Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Month: December 2011 Page 1 of 2

You don’t get the payroll tax “cut”

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On December 27, 2011

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There has been much ballyhoo about how there is a payroll tax cut and that an extra $40 per paycheck (every two week) will make a big difference.

Sure, if you get to keep it (via Americablog):

Some rates will be significantly higher, such as a 27.4% increase to $17 from $13.34 just to receive local broadcast channels. Others will be modestly higher, such as a 9.5% increase to $69 from $63 for broadcast plus basic cable channels, or a 7.3% increase to $58.99 from $54.99 for the digital video package. Compare that with a 3.5% annual inflation rate as of October. “The cable industry maintains a near-monopoly over television services,” said Doug Heller, executive director of Consumer Watchdog, a Santa Monica advocacy group. “Their prices are completely disconnected from the real lives of their customers.”

Pricing power is the ability to raise your prices beyond the inflation rate and expect that most people will pay.  It occurs in monopolies and oligopolies and in necessities during crises (how much is a loaf of bread worth if you’ll die without it?)

American consumers and workers, as a group, do not have pricing power and they do not have alternatives.  They cannot charge more for their labor, because there is a huge surplus of workers.  Because almost every major industry is an oligopoly or a local monopoly,  as consumers, they cannot move from one company to another, as the companies are almost all in collusion and raising prices more or less in lockstep.  There is no real competition on price in most industries (certainly not in telecom).

Until Americans have the ability to opt out, things will not get better.  And tax cuts will do NOTHING.  If you give money to ordinary people corporations with pricing power will take it away.  If you give money to corporations or rich people, they will use it for leveraged financial plays (job destruction), offshoring or outsourcing (job destruction) or on luxury consumption like $50,000/night hotel rooms and private jets (some job creation, but destroying the quality of services you get.)

What the US needs right now is a massive tax increase on the rich and corporations.  They are not spending their money usefully, and in the case of corporations are sitting on billions.  In fact, every extra dollar of profit makes things worse, not better.  If corps and the rich can’t use money to create growth, and in fact are using it in destructive ways, you take it away and use it to create growth (assuming the Obama administration knew how to do that, which it doesn’t.  But theoretically, assuming competent individuals of good will in power.  Yes, you can laugh hysterically now.)

Yes, the American people are responsible

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On December 19, 2011

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Let me respond to the idea that Americans are not responsible for what is happening to America, especially poorer Americans.

No.  Sorry, but no.  Sure, their guilt isn’t as great as that of the liberal class, or the financiers, or various other folks, but they are still responsible.  It was a democracy.  There were ways to stop it from getting to this.  In a democracy, the PEOPLE are held responsible.  Yes, there were forces working to stop it from being a democracy, but they voted for people like Reagan and the members of Congress, and so on.  Whether you think the 2000 or 2004 elections were stolen (yes on the first, maybe on the second) they let it get to the point where it could be stolen.  They didn’t riot in 2000.  They reelected George Bush after everyone knew he was torturing scum.

I’m not letting them off the hook.  Sorry.

The pathetic attempts of Americans to pretend they’re good people and don’t deserve what’s happening to them are just that, pathetic.  Yeah, some of them are good, but not enough.  It’s just that simple.

Take some goddamn responsibility.

Until Americans get that they are responsible, they will not also get that they can change things.  If Americans are powerless, if it’s “not their fault” that also means they can’t fix it.

This is basic, like everything else I have to explain these days, it seems.

Sadly America is no longer the issue.  While it is theoretically possible it could be saved, the odds are so low the fight is pointless for anyone not an American (and even there, if you can leave, you should).  We are now in triage, trying to save other nations.  The center did not hold.  So be it, the provinces are on their own, and must do what they can, for themselves.

And the people who continue to apologize for the American public, pretending that Americans as a group are not complicit… yeah, well, whatever.  Doesn’t matter now.  But that sort of “it’s not your responsibility” BULLSHIT is part of why America is going down.

“It’s not your responsibility” means “don’t pay attention, don’t try and change it.”

Do not judge public figures on how “nice” they are

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On December 18, 2011

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Newshoggers has a roundup of Hitchens posts.  Most of them are generally positive towards Hitchens.  For example:

But I guess all that is why I want to put down for the record that in addition to all those things, Hitchens was incredibly kind and giving with his time. Every time I met him over the past seven years he greeted me like an old friend, and as far as I could see, every fan he met got his full attention. Even when he was dying, he had time to sit down with a little girl to figure out what books should be on her reading list.

Or:

Sometimes, Christopher Hitchens was a fucking asshole, and said and wrote things that were beneath him. Most of the time, he was brilliant. I’m deeply sorry that I never met him.

Or Dawkins:

Every day of his declining life he demonstrated the falsehood of that most squalid of Christian lies: that there are no atheists in foxholes. Hitch was in a foxhole, and he dealt with it with a courage, an honesty and a dignity that any of us would be, and should be, proud to be able to muster. And in the process, he showed himself to be even more deserving of our admiration, respect, and love.

He helped get over 100K people killed (that’s the very conservative #, it’s probably over 500K). He worked really hard to do that. That is more than being “an asshole”. He could personally be an asshole, and I would not give a damn. He was a public figure, a public intellectual, and I do not judge public figures based on whether they are “nice” in person or died a good death or had beliefs about the supernatural which match mine. Anyone who does so is morally defective. That sort of “I’d like to have a beer with him” reasoning led directly to George Bush, Jr.

You get the pundits and leaders you deserve, example 5,242,176.

I don’t, personally, think Hitchens was brilliant most of the time, but let’s say he was.  So what?  He helped commit the same war crime Nazis were hung for.  In a just world, he would have been hung or locked up for life, alongside Henry Kissinger, whom he hated and George Bush, whose policies he helped push.

Contemptible.  If you knew him personally, I can forgive your love of him, I have loved evil people.  But an intellectual has the responsibility to separate those personal feelings from judgement. Hitchens was an evil man.  Helping kill large numbers of people in an unprovoked war is not just a war crime, it is, as was noted at Nuremburg, the crime from which all war crimes come — every rape, every death, every person who lost their home, every person tortured with power drills in Iraq, every dead child—those are Hitchens legacy.

The refusal to hold people responsible for the entirely forseeable results of policies they work hard to enable is also evil.  It is at the root of why you no longer have functioning democracies.

Hitchens was a bad man whose legacy is enabling a war crime.  If you do not think so, you are part of the reason why things like Iraq happen.

RIP Christopher Hitchens

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On December 16, 2011

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I was going to keep my mouth shut, but the hagiography is making me hurl.  Yes, he was a good writer.  Yes, when he was young he seemed to want atrocities to stop.  After 9/11, however, he realized that people like him could die senselessly and became an apologist for an unprovoked war (the same war crime the US hung Germans for) and for torture.  Atrocities were ok to protect lily-livered upper class white people like himself.

Christopher Hitchens helped make the world you live in, the one most of my readers spend time complaining about.   As a prominent ex-lefty he was very useful to the powers that be in excusing their policies.

Also a quick note to my atheist friends.  Because someone is an atheist does not mean they are in any way, shape or form a good person or someone who has made the world a better place.  Richard Dawkins is a noxious human being and was before he defended an inappropriate pass. Hitchens was a war crimes apologist.

If there is life after death, I hope Hitchens is treated kindly, because I don’t believe in torture.  But for the last 10 years of his life he was a profoundly bad man.

There’s a hardly a “progressive” alive who isn’t a moron or a sellout

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On December 12, 2011

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Seriously, listening to all the progressives either supporting the payroll tax rebate extension (an attack on Social Security) or saying that Cameron should have signed on to a forced austerity pact, I am reminded how mind  numbingly stupid and partisan these people are.  Scum.  Evil. Stupid. I could have a small amount of respect for them if they were getting millions in order to sell out the people they say they care about, but many of them do it for free and the most of the rest do it for peanuts.

There is not an institution in existence, of any importance, which will not have to be torn down.  Unions, corporations, schools, the UN, IMF, World Bank, WTO, they all have to go.  All of them.

The oligarchs have made peaceful change impossible and the people have refused to take the few chances they had (many European countries had far left parties.  Why weren’t they voted for?)

There will be war, there will be revolution.  And there will be Terror.  Hundreds of millions will die.

We had our chances.  I spent 15 years of my life trying to explain how to save the old system, how to make it work.  Others have spent decades.  We failed.  The oligarchs and the people, at every step, refused to do what was necessary.  At every step small minded greed and selfishness won.

So it was.

Unwilling to give up anything to make our civilization actually work, many will now lose everything.

So shall it be.

We shall reap as we have sowed, and we shall know ourselves by our fruits.

Perhaps the Only Thing Cameron Will Ever Do That I Agree With

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On December 10, 2011

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was to tell Merkel to take a long leap of a short pier, and refusing to sign on board for European control of member state’s fiscal policies.  Such control in the current context (forced austerity) is a recipe for outright, extended depression.  Cameron may be throwing Britain into depression all on his own, but not signing away control to Germany (and be clear, in this context, European means German) was the right thing to do, even if he did it for what appear to be all the wrong reasons.

As a friend of mine quipped, who thinks Europe should have a common currency.  “By common currency, however, I don’t mean everyone using the EuroMark.”

The insistence on policies which everyone knows, and which even straightforward macro-economics shows clearly, will throw Europe into a semi-permanent depression is rather remarkable.

Oh well.

Why MF Global Collapsed

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On December 8, 2011

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Because the Fed cut them off.  That is all. Yes, they were doing shady things, but no more shady than many other companies that didn’t get cut off.  If you are a financial firm, you need the essentially free money the Fed provides.  With it, you can make money, without it, you can’t. Once the Fed cut them off, everything else was just the thrashing around of a dying firm.

I would assume, and lay long odds, that someone at the Fed didn’t like Corzine.

Yes, this is how your “economy” works.

How to lie with headlines – NY Times edition

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On December 8, 2011

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So, I’m browsing the NY Times and a title leaps out at me:

Albany Tax Deal to Raise Rate for Highest Earners

The URL says Cuomo, governor of New York.

Odd, I think.  I wouldn’t expect Cuomo to raise taxes on rich people.  Maybe I’ve misjudged him?  Maybe he isn’t just a union busting jerk squishing the small people and covering his butt with things like gay marriage which the corporate interests he serves are good with?

I read further.  Paragraph 3:

The long-term impact on the wealthy was described by some as a cut and others as an increase: beginning next year, the highest-income earners will be taxed at a lower rate than at present, but at a higher rate than had been expected with the expiration of the surcharge.

Oh.  So, in fact, the deal lowers the actual tax rate the rich will pay.

Good to see the NY Times is still the same gray old lady she’s been my entire life.

Back when I was a managing editor at FDL and the Agonist, I used to tell the writers the following: assume that 90% of readers will only read the title of the piece.  Assume that of those who do read further, you are losing half of them with each paragraph. I doubt the Times numbers are that much different.  The vast majority of readers will never get to paragraph 3.  They will assume the title is accurate.  If the title is a lie, which it is, that is the information they will take away.

The accurate headline, if this is the story they want to tell,  by the way, would be:

Legislators lower tax rate for highest earners less than expected

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