“Sam Brownback’s Kansas Disaster Is Getting Even Worse”: Conservative Policies Are Both A Moral And Practical Disaster
Politics is all too often couched in terms of morality and ethics, rather than simple right and wrong. What I mean by that is that reasonable people can come to different moral value judgments about ethical dilemmas: is it more moral to ensure that everyone has access to a social safety net even if some people game the system, or is it more moral to ensure that people keep all their private property and never have to give it up to someone less hardworking than themselves?
But it’s important to remember that it’s not just about empathy and ethics. It’s about what works and what doesn’t. And every day in every way, we are learning that conservative approaches simply don’t work–not in terms of social policy, and certainly not in terms of economic policy.
Exhibit A in the utter failure of conservative dogma is Sam Brownback’s trainwreck in Kansas. Here are the latest figures, courtesy of Yael Abouhalkah in the Kansas City Star:
This has been a bad week for Gov. Sam Brownback and others who believe his massive income tax cuts are going to dramatically boost employment in the state. A new report Friday showed that Kansas had lost a whopping 4,300 jobs in July from a month earlier.
The unemployment rate climbed for the fourth straight month, up to 4.6 percent, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. And look at this disastrous note: The Sunflower State now has 1,700 fewer jobs than it did at the start of 2015.
One more fact from the latest report shows that Kansas has added a puny 5,600 total jobs in the last year — from July 2014 to July 2015. The new information shows that the tax cuts that have drained the Kansas treasury of hundreds of millions of dollars the past two years are not working to attract employers and jobs.
Keep in mind that Kansas’ atrocious performance has nothing to do with the state of the midwest or the manufacturing sector generally, because both manufacturing and Kansas’ neighbors are actually doing pretty well comparatively:
Meanwhile, Missouri celebrated much better news in the latest BLS report. The Show-Me State gained 11,900 jobs in July, and now has added 30,900 for 2015. Yes, that’s without the huge tax cuts that Brownback and Co. put in place.
Earlier this week, a separate report showed Kansas is missing out on the growth in manufacturing employment, which is happening across much of the rest of America. One key statistic: Kansas lost 39,000 manufacturing jobs during the recession but has added just 4,000 since it ended.
All this as Brownback’s tax cuts are destroying what remains of the state’s educational system and social services. Brownback and his allies suffer under the delusion that supply-side economics really works, and that if they cut taxes enough on rich people and businesses that there will be an explosion of jobs and economic growth. That’s not just immoral because it increases inequality and hurts the poor. It’s as wrong as 2+2=5. In all but the most extreme cases, cutting taxes on the rich does nothing to create jobs, but slashing the salaries of teachers and cutting welfare benefits means less consumer demand, which in turns drives the economy into recession. The immorality would at least be somewhat tolerable if the ideology functioned at a broad utilitarian level, but it doesn’t.
Conservative policies are both a moral and practical disaster.
By: David Atkins, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, August 22, 2015
“Some Americans Should Not Have Equal Rights?”: The Racist Roots Of The GOP’s Favorite New Immigration Plan
The year 1866 was an alarming one for xenophobes: Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, declaring “all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power…to be citizens of the United States.” Though explicitly intended to grant citizenship to African-Americans, who’d been denied it by the Supreme Court’s ruling in the 1857 Dred Scott case, wouldn’t the law also “have the effect of naturalizing the children of Chinese and Gypsies born in this country?” wondered Pennsylvania Senator Edgar Cowan. “Undoubtedly,” responded Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois. When President Andrew Johnson vetoed the act, he too raised the specter of the Chinese and “the people called Gypsies.”
Congress overrode the veto, and went on to enshrine the principle of birthright citizenship in the Constitution’s 14th Amendment. Needless to say, fears about the children of the gypsies proved unfounded. Yet the idea that people with certain types of parents should be denied citizenship—and the associated rights—persisted. Late in the nineteenth century the government tried to withhold citizenship from the children of Chinese immigrants, but was rebuffed by the Supreme Court. Native Americans weren’t considered citizens until 1924. These days the target is Latino immigrants and their children. And thanks to Donald Trump, the nativist argument against birthright citizenship has moved from a sideline item to a centerpiece in the Republican primary.
In a set of immigration policies released Sunday, Trump called for an end to birthright citizenship, which he described as “the biggest magnet for illegal immigration.” Trump’s invocation of the fictitious “anchor baby” phenomenon isn’t particularly original. But what’s striking is that his implausible call for reinterpreting or rescinding the 14th Amendment has been taken up by so many of his competitors in the Republican field, including Scott Walker, Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, Bobby Jindal, Rick Santorum, Ben Carson, and Rand Paul. Chris Christie said recently that birthright citizenship should be “reexamined.” The much shorter list of those not in favor includes John Kasich (who previously advocated for revoking birthright citizenship), Jeb Bush, and Marco Rubio, who stated that he is “open to exploring ways of not allowing people who are coming here deliberately for that purpose to acquire citizenship.”
The issue of birthright citizenship resurfaces every so often in Congress, but it’s never gotten much traction. Most recently Louisiana Senator David Vitter warned of the “exploding phenomenon” of “birth tourism,” and in March proposed to limit citizenship to those who have at least one parent with a green card or who’ve served in the military. Though bids like Vitter’s are more demagogic than actionable, some US-born children with undocumented parents already face hurdles related to their citizenship rights. Texas, for instance, recently began refusing to issue birth certificates to parents who use a photo ID from the Mexican Consulate as their only form of identification.
Kelefa Sanneh points out that, bluster aside, Trump is actually forcing a substantive policy debate. The substance is extreme: Walker, for instance, once supported comprehensive reform legislation that including labor rights and a pathway to legal status; now he is “absolutely” in favor of ending birthright citizenship. (So are 63 percent of Republicans, according to a 2010 Fox News poll.) While the GOP was once wondering whether Romney’s promotion of “self deportation” went too far, now candidates are pandering to the base’s racial anxieties with talk of undoing what historian Eric Foner characterizes as one of the Republican Party’s own “historic achievements.”
The irony is that doing so would dramatically increase the number of undocumented people living in the United States. (As has the militarization of the border.) Denying birthright citizenship to children with undocumented parents would bring the population of unauthorized people to as many as 24 million by 2050, according to the Migration Policy Institute. The result, according to MPI, would be the creation of “an underclass of unauthorized immigrants who, through no fault of their own, would be forced to live in the margins of US society.” In other words, undermining the 14th Amendment won’t solve the (nonexistent) problem of “birth tourism.” It would, however, do what the denial of citizenship has done since the era of Dred Scott: strip civil rights from a racialized group, facilitating their exploitation.
By: Zoe Carpenter, The Nation, August 19, 2015
“The GOP Candidates Are Pledging To Undo The Iran Nuclear Deal; Don’t Buy It”: Get’s Us Nothing, And Potentially Costs Us A Great Deal
Republicans have spent much of the last six years shaking their fists in impotent protest against the things that Barack Obama has done. That’s the way it is when you’re out of power: There are only so many tools at your disposal to undo what the president does, even if you control Congress. This dynamic also explains some of the restiveness in the Republican electorate, since their leaders have been telling them of all the ways they’ll fight Obama (like repealing the Affordable Care Act), only to be stifled at every turn.
And now it looks like they’re going to fail to stop the deal the United States and five other world powers negotiated with Iran to restrain its nuclear program. Since the agreement isn’t a treaty, it doesn’t require ratification; instead, Congress can try to pass a resolution to stop it, which President Obama would veto. A veto override would require two-thirds of the members of both chambers of Congress, and the deal’s opponents aren’t going to get that.
While there are still a few Democratic senators who have not made their positions known, the last few days have seen one after another come out in favor of the deal (with the exception of New Jersey’s Bob Menendez, to no one’s surprise). Republicans need 13 senators to join them in opposition to the deal, and so far they have only two. As of this writing, there are 13 Democrats who have yet to announce their position; unless 11 of them come out in opposition — which seems all but impossible — the deal will have enough supporters to stop a veto override. Furthermore, such an override would probably fail in the House anyway.
So what will happen then? When all the votes are cast and the deal’s critics come up short, the Republicans running for president will rush to the microphones to repeat what they’ve already said: that this is the worst deal in diplomatic history, that Barack Obama is Neville Chamberlain, that Israel is all but already consumed in a fiery nuclear blast, etc.
If there’s been any disagreement between the candidates, it’s only in how fast they want to tear up the deal. For instance, Scott Walker says he’d do it on “day one” of his presidency, and even suggested he might launch a military strike on Iran to boot. Marco Rubio has said something similar, that he would “quickly reimpose sanctions,” which means tossing out the deal. Jeb Bush suggested that he’d at least hire his cabinet and check in with allies before figuring out what to do next, which is what passes for thoughtfulness in GOP circles these days.
What none of them have grappled with is what happens afterward. It’s possible that the other signatories to the agreement, including Germany, China, and Russia, will say that whatever President Trump thinks, they’ll hold up their end. If Iran agrees, then it might be subject to renewed U.S. sanctions, but the reason the current sanctions regime has been so effective is that the U.N. and so many other nations have participated in cutting Iran out of the world economy; sanctions by the U.S. alone would not have nearly the same impact.
On the other hand, if the agreement falls apart when we pull out — which is what Republicans would obviously prefer — then we return to the status quo, with Iran free to pursue nuclear weapons if it wishes without any inspections at all.
If the past is any indication, I don’t expect Republicans to find the time to discuss what would actually happen if they got their wish, since they’ll be too busy throwing Munich analogies around. But let’s assume that the deal doesn’t get shot down in Congress, and it begins to take effect. A year from now, what will the GOP nominee say about the deal? What if it seems to be working — the sanctions have begun to be unwound, inspections are proceeding, and there’s no indication yet that Iran is secretly trying to create nuclear weapons. What then? Will that nominee say, “I don’t care if it looks like it’s working, Bibi Netanyahu once showed me a picture of a cartoon bomb, so I’m still going to walk away from this agreement”?
Maybe. But the truth is that the next president abandoning this agreement has about as much likelihood of happening as Donald Trump’s plan to convince Mexico to pay for a 2000-mile wall between our two countries. It’s the kind of thing a candidate says when he wants to sound tough, but it’s not the kind of thing a president — even if it’s one of these guys — actually does. It would get us virtually nothing, and potentially cost us a great deal.
Think about that when you see the candidates shouting at the cameras after Congress fails to stop the agreement, pledging to do their utmost to destroy it.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Week, August 21, 2015
“Fiorina The Smooth Operator”: The Essence Of Fiorina ’16: A Smooth Exterior With Little Beneath It
In a piece at Vox today that you should most definitely read if you are following what passes for a bipartisan debate on climate change, Dave Roberts looks closely at a four-minute segment of an interview Katie Couric did with Carly Fiorina that Republican flacks are praising as a genius tour de force (for Carly, of course, not for Katie). He goes through ten claims Fiorina–not a climate change denier but rather someone who finds infinite excuses not to do anything about it–made in the interview against Democratic climate change proposals and shows they are more than a bit factually challenged. A sample of an argument Carly advanced as a Californian:
California “destroys lives and livelihoods with environmental regulations”
California’s climate regulations are indeed the most ambitious in the nation, and they just keep getting more ambitious. (A pair of new climate bills has cleared the Senate and is headed to the Assembly.)
If California were its own country, it would be one of the world’s top 10 in total renewable energy generation and one of the bottom two in carbon intensity. It is the top state in the nation for venture capital investments in cleantech, cleantech patents, and advanced-energy jobs. In fact, it leads the nation in virtually every cleantech category, from electric vehicles to green buildings to solar capacity to policy to investment, reliably topping the US Cleantech Leadership Index.
Meanwhile, between 1993 and 2013, thanks to energy efficiency, the average residential electricity bill in California declined, on an inflation-adjusted basis, by 4 percent, even as bills rose elsewhere in the country. Between 1990 and 2012, the state cut per-capita carbon emissions by 25 percent even as its GDP increased by 37 percent. Its total carbon emissions are declining, even as its economy continues to grow.
Oh, and California created more jobs than any other state in the nation last year, with the fifth-highest GDP growth rate. And its budget is balanced.
Looks like the state is surviving its environmental regulations so far.
After nine other, similar expositions, Roberts concludes:
However smooth Fiorina may be, in the end it’s not going to make sense to voters to acknowledge the science of climate change and then say you’re against every solution to it except handing out subsidies to the coal industry. That is some unstable derp. If I had to predict, I’d say political pressure will be such that Fiorina will either be forced back into outright denialism or she’ll have to offer something less vaporous on the policy front. She won’t be able to stay where she is.
But note that qualifier “in the end.” Untutored folk watching Fiorina may simply notice how “smooth” she is. And the fact that it’s Katie Couric interviewing her is instructive. A series of Couric inteviews took Sarah Palin down several notches in 2008 because the nationally unknown Alaska governor was anything but smooth. But that’s the essence of Fiorina ’16: a smooth exterior with little beneath it.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, August 21, 2015
“A Vague Hand-Waving Promise Is Not A Plan”: The Republican Plans To Replace Obamacare Have Been Tried, And They Failed
Before Obamacare, the individual insurance market for people who could not get health care through their job was a nightmare. The only way for insurers to make money was to avoid getting stuck with customers who would rack up high medical bills, forcing them to expend enormous time and expense to screen potential customers for preexisting conditions. Even people who could find plans with affordable premiums had to sign contracts loaded with fine-print exclusions leaving them responsible for unexpected costs. Obamacare overhauled that market, eliminating insurers’ ability to screen out healthy customers. In the new, regulated individual markets, people buy plans regardless of their prior health status. This has been a godsend to those unable to obtain coverage before.
Republicans would repeal all these new protections. But never fear, conservatives insist. In their place will be new protections. Ramesh Ponnuru, writing in National Review, points to two protections put in place by Scott Walker’s proposal, which is the prototypical Republican “see, we do too have a plan to replace Obamacare” plan.
Ponnuru mentions two protections. The first is a provision that would “bar insurers from charging higher prices to sicker customers provided they had maintained continuous coverage.” Republicans have taken to using this line a lot, because it sounds to the average person tuning in a lot like a promise to protect people with preexisting conditions, but the last six words are crucial. Maintaining continuous coverage is really hard. We know this because Congress passed a law in 1996 letting people who have employer-provided insurance keep their plan if they maintain continuous coverage. It has proven nearly useless. Maintaining continuous coverage is really hard for people who have financial distress, and it’s harder if the insurance company has every incentive for you to miss a payment or fail to dot one of your i’s or cross one of your t’s, so they can kick you out. And, of course, in a market where insurers can charge higher prices to sicker customers, “maintaining continuous coverage” means buying insurance that’s really expensive and can deny you coverage for lots of treatments you need.
The second provision is high-risk pools. This is a special market for the customers with the most expensive medical needs. Many states have tried high-risk pools. They also work really, really badly. There are all sorts of practical barriers that make it hard to operate a special insurance system for people with the most expensive conditions. For instance, how do you determine eligibility? Tens of millions of Americans have something in their medical history that makes them a less than perfect risk, from the insurance company’s standpoint. Where do you draw the cutoff for eligibility? And how do you keep insurance companies from skimming the high-risk pools, too — after all, they’ll want to cover the least costly people in the high-risk pool, not the most costly ones.
Even if it is possible to devise solutions to these problems, the biggest single impediment is that high-risk pools cost money. There’s no magic secret in a high-risk pool that makes insurers able to sell affordable insurance to people who need lots of medical care. And where would Republicans get the money to finance the high-risk pools? They don’t say. And they all have signed the Grover Norquist pledge that they will never raise taxes under any circumstances — even if aliens come to Earth and threaten to destroy humanity unless the president agrees to raise taxes by a single penny.
The funding problem is not ancillary. There’s an old joke in which a chemist, a physicist, and an economist are trapped on a desert island, and some cans of food wash up onshore. The physicist devises a plan to smash open the cans. The chemist comes up with a plan to heat them open. And the economist says “assume a can opener.” This is the problem not just with the high-risk pools, but the Republican health-care plans as a whole. They assume the availability of funding, but the party is theologically opposed to raising revenue of any kind. Like having a can opener, if the Republicans were able to overcome their fanatical opposition to revenue, the problem wouldn’t exist in the first place. Any reform that assumes Republicans will find a way to fund it is assuming a can opener. It’s premised on a fantastical assumption. That is why, in the absence of some concrete way around the no-taxes-ever problem, a vague hand-waving promise can’t be called a real plan.
Before Obamacare took effect, different measures were tried to reform America’s cruel and dysfunctional individual health-care marketplace. The continuous-coverage protection and high-risk pools both failed. One thing that succeeded was tried in Massachusetts, by Mitt Romney. The Obama administration decided to build that model out nationally, and it has worked very well — premiums have actually come in well under projections. But since it was Obama’s plan, Republicans oppose it. But since Obamacare is working, they need to have something they can say they’ll replace it with, and they’ve turned to the things that have already failed.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, August 21, 2015
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