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Wisconsin Supreme Court Race Throws A Spanner In The Works Of Wisconsin Wingnuts

While Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan prepares to shut down the federal government to prove that government is bad, analysts say the radical agenda of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker suffered a major set back today as his good friend incumbent Justice David Prosser was defeated for Wisconsin Supreme Court. The AP unofficial vote count, with 100 percent of the precincts reporting, puts challenger Joanne Kloppenburg ahead by slightly more than 200. A recount is doubtless on the way.

In a state that has never unseated a conservative Supreme Court justice, people power fueled a concentrated effort to deny the Imperial Walker one branch of government. Walker’s opponents hope a Kloppenburg victory will swing the Supreme Court in a more independent direction and set the stage for the court to strike down Walker’s controversial collective bargaining law. While the fate of the law is uncertain, Kloppenburg’s three week sprint from dead-in-the-water to victor may give Walker, Ryan and other Wisconsin politicians pause as they rush to radically reshape government to benefit the privatizers and profiteers. 

Sleepy Court Race Electrifies the State

While it may seem odd to many Americans, Wisconsinites like to elect their judges. Although an elected judiciary has its problems (namely, unseemly high-dollar elections), the ballot box sometimes hands citizens a rare opportunity to un-elect judges — and that is what many Wisconsinites decided to do today.  Prosser, a former Republican Assembly Speaker, stumbled when his campaign embraced Walker’s election.

The Kloppenburg victory is stunning. Six weeks ago, sitting Judge David Prosser was a shoo-in and the challenge by Assistant Attorney General Kloppenburg was a snooze fest. But something happened on the way to the high court. A governor, who was elected to create jobs, took office and quickly moved to disenfranchise voters and kneecap unions so they could no longer be a viable force in state elections. The raw power grab sparked a spontaneous uprising, the likes of which this state has never seen, and the Supreme Court race was the next vehicle for people to have their voices heard.

Proxy Fight Over Worker Rights

The whole country took notice when firefighters, teachers and cops stood with working families across Wisconsin to say ‘no’ to Walker’s radical plans to bust unions, cut $1 billion from schools and privatize the university system.

When his “budget repair bill” was passed March 9th, many national observers thought the fight was over.  With large margins in both houses, Walker’s stranglehold on government seemed invincible.

But irate Wisconsinites fought back on multiple fronts, filing lawsuits over the way in which Senate leaders rammed the bill through with less than the requisite notice required under the state open meetings law, blocking the bill’s implementation. They filed recall petitions against eight Wisconsin senators and this week delivered the requisite signatures for two of those recalls well ahead of schedule. They turned their attention to the heretofor unnoticed race for Wisconsin Supreme Court. Within days, handmade signs for Joanne Kloppenburg popped up across the state. Many voters understood that to win any of the battles ahead over worker rights, over the recalls, over redistricting and more, a more balanced judiciary was needed.

Kloppenburg went from being a long-shot to victory in a three-week sprint marked by huge independent expenditures on both sides. The anticipated recount will keep the juices flowing and will fuel the remaining recall fights.

Shock Doctrine at Work

While some voters believe the court will act as a check and balance on the madness at the state level, they are concerned that Paul Ryan continues to run amok at the federal level — threatening a complete government shut down. At the same time that Walker was working to obliterate unions and privatize public schools, Ryan, Chair of the House Budget Committee, decided to go after Grandma with the complete privatization of Medicare. His radical budget bill, unveiled this week, slashes trillions of dollars from America’s social safety net and throws the elderly into the private insurance market with a “voucher” in their pocket.

Less interested in balancing the budget than redistributing wealth, his budget plan would funnel billions into the pockets of big insurance firms while also giving a ten percent tax break to corporations and the very richest Americans.

What is really going on here? Naomi Klein warned in her groundbreaking book “Shock Doctrine” that the right-wing excels at creating crises, real and imagined, to viciously advance their pro-corporate anti-government agenda. She credits economist Milton Friedman who observed that “only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real changes. When the crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is out basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”

UW Professor Joel Rogers wrote recently:  “As explained by Grover Norquist and Karl Rove, this project aims at national repeal of most of democratic achievements of the 20th century, a return to business domination of public life not seen since the Gilded Age and McKinley.”

The Wall Street financial crisis caused by years of deregulation and lack of government oversight cost Americans eight million jobs, tanking federal and state tax receipts and creating budget shortfalls. Ryan and Walker are moving to take advantage this real jobs crisis to cook up a fake deficit crisis to advance a radical agenda that is hostile to the very idea of government – the idea that sometimes services are best provided and things are best accomplished collectively, for the public good, and not for corporate profit.

Today, many voters believe that this agenda was checked in Wisconsin. While another recount battle looms, voters of Wisconsin are pledging that they will not allow this victory to be stolen.

By: Mary Bottari, Center For Media And Democracy, April 6, 2011

April 6, 2011 Posted by | Banks, Collective Bargaining, Corporations, Debt Crisis, Deficits, Democracy, Economy, Elections, GOP, Gov Scott Walker, Government Shut Down, Labor, Medicare, Middle Class, Politics, Public Employees, Rep Paul Ryan, Republicans, Right Wing, Union Busting, Unions, Voters, Wisconsin, Wisconsin Republicans | , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

In This Fantasy Budget Deficit And Debt Fight, the Tea Party Refuses To Take ‘Yes’ For An Answer

Suppose I told you that I knew of a simple way to alleviate the budget deficit problem, and that it would require Congress not to do anything at all. You’d conclude that this was the poor start to a late April Fools’ column.

But unhappily the April Fools’ joke unfolding in the nation’s capital is the fantasy budget and spending debate itself. It’s rooted in an unreality that is about to crash into an unyielding real world, possibly in the form of a government shutdown.

The Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan fiscal scorekeeper, projects the budget deficit will be $1.5 trillion this year, or 9.8 percent of gross domestic product. In order to achieve budget stability and sustainability, according to economists, that figure should be around 3 percent of GDP. But here’s the good news: The CBO projects that the deficit will “drop markedly over the next few years as a share of output and average 3.1 percent of GDP from 2014 to 2021.” We’re saved! And it gets better: “Those projections . . . are based on the assumption that tax and spending policies unfold as specified in current law.”

In other words, all Congress has to do is what they seem ideally suited to these days—nothing. Ah, but there’s the rub. CBO continues that its projections “understate the budget deficits that would occur if many policies currently in place were continued, rather than allowed to expire as scheduled under current law.” Those policies include the Bush tax cuts. They also include annual spending punts that enjoy broad bipartisan support, like preventing the Alternative Minimum Tax’s bracket creep from snagging the middle class, and the “doc fix,” which pushes back a scheduled cut in Medicare payments.

So the solution isn’t so simple. But lawmakers wishing to do more than talk about dealing with the deficit could demand offsets for these policy changes. Instead, we’re reminded of the reality that even the toughest self-styled budget hawks–including Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, who describes dealing with the deficit as a “moral imperative” but advocates extending the Bush tax cuts in full in perpetuity at a cost of nearly $4 trillion–are actually strutting budget peacocks more concerned with perception than results, or fiscal results anyway.

Take, for example, the Republican Study Committee, the hawkiest of the GOP budgetary birds of prey and enforcers of the party’s economic dogma. Going by reputation, they should be able to proffer a budget plan to bring the deficit into line. But the Concord Coalition, a group focused on eliminating the deficit, last month used CBO numbers to examine a scenario under which the Study Committee got its tax-and-spending wish list, which includes an extension of the Bush tax cuts, repeal of the Obama healthcare law (which CBO scores as a money-saver, meaning that repeal adds to the deficit), and $2.7 trillion saved in a spending freeze and cuts. The result? “Under this scenario, the resulting deficits would be $2.1 trillion larger over 10 years,” according to Concord, which concludes, “A budget that uses honest numbers and reflects Republicans’ current policy preferences will result in large continuing deficits.”

But nevertheless, and in the face of six recent years of GOP control over both the White House and Congress, Republicans have won the budget perception battle, and soundly. A poll released last week by Democracy Corps, a group of prominent liberal pollsters including Stan Greenberg and James Carville, found that independent voters are “still hesitant to trust Democrats on spending.”

Meanwhile the debate in Washington has focused almost entirely on spending cuts, even though polls show that voters are more concerned about jobs and the economy than the budget and the deficit—and even though most economists agree that the GOP’s proposed spending cuts would set back the recovery.

But the clearest example of the GOP having the Democrats on the run can be found in the current negotiations aimed at averting a government shutdown in a week. House Republican leaders originally wanted $32 billion in spending cuts for this year; that figure prompted a conservative backlash that ended with the House passing $61 billion in cuts. Now, according to press reports, negotiators have settled on $33 billion in cuts. In other words, the GOP, which controls one of three players in this negotiation, has already achieved its original budgetary goal. In this regard, House Speaker John Boehner seems to have (intentionally or not) used his Tea Party wing as a perfect foil to pull the debate to the right.

But judging by last Thursday’s Tea Party demonstration on the Hill—aimed at the GOP, mind you—conservatives don’t seem capable of banking their win and moving on to the next fight. They see anything less than total victory as an abject surrender.

And in that sense reality is about to intrude upon their budgetary-political fantasy land. The reality is that while voters like spending cuts in the abstract, polls show they object to the particulars of the GOP agenda. That reality is already taking hold at the state level where, Politico reported last week, the wave of newly elected governors trying to get tough on budgets have seen their approval ratings collapse.

And the experience of state governments also provides an insight into the possible winners and losers in a government shutdown. A pair of political scientists published a paper last year looking at the effects of such budgetary breakdowns (167 of them since 1988) at the state level, reports the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein. The study found that voters tend to punish legislators while rewarding the executive. So a shutdown would benefit President Obama while hurting lawmakers in both parties.

So if members of Congress let the government shut down on Friday, they will be the real April fools.

By: Robert Schlesinger, U.S. News and World Report, April 6, 2011

April 6, 2011 Posted by | Affordable Care Act, Conservatives, Democrats, Economy, Federal Budget, GOP, Government Shut Down, Health Reform, Jobs, Politics, President Obama, Rep Paul Ryan, Republicans, States, Tea Party, Voters | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Chairman Ryan Gets Roughly Two-Thirds of His Huge Budget Cuts From Programs For Lower-Income Americans

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s budget plan would get about two-thirds of its more than $4 trillion in budget cuts over 10 years from programs that serve people of limited means, which violates basic principles of fairness and stands a core principle of President Obama’s fiscal commission on its head.

The plan of Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, who co-chaired President Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, established, as a basic principle, that deficit reduction should not increase poverty or inequality or hurt the disadvantaged. The Ryan plan, which the chairman unveiled in a news conference, speech, and Wall Street Journal op-ed today, charts a different course, turning its biggest cannons on these people.

This finding emerges from a Center on Budget and Policy Priorities analysis of the Ryan plan. Table S-4 of the plan shows that it proposes net program cuts of $4.3 trillion over ten years. The plan shows a $5.8 trillion cut in outlays from the Congressional Budget Office baseline, but $446 billion of that is interest savings and another $1.04 trillion is simply an assumption that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars will phase down on the Obama Administration’s timetable. Actual program cuts produce net savings of $4.322 trillion.

Cuts in low-income programs appear likely to account for at least $2.9 trillion — or about two-thirds — of this amount. The $2.9 trillion includes the following three categories of cuts:

  • $2.17 trillion in reductions from Medicaid and related health care. The plan shows Medicaid cuts of $771 billion, plus savings of $1.4 trillion from repealing the health reform law’s Medicaid expansion and its subsidies to help low- and moderate-income people purchase health insurance.
  • $350 billion in cuts in mandatory programs serving low-income Americans (other than Medicaid).  The budget documents that Chairman Ryan issued today show that he is proposing $715 billion in cuts in mandatory programs other than Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, but do not specify how much will be cut from various programs (although they imply that cuts in the food stamp program will be large). In this analysis, we make the conservative assumption that savings from low-income mandatory programs (other than Medicaid) would be proportionate to their share of spending in this category. Thus, we derive the $350 billion figure from the fact that about half of mandatory spending other than for Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security goes for programs for low- and moderate-income individuals and families. This likely substantially understates the cuts that the plan would make in low-income programs. The Ryan documents show that $380 billion in cuts would come from programs in the income security portion of the budget (function 600), and the overwhelming bulk of the mandatory spending in that category goes for low-income programs. The documents also show $126 billion in mandatory cuts in the education, training, employment, and social services portion of the budget (function 500), which, based on the discussion in those documents, would likely come mainly from cuts in the mandatory portion of the Pell Grant program for low-income students.
  • $400 billion in cuts in low-income discretionary programs. The Ryan budget documents show that he is proposing $1.6 trillion in cuts in non-security discretionary programs, but again do not provide details about the size of cuts to specific programs. (The documents do identify some major low-income program areas, including Pell Grants and low-income housing, as prime targets for cuts.) Here, too, we make the conservative assumption that low-income programs in this category would bear a proportionate share of the cuts. Thus, we derive the $400 billion figure from the fact that about a quarter of non-security discretionary spending goes for programs for low- and moderate-income individuals and families.

Our numerical assumptions are conservative in another way as well. That’s because, when faced with the choice of which specific programs to cut, policymakers are unlikely to cut much from a number of non-low-income programs in these budget categories that are popular, such as veterans’ disability compensation and the FBI. That means that other programs — including low-income programs — would have to be cut by more than their proportionate share.

By: Robert Greenstein, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, April 5, 2011

April 6, 2011 Posted by | Consumers, Economy, Federal Budget, Medicaid, Medicare, Middle Class, Politics, Rep Paul Ryan, Republicans, Social Security | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Congressional Budget Office Looks At “RyanCare” Rationing And It Ain’t Pretty

The Congressional Budget Office has released its preliminary analysis (PDF) of House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s budget, and I wouldn’t say it’s pretty. According to the CBO, Medicare beneficiaries will be left paying more for less. The CBO goes about this in a bit of a confusing way, setting a “benchmark” that corresponds to the cost of purchasing a private plan equivalent to Medicare, and then seeing how much more that plan would cost than Medicare under two different scenarios. Compared with either scenario, RyanCare costs a lot more than Medicare:

Under the proposal, most elderly people would pay more for their health care than they would pay under the current Medicare system. For a typical 65-year-old with average health spending enrolled in a plan with benefits similar to those currently provided by Medicare, the CBO estimated the beneficiary’s spending on premiums and out-of-pocket expenditures as a share of a benchmark: what total health-care spending would be if a private insurer covered the beneficiary. By 2030, the beneficiary’s spending would be 68 percent of that benchmark under the proposal, 25 percent under the extended-baseline scenario, and 30 percent under the alternative fiscal scenario.

If Medicare’s beneficiaries are getting less for more, Medicaid’s are simply getting less, period:

Federal payments for Medicaid under the proposal would be substantially smaller than currently projected amounts. States would have additional flexibility to design and manage their Medicaid programs, and they might achieve greater efficiencies in the delivery of care than under current law. Even with additional flexibility, however, the large projected reduction in payments would probably require states to decrease payments to Medicaid providers, reduce eligibility for Medicaid, provide less extensive coverage to beneficiaries, or pay more themselves than would be the case under current law.

As the CBO recognizes, a lot of what Ryan is doing isn’t saving money so much as shifting costs. Poor people and seniors don’t need less health care because Medicare and Medicaid are providing less health care. They just have to pay for more of it on their own. And as the CBO says, it’s hard to imagine Congress simply ignoring their pleas for help:

Under the proposal analyzed here, debt would eventually shrink relative to the size of the economy — but the gradually increasing number of Medicare beneficiaries participating in the new premium support program would bear a much larger share of their health care costs than they would under the current program; payments to physicians and other providers for services provided under the traditional Medicare program would be restrained (as under the two scenarios); states would have to pay substantially more for their Medicaid programs or tightly constrain spending for those programs; and spending for federal programs other than Social Security and the major health care programs would be reduced far below historical levels relative to GDP. It is unclear whether and how future lawmakers would address the pressures resulting from the long-term scenarios or the proposal analyzed here.

By: Ezra Klein, The Washington Post, April 5, 2011

April 5, 2011 Posted by | Affordable Care Act, Congress, Conservatives, Consumers, Economy, Federal Budget, GOP, Health Care Costs, Medicaid, Medicare, Politics, Rep Paul Ryan, Republicans, States | , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Implosion: Paul Ryan’s Radical, Ridiculous, Rip-Off Roadmap

While the process of crafting a budget plan for this fiscal year implodes under the weight of GOP intransigence, today also happens to be the day next year’s budget fight begins in earnest. And if you think the current fight is a mess, prepare to have Republicans take your breath away.

And if you’re a disabled senior on Medicaid, relying on an oxygen tank, that expression should probably be taken literally.

Today, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) unveils his plan for fiscal year 2012. He promised a truly radical approach to our entire system of government, and he wasn’t lying — Ryan’s budget is based on his radical “roadmap” and effectively rewrites the American social contract.

Medicare would be eliminated and replaced with a voucher system. Medicaid would be gutted and sent to the states as a block grant. The Affordable Care Act would be scrapped, tax rates on corporations and the wealthy would be slashed, and all told, Ryan’s plan intends to slash roughly $6 trillion from the federal budget over the next 10 years.

This is madness.

There’s obviously no way Democrats in the Senate or the White House will even consider such extremism, but House Republicans don’t much care. This is the plan they want; this is the plan they’ll pass; and this is the plan that will set a truly ridiculous benchmark for future negotiations. If a shutdown seems inevitable this week, wait until the House GOP votes to eliminate Medicare as part of their next budget pitch.

Those of us hoping the chattering class will recognize the Republican plan as extremist nonsense are likely to be disappointed. David Brooks gushed today about the radical roadmap.

The country lacked that leadership until today. Today, Paul Ryan, the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, is scheduled to release the most comprehensive and most courageous budget reform proposal any of us have seen in our lifetimes. Ryan is expected to leap into the vacuum left by the president’s passivity. The Ryan budget will not be enacted this year, but it will immediately reframe the domestic policy debate.

His proposal will set the standard of seriousness for anybody who wants to play in this discussion…. Paul Ryan has grasped reality with both hands. He’s forcing everybody else to do the same.

 

Jonathan Zasloff’s point-by-point takedown of the Brooks column is worthwhile, but my biggest fear is that the D.C. establishment will start to assume that Brooks is correct. He’s not. Ryan’s budget plan is stark raving mad.

“Courageous”? To the extent that a major political party and House majority is actually willing to rally behind such extremism — without a hint of shame or trepidation — I’ll gladly give Republicans credit for actually putting their ridiculous wish list on the table.

But in this context, real, meaningful courage requires sound judgment, not just a willingness to fight for millionaires and corporations, while screwing over the elderly, the poor, the disabled, and working families.

By: Steve Benen, Washington Monthly, April5, 2011

April 5, 2011 Posted by | Affordable Care Act, Constitution, Consumers, Corporations, Democrats, Economy, Federal Budget, GOP, Government Shut Down, Medicaid, Medicare, Middle Class, Politics, Rep Paul Ryan, Republicans, Senate, Wealthy | , , , , , | Leave a comment

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