Bushie writes Open Letter to Obama, encourages Obama to be even more Republican than he already is

The caving is by design, and so is the wingnut slide further to the right of anything that makes sense.

Alright, so the letter is not as blunt as I am. But, that’s how this reads to me. To appear in Sunday morning’s NY Times, an open letter to President Obama by Bushie N. Gregory Mankiw titled “How to Break Bread With the Republicans“:

DEAR President Obama:

Sorry to bother you. I know you are busy. But I have the sense that you could use a few words of advice.

In a matter of days, Republicans will control the House of Representatives and have a larger voting bloc in the Senate. If economic policy is to make any progress over the next two years, you really will have to be bipartisan. To do so, you’ll need to get inside the heads of the opposition.

I am here to help. As a sometime adviser to Republicans, I’d like to offer a few guidelines to understanding their approach to economic policy. Follow these rules of thumb and your job will be a lot easier.

Right. Well lucky for Obama it is not too difficult for him to get inside the heads of Republicans since he’s essentially one himself in everything but name. But, I’m sure he is ever so grateful for Mankiw’s pointers. I can picture Obama reading them with his chin peevishly up in the air. He’s got to be grateful for all the cover the right wing gives him to keep on telling the Democratic base to suck it up and quit whining about all the magnificent crumbs they are getting.

Mankiw’s letter continues with his first Rule of Thumb Dumb:

FOCUS ON THE LONG RUN Charles L. Schultze, chief economist for former President Jimmy Carter, once proposed a simple test for telling a conservative economist from a liberal one. Ask each to fill in the blanks in this sentence with the words “long” and “short”: “Take care of the ____ run and the ____ run will take care of itself.”

Liberals, Mr. Schultze suggested, tend to worry most about short-run policy. And, indeed, starting with the stimulus package in early 2009, your economic policy has focused on the short-run problem of promoting recovery from the financial crisis and economic downturn.

But now it is time to pivot and address the long-term fiscal problem. In last year’s proposed budget, you projected a rising debt-to-G.D.P. ratio for as far as the eye can see. That is not sustainable. Conservatives believe that if the nation credibly addresses this long-term problem, such a change will bolster confidence and have positive short-run effects as well.

Fortunately, the fiscal commission you appointed assembled a good set of spending and tax reforms. The question you now face is whether to embrace their sensible but politically difficult proposals in your own budget.

WTF? “Liberals tend to worry most about short-run policy…” While what? Republicans focus on the long run? Funny that, I seem to remember 8 years of Bush-Cheney not planning for a damn thing, be it when it came to national security, the wars, the economy, natural disasters, infrastructure, the environment, energy, etc. That’s largely how we got in the mess we are in today, with Bush-Cheney allowing 9-11 to take our eyes off the prize and let our standard of living fall by the wayside, though Obama sure has yet to answer the call of getting us out of any of this either.

Second Rule of Dumb:

THINK AT THE MARGIN Republicans worry about the adverse incentive effects of high marginal tax rates. A marginal tax rate is the additional tax that a person pays on an extra dollar of income.

From this perspective, many of the tax cuts you have championed look more like tax increases. For example, the so-called Making Work Pay Tax Credit is phased out for individuals making more than $75,000 a year. That is, because many Americans lose some of the credit as they earn more, the credit reduces their incentive to work. In effect, it is an increase in their marginal tax rate.

From the standpoint of incentives, a tax cut is worthy of its name only if it increases the reward for earning additional income.

Republicans are something else with the way they worry about “the reward for earning additional income” but not about unemployment benefits and benefits for the 9-11 first responders. I’m starting a new tag for this kind of crap: Culture of life, my ass. It’s always been a culture of No Profit Left Behind for these social darwinists.

Third Rule of Dumb:

STOP TRYING TO SPREAD THE WEALTH Ever since your famous exchange with Joe the Plumber, it has been clear that you believe that the redistribution of income is a crucial function of government. A long philosophical tradition supports your view. It includes John Rawls’s treatise “A Theory of Justice,” which concludes that the main goal of public policy should be to transfer resources to those at the bottom of the economic ladder.

Many Republicans, however, reject this view of the state. From their perspective, it is not the proper role of government to fix the income distribution in an attempt to achieve some utopian vision of fairness. They believe, instead, that in a free society, people make money when they produce goods and services that others value, and that, as a result, what they earn is rightfully theirs.

This view also has a long intellectual tradition. The libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick has suggested revising the old leftist slogan “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” to “From each as they choose, to each as they are chosen.”

Obama is not a socialist, he is a corporate stooge. Even Ron Paul gets that much.

Fourth Rule of Dumb:

SPREAD OPPORTUNITY INSTEAD Despite their rejection of spreading the wealth, Republicans recognize that times are hard for the less fortunate. Their solution is not to adjust the slices of the economic pie, as if they had been doled out by careless cutting, but to expand the pie by providing greater opportunity for all.

Since the mid-1970s, the gap between rich and poor has grown considerably. One of best analyses of this long-term trend is by the Harvard economics professors Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz in their book, “The Race Between Education and Technology.” The authors conclude that widening inequality is largely a symptom of the educational system’s failure to provide enough skilled workers to keep up with the ever increasing demand.

Educational reform, therefore, should be a high priority. To be sure, this is easier said than done. But research suggests that one key is getting rid of bad teachers. In a recent study, the economist Eric Hanushek says that “replacing the bottom 5 to 8 percent of teachers with average teachers could move the U.S. near the top of international math and science rankings.”

Oh, so we’re back to this. Education reform is the place where Obama and the rightwing are open about their shared agenda, after all.

Last Rule of Dumb:

DON’T MAKE THE OPPOSITION YOUR ENEMY Last month, when you struck your tax deal with Republican leaders, you said you were negotiating with “hostage takers.” In the future, please choose your metaphors more carefully.

Republicans are not terrorists. They are not the enemy. Like you, they love their country, and they want what is best for the American people. They just have a different judgment about what that is.

Let me propose a New Year’s resolution for you: Have a beer with a Republican at least once a week. The two of you won’t necessarily agree, but you might end up with a bit more respect for each other’s differences.

Gah. I am so tired of this political theatre. I’m going to rant in the form of my own open letter.

Dear President Obama,

I know you won’t follow my suggestions, but here they are.

1. FOCUS ON THE LEAST OF THESE. It’s a very Christian thing for you to do, since you seem obsessed with convincing the zombie class of your religiosity.
2. THINK AT THE MARGINS OF SOCIETY, NOT AT THE MARGINS OF PROFIT. You were elected by human beings, not dollar signs, although I can see why with all the heavy marketing and big money that went into your campaign, you might get confused.
3. STOP USING THE WINGNUTS WHO SHRIEK ABOUT SOCIALISM AS COVER TO GET AWAY WITH THE WEALTH TRANSFER TO WALL STREET AS IF IT IS SOME KIND OF COMPROMISE THAT BENEFITS MAIN STREET. It’s bad karma. You can finagle on this one all you want, but the American people have already figured out you’re just a bagel. (I never tire of that finagle/bagel line from Chicago‘s “Razzle Dazzle.”)
4. DO SPREAD OPPORTUNITY. Using charter schools as a catch-all solution to the education system is not spreading opportunity. It is a backdoor to privatization. Don’t listen to Wall Street on education. Listen to what educators say. Where charter schools work, study why they worked. And, where charter schools do not work, let an honest discussion of those failures happen. And, until we can solve the big picture problem of our education system, let’s focus on the opportunities we can spread to workers right now. That means jobs and a strengthened social safety net, instead of more expensive and unnecessary war, less civil liberties, less opportunities to work, and less benefits.
5. DO MAKE GOP CORPORATE CONSERVATISM THE ENEMY. It is a failed ideology. You and Bush have already proved it. You need to do what you should have done when you were elected. Lead on something genuinely populist and socially democratic, as if your own well-being depended on it. You have nothing left to lose, though you probably foolishly believe otherwise.