Contrary to my hopes, I'm not going to get to a long discussion of the so-called "Grand Bargain to avoid the Fiscal Cliff." But since this will be debated for a few more weeks anyway, I still have time. So here I'm just going to repeat what I said last week: It ain't grand, it ain't no bargain, and there ain't no cliff.However, this week's Outrage of the Week will give you a taste of some of the nonsense being cooked up over this.
Last week, when CBS Evening News wanted to ask someone about what to do about the so-called "fiscal cliff," who did they pick? Why, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, obviously! Who else?
His name is Lloyd Blankfein, and in case you can't tell, he's the one on your right.They may have picked Blankfein to interview because he's been pushed out there as a point man by this thing called the Campaign to Fix the Debt. It's essentially a bunch of corporate CEOs whose companies have received trillions in federal war contracts, subsidies, and bailouts, as well as special tax breaks and loopholes that virtually eliminate the companies' tax bills and who themselves are paid tens to hundreds of millions of dollars a year - and who are now going to tell everyone else what they have to give up.
You know what that is, I don't even have to tell you: Cut - meaning slash - the programs that help you while maintaining or increasing those that help them. The big three - Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid - are all on the chopping block along with assorted programs of "low-priority spending."
What constitutes "low-priority spending" is not explained, but last spring, House GOPpers showed how they defined the term by what they included in the Ryan budget: It meant, among other things, cut Food Stamps, cut school lunch programs, cut employment and training programs, cut the Child Tax Credit, and eliminate the Social Services Block Grant, which provides services to 11 million children as well as supporting Meals on Wheels and community-based care for the elderly.
On CBS, Blankfein described what in the CEOs minds had to be done: "lower people's expectations. The entitlements, and what people think that they're going to get - they're not going to get it." In other words, the message should be "You're gonna be poor. Get over it."
For example, how to deal with Social Security? Raise the retirement age, cut benefits, cut cost-of-living-allowances. We have to do this, he said, because, after all, "Social Security wasn't devised to be a system that supported you for a 30-year retirement after a 25-year career."
Excuse me? Maybe this should have been the Clown Award rather than the Outrage of the Week. A 25-year career? Yeah, maybe, if you started working at 42. A 30-year retirement? Sure, if the average person lives to 97.
At the same time they are spewing this bilge, the group is pushing for what they call a "territorial tax system" that would exempt their companies' foreign profits from taxation, netting them about $134 billion a year in tax cuts. And another of these bozos, Honeywell CEO David Cote, is saying the corporate tax rate should be as low as possible - ideally, he said, it should be zero.
And don't expect them to be lowering their own expectations or to forgo federal money or pay a higher tax rate on their personal income. Instead, they argue for "comprehensive tax reform which broadens the base - ideally by enough to also lower tax rates."
You do realize what "broaden the base" means, yes? It means people who now do not have enough of an income to owe federal income tax would pay it - increasing revenue enough, they hope, to lower tax rates. So they are bluntly hoping to have the poor pay more taxes so that they will pay less and corporations pay nothing at all.
And if that doesn't strike you as outrageous, I can't imagine what would.
Sources:
http://www.fair.org/blog/2012/11/20/you-think-youre-getting-social-security-but-youre-not-says-multimillionaire-banker/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/25/deficit-reduction-council-fiscal-cliff_n_2185585.html
http://www.thenation.com/blog/167842/week-poverty-republicans-define-lower-priority-spending
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/11/squirming-hawks/
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