It was just a couple of days ago when we were all cheered to learn that President Obama was emphatically rejecting the possibility of extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. After Bush’s wars of choice, and the recession that resulted from his deregulatory economic policies, these ill-considered tax cuts have been one of the biggest drivers of the deficit. They were a mistake that needs to be fixed.

Sadly, although President Obama is promising to stand firm, his resolve may come to naught. An article in The Hill reports that Democrats like our own Claire McCaskill are, predictably, wavering and in the process endangering the entire Democratic strategy:

Democratic leaders maintain they are content to play defense, but are worried that some vulnerable Democrats might defect and support a temporary extension of all the Bush-era rates, which would undercut their negotiating position.

Sens. Claire McCaskill (Mo.) and Bill Nelson (Fla.), two Democrats facing tough races this year, on Thursday declined to rule out support for an across-the-board extension of the rates.

“If you want to do something in the spirit of compromise, you don’t start out by saying, ‘I refuse to do this’ or ‘I refuse to do that,’ ” said McCaskill. “It’s not my preference to extend tax cuts to multimillionaires – that’s not my preference – but I want to keep every option open in the spirit of compromise.”

No, Claire, we do not go into a negotiation and send signals that we’re so intimidated that we’re ready to hand all the goodies over if the other party says boo to us.* Nor does it hurt the process to draw clear lines in the sand – let everybody know upfront what’s negotiable and what’s not. Which is precisely why, as The Hill writer implies in the quote above, the Democratic leadership is so worried that pols like McCaskill will give the game away before they players even get onto the field.

And as far as many of McCaskill’s Democratic constituents are concerned, given the misery that her deficit hawk colleagues in the GOP have inflicted on poor and working Americans – not to mention the harm they have done to the economic recovery – tax cuts for the wealthy aren’t negotiable. President Obama has it right and God bless ‘im for it.

I know that McCaskill’s in a hard place, but I promise acting like her GOP opposite numbers won’t help her out. Of course, we’ve got to take some responsibility too. I quote Peter Dreier on FDR’s blending of ethics and realpolitik:

FDR once met with a group of activists who sought his support for bold legislation. He listened to their arguments for some time and then said, “You’ve convinced me. Now go out and make me do it.”

We’ve got to make McCaskill do it. We’ve got to write and call her and let her know that we are counting on her. We also have to write letters to editors, talk to our neighbors and friends, do everything we can think of to do to help remind people that the GOP is willing to balance the nation’s budget on the people’s backs in order to privilege the wealthy. We’ve got a lot to do in order to make the world safe for progressives.

ADDENDUM: Jonathan Bernstein explains why caving on the tax cuts is stupid politically. Maybe I should send Claire a link?

*Sentence edited slightly.

MoveOn is spreading the chart above all over the internet.

Ed Martin quotes the S & P report,

The outlook on the long-term rating is negative. We could lower the long-term rating to ‘AA’ within the next two years if we see that less reduction in spending than agreed to, higher interest rates, or new fiscal pressures during the period result in a higher general government debt trajectory than we currently assume in our base case.

moralizes on it,

While I expect our opponents in President Obama’s party to derive all the wrong lessons from this embarrassment, the brutal reality is that the much ballyhooed “victory” of the debt deal did not convince this bond ratings agency that we had begun to master our spending problem.

and conveniently overlooks where S & P laid the blame. The report says in three different places that Congress’s unwillingness to raise revenue will make it impossible for the country to regain its AAA credit rating. For example:

Compared with previous projections, our revised base case scenario now assumes that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, due to expire by the end of 2012, remain in place. We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act.

[last paragraph, page 4]

In plainer English, the Bush tax cuts are pulling us under and the Republicans refuse to do anything about it. According to the CBO, 60% of our debt is caused by those tax cuts. The public wants the gazillionaires to start paying their share. But the Tea Partiers, says Howard Dean, have been smoking tea instead of drinking it. Whatever. Being whacked out of their heads is no excuse. They conducted negotiations while one of the negotiating parties was hanging out of a window by his ankles, and now they want to blame Obama for dropping the change out of his pockets.

Repeat after me, until the nation gets it: Our AA+ rating is the fault of those extortionists in the Tea Party. We could solve the problem by letting those tax cuts expire, by not giving oil companies $53 billion a year, and by laying off of working people, who are already paying more than their fair share.

Ever since Social Security became the law over 75 years ago, there have been conservatives who wanted to kill it, finding the very notion that elderly or disabled people should retain any dignity or independence after their productive years have passed anathema. If you’re no longer “useful” in their particular definition of the word, then you’ve got a lot of damned gall even thinking you should be able to stay out of poverty.

What the hell right does Grandma have to a flu shot and a living allowance? There are a lot of ways that money could be better spent, so far as they are concerned. It could be used to pay down the debt, or it could be invested on Wall Street. All Grandma does is spend it on rent and groceries and the like. She just pisses it away, staying out of poverty, the parasite.

As best I can tell — I sometimes have trouble translating “bloodless goon” into ordinary, American English — that is at least part of Robert Samuelson’s position in his latest post at Real Clear Politics. That, and making sure that the deficit problem that Bush and the GOP Congress created gets solved by making the people who have realized no benefit from the Bush tax cuts and can least afford it pick up the tab:

Suppose we increased the federal gasoline tax by 25 cents a gallon, from 18.4 cents to 43.4 cents. That would raise $291 billion over the decade from 2012 to 2021, estimates the CBO. Or we could advance the ages for early and full Social Security benefits; one suggestion is to raise them (now 62 and 66) by two months a year until reaching predetermined targets (say, 64 and 70). The CBO reckons the decade’s savings at about $264 billion. How about slowly moving Medicare’s eligibility age from 65 to 67. The savings: $125 billion.

Are we finished? Nowhere near. At most, these crowd pleasers would make noticeable dents. Recall that the deficits total almost $10 trillion over the next decade under President Obama’s original 2012 budget. That’s the point: even discounting the effects of the deep recession, prospective deficits are so large that they can’t be cured by tinkering. We should be asking basic questions:

— How big a government do we want? For four decades, federal spending has averaged 21 percent of gross domestic product. An aging population and high health costs mean that average spending, as a share of GDP, will rise by a third or more in the next 10 to 15 years if today’s programs simply continue.

— Who deserves government subsidies and how much? About 55 percent of spending goes to individuals, including the elderly, veterans, farmers, students, the disabled and the poor.

— How much, if at all, should social spending be allowed to squeeze national defense?

— If taxes rise, how much and on whom? What taxes would least hurt economic growth?

Perhaps Samuelson calls an increase in the gas tax a “crowd pleaser” because it would hit those at the bottom of the economic ladder the hardest, since simple economics dictates that the lower the rung one occupies the less likely they are to drive a newer, more fuel-efficient car — and cashiers and construction workers don’t have a telecommute option to exercise. But let’s not get distracted with the gas tax issue, because what he really wants to do is eviscerate the social safety net.

He is being disingenuous at best and deliberately dishonest at worst when he says “the deficits total almost $10 trillion over the next decade under President Obama’s original 2012 budget. That’s the point: even discounting the effects of the deep recession, prospective deficits are so large that they can’t be cured by tinkering.” That same CBO that he touts in his very first ‘graph also says that if nothing is done, other than simply letting the Bush tax cuts expire and tax rates return to the Clinton-era levels, the deficit disappears.

Now let’s answer some of those questions that he says no one is asking.

When he asks how big we want our government to be, he is starting from a faulty premise. It isn’t the size of government that matters, it is the quality. When he asserts that our “aging population and high health costs mean that average spending, as a share of GDP, will rise by a third or more in the next 10 to 15 years if today’s programs simply continue.”

What he is surely smart enough to know, but is betting that his target audience isn’t, is that he just made the perfect argument for single-payer healthcare, most easily achieved by expanding Medicare to cover everyone and then allowing Medicare to negotiate the price of medications and assignment schedules. Healthcare is the problem, and we are decades behind the rest of the developed world in coming to that realizations and moving away from the ridiculous “market based solutions” that conservatives are so fond of.

Then he asks just who, exactly, deserves to be subsidized by the government and how much subsidy they deserve. I answer that question with “children and the elderly” and I believe that human beings deserve more investment than the “defense” budget that currently eats up more than half of every dollar the government spends, either killing or preparing to kill other human beings.

When he asserts that currently, 55 cents of every dollar the government spends “goes to individuals” he is deliberately and dishonestly fudging his numbers. He is including Social Security in that number, but Social Security is not part of the general fund. It is a separate, self-funding entity. Workers pay in a few dollars from every paycheck on the first $106,800, and at retirement start receiving a monthly benefit. As it currently stands, the Social Security trust fund is perfectly solvent for at least 25 more years — if we do nothing. It would be solvent in perpetuity if the earnings cap was raised and high-earners paid in on all of their income.

His next question, though, really cuts to the heart of what really drives every conservative – how much should social programs “be allowed” to “squeeze” the spending on the military? What drives conservatives is fear. They are different from you and me. They are fearful and scared and will pay any price to feel “safe” in a world that is constantly changing and evolving and moving on without them. It is a sad and specious strawman argument. The United States currently accounts for 42.8% of all of the military spending in the world, but we only have 5% of the world’s population. Compare that to China, the most populace country in the world, which accounts for a mere 7.3% of global military expenditures.

It’s simple math – the biggest piece of the pie is the place to start cutting off slivers. The military budget is the biggest piece of the pie – and after a certain point, the amount of money we spend doesn’t make us more safe, but instead does just the opposite.  

When he asks how much taxes should rise, and on whom, and which ones would least hurt economic growth, we know his answer. He gave it to us at the start: He has no problem at all with taxes that disproportionately hit those who can least afford it. Conservatives like to pretend that taxing the rich would keep them from creating jobs. Yet during the Bush years — and he pushed through two rounds of tax cuts in his first term – American jobs disappeared, not to be replaced, every single year, we didn’t gain them.

Raising taxe
s on those at the bottom, on the other hand, hampers economic growth. The less money one has, the faster they spend it when it comes in. They buy groceries and clothes and gasoline, and they pay rent and utilities. Those are dollars that circulate through the economy locally and add a little stimulus at every stop along the way.

Samuelson concludes with the familiar palaver about means testing and raising the eligibility age for Social Security and Medicare – even though Social Security is not part of the general fund, and the cost of health care is the underlying problem that is causing our money woes.

If we actually did what he suggests and put off Medicare eligibility a couple more years, it would be a false economy. Imagine all the people who would be wiped out financially by medical bills between the ages of 65 and 67…assuring that many more seniors would pass his odious “means test” before accessing that which they paid into all their working lives.

*****

This post is part of a series I am writing as a blogging fellow for the Strengthen Social Security Campaign, a coalition of more than 270 national and state organizations dedicated to preserving and strengthening Social Security.

Here’s Rep. Todd Akin (R-2) wailing about the threat posed by the deficit:

It is imperative that we address the unsustainable growth in entitlement spending and debt service, which is now eating up the entirety of government revenue.  If we fail to address those facts we will be facing a total economic meltdown. …

Here’s Senator Roy Blunt doing his wooden imitation of someone wailing abut the threat posed by the deficit:

I believe we’re facing an historic crossroads in our nation’s long-term financial health. Voters sent a clear message last fall that they expect us to make the tough choices to rein in Washington’s out-of-control spending, and they expect us to do it now.

Keeping in mind that both of these gentlemen were members of Congress during the Bush years, take a careful look at the chart below (from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities) which outlines the individual drivers of the federal debt:

Let’s see – great big parts of the debt seem to be due to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, although the Bush tax cuts are undoubtedly the biggest contributor. Both of these expensive exercises,  may I remind you, were heartily endorsed by Messrs. Akin and Blunt during their years in the GOP ascendancy. The other big piece of deficit pie seems to be the decline in revenue that resulted from the economy going smash. This event, as I am sure you remember, came about as a result of the mismanagement practiced by the regulation averse Bush administration, aided and abetted by a GOP congress heavily in hock to corporate interests that wanted to keep on playing without adult supervision. TARP and the stimulus (labeled “recovery measures” in the chart), favorite targets of GOPers like Akin and Blunt, were small potatoes in the deficit pantry.  

Tell me now, how do these folks who time and time again voted to raise the debt ceiling for Mr. Bush, justify sanctimonious little diatribes like those above? Or, envision putting all our economic welfare on the line in order to play politics with the debt ceiling when it’s the Democratic Mr. Obama in the White House? Of course, I already know the answer. As Jonathan Capehart said today in reference to the  graph above, memories are, lamentably, short, which, I would add, means that con artists like Akin, Blunt and their ilk seem to be able to get away with just about any made-up story they want to tell.  

Today St. Luis Public radio KWMU broadcast our Missouri senatorial delegation’s somewhat muddled thoughts on the President’s proposed tax deal.

Claire McCaskill, as usual, says as little as possible as deliberatively as possible:

So, I’m gonna continue to drill down and look at it very carefully, make sure that what we are doing is very stimulative. Frankly, that extra bonus for the multimillionaires, that’s not very stimulative. If it were stimulative we would have had a lot of jobs created the last decade and we haven’t.

Let’s see … McCaskill’s going to have to “drill down” to figure out how stimulative giving a hundred thousand dollar minimum tax break to each American millionaire might be? Somebody should acquaint her with the fact that economists are already on the record that there’s little stimulus to be found in that quarter. It’s actually common knowledge, which is why the Republican rhetoric is so hilarious and will cost them dearly in the long run. And why isn’t she worried abut the effect on the deficit? This is a woman who opposed a program proven to be  stimulative, the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program, because it wouldn’t be “fiscally prudent.”

Kit Bond, on the other hand, sleepwalks it in:

And I expect if this bill goes through it is going to generate the jobs. And I think it is simple economics 101 and I am disappointed that some people don’t understand that. No jobs are created by raising taxes.

Glad to know that Kit’s got those expectations. Not likely to be realized though; as those of us who actually took economics 101 know, the relationship of tax policy to economic growth is just a little more complex than he realizes. Ample evidence exists that tax cuts don’t always create jobs – if they did, the Bush tax cuts would have done so over the ten years they were in force. Instead, after years of lack-luster performance, we are in a employment crisis.    

Interesting fact: Missouri has 55,000 households that earn over $200,000. It has around 280,000 unemployed. Whose spending do you think is going to do the most for the economy? Believe me, those 55,000 aren’t going to do that much to provide an alternative for the 280,000 who need jobs – real stimulus is the only thing that will do it.

Interesting question: Who are McCaskill and Bond working for? The 55,000 households that would see their tax on income over $250,000 increase? Or those of us who muddle along – including the 280,000 who won’t muddle along too much longer without continued unemployment subsidies. How much longer will we put up with pols who would even consider holding the welfare of the majority hostage to the welfare of their wealthy pals.

Later thoughts …. Reading this over, I am not sure that I made it clear that I think the problem is that our Senators are seriously considering a deficit-busting deal that would give away $133 billion in tax breaks to 4.8 million people on the GOP side, as opposed to $214 billion in tax breaks and other provisions to benefit 156 million people on Obama’s side. It costs too much for the amount of stimulus it will provide, it’s unfair to the working poor, and there are too many risky elements – setting a precedent for raiding Social Security payroll taxes, for one.

An elegant solution: let all the tax cuts expire, come back in 2011 and introduce legislation for a middle class tax cut and let the GOP oppose that if they dare! The only issue that gives me any pause when I consider this suggestion is that of the unemployment benefits extension, but I truly believe that if they were willing to fight, the Democrats could get benefits extended for a lot less cost.  

Since I spent some time examining how Todd Akin (R-2) has tried to spin his support for extending the tax giveaways for the super-rich with his on-going hectoring about deficits, I thought I would mosey over to look at the response to the issue by another Missouri GOP favorite, Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-9).  And guess what I found out? Good old, by-by-the-GOP-rule-book Blaine is hewing close to the Crossroads GPS strategy outlined earlier today – feign outrage and talk lots and lots about jobs, small businesses and the recession:

Today is a disappointing day for our job-creating small business owners, who are greatly affected by the job-killing tax increases that Democrats support, which will take effect in less than a month. Today’s job-destroying vote will continue to subject our small businesses to damaging tax hikes, which will only perpetuate the ongoing uncertainty that small business folks have been dealing with for months. My pledge to the people of the 9th District was to oppose all tax increases and to cut spending during these tough economic times. …

Once again, loud and clear – Blaine Luetkemeyer voted for tax increases for 98% of the American taxpayers, and his “pledge” to oppose “all” tax increases amounts to a willingness to sacrifice that 98% for the sake of those with enough of the green to fork over the big campaign moolah. Nothing more, nothing less.

But Luetkemeyer is right in line with the recommendations suggested by Glen Bolger in a Crossroad GSP GPS funded report on how to obfuscate those facts: Pretend, despite clear evidence to the contrary, that the tax giveaways for the wealthy would affect a majority of small businesses, and that they could have more than a minimal stimulative effect in general. He also deftly uses Bolger’s suggested ploy of conflating the tax giveaways for the wealthy with the middle class tax cuts put forward by the Democrats, creating an image of himself as a fighter for equal treatment for all, even those who have had an unequal advantage for the past eight years at least.

Just in case anyone’s inclined to take the equality bait, it is useful to look at this chart (source: The Joint Committee on Taxation, via Ezra Klein) that shows just how unequal the middle tax cuts vs. the wealthy tax giveways really are:

Somehow makes Luetkemeyer’s (and Akin’s) rhetoric about about extending the tax cuts for all “equally” seem just a little hollow.

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.

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.

According to TPM, the House Democratic caucus will meet tonight as a group and individually with leadership to figure out whether or not the President’s plan to extend all but the top bracket Bush tax cuts will fly. At issue is whether or not to bring the measure to a speedy vote.

Buoyed by Democrat pollster Stan Greenberg’s latest poll which shows that “a majority of independents, 53-38, back the middle class extension only,” party leaders are smelling a victory that might have real legs come November. The poor dimwits are finally figuring out that restoring some equity might actually be a winner – but a little further persuasion from constituents probably wouldn’t go amiss.

So if it galls you unendurably to think of a spineless Democratic majority acquiescing to costly giveaways to the richest segment of the country when we can’t afford it and they don’t have to, this might be a very good time for those of you who live in districts represented by Democrats – Skelton, Cleaver, Carnahan, and Clay – to contact them and let them know that you’re fine with killing big giveaways for the wealthiest 2% of the population. (If you click on their names above, you will go to a page with their contact information.)

Apropos my earlier post about Claire McCaskill’s dithering, it might not hurt to contact her as well – Henry Reid has indicated that he will bring the tax issue up for a vote sometime within the next three weeks. Let her know that this could be a winner for her – her base might really appreciate it if she throws them a bone here and there.