Jay Bookman

President Harry Truman

A reader, the daughter of a now-deceased reporter for the Atlanta Journal, was digging through some old files of her father’s and came across something that she thought I might find interesting. She was right.

It’s a clip of a story written by her father, Odom Fanning, in 1949, reporting on a debate sponsored by the Gate City Lodge of B’nai Brith. Read the first two paragraphs alone, and you get the flavor of the piece. The parallels with today’s debate on health care are uncanny, missing only a reference to Marxist anti-colonial Kenyans out to destroy this country from within.

The president pushing the program at the time was Harry Truman, the man who had dropped the A-bomb on Japan and who, a year later, would commit U.S. troops to a land war in Asia, trying to block the invasion of South Korea by North Korean and Chinese communists.

– Jay Bookman

Continue reading Ol’ Harry Truman was a dirty socialist? Who knew? »

So this is what it looks like on Sept. 20, 2012, 47 days to the election that Newt Gingrich kept calling the most consequential since 1860:

In the presidential race, Mitt Romney remains neck and neck with Barack Obama in both the Rasmussen and Gallup tracking polls, with most of Obama’s post-convention bounce eroding. Other recent polls, however, show Obama building a significant lead. The latest Pew poll puts Obama up eight points; the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll puts him up five.

But Romney’s real problems show up at the state level. In the swing states that he has to have — Ohio, Virginia, Florida — poll after poll shows his situation deteriorating significantly. At a point in the campaign where he has to be shrinking the margin, the margin is growing. Fox puts Romney down seven in Ohio, down five in Florida and down seven in Virginia.

Republican hopes to take the Senate, a goal the party once deemed a near certainty, seem to be collapsing as well. In state after …

Continue reading GOP strategists cannot like what they’re seeing »

Yet another major right-wing outrage goes pffffft, as was predicted here almost a year ago.

From Politico:

An internal Justice Department investigation into the Operation Fast and Furious scandal singles out 14 different officials for criticism and possible disciplinary action. But a report out Wednesday found no evidence that the department’s top leaders knew about the gun-walking aspect of the operation when it was underway.

… the investigators found Attorney General Eric Holder didn’t know about the controversial operation until after the scandal emerged in the wake of the discovery of two weapons linked to the operation at the scene of the shooting death of a Border Patrol agent in December 2010.

The investigative report (available here) was harshly critical of the operation itself, as it should have been, noting that “the investigations were seriously flawed in several respects, most significantly in their failure to adequately consider the risk to public safety in the …

Continue reading ‘Fast and Furious’ report exonerates AG Holder »

The more I think about Mitt Romney telling his fellow 1 percenters that 47 percent of their fellow Americans are in effect leeches content to live off the work of others, the more bothered I am by it. Most of those 47 percent are hard-working people struggling to raise families and build a life under conditions that Romney has never experienced, and the lack of empathy it reveals is disturbing.

His running mate, Paul Ryan, said yesterday that Romney had been “obviously inarticulate” in those statements, but as anybody who has seen the video can attest, quite the opposite is true. In expressing those views, Romney was far more natural and articulate than in almost any of his public appearances to date.

Romney is now trying to reverse the tables, citing a 1998 audiotape featuring Barack Obama.

“There’s a tape that came out today where the president’s saying he likes redistribution,” Romney said on Fox News. “I disagree. I think a society based upon a government-centered nation …

Continue reading Romney, Obama and the politics of redistribution »

NOTE: This post includes some material published in earlier blog posts. It is posted here as the electronic version of today’s AJC print column:

As marriage counselors will attest, more marriages are broken up by fights over money than for any other reason. That’s particularly true during tough economic times, when dreams falter and tough choices have to be made. That reality also helps to explain the current state of American politics, which is bitter and highly emotional. The 2012 campaign season is at root a battle over money, with two partners each angrily insistent that the other one has lost all contact with the real world.

In trying to sort it all out, however, it’s important to acknowledge that we are actually struggling with two related yet very distinct challenges, and it’s important to think each of them through on their own terms.

Let’s start with this one: How do we finance our government? It is undeniably true that the U.S. government is living beyond its means …

Continue reading Twin challenges facing the U.S. political system »

Whew.

I just returned from a trek through the fever swamps of the right, and I have to say, the trip was a bit unnerving. My goal was to track a particular piece of right-wing nonsense down to its source, in hopes that I might learn something about those who generate such stories, those who disseminate them and those who are willing to swallow them hook, line and sinker, time and time again.

This time, our trip starts with this rather startling headline from Redstate:

Now, if true, that would be a major story to say the least. It would also be the most stupid act of political suicide imaginable. It is inconceivable to any sane person that any American administration would consider releasing the mastermind of attacks on the World Trade Center that killed six Americans, injured more than a thousand and served as the precursor for the later attacks of Sept. 11. There is no rational universe in which that could be true.

Ahhhh, but the Redstate post contains actual links that …

Continue reading A sordid trek through the right-wing fantasy swamps »

Who are these 46 percent* of Americans who pay no income taxes (but who do pay a variety of other federal taxes, including payroll taxes that fund Social Security and Medicare)?

The Tax Policy Center, which generated that statistic in the first place, breaks it down for us. They are:

• Fifty percent of those not paying income tax are “tax units” — someone filing as an individual or a couple filing jointly — that simply make too little money. For example, ” … a couple with two children earning less than $26,400 will pay no federal income tax because their $11,600 standard deduction and four exemptions of $3,700 each reduce their taxable income to zero.” These are often working people — janitors, nursing home aides, Walmart clerks, etc. An income of $26,400 breaks down to one full-time job paying roughly $12.70 an hour.
• Two-thirds of those who do not pay income taxes do pay Social Security and Medicare taxes. The combined payroll tax on their labor of 15.3 percent exceeds the …

Continue reading Who are Mitt Romney’s freeloading 46 percent? »

UPDATE at 7:20 a.m.: Initially, some had attempted to brush this off as a “nonstory.” The Romney campaign itself has proved that claim wrong. You don’t call a late-night unscheduled televised press conference, as Romney did, to get ahead of a “nonstory.”

It’s also not true that this is something Romney has been saying on the campaign trail anyway. To my knowledge, he has sunk to this line of argument only once, back in the primaries. If I’m mistaken and he has done so more regularly, I’m sure that will surface.

In policy terms, Romney clearly believes that 47 percent of Americans — for the most part, the poorer 47 percent — ought to pay more in income taxes. There’s no other way to interpret the remarks, although some will surely try to give them imaginative new meaning. The recession has a lot to do with the increase in those not paying income tax, but a larger driver was the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003. To build political support for tax cuts at the top end, President …

Continue reading Smile, Mitt Romney. You’re on Candid Camera! »

That’s the number of people employed full-time in the private sector in January, 2001, when President George W. Bush raised his right hand to take the oath of office.

That’s the number of people employed by the private sector in January, 2005, after four years of supposedly “pro-growth” tax and regulatory policies almost identical to those now being proposed by Mitt Romney.

That’s the number of jobs “gained” in the first term of President Bush, even after major tax reductions in 2001 and 2003 that were supposed to jump-start hiring by giving more affluent Americans an incentive to invest.

That’s the number of people employed by the private sector in January, 2009, at the end of President Bush’s second term in office.

That’s the total number of private sector jobs “gained” by the U.S. economy in the eight-year period from January 2001 to January 2009 under President Bush.

That’s the number of people employed fulltime in the private sector as of August 2012, the most …

Continue reading How do GOP’s ‘pro-growth’ policies work? A quick review »

Martin Feldstein, a conservative Harvard economist, served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Reagan. He is also an adviser to Mitt Romney. In that role, Feldstein recently undertook a study of Romney’s proposed tax “plan” to try to prove that it is indeed mathematically possible to accomplish the three basic promises of the Romney approach. They are:

– Cut individual tax rates by 20 percent across the board;
– Make up revenue lost through the lower rates by eliminating tax deductions.
– Ensure that taxes are not raised on the middle class.

Romney has since seized upon the Feldstein study as confirmation that his plan — vague as it is — holds together mathematically. However, there are at least three* rather large and well-documented problems with Feldstein’s study:

1.) To make the math work and maintain the fiction that taxes on the middle class won’t rise, Feldstein begins by redefining that middle class. Under his formulation, every household …

Continue reading Mitt’s economic adviser spills beans on middle-class tax hike »