“The Future Of The American Union”: Lincoln, Liberty And Two Americas
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
Those are the opening words of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and they seem eerily prescient today because once again this country finds itself increasingly divided and pondering the future of this great union and the very ideas of liberty and equality for all.
The gap is growing between liberals and conservatives, the rich and the not rich, intergenerational privilege and new-immigrant power, patriarchy and gender equality, the expanders of liberty and the withholders of it. And that gap, which has geographic contours — the densely populated coastal states versus the less densely populated states of the Rocky Mountains, Mississippi Delta and Great Plains — threatens the very concept of a United States and is pushing conservatives, left quaking after this month’s election, to extremes.
Some have even moved to make our divisions absolute. The Daily Caller reported last week “more than 675,000 digital signatures appeared on 69 separate secession petitions covering all 50 states,” according to its analysis of requests made through the White House’s “We the People” online petition system.
According to The Daily Caller, “Petitions from Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas residents have accrued at least 25,000 signatures, the number the Obama administration says it will reward with a staff review of online proposals.” President Obama lost all those states, except Florida, in November.
The former Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul took to his Congressional Web site to laud the petitions of those bent on leaving the union, writing that “secession is a deeply American principle.” He continued: “If the possibility of secession is completely off the table there is nothing to stop the federal government from continuing to encroach on our liberties and no recourse for those who are sick and tired of it.”
The Internet has been lit up with the incongruity of Lincoln’s party becoming the party of secessionists.
But even putting secession aside, it is ever more clear that red states are becoming more ideologically strident and creating a regional quasi country within the greater one. They are rushing to enact restrictive laws on everything from voting to women’s health issues.
As Monica Davey reported in The New York Times on Friday, starting in January, “one party will hold the governor’s office and majorities in both legislative chambers in at least 37 states, the largest number in 60 years and a significant jump from even two years ago.”
As the National Conference of State Legislatures put it, “thanks to an apparent historic victory in Arkansas, Republicans gained control of the old South, turning the once solidly Democratic 11 states of the Confederacy upside down.” Arkansas will be the only one of these states with a Democratic governor.
As Davey’s article pointed out, single-party control raises “the prospect that bold partisan agendas — on both ends of the political spectrum — will flourish over the next couple of years.” But it seems that “both ends of the political spectrum” should not be misconstrued as being equal. Democrats may want to expand personal liberties, but Republicans have spent the last few years working feverishly to restrict them.
According to a January report from the Guttmacher Institute: “By almost any measure, issues related to reproductive health and rights at the state level received unprecedented attention in 2011. In the 50 states combined, legislators introduced more than 1,100 reproductive health and rights-related provisions, a sharp increase from the 950 introduced in 2010. By year’s end, 135 of these provisions had been enacted in 36 states, an increase from the 89 enacted in 2010 and the 77 enacted in 2009.” Almost all the 2011 provisions were enacted in states with Republican-controlled legislatures.
According to the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, at least 180 restrictive voting bills were introduced since the beginning of 2011 in 41 states. Most of the states that passed restrictive voting laws have Republican-controlled legislatures.
An N.C.S.L. report last year found “the 50 states and Puerto Rico have introduced a record 1,538 bills and resolutions relating to immigrants and refugees in the first quarter of 2011. This number surpasses the first quarter of 2010 by 358.” That trend slowed in 2012 in large part because of legal challenges. Many of the states that had enacted anti-immigrant laws or adopted similar resolutions by March of last year, again, had Republican-controlled legislatures.
We are moving toward two Americas with two contrasting — and increasingly codified — concepts of liberty. Can such a nation long endure?
By: Charles M. Blow, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, November 23, 2012
“Let Me Count The Ways”: Would A Republican Candidate Lie About Taxes?
The United States faces a gigantic economic choice next year, and last night’s debate centered largely around what Mitt Romney would do about it. Romney’s plan is to lock the Bush tax cuts into place, reduce the long-term deficit entirely through spending cuts, enact an additional 20 percent tax rate cut that would disproportionately benefit the rich and cover the cost through unspecified closings of tax deductions. But Romney labored tirelessly, and with evident success, to portray himself in a far more egalitarian light. Every time President Obama described the cost of his tax rate cost, Romney dismissed it as untrue, pledged that his plan would not reduce the current tax burden on the rich, and even implied that he would make the rich pay higher taxes by closing their loopholes.
It was a virtuoso performance. But what does it tell us about how Romney would govern if elected? Here he was making promises about how he would govern that flatly contrasted with his plans. Which promises should we believe? Ross Douthat argues that Romney’s soothing moderate rhetoric shows that he is likely to govern as the moderate he presented himself as.
It’s worth considering a similar — in many ways, identical — episode that took place a dozen years before. During the 2000 election, the growth of a budget surplus offered the country a major choice. Al Gore proposed to use most of the surplus to retire the national debt and the balance for public investment. George W. Bush proposed a large, regressive income tax that Gore warned would exacerbate inequality and jeopardize the soundness of the budget.
Then, as now, the Republican simply denied over and over that his plan would do what the Democrats said it would. Bush portrayed his plan as devoting just a small fraction of the surplus to tax cuts and described his tax cut itself as benefitting the poor far more than the rich. And you certainly could find circumstantial evidence to suggest that Bush might govern the way he portrayed himself, rather than the way his plan read. He had governed in a bipartisan way in Texas, he had explicitly denounced the conservative wing of the Congressional GOP, and he had surrounded himself with moderate advisers like Michael Gerson and Karen Hughes.
But Bush in fact followed through on what his plan actually did, which happened to be what Gore described it as, and not what Bush described it as. His promises to maintain the budget surplus and direct most of the tax cuts to lower-earners fell by the wayside. What mattered was the party, and the Republican Party was committed to a policy of regressive tax cuts.
The Bush-Gore debates centered primarily around Gore’s endless, frustrating attempts to pin down Bush’s priorities. I compiled pieces of Bush denying he would pursue what turned out to be the centerpiece of his administration’s economic agenda.
Here’s Bush in the first presidential debate:
I want to take one-half of the surplus and dedicate it to Social Security. One-quarter of the surplus for important projects …
tonight we’re going to hear some phony numbers about what I think and what we ought to do. …
this is a man who has great numbers. He talks about numbers. I’m beginning to think not only did he invent the Internet, but he invented the calculator. It’s fuzzy math. It’s a scaring — he’s trying to scare people in the voting booth. Under my tax plan that he continues to criticize, I set one-third. The federal government should take no more than a third of anybody’s check. But I also dropped the bottom rate from 15% to 10%. Because by far the vast majority of the help goes to people at the bottom end of the economic ladder. …
After my plan is in place, the wealthiest Americans will pay a higher percentage of taxes then they do today…
Let me tell you what the facts are. The facts are after my plan, the wealthiest of Americans pay more taxes of the percentage of the whole than they do today.
First of all, that’s simply not true what he just said, of course. And secondly, I repeat to you –
MODERATOR: What is not true, Governor?
That we spent — the top 1% receive 223 as opposed to 445 billion in new spending. The top — let’s talk about my tax plan. The top 1% will pay one-third of all the federal income taxes. And in return, get one-fifth of the benefits, because most of the tax reductions go to the people at the bottom end of the economic ladder. …
GORE: I think that what — I think the point of that is that anybody would have a hard time trying to make a tax cut plan that is so large, that would put us into such big deficits, that gives almost half the benefits to the wealthiest of the wealthy. I think anybody would have a hard time explaining that clearly in a way that makes sense to the average person.
BUSH: That’s the kind of exaggeration I was just talking about. (LAUGHTER)
But the top 1% will end up paying one-third of the taxes in America and they get one-fifth of the benefits.
Under my plan, if you make — the top — the wealthy people pay 62% of the taxes today. Afterwards they pay 64%. This is a fair plan. You know why? Because the tax code is unfair for people at the bottom end of the economic ladder. If you’re a single mother making $22,000 a year today and you’re trying to raise two children, for every additional dollar you earn you pay a higher marginal rate on that dollar than someone making $200,000, and that’s not right. So I want to do something about that.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intel, October 4, 2012
“The Rise Of The Super Rich”: GOP Congress Really Does Make The Rich Richer
Are you rich and want to get richer? Vote Republican! The stronger the GOP is in Congress, the larger the share of wealth the top 1 percent controls, according to a new study in the October issue of American Sociological Review, which confirms what we figured all along — there’s a direct connection between the rightward shift of Congress and the upward advance of the richest Americans’ net worths.
From 1949 through 2008, the impact of a 1 percentage point increase in the share of seats held by Republicans in the House (a little over five seats) raised the top 1 percent’s income share by about .08 percentage points.
“At first glance, this might seem negligible,” said Thomas Volscho, a sociologist at CUNY-College of Staten Island who co-authored the study. But it’s not. “Given that the estimated national income in 2008 was more than $7.8 trillion, an increase of only 1 percent in Republican seat share would raise the income of the top 1 percent by nearly $6.6 billion. That equates to about $6,600 per family in the top 1 percent.”
The ASR study, “The Rise of the Super-Rich,” looks at the experience of the 1 percent from just after World War II to 2008 and identifies several other factors that have propelled the top tier’s rise. The fact that the uber wealthy have gotten richer much faster than lower-income brackets has been well documented and helped spark the Occupy movement, but this research looks at the role that policy and other variables have played.
Beyond politics, Volscho and Kelly found that the decline of private-sector union membership, and the increasing financializing of the economy — which has heightened the impact of financial-asset bubbles — were also key contributors to income inequality and the rise of the 1 percent. Over the 60 years the paper studied, a 1 percentage point decrease in union membership among private sector workers was linked to a more than 0.4 percentage point increase in the income share of the super-rich.
But the most surprising finding of the study may be the impact a GOP Congress has on income inequality. “Based on our analysis, Democrats appear to favor an economic system that produces more egalitarian outcomes even before any redistribution occurs,” the study concludes. “In essence, the market is not completely beyond the influence of politics and policy, and it is not just in the realm of explicit redistribution that political parties produce divergent distributional outcomes. Political decisions in part ‘make the market.”
Interestingly, the party affiliation of the president did not significantly impact the wealth share of the top 1 percent. Volscho told Salon he was surprised by that finding. Instead, it’s Congress that has the bigger impact. “It was surprising, but not. Because if you look at, in 1995, the Republican takeover over Congress, that’s when you started to see the spike in the top 1 percent,” he said. “They had been doing well since around 1980, but not as well as around 1995. And the stock market boom started in 1995 as well, but we took that into consideration and that had an independent effect.”
The study doesn’t get into specific policies that impact income inequality much, calling for further research on the subject, but it doesn’t take a Ph.D. to make some pretty good guesses. Republicans (with help from Democrats, no doubt) have pushed tax cuts that disproportionately impact the wealthy, opposed redistributive programs, decreased financial regulation, which allowed for the explosion of financial speculation, cut education funding, etc. “There are so many things, appointments, heads of agencies, mundane policies and regulations that filter down from Congress into government agencies that potentially can aid the very rich,” Volscho said.
But a Republican president like Mitt Romney could help in that they would “make that pro-1 percent legislation flow through so much quicker,” Volscho said. Of course, this isn’t too surprising — polls consistently show that Americans think Romney and the GOP would do more to help the wealthy. Now social science shows they’re right!
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, October 2, 2012
“Where’s The Data?”: Paul Ryan Claims 30 Percent Of America Happy To Freeload
One of the more enduring ‘knocks’ on the candidacy of Mitt Romney is that he incorrectly views many of those who are in need of government provided assistance as being people who prefer to live life at the expense of the taxpayer rather than pursue a more meaningful existence of hard work and self-sufficiency.
Whether this perspective on Romney is fair or unfair, most would agree that the GOP standard bearer’s now infamous 47% speech—delivered at a Boca Raton fundraiser—has done little to dispel this meme as we head in to the dwindling days of the 2012 presidential campaign.
Now, Romney’s running mate, Congressman Paul Ryan, has weighed in with his own assessment of what drives a significant portion of the American public—and it’s not pretty.
Speaking at the annual American Spectator Robert L. Bartley Gala Dinner in November of 2011, Ryan had this to say-
“Today, 70 percent of Americans get more benefits from the federal government in dollar value than they pay back in taxes. So you could argue that we’re already past that [moral] tipping point. The good news is survey after survey, poll after poll, still shows that we are a center-right 70-30 country. Seventy percent of Americans want the American dream. They believe in the American idea. Only 30 percent want their welfare state. What that tells us is at least half of those people who are currently in that category are there not of their wish or their will.”
While it is certainly interesting that Ryan predicates his remarks on the belief that one who does not self-identify as “right of center” necessarily opposes the the American dream, leaving it to follow that such an individual would prefer to allow the government to pay for his or her existence (quite a stretch by any reasonable standard), what most interested me about Ryan’s address was the source for his assumptions.
Who says that America is a center-right nation by a 70-30 margin? And if that is the basis of Ryan’s calculations in determining how many of us prefer the welfare state to hard work, wouldn’t a source for such a claim be appropriate?
As I simply could not recall there being any such ‘survey after survey’ and ‘poll after poll’ that would support Congressman Ryan’s conclusions, it struck me as a worthwhile venture to go looking for the same.
Bearing in mind that the Ryan address was given November of 2011—and wanting to be fair to Congressman Ryan—I went off in search of any poll conducted within a reasonable window of the time frame of Ryan’s address that might support his allegations.
I found that virtually every single one of the major polls conducted in the nation during the months leading up to Ryan’s speech revealed that the overwhelming majority of Americans (64.5 percent when the polls are averaged) believed we should be raising taxes to help cut into the deficit—an odd conclusion in a nation so heavily slanted to the right of center as claimed by Mr. Ryan.
I found that the Gallup Poll conducted on September 20th of 2011 revealed that 70% of Americans wanted to increase taxes on corporations by eliminating certain tax deductions the public believed to be unfair. The same poll also discovered that Americans widely supported the jobs plan that President Obama sent to Congress where it failed thanks to Congressman Ryan and his cohorts.
Again, a shocking result if we are to believe Ryan’s assessment that seven out of ten Americans are committed to the very ideology that Ryan professes to be his own.
I found a CBS/New York Times poll conducted just a few months before Ryan’s speech reporting that 72 percent of those polled disapproved of the way his party handled the default crisis.
And in a Time Magazine poll conducted less than one month before Ryan’s labeling 30 percent of our fellow Americans to be a bunch of bums, 79 percent of the public believed that the gap between the rich and the poor had grown too large, 86 percent believed that Wall Street and its lobbyists have far too much to say about what happens in Washington and a majority of Americans supported the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Do you know what I could not find?
Not so much as one survey or poll suggesting that the United States is a right-of–center electorate by a margin of 70-30 or that 30 percent of the public is content to live their lives courtesy of the United States government with no interest or desire in taking control of their own support and sustenance if given the chance.
While it might not be forgivable, it would at least be understandable had Ryan made this speech in the heat of a campaign where he has proven himself willing to say or do just about anything to solidify his base. However, these comments were made well before Congressman Ryan was chosen for the GOP ticket. Thus, it seems reasonable to accept that this is either what Mr. Ryan believes or what he thinks he can sell—despite an apparent lack of any evidence whatsoever to support so shrill and offensive a claim.
Congressman Ryan owes us some authority for his remarks. If these polls and surveys exist, his campaign should make them available to us.
Otherwise, Paul Ryan—a man whose own living has long come solely at the expense of the American taxpayer—is simply making this stuff up out of whole cloth and, in the process, deeply offending the millions of Americans who want more than anything to find work and get ahead but are struggling to do so.
Talk about being out of touch….
By: Rick Ungar, Contributor, Forbes, October 3, 2012
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