Month: November 2012

Bravo to Rand Paul

by David Atkins

Rand Paul is doing his part to quash the Grand Bargain:

While some Republicans have indicated they may break their no-tax-hike pledge, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is not among them:

“I made a pledge to the people of Kentucky that I’m not raising taxes. I took a pledge. I signed a statement, an oath that I wouldn’t raise taxes, and I’m going to adhere to it,” Sen. Paul told Fox New’s Greta Van Susteren Monday night.

In fact, if Paul had his way, he says he’d lower taxes:

“I think you should balance budgets, not spend more than comes in, and I think you should lower taxes, not raise taxes. In fact, if you want to stimulate the economy, I’m for cutting tax revenues. All these Republicans who want to give up their taxpayer pledge and raise taxes, I’m the opposite. I want to lower taxes because that’s how we’d get actually more economic growth and maybe more revenue, if you cut tax rates.

One mark of a moron is not to know a good deal when they see one. So thank goodness for morons like Rand Paul, the kind of people who still think tax cuts for the rich pay for themselves and don’t realize that this is their one big chance to cut Medicaid and Medicare in exchange for easily replaceable tip money for the rich, and blame it on the Democrats to boot.

The Grand Bargain would be much more likely without such useful idiots, and that would be awful. So bravo to you, Rand Paul. Keep that venal stupidity coming all the way through the end of the lame duck session, and best of luck with the 2016 GOP nomination.

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And they don’t even have to be virgins

by digby

Here’s a CNBC celebrity having a fit when Raul Grijalva suggests that Medicare shouldn’t be cut:

She seemed to be having a very hard time controlling herself.

Meanwhile, let’s have a little fact check, shall we? The Medicare cuts they are anticipating would likely affect people younger than the current crop of allegedly wealthy baby boomers.

And how are those damned boomers really doing anyway?

Americans nearing retirement age have suffered disproportionately after the financial crisis: along with the declining value of their homes, which were intended to cushion their final years, their incomes have fallen sharply.

The typical household income for people age 55 to 64 years old is almost 10 percent less in today’s dollars than it was when the recovery officially began three years ago, according to a new report from Sentier Research, a data analysis company that specializes in demographic and income data.

And this:

According to the Social Security Administration, the average worker’s Social Security income for current retirees is about $1,233 per month, and the average spouse’s income is $610 per month, for a total of $1,843 per month…

The median amount of annual income in 2010 is $42,700 for families headed by a person age 65 to 74 and $29,100 for households headed by someone age 75 and over. One important reason for the large difference between these two age groups is that the 65-to-74 age group includes many households where one or more people still work, while the age 75 and over household is probably fully retired.

Yeah, they’re all living large all right.

But the angry celebrity TV hostess said they should be means tested, by which I assume only those at the very top would be out of the program. The problem is that all the wealth in this country now belongs to a very tiny group of people. There just isn’t much money in means testing those who can truly afford it. So, we’d have to means test anyone who isn’t living in dire poverty. Which would put them in dire poverty. But then, that’s their problem, right? They should have gotten rich when they had the chance.

But all of that hardly matters. Failing to cut Medicare is upsetting the “Market” and SACRIFICES MUST BE MADE:

This is all faith based nonsense as that angry celebrity hostess proved when she nervously pointed to the stock market ticker and implied that Raul Grijalva even talking about going over the fiscal cliff was making the Market Gods angry. The sooner we recognize that the better.

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Median income lowest since 1969, so let’s cut healthcare for poor people

by David Atkins

Natasha Lennard at Salon shows with data what we all know is true: the middle class is suffering its worst economics in over forty years:

New research from NYU economics professor Edward Wolff, flagged by Think Progress, found that the median wealth of American households plummeted over the years 2007 to 2010, and by 2010 was at its lowest level since 1969. Meanwhile, the late 2000′s saw a high rise inequality: while the median wealth fell, the top 1 percent increased their wealth by 71 percent between 2007 and 2010 (a statistic almost ready-made for an Occupy Wall Street banner).

Wolff argues that while “the debt of the middle class exploded from 1983 to 2007, already creating a very fragile middle class in the United States… their position deteriorated even more over the ‘Great Recession.’” His research also detailed how the household wealth of racial minorities and young people dropped to an even greater extent in the wake of the housing bubble’s burst, when house prices collapsed…

[S]tudies of income inequality also support Wolff’s pessimistic account of growing inequality: they’ve found income inequality has risen in almost every state over the last 30 years and that the middle class has just suffered its ‘worst decade in modern history.’”

Now, it’s certainly true that we live in a brave new world that structurally advantages the wealthy: labor is global and expendable, jobs are increasingly mechanized, the world is flattened, vertical integration and economies of scale are commonplace. But as Hacker and Pierson persuasively argue, this is also a product of intentional public policy, including (as I have frequently argued) an obsession with inflating assets over wages.

But regardless of the causes, to even think about slashing healthcare for the poor and elderly at times like this is morally insane. A society so economically sick as to drag middle class wages to a 40-year-low while giving all the rewards to the already wealthy is just as politically sick if it throws the sick, poor and elderly onto the bonfire in a sacrifice to the Bond Vigilantes and Confidence Fairies.

That a supposedly “Democratic” Administration is considering doing this in exchange for a few tax increases the wealthy will barely notice makes it even worse.

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Today’s Fiscal Flim Flam update

by digby

Yesterday the White House met with business leaders and the president of the Chamber of Commerce so I guess this was “get the left onboard” day since they trotted out Dick Durbin (an odd choice considering his total cave on Simpson-Bowles) and a big meeting with all the important unions and assorted lefty groups.

Dday has the whole story, which basically says that Social Security is off the table (which we knew was likely for months) and Durbin danced around the issues of medicare and medicaid leaving more questions than answers.

I think dday’s conclusion gets it just right:

Overall, Durbin tried to put a happy face on a grand bargain deal expressly to encourage the Professional Left in DC. Many of them came out of a meeting at the White House encouraged by the Democratic lineas well. I think there’s a serious case of “trust but verify” needed here. And it should be noted that this is where the party is at before one minute of negotiation with the other side.

Right. But then the president has been very explicit in his desire to have a “balanced approach” where he rich are asked to “pay a little bit more” so they didn’t have much to work with unless they were very willing to go over the cliff (which, unlike others, I believe they are terrified of actually doing.)

Ryan Grim reports that Durbin tried to clarify his remarks, but it’s still unclear to me what specifically they’re talking about:

“What I’m saying is, what I’m talking about now is the immediate — what takes us to the end of the year to avoid the fiscal cliff,” he said, adding that Medicare and Medicaid should not be part of those talks. But, he said, “When you’re talking about long-term deficit reduction, $4 trillion worth, entitlement reform needs to be part of it.”

Social Security, too?

“No. Social Security you take off the table and put in a separate commission,” Durbin said.

If David Corn is any indication of what the liberal establishment thinks about this, the necessity of making a “deal” is so paramount that the crazy hippies are just going to have to be willing to “give something up” on entitlements in order to make it happen. On Martin Bashir’s show earlier, he seemed not to understand that unlike the whining billionaires, we crazy hippies aren’t screaming because we have to give something up. It’s not personal, fercryingoutloud. We’re screaming because vulnerable people who cannot afford to have the slightest bit of their meager benefits slashed without dire consequences are being asked to put their “skin in the game” with plutocrats for whom there will be no consequences at all. This amount of money is insignificant to them. That’s not a good deal by any definition. Exhorting the left to “give something up” is telling us to make the weakest members of society suffer in exchange for nothing — and for what? A terrible deal to solve a phony “crisis” that doesn’t need solving? This is crazy talk, particularly since the alleged crisis that needs solving will be magically fixed if they don’t make a deal!

This isn’t really a poker game, guys. The stakes aren’t abstract numbers on a computer model. These are real human beings being used by politicians in a beltway power play. And the losers in this game are not going to be beltway celebrities or Senators or members of the Chamber of Commerce, no matter what happens.

Update: Greg Sargent spoke with some of the people in the meeting today and they are encouraged.

Update II:  Oh hell. 

And from what I hear, some people in that meeting today are not so sanguine about the possible cuts.

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The (political) war without end

by digby

As we watch the wrangling over whether and how to cut entitlements, you might find this conversation between Harold Pollack and Paul Starr on the history and future of Obama care to be enlightening.

Here’s a little sample:

Pollack: I assume you are relieved by the election. But I take it that you are pretty concerned moving forward. What do you see as the two or three biggest challenges between now and 2014, when the exchanges officially are slated to kick in?

Starr: The biggest challenges before 2014? In the fall of 2013, open enrollment is supposed to begin for the insurance exchanges. Yet according to Ron Pollack of Families USA, a recent poll by Celinda Lake showed that 78 percent of the uninsured are unaware of the new opportunities for coverage under the law.

Moreover, the legislation did not provide any funds for public education, and the 30 or so state governments controlled by Republicans aren’t going to spend money to educate the public about the exchanges. So there is a significant possibility that the number of people insured through the exchanges will fall substantially short of projections.

In addition, it’s not clear yet whether the federal government will have the capacity to launch a federal exchange successfully. It would be one thing if a federal exchange had been planned from the beginning; it’s a different matter when states decide to leave it to the federal government with less than a year before open enrollment, and without a specific appropriation for a federal exchange. How this is going to work is at least unclear.

And then there’s the likelihood that many states will not carry out the Medicaid expansion, at least not to start with.

The whole thing is quite interesting (and not too long) but I think this observation is key:

Starr: Health care is so large a part of the federal government that presidents cannot avoid the issue. But if the ACA fails, will another Democratic president attempt to achieve universal coverage a different way? I’m not sure.

It depends how bad things get. If the Republicans had won the election, repealed the ACA, and block-granted Medicaid under the formula that Paul Ryan favored, we’d be looking at 60-70 million uninsured. That still might happen after 2016, and it might prompt yet another effort. This battle is going to be with us a long time.

We’re still fighting them on the New Deal programs and they were conceived nearly 80 years ago. I can’t imagine that the right is going to stop attacking health care reform and the complacency of many on the left about this continues to astonish me. The idea that the Republicans will not only give up on repeal but allow the Democrats to add to the program as needed (which many ACA advocates promised would happen) has always struck me as a utopian view of current American politics. What happened in the past is not a good guideline for an era of extreme polarization and an ideologically rigid opposition. These things were very hard to do even in a time of liberal consensus.

But we live in hope. What else have we got?

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Illegitimate presidency

by digby

I’m fairly sure that within a short period of time a large number of Americans will truly believe that the 2012 election was stolen through voter fraud. Considering all the hype before hand and the fact that they had convinced themselves they had it won, I suppose it was inevitable.

But stories like this are starting to crop up all over the place:

Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R) told a radio host he completely agreed with her assertion that investigations are needed to determine why President Obama lost “every one” of the states with photo identification requirements for voting, yet won re-election. Cuccinelli, who has lost most of the major legal cases he has brought since taking office in 2010, told the host she was “preaching to the choir.”

I know it’s hard to believe they would actually be that gullible, but consider that 30% of Republicans believe Obama is a practicing Muslim. Clearly, millions of them will believe anything.

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Propagandists only need apply

by digby

We often talk about how the media is driven by pre-established narratives and facts are assembled to validate it. Here we have a case in which they literally put it in the job description:

Cox Media Group, the parent company of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, plans to launch an “independent (nonpartisan), anti-propaganda” national news website for conservative audiences that is “rooted in the South away from the right and left coasts.”
[…]
From the editor’s ad:

He or she will be the face of the publication on TV/radio talk shows and in the public arena. This editor will set the voice and tone of the publication and drive national public conversation. This editor will mentor a small team of editors working on the 24/7 news site and offer fans/readers instant insights with humor, intelligence and transparency. The editor must establish a strong ideological narrative and lead the editorial team to find stories that mirror or magnify it. This editor embodies the soul of the publication and will be responsible for setting and meeting overall product goals and launch milestones throughout 2013 and beyond.

It will, of course, be fair and balanced.

Elections may come and go but wingnut welfare is always there. But then it stands to reason there would be good money in a “movement” financed by CEOs and billionaires.

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This is all we’ve got

by David Atkins

For reference, this is the size of our planet compared to various stars, including our sun:

And here’s how this planet scales compared to the universe:

This little speck of ours, Sagan’s pale blue dot, is all we have. It’s our own common possession and our one common heritage. If relativistic mechanics holds up as a barrier, the solar system and maybe a few other stars are all we’ll ever have, and the challenges of terraforming anywhere else are enormous.

The idea that God cares what we do with our private parts, or who owns what particular parcels of land in this context is utterly ludicrous. There are likely millions of planets teeming with life more and less advanced than human beings. If we extinguish ourselves we’ll have no one but ourselves to blame, and nothing out there will care or miss us when we’re gone. We have the tools to destroy ourselves and most every other living thing on the planet. We’re already well on our way to getting there.

The world-destroying challenges we face are so enormous at this point that anyone who doesn’t get this concept loud and clear needs to be removed from every position of power. Every government that tries to limit human potential in the cause of some delusional neanderthal philosophy of selfishness or racial and sectarian dominance must suffer the fate of Ozymandias.

The stakes are too high to allow the stupidities of the past to prevent us from salvaging our future. This is our only home. We can’t allow the idiots to wreck the place.

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Plouffe lays out WH thinking on the “fiscal cliff”

by digby

If you are curious as to what the White House really thinks about the fiscal cliff, I’d have to guess that David Plouffe would know:

I urge you to watch that all the way through, it’s only three painful minutes. He lays it out in all its Village glory.

It would seem that the administration is still believing its own hype, even after all this time. They still believe they can end these pesky partisan battles for all time (or at least the next 20 years) with one Grand Bargain and then move on to curing cancer, reversing climate change and bringing peace to all mankind. The fact that Bill Clinton left a surplus just 12 years ago has apparently eluded them. And one can only assume that they’re so pleased with the untried Rube Goldberg contraption called Obamacare that they’ve decided we don’t really have much need for these creaky old single payer systems anymore.

This is called hubris and it’s mind boggling considering just how weak this economy is. Apparently, they believe that they won because everyone just loved the past four years, not because the Republicans have gone batshit insane.

It was somewhat stunning to find out that Fox and the Romney campaign were so caught up in the alternate reality they created that they didn’t believe they could lose the election. It would seem the Democrats have created one of their own.

Buzzflash wrote up the Plouffe comments:

Obama senior adviser David Plouffe predicted that the fiscal cliff negotiations are “going to get hairy” in the coming weeks, saying President Barack Obama is committed to achieving the elusive “big deal” on taxes and spending he and Speaker of the House John Boehner have tried to strike for more than 18 months.

In post-election remarks at the University of Delaware, Plouffe warned of “paralysis” if both parties remain beholden to their base, saying Obama is looking for a deal that sets the country on the right fiscal path for a 10- to 20-year period.

“The only way that gets done is for Republicans again to step back and get mercilessly criticized by Grover Norquist and the Right, and it means that Democrats are going to have to do some tough things on spending and entitlements that means that they’ll criticized on by their left,” Plouffe said at his alma mater in conversation with former McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt.

The senior White House adviser repeated Obama’s opposition to extending the Bush tax cuts on those earning more than $250,000 a year, but expressed openness to a tax reform deal that could potentially lower what the wealthy pay.

“What we also want to do is engage in a process of tax reform that would ultimately produce lower rates, even potentially for the wealthiest,” he said, referring to benefits from corporate tax reform.

Plouffe added that while the White House wants to engage in comprehensive tax reform, they know they must also “carefully” address the “chief drivers of our deficit”: Medicare and Medicaid.

And then we’ll all live happily ever after.

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Atomic History

by digby

I’d just like to give a shout out to tonight’s episode of The Untold History of the United States on Showtime. It’ all good, but tonight’s episode about Hiroshima is especially mind-blowing (no pun intended.)

To get a sense of it, this interview with Oliver Stone by Greg Mitchell will clue you in. I find myself both depressed at how little things have change and impressed that the species has so far been mature enough not to drop one of those horrible bombs again. (Not that we haven’t done much that is equally reprehensible, mind you.)

Stone wrote on his Facebook page today:

For those of you protesting Untold History is not on free TV, the reason is that no free TV station would take it. It was extremely courageous of Showtime to put this on the air and we are happy that eventually it will get out to the broadest public and disseminated through the world, free, YouTube, piracy or whatever you like. This is a different kind of history.

Here is the first hour:

It’s a truly great series so far, highly recommended.

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