Obama-itis

I have a friend who is incapable of saying anything against Obama. It is truly astonishing. He loves Obama’s budget proposals. I hate them.

Right now the media is awash with breathless articles arguing that Obama has a great opportunity to ‘do a deal’ with the Republicans. After all he is now ‘concerned with his legacy’, and the GOP is, apparently, suddenly concerned that it has to do something vaguely constructive in order to look responsible in 2016. It’s their only hope of winning – to look like a responsible party! Who knew?

This marvelous confluence of short term desires is a perfect storm for those professional Kremlin watchers who misinterpret the minute details of Washingtonian infighting as some sort of geopolitical grand strategy.

Surely, they say, we can all break the dreaded Washington deadlock now. The time for progress has arrived!

Really?

Let’s keep this short.

A major plank in Obama’s budget proposal is that he is willing to trade a major tax break for big business in return for a one time windfall tax on foreign earnings they repatriate. The tax break being a heavy cut in the tax rate they incur going forward. For ever.

Where in here is a compromise?

It looks, to me, like a sell out. That foreign income ought to have been taxed anyway. And even though our corporate tax rate is very high by international standards, so are the tax wheezes and dodges that diminish that rate to next to zero when it comes to writing actual tax payment checks. Our biggest businesses pay hardly any tax. Why cut their tax rate? And why is it a ‘victory’ to get them to pay a tax they already owe?

I think that the allure of the faintest glimmer that we might invest something in our rotten infrastructure – which is what Obama is proposing that windfall corporate tax is used for – has confused my friend and his media buddies.

Think about it: we are so incapable of investing in essential infrastructure because of the pressure of right wing extremist opposition to all things governmental, that we have to lower – permanently – our revenue from taxes, in order to induce a modicum of sanity.

That is not compromise. It is capitulation.

As a nation these United States have become so dysfunctional and so beholden to right wing economic ideas that we radically underinvest in infrastructure. Our roads, ports, airports, railways, bridges, schools, and so on are decaying rapidly. Our internet services are deplorable and high cost. Our health care system sucks. We have spent the past three decades avoiding investment in order to give ourselves unsustainable tax cuts. We have gutted the future. We have deprived future generations of a world class base from which to compete.

We cannot fix it because infrastructure spending is an inherently governmental task, and ever since Reagan we have been led to believe that the government ought to be bled dry of cash. ‘Starving the beast’ has been the dominant right wing strategy since the old actor lied to us, and to this day the notion of raising taxes to pay for some of these services is an anathema to most voters.

So, in sallies Obama proposing to cave in on another battle front in order to appear above the petty fray.

With Democrats like him we don’t need Republicans.

But my friend persists in the adulation.

I have no idea why.