“Blind In Both Eyes”: Marco Rubio Thinks George W. Bush “Did A Fantastic Job”
It’s strange to hear an endorsement so ringing of an unpopular ex-president who failed in so many different ways.
George W. Bush’s tenure began with a catastrophic terrorist attack. It ended with a catastrophic financial crisis. In the interim, it was consumed mostly with fighting a costly war of choice. The invasion of Iraq was launched on false premises with inadequate planning; it was poorly managed for years on end; and even America’s fallback goal of a stable democracy in the Middle East wasn’t achieved. In fact, the invasion and occupation mostly just strengthened Iran’s position. Our enemies also benefited from the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.
On the domestic front, President Bush signed an education reform bill that liberals and conservatives now agree was a mistake; he failed to reform Social Security, and rather than finding a way to save money on Medicare he added a costly prescription drug benefit to it even as he cut taxes. It’s no wonder that the deficit exploded during his spendthrift two terms in the White House. Bush’s faith based initiatives were a bust, as were his immigration reform efforts, and he signed into law campaign finance reform legislation he’d previously deemed unconstitutional. He created the instantly dysfunctional Department of Homeland Security and illegally spied on American citizens without warrants. His dubious appointments included Alberto Gonzalez and Harriet Miers, a Supreme Court choice so bad that his own base revolted. And he left office so unpopular that his party suffered a historic defeat; even four years later its presidential candidates did their utmost to avoid saying his name in speeches and debates.
That is the record Marco Rubio deems fantastic.
As he put it:
George W. Bush, in my opinion, did a fantastic job as president over eight years, facing a set of circumstances during those eight years that are different from the circumstances that a President Romney would face.
Partisan loyalty sure does make people say ill-conceived things.
“Knuckleheaded Assumptions”: Bad Science Around “Job-Killing Regulations”
It is a seemingly immutable law of modern Republican rhetoric that the word “regulation” can never appear unadorned by the essential adjective: “job-killing.”
As in nominee-in-waiting Mitt Romney, after winning the Illinois primary: “Day by day, job-killing regulation by job-killing regulation, bureaucrat by bureaucrat, this president is crushing the dream.”
Or House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) denouncing “the president’s job-killing regulatory agenda” last month after the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed new limits on coal-fired power plants.
Or Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), who said during her presidential campaign that the EPA should be renamed the “Job-Killing Organization of America.”
Hating regulation is an old argument, but the phrase is a relatively new trope. A Nexis search of articles from U.S. newspapers and news services shows that the words “job-killing regulations” appeared just a handful of times in 2007 — but several hundred times in 2011.
This inflated rhetoric is often accompanied by bad science — or, perhaps more precisely, inherently inexact science badly used. Opponents of a particular regulation tout inflated projections of the regulatory body count, more often than not financed by the affected industry. Ditto, by the way, for those on the other side.
For example, when the EPA last year issued rules to limit mercury and other power-plant emissions, the industry-backed American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity estimated the regulations would trigger the loss of 1.44 million jobs.
At the same time, the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst concluded that the rules would instead create 1.46 million jobs through retrofitting old plants and switching to new sources of renewable energy.
The EPA itself came up with much more modest predictions — that the rules would create about 50,000 one-time jobs and another 9,000 additional jobs annually. All in the broader context of a rule that the agency estimated would deliver annual net benefits of between $166 billion and $407 billion from cleaner air, including avoiding as many as 51,000 premature deaths annually.
Lesson One: If you plug your cherry-picked assumptions into your preferred model, it’s easy to obtain the desired result. Lesson Two: Jobs are only part of the larger picture.
A new report from the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law attempts to bring some economic rationality to the regulatory discourse — however quixotic that might be in the current political environment, not to mention in a presidential election year.
The report is titled “The Regulatory Red Herring: The Role of Job Impact Analyses in Environmental Policy Debates.” Yet somewhat surprisingly, Michael Livermore, the institute’s executive director, does not oppose factoring job impact into the cost-benefit analysis. Rather, he argues for adopting a more sophisticated approach than the prevalent knuckleheaded assumption — my words, not his — that increased regulation inevitably results in fewer jobs.
If an employer’s costs increase as the result of a regulation, Livermore notes, that is another way of saying that the employer has to hire workers to, say, install new technology while other employers hire workers to produce the new equipment.
In a healthy economy, the cost of layoffs should be transitory, as workers quickly find new jobs. In an economy like the current one, the impact of such layoffs may be more persistent — but any new jobs created may be more significant since, in a soft labor market, otherwise unemployed workers may be hired.
Can these cross-cutting impacts be accurately measured in a dynamic economy? Perhaps more important for the current discourse, is it possible to have the jobs and regulation discussion without ignoring the inherent limitations of economic modeling?
“The jobs impact analysis is important and we should do it, but the way it’s discussed now is completely wrong,” Livermore told me.
First, he said, “we talk about the jobs impact on the one hand and the other impacts (such as health and safety improvements) on the other hand, and they’re treated as apples and oranges.” Instead, he said, “we need to integrate the jobs impact into the broader costbenefit analysis.”
Second, Livermore said, is a failure among those doing the analyzing to disclose the assumptions and limitations of their models — and the willingness of politicians (and the media, for that matter) to treat the resulting figures as gospel rather than guesstimate.
“The real problem is the way they’re used in the political back and forth,” Livermore said. “They’re used as sledgehammers to beat up the other side.”
No surprise there. But a useful reminder at a time when the phrase job-killing has become mind-numbing.
By: Ruth Marcus, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, April 24, 2012
“Supernatural Beliefs”: More Americans Believe In Witchcraft Than Agree With Citizens United
In Citizens United v. FEC, the Supreme Court justified its conclusion that corporations and wealthy individuals can spend unlimited money to influence elections because it believed that “independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” According to a recent survey conducted for the Brennan Center for Justice, however, this places the five conservatives who joined this opinion in very lonely company. According to the poll, “69% of respondents agreed that ‘new rules that let corporations, unions and people give unlimited money to Super PACs will lead to corruption.’ Only 15% disagreed.”
To put this in perspective, a 2007 poll found that 19 percent of Americans believe in “spells or witchcraft,” and that’s just one of the supernatural beliefs that are more common than agreement with the conservative justices’ bizarre reasoning in Citizens United:
Put Conrad, a homemaker from Hampton, Va., firmly in the camp of the 34% of people who say they believe in ghosts, according to a pre-Halloween poll by The Associated Press and Ipsos. That’s the same proportion who believe in unidentified flying objects — exceeding the 19% who accept the existence of spells or witchcraft. . . .
A smaller but still substantial 23% say they have actually seen a ghost or believe they have been in one’s presence, . . . Three in 10 have awakened sensing a strange presence in the room.
To be fair, only 14 percent of Americans believe that they have personally seen a UFO, or one percent less than those who think that Citizens United was correctly decided.
By: Ian Millhiser, Think Progress, April 24, 2012
Russell Pearce: Romney “Absolutely” Called Arizona Immigration Bill A National Model
Mitt Romney had the most conservative immigration policy of any Republican presidential candidate during most of the primary, but now that’s he trying to appeal to Hispanic voters as he pivots to general election, the presumed GOP nominee has been shifting back towards the center. Yesterday, he opened the door to a Republican alternative to the DREAM Act — a law he vowed to veto during the primary — and earlier, he said that he never called for making Arizona’s harsh immigration law a “model” for the nation.
But that’s not how one of the key people behind that law, former Arizona Senate President Russell Pearce, sees it. The former Republican lawmaker, who was ousted in a recall election, was the key force behind turning SB-1070, authored by Romney adviser Kris Kobach, into law.
He told reporters today that he “absolutely” believed Mitt Romney had endorsed the law as a model for the country. The Huffington Post’s Elise Foley reports:
“The folks that he’s said [are] his advisers on this, I have worked with for years and have great confidence and trust in them,” Pearce told reporters after a Senate subcommittee hearing on the immigration law. “I know Romney is a compassionate man, most of us, I’d like to think, are. But I think he also understands the crisis and the damage to this republic and the need to enforce our law.” […]
Romney also has advocated for what he called “self-deportation,” or making things difficult for undocumented immigrants until they decide to leave, one of the central tenets of the Arizona law. […] “[Self-deportation] is in SB 1070,” Pearce said.
Previously, Pearce has said that Romney’s “immigration policy is identical to mine.”
Romney has tried to distance himself from Kobach, who also helped author the controversial immigration crackdowns in Alabama, South Carolina, and other states. But Kobach quickly contradicted him, saying he regularly advises senior members of Romney’s staff.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Think Progress, April 24, 2012
“We Will Not Be Denied”: Giving Women Maternity Care Is Illegal. Really?
We all know that the health care law signed by President Obama in 2010 has its detractors. It’s a shame. The law goes a long way to expanding access to health care for women. It’s not perfect, but the law does some really important things, like ending gender discrimination in health care and making sure insurance coverage includes services women need like maternity care. But, a majority of Missouri State Representatives do not agree with me. In fact, they loathe this law so much that the House of Representatives recently passed a bill that would make it illegal to implement the health care law. The bill states, “Any official, agent, or employee of the United States government who undertakes any act within the borders of this state that enforces or attempts to enforce any aspect of the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is guilty of a class A misdemeanor.”
Wow, a class A Misdemeanor for implementing the health care law? This is serious stuff. And it’s pretty unfortunate because Missouri could stand to improve health care access for women.
Here is what’s not working in Missouri: 100% of health plans in the individual market in Missouri charge women more for the same health coverage than if they were men and no health plans in the individual market provide maternity services for women.
These policies should be illegal, and under the health care law, they will be.
The health care law is already helping women and families in Missouri. Health plans must now cover preventive services such as mammograms, flu shots, and colon cancer screenings at no additional out of pocket costs such as co-payments. Over 408,000 women in Missouri are receiving preventive services without a co-payment. The law also allows young adults to remain on their parents’ health insurance until age 26. Nearly 40,000 young people in Missouri have gained coverage thanks to the law. And this is just the beginning. Women will experience even more benefits as the law is fully implemented in 2014.
Despite these advances, legislators in Missouri want to make it illegal to implement the law. It’s illegal to make sure women have maternity coverage? It’s illegal to insist women should not have to pay more for the same health coverage as men?
Don’t let the opponents have their way. We will not be denied.
By: Anna Benyo, Senior Health Policy Analyst for Health and Reproductive Services, National Womens Law Center, NWLC Blog, April 23, 2012
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