Sharron Angle stumps for military dictator’s retirement program

Sharron Angle stumps for military dictator’s retirement program

Reid opponent Sharron Angle stumps for military dictators retirement program. To those who've actually studied recent history, former Chilean military dictator Augusto Pinochet Ugarte was a cruel tyrant.

But to Sharron Angle, the tea parties' favorite U.S. Senate candidate from Nevada, he had at least one good idea: replacing the country's Social Security-like program with compulsory private retirement savings accounts.

Or, that's at least what she said -- that Medicare and Social Security must be "phased out" for "private" programs -- in a recent interview.



Sound familiar? That's because Pinochet's former labor minister, has since become one of the world's leading advocates of privatizing pension accounts. After demolishing the nation's political stronghold, he went to work for the conservative-leaning Cato Institute to advocate around the world for private retirement accounts. He's even credited as the man who convinced former U.S. President George W. Bush to pursue an agenda of privatizing Social Security.


Angle, in a recent interview with News 8 Now in Las Vegas, appeared taken aback when asked if her position on Social Security is a "flip flop". While she's been advocating privatization as of late, she's also released a television advertisement that would seem to convey quite the opposite message.


Confronted by a journalist with the apparent conflict in her messaging, she replied, according to the report: "It is when we have a $2.5 trillion raid and pillaging going on and an empty trust fund and now we are upside down. As of last Friday, they said, (there was a) $41 billion shortfall in Social Security. $41 billion less going in than coming out. It's broken.

"When I said privatize, that's what I meant. That I thought we would just have to go to the private sector for a template on how this is supposed to be done. However, I've since been studying and Chile has done this."

And just what happened in Chile after the country's public pension system was taken private? Barbara T. Dreyfuss, writing for Mother Jones in April, 2005, explained:

The transition was expensive and funded by slashing government programs, selling off state-owned industries, selling bonds to the new pension funds, and raising taxes. Privatization costs, which also included a government subsidy for workers unable to accumulate enough in their private accounts to guarantee a minimum income in retirement, averaged more than 6 percent of Chile's gross domestic product in the 1980s and are expected to average more than 4 percent of GDP each year until 2037.

Modeling America's care for seniors and the disabled on a banana republic dictator's program? No wonder right-wing extremists like Angle are called banana republicans.

The tea baggers are the new reformed Republicans? They seem a lot like the old Republicans - Revealed: JoinTheTeaParty.us took $469,000 in donations, spent none of it on candidates

Report: Arizona-based website took nearly $500,000 in donations but didn't turn out support for tea party or candidates

teapartyplate Revealed: JoinTheTeaParty.us took $469,000 in donations, spent none of it on candidatesA website run out of Arizona, ostensibly to support the so-called tea party movement, is under scrutiny after a local news organization dug into their finances and ownership, only to find what some may characterize as a remarkable scam.

According to Federal Election Commission (FEC) disclosure forms, JoinTheTeaParty.us took in approximately $469,000 in donations this year and spent roughly half its budget on marketing, with the rest going to distinctly non-political avenues.

The tangled web of Republican deceit and shadowy conservative groups

The tangled web of Republican deceit and shadowy conservative groups

ThinkProgress deserves a boatload of credit for turning the nation's attention to the huge amounts of money very shadowy groups on the Right--and the handful of people who are pulling the strings. Case in point, a story done today by NPR: "'Independent' Groups Behind Ads Not So Independent."

With these advertisers and others, the same words come up again and again: Grass-roots. Nonpartisan. Independent.

Their ads seem to imply the groups are homegrown. But every single one mentioned here is based within 20 minutes of Capitol Hill. Most of them, in fact, are in just two office suites.

As for their independence: It would be illegal for them to coordinate their attacks with the candidates they're helping, or with Republican Party committees. But among themselves, they're proud of the way they synchronize their efforts.

"If one group puts an ad on television in a certain congressional district, they let everyone else know that," says Jonathan Collegio with American Crossroads. "This way they don't double up on the advertising."

.....

This teamwork didn't happen by accident. But it's hard to grasp just how interconnected these secret donor groups are — so it may help to take a look at this map....

This clearly isn't a bunch of individual, independent groups — as you can see from the map. It's one big network: a Republican campaign operation, working outside the official party.

Here's the map, or in keeping with the season, a spider web with Karl Rove and John Boehner as the big fat spiders connecting just about all the strands.

GOP influence chart


Here's sort of a thumbnail from the story:

Rove co-founded American Crossroads, which later set up Crossroads GPS.... They both use the same media services firm to buy airtime for their ads, Crossroads Media.... Other clients of Crossroads Media include House Republican leader John Boehner, the Republican National Committee, and the Republican Governors Association, or RGA.

This fall, the RGA received a donation of $3.5 million from Bob Perry. You might recognize that name, since Perry helped to fund the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads against presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004.

This fall, Perry made another donation: $7 million to American Crossroads, the group co-founded by Karl Rove.

Huge amounts of money (including all that from the Chamber--they're up there in the upper right of the map, linked to Steven Law who is in turn hooked up with, Crossroads GPS, American Crossroads and through American Crossroads, just about every group and every individual on the list) that is almost entirely secret.

Which, yes, is a big issue for American voters: "71 percent of registered voters are concerned that 'a candidate who is helped' by groups like the Chamber of Commerce, Americans for Prosperity, and the Rove-inspired money mills 'could be beholden to their interests.'" And we don't have any idea who they're beholden to, because it's all secret.

While both parties may share some guilt, Republicans have become the slaves of special interests. That must be what conservatives mean when they say we should return to democracy the way The Founders intended. Anyone get the feeling Thomas Jefferson is turning in his grave at America being ruled by flakes and corporatists instead of an enlightened citizenry.

Rand Paul Followers Are Thugs. Attack Protester to Prevent Free Speech

Rand Paul Supporter Stomps Head Of Female MoveOn Member Outside KY Debate - video at link.

Josh Green flagged an incident that occurred outside of the Rand Paul-Jack Conway debate in Lexington, Kentucky Monday night that's already dominating the news in Kentucky and could easily make headlines nationally.

As the candidates arrived, a group of Paul supporters pulled a female MoveOn member to the ground and held her there as another Paul supporter stomped on the back of her head and neck.

According to the Louisville Courier Journal, "Lauren Valle of MoveOn.org approached Paul and tried to give him an "employee of the month award" from Republicorp...a fake business MoveOn created to symbolize what it says is the merger of the GOP and business interests controlling political speech."

The whole thing was caught on video. Watch:

At the end of the clip, Valle is alert and speaking with the press. However, MoveOn's political director Ilyse Hogue tells TPM that Valle is in the hospital and they're awaiting word on her condition. We'll get you more information when we have it.

We have a call out to the Lexington police department's public affairs office for further comment. According to WTVQ, an assault report was filed but there have been no arrests.

Typical of the Rand Paul crowd - free speech for them, but no one else. Rand Paul is known to be a wacko so it is only natural that he attacks that kind of person. In order to deflect from their attack on a woman - fully armed with petitions no less - Paul supporters are claiming someone stepped on the feet of one their side. Yep, accidentally stepping on someone's foot - if it did happen - is the same thing as several men beating a woman. I guess it would take several male Paul supporters to beat up one woman since they're known to be some of the country's biggest wussies.. Here is a picture of one of the fascist conservatives who attacked her. There is also another man who kicked her head once she was held down.

Conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas's Ethics Problems, Then and Now

It is now nearly forgotten that Thomas's ethics record gave Hill's accusation traction. Briefly a federal appeals judge, and before that a Reagan operative charged with undercutting civil rights enforcement, Thomas had a long habit of telling untruthful stories. As the late civil rights scholar Haywood Burns, dean of the law school at City University of New York, testified during the '91 hearings before Hill's accusations surfaced, Thomas's testimony and record were marked by "a lack of candor, compassion and ethical judgment."

Reporting to Congress as head of the EEOC, Thomas misrepresented his agency's nonenforcement of age discrimination law. As a federal judge he sat on an appeals court review of the criminal conviction of Col. Oliver North, despite having spoken out in support of North's actions in the Iran/Contra scandal. He failed to recuse himself from a case involving his political patron, Senator John Danforth.

To score points, Thomas even lied about his sister: falsely describing her in speeches as pathetically welfare dependent, a mocking depiction utterly at odds with the proud and hard existence of a woman who worked a series of minimum-wage jobs for most of her life to support her family.

Perhaps Ginni Thomas's phone call was a smokescreen—an attempted distraction from the reporting on Liberty Central's funding. Maybe it was unrelated. Either way, twenty years later it bears remembering that Hill's accusations were not just a matter of "she said, he said." Hill, in 1991, testified as a credible witness of unquestioned probity. Thomas had a documented ethics problem then—and, it appears, an ongoing ethics problem now. Back then, Thomas's truth problem obscured his shameful role in undoing the very civil rights tradition that made his nomination possible. Today, the Thomases' evocation of that old episode obscures an ethically challenged Supreme Court justice complicit in handing American politics over to corporations and anonymous far-right donors—that is the real scandal.

Under 30? Vote Republican So They Can End The Net Neutrality You Grew Up With

Under 30? Vote Republican So They Can End The Net Neutrality You Grew Up With

If Democrats want to turn out the 18-30 year-old voters, my message to Organizing for America is to text the mobile phone numbers you have from 2008 with a simple message about what is literally about to happen to net neutrality if they stay at home at let Republicans take Congress. For one thing, such a text message will no longer be possible--or, at least, not without paying a high price to do it.

Here's what's cookin':

In January, 2011, the Koch Boys and their rightwing ultra-rich comrades will gather for a secret meeting to discuss what to do with the Congress they just purchased.

First on the agenda: kill and bury net neutrality, the principle that all messages are treated equal, that there are no "fast speed" and "slow speed" lanes based upon one's ability to pay.

Once destroyed, net neutrality can never return. Messaging to return to net neutrality will be routed to the bridge to nowhere. With the news media under corporate control already, you do not even see this issue covered, even by good people like Ed Schultz.

Otherwise, voters, especially those 30 and under who were raised on and expect a neutral internet, would be flocking to the polls.

This is no joke. Invitations to the "Kochs and comrades" meeting have already been sent. [If you didn't get yours yet, let me know. Justices Scalia and Thomas may have a few left over].

A brief note to so-called 'pundits': if the electorate had really soured on progressive policies, just why did Kochs and comrades have to pour one-quarter billion of their inherited money to win? It is not as if the Democrats are adept at political strategy.

The 'pundits' don't get it, but the Kochs and their comrades get it very well. Their self-interests and the interests of 350 million Americans are different. They cannot sustain support for what they want--no taxes, no regulations, the globalization of labor markets to pressure wages even lower, and unfettered pollution. It's a simple set of goals, but many Americans cannot square that with their own modest savings and jobs and social safety net being demolished by policies the Kochs and comrades want pursued.

They did not make their billions by wasteful spending. Purchasing the Supreme Court was far less expensive than buying Congress (9 lifetime appointees vs 435 two-year stints). And so, carefully grooming a legion of faux-Constitutionalists through the benign-sounding 'Federalist Society' cost chicken feed. (Harriet Myers was hounded by the rightwing when "the smartest man she ever met", George W Bush, appointed her; the Kochs and their comrades could not be certain of her votes as she was not a card-carrying member of the Federalist Society despite George W's curious 'guarantee' that she would never change).

The reason the rightwing hates war-hero John McCain, and never credited him with his obsession with fiscal conservatism and militarism, is he committed the cardinal sin: he restricted how they spent their money in elections. They went after the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law--and failed. Finances of the electoral playing field were not leveled, but brought into some balance.

Leveling, balancing--the big-moneyed interests lose. They then must spend all their money on buying individual votes on specific issues(which they did with reasonable success), but were always subject to popular opinion overcoming their largesse and their lies being exposed.

So, first they purchased the Supreme Court.

Step 1: Citizens United, in which the Supreme Court found that the original intent of the Founders was to define Corporations as Persons for purposes of the Free Speech protections of the First Amendment, they just forgot to insert the word. [I had American history in the 5th, 8th, and 11th grades, and never learned that the Founders intended that, but then we did not use history textbooks written for schools in Texas].

Without limitations on corporate spending, and without disclosure of the source (so that those who objected could vote with their feet by not purchasing a company's products), paid advertising overwhelms unpaid speech.

But, a funny thing happened on the way to plutocracy. The internet.

So long as we are still able, we can organize, debunk lies and slanderous claims, and disseminate widely and--here is what sticks in their craw--equally. All messaging is treated equal.

Hence, with the first step achieved, the number one item on the "Kochs and comrades" January agenda must be to destroy the last bastion of equality and democracy, the last threat to their power.

Step 2: End Net Neutrality.

With newspapers and magazines in inexorable decline, with one major TV network that has declared itself to be the communications arm of the rightwing, and the others under corporate control, and with the population under 30 getting most of their "news" online anyhow, ending net neutrality will not end the principle of free speech, but it will certainly diminish its value and rig the "market place of ideas".

Couldn't happen in America, you say?

Give Republicans control of Congress, and it is guaranteed.

Young voters, 18-30--the group who will suffer most under such a regime--can stop them.

But, only if they vote. In large numbers. Like they did in 2008. It didn't really interrupt their lives then. It won't now.

The end of net neutrality--that will interrupt their lives.

Permanently.

‘U.S.’ Chamber Of Commerce Is Fueled By Foreign Oil

The United States Chamber of Commerce is running an unprecedented $75 million campaign to unseat progressives from Congress, in defense of a big-oil agenda. As a ThinkProgress investigation has learned Chamber’s donors — who send their checks to the same account from which the political campaign is run — include multinational oil corporations, and even oil companies owned by the Kingdom of Bahrain. The oil-fueled Chamber has hammered candidates who voted to limit our dependence on oil, falsely claiming they supported a “job-killing energy tax” (like Rep. Paul Hodes (D-NH), Rep Joe Sestak (D-PA), Rep. Betsy Markey (D-CO), Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL), and Rep. Harry Teague (D-NM)).

The Chamber has repeatedly questioned the science behind climate change, even calling for a “Scopes monkey trial” in 2009. Numerous companies, including Apple, Exelon, PNM Resources, PG&E, and PSEG, quit the Chamber because of their reactionary opposition to climate legislation, determined by right-wing board members like coal giants Massey, Peabody, and Consol. Multinational oil companies BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Hess, and Shell Oil fund the Chamber of Commerce through its Business Civic Leadership Council. The Chamber’s anti-clean-energy agenda serves not only domestic coal barons and oil majors, but also the following foreign oil and coal companies, who are some of the dozens of foreign corporations that pay member dues to the Chamber of Commerce’s 501c(6) account, which is used to fund its political ads - list of companies at the link.

Dear Wisconsin Welcome to Ron Johnson's Tea Party

Dear Wisconsin Welcome to Ron Johnson's Tea Party

What is the tea party? Many have tried to answer that question ever since CNBC's Rick Santelli first launched the backlash with his trading-floor rant against the poor.

Democratic operatives, for instance, say the tea party is merely a Republican Party facade. As proof, they point to GOP-linked corporate groups' involvement in tea party events, and cite the absence of tea party deficit and bailout protests during George W. Bush's presidency.

Social scientists, meanwhile, suggest that the tea party is not the entire Republican apparatus, but specifically the extreme conservative edge of the GOP. The data add credence to that argument: As the Public Religion Research Institute and the University of Washington report, tea party followers are disproportionately part of the Christian right and are more racially resentful than the general public.

For their part, tea party activists brush off these pesky facts with nostalgic paeans about the Constitution and indignant bromides against partisanship.

"Although we are conservative in political philosophy, we are nonpartisan in approach," insisted a tea party leader in a typical platitude. "Both parties need to re-dedicate themselves to the principles of our Founding Fathers."

Thus, with both sides at loggerheads, the only way to objectively define the tea party is to find a test case. And thanks to Wisconsin's Senate race, we have exactly that.

On one side is Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold, who has made his name championing many of the tea party's purported views about the state, the Constitution and national sovereignty. For instance, when it comes to "big government," Feingold has opposed wasteful pork barrel spending, worked to trim the defense budget and voted against financial bailouts. When it comes to the Constitution, Feingold was the only senator to vote against the Constitution-defying Patriot Act and has boldly questioned both parties' willingness to let the state trample citizens' civil liberties. And Feingold has been one of the few senators to consistently oppose NAFTA-style trade deals – pacts that usurp domestic control over our economy and lay waste to the very industrial heartland the tea party claims to cherish.

On the other side is Republican Ron Johnson, the antithesis of everything the tea party says it stands for. In business, Johnson built a company propped up by government grants and loans – otherwise known in tea party terms as "bailouts." As a board member of a local opera house, he lobbied for funds from the same "big government" stimulus bill the tea party despises. During the campaign, he has touted NAFTA-style trade policies' "creative destruction" of Wisconsin's manufacturing economy. And rather than promoting the freedom the tea party says it values, Johnson has praised China's repressive communist regime for its economic policies.

Candidate contrasts rarely get starker than this. And clearly, if the tea party is as nonpartisan as it asserts, then its supporters should be flocking to Feingold.

If that were happening, though, Feingold would be winning. Instead, polls show Feingold trailing Johnson – and as CNN notes, Johnson "owes much of (that) political success to the tea party." Indeed, despite contradicting most major tea party positions, Johnson has been featured at Wisconsin Tea Party events; touted in the local media as a tea party favorite; called a "Champion of Freedom" by national tea party activists; and promoted by tea party opinion leaders like George Will as the epitome of "what the tea party looks like."

This, of course, gets back to the questions surrounding the tea party's true motive. Is the movement inspired by principle, as its leaders claim? Or is it propelled by partisanship?

Johnson's recent success suggests the latter, and should Feingold ultimately lose, any debate about that reality will finally be put to rest.

Pop The Cork? The Democrats Create Biggest Deficit Reduction In U.S. History Occurred From 2009 to 2010

In previous years we would have been breaking out the champagne on this news: The monthly budget review released yesterday by the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the federal budget deficit fell by $125 billion from 2009 to 2010. This by far is the biggest one-year nominal drop in the deficit that has ever occurred.

Many of us will be old and gray by the time Democrats finish repairing the damage done by Ron Johnson's conservative pals, but this is a good start.

Democrats Cut Taxes and Make Profit for Tax Payers on TARP - No One Notices

Wall Street Bailout Returns 8.2% Profit Beating Treasury Bonds

The U.S. government’s bailout of financial firms through the Troubled Asset Relief Program provided taxpayers with higher returns than they could have made buying 30-year Treasury bonds -- enough money to fund the Securities and Exchange Commission for the next two decades.

The government has earned $25.2 billion on its investment of $309 billion in banks and insurance companies, an 8.2 percent return over two years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That beat U.S. Treasuries, high-yield savings accounts, money- market funds and certificates of deposit. Investing in the stock market or gold would have paid off better.

When the government first announced its intention to plow funds into the nation’s banks in October 2008 to resuscitate the financial system, many expected it to lose hundreds of billions of dollars. Two years later TARP’s bank and insurance investments have made money, and about two-thirds of the funds have been paid back. Yet Democrats are struggling to turn those gains into political capital, and the indirect costs of propping up banks could have longer-term consequences for the economy.

“From the perspective of the taxpayers getting their money back, TARP has been a great success,” said Todd Petzel, chief investment officer at New York-based Offit Capital Advisors LLC, which has more than $5 billion of assets under management.

How did this happen - conservatives and tea baggers claim they are honest people of good character and only tell the truth. Tea baggers and their conservative brethren have said Obam, Reid and Pelois are socialist and have wasted tax payer money. Gosh, that turns out to be a lie. Yet the media has decided not to report on the fact that President Obama, Senator Reid(D-NV) and Speaker Pelosi (D) saved this capitalist economy and made a profit for tax payers. From Obama, the Tax Cut Nobody Heard Of

What if a president cut Americans’ income taxes by $116 billion and nobody noticed?

It is not a rhetorical question. At Pig Pickin’ and Politickin’, a barbecue-fed rally organized here last week by a Republican women’s club, a half-dozen guests were asked by a reporter what had happened to their taxes since President Obama took office.

“Federal and state have both gone up,” said Bob Paratore, 59, from nearby Charlotte, echoing the comments of others.

After further prodding — including a reminder that a provision of the stimulus bill had cut taxes for 95 percent of working families by changing withholding rates — Mr. Paratore’s memory was jogged.

“You’re right, you’re right,” he said. “I’ll be honest with you: it was so subtle that personally, I didn’t notice it.”

Few people apparently did.

In a troubling sign for Democrats as they head into the midterm elections, their signature tax cut of the past two years, which decreased income taxes by up to $400 a year for individuals and $800 for married couples, has gone largely unnoticed.

In a New York Times/CBS News Poll last month, fewer than one in 10 respondents knew that the Obama administration had lowered taxes for most Americans. Half of those polled said they thought that their taxes had stayed the same, a third thought that their taxes had gone up, and about a tenth said they did not know.

The tea baggers didn't notice because they are not as knowledgeable about politics, taxes and public policy as they and the media would have us believe. The tea baggers are willfully ignorant because it interferes with their sad shrill whining about problems they either do not exist or are a legacy of financial recklessness left by a Republican Congress and George Bush.

Are Republicans drinking something which makes them batsh*t insane? - Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) Says That The Stimulus And Health Care Laws ‘Are Gonna Kill’ Elderly And Disabled Americans

The only things resembling death panels that do exist are the rescission and denial practices followed by private health insurers that the bill is slowly outlawing. A congressional investigation recently found that “the nation’s four largest for-profit health insurers denied coverage to more than 651,000 people over a three-year period, citing pre-existing conditions” — one out of every seven Americans who applied for insurance was denied. If anyone supports health care being denied to Americans, it is Broun, who has a long history of fearmongering about efforts to reform the American health care system.

GOP Senate candidate Carly Fiorina (R-CA) Has All the Answers

Asked 7 Times, Fiorina Fails To Give A Frustrated Wallace One Solution To Cut
Spending

Touting her outisde, business-executive saavy, GOP Senate candidate Carly Fiorina (R-CA) constantly chants the GOP mantra to cut government spending. She even released a budget plan last month intended to prove that she’d “rein in out-of-control government spending.” But, in telling her constituents that she will cut government spending, Fiorina seems undaunted by one minor fact: she has no idea how.

Today on Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace gave Fiorina a chance to lay out her actual plan. Touting her “tough, bottom-line business executive” motto, Wallace pointed out that Fiorina also wants “to extend all, all the Bush tax cuts which would add $4 trillion dollars to the deficit…where are you going to find $4 trillion dollars to cut?” But when Fiorina retreated to recycled response of government waste and an earmarks ban, a frustrated Wallace begged Fiorina seven times to “name one single entitlement expenditure you’re willing to cut” because “that’s where the money is.” Fiorina’s only response? “You’re asking a typical political question”:

WALLACE: You’re campaigning and you just alluded to it, to your record as a tough, bottom line, former business executive. But you want to extend all the Bush tax cuts which would add 4 trillion to the deficit. You say balance the budget by cutting spending. Question, as a bottom line businesswoman, where are you going to find $4 trillion to cut?

FIORINA: …We don’t know how taxpayer money is spent in Washington, D.C, which is why I think we ought to put every agency budget up on the internet for everyone to see, ban earmarks, and we ought to give citizens the opportunity to desginate up to 10% of their federal income tax toward debt reduction. If we did, that we would reduce our debt by $95 billion a year.

WALLACE: Miss Fiorina, the traditional ways that people talk about non-discretionary – I mean discretionary, non-defense spending is only 16% of the budget. You could cut all of that out, all for education and energy, and for police support and government worker support around the country, it wouldn’t be anywhere close to $4 trillion. Where are you going to get that kind of money if you extend all of the bust era tax cuts. That only adds to the deficit. It doesn’t even deal with the deficit we already have.

FIORINA: Well, of course, first the thing we need to do, to deal with our debt and our deficit is to both cut spending and grow the economy. That’s fundamentally what we have to do. Those tax cuts are central to growing the economy. Indeed, I would argue there are some additional tax cuts we need to make.[...]

WALLACE: Miss Fiorina, let me ask you a specific question because I still haven’t gotten many specifics on how you will cut $4 trillion and more out of the budget. Back when there was talk about a non-partisan, or a bipartisan deficit, debt commission you blasted that idea in January and said we know all the solutions. We don’t need another commission to study it. Now…you tell me specifically what are you going to do to cut the billions, the trillions of dollars in entitlements?

FIORINA: First, I didn’t blast the commission saying we already had solutions. I blasted the commission because I believed it was a feint for tax increases.[...]

WALLACE: But forgive me, Miss Fiorina, where are you going to cut entitlements? What benefits are you going to cut? What eligibility are you doing..

FIORINA: Chris, I have to say, with all due respect, you’re asking a typical political question.[...]

WALLACE: It may be a typical political question but that’s where the money is. The money is in Medicare and Social Security. We have baby-boomers coming. There will be a huge explosion of entitlement explosion and you call it a political question when I ask you to name one single entitlement you are willing to cut.

FIORINA: Chris, I believe to deal with entitlement reform, which we must deal with, we ought to put every possible solution on the table, except we should be very clear we are not going to cut benefits to those nearing retirement or those nearing retirement or those in retirement.[...]

WALLACE: I’m going to try one last time, and if you don’t want to answer it, Miss Fiorina, you don’t have to.

FIORINA: It’s not a question of not wanting to answer it!

WALLACE: Let me ask the question, if I may, please. You’re not willing to put forward a single benefit – I’m not talking about the people 60 or let alone 65, or 70. I’m talking about people under 55. You’re not willing to say there is a single benefit eligibility for Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security that you are willing to say “Yeah, I would cut that?”

FIORINA: What I think we need to do to engage the American people in a conversation about entitlement reform is to have a bipartisan group of people who come together and put every solution on the table, every alternative on the table. Then we ought to engage in a long conversation with the American people so they understand the choices.

Watch it:

Wallace’s exasperation is understandable. For all of Fiorina’s bluster about government spending, her solutions don’t add up to any serious impact. An earmark ban would only account for less than one percent of the federal budget and eliminating ineffective or duplicative programs would not come close to addressing the deficit. As the Wonk Room’s Pat Garofalo points out, she’d have to eliminate the entire discretionary budget — which includes defense spending defense spending, all federal education funding, some veteran’s benefits, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Secret Service, federal highway funding, and Congress itself — to eliminate the deficit. In fact, the only “solution” Fiorina has offered is to defund the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — an agency that does not yet exist.

While frustrating, Fiorina’s lack of solutions should not be surprising. As a member of the GOP, Fiorina joins a slew of Republicans in their refusal to offer any deficit solutions no matter how many times a reporter may beg.



Nothing shocking here. tea bagger conservatives from California to Wisconsin to Kentucky to Delaware to Florida have NO concrete plans. It's a case of trust them they'll figure out something once you vote them into office. What cave were these neanderthals sleeping in when Bush and a Republican Congress were spending like crazy and letting wall St run wild.

The Small Business Case for Ending Tax Cuts for the Wealthy - Small business owners, often used as a prop by anti-tax lobbyists, say letting the Bush-era tax cuts expire is a good business decision.

Enter several refreshing new voices in this debate: the American Sustainable Business Council and Business for Shared Prosperity, networks of enterprises rooted in their localities. In their recent report, “Restoring Top Tax Rates Makes Sense for Small Business,” they make a business case for allowing the top tax rates to expire.

These business organizations point out that very few small businesses are affected. Less than 3 percent of tax filers with any business income earn enough ($200,000 as individuals or $250,000 as couples in a year) to be affected—and many of those that do are Wall Street investment partners, big business CEOs paid to sit on boards of other big companies, and wealthy folks renting out investment properties and vacation homes.

If Congress wants to help small business, the small business owners argue, it shouldn’t spend $700 billion over the next decade in poorly targeted tax cuts.

“Letting high end tax cuts expire is a good business decision,” said Frank Knapp, CEO and President of the South Carolina Small Business Chamber of Commerce. “Boosting our local economy by helping real small businesses create jobs should be our goal. We can either cut taxes for CEOs and Wall Street traders, or we can invest the money to generate more customers for small business by keeping teachers, police officers, and other Americans on the job rebuilding the crumbling transportation, water, and energy infrastructure small business depends on.”