“A Nation Of Takers?”: Demanding Cuts In Public Assistance To The Poor, While Ignoring Public Assistance To The Rich
In the debate about poverty, critics argue that government assistance saps initiative and is unaffordable. After exploring the issue, I must concede that the critics have a point. Here are five public welfare programs that are wasteful and turning us into a nation of “takers.”
First, welfare subsidies for private planes. The United States offers three kinds of subsidies to tycoons with private jets: accelerated tax write-offs, avoidance of personal taxes on the benefit by claiming that private aircraft are for security, and use of air traffic control paid for by chumps flying commercial.
As the leftists in the George W. Bush administration put it when they tried unsuccessfully to end this last boondoggle: “The family of four taking a budget vacation is subsidizing the C.E.O.’s flying on a corporate jet.”
I worry about those tycoons sponging off government. Won’t our pampering damage their character? Won’t they become addicted to the entitlement culture, demanding subsidies even for their yachts? Oh, wait …
Second, welfare subsidies for yachts. The mortgage-interest deduction was meant to encourage a home-owning middle class. But it has been extended to provide subsidies for beach homes and even yachts.
In the meantime, money was slashed last year from the public housing program for America’s neediest. Hmm. How about if we house the homeless in these publicly supported yachts?
Third, welfare subsidies for hedge funds and private equity. The single most outrageous tax loophole in America is for “carried interest,” allowing people with the highest earnings to pay paltry taxes. They can magically reclassify their earned income as capital gains, because that carries a lower tax rate (a maximum of 23.8 percent this year, compared with a maximum of 39.6 percent for earned income).
Let’s just tax capital gains at earned income rates, as we did under President Ronald Reagan, that notorious scourge of capitalism.
Fourth, welfare subsidies for America’s biggest banks. The too-big-to-fail banks in the United States borrow money unusually cheaply because of an implicit government promise to rescue them. Bloomberg View calculated last year that this amounts to a taxpayer subsidy of $83 billion to our 10 biggest banks annually.
President Obama has proposed a bank tax to curb this subsidy, and this year a top Republican lawmaker, Dave Camp, endorsed the idea as well. Big banks are lobbying like crazy to keep their subsidy.
Fifth, large welfare subsidies for American corporations from cities, counties and states. A bit more than a year ago, Louise Story of The New York Times tallied more than $80 billion a year in subsidies to companies, mostly as incentives to operate locally. (Conflict alert: The New York Times Company is among those that have received millions of dollars from city and state authorities.)
You see where I’m going. We talk about the unsustainability of government benefit programs and the deleterious effects these can have on human behavior, and these are real issues. Well-meaning programs for supporting single moms can create perverse incentives not to marry, or aid meant for a needy child may be misused to buy drugs. Let’s acknowledge that helping people is a complex, uncertain and imperfect struggle.
But, perhaps because we now have the wealthiest Congress in history, the first in which a majority of members are millionaires, we have a one-sided discussion demanding cuts only in public assistance to the poor, while ignoring public assistance to the rich. And a one-sided discussion leads to a one-sided and myopic policy.
We’re cutting one kind of subsidized food — food stamps — at a time when Gallup finds that almost one-fifth of American families struggled in 2013 to afford food. Meanwhile, we ignore more than $12 billion annually in tax subsidies for corporate meals and entertainment.
Sure, food stamps are occasionally misused, but anyone familiar with business knows that the abuse of food subsidies is far greater in the corporate suite. Every time an executive wines and dines a hot date on the corporate dime, the average taxpayer helps foot the bill.
So let’s get real. To stem abuses, the first target shouldn’t be those avaricious infants in nutrition programs but tycoons in their subsidized Gulfstreams.
However imperfectly, subsidies for the poor do actually reduce hunger, ease suffering and create opportunity, while subsidies for the rich result in more private jets and yachts. Would we rather subsidize opportunity or yachts? Which kind of subsidies deserve more scrutiny?
Some conservatives get this, including Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma. He has urged “scaling back ludicrous handouts to millionaires that expose an entitlement system and tax code that desperately need to be reformed.”
After all, quite apart from the waste, we don’t want to coddle zillionaires and thereby sap their initiative!
By: Nicholas D. Kristof, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, March 26, 2014
“Can Liberals Trust John Roberts To Rescue Obamacare Again?”: A Pro-Hobby Lobby Ruling Would Be His Most Radical Decision
Most Supreme Court watchers are fixated these days on Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby—the important challenge to the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate scheduled for argument Tuesday. And why wouldn’t they be? With its potent mix of religion, sex, Obamacare, and prayerful corporations, it’s the blockbuster case of the term. It is also a crucial test of Chief Justice John Roberts’s leadership on the Supreme Court.
Just two years ago, Roberts cast the deciding vote to largely uphold the Affordable Care Act. While the country remains divided over whether he acted like a traitor or a statesman, all would have to agree that, given the level of public scrutiny on the Court and the case’s overall importance (both substantively and to the President’s legacy), Roberts’s ACA vote was the defining moment of his tenure thus far. In a bold move, he broke ranks with his conservative colleagues, joined with the Court’s progressive wing, and preserved the President’s signature achievement. In Hobby Lobby, Roberts meets the ACA yet again, and the stakes for his reputation—and that of his Court—couldn’t be higher.
Chief Justice Roberts has often spoken about how important it is for the justices to maintain the legitimacy of the Court—by limiting divisive rulings, moving the law incrementally, and trying to stay above politics. For instance, in an interview with Jeffrey Rosen early in his tenure as chief justice, Roberts explained that the Court is “ripe for a … refocus on functioning as an institution, because if it doesn’t it’s going to lose its credibility and legitimacy.” Expressing admiration for the great Chief Justice John Marshall, Roberts added that, even as a committed Federalist, Marshall preferred to move the law “in a way that … wasn’t going to alienate people on the Court and turn the Court into another battleground.” While commentators certainly quibble over just how radical an effect John Roberts has had on the law—even Justice Antonin Scalia once attacked the chief justice’s approach in a pre-Citizens United campaign finance case as “faux judicial restraint”—there’s little question that Roberts himself prefers the image of the modest jurist to that of judge-as-hero (think Earl Warren) or judge-as-prophet (think Scalia).
He cultivated this image most dramatically in the first ACA case, joining with his progressive colleagues to uphold a Democratic president’s most important achievement—and in the middle of an election year, no less. Furthermore, just last term, the Roberts Court managed to reach an unlikely compromise in a blockbuster affirmative action case, and Roberts himself preserved the marriage-equality status quo in California with his majority opinion in Hollingsworth v. Perry. However, even in areas where Roberts has pushed the law dramatically to the right (like voting rights), he has tended to prefer a slower-moving, more incremental approach than his more radical colleagues, with seismic shifts (like Shelby County v. Holder) coming only after the political ground has already been prepared with previous, more modest decisions (like NAMUDNO v. Holder)—legal warning shots, if you will. He has also chipped away at progressive laws in a series of low-profile cases—for instance, those on the Court’s business docket. This strategy allows him to move the law to the right, while also preserving the institutional legitimacy of the Court.
Through this lens, Hobby Lobby presents a potential dilemma for the savvy Chief Justice. In the case, Hobby Lobby, a craft-store chain owned by Southern Baptists, is suing the government to seek religious exemption from the ACA’s requirement that it offer insurance plans to employees that cover contraception at no extra cost. On the one hand, Roberts is confronting the ACA for the first time since the conservative firestorm over his decision largely upholding the Act. There’s little doubt that he’ll be tempted to throw conservatives a bone, siding with Hobby Lobby and against the ACA.
On the other hand, a vote in favor of Hobby Lobby requires the chief justice to do at least three things that threaten major disruptive consequences and present serious downstream risks for the Court as an institution. First, he must conclude that corporations have the same rights to religious freedom as living, breathing humans—something that the Supreme Court has never done. Second, he must unsettle centuries of well-established corporate law practice—a move at loggerheads with the Roberts Court’s (and John Roberts’s own) pro-corporate leanings. And, third, he must extend unprecedented protections to a secular employer, therefore opening the floodgates to new religious freedom challenges to countless other laws. In short, a vote for Hobby Lobby means endorsing a radical departure from well-settled precedent—perhaps nowhere more strikingly than in the realm of religious freedom.
In the decades leading up to the Supreme Court’s 1990 landmark decision in Employment Division v. Smith, courts heard many free exercise challenges. For the most part, they followed a familiar pattern: A law applied to everyone in a given jurisdiction; someone came to court and claimed a religious objection to that law; and the court ultimately rejected that challenger’s claim. This was true in the Supreme Court and, as explained by Professor James Ryan, it was also true in the lower courts. The bottom line—whether you were an Amish employer refusing to pay Social Security taxes or an army doctor wishing to wear a yarmulke while on duty, you were probably going to lose your free exercise claim.
Then along came Smith—a free exercise decision that hit the legal and political world like a thunderbolt. The case involved Native Americans dismissed from their jobs for failing a drug test. (They had smoked peyote during a religious ceremony.) Because of this drug use—religiously motivated or not—Oregon then denied them unemployment benefits. When they challenged this action on free exercise grounds, the Court rejected their claim. However, rather than simply applying the Court’s traditional balancing test (where the Court weighed a given law’s burden on religion against the governmental interest advanced by the law), Justice Scalia struck a radical pose, shelving it for a bright-line rule that was even less protective of religious objectors—and hence the controversy.
Of course, under the pre-Smith test, religious objectors were already losing these cases. Following Smith, they were only slightly more likely to do so. Nevertheless, Congress responded to Scalia’s decision by enacting a new law explicitly overturning Smith and restoring the pre-Smith status quo, but all that really did was reestablish an environment where free exercise claims rarely succeeded.
Given this legal backdrop, the key question for Roberts leading up to the Hobby Lobby argument is whether he’ll stick with this traditional approach or adopt a new, more stringent test—one even stricter than anything that existed in the pre-Smith world. If the chief justice takes the more radical path—and, more importantly, if he convinces at least four of his colleagues to go along with him—Hobby Lobby could, indeed, live up to the hype and become a truly revolutionary case.
For instance, such a ruling would entangle lower courts and the Roberts Court itself in knotty free exercise challenges (and a lot of them)—challenges that would potentially require judges to define what counts as “religious belief,” assess the sincerity of those beliefs that pass muster, and apply the traditional balancing test with serious bite. Courts have balked at going down this path in the past—and for good reason. Furthermore, the Supreme Court has never granted a religious accommodation to a secular business that comes at the expense of its employees—an unprecedented move that would allow secular employers to effectively impose their own religious views on the employees, even in the face of contrary laws.
In the end, however tempted Chief Justice Roberts may be to strike a blow to Obamacare in this highly publicized, blockbuster case—and however much his conservative colleagues may be pulling him in that direction—Roberts can’t give in to these pressures without tarnishing his carefully cultivated image as a cautious jurist and, in the process, unleashing a wave of unpredictable (and risky) consequences.
By: Tom Donnelly, Counsel at Constitutional Accountability Center; The New Republic, March 24, 2014
“Media Atonement Day”: Media Response To Iraq War Anniversary, What Iraq War?
As you may have noticed—or rather, not noticed—few in the media paid any attention to last week’s 11th anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, an event which had, oh, a few consequences. This seemed especially odd, and revealing, since US vets are still dying from their wounds and brain injuries and committing suicide in still growing numbers—not to mention the continuing toll in Iraq (more bombings killing dozens seemingly to mark the anniversary).
Last year on the 10th anniversary there was a good deal of coverage, which I guess we can’t expect for any year that doesn’t end in zero (see: Hiroshima). But still: almost no coverage or probing or re-capping at all? Perhaps the media are rightly still embarrassed by their performance in the run-up to the war, which helped make it possible…inevitable.
That makes it all the more important for them to re-visit their massive failures, especially with new calls for US intervention abroad. Consider how close we came to bombing Syria (or more) just a few months back, based on sketchy evidence, and calls from “liberal hawks” like Keller and Kristof to take military action there. And now: Crimea and the Ukraine. Maybe: Iran (still).
That’s why I like the idea proposed elsewhere of naming the anniversary of our invasion of Iraq, March 20, henceforth as “Media Atonement Day.” Well, I’ve tried to do my part by posting about 20 stories, items and videos here in the past ten days or at my Pressing Issues blog.
Will Media Atonement Day happen? Don’t bet on it. To illustrate, let me direct you to a piece written by the great Charles P. Pierce exactly one year ago. This followed a controversy over the Washington Post killing a piece they had assigned to me, reviewing media missteps in the run-up to the Iraq war and any later mea culpas. A couple of excerpts from his rant:
Before we begun, let us partially immunize ourselves with a dose of The Washington Post, the largest and deadliest blight ever to afflict elite political journalism. Last week, apparently, they engaged Greg Mitchell of The Nation to write a piece analyzing the performance of the elite political media in the run-up to the Iraq debacle. (The Post has spent the years since helping to launch the disaster giving jobs to a lot of the people behind it, including word-‘ho Michael Gerson and torture-porn enthusiast Marc Thiessen.) Mitchell turned in the piece and it was killed by the Post, a formerly great newspaper now sucking hind tit on the lucrative scam that is the educational-testing industry. However, the Post did run another piece arguing that elite political journalism did not suck as much pondwater as it has been accused of sucking….
And:
These are the people who publish Thiessen on torture, George Effing Will’s experiments with climate-change denialism, and Michael Gerson on anything. These are people who will publish any prominent conservative who can find a crayon. Here’s my broader analytical point — everyone associated with The Washington Post editorial page — and a lot of the executives on the news side, especially the ones that buried Walter Pincus’s great work back on A13 — are complicit in hundreds of thousands of deaths, and they should all have their heads shaved, the phrase “I fked up the world” tattooed on their scalps, and sent off to work in the wards at Walter Reed until they collapse from exhaustion. My insights are fairly well summed up by the phrase, “Shut the fk up forever.”
But it’s never too late to catch up with how the war happened and proceeded, and the media failtures, via my book, So Wrong for So Long.
By: Greg Mitchell, The Nation, March 21, 2014
“No Separating The Son From The Father”: What Rand Paul Can Learn From George W. Bush’s Daddy Issues
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) recently told my Daily Caller colleague Alex Pappas that he has “pretty much quit answering” questions about his controversial father, former Texas Rep. Ron Paul.
Referencing George W. Bush’s campaign for president in 2000, Paul continued: “Did he get tons of questions about his dad? … I don’t know that he did, to tell you the truth.”
This is a silly semantic game for Paul to play. Whether or not George W. Bush was directly asked a lot of questions about George H.W. Bush in the run-up to the 2000 race is almost irrelevant. Because it is something close to an irrefutable fact that the elder Bush has loomed large over W.’s career and life for decades. In the minds of millions of Americans, there was no separating the son from the father — much in the same way there is no separating Hillary from Bill, or Jeb from a pair of Georges.
A simple search of the news archives is telling. As far back as 1978, when George W. Bush lost a bid for Congress, Bush declared: “We don’t need dad in this race.” When his opponent attacked him over his family connections and pedigree, Bush responded: “Would you like me to run as Sam Smith? The problem is I can’t abandon my background. I’m not trying to hide behind any facade.”
George H.W. Bush was a congressman, director of the CIA, vice president, and president. It is a legacy no son could escape — particularly a son who entered his father’s profession.
Ron Paul does not have nearly the record that the first President Bush did. But he is still a leading political figure in his own right. Perhaps the country’s most famous libertarian, the maverick congressman from Texas has an extremely passionate following, and became a nationally known figure thanks to several failed presidential bids. Rand Paul is kidding himself if he thinks he won’t have to deal with his dad’s legacy.
If after four years in the political limelight, Rand is already tired of answering questions about his dad, well, he’s got a long haul ahead of him. The “fortunate son” charge first lodged against Bush in 1978 was leveled more than two decades later, during the 2000 GOP primary. “If [John] McCain’s book is titled Faith of My Fathers,” quipped Margaret Carlson, “Bush’s should be called Friends of My Father.”
Of course, George W. Bush also faced the challenge of subtly distancing himself from his father’s “read my lips” flip-flopping image, without throwing the old man under the bus. Today, it’s easy to see 41 as a wise old statesman, but in 1999 and 2000, skeptical conservatives still didn’t trust the Bush clan.
The good news for the younger Bush was that after eight years of President Bill Clinton, Republicans were desperate for a winner (and the perception of being a winner can cover a multitude of perceived sins).
And for us mainstream conservatives, word had gotten out that Dubya was more conservative than his father — that he was “one of us.” He came of age studying Lee Atwater’s campaign style and Ronald Reagan’s political philosophy, we were told. The son was not like the father, the whispers went, answering questions we all had, even if they weren’t asked of the candidate himself.
Good luck finding any contemporaneous documentation to back this up, mind you. You’ll just have to take my word for it. We conservatives were somewhat quiet about it. But a 2003 Bill Keller article retroactively confirms this messaging: “That Bush is Reaganesque is a conceit that some conservatives have wishfully, tentatively embraced since he emerged as a candidate, and one that Bush himself has encouraged,” Keller noted. “The party faithful have been pining for a new Reagan since Reagan, and for Bush the analogy has the added virtue of providing an alternative political lineage; he’s not Daddy’s Boy, he’s Reagan Jr.” (Emphasis added)
For all the talk about Poppy and Dubya — and I’m sure they have a strong bond — the backers of George W. Bush had to burn a lot of calories distancing the son from his old man. And this lasted well into his presidency. “When Bob Woodward asked President Bush if he had consulted with his father about the decision to go to war in Iraq,” Bob Herbert recalled in 2005, “the president famously replied, ‘There is a higher father that I appeal to.'”
Similarly, Rand cannot escape his father, just as Jeb and George W. couldn’t, and just as Hillary Clinton cannot escape her husband. “Hillary Clinton spent eight years in the Senate and four at the State Department,” says Dave Weigel, “but has to answer for her husband’s actions in the mid-1990s. Paul, with three years behind him in the Senate, says he does not have to answer for what his father does right now.”
I’m not sure it’s fair to judge anyone based on the sins of their father, the successes of their father, or whom they’re married to. But these comparisons and questions are inescapable, and have always been so. Rand Paul cannot appeal to historical precedence to evade comparisons to his dad. Because fair or not, voters still want to know how far the apple falls from the tree — and they always have.
By: Matt K. Lewis, The Week, March 24, 2014
“The New Tribalism”: Not That Different From What’s Happening In The Rest Of The World
We are witnessing a reversion to tribalism around the world, away from nation states. The same pattern can be seen even in America – especially in American politics.
Before the rise of the nation-state, between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, the world was mostly tribal. Tribes were united by language, religion, blood, and belief. They feared other tribes and often warred against them. Kings and emperors imposed temporary truces, at most.
But in the past three hundred years the idea of nationhood took root in most of the world. Members of tribes started to become citizens, viewing themselves as a single people with patriotic sentiments and duties toward their homeland. Although nationalism never fully supplanted tribalism in some former colonial territories, the transition from tribe to nation was mostly completed by the mid twentieth century.
Over the last several decades, though, technology has whittled away the underpinnings of the nation state. National economies have become so intertwined that economic security depends less on national armies than on financial transactions around the world. Global corporations play nations off against each other to get the best deals on taxes and regulations.
News and images move so easily across borders that attitudes and aspirations are no longer especially national. Cyber-weapons, no longer the exclusive province of national governments, can originate in a hacker’s garage.
Nations are becoming less relevant in a world where everyone and everything is interconnected. The connections that matter most are again becoming more personal. Religious beliefs and affiliations, the nuances of one’s own language and culture, the daily realities of class, and the extensions of one’s family and its values – all are providing people with ever greater senses of identity.
The nation state, meanwhile, is coming apart. A single Europe – which seemed within reach a few years ago – is now succumbing to the centrifugal forces of its different languages and cultures. The Soviet Union is gone, replaced by nations split along tribal lines. Vladimir Putin can’t easily annex the whole of Ukraine, only the Russian-speaking part. The Balkans have been Balkanized.
Separatist movements have broken out all over — Czechs separating from Slovaks; Kurds wanting to separate from Iraq, Syria, and Turkey; even the Scots seeking separation from England.
The turmoil now consuming much of the Middle East stems less from democratic movements trying to topple dictatorships than from ancient tribal conflicts between the two major denominations of Isam – Sunni and Shia.
And what about America? The world’s “melting pot” is changing color. Between the 2000 and 2010 census the share of the U.S. population calling itself white dropped from 69 to 64 percent, and more than half of the nation’s population growth came from Hispanics.
It’s also becoming more divided by economic class. Increasingly, the rich seem to inhabit a different country than the rest.
But America’s new tribalism can be seen most distinctly in its politics. Nowadays the members of one tribe (calling themselves liberals, progressives, and Democrats) hold sharply different views and values than the members of the other (conservatives, Tea Partiers, and Republicans).
Each tribe has contrasting ideas about rights and freedoms (for liberals, reproductive rights and equal marriage rights; for conservatives, the right to own a gun and do what you want with your property).
Each has its own totems (social insurance versus smaller government) and taboos (cutting entitlements or raising taxes). Each, its own demons (the Tea Party and Ted Cruz; the Affordable Care Act and Barack Obama); its own version of truth (one believes in climate change and evolution; the other doesn’t); and its own media that confirm its beliefs.
The tribes even look different. One is becoming blacker, browner, and more feminine. The other, whiter and more male. (Only 2 percent of Mitt Romney’s voters were African-American, for example.)
Each tribe is headed by rival warlords whose fighting has almost brought the national government in Washington to a halt. Increasingly, the two tribes live separately in their own regions – blue or red state, coastal or mid-section, urban or rural – with state or local governments reflecting their contrasting values.
I’m not making a claim of moral equivalence. Personally, I think the Republican right has gone off the deep end, and if polls are to be believed a majority of Americans agree with me.
But the fact is, the two tribes are pulling America apart, often putting tribal goals over the national interest – which is not that different from what’s happening in the rest of the world.
By: Robert Reich, The Robert Reich Blog, March 23, 2014
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