Month: February 2013

A little trip down memory lane: why *is* the Village so shocked by the GOPs extremism?

by digby

Do you ever wonder what became of the Republicans who voted to impeach a two term president over inappropriate fellatio?  Howie looked it up:

No Democrats voted for removal and 8 Republican senators voted not guilty on at least one of the two articles. The only Republicans left in the Senate who voted to remove Bill Clinton from office are:

Miss McConnell (R-KY)
John McCain (R-AZ)
Jim Inhofe (R-OK)
Jeff Sessions (KKK-AL)
Pat Roberts (R-KS)
Mike Enzi (R-WY)
Mike Crapo (R-ID)
Thad Cochran (R-MS)
Orrin Hatch (R-UT)
Chuck Grassley (R-NE)

Below you’ll find a whole gaggle of former House Members, now in the Senate, who voted to impeach President Clinton. He isn’t in the Senate any longer, but Chuck Hagel (R-NE) also voted to remove Clinton from office on both counts. He’s up for some big job now.

Click over to see who they are. Nine of them are now Senators. And a whole bunch of others are in the GOP House leadership.

And yet, for some reason,the Villagers all act as if it’s a complete surprise that the Republican Party is composed of a bunch of nuts. Of course, the Villagers all led that nutty witch hunt, so they aren’t likely to see just how responsible they are for the extremism they enabled with that juvenile crusade. But they are.

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Ted Nugent is harmless by contrast

by David Atkins

The political universe is roiling with obsession today at Ted Nugent’s invite to the State of the Union. Greg Sargent provides a little perspective:

But really, this episode is significant for reasons that go well beyond Nugent. The key actor here who matters is Steve Stockman. The problem lies in all the over-the-top stuff GOP lawmakers say regularly that isn’t quite crazy enough to earn widespread condemnation, as Nugent’s quotes have, but are still whacked out enough to encourage an atmosphere that helps keep millions of GOP base voters sealed off from reality. The problem is the perpetual winking and nodding to The Crazy that is deemed marginally acceptable – the hints about creeping socialism, the claim that modest Obama executive actions amount to tyranny, the suggestions that Obama’s values are vaguely un-American and that Obama is transforming the country and the economy into something no longer recognizably American, and so on — more so than the glaringly awful stuff that gets the media refs to throw their flags.

As Jonathan Bernstein put it the other day, Republican lawmakers who flirt with this type of talk regularly are helping create an environment in which moderate Republicans are forever on the defensive and in fear of the base. If moderate Republicans want to change this, they will have to dial this stuff back.

Sargent is right, but I would go further. Neither Nugent nor Stockman have gotten anyone killed or hurt, except insofar as they’re part of the broader pro-gun movement. For all their big talk, they’re effectively harmless.

Not so harmless, on the other hand, are the very real cuts to Medicare and Social Security being espoused by Alan Simpson, Erskine Bowles, John Boehner and, yes, Barack Obama. Those are actually dangerous and will end up costing lives. Not harmless are the cuts to Medicaid and the WIC program, which will certainly cause death and injury to large numbers of people. The militarization of our police force, advocated by so many Very Serious People within the national security establishment, has already cost many lives. And, of course, the lack of action on climate change being enforced by all sorts of respectable types within both parties has already cost thousands of lives and will cost millions more.

In that context, not only is Ted Nugent a harmless buffoon, but so even is Steve Stockman to a certain degree. The Washington Consensus types love to clutch their pearls over the Sarah Palins, Ted Nugents and Todd Akins in the same breath that they tut-tut Paul Krugman, Bernie Sanders or Dennis Kucinich. But it’s not the right-wing buffoons who are hurting people. It’s the Consensus crowd that’s actually doing the damage.

Joe Scarborough is far more dangerous and will end up getting far more people killed than Ted Nugent ever dreamed of.

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Get ’em on the grid: the selfish case for immigration

by digby

On the subject of immigration, I have long said, “put them on the grid,” meaning that we need willing immigrants to join our system and contribute their dollars to our retirement programs. And they too will benefit from them when they get old. Two problems — one solution.

Matt Yglesias gives the more complicated case for why this is a good idea:

The problem a retired person faces is that while you can stockpile food, you can’t stockpile human labor. And yet every modern person’s consumption bundle consists primarily of services, and that’s especially true for elderly people who need a lot of health care services and other assistance. So you can’t just stockpile stuff for yourself, you need to stockpile a bunch of extra stuff that you can trade for labor in the future. For example, you might work and save and buy two houses. Then, when you’re old, you can live in one house and let someone else live in the second house in exchange for taking care of you. That strategy works great as long as the population is rising rapidly, in which case the ratio of able-bodied workers to houses will be high so you’ll be able to trade your spare house for lots of labor. But if the population is stagnant, your house isn’t so valuable. If the population is actually shrinking, then one house is only going to be tradeable for a little labor. You, personally, can ameliorate this by saving enough to have two or three spare houses, but if society attempted to do that systematically the problem would only get worse.

In the real world, of course, people save through more sophisticated instruments. But the same problem arises. Stockpiling financial assets only helps if future people are going to want to buy a lot of financial assets. If the rate of population growth slows, your private savings plan faces the exact same problem as a pay-as-you-go public pension scheme like Social Security. Fewer people around to pay payroll taxes means fewer people around to sell your financial assets to. You’re doomed.

What if people start having more children? It’s too late for that. Even if it happens, it’ll take decades for those babies to get through school and start earning enough money to want to buy financial assets. The only viable option, then, is to import adult human beings—immigrants—who’ll want houses to live in, who will expand the labor supply, and who will expand the demand for capital goods. This solution won’t work forever, since the trend toward population aging is global, but in the short term at least there are plenty of able-bodied adults who are eager to move here and work. Some of those able-bodied adults even have specialized skills in health care professions, and can directly increase the supply of the kind of labor that an aging America will need.

This is obviously about more than just getting your lawn mowed and picking your tomatoes. It’s an essential component of economic stability in a number of different ways, not the least of which is the fact that we’ll need their contribution of both labor and taxes. Get ’em on the grid. If they want to be Americans, we should welcome them. We actually need them more than they need us.

Update: Dean Baker disagrees about this

What is undoubtedly what readers of Matt Yglesias’ blogpost on immigration and retirement income are saying. Matt correctly notes that an economy cannot collectively save for a generation’s retirement in the sense of putting aside the goods and services that the generation will consume in retirement. His conclusion is that we need large numbers of new workers to support our current or soon to be retired population. This leads him to call for a much larger number of immigrants.

While we may want more immigrants, the need to support a larger retired population should not rank high on the list of reasons. According to the Social Security trustees projections, a more rapid pace of immigration will make little difference to the program’s finances. This is due to the fact that immigrants will also get benefits. Since they tend to work for lower pay during their working lifetime, and the program’s payout structure is highly progressive, the net gain from more immigrants is limited. Increasing the projected immigration level by 30 percent reduces the projected long-term shortfall by less than 10 percent.

On the other hand, suppose that real wages grow roughly in step with productivity. If we saw real wage growth of 1.5 percent annually, then the tax increase needed to meet the projected 75-year shortfall would be equal to 4.6 percent of projected wage growth over the next 30 years. Suppose we got real kinky and imagined we saw some of that 2.0 percent annual wage growth that we had in the golden age (1947-1973). Then the tax increase need to main the program’s solvency would be equal to just 3.2 percent of projected wage growth over the next 30 years.

The story here is straightforward. We expect retirees’ income to be related to their living standards in their working lifetime. If wages grow rapidly then it is easy for a smaller number of workers to support a growing population of retirees while still ejoying a rise in living standards. This is the way the world used to work. It might not be easy for political reasons to get back to that world, but we should at least know that such a world did once exist and is still possible.

I hope that Baker’s right about wage growth, obviously. But I think it won’t hurt us to have an influx of immigrants paying into the system as well. This is how we can keep both rising living standards and social insurance programs healthy.

I’m pretty pessimistic about wage growth, because in my working liftime, roughly the span of the chart below (from Mother Jones) it has been flat. And I’m certainly not young:

Productivity has surged, but income and wages have stagnated for most Americans. If the median household income had kept pace with the economy since 1970, it would now be nearly $92,000, not $50,000.

I wish I believed that was going to change substantially, but it’s hard to see it, at least in the term that covers the projected SS shortfall.

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The central economic problems of our time: ideological fools

by digby

Here it is, in living color:

Previewing his speech for The Weekly Standard’s Stephen F. Hayes, Rubio said he would make the case that the national debt “has a direct impact on unemployment” and that it is hurting job growth:

“The debt has a direct impact on unemployment. Every dollar that is being lent to the government is a dollar that is not being invested in our economy,” he says. “The immediate danger of the debt, and the one that speaks to people in the real world, is the fact that the debt is contributing to the fact that they don’t have a good job.”

You know, I’ve been saying for a few years now that this is exactly what the right wing wants people to believe and have taken Democrats to task for helping them by making the idiotic argument about government being like a household and having to pull in its belt.  Very Serious People told me that that’s a hysterical  reaction and that nobody’s really making that argument. Well there’s Marco Rubio making that argument.

I know my regular readers don’t need this, but it’s good to have it on the record. Travis Waldron at Think Progress explains why this is so wrong:

The idea that the national debt is harming economic growth is a favorite tenet of conservative orthodoxy, but there’s no evidence of that orthodoxy being correct. European politicians have spent the last four years attempting to spark economic growth through deficit and debt reduction, and the result has been total failure. Multiple rounds of spending cuts across Eurozone countries were never followed by economic growth, and now the Eurozone is back in recession, as are seven of its 17 countries, while unemployment is at record highs.

The United States bucked that trend and pursued economic stimulus, resulting in faster growth than Europe. Still, spending cuts have dampened the recovery. Government spending flatlined in recent years, and crunched state and federal budgets have led to the loss of roughly 700,000 government jobs — most of which are teachers, firefighters, police officers, and other middle-class public workers that could be contributing to economic growth if only they had a paycheck. The loss of those jobs has reduced demand and led to the loss of more jobs in the private sector.

America’s problem is that it is focused on spending cuts (which the Congressional Budget Office says will further dampen growth in 2013) and is not investing enough to offset the lack of private demand.

This is the great Republican hope saying this. And he’s the mainstream choice. Just imagine what Rand Paul will say in the Tea Party response.

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There’s a sucker born every minute (and most of them end up listening to right wing talk radio)

by digby

From TPM:

In the wake of news that Sen. Lindsey Graham is threatening to block the nominations of Hagel and Brennan, there’s a whole new conspiracy theory bubbling up on the right. From ground zero of Obama era conspiracy theories comes the conspiracy theory to top them all: that CIA nominee John Brennan is himself a Muslim.

The claim originates with longtime TPM favorite, ex-FBI agent and anti-Islam activist John Guandolo. Guandolo left the FBI after sleeping with a witness in the investigation of disgraced Rep. William Jefferson of Louisiana. But he subsequently landed on his feet as part of the anti-Islam circuit.

whatever …

Sorry guys, Kent Conrad thinks we need a lot more deficit reduction

by digby

Oh fergawdsakes:

President Obama’s debt reduction goals are at least $1 trillion too modest, according to the Democrat who chaired the Senate Budget Committee until the end of last year.

“To get us on a path that is declining in terms of debt as a share of gross domestic product requires a package of about $5 trillion total,” former Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., told reporters during a Fix the Debt press briefing today at the National Press Club. “If you look at [the Congressional Budget Office’s] most recent numbers, that’s about the size of the package that we need, somewhere in about the $5 trillion range, to get this debt going down as a share of the economy. And we’re still going to have debt, at the end of this period, publicly held debt of 70 percent of GDP. That’s 100 percent of GDP as gross debt.”

President Obama is only shooting for $4 trillion in debt reduction. “Over the last few years, Democrats and Republicans have come together and cut our deficit by more than $2.5 trillion through a balanced mix of spending cuts and higher tax rates for the wealthiest Americans,” he said during his weekly address on Saturday. “That’s more than halfway towards the $4 trillion in deficit reduction that economists and elected officials from both parties say we need to stabilize our debt.”

Over the last few years, Democrats and Republicans have come together and cut our deficit by more than $2.5 trillion through a balanced mix of spending cuts and higher tax rates for the wealthiest Americans.

Really? Does this look balanced to you?

That’s what passes for balance in Kent Conrad’s mind. I’m going to guess that he’d consider another trillion in spending cuts and slashing Social Security to add up to a 50/50 split. (Let’s not even talk about the fact that austerity is the worst thing to be doing right now.)

I guess I find it kind of hard to take a budget “guru” seriously when he can’t even do simple arithmetic.

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Now that it might cost rich people money, it’s time to talk about the climate

by David Atkins

Very Serious Person Coral Davenport is rightly freaked out about the economic impact of climate:

It’s important to point out, of course, that no single weather event, including Sandy, can be attributed to climate change. But the data show that climate change has already locked us into a future of more Sandy-like storms—which will come with Sandy-sized price tags. The Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental-advocacy group, estimates that by 2025, taxpayers could be shelling out more than $270 billion a year for disaster relief if no action is taken to cut the fossil-fuel pollution that causes global warming or to prepare for the damage that science tells us—and evidence shows us—is coming.

Despite all the evidence that climate change has started costing the economy, businesses, and taxpayers, and that much higher costs are to come, the congressional response has been to largely ignore the problem, except to pay for damages as they arise. And while Congress authorized $61 billion for Sandy relief, the House rejected amendments that would have required planning for the impact of sea-level rise due to climate change. In the past, FEMA’s budget has included money to prevent flood damage—to help pay, for example, for projects like elevating Jimmy Strickland’s office. But Congress slashed that funding last year, and the Obama White House has proposed eliminating it altogether. Over the past year, House Republicans have voted to block programs aimed at researching the effects of climate change on the United States, programs to help farmers adapt to the impact of climate change, and a Securities and Exchange Commission requirement that companies disclose financial risk related to climate change. In some state legislatures, lawmakers have pushed to have scientific data on the effects of climate change excised from development and infrastructure plans.

“Up until recently, the debate was, how much does it cost us to address climate change—and the cost of acting overwhelmed us,” says Matthias Ruth, an economist at Northeastern University who has published a series of reports on the economic impact of climate change on various states. “The cost of inaction is at the same order of magnitude, if not higher, than doing something about it.”

The graph of flood insurance payouts in an age of increasingly frequent superstorms is one such example of overwhelming costs coming our way:

RL Miller has other examples of Very Serious People talking about the economic impacts of climate as well.

I suppose this is a good and welcome thing. But it’s also deeply troubling that issues as important as climate change only start to gain traction with the Very Serious People when they start to impact deficits and stock prices. The good of the world is much more than a series of corporate and national balance sheets. There are many things in this world that can, should and must be done, that will likely increase public debts and decrease corporate profits. They must be done anyway.

If the criterion for global action on an issue is that profits and bond ratings might be threatened, this world of ours is doomed regardless.

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The Village has decided that SS must be cut. But will it be enough?

by digby

Here’s your Village in action. We have Ben White, POLITICO Chief Economic Correspondent, declaring on twitter that the White House offer to cut Social Security just isn’t going to get the job done:

If all WH has in return for another tax increase is superlative CPI I really don’t see any deal materializing.
— Ben White (@morningmoneyben) February 11, 2013

Ok fine, he’s just being a typical jaded and “savvy” Politico reporter.  Why, of course, anyone who’s anyone knows that simply destroying Social security won’t be enough. 

But look at how the White House immediately responds:

@morningmoneyben Remember we have an offer on the table that includes CPI, but also inclues Medicare changes and spending cuts
— Dan Pfeiffer (@pfeiffer44) February 11, 2013

@morningmoneyben R’s have no offer on the table, no plan, and no longer agree with their previous position that tax refom can reduce deficit
— Dan Pfeiffer (@pfeiffer44) February 11, 2013

See?  We really do want to cut Social Security but that’s not all! We also want to “change” medicare and cut more spending.  Really!  We just dying to enact more austerity and we’re willing to do it as far as the eye can see! Those Republicans won’t even agree to tax reform, (which everyone knows means that we’re going to lower corporate rates.)

Ok, how about if we agree to slash funding for education and Veteran’s health care?  Would you give us credit then? How about if we agree to ritualistically kill Big Bird on national TV? Then will you believe that we’re Grown-ups?  CAN’T YOU SEE THAT WE ARE THE GROWN-UPS!!!! Why won’t you give us credit for being grown-ups ? We try so hard….

Here’s another good example of the dynamic:

DAVID GREGORY: I want to get back to the automatic spending cuts and ask a fundamental question that I think Republican critics of this president are asking. Do you not concede that there is a spending problem in Washington? Even when it comes to the 50% cuts out of the sequester that are for the Defense Department. You have said in recent interviews you could live with those. You don’t like the manner in which the cuts would be made, but you could live with those cutbacks to the Pentagon. So isn’t there a spending problem here that must be addressed?

SEN. DICK DURBIN: Absolutely. And I believe, as chairman of The Defense Appropriation Subcommittee in– in the Senate, that we can save money, cut waste in the Pentagon, and not compromise our national security. But to do this in such a haphazard way over the remaining six or seven months is going to be unfair to the military and their families. 

Think about this for a second. Cutting back on psychological counseling for the members of the military and their family during the remainder of this year, when we have this grievous problem of suicides in the military and readjustment when they come home from battle? We can’t do that.

DAVID GREGORY: But isn’t there always a reason–
(OVERTALK)

DAVID GREGORY: Isn’t there always a reason to spend the money in Washington?
(OVERTALK)
DAVID GREGORY: Can’t you always find a reason not to cut? Isn’t this the Republican argument that, at least here, if worse comes to worse and the sequester passes, at least we’ll get spending cuts, how else to force the President’s hand?

SEN. DICK DURBIN:
But listen. Do we really want to base our spending cuts on reducing medical research in America, on eliminating 70,000 children from Head Start, that early learning program that’s so important? These things don’t make sense. Let’s sit down and do this in a thoughtful manner. And let’s include revenue. We should have half of this as revenue from tax reform and the other half in spending cuts. And I support those spending cuts.

Isn’t there always some loser, like a military veteran or a pre-schooler, who needs these programs? Can’t you always find some stupid reason not to put them out in the street?

Luckily for all of us, not everyone is as cynical as the Politico. Gregory and GOP strategist Mike Murphy solved this whole thing for us:

MIKE MURPHY: …[T]he President’s got a pretty simple choice. And the clock is running. Politics will take over everything in two years. The presidential primaries and everything else, and the midterm elections. If he wants to move now, it’s got to be “Nixon to China.” And there are seven magic words. If he would say this, he would unlock a lot of Republican votes. He’d have to fight his own party. But it’s time for some of that. And those words are, “Change CPI and beneficiaries pay a little more.”

DAVID GREGORY: Right.

MIKE MURPHY: That’s what we pay–

DAVID GREGORY: That’s for Medicare, that’s for Social Security.

MIKE MURPHY: That’s the serious look at entitlements.

DAVID GREGORY: Right.

MIKE MURPHY: As the country needs.

There you have it. And if Ben White is correct, that’s just for starters.

Reminder:

The average monthly Social Security benefit for a retired worker was about $1,230 at the beginning of 2012. Among elderly Social Security beneficiaries, 23% of married couples and about 46% of unmarried persons rely on Social Security for 90% or more of their income. 51% of the workforce has no private pension coverage. 34% of the workforce has no savings set aside specifically for retirement.

By 2033, there will 75 million retirees. And these celebrity millionaires think it’s fine for them to get less than $1200 a month in benefits. Even the 25 million who won’t have anything else. What kind of people are these? I would bet that David Gregory drops $1200 a month in tips alone.

Update: Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse …

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Papal cuts: why is really resigning?

by digby

Adele Stan addresses what virtually everyone is thinking but nobody will admit (at least on TV, particularly MSNBC where “pope news” is right up there with a terrorist attack for the amount of attention it garners.)

Citing age and infirmity as his reason for leaving the papacy, Benedict’s action comes just weeks after he opened his celebrated Twitter account — and less than a month after the decades-old child abuse scandal drew nearer to the pope’s door, with revelations published in the Los Angeles Times earlier this month that Cardinal Roger Mahony, then Archbishop of Los Angeles, sought to evade the law in cases involving the sexual abuse of children by the priests in his charge by sending them to treatment facilities in states that did not require health professionals to report the crimes to authorities.

At the time that Mahony was covering up the crimes of his priests, Benedict, then known as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, led the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican office that oversaw such matters.

In archdiocese documents released under a court order earlier this month, Mahony is revealed to have taken actions deliberately contrived to avoid legal prosecution of priests who had sexually abused, and even raped, children. The documents were so damaging that Mahony, now retired and once thought to be a contender for the papacy, was publicly rebuked by the current Archbishop of Los Angeles Jose Gomez, and stripped of any public duties, an unprecedented censure of a cardinal archbishop by his successor.

Amid the cache of church records, released as part of a settlement between the archdiocese and 500 sex-abuse victims, are several letters to Ratzinger from Mahoney, in which the California prelate reports to the Vatican his reasons for various actions (such as defrocking) taken against the offending priests. The records amount to some 30,000 pages, so their full contents have yet to be pored through by investigators and journalists.

What is clear, though, is that Mahony repeatedly failed to act on concerns about the sexual abuse of children by priests that brought to him by pastors and church officials throughout the diocese, and that when he did, his actions were designed to avoid criminal prosecutions of the predator priests. And it is also clear that in his Vatican office, Ratzinger was the recipient of letters from Mahony informing the Holy See of what actions he had taken.

They haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of these document. Mahoney and Ratzinger worked closely together and Mahoney was previously thought to be one of the rare exceptions to the Cardinal cover-up, at least to the degree he’s recently been revealed to have been involved. So, most likely, was Ratzinger. Stay tuned.

The one thing I’m glad about is that Tim Russert isn’t going to be running the “Pope Watch” coverage, although Chris Matthews looks to be stepping up quite gladly. For those of us who have a justifiably jaundiced view of the Catholic hierarchy, it get pretty hard to take.

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Protesting with a loaded gun makes a joke of the Bill of Rights they supposedly love so much


by digby

I feel so free:

Some gun-toting demonstrators have taken their protest and their weapons inside the Capitol building.

Oregon law allows people who have concealed handgun licenses to openly carry weapons inside public buildings, including the Capitol.

Among those who ventured inside from a pro-gun rally across the street was a man who would only give a first name, Warren.

“I’m supporting my fellow patriots,” he said. He was carrying an AR-15 slung across his back. “It’s technically loaded,” he said, meaning a full magazine was in place, but no round was chambered.

He was approached by a state police officer — about a half dozen were posted directly inside the Capitol rotunda — who asked to see Warren’s concealed handgun permit. The trooper looked at the permit and walked away, while Warren took photos of the Rotunda art work.

Several hundred gun enthusiasts are rallying in the Capitol Mall to support the Second Amendment and to protest efforts to restrict gun ownership.

You’ll notice the third picture, taken at the protest outside, features a sign that says that it’s irrational to fear firearms. Really. I guess the fact that there have been 1695 gun deaths just since the Newtown massacre means that we’re being silly for thinking they are dangerous. Maybe this person needs to come live in a big city for a while and hear some gunfire near his house to understand why the idea of more and more guns in circulation is scary.  It’s too late to fire back when a bullet comes through the wall of your house or hits an elderly man by accident who was just walking down the street. (That happened in my neighborhood not too long ago.)

I’m fairly sure these protesters understand very well why average people fear the proliferation of guns or they wouldn’t carry their guns to a political rally, an act obviously designed to intimidate the opposition. After all, like any other Americans they could protest these gun laws without carrying loaded guns. They could carry signs, they could march around, they could occupy a building or participate in civil disobedience, which requires that one submit oneself to the law. But they don’t. They carry loaded guns to protests and political events. And that means these protests and political events are not opportunities for people to freely debate and disagree. After all, protests and political events are by their nature often contentious, angry and emotional. When one side is armed with automatic weapons, I think the other side can be forgiven for being reluctant to engage them.

That is obviously not what was intended by our bill of rights.  Basically what these folks are saying by arming themselves in this political context is, “nice little First Amendment right you have there. Go ahead, make my day.”

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