Wednesday, September 25, 2013 11:41:13 AM
Ted Cruz: The Distinguished Wacko Bird from Texas
In less than a year, Texas Republican Ted Cruz has become the most despised man in the U.S. Senate. He's been likened to Joe McCarthy, accused of behaving like a schoolyard bully, and smeared by senior members of his own party. Is this any way to get ahead in Washington? Well, Cruz is no dummy—just ask him—and his swift rise might prove that it's the only way
By Jason Zengerle
Photographs by Chris Buck
October 2013 [issue of]
It's hard for Ted Cruz to be humble. Part of the challenge stems from his résumé, which the Texas senator wears like a sandwich board. There's the Princeton class ring that's always on his right hand and the crimson gown that, as a graduate of Harvard Law School, he donned when called upon to give a commencement speech earlier this year. (Cruz's fellow Harvard Law alums Barack Obama and Mitt Romney typically perform their graduation duties in whatever robes they're given.) Even Cruz's favorite footwear, a pair of black ostrich-skin cowboy boots, serves as an advertisement for his credentials and connections. "These are my argument boots," he told me one morning this summer as we rode the subway car beneath the Capitol to a vote on the Senate floor. "When I was Texas solicitor general, I did every argument in these boots. The one court that I was not willing to wear them in was the U.S. Supreme Court, and it was because my former boss and dear friend William Rehnquist was still chief justice. He and I were very close—he was a wonderful man—but he was very much a stickler for attire."
It was only after Rehnquist died that Cruz felt comfortable wearing his cowboy boots in the Supreme Court—and only then because John Roberts ("a friend for many years") blessed it. "I saw John shortly after his confirmation," Cruz said, "and I guess I was feeling a little cheeky, because I took the opportunity to ask, 'Mr. Chief Justice, do you have any views on the appropriateness of boots as footwear at oral argument?' And Chief Justice Roberts chuckled and he said, 'You know, Ted, if you're representing the state of Texas, they're not only appropriate, they're required.'"
Cruz, 42, arrived in Washington in January as the ultimate conservative purist, a hero to both salt-of-the-earth Tea Partiers and clubby GOP think-tankers, and since then he has come to the reluctant but unavoidable conclusion that he is simply more intelligent, more principled, more right—in both senses of the word—than pretty much everyone else in our nation's capital. That alone isn't so outrageous for the Senate. "Every one of these guys thinks he's the smartest guy in the room," one senior Democratic aide told me. "But Cruz is utterly incapable of cloaking it in any kind of collegiality. He's just so brazen."
Little more than a month after Cruz was sworn in, Senator Barbara Boxer, a Democrat from California, likened him to Joe McCarthy for his conduct during Chuck Hagel's confirmation for secretary of defense. Without presenting a shred of evidence, Cruz insinuated that Hagel, a fellow Republican, was on the take from America's enemies. Because Hagel had declined to reveal the source of a $200,000 payment, Cruz suggested, how do we know it didn't come from the North Korean government? Or Saudi Arabia's? Even South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, also a Republican, called Cruz's line of inquiry "out of bounds."
And then there was the moment, just a month later, when the Judiciary Committee was debating the assault--weapons ban: Cruz was trying to get it through Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein's thick skull that there was this thing called the Second Amendment and that it deserved the same respect as the rest of the Bill of Rights. He made his point by rattling off other amendments and the rights they protected until Feinstein bristled, "I'm not a sixth grader. I've been on this committee for twenty years.... I've studied the Constitution myself. I am reasonably well educated, and I thank you for the lecture."
For a while, veteran Republicans groused in private about the new guy. But it boiled over when Cruz joined Kentucky senator Rand Paul's filibuster of John Brennan's nomination to head the CIA—an act of protest against Obama's drone program. John McCain, already seething over Cruz's treatment of Hagel, called them "wacko birds." "He fucking hates Cruz," one adviser of the Arizona senator told me. "He's just offended by his style."
The "wacko bird" dig, however, has only endeared Cruz more to his party's purist wing. Already his fans are nudging him to think about a presidential run in 2016, and he's nudging right back, making trips to Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. He's even embraced "wacko bird," reclaiming McCain's knock as a badge of honor. Later on the day I visited him on Capitol Hill, Cruz was engaging in the kind of showing off that even his detractors might forgive: He was giving me a tour of his Senate office. "A couple of things I keep," he said, picking up a red leather rectangle branded with the words IT CAN BE DONE—a replica, he explained, of the sign that sat on President Reagan's desk in the Oval Office. The tchotchke he was most excited to show me, however, was a black baseball cap with a picture of Daffy Duck next to the words WACKO BIRD. Supporters back in Texas made it, Cruz said, grabbing the hat from its prominent perch on his bookshelf. "Isn't it great?"
But all along, what kept drawing my eye was a giant oil painting above the couch depicting Cruz as he delivered the first of his nine oral arguments before the Supreme Court. "I was 32 years old," he recalled. "It was abundantly clear we didn't have a prayer.... And I've always enjoyed the fact that as I'm sitting at my desk, I'm looking at a giant painting of me getting my rear end whipped 9-0." He gazed at the wall. It is an unusual painting: From the artist's vantage point, we see three other courtroom artists, each also drawing Cruz—so the painting actually features not one but four images of young Cruz before the bench. "It is helpful," he explained to me, "for keeping one grounded."
•••
Ted Cruz doesn't look much like a wacko bird. With his pomaded black hair and trim suits—the kind you might expect on a former partner at an international law firm, say, or the husband of a Goldman Sachs executive—the more appropriate avian metaphor would seem to be a peacock. He doesn't sound much like a wacko bird, either. Cruz is a dazzling orator, speaking not merely in precise sentences but complete paragraphs—no teleprompter, sometimes not even a podium—and name-dropping everyone from Reagan to Rawls (as in John, the late Harvard philosopher).
But as Cruz and his supporters define it, "wacko bird" describes more of a state of mind. Or as Cruz put it on the Senate floor a few weeks before my visit, in the midst of yet another fight with McCain, this time over the rules for negotiating a budget: "It has been suggested that those of us who are fighting to defend liberty—fighting to turn around the out-of-control spending and out-of-control debt in this country, fighting to defend the Constitution, it has been suggested that we are wacko birds. Well, if that is the case, I will suggest to my friend from Arizona, there may be more wacko birds in the Senate than is suspected."
He might be right. This certainly feels like a wacko-bird moment in Washington, and maybe in America, too. It's a time when governmental breakdown and public antipathy for the profession of politics have combined to create a perverse incentive structure for congressional Republicans—one that punishes politeness and cooperation and rewards antagonism and obstruction. So far Cruz has proposed no major legislation and has shown little interest in changing that. He seems content accomplishing nothing because, in Cruz's view of the federal government, nothing is the accomplishment.
Contrast this approach with the recent fate of that other precocious Republican in the Senate, Florida's Marco Rubio, who spent the first half of this year crafting bipartisan immigration reform—the kind of grand, reach-across-the-aisle gesture that could serve as a springboard to a presidential campaign. And for his trouble, he wound up with no law (his bill passed the Senate but is seemingly DOA in the House) and a dented reputation among the very people who put him in office. Cruz, a second-generation Cuban-American with a story so singular that it verges on the novelistic, was one of the most outspoken opponents of Rubio's bill.
"Stopping bad things," Cruz told me, "is a significant public service."
•••
About that family story: American voters have a hard time resisting politicians with a good one. Ted Cruz's is great, and he's even better at telling it.
In the aftermath of the Newtown shooting spree, when even some Republican senators were softening on gun control, Cruz took a hard line against any limits to firearm access.
He was born in Canada, in 1970, but his tale, as he likes to say, begins fourteen years earlier in a Cuban jail cell. His father, Rafael, had belonged to Castro's rebel forces fighting to overthrow the Batista dictatorship, and on the night of Rafael's seventeenth birthday in 1956, Batista's goons caught up with him. "He got captured and he disappeared," Cruz told me one day over lunch at a Tex-Mex restaurant in Houston.
"My grandfather began searching for him, and he just began visiting the jails, going to one after the other after the other. And he eventually found him. He had been beaten so much that there was not a spot of white visible on his suit. It was all stained with mud and blood, and his teeth were dangling out of his mouth." After managing to get Rafael out of prison, Cruz's grandfather told his son that he needed to leave Cuba or the goon squad would find him again. "He said, 'They know who you are. They're just going to hunt you down and kill you.'"
Rafael applied to college in the United States and was admitted to the University of Texas. He secured a student visa, and in 1957 he arrived in Austin. "He was 18, and he couldn't speak English, and he had a hundred dollars sewn into his underwear," Cruz said. "The only possession he had was a slide rule in his pocket." (Parts of the elder Cruz's saga have an air of myth-making—he got into the University of Texas without speaking a word of English? He got out of Batista's prison...how, exactly?)
In between bites of queso flameado, Cruz went on to explain how Rafael put himself through college by washing dishes for fifty cents an hour, learned English from math classes, met an American woman he would soon marry, and recognized the error of his ways in supporting Castro. "He ended up graduating with a math degree and getting a job and eventually starting a small business and working toward the American Dream," Cruz said. "I think it is an enormous blessing to be the child of an immigrant who fled oppression and came here seeking freedom, because there was an urgency in politics. Having principled men and women in office is how you protect yourself from tyranny, and that was something I learned from when I was 2, 3, 5 years old."
Cruz has been telling his father's story for decades. As a champion debater at Princeton, Cruz would frequently deploy it in competition. "I heard that exact narrative about a hundred dollars sewn in his father's underwear," recalls Austan Goolsbee, a former Obama economic adviser who was Cruz's main rival on the college debate circuit in the early '90s. "We all knew the story."
Today, Cruz talks about his father so much that as his political star has risen, so has Rafael's. At the age of 74, the elder Cruz is now a Tea Party celebrity, a sought-out speaker who likens Obama to Castro ("that old bearded friend I left behind in Cuba") and whose words are often rebroadcast by Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. For Ted, this recognition has been the most enjoyable by-product of his own political success. "I've really had two heroes in my life," he says. "My father and Ronald Reagan."
But there's one part of Rafael's story that Cruz purposefully omits, and it might be the most affecting—and offers perhaps the most revealing window into Ted's own youthful determination. Cruz's father had started an oil and gas exploration business, then moved with his wife to Calgary, where Ted was born. (Cruz's supporters say—and most legal experts agree—that his Canadian birth would not be an obstacle should he ever run for the White House, since, by dint of his mother's American citizenship, he qualifies as a natural-born American citizen.) In 1974 the family followed the oil business to the Houston suburbs, where Ted would enjoy a typical American adolescence. But then, in the '80s, when Ted was in high school, the oil industry briefly cratered, and his father's business tumbled down with it. He went bankrupt. Eventually his marriage crumbled as well.
When I brought up the bankruptcy one afternoon in Cruz's office—I had learned about it from one of his college friends—his face fell and he grew quiet. After a moment, he let out a long sigh and acknowledged that this was true. "My father poured all of my parents' personal assets into the company, and demand for oil and gas exploration just disappeared, because oil prices dropped so low. There's a whole generation of people in the energy industry at that time that just lost everything."
Instead of derailing Cruz's sky-high ambitions, his father's financial calamity only intensified his drive. In the middle of his junior year, he persuaded his parents to take him out of the high school he was attending—a small evangelical school that met in a former Handy Dan hardware store—and send him to a more academically rigorous Baptist academy.
By then Cruz had already fallen under the spell of a conservative impresario named Rolland Storey, a onetime vaudevillian and retired natural-gas executive who ran a Houston-area think tank called the Free Enterprise Institute. At the institute, Cruz studied right-wing icons Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman. He also mastered a mnemonic version of the Constitution, which he'd recite, along with four other high school students, for Kiwanis, Rotary, and other civic clubs across Texas. They performed as a troupe called the Constitutional Corroborators.
Princeton turned out to be as alien to Cruz as Austin had been to his father some thirty years earlier: "I did not know anybody there; I didn't know anybody who had gone there." Like his father, he needed to earn tuition money. Unlike his father, he didn't do it by washing dishes. He got a job with the Princeton Review, teaching test-prep classes.
The elite academic circles that Cruz was now traveling in began to rub off. As a law student at Harvard, he refused to study with anyone who hadn't been an undergrad at Harvard, Princeton, or Yale. Says Damon Watson, one of Cruz's law-school roommates: "He said he didn't want anybody from 'minor Ivies' like Penn or Brown."
•••
Ted Cruz blew his first big shot in politics. Back in 2000, he had scored a plum assignment working in the policy shop of George W. Bush's Austin-based presidential campaign. He distinguished himself in the weeks after the election, serving on the legal team that helped Bush win the Florida recount and, by extension, the White House. He seemed destined for a meaty job in the new administration.
But Cruz's personal style earned him many detractors in BushWorld. He was infamous for firing off mundane work e-mails in the middle of the night—it happened so often that some in the Bush campaign suspected him of writing them ahead of time and programming his computer to send while he was asleep. He was also known for dispatching regular updates on his accomplishments that one recipient likened to "the cards people send about their families at Christmas, except Ted's were only about him and were more frequent." When it came time to divvy up the spoils of victory, many of Cruz's campaign colleagues headed to the White House; Cruz went to Washington, too—but he was exiled to the outer Siberia of the Federal Trade Commission. Says one friend: "He was pretty crushed."
Cruz lasted two years at the FTC, then returned to Austin and was appointed Texas's solicitor general. His new boss, the state's attorney general, wanted to use the office as a platform for advancing conservative legal theories on politically charged issues such as religion and state's rights. Cruz was the perfect instrument for such a mission. Although he lost that first Supreme Court case, he went on to win four of his next eight, including the landmark Medellín v. Texas, affirming—in defiance of an international court ruling as well as an order from President Bush—the state's right to execute a Mexican citizen who'd participated in the gang rape and murder of two teenage girls in Houston. Legal publications hailed him as one of the finest appellate attorneys in America. He was being talked up for a federal judgeship, possibly even the Supreme Court one day.
But Cruz did not want to serve on the bench. In November 2010, he made a trip to Washington for an annual meeting of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group whose confabs he'd been attending since his first year at Harvard Law. Only now he was job hunting. He was about to turn 40, and he was at a professional crossroads. He'd been out of government for two years and was looking for a way back in, this time via election. The only real opening in Texas, though, was a U.S. Senate seat—an impossible reach for Cruz, who'd never even held elected office.
But at the meeting, he met someone who had pulled off that exact feat: Utah senator-elect Mike Lee. Like Cruz, Lee had been a creature of the conservative legal movement, having clerked for Samuel Alito on the Supreme Court. Like Cruz, he had left Washington to become a government lawyer back home. And like Cruz, he had never before run for office. But he rode the Tea Party wave of 2010 into the Senate, ousting an incumbent Republican by running to his right. After the Federalist Society meeting, Lee and Cruz took a long walk around the Capitol. "We talked about every conceivable political and constitutional issue," Lee recalls. "I concluded we were kindred spirits."
Cruz launched his insurgent Senate campaign the following January, zeroing in on the GOP front-runner, David Dewhurst, who as Texas lieutenant governor had the party and business establishments lined up behind him. In classic Tea Party fashion, Cruz went after him from the right. In fact, his highfalutin legal career served as the centerpiece of his grassroots campaign, as he took his esoteric Supreme Court victories, from Medellín to his successful defense of a Ten Commandments statue on the grounds of the Texas State Capitol, and recast them as conservative crusades. "He made the solicitor general's job sound like a combination of Rocky and Rambo," marvels the Texas GOP consultant Matt Mackowiak. With an influx of cash from national conservative groups and rousing speeches to whip up the grass roots, Cruz came out of nowhere to force a primary runoff with Dewhurst. He then trounced Dewhurst by fourteen points and cruised past his token Democratic opponent in the general election.
"I cannot tell you," Cruz says now, "how many little old ladies clasped my shoulder and said, 'Ted, please don't go to Washington and become one of them.'"
The little old ladies of Texas ought to be doing cartwheels. Instead of becoming one of them, Cruz has scorched almost all of them. He's reserved his most scathing criticism for his fellow Senate Republicans—branding those who've had the temerity to stake out not-far-right-enough positions as "squishes" and the "surrender caucus." I asked one of Cruz's colleagues, Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley, if he could recall a freshman behaving as brashly as Cruz. Grassley has been in the Senate for thirty-three years. He was stumped. "Not somebody I've served with," he said finally. "I think Barry Goldwater—reading the history of Barry Goldwater, he made those sorts of impressions right away."
•••
It's unclear exactly how many wacko birds are in the Senate right at this moment, but by Cruz's count there are at least three—Rand Paul, Lee, and himself. And three, he says, is a lot. "I do think the impact of a handful of principled leaders who are fearless in the Senate is significant, and I think it's significant even going from two to three. If you have three, you pretty quickly get to five or six. Five or six is over 10 percent of the Republican conference, and that's enough to move a conference and move the Senate."
Already many conservative Republicans believe Cruz can be their anti-Palin in 2016: all of her charisma with none of her drawbacks.
Perfect example, to hear Cruz tell it: gun-control legislation. After the Newtown school shootings, "the conventional wisdom in Washington was that [it] was unstoppable, that it was going to get sixty-five, sixty-eight votes, that it was a done deal," he says. In Cruz's narrative, the turning point came when he, Lee, and Paul vowed to filibuster any legislation. The threat failed, but Cruz insists that was never the point: "What we were able to do is, number one, slow things down and, number two, shine a spotlight on them and give time for the grass roots to get engaged."
Not everyone agrees with this interpretation of the events. "Cruz is the rooster taking credit for the sunrise," says Jim Kessler of the think tank Third Way, which lobbied for the bill. "There was never a point in time where we could identify sixty yes votes." Cruz's view is also disputed by many Senate Republicans, who believed (correctly, as it turned out) that gun-control legislation would ultimately fail at the hands of skittish red-state Democrats. Cruz's blustering, these Republicans argued, was actually counterproductive, since it risked shifting the blame for the defeat of a broadly popular bill away from those Democrats and onto obstructionist Republicans.
All that bluster, though, has definitely had an impact in other ways. Some Republicans are so spooked about drawing a conservative primary challenger in next year's midterms—or, as it's now called in Texas circles, "being Ted Cruzed"—that they've moved even farther to the right, paralyzing the Senate's GOP leadership. Exhibit A: John Cornyn, Cruz's fellow senator from Texas. "He has Cornyn just frozen on everything," one senior Senate Republican aide grumbled to me. "A member of our leadership just kind of takes his marching orders from this guy who's been here for a day!"
That may be a problem for Republicans, but not necessarily for Cruz. "We're in a moment when the combination of being hard-core and intelligent is really at a premium," says National Review writer Ramesh Ponnuru, who's been friends with Cruz since they went to Princeton together. "Because the two things that conservatives are tired of are politicians who sell out and politicians who embarrass them by not being able to make an account of themselves." In this arithmetic, Mitt Romney is the sellout and Sarah Palin is the embarrassment—and Cruz is the great new hope who brings the virtues of both without the liabilities of either.
And yet when it comes to policy, the man hailed as the "Tea Party intellectual" has deployed that powerful intellect only sparingly since arriving in Washington. Cruz's most ambitious proposal to date has been his call to abolish the IRS—something that, as one Cruz admirer lamented to me, "he's smart enough to know is an entirely cynical thing to do." Meanwhile, his effort to shut down the federal government (remember how well that worked out for the GOP the last time they tried it?) unless Obamacare is defunded prompted North Carolina Republican senator Richard Burr to call it "the dumbest idea I've ever heard." In multiple conversations with people who know Cruz well, I kept hearing the same refrain: "He's smart enough to know better."
Then again, maybe Cruz does know better. For a party in the midst of some serious soul-searching, Cruz offers a simple, reassuring solution: Forget the blather about demographic tidal waves and pleas for modernization; all Republicans need to do is return to their small-government, anti-tax fundamentals. "I don't know a conservative who didn't feel embarrassed voting in 2006 or 2008," Cruz told me—a remark that's sure to endear him even more to McCain. "I think the Republican Party lost its way. We didn't stand for the principles we're supposed to believe in."
Should he run for president, in 2016 or beyond, Cruz's strategy will be to superglue himself to the conservative base and hope it carries him to the GOP nomination. It's been tried over and over since Reagan—and it has failed every time. Just not enough wacko birds out there. Then again, the men who have tried it—from Pat Robertson in 1988 to Rick Santorum in 2012—possessed nowhere near Cruz's political acumen, not to mention his life story. Or, to put it the way Cruz himself might: None of them were Ted Cruz.
•••
One Thursday evening in July, Cruz and Rand Paul—ideological kissing cousins already sizing each other up as 2016 rivals—caught the same flight from Washington to Des Moines for the Iowa Renewal Project, a summit for conservative Christian pastors held at the downtown Marriott. It was nearly two and a half years before the state's presidential caucuses.
In his speech to the pastors the following Friday, Paul evoked Billy Graham: "America needs to revive the hope that springs eternal from the transcendent teachings of a humble carpenter who died on a cross." Cruz cited the book of Isaiah, Edmund Burke, and the prophet Ezekiel, and he regaled the pastors with tales of his Supreme Court battles, casting them in religious terms. Paul had arrived in Iowa with the bigger profile, but Cruz made the bigger splash. Countless pastors came up to him and laid their hands on his shoulders in a prayerful gesture. "Remember when the devils tried to take the Ten Commandments out of the State Capitol there?" I overheard one pastor breathlessly relay into his cell phone. "That was his case, so he's really a fighter. He's a righteous man."
Later in the afternoon, Cruz stopped by the Iowa Republican Party's annual summer picnic, where for $100 a head, about fifty GOP activists squeezed into a small brick building to eat barbecue and hear the Texas senator's pitch. But Cruz also drew another, less friendly crowd. Outside, a pack of immigration protestors had gathered on the front steps, and while he spoke, they banged on the door and chanted through bullhorns, "Ted, Ted, come on out, see what Iowa's all about!" At one point in his speech, Cruz got a laugh by acknowledging the ruckus: "We obviously have some friends outside who have different views from those of us in here."
And with that, Cruz launched into one of his humble-bragging stories—about the time he had "the curious opportunity" to give the commencement address to the University of California Berkeley's political- science department. "It so happened that that attracted protesters," he said, not trying to hide a smug grin. "They were very, very upset that I had defended the Ten Commandments in Texas, and the Pledge of Allegiance." He paused, letting the virtue of his stand sink in with his audience. Then he went on: "And my wife Heidi's comment upon hearing them, as she looked at me and she said, 'You know, you're not nearly important enough to protest.'"
Jason Zengerle [ http://www.gq.com/contributors/jason-zengerle ] is GQ contributing editor.
© 2013 Condé Nast (emphasis in original)
http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmakers/201310/ted-cruz-republican-senator-october-2013 [with comments]
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Why the Upcoming Shutdowns and Defaults Are Symptoms of a Deeper Republican Malady
By Robert Reich
Posted: 09/22/2013 11:06 pm
Congressional Republicans have gone directly from conservatism to fanaticism without any intervening period of sanity.
First, John Boehner, bowing to Republican extremists, ushers a bill through the House that continues to fund the government after September 30 but doesn't fund the Affordable Care Act. Anyone with half a brain knows Senate Democrats and the president won't accept this -- which means, if House Republicans stick to their guns, a government shut-down.
A shutdown would be crippling. Soldiers would get IOUs instead of paychecks. Hundreds of thousands of federal employees would be furloughed without pay. National parks would close. Millions of Americans would feel the effects.
And who will get blamed?
House Republicans think the public hates the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) so much they'll support their tactics. But the fact is, regardless of Americans' attitudes toward that Act -- which, not incidentally, passed both houses of Congress and was signed into law by the president, who was re-elected with over 50 percent of the vote, and constitutionality was upheld by the Supreme Court -- Americans hate even more one party using the United States government as a pawn in their power games.
According to a recent CNN poll, 51 percent of Americans say they'd blame the Republicans for a shutdown; 33 percent would blame the president. They blamed Republicans for the last shutdown at the end of 1995 and start of 1996 -- contributing to Republican losses of seven out of 11 gubernatorial races in 1996, 53 state legislative seats, 3 House seats, and the presidency.
So what are Senate Republicans doing about this impending train wreck for the country and the GOP?
Senator Ted Cruz is now trying to round up 40 Senate Republicans to vote against -- not for, but against -- the House bill when it comes to the Senate floor next week. Why? Because Cruz and company don't want the Senate to enact any funding bill at all. That's because once any bill is enacted, Senate Democrats can then amend it with only 51 votes -- striking out the measure that de-funds Obamacare, and even possibly increasing funds in the continuing resolution to keep the government running.
So if Ted Cruz gets his way and the Senate doesn't vote out any funding bill at all, what happens? The government runs out of money September 30. That spells shutdown.
The only difference between the Cruz and Boehner scenarios is that under Boehner we get a government shutdown and the public blames the GOP. Under Cruz, we get a shutdown and the public blames the GOP even more, because Republicans wouldn't even allow a spending bill to come to the Senate floor.
In truth, the fanatics now calling the shots in the Republican Party don't really care what the public thinks because they're too busy worrying about even more extremist right-wing challengers in their next primary -- courtesy of gerrymandering by Republican state legislators, and big-spending right-wing gonzo groups like the Club for Growth.
The Republican Party is no longer capable of governing the nation. It's now a fanatical group run out of right-wing states by a cadre of nihilists, Know-nothings, and a handful of billionaires.
But America needs two parties both capable of governing the nation. We cannot do with just one. The upcoming shutdowns and possible defaults are just symptoms of this deeper malady.
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-reich/republican-budget_b_3973606.html [with comments]
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Diary Of A Legislative Extortionist-Ted Cruz Goes Nuclear Against His Own Party To Save His Own Skin
(Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)
Rick Ungar
9/23/2013 @ 3:10PM
After months of attempting to tie the continued funding of the government to his demand that the Affordable Care Act be demolished, Texas Senator Ted Cruz is now coming face to face with what happens to demagogues who write political checks they can never hope to cash—and it isn’t pretty.
With a strategy that is now crumbling beneath his feet, it is all too clear that Ted Cruz made one heck of a miscalculation—one that promises to put an end to a budding political career that many believed would lead all the way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
So, how did it happen?
It began with Mr. Cruz placing a populist bet that he could use the August town hall season to change the math on Capitol Hill while enlisting millions to his ultimate cause—his candidacy to become President of the United States in 2016.
As the Texas Senator likely saw it, he could swoop in on the gatherings of like-minded, adoring members of his base and, by using the media to spread his message, convince watching independents that the Affordable Care act was so detrimental to the nation’s future that there was no legislative action—no matter how radical or extreme—that should be avoided in the quest to rid the country of the scourge of healthcare reform.
If Cruz’s efforts somehow succeeded beyond what most would have viewed as a rational expectation and the Senator was able to force enough Republican votes—and maybe even a few Democratic votes—to his way of thinking, Cruz would be portrayed as a great and heroic warrior.
This would be true even if there were, ultimately, insufficient votes for Cruz to win the battle.
And if his fellow Republicans in the Senate chose not to go along with his tactics, the Senator would, at the least, depart the town hall circuit with pockets full of publicity and legions of adoring minions who would henceforth view him as a great leader willing to fall on his own sword while appearing to bravely ignore his own political future if that is what it took to save his country from the evils of Obamacare.
It wasn’t a completely insane gambit.
The problem, however, was that Cruz’s entire strategy was dependent upon his expectation that the majority of Americans who continue to dislike the Affordable Care Act (and they do) would be willing to support a government shutdown brought about by Cruz’s effort to tie the destruction of Obamacare to the continuing operations of government.
That is where it all began to fall apart.
It turns out that, while the majority of Americans may continue to view Obamacare with a jaundiced eye, they are not at all prepared [ http://www.people-press.org/2013/09/16/as-health-care-law-proceeds-opposition-and-uncertainty-persist/ ] to accept Cruz’s radical, ‘take no prisoners’ approach as a solution.
With right-leaning publications like “Hot Air” screaming headlines [ http://hotair.com/archives/2013/08/22/republican-poll-public-opposed-to-a-government-shutdown-to-defund-obamacare-including-republicans/ ] like “Republican poll: Public opposed to a government shutdown to defund ObamaCare, including Republicans” , it began to dawn on the Texas Senator that he had made a serious miscalculation and that being credited with causing a shutdown was not going to be the political bonus he had anticipated.
Cruz reacted as might be expected—he began looking for a way to squirm out of his predicament. Immediately, he turned to boldly stating that any government shutdown would not be his fault—but rather the fault of the President.
Why? Because while he had initially perceived getting the credit for a shutdown to be a good thing, the data revealed he had badly judged the intent of the public. Therefore, he had to find a way to continue his plan while pushing the blame of shutdown to the other side—a tall order leaving Cruz to employ a deeply flawed logic that could only appeal to the lowest of low-information voters when attempting to sell us on the idea that this would all be Obama’s fault.
But having discovered the great flaw in his grand design, Cruz really had nowhere else to go.
If you, somehow, remain unclear as to the absurdity of Cruz’s attempt to argue that a shutdown would fall on the shoulders of the White House, consider that this logic would be akin to someone pointing a gun to the head of your puppy before turning to you and demanding that, if you want to save your hapless pooch, you must hand over to him your child’s entire college fund which you have been contributing to for some twenty years.
When you, understandably, refuse to make the trade—despite the fact that you could give the perpetrator the entire fund and deny your child her dreams for the future in order to save the pup—the perpetrator follows through on his terrible deed and then blames you for the death of the poor little puppy. Why? Because he gave you the chance to save the dog’s life and it was within your power to do so, no matter how repugnant. Never mind that the perpetrator had no right to put your dog’s life into the balance in the first place.
Thus, by Cruz’s logic, because the President will not destroy his own law, duly passed by Congress, signed into law by that President and adjudicated legal by the United States Supreme Court, and all because a first term Senator and a few of his friends demand he do so, the fault for the resulting threatened punishment is on the President—not on Cruz himself.
There were additional flaws in Ted Cruz’s grand plan.
Faced with a public that does not favor closing up government in order to extract the end of the President’s signature legislation, the likelihood of persuading Cruz’s fellow Republicans in the Senate to go along with his strategy drops to near zero. While it was always a pipedream to imagine that there would ever have been enough votes in the Senate to make Cruz’s dreams of Obamacare defunding come true—even if a majority of voters supported the notion—without a public hunger for extreme measures, any hope Cruz might have harbored for Senate support were—and are–doomed.
And if, by some miracle, Cruz could use public sentiment to turn enough Democrats and Republicans in the Senate to his way of thinking, hell would freeze over before the President of the United States would go along with any continuing resolution that includes the destruction of his own, signature legislation.
As Congressman Tom Cole (R-OK) put it, “It’s awfully hard to repeal Obamacare when a guy named Obama is President.”
While Senator Cruz certainly would have relished an ultimate victory that included defunding Obamacare, he surely knew this was an unlikely result to his campaign. But his true objective, despite his falsely courageous protestations otherwise, was never to actually pull off the death of Obamacare—rather, his objective was to portray himself as a committed leader who was willing and able to single-handedly shut down the government in a greater cause. Cruz was placing this bet in the belief that were he to earn the credit for a government shutdown over the Obamacare issue, he would become a true hero in the hearts and minds not only of the Republican base—but the millions of independent Americans who both object to Obamacare and would not be personally affected by a shuttering of the government.
Who knew the public would show such disdain for Cruz’s tactics?
Realizing that Cruz had put his penchant for demagoguery ahead of the fortunes of his own party, key Republican leaders, both inside and outside of government, began to speak up and to do so loudly.
Karl Rove published an op-ed taking Cruz—and other Republicans who would favor a shutdown—to task for being willing to inflict the serious political damage such an action would cause the Republican Party. As for the elected ‘insiders’, we’ve learned that Fox News Sunday talk show host Chris Wallace was flooded with reams of opposition research aimed at Cruz as Wallace prepared for yesterday’s show—all of which was provided by Republicans!
Ted Cruz’s response to his massive failure?
Speaking during his appearance on the Fox Sunday show, Cruz said—
“Any vote for cloture, any vote to allow Harry Reid to add funding to Obamacare with just a 51-vote threshold, a vote for cloture is a vote for Obamacare. And I think Senate Republicans are going to stand side-by-side with Speaker [John] Boehner and House Republicans, listening to the people and stopping this train wreck that is Obamacare.”
What that means is that Ted Cruz now plans on taking his party down with him by using a procedural tactic in the Senate that would brand any Republican voting for cloture—thereby agreeing to send the House bill to a vote of the Senate where it will surely be defeated—as a ‘supporter’ of Obamacare.
And if the Senate Republicans were to buckle to Cruz and refuse to vote in favor of cloture, the House Bill will remain stalled in the Senate and the government will shut down with the Republicans clearly taking all the blame.
Either way, Cruz has now created a lose-lose scenario for his Republican colleagues in the Senate that either brings an unwanted government shutdown or invites a never-ending flurry of primary challenges to his GOP cohorts…and all to save whatever credibility Ted Cruz might still be hanging onto with a narrow slice of the GOP base.
All of this brings us to one, inescapable conclusion…Ted Cruz is desperate.
How bad is it?
As one House GOP aide put it, “Nancy Pelosi [ http://www.forbes.com/profile/nancy-pelosi/ ] is more well-liked around here.”
Ouch.
UPDATE: Greg Sargent over at Washington Post [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2013/09/23/the-morning-plum-why-wont-the-gop-establishment-let-ted-cruz-defund-obamacare/ ] reporting this poll just out—
POLL FINDS BROAD OPPOSITION TO SHUTDOWN SHENANIGANS:
The CNBC All-America Economic Survey of 800 people across the country conducted by Hart-McInturff, finds that Americans oppose defunding Obamacare by a 44 percent to 38 percent plurality. But support for defunding drops off sharply when the issue of shutting down the government and defaulting is included. In that case, Americans oppose defunding 59 percent to 19 percent with 18 percent unsure.
*
Related
Government Shut Down Likely To Actually Happen This Time
http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2013/09/19/government-shut-down-likely-to-actually-happen-this-time/
Ted Cruz-The Reincarnation Of Joe McCarthy?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2013/02/18/ted-cruz-the-reincarnation-of-joe-mccarthy/
Ted Cruz And The Doctrine Of Pretend Paranoia
http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2013/07/24/ted-cruz-and-the-doctrine-of-pretend-paranoia/
Meet Ted Cruz-Second Amendment Hypocrite
http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2013/03/16/meet-ted-cruz-second-amendment-hypocrite/
*
2013 Forbes.com LLC™
http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2013/09/23/diary-of-a-legislative-terrorist-ted-cruz-goes-nuclear-against-his-own-party-to-save-his-own-skin/ [with comments]
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Ted Cruz Has a Plan to Get the America He Wants: Minority Rule
Ted Cruz, R-Texas
(AP/J. Scott Applewhite)
John Nichols on September 23, 2013 - 9:16 PM ET
Ted Cruz has figured out how to get the America he wants: he wants to impose minority rule [ http://www.politico.com/story/2013/09/harry-reid-ted-cruz-senate-97215.html ].
No, not majority rule, minority rule.
The senator from Texas hatched a “plan” to “defund Obamacare” by threatening to shut down the federal government. He got a lot of true-believer conservatives—especially in the Republican-controlled US House—to buy into the scheme. But the Texan never rounded up significant support for his approach in the upper chamber.
So the whole defunding scheme—which was never grounded in budgetary reality—has begun to look more and more like the sort of mess that costs political parties seats. House Republicans are furious.
After Cruz waged a national campaign to get the House to follow his strategy, and after they did indeed vote as he said they must, the Texan acknowledged that Senate Democrats could simply strip the House’s defunding language from the continuing resolution, pass a measure that would avert a shutdown and call the House’s bluff.
Even as Cruz was abdicating responsibility his own strategy, he was telling House Republicans to “stand firm [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/09/how-unpopular-is-ted-cruz-right-now/279903/ ].”
They were incredulous [id.].
Congressman Sean Duffy, a Wisconsin Republican who voted for the House version of the plan, said on The Laura Ingraham Show [ http://www.lauraingraham.com/pg/jsp/charts/streamingAudioMaster.jsp?dispid=302&headerDest=L3BnL2pzcC9tZWRpYS9mbGFzaHdlbGNvbWUuanNwP3BpZD0xNjE0OQ== ], “I think the strategy that Ted Cruz has been advocating for—it’s really hard to win when you can’t get the Senate on board and he’s proving that by the very nature of his surrender.”
But Duffy wasn’t finished.
“You can’t talk to the American people, you can’t talk to our bases on this strategy, and then completely roll over,” he said of Cruz [ http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/359135/sean-duffy-ted-cruz-thank-god-he-wasnt-fighting-alamo-sterling-beard ]. “Thank God he wasn’t there fighting at the Alamo!”
Ouch!
That’s not the kind of talk that Canada’s favorite son in the 2016 Republican presidential race likes to hear.
So Cruz is thinking fast.
And he’s got a new strategy.
End majority rule.
We’re not talking the back-door strategy of filibuster gamesmanship. Cruz wants Senate majority leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, to save him from the slings and arrows of his fellow partisans.
Reid plans to have the Senate vote on removing the Obamacare language from the continuing resolution. To do that, a simple majority is required. But Cruz is asking Reid set a sixty-vote threshold for addressing the defunding issue.
“The Senate, generally on controversial votes, we work out an agreement for it to be subject to a sixty-vote threshold,” Cruz declared [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2013/09/23/the-most-important-week-of-ted-cruzs-short-career/ ] on Fox News Sunday. Otherwise, “the majority is going to run the minority over with a train.”
Cruz is wrong on principle: the majority should rule.
And he is wrong on the facts of how the Senate operates when dealing with controversial legislation, amendments and nominations.
During the gun-safety debate that played out earlier this year with regard to the Safe Communities, Safe Schools Act of 2013 [ http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/vote_menu_113_1.htm ], a stack of amendments passed or failed on votes of 52-48, 54-46, 57-43 and 58-42. And the history of the Senate is filled with instances where major legislation advanced by relatively narrow majorities.
Justice Samuel Alito [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Alito ] sits on the US Supreme Court based on a 58-42 vote.
Justice Clarence Thomas [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_Thomas ] was confirmed by a 52-48 vote.
Senate Democrats (and at least a few Republicans) might have been quite pleased to operate under Cruz’s sixty-vote threshold for those controversial confirmations. But no such standard applied in 2006, when Alito was up for confirmation; nor did it apply in 1991, when the Thomas nomination was being considered.
The Cruz model for minority rule exists in the head of Ted Cruz.
But it cannot be found in the Senate rules.
Reid says [ http://www.politico.com/story/2013/09/harry-reid-ted-cruz-senate-97215.html ] he plans to follow “basic Senate procedure” when it comes to the continuing resolution.
The majority leader does not appear to be getting substantial pushback on that position from Senate Republicans. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, and Senate Republican whip John Cornyn, the senior senator from Cruz’s homestate of Texas, have distanced themselves [id.] from Cruz’s latest gambit. And one of the most serious conservatives in the Senate, Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn [ http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/cruz-reid-obamacare-power/2013/09/22/id/527041 ], says Cruz is “not realistic” and of the Texan’s overall strategy, “It’s not a tactic that we can actually carry out and be successful.”
A high-ranking Democratic aide says of Cruz, “No one is taking him seriously on this.”
No one should.
The Senate ought to be a deliberative body.
It ought to have thoughtful debates, extended debates.
But, ultimately, the Senate is a legislative chamber in the federal government.
It must legislate and govern.
And it cannot be the plaything of petty partisans who seek to rewrite the rules in order to avoid accountability within their own party caucuses.
This is not about Democrats and Republicans. This is not about liberals and conservatives. It is not even about Obamacare.
It’s about Cruz.
And a plutocratic fantasy that says the United States should be governed not by the majority of citizens or senators but by a minority. Perhaps even a minority of one Tea Party cowboy from Calgary.
John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney examine the special interests [ http://www.thenation.com/article/176140/dollarocracy ] that dominate our "dollarocracy."
Copyright © 2013 The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/blog/176316/ted-cruz-has-plan-get-america-he-wants-minority-rule [with comments]
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Sarah Palin To Chris Wallace: Reveal Republicans Who Are Trying To 'Trash Ted Cruz'
Posted: 09/23/2013 8:38 am EDT | Updated: 09/23/2013 9:34 am EDT
Sarah Palin went after Chris Wallace on Sunday after the Fox News host said he received opposition research from Republicans about Ted Cruz.
"This has been one of the strangest weeks I've ever had in Washington," Wallace said on "Fox News Sunday [ http://nation.foxnews.com/2013/09/22/chris-wallace-republican-leaders-sent-me-opposition-research-ted-cruz ]." "As soon as we listed Ted Cruz as our featured guest this week, I got unsolicited research and questions, not from Democrats, but from top Republicans to hammer Cruz."
Palin responded on Twitter [ http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/09/22/palin-demands-fox-news-host-turn-over-the-gop-cannibals-who-are-trying-to-trash-cruz/ ], writing: "@FoxNewsSunday Keep it TRULY fair & balanced. Release the GOP names encouraging you to trash @SenTedCruz. No more anonymous sources."
Wallace hosted Cruz to discuss the Republican bill to defund Obamacare in order to avoid a government shutdown, which has almost no chance of passing the Senate. The initiative has earned the senator the ire of fellow Republicans [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/22/ted-cruz-obamacare_n_3971685.html ]. Cruz has called for filibustering the bill, which he supports, in the Senate to prevent Democrats from amending it.
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/23/sarah-palin-chris-wallace-ted-cruz_n_3975077.html [with comments]
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Mike Lee 'Would Love To Know' Who Fox News' Anti-Ted Cruz Sources Are
09/24/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/24/mike-lee-fox-news_n_3982945.html [with embedded video, and comments]
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Mitch McConnell Rejects Ted Cruz Push To Filibuster Bill Defunding Obamacare
09/24/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/23/mitch-mcconnell-ted-cruz-obamacare_n_3977222.html [with embedded video report, and (over 15,000) comments]
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Harry Reid Accuses GOP Of 'Thelma And Louise' Fanaticism Over Shutdown Threat
By Michael McAuliff
Posted: 09/23/2013 3:01 pm EDT | Updated: 09/24/2013 10:42 am EDT
WASHINGTON -- The Republicans bent on defunding Obamacare or shutting down the government are "fanatics" with a "Thelma and Louise"-like mission to drive the nation off a cliff, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Monday.
The federal government will run out of money after Sept. 30 if Congress does not act by then to authorize more spending. Rather than simply do that, the House of Representatives last week passed a bill that would keep federal offices running only if the Senate and White House agreed to defund the Affordable Care Act. Senate Democrats and President Barack Obama are refusing to give in to that demand.
In his opening Senate floor remarks Monday afternoon, Reid said the only people who actually want Obamacare defunded are extremists.
He pointed to polls that have found broad support for most elements of the health care law and noted that many Senate Republicans think using a government shutdown to try to defund the law is a terrible idea.
"Are Republicans so intent on undermining both President Obama and his signature health care law that they're willing to inflict severe damage to our economy in the process?" Reid said. "America will know exactly who to blame: Republican fanatics in the House and the Senate."
"Two dozen Senate Republicans have spoken out against this foolhardy plan to drive the economy off the cliff -- two dozen," Reid added. "This 'Thelma and Louise' style just isn't getting the attention of the American people in a positive tone. If Democrats don't bow to every demand they [tea party Republicans] have, they want to go right over the cliff. Well, we're not going to go with them."
Reid said the Senate will deal with the House's continuing resolution -- as the spending bill is called -- and send it back to the House as quickly as possible.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who earlier pushed the House to pass its defund-or-else bill, has now said he will filibuster it [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/22/ted-cruz-obamacare_n_3971685.html ] because the Senate is likely to strip the defunding provision.
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/23/government-shutdown-harry-reid_n_3976609.html [with embedded video report, and (over 7,000) comments]
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The Double Absurdity of Ted Cruz's 'Filibuster'
Screenshot
Why the senator's last stand against Obamacare just doesn't make sense
Molly Ball
Sep 24 2013, 4:26 PM ET
Who says Republicans and Democrats can't agree on anything? These days, they are largely united in their loathing for Ted Cruz [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/09/how-unpopular-is-ted-cruz-right-now/279903/ ], the pugnacious Republican freshman senator from Texas. On Tuesday afternoon, Cruz took the floor of the Senate and vowed to speak as long as he could stand. (His colleague Mike Lee has already taken a turn at the podium.)
For procedural reasons, Cruz's remarks, however long, do not constitute a true filibuster; the vote to move forward with government-funding legislation is scheduled to begin after noon on Wednesday [ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/09/ted-cruz-vows-to-speak-against-obamacare-until-i-am-no-longer-able-to-stand/ ] and will go forward regardless. Twitter quickly dubbed his stand a "fauxlibuster" or -- perfect for its invocation of vacuous, feel-good nonsense-speech -- a "Ted Talk." Invoking the Nazis, the Soviet Union, and the Little Engine That Could, Cruz styled himself the lone crusader for right against a formidably equipped enemy.
Nearly to a one, Republicans want to get rid of Obamacare. But most also worry Cruz's defund crusade will lead to a government shutdown that hurts the GOP politically [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/09/would-a-government-shutdown-really-be-all-that-bad-for-republicans-yes/279790/ ]. Leaving aside the policy or even the political advisability of Cruz's undertaking, though, there are a couple of basic logical problems with what he's trying to do, as the conservative writer David Freddoso pointed out on the Conservative Intelligence Briefing website on Sunday [ http://www.conservativeintel.com/2013/09/22/cruz-makes-his-case-and-heres-why-its-wrong/# ].
1. He's trying to block the same bill he says he wants to pass. Cruz and his fellow defunders pushed the Republican-controlled House of Representatives to pass a bill funding the federal government but stopping funding for health-care-reform implementation. The House obeyed and passed the bill on Friday [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/09/what-todays-house-vote-to-defund-obamacare-does-nothing/279860/ ]. But now that the Senate is considering the bill, Cruz wants to prevent it from being voted on. "If you’re really interested in putting pressure on Democrats to heed their constituents and vote to defund Obamacare, then you make them take the very vote that Cruz is trying to prevent from happening," Freddoso writes.
2. Shutting down the government wouldn't stop Obamacare. On Fox News on Friday, Cruz proposed passing piecemeal funding bills for "different pieces of the government," such as the military, implying Congress could fund other government functions while omitting Obamacare. But that's wrong -- the money for Obamacare isn't at stake in the continuing resolution currently under consideration. It's "mandatory" spending, akin to Medicare and Social Security, and would require action by Congress to revoke. "I’m convinced that most conservatives who have bought into [Cruz's] strategy have been misled to believe we can hold off Obamacare for a while with a government shutdown," Freddoso writes. "Obamacare is already funded, and that won’t change if this bill gets stalled by a filibuster. During the shutdown, the Marines don’t get paid, but Obamacare gets funded."
Conservatives can cheer Cruz for grabbing the nation's attention and giving an impassioned, high-profile speech. But, Freddoso argues, they shouldn't pretend this is a practical step toward stalling legislation they hate. As he wrote in another post [ http://www.conservativeintel.com/2013/09/20/next-step-defund-obamacare-by-preventing-a-vote-on-defunding-obamacare/ ]: "This plan is right out of Alice in Wonderland. You need to prevent a vote on defunding Obamacare in order to defund Obamacare." Good luck with that, Senator.
Copyright © 2013 by The Atlantic Monthly Group
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/09/the-double-absurdity-of-ted-cruzs-filibuster/279959/ [with comments]
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Marco Rubio Ditches Ted Cruz Speech For Fundraiser
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) ducked out of fellow tea party darling Sen. Ted Cruz's anti-Obamacare speech in the Senate for a fundraiser on Tuesday.
09/25/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/25/marco-rubio-ted-cruz_n_3986042.html [with comments]
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Senator Persists Battling Health Law, Irking Even Many in His Own Party
Sen. Ted Cruz walked to the senate luncheon at the Capitol on Tuesday.
Gabriella Demczuk/The New York Times
Video [embedded]
Senate Leaders Debate Health Care Law: Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, and Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, spoke on the Senate floor about alternatives to a government shutdown.
Graphic
What Congress Must Do to Avoid a Shutdown
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/09/24/us/politics/what-congress-must-do-to-avoid-a-shutdown.html
Video
Cruz Attacks Health Care Law
http://www.nytimes.com/video/2013/09/24/us/politics/100000002462822/cruz-attacks-health-care-law.html
By JONATHAN WEISMAN
Published: September 24, 2013
WASHINGTON — Facing an increasingly likely defeat in his tangled procedural fight over funding the government, Senator Ted Cruz took to the Senate floor on Tuesday and declared he would speak “until I cannot stand” to rally voters against the health care law.
While the Senate appeared ready to override him in a preliminary vote scheduled for Wednesday, Mr. Cruz, a freshman Republican from Texas, pressed ahead hour after hour with his opposition, comparing his fight to efforts by leaders who stood against the Nazis, ended the cold war or started the American Revolution.
“Everyone in America knows Obamacare is destroying the economy,” said Mr. Cruz, who began speaking at 2:41 p.m. and was still at it after midnight. “Where is the urgency?”
Yet outside the chamber, his colleagues worked against his efforts to block a vote to take up the House-passed bill that does precisely what he wants: financing the government through mid-December while cutting off money for the Affordable Care Act.
Mr. Cruz called on his colleagues to stonewall the measure they technically supported, arguing that Senate Democrats would be successful in stripping the health care provision from the funding bill once the way was cleared to a Senate vote on the issue. His basic demand was an agreement that a final vote require 60 supporters, a demand Democrats rejected.
Other Republicans said they saw no reason to oppose debating a measure they actually backed.
“We’d be hard-pressed to explain why we were opposed to a bill we’re in favor of,” said Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader.
Others warned of political repercussions if Republicans, who hope to regain control of the Senate in next year’s elections, were seen as contributing to a shuttering of the government. “Getting the majority in the Senate in 2014 is possible, and we don’t want to go down roads that make it harder,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, who is up for re-election next year. “Repealing Obamacare is a goal all Republicans share,” he added, “but the tactics of achieving that goal can have a backlash.”
Mr. Cruz’s lonely stand was not technically a filibuster. The first vote in a long process to get to a final showdown is set for Wednesday, and Mr. Cruz cannot head off that vote. And only a handful of Republicans are expected to join him in voting against taking up the House bill.
“There will be no filibuster today,” said Senator Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat and majority leader.
Senior Senate Republicans pushed Mr. Cruz on Tuesday to give up his stalling tactics and let the Senate take its final votes as soon as possible to strip out the health care language and other policy prescriptions, then approve new language to keep the government operating until mid-November. An early vote would give Speaker John A. Boehner more time to plan his next move: Whether to put the Senate-passed bill up for a vote and ensure no government shutdown or to add new Republican-favored language and send it back to the Senate.
If Mr. Cruz persists and forces the Senate to exhaust the time allowed for the necessary votes, the final vote cannot happen until Sunday.
“I don’t know who else in the conference may feel differently, but I do know if the House doesn’t get what we send over there until Monday, they’re in a pretty tough spot,” Mr. McConnell said.
Some Senate Republicans suggested a quick vote on a stopgap spending measure could allow the House to attach a measure related to the Affordable Care Act but one that could split Democrats and possibly become law. The obvious target would be a tax on medical devices that helps finance the law, but which has strong opponents in both parties. House Republicans are also considering adding a one-year delay in the individual mandate.
Such procedural niceties carried little weight with the conservative activists backing Mr. Cruz, and the conservative advocacy groups egging them on. Phone lines were jammed by Cruz supporters. E-mails flew, encouraged by organizations like the Tea Party Patriots [ http://www.teapartypatriots.org/ ] and the Heritage Foundation [ http://www.heritage.org/ ]. The Senate Conservative Fund [ http://www.senateconservatives.com/ ], a group that has been running advertisements attacking Republicans who are not supporting the “defund Obamacare” effort, called Mr. McConnell and the No. 2 Senate Republican, John Cornyn of Texas, “turncoats.”
But most Republicans showed little fear of a backlash for voting to take up the House bill. “If this is what you wanted, consideration of this bill, I don’t know how you can be against taking it up,” said Senator Richard Burr, Republican of North Carolina.
Mr. Reid moved Tuesday to change the House-passed bill, shortening the stopgap spending measure so it would finance the government only through mid-November instead of mid-December. Senator Barbara Mikulski, the Maryland Democrat who leads the Appropriations Committee, requested the change to raise pressure on the House to address the automatic spending cuts that are squeezing federal programs and are reflected in the spending plan passed by the House.
But such narrow issues took a back seat to Mr. Cruz’s crusade, with bit parts granted to his Senate Republican supporters. They included Marco Rubio of Florida, Mike Lee of Utah, Pat Roberts of Kansas, David Vitter of Louisiana, Jeff Sessions of Alabama and Rand Paul of Kentucky, whose own filibuster this year [ http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/06/rand-paul-does-not-go-quietly-into-the-night/ ] over the government’s use of lethal drone strikes lasted 12 hours and 52 minutes.
Topics Mr. Cruz addressed included his affection for the little hamburgers at White Castle, the fast-food chain that says its growth is slowing because of the health care law, and a tough-love speech by Ashton Kutcher [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBjnRSSgh8g (next below)].
Under the current timetable, the Senate will vote Wednesday to cut off debate on a motion to take up the House bill and vote Thursday to actually take up the House bill. Mr. Reid will then introduce his version of the stopgap spending bill, stripped of the health care language and other policy measures.
The real showdown vote will probably come on Saturday, when the Senate votes to cut off debate on Mr. Reid’s version of the bill. If that receives 60 votes, a final vote would come on Sunday, leaving the House one day to act before much of the government closes its doors.
That would give Mr. Boehner a stark choice: pass a short-term spending bill with Democratic votes and risk the wrath of conservative activists or try again to take a bit out of the health care law with no time left on the clock and ensure a shutdown.
“I don’t know what all the scenes are, but I’ve seen how this movie ends,” said Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona. “We will end up not shutting the government down, and we will not defund Obamacare.”
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Related
McConnell’s Deal-Making Yields to Politicking (September 24, 2013)
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/24/us/politics/often-at-the-forefront-mcconnell-seems-to-step-back.html
Economix Blog: Shutdown vs. Default: The Relative Impact (September 23, 2013)
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/23/shutdown-vs-default-the-relative-impact/
About New York: A Republican Calls Another a ‘Fraud’ (September 25, 2013)
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/25/nyregion/a-republican-glad-to-label-cruz-a-fraud.html
Related in Opinion
Editorial: The Embarrassment of Senator Ted Cruz (September 25, 2013)
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/25/opinion/the-embarrassment-of-senator-ted-cruz.html
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© 2013 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/25/us/politics/senate-democratic-leader-sets-stage-for-budget-showdown.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/25/us/politics/senate-democratic-leader-sets-stage-for-budget-showdown.html?pagewanted=all ] [with comments]
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Sen. Ted Cruz Compares Conservative #DefundObamacare Skeptics to Nazi Appeasers Because Why Not?
By Asawin Suebsaeng
Tue Sep. 24, 2013 5:31 PM PDT
During Tuesday's anti-Obamacare "fauxlibuster [ http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/09/ted-cruz-nazi-obamacare-filibuster-video.html ]," Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas [ http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/10/ted-cruz-texas-gop-senate ]) whipped out an analogy [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4HGEzAnf6E (next below) (the derivative http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8TL7x4CL7U embedded in the original)]:
There are key differences between the Affordable Care Act [ http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/09/collected-poetry-affordable-care-act ] and Hitler. But, you know, whatever [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law ].
*
Related
Ted Cruz: "We Need 100 More Like Jesse Helms"
At DC speech, the rising GOP star embraces one of the Senate's last proud racists.
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/09/ted-cruz-we-need-100-more-jesse-helms
Obamacare Could Help People Register to Vote—Unless the Administration Caves to the GOP
Federal law says that Obamacare's health exchanges have to offer voter registration services. Republicans have thrown a fit over that, and now the administration is considering backing down.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/09/obamacare-motor-voter-registration-health-exchange
Funny or Die Is Making Pro-Obamacare Videos
Mike Farah, president of production at the comedy website, says this week's celebrity-packed Obamacare rollout meeting at the White House "kind of kicked ass."
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/07/funny-or-die-obamacare-white-house-mike-farah
*
Copyright ©2013 Mother Jones and the Foundation for National Progress
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/09/senator-ted-cruz-compares-defund-obamacare-skeptics-nazi-appeasers [with comments]; http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/cruz-likens-obamacare-defunding-skeptics-to-nazi-appeasers-video [with comments]
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The Daily Szep -- Joe and Ted
09/24/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-szep/the-daily-szep-joe-and-te_b_3980939.html [with comments]
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American Bile
Javier Jaén
By ROBERT B. REICH
September 21, 2013, 2:32 pm
Not long ago I was walking toward an airport departure gate when a man approached me.
“Are you Robert Reich?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“You’re a Commie dirtbag.” (He actually used a variant of that noun, one that can’t be printed here.)
“I’m sorry?” I thought I had misunderstood him.
“You’re a Commie dirtbag.”
My mind raced through several possibilities. Was I in danger? That seemed doubtful. He was well-dressed and had a briefcase in one hand. He couldn’t have gotten through the checkpoint with a knife or gun. Should I just walk away? Probably. But what if he followed me? Regardless, why should I let him get away with insulting me?
I decided to respond, as civilly as I could: “You’re wrong. Where did you get your information?”
“Fox News. Bill O’Reilly says you’re a Communist.”
A year or so ago Bill O’Reilly did say on his Fox News show that I was a Communist. I couldn’t imagine what I’d done to provoke his ire except to appear on several TV shows arguing for higher taxes on the wealthy, which hardly qualified me as a Communist. Nor am I exactly a revolutionary. I served in Bill Clinton’s cabinet. My first full-time job in Washington was in the Ford administration, working for Robert H. Bork at the Justice Department.
“Don’t believe everything you hear on Fox News,” I said. The man walked away, still irritated.
It’s rare that I’m accosted and insulted by strangers, but I do receive vitriolic e-mails and angry Facebook posts. On the Internet and on TV shows, name-calling substitutes for argument, and ad hominem attack for reason.
Scholars who track these things say the partisan divide is sharper today than it has been in almost a century. The typical Republican agrees with the typical Democrat on almost no major issue. If you haven’t noticed, Congress is in complete gridlock.
At the same time, polls show Americans to be more contemptuous and less trusting of major institutions: government, big business, unions, Wall Street, the media.
I’m 67 and have lived through some angry times: Joseph R. McCarthy’s witch hunts of the 1950s, the struggle for civil rights and the Vietnam protests in the 1960s, Watergate and its aftermath in the 1970s. But I don’t recall the degree of generalized bile that seems to have gripped the nation in recent years.
The puzzle is that many of the big issues that used to divide us, from desegregation to foreign policy, are less incendiary today. True, we disagree about guns, abortion and gay marriage, but for the most part have let the states handle these issues. So what, exactly, explains the national distemper?
For one, we increasingly live in hermetically sealed ideological zones that are almost immune to compromise or nuance. Internet algorithms and the proliferation of media have let us surround ourselves with opinions that confirm our biases. We’re also segregating geographically into red or blue territories: chances are that our neighbors share our views, and magnify them. So when we come across someone outside these zones, whose views have been summarily dismissed or vilified, our minds are closed.
Add in the fact that most Americans no longer remember the era, from the Great Depression through World War II, when we were all in it together — when hardship touched almost every family, and we were palpably dependent on one another. There were sharp disagreements, but we shared challenges that forced us to work together toward common ends. Small wonder that by the end of the war, Americans’ confidence in major institutions of our society was at its highest.
These changes help explain why Americans are so divided, but not why they’re so angry. To understand that, we need to look at the economy.
Put simply, most people are on a downward escalator. Although jobs are slowly returning, pay is not. Most jobs created since the start of the recovery, in 2009, pay less than the jobs that were lost during the Great Recession. This means many people are working harder than ever, but still getting nowhere. They’re increasingly pessimistic about their chances of ever doing better.
As their wages and benefits shrink, though, they see corporate executives and Wall Street bankers doing far better than ever before. And they are keenly aware of bailouts and special subsidies for agribusinesses, pharma, oil and gas, military contractors, finance and every other well-connected industry.
Political scientists have noted a high correlation between inequality and polarization. But economic class isn’t the only dividing line in America. Many working-class voters are heartland Republicans, while many of America’s superrich are coastal Democrats. The real division is between those who believe the game is rigged against them and those who believe they have a decent shot.
Losers of rigged games can become very angry, as history has revealed repeatedly. In America, the populist wings of both parties have become more vocal in recent years — the difference being that the populist right blames government more than it does big corporations while the populist left blames big corporations more than government.
Widening inequality thereby ignites what the historian Richard Hofstadter called the “paranoid style in American politics.” It animated the Know-Nothing and Anti-Masonic movements before the Civil War, the populist agitators of the Progressive Era and the John Birch Society — whose founder accused President Dwight D. Eisenhower of being a “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy” — in the 1950s.
Inequality is far wider now than it was then, and threatens social cohesion and trust. I don’t think Bill O’Reilly really believes I’m a Communist. He’s just channeling the nation’s bile.
Robert B. Reich [ http://gspp.berkeley.edu/directories/faculty/robert-reich ], a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of “Beyond Outrage: What Has Gone Wrong With Our Economy and Our Democracy, and How to Fix It [ http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Outrage-Expanded-Edition-democracy/dp/0345804376 ],” is featured in the new documentary “Inequality for All [ http://inequalityforall.com/ ].”
© 2013 The New York Times Company
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/21/american-bile/ [with comments]
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At 77 He Prepares Burgers Earning in Week His Former Hourly Wage
Tom Palome, right, and Maxine Haynes, project director for Tampa's AARP Foundation, who helped him get an interview at Advantage Sales & Marketing LLC, which runs food demonstrations for Sam’s Club and other stores.
Phelan M. Ebenhack/Bloomberg
Today, the 77-year-old former vice president of marketing for Oral-B juggles two part-time jobs: one as a $10-an-hour food demonstrator at Sam’s Club, the other flipping burgers and serving drinks at a golf club grill for slightly more than minimum wage.
Phelan M. Ebenhack/Bloomberg
At the height of his corporate career, Tom Palome was pulling in a salary in the low six-figures and flying first class on business trips to Europe.
Phelan M. Ebenhack/Bloomberg
Video [embedded]
Boomers Find They Need Work to Support Retirement
By Carol Hymowitz - Sep 23, 2013 3:44 PM CT
It seems like another life. At the height of his corporate career, Tom Palome was pulling in a salary in the low six-figures and flying first class on business trips to Europe.
Today, the 77-year-old former vice president of marketing for Oral-B juggles two part-time jobs: one as a $10-an-hour food demonstrator at Sam’s Club, the other flipping burgers and serving drinks at a golf club grill for slightly more than minimum wage.
While Palome worked hard his entire career, paid off his mortgage and put his kids through college, like most Americans he didn’t save enough for retirement. Even many affluent baby boomers who are approaching the end of their careers haven’t come close to saving the 10 to 20 times their annual working income [ http://www.bloomberg.com/infographics/2013-23-19/end-of-retirement.html ] that investment experts say they’ll need to maintain their standard of living in old age.
For middle class households, with incomes ranging from the mid five to low six figures, it’s especially grim. When the 2008 financial crisis hit, what little Palome had saved -- $90,000 -- took a beating and he suddenly found himself in need of cash to maintain his lifestyle. With years if not decades of life ahead of him, Palome took the jobs he could find.
Mopping Floors
The youthful and perennially optimistic grandfather considers himself lucky. He’s blessed with good health, he said. He’s able to work, live independently and maintain his dignity, even if he has to mop the floors at the club grill before going home at 8 p.m. and finally getting off his feet.
“That’s part of the job,” he said. “You have to respect the job you’re doing and not be negative -- or don’t do it.”
Low-income Americans have long had to scrape by in old age, relying primarily on Social Security. The middle class, with its more educated and resourceful retirees, is supposed to be better prepared, with some even having the luxury to forge fulfilling second acts as they redefine retirement on their own terms. Or so popular culture tells us.
The reality is often quite another story. More seniors who spent much of their careers as corporate managers and professionals are competing for low-wage jobs. For these growing ranks of seniors with scant savings, it’s the end of retirement.
Downward Mobility
About 7.2 million Americans who were 65 and older were employed last year, a 67 percent [ http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNU02000097 ] increase from a decade ago, according to government data. Yet 59 percent of households headed by people 65 and older currently have no retirement account assets, according to Federal Reserve data analyzed by the National Institute on Retirement Security.
“People who built successful careers, put their kids through college and saved what they could, are still facing downward mobility,” said Teresa Ghilarducci, an economist at The New School, who has studied the finances of seniors.
It’s about to get worse. Right behind the current legions of elderly workers is the looming baby boomer generation, who began turning 65 in 2011 and are reaching that age at a rate of about 8,000 a day. They’re the first generation expected to fund their own retirements, even as they live longer lives.
They, too, are coming up short. Company-paid pensions are mostly a thing of the past, replaced in the last three decades by 401(k) accounts primarily funded and managed by employees. The median 401(k) balance for households headed by people aged 55 to 64 who had retirement accounts at work was $120,000 in 2011, according to the Center for Retirement Research [ http://crr.bc.edu/ ] at Boston College.
Not Enough
Those savings will provide $4,800 a year, assuming seniors withdraw 4 percent annually, the amount recommended by retirement experts to ensure retirees don’t run out of money in their lifetimes.
Little wonder that half of baby boomers aged 50 to 64 don’t think they’ll ever have enough to retire, according to a 2011 survey by AARP.
“The current retirement savings systems isn’t working, and that’s becoming a crisis as Americans who make it to 65 in good health are now living at least two more decades,” said Larry Fink, chief executive officer of BlackRock Inc. (BLK), the world’s largest asset manager.
“Longevity should be a blessing, but if you haven’t planned for it, you’re going to work much longer than you ever dreamed of doing,” he said. “Or you better be good to your children because you’re probably going to be living with them.”
Being Independent
That’s the last thing Tom Palome wants to do -- even though his children have offered to take him in. After decades of keeping his body trim -- at 5-foot, 10-inches tall, he weighs a fit 170 -- and his hair colored a dark brown, he’s often mistaken for a 60-year-old and has no intention of giving up his independence.
On the job at Sam’s Club, Palome is easy to spot amid shoppers pushing carts down the aisles. It’s not just the bright green apron he’s wearing with the words “Tastes and Tips” printed across the front nor the matching green baseball cap that set him apart in the Brandon, Florida, store near Tampa. It’s also his charisma and determination.
He waves to a mother with a toddler in tow and insists she sample the blueberry-flavored crackers he has stacked neatly on a tray at his aluminum work station.
“They’re multigrain, and healthier for kids than cookies,” said Palome, who researches the products he pitches on the Internet.
Product Demos
He’s supposed to sell two boxes of the crackers during his seven-hour shift. He sells 24 by clean-up time, then grabs a garbage bag and gathers containers and leftover food from demonstration carts around the store.
The next day, a humid Sunday in August, Palome is at his second part-time job, an eight-hour shift as a short-order cook and bartender at Rogers Park Golf Course [ http://www.rogersparkgc.com/home/ ] in Tampa. Working solo, he’s in perpetual motion, rushing between the take-out counter at the golf course’s cafe and indoor counter to collect orders and operate the cash register, while grilling hot dogs and hamburgers and grabbing soft drinks from the refrigerator.
It’s a busy day at the 18-hole municipal course, and he serves 70 customers before closing time. Then he scrubs down the grill and sweeps and mops the floors.
Palome earns about $80 for his day’s work, $7.98 per hour in wages, plus tips.
“I earn in a week what I used to earn in an hour,” he said, adding that he understands seniors can’t easily keep or get jobs that pay middle-income wages.
Social Security
Palome, who said his jobs keep him active and learning new things, could survive without working. He receives $1,200 from Social Security and a $600 a month pension from his last corporate job. Still, his $1,400 in monthly wages allows him to bolster his savings and provides for some extras. He goes to the theater, pays for plane tickets to visit his children and grandsons and takes occasional vacations.
“I know seniors like me who hardly ever leave their homes because they don’t have money to do anything,” Palome said. “They could work, but won’t take a lesser job.”
To stretch his income, Palome runs his dishwasher once a week and turns off his hot water heater every morning after he showers. He buys airline tickets six months in advance, booking rental cars for as little as $13.80 a day.
Getting Stuck
Palome grew up in Poughkeepsie, New York. His parents were both immigrants, and his father worked as a laborer. After a stint in the Navy, Palome had a chance to work at a local International Business Machine Corp. (IBM) plant. The work was steady, with solid pay and benefits. Instead, he enrolled at Fordham University to study business, relying on veteran benefits to pay tuition. His father was so angry Palome turned down the plant job that he didn’t speak to him for months.
“I knew that anyone who got into that plant never got out,” he said. “You just got stuck because of the steady pay.”
Palome landed a job at Shulton Co., the maker of Old Spice after-shave lotion and cologne, then moved to Yardley of London as a brand manager. His big break came in 1975 when he was recruited to The Cooper Cos. as vice president of marketing for the Oral-B dental-care business.
The job gave him a high five-figure income and an executive’s life at age 39. He flew first class to Cooper offices in the U.S. and in England, Sweden and Germany. He helped win an endorsement for the Oral-B toothbrush from the U.S. Olympic Committee [ http://www.teamusa.org/ ]. He had a closet filled with business suits, and on weekends he played golf with other executives.
Tragedy Strikes
That life turned upside down when his wife, Edna, was killed in a car accident in 1983. Palome’s daughter, then a college student, offered to come home to take care of her brothers, who were 14 and 16 years old. Palome insisted she stay in school. He took charge of the parenting and the housework.
“I was numb, in shock and trying to hold everything together,” he said. “And my sons didn’t want anyone in the house besides me, not even a housekeeper.”
When Cooper relocated from New Jersey to California, Palome didn’t want to uproot his family. So in 1980, when he was 44, he started a consulting company, with Cooper as his main client. He also did consulting for Sandoz Pharmaceuticals, Johnson & Johnson and others.
In flush years, Palome had several clients and earned about $120,000. Though he saved for his kids’ college and helped his elderly parents, retirement wasn’t on his radar.
“I never thought I’d live this long,” he said.
No Savings
Because he was self-employed, Palome didn’t have a 401(k) account, and he has never had a tax-deferred IRA, or Individual Retirement Account. It’s the same for most Americans. Only about half of private-sector workers were covered by an employer-sponsored retirement plan of any kind in 2011. And fewer than 40 percent of those participated, according to the Employee Benefits Research Institute.
Many now approaching retirement began saving too late, stopped saving when they lost jobs, or borrowed against their 401(k) accounts to finance their children’s college tuition. They also often chose investments that failed to yield the best results, or they bailed out of the stock market after the financial crisis battered their savings, then missing the rebound.
“How is the average middle-class person going to amass $1,000,000 by the time they’re 65, which is what they’ll need to get $40,000 a year in income from their retirement savings?” Ghilarducci said.
Keep Going
Palome had lean years when he couldn’t easily save. He decided to take a job running a Friendly’s restaurant in Parsippany, N.J., from 1990 to 1993. He figured he’d acquire new skills, which have since proved useful.
“Tom always did what he had to do to keep going,” said his younger brother Peter, who’s 66 and lives in the same senior community.
Palome later ran a restaurant at a New Jersey golf club while he continued his consulting. At 64, when an 800 square foot manufactured home he’d seen in Plant City, a Tampa suburb, became available for $21,500, he purchased it with a credit card to amass frequent flier miles. He then sold his New Jersey home for $180,000, kept what he needed to quickly pay off his credit card debt and divided the rest among his children so they’d have down payments for their own homes.
“The house was theirs as much as mine, and that’s their inheritance from me,” he said.
Don’t Panic
At first everything went according to his plan. Palome enjoyed the year-round warm weather and he avoided dipping into savings by doing part-time bar-tending and catering. Then the financial crisis hit. Palome’s part-time work evaporated. His savings, which he’d invested mostly in stocks, shrank from about $90,000 to less than $40,000.
“I was shocked by how fast I lost so much,” he said.
Palome didn’t panic. He rewrote his resume, taking out references to his corporate career so he wouldn’t appear overqualified for restaurant and hotel jobs. He searched online jobs sites and local papers for leads. Between 2008 and 2011 he figures he applied for about 100 jobs.
He came close to getting two of those until his prospective employers learned his age. He was never told explicitly that he was too old for a job. Yet hiring managers who asked when he could start working never called again after he submitted required copies of his driver’s license with his birth date.
Foreclosure City
“I was in a foreclosure city in a foreclosure state,” he said. “So many people were out of work. Who wants to hire a 75-year-old?”
Two years ago, Palome saw an advertisement in a local paper for an AARP Foundation [ http://www.aarp.org/aarp-foundation/ ] job training program. He met with Maxine Haynes, the program’s Tampa project director, who helped him get an interview at Advantage Sales & Marketing LLC, which runs food demonstrations for Sam’s Club and other stores.
“He had so much energy and enthusiasm when he walked through the door here, I knew I had to try to help him,” Haynes said.
Palome aced the interview with a spontaneous pitch on how to sell a simple magic marker. Still, he worried his age would be a deal breaker.
“You ought to know I’m 75,” he offered.
“Age is only a number,” Wanice Matthews, Palome’s current boss at Advantage Sales & Marketing, later said. “If I had 10 more Toms on my team, I’d have the best team in the business.”
Every other morning, Palome does 70 sit-ups and 70 squats and almost as many leg lifts and arm strengthening exercises. He alternates his at-home exercises with two or three 10-mile bike rides each week.
Heating Pad
At Sam’s Club, his single 30-minute break during his seven-and-a-half hour shift is not enough time to prevent backaches and leg cramps after standing all day.
“Make sure you rest when you get home and don’t do any housecleaning,” Palome recently advised a new employee, a widow who hasn’t worked in years.
When Palome gets home, he stretches out on his couch, tucking a heating pad behind his back before preparing a light supper. He goes to bed by 10 p.m.
If Palome has one regret, it’s that he didn’t get better retirement investing advice somewhere along the line. “I thought I could do it on my own,” he said.
Still, he’s proud of his accomplishments. He built a career in marketing, raised a family following a tragic loss and helped his kids get a start in life.
“I’m not going to sit on my laurels and say I was an executive making six figures and traveling the world,” he said. “I tell people I demonstrate food and I do short-order cooking. I don’t mind saying it. What’s important is that I can work today.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Carol Hymowitz in New York at chymowitz1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jonathan Kaufman at jkaufman17@bloomberg.net
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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-17/aging-boomers-befuddle-marketers-eying-15-trillion-prize.html
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Special Report: The Future of Retirement
http://topics.bloomberg.com/the-future-of-retirement/
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©2013 BLOOMBERG L.P.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-23/why-100-000-salary-may-yield-retirement-flipping-burgers.html [with comments]
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The 99% Owe “A Debt of Gratitude” to the 1%: Harry Binswanger
By Morgan Korn | Daily Ticker – September 24, 2013
The 99% will not be happy with Harry Binswanger.
The former college professor and board member of the Ayn Rand Institute wrote an incendiary column this month in Forbes [ http://www.forbes.com/sites/harrybinswanger/2013/09/17/give-back-yes-its-time-for-the-99-to-give-back-to-the-1/ ], arguing that “the community should give back to the wealth-creators” and the world should be indebted to the rich and powerful for “their enormous contributions to our standard of living.”
Binswanger sat down with The Daily Ticker’s Aaron Task and Henry Blodget to defend his controversial views. He also reiterated his call that anyone who earns more than $1 million a year deserves an exemption from paying taxes, a “symbolic gesture” he notes, because the “great achievers” (individuals like Henry Ford, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Steve Jobs) “lifted us out of the cave and gave us our standard of living.” He also proposes that the highest earner of the year – maybe an investment banker, hedge fund manager or CEO – be given a Congressional Medal of Honor [ http://www.cmohs.org/ ] in return for his or her contribution to human life.
If millionaires do not pay taxes, do they still get the benefits of public assets, such as the military, firefighters, police officers, court of law and public schools? Watch the video [embedded in the original] above to see how Binswanger responds and check out who he ranks as the most influential person of all time: Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein or Mother Teresa?
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Related
Top 1% Getting 95% of Income Gains: Is Washington Responsible?
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/top-1-getting-95-income-gains-washington-responsible-151332783.html
5 Ways a Government Shutdown Would Affect You
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/5-ways-government-shutdown-affect-113007959.html
Defunding Obamacare: GOP Is "Playing with Fire"
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/republicans-playing-fire-attack-obamacare-chris-moody-145043225.html
*
Copyright 2013 Daily Ticker
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/99-owe-debt-gratitude-1-harry-binswanger-153327379.html [with the referenced video segment embedded, and (approaching 4,000) comments]
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Ayn Rand Disciple Says CEOs Deserve All the Credit – Henry Blodget Disagrees
By Henry Blodget | Daily Ticker – September 24, 2013
A Forbes contributor, Harry Binswanger, who is a disciple of the writer Ayn Rand, argued this week that people who make $1+ million a year are so valuable to society that they shouldn't pay any taxes [ http://www.forbes.com/sites/harrybinswanger/2013/09/17/give-back-yes-its-time-for-the-99-to-give-back-to-the-1/ ].
Far from these million-dollar earners paying more taxes, Binswanger argued, the rest of America should "give back" to the 1% by thanking them for their service to the country and rewarding them by exempting them from taxation.
This argument is the logical extension of an argument that many American entrepreneurs and investors make, which is that they are the country's "job creators" and therefore deserve almost all of the country's income and wealth. These "job creators," this argument goes, should pay their employees as little as possible and keep every penny of profit for themselves. After all, they deserve it: They're the ones who "create" the jobs that sustain the country.
It's no surprise why this argument is popular among entrepreneurs and investors: Instead of making them feel selfish about taking such a big share of the country's wealth for themselves, it actually makes them feel magnanimous. If they weren't "creating all those jobs," then most Americans would have nothing to do!
Unfortunately, this argument is both startlingly selfish and economically wrong.
What actually "creates jobs" in an economy is a healthy economic ecosystem, one comprised of entrepreneurs, investors, employees, and, critically, customers.
Successful entrepreneurs do play a valuable and important role in this ecosystem: They start companies that develop products and services that people want, and they guide the companies that produce them.
Successful investors also play a valuable and important role: They provide the capital necessary for companies to invest in new products and services.
But without talented employees who make a company's products and services, and--just as important--without financially healthy customers who buy them, entrepreneurs and investors can't create any sustainable jobs.
So to suggest that entrepreneurs and investors deserve all the credit or compensation in the economy is absurd.
It's also absurd to suggest that placing all of a country's wealth in the hands of entrepreneurs and investors is somehow good for the economy. The 100+ million Americans who work for others, after all, aren't just "employees." They're also American consumers. Every penny they earn is spent on buying products and services. So sharing more of a company's wealth with the folks who create it isn't just the right thing to do. It's also good for the economy.
Mr. Binswanger was kind enough to join me and Aaron Task on The Daily Ticker to talk about his philosophy. He argued that CEOs and entrepreneurs should pay employees as little as possible. After all, Mr. Binswanger argues, the employees are just "trading" their labor for the entrepreneur's money. That's the employees' decision, and they don't deserve a penny more than they get.
That's one way of looking at it.
The other way of looking at it is that employees are members of a team. And that, as members of the team, employees should not be paid as little as possible but, instead, share in the value they help create.
That, for what it's worth, is the way I look at it.
And my view of this isn't the product of an armchair philosophy.
It's the product of living and working in the once-vibrant U.S. economy and of running a successful company with ~130 employees.
Most of the full-time employees at our company, Business Insider, have stock options. These allow everyone to share in the success of the company. We don't pay our employees "as little as possible." We pay our employees as much as possible while still achieving our financial goals. As the CEO of the company--and the entrepreneur who co-founded it and an investor who funded it--I don't hallucinate that all of the company's success is due to me. It is a privilege to lead our team, but it is the hard work of the ~130 talented people on the team that make us successful. And it is the revenue we receive from our readers and clients that sustains all the jobs here--not me. The overall mission of Business Insider, meanwhile, is not to "make as much money as possible." It is to produce a great product for our readers and clients, produce a compelling return for our investors, and provide excellent jobs for our team.
In short, the goal of our company is to create value for all three of our important constituencies: customers, shareholders, and employees.
Unfortunately, in America right now, Mr. Binswanger's business philosophy is quite popular. America's investor class has taken such complete control of the economy that American companies are treating their employees as "costs" [ http://www.businessinsider.com/business-and-the-economy-2013-7 ] and paying them as little as they possibly can. Big American corporations are currently earning the highest profits in history and paying the lowest wages in history [ http://www.businessinsider.com/profits-at-high-wages-at-low-2013-4 ]. And because most of the employees that work for these companies are American consumers, the U.S. economy is suffering.
This business philosophy is greedy, selfish, and shortsighted. And it is constraining the growth of the American economy.
Copyright 2013 Daily Ticker (emphasis in original)
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/ayn-rand-disciple-says-ceos-deserve-credit-henry-164112682.html [with comments]
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America's Ruling Class Hall of Shame
By Peter Dreier
Posted: 09/22/2013 8:26 pm
Out of 300 million Americans, a few thousand wield disproportionate economic and political influence because of their positions at the pinnacle of America's corporate and media establishments or their roles as political allies (or puppets) of the corporate ruling class. C. Wright Mills described this group in his 1956 book, The Power Elite [ http://www.amazon.com/The-Power-Elite-Wright-Mills/dp/0195133544 ], G. William Domhoff has updated this analysis in his book, Who Rules America? [ http://www.amazon.com/Rules-America-Triumph-Corporate-Rich/dp/0078026717 ] (now in its 7th edition), and Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson have described how the power elite wields its influence in Winner-Take-All Politics [ http://www.amazon.com/Winner-Take-All-Politics-Washington-Richer-Turned/dp/1416588701 ].
Many of them have overlapping memberships on the boards of the largest corporations, business lobby groups, universities and think tanks, foundations, and media conglomerates. They are not part of conspiracy. They do not meet secretly to plot America's future. And they disagree with each other on some issues, particularly same-sex marriage, abortion and gun control. Some are corporate conservatives and moderates; some are right-wing reactionaries and racists; others are lunatic libertarians.
But they agree on the essential concerns about the economy. The top Wall Street and Wal-Mart CEOs, the media monopolists and their talk-show agitators, the billionaire benefactors, and the business lobbyists share an antipathy toward unions, progressive taxes, and government regulations that protect consumers, workers, and the environment. They fund think tanks and hire college professors to promote their views and to cry wolf [ http://crywolfproject.org/ ] about government rules -- denying the reality of global warming, warning that raising the minimum wage or strengthening regulations on banks will "kill jobs," and attacking Obamacare (and Obama) as "socialist." They work closely with right-wing, conservative, and moderate politicians to carry out their agenda. They act on behalf of big business and the super-rich, but to translate their ideas into public policy they have to persuade voters that their agenda benefits middle class Americans -- a task that is getting harder and harder to do.
Yet even among the few thousand members of the power elite, there are a small number whose influence is greater than the others. Here is a list of the 20 most influential members of the power elite.
Congressmen Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan, corporate lobbyist and Americans for Tax Reform head Grover Norquist, Chase CEO Jamie Dimon; Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf
[embedded pictures]
David and Charles Koch, Walmart CEO Mike Duke, Sen. Mitch McConnell, Newt Gingrich
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Wall Street titan and Fix-the-Debt funder Pete Peterson, Sen. Rand Paul, sleazy corporate front man Rick Berman, Fox News president Roger Ailes, media mogul Rupert Murdoch
[embedded pictures]
Radio reactionary Rush Limbaugh, casino billionaire benefactor Sheldon Adelson, Sen. Ted Cruz, Chamber of Commerce CEO Tom Donohue, NRA hit man Wayne LaPierre
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As in all eras of American history, there are a handful of members of America's upper class who are traitors to their class. They sympathize with and even fund progressive causes, campaigns, and candidates. They side with the growing movement [ http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-08-22/opinions/41435494_1_king-s-voting-rights-act-gun-violence ] that is emerging to challenge the domination of America's power elite.
Like Yertle the Turtle, these 20 men sit atop an unstable foundation of widening inequality and social injustice. And like Mack, the turtle at the bottom, there are more and more Americans [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/09/12/the-rise-of-the-new-new-left.html ] angered and frustrated by the status quo. Polls show that most Americans prefer "responsible capitalism" [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-dreier/what-kind-of-capitalism_b_705987.html ] over "no rules" capitalism.
If history offers any lessons, it is that these men -- and the interests and ideas they represent -- are not invincible. Martin Luther King said, "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." But it takes movements and activists to bend it.
Peter Dreier [ http://employees.oxy.edu/dreier/ ] is the E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics and chair of the Urban & Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College. His most recent book is The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame [ http://100greatestamericans.org/ ; http://www.amazon.com/The-Greatest-Americans-20th-Century/dp/1568586817 ] (Nation Books, 2012).
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc. (emphasis in original)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-dreier/americas-hall-of-shame_b_3972642.html [with comments]
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Why the Poor Don't Work, According to the Poor
Few say it's because they can't find jobs. But is that a reason to take away their food stamps?
Jordan Weissmann
Sep 23 2013, 4:26 PM ET
Conservative Republicans have officially made it their mission to end food stamps as we know them. Such was evident last week, when the House GOP voted to cut [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/20/us/politics/house-passes-bill-cutting-40-billion-from-food-stamps.html ] the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, as food stamps are now known, by $39 billion over a decade and begin bulking up its work requirements, along the lines of welfare reform [ http://www.politico.com/story/2013/08/house-republicans-welfare-reform-95351.html ] in the 1990s.
Whether you believe this a good or humane idea probably boils down to your take on a single question: why don't the poor, who make up the overwhelming majority of food stamp recipients, go to work? In 2012, more than 26 million 18-to-64-year-old adults lived under the poverty line; about 15 million of them didn't have a job during the year. Is the economy to blame? Or are personal choices at fault?
If you're a liberal, your answer is probably pretty cut and dry, and these days likely involves the word "recession." But conservatives tend to take a different view. They argue that whereas unemployment among middle class families rises and falls with the health of the job market, poverty is shaped and fueled mostly by cultural forces, that the poor could work if they wanted, and that the safety net lulls them into indolence. One of their key data points on this front comes from the Census. Each year, the bureau asks [ http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/cpstables/032013/pov/pov24_000.htm ] jobless Americans why it is they've been out of work. And traditionally, a only a small percentage of impoverished adults actually say it's because they can't find employment, a point that New York University professor Lawrence Mead, one of the intellectual architects of welfare reform, made to Congress in recent testimony [ http://waysandmeans.house.gov/uploadedfiles/larry_mead_testimony_hr061813.pdf ].
In 2007, for instance, 6.4 percent of adults who lived under the poverty line and didn't work in the past year said it was because they couldn't find a job. As of 2012, it had more than doubled, leaving it at a still-small 13.5 percent. By comparison, more than a quarter said they stayed home for family reasons and more than 30 percent cited a disability.
As you might expect, the are some big differences between the genders on this front. Women are far more likely than men to cite family. Men are more likely to cite their inability to find a job.
To me, these are the sorts of numbers that raise more questions than they answer. Are women staying home because they prefer to be mothers, or because they can't find jobs that pay enough to make working a financially viable choice, once the cost of family care is factored in? Are youngish retirees really choosing to leave the workforce early, or are they cashing in their social security benefits prematurely because they're out of other options? Of the 1.2 million adult men who said they couldn't hunt down work, how many really couldn't find any job, and how many couldn't find a job they wanted? Of the millions of apparently impoverished college students in the country, how many are essentially living on loans or their Pell Grants? You get the idea.
If you do choose to take the Census figures at face value, though, I think there are a couple of lessons. First, the recession changed poverty to some extent. More of the non-working poor claim they cannot find a job than at any point in the past two decades. Given that there are three unemployed Americans for every job opening, that shouldn't be much of a surprise. Second, the poor who choose not to work aren't necessarily doing so out of laziness, but because they have other obligations: they're trying to take care of relatives, they're ill, or they're attempting to make their way through school.
And taking away their meal tickets won't fix any of those problems.
*
Americans 18 to 64 who lived under the poverty line each year from 1994 thru 2012 and did not work during the year, by reason for not working (U.S. Census, in thousands)
Copyright © 2013 by The Atlantic Monthly Group
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/09/why-the-poor-dont-work-according-to-the-poor/279900/ [with comments]
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Food Stamp Work Requirements Could Still Be Waived For Some Under GOP Bill
Rep. Robert Hurt (R-Va.) has lauded the House's legislation to slash food stamp funding while at the same time telling his constituents they could be spared the cuts.
(AP Photo/Steve Helber)
By Arthur Delaney
Posted: 09/24/2013 4:15 pm EDT | Updated: 09/24/2013 4:54 pm EDT
WASHINGTON -- After the House of Representatives voted to cut food stamp funding by 5 percent last week, Rep. Robert Hurt (R-Va.) trumpeted the legislation's work requirements for nutrition assistance.
"Not only does this legislation restore the integrity of this safety-net program and encourage beneficiaries to become more self-sufficient, but it will also ensure that the benefits are available to those who need them most," Hurt said in a statement on his website [ http://hurt.house.gov/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=261935e6-d3b8-477e-9645-df6d8e31ccd8 ].
But Hurt told a local paper that parts of his Southside Virginia district could be spared from having to work for food stamps. His office said able-bodied adults in high-unemployment areas like Danville, Martinsville and Henry County could keep drawing Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits without having to obey the new requirement that they find jobs or enroll in training.
"Under the House proposal, the states would be given certain flexibility to grant waivers in certain cases depending on unemployment levels and/or hardship," Hurt's office told Brittany Hughes of the Danville Register & Bee [ http://www.godanriver.com/news/danville/article_11e138da-24a5-11e3-946d-0019bb30f31a.html ].
Hurt was not one of the 15 moderate Republicans who voted against the bill, but his statement to the local press suggests he and they share some of the same sensitivity "to the struggles that people are having," as one of the GOP nays, Rep. Patrick Meehan (R-Pa.), put it after the vote [ http://www.newsworks.org/index.php/local/item/60063-pa-republicans-break-ranks-vote-no-on-food-stamp-cuts ].
The 1996 welfare reform law allowed able-bodied adults without dependents, known by policy wonks as "ABAWDs," to receive food stamps for only three months unless they worked or enrolled in training at least 20 hours per week. The law gave states authority to wave the requirement in times of high unemployment, something most states currently do.
The House voted Thursday to stop states from waiving the requirement, a policy change that would push 1.7 million Americans off assistance, according to the Congressional Budget Office [ http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/HR3102.pdf ]. As liberal critics of the House legislation have noted [ http://www.offthechartsblog.org/author/greenstein/ ], the measure doesn't require states to make training programs available to food stamp applicants if jobs are scarce.
But a little-discussed provision of the new legislation would allow states to exempt 15 percent of able-bodied adults from the requirement. The calculation would be based on the number of ABAWDs who receive benefits in a given state as counted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In the most recent data available [ http://www.fns.usda.gov/ora/MENU/Published/snap/FILES/Participation/2011Characteristics.pdf ], 74,000 able-bodied Virginians without dependents received SNAP benefits in 2011. That means that under the House bill, next year Virginia could give food stamps to 15 percent of that total, or 11,100 people -- if it wanted to. It's unclear how the more limited waiver process would work. More than 36,000 households receive SNAP benefits in Hurt's district alone [ http://www.fns.usda.gov/ora/SNAPCharacteristics/Virginia/Virginia_5.pdf ].
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities [ http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=4009 ], a progressive critic of the GOP bill, has said the exemptions approach is flawed.
"Since the number of exemptions is very small compared to the number of people affected by the three-month cut-off provision and many of the affected individuals have similar circumstances — they are unemployed in a weak economy, struggling to make ends meet, and often facing destitution — it is difficult for states to determine which of those individuals should receive exemptions and which should not," the Center's Dottie Rosenbaum, Stacy Dean and Robert Greenstein wrote in a recent report.
The House legislation is unlikely to become law in its entirety; it will have to be reconciled with a more moderate food stamps measure that passed the Senate earlier this year, and both chambers must approve a final compromise.
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/24/food-stamp-cuts_n_3982940.html [with comments]
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The Most Controversial Laws of the Last 100 Years (The Stimulus and Obamacare Are 1 and 2)
Reuters
Extreme polarization is something new. It's also something very old.
Derek Thompson
Sep 23 2013, 12:19 PM ET
"Fund government, not Obamacare," Sen. Ted Cruz tweeted this morning, drawing a distinction where there is no difference, since Obamacare is a part of the government. If the Republican campaign to shut down Washington over de-funding the Affordable Care Act seems too silly to become reality, consider that Obamacare is no ordinary law -- and this is no ordinary Congress.
In the last 100 years, no major lasting legislation has passed over 100 percent opposition from the other party. Until Obamacare.
Maybe you knew that part. But you might not know how it fits in the context of the most important laws of the last century. "In the 21st century, the concept of universal health care occurs just about everywhere in the developed world, and increasingly, in the developing world," writes Michael Cembalest, chairman of market and investment strategy at JP Morgan, in a new research note. But in the U.S., Obamacare suffers from an “original sin” problem. Along with the Obama stimulus bill, it is the most divisive legislation in modern history.
How do you measure most divisive? Cembalest constructed a table (see bottom of post) of the century's major legislation and the percent difference in voting between the two parties. For example, in 1956, 98 percent of House Republicans and 93 percent of House Democrats voted for the Federal Aid Highway Act, which built the interstate highway system. That's a "difference gap" of 5 percent. In the Senate, 100 percent of Republicans and 98 percent of Democrats voted for the bill -- a "difference gap" of just 2 percent.
Here is a chart of the last 100 years of the disagreement gap for the most important pieces of legislation, with each number showing the average of the House and Senate gaps (data via Cembalest):
Lots to chew on here, but in particular note that polarization took a reprieve in the middle of the 20th century, but huge difference gaps are something old, not something new.
Here are the most divisive laws of the century, by Cembalest's definition (he doesn't include the 2009 stimulus in his research note, but I've added it). Of perhaps trivial note: No bill between 1931 and 2000 has an average voting gap of more than 50 percentage points.
Here's the full table from Cembalest's report:
Copyright © 2013 by The Atlantic Monthly Group (emphasis in original)
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/09/the-most-controversial-laws-of-the-last-100-years-the-stimulus-and-obamacare-are-1-and-2/279899/ [with comments]
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Obamacare Enrollment Continues If Government Shuts Down
Claude Cesard, left, and Margot Lee, right, volunteers with the Get Covered America campaign, canvas the neighborhood informing prospective health insurance consumers about new insurance possibilities available through the Affordable Care Act, in Englewood, New Jersey, on July 27, 2013.
Shutting down the government won’t shut down the health-care law.
Sep 22, 2013
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-23/obamacare-enrollment-continues-if-government-shuts-down.html [with embedded video report, and comments]
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Texas Fighting Affordable Care Act Rollout
An Affordable Health Care informational meeting in San Antonio
September 23, 2013
http://www.fronterasdesk.org/content/9031/texas-fighting-affordable-care-act-rollout [with embedded audio report, and comment]
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Health Care Law Enrollment Finds Allies In Red States
Texas Gov. Rick Perry addresses attendees of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation's Defending the American Dream Summit in Orlando, Fla., Friday, Aug. 30, 2013.
(AP Photo/Phelan M. Ebenhack)
By David Morgan
Posted: 09/25/2013 12:59 am EDT
HOUSTON, Sept 25 (Reuters) - Behind the political battle lines on Obamacare, the three-story headquarters of Change Happens rises like a fortress in a blighted southeast Houston neighborhood of tiny wood-frame shacks, empty lots and crack houses.
The Rev. Leslie Smith has been running the nonprofit that helps poor adults and children with Medicaid enrollment, homeless support and HIV prevention since 1989. Now he is planning how best to reach uninsured people in the communities he serves with the offer of new healthcare benefits under President Barack Obama's landmark reform law.
"Two weeks ago, there was a shootout at the corner that left over 200 shell casings on the ground," Smith said, speaking in the parking lot as he noted a row of first-floor windows set high and narrow to protect against stray bullets from gunfights between rival gangs. "This is the bottom. This is crack alley. All the ills of the community are around us."
Even among "red" states, Texas has stood out in its fierce opposition to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. Republican Governor Rick Perry has long been an opponent, and Republican Senator Ted Cruz is leading a charge in Congress to eliminate funding for the healthcare law at the risk of shutting down the federal government.
But in their backyard, one of the best-organized of red-state efforts to reach millions of America's uninsured has taken root.
Healthcare reform advocates like Smith believe the realities of life without health coverage will drive large numbers of young, healthy, low-income people to subsidized insurance premiums and other benefits that Obamacare will begin offering to the public starting on Oct. 1.
His organization is part of a loose confederation of nonprofits, charities, universities, religious groups, government agencies and private companies, known collectively as "navigators," that is helping Americans sign up for coverage. It is a task Smith zealously embraces.
"Something great is going to happen from this effort," he says. "I believe this is history."
ORGANIZED IN TEXAS
Obamacare's success or failure depends on how many healthy young adults enroll in health insurance that will be sold on new state exchanges, helping offset the cost of sicker beneficiaries. Administration officials hope they will account for about 40 percent of the 7 million people expected to sign up for private coverage in 2014.
That calculation has put a premium on urban neighborhoods in places like Houston, Los Angeles, Miami and Chicago, four metropolitan areas with a combined uninsured population of 4.8 million - many of them lower-income blacks and Latinos aged 18 to 35, according to U.S. Census figures.
Organizers face special challenges in Texas and Florida, where Republican leaders rejected the opportunity to set up new insurance marketplaces and collect billions of dollars in government funds to expand Medicaid. Perry and other Texas Republicans are now pushing to impose regulations including fees, extra training and surety bond requirements on navigator groups.
Conservatives in the state echo claims made by critics elsewhere, who say the navigator program has been put together too rapidly and requires too little training to safeguard the public. They also contend that Obamacare will raise healthcare costs overall and strap low-income beneficiaries with plans that restrict access to medical services.
Meanwhile, they dismiss the network of volunteers and nonprofits lining up to promote Obamacare as overly optimistic about its value to the public.
"It's a touch naïve," said John Davidson of the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation. "There's a feeling that the law is half-baked and that the navigator program is half-baked."
Political opposition has created an atmosphere that makes it difficult even for Democrats to talk openly about the law.
"I don't want to talk about the Affordable Care Act on camera," Dallas County Administrator Clay Jenkins, a Democrat and healthcare reform supporter, joked as local TV crews set up for a summer press conference with U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. "I want to talk about the opportunity to get people covered," he said.
But it has also helped turn grassroots Obamacare advocates into a well-oiled network. In Texas, the effort was born of an intensive, but ultimately fruitless, months-long attempt to persuade Perry to expand Medicaid last spring.
Change Happens is one of three navigator organizations that have received federal money to hire and train staff to help enroll people in Houston's Harris County, home to nearly 20 percent of the state's 5.8 million uninsured. The group has pledged to reach nearly 100,000 people by the time enrollment wraps up in March. Smith thinks the final number could be close to 300,000 with help from sister organizations across five southeast Texas counties.
Houston's Health and Human Services Department - an agency in a city government whose elected officials are largely Democratic - is also a navigator. It has organized outreach groups under a command structure developed to combat hurricanes. Its public-health database, which is normally used to track epidemics, will measure the enrollment effort's penetration of neighborhoods with large uninsured populations. The city is also providing a consolidated "800" number for public queries, has set aside a "war room" for organizers and is encouraging other major cities to consider the same strategy.
"We really have to bring some science into our approach," said Stephen Williams, the department's director. "This is an opportunity of a lifetime."
The Texas Organizing Project (TOP), a grassroots advocacy group with nearly 20,000 low- to moderate-income members, many of them uninsured, has also been running Obamacare canvasses and workshops since May. Earlier this month it packed hundreds of uninsured people into a university auditorium for an Obamacare rally and information session.
"We run the largest issue-driven grassroots get-out-the-vote campaign, and in 2012, we targeted roughly 200,000 voters. Their No. 1 issue, that we identified after talking to them door to door and over the phone, was healthcare," said TOP Executive Director Ginny Goldman.
Houston's Erenea Perez has heard the message from TOP organizers.
Perez, a single mother in her late 20s who says she is a U.S. resident from El Salvador, works two minimum-wage jobs but can't afford insurance. She counts off the benefits she hopes to obtain with Obamacare subsidies: "Extended maternity services. Pediatric services. Coverage for exams or the ER. Medicine. In-patient services. Ambulatory services."
Many of her uninsured peers across the country are only now starting to pay attention. Local advertising is expected to begin in earnest across the country on Oct. 1. Earlier this month volunteers in 10 states, including Texas, Florida, Illinois and Michigan, began canvassing campaigns.
Copyright 2013 Thomson Reuters
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/25/health-care-law-enrollment_n_3986333.html [with comments]
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The Biggest Myth About Obamacare
09/23/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/23/obamacare-change_n_3975425.html [with (over 12,000) comments]
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Lower Health Insurance Premiums to Come at Cost of Fewer Choices
Peter L. Gosline, the chief executive of Monadnock Community Hospital in Peterborough, N.H.
Andrea Morales for The New York Times
Video [embedded]
Obama Defends Affordable Care Act (July 18, 2013)
http://www.nytimes.com/video/2013/07/18/us/politics/100000002344025/obama-defends-affordable-care-act.html
By ROBERT PEAR
Published: September 22, 2013
WASHINGTON — Federal officials often say that health insurance will cost consumers less than expected under President Obama’s health care law [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/health_insurance_and_managed_care/health_care_reform/index.html ]. But they rarely mention one big reason: many insurers are significantly limiting the choices of doctors and hospitals available to consumers.
From California to Illinois to New Hampshire, and in many states in between, insurers are driving down premiums by restricting the number of providers who will treat patients in their new health plans.
When insurance marketplaces open on Oct. 1, most of those shopping for coverage will be low- and moderate-income people for whom price is paramount. To hold down costs, insurers say, they have created smaller networks of doctors and hospitals than are typically found in commercial insurance. And those health care providers will, in many cases, be paid less than what they have been receiving from commercial insurers.
Some consumer advocates and health care providers are increasingly concerned. Decades of experience with Medicaid [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/medicaid/index.html ], the program for low-income people, show that having an insurance card does not guarantee access to specialists or other providers.
Consumers should be prepared for “much tighter, narrower networks” of doctors and hospitals, said Adam M. Linker, a health policy analyst at the North Carolina Justice Center, a statewide advocacy group.
“That can be positive for consumers if it holds down premiums and drives people to higher-quality providers,” Mr. Linker said. “But there is also a risk because, under some health plans, consumers can end up with astronomical costs if they go to providers outside the network.”
Insurers say that with a smaller array of doctors and hospitals, they can offer lower-cost policies and have more control over the quality of health care providers. They also say that having insurance with a limited network of providers is better than having no coverage at all.
Cigna illustrates the strategy of many insurers. It intends to participate next year in the insurance marketplaces, or exchanges, in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Tennessee and Texas.
“The networks will be narrower than the networks typically offered to large groups of employees in the commercial market,” said Joseph Mondy, a spokesman for Cigna.
The current concerns echo some of the criticism that sank the Clinton administration’s plan for universal coverage in 1993-94. Republicans said the Clinton proposals threatened to limit patients’ options, their access to care and their choice of doctors.
At the same time, House Republicans are continuing to attack the new health law and are threatening to hold up a spending bill unless money is taken away from the health care program.
In a new study, the Health Research Institute of PricewaterhouseCoopers, the consulting company, says that “insurers passed over major medical centers” when selecting providers in California, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky and Tennessee, among other states.
“Doing so enables health plans to offer lower premiums,” the study said. “But the use of narrow networks may also lead to higher out-of-pocket expenses, especially if a patient has a complex medical problem that’s being treated at a hospital that has been excluded from their health plan.”
In California, the statewide Blue Shield plan has developed a network specifically for consumers shopping in the insurance exchange.
Juan Carlos Davila, an executive vice president of Blue Shield of California, said the network for its exchange plans had 30,000 doctors, or 53 percent of the 57,000 doctors in its broadest commercial network, and 235 hospitals, or 78 percent of the 302 hospitals in its broadest network.
Mr. Davila said the new network did not include the five medical centers of the University of California or the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center near Beverly Hills.
“We expect to have the broadest and deepest network of any plan in California,” Mr. Davila said. “But not many folks who are uninsured or near the poverty line live in wealthy communities like Beverly Hills.”
Daniel R. Hawkins Jr., a senior vice president of the National Association of Community Health Centers, which represents 9,000 clinics around the country, said: “We serve the very population that will gain coverage — low-income, working class uninsured people. But insurers have shown little interest in including us in their provider networks.”
Dr. Bruce Siegel, the president of America’s Essential Hospitals, formerly known as the National Association of Public Hospitals and Health Systems, said insurers were telling his members: “We don’t want you in our network. We are worried about having your patients, who are sick and have complicated conditions.”
In some cases, Dr. Siegel said, “health plans will cover only selected services at our hospitals, like trauma care, or they offer rock-bottom payment rates.”
In New Hampshire, Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, a unit of WellPoint, one of the nation’s largest insurers, has touched off a furor by excluding 10 of the state’s 26 hospitals from the health plans that it will sell through the insurance exchange.
Christopher R. Dugan, a spokesman for Anthem, said that premiums for this “select provider network” were about 25 percent lower than they would have been for a product using a broad network of doctors and hospitals.
Anthem is the only commercial carrier offering health plans in the New Hampshire exchange.
Peter L. Gosline, the chief executive of Monadnock Community Hospital in Peterborough, N.H., said his hospital had been excluded from the network without any discussions or negotiations.
“Many consumers will have to drive 30 minutes to an hour to reach other doctors and hospitals,” Mr. Gosline said. “It’s very inconvenient for patients, and at times it’s a hardship.”
State Senator Andy Sanborn, a Republican who is chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, said, “The people of New Hampshire are really upset about this.”
Many physician groups in New Hampshire are owned by hospitals, so when an insurer excludes a hospital from its network, it often excludes the doctors as well.
David Sandor, a vice president of the Health Care Service Corporation, which offers Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans in Illinois, Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas, said: “In the health insurance [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/health_insurance_and_managed_care/index.html ] exchange, most individuals will be making choices based on costs. Our exchange products will have smaller provider networks that cost less than bigger plans with a larger selection of doctors and hospitals.”
Premiums will vary across the country, but federal officials said that consumers in many states would be able to buy insurance on the exchange for less than $300 a month — and less than $100 a month per person after taking account of federal subsidies.
“Competition and consumer choice are actually making insurance affordable,” Mr. Obama said recently.
Many insurers are cutting costs by slicing doctors’ fees.
Dr. Barbara L. McAneny, a cancer specialist in Albuquerque, said that insurers in the New Mexico exchange were generally paying doctors at Medicare [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/medicare/index.html ] levels, which she said were “often below our cost of doing business, and definitely below commercial rates.”
Outsiders might expect insurance companies to expand their networks to treat additional patients next year. But many insurers see advantages in narrow networks, saying they can steer patients to less expensive doctors and hospitals that provide high-quality care.
Even though insurers will be forbidden to discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions, they could subtly discourage the enrollment of sicker patients by limiting the size of their provider networks.
“If a health plan has a narrow network that excludes many doctors, that may shoo away patients with expensive pre-existing conditions who have established relationships with doctors,” said Mark E. Rust, the chairman of the national health care practice at Barnes & Thornburg, a law firm. “Some insurers do not want those patients who, for medical reasons, require a broad network of providers.”
© 2013 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/23/health/lower-health-insurance-premiums-to-come-at-cost-of-fewer-choices.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/23/health/lower-health-insurance-premiums-to-come-at-cost-of-fewer-choices.html?pagewanted=all ] [with comments]
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What You Need to Know About the Obamacare Marketplaces
By: Mary Agnes Carey and Julie Appleby
September 24, 2013 at 12:05 PM ET
Companies including the Trader Joe's grocery store chain will end health benefits for part-time workers next year, directing them instead to new insurance marketplaces. Story by Kaiser Health News and photo by David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images.
The health law's online marketplaces, also known as exchanges, will be open for enrollment Oct. 1. They will allow individuals and consumers to comparison shop for health insurance, much like they do now online for an airline ticket or a hotel room, and apply for subsidies, if they are eligible.
If done well, proponents say, the marketplaces could make it easier to buy health insurance and possibly lead to lower prices because of increased competition. But, if designed or marketed poorly, the exchanges will not attract healthy people and will instead be left with a higher percentage of sicker people that will cause premiums to rise.
Here are some answers to common questions about the exchanges:
What is an exchange?
It's an online marketplace [ https://www.healthcare.gov/ ] where individuals and small employers will be able to shop for insurance coverage. Enrollment begins Oct. 1 for policies that will go into effect on Jan. 1. The exchanges will also help people find out if they are eligible for federal subsidies [ https://www.healthcare.gov/how-can-i-save-money-on-marketplace-coverage/ ] to help cover the cost of coverage or if they are eligible for Medicaid, the federal-state health insurance program for the poor.
Will all states have exchanges?
Yes. Sixteen states and the District of Columbia are running their own [ http://kff.org/health-reform/slide/state-decisions-for-creating-health-insurance-exchanges/ ] exchanges and the federal government is setting them up in 27 states. In seven states, federal and state officials are partnering to run the exchanges. You can get information about the exchange at healthcare.gov [ https://www.healthcare.gov/ ], which has details on the federal exchanges and links to state-run exchanges.
Who will use the exchanges?
Most people [ https://www.healthcare.gov/am-i-eligible-for-coverage-in-the-marketplace/ ] will be able to purchase coverage on the exchanges. But many workers and their families already have coverage through their jobs, and they will not be likely to buy policies on the exchanges. The marketplaces are primarily aimed at people who are uninsured and those whose employer-based coverage is too costly and/or lacking in benefits.
Most states and the federal marketplace also will offer a Small Business Health Options program, or SHOP exchange, that will give employees more options than they have now. Initially, these SHOP exchanges will be open only for businesses with 50 or fewer workers.
Who cannot buy coverage there?
Immigrants who are in the country illegally will be barred [ http://www.irs.gov/uac/Questions-and-Answers-on-the-Individual-Shared-Responsibility-Provision ] from buying insurance on the exchanges. Legal immigrants are permitted to use the marketplaces and may qualify for subsidies if their income is no more than 400 percent of the federal poverty level (about $46,000 for an individual and $94,200 for a family of four).
If my employer offers me insurance, can I shop on the exchange to get a better deal?
Even if your employer offers coverage, you can opt to buy a plan on the exchange. However, you may not be eligible for a subsidy unless you make less than 400 percent of the federal poverty level and your employer's plan covered less than 60 percent of allowed medical expenses or cost more than 9.5 percent of your household income.
If I am buying coverage on my own, do I have to buy it on the exchange?
Consumers can shop for coverage on or off the exchange. However, subsidies are generally available only for plans sold on the exchange. Also, adults up to the age of 26 have another choice: They often can get coverage through their parents' health plans.
How will the process work?
For someone with a computer, it's relatively straightforward. You can go online to Healthcare.gov or to your state-run exchange, if there is one, and create an account. Then you would fill out an application and provide information such as household size, location, income and citizenship status.
Then the exchange takes over. It first determines whether the person is eligible for Medicaid; if so, it will refer you there. If not, it will tell you how much of a subsidy you can receive. (These subsidies will be sent directly by the government to the insurer to pay a portion of the premium.)
After that, the exchange will offer a list of health plans and their premiums and out-of-pocket costs, including deductibles and co-payments. If a consumer decides to buy one of those plans, in most cases, you will be directed to the insurer's Web site to make the payment. In some jurisdictions, consumers will make their first premium payment to the exchange and then further monthly payments to the insurer.
You can also fill out paper applications or apply over the phone. The federal and state exchange sites have toll-free numbers where consumers can find information about getting help in person.
Are exchanges the only place where I can get subsidized coverage?
Not exactly. Under a little-known [ http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2013-06-19/pdf/2013-14540.pdf ] rule proposed by the administration in June, consumers will be able to buy an exchange-approved plan -- and receive a health law subsidy -- from the insurance company itself rather than from the exchange.
I am on Medicare. Do I need to use the exchange?
No. Medicare is not part [ https://www.healthcare.gov/if-i-have-medicare-do-i-need-to-do-anything/ ] of the health insurance exchanges. As a Medicare beneficiary, you can enroll in the program's traditional drug coverage or in a Medicare Advantage plan, where Medicare enrollees get coverage through private health insurance plans, on Medicare.gov during the Medicare open season, which begins Oct. 15.
What about federal workers?
Most federal workers will continue to get their health coverage through the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program [ http://www.opm.gov/healthcare-insurance/healthcare/ ] (FEHBP) and not be required to purchase coverage through the health law's marketplaces. Members of Congress and their personal staffs, however, will be required to buy health insurance through the exchanges.
A proposed rule from the Office of Personnel Management said the government would continue its practice [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/wp/2013/08/07/employer-health-premium-share-will-continue-for-hill-staff-forced-out-of-fehbp/ ] of paying up to 75 percent of the premium, as it does for federal workers enrolled in FEHBP. Members of Congress and their personal staffs will not be eligible for the health law's subsidies and will purchase on the exchange in the state where they live, the agency said.
Will exchanges be like travel websites or some existing health insurance sites?
In some ways, but they will be more complex. People will be able to compare policies sold by different companies. Information on the plan benefits will be standardized in an effort to make it easier to compare cost and quality. Plans will be divided into four different types [ https://www.healthcare.gov/how-do-i-choose-marketplace-insurance/ ] -- bronze, silver, gold and platinum -- varying based on the size of their deductibles, copayments and other consumer cost-sharing. They will also have to provide personal financial information and citizenship status that will be linked to the Internal Revenue Service and other government agencies.
What will the coverage sold on the exchanges look like?
Plans will have to offer a set of "essential benefits [ http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/stories/2011/december/16/essential-benefits-guidance.aspx?referrer=search ]" that include hospital, emergency, maternity and pediatric care as well as coverage for prescription drugs and lab services. Annual cost-sharing -- or the amount consumers pay for out-of-pocket for care for medical services and deductibles but not premiums -- will be capped [ http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/rp-13-25.pdf ] at $6,350 for individual policies and $12,700 for family plans in 2014.
What if I can't afford the premiums?
The health law provides sliding scale subsidies [ http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Stories/2013/July/24/interview-with-cathy-livingston-on-how-to-apply-for-tax-credit-subsidies-for-premiums.aspx ] to help people pay premiums up to 400 percent of the poverty level, which is currently about $46,000 for an individual and about $94,000 for a family of four. There's also help with cost-sharing [ http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/features/insuring-your-health/2013/070913-michelle-andrews-on-cost-sharing-subsidies.aspx?referrer=search ] for individuals and families with incomes of up to 250 percent of the poverty level ($28,725 for an individual or $58,875 for a family of four). According to government estimates [ http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/44190_EffectsAffordableCareActHealthInsuranceCoverage_2.pdf ], subsidies will average $5,290 per person in 2014. Recipients must pay [ http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=3190 ] a portion of their household income -- 2 percent to 9.5 percent -- toward the cost of the premium, based on how much they make.
Does everyone on the exchange get a subsidy?
No, subsidies will be limited to people who meet specific income requirements. In addition, individuals with access to insurance through their jobs but who decide to purchase insurance on the exchange instead are eligible for subsidies only if their employer's plan does not cover at least 60 percent of estimated medical expenses or if it would cost the worker more than 9.5 percent of household income.
The health law also expands Medicaid. How will I know if I qualify?
The law sought to extend Medicaid to all people who earn less than 138 percent of the federal poverty level, just under $16,000 for an individual and $32,500 for a family of four based on current guidelines. However, the Supreme Court ruled in June 2012 that states may opt out of that Medicaid expansion, and 21 states have chosen [ http://kff.org/medicaid/state-indicator/state-activity-around-expanding-medicaid-under-the-affordable-care-act/ ] not to expand. People who would have qualified for Medicaid in states that don't participate in the health law's expansion can enroll in the exchanges but they won't qualify [ http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/412630-opting-in-medicaid.pdf ] for subsidies if their income is below 100 percent of the federal poverty limit.
Will all insurers have to offer policies through the exchange?
No. Insurers are not required [ http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Stories/2013/August/02/univision-obamacare-deal-could-help-insurers-ahead.aspx ] to sell through the exchanges.
Where can I go for help?
You can start with Healthcare.gov [ https://www.healthcare.gov/ ]. Beginning Oct. 1, the site will publish more information about the plans offered on the federally administered exchanges. If your state is running its own exchange, you'll be directed there as well. The federal government has also set up call centers to answer questions from people in states with federal exchanges. That phone number is 800-318-2596. States running their own exchanges will also have individual call centers.
Kaiser Health News [ http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/ ] is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan health policy research and communication organization not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente. This story was produced in collaboration with The Washington Post.
Copyright © 2013 Kaiser Health News
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2013/09/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-obamacare-marketplaces.html [with comments]
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Questions And Answers About Obamacare Marketplaces
September 24th, 2013
http://capsules.kaiserhealthnews.org/index.php/2013/09/questions-and-answers-about-obamacare-marketplaces/
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In less than a year, Texas Republican Ted Cruz has become the most despised man in the U.S. Senate. He's been likened to Joe McCarthy, accused of behaving like a schoolyard bully, and smeared by senior members of his own party. Is this any way to get ahead in Washington? Well, Cruz is no dummy—just ask him—and his swift rise might prove that it's the only way
By Jason Zengerle
Photographs by Chris Buck
October 2013 [issue of]
It's hard for Ted Cruz to be humble. Part of the challenge stems from his résumé, which the Texas senator wears like a sandwich board. There's the Princeton class ring that's always on his right hand and the crimson gown that, as a graduate of Harvard Law School, he donned when called upon to give a commencement speech earlier this year. (Cruz's fellow Harvard Law alums Barack Obama and Mitt Romney typically perform their graduation duties in whatever robes they're given.) Even Cruz's favorite footwear, a pair of black ostrich-skin cowboy boots, serves as an advertisement for his credentials and connections. "These are my argument boots," he told me one morning this summer as we rode the subway car beneath the Capitol to a vote on the Senate floor. "When I was Texas solicitor general, I did every argument in these boots. The one court that I was not willing to wear them in was the U.S. Supreme Court, and it was because my former boss and dear friend William Rehnquist was still chief justice. He and I were very close—he was a wonderful man—but he was very much a stickler for attire."
It was only after Rehnquist died that Cruz felt comfortable wearing his cowboy boots in the Supreme Court—and only then because John Roberts ("a friend for many years") blessed it. "I saw John shortly after his confirmation," Cruz said, "and I guess I was feeling a little cheeky, because I took the opportunity to ask, 'Mr. Chief Justice, do you have any views on the appropriateness of boots as footwear at oral argument?' And Chief Justice Roberts chuckled and he said, 'You know, Ted, if you're representing the state of Texas, they're not only appropriate, they're required.'"
Cruz, 42, arrived in Washington in January as the ultimate conservative purist, a hero to both salt-of-the-earth Tea Partiers and clubby GOP think-tankers, and since then he has come to the reluctant but unavoidable conclusion that he is simply more intelligent, more principled, more right—in both senses of the word—than pretty much everyone else in our nation's capital. That alone isn't so outrageous for the Senate. "Every one of these guys thinks he's the smartest guy in the room," one senior Democratic aide told me. "But Cruz is utterly incapable of cloaking it in any kind of collegiality. He's just so brazen."
Little more than a month after Cruz was sworn in, Senator Barbara Boxer, a Democrat from California, likened him to Joe McCarthy for his conduct during Chuck Hagel's confirmation for secretary of defense. Without presenting a shred of evidence, Cruz insinuated that Hagel, a fellow Republican, was on the take from America's enemies. Because Hagel had declined to reveal the source of a $200,000 payment, Cruz suggested, how do we know it didn't come from the North Korean government? Or Saudi Arabia's? Even South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, also a Republican, called Cruz's line of inquiry "out of bounds."
And then there was the moment, just a month later, when the Judiciary Committee was debating the assault--weapons ban: Cruz was trying to get it through Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein's thick skull that there was this thing called the Second Amendment and that it deserved the same respect as the rest of the Bill of Rights. He made his point by rattling off other amendments and the rights they protected until Feinstein bristled, "I'm not a sixth grader. I've been on this committee for twenty years.... I've studied the Constitution myself. I am reasonably well educated, and I thank you for the lecture."
For a while, veteran Republicans groused in private about the new guy. But it boiled over when Cruz joined Kentucky senator Rand Paul's filibuster of John Brennan's nomination to head the CIA—an act of protest against Obama's drone program. John McCain, already seething over Cruz's treatment of Hagel, called them "wacko birds." "He fucking hates Cruz," one adviser of the Arizona senator told me. "He's just offended by his style."
The "wacko bird" dig, however, has only endeared Cruz more to his party's purist wing. Already his fans are nudging him to think about a presidential run in 2016, and he's nudging right back, making trips to Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. He's even embraced "wacko bird," reclaiming McCain's knock as a badge of honor. Later on the day I visited him on Capitol Hill, Cruz was engaging in the kind of showing off that even his detractors might forgive: He was giving me a tour of his Senate office. "A couple of things I keep," he said, picking up a red leather rectangle branded with the words IT CAN BE DONE—a replica, he explained, of the sign that sat on President Reagan's desk in the Oval Office. The tchotchke he was most excited to show me, however, was a black baseball cap with a picture of Daffy Duck next to the words WACKO BIRD. Supporters back in Texas made it, Cruz said, grabbing the hat from its prominent perch on his bookshelf. "Isn't it great?"
But all along, what kept drawing my eye was a giant oil painting above the couch depicting Cruz as he delivered the first of his nine oral arguments before the Supreme Court. "I was 32 years old," he recalled. "It was abundantly clear we didn't have a prayer.... And I've always enjoyed the fact that as I'm sitting at my desk, I'm looking at a giant painting of me getting my rear end whipped 9-0." He gazed at the wall. It is an unusual painting: From the artist's vantage point, we see three other courtroom artists, each also drawing Cruz—so the painting actually features not one but four images of young Cruz before the bench. "It is helpful," he explained to me, "for keeping one grounded."
•••
Ted Cruz doesn't look much like a wacko bird. With his pomaded black hair and trim suits—the kind you might expect on a former partner at an international law firm, say, or the husband of a Goldman Sachs executive—the more appropriate avian metaphor would seem to be a peacock. He doesn't sound much like a wacko bird, either. Cruz is a dazzling orator, speaking not merely in precise sentences but complete paragraphs—no teleprompter, sometimes not even a podium—and name-dropping everyone from Reagan to Rawls (as in John, the late Harvard philosopher).
But as Cruz and his supporters define it, "wacko bird" describes more of a state of mind. Or as Cruz put it on the Senate floor a few weeks before my visit, in the midst of yet another fight with McCain, this time over the rules for negotiating a budget: "It has been suggested that those of us who are fighting to defend liberty—fighting to turn around the out-of-control spending and out-of-control debt in this country, fighting to defend the Constitution, it has been suggested that we are wacko birds. Well, if that is the case, I will suggest to my friend from Arizona, there may be more wacko birds in the Senate than is suspected."
He might be right. This certainly feels like a wacko-bird moment in Washington, and maybe in America, too. It's a time when governmental breakdown and public antipathy for the profession of politics have combined to create a perverse incentive structure for congressional Republicans—one that punishes politeness and cooperation and rewards antagonism and obstruction. So far Cruz has proposed no major legislation and has shown little interest in changing that. He seems content accomplishing nothing because, in Cruz's view of the federal government, nothing is the accomplishment.
Contrast this approach with the recent fate of that other precocious Republican in the Senate, Florida's Marco Rubio, who spent the first half of this year crafting bipartisan immigration reform—the kind of grand, reach-across-the-aisle gesture that could serve as a springboard to a presidential campaign. And for his trouble, he wound up with no law (his bill passed the Senate but is seemingly DOA in the House) and a dented reputation among the very people who put him in office. Cruz, a second-generation Cuban-American with a story so singular that it verges on the novelistic, was one of the most outspoken opponents of Rubio's bill.
"Stopping bad things," Cruz told me, "is a significant public service."
•••
About that family story: American voters have a hard time resisting politicians with a good one. Ted Cruz's is great, and he's even better at telling it.
In the aftermath of the Newtown shooting spree, when even some Republican senators were softening on gun control, Cruz took a hard line against any limits to firearm access.
He was born in Canada, in 1970, but his tale, as he likes to say, begins fourteen years earlier in a Cuban jail cell. His father, Rafael, had belonged to Castro's rebel forces fighting to overthrow the Batista dictatorship, and on the night of Rafael's seventeenth birthday in 1956, Batista's goons caught up with him. "He got captured and he disappeared," Cruz told me one day over lunch at a Tex-Mex restaurant in Houston.
"My grandfather began searching for him, and he just began visiting the jails, going to one after the other after the other. And he eventually found him. He had been beaten so much that there was not a spot of white visible on his suit. It was all stained with mud and blood, and his teeth were dangling out of his mouth." After managing to get Rafael out of prison, Cruz's grandfather told his son that he needed to leave Cuba or the goon squad would find him again. "He said, 'They know who you are. They're just going to hunt you down and kill you.'"
Rafael applied to college in the United States and was admitted to the University of Texas. He secured a student visa, and in 1957 he arrived in Austin. "He was 18, and he couldn't speak English, and he had a hundred dollars sewn into his underwear," Cruz said. "The only possession he had was a slide rule in his pocket." (Parts of the elder Cruz's saga have an air of myth-making—he got into the University of Texas without speaking a word of English? He got out of Batista's prison...how, exactly?)
In between bites of queso flameado, Cruz went on to explain how Rafael put himself through college by washing dishes for fifty cents an hour, learned English from math classes, met an American woman he would soon marry, and recognized the error of his ways in supporting Castro. "He ended up graduating with a math degree and getting a job and eventually starting a small business and working toward the American Dream," Cruz said. "I think it is an enormous blessing to be the child of an immigrant who fled oppression and came here seeking freedom, because there was an urgency in politics. Having principled men and women in office is how you protect yourself from tyranny, and that was something I learned from when I was 2, 3, 5 years old."
Cruz has been telling his father's story for decades. As a champion debater at Princeton, Cruz would frequently deploy it in competition. "I heard that exact narrative about a hundred dollars sewn in his father's underwear," recalls Austan Goolsbee, a former Obama economic adviser who was Cruz's main rival on the college debate circuit in the early '90s. "We all knew the story."
Today, Cruz talks about his father so much that as his political star has risen, so has Rafael's. At the age of 74, the elder Cruz is now a Tea Party celebrity, a sought-out speaker who likens Obama to Castro ("that old bearded friend I left behind in Cuba") and whose words are often rebroadcast by Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. For Ted, this recognition has been the most enjoyable by-product of his own political success. "I've really had two heroes in my life," he says. "My father and Ronald Reagan."
But there's one part of Rafael's story that Cruz purposefully omits, and it might be the most affecting—and offers perhaps the most revealing window into Ted's own youthful determination. Cruz's father had started an oil and gas exploration business, then moved with his wife to Calgary, where Ted was born. (Cruz's supporters say—and most legal experts agree—that his Canadian birth would not be an obstacle should he ever run for the White House, since, by dint of his mother's American citizenship, he qualifies as a natural-born American citizen.) In 1974 the family followed the oil business to the Houston suburbs, where Ted would enjoy a typical American adolescence. But then, in the '80s, when Ted was in high school, the oil industry briefly cratered, and his father's business tumbled down with it. He went bankrupt. Eventually his marriage crumbled as well.
When I brought up the bankruptcy one afternoon in Cruz's office—I had learned about it from one of his college friends—his face fell and he grew quiet. After a moment, he let out a long sigh and acknowledged that this was true. "My father poured all of my parents' personal assets into the company, and demand for oil and gas exploration just disappeared, because oil prices dropped so low. There's a whole generation of people in the energy industry at that time that just lost everything."
Instead of derailing Cruz's sky-high ambitions, his father's financial calamity only intensified his drive. In the middle of his junior year, he persuaded his parents to take him out of the high school he was attending—a small evangelical school that met in a former Handy Dan hardware store—and send him to a more academically rigorous Baptist academy.
By then Cruz had already fallen under the spell of a conservative impresario named Rolland Storey, a onetime vaudevillian and retired natural-gas executive who ran a Houston-area think tank called the Free Enterprise Institute. At the institute, Cruz studied right-wing icons Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman. He also mastered a mnemonic version of the Constitution, which he'd recite, along with four other high school students, for Kiwanis, Rotary, and other civic clubs across Texas. They performed as a troupe called the Constitutional Corroborators.
Princeton turned out to be as alien to Cruz as Austin had been to his father some thirty years earlier: "I did not know anybody there; I didn't know anybody who had gone there." Like his father, he needed to earn tuition money. Unlike his father, he didn't do it by washing dishes. He got a job with the Princeton Review, teaching test-prep classes.
The elite academic circles that Cruz was now traveling in began to rub off. As a law student at Harvard, he refused to study with anyone who hadn't been an undergrad at Harvard, Princeton, or Yale. Says Damon Watson, one of Cruz's law-school roommates: "He said he didn't want anybody from 'minor Ivies' like Penn or Brown."
•••
Ted Cruz blew his first big shot in politics. Back in 2000, he had scored a plum assignment working in the policy shop of George W. Bush's Austin-based presidential campaign. He distinguished himself in the weeks after the election, serving on the legal team that helped Bush win the Florida recount and, by extension, the White House. He seemed destined for a meaty job in the new administration.
But Cruz's personal style earned him many detractors in BushWorld. He was infamous for firing off mundane work e-mails in the middle of the night—it happened so often that some in the Bush campaign suspected him of writing them ahead of time and programming his computer to send while he was asleep. He was also known for dispatching regular updates on his accomplishments that one recipient likened to "the cards people send about their families at Christmas, except Ted's were only about him and were more frequent." When it came time to divvy up the spoils of victory, many of Cruz's campaign colleagues headed to the White House; Cruz went to Washington, too—but he was exiled to the outer Siberia of the Federal Trade Commission. Says one friend: "He was pretty crushed."
Cruz lasted two years at the FTC, then returned to Austin and was appointed Texas's solicitor general. His new boss, the state's attorney general, wanted to use the office as a platform for advancing conservative legal theories on politically charged issues such as religion and state's rights. Cruz was the perfect instrument for such a mission. Although he lost that first Supreme Court case, he went on to win four of his next eight, including the landmark Medellín v. Texas, affirming—in defiance of an international court ruling as well as an order from President Bush—the state's right to execute a Mexican citizen who'd participated in the gang rape and murder of two teenage girls in Houston. Legal publications hailed him as one of the finest appellate attorneys in America. He was being talked up for a federal judgeship, possibly even the Supreme Court one day.
But Cruz did not want to serve on the bench. In November 2010, he made a trip to Washington for an annual meeting of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group whose confabs he'd been attending since his first year at Harvard Law. Only now he was job hunting. He was about to turn 40, and he was at a professional crossroads. He'd been out of government for two years and was looking for a way back in, this time via election. The only real opening in Texas, though, was a U.S. Senate seat—an impossible reach for Cruz, who'd never even held elected office.
But at the meeting, he met someone who had pulled off that exact feat: Utah senator-elect Mike Lee. Like Cruz, Lee had been a creature of the conservative legal movement, having clerked for Samuel Alito on the Supreme Court. Like Cruz, he had left Washington to become a government lawyer back home. And like Cruz, he had never before run for office. But he rode the Tea Party wave of 2010 into the Senate, ousting an incumbent Republican by running to his right. After the Federalist Society meeting, Lee and Cruz took a long walk around the Capitol. "We talked about every conceivable political and constitutional issue," Lee recalls. "I concluded we were kindred spirits."
Cruz launched his insurgent Senate campaign the following January, zeroing in on the GOP front-runner, David Dewhurst, who as Texas lieutenant governor had the party and business establishments lined up behind him. In classic Tea Party fashion, Cruz went after him from the right. In fact, his highfalutin legal career served as the centerpiece of his grassroots campaign, as he took his esoteric Supreme Court victories, from Medellín to his successful defense of a Ten Commandments statue on the grounds of the Texas State Capitol, and recast them as conservative crusades. "He made the solicitor general's job sound like a combination of Rocky and Rambo," marvels the Texas GOP consultant Matt Mackowiak. With an influx of cash from national conservative groups and rousing speeches to whip up the grass roots, Cruz came out of nowhere to force a primary runoff with Dewhurst. He then trounced Dewhurst by fourteen points and cruised past his token Democratic opponent in the general election.
"I cannot tell you," Cruz says now, "how many little old ladies clasped my shoulder and said, 'Ted, please don't go to Washington and become one of them.'"
The little old ladies of Texas ought to be doing cartwheels. Instead of becoming one of them, Cruz has scorched almost all of them. He's reserved his most scathing criticism for his fellow Senate Republicans—branding those who've had the temerity to stake out not-far-right-enough positions as "squishes" and the "surrender caucus." I asked one of Cruz's colleagues, Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley, if he could recall a freshman behaving as brashly as Cruz. Grassley has been in the Senate for thirty-three years. He was stumped. "Not somebody I've served with," he said finally. "I think Barry Goldwater—reading the history of Barry Goldwater, he made those sorts of impressions right away."
•••
It's unclear exactly how many wacko birds are in the Senate right at this moment, but by Cruz's count there are at least three—Rand Paul, Lee, and himself. And three, he says, is a lot. "I do think the impact of a handful of principled leaders who are fearless in the Senate is significant, and I think it's significant even going from two to three. If you have three, you pretty quickly get to five or six. Five or six is over 10 percent of the Republican conference, and that's enough to move a conference and move the Senate."
Already many conservative Republicans believe Cruz can be their anti-Palin in 2016: all of her charisma with none of her drawbacks.
Perfect example, to hear Cruz tell it: gun-control legislation. After the Newtown school shootings, "the conventional wisdom in Washington was that [it] was unstoppable, that it was going to get sixty-five, sixty-eight votes, that it was a done deal," he says. In Cruz's narrative, the turning point came when he, Lee, and Paul vowed to filibuster any legislation. The threat failed, but Cruz insists that was never the point: "What we were able to do is, number one, slow things down and, number two, shine a spotlight on them and give time for the grass roots to get engaged."
Not everyone agrees with this interpretation of the events. "Cruz is the rooster taking credit for the sunrise," says Jim Kessler of the think tank Third Way, which lobbied for the bill. "There was never a point in time where we could identify sixty yes votes." Cruz's view is also disputed by many Senate Republicans, who believed (correctly, as it turned out) that gun-control legislation would ultimately fail at the hands of skittish red-state Democrats. Cruz's blustering, these Republicans argued, was actually counterproductive, since it risked shifting the blame for the defeat of a broadly popular bill away from those Democrats and onto obstructionist Republicans.
All that bluster, though, has definitely had an impact in other ways. Some Republicans are so spooked about drawing a conservative primary challenger in next year's midterms—or, as it's now called in Texas circles, "being Ted Cruzed"—that they've moved even farther to the right, paralyzing the Senate's GOP leadership. Exhibit A: John Cornyn, Cruz's fellow senator from Texas. "He has Cornyn just frozen on everything," one senior Senate Republican aide grumbled to me. "A member of our leadership just kind of takes his marching orders from this guy who's been here for a day!"
That may be a problem for Republicans, but not necessarily for Cruz. "We're in a moment when the combination of being hard-core and intelligent is really at a premium," says National Review writer Ramesh Ponnuru, who's been friends with Cruz since they went to Princeton together. "Because the two things that conservatives are tired of are politicians who sell out and politicians who embarrass them by not being able to make an account of themselves." In this arithmetic, Mitt Romney is the sellout and Sarah Palin is the embarrassment—and Cruz is the great new hope who brings the virtues of both without the liabilities of either.
And yet when it comes to policy, the man hailed as the "Tea Party intellectual" has deployed that powerful intellect only sparingly since arriving in Washington. Cruz's most ambitious proposal to date has been his call to abolish the IRS—something that, as one Cruz admirer lamented to me, "he's smart enough to know is an entirely cynical thing to do." Meanwhile, his effort to shut down the federal government (remember how well that worked out for the GOP the last time they tried it?) unless Obamacare is defunded prompted North Carolina Republican senator Richard Burr to call it "the dumbest idea I've ever heard." In multiple conversations with people who know Cruz well, I kept hearing the same refrain: "He's smart enough to know better."
Then again, maybe Cruz does know better. For a party in the midst of some serious soul-searching, Cruz offers a simple, reassuring solution: Forget the blather about demographic tidal waves and pleas for modernization; all Republicans need to do is return to their small-government, anti-tax fundamentals. "I don't know a conservative who didn't feel embarrassed voting in 2006 or 2008," Cruz told me—a remark that's sure to endear him even more to McCain. "I think the Republican Party lost its way. We didn't stand for the principles we're supposed to believe in."
Should he run for president, in 2016 or beyond, Cruz's strategy will be to superglue himself to the conservative base and hope it carries him to the GOP nomination. It's been tried over and over since Reagan—and it has failed every time. Just not enough wacko birds out there. Then again, the men who have tried it—from Pat Robertson in 1988 to Rick Santorum in 2012—possessed nowhere near Cruz's political acumen, not to mention his life story. Or, to put it the way Cruz himself might: None of them were Ted Cruz.
•••
One Thursday evening in July, Cruz and Rand Paul—ideological kissing cousins already sizing each other up as 2016 rivals—caught the same flight from Washington to Des Moines for the Iowa Renewal Project, a summit for conservative Christian pastors held at the downtown Marriott. It was nearly two and a half years before the state's presidential caucuses.
In his speech to the pastors the following Friday, Paul evoked Billy Graham: "America needs to revive the hope that springs eternal from the transcendent teachings of a humble carpenter who died on a cross." Cruz cited the book of Isaiah, Edmund Burke, and the prophet Ezekiel, and he regaled the pastors with tales of his Supreme Court battles, casting them in religious terms. Paul had arrived in Iowa with the bigger profile, but Cruz made the bigger splash. Countless pastors came up to him and laid their hands on his shoulders in a prayerful gesture. "Remember when the devils tried to take the Ten Commandments out of the State Capitol there?" I overheard one pastor breathlessly relay into his cell phone. "That was his case, so he's really a fighter. He's a righteous man."
Later in the afternoon, Cruz stopped by the Iowa Republican Party's annual summer picnic, where for $100 a head, about fifty GOP activists squeezed into a small brick building to eat barbecue and hear the Texas senator's pitch. But Cruz also drew another, less friendly crowd. Outside, a pack of immigration protestors had gathered on the front steps, and while he spoke, they banged on the door and chanted through bullhorns, "Ted, Ted, come on out, see what Iowa's all about!" At one point in his speech, Cruz got a laugh by acknowledging the ruckus: "We obviously have some friends outside who have different views from those of us in here."
And with that, Cruz launched into one of his humble-bragging stories—about the time he had "the curious opportunity" to give the commencement address to the University of California Berkeley's political- science department. "It so happened that that attracted protesters," he said, not trying to hide a smug grin. "They were very, very upset that I had defended the Ten Commandments in Texas, and the Pledge of Allegiance." He paused, letting the virtue of his stand sink in with his audience. Then he went on: "And my wife Heidi's comment upon hearing them, as she looked at me and she said, 'You know, you're not nearly important enough to protest.'"
Jason Zengerle [ http://www.gq.com/contributors/jason-zengerle ] is GQ contributing editor.
© 2013 Condé Nast (emphasis in original)
http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmakers/201310/ted-cruz-republican-senator-october-2013 [with comments]
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Why the Upcoming Shutdowns and Defaults Are Symptoms of a Deeper Republican Malady
By Robert Reich
Posted: 09/22/2013 11:06 pm
Congressional Republicans have gone directly from conservatism to fanaticism without any intervening period of sanity.
First, John Boehner, bowing to Republican extremists, ushers a bill through the House that continues to fund the government after September 30 but doesn't fund the Affordable Care Act. Anyone with half a brain knows Senate Democrats and the president won't accept this -- which means, if House Republicans stick to their guns, a government shut-down.
A shutdown would be crippling. Soldiers would get IOUs instead of paychecks. Hundreds of thousands of federal employees would be furloughed without pay. National parks would close. Millions of Americans would feel the effects.
And who will get blamed?
House Republicans think the public hates the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) so much they'll support their tactics. But the fact is, regardless of Americans' attitudes toward that Act -- which, not incidentally, passed both houses of Congress and was signed into law by the president, who was re-elected with over 50 percent of the vote, and constitutionality was upheld by the Supreme Court -- Americans hate even more one party using the United States government as a pawn in their power games.
According to a recent CNN poll, 51 percent of Americans say they'd blame the Republicans for a shutdown; 33 percent would blame the president. They blamed Republicans for the last shutdown at the end of 1995 and start of 1996 -- contributing to Republican losses of seven out of 11 gubernatorial races in 1996, 53 state legislative seats, 3 House seats, and the presidency.
So what are Senate Republicans doing about this impending train wreck for the country and the GOP?
Senator Ted Cruz is now trying to round up 40 Senate Republicans to vote against -- not for, but against -- the House bill when it comes to the Senate floor next week. Why? Because Cruz and company don't want the Senate to enact any funding bill at all. That's because once any bill is enacted, Senate Democrats can then amend it with only 51 votes -- striking out the measure that de-funds Obamacare, and even possibly increasing funds in the continuing resolution to keep the government running.
So if Ted Cruz gets his way and the Senate doesn't vote out any funding bill at all, what happens? The government runs out of money September 30. That spells shutdown.
The only difference between the Cruz and Boehner scenarios is that under Boehner we get a government shutdown and the public blames the GOP. Under Cruz, we get a shutdown and the public blames the GOP even more, because Republicans wouldn't even allow a spending bill to come to the Senate floor.
In truth, the fanatics now calling the shots in the Republican Party don't really care what the public thinks because they're too busy worrying about even more extremist right-wing challengers in their next primary -- courtesy of gerrymandering by Republican state legislators, and big-spending right-wing gonzo groups like the Club for Growth.
The Republican Party is no longer capable of governing the nation. It's now a fanatical group run out of right-wing states by a cadre of nihilists, Know-nothings, and a handful of billionaires.
But America needs two parties both capable of governing the nation. We cannot do with just one. The upcoming shutdowns and possible defaults are just symptoms of this deeper malady.
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-reich/republican-budget_b_3973606.html [with comments]
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Diary Of A Legislative Extortionist-Ted Cruz Goes Nuclear Against His Own Party To Save His Own Skin
(Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)
Rick Ungar
9/23/2013 @ 3:10PM
After months of attempting to tie the continued funding of the government to his demand that the Affordable Care Act be demolished, Texas Senator Ted Cruz is now coming face to face with what happens to demagogues who write political checks they can never hope to cash—and it isn’t pretty.
With a strategy that is now crumbling beneath his feet, it is all too clear that Ted Cruz made one heck of a miscalculation—one that promises to put an end to a budding political career that many believed would lead all the way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
So, how did it happen?
It began with Mr. Cruz placing a populist bet that he could use the August town hall season to change the math on Capitol Hill while enlisting millions to his ultimate cause—his candidacy to become President of the United States in 2016.
As the Texas Senator likely saw it, he could swoop in on the gatherings of like-minded, adoring members of his base and, by using the media to spread his message, convince watching independents that the Affordable Care act was so detrimental to the nation’s future that there was no legislative action—no matter how radical or extreme—that should be avoided in the quest to rid the country of the scourge of healthcare reform.
If Cruz’s efforts somehow succeeded beyond what most would have viewed as a rational expectation and the Senator was able to force enough Republican votes—and maybe even a few Democratic votes—to his way of thinking, Cruz would be portrayed as a great and heroic warrior.
This would be true even if there were, ultimately, insufficient votes for Cruz to win the battle.
And if his fellow Republicans in the Senate chose not to go along with his tactics, the Senator would, at the least, depart the town hall circuit with pockets full of publicity and legions of adoring minions who would henceforth view him as a great leader willing to fall on his own sword while appearing to bravely ignore his own political future if that is what it took to save his country from the evils of Obamacare.
It wasn’t a completely insane gambit.
The problem, however, was that Cruz’s entire strategy was dependent upon his expectation that the majority of Americans who continue to dislike the Affordable Care Act (and they do) would be willing to support a government shutdown brought about by Cruz’s effort to tie the destruction of Obamacare to the continuing operations of government.
That is where it all began to fall apart.
It turns out that, while the majority of Americans may continue to view Obamacare with a jaundiced eye, they are not at all prepared [ http://www.people-press.org/2013/09/16/as-health-care-law-proceeds-opposition-and-uncertainty-persist/ ] to accept Cruz’s radical, ‘take no prisoners’ approach as a solution.
With right-leaning publications like “Hot Air” screaming headlines [ http://hotair.com/archives/2013/08/22/republican-poll-public-opposed-to-a-government-shutdown-to-defund-obamacare-including-republicans/ ] like “Republican poll: Public opposed to a government shutdown to defund ObamaCare, including Republicans” , it began to dawn on the Texas Senator that he had made a serious miscalculation and that being credited with causing a shutdown was not going to be the political bonus he had anticipated.
Cruz reacted as might be expected—he began looking for a way to squirm out of his predicament. Immediately, he turned to boldly stating that any government shutdown would not be his fault—but rather the fault of the President.
Why? Because while he had initially perceived getting the credit for a shutdown to be a good thing, the data revealed he had badly judged the intent of the public. Therefore, he had to find a way to continue his plan while pushing the blame of shutdown to the other side—a tall order leaving Cruz to employ a deeply flawed logic that could only appeal to the lowest of low-information voters when attempting to sell us on the idea that this would all be Obama’s fault.
But having discovered the great flaw in his grand design, Cruz really had nowhere else to go.
If you, somehow, remain unclear as to the absurdity of Cruz’s attempt to argue that a shutdown would fall on the shoulders of the White House, consider that this logic would be akin to someone pointing a gun to the head of your puppy before turning to you and demanding that, if you want to save your hapless pooch, you must hand over to him your child’s entire college fund which you have been contributing to for some twenty years.
When you, understandably, refuse to make the trade—despite the fact that you could give the perpetrator the entire fund and deny your child her dreams for the future in order to save the pup—the perpetrator follows through on his terrible deed and then blames you for the death of the poor little puppy. Why? Because he gave you the chance to save the dog’s life and it was within your power to do so, no matter how repugnant. Never mind that the perpetrator had no right to put your dog’s life into the balance in the first place.
Thus, by Cruz’s logic, because the President will not destroy his own law, duly passed by Congress, signed into law by that President and adjudicated legal by the United States Supreme Court, and all because a first term Senator and a few of his friends demand he do so, the fault for the resulting threatened punishment is on the President—not on Cruz himself.
There were additional flaws in Ted Cruz’s grand plan.
Faced with a public that does not favor closing up government in order to extract the end of the President’s signature legislation, the likelihood of persuading Cruz’s fellow Republicans in the Senate to go along with his strategy drops to near zero. While it was always a pipedream to imagine that there would ever have been enough votes in the Senate to make Cruz’s dreams of Obamacare defunding come true—even if a majority of voters supported the notion—without a public hunger for extreme measures, any hope Cruz might have harbored for Senate support were—and are–doomed.
And if, by some miracle, Cruz could use public sentiment to turn enough Democrats and Republicans in the Senate to his way of thinking, hell would freeze over before the President of the United States would go along with any continuing resolution that includes the destruction of his own, signature legislation.
As Congressman Tom Cole (R-OK) put it, “It’s awfully hard to repeal Obamacare when a guy named Obama is President.”
While Senator Cruz certainly would have relished an ultimate victory that included defunding Obamacare, he surely knew this was an unlikely result to his campaign. But his true objective, despite his falsely courageous protestations otherwise, was never to actually pull off the death of Obamacare—rather, his objective was to portray himself as a committed leader who was willing and able to single-handedly shut down the government in a greater cause. Cruz was placing this bet in the belief that were he to earn the credit for a government shutdown over the Obamacare issue, he would become a true hero in the hearts and minds not only of the Republican base—but the millions of independent Americans who both object to Obamacare and would not be personally affected by a shuttering of the government.
Who knew the public would show such disdain for Cruz’s tactics?
Realizing that Cruz had put his penchant for demagoguery ahead of the fortunes of his own party, key Republican leaders, both inside and outside of government, began to speak up and to do so loudly.
Karl Rove published an op-ed taking Cruz—and other Republicans who would favor a shutdown—to task for being willing to inflict the serious political damage such an action would cause the Republican Party. As for the elected ‘insiders’, we’ve learned that Fox News Sunday talk show host Chris Wallace was flooded with reams of opposition research aimed at Cruz as Wallace prepared for yesterday’s show—all of which was provided by Republicans!
Ted Cruz’s response to his massive failure?
Speaking during his appearance on the Fox Sunday show, Cruz said—
“Any vote for cloture, any vote to allow Harry Reid to add funding to Obamacare with just a 51-vote threshold, a vote for cloture is a vote for Obamacare. And I think Senate Republicans are going to stand side-by-side with Speaker [John] Boehner and House Republicans, listening to the people and stopping this train wreck that is Obamacare.”
What that means is that Ted Cruz now plans on taking his party down with him by using a procedural tactic in the Senate that would brand any Republican voting for cloture—thereby agreeing to send the House bill to a vote of the Senate where it will surely be defeated—as a ‘supporter’ of Obamacare.
And if the Senate Republicans were to buckle to Cruz and refuse to vote in favor of cloture, the House Bill will remain stalled in the Senate and the government will shut down with the Republicans clearly taking all the blame.
Either way, Cruz has now created a lose-lose scenario for his Republican colleagues in the Senate that either brings an unwanted government shutdown or invites a never-ending flurry of primary challenges to his GOP cohorts…and all to save whatever credibility Ted Cruz might still be hanging onto with a narrow slice of the GOP base.
All of this brings us to one, inescapable conclusion…Ted Cruz is desperate.
How bad is it?
As one House GOP aide put it, “Nancy Pelosi [ http://www.forbes.com/profile/nancy-pelosi/ ] is more well-liked around here.”
Ouch.
UPDATE: Greg Sargent over at Washington Post [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2013/09/23/the-morning-plum-why-wont-the-gop-establishment-let-ted-cruz-defund-obamacare/ ] reporting this poll just out—
POLL FINDS BROAD OPPOSITION TO SHUTDOWN SHENANIGANS:
The CNBC All-America Economic Survey of 800 people across the country conducted by Hart-McInturff, finds that Americans oppose defunding Obamacare by a 44 percent to 38 percent plurality. But support for defunding drops off sharply when the issue of shutting down the government and defaulting is included. In that case, Americans oppose defunding 59 percent to 19 percent with 18 percent unsure.
*
Related
Government Shut Down Likely To Actually Happen This Time
http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2013/09/19/government-shut-down-likely-to-actually-happen-this-time/
Ted Cruz-The Reincarnation Of Joe McCarthy?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2013/02/18/ted-cruz-the-reincarnation-of-joe-mccarthy/
Ted Cruz And The Doctrine Of Pretend Paranoia
http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2013/07/24/ted-cruz-and-the-doctrine-of-pretend-paranoia/
Meet Ted Cruz-Second Amendment Hypocrite
http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2013/03/16/meet-ted-cruz-second-amendment-hypocrite/
*
2013 Forbes.com LLC™
http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2013/09/23/diary-of-a-legislative-terrorist-ted-cruz-goes-nuclear-against-his-own-party-to-save-his-own-skin/ [with comments]
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Ted Cruz Has a Plan to Get the America He Wants: Minority Rule
Ted Cruz, R-Texas
(AP/J. Scott Applewhite)
John Nichols on September 23, 2013 - 9:16 PM ET
Ted Cruz has figured out how to get the America he wants: he wants to impose minority rule [ http://www.politico.com/story/2013/09/harry-reid-ted-cruz-senate-97215.html ].
No, not majority rule, minority rule.
The senator from Texas hatched a “plan” to “defund Obamacare” by threatening to shut down the federal government. He got a lot of true-believer conservatives—especially in the Republican-controlled US House—to buy into the scheme. But the Texan never rounded up significant support for his approach in the upper chamber.
So the whole defunding scheme—which was never grounded in budgetary reality—has begun to look more and more like the sort of mess that costs political parties seats. House Republicans are furious.
After Cruz waged a national campaign to get the House to follow his strategy, and after they did indeed vote as he said they must, the Texan acknowledged that Senate Democrats could simply strip the House’s defunding language from the continuing resolution, pass a measure that would avert a shutdown and call the House’s bluff.
Even as Cruz was abdicating responsibility his own strategy, he was telling House Republicans to “stand firm [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/09/how-unpopular-is-ted-cruz-right-now/279903/ ].”
They were incredulous [id.].
Congressman Sean Duffy, a Wisconsin Republican who voted for the House version of the plan, said on The Laura Ingraham Show [ http://www.lauraingraham.com/pg/jsp/charts/streamingAudioMaster.jsp?dispid=302&headerDest=L3BnL2pzcC9tZWRpYS9mbGFzaHdlbGNvbWUuanNwP3BpZD0xNjE0OQ== ], “I think the strategy that Ted Cruz has been advocating for—it’s really hard to win when you can’t get the Senate on board and he’s proving that by the very nature of his surrender.”
But Duffy wasn’t finished.
“You can’t talk to the American people, you can’t talk to our bases on this strategy, and then completely roll over,” he said of Cruz [ http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/359135/sean-duffy-ted-cruz-thank-god-he-wasnt-fighting-alamo-sterling-beard ]. “Thank God he wasn’t there fighting at the Alamo!”
Ouch!
That’s not the kind of talk that Canada’s favorite son in the 2016 Republican presidential race likes to hear.
So Cruz is thinking fast.
And he’s got a new strategy.
End majority rule.
We’re not talking the back-door strategy of filibuster gamesmanship. Cruz wants Senate majority leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, to save him from the slings and arrows of his fellow partisans.
Reid plans to have the Senate vote on removing the Obamacare language from the continuing resolution. To do that, a simple majority is required. But Cruz is asking Reid set a sixty-vote threshold for addressing the defunding issue.
“The Senate, generally on controversial votes, we work out an agreement for it to be subject to a sixty-vote threshold,” Cruz declared [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2013/09/23/the-most-important-week-of-ted-cruzs-short-career/ ] on Fox News Sunday. Otherwise, “the majority is going to run the minority over with a train.”
Cruz is wrong on principle: the majority should rule.
And he is wrong on the facts of how the Senate operates when dealing with controversial legislation, amendments and nominations.
During the gun-safety debate that played out earlier this year with regard to the Safe Communities, Safe Schools Act of 2013 [ http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/vote_menu_113_1.htm ], a stack of amendments passed or failed on votes of 52-48, 54-46, 57-43 and 58-42. And the history of the Senate is filled with instances where major legislation advanced by relatively narrow majorities.
Justice Samuel Alito [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Alito ] sits on the US Supreme Court based on a 58-42 vote.
Justice Clarence Thomas [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_Thomas ] was confirmed by a 52-48 vote.
Senate Democrats (and at least a few Republicans) might have been quite pleased to operate under Cruz’s sixty-vote threshold for those controversial confirmations. But no such standard applied in 2006, when Alito was up for confirmation; nor did it apply in 1991, when the Thomas nomination was being considered.
The Cruz model for minority rule exists in the head of Ted Cruz.
But it cannot be found in the Senate rules.
Reid says [ http://www.politico.com/story/2013/09/harry-reid-ted-cruz-senate-97215.html ] he plans to follow “basic Senate procedure” when it comes to the continuing resolution.
The majority leader does not appear to be getting substantial pushback on that position from Senate Republicans. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, and Senate Republican whip John Cornyn, the senior senator from Cruz’s homestate of Texas, have distanced themselves [id.] from Cruz’s latest gambit. And one of the most serious conservatives in the Senate, Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn [ http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/cruz-reid-obamacare-power/2013/09/22/id/527041 ], says Cruz is “not realistic” and of the Texan’s overall strategy, “It’s not a tactic that we can actually carry out and be successful.”
A high-ranking Democratic aide says of Cruz, “No one is taking him seriously on this.”
No one should.
The Senate ought to be a deliberative body.
It ought to have thoughtful debates, extended debates.
But, ultimately, the Senate is a legislative chamber in the federal government.
It must legislate and govern.
And it cannot be the plaything of petty partisans who seek to rewrite the rules in order to avoid accountability within their own party caucuses.
This is not about Democrats and Republicans. This is not about liberals and conservatives. It is not even about Obamacare.
It’s about Cruz.
And a plutocratic fantasy that says the United States should be governed not by the majority of citizens or senators but by a minority. Perhaps even a minority of one Tea Party cowboy from Calgary.
John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney examine the special interests [ http://www.thenation.com/article/176140/dollarocracy ] that dominate our "dollarocracy."
Copyright © 2013 The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/blog/176316/ted-cruz-has-plan-get-america-he-wants-minority-rule [with comments]
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Sarah Palin To Chris Wallace: Reveal Republicans Who Are Trying To 'Trash Ted Cruz'
Posted: 09/23/2013 8:38 am EDT | Updated: 09/23/2013 9:34 am EDT
Sarah Palin went after Chris Wallace on Sunday after the Fox News host said he received opposition research from Republicans about Ted Cruz.
"This has been one of the strangest weeks I've ever had in Washington," Wallace said on "Fox News Sunday [ http://nation.foxnews.com/2013/09/22/chris-wallace-republican-leaders-sent-me-opposition-research-ted-cruz ]." "As soon as we listed Ted Cruz as our featured guest this week, I got unsolicited research and questions, not from Democrats, but from top Republicans to hammer Cruz."
Palin responded on Twitter [ http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/09/22/palin-demands-fox-news-host-turn-over-the-gop-cannibals-who-are-trying-to-trash-cruz/ ], writing: "@FoxNewsSunday Keep it TRULY fair & balanced. Release the GOP names encouraging you to trash @SenTedCruz. No more anonymous sources."
Wallace hosted Cruz to discuss the Republican bill to defund Obamacare in order to avoid a government shutdown, which has almost no chance of passing the Senate. The initiative has earned the senator the ire of fellow Republicans [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/22/ted-cruz-obamacare_n_3971685.html ]. Cruz has called for filibustering the bill, which he supports, in the Senate to prevent Democrats from amending it.
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/23/sarah-palin-chris-wallace-ted-cruz_n_3975077.html [with comments]
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Mike Lee 'Would Love To Know' Who Fox News' Anti-Ted Cruz Sources Are
09/24/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/24/mike-lee-fox-news_n_3982945.html [with embedded video, and comments]
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Mitch McConnell Rejects Ted Cruz Push To Filibuster Bill Defunding Obamacare
09/24/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/23/mitch-mcconnell-ted-cruz-obamacare_n_3977222.html [with embedded video report, and (over 15,000) comments]
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Harry Reid Accuses GOP Of 'Thelma And Louise' Fanaticism Over Shutdown Threat
By Michael McAuliff
Posted: 09/23/2013 3:01 pm EDT | Updated: 09/24/2013 10:42 am EDT
WASHINGTON -- The Republicans bent on defunding Obamacare or shutting down the government are "fanatics" with a "Thelma and Louise"-like mission to drive the nation off a cliff, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Monday.
The federal government will run out of money after Sept. 30 if Congress does not act by then to authorize more spending. Rather than simply do that, the House of Representatives last week passed a bill that would keep federal offices running only if the Senate and White House agreed to defund the Affordable Care Act. Senate Democrats and President Barack Obama are refusing to give in to that demand.
In his opening Senate floor remarks Monday afternoon, Reid said the only people who actually want Obamacare defunded are extremists.
He pointed to polls that have found broad support for most elements of the health care law and noted that many Senate Republicans think using a government shutdown to try to defund the law is a terrible idea.
"Are Republicans so intent on undermining both President Obama and his signature health care law that they're willing to inflict severe damage to our economy in the process?" Reid said. "America will know exactly who to blame: Republican fanatics in the House and the Senate."
"Two dozen Senate Republicans have spoken out against this foolhardy plan to drive the economy off the cliff -- two dozen," Reid added. "This 'Thelma and Louise' style just isn't getting the attention of the American people in a positive tone. If Democrats don't bow to every demand they [tea party Republicans] have, they want to go right over the cliff. Well, we're not going to go with them."
Reid said the Senate will deal with the House's continuing resolution -- as the spending bill is called -- and send it back to the House as quickly as possible.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who earlier pushed the House to pass its defund-or-else bill, has now said he will filibuster it [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/22/ted-cruz-obamacare_n_3971685.html ] because the Senate is likely to strip the defunding provision.
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/23/government-shutdown-harry-reid_n_3976609.html [with embedded video report, and (over 7,000) comments]
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The Double Absurdity of Ted Cruz's 'Filibuster'
Screenshot
Why the senator's last stand against Obamacare just doesn't make sense
Molly Ball
Sep 24 2013, 4:26 PM ET
Who says Republicans and Democrats can't agree on anything? These days, they are largely united in their loathing for Ted Cruz [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/09/how-unpopular-is-ted-cruz-right-now/279903/ ], the pugnacious Republican freshman senator from Texas. On Tuesday afternoon, Cruz took the floor of the Senate and vowed to speak as long as he could stand. (His colleague Mike Lee has already taken a turn at the podium.)
For procedural reasons, Cruz's remarks, however long, do not constitute a true filibuster; the vote to move forward with government-funding legislation is scheduled to begin after noon on Wednesday [ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/09/ted-cruz-vows-to-speak-against-obamacare-until-i-am-no-longer-able-to-stand/ ] and will go forward regardless. Twitter quickly dubbed his stand a "fauxlibuster" or -- perfect for its invocation of vacuous, feel-good nonsense-speech -- a "Ted Talk." Invoking the Nazis, the Soviet Union, and the Little Engine That Could, Cruz styled himself the lone crusader for right against a formidably equipped enemy.
Nearly to a one, Republicans want to get rid of Obamacare. But most also worry Cruz's defund crusade will lead to a government shutdown that hurts the GOP politically [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/09/would-a-government-shutdown-really-be-all-that-bad-for-republicans-yes/279790/ ]. Leaving aside the policy or even the political advisability of Cruz's undertaking, though, there are a couple of basic logical problems with what he's trying to do, as the conservative writer David Freddoso pointed out on the Conservative Intelligence Briefing website on Sunday [ http://www.conservativeintel.com/2013/09/22/cruz-makes-his-case-and-heres-why-its-wrong/# ].
1. He's trying to block the same bill he says he wants to pass. Cruz and his fellow defunders pushed the Republican-controlled House of Representatives to pass a bill funding the federal government but stopping funding for health-care-reform implementation. The House obeyed and passed the bill on Friday [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/09/what-todays-house-vote-to-defund-obamacare-does-nothing/279860/ ]. But now that the Senate is considering the bill, Cruz wants to prevent it from being voted on. "If you’re really interested in putting pressure on Democrats to heed their constituents and vote to defund Obamacare, then you make them take the very vote that Cruz is trying to prevent from happening," Freddoso writes.
2. Shutting down the government wouldn't stop Obamacare. On Fox News on Friday, Cruz proposed passing piecemeal funding bills for "different pieces of the government," such as the military, implying Congress could fund other government functions while omitting Obamacare. But that's wrong -- the money for Obamacare isn't at stake in the continuing resolution currently under consideration. It's "mandatory" spending, akin to Medicare and Social Security, and would require action by Congress to revoke. "I’m convinced that most conservatives who have bought into [Cruz's] strategy have been misled to believe we can hold off Obamacare for a while with a government shutdown," Freddoso writes. "Obamacare is already funded, and that won’t change if this bill gets stalled by a filibuster. During the shutdown, the Marines don’t get paid, but Obamacare gets funded."
Conservatives can cheer Cruz for grabbing the nation's attention and giving an impassioned, high-profile speech. But, Freddoso argues, they shouldn't pretend this is a practical step toward stalling legislation they hate. As he wrote in another post [ http://www.conservativeintel.com/2013/09/20/next-step-defund-obamacare-by-preventing-a-vote-on-defunding-obamacare/ ]: "This plan is right out of Alice in Wonderland. You need to prevent a vote on defunding Obamacare in order to defund Obamacare." Good luck with that, Senator.
Copyright © 2013 by The Atlantic Monthly Group
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/09/the-double-absurdity-of-ted-cruzs-filibuster/279959/ [with comments]
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Marco Rubio Ditches Ted Cruz Speech For Fundraiser
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) ducked out of fellow tea party darling Sen. Ted Cruz's anti-Obamacare speech in the Senate for a fundraiser on Tuesday.
09/25/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/25/marco-rubio-ted-cruz_n_3986042.html [with comments]
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Senator Persists Battling Health Law, Irking Even Many in His Own Party
Sen. Ted Cruz walked to the senate luncheon at the Capitol on Tuesday.
Gabriella Demczuk/The New York Times
Video [embedded]
Senate Leaders Debate Health Care Law: Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, and Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, spoke on the Senate floor about alternatives to a government shutdown.
Graphic
What Congress Must Do to Avoid a Shutdown
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/09/24/us/politics/what-congress-must-do-to-avoid-a-shutdown.html
Video
Cruz Attacks Health Care Law
http://www.nytimes.com/video/2013/09/24/us/politics/100000002462822/cruz-attacks-health-care-law.html
By JONATHAN WEISMAN
Published: September 24, 2013
WASHINGTON — Facing an increasingly likely defeat in his tangled procedural fight over funding the government, Senator Ted Cruz took to the Senate floor on Tuesday and declared he would speak “until I cannot stand” to rally voters against the health care law.
While the Senate appeared ready to override him in a preliminary vote scheduled for Wednesday, Mr. Cruz, a freshman Republican from Texas, pressed ahead hour after hour with his opposition, comparing his fight to efforts by leaders who stood against the Nazis, ended the cold war or started the American Revolution.
“Everyone in America knows Obamacare is destroying the economy,” said Mr. Cruz, who began speaking at 2:41 p.m. and was still at it after midnight. “Where is the urgency?”
Yet outside the chamber, his colleagues worked against his efforts to block a vote to take up the House-passed bill that does precisely what he wants: financing the government through mid-December while cutting off money for the Affordable Care Act.
Mr. Cruz called on his colleagues to stonewall the measure they technically supported, arguing that Senate Democrats would be successful in stripping the health care provision from the funding bill once the way was cleared to a Senate vote on the issue. His basic demand was an agreement that a final vote require 60 supporters, a demand Democrats rejected.
Other Republicans said they saw no reason to oppose debating a measure they actually backed.
“We’d be hard-pressed to explain why we were opposed to a bill we’re in favor of,” said Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader.
Others warned of political repercussions if Republicans, who hope to regain control of the Senate in next year’s elections, were seen as contributing to a shuttering of the government. “Getting the majority in the Senate in 2014 is possible, and we don’t want to go down roads that make it harder,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, who is up for re-election next year. “Repealing Obamacare is a goal all Republicans share,” he added, “but the tactics of achieving that goal can have a backlash.”
Mr. Cruz’s lonely stand was not technically a filibuster. The first vote in a long process to get to a final showdown is set for Wednesday, and Mr. Cruz cannot head off that vote. And only a handful of Republicans are expected to join him in voting against taking up the House bill.
“There will be no filibuster today,” said Senator Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat and majority leader.
Senior Senate Republicans pushed Mr. Cruz on Tuesday to give up his stalling tactics and let the Senate take its final votes as soon as possible to strip out the health care language and other policy prescriptions, then approve new language to keep the government operating until mid-November. An early vote would give Speaker John A. Boehner more time to plan his next move: Whether to put the Senate-passed bill up for a vote and ensure no government shutdown or to add new Republican-favored language and send it back to the Senate.
If Mr. Cruz persists and forces the Senate to exhaust the time allowed for the necessary votes, the final vote cannot happen until Sunday.
“I don’t know who else in the conference may feel differently, but I do know if the House doesn’t get what we send over there until Monday, they’re in a pretty tough spot,” Mr. McConnell said.
Some Senate Republicans suggested a quick vote on a stopgap spending measure could allow the House to attach a measure related to the Affordable Care Act but one that could split Democrats and possibly become law. The obvious target would be a tax on medical devices that helps finance the law, but which has strong opponents in both parties. House Republicans are also considering adding a one-year delay in the individual mandate.
Such procedural niceties carried little weight with the conservative activists backing Mr. Cruz, and the conservative advocacy groups egging them on. Phone lines were jammed by Cruz supporters. E-mails flew, encouraged by organizations like the Tea Party Patriots [ http://www.teapartypatriots.org/ ] and the Heritage Foundation [ http://www.heritage.org/ ]. The Senate Conservative Fund [ http://www.senateconservatives.com/ ], a group that has been running advertisements attacking Republicans who are not supporting the “defund Obamacare” effort, called Mr. McConnell and the No. 2 Senate Republican, John Cornyn of Texas, “turncoats.”
But most Republicans showed little fear of a backlash for voting to take up the House bill. “If this is what you wanted, consideration of this bill, I don’t know how you can be against taking it up,” said Senator Richard Burr, Republican of North Carolina.
Mr. Reid moved Tuesday to change the House-passed bill, shortening the stopgap spending measure so it would finance the government only through mid-November instead of mid-December. Senator Barbara Mikulski, the Maryland Democrat who leads the Appropriations Committee, requested the change to raise pressure on the House to address the automatic spending cuts that are squeezing federal programs and are reflected in the spending plan passed by the House.
But such narrow issues took a back seat to Mr. Cruz’s crusade, with bit parts granted to his Senate Republican supporters. They included Marco Rubio of Florida, Mike Lee of Utah, Pat Roberts of Kansas, David Vitter of Louisiana, Jeff Sessions of Alabama and Rand Paul of Kentucky, whose own filibuster this year [ http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/06/rand-paul-does-not-go-quietly-into-the-night/ ] over the government’s use of lethal drone strikes lasted 12 hours and 52 minutes.
Topics Mr. Cruz addressed included his affection for the little hamburgers at White Castle, the fast-food chain that says its growth is slowing because of the health care law, and a tough-love speech by Ashton Kutcher [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBjnRSSgh8g (next below)].
He doled out insults to the Washington establishment, blasting politicians in “cheap suits” and “bad haircuts,” and branding journalistic fact-checking as a “particularly pernicious bit of yellow journalism.” At one point, he read some of his daughters’ favorite stories, including “Green Eggs and Ham” by Dr. Seuss.
Under the current timetable, the Senate will vote Wednesday to cut off debate on a motion to take up the House bill and vote Thursday to actually take up the House bill. Mr. Reid will then introduce his version of the stopgap spending bill, stripped of the health care language and other policy measures.
The real showdown vote will probably come on Saturday, when the Senate votes to cut off debate on Mr. Reid’s version of the bill. If that receives 60 votes, a final vote would come on Sunday, leaving the House one day to act before much of the government closes its doors.
That would give Mr. Boehner a stark choice: pass a short-term spending bill with Democratic votes and risk the wrath of conservative activists or try again to take a bit out of the health care law with no time left on the clock and ensure a shutdown.
“I don’t know what all the scenes are, but I’ve seen how this movie ends,” said Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona. “We will end up not shutting the government down, and we will not defund Obamacare.”
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Related
McConnell’s Deal-Making Yields to Politicking (September 24, 2013)
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/24/us/politics/often-at-the-forefront-mcconnell-seems-to-step-back.html
Economix Blog: Shutdown vs. Default: The Relative Impact (September 23, 2013)
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/23/shutdown-vs-default-the-relative-impact/
About New York: A Republican Calls Another a ‘Fraud’ (September 25, 2013)
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/25/nyregion/a-republican-glad-to-label-cruz-a-fraud.html
Related in Opinion
Editorial: The Embarrassment of Senator Ted Cruz (September 25, 2013)
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/25/opinion/the-embarrassment-of-senator-ted-cruz.html
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© 2013 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/25/us/politics/senate-democratic-leader-sets-stage-for-budget-showdown.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/25/us/politics/senate-democratic-leader-sets-stage-for-budget-showdown.html?pagewanted=all ] [with comments]
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Sen. Ted Cruz Compares Conservative #DefundObamacare Skeptics to Nazi Appeasers Because Why Not?
By Asawin Suebsaeng
Tue Sep. 24, 2013 5:31 PM PDT
During Tuesday's anti-Obamacare "fauxlibuster [ http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/09/ted-cruz-nazi-obamacare-filibuster-video.html ]," Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas [ http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/10/ted-cruz-texas-gop-senate ]) whipped out an analogy [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4HGEzAnf6E (next below) (the derivative http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8TL7x4CL7U embedded in the original)]:
There are key differences between the Affordable Care Act [ http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/09/collected-poetry-affordable-care-act ] and Hitler. But, you know, whatever [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law ].
*
Related
Ted Cruz: "We Need 100 More Like Jesse Helms"
At DC speech, the rising GOP star embraces one of the Senate's last proud racists.
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/09/ted-cruz-we-need-100-more-jesse-helms
Obamacare Could Help People Register to Vote—Unless the Administration Caves to the GOP
Federal law says that Obamacare's health exchanges have to offer voter registration services. Republicans have thrown a fit over that, and now the administration is considering backing down.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/09/obamacare-motor-voter-registration-health-exchange
Funny or Die Is Making Pro-Obamacare Videos
Mike Farah, president of production at the comedy website, says this week's celebrity-packed Obamacare rollout meeting at the White House "kind of kicked ass."
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/07/funny-or-die-obamacare-white-house-mike-farah
*
Copyright ©2013 Mother Jones and the Foundation for National Progress
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/09/senator-ted-cruz-compares-defund-obamacare-skeptics-nazi-appeasers [with comments]; http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/cruz-likens-obamacare-defunding-skeptics-to-nazi-appeasers-video [with comments]
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The Daily Szep -- Joe and Ted
09/24/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-szep/the-daily-szep-joe-and-te_b_3980939.html [with comments]
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American Bile
Javier Jaén
By ROBERT B. REICH
September 21, 2013, 2:32 pm
Not long ago I was walking toward an airport departure gate when a man approached me.
“Are you Robert Reich?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“You’re a Commie dirtbag.” (He actually used a variant of that noun, one that can’t be printed here.)
“I’m sorry?” I thought I had misunderstood him.
“You’re a Commie dirtbag.”
My mind raced through several possibilities. Was I in danger? That seemed doubtful. He was well-dressed and had a briefcase in one hand. He couldn’t have gotten through the checkpoint with a knife or gun. Should I just walk away? Probably. But what if he followed me? Regardless, why should I let him get away with insulting me?
I decided to respond, as civilly as I could: “You’re wrong. Where did you get your information?”
“Fox News. Bill O’Reilly says you’re a Communist.”
A year or so ago Bill O’Reilly did say on his Fox News show that I was a Communist. I couldn’t imagine what I’d done to provoke his ire except to appear on several TV shows arguing for higher taxes on the wealthy, which hardly qualified me as a Communist. Nor am I exactly a revolutionary. I served in Bill Clinton’s cabinet. My first full-time job in Washington was in the Ford administration, working for Robert H. Bork at the Justice Department.
“Don’t believe everything you hear on Fox News,” I said. The man walked away, still irritated.
It’s rare that I’m accosted and insulted by strangers, but I do receive vitriolic e-mails and angry Facebook posts. On the Internet and on TV shows, name-calling substitutes for argument, and ad hominem attack for reason.
Scholars who track these things say the partisan divide is sharper today than it has been in almost a century. The typical Republican agrees with the typical Democrat on almost no major issue. If you haven’t noticed, Congress is in complete gridlock.
At the same time, polls show Americans to be more contemptuous and less trusting of major institutions: government, big business, unions, Wall Street, the media.
I’m 67 and have lived through some angry times: Joseph R. McCarthy’s witch hunts of the 1950s, the struggle for civil rights and the Vietnam protests in the 1960s, Watergate and its aftermath in the 1970s. But I don’t recall the degree of generalized bile that seems to have gripped the nation in recent years.
The puzzle is that many of the big issues that used to divide us, from desegregation to foreign policy, are less incendiary today. True, we disagree about guns, abortion and gay marriage, but for the most part have let the states handle these issues. So what, exactly, explains the national distemper?
For one, we increasingly live in hermetically sealed ideological zones that are almost immune to compromise or nuance. Internet algorithms and the proliferation of media have let us surround ourselves with opinions that confirm our biases. We’re also segregating geographically into red or blue territories: chances are that our neighbors share our views, and magnify them. So when we come across someone outside these zones, whose views have been summarily dismissed or vilified, our minds are closed.
Add in the fact that most Americans no longer remember the era, from the Great Depression through World War II, when we were all in it together — when hardship touched almost every family, and we were palpably dependent on one another. There were sharp disagreements, but we shared challenges that forced us to work together toward common ends. Small wonder that by the end of the war, Americans’ confidence in major institutions of our society was at its highest.
These changes help explain why Americans are so divided, but not why they’re so angry. To understand that, we need to look at the economy.
Put simply, most people are on a downward escalator. Although jobs are slowly returning, pay is not. Most jobs created since the start of the recovery, in 2009, pay less than the jobs that were lost during the Great Recession. This means many people are working harder than ever, but still getting nowhere. They’re increasingly pessimistic about their chances of ever doing better.
As their wages and benefits shrink, though, they see corporate executives and Wall Street bankers doing far better than ever before. And they are keenly aware of bailouts and special subsidies for agribusinesses, pharma, oil and gas, military contractors, finance and every other well-connected industry.
Political scientists have noted a high correlation between inequality and polarization. But economic class isn’t the only dividing line in America. Many working-class voters are heartland Republicans, while many of America’s superrich are coastal Democrats. The real division is between those who believe the game is rigged against them and those who believe they have a decent shot.
Losers of rigged games can become very angry, as history has revealed repeatedly. In America, the populist wings of both parties have become more vocal in recent years — the difference being that the populist right blames government more than it does big corporations while the populist left blames big corporations more than government.
Widening inequality thereby ignites what the historian Richard Hofstadter called the “paranoid style in American politics.” It animated the Know-Nothing and Anti-Masonic movements before the Civil War, the populist agitators of the Progressive Era and the John Birch Society — whose founder accused President Dwight D. Eisenhower of being a “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy” — in the 1950s.
Inequality is far wider now than it was then, and threatens social cohesion and trust. I don’t think Bill O’Reilly really believes I’m a Communist. He’s just channeling the nation’s bile.
Robert B. Reich [ http://gspp.berkeley.edu/directories/faculty/robert-reich ], a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of “Beyond Outrage: What Has Gone Wrong With Our Economy and Our Democracy, and How to Fix It [ http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Outrage-Expanded-Edition-democracy/dp/0345804376 ],” is featured in the new documentary “Inequality for All [ http://inequalityforall.com/ ].”
© 2013 The New York Times Company
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/21/american-bile/ [with comments]
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At 77 He Prepares Burgers Earning in Week His Former Hourly Wage
Tom Palome, right, and Maxine Haynes, project director for Tampa's AARP Foundation, who helped him get an interview at Advantage Sales & Marketing LLC, which runs food demonstrations for Sam’s Club and other stores.
Phelan M. Ebenhack/Bloomberg
Today, the 77-year-old former vice president of marketing for Oral-B juggles two part-time jobs: one as a $10-an-hour food demonstrator at Sam’s Club, the other flipping burgers and serving drinks at a golf club grill for slightly more than minimum wage.
Phelan M. Ebenhack/Bloomberg
At the height of his corporate career, Tom Palome was pulling in a salary in the low six-figures and flying first class on business trips to Europe.
Phelan M. Ebenhack/Bloomberg
Video [embedded]
Boomers Find They Need Work to Support Retirement
By Carol Hymowitz - Sep 23, 2013 3:44 PM CT
It seems like another life. At the height of his corporate career, Tom Palome was pulling in a salary in the low six-figures and flying first class on business trips to Europe.
Today, the 77-year-old former vice president of marketing for Oral-B juggles two part-time jobs: one as a $10-an-hour food demonstrator at Sam’s Club, the other flipping burgers and serving drinks at a golf club grill for slightly more than minimum wage.
While Palome worked hard his entire career, paid off his mortgage and put his kids through college, like most Americans he didn’t save enough for retirement. Even many affluent baby boomers who are approaching the end of their careers haven’t come close to saving the 10 to 20 times their annual working income [ http://www.bloomberg.com/infographics/2013-23-19/end-of-retirement.html ] that investment experts say they’ll need to maintain their standard of living in old age.
For middle class households, with incomes ranging from the mid five to low six figures, it’s especially grim. When the 2008 financial crisis hit, what little Palome had saved -- $90,000 -- took a beating and he suddenly found himself in need of cash to maintain his lifestyle. With years if not decades of life ahead of him, Palome took the jobs he could find.
Mopping Floors
The youthful and perennially optimistic grandfather considers himself lucky. He’s blessed with good health, he said. He’s able to work, live independently and maintain his dignity, even if he has to mop the floors at the club grill before going home at 8 p.m. and finally getting off his feet.
“That’s part of the job,” he said. “You have to respect the job you’re doing and not be negative -- or don’t do it.”
Low-income Americans have long had to scrape by in old age, relying primarily on Social Security. The middle class, with its more educated and resourceful retirees, is supposed to be better prepared, with some even having the luxury to forge fulfilling second acts as they redefine retirement on their own terms. Or so popular culture tells us.
The reality is often quite another story. More seniors who spent much of their careers as corporate managers and professionals are competing for low-wage jobs. For these growing ranks of seniors with scant savings, it’s the end of retirement.
Downward Mobility
About 7.2 million Americans who were 65 and older were employed last year, a 67 percent [ http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNU02000097 ] increase from a decade ago, according to government data. Yet 59 percent of households headed by people 65 and older currently have no retirement account assets, according to Federal Reserve data analyzed by the National Institute on Retirement Security.
“People who built successful careers, put their kids through college and saved what they could, are still facing downward mobility,” said Teresa Ghilarducci, an economist at The New School, who has studied the finances of seniors.
It’s about to get worse. Right behind the current legions of elderly workers is the looming baby boomer generation, who began turning 65 in 2011 and are reaching that age at a rate of about 8,000 a day. They’re the first generation expected to fund their own retirements, even as they live longer lives.
They, too, are coming up short. Company-paid pensions are mostly a thing of the past, replaced in the last three decades by 401(k) accounts primarily funded and managed by employees. The median 401(k) balance for households headed by people aged 55 to 64 who had retirement accounts at work was $120,000 in 2011, according to the Center for Retirement Research [ http://crr.bc.edu/ ] at Boston College.
Not Enough
Those savings will provide $4,800 a year, assuming seniors withdraw 4 percent annually, the amount recommended by retirement experts to ensure retirees don’t run out of money in their lifetimes.
Little wonder that half of baby boomers aged 50 to 64 don’t think they’ll ever have enough to retire, according to a 2011 survey by AARP.
“The current retirement savings systems isn’t working, and that’s becoming a crisis as Americans who make it to 65 in good health are now living at least two more decades,” said Larry Fink, chief executive officer of BlackRock Inc. (BLK), the world’s largest asset manager.
“Longevity should be a blessing, but if you haven’t planned for it, you’re going to work much longer than you ever dreamed of doing,” he said. “Or you better be good to your children because you’re probably going to be living with them.”
Being Independent
That’s the last thing Tom Palome wants to do -- even though his children have offered to take him in. After decades of keeping his body trim -- at 5-foot, 10-inches tall, he weighs a fit 170 -- and his hair colored a dark brown, he’s often mistaken for a 60-year-old and has no intention of giving up his independence.
On the job at Sam’s Club, Palome is easy to spot amid shoppers pushing carts down the aisles. It’s not just the bright green apron he’s wearing with the words “Tastes and Tips” printed across the front nor the matching green baseball cap that set him apart in the Brandon, Florida, store near Tampa. It’s also his charisma and determination.
He waves to a mother with a toddler in tow and insists she sample the blueberry-flavored crackers he has stacked neatly on a tray at his aluminum work station.
“They’re multigrain, and healthier for kids than cookies,” said Palome, who researches the products he pitches on the Internet.
Product Demos
He’s supposed to sell two boxes of the crackers during his seven-hour shift. He sells 24 by clean-up time, then grabs a garbage bag and gathers containers and leftover food from demonstration carts around the store.
The next day, a humid Sunday in August, Palome is at his second part-time job, an eight-hour shift as a short-order cook and bartender at Rogers Park Golf Course [ http://www.rogersparkgc.com/home/ ] in Tampa. Working solo, he’s in perpetual motion, rushing between the take-out counter at the golf course’s cafe and indoor counter to collect orders and operate the cash register, while grilling hot dogs and hamburgers and grabbing soft drinks from the refrigerator.
It’s a busy day at the 18-hole municipal course, and he serves 70 customers before closing time. Then he scrubs down the grill and sweeps and mops the floors.
Palome earns about $80 for his day’s work, $7.98 per hour in wages, plus tips.
“I earn in a week what I used to earn in an hour,” he said, adding that he understands seniors can’t easily keep or get jobs that pay middle-income wages.
Social Security
Palome, who said his jobs keep him active and learning new things, could survive without working. He receives $1,200 from Social Security and a $600 a month pension from his last corporate job. Still, his $1,400 in monthly wages allows him to bolster his savings and provides for some extras. He goes to the theater, pays for plane tickets to visit his children and grandsons and takes occasional vacations.
“I know seniors like me who hardly ever leave their homes because they don’t have money to do anything,” Palome said. “They could work, but won’t take a lesser job.”
To stretch his income, Palome runs his dishwasher once a week and turns off his hot water heater every morning after he showers. He buys airline tickets six months in advance, booking rental cars for as little as $13.80 a day.
Getting Stuck
Palome grew up in Poughkeepsie, New York. His parents were both immigrants, and his father worked as a laborer. After a stint in the Navy, Palome had a chance to work at a local International Business Machine Corp. (IBM) plant. The work was steady, with solid pay and benefits. Instead, he enrolled at Fordham University to study business, relying on veteran benefits to pay tuition. His father was so angry Palome turned down the plant job that he didn’t speak to him for months.
“I knew that anyone who got into that plant never got out,” he said. “You just got stuck because of the steady pay.”
Palome landed a job at Shulton Co., the maker of Old Spice after-shave lotion and cologne, then moved to Yardley of London as a brand manager. His big break came in 1975 when he was recruited to The Cooper Cos. as vice president of marketing for the Oral-B dental-care business.
The job gave him a high five-figure income and an executive’s life at age 39. He flew first class to Cooper offices in the U.S. and in England, Sweden and Germany. He helped win an endorsement for the Oral-B toothbrush from the U.S. Olympic Committee [ http://www.teamusa.org/ ]. He had a closet filled with business suits, and on weekends he played golf with other executives.
Tragedy Strikes
That life turned upside down when his wife, Edna, was killed in a car accident in 1983. Palome’s daughter, then a college student, offered to come home to take care of her brothers, who were 14 and 16 years old. Palome insisted she stay in school. He took charge of the parenting and the housework.
“I was numb, in shock and trying to hold everything together,” he said. “And my sons didn’t want anyone in the house besides me, not even a housekeeper.”
When Cooper relocated from New Jersey to California, Palome didn’t want to uproot his family. So in 1980, when he was 44, he started a consulting company, with Cooper as his main client. He also did consulting for Sandoz Pharmaceuticals, Johnson & Johnson and others.
In flush years, Palome had several clients and earned about $120,000. Though he saved for his kids’ college and helped his elderly parents, retirement wasn’t on his radar.
“I never thought I’d live this long,” he said.
No Savings
Because he was self-employed, Palome didn’t have a 401(k) account, and he has never had a tax-deferred IRA, or Individual Retirement Account. It’s the same for most Americans. Only about half of private-sector workers were covered by an employer-sponsored retirement plan of any kind in 2011. And fewer than 40 percent of those participated, according to the Employee Benefits Research Institute.
Many now approaching retirement began saving too late, stopped saving when they lost jobs, or borrowed against their 401(k) accounts to finance their children’s college tuition. They also often chose investments that failed to yield the best results, or they bailed out of the stock market after the financial crisis battered their savings, then missing the rebound.
“How is the average middle-class person going to amass $1,000,000 by the time they’re 65, which is what they’ll need to get $40,000 a year in income from their retirement savings?” Ghilarducci said.
Keep Going
Palome had lean years when he couldn’t easily save. He decided to take a job running a Friendly’s restaurant in Parsippany, N.J., from 1990 to 1993. He figured he’d acquire new skills, which have since proved useful.
“Tom always did what he had to do to keep going,” said his younger brother Peter, who’s 66 and lives in the same senior community.
Palome later ran a restaurant at a New Jersey golf club while he continued his consulting. At 64, when an 800 square foot manufactured home he’d seen in Plant City, a Tampa suburb, became available for $21,500, he purchased it with a credit card to amass frequent flier miles. He then sold his New Jersey home for $180,000, kept what he needed to quickly pay off his credit card debt and divided the rest among his children so they’d have down payments for their own homes.
“The house was theirs as much as mine, and that’s their inheritance from me,” he said.
Don’t Panic
At first everything went according to his plan. Palome enjoyed the year-round warm weather and he avoided dipping into savings by doing part-time bar-tending and catering. Then the financial crisis hit. Palome’s part-time work evaporated. His savings, which he’d invested mostly in stocks, shrank from about $90,000 to less than $40,000.
“I was shocked by how fast I lost so much,” he said.
Palome didn’t panic. He rewrote his resume, taking out references to his corporate career so he wouldn’t appear overqualified for restaurant and hotel jobs. He searched online jobs sites and local papers for leads. Between 2008 and 2011 he figures he applied for about 100 jobs.
He came close to getting two of those until his prospective employers learned his age. He was never told explicitly that he was too old for a job. Yet hiring managers who asked when he could start working never called again after he submitted required copies of his driver’s license with his birth date.
Foreclosure City
“I was in a foreclosure city in a foreclosure state,” he said. “So many people were out of work. Who wants to hire a 75-year-old?”
Two years ago, Palome saw an advertisement in a local paper for an AARP Foundation [ http://www.aarp.org/aarp-foundation/ ] job training program. He met with Maxine Haynes, the program’s Tampa project director, who helped him get an interview at Advantage Sales & Marketing LLC, which runs food demonstrations for Sam’s Club and other stores.
“He had so much energy and enthusiasm when he walked through the door here, I knew I had to try to help him,” Haynes said.
Palome aced the interview with a spontaneous pitch on how to sell a simple magic marker. Still, he worried his age would be a deal breaker.
“You ought to know I’m 75,” he offered.
“Age is only a number,” Wanice Matthews, Palome’s current boss at Advantage Sales & Marketing, later said. “If I had 10 more Toms on my team, I’d have the best team in the business.”
Every other morning, Palome does 70 sit-ups and 70 squats and almost as many leg lifts and arm strengthening exercises. He alternates his at-home exercises with two or three 10-mile bike rides each week.
Heating Pad
At Sam’s Club, his single 30-minute break during his seven-and-a-half hour shift is not enough time to prevent backaches and leg cramps after standing all day.
“Make sure you rest when you get home and don’t do any housecleaning,” Palome recently advised a new employee, a widow who hasn’t worked in years.
When Palome gets home, he stretches out on his couch, tucking a heating pad behind his back before preparing a light supper. He goes to bed by 10 p.m.
If Palome has one regret, it’s that he didn’t get better retirement investing advice somewhere along the line. “I thought I could do it on my own,” he said.
Still, he’s proud of his accomplishments. He built a career in marketing, raised a family following a tragic loss and helped his kids get a start in life.
“I’m not going to sit on my laurels and say I was an executive making six figures and traveling the world,” he said. “I tell people I demonstrate food and I do short-order cooking. I don’t mind saying it. What’s important is that I can work today.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Carol Hymowitz in New York at chymowitz1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jonathan Kaufman at jkaufman17@bloomberg.net
*
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Aging Boomers Befuddle Marketers Aching for $15 Trillion Prize
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-17/aging-boomers-befuddle-marketers-eying-15-trillion-prize.html
Germans Export Grandma to Poland as Costs, Care Converge
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-16/germans-export-grandma-to-poland-as-costs-care-converge.html
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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-24/death-dinners-at-baby-boomers-tables-take-on-dying-taboo.html
Special Report: The Future of Retirement
http://topics.bloomberg.com/the-future-of-retirement/
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©2013 BLOOMBERG L.P.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-23/why-100-000-salary-may-yield-retirement-flipping-burgers.html [with comments]
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The 99% Owe “A Debt of Gratitude” to the 1%: Harry Binswanger
By Morgan Korn | Daily Ticker – September 24, 2013
The 99% will not be happy with Harry Binswanger.
The former college professor and board member of the Ayn Rand Institute wrote an incendiary column this month in Forbes [ http://www.forbes.com/sites/harrybinswanger/2013/09/17/give-back-yes-its-time-for-the-99-to-give-back-to-the-1/ ], arguing that “the community should give back to the wealth-creators” and the world should be indebted to the rich and powerful for “their enormous contributions to our standard of living.”
Binswanger sat down with The Daily Ticker’s Aaron Task and Henry Blodget to defend his controversial views. He also reiterated his call that anyone who earns more than $1 million a year deserves an exemption from paying taxes, a “symbolic gesture” he notes, because the “great achievers” (individuals like Henry Ford, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Steve Jobs) “lifted us out of the cave and gave us our standard of living.” He also proposes that the highest earner of the year – maybe an investment banker, hedge fund manager or CEO – be given a Congressional Medal of Honor [ http://www.cmohs.org/ ] in return for his or her contribution to human life.
If millionaires do not pay taxes, do they still get the benefits of public assets, such as the military, firefighters, police officers, court of law and public schools? Watch the video [embedded in the original] above to see how Binswanger responds and check out who he ranks as the most influential person of all time: Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein or Mother Teresa?
*
Related
Top 1% Getting 95% of Income Gains: Is Washington Responsible?
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/top-1-getting-95-income-gains-washington-responsible-151332783.html
5 Ways a Government Shutdown Would Affect You
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/5-ways-government-shutdown-affect-113007959.html
Defunding Obamacare: GOP Is "Playing with Fire"
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/republicans-playing-fire-attack-obamacare-chris-moody-145043225.html
*
Copyright 2013 Daily Ticker
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/99-owe-debt-gratitude-1-harry-binswanger-153327379.html [with the referenced video segment embedded, and (approaching 4,000) comments]
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Ayn Rand Disciple Says CEOs Deserve All the Credit – Henry Blodget Disagrees
By Henry Blodget | Daily Ticker – September 24, 2013
A Forbes contributor, Harry Binswanger, who is a disciple of the writer Ayn Rand, argued this week that people who make $1+ million a year are so valuable to society that they shouldn't pay any taxes [ http://www.forbes.com/sites/harrybinswanger/2013/09/17/give-back-yes-its-time-for-the-99-to-give-back-to-the-1/ ].
Far from these million-dollar earners paying more taxes, Binswanger argued, the rest of America should "give back" to the 1% by thanking them for their service to the country and rewarding them by exempting them from taxation.
This argument is the logical extension of an argument that many American entrepreneurs and investors make, which is that they are the country's "job creators" and therefore deserve almost all of the country's income and wealth. These "job creators," this argument goes, should pay their employees as little as possible and keep every penny of profit for themselves. After all, they deserve it: They're the ones who "create" the jobs that sustain the country.
It's no surprise why this argument is popular among entrepreneurs and investors: Instead of making them feel selfish about taking such a big share of the country's wealth for themselves, it actually makes them feel magnanimous. If they weren't "creating all those jobs," then most Americans would have nothing to do!
Unfortunately, this argument is both startlingly selfish and economically wrong.
What actually "creates jobs" in an economy is a healthy economic ecosystem, one comprised of entrepreneurs, investors, employees, and, critically, customers.
Successful entrepreneurs do play a valuable and important role in this ecosystem: They start companies that develop products and services that people want, and they guide the companies that produce them.
Successful investors also play a valuable and important role: They provide the capital necessary for companies to invest in new products and services.
But without talented employees who make a company's products and services, and--just as important--without financially healthy customers who buy them, entrepreneurs and investors can't create any sustainable jobs.
So to suggest that entrepreneurs and investors deserve all the credit or compensation in the economy is absurd.
It's also absurd to suggest that placing all of a country's wealth in the hands of entrepreneurs and investors is somehow good for the economy. The 100+ million Americans who work for others, after all, aren't just "employees." They're also American consumers. Every penny they earn is spent on buying products and services. So sharing more of a company's wealth with the folks who create it isn't just the right thing to do. It's also good for the economy.
Mr. Binswanger was kind enough to join me and Aaron Task on The Daily Ticker to talk about his philosophy. He argued that CEOs and entrepreneurs should pay employees as little as possible. After all, Mr. Binswanger argues, the employees are just "trading" their labor for the entrepreneur's money. That's the employees' decision, and they don't deserve a penny more than they get.
That's one way of looking at it.
The other way of looking at it is that employees are members of a team. And that, as members of the team, employees should not be paid as little as possible but, instead, share in the value they help create.
That, for what it's worth, is the way I look at it.
And my view of this isn't the product of an armchair philosophy.
It's the product of living and working in the once-vibrant U.S. economy and of running a successful company with ~130 employees.
Most of the full-time employees at our company, Business Insider, have stock options. These allow everyone to share in the success of the company. We don't pay our employees "as little as possible." We pay our employees as much as possible while still achieving our financial goals. As the CEO of the company--and the entrepreneur who co-founded it and an investor who funded it--I don't hallucinate that all of the company's success is due to me. It is a privilege to lead our team, but it is the hard work of the ~130 talented people on the team that make us successful. And it is the revenue we receive from our readers and clients that sustains all the jobs here--not me. The overall mission of Business Insider, meanwhile, is not to "make as much money as possible." It is to produce a great product for our readers and clients, produce a compelling return for our investors, and provide excellent jobs for our team.
In short, the goal of our company is to create value for all three of our important constituencies: customers, shareholders, and employees.
Unfortunately, in America right now, Mr. Binswanger's business philosophy is quite popular. America's investor class has taken such complete control of the economy that American companies are treating their employees as "costs" [ http://www.businessinsider.com/business-and-the-economy-2013-7 ] and paying them as little as they possibly can. Big American corporations are currently earning the highest profits in history and paying the lowest wages in history [ http://www.businessinsider.com/profits-at-high-wages-at-low-2013-4 ]. And because most of the employees that work for these companies are American consumers, the U.S. economy is suffering.
This business philosophy is greedy, selfish, and shortsighted. And it is constraining the growth of the American economy.
Copyright 2013 Daily Ticker (emphasis in original)
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/ayn-rand-disciple-says-ceos-deserve-credit-henry-164112682.html [with comments]
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America's Ruling Class Hall of Shame
By Peter Dreier
Posted: 09/22/2013 8:26 pm
Out of 300 million Americans, a few thousand wield disproportionate economic and political influence because of their positions at the pinnacle of America's corporate and media establishments or their roles as political allies (or puppets) of the corporate ruling class. C. Wright Mills described this group in his 1956 book, The Power Elite [ http://www.amazon.com/The-Power-Elite-Wright-Mills/dp/0195133544 ], G. William Domhoff has updated this analysis in his book, Who Rules America? [ http://www.amazon.com/Rules-America-Triumph-Corporate-Rich/dp/0078026717 ] (now in its 7th edition), and Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson have described how the power elite wields its influence in Winner-Take-All Politics [ http://www.amazon.com/Winner-Take-All-Politics-Washington-Richer-Turned/dp/1416588701 ].
Many of them have overlapping memberships on the boards of the largest corporations, business lobby groups, universities and think tanks, foundations, and media conglomerates. They are not part of conspiracy. They do not meet secretly to plot America's future. And they disagree with each other on some issues, particularly same-sex marriage, abortion and gun control. Some are corporate conservatives and moderates; some are right-wing reactionaries and racists; others are lunatic libertarians.
But they agree on the essential concerns about the economy. The top Wall Street and Wal-Mart CEOs, the media monopolists and their talk-show agitators, the billionaire benefactors, and the business lobbyists share an antipathy toward unions, progressive taxes, and government regulations that protect consumers, workers, and the environment. They fund think tanks and hire college professors to promote their views and to cry wolf [ http://crywolfproject.org/ ] about government rules -- denying the reality of global warming, warning that raising the minimum wage or strengthening regulations on banks will "kill jobs," and attacking Obamacare (and Obama) as "socialist." They work closely with right-wing, conservative, and moderate politicians to carry out their agenda. They act on behalf of big business and the super-rich, but to translate their ideas into public policy they have to persuade voters that their agenda benefits middle class Americans -- a task that is getting harder and harder to do.
Yet even among the few thousand members of the power elite, there are a small number whose influence is greater than the others. Here is a list of the 20 most influential members of the power elite.
Congressmen Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan, corporate lobbyist and Americans for Tax Reform head Grover Norquist, Chase CEO Jamie Dimon; Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf
[embedded pictures]
David and Charles Koch, Walmart CEO Mike Duke, Sen. Mitch McConnell, Newt Gingrich
[embedded pictures]
Wall Street titan and Fix-the-Debt funder Pete Peterson, Sen. Rand Paul, sleazy corporate front man Rick Berman, Fox News president Roger Ailes, media mogul Rupert Murdoch
[embedded pictures]
Radio reactionary Rush Limbaugh, casino billionaire benefactor Sheldon Adelson, Sen. Ted Cruz, Chamber of Commerce CEO Tom Donohue, NRA hit man Wayne LaPierre
[embedded pictures]
As in all eras of American history, there are a handful of members of America's upper class who are traitors to their class. They sympathize with and even fund progressive causes, campaigns, and candidates. They side with the growing movement [ http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-08-22/opinions/41435494_1_king-s-voting-rights-act-gun-violence ] that is emerging to challenge the domination of America's power elite.
Like Yertle the Turtle, these 20 men sit atop an unstable foundation of widening inequality and social injustice. And like Mack, the turtle at the bottom, there are more and more Americans [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/09/12/the-rise-of-the-new-new-left.html ] angered and frustrated by the status quo. Polls show that most Americans prefer "responsible capitalism" [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-dreier/what-kind-of-capitalism_b_705987.html ] over "no rules" capitalism.
If history offers any lessons, it is that these men -- and the interests and ideas they represent -- are not invincible. Martin Luther King said, "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." But it takes movements and activists to bend it.
Peter Dreier [ http://employees.oxy.edu/dreier/ ] is the E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics and chair of the Urban & Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College. His most recent book is The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame [ http://100greatestamericans.org/ ; http://www.amazon.com/The-Greatest-Americans-20th-Century/dp/1568586817 ] (Nation Books, 2012).
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc. (emphasis in original)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-dreier/americas-hall-of-shame_b_3972642.html [with comments]
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Why the Poor Don't Work, According to the Poor
Few say it's because they can't find jobs. But is that a reason to take away their food stamps?
Jordan Weissmann
Sep 23 2013, 4:26 PM ET
Conservative Republicans have officially made it their mission to end food stamps as we know them. Such was evident last week, when the House GOP voted to cut [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/20/us/politics/house-passes-bill-cutting-40-billion-from-food-stamps.html ] the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, as food stamps are now known, by $39 billion over a decade and begin bulking up its work requirements, along the lines of welfare reform [ http://www.politico.com/story/2013/08/house-republicans-welfare-reform-95351.html ] in the 1990s.
Whether you believe this a good or humane idea probably boils down to your take on a single question: why don't the poor, who make up the overwhelming majority of food stamp recipients, go to work? In 2012, more than 26 million 18-to-64-year-old adults lived under the poverty line; about 15 million of them didn't have a job during the year. Is the economy to blame? Or are personal choices at fault?
If you're a liberal, your answer is probably pretty cut and dry, and these days likely involves the word "recession." But conservatives tend to take a different view. They argue that whereas unemployment among middle class families rises and falls with the health of the job market, poverty is shaped and fueled mostly by cultural forces, that the poor could work if they wanted, and that the safety net lulls them into indolence. One of their key data points on this front comes from the Census. Each year, the bureau asks [ http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/cpstables/032013/pov/pov24_000.htm ] jobless Americans why it is they've been out of work. And traditionally, a only a small percentage of impoverished adults actually say it's because they can't find employment, a point that New York University professor Lawrence Mead, one of the intellectual architects of welfare reform, made to Congress in recent testimony [ http://waysandmeans.house.gov/uploadedfiles/larry_mead_testimony_hr061813.pdf ].
In 2007, for instance, 6.4 percent of adults who lived under the poverty line and didn't work in the past year said it was because they couldn't find a job. As of 2012, it had more than doubled, leaving it at a still-small 13.5 percent. By comparison, more than a quarter said they stayed home for family reasons and more than 30 percent cited a disability.
As you might expect, the are some big differences between the genders on this front. Women are far more likely than men to cite family. Men are more likely to cite their inability to find a job.
To me, these are the sorts of numbers that raise more questions than they answer. Are women staying home because they prefer to be mothers, or because they can't find jobs that pay enough to make working a financially viable choice, once the cost of family care is factored in? Are youngish retirees really choosing to leave the workforce early, or are they cashing in their social security benefits prematurely because they're out of other options? Of the 1.2 million adult men who said they couldn't hunt down work, how many really couldn't find any job, and how many couldn't find a job they wanted? Of the millions of apparently impoverished college students in the country, how many are essentially living on loans or their Pell Grants? You get the idea.
If you do choose to take the Census figures at face value, though, I think there are a couple of lessons. First, the recession changed poverty to some extent. More of the non-working poor claim they cannot find a job than at any point in the past two decades. Given that there are three unemployed Americans for every job opening, that shouldn't be much of a surprise. Second, the poor who choose not to work aren't necessarily doing so out of laziness, but because they have other obligations: they're trying to take care of relatives, they're ill, or they're attempting to make their way through school.
And taking away their meal tickets won't fix any of those problems.
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Americans 18 to 64 who lived under the poverty line each year from 1994 thru 2012 and did not work during the year, by reason for not working (U.S. Census, in thousands)
*Year-Total-Ill or Disabled-Retired-Home or Family Reasons-Could Not Find Work-School or Other
1994 9,738 3,027 660 3,379 851 1,820
1995 9,398 2,799 589 3,363 810 1,837
1996 9,526 2,983 669 3,364 716 1,794
1997 9,116 3,128 639 2,932 732 1,684
1998 8,914 3,019 760 2,703 582 1,850
1999 8,333 2,813 786 2,476 420 1,839
2000 8,221 2,866 897 2,446 432 1,580
2001 9,588 3,291 1,011 2,806 557 1,923
2002 10,253 3,269 1,085 2,951 793 2155
2003 10,951 3,618 971 3,106 867 2390
2004 11,510 3,716 1,147 3,386 847 2,415
2005 11,450 3,750 1,058 3,563 671 2,407
2006 11,385 4,003 1,048 3,312 619 2403
2007 11,627 4,035 1,103 3,281 747 2,461
2008 12,365 4,225 1,175 3,317 1,177 2,470
2009 14,291 4,336 1,065 3,726 2,200 2,964
2010 16,037 4,764 1,201 4,136 2,382 3,552
2011 16,147 4,917 1,352 4,034 2,352 3,492
2012 15,825 4,908 1,312 4,074 2,132 3,399
Copyright © 2013 by The Atlantic Monthly Group
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/09/why-the-poor-dont-work-according-to-the-poor/279900/ [with comments]
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Food Stamp Work Requirements Could Still Be Waived For Some Under GOP Bill
Rep. Robert Hurt (R-Va.) has lauded the House's legislation to slash food stamp funding while at the same time telling his constituents they could be spared the cuts.
(AP Photo/Steve Helber)
By Arthur Delaney
Posted: 09/24/2013 4:15 pm EDT | Updated: 09/24/2013 4:54 pm EDT
WASHINGTON -- After the House of Representatives voted to cut food stamp funding by 5 percent last week, Rep. Robert Hurt (R-Va.) trumpeted the legislation's work requirements for nutrition assistance.
"Not only does this legislation restore the integrity of this safety-net program and encourage beneficiaries to become more self-sufficient, but it will also ensure that the benefits are available to those who need them most," Hurt said in a statement on his website [ http://hurt.house.gov/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=261935e6-d3b8-477e-9645-df6d8e31ccd8 ].
But Hurt told a local paper that parts of his Southside Virginia district could be spared from having to work for food stamps. His office said able-bodied adults in high-unemployment areas like Danville, Martinsville and Henry County could keep drawing Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits without having to obey the new requirement that they find jobs or enroll in training.
"Under the House proposal, the states would be given certain flexibility to grant waivers in certain cases depending on unemployment levels and/or hardship," Hurt's office told Brittany Hughes of the Danville Register & Bee [ http://www.godanriver.com/news/danville/article_11e138da-24a5-11e3-946d-0019bb30f31a.html ].
Hurt was not one of the 15 moderate Republicans who voted against the bill, but his statement to the local press suggests he and they share some of the same sensitivity "to the struggles that people are having," as one of the GOP nays, Rep. Patrick Meehan (R-Pa.), put it after the vote [ http://www.newsworks.org/index.php/local/item/60063-pa-republicans-break-ranks-vote-no-on-food-stamp-cuts ].
The 1996 welfare reform law allowed able-bodied adults without dependents, known by policy wonks as "ABAWDs," to receive food stamps for only three months unless they worked or enrolled in training at least 20 hours per week. The law gave states authority to wave the requirement in times of high unemployment, something most states currently do.
The House voted Thursday to stop states from waiving the requirement, a policy change that would push 1.7 million Americans off assistance, according to the Congressional Budget Office [ http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/HR3102.pdf ]. As liberal critics of the House legislation have noted [ http://www.offthechartsblog.org/author/greenstein/ ], the measure doesn't require states to make training programs available to food stamp applicants if jobs are scarce.
But a little-discussed provision of the new legislation would allow states to exempt 15 percent of able-bodied adults from the requirement. The calculation would be based on the number of ABAWDs who receive benefits in a given state as counted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In the most recent data available [ http://www.fns.usda.gov/ora/MENU/Published/snap/FILES/Participation/2011Characteristics.pdf ], 74,000 able-bodied Virginians without dependents received SNAP benefits in 2011. That means that under the House bill, next year Virginia could give food stamps to 15 percent of that total, or 11,100 people -- if it wanted to. It's unclear how the more limited waiver process would work. More than 36,000 households receive SNAP benefits in Hurt's district alone [ http://www.fns.usda.gov/ora/SNAPCharacteristics/Virginia/Virginia_5.pdf ].
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities [ http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=4009 ], a progressive critic of the GOP bill, has said the exemptions approach is flawed.
"Since the number of exemptions is very small compared to the number of people affected by the three-month cut-off provision and many of the affected individuals have similar circumstances — they are unemployed in a weak economy, struggling to make ends meet, and often facing destitution — it is difficult for states to determine which of those individuals should receive exemptions and which should not," the Center's Dottie Rosenbaum, Stacy Dean and Robert Greenstein wrote in a recent report.
The House legislation is unlikely to become law in its entirety; it will have to be reconciled with a more moderate food stamps measure that passed the Senate earlier this year, and both chambers must approve a final compromise.
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/24/food-stamp-cuts_n_3982940.html [with comments]
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The Most Controversial Laws of the Last 100 Years (The Stimulus and Obamacare Are 1 and 2)
Reuters
Extreme polarization is something new. It's also something very old.
Derek Thompson
Sep 23 2013, 12:19 PM ET
"Fund government, not Obamacare," Sen. Ted Cruz tweeted this morning, drawing a distinction where there is no difference, since Obamacare is a part of the government. If the Republican campaign to shut down Washington over de-funding the Affordable Care Act seems too silly to become reality, consider that Obamacare is no ordinary law -- and this is no ordinary Congress.
In the last 100 years, no major lasting legislation has passed over 100 percent opposition from the other party. Until Obamacare.
Maybe you knew that part. But you might not know how it fits in the context of the most important laws of the last century. "In the 21st century, the concept of universal health care occurs just about everywhere in the developed world, and increasingly, in the developing world," writes Michael Cembalest, chairman of market and investment strategy at JP Morgan, in a new research note. But in the U.S., Obamacare suffers from an “original sin” problem. Along with the Obama stimulus bill, it is the most divisive legislation in modern history.
How do you measure most divisive? Cembalest constructed a table (see bottom of post) of the century's major legislation and the percent difference in voting between the two parties. For example, in 1956, 98 percent of House Republicans and 93 percent of House Democrats voted for the Federal Aid Highway Act, which built the interstate highway system. That's a "difference gap" of 5 percent. In the Senate, 100 percent of Republicans and 98 percent of Democrats voted for the bill -- a "difference gap" of just 2 percent.
Here is a chart of the last 100 years of the disagreement gap for the most important pieces of legislation, with each number showing the average of the House and Senate gaps (data via Cembalest):
Lots to chew on here, but in particular note that polarization took a reprieve in the middle of the 20th century, but huge difference gaps are something old, not something new.
Here are the most divisive laws of the century, by Cembalest's definition (he doesn't include the 2009 stimulus in his research note, but I've added it). Of perhaps trivial note: No bill between 1931 and 2000 has an average voting gap of more than 50 percentage points.
Here's the full table from Cembalest's report:
Copyright © 2013 by The Atlantic Monthly Group (emphasis in original)
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/09/the-most-controversial-laws-of-the-last-100-years-the-stimulus-and-obamacare-are-1-and-2/279899/ [with comments]
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Obamacare Enrollment Continues If Government Shuts Down
Claude Cesard, left, and Margot Lee, right, volunteers with the Get Covered America campaign, canvas the neighborhood informing prospective health insurance consumers about new insurance possibilities available through the Affordable Care Act, in Englewood, New Jersey, on July 27, 2013.
Shutting down the government won’t shut down the health-care law.
Sep 22, 2013
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-23/obamacare-enrollment-continues-if-government-shuts-down.html [with embedded video report, and comments]
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Texas Fighting Affordable Care Act Rollout
An Affordable Health Care informational meeting in San Antonio
September 23, 2013
http://www.fronterasdesk.org/content/9031/texas-fighting-affordable-care-act-rollout [with embedded audio report, and comment]
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Health Care Law Enrollment Finds Allies In Red States
Texas Gov. Rick Perry addresses attendees of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation's Defending the American Dream Summit in Orlando, Fla., Friday, Aug. 30, 2013.
(AP Photo/Phelan M. Ebenhack)
By David Morgan
Posted: 09/25/2013 12:59 am EDT
HOUSTON, Sept 25 (Reuters) - Behind the political battle lines on Obamacare, the three-story headquarters of Change Happens rises like a fortress in a blighted southeast Houston neighborhood of tiny wood-frame shacks, empty lots and crack houses.
The Rev. Leslie Smith has been running the nonprofit that helps poor adults and children with Medicaid enrollment, homeless support and HIV prevention since 1989. Now he is planning how best to reach uninsured people in the communities he serves with the offer of new healthcare benefits under President Barack Obama's landmark reform law.
"Two weeks ago, there was a shootout at the corner that left over 200 shell casings on the ground," Smith said, speaking in the parking lot as he noted a row of first-floor windows set high and narrow to protect against stray bullets from gunfights between rival gangs. "This is the bottom. This is crack alley. All the ills of the community are around us."
Even among "red" states, Texas has stood out in its fierce opposition to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. Republican Governor Rick Perry has long been an opponent, and Republican Senator Ted Cruz is leading a charge in Congress to eliminate funding for the healthcare law at the risk of shutting down the federal government.
But in their backyard, one of the best-organized of red-state efforts to reach millions of America's uninsured has taken root.
Healthcare reform advocates like Smith believe the realities of life without health coverage will drive large numbers of young, healthy, low-income people to subsidized insurance premiums and other benefits that Obamacare will begin offering to the public starting on Oct. 1.
His organization is part of a loose confederation of nonprofits, charities, universities, religious groups, government agencies and private companies, known collectively as "navigators," that is helping Americans sign up for coverage. It is a task Smith zealously embraces.
"Something great is going to happen from this effort," he says. "I believe this is history."
ORGANIZED IN TEXAS
Obamacare's success or failure depends on how many healthy young adults enroll in health insurance that will be sold on new state exchanges, helping offset the cost of sicker beneficiaries. Administration officials hope they will account for about 40 percent of the 7 million people expected to sign up for private coverage in 2014.
That calculation has put a premium on urban neighborhoods in places like Houston, Los Angeles, Miami and Chicago, four metropolitan areas with a combined uninsured population of 4.8 million - many of them lower-income blacks and Latinos aged 18 to 35, according to U.S. Census figures.
Organizers face special challenges in Texas and Florida, where Republican leaders rejected the opportunity to set up new insurance marketplaces and collect billions of dollars in government funds to expand Medicaid. Perry and other Texas Republicans are now pushing to impose regulations including fees, extra training and surety bond requirements on navigator groups.
Conservatives in the state echo claims made by critics elsewhere, who say the navigator program has been put together too rapidly and requires too little training to safeguard the public. They also contend that Obamacare will raise healthcare costs overall and strap low-income beneficiaries with plans that restrict access to medical services.
Meanwhile, they dismiss the network of volunteers and nonprofits lining up to promote Obamacare as overly optimistic about its value to the public.
"It's a touch naïve," said John Davidson of the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation. "There's a feeling that the law is half-baked and that the navigator program is half-baked."
Political opposition has created an atmosphere that makes it difficult even for Democrats to talk openly about the law.
"I don't want to talk about the Affordable Care Act on camera," Dallas County Administrator Clay Jenkins, a Democrat and healthcare reform supporter, joked as local TV crews set up for a summer press conference with U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. "I want to talk about the opportunity to get people covered," he said.
But it has also helped turn grassroots Obamacare advocates into a well-oiled network. In Texas, the effort was born of an intensive, but ultimately fruitless, months-long attempt to persuade Perry to expand Medicaid last spring.
Change Happens is one of three navigator organizations that have received federal money to hire and train staff to help enroll people in Houston's Harris County, home to nearly 20 percent of the state's 5.8 million uninsured. The group has pledged to reach nearly 100,000 people by the time enrollment wraps up in March. Smith thinks the final number could be close to 300,000 with help from sister organizations across five southeast Texas counties.
Houston's Health and Human Services Department - an agency in a city government whose elected officials are largely Democratic - is also a navigator. It has organized outreach groups under a command structure developed to combat hurricanes. Its public-health database, which is normally used to track epidemics, will measure the enrollment effort's penetration of neighborhoods with large uninsured populations. The city is also providing a consolidated "800" number for public queries, has set aside a "war room" for organizers and is encouraging other major cities to consider the same strategy.
"We really have to bring some science into our approach," said Stephen Williams, the department's director. "This is an opportunity of a lifetime."
The Texas Organizing Project (TOP), a grassroots advocacy group with nearly 20,000 low- to moderate-income members, many of them uninsured, has also been running Obamacare canvasses and workshops since May. Earlier this month it packed hundreds of uninsured people into a university auditorium for an Obamacare rally and information session.
"We run the largest issue-driven grassroots get-out-the-vote campaign, and in 2012, we targeted roughly 200,000 voters. Their No. 1 issue, that we identified after talking to them door to door and over the phone, was healthcare," said TOP Executive Director Ginny Goldman.
Houston's Erenea Perez has heard the message from TOP organizers.
Perez, a single mother in her late 20s who says she is a U.S. resident from El Salvador, works two minimum-wage jobs but can't afford insurance. She counts off the benefits she hopes to obtain with Obamacare subsidies: "Extended maternity services. Pediatric services. Coverage for exams or the ER. Medicine. In-patient services. Ambulatory services."
Many of her uninsured peers across the country are only now starting to pay attention. Local advertising is expected to begin in earnest across the country on Oct. 1. Earlier this month volunteers in 10 states, including Texas, Florida, Illinois and Michigan, began canvassing campaigns.
Copyright 2013 Thomson Reuters
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/25/health-care-law-enrollment_n_3986333.html [with comments]
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The Biggest Myth About Obamacare
09/23/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/23/obamacare-change_n_3975425.html [with (over 12,000) comments]
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Lower Health Insurance Premiums to Come at Cost of Fewer Choices
Peter L. Gosline, the chief executive of Monadnock Community Hospital in Peterborough, N.H.
Andrea Morales for The New York Times
Video [embedded]
Obama Defends Affordable Care Act (July 18, 2013)
http://www.nytimes.com/video/2013/07/18/us/politics/100000002344025/obama-defends-affordable-care-act.html
By ROBERT PEAR
Published: September 22, 2013
WASHINGTON — Federal officials often say that health insurance will cost consumers less than expected under President Obama’s health care law [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/health_insurance_and_managed_care/health_care_reform/index.html ]. But they rarely mention one big reason: many insurers are significantly limiting the choices of doctors and hospitals available to consumers.
From California to Illinois to New Hampshire, and in many states in between, insurers are driving down premiums by restricting the number of providers who will treat patients in their new health plans.
When insurance marketplaces open on Oct. 1, most of those shopping for coverage will be low- and moderate-income people for whom price is paramount. To hold down costs, insurers say, they have created smaller networks of doctors and hospitals than are typically found in commercial insurance. And those health care providers will, in many cases, be paid less than what they have been receiving from commercial insurers.
Some consumer advocates and health care providers are increasingly concerned. Decades of experience with Medicaid [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/medicaid/index.html ], the program for low-income people, show that having an insurance card does not guarantee access to specialists or other providers.
Consumers should be prepared for “much tighter, narrower networks” of doctors and hospitals, said Adam M. Linker, a health policy analyst at the North Carolina Justice Center, a statewide advocacy group.
“That can be positive for consumers if it holds down premiums and drives people to higher-quality providers,” Mr. Linker said. “But there is also a risk because, under some health plans, consumers can end up with astronomical costs if they go to providers outside the network.”
Insurers say that with a smaller array of doctors and hospitals, they can offer lower-cost policies and have more control over the quality of health care providers. They also say that having insurance with a limited network of providers is better than having no coverage at all.
Cigna illustrates the strategy of many insurers. It intends to participate next year in the insurance marketplaces, or exchanges, in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Tennessee and Texas.
“The networks will be narrower than the networks typically offered to large groups of employees in the commercial market,” said Joseph Mondy, a spokesman for Cigna.
The current concerns echo some of the criticism that sank the Clinton administration’s plan for universal coverage in 1993-94. Republicans said the Clinton proposals threatened to limit patients’ options, their access to care and their choice of doctors.
At the same time, House Republicans are continuing to attack the new health law and are threatening to hold up a spending bill unless money is taken away from the health care program.
In a new study, the Health Research Institute of PricewaterhouseCoopers, the consulting company, says that “insurers passed over major medical centers” when selecting providers in California, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky and Tennessee, among other states.
“Doing so enables health plans to offer lower premiums,” the study said. “But the use of narrow networks may also lead to higher out-of-pocket expenses, especially if a patient has a complex medical problem that’s being treated at a hospital that has been excluded from their health plan.”
In California, the statewide Blue Shield plan has developed a network specifically for consumers shopping in the insurance exchange.
Juan Carlos Davila, an executive vice president of Blue Shield of California, said the network for its exchange plans had 30,000 doctors, or 53 percent of the 57,000 doctors in its broadest commercial network, and 235 hospitals, or 78 percent of the 302 hospitals in its broadest network.
Mr. Davila said the new network did not include the five medical centers of the University of California or the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center near Beverly Hills.
“We expect to have the broadest and deepest network of any plan in California,” Mr. Davila said. “But not many folks who are uninsured or near the poverty line live in wealthy communities like Beverly Hills.”
Daniel R. Hawkins Jr., a senior vice president of the National Association of Community Health Centers, which represents 9,000 clinics around the country, said: “We serve the very population that will gain coverage — low-income, working class uninsured people. But insurers have shown little interest in including us in their provider networks.”
Dr. Bruce Siegel, the president of America’s Essential Hospitals, formerly known as the National Association of Public Hospitals and Health Systems, said insurers were telling his members: “We don’t want you in our network. We are worried about having your patients, who are sick and have complicated conditions.”
In some cases, Dr. Siegel said, “health plans will cover only selected services at our hospitals, like trauma care, or they offer rock-bottom payment rates.”
In New Hampshire, Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, a unit of WellPoint, one of the nation’s largest insurers, has touched off a furor by excluding 10 of the state’s 26 hospitals from the health plans that it will sell through the insurance exchange.
Christopher R. Dugan, a spokesman for Anthem, said that premiums for this “select provider network” were about 25 percent lower than they would have been for a product using a broad network of doctors and hospitals.
Anthem is the only commercial carrier offering health plans in the New Hampshire exchange.
Peter L. Gosline, the chief executive of Monadnock Community Hospital in Peterborough, N.H., said his hospital had been excluded from the network without any discussions or negotiations.
“Many consumers will have to drive 30 minutes to an hour to reach other doctors and hospitals,” Mr. Gosline said. “It’s very inconvenient for patients, and at times it’s a hardship.”
State Senator Andy Sanborn, a Republican who is chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, said, “The people of New Hampshire are really upset about this.”
Many physician groups in New Hampshire are owned by hospitals, so when an insurer excludes a hospital from its network, it often excludes the doctors as well.
David Sandor, a vice president of the Health Care Service Corporation, which offers Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans in Illinois, Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas, said: “In the health insurance [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/health_insurance_and_managed_care/index.html ] exchange, most individuals will be making choices based on costs. Our exchange products will have smaller provider networks that cost less than bigger plans with a larger selection of doctors and hospitals.”
Premiums will vary across the country, but federal officials said that consumers in many states would be able to buy insurance on the exchange for less than $300 a month — and less than $100 a month per person after taking account of federal subsidies.
“Competition and consumer choice are actually making insurance affordable,” Mr. Obama said recently.
Many insurers are cutting costs by slicing doctors’ fees.
Dr. Barbara L. McAneny, a cancer specialist in Albuquerque, said that insurers in the New Mexico exchange were generally paying doctors at Medicare [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/medicare/index.html ] levels, which she said were “often below our cost of doing business, and definitely below commercial rates.”
Outsiders might expect insurance companies to expand their networks to treat additional patients next year. But many insurers see advantages in narrow networks, saying they can steer patients to less expensive doctors and hospitals that provide high-quality care.
Even though insurers will be forbidden to discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions, they could subtly discourage the enrollment of sicker patients by limiting the size of their provider networks.
“If a health plan has a narrow network that excludes many doctors, that may shoo away patients with expensive pre-existing conditions who have established relationships with doctors,” said Mark E. Rust, the chairman of the national health care practice at Barnes & Thornburg, a law firm. “Some insurers do not want those patients who, for medical reasons, require a broad network of providers.”
© 2013 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/23/health/lower-health-insurance-premiums-to-come-at-cost-of-fewer-choices.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/23/health/lower-health-insurance-premiums-to-come-at-cost-of-fewer-choices.html?pagewanted=all ] [with comments]
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What You Need to Know About the Obamacare Marketplaces
By: Mary Agnes Carey and Julie Appleby
September 24, 2013 at 12:05 PM ET
Companies including the Trader Joe's grocery store chain will end health benefits for part-time workers next year, directing them instead to new insurance marketplaces. Story by Kaiser Health News and photo by David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images.
The health law's online marketplaces, also known as exchanges, will be open for enrollment Oct. 1. They will allow individuals and consumers to comparison shop for health insurance, much like they do now online for an airline ticket or a hotel room, and apply for subsidies, if they are eligible.
If done well, proponents say, the marketplaces could make it easier to buy health insurance and possibly lead to lower prices because of increased competition. But, if designed or marketed poorly, the exchanges will not attract healthy people and will instead be left with a higher percentage of sicker people that will cause premiums to rise.
Here are some answers to common questions about the exchanges:
What is an exchange?
It's an online marketplace [ https://www.healthcare.gov/ ] where individuals and small employers will be able to shop for insurance coverage. Enrollment begins Oct. 1 for policies that will go into effect on Jan. 1. The exchanges will also help people find out if they are eligible for federal subsidies [ https://www.healthcare.gov/how-can-i-save-money-on-marketplace-coverage/ ] to help cover the cost of coverage or if they are eligible for Medicaid, the federal-state health insurance program for the poor.
Will all states have exchanges?
Yes. Sixteen states and the District of Columbia are running their own [ http://kff.org/health-reform/slide/state-decisions-for-creating-health-insurance-exchanges/ ] exchanges and the federal government is setting them up in 27 states. In seven states, federal and state officials are partnering to run the exchanges. You can get information about the exchange at healthcare.gov [ https://www.healthcare.gov/ ], which has details on the federal exchanges and links to state-run exchanges.
Who will use the exchanges?
Most people [ https://www.healthcare.gov/am-i-eligible-for-coverage-in-the-marketplace/ ] will be able to purchase coverage on the exchanges. But many workers and their families already have coverage through their jobs, and they will not be likely to buy policies on the exchanges. The marketplaces are primarily aimed at people who are uninsured and those whose employer-based coverage is too costly and/or lacking in benefits.
Most states and the federal marketplace also will offer a Small Business Health Options program, or SHOP exchange, that will give employees more options than they have now. Initially, these SHOP exchanges will be open only for businesses with 50 or fewer workers.
Who cannot buy coverage there?
Immigrants who are in the country illegally will be barred [ http://www.irs.gov/uac/Questions-and-Answers-on-the-Individual-Shared-Responsibility-Provision ] from buying insurance on the exchanges. Legal immigrants are permitted to use the marketplaces and may qualify for subsidies if their income is no more than 400 percent of the federal poverty level (about $46,000 for an individual and $94,200 for a family of four).
If my employer offers me insurance, can I shop on the exchange to get a better deal?
Even if your employer offers coverage, you can opt to buy a plan on the exchange. However, you may not be eligible for a subsidy unless you make less than 400 percent of the federal poverty level and your employer's plan covered less than 60 percent of allowed medical expenses or cost more than 9.5 percent of your household income.
If I am buying coverage on my own, do I have to buy it on the exchange?
Consumers can shop for coverage on or off the exchange. However, subsidies are generally available only for plans sold on the exchange. Also, adults up to the age of 26 have another choice: They often can get coverage through their parents' health plans.
How will the process work?
For someone with a computer, it's relatively straightforward. You can go online to Healthcare.gov or to your state-run exchange, if there is one, and create an account. Then you would fill out an application and provide information such as household size, location, income and citizenship status.
Then the exchange takes over. It first determines whether the person is eligible for Medicaid; if so, it will refer you there. If not, it will tell you how much of a subsidy you can receive. (These subsidies will be sent directly by the government to the insurer to pay a portion of the premium.)
After that, the exchange will offer a list of health plans and their premiums and out-of-pocket costs, including deductibles and co-payments. If a consumer decides to buy one of those plans, in most cases, you will be directed to the insurer's Web site to make the payment. In some jurisdictions, consumers will make their first premium payment to the exchange and then further monthly payments to the insurer.
You can also fill out paper applications or apply over the phone. The federal and state exchange sites have toll-free numbers where consumers can find information about getting help in person.
Are exchanges the only place where I can get subsidized coverage?
Not exactly. Under a little-known [ http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2013-06-19/pdf/2013-14540.pdf ] rule proposed by the administration in June, consumers will be able to buy an exchange-approved plan -- and receive a health law subsidy -- from the insurance company itself rather than from the exchange.
I am on Medicare. Do I need to use the exchange?
No. Medicare is not part [ https://www.healthcare.gov/if-i-have-medicare-do-i-need-to-do-anything/ ] of the health insurance exchanges. As a Medicare beneficiary, you can enroll in the program's traditional drug coverage or in a Medicare Advantage plan, where Medicare enrollees get coverage through private health insurance plans, on Medicare.gov during the Medicare open season, which begins Oct. 15.
What about federal workers?
Most federal workers will continue to get their health coverage through the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program [ http://www.opm.gov/healthcare-insurance/healthcare/ ] (FEHBP) and not be required to purchase coverage through the health law's marketplaces. Members of Congress and their personal staffs, however, will be required to buy health insurance through the exchanges.
A proposed rule from the Office of Personnel Management said the government would continue its practice [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/wp/2013/08/07/employer-health-premium-share-will-continue-for-hill-staff-forced-out-of-fehbp/ ] of paying up to 75 percent of the premium, as it does for federal workers enrolled in FEHBP. Members of Congress and their personal staffs will not be eligible for the health law's subsidies and will purchase on the exchange in the state where they live, the agency said.
Will exchanges be like travel websites or some existing health insurance sites?
In some ways, but they will be more complex. People will be able to compare policies sold by different companies. Information on the plan benefits will be standardized in an effort to make it easier to compare cost and quality. Plans will be divided into four different types [ https://www.healthcare.gov/how-do-i-choose-marketplace-insurance/ ] -- bronze, silver, gold and platinum -- varying based on the size of their deductibles, copayments and other consumer cost-sharing. They will also have to provide personal financial information and citizenship status that will be linked to the Internal Revenue Service and other government agencies.
What will the coverage sold on the exchanges look like?
Plans will have to offer a set of "essential benefits [ http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/stories/2011/december/16/essential-benefits-guidance.aspx?referrer=search ]" that include hospital, emergency, maternity and pediatric care as well as coverage for prescription drugs and lab services. Annual cost-sharing -- or the amount consumers pay for out-of-pocket for care for medical services and deductibles but not premiums -- will be capped [ http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/rp-13-25.pdf ] at $6,350 for individual policies and $12,700 for family plans in 2014.
What if I can't afford the premiums?
The health law provides sliding scale subsidies [ http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Stories/2013/July/24/interview-with-cathy-livingston-on-how-to-apply-for-tax-credit-subsidies-for-premiums.aspx ] to help people pay premiums up to 400 percent of the poverty level, which is currently about $46,000 for an individual and about $94,000 for a family of four. There's also help with cost-sharing [ http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/features/insuring-your-health/2013/070913-michelle-andrews-on-cost-sharing-subsidies.aspx?referrer=search ] for individuals and families with incomes of up to 250 percent of the poverty level ($28,725 for an individual or $58,875 for a family of four). According to government estimates [ http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/44190_EffectsAffordableCareActHealthInsuranceCoverage_2.pdf ], subsidies will average $5,290 per person in 2014. Recipients must pay [ http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=3190 ] a portion of their household income -- 2 percent to 9.5 percent -- toward the cost of the premium, based on how much they make.
Does everyone on the exchange get a subsidy?
No, subsidies will be limited to people who meet specific income requirements. In addition, individuals with access to insurance through their jobs but who decide to purchase insurance on the exchange instead are eligible for subsidies only if their employer's plan does not cover at least 60 percent of estimated medical expenses or if it would cost the worker more than 9.5 percent of household income.
The health law also expands Medicaid. How will I know if I qualify?
The law sought to extend Medicaid to all people who earn less than 138 percent of the federal poverty level, just under $16,000 for an individual and $32,500 for a family of four based on current guidelines. However, the Supreme Court ruled in June 2012 that states may opt out of that Medicaid expansion, and 21 states have chosen [ http://kff.org/medicaid/state-indicator/state-activity-around-expanding-medicaid-under-the-affordable-care-act/ ] not to expand. People who would have qualified for Medicaid in states that don't participate in the health law's expansion can enroll in the exchanges but they won't qualify [ http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/412630-opting-in-medicaid.pdf ] for subsidies if their income is below 100 percent of the federal poverty limit.
Will all insurers have to offer policies through the exchange?
No. Insurers are not required [ http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Stories/2013/August/02/univision-obamacare-deal-could-help-insurers-ahead.aspx ] to sell through the exchanges.
Where can I go for help?
You can start with Healthcare.gov [ https://www.healthcare.gov/ ]. Beginning Oct. 1, the site will publish more information about the plans offered on the federally administered exchanges. If your state is running its own exchange, you'll be directed there as well. The federal government has also set up call centers to answer questions from people in states with federal exchanges. That phone number is 800-318-2596. States running their own exchanges will also have individual call centers.
Kaiser Health News [ http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/ ] is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan health policy research and communication organization not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente. This story was produced in collaboration with The Washington Post.
Copyright © 2013 Kaiser Health News
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2013/09/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-obamacare-marketplaces.html [with comments]
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Questions And Answers About Obamacare Marketplaces
September 24th, 2013
http://capsules.kaiserhealthnews.org/index.php/2013/09/questions-and-answers-about-obamacare-marketplaces/
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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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