Vic Socotra

10 March 2009

Thelma and Louise

(Thelma and Lousie)

The Republicans are back.

No, don’t freak. Not those Republicans. Congressman Boener of Ohio ought not to take heart in the matter, since that is the term for the Marxist scum in Northern Ireland who take grim delight in killing British soldiers and police officers.

They are rejectionists of the peace process, refusers to take compromise for an answer. There are so many Republican splinters who strive for the mantel of the original revolutionaries it gets confusing to the Diaspora Irish about who is who. In addition to the Provisional and Real factions, there were four more formations in existence at the height of the Troubles, 1970-1999.

It is troubling that the cockroaches have crawled out of the woodwork when thing appeared to be going so well. Of course, the six counties of Ulster have much in common with the Irish Free State, where the wheels have come off the economic miracle just as it has everywhere else.

Maybe it is confronting the Great Recession that is doing it. The Free State became the first member of the eurozone to fall into official recession last September. Maybe that is what has brought the gunmen back. They may see an opportunity to fan the fire of dissatisfaction with the pocketbook into a return to open warfare.

Gordon Brown says there will be no return to the old days, but Gerry Adams, former head of PIRA’s political wing, is maintaining a troubling ambivalence.

I don’t know what will come of this. I always felt that reconciliation in the Ault Sod might mean that even the most intractable conflicts, Sunni and Shia, Israeli and Palestinian might be healed in time. But maybe not.

It really comes down to people like you and me getting out there and starting to consume again. If we do not jump-start the global economic engine, then we drag the rest of the world with us over the precipice, like Thelma and Louise on the run from the cops with nothing left to lose.

That is what they tell us, anyway. Still, you can’t help but look over your shoulder and be a little jumpy. It seems unwise to run up a lot of debt at the moment, and awfully prudent to pay it down rather than embark on some new mad whim.

I don’t think the curtains were necessarily a luxury, nor the bedspread. I cut back, but did not eliminate, the Russian coffee; put the Netflix on hold. I haven’t seen all the movies I would like, or even had a chance to go back and watch the ones I liked more than once, like Thelma and Louise on their doomed road trip.

I have no more work for Captain Middleton, the handyman, and I hope the lack of off-the-books labor does not drive him too far into his own recession.

It is not much, I’ll grant you, but considering what is going to come it only seems rational. The IRS will step in next payday and dock my pay another $145 dollars; I have stepped up the allotment to the retirement account, since there is so much less in it than there was before all the legal battles.

So, the belt tightening begins now, and I am sorry that it is likely to have the effect that we need exactly the least now.

I would like the Administration to succeed, not fail, but they are not concentrating on fixing the crisis. They have half an eye cast toward cloud cuckoo-land, working on utopia.

Think about it. The President has predicated his lofty plans on a series of assumptions that cannot happen. The budget is based on the notion of a mild recession this year, and a resurgent economy in 2010. That is possible, I suppose, though it is nothing on which I would bet the farm.

A woman named Dorothy Brown explained it the best I have heard in the Times yesterday, since nothing like this is ever said explicitly from the podium in the West Wing. All those words about socking it to taxpayers who “make over $250 thousand a year” are worth exactly what they cost.

Air is still free, right? I have not checked this morning.

The real deal is this: Families earning more than $250,000 and singles earning more than $200,000 will see taxes on their wages and interest increased to a top rate of 39.6 percent from 35 percent, and to 35% from 33% for individuals who make $160 thousand a year.

That is why the IRS is adjusting the tax tables, and why the impact will be felt at the end of the month for a lot of people who make nowhere near what the President claimed the limit is, and clearly now never will.

I heard a vigorous debate on the radio last night while I was still working, thinking that the internet was more a curse than a blessing.

An articulate woman explained how the income tax thing worked. It is already progressive in nature; the top one percent of people we are beating up pay about 40% of the total tax bill; the top five percent (of which I am proud to be a member) pay an additional 20%, to a total of 60% of all income tax revenues. If you take the top quarter of those of us who work, the total collected dollars amount to 85% of all the income seized by the Treasury.

The bottom half of taxpayers contribute a little over two percent, or decimal dust. That is extraordinary, particularly when you hear the word “fairness” thrown around so much.

But a shrill male voice responded to the articulate woman. He was on a cell phone, hurtling somewhere toward the abyss in his Volvo. He said that everyone pays Social Security taxes, on all income up to $106,500 this year, and that was clearly unfair.

I looked up from the company e-mail, startled. What appeared to be fair to this expert is that half of America should be on direct subsidy for everything. I wondered if he was driving or the passenger.

No one on the show called him an idiot, either. They were all very nice to him. He was starting on capital gains, none of which I have ever had, when his Volvo disappeared into a tunnel and his voice went away.

That is about the death of a dream, in a way, but I am OK with that. It seems only fair.

Of course, the collision of the Administration’s wildly erroneous assumptions with the political reality of Congress will bring significant change. Even with that body under firm Democratic control in both houses, there are some bridges that really are to nowhere.

The apparent first casualty is a big one: the proposal to limit tax deductions for the wealthiest 1.2 percent of taxpayers. That is what was going to fund half of the Health Care plan over the next decade.

The billions in savings from cutting subsidies to big farmers and agribusinesses? Not going to happen, according to the chair of Senate Budget Committee, who happens to be from grain-belt North Dakota.

Cap-and-trade for the emissions of carbon dioxide? The rust belt Democrats are going to fight hardagainst it, and what is left of the other Republican Party is going to pile on.

There doesn’t appear to be any way to raise the kind of bucks required to get us to Cloud Cuckoo Land, which means that the stunning deficits are going to continue until the whole machine breaks down. Then what? Is that when the new social order starts?

Paul Krugman is as progressive an economist as exists, and he is concerned that administration’s economic policy is already falling behind the curve to deal with the situation as it is. He thinks there is a real, growing danger that it will never catch up.

That is a charitable assumption. But since Change is the mantra, and the Crisis the only vehicle to get it, this is the time that the Administration has to make everything happen. If we wait to drive back the recession, cool reason might come back, and in the cold light of day, billions of dollars in eternal obligation might be subject to debate.

Clearly, that cannot be permitted.

So, I sigh and thank God I have a job this morning, and need to get off to it. But like the bubble we rode with such exhilaration toward the abyss, it doesn’t seem to make much sense. Couldn’t we do one thing at a time?

In this movie, would you prefer to be Thelma, or Louise? And who would you prefer to drive?

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