Monthly Archives: April 2011

Face it, anything that can accurately be labeled “[gender] culture” is probably stupid

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I both agree and disagree with Amanda Hess when she takes issue with the media backlash against all the attention placed on the Royal Wedding. I agree with her argument that it’s getting degraded largely because it’s perceived as feminine. But I disagree that the public obsession with the Royal Wedding is something to be defended. In its defense, she says that “the royal wedding is this year’s Superbowl of girl culture.”

I can agree with that much. The Superbowl is a pointless, idiotic ritual focusing on people with way more money than they deserve that gets way more media attention than it deserves. Oh hey, so is the Royal Wedding. So it’s a good analogy.

Lavish wedding ceremonies, the institution of marriage itself, the adulation of monarchy, the popular mythology surrounding princesses – these are not things to be upheld or defended. Sure, some women celebrate these things. That doesn’t make them feminist. That’s something that some feminists refer to as “participating in their own oppression.”

But Hess’ response to this Washington Post column is otherwise pretty spot-on. Ah, WaPo. Even when you try to be feminist you still manage to be wrong. The columnist, Petula Dvorak, also has a problem with the Royal Wedding craze. But her basic argument is that girls like dumb things, so they should act like boys instead. This is the telling paragraph:

The average age of the American bride is about 26 today, though it’s probably higher in this area. Here, 26-year-olds are still joining kickball leagues while getting their advanced degrees in international affairs. They are more into debating U.S.-China policy and less into picking out a China pattern.

So let’s get this straight. Kickball is okay for intelligent people to do (presumably because it’s coded masculine in our culture). But picking out China patterns is not okay for intelligent people to do (presumably because it’s coded feminine). I’m afraid I just don’t see it.

As Hess points out, “boy culture” isn’t exactly filled with intellectual activities. Kickball involves kicking a ball. It’s not a thought-intensive process. But Dvorak seems to just unconsciously assume it’s a more intelligent activity because it’s a guy thing. She’s wrong about that.

But I disagree with Hess in her attempt to defend “girl culture.” Let’s face it, girl culture is stupid. It should be torn down. That being said, boy culture is also stupid, in equal measure. And it should also be torn down. Just as some feminists in the past wanted to celebrate supposedly “feminine” qualities, Hess wants to celebrate supposedly “feminine” activities. Many feminists today feel that it would be far more beneficial to simply tear down the distinctions between “masculine” and “feminine.” I’m one of them.

So diss the Royal Wedding. But don’t do it because it’s the cool thing to do. Do it because marriage, lavish marriage rituals, and monarchy are all institutions that need to be thrown out the window.

And Jesus said unto them, “Fuck the poor.”

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Hipster JesusShocking news:

The results from a recent poll published by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life (http://www.pewforum.org/Politics-and-Elections/Tea-Party-and-Religion.aspx) reveal what social scientists have known for a long time: White Evangelical Christians are the group least likely to support politicians or policies that reflect the actual teachings of Jesus.

Now just so we’re clear, when I said “shocking,” I meant the opposite. Let Bender explain.

It is perhaps one of the strangest, most dumb-founding ironies in contemporary American culture. Evangelical Christians, who most fiercely proclaim to have a personal relationship with Christ, who most confidently declare their belief that the Bible is the inerrant word of God, who go to church on a regular basis, pray daily, listen to Christian music, and place God and His Only Begotten Son at the center of their lives, are simultaneously the very people most likely to reject his teachings and despise his radical message.

I suppose you could make a case for strange, but it’s not actually all that dumbfounding. Christians in America are a massively privileged group, and they’re interested in defending that privilege. People who involve themselves in defending their own privilege are necessarily going to be conservative.

As many people who see Christianity from the outside (and even a few really smart people who see it from the inside) can tell, Christianity for most Christians isn’t actually a guide to how to live your life. It’s just an identity that separates them from the Others. This became true pretty much the moment Christianity went from being a religion of the oppressed to a religion of the privileged elite.

It’s funny to see contemporary American Christians compare the persecution they perceive themselves to be suffering to the feeding of Christians to the lions in pre-Catholic Rome. American Christians are impossibly far removed from those martyrs, and not just in time, but in circumstance and the level of oppression they experience (which, for a Christian in America, is virtually none, at least as far as religious oppression goes). Once Christianity became the privileged class, it started aggressively defending its privilege (see: the entire history of the Catholic Church, the entire history of American Protestantism, etc.). And that means fundamentally abandoning everything Jesus taught, because Jesus wasn’t interested in defending the privileged. So somehow the Church that hails as its savior a man who said, “The meek shall inherit the Earth” ended up building enormous cathedrals with gilded domes.

I grew up in a Protestant church in the US. I’ve heard the phrase, “I’m trying to be more like Christ every day” more times than I’ve taken a dump. And the churches where I heard those words are the churches that favor the oppression of women and non-cisgendered people, the disenfranchisement of minorities and the poor. The Christ that they claim to want to emulate offered salvation to people that these churchgoers would never want to speak to. Because if just anyone can have salvation, what’s the fun in it anymore? It’s way more self-satisfying to be in an exclusive club.

Obama still a little too black for Trump’s taste

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Donald Trump responded yesterday to the release of Obama’s birth certificate. Baratunde has the video and a reaction. Trump essentially said that the birth certificate still needs to be verified for authenticity. And after that we’ll need to make sure that Obama wasn’t born in Kenya and then transported by wormhole to the maternity ward of the hospital in Honolulu. Birthers are never going to fundamentally accept Obama’s right to be president, because it’s not actually about what his birth certificate says.

Why didn’t Obama release this back in 2008 when people started asking about it, Trump asks. Well, Trump, that would be because we live in a country where we have the right not to have our citizenship questioned without probable cause. This is a right that you understand intuitively and take for granted when it’s a white person.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand that there are any number of bureaucratic processes in which our citizenship is verified. But anyone who thinks that Obama didn’t go through some of these before setting foot in the Oval Office is being willfully stupid. At the very least I assume he signed a W-9 to get his presidential paychecks.

As Judge Clay D. Land put it when he dismissed one of Orly Taitz’ many lawsuits contesting Obama’s eligibility to hold office:

Thus, Plaintiff’ s counsel, who champions herself as a defender of liberty and freedom, seeks to use the power of the judiciary to compel a citizen, albeit the President of the United States, to “prove his innocence” to “charges” that are based upon conjecture and speculation. Any middle school civics student would readily recognize the irony of abandoning fundamental principles upon which our Country was founded in order to purportedly “protect and preserve” those very principles.

But if you’re not white, according to Trump, Taitz, and the rest of the birthers, you’re automatically suspect. But they’re totally not racist, guys!

Are terrorists so sneaky that they might actually be saving you from other terrorists?

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You may have noticed that the 9/11 victim/survivor/responder hero worship among right-wingers started to die down around 2003. That’s because a lot of those people started expressing politically inconvenient opinions, which as far as the GOP was concerned, was much more important than the fact that they were supposedly heroes.

Presumably that’s why, when Congress finally got around to authorizing compensation for first responders who are facing medical issues resulting from their work at Ground Zero, Republican Congressman Cliff Stearns felt that he needed to do his part to cast doubt on these first responders and their supposed non-terroristiness. Stearns introduced the amendment that resulted in the line that Stewart gets angry about here:

The Great Chinese Menace to Our Economy and Why It’s a Load of Shit

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You’ve probably heard the trite refrain, and the funny thing is you’ve probably heard it from people in the left and right wings alike. China, we are solemnly warned from time to time, holds such a large portion of the US’s debt obligations that they could, at any time they chose, swoop in, demand their money back, and bring the US economy to its knees.

This claim has gained an enormous amount of traction, and in fact I almost always see it stated without challenge. It’s understandable, I suppose – despite conservative claims, neither liberals nor conservatives are big fans of deficit spending. The fundamental budgetary disagreement between them lies in what needs to be cut in order to eliminate the deficit. But before I elaborate on that, let’s return to the initial point of this post: has the US, in fact, borrowed overwhelming amounts of money from China? Do we stand on the precipice of financial ruin, relying on China’s benevolence to remain afloat?

In short, not really. The US government has certainly borrowed an enormous amount of money: current public debt stands at just over $14 trillion. To put that in perspective, you could buy 14 trillion items off the dollar menu at McDonald’s with that amount of money. No, not really. I don’t think they have 14 trillion Jr. Cheeseburgers lying around to just sell you.

What gets mostly ignored in the discussions of the US debt is that the majority of that money (specifically, about $9.7 trillion, or about 70% of our total debt) is borrowed from domestic sources. These primarily take the form of treasury notes, bonds, and securities. However, things like government pensions are also factored into the debt.

So if you can subtract, you already know that about $4.4 trillion is owed to sources outside the United States. Even if China owned all of that, it would probably seem less dire than the doomsayers imply when they make their claims about Chinese ownership of US debt. It would still be pretty dire, though. In reality, China owns just about one quarter of that $4.4 trillion. If you can divide, you know that’s about $1.1 trillion. So basically, China holds less than 10% of the US’s $14.1 trillion public debt. It’s simply not the apocalyptic situation people often make it out to be. Observe this rather crude-looking pie chart:

Pie chart showing US debt held by foreign countries

Source: United States Department of the Treasury. (The data, not the shoddy graph. I made that. You could probably tell.)

Kind of looks like Pac-Man wearing a helmet with a green visor, right? Would such a helmet protect against ghosts? I can’t imagine why else he’d be wearing it. It’s not like he can ride a motorcycle. He doesn’t even have legs.

But don’t just take it from me, take it from someone who actually has a degree in these things, Paul Krugman. (A degree in economics, not Pac-Man. I don’t think even Full Sail offers that one. They should, though.) Last year, he wrote:

Dean Baker gets upset by this line in today’s very useful Keith Bradsher article:

China is the biggest buyer of Treasury bonds at a time when the United States has record budget deficits and needs China to keep buying those bonds to finance American debt.

As I said, this was a very good article about China; the debt line was probably inserted because it’s considered obligatory to say this in any article about US-China relations. As it happens, however, while it’s part of what everyone knows, it’s also completely false.

(This block quote within a block quote is brought to you by the movie Inception.)

Indeed, a statement like “China is the biggest buyer of Treasury bonds” will generally go unchallenged. Like I said at the beginning of this post, it’s become part of conventional wisdom. It just sounds right. But while China is the biggest foreign buyer of Treasury bonds, as I’ve already shown you, the biggest buyers of Treasury bonds overall come, by far, from within the United States.

As Krugman says at the end of the same article:

The US private sector has gone from being a huge net borrower to being a net lender; meanwhile, government borrowing has surged, but not enough to offset the private plunge. As a nation, our dependence on foreign loans is way down; the surging deficit is, in effect, being domestically financed.

This doesn’t make our massive and ever-expanding public debt a good idea, by any means. But this notion of China as some looming threat poised to pull the rug out from under the US economy is not the reason that it’s a bad idea.

For us liberals, I believe it’s particularly important to stop buying into this China nonsense, because it seems designed to direct our attention away from the people we should actually be blaming for our country’s poor budgetary decisions. After all, there’s a group of people within the United States itself who actually do have the power to pull the rug out from under our economy, and indeed they nearly did so a few years ago. And as long as we continue to believe that China is a greater threat to our well-being than the wealthy financiers who have already driven millions into unemployment and poverty, we’re playing right into those financiers’ plans.

Naturally, they would have you believe that our nation is being held hostage by an unwashed horde of poor people, demanding their welfare checks and food stamps and forcing the government to borrow from China just to keep that tap flowing. Yes, believe it or not there are people who think that poor people are a greater cause of the deficit than defense spending.

Defense spending is about to hit $700 billion. Obama’s doing nothing to curb its expansion. Of course, Defense is only the second largest federal agency. The largest is the Department of Health and Human Services, whose budget is over twice that of the Department of Defense. This is a fact that conservatives will latch onto, conflating that Department’s budget with welfare in a manner that’s somewhat disingenuous.

See, about half of the Department of HHS budget goes to Medicare and Social Security – programs that don’t just help poor people, and that are largely uncontroversial outside of the teabaggingest of teabaggers. I’d gladly agree that something should be done to curb rising Medicare costs, but the obvious answer there is preventative medicine rather than just turning off the tap and letting people die in the streets.

Anyway, the other part of the HHS budget, the part that primarily helps lower-income Americans and makes up what we generally think of as “welfare” – the kind of stuff that conservatives are constantly getting pissed about, in other words – is grouped into a budgetary category called “income security.” Food stamps, unemployment benefits, Section 8 programs, things like that.

And here’s a fact that may seem obvious to some of you, but is often unknown to low-information voters and willfully denied by conservatives: At no point in history has the federal government spent more money on income security than on the military. Observe:

Line graph depicting welfare spending and defense spendingSource: White House Office of Management and Budget

So if you’re worried about the budget deficit, do two things: one, see that spike in the red line towards the end? That’s W. Bush and his wars. Cut that back to circa-2000 levels. Two, see that spike in the blue line? That’s all the people who are suddenly on unemployment and other forms of welfare because of the recession. Get them some jobs. Congratulations, you just eliminated literally half of the budget deficit. Reverse Regan’s enormous upper-class tax cuts and the deficit is gone. Yay, balanced budget. Good job. We really pulled together on that.

The reason conservatives want you to believe that welfare is some unendurable drain on the federal government is that they absolutely don’t want to cut back on defense spending, and they’re not interested in doing constructive things like reducing unemployment. They’d rather take from the poor and give to the rich in the form of military-industrial handouts and upper-class tax cuts. And that’s why you, unless you’re a billionaire yourself, should be a lot more worried about them than China.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/15/chinas-water-pistol/

Things That Go Bump in the Right: Conservative heroes and the things they don’t mention about them

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Ayn RandAyn Rand

Why Conservatives Love Her:

Provides rich dudes with a moral justification for stomping all over the poor. Lets narcissistic toads feel like Supermen while sitting on their ass. Or in the words of Rep. Ryan, “Rand makes the best case for the morality of democratic capitalism.”

What Conservatives Fail to Mention:

She idolized a brutal child murderer, not in spite of his crimes, but because of them. She regarded the serial killer William Hickman as an expression of her idea of the Nietzschean Superman – his inability to comprehend or concern himself with the feelings of other people was, in Rand’s view, a morally superior mindset. As such she was adamantly opposed to charity and social entitlement programs. And despite Ryan’s claim quoted above, she was not a fan of democracy: “Democracy, in short, is a form of collectivism, which denies individual rights: the majority can do whatever it wants with no restrictions. In principle, the democratic government is all-powerful. Democracy is a totalitarian manifestation; it is not a form of freedom.”

So, to summarize: Raping a child, murdering her, and returning her dismembered body to her father is morally superior to giving to charity.

Ronald ReaganRonald Reagan

Why Conservatives Love Him:

Lowered the top income tax rate from 50% to 28%. Raised the bottom income tax rate from 11% to 15%. Increased defense spending by 35%. Starred in the 1951 comedy Bedtime for Bonzo.

What Conservatives Fail to Mention:

It’s amusing that conservatives often try to give Reagan credit for resolving the Iran hostage crisis of 1979-81, despite the fact that the hostages were released literally minutes after Reagan’s inauguration. The timing certainly suggests that Iran released the hostages when they did deliberately to embarrass Carter. But it certainly doesn’t suggest that Reagan had time travel abilities. Of course, five years later he got a chance to show how he would respond to an Iranian hostage crisis. And he responded by committing treason and selling arms to an enemy state.

Reagan is also hailed by today’s conservatives as a champion of fiscal responsibility; indeed, he portrayed himself this way. Yet somehow he left the federal government with $2 trillion more debt than he’d begun with. (Current national debt is a bit over $14 trillion, meaning that Reagan is responsible for a healthy 14% of our current debt crisis.) Turns out cutting taxes and raising defense spending doesn’t lead to a balanced budget. Go figure.

There’s a lot that could be said about Reagan, but I’ll conclude with one more. Reagan promised to reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil. Instead, he removed price controls on oil, leading to record low gas prices throughout the 80s and 90s. Perversely, the spike in gas consumption this caused among  American citizens ended up massively increasing our dependence on foreign oil. A tariff on oil imports, or a higher direct tax on gasoline, may have remedied this, but Reagan was determined to only increase taxes for poor people, so he refused.

Joseph McCarthyJoseph McCarthy

Why Conservatives Love Him:

McCarthy’s legacy is well-known, and public opinion of him isn’t exactly stellar, but many conservatives come to his defense nonetheless. “But there really were Soviet spies infiltrating America!” they declare. Well duh. Countries send spies to infiltrate other countries as a matter of course. The Soviets weren’t the first people to think of it. That fact doesn’t override our First Amendment freedoms of speech and assembly.

What Conservatives Fail to Mention:

Well, like I said, there’s not a lot about McCarthy that the right wing feels the need to hide. They’re either defending him and holding him up as a defender of American values, or they’re incoherently claiming that he was a liberal. (Conservative pundits appear to have forgotten what “liberal” actually means, so they seem to simply assume that it means “whatever I don’t like.”) What both groups are failing to mention is that McCarthy’s scaremongering is a conservative tactic that’s still in play today, taking a very similar form with different particulars. Whether it’s black people, Communists, or Arabs, conservatives are always going to find some group to try to make people afraid of, in an attempt to deflect their attention from the people they should actually be afraid of (by and large, the wealthy).

Adam SmithAdam Smith

Why Conservatives Love Him:

Wrote The Wealth of Nations, which is like the Bible, in that most conservatives haven’t read it but agree dogmatically with what they think it says. (Supposedly) championed laissez-faire economics. Has an incredibly generic white guy name, which is very comforting to conservatives.

What Conservatives Fail to Mention:

Just for a change of pace, I decided to profile a conservative hero who wasn’t a giant asshole. Funny enough, there’s another thing he wasn’t: conservative. Well, that would be an anachronism anyway. But if Adam Smith showed up in 21st century America and somehow gained citizenship, I assure you he would not be voting Republican.

See, Adam Smith did describe the process by which individual self-interest promotes the public good. And he used the term “invisible hand” at one point to illustrate it. That’s why conservatives love him, and that’s where they generally stop reading. But Smith wasn’t promoting self-interest as a moral good in itself. We’ve seen where that leads (namely, it leads to praising a man for raping a little girl and then dismembering her). He did observe, however, that it’s self-interest that leads people to create goods or services and provide them for sale, and self-interest that leads customers to purchase them. Or, in his words, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”

And thus did capitalism spring fully grown from Zeus’ forehead. Except not really, at least not as we understand capitalism today. See, the scenario he describes above, where everybody is happily producing goods and services for sale, and paying everybody for their goods and services, and no government is involved, only works in the absence of market distortions. Yes, I see you conservatives still nodding along, but not so fast. Government isn’t the only possible market distortion. Smith also said that the public good can be harmed if the market is distorted by… wait for it… businesses. Businesses are going to happen, of course, so Smith favored government regulation of the market to protect the public good against businessmen. What a goddamn socialist, right?

In fact, he described businessmen as “an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.”

He was also a fan not only of taxation, but of progressive taxation. In fact, he had a lot of good things to say about it. Such as this: “Every tax, however, is, to the person who pays it, a badge, not of slavery, but of liberty.” And this: “The rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.”

Oh, and he said this: “Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.”

Wow, I must have mistakenly quoted Karl Marx! No, false alarm. It’s Adam Smith. Stop co-opting him, libertarians and free-market conservatives. He wouldn’t like you.

Phyllis Schlafly

The Overton Window: It’s not just a terrible Glenn Beck novel

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Although it bears repeating that this is a really, really terrible novel.

I’m sure most of you know what the Overton window is, but I feel like writing about it, so those of you who don’t know what it is will learn something, and for the rest, it’s always worth pausing to consider where the window is in our current public discourse. First, let’s let Glenn Beck tell us what the Overton window is not:

There is a powerful technique called the Overton Window that can shape our lives, our laws and our future. It works by manipulating public perception so that ideas previously thought of as radical begin to seem acceptable over time. Move the Window and you change the debate. Change the debate and you change the country. (publisher’s description, courtesy of Beck’s site)

I don’t really feel like jumping into the “stupid or dishonest?” debate, so for the sake of argument, let’s just assume he’s stupid. (For the record, the answer is both, so my assumption works out fine.) The Overton window is not a technique, Glenn. It’s simply an observation of where the public perception lies at the moment. If you really believe the above paragraph, you probably also believe that the Oxford English Dictionary is a factory that produces brand new words.

Let me start at a more fundamental level for those who don’t know about the Overton window. It’s basically a spectrum that describes the range of political opinions considered mainstream in a given society (for our purposes, this article will discuss the Overton window in the context of US politics). The essence of the Overton window is that it’s mobile, and it sits atop a larger spectrum of political opinions. Those lying outside the window are considered radical by mainstream society. Let’s say this is the spectrum of possible political opinion:

The red brackets represent a possible Overton window, in an alternate version of the US where our society is politically centrist. In a genuinely centrist society, laissez-faire economics would be seen as a distinctly right-wing point of view, and socialized medicine, while definitely left-wing, would not be regularly compared to the Nazis. Meanwhile, things like birtherism would be well outside the public focus. Sadly, QUILTBAG rights would probably still be outside the public discourse.

Now, the Overton window defines where the relative center of political discourse lies. Over time it can be nudged left or right as certain ideas are normalized. (This does not, as the synopsis of Beck’s dumbass book claims, make it a “technique.” There are techniques politicians and ideologues can and do employ to affect public discourse, but the movement of the Overton window is the result of those techniques.)

Here, in my judgment, is where the Overton window lies in America’s current political atmosphere:

What this means is that people have a skewed notion of what exactly is “centrist.” I put laissez-faire economics dead center because our corporate media, and the politicians who fellate them, have managed to convince people that it’s the natural state of affairs. Meanwhile, people who advocate socialized medicine are horrible commies who hate America!

The Overton window in this country has been, in most respects, moving rightward since World War II, with only occasional exceptions. The idea that our society has been liberalizing is largely a myth, resulting from an expanding definition of what constitutes “liberal” as once-normal ideas (eg, workers’ rights) get pushed out of the mainstream. See, Obama may sit on the left side of that red bracket up there, but he’s still to the right of the actual center of the spectrum.

Thinks like gay rights have been marching ever so slowly forward, admittedly. (The reason I put QUILTBAG as a whole so far left is because we’re still a long, long way from acceptance of trans and intersexed people, asexuals, and the rest of the people represented by the acronym.) That, in my view, simply means that gay rights as an issue is becoming less liberal and more centrist, which is a good thing.

But when it comes to economic policy especially, with regard to things like distribution of wealth, workers’ rights, and social safety nets, the Overton window is so far to the right that you have to hate most Americans to love America.

Rep. Crowley takes the GOP to task on the House floor

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If your speakers are broken today, you’re in luck, because Representative Joe Crowley (D-NY) chose not to actually deliver his speech yesterday out loud. You’ll see why at the end, but his words are valuable and necessary however they’re delivered.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZCl2bi-JDY]

The wealthy are recovering from the recession – the rest of us? Not so much.

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If you listen to the mainstream media you’ll probably get the general impression that the worst of the recession is over. That’s because the markets are indeed normalizing, which is good news for everyone who buys things, but particularly good news for the people who actually own those markets. For the average American, the measure of how much shit your life is in right now is probably centered around whether or not you have a job, and by that measure the picture is far bleaker than the media implies. Observe:

(h/t Paul Krugman)

It’s important to note the scale of the graph – the Y-axis runs from 58% to 64%, so it’s not like almost everybody is out of a job. Nonetheless, that downward plunge represents roughly nine million lost jobs, which is a dire situation to say the least. The other thing you’ll notice is that, while the precipitous job loss has finally stabilized, the jobs aren’t really coming back. At all. This is bad, bad news for the working class.

But you might notice a distinct lack of Wall Street brokers jumping out of their office windows, and here’s why – the Dow Jones average over the same period of time as the above graph:

Source: Google Finance

As you can see, 2008 wasn’t a great year for rich people either – some of them even had to sell their fifth and sixth cars, no doubt. Everybody was panicking when the market briefly dipped below 7000 points, but now it’s back up to around 12,000, not far off from its historical peak of 14,164 (which is actually that summit you see there in 2007).

So on average, and admittedly going entirely by the DJIA is simplistic, it’s looking like the rich managed to stay rich and reclaim much of their lost wealth. And the world keeps on turning.

But keep in mind that the GOP’s budget proposals make no attempt whatsoever to create new jobs, at a time when something desperately needs to be done to get those millions of people employed again. But the wealthy, who are back on the rise? The GOP feels they need all the government handouts they can (almost) afford to give them.