Tag: Punting the Pundits

As President Obama gets closer to making his deal with the Republicans on the budget, the most important thing to keep in mind is that the fiscal cliff is an artificially contrived trap. Were it not for the two Bush wars and the two Bush tax cuts and the House Republican games of brinksmanship with the routine extension of the debt ceiling, there would be no “fiscal cliff.”

Rather, there would be a normal, relatively short-term increase in the deficit resulting from a deep recession and the drop in government revenues that it produces. When the economy recovered, the deficit would return to sustainable levels. In the meantime, these deficits are necessary and useful to maintain public spending as a tonic to the economy.

In addition, there are two entirely extraneous questions that do not belong in this debate — whether Social Security requires any long-term adjustment to assure its solvency, and if so, what kind; and how to restrain the long-term growth in Medicare spending.

Warren E. Buffett: A Minimum Tax for the Wealthy

SUPPOSE that an investor you admire and trust comes to you with an investment idea. “This is a good one,” he says enthusiastically. “I’m in it, and I think you should be, too.”

Would your reply possibly be this? “Well, it all depends on what my tax rate will be on the gain you’re saying we’re going to make. If the taxes are too high, I would rather leave the money in my savings account, earning a quarter of 1 percent.” Only in Grover Norquist’s imagination does such a response exist.

Between 1951 and 1954, when the capital gains rate was 25 percent and marginal rates on dividends reached 91 percent in extreme cases, I sold securities and did pretty well. In the years from 1956 to 1969, the top marginal rate fell modestly, but was still a lofty 70 percent – and the tax rate on capital gains inched up to 27.5 percent. I was managing funds for investors then. Never did anyone mention taxes as a reason to forgo an investment opportunity that I offered.

Leslie Savan: The $250,000 Question: Poll Shows Obama’s Tax Plan Is Widely Misunderstood

For the last four years, President Obama has been pushing his plan to raise tax rates on people’s income over $250,000, but a new poll indicates that most people still don’t understand one of the plan’s most basic concepts. [..]

Here’s the Obama plan in brief. The Bush tax cuts would be extended for households with an annual income under $250,000 (or $200,000 for individuals), but the tax cuts would expire on any income above $250,000. That means, for example, if you make $300,000, your tax rate would rise a few percentage points, to the Clinton-era rates, but only on the portion above $250,000; in this case, only on $50,000. Bottom line: no one-not a billionaire, not someone making $251,000-would have to pay more taxes on that first $250,000.

There’s a widespread misconception, however, and it’s causing a lot of unnecessary fear. It’s the faulty belief that if your income is above $250,000, you’d have to pay the higher rates on all your income, as if you were suddenly being moved entirely into a higher tax bracket. That is wrong.

Benjamin Strauss and Robert Kopp: Rising Seas, Vanishing Coastlines

The oceans have risen and fallen throughout Earth’s history, following the planet’s natural temperature cycles. Twenty thousand years ago, what is now New York City was at the edge of a giant ice sheet, and the sea was roughly 400 feet lower. But as the last ice age thawed, the sea rose to where it is today.

Now we are in a new warming phase, and the oceans are rising again after thousands of years of stability. As scientists who study sea level change and storm surge, we fear that Hurricane Sandy gave only a modest preview of the dangers to come, as we continue to power our global economy by burning fuels that pollute the air with heat-trapping gases.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

Those are the opening words of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and they seem eerily prescient today because once again this country finds itself increasingly divided and pondering the future of this great union and the very ideas of liberty and equality for all.

The gap is growing between liberals and conservatives, the rich and the not rich, intergenerational privilege and new-immigrant power, patriarchy and gender equality, the expanders of liberty and the withholders of it. And that gap, which has geographic contours – the densely populated coastal states versus the less densely populated states of the Rocky Mountains, Mississippi Delta and Great Plains – threatens the very concept of a United States and is pushing conservatives, left quaking after this month’s election, to extremes.

Stephen Rohde: Will President Obama Restore the Rule of Law During His Second Term?

Progressives, civil libertarians, faith leaders and Democrats by and large held their noses during the 2012 presidential campaign regarding the president’s abject failure to restore the Rule of Law and worse yet his dangerous expansion of unilateral executive power, fearing far worse if the right-wing of the Republican Party took over the White House and, in addition to implementing other catastrophic policies, secured the power to solidify a conservative majority on the Supreme Court for generations to come.

But that disaster has been avoided. And now everyone who cares about the future of the Constitution must organize, advocate and demand that President Obama spend a considerable share of his political capital to fulfill his constitutional obligation to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”

For if he is excused by the rest of us from his solemn duty, we should tremble over the prospect that the unrestrained executive powers, born in the Bush administration, to subject citizens and non-citizens alike to ever widening abuses, including unwarranted surveillance, indefinite detention, torture and targeted killings, which have since gone unchecked and indeed have taken root and been cultivated during the Obama administration, will spread and grow even stronger in future administrations, blossoming with poisonous thorns and unbreakable branches, choking off constitutional rights, suffocating dissent and strangling democracy.

Ana Marie Cox: Republicans’ choice: fantasy follies or reality-based relevance

The GOP’s electoral future hangs on whether it prefers the ‘conservative entertainment complex’ to America as it finds it

Republicans’ belief in the feel-good Fox News fantasies of what “real America” wanted and believed helped them lose the election. Would Romney have lost if his base didn’t stubbornly insist that polls were rigged, that almost half the country was looking for a handout (and the other half was angry about it), and that government exists only to coddle or sabotage (not so much the “Nanny state” as Mommie Dearest)? The “conservative entertainment complex”, as columnist David Frum put it, promulgated a view of the American electorate that wasn’t just objectively false, in terms of polled support, but to which they objected. That is, they didn’t just get wrong how much support Romney had; they told a story about American voters that Americans themselves didn’t believe.

You can’t win an election by appealing solely to a class you’ve arbitrarily designated as the “makers” – there are too many of us who don’t believe getting back from your government is “taking”. And when it comes to civil rights, you can’t woo voters with a description of a future they’re not part of. Ultimately, we didn’t want to be the kind of country Mitt Romney and the Republican party told us we were.

Jan Lee: Black Friday: Deciphering the Importance of Buy Nothing Day

For many Americans, Black Friday is a special but important part of the holiday season. A time in which the warm, appreciative glow of a family Thanksgiving is replaced by insatiable deals at midnight store openings; when hot turkey sandwiches, hot coffee and cold pie are savored all the more for the comfort they provide during long shopping lines, brutal crowds and desperate searches for those key items on the Christmas list. It’s a time that comes but once a year for both the consumer and the store owner, who each know that a profitable Black Friday may determine the financial outcome of the rest of the holiday season.

But for a small but growing sector of the population, Black Friday represents a different vision of holiday symbolism: a time to buy nothing.

It’s a time for visiting friends, renewing ties and regaining one’s perspective. It’s a time symbolized by pot-luck dinners, reflective discussions about sustainable living and the beneficial prospects of investing in a sharing economy.

Progressives need to pressure Obama to stick up for workers as promised.

President Barack Obama’s re-election is a huge relief-we dodged the Romney/Ryan bullet.

However, that’s not the same as winning a better future. If Obama’s first term is a prologue to the second, we should not expect to see much progress in strengthening the rights or bargaining ability of workers. Therefore, in Obama’s second term, we need to be:

• Smarter about the policies we advocate.

• Selective about the candidates we endorse.

• More disciplined about building a strong social movement.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: The Greatest Generation, Redux

For nearly a decade I have had the privilege of teaching veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, though they have taught me more.

Most of them were Army captains and majors who had done three or four tours of duty. And here’s the most remarkable thing: Not one of these men and women complained about what we asked of them.

They have, however, occasionally objected to the shameful fact that after the first few years of hostilities, these became largely invisible conflicts. In the final stages of the Iraq War and for a long time now in Afghanistan, there has been something close to media silence even as our fellow Americans continue to fight and die.

Michelle Chen: Immigrant Supply-Chain Labor Struggles Galvanize Walmart Activism

On Black Friday, as Walmart workers across the country stand up against the retail giant’s labor regime, they’ll be in part standing on the shoulders of smaller uprisings that have popped up in low-wage workplaces. Alongside the disgruntled store employees, various subcontracted warehouse workers have helped lead the wave of protests.

The interconnected campaigns reveal that what makes Wal-Mart so powerful–its hegemonic size and market domination–is also what makes it a solid target for an increasingly militant solidarity movement of precarious workers across the supply chain.

Joe Conason: Change? Learn? Compromise? Grow? Not These Republicans

Hearing so much chatter about “change” in the Republican Party, the innocent voter might believe that the Republicans had learned important lessons from their stinging electoral defeat. On closer examination, however, the likelihood of real change appears nil because the party’s leaders and thinkers can cite so many excuses to remain utterly the same.

At the Republican Governors Association conference last week, for instance, the favored explanation for the voting public’s emphatic rejection of Mitt Romney had nothing to do with issues or ideology, but only with more effective Democratic Party organizing and communicating. According to Wade Goodwyn, the National Public Radio reporter who covered the GOP governors’ meeting, their post-election mood was not one of shock, but complacency.

Thanksgiving used to be the signal for the start of holiday shopping, but that was long ago and, of course, now the signal is Arbor Day. But Thanksgiving still retains an important role as the real end to the election season. This is it. No more talking about what happened in Ohio. Time to move forward. And, as a public service, I am willing to take questions.

What about the fiscal cliff? How can anybody be happy when we’re falling off the fiscal cliff? We’re all going to die!!!!

Just stop that. Do you know where the members of Congress are now? Home having dinner with their families. Do you think they’re refusing to eat anything because they’re worried about the Bush tax cuts? No. Do you think they’re sitting in the basement muttering about sequestration? No. Get with the program. No talking about the fiscal cliff during Thanksgiving. [..]

Ralph Nader: Getting Active on Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is a time for family, food, and celebration. But it’s no secret that the holidays are also a source of stress for many people — there’s the planning, the shopping, and, of course, all the food preparation. Perhaps too many people, against their own better judgment, plop down on the couch to watch the football games while overindulging in Thanksgiving delicacies. Maybe this Thanksgiving consider starting a new family tradition, one of activity and engagement. [..]

There’s no easy answer to the issue of getting more Americans moving again, but consider this suggestion — this Thanksgiving, instead of sitting around the television, try stepping outside and engaging in some friendly competition. Consider a return to tradition, especially during the holiday season, to help build and foster relationships amongst family members and encourage interaction amongst neighbors. Whether it’s a game of touch football or merely shooting some hoops in front of the garage or playing catch, a little exercise with friends and family can go a long way toward a healthier life.

Bill Maher: Won Direction

New Rule: Now that he’s been reelected, President Obama must get back at all those right wing hacks who tried to paint him as an angry black man pushing a liberal agenda by becoming an angry black man who’s pushing a liberal agenda.

Now, I have been mostly holding my tongue about the president this past season, because I didn’t want to muddy the waters in a country where you only get two choices, but Mr. President, there are two ways to look at your 51 to 48 percent victory: One is, we love you. The other is, we like you three percent better than Mitt Romney. And by the way, let us never speak that name again… Mitt… let it be a dark and buried memory of a close call with a creature equal parts pure evil and excellent posture, like getting dry humped in a crowded subway by Roger Moore.

I like this president. In all those secret strategy meetings we had, with me and him and George Soros and The New Black Panthers, I found him to be very agreeable, Allah be praised. But it’s now the job of progressives to hold his feet to the fire for causes important to us. If not now, when?

Frances Moore Lappé: This Holiday, Give Thanks and Get Real (About Our Food!)

Fall is about food. Approaching Thanksgiving, my favorite holiday, copious food-rich words are written before we all sit down with loved ones to celebrate food abundance. But in this fall food season, what do we most need to know about food for all seasons?

It is this: Our exceedingly bright species has ended up creating a “food” system so inefficient that much of it doesn’t really produce food at all!

Sound extreme? Here’s what I mean: First, there’s no inherent connection between what we grow on most of the world’s farmland and what human bodies need to thrive.

This year’s UN Population Fund’s annual report reiterates the long-accepted fact that access to contraception is a basic human right, making women’s rights and women’s health at the center of development. The document reflects a growing worldwide understanding that, as bell hooks titled her famous book, feminism is for everybody. When women can control their birth spacing and family size, they and their families have more economic opportunities and can better provide for the children they do have. No duh, right?

Well, unfortunately, the anti-choice movement in the United States presents the biggest obstacle for getting our country to embrace this common sense understanding of the value of contraception. Yes, they are coming for your birth control.  

Heather Mallick: Fiscal Cliff or Austerity Bomb, Time for Obama to Show Courage

The “fiscal cliff” allegedly approaches, as if the U.S.A. spends its days and nights in a Road Runner cartoon. Tax cuts expire but automatic spending cuts kick in, and that just might resend America into recession.

But a better name for it would be the “austerity bomb,” as economist Paul Krugman has written. Americans would be blowing themselves up with a weapon of their own making. Stupidity is a weapon. How ironic it would be if sheer foolishness and the “selfishism” cult did the damage.

Why am I even writing “Americans”? It’s Republicans vs. Democrats and it’s time for the victorious Democrats to start actual governing instead of catering and pandering to the countrified primitives that the Republican party has become.

It’s time for President Barack Obama to take the stand he should have taken in his first term: no more bowing to Tea Party Republicans eager to hammer the economy into the ground to back a disgraced ideology, that taxation is bad, government is emasculating and its spending toxic.

Michelle Chen: Coal Communities at the Pivot of Dirty Industries and Clean Energy

To environmentalists, King Coal is headed for ruin, and the country’s old, dirty coal-powered plants symbolize the industry’s last dying gasps. But in an uncertain economy, coal is the only thing many working-class communities can cling to for stability.

That’s why when environmentalist tout the vision of a renewable energy future–lush with solar panels and wind turbines–regions that have long depended on the coal economy see only a dark cloud on the horizon. A new report from the environmental group Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), which makes a convincing economic and ecological case for phasing out an outmoded component of the coal industry, is unlikely to get a warm reception from them, either.

Tamara Draut: Subprime Students: How Wall Street Profits from the College Loan Mess

Five years after Wall Street crashed the economy by irresponsibly securitizing and peddling mortgage debt, the financial industry is coming under growing scrutiny for its shady involvement in student loan debt.

For a host of reasons, including a major decline in public dollars for higher education, going to college today means borrowing-and all that borrowing has resulted in a growing and heavy hand for Wall Street in the lending, packaging, buying, servicing and collection of student loans. Now, with $1 trillion of student loans currently outstanding, it’s becoming increasingly clear that many of the same problems found in the subprime mortgage market-rapacious and predatory lending practices, sloppy and inefficient customer service and aggressive debt collection practices-are also cropping up in the student loan industrial complex.

This similarity is especially striking in the market for private student loans-which currently make up $150 billion of the $1 trillion of existing student loans.

Jennifer Hough; Senseless Death of Irish Woman Exposes Grim Reality for Women

For three days, Savita Halappanavar suffered agonizing pain, asking repeatedly that a 17-week-old dying fetus be removed from her body.

For three days she lay in a hospital bed getting sicker and sicker, until eventually she succumbed to septicemia.

While it sounds like a scene from the Dark Ages, this is what happened to Savita, a 31-year-old Indian immigrant living in Ireland, last month.

Everyone wants to know how could such a thing happen in a modern 21st-century nation. In a society much like Canada’s, with the same values, language, health and social structures.

If you voted this election, whether for Barack Obama, Jill Stein or even Mitt Romney, you did not vote for austerity. But that’s of little consequence to Obama and the Republicans. The two parties are currently drafting measures that will undermine Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare as the economy approaches the “fiscal cliff” at the end of this year when more than $600 billion in tax increases and spending cuts will kick in absent a new budget deal. [..]

Trusting a Democratic president with protecting the general welfare is ill advised when the last one gave us NAFTA, welfare “reform” and the repeal of Glass-Steagall. Not only has Obama been gunning for retirement programs since 2008 (I’ll explain), he’s so hell bent on reducing deficits that he’s willing to damage the economy. The Congressional Budget Office estimates (pdf) if the economy plunges over the cliff, recession will hit in 2013. Interestingly, the CBO calculates that if all the tax cuts are left in place and no spending cuts are enacted the economy will grow by 4.4 percent next year and add 2.3 million full-time equivalent jobs. This would be the highest rate of growth since the late 1990s.

Wendell Potter: The Usual Suspects Who Will Benefit From Gutting Obamacare Now Want You to Worry About ‘Disruption’

Disruption.

Get ready to hear that word many times in the coming weeks, especially if you hang out inside the Washington beltway.

“Disruption” will be the new buzzword in an upcoming advertising campaign aimed at scaring us. The campaign is selling the idea that millions of Americans will face higher premiums and possibly be forced into health plans with skimpier benefits — i.e., disrupted — if Congress doesn’t repeal a provision of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that raises money to pay for expanding coverage for the uninsured.

The greed of the health insurance industry knows no bounds. Insurance companies will get billions of dollars in new revenue every year as a result of the health act’s requirement that, starting in 2014, we will have to buy coverage from private insurers if we’re not eligible for Medicare or Medicaid.

Peter Diamond: Down With Supercommittees

Instead of wide-ranging, politically motivated panels, we need narrowly targeted commissions, without sitting members of Congress, modeled on the successful Base Closure and Realignment Commissions of recent decades.

Compare the successes of five consecutive base-closing commissions, which were charged with shuttering or shrinking military facilities, and the failures of both the Simpson-Bowles Commission and the deficit “supercommittee.”

In all of these cases, Congress recognized the difficulty in addressing an important issue, and committed itself to a no-amendments, up-or-down action on a possible commission report.

Each report from the base-closing commissions resulted in closures. In contrast, the Simpson-Bowles report did not receive enough votes to prompt Congressional action, and the supercommittee did not even finish a report.

John Nichols: Vulture Capitalism Ate Your Twinkies

“Wall Street investors first came onto the scene with Hostess about a decade ago, purchasing the company and then loading it with debt. All the while, its executives talked of investments in new equipment, new research and new delivery trucks, but those improvements never materialized,” explains AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka.

“Instead, the executives planned to give themselves bonuses and demanded pay cuts and benefit cuts from the workers, who haven’t had a raise in eight years,” said the AFL-CIO head. “In 2011, Hostess earned profits of more than $2.5 billion but ended the year with a loss of $341 million as it struggled to pay the interest on $1 billion in debt. This year, the company sought bankruptcy protection, the second time in eight years. Still, the CEO who brought on the latest bankruptcy got a raise while Hostess demanded that its workers accept a 30 percent pay and benefits cut.”

When BCTGM workers struck Hostess, they did not do so casually.

They were challenging Bain-style abuses by a private-equity group – Ripplewood Holdings – that had proven its incompetence and yet continued to demand more money from the workers.

Missing the January deadline simply means those who want to preserve Bush tax cuts for the super-rich lose political leverage

Washington elites have spent much of the last three decades getting hysterical about budget deficits, but they are outdoing themselves in the current budget stand-off which they labeled as the “fiscal cliff”. Their story is that scheduled increases in taxes at the end of 2012, coupled with mandated cuts in spending, will send the economy tumbling into recession if Congress doesn’t take action before the end of the year.

The horror story associated with this 1 January deadline depends on fundamentally misrepresenting reality. There are projections from the Congressional Budget Office and other independent forecasters that show the combination of tax increases and spending cuts would chop more than 3.5 percentage points off GDP growth. This hit would mean a contracting economy and push the unemployment rate back over 10%.

However, the part that is generally downplayed in this genuine horror story, or left out altogether, is that the projection of a recession is not based on missing the 1 January deadline. The projection assumes that the higher tax rates and lower spending levels are left in place throughout the year – a scenario that almost no one considers plausible.

Robert Reich: Why We Should Stop Obsessing About the Federal Budget Deficit

I wish President Obama and the Democrats would explain to the nation that the federal budget deficit isn’t the nation’s major economic problem and deficit reduction shouldn’t be our major goal. Our problem is lack of good jobs and sufficient growth, and our goal must be to revive both.

Deficit reduction leads us in the opposite direction — away from jobs and growth. The reason the “fiscal cliff” is dangerous (and, yes, I know — it’s not really a “cliff” but more like a hill) is because it’s too much deficit reduction, too quickly. It would suck too much demand out of the economy.

Robert Kuttner: Ben Bernanke for Treasury Secretary

Why Bernanke to succeed Tim Geithner? Several reasons.

First, he is probably the most influential and credible person in official Washington who is not part of the echo chamber on deficit reduction. By his speeches and actions, Bernanke has made it clear that he considers the most serious threat to the economy to be a continued deflationary drag, and not worries about the public debt.

Bernanke’s Fed has poured money into the economy by buying bonds by the trillions of dollars. He’s driven interest rates about as low as they can go using this method, and he has repeatedly said that it’s not enough. He’s open to even more drastic measures, such as selective purchases of certain kinds of bonds to get bank lending and mortgage refinancing moving at the scale necessary.

In his “fiscal cliff” speech of last August 31, Bernanke pointedly refused to join the austerity posse. On the contrary, he all but asked Congress to use fiscal policy to stimulate the economy in the short run.

Bob Herbert: Why Walmart and Big Retailers Should Pay Their Workers More

Henry Ford famously decided in 1914 to pay many of his workers the then incredible sum of five dollars a day, which was substantially higher than the prevailing wage at the time.

While that wasn’t done specifically to enable Ford’s workers to buy his cars (his primary objective was to reduce employee turnover), it did at times have that effect. More important, Ford’s innovation, which shocked the industrialists of that era, helped kickstart America’s high-wage, high-consumption economy and the creation of its vast middle class.

Nearly a century later, in the midst of a weak economy and rising poverty, my colleagues at Demos, a New York-based think tank, have made a compelling case that Ford’s revolutionary approach to industrial wages should now be applied to America’s retail sector.

What’s next? Amid all the munchie-themed jokes from reporters, political elites and late-night comedians, this remains the overarching question after Coloradans voted overwhelmingly to legalize, regulate and tax marijuana in the same way alcohol is already legalized, regulated and taxed. Since those anti-Drug-War principles are now enshrined in Colorado’s constitution, only the feds can stop this Rocky Mountain state-if they so choose. But will they? And should they even be able to?

The answer to the former is maybe. Barack Obama campaigned for president pledging to respect state marijuana laws and his Justice Department in 2009 issued a memo reiterating that promise. But by 2011, the same Justice Department countermanded that directive and authorized a federal crackdown. Now, with the results of the 2012 election, Colorado’s Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper has been forced into the awkward position of fighting off the feds in defense of a state constitutional amendment he tried to defeat.

Robert Sheer: The Land of Milk and Honey Once More

What’s the matter with California? It is a question once asked about Kansas when that state came to be viewed as a harbinger of a more conservative America. But now the trend is quite opposite, the right-wing is in retreat and the Golden State is the progressive bellwether.

How is it that the state that incubated the presidencies of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan is now so deep blue Democrat that Mitt Romney hardly bothered to campaign there? Why did voters, including huge majorities in the state’s two wealthiest counties, approve a tax on high-income earners to increase funding for public education?

Joe Nocera: Hacking General Petraeus

This is not going to end well for the F.B.I.

We are now entering the second phase of the David Petraeus scandal. The first phase began on Nov. 9 when Petraeus revealed that he had had an affair and resigned as C.I.A. director. For the next week, the press scrambled to keep abreast of every head-spinning new plot twist. General Petraeus slept with whom? Jill Kelley did what? Petraeus’s biographer/mistress titled her book what? Phase 1 of any big national scandal ends when the New York tabloids stop writing their laugh-out-loud cover headlines (“Cloak and Shag Her” screamed The New York Post) and relegate the story to the inside pages. That happened on Friday.

In Phase 2, people begin to grapple with the scandal’s larger meaning, assuming, of course, that it has some larger meaning.  [..]

But the Petraeus scandal could well end up teaching some very different lessons. If the most admired military man in a generation can have his e-mail hacked by F.B.I. agents, then none of us are safe from the post-9/11 surveillance machine. And if an affair is all it takes to force such a man from office, then we truly have lost all sense of proportion.

Ralph Nader: Tax What They Burn Before Tax What We Earn…

As America faces the so-called “fiscal cliff,” let’s turn our attention to our country’s systemic tax problem. To paint a picture, imagine our country as a mine car with its brake lines severed, barreling toward an uncertain fate. In this metaphor, the brake lines are represented by the U.S. tax code — all 7,500 pages of it — long the victim of severe tampering and perforating by corporate lobbyists and tax attorneys and unattended to by inadequate IRS enforcement. What is troubling is that these metaphorical brakes have been damaged for years, and only now, with an economy fitfully recovering from recession and the livelihoods of millions of Americans at stake, are the dangers ahead becoming headlines. [..]

Former IRS commissioner Sheldon Cohen once wrote: “If you know the position a person takes on taxes, you can tell their whole philosophy. The tax code embodies all the essence of life: greed, politics, power, goodness, charity.” With that sentiment in mind, any significant push toward fundamental tax reform has to start by chipping away at the corporatized, commercial Congress which uses tax breaks, deferrals, credits and exemptions as inventory to sell for campaign cash in increasingly costly campaigns. Until that happens, the metaphorical “brake lines” will remain faulty as America speeds toward increasingly more ominous fiscal cliffs.