The Next Fight For The 99%

By Isaiah J. Poole
December 23, 2011 - 8:45am ET
http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2011125123/next-fight-99

Consider House Speaker John Boehner's U-turn on a
temporary extension of a payroll tax holiday a temporary
retreat. The tea-party Republicans who lead Boehner show
no signs of actually moderating their agenda, and that
will make next year's fight to continue the payroll tax
for a full year no less intense than this week's nail-
biter.

We're going to have to keep the pressure on
congressional Republicans. When it comes to anything
related to the economy, they are still in the hostage-
taking business. They will still make unacceptable
demands on behalf of their conservative and corporate
overlords in exchange for the ability of ordinary
Americans to have the wherewithal to make it from week
to week.

It pays to remember how we got to this drama in the
first place. For that the House Republicans themselves
have given us a helpful guide: the resolution they
passed on Monday affirming their support for a one-year
payroll tax extension, continuation of extended
unemployment benefits, and forestalling for two years a
deep cut in Medicare reimbursements to doctors.

That resolution demands that in exchange for this that
we "reduce spending from areas throughout the Federal
Government, including a freeze on congressional
salaries" and acquiescence on three important business
priorities: (A) final approval of the Keystone XL
pipeline; (B) expensing for capital assets placed in
service in 2012; and (C) drafting new regulations for
boilers that are achievable and cost-effective."

The first demand will undercut the whole reason for the
payroll tax holiday, which is to add demand to the
economy through increased spending. The Economic Policy
Institute's Andrew Fieldhouse wrote that Republican
proposals to cut federal spending "would result in
roughly 280,000 job losses-ironic, given that the
purpose of the payroll tax cut is to create jobs.
Someone should remind the GOP that the purpose of a pay-
for is to offset the cost of a policy, not its impact."

Plus, budget cuts in some agencies will actually
increase the deficit, not reduce it. Imagine fewer
Internal Revenue Service auditors catching tax fraud, or
fewer Medicare investigators catching overbilling by
doctors and hospitals.

Brian Beutler at Talking Points Memo pointed out that
the payroll tax break, unemployment benefits and
Medicare "doc fix" together "cost a couple hundred
billion dollars over the course of a year, and
offsetting them via cuts to an already constrained
budget is hard. ... In the end, depending upon whom you
ask, Senate Dem and GOP negotiators got within $60
billion and $90 billion of the total cost - but they
couldn't bridge the gap."

But Democratic leaders have pretty much conceded on the
larger frame of this issue by abandoning the one "pay
for" that made the most sense: a surtax of about 2
percent on incomes in excess of $1 million. That would
have placed the burden of offsetting the cost of these
measures on the one segment of the population with the
capacity to bear it-the one segment whose incomes have
skyrocketed over the past decade as their tax burdens
have hit record lows.

Democratic leaders and the White House have completely
caved on the Keystone XL pipeline. By allowing language
in the two-month extension that requires the
administration to make an environmental ruling on the
pipeline, which would run from Canada to the Gulf Coast,
Democrats allowed Republicans to get away with one of
their repeated attempts to have Congress dictate the
terms of administrative actions of the executive branch.
Earlier, the House passed legislation that would
essentially strip the executive branch of its ability to
make independent decisions on environmental policy based
on expert, scientific analysis, and instead impose the
whims of Congress (and the corporate lobbyists who own
Congress) on the process. It is bad enough that the
Keystone XL pipeline will only create a small number of
jobs during its construction and is intended for
exporting Canadian tar sands oil overseas; little if any
oil would end up being used in the U.S. But the pipeline
is a conservative nose in the tent of congressional
micromanagement of the executive branch-a highly
dangerous trend.

Which brings us to the innocuous sounding directive that
the feds draft "new regulations for boilers that are
achievable and cost-effective." That's in response to
the Environmental Protection Agency's anticipated
ruling, which finally came out earlier this week, on
reducing emissions from coal-fired power plants.

David Roberts at Grist writes, "There are still dozens
of coal plants in the U.S. that don't meet the pollution
standards in the original 1970 Clean Air Act, much less
the 1990 amendments. These old, filthy jalopies from the
early 20th century, mostly along the eastern seaboard
and scattered around the Midwest, are responsible for a
vastly disproportionate amount of the air pollution
generated by the electricity sector in America,
including most of the mercury. They have been
environmentalists' bête noire for over 30 years now."

The EPA's new ruling would finally force these plants to
adapt new technology to operate more cleanly or shut
down altogether. The Republican directive is to keep
these plants open and force no consequential changes in
the amount of mercury and other pollutants released by
these plants other than what the industry itself deems
"achievable and cost-effective."

So this is the deal the conservatives in the House, and
their counterparts in the Senate, are offering the
American people: You want an extra $40 or so in your
biweekly paycheck? You're going to have to accept a
crippled federal government (including federal workers
who won't see a raise until at least 2014), a pipeline
that puts environmentally sensitive parts of the country
at risk for only a pittance of jobs, and the continued
operation of outdated, coal-fired power plants that spew
toxic chemicals into the air breathed by tens of
millions of Americans.

It's hard to have a merry Christmas when this is the
kind of fight that lies ahead. The good news is that
Christmas does remind us of the basic values we're
fighting for, that in the end it's people who matter
most. We can use this time to fortify ourselves for the
fight ahead.

___________________________________________

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