Man, that was a thumpin'. We're in the hands of the Philistines.
What will be the first thing the Republican controlled congress will try to do?
Originally Posted by timpage
I'm afraid the probability is very high that Republicans will do what they usually do; that is, claim they have a great mandate, overplay their hand, and shoot themselves in the foot.
But here are a couple of things I think they should do and
might do, although I certainly won't be waiting with bated breath.
Fix the myriad problems caused by Dodd-Frank. Although it contains a number of good provisions, the bill makes life far too difficult for smaller community banks, many of which have historically been the lifeblood of small business. Dodd-Frank creates strong headwinds for smaller institutions and has made it very difficult to compete for capital availability and loan books with the megabanks, which are typically 60-70% larger than they were six or seven years ago. This set of conditions has allowed the biggest behemoths to simply swallow up smaller players at bargain prices. Sadly, very little has been done about TBTF and systemic risk. In my view, a good place to start would be to create a reasonably streamlined and transparent set of financial regulations (which Dodd-Frank most assuredly is not), along with something like a new Glass-Steagall updated for the 21st century.
Address (at minimum) the worst elements of the health care law. It obviously will not be repealed, and hopefully Republicans have learned that trying to do so without offering some sort of plan with broad-based appeal will backfire. But there ought to be widespread support for doing away with many of the perverse incentives and other damaging aspects of the bill. Although the whole thing was very poorly conceived from the get-go, I think there may be a number of incremental ways to make it less bad than it is now. Democrats should be eager to support substantial efforts in this area, since -- if they do not -- some of their own political fortunes may be damaged during the coming years.
Do something about the corporate tax code. It is arguably the worst in the technologically advanced world, and that's led to multiple inversions and has kept massive amounts of capital overseas since we do not have a territorial tax system like virtually everyone else.
Even Jason Furman realized this back in 2007:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...102601860.html
Now that he has a bigger voice, you'd think he'd get his boss on board with a few ideas here.
For that matter, I think we need to blow away the entire clusterfuckish mess that answers to the name of our tax code and start completely afresh.
But the business-as-usual types are generally interested only in winning pointless (and often Pyrrhic) political battles.