Colbert: Progressive, small-town...Kentucky?

National news about small-town Kentucky tends to be embarrassing: the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter; feuds; gun love; racism and Muslim-bashing, McConnell-Paul, etc.  

Well here is one little town that makes KY more progressive than the rest of the USA.  

It also goes to show that having a friend or loved one who is gay makes all the difference, instead of discussing abstract groups of people.

Watching these townsfolk and their neighborly, what's-the-big-deal sense of decency makes me proud to be a Kentuckian!

I even got a little misty-eyed, I admit it....

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People Who Are Destroying America - Johnny Cummings

August 14, 2013 | The Colbert Report

Dems have always championed the 'out-groups'

Political analyst Bill Schneider found a way to tie together the old and new Democratic Party:

Notice that the Democratic Party changed its ideology, from anti-government to pro-government. But the party did not change its allegiance. The Democratic Party remained the party of out-groups. Only now, those out-groups saw the federal government as their ally, not their enemy. Under President Obama, the Democratic coalition includes working and single women, African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans, gay people, young people, Jewish voters, educated professionals, and the "unchurched" (the one-fifth of Americans who say they have "no religion").

That's the New America. For different reasons, they all see themselves as out-groups. They see the federal government as a force that protects their interests and promotes their values. They see the Republican Party as the party of entrenched wealth and privilege (i.e., Mitt Romney). What's changed is that the New America is becoming the nation's majority. Democrats have carried the popular vote in five out of the last six presidential elections.

Let's hope Schneider's right, and government isn't a dirty word in the U.S. anymore. Next we'll restore for the words liberal and progressive the respect they deserve.

Sh*t, F#%k, D&mn -- Is Government No Longer a Four Letter Word?

By Bill Schneider

January 25, 2013 | Huffington Post

URL: http://huff.to/11WOxUo

Ames: Sordid, bloody history of 'right to work'

I'm posting this in full because Mark Ames gives us a great history lesson. Most Americans are ignorant of their own history. They take for granted and don't know things like where the 8-hour workday and a ban on child labor came from. These things came from Progressives and Democrats. 

Likewise, we don't know how many innocent workers and their wives and children were murdered for trying to organize. Those company-sponsored massacres of innocent people with machine guns and tear gas in the first three decades of the 20th century don't make it into our elementary school textbooks.  

So git yerselves edumacated and think twice before you nod your head absently in support of innocuous-sounding, anti-American poison like "right-to-work" laws. We owe a debt of gratitude to our grandparents and great-grandparents who fought and died to protect unions and build the large, stable U.S. middle class that was the envy of the world through the 1970s. We owe it to them not to throw away their hard-fought gains that gave us the good life we enjoyed.

You Hate "Right To Work" Laws More Than You Know. Here's Why. 

By Mark Ames

December 12, 2012 | NSFW CORP

"From now on, white women and white men will be forced into organizations with black African apes whom they will have to call ‘brother’ or lose their jobs."

— Vance Muse, founder of the "right to work" anti-labor campaign

The Michigan GOP apparently blindsided everyone with the union-busting "right to work" laws they just rammed through the state. Certainly my labor friends were caught off-guard tactically by the Republicans’ speed and choice of battleground.

For most of the county, though, the confusion has to do with what "right to work laws" are and why they’re so bad. You can see it written on the faces of the morning cable news hosts on CNN and even MSNBC — trying to pretend like they know what "right-to-work" laws actually mean, flummoxed by the brazen Orwellian neologism of the phrase and sweating over the possibility that they might have to explain it. Lucky for them, and for most of the media establishment (and for the Koch brothers), few people even know what questions to ask about "right to work laws." All they know — kinda — is that they’re bad for unions, and that those unions seem to know exactly how bad things are about to get.

Today, in most of America, unions have it bad. And part of the reason it’s bad is because we no longer know how to organize. Imagine trying to organize workers in your call center or warehouse, or your software gaming firm or your human rights NGO, as they’re doing at Amnesty International. The pressures against you — from worker cynicism and colleagues’ fear of losing their jobs, to personal relations with your boss and superiors, the bills you have to pay, and simple questions like "how do I organize" and "how do I know I won’t be screwed" — not to mention the inevitable appearance of company snitches, provocateurs, and just run-of-the-mill assholes and idiots... I’m not even talking here about your company’s ability to fire you, demote you, abolish your department, slash your pay, pretty much whatever the Hell they want ever since Reagan busted the air traffic controller’s union... This is the lot of American labor organizers in 2012 , except for in a few remaining pockets of America where union power and memory is still strong and tightly woven into the local cultural DNA.

Michigan is one of those places, which is why crushing labor power there would be as inspiring to the rightwing oligarchs who just got creamed at the polls as, say, the rise of the Tea Party was in early 2009.

So yesterday, as Michigan Republicans pushed the bill into law, labor groups converged on the capital in Lansing. According to the BBC, "police in riot gear used tear gas to control tensions among a crowd [outside the Michigan statehouse] of more than 10,000 protesters." For a lot of (once)-middle-class Americans, it’s hard to reconcile that level of anger with something as dull-sounding as "right to work laws."

"Austerity measures" are easier to fear: "austerity" is meant to sound scary and sadomasochistic. But "right to work" sounds dreary and almost redundant, like "right to pay bills."

That’s until you start to understand the history of the "right to work" movement, the racist human hagfish who brought "right to work" into our lexicon and made it happen, and the far-right fascist oligarchs who made it worth their while. Once you meet a few of these cretins — specifically, Vance Muse, the Karl Rove-meets-David Duke brains behind the whole "Right-to-Work" movement whom I’ll introduce you to a little later in this piece — you’ll understand why those thousands who converged on Lansing were acting like their state legislators just invited Count Dracula into everyone’s homes.

In terms of understanding what just happened, it would help if we were back in the 1940s and 50s, when most liberals and establishment media used — and understood — the antonym, "union security" — a descriptive phrase for the New Deal labor laws which finally gave union organizers a fighting chance, and saw the percentage of unionized workers in the US soar from single digits in the early 1930s to around 35% of the workforce by the mid-late 1940s.

The "right-to-work" movement to destroy labor unions began almost as soon as FDR passed the Wagner Act in the mid-1930s, which gave labor organizers "union security" as the old euphemism went and should still go. Again, you have to understand the historical context: Until the Wagner Act passed, when it came to workers’ rights, America in the 1930s was about half a century or more behind the rest of the West — child labor wasn’t even outlawed here until 1938.

But nothing compared to the endless massacres and murders of American labor organizers, massacres that are all but censored from the official history of this country. Maybe you’ve heard something about the Ludlow Massacre of the families of mine workers at Rockefeller’s mines in Colorado in 1913 — but you probably don’t know many of the details, like how Rockefeller’s private armed goons patrolled the miners’ miserable tent cities in an armored car with a mounted machine gun, spraying the tents and terrorizing the strikers, who demanded such radical concessions as "enforcement of Colorado’s laws," the eight hour work week, and pay for time spent working. Or how the terrorized women and children in the embattled tent city dug a giant makeshift bunker pit beneath one of the larger tents to hide out from the bullets — only to have Colorado National Guardsmen douse the tents with kerosene and light them on fire while the miners’ families were sleeping, then shoot some of those who ran out, killing over a dozen children, scores of workers and their wives, and ending with the arrests of hundreds of miners.

In the end, anywhere from several dozen to 200 were left dead. We don’t know exactly — and there hasn’t been much effort on the part of our culture to find out. This "we don’t know the death toll" marks just about all of the many killings and massacres of labor organizers and strikers in the pre-New Deal era.

The same goes with the West Virginia mine wars: whether the massacre of tent city workers in 1913 by coal miner thugs firing from armored trains passing through the tent cities, or the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921, when the company raised the largest private standing army in the US, and attacked strikers with gas shells fired from artillery and dropped from bombers. President Harding followed that up by sending in federal troops and the US Air Force led by Brig. General Billy Mitchell, and when it was over, the miners’ unionization drive was dead. Along with well over 100 workers and family members — again, the exact number is "in dispute" as they say.

The "Red Scare" of 1919-20 was aimed at breaking labor unions, and specifically at equating union security — the "closed shop" where unionized companies and factories could require all workers to pay dues to the unions since they all benefited from union contracts — with Bolshevism. In contrast stood the "open shop"—where union membership was merely a "choice" strongly discouraged by employers — with "Americanism." In fact that’s what they called "right to work" back then: the "American Plan."

The Palmer Raids of those years (where J. Edgar Hoover first distinguished himself) resulted in tens of thousands of Americans illegally rounded up, beaten, tortured, imprisoned without any due process, and deported by the thousands, citizens included. Big business coordinated their PR offensive with the Palmer Raids by labeling anti-union open shop laws "American Plan."

After the 1929 crash, that euphemism became associated in people’s minds with the brutal pre-New Deal culture. So corporate America went back to their PR flaks to brand "open shop" with a new, less toxic-sounding euphemism. The phrase they came up with was "right to work," as if they were actually empowering workers with "individual liberty" by going after their unions.

History shows us what’s at stake here, and how far big business was willing to go to keep "right to work" or "American Plan" the national standard. Big business in America regarded the rest of the population and its labor pool much the same way colonial powers viewed the local Natives — as inherently hostile, alien savages whose purpose was to enrich their masters, and who must not be given even the slightest concessions, such as child labor laws, lest it put ideas in their heads about "rights"...

It was in this atmosphere that the ACLU really began as a defender of labor rights, when the ACLU equated civil liberties and Constitutional liberties with union organizing rights. Contrast that with today’s ACLU, which supports Citizens United and corporate "free speech" in exchange for massive donations from tobacco firms and the Koch brothers, while focusing on high-profile culture war cases at the expense of labor.

By 1930, labor unions were practically dead, considered a relic of the past by the media and academic elites. The Great Depression changed all that, in part because unlike today, back then Americans had no food stamps, no unemployment insurance, no state pensions, and of course, no child labor laws and no labor protections to speak of — all the things labor unions are responsible for giving us today.

From the Ford Motors massacre in Michigan in 1932, which left four workers killed and up to 50 wounded — through the Chicago Memorial Day Massacre of striking Republic Steel workers in 1937, in which company thugs and cops killed 10 peaceful marchers nearly all of whom were shot in the back, and wounded 60 more, billyclubbing the wounded as they crouched in the dirt — America was a savage and violent place to work if you weren’t rich.

Hearings were held in the Senate, and the LaFollette Committee Report discovered that corporations not only operated armies of spies in the tens of thousands, but that "Republic Steel Corporation [responsible for the 1937 massacre] has a uniformed police force of nearly 400 men whom it was equipped not only with revolvers, rifles, and shotguns, but also with more tear and sickening gas and gas equipment than has been purchased...by any law-enforcement body, local, State or Federal in the country.  It has loosed its guards, thus armed, to shoot down citizens on the streets and highways," the Senate report observed.

That was the arsenal controlled by just a single steel company.

FDR leveled the workplace playing field some with the Wagner Act, for the first time making union security (closed shop) a reality. Labor union power and membership soared, as did wages and benefits; America suddenly had Social Security and unemployment insurance, child labor laws, a minimum wage, five day/40 hour work week, and within a few years, a powerful middle class.

To big business plutocrats, the New Deal labor laws represented a sort of political Holocaust that they never forgot or forgave. They lost their full spectrum political dominance over their workers and over the political and judicial direction of the country, and all that essentially because FDR brought to an end America’s "open shop" culture and empowered unions with "closed shop" union security.

But business vowed that one day it would have its revenge. And that revenge would be "right to work" laws.

A report I found dating back to 1962 by Group Research, Inc — one of those left-liberal outfits back in the days before the left was defunded — dated big business’ first use of this new "right to work" to 1935, when the Automobile Manufacturers’ Association lobbied against FDR’s pro-labor Wagner Act, telling the New York Times, "men have an inalienable right to work, free from coercion..."

That’s an interesting coincidence, because Mitt Romney’s dad, George Romney, owed his success to the Automobile Manufacturers’ Association, which hired him as a top lobbyist in 1939. It was from that job that Romney eventually took over his own Michigan automobile firm, AMC, took over Michigan as governor (where he oversaw the bloodiest inner city riots of 1967), told America he’d been brainwashed in Vietnam, denounced supporters of the Equal Rights Amendment as "moral perverts" and homosexuals, and yes, gifted the world with his vulture capitalist son, Willard M. Romney, or "Mitt The Impaled" as we call him here at the NSFWCORP headquarters.

But I digress. And there’s a reason I digress. Because I’ve been putting off introducing you to Vance Muse, the real brains behind the "right to work" movement that’s still plaguing Americans to this day.

Vance Muse was a racist political operative and lobbyist from the state of Texas — the native habitat for all America’s vermin —as Satanically vile as "Turd Blossom" Rove, a racist smear-peddler like Andrew Breitbart, only without Breitbart’s degenerate heart and fondness for blow.

Here is a description of Vance Muse, creator of the "right to work" movement, from a book by an old celebrated journalist, Stetson Kennedy, the reporter who famously went undercover inside the KKK and wrote a tell-all in the 40’s:

"The man Muse is quite a character. He is six foot four, wears a ten-gallon hat, but generally reserves his cowboy boots for trips Nawth. Now over fifty [this is published in 1946—M.A.], Muse has been professionally engaged in reactionary enterprises for more than a quarter of a century."

Among Vance Muse’s "reactionary enterprises": He lobbied against women’s suffrage, against the child-labor amendment, against the 8-hour workday, and in 1936, Muse engineered the first split in the South’s Democratic Party by peeling off the segregationists and racists from the New Deal party, a political maneuver that eventually led to Strom Thurmond, George Wallace, and at last a Republican right-wing takeover of the South, and with it, the collapse of the old New Deal coalition. Which worked out fine for Vance Muse, since he was a covert Republican himself, serving "for years" as the Republican Party state treasurer in Texas.

That first attempt at splitting the Democratic party by peeling away the Southern segregationist-fascists took place in 1936, when Georgia’s brutal white supremacist governor, Eugene Talmadge, organized a "grassroots" convention with Vance Muse’s help. To stir up anti-FDR and anti-New Deal hate in the South, Vance Muse used photographs he acquired showing First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt being escorted by two African-American professors at Howard University. Muse used that photo to stir up the white supremacists in Georgia, he leaked it to as many newspapers as he could, and he even brandished it around a Senate hearing he was called before in 1936. Those hearings revealed that the anti-FDR "convention" that Vance Muse put on, through his "Southern Committee to Uphold the Constitution"— which featured guests of honor like Gerald L K Smith, America’s leading anti-Semite and godfather to the modern American Nazi movement — was financed not only by Confederate sponsors like Texan Will Clayton, owner of the world’s largest cotton broker, but also reactionary northeast Republican money: the DuPont brothers, J. Howard Pew of Sun Oil, Alfred Sloan of General Motors... That unholy alliance of Northeastern and Confederate plutocrat money financed the first serious attempt at splitting the Southern Democrats off by exploiting white supremacism, all in order to break labor power and return to the world before the New Deal — and to the open shop.

Incidentally, Vance Muse’s northern donors — DuPont, Pew, Sloan — were the same core investors in (and board directors of) the first modern libertarian think-tanks of the 40s and 50s, including the Foundation for Economic Education. DuPont, Pew and Sloan funds also seeded the American careers of Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman and Murray Rothbard, among others. In other words, Vance Muse’s funders built the first layer of the libertarian nomenklatura that Charles Koch later took control of — no surprise, since Koch outfits are credited with making the Michigan "right to work" law possible.

...Getting back to Vance Muse: In 1936, he incorporated in Texas another union-busting outfit called the "Christian American Association" which was closely associated with the Texas Ku Klux Klan as well as the American Legion, a far-right veterans’ group used to bust up unions and terrorize minorities and suspected Communists. It was this same Christian American Association which launched the "right to work" anti-union campaign using that very same euphemism.

Dartmouth professor Marc Dixon, writing in the Journal of Policy History, summed it up like this:

The modern Right-to-Work movement and political mobilization championing this slogan...was spearheaded by the Christian American Association out of Houston in the early 1940s.

Initially, Vance Muse set the association up to create a sort of fundamentalist Christian KKK outfit to undermine FDR’s 1936 election. In 1941, he saw an editorial in the Dallas Morning News calling for Texas to pass an open shop amendment called "Right-To Work" to its state constitution.

Dixon writes:

"After traveling to Dallas and consulting with the editor, Muse was encouraged to use and promote the idea of Right-to-Work. This became their [Christian American’s] primary cause and they campaigned extensively for Right-to-Work legislation throughout the country, and especially in Texas."

Vance Muse’s fellow traveler in Texas union-busting fascism was a local big business outfit called the "Fight for Free Enterprise" and together, the two of groups passed laws outlawing picketing by striking workers and making it easy for anyone to accuse picketing workers of inciting violence, open shop "Right-to-Work" laws, and they even pushed for a Nazi-like law that would force union organizers to wear "identifying head gear (red for the CIO and gray for the AFL)."

Even as millions of Americans were fighting fascism overseas, Vance Muse in his ten-gallon hat bragged to his Confederate plutocrats about the passage of Texas’ anti-picketing bill, saying it would "keep the color line drawn in our social affairs."  In 1944, he told the Houston Post that so-called "Eleanor Clubs," named in honor of the First Lady, were a "RED RADICAL scheme to organize negro maids, cooks and nurses in order to have a Communist informer in every Southern home."

Muse’s sister and partner in Christian American, Ida Darden, agreed with her brother, telling the Antioch Review she worried that the Eleanor Clubs...

...stood for "$15 a week salary for all nigger house help, Sundays off, no washing, and no cleaning upstairs." As an afterthought, she added,"My nigger maid wouldn’t dare sit down in the same room with me unless she sat on the floor at my feet!"

Allowing herself to go still further, the little lady went on to say, "Christian Americans can’t afford to be anti-Semitic, but we know where we stand on the Jews, all right. It doesn’t pay us to work with Winrod, Smith, Coughlin, and those others up North; they’re too outspoken and would get us into trouble...You’d be surprised how many important corporations support our work."

- Southern Exposure, Stetson Kennedy

Indeed. That, again, from the sister and partner in the outfit that created the modern Right-To-Work movement which, decades later, just steamrolled over Michigan.

A March 10, 1945 article in the Sunday Morning Star in Delaware reported on Vance Muse’s outfit, as its first "Right-To-Work" successes started to get national attention:

"Union groups throughout the country are asking [for] an investigation of the Christian American Association which has been pushing anti-labor bills in many state legislators. Anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic literature has also been attributed to the Christian Americans."

In fact, their anti-Catholic literature was so strident that they were all but chased out of Louisiana.

But in Texas it worked: That year, 1945, Vance Muse’s Christian American Association successfully lobbied for Texas’ "Right-To-Work" law thanks to a brilliant smear campaign run by Muse himself: He arranged for a woman called Ruth Koenig, who claimed to be the head of an alleged Texas Communist Party, to testify before the Texas legislature on the Right-to-Work law. Naturally the Communist testified against the law – and thanks to that testimony Muse’s Christian American Association was able to label any Texas lawmaker opposed to Right-to-Work as a Communist. Flyers were printed up warning state residents about "Communists in the Legislature," listing their names, linking them to Koenig with the header: "Where She Leads Us, We Will Follow."

Until that day, Texas was on its way to becoming a strong union state, according to Dartmouth’s Prof. Dixon, outpacing other states in the South thanks largely to successful organizing by the CIO.  After passage of the Right-to-Work law...well, look at Texas today. It’s libertarian Hell, Koch Industries paradise, home to Ron Paul and Rick Perry. Just how they like it.

The transition to our time has been seamless. Charles Koch’s father, Fred Koch, made his name in right-wing politics as one of the leaders of the Kansas Right-to-Work movement. The fight in Kansas was more bitter and protracted than in Texas — Kansas had a strong tradition of populism and farmer socialism — but in 1958, they succeeded and the law passed. That same year, Fred Koch co-founded the crypto-fascist John Birch Society with eleven other industrialists, the most powerful grassroots libertarian outfit of the postwar era until his son Charles raised libertarianism to an entirely new level.

Among other things, the John Birch Society taught that President Eisenhower was a conscious active Communist agent taking orders from Moscow; that the Civil Rights movement was a Communist conspiracy and Martin Luther King took direct orders from Moscow; and that the world was controlled by a group of conspiratorial insiders known as the Illuminati; and that America is "a republic, not a democracy."

Politically, its goal was the same as Vance Muse’s: reversing "the whole new-deal march toward state socialism" and expunging "the disease of collectivism," in the words of Bircher leader Robert Welch. In other words: union-busting, stripping government benefits and eliminating taxes on the rich. (To understand why Fred Koch and the Bircher libertarians hated Ike so much, imagine today a Republican like Eisenhower who raised the top marginal tax rate to 91%, who poured massive government investments into building roads and schools, who publicly declared his support for Social Security and denounced any Republican who opposed it — you get the point.)

The founder of the National Right To Work Committee in the mid-1950s, Reed Larson, came from Fred and Charles Koch’s base in Wichita, Kansas — headquarters of Koch Industries. Fred Koch teamed up with Reed Larson to pass Kansas’ Right-to-Work law, and Reed Larson’s "National Right to Work Committee" intertwined itself with Fred Koch’s John Birch Society.

And that sordid history of Right-to-Work, that seamless historical thread running straight out of Vance Muse’s putrid little brain right through all of the shock and misery on display in Lansing, Michigan today — that’s what’s the matter with Kansas. Dorothy’s wrong, folks: we’re all stuck in Kansas, and no one’s safe, no matter which state you live in.

West: 'We end up with a Republican in blackface'

Here's what brother Cornel West had to say about President Obama:

CORNEL WEST: Well, one, I think that it’s morally obscene and spiritually profane to spend $6 billion on an election, $2 billion on a presidential election, and not have any serious discussion—poverty, trade unions being pushed against the wall dealing with stagnating and declining wages when profits are still up and the 1 percent are doing very well, no talk about drones dropping bombs on innocent people. So we end up with such a narrow, truncated political discourse, as the major problems—ecological catastrophe, climate change, global warming. So it’s very sad. I mean, I’m glad there was not a right-wing takeover, but we end up with a Republican, a Rockefeller Republican in blackface, with Barack Obama, so that our struggle with regard to poverty intensifies.

My Republicans friends will read that and think West is just nuts.  There's nobody to the left of Obama, many of them have been led to believe.  But as I've been saying, and will continue to say, Obama's real problems is that he's either not liberal enough at heart, or he doesn't have the courage of his liberal convictions.  It doesn't really matter which, the result is the same: a Third Way, bankster-trusting, safety-net cutting, austerity-imposing, forget-labor Democrat.

As Michael Moore said, we liberals hope that Republicans are right about Obama's being a crypto-socialist.  We hope that now he doesn't have to worry about re-election, he'll grow some spine and fight on issues like the banking reform, mortgage relief, the environment, and protecting labor unions.  We hope, but we're not stupid. History doesn't give us much grounds for hope.  We realize Obama probably won't "come to Jesus" on his own.  He has to be pushed.

If We Call Obama "Progressive," Are We Ignoring His Record?

By Amy Goodman

November 10, 2012 | Democracy Now!

URL: http://www.alternet.org/economy/if-we-call-obama-progressive-are-we-ignoring-his-record?paging=off

David Brooks: Why aren't there more liberals?

Of course Brooks's op-ed is mostly wrong, but it's wrong in a thoughtful way, not a "liberals-hate-America-and-are-trying-to-destroy-it" way, so Brooks deserves a thoughtful response.

To start, we must concede that "liberal" is a dirty word in the U.S. nowadays, unfair and silly as that may be. We liberals have failed to own it and say it proudly. (Except for me). The Right has done a pretty good job of destroying it, by linking "liberal" to anything that goes wrong with government. As Brooks correctly points out, Republicans are in the ridiculous but advantageous position of being able to criticize any lapse of government, including lapses of their own creation, on "liberal" government, or Big Government. When they screw up it's just an abstract "See, I told you so," moment. When they don't screw up, they've defied the odds and "proven" that Republicans govern better. Win-win for them. Give them a pat on the back for excellent spin control.

But as Michael Moore and others have aptly noted, when you go policy by policy, Americans who won't dare call themselves liberals say they hold liberal policy views -- equal pay for equal work; higher taxes on the rich; right to abortion and gay marriage; environmental regulation, etc.

Liberals and liberalism, I believe, are partly a victim of their own successes. I don't distinguish "progressives" from liberals in any significant way, except self-identified progressives seem more interested in reform. Anyway, my point is that the Progressive Era, one of the only hopeful and shining eras of U.S. politics, is now under attack, as is the word "progressive" *. I've written about this before. The achievements of the Progressive Era, presided over by reformist Republicans Teddy Roosevelt and William Taft, are numerous, profound, and enduring. To name just a few: ban on child labor; the 8-hour workday; regulating sweatshops; direct election of U.S. senators; breaking up monopolies and trusts; regulating interstate commerce; food and meat inspection; establishing national wilderness parks (a uniquely American invention); and on and on. None of us wants these reforms repealed. We take them so much for granted, or are simply ignorant about how hard-fought they were, that today's liberal-progressives don't even think to brag about their track record of successful reform within the framework of free market capitalism.

* Evil psych patient Glen Beck's recent "lectures" about the "horrors" of the Progressive Era and Teddy Roosevelt are his attempt at Swiftboating U.S. history; because Republican sharks like him understand they must attack their opponent's greatest strengths, not their weaknesses.

If you want to go back to the post-WWII and Great Society, again, I believe liberals are victims of their own success. After winning two world wars and ending the Great Depression, Democrats passed two programs, Social Security and Medicare, which have helped to keep generations of U.S. seniors out of squalor, suffering and indignity in old age. Compare poverty stats of seniors before and after Social Security: 50 percent in poverty before; 12 percent in poverty today (during a recession, mind you). No comparison. The G.I. Bill and cheap G.I. housing loans put the Greatest Generation through college with a roof over their heads. The War on Poverty did work. It's just that Democrats (and liberal-progressives) don't take credit for it, because, well, maybe we look at those today as American achievements. But strictly speaking, they weren't. They were liberal-progressive achievements. We liberals are always stuck, as David Brooks remarks, defending Big Government's administrative weaknesses, and not celebrating its dramatic successes -- as Republicans would do... if they had any successes to celebrate. (Seriously, think hard and name one in the last 30 years that is all theirs. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. .... OK, I'll name one for you: they ended unfunded federal mandates on the states. Bet you weren't going to say that, though.)

Brooks is right about "rent-seeking" behavior, although let's face it, he's really just talking about the need for congressional campaign finance reform of our pay-to-play system. We don't have bureaucrats regularly soliciting bribes in America, or political patronage on a 19th century scale anymore. What we have are the rich paying for more legislated tax breaks and privileges all the time, to the detriment of the middle-class majority.

Americans may not have a lot of trust in government, but compared to what? The military? Oops, that sort of is government. The priesthood? Big oops. Corporations? Do they trust BP more than the EPA? I doubt it. But again, it's the fault of us liberal-progressives for not constantly pointing out the obvious, which is just how seamlessly our federal bureaucracy works most of the time. We suck at self-promotion. Instead we let conservatives jump on every badly designed program, or dishonest citizen who games the system, and blame it all on hapless liberals, as if the exceptions prove the rule.

For better or worse, America is a country where the loudest voice seems the most convincing, where you spike the ball in the endzone to brag about every achievement, and where you kick your opponent when he's down and call him a loser. But that's just not the way most liberals are. And it costs us. We look terribly weak and ineffective when in fact we are strong and make America stronger. That is our problem, Mr. Brooks.

Where Are the Liberals?

By David Brooks

January 9, 2012 | New York Times

Why aren't there more liberals in America?

It's not because liberalism lacks cultural power. Many polls suggest that a majority of college professors and national journalists vote Democratic. The movie, TV, music and publishing industries are dominated by liberals.

It's not because recent events have disproved the liberal worldview. On the contrary, we're still recovering from a financial crisis caused, in large measure, by Wall Street excess. Corporate profits are zooming while worker salaries are flat.

It's not because liberalism's opponents are going from strength to strength. The Republican Party is unpopular and sometimes embarrassing.

Given the circumstances, this should be a golden age of liberalism. Yet the percentage of Americans who call themselves liberals is either flat or in decline. There are now two conservatives in this country for every liberal. Over the past 40 years, liberalism has been astonishingly incapable at expanding its market share.

The most important explanation is what you might call the Instrument Problem. Americans may agree with liberal diagnoses, but they don't trust the instrument the Democrats use to solve problems. They don't trust the federal government.

A few decades ago they did, but now they don't. Roughly 10 percent of Americans trust government to do the right thing most of the time, according to an October New York Times, CBS News poll.

Why don't Americans trust their government? It's not because they dislike individual programs like Medicare. It's more likely because they think the whole system is rigged. Or to put it in the economists' language, they believe the government has been captured by rent-seekers.

This is the disease that corrodes government at all times and in all places. As George F. Will wrote in a column in Sunday's Washington Post, as government grows, interest groups accumulate, seeking to capture its power and money.

Some of these rent-seeking groups are corporate types. Will notes that the federal government delivers sugar subsidies that benefit a few rich providers while imposing costs on millions of consumers.

Other rent-seeking groups are dispersed across the political spectrum. The tax code has been tweaked 4,428 times in the past 10 years, to the benefit of interests of left, right and center.

Others exercise their power transparently and democratically. As Will notes, in 2009, the net worth of households headed by senior citizens was 47 times the net worth of households led by people under 35. Yet seniors use their voting power to protect programs that redistribute even more money from the young to the old and affluent.

You would think that liberals would have a special incentive to root out rent-seeking. Yet this has not been a major priority. There is no Steve Jobs figure in American liberalism insisting that the designers keep government simple, elegant and user-friendly. Sailors scrub their ships. Farmers clear weeds. Democrats have not spent a lot of time scraping barnacles off the state.

Worse, in an attempt to match Republican rhetoric, Democratic politicians are perpetually soiling the name of government for the sake of short-term gain. How many times have you heard Democrats from Carter to Obama running against Washington, accusing it of being insular, shortsighted, corrupt and petty? If the surgeon himself thinks his tools are rancid, why shouldn't you?

In the past few weeks, the Obama administration has begun his presidential campaign by picking a series of small fights with the Republican-led House over things like recess appointments. These vicious squabbles may help Obama in the short term by making him look better than Republicans in Congress. But they will only further discredit Washington over the long run.

Life is unfair. Republican venality unintentionally reinforces the conservative argument that government is corrupt. Democratic venality undermines the Democratic argument that Washington can be trusted to do good.

Liberalism has not expanded because it has not had a Martin Luther, a leader committed to stripping away the corruptions, complexities and indulgences that have grown up over the years.

If you'll forgive some outside advice, President Obama might consider running for re-election as Luther. It's not enough to pick a series of small squabbles and then win as the least ugly man in the room. He might run as someone who believes in government but sees how much it needs to be cleansed and purified.

Make the tax code simple. Make job training simple. Make Medicare simple. Every week choose a rent-seeker to hold up for ridicule and renunciation. Change the Congressional rules. Simplify the legal thickets that undermine responsibility.

If Democrats can't restore Americans' trust in government, it really doesn't matter what problems they identify and what plans they propose. No one will believe in the instrument they rely on for solutions.

Strategic advice for liberal-progressive losers

Kline's critical essay is excellent but long so I'll quote selectively:

"At best, progressives seek to convert.... Thus, they don't frame what they engage in as a fight but rather as a debate."

"It is difficult to think of a major progressive policy which commands less than a plurality. This situation is one reason for the lazy reliance upon electioneering by progressives, they know that their issues are popular, in principle at least. Rather childishly, they just want a show of hands then, as if that is what goes on really in elections."

"One could say unflatteringly that the goal of 'progressives' in activism is to raise their personal karma by standing up for what is right."

And here's how Kline sums it up, how radical leftists like moi can win:

"Money is not the main problem; feet on the ground moving forward are the real problem. A discrete agenda pursued full-time by experienced organizers is the solution. Less talk, and more walk. Progressives have successfully stamped Big Capital as 'anti-us' historically, and they need to return to this. Those active for social reform have to forget about the electoral cycle. They have to forget about what the lunatic Right is doing as much as possible and concentrate on what they themselves are in process of accomplishing. They need a compact reform agenda (yes, bullet points and not more than ten of them). They need a defined activist strategy, no matter how large the difficulties or time horizon appear. They need to build genuinely activist organizations with specific plans to achieve a core set of goals. And they have to reclaim militancy as a word, and deed, of pride. If they do those things, they will make real progress, and moreover they will be ready when the moment comes for breakthrough amongst the wider society."

On third thought, this is a stinging rebuke to me and basically everybody who spends most of their spare time & energy blogging, posting, linking, and writing stuff to support their liberal-progressive causes. Because basically, Kline is saying (while writing/blogging, OK I get the irony here), that preaching to the choir won't cut it, that nothing was ever won politically by persuasion but only by pounding electorally those folks who hate your guts. 'Nords, it doesn't matter what Americans think, it matters how their politicians vote. Point taken. Blog on!....

Progressively Losing

By Richard Kline

September 11, 2011 | Naked Capitalism

URL: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/09/richard-kline-progressively-losing.html

Gallup: America reddening?

Can't believe I missed this one. And I can't believe you Repugs didn't rub this in my face!

For 79% of Americans, "liberal" is still unfortunately a four-letter word. That's why I'm all in favor of re-branding us as progressives, although I'm proud to be a big, stinking, bleeding-heart liberal.

So how the hell did Obama get elected and the Dems win Congress, huh? Jeez, the Republicans must really suck, when conservatives have an inherent 2:1 lead over liberals. (We all know conservatives aint gonna vote for no Democrats.) Oh yeah, there's still that 35% of Americans who call themselves "moderates." I guess the Republicans are just really good at alienating moderates. Sometimes you don't have to be competent to succeed, you just have to be less incompetent than everybody else....

"Conservatives" Are Single-Largest Ideological Group

Percentage of "liberals" higher this decade than in early '90s

By Lydia Saad

June 15, 2009 | Gallup.com

______________________________________________________

UPDATED with my comments to actual conservatives!

Did you follow that link? For example, 54% of Americans favor legal unions for gays. Is that conservative? Or have you seen the polls about the 77% of people who want a public option in the health care bill? Is that conservative? Or the pretty high number -- 39% now, but it was 50% in 2007 when Dubya was in office -- of Americans who favor stricter gun control laws, and the only 15% of people who want current gun laws to be less strict? Or, worst of all, the polls that show steadily about 60% of Americans continue to support Roe v. Wade.

Once you get down to the issue level, the ideological labels break down. That's why the zealots on either side try to label pragmatic reforms as too "conservative" or "liberal" to whip those self-identified people back in line, in terms of, "Oh, if they're saying this bill is too liberal, I can't support it, because I'm a conservative." This is Rush Limbaugh and FOX's bread & butter, you know: they are like sheepherders/enforcers trying to keep all their sheep in the flock, not straying on any single issue. But we all know that most people do stray occassionally, they don't stay in the ideological flock, and they do have minds of their own. They even change them! (Rarely).

* * *

But why do you cling to the labels "conservative" and "liberal" if they are not reliable indicators of how Americans feel about the important issues? (I know, I'm the pot calling the kettle black). If it gives you some special satisfaction to know you're in the self-identified majority, so be it. I wouldn't mind if every last American called himself a conservative Republican if we had national health care, stricter gun control, legal unions for gays, more equitable taxation, etc., etc. If I get a "win" on my issues, I'm happy.

These labels are a convenient shorthand for discussion and analysis, sure, but we shouldn't assign principle significance to them, when the real information we want lies deeper.

And for the record, liberals are slowly winning -- at least liberal policies are, which is why you all complain about the U.S. going to hell in a handbasket, "the culture war," and so on. We are going to have more equitable taxation, we will have a tax on carbon emissions, we will have stricter gun control, we will have a more active government when it comes to energy and education, etc.. These things are happening and will continue to happen, because at the end of the day people -- conservatives and liberals -- want them to. They want government to do more and pick up the slack that nobody else is pulling -- not charities, not corporations, not states or municipalities. That's our pragmatism. That's what's going to save us. That's why I'm optimistic.

Finally, it's too easy to dismiss polling as always poorly worded or biased. We all know polls matter, and we ignore polls at our peril. Just ask polling extraordinaires Karl Rove and Dick Morris.

Reich: Progressive tax & reform agenda

I'm editing out a lot of this article by Reich. I'm especially interested in his progressive ideas on paying for the fed. government.


Financing the Common Good
By Robert B. Reich
February 1, 2008 | Prospect.org


> ... A new Democratic president coming into office in 2009 will face a national debt much larger than it was in 1993. Despite the $5 trillion 10-year budget surplus that ended the Clinton years, the federal debt at the end of the Bush years will be almost $4 trillion larger than it was then. It will have grown about 70 percent during Bush's reign.

> ... the administration of George W. Bush has exploited the asymmetry in American politics. By trashing the institutions of government, the younger Bush personified his central thesis that government cannot be trusted to do anything well. He has shown that Republicans cannot lose at this game. There is no downside in treating government like a sewer. To the extent they have been careless or negligent with it, or crassly mendacious, illegally rewarding cronies and punishing opponents, splurging and plundering at every turn, they still come out on top. If, against all odds, a program or initiative somehow succeeds, they can show how wise they were all along. If programs or initiatives fail, as has been more likely, the failures only illustrate why citizens and taxpayers should not rely on government in the first place. Bush has thus enlarged upon the Reagan-era fiscal tactic of "starving the beast" of revenues into a more insidious strategy of starving the beast of public trust.

> ...Increase the staffing of regulatory agencies charged with protecting the public, and appoint regulators who believe in protecting citizens. See to it that corporate lawbreakers are prosecuted vigorously. There is no better means of demonstrating to the public why government is necessary and, not incidentally, that you are not in the pockets of the powerful. Crack down on unsafe products, sweatshops, consumer fraud, bribery, the looting of corporations by executives, illegal firings, sexual harassment, oil spills, predatory lending, insurance companies that fail to honor their policies, underfunded pension plans, corruption in the awarding of government contracts. Protect corporate whistleblowers. Publicly castigate CEOs who endanger or defraud the public.


> ...Where to get the additional money? Three sources: The peace dividend from ending the Iraq War, a more progressive tax, and modest deficit spending. Because many of America's deferred needs are felt so directly by a large majority of citizens -- health care, early education, child care, training for good jobs, better public transit, and so on -- you can gain support for additional revenue if you educate the public about what you're doing and why.

Start with the peace dividend. According to government figures, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have so far cost the United States more than half a trillion dollars. Another four years would cost significantly more, because this figure doesn't include the ever larger costs of recruitment or the cost of replacing the equipment that's been used in the war so far. If you ended the war, it's safe to say that the peace dividend would be more than $100 billion a year, even including the costs of attending to our wounded.

The only people who have the money necessary to reverse the nation's troubling trends are at the top. Recent data from the IRS show that the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans are earning more than 21 percent of all income -- a postwar record -- while the bottom 50 percent of Americans combined are earning just 12.8 percent of total income. (Right-wingers have attacked these data by arguing that the IRS improperly counts adjusted gross income, but however you try to bend the numbers the trend is unmistakable.)

Explain to the public that even as income and wealth have become more concentrated than at any time in the past 80 years, those at the top are now taxed at lower rates than rich Americans have been taxed since before the start of World War II. Taxpayers who bring home over $5 million annually now pay less than 22 percent of their incomes in federal tax, on average. Managers of hedge funds, private-equity partners, and many venture capitalists are paying no more than 15 percent -- since their earnings are, absurdly, treated as capital gains. This means that America's wealthiest, who have been receiving most of the economy's bounty, are paying a smaller percentage of their income in taxes than are middle-class Americans. Financiers who are raking in hundreds of millions -- last year, each of the 25 highest paid hedge-fund managers took in an average of $560 million -- are paying at a lower rate than many of America's working poor who barely clear $20,000 annually.

How to sell a higher marginal tax on the wealthy? Emphasize that there's no way the country can do what's needed unless more money is raised -- and yet, if the rich don't pay their fair share, the burden will fall on a middle class that's already financially strapped. By the same token, only a relatively few at the top would need to pay more. According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, if the marginal income tax rate on Americans whose yearly income exceeds $10 million were raised to 70 percent, and the rate for those who earn between $5 million and $10 million a year were raised to 50 percent, federal revenues in 2008 would increase by $105 billion. By my calculation, a tiny annual wealth tax of one-tenth of 1 percent on all net worth exceeding $5 million -- a tax that would affect only 50,000 households, or fewer than one-tenth of 1 percent of the nation's taxpayers -- would yield an additional $100 billion.

Point out that a progressive income tax has been a cornerstone of our fiscal system since 1913 -- and our current non-progressive and often regressive tax is the anomaly. In World War II, rich Americans paid a marginal rate of over 68 percent of their incomes in federal taxes, even after exploiting every tax loophole they could find. In the 1950s, under Dwight Eisenhower, the highest marginal rate was over 90 percent, and even after using all the deductions and credits, the rich paid almost 52 percent.

[...]

A Real Progressive Tax Policy?

What Does a Progressive Tax Policy Look Like?

By Ezra Klein
January 24, 2008 | Prospect.org

[...]

Consumption taxes, however, do not need to be sales taxes, and they do not need to be flat. Cornell economist Robert Frank has a particularly elegant proposal for a progressive sales tax that's tabulated at year's end, rather than at the point of sale. Under his system, come tax time, families would report their income, just as they do now, but also their savings (how much they've invested, kept in the bank, etc). The difference between the two would be their taxable consumption. Everyone would then get a standard deduction of $30,000, effectively exempting low-income families from taxation altogether. As the total taxable consumption rose, so too would the rates, just as is true now. A taxable consumption of $15,000 might pay 10 percent in taxes. At $8 million the top rate could be as high as we chose to make it.

This could have substantial benefits. "Consider a family that spends $10 million a year and is deciding whether to add a $2 million wing to its mansion," Frank writes. "If the top marginal tax rate on consumption were 100 percent, the project would cost $4 million. The additional tax payment would reduce the federal deficit by $2 million. Alternatively, the family could scale back, building only a $1 million addition. Then it would pay $1 million in additional tax and could deposit $2 million in savings. The federal deficit would fall by $1 million, and the additional savings would stimulate investment, promoting growth. Either way, the nation would come out ahead with no real sacrifice required of the wealthy family, because when all build larger houses, the result is merely to redefine what constitutes acceptable housing."

Give tax credits to ALL U.S. taxpayers

I await your howls and vociferous objections!

Share the Credit

Why extending income tax credits to payroll tax payers should be the next big idea in American politics -- politically unassailable, progressive economics on a grand scale.

Michael Lind
Prospect.org | September 3, 2007

The Democrats are a potential majority party in need of a major idea with potential. The major idea that built a Republican majority starting with Ronald Reagan's election was simple: cutting income taxes, with or without cuts in spending. The Republicans reduced income tax rates and then they cut big holes in those rates by creating new or enlarged tax credits available only to Americans who pay income tax.

Meanwhile payroll taxes have risen for working Americans who, because they pay little or no income tax, are ineligible for a range of tax breaks from the $1,000-a-year child tax credit to the home mortgage interest deduction.

Some progressives hope to reverse a generation of Reaganism by repealing George W. Bush's income tax cuts in order to pay for major new spending programs. But the stigma attached to "tax-and-spend" liberalism by a generation of conservative propaganda remains. Equally dubious is the strategy proposed by neoliberal Democrats, whose slogan seems to be: "no pain, no gain." Their formula of budget-balancing fiscal conservatism plus tiny, symbolic subsidies has no popular appeal.

Instead the Democrats should take a leaf from the Republican playbook and position themselves as the party of deep tax cuts for working Americans. What the Reaganites did for affluent income tax payers, Democrats (and like-minded Republicans) can do for America's working-class majority.

Here is a majority-making idea: Make all Americans who pay payroll taxes eligible for every existing income tax credit -- the child tax credit, the home mortgage interest deduction, all of them. With a single stroke, this would accomplish two important goals. First, it would provide substantial tax relief for working Americans who pay only, or chiefly, payroll taxes. Second, it would permit these same payroll tax payers to enjoy the same tax breaks that more affluent income tax payers now enjoy exclusively.

The party that opens up all income tax breaks to all payroll tax payers might be able to consolidate the next majority in American politics, a majority built on center-left, tax-cut Reaganism for the masses, not the elites.

If you're like most Americans, you pay the federal government more money in the form of the 15.3 percent payroll tax taken out of your paycheck every two weeks than you pay in income tax. Even Americans making between $65,000 and $100,000 a year, well above the national median income, pay a greater share of their federal tax dollar for payroll tax than for income tax. You have to be in the highest-earning 20 percent of Americans to pay more income tax than payroll tax.

You'd think that politicians in Washington would be eager to relieve voters of the payroll tax burden, right? Wrong.

Since 1980 the payroll tax has been hiked several times. Meanwhile federal income taxes have been slashed repeatedly -- to the benefit, chiefly, of the rich. The wealthiest 5 percent of taxpayers saw their effective federal tax rates fall from 30.1 percent in 2001 to 25.6 percent in 2004, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). And they have benefited even more from steep reductions in taxes on capital gains and dividends.

To make matters worse, more and more of the burden of paying for the federal government has shifted to the payroll tax, which hits middle-class workers the hardest. As a percentage of federal revenue, the payroll tax rose from 27 percent in 1973 to a whopping 40 percent in 2003.

It gets even worse. In the past generation, Congress has quietly expanded an invisible welfare state for the well-to-do -- a generous system of income tax subsidies that is off limits to tens of millions of working-class and middle-class Americans.

Here's how the tax-break welfare state for the affluent works: The IRS allows them to take advantage of a number of different tax credits, from the home mortgage interest deduction to the $1,000-a-year child tax credit to a separate credit for money spent by working parents on child care. Under the current tax system, the affluent are also able to shelter large amounts from taxes in tax-preferred savings vehicles like IRAs and Keogh Plan pensions.

Here's the catch: You can only claim these tax credits against income taxes, not against payroll taxes. One-third of American families pay only payroll tax and no income tax. If you belong to one of those families, you're out of luck.

And even if you pay income tax on top of payroll tax, you can only claim these credits for your income tax liability. In theory income tax payers can claim thousands of dollars in total for various deductions -- but only if they pay that amount or more in income taxes. The more money you make, the greater your subsidy from the government! Here's one example: In 2005 families earning more than $75,000 saved twice as much money using the child tax credit as families earning less than $30,000.

And we haven't even mentioned corporate income tax breaks that chiefly benefit the economic elite in this country. Hundreds of billions of dollars in potential federal revenues are lost each year because of private company health care plans and pensions -- including "gold-plated" plans for corporate executives. If you work for an employer who does not provide either health care or a pension, you're out of luck again.

Reforms in recent decades have created a three-caste society for purposes of taxation. At the bottom, the poor have largely been exempted from taxation and receive such generous tax subsidies as the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). At the top, income tax rates have fallen, and the reduced rates, in turn, have been hollowed out by a system of generous tax credits for upper-income households. Stuck in between the affluent and the poor are working-class Americans. They make too much money to receive means-tested subsidies for the poor like the EITC. But they do not qualify for the income-tax welfare state of the affluent because they pay little or no federal income tax. The chief federal tax they pay is the combined Social Security/Medicare payroll tax, for which there are no tax credits comparable to those available to affluent income tax payers.

To put it another way, the United States has moved away from a system of universal social insurance for the broad middle class toward two means-tested welfare states taking the form of tax expenditures and administered by the IRS: a tax-credit welfare state for the poor (the EITC) and another tax-credit welfare state for the affluent.

The idea of granting payroll tax relief has been around since the 1980s. Until now ideas for payroll tax relief have taken four forms: abolition of the payroll tax, permanent payroll tax rate cuts, rebates for payroll taxes, and the extension of the child tax credit to workers who pay payroll tax but not income tax.

Al Gore has proposed abolishing the payroll tax and replacing it with a carbon tax. In our book The Radical Center (2001), Ted Halstead and I proposed replacing the payroll tax with a progressive consumption tax. There is little political support, however, for completely substituting a new tax for the payroll tax.

In the early 1990s, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan proposed permanently cutting payroll taxes so that they met only annual Social Security obligations. Richard Darman, the budget director for President George H.W. Bush, called it "the most irresponsible budget idea of the 1990s." Moynihan's proposal went nowhere in a decade marked by hysteria about the alleged looming bankruptcy of Social Security.

Robert Reich, in this magazine, was just one of a number of writers who floated the idea of payroll tax rebates in the early 2000s, as part of efforts to devise a progressive alternative to the further round of income tax cuts proposed by the current President Bush and enacted by the Republican Congress. Like proposals for the abolition of payroll taxes and Moynihan's proposed rate cuts, the rebate proposals would help many working Americans. But all three kinds of proposed reforms are completely unconnected to the question of income tax expenditures, which would continue to exist and continue to be unavailable to payroll tax payers.

The link between income tax credits and the payroll tax was actually made by Newt Gingrich and his Republican colleagues in the 1994 Contract with America. The Contract proposed extending the then-novel child tax credit to working parents who paid payroll taxes but not income taxes. Once in power, the Republicans reneged on their promise, and to this day the child tax credit is available only to parents who pay income tax. But the idea did not die. It was recently revived by the Center for American Progress, which has proposed making the child tax credit refundable to all families who pay payroll taxes.

This is an excellent idea -- but why limit the reform to only one tax credit? Here is a simple, bold, and elegant proposal which at one stroke would universalize the income tax credit system and, at the same time, grant significant payroll tax relief to stressed American households: Make all Americans who pay payroll taxes eligible for all existing income tax credits for children, housing, education, savings, and other purposes. Every single tax credit that can now be claimed by individual income tax payers, from the child tax credit to the home mortgage interest deduction, should be available to all Americans who pay the payroll tax. Every single one. No exceptions.

Call it the Total Tax Credit (TTC) system. Under the TTC system, even if you don't pay income taxes, your employer would let you deduct your tax credits from the payroll tax that is sent to the government every two weeks.Result: fatter biweekly paychecks for all American workers. The biggest winners would be those who could claim the most TTC deductions: home-owning families with dependent children. But even single, childless renters who don't pay income tax, or pay only a small amount, could benefit as well -- for example, from tax credits for savings. In this way, today's tax credit system exclusively for income tax payers would be turned overnight from a professional-class gated community into a mainstream middle-class neighborhood.

But wait, wouldn't allowing payroll tax payers to claim credits against the payroll tax blow a huge hole in revenues? Wouldn't we need to make up for the lost revenue in order to fund Social Security and Medicare? Of course we would. And we could, in various ways.

The first step would be to lift the cap on payroll taxation, which is now $97,500 a year. The American public supports the idea of lifting the cap on Social Security payroll taxes. In a February 2005 Washington Post poll, 81 percent said that Americans who make more than the present limit should pay Social Security tax on their wage income. There is a precedent for this long-overdue reform: In 1993 Congress removed the similar cap that previously existed on Medicare taxes on wage income.

Would lifting the cap hurt mainstream Americans? Hardly. Only the top 5 percent or 6 percent of wage earners would see their Social Security tax go up. These are the same people who have received most of the benefits from tax cuts over the past 30 years. They can afford it.

Lifting the cap while keeping benefits for affluent retirees unchanged would produce a surplus for Social Security for the next 75 years. But this assumes no payroll tax relief for middle-income workers. If we adopt the Total Tax Credit system, then the money that streams in from applying payroll taxation to wage income higher than $97,500 would fill part of the revenue shortfall created by extending income tax credits to payroll tax payers. But we would still need to cut spending elsewhere or come up with new revenues.

How about imposing a cap on tax expenditures -- while lifting the cap on payroll tax? Right now the benefits of the home mortgage deduction go disproportionately to the richest Americans with the biggest houses. Capping the home mortgage interest deduction at, say, the median amount spent by homeowners would result in new revenue flowing from the rich into federal coffers -- without raising existing federal income tax rates at all. Politically speaking it's much more attractive to raise revenue by capping income tax loopholes than to raise income tax rates. Reducing the amount of money the wealthy can shelter in tax-favored savings vehicles alone would result in a flood of new revenues to the Treasury. The price of extending today's income-tax-only credits to all American payroll tax payers without bankrupting the government may be to make all tax credits -- for housing, children, and education -- more modest. But that's how it should be, anyway.

The Total Tax Credit system would also affect the economy indirectly, to the benefit of the broad middle class. As take-home pay for working people increased, the economy's spending on housing, day care, and other sectors would come to include the less affluent. A universalized home mortgage interest deduction capped below the current $1 million would encourage realtors to build a greater number of modest homes, rather than second homes and McMansions. Day-care centers would find a new clientele in working-class parents as well as professionals. Allowing payroll tax payers to cut their payroll tax by saving money in tax-favored retirement accounts would create an entirely new source of capital for banks. America's tax-credit-subsidized economy would shift downmarket -- and about time, too.

Lifting the cap on payroll taxes while capping the newly universal tax credits might still result in revenue shortfalls. We could increase other taxes that fall lightly on working people, such as income taxes, taxes on capital gains and dividends, and estate taxes. Or we could raise revenue from new taxes, like a national sales tax or value-added tax (VAT) on luxury goods. Think about it -- a national tax on luxuries enjoyed by the wealthy could help to pay the cost of extending tax breaks now enjoyed by elite income tax payers to ordinary payroll tax payers.

But our representatives should prefer to raise new revenue to pay for the Total Tax Credit system by means of consumption taxation rather than higher income taxes, and the reason is political, not economic. Consumption taxes, like national VATs elsewhere in the world, state and local sales taxes in the United States, and, for that matter, payroll taxes, have the political advantages of being inescapable and invisible. Payroll and consumption taxes are difficult if not impossible to avoid. And even more importantly, because they are relatively invisible compared to highly transparent taxes like the income tax and property tax, consumption taxes and payroll taxes are less likely to provoke tax revolts.

In Europe the architects of generous social-insurance systems have been wise to rely heavily on non-transparent taxes like payroll taxes and consumption taxes. While these are regressive, in Europe their effect has been moderated by progressive spending. In the taxophobic United States, we could achieve the same result by making our tax burden more progressive. Social-democratic purists may lament the fact that so much public policy in the United States is done via the tax code rather than direct spending programs. But instead of complaining that the United States is not Sweden, American progressives and centrists ought to make a virtue of necessity and make the existing tax-expenditure welfare state nearly universal (by allowing payroll tax payers to participate) and more progressive (by capping the new federal total tax expenditures).

What about the politics of the total tax credit proposal? Two questions must be addressed: Would it endanger public support for Social Security? And would it be popular with voters?

The first question is whether it is wise partly to sever the link between payroll taxes and Social Security expenditures, something that any major payroll tax relief plan without major Social Security spending cuts would do. Franklin D. Roosevelt conceded that the payroll tax was a regressive tax, but argued that the link between contributions and payouts was necessary so that "no damn politician can ever scrap my Social Security program." The same logic has inspired many progressives as well. Like FDR, they fear that Social Security would no longer be viewed as social insurance for the middle class but as a redistributive welfare program for the elderly poor. And as the saying goes, "programs for the poor are poor programs."

The evidence suggests, however, that there is little basis for the fear that Social Security will lose public support if it is funded by taxes other than payroll tax. Some of the evidence comes from abroad, from countries that fund their public pension systems partly or wholly out of general revenues. But the most convincing evidence comes from here in the United States. Medicare is divided into two programs, Part A and Part B. Part A is funded by the Medicare payroll tax. Part B is funded in part from general revenues. In spite of this mixture of streams of funding, support for Medicare as a whole remains strong -- so strong, in fact, that Bush and the Republican Congress presided over the biggest expansion in Medicare expenditures since the program's inception, in the form of the Medicare drug benefit.

The truth is that whether programs are popular or not seems to have no connection to how they are funded. Social Security in particular remains the "third rail" of American politics. By endorsing partial privatization of Social Security, Bush boldly seized the third rail -- and was promptly shocked. Public reaction to his idea was so hostile that the idea died, even in a Republican Congress.

The same fate undoubtedly awaits proposals to impose radical means-testing and steep cuts on middle-class Social Security payments as an alternative to raising taxes to cover Social Security costs. By paying for Social Security out of general revenues or other dedicated taxes, the solvency of Social Security can be assured, even as the Total Tax Credit system slashes payroll tax for most Americans.

The larger political issue remains to be addressed: will the Total Tax Credit system play in Peoria? The answer is obvious: It is hard to imagine a proposal that would be more popular with the American public.

The swing vote in American politics since the 1960s has consisted of high-school-educated white working-class populists -- Reagan Democrats or Jim Webb Republicans. A slight shift of these voters gave Congress to the Republicans in 1994 and took it away in 2006. In theory the Democrats can build a bare-majority coalition on the basis of affluent liberal whites, blacks, and Latinos. But a veto-proof Democratic supermajority in Congress capable of passing reform legislation, with or without a Democratic president, cannot exist in the foreseeable future unless white working-class swing voters are welded to the party. And these are the very voters who would benefit the most from the Total Tax Credit system.

What do today's Democrats offer these voters? The neoliberal wing offers Rubinomics -- deficit reduction, cuts in middle-class entitlements like Social Security, and symbolic microsubsidies. For the working class, Rubinomics is all pain and no gain -- their Social Security benefits would be slashed under most neoliberal Social Security solvency plans, and new subsidies would be means-tested programs for the poor for which the working class is ineligible.

The left wing of the Democratic party is more in tune with the operational economic liberalism of working-class voters, who tend to be New Deal liberals when it comes to spending (if not taxing) and moderate conservatives when it comes to social issues. But the 2006 election was a referendum on a lost war, not a sign that the public in general -- and working-class swing voters in particular -- want more direct public spending.

The TTC system offers Democrats a third way: putting money in the pockets of working-class voters by cutting their taxes, not by appropriating more money for federal programs. This Reaganism for the masses is immune to political attack by Reaganites themselves. The gloomy deficit hawks in both parties can flap their wings and squawk about how irresponsible it is to cut the payroll tax, even if the cap is raised. But progressives are likely to find allies among two groups of conservatives: populist supply-siders and family-values social conservatives like Allan Carlson, who have been arguing for tax relief for working-class families for years.

Conservatives have had considerable success in arguing against making income tax credits refundable for the non-tax-paying poor. They argue that the very concept of "tax expenditures," which treats special-purpose tax breaks like the child tax credit as the equivalent of government spending, is an academic fiction. In reality, they argue, these tax breaks are not government subsidies at all. The government is simply allowing taxpayers to keep more of their own money.

But this argument against extending income tax credits to Americans with little or no tax liability does not work against extending income tax credits to Americans with another kind of tax liability -- payroll tax liability. Conservatives may argue that the untaxed poor don't deserve tax breaks -- but working-class Americans are taxpayers themselves. Conservatives cannot argue that Americans who pay payroll tax should be discriminated against in favor of Americans who pay income tax. Doing so would be political suicide.

In an ideal world, the Total Tax Credit would be refundable so that non-taxpayers among the working poor would get them, too, in the form of federal subsidies like the EITC. However, abandoning the goal of making the Total Tax Credit refundable to the non-tax-paying poor might be the price of a bipartisan coalition to enact this important reform.

Besides, Republicans who oppose the TTC will doubtless have it pointed out to them it was Newt Gingrich who in 1994 proposed making the child tax credit available to payroll tax payers -- a key element of the Total Tax Credit proposal. And it was Bush who in 2006 proposed capping "gold-plated" income tax expenditures, a precedent for another key element of the TTC system: capping "gold-plated" tax expenditures that benefit the affluent.

Nor would the TTC pit income tax payers against payroll tax payers. On the contrary, large numbers of income tax payers would be able to add their payroll tax to their income tax, against which they could claim bigger tax credits. Many in the upper-middle class as well the lower-middle and working classes would benefit from a Total Tax Credit law.

Making payroll tax payers eligible for all income tax credits is a big idea that can shake up the stagnant domestic policy debate. We've had three decades of income tax cuts for the elites; now it's time for payroll tax cuts for the masses. "Lift, cap, and share" should be the motto of proponents of the TTC system. Lift the cap on payroll taxation; cap all income tax expenditures; and share all existing income tax expenditures with Americans who pay payroll tax, even if they pay no income tax at all. If Democrats are shrewd enough to take up this cause, they could immunize themselves against conventional right-wing attacks. How could conservatives possibly object to cutting taxes and modifying existing programs to make them more fair? (There would still be the option of adding new tax credits in the future, like one to help people buy health insurance under an individual mandate system or to offset public health programs paid for by state taxes.)

It's time to share the credit -- the tax credit. The next president should work with Congress to ensure that all taxpayers get exactly the same tax breaks, whether they pay income tax on top of payroll tax or payroll tax alone. That's not only fair -- it's the American thing to do.