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Andrew Tobias

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Andrew Tobias
Andrew Tobias

Money and Other Subjects

Year: 2012

Buying A Gun Should Be Easy; Voting Should Be Hard

August 21, 2012August 20, 2012

Basically, if you make it easy for everyone to vote, say the Republicans, it won’t be fair — the Democrats will win.  In 2008, according to this recent article, 100,000 votes were cast in the three days of early voting just prior to election day that the Republicans have now canceled.  In justifying this, one county Republican chairman told the Columbus Dispatch: “I guess I really actually feel we shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban — read African-American — voter-turnout machine.”   People should be allowed to vote; we just shouldn’t make it easy or convenient.  It was better in 2004, when as you can see in this YouTube, some Ohioans had to wait in line as long as 15 hours.  Which meant a lot gave up, which gave George W. Bush his second remarkable term as the most important man in the world.  To the great benefit of the wealthy, who want to see President Bush’s Harvard Business School ’75 classmate Mitt Romney win this time, so (as noted yesterday) we can get on with the business of slashing programs that help the formerly-middle-class (now poor) and cutting the estate tax on billionheirs, like the Koch brothers, to zero.

Ohio’s 20 Electoral College votes made all the difference in 2004.  (Bush won 286-251; but would have lost 266-271.)  As it may again this year, which is why Republicans are working so hard to make it difficult to vote.  Remember: it should be easy to buy a semi-automatic weapon (let’s not close the gun show loophole!) but difficult to vote (let’s cut back on the improvements Ohio made in 2008!).

It’s a pretty stunning four minutes, that YouTube.  Watch — and send it to your friends.  Maybe we can take it viral.

 

Tough On Poverty

August 20, 2012August 19, 2012

POSSIBLE SLOGAN

“Republicans: Dedicated to diminishing democracy, one voter-suppression tactic at a time.”

Seriously: what do you think?

Where for decades the country trended toward making it easier to vote — allowing women to vote, for example, and then blacks — the Republicans are now working full throttle to make it harder: cutting back on early-voting; purging voter files of legitimate voters; requiring photo ID (ostensibly to combat the nonexistent problem of people showing up with fake ID); disallowing university-issued photo IDs that lack expiration dates (ostensibly to combat the nonexistent problem of . . . what?); and, of course, withholding the vote from people who’ve paid their debt to society (in many cases for drug possession that should arguably not have been criminalized in the first place).

In Ohio, they cut back on voting hours in heavily Democratic counties — but not in heavily Republican counties.  And though that ultimately got squashed, they still plan to eliminate early voting the weekend before Election Day, knowing that this is when African American churches typically carpool their congregants to the polls.  In Pennsylvania . . . well, here’s Jon Stewart on what they’re doing in Pennsylvania, in case you missed it.

POVERTY

Whitney Tilson: “Here is a very insightful New York Times Sunday Magazine cover story, by Paul Tough, about poverty in America and what Obama has (and hasn’t) done to address it.   It’s stunning to consider that there are SEVEN MILLION children today who live in households struggling to survive on income equal to less than HALF the poverty level!  Ah, but forget all that – I just need to remind myself that the future of our country depends on more savage cuts to our already tattered safety net so that private equity and hedge fund millionaires (like me) can pay even lower taxes. It makes me sick to my stomach (and despair for the future of our country).”

Just a few excerpts (it’s worth reading it all):

In 1966, at the height of the War on Poverty, the poverty rate was just under 15 percent of the population; in 2010, the most recent year for which data is available, it was 15.1 percent. And the child-poverty rate is 22 percent — substantially higher today than it was then. And yet as a political issue, especially during this presidential campaign season, poverty has receded almost to silence.

The idea that Obama hasn’t done much for poor Americans is simply not true; by some measures, he has done more than any other recent president. But [columnist Bob] Herbert is right that Obama has stopped talking publicly about the subject. Obama hasn’t made a single speech devoted to poverty as president, and if you visit barackobama.com these days, you would be hard-pressed to find any reference to the subject whatsoever.

[O]ver the last two decades, and especially during the Obama administration, the way the federal government gives aid to poor people has shifted away from cash transfers toward noncash transfers — food stamps, Medicaid subsidies, housing vouchers — none of which are included in a family’s income for the purposes of poverty statistics. If you do count food stamps and other noncash aid, the poverty rate has, according to some calculations, not gone up much at all during the Obama administration, during the worst economic crisis in 70 years. That is a remarkable accomplishment. When I asked William Julius Wilson last month for his thoughts on the current administration’s antipoverty efforts, he said that Obama had “done more for lower-income Americans than any president since Lyndon Baines Johnson.”

But, Republicans might ask: is that a good thing?  Isn’t it better to enact the Ryan budget, that slashes the social programs, so we can lower taxes on people at the top?  (The Ryan budget passed the house with unanimous Republican support.)  Isn’t it better to cut the estate tax on billionheirs from 45% to 0% as Mr. Romney is pledged to do?  And lower Mr. Romney’s own tax rate from 13.9% to under 1%?

When administration officials talk about longer-term solutions to poverty these days, they often talk about education. And the cabinet member who expresses the most personal concern about the plight of disadvantaged children is Arne Duncan, the education secretary. . . .

There is a growing body of evidence that for many low-income children, a great school can provide a route out of poverty. And Duncan is a firm believer in the idea that transforming the schools in neighborhoods like Roseland will in turn transform the lives of the children who live there. But the record of school reform in Roseland is not encouraging. . . .

Lett’s analysis has support from many of the academics who study how poverty has changed over time. Looking back on the lives and prospects of the American poor during President Johnson’s War on Poverty, you can see two broad changes. In material terms, the trends have been mostly positive. Americans who live below the poverty line are much less likely to be hungry or malnourished today than they were then. A majority of families below the poverty line now have material possessions that would have been unthinkable luxuries in the 1960s: air-conditioning, cable TV, a mobile phone.

But while the material gap has diminished, a different kind of gap has opened between poor and middle-class Americans: a social gap. In the 1960s, most Americans, rich, middle-class and poor, were raising children in two-parent homes; they lived in relatively stable, mixed-income communities; they went to church in roughly similar numbers; their children often attended the same public schools. Today, those social factors all diverge sharply by class, and the class for which things have changed most starkly is the poor. Damien may have a cellphone, but he has never met his father.

A critical factor perpetuating poverty from one generation to the next is family dynamics and their effects on child development. This means that if we want to improve social mobility, we need to find a better way to help disadvantaged parents and their children.

While this theory of poverty is still being debated by social scientists, it is not particularly controversial in poor neighborhoods. Obama saw it himself in Roseland. In “The Audacity of Hope,” Obama wrote that poor African-Americans were well aware of the role that family breakdown played in the perpetuation of urban poverty. As he put it, “black folks can often be heard bemoaning the eroding work ethic, inadequate parenting and declining sexual mores with a fervor that would make the Heritage Foundation proud.”

Poverty is not the top priority in most churches that it once was; now it’s the unborn and the threat that I might have married Charles that are the key issues.  But even if the Deeply Religious skew Republican, believing this is what Jesus would have done, a lot of us think Romney/Ryan have it all wrong and applaud the (admittedly limited) success the Obama Administration has had dealing with this most difficult of problems.

 

The Newsroom

August 17, 2012August 16, 2012

The thing about yesterday’s 6-MINUTE CLIP is that it’s freely available, at least to anyone with Internet access, and everyone in America should see it.  They are free to disagree with it, although I would love to know their logic.  But everyone who’s been exposed to the “job creators” mantra, over and endlessly over, needs to at least have one shot at understanding why it’s a crock.  And why Steve Jobs was not deterred from starting Apple because tax rates were high, and why no business, small or otherwise, is going to pass up the chance to hire workers needed to increase profits because of the rate at which those extra profits will be taxed.

The thing about THE NEWSROOM, especially, for example, Episode Three about the 112th Congress and the Tea Party and the Koch brothers and the news media, is that it’s only available to those who have HBO (though if you do, you can watch that episode right now on your computer or iPhone via HBOGO).  But, boy, would it be great if everybody saw it.  Smart, funny, entertaining, dramatic – raising issues fundamental to the course of our democracy.

The difference between the Nick Hanauer clip and “The Newsroom” – apart from one’s being readily available and the other not – is that, realistically, those predisposed to tuning out Rush Limbaugh’s “four pillars of deceit” — “science, academia, government, and the media” — will find a dozen reasons to dismiss it.  For starters, Episode Three guest stars Jane Fonda (knuckling under to the Koch brothers, but still).

So, realistically, THE NEWSROOM will likely not reach the people who need to see it – although it’s as gripping as, and even more important than, Aaron Sorkin’s previous series, THE WEST WING.

But that 6-minute “job creators” clip?  Where the only “performer” is a self-made American billionaire?  With a short, compelling, logical message?  That, maybe, they will watch.  If you know anyone who believes that lowering taxes on the rich creates jobs, send them that clip.

 

 

Who Are The Job Creators? The Middle Class!

August 16, 2012August 15, 2012

Henry Ford, that old commie, may really have been onto something when he paid his workers enough to afford to buy what he was selling.

In this must-see 6-minute TED talk* — initially withheld from a wider audience — serial entrepreneur Nick Hanauer makes the case that it’s the middle class who are the job creators.

So if we went back to tax rates high enough to pay people decently to modernize our crumbling infrastructure, we’d accomplish three things:  We’d put those people to work.  We’d arrest the decay (even, here and there, leapfrog back into first place).  And — by returning people to the middle class — we’d be swelling the ranks of the job creators.  America’s normally virtuous economic cycle, disrupted at times of massive inequality, could resume.  Powerfully.

This is exactly the opposite of what Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan propose.

It is exactly the opposite of what Rush Limbaugh, Joe the Plumber, Joe the Scarborough, Michele Bachmann, and Sarah Palin preach.

It is exactly the opposite of what the Koch brothers (who are busily buying Congress and the White House) hope they are paying for.

*Thanks to reader Mark Langenderfer for reminding me of this talk.

 

 

Three Good Things About Paul Ryan — Ask Your Republican Friends

August 15, 2012August 15, 2012

THREE GOOD THINGS ABOUT PAUL RYAN

In Paul Ryan the Republicans have chosen a man who co-sponsored the national personhood bill — a good thing if you believe a rape victim should be forced by the government to carry her rapist’s child to term (and that common forms of contraception and should be banned) . . . a man with a near-zero percent rating from the Human Rights Campaign — a good thing if you believe gays do not deserve equal rights under the law (he didn’t even want the hate crimes law extended to cover gays) . . . a man whose tax plan would slash Mitt Romney’s tax rate from its already remarkable 13.9% to less than 1% — a good thing if you think the problem with America today is that guys and gals like Mitt Romney are over-taxed.

Ask your Republican friends whether this is really who they are — or whether, with the entire political landscape having sifted so far to the right these last few decades, they’re not actually more comfortable identifying as Independents.  And voting for a man under whose Administration the stock market has doubled over the last three years, corporate profits are at record highs, private sector jobs have expanded for 29 straight months, stem cell research lines have sextupled, our standing in the world has soared, and our number-one enemy has been decimated.

Not such a bad record considering the disaster he was handed and the Republican determination to see him fail.

THE POLICY GAP

Ezra Klein explores it here:

. . . The policy gap, put simply, is this: Obama has proposed policies. Mitt Romney hasn’t.

It is important to say that this exists separately from any judgments about the quality of either man’s policies. You can believe every idea Obama has proposed is a socialist horror inspired by Kenyan revenge fantasies. This would, I think, be a strange judgment to reach about plans to invest in infrastructure, temporarily double the size of the payroll tax cuts and raise the marginal tax rate on income over $250,000 by 4.5 percentage points. Nevertheless, Obama’s policy proposals are sufficiently detailed that they can be fully assessed and conclusions — even odd ones — confidently drawn. Romney’s policies are not.

Romney’s offerings are more like simulacra of policy proposals. They look, from far away, like policy proposals. They exist on his Web site, under the heading of “Issues,” with subheads like “Tax” and “Health care.” But read closely, they are not policy proposals. They do not include the details necessary to judge Romney’s policy ideas. In many cases, they don’t contain any details at all.

Take taxes. Romney has promised a “permanent, across-the-board 20 percent cut in marginal rates,” alongside a grab bag of other goodies, like the end of “the death tax.” Glenn Hubbard, his top economic adviser, has promised that the plan will “broaden the tax base to ensure that tax reform is revenue-neutral.”

It is in the distance between “cut in marginal rates” and “revenue-neutral” that all the policy happens. That is where Romney must choose which deductions to cap or close. It’s where we learn what his plan means for the mortgage-interest deduction, and the tax-free status of employer health plans and the Child Tax Credit. It is where we learn, in other words, what his plan means for people like you and me. And it is empty. Romney does not name even one deduction that he would cap or close. He even admitted, in an interview with CNBC, that his plan “can’t be scored because those details have to be worked out.” . . .

But this much is clear: to make his cuts for the wealthy revenue-neutral (including his elimination of the estate tax on billionheirs), he will have to get more revenue from the not-wealthy.

. . . On financial regulation, Romney would “repeal Dodd-Frank and replace with streamlined, modern regulatory framework.” That is literally his entire plan. Three years after a homegrown financial crisis wrecked the global economy, the likely Republican nominee for president would repeal the new regulatory architecture and replace it with … something. . . .

. . . Romney’s vagueness is unique among modern presidential campaigns. . . . so far, Romney has refused to give voters the most basic information about what he would do as president. That means he has refused to give voters the most basic information necessary for them to make an informed choice this November. That’s not acceptable. And neither voters nor the media should accept it.

Look: things are rough out there.  But did I mention that the stock market has doubled in the last three years?  That we’ve gained private-sector jobs for 29 consecutive months (too slowly, because Republicans manufactured a debt ceiling crisis and blocked the American Jobs Act and its infrastructure investments that cry out to be done)?  That corporate profits are at record highs?  That the number of stem cell lines made available to researchers has sextupled?  That our standing in the world has soared?  That our number-one enemy has been decimated?

Ask your friends who like Romney (or hate Obama): why would we reverse course now?  Which was better for job creation and our national balance sheet: the Clinton policy of modestly higher taxes on the best off?  Or the the Bush policy of record-low taxes on the best off, which Romney wants to lower further still?  (For readers too young to recall: 23 million new jobs were created during the Clinton years and the talk by the end of his term was of “budget surpluses as far as the eye can see.”)

 

 

Three Good Things About Paul Ryan — Ask Your Republican Friends

August 15, 2012August 15, 2012

THREE GOOD THINGS ABOUT PAUL RYAN

In Paul Ryan the Republicans have chosen a man who co-sponsored the national personhood bill — a good thing if you believe a rape victim should be forced by the government to carry her rapist’s child to term (and that common forms of contraception and should be banned) . . . a man with a near-zero percent rating from the Human Rights Campaign — a good thing if you believe gays do not deserve equal rights under the law (he didn’t even want the hate crimes law extended to cover gays) . . . a man whose tax plan would slash Mitt Romney’s tax rate from its already remarkable 13.9% to less than 1% — a good thing if you think the problem with America today is that guys and gals like Mitt Romney are over-taxed.

Ask your Republican friends whether this is really who they are — or whether, with the entire political landscape having sifted so far to the right these last few decades, they’re not actually more comfortable identifying as Independents.  And voting for a man under whose Administration the stock market has doubled over the last three years, corporate profits are at record highs, private sector jobs have expanded for 29 straight months, stem cell research lines have sextupled, our standing in the world has soared, and our number-one enemy has been decimated.

Not such a bad record considering the disaster he was handed and the Republican determination to see him fail.

THE POLICY GAP

Ezra Klein explores it here:

. . . The policy gap, put simply, is this: Obama has proposed policies. Mitt Romney hasn’t.

It is important to say that this exists separately from any judgments about the quality of either man’s policies. You can believe every idea Obama has proposed is a socialist horror inspired by Kenyan revenge fantasies. This would, I think, be a strange judgment to reach about plans to invest in infrastructure, temporarily double the size of the payroll tax cuts and raise the marginal tax rate on income over $250,000 by 4.5 percentage points. Nevertheless, Obama’s policy proposals are sufficiently detailed that they can be fully assessed and conclusions — even odd ones — confidently drawn. Romney’s policies are not.

Romney’s offerings are more like simulacra of policy proposals. They look, from far away, like policy proposals. They exist on his Web site, under the heading of “Issues,” with subheads like “Tax” and “Health care.” But read closely, they are not policy proposals. They do not include the details necessary to judge Romney’s policy ideas. In many cases, they don’t contain any details at all.

Take taxes. Romney has promised a “permanent, across-the-board 20 percent cut in marginal rates,” alongside a grab bag of other goodies, like the end of “the death tax.” Glenn Hubbard, his top economic adviser, has promised that the plan will “broaden the tax base to ensure that tax reform is revenue-neutral.”

It is in the distance between “cut in marginal rates” and “revenue-neutral” that all the policy happens. That is where Romney must choose which deductions to cap or close. It’s where we learn what his plan means for the mortgage-interest deduction, and the tax-free status of employer health plans and the Child Tax Credit. It is where we learn, in other words, what his plan means for people like you and me. And it is empty. Romney does not name even one deduction that he would cap or close. He even admitted, in an interview with CNBC, that his plan “can’t be scored because those details have to be worked out.” . . .

But this much is clear: to make his cuts for the wealthy revenue-neutral (including his elimination of the estate tax on billionheirs), he will have to get more revenue from the not-wealthy.

. . . On financial regulation, Romney would “repeal Dodd-Frank and replace with streamlined, modern regulatory framework.” That is literally his entire plan. Three years after a homegrown financial crisis wrecked the global economy, the likely Republican nominee for president would repeal the new regulatory architecture and replace it with … something. . . .

. . . Romney’s vagueness is unique among modern presidential campaigns. . . . so far, Romney has refused to give voters the most basic information about what he would do as president. That means he has refused to give voters the most basic information necessary for them to make an informed choice this November. That’s not acceptable. And neither voters nor the media should accept it.

Look: things are rough out there.  But did I mention that the stock market has doubled in the last three years?  That we’ve gained private-sector jobs for 29 consecutive months (too slowly, because Republicans manufactured a debt ceiling crisis and blocked the American Jobs Act and its infrastructure investments that cry out to be done)?  That corporate profits are at record highs?  That the number of stem cell lines made available to researchers has sextupled?  That our standing in the world has soared?  That our number-one enemy has been decimated?

Ask your friends who like Romney (or hate Obama): why would we reverse course now?  Which was better for job creation and our national balance sheet: the Clinton policy of modestly higher taxes on the best off?  Or the the Bush policy of record-low taxes on the best off, which Romney wants to lower further still?  (For readers too young to recall: 23 million new jobs were created during the Clinton years and the talk by the end of his term was of “budget surpluses as far as the eye can see.”)

 

 

He Won’t Reveal His Taxes — Here’s How He’ll Raise Yours

August 14, 2012August 16, 2012

EVOLUTION OF THE HUMAN RACE

Tamara Hendrickson:  “While that video of the Olympic 100-meter race you linked to last week is absolutely fascinating and factual, it, sadly, doesn’t represent evolution of the human race.  Our evolution takes centuries and even millennia because we have such long life spans and so few children.  (These stats are compared to bacteria. A population of E. coli with enough food will double in 20 minutes and divide—produce copy cells—exponentially.)  Instead, the increases in speed graphically represented in the video reflect better nutrition (leading to taller, more fit people), antibiotics (fewer deaths), and huge advances in our understanding of human metabolism, nutrition specific for athletes, and the science of athletics (training regimens, muscle recovery, etc.)   None of this detracts from the fascinating observation that humans run a lot faster now than they did 100 years ago.  The Olympics are such an amazing testament to the capabilities of our race!”

WHAT IF SOLAR GOT THE SAME SUBSIDIES AS FOSSIL FUELS?

This dramatic graphic claims three things:

> As a taxpayer, you’ve paid $7.24 toward solar subsidies over te past five years — versus $521.73 for fossil fuels.

> Solar is cheaper than grid power in 14% of the country now – but would be cheaper in 100% of the country if it received an equal subsidy.

> The US has 39 times as much sun hitting it as Germany, but Germany generates 60 times as much solar energy.

Not every effort will succeed — witness Solyndra — but the above suggests the Obama Administration is serving us well by choosing not to cede the solar industry to China, which is investing a fortune in solar subsidies to dominate the energy of the future.  One Chinese report has projected solar becoming as cheap as coal  by 2015.

Jimmy Carter installed solar panels on the White House roof, Ronald Reagan removed them.  (This according to Michael Grunwald’s The NEW New Deal, out today.)  Not to say it’s more than symbolic — but it is symbolic.  Progressives progress.  Conservatives retrench.  Democrats boost expenditures for basic research, help kids afford college, sextuple the number of stem cell lines available for research, confront climate change.  Republicans tend to lean the other way.  Some even side with Rush Limbaugh, who calls “science” one of the “four pillars of deceit.”

YOUR TAXES

Seriously: if Romney wins, he plans to lower his own taxes and, though he doesn’t cop to it, raise yours.  Download the report of the Brookings analysis here.

ABSTRACT
This paper examines the tradeoffs among three competing goals that are inherent in a revenue-neutral income tax reform—maintaining tax revenues, ensuring a progressive tax system, and lowering marginal tax rates—drawing on the example of the tax policies advanced in presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s tax plan. Our major conclusion is that any revenue-neutral individual income tax change that incorporates the features Governor Romney has proposed would provide large tax cuts to high-income households, and increase the tax burdens on middle- and/or lower-income taxpayers.

The PBS NewsHour interview with the study’s co-author is here.  The New York Times reports on it here (“middle-income [taxpayers] would pay on average $546 more a year, according to the study, and upper-middle class taxpayers would pay $1,880 more, while the taxes of the richest 1 percent would be cut by $29,282”), noting the Romney team’s rebuttal that lower tax rates will lead to faster growth (it worked so well these last ten years) and that will lessen or eliminate the burden on the rest of us that Brookings projects.

 

Pomegranate and Soda

August 13, 2012August 12, 2012

In Paul Ryan, Mr. Romney has chosen a guy who shares his commitment to further — insane — tax cuts for the wealthy, while placing greater burdens on everyone else.  Somehow, this will get the economy moving?  Ryan’s House budget calls for deep cuts in education, from Head Start to college aid, and for shifting thousands of dollars in Medicare costs to seniors.  Romney’s choice Saturday just confirms the gravity of our own 85 days from now.  (Or sooner, if your state has early voting.)

MARS, SHMARZ — WHAT ABOUT THE COMET?

Usually, I just write fundraising pitches and click SEND — for better or worse.

The most recent one I planned to send my list  I thought might be too shrill, so I asked a wise donor — who had had nothing more to drink than a soda water with pomegranate juice — if I could test it out on her.

(We had been discussing our prospects for the election.)

She said:  “Sure.”

So I explained that there was a comet hurtling our way with a 70% chance of missing Earth — so we would likely barely notice — but a 30% chance it would blow us to smithereens . . . except that a new kind of force field had been developed that could almost surely divert the comet if we all just pooled our energy into doing so.

“Really?” her eyes widened.

Whether they were widening more at the comet or at the invention of the force field I do not know.

“Well, no, of course not!” I said, confused that she could be taking this literally. (As the Ugandan woman so marvelously explains to the disillusioned missionary near the end of THE BOOK OF MORMON: “Eeet . . . eeez . . . a . . . METAPHOR!”)

And then she got it.

“Oh,” she said.

And that’s the thing. The President will probably be reelected — in which case we’ll continue to make progress and will barely notice the catastrophe we dodged . . . but there’s a 30% chance Mr. Romney will win (intrade actually puts it at more like 41%), which will mean we failed to turn out enough votes to hold the White House OR the Senate, let alone take back the House, in which case Rush Limbaugh / Karl Rove, et al, will have a complete lock on all three branches of government. We will lose the Supreme Court for 20 years, democracy will give way to oligarchy, we will have a global depression (as the Republican austerity budget sucks hundreds of billions of dollars of demand OUT of the economy at exactly the time we should be putting hundreds of billions IN, to modernize our infrastructure), with all the war and horror global depressions are all too prone to lead to.

And all we have to do to avert it –- like the comet –- is pool our energy. Our votes, our voices, our Visa cards.

“It’s actually worse than the comet,” said my pal, warming to the analogy.

“Huh?”

(It is usually I, not my donors, who flirt with hyperbole. How could a Romney win be worse than the planet being blown to smithereens?)

“With the comet,” she explained, “we’d experience no pain. We’d just die instantly. We’d be living with the election for decades.”

Just as we are living now with the fall-out from the President’s predecessor.

We have 85 days. Fewer, really, because early voting starts in just a few weeks — and because it doesn’t really help to send a check the day before the election, when the comet is moments from impact. NOW is the time to bend its course.

Blame this pitch, if it’s too shrill, on my pal with the pomegranate and soda. She said I should go with it. But if you know folks who’ve not yet done all they can . . . because they “don’t do political giving” (time to make an exception!) . . . or because “Obama’s going to win” (not if we stand by as they outspend us by a billion dollars of superPAC money) . . . or because they “have another engagement that day” (truthfully, I don’t CARE if they come shoot hoops with the NBA stars –- it’s not about attending an event, it’s about climate change and stem cell research and the separation of church and state and what kind of country we’re going to be) . . .

. . . if you know folks like that, who are with us but have not yet done all they can, please tell them, with love but with urgency, that a comet is headed our way, and that all we have to do to divert it is make a modest but meaningful sacrifice. Like, say, 1% of our net worth.

Here.

As always, I’ll see the $$$ the minute it comes through, to say thanks.

[Or — if you’re not a part of QuickDonate yet — you should know that you can donate to the campaign with a single click in emails, online, or on your smartphone. All you need to do is securely save your payment info: here.]
Tomorrow:  Evolution of the Human Race v. Evolution of the E. Coli Bacterium . . . Solar v. Fossil . . . And More.

 

 

Your Taxes, Mitt’s Taxes

August 10, 2012August 9, 2012

YOUR TAXES

Click here to see how you’d fare depending on who wins.

If you make $20 million a year (and are adequately hedged to weather a depression), the choice is clear:  you will come out ahead if the new guy wins.

Speaking of whom:

HORSE BALLET

Their candidate would have us believe he doesn’t follow dressage.  Matt Miller suggests this is mitticulous.

EVOLUTION OF THE HUMAN RACE

The 100-meter dash.  Very cool.

 

 

 

 

Twice As Big as the Louisiana Purchase and Marshall Plan Combined

August 9, 2012August 9, 2012

Hitting bookstores next week, as I mentioned a couple of days ago, The NEW New Deal by Michael Grunwald.

Mel White: “Your confession that you had only read the book jacket was hilarious BUT you and I both know that the publisher writes those blurbs.  I’m wondering if the blurb represents the author accurately. When you have time, write a followup piece to assure us.”

Indeed it does.  And it makes you want to scream at how little the country knows of the important, far-sighted, hopeful things the Administration has done.  For every 100 people who have heard of Solyndra, and think it’s a scandal (which it is not), is there even 1 who’s heard of ARPA-E and knows its its importance to our long-term prosperity and competitive position in thew world?

Ultimately [Grunwald writes of the $786 billion Recovery Act that turned out to be $831 billion], one of the most sweeping pieces of legislation in modern history [“in constant dollars, more than 50% bigger than the entire New Deal, twice as big as the Louisiana Purchase and Marshall Plan combined”] was reduced [in the pubic mind] to an afterthought.  In April, 2011, Obama’s most influential supporter asked him on national TV whether he wished he had started his presidency by focusing on the economy instead of health care.  “Oprah, I’ve got to tell you, we did start with the economy,” Obama replied with evident irritation.  “Remember, the first thing we did was pass a Recovery Act.”  Polls have found that most Americans see the stimulus as a giveaway to bankers, confusing it with the $700 billion financial bailout that passed before Obama was elected.  I interviewed several congressmen who were under the same misimpression.

This book aims to tell the story of the stimulus — how it happened, how it’s changing the country, how Republicans found their voice in opposing it, and how it’s been distorted by the Washington funhouse.  . . .

It was greeted with virtually unanimous opposition by congressional Republicans, who had secretly decided to fight Obama on just about everything.

“If he was for it,” explains former Republican senator George Voinovich of Ohio, “we had to be against it.”

And yet it prevented a full-scale depression and, as you will read, offers real hope for our future.  The same American ingenuity that could successfully land a one-ton nuclear-powered rover on Mars in the astounding way it just did — on Mars! — is being unleashed and nurtured in game-changing ways.

ARPA-E, modeled after DARPA, is a big piece of that effort.  And by the way?  When President Obama noted that entrepreneurs didn’t achieve their success entirely on their own — they had help from the folks who built the national infrastructure and perhaps from the public school system or government-backed student loans or government contracts or SBA loans — he might have mentioned DARPA, which gave us the Internet.  Can you think of any entrepreneurs whose success has depended partly on that?  The same will hold true of ARPA-E, and almost nobody knows about it.

Read the book.  Spread the word.  Vote to keep moving forward.  Vote for the party under whose leadership $10,000 would have grown to $415,000 since 1929 instead of $11,700.  Or — if you can’t bear to do that for some reason — stay home.

 

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