The Hill quotes the former potential next candidate for president:

Vice President Joe Biden on Tuesday took a swipe at Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton, saying it’s “naive” to think the country can be governed without working with Republicans.

At a gala honoring former Vice President Walter Mondale, Biden said it’s critical to “end this notion that enemy is the other party.”

“End this notion that it is naive to think we can speak well of the other party and cooperation,” he added. “What is naive is to think it is remotely possible to govern this country unless we can.”

It was Biden’s sharpest critique yet of Clinton’s remark during last week’s Democratic debate that she sees the GOP as her “enemy.” …

Clinton was asked during last week’s debate which enemy she is most proud of. Clinton listed the National Rifle Association, the Iranians, drug companies and “probably the Republicans.”

“It’s most important that everyone in this room understand the other team is not the enemy,” the vice president said. “If you treat it as the enemy, there is no way you can ever resolve the problems we have.”

Biden has taken repeated subtle jabs at Clinton for the comment, albeit without mentioning her by name. At a panel discussion with Mondale on Monday morning, Biden emphasized that “I still have a lot of Republican friends.”

“I don’t think my chief enemy is the Republican Party,” he added. “This is a matter of making things work.”

Biden said he’s fond of former Vice President Dick Cheney, a deeply unpopular figure with Democrats, even though he disagrees with how he used his office.

“I actually like Dick Cheney, for real,” Biden said. “I get on with him. I think he’s a decent man.”

Given that Democrats believe Cheney (who I met 20 years ago) is the devil incarnate, Biden may have lost some Democratic support right there, and perhaps that’s why he announced Wednesday he wasn’t running. On the other hand, Biden is the first actual or potential candidate of either party who, as far as I have noticed, has made a statement that acknowledges the legitimate existence of the opposition party. It’s as if he wanted to get crossover votes or something.

Of course, bipartisanship goes both ways. U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan (R–Janesville) probably lost support in his own party when he was endorsed, sort of, for the job no one seems to want, Speaker of the House, by U.S. Sen. Harry Reid (D–Nevada) and former speaker Nancy Pelosi (D–California). It’s hard to believe that Ryan isn’t a conservative, but that’s what the House Freedom Caucus would have you believe.

Biden’s statement that begins this blog was on Tuesday. Here’s what happened Wednesday, reported by Facebook Friend Ron Fournier:

“I be­lieve we’re out of time,” Joe Biden said Wed­nes­day of his op­por­tun­ity to seek the Demo­crat­ic pres­id­en­tial nom­in­a­tion. Then the vice pres­id­ent warned Wash­ing­ton’s polit­ic­al class that its time was run­ning out.

Stop fight­ing, he said. Stop the mad­ness.

“I be­lieve that we have to end the di­vis­ive par­tis­an polit­ics that is rip­ping this coun­try apart. And I think we can. It’s mean-spir­ited, it’s petty, and it’s gone on for much too long,” Biden said in Rose Garden along­side his wife Jill and Pres­id­ent Obama. “Four more years of this kind of pitched battle may be more than this coun­try can take.” …

Biden pro­jec­ted con­fid­ence in his stand­ing among Demo­crats. “While I will not be a can­did­ate,” he said, “I will not be si­lent.”

Prov­ing his point, he made a thinly veiled jab at Clin­ton.

“I don’t be­lieve, like some do, that it’s na­ive to talk to Re­pub­lic­ans. I don’t think we should look at Re­pub­lic­ans as our en­emies. They are our op­pos­i­tion. They’re not our en­emies. And for the sake of the coun­try, we have to work to­geth­er.”

… While par­tis­an voters love polit­ic­al com­bat—en­cour­age it, ac­tu­ally—a grow­ing num­bers of voters are wary. They’re identi­fy­ing them­selves as in­de­pend­ents, even if they tend to routinely sup­port one party over an­oth­er. They’re dis­con­nect­ing from the polit­ic­al pro­cess or hanging out at the fringes with the likes of Sanders, Don­ald Trump and Ben Car­son.

Clin­ton says she gets it, and she prom­ises to work with Re­pub­lic­ans if elec­ted. It’s hard to ima­gine that hap­pen­ing.

The vice pres­id­ent cer­tainly is a par­tis­an, but Biden is also the product of a time—he was first elec­ted to the Sen­ate in 1972—when polit­ic­al lead­ers worked to­geth­er, when party voters al­lowed their lead­ers to bar­gain, and when mem­bers of Con­gress lived in Wash­ing­ton and made friends on both sides of the polit­ic­al di­vide. It wasn’t per­fect, but it was in many ways bet­ter than now.

Biden re­mem­bers when there was an in­cent­ive to solve prob­lems.

“As the pres­id­ent has said many times,” he said, “com­prom­ise is not a dirty word. But look at it this way folks, how does this coun­try func­tion without con­sensus? How can we move for­ward without be­ing able to ar­rive at con­sensus?”

Good ques­tions. We need an­swers. Time is run­ning out.

Time for what is running out? Let’s remember that politics is and remains a zero-sum game in which one side wins, therefore the other side loses, and therefore the only goal is winning. This is the logical result of every political development from Franklin D. Roosevelt to today. Congressmen make nearly $200,000 a year, which is four times what the average Wisconsin family takes in each year.

I am starting to think that, like the bizarre Vietnam War statement “we had to destroy the village in order to save it,” we need to destroy our government as it exists today in order to save our country.

Jonah Goldberg noticed something during the Democratic presidential debate:

But of course Hillary Clinton won the debate! Her opponents were like Mohammed, Jagdish, Sidney, and Clayton from Animal House. It was like a line-up at the station house where all the other suspects are cops in uniform, except for Hillary. …

I’m being unkind to Jim Webb, who was kind of fascinating and awesome. He seemed almost like a different species than [Lincoln] Chafee. I loved Webb’s last line about his real enemy being the guy who threw a grenade at him in Vietnam for all the reasons David French gives here. (Still, I keep using my Ron Burgundy voice to say, “Jim killed a guy!”) Webb’s a great reminder that serious men once found a home in the Democratic party.

But he has no chance of getting the nomination. None of them do, really — with the possible exception of Bernie Sanders. But Sanders is like Colonel Nicholson in Bridge on the River Kwai; he’s sticking to a principle in spite of what is actually required of him. At some point he’s going to look over his shoulder at the Clinton locomotive barreling down the tracks and say, “My God, what have I done?”

That said, for what it’s worth, I don’t think Sanders meant to give a gift to Hillary on the e-mail controversy by saying he was “sick and tired of hearing about [her] damn e-mails.” I’m told that on the stump he blames Clinton for her poor judgment, which made the scandal possible. He may have just flubbed the line. Or it may have been smart politics, as I wrote here and here:

That’s one reason why Sanders wasn’t as foolish as some think for his “gift” on the e-mail scandal. Many Democrats now reflexively take the view that if Republicans or Fox News think something is bad, then it must be an illegitimate issue. Lending even rhetorical aid and comfort to the enemy is counted as “unprogressive” even on issues that progressives should be horrified by. The Clinton Foundation’s incestuous cronyism should horrify the Elizabeth Warren wing of the Democratic party. But saying so would be seen as using “right-wing talking points” so they stay mum on the issue. The same people who freaked out over the leaking of Valerie Plame’s identity should properly want Clinton indicted for what she did with her e-mail. But if the Republicans think so too, it must not be so.

Clinton did well. She’s had a lot of experience in these things. But to the extent she shined, it was because the competition was so pathetic. Put me out on the basketball court with a bunch of second graders and I will go Dikembe Mutombo on their asses. Boom! “Not in my house, Timmy!” I’d be like Billy Madison playing dodgeball.

And then there’s the substance. I guess a more meaningful cause for my resentment is that the debate was a joyless ass ache of a reminder of what liberalism really is. Bernie Sanders thinks you can pay for an 18 trillion dollar expansion of the welfare state — to make it align with a Denmark that doesn’t actually exist — simply by taxing “the billionaire class.” There are 536 billionaires in America. Even if you confiscated everything they had — which, by the way, would surely destroy the American economy by triggering the greatest round of capital flight in human history and amount to government seizure of countless businesses — it wouldn’t come close to covering the tab of Sanders’s proposals.

But saying stupid things about economics is why God put socialists on this planet. Sanders has to say such things because that is what socialists do. It’s Aesopian: The scorpion must sting the frog; water must seek its level; Anthony Weiner must text junk pics; and socialists must pretend that they have serious ideas.

What really bothered me was Hillary Clinton’s “We need a new New Deal” line. Ever since I started working on Liberal Fascism, I’ve had a heightened sensitivity to this liberal obsession. I can’t count how many times I’ve written about it. Here’s what I wrote in 2008:

The New Deal is 75 years young this month.

A host of commentators have invoked the current mortgage credit crisis as justification for a sweeping intrusion of the government into the economy, not just into the credit markets. American Prospect editor Harold Myerson says, “Bring on the new New Deal.”

For all this talk of newness, you might be surprised at how old the idea is. Liberals were calling for a “new New Deal” when the first New Deal was barely out of diapers. That’s one reason FDR launched a “second New Deal” from 1935-1937. In 1944, he attempted to jump-start a third New Deal with his “second Bill of Rights.”

Let’s set aside Harry Truman’s “Fair Deal,” JFK’s “New Frontier,” LBJ’s “Great Society” and Bill Clinton’s “New Covenant.” I’m sure Jimmy Carter had something like this, too; I just try to avoid paying any attention to the man.

Even the New Deal wasn’t as new as many claimed (as I argue in my book, Liberal Fascism). FDR himself sold the New Deal as a continuation of the war socialism of the Wilson administration, in which FDR had served. For example, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the signature public-works project of the New Deal, had its roots in a World War I power project. (As FDR explained when he formally asked Congress to create the thing, “This power development of war days leads logically to national planning.”)

If the CNN moderators had been doing their job, you might expect someone to ask Hillary Clinton why, after seven years of Barack Obama(!), we still need a new New Deal. I mean, does anyone remember this?

The depressing answer is that for progressives — and please forgive the all caps — IT IS ALWAYS TIME FOR A NEW NEW DEAL.

You can explain all day how the New Deal prolonged the Great Depression and they won’t care. They’re like our new canine visitor Pippa, who apparently thinks every moment is the best moment for a New Throw of the tennis ball. After 9/11 Chuck Schumer raced to the pages of the Washington Post to explain that terrorism requires a new New Deal. After Katrina, liberals said “Aha! This proves we need a new New Deal.” Thomas Friedman has a shortcut macro on his keyboard that allows him to vomit up a column arguing that pretty much everything (but especially climate change!) requires, nay demands, a new New Deal.

They don’t always use the phrase “new New Deal.” Often, they use the hackneyed language of the “moral equivalent of war” instead (see this latest installment at The Atlantic of this ancient trope). But, as I’ve written 8 trillion times, that’s the same frickin’ argument.

The real appeal of the New Deal wasn’t its alleged success, it’s that the New Deal is synonymous with a time when progressives had nearly unfettered political power to do what they wanted. Liberals don’t really worship the New Deal, they worship themselves. The New Deal is just a talisman in their undying faith in their own ability to guide society and make decisions for others better than people can make for themselves.

And, at a fundamental level, the desire for an unending string of New Deals going on forever, is indistinguishable from socialism. Liberals used to be honest about this point, as when Arthur Schlesinger let slip in the pages of Partisan Review that “There seems no inherent obstacle to the gradual advance of socialism in the United States through a series of New Deals.”

It’s all just so exhausting. And I guess what I resent most of all is the fact that I will spend the rest of my life arguing with people who not only think that their faith in progressivism and the State is smart and modern, but that their opponents are the ones who are stuck in the past. And in the process, they’ll keep making the country worse, with every failure providing the latest evidence that now, now, is the time for a new New Deal.

Media reports indicate Barack Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden, may throw his hat into the Democratic presidential ring, possibly as early as today.

That cannot possibly be good news for Hillary Clinton. Not only does she have Comrade Bernie on her left, now she may have Uncle Joe, who has Obama’s record but without Hillary’s negatives.

Which doesn’t mean Biden lacks negatives, in addition to his inattention to personal space, lack of intellect, strange public behavior and other personal characteristics that gave him the label “assassination insurance.” David Harsanyi notes potential problems with other Democrats:

So let’s for a moment imagine that Biden is a principled politician and wouldn’t say absolutely anything just to become president—this would bethe third time he’d be running for the position. And let’s, for a moment, concede that Biden, after his flirtation with Elizabeth Warren and hiring of new staff, is the sort of candidate that can knock off the front-runner. But then let’s suspend our disbelief and pretend the media will hold the new candidate responsible for his previous positions and votes at least as strictly as they hold Marco Rubio accountable for his wife’s parking tickets.

If they did, they would find that Joe Biden has had, in some sense, more consequential conservative votes on record than any candidate running for president from either party. Or a better way to put it: his greatest legacy is a lack of coherent philosophy and a ton of politically convenient grandstanding.

The one issue that has generated some attention is that Biden authored the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which not only expanded the number of crimes subject to the federal death penalty, but also played a pivotal role in the explosion of incarcerations and the disproportionate criminal prosecution in poor black communities. Joe’s always been a tough-on-crime sort of guy, and as The New York Timespointed out recently

Despite reservations, Mr. Biden, who has served as the Obama administration’s unofficial liaison to the law enforcement community, has not only stood by the 1994 legislation, but has also frequently taken credit for it. As recently as this spring, in an essay on community policing for a book of bipartisan reform proposals put together by the Brennan Center for Justice, Mr. Biden referred to the legislation as the “1994 Biden Crime Bill.”

In addition to the “1994 Biden Crime Bill,” the vice president was one of the biggest proponents of the War on Drugs, taking a leading role in creating federal mandatory minimum laws that have put scores of non-violent criminals in prison. The kind of policies President Obama, Elizabeth Warren, every progressive, and many others have claimed are destructive. Biden also helped create the Drug Czar, a government official that oversees all anti-drug operations. As Biden explained to Timeback in 2008, “I am not only the guy who did the crime bill and the drug czar, but I’m also the guy who spent years when I was chairman of the Judiciary Committee and chairman trying to change drug policy relative to cocaine, for example, crack and powder.”

On the social front, Biden voted for the bigoted, anti-equality Defense of Marriage Act that has since been found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Biden voted in favor the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy which pushed members of the American gay community who wanted to fight for their nation deeper into the closet. Surely he will be asked to defend these votes by explaining how he evolved to his current position.

Biden has not only come out against federal funding for abortions, but also voted in favor of a 1999 bill to ban most partial-birth abortions, and in favor of the 2003 Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act. Surely if he supported a bill that protected post-viable babies, he must also support Republican efforts to protect viable babies and believe it’s wrong to harvest a baby’s body parts after she’s been born. I look forward to the Catholic Biden’s clarification.

On issues of war and peace, Biden didn’t simply vote for the Iraq War, he was a vocal proponent of going to war. In 2002, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden said that Saddam Hussein was “a long term threat and a short term threat to our national security.” Biden went on to say that there was “no choice but to eliminate the threat.” In October of 2002, he gave a speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate advocating for going to war. How Americans–liberals especially–can vote for someone who, when confronted with most important issue of his age, voted the wrong way? “A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics,” as Obama put it.

Before joining the administration, Biden was not only for increasing federal domestic spying programs, but he used to boast that the Patriot Act was essentially a copy of his own the anti-terrorist legislation from 1995. Either this is not true, or Democrats would be supporting the author of the Patriot Act. And Biden was a proponent of expanding the power of FBI wiretaps long before 9/11.

So, as we mock Donald Trump supporters for their ambivalence to the actual policy positions of their candidate, let’s remember that the other party may feature both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. Biden’s erratic voting record–he supported the embargo on Cuba, for instance, promising in 2009 that the administration would not overturn it–makes all the sense in the world when you view it in context. When we set aside Biden’s smarmy Mr. Magoo-ishness, it’s worth remembering that although Biden may cast himself as some kind of dependable alternative to Clinton, and he would almost certainly be a stronger candidate than Hillary, he is also an escape hatch for those concerned about the ethical problems of an equally calculated candidate.

There is also his difficulty in not casting others’ work as his own, noted by American Thinker in 2008:

Political insiders have long known about Joe Biden getting caught plagiarizing almost word-for-word a speech given by British Labour politician Neil Kinnock. In fact, that killed his 1988 presidential campaign.
But a more serious plagiarism charge has been out there even longer – that he plagiarized in law school. That is something that can get you thrown out if proven.

Sweetness & Light remembers this 1987 New York Times article:

According to the people familiar with the record of the 44-year-old Senator from Delaware, he was called before the disciplinary body at the law school during his first year because of charges that he had committed plagiarism on a paper. Mr. Biden entered the school in 1965 and graduated in 1968.

CBS News tonight quoted an aide to Mr. Biden as saying he had been exonerated. However, an academic official said Mr. Biden had been found guilty, “threw himself on the mercy of the board” and promised not to repeat the offense. This, according to the official, persuaded the board to drop the matter and allow Mr. Biden to remain in law school. Mr. Biden’s office declined to clarify the circumstances surrounding the case, saying the Senator had insisted on handling the matter himself at the news conference. [….]

Unsurprisingly, the New York Times article actually downplays the Kinnock plagiarism. For Mr. Biden didn’t just plagiarize his words, he plagiarized his life.

From a concomitant article in the (FL) St. Petersburg Times:

Biden’s way with words now seems to be a liability

JOHN HARWOOD
Sep 20, 1987

… But it was just last month that Biden appropriated an inspirational speech by British Labor leader Neil Kinnock. Kinnock told of ancestors who played football after long days underground in the mines, who recited poetry poetry and paved the way for him to become the first in his family to attend college.

When he saw a tape of Kinnock in action, Biden said Thursday, “it was a connect. I mean, I could tell how that man felt. That’s how I feel.”
So he used it – changing the names but little else – at a debate last month in Iowa. But instead of crediting Kinnock, he told the audience he thought of it on the way to the debate…

Biden acknowledged Kinnock’s language didn’t fit his family perfectly. His father was in used car sales, his grandfather was a mining engineer. But he had been told and “assumed” that other relatives had worked in the mines. And, “to make it clear,”  members of his mother’s family had, indeed, been to college…

Doubtless Democrats will find Biden’s non-liberal positions more damning than cheating and plagiarizing.

James Taranto:

“When it comes to paying taxes, most Americans think the wealthy do not pay their fair share,” observes the New York Times’s Patricia Cohen. The Democratic candidates for president agree. In last week’s debate, Bernie Sanders railed: “Let me tell you, Donald Trump and his billionaire friends under my policies are going to pay a hell of a lot more in . . . taxes in the future than they’re paying today.” Inevitable nominee Hillary Clinton put it more gently: “Right now, the wealthy pay too little, and the middle class pays too much.”

Cohen means to assure her readers that a policy of punishing the rich would serve other ends as well:

But what could a tax-the-rich plan actually achieve? As it turns out, quite a lot, experts say. Given the gains that have flowed to those at the tip of the income pyramid in recent decades, several economists have been making the case that the government could raise large amounts of revenue exclusively from this small group, while still allowing them to take home a majority of their income.

It is “absurd” to argue that most wealth at the top is already highly taxed or that there isn’t much more revenue to be had by raising taxes on the 1 percent, says the economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, winner of the Nobel in economic science, who has written extensively about inequality. “The only upside of the concentration of the wealth at the top is that they have more money to pay in taxes,” he said.

That sounds more covetous than practical-minded, doesn’t it? And Cohen provides data that belie Stiglitz’s first assertion: The tax system is quite progressive, with the overall federal burden rising from 3.6% for the lowest income quintile to 7.8%, 13.7%, 17.0% and 25.7% for the top quintile. The trend continues within the top quintile, for whom the burden ranges from 20.0% for the second decile (i.e., the bottom half of the top quintile) to 33.4% for the top 1% and 34.9% for the top 0.1%.

Still, the burden could be heavier. And for those who aren’t quite as zealous as Stiglitz about punishing the rich, Cohen offers a payoff:

Raising [the top 1%’s] total tax burden to, say, 40 percent would generate about $157 billion in revenue the first year. Increasing it to 45 percent brings in a whopping $276 billion. Even taking account of state and local taxes, the average household in this group would still take home at least $1 million a year.

If the tax increase were limited to just the 115,000 households in the top 0.1 percent, with an average income of $9.4 million, a 40 percent tax rate would produce $55 billion in extra revenue in its first year.

That would more than cover, for example, the estimated $47 billion cost of eliminating undergraduate tuition at all the country’s four-year public colleges and universities, as Senator Bernie Sanders has proposed, or Mrs. Clinton’s cheaper plan for a debt-free college degree, with money left over to help fund universal prekindergarten.

A tax rate of 45 percent on this select group raises $109 billion, more than enough to pay for the first year of a new $2,500 child tax credit introduced by Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida.

How is this any different from enviously imagining what you would do if you got your grubby paws on your wealthy neighbor’s money? And Cohen doesn’t stop with the top 1%. The next paragraph begins: “Move a rung down the ladder and expand the contribution of those in the 95th to 99th percentile . . .,” and imagines raising their overall federal tax burden to 30% from the current 25.2%. The average income in this class is just over $400,000.

There’s an enormous practical problem with this exercise as well. Early in her piece, she observes that for all their talk about “raising taxes at the top,” the Democrats “have not been very specific about how they would do so.”

But neither is Cohen. She imagines an increase in various income classes’ overall federal tax burden, but that is not how taxes are actually assessed. As she acknowledges, the total figure “takes into account the entire menu of taxes—including income tax, payroll taxes that fund Medicare and Social Security, estate and gift taxes, excise and custom duties as well as investors’ share of corporate taxes.”

Exactly what tax laws would one change in order to ensure that the top 1% (or the top 0.1% or the top 5%) gets gouged without harming the middle class? The question is unanswerable—it can’t be done. And as Cohen eventually acknowledges, high-income taxpayers have ways of defending themselves against covetous officials. Example:

Aided by a phalanx of lawyers and accountants, the rich have become adept at figuring out ways to shift earnings that would normally be taxed at the top 39.6 percent rate on ordinary income into capital gains, said the economist Gabriel Zucman of the University of California, Berkeley, who is researching the link between widening inequality and tactics—legal and illegal—used by the wealthy to sidestep taxes.

Naturally Cohen suggests raising the tax on capital gains to match that for ordinary income, but she doesn’t seem much worried about the disincentive effect on investment. (It’s reminiscent of Barack Obama’s assertion in 2008 that he favored raising capital-gains taxes “for purposes of fairness,” even if revenues went down as a result.)

Meanwhile, the main expert she cites calls for new tax breaks to encourage the sort of investment he favors:

“Why give a blank check to all of these guys?” Mr. Stiglitz, the liberal economist, asked. He pointed out that current tax law makes no distinction between, say, investing abroad, speculating in land or building a new factory. A better approach, he said, is to say: “We’ll give you generous deductions if you invest in America.”

The wealthier the taxpayer, the better equipped he is to take advantage of tax-code complications like the “generous deductions” Stiglitz proposes here.

A caption on a chart accompanying Cohen’s piece states: “Taking all federal taxes into account, the richest taxpayers contribute, on average, about a third of their income to the government. But they still enjoy after-tax incomes far higher than those of other Americans.” In other words, wealthy people are wealthier than less-wealthy people. The politics of envy rests on a rejection of that simple logic.