Month: December 2012

Preparing for Uncle Harry

by digby

When your rich wingnut uncle Harry starts going on about “entitlements” over egg nog today, bring out Dean Baker to explain it to him,  just as he explained it to Fareed Zakaria:

In 1900, 1 in 25 Americans was over the age of 65. In 2030, just 18 years from now, 1 in 5 Americans will be over 65. We will be a nation that looks like Florida. Because we have a large array of programs that provide guaranteed benefits to the elderly, this has huge budgetary implications. In 1960 there were about five working Americans for every retiree. By 2025, there will be just over two workers per retiree. In 1975 Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid made up 25% of federal spending. Today they add up to a whopping 40%. And within a decade, these programs will take up over half of all federal outlays.”

Yes, the facts are hard to dispute. That is why those of us on “the American Left” try to use them wherever possible. As Zakaria points out, apparently without noticing, we have already seen most of this aging disaster story. As he says, in 1960 there were about five working Americans for every retiree. Currently the number is less than three. It is projected to fall to around 2 workers per retiree by 2030 or “just over two” if we prefer Zakaria’s 2025 date. And the big three programs grew from 25 percent of federal spending to 40 percent between 1975 to 2010, they are projected to rise another 10 percentage points in a decade.

Apparently Zakaria missed it, but this sharp decline in the ratio of workers to retirees did not prevent us on average from enjoying a substantial rise in living standards over this period. Of course the gains were not evenly distributed because of policies that redistributed income to people like Peter Peterson and his friends in the Campaign to Fix the debt (e.g. trade policy, anti-union policies, deregulation of the financial sector — the fuller story is available here). However per capita after-tax income is more than twice as high today as it was in 1960, in spite of the scourge of a growing elderly population.

The reality known by arithmetic fans everywhere is that even modest gains in productivity growth swamp the impact of demographics. Here is the story for the years from 2012 to 2035, the peak stress of the baby boomers retirement.

Note that even in the most pessimistic productivity story, the slowest rate of productivity growth of the post-war era, the impact of productivity in raising living standards is more than three times as large as the impact of demographics in reducing them. Furthermore, this takes 2035 as an endpoint. After that year there is little projected change in demographics for the rest of the century whereas productivity will continue to grow.

Of course it is worth noting that our broken health care system can impose a serious burden on the economy. We already pay more than twice as much per person for our health care as do people in any other wealthy country with little to show for it in terms of outcomes. If the gap rises to a factor of three or four to one as some projections show, then it will impose a serious problem for the budget and the economy. However the answer is to fix our health care system, not to get angry at people for growing old.

The American Left is very willing to face the facts and look at the arithmetic. Unfortunately Mr. Zakaria and his editors at Time Magazine don’t have the same interest.

And when your smartass young business school nephew comes at you with the patented Peterson Institute generational warfare rap about the selfish baby boomers stealing the future, try this one:

[T]he cohorts between the ages of 55 to 64 … (Wealth typically peaks in these years, so these people are unlikely to have more wealth when they cross age 65.) The median wealth for this group was reported as $162,000… if they were to use this wealth to buy an annuity at age 65, it would be sufficient to get them an annuity of roughly $10,000 a year or just over $800 a month. This would supplement Social Security income that comes to less than $1,200 a month for a typical worker. The monthly premium for Medicare Part B is $100, which would leave $1,100 from a monthly Social Security check for a typical retiree.

Note that this calculation assumes that they have no equity in their home so they would either being paying rent or still paying off a mortgage out of this money. It is also worth remembering that the Medicare premium is projected to rise considerably more than the cost of living each year. This means that as retirees age, rising Medicare premiums will be reducing the buying power of their Social Security check each year. And this is the median; half of all seniors will have less income than this to support themselves.

This is the group that the Very Serious People in Washington want to target for their deficit reduction. While the Very Serious People debate whether people who earn $250,000 a year are actually rich when it comes to restoring the tax rates of the 1990s, they somehow think that seniors with incomes under $30,000 a year must sacrifice to balance the budget. There is a logic here, but it ain’t pretty.

I hope you are lucky enough not to have to have this conversation today. Life is short and it’s important to just enjoy your family, friends and leisure time if you can. But just in case one of the inevitable blowhards in your life decides to make an issue out of it, you’ll be prepared …

Dank u, Sinterklaasje

And yeah, the tradition of “Black Pete” is hideously racist and they should get rid of it:

[Sinterklaasje] used to be accompanied by a jester symbolising the devil. But in the mid-1800s, when the Dutch were major players in the global slave trade, this changed.

Nice.

Love one another and cherish your time together

by David Atkins

Less than 36 hours ago my beloved cockatiel Tiki suddenly passed away with almost no warning after 10 years of devoted companionship. My wife and I are committed bird people and watch them very carefully for signs of illness. So we were disturbed and surprised to see that after a normal-seeming day and evening with us, Tiki suddenly showed acute respiratory distress at around 2am. We took her to the local emergency clinic, but there was nothing they could do and directed us to a clinic with better facilities and bird specialists half an hour away. Tiki didn’t make it more than ten minutes sitting in my lap as I drove before she passed. Our best guess is some sort of heart failure, but we just don’t know.

I’m in shock and grief right now, happy to be with loved ones, but stunned and deeply depressed at her loss. The holidays and my life will never be the same without her.

Remember everyone: bad things can happen to cherished companions both animal and human at any time, and the end can come quite suddenly. Take precautions, make sure to enjoy your time together as much as possible, and cherish every moment you have with one another. Nothing else is more important, and that is in large part what the holidays are all about.

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Holiday Fundraiser Greatest Hits: The Eunuch Caucus

by digby

Merry Christmas Eve everyone. Thank you so much for your support for this year’s holiday fundraiser. If you’re a last minute Christmas shopper, this one’s easy:

A few years back I wrote the following post on the opening day of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing’s on the FISA controversy. People found it amusing because they assumed at first glance at the title that I was speaking of the Democrats. We were all feeling terrible frustration about the first year of President Bush’s second term and the Democrats’ ongoing inability to do anything to stop it.  My point of view was that it wasn’t the Democrats who were weak, it was the Republican congress which bent over backwards to accommodate the president’s wishes, despite the fact that his agenda wasn’t exactly good for them or the institution — or the country.

Considering what’s happening now, I thought it was an interesting blast from the past:

Monday, February 06, 2006

The Eunuch Caucus

by digby 

I’ve been digesting this morning’s hearings and I am dumbstruck by the totality of the Republicans’ abdication of their duty. These men who spent years running on Madisonian principles (“The essence of government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse”) now argue without any sense of irony or embarrassment that Republican Senators are nothing more than eunuchs in President Bush’s political harem. They have voluntarily rendered the congress of the United States impotent to his power.  

I’ve watched this invertebrate GOP caucus since 2000 as they submitted themselves to this lawless administration again and again, shredding every bit of self respect, every figment of institutional pride, every duty to the constitution. The look in their eyes, which is somehow interpreted as strong and defiant by the equally servile media, is actually a window to empty little men who have given up their manhood to oblige their master. The only reward they seek is unfettered access to the taxpayers money for their own use.  

We are looking at fifty-five of the most powerful people in the country. Collectively the Republican Senators represent almost a hundred and fifty million citizens. And they have allowed a callow little boy like George W. Bush along with his grey Eminences Karl Rove and Dick Cheney to strip them of their consciences, their principles and their constitutional obligations. What sad little creatures, cowardly and subservient, unctuously bowing and scraping before Karl Rove the man who holds their (purse) strings and dances them around the halls of congress singing tributes to their own irrelevance at the top of their lungs. How pathetic they are.  

Barry Goldwater is rolling over in his grave. 

Update: Oh, and don’t get excited about Huckleberry Graham’s “tough” questions. This is his schtick. Going all the way back to the impeachment hearings, he has done this. He hems and haws in his cornpone way how he’s “troubled” by one thing or another until he finally “decides” after much “deliberation” that the Republican line is correct after all and he has no choice but to endorse it. 

Merry Christmas everyone

by digby

I just spent an hour with a five year old. No human being could possibly ever be as excited about anything as she is right now. I hadn’t realized until tonight that this may be the peak experience of our lives. No wonder Christmas has such a hold on us.

Here’s a beautiful Christmas song by a nonbeliever who, like me, loves it nonetheless:

Merry Christmas to you and yours.

Courtesy my pal the freewayblogger.

Doomsday celebrities

by digby

I’ve been watching TV sporadically today but every time I tune in it’s yet another voice of doom predicting the end of the world if “the grown-ups” don’t come together to save us from the fiscal cliff. These people inevitably also claim that the deficits are killing us and must be fixed — or it will be the end of the world. Either they don’t know that going over the fiscal cliff will go a long way toward closing this deadly deficit they fear so much or they just want to ensure that the deficit is closed on the backs of the poor, the old and the sick. I’ll let you decide if these people are really stupid or just selfish and cruel.

In case you needed something to really get your blood pressure up on Christmas Eve, take a look at what “centrist” David Gergen has to say about it:

With time rapidly running out, efforts have collapsed to reach a major agreement on federal spending and taxes before year’s end, and both Congress and President are leaving town for the holidays. At best, they will return next week and construct a small bridge over the “fiscal cliff”; at worst, they won’t. But who knows?

And that’s a big part of the problem — no one can be confident that our national leaders are still capable of governing responsibly. And in the process, they are putting both our economy and our international reputation at risk.

As the blame game heats up, Republicans are sure to pay the biggest price with the public. It was bad enough that they lost the message fight, letting themselves be painted as protectors of the wealthy. But it was inexcusable when they revolted against House Speaker John Boehner in his search for a way forward: that only reinforced a narrative that the Grand Old Party has fallen hostage to its right wing — a narrative that already exacted a huge price in the fall elections.

President Obama is certainly not blameless in these financial talks. Early on, he overplayed his hand, alienating rank-and-file Republicans. Like Boehner, he has been more accommodating recently, offering concessions on taxes and entitlement spending that narrowed the negotiating gap between the parties, even as his leftward allies fretted.

Still, Boehner has a point in arguing that what Obama now has on the table comes nowhere close to what the he was advocating in the election season: a ratio of 2.5 dollars in spending cuts to 1.0 dollars in tax increases.

The buck stops on the President’s desk, so that ordinarily one would expect him to take the lead in these final days before January 1. For reasons that are still unclear, he instead chose in his press statement late Friday to toss responsibility for negotiations next week into the laps of Congressional leaders.

Brilliant. Yes, it’s true that the Republicans are a little bit wacky but that’s not the real problem. The roadblock is that the president just has not agreed to hurt enough people for the elite centrist pundit’s taste. And that’s after the president agreed to throw Social Security on the pyre despite the fact that Social Security contributes nothing to this allegedly deadly deficit.

I am no fan of the Tea Party. But I don’t think they are the real problem. They are, after all, doing what their voters want them to do, however ill-advised that might be. No, our real problem is David Gergen and his ilk.

Here’s Paul Krugman from earlier today:

[V]ery few of the prophets of fiscal doom have acknowledged the failure of their prophecies to come true so far. And those who have admitted surprise seem more annoyed than chastened. For example, back in 2010 Alan Greenspan — who is, for some reason, still treated as an authority figure — conceded that despite large budget deficits, “inflation and long-term interest rates, the typical symptoms of fiscal excess, have remained remarkably subdued.” But he went on to declare, “This is regrettable, because it is fostering a sense of complacency.” How dare reality not validate my fears!

Regular readers know that I and other economists argued from the beginning that these dire warnings of fiscal catastrophe were all wrong, that budget deficits won’t cause soaring interest rates as long as the economy is depressed — and that the biggest risk to the economy is that we might try to slash the deficit too soon. And surely that point of view has been strongly validated by events.

The key thing we need to understand, however, is that the prophets of fiscal disaster, no matter how respectable they may seem, are at this point effectively members of a doomsday cult. They are emotionally and professionally committed to the belief that fiscal crisis lurks just around the corner, and they will hold to their belief no matter how many corners we turn without encountering that crisis.

So we cannot and will not persuade these people to reconsider their views in the light of the evidence. All we can do is stop paying attention. It’s going to be difficult, because many members of the deficit cult seem highly respectable. But they’ve been hugely, absurdly wrong for years on end, and it’s time to stop taking them seriously.

That goes for the hand-wringing Villagers who love to prescribe painful cuts to vital services while pretending they are among those who will “sacrifice” as well.

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Bad Christmas Movies

by digby

Now that a lot of people have instant download, I thought this would be a good opportunity to run one of Dennis Hartley’s Greatest Hits with some recommendations for some shall we say, offbeat Christmas Movies for your misanthropes and Scrooges out there (who me?)  at least some of which you should be able to download on Amazon or Netflix.

Somewhat naughty and not so nice

By Dennis Hartley

Not the Coca-Cola Santa: Rare Exports

It’s official. I now have a new favorite Christmas movie. John Carpenter’s The Thing meets Miracle on 34th St. in Finnish writer-director Jalmari Helander’s Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, a wickedly clever Yule story that spices up the usual holiday family movie recipe by folding in generous dollops of sci-fi, horror, and Norse legend. The twist here is that our protagonist, a young boy named Pietari (Onni Tommila) not only believes that Santa Claus is, in fact, real, but that he is buried just beyond the back 40 of his dad’s reindeer ranch, where some American archeologists are excavating a mysterious promontory. After bizarre and troubling events begin to plague the sleepy hamlet where Pietari lives, it looks that Santa may have just been “resting”. And if this is the mythical Santa Pietari suspects, then he is more Balrog than eggnog…and is best left undisturbed.

The director also works a sly anti-consumerist polemic into his narrative. Pietra’s dad (Jorma Tommila) and his fellow reindeer hunters-who are more chagrinned that the saturnine Santa is threatening their livelihood by slaughtering all the reindeer than by the fact that he is also methodically kidnapping the village children and spiriting them away to an undisclosed location, manage to capture him, and then demand a “ransom” from the corporate weasel who, for his own nefarious reasons, is funding the archeological dig. In the meantime, a legion of Santa’s nasty little “helpers” are running amuck and wreaking havoc. Pietari, the only one keeping a cool head, just wants to enjoy a nice quiet Christmas with dad-even if he has to transform into a midget version of Bruce Campbell in Army of Darkness to rescue the children (and save the farm, in a manner of speaking).

There’s nothing “cute” about this film, yet it’s by no means mean-spirited, either. It is an off-beat, darkly funny, and wholly original treat for moviegoers hungry for a fresh alternative to the 999th lifetime viewing of It’s a Wonderful Life or A Christmas Story. Speaking as someone who lived for many years within a day’s drive of the Arctic Circle, the film also perfectly captures the stark beauty of midwinter in the far Northern Hemisphere; especially that uniquely dichotomous sense of both soothing tranquility and alien desolation that it can bring to one’s soul. And for god’s sake-let Santa rest in peace.

Holiday dispirited: Bad Santa , Female Trouble, The Ref, The Lion in Winter, The Rocking Horse Winner, Monty Python’s Life Of Brian, Go , Trading Places, Nightmare Before Christmas,Christmas On Mars, The Matador, The French Connection, The Curse of the Cat People, Tokyo Godfathers, Less Than Zero, In Bruges , Roger & Me, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians,Gremlins , Elves , Scrooged, Jack Frost (1997),You Better Watch Out, Silent Night, Deadly Night, Black Christmas.

Previous posts with related themes:

What Would Jesus Buy?

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Christmas with the Kochs

by digby

Apparently, I missed these lovely Christmas cards from the Koch Brothers’ Americans For Prosperity:

Just look at all that sick imagery and misinformation working together in one big mess of right wing propaganda.

These are all supposed to be sent to political leaders who have indicated they’d be willing to raise taxes. Surprisingly they don’t include this fine fellow:

“I think it’s essential to be able to achieve spending reductions and maybe it’s going to require some tax increases,” he said. “We got to come close to balancing the budget, otherwise we’re in a terrible deep problem.”

That’s right. That’s David Koch.

When you read about the massive infighting at Freedomworks, you realize that the wingnut welfare industry is just as self-serving, corrupt and incompetent as American big business and Wall Street (and the Mitt Romney campaign.) Like them, the so-called experts turn out not to be so good at what they are supposedly so good at.

h/t to PR Watch

Gingerbread White House

by digby

It’s very beautiful. Bo’s a little bit out of scale — he seems to be the size of a small elephant.

But then he is a big boy.  A very, very cute big boy:

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And then, and then … nothing happens

by digby

I just want to congratulate Ryan Grim for writing the story that should be on the front page of every newspaper in the country but isn’t:

On Jan. 1, 2000, the world awoke to find that little had changed since the night before. After years of hype around what was then called Y2K — the fear that computer systems across the globe would collapse, unable to handle the year shifting from ’99 to ’00 — the date change turned out to be a momentous non-event.

Next week, the United States is in for much the same, after months of frantic hype about the economic disruption that awaits if Congress and the president fail to reach a deal and the federal government goes “over the fiscal cliff.”

The so-called fiscal cliff is a combination of automatic tax hikes and spending cuts scheduled to go into effect Jan. 1. But the agencies responsible for implementing those changes, including the IRS and the Pentagon, are well aware that congressional and White House negotiators will most likely come to some sort of deal within weeks or months — and so they are planning to carry on as usual, according to a broad review of private and public government plans.

In other words, there will be no cliff. There won’t even be a slope. Congress and the president can have their public and private dramas, but the government officials responsible for carrying out their eventual orders have seen this movie before, and they know how it ends.

He goes on to write about a number of agencies who have sent out memos saying they -plan to do … nothing.

Much like government workers, for the vast majority of the population, life on the other side of the cliff will be no different than life on this side. Those most likely to get hit, however, are the jobless, who would see unemployment benefits cut off. (They would be eligible for back benefits once a deal is cut.)

The most substantial fiscal cliff pain, then, will likely be felt by House Republicans. Indiana Rep. Dan Burton, a strongly conservative Republican, laid out on Thursday what has increasingly become conventional wisdom across party lines.

“If we go over the fiscal cliff, the president just comes back and says, ‘Okay, we’re going to give tax cuts to everybody under $250,000.’ Who’s going to vote against that? Everybody’ll vote for that. Everybody,” Burton told reporters in the Capitol. “Because it will be just a fait accompli. You won’t be voting on whether you’re going to do away with a tax cut, you’re going to be reimposing tax cuts for everybody under $250,000. So the Republicans are in an untenable situation.”

Uh, yeah. So why are Democrats pretending to be so panicked about this that they are “begrudgingly” agreeing to cut Social Security rather than have that happen?

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