Things I Learned on Election Night

It's finally over.

Election Night has come and gone; the ceaseless campaign machine can grind to a halt and the talking heads can give their vocal chords a rest (aside from a few remaining blowhards). I won't try to hide my elation at the country's collective decisions- but I do want to take a brief moment and talk about what all just happened here.

1) President Obama, smug as ever, keeps his job.

I was clearly an Obama supporter. I think he's done a lot of good in the face of an unprecedented amount of conservative obstructionism. A Romney Presidency would have disappointed me, make no mistake. Now- I wasn't one of the "I'm moving to Canada!" liberals that were bemoaning our possible fate, but the worries I had were as follows: If Romney had won, I was afraid that liberals would have become embittered and taken up the mantle of obstructionism, and the whole damn process would have started all over again. With Obama retaining his job, and Democrats gaining ground in both the House and the Senate, I'm hoping that conservative stonewalling will have lost some of its steam. The same ideologues that said their top priority was to make Obama a one-term President will hopefully see how far that got them, and be more willing to come to the table and make realistic offers.

2) People set up a firewall vote about marriage equality and reproductive rights. 

Four out of four states (including my home state, Maryland! Woooo!) either supported marriage equality or rejected state constitutional amendments to define marriage as between a man and a woman. The reverses a trend of anti-equality ballots, and could send an interesting message. Also on the list of things that split heavily against Republicans were two big names who came out as being ignorant-at-best and anti-womens'-rights at worst, Todd Akin and Richard Murdock. They're the proud owners of the "legitimate rape" and "God intended rape-borne babies" statements, and voters turned out in droves to tell them where to stuff their opinions. These two factors taken together could signal a warning to surviving conservatives that running on social issues such as these is political suicide- and if that does end up being the takeaway from this election, that could have enormous ramifications in the culture wars.

3) Puerto Rico voted to become a state.

No, really. They've apparently voted this down two or three times before, but this time it passed with a 61% majority. I know nothing about the pros and cons of accepting another state into the union, but at the moment it's being drowned out by MSNBC's congratulatory orgy and FoxNews' sob-fest, so I figured it needed mentioning.

So what comes now?

Well, there's that whole automatic tax-increase and spending-cut thing that comes up this winter that needs dealing with; we've still got beef with Syria and we're still at or around 8% unemployment. There's no shortage of things that need work. But, what I plan to do personally is write to my state's national House and Senate members, be they Democrats or Republicans, and tell them to work together. I will tell them that I'm mailing their counterparts across the aisle, saying the same thing. Because now that this whole battle is over and done with, we have too much to do to keep saying "Well, he suggested it, so in the interest of increasing our potential wins in two or four years, I'm voting against it". The hyper-partisanship needs to cool.

Obama’s Failed Economic--- Waaaiiit a Minute!

Mitt Romney has shut up about this issue specifically in recent weeks, and wisely so, though he still bashes the stimulus as a whole. The bailout of the American auto industry was at best an incredibly risky maneuver, and if it hadn’t have worked even a little bit, you can believe that conservatives would have crucified the President on this one. The fact that even the spin machines have gone silent about it, though, shows pretty clearly just how successful it was. Let’s break this down by company.

• Ford: If you’re a George R.R. Martin fan, you could go so far as to call this automaker Dorn; they are the only of the Big Three to remain Unbent, Unbowed, Unbroken. For those of you unfamiliar with A Song of Ice and Fire, this means that they are the only of the major American automakers that were able to survive the economic crisis without a government bailout. Their brand is down across the world but it’s rising in the States, enough so to offset the other losses. They earned just over 20 billion in 2011, cutting their debt from the past year by about 6 billion dollars and eliminating a tax allowance they’d been given to help them out back in 2006. (Why is a special tax reduction not considered a bailout? Not sure.)
• Chrysler: Uncle Sam shelled out 12.5 billion dollars to keep Chrysler afloat, and of that money, 11.2 billion had been repaid as of July 2011. We’re still out 1.3 billion, but that’s because the automaker actually did too well. Apparently, the government expected them to take until 2017 to pay everything back, and so they set up an interest schedule to match that expectation. Because Chrysler paid the people back too soon, they saved themselves interest payments later on. They just went on to quadruple their quarterly profits over last year’s quarter, putting up a whopping $437 million dollars in the bank- their best quarter in over a decade. They’re on track to post 1.5 billion dollars in profit over the course of the fiscal year, which will be up from 183 million last year. For those of you following along at home, that’s about 8.2 times what they made last year. That’s kind of a big deal. If it means that Chrysler is doing that well, especially considering that during times of $4.00+ gasoline its most popular model is a fucking truck.
• General Motors: GM appears to have had the slowest recovery of the Three. (Their information is also hardest to find). Their increase in stock prices has helped evaporate another 2 billion of the government’s bailout losses, but apparently they’d have to double their worth from this point to completely clear what the American people are out.

The politics of money are always tricky, because you can’t have two side-by-side economies to study in which one gets the bailout and the other one doesn’t. Because of this, economic policy might be one of the most spin-prone areas in the national discussion, as one side can say “The recovery would have been twice as bad without the bailout!” while the other one screams “It would have been twice as good without it!”. Both provide legitimate-sounding statistics from both biased and impartial-sounding sources (if they cite their sources at all, but that’s another rant).

Debt Man Walking: The Verdict

So, after reading this bill over and letting it peculate a little, I've come to a conclusion about it. In short, the entire affair is a sham.
Allow me to explain. After displaying unparalleled brinksmanship and a profound ignorance about the potential consequences of defaulting, Congress agreed on a plan that is almost entirely spending cuts. However, to satiate the Left, the debt deal included the creation of a "Supercongress", which is really nothing more than a committee whose task is to come up with a plan to reduce America's deficit. This group of 12 people is made up of six conservatives and six liberals; six from the House and six from the Senate. They've got until December to present the nation with their grand plan, at which point their resolution must get an up or down vote; if it doesn't, then huge spending cuts go into effect- half from domestic spending and half from military spending.

Here's the problem.

Section 402(e)(2) states that if the House accepts the Supercongress' resolution first and sends it to the Senate, then the thing must be voted on posthaste and cannot be sent to another committee to be altered. BUT, if the Senate accepts the resolution first and sends it to the House, the House can send it to a committee- if the resolution contains any revenue. In other words, the House can shuffle the entire Supercongress' work off to a committee if it has tax increases (or a removal of tax cuts to pre-Bush levels, for example).

Why is that bad?

The House, as you may know, is largely Republican. Many of these representatives have taken this pledge to never increase taxes on anybody. It's the brainchild of Grover Norquist and the Americans for Tax Reform group that champions such causes as elimination of the Fairness Doctrine in the name of "free speech" (or, rather, speech only for those who can afford prime time costs without any government regulations stating channels must allot equal airtime for opposing viewpoints)... but I digress. Through Mr. Norquist's influence, it has become conservative dogma that increasing taxes on any business at all, even enormous multinational conglomerates, is unacceptable. The House, therefore, has the unique composition to push the entire Supercongress proposal into committee (should it contain any revenue language) where it will be detained at length, preventing meaningful debate on the House floor until the last minute. This is, of course, all before the overwhelmingly Republican House votes on it- which, if it contains revenue, will be a vote of (in all likelihood) "no". In this scenario, the bill fails, and cuts are enacted- but no revenue.

The inclusion of cuts to defense should the Supercongress' measure not pass is the only reason a Republican would vote on it; such an action could, in an election year, be painted as being "against the military" or "against jobs" (as a base closing in someone's district would be terrible press). But just as likely, in my eyes, is the opportunity that military cuts present the Republican party: the chance to say "Look how serious about reigning in government spending we are! We even slashed the parts of the budget we like!", without ever addressing the other half of the budget-balancing equation. Their corporate patrons, with their newly-minted Personhood thanks to Citizens United, will surely thank them for not pressing them to pay taxes.

The idea of the Supercongress as a compromise is, at its core, a falsehood; manufactured bipartisanship and nothing more. I expected more from the President's negotiations.

Understanding the Credit Crisis

I stumbled across a really good way to put the financial meltdown into layman's terms, and it comes in the form of a video that literally draws out a step-by-step diagram of exactly what happened.


The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

My thanks to these guys for the video, and further thanks to my continuing addiction for introducing me to said blog. I think it's important that people understand just how things are imploding, and this video really makes it simple to comprehend.