Tag: Republicans

GOP Misdirection

Claim­ing to be con­cerned about the deficit, the GOP pro­pos­es 61 bil­lion in cuts in this year’s spend­ing. These cuts will like­ly lead to the loss of one mil­lion jobs and slow the growth of the econ­o­my by 1.5 to 2 per­cent­age points in the sec­ond and third quar­ters of 2011.

There are two things that are absolute­ly nec­es­sary for there to be any hope of a bal­anced bud­get. One of those is a strong econ­o­my. In the over­all scheme of the US bud­get deficit, sav­ing $61 bil­lion this year is noth­ing. Risk­ing a strong eco­nom­ic recov­ery is a lot.

The Repub­li­cans either do not real­ly care about the deficit, or they sim­ply do not under­stand the sit­u­a­tion. The ques­tion is, is the GOP mis­di­rect­ing us or themselves?

The Class War

What? Amer­i­ca is a class­less soci­ety? Ide­al­ly, yes. In real­i­ty, no.

Sure, in Amer­i­ca any­one is able to climb the social class lad­der through hard work, ini­tia­tive, etc., etc. But this is not as true as some would have you believe.

Gen­er­al­ly, the rich get rich­er and the poor get poor­er. The lat­est reces­sion is telling. Lots of bailouts for the wealthy who are today again receiv­ing their cus­tom­ary fat bonus checks. How are you doing?

The Repub­li­cans take the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives and, under the guise of bal­anc­ing the bud­get, attempt to slash spend­ing that ben­e­fits the low­er and mid­dle income pop­u­la­tion. Spend­ing stim­u­lus bills are now ver­boten (though tax cuts, espe­cial­ly for the wealthy, are always wel­come), so the states can­not receive any extra sup­port to bal­ance their bud­gets from the feds.

The Repub­li­cans in the states use the (sup­posed) state bud­get crises to destroy pub­lic employ­ee unions. Despite the fact that

over the last fif­teen years the pay of pub­lic-sec­tor work­ers, includ­ing teach­ers, has dropped rel­a­tive to pri­vate-sec­tor employ­ees with the same lev­el of edu­ca­tion — even includ­ing health and retire­ment benefits.

I do not have the num­bers, but I would bet that the pri­vate sec­tor employ­ees have not exact­ly done all that great over the past fif­teen years. Based on the Win­ners Take All graphs (scroll down just a bit) at Moth­er Jones, it does­n’t look too good.

James Taran­to opines at The Wall Street Journal:

Actu­al mid­dle-class Amer­i­cans don’t feel put upon by “cor­po­rate pow­er” or “the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty,” because by and large, they own the means of pro­duc­tion: They run busi­ness­es; they hold shares in cor­po­ra­tions through their invest­ment and retire­ment accounts.

I would love to see the polling on that.

I actu­al­ly qual­i­fy as some­one who holds shares in cor­po­ra­tions through a retire­ment account. Odd­ly, I do find myself put upon by cor­po­rate pow­er. My expe­ri­ence is that big busi­ness will screw me over every chance it gets.

But I digress. Mem­ber­ship in unions has dropped a lot over the past few decades. In 1977 26.9% of non-agri­cul­tur­al work­ers were cov­ered by a col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing agree­ment. In 2009, this num­ber is 13.7%.

And over the past few decades, inequal­i­ty has increased. Note that the share of income after tax­es has declined for the bot­tom 80%.

Yes, the rich have done very well for them­selves over the past few decades. But it is not enough it would seem. Class war has been declared by the 20% against the 80%. It is a sad fact that many of the 80% are sup­port­ing the 20% in the war.

The Pendulum Gets Shoved

Back in June of 2009, I post­ed about the “death” of the Repub­li­can Par­ty and who would save it. Today, as pre­dict­ed, the Repub­li­can Par­ty is resur­gent and I read sto­ries of how the repub­li­cans are going to threat­en demo­c­ra­t­ic con­trol of the sen­ate and the pres­i­den­cy. Who will save the Democrats??

The Repub­li­cans!!! With the last elec­tion results being dri­ven most­ly by the econ­o­my, unem­ploy­ment specif­i­cal­ly, the repub­li­can con­trolled House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives has not yet done a thing to address that issue.

With the nation­al debt stand­ing as one of the impor­tant issues of our time, the Repub­li­cans are con­tent with address­ing it by slash­ing domes­tic non-secu­ri­ty dis­cre­tionary spend­ing, i.e., spend­ing they do not like. In oth­er words, they do not care about the deficit (there is not enough mon­ey in domes­tic non-secu­ri­ty dis­cre­tionary spend­ing to do much for the deficit), they are just hap­py to use the cri­sis as an oppor­tu­ni­ty to cut spend­ing they do not like. (Remem­ber how unhap­py they were when Oba­ma talked about crises pre­sent­ing opportunity?)

Of course, Amer­i­cans like the spend­ing and are still unhap­py with the unem­ploy­ment sit­u­a­tion. If this keeps up, I expect the Democ­rats to win big.

The Certainty of Uncertainty

Uncer­tain­ty seems to be one of the favorite words for repub­li­cans to pull out when they are try­ing to explain why a par­tic­u­lar sit­u­a­tion is bad. Last month they were very con­cerned about the uncer­tain­ty busi­ness had to deal with over the up in the air sta­tus of the Bush tax cuts.

The one cer­tain­ty of this uncer­tain­ty is that it is a load of crap.

In the first place, when was there ever certainty?

Fur­ther, the exten­sion of the tax cuts for two years appar­ent­ly did away with the uncer­tain­ty. Any busi­ness per­son can tell you how he or she only con­sid­ers the next two years when con­tem­plat­ing invest­ing tens of thou­sands, or hun­dreds of thou­sands, or mil­lions of dol­lars. Even if the two years was enough cer­tain­ty, that “two years of cer­tain­ty” only exist­ed for a few days. Then the two years start­ed and now it is less.

And if extend­ing the tax cuts for two years did away with uncer­tain­ty, would not have allow­ing the tax cuts to lapse have also done away with uncer­tain­ty? I did not hear any repub­li­can men­tion­ing that.

Anoth­er exam­ple is the health care reform. It passed. It is law. That is as cer­tain as it is going to get (again, not all that cer­tain, but…). Repub­li­cans have gone on and on about how they are going to undo the law with few specifics about how they would change it. Who is intro­duc­ing uncertainty?

There have been rum­blings from Repub­li­cans to not vote to raise the debt ceil­ing. What might hap­pen if the debt ceil­ing is not raised? Seems like there is plen­ty of uncer­tain­ty there.

There has been enough rhetoric on both sides to sug­gest that it is not beyond the pale that the gov­ern­ment could well be shut down some­time in the next two years if agree­ment on bud­gets can not be reached. A gov­ern­ment shut­down presents all kinds of uncertainty.

Final­ly, soon­er or lat­er, the fed­er­al debt, if allowed to con­tin­ue grow­ing at present rates (or even Bush rates!), will cause sig­nif­i­cant prob­lems for the US econ­o­my. Most agree we are still sev­er­al tril­lion dol­lars away (a few years) before such prob­lems become plau­si­ble, but no one real­ly knows. The debt is prac­ti­cal­ly the def­i­n­i­tion of uncer­tain­ty. But Repub­li­cans con­tin­ue to pre­tend that the deficit can be solved with dis­cre­tionary spend­ing cuts and tweak­ing of enti­tle­ments. It can­not be solved this way. Until the deficit is seri­ous­ly addressed, there is no end of uncertainty.

Credit Where Credit is Taken?

You may have heard that the eco­nom­ic recov­ery has con­tin­ued to strength­en. Of course, Repub­li­cans are quick to take cred­it. Real­i­ty presents a dif­fer­ent picture:

This chart* is the change in GDP by quar­ter. The red rep­re­sents the end of the Bush admin­is­tra­tion, the blue the begin­ning of the Oba­ma administration.

It would appear that the failed stim­u­lus and bailouts real­ly fouled things up!

In any event, the econ­o­my was clear­ly in growth mode before the Repub­li­cans had any chance to influ­ence it (espe­cial­ly giv­en that the Repub­li­cans have yet to do any­thing that would have an effect!!!).

But what does evi­dence mean to a par­ty that large­ly denies human caused cli­mate change (when they are not deny­ing cli­mate change itself) and most­ly does not accept evo­lu­tion as a valid the­o­ry of how life works on earth?

*Chart from The Wash­ing­ton Month­ly.

Health Care Reform!

Con­gress has passed it. The Pres­i­dent signed it. It is law. We still need the rec­on­cil­i­a­tion to be passed, but I am con­fi­dent that it will get done (may take more effort than one would think, but it will get done).

Seems like a com­mon theme I was hear­ing in recent weeks was how Oba­ma’s pres­i­den­cy was a fail­ure (from con­ser­v­a­tives). Now I hear that the Oba­ma pres­i­den­cy is an his­toric suc­cess (from lib­er­als). In both cas­es it is a bit soon to judge. It is still too soon to judge George W. Bush’s presidency.

This was not rammed through against the wish­es of the Amer­i­can peo­ple. It was passed by nor­mal leg­isla­tive pro­ce­dures against the wish­es of a minor­i­ty of the Amer­i­can peo­ple. 53% of vot­ers vot­ed for Oba­ma. Any­one who vot­ed for Oba­ma and did not know he or she was vot­ing for health care reform was not pay­ing atten­tion. Although there were recent polls show­ing that a major­i­ty were against the health care reform bill, those polls actu­al­ly showed that a lot of peo­ple were against what they believed the health care bill to be, not what it was. And a few were against it because it was not lib­er­al enough.

Don’t believe it when Repub­li­cans claim they had no choice but to oppose the bill at all costs since the Democ­rats refused to nego­ti­ate in good faith. It was the oth­er way around. In par­tic­u­lar, Sen­a­tor Bau­cus spent weeks try­ing to get a com­pro­mise that would gar­ner some Repub­li­can sup­port. Lat­er, the Democ­rats stug­gled to find the ground that would get both the con­ser­v­a­tive and the lib­er­al Democ­rats to vote for the bill. If there were some mod­er­ate Repub­li­cans there to stand in for the loss of the lib­er­al Democrats.….

This is not the sal­va­tion of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Pary (though it does and will stand as an impor­tant achieve­ment). There are still seats to lose in November.

This is not the Water­loo of the Repub­li­can Par­ty. The Par­ty is not now exiled onto St. Hele­na to die six years hence. There are seats to win in November.

Now the law­suits begin. Under the head­ing of “be care­ful what you wish for”, if this bill gets thrown out as uncon­sti­tu­tion­al due to the indi­vid­ual man­date, then the next time around the bill that will be passed will be sin­gle pay­er. Yes, it might take a few years to get us back to such a point, but it will hap­pen if this gets tossed.

There are plen­ty of issues to occu­py Wash­ing­ton after health care, but my vote for most impor­tant issue is the deficit.

Make It Say Whatever You Need It To Say

As we, sup­pos­ed­ly, come down to the final hours before the House vote on Health Care Reform, the Repub­li­can Nation­al Com­mit­tee has come out with a poll on the sub­ject. The tim­ing of this poll is clear­ly intend­ed to intim­i­date Demo­c­ra­t­ic con­gress­man into vot­ing no.

From the link:

The RNC poll also holds oth­er good indi­ca­tions of a strong Repub­li­can show­ing in Novem­ber. Among unde­cid­ed vot­ers, 46% said that they would pre­fer a “Repub­li­can can­di­date who would be a check and bal­ance to Pres­i­dent Oba­ma and the Democ­rats in Con­gress,” com­pared to 19% who dis­agreed with the state­ment. 53% said that the would con­sid­er vot­ing for a Repub­li­can so as to “send a mes­sage to Pres­i­dent to Pres­i­dent Oba­ma and the Democ­rats and make them lis­ten to vot­ers like me.”

If the poll shows that 46% would pre­fer a “Repub­li­can can­di­date who would be a check and bal­ance to Pres­i­dent Oba­ma and the Democ­rats in Con­gress,” the poll had to have that lan­guage in the ques­tion. Dit­to with “send a mes­sage to Pres­i­dent to Pres­i­dent Oba­ma and the Democ­rats and make them lis­ten to vot­ers like me.”

The result is that the poll is, for all intents and pur­pos­es, mean­ing­less. But it was guar­an­teed to give the result the Repub­li­cans were look­ing for.

The Repub­li­cans are des­per­ate to pre­vent the bill from pass­ing because they fear the elec­torate will like the bill once it is seen for what it is and not through Repub­li­can distortions.

Saints and the Republicans

This from a post at fivethirtyeight.com:

Repub­li­cans were crow­ing about social­ism and gov­ern­ment takeovers way back in the sum­mer of 2008, and oppos­ing vir­tu­al­ly every pol­i­cy that the Democ­rats put forth from the first meet­ing of the 111th Con­gress last Jan­u­ary — a time when Oba­ma’s approval had been in the high 60s. At first, those mes­sages weren’t work­ing for them — they were par­tic­u­lar­ly inef­fec­tu­al, for instance, for the McCain cam­paign, and there were lots of sto­ries in the spring about the num­ber of peo­ple who iden­ti­fied as Repub­li­can slip­ping to all-time lows. But the GOP stuck by their mes­sag­ing strat­e­gy, and it has allowed them to frame every­thing that has come there­after in ways that are more res­o­nant with the public.

This reminds me of the NFC Cham­pi­onship foot­ball game between the Saints and the Vikings. The Saints defen­sive game plan includ­ed an empha­sis on hit­ting Bret Favre. They got sev­er­al hits on him but failed to sack him. Still, they did not change the plan. Favre threw for 310 yards, but still the Saints worked to hit Favre. Sure enough, before the game was over, Favre reward­ed them by throw­ing three inter­cep­tions (the stats say two because the Saints did not catch one of the balls thrown right to them).

And the Saint won.

Ted Kennedy’s Senate Seat

Sen­a­tor Kennedy has request­ed that the Mass­a­chu­setts leg­is­la­ture and gov­er­nor move to change the law regard­ing how a vacant Sen­ate seat is filled. Kennedy’s inter­est is due to his own seri­ous health issue and the pre­car­i­ous nature of health reform leg­is­la­tion in the US Sen­ate. Health reform has been one of Kennedy’s top con­cerns his entire career.

Noam Scheiber over at The New Repub­lic thinks it would be a bad idea for Mass­a­chu­setts to change the law.

Scheiber thinks that Kennedy’s vacant seat after his death would increase the like­li­hood that health reform leg­is­la­tion would pass.

… it would be sui­ci­dal for the GOP to fil­i­buster the cul­mi­na­tion of the last Kennedy broth­er’s life­long crusade.

I see two prob­lems here. I’m not con­vinced it would be sui­ci­dal for the GOP to do that (though pos­si­bly). More impor­tant­ly, I doubt the GOP would see it that way.

Fur­ther, I don’t see what dif­fer­ence it would make if Kennedy’s seat was filled by the gov­er­nor’s appoint­ment or not. If the GOP did believe it sui­ci­dal to “fil­i­buster the cul­mi­na­tion of the last Kennedy broth­er’s life­long cru­sade” why would the seat being filled change that calculation?

Scheiber goes on to say:

I sus­pect the cov­er­age of Kennedy’s death would silence health­care reform crit­ics and boost pro­po­nents in a way that net­ted at least a cou­ple of waver­ing mod­er­ates – so clear­ing the 51-vote thresh­old would­n’t be a prob­lem. Heck, you might even see Utah Repub­li­can (and long­time Kennedy friend) Orrin Hatch back in the reformist camp.

This may very well be true, but again, I don’t see how the gov­er­nor nam­ing some­one to fill the vacant seat dis­rupts this all that much. An addi­tion of a cou­ple of mod­er­ate votes would be help­ful to get to 60.

Final­ly, Scheiber is assum­ing that Kennedy is con­cerned about what will hap­pen after his death. It could be that Kennedy is pre­pared to resign the moment Mass­a­chu­setts makes the appro­pri­ate change in the law. Kennedy might be at the point where he now knows he will nev­er be on the floor of the Sen­ate again, but also know­ing his vote (read: his replace­men­t’s vote) will be needed.

I can see an argu­ment that Mass­a­chu­setts should not change the law based on the idea that laws should not be altered for polit­i­cal expe­di­en­cy. The Mass­a­chu­setts law used to allow the gov­er­nor to appoint some­one to a vacant Sen­ate seat but the leg­is­la­ture changed it when there was a faint hope that Ker­ry would vacate the seat to become Pres­i­dent and the Mass­a­chu­setts gov­er­nor at the time was a Repub­li­can. Not that I would be per­suad­ed in this par­tic­u­lar case by such an argu­ment, but it is a good one (and should have been heed­ed the first time around).

Its Nice To Learn That Evrybodys So Concerned About My Health.

Kris Kristof­fer­son sings

Well, they final­ly came and told me they was a gonna set me free
And Id be leav­in town if I knew what was good for me
I said, its nice to learn that evry­bodys so con­cerned about my health.

The Repub­li­can’s con­cern over health care reform reminds me of that song. To be clear, the Repub­li­cans pri­ma­ry goal here is to have noth­ing done. One need look no fur­ther than the years 2003 through 2007. In those years the Repub­li­cans had majori­ties in both hous­es of con­gress and the pres­i­den­cy. Did they do any­thing about health care? No. It is not like the health care prob­lems that we have just appeared in the last two years.

Any Repub­li­can dis­cus­sion about “doing it right” and “going slow” real­ly just means pre­vent­ing any­thing from happening.