Category: Rants

An old Soviet-era joke:

Svetlana works at a factory that makes the finest beds in the Soviet Union, more comfortable than any bed in the world. But neither she nor any of the workers have a bed. At the end of a long shift they return home and sleep on the floor.
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The correct application of socialist principles dictates that the beds first go to the hospitals, then to the army, then to the universities, then to the collective farms, and so on. The workers understand that they must wait their turn and none are bitter.

One day Svetlana's sister Olga visits and is stunned to see that she sleeps on the floor. "Svetlana," she said, "you work in a bed factory!
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How can it be that you have no bed?" After hearing the explanation, Olga says, "But you are missing the obvious answer. You're strong and good with your hands. Steal one small part from the factory every day and smuggle it home. In a few weeks, assemble them and you will have a bed.
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"

"We tried that several times," Svetlana said, "and every time when we finish we find that instead of a bed we have an AK-47."

I don't expect much out of a guy like Joe Lieberman. Watching him take the Senate floor to tout his legislation (cosponsored by Tom Coburn) proposing to reallocate money from Social Security and Medicare to prevent the Pentagon budget from seeing any cuts, the ignorance of history is a little stunning even for him. When a nation is at the point of liquidating its domestic infrastructure to maintain its grotesque, bloated war machine, some historical parallels should be apparent.

When the USSR was doddering through its twilight years, it poured money and resources into a pointless war because saber-rattling and military hubris were futile efforts to stay the irreversible decline of an unsustainable system. The Roman Empire rotted from the inside and collapsed under the weight of the barbarian horde it paid to enforce Pax Romana long after it ceased to be able to afford it. That the U.S. could be in the terminal stages of empire, blindly shoveling money into an outsized military to combat boogeymen both real and imagined, seems impossible for our political class to comprehend let alone consider. Sure, analogies are fun. But people like Lieberman understand that there's a difference here: Muslims are scary and America is goddamn awesome.

A recent Huffington Post article on the phenomenon – although it is not at all clear if this is anecdotal or widespread – of college graduate women resorting to "sugar daddy" relationships to pay off student debt is making the rounds. I can't be certain of the author's intent, but the final product is offensive in ways she probably never intended.

Briefly, the article covers websites that connect older, wealthy individuals with young women (note: it mentions young men in passing as well) who are willing to provide "companionship" in exchange for "being taken care of" financially. If this sounds an awful lot like prostitution, I agree. And let me clarify one thing before everyone jumps all over me: I have no moral, legal, or ethical qualms with whatever consenting adults agree to do. If a young person is willing to provide an older person with "companionship" in exchange for money without either force or coercion being involved, then in my mind everyone is fully informed and participating willingly. Fine. If men or women, young or old, are comfortable entering into such an arrangement then that is their right and my feelings about it are irrelevant.

But here is the aspect of this story that bothers me. A lot.

"I'm honestly surprised there aren't more college students doing this," says Jennifer, not blinking. She's a 23-year-old recent graduate of Sarah Lawrence College.

Fed up with young, unemployed men her own age, Jennifer recently began trawling for a sugar daddy to pay down about $20,000 in student loan debt. She also wouldn't mind a clothing allowance or rent money for her studio apartment in New York's East Village.

A week ago, she boarded a plane to Florida to spend the weekend with a 30-something banker she met on SugarDaddie.com. He told her his house was undergoing a renovation and instead drove her to a nearby hotel, where they spent the night together…At the end of the weekend, the man handed her 10 crisp $100 bills. They next plan to rendezvous in Orlando in August.
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Jennifer doesn't label what she's doing as prostitution.
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"I'm not a whore. Whores are paid by the hour, can have a high volume of clients in a given day, and it's based on money, not on who the individual actually is. There's no feeling involved and the entire interaction revolves around a sexual act," says Jennifer, who wears a $300 strapless dress purchased with money from her most recent conquest. The rest of the money, she says, went towards paying down her student loans.
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"My situation is different in a number of different ways. First of all, I don't engage with a high volume of people, instead choosing one or two men I actually like spending time with and have decided to develop a friendship with them. And while sex is involved, the focus is on providing friendship. It's not only about getting paid."

To most of today's undergraduates, this is the biggest benefit of a liberal arts education: learning how to intellectualize their own life choices in a way that belittles others and enforces class barriers. Again, in my mind there is nothing wrong with "Jennifer" or her choices. These are willing adults. But I subscribe to the Call a Spade a Spade school of logic. Jennifer, you are fucking someone in exchange for money. That is called prostitution. Deal with it.

Instead of looking into the mirror and saying "OK, this is the choice I made," we see the wheels of a six-figure private school education turning in her head. People who go to Sarah Lawrence and meet rich men on websites aren't whores – whores are poor people!
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Brown people! Whores are people who live in ghettos and bang guys for $20 or some rock. I'm certainly not one of them! Look at my expensive lifestyle. Look at how effectively I can segregate us into clearly defined groups. I am a good person. They are not.

If the only way you can defend or feel good about what you're doing with your life is to demean or denigrate people of a lower social class in order to elevate yourself, there is an excellent chance that you're trying to placate yourself as much as you are trying to convince others. Oh, and as a general rule, much like the phrase "I'm not a racist, but…" is used exclusively by racists, anyone who feels compelled to explain why "I'm not a whore" is probably exactly that. Lobbyists, take note.

Let's say you have a child. We'll call him Billy. Because of your schedule, you and your working spouse/partner decide that it's time to hire a nanny to help with childcare.

You hire someone who seems very nice.
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She promises to do a lot of things that you think will be good for your child – no TV allowed, an hour of reading time every day, outdoor activities, healthy snacks, and so on. This sounds promising, so much so that you don't even feel as guilty about leaving Billy in the care of a virtual stranger.

After a few months you realize that not everything has gone as well as you hoped.
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The nanny isn't bad per se, but she's not following through on some of the promises. She gives him more snacks than you would like. She arranges playdates with the children of adults you don't know. Billy seems to have picked up a few four-letter words from her. It's a lot of small things, not one big thing. But Billy bonded with the nanny and you don't want to fire her.

So you hire another person to help care for your child – a 47 year old schizophrenic convicted sex offender named Rich Crenshaw who keeps three knives on his person at all times. He promises to straighten that nanny right out.

Almost immediately you realize that things are not quite right. Billy seems to have a lot of unexplained cuts and bruises. He reverts to sucking his thumb and gently sobbing himself to sleep. The nanny has stopped doing the things you disliked, but it seems like she stopped doing the things you liked as well. She's sort of a non-entity.

You have a little sit down with Rich and the nanny, letting them know that you don't want Billy to be given snacks but you don't want him to be starved.

You don't want him playing with strangers, but that doesn't mean he should be locked in the closet. You want him to behave, but you don't want him threatened with a knife. In your mind these are reasonable demands.

Rich pulls out his knife, grabs your child, and runs into the attic. He holds the knife to Billy's throat and insists that he'll ventilate the little SOB unless you let him do whatever he wants. After a tense standoff you figure that it's better for Billy to be messed up than dead, so you negotiate.

Clearly the right thing for Billy lies somewhere between the two approaches. Neither the nanny nor Mr. Crenshaw did the right thing, so you realize that both are at fault. You work out a compromise: your child will get healthy snacks and outdoor playtime in the morning, and then in the afternoon Rich will beat him with a broken table leg, slash at him with a broken Night Train bottle, and dangle him from the roof.

Deep down you're not happy. You know that this isn't exactly "good" for your child. You feel indirectly responsible for this situation but you can't quite figure out what you did wrong. Isn't moderation good? Splitting the difference between opposing viewpoints? Finding balance? But try as you might, you just cannot understand how things went so wrong. When you hired that knife-wielding 47 year old schizophrenic convicted sex offender, you trusted that he would do the right thing. Instead he turned out to be crap-eating crazy, precipitated a hostage crisis, and acted like some kind of violent sociopath.

It truly is an outcome that could not be foreseen.

Yesterday I received an email nearly identical to emails I have received from two other people in the past few weeks, and it's getting me increasingly ticked off. Not that people I know want to share information with me or ask my opinion, but that such an obvious scam has managed to put down deep roots in the popular consciousness.

The content of the three emails boiled down to: I'm being told I should convert all of my liquid assets from cash into gold. Is this a good idea?

I do not fault anyone for asking the question. The idea has some intrinsic appeal. However, it brings me to the point of wanting to choke something to think about how many people are going to get screwed in the long run as a result of taking non-objective financial advice. If you choose to read no further or are even remotely considering jumping on the gold bandwagon, please read this piece on gold myths versus reality from Seeking Alpha.

Prominent media personalities, notably Glenn Beck, are paid handsomely to hit their gullible, elderly viewers over the head repeatedly with the buy-gold-now message. Gold interests have also taken to advertising directly, either encouraging viewers to buy gold or exchange gold for cash (which is a scam unto itself). Compounding the message, holding gold and silver as a "hedge" against future (and impending!!!1!!) collapse of the dollar has long been a popular idea on the survivalist, hardcore libertarian right. Forwarded emails from friends and family have multiplied the effect of advertising, Beck boosterism, and email spam campaigns extolling the virtues of gold. Of course, the mainstream media compound the problem by breathlessly – and accurately – reporting the meteoric rise in gold prices over the past few years.

Of course prices have increased dramatically – gold interests have been working very hard and spending a lot of money for years in an effort to convince people that they need to buy. Like any other investment, high demand drives up the price. In many cases demand is not driven by fundamentals or reality, but by speculation and what Mr. Greenspan called "irrational exuberance." In this case, however, demand is being driven by a paid, well-crafted marketing campaign. It is a classic Pump & Dump, a scam as old as investing itself.

I buy some gold at $400/oz, promote the hell out of it until other people drive up the price to $1600/oz, and then I sell high. By the time the bubble bursts and everyone realizes that it is not actually worth $1600/oz, I and my profits are long gone. If you get on board early and are smart enough to sell high, you'll make some money too. Everyone who gets on the train after the first station, though, is going to lose money. The average AM radio-listening elderly person who believes everything Glenn Beck says is going to get reamed like you wouldn't believe.

What we're seeing now is a flurry of OMGBUYGOLD hysteria using the debt ceiling issue as a selling point – get out of cash now before the US dollar becomes worthless! Which will happen soon! When this bubble pops, just imagine what is going to become of people who are buying now, at $1600/oz. Before Granny, your neighbor Joe, and Uncle Larry the Survivalist realize what happened, their "investment" will be worth somewhere between 25 and 50 percent of what they paid. Someone who really does convert his or her life savings to gold – especially physical gold which can't be liquidated quickly or easily – could easily be ruined.

There are lots of ways to lose money in investing, but few as transparently silly as the recent obsession with holding "precious" metals. Put simply, as Mike Konczal once told me, "When cabdrivers and USA Today are telling you to get in on an investment, it's time to go short."

It is a foregone conclusion, as it has been one since Obama began his rightward march, that the retirement age for Social Security will be sacrificed to the gods of austerity.
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A safe bet for the current round of changes is 69 or 70, and in all likelihood it will continue to increase until it hits 75 in the next decade or two. These changes are economically motivated, with proponents constructing a post hoc demographic explanation by pointing out that life expectancy in the U.S. has grown from 70 years in 1960 to 78.7 in 2009 (per the World Bank).

This raises three questions that have no apparent answer, and moreover that Congress has no interest in answering in their search for a short-term fix that protects current (high voter turnout) seniors from experiencing any changes.

First, how many jobs can an individual reasonably be expected to perform until age 70? Just because people are living longer thanks to all kinds of advanced medical care doesn't mean that they're functional for a longer period of time. Life-extending technology can add a few years to the senile, bed-wetting years of one's life but a 65 year old man is still a 65 year old man. What is it that we expect people to do from 65 to 70? Operate machinery? Teach small children? Do manual labor? Hell, it's not hard to argue that productivity declines well before the retirement age of 65, and my field, for instance, usually has mandatory retirement at 70 – meaning, "We really expect that you've retired by now, but if you haven't, there's the door." How many jobs do you think can be performed adequately by the average – not exceptional – 68 year old?

The second question, building off the first, is how an elderly individual is supposed to make it to 70. Many readers are all too familiar with the ways employers are hostile toward older employees. Forget 70 – once you hit 50 they're looking for ways to push you out the door, either offering "early exit" packages, making things unpleasant in the hope that you'll quit, or flat-out firing/laying off the older part of the workforce. People over 50 are expensive, with the high salaries and (relatively) luxurious benefits they've accrued over time. The massive oversupply of qualified 23 year olds in the labor pool can more than make up in costs savings what they cost the company in quality and training time.
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How exactly will the over 60 crowd manage to run this gauntlet until they're 70 – especially given that they probably will be bad at their jobs by that point?

Third, the trite-but-true "Social Security isn't supposed to be your only source of income, but rather a supplement to your other retirement income" line isn't going to solve any of these problems. The last generation of people with defined benefit pensions will be out of the labor pool soon, the rest of us having been shuffled into the high stakes Three Card Monte game of IRAs, 401(k) plans, and the like. Leaving aside the very open-ended question of what (if anything) those instruments will be worth when we reach retirement age, what proportion of the current workforce under 55 is earning enough to make the level of contributions required to provide a meaningful income at retirement?
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The Isaac Asimov story Pebble in the Sky describes a world in which everyone is executed at age 60, after which it is believed that their contributions to society will disappear. That almost seems benevolent compared to a system in which we pretend that we can extend our productive years whenever doing so is politically, economically, or demographically convenient – and leave them to their own devices and a pittance from The Gub'mint thereafter.

I propose a new rule.

If you're going to resort to murdering people in order to draw attention to yourself and your belief system – which, incidentally, is not a good idea – the least you could do is write an interesting manifesto. Honestly, when the media reported that the Norway terrorist had written one I was legitimately curious to see it.

I wanted to see what ideas could be so important that it would be worth killing 95 people (not to mention that he could reasonably have expected to die himself during the attack) just so that the world would hear them.

And then I saw it (No, I'm not linking it.
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You can find it.)

I haven't felt this let down since Matrix: Reloaded.

The message he wanted us to hear so badly, badly enough to kill and risk his own life, is a lukewarm rehash of the same thing that already fills websites and Conservative Book of the Month Club hardcovers by the dozen. Basically he took a Mark Stayn book, melded it with Pam "Atlas Jugs" Geller-style OMG MUSLIMS! histrionics, and then pasted it on a layer of sad David Horowitz talking points about the Liberal Ivory Tower of Academia. Seven years and 100 corpses, and this is what you wanted us to hear? We have already heard this. This set of ideas, contrary to the spirit of the persecution complex that holds many white conservatives in its thrall, disseminates freely. Look at World Net Daily. Look at Atlas Shrugs (the website). Look at Mark Steyn, David Horowitz, Ann Coulter, Mike Huckabee, Herman Cain, and dozens of other bobbleheads / authors / AM radio jockeys. Neither the idea of the white majority being afraid of change and the racial "other" nor the specific application of those concepts to Muslims are new.

All this terrorist did was to reheat established if semi-fringe arguments and then tack on some adolescent ideas about going around killing "traitors" to the White European Culture in order to reclaim Christendom, followed by detailed (and now instantly obsolete) instructions on acquiring weapons and armor. Many authors and commentators do the first part without diving into the "Let's start rounding up traitors and killing them" part.

Certainly in the next few days we will hear people like Steyn, Coulter, Horowitz, and Cain point this out; they will truthfully note that they merely discussed the "problem" – the Islamification of Europe and eventually, of course, the USA – and never advocated violence.
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So here's the compelling question: Where else can these arguments lead?

If, as many people and media personalities are, you are afraid that the brown horde of Others is invading your country and threatening to conquer it demographically and culturally, how can that Problem be solved short of: 1) Genocide, in which Muslims are rooted out and killed, or 2) a closed borders, Festung Europe style immigration policy and the xenophobia to support it, which would necessarily require "patriots" like this guy to eliminate anyone who fails to share his reactionary worldview?

When one accepts the premise, "The Muslims are comin', and We need to defend Our Way", rarely does anyone outside of the neo-Nazi / fascist subculture follow that with, "and that's why we need to start killing them and their allies." Maybe it is unstated because it's implied. Western societies, with their rights and political systems that all but preclude the idea of making a religion illegal, can only achieve the right-wing nationalist goal of eliminating the cultural influence of Islam through upheaval and violence. Apparently this guy felt compelled to go the extra mile and state explicitly what the people who consume this kind of reading already understand.

Any moderately well-informed person understands that what we generically call the "unemployment rate" is unadulterated bullplop. Through the neat accounting trick of reclassifying the long-term unemployed (6 months or more) as no longer part of the workforce is based on the quaint notion that anyone unemployed for half a year has stopped trying to find a job. The official rate, then, masks a shadow population of long-term unemployed that, if counted, would likely double the official rate.

The never-reported U6 unemployment rate, which accounts for long-term and "discouraged" unemployed, is currently hovering between 16% and 17% compared to the official (U3) rate of about 9.5%. An honest economist will tell you that even the government's U6 rate is understated, as there are a greater number of long-term unemployed (including some who have never been employed) floating around outside of what we define as the labor force. If we could really count everyone – unemployed, part timers who can't find full time, discouraged workers who have stopped trying, etc. – we're probably looking at something like 1 in 5 adults who could be working but are not.

Even that understates the problem. Consider this unremarkable, back page news item about automaker BMW's distribution center in California. It is being closed and outsourced. Were it outsourced to a foreign country, its employees would probably end up in the unemployment statistics eventually (for a short time, if nothing else). It isn't heading to Mexico, though. The distribution center is being outsourced to a contractor that will operate the warehouse with the usual perks of subcontracting – namely a high turnover, $9/hr workforce – instead of the 20+ year veteran BMW employees.

This incident isn't exactly national news. We're talking about approximately 75 employees. Maybe the old BMW workers will go to work for the contractor doing the same job for 33% of their old salary. Maybe they'll be replaced by different workers. Either way the unemployment numbers over which we all obsess do nothing to capture what happened here, and what happened here is more damaging to the macroeconomy than plain old unemployment. There's no net job loss. It's merely a transition from 75 good jobs to 75 shit ones, from 75 people who are productive in the economy to 75 who live paycheck-to-paycheck as the working poor.

I can't tell which is worse, from the perspective of both the individual and the economy as a whole: being unemployed for a while but eventually finding a decent job or being continuously employed but "downgraded" from middle class to working poor status. Since the 1980s the unemployment statistics have been used to cover up what is too often happening to the employed. We can trumpet that 5% unemployment rate that we have in "normal" times all we want, but it is little more than a layer of paint over a workforce that is rusting from the inside out. There's little benefit to a low unemployment rate if the workforce is occupying itself by serving one another fast food.

Barack Obama (excerpt) on Tuesday, April 19, 2011:

Now, politically, it’s hard to do. Politically, it’s hard to do. For example — I’ll just give you one example of a change that would make a difference in Social Security. Right now you only pay a Social Security tax up to a certain point of your income. So a little bit over $100,000, your Social Security — you don’t pay Social Security tax.

Now, how many people are making less than $100,000 a year? Don’t be bashful. (Laughter.) The point is, for the vast majority of Americans, every dime you earn, you’re paying some in Social Security. But for Warren Buffett, he stops paying at a little bit over $100,000 and then the next $50 billion he’s not paying a dime in Social Security taxes.

So if we just made a little bit of an adjustment in terms of the cap on Social Security, that would do a significant amount to stabilize the system. And that’s just an example of the kinds of changes that we can make. (Applause.)

That is, to the best of my knowledge, the last time a major player in the current debate over the debt ceiling (Sadly I am not charitable enough to call Bernie Sanders and some bloggers "major players") mentioned the simple, unspoken change that would ensure the solvency of Social Security (which isn't currently at risk, and isn't projected to be for a few decades but ohmygodit'sanemergency and we have to cut it now because the president is a negro this is such a major crisis). The Cato Institute and the ragingly liberal Citizens for Tax Justice agree: lifting the Social Security payroll tax cap raises over $1.2 trillion over 10 years and essentially makes the program solvent in perpetuity. I hate oversimplifications, but this really isn't complex. Lift the cap and the "problem" disappears. Immediately.

The idea hasn't since come out of Obama's mouth, of course. He mentioned it as a hypothetical to make it easier to backpedal (see also: "I'd like to have a public option", "I fully support equal marriage rights for same-sex couples”, “Torture is wrong, and those who did it must be held accountable", etc.) and has made no effort to introduce the idea into the current debate. I mean, why mention something that would only affect about 6% of taxpayers – that's right, if you make $106,000 or more you're in the top five percent of wage earners in the country so maybe shut the fuck up about your taxes recognize that we're all making sacrifices here – and would actually accomplish the goal that everyone in Congress claims to care about?

Currently we pay 6.2% on the first $106,800 of our taxable income and not a red cent after that. But wait! In 2011 we're paying 4.2% because Obama decided to sign off on a bill with one of those I'm-going-to-kill-myself-if-you-don't-stop-with-these-titles titles, the "Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010" in December of 2010. This legislation cuts the payroll tax to 4.2% for 2011 only (*WINK*), although of course it'll never go back up again – because that would be "raising taxes"! (see: Bush tax cut expiration). But I'm sure this is helping to solve the problem. The problem of Americans paying too much into Social Security.

If the president had balls Americans weren't such reactionary dolts our political class was willing to show some initiative, with minimal effort we could probably come up with a pretty appealing way to package a "tax hike" in the form of repealing the cap. Let's say that for every $100,000 in income an individual makes over the current $106,800 cap, he or she is entitled to a 10% larger benefit at retirement age. That would eat away at some of the benefits of lifting the cap, but undoubtedly it would A) make clear that the wealthy would receive something extra in exchange for their larger contributions in absolute dollars, and B) still provide a huge net benefit to the program. Hell, with his current leverage a president could probably make this kind of deal look like the Sale of the Century – lifting the cap in exchange for some retirement age increases and a scaled benefit plan for high-earners. Sure, Eric Cantor wouldn't go for it, but who cares? With some additional candy corn perks for *insert buzzword here* ("small business owners," farmers, the self-employed, etc.) Congress would probably need Tommy John surgery from all the high-fives they'd be giving each other after passing the bill.

But we can't even talk about it, because we can't say "raise taxes." Normal people bandy about the idea all the time, but in the Beltway it remains the idea whose name shall not be spoken. Social Security has long been considered the third rail of American politics – touch it and you're dead, right? – and far too little attention has been paid to the fact that our political class would rather stand on the third rail than even mention the idea of raising taxes. By a small amount. On 5% of the population. With six-plus figure incomes.

So which one is the third rail?

The most recent developments in the debt ceiling "negotiations" are the best example yet of why Barack Obama is either A) not good at the concept of bargaining, or B) secretly brilliant, and still not good at the concept of bargaining.

When John Boehner and The Lipless Tortiose, Mitch McConnell, individually signaled their willingness to consider tax increases – mind you they didn't agree to any, but merely offered what may well have been a false impression that they would discuss the matter – many commentators hailed it as some sort of breakthrough or surprising development. It might qualify as a surprise if one takes the GOP rhetoric at face value, but anyone who reads above a fifth grade level would have realized months ago, well before this subject was even on the public radar, that Barack Obama was and is in a position to get absolutely anything he wants out of Congress here. If only someone had told him.

Of course the GOP is signaling concession on tax cuts. Congressional Republicans are the biggest whores for the banking and finance industry on the planet, trailed closely by Congressional Democrats and the legion of actual whores who service the banking and finance industry. Does anyone think for one second that the GOP would actually risk default when default would hurt their corporate and financial masters far more than it would hurt you and I? And bear in mind that it would hurt you and I a lot.

A default on Treasury obligations would wipe out the GOP's paymasters almost overnight. Did anyone expect that this "crisis" would not be resolved by the titans of Wall Street and the Fortune 500 calling Eric Cantor and John Boehner on the carpet and letting them know that, OK, this has been cute and all, but playtime is over?

This reality casts two elements of this Kabuki theater tragicomedy in high relief.
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First, Barack Obama could have dug in his heels at whatever point he chose on this issue…and won. There are no circumstances under which Congress, in a system in which elections are raffled off to the highest bidder and representation is purchased rather than secured by right, would be allowed by the real powers that be to default on the debt.

So optimistically we could say that Obama accepted some big spending cuts to signal that he's the bigger man, that he's bipartisan, and that he can speak to the moderate tendencies of the electorate. Conversely we could say he's a fool who gave away a bunch of things in negotiation when he didn't have to give away a damn thing.

Second, the problem with running on a "throw the bums out!" platform is that the morning after the election, you become The Bums.
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Having wedded themselves to an absolutely insane, dogmatic, irrational, and litmus-test-crazy Teabagger ideology, the GOP has put itself in a position from which any concession will be a lethal self-inflicted wound. Even if the tax increases are token and symbolic (which is likely – something like "rolling back tax breaks for corporate jets" that sounds populist but is effectively meaningless) can you imagine what the Teabaggers are going to do to the GOP leadership? The reason Eric Cantor is trying to play Mr. Tough Guy now is not so much that he is a fanatical believer in Grover Norquistism but that he is thinking to himself "Oh my god I am so fucked" as he realizes that Obama and the GOP's Wall Street masters may combine to force him to accept tax increases of some kind.

The remaining Republican resistance to considering even token tax hikes is not a matter of ideological stridency. It is a matter of intense fear and self-preservation at this point. They're realizing that they may not have a choice in the matter and they can only look forward in horror to what the idiot rabble that elected them are going to do when it happens. Their only hope at this point is that Obama is dumb enough to save them.