Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for November 05, 2010

No matter… I believe Pres. Bush probably failed math anyway…

He pretty much failed everything.

Bush = Epic Fail

Gated thoughts.

The orgy of Bush hating is assuming Nixonesque proportions.

We hate everyone. That’s how we got to be #1.

How many American citizens are left who do not hate either Bush or Obama, if not both? How many do not think that one or the other is the ‘worst president ever.’

And both men are moderates and centrists compared to their parties as they exist now.

The fruit of hyperbolic rhetoric is a politics in which the members of each party fear the other party more than they love their country.

We have painted ourselves into a corner, and if we don’t find a way out, then goodbye to American greatness.

Whatever happened to the Fake Ranch?

sandfan, what Bush did – or what was done by others in his administration and what they convinced him to do – was reprehensible in every regard. It was worthy of being hated.

Some of what Obama has done (expanding war in Afghanistan) is also worthy of being hated.

The bigger picture is that this is a divided country, and the left and right, north and south, blue and red cannot and will not work together. The animosity is too great (and I’d argue has been too great through most of our history). I say it’s time to divide the US up into at least two smaller countries. Maybe the USA and the CSA?

echoing the sentiment of ronebofh: i am not prejudice, i hate everyone equally…

Well said, Grimma!

This is not about hating Bush-Dick, Sandfan; this is about a clear-eyed view of how awful his presidency was.

Dough, there is no way that anyone can evaluate President Obama’s presidency for several years. We can begin the evaluation of Bush-Dick’s presidency, however, and no one has anything good to say about it.

Cdward, your suggestion is very bad.

I am very pleased with today’s cartoon. There is not enough mention made of all the blood on Bush-Dick’s hands: 100,000 dead Iraqi men, women, and children; 150,000 maimed Iraqi men, women, and children. How many dead or maimed Afghans can we include in these numbers?

The real number of Iraqi civilian dead is closer to 1,000,000.

well, yeah, there’s THAT….but don’t we make great warplanes and cool exploding stuff?

If you paint yourself into a corner, just build a door, or blow out a wall, your preference.

But on the plus side, I’ve checked over 30 GoComics today, and as of this writing - NO SPAM!!!

Whatever you guys are doing, Keep it up! (Or is it just some Chinese national holiday and they’ll all be back tomorrow?)

cdward, as much as I’d like some days to push California into the Pacific, we sacrificed about 700,000 Americans to prevent that from happening in the 1800’s and it’s no better an idea now than it was then. Besides, today’s issues are not so much geographical as they are philosophical. You can’t form a different country from that of your next-door neighbor.

The new Civil War will soon become between those who contribute and those who do not. About 50% of Americans paid no federal income taxes last year, dividing the country not only into haves and have-nots, but pay and pay-nots, the latter of whom have a propensity to vote for candidates who favor wealth redistribution tactics. Some of those folks just need jobs, and perhaps they’ll have a better chance now with our government shifting more pro-business in the near future. Others will come to understand that the government is not their Mommy (or their Big Brother) and cannot be counted upon to tuck them into bed every night.

7thSon – My personal theory, as I remarked a couple of days ago, is this: Obama’s icon is that you never actually see him. Obama is a cool, reserved person who does not readily put his inner self on public view, which makes him effectively invisible as a real human being to many people. (GT, if you’re reading, what do you think?)

Nemesys – You make an interesting point about pay and pay-nots…except the pay-nots can include the wealthy, who can avoid their taxes, and who would not be likely to favor wealth redistribution.

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that the poor, unemployed, and “lazy and shiftless” – that last was your unspoken meaning, wasn’t it? – are all the same. You can easily be lazy, shiftless, and rich, and just as much a drag on society as those you disdain, who have to live on government aid. The kind of person who goes through a revolving door without pushing can be rich or poor, and a parasite just the same.

They got rid of the spam, now if they could just get rid of the pop-up ads. Oh, wait…

SCAATY, I do include those wealthy parasites who don’t pay anything into that category, but I suspect that they are fairly rare. I’d like to see a list of those people, though… In 2008, even with the Bush “tax cuts for the wealthy”, the top 1% of wage earners pay over 38% of all federal income taxes collected - the top 5% paid over 58%. The bottom 50% of wage earners paid 2.7% of the taxes.

I already addressed the unemployed, who need a government focused upon creating a job-friendly climate. It’s not their fault, but our government’s, who spend much more attention on increasing dependence on their own programs than they do on creating an environment in which Americans can practice self-dependence.

Do you know of perfectly healthy, working people who recieve state subisides for housing, higher education, heating oil, food stamps, and child care - all at the same time? People who file as single parents, but live with others who chose not to work? People who use WIC to buy shrimp and steak in the grocery line while the fellow who is working hard at a job to keep his family together can only afford hamburger?

It’s just too easy to rip off the system. The government makes it too easy for others to steal our money, as I highlighted earlier when noting that yearly Medicare fraud accounts for more than the profits earned by the top 18 medical insurance companies - combined.

Personally, I think all Americans should pay something, even a token amount, even it it means increasing fixed income payments to account for it, and then have it deducted. When it’s your money going to pay for things, you become more aware of what’s being spent.

Many elderly living on Social Security and maybe some investments still do not make enough to pay income tax. So they are part of the 50% who do not pay. Remember this is the generation whose salaries were low but normal for the times, especially women. My highest salary after 20 years in the work force was $11/hour after starting at $1.40. My sister married a successful man, never worked, and her SS from him, (still alive) is more than mine. I won’t get into the loop holes in the tax system for the wealthy-register your business off shore and pay little or nothing.

pouncingtiger said, “He pretty much failed everything.”

You can only fail if you try; if you don’t try, you can’t fail. Since I have not seen any reference to “President Pouncingtiger,” I can only assume that (s)he either never tried to become president or tried and failed.

^By the way, they vote straight Rep, listen to Fox all day. My deceased husband and I voted mostly Dem and never turned on Fox. I blame the deficit on the Iraq war, and the loss of jobs on outsourcing, neither Obama’s doing.

“Obama is a cool, reserved person who does not readily put his inner self on public view.” Exactly right, SCAATY. I’d add that the source of his dignity is his aristocratic self-denial.

Americans are too self-indulgent to value self-denial and cannot stand to be told it’s necessary. (Carter, who lacked Obama’s dignity, destroyed his presidency by asking the voters to make sacrifices.)

As Ouirsophuct wrote yesterday, the voters this week opted to fawn on our corporate masters in the hope that they’ll throw us some scraps or, barring that, at least relieve us from the burden of having to pay the medical bills of all those deadbeats who choose to get sick.

Nemesys, the right-wing view of the wealthy is distorted. They typically pay less than 20% in taxes, as shown here by Buffet’s 17.7% rate.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/money/tax/article1996735.ece

70% of the wealthy have no employees, unless you count maids and gardeners. The sensible policy is to cut taxes for actual small business employers, while allowing taxes for CEO’s, entertainers, etc. to rise back to a more normal rate.

Capital gains are the major income source of the wealthy, thus they do make most of their money without any “labor” at all.

True, many at the bottom pay no income tax. They do, however, pay a proportionally higher rate of virtually all other taxes, particularly payroll taxes, but also state sales, “sin” taxes, excise taxes, gas taxes, etc. The income tax is the only means to redress this imbalance.

Spaghettus is right, Nemesys. Your “1% of wage earners” who pay 38% of the Federal income tax are not wage earners at all, much less small businesses. They file as a “corporation sole,” meaning they get taxed as a corporate individual (i.e. they pay the reduced rate granted to a business). Fully 70% of these incoporated taxpayers are doctors, lawyers, money-managers and banksters who protect their wealth by pretending to run a business.

Ps. Both of you will be interested in Floyd Norris’s discussion of Social Security in today’s NYT:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/05/business/05norris.html?_r=1&ref=business

Norris shows that our debates over SS arise from our assuming it’s a pension plan when in fact it was conceived as—-and remains—-“a plan to tax wealthy Americans to pay for benefits given to retired and disabled workers and their families.”

In other words, SS is not and never was meant to be run like a pension business. You can’t make it “more efficient,” because someone (the govt.) has got to oversee the distribution of surplus wealth to the needy. The proper gauge of SS is justice, not economics.

Spaghettus, both of our numbers are correct, and I agree with your perspective on small businesses vs. others in that income range.

It seems likely that social security reform will become an issue in the next few years. Bush tried it, but I think he only looked at half the equasion and it didn’t work. In line with “taxing the rich” appropriately, what would you think of this 3-step approach:

1) Allowing working Americans of all income ranges to choose to continue to contribute to Social Security or to selected savings/investment instruments, of which they could leave to their children’s retirement or educational savings account, or to a 501c agency of their choice

2) To fund the program during transition years, eliminate the current 100k ceiling on Social Security earnings deductions. Collect SS taxes on all earned income with no limits (both employee and employer contributions) while collecting the flat employee rate only on ALL unearned income. Keep this portion in the SS fund only (no investment options). Reduce capital gains slightly on the front end to encourage SS collection on the back end.

3) Make it a federal law to keep the lock on the SS lockbox. Make it illegal to tap into for wars, bad decisions, or giveaway programs.

Still bashing Bush. Because of political correctness I suppose you can’t say a word about Obama. Let me say it: He will be one term, and the most stupid President in history. $14 trillion and still spending. Thank God we have hope now through the House filled with Republicans.

As much as I detest GWB, I only have him #2 on my list of worst presidents ever. #1 is reserved for James Buchanan, who twiddled his thumbs while the country drifted into civil war. To roy pendergraft who supposes you can’t say anything bad about the current president; I am a hard-core liberal who thinks President Obama is a gutless disaster. Many of my liberal friends agree with me. But stupid? At least he knows how to pronounce nuclear!

palin, if SS was designed to tax wealthy Americans, it does a very poor job of it. My SS contributions stop right about Columbus Day. Perhaps Norris doesn’t understand that there’s an income limit?

Methinks that regardless of its orginal intent, its time to look at it again. It can have a much better impact than it does now.

The good thing about CA is it’s too big too fail. “Falling in the ocean”, is just the “Slackmeyer” in Nemesys talking. He’s just mad because the tea party didn’t do so swell here, and spending $140 mil and getting blown out of the governor’s race has to burn. That can’t compute with his capitalist morality, it makes more sense too push Nemesys in the ocean.

Blackwater has to be one of the biggest govt ripoffs in Nemesys experience. Blaming the rape victim is the equivalent of the arsonist claiming credit for putting out the fire.

Good post Spaghettus1

roy@:

By your logic, Obama’s spending should buy him a second term, provided he can match G.W. Bush.

As for the neolibs’ Bush-hatred, they’re being cheered on by Trudeau himself, who’s trying to blame Bush for the fact that civilians die in wars. You’d think every president who started a war since Truman would have learned something from Hiroshima. Calling Bush’s response to 9/11 a “war of choice” is pure denial on the part of neolibs, who don’t mind rewriting history according to their wishes.

Much better is Eisenhower’s brutal candor when he was warned that by getting involved in Viet Nam, we were killing children. “I know,” replied honest Ike, “but we doing it so their children can’t kill our grandchildren.”

^ So you can judge the intelligence of a Harvard magna bleeep laude graduate, but can’t write grammatically correct English? I believe you overestimate your own intelligence.

@ Nemesys

The problem is more complicated than you realize, Nemesys. As Norris points out, every time the taxable income cap (currently about $107K) is raised, 20% of the revenue realized goes to increase benefits for the wealthy who don’t need them.

Ps. That’s delightful, Spaghettus: your Latin for “with great honor” got bleeped because Latin for “with” is an obscenity! Don’t you love the illiterate “literacy” of the internet? It puts old-fashioned political correctness to shame. Or maybe it’s the cu(l)mination of P.C.

“Honest Ike” also warned that one of the greatest dangers to our country was the growing “Military Industrial Complex”. The Neocons of today would say, “Ike is soft on Defense”.

Roy, the Republican party put us in two different wars, one unnecesarily. How much of the debt is through the idiotic war, and following occupation, of Iraq?

I feel compelled to note that the VAST majority of those tragic deaths were caused by terrorists. Why don’t we blame the guilty? Also, while Bush’s decision to invade was sold to us via a possibly out-and-out lie about WMDs, it was also based on a standing US policy that Sadaam was the most dangerous figure in the Middle East, a conviction shared by earlier presidents.

palin, I agree that it is a complex issue, but even according to your numbers, 80% of increased revenue goes to all participants. Why prevent that just because the wealthy can collect benefits, too? It’s sort of the reverse of what happened with schools in the south in the 50’s, when Dixie taxpayers refused to fund education because blacks might benefit from it, too.

Lou, please get over yourself, and nothing - and nobody - is too big to fail.

Obama’s not stupid; he’s brilliant, but in a way that isn’t very useful for the president to be. Consider these one-termers: Adams, John Quincy Adams, Hoover, Carter – all exceptionally intelligent people with resumes indicating that they got things done.

It may just be that “getting things done” isn’t the president’s job. Carter and Hoover especially succeeded as one-man shows. JQA was brilliant in the House of Representatives in the decades after leaving the White House and his life before the White House was pretty stellar too. And with JQA, part of his reality was that the new west (Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio et al.) did not feel represented by easterners no matter how smart or capable.

By no means am I suggesting that single-termers are all winners; sometimes they are just plain jerks. Not counting VPs who took over halfway thru a term, consider: Polk, Taylor, Fillmore, Pierce, Buchanan, Cleveland, B. Harrison, Cleveland, and Harding.

Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan were presidents at a time when, basically, government was sitting still waiting for something to happen. The voters (who were not yet “the people”) didn’t want to be led anywhere.

The Cleveland-Harrison-Cleveland twelve years (because Cleveland’s terms were separated from each other, he appears in the chronology twice and always gets an asterisk) were at a time when Big Business was rolling along. Economic expansion was possible at the edges, in places where the rich weren’t troubled– like homesteading, which required homesteaders to live on the land and farm it continuously for a number of years. The rich couldn’t qualify and really didn’t care–nobody was yet interested in the mineral rights beneath the homesteaded land.

Harding was like Bush 43: a good companion whose friends got rich off his policies, a man of some decent qualities who was fundamentally lazy. If Harding hadn’t died in office, it’s hard to imagine what he would have accomplished even if he had been elected again to the term Coolidge filled. It seems the mood of the land was unadventurous and complacent, and both Harding and Coolidge suited the times.

Reviewing them like that, it suggests that at times when the upper classes are in clover, do-nothing presidents are what gets elected. The voters get just what they want. When subsequent historians rank the do-nothings against the doers, they look for reasons why the do-nothings were failures. The fault is not so much in the individuals as in the people who elect them.

Bush earned his reputation, by letting Cheney call the shots and his gutless response to failures, just like the Democrats in Congress who buckled to the propaganda that inundated the public from the Cheney/Rove/Rumsfeld et al camp of lies and greed that drove this country into a hole, economically and morally.

There is indeed a difference between hate and contempt. Cheney, and since Obama took office, Boehner, McConnell and the other conductors on the right side of the orchestra have played nothing but sour notes, and the public has been too tone deaf to react. Now they will have even more brass, and the sound will be even more grating.

(Speaking of JQ Adams, here’s a letter from today’s NYT:)

Little-known fact: more than 200 years ago, John Adams predicted the rise of the Tea Party:

“We may please ourselves with the prospect of free and popular governments. But there is great danger that those governments will not make us happy. God grant they may. But I fear that in every assembly, members will obtain an influence by noise not sense. By meanness, not greatness. By ignorance, not learning. By contracted hearts, not large souls … .”

Ps. @ Nemesys,

Do the math. If the revenues realized by hiking the tax are disbursed by paying the wealthy retiree 120% of what s/he was getting with the old cap in place, and paying new retirees only 80% of what they would have gotten under the old cap, how does that “fix” SS?

You seem to think that the govt. can create wealth, not just redistribute it. SS has been set up to redistribute the existing wealth, not to “guarantee” our benefits as the entitlement-minded would have us think. SS is not a pension fund. Read Norris’s article.

Oh lets face it even the tea party republicans don’t like GWB. Heck I’m not sure how the Republican party stands on him. They didn’t mention him at all in the last election, it was as if he simply didn’t exsist. They kept going back Ronald Rayguns (yes that is intentional) as if he was a god. The tea party wants the good old days of stagflation and 13% interest rates for home loans. And yes the right moving and left moving of the parties is bad for anyone who loves this country. Why becouse nothing gets done.

Yes there are a lot of people out there who want nothing done, goverment is bad they say. Nobody wants to do away with Social Securit, no one wants to cut military spending. But if you cut infrastructure and education this country falls further behind the rest of the world. We don’t create jobs because the country doesn’t build anything.

Fast trains are everywhere in Europe and Japan and China have them and are building more. The roads we have are crumbling, but no one wants to pays to repar them. .

The Republican answer is cut taxes, but won’t cut spending. They blame Obama for a growth in goverment. The goverment grew more uner GWB them any other president, Heck it grew under Rayguns. Goverment grows and shrinks and moves in cycles. Nut what the far right is proposing is terrible.

I know Neocon and others will think of me as left leaning liberal. I am not I truly wish that goverment would leave me alone. But I also believe that they should leave everybody alone. If it doesn’t hurt anyone else then let em do it.

The far right wants independence for themselves but not for others. Gay marriage is a nono, beibng gay is nono. Abortion is a nono. I firmly beielve that what you do in the privacy of your home is yours to do, so long as it doesn’t involve animals little children and me. And the me is only if I say no, I can make a decision on my own what I will do.

Why is the right telling me I can’t have an abortion and the left telling me what I can’t eat. That is the real problen with goverment.

Health care reform is there to protect those who can’t protect themselves. Finance reform is there to protect thjose who can’t protect themselves. That is what goverment is meant to do, protect the inocent and this country. The so called tea party and the far right in a whole wants to do away with those protections. Do away with social security, do away with financial reform, do away with the health care protections.

I could continue this ranr for a long time. I firmly believe that you can tell when a politician is lying….his lips are moving. And anyone running for a polical office eventually turns into a poluitician if he/she wishes to be re-elected.

Please pardon any misspellings.

cdward and BrianCrook: I’m not alleging that Bush made no mistakes, but your portrayal of him as evil incarnate is a little extreme, don’t you think? Was Saddam’s regime a danger, WMD’s or not? Hadn’t Iraq already invaded and pillaged Kuwait once before?

Were all the [insert your number here] civilian Iraqi deaths caused by invading forces, as Trudeau is implying?

It’s a trick question.

100,000 dead Iraqi would obviously be zombies.

Zombies are looking for brains.

Therefore, they wouldn’t even bother going past Dubya’s house.

^^The difference between Osama and Saddam: Saddam has a country that we can locate. Osama is still alive because he can disappear like smoke. Saddam couldn’t, if he wanted to keep his position and his palaces.

Saddam knew if he attacked and killed a single American, we would smash his military and his country. He was going to make a lot of noise, but he wasn’t going to DO squat. Bush wasted lives we can’t get back and money we desperately need now on a non-threat.

diggitt … Polk was one of our best presidents. He made 5 campaign promises:

Gain California. Settle the Oregon boundary with Great Britain. Lower the tariff. Reform the Treasury. Leave after one term.

He did all 5, as well as win the Mexican War. The territory he added to the United States set us up to become a world superpower.

palin, please pardon me for being confused, but “20% of the revenue realized goes to increase benefits for the wealthy who don’t need them” is not the same math as “paying new retirees only 80% of what they would have gotten under the old cap”. Besides the fact that raising benefits for the wealthy wasn’t mentioned at all, raising the overall revenue stream from SS cannot reduce existing benefits for non-wealthy particpants unless the system is very, very corrupt. Is it? Or is it just that you’d rather not see the system updated for the 21st century because “the wealthy who do not need them” might benefit from it too?

Hell, if we can twist the very Constitution around to fit the whims of modern day philosophers, it does not seem credible that we cannot touch Social Security.

Nice John Adams quote, but perhaps Sam Adams predicted the minority Tea Party political victory when he said “It does not take a majority to prevail … but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.”

It’s significant that Nemesys didn’t have an argument against being pushed in the ocean.

@ Marchman,

You said “The Republican answer is cut taxes, but won’t cut spending”.

That’s what I keep hearing, including from Garry, but not from the Republicans. It’s true that the R’s strategically didn’t go into where they would cut as part of their campaign rhetoric, just as the D’s didn’t go into where they would increase it last time around, but I suspect you’ll be hearing the screaming start very soon when those cuts are put on the table.

Will anyone be surprised? Only if they haven’t been paying attention.

OK Nemesys, no one likes to make cuts and the Republicans never stated where they would. But after the election many of the winners said they wanted to go after social security, I.E. raise the age for retirement. Rand Paul wants to do away with all financial regulation and i belive that he wouldn;t mind doing away with social security all together.

A republican was on CNBC the day after the elections and stated that they wanted to do away with or change some onorous rules and lower costs, one was unemployment and the other was workers compensation. This he said would get business hiring again.

I simply belive that the government has to protect those who can’t protect themswelves. The red colored party believes that everyone must protect what is theirs.

The right has moved farther with the tea party then Obama has gone to the left. Ms. Pelosi on the other hand wants a nanny state. I again ask who has the answers? My feeling is no one on either side wants to compromise. Without comprimise nothing is done. We had two years of the party of no. Now we look forward to two years of nothing.

Nemesys, Sorry what I wrote sounded confused. “Brevis esse laboro, obscurus fio” (I put in the quote from Horace to check whether GoComics will bleep my Latin, the way they did Spaghettus’s “magna [with] laude,” above).

Norris reports that when the academics tried to find out how the several hikes in the income cap have affected SS benefits, they ran into an unexpectedly complex problem. This from Norris:

They compare three groups of Social Security recipients, the youngest being those born from 1948 through 1953, a group that is starting to retire now. That group is compared with a group 12 years older, born from 1936 through 1941, and to a group 24 years older, born from 1924 to 1929. They take into account inflation and increases in median income.

Comparing the youngest of these groups to those born 12 years earlier, they conclude that “for a person earning at the maximum level covered by Social Security, about a fifth of the additional taxes collected due to the increase in the earnings cap are used to pay for incremental benefits, reducing the incremental funds available for addressing the Social Security revenue shortfall by about a fifth.” Comparing the youngest group with the workers 24 years older, the increase in benefits is even greater. (End of quotation from Norris’s article)

From this, you can see the dilemma. If we continue to regard SS as a pension plan (that’s how it was misleadingly sold to the public 75 years ago), then what you take out will depend on what you’ve paid in. As a result, wealthy taxpayers will skim 20% off any new revenues, reducing them to only 80% of what’s needed to cover NEW retirees.

To prevent this happening, we should drop the pretext that these are pension benefits and should distribute the new revenues strictly on the basis of need.

I imagine you’ll agree with that, although you may have caveats about an incompetent govt. doing the distributing. (Better a bumbling govt., say I, than a sly bankster who’s adept at covering his tracks.) Also, the govt. is going to have a hard time persuading wealthy retirees that they have not been contributing to a pension but to a welfare fund.

sandfan, I don’t believe I portrayed GWB as evil incarnate. I merely said virtually everything his administration accomplished was bad. Big difference.

Oh - and the “split the nation in two” comment was intended to be tongue-in-cheek. Although…..

@ sandfan

What you meant as facetious nevertheless reflects an economic truth. The divide between the wealthy and the rest of us (to say nothing of the “income gap” between rich and poor) has begun to erode our political stability. Starting with 1980, recessions have uprooted either party in favor of its opposite. This year’s midterm is the third in a row to topple incumbents.

Could it be that our country is in the birth throes of a new, American version of socialism? I’m not a Marxist, but it occurs to me that when private business (i.e. the banksters and corporations) ignore the welfare of society as a whole, the only institution still in a position to look out for society will be the Federal government.

Voters can sense that the future of America lies in the hands of Federal, not private institutions. That’s why the Tea Party, in order to refashion our society, got itself elected to the government.

ronebofh – You got that right!!

Nemesys – I once worked in the welfare office and I could never fathom anyone using WIC to buy shrimp or anything of the sort. WIC is for baby foods – milk, juices, eggs, etc. Now if they sell the coupons, it’s another thing…

And it has always been the “middle class” who pays taxes to support both the rich and the poor. And if you think you are not supporting the rich just think about things like roads, firefighters, police, universities, etc.

It should also be noted that Bush conveniently managed to keep his war budget out of the deficit calculations for 8 years. Now it has been added back in by this administration, and accounts for nearly a trillion dollars in and of itself. I suppose we could cut the deficit almost in half if we just operated the way the last administration did.