Grover Norquist

Hey, GOP: Give the 99 Percent Some Lovin’

Leo Gerard — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 10:26:16 -0500

MTV needs to stop giving that creepy vampire guy and moony human girl in the “Twilight” series the “best kiss” prize in its annual movie awards because it’s Republicans who truly earned the trophy for the big wet smooches they lay on the 1 percent.

Just think of the GOP lovin’ that went into the Bush tax breaks that gave millionaires more than $125,000 a year and the middle class less than $1,000. Or the arduous embrace signified by cutting the capital gains tax to a rate lower than that on middle class income.

The GOP is a faithful lover to the 1 percent, steady and true. Last week, Republicans found themselves confronted with a choice between raising taxes on the 99 percent or on the 1 percent, and the GOP spared the millionaires. The GOP’s fidelity to the 1 percent is so strong that Republicans wavered on their promises – never raise taxes – and principles – tax cuts don’t have to be offset. As a result, the 99 percent is beginning to feel more than a little spurned by the GOP.

Since the days of the Bush breaks in 2001 and 2003, Republicans consistently have said that tax reductions stimulate the economy and the lost revenue needn’t be offset. Jon Kyl, the No. 2 Senate Republican, asserted, for example: “You should never have to offset the cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans.” The GOP didn’t pay for the Bush breaks, a decision that dramatically increased the deficit, which Republicans now say the 99 percent must pay by suffering slashed government services.

Similarly, Republicans have loyally upheld their solemn pledge to lobbyist Grover Norquist to never, ever raise taxes. Last year, for example, they GOP refused to allow the Bush tax cuts to expire, contending that would be a tax increase, not the end of rates intended to be temporary.

To recap: The GOP vowed never to raise taxes. The GOP defines an expiring temporary tax cut as a tax increase. And the GOP believes tax reductions don’t have to be offset.

To serve the 1 percent, however, Republicans discarded all of that supposedly sacrosanct philosophy during last week’s struggle over extending the temporary payroll tax cut. Congress voted last December to decrease for one year the payroll tax from 6.2 percent to 4.2 percent, putting an extra $1,000 in the hands of 160 million workers during a recession to pay bills.

This fall, President Obama and the Democrats proposed extending the cut another year, enlarging it by dropping the rate to 3.1 percent, and expanding it under certain circumstances to employers, who pay a matching amount. That would give the average family an extra $1,500 to spend, which would, according to Moody’s Analytics, inject as much as $120 billion into the economy and create 750,000 jobs.

Initially, the GOP opposed extending the tax cut – even though that would seem to violate their principal that restoring previous rates is a tax increase. Norquist must have taken to task the anti-payroll-tax-break Republicans because by last Tuesday, the GOP changed its mind.

Still, Republicans insisted, this tax cut would have to be offset – even though that demand violates their principal that tax cuts don’t need to be paid for.

Democrats proposed offsetting the cost of the extension with a 3.25 percent surtax on 350,000 millionaires and billionaires – the 1 percent.

That confronted lawmakers with this choice: Slightly increase taxes on the nation’s richest 350,000 or raise taxes on 160 million workers by allowing the payroll tax break to expire.

In the U.S. Senate, Democrats and one Republican, moderate Susan Collins of Maine, voted to give the 160 million the break, for a total of 51 votes, more than half. Every other Republican in the Senate sided with the nation’s richest 350,000, providing enough votes to defeat the tax break for the 99 percent – not by a majority but by filibuster.

Republicans then proposed instead to leave the tax at 4.2 percent and offset the extension by freezing the pay of federal workers through 2015 and slashing the federal workforce by 10 percent – a total of 210,000 public servants.

That would spare the wealthy and instead make federal workers pay, and kill jobs during a period of prolonged, painfully high unemployment. Democrats defeated that.

The payroll tax break is set to expire Dec. 31.

Where’s the GOP lovin’ for the 99 percent?

The GOP vote against extending and expanding the payroll tax break felt like a kick in the ass to the 99 percent. The Republican proposal to make middle class federal workers – instead of the nation’s wealthiest – bear the cost of extending the tax break seemed like the GOP was once again kissing the 1 percent’s ass.

The 99 percent is beginning to suspect the GOP will never treat them any better than Newt Gingrich treats his wives. Nearly 7 in 10 Americans told New York Times/CBS News pollsters in October that they believe Congressional Republicans favor the rich.

Hey, GOP, are your right wings just too short to embrace the 99 percent?

The Conservative Pledge To Encourage Big Companies To Send Jobs Away

Dave Johnson — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 14:27:39 -0400

Did you know that almost every conservative politician in the country has signed a pledge to encourage big multinational corporations to keep sending jobs out of the country?

Grover Norquist, head of the lobbying organization Americans for Tax Reform, is one of the leaders of the modern "conservative movement." Norquist is well-known (among certain circles) for his statement that he wants to shrink government "down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."

As part of the conservative movement's long-term strategy to weaken and destabilize government, his organization gets conservative politicians to sign a Taxpayer Protection Pledge: "In the Taxpayer Protection Pledge, candidates and incumbents solemnly bind themselves to oppose any and all tax increases." Almost every conservative politician in the country has signed this pledge.

Of course, the point of this is to destroy government's ability to govern. And, of course, with government, i.e. "We, the People," out of the way, something else necessarily fills the vacuum. And that something else is the large monopolistic corporations and extremely wealthy few that fund organizations like Americans for Tax Reform and the rest of the "conservative movement." (Quelle surprise.) This is why conservatives propose tax cuts as the solution to everything -- it is really about defunding government by causing the government to run out of money. This is why you will never, ever hear a conservative talk about any actual "spending cuts" they propose, with specifics, and how their proposed cuts will add up to actually cutting the deficit. It isn't about cutting the deficit, it is about getting rid of government's ability to regulate what these corporations do.

A Pledge To Encourage Companies To Kill Jobs

With that in mind, I have been hearing a very interesting line of attack on The Pledge in this election. If there is one thing the public is really, really angry about it is companies that close factories and ship jobs out of the country. In fact, there is a tax break that encourages companies to do this. Democrats in Congress have been trying to close that tax break. Every single Republican has been voting against closing this loophole and for one and only one reason -- closing this tax loophole for the big monopolistic corporations that ship our jobs out of the country would violate the Norquist Pledge.

Government Is We, the People Making The Decisions

Let's hope that this line of attack enables people to understand that "government spending" is money that is spent on We, the People, and that "less government" means less decision making by We, the People and more decision-making by ... guess who.

The Tax History Conservatives Want Us to Forget

David Sirota — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 13:53:19 -0500

Grover Norquist is regularly billed as one of the leading intellectual lights of the conservative movement - and I think you will agree that the arguments he made in a debate with me over taxes this morning on CNBC highlight not merely the shocking intellectual bankruptcy of the movement he leads, but just how out of touch Republicans in Washington really are.

The debate revolved around President-elect Obama's potential plans to put off raising taxes on the very wealthy. Norquist begins the debate with the claim - I kid you not - that "the economy is in the present state because when the Democrats took the House and Senate in 2006 you knew those tax increases were going to come in 2010." He insisted that, "The stock market began to collapse as soon as you recognize that those old tax rates were coming back." Yes, because under "those old tax rates" - ie. Clinton-era tax rates - the economy was so much worse than it is today.

As you'll see, the CNBC reporters start laughing at Norquist, having trouble taking him seriously. And I must say, I really wasn't sure he was being serious - but, of course, he was. I went on to make the point that I've often made in the past - the point that conservatives simply want everyone to forget: Namely, that President Clinton faced down a recession in 1993 by raising taxes on the wealthy in order to finance an economic stimulus package, and the economy subsequently boomed.

That simple, undeniable bit of history undermines the entire structure of conservatives claim that raising taxes on the super-rich will hurt the economy. And as you'll see from Norquist's response, they simply cannot deal with that truth. Indeed, Norquist actually goes all the way back to the 1920s as his example that raising taxes on the wealthy impedes economic growth - somehow ignoring the history from 15 years ago. He then goes on to claim with a straight face that Franklin Roosevelt created the Great Depression (this, along with the "center-right nation" propaganda, seems to be the right's new talking point).

The question now is whether the Obama administration buys into Norquist's fact-free nonsense, or whether it musters the same courage President Clinton mustered in prudently raising taxes on the super-rich to responsibly finance an economic stimulus package. Sure, temporary deficits are acceptable right now - there's no arguing that. But doing what's necessary to minimize those deficits is also important.

In terms of policy, if, as Congressional Quarterly reports, Obama wants to enforce budget discipline on a necessarily large economic stimulus package, it will require generating additional revenue from the wealthy. In terms of raw politics, if Clinton's 43 percent of the vote gave him enough political capital to come into office during an economic downturn and do that, I'd say Obama and his 53 percent gives him enough political capital to do the same today. And I would argue that if Obama backs off his promise to raise taxes on the wealthy, he will effectively validate the false conservative frame that claims tax increases on the wealthy endangers an economy.

While I certainly agree with the CNBC reporter that the 2008 is different than the 1990s, it isn't different when it comes to taxes - we have very recent history that proves raising taxes on the wealthy in order to raise revenues for economic stimulus, if done prudently, helps an economy recover. That is the argument that nobody during this debate was able to undermine - and it is the argument conservatives fear most, because they know it is accurate.

Debating Grover Norquist, America's Leading Fake Populist

David Sirota — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 10:25:15 -0400

SEATTLE - This week on my national book tour, I had the opportunity to debate conservative leader Grover Norquist on KUOW - Seattle's NPR affiliate. The topic of the debate was my new book, THE UPRISING, and specifically the rise of populism in American politics. You can listen to the debate here - it begins about half way into the interview.

Norquist, one of the architects of the original conservative uprising of the 1980s and 1990s, is a good indicator of where the conservative movement is today. As you can hear, the Right is angry with the Bush administration for not being more conservative on a whole host of issues - and you can sense from Norquist how ideologically bankrupt conservatives really are today.

For a generation or so, the Right has dynamically adapted its reactionary ideas to sound like a populist, anti-Establishment, for-the-little-guy agenda. But thanks to all the crises we now face from those ideas - an energy crisis, stagnant wages, national security catastrophes, a global warming emergency - it has become much easier for progressives to unmask the Right as what I called Norquist: Fake populists.

The concept of fake populism is an important one as we move into the superheated general election campaign.

Just as Norquist tries in the debate to package environmental degradation, oil industry handouts and tax cuts for billionaires as policies designed to help us regular folks, so will John McCain try to present more NAFTA-style trade deals and more war in Iraq as populism. And the more we label it for what it is - fake populism - the more we will show the country the difference between a true majority agenda and the Beltway elitism of the Right.

What struck me most about the debate with Norquist is how truly out of touch with ordinary people he really is.

This is a person who in the face of $4.50 gasoline and $40 billion in ExxonMobil profits tells us that we should give away more policy goodies to the oil companies. This is a person who in the face of polls showing the public thinks the tax system is fundamentally unfair in the wake of the Bush tax cuts, says we should nonetheless push forward with even more regressive tax cuts. This is a person who in the face of massive budget deficits and social service cuts, says we should slash corporate tax rates, even though our effective corporate tax rate is among the lowest in the industrialized world. This is, in short, a person who is so insulated inside the Beltway and so coddled by the Big Money interests that have financed his career that he quite literally has no idea that there's an uprising going on throughout the country - and no official photos of him with statues of Ronald Reagan can hide that reality. He seems genuinely unaware of the trends on both the Right and Left that I report on in my book.

Of course, I praise Norquist at the beginning of the debate for his tactical brilliance in building a movement (and he is featured in my book because of this). The pressure he has put on Republicans from the Right has been remarkably effective - and progressives could learn a thing or two about the value of a more confrontational attitude towards Democrats on our own issues for our own uprising. That said, I think this debate shows that the conservative movement is indeed buckling under the bankruptcy of its ideas. And as we continue building our uprising and exposing their fake populism, we are getting closer to the truly exponential change that has marked other uprising moments in American history.

Listen to the full debate here, and then go pick up THE UPRISING at Amazon.com or through your local independent bookstore. Also, make sure to check the book tour schedule at www.davidsirota.com/uprising - I hope to see you on the trail!

This is an ongoing series from the national tour for THE UPRISING. You can order The Uprising at Amazon.com or through your local independent bookstore.