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EDITOR OF REDSTATE

Superficial Agreement

By: Erick Erickson (Diary)  |  October 13th, 2011 at 04:45 AM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

Last night on AC360, John King filled in for Anderson Cooper and noted that a number of the Republican Presidential candidates are tempering their tone toward the Occupy Wall Street crowd. He asked if I stood by all my harsh words toward them. “Absolutely,” I replied.

Part of the reason the candidates are toning down is because it is a good way to put more light on Mitt Romney being more of Wall Street than the rest of them. There is a populist campaign against Wall Street to be waged by the GOP and Mitt Romney can’t do it.

But in waging such a campaign — one I think needs to be waged — the right needs to be very careful about going too far down the Occupy Wall Street road.

The hipsters, hippies, and assorted police car poppers on Wall Street are as upset as some on the right with the bank bailouts, etc. Superficially there is a lot to agree on.

I have said for a while that it is a crying shame companies in this country have gotten to the point where they’d rather pay a K-Street lobbyist to go carve out a tax loophole to benefit the corporation than spend money to innovate.

Simplifying the tax code, getting rid of corporate welfare, etc. are things that can be agreed on.

But in a lot of the rhetoric from the police poppers and occupying Wall Street, there is a lot of class warfare rhetoric and a lot of pop marxism. They want to redistribute wealth. They want to take from those who have and give to those who they have determined are more deserving. The blame the top 1% for gaming the system when, if they were honest, they themselves helped elect a lot of the people who passed the laws.

How many of the occupiers support Barney Frank? What about Chris Dodd?

Additionally, much of the rhetoric involves more government intervention in the economy. They claim it isn’t really a free market. But their solution is not to deregulate and make the market more free. Their solution is to make the market even less free.

Historically, the further a nation moves from a free market, the more its people get poor and the more its government gets totalitarian.

The anti-Wall Street populism will play well on both sides of the aisle. But the solutions, beyond the superficial, are in stark ideological contrast. And we cannot afford as nation for the ragtag group of socialists, communists, and hangers on to have their way.

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COMMENTS

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  • BA Cyclone

    is that their supposed solution to “being the 99%” would merely change the supposed 1%.

    Instead of the mythical 1% in charge being innovators and creators chosen by people who want their wares, the new 1% will be an all-powerful government bureaucracy who forcibly chooses what the 99% are allowed to have.

    Sounds utopian, don’tcha think?

  • Marcus_Traianus

    Corporate Welfare? You will need to define that for me and then provide a few examples where it is occurring to our detriment,

    Is it really tax breaks that allow certain industries to compete more effectively overseas and abroad due to foreign government subsidies, which artificially push the price down, thereby creating imbalance in the market?

    Language is important. Have we come so far as to adopt the Left’s nomenclature? Have they changed our dialogue that much we now concede certain anti-capitalist principles and adopt their catchphrases such as “Wall Street Greed”?

    This alleged “greed” and “welfare” helps employ thousands of people. The more money individuals legally make for a corporation, the more people that company employs and they become better paid. It’s a pretty simple concept actually, which many people have seemed to abandon as they adopt the rhetoric of class-warfare twisted into the language by this President and his supporters. It’s about time we take back control of this conversation and stop yielding to this divisive, and candidly, un-American dialogue.

  • djvu

    Dear Marcus,
    You have a very valid point here with which I agree. IE what is the actual tax rate on our oil companies after we factor in all the depletion allowences etc.? That doesn’t mean that after the factoring in we shouldn’t reduce the tax rate by a substantial portion. To repeat an old clih?, ‘Corporations don’t pay taxes, they collect them.’ How many of our liberals and progressives realize that if this administration increases the tax on the oil companies that they will be the ones to end up paying that increase in tax?
    I worked for an interantional oil compay for 34 years and I have had a lot to say about the internationals and their tax base in my book ‘DARKEST TRUTHS OF BLACK GOLD’. I have, also, a lot to say in the same book about about what the Fed is doing to our dollar. Has our 2% percenter, aka as the Fed chairman, ever written a check in the amount of C$700,000.00 for a temporary membership in the Shanghai Club in Shanghai as I have done? Has he ever ordered a beer at the bar of the Shanghai Club when the bartender drew two draughts, instead of one, because he was looking after the well being of the member? He knew the price of the second draught would have increased before the member finished his first.
    Robert Palmer Smith

  • http://www.planettron.com NickDeringer

    Most of the people at OWS are just reliving the 60s. Look at the signs protesting American Imperialism, the wars, etc. They are useful idiots. They are being used by Obama and the Left to create instability so Obama can declare “a state of emergency” and jam through more regulations and grab more power for the Government.

    Conservatives need to call this for what it is: a manufactured crisis that will be used to jam through Obama’s new jobs bill.

  • spinoneone

    won’t fully resolve this problem We know, having had it excellently demonstrated with the housing bubble, that there are burglars on Wall Street. On the other hand, without Wall Street we wouldn’t be able to practice capitalism as we know it today. If we returned to a barter economy, as proposed by some of the banal buffoons at OWS, nothing would remain of the world economy, at least not was we know it today.

    Taxes paid on corporate profits reduce the amount of money available to the corporation for investment and/or distribution to their shareholders. Both the investment and distribution of corporate income place more money in the national economy, to the profit of everyone. Putting some quantity of the money in the hands of the government [national, state, and/or local] necessarily reduces the amount of money available to the national polity because the government is not efficient at redistributing that money. [Lot's of "drag" in the form of government payroll, waste, fraud, mismanagement, and plain stupidity in how those taxes are used.]

    Of course, we treat a corporation as a “person” for most legal purposes. So, corporations, like living people, have certain rights, responsibilities, and opportunities. For tax purposes, corporation profits are taxed as if they were a person’s “income.” Which means, if the profits are distributed outside the corporation, they are taxed again since the distribution is another person’s “income.” What a great deal for the government. Two bites from the same apple! One could get fat from that; no doubt at all that government does.

    It is politically impossible to end the income/profits tax on corporations. It is difficult but not impossible to deem dividends and other distributions from corporations as business expenses and thus not taxed at the corporate level. They obviously would be taxed as income for the recipient, but would only be taxed once.

    A distortion free tax code is an ideal to which we can aspire. The problem is how to keep Congress, two, five, or twenty years later, from messing it up.

  • williamjameson

    or two, perhaps they were Anarcho Capitalists. The majority of Americans
    have little in common with the 25%er’s Let’s start calling them 25%er’s because they’re an insult to everything the mainstream stand for.

    Also noticed a few racist and anti-Semitic rants from these Kooks.

    Where was John’s Kings coverage of racism plus I thought CNN was against hatred of Jews……..they fired Rick Sanchez so its time for CNN to represent the mainstream and call out the problems and question the integrity of this group. Drug use, sex in public, naked and poop and urine everywhere. Violence threatening loons, vandalism, theft, assault and battery and so on. Very sleazy bunch and no leadership in the group in any city. And where is CNN and FOX and MSDNC aka MSNBC????????????

    Watched the interview at 10pm, Erick did well while King tried the PC standard and as expected King refused to disclose many problems with the 25%er’s.

    Immigrants and illegal aliens have a superior work ethic than these KooKs. And $8/hour job is always better than no job. Not everyone gets a desk with computer and bean bag chairs located near the arcade machines. Does Obama think these people want to build roads, bridges or paint homes? Too many want something they are not willing to work for. I have little respect for lazy people waiting for handouts who denigrate themselves while thinking the majority are in agreement with them.

  • romeg

    who will be our nominee to take on Barrack Hussein Obama and is campaign to destroy the American economy. One of those candidates is proposing a deeply flawed but serious plan to utterly overhaul the current tax code after having been a serious proponent of another even more radical overhaul of that code and all we hear is about how flawed it is and how that candidate’s weekends on his Unicorn ranch have, somehow, caused a disconnect between him and human reality.

    My point is this: The tax code is like the weather: Everyone TALKS about it and, save for the proponents of anthropogenic global warming, no one DOES anything about it. And even when someone DOES take it on and actually DOES something about it, in less than a decade those changes are largely undone.

    So, Erick, if YOU were a Wall Streeter or the CEO of a large multinational, which would YOU do: Would you set to work replacing the tax code with something that would unleash the power of the free market and makes actual economic sense, not to mention extricating the federal government from the lives of everyday working Americans or would you go to K Street and hire a lobbyist to create a carve-out for YOUR stockholders, (you know, those people that hired you to work for THEIR interests)?

    Before the current code gets jettisoned in favor of something more fair, balanced and beneficial to all, someone is going to have to come up with a plan and, just as the Prohibitionists did 100 years ago, begin to put members of Congress in a position that makes it IMPOSSIBLE to oppose the plan. We already have a model for that campaign in the Prohibition movement.

    We need a point man in the mode of Wayne Wheeler to crank up the heat on elected officials before it will happen. We must make them act in the best, long-term interests of the nation rather than their narrow political self-interest by promising to put their narrow political self-interest in grave jeopardy if they fail to support the replacement of the current system.

  • runner12

    While some of the OWS rhetoric may “sound” like their is common ground between these people and the Tea Party, none really exists.

    The solutions the Tea Party wants involve less government, these people want more. They would be perfectly fine with government enforcement of their socialist ideals.

    They see the “man” as being corporations and anyone who has ever been successful whether it be in business, medicine, law, etc. Profits are sin in their eyes. Class warfare is what they thrive upon.

    The Tea Party/Conservatives view government as the “man.” We believe that everyone in the country has the right to profit by their own hard work and effort. Profits lawfully gained are no sin, they are celebrated.

    The philosophy behind the OWS crowd is completely opposite of the Tea Party crowd, as are the goals. Our GOP canidates need to be more bold when discussing this crowd. They do not have to name call or be denigrating to these misguided and somewhat dangerous fools. They just need to state what Erick has above. You know, the truth.

  • runner12

    “there”

  • Death_of_the_Donkey

    **By fair trade I mean a fianancial level playing field not a labor/environmental one.

    Under President Reagan we had free trade, but it was tempered by fairness. Reagan didn’t stand for the Japanese manipulating markets and playing under a different set of rules so he forced “voluntary” quotas on them (which then forced their auto companies to make cars here).

    What we have today is a system (specifically with regards to China) in which the rules are so skewed against us that companies are better off making stuff in China to export back here almost regardless of value (ie it isn’t just toys and underwear, it’s also Ipads etc). In other words, we have set up a system to benefit corporate profits of the large lobbyist employing multinationals at the expense of employment and smaller firms who do not have the same access to China (ie the single locally owned plastics plant that competes with the corporation that outsourced to China).

    I have no problems with free trade, so long as it is fair (ie floating currencies, reduction in government subsidies, equal access for our firms to fully buy Chinese firms like they can buy ours, equal property rights, etc). Reagan would have never stood for this kind of trade and it is sad that our leaders today are so in the thrall of lobbyists that they push this version of “free trade” upon us with every opportunity.

  • olsmithie

    but for all it’s warts and blemishes, it is still the center of capitalism.
    Wall Street has to be screwed up when they are subject to whims of screwballs like Dodd and Frank.
    Those two should be on trial, not Wall Street.

    Regards

  • holymoly

    Sure, wall street employs thousands of people… so does the department of energy. They are leeches, their profits come from political corruption, mostly dems but also plenty of republicans.

  • texanlady

    The only thing I see that the OWS have in common with the Tea Party is that they both are against the bank bailouts .Beyond that I don’t see much. There are a lot of independent swing voters that don’t like Wall St. much these days. Romney will be an easy target for the opposition party because of Bain Capital. We need a candidate that appeals more to the so called average Americans. Obama does not appeal to them anymore so the republican party needs to fill that void. Romney does not do it. Perry could but… Not too sure about Cain. The sales tax will hurt him.

  • avgjo

    You could easily get banned. They’re not very tolerant of that here, with good reason. We have ladies and young folks reading here.

  • johnt

    More disclosure means more federal control. and more opporrtunities to collect tribute, bribes, for the real crooks in government. The allocation of capital, like the rest of human nature, may be imperfect but give things a couple of years when the hands of Washington are wrapped around the throats of the Street. Envy will only supply so much satisfaction then you wake up, to late.
    Social Justice is on the way, trailed by the real corruptiion and waste.

  • gawken

    Happy for your gig on CNN, and always enjoy when you write about it afterwards. Any chance you can post clips each time you’re on?

  • http://www.erickerickson.org Erick Erickson

    n/t

  • http://www.erickerickson.org Erick Erickson

    I’d put under corporate welfare:

    – ethanol subsidies
    – TARP
    – government ownership of GM
    – government rejiggering of pension plan rules for private industry
    – tax exemptions for NASCAR
    – retirement and pension loopholes that favor major corporations over entrepreneurs and small businesses.

  • steveinfl

    Eric, you are putting in too many hours. I love your reasoned analysis, but you are so far off on this one. There is nothing any republican has in common with any of these protests, except Ron Paul. These are pure anti-Semite protests, organized by Jew haters, designed to gin up hatred for the top 1% ( Jewish bankers, lawyers, etc.). So, the 1% are the Jews.The 99% are the non Jews. Yesterday at the protest, one of the Marxist thugs took out a huge sign and started screaming ” The 1% are the Jews, google Wall street Jews”. Research Adbusters.- they are a big time anti-Semite/ pro Muslim organization and they are behind this whole Occupy Wall Street .movement.

  • nhbuckeye

    OWS is manufactured. However, there is a lot of pain out there due to unemployment and underemployment. We the People have been taught to look to government for our answers instead of ourselves over the past 100 years. When I graduated from college in 1992, we were still in a big recession. I went to Miami University, then deemed the “Harvard of the Midwest”. I had a friend Melissa who was an accounting major who worked at the GAP after she graduated because that was the best job she could get, and she is just one of dozens of examples I could give you. We were all pretty sallow about job prospects in 91 and 92. Remember the movie “Reality Bytes”? There was a chunk of truth upon which that movie was built. BUT we all paid our dues, worked hard, and eventually got our careers on track, and very likely my friends and I are all better off for having suffered more than anyone expected. Things are different this time around. The recession is worse and far longer. School loans are much greater. The risk-reward scenario of going to college isn’t the same as it was 20 years ago. Wall Street has definitely played a role in the pain of today, as did the government with its moronic Community Reinvestment Act and hardball tactics played by the Clinton administration to make housing more affordable. We also cannot forget the responsibility borne by home-buyers who made some pretty terrible decisions about what they could truly afford. Of course the left focuses on Wall Street because that fits their ideological view the best. However there are a far greater number of people responsible for our current economic woes. I think life is hard for the protestors across the nation, and they have my empathy. But I think they need to look inside instead of looking for a bail out from government or Wall Street. Government and Wall Street have proved to be incapable to doing their jobs the right way, so you have to depend on yourself and the sooner the better.

  • leehazel

    not Capital Gains. How the treatment of these Wall Street paychecks ever hgot to be treated as Capital Gains is malfeasance at least and criminal at worst.
    Fix this and Congress will have gone along way in fixing the so called “Wall Street Problem”.

  • http://impudent.edublogs.org/ kyle8

    Did you know, for instance, that the government has paid out subsidies to the tune of hundreds of millions to big American companies to advertise in other nations?

    And Let’s not forget Amtrack.

  • Justin Spagnolo (standardcandle)

    The large financial firms of Wall St. will benefit greatly due to dodd-frank, and it will push medium sized firms out of their way…and cause greater divides between small and medium business vs large corporations… it will cause regulations that benefit the “too big to fail” crowd… while setting punitive regulations and tax burdens on smaller firms… I’m not sure I’d go after “Wall St” as a whole, but some of the big boys that drive a large portion of the financial market definitely have a large footprint there… but as you said, there are “superficial” agreements here… and doing what these dope smoking wannabe woodstockers are doing, vs. being adult about it, and driving the fixes through the system our Constitution provides us is quite a large chasm…

  • leehazel

    I would like to see some Brietbart like look see into the background of this movement. It would make a lot of sense for this to be an anti-semite based flare-up funded by Islam.
    The timing as it relates to the US election and Palistinian question(s) are portentious at any rate.

  • renl57

    How do we attack Obama for giving loan guarantees to Solyndra, while simultaneously defending Boeing which has gotten $15 BILLION dollars in loan guarantees from the Export-Import Bank?

    http://www.pewtrusts.org/news_room_detail.aspx?id=55965

    The Export-Import Bank is a Government Sponsored Enterprise (GSE), which operates in that same twilight zone that Fannie and Freddie do. They pretend to be a private corporation while knowing–wink-wink, nudge-nudge–that the Government will bail them out if necessary.

    A “beggar-thy-neighbor” argument–socialist nations subsidize their companies so why shouldn’t America subsidize hers–is saying we need to compete with socialists by becoming socialist ourselves.

  • littlehouse18

    based on their behavior and foolishness. The rest of the unemployed are busy filling out job applications.

  • uncmike

    “I have said for a while that it is a crying shame companies in this country have gotten to the point where they?d rather pay a K-Street lobbyist to go carve out a tax loophole to benefit the corporation than spend money to innovate.”

    It is very distressing to me to see the behavior you identify in the quote above because innovation is what made the US a great economic power. It still is happening (some, but not enough) with smaller start-up companies and the like, but they face major obstacles to success, e.g., myriad regulations and taxes to name only a couple. They also face resistance from major corporations who use their political clout (K-Street) to undercut these smaller companies.

    Another problem is that too many corporations look only at bottom-line numbers in an accounting sense. Take outsourcing. Many tech companies have contracted out elements of their business they consider non-core. Eventually, however, they contract out so much that the subcontractors gain the ability to produce the whole product line themselves, off-shore, and take over the market. Dell should know about this.

    I’m all for ending corporate wellfare and returning what was once a free-market to its rightful place as a real freemarket.

  • Marcus_Traianus

    …I would term those examples a combination of “Pork Barrel Spending” and “overreaching government intervention in the private market”. I also believe we can agree these are destructive and inappropriate uses of taxpayer funds.

    However, I would not wrap it up in a term most likely invented by a Progressive Democrat, Green Party, Peoples Party, Union mouthpiece that has become a catchphrase for the extreme Left.

    Respectfully, I realize those phrases do not role off the tongue that easily. But brevity and sloganeering is no substitute for exposition.

  • rightwingmom52

    There are 2, count ‘em, 2 people with signs representing the 99% on the street corner between the Wells Fargo Tower (that houses the law firm where I work) and Regions Bank. If they hang out until lunch, I’ll walk down and take a picture.

    I’m praying for rain.

  • skorrent1

    Between underwriting signed contracts for production by a proven long-time business, and guaranteeing start-up funds for a business that has no viable plan to make a profit and only exists to benefit from a hoax and continuing government subsidies/mandates? Pretty easy, I’d say.

    That’s not to say that the Ex-Im Bank is a necessary or desirable function of the government. It is probably not. It most likely skews the market as much as Fannie, Freddy and the rest.

  • Repair_Man_Jack

    but that sample has a pretty wide margin of error!

  • surfcat50

    but at least they typically pay ALL of their employees. They don’t pay a few and ask the rest to do the same job as “volunteers.”

    I wonder why somebody doesn’t pass out these want ads and ask (the majority) of the protestors why SOME of them get paid while others don’t.

    http://newyork.craigslist.org/brk/npo/2610084664.html

    Sounds to me like “the Man” might be repressing them. :)

  • Marcus_Traianus

    Not that I necessarily agree with EX-IM loan guarantees. But an argument can be made they do serve a purpose in certain global trade situations for specific industries.

    Anyway in the case of Solyndra, a start-up company in an unproven industry, very clearly politically connected to the administration, fast-tracked through the loan process without proper scrutiny, against the wishes of some in the process and which the President used as a soapbox for political objectives vs. Boeing, a proven global company, in a leading American industry, under attack from a very heavily governmental subsidized competitor (Airbus), who is fiscally sound and a major provider of jobs with a long term positive fiscal outlook?

    Apples and oranges. Maybe even apples and mangoes.

  • A Liberal

    Erickson wrote:

    “The blame the top 1% for gaming the system when, if they were honest, they themselves helped elect a lot of the people who passed the laws.”

    In fact, many of the protesters are quite young, so they couldn’t have voted for the politicians who established public schooling, the FRS, the 16th Am., Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, Sarbanes-Oxley, and other ways in which commerce has been rigged and private, social power undermined.

    Still, the protester’s thinking is mostly harmonious with the politicians who established those programs and with the fools who voted for those politicians.

    And, YES, it’s a communistic uprising. Now it needs to be put down.

  • A Liberal

    Kyle8, to Eric’s list we should add the interstate highway system and airports. The former subsidizes automakers, trucking businesses, contruction companies, construction equipment makers, and so on. The latter subsidizes the airlines and aircraft manufacturers in addition to suppliers of those businesses.

    Of course, oil companies and related businesses, too, are flourishing beneficiaries of subsidized roads and airports. It should go without saying, here, that if leftists were serious about their opposition to corporate welfare and their environmentalism, they’d be demanding and end to subsidized interstate highways and airports. But no. Instead they hold up signs that read ?Tax The Rich?. In other words, ?Gimme My Cut Of The Action?.

    I’m sure that if you search LewRockwell.com or Mises.org you will find numerous other examples of corporate welfare. Massive government borrowing, for example, is a suspect. And let’s not overlook what I suspect is the #1 corporate welfare racket in the USA:

    THE MILITARY.

    When rightwingers are ready to be serious about corporate welfare, they will condemn the MIC and it’s aggressive antics. Of course, each such person will cease to be a rightwinger at about the same time he or she does so.

    As for Amtrak: I think that it was established by cobbling together the remnants of failing or failed commercial passenger rail companies. So perhaps we could call that communistic operation the legacy of a bailout of creditors of those companies and a welfare racket for businessness that make railroad equipment. And it puts a few railroad workers, too, into the government’s pocket.

  • funwithknives

    ever been to Union Station {Chicago} or Seattle’s R/R station. I’ve been to both and it’s much more than a FEW, chum. Spin off in seattle is just outstanding.
    By the way America, thank you ever so much for helping me with my Detroit to Seattle train fare , September ,2010. Right nice of all of you.{Mom always taught me to be polite}

  • djvu

    I wouldn’t have called it ‘corpoate welfare’ though. I would have called ‘stealing’ from the taxpayers.
    Robert Palmer Smith.

  • kenchely

    Not directly. The funny thing is that a disproportionate number of these demonstrators are the sons and daughters of the Jewish bankers, whose real grievance isn’t with the political system, but with their fathers who made the money that let them go to Harvard, Columbia, etc.. This is an alternate version of the girls who marry scummy guys just to prove to their fathers that they can’t stop them from doing what they want.

    Real Jews, the ones in the hats in Brooklyn who actually care about the Law and Israel, just elected a Republican congressman.

  • kenchely

    Not directly. The funny thing is that a disproportionate number of these demonstrators are the sons and daughters of the Jewish bankers, whose real grievance isn’t with the political system, but with their fathers who made the money that let them go to Harvard, Columbia, etc.. This is an alternate version of the girls who marry scummy guys just to prove to their fathers that they can’t stop them from doing what they want.

    Real Jews, the ones in the hats in Brooklyn who actually care about the Law and Israel, just elected a Republican congressman.

  • Common_Cents

    Gingrich got the distinction correct. There are roughly two groups, the agitators and those who are concerned and are looking for answers. It was a good answer for a candidate to not alienate and over generalize the entire group.

    Dang right there is reason to yell about the highest level of wall street crony banksters. Bailouts, AIG scam, co-located servers and HFT, that is not free market. However, almost all the ink spilled is about the banksters, when in fact, there is a 50% equal accomplice, crooked politicians. Repealing glass steagal, allowing fannie/freddie mess, dodd/frank, SEC not doing its job, etc…. there should be an Occupy DC.