This is just plain disgusting.

“We’re approaching nearly half of the United States population that doesn’t pay any income taxes,” Mr. Perry said in Iowa, when asked about combating an “entitlement culture” in the U.S. “And I think one of the ways is to let everybody, as many people as possible…be able to be helping pay for the government that we have in this country.” In Nashua, N.H., Mr. Romney hit a similar theme: “We want to make sure people do pay their fair share.”

Broadening the tax base, simplifying the tax code and lowering tax rates have long been prescriptions for a more efficient tax system, notably from the right. The idea is likely to be a major issue as a congressional supercommittee seeks at least $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction by Thanksgiving.

Of the poorest 20% of American households, those earning less than $16,812 a year, 93.4% pay no income tax. But even 30% of the middle class earning between $33,542 and $59,386 are exempt. Some Republican economists say the tax policies that cause this phenomenon have gone too far, contending that people who don’t pay income taxes have an incentive to support politicians who promise more federal programs, since they aren’t paying for them. …

…About half of the households that pay no income tax do so simply because the standard deductions for tax filers and dependents are large enough to negate taxable earnings. In addition, nearly half of the remainder who were knocked off the tax rolls because of other tax measures are seniors, according to the Tax Policy Center.

The elderly who do not itemize their taxes get a larger standard deduction and most can exclude some or all of their Social Security from being counted as income. Repealing those benefits would subject 16.3 million more households to income taxation.

In other words, it’s wrong to raise taxes on the wealthy when we can squeeze money out of Grandpa.

This sorta kinda goes with the last post — the President’s requests to Congress to work with the White House on immigration reform have been ignored. So, the White House is doing some reform on its own.

The President has no power to change immigration law, but he has some room to maneuver within the implementation of the law. Instead of deporting people wholesale, the administration has set some priorities.

The Obama administration announced Thursday that it would suspend deportation proceedings against many illegal immigrants who pose no threat to national security or public safety.

The new policy is expected to help thousands of illegal immigrants who came to the United States as young children, graduated from high school and want to go on to college or serve in the armed forces.

White House and immigration officials said they would exercise “prosecutorial discretion” to focus enforcement efforts on cases involving criminals and people who have flagrantly violated immigration laws.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano:

“This case-by-case approach will enhance public safety,” she said. “Immigration judges will be able to more swiftly adjudicate high-priority cases, such as those involving convicted felons.”

Many people in the country illegally will now be able to get work permits, meaning they will no longer be undocumented.

This is sensible. Naturally, righties are going ballistic.

Steve Benen writes,

The element of discretion is key here — the administration can’t change the law unilaterally, but it can choose to prioritize among cases. As of yesterday, felons and security threats will be (and stay) at the top of the list, while young people who entered the country illegally with their families as children will not face deportation.

If this latter part sounds kind of familiar, it’s because the DREAM Act is intended to help these same young people. Republicans have refused to allow the legislation to advance, and while the bill is still worthwhile, yesterday’s move from the Obama administration will directly benefit those kids who stand to benefit from the proposal.

I’ll expect the usual howlers to explain how this shows the President wants to promote the GOP agenda. Of course, I think it shows that he is trying to move some things in a more progressive direction within the limitations of the constraints that Congress imposes.

I have a lot of respect for Glenn Greenwald, but I think the time has come to say — Glenn, get a grip.

Background: Scott Lemieux, who a professor of political science, wrote about presidential powers generally in a recent post. Scott explained that presidents have some powers to do some things but little power to do other things. For example, presidents have a lot of authority in the area of foreign policy, but relatively little in regard to enacting new domestic legislation.

Scott was responding to arguments that IF President Obama’s shortcomings are a result of the weakness of presidential power, then (a) how come George W. Bush could get anything done he wanted with a snap of the fingers; and (2) then it doesn’t matter if Rick Perry is elected in 2012, then? And Scott is saying that presidents have a lot of leeway in foreign policy and in implementing old policies, but in getting new domestic legislation done they are relatively weak.

But the fact that the president has very substantial powers in some areas doesn’t change the fact that in terms of domestic policy presidential power is subordinate and highly contingent. The fact that the president can unilaterally decide to bomb Libya doesn’t mean that the president can get 60 Senate votes for single payer health care because he really wants to. And pointing this out doesn’t mean that it doesn’t matter whether Barack Obama or Rick Perry sits in the oval office.

He continues,

I’ve asked this before, but since I’ve never received a decent answer let me ask again: for people who believe in the Green Lantern theory of domestic presidential power, how do you explain the near-total lack of major legislation passed during George W. Bush’s second term, including a failure to even get a congressional vote on his signature initiative to privatize Social Security? He didn’t give enough speeches? He wasn’t ruthless enough? Help me out here.

Here is where Glenn comes in, blasting Scott for “focusing” on Bush’s second term rather than the first. Bush got all kinds of stuff through Congress in his FIRST term, nyah nyah nyah.

I’m sorry, but if you have to have the difference between Congress vis-à-vis Bush, 2001- 2005; and Congress vis-à-vis Obama, 2009-present, plus the domestic and political context of the aftermath of 9/11, explained to you, then you need a brain check.

Fortunately for me, yesterday Matthew Yglesias addressed “the surprisingly persistent myth that George W Bush was some kind of legislative steamroller who somehow coerced Congress into doing things it didn’t want to do through magic narrative powers that Barack Obama unaccountably fails to use.”

Focusing primarily on Bush’s first term, Matt pretty much shreds the notion that Bush somehow repeatedly bullied a reluctant Congress into doing anything it wasn’t already eager to do. Much of Bush’s domestic agenda had broad bipartisan support, believe it or not. And where it didn’t, he used his Republican majority to get ‘er done — passing his tax cuts through reconciliation, for example.

Neither Matt nor Scott are saying that Obama is without fault. Scott in particular is pleading with people to make a distinction between matters that presidents can do without going through Congress first, and things they can’t. And Matt is saying that Bush wasn’t really the political powerhouse he is made out to be. Rather, in his first term he was the benefactor of unusual circumstances and generally enjoyed the cooperation of Congress to a much greater degree than President Obama.

Now, it might be argued that President Bush was more skillful at handling Congress, but I clearly remember that by the second term even Republicans were complaining about the high-handed way Bush treated them. Matt argues that the biggest difference is not the White House, but Congress –

Then comes the part of the story where I think most people lose the plot, things like No Child Left Behind and the 2003 Medicare bill. The thing about these laws that’s crucial to understand is that their Democratic supporters genuinely wanted these bills to pass. I know people who worked with Ted Kennedy and George Miller on NCLB. They’re very proud of their work. They weren’t cowed into submission by Bush, they were excited about Bush’s willingness to deliver Republican votes for some ideas they like. It’s much the same with Team Baucus and the Medicare bill. This is important because this is exactly the ingredient that’s been missing from the Obama years. The White House keeps hoping it will find Republican partners who aren’t just reluctantly willing to work with it on things, but positively eager to do so. But time and again the Chuck Grassley or Lindsay Graham figure ends up folding faced with the superior party discipline of the GOP and the highly mobilized and ideologically homogeneous GOP base. This is a huge problem for the White House that Bush didn’t really face during his first term. But it’s not one you can solve with more or better intimidation.

Bush also didn’t have to deal with a Republican equivalent of the Blue Dogs. Even when President Obama enjoyed a Democratic majority in Congress, a big chunk of those so-called Democrats worked against him rather than with him.

And this is not a secret. Congress is a huge factors in a president’s ability to enact his domestic agenda. This is something anyone who has taken high school civics ought to know. It is not something an intellectually honest person could dismiss.

Scott explicitly says that foreign policy is different, and that much of Glenn’s criticism of the President on foreign policy issues is correct. But there are many concrete and not all that complicated reasons why domestic issues are different.

Last spring, Ohio Gov. John Kasich signed Senate Bill 5 (SB5) into law. Among other things, SB5 drastically reduced the collective bargaining power of all public workers, including teachers, police and firefighters.

However, it appears progressives in Ohio were able to get a referendum on the law on the ballot this November. Ohio voters will be given a chance to repeal it.

Now, all of a sudden, Gov. Kasich wants to compromise. And the unions are saying, repeal SB5 first, then we’ll talk.

Interesting development, I say.

Jonathan Alter tweets that his sources say Gov. Chris Christie might run for president, after all. However, there is also news that New Jersey just got its credit rating downgraded by Fitch from AA to AA-. At this point I doubt that will matter to the GOP establishment.

Gov. Rick Perry definitely is the new shiny thing for Republicans. Rasmussen (yeah, I know, it’s Rasmussen) has him surging way ahead of Romney and Bachmann among likely primary voters. And let’s remember that last May, Nate Silver wrote that Perry had a good shot at the nomination if he decided to run.

Conventional wisdom says that the fight for the nomination will be between Romney and Perry, and barring an unforeseen shakeup of some sort I’m inclined to agree. I’m also predicting that Bachmann will fade in New Hampshire and South Carolina — Perry will go all out for South Carolina — and that will be the end of her campaign.

I also think that Perry will be completely unsalable outside the Tea Party. More moderate Republicans might be persuaded to hold their noses and vote for him — he’s not Obama, after all — but Independents will run, screaming — it’s another Bush!

People who know Perry well say he’s nothing like Dubya, although it seems to me he’s just like Dubya in every way that might affect how he would “govern” as POTUS. However, those associated with the Bush family and their administrations apparently really, really, really do not like Perry. Why they do not like him I do not know. Part of the aversion may be that the Bushies (for all of Dubya’s affected folksiness) are genuine aristocrats, while Perry’s background is about as low as class gets in America. A Perry family reunion must be something like “Deliverance on the Prairie.” Believe me, for genuine bluebloods whiteness alone doesn’t make one respectable.

But while it’s very possible Perry will self-destruct, he might not do it soon enough to save the GOP from having to put him on the ticket.

And might the ticket be Romney-Perry? That would be a true mashup of the worst of everything the GOP has to offer. But it’s a logical choice, in many ways. It’s a ticket that could pose a real challenge to Obama, depending on whether Romney stops trying to be one of the guys — painful to watch — and Perry stops channeling Yosemite Sam.

Stuff to Read:

Harold Meyerson, “The Sad Facts Behind Rick Perry’s Texas Miracle”

Rick Perry’s Texas is Ross Perot’s Mexico come north. Through a range of enticements we more commonly associate with Third World nations — low wages, no benefits, high rates of poverty, scant taxes, few regulations and generous corporate subsidies — the state has produced its own “giant sucking sound,” attracting businesses from other states to a place where workers come cheap.

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes some great commentary on Civil War history, along with his great commentary on current events. Today he quotes from a book by prominent historian James McPherson (and if you really want to understand the late unpleasantness, you must read McPherson) that suggests some things don’t change –

“The conflict between slavery and non-slavery is a conflict for life and death,” a South Carolina commissioner told Virginians in February 1861. “The South cannot exist without African slavery.” Mississippi’s commissioner to Maryland insisted that “slavery was ordained by God and sanctioned by humanity.” If slave states remained in a Union ruled by Lincoln and his party, “the safety of the rights of the South will be entirely gone.”

If these warnings were not sufficient to frighten hesitating Southerners into secession, commissioners played the race card. A Mississippi commissioner told Georgians that Republicans intended not only to abolish slavery but also to “substitute in its stead their new theory of the universal equality of the black and white races.”

Georgia’s commissioner to Virginia dutifully assured his listeners that if Southern states stayed in the Union, “we will have black governors, black legislatures, black juries, black everything.”

An Alabamian born in Kentucky tried to persuade his native state to secede by portraying Lincoln’s election as “nothing less than an open declaration of war” by Yankee fanatics who intended to force the “sons and daughters” of the South to associate “with free negroes upon terms of political and social equality,” thus “consigning her [the South's] citizens to assassinations and her wives and daughters to pollution and violation to gratify the lust of half-civilized Africans…”

This argument appealed as powerfully to nonslaveholders as to slaveholders. Whites of both classes considered the bondage of blacks to be the basis of liberty for whites. Slavery, they declared, elevated all whites to an equality of status by confining menial labor and caste subordination to blacks. “If slaves are freed,” maintained proslavery spokesmen, whites “will become menials. We will lose every right and liberty which belongs to the name of freemen.”

Substitute the issue of slavery with “Obamacare,” and this almost could have been written about the Tea Party. See also “Hiding in Plain Sight: Racism’s Role in the Party GOP’s Effort to Destroy President Barack Obama and the U.S. Economy.”

Update: Nate Silver ponders Perry’s electability.

Stuff to read about Rick Perry –

From Texas Monthly — “Dear Yankee: Eight things you ought to know before you start writing stories about Rick Perry. You’re welcome.”

Via c u n d gulag, this article makes allegations about Perry’s, um, extramarital activities that really should be investigated. However, I understand the parts about Perry running Texas on borrowed money and being a crony capitalist are well documented.

Brad Plumer writes (at Ezra’s place) that much of Perry’s alleged success at steering Texas’s economy came about because of federal stimulus money.

Trouble is, that’s all about to change. Texas could only fend off its deficit woes for so long, and this year, faced with a $27 billion shortfall, Perry and the legislature opted for steep cuts to Medicaid and education over the next two-year budget cycle. Given that roughly half of all new Texas jobs in the last two years have come in the health care, education and government sectors, it’s a real question as to whether a newly austere Texas will keep creating jobs at its current pace.

See also “How Will Rick Perry’s Budget Affect Education?”

Paul Begala:

I first met Rick Perry in 1985. He was a Democratic freshman state rep, straight off the ranch in Haskell, Texas. He wore his jeans so tight, and, umm, adjusted himself so often that my fellow young legislative aides and I used to call him Crotch. Even among state representatives, even among Texas Aggies (graduates of this cute remedial school we have in Texas), Perry stood out for his modest intellectual gifts. Hell, he got a C in animal breeding. I have goats who got an A in that subject. But lack of brains has never been a hindrance in politics.

Yesterday Perry suggested that Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke’s “printing” of money is “almost treasonous” and hinted that, in Texas, Bernanke would be lynched. Alex Pareene says this is typical Perryism.

Perry’s love-hate relationship with federalism. He was for it before he was against it.

There, that should keep you busy!

Yves Smith, filling in for Glenn Greenwald — who is “away” — writes that the “business needs certainty” meme is a pile of hooey. Highly recommended reading.

See also Steve Rattner, “Republican Extremism, Bad Economics.” The Republican nomination process has become a race to the Right into Crazeeland.

Reinforcing Rattner, Ezra writes about “Rick Perry vs…Milton Friedman?” Wingnut economic theory has left the Ayn Rand acolyte Friedman in the dust.

Bruce Bartlett, “It’s the Aggregate Demand, Stupid.” Wingnut economic theory has left Mr. Bartlett in the dust, too.

Steve Benen, “Right Rejects Buffett’s Good Advice.” Of course they do. Because they are too stupid to grasp that if someone like Buffett wants the wealthy to pay higher taxes, he is not just being altruistic. Buffett is arguing for his own self-interest, which is a politically and economically stable United States. Some bleeping idiot on Faux Nooz actually called Warren Buffett a socialist. Un-bee-lee-vah-bull.

Karl Rove, along with the editorial staff of the Wall Street Journal, are concerned that the GOP will nominate an unelectable whackjob for President.

Really, Karl? You spent your career catering to teh crazee and conditioning voters to respond to a whole symphony of dog whistles. And the worldview you helped create out of sound bytes and hysteria has now been so internalized by many Republican voters that it’s all they will respond to. So what’s the problem, Karl?

You used to be able to play the whackjobs like a fiddle. You’d signal the fringies with winks and nods while keeping up a sane, rational facade for the rest of the public. But now the Frankenstein’s monster has escaped from the laboratory; the Terminator is out of control.

Cliff Schecter wrote,

Towards the beginning of the original Terminator film, Kyle Reese, who has come back to the past to save Sarah Connor – whose spawn will save mankind – lets her know what she’s facing in her new cybernetic stalker. “Listen, and understand. That terminator is out there. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.”

Substitute “Tea Party” for “Terminator” and “U.S. Government” for “you,” and with the exception of “fear” (which I’d argue is what drives them), this pretty much sums up the story of the 60-odd birdbrain Birchers who have rebranded themselves Tea Partiers and brought more crazy than Kanye West to the House of Representatives.

Steve M. wrote, “I love it that Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul scored nearly 30% of the vote each in the Ames straw poll and the result is that we’re told it’s now a two-person race — Perry vs. Romney.” That”s because Everyone Knows the GOP establishment isn’t going to let Bachmann or Paul get the nomination. That’s how the GOP primary process works. There’s some primary theater, and somehow the guy the establishment had already settled on gets to win.

What will the establishment do to get the process back in hand? I doubt editorials in the Wall Street Journal will do it.

The more I look at Rick Perry, the more he seems to have all the worse attributes of George W. Bush on steroids.

He’s already running on a “Texas Miracle,” which is that his state somehow escaped the worst of the recession. In 2000, George W. Bush ran on a “Texas Miracle” also, which was that education reforms that went forward during his administration — which I dimly remember he had actually opposed, but I may be confused about that — had resulted in miraculous improvements in test scores and dropout rates. You might remember that these miraculous results came about because school principals were strongly incentivized to report phony numbers.

Well, something like that is going on with Perry’s Texas Miracle. It is true that Texas has had stronger job growth than other states in recent years. But it has had stronger population growth as well, which means its employment rate remains high. Its unemployment rate in June 2011 was 8.2, which means it has the 26th lowest unemployment rate of all the states, or pretty much exactly average.

At the same time, Texas has very high poverty rates compared to other states. The most recent data I found was for 2009, but at that time 17.2 percent of the population of Texas lived below poverty level, giving it the 9th largest population in poverty in the nation. Wages are low in Texas; in his column today Krugman says almost 10 percent of Texans are earning minimum wage or less. And have I mentioned lately than a quarter of Texas citizens have no health insurance?

Gov. Perry says lots of businesses are moving to Texas, and there’s some truth to that. Texas offers cheap land, cheap labor, and minimal regulation. It’s like having a third world country here in our own backyard. So much more convenient than Bangladesh!

And under Gov. Perry, Texas promises to become even more competitive. Thanks to a whopping budget shortfall and politicians’ aversion to raising taxes, teachers are being laid off by the truckload. As the education level of the state declines, Texas is poised to become the number one supplier of domestic and agricultural migrant workers in America! Hey, who needs Mexico?

Update: From Steve Benen:

I’d add, by the way, that Texas has also benefited from state government spending that’s risen “faster than inflation and population growth,” and spending in Texas increased even more under Perry than under his predecessor, George W. Bush. Perry has also taken on more state debt at a pace that eclipses the national government, “paying for much of [Texas’] expansion with borrowed money.”

The only thing we don’t know he would do as much as or even worse than Dubya is start wars.