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Month: September 2013

QOTD: @Politico

QOTD: @Politico

by digby

Yes, they’re going there:

Jesus H. Christ. Yes it will stoke “concerns” if you are an idiot. Or a beltway insider. Normal people understand that a big program takes time to roll out and that postponing certain pieces of it doesn’t mean the rest of it isn’t ready.  it’s called prioritizing and the vaunted “private sector” does it all the time. But sure, go ahead and adopt the “some say” attitude and pretend that you aren’t actually aiding and abetting those who are hostile to the program.

Also too: nobody is really “concerned” that the law is not ready. The people who keep saying that want it to fail and they aren’t hiding that fact. Apparently, Politico is rooting for them.

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The panic over Tarzan, Jane and Cheetah

The panic over Tarzan, Jane and Cheetah

by digby

Ronald Reagan apparently had his finger on the pulse of 2013 when he said
“A hippie is someone who looks like Tarzan, walks like Jane, and smells like Cheetah”

People hate women and men who other men think are like women. And they hate them so much they even assume they smell bad. Seriously:

Why don’t people behave in more environmentally friendly ways? New research presents one uncomfortable answer: They don’t want to be associated with environmentalists.

That’s the conclusion of troubling new research from Canada, which similarly finds support for feminist goals is hampered by a dislike of feminists.

Participants held strongly negative stereotypes about such activists, and those feelings reduced their willingness “to adopt the behaviors that these activities promoted,” reports a research team led by University of Toronto psychologist Nadia Bashir. This surprisingly cruel caricaturing, the researchers conclude, plays “a key role in creating resistance to social change.”

Writing in the European Journal of Social Psychology, Bashir and her colleagues describe a series of studies documenting this dynamic. They began with three pilot studies, which found people hold stereotyped views of environmentalists and feminists.

In one, the participants—228 Americans recruited via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk—described both varieties of activists in “overwhelmingly negative” terms. The most frequently mentioned traits describing “typical feminists” included “man-hating” and “unhygienic;” for “typical environmentalists,” they included “tree-hugger” and “hippie.”

People who want to change things are often hated. Change isn’t easy. Squeaky wheel and all that.

And anyway judging from the caricatured stereotypes here, which seem to have arrived via comic book, these “feelings” are all about sexual insecurity which is very hard to overcome. Hippies are considered to be effeminate men and feminists are considered to be masculine women. This patriarchal panic is the underlying basis of The Reactionary Mind and they’ve spent a lot of time and energy demonizing this threat to their dominance.

Feminists and hippie environmentalists unite — accept being hated and do what you have to do. Being popular isn’t required.

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Dynamic score settling

Dynamic score settling

by digby

Following up on David’s post below about the “Santa list” the House Republicans are compiling to demand in a debt limit hostage crisis, I think this by Dave Weigel is worth noting as well:

Texas Rep. Blake Farenthold, another 2010er, was more bullish on the debt limit “letter to Santa” approach. “Fortunately, the economy’s doing better,” he told me. “I think we’re still committed to cuts and growth commensurate with what the increase is, but there’s some actual economic growth in the energy industry, for example. Every tenth of a point we see in economic growth increases the money in the coffers and lowers the deficit.”

It sounds a lot like “dynamic scoring,” honestly. Republicans have argued for a long time that traditional budgeting doesn’t reflect the amazing Lafferian benefits that tax cuts can bring. Instead of scoring a tax cut for what it will take out of revenue, they want it scored for its possible economic benefits.*

And apart from some hold-outs, it’s an easy-read hymnal. When Cantor spoke to the press, he used the same happy data as Farenthold.

“Our plan delays the implementation of ObamaCare, which will help job growth and our economy while protecting people from its negative consequences,” he said. “The Congressional Budget Office has previously estimated that an additional one-tenth of one-percentage point increase in economic growth will reduce the deficit by approximately $300 billion over ten years.”

That’s right, we are now comfortably back in supply-side heaven, where tax cuts are magic and everyone lives happily ever after. It’s actually an improvement over their slash and burn politics of the last few years. But make no mistake, if “the deficit” conveniently starts growing again, they’ll be right back at it. That’s how this works. Cut taxes and regulations,raise “the deficit”, get hysterical about debt, slash spending. Wash, rinse, repeat.

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Your move, insitutional America. by @DavidOAtkins

Your move, institutional America

by David Atkins

Curious as to what the Republicans are likely to demand in exchange for raising for the debt ceiling? Read it and weep:

House Republicans plan to demand major perks for coal companies and Wall Street banks, alongside healthcare and social service cuts and a one-year delay in the implementation of Obamacare, in exchange for raising the debt ceiling until the end of 2014, according to a source close to the House GOP leadership.

President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats have repeatedly stated that they will not negotiate over raising the debt limit, saying they will not make a political football of the U.S. government’s creditworthiness.

The Republican plan, which would also constitute a significant overhaul of the environmental and financial regulatory system, would cut pensions for Federal employees and raise taxes on immigrant families with parents who do not have a Social Security number. The document claims $7 billion in savings from restricting the child tax credit to immigrants who do have a number, and up to $84 billion from “reform” to the Federal Employee Retirement System.

The plan would increase Medicare means testing, and would eliminate social service block grants and a fund for preventative healthcare in the Affordable Care Act that conservatives have characterized as a “slush fund.” Block grants are a capped entitlement program given to states to help fund services like daycare, transportation and home-delivered meals. The Prevention and Public Health Fund has included funds for training primary care doctors and supporting healthy corner stores.

Coal and oil companies would benefit from provisions to expand offshore drilling and drilling on federal lands. The proposal blocks the federal government from regulating greenhouse gas emissions and coal ash, and would give Congress the power to veto any “major” regulation issued by a federal agency (because an affirmative vote would be required, Congress could void new rules simply through inaction).

In addition, the document claims $23 billion in budget savings from a provision to “Eliminate Dodd-Frank Bailout Fund.” The money, however, is not legally permitted to support collapsing banks. Dodd-Frank established the fund to allow regulators to pay some creditors of large banks when they fail, in order to prevent a domino of failures akin to what occurred in 2008 when Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. Absent the fund, the government would have no effective way of limiting the economic damage from a bank’s failure, increasing the likelihood that a bailout would be necessary.

And what are the Democratic demands? None, of course. Democrats are just looking to raise the debt ceiling, a move that used to be unremarkable, and has been undertaken far more often by Republican presidents than Democratic ones over the last few decades.

Greg Sargent notes the challenge this presents to the traditional press:

Here’s my worry: By laying out a truly insane list of demands, Republicans could perversely succeed in reframing this battle — at least in the eyes of some in the Beltway press — as a standard Washington confrontation in which both sides are making demands and the impasse is the result of each side’s refusal to meet somewhere in the middle. You could easily see a scenario in which Republicans “agree” to drop some of their demands and argue they are trying to compromise, with some commentators then wondering aloud why the White House is refusing to negotiate in kind.

So let’s say it again: This is not a standard Washington negotiation, in which each side is demanding concessions from the other. Democrats are not asking Republicans to make any concessions. They are asking Republicans to join them in not destroying the U.S. economy. House Republican leaders — who have themselves conceded not raising the debt limit would jeopardize the full faith and credit of the U.S. government — are asking Democrats to make a series of concessions in exchange for not unleashing widespread economic havoc that will hurt all of us. But agreeing not to destroy the economy doesn’t count as a concession on the part of Republicans, and no one should expect it to be rewarded with anything in return. Just because Republicans are trying to frame this as a conventional negotiation doesn’t mean folks have to play along with it.

At some point even big business has to get queasy about this sort of gamesmanship, no?

Without a competent press corps eviscerating the GOP for this blatant hostage taking less than a year after they lost a big election, there’s little other recourse. The public isn’t going to take to the streets over one political party demanding a bevy of stupid cuts in exchange for raising a debt ceiling that shouldn’t even exist in the first place. It’s too arcane for the public imagination.

If the press, nonpartisan officials and moderate business people don’t stand up in unison and cry foul, where does that leave the political system? How does the country survive another decade of relentless hostage taking by a party that structurally almost can’t lose the House due to gerrymandering?

Expecting rational self interest to bring the GOP to its senses is a fool’s errand. Many House Republicans have actually bought into their Objectivist rhetoric; the rest know that in their nicely gerrymandered seats they’re likelier to face electoral difficulty from a primary challenge than from a Democrat for the next nine years at least.

At some point non-partisan institutional America, including and especially the press, has to step up and say that enough is enough.

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Wingnut Lovefest

Wingnut Lovefest

by digby

Earlier today:

RUSH: I have to tell you, I’ve had so many people… I’ve been off the past couple of days, but, while this has been going on, I’ve had so many people e-mail me so uplifted by what you did in the last 21 hours and what you did leading up to it. So many people are so happy that there finally is some leadership. They’re so happy that, finally, somebody is doing in Washington what they were elected to do, what they said they were going to do. And I just wanted to say, before we started: I’m sure you’re hearing much the same thing, but I wanted you to know that, while you’re getting all these arrows as pioneers do, there’s a lot of appreciation and a lot of love for what you’re doing out there.

CRUZ: Well, Rush, thank you so much. Thank you for that encouragement, and thank you for your leadership. You know, I really hope that over the course of this week we’ll see more and more Republicans step forward. We had quite a few Republicans come down to the floor and support the effort, and I hope we’ll see as many Republicans as possible, and even some Democrats, come together and listen to the American people. As you know… Every week, you talk to 20 million Americans. You know where the American people are on this, and it’s not a close call. Obamacare isn’t working and millions of Americans are hurting, and if the Senate just listened to the American people, we’ll do the right thing and we’ll vote to defund it.

He had some choice words for the media:

CRUZ: And, listen, what I tried to spend much of the filibuster all but begging the media to do… In fact, I explicitly said, “Listen. All right, you guys can’t resist writing something about the process, something about that silliness. But let me just ask you: 50% of what you write, discuss the substance of how Obamacare is the number one job killer in the country, how millions of Americans are suffering, how it’s forcing people into part-time work, how it’s threatening millions of Americans’ health insurance.

“Just write a little about the substance,” and the strategy on the other side is really twofold. Number one: Confuse the voters. Confuse the voters with procedural obfuscation, with complexity, so that they don’t understand what’s going on. And number two: Make it all about personalities. And, listen, others can engage in that game, Rush. I have no intention of defending myself or of reciprocating. It’s not about anybody. It’s not about us. It is about listening to the American people and stopping this disaster, this nightmare, this train wreck that is Obamacare.

I’m sure that in Republican bizarroworld they are reporting that. On planet earth, none of that is actually happening.

Man this guy is scary to me. I think he might really believes this stuff. And all the poor schmucks who listen to Rush probably believe it too.

Rush knows better, of course. He says his business isn’t politics, which is really funny. But he knows what Cruz is doing and he’s decided to help him:

RUSH: Senator, most of your colleagues said exactly what you’ve said in the last 21 hours, and the last two weeks, and the last year, most of your colleagues said years ago what you said. At the moment of truth, they’re not to be found. They’ve sought solace somewhere else. I look at what you’re doing — forgive me for characterizing it — I look at what you’re doing as simply doing what you were elected to do as you said, but you’re also drawing a line. At some point we’ve got to say we’re not gonna allow this kind of freedom to be lost in this country. I think this is what this is about. What Obamacare substantively is is what you’re about.

What Cruz is doing is building a grassroots donor base. If he can pick up a few looney tunes billionaires like Adelson or a Foster Friess he could make a good run at it. I don’t think he can win, but it’s never a good idea to allow anyone this extreme anywhere near real power.

Update: Are Rabin-Havt at Media Matters makes the case that Rush, Hannity and Cruz are on their way out. Could be …

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Debt ceiling positioning

Debt ceiling positioning

by digby

FYI:

Senate Republicans have a strategy for lifting the U.S. borrowing limit: offer what President Barack Obama asked for in his budget, then dare him to refuse.

These lawmakers, looking beyond an effort to derail the president’s health-care law, see the possibility of replacing automatic cuts to federal programs with reductions to entitlement spending. Among these: Obama’s proposal to trim Social Security cost-of-living increases that would save about $130 billion over 10 years.

“Since the president himself has proposed some of these things, it would seem logical that he would not turn that down,” John Cornyn, the Senate’s No. 2 Republican, said in an interview.

The approach is aimed at gaining enough Democratic support in the Senate to force Obama, who said he won’t negotiate on the debt limit, to accept changes that he has called “manageable” as a first step to shoring up Social Security and Medicare. Republicans also would score a victory that would provide balance to lifting the debt ceiling, something their party base opposes…

Even with Obama’s refusal to negotiate, there is room for compromise on the debt measure, said Senator Amy Klobuchar.

“There will be an agreement, and I think we can do it without any of these extraneous, partisan poison pills,” the Minnesota Democrat said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sept. 22.
Murray, who also led a 2011 supercommittee on debt reduction, said there can be no real negotiating as long as the Tea Party is singularly focused on defunding Obamacare. “If there is a fair and balanced path forward,” she said, “I’m on board, but it’s not going to include eliminating Obamacare.”

So, if they agree not to defund Obamacare, will the Democrats agree not to raise taxes? Inquiring minds …

Senator Mike Crapo, an Idaho Republican and member of a separate debt-negotiating group, said a small-scale bargain targeting entitlement spending is possible once wrangling over Obamacare ends.

“The only place you can be incremental at this point is in entitlement reform,” Crapo said. Revisions to the U.S. tax code must be made in a comprehensive way, and the Congress has already cut other federal programs to historic lows, he said.

Republicans would be willing to replace some of the $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts to domestic and military programs over the next nine years in exchange for cuts to Social Security and Medicare, Cornyn said.

Senate and House Republicans are taking the same approach on entitlement programs. A House proposal that could come to a vote this week would suspend the debt cap until Dec. 31, 2014. In addition to delaying the health law, it would charge higher-income Medicare beneficiaries more for their premiums.

Any effort to attach a delay of Obamacare to the debt measure probably will be rejected by the Senate.

The president has repeatedly said that he must have some mild (and obviously temporary) tax hikes in return for cutting “entitlements.” The Tea Partiers in the House will not go for that.

But Kent Conrad says:

“There are people on the Republican side and people on the Democratic side who are ready to go against party orthodoxy and put together a package,” he said. “Honestly, I think they are actually in the majority.”

Has anyone heard whether the White House has reiterated its requirement for higher taxes in exchange for these “entitlement” cuts lately? Maybe someone should ask.

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Who are the austerians anyway?

Who are the austerians anyway?

by digby

Krugman looks at the numbers and tells us what he sees: the moribund American economy is due to austerity:

[H]ow much of our depressed economy can be explained by the bad fiscal policy?

To a first approximation, all of it. By that I mean that to have something that would arguably look like full employment, at this point we wouldn’t need a continuation of actual stimulus; all we’d need is for government spending to have grown normally, instead of shrinking.

Here’s a comparison of two series. One is actual government purchases of goods and services since the Great Recession began (this is at all levels; most of the fall has been state and local, but the Federal government could have prevented that with revenue sharing). The other is what would have happened if those purchases had grown as fast as they did starting in the first quarter of 2001, i.e., in the Bush years.

As you can see, the gap is large and has been growing rapidly; it’s currently at about 400 billion 2009 dollars, or more than 2 1/2 percent of GDP. Given reasonable multipliers, this suggests that real GDP is somewhere between 3 and 3.75 percent lower than it would have been without the austerity. And given the usual Okun’s Law rule of half a point of unemployment per point of GDP, this in turn says that without the austerity we’d have an unemployment rate well under 6 percent, maybe even under 5.5 percent.

I don’t want to pretend to spurious precision here. Instead, I just want to make the point that given what we know and have learned about macro these past five years — and given the modest recovery that has taken place — we’re now at a point where, to repeat, to a first approximation the depressed state of the economy is entirely due to destructive fiscal policy.

This raises the question: who are these austerians, exactly?

Well, I hate to bang this drum once more but I think it’s important to note this for posterity as often as I can if liberals hope to learn anything at all from this debacle. (This is excerpted from an earlier piece of mine.)

People keep telling me that President Obama “pivoted” to deficit reduction only after the 2010 “shellacking” as a way of making the case for re-election.  But that’s not how I remember it.  And in the course of doing some research today, I was reminded of this:

At bottom, entitlement reform means one of two things: less spending on things voters like, such as medical treatment or retirement checks, or unpopular higher taxes to pay for those things — and quite possibly it means both. Blocking each of those routes are powerful lobbies ready to whip supple members of Congress: antitax ideologues, liberal New Deal defenders, retiree groups, patient advocates, pharmaceutical companies and medical providers, to name a few. To make matters worse, while the financial crisis is both real and terrifying, it is not always apparent. Even as our fiscal position deteriorates, the world continues to buy U.S. government debt, allowing for magically low interest rates in spite of enormous deficit spending.

It is on this inhospitable terrain that President Barack Obama now plans to accomplish the impossible: reverse the trajectory of the political universe and make real progress on reforming Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. […] 

The effort to reform Social Security, which is generally seen as a less complex problem, is likely to take a backseat over the coming months to health-care efforts. This is partly because of resistance by many House liberals to the idea of reducing Social Security benefits. This group includes House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was able to take over the reins in Congress in part because of the resentment caused by Bush’s failed reform effort. Although Administration officials don’t like discussing the problem on the record, the White House has not yet ruled out the idea of establishing an independent commission (outside the congressional committee structure) to look at creating a specific reform plan, an approach supported by many experts as the best way to break the political deadlock. 

Perhaps the biggest advantage that Obama has as he prepares to tackle entitlement is the financial crisis, which has forced everyone in Washington to focus on the nation’s long-term fiscal problems. The recent explosion of government spending to handle the banking collapse and housing crisis has concerned nations like China, which buy government debt. A drop in international interest in U.S. debt could lead to a spike in interest rates, which would have a damaging impact on the U.S. economy. On Sunday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urged Chinese leaders to continue their investments in U.S. debt. “We are truly going to rise and fall together,” she warned. 

None of this, however, means that Obama’s task will be much easier than the one that has bedeviled his predecessors. “This is not walking and chewing gum,” joked Robert Reischauer, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office. “It’s doing open-heart surgery and particle physics at the same time.” But the difficulty has not dissuaded Obama. As he pivots to confront the nation’s fiscal problems, his aides say he knows exactly what he is getting into.

The date of that Time magazine article?  That was written on February 23, 2009, a month after the president was inaugurated the first time. It was on the heels of these reports the week before:

With a $787 billion stimulus package in hand, President Barack Obama will pivot quickly to address a budget deficit that could now approach $2 trillion this year.

He has scheduled a “fiscal-responsibility summit” on Feb. 23 and will unveil a budget blueprint three days later, crafted to put pressure on politicians to address the country’s surging long-term debt crisis.

Speaking Friday to business leaders at the White House, the president defended the surge of spending in the stimulus plan, but he made sure to add: “It’s important for us to think in the midterm and long term. And over that midterm and long term, we’re going to have to have fiscal discipline. We are not going to be able to perpetually finance the levels of debt that the federal government is currently carrying.”

Along those lines, White House budget director Peter R. Orszag has committed to instituting tougher budget-discipline rules — once the economy turns around. Those include a mandate that any “nonemergency” spending increases be offset by equal spending cuts or tax increases[…]

The president met with 44 fiscally conservative “Blue Dog” Democrats this week and gave a nod to legislation that would set up commissions to deal with long-term deficit strains. The commissions would then present plans to Congress for an up-or-down vote.

“We feel like we’ve found a partner in the White House,” said Rep. Charlie Melancon (D., La.), a Blue Dog co-chairman.

I can understand why it’s important for some people to believe that the president was “forced” to pivot by the results of a major electoral setback.  But this pivot happened in the midst of a delirious honeymoon, long before the Republicans had regrouped from their shellacking. It was the purpose of the “Fiscal Summit” (in which the White House very nearly had Pete Peterson himself as the keynote speaker.)


I was reminded of all this when I read this interesting piece by Josh Marshall today on whether or not Obama is a bad manager (in response to today’s op-ed on the subject in the NY Times.  Josh wrote this:

[N]ot that I don’t think Obama’s management or approach to the presidency was flawless. My critique is simply different. I think the biggest single flaw in Obama’s approach to the presidency in his first term was the focus on the inside game, both in policy and legislative terms — an inherent peril of technocrats. For much of his first term, Obama simply did not focus on the public and political dimensions of the work he was trying to get done. To give but one example, the health care edifice was getting built up largely in private while public support for it cratered in the midst of catastrophic levels of unemployment. Yes, it was always going to be hard and there was the biggest economic crisis in 70 years. But there was a failure to grasp a dimension of the job.

I don’t disagree with this. I think it’s been a problem. But I think that on the greatest challenge of his administration — the economy — he’s been wrong on a political and a policy level from the beginning. 

Obviously, I think  deficit reduction is and was completely daft at a time like this. But I would suggest that by “pivoting” to talking about deficit reduction in the middle of the crisis, as he did, made it so that even the stimulus and all the other government actions to try to spur the economy sputtered as people anticipated more austerity.


And when you read those articles, it sure sounds as though they were using the bad economy an excuse to “fix” the “entitlements.” Michael Sherer talked about the motivation in the first article I excerpted above:

As sure as the sun rises, the sitting President of the United States will promise to save our fiscal future by reforming entitlement spending. And as sure as the sun sets, each attempt at delivering on that pledge will end in failure.
[…]
At bottom, entitlement reform means one of two things: less spending on things voters like, such as medical treatment or retirement checks, or unpopular higher taxes to pay for those things — and quite possibly it means both. Blocking each of those routes are powerful lobbies ready to whip supple members of Congress: antitax ideologues, liberal New Deal defenders, retiree groups, patient advocates, pharmaceutical companies and medical providers, to name a few. To make matters worse, while the financial crisis is both real and terrifying, it is not always apparent. Even as our fiscal position deteriorates, the world continues to buy U.S. government debt, allowing for magically low interest rates in spite of enormous deficit spending. (See 25 people to blame for the financial crisis.)

It is on this inhospitable terrain that President Barack Obama now plans to accomplish the impossible: reverse the trajectory of the political universe and make real progress on reforming Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

Why in the world were they thinking this way in the midst of what they themselves called the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression?   

This was the hubristic attitude of the Obama administration in the beginning — the belief that they alone would be able to solve all the problems that had eluded their predecessors, despite the fact that the world economy was melting down. (Or was it because the world economy was melting down?) They were just that special (aka Best and Brightest Syndrome, which does relate to Josh Marshall’s point.)  And on health care, they even have made some progress.  

Unfortunately, by flogging the deficit boogeyman from the very beginning they perpetuated a whole bunch of economic myths that have hamstrung the recovery (and may wind up hurting the chances for the health care reforms to work by giving the deficit fetishists the weapon they need to cut it before it gets the chance.)


This was, in my opinion, the major error of the first term. And it’s why I have trouble trusting that the administration isn’t going to use whatever “cliff” or crisis to accomplish it in the second term. I hope they have seen the error of their ways, but these trial balloons about raising the Medicare age or the Chained CPI, don’t bode well. After all, the history shows that this does not come from being cornered or in “hostage” negotiations — it comes from a desire to actually do it. There were no hostages in February of 2009. 

A bridge too far?

A bridge too far?


by digby

I think this ad speaks to a lot of Americans:

The food stamp thing may have really been the bridge too far.

Most Americans don’t think of themselves as the kind of people who would deny poor people food.

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