By: Emily Schwartz Greco, Columnist and Managing Editor of OtherWords; The National Memo, January 16, 2015
“The Pipeline To Nowhere”: A Monument To Wasting Colossal Sums Of Money On Dirty-Energy Infrastructure
When Maria van der Hoeven summed up the 20-year outlook for global energy investment in London last year, she identified a couple of daunting challenges.
The amount of money required by 2035 is a staggering $48 trillion, the International Energy Agency chief and former Dutch economy minister said. And it’s not clear how many of those trillions of dollars will power climate-friendly options.
“Will policymakers succeed in steering investment towards a cleaner, more secure energy system — or are we locking in technologies and patterns of consumption that store up trouble for the future?” she asked.
There’s no better example of what van der Hoeven meant by “storing up trouble for the future” than the Keystone XL pipeline.
After years of being flustered by President Barack Obama’s procrastination, the pipeline’s conservative backers in Congress are trying to force him to green-light this conduit for some of the world’s dirtiest, most expensive, and most dangerous oil.
The House recently voted in favor of building the 1,200-mile pipeline for the 10th time. The Senate is poised to approve it too. Although dozens of Democrats are siding with Republicans in favor of this boondoggle, those lawmakers lack the votes, so far, to override the veto Obama has threatened.
Senator John Hoeven, a North Dakota Republican and a leading Keystone XL proponent, has turned into a broken record touting what he calls “vital energy infrastructure legislation.”
Despite their similar names and obsession with all things energy, Hoeven and van der Hoeven are polar opposites. She’s a leading player in the effort to wean the world off its dependence on oil, gas, and coal. He’s a “drill, baby, drill” type.
There are many good arguments against the $8 billion pipeline on environmental and labor grounds. People like 350.org founder Bill McKibben and groups like Media Matters need no help explaining them.
Here’s another reason why the pipeline shouldn’t be built: It’s a waste of money.
First, plunging oil prices matter. A lot. They’ve sunk below $47 a barrel, losing more than half their value since last June. Saudi Arabian Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi declared a few weeks ago that he doesn’t care whether oil goes as low as $20 a barrel, a 16-year low. It just might.
By some estimates, a barrel of oil must fetch at least $95 for profits to be extracted from Canada’s tar sands. It’s impossible to say when prices will rebound to that level or if companies will give up on that oil patch, leaving the Keystone XL without much (if any) heavy crude to move.
Ultimately, there could be no oil to haul from Alberta to Louisiana to be refined — or not, if the U.S. scraps its ban on exporting crude — and then shipped to, say, China.
More importantly, tar sands oil production may stop within a few years even if it does prove profitable. You see, global climate talks are heading in a direction that’s likely to result in countries and companies leaving large amounts of oil, gas, and coal in the ground.
A new study published in the journal Nature spelled out where and what kind of fossil fuels would need to be left unexploited. Its authors predict that virtually all Canadian tar sands oil production will stop by 2020.
If it’s built by then, there’d be nothing for the Keystone XL to transport. As a pipeline to nowhere, it would become a monument to wasting colossal sums of money on dirty-energy infrastructure.
John Hoeven should listen to Maria van der Hoeven. If he did, he’d realize the benefits of losing this political battle.
“Romney Is The Only One Who Thinks He’s Reagan”: Mitt Has Done Exactly Zero To Enhance His Credentials
Yeah, this one isn’t gonna fly.
Mitt Romney’s third campaign for the White House got off to a good start … for about three days. The backlash this week came not just from core conservatives, who have never been enthusiastic about the ideological chameleon, but also from just about everyone who isn’t a die-hard Romney supporter. This group includes quite a few mainstream conservatives, according to Washington Post and New York Times reporting.
What is Team Romney’s answer to those who say he’s had his chance?
“If that’s the case, then Ronald Reagan never would have become president,” said Eric Fehrnstrom, Romney’s longtime spokesman. “Reagan ran three times. Mitt learns from experience. If he does run, he will run his strongest campaign yet.”
Yeesh. I can just imagine all the Republican contenders and conservative leaders going all Bentsen on the Mittster, as the Wall Street Journal did Wednesday.
Does Romney really want to die on this hill?
Between Reagan’s first (1968) and second (1976) presidential runs, he went from being an inexperienced governor who had given an impressive speech for Barry Goldwater in 1964 to being a successful two-term governor who continued to consolidate his position as leader of the conservative movement. Then, in the run-up to his third try in 1980, Reagan remained the clear conservative leader. A real, influential leader: His attack on the Panama Canal treaties, for example, made opposition to them the standard conservative position.
In other words, Reagan didn’t just get better at running for president. He was a much more impressive politician with far more accomplishments by 1980 than he had been in 1968.
Romney? Not so much.
He first ran for president as a successful one-term governor, although he had to repudiate much of what he had done when he moved to the national stage. He ran for president a second time as a successful one-term governor. He is now running for president yet again as … a successful one-term governor.
As far as I can see, he has done exactly zero to enhance his credentials apart from having now developed extensive experience in running for president. If he has ever been an influential leader among Republicans on any policy position, I’ve clean forgotten about it.
More to the point, no one has rallied to Romney’s side other than his core supporters, and reporters are having no trouble finding 2012 supporters who are willing to distance themselves publicly from his third effort. And not only has no one dropped out of the race in the last week since Romney and Jeb Bush stepped up their efforts, other than the already bearded Paul Ryan, but Rand Paul, Chris Christie, Scott Walker and others are ramping up their own campaigns.
Right now, the odds of Romney’s campaign fizzling out before summer appear to be higher than the odds of his making it to New Hampshire, let alone repeating as the Republican’s presidential nominee.
By: Jonathan Bernstein, Columnist, Bloomberg View; The National Memo, January 15, 2014
“We’re No. 1!”: How Government Helps The 1 Percent
You may think that government takes a lot of money from the wealthy and gives it to poor people. You might also assume that the rich pay a lot to support government while the poor pay a pittance.
There is nothing wrong with you if you believe this. Our public discourse is dominated by these ideas, and you’d probably feel foolish challenging them. After Mitt Romney’s comments on the 47 percent blew up on him, conservatives have largely given up talking publicly about their “makers versus takers” distinction. But much of the right’s rhetoric and many of its policies are still based on such notions.
It is thus a public service that the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) has issued a report showing that at the state and local level, government is, indeed, engaged in redistribution — but it’s redistribution from the poor and the middle class to the wealthy.
It’s entirely true that better-off people pay more in federal income taxes than the less well-to-do. But this leaves out not only Social Security taxes, but also what’s going on elsewhere.
The institute found that in 2015, the poorest fifth of Americans will pay, on average, 10.9 percent of their incomes in state and local taxes and the middle fifth will pay 9.4 percent. But the top 1 percent will pay states and localities only 5.4 percent of their incomes in taxes.
When you think about it, such figures should not come as a surprise. Most state and local governments rely on regressive taxes — particularly sales and excise levies. Poor and middle-class people pay more simply because they have to spend the bulk of their incomes just to cover their costs.
This gets to something else we don’t discuss much: Public policies in most other well-to-do countries push much harder against inequality than ours do. According to the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), the United States ranks 10th in income inequality before taxes and government transfers. By this measure, Ireland and Britain, and even Sweden and Norway, are more unequal than we are. But after government transfers are taken into account, the good old USA soars to first in inequality. Norway drops to 6th place and Sweden to 13th.
It’s not a matter about which we should be proud to shout, “We’re No. 1!”
Actually, things may be a bit worse for us even on pre-transfer incomes, said LIS Director Janet Gornick, because people in the other rich countries tend to draw their pensions earlier.
The overall story is that we are not very aggressive, with apologies to Joe the Plumber, in spreading the wealth around. “Our inequality is already high because of the low minimum wage, the weakness of unions and very high levels of private-sector compensation at the top,” Gornick, a professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, said in a telephone interview from Luxembourg. “But on top of that, we are redistributing less than other countries and also have lower taxes on the highest incomes, particularly income from capital.”
And at the state and local levels, our governments are exacerbating inequality. The ITEP study concludes that “every single state and local tax system is regressive and even the states that do better than others have much room for improvement.” The five states with the most regressive systems are Washington, Florida, Texas, South Dakota and Illinois.
On its face, the property tax would seem progressive, because big houses are taxed more. But the study finds that on average, “poor homeowners and renters pay more of their incomes in property taxes than do any other income group — and the wealthiest taxpayers pay the least.”
There is also an unanticipated consequence of growing economic disparities: Because states and localities tax the wealthy less, “rising income inequality can make it more difficult for state tax systems to pay for needed services over time. The more income that goes to the wealthy, the slower a state’s revenue grows.”
Political debates are typically driven by clichés , but at the very least, we can expect our clichés to be true. We need to stop claiming that we have a massively redistributive government. We need to stop pretending that poor people are “takers” when they in fact kick in a lot to the common pot. And we need to replace arguments about “big” and “small” government with a debate over what governments at all levels are doing to make our society more just — or less.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 15, 2015
“There Are Things In It That Scare Me”: For Republicans, Dishonesty Works And Deceit Instills Fear And Uncertainty
There isn’t a democracy on the planet in which even conservative candidates take aim at citizens’ access to health care. At a certain level, the very idea seems a little silly – a national candidate would presumably fail if he or she told their electorate, “Vote for me and I promise to leave some of you behind without access to basic medical care.”
But the United States is the exception. The Republican Party is the only major party in any major democracy that believes citizens are not entitled to medical care as a benefit of citizenship. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R), as we discussed yesterday, want the GOP to abandon universal coverage as a worthwhile goal.
The Affordable Care Act may have extended new health security to tens of millions of families, but Jindal and Republicans believe voters should elect them to deliberately take that security away.
In theory, this should be a very tough sell. Why in the world would any Americans consider voting, on purpose, for a platform that could deliberately punish their own family?
The answer, I suspect, has a lot to do with the power of fear.
The New York Times recently published a fascinating piece on Kentucky’s triumphs in implementing the Affordable Care Act, and the article highlighted a woman named Amanda Mayhew. On paper, the piece presents Mayhew as a classic example of an “Obamacare” success story: thanks to the ACA, she been able to receive free, overdue dental care; she was able to see a dermatologist for free; and she received medication to treat depression for free. This one law has made a big, positive difference in her life.
And then came the twist.
“I don’t love Obamacare,” she said. “There are things in it that scare me and that I don’t agree with.”
For example, she said, she heard from news programs that the Affordable Care Act prohibited lifesaving care for elderly people with cancer.
Mayhew went on to tell the NYT that she’s “thankful” for her coverage, she would “gladly give up my insurance today if it meant that some of the things that are in the law were not in place.”
The problem, of course, is that Mayhew has been misled. Despite what she “heard from news programs,” the Affordable Care Act does not prohibit lifesaving care for elderly people with cancer. It actually does the opposite – which is why the law has received the enthusiastic support of the American Cancer Society and AARP.
The Times article featured a well-intentioned woman, whose heart clearly seems to be in the right place, who would sacrifice her own access to medical care in order to scrap provisions in the law that do not actually exist.
And that’s where Republican rhetoric comes into play. For years, the naive among us – a group that I include myself in – have marveled at the extraordinary lies that have been told about the Affordable Care Act. Why, we ask, would the right lie so brazenly to families who urgently need access to doctors and medicine?
Because dishonesty works. Deceit instills fear and uncertainty.
When Republican candidates vow to gut the American health care system and take Americans’ coverage away, there are plenty of voters who are willing to go along because they’re eager to undo those horrible provisions in the law they “heard about” on “news programs.”
The power of deceptive propaganda, backed by billionaires and their powerful elected allies, shouldn’t be underestimated.
The Kaiser Family Foundation recently found that 41% of the country still, even now, believes “a government panel” exists to “make decisions about end-of-life care for people on Medicare.” That’s two out of every five Americans who believe a ridiculous falsehood.
It’s not that these people are bad or dumb. It’s not that they want their neighbors or community to suffer. The issue here is that some wealthy and sophisticated folks launched a con job on the public, and the scam roped in a lot of victims.
Why else would politicians run on a platform of pushing millions of Americans into a position where they’re one ailment away from bankruptcy? It’s because they think they can get away with it – nice, generous folks will sacrifice their own security to prevent imaginary threats from hurting someone else.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 13, 2015
“It’s More Than Romney Promised”: What Would Republicans Say If Mitt Romney Were President And The Economy Was This Strong?
Imagine if Mitt Romney were president right now.
Imagine if, 722 days after winning the election, President Romney were presiding over an economy growing at five percent a year, an unemployment rate dipping beneath six percent, and gasoline that was less than $2-a-gallon.
This is, after all, what Romney promised. Hell, it’s more than Romney promised.
“I can tell you that over a period of four years, by virtue of the policies that we’d put in place, we’d get the unemployment rate down to six percent, and perhaps a little lower,” he told Time during the campaign. December’s tumble to 5.6 percent unemployment is, thus, two years ahead of schedule.
As for the five percent growth rate and the sub-$2 gas — that’s more than Romney dared ask the electorate to expect. Tim Pawlenty — remember him? — promised to nudge growth to five percent and was roundly mocked for his troubles. And to find anyone promising $2-a-gallon gas, you need to dig up Michelle Bachmann’s campaign lit (even Newt Gingrich didn’t dare predict gas under $2.50, and he wanted to use space mirrors to light highways).
If Mitt Romney were president right now, he would be seen as the second coming of Ronald Reagan. There would be parades in the streets. The kids would have “severely conservative” tattoos. Men would be saying “gosh.”
This is the problem with how Washington — Democrats and Republicans alike — interpret economic news. If Mitt Romney was president right now the economic numbers would be seen as proof that he was a remarkable success. They would appear to show that his agenda — repealing Obamacare, cutting taxes, deregulating the economy, greenlighting the Keystone XL pipeline — was precisely what had been needed to unleash the awesome growth engine that is the American economy. Conservatism would be ascendant. Liberalism would be discredited.
But Barack Obama won the election. The Affordable Care Act hasn’t been repealed. Taxes were raised in 2013. Regulation has proceeded apace. The Keystone XL pipeline is no closer to being built. And yet the economy is roaring. The ambitious economic promises the GOP field made for their conservative policies have been achieved despite the continuation of liberal policies.
There is an easy liberal interpretation here: President Barack Obama is great. Liberalism is great. And it’s simply entrenched media narratives and the GOP’s relentless resistance to giving Obama credit for anything that has left his approval rating stuck at 44 percent.
But I come not to praise President Obama. I come to bury the lazy economic thinking that infects American politics and, particularly, political campaigns.
Washington tends to think of itself as the cause and everything that subsequently happens in the world as the result. A booming economy is proof that Bill Clinton is a genius, or that Ronald Reagan is a genius. A crappy economy is proof that Barack Obama is a naif, or that George H. W. Bush can’t govern. It’s a view of causality usually found in five-year-olds, but it is pervasive in American politics. It is also false.
Policy matters, of course. And, particularly in 2008, 2009, and 2010, it was, arguably, the driver of our economic fortunes. But, for the most part, the economy is driven by much beyond what happens in the White House and the Congress (caveat: the Federal Reserve is an immensely powerful actor, but come campaign time, politicians tend to pretend it doesn’t exist).
It’ll be some time yet before we know whether the economy is truly beginning to roar or the engine is about to sputter out. But the $2 gas that’s left economists so optimistic isn’t the fault of anyone in Washington; it’s a mixture of technological innovation leading to more supply, falling global demand leading to yet lower prices for that supply, and Saudi Arabia refusing to slow production because it wants to choke America’s nascent shale-gas industry (Brad Plumer has an excellent look at the causes behind the cheap gas here).
The reasons unemployment has fallen below six percent are varied, and some of them are problematic (like the reduction in labor-force participation). Government policy has played a role, and my read of the evidence is that premature austerity, particularly at the state and local government level, did a lot to slow the recovery. Nevertheless, anyone suggesting that the job gains over the last two years are the clear result of anything Congress did, or didn’t do, is fooling themselves.
It’s an unhappy fact of political life that the direction of the economy tends to decide elections even though it isn’t actually driven by political decisions. Politicians tend to get around that by pretending otherwise: they take more credit than they deserve when the labor market is doing well, and they receive more blame than they deserve when it’s flagging.
By the normal rules of politics — the rules we would be playing under if Mitt Romney had won the election — the recent economic news proves Barack Obama is a magnificent leader and liberal policies an economic boon. But the normal rules of politics, at least when it comes to interpreting the economy, are dumb.
By: Ezra Klein, Vox, January 12, 2015
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