Month: October 2013

Hunger games

by digby

I wrote yesterday about the looming cuts to food stamp benefits, and this story by Nat Resnikoff at All In fleshes the issue out substantially. Here’s just a small piece of it, about just one person who’s trying to get by:

[Food Stamp] cuts may be a political winner for a few politicians, but for people like Winsome Stoner, they could be devastating.

Stoner was among those to start collecting food stamps during the post-crash era. She was unemployed at the time, and her husband’s salary as a security guard was not sufficient to pay the rent and feed their five children. Now working full-time at the Bed-Stuy Coalition Against Hunger food pantry in her neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Stoner still collects $640 per month in food stamps. Even that, combined with her income and her husband’s income, is not enough.

“It does cushion me a bit, it helps,” she said. “But we still run out of food by the end of the month. The middle, sometimes.”

When there’s no more food left, and no more money to buy new groceries, Stoner and her husband go to food pantries. At the Bud-Stuy pantry, the largest emergency food pantry in New York City, Stoner is both an employee and a regular client.

Visiting food pantries is a common practice for those who can’t stretch their food stamp money, also known as SNAP benefits, until the end of the month, according to Lisa Davis, senior vice president of government relations for the national food bank network Feeding America.

“Right now SNAP benefits are not overly generous,” Davis told MSNBC.com. “They average out to be about $1.49 per person per meal, and we know from our food banks that many of the clients coming to them are those who are receiving SNAP, but the benefits aren’t getting them through the entire month.”

For Stoner’s seven-person household, a monthly SNAP benefit of $640 per month translates to about $1 per meal, assuming everyone in the family eats three meals a day. Thanks to the expiration of the stimulus package’sfood stamp provisions, Stoner has already received word that she might soon receive even less—and without knowing how big the cut will be, she’s terrified.  

“I don’t know if we’re going to get anything,” she said, her voice rising in agitation. “We’re not sure if we’re on it. I’m really worried, I really am.”

Winsome Stoner stocks the pantry’s refrigerator. Both Stoner and her husband work, but they have to use the food pantry themselves because their incomes don’t cover all their family’s monthly food expenses.

So, here you have someone who is working — and her husband is working — but they still don’t have enough money to pay for food for their children. And yet the right wingers are still accusing them of being lazy and dependent and are determined to cut this program even more. And sadly I have no idea if the progressives in congress will get their act together to stop it. (They reluctantly voted for these cuts last time because it was the only way they could pay for healthy school lunches. That’s what it’s come down to.)

Meanwhile, just for kicks, let’s take a trip across town and see how some of this lady’s fellow New Yorkers are doing:

To determine the highest-earning hedge fund managers and traders of 2012, we examined hedge fund returns and worked to understand the fee and ownership structure of a wide array of hedge fund firms. Hedge funds generally reap fees equal to 20% of profits and 2% of assets, but we found all sorts of variations on this theme. In addition, our earnings figures include the personal gain or loss of each manager’s interest in their funds. Our figures are pretax, account for firm expenses and profit-sharing arrangements, and exclude gains or losses stemming from ownership in the hedge fund firms themselves or from investments held outside the managed investment pools…

The most surprising comeback was staged by Philip Falcone. His Harbinger Capital Partners hedge fund firm, which at its peak managed $26 billion, blew a ton of money on LightSquared, a controversial attempt to convert satellite radio frequencies into a new cellular service that filed for bankruptcy protection. The Securities & Exchange Commission has brought a pending enforcement action against him that he is fighting. But Faclone’s hedge funds performed very well in 2012 after LightSquared bonds recovered and shares in his publicly-traded Harbinger Group, in which his hedge funds have a big position, soared. Since a big percentage of the assets managed by his hedge funds belong to him, Falcone made $250 million.

See? It’s not all bad news …

This is the problem in a nutshell.  We have working parents unable to pay for food for their children. And we have Wall Street titans scarfing up all the money and complaining that poor people aren’t paying their fair share. It’s always been this way to some extent.  But up until now the big money boyz haven’t felt the need to subvert democracy to the point that people must literally starve. In their own city.

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The political crisis caused by the decline in discretionary spending

by David Atkins

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has a fantastic chart of non-interest federal spending today. As you might have known if you don’t consume conservative media, government spending on things non-Medicare and non-Social Security expenses is decreasing:

As they say:

If we continue current policies, federal spending outside of interest payments on the debt is projected to decline in the decade ahead as the economy recovers. In fact, this spending (which analysts call “primary outlays”) has already fallen from 23.9 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2009 — at the bottom of the recession — to a projected 20.2 percent of GDP in 2013. It is projected to fall further, to 19.5 percent of GDP or lower in the latter part of this decade.

While total federal spending will remain high throughout the coming decade under current policies, that’s mostly because of a marked increase in interest payments. In particular, as the economy recovers, interest rates will also rise, simultaneously increasing the interest we must pay on any given amount of debt.

Total non-interest spending outside of Social Security and Medicare — two programs whose costs are driven up by the aging of the population and the rise in health care costs throughout the U.S. health care system — will fall well below its 50-year historical average in the decade ahead.

This data, by the way, doesn’t just make for good progressive talking points on the budget. It also creates crucial political and strategic problems for both parties.

The core conservative demographic at this point is seniors. Without the senior vote, the Republican Party would be in danger of disappearance outside the deep south. But there just isn’t a lot of budget to cut much further without slashing either the military or programs that seniors depend on. They could (and do) go after certain popular programs like education, food stamps and Medicaid, but doing so only hastens their demographic demise among minorities and young adults. Not a lot of good options here for Republicans.

Democrats, meanwhile, face the opposite problem. Almost the entire progressive establishment is digging in its heels to protect Medicare and Social Security from the “Grand Bargain.” That’s a good thing, of course, but also leaves younger adults in the cold as discretionary non-defense spending only accounts for less than a paltry one-fifth of the federal budget.

Think about that for a moment. When progressives make arguments about all the great things government does, the go-to arguments are about street lights, roads, fire, police, education, public health, the space program, medical research, pollution control, Wall Street regulation. The federal government spends less than 20% of its budget on all these things combined. Sometimes that’s because they’re paid out of state and local coffers, but mostly it’s that the military, Medicare and Social Security take up so much of the budget.

Now, that’s fine and very important. Most of us will reach age 65, one hopes, and terrible economic conditions mean that most of us will be desperate for that lifeline when we reach that point. But I’m 32 years old. I will have eight more presidential cycles in my lifetime before I reach the age of 65. How many more grand bargains will have to be fought in the meantime? Are progressives my age (to say nothing of those just reaching adulthood) supposed to spend our organizing and waking hours fighting like the dickens for programs that we may or may not benefit from some 30 or 40 years down the road?

If Democrats continue to give away the store on discretionary spending on younger adults that invests in America’s future in order to hold a Maginot line on Medicare and Social Security programs they may or may not live to see one day, why should younger voters care about which political party holds the reins?

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It’s always something


by digby

John Harwood of the New York Times discovers that race is at the heart of much of our political polarization. Imagine that:

Whites tend to hold negative views of Obamacare, while blacks tend to like it. Specifically, 55 percent of whites, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found this year, consider Mr. Obama’s health care law a bad idea, while 59 percent of blacks call it a good idea. On immigration, 51 percent of whites oppose legal status for illegal residents, but 63 percent of blacks and 76 percent of Hispanics favor it.

The statistics mirror the core philosophical division in Washington’s fierce battles over taxes, spending and debt. Whites say government does too much, while blacks and Hispanics say it should do more to meet people’s needs.

Those attitudes, and the continued growth of the nonwhite population, have produced this sometimes-overlooked result: American politics has grown increasingly polarized by race, as well as by party and ideology.

Overlooked by the mainstream media, maybe. But it’s been obvious to the rest of us for well… forever.

Remember this stuff from about 10 years ago?

Bill explains that he “slid into the Minutemen” because he was disturbed by the way his neighborhood was changing, and the other Minutemen standing with him nod in agreement. “Dormitory-style homes” have popped up on their streets, Bill says, and the residents come and go at strange hours. Their neighbors’ children are intimidated and no longer like to play outside, in part because “we’ve got about 17 cars coming and going from our neighbors’ houses.” Matt, another Minuteman who lives in nearby Manassas, claims that the police have busted prostitution rings operating out of nearby properties.

Bill doesn’t want his name printed, he tells me, because he worries about retaliation from the local Hispanic gang, MS-13. Pointing to the cluster of day-laborers across the street, he explains to me that the Herndon 7-11 is “a social gathering place, too.” Taplin has publicly objected to a regulated day-laborer site set to open in Herndon on December 19–proposed in order to combat the trespassing, litter, and nuisance complaints that have arisen in conjunction with the informal 7-11 site–because he worries that even a regulated locale wouldn’t change “their behaviors.” Even on the coldest mornings, more than 50 workers often convene at the 7-11, and Bill judges that sometimes only 10 or 20 get hired. “When,” he asks me, “is it ever a good thing for 40 men to hang out together?”

These anxieties may be overblown, in some cases borderline racist; but they are not, unfortunately, outside the mainstream. In Mount Pleasant, the predominantly Hispanic, rapidly gentrifying Washington neighborhood where I live, complaints have begun to surface about the groups of men that congregate on stoops or outside of convenience stores at night. Those who have complained call it loitering, but one Hispanic resident told the Post that when the men gather outdoors, “[t]hey’re having coffee; they talk about issues. … It’s part of our community.” For the neighborhood’s Hispanic population, this practice is a cultural tradition; for its newer batch of hip, ostensibly liberal urbanites, it is disturbing, and too closely resembles something American law designates a crime.

These are people who would never admit they share anything in common with the Herndon Minutemen. But like it or not, the Minutemen are acting on anxieties many Americans share–anxieties about the challenge of enforcing the law in towns that are swelling in size due to immigration; anxieties about the challenge of integrating and accommodating an immigrant culture. Border states like California have been grappling with these issues for years, in court battles about day-laborer sites and debates over concepts like bilingual education.

Often in these conflicts those who have presented cultural, as opposed to legal, objections to uncontrolled immigration are condemned as xenophobic or racist. But as my Mount Pleasant neighbors have shown, it can be tricky to disentangle legal from cultural discomfort.

A moldy oldie from me:

1955 – They are an inferior race
1965 – They aren’t good workers
1975 – They make old white customers uncomfortable
1985 – Affirmative action means their diplomas are bogus
1995 – They’re the victims of a culture of dependency
2005 – They’re culturally out of step with the mainstream

It’s always something.

What’s astonishing is that the media seems to discover this every decade or so and then assumes it’s gone away. And yeah, it is the basis for “the core philosophical division in Washington’s fierce battles over taxes, spending and debt. Whites say government does too much, while blacks and Hispanics say it should do more to meet people’s needs.” And there’s nothing new about it.

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Henry Hyde’s legacy lives on


by digby

One of the inevitable — and fully predictable — bits of fallout from the ACA is the further “Hydeification” of abortion rights. (God knows, fought it tooth and nail at the time. And we lost.) Now we are seeing the first results:

In 2010, President Obama signed into law the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which, among many other things, provides for the establishment of state-level health care exchanges to assist individuals and small businesses in purchasing a private health insurance plan. Despite the fact that these exchanges will not be operational until 2014, some states have already enacted laws restricting the abortion coverage that will be available in plans purchased through the exchanges. But although federal health care reform may have renewed the debate around restricting insurance coverage of abortion, restrictive state abortion insurance policies are not a new phenomenon. Several states already restrict private insurance coverage of abortion; these restrictions will also apply to plans sold on the exchanges. More often, states have banned abortion coverage in public employees’ insurance policies or in other cases where public funds are used to insure employees.

8 states have laws in effect restricting insurance coverage of abortion in all private insurance plans written in the state, including those that will be offered through the health insurance exchanges that will be established under the federal health care reform law. 

 7 states limit coverage to life endangerment.
 1 state limits coverage to life, rape, incest, fetal impairment and “substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function.”
 7 states permit additional abortion coverage through purchase of a separate rider and payment of an additional premium.
 23 states restrict abortion coverage in plans that will be offered through the insurance exchanges.
 6 states limit coverage to life endangerment.
 2 states limit coverage to life endangerment and “substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function.”
 1 state limits coverage to life endangerment, “substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function,” rape or incest.
 10 states limit coverage to life endangerment, rape and incest.
 1 state limits coverage to life endangerment, rape and incest, fetal impairment and “substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function.”
 1 state limits coverage to life endangerment, rape, incest and cases of “grave long-lasting physical health damage.”
 2 states prohibit any abortion coverage

It’s important to emphasize that the ACA isn’t responsible for all of this. A lot of states had these rules on the books before. But it accelerated the movement to do it. Mandated insurance for abortion coverage was just another casualty in the negotiations. Funny how that always happens around women’s rights, isn’t it? The good news is that they didn’t buckle on the birth control mandate, which the same anti-abortion zealots objected to just as fervently.

Women who live in modern states with respect for women’s rights will be able to buy private insurance that has abortion coverage. And many who have employer coverage will likewise still be covered. But the fact is that more women are not going to have this coverage than had it before now and any woman who is on medicaid is still out of luck — it hasn’t been allowed since the 1970s, thanks to Henry Hyde and the cowardly politicians who kow-tow to the religious right on this issue.

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The Grand Bargain was not conceived as a budget negotiation


by digby

Just a reminder here that the Grand Bargain was not conceived as a “deal” between the Republicans and Democrats to cut the “entitlements” in exchange for some “revenue.” That’s the “Balanced Approach” that was set forth by the President in the 2012 campaign.

The Grand Bargain is an agreement between the government and the American People. This is Obama’s vision of a Grand Bargain as told by E.J. Dionne back in January of 2009 before the president was inaugurated:

To listen to Obama and his budget director Peter Orszag is to hear a tale of long-term fiscal woe. The government may have to spend and cut taxes in a big way now, but in the long run, the federal budget is unsustainable.

That’s where sacrifice kicks in. There will be signs of it in Obama’s first budget, in his efforts to contain health-care costs and, down the road, in his call for entitlement reform and limits on carbon emissions. His camp is selling the idea that if he wants authority for new initiatives and new spending, Obama will have to prove his willingness to cut some programs and reform others.

The “grand bargain” they are talking about is a mix and match of boldness and prudence. It involves expansive government where necessary, balanced by tough management, unpopular cuts — and, yes, eventually some tax increases. Everyone, they say, will have to give up something.

The “bargain”  was about a restructuring of government in which Americans would have to “sacrifice” because “the federal budget is unsustainable.” But once that gets done we would get to have some neat new (cheaper) modern stuff because everyone will know the government is living within its means.

Again, this “bargain” was not about a negotiation with Republicans. It has morphed into that in the last couple of years due to the White House requiring some kind of revenues or loophole closing (or something) in return for “entitlement” cuts in various budget negotiations. But that’s not the basis of this vision and never has been.

So, when Paul Ryan says the Grand Bargain is off the table because he won’t agree to tax
increases, and Patty Murray says she won’t budge unless we get some loopholes closed in the tax code, it’s important to keep in mind that the Grand Bargain originally envisioned by Peter Orszag and the president way back when is still very much in play.

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Silver lining Wednesday: Tom Delay isn’t in government any longer

by digby

This was once one of the most powerful men in the world:

“Jesus died for our freedom,” DeLay said. “And Jesus destroyed Satan so that we could be free and that is manifested in what is called the Constitution of the United States. God created this nation and God created the Constitution; it is written on biblical principles.”

And you thought the current crop of Tea Partiers was uniquely looney? Nope. The right wing has been looney for a very long time.

DeLay went on to recount a recent experience he had in which he spent four hours “on a conference call with the Lord” during which God told DeLay that he is to write a book called “Shut It Down” about the need for Constitutional revival:

Somebody ought to ask the NSA who else was on that conference call.

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Spying for fun and personal profit

by digby

Greenwald was on Anderson Cooper last night talking about James Clapper’s contention that they need to spy on pretty much everyone in the world and will continue to do so whether anybody likes it or not. (Ok, I exaggerated a little.  But Clapper was pretty arrogant. )

Glenn makes a point that just cannot be overstated: yes, everyone spies on everyone. But there’s only one nation that’s making a fetish out of it with unlimited resources and no accountability. Glenn also appeared on Andrea Mitchell a couple of days ago and pointed out that it’s entirely possible that the president didn’t know anything about this.

We’re dealing with an agency that’s clearly unaccountable to anyone. The volume and complexity is just too great for anyone who isn’t deeply enmeshed in the system to fully understand it. And on this issue of tapping foreign leaders, I’m going to guess it’s actually likely they didn’t tell the president they were doing it — because he’s a world leader too, a member of a very select club that probably doesn’t much like the idea of other leaders being privy their private conversations. It’s very believable to me that they’d think this was something he was better off not knowing about.

There is a long history in this country of rogue agency collection of dirt on politicians. There is every reason to believe that this “intelligence” was used by the head of the agency for his own purposes. I guess everyone assumes that was in the olden days and it could never happen again. I just don’t know why they would think that.

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Speaking of income inequality

by digby

Apropos of David’s post below, here’s Colbert:

The Dow hit another record high yesterday. So where are all the jobs?

by David Atkins

The Dow Jones Industrial Average hit another record high yesterday, closing at a nosebleed-worthy 15,680.35. This isn’t exactly a surprise, given that corporate profits are at or near record highs and still growing strongly.

So where are all the jobs?

The entire economic battle between the left and right is about supply and demand. The right believes that if you boost the supply side the economy will grow and people will thrive. The left believes that the best way to economic prosperity is through boosting demand. The right says that if you cut taxes on corporations and the wealthy while cutting regulations, business will make more money which it can spend on investing in new products and new markets, thereby creating jobs. The left says that doing so will only put more money into the pockets of a few while generating no job growth, whereas boosting wages will grow middle-class consumer demand, thus creating the desire and capacity for new product purchases that companies will then deliver.

It’s a simple debate. It’s also one in which the media refuses to take sides, pretending that the answer is an elusive and ineffable mystery. This economic debate is considered a matter of opinion rather than of fact.

And yet, we have facts that are startlingly obvious and help us easily determine the victor in this battle of ideas.

It is a fact that taxes on the wealthy are at near historic lows, and that the share of the wealth controlled by the rich is at historic highs. It is a fact that corporate profits are at record highs, as is the stock market. Business, and big business in particular, is doing very, very well. Yet unemployment remains high, wages are stagnant, economic mobility is weak and the middle class is shrinking. Corporations are sitting on vast accumulated wealth, but are not investing that wealth in human capital that advances broad-based prosperity.

We do, on the other hand, have plenty of evidence that high levels of income inequality are very damaging to an economy. We have plenty of evidence that corporations are unwilling to invest in new products because they’re not certain that consumers will be able to afford them. Moreover, we know that unemployment was lower and the nation more prosperous when taxes on the wealthy were higher, when regulations on Wall Street were more stringent, and when organized labor was more powerful.

The argument should by all rights be over. Much as in other areas of scientific debate, conservatives have plainly lost this argument in the realm of fact, and have resorted to restating ideological opinions in the hope that repetition will become accepted truth.

The difference is that the media have finally begun to accept and report that climate change and evolution are incontrovertible facts, while Young Earth creationism and climate denialism are fiction undeserving of publication.

The same standard should be applied to the obvious fiction of supply-side economics. Record profits, record stock values and record inequality coupled with high unemployment should end the argument among serious thinkers and objective analysts once and for all.

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Political malpractice

by digby

Here is a perfect illustration of why so many progressives are downright distraught over the direction of the Democratic Party.  It’s less about ideology and much, much more about basic strategic and tactical incompetence.

Get a load of this:

A group of nine Democratic members of the House of Representatives held a press conference outside the Capitol on Tuesday to demand Congress avert an automatic food stamp cut scheduled to take effect on Friday.

“The average family of four will see a $36 cut in their monthly benefits, bringing an accurate per-person benefit from $1.50 a meal to $1.40 a meal,” Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) said. “Shame on this Congress for allowing this to happen.”

But the cut, which will reduce monthly benefits for all 47 million Americans enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program by roughly 7 percent, is happening thanks mainly to Democratic votes that hastened the demise of a benefit increase from the 2009 stimulus bill. Each of the representatives at Tuesday’s presser voted with their party for a pair of 2010 spending bills that set the cuts in motion.

The first bill took money allocated for future food stamp use and used it instead to prevent states from laying off teachers. Democrats supported the bill grudgingly, lamenting that it would cause a food stamp cut in 2014. When it came time to support a second bill that raided future food stamp funds once again, pushing the cut to November 2013, they protested — at least at first.

“This is one of the more egregious cases of robbing Peter to pay Paul, and is a vote we do not take lightly,” more than 100 Democrats wrote in an August 2010 letter to then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

But then President Barack Obama smoothed things over in a meeting at the White House, because the bill in question was the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act — a priority of the first lady’s. The measure provided free lunches and updated nutrition standards for schools.

“I am very pleased we were able to work together with the president and his team to address concerns regarding cuts to the food stamp program that are included in the child nutrition bill,” Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) said in a statement at the time. On Tuesday, Lee told HuffPost the president had pledged to support replacing the SNAP funds, a vow he fulfilled in subsequent budget blueprints that didn’t become law. Congress and the White House have been otherwise silent about the issue for the past three years.

On Tuesday, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) defended the 2010 tradeoff.

“It was a piece of legislation that said let’s change nutrition standards, let’s get junk foods out of our schools, and let’s make sure that our kids can have those fruits and vegetables,” DeLauro told HuffPost. “There was no money for it. The price of it was $2.2 billion. That came from the food stamp program and all of us here complained. And we were opposed to that but we knew that it was a good first step in getting the Hunger-Free Kids Act.”

Friday’s cut is happening thanks to the expiration of a 13.6 percent food stamp boost from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, better known as the stimulus bill. Originally, lawmakers had planned to let SNAP’s annual inflation adjustments catch up to the increase sometime after 2015. Canceling the enhanced benefits this November means the government will spend $5 billion less on nutrition assistance next year — an annual SNAP spending cut 25 percent larger than what House Republicans are seeking in farm bill negotiations starting this week.

They are actually defending the fact that they were forced into choosing between vegetables and fruits for school lunches and food stamps for poor people. Our progressive representatives passively capitulated to the absurd notion that we could not do both. How many of these “deals” have Democrats made over the past few years?

This is just pathetic:

DeLauro pivoted from November’s food stamp decrease to Republican demands that food stamps be reduced by 5 percent, or $40 billion over 10 years, though the two things are completely separate.

“This is about people wanting to make a $40 billion cut in the food stamp program,” DeLauro said, “not to put in place a Hunger-Free Kids Act, but in fact to take food out of the mouths of our children, or seniors, and the disabled. A much different time, a much different place, and a much different set of circumstances.”

Right, poor people are much more fucked than they were before and are about to get fucked even more.

Meanwhile:

The 400 wealthiest Americans are worth a record $2.02 trillion, roughly equivalent to the GDP of Russia. That is a gain of $300 billion from a year ago, and more than double a decade ago. The average net worth of list members is a staggering $5 billion, $800 million more than a year ago. The minimum net worth needed to make the 400 list was $1.3 billion. The last time it was that high was in 2007 and 2008, just before the financial crisis. Because the bar is so high, 61 American billionaires didn’t make the cut.

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