Budgeting For Insecurity: GOP Soft On Terrorism
Has any political party in history been as hypocritical as the modern GOP in terms of paying lip service to principles they undercut with policies?
Republicans say they are all about supporting our troops, and then they slash veterans benefits. They loudly proclaim their religious devotion to gatherings of evangelicals, but their philosopher queen is the faith-hating atheist Ayn Rand (see video in Noteworthy box above). Turns out they have two faces even for matters of critical national security, as yesterday’s editorial in the New York Times, “Budgeting for Insecurity,” makes disturbingly clear. An excerpt:
House Republicans talk tough on terrorism. So we can find no explanation — other than irresponsibility — for their vote to slash financing for eight antiterrorist programs. Unless the Senate repairs the damage, New York City and other high-risk localities will find it far harder to protect mass transit, ports and other potential targets.The programs received $2.5 billion last year in separate allocations. The House has cut that back to a single block grant of $752 million, an extraordinary two-thirds reduction. The results for high-risk areas would be so damaging — with port and mass transit security financing likely cut by more than half — that the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Peter King of New York, voted against the bill as “an invitation to an attack.”
The Times editorial goes on to explain that the “Republicans made clear that budget-cutting trumped all other concerns…One $270 million cut, voted separately, would eliminate 5,000 airport-screening jobs across the country, according to the Transportation Security Administration.” They also fought to cut more than half of funding for first responder training, but the Democrats were able to restore most of it.
As the Times editorial asks, “Are these really the programs to be cutting?” Not if we put national security before politics.
By: Democratic Strategist Staff, June 10, 2011
Memo To Rep Eric Cantor: Blame Is A Tricky Thing
In April, House Democrats “celebrated” the 100th day of the new Republican rule in the chamber. Most notably, Dems emphasized the fact that the GOP, despite a year of campaign promises, haven’t even considered any jobs bills, with Republicans instead preferring to waste time on pointless gamesmanship and culture war crusades.
As if to say, “Oh yeah?” House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) turned to Twitter to respond to the Democratic argument:
And here we are six weeks later.
Cantor said that “everything seems to be going in the wrong direction,” but denied that Republicans deserve a share of the blame for the stagnant economic recovery.
Well, Eric, blame is a tricky thing, isn’t it?
Even in April, Cantor’s argument was foolish. Indeed, by Cantor’s reasoning, job growth should be impossible. How can all of these jobs be created in the midst of Obama-induced uncertainty? And with crushing tax rates so high? And a massive debt? And with pesky regulations stifling the engines of ingenuity?
We were apparently supposed to believe that Republicans’ mere presence in the House of Representatives is enough to overcome these burdensome hurdles.
That is, until the jobs picture deteriorates, at which point, Republicans bear no responsibility whatsoever.
Heads Cantor wins; tails Dems lose.
By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly-Political Animal, June 6, 2011
Bush Tax Cuts Turn 10: Wall Street Celebrates, Americans Suffer
Break out the bubbly, because there will be celebrations today on Wall Street and in corporate boardrooms and mansions all across America. Why? Because today is the 10th anniversary of the big Bush tax breaks for bankers and billionaires and the businesses that bankroll their big-budget campaigns.
Today is an opportunity to ponder these questions: If the Bush tax cuts are so great, why has the economy been so bad since they became law 10 years ago? And how about this brain teaser: If the GOP theology of cutting taxes for the rich brings in more revenue, why is Democratic President Bill Clinton the only president in the last generation to leave a surplus behind for the next president?
In 1980, President George H.W. Bush called it voodoo economics. Bush 41 conveniently changed his position when he became Ronald Reagan’s running mate that year. But the first President Bush was right the first time. The idea that tax revenues will go up when you cut taxes has cast an evil spell over the U.S. economy going all the way back to Ronald Reagan. In 1981, the new GOP math became 1 + 1 = 3. With this kind of fuzzy math, it’s no wonder that President Reagan left behind a massive budget deficit.
George W. Bush may have had George H.W. Bush for a father, but Ronald Reagan was his role model. The latest incarnation of voodoo economics was the creation of the second President Bush. The tax cuts for bankers and billionaires that became law in 2001 quickly turned the Clinton surplus into the Bush budget deficit as big as Donald Trump’s ego. Voodoo is what Republicans do so well.
But Bush 43 did not stop there in handing out goodies to Wall Street. In 2008, the president asked his Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson, the former CEO of Goldman Sachs, to bail out Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street investment firms to the tune of three quarters of a trillion dollars. Of course, President Bush never even considered an attempt to rescue the millions of working Americans who first lost their jobs and then their homes because of malfeasance on Wall Street.
Last month, the Center for Budget Priorities released a study that demonstrated that the two biggest reasons for the current budget deficit were the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. So what do the Republicans do? Do they vote to cut Pentagon spending or end dole welfare for wealthy Americans? Of course they don’t. They gut Medicare. Genius!
Yesterday, Frank Patitucci, CEO and Chairman of NuCompass Mobility Service, called on Republican Speaker John Boehner to increase taxes on Americans making more than $1 million a year. Patitucci explained his position by saying businesses need a strong middle class to prosper.
But I don’t want to be a party pooper or rain on Wall Street’s parade, so party hardy, guys. Don’t scrimp on the Dom Perignon and the caviar. Santa Claus comes only once a year. Let’s worry about the GOP cuts in healthcare for seniors and nutrition programs for women and their infant children another day.
By: Brad Bannon, U. S. News and World Report, June 7, 2011
Age Gap: The GOP’s Generational Weapon In The Medicare Fight
To senior citizens at town hall meetings angry or worried about their plan to convert Medicare to a private insurance scheme, Republicans have a simple answer: It’s not about you. You’ll be fine. This is for “the next generation.”
The next generation is everyone 55 or under, since the plan would not start for ten years and would affect only newly eligible seniors. The stated logic of the ten-year delay is that it takes time to put the system in place and that people need time to plan. But if “premium support” (a euphemism right up there with “enhanced interrogation”) were ever going to work, it could be implemented as quickly as the Affordable Care Act (four years) or Medicare’s prescription drug coverage (two years). Presumably, the delay is mostly a political kludge, intended to avoid a backlash from those now or soon to be dependent on Medicare by affecting only those young enough to be giving little thought to retirement health coverage.
But the line they chose is more than a gimmick: The 55-and-over cutoff marks a sharp and significant generational divide. Those over 55 will continue to benefit from one of the triumphs of social insurance in the Great Society, while the rest of us will be on our own, with a coupon for private health insurance. If you consider what it means to be 55 years old in 2011, you’ll see the significance of the line.
Today’s 55-year-old was born in 1956. That’s not generally considered a major break in the generations. It’s smack in the middle of the Baby Boom (the peak of the boom, in fact), with almost a decade to go before the first Gen-Xers were born, dreaming of Winona Ryder. But the difference between early and later Boomers, especially in their experience of the economy, is dramatic.
A baby born in 1956 would have graduated from high school in about 1974, from college in 1978 or so. Look at almost any historical chart of the American economy, and you see two sharp breaks in the 1970s. First, in 1974, household incomes, which had been rising since World War II, flattened. Real wages started to stagnate. The poverty rate stopped falling. Health insurance coverage stopped rising. Those trends have continued ever since.
Second, a little later in the decade, around the time today’s 55-year-olds graduated from college (if they did—fewer than 30 percent have a four-year degree), inequality began its sharp rise, and the share of national income going to the bottom 40 percent began to fall. Productivity and wages, which had tended to keep pace, began to diverge, meaning that workers began seeing little of the benefits of their own productivity gains. The number of jobs in manufacturing peaked and began to drop sharply. Defined benefit pensions, which provide a secure base of income in retirement, began to give way to 401(k)s and similar schemes that depend on the worker to save and the stock market to perform. While the benefits of higher education rose, college tuitions started to rise even faster. Those trends, too, have continued.
If there was ever going to be a generational war in this country, that high school class of ’74 would be its Mason-Dixon line. It’s the moment when Bill Clinton’s promise—“if you work hard and play by the rules you’ll get ahead”—began to lose its value. Today’s seniors and near-seniors spent much of their working lives in that postwar world, with their incomes rising, investments gaining, their health increasingly secure, and their retirements predictable. Everyone 55 and younger spent his or her entire working life in an economy where all those trends had stalled or reversed. To borrow former White House economist Jared Bernstein’s phrase, it was the “You’re On Your Own” economy. Finally, those 55-year-olds are spending several of what should be their peak earning years, years when they should be salting away money in their 401(k)s and IRAs, in a period of deep recession and very slow recovery.
The Ryan plan, in other words, delivers to the older generation exactly what they’ve had all their lives—secure and predictable benefits—and to the next generation, more of what they’ve known—insecurity and risk. It’s hardly the first generational fight the GOP has started. The previous one was just last fall, when they campaigned for Medicare, and against the $500 billion in cuts (mostly by getting rid of the overgenerous subsidies to private insurers in an experimental program) passed as part of the Affordable Care Act. With an off-year electorate that was overwhelmingly older, they could put all their bets on the older side, knowing that seniors would see little benefit from the Affordable Care Act and were naturally worried about any change to the health system they enjoyed.
Heading into the 2012 election, however, the electorate is likely to shift back to one in which younger and middle-aged voters vote in proportion to their share of the population, so a “Mediscare” campaign won’t work. This time, the GOP hopes to play both sides of the generational war, gambling that while seniors want security, younger voters never expected the certainty of Medicare, just as they don’t expect reliable pensions or Social Security benefits, and thus will embrace a plan that sounds innovative, flexible, and market-based. Contending that the only alternative to premium support is the end of Medicare entirely, they are offering a generation that is accustomed to getting less than their parents a little bit, rather than nothing.
This strategy is a variation on the generational conflict the Bush Administration tried to launch in 2005 over Social Security privatization. Although it never reached the level of specificity that Ryan achieved, the calculus was the same: Younger voters would welcome the opportunity to take advantage of the stock market for their retirement, rather than the stodgy and predictable system their parents and grandparents liked.
That wager didn’t work, however: It turned out that older voters were terrified of Social Security privatization and younger voters unenthusiastic. Within five months, the radical move that every pundit thought was a near-certainty when George W. Bush declared “I’ve got political capital and I intend to use it,” had disappeared, never even introduced as legislation. And despite this week’s relaunch of the Ryan plan, it’s likely to end in the same result. If Social Security is any precedent, younger voters will be indifferent, while older voters won’t believe they’re exempt. The Republicans will again walk away from the conflict, hoping to get credit for being “serious” without bearing a political price for the error.
For Democrats, the defeat of the Ryan plan, like the failed Social Security privatization before it, will be regarded as a great victory, and an opportunity to get a fresh start with worried older voters. But they should not ignore the generational divide revealed by Ryan’s cutoff. If progressive politics has nothing to offer the late Boomers and the generations that follow except the same old programs, and nothing that responds to their distinctive experience of the economy, then eventually they’ll fall for one of these gimmicks from the right.
By: Mark Schmitt, The New Republic; Senior Fellow, Roosevelt Institute, May 20, 2011
GOP Jobs Plan: Old Ideas, Fancy New Clip Art
Academic books pack about 600 words to a page. Normal books clock in around
400. Large-print books, you know, the ones for kids or the visually impaired — fit about 250. The House GOP’s jobs plan, however, gets about 200 words to a page. The typeface is fit for giants, and the document’s 10 pages are mostly taken up by pictures. It looks like the staffer in charge forgot the assignment was due on Thursday rather than Friday and cranked up the font to 24 points and began dumping clip art to pad out the plan.
Which is odd, because there’s nothing in this plan that hasn’t been in a thousand other plans. When I asked David Autor, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a specialist on labor markets, to take a look at the substance, he pronounced it a classic case of “what Larry Summers would call ‘now-more-than-everisms.”
“Here’s how it works,” Autor wrote in an e-mail. “1. You have a set of policies that you favor at all times and under all circumstances, e.g., cut taxes, remove regulations, drill-baby-drill, etc. 2. You see a problem that needs fixing (e.g., the economy stinks). 3. You say, ‘We need to enact my favored policies now more than ever.’ I believe that every item in the GOP list that you sent derives from this three-step procedure.
“That’s not to say that there are no reasonable ideas on this list. But there is certainly no original thinking here directed at addressing the employment problem. Or, to put it differently, is there any set of economic circumstances under which the GOP would not actually want to enact every item on this agenda? If the answer is no, then this is clearly now-more-than-everism.”
If you read Autor’s answer and then guessed at what’s included in the plan, you’d probably get it about right. The GOP wants a separate congressional vote on every significant regulation. It wants to cut taxes for corporations and small businesses led by individuals. It wants a tax break on profit that corporations earn overseas. It wants to pass pending trade agreements, increase domestic production of oil and enact spending cuts. The only two proposals you couldn’t have guessed sight unseen are patent reform and visas for the highly skilled.
But even if you think every item on that agenda is a grand idea, this isn’t exactly fast-acting medicine. “At best, an agenda like this is meant to improve long-term growth by a couple of tenths of a percentage point,” says Larry Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute. “It takes a really long time to move the dial. It’s not a response to a cyclical downturn.”
That’s okay, because the document doesn’t believe in cyclical downturns. It only believes in deviations from the Republican agenda. The first page sets out the GOP’s narrative of the unemployment crisis. See if you recognize what’s missing here: “For the past four years, Democrats in Washington have enacted policies that undermine these basic concepts which have historically placed America at the forefront of the global marketplace. As a result, most Americans know someone who has recently lost a job, and small businesses and entrepreneurs lack the confidence needed to invest in our economy. Not since the Great Depression has our nation’s unemployment rate been this high this long.”
Four years ago, of course, George W. Bush was president. And he was, as you might remember, a Republican, not a Democrat. As for Wall Street, well, Wall Street who?
But it’s not just that you could read this jobs plan without knowing the financial crisis ever happened. You could read it without knowing the past decade ever happened. As Mishel says, “If lower taxes and less regulation was such good policy, then George W. Bush’s economy would have been a lot better. But under Bush, Republicans cut taxes on business and on investors and high-income people, and they didn’t add many regulations, and that business cycle was the first one in the postwar period where the income for a typical working-class family was lower at the end than at the beginning.”
That, however, is the agenda the House GOP thinks we need. And now more than
ever.
By: Ezra Klein, Columnist, The Washington Post, May 26, 2011
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