Question of the day
by digby
If Romney and other rich GOP only pay 13% or lower in taxes, why on earth are they screaming taxes are too high?
I’m going to guess they feel they are so very, very special that they shouldn’t have to contribute anything at all.
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Just tweak the catfood a little bit and it tastes like fresh Mahi-Mahi
by digby
God I wish I understood the twisted psychology that makes people with plenty of income and future security insist that those who don’t should suffer even more.
The Washington Post once again confounded its critics who insisted that it couldn’t get any worse. Yesterday the paper ran an editorial that criticized Vice President Joe Biden for his lack of courage when he committed the administration to a policy of not cutting Social Security. Biden repeatedly told an audience in Southern Virginia that he guaranteed there would be no cuts to Social Security in a second Obama administration.
The paper then laid out its case for cuts to the program and outlined its plan:
“Tweak the inflation calculator and moderately raise the income limit for applying the payroll tax, and you can shore up Social Security with no harm to the safety net.”
Did you catch the cuts in that sentence? If not, that is what “tweak the inflation adjustment” means. It means reducing the size of the benefit by 0.3 percent annually. This cut accumulates over time to roughly 3 percent after 10 years, 6 percent after 20 years, and for those who collect benefits long enough, 9 percent after 30 years. Certainly many people might think that a 9 percent cut in benefits for 10 percent of retirees who rely solely on Social Security for their income, or the 30 percent of retirees who rely on it for more than 90 percent of their income, does some harm to the safety net.
Just tweak it a little. After all, if you’re a 95 year old woman with no other income, will you really miss that 9%? I don’t think they eat much at that age anyway. They’ll never miss it!
Besides, they should have thought ahead a little bit and worked a little bit harder, don’t you think?
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I’m sure Neil Young will remember
by digby
Greg Mitchell shares the news about the major hipness of the GOP convention:
Now comes word that the GOP has lined up two (crappy) acts for its convention: the always annoying Kid Rock and the over-the-hill Lynyrd Skynrd. Says the latter’s Johnny van Zant: “As far as I’m concerned, I’ve heard the president go we’re asking the rich to take a little bit more in taxes. Well, that’s not asking, that’s telling. I still believe in the trickle-down effect.
There’s only one response:
Also too, Tom Morello.
Update: It turns out that “Johnny” is their roadie travelling as a nostalgia act since the original band has all died. Figures.
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Pro-life: well sort of
by digby
This is where these draconian anti-abortion laws are taking us:
A pregnant 16-year-old in the Dominican Republic died from complications of leukemia, according to CNN. The young woman was forced to wait nearly three weeks to begin chemotherapy to treat her disease as hospital officials initially refused to treat her fearing it could terminate her pregnancy. In the end she lost her life and the pregnancy, and may have died because of the delay in her treatment.
Under an amendment to the Dominican Republic’s constitution which declares that “life begins at conception,” abortion is banned, effectively for any reason. The girl’s leukemia was diagnosed when she was just nine weeks pregnant.
Dominican women’s health advocates told RH Reality Check this afternoon that while the doctors and the state refused to allow the girl treatment for leukemia, they made her undergo “ultrasounds to show that the baby was healthy and for her to see it moving.”
They went on to give the chemo at the end of the first trimester but refused the abortion. The girl miscarried, started hemorrhaging and they couldn’t stop it. So she died.
But that could never happen here, right? Well, according to the “personhood” zealots, it certainly could:
“There are no exceptions in Personhood USA’s presidential pledge because there are no situations where it becomes necessary to dismember a baby,” said Jennifer Mason, spokesperson for Personhood USA, in a January press release.
“With the passage of federal or state personhood amendments, recognizing the personhood rights of both mother and child, women will still of course have access to life-saving treatments and medical care,” Mason continued. “Procedures to treat both mom and baby can potentially lead to happier outcomes for both patients, whereas abortion procedures, which are dangerous as it stands already, intentionally kill a child.”
They would have done exactly what those Dominican doctors did.
And by the way, our good pal Paul Ryan sponsored the federal personhood amendment. Romney supports it too. This is the new mainstream Republican position.
Update: Jesus, oh Jesus can we do away with this literalist bullshit that’s coming out of the so-called fact checkers?
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A more honest and realistic “abortion survivor” story
by David Atkins
One of the more reprehensible tactics of the anti-choice movement is the “abortion survivor” story: the child born of rape or incest who gives thanks for not having been aborted. These stories, of course, beg the question entirely: at the time of their mother’s decision, they weren’t fully human or even conscious, and it wasn’t their choice to make.
Well, Lynn Beisner at Role/Reboot has a challenging and powerful story to tell as well:
The narrative that anti-choice crusaders are telling is powerful, moving, and best of all, it has a happy ending. It makes the woman who carries to term a hero, and for narrative purposes, it hides her maternal failing. We cannot argue against heroic, redemptive happy-ending fairy tales using cold statistics. If we want to keep our reproductive rights, we must be willing to tell our stories, to be willing and able to say, “I love my life, but I wish my mother had aborted me.”
An abortion would have absolutely been better for my mother. An abortion would have made it more likely that she would finish high school and get a college education. At college in the late 1960s, it seems likely that she would have found feminism or psychology or something that would have helped her overcome her childhood trauma and pick better partners. She would have been better prepared when she had children. If nothing else, getting an abortion would have saved her from plunging into poverty. She likely would have stayed in the same socioeconomic strata as her parents and grandparents who were professors. I wish she had aborted me because I love her and want what is best for her.
Abortion would have been a better option for me. If you believe what reproductive scientists tell us, that I was nothing more than a conglomeration of cells, then there was nothing lost. I could have experienced no consciousness or pain. But even if you discount science and believe that I had consciousness and could experience pain at six gestational weeks, I would chose the brief pain or fear of an abortion over the decades of suffering I endured.
An abortion would have been best for me because there is no way that my love-starved trauma-addled mother could have ever put me up for adoption. It was either abortion or raising me herself, and she was in no position to raise a child. She had suffered a traumatic brain injury, witnessed and experienced severe domestic violence, and while she was in grade school she was raped by a stranger and her mother committed suicide. She was severely depressed and suicidal, had an extremely poor support system, was experiencing an unplanned pregnancy that resulted from coercive sex, and she was so young that her brain was still undeveloped.
With that constellation of factors, there was a very high statistical probability that my mother would be an abusive parent, that we would spend the rest of our lives in crushing poverty, and that we would both be highly vulnerable to predatory organizations and men. And that is exactly what happened. She abused me, beating me viciously and often. We lived in bone-crushing poverty, and our little family became a magnet for predatory men and organizations. My mother found minimal support in a small church, and became involved with the pastor who was undeniably schizophrenic, narcissistic, and sadistic. The abuse I endured was compounded by deprivation. Before the age of 14, I had never been to a sleep-over, been allowed to talk to a friend on the phone, eaten in a restaurant, watched a television show, listened to the radio, read a non-Christian book, or even worn a pair of jeans.
If this were an anti-choice story, this is the part where I would tell you how I overcame great odds and my life now has special meaning. I would ask you to affirm that, of course, you are happy I was born, and that the world would be a darker, poorer place without me.
It is true that in the past 12 years, I have been able to rise above the circumstances of my birth and build a life that I truly love. But no one should have to make such a Herculean struggle for simple normalcy. Even given the happiness and success I now enjoy, if I could go back in time and make the choice for my mother, it would be abortion.
Read the whole thing. It’s a powerful and thought-provoking piece.
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Romney’s “trust me” strategy: trust what?
by digby
Greg Sargent has a nice rundown of the Romney “trust me” strategy including some very damning quotes from Romney advisors telling Politico:
Advisers say the campaign has no plans to pivot from its previous view that diving into details during a general-election race would be suicidal.
The Romney strategy is simple: Hammer away at Obama for proposing cuts to Medicare and promise, in vague, aspirational ways, to protect the program for future retirees — but don’t get pulled into a public discussion of the most unpopular parts of the Ryan plan.
“The nature of running a presidential campaign is that you’re communicating direction to the American people,” a Romney adviser said. “Campaigns that are about specifics, particularly in today’s environment, get tripped up.”
Sargent has more. I’ll just add this: if a campaign is going to rely on the “trust me” strategy and not talk about any policy specifics, the candidate had better be an upfront, straight arrow of the utmost integrity. For instance, he would need to be like Mitt’s father George, who released all his tax returns in order to show the country that he was a citizen of high ethical standards who not only followed the letter of the law but the spirit of the law as well. It would require a person of very strong principles, principles that have been demonstrated publicly over a long period of time so that the public would understand how this person thinks and acts.
Uhm… Mitt Romney is not that person and people of both parties would be right to suspect him of the worst. After all, this is a man whose public record shows that he will literally say and do anything depending on the circumstances. To “trust” him is to trust in a phantom.
Now, one might say that the “trust me” strategy could work for someone who is the head of a party which the American people have, rightly or wrongly, deemed trustworthy on certain issues over the long haul. If Romney were a Republican national security expert or a Democrat running on his record of health care achievement, perhaps that would convince enough people to trust him under the right circumstances. But a Republican running on the vague promise to “fix Medicare” while promising to “close tax loopholes” for the wealthy? I don’t think that’s a formula that inspires a lot of trust, do you? In Romney’s case, it may not work even among Republicans who haven’t got a clue what this guy will really do once in office.
Even incumbents in a time of peace and properity have a hard time running on the “trust me” platform. Some rich guy who served one half-hearted term as Governor, belongs to secretive religion, refuses to say what he paid in taxes and has held every conceivable position on every issue, is the last politician on earth who can tell people to quit asking questions and trust him. It’s frighteningly arrogant that he would even try.
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Would you like to own a signed Green Day guitar?
Take this as an opportunity to help us raise some much-needed campaign money for Alan Grayson’s congressional campaign in Central Florida. Alan explained what this is all about on his Facebook page. The thank you rock memorabilia– the beautiful autographed Green Day guitar– is gravy.
I think it’s very, very appropriate:
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Premium Support for dummies
by digby
Scott Lemieux links to this panicked warning from William Galston who says that an argument about Medicare could wind up taking “premium support” off the table, which Galston thinks is a bad idea and leaves us with no solutions for the rise in health care costs. This is not true, of course, but it’s an article faith among conservatives and centrists alike that there is no way to reduce costs without “competition,” (which speaks to a deeper set of delusions than health care policy.)
As Lemieux points out:
So it would stop us from replacing Medicare with “premium supports.” Uh, good? Here’s the thing — Ron Wyden foolishly agreeing to give Paul Ryan cover doesn’t make his proposal a “Democratic” proposal in any meaningful sense; it proves that it’s long past time for Wyden to retire. As Galston implicitly concedes, most Democrats reject Wyden’s kinder, gentler end to Medicare for the obvious reason that it’s a horrible idea. As Medicare Advantage conclusively demonstrates, replacing Medicare with “premium support” (even in the somewhat more generous Wyden version) would result in greater inefficiency, with less money going to the provision of health care and more money going to rentiers. It can “stabilize” Medicare only by denying people medical care and/or greatly increasing costs to individuals. It is the unappealing option.
(I’ll also refer you once again to this piece from one of the people who originally conceived the idea of premium support for the reasons why he changed his mind.)
There are Democrats who like this idea. Some health care wonks dream of the day when Obamacare is universal, even for the elderly, with some sort of Medicare/public option as part of the mix. But even they know that Obamacare needs to be fully implemented and analyzed before you can put this very sick population into the mix. Right now, the ACA is theoretical and it’s important to have some real world experience, both with the system itself and the politics around it.
And this is because unlike other western nations that have various forms of universal health care, the (powerful) American right is rigidly hostile to any form of government guaranteed social insurance or regulatory scheme. This makes it a unique challenge, one which requires the defenders to create programs that not only work but that have mechanisms which will make it very difficult to dismantle once they are in place. If it’s very complicated, all the Republicans have to do is start pulling out small pieces or targeting the poor to make the whole thing fail. (This is why I was so nervous about the ACA in the first place, particularly the Medicaid portion, which was always the most vulnerable component. If you look at Ryan’s Dystopian Hellscape plans, it’s obvious that this will be their first hunting ground.)
And needless to say, the problem isn’t just the Republican Party. As Lemieux says:
Alas, I don’t think Galston is right that attacking Ryan ferociously would permanently kill premium support, but I certainly wish he was right.
And that’s because there are far too many Democrats willing to jump on this sort of “compromise,” some of whom are sincere people who see this as a positive but fail to fully grasp how it undermines the entire system once the eternally hostile GOP gets in power. The politics are just as important as the policy.
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It’s not just Fox, folks
by digby
This is why politicians love local news. They can go straight to the people with their lies, without even the lame pushback you might get from the political press:
When he’s allowed to just spew his bizzaroworld platform out of context he sounds very reasonable, doesn’t he?
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Competitive plutocracy
by David Atkins
The New York Times yesterday actually had a debate forum asking whether we should just eliminate the capital gains tax altogether. Since apparently wages are too high, the stock market isn’t soaring enough, corporate profits aren’t at high enough records yet, and Wall Street types don’t make nearly enough money.
The fact that this question was even asked in a major newspaper is a dark, dark sign.
But there is an answer from a Cato Institute shill that is simultaneously hilariously wrong and food for thought:
Taxing capital income causes capital to seek countries with lower rates. Jobs are lost when that capital builds businesses elsewhere.
In the short term this is ludicrous. Capital income seeks profitable investment regardless of the tax rate. Profitable investment can be found either in extraction economies where the cost of human dignity and life is very cheap, or in economies with a strong middle class where demand is strong. Because of that, the capital gains rate should probably be doubled to 30% if that money can be used to strengthen the middle class.
Over the long term, however, it is almost certainly true that nations will play the same destructive games with their capital gains rates that states like Delaware have been allowed to play with corporate tax rates, and that cities continue to play with each other to encourage the next WalMart SuperCenter to move in and plague their citizens.
At some point the world is going to have to step up and say “no, you can’t do that.” And as the shrieking about national sovereignty overwhelms the obvious progressive rationale for doing so, all people the world over will lose real sovereignty while the plutocratic elite play nations, states and cities against each other for their own corrupt and venal ends.
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