“A Bleeding-Heart Liberal”: Why Conservatives Should Hate Santa Claus
The war over the War on Christmas has flared up again. Slate’s Aisha Harris fired the latest salvo with her piece last week, “Santa Claus Should Not Be a White Man Anymore,” prompting a famously confused response from Fox News host Megyn Kelly that “Santa Claus just is white” and “Jesus was a white man, too. He was a historical figure, I mean, that’s verifiable fact—as is Santa.” Every single living being on the Internet weighed in. Kelly later defended herself in the usual manner of someone who regrets having said something: “Humor is a part of what we try to bring to this show, but sometimes that is lost on the humorless.”
She was not joking, of course. To conservatives—of which she is one—the War on Christmas is a very real and serious thing, and the holiday’s two most revered figures, Jesus and Santa, must be defended at all costs from liberals who would dare make the holiday more inclusive. What’s even weirder than the insistence that Santa is white, though, is that conservatives dare to defend him in the first place. He’s a conservative’s worst nightmare, actually.
Consider the lyrics to “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town”:
He’s making a list / Checking it twice / Gonna find out who’s naughty or nice / Santa Claus is coming to town
He sees you when you’re sleeping / He knows when you’re awake / He knows if you’ve been bad or good / So be good for goodness sake
That he’s “making a list” sounds more than vaguely McCarthyistic, I’ll admit, but this is 2013, not 1954. You know who makes lists these days? The National Security Agency—for the express purpose of finding out who has been, or may one day be, naughty. By monitoring your emails and cell phone metadata, the NSA also has a pretty good idea of when you’re sleeping or awake. (Another agency that likes lists: the Internal Revenue Service.)
Santa invades our privacy in more literal ways, too. He breaks into everyone’s homes in the middle of the night—a crime that no one of any political persuasion, except perhaps anarchists, should endorse—and once inside, what does he do? He leaves presents totaling hundreds or thousands of dollars under your tree. You know who else gives Americans free stuff simply for being alive, rather than making recipients work for it? The bloated federal government and its social safety net. Every day, millions of Americans open unearned gifts in the form of Medicaid, unemployment insurance, TANF, and food stamps.
Santa’s home address further complicates matters. Eventually the North Pole will become the equivalent of a Caribbean beach, converting Santa into the world’s most famous and influential climate-change activist—at which point the only coal being mined in America will end up in presents beneath conservatives’ Christmas trees.
And as longtime Santa actor Jonathan Meath points out, “Santa is really the only cultural icon we have who’s male, doesn’t carry a gun, and is all about peace, joy, giving, and caring for other people.” Sure sounds like a bleeding-heart liberal to me.
Note: Humor is a part of what we try to bring to this website, but sometimes that is lost on the humorless.
By: Ryan Kearney, The New Republic, December 16, 2013
“Pushing Bad Politics And Bad Economics”: Washington ‘Centrists’ Don’t Want President Obama To Target Inequality
Last week, President Obama delivered an impassioned address about growing income inequality and declining mobility, correctly identifying the trend as both a problem long in the making and the seminal economic challenge of our time. Inequality in the U.S. has not just meant a growing divide between the rich and the poor, but a weakening middle class, with median wages declining to $51,404 a year, down from $56,000 a year in 2000, all while productivity increased. As President Obama put it, “We know from our history that our economy grows best from the middle out, when growth is more widely shared.” But this belief that a strong and growing middle class is key to economic growth and that inequality actually harms the economy is not an argument Obama pulled out of thin air. Rather it is a theory at the core of the Democratic Party, adhered to by both recent and long past Presidents. Indeed, Bill Clinton who titled his campaign book “Putting People First,” made the same argument when he accepted his party’s nomination for the middle class, stating he was doing so “in the name of all those who do the work, pay the taxes, raise the kids and play by the rules.” And of course, FDR was the father of middle-out economics, adopting demand-side Keynesian economics in the face of the Great Depression.
That’s why it was so surprising that the day before Obama’s speech hosted by the Center for American Progress, Third Way’s Jon Cowan and Jim Kessler declared economic populism “a dead end for Democrats.” They argue that messages about income inequality are overly idealistic and claim that the progressive economic agenda doesn’t excite voters outside of midnight blue districts. Of course, they ignore that it was a populist message about reducing inequality that won Obama reelection just over a year ago.
However, the push from leading progressives for Democrats to embrace a policy agenda that says the promise of America should be for all wasn’t born from a political playbook, but from the economic reality of the last decade. Wages have been unacceptably stagnant: in 2000 the median American worker earned $768 per week, in 2012 that worker still makes $768 per week even as productivity increased over the same time period by 23 percent. Inequality is on the rise. Between 2009 and 2012, 95% of the country’s income gains went to the top 1% of earners. An overwhelming majority of Americans—85 percent—feel that it’s more difficult for middle-class families to maintain their standard of living now than a decade ago. It is in response to this economic hardship and widening income inequality that Americans have embraced a policy vision that rejects failed austerity measures in favor of smart investments in the middle class.
This vision is far from “fantasy-based blue-state populism.” In fact, it’s budget-hawks whose arguments for austerity find support in fictional evidence. The deficit is falling fast—in 2013 it decreased by 37 percent. Where in 2010, the Congressional Budget Office projected deficits would exceed 8 percent of gross domestic product by 2023, today deficits are projected to average around 3 percent of GDP; the unemployment rate, on the other hand is higher today, averaging 7.5% this year, than the CBO predicted it would be by this year , 6.7%. But unemployment isn’t following the same trend. While debt projections are no longer threatening to spiral out of control, budget hawks continue their relentless focus on deficit reduction. And Washington’s obsession with fiscal “solutions” that are in search of a problem has made it harder, not easier, to create good jobs, to increase wages, and to boost overall economic growth.
This is the reality not only in true-blue districts and states, but across the country. That’s why a focus on inequality and requiring the wealthy to pay their fair share has not just been a successful political strategy for Bill de Blasio and Elizabeth Warren, but for leaders in Ohio, California, Maryland, and across the country.
In Ronald Reagan’s home state of California, Gov. Jerry Brown fought for a proposition to raise taxes on those making $250,000 or more a year and to increase the state’s sales tax by a quarter-cent directly to Californians in 2012. The establishment of a “millionaire tax” didn’t drive away innovators, but allowed the state’s leaders to say no to painful budget cuts and turned California into a global model for how to make an economy that works for everybody. Brown turned a $27 billion deficit into a surplus, brought down California’s unemployment rate, and improved the state’s credit rating. As Brown’s progressive, middle-out economic agenda paid dividends, his approval ratings soared.
Kessler and Cowan disingenuously term the serious policy ideas put forward by progressives as a “‘we can have it all’ fantasy.” But what’s lofty about a proposal to enable every child the opportunity to attend preschool when the plan would dramatically expand opportunity by boosting children’s lifetime earnings, reducing teen pregnancy rates, and lowering the chances of future arrest and incarceration? Making smart investments in early childhood education could not only generate more than $7 of economic benefits over a child’s lifetime for every dollar spent up front, but would also benefit our economy in the immediate term by providing parents with increased workplace flexibility. In pursuit of pragmatic, big ideas like universal pre-k, progressives are more than willing to talk about entitlement reforms that don’t hurt beneficiaries. In fact, the idea that every child should have access to high quality pre-k in return for enormous economic dividends is simply smart economics, not fantasy.
The most confounding piece of Kessler and Cowan’s argument is that they don’t distinguish between tax increases that affect everyone and tax increases that impact the wealthy. They argue that Democrats should learn a lesson from Colorado’s recent decision to turn down an across the board tax. While raising taxes on the wealthy has proven to be both good policy and good politics, there’s no doubt that raising taxes on everyone, as Colorado attempted, may be difficult to do—especially when wages are down. But, Bill de Blasio and Elizabeth Warren aren’t arguing that everyone should pay more in taxes, but only that the wealthy should pay their fair share. President Obama is advocating for the idea that when the top 10 percent of earners take home 50 percent of the country’s wealth, it’s reasonable to ask that the wealthiest Americans pay their fair share to ensure that all Americans have a shot at economic success. There’s another politician who raised taxes on the wealthy by raising the top marginal rate who was handily reelected President: Bill Clinton.
By: Neera Tanden, President of the Center for American Progress; The New Republic, December 15, 2013
“Ending Medicare As We Know It”: Here’s Why There Won’t Be A Republican Alternative To Obamacare
Republicans are sick of people saying they don’t have an alternative to Obamacare.
They have plenty!
And not just, “Don’t get sick! And if you do get sick, die quickly,” as Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) said in 2009.
The Republican-controlled House of Representatives just hasn’t voted on even one Obamacare alternative because it’s hard to fit stuff in when you only work 28 hours a week and have to squeeze in all those Obamacare repeals.
But they’re going to fix that problem in 2014, says Rep. Tom Price (R-GA).
The congressman has introduced his Obamacare alternative — the Empowering Patients First Act — three times since 2009. Price’s bill has never been given a vote, even though it has 50 co-sponsors, including the eminent Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN).
Price told Fox News that after the first of the year, Republican leaders are going to bring forth a bill that will “unite Republicans around health care issues” because “you can’t beat something with nothing.”
This logic runs contrary to Town Hall‘s Conn Carroll, who believes the House GOP won’t coalesce around one plan or, as he calls it, “a villain to run against.”
This has been the GOP strategy since 2010, and don’t expect it to change, despite the assurances the leadership has given to Rep. Price.
Price’s bill has never been scored by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). But a former Republican head of the CBO scored it independently and found that it saves trillions of dollars over 10 years and will reduce the uninsured population by 29 percent by 2016.
If this is true, why haven’t Republicans even put it up for a vote?
A quick look at H.R. 2300, the current version of Price’s bill, shows you why the GOP likely won’t propose an alternative to Obamacare — ever.
The bill starts off with Republicans’ favorite health care distractions — tort reform and selling across state lines.
If you eliminated every malpractice claim in America, that would only reduce the costs of our health care system by 1 to 1.5 percent – far less than implementing a public option.
Selling insurance over state lines would just give insurers the chance to sell plans from the state with the fewest regulations. The Washington Post‘s Ezra Klein looked at a CBO report on a bill from 2005 that would have made national sales of state insurance plans possible and found “the legislation would not change the number of insured Americans or save much money, but it would make insurance more expensive for the sick and cheaper for the healthy, and lead to more healthy people with insurance and fewer sick people with insurance.”
The real goal of Price’s bill and just about every Republican reform of the health care system is to end the employer-provided health insurance dynamic that most Americans rely upon. Employers get a generous tax break for providing health coverage that Price would then extend to individuals. The 2009 version of his bill did this in a way that would actually have resulted in a huge tax increase.
But the bigger problem with Price’s plan to sever the employer-employee health insurance relationship and create plans that stay with an individual for life is that it would end up in cancelations of current plans — tens of millions of cancelations.
Republicans could argue that these new plans would be better than the existing plans for various reasons — but that’s an argument they know doesn’t work, because they crushed it when Democrats used it to defend the cancelations that happened after the implementation Obamacare.
Price says his plan would cover people with pre-existing conditions, though it doesn’t include an individual mandate or any incentive to prevent insurers from cherry-picking the healthiest consumers.
“In other words, this looks much like the reforms that collapsed in Texas, and in California,” Klein noted. ”Price isn’t learning from past policy mistakes, and so he means to repeat them.”
The biggest problem with Price’s bill is how it reforms existing public health care programs.
If H.R. 2300 became law, anyone could opt out of Medicare or Medicaid and receive a voucher to purchase private insurance.
We have no idea how many people would opt out of Medicare given the fact that few private insurers see people over 65 as the path to prosperity for their business. But when the growth of Medicare costs is far below that of private insurers, all that voucher would end up being is a ticket to pay far more for health care at the time of your life when it will cost you the most.
And if too many beneficiaries opted out, the entire system of dictating costs to providers in exchange for volume could collapse with devastating effects to our deficit and debt.
The worst part for Republicans is the facet of the law that allows Democrats to make a pretty simple case against the GOP’s Obamacare alternative: It ends Medicare as we know it. The GOP could rebut that assertion by saying that Medicare will still exist for those who want it, but a party that has been shedding senior support all year doesn’t want to have that argument.
Any alternative the GOP proposes to replace Obamacare is going to spark negative headlines — even if the GOP manages to evade the tax increases, cancelations and potential problems for Medicare that exist in Price’s bill.
If the Republican leadership makes the mistake of offering an alternative, they’ll dull the sting of their attacks on Obamacare by having to defend some version of a plan they were wise enough to sit on for years.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, December 16, 2013
“And The Shootings Continue”: 2013, The Year We Learned Gun Reform Is Impossible
Nothing in 2013 matched the horror of Sandy Hook or Aurora, but the year proved to be a dispiriting one for gun-control crusaders hoping to capitalize on the intense outpouring of grief wrought by 2012’s shooting massacres.
After Newtown, President Obama gave an impassioned speech promising to do everything in his power to prevent “more tragedies like this.” We’d watched these scenes of public mourning before—after Tucson, after Aurora—but it was different this time. Obama’s bold declaration that “we are not doing enough and we will have to change” seemed more forceful than before. And coming just six weeks after his reelection, it seemed more possible.
But once the National Rifle Association and others got a whiff of any serious threat to firearm freedoms, they moneyed up. Although gun-control groups spent five times as much on federal lobbying in 2013 as they did in 2012, according to data compiled by the Sunlight Foundation, gun-rights groups outpaced them by more than 7-to-1.
As usual, the NRA’s efforts paid off. Watered-down legislation that would have expanded background checks failed in the Senate this past spring, and the issue retook its place in Congress as a perennial nonstarter.
And the shootings continued.
But Congress delivered gun-reform advocates one final 2013 disappointment this week. The Senate on Monday voted to renew the Undetectable Firearms Act just hours before the 25-year-old law was set to expire. The 10-year extension, which even the National Rifle Association endorsed, is largely genteel. It keeps on the books a ban on firearms that can sneak through metal detectors, but efforts by Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., to close what he called a “dangerous loophole” allowing a person to use 3-D printing technology to craft a plastic gun failed to get off the ground. Schumer wanted to amend the law to require that firearms have permanent metal pieces in them.
Gun-control advocates have seen some movement outside of Congress. In September, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz declared guns unwelcome in his stores, even in states with open-carry laws. Colorado’s State House passed stricter gun laws, though members did so at great political peril. Connecticut adopted some of the strictest in the nation, despite being home to several gun manufacturers. And Obama did pass a number of executive orders that make small inroads, such as restricting the import of military surplus weapons and ordering federal agencies to share more data with the background-check system.
But national lawmakers in 2013 did what they do every year when it comes to tightening gun restrictions: nothing.
“It should be a source of great embarrassment to the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives that we have not moved the ball forward one inch when it comes to the issue of protecting the thousands of people all across this country who are killed by guns every year,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., before Monday’s vote of the Undetectable Firearms Act, which passed by unanimous consent.
2012’s gun violence brought us unprecedented grief. But 2013 reminded us just how impossible it is to move that ball forward. If a deranged man killing 20 kids and six teachers at an elementary school won’t prompt meaningful gun reform, it’s hard to imagine what will.
By: Dustin Volz, The National Journal, December 10, 2013
“A Pill For Every Ill”: Consumer Drug Advertising Should Be Banned
Consumer advertising of prescription drugs is a massive public health experiment in which billions of dollars are spent each year. But this advertising is a blunt instrument where a sharp edge is needed.
Drugs have harms as well as benefits, and the harms are greater when drugs are indiscriminately prescribed. Consumer advertising, delivered to the masses as a shotgun blast, rather than as specific information to concerned patients or caregivers, results in more prescriptions and less appropriate prescribing.
There is no evidence that consumer ads improve treatment quality or result in earlier provision of needed care. Research has shown that the ads convey an unbalanced picture, with benefits and emotional appeals given far greater weight than risks. Clinicians can work to override these miscues, but this steals precious time from activities that can provide real benefit to patients. In the packed agenda of the patient visit, in which so many real concerns and evidence-based care are available to make a difference in people’s lives, the intrusion of marketing risks harm.
Advertising also provokes a subtle shift in our culture — toward seeking a pill for every ill. While there are many for whom stimulants and other medications can be a godsend, the case of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is a prime example of how, too often, a pill substitutes for more human responses to distress. U.S. clinicians prescribe stimulant medication for A.D.H.D. at a rate 25 times that of their European counterparts. The complex decision to start a long-term medication should be motivated by the observations of teachers and parents and children, in the context of a relationship with a caring clinician − not stimulated by rosy ads.
Consumer drug advertising is banned in most of the world, although pharmaceutical companies are making a full-court press on the European Union, even while violating the limited guidelines for that advertising in the United States.
In the information age, in which more balanced sources of information on drugs should be widely available, biased pill-pushing messages are a public health menace. To advance the health of the public, the United States should follow the lead of the vast majority of countries, and ban direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising.
By: Kurt C. Strange, Room for Debate, The New York Times, December 15, 2013
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