Month: May 2011

Who picks the president?

by digby

Amato asks a good question:

I meant to write about this sooner after reading the NY Mag article, but time flies. We all know that Roger Ailes fashions himself a GOP kingmaker, but can you imagine the the outcry by the RWNM and all media critics if the head of a cable news network called a Democratic Governor or an active military man and begged him to run for President? NY Mag:

A few months ago, Ailes called Chris Christie and encouraged him to jump into the race. Last summer, he’d invited Christie to dinner at his upstate compound along with Rush Limbaugh, and like much of the GOP Establishment, he fell hard for Christie, who nevertheless politely turned down Ailes’s calls to run. Ailes had also hoped that David Petraeus would run for president, but Petraeus too has decided to sit this election out, choosing to stay on the counterterrorism front lines as the head of Barack Obama’s CIA.

If the head of any other news network tried to shape a single political party’s presidential primaries, they would rightly be decried for the unequivocal bias it revealed — not to mention the breathtaking absence of ethics.

When the White House did the unthinkable and questioned the integrity of Fox News, the Villagers all circled the wagons and declared such discussion off limits. And so it is. But it doesn’t change the fact that Fox is a corrupt adjunct of the Republican Party and nothing proves it more than the fact that the head of the network is recruiting people for the presidential nomination of the GOP, even going so far as to provide most contenders with a handsome sinecure.
He has a little problem at the moment. They are all nuts and he knows it. I think the silver lining in all this is that perhaps the Republican Party may recognize that putting a media genius in charge might not always work out the way you think it will. Fox brewed the television friendly tea and now the Presidential candidates are drowning in it.

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Winning on points

by digby

I’ve been hearing a lot lately about how the right hasn’t really achieved much and that the whole idea that the Republicans have gained anything long term with this race over the cliff is delusional. Well, they may have destroyed whatever weak chances they ever had of winning big in 2012 with their mind-boggling Ryan debacle, but they’ve achieved a whole lot in terms of shifting the debate to the right.

Yesterday the Democrats managed to get all but five of the Senate Republicans on the record voting for the Ryan plan. But look what the Republicans have managed to get in return:

[T]he vote on the president’s plan turned into a rout, with neither Republicans nor Democrats voting in favor of taking it up. At one level, the 97-0 vote showed how out-of-date the February requests can seem after so much has changed in the spending debate already this year. But for Democrats, it also proved a convenient way to mask their substantial internal differences over how to proceed, Obama himself has also substantially altered his February requests as part of a “new framework” announced last month just prior to House-Senate talks with the administration led by Vice President Joe Biden. The immediate goal is to find the votes needed to expand Treasury’s borrowing authority and avert default this summer, but Biden has also spoken of the package as a “down payment” toward a longer range deficit reduction plan akin to what was proposed last December by the president’s debt commission.

Illegitimate Son?

by digby

I’ve been wondering something for a while. Has anyone ever seen Walter Mondale and Pawlenty in the same room together? I’m sure everyone recalls when Mondale was running for president he promised the entire country that he was going to raise their taxes, right? Just like a tax ‘n spend Democrat.

Here’s T-Paw presenting himself as a classic slash and burn Republican:

Republican presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty urged big changes to the Social Security retirement program on Wednesday, but said paring U.S. defense spending is not vital to tame the bloated federal budget.

When Obama compared himself to Reagan and the campaign team adopted the “Dear God We Hope It Will Be Morning in America” re-election strategy, I don’t think they could have dreamed that they might get an equal charisma gap. This is just frosting on the cake.

Update: Mondale is a good guy and I don’t mean to disrespect him. But he wasn’t exactly a dynamic politician and his famous statement that he would raise taxes is widely considered to be one of the more inelegant campaign promises in history. I think this one is in the same league.
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“Ask the wizard”: Grandpa Simpson babbles nonsense again

by digby

I think that many people believed that George W. Bush and Sarah Palin were members of a new breed of conservative politicians who were mean as snakes, dumb as posts and spoke gibberish instead of English. Not true. They’ve been around forever:

“The AARP, I mean, come come,” [Alan] Simpson said to an audience of Washington insiders. “If you can’t understand that when I was a freshman at the University of Wyoming, there were 17 people paying into the system and one taking out, and today there are three people paying into the system and one taking out — if you can’t understand that it was never set up as a retirement program, it was an income supplement which became a retirement, if you can’t understand it was never structured to handle disability insurance, it couldn’t exist with that burden on it. If you can’t understand it didn’t take care of kids at 22 going to college, we can’t make it.”

Simpson went on to reference a recent interview with Huffington Post reporter Ryan Grim, who presented Simpson with evidence that one of the statistics he deployed in his Social Security arguments was misleading.

“Now the great sharpshooters are out there and the cat food commission cats and all those guys using these distorted figures,” Simpson told the crowd. “And I always say, look, if you torture statistics long enough, eventually they’ll confess.”

In truth, Social Security was indeed established as a retirement program.

Lately, Simpson has been fond of claiming that the average life expectancy when Social Security was created was just 63 years of age, much lower than today. But the figure that actually matters for Social Security finances is the life expectancy for people who live to 65, the age at which benefits kick in. That number hasn’t changed much since 1940.

In an interview with The Huffington Post following his remarks, Simpson reiterated his attack.

“I was talking about the guy who called me and went through this exercise of sharpshooting,” Simpson told HuffPost. “And if he can’t understand a couple or three things then there’s no help. Forget all the crap he’s going through and know that if you — if 17 people were paying into this system in 1950 and one taking out, today there are three paying in and one taking out. I’d like you to refute that.”

Can’t someone draw him a picture or something? Or just direct him to the social security administration web site? Here’s the explanation of the life expectancy question:

If we look at life expectancy statistics from the 1930s we might come to the conclusion that the Social Security program was designed in such a way that people would work for many years paying in taxes, but would not live long enough to collect benefits. Life expectancy at birth in 1930 was indeed only 58 for men and 62 for women, and the retirement age was 65. But life expectancy at birth in the early decades of the 20th century was low due mainly to high infant mortality, and someone who died as a child would never have worked and paid into Social Security. A more appropriate measure is probably life expectancy after attainment of adulthood. As Table 1 shows, the majority of Americans who made it to adulthood could expect to live to 65, and those who did live to 65 could look forward to collecting benefits for many years into the future.

Or maybe he could read Nancy Altman’s book The Battle For Social Security where she spells out the worker to retiree issue so plainly that even Alan Simpson should be able to wrap his addled mind around it:

… all pension programs that require a period of employment for eligibility, private as well as public, show similar ratios at the start, because all newly covered workers are paying in, but no one in the newly covered group has yet qualified for benefits. The president could just as accurately have said that in 1945, the ratio of works to beneficiaries as 42 workers paying in for every one beneficiary or the equally accurate but misleading ratio from 1937, 26 million workers paying in for about a dozen beneficiaries.

… what is important is not the worker-to-beneficiary ratio at the start of the program but the ratio when the program reaches maturity. Consistent with the meaninglessness of the 16-to-1 factoid, the worker-to-beneficiary ratio was halved to eight workers for every beneficiary within five years, and by 1975, the ratio was where it is today. The 1994-1996 advisory council had not agreed on much, but it made one very valuable contribution. Its report included the appendix that stated that “the fundamental ratio of beneficiaries to workers was fully taken into account in the 1983 financing provisions, and, as a matter of fact, was known and taken into account well before that…

That’s right. And as a matter of fact some of the people who created the program are still around to testify about what they intended. Also from Altman’s book:

Bob Myers watched Bush on television from his home right outside Washington and stared in disbelief. In 1934, not only could Myers foresee the world as it changed, he had forecast these changes with great specificity. He was the one who had crunched the numbers for Roosevelt’s Social Security proposal. Myers and Otto Richter, the senior actuary with whom he had worked, had been extremely farsighted. Myers knew, in 1934, that people in the twenty-first century would live longer and draw benefits longer.

As it turned out, Myers and Richer were a shade too conservative in their projections, believing the percentage of the population that would be elderly in the future would actually be higher than it turned out to be. Specifically, in 1934, he and Richter projected that, in year 2000, 12.7 percent of the population would be age 65 or older. How accurate were they? According to the 2000 census figures, the percentage of those aged 65 and over was 12.4 percent of the population.

So no, these Social Security actuaries over the years have not been total morons who need Alan Simpson to point out that they were total dopes by not foreseeing that people would probably live longer in the future or that there would be more people paying into the system than collecting from it in the early years of the program’s existence.

And by the way, the unexpected post-war baby boom was dealt with by having all of us pre-pay a ton of money into the system that would make up for the fact that we were a larger than normal demographic. We invested that money in an unusual financial instrument called a US Treasury bill, the same one that Bill Gates and Lloyd Blankfein and The People’s Republic of China buy because they are considered the world’s safest investment. It’s not like we didn’t all do the prudent thing.

Huffington Post concludes with this:

“Repeating a false claim over and over again does not make it true,” said Frank Clemente of the Strengthen Social Security Campaign, a coalition over 270 national and state organizations dedicated to protecting Social Security from benefit cuts. “Those who continue to use this canard show they are more interested in tearing down Social Security rather than making it stronger. Social Security has a huge surplus today but a long-range gap in 25 years that can be closed relatively painlessly if the richest two percent of Americans started paying Social Security taxes on all their wages — like nearly all other Americans do.”

Good idea. But they’ve all threatened to go on strike because it just wouldn’t be worth it to them to work anymore and our whole civilization would come down around ears.

Finally, please, someone tell Simpson to pipe down and take his nitro glycerin before he has a heart attack from all the gibberish:

“I know all the stuff [Ryan Grim] goes through. Its like gymnastics! Yes and we’ve done distributional analysis. Ask him if he knows what that is! Ask the wizard if he knows what distributional analysis is! We did that. And then ask him what we did for the seniors, for the older old and the people who are in poverty. Ask the wizard all that and then get back to me.”

He then shouted, “I’m through!” and walked away.

God, if only …

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Fall into the Gap

by digby

Brad DeLong is not a drama queen. So when he writes this, I think it’s probably a good idea to pay attention:

Time to push the panic button. Macroeconomic Advisers is revising their tracking forecast of real GDP growth in the second quarter. It now looks as though, come July 1, that there will have been no gap-closing in the six quarters since the start of 2010. That means that it is:

• Time for Quantitative Easing III…
• Time for pulling more spending from the future forward into the present, and pushing more taxes from the present back into the future…
• Time to use Fannie and Freddie to (temporarily) nationalize mortgage finance and fix the ongoing foreclosure crisis…
• Time for a weaker dollar…

I don’t have an opinion on the solutions. But then none of them seem likely to happen as we go into presidential campaign. Scary.

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No Dice

by digby

I have long felt that it was unlikely that the President would allow substantial cuts to health care programs, since it is his signature issue. But since everyone in DC has come down with Deficit Fever, I’ve become a little bit worried that he might be coerced into cutting Medicaid since it’s seen by many people as a “welfare” program and who likes that? (This was why I was always more worried about Social Security — it’s not a health care program and so less likely to be protected by the president in a Grand Bargain.)

If Gene Sperling’s words this morning are any indication, the White House is not going to use health care as a bargaining chip:

He said Mr. Ryan has “put himself in a box” with his unwillingness to raise tax revenue. He said this forced Republicans to call for “very severe cuts” that if “explored” by Americans “they would not be proud of.”

Mr. Sperling attacked the House Republican proposals to overhaul Medicare and Medicaid, saying that the $770 billion in savings Republicans wanted from changing Medicaid would be unneccessary if Republicans would agree to roll back certain tax cuts.

“You can’t say to anybody who would be affected by that, that we have to do that, that we have no choice,” he said. “The fact is that all of those savings would be unnecessary if you were not funding the high income tax cuts.”

He also said that Mr. Ryan was wrong when he said that raising taxes as part of a broader package would hurt economic growth.

“Everything he said I heard nine million times in 1993,” said Mr. Sperling, who was NEC deputy director in the Clinton administration and later became Mr. Clinton’s national economic adviser.

This is really important. Sperling has ben one of the foremost proponents of the Grand Bargain and this pretty unequivocally takes Medicaid cuts off the table.

It will always be vulnerable — whenever the Republicans get the chance they will try to cut Medicaid, especially once it is expanded to cover more people. They will be desperate to call it a welfare program that somehow is keeping people from being productive members of society. But if the Dems can at least protect what exists now and get the expansion enacted it will be harder. Sperling’s comments were terribly important in that it positioned it as a safety net program that helps the middle class as much as the poor and I’m not sure most people know that.

Update: Dday has the full transcript of Sperling’s remarks:

And I say this to everybody in this room, there is enormous discussion about the revenue side and the Medicare side. But from a policy perspective, from a values perspective, we should be very deeply troubled by the Medicaid cuts in the House Republican plan. I want to make clear what they are. This is not my numbers, this is theirs.

After they completely repeal the Affordable Care act, which would take away coverage for 34 million Americans, according to the Congressional Budget Office. After they’ve completely repealed that, they do a block grant that would cut Medicaid by $770 billion. In 2021, that would cut the program by 35 percent. Under their own numbers, by 2030, it would cut projected spending in Medicaid by half. By 49 percent. So, of course– I don’t think– or imply any negative intentions or– lack of compassion. But there is a tyranny of the numbers that we have to face.

And here’s the tyranny of the numbers. Sixty-four percent of Medicaid spending goes to older people in nursing homes or families who have someone with serious disabilities. Another 22 percent goes to 35 million very poor children. Now I ask you, how could you possibly cut 35 percent of that budget and not hurt hundreds of thousands, if not millions of families who are dealing with a parent or a grandparent in a nursing home, or a child with serious disabilities. How is the math possible.

If you tried to protect them mathematically, you would have to eliminate coverage for all 34 million children. Now I know some people didn’t like when– the President mentioned that this was going to be very negative for families, for those amazingly brave parents. And he may be one of them in our country, who have a child with autism or Down’s and who just are enormously committed and dedicated to doing everything they can to give their child the same chance– every other child has.

But here’s the reality. Medicaid does help so many families in those situations. Over the years, we’ve allowed more middle class families who have a child with autism to get help in Medicaid. There’s a medical needy program that says when you spend down– we’ll– we’ll count the income after you’ve spent down medical costs.

There’s a Katie Beckett (PH) program that was passed by President Reagan that says if you have a child that’s in need of institutional care– you can get help from Medicaid. This is– this is a life support for many of these families. But these are the optional programs in Medicaid. These are the ones that go to more middle class families. If you’re going to cut 49 percent of projected Medicaid spending by 2030, do you really think these programs will not be seriously hurt.

So when we say that there– that the tyranny of the math is that these– these– this Medicaid– program, this Medicaid cut will lead to millions of poor children, children with serious disabilities, children with autism– elderly Americans in nursing homes losing their coverage or being– or– or having it significantly cut, we are not criticizing their plan. We are just simply explaining their plan.

Can any American know that that none of these things will ever happen to them?

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Delivering On Gridlock

by digby

When the Republicans go all in, they go all in. Here’s Paul Ryan this morning:

Washington has not been honest with you about Medicare. Medicare is a critical program which helps seniors achieve health security. But the truth is it’s headed for a painful collapse. We can save Medicare, but we have to reform it so that it delivers the high quality we expect, at a price we can afford.
[…] The urgent need to reform Medicare, and the President’s misguided approach, have left us with a serious question to ask: Who should be making health-care decisions for you and your family? A government monopoly and a panel of bureaucrats in Washington, D.C.? Or you?

We have to destroy Medicare in order to save it. I think we’ve been down that bizarroworld wingnut logic road before. It doesn’t make any more sense today than it ever has. But they are going there, presumably trying to convince senior citizens that the only people they really want to screw are people under 55. (Apparently, they have zero interest in ever getting the votes of the second wave baby boomers who are now between 47 and 55 — and just took a major hit in their retirement plans. And why not? They only make up 25% of the voting population. Who needs ’em?)

This is actually good news because it indicates that the Republicans are so delusional that they will never agree to even the kind of fake tax hikes the corporate Dems are more than willing to give them in exchange for the cuts in “entitlements” so they think they need to sell themselves as “fiscally responsible.” As I’ve been harping for months — with the Republicans having gone completely over the cliff and the Democrats ready to compromise on anything in order that the Villagers finally acknowledge them as “grown-ups” the best thing that could happen is gridlock. Since it’s unlikely that the Democrats will ever draw a real line in the sand we have to depend upon Grover Norquist and Paul Ryan to stay crazy. Looks like that’s not going to be a problem.

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Snappy Slogans

by digby

Thomas Friedman proves once again why he isn’t looked to for advice by political movements around the world:

May I suggest a Tahrir Square alternative? Announe that every Friday from today forward will be “Peace Day,” and have thousands of West Bank Palestinians march nonviolently to Jerusalem, carrying two things — an olive branch in one hand and a sign in Hebrew and Arabic in the other. The sign should say: “Two states for two peoples. We, the Palestinian people, offer the Jewish people a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders — with mutually agreed adjustments — including Jerusalem, where the Arabs will control their neighborhoods and the Jews theirs.”

Maybe they can write it in really, really small letters.

It’s better than “suck on this, Iraq” but I’m afraid it doesn’t have quite the same ring to it…

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Man Bites Dog

By tristero

While Digby already noted the potential importance of the special election in New York-26, this article about the contest is still worth reading. Not because it’s a well written report – it isn’t, it just describes the horserace and gallops over the ideas – but because of the way in which the Democratic challenger, and the race, was described. We have rarely seen either this kind of activity from a Democratic challenger in a difficult race, and even less frequently read this kind of positive coverage. It’s almost as if running an exciting campaign that appeals to voters encourages a more positive attitude from the press.

I know: it’s more complicated than that. Even so, Kathy Hochul is clearly doing something very right:

Two months ago, the Democrat, Kathy Hochul, was considered an all-but-certain loser in the race against the Republican, Jane Corwin. But Ms. Hochul seized on the Republican’s embrace of the proposal from Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, to overhaul Medicare, and she never let up…

The district, which stretches from Buffalo to Rochester, has been in Republican hands for four decades, producing influential figures like Representative Jack Kemp and siding with Carl P. Paladino, a Republican, over Andrew M. Cuomo in the governor’s race last year…

Ms. Hochul… campaigned energetically and with great focus…

Ms. Hochul maintained a positive image conveying a homespun quality, speaking with a Buffalo accent, connecting naturally with voters…

In her victory speech Tuesday night, she noted that her mother and father, who have retired to Florida, were making phone calls to voters on her behalf for months.

..given the makeup of the district, one of four in the state that John McCain carried in 2008, Republicans said they needed to understand if they had misread the public.

“It’s a Republican district with a solid Republican candidate,” said Representative Peter T. King, a Republican from Long Island.

“What went wrong? We definitely have to determine the extent to which the Medicare issue hurt us…”

The seat became vacant in February when Representative Christopher Lee, a Republican, abruptly resigned after he e-mailed a shirtless photo of himself to a woman and it was published on the Internet…

The race also marked the debut of House Majority PAC, a group recently established by Democratic strategists as a counterbalance to the slew of conservative organizations that helped Republicans make significant gains in the 2010 elections. House Majority PAC spent nearly $400,000 on advertising in the race.

Bellwether Report

by digby

So the Democrats won the special election in Jack Kemp’s old district, NY-26, a GOP stronghold for 40 years. The pendulum is swinging so wildly it hit the Republicans in the head and left them so confused they attacked the most popular program in America in a time of terrible economic anxiety just after they lost a huge amount of wealth in the most frightening economic crisis since the great depression.

But I think they should stay the course. It’s the kind of message that will surely resonate with time if they just keep repeating it. They should listen to this fellow. He really knows how to sell it: