“A Good Time To Count Our Blessings”: Imagine The Iraq Crisis–But With A GOP President At War With Iran
As Iraq spirals deeper into a sectarian crisis between an ineffectual Shi’ite government and radical Sunni militants, the importance of a grudging working relationship between the United States and Iran has never been of greater importance. Without some Iranian help, Iraq’s central government will likely fall apart and the nation will be overrun by extremists potentially as dangerous as Al Qaeda in Afghanistan ever was.
So today would be a good time to count our blessings that we do not have this man as president:
John McCain: “You know that old Beach Boys song, Bomb Iran? Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran.”
Or this one:
Mitt Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, said he would “bring the current policy of procrastination to an end.” “Hope is not a foreign policy,” Romney said. “The only thing respected by thugs and tyrants is our resolve.”
Or this one:
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, also addressing the group by satellite, said in his administration, “we would not keep talking while the Iranians keep building.” He said the “red line” was not when Iran was ready to detonate a nuclear bomb. “The red line is now” because the Iranians are “deepening their commitment to nuclear weapons while we talk,” Gingrich said. “It is an unacceptable risk.”
Here is what the President said after Romney, Gingrich and others were getting their war talk on:
“These folks don’t have a lot of responsibilities,” the president said. He said he was struck by the “casualness” of the way his political opponents talk about war. “I’m reminded of the costs involved in war.”
No kidding. If a Republican had been elected President in either 2008 or 2012, we would likely be at hot war with Iran by now or at the very least on the edge of it. This would have further weakened the Shi’ite position in Baghdad even as Syria devolved into the nightmare that has been helping to fuel ISIS, the Sunni extremists. The entire Middle East would be in abject chaos, with potentially nuclear consequences.
A McCain or Romney presidency would have been a foreign policy disaster that would have made George W. Bush look like a skilled statesman and general, and it would have cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of lives.
By: David Atkins, Political Animal, The Washington Times, June 28, 2014
“The Lifetime Framework”: The Devastating, Lifelong Consequences Of Student Debt
America has gone through a rapid social experiment over the last 20 years. We have created a system, in large part through public disinvestment, where our young people take on large amounts of student debt in order to achieve a college degree. The sea change has been so quick it’s been difficult to gather even basic, solid numbers on it, making the consequences of such massive student debt subject to intense debate.
A new report from Beth Akers and Matthew M. Chingos of the Brookings Institution has further fueled that debate, arguing that the conventional story of escalating debt burdens due to student loans are overstated. Even though the number of young households with debt has increased from 14 percent to 36 percent between 1989 and 2010, the percentage of monthly income those people put toward their student debt payments is largely the same. Even though student loan debts are going up, they’ve been accompanied by rising incomes, largely balancing out the burden. The focus shouldn’t be on student loans broadly, and instead on more targeted solutions like focusing on those who drop out of college but still have debt.
But this study, like many arguments along these lines, suffers from a major problem: It focuses on a month-to-month comparison. When we look at the effects of a major economic change—whether it’s government debt, taxes, or replacing a system of publicly funded free colleges with a system of debt for a diploma—we can’t just look at what immediately happens. We need to also consider how people behave in the long run. And when we look at student loans from the point of view of a lifetime, the results are more worrisome.
How could this matter? An infamous study on student debt by Jesse Rothstein of the University of California, Berkeley, and Cecilia Elena Rouse of Princeton looked at the results of a highly selective university replacing loans with grants. It concluded “that debt causes graduates to choose substantially higher-salary jobs and reduces the probability that students choose low-paid ‘public interest’ jobs.”
Let’s imagine two scenarios. In the first you have high student loans, so you work for a corporation in the private sector for high wages. And in the second you have virtually no student loans, and you work for less wages in a job focused on the public interest, say as an educator or at a nonprofit. In both cases your student loan payment would be the same as a percentage of your income. The Brookings result would hold. However your lifetime choices will have radically changed as a result.
We see this with other lifetime measures, such as how entrepreneurial people are. A recent study by Brent W. Ambrose of Pennsylvania State University, and Larry Cordell and Shuwei Ma of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, found “a significant and economically meaningful negative correlation between changes in student loan debt and net business formation for the smallest group of small businesses.” This makes sense. You can keep your high student loan burdens low if you stay with an established employer. But if you strike out on your own, you’ll have less and more volatile income when you start. This is harder to manage with student loans, which also impacts your credit rating. Again, we can see the short-term student loan burdens staying the same, even though lifetime choices are much more limited as a result.
The lifetime framework also puts front and center something the Brookings study largely hand-waves: the rapid increase in how long people are paying off their student debt. Though the percentage of income that student-loan debtors pay stays the same, the length they are paying those loans is up 80 percent. What was once an average length of 7.4 years in repayment in 1992 is now 13.4 years. All things equal, a large increase in the length you will be paying student loans means you will dedicate a larger portion of your lifetime income to student loans. This burden goes missing by narrowly looking at a month-to-month basis.
This has major consequences for people’s ability to build wealth. Indeed, much of the current energy in analyzing student loan burdens are looking at this longer dynamic, and how it interplays with the ability for people to amass savings. As Richard Fry of Pew found, using the same data set as Brookings, “households headed by a young, college-educated adult without any student debt obligations have about seven times the typical net worth ($64,700) of households headed by a young, college-educated adult with student debt ($8,700).” Fry also finds that those who took out loans are less satisfied with their financial situation compared to people without loans. Similar results have been investigated and found by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
This, in turn, has major consequences for how young people will ultimately transition into adulthood. According to Dora Gicheva of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, student debt decreases the long-term probability of marriage by a significant amount. In a result that should make social conservatives gasp, Gicheva found that an additional $10,000 in loans decreases the probability of marriage by at least 7 percentage points. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that young student debtors are retreating from those traditional markers of adulthood, homeownership and owning a car. These effects reflect the long-term consequences of student debt on a young person’s economic security just as much, if not more, than their monthly bill.
This system of student debt has happened so fast that proper analysis is hard to do. But what’s most interesting is research showing how student debt threatens fundamentally American ways of life. Student debt chips away at the ability to be a risk-taking entrepreneur, a homesteader who has amassed enough wealth to be self-sufficient, or someone who has dedicated their craft to working in our rich civil society. These are three very real versions of the American Dream, and contrary to what studies like Brookings’s might show over the short term, they are all being weakened by the way we saddle young people with student debt burdens.
By: Mike Konczal, a Fellow with The Roosevelt Institute; The New Republic, June 24, 2014
“The ‘Conspiracy’ In Mississippi”: A Perilous Challenge Based On Mississippi’s Silly, Unenforceable And Probably Unconstitutional Law
Three days after his upset defeat in the MS GOP SEN runoff, Chris McDaniel is still keeping his counsel on what he might or might not do to challenge the results. All but one of the national conservative groups (the Tea Party Patriots being the exception) have written off the contest and moved on. And while there is some anecdotal evidence–much of it not necessarily credible–of plain violations of the law (people who voted in the Democratic primary on June 3 being allowed to participate in the runoff), it seems unlikely it’s sufficient to close a 6,000-vote deficit or mount a legal challenge to the outcome.
If that’s all accurate, that means what McDaniel may be pondering is an extremely perilous challenge based on Mississippi’s silly, unenforceable and probably unconstitutional law limiting primary participation to those who “intend” to support the party in the next general election. Here’s what he told Sean Hannity earlier this week:
McDaniel says Cochran’s campaign brought in Democrats to steal the GOP primary. He told Hannity he might launch a court challenge on “a civil conspiracy to violate state law.”
Sounds like given the inability of anyone without divine omniscience to establish individual violation of the “intent” law, McDaniel may claim that the open Cochran campaign appeals for crossover votes amount to a conspiracy to encourage violation of that law.
Legal niceties aside, this will come down to a toxic claim that by appealing to Democrats–which in Mississippi mostly means African-Americans–Cochran was “stealing the election.” Given Mississippi’s history, I don’t think this would redound to the benefit of a Republican Party struggling to overcome its reputation as a sort of national redoubt for Old White People, or of a conservative movement whose denizens become crazy furious (as my Twitter account can attest) at any suggestion “race” ever enters their minds.
As the days go by and Team McDaniel’s accusation that black people voting in “their” primary constitutes voter fraud hangs in the air, you wonder if he’ll be able to walk any of this back. Mark my words: if McDaniel does move forward with a conspiracy charge, “Establishment Republicans” may ultimately wish he had won the runoff after all.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, June 27, 2014
“So When Is The Senate In Recess?”: An Extended Recess Broken Up By Several Pro Forma Sessions Is Still A Recess
Before the Circuit Court went all activist in the Canning case, everyone thought the question was defining what counted as a “recess.” On that issue, the Supreme Court had a clear answer today: “For purposes of the Recess Appointments Clause, the Senate is in session when it says that it is, provided that, under its own rules, it retains the capacity to transact Senate business.”
That’s a nominal defeat for President Barack Obama, who had claimed that an extended recess broken up by several pro forma sessions is still a recess.
The history here is that a Senate with a Democratic majority used pro forma sessions every three days in 2007-2008 to prevent President George W. Bush from making recess appointments, and Bush didn’t contest the maneuver. Then, in 2011, the Republican majority in the House of Representatives tried the same workaround, which forced the Senate to stay “in session” because of the constitutional provision that when one chamber is in session, the other cannot adjourn for “more than three days.”
The Senate-initiated attempt to block recess appointments seemed dicey, but probably reasonable. The House-initiated obstruction, however, was constitutionally noxious. After all, the House has no constitutional role in presidential nominations. By refusing to recess, the Senate essentially is enforcing its role in advise and consent. That changes when lawmakers hold pro forma sessions instead of “real” sessions and enforce that role at their convenience. When the House does it, however, that chamber is being inserted into matters it has no business being involved in.
The court didn’t differentiate those two very different situations today, but Associate Justice Stephen Breyer reminded everyone that there is another option for combating the House: The Constitution allows the president to act if the two chambers cannot agree on adjournment. Although I argued strongly at the time that Democrats shouldn’t allow the House to veto nominations — and that therefore Obama should have acted — I believed that the unused Article II power of adjournment was the safest constitutional ground.
As it turns out, the House option is pretty much a moot question since Senate Democrats pushed through the nuclear option, which allows nominations to go through with a simple majority vote. The House option for obstruction was relevant only in cases in which the president and Senate majority were from one party, and the House majority and a Senate minority large enough to kill nominations by filibuster were from the other party. Given simple majority confirmation, the House no longer has the power to obstruct. I suppose it’s still true that a president and the Senate majority might prefer a simple recess appointment to going through the hurdles of confirmation, even if it’s guaranteed to happen, but that’s not as big a deal as the attempt to nullify entire agencies by the House in conjunction with a Senate minority.
To be sure, the Senate will still have the ability to refuse to confirm any nominee and to prevent recess appointments. But that was always going to be the case; the only thing at stake here (on the narrow question of what counts as a recess) was how inconvenient it was going to be for the Senate to do so. In the long term, odds are that future legislation will be written more carefully to prevent nullification by obstructing nominations, now that Republicans have revealed that such a weapon is available and will be used. Constitutionally, none of that is a big deal.
To get into the details, the question of what counts as a “recess” is complicated because the Constitution doesn’t offer a definition, and usage now and then is ambiguous. Both Breyer and Associate Justice Antonin Scalia discussed two meanings (recess between two sessions of Congress and recess within one session). But, in fact, there are three usages: everyone in and around Congress knows that “recess” can mean both short periods when Congress is out for a weekend, the night, or even lunch, or it can mean the longer “district work periods” that last for a week (with surrounding weekends) or longer. Without explaining it very well and therefore opening himself up to Scalia’s claims that it’s just an arbitrary ruling, Breyer is basically attempting to follow that perfectly common-sense, ordinary usage distinction. That is the correct way to go; it’s the only option that really conforms to Senate practice.
That leaves the question about the pro forma sessions. Breyer puts a fair amount of weight on the ability of the Senate to transact business (by unanimous consent, or presumably by a voice vote if it wasn’t challenged) during these sessions. That’s true, but it’s also true that everyone talks and acts as if the Senate is in a normal recess during those periods. So the court has erred, but it’s a close call, and relatively little is at stake in this portion of the decision, especially in the post-nuclear era.
By: Jonathan Bernstein, Ten Miles Square, Washington Monthly, June 27, 2014
“GOP Chases Fake IRS Scandal, But Makes The Real One Worse”: Republicans Need Look No Further Than Their Own Budget Proposals
With the exception of the 2012 Benghazi attacks, no Obama-era controversy has animated Republican imaginations quite like the one surrounding the Internal Revenue Service.
Congressional Republicans’ version of the scandal originally went like this: President Obama ordered the IRS to target right-wing organizations applying for tax-exempt status as non-political “social welfare” groups, leading the agency to harass those on the president’s Nixonian enemies list.
It turns out that none of that ever happened; the IRS targeted liberal groups as well as conservative ones, not a single Tea Party group was denied tax-exempt status (despite overwhelming evidence that many of them were engaged in political activity), and no evidence ever emerged that the White House was involved in any of it. Still, that hasn’t stopped Republicans from escalating the “scandal” in increasingly ridiculous ways.
The current outrage centers around the IRS’ claim that thousands of former IRS official Lois Lerner’s emails were lost when her computer crashed in 2011. Although evidence and logic suggest that this was not part of a massive cover-up, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) is threatening to impeach Attorney General Eric Holder unless he appoints a special prosecutor to investigate it, and Reps. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) and Bill Flores (R-TX) have introduced a bill promising a $1 million bounty to anyone who can restore the lost emails, while threatening to cut the salaries of IRS employees by 20 percent unless the emails are recovered.
As it happens, Republicans have already hammered IRS employees with cuts since they took control of the House of Representatives in 2011 — and they didn’t even need a “Nixonian” “scandal” to do so.
In a report released Wednesday, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities illustrates just how badly Congress has constrained the IRS’ ability to do its job. Due to a combination of discretionary budget cuts and sequestration, the IRS has been left with an $11.3 billion budget for 2014. That’s $840 million lower than it was in 2010, amounting to a 14 percent cut when accounting for inflation.
As a result of the cuts, the IRS has been forced to reduce its workforce by 11 percent since 2010, even as the agency’s workload has substantially increased (for example, in addition to the IRS’ new campaign finance responsibilities, CBPP notes that the number of individual tax returns has grown by 1.5 million annually over the past decade).
Furthermore, even as the IRS’ remaining workers have been forced to take on more responsibility, the agency’s training budget has been slashed by an astonishing 87 percent between 2010 and 2013, the most recent year with available data. If Congress wants to know why the IRS struggled so badly at sorting out the glut of groups that applied for tax exemption, there is your answer.
President Obama’s 2015 budget would reverse the rapid slide in the IRS’ funding; it would increase the agency’s budget by $1.2 billion from this year’s level, returning it to roughly its 2010 level (before adjusting for inflation).
The House appropriations subcommittee wants to go further in the other direction, however; it has proposed cutting IRS funding by yet another $340 billion. This is especially illogical considering the GOP majority’s supposed desire to limit the budget deficit. According to the Treasury Department, each $1 spent on the IRS budget yields $4 of revenue.
“Policymakers should give the IRS sufficient resources to carry out its mission,” the CBPP paper concludes. “In particular, policymakers who profess to be concerned or even alarmed about the nation’s current or future fiscal course should provide the IRS with the funding it needs to administer the nation’s tax laws and collect taxes due under the laws of the land.”
CBPP is not the first to sound the alarm over the IRS’ lack of funding; The National Memo’s David Cay Johnston made a similar argument in 2013, at the height of the “targeting” controversy.
Republicans are clearly desperate to uncover a real scandal at the IRS. But if they really want to improve things at the much-maligned agency, they need look no further than their own budget proposals.
By: Henry Decker, The National memo, June 27, 2014
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