Month: March 2017

The fetish of choice
by Tom Sullivan

Unquestioned assumptions abound in political debate, but the relative advantage of more choice is one that is both ubiquitous and rarely challenged. More is better. End of discussion. At The Week, Damon Linker looks at how Paul Ryan’s trying to sell health care reform on choice doomed it. Ryan’s American Health Care Act (AHCA) treats patients as consumers looking for the best bargain:

It’s hardly surprising that Ryan took this approach. The right is obsessed with the cost of health care, both for individuals and in the aggregate, and it believes that spending can be most effectively contained by increasing options and competition. That makes choice a means to the end of cost savings. Then there’s the fact that the right also makes a fetish of choice for its own sake. It’s simply better, apparently, for individuals (acting as consumers) to have more insurance policies, doctors, and hospitals to choose from.

It is also more tedious. Quite frankly, I hate shopping. I don’t mind going out and buying when I already know what I want, but I hate shopping. Loathe it. When on rare occasions the mood strikes, I go out and buy what I need for the next year so I won’t have to shop again for months. The Paul Ryans of the world insist I spend the rest of my life doing what I hate simply because it fits the ideology of their economic cult.

Linker points to a 2011 post by Bloomberg View economist Noah Smith who found the toll constant transaction costs take in a culture where they are everywhere. If private everything is better, Japan must be a libertarian paradise, Smith mused:

For example, there are relatively few free city parks. Many green spaces are private and gated off (admission is usually around $5). On the streets, there are very few trashcans; people respond to this in the way libertarians would want, by exercising personal responsibility and carrying their trash home with them in little baggies. There are also very few public benches. In cafes, each customer must order something promptly or be kicked out; outside your house or office, there is basically nowhere to sit down that will not cost you a little bit of money. Public buildings generally have no drinking fountains; you must buy or bring your own water. Free wireless? Good luck finding that!

Does all this private property make me feel free? Absolutely not! Quite the opposite – the lack of a “commons” makes me feel constrained. It forces me to expend a constant stream of mental effort, calculating whether it’s worth it to spend $4 to sit and rest for 10 minutes, whether it’s worth $2 to get a drink.

Linker extends that experience into the realm of medical care:

As options proliferate, individuals face the need to choose among a growing list of high-stakes possibilities. Should I opt for catastrophic coverage that costs less but allows me to see a doctor only if I’m in a severe car accident or suffer a heart attack? Should I purchase something more expensive that will enable me to make an appointment if I’m merely running a fever, worried about the occasional tightness in my chest, or concerned about the mysterious lump in my neck? Or should I take on the enormous medical and financial risk of foregoing coverage altogether?

If I opt for little or no coverage, I’m gambling that I’ll be lucky. If I win that bet, the choice will be retrospectively vindicated. But if I’m unlucky, the choice will seem horribly foolish, contributing either to much worse medical outcomes, much worse financial consequences, or both. If, on the other hand, I opt to pay for maximal coverage and I get sick, I’ll feel wise. But if I stay healthy, I’ll likely end up feeling like a sucker who’s wasted enormous resources just to ease my mind.

Sometimes I don’t need or want more choice. Yes, I can have a coffee maker that is also a timer, an alarm clock, satellite radio, and that starts and warms up my car on cold mornings. But all I really wanted was a cup of coffee.

It is also hard to escape the feeling that the fetishizing of choice comes from people who fancy themselves more savvy than their neighbors. “I’m, like, a really smart person” types. Your basic social Darwinists who imagine themselves at the top of the social order and who would like to structure it so they stay there. Imagine how a confusing array of choices might make it easier for them to fleece their neighbors, especially when the neighbor’s child is in distress or the, uh, “consumer” faces a medical emergency. If Americans wanted to shop for “best buys” in medical care, they’d already be selling it through big box stores.

Which is why a single-payer health care system makes more sense, Linker writes, “everyone pays in, and everyone is eligible for benefits. Choice has nothing to do with it.” A medicare for all system that leaves no American behind. But who would propose a system like that?

He Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere 

by tristero

Kevin Drum is right. The important polling data is in regards to Trump’s popularity among the poor benighted souls who voted for him. And it’s incredibly high, slightly higher than St. Ronald Reagan’s at this point in his presidency. Or as Kevin says: “Unless things change, the Republican base remains not just out of reach, but positively thrilled with President Trump.”

This poll was taken before the healthcare debacle, but the numbers won’t change that much.

Trump is going nowhere.

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The generals go to war with each other

by digby

Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson

Reuters reports:

For years the national political organizations of both Democratic and Republican state attorneys general observed an agreement not to target the other party’s incumbent office-holders in elections.

That hands-off stance ended this month when Republican AGs voted to abandon the agreement and spend money to help unseat Democrats in other states, according to the Republican Attorneys General Association. The decision has not been previously reported.

The move comes as Democratic attorneys general in states across the country have assumed lead roles in opposing some of Republican President Donald Trump’s policies. State AGs in Washington and Hawaii successfully sued to block Trump’s executive orders restricting travel from some Muslim-majority countries, and California’s attorney general has pledged to defend the state’s environmental standards.

Republican attorneys general who supported the change reasoned that AGs should join other national political campaigns which target incumbents, two sources familiar with the closed door process said. Additionally, a desire by some to roll back same-sex marriage and the potential for increased corporate contributions played a role in the decision, said the sources, who requested anonymity to discuss the deliberations.

The so-called ‘incumbency rule’ observed by the state attorneys’ party fundraising arms reflected a rare bit of bipartisanship in the polarized environment of U.S. politics, aimed at promoting cooperation across state lines on issues of common interest, such as consumer protection.

Yeah, why even pretend? Their agreement was downright quaint in this environment.

Also, there’s just too much fundraising potential at stake for these Republicans not to exploit it. There’s lots of Koch money to be had.

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I’ve gotcher racism and sexism for ya right here (on Fox)

by digby

Wow, this is bad. Really, really bad:

BILL O’REILLY: I didn’t hear a word [Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA)] said. I was looking at the James Brown wig. If we have a picture of James, it’s the same wig.

STEVE DOOCY (CO-HOST): It’s the same one.

BRIAN KILMEADE (CO-HOST): And he’s not using it anymore. They just — they finally buried him.

[CROSSTALK]

AINSLEY EARHARDT (CO-HOST): No. OK, I’ve got to defend her on that. I have to defend her on that. She a — you can’t go after a woman’s looks. I think she’s very attractive.

O’REILLY: I didn’t say she wasn’t attractive.

EARHARDT: Her hair is pretty.

OREILLY: I love James Brown, but it’s the same hair, James Brown — alright, the godfather of soul — had.

EARHARDT: So he had girl hair.

O’REILLY: Whatever it is, I just couldn’t get by it.

First of all, I don’t know wtf he’s talking about. Waters’ hair is fine. It
doesn’t look like James Brown unless you’re racist who thinks “they all look alike.”

These guys have always been bad. But Trump has super-charged their cretinism.

O’Reilly apologized later saying his “jest” was dumb. That’s nice.

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Trump needs to have a chat with Kellyanne’s hubbie

by digby

I can’t believe they think this will work, but of course they’re going to try:

Donald Trump is making a big legal move that may shape his presidency over the next four years. In New York Supreme Court, his longtime lawyer Marc Kasowitz looks to throw up a roadblock to a defamation lawsuit filed by Summer Zervos, who appeared on season five of The Apprentice.

Zervos, represented by Gloria Allred, claims that Trump tarnished her reputationby denying acts boasted to Access Hollywood’s Billy Bush about grabbing women’s genitals. The Apprentice alum accuses Trump of kissing her twice in 2007 and attacking her in a hotel room. In response to this, Trump put out a statement that he “never met [Ms. Zervos] at a hotel or greeted her inappropriately,” along with tweets how his accuser “made up events THAT NEVER HAPPENED.”

Now, Trump is looking to bifurcate the litigation so that “the threshold issue of whether the United States Constitution bars this Court from adjudicating this action against President Trump during his Presidency” can be briefed and resolved first.

Kasowitz writes that Trump intends to file a motion to dismiss arguing that the Supremacy Clause immunizes the President from being sued in state court while in office. The attorney adds the “crucial threshold issue was raised, but not decided, by the U.S. Supreme Court in Clinton v. Jones.”

That refers to a lawsuit that Paula Jones filed against Bill Clinton in 1994, while he was serving his first term in the White House. Jones alleged that Clinton sexually harassed her while serving as Governor of Arkansas. Clinton’s attorneys argued that in all but the most exceptional cases, any litigation against the president should be deferred until he left office.

In 1997, the high court came back with its answer that a president can’t escape private litigation.

“Indeed, if the Framers of the Constitution had thought it necessary to protect the President from the burdens of private litigation, we think it far more likely that they would have adopted a categorical rule than a rule that required the President to litigate the question whether a specific case belonged in the ‘exceptional case’ subcategory,” wrote Justice John Paul Stevens at the time. “In all events, the question whether a specific case should receive exceptional treatment is more appropriately the subject of the exercise of judicial discretion than an interpretation of the Constitution.”

But Trump’s lawyer seizes on another aspect of the decision.

Stevens also wrote that “immunity questions should be decided at the earliest possible stage of the litigation” in recognition of the “singular importance of the President’s duties.”

“Moreover, as in Clinton v. Jones, the public interest mandates that the immunity issue be resolved before proceeding further,” writes Kasowitz. “The ‘singular importance of the President’s duties’ warrants a stay where civil actions, such as this one, ‘frequently could distract a President from his public duties, to the detriment of not only the President and his office but also the Nation that the President was designed to serve.’ Requiring President Trump to litigate the merits on a motion to dismiss the complaint, in addition to moving to dismiss on grounds of Presidential immunity, would negate the very interests that that immunity is designed to protect.”

According to Trump’s court papers, Zervos’ lawyer initially agreed to a 30-day extension, but wouldn’t agree to a more expansive time table without an agreement to accept service of Zervos’ subpoena. Without a deal, a judge is now being asked to intervene in a constitutional showdown.

What this article doesn’t mention is that Trump’s choice to head the civil right’s division of the Justice department, George Conway, husband of Kellyanne, is one of the lawyers who helped prepare the Paula Jones case — which led to the impeachment of President Clinton. This is almost exactly the same circumstance — exactly. You literally couldn’t find a more similar case.

Trump seems to think that just as they’ve decided a president can’t be corrupt they will also decide a president can’t be sued. But thanks to Kellyanne’s husband and the rest of “the elves” this is a question that went all the way up to the supreme court and was decided against the president.

As ye sow so shall ye reap.

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Somebody got the wrong talking points

by digby

This CNN format has been tiresome for months. But just … wow:

WATCH: Kayleigh McEnany: Obama rushed off to golf after Daniel Pearl was beheaded.

Pearl was killed in 2002. Obama was a state senator. pic.twitter.com/5QkFRgjoR4

— Yashar (@yashar) March 28, 2017

I don’t know who they think they’re fooling with this but the format of having Trump hacks like her and Jeffrey Lord on isn’t interesting because they are predictable robots. That’s not compelling TV.

McEnany isn’t dumb. But her job is to say dumb things. It’s not real.

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Jared Kushner, renaissance boy

by digby

I wrote about young Jared for Salon this morning:

For a few days last week the scuttlebutt held that President Donald Trump’s most trusted adviser might be on the outs with the boss because he decided to take the family skiing in Aspen, Colorado, just as the White House entered its first big legislative fight, which of course it ignominiously lost. I’m speaking of Jared Kushner, the boyish 36-year-old husband of favorite offspring Ivanka and, by all accounts, the man who is the last person Trump talks to before he makes a decision.

The pictures of Jared and Ivanka posing for Instagrams like a bunch of Kardashians hawking designer ski gear while the embattled president called up wavering Republican congressmen and prattled on about “his damn election” didn’t exactly show a serious, hardworking image to the nation. And we know how Trump feels about that, right?

You hear that Trump didn’t hoodwink voters (they knew what they were getting!) and then find clips like this. Just breathtaking hypocrisy. pic.twitter.com/LDnb3Xr7oF

— Matt McDermott (@mattmfm) March 18, 2017

As it turns out Trump’s actually a yuuuge believer in taking vacations. He has been to his Florida resort seven times already (at taxpayer expense) and last weekend the White House tried to pretend the president was having meetings at his Virginia golf club. It was later revealed that he was hitting the links again.

So it’s not surprising that Trump was quick to forgive his favorite daughter and son-in-law for their little getaway. Not only did he forgive Jared; yesterday he put him in charge of a bold new initiative to run the country like a business with what the Washington Post described as a “SWAT team of strategic consultants” that “will be staffed by former business executives.” If the first couple of months of the Trump administration are any indication of what that might look like, we’re in for a bumpy ride. As Salon’s Simon Maloy observed:

Innovation! What a concept. And who better to head up a team of business innovators and power brokers than Jared Kushner, a child of privilege who inherited his father’s real estate business and fell ass backward into a position of authority? Kushner will take the lessons he learned from being born rich and marrying the right person and use them to disrupt the American government.

And this tired old GOP mantra about running government like a business is like saying that you should build boats like you wash dishes. They are completely different tasks. And Kushner is a particularly poor choice, even if you buy the argument. As Maloy pointed out, Kushner is a lot like his father-in-law in that he inherited his father’s New Jersey real estate business and, well, that’s about it.

Actually, after Chris Christie put Kushner’s father in jail for corruption (it’s a long story), Jared took the reins of the business and jumped into Manhattan real estate where he is known for one very big deal. Unfortunately, also like his father-in-law, it turns out Kushner is not very good at what he does. Kushner sold his stake in that project to his family recently, ostensibly to avoid a conflict of interest. It was actually a smart business decision because the building’s finances are in big trouble at the moment. The Kushners may receive a bailout from a powerful Chinese insurance company. So it’s a good thing that we’ve decided that Republicans enriching their immediate family while in office isn’t corruption — or that might look bad.

Kushner’s new job is just an addition to his already bulging portfolio. Recall that a while back he was given the special task of resolving the Israeli-Palestinian issue. One might assume he’s even less qualified for that job than he is for heading up a “SWAT team” of business leaders, but apparently being an observant Jew is all that’s required. It’s surprising that nobody ever thought of that before.

On Monday we found out from White House press secretary Sean Spicer that “throughout the campaign and the transition, Jared served as the official primary point of contact with foreign governments and officials until we had State Department officials up.” That’s correct: This 36-year-old with no experience in government or foreign affairs served as the new president’s primary contact with foreign governments. Apparently, no one who knew what he (or she) was doing was available.

This important task seems to have landed young Kushner into a spot of trouble, however. We also learned on Monday that the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is investigating possible Russian ties to the Trump campaign, has asked to speak to Kushner about his meeting during the transition with the Russian ambassador. Apparently there was more than one, including a meeting previously unacknowledged by the Trump administration with a Russian banker named Sergey N. Gorkov, head of the state-owned development bank Vnesheconombank, which just happens to be one of the Russian banks facing U.S. sanctions. (Gorkov is reportedly close to Vladimir Putin and graduated from what was formerly the KGB academy.)

At the time of those meetings, Kushner had not sold his interest in the Manhattan building to his family and The New York Times reported that the committee wants to know whether Kushner spoke to Gorkov about potentially helping him with his financial problems. According to Reuters, Kushner met with representatives of the bank earlier in 2016 as well, which raises still more questions. Whatever the substance of the conversations, the whole thing carries the stench of a conflict of interest.

That Kushner wouldn’t understand this and would hold such meetings after numerous news reports and government acknowledgments about Russian intervention in the election campaign shows such astonishingly poor judgment that it makes one shudder to think what he may have said and done in his role in the transition and now in the administration.

I cannot help but be reminded of a comment from a State Department employee:

They think Jared can do everything. It’s reminiscent of the developing countries where I’ve served. The family rules everything, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs knows nothing.

The United States is not a developing country. It is supposedly the world’s only superpower. Can’t we do better than this?

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Trump voters starting to wonder what the hell is going on

by digby

“We can tweet about Snoop Dogg…but can’t seem to help people who lost over 1 million acres”

Devastating wildfires ripped across the grasslands in Kansas, Texas, and Oklahoma earlier this month, and ranchers were among those hardest hit. Some families lost 80 percent of their livestock herds, along with hundreds of miles of fences and land. Seven people have died, several trying to save their cattle.

Many of these ranchers voted for Donald Trump, and some say they wish the president was paying more attention to them in their time of need.

Garth Gardiner runs Gardiner Angus Ranch in Ashland, Kansas with his brothers and their families. He says the day the fire started, his brother was out working on their ranch. By the time the fires burned out, he had lost 500 cows — a third of his herd.

Here, Gardiner makes an emotional appeal for help to the White House, and the president he helped elect.

He’s busy marketing his “brand” with endless photo ops and tweeting and monitoring his PR on cable news networks. That’s what he does. And every week-end he needs to fly at taxpayer expense to his Florida resort or go to his Virginia golf club to get in 36 holes or so and secretly meet with his rich cronies. That’s also what he does.

Helping out disaster victims isn’t really in the job description of a billionaire who promised to run the country like a business. Where’s the profit in that?

Trump misunderestimated
by Tom Sullivan

Donald Trump promised that repealing Obamacare was the first on his agenda as president (turns out it was banning Muslims). Team Trump expected to use the “savings” from the repeal to justify a tax cut as big, fat, and juicy as Trump doesn’t like his steaks. Stocks have taken a tumble as investors realized they might get their tax cuts cooked to perfection either.

Jim Newell at Slate explains how this was supposed to go:

The AHCA was supposed to lower the budget baseline to give leaders about $1 trillion to work with in the tax reform package. This would have gone a long way toward making tax reform revenue-neutral—i.e., not a long-run deficit increaser—which would be a requirement in order to pass the bill with a 51-vote majority under reconciliation if the changes are to be permanent. If the tax reform package isn’t revenue-neutral, its cuts will expire after 10 years like the Bush tax cuts did. Balancing rate cuts with a simplification of the code is what would define it as “reform, and not just an enormous temporary tax cut.

That $1 trillion evaporated when the AHCA went down in flames on Friday. Now what? Freedom Caucus chair Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) spoke to that on Sunday. From The Hill (emphasis mine):

“Does it have to be what they would say revenue-neutral, or do you have to have an offset, like with the border-adjustment tax — I think those are going to be the two questions,” Meadows said during an interview on ABC’s “This Week.”

“I think there’s been a lot of flexibility in terms of some of my contacts and conservatives in terms of not making it totally offset.”

[…]

“When we start to grow the economy at 4, 4.1 percent, it actually not only increases wages but it puts more money in Americans pockets each and every day,” he said.

“And so tax reform and lowering taxes will create and generate more income, and so we’re looking at those, where the fine balance is. But does it have to be fully offset? My personal response is no.”

You saw it coming, didn’t you? I haven’t yet heard a Republican in Congress utter the phrase “tax cuts pay for themselves,” but that’s just a matter of time. The National Review is already there. There will be “dynamic scoring” and other sleight-of-hand deployed to sell as sound economics tax cuts that are actually conservative dogma.

FiveThirtyEight addressed the question last fall:

The root of the problem is that in order to understand how taxes will affect the economy, we have to understand how the economy itself works. In a number of important ways, we don’t. Paul Romer, the incoming chief economist of the World Bank, made waves last week (at least on Twitter) with a new paper arguing that the field of macroeconomics has suffered through “more than three decades of intellectual regress.” At the Tax Policy Center event on Friday, former Fed economist Louise Sheiner ticked off a list of big questions that economists can’t answer: “We don’t understand why productivity has slowed so much. We don’t understand why labor force participation has fallen by so much. We don’t understand why companies aren’t investing now with such low interest rates.” With so many unanswered questions, Sheiner said, there is no way we can accurately estimate the impact of specific tax policies.

What the Trump administration underestimates, as it did with tackling health care, are the number of obstacles to getting through a tax package. Newell again:

When Republicans talk about simplifying the corporate tax code, they talk about weeding out corporate “loopholes” while lowering marginal rates. The effective tax rate that corporations pay is far lower than the top statutory rate that Republicans so often complain is too high. But if you weed out “loopholes” in any way that would result in a large corporation ending up having to pay more in taxes, they will lobby against that with every fiber of their being until the bill is dead, forever.

As Mark Mazur, director of the Tax Policy Center, told me cheekily, what the public may see as a corporate loophole is what each relevant corporation sees as a “well-deserved tax incentive.” If a corporation is paying an effective tax rate of 10 percent now, they’re going to lobby hard against any bill “that makes it 11.”

Entitlements. In the Republican universe, they only benefit poor people, low caste Irresponsibles. The president could find himself up against opponents with much more fight in them in the next round. He will need more golf to get through the tax fight.