Annals of "compromise," Wednesday edition: Billionaires rally for the president's tax-cut plan

America's favorite billionaire: Thurston Howell III, whose son, Thurston Howell IV, is a big supporter of the president's plan

by Ken

As I pointed out last night, here once again we turn -- for insight into the news behind the news -- to our daily fix of Andy Borowitz.

BOROWITZ REPORT

DECEMBER 8, 2010

Wealthiest .0000001% Hail Tax Deal

Billionaires Praise Obama Move

GENEVA (The Borowitz Report) - President Obama's deal to extend the Bush tax cuts for the rich drew rave reviews today from the wealthiest .0000001% of Americans, who pronounced the deal "a total home run."



"When we first heard about the deal, we were like, this is too good to be true," said multibillionaire Thurston Howell IV, a spokesman for the richest .0000001%. "But when our butlers read the plan aloud to us during the cocktail hour, we were incredibly stoked."



The 29 plutocrats who make up the nation's wealthiest .0000001% were at their annual meeting at Mr. Howell's villa in Geneva, Switzerland when news of the President's deal was first released.



"Bill Gates and Warren Buffett were the first to hear about it, and then the news just kind of trickled down, if I may use a favorite phrase of ours," Mr. Howell said.



"The President deserves credit for recognizing what the wealthiest .0000001% have known for years," he added. "Our cost of living has soared astronomically, especially when you consider how expensive it's gotten to control the outcome of elections.

"

In response to critics who have said that Mr. Obama's decision to extend the tax cuts represents a change in his position, Mr. Howell said, "If I may coin a phrase, that's change I can believe in."


Meanwhile, Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson points out in his column today, "The paucity of hope - and other victims of Obama's tax-cut deal":

Holding income tax rates at their current level would merely perpetuate the economic status quo. The extension of unemployment insurance is the deal's most effective provision for maintaining the amount of money in circulation - but it does nothing to raise that level. Like most of the provisions that came from the White House, its effect is more humanitarian and anti-contractionary than stimulative. That doesn't make those provisions less necessary - far from it - but neither are they a panacea for the nation's economic ills.

"But," he says, "the price the Republicans extracted in return for staying their assault on common decency was uncommonly steep: Directing public funds to enriching the rich, despite the evidence that this will do nothing for the economy."

He points to some of the noxious stuff in the package, like: the dramatic slashing of the estate tax ("with an assist from outgoing Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln, who thoughtfully tends to the interests of Sam Walton's heirs") and the array of tax breaks "for capital over labor" while leaving the cap on capital gains at 15 percent --

meaning, income derived from investment will continue to be taxed at a lower level than most income from wages. But money invested in American companies these days is as likely to be spent abroad as in the United States. By 2008, 48 percent of the revenue of the Standard & Poor's leading 500 companies came from abroad - up from 32 percent in 2001, according to Business Week. For many (nominally) American companies, production is even more offshored than sales. If you invest in Apple, you're investing in a company that employs roughly 25,000 people in the United States, even as 250,000 employees of Foxconn, China's leading manufacturer, make Apple's products in Shenzhen province.

At the same time, "proposals that would have created jobs in America seem to have fallen by the wayside in the new tax deal." He points to the Build America Bonds program ("which enabled local governments to construct schools and roads for lower costs") and "Sen. Mark Warner's proposal to swap out the tax cut for the rich in favor of a job-creation tax credit."

Even viewing this deal as the closest thing to a stimulus package that can emerge from a Congress in which Republicans routinely thwart spending on all but the rich, it still falls far short of the 2009 stimulus - which saved millions of jobs but was nonetheless too small to really restart the economy.

The best we can say of the deal is that it largely perpetuates, and only occasionally worsens, the status quo - in particular, the three-decade status quo in which the rich get richer at ordinary Americans' expense. Obama vowed during his news conference Tuesday to take on that status quo over the next two years, but his inability thus far to frame that debate - even though most Americans share his opposition to extending tax cuts for the rich - is maddening.

Stasis you can grieve over. Good grief.

Good grief indeed!

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