Snoopy 3
Look — up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane!
It’s John McCain!
The Hindenburg was inflated with hydrogen (bad move). The Goodyear Blimp uses helium. Met Life’s Snoopy 1 and Snoopy 2 are filled with insurance. It’s basic physics — empty promises are lighter than air.
And now, like a giant manatee galumphing through the troposphere, comes the latest, largest, most bloated, bulging gas bag of them all, pumped full of hyperbolic flatulence by grasping lobbyists like Phil Gramm – posing as an economist – and great, fat oil company tycoons standing by as alternative fools.
What is this amorphous, colorless, odorous, and utterly tasteless behemoth? Why, it’s the John McCain economic plan! Get out your secret decoder ring because, without it, the rest of this will make no sense whatever.
In the alternative universe of McCainsian economics, George Bush’s tax cuts for the richest people in America – which McCain once reviled – are anointed to go on forever. And there will be other tax reductions – in the alternative minimum tax, the federal gasoline tax, and of course generous tax cuts for corporations.
Don’t tell McCain, but hardly any company ever pays the 35% corporate rate.
That’s because people like Phil Gramm have spent their entire careers perforating the law with loopholes. Many companies pay zero – or less. Some get more in tax breaks and credits and handouts than they ever pay in taxes. In a McCain administration, corporations might be able to shut down their factories and refineries entirely and just live on corporate welfare and unregulated commodity futures.
So who’s left to tax?
He’d better find some patsies somewhere because McCain is promising to spend big on wars and healthcare, and yet he’s promising to balance the federal budget before his first term is over.
How? Nobody knows, certainly not McCain. He talks vaguely about trimming pork and earmarks, but the entire total of earmark funds wouldn’t pay for two months of the Iraq war that he wants to pursue in perpetuity.
Maybe he has a secret plan – say, to sell California and Florida and dismantle Social Security and Medicare.
Possibly he’s counting on the reduction in waste and corruption that would have taken place because Gramm left the Senate, except that the Senator then became a lobbyist to keep stoking the boiler on the gravy train.
Phil Gramm is one of McCain’s oldest and dearest friends, his primary source of economic guidance (McCain told the Wall Street Journal that Gramm is his “financial guru”), and a likely McCain pick for Secretary of the Treasury. When Gramm ran for president in 1996, McCain chaired his campaign. He is also a darling of the financial industry, which has given him many millions.
Not that he hasn’t earned it.
It was Gramm who engineered the Enron Loophole when he was in the Senate – exempting energy trading from regulators, leaving Enron free to turn the California electricity market inside-out, costing rate-payers and taxpayers billions (after which his wife Wendy joined Enron’s board).
Gramm is also the principal enabler of the subprime mortgage meltdown. Mother Jones has dubbed him Foreclosure Phil. He sneaked a measure into the 2000 budget, largely written by financial industry lobbyists, that barred the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from regulating exotic swindles like bundling worthless mortgages – which has led to the current threat of a global financial meltdown.
This also paved the way for the next looming crisis we’ll be shuddering about – in credit default swaps, which account for far greater exposure than subprime mortgages ever did. But why worry?
In Phil Gramm’s America, you don’t have to spend any money except on him.
Nobody else really needs anything, and there are no problems to solve. Poor people are faking it. The recession is all in your head. We’ve become a nation of whiners. Suck it up – you were meant to be miserable.
So, come to think of it, who needs a federal budget?
Maybe that’s the plan. Just make sure you’re not standing in the shadow of that bloated blimpful of noxious nonsense if anyone sticks a pin in it.
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I thought we were mercifully rid of Phil Gramm when he opted out of the senate a few weeks before the end of his term – a move calculated to give his Republican successor, John Cornyn, more seniority over newly elected Democrats. Just goes to show you that in America, you can’t keep a bad man down.
Steve Alber
Comment by Steve Alber — July 14, 2008 @ 10:34 am
Sad but true. But if we ever find a Democratic spokesperson who has both a spine and a tongue (most have one or the other), Gramm could become a great anti-McCain campaign symbol. Sort of like an albatross around the neck of another albatross.
Comment by Al — July 14, 2008 @ 2:05 pm
On a totally unrelated topic (though speaking of ex-senators): Why didn’t Jesse Helms have the decency to die when it would have done the country some good? Maybe you can’t keep a bad man down until it’s too late.
Comment by Steve Alber — July 15, 2008 @ 9:08 am
He’s constantly in my godless prayers. I pray that Jesse now shares a cell in hell with Lester Maddox.
Comment by Al — July 15, 2008 @ 3:04 pm