Today I received a remarkable email from the infamous Crossroads GPS, Carl Rove’s gift from the Roberts court, about the battle over tax giveaways for the wealthy. It heralds the release of a survey executed by Glen Bloger of Public Opinions Strategies that purports to show strong majorities favor extending the Bush tax cuts for everyone, including those in the top brackets.  However, when one examines the survey and the accompanying summary memo, it is clear that the survey does not deal with actual public preferences, but with ways to spin the unpopular Republican drive to extend tax cuts for the wealthiest so that their payback to their big contributors does not bite them in the pants. It is, in Bolger’s words, “messaging” research that:

… identifies powerful arguments that Republicans and other limited government advocates can use to puncture the Democrats flimsy rationale for raising taxes on anyone in the midst of a deepening jobs crisis.

And indeed, if you read the survey results you will find that the only way the response comes out in favor of extending tax cuts for the wealthy is when the questions are asked in a specific, emotively misleading way. When people are asked straightforwardly if they favor extending the tax cuts for the wealthy, even a highly partisan survey can’t get more than an even split – which is still many more in favor of the giveaways than almost every other non-partisan survey has found to date. This survey and its resultant messaging formula is relatively weak, and it is not surprising that its author recommends that the GOP continue doing what they have already been doing to poor effect:

— frame the issue as tax increases not extensions of tax cuts;

— fail generally to distinguish between middle-class tax-cut extensions and those for the wealthy;

— seek cover by invoking the recession and beat the “jobs” dead horse until it’s even bloodier than it is now (how this works for the folks who killed  the unemployment benefits extension is hard to say);

— neutralize the deficit question by casting the issue as letting people keep their own money, not denying the government its dues.

Of course, this particular pseudo-survey is itself part of the messaging game, the effort to manipulate appearances. It doesn’t, however, strike me as worth the money Crossroads GPS probably paid for it.

What should we do to counter it? We may actually be doing just fine as we are.  For example, for the first time in a long time, we may have our Democratic Senator, Claire McCaskill, on our side as indicated by her on-the-money comments after the Senate votes last Saturday:

I’m trying to figure out how anyone can keep a straight face and say they are for deficit reduction when they insist on a permanent tax cut for the wealthiest Americans, completely unpaid for,” McCaskill said. “If they think it is OK to raise taxes for the embattled middle class because they are going to pout if we don’t give more money to millionaires, it really is time for the people of America to take up pitchforks.

For once, her wrong-headed deficit hobbyhorse may be working to our advantage. Now it is our turn to contact her and let her know that we approve of her strong stance on the tax giveaways for the wealthy. The Republicans have a weak hand and, as the Bolger memo shows, their bluff hasn’t been working – if we let them win with these cards, we’ll deserve to see our country demolished by the GOP wrecking crew over the coming decade. The next few days will show us if Democrats are just too strongly programed for capitulation to manage a victory, albeit one that will hurt more now than it would have if they had taken it when it was first offered before the midterms.

As you all know by now, the entire Missouri House delegation voted yesterday against extending the Bush tax cuts for 98% of Americans – those individuals who make less than $200,000 and families who make less than $250,000. This naturally left me just a little curious about how my own representative, Todd Akin (R-2nd), rationalized his vote given that he’s spent lots of time over the past few years gassing about how Democrats want to raise our taxes. And sure enough, when I went to his Webpage to see if he had something to say on the topic, I learned that he wants us to know that he “will be fighting for the extension of the Bush tax cuts for all Americans.” Which seems to mean wealthy Americans since he showed us yesterday that he doesn’t care diddly for my bottom line or that of most of my neighbors.

Of course, poor old Todd is not the sharpest knife in the drawer and might be a little confused – or he just hasn’t been paying too much attention to what he’s voting on. On his Webpage he claims that:

While Democrats are preparing to raise taxes by $3.9 trillion, ordinary Americans are still struggling to find work.  It is wrong to prioritize the singling out of some Americans for tax increases at the detriment of creating jobs

First, the $3.9 trillion he’s talking about is the cost of all the Bush tax cuts over ten years. Since it was the Democrats who were offering him a chance to cut a big chunk, $3.2 trillion, off that sum, the amount that would give a tax break to most middle class Americans, if Akin isn’t confused or not paying attention, he just might be trying to spin a little fib. My question is why doesn’t Todd, winner of a Distinguished Christian legislator award in 2007, know that Jesus frowns on bad little boys who tell lies? (For that matter, doesn’t he remember that Jesus said that it would be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to go to heaven (Matthew 19:16-30). Seems like he might show a little more concern for the souls of the wealthy, no?)

Second, the amount in question is not the only little invention he’s trying to pass off. Clearly, the middle class tax cut he nixed might do something to create some jobs since it gives folks who have to watch their pennies a little more spending money and thus creates demand – but I bet (and economists agree) that the wealthy 2% he’s so concerned about won’t kill that many jobs when their income tax rates go up by about 4.5 percentage points – still among the lowest top-bracket tax rates in the developed world. Letting the top bracket tax cuts expire would cut the deficit by something in the vicinity of $700 billion dollars over ten years – and isn’t the deficit what all the GOP deficit scare-mongers are hyperventilating about, the reason why they can’t do things like extend unemployment benefits for those victimized by the recession laissez-faire, tax-cutting policies created?

But hey! You know what? I bet Akin won’t sweat it. He can always depend on the gullibility of the black-is-white, tea-drinking brigade. Winger Dan Varroney of The Hill’s Congress blog, accuses President Obama of missing the “message” of the Nov. 2 rout – he thinks that Obama’s not only wrong, but condescending when he stands by his policies. Varroney compares the President’s logic to that of a chef who claims that it’s not “his inability to cook, but the customer’s inability to think the food tastes good.” While Varroney might be right about Obama’s condescension, he need only take a careful, unbiased look at the tripe that respected Republican congresspeople, such as Rep. Akin, are dishing out and that the GOP base is gobbling up to understand that a little condescension might be in order.

People voted for Todd Akin in spite of the fact that almost every other sentence he writes or speaks can easily be shown to be intellectually spurious and often dead false. The same people who vote for him over and over again, no matter how egregiously he betrays their interests, will probably give him a pass on this issue as well because he says he’s “fighting for the extension of the tax cuts for all Americans,” and if he says so, it must be true.

In October I reported that my State Representative, Andrew Koenig (R-88), was crowing about reviving the fair tax initiative that limped into obscurity last year. The plan is to eliminate the state income tax and replace it with a regressive sales tax.

Sure enough, the newly-minted Speaker, Rep. Steve Tilley (R-106), has identified the sadly misnamed fair tax as one of his big legislative priorities (right along with busting unions via right-to-work legislation). Not surprisingly, the Wonkroom reports that Mr. Tilley – who ran unopposed – is in receipt of some $200,000 in campaign contributions from one Rex Sinquefield. Looks like Sinquefield was gunning for bigger game even before he was sure that the $11,218,000 that he spent was going to snare enough voters to pass Prop. A.

Proposition A has the potential to decimate the budgets of Kansas City and St. Louis, but eliminating the state income tax will amount to a blitzkreig on the poor and middle class in the entire state:

Completely eliminating the Missouri income tax would cost the state about $6 billion, when the state is already facing a nearly $1 billion shortfall in its 2012 budget. Missouri business groups are also pushing the new GOP legislature to repeal the state’s corporate income tax, costing another $500 million.

When the fair tax was proposed last year, the Missouri Budget Project demonstrated that sales taxes would have to be uniformly raised to 11% to compensate for the lost revenue (think about adding 11% onto the price of your next new car, onto your grocery bill, and to just about everything else that you buy). The fair tax plan outlined by Koenig, which is, I presume, the plan that Tilly endorses, specifies that the sales tax will be no more than 7%. Given that Missouri sales taxes currently vary from 4.25% to 9.421% in different jurisdictions, it is difficult to see how this tax alone will compensate for lost revenue. You think that budget cuts have been draconian this last year? Just wait and see what happens if this piece of rotten tripe becomes state law.

And who will the fair tax affect the most? The great majority of Missourians whose incomes cluster somewhere in the vicinity of the $42,000 median and the 13.5% below the poverty level will feel the pain for sure, while the state’s rich business movers and shakers who pour money into GOP coffers will dance all the way to the bank with big returns on their investment. To add insult to injury, middle-class and poor Missourians are already carrying the state’s rich schmucks on their shoulders; the Wonkroom’s Pat Garofalo observes that:

Missouri already has a slightly regressive state tax system; those in the lowest income quintile can expect to pay about 10 percent of their income in state and local taxes, while those in the top one percent will pay about 5.4 percent.

And what has letting the big guys and corporations off the hook done for the state so far? Have any of you missed the fact that Missouri isn’t exactly a dynamic place to live and do business? Does anyone really think that when the state is a wholly owned subsidiary of Rex Sinquefield Inc. – which it seems well on the way to becoming – our lives will be vastly improved?

Last night Rachel Maddow nailed the key to Claire McCaskill’s 2006 victory over Jim Talent: the minimum wage. The GOP’s business constituency hates it, everyone else loves it.  It  didn’t hurt that a minimum wage initiative was on the Missouri ballot then either:

To their credit, the DSCC does get that this is a potent issue. I just saw an ad last night that they produced for Carnahan that hits Roy Blunt for his past opposition to the minimum wage – a past record that he is eager, by the way, to keep quiet:

I take the ad as indicating that Robin Carnahan gets it too, although she certainly isn’t running hard with it.

Another issue that strikes me as having all the positive mojo of the minimum wage is wiping out the BushCo tax giveaways for the wealthy – but wait – Carnahan already blew that. To be fair, she’s not alone in this lack of judgment, since the entire Democratic Congress crapped out on ending the tax breaks for the wealthy when they had a chance to use a vote on the issue to make a statement before the midterms. Remember operant conditioning? The GOP has been far too successful in training the Democrats to fold their tails between their legs and run whenever they hear the dreaded “T” word.

The real import of what Maddow is saying, though, lies in what both these issues have in common. They represent a core Democratic principle: fairness. When Democratic politicians fail to stand up for this principle, they deny their intrinsic identity, what it means to be a Democrat – and you can be sure that a self-hating Democrat isn’t likely to inspire much love from voters.

The Republican party, mindful of its role as a supplicant before the voting public, issued a “Pledge to America.” Not to be outdone, the presumably more militant St. Louis and Jefferson County Tea Party groups are offering potential allies a “Treaty,” which, one assumes, affirms the Tea Party’s deepest, most profound principles. Needless to say, it’s a very simple document.

The first of the three provisions, calling for the repeal of The Affordable Care Act (ACA), is the most specific, which is not surprising since the Tea Party’s first raison d’etre was squashing health care reform:

1) I believe that the Health Care Reform bill (Affordable Care Act) should be immediately repealed as an un-Constitutional extension of governmental powers according to Article I of the US Constitution, and thus a burden on the people’s rights as recognized by the 9th Amendment.

While we are all sick and tired of pointing out that attacking the ACA on constitutional grounds is spurious, the Tea Party is not likely to cease and desist anytime soon. Such claims lend a veneer of legitimacy to the whole corporate-orchestrated cacophony. Besides, who knows whether or not the efforts of the Roberts Court to, as TAP puts it, “repeal the 20th century” may yet bear the intended rotten fruit.

The language of the provision, though, is not especially artful. To say that extending health insurance to millions of people is a “burden” on our constitutional rights is akin to saying that dying untreated because one lacks the means to pay is an inalienable right.

Just why are these crusaders so worked up about the ACA? The answer is easy – they’ve got that old time pocketbook religion – which brings us to the second provision:

2) I believe the government should reduce taxes and cut spending, as a rejection of the Keynesian model of economics.  Government should be fiscally responsible with the people’s dime.

A quasi-religious manifesto, which is what the “Treaty” is, need not justify assumptions shared by those to whom it is directed. So, if you ask why we should reject Keynesian economics, which have arguably served us well during the past century, expect to get uncomprehending stares and a few indignant, conservative economic cliches, along with lots of poorly-digested babble about “freedom.”

The concept of “fiscally responsible,”  though, really does need to be reclaimed by the linguistically responsible. It does not necessarily mean gutting progressive taxation and cutting social spending. It could just as eaily mean right-sizing taxes and spending in order to meet goals approved by the majority. And by majority I don’t mean the loudest, which would be the Tea Party, but the plurality that voted for Obama, the same majority that, for example, either aproves of the ACA, or disapproves because  it hasn’t gone far enough.

The final provision brings up the last article of faith in the trinitarian Tea Party theology:

3) I believe that we should reduce the federal bureaucracy.  The size and scope of federal regulation endangers all liberty, and hinders accountability to the public.

Does this mean repealing regulations that affect food safety? Or drilling regulations that, if they had been place, would have prevented the Gulf oil spill?  How about financial regulations that would have prevented the crisis in 2007? There are endless examples of beneficial regulation; what kind of fool signs a blanket proviso to scrap them? If you answer seriously deluded industry dupe, you might be on to something. And, while we’re on the topic, do the authors of this document even know what “accountability” means?

In short, which it mercifully is, the “Treaty” confirms the suspicion that the Tea Party is nothing more than lots of “sound and furry, signifying nothing.” However, the propensity of the media to treat their antics with a civility that Tea Partiers themselves rarely exhibit might help boost an essentially empty exercise into a useful tool for rallying the dessicated (as in middle aged and older) right arm of the GOP. We’ll learn in November just how effective gimmicks like the “Treaty” have been.

This morning on CBS Sunday Morning Linda McGibney took Ben Stein to task for his whining greed:

….I have always understood that the “haves” were greedy. This is the first time I’ve heard one of them express it out loud so openly.

I am a “have.” I am willing to pay this tax increase. I’m not going to whine about it. I won’t feel punished. I will understand it’s the cost of doing business.

It is worth sacrificing because our country needs some of us to sacrifice . . . the some of us who can.

And, Mr. Stein, we are not suffering.

But then again, that’s what we have come to expect from Nixon speech writers.

* Title taken from spoken dialogue in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986).

My two-cents on two phenomena that are getting attention on progressive blogs today:

The first is the Republican fear of debates which I discussed in an earlier post. Today over at DailyKos Laura Clawson picks up on that story, commenting on Roy Blunt’s hypocritical, dishonest posturing when it comes to debating Robin Carnahan. The money quote:

If you’re the frontrunner [sic], which Blunt still is, you know you don’t have much to gain from debates. The question is how much you think you have to lose, and if it’s worth drawing attention to that by trying to avoid public debate. Sounds like Blunt knows he has a lot to lose if Missouri’s voters see him go head to head with Carnahan.

Maybe if we work really, really hard, we can shift that equation – although I am not sure that even if he weren’t the frontrunner, Blunt wouldn’t still have more to loose than to gain if he had to go up in front of a diverse crowd and defend some of the stock GOP boilerplate he has been ladling out to the faithful.

The second development is the concerted effort of congressional Democrats to give the store away to the GOP. The Democrats’ death wish has most recently manifested itself in the decision to back away from a vote on the Bush tax giveaways for the wealthy. So what else is new? Their possible rationale perhaps? According to TPM, the idiots may have done it just because it was a winning issue:

… according to a very plugged in Senate aide, Senators debating the issue were very aware that the polling was on their side. Yet, paradoxically, this ended up tipping the balance against holding the vote. Senate Dems felt they were alreadly winning on the issue, and in the end they thought a vote risked upsetting a dynamic that was already playing in their favor.

We’ve really got to get us some better Democrats.

To give you an idea about how that ploy is playing with the base here in Missouri, you need go no further than a post by Missouri blogger Duane Graham of the Erstwhile Conservative, billiantly titled “The Democratic Valley Of Dry Bones.” The title refers to Ezekiel 37:3 which reads:

And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord God, thou knowest.

To which my response is that this is the most telling use of a biblical quotation yet. Here, however, is the passage that offers the best measure of the temperature on the left right now:

If it weren’t for the fact that a lot of innocent and hardworking folks would get hurt, I would wish the entire Democratic leadership go down in flames.  And I would wish the Democrats lose control of both legislative chambers, if the results weren’t slated to be so deleterious for already struggling Americans.  

There just aren’t enough pejoratives for such cowards, for such pusillanimous political pansies.

The angst spills off the page. The moral is simply that the markers of the progressive mood are all out there; one can only hope that Democrats start taking the readings soon. If they lose the House and/or the Senate and can’t do anything to repeal the wasteful, harmful upper bracket tax cuts, I guarantee it’ll be too late.  

Last week I noted that no members of the Missouri Democratic House delegation had signed onto a letter to Speaker Pelosi from Blue-Dog Democrats in the House who are in favor of extending all of BuschCo’s upper bracket tax cuts. As far as I know, this is still the truth – a list maintained on Politico has not been updated to show any of their names. Nor, as of Sept. 18th, had Claire McCaskill’s name been added to the list of six Democratic Senators known to be in favor of extending the Bush goodies for the upper crust.

While this is good news, it could be even better. Today, via DailyKos, we learn that 36 House Democrats have signed onto a letter written by House Progressive Caucus members Mary Jo Kilroy, Alan Grayson, and Raul Grijalva, which calls calls for a vote, “before Congress adjourns in October on repealing the tax cuts for the top two percent, and making the middle class tax cuts permanent.” Wouldn’t it be wonderful if some of our Missouri reps signed on?

Can we convince our Missouri Democrats to stand up and act like leaders? Leaders don’t resort to protective camouflage – or at least smart ones don’t when there’s no reason for them to hide. Letting tax cuts for those with incomes in the top 2% expire is not only the right thing to do, it’s a politically smart strategy.

The text of the letter and the signatories over the fold:

Dear Madam Speaker:

Last decade, President Bush rammed through Congress a multi-billion dollar give-away for the wealthiest Americans on the backs of our nation’s middle-class. In the process, the aforementioned Bush tax cuts eviscerated an unprecedented budget surplus and weakened our nation’s fiscal health. As the Bush tax cuts are set to expire, we respectfully urge you to bring to the floor, before Congress adjourns in October, a vote on President Obama’s recently proposed tax plan: permanent tax cuts for the middle-class while allowing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest two percent of Americans to expire, using any additional revenue to close our budget deficit.

We must show the American people that our Democratic Majority stands for them — people who have worked hard, played by the rules and depend on these tax breaks to make ends meet. We also need to get serious about cutting our budget deficit by allowing the Bush tax cuts for the rich to expire.

Some have argued that the Bush tax cuts help to stimulate the economy, or that allowing these cuts to expire would hurt our nation’s small businesses. This is flat out wrong. According to a recent report by the Center for American Progress, the economy boasted 132 million jobs in June 2001, the month that the first of the Bush tax cuts was signed into law. By June 2004, there were just 131.4 million jobs — a decrease of 600,000 jobs. Furthermore, a recent report from the Tax Policy Center states that, “Roughly 97 percent of small businesses would not be affected at all by increases in the top two tax rates.”

Rather, extending the Bush tax cuts will result in an $830 billion give-away for the nation’s wealthiest Americans, significantly increasing government debt, the interest on which will be paid by our nation’s middle-class for years to come. This astronomical sum could instead be used to close our budget deficit.

It is critical that we pass the Obama middle-class tax cuts — not providing an even greater lift for the wealthiest Americans who don’t need it.

Tammy Baldwin

Robert Brady

Michael Capuano

Andre Carson

Steve Cohen

John Conyers

Donna Edwards

Elliot Engel

Keith Ellison

Bob Filner

Marcia Fudge

Raul Grijalva

AlanGrayson

Phil Hare

Alcee L. Hastings

Maurice Hinchey

Mazie Hirono

Mike Honda

Mary Jo Kilroy

Barbara Lee

Sheila Jackson Lee

Jim McDermott

Jim McGovern

Kendrick Meek

Gwen Moore

Tim Ryan

Jan Schakowsky

Carol Shea-Porter

Jackie Speier

Betty Sutton

Peter Welch

Lynn Woolsey

David Wu

It came to my attention that Mr. Ed Martin, GOP House candidate for the 3rd district,  was all excited that folks 24th State were reading SMP:

RT @24thstate: ShowMeProgress Showing Lack Of Economic Education

I assumed that he was thrilled that 24th State wanted to participate in a  substantive discussion of economic issues that conservatives have so far reduced to slogans and generalities. (You don’t believe me? Take a look at Roy Bunt’s jobs plan – not much there to back up his ideas list of standard GOP talking points.) After following the link to the 24th State post, though, I changed my mind about the reason for Mr. Ed’s enthusiasm.

If Mr. Ed were interested in substance, he couldn’t have been that taken with the 24th stater’s smug response to a recent post by Sarah Jo in which she offers evidence that the the low tax, low regulation elixir that the GOP snake oil salesmen are peddling hasn’t racked up such a great record in the past when it comes to the welfare of anyone but billionaires and corporations. 24th State seems to think that Sarah Jo is claiming that “rich people cause depressions.”  Sheesh! Somebody needs to work on their reading comprehension skills.

Apart from demonstrating a common right-wing misunderstanding of JFF’s “supply-side” tax cuts, our 24th Stater mostly contents himself with several convoluted ad hominem assertions. No doubt it’s this exercise in deflection that has the slippery Mr. Ed so excited – evading real issues seems to be something of an art form among GOPers.

Progressives, if this post were to be believed, are academic types whom Mr. Ed’s blogging friend characterizes as economic failures too naive to understand the difference between the “rich,” who are the “producers,”  and the “super-rich” whom he insists are – wait for it – Democrats. Evidently our confrere on the right has never heard of the Koch brothers, Richard Mellon Scaife, Phillip Anschutz, Missouri’s own Rex Sinquefield, and a host of Republican billionaire donors who keep the struggle against us ineffectual, progressive failures perking along.

Of course, no one denies that there are Democratic “super-rich” too. You can tell them from the other kind because they’re usually willing to pay their fair share. Shucks, some Democratic billionaires actually campaign in favor of tax policies that work for everybody, not just their own financial class.  

While this crude stereotyping suggests the resentment of intellectual elites that pols like Mr. Ed encourage, fanciful speculation about Sarah Jo’s mental life and that of progressives in general does not refute the points she makes. It does, however, raise an interesting question that speaks to the point of the post. Who in this economically complicated world should be labeled a “producer”? If creating jobs is the criteria, then government at all levels qualifies, yet the very idea seems to horrify Tea Party conservatives.

As for academia, Mr. Ed, as a person who wants to represent Missourians in Congress, should know about the role of academic technology transfer in fueling the prosperity of many of those entrepreneurial “producers” with whom his 24th state surrogate wants to identify the Tea Party “leadership.” Academic technology transfer is the process whereby academic research is spun-off into the private sector, and which, in 2008 alone, was responsible for the creation of 595 new companies and the introduction of 648 new commercial products – and that’s only the tip of the iceberg. So, you tell me, are academics also producers?

I also wonder if Mr. Ed thinks that the folks who work in the jobs that he believes Tea Party “producers” produce are producers as well?  Certainly, if it weren’t for them, business men of all types would be up the creek. They’re one of the groups that Sarah Jo focused on, arguing persuasively that they’re also the individuals who lose in each iteration of the laissez-faire capitalism that Mr. Ed champions.

In a statement that I am sure leaves Mr. Ed all starry-eyed, the 24th Stater asserts, speaking of his cohort of choice, those Tea Party leaders who own or hope to own small businesses:

… none of us are the super rich.  Heck, none of us are the rich.  Some of us are downright poor, today, but we won’t be tomorrow.

Hate to be a downer here, but I’ve got some news for this aspiring Tea Party capo. If he gets his way in the next two elections, his future may not be as rosy as he hopes. Nothing more or less than the Bush economic policies of lower taxes and minimal regulation are on offer from the GOP and by extension, the Tea Party. And, in line with Sarah Jo’s post, during the Bush years, poverty levels increased in a steady trajectory from 11.7% to 12.5% in spite of the very modest economic growth his policies managed to create, prompting Ezra Klein to observe:

This was the first period since we began keeping records in which the economy expanded but poverty went up — usually, economic expansions bring the poverty rate down.It’s more evidence that the pre-crisis “normal” was an economy that wasn’t working very well for a lot of people, even when it was growing.

This is what rings Mr. Ed’s bells? Kinda make you wonder what type of rich he’s really cultivating, the wannabe rich or those “super-rich” GOPers who fork over all the lobbying money.

Today I have bad and good news. TPM made public a list of 31 Democrats in the House of Representative who are breaking with the president’s plan to cut taxes for the middle class while allowing tax giveaways for the wealthy to expire. These so-called Democrats are signatories to a letter to Nancy Pelosi that repeats debunked Republican arguments about how allowing the tax bracket of the 2% of the richest Americans to rise less than 4% points will crash the economy. (Even Republicans don’t really believe that stuff!)  

That’s the bad news. The good news? To date, none of Missouri’s Democratic House delegation are on that list! Sing Hallelujah!

Given that Senator McCaskill has been dancing around the issue, telegraphing her willingness to give the goods away if anyone asks, and the fact that Robin Carnahan managed to do just that before anyone even knocked on her door to ask, this comes as a pleasant surprise. I had begun to think that Missouri’s Democrats were a pretty worthless bunch. Representatives Emanuel Cleaver, Russ Carnahan, Lacy Clay and Ike Skelton are to be congratulated for standing up for the people that they represent on this issue.

There is no way that extending the Bush tax giveaways for the wealthy does anyone any good. The tax cuts do not, contrary to GOP claims, affect most small businesses; economists argue convincingly that they will play little or no stimulative role; and, to cap it all off, they will cost 1.1 trillion dollars over ten years – which is to say that they will really bolster up the big, bad, deficit boogeyman that the right wing has been using to herd weak Democrats rightwards. To top it all off, for once, Americans seem to recognize that extending the tax cuts is a stupid idea – with maybe the exception of the Tea Party where stupid seems to be king.

Just to encourage these gentlemen to keep on keeping on, I suggest that those of you who live in their districts, if  you are so inclined, drop them an email or give them a phone call and let them know that you are gratified by the respect they are showing their constituents and to good policy:

Russ Carnahan: (Email Contact page; phone nos.)

Lacy Clay (Email contact page*; phone nos.)

Emanuel Cleaver (Email contact page; phone nos.)

Ike Skelton (Email contact page; phone nos.)

Just remember, if progressives can’t win on this issue, we might as well just give up and get minimum wage jobs helping McCaskill parcel out the goods to the waiting Tea Party. We need to let our guys know that if they want us to stick with them, we need a win.

* Perhaps it’s just my browser, but but the email contact page on Lacy Clay’s website appears to be broken.