“Complete Nihilists”: The Audacity Of GOP Dopes On Health Care
In three weeks or so, the Supreme Court will rule on health care. Republicans have been discussing what they might do in the event that poor, beleaguered John Roberts manages to withstand that vicious assault of the liberals and to lead a majority that strikes down the individual mandate. This one is a classic, folks. After spending three years lying their eyes out about the bill and tearing this country apart over it, it now turns out that they may well want to keep several of its provisions. And of course they want to keep the easy and fun stuff and get rid of all that bad-bad-bad stuff, but what they don’t understand—or more likely do understand but refuse to acknowledge—is that the good doesn’t work without the “bad.” It’s breathtaking and ignorant—whether breathtakingly ignorant or ignorantly breathtaking I’m not quite sure. Call it the audacity of dopes.
Two weeks ago, John Boehner was insisting that “Obamacare” must be repealed lock, stock, and barrel. Some other Republicans wanted the slightly less radical approach of keeping some aspects of the law. A few days ago, some in the House warmed to this idea. Now, TPM is reporting that Senate Republicans are hopping on the piecemeal train.
The idea is to preserve the language that requires insurers to cover people with preexisting conditions, because everyone likes that; to continue to permit young people up to age 26 to stay on their parents’ insurance, because that’s helpful, especially in a rocky economy; and to press forward with eliminating the Medicare prescription drug “donut hole,” whereby seniors have to pay 100 percent of medication costs within a certain price range.
The last two are fine. But that first one is the gobsmacker. You cannot just make insurance companies cover really sick people. Sick people are expensive people, and insurers’ costs will shoot to the heavens, and those costs of course will be passed along to everyone else. Is there a solution to this problem? Yes. The solution is to get more people in the insurance pool—especially more healthy people, who don’t cost a lot to cover. Then, insurers have more money to use paying for the care of the sick people. But since you can’t just wish for more healthy people to buy insurance, you have to figure out some way to get them to do so. And hence … the individual mandate. It broadens the pool and brings premiums down. It’s how you manage to pay for all those people who need radiation and chemo and dialysis.
There are alternatives to the mandate, which I needn’t go into now because the mandate is what we have. Without the mandate, you have millions of sick people being added to insurance rolls but no healthy ones. What happens? You develop “high-risk pools,” in the argot, and Harold Pollack, a leading health-care expert from the University of Chicago (who advised the Obama campaign) says that high-risk pools don’t work: “Except as a temporary stopgap measure, the track records of high-risk pools is quite poor. Experience in state programs indicates that high subsidies are required to keep premiums affordable for this (by definition) high-cost group. Many states have ended up capping the program, charging high premiums, or both.”
As it happens, the ACA has started temporary high-risk pools, designed to try to help some people before the law fully takes effect. Pollack studied them and wrote up the results in the Journal of General Internal Medicine last year. He found that the program’s funding didn’t come close to matching the need. In other words, lots of money is required to serve these people properly—money that would come from premiums imposed by the individual mandate.
The Republicans’ “answer” to this is their answer to everything like this, tax-free saving accounts. But health-savings accounts, if they work at all, which is a serious question, work only for healthy people who break a leg tossing the Frisbee. Nobody can sock away $25,000 for an operation or $100,000 for end-of-life care; the very idea is crazy. The GOP would also subsidize care for high-risk people. But Pollack notes that these subsidies would have to be billions of dollars a year. Republicans aren’t throwing that kind of money around at anything. Except at ships the Navy doesn’t want and tax cuts really rich people don’t need.
It’s just a shockingly unserious approach to a very serious problem of roughly 4 million uninsured Americans who have cancer, diabetes, emphysema, and the like. Republicans don’t give a happy crap about any of these people. They have no interest whatsoever in trying to solve a public problem. See, this is the Democrats’ burden, and when you come down it, the true difference between the parties these days. Democrats are actually concerned with trying to address a public-policy problem in a responsible way. You can disagree with their way, but they’re at least trying to do something positive in the country—help those 4 million as best they can. This involves difficulty and choices because nothing meaningful in life doesn’t. It also requires the people to stop being selfish apes for five minutes and look at the larger picture.
The Republicans, on the other hand, are complete nihilists. They don’t care about solving any policy problems. They care about two things. They care about politics—advantage, winning, humiliating Obama. And they care about ideology, their drunken and medieval belief that the market can fix everything. But wait; it’s not even really a belief. They’re dumb, but they are not that dumb. They don’t fully believe it. Like Romney accidentally acknowledging to Mark Halperin that huge budget cuts cause recessions. It’s just the garbage they say because it sounds good. No pain! Nothing is complicated! Be selfish!
There is some question as to whether the Republicans will unite behind the three planks I mentioned. Because only the “moderates,” the sell-outs, really want to do it. “Real” Republicans, the Tea Party people, want to kill every aspect of the bill, strike its name from the very records of history. So we’ll see what they do. And of course it all depends on the Supremes tossing the mandate out, which they might not do.
But if this chain of events unfolds, you can bet on Paul Ryan and others going out there to talk about their “reform” of the high-risk pool problem with all the pious sincerity they can muster. And if, God forbid, the Republicans win the presidency in November? Then they’d enact some patchwork thing with about 1/20th of the money actually required, and millions would remain uninsured. But most Americans would never be the wiser because 4 million people just isn’t that many to begin with. That’s how the GOP will hope to get away with it. Here’s hoping little Johnny Roberts is as delicate a flower as conservatives fear he is.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, May 31, 2012
“Competing Traditions And A Series Of Scandals”: Wisconsinites Running The RNC Double Down On Walker Recall Fight
It’s not just because the attempt to recall conservative Gov. Scott Walker is a ground-game test case that foreshadows the super PAC–funded fight between big business and big labor in the fall presidential election.
It’s because the Wisconsin GOP dominates the Republican National Committee right now. This is a time of national influence for Badger State conservatives—and this recall effort is a personal challenge not just to Scott Walker, but to Republican Party Chairman Reince Priebus and his team at the top of RNC.
Priebus was the chairman of the Wisconsin Republican Party from 2007 through 2010 while also serving as the RNC’s general counsel. Under his leadership, the GOP took control of the Wisconsin statehouse as well as the Governor’s mansion. Walker and Preibus are personally close, talking and texting frequently, with a friendship that goes back more than a decade to when Walker served in the State Assembly and Preibus ran unsuccessfully for the State Senate.
Politics is about personal relationships, and the Wisconsin ties within the RNC run deep right now. For example, RNC Political Director Rick Wiley served as executive director of the state party. RNC counsel Jonathan Waclawski previously was finance director and chief counsel of the state party. Press Secretary Kirsten Kukowski worked as communications director of the state party. And National Field Director Juston Johnson was the campaign manager for Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson (no relation) as well as political director of the state party. The august offices of the RNC are now a paradise for Cheeseheads.
None of this is unprecedented or improper. It’s common for executives to bring in trusted team members from their home state. But the disproportionate influence of Wisconsin Republicans reflects how personally invested members of the RNC apparatus in this Tuesday’s recall results. This is personal—an ideological fight playing out on their home turf. And it shows how the national Republican Party has been uniquely well positioned to push back on attempts to undo the 2010 election results, beginning with state Senate special elections in April 2011.
The Republican Party’s history in Wisconsin, is deep and reflects the party’s competing conservative and progressive traditions. The GOP’s birthplace is regarded as Ripon, Wis., where it was formed in a small schoolhouse an antislavery alternative to the Whig Party in 1854. In the early decades of the 20th-century, “Fighting Bob” LaFollette and his sons were nationally known as Republican senators and leaders of the progressive movement. But a different, darker Republican tradition also emerged in Wisconsin by the mid-20th century, characterized by conservative Sen. Joe McCarthy and the establishment of the John Birch Society in Appleton, Wis. Rabidly anticommunist and reactionary in ways that helped give rise to both the book and term “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” their influence on mainstream debates faded after McCarthy’s deserved disgrace. But in the 1990s, the Wisconsin Republican Party came back into national prominence with the pioneering welfare reform initiatives of Gov. Tommy Thompson, who won reelections by nearly 60 percent margins. And even before the elections of 2010, perhaps the brightest rising star and intellectual leader of the Republican Party was Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan.
But Scott Walker’s election in 2010 signified a decided shift to the right for statewide Republican candidates, and his collective bargaining reforms for public-sector unions—which he didn’t mention on the trail but introduced just after taking office—spurred weeks of protests at the state capital. The petition effort required to get a recall effort on the ballot returned more than a million signatures—twice the number needed. By early April, a stunning 46 percent of state residents strongly disapproved of his performance in office. The latest polls show Walker, despite marinating in sky-high disapproval numbers, with a slight edge over his challenger, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett—but it’s all going to come down to the ground game on Election Day.
Buoyed by his national ties, and the national prominence of Tuesday’s recall contest—Walker has raised almost $15 million from out-of-state donors, as well as $10 million from those within Wisconsin. As of May 1, Walker had raised more from donors in Texas, Illinois, Florida, California, Missouri, and New York than Barrett had raised in total. Among the highest profile big-dollar Walker donors are Newt’s onetime super PAC sugar daddy Sheldon Adelson, who cut a $250,000 check, and Rick Santorum’s super PAC benefactor Foster Friess, who kicked in $100,000.
But while national prominence and connections have helped Walker’s bottom line, a series of local scandals threatens to add to the recall momentum. A “John Doe” investigation into improprieties when Walker was county executive is still being conducted, and six onetime Walker aides have been confronted with criminal charges and 13 individuals granted immunity. The public charges range from evidence that a separate wireless email router was installed in the county executive office to allow campaign-related business and fundraising to be conducted on government time to the far more serious and salacious charge that onetime Walker deputy chief of staff and economic development director Tim Russell embezzled more than $60,000 from a veterans charity.
To date, Walker has transferred $100,000 from campaign funds into legal defense funds. The ongoing nature of this investigation could continue to dog Walker and his allies even if he passes the recall text on Tuesday. Wisconsin Republican politics is a small world, and indictments could affect local figures well known to the Badger State crew running the RNC. This is the considerable downside that comes when local politics reaches the national level.
All the more reason to watch the results of Tuesday’s recall in Wisconsin closely.
While Wisconsin is regarded as a swing state that leans Democrat in presidential elections, progressive forces’ focus on pushing back against the Tea Party in this particular state could seem ill-timed and ill-advised in retrospect. The national party’s strong ties to Walker and knowledge of the state’s politics helps account for why Democratic efforts, first to stop Walker’s policies and then to push him from office, have been unsuccessful to date despite the governor’s extraordinarily polarizing presence. This RNC team knows Wisconsin cold and has helped direct national resources to what might have been otherwise a remote local fight in 2015.
The Republican Party’s history in Wisconsin, is deep and reflects the party’s competing conservative and progressive traditions. The GOP’s birthplace is regarded as Ripon, Wis., where it was formed in a small schoolhouse an antislavery alternative to the Whig Party in 1854. In the early decades of the 20th-century, “Fighting Bob” LaFollette and his sons were nationally known as Republican senators and leaders of the progressive movement. But a different, darker Republican tradition also emerged in Wisconsin by the mid-20th century, characterized by conservative Sen. Joe McCarthy and the establishment of the John Birch Society in Appleton, Wis. Rabidly anticommunist and reactionary in ways that helped give rise to both the book and term “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” their influence on mainstream debates faded after McCarthy’s deserved disgrace. But in the 1990s, the Wisconsin Republican Party came back into national prominence with the pioneering welfare reform initiatives of Gov. Tommy Thompson, who won reelections by nearly 60 percent margins. And even before the elections of 2010, perhaps the brightest rising star and intellectual leader of the Republican Party was Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan.
But Scott Walker’s election in 2010 signified a decided shift to the right for statewide Republican candidates, and his collective bargaining reforms for public-sector unions—which he didn’t mention on the trail but introduced just after taking office—spurred weeks of protests at the state capital. The petition effort required to get a recall effort on the ballot returned more than a million signatures—twice the number needed. By early April, a stunning 46 percent of state residents strongly disapproved of his performance in office. The latest polls show Walker, despite marinating in sky-high disapproval numbers, with a slight edge over his challenger, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett—but it’s all going to come down to the ground game on Election Day.
Buoyed by his national ties, and the national prominence of Tuesday’s recall contest—Walker has raised almost $15 million from out-of-state donors, as well as $10 million from those within Wisconsin. As of May 1, Walker had raised more from donors in Texas, Illinois, Florida, California, Missouri, and New York than Barrett had raised in total. Among the highest profile big-dollar Walker donors are Newt’s onetime super PAC sugar daddy Sheldon Adelson, who cut a $250,000 check, and Rick Santorum’s super PAC benefactor Foster Friess, who kicked in $100,000.
But while national prominence and connections have helped Walker’s bottom line, a series of local scandals threatens to add to the recall momentum. A “John Doe” investigation into improprieties when Walker was county executive is still being conducted, and six onetime Walker aides have been confronted with criminal charges and 13 individuals granted immunity. The public charges range from evidence that a separate wireless email router was installed in the county executive office to allow campaign-related business and fundraising to be conducted on government time to the far more serious and salacious charge that onetime Walker deputy chief of staff and economic development director Tim Russell embezzled more than $60,000 from a veterans charity.
To date, Walker has transferred $100,000 from campaign funds into legal defense funds. The ongoing nature of this investigation could continue to dog Walker and his allies even if he passes the recall text on Tuesday. Wisconsin Republican politics is a small world, and indictments could affect local figures well known to the Badger State crew running the RNC. This is the considerable downside that comes when local politics reaches the national level.
All the more reason to watch the results of Tuesday’s recall in Wisconsin closely.
“The American Jobs Act”: The Road Not Taken By A “Do Nothing Congress”
About a year ago, the job market looked a lot like it does now — after a strong winter, the economy stumbled badly in May and job growth stalled. Once the Republicans’ debt-ceiling crisis was resolved, President Obama shifted gears, refocused his agenda, and unveiled the American Jobs Act.
It seems like ages ago, but it was just last September when the president delivered an address to a joint session of Congress, laying out a detailed plan to boost job creation. It’s easy to forget, but it was a credible, serious plan — the AJA would have prevented thousands of layoffs for teachers, cops, and firefighters; invested heavily in infrastructure; and cut taxes intended to spur hiring.
Independent analysis concluded the plan would have a significant and positive effect. From an AP report in September:
A tentative thumbs-up. That was the assessment Thursday night from economists who offered mainly positive reviews of President Barack Obama’s $450 billion plan to stimulate job creation. […]
Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, estimated that the president’s plan would boost economic growth by 2 percentage points, add 2 million jobs and reduce unemployment by a full percentage point next year compared with existing law.
Macroeconomic Advisers wasn’t quite as optimistic, but its analysis projected that the White House plan “would give a significant boost to GDP and employment over the near-term.” The firm would expect to see the proposal create at least 1.3 million jobs.
Despite public clamoring for action on jobs, congressional Republicans reflexively killed the American Jobs Act, saying it was unnecessary. The House wouldn’t bring it up for a vote, and a Republican filibuster killed it in the Senate. For GOP policymakers, this was a time when Washington should stop investing in job creation and start focusing on austerity — lower the deficit, take capital out of the economy, and everything would work out fine.
As panic sets in after this morning’s brutal jobs report, take a moment to consider a hypothetical: what would the economy look like today if Congress had followed Obama’s lead, responded to public-opinion polls, and passed the American Jobs Act? In 2012, do you think the nation could use those 1.3 million jobs or not?
Are we better off now as a result of Republican obstructionism and intransigence, or would we have been better off if popular and effective job-creation measures had been approved?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, June 1, 2012
“Throwing Crumbs To The Bottom Feeders”: Mitt Romney, The “Fighting Moderate”
The latest meme making the Beltway rounds at the urging of Mitt Romney’s staff is that their candidate has really pulled a fast one on the “conservative base” of his party: he’s a “moderate” (you know, like Bill Clinton) who’s figured out he can keep the wingnuts happy just by being a Breitbartian badass towards Obama. Give’ em Solyndra photo ops, the meme suggests, and they won’t make Romney endorse the Gold Standard or a Personhood Amendment. McKay Coppins wrote up the meme today for Buzzfeed:
The conventional wisdom of the chattering class has been that Romney is captive to the Republican Party’s conservative base, desperate and anxious to maintain their tepid support. But his new appeal to the right marks a recognition that he can court conservatives without, in any traditional sense, “tacking right.” His aggressive tactics stand in for the sort of policy compromises that could damage him in November; better, his advisers argue, to court conservatives with a press conference shouting match than with a high-profile fight over abortion or gay marriage. What’s more, they say, the media obsession with Romney “pandering” to the right represents a misunderstanding of conservatives, who can live with Romney’s moderate record – as long as he’s a fighting moderate.
So the idea here is that every time Romney pleases the crazy people by echoing one of their favorite attack lines on Obama, or simply looks the other way when they pursue craziness (e.g., Trump’s neo-birtherism), it’s a sign Mitt is actually being faithful to his “moderate” course, giving the Right bread and circuses while intending to offer swing voters—and America—that fine “moderate” governance.
If anyone buys this meme, then they’re falling for a stunt a lot more transparent than the base-tending hijinks that have supposedly fooled the right-wing rubes.
It should be enough for anyone that Romney has endorsed two large and violently immoderate measures: the Ryan budget, and Jim DeMint’s Cut, Cap and Balance Pledge, those twin substantive litmus tests for a candidate’s commitment to a long-term agenda focused on a radically reduced government at all levels supported by a more regressive tax system. He’s also promised to try to make abortion and same-sex marriage illegal through federal policy if possible and judicial appointments if necessary; there is nothing “moderate” about reversing 40 years of legalized abortion. And don’t get me started on Romney’s foreign policy views, which seem to combine the worst features of Dick Cheney and John Bolton.
Are there right-wing policy positions too extreme for Romney to embrace unless he has to? Of course; there always are and always will be; we’re living in a moment of movement conservative triumphalism so powerful that no one is safe of the charge of being insufficiently pure. That doesn’t make Mitt some sort of safe “centrist” alternative to Obama who’s managed to outmanuever a weak field and trick the Right into accepting his nomination, and is now tricking hard-core conservatives again by giving them the sizzle of the psychotic campaign they crave instead of the steak.
By: Ed Kilgore, Washington Monthly Political Animal, June 1, 2012
“The Wrong Résumé”: The Myth Of The Businessman President – A Prelude To Disaster
Lost in the exhaust of mendacity left in Las Vegas this week, after Donald Trump brought his birther fantasies to town on behalf of Mitt Romney, was a curious statement by the man who has now cinched the Republican nomination for president.
On Tuesday, the same day Trump proved yet again that money and truth, like money and taste, are seldom twined, Romney talked about amending the Constitution to require the president to have business experience. He spoke approvingly of a notion from a store owner who wanted to make anyone who does not have at least three years of business background ineligible to lead the country.
“He said, ‘I’d like to have a provision in the Constitution that in addition to the age of the president and the citizenship of the president and the birth place of the president being set by the Constitution, I’d like it also to say that the president has to spend at least three years working in business before he could become president of the United States,’” said Romney, cheerfully summarizing this rewrite of the founders’ governing blueprint.
Well, there goes Teddy Roosevelt, the writer, rancher and police commissioner, not to mention his distant cousin Franklin Roosevelt, the assistant naval secretary and politician, or Dwight Eisenhower, the career soldier. Ike’s résumé, which includes defeating the world’s most concentrated form of evil in Nazi Germany, would not be enough to qualify him for the presidency.
Romney has made business experience the main reason to elect him. Without his business past or his projections of business future, there is no there there. But history shows that time in the money trade is more often than not a prelude to a disastrous presidency. The less experience in business, the better the president.
In a scholarly ranking of great presidents, a 2009 survey conducted by C-Span,6 of the 10 best leaders lacked sufficient business experience to be president by Romney’s rumination. This list includes Ronald Reagan, the actor, union activist and corporate spokesman, and John F. Kennedy, the naval officer, writer and politician. There is one failed businessman on the list of great presidents, the haberdasher Harry S. Truman.
By contrast, two 20th century businessmen — George W. Bush, whose sweetheart deal with the Texas Rangers made him a multimillionaire, and Herbert Hoover, who came by his mining fortune honestly — were ranked among the worst presidents ever by the same historians. Bush left the country in a sea of debt and an economic crisis rivaled only by the one that engulfed Hoover.
Both George W. Bush and Romney are Harvard Business School graduates, further padding their business cred. Once they started governing, both men failed to improve the economic lives of those under them.
At Bain Capital, Romney as C.E.O. practiced a very Darwinian form of capitalism for 14 years; he points to his time there as a model for how he would turn around the American economy. But it’s clear that enriching a handful of shareholders often has very little to do with job creation. The point of private equity, after all, is to make deals that turn investments into profits — nothing more. In that realm, Romney has succeeded.
Once he moved from running Bain to running the Bay State, Romney was a failure at job creation. His state ranked 47th. Job growth nationwide, even under the sluggish economy of George W. Bush, was five times higher than it was in the Massachusetts run by Romney from 2003 to 2007. This was reflected in his approval ratings — 34 percent in the last full year of his term, making him one of the most unpopular governors in the country, ranked 48 out of 50.
The biggest job creator of modern times, Bill Clinton, wouldn’t know a spreadsheet from a cooked derivative. His business experience was nil, but he had governing smarts, and his instincts were usually right. Under Clinton’s watch, the United States added 23 million new jobs — this after he raised “job-killing” taxes on the rich.
Romney never mentions Clinton’s formula for prosperity, or that of Franklin Roosevelt, the other business-challenged president who took the American economy to new highs. Roosevelt had been through a traumatic life experience, the diagnosis of polio, that made him a man of resolve, with empathy for the average person.
“If you spent two years in bed trying to wiggle your toes, after that anything would seem easy,” said Roosevelt. When he ran for president in 1932, his theme was “the forgotten man.”
Romney has shown a strange tendency to fetishize wealth, from his belief that “corporations are people” to his boasting of how many Cadillacs his wife drives. His European role model would have to be Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s richest man. A media tycoon, the Rupert Murdoch of his country, Berlusconi was laughably bad as a three-time prime minister.
The verdict is still out on Barack Obama, the community organizer, lawyer and writer. Because he got hit with the Bush hangover, his overall job numbers show a net loss of about 850,000, from January 2009 to the present. But if you start a year into his presidency, Obama has added almost four million jobs.
We aren’t electing a C.E.O. to occupy the White House. We’re looking for good judgment, broad life experience, flashes of wisdom. Still, for those who insist on making business the bottom line in who they pick, the past is indeed predictive.
By: Timothy Egan, The New York Times, May 31, 2012
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