by hilzoy
"The most radical, and effective, thing we could do for the economy right now is this: Stop collecting all forms of Federal business, income and payroll tax. EVERY PENNY OF IT. RIGHT NOW.
Gasp! Yes, I said it, and I meant it. Go on an absolute, 100% Federal tax holiday. That’s a real shot in the arm that would suddenly inflate the economy by a solid $1.5 trillion or more per year.
Are you worried about the resulting fiscal deficits? Don’t be. There is a huge amount of demand for debt from global investors, and the credit crunch has blown a huge hole in private debt formation. That leaves a lot of room for the government to borrow more."
That certainly is a radical proposal. But "the most radical thing we could do for the economy"? I don't think so. If we really don't have to worry about deficits, Erick's proposal seems pretty small-bore. Why not help Americans deleverage by having the government buy up all individual and corporate debt? That would help get the economy moving again! Why not provide health insurance for everyone, along with Supertrains, flatscreen TVs, living room suites, and a lifetime supply of chocolate? And why hasn't he mentioned this to his co-bloggers at RedState, so that they can stop writing things like this?
"Do the Blue Dogs care about balanced budgets? Do they oppose wasteful spending? Are they the taxpayer’s best friend, the conscience of the Congress, and the moderates who craft bipartisan solutions? Today is the day to prove it."
"A $789 billion spending bill, all of which will have to be borrowed and later repaid by our progeny, cannot possibly be “fiscally responsible.”"
Tax cuts?
“The most radical, and effective, thing we could do for the economy right now is this: Stop collecting all forms of Federal business, income and payroll tax. EVERY PENNY OF IT. RIGHT NOW.
Republican ideas brand new and fresh. I think I’ll take this opportunity to link ti my latest Kos diary.
Stop collecting all forms of Federal business, income and payroll tax.
but leave the DEATH TAX ??? ZOMG!?! and what about the capital gains tax? surely there could be no better way to stimulate investment than to eliminate the CG tax!
sheesh. these clowns can’t even keep their talking points straight.
(maybe they did propose those, too. i can’t tell, because the big brains over there have blocked my IP address again!)
You don’t say!
I don’t remember who said it recently, but someone pointed out that when you boil down the Republican reflex of bleating “tax cuts!” as an answer to everything, what this really comes down to is “I don’t want to pay taxes”. For most of the talking heads in Congress and the media, it’s not about effective fiscal policy, it’s about not wanting the government to use their money used to help anyone else.
But this really is a profound new level of stupid from Erick.
But this really is a profound new level of stupid from Erick.
How he manages to constantly outdo himself, I’ll never know.
Well, you can’t argue it’s not out-of-the-box thinking.
Thinking like Erick’s and Moe’s, the wisdom of Joe the Plumber and the leadership of Rush Limbaugh certainly has the GOP well in the lead for locking up that all-important clinically insane demographic.
Ok, I’m unclear as to the problem here: Given that it’s already accepted that we’re going to run massive deficits for years to come, (“Stimulus” just seems to be another way of saying “deficit”, so far as I can see.) what’s the objection to creating the deficit by cutting taxes rather than raising spending? That the potential for kickbacks is limited when you’re not directing in detail who gets the loot?
You certainly can’t get a faster stimulus than directing people to stop withholding taxes…
You might think so, Ugh, but apparently you’re wrong – you didn’t actually take the opportunity to link to anything at the Daily Kos.
what’s the objection to creating the deficit by cutting taxes rather than raising spending?
0% of $0 = $0
You might think so, Ugh, but apparently you’re wrong – you didn’t actually take the opportunity to link to anything at the Daily Kos.
Hmmm…must be my aversion to shameless self-promotion. Let’s see if the aversion lasts.
Just to be clear – it’s posted in a summary post by Erick, but this particular bit of innanity is actually from someone named Francis Cianfrocca – you have to click through the summary to read the whole thing.
And I’m still trying to figure out if this person is an idiot or someone pretending to be an idiot to lure out the crazies. The whole post is just so chock full o’ stupid.
This makes total sense. We can pay for the troops in Iraq with gold nuggets we pull out of our butts, like the Japanese. And all that federal spending to subsidize the price of gasoline and agriculture? Why, that money will come from the near infinite yields provided by the Lauffer Curve. Hell, if we cut our tax rates to 0%, we’ll practically be making money. We should have done this years ago!
Targeted spending on concrete goods and services won’t generate jobs. That’s silly. But giving me a full refund on all my taxes for the 2009 year gives me… uh… roughly 25% of what I make minus deductions and credits!
This is such a sweet deal! If only me and 3.6 million of my friends hadn’t been laid off in the last four months, we would totally make use of all this extra dough.
Let me be clear: It’s a stupid idea, it’s not for nothing that conservatives refer to the GOP as “The Stupid Party”, but I’m trying to figure out the liberal objection to the idea. It’s a really, really fast way of getting the stimulus out there, and every time somebody raises some objection to the details of the package, all I hear is, “We can’t stop to discuss this, we need a stimulus NOW!”
You’re going to have to clarify that, Cleek. Yeah, I know that if you cut a catagory of tax to zero for a while, you’ll bring in zero revenue during that time. How’s this different from keeping the tax where it was, and spending twice as much as the tax yields for the same period of time? Nets out the same.
Except, as I said, you can do it fast, and the potential for kickbacks is limited when you haven’t got 5000 pages of line items to work with.
You’re going to have to clarify that, Cleek.
cutting taxes on the unemployed does nothing to directly help people who have no income. those people have to sit around and wait (on unemployment, prolly) for the employed to spend enough to create enough new demand that employers start hiring again.
on the other hand, funding projects that are ready to go except for lack of funding (“shovel ready” construction jobs, for example) creates jobs immediately.
cutting taxes on the unemployed does nothing to directly help people who have no income.
that really should read: cutting taxes does nothing to directly help people who have no income.
Ok, I’m unclear as to the problem here: Given that it’s already accepted that we’re going to run massive deficits for years to come, (“Stimulus” just seems to be another way of saying “deficit”, so far as I can see.) what’s the objection to creating the deficit by cutting taxes rather than raising spending?
Because in a deflationary environment the main object of fiscal policy is to increase the velocity of the money supply, not to decrease it. Cutting taxes to 0% on everybody means that the fraction of the tax paying population wealthy enough that they don’t have to overly concern themselves with consumption needs (you know, the group that your side likes to complain are paying in aggregate about 50 percent of our income tax) will in all likelihood take their share of that “stimulus” and use it for investing (and not into equity in new businesses either – it will go into safe and highly liquid assets like gold and short-term Treasuries), not spending on increased consumption. Not much of an increase in velocity in that, is there? If anything it does the exact opposite.
If you really, really want to crash the economy, this is an excellent idea.
Brett Bellmore is not wrong, in that the Government ceasing to collect any and all taxes would be a very, very fast way to shovel money at people.
But it would also be a very inefficient and misguided way to shovel money at the economy: there are a lot of people who aren’t working, and would spend any extra money they could get, and canceling all taxes wouldn’t help them directly. There are a lot of people who don’t spend their whole after-tax salaries, and while they might spend a sudden windfall on something they never thought they’d bother to buy, they also might save the extra money, rather than use it to stimulate the economy. The third group, those people living paycheck to paycheck, would benefit immediately and would spend the extra money: but the money going to them would be a tiny portion of the money the government would forfeit. Not surprisingly, the Obama plan emphasizes aid to the first and third groups, and all the winger plans help mostly the second group.
So, yes, Brett’s not wrong that Erick’s plan is fast. But Brett is also being careful: he’s not saying it’s efficient, or that it’s clever. Because I think Brett’s honest enough not to claim that.
It’s like the point Chait made in his cleverly titled post “Man’s inhumanity to Mankiw”: Those conservatives who have any sort of self-respect aren’t bothering to defend the “plans” coming out of the fever swamps of the right, which all consist of cheap shots at government and massive handouts to the wealthy.
What I really want to do is deny sitting members of Congress an excellent opportunity to engage in their usual rent seeking behavior by handing out a trillion dollars in carefully targeted largesse. So I prefer that, if there be a stimulus package, it be so crude that it can’t be used to generate kickbacks. And I view the resulting inefficiency as worth the lesser increment of detailed government control over the economy, and it’s winners and losers.
Then there is the fact that simply dumping money into the pockets of consumers won’t actually do more than inflate another bubble.
What the economy needs most right now is jobs. Shoveling cash will create a great deal of monetary supply, but it won’t increase the demand for goods or services. At best, you’ll just see rapid inflation as existing prices rise in the face of increased currency.
But there is a demand for infrastructure in the United States that can’t be purchased by any single individual. No one guy is going to go out and build a new elementary school. No family of four can afford a new bridge or a resurfaced highway. No single business could afford to upgrade the internet backbone, and the billions invested in such an activity wouldn’t see returns for a generation. Even whole cities or states can’t afford to overhaul the entire US electrical grid. Yet there is a demand for this kind of purchasing. You just need someone with a big enough checkbook.
A rush on cars from an automotive tax credit today might prop up Chevy or Ford for another year, but a vibrant new highway built by a thousand well-paid construction workers will generate a lane of commerce and thousands more well-paying jobs that can – in turn – be used to sustain the automotive industry for another 30.
What I really want to do is deny sitting members of Congress an excellent opportunity to engage in their usual rent seeking behavior
Brett that sounds awfully close to saying that you’re willing to hurt the entire country and everybody in it in order to gain the short term emotional satisfaction of spiting Congress. Are you sure you don’t want to rephrase that?
I’ll admit that there are times when my head and my heart don’t agree with each other (usually along the lines of: my heart says “line the bankers up and shoot ’em”, and my head says “WWRD (What would Robespierre do?) isn’t going to have a happy ending. Try something else.”). I try to stay on the lookout for these situations and make a real effort to let my head have the final say on these occasions; that seems like the best public face to put forward, but YMMV.
According to the EPA, there exists an unmet need for approximately $250 billion in water, wastewater and recycled water projects. While not all of these are “shovel-ready”, they will (a) create a lot of good jobs, and (b) increase public health and decrease water losses due to waste. These are classic long-term stimulus projects.
Cutting taxes pays for projects like this precisely how?
“That certainly is a radical proposal. ”
Well of course they would propose this. It would starve the federal government into nothingness and the Dark Lord would fall from his throne. Look how Yugoslavia has flourished since they got rid of their federal government.
Thanks for the giggle, Ugh! Nicely done.
Another point is that the willingness of foreign investors to lend us money, and thus finance our ongoing budget deficit, will dry up more rapidly if they perceive us to be pursuing completely irrational policies.
Without any income or payroll tax, how would people imagine that the Federal Government would ever be in a position to redeem the debt held by foreign investors? Or, to put this in simpler terms, do you think the bank is more or less likely to give you a loan if you inform them that you’re quitting your job tomorrow?
NonyNony: Oh my God. I used to work for Francis – at least I’m fairly sure it’s the same guy; I see some similar articles under his name at various right-wing sites, and the profile info sounds like it’s the same guy. Didn’t know he was a wingnut, but it makes sense.
“Brett that sounds awfully close to saying that you’re willing to hurt the entire country and everybody in it in order to gain the short term emotional satisfaction of spiting Congress.”
Or maybe that I think rent seeking behavior by Congress, and increasing governmental control over the entire economy, is a bad thing in the long run, and reducing it is worth the stimulus being a little less effective.
The more the government controls the economy, the more economic decisions are controlled by political, not economic, considerations. (We got into this crisis at least in part because the government already had enough influence over banks and mortgage companies that lending practices were determined more by political pressure to ‘expand home ownership’ than by a sane consideration of who was really capable of making loan payments.) And the more the winners and losers are determined by who bribes members of Congress. Or, if we’re going to be brutally honest about it, who pays their assigned Congressional extortion.
Hob:
What? Me, a wingnut who posts at right-wing sites? umm, I think you’ve got the wrong guy. I’m a pretty mild-mannered water lawyer in Southern California.
[on preview. oops, maybe you meant the other Francis?]
Brett,
Thanks for responding, that’s a much better formulation.
Oh Brett. Let’s agree that rent seeking is bad. Now, let’s not assume that the default is no government with no taxes, but rather some government with some taxes. On this utterly reasonable assumption, there must be some policy by which government allocates the tax burden. With me? Now, explain how the wealthy, in seeking to reduce their share of the tax burden, are not engaging in rent-seeking behavior.
OT, but apparently Senator Gregg and the Obama admin have had a rather stormy falling out, so the Commerce Secty post is now open again.
Send in your resumes!
Oh great, Brett now comes awfully close to invoking the “Acorn did it!” nuttery, albeit with a “partially” modifier.
Can I withdraw my upthread accusation of good faith on Brett’s part?
P.S. You may be surprised to learn that poor folks seeking entry to what used to be termed “the housing ladder” (or maybe still do, but now ironically) don’t bribe a lot of politicians.
P.P.S. Up north, where they follow a slightly more pro-government theory, there have been no bank failures.
So, Brett: the financial wizards who engineered crappy loans into “safe” CDOs were doing it in order to “expand home ownership”?? It was “political pressure” rather than personal greed that motivated them??
Incidentally, if you wanted to “expand home ownership”, would you politically promote higher house prices, or lower ones?
–TP
Per TLTIABQ’s threadjacking comment, and supporting the threadjack (since there’s still no Hilzoy For Commerce Secretary thread), and from TLT’s hyperlinked 538 post, the press release on Gregg from the White House is indeed pretty strong stuff:
Stealing one more quote from the post, this one from the post’s author Sean Quinn:
Ugh: You have just won the Internet. Congratulations.
I prefer that, if there be a stimulus package, it be so crude that it can’t be used to generate kickbacks.
We could get a few thousand pallets and put a couple million bucks, cash, on each one. Drop them off at exits on the interstate system at intervals roughly corresponding to the population density.
If you want something more targeted to lower income folks, we could just drop them in WalMart parking lots. There are about 4000 of those in the US.
If you’re after fast and crude, that will get it done.
We got into this crisis at least in part because the government already had enough influence over banks and mortgage companies that lending practices were determined more by political pressure to ‘expand home ownership’ than by a sane consideration of who was really capable of making loan payments.
Brett, I’m sure you think that loans offered under programs like the CRA are a significant part of the problem we’re facing now.
I tend to think they’re not. That won’t stop this line of argument from living on as a festering sore on the whole discussion, but I really think they’re not.
I’ve been trying to find a credible dollar value for the total sum of loans issued under the CRA or similar programs which would otherwise have been denied because the borrowers would not otherwise have met lending guidelines, and which subsequently went into foreclosure.
I’d like that number because I’d like to compare it to the total value of the credit obligations of the major investment banks in this country as of, say, last September.
In 2007, the credit default swap market had a notional value of $45 trillion dollars. The entire US GDP in 2007 was just short of $14 trillion dollars.
I just don’t see foreclosures on sub-prime mortgages offered under programs like the CRA as a significant part of the problem.
What if we converted to an entire Civil War re-enactment based economy?
Now that would be a radical change.
Weren’t there links around when all of this started to go down to the effect that CRA loans were actually significantly less likely to have been defaulted on? I’m pretty sure there were.
In 2007, the credit default swap market had a notional value of $45 trillion dollars. The entire US GDP in 2007 was just short of $14 trillion dollars.
Yeah, given that the average US home price in 2007 was around $300,000, that means that, to approach the value of the CDS market, there would need to be outstanding loans for somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 million homes, which a moment’s examination might appear preposterous even to Brett. I’m sure he’ll find a nice, comfy wedge in “in part” to hide inside, though.
Warren T: “Can I withdraw my upthread accusation of good faith on Brett’s part?”
You can do whatever you want in the privacy of your own mind. But accusations of bad faith in these comments would violate the posting rules.
Yeah. Doesn’t pass the sniff test. Kinda betrays innumeracy, you know? That the bulk of valuable real estate in the US just SOMEHOW ended up all in the hands of poor and lower middle class people…
Ack. Sorry, but just thinking of that pisses me off. Anybody try to claim that, I’ll ask them–do the math. Aint enough real estate value in those parts of town to do it, not enough even to tempt banks into doing it.
More OT:
The Judd blowup is truly instant karma for all concerned.
I hope one of the lessons learned at the WH is “don’t get cute.”
Did I not warn, when this first came up, that these Senate Republicans, almost to a person, are snakes?
The WH press release tells me that Team Obama has absorbed at least that lesson.
This OT’s not so OT, either. Judd’s bailing because of deep philosophical differences over the stimulus package. Of course he is! He’d have voted for that all-tax-cuts-for-the-rich proposal last week if he hadn’t been “recusing” himself. The right wingers have only a couple of ideas when it comes to economics. These are truly ideal Ideas: they exist outside of time and space, changeless and unconnected to anything that might actually be happening in the economy or the world.
Lower Taxes. Less Regulation.
Cut Gummint Spending.*
*Military spending isn’t spending; it’s Strong Defense.
Lower Taxes. Less Regulation.
Cut Gummint Spending
You know the funny thing? I’m sympathetic to this point of view.
Who likes to pay taxes?
Who enjoys dealing with government regulations?
I built my wife a garden shed a couple of years back. It’s 8′ x 2′, a total of 16 square feet. It’s built into a dogleg of the house, and is attached to the house itself. Because it’s attached to the house, I built it on a tiny, 16 sq ft footprint cinderblock foundation. I took the block down 4 feet to get it below the frost line.
By the time I got done with the permitting for the foundation, for an exemption on the property line setbacks, with the *instrument freaking survey* to determine the actual property offset vs the setbacks, and so on, it probably cost me between two and three thousand bucks to build a damned 16 foot garden shed.
We’re talking upwards of $150 a square foot. And after I built it, the mice moved in. They live on the bird seed that we store in there.
There’s more: when I pitched the plans to the zoning board for the exemption on the property line setbacks, one of the guys asked me to re-draw the plan, because I hadn’t taken into account the 1/4 inch width of the shingle I intended to us for siding.
One quarter inch.
So, you know, when conservatives b*tch about regulation, and taxes, and what have you, I really do feel your pain.
Taxes and regulation are a royal PITA.
In 1789, when the Constitution of the US was ratified, there was slightly less than 4 million citizens living in the United States. Granted, the land area they lived in was pretty much the eastern seaboard. But it was 4 million people.
There are now over 300 million people living here.
Regulation is the way we live with each other without totally screwing each other over, or pissing each other off.
Taxes are the way we pay for governing a complex, primarily urban and suburban population, that no longer grows its own food, builds its own homes, and makes its own clothes.
In some ways, it might be lovely to turn back the hands of time, but it ain’t gonna happen.
If you can’t get your head around that, there’s always Alaska.
If you can’t get your head around that, there’s always Alaska.
and Somalia. i hear they don’t have many regulations, or taxes, or intrusive parasitic government there.
come on libertarians, put your hides where your rhetoric is.
that, or knock of the Bullshirt.
OK Ugh – credit where it is due – that was pretty funny – even if it did hit a bit close to home. 😉
“Once it became clear after his nomination that Senator Gregg was not going to be supporting some of President Obama’s key economic priorities,”
LOL! Illegally taking direct control of the Census bureau instead of letting the Commerce secretary run it like the law says is one of Obama’s “key economic priorities”? Go figure…
“and after I built it, the mice moved in. They live on the bird seed that we store in there.”
Gnaw-proof metal cans, with tightly-securable lids. Although you want to make sure no-one’s managed to scurry in each time before you close ’em . . . esp if you won’t be using them for a time, ’cause nobody, liberal or conservative, likes finding mummified mouse in the morning.
Alternately, you can offer the mice tax cuts.
It’s almost as though the people at RedState are applying, well, a double standard: they care about fiscal responsibility when it comes to spending money to build schools or fix bridges, but all that concern just flies out the window when it comes to
tax cutsblowing people up and acting all macho with big guns and stuff.Fixed that for ya.
Gnaw-proof metal cans, with tightly-securable lids.
Yeah, we store it in small galvanized metal trash cans with tight lids. There’s always spillage, though, and a mouse can apparently live quite a while on a couple of sunflower seeds.
They do get into some unusual places, though. Once we found a very fat, very happy mouse inside the metal, squirrel-proof bird feeder.
That Judd shot his withdrawal across the news just in time for the President’s appearance is the behavior of a snake.
No surprise from the Party of snakes, who have been programmed by Gingrich, Rove, Limbaugh and filth to use only one political tool: venom.
Fine.
Fire Gates and Lahood now. They cannot be trusted.
Put a little arsenic too in those cocktails for the Republicans attending the weekly White House soirees.
Can we get an EPA ruling permitting the beheading of all snakes in the grass?
I guess that would cause an increase in the population of Republican rats.
We’re infested anyway we look at it.
Illegally taking direct control of the Census bureau
bzzzt
Brett: Illegally taking direct control of the Census bureau
Uh, no.
Uh, no.
This was extensively hashed out in comments over at Balloon-Juice as well, with the verdict being that this is all smoke and no fire. Since Senator Gregg himself has commented that the Census was a minor issue, and given that he belongs to the opposition party and is thus under no obligation to protect the President, I’m inclined to take him at his word.
Meanwhile, what Glenn said:
As a result, there is very little political or media structure to Obama’s Left that can or will criticize him, even when he moves far to what the Beltway calls the “center” or even the Right (i.e., when he adopts large chunks of the GOP position). That situation is extremely bad — both for the Left and for Obama. It makes impossible what very well might be the apocryphal though still illuminating FDR anecdote:
As Judis points out, Obama, on some issues, might move to the Right because he wants to. In other cases, he will do so because he perceives that he has to, because the combination of the GOP/Blue-Dog-following-caucus/Beltway-media-mob might force him to. Regardless of Obama’s motives, the lack of a meaningful, potent movement on the Left to oppose that behavior ensures that it will continue without any resistance. The lack of any independent political pressure from the Left ensures that Obama will be either content to ignore their views or will be forced to do so even when he doesn’t want to.
Prioritizing political allegiance to their leader was exactly the mistake the Right made for the first several years of the Bush presidency.
[LeftTurn here] I’m not sure that I agree with Glenn that there is no political or media movement to the Left of Obama, but it is certainly not well organized and capable of directed pressure against Congress (via threatened primary challenges) in the way that the right is able to enforce ideological orthodoxy – witness the Senatorial career of DiFi for example.
Whether this is because of unalterable traits associated with the personality of the left (vs. the right,) or is due to a lack of numbers, or is due to a currently incohate organizational structure, or is due to a lack of mass media presence which helps to coordinate mass pressure, or some combination of all of the above, I don’t know. Time will tell.
@TLT: On civil liberties and accountability questions, Accountability Now will address to some extent the lack of organizational structure and willingness to provide primary challenges. Other allied vehicles include the Get FISA Right group that formed at the Obama campaign website and Democrats.com (Bob Fertik, David Swanson et al.), who cooperated in the recent effort to push questions about accountability for Bush administration crimes onto the top ten list at change.gov.
On health care, organizations pushing for single-payer (‘Medicare for All’) have recently united to co-ordinate grassroots pressure for something better than the miserable thin-end-of-the-wedge plan of the completely co-opted Health Care for America Now coalition (unions, CAF, U.S. Action, MoveOn).
But it’s on the economic front where there’s a crying need for a co-ordinated push for actions that go well beyond what an economic team run by Larry Summers and Tim Geithner want to consider.
That has a great deal to do with the extent to which the terms of discussion have moved steadily rightward from Reagan onward, including during the Clinton administration, and the lack of a real economic left in the U.S. during capital’s thirty-year resurgence. Which itself has a whole lot to do with the two-party stranglehold and corporate dominance in election financing.
Labor, the main constituency that might otherwise be pushing a more progressive broad economic program, is wedded to a couple of narrower ‘wins’ for their own survival: the Employee Free Choice Act and something that can be sold as legitimate health care reform.
Decades of being in the wilderness, a tactical-electoral mindset rather than strategic movement-building, and the expectation of a favorable climate combined with the failure to foresee the extent and character of the current depression make them unwilling, especially at this point in the new regime, to be an oppositional force.
@left turn
The Democratic Party is unorganized to be sure, but particularly when compared to the Republicans.
Grover Norquist decided a couple of decades ago that he and his buddies would make the Republican Party a brand name, like Coke, so when you go to the ballot box, you know exactly what you are getting when you vote for an ‘R’.
That strategy has it’s drawbacks. Every time a Republican screws a male prostitute (or whatever) they suffer as a group, while Democratic malfeasance generally does not paint the party with a broad brush. Than all the Republicans sit around a cry that they were all sullied by their black sheep, but the ‘liberal media’ lets the Democrats get away with it. Well, sometimes there are weaknesses inherent in your strengths, and you can’t have it both ways.
Not sure f this is entirely addressing your point, but the Democrats are notoriously unorganized, and have been for as long as I’ve been paying attention. Organization has been a deliberate strategy on the part of the Republicans, while a few Democrats piecemeal organize around issues, without ever coming together as a unified front.
“LOL! Illegally taking direct control of the Census bureau instead of letting the Commerce secretary run it like the law says is one of Obama’s ‘key economic priorities’? Go figure…”
Brett doesn’t seem to have bothered to give a cite to support his accusation. How about one, Brett? Thanks!
[on preview. oops, maybe you meant the other Francis?]
He didn’t mean me either :p
The name we share isn’t common, but certainly isn’t non-existent.
A quick observation on the absurdities of partisan discourse: Hilzoy ends with:
Just about anytime a person complains about their oppositions double standards or hypocrisy, they generally do it while holding precisely the opposite position, which is still a double standard. Watch:
People don’t generally point it out, because it doesn’t do their arguments any good.