W21st NYC's List: 113th Congress

• The fiscal deal preserved the carried interest loophole, eliminated most of a  large prospective increase in dividends taxes and preserved a tax break, known  as the active financing exception, that allows G.E. and other multinational  companies to avoid paying United States taxes on overseas profits.
• The deal also forestalled large automatic cuts in military spending, a boon to  contractors like Honeywell. The company’s chief executive, David M. Cote, is a  co-founder of Fix the Debt; the group’s “core principles,” which call for  retrenchment in entitlement programs like Social  Security, make no mention of military spending, which constitutes about a  fifth of the federal budget.

• Those fees amounted to more than half of what homeowners will receive under the  $8.5 billion settlement that ended the review. As part of the deal, officials  will disburse $3.3 billion to 3.8 million borrowers in foreclosure.

• Instead of learning from this experience, however, many on the right have chosen  to rewrite history.
• Every piece of this revisionist history has been refuted in detail. No, the  government didn’t force banks to lend to Those People; no, Fannie Mae and  Freddie Mac didn’t cause the housing bubble (they were doing relatively little  lending during the peak bubble years); no, government-sponsored lenders weren’t  responsible for the surge in risky mortgages (private mortgage issuers accounted  for the vast majority of the riskiest loans).

• For here we are, more than five years into the worst  economic slump since the Great Depression, and one of our two great political  parties has seen its economic doctrine crash and burn twice: first in the run-up  to crisis, then again in the aftermath. Yet that party has learned nothing; it  apparently believes that all will be well if it just keeps repeating the old  slogans, but louder.

   

  It’s a disturbing picture, and one that bodes ill for  our nation’s future.

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