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Tag: millionaires tax
Beneath The Republican Wave, Voters Still Reject Right-Wing Ideology

Beneath The Republican Wave, Voters Still Reject Right-Wing Ideology

In the wake of a “wave election” like the 2014 midterm, Americans will soon find out whether they actually want what they have wrought. The polls tell us that too many voters are weary of President Obama, including a significant number who actually voted for him two years ago. Polls likewise suggest that most voters today repose more trust in Republicans on such fundamental issues as economic growth, national security, and budget discipline. But do they want what Republicans in control will do now?

If they are faithful to their beliefs, the Republican leadership in Washington will now seek to advance a set of policies that are simply repugnant to the public – most notably in the Ryan budget that they have signed up to promote (except for the caucus of ultra-right Republicans who consider that wild plan too “moderate”).

House Speaker John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, the new Senate Majority Leader, will have to try to repeal Obamacare — but they will likely be pushed further than that. Proposals to reduce Medicare to vouchers, privatize Social Security, and gut the Federal agencies that protect the health and safety of ordinary citizens and the preservation of clean water and air will soon emerge. They will continue to let the nation’s infrastructure crumble. And they will attempt to shift the burden of taxation from the wealthy to the middle class, working families, and even the poor.

Attention to all these basic questions has been deflected, for the moment, by demagogic campaigns blaring the Ebola virus and Islamist militants at the border, as well as disaffection with the president. But that level of distraction will not last, once the Republicans begin to bring forward the kind of extremist legislation that their Tea Party base (and the billionaire lobby surrounding the Koch brothers) will demand.

When Americans look at real issues – even in this era of dissatisfaction and distraction – they display little interest in Republican-style solutions. The most obvious examples in this election are the referendum ballots on the minimum wage, which passed by two-to-one margins both in deep-red states such as Arkansas and in suddenly purplish places like Illinois, which elected a Republican governor. In Alaska, South Dakota, and Nebraska, where Republican candidates romped at every level,  voters passed state minimum wage increases by wide margins.

While GOP candidates in this year’s election set aside their “free-market” principles in the face of voter sentiment for higher wages – including Tom Cotton, who won a Senate seat in Arkansas – the Republican platform declared plainly in 2012 that the minimum wage “has seriously restricted progress in the private sector.” They aren’t simply against federal minimum wage increases, which they consistently oppose in Congress. They are against the very idea of a legal minimum wage, period.

In the president’s home state, where the election of a Republican governor is regarded as a political bellwether, the simultaneous rejection of right-wing ideology went beyond the minimum wage. Voters in Illinois overwhelmingly approved a “millionaire’s tax” – a special 3 percent state income tax surcharge on every resident earning more than a million dollars annually. Increasing taxes on the wealthy is, of course, anathema to the Republican right.

Even worse, from the Republican perspective, is that revenues from the millionaires tax will be dedicated to public education – another element of American democracy that the GOP constantly seeks to undermine.

Finally, the Illinois electorate approved a law mandating insurance coverage of prescription birth control, directly repudiating the Hobby Lobby decision by the Supreme Court’s right-wing majority. Like the minimum wage and the millionaires tax, this referendum was advisory and not legally binding. Republicans mocked all three as obvious attempts to draw Democratic voters to the polls. And as a political ploy, if that is what those ballot questions represented, they did not succeed.

But taken with the minimum wage referenda in other, more conservative states, they appear to represent prevailing sentiment among the American people.

Today, Republicans have every reason to celebrate a smashing victory that had very little to do with ideas and policies – and everything to do with an unpopular president’s streak of bad luck. What will happen when the right begins to implement its extremist ideology remains to be seen.

Clinton: Pass Obama’s Job Bill (And Of Course I’ll Pay The ‘Millionaires Tax’)

Nothing excites Republicans more these days than to draw contrasts — and foment dissension — between President Obama and former president Bill Clinton, his most recent Democratic predecessor. Much as the Republican right despised Clinton when he was in the White House, they pretend to yearn for him today.

The political media delight in the same game, which is why so many news outlets seized on Clinton’s remarks in an exclusive interview on Wednesday with the conservative Newsmax website that seemed to put him at odds with Obama’s policies — especially at a moment when the stock market fell steeply again and economic confidence appears to be ebbing.

“I personally don’t believe we ought to be raising taxes or cutting spending until we get this economy off the ground,” Clinton told Newsmax Editor-in-Chief Christopher Ruddy last Wednesday. The resulting headline — “Ex-President Clinton to Newsmax: Raising Taxes Won’t Work” — was accurate when compared with the headlines that swiftly followed in other media, which suggested that Clinton had “rejected” Obama’s proposed tax on millionaires and “undercut” the president. The Republican National Committee distributed the Newsmax interview in a press release, asking “Is Clinton off script or tired of using this White House’s talking points?”

Responding to those jibes on Thursday at the Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York, the former president said, “I don’t disagree with President Obama, and he doesn’t disagree with me, because he isn’t proposing to raise taxes now. But I understand why there was some confusion about what I said, because we’re discussing how to stimulate the economy and how to reduce the deficit at the same time.”

As Clinton explained, he has long supported raising taxes on those who, like him, can well afford to pay more. He noted bluntly that “a lot of the stories I read today said that I disagreed with [Obama], that I wasn’t for [raising taxes] now. He’s not for doing it now. His proposal is for triggering this [tax increase] in 2013 and going forward.”

Over the years since he became a multi-millionaire, Clinton has often urged the restoration of the higher tax levels on the wealthy that he passed during his first year as president (which didn’t seem to hinder the vast growth and investment during his administration). On Thursday, he noted that “those of us in the very highest income groups, the top 1 percent of the American people, got more than 40 percent of the income gains of the past decade. We got a huge chunk of the tax cuts. We did just fine, people in my income group, under the [tax] system that prevailed when I was president. So, in some form or fashion we’re going to have to pay a little more. Not because it’s class warfare, but because we got most of the gains of the last decade, we got the benefit of most of the tax cuts, and we’re in the best position to make this contribution.”

President Obama, said Clinton, “doesn’t propose to raise any taxes until 2013, or to cut any more spending until 2013, because we need to get economic growth going again. I completely agree with that. I’m for a long-term plan to reduce the debt that triggers when we’ve got normal growth, which is now estimated to be some time in 2013. And between now and then we ought to do everything we can to get the economy going again.”

Indeed, Clinton’s approach to both taxes and spending is entirely in keeping not only with Obama’s plan but with the Keynesian approach that Republicans and conservatives dismiss. He believes that the original 2009 stimulus “was good for the country,” but that the continued downturn has proved that it wasn’t sufficient to fill the gap caused by the financial crash.

As for the “millionaire” tax proposed by Obama this week, “I’m fine with that,” he said, “but what we need to do is calibrate it so that both [increased taxes] and spending reductions are taking place in an atmosphere of economic growth — so that private sector growth will more than offset public sector reductions.”

His support for Obama’s jobs bill could not be plainer, as he reiterated on Thursday when he described the plan as “well-conceived” and quoted Republican economists who say that the jobs program will promote higher GDP and “give us between a million and two million more jobs than we would have otherwise.”

But he went still further: “There are other countries… doing things better than we are now, including providing more broad-based economic growth and lower unemployment — and without exception, they have public-private cooperation. They have the government and private sector working together.” What will not work, he said, is the ideological approach of the far right, as represented by the Republicans’ Tea Party wing.

As he bid farewell to dozens of heads of state, corporate leaders and nonprofit entrepreneurs attending his global meeting, Clinton warned: “The vision that the Tea Party’s articulating — of the weakest possible government where there’s no such thing as a good tax or a bad tax cut, no such thing as a good regulation or a bad deregulation, no such thing as a good program or a bad program cut — there’s not a single place on the planet where that [approach] is giving birth to a modern, successful, broad-based economy.”