Beware the CBPP
Robert Samuelson mounts a strong challenge to Charles Krauthammer in the “worst major newspaper columnist” sweepstakes:
A second myth is that lobbying favors the wealthy, including corporations, because only they can afford the cost. As a result, government favors the rich and ignores the poor and middle class. Actually, the facts contradict that. Sure, the wealthy extract privileges from government, but mainly they’re its servants. The richest 1 percent of Americans pay 28 percent of federal taxes, says the Congressional Budget Office. About 60 percent of the $3 trillion federal budget goes for payments to individuals—mostly the poor and middle class. You can argue that those burdens and benefits should be greater, but if the rich were all powerful, their taxes would be much lower. Similarly, the poor and middle class do have powerful advocates. To name three: AARP for retirees; the AFL-CIO for unionized workers; the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities for the poor.
Yes, that’s right — the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has as much or more power in DC as do the wealthy or large corporations.
People who read the Post’s op-ed pages and take what’s printed their seriously are going to be worse-informed than people who leave the paper alone. It’s a serious problem if you want people to read the paper.
43 Responses to “Beware the CBPP”
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December 15th, 2008 at 3:23 pm
Instead of taking it, as they’re, seriously, It would be better if they took it with their grain of salt. Although they should also be watching there sodium intake.
December 15th, 2008 at 3:25 pm
Just so I’m clear, the problem is that the 3rd example he listed is not a powerful organization? Which renders his argument uncompelling in total?
December 15th, 2008 at 3:29 pm
Doesn’t the top one percent pay a high percentage of income tax because they actually make such a high percentage of income? And if so, why is that never mentioned?
Yeah, I know the answer.
December 15th, 2008 at 3:31 pm
the problem is that the 3rd example he listed is not a powerful organization?
The problem is that none of the three specifically advocate for the interests of the poor and/or middle class.
December 15th, 2008 at 3:39 pm
I doubt that any of those organizations write the legislation that Congress votes on without reading. Is there a revolving door between the congress and AARP? Think not.
December 15th, 2008 at 3:40 pm
Yes, that’s right — the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has as much or more power in DC as do the wealthy or large corporations…
Well, the AARP certainly does. My own view is it’s neither the poor nor the wealthy that have the most influence in the aggregate (sure, the rich have the most influence as individuals), but rather the middle class. The various third rails of our political economy (SS, Medicare, MID, low gasoline taxes, etc.) are largely geared toward the middle class.
December 15th, 2008 at 3:51 pm
Robert Samuleson:
“You can argue that those burdens and benefits should be greater, but if the rich were all powerful, their taxes would be much lower.”
As Obama told the Wall Street Journal during the campaign:
“We have drastically increased productivity since 1995, and there was the theory that if you increase productivity enough some of these problems of living standards would solve themselves. But what we’ve seen is rising productivity, rising corporate profits but flat-lining or even declining wages and incomes for the average family.
What that says is that it’s going to be important for us to pay attention to not only growing the pie, which is always critical, but also some attention to how it is sliced. I do not believe that those two things — fair distribution and robust economic growth — are mutually exclusive.”
Also union membership is decling in the private sector and has been for a while as a result of a conscious effort of anti-union forces. In other words, Samuelson is full of shit.
December 15th, 2008 at 3:55 pm
There are some other contenders: Dennis Praeger, Mona Charen, James Pinkerton, Jeff Jacoby, Richard Cohen, David Brooks, Bill Kristol, Jonah Goldberg, O’Reilly, Dick Morris, ad nauseum
December 15th, 2008 at 4:12 pm
Also – it is patently false that 60% of the federal budget goes to payments to poor individuals. I am assuming that he is including social security payments in this figure (which go to everyone regardless of income and which should be excluded from these types of arguments). And the truth of the matter is that we spend more per year servicing the national debt than we do on true social safety net programs like food stamps and welfare.
December 15th, 2008 at 4:14 pm
You spelled “their” wrong.
December 15th, 2008 at 4:31 pm
“You can argue that those burdens and benefits should be greater, but if the rich were all powerful, their taxes would be much lower.”
with this foolishness as the main point of evidence in his article, I wonder exactly what taxation would show that the rich were in fact all powerful? Any tax rate greater than 0% would still lend itself to his argument. On the other hand, if one were to present tax rates from any previous time in modern american history, the comparison of those rates to current ones would actually prove the converse, that clearly the rich are setting the agenda!
December 15th, 2008 at 4:36 pm
This foolish arguments always leave out the tidbit that capital gains taxes form the bulk of the tax on the rich and they are much lower.
Sillyness and distraction, all. Wealthy don’t pay much income tax, they pay capital gains tax.
December 15th, 2008 at 4:56 pm
The wealthy aren’t all powerful, otherwise we’d still have a very limited voting franchise, and nothing that cut in on their action would see the light of day.
Instead, we recognize that the wealthy see their interests over-represented in Washington, for exactly the reasons Robert Reich and Barack Obama have written about.
A better statement would have been that “only well-funded individuals and organizations can afford lobbying”. Most of these represent the interests of the wealthy, but being as life is imperfect, it’s not to the total exclusion of all others.
Also, the wealthy do pay a large fraction of the taxes, and the reason you don’t see them moaning more about it is because the freight they’re paying ain’t all that bad, relative to their overall ability to pay. The people who publicly piss and moan the most about taxes are in the upper-middle brackets, some of who think that it’s the taxes that are holding them back from hitting the big time.
December 15th, 2008 at 5:55 pm
What happened to the Washington Post? I think it’s Bob Woodward. That guy is evil. He brought down Nixon, but he is Nixon! Sally Quinn is no day at the beach either. It’s a shame to see a good paper go bad. Maybe the Washington times will become more liberal.
December 15th, 2008 at 6:24 pm
Admittedly, Samuelson and Krauthammer are pretty pathetic but so are Tom Friedman and Maureen Dowd. Scotty Reston and Walter Lippman must turn over in their graves seeing their replacements at the New York Times and the Washington Post.
December 15th, 2008 at 6:53 pm
If you were to ask which of the two men would more welcome a fascist state, Herr Doktor K would take the cake, or be a “shoe-in” as we say in Iraq.
December 15th, 2008 at 7:24 pm
@10 cryptic ned
actually he spelled “their” correctly, but he used the wrong homonym.
“what’s printed their”? er, no gracie. what’s printed there.
December 15th, 2008 at 7:49 pm
the people to blame for this, of course, are the idiot son publishers, donald graham and pinch sulzberger. no one makes them sign checks to the clowns who populate the bulk of their op-ed pages.
as for samuelson, he is a joke; the idea that high-income individuals are low on power in america is beyond deranged. it’s a form of dishonesty that results from being too clever by half….
December 15th, 2008 at 8:25 pm
It would be useful if you made some attempt to explain why Samuelson is misguided. Not all of your readers think like you. Some might even agree with Samuelson. A little snark is good fun, but there is remarkably little content in this post.
December 15th, 2008 at 9:03 pm
THERE.
Chalk this one up to the “our children isn’t learning” file. Yeesh, it hurts.
December 16th, 2008 at 10:17 am
A vile slander on Chuckles. He is the worst and always will be; neither Samuelson nor any of the other challengers put forward can lay a glove on him.
December 16th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
“You can argue that those burdens and benefits should be greater, but if the rich were all powerful, their taxes would be much lower.”
This is actually an interesting claim. If the rich were all powerful in some normal sense it wouldn’t be a democracy at all, it would be an oligarchy. And we wouldn’t be talking about lobbying. But what we are actually talking about is whether our democracy favors the poor a lot, or the rich a lot, specifically through lobbying. So you could look at is at a very general level, like Samuelson does, and notice that the taxes on the rich in the past generation have gone down while their economic fortunes have skyrocketed. or you could look at it issue by issue and wonder how something like estate tax repeal which benefits a very small group of people who stand to gain vast unearned wealth, should dominate conservative politics in Congress.
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