“Doesn’t Even Rise To The Level Of Pitiful”: Sorry, Republicans; The Keystone XL Pipeline Is Not A Jobs Agenda
In the new Congress, Republicans will have the majority in both the Senate and the House for the first time in eight years. As they get ready to take power, their rhetorical focus is clear: jobs, the economy, and more jobs.
So far, there are two main proposals on deck for the GOP. First, the Hire More Heroes Act, which would make it easier for small businesses that hire veterans to deny health care to their employees. Second, they want to immediately build the Keystone XL pipeline, a project that would transport oil from Canada to the Gulf Coast.
On their own, these are both extremely small-bore policies. But as a jobs agenda, this doesn’t even rise to the level of pitiful. It’s the latest evidence that Republicans continue to struggle with basic macroeconomics — and it does not bode well for the nation should they win the White House in 2016.
Let’s examine the Hire More Heroes Act first. ObamaCare requires that all businesses that have over 50 full-time employees provide health-insurance benefits. This law would exempt veterans from counting toward that cap, thus making it easier to expand a business over 50 employees if you hire veterans.
On its face, this might not even be a terrible idea. Health-care policy experts have long argued that funneling American health care through employer subsidies is bad, locking people into jobs they don’t like for fear of losing coverage, and increasing health-care spending. Rolling that system back very slightly might be a good thing. My problem is that there’s no reason to direct general social spending to veterans so preferentially.
But make no mistake, this is a tiny, tiny policy involving a relative handful of people and jobs.
Keystone XL is bigger in one respect. Generous estimates predict that the pipeline would create around 42,000 temporary jobs — about 2,000 construction jobs and the rest in supplying goods and services.
How many long-term jobs? Fifty. That’s right, 50 whole long-term jobs. (One more, and the pipeline would have to get health insurance for them! Unless they hired veterans, I suppose.)
Furthermore, the argument that Keystone XL would help by lowering gas prices just had the legs kicked out from under it, with the price of oil plummeting toward $50 per barrel with no sign of stopping. This was always a bogus argument, since the pipeline is a drop in the bucket compared with world supply, but now it makes even less sense.
To get a sense of the bigger picture, the U.S. economy pumped out probably close to 3 million jobs total last year. The GOP’s proposals, if enacted, will fail to make more than a small ripple in the job market.
The problem with the American economy is the same problem we’ve had since 2007: a lack of demand. With factories idle and workers unemployed, there’s not enough spending and not enough investment. Nations have two options for attacking this problem. First, spend money, through government investment in things like infrastructure, or handouts to citizens in the form of checks or tax cuts (fiscal policy). Second, use control of the money supply to ease credit and stimulate lending (monetary policy).
Republicans used to accept this framework, proposing a $713 billion government stimulus bill as recently as 2009. But they’ve since regressed intellectually to the pre–Great Depression era. The economic policy of the GOP today is almost indistinguishable from the days of Herbert Hoover and Andrew Mellon. Their platform is muddled on fiscal policy, proposing massive spending-side cuts coupled with large tax cuts for the rich — which in macro terms would cancel each other out. On monetary policy, they propose tighter money and reexamining the gold standard — which would slow the economy and throw people out of work. At best, it’s a large net negative for workers.
After the colossal failure of Hoover, when the Republican Party was largely locked out of national politics for a generation, they learned that parties ignore the lessons of Keynes at their peril. But it seems they will have to learn them again — and if they win full power in 2016, it will be at everyone’s expense.
By: Ryan Cooper, The Week, January 6, 2014
“So, Who’s Getting The Gigs?”: When The GOP Goes On A ‘Hiring Spree’
If you want to know where Congress is headed, it obviously makes sense to take a close look at elected lawmakers themselves. But to understand how they intend to get there, you’ll need to understand who they’re hiring.
As Republicans get ready to take complete control of Capitol Hill, GOP officials are going on a “hiring spree,” especially in the Senate, where the new majority will have expanded staffs at both the leadership and committee level.
So, who’s getting the gigs? We can break them down into two broad groups of people. The first, as Anna Palmer reported the other day, are corporate lobbyists.
Lobbyists can come home again.
As Republicans take control of Congress, they are bringing in veteran influence peddlers to help them run the show. Nearly a dozen veteran K Streeters have been named as top staffers to GOP leaders or on key committees as lawmakers prepare to take the gavel in January.
And why would lobbyists leave better-paying jobs at K Street firms in order to tackle unglamorous work on Capitol Hill? Because as any good lobbyist knows, they can, when they’re done with their congressional work, return to K Street and demand even more money.
In the meantime, the line between corporate lobbyists and congressional Republicans has long been blurry, but the partnership will now be even stronger as the GOP takes over the Senate for the first time in eight years.
But they’re not the only ones getting new gigs in Congress. The other group includes Heritage Action staffers.
Heritage Action for America is losing three staffers, including its top House lobbyist, to a trio of newbies in the 114th Congress. […]
“One of the great roles of having a permanent 300-person institution is that people take what they learn here and spread that throughout the universe,” said Heritage Action for America’s CEO Michael Needham.
Depending on one’s perspective, that’s either very nice or very scary.
Regardless, taken together, staffing moves like these tell us something interesting about who’ll be doing the legislative legwork for the next couple of years.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, December 22, 2014
“A Responsibility We Cannot Escape”: Keystone Stalemate; Fix Decaying Pipelines First For Jobs, Health, And Safety
With the Keystone XL pipeline stalled again, now perhaps we can look ahead and consider more promising ways to rebuild our energy system, creating many more jobs than that controversial project ever would. No matter where we look, the far larger issue that still confronts Americans is decaying infrastructure — which emphatically includes the enormous web of oil and gas pipelines crisscrossing the continental United States in every direction.
When TransCanada CEO Russ Girling touted Keystone as an engine of employment on ABC News’ This Week last Sunday, he insisted that its construction would create 42,000 jobs. Not only would his venture create those 42,000 “direct and indirect” jobs, boasted Girling, but those positions would be “ongoing and enduring” rather than temporary, like most construction jobs — citing a State Department study that drew no such conclusions. A company spokesman later tempered Girling’s pronouncements, more or less acknowledging that they were grossly exaggerated. The number of permanent jobs when construction is completed would top out at around 50. With or without Keystone, the national economy already produces about 42,000 jobs every week, so it just doesn’t matter much.
Yet even if Keystone would actually result in tens of thousands of permanent jobs, its expected impact on the environment, health and safety raised grave questions about whether it should be permitted to proceed. But there are pipeline projects of unquestioned value that could create far more jobs for many more years that any of Keystone’s promoters ever contemplated.
Rather than a new pipeline for the dirtiest tar-sands fuel, what America needs is a commitment to repair the “leaks and seeps” that have made the old network of pipelines into a continuing danger to health and safety, air and water – as AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka noted in a 2013 interview with The National Memo. The labor chief estimates that a serious program of repair to degraded oil and gas facilities would mean at least 125,000 jobs a year – three times as many as Keystone – and they would continue for decades.
In that brief remark, Trumka alluded to an important point: With more than 2.5 million miles of corroding underground pipes, often made of steel or cast iron laid decades ago, the likelihood of deadly and potentially catastrophic accidents increases every year. Fuel and fumes that escape old pipelines every day, along with occasional large spills of petroleum products, pour carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as well.
Using pipelines to transport natural gas and hazardous liquid fuels is generally safer than the alternatives of road and rail, but when pipeline accidents happen, they can be devastating – as we have learned in recent years from the tragic explosions in San Bruno, CA, which killed eight people and razed dozens of homes, and in Allentown, PA, which killed five people and destroyed 50 buildings.
Officials in Michigan are concerned about the condition of 61 year-old pipelines under the Straits of Mackinac, where Lake Huron and Lake Michigan meet – and where, if the pipelines failed, a ruinous oil spill could conceivably leave the Great Lakes in the same ruinous condition as the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon disaster. And New York officials worry every day about the perilous state of the city’s gas mains, aging and decrepit, which exploded in East Harlem last March, killing and injuring dozens of people and causing millions in property damage.
An investigation by reporters at Pro Publica, the nonprofit news service, revealed that over the past three decades, pipeline accidents accounted for more than 500 deaths, over 4,000 injuries, and almost $7 billion in property damage – numbers that will swell in the years ahead unless repairs and inspections are stepped up drastically. At the moment, replacing only the most dangerously corroded pipes in New York’s Con Edison system is estimated to require $10 billion and 30 years of construction.
The upside of this looming threat is that confronting it would create hundreds of thousands of permanent, well-paid jobs while preserving the environment and improving public safety and health. Like so much of the incredible infrastructure left to us by previous generations, the pipelines need to be maintained, modernized, or mothballed for the sake of the future. Politicians and their paymasters may prefer to look the other way, but it is a responsibility we cannot escape.
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, The National Memo, November 19, 2014
“The Same Supply-Side Ideas”: Republicans Have Known All Along That Their Jobs Plan Wouldn’t Work That Well
If you’ve read my work over the past few months, you’ve probably heard me argue that Republicans don’t have a jobs plan. I’ve said it a few times. Never has that point been clearer than in the New York Times Thursday morning, where economists on both sides of the aisle—and even House Speaker John Boehner’s spokesman—admit that the Republican “jobs” plan wouldn’t actually help the economy very much.
“Some of those things will help,” Matthew J. Slaughter, who served on President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, told the Times about Republican economic ideas, “but, it just struck me as sort of a compendium of modest expectations. If you ask me, ‘What’s your ballpark guess for how many jobs are going to be created?,’ it’s just not many.” Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a conservative economist and former director of the Congressional Budget Office said, “I don’t think any of these are particular game changers.”
The traditional Republican ideas to boost the economy—cutting spending, reducing regulations, and reforming the tax code—represent a misunderstanding of the underlying problems with the economy. Those are all supply-side policies, intended to boost investment and improve productivity. Those aren’t bad goals, of course, but they don’t solve the demand-side issues that are actually holding back growth.
When the Great Recession struck, households cut back on their spending, forcing businesses to fire workers, who then cut back their own spending—thus, a lack of demand. This creates a nasty cycle of reduced spending and job losses. The government’s role in these situations is to fill the hole in demand by using fiscal or monetary policy. We did both and they were moderately successful. But they weren’t sufficient to fill the entire hole in demand and we’ve had a lackluster recovery as a result, made even worse by a premature turn to austerity.
The most revealing quotation in the Times article came from Kevin Smith, a spokesman for Boehner. When asked about the 46 bills that Boehner has outlined as the Republican jobs package—most of which would cut regulations and taxes—Smith said that the bills were not “a cure-all, but they would be a good start for our economy; we need to do more.” In other words, after six years of critiquing Obama’s economic policies, House Republicans still don’t have an economic agenda to fix the economy’s ills.
In some sense, that’s OK right now. The recovery has taken a step forward this year and we no longer need a big jobs package to save the economy (although more infrastructure spending would help). But during the beginning of the Obama presidency that wasn’t the case. Then, we did need a big jobs plan, but Republicans offered the same supply-side ideas they’re proposing now. Based on Smith’s comments, it seems the GOP was aware of this too.
By: Danny Vinik, The New Republic, October 23, 2014
“Unemployment Truthers See New Conspiracy”: There’s Just No Way That Reality Is Real
Two years ago this week, the nation’s unemployment dipped below 8% for the first time since the start of the Great Recession. Almost immediately, Republicans were outraged – the good news couldn’t be real, they said, but rather must be the result of an elaborate conspiracy.
Friday we learned that the nation’s jobless rate has dipped even lower, dropping below 6% for the first time in over six years. Rush Limbaugh told his audience that the 2012 data was “entirely made up” and “artificially manufactured,” and the 2014 data is worse.
“[T]his today is just as illegitimate. This 5.9% number is even more illegitimate than the 7.9% number. There’s no way that this country has an economy producing jobs with an unemployment rate of 5.9%. It just isn’t happening…. [I]t isn’t real.”
Over the course of two years, from Jack Welch to Rush Limbaugh, we just haven’t seen much in the way of progress on the scourge of denialism among President Obama’s critics.
Indeed, this has come up quite a few times. Whenever the economy improves, a few too many on the right don’t celebrate; they reflexively deny the evidence and point to a conspiracy that exists only in their imaginations.
I’m reminded of this piece from Alex Seitz-Wald, now an msnbc colleague, written when Fox News first began pushing these conspiracy theories in earnest: “If it weren’t improper to psychologically analyze strangers, one might think the Fox hosts are displaying a textbook example of cogitative dissonance here, a psychological phenomena in which people who hold a strong belief about something, invent (sometimes farfetched) explanations for new evidence that conflicts with their existing views. Obama is bad for the economy, the jobs numbers show the economy is doing better, so there must be something wrong with the jobs numbers.”
If nothing else, Limbaugh’s assessment was helpful in its candor: in his mind, there’s just “no way” that reality is real. It can’t be real, therefore, it’s not real, evidence be damned.
I can appreciate where the denial comes from. Republicans just know that last year’s tax increases on the wealthy are slowing the economy; they just know that “Obamacare” is destroying the job market; they just know federal regulations are strangling economic vitality.
And when reality presents proof that they’re mistaken, well, reality must be wrong, too. “Those Chicago guys” must be at it again.
The right was so certain the Affordable Care Act would fail that it literally couldn’t believe the enrollment numbers. The right was equally certain that Mitt Romney was cruising towards a landslide victory, so it seemed obvious to them that pollsters conspired to ensure that survey results were “skewed.”
Climate data is politically inconvenient, so it must be rejected. The job numbers are politically inconvenient, so they must be ignored, too.
Such systemic hostility towards empiricism just isn’t healthy.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 6, 2014
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