Quartz has the article Five ways the world could actually end by Friday. In case time is running low and you don’t have time to read the article, see if what’s happening now fits any of these 5 ways:
1. Electrical grid-killing solar flare
2. Planet-killing asteroid
3. Loose nukes
4. Death-ray from space
5. Magic
As they say at the end of the article “If you’re reading this on Saturday and it turned out that the world did end after all…”
McClatchy News has the story Obama, Boehner return to verbal fisticuffs on fiscal cliff.
President Barack Obama on Wednesday accused House Republicans of letting their animosity toward him prevent them from approving a deal to avert the nation’s imminent fiscal crisis, even though the two sides had been close to a compromise days ago.
“They keep on finding ways to say no as opposed to finding ways to say yes,” Obama said at a midday news conference at the White House. “I don’t know how much of that just has to do with, you know, it is very hard for them to say yes to me. But, you know, at some point, you know, they’ve got to take me out of it and think about their voters and think about what’s best for the country.”
The President is getting close to understanding the problem. While it may be true that there is some personal animosity toward him from the Republicans, the real reason why this revolves around him personally is something else.
The Republicans have figured out what a patsy he is, and they are determined to take advantage of what they know of his behavioral patterns.
The quickest way for the President to turn this around is to say, “No” and then walk away. No more negotiations. Another tactic the President might employ is to find a stand-in for himself in the negotiations. He needs to find someone with a stiffer spine than he has. Some actual vetoes might do wonders for his negotiating position in the future.
We don’t need for the President to prove what a great guy he is because he is willing to have his backers suffer the consequences. We need for him to decide what is right and fair, and not compromise on fairness. He seems to be willing to give the people earning between $250,000 and $400,000 a year a tax break paid for by cuts in the Social Security payments to the near poverty line seniors. How is this right and fair to pick on the people least able to manage the sacrifice in order to comfort the people most able to withstand some sacrifice?
This compromise plan also takes money out of the hands of people who are so close to a minimum living standard that they spend almost every cent they get on goods and services that stimulate the economy. The money he takes out of their hands goes to people who have enough to spare that they can suck this money right out of the economy and just save a good deal of the extra money instead of spending it.
The Fed is pouring liquidity into the economy at a furious rate, and the people who can afford to save are sucking it right back out almost as fast. Just imagine how much better we could do if the Fed and the rest of government weren’t working at cross purposes to each other.
The American Prospect has the Robert Kuttner article Social Security: Will Obama Cave?.
The premise of the “Chained CPI” is that the standard CPI overstates inflation because people regularly substitute products when they are more expensive. If beef is too pricey, people switch to chicken.
There are two fallacies in this premise as applied to seniors. Most seniors already live so close to the margin of poverty that they have already done all the easy substituting, unless we expect them to further downshift from chicken to cat food, or to choose between filling stomachs and filling prescriptions.
Moreover, the CPI as applied to seniors understates the true impact of inflation, not overstates it. As several studies have shown, the cost of health care has been increasing at more than twice the general rate of inflation, and seniors spend a far larger share of their incomes on medical care than younger Americans do.
This information backs up what I told Representative Richard Neal’s staffer as described in my previous post Cutting Social Security benefits is a cruel, stupid policy.
One other set of enablers are those liberals who say that at least a disguised cut in Social Security is not quite as bad as raising the Medicare eligibility age, a Republican demand that Obama has rejected. This chorus includes the sainted Paul Krugman, another resolute liberal who ordinarily earns nothing but our thanks and appreciation.
But saying that cutting Social Security is not quite as bad as cutting Medicare sets a pretty low bar. Neither should be cut.
The above quote also seems to back up my deviation from Krugman as mentioned in that previous post.
My best hope is that Boehner will pass his Plan B in the House and so anger President Obama, that all negotiations fall through. Once on the other side of the cliff we can see what kind of a deal can be worked out with the next Congress. Perhaps with restricted ability to threaten filibuster in the Senate and fewer Tea Party members in the House, the President will finally come to recognize the strength of his position.