“Just A Reminder”: Congress, Sometimes You Guys Are An Embarrassment
We’re 15 days out from the expiration of our eighth stopgap — yes, our eighth stopgap — to extend funding for transportation infrastructure. The last long-term transportation bill ended in 2009, and here we are, three years later, with no replacement.
It looked, this week, like perhaps we had finally broken the impasse when 72 senators joined together to pass the Boxer-Inhofe transportation bill. But Hill staffers tell Politico that the House won’t take the Senate bill up before the end of the month. Which means, yes, a ninth transportation stopgap. A ninth bill that doesn’t give states any predictable framework in which to make long-term investments. A ninth failure, in other words.
Congress, sometimes you guys are an embarrassment.
And so long as we’re taking the dim view here at Wonkbook, let’s just be honest about it: Boxer-Inhofe won’t solve our transportation problems, either. It’s much better than nothing, of course. And it’s better than yet another stopgap. But both on the spending and funding sides, it’s inadequate.
On the spending side, it only lasts for two years — the House wants a five-year bill, as does the White House — and, at $109 billion, it’s only about two-thirds the size of the president’s budget request for infrastructure, which was, in turn, smaller than what most infrastructure experts thought was needed.
This is a bad time to do a half-measure on infrastructure. We have literally trillions of dollars in unmet infrastructure needs. We have massive unemployment in the construction sector. Materials are unusually cheap because of a depressed global economy. Borrowing is unusually cheap because we’re one of the few safe havens left in the global financial market. And it’s cheaper to repair an aging bridge today than rebuild a crumbled one 10 years from now. So waiting to do the bulk of our infrastructure passing a half-measure on infrastructure investment later is like waiting till after the big sale ends to buy your groceries. It’s just bad financial planning.
Further, as my colleague Brad Plumer reports, Boxer-Inhofe does nothing to stop the Highway Trust Fund, which is paid for by the federal gas tax, from going broke. There are all sorts of reasons the fund is going broke — more fuel-efficient cars, the gas tax isn’t indexed to inflation, etc — but the bottom line is that the primary mechanism we use to pay for infrastructure in this country is in crisis. President Ronald Reagan, you’ll recall, actually raised the gas tax to fund his infrastructure bill, and Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY) offered an amendment to index the gas tax to inflation in this bill. But that amendment was defeated, and so rather than actually fixing the Highway Trust Fund, we’re exhausting it, and patching the rest of the bill with one-time pay-fors and gimmicks. So the central problem in transportation funding — the problem that has arguably led to these nine stopgaps — will be left for another day.
Boxer-Inhofe is a lot better than doing nothing. It’s a lot better than another stopgap. And Sens. Barbara Boxer and James Inhofe deserve credit for actually moving a bipartisan infrastructure bill through the Senate. But it’s a reminder that, these days, even when Congress does get around to doing its job, it doesn’t do it particularly well.
By: Ezra Klein, The Washington Post Wonkbook, March 16, 2012
“Affordable Care Act For The Wealthy”: The Rest Of You Can Have Vouchers
It’s not uncommon for the über-wealthy to equip their mega-mansions with pricey private home theaters, spa-worthy washrooms, and palatial pools. Now an increasing number of the super-rich are setting aside space in their homes for another purpose: top-notch medical care.
According to Bloomberg, more well-off families are paying up to install at-home emergency rooms, which can cost upwards of $1 million, and forking over as much as $30,000 a year for “concierge care,” which puts the best-of-the-best physicians at their disposal anytime, anywhere.
“Wealthy people want to have a little exclusivity and want better service than they can get at their normal healthcare facility, and they’re willing to pay for it,” Rick Flynn, principal and head of the Family Office Group with Rothstein Kass, told Bloomberg.
Guardian 24/7, a Virginia-based medical care company founded by former White House physician Sean O’Mara, charges as much as $12,000 a month for its ReadyRooms, Bloomberg reported, which feature discreetly installed medical equipment available at the touch of a button.
If a medical emergency arises, homeowners can immediately contact an on-call emergency physician—a much faster response than waiting for an ambulance to arrive and transport the ailing homeowner to the hospital, the company’s website notes.
“Before Guardian, this kind of medical protection was only available to one person,” the company’s website says. “Now, presidential-level care can be yours—on your schedule and your terms.”
And if you thought for a minute the super-rich might have to be without immediate access to medical care outside the confines of their estates, think again. Guardian 24/7 installs any number of medical apparatuses from X-ray machines to CT scanners on yachts, motor coaches, and aircraft.
By: Meg Handley, Washington Whispers, U. S. News and World Report, March 16, 2012
“White Like Me”: The Re-Racialization Of American Politics
The conditions are converging for another presidential election that will sharply divide the country along racial lines, with troubling implications no matter which side prevails.
From one direction, the Republican presidential primaries have witnessed an epic failure by the GOP contenders to attract and engage minority voters. White voters, especially older ones, are routinely casting 90 percent or more of the votes in GOP contests this year, at least as high a proportion as in 2008.
Simultaneously, despite some recent gains, President Obama continues to struggle among white voters, especially the white working class. In 2008, he became the first presidential nominee ever to lose white voters by double digits and still win the White House. In 2012, as minorities loom larger in the vote, Obama could lose whites even more lopsidedly and still win reelection.
As these trends intensify, the election could reinforce the hardening re-racialization of American politics. Republicans today rely on a preponderantly white coalition centered on older and blue-collar voters, many of whom express great unease not only about activist government but also about the demographic changes swelling the minority population. Democrats depend on a coalition of minorities and of white voters (particularly those with college degrees) who are the most comfortable with government activism and the propulsive demographic transformation.
This year’s tumultuous Republican presidential race has underscored the dominance of whites, especially older white voters, in the GOP. After Tuesday’s contests in Alabama and Mississippi, exit polls have been conducted in 16 states that have held Republican primaries or caucuses. In all but two, whites cast at least 90 percent of the ballots. Indeed, whites delivered at least 94 percent of the votes in all but five GOP contests this year. Whites represented only 74 percent of all voters in the 2008 general election.
Among those 16 states, only Michigan has seen its minority vote share increase by more than a trace (to 8 percent, from 4 percent in 2008). Whites are dominating the GOP electorate even in rapidly diversifying states. In Nevada, whites were just 69 percent of all voters in the 2008 general election, but they cast 90 percent of the votes in last month’s Republican caucus. Similar gaps are evident in GOP primaries from Georgia, Mississippi, and Virginia, to Arizona, Ohio, and Oklahoma.
This year’s Republican electorate shades not only white but also gray. In 12 of the 16 states where exit polls have been conducted, voters over 50 cast at least 60 percent of the GOP primary votes; in the other four, they represented at least 55 percent of the vote. Just 43 percent of 2008 general-election voters were that old. Even compared with the 2008 GOP primaries, the gray tint is much more pronounced.
All of this flags near- and long-term challenges for the Republican Party. The problem this fall will be to attract minority (and younger) voters who are uninspired, or even alienated, by the primaries. As GOP front-runner Mitt Romney has hurtled to the right on immigration, recent surveys have shown Obama’s support against him matching, or exceeding, the president’s 67 percent showing among Hispanics in 2008. Hispanic Republicans such as Jennifer Korn, executive director of the Hispanic Leadership Network, say that if Romney wins the nomination, he will need to vastly expand his outreach “to explain his [immigration] position.” But outreach may go only so far for a candidate who touts “self-deportation” for illegal immigrants.
As population trends continue, the electoral math will grow more daunting for Republicans. If the GOP allows Democrats to continue winning four-fifths of all minority voters—as Obama did in 2008—Republicans will need to attract an implausibly high percentage of whites to win presidential elections. The conundrum is that the party’s current reliance on the most conservative whites constrains its ability to embrace policies attractive to minorities, as the harsh primary debate on immigration demonstrates.
Today, however, the GOP’s white strength can still overcome its minority weakness. Obama could win reelection with backing from only about 39 percent of whites if he duplicates his 2008 showing among minorities (and if their vote share rises slightly). But Democrats couldn’t muster even that much white support during the 2010 Republican congressional landslide. And Obama has no guarantee of crossing that bar this fall. In the Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor poll released on Friday, his approval rating among whites reached just 41 percent, a meager level that he has exceeded only once in the poll since October 2009.
These contrasting racial patterns signal another tough election in November. Equally important, they show how closely the ideological divisions between the parties track racial lines, with minorities more open than most whites to an activist role for Washington in promoting opportunity and providing a safety net. That divergence is a formula for social tension and polarized debate. But it’s the future that appears increasingly likely as Obama marshals a coalition powered at its core by the diversity reshaping American life, and his Republican rivals compete for an electorate that remains almost entirely untouched by it.
By: Ronald Brownstein, National Journal, March 17, 2012
“Natural Born Drillers”: Republicans Are Just Plain “Full Of Gas”
To be a modern Republican in good standing, you have to believe — or pretend to believe — in two miracle cures for whatever ails the economy: more tax cuts for the rich and more drilling for oil. And with prices at the pump on the rise, so is the chant of “Drill, baby, drill.” More and more, Republicans are telling us that gasoline would be cheap and jobs plentiful if only we would stop protecting the environment and let energy companies do whatever they want.
Thus Mitt Romney claims that gasoline prices are high not because of saber-rattling over Iran, but because President Obama won’t allow unrestricted drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Meanwhile, Stephen Moore of The Wall Street Journal tells readers that America as a whole could have a jobs boom, just like North Dakota, if only the environmentalists would get out of the way.
The irony here is that these claims come just as events are confirming what everyone who did the math already knew, namely, that U.S. energy policy has very little effect either on oil prices or on overall U.S. employment. For the truth is that we’re already having a hydrocarbon boom, with U.S. oil and gas production rising and U.S. fuel imports dropping. If there were any truth to drill-here-drill-now, this boom should have yielded substantially lower gasoline prices and lots of new jobs. Predictably, however, it has done neither.
Why the hydrocarbon boom? It’s all about the fracking. The combination of horizontal drilling with hydraulic fracturing of shale and other low-permeability rocks has opened up large reserves of oil and natural gas to production. As a result, U.S. oil production has risen significantly over the past three years, reversing a decline over decades, while natural gas production has exploded.
Given this expansion, it’s hard to claim that excessive regulation has crippled energy production. Indeed, reporting in The Times makes it clear that U.S. policy has been seriously negligent — that the environmental costs of fracking have been underplayed and ignored. But, in a way, that’s the point. The reality is that far from being hobbled by eco-freaks, the energy industry has been given a largely free hand to expand domestic oil and gas production, never mind the environment.
Strange to say, however, while natural gas prices have dropped, rising oil production and a sharp fall in import dependence haven’t stopped gasoline prices from rising toward $4 a gallon. Nor has the oil and gas boom given a noticeable boost to an economic recovery that, despite better news lately, has been very disappointing on the jobs front.
As I said, this was totally predictable.
First up, oil prices. Unlike natural gas, which is expensive to ship across oceans, oil is traded on a world market — and the big developments moving prices in that market usually have little to do with events in the United States. Oil prices are up because of rising demand from China and other emerging economies, and more recently because of war scares in the Middle East; these forces easily outweigh any downward pressure on prices from rising U.S. production. And the same thing would happen if Republicans got their way and oil companies were set free to drill freely in the Gulf of Mexico and punch holes in the tundra: the effect on prices at the pump would be negligible.
Meanwhile, what about jobs? I have to admit that I started laughing when I saw The Wall Street Journal offering North Dakota as a role model. Yes, the oil boom there has pushed unemployment down to 3.2 percent, but that’s only possible because the whole state has fewer residents than metropolitan Albany — so few residents that adding a few thousand jobs in the state’s extractive sector is a really big deal. The comparable-sized fracking boom in Pennsylvania has had hardly any effect on the state’s overall employment picture, because, in the end, not that many jobs are involved.
And this tells us that giving the oil companies carte blanche isn’t a serious jobs program. Put it this way: Employment in oil and gas extraction has risen more than 50 percent since the middle of the last decade, but that amounts to only 70,000 jobs, around one-twentieth of 1 percent of total U.S. employment. So the idea that drill, baby, drill can cure our jobs deficit is basically a joke.
Why, then, are Republicans pretending otherwise? Part of the answer is that the party is rewarding its benefactors: the oil and gas industry doesn’t create many jobs, but it does spend a lot of money on lobbying and campaign contributions. The rest of the answer is simply the fact that conservatives have no other job-creation ideas to offer.
And intellectual bankruptcy, I’m sorry to say, is a problem that no amount of drilling and fracking can solve.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, March 15, 2012
“Unlicensed Doctors”: Politicians Swinging Stethoscopes
Let’s take a look at sex and state legislatures.
Never a good combo. Lawmakers venture into murky waters when they attempt to deal with the mysteries of human reproduction. The results are generally short of scientific. Once, when I was covering the Connecticut House of Representatives, a bill introduced at the behest of professional musicians, “An Act Concerning Rhythm Machines,” was referred to the Public Health Committee under the assumption that it was about birth control.
That was a long time ago, but a definite high note. Normally when these matters come up in a state capitol, the result is not chuckles.
New Hampshire, for instance, seems to have developed a thing for linking sex and malignant disease. This week, the State House passed a bill that required that women who want to terminate a pregnancy be informed that abortions were linked to “an increased risk of breast cancer.”
As Terie Norelli, the minority leader, put it, the Legislature is attempting to make it a felony for a doctor “to not give a patient inaccurate information.”
And there’s more. One of the sponsors, Representative Jeanine Notter, recently asked a colleague whether he would be interested, “as a man,” to know that there was a study “that links the pill to prostate cancer.”
This was at a hearing on a bill to give employers a religious exemption from covering contraception in health care plans. The article Notter appeared to be referring to simply found that nations with high use of birth control pills among women also tended to have high rates of prostate cancer among men. Nobody claimed that this meant there was scientific evidence of a connection. You could also possibly discover that nations with the lowest per capita number of ferrets have a higher rate of prostate cancer.
Bringing the prostate into the fight was definitely a new wrinkle. But it’s getting very popular to try to legislate an abortion-breast cancer link. I suspect this is at least in part because politicians in some states are being forced to stretch to find new ways to torture women who want to end an unwanted pregnancy. It’s sort of like gun control — once your state already has guaranteed the right to wear concealed weapons into bars and churches, you’re going to have to start getting really creative to reaffirm a commitment to the Second Amendment.
Last year, South Dakota — which has a grand total of one abortion provider — instituted a 72-hour waiting period, plus a requirement that the woman undergo a lecture at one of the state’s anti-abortion pregnancy counseling centers.
This law is tied up by litigation. While they’re waiting, the legislators have improved upon their work, requiring the doctor to ask his patient — who may have already traveled for hours, waited for three days and gone through the counseling center harangue — questions including what her religious background is and how she thinks her family might react to the decision to end the pregnancy.
“South Dakota has taken the I.R.S. audit model and applied it to women’s reproduction,” said Ted Miller of Naral Pro-Choice America.
But about this cancer business.
“Now we’re seeing why legislatures getting into the practice of medicine is dangerous,” said Barbara Bollier, a Republican state representative in Kansas, where a bill requiring doctors to warn abortion patients about the breast cancer connection is pending.
Bollier is a retired anesthesiologist, who also formerly taught bioethics. If you wanted to have a résumé guaranteed to drive you crazy in the Kansas State Legislature, she’s got it.
We had a very interesting discussion over the phone about good science — what makes a reliable study, and how an early suggestion of a possible connection between abortions and breast cancer was overtaken by larger, better studies that showed no evidence of a link whatsoever. All of this has been shared with the Kansas Legislature, to no effect whatsoever.
Bollier has her finger on the moral to all this. When faced with a choice between scientific evidence and their personal and political preferences, legislators are not going to go with the statistics. I have warm memories of the committee of the Texas House of Representatives that last year rejected a bill to require that public school sex education classes be “medically accurate.”
Let’s refrain from discussing how the people who are preparing to legislate medical science are often the very same ones who scream about government overreach when health experts propose taxing sugary beverages.
Just try to envision yourself in a doctor’s office for a consult. Then imagine you’re joined by a state legislator. How many of you think the situation has been improved? Can I see a show of hands?
Thought so.
By: Gail Collins, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, March 16, 2012
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 