Monday, September 23, 2013 7:55:13 AM
The Stranglehold on Our Politics
Michele Bachmann (left) and Ted Cruz (center) with Tea Party leaders, Washington, D.C., May 16, 2013
Yuri Gripas/Reuters
Elizabeth Drew
August 27, 2013
Most of the electorate can’t be bothered with midterm elections, and this has had large consequences—none of them good—for our political system and our country. Voting for a president might be exciting or dutiful, worth troubling ourselves for. But the midterms, in which a varying number of governorships are up for election, as well as the entire House of Representatives and one third of the Senate, just don’t seem worth as much effort. Such inaction is a political act in itself, with major effects.
In the past ten elections, voter turnout for presidential contests—which requires a tremendous and expensive effort by the campaigns—has ranged from 51.7 to 61.6 percent, while for the midterms it’s been in the high thirties. Turnout was highest for the two midterms in which the Republicans made their greatest gains: in 1994, when Clinton was president, it was 41.1 percent and in 2010 it was 41.6 percent. In 2006, when Bush was president, the Democrats took over the House and Senate and won most of the governorships, turnout was the next highest, 40.4 percent. The quality of the candidates, the economy, and many unexpected issues of course determine the atmosphere of an election; but in the end turnout is almost always decisive.
The midterms, with their lower turnout, reward intensity. In 2010, the Republicans were sufficiently worked up about the new health care law and an old standby, “government spending,” particularly the stimulus bill, to drive them to the polls in far larger numbers than the Democrats. A slight upward tick in turnout numbers can have a disproportionate impact in Congress and many of the states, and therefore the country as a whole. The difference in turnout caused such a change in 2010; in fact, the Republicans gained sixty-three House seats and took control of both the governorships and the legislatures in twelve states; the Democrats ended up with control of the fewest state legislative bodies since 1946. The midterms go a long way toward explaining the dismaying spectacle in Washington today. State elections bear much of the responsibility for the near paralysis in Congress thus far this year and the extremism that has gripped the House Republicans and is oozing over into the Senate.
The difference in the turnouts for presidential and midterm elections means that there are now almost two different electorates. Typically, the midterm electorate is skewed toward the white and elderly. In 2010 the youth vote dropped a full 60 percent from 2008. Those who are disappointed with the president they helped elect two years earlier and decide to stay home have the same effect on an election as those who vote for the opposition candidate.
Little wonder, then, that there can be such a gulf between the president and Congress, particularly the House of Representatives—but also between the president and the governments of most of the twenty-four states over which the Republicans now maintain complete control; almost half of these were elected in 2010. Democrats have complete control over fourteen states. The Republican-controlled states include almost all the most populous ones outside of New York and California. Since the midterms of 2010 the Republicans in most of these states have pursued coordinated, highly regressive economic policies and a harsh social agenda. Thus, while there’s largely been stalemate in Washington, sweeping social and economic changes that are entirely at odds with how the country voted in the last presidential election have been taking place in Republican-controlled states.
As a result of the relative lack of interest in state elections, we now have the most polarized political system in modern American history. It’s also the least functional. Many state governments’ policies are not just almost completely divorced from what is going on at the federal level—but also in some cases what is prescribed by law and the Constitution. Systemic factors based in state politics explain more about our national political condition than tired arguments in Washington over who is at fault for what does or doesn’t—mainly doesn’t—happen at the federal level. The dysfunction begins in the states.
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The 2010 elections were the single most important event leading up to the domination of the House by the Republican far right. Both the recession and organized agitation by the Tea Party over the newly passed health care law—“spontaneous” campaigns guided from Washington by the old pros Karl Rove and Dick Armey, and funded by reactionary business moguls—helped the Republicans, and especially the most radical elements in the party, sweep into the majority in the House of Representatives and take control of twelve additional states, including Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. The Republicans who took over states in 2010 reset our politics. Among other things, they made the House of Representatives unrepresentative. In 2012 Democrats won more than 1.7 million more votes for the House than the Republicans did, but they picked up only eight seats. (This was the largest discrepancy between votes and the division of House seats since 1950.)
Thus, while Obama won 51.1 percent of the popular vote in 2012, as a result of the redistricting following 2010 the Republican House majority represents 47.5 percent as opposed to 48.8 percent for the Democrats, or a minority of the voters for the House in 2012. Take the example of the Ohio election: Obama won the state with 51 percent of the vote, but because of redistricting, its House delegation is 75 percent Republican and 25 percent Democratic.
The state government’s power over the redrawing of congressional districts every ten years is probably the single most determining factor of our political situation. It’s clear that the Republicans were successful in winning and using the 2010 elections as a prelude to the most distorted and partisan redistricting in modern times. Their approach was so different in degree as to be a difference in substance—and the post-2010 politics in Washington resemble nothing that has gone before. There has been something of a war raging among students of electoral politics over the role of redistricting in our current situation. But Sam Wang of Princeton, a neuroscientist who founded the Princeton Election Consortium, wrote in The New York Times earlier this year:
Political scientists have identified other factors that have influenced the relationship between votes and seats in the past. Concentration of voters in urban areas can, for example, limit how districts are drawn, creating a natural packing effect. But in 2012 the net effect of intentional gerrymandering was far larger than any one factor.
Moreover, the redistricting has become different from the process that we learned about in civics classes. Traditional “gerrymandering,” which had been practiced since the early 1800s, involved drawing weirdly shaped districts for the purpose of protecting incumbents. But in recent years redistricting has developed into a vicious fight for control of redistricting—though the shape of the districts can be just as weird.
The Republicans have made the greater effort to shape the House to their benefit, through a deliberate two-step process: first, win state elections so as to control the redistricting, and then redistrict to give the party as much advantage as possible in the House. Though they’ve done their own self-interested redistricting, Democrats haven’t been as zealous about controlling reapportionment. Still, through the combination of both parties’ actions, they have ended up with more safe seats than before.
There was just one problem: when the Republicans began their intense effort in the run-up to 2010 to take over state legislatures and draw districts free of serious Democratic challengers, they failed to anticipate that this would leave their members more vulnerable to challenges from the right. The fear of being defeated in local contests by even more radical Republicans has also taken hold in the state legislatures, which in turn affects the nature of the House. The more established House Republicans, including the leaders, now live in terror of a putsch from the most extreme right-wing elements of their caucus, in particular the Tea Party. They are not yet a majority of the party but they have the power to behave like one through their use of fear. A lamentable result of the effort to draw safe districts is that only an estimated thirty-five House seats out of 435 will actually be competitive in the 2014 election. Therein lies the source of the near paralysis of the federal government.
Nate Silver wrote in the The New York Times after the 2012 election that while there had been earlier periods of great partisanship, in particular between 1880 and 1920, “it is not clear that there have been other periods when individual members of the House had so little to deter them from highly partisan behavior.” Under these circumstances, it’s harder than ever before to put together bipartisan coalitions to pass major legislation, as had long been done for civil rights bills and other major changes in economic, social, and even environmental policy. The fact that Obama had to pass the health care law with almost no Republican support rendered it more vulnerable later. The Republicans’ limp and deceptive explanation for their opposition to the law is that the Democrats left them out of consideration of the bill (which was actually based on Republican ideas).
The Republicans who took over the states following the 2010 elections arrived with an agenda strongly based on model laws supplied by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), heavily funded by the Koch brothers along with some other big corporations. The other group that benefited most from the 2010 elections was the passionately anti-abortion Christian right—which is not only an essential part of the national Republican Party’s base but also dominates the Republican Party in about twenty states, and has a substantial influence in more than a dozen other state parties. The Christian right is tremendously effective in motivating its followers to go to the polls—and then threaten a loss of support if their agenda isn’t adopted.
The overall result of the new Republican domination has been that these states have cut taxes on the wealthy and corporations and moved toward a more comprehensive sales tax; slashed unemployment benefits; cut money for education and various public services; and sought to break the remaining power of the unions. Not only did Republican officials in these states manipulate the constitutionally guaranteed right to vote in their effort to win the presidency in 2012 and preserve their own power by keeping Democratic supporters from voting, but they are at it again. The constitutional right to abortion granted under Roe v. Wade has been flouted. The new strategy among anti-abortion forces is to limit legal abortions to the first twelve weeks of pregnancy. Several states have adopted this measure and others are in the process of doing so.
Pregnant women’s privacy has also been invaded through state measures requiring them to be subjected to transvaginal ultrasound examinations of the fetus, and forcing them to look at or hear described the result of any sonogram. Doctors have been ordered by state law to lie to women about supposed dire consequences of abortion, for example that abortions can lead to breast cancer. Abortion clinics in some states have been shut down or eliminated. Funding for other medical services for women, such as mammograms, has also been greatly reduced. Many of these state laws are under legal challenge and some of them may end up in the Supreme Court. Roe v. Wade may be doomed.
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North Carolina provides the most dramatic example of what can happen to a state in just three years. It was formerly a progressive southern state, racially tolerant, and a proud leader in education. Obama carried North Carolina in 2008. But the Republicans won the legislature in 2010, and in 2012 they won the governorship. In addition, as a result of their redistricting after 2010, in 2012 they gained “super-majorities” in the legislature. Since then, the Republican governor and legislature have made drastic cuts in unemployment insurance and tax credits to low-income workers. The legislature is leaning toward passing proposals to reduce the number of teaching assistants and aid to college students, and it has cut the number of openings for children in state-run pre-kindergarten programs. Proposals are pending to flatten the income tax, expand the sales tax, and kill the estate tax.
The North Carolina legislature also passed a law to bar the courts from applying sharia law, making it the seventh state to do so. In reality, there’s no threat that courts will start interpreting the laws according to sharia doctrine, but Republican state lawmakers say they’re taking “preemptive” action. Oklahoma’s prohibition of sharia law was recently held unconstitutional by a federal court (as singling out a religion).
North Carolina has also adopted the most severe restrictions in the country both on abortion and on voting rights. It makes the impediments to voting that were used in 2012 seem meager by comparison. Its sole remaining abortion clinic is being shut down. North Carolina is one of the states that, as a result of the Supreme Court’s decision in June, was liberated from the requirement of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that it get prior clearance from the Justice Department before making changes in its voting laws. Texas and North Carolina, both under Republican control, were the first to savor their freedom by making it harder than ever for minorities, students, and the elderly poor to vote. A former North Carolina Democratic official said to me, “They do all these things and then they pass voting rights laws to keep us from voting them out of office.”
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In 2014, thirty-six governorships, an unusually large number, will be up for election, including in such important swing states in presidential elections as Ohio, Wisconsin, Florida, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Until 2010, all of them but Florida were governed by Democrats and carried by Obama, but since then they have been governed by Republicans determined to impose highly conservative policies on previously Democratic states carried by Obama.
Who controls the country’s statehouses can matter a lot in presidential elections. For one thing, that’s where the rules and conditions for voting are set. In 2012 we saw the Republican governor of Florida and the attorney general of Ohio cut the number of polling places and the number of days and hours they were open in an obvious effort to limit the votes of blacks and other minorities, as well as poor seniors.
Though great numbers of voters rose up and insisted on casting their ballots, it’s still the case that large numbers—estimated at a minimum at hundreds of thousands—were prevented from voting. And in a close election a governor can be of significant aid to the national candidate: the state’s party machinery and the governor’s political network can be called on to help out. The ultimate example of how helpful a governor can be was provided by Jeb Bush in Florida in 2000.
As early as November of this year, two states, Virginia and New Jersey, will hold their contests for governor and senator. Usually of interest only to political obsessives, both states’ elections will be more widely watched for their implications for the 2016 presidential race, ridiculously early as it may be for that. In New Jersey, Governor Chris Christie, a relatively moderate Republican, is generally expected to be reelected easily but if he runs for president the main questions are whether his pugnacious style will be popular outside the state and how he will deal with the party base.
Virginia is more significant for national politics because it’s a swing state in federal elections—it was crucial to Obama’s reelection victory. The Virginia race for governor this November is an embarrassment. The Republican candidate, Ken Cuccinelli, who is even further to the right than Bob McDonnell, the current governor (who cannot run again), most famously wants to make consensual sodomy illegal in Virginia. That the proposal has been met with derision—and also some fright—and is clearly unconstitutional does not deter him.
Cuccinelli’s campaign is also suffering from the recent squalid revelations about McDonnell, who had already won national attention for backing transvaginal ultrasounds of women seeking abortions. McDonnell and his wife accepted considerable financial favors from a wealthy businessman whose products he then promoted—among other gifts, he picked up the cost of their daughter’s wedding and treated Mrs. McDonnell to a shopping spree at Bergdorf’s. Now Cuccinelli has been found taking favors from the same businessman, if on a more modest scale.
The Democratic nominee, Terry McAuliffe, the backslapping politician and businessman and close pal of the Clintons, has a problem of his own: one of his companies is under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission. To assure that this got a lot of publicity and to try to counter Cuccinelli’s problems, the right-wing activist David Bossie, founder of Citizens United, which brought the famous case of that name to the Supreme Court, has made a film (Fast Terry) charging McCauliffe with sleazy business practices. For good measure the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, who is black, has called the Obamas communists who “don’t understand our country, I don’t think they even like it.”
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Critical to the 2013–2014 midterm elections will be attempts to destroy the new health care law—the one issue the Republicans have found most effective for rallying their forces; that and “spending,” even as the deficit steadily declines, are the only two issues on which they have taken a real position. The obsessive attempt by conservative Republicans to prevent “Obamacare” from being implemented may be without precedent but it isn’t without purpose. By playing on people’s fears—proposed changes in health care arouse anxiety as no other domestic issue does—they are seeking to advance their own political cause. Even after it failed, “Hillarycare” was a major factor in the 1994 Republican sweep.
John Boehner standing next to a printed version of the Affordable Care Act during a press conference calling for its repeal, Washington, D.C., May 16, 2013
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
What began in 2009 as a movement to block passage of the health care program championed by Obama was transformed in 2010 into a furious reaction to its becoming law that was used as the organizing force in seeking Republican gains in those midterm elections. Since it worked then, why not have another go at it? The seemingly futile effort to repeal the law isn’t as silly as it seems. The forty roll-call votes by House Republicans to repeal it aren’t useless, even if there isn’t a chance that the Senate will agree. The Republican base strongly approves of these votes. The base has been mobilized around opposition to the health care law as a force for the midterms (and beyond) by the principal organizers and funders of the Tea Party in Washington as well as by the Heritage Foundation, the supposed think tank now headed by former South Carolina senator Jim DeMint. While in the Senate DeMint promoted Tea Party candidates for senator, several of them fools who flamed out. The votes not only help the Republicans raise money; they also provide protection for members trying to fend off attacks or challengers, enabling them to say, “I voted to kill Obamacare forty times.”
The Republicans are racing against the fact that some popular parts of the Affordable Care Act, such as the elimination of pre-conditions as a barrier for getting insurance and allowing parents to cover their children up to the age of twenty-six, have already gone into effect. If the complex health care program is seen as successful on the whole, Obama and the Democrats could get long-term credit for it, just as the Democrats did from Medicare. If the Republican fantasy were to come true and they somehow killed it off, Obama’s principal achievement will have been eliminated. Both parties understand that a health care program undergoing a lot of turmoil in 2014 spells trouble for the Democrats.
Egged on by a campaign run by FreedomWorks, the Tea Party stronghold in Washington, D.C., more than half (or twenty-seven) states have rejected the expansion of Medicaid for the ailing and elderly poor; and a majority of the states have also refused to set up the exchanges through which people can shop for medical insurance at presumably competitive prices. (This is partly a grandstanding gesture because the federal government will set up the exchanges in those states instead.)
FreedomWorks has urged people to burn their nonexistent “health care cards,” and it and other conservative groups are urging young people not to sign up for the new health insurance, and pay a penalty instead. The success of the plan depends on a certain number of healthy young people buying insurance on the exchanges in order to keep prices down for everyone else.
But in their zeal to eliminate a law that’s been passed and is on the books, congressional Republicans may have built their own trap. Whatever they do in the name of getting rid of the program or cutting it back is attacked by the most militant Republicans as insufficient; there’s always a more drastic proposal, and a demand from the base that they support it. A recent idea—backed by Senators Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Mike Lee—was that the government be shut down unless “Obamacare” is defunded. But some senior Republicans with memories of the calamity to their party caused by the Newt Gingrich–led shutdown in 1995–1996, as well as governors with national ambitions, were outspoken in calling this a stupid idea. Cruz, at the center of the effort, showed in his first weeks in the Senate that he’s not above McCarthyite tactics (as in the Hagel hearings); and he freely breaks the rules and understandings by which the Senate functions at all. Most uncommonly, he is actually hated and feared by most of his colleagues (including Republicans)—such strong feelings about a fellow senator are rare. The Harvard Law graduate and able advocate before the Supreme Court dismissed his senior Republicans’ concerns and in his mellifluous tone said that they were misreading history, and he carried on a crusade for a shutdown, which few of his colleagues liked.
But the ruffian Cruz overstepped and made a big mistake. As he traveled around with DeMint, he aroused great cheers from crowds at town meetings in August—but his colleagues held firm; no additional sponsors of the shutdown proposal came forth. Beyond that, Cruz and DeMint threatened Senate Republicans—true conservatives such as Tom Coburn and Lindsay Graham—who refused to back the shutdown with primary challenges. (Cruz is far more intelligent than DeMint but in defying the leaders of his party he is following his own agenda.) The base doesn’t mind if he’s unpopular in Washington, though.
Struggling once more to convince his far-right caucus members to take a less self-damaging route than the shutdown, the beleaguered Speaker John Boehner suggested that instead of shutting down the government unless Obamacare is defunded or postponed—anything to keep it from going into effect by the 2014 elections—they delay passing an increase in the debt ceiling. Holding up the debt ceiling in 2011 brought all kinds of obloquy down on the heads of the House Republicans and also stupidly hurt the credit standing of the US. Boehner has been leaping from ice floe to ice floe, each one more dangerous. So far his strategy of postponing calamity has worked—but what happens if he runs out of ice floes?
The agony of the current Republican Party is that most of the far right isn’t concerned about the possible effects of their tactics on the national party—on its ability to win not just the next presidential election but also other offices down the line. The Tea Party members of Congress are responding to their districts. But the mainstream Republicans are panicked that they have lost four out of the last six presidential elections, and they have yet to figure out how to placate their base in the nomination process and still win the general election. But the far right has its own version of reality. Some even plan to run for president on it.
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As a result of the centrifugal forces that have taken over our politics, we have ended up with warring political blocs, not with the federal system envisioned by the Founders. Instead of cooperative interaction among the states and the federal government, we have a series of struggles between them. Federal laws are blocked or degraded in many of the states, and state obligations are unmet. After the country reelected a Democratic president in 2012, the Republicans continued to refuse to recognize his legitimacy and they opposed virtually his every policy proposal. (Whether immigration will break this pattern is up in the air.) Meanwhile the most sweeping changes in domestic policy are taking place in states dominated by Republicans. As it turns out, 56 percent of the population, and 60 percent of poor children, live in these states.
The new turbulence between the federal government and the states and between the president and Congress has been exacerbated by midterm elections. The turbulence has been spreading across our governing institutions—putting the very workability of the American political system in jeopardy. With the House in the grip of the very far right, the wreckers have made it almost impossible for Boehner to lead—and Obama to govern.
The madness has been seeping into the usually more staid Senate, to the point where freshman radicals—Rand Paul, Cruz, and Rubio, with the Tea Party at their backs and a presidential gleam in their eyes—can break with longstanding precedent and courtesies and presume to define the national agenda. Minority leader Mitch McConnell is being challenged for renomination by a Tea Party member, which has limited his leadership capacities and his judgment. The turbulence has spread into the Supreme Court. Our federal organism is a delicate instrument, one that can work reasonably well only if its caretakers proceed on the basis of understandings and restraint.
The seeds of this situation were planted in the 1994 midterm election that swept the former back bencher Newt Gingrich into the Speakership of the House. Gingrich rashly maneuvered himself into a government shutdown that ended in disaster for the Republicans. (Bill Clinton outmaneuvered Gingrich, and the public didn’t at all appreciate the shutdown of federal services.) There is no evidence that Gingrich had thought through the consequences. He thus spawned the consequence-free politics that is now bedeviling our system of government. In 2009, for the first time, defeat of the incoming president in the next election became the opposition party’s explicit governing principle. If that meant blocking measures to improve the economy, or preventing the filling of important federal offices to keep the government running, so be it. Wrecking became the order of the day. Confrontation became the goal in itself. Now the rightward trend in Republican politics is feeding on itself, becoming even more extreme until the preposterous becomes conceivable.
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Can this chokehold on our politics be broken? Several states are considering the possible removal of the power to control redistricting from the politicians who stand to benefit from their own decisions. Arizona and California have adopted independent commissions to redraw districts.
Theoretically, Congress could pass legislation requiring the states to reform their redistricting practices for federal elections; but that would require a sufficiently powerful movement—of which there is no sign—to put pressure on members of Congress to act against their own perceived interest.
The citizens of a state have it within their power to press for such changes in the nature of their state governments and the consequent effects on their immediate lives as well as the functioning of the nation’s political system. By rousing themselves to vote, they could have a stronger voice in filling state offices that may not seem so exciting but are highly consequential. Is it possible that the off-year elections could be taken almost as seriously as the presidential ones? The radicalism of the right has become so extreme that it may have unintentionally provided an impetus in that direction.
In the end only the members of the electorate can restore the institutions and procedures that make our democratic system work, starting with the next chance they get.
Copyright © 2013 NYREV, Inc. (emphasis in original)
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/sep/26/stranglehold-our-politics/ [ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/sep/26/stranglehold-our-politics/?pagination=false ]
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'The Entrepreneurial State': Apple Didn't Build Your iPhone; Your Taxes Did
Government support for research and development is responsible for much of the innovation that drives GDP, argues Mariana Mazzucato.
Photo courtesy of Stephen Yang/Bloomberg via Getty Images.
By Mariana Mazzucato
Posted September 20, 2013
As the deadline for raising the government debt limit fast approaches, and wrangling on the issue in Congress intensifies, Mariana Mazzucato [ http://www.marianamazzucato.com/ ( http://www.marianamazzucato.com/home/ )] reminds us of the difference between public and private debt. Professor of economics at the University of Sussex, Mazzucato is the author of "The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Private vs. Public Sector Myths [ http://www.amazon.com/The-Entrepreneurial-State-Debunking-Private/dp/0857282522 ]." Her provocative "they-didn't-build-that" thesis, that the government funds most of the initial research and development on which the private sector capitalizes, has generated a lot of buzz [ http://www.economist.com/news/business/21584307-new-book-points-out-big-role-governments-play-creating-innovative-businesses ] in the financial press [ http://www.forbes.com/sites/bruceupbin/2013/06/13/debunking-the-narrative-of-silicon-valleys-innovation-might/ ], including Martin Wolf's review [ http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/32ba9b92-efd4-11e2-a237-00144feabdc0.html ] in the Financial Times calling it "basically right." So we asked her to explain her thinking to our Business Desk audience.
Is government debt slowing economic growth, if not impeding it? The world-wide economic crisis that began in 2007 has kept that question alive, despite the fact that it was private debt that caused the crisis in the first place. But attempts to curb the crisis have also led to an explosion of public sector expenditures like bank bailouts and unemployment insurance that have ballooned debt levels. At the same time, lower tax receipts due to falling incomes have prompted even more borrowing.
Yet amnesia and dogma have conflated the public debt that helped cure the crisis with the private debt that caused it. The Reinhart-Rogoff saga [ http://www.pbs.org/newshour/businessdesk/2013/04/paul-krugman-v-reinhart-and-ro.html ] seems to have ended with evidence winning out over ideological fiction. That's because the government debt threshold these noted economists supposedly discovered -- surpass a 90 percent ratio of debt-to-GDP and you're screwed -- seems to have been based on statistical error. But despite the correction, countries across the globe are still being asked to slash spending in hopes of kick starting economic growth.
My own work shows the utter foolishness of such a strategy. What matters is not the absolute size of debt, but what that debt consists of. Throughout history, strategic government expenditures have played a key role in spurring economic growth. Indeed, by forcing the world's weakest economies to cut public spending -- in key areas like education, research and health -- their potential for long-run growth is weakening. Spain, for instance, has cut its research spending by 40 percent since 2009. Will this help it create the kind of goods and services the world might want to buy -- and be as competitive as its Nordic neighbors? It seems wildly unlikely.
The key question is simple: what causes GDP growth? And the answer from economists is that, at the very least, spending on education, human capital, and research are tightly related to it. Indeed, Robert Solow, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1987, found that close to 90 percent of growth is not explained by the usual suspects, capital and labor. They account for only 10 percent. So Solow called the unaccounted-for 90 percent the "residual." And what drove the residual? It had to be technology. And how is technology fostered? More often than not, down through history, by government investment, from the roads of ancient Rome to the Internet of modern America.
However, things are not quite so easy. Which areas should the government fund? Traditional economic theory argues that government funding should be limited to areas where the free market is not working properly because of so-called "market failures," some of which might be due to the existence of "public goods" like basic research, which are hard to make proprietary and profitable since they're quickly available to everyone. As a result, the private sector under-invests.
So if government nudges the private sector to invest by doing the basic research itself, goes the argument, business will promptly respond by innovating. Thus policy makers have obsessed over different types of tax incentives (from R&D tax credits to recent tax cuts related to patents) in order to increase the amount which the business sector spends on R&D.
I have been pushing a very different view, as embodied in my recent book "The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Private vs. Public Sector Myths [ http://www.amazon.com/The-Entrepreneurial-State-Debunking-Private/dp/0857282522 ]." I argue that businesses are typically timid -- waiting to invest until they can clearly see new technological and market opportunities. And evidence shows that such opportunities come when large sums of public money are spent directly on high risk (and high cost) technological missions. This raises debt of course, but also GDP, keeping the ratio of debt-to-GDP in check.
These missions are expensive precisely because the government does much more than just solve market failures. It intervenes in both basic and applied research and even provides early stage seed finance to private companies. Indeed, Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants have funded a higher percentage of early stage seed finance than private capital. This is because private finance is too risk-averse -- afraid -- to engage with industries characterized by high technological and market risk. The fear explains why we have seen venture capital entering, in industry after industry, only decades after the initial high risk has been absorbed by government.
Mission-oriented public investment put men on the moon, and later, lead to the invention and commercialization of the Internet, which in turn has stimulated growth in many sectors of the economy. Indeed, as I describe in the longest chapter of my book, the U.S. government has been a leading player in funding not only the Internet but all the other technologies -- GPS, touchscreen display, and the new Siri voice-activated personal assistant -- that make the iPhone, for example, a miracle of American technology.
Crucially, mission-oriented policies are needed today to tackle climate change and other large societal, technological challenges. But the fear that such investments will cause debt to rise too high and stymie growth -- ignoring the potential positive effects on growth that these investments can make in the long run -- is paralyzing governments throughout the world.
Furthermore, there is the general belief that the direction of investments should be determined by the market, not government, because government consists of a bunch of bureaucrats who lack expertise. But the technological leadership in countries like Singapore, Korea, China, Israel, Brazil, Finland, Denmark and Germany is a result of the well-funded network of state agencies in those countries that are able to attract expertise and drive change, working of course, alongside the private sector, but often leading it.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) was recently run by a Nobel Prize winning physicist. And the atmosphere at the Advanced Research Project Agency-Energy [ http://arpa-e.energy.gov/ ], which is trying to do for renewable energy what the Defense Advanced Research Agency [ https://www.google.com/search?q=DARPA&oq=DARPA&aqs=chrome..69i57j5j0l2.1952j0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 ] did for the Internet, is just as dynamic and creative as Google. And historically, it is investments driven by such agencies (including the National Science Foundation, National Nanotech Initiative, National Institutes of Health) that galvanize private sector investment.
Indeed, when Pfizer recently closed down a large R&D lab in Sandwich, Kent, and transferred it to Boston, Massachusetts, it was not due to the lower taxes or laxer regulation for which industry is constantly lobbying. They moved because of the large amounts of money that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has been spending on research and the mission of improved health care in the United States: $792 billion from 1936-2011 (in 2011 dollars), with $30.9 billion in 2012 alone.
These lessons are important for policy makers interested in fostering entrepreneurship. While Steve Jobs was a genius in his ability to exploit existing government-funded technologies in new ways, he would have had little to work with absent massive public spending. And given the public spending cuts that are happening in most countries the world over, the question then becomes: will there be a future wave to surf in places like Silicon Valley, or is the technology tide destined to turn?
Furthermore, casting the public sector as the villain and business as savior has relieved the private sector from any obligation to increase its own commitment to the innovation process. There simply are not enough large businesses today playing the role that Xerox PARC (the Palo Alto Research Center) and AT&T (Bell Labs) played in the past.
Today's big companies, like Cisco and Pfizer, spend almost as much on share-repurchase schemes (which enrich those who own stock) as they spend on research. Interestingly, the big "repurchasers" (the biggest being in oil and pharma) often justify such buybacks with the claim that there are no other "opportunities" for their investments. But really? No opportunities in health for pharma these days? Nothing for oil companies to invest in? What about safe and clean renewable energy?
When building innovation "eco-systems," then, it is important to make sure the role of business is symbiotic, not parasitic. That means, if we want to rebalance the economy, we need to rebalance the story we tell about who the innovators really are. Interestingly, it was the venture capital lobby in the mid-1970s that pushed for the capital gains tax to fall by [50] percent (from 40 percent in 1976 to 20 percent in the mid '80s). It has been [as low or lower most of the time] since, based on the narrative that only thus will the entrepreneurial "risk-takers' do their thing and enrich us all.
But that narrative is false. The entrepreneurial state has funded the radical innovation behind much if not most of modern economic growth. Denying government today the resources to do its thing endangers us all.
Copyright © 2013 MacNeil/Lehrer Productions (emphasis in original)
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/businessdesk/2013/09/the-entrepreneurial-state-appl.html [with comments]
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U.S. Revives Aid Program for Clean Energy
By DIANE CARDWELL
Published: September 19, 2013
The Obama administration has decided to revive a controversial loan guarantee program at the Energy Department, administration officials said on Thursday, even as the program remains under Congressional scrutiny after losing hundreds of millions in taxpayer money on investments in failed green energy start-ups like the solar module maker Solyndra.
This time, though, the program would devote as much as $8 billion to helping industries like coal and oil make cleaner energy. Although the program, which does not require Congressional approval, would support a wide range of technologies, it could help coal-fired power plants find a way to keep their emissions from escaping into the atmosphere, department officials said.
Officials say the federal subsidies are necessary to support the development of technologies that are too complex, unproven and expensive for investors and private companies to pursue on their own, assertions that have already stirred criticism from opponents who see the program as too risky and a misuse of taxpayer money.
The program’s renewal comes just as the administration is releasing stringent environmental rules that would severely restrict air pollution at new coal plants.
“We have a real problem, and that’s, ‘How do we get new technology to market?’ ” said Peter W. Davidson, executive director of the loan program office at the Energy Department. “We partner with industry developers and entrepreneurs to demonstrate a new technology at industrial scale or utility scale, and hopefully once that technology is proven by deployment at scale, we step out of the way,” and let the private debt markets take over.
A spokeswoman for the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, which is controlled by Republicans, who have been critical of the loans in the past, took a skeptical view of the program.
“The D.O.E. loan guarantee program’s history of mismanagement, bankruptcies and failure to deliver the jobs promised raises significant concerns about risking billions in additional taxpayer dollars,” Charlotte Baker said. “We are supportive of efforts to encourage the development of advanced fossil fuel technologies, but we are skeptical that federal loan guarantees are the best way” to bring this about.
Analysts and climate experts also questioned whether the program, which was originally established in 2005 and whose new guidelines will be completed this fall, could make the technologies economically viable on a mass scale. There are currently no ventures in the United States that achieve this, despite years of government-sponsored research and development, according to the Congressional Research Service. An ambitious clean-coal demonstration project called FutureGen, proposed by President George W. Bush in 2003, has yet to advance beyond the early development stages.
“It seems sound policy for the administration to provide these loan guarantees,” said Paul Bledsoe, a former energy aide in the Clinton White House who is now a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund. “The real question becomes, ‘Is that adequate to actually prompt significant numbers of new builds?’ and I think that the answer so far is no.”
The Energy Department’s loan program was created in 2005 under President Bush to spur commercial adoption of innovative technologies or those that avoided, reduced or permanently stored pollutants. In 2008, Congress added another section, for more fuel-efficient cars, and a year later created a temporary program to encourage renewable energy and electrical transmission projects.
That temporary program, which was responsible for the Solyndra loan, has since expired, but the department still has about $50 billion left that could be lent, with a large chunk earmarked for nuclear projects.
The department points to several successful investments from the loan program. Ernest J. Moniz, the energy secretary, has pointed to Tesla Motors’ early repayment of $465 million as an example. Mr. Davidson said that since his office financed the first six large-scale photovoltaic solar farms in 2010 and 2011, 10 big solar power plants had started or finished construction without any federal money. On a $34 billion loan portfolio, the government has lost about $800 million, he said. That’s about 2.3 percent, and only a small fraction of the $10 billion Congress set aside to cover losses.
“We think that number compares extremely well with other lenders,” he said. “The rigor in the policy and procedures that we make borrowers go through is intense and profound and it’s very significant.”
But the loan office has attracted far more attention for failures like Solyndra, which defaulted on a $535 million loan, and Fisker Automotive, the electric car company whose unpaid $168 million loan the Energy Department put up for auction this week. Many Republicans have seized on these missteps in criticizing the program.
“The Obama administration has gotten into the business of picking winners and losers at a significant cost to taxpayers,” Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota, said on Wednesday in calling for legislation to end the part of the program geared toward fuel-efficient cars.
Now, with clean energy and conservation programs stymied in the legislature and President Obama emphasizing the need to pursue avenues that do not require Congressional approval, the loan guarantee office is gearing up.
With its focus on conventional sources of energy rather than renewables like solar and wind, the program has “a chance to take so much of the focus off Solyndra and get it onto some new and exciting opportunities,” said Dan W. Reicher, executive director of the Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance at Stanford University and an adviser to Mr. Moniz.
The revived program is broader than its predecessor, which focused on capturing carbon emissions from coal plants and on turning coal into gas. Mr. Davidson said officials were looking for projects that reduced carbon and other gases along the various stages of energy production, like cutting methane emissions or water usage in the natural gas extraction process known as “fracking” as well as retrofitting existing coal-fired power plants.
There had been little interest in loan guarantees or private investment for limiting carbon emissions, said Daniel J. Weiss, a senior fellow and director of climate strategy at the Center for American Progress, a liberal policy group, because of a “lack of limits on carbon pollution from power plants and other industrial sources.” He added: “President Obama’s pending carbon pollution standards for power plants should spark more interest in this program.”
That could come from some in the coal industry, which has already had a hard time competing with cheap natural gas, and would have trouble competing with renewable energy sources like solar and wind under the proposed environmental regulations.
“If you do coal the right way, it’s so expensive that wind and solar beat it on the markets, and that’s why the guys who want to do coal the right way need their policy support” with loan guarantees, research assistance and tax incentives, said Michael E. Webber, deputy director of the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. “Wind and solar are big kids and almost competitive on their own already, but the advanced fossil and small nuclear are still years away.”
Still, some energy professionals questioned how much of an effect the program itself would have on the markets.
“It turns, potentially, a nonstarter into an economically interesting proposition,” said Kenneth W. Hansen, a lawyer at Chadbourne & Parke who leads its practice using the energy loan program. “If you can bring down the financing costs, that brings down the cost of the project, makes it more feasible. Whether or not it’s enough, I don’t know.”
© 2013 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/20/business/energy-environment/us-revives-aid-program-for-clean-energy.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/20/business/energy-environment/us-revives-aid-program-for-clean-energy.html?pagewanted=all ]
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Making Money Off the Poor
By THOMAS B. EDSALL
September 17, 2013, 10:48 pm
A lot of people are making money off the poor. The Center for Responsible Lending [ http://www.responsiblelending.org/ ], a North Carolina nonprofit that tracks predatory lending practices, issued a revealing report [ http://www.responsiblelending.org/state-of-lending/reports/10-Payday-Loans.pdf ] earlier this month on payday loans, which carry annual interest rates as high as 400 percent. Using data compiled by [ http://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/201304_cfpb_payday-dap-whitepaper.pdf ] the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the center found that most borrowers repeatedly rolled over or renewed loans.
The center’s analysis also found that “the median annual income of a borrower was $22,476, with an average loan amount of $350.” Most crucially, though,
the median consumer in our sample conducted 10 transactions over the 12-month period and paid a total of $458 in fees, which do not include the loan principal. One-quarter of borrowers paid $781 or more in fees.
You might think these companies are making enough money from their usurious interest rates, but the center’s report [ http://www.responsiblelending.org/state-of-lending/reports/10-Payday-Loans.pdf ] makes it clear that payday lenders are dependent for profits on borrowers who take out repeated loans:
The leading payday industry trade association — the Community Financial Services Association (C.F.S.A.) — states in a recent letter to the C.F.P.B.,“{i}n any large, mature payday loan portfolio, loans to repeat borrowers generally constitute between 70 and 90% of the portfolio, and for some lenders, even more.”
The center cites the following industry analysis, which is remarkably clear on how this scheme plays out in practice:
“In a state with a $15 [fee] per $100 [loan] rate, an operator … will need a new customer to take out 4 to 5 loans before that customer becomes profitable. Indeed, Dan Feehan, C.E.O. of Cash America, remarked at a Jeffries Financial Services Conference in 2007, “[T]he theory in the business is [that] you’ve got to get that customer in, work to turn him into a repetitive customer, long-term customer, because that’s really where the profitability is.” Lender marketing materials offer incentives to promote frequent loan usage, such as discounts to promote repeat borrowing.
Payday loans, the report concludes, “create a debt treadmill that makes struggling families worse off than they were before they received a payday loan.”
The payday loan industry operates out of storefronts in poor neighborhoods, but a share of its profits filter into some of the nation’s most prestigious banks.
Jessica Silver-Greenberg, a banking and consumer finance reporter for The Times, disclosed on Feb. 23 [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/business/major-banks-aid-in-payday-loans-banned-by-states.html?_r=0&pagewanted=allJ (about 70% of the way down at/see {linked in} http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=85141987 and preceding and following)] that major banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, have been acting as key intermediaries, allowing online lenders to directly collect money from the bank accounts of those borrowers who have accounts.
The intermediary role of the banks is particularly controversial, Silver-Greenberg writes, because
a growing number of the [payday] lenders have set up online operations in more hospitable states or far-flung locales like Belize, Malta and the West Indies to more easily evade statewide caps on interest rates.
Banks have been profiting from their customers’ “shaky financial footing,” according to Silver-Greenberg, by collecting “a cascade of fees from problems like overdrafts.”
The Times financial columnist Gretchen Morgenson separately reported [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/08/business/find-the-loan-behind-the-loans.html?pagewanted=all ] on Sept. 7 that court papers filed in 2007 revealed that Deutsche Bank and Citigroup were providing financial banking to Cash Call, a payday lender specializing in loans to the working poor at annual interest rates as high as 343 percent. (Spokespeople for both Deutsche Bank and Citi told Morgenson that they no longer did business with Cash Call.)
Another of the multiple pathways eager moneylenders have found to profit from the cash needs of the poor is through title loans to low-income car owners who need to make monthly payments. Title loans offer lenders another chance to collect astronomical interest rates. In a Feb. 28 report [ http://www.responsiblelending.org/other-consumer-loans/car-title-loans/research-analysis/CRL-Car-Title-exec.pdf ], the center found that the average title loan, secured by an automobile, is $951, and carries a monthly interest rate of 25 percent. That’s 300 percent a year. Customers typically renew these loan eight times.
The center determined that for a typical borrower the total amount paid in interest and principal for a car loan of $951 is $3,093.
•
It is not only the middle class and the wealthy who exploit the poor. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that at times the poor exploit one another.
For his doctoral research in 2008 and 2009, Jacob Avery, now a professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine, spent 17 months with homeless men in Atlantic City. What he found was a hierarchy of exploitation.
Avery describes the way that cabdrivers would purchase SNAP food stamp cards — at half their face value — from homeless men desperate for cash to buy liquor or drugs. Other homeless men, who qualify for a meager supplemental-security stipend, took advantage of people with even less money, using their S.S.I. income to buy cartons of cigarettes that they then sold to their fellow homeless men for 50 cents a cigarette.
As Avery dove deeper into his research, he came to see the organization of society as a whole “like layers on a cake, with those at the highest level of each layer exploiting those below.”
The exploitation of those on the bottom is also revealed in the work of Gretchen Purser, an assistant professor of sociology at Syracuse University. For her dissertation, Purser spent time [ http://sociology.ucdavis.edu/events/the-circle-of-dispossession-evicting-the-urban-poor/pi-workshop-paper.pdf ] with a group of largely “homeless, formerly incarcerated, African-American men” who were paid $6.15 an hour by a major Baltimore property management company to evict tenants behind in their rent.
Purser writes that while poor, homeless African-Americans evicting poor, soon-to-be homeless African-Americans would seem to present “an opportunity for solidaristic identification amongst the poor,” it didn’t work out that way.
Laborers on eviction crews tend to espouse the same disparaging characterizations of tenants as do the property managers who hire them, thus reinforcing the belief that eviction is rooted in the individual moral deficiencies of the tenant. In this social drama of eviction, the vertical conflict between landlord and tenant is subtly transmuted into a lateral conflict amongst the propertyless.
•
Those profiteering off the most vulnerable are nothing if not innovative.
In a Washington Post series [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2013/09/08/left-with-nothing/ ] that began running on Sept. 8, Debbie Cenziper, Michael Sallah and Steven Rich disclose how an effort by the District of Columbia to collect overdue property taxes has turned into a bonanza for enterprising real estate operators:
For decades, the District placed liens on properties when homeowners failed to pay their bills, then sold those liens at public auctions to mom-and-pop investors who drew a profit by charging owners interest on top of the tax debt until the money was repaid.
But on the watch of local leaders, the program has morphed into a predatory system of debt collection for well-financed, out-of-town companies that turned $500 delinquencies into $5,000 debts — then foreclosed on homes when families couldn’t pay.
Real estate in Washington has been booming, leading to greater interest in buying tax liens:
As the housing market soared, such investors scooped up liens in every corner of the city, then started charging homeowners thousands in legal fees and other costs that far exceeded their original tax bills, with rates for attorneys reaching $450 an hour.
The Post series focused on Bennie Coleman, a 76-year-old former Marine suffering from dementia, who lost his home in 2011 to foreclosure. The process began in 2006 when he failed to pay a $134 tax bill, which was then sold to a Maryland company. In 2010, the Maryland company, claiming Coleman owed a total of $4,999 in legal fees and expenses, 37 times the original tax bill, won a court-ordered foreclosure. “Not only did Coleman lose his $197,000 house, but he also was stripped of the equity because tax lien purchasers are entitled to everything,” the Post reported.
While predatory practices and rising levels of inequality have been gaining media attention, poverty itself [ http://www.brookings.edu/events/2013/09/17-census-data-poverty-income ] has been the subject of news coverage less often.
In May, the University of Michigan’s National Poverty Center found [ http://npc.umich.edu/publications/u/2013-06-npc-working-paper.pdf ] that 1.65 million households in the United States — with 3.55 million children living in them — are now in “extreme poverty.” In 1996, there were 636,000 extremely poor households. The center uses the World Bank definition of extreme poverty — “surviving on less than $2 per day, per person, each month,” or $8 dollars a day for a family of four.
Since the start of the recovery in 2009, the number of homeless people in the New York City shelter system has grown steadily [ http://www.coalitionforthehomeless.org/pages/basic-facts-about-homelessness-new-york-city-data-and-charts ], reaching a high (Fig. 1) of 50,926 people in June 2013, according to the Coalition for the Homeless.
Figure 1.
New York City Department of Homeless Services and Human Resources Administration and NYCStat, Shelter Census Reports
Pending applications for New York City public housing have reached 227,000 [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/24/nyregion/for-many-seeking-public-housing-the-wait-can-be-endless.html?pagewanted=all ], and the queue moves slowly. Only 5,400 to 5,800 open up annually. Waiting lists across the country are growing.
Payday lending, title loans, tax-lien foreclosures and the growing scarcity of affordable housing exacerbate the anxiety and insecurity of the poor. Inflation hurts, too. In contrast to the relatively low official inflation rate [ http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm ] calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the centrist American Institute for Economic Research has developed the Everyday Price Index [ https://www.aier.org/article/7557-epi-reflects-basic-economic-change ]. According to a report [ http://business.time.com/2012/03/06/youre-already-the-victim-of-inflation/ ] in Time magazine using the Everyday Price Index, in 2011 the official Consumer Price Index rose 2.9 percent, but the cost of certain basic necessities rose much more: meat and milk rose more than 9 percent; coffee, 19 percent; peanut butter, 27 percent; heating oil, 18 percent; children’s clothes for boys, 6 percent, and for girls, 9 percent.
The rising price of milk and peanut butter is just one facet of the inflation that takes a higher share of a poor family’s resources than those of a middle or upper income family. Not only are the poor disproportionately exploited, the very fact of being poor creates extraordinary vulnerability to countless major and minor daily roadblocks. Recent research [ http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/books/scarcity-why-having-too-little-means-so-much-by-sendhil-mullainathan-and-eldar-shafir/2007116.article ] by Sendhil Mullainathan of Harvard and Eldar Shafir of Princeton [ http://us.macmillan.com/scarcity/SendhilMullainathan ] demonstrates [ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/sep/26/it-captures-your-mind/?pagination=false ] that, as a post on Truthdig put it:
There is a strong connection between scarce resources and cognition: The more a person struggles financially, the less he or she can channel brain processes to completing other tasks. When you can’t make ends meet, the weight of worry occupies a large portion of the mind.
This doesn’t just mean those who suffer because of poverty are just stressed but rather, incapable of dedicating themselves to other endeavors because their minds are so fully engrossed in finding ways to survive. It goes beyond the ability to pay bills, and stretches out to other important everyday responsibilities, such as parenting, going to night school or even remembering to take prescribed medicine.
In the current political climate, there is little prospect for a major initiative to improve life chances for those at the bottom. But there is more we can do: enact restraints on predatory lending and corrupt eviction procedures, for one. Even more important would be to revive public discussion about the multiple impediments that restrict opportunity for those who are already confronted with hurdles to advancement far higher than those facing the affluent.
*
Related Posts from Opinionator
Land of Plenty (of Government)
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/02/land-of-plenty-of-government/
Inequality Is Holding Back the Recovery
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/19/inequality-is-holding-back-the-recovery/
When Lenders Won’t Listen
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/10/when-lenders-wont-listen/
Foreclosure Is Not an Option
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/06/foreclosure-is-not-an-option/
What’s Good for G.M. Is Good For Homeowners
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/19/whats-good-for-g-m-is-good-for-homeowners/
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© 2013 The New York Times Company
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/17/making-money-off-the-poor/ [with comments]
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Rich Poor Gap
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-danziger/rich-poor-gap_b_3968794.html [with comment]
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It's Time for Some Straight Talk About the GOP Budget
By Richard (RJ) Eskow
Posted: 09/20/2013 1:01 am
When it comes to the economy, the White House is talking tough to the Republicans ... about the debt ceiling. It's true that the threat to shut down the government by refusing to honor its debt obligations is downright un-American [ http://ourfuture.org/20130918/the-houses-un-american-activities ]. The Administration's right to call them out for that. But there's a larger question: Who's going to give the American people some straight talk about the GOP's economic ideas?
Forget the debt ceiling for a moment, if you can. Forget the GOP's attempt to shut down the government over the Affordable Care Act. Who is going to explain to the American people how profoundly misguided, and even immoral, the Republicans' entire economic agenda has become?
Granted, it's a big job. First, there's the House's underhanded "continuing resolution," which freezes in place "sequestration" cuts that are $70 billion [ http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/budget/report/2013/09/10/73749/the-dirty-truth-about-boehners-clean-continuing-resolution/ ] below the figure which both parties agreed to in prior negotiations. Apparently trustworthiness is not a strong trait among today's Republicans.
Then there's the wanton cruelty in this budget: The cuts to the TRIO [ http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/09/19/2647351/trio-programs-college-sequestration/ ] program which helps poor Americans get a higher education and better themselves. Reductions in the SNAP program for hungry Americans, which provides the average recipient with $133 per month [ http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=3744 ] in assistance.
Sen. Bernie Sanders [ http://www.sanders.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/SandersCR.pdf ] lists some of the effects of sequester-based cuts: 57,000 children losing access to Head Start programs. Tens of thousands of seniors dropped from Meals on Wheels. Cuts to housing assistance for the elderly, disabled, and others that will affect 147,000 households. 70,000 college students without a work-study program. Cancer patients losing Medicare-financed treatments. Roughly 400,000 elderly and other low-income households losing heating assistance during the upcoming winter months.
If the GOP's Continuing Resolution is adopted, more cuts will follow: Head Start and the heating-assistance program will suffer further cuts. Education funds for low-income children and the disabled will be slashed. Not that the Republicans are entirely ungenerous: Their plan increases spending for defense by $20 billion, most of which will wind up in the pockets of wealthy defense contractors.
That's the cruelty in the Republican economic plan. Then there's the stupidity. The Congressional Budget Office has already estimated that sequestration cuts will cost the economy 900,000 jobs and shrink our national economy by 0.7 percent.
For reference, that's 900,000 jobs out of an economy that's in desperate need of more, not, less employment. We're far from a recovery when it comes to unemployment in this country:
And that's 0.7 percent out of an economy that, with some wise stewardship, might grow instead -- and in a way that boosts income for the 99 percent, not just the wealthiest among us:
When it comes to the deficit Republicans should be declaring victory, not calling for more spending cuts. After all, the deficit is plummeting:
The problem is, it's falling too fast. Lost jobs and lost wages add up to a shrinking economy.
The President and his staff are certainly taking a firmer stance on the negotiation process. Gene Sperling, head of the President's Council of Economic Advisors, told reporters this weekend that President Obama "is not going to negotiate over whether we should be paying our bills."
And Ezra Klein, a reliable reflector of White House moods, said this [ http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2013/09/ezra-terrified-framing.html ] on MSNBC: "The White House has complete religion on the debt ceiling... This White House does not want their legacy to be (that) they set in motion the chain of events that led to America's role as an economic corner stone of the world being degraded."
But those objections are about process, not economic policy. On the fiscal front, the White House is boasting about deficit reduction [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/17/white-house-jobs-deficit_n_3943917.html ] instead of focusing on the case for urgently-needed spending. And even as Boehner raises the stakes with his Continuing Resolution, both the Senate and White House budget proposals hew faithfully to the stark and austere budget cuts agreed upon in the last round of negotiations.
If the Democrats stick to that approach, once again they'll be negotiating against themselves.
They're right to oppose Boehner's attempt to extend the sequestration cuts. But the President is only intermittently making the case for the increased government investment - in infrastructure, education, and other job-creating programs - that's necessary to get this economy back on track. He should drop the deficit boasting, which only reinforces the right's flawed logic, and stick to discussing the additional spending this country so urgently needs.
When it comes to economic substance, rather than legislative process, this still tends to be a one-sided conversation. The conservative monologue is not being met with a singular, clear counter-argument based on economic common sense.
Sure, they'll all have to try to work out an agreement at some point. But before they do that, Democrats should take a tip from Tip O'Neill. The President's team loves to celebrate the former Democratic Speaker for "having a beer" with President Ronald Reagan and working through tough fiscal issues with the conservative icon.
But O'Neill always began by making it clear where he and his party stood, and how deeply they disagreed with Reagan and the Republicans. He wasn't afraid to describe Reagan as "a cheerleader for selfishness" or to pronounce his budget proposals "dead on arrival."
If Reagan was a cheerleader for selfishness, Boehner & Company are pit bulls for it. They need to be opposed forcefully, in plain and direct language. Before the deal-making begins, the American people deserve a little truth-telling.
It's good to hear the President and his party explain why the legislative process must be protected from Republican extremism. It's time for them to do the same thing for the economy.
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc. (emphasis in original)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rj-eskow/its-time-for-some-straigh_b_3959125.html [with comments]
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Red State Pain
By TIMOTHY EGAN
September 19, 2013, 9:00 pm
Rick Santorum is right. Not far right, crazy right, piously right or, on most issues, never right. He is all of those things. But under the rubric that even a blind pig can find an acorn every now and then, the moral scourge of the Republican Party is on to something — a greater truth.
Earlier this summer, Santorum said Republicans look like the party of plutocrats, stiffing working people and the poor. The 2012 convention, he noted, was a parade of one-percenters, masters of the universe and company owners.
“But not a single — not a single — factory worker went out there,” he said. “Not a single janitor, waitress or person who worked in that company! We didn’t care about them.”
They still don’t care, and the darkening events of what looks to be an autumn of catastrophic failure by a Congress stuffed with extremists will prove Santorum’s point ever more.
Late Thursday, despite pleas from Catholic bishops and evangelicals, the Republican-dominated House passed a bill that would deprive 3.8 million people of assistance to buy food next year. By coincidence, this is almost the exact amount of people who have managed to remain just above the poverty line because of that very aid, the Census Bureau reported a few days ago.
A Republican majority that refuses to govern on other issues found the votes to shove nearly 4 million people back into poverty, joining 46.5 million at a desperation line that has failed to improve since the dawn of the Great Recession. It’s a heartless bill, aimed to hurt. Republicans don’t see it that way, of course. They think too many of their fellow citizens are cheats and loafers, dining out on lobster.
Certainly there are frauds among the one in seven Americans getting help from the program formerly known as food stamps. But who are the others, the easy-to-ignore millions who will feel real pain with these cuts? As it turns out, most of them live in Red State, Real People America. Among the 254 counties where food stamp use doubled during the economic collapse, Mitt Romney won 213 of them, Bloomberg News reported. Half of Owsley County, Ky., is receiving federal food aid. Half.
You can’t get any more Team Red than Owsley County; it is 98 percent white, 81 percent Republican, per the 2012 presidential election. And that hardscrabble region has the distinction of being the poorest in the nation, with the lowest household income of any county in the United States, the Census Bureau found in 2010.
Since nearly half of Owsley’s residents also live below the poverty line, it would seem logical that the congressman who represents the area, Hal Rogers, a Republican, would be interested in, say, boosting income for poor working folks. But Rogers joined every single Republican in the House earlier this year in voting down a plan to raise the minimum wage over the next two years to $10.10 an hour.
The argument holding back higher pay — a theory that Republicans accept without challenge — is that raising wages for the poorest workers would be bad for companies, and bad for hiring.
But experience debunks this convenient political shelter. Washington State has the highest state-mandated minimum wage in the country, $9.19 an hour, and an unemployment rate that has been running below the national average. It’s not all Starbucks, Amazon and Microsoft in Seattle, either. In the pine-forested sliver of eastern Washington, a high-wage state bumps right up against low-wage Idaho. Fast-food outlets flourish in Washington, the owners have said, because they can retain workers longer, while Idaho struggles to find qualified people to hold entry-level jobs.
Costco, they of the golf-cart-size containers of gummy bears, has long paid wages and benefits well above the industry average for big-box stores, and it hasn’t hurt the bottom line. The stock is up 79 percent over the last five years. Costco, to its credit, is urging Congress to raise the minimum wage. But that’s one big business Republicans will not listen to, because it breaks with the heartless credo of the new G.O.P.
The movement for higher minimum pay is raging through the states just now, with ballot initiatives and legislation plans. The people, in this case, will have to circumvent a Congress bent on actively trying to hurt the poor.
Republicans have more pain in store for their base in poor white America. Shutting down government, for one, will cause a ripple effect that will be hardest on those living paycheck-to-paycheck. The biggest obsession, the Moby-Dick of the right wing, is making sure millions of people do not have access to affordable health care. This week, Republicans drew the line for any doubters: they will wreck lives to blow up the health care law.
You have to wonder where this animus for those in the economic basement comes from. It’s too easy to say Republicans hate the poor. Limousine liberals can seem just as insensitive. And if Republicans were offering some genuinely creative approaches to helping the 26 million Americans who self-identified as “lower class” in a recent survey, they would deserve a listen. Tax cuts, the party’s solution to everything, do nothing for people who pay no federal income tax.
What’s at work here is the poison of ideology. Underlying the food assistance fight is the idea that the poor are lazy, and deserve their fate — the Ayn Rand philosophy. You don’t see this same reasoning applied to those Red State agricultural-industrialists living high off farm subsidies, and that’s why Republicans have separated the two major recipient groups of federal food aid. Subsidized cotton growers cannot possibly be equated with someone trying to stretch macaroni into three meals.
But Republican House leaders do have some empathy — for themselves. National Review reported this week that Representative Phil Gingrey, a hard-right conservative who wants to be the next senator from Georgia, complained in a private meeting about being “stuck here making $172,000 a year.” To say the least, he doesn’t yet qualify for food assistance.
© 2013 The New York Times Company
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/19/red-state-pain/ [with comments]
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The Mismeasure of Poverty
Ana Benaroya
THE Census Bureau reported yesterday that the poverty rate in America held stable between 2011 and 2012, at about 15 percent. According to the official measure [ http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/income_wealth/cb13-165.html ], poverty today is higher [ http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL33069.pdf ] than it was in 1973, when it reached a historical low of 11.1 percent.
To many, this dismaying fact suggests that taxpayers waste billions of dollars a year fighting a war on poverty that has been largely lost. As Representative Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, said earlier this year, “We have spent $15 trillion from the federal government fighting poverty, and look at where we are, the highest poverty rates in a generation, 15 percent of Americans in poverty.”
But this position is wrong, for two reasons. The first is that the official measure is misleading — it measures only cash income, and it does not count benefits from many programs that help the poor. If they were counted, the rate would be closer to 11 percent.
Consider the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps, which was first put into nationwide use in the 1960s [ http://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/rules/Legislation/about.htm ]. The immediate benefits are easy to calculate: a dollar of SNAP subsidies spent on food frees up a dollar for low-income families to spend on rent, utilities or other needs. When SNAP benefits are counted as income, they lift almost four million people [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/09/17/4-million-more-people-would-be-poor-if-it-werent-for-food-stamps/ ] above the poverty line.
And SNAP benefits not only reduce food insecurity and poverty this year; they also reduce poverty in the next generation. Recent research that tracked children into adulthood found that families’ access to food stamps improved their infants’ health and birth weight. Children who benefited from the program later posted better health, higher educational attainment, less heart disease and, for women, greater earnings and less reliance on welfare as adults.
The earned-income tax credit is also ignored in calculating the poverty rate. Yet this program offers working low-income families with children about $3,000 a year. When these tax refunds are counted, they reduce the number of people in poverty [ http://www.offthechartsblog.org/category/federal-tax/earned-income-tax-credit/ ] by about 5.5 million people.
Social Security benefits are counted in the official measure, but their large antipoverty effect receives little attention. Without these benefits, the elderly poverty rate would have been more than 44 percent, instead of the actual rate of less than 9 percent.
The next time critics of the safety net claim that we fought a war on poverty and poverty won, remind them that without these and other programs, poverty would be much higher.
But, says the critic, if all these programs have such broad effects, why has the poverty rate stayed so frustratingly stable? That’s the second flaw in the conventional wisdom.
All things being equal, such programs, whether we count them or not, should have reduced the official poverty rate across generations. But all things have not been equal. Although these programs help the poor, poverty remains high because inequality of economic outcomes has increased sharply since the 1970s.
Before income inequality took off, the poverty rate fell more rapidly with G.D.P. growth. But while the economy grew by 2.8 percent in 2012 and corporate profits went up as a share of national income, the earnings of full-time workers, median household income and the poverty rate barely changed.
Antipoverty programs do help, but their recipients don’t move forward because they no longer benefit much from that other great poverty-ameliorating factor, economic growth.
That’s not to say that growth is no longer necessary for reducing poverty. But in our gilded age of inequality, growth alone is insufficient.
A few changes would make a difference. First, a poverty measure that incorporated all anti-poverty policies would show that the safety net is more effective than critics say, and would show how painful cuts to those programs could be.
In fact, the Census Bureau has already developed a supplemental measure that reveals the importance of these programs to low-income families. But when it is released next month, it will receive far less attention than the official rate from policy makers and the press.
Second, more benefits from growth must reach the poor, and the best way to do that is through matching robust antipoverty measures with policies that lower the unemployment rate and increase wages. During the full employment years of the late 1990s, even low wages rose in step with productivity [ http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0104525.html ], and poverty fell more sharply than it had in a generation. A minimum-wage increase helped then, and an increase now would help again.
Lowering poverty means both recognizing the successes of safety net programs we now have and devising new policies that can spread the gains generated by economic growth. If we don’t, then we will continue to face poverty rates that are unacceptably high, and wonder why we can’t do anything about them.
Sheldon H. Danziger [ http://www.russellsage.org/blog/sheldon-h-danziger-named-new-president ] is the president of the Russell Sage Foundation and a co-editor of “Legacies of the War on Poverty [ https://www.russellsage.org/publications/legacies-war-poverty ].”
© 2013 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/18/opinion/the-mismeasure-of-poverty.html [with comments]
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Republicans: We Were Too Nice to the Hungry, But We’ve Fixed That
By Jonathan Chait
September 20, 2013
Republicans hate domestic spending, but their hatred is not completely indiscriminate. Some programs offend them more, and others less. The general pattern is that social programs offend Republicans to the degree that they benefit the poor, sick, or otherwise unfortunate. The struggle over the farm bill is not the biggest policy dispute in American politics, but it is the one that most clearly reveals the priorities and ideological identity of the contemporary GOP.
The farm bill traditionally combines agriculture subsidies (which hands out subsidies to people on the arbitrary basis that the business they own produces food as opposed to some other goods or services) with food stamps (which hands out subsidies to people on the highly nonarbitrary basis that they’re poor enough to likely have trouble scraping together regular meals). Conservative Republicans revolted against the normally automatic passage, insisting that the cuts to food stamps — $20 billion — did not slice deeply enough. Last night the House rectified its failure by cutting food stamps by $40 billion.
The putative rationale for the food-stamp cuts is that eligibility standards have loosened, or that it encourages sloth. Jonathan Cohn [ http://www.newrepublic.com/blog/plank/104921/republican-conservative-cut-snap-food-stamps-obama-bush ] makes quick work of these claims, and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities [ http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=4009 ] makes long, detailed work of them. Click on those links if you want a blow-by-blow refutation. The upshot is that food stamps are a meager subsidy, of less than $1.40 per meal, for people either stuck in very low paid jobs or unable to find work at all. Their cost has increased because the recession has increased the supply of poor, desperate people. Republicans have offered specious comparisons to welfare reform, but that law both offered funds for job training and was passed in a full-employment economy. Neither of these conditions holds true of the GOP’s food-stamp cuts, whose only significant result would be the first-order effect of making very poor people hungrier.
CNN reported [ http://thelead.blogs.cnn.com/2013/09/19/congresswoman-outs-gop-saying-they-slash-food-stamps-while-dining-out/ ] last night that Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas, a Republican supporter of the bill, received a daily meal allowance of $127.41, or 91 times the average daily food-stamp benefit. Lucas is also notable as a recipient of the agriculture subsidies his committee doles out: He and his wife have collected more than $40,000 worth [ http://newsok.com/oklahoma-rep.-frank-lucas-criticized-for-taking-farm-subsidies-while-delaying-food-stamp-renewal/article/3864804 ].
We'll never convince you to take responsibility for your own lives, but that's okay.
It’s the juxtaposition of the two programs that so clearly exposes the party’s agenda. Anti-government ideology can justify even the most vicious cuts to the safety net. It can’t justify the massive socialist scheme that is agriculture policy. And, to be fair, conservative intellectuals generally don’t justify agriculture socialism. But the Republican Party certainly does. The ultraconservative Republican Study Committee recently banned the Heritage Foundation [ http://www.nationaljournal.com/congress/republican-lawmakers-retaliate-against-heritage-foundation-20130828 ] from its meetings because Heritage denounced the GOP’s farm subsidies. There is a grim hilarity here: Republicans punished Heritage for its one technocratically sane position.
Henry Olsen has an admirable screed [ http://www.nationalreview.com/node/358914/print ] in National Review assailing Republicans for their lack of interest in cutting agriculture subsidies even as they go to war on food stamps. Even so, Olsen understates the case in crucial ways. He cites the budgetary cost of agriculture subsidies versus food stamps, but neglects to mention the non-budgetary cost of agriculture subsidies: Much of their cost comes in the form of higher food prices.
Olsen also neglects to mention that House Republicans are not only locking in high agriculture subsidies [ http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2013/07/17/GOP-Plants-Seeds-of-Fiscal-Disaster-with-Farm-Bill ], they are throwing more money at agriculture than Democrats want to spend. Obama has attacked the GOP farm-subsidy bill for spending too much [ http://bigstory.ap.org/article/white-house-says-more-farm-subsidy-cuts-needed ]. Here is the one chunk of social spending where Republicans are not only failing to issue hostage threats to secure the cuts they demand, they are also refusing to cut spending as much as Barack Obama asks. And the program they pick to defend is, on the substantive merits, the most unjustifiable program of any significant scale in the federal budget.
It is also one that accrues to disproportionately wealthy and overwhelmingly white recipients. (As opposed to Obamacare, whose beneficiaries are disproportionately poor [ http://www.commonwealthfund.org/Charts/Report/Losing-Ground--How-the-Loss-of-Adequate-Health-Insurance-Is-Burdening-Working-Families/U/Uninsured-Adults-Are-Disproportionately-Poor--Young--and-Racial-Ethnic-Minorities.aspx ] and non-white [ http://kff.org/uninsured/state-indicator/distribution-by-raceethnicity-2/ ].) Olsen, as he no doubt has to do to publish in National Review, presents the contrast as an unfortunate coincidence:
The conservative war on food stamps is the most baffling political move of the year. Conservatives have suffered for years from the stereotype that they are heartless Scrooge McDucks more concerned with our money than other people’s lives. Yet in this case, conservatives make the taking of food from the mouths of the genuinely hungry a top priority. What gives? And why are conservatives overlooking a far more egregious abuse of taxpayer dollars in the farm bill?
It’s not baffling, nor is the notion that the Republican Party protects the class interests of the rich a “stereotype.” It’s an analysis that persuasively explains the facts.
Indeed, it’s the only analysis that persuasively explains the facts. I’d prefer to abolish agriculture subsidies completely while keeping in place (or boosting) food rations for the poor. A libertarian might want to abolish both programs, a socialist might want to keep both. I’d disagree but attribute the disagreement to philosophical differences. What possible basis can be found to justify preserving subsidies for affluent farmers while cutting them for the poor? What explanation offers itself other than the party’s commitment to waging class war?
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Related
Household Incomes Remain Flat Despite Improving Economy (September 18, 2013)
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/18/us/median-income-and-poverty-rate-hold-steady-census-bureau-finds.html
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Copyright © 2013, New York Media LLC (emphasis in original)
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/09/republicans-we-were-too-nice-to-the-hungry.html [with comments] [linked at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/20/republicans_n_3964866.html (with {over 8,000} comments)]
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The Money Behind the Shutdown Crisis
Editorial
Published: September 17, 2013
Representative Aaron Schock [ http://schock.house.gov/ ] is a conservative Republican from Illinois, but not conservative enough for the hard-right activist group Club for Growth, which is seeking someone to run against him [ http://www.primarymycongressman.com/rep-aaron-schock-il-18-2/ ] in next year’s primary.
His crime? In 2011, he voted to increase the debt ceiling, and, in 2012, he voted for a stopgap spending bill that prevented a government shutdown. In neither case did he demand the defunding of health care reform.
Club for Growth and other extremist groups consider a record like his an unforgivable failure, and they are raising and spending millions to make sure that no Republicans will take similar positions in the next few weeks when the fiscal year ends and the debt limit expires.
If you’re wondering why so many House Republicans seem to believe they can force President Obama to accept a “defunding” of the health care reform law by threatening a government shutdown or a default, it’s because these groups have promised to inflict political pain on any Republican official who doesn’t go along.
Heritage Action and the Senate Conservatives Fund have each released scorecards [ http://www.dontfundobamacare.com/ ] showing which lawmakers have pledged to “defund Obamacare.” When a senator like Tom Coburn of Oklahoma [ http://www.coburn.senate.gov/public/ ] refuses to pledge, right-wing activists are told: “Please contact Senator Coburn and tell him it’s dishonest to say you oppose Obamacare, but then vote to fund it. Tell him he swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution.”
Mr. Schock and 10 other lawmakers considered suspiciously squishy by the Club for Growth were designated as RINO’s (Republicans in name only), and the club has vowed to find primary opponents and support them with cash — a formidable threat considering that it spent $18 million backing conservative candidates in the 2012 cycle. Americans for Prosperity, a Koch brothers group that has already spent millions on ads fighting health reform, is beginning a new campaign [ http://americansforprosperity.org/newsroom/americans-for-prosperity-launches-new-efforts-against-obamacare-with-exempt-me-too/ ] to delay the law’s effects.
These groups, all financed with secret and unlimited money, feed on chaos and would like nothing better than to claim credit for pushing Washington into another crisis. Winning an ideological victory is far more important to them than the severe economic effects of a shutdown or, worse, a default, which could [sic - would] shatter the credit markets [and crash our/the world's economy].
They also have another reason for their attacks: fund-raising. All their Web sites pushing the defunding scheme include a big “donate” button for the faithful to push. “With your donation, you will be sending a strong message: Obamacare must be defunded now,” says the Web site of the National Liberty Federation [ https://secure.piryx.com/donate/ovaM0bdJ/National-Liberty-Federation/defundobamacare ], another “social welfare” group that sees dollar signs in shutting down the government.
Brian Walsh, a longtime Republican operative, recently noted in U.S. News and World Report [ http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/brian-walsh/2013/09/12/the-senate-conservative-fund-and-the-heritage-foundation-profit-from-attacking-republicans ] that the right is now spending more money attacking Republicans than the Democrats are. “Money begets TV ads, which begets even more money for these groups’ personal coffers,” he wrote. “Pointing fingers and attacking Republicans is apparently a very profitable fund-raising business.”
It may be good for their bank accounts, but the combination of unlimited money and rigid ideology is proving toxic for the most basic functioning of government.
*
Related
Budget Office Warns That Deficits Will Rise Again Because Cuts Are Misdirected (September 18, 2013
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/18/us/congressional-budget-office-predicts-unsustainable-debt.html
*
© 2013 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/18/opinion/the-money-behind-the-shutdown-crisis.html [with comments]
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'Defund Obamacare' Push Filled Coffers Of Senate Conservatives Fund
By Paul Blumenthal
Posted: 09/20/2013 12:43 pm EDT | Updated: 09/20/2013 1:27 pm EDT
WASHINGTON -- The Senate Conservatives Fund, a political action committee connected to Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint, raised its largest-ever monthly total for a non-election year this August while running a campaign pressuring Republican senators and representatives to defund Obamacare.
The PAC raised more than $1.5 million [ http://query.nictusa.com/cgi-bin/dcdev/forms/C00448696/888598/ ] in August, according to its Federal Election Commission filing, with $1.3 million of that sum coming from small donors giving under $200 each. The small-donor haul is the largest-ever monthly small-donor total brought in by the Senate Conservatives Fund.
This fundraising bonanza came as the PAC joined efforts by the Heritage Foundation and its sister 501(c)(4) nonprofit Heritage Action, along with a series of tea party groups, to defund Obamacare. Money was pumped into an advertising and publicity campaign that, with the vocal support of Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Mike Lee (R-Utah), sought to block all spending measures if they did not defund President Barack Obama's signature health care law.
This campaign culminated on Friday with the House voting [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/20/government-shutdown-vote_n_3961908.html ] to strip funding for Obamacare in its version of the continuing resolution needed to keep the government open through Dec. 16. This vote sets up a fight with the Senate and a potential government shutdown. Senate Republicans have warned that they lack the votes to pass a resolution defunding the health care law, and Republicans and others have called out the anti-Obamacare push led by DeMint as merely a fundraising exercise [ http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2013/09/12/a_user_s_guide_to_the_many_conservative_groups_grubbing_money_from_the_defund.html ].
Former National Republican Senatorial Committee spokesman Brian Walsh wrote in U.S. News & World Report [ http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/brian-walsh/2013/09/12/the-senate-conservative-fund-and-the-heritage-foundation-profit-from-attacking-republicans ], "You see, money begets TV ads which begets even more money for these groups' personal coffers. Pointing fingers and attacking Republicans is apparently a very profitable fundraising business."
The money haul has been aided by the Senate Conservatives Fund's Don't Fund Obamacare website [ http://www.dontfundobamacare.com/ ], which has acted as a hub for the "defund Obamacare" campaign. The website helped collect more than 1.5 million signatures to zero out the health care law. In turn, it benefited from robo-calls [ http://freebeacon.com/pacs-fundraising-off-defund-obamacare-abolish-the-irs-petitions/ ] featuring Cruz asking for money for the larger effort.
The Senate Conservatives Fund ran ads targeting many Senate Republicans, including Mitch McConnell (Ky.), Johnny Isakson (Ga.), Richard Burr (N.C.), Jeff Flake (Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (S.C.). On Sept. 17, the group announced it would expand into targeting House Republicans [ http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/powerful-senate-conservatives-fund-expands-to-focus-on-house-races ] on the issue of defunding Obamacare.
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/20/senate-conservatives-fund-obamacare_n_3962426.html [with embedded video report, and comments]
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Ted Cruz, Liberal Hero, May Have Just Bailed Washington Out Of The Shutdown Crisis
By Ryan Grim and Sabrina Siddiqui
Posted: 09/19/2013 12:09 pm EDT | Updated: 09/20/2013 11:32 am EDT
WASHINGTON -- In one moment, with one statement, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) managed Wednesday to accomplish what House GOP leaders, Republican senators and the Wall Street Journal editorial page had failed to do for months: Persuade rank-and-file House Republicans that shutting down the government in an attempt to defund Obamacare was simply impossible.
On Wednesday, after House leaders said they'd go forward with the defund strategy Cruz had been pitching with ads on Fox News, his response boiled down to 'Thanks, you're on your own.'
"Harry Reid will no doubt try to strip the defund language from the continuing resolution, and right now he likely has the votes to do so," Cruz said in a statement. "At that point, House Republicans must stand firm, hold their ground, and continue to listen to the American people."
On the surface, House Republicans were seething. Members openly accused [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/18/ted-cruz-obamacare-house-republicans_n_3950901.html ] Cruz and his allies, Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), of waving the white flag before the fight had even begun. One House GOP aide even called Cruz a "joke, plain and simple."
But by admitting that he had no ability in the Senate to back up the House effort to defund Obamacare, and saying so on the same day that House Republicans had announced they would support the Cruz-inspired strategy, Cruz has inadvertently done more than any other lawmaker to avert a government shutdown.
"Cruz officially jumped the shark this week," said one GOP operative allied with House leadership, who, like others, requested anonymity to speak critically about fellow Republicans. "He's doing for the House Leaders what they couldn't do for themselves. House rank-and-file members are uniting with Boehner, Cantor over Ted Cruz's idiotic position."
The retreat by Cruz has led to public questioning from House Republicans about his motives and political acumen, not to mention joking speculation that he may be part of a vast and devious liberal conspiracy to undermine conservatives.
"Cruz is the leader of a secret cabal of leftists that are seeking control of the conservative movement," quipped one senior House Republican leadership source. "Their aim is to force the party to take on suicidal missions to destroy the movement from within."
Another senior House GOP aide was grateful that Cruz had made plain what House leaders had been arguing for weeks -- that there was no viable strategy connected to a government shutdown that would defund Obamacare. "We can only defund Obamacare if it passes the Senate," the aide said. "If there is no plan to get the defunding provision passed in the Senate, or even a plan to fight to get it passed in the Senate, then what we’re talking about isn’t a plan to defund Obamacare -- it’s just a plan to shut down the government and hope for the best. That’s not a great plan."
That Cruz was left without any strategy at all, after demanding for months that Republicans follow his lead, feeds into the notion that the tea party is rooted more in political nihilism than any particular ethos, an argument Walter Sobchak would appreciate.
When asked by HuffPost Thursday to respond to his Republican critics in the House [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/19/ted-cruz-government-shutdown-2013_n_3953754.html ], Cruz said, "I salute the House Republicans for their fight on this." He added, "The House of Representatives, where Republicans have the majority -- the House has to drive this process."
He also thanked House leadership for their work on Wednesday, in an appearance on Fox News' "Hannity." With Lee by his side, Cruz pledged to continue the fight, likened himself to Winston Churchill, and noticeably put the onus to defund Obamacare on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) -- all with a straight face.
"As Churchill said, we will fight on the beaches, we will fight on the streets, we will fight at every step to stop the biggest job killer in America," Cruz said, adding later that "Harry Reid needs to listen to the American people just like John Boehner did."
For liberals, Cruz and the tea party have been the gift that keeps on giving. In both 2011 and 2012, tea party opposition staved off a "grand bargain" between Boehner and Obama that would have brought draconian cuts to Medicare and Social Security. In 2010 and again in 2012, the tea party pushed extreme Republicans through Senate primaries, where they subsequently lost winnable races in Delaware, Nevada, Colorado, Indiana and Missouri.
And they also brought Cruz to the Senate.
Jennifer Bendery contributed reporting.
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/19/ted-cruz-shutdown-house-republicans_n_3954461.html [with embedded video report "Ted Cruz Angers House GOP By Conceding Defeat On Obamacare Repeal", and comments]
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Ted Cruz Turns Obamacare Defunding Plan From Disaster to Utter Fiasco
Reports that I am an evil genius turn out to be half true.
By Jonathan Chait
September 20, 2013
Now that the House of Representatives has passed its bill to keep the government open and rid the world of Obamacare, the full strategic disaster the Republicans have embarked upon is coming into focus. The procedure is a little confusing, but once we disentangle the steps, it quickly becomes clear that the Republicans have started a dumpster fire they have no obvious way to extinguish.
It’s important to keep in mind that a government shutdown does not, in and of itself, stop Obamacare from going forward. Most of the money for that law has been appropriated through channels (tax credits, state-based exchanges, etc.) immune to shutdown. The Obamacare-shutdown method relies on the hope that keeping the government shut down proves so annoying to the president that he (or a filibuster-proof majority in both houses) submits to abolishing his health-care reform in return for reopening the government. That is the only way shutting down the government could result in the defunding of Obamacare.
Step one of this far-fetched scheme was the passage of a “continuing resolution,” which keeps the government open, attached to abolishing Obamacare. Now it goes to the Senate. Once that bill comes up for a vote in the Senate, the majority can vote to strip away the provision defunding Obamacare. That vote can’t be filibustered. It’s a simple majority vote, and Democrats have the majority.
What Senate Republicans can do is filibuster to prevent the bill from coming to a vote at all. That’s the only recourse the Senate defunders have. And Ted Cruz is promising to do just that [ http://blogs.rollcall.com/wgdb/filibuster-the-house-cr-some-conservatives-say-yes/ ]: “ I hope that every Senate Republican will stand together,” he says, “and oppose cloture on the bill in order to keep the House bill intact and not let Harry Reid add Obamacare funding back in.” A “committed defunder” in the Senate likewise tells David Drucker, “Reid must not be allowed to fund Obamacare with only 51 votes.”
In other words, the new stop-Obamacare plan now entails filibustering the defunders’ own bill. They can do this with just 41 votes in the Senate, if they can get them. But consider how terrible this situation is for the Republicans. If they fail, it will be because a handful of Republicans joined with Democrats to break the filibuster, betraying the defunders. This means the full force of the defund-Obamacare movement – which is itself very well funded by rabid grassroots conservatives eager to save the country from the final socialistic blow of Obamacare — will come down on the handful of Senate Republicans who hold its fate in their hands. The old plan at least let angry conservatives blame Democrats for blocking their goal of defunding Obamacare. Now the defunders can turn their rage against fellow Republicans, creating a fratricidal, revolution-eats-its-own bloodletting.
But what if it succeeds? Well, success means the government shuts down because the Senate Republican majority has successfully filibustered a vote on the House bill preventing a shutdown.
Remember, the whole Republican plan to win the shutdown fight is to pin the blame on Obama. Obama is trying to shut down the government, they are already saying, and we’re trying to keep it open. That message depends on both houses of Congress passing a law that defunds Obamacare, and Obama refusing to sign it. Then they can present themselves as having acted to keep the government open, and Obama refusing to go along merely because he doesn’t want to snatch health insurance away from 20 million people.
It’s a patently disingenuous argument that stands no chance of success. But even that patently disingenuous message relies on establishing the optics of Obama refuses to sign our bill. Now the Republican plan relies instead on maintaining a Republican filibuster in the Senate, in perpetuity, to prevent a vote on a bill to open the government. They have maneuvered themselves into the least tenable position to defend a plan that never stood a chance of succeeding in the first place.
Copyright © 2013, New York Media LLC (emphasis in original)
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/09/cruz-turns-obamacare-defunding-plan-to-fiasco.html [with comments]
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Chris Wallace Challenges Ted Cruz Over Obamacare Plan (VIDEO)
Posted: 09/22/2013 1:43 pm EDT | Updated: 09/22/2013 1:53 pm EDT
Chris Wallace challenged Senator Ted Cruz over his plan to defund Obamacare on "Fox News Sunday."
Cruz is one of the leaders behind the Republican bill that would defund health care reform in order to prevent a government shut down. The Senate is expected to eliminate the Obamacare provision from the bill, and Cruz has called for filibustering to prevent the bill from being voted on — a plan that fellow Republicans have criticized [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/20/ted-cruz-attacked-gop_n_3963702.html ] in recent days.
"I'm confused," Wallace said on Sunday, asking Cruz, "Are you going to allow consideration of the bill... or are you going to block [the Senate] from even taking up a bill which you support?"
Cruz said that Senate Republicans could ask Harry Reid to require 60 votes in order to pass any amendments to the legislation, but said that he probably wouldn't agree because he wants to use "brute political force" to continue Obamacare.
Wallace seemed unconvinced. "It's Senate Rule 22…it says you say allow debate, that you can pass an amendment by a simple majority, that’s the rule," the Fox News host argued.
Later in the interview, Wallace also asked Cruz to address criticism from his fellow Republicans [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/22/ted-cruz-obamacare_n_3971685.html ] and what his "end game" will be if the Senate sends the bill back to the House without the Obamacare provision.
(h/t Think Progress [ http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2013/09/22/2661541/fox-news-tells-ted-cruz-plan-defund-obamacare-wont-work/ ])
*
Related
Ted Cruz: Republicans Who Vote To Take Up Bill Defunding Obamacare Are Voting For Obamacare
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/22/ted-cruz-obamacare_n_3971685.html
*
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/22/chris-wallace-ted-cruz-obamacare_n_3972300.html [the YouTube of the segment, as embedded, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRpaHFKEbbE ; with comments]
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Ted Cruz vs. The Universe
By Jason Linkins
Posted: 09/20/2013 4:19 pm EDT | Updated: 09/20/2013 4:27 pm EDT
While most of the week has been spent watching House Republicans decide precisely what to do about defunding Obamacare, and how much energy they'll pointlessly expend in this going-nowhere act this time around, here at week's end, we find that GOP leaders on the Hill going to war in a more parochial fashion. Their target: Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas).
The Cruz-directed snipes have been coming as fast and as furious as is possible, given that they've mostly been dispensed by anonymous sources. "He's a joke, plain and simple [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/18/ted-cruz-obamacare-house-republicans_n_3950901.html ]," said one "senior GOP aide." Another House GOP aide told the National Review Online that "Nancy Pelosi is more well-liked around here [ http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/house-gop-aide-nancy-pelosi-is-more-well-liked-than-ted-cruz ]."
One of Cruz's fellow Republicans who has been brave enough to attach his name to his remarks is Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), who told reporters this week [ http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/09/20/peter-king-ted-cruz-is-a-fraud/ ] that Cruz was a "fraud" who should "no longer have any influence in the Republican Party." As CNN reported, King continued like so:
"We can't be going off on these false missions that Ted Cruz wants us to go on. The issues are too important. They're too serious, they require real conservative solutions, not cheap headline-hunting schemes," he said.
But where is all this coming from? It's actually pretty much high school-level clique-histrionics, actually. And more than anything else, it's a battle between the House and the Senate over who will be left holding the Defund Obamacare Futility Bomb when it finally goes off.
Obviously, just about every GOP legislator, given the opportunity, would defund Obamacare tomorrow if there was a possibility they could do so. And, in fact, they've tried some 40-odd times [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/02/obamacare-repeal-attempts_n_3697207.html ]. One might question whether doing so is good policy, but none should question the desire of Republican policymakers to gut President Barack Obama's landmark achievement.
The thing is, though, Cruz sort of did. Cruz was one of the GOP leaders who first hatched the plan to threaten taking the government hostage over Obamacare. Birthing that notion immediately gave House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) -- whose preference is to avoid a government shutdown -- a huge migraine. But Cruz didn't stop there. He appeared in ads for the Senate Conservatives Fund, haranguing his fellow senators "to stand up and defund Obamacare now." As Jackie Kucinich noted [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2013/08/29/ted-cruz-vs-the-senate/ ], the fact that he did so while simultaneously serving as the vice chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee "put him at odds with the campaign committee’s practice of supporting incumbent senators."
Boehner had wanted to pass [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/11/gop-infighting-obamacare_n_3909292.html ] a continuing resolution in the House with an addendum attached that would give everyone in the House a chance to once again vent and complain about Obamacare's existence. But enough members of his House GOP caucus rose up to scuttle that. They were largely influenced by Cruz, who called Boehner's idea [ http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2013/09/grand-betrayal-conservatives-gop-gambit-defund-obamacare.php?ref=fpb ] "political chicanery" that "easily allows Senate Democrats to keep funding Obamacare."
This forced Boehner to modify his plans, and the bitter utterances of anonymous GOP aides at the time basically boiled down to: "Kiss my ass, Ted Cruz, this is your problem, now." One GOP aide got splenetic with Politico, like so [ http://www.politico.com/story/2013/09/continuing-resolution-2013-fights-96579.html ]:
If figures like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) call the plan chicanery, and other conservatives say the House is weak, GOP leadership wants to see him and others stand up and filibuster the CR [continuing resolution]. In short, the House is sick of getting blamed for being weak on Obamacare.
Asked whether they are trying to put pressure on Senate Republicans to filibuster, Rogers said, “You can say that.”
A senior GOP aide said, “They should be preparing for a two [to] three week filibuster, to prevent the Senate from adjourning.” The aide added that there are enough Senate Republicans to prevent a funding bill from reaching President Barack Obama’s desk.
But after the House modified their plans to suit the insurgency that Cruz had helped foment, Cruz suddenly shifted from rabble-rouser to surrender-monkey. In a statement that left many Republicans gobsmacked, Cruz said [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/18/ted-cruz-obamacare-house-republicans_n_3950901.html ], "Harry Reid will no doubt try to strip the defund language from the continuing resolution, and right now he likely has the votes to do so."
So after all the "come die on this hill with me" ads, and the broadsides against Boehner's plan -- mocking it as a surrender to Harry Reid -- Cruz just ... surrenders to Harry Reid. And with that, it seems like GOP leadership in Washington voted unanimously to raise the hackle-ceiling sky high [ http://blogs.rollcall.com/218/house-gop-vents-frustration-with-cruz-on-twitter/ ].
Of course, beneath all of the backbiting, there is reality -- and the reality is that Cruz is correct. As Byron York explains here [ http://washingtonexaminer.com/actually-senate-gop-cant-filibuster-to-defund-obamacare/article/2536120 ], Cruz and his like-minded Senate allies are constrained by certain Senate rules and actually do not have the option to filibuster. Not even one of those old-timey, talk-until-you-piss-yourself filibusters.
And as Niels Lesniewski of Roll Call explains [ http://blogs.rollcall.com/wgdb/why-ted-cruz-is-right-about-obamacare-defunding-in-the-senate/ ], the simple fact of the matter is that there are procedural options available to Reid to do precisely what Cruz is saying will happen. The Senate will have the votes to strip the Obamacare part of the law and pass a clean continuing resolution, at which point it bounces back to the House. (From there, in theory, the House can keep sending it back to the Senate, but the conditions in the Senate aren't likely to change anytime soon.
So, the basic bottom line here is that Cruz is right about what's realistically possible, but GOP leaders are nonetheless well-and-rightly pissed off at Cruz for ginning up all this mad, stand-and-fight foolery that denied Boehner his preferred "vent-and-pass" plan for the continuing resolution. Now, we've got this fight between House and the Senate -- neither of whom want to be left holding the bag when this effort to defund Obamacare fails.
Of course, all of this pain could have been avoided if everyone could come to terms with the simple reality that President Barack Obama is never, ever, ever going to sign a bill that defunds or delays or in any way imperils Obamacare. But that is clearly asking too much.
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc. (emphasis in original)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/20/ted-cruz-attacked-gop_n_3963702.html [with embedded video report, and (over 6,000) comments]
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Chris Van Hollen Reminds Republicans Their Budget Includes Savings From Obamacare [the very same regarding which Romney/Ryan/Republicans relentlessly and utterly dishonestly attacked Obama throughout the 2012 campaign]
By Jennifer Bendery
Posted: 09/22/2013 12:01 pm EDT | Updated: 09/23/2013 12:05 am EDT
WASHINGTON -- Days after House Republicans voted nearly unanimously for a measure to defund Obamacare, Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) reminded them of one little detail: Their own budget relies on savings from President Barack Obama's signature health care reform law.
During an appearance on ABC's "This Week," Van Hollen, the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee, said Republicans owe the public an explanation for how they can regularly vote to get rid of the Affordable Care Act -- they have now voted 42 times [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/13/tim-huelskamp-obamacare-repeal_n_3921960.html ] to repeal or defund it -- when they passed a budget that balances in part because of Obamacare savings [ http://vanhollen.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=334218 ].
Republicans "have to explain to the American people how they voted for a budget that includes all of the Medicare savings from Obamacare, that includes the same level of revenue generated from Obamacare and, in fact, would not even balance in 10 years, if not for the Affordable Care Act," Van Hollen said.
"That's misleading and that's a hoax," he added.
Van Hollen was joined on the show by Rep. Tom Graves (R-Ga.), who authored the bill the House passed last week that would permanently defund Obamacare. Graves responded by turning to the fact that the health care law still isn't popular with the public. A recent ABC/Washington Post poll [ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/09/three-years-later-obamacare-arrives-little-understood-and-not-well-liked/ ] found that 52 percent of Americans remain opposed to the law, compared to 42 percent who support it.
"I mean, it's clear that I was in my district during August, listening to my constituents -- " Graves began, but was interrupted by Van Hollen.
"I asked a question about the budget, Tom," he said. "You guys passed a budget that assumes big parts of Obamacare are kept."
When Graves said the GOP budget also assumed Obamacare wouldn't be in effect, Van Hollen pointed out that wasn't the case.
"You assume all the Medicare savings in your budget," he said.
While it wouldn't keep every aspect of the health care law in place, the budget authored by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) does rely on Obamacare's $716 billion in cuts to Medicare [ http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/03/16/paul-ryans-plan-to-balance-the-budget-in-ten-years-relies-on-obamacare/ ] and maintains its $1.2 trillion tax increase.
Graves again tried to reframe the issue, saying that Van Hollen had voted to impose a 25 percent increase in health insurance premiums on his constituents by voting against the Republican bill to defund Obamacare. Van Hollen again brought the focus back to Republicans' reliance on Obamacare savings.
"You guys don't want to provide affordable care under this system for millions of Americans, but you have a plan to take millions of people in Medicare and put them into the Obamacare system," he said. "That's what you're proposing to do."
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc. (emphasis added)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/22/chris-van-hollen-obamacare_n_3971971.html [with embedded video, and comments]
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House Democrats Raise Big Money Off Republican Push To 'Defund Obamacare'
09/22/2013
[...]
This week's fundraising swell for the DCCC is comparable to two of its best online fundraising spurts in recent memory: the unveiling of the budget presented by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), and the week Ryan was announced as Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's running mate.
[...]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/22/house-democrats-defund-obamacare_n_3971793.html [with embedded video report, and comments]
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Tom Coburn Says Republicans Pushing To Defund Obamacare Are Not Based In The 'Real World'
09/22/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/22/tom-coburn-obamacare_n_3972316.html [with embedded video, and comments]
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Nancy Pelosi: Republicans' Goal Is Government Shutdown
By PHILIP ELLIOTT
09/22/13 01:48 PM ET EDT
WASHINGTON — Even before a budget deadline arrives, leaders from both parties are blaming each other – and some Republicans are criticizing their own – for a government shutdown many are treating as inevitable.
The top Democrat in the House says Republicans are "legislative arsonists" who are using their opposition to a sweeping health care overhaul as an excuse to close government's doors. A leading tea party antagonist in the Senate counters that conservatives should use any tool available to stop the Affordable Care Act from taking hold. President Bill Clinton's labor secretary says the GOP is willing "to risk the entire system of government to get your way," while the House speaker who oversaw the last government shutdown urged fellow Republicans to remember "this is not a dictatorship."
The unyielding political posturing on Sunday comes one week before Congress reaches an Oct. 1 deadline to dodge any interruptions in government services. While work continues on a temporary spending bill, a potentially more devastating separate deadline looms a few weeks later when the government could run out of money to pay its bills.
"This is totally irresponsible, completely juvenile and, as I called it, legislative arson. It's just destructive," House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi said in an interview that aired Sunday.
The Republican-led House on Friday approved legislation designed to wipe out the 3-year-old health care law that President Barack Obama has vowed to preserve. But the House's move was more a political win than a measure likely to be implemented.
Across the Capitol, Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid said he would keep the health law intact despite Republicans' attempts, in his words, "to take an entire law hostage simply to appease the tea party anarchists."
One of those tea party agitators, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, showed little sign on Sunday that he cared about the uphill climb to make good on his pledge to derail the health care law over Obama's guaranteed veto.
"I believe we should stand our ground," said Cruz, who already was trying to blame Obama and his Democratic allies if the government shuts down.
Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat, said Cruz's efforts were destructive and self-serving as Cruz eyes a White House campaign.
"I cannot believe that they are going to throw a tantrum and throw the American people and our economic recovery under the bus," she said.
"This is about running for president with Ted Cruz. This isn't about meaningful statesmanship," she added later.
The wrangling over the budget comes as lawmakers consider separate legislation that would let the United States avoid a first-ever default on its debt obligations. House Republicans are planning legislation that would attach a 1-year delay in the health care law in exchange for ability to increase the nation's credit limit of $16.7 trillion.
Obama, speaking to political allies on Saturday evening, showed little patience for the GOP efforts to undermine his legislative accomplishment by either avenue.
"We will not negotiate over whether or not America should keep its word and meet its obligations," Obama told the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation dinner. "We're not going to allow anyone to inflict economic pain on millions of our own people just to make an ideological point."
Congress doesn't seem eager to help Obama, although there are deep divides – both between parties and within them – over who deserves blame.
Rep. Tom Graves, R-Ga., said the goal was to defund the president's health care legislation for at least one more year if not forever.
"We do have eight days to reach a resolution on this, and I propose an idea that kept the government operating and opened for an entire year while delaying and defunding Obamacare for a year so that we could work out those differences," Graves said.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, whose faceoff with Clinton led to government shutdowns that inflicted significant damage on the GOP and helped resurrect the then-president's political fortunes in time for his 1996 re-election bid, said his GOP colleagues should not yield.
"This is not a dictatorship. Under our constitution, there should be a period of tension and there should be a compromise on both sides," Gingrich said.
Robert Reich, who was Clinton's labor secretary, said that works only if both parties are willing to negotiate.
"Sorry, under our constitutional system you're not allowed to risk the entire system of government to get your way," Reich said.
It is likely that when the House legislation arrives in the Senate, Democrats there will strip off the health care defunding mechanism. Democrats plan to send back to the House a bill that prevents disruptions in government services but not the health provision they championed.
Cruz, however, said Senate Republicans cannot allow that to happen and should mount every procedural hurdle available. Cruz, who pushed lawmakers to tie a budget bill with health care hurdles, said Republicans should mount a procedural roadblock that would require 60 votes for any changes to the House bill.
"You know what? If Senate Republicans stand together, we can stop Harry Reid from doing it," Cruz said.
But within his own party, Cruz faced skepticism.
"It's not a tactic that we can actually carry out and be successful," said Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla. "The answer now in the Senate, by those who propose this strategy, is to filibuster the very bill they said they wanted."
Pelosi spoke to CNN's "State of the Union." Cruz and McCaskill were interviewed on "Fox News Sunday." Reich, Gingrich and Graves appeared on ABC's "This Week." Coburn was on CBS' "Face the Nation."
© 2013 Associated Press
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/22/nancy-pelosi-government-shutdown_n_3971846.html [with embedded video, and comments]
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Rand Paul: GOP ‘probably can’t defeat’ Obamacare
Paul acknowledges time is running out for Congress to pass a funding bill.
John Shinkle/POLITICO
By ADAM SNEED | 9/21/13 7:35 PM EDT Updated: 9/21/13 9:48 PM EDT
Sen. Rand Paul conceded Saturday that congressional Republicans have little chance of stopping Obamacare.
“We probably can’t defeat or get rid of Obamacare,” the Kentucky senator told reporters at a gathering of Michigan Republicans, according to the Associated Press.
Paul acknowledged that time is running out for Congress to pass a government funding bill, however he said House Republicans’ efforts to defund Obamacare in its government funding bill could lead to a compromise.
Late Saturday, Paul said in a statement that he still fully supports defunding and repealing Obamacare.
“I will continue to lead the fight until we win,” he said. “I will not vote for any CR that funds Obamacare and if there is one penny for Obamacare I will vote no.”
Congress must pass a funding bill by Oct. 1 to avoid a government shutdown.
The House’s continuing resolution, passed [ http://www.politico.com/story/2013/09/house-defunds-obamacare-97124.html ] Friday, defunds President Barack Obama’s signature health care law. As the bill goes before the Democratic-controlled Senate next week, it faces essentially no chance of keeping the Obamacare measure intact.
Leading the anti-Obamacare charge in the Senate is Sen. Ted Cruz, who drew heat from House Republicans earlier this week when he seemed to suggest that his Senate colleagues can’t stop Majority Leader Harry Reid from funding Obamacare in the Senate’s continuing resolution.
Late Friday, Cruz asked [ http://www.politico.com/story/2013/09/ted-cruz-strategy-obamacare-government-shutdown-97152.html ] his Republican colleagues to block upcoming procedural votes on the House bill, even though he supports it. His strategy is to block a cloture vote so Senate Democrats can’t change the bill, but many Republicans have said they won’t block votes on a bill they also support.
Reid has said any bill defunding Obamacare would be dead on arrival, and Sen. John McCain said Thursday that it was “not rational [ http://www.politico.com/story/2013/09/john-mccain-obamacare-97081.html ]” to think the Senate would pass anything defunding the program.
© 2013 POLITICO LLC
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/09/rand-paul-gop-defund-obamacare-97161.html [with embedded video "House GOP celebrates 'victory'", and comments]
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A harsh clear look at the history of the Republican Party
by Fabius Maximus
22 September 2013
Summary: Understanding the roots of our dysfunctional political system requires shining a harsh light on the institutions that run the system. This post looks at the Grand Old Party, born fighting against slavery — and a sad history in the 20th Century.
Contents
1. The GOP’s great betrayal
2. Look at the present
3. The GOP’s war on public health
4. For More Information
5.Tom Tomorrow explains the Class War
(1) The GOP’s great betrayal
The great betrayal in modern American history is the Republican Party giving a home to the South’s racists after the enactment of the great Civil Rights legislation in the 1960s — a straightforward accommodation of evil in exchange for political power. Selling their souls for 30 pieces of silver, instead of allowing the South’s racists to either accept this progress or marginalize themselves with a pariah third party.
But this is consistent with the GOP’s behavior before and since. To understand their inimical role shaping America, let’s take a brief look at our history. Perhaps the reform of America should start with the part most needing reform: conservatives, heal thyselves.
(2) Starting with the present: the GOP at work today
Look at the present. Today they are threatening to shutdown the Federal government, perhaps forcing a default and ruining a two-century long clear credit record (one of the finest in history). Even clearer is their advocacy for cutting the food stamp program while boosting subsidies for agri-corps. As explained in “Republicans: We Were Too Nice to the Hungry, But We’ve Fixed That [ http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/09/republicans-we-were-too-nice-to-the-hungry.html (in full, 9th item in this post, above)]“, Jonathan Chait, NY Magazine, 20 September 2013 — Excerpt:
Republicans hate domestic spending, but their hatred is not completely indiscriminate. Some programs offend them more, and others less. The general pattern is that social programs offend Republicans to the degree that they benefit the poor, sick, or otherwise unfortunate. The struggle over the farm bill is not the biggest policy dispute in American politics, but it is the one that most clearly reveals the priorities and ideological identity of the contemporary GOP.
The farm bill traditionally combines agriculture subsidies (which hands out subsidies to people on the arbitrary basis that the business they own produces food as opposed to some other goods or services) with food stamps (which hands out subsidies to people on the highly nonarbitrary basis that they’re poor enough to likely have trouble scraping together regular meals). Conservative Republicans revolted against the normally automatic passage, insisting that the cuts to food stamps — $20 billion — did not slice deeply enough. Last night the House rectified its failure by cutting food stamps by $40 billion.
The putative rationale for the food-stamp cuts is that eligibility standards have loosened, or that it encourages sloth. Jonathan Cohn [ http://www.newrepublic.com/blog/plank/104921/republican-conservative-cut-snap-food-stamps-obama-bush ] makes quick work of these claims, and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities [ http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=4009 ] makes long, detailed work of them. Click on those links if you want a blow-by-blow refutation. The upshot is that food stamps are a meager subsidy, of less than $1.40 per meal, for people either stuck in very low paid jobs or unable to find work at all. Their cost has increased because the recession has increased the supply of poor, desperate people.
… CNN reported [ http://thelead.blogs.cnn.com/2013/09/19/congresswoman-outs-gop-saying-they-slash-food-stamps-while-dining-out/ ] last night that Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas, a Republican supporter of the bill, received a daily meal allowance of $127.41, or 91 times the average daily food-stamp benefit. Lucas is also notable as a recipient of the agriculture subsidies his committee doles out: He and his wife have collected more than $40,000 worth [ http://newsok.com/oklahoma-rep.-frank-lucas-criticized-for-taking-farm-subsidies-while-delaying-food-stamp-renewal/article/3864804 ].
… It’s the juxtaposition of the two programs that so clearly exposes the party’s agenda. Anti-government ideology can justify even the most vicious cuts to the safety net. It can’t justify the massive socialist scheme that is agriculture policy. And, to be fair, conservative intellectuals generally don’t justify agriculture socialism. But the Republican Party certainly does. The ultraconservative Republican Study Committee recently banned the Heritage Foundation [ http://www.nationaljournal.com/congress/republican-lawmakers-retaliate-against-heritage-foundation-20130828 ] from its meetings because Heritage denounced the GOP’s farm subsidies. There is a grim hilarity here: Republicans punished Heritage for its one technocratically sane position.
…It’s not baffling, nor is the notion that the Republican Party protects the class interests of the rich a “stereotype.” It’s an analysis that persuasively explains the facts.
Indeed, it’s the only analysis that persuasively explains the facts. I’d prefer to abolish agriculture subsidies completely while keeping in place (or boosting) food rations for the poor. A libertarian might want to abolish both programs, a socialist might want to keep both. I’d disagree but attribute the disagreement to philosophical differences. What possible basis can be found to justify preserving subsidies for affluent farmers while cutting them for the poor? What explanation offers itself other than the party’s commitment to waging class war?
(3) The GOP’s war on public health
The GOP’s role as vanguard of the class war has deep roots in American history, appearing in accounts of our past on a wide range of subjects. Such as in this history of America’s public health programs: “The Doctor Who Made a Revolution [ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/sep/26/doctor-who-made-revolution/?pagination=false ]“, Helen Epstein, New York Review of Books, 26 September 2013 — Excerpts:
It was in the 1890s that Sara Josephine Baker decided to become a doctor. … By the time Baker retired from the New York City Health Department in 1923, she was famous across the nation for saving the lives of 90,000 inner-city children. The public health measures she implemented, many still in use today, have saved the lives of millions more worldwide.
Opposing public health services
… Articles about Baker’s lifesaving campaigns appeared in newspapers from Oklahoma to Michigan to California. In the late 1910s, she and other reformers drafted a bill to create a nationwide network of home-visiting programs and maternal and child health clinics modeled on the programs in New York. But the American Medical Association (AMA) — backed by powerful Republicans averse to spending money on social welfare — claimed the program was tantamount to Bolshevism. Baker was in Washington the day a young New England doctor explained the AMA’s position to a congressional committee:
“We oppose this bill because, if you are going to save the lives of all these women and children at public expense, what inducement will there be for young men to study medicine?” Senator Sheppard, the chairman, stiffened and leaned forward: “Perhaps I didn’t understand you correctly,” he said: “You surely don’t mean that you want women and children to die unnecessarily or live in constant danger of sickness so there will be something for young doctors to do?” “Why not?” said the New England doctor, who did at least have the courage to admit the issue: “That’s the will of God, isn’t it?”
Effects of the public health services revolution
… The enormous declines in child mortality that Baker helped bring about are frequently attributed to improved nutrition and a general improvement in working and living conditions, and to the availability of vaccines and antibiotics.
However, demographers who have studied the subject in detail have concluded that it had little to do with any of these things. Most vaccines and antibiotics weren’t available until after World War II and the “general uplift” in nutrition and living conditions occurred at the end of the 19th C, decades before the mortality decline. This may have set the stage for the drop in the death rate that followed, but the survival of babies didn’t substantially improve until safer milk supplies became widely available and, even more crucially, campaigns like Baker’s had helped women understand germs and how to avoid them, so that they could provide better care for their children.
Child Care
… In 1971, a group of Washington officials and their allies in the civil rights movement drafted the Comprehensive Child Care and Development Act, which would have created a nationwide system of high-quality day-care, preschool, and home-visiting programs that resembled the national system of child health programs envisioned by Baker and other reformers fifty years earlier. It passed both houses of Congress with strong bipartisan support, but right-wing Republicans, using language similar to that used to quash the mother and baby care programs, pressured President Nixon to veto it.
As described in the excellent forthcoming documentary series The Raising of America: Early Childhood and the Future of the Nation, Nixon’s adviser Pat Buchanan encouraged conservative journalists to write commentaries with headlines such as “Child Development Act — To Sovietize Our Youth,” which Buchanan would then present to Nixon in his morning press digest, as if it represented mainstream conservative opinion.Even though polls suggested that most Americans supported the bill, large numbers of letters denouncing it—some even comparing it to the Hitler Youth programs—poured into the White House.
Edward Zigler, head of Nixon’s Office of Child Development and one of the main architects of the bill, read through many of them. Most seemed to him to be form letters, and he suspected that the campaign had been orchestrated by a small number of conservative opponents. Nevertheless, the president got the message and vetoed the bill. This campaign gave rise to the “Family Values” movement, which has since attempted to thwart just about every legislative proposal to support American families. Today, nearly every other industrialized nation on earth provides some form of guaranteed support to families with young children. That America still does not is considered by many to be a national disgrace.
The infection of socialism has a hold on one part of America
… In some respects, contemporary America is not all that different. It turns out that there is one group of Americans that receives high-quality government-subsidized child-care services, including day care, preschool, home-visiting programs, and health care: the US military. Unlike the Soviet version, these comprehensive programs aren’t designed to create obedient little soldiers. Instead, they use a play-oriented approach to help bring out children’s individual cognitive and social capacity.
This may help explain why military children score higher on reading and mathematics tests than public school children, and why the black/white achievement gap is much lower in military families than it is in the general population. Since the military child-care program was created in 1989, the government has repeatedly declined requests to fund an in-depth evaluation, perhaps because if the effects were known, all Americans would demand these programs for their children too.
(4) For More Information
a) About American politics:
Posts about politics in America
http://fabiusmaximus.com/america/politics-2/
Posts about the Democratic Party
http://fabiusmaximus.com/tag/democratic-party/
Posts about Obama, his administration and policies
http://fabiusmaximus.com/america/candidates/
The world of wonders: Democratic Party takes center, pushes GOP right to madness
http://fabiusmaximus.com/2013/02/19/democratic-republican-madness-48918/
(b) Posts about the Republican Party:
Whose values do Dick and Liz Cheney share? Those of America? Or those of our enemies, in the past and today?, 14 March 2010
http://fabiusmaximus.wordpress.com/2010/03/14/cheney/
The evolution of the Republican Party has shaped America during the past fifty years, 8 May 2010
http://fabiusmaximus.wordpress.com/2010/05/08/santa/
Will people on the right help cut Federal spending?, 19 June 2010
http://fabiusmaximus.wordpress.com/2010/06/19/18320/
Conservatives oppose the new START treaty, as they opposed even the earlier version negotiated by Ronald Reagan, 24 July 2010
http://fabiusmaximus.wordpress.com/2010/07/24/19644/
A modern conservative dresses up Mr. Potter to suit our libertarian fashions, 17 November 2011
http://fabiusmaximus.wordpress.com/2011/11/17/30999/
The key to modern American politics: the Right-Wing Id Unzipped, 15 February 2012
http://fabiusmaximus.wordpress.com/2012/02/15/35479/ [first item at/see (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=72131063 and preceding and following]
Why Republicans Need Remedial Math: Their Budget Plans Explode the Deficit, 16 March 2012
http://fabiusmaximus.wordpress.com/2012/03/16/36538/
Let’s list the GOP’s problems. They’re all easily solvable, 12 November 2012
http://fabiusmaximus.com/2012/11/12/republican-party-45624/
The Republican Party is like America, and can quickly recover it strength, 14 November 2012
http://fabiusmaximus.com/2012/11/14/republican-party-45634/
(c) The Great Betrayal: racism on the Right:
Ron Paul’s exotic past tells us much about him, the GOP, libertarians – and about us, 27 December 2011
http://fabiusmaximus.com/2011/12/27/32944/
What every American must know about the Republican Party, 16 October 2012
http://fabiusmaximus.com/2012/10/16/republican-party-racism-44120/
(5) Tom Tomorrow explains the Class War
See Tom Tomorrow’s website [ http://thismodernworld.com/ ]!
Copyright 2013 Fabius Maximus
http://fabiusmaximus.com/2013/09/22/republican-class-warfare-55553/ [with comments]
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Michele Bachmann (left) and Ted Cruz (center) with Tea Party leaders, Washington, D.C., May 16, 2013
Yuri Gripas/Reuters
Elizabeth Drew
August 27, 2013
Most of the electorate can’t be bothered with midterm elections, and this has had large consequences—none of them good—for our political system and our country. Voting for a president might be exciting or dutiful, worth troubling ourselves for. But the midterms, in which a varying number of governorships are up for election, as well as the entire House of Representatives and one third of the Senate, just don’t seem worth as much effort. Such inaction is a political act in itself, with major effects.
In the past ten elections, voter turnout for presidential contests—which requires a tremendous and expensive effort by the campaigns—has ranged from 51.7 to 61.6 percent, while for the midterms it’s been in the high thirties. Turnout was highest for the two midterms in which the Republicans made their greatest gains: in 1994, when Clinton was president, it was 41.1 percent and in 2010 it was 41.6 percent. In 2006, when Bush was president, the Democrats took over the House and Senate and won most of the governorships, turnout was the next highest, 40.4 percent. The quality of the candidates, the economy, and many unexpected issues of course determine the atmosphere of an election; but in the end turnout is almost always decisive.
The midterms, with their lower turnout, reward intensity. In 2010, the Republicans were sufficiently worked up about the new health care law and an old standby, “government spending,” particularly the stimulus bill, to drive them to the polls in far larger numbers than the Democrats. A slight upward tick in turnout numbers can have a disproportionate impact in Congress and many of the states, and therefore the country as a whole. The difference in turnout caused such a change in 2010; in fact, the Republicans gained sixty-three House seats and took control of both the governorships and the legislatures in twelve states; the Democrats ended up with control of the fewest state legislative bodies since 1946. The midterms go a long way toward explaining the dismaying spectacle in Washington today. State elections bear much of the responsibility for the near paralysis in Congress thus far this year and the extremism that has gripped the House Republicans and is oozing over into the Senate.
The difference in the turnouts for presidential and midterm elections means that there are now almost two different electorates. Typically, the midterm electorate is skewed toward the white and elderly. In 2010 the youth vote dropped a full 60 percent from 2008. Those who are disappointed with the president they helped elect two years earlier and decide to stay home have the same effect on an election as those who vote for the opposition candidate.
Little wonder, then, that there can be such a gulf between the president and Congress, particularly the House of Representatives—but also between the president and the governments of most of the twenty-four states over which the Republicans now maintain complete control; almost half of these were elected in 2010. Democrats have complete control over fourteen states. The Republican-controlled states include almost all the most populous ones outside of New York and California. Since the midterms of 2010 the Republicans in most of these states have pursued coordinated, highly regressive economic policies and a harsh social agenda. Thus, while there’s largely been stalemate in Washington, sweeping social and economic changes that are entirely at odds with how the country voted in the last presidential election have been taking place in Republican-controlled states.
As a result of the relative lack of interest in state elections, we now have the most polarized political system in modern American history. It’s also the least functional. Many state governments’ policies are not just almost completely divorced from what is going on at the federal level—but also in some cases what is prescribed by law and the Constitution. Systemic factors based in state politics explain more about our national political condition than tired arguments in Washington over who is at fault for what does or doesn’t—mainly doesn’t—happen at the federal level. The dysfunction begins in the states.
*
The 2010 elections were the single most important event leading up to the domination of the House by the Republican far right. Both the recession and organized agitation by the Tea Party over the newly passed health care law—“spontaneous” campaigns guided from Washington by the old pros Karl Rove and Dick Armey, and funded by reactionary business moguls—helped the Republicans, and especially the most radical elements in the party, sweep into the majority in the House of Representatives and take control of twelve additional states, including Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. The Republicans who took over states in 2010 reset our politics. Among other things, they made the House of Representatives unrepresentative. In 2012 Democrats won more than 1.7 million more votes for the House than the Republicans did, but they picked up only eight seats. (This was the largest discrepancy between votes and the division of House seats since 1950.)
Thus, while Obama won 51.1 percent of the popular vote in 2012, as a result of the redistricting following 2010 the Republican House majority represents 47.5 percent as opposed to 48.8 percent for the Democrats, or a minority of the voters for the House in 2012. Take the example of the Ohio election: Obama won the state with 51 percent of the vote, but because of redistricting, its House delegation is 75 percent Republican and 25 percent Democratic.
The state government’s power over the redrawing of congressional districts every ten years is probably the single most determining factor of our political situation. It’s clear that the Republicans were successful in winning and using the 2010 elections as a prelude to the most distorted and partisan redistricting in modern times. Their approach was so different in degree as to be a difference in substance—and the post-2010 politics in Washington resemble nothing that has gone before. There has been something of a war raging among students of electoral politics over the role of redistricting in our current situation. But Sam Wang of Princeton, a neuroscientist who founded the Princeton Election Consortium, wrote in The New York Times earlier this year:
Political scientists have identified other factors that have influenced the relationship between votes and seats in the past. Concentration of voters in urban areas can, for example, limit how districts are drawn, creating a natural packing effect. But in 2012 the net effect of intentional gerrymandering was far larger than any one factor.
Moreover, the redistricting has become different from the process that we learned about in civics classes. Traditional “gerrymandering,” which had been practiced since the early 1800s, involved drawing weirdly shaped districts for the purpose of protecting incumbents. But in recent years redistricting has developed into a vicious fight for control of redistricting—though the shape of the districts can be just as weird.
The Republicans have made the greater effort to shape the House to their benefit, through a deliberate two-step process: first, win state elections so as to control the redistricting, and then redistrict to give the party as much advantage as possible in the House. Though they’ve done their own self-interested redistricting, Democrats haven’t been as zealous about controlling reapportionment. Still, through the combination of both parties’ actions, they have ended up with more safe seats than before.
There was just one problem: when the Republicans began their intense effort in the run-up to 2010 to take over state legislatures and draw districts free of serious Democratic challengers, they failed to anticipate that this would leave their members more vulnerable to challenges from the right. The fear of being defeated in local contests by even more radical Republicans has also taken hold in the state legislatures, which in turn affects the nature of the House. The more established House Republicans, including the leaders, now live in terror of a putsch from the most extreme right-wing elements of their caucus, in particular the Tea Party. They are not yet a majority of the party but they have the power to behave like one through their use of fear. A lamentable result of the effort to draw safe districts is that only an estimated thirty-five House seats out of 435 will actually be competitive in the 2014 election. Therein lies the source of the near paralysis of the federal government.
Nate Silver wrote in the The New York Times after the 2012 election that while there had been earlier periods of great partisanship, in particular between 1880 and 1920, “it is not clear that there have been other periods when individual members of the House had so little to deter them from highly partisan behavior.” Under these circumstances, it’s harder than ever before to put together bipartisan coalitions to pass major legislation, as had long been done for civil rights bills and other major changes in economic, social, and even environmental policy. The fact that Obama had to pass the health care law with almost no Republican support rendered it more vulnerable later. The Republicans’ limp and deceptive explanation for their opposition to the law is that the Democrats left them out of consideration of the bill (which was actually based on Republican ideas).
The Republicans who took over the states following the 2010 elections arrived with an agenda strongly based on model laws supplied by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), heavily funded by the Koch brothers along with some other big corporations. The other group that benefited most from the 2010 elections was the passionately anti-abortion Christian right—which is not only an essential part of the national Republican Party’s base but also dominates the Republican Party in about twenty states, and has a substantial influence in more than a dozen other state parties. The Christian right is tremendously effective in motivating its followers to go to the polls—and then threaten a loss of support if their agenda isn’t adopted.
The overall result of the new Republican domination has been that these states have cut taxes on the wealthy and corporations and moved toward a more comprehensive sales tax; slashed unemployment benefits; cut money for education and various public services; and sought to break the remaining power of the unions. Not only did Republican officials in these states manipulate the constitutionally guaranteed right to vote in their effort to win the presidency in 2012 and preserve their own power by keeping Democratic supporters from voting, but they are at it again. The constitutional right to abortion granted under Roe v. Wade has been flouted. The new strategy among anti-abortion forces is to limit legal abortions to the first twelve weeks of pregnancy. Several states have adopted this measure and others are in the process of doing so.
Pregnant women’s privacy has also been invaded through state measures requiring them to be subjected to transvaginal ultrasound examinations of the fetus, and forcing them to look at or hear described the result of any sonogram. Doctors have been ordered by state law to lie to women about supposed dire consequences of abortion, for example that abortions can lead to breast cancer. Abortion clinics in some states have been shut down or eliminated. Funding for other medical services for women, such as mammograms, has also been greatly reduced. Many of these state laws are under legal challenge and some of them may end up in the Supreme Court. Roe v. Wade may be doomed.
*
North Carolina provides the most dramatic example of what can happen to a state in just three years. It was formerly a progressive southern state, racially tolerant, and a proud leader in education. Obama carried North Carolina in 2008. But the Republicans won the legislature in 2010, and in 2012 they won the governorship. In addition, as a result of their redistricting after 2010, in 2012 they gained “super-majorities” in the legislature. Since then, the Republican governor and legislature have made drastic cuts in unemployment insurance and tax credits to low-income workers. The legislature is leaning toward passing proposals to reduce the number of teaching assistants and aid to college students, and it has cut the number of openings for children in state-run pre-kindergarten programs. Proposals are pending to flatten the income tax, expand the sales tax, and kill the estate tax.
The North Carolina legislature also passed a law to bar the courts from applying sharia law, making it the seventh state to do so. In reality, there’s no threat that courts will start interpreting the laws according to sharia doctrine, but Republican state lawmakers say they’re taking “preemptive” action. Oklahoma’s prohibition of sharia law was recently held unconstitutional by a federal court (as singling out a religion).
North Carolina has also adopted the most severe restrictions in the country both on abortion and on voting rights. It makes the impediments to voting that were used in 2012 seem meager by comparison. Its sole remaining abortion clinic is being shut down. North Carolina is one of the states that, as a result of the Supreme Court’s decision in June, was liberated from the requirement of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that it get prior clearance from the Justice Department before making changes in its voting laws. Texas and North Carolina, both under Republican control, were the first to savor their freedom by making it harder than ever for minorities, students, and the elderly poor to vote. A former North Carolina Democratic official said to me, “They do all these things and then they pass voting rights laws to keep us from voting them out of office.”
*
In 2014, thirty-six governorships, an unusually large number, will be up for election, including in such important swing states in presidential elections as Ohio, Wisconsin, Florida, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Until 2010, all of them but Florida were governed by Democrats and carried by Obama, but since then they have been governed by Republicans determined to impose highly conservative policies on previously Democratic states carried by Obama.
Who controls the country’s statehouses can matter a lot in presidential elections. For one thing, that’s where the rules and conditions for voting are set. In 2012 we saw the Republican governor of Florida and the attorney general of Ohio cut the number of polling places and the number of days and hours they were open in an obvious effort to limit the votes of blacks and other minorities, as well as poor seniors.
Though great numbers of voters rose up and insisted on casting their ballots, it’s still the case that large numbers—estimated at a minimum at hundreds of thousands—were prevented from voting. And in a close election a governor can be of significant aid to the national candidate: the state’s party machinery and the governor’s political network can be called on to help out. The ultimate example of how helpful a governor can be was provided by Jeb Bush in Florida in 2000.
As early as November of this year, two states, Virginia and New Jersey, will hold their contests for governor and senator. Usually of interest only to political obsessives, both states’ elections will be more widely watched for their implications for the 2016 presidential race, ridiculously early as it may be for that. In New Jersey, Governor Chris Christie, a relatively moderate Republican, is generally expected to be reelected easily but if he runs for president the main questions are whether his pugnacious style will be popular outside the state and how he will deal with the party base.
Virginia is more significant for national politics because it’s a swing state in federal elections—it was crucial to Obama’s reelection victory. The Virginia race for governor this November is an embarrassment. The Republican candidate, Ken Cuccinelli, who is even further to the right than Bob McDonnell, the current governor (who cannot run again), most famously wants to make consensual sodomy illegal in Virginia. That the proposal has been met with derision—and also some fright—and is clearly unconstitutional does not deter him.
Cuccinelli’s campaign is also suffering from the recent squalid revelations about McDonnell, who had already won national attention for backing transvaginal ultrasounds of women seeking abortions. McDonnell and his wife accepted considerable financial favors from a wealthy businessman whose products he then promoted—among other gifts, he picked up the cost of their daughter’s wedding and treated Mrs. McDonnell to a shopping spree at Bergdorf’s. Now Cuccinelli has been found taking favors from the same businessman, if on a more modest scale.
The Democratic nominee, Terry McAuliffe, the backslapping politician and businessman and close pal of the Clintons, has a problem of his own: one of his companies is under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission. To assure that this got a lot of publicity and to try to counter Cuccinelli’s problems, the right-wing activist David Bossie, founder of Citizens United, which brought the famous case of that name to the Supreme Court, has made a film (Fast Terry) charging McCauliffe with sleazy business practices. For good measure the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, who is black, has called the Obamas communists who “don’t understand our country, I don’t think they even like it.”
*
Critical to the 2013–2014 midterm elections will be attempts to destroy the new health care law—the one issue the Republicans have found most effective for rallying their forces; that and “spending,” even as the deficit steadily declines, are the only two issues on which they have taken a real position. The obsessive attempt by conservative Republicans to prevent “Obamacare” from being implemented may be without precedent but it isn’t without purpose. By playing on people’s fears—proposed changes in health care arouse anxiety as no other domestic issue does—they are seeking to advance their own political cause. Even after it failed, “Hillarycare” was a major factor in the 1994 Republican sweep.
John Boehner standing next to a printed version of the Affordable Care Act during a press conference calling for its repeal, Washington, D.C., May 16, 2013
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
What began in 2009 as a movement to block passage of the health care program championed by Obama was transformed in 2010 into a furious reaction to its becoming law that was used as the organizing force in seeking Republican gains in those midterm elections. Since it worked then, why not have another go at it? The seemingly futile effort to repeal the law isn’t as silly as it seems. The forty roll-call votes by House Republicans to repeal it aren’t useless, even if there isn’t a chance that the Senate will agree. The Republican base strongly approves of these votes. The base has been mobilized around opposition to the health care law as a force for the midterms (and beyond) by the principal organizers and funders of the Tea Party in Washington as well as by the Heritage Foundation, the supposed think tank now headed by former South Carolina senator Jim DeMint. While in the Senate DeMint promoted Tea Party candidates for senator, several of them fools who flamed out. The votes not only help the Republicans raise money; they also provide protection for members trying to fend off attacks or challengers, enabling them to say, “I voted to kill Obamacare forty times.”
The Republicans are racing against the fact that some popular parts of the Affordable Care Act, such as the elimination of pre-conditions as a barrier for getting insurance and allowing parents to cover their children up to the age of twenty-six, have already gone into effect. If the complex health care program is seen as successful on the whole, Obama and the Democrats could get long-term credit for it, just as the Democrats did from Medicare. If the Republican fantasy were to come true and they somehow killed it off, Obama’s principal achievement will have been eliminated. Both parties understand that a health care program undergoing a lot of turmoil in 2014 spells trouble for the Democrats.
Egged on by a campaign run by FreedomWorks, the Tea Party stronghold in Washington, D.C., more than half (or twenty-seven) states have rejected the expansion of Medicaid for the ailing and elderly poor; and a majority of the states have also refused to set up the exchanges through which people can shop for medical insurance at presumably competitive prices. (This is partly a grandstanding gesture because the federal government will set up the exchanges in those states instead.)
FreedomWorks has urged people to burn their nonexistent “health care cards,” and it and other conservative groups are urging young people not to sign up for the new health insurance, and pay a penalty instead. The success of the plan depends on a certain number of healthy young people buying insurance on the exchanges in order to keep prices down for everyone else.
But in their zeal to eliminate a law that’s been passed and is on the books, congressional Republicans may have built their own trap. Whatever they do in the name of getting rid of the program or cutting it back is attacked by the most militant Republicans as insufficient; there’s always a more drastic proposal, and a demand from the base that they support it. A recent idea—backed by Senators Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Mike Lee—was that the government be shut down unless “Obamacare” is defunded. But some senior Republicans with memories of the calamity to their party caused by the Newt Gingrich–led shutdown in 1995–1996, as well as governors with national ambitions, were outspoken in calling this a stupid idea. Cruz, at the center of the effort, showed in his first weeks in the Senate that he’s not above McCarthyite tactics (as in the Hagel hearings); and he freely breaks the rules and understandings by which the Senate functions at all. Most uncommonly, he is actually hated and feared by most of his colleagues (including Republicans)—such strong feelings about a fellow senator are rare. The Harvard Law graduate and able advocate before the Supreme Court dismissed his senior Republicans’ concerns and in his mellifluous tone said that they were misreading history, and he carried on a crusade for a shutdown, which few of his colleagues liked.
But the ruffian Cruz overstepped and made a big mistake. As he traveled around with DeMint, he aroused great cheers from crowds at town meetings in August—but his colleagues held firm; no additional sponsors of the shutdown proposal came forth. Beyond that, Cruz and DeMint threatened Senate Republicans—true conservatives such as Tom Coburn and Lindsay Graham—who refused to back the shutdown with primary challenges. (Cruz is far more intelligent than DeMint but in defying the leaders of his party he is following his own agenda.) The base doesn’t mind if he’s unpopular in Washington, though.
Struggling once more to convince his far-right caucus members to take a less self-damaging route than the shutdown, the beleaguered Speaker John Boehner suggested that instead of shutting down the government unless Obamacare is defunded or postponed—anything to keep it from going into effect by the 2014 elections—they delay passing an increase in the debt ceiling. Holding up the debt ceiling in 2011 brought all kinds of obloquy down on the heads of the House Republicans and also stupidly hurt the credit standing of the US. Boehner has been leaping from ice floe to ice floe, each one more dangerous. So far his strategy of postponing calamity has worked—but what happens if he runs out of ice floes?
The agony of the current Republican Party is that most of the far right isn’t concerned about the possible effects of their tactics on the national party—on its ability to win not just the next presidential election but also other offices down the line. The Tea Party members of Congress are responding to their districts. But the mainstream Republicans are panicked that they have lost four out of the last six presidential elections, and they have yet to figure out how to placate their base in the nomination process and still win the general election. But the far right has its own version of reality. Some even plan to run for president on it.
*
As a result of the centrifugal forces that have taken over our politics, we have ended up with warring political blocs, not with the federal system envisioned by the Founders. Instead of cooperative interaction among the states and the federal government, we have a series of struggles between them. Federal laws are blocked or degraded in many of the states, and state obligations are unmet. After the country reelected a Democratic president in 2012, the Republicans continued to refuse to recognize his legitimacy and they opposed virtually his every policy proposal. (Whether immigration will break this pattern is up in the air.) Meanwhile the most sweeping changes in domestic policy are taking place in states dominated by Republicans. As it turns out, 56 percent of the population, and 60 percent of poor children, live in these states.
The new turbulence between the federal government and the states and between the president and Congress has been exacerbated by midterm elections. The turbulence has been spreading across our governing institutions—putting the very workability of the American political system in jeopardy. With the House in the grip of the very far right, the wreckers have made it almost impossible for Boehner to lead—and Obama to govern.
The madness has been seeping into the usually more staid Senate, to the point where freshman radicals—Rand Paul, Cruz, and Rubio, with the Tea Party at their backs and a presidential gleam in their eyes—can break with longstanding precedent and courtesies and presume to define the national agenda. Minority leader Mitch McConnell is being challenged for renomination by a Tea Party member, which has limited his leadership capacities and his judgment. The turbulence has spread into the Supreme Court. Our federal organism is a delicate instrument, one that can work reasonably well only if its caretakers proceed on the basis of understandings and restraint.
The seeds of this situation were planted in the 1994 midterm election that swept the former back bencher Newt Gingrich into the Speakership of the House. Gingrich rashly maneuvered himself into a government shutdown that ended in disaster for the Republicans. (Bill Clinton outmaneuvered Gingrich, and the public didn’t at all appreciate the shutdown of federal services.) There is no evidence that Gingrich had thought through the consequences. He thus spawned the consequence-free politics that is now bedeviling our system of government. In 2009, for the first time, defeat of the incoming president in the next election became the opposition party’s explicit governing principle. If that meant blocking measures to improve the economy, or preventing the filling of important federal offices to keep the government running, so be it. Wrecking became the order of the day. Confrontation became the goal in itself. Now the rightward trend in Republican politics is feeding on itself, becoming even more extreme until the preposterous becomes conceivable.
*
Can this chokehold on our politics be broken? Several states are considering the possible removal of the power to control redistricting from the politicians who stand to benefit from their own decisions. Arizona and California have adopted independent commissions to redraw districts.
Theoretically, Congress could pass legislation requiring the states to reform their redistricting practices for federal elections; but that would require a sufficiently powerful movement—of which there is no sign—to put pressure on members of Congress to act against their own perceived interest.
The citizens of a state have it within their power to press for such changes in the nature of their state governments and the consequent effects on their immediate lives as well as the functioning of the nation’s political system. By rousing themselves to vote, they could have a stronger voice in filling state offices that may not seem so exciting but are highly consequential. Is it possible that the off-year elections could be taken almost as seriously as the presidential ones? The radicalism of the right has become so extreme that it may have unintentionally provided an impetus in that direction.
In the end only the members of the electorate can restore the institutions and procedures that make our democratic system work, starting with the next chance they get.
Copyright © 2013 NYREV, Inc. (emphasis in original)
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/sep/26/stranglehold-our-politics/ [ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/sep/26/stranglehold-our-politics/?pagination=false ]
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'The Entrepreneurial State': Apple Didn't Build Your iPhone; Your Taxes Did
Government support for research and development is responsible for much of the innovation that drives GDP, argues Mariana Mazzucato.
Photo courtesy of Stephen Yang/Bloomberg via Getty Images.
By Mariana Mazzucato
Posted September 20, 2013
As the deadline for raising the government debt limit fast approaches, and wrangling on the issue in Congress intensifies, Mariana Mazzucato [ http://www.marianamazzucato.com/ ( http://www.marianamazzucato.com/home/ )] reminds us of the difference between public and private debt. Professor of economics at the University of Sussex, Mazzucato is the author of "The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Private vs. Public Sector Myths [ http://www.amazon.com/The-Entrepreneurial-State-Debunking-Private/dp/0857282522 ]." Her provocative "they-didn't-build-that" thesis, that the government funds most of the initial research and development on which the private sector capitalizes, has generated a lot of buzz [ http://www.economist.com/news/business/21584307-new-book-points-out-big-role-governments-play-creating-innovative-businesses ] in the financial press [ http://www.forbes.com/sites/bruceupbin/2013/06/13/debunking-the-narrative-of-silicon-valleys-innovation-might/ ], including Martin Wolf's review [ http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/32ba9b92-efd4-11e2-a237-00144feabdc0.html ] in the Financial Times calling it "basically right." So we asked her to explain her thinking to our Business Desk audience.
Is government debt slowing economic growth, if not impeding it? The world-wide economic crisis that began in 2007 has kept that question alive, despite the fact that it was private debt that caused the crisis in the first place. But attempts to curb the crisis have also led to an explosion of public sector expenditures like bank bailouts and unemployment insurance that have ballooned debt levels. At the same time, lower tax receipts due to falling incomes have prompted even more borrowing.
Yet amnesia and dogma have conflated the public debt that helped cure the crisis with the private debt that caused it. The Reinhart-Rogoff saga [ http://www.pbs.org/newshour/businessdesk/2013/04/paul-krugman-v-reinhart-and-ro.html ] seems to have ended with evidence winning out over ideological fiction. That's because the government debt threshold these noted economists supposedly discovered -- surpass a 90 percent ratio of debt-to-GDP and you're screwed -- seems to have been based on statistical error. But despite the correction, countries across the globe are still being asked to slash spending in hopes of kick starting economic growth.
My own work shows the utter foolishness of such a strategy. What matters is not the absolute size of debt, but what that debt consists of. Throughout history, strategic government expenditures have played a key role in spurring economic growth. Indeed, by forcing the world's weakest economies to cut public spending -- in key areas like education, research and health -- their potential for long-run growth is weakening. Spain, for instance, has cut its research spending by 40 percent since 2009. Will this help it create the kind of goods and services the world might want to buy -- and be as competitive as its Nordic neighbors? It seems wildly unlikely.
The key question is simple: what causes GDP growth? And the answer from economists is that, at the very least, spending on education, human capital, and research are tightly related to it. Indeed, Robert Solow, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1987, found that close to 90 percent of growth is not explained by the usual suspects, capital and labor. They account for only 10 percent. So Solow called the unaccounted-for 90 percent the "residual." And what drove the residual? It had to be technology. And how is technology fostered? More often than not, down through history, by government investment, from the roads of ancient Rome to the Internet of modern America.
However, things are not quite so easy. Which areas should the government fund? Traditional economic theory argues that government funding should be limited to areas where the free market is not working properly because of so-called "market failures," some of which might be due to the existence of "public goods" like basic research, which are hard to make proprietary and profitable since they're quickly available to everyone. As a result, the private sector under-invests.
So if government nudges the private sector to invest by doing the basic research itself, goes the argument, business will promptly respond by innovating. Thus policy makers have obsessed over different types of tax incentives (from R&D tax credits to recent tax cuts related to patents) in order to increase the amount which the business sector spends on R&D.
I have been pushing a very different view, as embodied in my recent book "The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Private vs. Public Sector Myths [ http://www.amazon.com/The-Entrepreneurial-State-Debunking-Private/dp/0857282522 ]." I argue that businesses are typically timid -- waiting to invest until they can clearly see new technological and market opportunities. And evidence shows that such opportunities come when large sums of public money are spent directly on high risk (and high cost) technological missions. This raises debt of course, but also GDP, keeping the ratio of debt-to-GDP in check.
These missions are expensive precisely because the government does much more than just solve market failures. It intervenes in both basic and applied research and even provides early stage seed finance to private companies. Indeed, Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants have funded a higher percentage of early stage seed finance than private capital. This is because private finance is too risk-averse -- afraid -- to engage with industries characterized by high technological and market risk. The fear explains why we have seen venture capital entering, in industry after industry, only decades after the initial high risk has been absorbed by government.
Mission-oriented public investment put men on the moon, and later, lead to the invention and commercialization of the Internet, which in turn has stimulated growth in many sectors of the economy. Indeed, as I describe in the longest chapter of my book, the U.S. government has been a leading player in funding not only the Internet but all the other technologies -- GPS, touchscreen display, and the new Siri voice-activated personal assistant -- that make the iPhone, for example, a miracle of American technology.
Crucially, mission-oriented policies are needed today to tackle climate change and other large societal, technological challenges. But the fear that such investments will cause debt to rise too high and stymie growth -- ignoring the potential positive effects on growth that these investments can make in the long run -- is paralyzing governments throughout the world.
Furthermore, there is the general belief that the direction of investments should be determined by the market, not government, because government consists of a bunch of bureaucrats who lack expertise. But the technological leadership in countries like Singapore, Korea, China, Israel, Brazil, Finland, Denmark and Germany is a result of the well-funded network of state agencies in those countries that are able to attract expertise and drive change, working of course, alongside the private sector, but often leading it.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) was recently run by a Nobel Prize winning physicist. And the atmosphere at the Advanced Research Project Agency-Energy [ http://arpa-e.energy.gov/ ], which is trying to do for renewable energy what the Defense Advanced Research Agency [ https://www.google.com/search?q=DARPA&oq=DARPA&aqs=chrome..69i57j5j0l2.1952j0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 ] did for the Internet, is just as dynamic and creative as Google. And historically, it is investments driven by such agencies (including the National Science Foundation, National Nanotech Initiative, National Institutes of Health) that galvanize private sector investment.
Indeed, when Pfizer recently closed down a large R&D lab in Sandwich, Kent, and transferred it to Boston, Massachusetts, it was not due to the lower taxes or laxer regulation for which industry is constantly lobbying. They moved because of the large amounts of money that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has been spending on research and the mission of improved health care in the United States: $792 billion from 1936-2011 (in 2011 dollars), with $30.9 billion in 2012 alone.
These lessons are important for policy makers interested in fostering entrepreneurship. While Steve Jobs was a genius in his ability to exploit existing government-funded technologies in new ways, he would have had little to work with absent massive public spending. And given the public spending cuts that are happening in most countries the world over, the question then becomes: will there be a future wave to surf in places like Silicon Valley, or is the technology tide destined to turn?
Furthermore, casting the public sector as the villain and business as savior has relieved the private sector from any obligation to increase its own commitment to the innovation process. There simply are not enough large businesses today playing the role that Xerox PARC (the Palo Alto Research Center) and AT&T (Bell Labs) played in the past.
Today's big companies, like Cisco and Pfizer, spend almost as much on share-repurchase schemes (which enrich those who own stock) as they spend on research. Interestingly, the big "repurchasers" (the biggest being in oil and pharma) often justify such buybacks with the claim that there are no other "opportunities" for their investments. But really? No opportunities in health for pharma these days? Nothing for oil companies to invest in? What about safe and clean renewable energy?
When building innovation "eco-systems," then, it is important to make sure the role of business is symbiotic, not parasitic. That means, if we want to rebalance the economy, we need to rebalance the story we tell about who the innovators really are. Interestingly, it was the venture capital lobby in the mid-1970s that pushed for the capital gains tax to fall by [50] percent (from 40 percent in 1976 to 20 percent in the mid '80s). It has been [as low or lower most of the time] since, based on the narrative that only thus will the entrepreneurial "risk-takers' do their thing and enrich us all.
But that narrative is false. The entrepreneurial state has funded the radical innovation behind much if not most of modern economic growth. Denying government today the resources to do its thing endangers us all.
Copyright © 2013 MacNeil/Lehrer Productions (emphasis in original)
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/businessdesk/2013/09/the-entrepreneurial-state-appl.html [with comments]
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U.S. Revives Aid Program for Clean Energy
By DIANE CARDWELL
Published: September 19, 2013
The Obama administration has decided to revive a controversial loan guarantee program at the Energy Department, administration officials said on Thursday, even as the program remains under Congressional scrutiny after losing hundreds of millions in taxpayer money on investments in failed green energy start-ups like the solar module maker Solyndra.
This time, though, the program would devote as much as $8 billion to helping industries like coal and oil make cleaner energy. Although the program, which does not require Congressional approval, would support a wide range of technologies, it could help coal-fired power plants find a way to keep their emissions from escaping into the atmosphere, department officials said.
Officials say the federal subsidies are necessary to support the development of technologies that are too complex, unproven and expensive for investors and private companies to pursue on their own, assertions that have already stirred criticism from opponents who see the program as too risky and a misuse of taxpayer money.
The program’s renewal comes just as the administration is releasing stringent environmental rules that would severely restrict air pollution at new coal plants.
“We have a real problem, and that’s, ‘How do we get new technology to market?’ ” said Peter W. Davidson, executive director of the loan program office at the Energy Department. “We partner with industry developers and entrepreneurs to demonstrate a new technology at industrial scale or utility scale, and hopefully once that technology is proven by deployment at scale, we step out of the way,” and let the private debt markets take over.
A spokeswoman for the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, which is controlled by Republicans, who have been critical of the loans in the past, took a skeptical view of the program.
“The D.O.E. loan guarantee program’s history of mismanagement, bankruptcies and failure to deliver the jobs promised raises significant concerns about risking billions in additional taxpayer dollars,” Charlotte Baker said. “We are supportive of efforts to encourage the development of advanced fossil fuel technologies, but we are skeptical that federal loan guarantees are the best way” to bring this about.
Analysts and climate experts also questioned whether the program, which was originally established in 2005 and whose new guidelines will be completed this fall, could make the technologies economically viable on a mass scale. There are currently no ventures in the United States that achieve this, despite years of government-sponsored research and development, according to the Congressional Research Service. An ambitious clean-coal demonstration project called FutureGen, proposed by President George W. Bush in 2003, has yet to advance beyond the early development stages.
“It seems sound policy for the administration to provide these loan guarantees,” said Paul Bledsoe, a former energy aide in the Clinton White House who is now a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund. “The real question becomes, ‘Is that adequate to actually prompt significant numbers of new builds?’ and I think that the answer so far is no.”
The Energy Department’s loan program was created in 2005 under President Bush to spur commercial adoption of innovative technologies or those that avoided, reduced or permanently stored pollutants. In 2008, Congress added another section, for more fuel-efficient cars, and a year later created a temporary program to encourage renewable energy and electrical transmission projects.
That temporary program, which was responsible for the Solyndra loan, has since expired, but the department still has about $50 billion left that could be lent, with a large chunk earmarked for nuclear projects.
The department points to several successful investments from the loan program. Ernest J. Moniz, the energy secretary, has pointed to Tesla Motors’ early repayment of $465 million as an example. Mr. Davidson said that since his office financed the first six large-scale photovoltaic solar farms in 2010 and 2011, 10 big solar power plants had started or finished construction without any federal money. On a $34 billion loan portfolio, the government has lost about $800 million, he said. That’s about 2.3 percent, and only a small fraction of the $10 billion Congress set aside to cover losses.
“We think that number compares extremely well with other lenders,” he said. “The rigor in the policy and procedures that we make borrowers go through is intense and profound and it’s very significant.”
But the loan office has attracted far more attention for failures like Solyndra, which defaulted on a $535 million loan, and Fisker Automotive, the electric car company whose unpaid $168 million loan the Energy Department put up for auction this week. Many Republicans have seized on these missteps in criticizing the program.
“The Obama administration has gotten into the business of picking winners and losers at a significant cost to taxpayers,” Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota, said on Wednesday in calling for legislation to end the part of the program geared toward fuel-efficient cars.
Now, with clean energy and conservation programs stymied in the legislature and President Obama emphasizing the need to pursue avenues that do not require Congressional approval, the loan guarantee office is gearing up.
With its focus on conventional sources of energy rather than renewables like solar and wind, the program has “a chance to take so much of the focus off Solyndra and get it onto some new and exciting opportunities,” said Dan W. Reicher, executive director of the Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance at Stanford University and an adviser to Mr. Moniz.
The revived program is broader than its predecessor, which focused on capturing carbon emissions from coal plants and on turning coal into gas. Mr. Davidson said officials were looking for projects that reduced carbon and other gases along the various stages of energy production, like cutting methane emissions or water usage in the natural gas extraction process known as “fracking” as well as retrofitting existing coal-fired power plants.
There had been little interest in loan guarantees or private investment for limiting carbon emissions, said Daniel J. Weiss, a senior fellow and director of climate strategy at the Center for American Progress, a liberal policy group, because of a “lack of limits on carbon pollution from power plants and other industrial sources.” He added: “President Obama’s pending carbon pollution standards for power plants should spark more interest in this program.”
That could come from some in the coal industry, which has already had a hard time competing with cheap natural gas, and would have trouble competing with renewable energy sources like solar and wind under the proposed environmental regulations.
“If you do coal the right way, it’s so expensive that wind and solar beat it on the markets, and that’s why the guys who want to do coal the right way need their policy support” with loan guarantees, research assistance and tax incentives, said Michael E. Webber, deputy director of the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. “Wind and solar are big kids and almost competitive on their own already, but the advanced fossil and small nuclear are still years away.”
Still, some energy professionals questioned how much of an effect the program itself would have on the markets.
“It turns, potentially, a nonstarter into an economically interesting proposition,” said Kenneth W. Hansen, a lawyer at Chadbourne & Parke who leads its practice using the energy loan program. “If you can bring down the financing costs, that brings down the cost of the project, makes it more feasible. Whether or not it’s enough, I don’t know.”
© 2013 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/20/business/energy-environment/us-revives-aid-program-for-clean-energy.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/20/business/energy-environment/us-revives-aid-program-for-clean-energy.html?pagewanted=all ]
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Making Money Off the Poor
By THOMAS B. EDSALL
September 17, 2013, 10:48 pm
A lot of people are making money off the poor. The Center for Responsible Lending [ http://www.responsiblelending.org/ ], a North Carolina nonprofit that tracks predatory lending practices, issued a revealing report [ http://www.responsiblelending.org/state-of-lending/reports/10-Payday-Loans.pdf ] earlier this month on payday loans, which carry annual interest rates as high as 400 percent. Using data compiled by [ http://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/201304_cfpb_payday-dap-whitepaper.pdf ] the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the center found that most borrowers repeatedly rolled over or renewed loans.
The center’s analysis also found that “the median annual income of a borrower was $22,476, with an average loan amount of $350.” Most crucially, though,
the median consumer in our sample conducted 10 transactions over the 12-month period and paid a total of $458 in fees, which do not include the loan principal. One-quarter of borrowers paid $781 or more in fees.
You might think these companies are making enough money from their usurious interest rates, but the center’s report [ http://www.responsiblelending.org/state-of-lending/reports/10-Payday-Loans.pdf ] makes it clear that payday lenders are dependent for profits on borrowers who take out repeated loans:
The leading payday industry trade association — the Community Financial Services Association (C.F.S.A.) — states in a recent letter to the C.F.P.B.,“{i}n any large, mature payday loan portfolio, loans to repeat borrowers generally constitute between 70 and 90% of the portfolio, and for some lenders, even more.”
The center cites the following industry analysis, which is remarkably clear on how this scheme plays out in practice:
“In a state with a $15 [fee] per $100 [loan] rate, an operator … will need a new customer to take out 4 to 5 loans before that customer becomes profitable. Indeed, Dan Feehan, C.E.O. of Cash America, remarked at a Jeffries Financial Services Conference in 2007, “[T]he theory in the business is [that] you’ve got to get that customer in, work to turn him into a repetitive customer, long-term customer, because that’s really where the profitability is.” Lender marketing materials offer incentives to promote frequent loan usage, such as discounts to promote repeat borrowing.
Payday loans, the report concludes, “create a debt treadmill that makes struggling families worse off than they were before they received a payday loan.”
The payday loan industry operates out of storefronts in poor neighborhoods, but a share of its profits filter into some of the nation’s most prestigious banks.
Jessica Silver-Greenberg, a banking and consumer finance reporter for The Times, disclosed on Feb. 23 [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/business/major-banks-aid-in-payday-loans-banned-by-states.html?_r=0&pagewanted=allJ (about 70% of the way down at/see {linked in} http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=85141987 and preceding and following)] that major banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, have been acting as key intermediaries, allowing online lenders to directly collect money from the bank accounts of those borrowers who have accounts.
The intermediary role of the banks is particularly controversial, Silver-Greenberg writes, because
a growing number of the [payday] lenders have set up online operations in more hospitable states or far-flung locales like Belize, Malta and the West Indies to more easily evade statewide caps on interest rates.
Banks have been profiting from their customers’ “shaky financial footing,” according to Silver-Greenberg, by collecting “a cascade of fees from problems like overdrafts.”
The Times financial columnist Gretchen Morgenson separately reported [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/08/business/find-the-loan-behind-the-loans.html?pagewanted=all ] on Sept. 7 that court papers filed in 2007 revealed that Deutsche Bank and Citigroup were providing financial banking to Cash Call, a payday lender specializing in loans to the working poor at annual interest rates as high as 343 percent. (Spokespeople for both Deutsche Bank and Citi told Morgenson that they no longer did business with Cash Call.)
Another of the multiple pathways eager moneylenders have found to profit from the cash needs of the poor is through title loans to low-income car owners who need to make monthly payments. Title loans offer lenders another chance to collect astronomical interest rates. In a Feb. 28 report [ http://www.responsiblelending.org/other-consumer-loans/car-title-loans/research-analysis/CRL-Car-Title-exec.pdf ], the center found that the average title loan, secured by an automobile, is $951, and carries a monthly interest rate of 25 percent. That’s 300 percent a year. Customers typically renew these loan eight times.
The center determined that for a typical borrower the total amount paid in interest and principal for a car loan of $951 is $3,093.
•
It is not only the middle class and the wealthy who exploit the poor. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that at times the poor exploit one another.
For his doctoral research in 2008 and 2009, Jacob Avery, now a professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine, spent 17 months with homeless men in Atlantic City. What he found was a hierarchy of exploitation.
Avery describes the way that cabdrivers would purchase SNAP food stamp cards — at half their face value — from homeless men desperate for cash to buy liquor or drugs. Other homeless men, who qualify for a meager supplemental-security stipend, took advantage of people with even less money, using their S.S.I. income to buy cartons of cigarettes that they then sold to their fellow homeless men for 50 cents a cigarette.
As Avery dove deeper into his research, he came to see the organization of society as a whole “like layers on a cake, with those at the highest level of each layer exploiting those below.”
The exploitation of those on the bottom is also revealed in the work of Gretchen Purser, an assistant professor of sociology at Syracuse University. For her dissertation, Purser spent time [ http://sociology.ucdavis.edu/events/the-circle-of-dispossession-evicting-the-urban-poor/pi-workshop-paper.pdf ] with a group of largely “homeless, formerly incarcerated, African-American men” who were paid $6.15 an hour by a major Baltimore property management company to evict tenants behind in their rent.
Purser writes that while poor, homeless African-Americans evicting poor, soon-to-be homeless African-Americans would seem to present “an opportunity for solidaristic identification amongst the poor,” it didn’t work out that way.
Laborers on eviction crews tend to espouse the same disparaging characterizations of tenants as do the property managers who hire them, thus reinforcing the belief that eviction is rooted in the individual moral deficiencies of the tenant. In this social drama of eviction, the vertical conflict between landlord and tenant is subtly transmuted into a lateral conflict amongst the propertyless.
•
Those profiteering off the most vulnerable are nothing if not innovative.
In a Washington Post series [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2013/09/08/left-with-nothing/ ] that began running on Sept. 8, Debbie Cenziper, Michael Sallah and Steven Rich disclose how an effort by the District of Columbia to collect overdue property taxes has turned into a bonanza for enterprising real estate operators:
For decades, the District placed liens on properties when homeowners failed to pay their bills, then sold those liens at public auctions to mom-and-pop investors who drew a profit by charging owners interest on top of the tax debt until the money was repaid.
But on the watch of local leaders, the program has morphed into a predatory system of debt collection for well-financed, out-of-town companies that turned $500 delinquencies into $5,000 debts — then foreclosed on homes when families couldn’t pay.
Real estate in Washington has been booming, leading to greater interest in buying tax liens:
As the housing market soared, such investors scooped up liens in every corner of the city, then started charging homeowners thousands in legal fees and other costs that far exceeded their original tax bills, with rates for attorneys reaching $450 an hour.
The Post series focused on Bennie Coleman, a 76-year-old former Marine suffering from dementia, who lost his home in 2011 to foreclosure. The process began in 2006 when he failed to pay a $134 tax bill, which was then sold to a Maryland company. In 2010, the Maryland company, claiming Coleman owed a total of $4,999 in legal fees and expenses, 37 times the original tax bill, won a court-ordered foreclosure. “Not only did Coleman lose his $197,000 house, but he also was stripped of the equity because tax lien purchasers are entitled to everything,” the Post reported.
While predatory practices and rising levels of inequality have been gaining media attention, poverty itself [ http://www.brookings.edu/events/2013/09/17-census-data-poverty-income ] has been the subject of news coverage less often.
In May, the University of Michigan’s National Poverty Center found [ http://npc.umich.edu/publications/u/2013-06-npc-working-paper.pdf ] that 1.65 million households in the United States — with 3.55 million children living in them — are now in “extreme poverty.” In 1996, there were 636,000 extremely poor households. The center uses the World Bank definition of extreme poverty — “surviving on less than $2 per day, per person, each month,” or $8 dollars a day for a family of four.
Since the start of the recovery in 2009, the number of homeless people in the New York City shelter system has grown steadily [ http://www.coalitionforthehomeless.org/pages/basic-facts-about-homelessness-new-york-city-data-and-charts ], reaching a high (Fig. 1) of 50,926 people in June 2013, according to the Coalition for the Homeless.
Figure 1.
New York City Department of Homeless Services and Human Resources Administration and NYCStat, Shelter Census Reports
Pending applications for New York City public housing have reached 227,000 [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/24/nyregion/for-many-seeking-public-housing-the-wait-can-be-endless.html?pagewanted=all ], and the queue moves slowly. Only 5,400 to 5,800 open up annually. Waiting lists across the country are growing.
Payday lending, title loans, tax-lien foreclosures and the growing scarcity of affordable housing exacerbate the anxiety and insecurity of the poor. Inflation hurts, too. In contrast to the relatively low official inflation rate [ http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm ] calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the centrist American Institute for Economic Research has developed the Everyday Price Index [ https://www.aier.org/article/7557-epi-reflects-basic-economic-change ]. According to a report [ http://business.time.com/2012/03/06/youre-already-the-victim-of-inflation/ ] in Time magazine using the Everyday Price Index, in 2011 the official Consumer Price Index rose 2.9 percent, but the cost of certain basic necessities rose much more: meat and milk rose more than 9 percent; coffee, 19 percent; peanut butter, 27 percent; heating oil, 18 percent; children’s clothes for boys, 6 percent, and for girls, 9 percent.
The rising price of milk and peanut butter is just one facet of the inflation that takes a higher share of a poor family’s resources than those of a middle or upper income family. Not only are the poor disproportionately exploited, the very fact of being poor creates extraordinary vulnerability to countless major and minor daily roadblocks. Recent research [ http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/books/scarcity-why-having-too-little-means-so-much-by-sendhil-mullainathan-and-eldar-shafir/2007116.article ] by Sendhil Mullainathan of Harvard and Eldar Shafir of Princeton [ http://us.macmillan.com/scarcity/SendhilMullainathan ] demonstrates [ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/sep/26/it-captures-your-mind/?pagination=false ] that, as a post on Truthdig put it:
There is a strong connection between scarce resources and cognition: The more a person struggles financially, the less he or she can channel brain processes to completing other tasks. When you can’t make ends meet, the weight of worry occupies a large portion of the mind.
This doesn’t just mean those who suffer because of poverty are just stressed but rather, incapable of dedicating themselves to other endeavors because their minds are so fully engrossed in finding ways to survive. It goes beyond the ability to pay bills, and stretches out to other important everyday responsibilities, such as parenting, going to night school or even remembering to take prescribed medicine.
In the current political climate, there is little prospect for a major initiative to improve life chances for those at the bottom. But there is more we can do: enact restraints on predatory lending and corrupt eviction procedures, for one. Even more important would be to revive public discussion about the multiple impediments that restrict opportunity for those who are already confronted with hurdles to advancement far higher than those facing the affluent.
*
Related Posts from Opinionator
Land of Plenty (of Government)
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/02/land-of-plenty-of-government/
Inequality Is Holding Back the Recovery
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/19/inequality-is-holding-back-the-recovery/
When Lenders Won’t Listen
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/10/when-lenders-wont-listen/
Foreclosure Is Not an Option
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/06/foreclosure-is-not-an-option/
What’s Good for G.M. Is Good For Homeowners
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/19/whats-good-for-g-m-is-good-for-homeowners/
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© 2013 The New York Times Company
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/17/making-money-off-the-poor/ [with comments]
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Rich Poor Gap
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-danziger/rich-poor-gap_b_3968794.html [with comment]
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It's Time for Some Straight Talk About the GOP Budget
By Richard (RJ) Eskow
Posted: 09/20/2013 1:01 am
When it comes to the economy, the White House is talking tough to the Republicans ... about the debt ceiling. It's true that the threat to shut down the government by refusing to honor its debt obligations is downright un-American [ http://ourfuture.org/20130918/the-houses-un-american-activities ]. The Administration's right to call them out for that. But there's a larger question: Who's going to give the American people some straight talk about the GOP's economic ideas?
Forget the debt ceiling for a moment, if you can. Forget the GOP's attempt to shut down the government over the Affordable Care Act. Who is going to explain to the American people how profoundly misguided, and even immoral, the Republicans' entire economic agenda has become?
Granted, it's a big job. First, there's the House's underhanded "continuing resolution," which freezes in place "sequestration" cuts that are $70 billion [ http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/budget/report/2013/09/10/73749/the-dirty-truth-about-boehners-clean-continuing-resolution/ ] below the figure which both parties agreed to in prior negotiations. Apparently trustworthiness is not a strong trait among today's Republicans.
Then there's the wanton cruelty in this budget: The cuts to the TRIO [ http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/09/19/2647351/trio-programs-college-sequestration/ ] program which helps poor Americans get a higher education and better themselves. Reductions in the SNAP program for hungry Americans, which provides the average recipient with $133 per month [ http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=3744 ] in assistance.
Sen. Bernie Sanders [ http://www.sanders.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/SandersCR.pdf ] lists some of the effects of sequester-based cuts: 57,000 children losing access to Head Start programs. Tens of thousands of seniors dropped from Meals on Wheels. Cuts to housing assistance for the elderly, disabled, and others that will affect 147,000 households. 70,000 college students without a work-study program. Cancer patients losing Medicare-financed treatments. Roughly 400,000 elderly and other low-income households losing heating assistance during the upcoming winter months.
If the GOP's Continuing Resolution is adopted, more cuts will follow: Head Start and the heating-assistance program will suffer further cuts. Education funds for low-income children and the disabled will be slashed. Not that the Republicans are entirely ungenerous: Their plan increases spending for defense by $20 billion, most of which will wind up in the pockets of wealthy defense contractors.
That's the cruelty in the Republican economic plan. Then there's the stupidity. The Congressional Budget Office has already estimated that sequestration cuts will cost the economy 900,000 jobs and shrink our national economy by 0.7 percent.
For reference, that's 900,000 jobs out of an economy that's in desperate need of more, not, less employment. We're far from a recovery when it comes to unemployment in this country:
And that's 0.7 percent out of an economy that, with some wise stewardship, might grow instead -- and in a way that boosts income for the 99 percent, not just the wealthiest among us:
When it comes to the deficit Republicans should be declaring victory, not calling for more spending cuts. After all, the deficit is plummeting:
The problem is, it's falling too fast. Lost jobs and lost wages add up to a shrinking economy.
The President and his staff are certainly taking a firmer stance on the negotiation process. Gene Sperling, head of the President's Council of Economic Advisors, told reporters this weekend that President Obama "is not going to negotiate over whether we should be paying our bills."
And Ezra Klein, a reliable reflector of White House moods, said this [ http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2013/09/ezra-terrified-framing.html ] on MSNBC: "The White House has complete religion on the debt ceiling... This White House does not want their legacy to be (that) they set in motion the chain of events that led to America's role as an economic corner stone of the world being degraded."
But those objections are about process, not economic policy. On the fiscal front, the White House is boasting about deficit reduction [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/17/white-house-jobs-deficit_n_3943917.html ] instead of focusing on the case for urgently-needed spending. And even as Boehner raises the stakes with his Continuing Resolution, both the Senate and White House budget proposals hew faithfully to the stark and austere budget cuts agreed upon in the last round of negotiations.
If the Democrats stick to that approach, once again they'll be negotiating against themselves.
They're right to oppose Boehner's attempt to extend the sequestration cuts. But the President is only intermittently making the case for the increased government investment - in infrastructure, education, and other job-creating programs - that's necessary to get this economy back on track. He should drop the deficit boasting, which only reinforces the right's flawed logic, and stick to discussing the additional spending this country so urgently needs.
When it comes to economic substance, rather than legislative process, this still tends to be a one-sided conversation. The conservative monologue is not being met with a singular, clear counter-argument based on economic common sense.
Sure, they'll all have to try to work out an agreement at some point. But before they do that, Democrats should take a tip from Tip O'Neill. The President's team loves to celebrate the former Democratic Speaker for "having a beer" with President Ronald Reagan and working through tough fiscal issues with the conservative icon.
But O'Neill always began by making it clear where he and his party stood, and how deeply they disagreed with Reagan and the Republicans. He wasn't afraid to describe Reagan as "a cheerleader for selfishness" or to pronounce his budget proposals "dead on arrival."
If Reagan was a cheerleader for selfishness, Boehner & Company are pit bulls for it. They need to be opposed forcefully, in plain and direct language. Before the deal-making begins, the American people deserve a little truth-telling.
It's good to hear the President and his party explain why the legislative process must be protected from Republican extremism. It's time for them to do the same thing for the economy.
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc. (emphasis in original)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rj-eskow/its-time-for-some-straigh_b_3959125.html [with comments]
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Red State Pain
By TIMOTHY EGAN
September 19, 2013, 9:00 pm
Rick Santorum is right. Not far right, crazy right, piously right or, on most issues, never right. He is all of those things. But under the rubric that even a blind pig can find an acorn every now and then, the moral scourge of the Republican Party is on to something — a greater truth.
Earlier this summer, Santorum said Republicans look like the party of plutocrats, stiffing working people and the poor. The 2012 convention, he noted, was a parade of one-percenters, masters of the universe and company owners.
“But not a single — not a single — factory worker went out there,” he said. “Not a single janitor, waitress or person who worked in that company! We didn’t care about them.”
They still don’t care, and the darkening events of what looks to be an autumn of catastrophic failure by a Congress stuffed with extremists will prove Santorum’s point ever more.
Late Thursday, despite pleas from Catholic bishops and evangelicals, the Republican-dominated House passed a bill that would deprive 3.8 million people of assistance to buy food next year. By coincidence, this is almost the exact amount of people who have managed to remain just above the poverty line because of that very aid, the Census Bureau reported a few days ago.
A Republican majority that refuses to govern on other issues found the votes to shove nearly 4 million people back into poverty, joining 46.5 million at a desperation line that has failed to improve since the dawn of the Great Recession. It’s a heartless bill, aimed to hurt. Republicans don’t see it that way, of course. They think too many of their fellow citizens are cheats and loafers, dining out on lobster.
Certainly there are frauds among the one in seven Americans getting help from the program formerly known as food stamps. But who are the others, the easy-to-ignore millions who will feel real pain with these cuts? As it turns out, most of them live in Red State, Real People America. Among the 254 counties where food stamp use doubled during the economic collapse, Mitt Romney won 213 of them, Bloomberg News reported. Half of Owsley County, Ky., is receiving federal food aid. Half.
You can’t get any more Team Red than Owsley County; it is 98 percent white, 81 percent Republican, per the 2012 presidential election. And that hardscrabble region has the distinction of being the poorest in the nation, with the lowest household income of any county in the United States, the Census Bureau found in 2010.
Since nearly half of Owsley’s residents also live below the poverty line, it would seem logical that the congressman who represents the area, Hal Rogers, a Republican, would be interested in, say, boosting income for poor working folks. But Rogers joined every single Republican in the House earlier this year in voting down a plan to raise the minimum wage over the next two years to $10.10 an hour.
The argument holding back higher pay — a theory that Republicans accept without challenge — is that raising wages for the poorest workers would be bad for companies, and bad for hiring.
But experience debunks this convenient political shelter. Washington State has the highest state-mandated minimum wage in the country, $9.19 an hour, and an unemployment rate that has been running below the national average. It’s not all Starbucks, Amazon and Microsoft in Seattle, either. In the pine-forested sliver of eastern Washington, a high-wage state bumps right up against low-wage Idaho. Fast-food outlets flourish in Washington, the owners have said, because they can retain workers longer, while Idaho struggles to find qualified people to hold entry-level jobs.
Costco, they of the golf-cart-size containers of gummy bears, has long paid wages and benefits well above the industry average for big-box stores, and it hasn’t hurt the bottom line. The stock is up 79 percent over the last five years. Costco, to its credit, is urging Congress to raise the minimum wage. But that’s one big business Republicans will not listen to, because it breaks with the heartless credo of the new G.O.P.
The movement for higher minimum pay is raging through the states just now, with ballot initiatives and legislation plans. The people, in this case, will have to circumvent a Congress bent on actively trying to hurt the poor.
Republicans have more pain in store for their base in poor white America. Shutting down government, for one, will cause a ripple effect that will be hardest on those living paycheck-to-paycheck. The biggest obsession, the Moby-Dick of the right wing, is making sure millions of people do not have access to affordable health care. This week, Republicans drew the line for any doubters: they will wreck lives to blow up the health care law.
You have to wonder where this animus for those in the economic basement comes from. It’s too easy to say Republicans hate the poor. Limousine liberals can seem just as insensitive. And if Republicans were offering some genuinely creative approaches to helping the 26 million Americans who self-identified as “lower class” in a recent survey, they would deserve a listen. Tax cuts, the party’s solution to everything, do nothing for people who pay no federal income tax.
What’s at work here is the poison of ideology. Underlying the food assistance fight is the idea that the poor are lazy, and deserve their fate — the Ayn Rand philosophy. You don’t see this same reasoning applied to those Red State agricultural-industrialists living high off farm subsidies, and that’s why Republicans have separated the two major recipient groups of federal food aid. Subsidized cotton growers cannot possibly be equated with someone trying to stretch macaroni into three meals.
But Republican House leaders do have some empathy — for themselves. National Review reported this week that Representative Phil Gingrey, a hard-right conservative who wants to be the next senator from Georgia, complained in a private meeting about being “stuck here making $172,000 a year.” To say the least, he doesn’t yet qualify for food assistance.
© 2013 The New York Times Company
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/19/red-state-pain/ [with comments]
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The Mismeasure of Poverty
Ana Benaroya
THE Census Bureau reported yesterday that the poverty rate in America held stable between 2011 and 2012, at about 15 percent. According to the official measure [ http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/income_wealth/cb13-165.html ], poverty today is higher [ http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL33069.pdf ] than it was in 1973, when it reached a historical low of 11.1 percent.
To many, this dismaying fact suggests that taxpayers waste billions of dollars a year fighting a war on poverty that has been largely lost. As Representative Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, said earlier this year, “We have spent $15 trillion from the federal government fighting poverty, and look at where we are, the highest poverty rates in a generation, 15 percent of Americans in poverty.”
But this position is wrong, for two reasons. The first is that the official measure is misleading — it measures only cash income, and it does not count benefits from many programs that help the poor. If they were counted, the rate would be closer to 11 percent.
Consider the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps, which was first put into nationwide use in the 1960s [ http://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/rules/Legislation/about.htm ]. The immediate benefits are easy to calculate: a dollar of SNAP subsidies spent on food frees up a dollar for low-income families to spend on rent, utilities or other needs. When SNAP benefits are counted as income, they lift almost four million people [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/09/17/4-million-more-people-would-be-poor-if-it-werent-for-food-stamps/ ] above the poverty line.
And SNAP benefits not only reduce food insecurity and poverty this year; they also reduce poverty in the next generation. Recent research that tracked children into adulthood found that families’ access to food stamps improved their infants’ health and birth weight. Children who benefited from the program later posted better health, higher educational attainment, less heart disease and, for women, greater earnings and less reliance on welfare as adults.
The earned-income tax credit is also ignored in calculating the poverty rate. Yet this program offers working low-income families with children about $3,000 a year. When these tax refunds are counted, they reduce the number of people in poverty [ http://www.offthechartsblog.org/category/federal-tax/earned-income-tax-credit/ ] by about 5.5 million people.
Social Security benefits are counted in the official measure, but their large antipoverty effect receives little attention. Without these benefits, the elderly poverty rate would have been more than 44 percent, instead of the actual rate of less than 9 percent.
The next time critics of the safety net claim that we fought a war on poverty and poverty won, remind them that without these and other programs, poverty would be much higher.
But, says the critic, if all these programs have such broad effects, why has the poverty rate stayed so frustratingly stable? That’s the second flaw in the conventional wisdom.
All things being equal, such programs, whether we count them or not, should have reduced the official poverty rate across generations. But all things have not been equal. Although these programs help the poor, poverty remains high because inequality of economic outcomes has increased sharply since the 1970s.
Before income inequality took off, the poverty rate fell more rapidly with G.D.P. growth. But while the economy grew by 2.8 percent in 2012 and corporate profits went up as a share of national income, the earnings of full-time workers, median household income and the poverty rate barely changed.
Antipoverty programs do help, but their recipients don’t move forward because they no longer benefit much from that other great poverty-ameliorating factor, economic growth.
That’s not to say that growth is no longer necessary for reducing poverty. But in our gilded age of inequality, growth alone is insufficient.
A few changes would make a difference. First, a poverty measure that incorporated all anti-poverty policies would show that the safety net is more effective than critics say, and would show how painful cuts to those programs could be.
In fact, the Census Bureau has already developed a supplemental measure that reveals the importance of these programs to low-income families. But when it is released next month, it will receive far less attention than the official rate from policy makers and the press.
Second, more benefits from growth must reach the poor, and the best way to do that is through matching robust antipoverty measures with policies that lower the unemployment rate and increase wages. During the full employment years of the late 1990s, even low wages rose in step with productivity [ http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0104525.html ], and poverty fell more sharply than it had in a generation. A minimum-wage increase helped then, and an increase now would help again.
Lowering poverty means both recognizing the successes of safety net programs we now have and devising new policies that can spread the gains generated by economic growth. If we don’t, then we will continue to face poverty rates that are unacceptably high, and wonder why we can’t do anything about them.
Sheldon H. Danziger [ http://www.russellsage.org/blog/sheldon-h-danziger-named-new-president ] is the president of the Russell Sage Foundation and a co-editor of “Legacies of the War on Poverty [ https://www.russellsage.org/publications/legacies-war-poverty ].”
© 2013 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/18/opinion/the-mismeasure-of-poverty.html [with comments]
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Republicans: We Were Too Nice to the Hungry, But We’ve Fixed That
By Jonathan Chait
September 20, 2013
Republicans hate domestic spending, but their hatred is not completely indiscriminate. Some programs offend them more, and others less. The general pattern is that social programs offend Republicans to the degree that they benefit the poor, sick, or otherwise unfortunate. The struggle over the farm bill is not the biggest policy dispute in American politics, but it is the one that most clearly reveals the priorities and ideological identity of the contemporary GOP.
The farm bill traditionally combines agriculture subsidies (which hands out subsidies to people on the arbitrary basis that the business they own produces food as opposed to some other goods or services) with food stamps (which hands out subsidies to people on the highly nonarbitrary basis that they’re poor enough to likely have trouble scraping together regular meals). Conservative Republicans revolted against the normally automatic passage, insisting that the cuts to food stamps — $20 billion — did not slice deeply enough. Last night the House rectified its failure by cutting food stamps by $40 billion.
The putative rationale for the food-stamp cuts is that eligibility standards have loosened, or that it encourages sloth. Jonathan Cohn [ http://www.newrepublic.com/blog/plank/104921/republican-conservative-cut-snap-food-stamps-obama-bush ] makes quick work of these claims, and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities [ http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=4009 ] makes long, detailed work of them. Click on those links if you want a blow-by-blow refutation. The upshot is that food stamps are a meager subsidy, of less than $1.40 per meal, for people either stuck in very low paid jobs or unable to find work at all. Their cost has increased because the recession has increased the supply of poor, desperate people. Republicans have offered specious comparisons to welfare reform, but that law both offered funds for job training and was passed in a full-employment economy. Neither of these conditions holds true of the GOP’s food-stamp cuts, whose only significant result would be the first-order effect of making very poor people hungrier.
CNN reported [ http://thelead.blogs.cnn.com/2013/09/19/congresswoman-outs-gop-saying-they-slash-food-stamps-while-dining-out/ ] last night that Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas, a Republican supporter of the bill, received a daily meal allowance of $127.41, or 91 times the average daily food-stamp benefit. Lucas is also notable as a recipient of the agriculture subsidies his committee doles out: He and his wife have collected more than $40,000 worth [ http://newsok.com/oklahoma-rep.-frank-lucas-criticized-for-taking-farm-subsidies-while-delaying-food-stamp-renewal/article/3864804 ].
We'll never convince you to take responsibility for your own lives, but that's okay.
It’s the juxtaposition of the two programs that so clearly exposes the party’s agenda. Anti-government ideology can justify even the most vicious cuts to the safety net. It can’t justify the massive socialist scheme that is agriculture policy. And, to be fair, conservative intellectuals generally don’t justify agriculture socialism. But the Republican Party certainly does. The ultraconservative Republican Study Committee recently banned the Heritage Foundation [ http://www.nationaljournal.com/congress/republican-lawmakers-retaliate-against-heritage-foundation-20130828 ] from its meetings because Heritage denounced the GOP’s farm subsidies. There is a grim hilarity here: Republicans punished Heritage for its one technocratically sane position.
Henry Olsen has an admirable screed [ http://www.nationalreview.com/node/358914/print ] in National Review assailing Republicans for their lack of interest in cutting agriculture subsidies even as they go to war on food stamps. Even so, Olsen understates the case in crucial ways. He cites the budgetary cost of agriculture subsidies versus food stamps, but neglects to mention the non-budgetary cost of agriculture subsidies: Much of their cost comes in the form of higher food prices.
Olsen also neglects to mention that House Republicans are not only locking in high agriculture subsidies [ http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2013/07/17/GOP-Plants-Seeds-of-Fiscal-Disaster-with-Farm-Bill ], they are throwing more money at agriculture than Democrats want to spend. Obama has attacked the GOP farm-subsidy bill for spending too much [ http://bigstory.ap.org/article/white-house-says-more-farm-subsidy-cuts-needed ]. Here is the one chunk of social spending where Republicans are not only failing to issue hostage threats to secure the cuts they demand, they are also refusing to cut spending as much as Barack Obama asks. And the program they pick to defend is, on the substantive merits, the most unjustifiable program of any significant scale in the federal budget.
It is also one that accrues to disproportionately wealthy and overwhelmingly white recipients. (As opposed to Obamacare, whose beneficiaries are disproportionately poor [ http://www.commonwealthfund.org/Charts/Report/Losing-Ground--How-the-Loss-of-Adequate-Health-Insurance-Is-Burdening-Working-Families/U/Uninsured-Adults-Are-Disproportionately-Poor--Young--and-Racial-Ethnic-Minorities.aspx ] and non-white [ http://kff.org/uninsured/state-indicator/distribution-by-raceethnicity-2/ ].) Olsen, as he no doubt has to do to publish in National Review, presents the contrast as an unfortunate coincidence:
The conservative war on food stamps is the most baffling political move of the year. Conservatives have suffered for years from the stereotype that they are heartless Scrooge McDucks more concerned with our money than other people’s lives. Yet in this case, conservatives make the taking of food from the mouths of the genuinely hungry a top priority. What gives? And why are conservatives overlooking a far more egregious abuse of taxpayer dollars in the farm bill?
It’s not baffling, nor is the notion that the Republican Party protects the class interests of the rich a “stereotype.” It’s an analysis that persuasively explains the facts.
Indeed, it’s the only analysis that persuasively explains the facts. I’d prefer to abolish agriculture subsidies completely while keeping in place (or boosting) food rations for the poor. A libertarian might want to abolish both programs, a socialist might want to keep both. I’d disagree but attribute the disagreement to philosophical differences. What possible basis can be found to justify preserving subsidies for affluent farmers while cutting them for the poor? What explanation offers itself other than the party’s commitment to waging class war?
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Related
Household Incomes Remain Flat Despite Improving Economy (September 18, 2013)
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/18/us/median-income-and-poverty-rate-hold-steady-census-bureau-finds.html
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Copyright © 2013, New York Media LLC (emphasis in original)
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/09/republicans-we-were-too-nice-to-the-hungry.html [with comments] [linked at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/20/republicans_n_3964866.html (with {over 8,000} comments)]
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The Money Behind the Shutdown Crisis
Editorial
Published: September 17, 2013
Representative Aaron Schock [ http://schock.house.gov/ ] is a conservative Republican from Illinois, but not conservative enough for the hard-right activist group Club for Growth, which is seeking someone to run against him [ http://www.primarymycongressman.com/rep-aaron-schock-il-18-2/ ] in next year’s primary.
His crime? In 2011, he voted to increase the debt ceiling, and, in 2012, he voted for a stopgap spending bill that prevented a government shutdown. In neither case did he demand the defunding of health care reform.
Club for Growth and other extremist groups consider a record like his an unforgivable failure, and they are raising and spending millions to make sure that no Republicans will take similar positions in the next few weeks when the fiscal year ends and the debt limit expires.
If you’re wondering why so many House Republicans seem to believe they can force President Obama to accept a “defunding” of the health care reform law by threatening a government shutdown or a default, it’s because these groups have promised to inflict political pain on any Republican official who doesn’t go along.
Heritage Action and the Senate Conservatives Fund have each released scorecards [ http://www.dontfundobamacare.com/ ] showing which lawmakers have pledged to “defund Obamacare.” When a senator like Tom Coburn of Oklahoma [ http://www.coburn.senate.gov/public/ ] refuses to pledge, right-wing activists are told: “Please contact Senator Coburn and tell him it’s dishonest to say you oppose Obamacare, but then vote to fund it. Tell him he swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution.”
Mr. Schock and 10 other lawmakers considered suspiciously squishy by the Club for Growth were designated as RINO’s (Republicans in name only), and the club has vowed to find primary opponents and support them with cash — a formidable threat considering that it spent $18 million backing conservative candidates in the 2012 cycle. Americans for Prosperity, a Koch brothers group that has already spent millions on ads fighting health reform, is beginning a new campaign [ http://americansforprosperity.org/newsroom/americans-for-prosperity-launches-new-efforts-against-obamacare-with-exempt-me-too/ ] to delay the law’s effects.
These groups, all financed with secret and unlimited money, feed on chaos and would like nothing better than to claim credit for pushing Washington into another crisis. Winning an ideological victory is far more important to them than the severe economic effects of a shutdown or, worse, a default, which could [sic - would] shatter the credit markets [and crash our/the world's economy].
They also have another reason for their attacks: fund-raising. All their Web sites pushing the defunding scheme include a big “donate” button for the faithful to push. “With your donation, you will be sending a strong message: Obamacare must be defunded now,” says the Web site of the National Liberty Federation [ https://secure.piryx.com/donate/ovaM0bdJ/National-Liberty-Federation/defundobamacare ], another “social welfare” group that sees dollar signs in shutting down the government.
Brian Walsh, a longtime Republican operative, recently noted in U.S. News and World Report [ http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/brian-walsh/2013/09/12/the-senate-conservative-fund-and-the-heritage-foundation-profit-from-attacking-republicans ] that the right is now spending more money attacking Republicans than the Democrats are. “Money begets TV ads, which begets even more money for these groups’ personal coffers,” he wrote. “Pointing fingers and attacking Republicans is apparently a very profitable fund-raising business.”
It may be good for their bank accounts, but the combination of unlimited money and rigid ideology is proving toxic for the most basic functioning of government.
*
Related
Budget Office Warns That Deficits Will Rise Again Because Cuts Are Misdirected (September 18, 2013
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/18/us/congressional-budget-office-predicts-unsustainable-debt.html
*
© 2013 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/18/opinion/the-money-behind-the-shutdown-crisis.html [with comments]
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'Defund Obamacare' Push Filled Coffers Of Senate Conservatives Fund
By Paul Blumenthal
Posted: 09/20/2013 12:43 pm EDT | Updated: 09/20/2013 1:27 pm EDT
WASHINGTON -- The Senate Conservatives Fund, a political action committee connected to Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint, raised its largest-ever monthly total for a non-election year this August while running a campaign pressuring Republican senators and representatives to defund Obamacare.
The PAC raised more than $1.5 million [ http://query.nictusa.com/cgi-bin/dcdev/forms/C00448696/888598/ ] in August, according to its Federal Election Commission filing, with $1.3 million of that sum coming from small donors giving under $200 each. The small-donor haul is the largest-ever monthly small-donor total brought in by the Senate Conservatives Fund.
This fundraising bonanza came as the PAC joined efforts by the Heritage Foundation and its sister 501(c)(4) nonprofit Heritage Action, along with a series of tea party groups, to defund Obamacare. Money was pumped into an advertising and publicity campaign that, with the vocal support of Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Mike Lee (R-Utah), sought to block all spending measures if they did not defund President Barack Obama's signature health care law.
This campaign culminated on Friday with the House voting [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/20/government-shutdown-vote_n_3961908.html ] to strip funding for Obamacare in its version of the continuing resolution needed to keep the government open through Dec. 16. This vote sets up a fight with the Senate and a potential government shutdown. Senate Republicans have warned that they lack the votes to pass a resolution defunding the health care law, and Republicans and others have called out the anti-Obamacare push led by DeMint as merely a fundraising exercise [ http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2013/09/12/a_user_s_guide_to_the_many_conservative_groups_grubbing_money_from_the_defund.html ].
Former National Republican Senatorial Committee spokesman Brian Walsh wrote in U.S. News & World Report [ http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/brian-walsh/2013/09/12/the-senate-conservative-fund-and-the-heritage-foundation-profit-from-attacking-republicans ], "You see, money begets TV ads which begets even more money for these groups' personal coffers. Pointing fingers and attacking Republicans is apparently a very profitable fundraising business."
The money haul has been aided by the Senate Conservatives Fund's Don't Fund Obamacare website [ http://www.dontfundobamacare.com/ ], which has acted as a hub for the "defund Obamacare" campaign. The website helped collect more than 1.5 million signatures to zero out the health care law. In turn, it benefited from robo-calls [ http://freebeacon.com/pacs-fundraising-off-defund-obamacare-abolish-the-irs-petitions/ ] featuring Cruz asking for money for the larger effort.
The Senate Conservatives Fund ran ads targeting many Senate Republicans, including Mitch McConnell (Ky.), Johnny Isakson (Ga.), Richard Burr (N.C.), Jeff Flake (Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (S.C.). On Sept. 17, the group announced it would expand into targeting House Republicans [ http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/powerful-senate-conservatives-fund-expands-to-focus-on-house-races ] on the issue of defunding Obamacare.
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/20/senate-conservatives-fund-obamacare_n_3962426.html [with embedded video report, and comments]
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Ted Cruz, Liberal Hero, May Have Just Bailed Washington Out Of The Shutdown Crisis
By Ryan Grim and Sabrina Siddiqui
Posted: 09/19/2013 12:09 pm EDT | Updated: 09/20/2013 11:32 am EDT
WASHINGTON -- In one moment, with one statement, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) managed Wednesday to accomplish what House GOP leaders, Republican senators and the Wall Street Journal editorial page had failed to do for months: Persuade rank-and-file House Republicans that shutting down the government in an attempt to defund Obamacare was simply impossible.
On Wednesday, after House leaders said they'd go forward with the defund strategy Cruz had been pitching with ads on Fox News, his response boiled down to 'Thanks, you're on your own.'
"Harry Reid will no doubt try to strip the defund language from the continuing resolution, and right now he likely has the votes to do so," Cruz said in a statement. "At that point, House Republicans must stand firm, hold their ground, and continue to listen to the American people."
On the surface, House Republicans were seething. Members openly accused [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/18/ted-cruz-obamacare-house-republicans_n_3950901.html ] Cruz and his allies, Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), of waving the white flag before the fight had even begun. One House GOP aide even called Cruz a "joke, plain and simple."
But by admitting that he had no ability in the Senate to back up the House effort to defund Obamacare, and saying so on the same day that House Republicans had announced they would support the Cruz-inspired strategy, Cruz has inadvertently done more than any other lawmaker to avert a government shutdown.
"Cruz officially jumped the shark this week," said one GOP operative allied with House leadership, who, like others, requested anonymity to speak critically about fellow Republicans. "He's doing for the House Leaders what they couldn't do for themselves. House rank-and-file members are uniting with Boehner, Cantor over Ted Cruz's idiotic position."
The retreat by Cruz has led to public questioning from House Republicans about his motives and political acumen, not to mention joking speculation that he may be part of a vast and devious liberal conspiracy to undermine conservatives.
"Cruz is the leader of a secret cabal of leftists that are seeking control of the conservative movement," quipped one senior House Republican leadership source. "Their aim is to force the party to take on suicidal missions to destroy the movement from within."
Another senior House GOP aide was grateful that Cruz had made plain what House leaders had been arguing for weeks -- that there was no viable strategy connected to a government shutdown that would defund Obamacare. "We can only defund Obamacare if it passes the Senate," the aide said. "If there is no plan to get the defunding provision passed in the Senate, or even a plan to fight to get it passed in the Senate, then what we’re talking about isn’t a plan to defund Obamacare -- it’s just a plan to shut down the government and hope for the best. That’s not a great plan."
That Cruz was left without any strategy at all, after demanding for months that Republicans follow his lead, feeds into the notion that the tea party is rooted more in political nihilism than any particular ethos, an argument Walter Sobchak would appreciate.
When asked by HuffPost Thursday to respond to his Republican critics in the House [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/19/ted-cruz-government-shutdown-2013_n_3953754.html ], Cruz said, "I salute the House Republicans for their fight on this." He added, "The House of Representatives, where Republicans have the majority -- the House has to drive this process."
He also thanked House leadership for their work on Wednesday, in an appearance on Fox News' "Hannity." With Lee by his side, Cruz pledged to continue the fight, likened himself to Winston Churchill, and noticeably put the onus to defund Obamacare on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) -- all with a straight face.
"As Churchill said, we will fight on the beaches, we will fight on the streets, we will fight at every step to stop the biggest job killer in America," Cruz said, adding later that "Harry Reid needs to listen to the American people just like John Boehner did."
For liberals, Cruz and the tea party have been the gift that keeps on giving. In both 2011 and 2012, tea party opposition staved off a "grand bargain" between Boehner and Obama that would have brought draconian cuts to Medicare and Social Security. In 2010 and again in 2012, the tea party pushed extreme Republicans through Senate primaries, where they subsequently lost winnable races in Delaware, Nevada, Colorado, Indiana and Missouri.
And they also brought Cruz to the Senate.
Jennifer Bendery contributed reporting.
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/19/ted-cruz-shutdown-house-republicans_n_3954461.html [with embedded video report "Ted Cruz Angers House GOP By Conceding Defeat On Obamacare Repeal", and comments]
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Ted Cruz Turns Obamacare Defunding Plan From Disaster to Utter Fiasco
Reports that I am an evil genius turn out to be half true.
By Jonathan Chait
September 20, 2013
Now that the House of Representatives has passed its bill to keep the government open and rid the world of Obamacare, the full strategic disaster the Republicans have embarked upon is coming into focus. The procedure is a little confusing, but once we disentangle the steps, it quickly becomes clear that the Republicans have started a dumpster fire they have no obvious way to extinguish.
It’s important to keep in mind that a government shutdown does not, in and of itself, stop Obamacare from going forward. Most of the money for that law has been appropriated through channels (tax credits, state-based exchanges, etc.) immune to shutdown. The Obamacare-shutdown method relies on the hope that keeping the government shut down proves so annoying to the president that he (or a filibuster-proof majority in both houses) submits to abolishing his health-care reform in return for reopening the government. That is the only way shutting down the government could result in the defunding of Obamacare.
Step one of this far-fetched scheme was the passage of a “continuing resolution,” which keeps the government open, attached to abolishing Obamacare. Now it goes to the Senate. Once that bill comes up for a vote in the Senate, the majority can vote to strip away the provision defunding Obamacare. That vote can’t be filibustered. It’s a simple majority vote, and Democrats have the majority.
What Senate Republicans can do is filibuster to prevent the bill from coming to a vote at all. That’s the only recourse the Senate defunders have. And Ted Cruz is promising to do just that [ http://blogs.rollcall.com/wgdb/filibuster-the-house-cr-some-conservatives-say-yes/ ]: “ I hope that every Senate Republican will stand together,” he says, “and oppose cloture on the bill in order to keep the House bill intact and not let Harry Reid add Obamacare funding back in.” A “committed defunder” in the Senate likewise tells David Drucker, “Reid must not be allowed to fund Obamacare with only 51 votes.”
In other words, the new stop-Obamacare plan now entails filibustering the defunders’ own bill. They can do this with just 41 votes in the Senate, if they can get them. But consider how terrible this situation is for the Republicans. If they fail, it will be because a handful of Republicans joined with Democrats to break the filibuster, betraying the defunders. This means the full force of the defund-Obamacare movement – which is itself very well funded by rabid grassroots conservatives eager to save the country from the final socialistic blow of Obamacare — will come down on the handful of Senate Republicans who hold its fate in their hands. The old plan at least let angry conservatives blame Democrats for blocking their goal of defunding Obamacare. Now the defunders can turn their rage against fellow Republicans, creating a fratricidal, revolution-eats-its-own bloodletting.
But what if it succeeds? Well, success means the government shuts down because the Senate Republican majority has successfully filibustered a vote on the House bill preventing a shutdown.
Remember, the whole Republican plan to win the shutdown fight is to pin the blame on Obama. Obama is trying to shut down the government, they are already saying, and we’re trying to keep it open. That message depends on both houses of Congress passing a law that defunds Obamacare, and Obama refusing to sign it. Then they can present themselves as having acted to keep the government open, and Obama refusing to go along merely because he doesn’t want to snatch health insurance away from 20 million people.
It’s a patently disingenuous argument that stands no chance of success. But even that patently disingenuous message relies on establishing the optics of Obama refuses to sign our bill. Now the Republican plan relies instead on maintaining a Republican filibuster in the Senate, in perpetuity, to prevent a vote on a bill to open the government. They have maneuvered themselves into the least tenable position to defend a plan that never stood a chance of succeeding in the first place.
Copyright © 2013, New York Media LLC (emphasis in original)
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/09/cruz-turns-obamacare-defunding-plan-to-fiasco.html [with comments]
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Chris Wallace Challenges Ted Cruz Over Obamacare Plan (VIDEO)
Posted: 09/22/2013 1:43 pm EDT | Updated: 09/22/2013 1:53 pm EDT
Chris Wallace challenged Senator Ted Cruz over his plan to defund Obamacare on "Fox News Sunday."
Cruz is one of the leaders behind the Republican bill that would defund health care reform in order to prevent a government shut down. The Senate is expected to eliminate the Obamacare provision from the bill, and Cruz has called for filibustering to prevent the bill from being voted on — a plan that fellow Republicans have criticized [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/20/ted-cruz-attacked-gop_n_3963702.html ] in recent days.
"I'm confused," Wallace said on Sunday, asking Cruz, "Are you going to allow consideration of the bill... or are you going to block [the Senate] from even taking up a bill which you support?"
Cruz said that Senate Republicans could ask Harry Reid to require 60 votes in order to pass any amendments to the legislation, but said that he probably wouldn't agree because he wants to use "brute political force" to continue Obamacare.
Wallace seemed unconvinced. "It's Senate Rule 22…it says you say allow debate, that you can pass an amendment by a simple majority, that’s the rule," the Fox News host argued.
Later in the interview, Wallace also asked Cruz to address criticism from his fellow Republicans [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/22/ted-cruz-obamacare_n_3971685.html ] and what his "end game" will be if the Senate sends the bill back to the House without the Obamacare provision.
(h/t Think Progress [ http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2013/09/22/2661541/fox-news-tells-ted-cruz-plan-defund-obamacare-wont-work/ ])
*
Related
Ted Cruz: Republicans Who Vote To Take Up Bill Defunding Obamacare Are Voting For Obamacare
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/22/ted-cruz-obamacare_n_3971685.html
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Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/22/chris-wallace-ted-cruz-obamacare_n_3972300.html [the YouTube of the segment, as embedded, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRpaHFKEbbE ; with comments]
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Ted Cruz vs. The Universe
By Jason Linkins
Posted: 09/20/2013 4:19 pm EDT | Updated: 09/20/2013 4:27 pm EDT
While most of the week has been spent watching House Republicans decide precisely what to do about defunding Obamacare, and how much energy they'll pointlessly expend in this going-nowhere act this time around, here at week's end, we find that GOP leaders on the Hill going to war in a more parochial fashion. Their target: Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas).
The Cruz-directed snipes have been coming as fast and as furious as is possible, given that they've mostly been dispensed by anonymous sources. "He's a joke, plain and simple [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/18/ted-cruz-obamacare-house-republicans_n_3950901.html ]," said one "senior GOP aide." Another House GOP aide told the National Review Online that "Nancy Pelosi is more well-liked around here [ http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/house-gop-aide-nancy-pelosi-is-more-well-liked-than-ted-cruz ]."
One of Cruz's fellow Republicans who has been brave enough to attach his name to his remarks is Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), who told reporters this week [ http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/09/20/peter-king-ted-cruz-is-a-fraud/ ] that Cruz was a "fraud" who should "no longer have any influence in the Republican Party." As CNN reported, King continued like so:
"We can't be going off on these false missions that Ted Cruz wants us to go on. The issues are too important. They're too serious, they require real conservative solutions, not cheap headline-hunting schemes," he said.
But where is all this coming from? It's actually pretty much high school-level clique-histrionics, actually. And more than anything else, it's a battle between the House and the Senate over who will be left holding the Defund Obamacare Futility Bomb when it finally goes off.
Obviously, just about every GOP legislator, given the opportunity, would defund Obamacare tomorrow if there was a possibility they could do so. And, in fact, they've tried some 40-odd times [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/02/obamacare-repeal-attempts_n_3697207.html ]. One might question whether doing so is good policy, but none should question the desire of Republican policymakers to gut President Barack Obama's landmark achievement.
The thing is, though, Cruz sort of did. Cruz was one of the GOP leaders who first hatched the plan to threaten taking the government hostage over Obamacare. Birthing that notion immediately gave House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) -- whose preference is to avoid a government shutdown -- a huge migraine. But Cruz didn't stop there. He appeared in ads for the Senate Conservatives Fund, haranguing his fellow senators "to stand up and defund Obamacare now." As Jackie Kucinich noted [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2013/08/29/ted-cruz-vs-the-senate/ ], the fact that he did so while simultaneously serving as the vice chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee "put him at odds with the campaign committee’s practice of supporting incumbent senators."
Boehner had wanted to pass [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/11/gop-infighting-obamacare_n_3909292.html ] a continuing resolution in the House with an addendum attached that would give everyone in the House a chance to once again vent and complain about Obamacare's existence. But enough members of his House GOP caucus rose up to scuttle that. They were largely influenced by Cruz, who called Boehner's idea [ http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2013/09/grand-betrayal-conservatives-gop-gambit-defund-obamacare.php?ref=fpb ] "political chicanery" that "easily allows Senate Democrats to keep funding Obamacare."
This forced Boehner to modify his plans, and the bitter utterances of anonymous GOP aides at the time basically boiled down to: "Kiss my ass, Ted Cruz, this is your problem, now." One GOP aide got splenetic with Politico, like so [ http://www.politico.com/story/2013/09/continuing-resolution-2013-fights-96579.html ]:
If figures like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) call the plan chicanery, and other conservatives say the House is weak, GOP leadership wants to see him and others stand up and filibuster the CR [continuing resolution]. In short, the House is sick of getting blamed for being weak on Obamacare.
Asked whether they are trying to put pressure on Senate Republicans to filibuster, Rogers said, “You can say that.”
A senior GOP aide said, “They should be preparing for a two [to] three week filibuster, to prevent the Senate from adjourning.” The aide added that there are enough Senate Republicans to prevent a funding bill from reaching President Barack Obama’s desk.
But after the House modified their plans to suit the insurgency that Cruz had helped foment, Cruz suddenly shifted from rabble-rouser to surrender-monkey. In a statement that left many Republicans gobsmacked, Cruz said [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/18/ted-cruz-obamacare-house-republicans_n_3950901.html ], "Harry Reid will no doubt try to strip the defund language from the continuing resolution, and right now he likely has the votes to do so."
So after all the "come die on this hill with me" ads, and the broadsides against Boehner's plan -- mocking it as a surrender to Harry Reid -- Cruz just ... surrenders to Harry Reid. And with that, it seems like GOP leadership in Washington voted unanimously to raise the hackle-ceiling sky high [ http://blogs.rollcall.com/218/house-gop-vents-frustration-with-cruz-on-twitter/ ].
Of course, beneath all of the backbiting, there is reality -- and the reality is that Cruz is correct. As Byron York explains here [ http://washingtonexaminer.com/actually-senate-gop-cant-filibuster-to-defund-obamacare/article/2536120 ], Cruz and his like-minded Senate allies are constrained by certain Senate rules and actually do not have the option to filibuster. Not even one of those old-timey, talk-until-you-piss-yourself filibusters.
And as Niels Lesniewski of Roll Call explains [ http://blogs.rollcall.com/wgdb/why-ted-cruz-is-right-about-obamacare-defunding-in-the-senate/ ], the simple fact of the matter is that there are procedural options available to Reid to do precisely what Cruz is saying will happen. The Senate will have the votes to strip the Obamacare part of the law and pass a clean continuing resolution, at which point it bounces back to the House. (From there, in theory, the House can keep sending it back to the Senate, but the conditions in the Senate aren't likely to change anytime soon.
So, the basic bottom line here is that Cruz is right about what's realistically possible, but GOP leaders are nonetheless well-and-rightly pissed off at Cruz for ginning up all this mad, stand-and-fight foolery that denied Boehner his preferred "vent-and-pass" plan for the continuing resolution. Now, we've got this fight between House and the Senate -- neither of whom want to be left holding the bag when this effort to defund Obamacare fails.
Of course, all of this pain could have been avoided if everyone could come to terms with the simple reality that President Barack Obama is never, ever, ever going to sign a bill that defunds or delays or in any way imperils Obamacare. But that is clearly asking too much.
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc. (emphasis in original)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/20/ted-cruz-attacked-gop_n_3963702.html [with embedded video report, and (over 6,000) comments]
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Chris Van Hollen Reminds Republicans Their Budget Includes Savings From Obamacare [the very same regarding which Romney/Ryan/Republicans relentlessly and utterly dishonestly attacked Obama throughout the 2012 campaign]
By Jennifer Bendery
Posted: 09/22/2013 12:01 pm EDT | Updated: 09/23/2013 12:05 am EDT
WASHINGTON -- Days after House Republicans voted nearly unanimously for a measure to defund Obamacare, Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) reminded them of one little detail: Their own budget relies on savings from President Barack Obama's signature health care reform law.
During an appearance on ABC's "This Week," Van Hollen, the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee, said Republicans owe the public an explanation for how they can regularly vote to get rid of the Affordable Care Act -- they have now voted 42 times [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/13/tim-huelskamp-obamacare-repeal_n_3921960.html ] to repeal or defund it -- when they passed a budget that balances in part because of Obamacare savings [ http://vanhollen.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=334218 ].
Republicans "have to explain to the American people how they voted for a budget that includes all of the Medicare savings from Obamacare, that includes the same level of revenue generated from Obamacare and, in fact, would not even balance in 10 years, if not for the Affordable Care Act," Van Hollen said.
"That's misleading and that's a hoax," he added.
Van Hollen was joined on the show by Rep. Tom Graves (R-Ga.), who authored the bill the House passed last week that would permanently defund Obamacare. Graves responded by turning to the fact that the health care law still isn't popular with the public. A recent ABC/Washington Post poll [ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/09/three-years-later-obamacare-arrives-little-understood-and-not-well-liked/ ] found that 52 percent of Americans remain opposed to the law, compared to 42 percent who support it.
"I mean, it's clear that I was in my district during August, listening to my constituents -- " Graves began, but was interrupted by Van Hollen.
"I asked a question about the budget, Tom," he said. "You guys passed a budget that assumes big parts of Obamacare are kept."
When Graves said the GOP budget also assumed Obamacare wouldn't be in effect, Van Hollen pointed out that wasn't the case.
"You assume all the Medicare savings in your budget," he said.
While it wouldn't keep every aspect of the health care law in place, the budget authored by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) does rely on Obamacare's $716 billion in cuts to Medicare [ http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/03/16/paul-ryans-plan-to-balance-the-budget-in-ten-years-relies-on-obamacare/ ] and maintains its $1.2 trillion tax increase.
Graves again tried to reframe the issue, saying that Van Hollen had voted to impose a 25 percent increase in health insurance premiums on his constituents by voting against the Republican bill to defund Obamacare. Van Hollen again brought the focus back to Republicans' reliance on Obamacare savings.
"You guys don't want to provide affordable care under this system for millions of Americans, but you have a plan to take millions of people in Medicare and put them into the Obamacare system," he said. "That's what you're proposing to do."
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc. (emphasis added)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/22/chris-van-hollen-obamacare_n_3971971.html [with embedded video, and comments]
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House Democrats Raise Big Money Off Republican Push To 'Defund Obamacare'
09/22/2013
[...]
This week's fundraising swell for the DCCC is comparable to two of its best online fundraising spurts in recent memory: the unveiling of the budget presented by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), and the week Ryan was announced as Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's running mate.
[...]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/22/house-democrats-defund-obamacare_n_3971793.html [with embedded video report, and comments]
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Tom Coburn Says Republicans Pushing To Defund Obamacare Are Not Based In The 'Real World'
09/22/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/22/tom-coburn-obamacare_n_3972316.html [with embedded video, and comments]
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Nancy Pelosi: Republicans' Goal Is Government Shutdown
By PHILIP ELLIOTT
09/22/13 01:48 PM ET EDT
WASHINGTON — Even before a budget deadline arrives, leaders from both parties are blaming each other – and some Republicans are criticizing their own – for a government shutdown many are treating as inevitable.
The top Democrat in the House says Republicans are "legislative arsonists" who are using their opposition to a sweeping health care overhaul as an excuse to close government's doors. A leading tea party antagonist in the Senate counters that conservatives should use any tool available to stop the Affordable Care Act from taking hold. President Bill Clinton's labor secretary says the GOP is willing "to risk the entire system of government to get your way," while the House speaker who oversaw the last government shutdown urged fellow Republicans to remember "this is not a dictatorship."
The unyielding political posturing on Sunday comes one week before Congress reaches an Oct. 1 deadline to dodge any interruptions in government services. While work continues on a temporary spending bill, a potentially more devastating separate deadline looms a few weeks later when the government could run out of money to pay its bills.
"This is totally irresponsible, completely juvenile and, as I called it, legislative arson. It's just destructive," House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi said in an interview that aired Sunday.
The Republican-led House on Friday approved legislation designed to wipe out the 3-year-old health care law that President Barack Obama has vowed to preserve. But the House's move was more a political win than a measure likely to be implemented.
Across the Capitol, Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid said he would keep the health law intact despite Republicans' attempts, in his words, "to take an entire law hostage simply to appease the tea party anarchists."
One of those tea party agitators, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, showed little sign on Sunday that he cared about the uphill climb to make good on his pledge to derail the health care law over Obama's guaranteed veto.
"I believe we should stand our ground," said Cruz, who already was trying to blame Obama and his Democratic allies if the government shuts down.
Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat, said Cruz's efforts were destructive and self-serving as Cruz eyes a White House campaign.
"I cannot believe that they are going to throw a tantrum and throw the American people and our economic recovery under the bus," she said.
"This is about running for president with Ted Cruz. This isn't about meaningful statesmanship," she added later.
The wrangling over the budget comes as lawmakers consider separate legislation that would let the United States avoid a first-ever default on its debt obligations. House Republicans are planning legislation that would attach a 1-year delay in the health care law in exchange for ability to increase the nation's credit limit of $16.7 trillion.
Obama, speaking to political allies on Saturday evening, showed little patience for the GOP efforts to undermine his legislative accomplishment by either avenue.
"We will not negotiate over whether or not America should keep its word and meet its obligations," Obama told the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation dinner. "We're not going to allow anyone to inflict economic pain on millions of our own people just to make an ideological point."
Congress doesn't seem eager to help Obama, although there are deep divides – both between parties and within them – over who deserves blame.
Rep. Tom Graves, R-Ga., said the goal was to defund the president's health care legislation for at least one more year if not forever.
"We do have eight days to reach a resolution on this, and I propose an idea that kept the government operating and opened for an entire year while delaying and defunding Obamacare for a year so that we could work out those differences," Graves said.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, whose faceoff with Clinton led to government shutdowns that inflicted significant damage on the GOP and helped resurrect the then-president's political fortunes in time for his 1996 re-election bid, said his GOP colleagues should not yield.
"This is not a dictatorship. Under our constitution, there should be a period of tension and there should be a compromise on both sides," Gingrich said.
Robert Reich, who was Clinton's labor secretary, said that works only if both parties are willing to negotiate.
"Sorry, under our constitutional system you're not allowed to risk the entire system of government to get your way," Reich said.
It is likely that when the House legislation arrives in the Senate, Democrats there will strip off the health care defunding mechanism. Democrats plan to send back to the House a bill that prevents disruptions in government services but not the health provision they championed.
Cruz, however, said Senate Republicans cannot allow that to happen and should mount every procedural hurdle available. Cruz, who pushed lawmakers to tie a budget bill with health care hurdles, said Republicans should mount a procedural roadblock that would require 60 votes for any changes to the House bill.
"You know what? If Senate Republicans stand together, we can stop Harry Reid from doing it," Cruz said.
But within his own party, Cruz faced skepticism.
"It's not a tactic that we can actually carry out and be successful," said Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla. "The answer now in the Senate, by those who propose this strategy, is to filibuster the very bill they said they wanted."
Pelosi spoke to CNN's "State of the Union." Cruz and McCaskill were interviewed on "Fox News Sunday." Reich, Gingrich and Graves appeared on ABC's "This Week." Coburn was on CBS' "Face the Nation."
© 2013 Associated Press
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/22/nancy-pelosi-government-shutdown_n_3971846.html [with embedded video, and comments]
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Rand Paul: GOP ‘probably can’t defeat’ Obamacare
Paul acknowledges time is running out for Congress to pass a funding bill.
John Shinkle/POLITICO
By ADAM SNEED | 9/21/13 7:35 PM EDT Updated: 9/21/13 9:48 PM EDT
Sen. Rand Paul conceded Saturday that congressional Republicans have little chance of stopping Obamacare.
“We probably can’t defeat or get rid of Obamacare,” the Kentucky senator told reporters at a gathering of Michigan Republicans, according to the Associated Press.
Paul acknowledged that time is running out for Congress to pass a government funding bill, however he said House Republicans’ efforts to defund Obamacare in its government funding bill could lead to a compromise.
Late Saturday, Paul said in a statement that he still fully supports defunding and repealing Obamacare.
“I will continue to lead the fight until we win,” he said. “I will not vote for any CR that funds Obamacare and if there is one penny for Obamacare I will vote no.”
Congress must pass a funding bill by Oct. 1 to avoid a government shutdown.
The House’s continuing resolution, passed [ http://www.politico.com/story/2013/09/house-defunds-obamacare-97124.html ] Friday, defunds President Barack Obama’s signature health care law. As the bill goes before the Democratic-controlled Senate next week, it faces essentially no chance of keeping the Obamacare measure intact.
Leading the anti-Obamacare charge in the Senate is Sen. Ted Cruz, who drew heat from House Republicans earlier this week when he seemed to suggest that his Senate colleagues can’t stop Majority Leader Harry Reid from funding Obamacare in the Senate’s continuing resolution.
Late Friday, Cruz asked [ http://www.politico.com/story/2013/09/ted-cruz-strategy-obamacare-government-shutdown-97152.html ] his Republican colleagues to block upcoming procedural votes on the House bill, even though he supports it. His strategy is to block a cloture vote so Senate Democrats can’t change the bill, but many Republicans have said they won’t block votes on a bill they also support.
Reid has said any bill defunding Obamacare would be dead on arrival, and Sen. John McCain said Thursday that it was “not rational [ http://www.politico.com/story/2013/09/john-mccain-obamacare-97081.html ]” to think the Senate would pass anything defunding the program.
© 2013 POLITICO LLC
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/09/rand-paul-gop-defund-obamacare-97161.html [with embedded video "House GOP celebrates 'victory'", and comments]
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A harsh clear look at the history of the Republican Party
by Fabius Maximus
22 September 2013
Summary: Understanding the roots of our dysfunctional political system requires shining a harsh light on the institutions that run the system. This post looks at the Grand Old Party, born fighting against slavery — and a sad history in the 20th Century.
Contents
1. The GOP’s great betrayal
2. Look at the present
3. The GOP’s war on public health
4. For More Information
5.Tom Tomorrow explains the Class War
(1) The GOP’s great betrayal
The great betrayal in modern American history is the Republican Party giving a home to the South’s racists after the enactment of the great Civil Rights legislation in the 1960s — a straightforward accommodation of evil in exchange for political power. Selling their souls for 30 pieces of silver, instead of allowing the South’s racists to either accept this progress or marginalize themselves with a pariah third party.
But this is consistent with the GOP’s behavior before and since. To understand their inimical role shaping America, let’s take a brief look at our history. Perhaps the reform of America should start with the part most needing reform: conservatives, heal thyselves.
(2) Starting with the present: the GOP at work today
Look at the present. Today they are threatening to shutdown the Federal government, perhaps forcing a default and ruining a two-century long clear credit record (one of the finest in history). Even clearer is their advocacy for cutting the food stamp program while boosting subsidies for agri-corps. As explained in “Republicans: We Were Too Nice to the Hungry, But We’ve Fixed That [ http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/09/republicans-we-were-too-nice-to-the-hungry.html (in full, 9th item in this post, above)]“, Jonathan Chait, NY Magazine, 20 September 2013 — Excerpt:
Republicans hate domestic spending, but their hatred is not completely indiscriminate. Some programs offend them more, and others less. The general pattern is that social programs offend Republicans to the degree that they benefit the poor, sick, or otherwise unfortunate. The struggle over the farm bill is not the biggest policy dispute in American politics, but it is the one that most clearly reveals the priorities and ideological identity of the contemporary GOP.
The farm bill traditionally combines agriculture subsidies (which hands out subsidies to people on the arbitrary basis that the business they own produces food as opposed to some other goods or services) with food stamps (which hands out subsidies to people on the highly nonarbitrary basis that they’re poor enough to likely have trouble scraping together regular meals). Conservative Republicans revolted against the normally automatic passage, insisting that the cuts to food stamps — $20 billion — did not slice deeply enough. Last night the House rectified its failure by cutting food stamps by $40 billion.
The putative rationale for the food-stamp cuts is that eligibility standards have loosened, or that it encourages sloth. Jonathan Cohn [ http://www.newrepublic.com/blog/plank/104921/republican-conservative-cut-snap-food-stamps-obama-bush ] makes quick work of these claims, and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities [ http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=4009 ] makes long, detailed work of them. Click on those links if you want a blow-by-blow refutation. The upshot is that food stamps are a meager subsidy, of less than $1.40 per meal, for people either stuck in very low paid jobs or unable to find work at all. Their cost has increased because the recession has increased the supply of poor, desperate people.
… CNN reported [ http://thelead.blogs.cnn.com/2013/09/19/congresswoman-outs-gop-saying-they-slash-food-stamps-while-dining-out/ ] last night that Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas, a Republican supporter of the bill, received a daily meal allowance of $127.41, or 91 times the average daily food-stamp benefit. Lucas is also notable as a recipient of the agriculture subsidies his committee doles out: He and his wife have collected more than $40,000 worth [ http://newsok.com/oklahoma-rep.-frank-lucas-criticized-for-taking-farm-subsidies-while-delaying-food-stamp-renewal/article/3864804 ].
… It’s the juxtaposition of the two programs that so clearly exposes the party’s agenda. Anti-government ideology can justify even the most vicious cuts to the safety net. It can’t justify the massive socialist scheme that is agriculture policy. And, to be fair, conservative intellectuals generally don’t justify agriculture socialism. But the Republican Party certainly does. The ultraconservative Republican Study Committee recently banned the Heritage Foundation [ http://www.nationaljournal.com/congress/republican-lawmakers-retaliate-against-heritage-foundation-20130828 ] from its meetings because Heritage denounced the GOP’s farm subsidies. There is a grim hilarity here: Republicans punished Heritage for its one technocratically sane position.
…It’s not baffling, nor is the notion that the Republican Party protects the class interests of the rich a “stereotype.” It’s an analysis that persuasively explains the facts.
Indeed, it’s the only analysis that persuasively explains the facts. I’d prefer to abolish agriculture subsidies completely while keeping in place (or boosting) food rations for the poor. A libertarian might want to abolish both programs, a socialist might want to keep both. I’d disagree but attribute the disagreement to philosophical differences. What possible basis can be found to justify preserving subsidies for affluent farmers while cutting them for the poor? What explanation offers itself other than the party’s commitment to waging class war?
(3) The GOP’s war on public health
The GOP’s role as vanguard of the class war has deep roots in American history, appearing in accounts of our past on a wide range of subjects. Such as in this history of America’s public health programs: “The Doctor Who Made a Revolution [ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/sep/26/doctor-who-made-revolution/?pagination=false ]“, Helen Epstein, New York Review of Books, 26 September 2013 — Excerpts:
It was in the 1890s that Sara Josephine Baker decided to become a doctor. … By the time Baker retired from the New York City Health Department in 1923, she was famous across the nation for saving the lives of 90,000 inner-city children. The public health measures she implemented, many still in use today, have saved the lives of millions more worldwide.
Opposing public health services
… Articles about Baker’s lifesaving campaigns appeared in newspapers from Oklahoma to Michigan to California. In the late 1910s, she and other reformers drafted a bill to create a nationwide network of home-visiting programs and maternal and child health clinics modeled on the programs in New York. But the American Medical Association (AMA) — backed by powerful Republicans averse to spending money on social welfare — claimed the program was tantamount to Bolshevism. Baker was in Washington the day a young New England doctor explained the AMA’s position to a congressional committee:
“We oppose this bill because, if you are going to save the lives of all these women and children at public expense, what inducement will there be for young men to study medicine?” Senator Sheppard, the chairman, stiffened and leaned forward: “Perhaps I didn’t understand you correctly,” he said: “You surely don’t mean that you want women and children to die unnecessarily or live in constant danger of sickness so there will be something for young doctors to do?” “Why not?” said the New England doctor, who did at least have the courage to admit the issue: “That’s the will of God, isn’t it?”
Effects of the public health services revolution
… The enormous declines in child mortality that Baker helped bring about are frequently attributed to improved nutrition and a general improvement in working and living conditions, and to the availability of vaccines and antibiotics.
However, demographers who have studied the subject in detail have concluded that it had little to do with any of these things. Most vaccines and antibiotics weren’t available until after World War II and the “general uplift” in nutrition and living conditions occurred at the end of the 19th C, decades before the mortality decline. This may have set the stage for the drop in the death rate that followed, but the survival of babies didn’t substantially improve until safer milk supplies became widely available and, even more crucially, campaigns like Baker’s had helped women understand germs and how to avoid them, so that they could provide better care for their children.
Child Care
… In 1971, a group of Washington officials and their allies in the civil rights movement drafted the Comprehensive Child Care and Development Act, which would have created a nationwide system of high-quality day-care, preschool, and home-visiting programs that resembled the national system of child health programs envisioned by Baker and other reformers fifty years earlier. It passed both houses of Congress with strong bipartisan support, but right-wing Republicans, using language similar to that used to quash the mother and baby care programs, pressured President Nixon to veto it.
As described in the excellent forthcoming documentary series The Raising of America: Early Childhood and the Future of the Nation, Nixon’s adviser Pat Buchanan encouraged conservative journalists to write commentaries with headlines such as “Child Development Act — To Sovietize Our Youth,” which Buchanan would then present to Nixon in his morning press digest, as if it represented mainstream conservative opinion.Even though polls suggested that most Americans supported the bill, large numbers of letters denouncing it—some even comparing it to the Hitler Youth programs—poured into the White House.
Edward Zigler, head of Nixon’s Office of Child Development and one of the main architects of the bill, read through many of them. Most seemed to him to be form letters, and he suspected that the campaign had been orchestrated by a small number of conservative opponents. Nevertheless, the president got the message and vetoed the bill. This campaign gave rise to the “Family Values” movement, which has since attempted to thwart just about every legislative proposal to support American families. Today, nearly every other industrialized nation on earth provides some form of guaranteed support to families with young children. That America still does not is considered by many to be a national disgrace.
The infection of socialism has a hold on one part of America
… In some respects, contemporary America is not all that different. It turns out that there is one group of Americans that receives high-quality government-subsidized child-care services, including day care, preschool, home-visiting programs, and health care: the US military. Unlike the Soviet version, these comprehensive programs aren’t designed to create obedient little soldiers. Instead, they use a play-oriented approach to help bring out children’s individual cognitive and social capacity.
This may help explain why military children score higher on reading and mathematics tests than public school children, and why the black/white achievement gap is much lower in military families than it is in the general population. Since the military child-care program was created in 1989, the government has repeatedly declined requests to fund an in-depth evaluation, perhaps because if the effects were known, all Americans would demand these programs for their children too.
(4) For More Information
a) About American politics:
Posts about politics in America
http://fabiusmaximus.com/america/politics-2/
Posts about the Democratic Party
http://fabiusmaximus.com/tag/democratic-party/
Posts about Obama, his administration and policies
http://fabiusmaximus.com/america/candidates/
The world of wonders: Democratic Party takes center, pushes GOP right to madness
http://fabiusmaximus.com/2013/02/19/democratic-republican-madness-48918/
(b) Posts about the Republican Party:
Whose values do Dick and Liz Cheney share? Those of America? Or those of our enemies, in the past and today?, 14 March 2010
http://fabiusmaximus.wordpress.com/2010/03/14/cheney/
The evolution of the Republican Party has shaped America during the past fifty years, 8 May 2010
http://fabiusmaximus.wordpress.com/2010/05/08/santa/
Will people on the right help cut Federal spending?, 19 June 2010
http://fabiusmaximus.wordpress.com/2010/06/19/18320/
Conservatives oppose the new START treaty, as they opposed even the earlier version negotiated by Ronald Reagan, 24 July 2010
http://fabiusmaximus.wordpress.com/2010/07/24/19644/
A modern conservative dresses up Mr. Potter to suit our libertarian fashions, 17 November 2011
http://fabiusmaximus.wordpress.com/2011/11/17/30999/
The key to modern American politics: the Right-Wing Id Unzipped, 15 February 2012
http://fabiusmaximus.wordpress.com/2012/02/15/35479/ [first item at/see (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=72131063 and preceding and following]
Why Republicans Need Remedial Math: Their Budget Plans Explode the Deficit, 16 March 2012
http://fabiusmaximus.wordpress.com/2012/03/16/36538/
Let’s list the GOP’s problems. They’re all easily solvable, 12 November 2012
http://fabiusmaximus.com/2012/11/12/republican-party-45624/
The Republican Party is like America, and can quickly recover it strength, 14 November 2012
http://fabiusmaximus.com/2012/11/14/republican-party-45634/
(c) The Great Betrayal: racism on the Right:
Ron Paul’s exotic past tells us much about him, the GOP, libertarians – and about us, 27 December 2011
http://fabiusmaximus.com/2011/12/27/32944/
What every American must know about the Republican Party, 16 October 2012
http://fabiusmaximus.com/2012/10/16/republican-party-racism-44120/
(5) Tom Tomorrow explains the Class War
See Tom Tomorrow’s website [ http://thismodernworld.com/ ]!
Copyright 2013 Fabius Maximus
http://fabiusmaximus.com/2013/09/22/republican-class-warfare-55553/ [with comments]
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Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
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