“A New Front In The War On Poverty”: The Affordable Care Act Will Do For Most Americans What Medicare Did For Seniors
Buried in Sunday’s Washington Post was a small notice of a study on senior citizens living in poverty. The numbers have plummeted from the late 1960s, according to a study of census data done by the Akron Beacon Journal.
27 percent of seniors were living in poverty more than 40 years ago, compared to only 9 percent today. There are 3.7 million seniors living in poverty today as compared to 5.2 million in 1969, while the number of seniors has more than doubled during that time, up to 40.6 million.
So who says President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s War on Poverty was a failure?
The reasons for this drastic reduction can be placed squarely on retirement programs like 401(k)s, Social Security and the establishment of Medicare in 1965. In addition, many continue to work post-65, many saw the tough times of the Depression and World War II and have been careful and frugal.
Another important change that I was involved in back in the 70s working for Sen. Frank Church, who was Chairman of the Aging Committee, involved the capital gains tax on the sale of one’s home. Congress passed an exemption for seniors who sold their homes and downsized, saving them substantial sums from taxes on their primary nest egg. Prices of homes had gone up and this change was crucial for many seniors and is still important today.
But there are still too many Americans, both young and old, living in poverty. Too many are without jobs, too many have jobs that don’t pay enough to raise a family and the future of pensions and retirement savings is far from certain. A new Kaiser study even indicates that additional health expenses could raise the percentage of seniors in poverty up from 9 percent to 15 percent.
And that is why the importance of the Affordable Care Act cannot be understated. Before Medicare, many seniors were one serious illness removed from bankruptcy. Today, the same is true for many Americans. The ACA, when it is fully implemented, will do much the same as Medicare to keep Americans out of poverty.
Here is what life was like before Medicare: The cost of health care for seniors kept many from having even basic hospital coverage. Only one in four had insurance that would cover 75 percent of a hospital stay, and half of all elderly Americans had no insurance at all.
The point is that when we look back at American life in the pre-Johnson era, the pre-Medicare era, we faced a daunting problem. We did much to solve that problem for the vast majority of seniors. Now, with the ACA, we can do the same for most Americans.
By: Peter Fenn, U. S. News and World Report, February 10, 2014
“Phony Experts On Retainer”: Fight Over Minimum Wage Illustrates Web Of Industry Ties
Just four blocks from the White House is the headquarters of the Employment Policies Institute, a widely quoted economic research center whose academic reports have repeatedly warned that increasing the minimum wage could be harmful, increasing poverty and unemployment.
But something fundamental goes unsaid in the institute’s reports: The nonprofit group is run by a public relations firm that also represents the restaurant industry, as part of a tightly coordinated effort to defeat the minimum wage increase that the White House and Democrats in Congress have pushed for.
“The vast majority of economic research shows there are serious consequences,” Michael Saltsman, the institute’s research director, said in an interview, before he declined to list the restaurant chains that were among its contributors.
The campaign illustrates how groups — conservative and liberal — are again working in opaque ways to shape hot-button political debates, like the one surrounding minimum wage, through organizations with benign-sounding names that can mask the intentions of their deep-pocketed patrons.
They do it with the gloss of research, and play a critical and often underappreciated role in multilevel lobbying campaigns, backed by corporate lobbyists and labor unions, with a potential payoff that can be in the millions of dollars for the interests they represent.
“It is the way of Washington now — and that is unfortunate,” said John Weaver, a Republican political consultant who has helped run several presidential campaigns. “Because if it’s not dishonest, it’s at least disingenuous.”
In this case, the policy dispute is over whether increasing the minimum wage by nearly 40 percent to $10.10 an hour within two and a half years would reduce poverty or further it.
Even if the legislation never passes — and it is unlikely to, given the political divide in Congress — millions of dollars will be spent this year on lobbying firms, nonprofit research organizations and advertising campaigns, as industry groups like the National Restaurant Association and the National Retail Federation try to bury it. Liberal groups, in turn, will be spending lots of money as they try to make the debate a political issue for the midterm elections.
The left has its own prominent groups, like the Center for American Progress and the Economic Policy Institute, whose donors include nearly 20 labor unions, and whose reports, with their own aura of objectivity, consistently conclude that raising the minimum wage makes good economic sense. But none has played such a prominent and multifaceted role in recent months as the conservative Employment Policies Institute.
The Employment Policies Institute, founded two decades ago, is led by the advertising and public relations executive Richard B. Berman, who has made millions of dollars in Washington by taking up the causes of corporate America. He has repeatedly created official-sounding nonprofit groups like the Center for Consumer Freedom that have challenged limits like the ban on indoor smoking and the push to restrict calorie counts in fast foods.
In recent months, Mr. Berman’s firm has taken out full-page advertisements in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and plastered a Metro station near the Capitol with advertisements, including one featuring a giant photograph of Representative Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat who is a proponent of the minimum wage increase, that read, “Teens Who Can’t Find a Job Should Blame Her.”
These messages, also promoted on websites operated by Mr. Berman’s firm, including minimumwage.com, instruct anyone skeptical about the arguments to consult the reports prepared by the Employment Policies Institute, most often described only as a “nonprofit research organization.”
But the dividing line between the institute and Mr. Berman’s firm was difficult to discern during two visits last week to the eighth-floor office at 1090 Vermont Avenue, a building near the White House that is the headquarters for both.
The sign at the entrance is for Berman and Company, as the Employment Policies Institute has no employees of its own. Mr. Berman’s for-profit advertising firm, instead, “bills” the nonprofit institute for the services his employees provide to the institute. This arrangement effectively means that the nonprofit is a moneymaking venture for Mr. Berman, whose advertising firm was paid $1.1 million by the institute in 2012, according to its tax returns, or 44 percent of its total budget, with most of the rest of the money used to buy advertisements.
Disclosure reports filed by individual foundations show that its donors in recent years have included the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, a longtime supporter of conservative causes. Mr. Berman and Mr. Saltsman would not identify other donors, but did say they included the restaurant industry. But its tax return shows that the $2.4 million in listed donations received in 2012 came from only 11 contributors, who wrote checks for as much as $500,000 apiece.
Mr. Saltsman, 30, who has an undergraduate degree in economics from the University of Michigan and previously worked for the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, drafts dozens of letters to the editor and opinion articles for newspapers, arguing that increasing the minimum wage would hurt more than help. Other special institute projects included a recent survey of lawmakers who support the minimum wage increase asking if they pay their interns — a report The Daily Caller, a conservative online publication, then released, calling out the lawmakers with unpaid interns as hypocrites.
The major reports released by the institute are prepared by outside academics, like Joseph J. Sabia, an associate professor of economics at San Diego State University, who has collected at least $180,000 in grant money from Mr. Berman’s group over the last eight years to deliver seven separate reports, each one concluding that increasing the minimum wage has caused more harm than good — or at least no significant benefit for the poor.
“There is never a good time to raise the minimum wage,” Mr. Sabia said at a briefing in the Longworth House Office Building late last month that was co-sponsored by the institute, as he laid out the findings of his newest report to Capitol Hill staff members and reporters. “You are not reaching the poor workers you want to help.”
Mr. Sabia said in an interview late last month that his research conclusions were developed independently. “I don’t write advocacy policy briefs,” he said. His papers are also submitted to academic journals, which publish them after a peer-review process — a standard, he noted, that publications put out by left-leaning groups like the Economic Policy Institute often do not meet.
What is clear is that the reports by the Employment Policies Institute are a critical element in the lobbying campaign against the increase in the minimum wage, as restaurant industry groups, in their own statements and news releases, often cite the institute’s reports, creating the Washington echo chamber effect that is so coveted by industry lobbyists.
“Once you have the study, you can point to it to prove your case — even if you paid to get it written,” said one lobbyist, who asked not to be named because his clients rely on him to use this technique.
But some questions have been raised about the institute-funded work. Saul D. Hoffman, a professor of economics at University of Delaware, examined the employment data Mr. Sabia used for a 2012 paper funded in part by the institute. Mr. Hoffman concluded that the narrow cut of data Mr. Sabia picked was perhaps unintentionally skewed, and once corrected, it would have showed that the 2004 increase in New York State’s minimum wage had no negative impact on employment — the opposite of the conclusion the institute had proclaimed in its news releases.
Mr. Berman, 71, a onetime auto mechanic turned labor lawyer and restaurant industry executive, rejected any suggestion that his reports were based on bias or faulty data.
“I get very upset when people say we are putting out junk science and twisted economics, because that happens to be our criticism of other people,” Mr. Berman said in an interview at his office. Yet internal company documents show that members of Mr. Berman’s team — at least when they have been involved in some of the other corporate-backed projects — have discussed ways to massage academic data to change outcomes.
For example, an academic study published by researchers at the University of Southern California concluded that soda had higher concentrations of high-fructose corn syrup than advertised. Mr. Berman’s team, hired by the corn refining industry to defend its sweeteners, mobilized staff at his Center for Consumer Freedom to challenge the results.
“If the results contradict U.S.C., we can publish them,” said an email sent to Mr. Berman and other staff in October 2010 from a Berman employee at the time, referring to the University of Southern California report. The exchange became public recently as a result of a lawsuit between the sugar and corn refining industries. “If for any reason the results confirm U.S.C., we can just bury the data.” Mr. Berman said that the employee who wrote that email left more than a year ago and that such practices were not allowed at the institute.
Left-leaning groups like the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington have filed legal complaints, arguing that the large payments to Mr. Berman’s for-profit firm may violate the law, an accusation that Berman and Company strongly disputes.
What is most important, said Lisa Graves, the executive director of an organization responsible for the online publication PR Watch, is that newspapers detail Employment Policies Institute’s corporate ties when they cite research it publishes. Such disclosure happened in less than 20 percent of the cases over a three-year period, an analysis by PR Watch found.
“They are trying to peddle an industry wish list, but mask it as if they are independent experts,” she said. “They are little more than phony experts on retainer.”
By: Eric Lipton, The New York Times, February 9, 2014
“Overrated, Useless Fools”: Why This Congress Will Never Achieve Anything Significant
As I wrote last month and also several other times over the past five or so years, “comprehensive immigration reform” — defined as a bill making it possible for currently undocumented residents to earn legal status and/or citizenship — can’t happen now because Republicans control the House of Representatives, conservatives control the Republican Party, and conservatives oppose granting legal status to undocumented immigrants. It’s a very simple calculation, and most discussions of the political status of immigration reform could start and end with some variation on that explanation.
But people need something to talk about, and politicians need reasons to go on Sunday shows. Elected officials need to “signal” to important donors and interest groups that they are doing everything in their power to enact the preferred policies of those important donors and interest groups. There is really more incentive for Republicans to talk about immigration reform than to actually pass it. Obviously lots of Republicans do sincerely want immigration reform to pass. But those Republicans don’t have a majority in the House, and until that changes, immigration reform will be practically politically impossible.
Last month, Speaker of the House John Boehner said he was confident that immigration reform could pass this year. That confidence lasted a few weeks. By the end of last week, the GOP had settled on an adequate excuse for declining to pursue their recently announced immigration “list of principles”: They can’t do anything at all because they don’t trust President Obama.
Which, fine. It’s a pretty lame excuse, but Speaker Boehner was not going to say, “I don’t have the clout or the power to unilaterally force a plurality of xenophobes and cowards ensconced in safe white districts to support a major Democratic policy priority.” Republicans were going to blame Democrats no matter what.
The flaw in their excuse, obviously, is that it leaves the GOP open to the line Sen. Chuck Schumer used on Sunday: If Obama is the problem, then Congress can pass a reform bill that won’t go into effect until 2017, when there will be a new president.
“It’s been a tough week for immigration,” he said. “But all three, many of the Republicans have said the following — Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Paul Ryan, even Jim DeMint — they have said that they want to do immigration reform, but they don’t trust the President to enforce the law, particularly the enforcement parts. So there’s a simple solution.”
Unfortunately, coming up with a clever workaround to the arbitrarily chosen GOP excuse won’t change the fact that the arbitrarily chosen GOP excuse is only being used to distract from intractable political reality. Addressing the made-up problem won’t fix the actual one. Schumer gets points for “calling Boehner’s bluff,” but Boehner will not now be like, “well, fair point, you got me, now I guess we have to pass this bill.”
Still, it was a fun couple of weeks of once again debating whether immigration reform would pass soon! Perhaps members of Congress play this elaborate game — hyping major legislation, walking it back, calling out one another’s “bluffs” — mainly to keep the political class occupied.
It has become incredibly difficult even to pass the recurring omnibus bills — like the farm bill, which took a few years to make it through the House, and the transportation bill, which will likely cause Congress to melt down in acrimony and dysfunction once again later this fall — that Congress uses to keep the government funded and operating. The idea that new initiatives and major reforms might be possible with this Congress is just fantasy. Comprehensive tax reform? Immigration reform? “Entitlement reform”? Various politicians will claim, over the next few months, that all of those things and more could happen before the next Congress is sworn in. They will be wrong, but the political press, in need of something to talk about, will take the idea seriously for a while anyway.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, February 10, 2014
“Peek-A-Boo”: The Police Can’t Wait To Get Their Hands On Augmented Reality
Now that New York City is under the rule of a socialist dictator, the “stop and frisk” method of policing, in which hundreds of thousands of citizens who brazenly walked the streets while in a state of non-whiteness were subjected to questioning, delay, and some unfriendly touching, has come to an end. But what if the cops didn’t even need to stop you to give you a virtual pat down?
Imagine this: You walk by a police officer and notice that he’s wearing a pair of odd-looking glasses, which he points in your direction. Almost instantly, a facial recognition program visible in those glasses identifies you, pulls up your file, and informs him that though you have a parking ticket you haven’t yet paid, there are no arrest warrants outstanding for you. A combination of infrared and hopefully non-cancer-causing scanning sensors tells him that you’ve got keys and change in your pockets, but nothing that looks like a gun or a knife, so he lets you pass. That may have all happened without you even noticing.
We’ve seen these kinds of things in science fiction for a while, but they’re getting very close to becoming a reality, like within-the-next decade close. Which is why it isn’t too surprising that the New York Police Department is exploring what it can do with Google Glass, to bring augmented reality to the cop on the beat. “We signed up, got a few pairs of the Google glasses, and we’re trying them out, seeing if they have any value in investigations, mostly for patrol purposes,” said one NYPD official.
There isn’t anything to be afraid of—yet. The capabilities of augmented reality for law enforcement are, at the moment, very limited. But they won’t be for long. There are no real large leaps in technology necessary to get from where we are now to where the cops would like to go—basically all you need is some steady and inevitable improvements in the sensors, the software they rely on, and the databases that integrate and process the information.
There are a couple of important things to keep in mind as this technology matures. First, law enforcement agencies are going to want them, and bad. Just imagine how much easier it would make their jobs if they could identify every person they come across as either a civilian with a clean record or a potentially dangerous criminal who needs a second look. Second, when privacy advocates raise objections, they’re going to make persuasive arguments for why they should be allowed to use the technology. One scenario they like to bring up is a cop chasing a suspect into an abandoned warehouse, whereupon she immediately sees the blueprint of the warehouse to identify possible exits, then switches to infrared to locate the suspect hiding behind a cabinet. Got him! Or, they’ll say, what about if they get a call about a suspect wielding a knife in a parking lot, they get there, scan and identify him, and learn his entire history of mental illness; then they can call in their colleagues who are trained to deal with that kind of suspect, instead of shooting him.
There are going to be controversies and lawsuits about the details, sorting out what kinds of sensors cops will be allowed to use and when. But law enforcement is almost certainly going to win the argument, first because people usually opt for safety at the expense of privacy, and second because at least parts of what the law enforcement officials claim will have genuine merit. It really will make some kinds of policing more efficient and effective. It really will catch some criminals. Getting scanned by a cop wearing augmented reality glasses as you walk by him is certainly preferable to getting slammed against a wall and frisked. And by the time we’ve fully considered whether the privacy invasion is too high a price to pay, it’ll be firmly in place and there’ll be no going back.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, February 7, 2014
“Pete Sessions And The GOP’s ‘Immoral’ Conservatism”: Allowing People To Die To Advance A Political Philosophy Isn’t Just Bad Policy
“It is immoral.”
That was the judgment of Rep. Pete Sessions, a Texas Republican and committee chairman, on the House floor this week. But the subject of his sermon wasn’t the Assad regime in Syria or human trafficking. What Sessions found immoral was the repugnant notion that the government would help Americans who lost their jobs and are looking for work.
Sessions was preaching in response to Democrats’ pleas that the Republican majority hold a vote on restoring unemployment-insurance benefits to the 1.7 million who have lost them since the benefits expired six weeks ago and the 70,000 or so who are losing them each week. Sessions, on the floor to usher through the House “sportsmen’s heritage and recreational enhancement” legislation, explained why he wouldn’t bring up jobless benefits: “I believe it is immoral for this country to have as a policy extending long-term unemployment to people rather than us working on creation of jobs.”
In fact, the economy has added about 8.5 million private-sector jobs in the last 47 months, and overall unemployment, at 6.6 percent in January, would be substantially lower if Sessions and his colleagues hadn’t been so successful in their “work” of cutting government spending when the recovery was fragile.
One result of the Great Recession, though, has been historically high long-term unemployment — 3.6 million people out of work 27 weeks or more, according to Friday’s Labor Department report. This is falling — by 1.1 million over the last year — but those still searching, from all parts of the country and all walks of life, need help.
Republican opponents of the benefits extension said they would consider extending that help if it were “paid for” by saving money elsewhere. So Senate Democrats drafted a three-month extension that was paid for using an accounting method Republicans have supported in the past. Republicans responded with another filibuster — and on Thursday they again succeeded in blocking an extension of benefits.
Those opposing unemployment insurance were conspicuously absent during the debate. Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) was brave enough to issue a statement: “We can get Americans back to work and our economy booming again, but this is not achieved by Washington turning a temporary federal benefit into another welfare program.”
That echoes the Sessions complaint that extending benefits is “immoral.” And, as is often the case, these complaints, in turn, echo Rush Limbaugh. After President Obama on Jan. 31 signed a memorandum directing the federal government not to discriminate against the long-term unemployed, the radio host responded: “So he says, ‘I’m directing every federal agency to make sure we are evaluating candidates on the level, without regard to their employment history.’ What if they’re fired because they’re drunk? What if they’re fired because they were having affairs with the boss’s secretary? Doesn’t matter. Can’t look at that.”
Of course, the memorandum says no such thing. Limbaugh and his congressional apostles are justifying indifference to the unemployed much the way one denies a panhandler under the rationale that he would use the money only to buy more booze. But these are not panhandlers; these are, by definition, people who had been working and are trying to work again.
The Sessions/Inhofe/Limbaugh definition of morality is based in the ideal world of universal productivity they’d like to see, but it offers little help for human misery in the real world. This morality can be seen, too, in the attempt, led by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and embraced by many conservative lawmakers, to repeal the “risk corridors” that protect health insurers from unanticipated losses under Obamacare. That would likely bring down the entire health-care law, as its foes desire. But a collapse would also cause 30 million to 40 million additional people to lose their health insurance suddenly, with no obvious solution or easy way back to the old system. “It would precipitate a crisis,” says Larry Levitt of the Kaiser Family Foundation.
This morality is also at work in the decisions by 25 states under Republican control to reject the expansion of Medicaid offered under Obamacare. The states generally object because they are philosophically opposed to entitlement programs. But a new study from researchers at Harvard Medical School and City University of New York calculates that 7,115 to 17,104 more people will die annually than would have if their states had accepted the Medicaid expansion. The researchers, who favor a single-payer health system, examined demographic data and past insurance expansions.
Conservatives dispute the study’s findings, and I hope the critics are right. Allowing people to die to advance your political philosophy isn’t just bad policy. It’s immoral.
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, February 7, 2014
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