“A Little Hard To Swallow”: The ‘Pressing’ Need For More Tax Breaks For The Rich?
President Obama delivered a pretty interesting speech on the economy yesterday, but towards the end, he completely abandoned his prepared text, ignoring the teleprompter to reflect on something that clearly bothered him on a personal level.
“[J]ust last month, at least one top Republican in Congress said that tax cuts for those at the top are – and I’m quoting here – ‘even more pressing now’ than they were 30 years ago. More pressing. When nearly all the gains of the recovery have gone to the top 1 percent, when income inequality is at as high a rate as we’ve seen in decades, I find that a little hard to swallow that they really desperately need a tax cut right now, it’s ‘urgent.’
“Why? What are the facts? What is the empirical data that would justify that position? Kellogg Business School, you guys are all smart. You do all this analysis. You run the numbers. Has anybody here seen a credible argument that that is what our economy needs right now?”
Almost every word of this was ad libbed. Presented with the Republican argument that the wealthy really need yet another tax cut, the president seemed genuinely gobsmacked. To appreciate the degree to which Obama was amazed, watch the video – go here and forward to the 48:02 mark.
Of course, the president wasn’t making up any of the allegations themselves – a leading congressional Republican really did argue last month that tax breaks for the very wealthy are “even more pressing now” than a generation ago.
The congressman is none other than House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who recently suggested combating poverty is one of his top priorities.
Here’s the interview the far-right Wisconsinite did with the conservative Weekly Standard.
“I’m a classic growth conservative. I believe that the best way to help families, the best way to help the economy is to reduce rates across the board,” Ryan said when asked about Utah senator Mike Lee’s plan to increase the child tax credit and create two income tax brackets of 15 percent and 35 percent. “Growth occurs on the margin, which is a wonky way of saying, if you want faster economic growth, more upward mobility, and faster job creation, lower tax rates across the board is the key-it’s the secret sauce.
“Some conservatives have argued that reducing the top rate is less urgent now than it was during the Reagan administration, when the top rate was cut from 70 percent to 50 percent and then cut again from 50 percent to 28 percent. But Ryan says that cutting the top rate is “even more pressing now” than it was back then “because the American economy was so dominant in the global economy and capital was not nearly as mobile as it is today.”
As a substantive matter, this serves as a reminder of why it’s tough to take Paul Ryan seriously as an alleged wonk. As Matt Yglesias explained after the Ryan interview was published, “The idea that globalization, which tends to increase the overall size of the economy while also increasing inequality, makes tax cuts for the rich even more urgent strikes me as a little bit hard to defend intellectually.”
But as a political matter, let’s not lose sight of the larger context. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) has floated a tax cut plan that focuses primarily on the middle class. Paul Ryan is drawing a distinct between Lee’s approach and his own – Ryan wants the tax cuts focused on the rich.
In light of everything we’ve seen, in light of the enormous class gap, in light of the already low U.S. tax rates as compared to most of the world, Ryan’s ideas about tax breaks for the wealthy just won’t budge.
Is it any wonder the president is astonished?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 3, 2014
“A Bad Week For The NRA”: Every Time The NRA Has A Week As Bad As This One, The American Public Wins
The NRA wants people to believe that its agenda — guns for anyone, anywhere, anytime — is as American as apple pie.
Only, the American public isn’t buying it.
This week, gun lobby extremism went down to defeat in a number of venues, in a number of states.
Guns for anyone? Not in California.
Guns anywhere? Not in Arkansas.
Guns anytime? Not in Florida.
It’s been a bad week for the NRA.
Consider what happened in California. You’d think we could all agree that someone who poses a significant danger to himself or herself or others shouldn’t have a gun. At the same time, that person is entitled to due process.
That’s why the particulars of California’s new gun violence restraining order law are important. Lawmakers — following the lead of states as diverse as Connecticut, Indiana, and Texas — got it right.
California’s law, which the governor signed on Tuesday, allows law enforcement or immediate family members to present evidence to a judge, who can order the police to take temporary custody of a person’s guns for an emergency period. Unless there’s a petition to hold the guns longer, the person will have his or her guns back after 21 days.
Now, both the police and family members can intervene in dangerous situations. More gun deaths — both homicides and suicides — can be prevented.
Of course, the NRA opposed the bill.
In California, no one was talking about banning guns — just temporarily keeping guns away from people who have given police and/or loved ones cause for significant concern.
But according to the NRA, letting everyone — felons, domestic abusers, the seriously mentally ill — have guns is just the price we pay for our Second Amendment rights. According to the NRA, life-saving restrictions on gun ownership — even court-ordered, temporary restrictions — are unacceptable.
While the NRA has had success pushing its agenda in state legislatures over the years, it’s met resistance on college campuses, where law enforcement and administrators agree that guns don’t belong.
You can understand the reasons college officials don’t want guns on campus. Think of those college ratings that magazines publish — and parents consult –every year. Colleges don’t want to be known as party schools, let alone places where people are carrying guns in classrooms and cafeterias.
The Arkansas legislature, in the NRA’s infinite wisdom, last year passed a law permitting university faculty and staff to carry guns on campus. Schools in the state do have the right to opt out of campus carry. But if only to make opting out more onerous, Arkansas requires schools to take that step and opt out every year.
For the second straight year, the vote on campus was unanimous. Once again, the governing boards of every Arkansas college, university, and technical institute chose to prohibit guns.
And that’s part of a pattern we’re seeing across the country. The gun lobby makes a dedicated push in state legislatures to pass campus carry laws. Then, when schools can opt out of allowing guns on their property, they almost uniformly do so.
Guns for anyone, anywhere, anytime might sound good to the NRA and gun manufacturers — but for the rest of us, it’s not a sound or an appealing public policy.
An argument over loud music, for example, isn’t the time to shoot someone. Justice was done in Florida this week, when a jury rejected Michael Dunn’s “Stand Your Ground” defense and found him guilty of first-degree murder — another high-profile blow to the “shoot first, ask questions later” mentality that NRA-backed Stand Your Ground laws help create.
With its losses adding up, the NRA’s political arm is getting desperate. On Wednesday, PolitiFact gave a “Pants on Fire” rating to the ad the NRA is running against Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana. The Washington Post‘sFact Checker gave it “Four Pinocchios” — a perfect score for a perfectly misleading ad.
When you see or hear an NRA ad talking about someone trying to take away your gun rights, it’s not true. As PolitiFact put it, it’s fear mongering, plain and simple.
The truth is that the NRA’s agenda is more guns, in more places, all the time. It’s dangerous and deeply irresponsible — and an ideology that elected officials, school administrators, and concerned citizens alike are increasingly rejecting.
And every time the NRA has a week as bad as this one, the American public wins.
By: John Feinblatt, The Huffington Post Blog, October 3, 2014
“Joni Ernst Loves The Constitution, But..”: Republican Senate Candidate Advocates Revolt Against U.S. Government
The Iowa Senate race is one of the closest in the nation, and what it seems to have come down to is the following two questions: Number 1, did Bruce Braley act like a jerk when he and his neighbor had a dispute over the fact that the neighbor’s chickens were crapping on Braley’s lawn? And number 2, is Joni Ernst a radical extremist?
You can argue that only one of these questions has anything to do with what Iowa’s next senator will be doing in office, and you’d be right. But the latest bit of information on Ernst is, if you actually understand the issue, quite a doozy:
State Sen. Joni Ernst, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Iowa, once said she would support legislation that would allow “local law enforcement to arrest federal officials attempting to implement” Obamacare.
Ernst voiced her support for that, as well as supporting legislation that would “nullify” Obamacare in a Iowa State Legislative Candidates survey for Ron Paul’s libertarian-aligned Campaign for Liberty in 2012. It can be viewed here.
The question was: “Will you support legislation to nullify ObamaCare and authorize state and local law enforcement to arrest federal officials attempting to implement the unconstitutional health care scheme known as ObamaCare?” Ernst answered that question as “yes.”
The “My opponent agreed to something crazy in a questionnaire” is its own genre of outrage, and seldom an enlightening one. It’s possible that a staffer filled this out, and it didn’t reflect Ernst’s actual views. If that’s the case, she should have the opportunity to clarify what she really thinks, and if this questionnaire doesn’t reflect her beliefs, then she needn’t necessarily be blamed for it.
But if this does reflect her views, then she’s not just a radical on the substance of issues (which she certainly is), but she’s a procedural radical as well. You can put words like “liberty” in the name of your organization all you want, but what Ernst was agreeing to here isn’t liberty, it’s insurrection against the Constitution of the United States.
States do not have the right to nullify federal laws they don’t like. The Supremacy Clause of the Constitution makes that absolutely clear. And the idea that local cops should be arresting federal officials who implement duly passed federal laws isn’t just some colorful conservatism, it’s positively insane. If you believe that, you forfeit your right to say you love the Constitution, and you worship the Framers, and all the other things people like Ernst so often claim.
Like I said, maybe these aren’t Ernst’s actual views, and if they aren’t, then that’s fine. But she damn sure ought to say whether they are.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, October 3, 2014
“Keeping Its Viewers In The Dark”: Fox News Causes America To Fixate On The Wrong Things
A grisly beheading at a food plant in Moore, Oklahoma last week reinforced some Americans’ greatest current fear: that the Islamic State terrorist group has infiltrated the U.S. Murder suspect Alton Nolen severed the head of his victim, just as an ISIS killer severed the heads of two American journalists and a British aid worker, among many other victims of the Islamist group. Coupled with Nolen’s reported ties to Islam, that was enough to warrant FBI involvement. Although the agency hasn’t yet determined Nolen’s motive, it doesn’t believe that he represents a further threat to us by ISIS or Islamists. But Fox News sees things differently.
“Sounding the jihadist alarms, Fox News and the right-wing media are eager to label the ghastly crime an act of Islamic terror,” writes Eric Boehlert on the liberal watchdog website Media Matters. “Law enforcement officials, however, aren’t in the same rush, noting that the attack came immediately after Nolen was fired and stating that they’ve yet to find a link to terrorism.”
Boehlert goes on to contrast Fox News’s coverage of the Oklahoma beheading with its coverage of an actual terrorist attack. On Sept. 16, marksman and anti-government extremist Eric Frein allegedly murdered one cop and attempted to kill another two. Hiding out in the Pocono Mountains, officials say Frein is “extremely dangerous” and perhaps in possession of an AK-47.
“We have a well-trained sniper who hates authority, hates society, hates government, and hates cops enough to plug them from ambush. He’s so lethal, so locked and loaded, that communities in the Pocono Mountains feel terrorized,” said Philadelphia columnist Dick Polman. According to the criminal complaint, Frein also collected “various information concerning foreign embassies.”
According to Boehlert’s research, Fox News only mentioned Frein and his killing spree six times in the two weeks since the shooting, and in none of those reports were the assassin’s anti-government sentiments even noted.
Ever since 2008, when Barack Obama began his first term in the White House, Fox News has been building a narrative to destroy him and his legacy. The president is routinely portrayed as having an alarmingly lax stance toward terrorism. Some conservative pundits even stoop so low as to emphasize his middle name, Hussein, to rile up Islamophobic viewers. If details of a story — or the story itself — don’t align with Fox’s ulterior purpose, they’re omitted.
Just as the most important news of the day receives front-page coverage in newspapers, it tends to be allotted the most time in newscasts, signaling its relative importance. Fox News has dedicated hours upon hours to covering the Oklahoma beheading. With such headlines as “Terror in the Heartland,” Boehlert argues, Fox politicized a tragic killing, which investigators reckon was nothing more than a disgruntled ex-employee gone berserk.
“In other words,” notes Boehlert, “on Fox News a Muslim who killed a co-worker in Oklahoma and who remains in police custody represents a much bigger story than a suspected anti-government assassin who killed a cop and remains on the run, eluding hundreds of law enforcement officials while terrorizing a Pennsylvania community.”
The Fox coverage of Nolen’s crime was only the latest in a long history of journalistic misconduct (if the word “journalistic” even applies). To tarnish Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state as well as her reputation before the next presidential election, the network aired almost 1,100 segments on Benghazi across five programs between the date the attack occurred and the formation of a select committee last May to investigate it, according to another Media Matters report. Even though no evidence of a cover-up was found over the course of 13 hearings and 50 briefings, 41 percent of Republicans continue to call Benghazi the biggest scandal in U.S. history, according to the results of a PPP poll.
Fox News had been equally powerful in convincing its viewers of the voter fraud “problem” in America, a problem “more rare than death by lightning,” a study by New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice finds. Nevertheless, Fox spearheaded the crusade for the enactment of voter ID laws – motivated, one can reasonably assume, to suppress Democratic votes.
The results of a 2013 Gallup poll showed Fox News to be the nation’s leading news source, while a 2012 survey by Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind revealed viewers of Fox News to be worse informed than even those who watch no news at all.
In April, CNN’s Peter Bergen observed that since 9/11, “extremists affiliated with a variety of far-right wing ideologies … have killed more people in the United States than have extremists motivated by al Qaeda’s ideology.” But because the top dogs at America’s No. 1 right-wing news channel are better served touting the improbable threat that ISIS poses to the homeland, the network elects to keep its viewers in the dark, distracting them from actual threats: the millions of unlicensed guns, unabated climate change, armed anti-government fanatics, and, of course, all the irrational fixations of Fox News.
By: Aimee Kuvadia, an editor and freelance journalist; The National Memo, October 2, 2014
“Ebola Was Already Here”: How The United States Contains Deadly Hemorrhagic Fevers
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Tuesday the first diagnosis of Ebola in a person in the United States. The man was admitted to a hospital in Dallas after traveling from West Africa. In August, infectious disease specialist Tara C. Smith wrote about how the United States stops the spread of diseases that are similar to Ebola. The original article is below.
It’s odd to see otherwise pretty rational folks getting nervous about the news that the American Ebola patients are being flown back to the United States for treatment. “What if Ebola gets out?” “What if it infects the doctors/pilots/nurses taking care of them?” “I don’t want Ebola in the United States!”
Friends, I have news for you: Ebola is already in the United States.
Ebola is a virus with no vaccine or cure. Any scientist who wants to work with the live virus needs to have biosafety level 4 facilities (the highest, most secure labs in existence, abbreviated BSL-4) available to them. We have a number of those here in the United States, and people are working with many of the Ebola types here. Have you heard of any Ebola outbreaks occurring here in the United States? Nope. These scientists are highly trained and very careful, just like people treating these Ebola patients and working out all the logistics of their arrival and transport.
Second, you might not know that we’ve already experienced patients coming into the United States with deadly hemorrhagic fever infections. We’ve had more than one case of imported Lassa fever, another African hemorrhagic fever virus with a fairly high fatality rate in humans (though not rising to the level of Ebola outbreaks). One occurred in Pennsylvania, another in New York just this past April, a previous one in New Jersey a decade ago. All told, there have been at least seven cases of Lassa fever imported into the United States—and those are just the ones we know about, people who were sick enough to be hospitalized, and whose symptoms and travel history alerted doctors to take samples and contact the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It’s not surprising this would show up occasionally in the United States, as Lassa causes up to 300,000 infections per year in Africa.
How many secondary cases occurred from those importations? None. Like Ebola, Lassa is spread from human to human via contact with blood and other body fluids. It’s not readily transmissible or easily airborne, so the risk to others in U.S. hospitals (or on public transportation or other similar places) is quite low.
OK, you may say, but Lassa is an arenavirus, and Ebola is a filovirus—so am I comparing apples to oranges? How about, then, an imported case of Ebola’s cousin virus, Marburg? One of those was diagnosed in Colorado in 2008, in a woman who had traveled to Uganda and apparently was sickened by the virus there. Even though she wasn’t diagnosed until a full year after the infection (and then only because she requested that she be tested for Marburg antibodies after seeing a report of another Marburg death in a tourist who’d visited the same places she had in Uganda), no secondary cases were seen in that importation either.
And of course, who could forget the identification of a new strain of Ebola virus within the United States. Though the Reston virus is not harmful to humans, it certainly was concerning when it was discovered in a group of imported monkeys. So this will be far from our first tango with Ebola in this country.
Ebola is a terrible disease. It kills many of the people that it infects. It can spread fairly rapidly when precautions are not carefully adhered to: when cultural practices such as ritual washing of bodies are continued despite warnings, or when needles are reused because of a lack of medical supplies, or when gloves and other protective gear are not available, or when patients are sharing beds because they are brought to hospitals lacking even such basics as enough beds or clean bedding for patients. But if all you know of Ebola is from The Hot Zone or Outbreak, well, that’s not really what Ebola looks like. I interviewed colleagues from Doctors without Borders a few years back on their experiences with an Ebola outbreak, and they noted:
As for the disease, it is not as bloody and dramatic as in the movies or books. The patients mostly look sick and weak. If there is blood, it is not a lot, usually in the vomit or diarrhea, occasionally from the gums or nose. The transmission is rather ordinary, just contact with infected body fluids. It does not occur because of mere proximity or via an airborne route (as in Outbreak if I recall correctly). The outbreak control organizations in the movies have no problem implementing their solutions once these have been found. In reality, we know what needs to be done, the problem is getting it to happen. This is why community relations are such an issue, where they are not such a problem in the movies.
So, sure, be concerned. But be rational as well. Yes, we know all too well that our public health agencies can fuck up. I’m not saying there is zero chance of something going wrong. But it is low. As an infectious disease specialist (and one with an extreme interest in Ebola), I’m way more concerned about influenza or measles or many other “ordinary” viruses than I am about Ebola. Ebola is exotic and its symptoms can be terrifying, but also much easier to contain by people who know their stuff.
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