If you’ve been hatin’ on House Speaker Paulie Ryan as long as I have, seeing Paulie finally take the beatdown he so richly deserves is schadenfreude beyond a Paulie hater’s wildest dreams. Perhaps the best of the many, many drubbings Paulie has received is administered by the hitherto unknown (to me) Philip Klein, who hangs…
Search Results for: tax reform
Jonathan Rauch has words of wisdom. Or not.
Over at Reason, Nick Gillespie has a long interview with Brookings dude Jonathan Rauch, bearing the snappy title “The Case For Back-Room Deals, Party Hacks & Unlimited Money in Politics”, a thesis he spells out at greater length in his new book, bearing the somewhat less snappy title “Political Realism: How Hacks, Machines, Big Money,…
And if pigs had wings, Ross Douthat could fly
Ralph, explaining why things didn’t quite work out the way they should have under Dub-Ya: If the Medicare Part D expansion had been combined the reforms to Medicare the Bush White House originally wanted, if the push Social Security reform hadn’t gone nowhere, and if tax reform hadn’t died along with the rest of Bush’s…
New Republican Strategy: Do Nothing, Blame Obama
Over at the National Review, James Capretta has both short- and long-term advice for Republicans. In the short-term, when the issue of whether to raise the debt limit comes up in February, the Republicans should threaten to blow up the nation’s economy, but not actually do it. It is perfectly appropriate to use the occasion…
Memo to Matt: Boehner may be bluffing, but so are the Democrats
Over at Slate, Matt Yglesias insists that President Obama doesn’t have to give an inch to House Speaker John Boehner on taxes in the upcoming fix everything we didn’t fix before lame-duck session. Because Republicans under Bush passed “temporary” tax cuts rather than permanent ones, and because those tax cuts are set to expire, Obama…
Bruce Bartlett, refuting vapor
Bruce Bartlett, everyone’s favorite truth-telling Reaganite, does the unnecessary, and does it well, here, explaining why, even if everything went “right” in Mitt Romney’s tax “plan”—which is to say, if one could divide by zero and count up to infinity in a couple of hours—it would have no more than a minimal impact on the…
Whither Republicans?
Is it too soon to wonder about what’s going to happen to the Republican Party after the defeat of Mitt Romney? Well, yes, it is, but what the fuck, it’s fun, so let’s do it. Mitt really put his foot in it, or on it, with his now famous though beginning to recede a bit…
Yeah, I flunked Econ 101! What’s your point?
As a matter of fact, I I didn’t flunk Econ 101, because I never took it! So what? To quote Mel Brooks, I’m an old man and I’ve got a right to talk. And, to quote another old man, Richard Nixon, “I am not an intellectual, but I do read books!” Well, I do and…
Socio-political-cultural notes from all over: Jack Goldsmith is a gosh-darn liar, Joe and Bibi may be pulling a fast one, and Oliver Anthony is a jive turkey
O mores O tempores, eh, motherfucker? What a list, what a list, what a list. Oy vey, oy vey, oy vey. First and worst is elegantly bearded Harvard prick in chief Jack Goldsmith, whose motto is “not as bad as John Yoo”, which may or not be true, because John stabs you in the chest…
Who’s stoopider, Noah Rothman, the New York Times, or the U.S. Treasury? Tough call!
Damn right it is. Over at the National Review, hot shot author Noah Rothman, whose best-selling book, The Rise of the New Puritans, trashing those damn West Coast hippies grown old and rich and censorious, which, if I read it, I’d probably agree with more often than not, is on a tear, tearing into those…