From Bush boomlet to bust

Either Jeb possesses the political world's most extravagant sense of self-confidence, or even he knows it's over.

Politico: "On Sunday, Bush was spotted at brunch at the Biltmore in Miami before hitting the golf course at the Coral Gables Country Club."

What's to worry?

"Hey, I need you to throw away money on Jeb — out of loyalty," a Bush fundraiser has told donors recently.

And,

"I’m resigned to it being over, frankly," [a Bush-donating Wall Streeter told Politico].

Another donor, again from Wall Street, managed to misread Jeb's predicament with such stunning cluelessness, it suggests just how Wall Street at large, of late, also managed to take the nation down: "As long as there is still all this insanity [about Trump] there is hope for Jeb." One assumes there are infinitely complex derivatives being hustled on that bankrupt concept.

I still dream of Mitt Romney, he who was spooked by Bush's once-powerful, intimidating money machine. But by now Mitt knows what the above executive does not: As long as there is still all this insanity about Trump, there is no hope for Jeb — or anyone like him.

Could Jeb's friends — namely, Bush's super-PAC Brain, Mike Murphy — have preempted this slow-motion implosion? Perhaps by unleashing, in early summer, a $100-million character-defamation campaign against Trump they could have made a fight of it. But they still would have been stuck with the worst of all possible wusses: Jeb himself. There was just never a way around that.

Which, I imagine, Jeb knows, and why he was playing golf last Sunday.

 

Comments

[Peter G]

I think Romney and the rest of the establishment crowd knows something even more frightening and that is the powerlessness of money to fix any of this. It was once their most powerful tool of political control and is now largely useless.

[Bob]

Too bad for Jeb the price of oil is down. In the good old days Bandar Bush and the House of Saud would have come through for him.

Off topic, but sometimes the wisdom of The American Folks brings a warmth to my heart and tear to my eye:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOzRl6pdYBs

[The Dark Avenger]

“As for the Republicans -- how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical 'American heritage'...) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead.”

H.P. Lovecraft

[Peter G]

Lovely! Who doesn't want a bag of dicks?

I too an going to head off topic for something that caught my attention this morning. It is this piece courtesy of Ezra Klein. http://www.vox.com/2016/1/15/10775420/hillary-clinton-doesnt-trust-you

I add my reply to him.

"Pretty good stuff as usual Ezra but contains a fundamental error. There is no way in hell that the necessary tax raises to create a Medicare for all system would be offset by reduced private insurance rates. there are too many uninsured and under insured even after ACA for this to be possible. For a significant percentage of the middle class they must wind up paying more in taxes and these aren't upper income middle class professionals. there is a very good reason Clinton is getting more union endorsements than Sanders. It's the unions leading the charge against the Cadillac health care plan tax in ACA isn't it? They don't want to pay for health care for those masses down stream economically from them. And they sure don't want Clinton explaining why. There is no chance whatsoever of Sander's plan being implemented. Forces within the Democratic party will not permit that and those forces are the reason Clinton cannot make the honest argument. And Bernie can't either." -Peter G

[Bob]

Recently I read somewhere that Sanders estimates raising income taxes 2% and payroll taxes about 9% to cover single payer. He estimates a 50% overall savings for the average family. I tried to find the article but couldn't. Maybe you'd have better luck. In a recent interview, maybe with Chis Hayes, he also admitted he'd have to raise taxes on everyone but the poor.

In another recent interview Howard Dean said he was backing Hillary over Bernie because he thought she'd actually be able to move health care forward instead of just offering liberals the moon. I agree, though somewhat unhappily.

Hillary is being almost universally panned in the hard news outlets for her lies about Bernie's plans. Sending Chelsea out to lie to the youth vote was really weird too. It's the kind of thing that makes me wish we had a better candidate. Yes, she's smart and able, but she is *such* a lousy politician. If she's paying for advice she should ask for her money back. If this nonsense is coming from Bill she should give him some singles to stuff in G strings and get him out of the hotel room.

[ohollern]

Jeb possesses the "extravagant self-confidence" of an established ruling class. Can't win the election this year? No problem, go golfing. Let the people have their affair with a demagogue like Trump. He'll fade away, as will the left's flirtation with Bernie Sanders and other such such radicals, and when that's all over, we'll still be here to pick it all up again. Go golfing, Jeb!, your turn will come four years later.

[Peter G]

More off topic fun from the terminally oblivious. This time Suzie Madrak fo Crooksandliars. So here we go: http://crooksandliars.com/2016/01/good-news-under-dodd-frank-pressures-big

In this piece Susie argues for the wonderfulness of Frank-Dodd and how it is forcing large financial institutions to rethink size when measured against the additional regulatory burdens that size brings with it. And in it she actually quotes the reason, as a good thing mind, that this is wonderful. They want to break themselves up into smaller bits to escape the burdensome regulations and allow them to engage in riskier but more potentially profitable behavior.

Now I've heard of selling a bug as a feature but if this is what Frank-Dodd produces then god help us. Sometime the stupid just hurts.

[Bob]

"I used to be a hide-bound Tory simply for traditional and antiquarian reasons—and because I had never done any real thinking on civics and industry and the future. The depression—and its concomitant publicisation of industrial, financial, and governmental problems—jolted me out of my lethargy and led me to reëxamine the facts of history in the light of unsentimental scientific analysis; and it was not long before I realised what an ass I had been. The liberals at whom I used to laugh were the ones who were right—for they were living in the present while I had been living in the past. They had been using science while I had been using romantic antiquarianism. At last I began to recognise something of the way in which capitalism works—always piling up concentrated wealth and impoverishing the bulk of the population until the strain becomes so intolerable as to force artificial reform." - Letter to Jennie K. Plaiser (8 July 1936), quoted in "H.P. Lovecraft, a Life" by S.T. Joshi, p. 564

A tip of the hat. You have one wild reading list, DA.

[Peter G]

The goal is fine and I wouldn't be all that happy about the path to get there either. But the fact is that Bernie has factional enemies within the party he recently joined that he doesn't even suspect exists. They can do math too and they know, as I do, that the income tax structure will not be sufficient to make Bernie's dream come true without those very factions taking a substantial hit in the pocketbook to benefit other people. Even if rates on the upper income levels were increased dramatically. It is also true that most of the wealth creation that is accruing to the very top levels isn't income and isn't taxable as such. It is capital gains that isn't even taxable until realized by conversion on sale. So what is really needed is not an income tax but a wealth tax and not just on estates. Annual. A couple of percent ought to do it.

There's no way the bulk of the middle class is going to subscribe to Bernie's dream of leaping to universal single payer when it costs them more than they get. Incrementalism is the only way to get this done. Is Hillary lying? You could call it that. But so is Bernie and in exactly the same way. Neither is telling the whole truth.

[The Dark Avenger]

The thrift story was my academy.

[Bob]

Unless the R's get annihilated incrementalism is the only path. Gov. Dean also said that Vermont tried to get SP up and running and failed because it's so difficult to do at once.

A few years ago I read about how SP got going in Canada. If I recall correctly it began in a single town in Saskatchewan. There was some initial resistance but once it was made to work it spread quickly. What I gather from my Canadian friends is that every 10 or 12 years growth, advancing technologies and techniques all raise costs enough to cause a budget shortfall and taxes get raised over the objections of the rightist types. The cycle then begins anew. Liberals down here aren't going to be talking about that much either.

[Bob]

I hope it's not too dated a reference, but your comment reminds me of Thirston Howell III waiting to get off Gilligan's Island. The rich are different.

[Bob]

I've gotten a lot of good reads out of used book stores. I've also sold back a lot I wish I still had.

[Peter G]

We were in a sense lucky. We moved towards single payer before entrenched interests were well established. But they still exist. The net result is that we have a two level system that provides first rate care to some but provides only basic service to most. My own example is most instructive. I can afford the medicine I require to keep functioning. They were nice enough to tell me what would probably kill me left untreated but the treatment wasn't covered. I can afford it but I know many who can't. Most disease require drug treatment but drugs are not covered unless you are the lucky people who work for some level of government or have private insurance. Once you have exhausted your financial resources there are programs for the indigent or the poor. The vast majority of middle class Canadians are only eligible for second rate coverage that doesn't include a whole host of benefits. The others have cadillac insurance and guess what? Those that do have no interest whatsoever in covering those that don't. Just like Vermont really. It would be affordable for all but the people who've already got it would have to vote tax increases on themselves that wouldn't get them anything more than what they've got. So they aren't going to do it.

[Bob]

It might be worse if you lived here. My wife needs to have a glucagon kit around for emergencies. We can buy one from a Canadian pharmacy for less than half what they cost here. Medicare covers her other needs, which is good because they've increased in cost by about 24X over the past 25 years despite development and manufacturing costs having been recovered long ago.

[Tom Benjamin]

I think the term "regulatory burden" is misleading. It makes it sound like it is the cost of filling out paperwork or something. This was definitely a feature. The large financial firms have a choice. They can hold higher reserves (more equity, less debt)making them much less likely to fail. Or they can get smaller, and use more leverage to take higher profits.

The smaller banks are more profitable because they are permitted to use more leverage. Is that escaping burdensome regulation?

[Peter G]

But the fact is that getting around the reserve requirements by fragmentation really costs them next to nothing. The same shareholders will hold the same value vested in more entities with less regukatroy requirements. And unless those regulatory agencies are given additonal resources to enforce they are just going to be playing whack a mole. I did not say Dodd-Frank was bad. But its weakness in this regard is obvious especially since it did not address the fundamental problem of risk management. There is no significant financial institutuion that requires less supervision than any other. If the simple expedient of breaking up larger institutions so they can can en masse increase risk while making supervision more difficult there is a big problem. I have always said that it doesn't matter how big the cards are that you use to build a house of cards.