A Final Summing Up

It is seven days until the election. All the polls suggest a close election in the popular vote, but a landslide in the Electoral College. The polls are also encouraging in terms of numbers of seats to be picked up by Democrats, but Republicans have far from given up. They have tried so many tacks until now; they have tried lies, smears, McCarthyite guilt by association and now according to the Huffington Post even a distribution of a leaflet telling Democrats in Virginia that voting for them has been moved to Wednesday, November 5th.

After eight years of redistributing wealth upward to the top 2% of the electorate and nationalizing the banking system, they try to scare voters by charging that Obama will redistribute wealth from working Americans to a bunch of loafers, knowing full well none of this is true. They have seized on Obama’s promise to lower taxes for 95% of taxpayers when only 62% of households pay any income taxes. http://einshalom.com/archives/985 and they claim that this means that the remainder would actually get subsidies. What they are talking about sounds like a radical new scheme but it in fact is well imbedded in our tax code. It is called the earned income tax credit. It is such a radical idea that it was enacted during the Republican Administration of Richard Nixon and was supported by that apostle of the free markets Milton Friedman. The current credit has been expanded three times--once in 1986 during the Reagan Administration, again in 1993 under George Bush I, and again in 2001 in the Clinton Administration.

The idea of another expansion in an Obama Administration is hardly a radical idea but these naysayers try to make it appear so. Of course non-earners are not eligible because people without an income have no basis to file tax returns so this is not welfare for non-workers but an aid to the working poor.

They know that what Obama is talking about is reversing the trend of Americans working longer and harder with less and less reward for their labors. Since under Obama taxes will go down for all who make under $200,000 it is ludicrous to tell people at McCain rallies that they will be targeted, unless of course McCain has managed to assemble people at his rallies who make over $200,000. That may be true at his fundraisers, but it is unlikely at rallies of tens of thousands.

They also misrepresent the impact and the cost of the Obama tax plan a compared to the McCain one. The Washington Post has made a comparison. I set it forth below:

“According to a new analysis by the Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain are both proposing tax plans that would result in cuts for most American families. Obama's plan gives the biggest cuts to those who make the least, while McCain would give the largest cuts to the very wealthy. For the approximately 147,000 families that make up the top 0.1 percent of the income scale, the difference between the two plans is stark. While McCain offers a $269,364 tax cut, Obama would raise their taxes, on average, by $701,885 - a difference of nearly $1 million.”

The Washington Post has tables that illustrate the enormous differences. They are worth studying closely.

As can be seen, McCain’s plan, like Bush’s, gives more and more to the wealthiest while Obama gives relief to the vast majority of the non rich Americans.

Even more interesting is the cost to the treasury of the respective plans. According to the Tax Policy Center while “both candidates have at times stressed fiscal responsibility, their specific non-health tax proposals would reduce tax revenues by $3.6 trillion (McCain) and $2.7 trillion (Obama) over the next 10 years, or approximately 10 and 7 percent of the revenues scheduled for collection under current law, respectively. Furthermore, as in the case of President Bush's tax cuts, the true cost of McCain's policies may be masked by phase-ins and sunsets (scheduled expiration dates) that reduce the estimated revenue costs. If his policies were fully phased in and permanent, the ten-year cost would rise to $4.0 trillion, or about 11 percent of total revenues.

Thus as can be evident McCain’s plans are more expensive and favor the rich. Haven’t we had enough of these kinds of policies?

Not surprisingly as more and more voters understand the priorities of the candidates they are flocking to Obama and the Democrats in the House and the Senate.

But now in the closing days of the campaign we hear the final plea. We must not allow Democrats to win a victory that would actually be big enough to allow them to govern. During this past Congress, when Democrats after years in the wilderness, finally achieved a Majority Republicans made it a matter of party policy to routinely filibuster almost all bills put forth by Democrats. The media has given the impression that it is a Senate requirement that 60 votes are needed to pass legislation in the Senate but that is far from true. Until now filibusters were relatively rare and were used primarily to block civil rights legislation. Now, however, there have been 72 motions to stop filibusters so far in this first year of the 110th Congress. Compare this to 68 such motions in the full two years of the previous Congress, 53 in 1987-88, and 23 in 1977-78. In 1967-68, there were 5 such votes, one of them on a plan to amend cloture itself, which failed.

This is a deliberate calculated successful attempt to prevent the majority from doing the peoples business. It is deliberate action to enforce gridlock. And then during the campaign the have the nerve to denounce the Congress for getting nothing done.

The opposite is true. Democrats must be given large enough majorities to govern. If they have the power, responsibility will go with it. Gridlock cannot solve the recession, or the financial crisis or the health care crisis or any of the other problems that Democrats will inherit.

If we want our problems addressed we must not only get a new hand on the tiller we must have a captain with a crew so that they can steer the ship of state.