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Tag: short sighted

Wake Up And Smell The Politics

Can a coffee kingpin give American politics the jolt it needs to snap out of its Tea Party hangover?

Don’t hold your breath. But Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz has made a valiant attempt, by way of an appeal he sent out by blast email and published in full-page ads in both The New York Times and USA Today.

“I love our country. I am a beneficiary of the promise of America,” wrote the Brooklyn-born, self-made industry leader. “I am frustrated by our political leaders’ steadfast refusal to recognize that, for every day they perpetuate partisan conflict and put ideology over country, America and Americans suffer from the combined effects of paralysis and uncertainty.”

He continued, listing the concerns that are troubling many average Americans these days: They’re unemployed or underemployed — or afraid of becoming so. Consumers are not spending money. Small businesses can’t get credit. And Congress and the White House don’t seem to get it.

Schultz also called on other American business leaders to join him in withholding political contributions until Congress and the president get their act together, play nice and enact a “transparent, comprehensive, bipartisan debt-and-deficit package … that honestly, and fairly, sets America on a path to long-term financial health and security.”

Oh, I know, President Obama tried to sound demanding in his nationally televised speech on jobs Thursday. He raised his voice authoritatively while delivering lines that Howard Schultz would cheer. He said that Americans can’t wait while Republicans trounce every jobs proposal. House Speaker John Boehner barely lifted a sleepy eyelid.

I don’t want to be too hard on Schultz. He seems like a mensch. When it comes to messaging around social conscience, few companies do it as well as Starbucks. It has been adept at letting its customers know that the part-time barista serving up your skinny macchiato of fair-trade coffee beans is covered by a generous health care plan. But he’s out of his league. It’s hard to see what holding back his money and a bit of that of a few rich friends will accomplish.

Washington is a business; its clientele are actually people like Schultz, who have multinational corporations to look after. He may be aware that the U.S. Supreme Court granted CEOs even more political power with its landmark Citizens United decision in 2010. Political action committees, lobbyists and the new “527” advocacy groups, which are able to draw unlimited contributions, are what props up our political class. Congressional committee chairmanships are given to the most proficient fundraisers. If he’s withholding his money from that business, good for him. But he’s not going to reform it anytime soon, not the way he’s going about it.

You don’t fix a broken political system by refusing to engage with it — especially right now, when the critical flaw is a certain asymmetry between the parties. In 2008, the electorate chose an eloquent candidate for president who conjured a future of hope and change and bipartisan cooperation. The reality, once he took office, turned out to be different. Trying to remain aloof from the partisan fray doesn’t produce the best results in the actual game of politics.

Barack Obama’s presidency has not been a total failure. But he has bitterly disappointed many his erstwhile admirers for the simple reason that he seems unwilling or unable to stand up for some basic Democratic principles. During the debt-limit debate, it was left to Warren Buffett, one of the wealthiest men in the country, to take to the op-ed page of the New York Times to beg Congress to raise taxes on rich people like himself. Obama has surrendered the bully pulpit to the better organized, better disciplined — and better at politics — Republican Party.

And it’s going to take more than sharing an artfully prepared latte to change things.

(Mary Sanchez is an opinion-page columnist for The Kansas City Star. Readers may write to her at: Kansas City Star, 1729 Grand Blvd., Kansas City, Mo. 64108-1413, or via e-mail at msanchez@kcstar.com.)

(c) 2011, The Kansas City Star. Distributed by Tribune Media Services

Rick Perry Knowingly Put Texas In The Red

Rick Perry talks about cutting taxes, spending, and managing budgets as if his ten years as Texas’ chief executive have lent him the knowledge and experience to be a wise fiscal manager. Unfortunately for Texans and, now that he is seeking the presidency, possibly for Americans as well, that does not appear to be true, in more ways than one, as Washington Spectator editor Lou Dubose explains:

Because there is no income tax [in Texas], property taxes are high. In 2006, Perry called a special session to address property taxes. With no income tax, there are no easy fixes. Yet Perry found one. A business-margins tax he said would provide enough revenue to allow for reductions in property taxes.

It was evident at the time that the new tax would not deliver what the governor promised. The state comptroller, [Republican] Carole Strayhorn, had her staff run the numbers on Perry’s tax-reform proposal.

“In 2007,” she wrote in a letter to Perry, “your plan is $3.4 billion short; in 2009, it is $5.4 billion short; in 2010 it is $4.9 billion short, and in 2011 it is $5 billion short. These are conservative estimates.”

The comptroller warned that “no economic miracle will close the gap your plan creates. Even if every dollar of the current [2006] $8.2 billion surplus was poured into the plan, it would not cover the plan’s cost for more than two years, 2007 and 2008. The gap is going to continue to grow year by year.” The shortfall the bill created could only be closed by tax increases, the comptroller warned, “or massive cuts in essential public services — like public education.

By now we all know what Rick Perry is selling. He collaborates with the private sector to create jobs and to attract jobs from other states. The Texas Enterprise Fund and the Emerging Technologies Fund, his creations, have had unprecedented success.

It’s not as simple as Perry would have you believe.

The two big economic development funds Perry controls operate on a trickle-up economic theory. The state takes money from taxpayers and gives it to corporations to entice them to create new jobs.

Yet corporations often fail to deliver, and the governor and his staff rewrite corporations’ contracts to relax their job-creation requirements.

Grants are often made to companies that would move into the state or expand their workforce without a taxpayer-funded incentive.

The governor hands over millions of dollars to corporations whose executives have contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to his campaigns.

Perry’s scornful attitude toward science — made plain in his explicit endorsement of teaching “intelligent design,” his dismissal of evolution and his extreme skepticism of climate change — apparently applies to basic mathematics as well. His style of accounting rejects empirical facts and projections about budgets and revenues in favor of “economic miracles” that will supposedly allow government to “grow out of it” when faced with hard choices between deficits and taxes.

Despite his poor personal relationship with George W. Bush, Perry’s version of economics sounds an awful lot like what Bush believed when he embraced tax cuts and supply-side doctrine regardless of nonpartisan estimates awash with red ink. (There’s a similar whiff of cronyism to boot.) If a Republican who specialized in budget gimmickry is so enthusiastically supported by Tea Party voters, imagine how they might respond to a candidate who actually reduced the deficit in a responsible manner — like President Obama with his health-care reform. Then again, perhaps we already know.