PMC Commentary

And he came from a log cabin

From the resonant depths of populist profundity, here, reports the Hill, is the penetrating advice that Wisconsin's Rep. Paul Ryan is hearing from the cosmic barkers of democratic hooey: "Stick with broad themes; don’t be negative; and smile and look like Ronald Reagan."

He can do that tonight. In fact, I could do that tonight. The hell, you say, you could do that, too. In which preposterous cases, we're all authentic contenders for the presidency of the United States.

They kid us not. Ryan could "be on the shortlist for vice president," says former GWB and McCain adviser Mark McKinnon; indeed a few splendid minutes of galloping simplicity with a million-dollar smile and the obscure Wisconsin congressman "could easily be presidential material somewhere down in the future," he added.

Tom Jensen, of Public Policy Polling, agrees. "Tuesday’s speech," paraphrases the Hill of Jensen's gushing, "could vault the Wisconsin lawmaker into contention for the 2012 presidential race."

And GOP "strategist" Ron Bonjean, an early identifier and molder of former Speaker Dennis Hastert's sparkling charisma, chimes in with a similar observation: "If he knocks it out of the park, some within the party faithful may want him to explore a run."

But enough with the superficialities. Here's McKinnon again, this time on the substantive guts of that which Paul Ryan should spill: "He should not get mired in the details of the roadmap, but provide a clear and compelling conservative economic argument building on — but contrasting with — the president’s proposal."

That elegant advice is presented perhaps less vividly than we'd like, but what I think it means is this: Without conspicuously gainsaying what the popular president just said -- that being let's move forward through public-private cooperation, to be reported on MSNBC as let's lean forward -- Ryan should suggest our return to the macroeconomic dark ages, which, QED, will somehow skip us right back through to that ancient, golden age of what never was.

In other words, a lollapalooza of enchanting fantasy, charming humbug, and the grossest of reactionary misdirection. 

You know what? I might just defy my viewing tradition of 'Gilligan' reruns in lieu of ritualistic theatre and watch this SOTU address after all. Because if I don't, how could I ever follow the opposition's exciting plot twists in "SOTU: the Sequel"?

And of course there's tea time with Michele Bachmann, piling farce upon ritual and rubbish. Then enter the Marx Brothers, "A Night at the Opera."

OMG another SOTU

I can't recall the last State of the Union address I watched in full, in part, or in any level of consciousness.

Eight hideous years of George W. Bush intervened and constituted a supremely justifiable avoidance of my presumed civic duty, but I cannot tell a lie: I can't recall the last one I watched mostly because I detest SOTU speeches and don't watch them. I instead read or recoup lost sleep or watch a 'Gilligan' rerun or find something else on the tube of such superior intellectual value.

SOTU addresses. OMG. Their endless applause sessions and cam-scans of who's who and who's being nice and who's being naughty and of course there are again those soaring presidential itemizations of utterly indispensable projects for the coming year that will never see the light of day and everyone knows it. 

It's a damn shame Woodrow Wilson revived the long-dead and ignominious practice of reading the silly things aloud and in person.

Mitch McConnell's big bet

"With all due respect to our Democratic friends, any time they want to spend, they call it investment, so I think you will hear the president talk about investing a lot Tuesday night," said Mitch McConnell on 'Fox News Sunday.' "This is not a time to be looking at pumping up government spending in very many areas."

I didn't hear it, I only read the quote. Did McConnell really say "our Democratic friends"? He actually used the proper adjectival form, not the taunting, McCarthyite usage? Was that a slip of the GOP's reptilian tongue? Or does McConnell speak with respect and dignity only on Fox, just to show the loyal troops that he and his leadership ilk are no adolescents.

Those questions, I think, are well worth the digression, assuming McConnell really did say "Democratic," not "Democrat." Of course he might have said the former merely in deference to President Obama's call for civility in language, whose definition, by definition, would include maturity. In that case, such a temperamental growth-spurt will prove temporary, and the old "Democrat friends" and "Democrat Party" will soon be back.

Still, any self-imposed hairline crack in the GOP's customary armor of infantile taunts should be saluted. Any competent child psychology text will emphasize that good behavior should always be rewarded. So let's give Mitch a pat on the head.

Digression over and out, which leaves us only the predictably disgraceful: "This is not a time to be looking at pumping up government spending in very many areas."

Unclear is what McConnell meant by the less than absolutist "very many areas," though unsurprisingly I suspect the phrase was a fiscal escape clause for defense spending. (Over at "Meet the Press," Eric Cantor was pretending that it, too, is on the chopping block, although not a Republican pol alive, except Ron Paul, would actually entertain such a profoundly reasonable and long-overdue budget cut.)

That aside, the GOP's perpetual -- which is to say perpetuating -- ignorance of modern economics is a public-policy instance of recovery-killing criminal negligence, since for the last 80 years it's been known in both papers and practice that this is precisely the time not only to be looking at pumping up government spending, but pumping the bejesus out of it. Less spending now means a much slower recovery and what's more, in the longer term, a much higher national debt because of persistently lower federal revenues.

But you know that. And of course McConnell knows that, which in public-policy terms is what poisons his rhetoric to the wilfully negligent point of political criminality.

What, McConnell care? Pshaw. As the Atlantic's Joshua Green observed in his excellent profile of the Senate minority leader, "McConnell has always been a Republican, though not the kind for whom ideology holds any great importance. What he believes in is winning."

In brief, McConnell has little if any ideological attachment to the long-discredited notion of tighter budgets in leaner times. He does believe -- and not without empirical reason -- that his party can bamboozle a good 51 percent of the electorate into wrongly believing just that.

So a quicker recovery and job creation and higher future revenues be damned, as long as Obama gets the blame. That's McConnell's gamble. Yet there might be a deliciously boomeranging joker in his deck: It might be the GOP that the electorate blames in a slower-recovery year of 2012, and not the more popular Obama and his Democrat friends.

The Good, the Bad, and the Uygur

From Politico:

Adam Green, the cofounder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee ... applauded MSNBC’s decision to move O’Donnell to 8 pm., Ed Schultz to 10 p.m. and Cenk Uygur to 6 p.m.

"The newly announced line up, including the addition of Cenk Uygur, consists of people who will undoubtedly continue Keith Olbermann’s legacy of holding power to account," he said. "But there’s a gnawing feeling among many MSNBC viewers that Keith blazed the trail for these other good hosts, Keith wasn’t ready to leave yet, and an important leader is now being sidelined involuntarily."

Two observations.

First, media-insider intelligence reports are saying that Olbermann was indeed ready to leave; he wanted out because he also wanted to establish his own "media empire," such as Arianna Huffington's or Glenn Beck's. Self-interest, Mr. Green, don't ever discount self-interest -- which, if those media reports are true, Olbermann elevated far above the interests of his loyal viewers.

Second -- more of a relief than an observation, I suppose -- the desolate addition of the inexhaustibly sanctimonious and politically illiterate Cenk Uygur means the happy addition of another hour of uninterrupted reading time to my day. Thank you, MSNBC.

Nostalgic utopias

I'm guilty of it, indeed we're all guilty of it; by virtue of our editorializing humanity we tend to look back on a scrubbed, sterilized, nostalgic past, one whose barbs are blunted by pains never felt and whose storybook sepia warmly welcomes with arms of simplicity never experienced.

Yes, I plead guilty, as any historicizing commentator-as-defendant should. And I've no doubt that Frank Rich, upon assuming the witness chair under oath, would spill his distortionist guilt just as freely. But seat him in front of a word processor, under deadline, and his deeper internal restraints take flight. According to a rather disturbing trend of indignant generalization in Rich's Sunday columns: Then, good; Today, bad.

Grasping for poignant metaphor, this morning Mr. Rich enlightens us with cinematic tales of the ruggedly virtuous Old West versus unspeakably corrupt modernity. To wit ...

"Talk about Two Americas. Look at 'The Social Network'" -- described by Rich as an immorality tale of "the ability of the powerful and privileged to manipulate the system [and] the collapse of loyalty as a prized American virtue" -- "after seeing 'True Grit'" -- bring in the angels, for here we're exalted by a "clear-cut sense of morality and justice, even when the justice is rough" -- "and you’ll see two different civilizations, as far removed from each other in ethos as Silicon Valley and Monument Valley....

"When Americans think of the law these days," reckons Rich, "they often think of a system that can easily be gamed by the rich and the powerful."

They do indeed, Mr. Rich. Just as "they" thought precisely that in "those days" as well, when the rich and powerful of the Railroad Trust and the Copper Trust and the Sugar Trust, ad infinitum, gamed and ruled the "system."

Which was also a time that even the incurably cynical H.L. Mencken looked back on and smiled on as something approaching a sociopolitical paradise, before came the abnormal corruption of his times.

"The legislature," wrote Mencken in the American Mercury, 1930, was once "the creature of the people." Yet, he lamented, "Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion; they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner. The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle -- a mere counter in a grotestue and knavish game."

This backward, nostalgic frogleaping in time could extend to the first instance of some 6th-century B.C. Mesopotamian farmer suspecting that his neighbor was getting that newfangled irrigation system only because the neighbor's wife was shtupping the tribal chief or the tribal chief had scored a higher kickback of grain.

Doubtless, if he had known of them, the farmer would have longed for the simpler, uncorrupted days of the Neanderthals.

Don't mistake me: I regard Frank Rich as a superb writer, of often keen insights, who invokes the abstractions of our better angels merely as an exhortative device. That kind of near-utopian voice in the public arena is needed; I've never denied that, although it happens not to be my cup of political tea.

Would that Mr. Rich, however, at least occasionally acknowledge the inescapable complications forever with us in his rather black-and-white worlds of then and now.

'Countdown' and Olbermann: A Special Comment

OK, 27 minutes after Keith Olbermann's final sign-off MSNBC ran an Olbermann-Lean Forward (huh?) promo - which pretty much exemplified the tawdry manner in which this squabbling couple handled their inevitable divorce.

No one really knows the "inside story" of this public kerfuffle. It's too soon to take sides. So of course the right wingers already have things sorted out: it was all Olbermann's fault, "difficult," thin-skinned, wildly radical-leftist bad boy that he is; while progressives immediately mined their conspiratorial obsession-in-waiting: corporate-dog Comcast had its sinister way with Truth.

Like I said, no one has a reliable clue, hence most everyone is pretty sure as to what "went down." I'll beg off from the certainty game, though, thank you very much, and merely venture a prejudiced thought or two about Olbermann's performance on "Countdown."

On balance, he did an admirable job, especially when injecting some humor into the characteristically humorless progressive narrative. Most stereotypes originate from some authentic source, and there are few truths like the excessively somber, gloomy and dreary progressive personality, which typically sees America's End Times behind every story (or rumor) of deviously wicked, "corporatist," media-raving, military-industrial encroachment.

True, Olbermann played to the apocalyptic crowd, whose immense satisfaction revealed itself in Olbermann's ratings. Throughout much of his program, however, he presented our inexorable doom in a relatively light-hearted way. Bravo. Good for him.

But those "Special Comments" -- oh dear, those over-every-top, blindingly self-righteous, embarrassingly unhinged segments of unparalleled Olbermann virtue. In time he learned to tone them down, a trifle at least, but their earlier primal shocks never again permitted much enjoyment. In short, he overplayed Ed Murrow's deliciously searing cards, right down to laughably mimicking his posture.  

One other gripe. Olbermann too often played the far-right game of self-examination-be-damned. On his final night, for instance, as the ironic gods would have it, he aired a video ad by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (an organ of the disingenuous BoldProgressives.org), which grossly misrepresented South Carolina's Sen. Lindsey Graham as having urged an immediate hike in Social Security's age eligibility. Now there's an abundance of issues on which to honestly attack Graham, so why would one risk credibility by conjuring a false attack? Anyway, Newsweek's scrupulous Jonathan Alter, who was Olbermann's guest at the time, tried to note the ad's seething disingenuity; Olbermann cut him off, yeah, yeah, enough of that, let's move on, we don't criticize our own kind here, even if our own kind sounds remarkably like Glenn Beck.

The upside, to my mind, of Olbermann's cancellation, or flight, is the primetime elevation of Lawrence O'Donnell's show to 8 p.m. Eastern. O'Donnell is a grownup, he's politically experienced (which is what generally spawns political grownupness), he's ruggedly and pragmatically realistic, and he's willing to invite, host, debate and thereby devastate leading right-wing voices, which serves Olbermann's progressive cause far more effectively than Olbermann's programmatic formula of entertaining only the virtuously likeminded.

Still, I'll miss Olbermann, particularly his humor. I may not light candles and wear only black and grieve lo these long winter nights, but to those who do, be it unquestionably known: he'll be back, somewhere, just as soon as he gains his contractual freedom.

Better a glockenspiel

Timothy Egan, eloquent portraitist:

Texas Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert has proposed a bill to allow fellow members to carry firearms into the Capitol Building. Gohmert has enough trouble carrying a coherent thought onto the House floor. God forbid he would try to bring a Glock to work.

Boiling point

The latest New York Times/CBS News poll reveals that "Nearly two-thirds of Americans choose higher payroll taxes for Medicare and Social Security over reduced benefits in either program." But -- and there's always a but -- "a majority [also] believes it should not be necessary for them to pay higher taxes to bridge the shortfall between what the government spends and what it takes in."

Hence the towering demagoguery of the political right in Congress and the upcoming, monolithic disinformation campaigns by its presidential candidates: "We can cut our way out of this."

In the more respectable conservative eras of yesteryear -- when, that is, conservatives understood that "fiscal" in "fiscal responsibility" meant fiscal, both expenditures and revenue, and that "responsibility" in "fiscal responsibility" meant responsibility, of the responsible kind -- something of an unpleasant consensus, though a consensus nevertheless, to raise taxes would have gelled among fiscally responsible conservatives because, well, they were fiscally responsible.

They of course would not have entertained the pernicious act of hiking taxes in a recession, nor would they have entertained the colossally imbecile act of actually slashing spending in a recession. "I am now a Keynesian in economics," said Nixon in one of his rare moments of honest engagement, however he could say that only because his surrounding Republican Party had not yet gone hopelessly demagogic and disinformational and downright insane.  

Anyway, having battened down those hatches with indifferent abandon and magnificent success, the contemporary GOP now espies yet another opportunity to exploit electoral ambivalence. "Americans’ sometimes contradictory impulses on spending and taxes suggest the political crosscurrents facing both parties," observes the Times. Yet those currents are of asymmetrical force, and the GOP knows it.

When asked -- merely asked, mind you -- the American voter will always volunteer a warm and thoughtful exuberance for higher taxes, if he's told the alternative is that his elders will be forced to select among faith-healers for good health and Purina's assorted varieties for dinner. When Election Day arrives, however, he'll invariably vote for the clown who skewered in 30-second ads that other fellow who was so indelicate as to suggest that fiscal responsibility entails fiscal responsibility.

And in that, no doubt, there lies a central and broad Democratic challenge of voter education, as Republicans persist in their massive disinformation campaign of "We can cut our way out of this." As always, House Republicans have overplayed their hand, making the Democratic challenge a bit softer; they've served up such a mindless platter of fiscal carnage -- $2.5 trillion in spending cuts -- the horrendous shock of it all just might ignite spontaneous national enlightenment.

But the Dems can't count on that. So at some nearing point, Democrats must risk the most politically perilous of all political perils: They must tell the American voter the hellish truth of it all -- that taxes will have to go up. And Democrats might as well begin the softest of voter-education campaigns now, suggesting that politicians who indelicately entertain such thoughts are perhaps the very politicians we should value most.

"We want more"

Frank McCloud [H. Bogart]: He knows what he wants. Don't you, Rocco? ... He wants more. Don't you, Rocco?

Johnny Rocco [E.G. Robinson]: That's it! More. That's right, I want more!

McCloud: Will you ever get enough? Will you, Rocco? 

Rocco: Well, I never have. No, I guess I won't.

Now, from the 2011 version of "Key Largo," I give you the Republican Study Committee, that thuggish, tea-party-inspired majority of the House GOP, whose latest proposal, "calling for [federal] outlays to be slashed by $2.5 trillion over the next decade," would rain catastrophe on an "entire array of government programs, among them education, domestic security, transportation, law enforcement and medical research."

These highest of unrealistic, gutted-government expectations left even Speaker Boehner so politically panicked and thus emotionally crushed, he sent forth his only begotten, designated spin-spokesman to pat the Study Committee's head and essentially tell it to get lost:

"Our immediate goal is to cut spending to pre-bailout, pre-stimulus levels. That’s what we pledged, and that’s what we’ll fight for. But that will be the beginning, not the end."

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor also declared the unmistakable end of discussion by invoking only the vaguest beginning:

"I applaud the Republican Study Committee. I look forward to the discussion on reducing spending that our country so desperately needs."

But, insisted South Carolina's freshman congressman, Johnny Rocco Mick Mulvaney, "We want more."

And more I genuinely hope they get from the cowering leadership, just as fast as their little tea-partying feet can trample those who brung 'em.

Ideally, the Republican Study Committee's preposterous recommendation to reset the national clock to 1786 will remain in the political forefront long enough to permit the minority to hang it out to twist and agonize in the electoral wind.

Federal spending on "education, domestic security, transportation, law enforcement and medical research" -- gone. As would be, in time, the entitlement programs of Social Security and Medicare, because in those memorable, tea-partying words of Johnny Rocco Mick Mulvaney: "We want more."

John Huston's 1948 metaphor of obscured, political malignancies was a cinematically stunning retort of simple human decency. The greedsters, the reactionaries, the demagogues wanted more then, and though they got it in spades, it wasn't enough.

It never is. So they're back.

Come again, Ms. Romer?

I was struck -- nay, dumbstruck -- by this passage in Peter Baker's portrait of Obama's economic policies:

Obama would say his main criterion is finding what works. His approach to economic policy has been as much improvisational as ideological, a blend of Keynesian spending, business tax breaks, bank and auto bailouts, tax cuts for workers — really almost anything he thought could fix the problems. "For all the people who want to say he’s a starry-eyed radical, in fact he’s a moderate, middle-of-the-road guy," Christina Romer, who recently left as chairwoman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, told me. "He worked to fix what we have, not throw it all out and start over. To the extent that he had to take emergency action, it was born of circumstances."

What dumbstruck me was the Romer quote. She has confused, or conflated, pragmatism -- "finding what works" -- with an inbred, temperamental rejection of "starry-eyed radicalism." The two are not exclusive. If Obama had thought that some form of radicalism would work, he would have exercised just that.

The point being, pragmatism rejects nothing, it entertains all comers. But only those who can prove themselves are welcome to stay. And that's why pragmatism works.

The GOP and transcendentalism

Republican hypocrisy has now transmogrified from the merely expected to the grotesquely metaphysical:

"I want to congratulate our colleagues in the House on this important first step. I hope the Senate will soon follow suit with a vote of its own [on the repeal of healthcare reform]," said Mitch McConnell in a "video release," presumably here on Earth as well.

"The Democratic leadership in the Senate doesn’t want to vote on this bill" -- booo, hissss -- added the pixilated Senate minority leader. "But I assure you, we will."

And that's because up-or-down votes are not only the American Way, they are, by God, the traditional Republican Way.

I guess partisanship among those who count in fundraising and on Election Day has become so engrained, so unshakable, so extraordinarily unquestioned that no amount of nakedly idiotic mumbo-jumbo will self-startle the pols or rattle the base.

McConnell could declare tomorrow that there are only 59 minutes in an hour, and 95 percent of Kentucky Republicans would bray "Damn right!" and the GOP Senate caucus would demand a confirming resolution.

facebook

God help me I'm now on Facebook; I'm an utter, incurable techno-moron so I've no idea what I'm doing (in fact my wife had to create the page).

Anyway, as I understand it, you can "friend" me (like "caveat," yet another noun that's gone down to verbal defeat) by searching "P.M. Carpenter" on your Facebook page, possession of which now seems to be an international birthright.

Cheers, and many thanks.

--Phil (P.M.)

"The political coup of our lifetimes"

Findings from the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll are really quite striking. It seems that Everyman suddenly has far more faith in the president he just shellacked, and virtually none in the party he just elevated to power. Go figure.

Which is precisely what NBC/WSJ did, and it's the particulars that stun -- nearly all, pleasantly. Obama's job approval, for instance, shot up across the spectrum, but in no group higher than that of independents: a whopping 11 point increase (to 46 percent) in only one month. Obama's Democratic base? Its approval stands at 86 percent, a near uniform show of support that will perhaps (though I doubt it) subdue the base's activist branch from predicting a mass exodus in 2012 and certain reelection doom.

In fact, if the presidential election were held today, Obama, according to the poll, would beat Mitt Romney by 7 points, making that the only contest of any conceivable excitement. Obama leads Mike Huckabee by 10 points, he crushes Newt Gingrich by 19, and Sarah Palin starts at a 22-point disadvantage, which, knowing Palin's knack for self-inflicted imbecility, would only widen from there.

Most striking, however, is the rapidity with which Obama's political strategy of unyielding cooperativeness, so to speak, has effectively taken hold of the public's imagination. From NBC News's "First Read," I quote: "a majority (55 percent) believe congressional Republicans will be too inflexible in dealing with President Obama, while an equal number (55 percent) say Obama will strike the right balance." Those twin figures reflect not only a broad disapproval of the GOP's intransigence campaign, but a solid thumbs-up for Obama's gentle tenacity.

The former, in both spirit and statistics, is unlikely to shift anytime soon, since for Republican pols there's no thrill like that of playing to their confrontational base. Yet this number (pdf), behind the question of "Do you think President Obama will be ... too quick to give in to Republicans in Congress...?" aggressively leaps out: only 15 percent said yes. And that conforms, in a puzzle-fitting way, almost exactly to Obama's base-approval number of 86: in brief, disaffected progressive activists are, at best, merely holding their negligible numbers.

On the lighter, even comical side of things, the public expresses only gossamer confidence in the ultraconservative cavalry -- that which the motivated public so recently called forth: "Just 25 percent say that the Republicans in Congress will bring 'the right kind of change' to the country" -- a stat that should be thrown by every journalist in every Republican's face when the latter begins pathologically prattling about fulfilling the American people's legislative desires.  

A fitting windup to this statistical review is, I think, the recent online exchange between the NY Times' David Brooks and Gail Collins. In assessing Obama's first two years, conservative Brooks noted, with undisguised glee, that "Republicans are more and more concerned that the guy has the wind at his back. Contempt has turned into fear and respect. All in all, kind of impressive"; and liberal Collins concluded, "here’s my bottom line: even if he never does anything else, he’s already accomplished a greater domestic agenda than any president in the last half-century. And if he can protect it, while getting all the moderates to forget about it, he’ll have pulled off the political coup of our lifetimes."

And that, in the way of my own conclusion, is precisely the kind of cognitive "Coming together" that Obama has so vigorously sought. To be sure, he cannot prevent the divisive ideological savagery of extremists and absolutists, but, from the center-left to center-right, he can assemble Reason. And he has -- spendidly.

Nyet neutrality

This is classic GOP double-talk of the party's classic responsibility-shirking, reported by Politico with classic and damn near laughable journalistic neutrality in its story, "Boehner: no deadline for a health reform alternative":

"I don’t know that we need artificial deadlines set up for the committees to act" on developing a GOP alternative healthcare bill to the perfectly good healthcare bill already in place, said Speaker Boehner yesterday.

In other words -- words that could have been clearly, and even fairly, written by Politico -- Boehner hasn't the vaguest notion as to what the GOP alternative is, because there isn't one, never has been, nor will there be. So why the hurry to nowhere?

A modest exchange

Corporate execs and corporate-indulging Republican pols are forever decrying what they classify as excessive corporate income taxes in the United States; that if we could only slash these taxes, corporate America would cease sending jobs overseas, would cease outsourcing, would produce and hire domestically, and therefore we'd all flourish as never before and thereby accelerate our inexorable arrival in that exceptionalist land of economic Eden.

That's the party line.

OK, how about this ...

Zero corporate taxes. No, really. Zero. Wipe 'em out, all of 'em. Most U.S. corporations, assuming they employ sober accountants, pay in reality little to no income taxes anyway, and the taxes they do pay are merely passed on to the consumer, meaning the corporation takes no sacrificial or patriotic hit.

But, supplanting the old corporate taxes would be hikes in the marginal, personal income tax rates -- substantial and undodgeable hikes of up to 60 or 70 or even 90 percent. If untethering corporations from the burdensome mire of income taxation is unquestionably the key to greater economic development, then corporate executives, after all, having always had that singular ideal uppermost in mind, surely wouldn't be troubled about picking up the slack from a personal angle -- right?

I've often thought this would be a dandy project to be undertaken by some fair-minded, progressive macroeconomist: determining how much of a hike in marginal, patriotically personal rates would compensate for the loss of those disgraceful, outsourcing, job-killing corporate rates.

But whatever it takes, whatever those new rates might be, I'm sure corporate executives and their Republican mouthpieces, concerned only about America's welfare, would be happy to sacrifice accordingly. Don't you think?