His description of the president’s social security proposal as a “dead horse” rightly got most of the attention, but House Ways & Means Chairman Bill Thomas covered a lot of strange turf in his comments yesterday on retirement and taxes. Most notably, he wondered aloud if we ought to downwardly adjust Social Security benefits for women because they tend to live longer.
The idea that women are unjustly sapping the Social Security Trust Fund by perversely refusing to die as fast as men raises the broader question whether all benefits should be “adjusted” based on longevity. Why not incentivize cost-effective early deaths instead of parasitical dotage?
As my friend the political consultant Dan Buck pointed out to me today, if women are to be punished for living too long, it follows that those with shorter average lifespans, like, say, African-Americans, should get a boost in monthly benefits. Maybe this could become Karl Rove’s prize wedge-issue for expanding the GOP share of the black vote.
But why stop at racial or gender categories? Why not just come right out and reward behaviors that tend to shorten life and thus protect the solvency of Social Security? By his own logic, Bill Thomas should start talking about higher benefits for smokers, heavy drinkers, and the obese, and lower benefits for careful eaters and regular exercisers. After all, good health and a buff physique are their own rewards.
It’s time to stop coddling oldsters and giving them more of their share of what they earned before retirement than they actually deserve. Anyone who can echo Casey Stengal’s late-life self-appraisal–“Most people my age are dead. You could look it up”–needs to shuffle on in the great cattle drive of life and get off the public dole. Right, Mr. Thomas?

Thanks to Josh Marshall, I just read the Wednesday WaPo piece in which Rep. Bill Thomas (R-CA), the chairman of the House Ways & Means Committee called the Bush Social Security “reform” proposal a “dead horse” and suggested–well, a whole bunch of possibilities, ranging from a “broader review of the problems of an aging nation” to a replacement of the Social Security payroll tax with something or other. It was clear that Thomas hoped Bush would change the subject from Social Security to taxes, pronto.
Thomas is, of course, notorious for self-regard in a city and a Congress where the average time spent in front of a mirror each day is extremely high. But it’s a bit hard to believe the congressional GOP leadership and the White House have somehow forgotten to send Thomas, whose committee has primary jurisdiction over Social Security, the talking points on this subject, with a few pointed reminders that going “off-message” might incur some serious wrath. So his sudden “dead horse” comment represents either a general GOP admission, or at least an honest assessment of the politics of the thing at the moment.
What makes me itchy (perhaps because I blogged about it just a few hours ago) is the suspicion that Thomas, whose committee also governs all of us through the Internal Revenue Code, is signalling a long-planned GOP shift from Social Security “reform” to tax “reform,” with the intention of resuming the Bush administration’s Long March towards relieving wealthy Americans of any real tax obligations at all.
Ah, but it’s important to wield the wooden stake at the monster most at hand before picking up another, so I guess it’s an unambiguously good thing that Thomas has so quickly bailed on a proposal to do us dirt when we retire before considering what he has in store for us in the meantime.
POSTSCRIPT: Guess I’m really tired to have missed this point, but as the indefatigable Josh noted in an email, this stuff with Thomas is happening two days before Bush’s inaugural speech, which was probably put to bed more than a week ago so that W. could rehearse it to a fine, non-smirking state of resolute perfection. Unless we are really dealing with a GOP bait-and-switch plan that’s been laid out in (Mayberry) Machiavellian detail for months, Thomas has probably stomped all over Bush’s message at the worst possible time. Look for a retraction, in the form of a correction, by Thomas by sundown today, and then for a resumption of whatever he’s up to once the inaugural risers have come down.

With all due deference to my vigilent Democratic blogger colleagues who are afraid that one defection on Social Security will lead to enactment of Bush’s plan, the political climate for privatizers looks prohibitively stormy.
Big changes in long-established elements of American society require a lot of public opinion lift. Polls consistently show sizeable majorities of Americans, including the young Americans who supposedly vibrate at the idea of getting to deposit payroll taxes in personal accounts, don’t like the idea.
Whether or not one or two or three or four House or Senate Democrats are willing to negotiate on partial privatization, there’s nothing remotely in the air like the pressure on Democrats to compromise on tax cuts this time four years ago, when huge budget surpluses created a strong argument (if not, from the DLC’s point of view, a good argument) for some kind of fiscal relief.
Republicans are far from being united in favor of Bush’s plan, which is losing momentum every day.
And finally, the chattering classes, whatever they think about Social Security, can be expected to consistently heap contempt on the idea that an administration that is deliberately engineering an immediate fiscal crisis is really worried about a Social Security solvency problem that’s decades down the road.
At present it looks to me like it’s a matter of when, not if, Bush has to step back from his SocSec “reform” drive. And given the extreme predictability of how this issue is playing out, you have to ask: what are they really aiming at?
That brings me to a very important article on Bush tax policy by Jonathan Chait that was posted by The New Republic about a week ago. I didn’t read it at the time because I read the headline and thought: “Tax reform–let’s think about that later.” But Chait’s article was a reminder that the overwhelming, preeminent, obsessive, redundant fiscal and economic priority of this administration has been to unburden the wealthy of tax obligations altogether.
Read Chait yourself, but his main point is that the administration is about midway through an effort to eliminate federal taxation of corporate and personal investment income. Creating large new loopholes for sheltering investment income from taxation is part of the GOP strategy, especially insofar as they fail to succeed in eliminating taxation of capital altogether.
You have to wonder if the purpose, if only the fallback purpose, of the Bush SocSec campaign is to suddenly shift the debate from personal retirement savings accounts financed by payroll taxes to personal general savings accounts stuffed with sheltered upper-crust investment income. If there’s any chance of that, Democrats needs to start preparing for it.
I have no doubt the conservative movement’s “starve the beast” ideologists would prefer a direct frontal assault on everything the federal government does other than coinage and national defense. But as they have so abundantly shown in the past, they are more than happy to follow the easier route favored by Republican politicians: to attack government by (a) deliberately engineering budget deficits that eventually force spending cuts, and (b) to shift the federal government’s tax base from income derived from wealth to income derived from labor, so that Democratic constituencies become the first to demand cuts in spending, while Republican constituencies laugh all the way to the bank.

In a postcript to the MLK holiday, Garance Franke-Ruta notes in Tapped today that the King commemoration coincides with a state-recognized Robert E. Lee holiday in several southern states.
There are a couple of other states (including my home state of Georgia) where the Lee birthday of January 19 only coincides with the King commemoration when it happens to fall on a Monday (otherwise, it becomes a movable feast that enables state employees to get the Friday after Thanksgiving off work).
I guess you could say this compromise reflects a decision by some southern legislatures to give equal time to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But it gets really confusing in Virginia, where the King holiday is celebrated in conjunction with a state holiday commemorating not only Robert E. Lee but Stonewall Jackson–hence, Lee-Jackson-King day.
But in some cases, there may be a very slowly creeping commemorative progressivism underway. When the Georgia legislature made Lee’s birthday a (little-known) state holiday, it did so to replace Jefferson Davis’ birthday, which was a source of huge embarrassment back when I was a Georgia state employee. And given Virginia’s deep obsession with the Civil War (which is a bit understandable when you consider the state’s incredibly bloody experience in that war), we should consider ourselves lucky that a day hasn’t been set aside to commemorate Lee’s horse, Traveller.

Probably like a fair number of other people, I decided to spend part of the weekend prior to MLK Day reading Nick Kotz’s new book, Judgment Days, about the complex relationship between King and Lyndon Johnson, who together helped achieve the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act breakthroughs in the mid-1960s.
I’ve just finished the section on the Civil Rights Act, a tale dominated by Johnson’s familiar legislative genius and King’s agonizing balancing act over how to keep pressure on Congress without creating a national backlash. But what really stands out is the common conviction of MLK and LBJ that the drive for civil rights legislation had to be cast in moral, not legal terms–a conviction that both expressed to John F. Kennedy prior to his first big national civil rights speech.

“I know the risks are great, and we might lose the South [in 1964], but those sorts of states may be lost to us anyway,” [Johnson] told Kennedy aide Theodore Sorensen. “The difference is, if your president just goes down there and enforces court decrees, the South will feel it’s yielded to force. But if he goes down there and looks them in the eye and states the moral issue and the Christian issue, these southerners will at least respect his courage….”
Six days after Johnson had given his counsel to the White House, the president received strikingly similar advice from Martin Luther King. A front-page article in the June 10 New York Times quoted King as saying that the president must begin to address race as a moral issue, in terms “we seldom if ever hear” from the White House. The following evening, with little preparation and against the advice of his staff, the president went before television cameras with a sketchily drafted text and committed himself to the main issues of the civil rights struggle. “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue,” he declared. “It is as old as Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.”

The importance of using “values language,” you see, did not just arise in 2004.

More than thirty-six years after the assassination of Martin Luther King, it’s still common to think of his commemorative day as a sort of ethnic holiday–an acknowledgement of the particular suffering and protracted struggle of African-Americans in achieving formal recognition as full citizens.
But even a cursory understanding of King’s ministry and public career shows otherwise. He had every opportunity, and every justification, to limit his message to one of racial grievance, but he didn’t. He could have rested on his laurels once the worst injustices of southern segregation had been overturned, but he wouldn’t. He might have retired from the Christian ministry to become a politician, or retired from civic activism to become a religious leader, but he never did, and never would have even if his life had not been cut so short.
What Martin Luther King did as effectively as anyone in our history was to hold up the civic and religious values of America and demand that his country, its institutions, and his fellow-citizens live up to them. And he held up a mirror and forced us to measure ourselves by what we pretended to believe. For all his eloquence and strategic and tactical leadership, that remains his most important legacy today, for all of us.
He didn’t just play a crucial role in the liberation of “his people.” As a white southerner, I am convinced he helped redeem me, and “my people” as well. And as a Christian, I am sure he helped redeem our faith community from decades of passive, and sometimes active, defiance of the Gospels.
We are at another time in American history when it would be useful to compare our contemporary civic life with our professed ideals, and our religious life to the divine commandments of selflessness, peacefulness, mutual respect and love so many of us claim as the center of our lives. In memory of Martin Luther King, we should pause a moment today to hold up a mirror, and again measure ourselves by what we pretend to believe.

My last installment on the remarkable interview the President gave The Washington Post involves the administration’s decision to become the first in history to refuse to pony up some new federal money to pay for local security costs associated with inaugural festivities. Asked why he was pushing for D.C. to use up some of its homeland security money for the Big Elephant Dance, here’s what Bush said:
“The inauguration is a high-profile event, like a lot of other events that, unfortunately, in the world in which we live, could be an attractive target for terrorists. And by providing security, hopefully that will provide comfort to people who are coming from all around the country to come and stay in the hotels in Washington and to be able to watch the different festivities in Washington and eat the food in Washington. We’ve got people coming from all around the country, and I think it provides them great comfort to know that all levels of government are working closely to make this event as secure as possible.”
Bush, you see, wants to make sure that District officials understand there’s a war on terror going on, and that a $40 million party to celebrate his second term might create an attractive target for terrorists, so what are they complaining about? I mean, what’s that homeland security money for, if not to make sure the Dancing Elephants feel as safe as they do back home, right?
That’s a really reassuring message to the residents of the Washington, DC area whose security will thereby suffer for the other 51 weeks of the year. I guess that’s what we get for failing to understand that our most important function is to serve as a staging area for George W. Bush’s second inaugural, which is what this country is all about.

Another great moment in the Washington Post’s interview with the President occurred when he breezily allowed as how he had no intention of pushing for approval of a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. Why? Because he’s discovered that a lot of Senators think there’s no need for it. “Senators have made it clear that so long as DOMA [the statutory Defense of Marriage Act that said no state had to recognize any other state’s action to legalize gay marriages] is deemed constitutional, nothing will happen,” said Bush. “I’d take their admonition seriously… Until that changes, nothing will happen in the Senate.”
Well jeez, Mr. President, this has been the central argument against your constitutional amendment proposal all along, and explicitly the position of the Kerry-Edwards campaign: that there was no evidence to support your lurid vision of “activist judges” in one state running wild and forcing gay marriage on Red States. That didn’t stop you from promoting it before the election and forcing the issue into the presidential race, right? I mean, had you adopted this “let’s wait and see” attitude on gay marriage a bit earlier, we wouldn’t have all had to endure a campaign marred by an inherently bitter and divisive issue, right?
The cynicism of Bush’s “never mind” statement on gay marriage is hard to mistake. He and his party richly deserve whatever backlash they incur from social conservatives on this one.

Every once in a while, George W. Bush says something so astonishing that you have to hope he doesn’t know what his words actually mean, which is always a possibility. In an interview with the Washington Post that was published today, he basically said the election results meant that nobody in his administration needed to worry about, or apparently, even talk about, the mistakes made in Iraq. Here’s the Post’s paraphrase of that portion of the interview, and the money quote from Bush:
“President Bush said the public’s decision to reelect him was a ratification of his approach toward Iraq and that there was no reason to hold any administration officials accountable for mistakes or misjudgments in prewar planning or managing the violent aftermath.
“‘We had an accountability moment, and that’s called the 2004 elections,’ Bush said in an interview with The Washington Post. ‘The American people listened to different assessments made about what was taking place in Iraq, and they looked at the two candidates, and chose me.'”
An accountability moment. This is the guy, remember, who promised back in 2000 to usher in a “responsibility era” in American politics. And now it’s down to a minute. Takes your breath away.
Aside from the fact that Bush would have lost badly had the entire election been about his Iraq policies, this idea that an electoral win provides some sort of plenary indulgence for every mistake made in the past, present and future is really scary. Unless I missed something, the presidential election was a choice between two candidates, not some sort of referendum on whether to endow the incumbent with retroactive and prospective infallibility. For every president, every moment in office should be an “accountability moment” when it comes to the impact of administration policies and actions, especially when they are fraught with the kind of life and death consequences associated with a war.
We should all raise hell about this Bush statement until such time as he qualifies it or admits his mouth once again got a dangerous distance from his brain.
There’s more of interest in the Post interview, but I’ll save that for another post, because I have a feeling I’ll have to link back to this one in its one-note simplicity early and often.

Categorizing politicians on Social Security “reform” is all the rage in the blogosphere at present, as witnessed by Josh Marshall’s tireless campaign to smoke out Members of Congress and classify them as either in or out of the Democratic “Faint-Hearted Faction” or the Republican “Conscience Caucus.” And then there is my colleague The Moose, and his useful effort to distinguish GOPers on Social Security as “free-lunchers,” “green-eyeshades,” and so forth.
I’d like to spread the practice to another critical issue, the budget deficit, where Republicans hew to a general line of spilling red ink like drunken sailors in a printshop, but offer a number of distinct rationales for their fiscal vice.
There are at least four Fiscal Factions in the Washington GOP.
There are those who pretend the deficit problem doesn’t really exist, or is rapidly getting better, and pursue a dazzling array of deceptions to advance their dubious case.
There are those who admit the deficits, but say they don’t matter.
There are those who buy into Grover Norquist’s “Starve the Beast” theory, which argues that deficits are a Good Thing because they will ultimately (and preferably long after current GOP politicians have retired) force a major shrinkage of the federal government. (Elsewhere I have described the allure of this theory as offering Republicans “the political equivalent of a bottomless crack pipe.”)
And there are those who grumble about fiscal profligacy and perpetually threaten to do something about it, even as they support an administration and a congressional leadership that are daily making matters worse.
Let’s call them the Liars, the Deniers, the Celebrators, and the Procrastinators.
Nominations are open for the membership and leadership of these factions, and for examples of their distinctive rationalizations.