Bobby Jindal Has Not Learned a Thing:
Please, motherfuckers. When will you learn? When will you learn that there is no such thing as a Republican giving up on an idea once he has started humping it? Those bastards are like male elephant seals, who will beat the living shit out of you if you try to take one of their dozens of seal bitches away. And elephant seal fucking is goddamn disturbing; the giant ass bull just flops its huge gut on the much smaller female and starts fucking away. So goes the harem of GOP ideological stances. They protect it and then take out a concept and fuck it until it's knocked up. It's nature, man.

So Louisiana Governor and winner of the "Largest Adam's Apple" award, Bobby Jindal, just a month ago, made a grand and mighty economic proposal: get rid of the state income tax on individuals and corporations and make up the money through various other taxes, like higher sales taxes and an eminently rational tax on internet purchases. Conservatives around the nation danced a grotesque jig in celebration and sacrificed a goat by drowning it in a tub as a robed Grover Norquist intoned ancient, guttural prayers of thanks to Mammon. However, most everybody else said, "Whoa, wait, what the fuck?" Because, see, they realized that the tax plan, which was designed to be "revenue neutral," would shift the burden to the poor and middle class. And Jindal saw his approval rating plunge to below 40%, which means he's perfectly suited to be the savior of the Republican Party.

Well, yesterday, saying that he had "listened" to the people, Jindal announced to the legislature that he was going to "park" his plan.

Now some on the left saw that as a defeat for the governor. It is a "collapse" of Jindal as a presidential aspirant. The plan crashed, and scrapping it is a "bitter pill."

Bullshit. Jindal is doing nothing of the sort. What's happening is that he has turned it over to the state legislature, which is led by Republicans, and they are going forward with what Jindal really wanted: elimination of the state income tax, phasing it out over a few years. In fact, "Eliminating a tax requires the support of a majority of each chamber, a far less ambitious goal than seeking the two-thirds support that would have been required for the full package he was proposing." You can look at the idea and say, "Well, that would be stupid, to scrap the income tax without any way to make up for the lost funds." And the Rude Pundit would say, "Yeah, sorry, but this is Louisiana, and 'stupid' would be a step up from the way that the government is usually run."

In other words, it's way too premature to declare that the Paul Ryan-like approach to slashing taxes has suffered a setback. It's merely suffered a brief pause while the Republicans in Louisiana try to figure out how to put a new bacon flavor into their shit sandwich for the poor.

And it's all founded on a lie about taxes making Louisiana unfriendly to business. As John Maginnis points out, "Last month, the governor interrupted his statewide tour bashing the income tax in order to herald IBM's decision to locate its regional software development center in Baton Rouge, creating 800 high-paying jobs and forming an invaluable partnership with LSU's computer science department. It's the biggest private deal for the capital since Mr. Rockefeller chose to locate his Standard Oil refinery there over a century ago." Which means that taxes didn't chase them away, no?

But supply-side economics is part of the harem. And you can bet that Jindal will be humping it hard even as he seems to undulate away.