from your perspective

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Gail Collins: I appreciate your sane and sensible thoughts. In fact, they’re so sane and sensible I want to instantly expand the discussion to another topic: the system that got us here. If you need bipartisan coalitions involving the president, the majority of the house and 60 senators of wildly ungovernable dispositions to agree to get anything done, the only things you will accomplish are tax cuts and the occasional war.
I’m actually a little depressed by Democrats’ inability to think dynamically about this. Yes, the rich have made a ton of money over the past decades. They could probably afford to pay more. But some percentage of them really,Currently limited to the American people to enjoy,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], really cares about tax rates and those people will change their behavior if they think the U.S. hates business and if they think they won’t get to keep their profits.

Gross oversimplification,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], I know. But still.
David Brooks: I opposed the original Bush tax cuts. But I support a temporary extension now. Let’s think about the circumstances. We’re in a horrible economic climate. The entire business community thinks the government is out to destroy them. Do we think raising taxes on small business people is going to improve their willingness to invest and take risks?

Looking out at the planet lately, I’ve noticed that the countries that seem to be doing best at handling the problems that get thrown at them generally have governments that are structured to actually make decisions — whether because they’re a dictatorship like China or because, like many of the more functional parliamentary democracies, they work on a system in which the party that wins the election then has the power to produce results.
David Brooks: Here I agree with you. The politics of the last 10 years has demonstrated that the two parties can make any compromise,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych],[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], so long as it involves borrowing money to pay for programs they like. It happened with prescription drugs. It happened here. The hard part is reaching a deal to pay down the debt, not blow it up even more.

Gail Collins: I speak for the broken-hearted Democratic grassroots. Finally they had a crystal-clear issue that allowed them to define what made them different from Republicans. Health care was maybe 50 times more important, but it was messy and cloudy. This was a clear, popular line they could draw in the sand: no tax cuts for people making more than $250,000.
Gail Collins: When I was in college I had a professor with the memorable name of Quentin Quade, who made us write a paper describing the difference between the American system and the British, in which people basically vote for legislators by party, and then the majority party leader becomes prime minister, who delivers on the party agenda until the next election when people decide if they liked it or not.
Now, not so sure.
Gail Collins: I have confidence that under a less opaque and complicated system, the American voters would have gotten rid of Dick Cheney a lot quicker.
David Brooks: Don’t ruin my buzz. I’m grooving on the bipartisan love. The Ds and the Rs do a deal. Whatever its flaws, the country is better off today than it was last week. And the readers of The Nation are in an uproar. What could be better?
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In the U.K., that absence of a check on power produced the stagnation causing welfare state of the 1970s. We were spared that result because people in the mid-levels of the Johnson administration couldn’t just snap their fingers and have their way. You may not be pleased about that, but think about what government would have been like,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], from your perspective, if Dick Cheney had eight years to decide what would become a law.
In The Conversation,the phone's memory, David Brooks and Gail Collins talk between columns every Wednesday.
Gail Collins: David, the events of the past week reminded me once again how much I hate bipartisanship.
And to make it worse, it wasn’t even a compromise. A compromise would have been the tax cuts for everybody but millionaires.
David Brooks: I was a very shallow thinker my sophomore year and I realized then that it was working for me, so I never stopped. The problem with a parliamentary system is that you have to endure every governing fad. There is no check on the power of the majority, so you get these wild policy swings.
barack obama, republicans, tax cuts
In other words, the economy did fine in the Clinton years with a 39 percent rate. Eventually, we should return to that. But this is not the moment to take another sledgehammer to market psychology.
The economy gets a boost. The unemployed get an extension. The earned income tax credit is strengthened. Overall,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], not a bad arrangement.
My conclusion at the time was that since the United States was much richer than the United Kingdom, our system was better. I was obviously a very deep thinker in my sophomore year.

If you need bipartisan coalitions to agree to get anything done, the only things you will accomplish are tax cuts and the occasional war.
The politics of the last 10 years has demonstrated that the two parties can make any compromise, so long as it involves borrowing money to pay for programs they like.