Oh, America!
by tristero
This has to be some kind of fucking joke. Otherwise, one can only wonder how much lower America’s Puritans, and those who pander to them, are prepared to sink.
Couldn’t they just replace Huck Finn with, you know, a different novel that wouldn’t offend so many people? How about this one? Or maybe this? Or, or, how about this one, as great a book, imo, as Huck Finn?
Hat tip to Kevin Drum, who’s written the most unintentionally funny post I’ve read in a very long time.
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David Barton, Constitutional Scholar
by digby
A political activist who claims America was founded on biblical principles has been invited to speak to elected officials at the state Capitol later this month.
The Christian conservative Family Council has asked David Barton to hold a seminar for state legislators and constitutional officers on Jan. 25 and 26 and has reserved the Old Supreme Court chamber on those dates, said Jerry Cox, the group’s executive director.
Barton, of Aledo, Texas, is the founder of the group WallBuilders and the author of several books on American history. Cox said he has spoken with Barton and is 90 percent certain he will accept the invitation.
Barton has argued that the Founding Fathers intended for the United States to be a Christian nation and did not support the separation of church and state as the phrase is understood today. Cox said Barton will discuss his views on the proper role of government, including his belief that “helping the poor … is primarily a function of the church,” not government.
Cox said he agrees with Barton’s views and wants to help educate lawmakers who will be sworn into office next week, the first week of the legislative session.
“I want to help our lawmakers understand what the role of government is and then try to keep the laws that we pass within the bounds of the proper role of government,” he said.
The good news is that they don’t want to oppress women quite as much as their Islamic Theocrat counterparts, which means they are totally different and should not in any way be compared.
What I will point out is that David Barton will also be lecturing the incoming DC House members on the meaning of the constitution as well. Not that I should even mention that either, mind you, because it would be rude to imply that there’s anything at all wrong with our national leadership believing that the constitution is a Christian fundamentalist document. Still, it’s interesting.
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Austerity, Democrat Style
by digby
A new era unfolds in California:
Brown… wants to slash virtually every state-funded program to help balance California’s massive deficit, in many cases resurrecting cuts sought by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger but rejected by lawmakers. Brown would restrict Medi-Cal access, divert low-level offenders to county jails and cut deeply into California State University and the University of California.
The Democrat is counting on lawmakers to approve the cuts to encourage voters to also provide revenue. A June ballot measure would extend higher tax rates on income, vehicles and sales set to expire this year, as well as eliminate a new corporate tax benefit. The money from the vehicle and sales tax extensions would be sent to local governments, which would take on some functions the state performs now.
Can someone please explain to me why anyone thinks that’s going to work? Do they think the citizenry will be so impressed by the government’s mature willingness to cause pain that they will agree that it’s time to pay more in taxes?
This should be a very interesting test of the starve the beast psychology. Brown wants to throw the state into further chaos in the hope that people will decide that they need to pay more for government services. The Republicans, of course, are counting on 40 years of conservative propaganda kicking in to reinforce the fact that government is so inherently dysfunctional that it can’t do anything right and so you shouldn’t send one more dime to the politicians who can’t deliver. Having this big test come under a Democrat is key. If it doesn’t work, it not only destroys the government, but the entire rationale of the Democratic Party with it. Sweet.
It should be interesting to see how this all works out. Grover Norquist must be all aquiver with anticipation waiting to clean out that empty bathtub. As California goes …
Update: I would guess these guys are going to deal with this in a different way, so it should be an interesting contrast:
there’s one state, which is fairly high up on the list of troubled states that nobody is talking about, and there’s a reason for it.
The state is Texas.
This month the state’s part-time legislature goes back into session, and the state is starting at potentially a $25 billion deficit on a two-year budget of around $95 billion. That’s enormous. And there’s not much fat to cut. The whole budget is basically education and healthcare spending. Cutting everything else wouldn’t do the trick. And though raising this kind of money would be easy on an economy of $1.2 trillion, the new GOP mega-majority in Congress is firmly against raising any revenue.
So the bi-ennial legislature, which convenes this month, faces some hard cuts. Some in the Texas GDP have advocated dropping Medicaid altogether to save money.
So why haven’t we heard more about Texas, one of the most important economy’s in America? Well, it’s because it doesn’t fit the script. It’s a pro-business, lean-spending, no-union state. You can’t fit it into a nice storyline, so it’s ignored.
But if you want to make comparisons between US states and ailing European countries, think of Texas as being like America’s Ireland. Ireland was once praised as a model for economic growth: conservatives loved it for its pro-business, anti-tax, low-spending strategy, and hailed it as the way forward for all of Europe. Then it blew up.
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Now We’re Talking
by digby
Here’s James Galbraith with a very unusual article. It doesn’t sound like something you’ve read before a thousand times:
ACTUALLY, THE RETIREMENT AGE IS TOO HIGH
The most dangerous conventional wisdom in the world today is the idea that with an older population, people must work longer and retire with less.
This idea is being used to rationalize cuts in old-age benefits in numerous advanced countries — most recently in France, and soon in the United States. The cuts are disguised as increases in the minimum retirement age or as increases in the age at which full pensions will be paid.
Such cuts have a perversely powerful logic: “We” are living longer. There are fewer workers to support each elderly person. Therefore “we” should work longer.
But in the first place, “we” are not living longer. Wealthier elderly are; the non-wealthy not so much. Raising the retirement age cuts benefits for those who can’t wait to retire and who often won’t live long. Meanwhile, richer people with soft jobs work on: For them, it’s an easy call.
Second, many workers retire because they can’t find jobs. They’re unemployed — or expect to become so. Extending the retirement age for them just means a longer job search, a futile waste of time and effort.
Third, we don’t need the workers. Productivity gains and cheap imports mean that we can and do enjoy far more farm and factory goods than our forebears, with much less effort. Only a small fraction of today’s workers make things. Our problem is finding worthwhile work for people to do, not finding workers to produce the goods we consume.
In the United States, the financial crisis has left the country with 11 million fewer jobs than Americans need now. No matter how aggressive the policy, we are not going to find 11 million new jobs soon. So common sense suggests we should make some decisions about who should have the first crack: older people, who have already worked three or four decades at hard jobs? Or younger people, many just out of school, with fresh skills and ambitions?
The answer is obvious. Older people who would like to retire and would do so if they could afford it should get some help. The right step is to reduce, not increase, the full-benefits retirement age. As a rough cut, why not enact a three-year window during which the age for receiving full Social Security benefits would drop to 62 — providing a voluntary, one-time, grab-it-now bonus for leaving work? Let them go home! With a secure pension and medical care, they will be happier. Young people who need work will be happier. And there will also be more jobs. With pension security, older people will consume services until the end of their lives. They will become, each and every one, an employer.
A proposal like this could transform a miserable jobs picture into a tolerable one, at a single stroke.
When I was young, a long time ago, it was conventional wisdom that you wanted the oldsters to get out of the job market to make way for the youngsters. Now perhaps that was a function of the boomer generation but it used to be common to hear this kind of talk in discussions of the future. But somewhere along the line it became an article of faith that anyone who didn’t want to work until they dropped dead was a spoiled parasite who expected young people to keep them in style by working 20 hour days.
In a modern, civilized world in which people were trying to find economic answers to the problem of how to deal in a humane way with an aging population in a time of economic transition, Galbraith’s prescription would at least be part of the discussion. Unfortunately, we are not in a civilized world — we are in some weird Randian/Calvinist era in which our leaders seem to have confused economics with moralism and have decided that the average folk have had it too good for too long.
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Not Shocking At All
by tristero
Apparently, some folks are genuinely shocked that a Supreme Court justice could so profoundly misread the crystal clear words of the Constitution. I don’t see why. Scalia doesn’t understand the Declaration of Independence either.
I realize that this flies in the face of widely held conventional wisdom but I can’t escape the conclusion that when it comes to understanding the founding documents of the United States, Scalia is a mediocre intellect. If that.
On the other hand, if we were to agree that this man really is as brilliant as Everyone says. then that can only mean that Scalia is deliberately misreading these documents to make them say the very opposite of what Jefferson, et al, clearly wrote. Furthermore, it can only mean that a justice of the Supreme Court is, for reasons we can only guess at, consciously adopting a distinctly un-American, if not blatantly anti-American, bias both to his judiicial philosophy and to his rulings. In other words, to believe that Scalia really is smart enough to understand the founding documents, and therefore deliberately misread them, is to believe that he is an activist, a reactionary, and a royalist openly seeking the destruction of this country.
And I certainly wouldn’t want to think that was possible of anyone with such authority or power.
The GOPs Best and Brightest
by digby
This is just too funny:
The candidates for chairman of the Republican National Committee are a literate bunch. And when asked to name their favorite book, their answers were revealing, to say the least. Maria Cino’s favorite is the classic To Kill a Mockingbird. Reince Priebus named The Reagan Diaries as his first choice. And current RNC Chairman Michael Steele’s favorite is War and Peace. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” Steele recited — which is actually a line from Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. But the real highlight of the exchange came when Ann Wagner responded to the question, saying, “Probably my kitchen table.” What was she referring to exactly? Her favorite bar, apparently, which she thought she was being asked. Her favorite book, though, is George W. Bush’s new memoir, Decision Points.
One of the things I like so much about Republican politicians is how they constantly top themselves. Back in 2000 we thought they’d hit the low point when the GOP presidential candidates were asked who were their favorite political philosophers and Junior came out with this:
GOV. GEORGE W. BUSH (Republican, Texas): Christ, because he changed my heart.
Unidentified Man: I think that the viewer would like to know more on how he has changed your heart.
GOV. BUSH: Well, if they don’t know, it’s going to be hard to explain. When you turn your heart and your life over to Christ, when you accept Christ as the savior, it changes your heart. It changes your life. And that’s what happened to me.
The questions are getting easier and the answers dumber.
Update: Sigh. I wasn’t sneering at Bush’s religion. I was sneering at the fact that he answered a question about how Christ changed his heart with the logic of a four year old. Would have been too much for him to actually relate how his relationship with religion and Jesus informs his politics? Or are we supposed to just sit there and applaud when our political leaders speak in infantile riddles because it’s “sneering” to suggest that they should be at least minimally able to explain their reasoning, values and belief system? I guess that’s rude. Good to know.
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Peterson Rewind
by digby
Kevin Drum responds to my post this morning about “the good liberal” and says that he believes they probably can take social security off the table with a few tweaks.
Benefit cuts are unpopular, after all, and conservatives by themselves don’t have either the desire or the ability to buck the public on this unless they also have the support of the Washington Post/Pete Peterson Beltway elite. And they won’t have that once the program is officially solvent. A deal on Social Security kicks the legs out of the centrist support they need in order to have any chance of reducing benefits in the future.
Here’s Peter Peterson in 2000, when the budget was in surplus:
PAUL SOLMAN: Solow got a Nobel Prize for a model of economic growth like this, driven by investment. And most economists agree with him — that we ought to be paying down the debt over time. But some traditional Republicans go a lot further. Longtime deficit hawk Pete Peterson, President Nixon’s Secretary of Commerce, says we should use all the surplus now to pay off our debts because our children and grandchildren will be taking on so much debt for our Social Security and Medicare in the future.
PETE PETERSON: Anybody that thinks about this problem has to know that when the boomers start retiring and these deficits, you know, go six, seven, eight hundred billion dollars a year, who’s ever running the country at that time is going to have several choices: they can cut the benefits, they can increase taxes, or they can try to borrow huge, unprecedented amounts of money.
PAUL SOLMAN: Peterson and others have been making this case since the early days of big budget deficits — when this TV ad first ran in 1985.
AD ANNOUNCER: You owe the United States government, in round numbers, $50,000.
[BABY CRIES]
PAUL SOLMAN: We may be generating surpluses at the moment, says Peterson, but they’re a drop in the bucket.
PETE PETERSON: I have computed in today’s inflation-adjusted dollars how much the deficits in cash are going to be over the next 75 years. It’s a stunning number, just for Social Security. It’s 21 trillion dollars.
PAUL SOLMAN: Twenty-one trillion in —
PETE PETERSON: Trillion dollars in cash deficits.
GOVERNOR GEORGE BUSH: What I want to do is take two trillion, half of the four trillion and save it for Social Security.
PETE PETERSON: People talk about how they’re gonna to put a couple of trillion dollars away, you know, in a lockbox and even throw in interest, you know, on that money.
VICE PRESIDENT GORE: I’ll secure the future of Social Security and Medicare by putting them in an ironclad lockbox with a sign that says “Politicians, Hands Off.”
PETE PETERSON: I wish them well but I don’t think there’s ever been a lockbox that can’t be picked by co-conspirators in the White House and Congress to spend it.
It could have been off the table then and Peterson didn’t advocate for it. Instead he kept up his incoherent fearmongering and suggested that the surplus be used to “pay down the debt” instead of shore up the social security program, because the some future politician could spend the money. And we all know what happened then.
He also staged an earlier crusade just a couple of years after the 1983 Greenspan commission which did exactly what everyone says needs to be done again — raise the retirement age (I don’t qualify until I’m nearly 67 and I’m old) and force average workers to pay in more in anticipation of future shortfalls. He went on to spend the 90s shrieking about entitlements and the deficit, barely pausing for breath when the budget went into surplus — and then forgot to speak up when George W. Bush passed massive tax cuts for the wealthy.
Pete Peterson is not a “centrist.” He’s not a liberal either, although he’s pretended to be both over the years depending on which constituency he was trying to con at the time. He has one mission and one mission only: to end “entitlements.” There is no deal, short of that, that will satisfy him and as long as the beltway considers him and his ilk to be nice, centrist deficit hawks instead of the wrecking crew they are, they will be right there with him until he (or whoever follows him) gets the job done.
I suppose it’s possible to imagine a “deal” which would modestly raise taxes on non-wealthy individuals in exchange for benefits cuts (which doesn’t sound like much of a deal to me.) But if it happens I can guarantee that Pete Peterson and the boys will be back in business the next day. They have been doing this for 30 years and they aren’t going to stop until they get what they want. After all, actuarial balance doesn’t mean anything to people who don’t believe that social security is separately funded in the first place.
Here’s old Pete in 1994:
“We will no longer be able to afford a system that equates the last third or more of one’s adult life with a publicly subsidized vacation.”
I think that most accurately reflects his real concern.
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For The Children
by digby
Steve King talks about how he explains abortion to schoolkids. Apparently, it’s a lot like a madman shooting up a room full of people who you later have to shoot because he’s killed and life is sacred. Or something. I couldn’t quite follow it. I’m sure the kindergartners he talks to about it have no problem, however:
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Compromising positions
by digby
Steve Benen discusses the political establishment op-eds admonishing the President to be more bipartisan, by which it means that he must give in to Republican demands, and giving him advice on which positions he must compromise. Benen notes:
This isn’t to pick on Mankiw, but I can’t help but notice there seems to be practically no related suggestions for the other side of the aisle. I can’t think of any recent op-eds from anyone, for example, letting congressional Republicans know that if economic policy is to make any progress over the next two years, the GOP really will have to be bipartisan. There’s no related talk about where Republicans should expect to compromise, or what promises they should expect to break as part of the give-and-take world of Washington policymaking in a time of divided government. The reason for this, I suspect, has something to do with the fact that Republican leaders have already foresworn making concessions with anyone on anything, and everyone seems well aware of this. You’ll recall, for example, that the incoming House Speaker proclaimed on “60 Minutes” last month that he “rejects the word” compromise. But this is a flaw in the conventional wisdom that needs to be corrected. In a few days, we’ll have a Democratic White House, a Democratic Senate, and a sizable House Republican majority. If the only question is “What can Democrats do to make those Republicans happy?” the conversation will need a dramatic overhaul.
One would think so, but I see no reason to believe that it will. And that’s less because the Republicans are intransigent than because this calculation reinforces the bedrock belief in the beltway that this is a “center-right” country. The fact the Republicans now control one House of congress with a 25 vote majority means that the nation has validated their belief. (That’s all ittakes.)
But not to worry. The Republicans are already setting up what they are willing to “compromise.” They will agree not to shut down the government. Or demand that the nation return to its debt levels of 1889. Or perhaps even agree not to blow up Capitol Hill or eat children for lunch. There’s no reason a deal can’t be made. The GOP have no end to absurd positions they are willing to give up in exchange for something they really want.
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The Good Liberal
by digby
I’ll take Brad Delong’s word for it that Gene Sperling really is a liberal and concur that in Woodward’s book “The Agenda” he is portrayed as being the most liberal of the economic advisors.
But this worries me:
Both Summers and Sperling said there would not be consensus in today’s session about how to fix the program. They also said the public was more receptive to the government making hard decisions necessary to keep SS from running out of money in the long run, because Americans are anxious about their private retirement savings and the value of their houses.
Sperling said: “I think there may be a lot more openness than we thought in the past for people to have an honest discussion about the shared sacrifice necessary to have Social Security solvency. That this would be a sure thing they could count on, and they could count on for the next 50 to 75 years.”
At the end, Sperling also tried to cut through disagreement over whether the program was in a state of crisis. “I really hate the whole argument about, is this a crisis or is this not a crisis? Why do we not want to preempt a crisis. Why do we not want to do something early? It is a shame on our political system that there has never been entitlement reform without a gun to our head. . .Wouldn’t it be a tremendous confidence-building thing to act early and smart?”
I know I’ve posted that too often and regular readers are sick of it. But it’s terribly important, I think, to understand that the rationale for liberals in this thing is that they are doing a good thing for the program, taking it “off the table” for the next 50 years and “making it sound.” Now, I don’t know if they really believe it, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that in the current environment whatever changes they come up with will come at the expense of the elderly because there will be no deal that requires tax hikes.
I think there’s ample reason to be skeptical of the administration’s negotiating skills, so the Grand Bargain is very likely to be an agreement to sacrifice social security in exchange for the Republicans agreeing to sacrifice something they don’t really care about. (See: tax cuts for the wealthy in exchange for unemployment insurance.) Huckleberry Graham already framed the deal as agreeing to raise the debt ceiling and cutting social security. Considering that raising the debt ceiling is normally a symbolic, pro forma vote (which the Tea People have helpfully turned into a “cause”) you can see how easily the administration could get rolled in this. There has never been a more inauspicious moment to put social security on the table than now.
Let’s hope Sperling is a bit more realistic about this today than he was two years ago when he made those comments. And let’s hope he’s not one of those liberals who has decided that the only way to influence the economy is by sending “signals” to a bunch of sociopathic Masters of the Universe who have demonstrated their myopia and incompetence over and over again. They are not going to save us.
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