“The Insecure American”: Members Of Our Political Elite Seem To Have No Sense Of How The Other Half Lives
America remains, despite the damage inflicted by the Great Recession and its aftermath, a very rich country. But many Americans are economically insecure, with little protection from life’s risks. They frequently experience financial hardship; many don’t expect to be able to retire, and if they do retire have little to live on besides Social Security.
Many readers will, I hope, find nothing surprising in what I just said. But all too many affluent Americans — and, in particular, members of our political elite — seem to have no sense of how the other half lives. Which is why a new study on the financial well-being of U.S. households, conducted by the Federal Reserve, should be required reading inside the Beltway.
Before I get to that study, a few words about the callous obliviousness so prevalent in our political life.
I am not, or not only, talking about right-wing contempt for the poor, although the dominance of compassionless conservatism is a sight to behold. According to the Pew Research Center, more than three-quarters of conservatives believe that the poor “have it easy” thanks to government benefits; only 1 in 7 believe that the poor “have hard lives.” And this attitude translates into policy. What we learn from the refusal of Republican-controlled states to expand Medicaid, even though the federal government would foot the bill, is that punishing the poor has become a goal in itself, one worth pursuing even if it hurts rather than helps state budgets.
But leave self-declared conservatives and their contempt for the poor on one side. What’s really striking is the disconnect between centrist conventional wisdom and the reality of life — and death — for much of the nation.
Take, as a prime example, positioning on Social Security. For decades, a declared willingness to cut Social Security benefits, especially by raising the retirement age, has been almost a required position — a badge of seriousness — for politicians and pundits who want to sound wise and responsible. After all, people are living longer, so shouldn’t they work longer, too? And isn’t Social Security an old-fashioned system, out of touch with modern economic realities?
Meanwhile, the reality is that living longer in our ever-more-unequal society is very much a class thing: life expectancy at age 65 has risen a lot among the affluent, but hardly at all in the bottom half of the wage distribution, that is, among those who need Social Security most. And while the retirement system F.D.R. introduced may look old-fashioned to affluent professionals, it is quite literally a lifeline for many of our fellow citizens. A majority of Americans over 65 get more than half their income from Social Security, and more than a quarter are almost completely reliant on those monthly checks.
These realities may finally be penetrating political debate, to some extent. We seem to be hearing less these days about cutting Social Security, and we’re even seeing some attention paid to proposals for benefit increases given the erosion of private pensions. But my sense is that Washington still has no clue about the realities of life for those not yet elderly. Which is where that Federal Reserve study comes in.
This is the study’s second year, and the current edition actually portrays a nation in recovery: in 2014, unlike 2013, a substantial plurality of respondents said that they were better off than they had been five years ago. Yet it’s startling how little room for error there is in many American lives.
We learn, for example, that 3 in 10 nonelderly Americans said they had no retirement savings or pension, and that the same fraction reported going without some kind of medical care in the past year because they couldn’t afford it. Almost a quarter reported that they or a family member had experienced financial hardship in the past year.
And something that even startled me: 47 percent said that they would not have the resources to meet an unexpected expense of $400 — $400! They would have to sell something or borrow to meet that need, if they could meet it at all.
Of course, it could be much worse. Social Security is there, and we should be very glad that it is. Meanwhile, unemployment insurance and food stamps did a lot to cushion unlucky families from the worst during the Great Recession. And Obamacare, imperfect as it is, has immensely reduced insecurity, especially in states whose governments haven’t tried to sabotage the program.
But while things could be worse, they could also be better. There is no such thing as perfect security, but American families could easily have much more security than they have. All it would take is for politicians and pundits to stop talking blithely about the need to cut “entitlements” and start looking at the way their less-fortunate fellow citizens actually live.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, May 29, 2015
“How ‘Public Servant’ Hastert Got His Riches”: An Indictment Of D.C.’s “Revolving Door” Money Culture
Not-so-frequently Asked Questions About the Hastert Indictment.
It’s clear that the indictment of Dennis Hastert has raised more questions than it’s provided answers. But I suspect a lot of people are asking the wrong ones. Hastert’s “misconduct” may turn out to be of sexually predatory nature, in which case talk of how much his reputation is worth is picayune compared the nature of the crime. But there are questions about what he did that are applicable to the entire industry he represents.
The most obvious question, that’s also the least relevant for most Americans: What is the “misconduct” that Hastert is alleged to have been trying to cover up?
This is an important question, to be sure, but indicting Hastert on the financial charges and lying to investigators rather than on whatever misconduct occurred seems to indicate that those charges were the best investigators could come up with. Presumably, if the misconduct was illegal, they’d have mentioned that—and indicted him for it. If the conduct was sexual abuse, as sources are saying, then the statute of limitations has run out. It follows that Hastert wasn’t paying hush money to stay out of jail, he was protecting his reputation.
A better question, and one that many Washington watchdogs leapt on quickly: How did Hastert happen to have enough money lying around that paying out $3.5 million was even within the realm of possibility?
Hastert’s ability to participate in the blackmail is, after all, itself a general indictment of D.C.’s “revolving door” money culture, in which former lawmakers move easily from government into lobbying. In Hastert’s case, the ability to profit off of one’s legislative position is especially galling: While in office, Hastert used the earmarking process to turn his investment in some Illinois farmland into a profit of 140 percent when a federal highway project just happened to make its way through those very fields. Indeed, it was this instance of a completely legal form of insider trading that helped prompt Congress to end earmarks.
And, of course, Hastert made even more money once he was out of office. One study found that, on average—and when the information is publicly available—former lawmakers get a 1,425 percent raise when they make the jump from Capitol Hill to K Street. Hastert, who was worth between $4 million and $17 million when he left Congress, was making $175,000 as a representative. His K Street bump would be to almost $2.5 million a year.
Okay, he made his money as a lobbyist, doing presumably sneaky lobbyist things. That raises the next question: How can Hastert’s reputation even be worth $3.5 million?
Hastert is a former member of Congress known to have profited off of a shady land deal and he’s a registered lobbyist—these are already the two professions that Americans regard as the most disreputable careers available. They are literally last (lobbyist) and second-to-last (congressman) on Gallup’s list of what jobs Americans regard as “honest” and “ethical.” What would one have to do to be thought even less of?
Given the ickiness of what has been reported, it might not be good to think about that question too hard, so let’s turn that question on its head: What kind of reputation could be worth spending $3.5 million to protect?
To consider $3.5 million a reasonable sum to spend on protecting one’s reputation, presumably it has to be worth a lot more than that. And, indeed, in the context of the lobbying world, $3.5 million just isn’t that much money. Especially considering that Hastert was apparently making pay-offs over time. Special interest groups spent almost 1000 times that—$3.2 billion—in 2015 alone. If Hastert viewed protecting his reputation as a kind of investment in future earnings, $3.5 million is on the scale of buying an alarm system for your home, not buying a whole other house.
And, it’s important to remember, what Hastert was covering up with that hush money was not a “reputation” as an average citizen might conceive of it: something akin to honor or trustworthiness or fidelity. A lobbyist’s reputation, after all, actually hinges on his or her established lack of principles. A lobbying client for someone who is a former member of Congress is paying a premium for that person’s willingness to engage in barely-legal favor-trading. A lobbyist’s prices go up the more corrupt he is. Who wants to hire an honest one?
By: Ana Marie Cox, The Daily Beast, May 30, 2015
“The Many Rebrandings Of Rick Santorum”: In The Middle Of At Least His Third Rebranding, And He’s Just Not Very Good At It
Rick Santorum is often portrayed as a stubborn man of principle, an unusual politician who’ll run for president in the face of terrible poll numbers, and despite an electorate increasingly hostile to his unsettlingly passionate social conservatism. But this isn’t really true. Santorum, who announced his 2016 presidential candidacy on Wednesday, is in the middle of at least his third rebranding. He’s just not very good at it.
In his announcement speech in Western Pennsylvania, Santorum pitched himself as a defender of the working man who also happens to be a foreign policy expert. Santorum bragged that in an issue of ISIS’s online magazine, Dabiq, “under the headline ‘In the Words of Our Enemy’ was my picture and a quote. … They know who I am, and I know who they are!” To be clear, while it would be unsettling to find your face in an ISIS magazine, it’s not that hard to get ISIS to know who you are. You basically just have to talk about ISIS. In the same section, Dabiq quoted two other “enemies”: Virginia State Senator Richard Black and former CIA officer Gary Berntsen, a frequent Fox and Friends guest who has less than 1,600 followers on Twitter. Gary 2016!
For someone who is supposedly dedicated to what he thinks is right, not what is popular, a list of Santorum’s political books makes for a decent guide to the trends of the Republican Party of the last ten years. It Takes a Family, released in 2005, was a rebuttal to Hillary Clinton’s It Takes a Village. It is concerned with apparently controversial social issues such as women working outside the home. His 2012 book American Patriots, printed on faux antique paper, is a Tea Partyish celebration of Revolutionary War-era Americans “heroes and heroines from all walks of life” (not just white guys). Last year’s Blue Collar Conservatives is about helping the working class. (“There was a time not long ago when Americans without college degrees could expect to earn a decent and steady income in exchange for hard work.”) His publisher says, “Santorum provides a game plan for Republicans to bounce back, regain popularity, and return to the party’s original values.” It’s less a game plan for the party’s comeback than one for Santorum’s.
Santorum tried to remake himself in both of his last two losing campaigns, in 2006 and 2012. His political career began in the 90s, when Republicans were focused on welfare reform and teen moms and the crime rate, and he ran with those issues. He campaigned on welfare reform, he said single moms were “breeding more criminals” and that politicians shouldn’t be afraid of “kicking them in the butt.” The target of that kind of rhetoric was not lost on black voters at the time. But for a while, it worked really well. The Harrisburg Patriot News reported in July 2005, “A Santorum victory in a state that has voted Democratic in recent presidential elections would solidify his reputation within the GOP and with conservatives nationally. It would also add fuel to a rumored 2008 presidential run, party officials and analysts said.” Maybe that’s why Santorum keeps running these long-shot campaigns. He was promised this, and he can’t believe it didn’t work out for him.
But by summer 2005, Santorum was clearly in trouble, trailing opponents by as much as 14 points in polls. He was closely tied to the increasingly unpopular president, and his social conservatism had started to rub people the wrong way. In 2002, Santorum had blamed the Catholic priest sex abuse scandal on Boston’s liberal culture. In 2003, he suggested that if we allowed gay marriage, we’d have to allow “man on child, man on dog.” It was “man on dog” that led to Santorum’s greatest branding issue: his Google problem. Sex columnist Dan Savage held a contest to turn “santorum” into a sex term. Savage’s SpreadingSantorum.com rose in Google rankings to outrank the candidate’s campaign site. The top result is now a Wikipedia page for “Campaign for ‘santorum’ neologism,” where it remains a reminder of, if not the neologism, the way that Santorum was turned into an online joke by gay rights activists.
Going into his 2006 Senate reelection campaign, Santorum’s persona changed to reflect the times. Demographic trends meant bashing inner cities and women with jobs and gays had diminishing returns. The white share of the vote shrunk from 84.6 percent in 1992 to 76.3 in 2008, according to Pew Research Center. Opposition to gay marriage dropped more than 10 points from 1996 to 2006, though a majority still opposed it. In 2004, as Senate Republican Conference Committee chair, he met with presidents of historically black colleges and universities in an attempt to get the GOP to reach out to minorities. In 2005, The New York Times Magazine explained that Santorum was an earnest man of faith who’d earned endorsements from leaders in the African-American community in Philadelphia. In April 2006, his campaign staged a photo op in which Santorum packed up food for low-income people. (Alas, the TV news cameras did not show up.)
By July 2006, he was distributing a listicle titled ”Fifty Things You May Not Know About Rick Santorum,” which included warm and fuzzy items like cracking down on puppy mills. The New York Times reported:
He needs to reintroduce himself over the next four months, he said, to get beyond the stereotypes. …
A kinder, gentler Rick Santorum? ”People already know about the other stuff,” he said. ”You guys remind them every day about the other stuff. Let’s tell the rest of the story.”
The listicle did not stop the senator from losing by 18 points to now-Senator Bob Casey.
During the 2012 Republican primary, Santorum faced a very different electorate, and he reshaped himself to appeal to people hurt by the Great Recession, trying to distinguish himself as the voice of the working class. He called for manufacturing subsidies. He was the son of immigrants. His grandfather “sort of coal-mined his way to freedom.” (Back in 1994, Santorum talked about how his father got his “biggest break” with World War II; he escaped the mines through the G.I. Bill, which paid for his psychology degree.) He came out against the term “middle class” because it was some kind of class warfare. He even tried to recast his signature issues, telling a Michigan crowd in February 2012, “All reporters in the back, they say, ‘Oh there’s Santorum talking about social issues again.’ … No, I’m talking about freedom. I’m talking about government imposing themselves on your lives.”
Santorum stuck with his new blue-collar image after he lost to Mitt Romney. “When all you do is talk to people who are owners, talk to folks who are Type As who want to succeed economically, we’re talking to a very small group of people,” he said in 2013.
“I never went to a country club until I was in college,” Santorum told the National Review recently, like a true man of the people. But now he’s blue collar plus. National Review explained:
If he runs in 2016, he says, it won’t be as a candidate defined by his Catholic, socially conservative views. He’s been there and done that, he says. In 2016, he is more likely to define himself as an economic populist and foreign-policy hawk.
In the months before his official campaign announcement, Santorum started playing up the hawk thing. In April, Santorum said that in 2016, Republicans will be “going up against a secretary of state, someone with a tremendous amount of experience and knowledge in this area—most of it wrong—but someone who’s knowledgeable, someone who’s an expert.” That means they “need to look at someone to go up against Mrs. Clinton who has background experience and knowledge and has gotten it right when she’s gotten it wrong.” (They both supported the Iraq war.) He pointed to the eight years he served on the Senate Armed Services Committee. At the South Carolina Freedom Summit this month, Santorm said of ISIS, “If these folks want to return to a 7th Century version of Islam, then let’s load up our bombers and bomb them back to the 7th Century.”
“Going up against a potential nominee who’s a former secretary of state, it’d be good to have someone with more experience than just a briefing book for the debate,” Santorum told NPR recently. A couple weeks earlier, he told voters in Iowa, “We have to have a president who understands the difference between a friend and an enemy. … Iran, enemy. Israel, friend. It’s real simple.” Briefing book? No. Little Golden Book? Yes!
Given that he’s polling at about 2.3 percent, Santorum is likely hoping that the 2016 primary is something like 2012’s, and voters will cycle through alternatives to the mainstream moderate Republican candidate until they get to him. What can he do to get Americans’ attention? Voters rarely care that much about foreign policy. Santorum will try on a new identity. For the sake of entertainment, let’s hope he’ll try to compete with Hillary Clinton not on foreign policy but on being a champion of single ladies.
By: Elspeth Reeve, Senior Editor, The New Republic, May 28, 2015
“The People’s Republic Of Nebraska?”: Nebraska’s No-Stalemate, Commie Legislature
Forget everything you know about Nebraska. Placidity, Midwestern aw-shucks-ness, red-meat exports and red-state politics? Nope, nope, nope, nope. In the past few days, the Cornhusker State’s legislature has astonished the nation with the kind of legislative assertiveness that could make Congressional Tea Partiers sputter in rage.
On May 27, the state legislature voted to override Republican Gov. Pete Ricketts’ veto of legislation that repealed the death penalty, making it the first red state in decades to bar executions. The next day, the state overrode the governor’s veto of legislation letting DREAMers—immigrants whose parents brought them into the country illegally when they were young—get driver’s licenses. And if that doesn’t have conservatives diving for the smelling salts, get this: These moves came just two weeks after the legislature overrode a veto of a hike on the gas tax.
So in the last few whirlwind weeks, a state mostly known for its corn products and youth football players has banned the death penalty, started giving driver’s licenses to ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS!!, and—take a deep breath—raised taxes. But, despite appearances, this isn’t because carpetbagging liberal interlopers have launched a subversively successful campaign to turn the state into Vermont for college football fans. Rather, the structure of the state’s legislature makes weird alliances and inter-party strategizing the norm, not the exception. And people troubled by the partisanship that dominates national politics would be well-served to take note.
Instead of having a house and senate like the other 49 states, Nebraska has a single, unicameral legislative chamber. On top of that, party distinctions are invisible there: No majority and minority leaders, no whips, no partisan caucusing, none of that. State Sen. Colby Coash said that gives lawmakers significantly more latitude to vote their consciences than legislators in other states have. He said that delegations from other states sometimes visit their Capitol and look on with envy. Those lawmakers, he added, sometimes fear that if they break party lines, party whips will threaten to take away their office space, their staff budgets, and even their parking spots.
“When you don’t have a party boss on either side, I think it frees you to use your mind and to make decisions that you think are right,” the senator said.
On top of that, every bill that legislators introduce gets an open, public committee hearing, so legislators don’t worry that their bills will get shelved indefinitely, and they don’t feel the same pressure to suck up to any party leadership.
“In most states you can introduce anything you want—but if you aren’t in the right party or don’t know the right person, you don’t even get a hearing on your bill,” Coash said. Nebraska’s political culture is very different, he added.
This unique independence played a huge role in the passage of the death penalty repeal, he said. Though the governor has been an adamant, vocal, and dogged advocate of keeping the death penalty, a critical mass of Republican lawmakers didn’t fear bucking him.
“My words cannot express how appalled I am that we have lost a critical tool to protect law enforcement and Nebraska families,” Ricketts said in a statement after the override vote, USA Today reported. The unicameral was “out of touch” with the state’s voters, he added.
Lawmakers, obviously, didn’t share those qualms.
“The Nebraska structure fosters a culture of people voting on their conscience rather than by politics,” said Shari Silberstein, executive director of Equal Justice USA, who helped organize the anti-death-penalty push that unified conservatives and progressives.
Stopping executions was just the start. The legislature’s decision to override the governor and implement a gas tax might be even more surprising, given the pressure national anti-tax groups put on state legislators to resist these kind of hikes. The state currently taxes gas at 26.5 cents per gallon, and it hasn’t raised that number in years. Advocates of the tax hike argued that the state needed to spend more on road and bridge maintenance, and that their options for finding the funds were slim.
“There’s just potholes everywhere here,” said Perry Pirsch, a prominent Lincoln attorney and spokesman for Citizens for a Better Lincoln PAC. “And there’s bridges that are in rough shape and potentially could crumble if they’re not worked on in the years to come, and we were overdue for an increase.”
And Jim Vokal, CEO of the Platte Institute for Economic Research, said his typically anti-tax group favored the hike, but wished it had been part of a broad tax reform bill.
“Typically the unicameral has operated with an independent mindset and that was certainly evident this year,” he added.
The fact that Nebraska decided to raise taxes to pay for infrastructure funding puts it in stark contrast with Wisconsin, where Gov. Scott Walker proposed issuing bonds to fund road improvement projects.
And who’s going to be paying higher gas taxes to drive on hopefully improved roads and bridges in the People’s Republic of Nebraska? Undocumented immigrants are going to be paying (some of) those taxes, thanks to even more bipartisan leadership-bucking. When the legislature overrode Ricketts’ veto, Nebraska became the last state in the country to let undocumented immigrants who came to the country as children get driver’s licenses.
So depending on your perspective, Nebraska is either a corn-fed, post-partisan Utopia or an anarchic pit of death-penalty-free chaos. Nebraskans seem inclined to think the former.
“There’s a lot of people in Nebraska who feel very strongly about their independent-mindedness,” said Ari Kohen, a political science professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “And to see it play out this way and have the nation see it play out this way, there’s a pride in that.”
By: Betsy Woodruff, The Daily Beast, May 30, 2015
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