The sound you're hearing is the noise of a blast fax careering around the right wing echo chamber: This is very clever--and very silly. The deficit last year was $1.3 trillion. With the Buffett rule in place, it would have been $1.295 trillion. Last year the tax credit for energy-efficient improvements to homes cost almost as much as the Buffett rule will raise annually ($4.7 billion on average). The President's proposal for keeping a low interest rate on some college loans, at $6 billion next year, costs more. The Buffett rule is government by catchphrase.
In the same vein, the President recently vowed to hunt down and stop energy "speculators," lest they "reap millions while millions of American families get the short end of the stick." Good luck with that. No one seriously believes--surely not even Obama--that speculation is responsible for this year's rise in oil prices, now beginning to recede. The President is sending the Commodity Futures Trading Commission on a make-believe mission after nonexistent villains because it sounds good. On the election's most central issue, the economy, Obama is stuck in a minor key. He offers no major reforms in taxes or entitlements, no new stimulus, no departures whatsoever. He is obsessed with the marginalia of green energy, which is less than 10% of the energy sector and is prone to a bust unless the subsidies keep on rolling. He is content to watch his party's majority in the Senate desperately maneuver to avoid the pain of even voting on a budget. Evasion is the order of the day.
What the Obama campaign lacks in substantive heft it will try to make up in relish for tearing apart Romney. He will be portrayed as out of touch, strange, secretive and--occasionally by Obama allies--Mormon. In this highly personal demolition, Romney has already been made out as hostile to women and cruel to dogs. Someday political scientists will marvel that a top adviser to the President of the United States once joined a drumbeat over an opponent's transporting his dog in a kennel on the roof of his car ... in the 1980s.
Compare and contrast:
“You know, we had the Buffett Rule,” he said. “You know, it went on for months. Even the president admitted it was a gimmick. And then we have the Rose Garden ceremony talking about manipulation in the oil markets, without one shred of evidence. And he has an entire administration to go after speculation or manipulation in the oil markets. And then they picked this student loan fight where there is no fight.”
It's almost like they have the same hands up their asses.
But back to Lowry's latest dump on the floor. Apart from the complete lack of coherent syntax (his grammar is almost human, however) and lack of illustrative metaphor, his logic falls apart when you consider those silly things: "facts."
Or the Buffett Rule, which isn't about the amount of money it raising in the face of $45 trillion in budget deficits over the next decade (presuming limited growth, etc.). It's about two things: an acknowledgement by those who have that they've been ungrateful bastards and an acknowledgement that this is just the tip of the iceberg, that the real debate starts later this year when the Bush tax cuts are set to expire.
But hey, GOP! You just keep plucking that bald chicken, a'ight?
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