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I'm not sure what the producers of MSNBC's UP with Steve Kornacki felt that Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform's Mattie Duppler was going to add to the debate on this Sunday's show, but after watching her on there, apparently it was to keep the rest of the guests busy debunking the endless string of lies she told during her time on the panel.

During a discussion ranging from what percentage of GDP is needs to be taxed, to the size and scope of government, to whether Americans even know what the federal government spends money on, or how many people realize that President Obama has lowered their taxes, the conversation got a bit contentious when Duppler trotted out the old "because of Obama, government spending is out of control" canard.

After the Center for American Progress' Neera Tanden made the point that the central thesis of Republicans' economic strategy has been tax cuts, and that it has been proven that tax cuts don't produce economic growth, here's Duppler's response.

DUPPLER: That's not the central thesis of the Republican party. It is one of the tenets of the Republican party. (crosstalk) But you also have explosive government growth. You've got government spending that's out of control and that...

JOHNSTON: It's not out of control. […] The government is rapidly shrinking under Obama.

DUPPLER: After he exploded it. After he increased spending by eighty-four percent. I mean, seriously, this is laughable that you're telling me that are just (crosstalk).

JOHNSTON: This would put us into a depression. You want to put us into a depression. (crosstalk).

NADLER: This is the central lie...

DUPPLER: I'm challenging your assertion that the deficit and the size of government is shrinking after Obama and congressional Democrats took spending and the size of government to all time highs.

NADLER: This is the central lie... this is the central lie of our political debate right now... what you just said.

JOHNSTON: Absolutely.

NADLER: The fact is, what happened to our deficit is, after it was cut... after it went up because of the Bush tax cuts and the wars and everything, since Obama took office, remember, the CBO before Obama took office said the 2009 deficit was going to be $1.4 trillion and it was. Why? And it was hugely increased. Why? Because when you get a recession, you get a depression such as we were in, two things happen.

One, revenues plummet, taxes plummet. People aren't working. They don't pay taxes, number one. And so taxes plummeted. And number two, automatic spending on unemployment insurance and on food stamps goes up because more people don't have money to eat with...

JOHNSTON: And Jerry, if you don't have part two, that you did, that's when you get the great depression.

After Duppler continued to insist that from a "small government perspective" government spending is still too high, David Cay Johnston reminded her of just what that philosophy is going to cost us.

JOHNSTON: We are going to be poorer in the future because we are cutting spending on basic research. The cell phones that we all have have grown from government spending in the past. The jet airplanes we fly come from government spending, the computers we use, the math in them, all come from government spending. [...] We need to be spending money on government research, development and education and Republicans want to cut all that.

After Duppler said she wanted to know how we were supposed to fund these things, Tanden pointed out the obvious... paying taxes. Duppler pretended that cutting taxes was not "the central tenet" of the Republican party, but thanks to her group, that's exactly what it's been.

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As Digby rightfully noted after taking a look at some of the reporting on this new Simpson-Bowles plan, "we see the folly of asking for a "balanced approach" when you are negotiating with partisan thugs." Once again, we see that Overton window continually being shoved to the right when there are other alternatives out there, like the package offered by the Progressive Caucus in the House. That, of course, will be ignored, because the Villagers don't seem to consider anyone Serious unless they're talking about austerity and inflicting pain on the working class.

Here's more from Greg Sargent at The Plum Line: Simpson-Bowles and the mythical, arbitrary “center”:

Like a pair of aging crooners hoping to recapture past glory with a long-awaited reunion tour, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson released a new version of their deficit reduction plan today. Ezra Klein ferrets out the real news in the plan: It asks for far less in new revenues, and more in spending cuts, than the previous Simpson-Bowles plan did.

Whereas the previous Simpson-Bowles plan contained a roughly even split of revenues and cuts, the new one reduces the revenue “ask” dramatically, with the result that the overall plan is lopsidedly tilted towards cuts. The reason pinpointed by Klein is particularly striking:

This isn’t meant to be an update to Simpson-Bowles 1.0. Rather, it’s meant to be an outline for a new grand bargain. To that end, Simpson and Bowles began with Obama and Boehner’s final offers from the fiscal cliff deal. That helps explain why their tax ask has fallen so far: Obama’s final tax ask was far lower than what was in the original Simpson-Bowles plan, while Boehner’s tilt towards spending cuts was far greater than what was in the original Simpson-Bowles.

In other words, the plan roughly represents the ideological midpoint between the Obama and Boehner fiscal cliff blueprints — which is why the plan is so heavily tilted towards cuts. As Kevin Drum notes, this is particularly odd, given that spending cuts have already been “75 percent of the deficit reduction we’ve done so far.” Drum adds: “this sure makes it hard to take Simpson-Bowles 2.0 seriously as a plan.” Read on ...

And here's more on that from Steve Benen: Meet the new Simpson-Bowles plan:

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In a welcome change of pace from what we saw on the Sunday shows and on his own network last week, guest host Ezra Klein took the Last Word viewers through what we could actually expect to happen if our politicians were irresponsible enough to allow the United States to default on our debt.

This is what would happen if we breach the debt ceiling:

Want to make sure your calendar is clear when we hit the debt ceiling? Then don’t schedule anything between Feb. 15 and March 1.

That, according to a new analysis by the Bipartisan Policy Center, is the likely range for debt-ceiling doomsday: The day when the Treasury Department runs out of room to maneuver and we actually begin to default on obligations. Either Congress figures out the debt ceiling before that date or things get very bad, very fast.

Imagine we hit the debt ceiling Feb. 15. The BPC’s analysis suggests that federal spending over the next month will be about $450 billion. Federal revenues will be nearer to $277 billion. That means that the government will have to default on about 40 percent of its obligations.

The choices it will face quickly become stark. It can cover interest on the debt, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense spending, education, food stamps and other low-income transfers, and a handful of other programs, but doing all that will mean defaulting on everything — really, everything — else. The FBI will shut down. The people responsible for tracking down loose nukes will lose their jobs. The prisons won’t operate. The biomedical researchers won’t be funded. The court system will close its doors. The tax refunds won’t go out. The Federal Aviation Administration will go offline. The parks will close. Food safety inspections will cease.

This is the difference between a debt-ceiling shutdown and a government shutdown. As Shai Akabas, a research at the Bipartisan Policy Center, puts it, “in a government shutdown, the government is shutting down future obligations. With the debt ceiling, They’ve already obligated the money. They owe these people the payments now, and they can’t make them.”

Then, of course, there’s the financial-market chaos. Trillions of dollars in derivatives and other financial products are based on the interest rate that the federal government pays when borrowing. U.S. government debt is, after all, supposed to be the safest investment in the world, and so it’s used to “benchmark” all other sorts of debt. A spike in the Treasury rate would mean a spike in credit card rates and mortgage rates, not to mention all manner of more esoteric financial derivatives. The damage to the economy would be tremendous, and it would occur at every level, from individuals looking for a loan to buy a house to hedge funders trying to play the markets. Read on...

Ezra needs to send his post over to the other hosts on MSNBC like David Gregory and Joe Scarborough so they quit lying to their audiences about the consequences of default and pretending that it would only be a partial government shutdown.

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I'm not sure what George Will was smoking before he made an appearance on ABC's This Week on Sunday morning, but apparently he believes that Democrats agreeing to extend tax cuts for income under $400-450K somehow marks the beginning of the decline of liberalism and now no other taxes can ever be raised. And of course in Will's world, we must go after "entitlements" because the only way to keep them was going to be to raise taxes on the middle class.

Never mind that, as Robert Reich reminded him, we did just raise taxes on the middle class with the expiration of the payroll tax holiday. I'm just wondering how many things Republicans have voted for to which he's asserted that same sense of finality? Or anyone else, for that matter? Will, like other Republicans, seems to have a little bit of trouble with that whole concept of compromising -- which, as much as people may dislike the results, is what used to be considered the normal way politics operated in Washington. Now it's become a series of hostage taking events, with Republicans continually threatening to kill the hostage if they don't get what they want.

I'm pretty sure Will has been predicting liberals' demise for quite some time now, but if his party thinks the way they're operating these days is an acceptable form of governing, and if they continue to push to destroy our social safety nets, the voters will start to wake up to the fact that we've got a problem with one of the political ideologies in this country -- and it's not liberalism.

Liberal groups in this country are the ones pushing back against austerity, against the unfairness of the unequal income distribution, pushing for a tax code that's fairer and pushing to keep our social safety nets in place. Will and his ilk are ready to throw grandma and the poor and the middle class under the bus and back over them a few times.

Transcript below the fold.

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Surprise, surprise! It's all sour grapes over at Fox now that it seems Republicans are finally going to allow a clean vote on this so-called “fiscal cliff” bill that had passed the Senate. Leave it to their resident curmudgeon Charles Krauthammer to use the opportunity to paint President Obama as some evil Socialist who just wants to extract money from those hard-working rich people so that the lazy, good-for-nothing moochers out there can have their “entitlements.”

Never mind that he's completely wrong about President Obama being willing to negotiate with Republicans (far too often with the hostage taking we've witnessed), or that Republicans were the ones who originally voted to have these tax cuts expire. And never mind that we've got record income disparity and if we want to pay for a democratic society with a middle class, we should have a progressive tax code where the rich pay their share.

And of course no segment on Fox would be complete without some revisionist history in the form of St. Reagan worship.

BAIER: I mean, if you look at his deficit and debt commission, the Simpson-Bowles commission and the recommendations that came out of there (sorry Bret, but there were no recommendations from that commission, it failed) and what has not been followed through on, now two years ago, it's pretty remarkable.

KRAUTHAMMER: But he's not interested in that. And he's not interested in leading on spending. He's not interested in cutting spending. I think if you look at this in a large view, it's now becoming very clear who he is and what he wants to do. He's now in his second term. He's liberated.

He can be open about what he wants to do. He once said on '08 that Reagan was a historical President in a way that Clinton or Nixon was not. He meant Reagan changed the nature of the country. He got it hooked on low taxes, less government and an increase in inequality, is the way Obama sees it.

He sees his historical role, Obama, is to undo Reaganism and that means, not to cut spending. It means to raise taxes and he let the cat out of the bag on Monday. In that little rally he had, he said to Republicans, you're not getting any spending today and you know that, any spending cuts, but he said that if you think that you can get spending cuts after this in the rest of our negotiations, the answer is no. If you want a cut in spending, you're going to have to increase taxes on the rich.

Remember, he got an increase in revenues now by raising the rates on the rich. Well, now he's going to return, as he said on Monday and get increased revenue from the rich by eliminating deductions, the other way to do it. So he has no interest in anything other than raising the level of taxation, to sort of pre-Reagan levels, so he can support the entitlement state, which is what his presidency is all about. It's a very long view and I think he's attacking it in exactly the right way, if you were of his ideology.

Yeah, that's the ticket. The Kenyan usurper Socialist Communist just wants to beat up on the poor, oppressed rich people and steal all of their money for those lazy, undeserving seniors who would like their Social Security benefits so they don't starve. Krauthammer's still stuck in the '60's if he thinks this sort of talk is going to move most people when you still have so many people hurting from the recession and unemployed. That said, he knows he's speaking to the Fox viewers here, who are probably stuck right there with him.

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I don't think David Gregory can make it through an interview without pushing the Villagers' favorite theme during these so-called "fiscal cliff" negotiations, which is that Democrats had better be willing to inflict some pain on the elderly and the working class, or they're just not being "serious." He was at it again this Sunday when he asked President Obama about whether he was going to just have to "talk tough" to seniors about Social Security and Medicare.

Of course no such tough talk or pain is ever required of the rich or of our bloated military industrial complex. Gregory also did his best to try to place the blame for Republican obstruction during these negotiations on President Obama's back, asking him "What is it about you, Mr. President, that you think is so hard to say yes to?" About him... really David Gregory? We've got one party that's lost its mind and cares about obstruction above all else and is willing to take us down in flames to get what they want and another party that's willing to bend over backwards to try to negotiate with them, and you want to know why the side that's too willing to compromise hasn't done enough to make the Teahadist happy? Spare me.

Obama: ‘Pressure’ on Congress, blames GOP as deadline nears:

President Obama said Sunday that the "pressure is on Congress" to reach a compromise and resolve the so-called “fiscal cliff,” sharply criticizing GOP leaders for the unresolved talks.

In an exclusive interview with NBC's “Meet the Press” on Sunday, his first appearance since the healthcare debate in 2009, Obama seemed intent on putting the blame solely on Congressional Republicans, if lawmakers fail to reach the pivotal year-end deadline.

"I offered not only a trillion dollars in -- over a trillion dollars in spending cuts over the next 10 years, but these changes would result in even more savings in the next 10 years, and would solve our deficit problem for a decade," Obama said, in the interview . “They say that their biggest priority is making sure that we deal with the deficit in a serious way, but the way they're behaving is that their only priority is making sure that tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans are protected. That seems to be their only overriding, unifying theme.”

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Sen. Bernie Sanders appeared on Ed Schultz's show on MSNBC this Tuesday evening and reiterated what he had told Schultz earlier in the day on his radio show: Stay Strong, Mr. President:

President Obama campaigned for raising tax rates on households making more than $250,000 a year, but he has now proposed allowing Bush-era tax rates to expire for households with more than $400,000 a year. In talks with House Speaker John Boehner, Obama also reportedly accepted a Republican proposal to cut Social Security by using a different formula to calculate cost-of-living increases. “He’s more serious about that than I would like to believe. The last thing you want to do is cut Social Security benefits,” Sen. Bernie Sanders told radio host Ed Schultz on Tuesday.

He cited a new Washington Post/ABC News poll that showed a clear majority of Americans, 74 percent, would go along with Obama’s initial proposal to raise taxes on those with incomes over $250,000. The same poll found 60 percent of Americans said it is unacceptable to change the way Social Security benefits are calculated so that benefits increase with inflation at a slower rate than they do now. Sanders noted that the White House as recently as three weeks ago said that Social Security was off the table in the year-end deficit talks. “I want him to keep that promise,” Sanders said. “I hope the president stays strong.”

Sen. Sanders also tweeted this chart today showing the benefit cuts if the Congress were to enact the chained CPI to Social Security.

Here is a chart from @nosocseccuts showing how benefits will be cut if Congress enacts the chained CPI. #budget twitter.com/SenSanders/sta…

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) December 18, 2012

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From this Wednesday's Starting Point, Republicans aren't doing a very good job defending themselves for wanting to keep most Americans and our economy hostage to retain those tax cuts for the richest among us: GOP Rep. Has No Answer For Why Republicans Won’t Vote For Middle-Class Tax Cuts:

Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX), the incoming chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, could not explain during an interview on Wednesday why House Republicans are holding middle- and low-income tax cuts hostage to the cuts for the wealthiest Americans in the fiscal cliff showdown. When pressed by CNN’s Soledad O’Brien, Hensarling first cited complaints about spending, but when O’Brien asked why he couldn’t set spending levels aside and compromise on taxes first, he had nothing but unrelated talking points: [...]

Hensarling’s invocation of Speaker John Boehner’s (R-OH) proposal is not only not an answer to O’Brien’s question — as it doesn’t explain what’s wrong with the simple solution O’Brien poses — but it’s also not anything close to balanced. While Boehner’s plan contains an array of draconian spending cuts, it doesn’t propose any actual increased revenue, relying instead on the same voodoo as the Romney tax plan.

As Zack noted, his analysis on the electoral math is also wrong and irrelevant.

Full transcript below the fold.

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Jon Stewart went after Republicans and their intransigence during the back and forth that is supposed to pass for negotiations over this so-called, self-inflicted "fiscal cliff" and I've got to say it was nice to see him leave the "both sides" false equivalencies out of the comedy routine this time around.

Jon Stewart summarizes GOP budget plan: Jump off the fiscal cliff voluntarily:

On his show Tuesday night, The Daily Show host Jon Stewart noted that Republicans proposed a budget plan that was eerily familiar so-called fiscal cliff — the very thing their budget plan was supposed to avert.

The fiscal cliff would reduce the federal deficit by $1.2 trillion over 10 years through across-the-board spending cuts to domestic and defense programs. The budget proposed by Republicans would also cut approximately $1.2 trillion, but almost entirely from domestic spending.

“This has 1.2 trillion in cuts, but they’re saying, ‘Why don’t we just make the whole thing cuts to entitlements and domestic spending and not cut defense at all?” Stewart said. “Basically, they’re trying to entice the Democrats by saying, ‘I don’t want you to fall off this cliff, so why don’t you voluntarily jump off this steeper cliff? But don’t worry, your fall will be cushioned by lava.”

Stewart wrapped things up with this:

STEWART: You know what? Maybe it's just time to stop the back and forth of offers. It's pretty clear the Republicans aren't ever going to come to the table with anything even remotely reasonable, so I'll be the one to say it.

I know it will be disastrous. I know it will doom our economy for years to come, but let's just go over the f**king cliff. Fine! Let's just go. Just leave the negotiations and send us over the cliff, because you know why? At least for a few seconds, it will feel like we're flying.

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It seems Paul Krugman is about as tired as I am of these talking heads and politicians who seem to be obsessed with inflicting pain on the working class. Republicans aren't going to be happy until they undo every New Deal program, destroy our social safety nets and destroy what's left of the dwindling middle class in America.

The PBS Newshour had Paul Krugman on this Tuesday evening to counter some of Erskine Bowles deficit fetishism from the previous night and all I can say is I hope the Democrats are listening to him. We don't have a deficit crisis. We've got a jobs crisis and what Republicans are proposing will just make that worse: Paul Krugman: Hasty Fiscal Fix to the Deficit Would Cause 'Austerity Bomb':

GWEN IFILL: Erskine Bowles may be one of the people you have written about in the past who you called deficit scolds who were touting a phantom menace known as the fiscal cliff.

PAUL KRUGMAN,PrincetonUniversity: Yes.

GWEN IFILL: Am I right about that?

PAUL KRUGMAN: Fiscal cliff is not a phantom menace. The deficit right now is, the notion that something terrible will happen if we don't deal with the deficit right away.

The fiscal cliff is a very different story. That's about reducing the deficit too fast.

GWEN IFILL: In fact, you call it an austerity bomb. Describe that, what you mean by that.

PAUL KRUGMAN: Yes.

Well, what's happening is that we are scheduled, unless something is done, basically to do to ourselves gratuitously what has been happening to some of the European economies.

We're going to have substantial spending cuts, substantial tax increases at a time when the economy is still very weak. And, of course, that's a recipe for sliding back into recession.

So, we set ourselves up with the land mine in the road in front of our economy, which is not based on anything real. It's just based on our political mess.

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