Month: November 2012

Fat Cat whine ‘o the day

by digby

Oh God, please someone make them stop:

That’s Jamie Dimond sniveling about how Obama needs to stop being so antagonistic toward business.

I am reminded of one of my father’s more annoying habits when I was a child: whenever I whined like that he’d point his finger in my face and say, “stop it now or I’ll give you something to cry about.” There are lots of things one could imagine would make Jamie Dimond cry. Raising his taxes “a little bit” is the least of it.

Here’s Jon Stewart on Whine Country:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

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Quick, let’s make a deal (before the deficit goes away on its own)

by digby

You know that deficit that’s killing us? The one we’re going to fix by “asking the rich to pay a little bit more” and cutting benefits for everyone else? What if the scam is even worse than we thought?

Dean Baker spills some very inconvenient beans:

[T]he big stick for the deficit hawks was their story of huge deficits in the longer term. They attributed these to the rising cost of “entitlements,” which are known to the rest of us as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

While they like to push the notion that the aging of the population threatened to impose an unbearable burden on future generations, the reality is that most of the horror story of huge deficits was driven by projections of exploding private sector health care costs. Since Medicare and Medicaid mostly pay for private sector health care, an explosion in private sector health care costs would eventually make these programs unaffordable.

As some of us have long pointed out, there are serious grounds for questioning the plausibility of projections that the health care sector would rise to 30 or 40 percent of GDP over the rest of the century. Recently a paper from the Federal Reserve Board documented this argument in considerable detail.

Even more important than the professional argument over health care cost projections is the recent trend in health care costs. While the CBO projections assume that age-adjusted health care costs rise considerably more rapidly than per capita income, in the last four years they have been roughly keeping pace with per capita income.

In fact, in the last year nominal spending on health care services, the sector that comprises almost two-thirds of health care costs, rose by just 1.7 percent. This is far below the rate of nominal GDP growth over this period, which was more than 4.0 percent. While at least some of this slowing in health care costs is undoubtedly due to the downturn, it is hard to believe that it is not at least partially attributable to a slower underlying rate of health care cost growth.

CBO and other budget forecasters can ignore economic reality for a period of time (they ignored the housing bubble until after its collapse wrecked the economy), but if it continues, at some point they will have to incorporate the trend of slower health care cost growth into their projections. When this happens, the really scary long-term deficit numbers will disappear.

A projection that assumes that health care costs will only rise as a result of the aging of the population, and otherwise move in step with per capita income, will lop tens of trillions of dollars off the most commonly cited long-term deficit projections. It would cost some deficit hawks, like National Public Radio, more than $100 trillion of their long-term deficit story. This would be a real disaster for the deficit hawk industry.

This is why the Campaign to Fix the Debt and the rest of the deficit hawk industry will be operating at full speed at least until a budget deal is reached over the current impasse. If CBO adjusts its long-term health care cost projections downward then their whole rationale for gutting Social Security and Medicare will disappear. Now that is really a crisis.

I’ve been cynical about this whole exercise and don’t believe we should do much of anything other than stimulate the economy for the time being. I know that this sense of panic over the the whole thing is a contrivance to force unpopular action. But I have to admit I didn’t realize that we had evidence emerging that the deficit projections were already falling short and that there’s good reason to suspect that they will be far short of what these fearmongers are selling.

But solving non-existent problems while avoiding real ones seems to be the new American way.

Has anyone even mentioned the fact that we still have 7.9% unemployment? Is that the new normal?

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Grand Old Sabotage

by David Atkins

Part of what is so frustrating about any conversation about the “deficit” is the obviousness of the lies being told. Conservatives have a decades-long strategy that they have telegraphed since the Goldwater years. It’s not complicated, and everyone in politics knows about it:

• 1) Claim that jobs and economic growth depend on tax cuts, especially on the wealthy. Claim that any cuts will pay for themselves. Both of these are lies, and everyone serious in public policy knows it.

  2) When revenues dwindle and deficits explode as they have under every Republican President since Nixon, blame “welfare” (a lie) and “spending” (another lie.)

  3) Let Democrats be the ones to take responsible measures to bring deficits back under control by sacrificing their own programs. Don’t take responsibility for “starving the beast”: let Democrats do it instead, and then blame them for it.

  4 When good economic times and minor tax boosts bring both the economy back to health and the deficit back in line, tell people that the government has too much money, and that they should “get more of their money back.” This is an intentional strategy to drive up the deficit, forcing more cuts later.

That strategy isn’t just politics. It amounts to direct economic sabotage–sabotage that everyone in politics and media knows is happening.

And it’s happening again right in front of our faces. Twenty years ago a Democratic President was elected in poor economic conditions and saddled with a significant government deficit caused by Ronald Reagan’s guns, butter and tax cuts policies. He wasn’t perfect by any means, but he created good (if bubble-generated) economic conditions and the creation of federal budget surpluses. George Bush took those surpluses, convinced America to “get its money back”, exploded the deficit with tax cuts mostly for the rich, squandered trillions on bungled and/or unnecessary wars, and helped crash the entire world economy.

Four years ago the nation elected a Democratic President whose primary job has been to save the economy from another Great Depression, while helping people’s lives and reducing long-term budget problems. Healthcare reform itself was in large part an attempt to reduce budgetary woes arising from exploding healthcare costs. We had another election recently in which conservative ideas were rejected, and the President’s approach reaffirmed by the American public.

Yet here we are again, held hostage to the same economic saboteurs using the same destructive tactics as they have for the last 40 years. And everyone paying attention knows about it.

The fact that everyone in the Village Media has bought into the deficit obsession as it were a real thing rather than simply the latest iteration of a decades-long tactic designed to further enrich the wealthy shows not just herd mentality and willful blindness. It shows a craven willingness to go along with direct economic sabotage and shameless lying in the guise of politics as usual.

It’s moral tragedy on a grand scale.

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Well at least we know we’re free

by digby

From the taser files:

The fire was all around Dan Jensen.

He could see it. He could smell it. He could hear it.

It was close enough to touch. It was burning down his neighbor’s house. It was creeping toward Jensen’s own fence 10 feet away, and he started spraying the fire with his hose.

Police ordered Jensen to get back, and he complied.

But after a few minutes passed without firefighters arriving, a frustrated Jensen stepped forward and leaned down to grab the skinny gray garden hose once again.

That’s when he heard the order.

“Hit ’em! Take him down! Tase him!”

Within moments, Jensen was on the ground. He felt electric.

“It was all over me,” Jensen said. “Crawling all over me.”

The 42-year-old commercial fisherman is still struggling to comprehend exactly how things deteriorated so quickly Thursday. He said he doesn’t understand why police shot him with a Taser that night as he tried to battle a house fire at 3420 Beechwood Ter. N.

Jensen’s family, friends and neighbors have been quick to defend him and accuse police of crossing a line.

“It was wrong,” he said. “There’s no way around it. … I was fighting a fire. I wasn’t fighting police. I thought they were here to help me. Instead, they hurt me.”

Police said they can sympathize with the stress Jensen was under. But they said he put himself and officers in danger when he refused to back down from fighting the fire.

Pinellas Park Capt. Sanfield Forseth told the Tampa Bay Times authorities could have even charged Jensen with obstruction, but decided against it.

But wait, you say. This man was putting himself and the authorities in danger and the police had no choice.

Really? How about this: turn off the water. Cut the hose. Pull him back. Talk to him.

Tasers are dangerous and not just to the public — they obviously present an even greater threat to the critical thinking capacity of police officers. Once they have them in their hands it appears they are compelled to shoot first and ask questions later. The idea that you have to shoot a citizen full of electricity in this situation is absurd. Moreover, it’s a fundamental abuse of authority under color of law. Imagine if they’d walked up behind him and hit him over the head with a baton. Or shot him in the leg. Just because it doesn’t leave a mark doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt.

They had no need to hurt him. Tasers just make it so easy.

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Nobody cares about the deficit

by David Atkins

Chris Hayes is a national treasure. Here he beautifully deconstructs the lie that is the fiscal “cliff” and the deficit trolls:

Politics in this country is built on so many intentional lies it’s hard to disentangle them all.

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QOTD: Glenn Beck

by digby

He moves in mysterious ways:

“Man, sometimes God really sucks,” 

No, that’s not, as you might expect, a comment about the casualties from Hurricane Sandy or children dying of cancer. It was about the GOP’s loss of the election.

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Windfall for the grown-ups

by digby

Regular readers know that I’ve been dogging this bogus “Fix the Debt” group for many months. It’s long been clear that they are working on behalf of those who created the series of arbitrary deadlines called the “fiscal cliff” in order to press for cuts to entitlements.

It turns out they have another, more personal, agenda as well:

When a group of 86 large U.S. companies came out in late October in favor of fixing the debt it was seen as a rare example of corporate unity, and a wake up call on just how urgent an issue the growing federal deficit has become for business.

In a new report, the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a liberal Washington think tank, argues that the group, called “Fix the Debt” is basically a larger version of an earlier Washington corporate lobbying group called “Win America”, and shares its focus on getting corporate money now being held overseas back into the United States with little or no taxes taken out.

Win America was pushing mainly for a lower tax rate on the repatriation of foreign earnings, but Fix the Debt is instead pushing for a shift by the United States to a territorial tax model. Under this kind of system, the companies would paylittle or no taxes on foreign earnings when those profits are brought into the to US. It’s especially beneficial to companies that earn a significant amount of profit in offshore tax havens.

Such a change would result in a $134 billion windfall for the 63 publicly traded companies in the Fix the Debt coalition, IPS calculates.

These are the people that were described like this in the Washington Post six months ago:

Anyone watching the Washington budget debate over the past decade must have wondered why there didn’t seem to be any grown-ups in the room — someone who could cut through what Honeywell’s Dave Cote calls the “hysteria, histrionics and hyperbole” and force the bickering children to agree on a reasonable compromise.

That’s what the voters want, what the economy demands and what country must now have to regain its confidence and its global influence.

Some grown-ups who have been noticeably absent from this conversation have been the heads of the country’s major corporations, who talk a good game about deficit reduction but haven’t invested the time, money and political capital necessary to jolt the political system from its dysfunctional equilibrium.

That’s about to change. Last week, the first battalion of CEOs showed up in Washington, reporting for duty.

Just what we need — more generals.

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Ideological Showdown! (not really)

by digby

So the president is meeting with progressive groups and unions to get a sense of where they stand on the fiscal cliff. What good news. Maybe he’ll finally get the message that it’s not all about raising taxes it’s also about not cutting vital programs for average Americans.

Unfortunately, that’s not what reporters seem to think is going to happen. The only argument they seem to think is up in the air is how much the rich are going to be required to pay:

BLITZER: One of the most pressing issues right now for the president of the United States, how to avoid what’s called the fiscal cliff. The president is planning a series of meetings with outside groups before sitting down with members of Congress. I’m joined by our chief White House correspondent, Jessica Yellin. Jessica, what’s the strategy here?

JESSICA YELLIN, CNN CHIEF WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Hey, Wolf. Well, you know, the president said he felt that one of the problems in his first term was he got stuck in, basically, a headlock with Congress. And he clearly doesn’t want to start there in a second term.

So, in the next two days, he’s meeting with labor leaders, progressive groups, business and opinion leaders, essentially, to get Democrats on the same page and shore up his own base before talking to Congress.

Now, afterwards, you can expect them to send out selling the message, pressuring members of Congress to pass whatever comes up the negotiations. Also, Wolf, to press the president on their own agenda for the fiscal cliff.

BLITZER: The Democrats, as you know, Jessica, they are certainly not all on the same page, are they?

YELLIN: No, they’re not. And you know, we focus on how this is a struggle between the White House and Republicans. It’s also a struggle within the Democratic Party. Some Democrats, they say, taxes should go up for families making $250,000 and more like the president. But some say that hits too many middle class families, especially urban and suburban areas.

They want the line to be higher, $500,000 or a million dollars and more. Those are the people who should see their taxes go up and then close deductions for those people, too. So, there will be challenges within the Democratic Party to get everyone together as well as within the Republican Party and some of those labor leaders meeting with the president also want to make sure he doesn’t touch Social Security, Wolf.

BLITZER: The president repeatedly says he wants taxes to go up for people who make $250,000 a year or more. So, is that negotiable?

YELLIN: That’s big question. You know, that is the official position of the White House. Last week, the president repeated that people making 250,000 and up must pay more was his phrase. He didn’t say what rate they must pay. But the question is, will the president move of that? You know, he has made clear, the president has, that he learned lessons from negotiating in his first term.

And one theory is, he could be playing tough with this line and maybe it will be move. He does have a forcing mechanism this time around. Taxes automatically go up if Washington does nothing. So, he has extra motivation on his side to force a deal, maybe that number could change.

BLITZER: Because if Congress does nothing between now and the end of the year, taxes go up on everyone, not just on the wealthy, middle class families. Everyone will see a hike in their taxes starting January 1st.

YELLIN: It gives him more leverage.

BLITZER: Yes. All right. Thanks very much, Jessica, for that.

Now keep in mind that this is the Village POV. I suspect that the president will hear from some of the labor leaders and progressive groups that a few hippies here and they are a tiny bit concerned about the possibility that in the quest for the holy grail of “revenue” from millionaires that the Democrats are going to lose sight of the scope of cuts to vital programs for many millions of average Americans that will required to get them.

From what I can gather that’s not high on the agenda. We are apparently on a grand crusade to get tip money from the wealthy and Democrats should be happy to agree to absolutely anything anything that will entice enough Republicans to take that deal. If a few million people have to be sacrificed it will be worth it. Nothing matters more than winning the rich people’s chump change debate.

It’s unclear how the White House is approaching today’s meeting. According to this article by Sam Stein, the progressives are preparing to do battle over the so-called entitlements and will require that a deal features no benefits cuts:

This puts negotiators, mainly those inside 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., in more than just a small bind. During negotiations with House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) in the summer of 2011, the White House was willing to agree to cuts to Medicare, changes to the program’s eligibility age, and deductions in Social Security benefits, even without demanding an end to the top-rate Bush tax cuts. A year and a half later, progressives are saying, essentially, don’t make that deal again..

Some moderate Democrats are up for reelection in 2014, making them reluctant to cast tough votes. But they already passed the president’s preferred tax cut package (raising rates only on incomes above $250,000) and the election results showed that they can run on a no-apology, Democratic platform and win.

“Every signal we’ve been getting from them is they want to fight this thing and stick to the lines they’ve drawn on taxes,” said a top Senate Democratic aide who spoke about caucus sentiment on condition of anonymity. “We passed that bill already. That was a huge deal. At the times people pooh-poohed it. … But having [Senators] Jon Tester and Claire McCaskill vote for that bill and win election is a huge deal in terms of morale and fortifying the ranks.”

Again with the taxes. Oy. Can we all just agree that everyone in the Democratic party thinks taxes are the greatest thing that’s ever happened to America and if we can get Republicans to allow us to raise them “a little bit” on rich people we will be the happiest people on earth?

Anyway, the White House believes they have things well in hand:

The White House also has more political capital now than before. The country just voted in favor of its agenda (parts of which can be accomplished if the president simply vetoes the alternatives). And in addition to a self-proclaimed, quasi-mandate on tax policy — which Vice President Joe Biden mentioned last week — there is a sense from within the administration of stronger trust from the base.

“The relationship has come a long way since last summer and it is important to our success that we continue to work well with the progressive community,” said one top White House official. “Now, everyone won’t agree with everything we do, but having good communication and a foundation of trust is critical to achieving our shared goals.”

And our shared goals are? You guessed it — tax policy. The rest? Well, I’m afraid everybody’s got to have some skin in the game, shared sacrifice etc, etc…

Stein appropriately concludes his piece with a lugubrious comment from Third Way:

“I think the idea of thanking the base in some sort of unified, symbolic way is either fantastical or a mistake. I think that is what George W. Bush did in the beginning of ’05, when he tried to privatize Social Security, which was the ultimate gift to his base and turned out to be a disaster for him and derailed the rest of his agenda,” said Matt Bennett, senior vice president for public affairs and a co-founder of the centrist-Democratic think tank, Third Way. “Obama will have learned that lesson and won’t try to hit a grand slam that will solidify his base.”‘

This is what it’s come to: refusing to cut benefits to veterans, the elderly and the sick in order to solve a non-existent problem is considered giving a “gift” to the base. That’s a sad comment on our alleged victory on November 6th.

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General indiscretions

by digby

Wait, what?

The FBI agent who started the case was a friend of Jill Kelley, the Tampa woman who received harassing, anonymous emails that led to the probe, according to officials. Ms. Kelley, a volunteer who organizes social events for military personnel in the Tampa area, complained in May about the emails to a friend who is an FBI agent. That agent referred it to a cyber crimes unit, which opened an investigation.

However, supervisors soon became concerned that the initial agent might have grown obsessed with the matter, and prohibited him from any role in the investigation, according to the officials.

The FBI officials found that he had sent shirtless pictures of himself to Ms. Kelley, according to the people familiar with the probe.

What in the hell is it with all these men sending “sexy” pictures of themselves to strange women? Has this exhibitionist streak always been a lot more prevalent than I knew and they just didn’t have an outlet? WTH?

Anyway, the shirtless stud also turns out to be a wingnut, or rather a man who has a “worldview” that made him suspect “a politically motivated cover-up to protect
President Obama. The agent alerted Eric Cantor, the House majority
leader, who called the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, on Oct.
31 to tell him of the agent’s concerns.”

And how about this, from everybody’s favorite general— a man considered so above reproach that the congress actually voted to condemn an outside political group for using the word “betray – us” in the same breath as the great man:

According to the Wall Street Journal, Petraeus and Broadwell used pseudonyms to set up separate Gmail accounts which they used to communicate in secret. Their trove of “sexually explicit emails” were discovered only by accident after Jill Kelley, an acquaintance of Petraeus, complained that she was receiving threatening emails, which led FBI investigators to Broadwell’s account and, in turn, to her X-rated messages detailing the affair.

The Journal explains:

FBI agents and federal prosecutors used the information as probable cause to seek a warrant to monitor Ms. Broadwell’s email accounts.
They learned that Ms. Broadwell and Mr. Petraeus had set up private Gmail accounts to use for their communications, which included explicit details of a sexual nature, according to U.S. officials. But because Mr. Petraeus used a pseudonym, agents doing the monitoring didn’t immediately uncover that he was the one communicating with Ms. Broadwell.

Oh yeah, this was the guy who was head of the most powerful spy agency in the world.

Am I the only one who feels as if the world is getting a little bit too surreal these days?

Update: Wow. I remember a conversation with Chris Hayes about the fact that the military is the last elite institution that seems to be unaffected by the failure of the meritocracy. Ooops:

In a new twist to the Gen. David Petraeus sex scandal, the Pentagon said Tuesday that the top American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John Allen, is under investigation for alleged “inappropriate communications” with a woman who is said to have received threatening emails from Paula Broadwell, the woman with whom Petraeus had an extramarital affair.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said in a written statement issued to reporters aboard his aircraft, en route from Honolulu to Perth, Australia, that the FBI referred the matter to the Pentagon on Sunday.

I should probably make clear that I could not care less who these Generals are sleeping with. It’s a bit odd that the head of the CIA would be dumb enough to leave a paper trail, but whatever. What I am finding interesting is the sudden acknowledgement of a zone of privacy among conservatives who love to control women’s reproduction and sexuality and had a field day back in the 90s with a certain president’s indiscretions. I’d like to think they are evolving …

(And yes, I understand that the military has a rule against “adultery” but I think it’s stupid.)

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California’s supermajority: use it or lose it

by Robert Cruickshank

[Note: This piece originally appeared on Calitics. I am reposting it in its entirety here with the permission of its author, as I agree with every word. — DA]

Democratic control of the California State Legislature is nothing new. Since 1970 Democrats have dominated the Capitol, with Republicans having only a narrow majority in the Assembly for a short 2-year period in the 1990s and never having control of the Senate in that time. But since 1978, Democratic majorities have been essentially meaningless. Proposition 13 required a 2/3 vote of the Legislature to raise taxes, a conservative attempt to seize power they had failed to win at the ballot box. In November 2012, Democrats finally won the 2/3 majority in the Legislature that had been so close in recent years.

The question on everyone’s mind is now “what will Democrats do with their new power?” To hear California’s punditocracy tell it, Democrats shouldn’t do much of anything. These pundits, who have been slow to grasp the massive changes in California politics that have unfolded over the last few years, argue that Democrats should be ultra-cautious and resist attempts to make big changes. Larry Gerston provides a classic example of the genre:

Still two facts are clear. First, the Democrats need to be careful not to go so far that they upset those who put them in this exalted position. And second, the Democrats should not take fellow Democrat Jerry Brown for granted as an automatic ally, given Brown’s penchant to not raise any taxes without voter approval.

Gerston, like the other pundits, completely misreads the situation. The only way Democrats can upset those who put them in this exalted position is to be hesitant and timid. As recent history shows, Democratic supermajorities always evaporate when they aren’t used to solve deeper problems.

California Democrats have a supermajority because the new electorate has killed off the Republican Party, just as I said it would two years ago, and put Democrats in power to renew the California Dream by using government to rebuild social democracy and the prosperity it creates. Democrats didn’t win because moderates swung their way, they won the same way President Obama won – by cranking out the progressive electorate to overwhelm the remnants of conservative California.

Here’s the key: For Democrats to hold these new seats, they have to keep that base happy and engaged in politics. If they disappoint that base, if they fail to solve the problems of that base, those voters won’t turn out in big numbers in 2014 and Democrats will guarantee they will lose the supermajority they finally won.

These pundits, almost all of them white men like me, do not understand this new situation. They’re locked into the old mentality of politics, which held that majorities were won by getting enough moderate white support. Those days are over. Here in 21st century California, you win and keep power by engaging, empowering, and improving the lives of a diverse, progressive majority.

History proves this theory. In 2006 and 2008, Democrats won two big national elections, seizing first the Congress and then the White House. Obama’s 2008 victory brought with it a Democratic supermajority in the Senate, finally reaching the crucial 60 vote threshold that had long eluded Democrats.

But instead of using this majority to solve the pressing problems facing the country, Democrats took a too-cautious approach. They passed a convoluted health care reform bill that few understood and that didn’t excite the base. The February 2009 stimulus was good, if too small, but it wasn’t followed up with any systematic job creation efforts. Immigration reform went nowhere. Labor unions and environmentalists sat and watched as their key legislative goals were abandoned. LGBT rights sat on the back burner until activists forced it to the top of the agenda on the eve of the 2010 elections.

The result was that in 2010, the electorate that won the 2006 and 2008 elections for the Democrats stayed home – and Democrats lost the House of Representatives as a result. In 2012, that electorate returned, and Republicans were dealt a smashing defeat.

A similar phenomenon recently took place in a West Coast legislature. In 2006 and 2008, Democrats won 2/3 majorities in Washington State. Just as in Congress, however, Democrats failed to use that majority to solve major problems. Democratic leaders in Olympia chose the path of caution, worried that they would lose the swing seats if they moved too boldly to address the state’s revenue crisis, create jobs, or improve schools. But because of that caution, Washington State Democrats failed to reward their electorate, and lost that supermajority in 2010 anyway.

Political reality, then, makes it absolutely clear that Democrats need to deliver meaningful improvements to people’s daily lives if they are going to keep their supermajority. However, that doesn’t mean they should just pass whatever they want. Legislators should assume any tax increase or substantial policy action will be put on the ballot for a referendum by wealthy conservatives. Democratic leaders will need to work hand-in-hand with California’s progressive movement to determine and then implement a reform agenda over the next two years. Only by a coordinated effort will that reform agenda withstand the certain counterrevolution from the rich that would come at the November 2014 ballot.

What should that agenda look like? Here are just a few ideas:

• Make it even easier to vote. Online voter registration was a big key to the Democratic victories this fall, but there’s still a lot of work to be done to make it easier for people to express their democratic rights. Same day registration is a good place to start.
• Bring even more revenue to the schools. Even with the passage of Prop 30, there’s still a lot of work to do to fix education. As Scott Lay of the Community College League pointed out on Twitter late last week, Prop 30 brings in $200 million for community colleges – but they’ve faced $800 million in cuts since 2008. Prop 30 will help California’s public schools, but they’ve been underfunded since 1978 and the new revenue won’t fully fix that problem. What’s the answer – an oil severance tax? More closed loopholes, something voters showed they’d support by passing Prop 39? More taxes on the rich? Whatever the means, California’s schools still need help.
• Make sure every Californian gets good health care. There’s no excuse now for not passing single-payer, nor is there any excuse for even something as simple as rate regulation for the current private insurers. Health care in California took a lot of cuts since 2007, and the federal health care bill won’t fully reverse those problems. Vermont is moving toward a single-payer system. California should join them.
• Do something to create jobs. Recovery is still slow in California, it’s uneven, and wages aren’t rising as fast as they should. A comprehensive job creation strategy, likely involving direct government hiring, should be high on the agenda. Matching this with clean energy would be a good start. Infrastructure repair makes sense too. And while they’re at it, a solution to the ongoing foreclosure crisis would be especially wise from both an economic and a political perspective.
• Fix the Constitution. California’s constitution has serious problems that get in the way of effective government. The Democratic supermajority can’t amend the constitution itself, but it can propose new amendments without having to raise a dime for signature gathering to do so. Well-funded neoliberal groups like California Backward, whose Prop 31 got clobbered, and Nicholas Berggruen’s Think Long group, are likely to come up with their own fixes. Democrats should preempt them with sensible changes.

What might those look like? Fixing Prop 13 would be a good start – a split roll, perhaps? Eliminating the 2/3 rule for local tax revenue is probably a more likely win than eliminating the 2/3 rule for the legislature, and with transportation measures in LA and Alameda counties “failing” even with 64% support, the need for a fix is clear. Dems could even be bold and abolish the useless State Senate and tripling the size of the Assembly. And a fix to the initiative process, whatever that might be, would be especially appropriate after the Munger insanity this year.

That’s a brief list, and I’m sure there’s a lot more that can and should be listed. But the point here is that unless California’s Democratic supermajority uses its power to fix some of the state’s deeper problems, they absolutely will lose that supermajority in 2014.

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