Needlenose

Now that the Democrat’s 2nd Great Capitulation is complete, let’s identify $2.4 trillion in budget cuts that will actually make America a better place.  In my first attempt, I’ll try to do this without addressing tax breaks, just subsidies.

I’m going to do this over the next few days so bear with me!

*Update 8/15/11* I’m at just over a $314 billion dollars and I haven’t finished up with Pentagon boondoggles yet, much less gotten to the wars!  Note that the Super Congress is only looking to save $2 trillion over a period of 10 years –  extrapolated over ten years, we’re probably already past $3 trillion…

Big debate in California right now is whether or not to tax out-of-state online purchases as if they were purchased locally. On the ‘pro’ side, Betty Yee argues that local brick and mortar retailers currently paying 8.5% sales tax can’t compete with online retailers residing in states with significantly lower, or non-existent tax rates.  A member of California’s tax board, she claims that we are thus ‘losing’ $1.2 billion in tax revenue for these purchases.  On the ‘con’ side is David Henderson, a Libertarian Lunatic from the far-right Hoover Institute corporatist “think” tank, argues that the lost amount is far smaller ($621 million/year), that tax competition between states is healthy and that California taxes its residents too much anyway as it offers too many unnecessary services, such as freeway building.  Seriously, he suggests that we should turn over our freeway system to private concerns who will make them into toll roads (somewhere at Stanford a clock is missing its cuckoo!).

Surprisingly lost in the debate is any discussion of ‘why’ the California legislators are contemplating a tax that would most likely get thrown out in Federal court (per a decision in 1967 ruling that a catalog retailer needs a local presence in order to be subject to local sales tax) – Prop 13!  A state like Oregon doesn’t need a sales tax to pay for their services as local assessors aren’t hamstrung by ludicrous legislation effectively ‘fixing’ the value of a property to the time of original purchase.

Of course an Oregonian e-retailer gets the 8.5% ‘edge’ over a California retailer provided our tax rate stays so ridiculously high.  But toss out the crazy cap on property value assessment and Blam!, California could easily make up it’s budget shortfall, reduce the sales tax rate and still have money to spare.

Rather than discuss the elephant in the room, the California Left and Right shift into preposterous positions (fighting establish Federal Law or turning our freeways into private toll roads) in a self-parodying attempt to address our state’s chronic budget woes.

As I mentioned before, California politics represents a microcosm of our woes at the Federal level, as now evidenced in the absurd showdown over the debt ceiling.  In that discussion, the Left argues that huge deficits are a good thing during an economic downturn, and that the Feds need to make up in spending what the consumers are not.  The Right, who didn’t care about deficit spending when they controlled Congress, trots out the same old trickle-down prescription of keeping taxes low on the wealthy, increasing fee-bases services for the middle class and cutting or eliminating social programs for the old, the poor and the disabled.

Seriously, there are plenty of things that could be cut out of the Federal Budget, like cutting hundreds of billions of dollars out of the Defense for unneeded programs, winding out of Shrubya’s legacy wars.  And on the other side, why not have a conversation about eliminating the NEA?  Trimming back the Department of Education?  Folding the ATF into the FBI (and similarly reducing redundancies)?  Encouragingly, there was some talk, albeit muted, of eliminating loopholes in the tax code, but not-surprisingly that seems to have gotten dropped from the Boehner/Obama capitulation.  And never discussed were some basic measures such as getting private interests to pay commercial rates for use of Federal land (ranching, mineral extraction, etc).

The underlying issue, though, is that addressing the deficit isn’t sufficient.  All our Free Trade deals have proven extremely successful at outsourcing manufacturing and even back-office work to Asia, in a perverse vindication of ‘trickle-down’ economics, as rich corporations ‘trickle-out’ of the country.  If the trickle-out continues, and the tax base continues to shrink, how can the Fed possibly spend its way out of our economic malaise?

Bottom line is that we are in absurdistan precisely because the Congressionals can’t/won’t go against their corporate campaign funders, either in the form of eliminating some tax loophole, collecting ‘fair use’ royalties on Federal land, eliminating a defense program that benefits a local defense contractor, or getting corporations to pay taxes on their overseas payroll or unrepatriated profits.  The Dems and the Repugs put on a little show but go back to business as usual – with the other 99% of us continuing to fall behind the other 1%.

A disheartening report from Glenn Hurowitz at Grist a couple of days ago:

Most underplayed economic story of the week: European aircraft manufacturer Airbus “trounced” the traditional U.S. behemoth Boeing at the Paris Air Show, booking a record $50 billion more in orders for new planes. The reason: commercial plane buyers’ demands for high fuel efficiency and low emissions….  Airbus racked up a whopping 730 new plane orders compared to a measly 142 for Boeing….

That giant sucking sound you hear is approximately half a million well-paying American jobs leaving Boeing factories in Seattle and other parts of America and heading to Airbus facilities in Toulouse, Seville, and Hamburg…

… As Rick Perlstein wrote in his seminal essay “The Stockticker and the Superjumbo,” Boeing is still paying for abandoning its once-successful strategy of long-term investments in innovative, groundbreaking products like the 747 jumbo jet in service of short-term profits meant to goose its quarterly earnings. Meanwhile, Airbus has maintained a decades-long commitment to the kind of painstaking, long-term R&D that helped it deliver the star of the Paris Air Show, the hyperefficient A320neo.

And it gets worse:

I wish I could report that the president was providing a counterweight to this anti-innovation attitude, in the same way he has signaled that he’s going to force American auto companies to achieve moderately ambitious increases in fuel efficiency. But just as Airbus was drubbing Boeing at the Paris Air Show, the Obama administration took the opportunity to announce that it would insist that Europe-bound flights on U.S. carriers be exempted from European laws requiring them to cut their emissions. If you can’t beat ‘em, unleash the lobbyists.

Of all the many, many disappointments the Obama administration has brought us, this personally ranks pretty high.  As a candidate, Barack Obama really seemed to grasp the potential of a “green recovery” to make economic and environmental progress at the same time — more so than the mere expedience of being a political candidate seemed to require.  But despite ongoing noises in that general direction, there has been the all-too-familiar lack of results.

When short-sighted corporate thinking meets weak-willed politics, the outcome is rarely good for the rest of us.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

I was curious what the wrong-wingers are making of the calls to end subsidies to Big Oil, and was pleasantly surprised to see Peter Suderman over at Hit & Run agree not only with ending Big Oil’s subsidies, but also taking a whack at corporate favoritism in the tax code across the board.  Bravo!  Curious though that he doesn’t mention the role the Repugs played in Big Oil pork.  Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that were he blogging back in ’03, he would have been decrying the squandering of our tax dollars on Big Oil!

Let’s go for Big Ag next!

Turkey stuffed with pork!!

Turporken is the holiday meal on Capitol Hill, basically Obama’s turkey tax deal now stuffed with pork, the time-honored way to get bi-partisan support for legislative shit sandwiches. Here are the details:

“Altogether the bill includes more than 6,000 pet projects worth $8 billion, including:

• $80 million to states and Indian tribes to preserve Pacific salmon.
• $2.5 million for bike paths in Illinois.
• $4 million for the Kentucky National Guard to eradicate marijuana.
• $500,000 for transportation improvements at the Bronx Zoo.”

The biggest pork of course is reserved for corporate welfare:

The legislation contains $11 billion in energy tax breaks, including tax credits for biodiesel, energy-efficient homes, marginal oil wells and alternative vehicle refueling property. Alternative-energy industry lobbyists calculated correctly that Republicans would not bring down the tax bill over a few energy credits.

And billions in subsidies for polluting and wasteful ethanol producers remain intact.

Guest post from Spy Buddy:

“Jim Hightower recently wrote about parasitical hedge fund managers (http://www.jimhightower.com/node/7280). Hightower makes a great point that hedge fund managers are crying because Obama wants to close a tax loophole enabling government to tax hedge funds at a 35% rate (a rate that applies to ordinary income) rather than at the 15% it gets today.

I am surprised hedge funds are being so vocal and calling attention to themselves. Like cockroaches, I thought this group may want to avoid the public spotlight due to their latest ventures.   The Huffington Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/18/the-new-tax-man-big-banks_n_766169.html) reported that hedge funds, and of course the banks we the taxpayers bailed out, are now creating companies that purchase from local governments the right to collect delinquent taxes on properties, many in distressed housing markets. These companies pay overdue real estate taxes then can and do legally collect the debt and levy fees, often outrageous fees. I don’t think collecting on a debt is a bad but charging sky rocketing fees is. This practice often results in property owners find their fees growing beyond recognition into thousands of dollars from originally owing just several hundred dollars.”

Sounds like a movie title, huh?  The pic you see isn’t some hillbilly gravel road - it’s a marine waterway chocked with dead marine life – result of the persistent de-oxygenated ‘dead zone’ around the Mississippi mouth in the Gulf of Mexico.  Mostly this zone results from the run-off of fertilizers from our massively over-fertilized and massively subsidized agribusiness farms in our country’s bloated midsection.  But it was perhaps exacerbated by microbial activity as the little critters use up the extra oxygen to break down all that oil from the BP disaster.

Another day, another ecological nightmare, huh?  And all so very preventable.

*Update 9/27/10* Continuing fish die-offs in and around the Delta in the Gulf of Mexico.

carcass of a fish leaks oil when poked. yum!

Judicial activism in liberal courts result in equal rights for Americans.  Reactionary judicial activism consists of increasing the rights of corporations over Americans, such as keeping individual campaign contributions in check while allowing unlimited corporate donations.  Or continuously letting Big Coal destroy mountains and fresh water streams and to hell with the locals.

*Update 8/6/10* Great analysis of 2 recent rulings in favor of gay marriage along with encouraging prognostication of how SCOTUS might rule.

For years it’s been trendy to argue that in pricing fuels it’s important to use  ’true (or full) cost accounting’  to adequately compute the total cost of fuels.  Alternative fuels, through this reasoning, don’t look nearly so bad in comparison on a cost basis once you add in environmental costs, cleanup costs and the like to the cost of fuel.  The usual public policy conclusion is invariably that the greenshades sharpen their pencils to compute externals, and the government then add those externals to the cost of the fossil fuels in the form of a tax.

So I’ve been reading about this true cost of accounting for nearly 3 decades and while there has been a lot of accounting done, gubbermint has sat on its ass and delivered nothing in the way of the tax.  In fact, under the Shrubya Reign of Error, they larded the fossil fuel industry with massive additional subsidies in a hellish ‘false cost accounting’ variant that could only have been concocted by a coterie of cthonic cretins on K Street.

The BP oil disaster, however, points to a novel approach for implementing at least a portion of applying ‘external’ costs – forget fossil fuel taxes that lily-livered  Congress will never pass – instead, make the fucking companies pay directly for their messes!

For example, the various oil companies could start with a supervised safety review of the other offshore wells currently in production as well as the 27,000 abandoned wells just in the Gulf of Mexico whose capping were most likely never supervised and which may be decaying as I type.  How about forcing the coal companies to put out the millions of tons of coal burning in thousands of coal seam fires around the world that are spewing noxious chemicals and carbon dioxide with zero benefit to anybody?  Or nuclear power plants paying for permanent storage of the 64,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel that will stay radioactive for up to 250,000 years?

We don’t need technology breakthroughs in alternative energy.  We need to eliminate the unbelievable corporate welfare the industry currently enjoys in subsidies, we need to force the companies to clean up the messes they have already created and to have plans to prevent and correct future messes, and we need to invest in conservation and modern grid infrastructure to properly use the power we do produce.

But first we need to break the link between the conservatives and the fossil fuel companies, otherwise we’ll keep circling the drain, faster with each turn of the spiral.

*Update 7/15/10* Could Congress actually be taking action to investigate those 27,000 abandoned Gulf Wells?  Or is this just more ‘look concerned’ bullshit?

Finally!!  A US President calls for an end to the ludicrous tax breaks that keep fossil fuel prices artificially low!  But you have to really push this, Mr. President, you have a golden window of opportunity here.  If you wimp-out now, it will be years if not decades before another President can address this.