By Robert Hockett
Many of our more cultivated readers, particularly the cinephiles among them, might be at least passingly familiar with Ed Wood’s 1959 anti-classic, Plan 9 from Outer Space. Designated ‘the worst movie ever made’ by the redoubtable Medved brothers, the film’s science-fiction-meets-horror-story plot involves a plan by extraterrestrials to plague earth-dwellers with zombies, whom (which?) they resurrect by stimulating the pituitary and pineal glands of corpses, all in order to distract the earthlings from constructing a world-imperiling doomsday weapon. Among other inspiredly camp curiosities, the film posthumously stars Bela Lugosi – known in the film as ‘the Old Man’ – in the form of film clips that Wood had shot of Lugosi for other purposes prior to his death.
Shift now to a parallel universe not that far from the world of
Plan 9, in which what transpires is not the worst movie ever made, but surely
the worst legislative story ever told. Yes, I speak of Washington,
DC, where I am located while on sabbatic this year and where all of the talk in
the past several days has been of another plan involving the walking dead and
conceived by agents who seem to inhabit another planet, or at any rate another
era – perhaps that of Herbert Hoover. I speak of John Boehner’s ‘Plan B.’
Plan B, not to be confused with the abortifacient (though
it was indeed meant to prevent something happening that might otherwise
happen), was purportedly conceived to avert that ersatz doomsday known as
the 'fiscal cliff.' In fact, however, it was meant to do something else. Plan
B would have permitted the disastrous Bush-era tax cuts, set to expire as of 31 December, to
expire only for increments of income over $ 1 million, while converting the
remainder to permanent status. Since President Obama had campaigned on a figure
of $250K, and in post-electoral compromise mode gone no higher than $400K,
Boehner apparently believed that proposing and passing Plan B would enable
Congressional Republicans to embarrass the President by first 'doing something
constructive' to avert ersatz doomsday and then being
rebuffed by a new putative 'party of "no"' - Mr. Obama's
Democrats.
As strategies go, Plan B was of course characteristically
(for Republicans) gamey and bad faith in character - unlike Plan 9 of the
extraterrestrials, who were at least trying to save us from ourselves. The bad
faith is manifest when one considers Plan B against the background fact that the
President and the Democrats could have offered ahead of time their own Plan A,
conceived before the election, to do precisely what Plan B did save with a lower
threshold for tax cut expiry - either the President's campaign promise of $250K
or his recent compromise to $400K.
The original rendition of that Plan - what I am calling
'Plan A' - was to employ it as a fallback after New Year's in the event that
ersatz-fiscal-doomsday-averting compromise was not reached by 31 December.
Holding it in reserve in that way demonstrated the good faith willingness of the
Dems to seek compromise before resorting to use of the lever afforded by the
Bush tax cuts' sunset clause. Republican gun-jumping on Plan B would
accordingly have constituted a cheap cheat - had they passed it in the House as
Boehner attempted.
As it happens, however, Plan B proved ultimately to be
more saliently science-fiction bizarro than dastardly. For Mr. Boehner's fellow
Republicans, true to contemporary form, ultimately proved unwilling to
relinquish their 'party of no' title to the Democrats. They rejected Mr.
Boehner's Plan B and the opportunity it offered potentially to embarrass the
President and the Democrats, apparently because it allowed the expiry of any of
the Bush tax cuts at all - even for increments of income over $1 million. And
so we are just about back where we were, with ersatz doomsday looming and the
Democrats ready to nullify the effects of that day by passing new tax cuts for
non-plutocrats the very day after.
What is most campily comical about all of this, rendering
it fit fodder for cornball science-fiction-cum-monster-movie or farce, is that
the Republican rejection of Republican Plan B now offers the public a lovely
holiday gift - namely, a President newly able to stick to his own principles and
promises as issued throughout the 2012 campaign. For why offer
to compromise the tax rise on income increments over $250K by raising
the amount - even merely to $400K - once Republicans have shown that they will
accept literally no expiration short of full expiration? The
answer is that they should not. Democrats should simply proceed with Plan A, as
they have planned all along absent compromise by Republicans.
Let all of the Bush tax cuts expire, then, and then
immediately introduce legislation to trim taxes again for those who will use the
savings to boost still badly needed consumer expenditure rather than to engage in more
volatility-inducing financial speculation. Meanwhile the planet will continue
in its elliptical orbit about the sun, and the zombies will keep losing
elections.
