“Priority Deficit Disorder”: When Congressional Republicans’ Homework And Playtime Are At Odds
Back in March, just two months into the new Congress, Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.) conceded that he had a small problem. He’d been assigned the task of working on loan guarantees for clean-energy companies, and was supposed to write legislation. But that never happened — Kelly got distracted.
His spokesperson said at the time, “It was a priority, and it remains an issue of interest. But Mike’s efforts shifted when he chose to focus more on holding the administration accountable with regards to Fast and Furious. And then when the Benghazi tragedy occurred, that took the cake.”
In other words, there was real work to do, but the Pennsylvania Republican couldn’t get to it because he decided made-up political “scandals” were a better use of his time.
Six months later, those attitudes continue to dominate the House GOP’s thinking.
Republicans on Capitol Hill are acknowledging that the fall’s looming fiscal fights could peel attention away from their investigation into the IRS’s singling out of conservative groups. […]
But Republicans have also made the IRS investigation a key part of their recent political message, at a time when the agency is trying to implement the Democratic healthcare law that conservatives are itching to defund. The controversy has also helped revive a Tea Party movement that had been flagging in recent months.
With all that in mind, GOP aides stress that the congressional investigation into the IRS will be moving full speed ahead, even as a potential debt default takes up much of the oxygen in the halls of Congress.
This will, by the way, include even more hearings into the discredited controversy.
John Feehery, a GOP strategist, told The Hill that Republicans “have to make the connection” between the non-existent IRS story and the Affordable Care Act “because it’s so hot right now.”
Oh for crying out loud.
Look, the House of Representatives is in session only nine days this month. Nine. Congress just took a four-week break, but the Republican-led lower chamber apparently wants to ease back into their work schedule.
On the to-do list? A budget crisis, a debt-ceiling crisis, a farm bill, immigration reform, appropriations bills, and fixing the Voting Rights Act. It’s simply unrealistic to think the dysfunctional House will complete all of these tasks, or even most of them, anytime soon, though a couple of these are non-optional.
But despite all of this work that remains undone, much of which should have been completed before the August recess, House GOP leaders are still eager to invest time and energy in a “scandal” that no longer makes any sense. Why? Apparently because it’s “so hot right now.”
It reminds me a lot of a child who prioritizes playtime over homework. Sure, the homework is important, but it’s not nearly as fun or satisfying as playing — so the child decides some of the homework just won’t get done.
Republicans remain a post-policy party. They have real work to do, which they will neglect because their shiny plaything has a firm grip on their limited attention span.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 3, 2013
“We Agree With The Same Red Line, Actually”: Let’s Not Pretend It Was A Position Most Republicans Didn’t Approve Of
House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) issued a statement this afternoon that left his position on Syria unclear, though he complained that President Obama “has some work to do to recover from his grave missteps in Syria.”
Curiously, the Wisconsin Republican didn’t say what “grave missteps” he disapproves of. When GOP lawmakers generally make this complaint, they’re referring to Obama last year declaring Syria’s use of chemical weapons a “red line” that the Assad government must not cross.
But Ryan really isn’t in a position to make this complaint. As CNBC’s Eamon Javers noted today, this was the exchange from last year’s vice presidential candidates’ debate:
RADDATZ: What happens if Assad does not fall? Congressman Ryan, what happens to the region? What happens if he hangs on? What happens if he does?
RYAN: Then Iran keeps their greatest ally in the region. He’s a sponsor of terrorism. He’ll probably continue slaughtering his people. We and the world community will lose our credibility on this….
RADDATZ: So what would Romney-Ryan do about that credibility?
RYAN: Well, we agree with the same red line, actually, they do on chemical weapons, but not putting American troops in, other than to secure those chemical weapons. They’re right about that.
I mention this in part because, just over the last week or so, it seems the conventional wisdom has coalesced around the belief that Obama was irresponsible last year by making his “red line” remarks, which may have helped lock his administration into a course of action. Whether or not the president’s stated position was the right call is certainly a topic worthy of debate.
But let’s not pretend it was a position Republicans broadly disapproved of last year, or really at any time up until two weeks ago. When Paul Ryan declared that his party “agrees with the same line,” it’s not like there was a great hullabaloo at the time about the congressman’s break with GOP orthodoxy.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 13, 2013
“Correlation Does Not Imply Causation”: The Myth Of Murderous Chicago, Neat, Simple And Wrong
A neatly typed letter arrived at the office the other day. It included a check made out to the National Rifle Association, on my behalf.
The reader, disgruntled by my call for reasonable gun control laws, thought it pertinent to take another lick at one of the right wing’s favorite whipping boys: Chicago. “If one thinks that gun control works,” he wrote, “I would ask them why Chicago, with some of the most restrictive gun laws in the nation, had over 500 homicides in 2012.”
For those who don’t watch Fox News or regularly peruse WorldNetDaily, this is a favorite theme on the right. Chicago is the murder capital of the nation, and also its gun control capital. I will disprove that first contention in a moment, but first let’s take the implied argument at face value: Gun control laws permit more murders to happen.
Correlation does not imply causation, but for a moment let’s enter the wingnut world where it does. In 2012, there were 507 homicides in Chicago. Ten years earlier, the statistic was 656. Ten years before that, it was 943. Holy cow! Chicago’s anti-gun laws must be working!
Not so fast. The murder rate has declined sharply across the country in the last 20 years. Chicago might still be at the top of the heap for murders. Indeed, 507 is a big number, the biggest of any city in the U.S. in 2012. But Chicago is a big place. The key is to take the number of murders, multiply by 100,000 and then divide by the population. That gives you the standard expression of the homicide rate: murders per 100,000.
How does Chicago stack up? Turns out it’s a dangerous place, but not even in the top 20 most deadly cities. Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn unraveled the myth of his city in a July piece that crunched preliminary FBI data on homicides, noting Chicago was safer than, among others places, Detroit, Philadelphia, Atlanta, New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Little Rock, Kansas City, Montgomery, Memphis and Richmond.
And in 2013, Chicago’s homicide numbers are down. Zorn pointed out that in the first six months of 2013, there were 26 percent fewer murders than the prior year, the lowest raw number since 1965.
Explaining changes in the murder rate on the basis of a single factor, such as stricter gun control laws, is at best quack social science. Peruse the list of the top 20 cities by homicide rate and you will see metropolises in Northern blue states and Southern red ones, on the East Coast and the West Coast and smack in the heartland – all with gun restrictions that vary with regional preference.
So why do conservatives love to portray Chicago as a wasteland of bloodshed? Simple. Chicago is President Obama’s hometown, long a political stronghold for Democratic politics. For many, that’s reason enough to demonize the city, to degrade it by twisting something as dire as murder to fit an ideological narrative.
This is not an argument that everything in Chicago is hunky-dory. What about August reports that with the opening of Chicago’s public schools, hundreds of city employees were necessary to escort students through dangerous parts of town? And what about all of those headlines from the summer, like 4th of July weekend, during which 72 people were shot and 12 killed?
All true.
However, what citywide statistics don’t show is that over the last 20 years a great divide has opened up between Chicago neighborhoods in terms of safety, even as murders have dropped by half. As Daniel Hertz, a masters student at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, put it in his blog, City Notes, “at the same time as overall crime has declined, the inequality of violence in Chicago has skyrocketed.”
Hertz points out that crime and violence were never evenly distributed in Chicago, but that if you compare the present to the “bad old days” of the early 1990s – as he did, using Chicago Police data – you see that the relatively safe areas advanced to Toronto levels of security, while some marginal neighborhoods (including those near the city center and those in or near gentrifying areas) made stunning progress. Sadly, some neighborhoods, particularly on the South and West Sides, are more violent than they were in the 1990s, which is staggering to imagine.
Another way to put it is that violent crime, like income and wealth, is unevenly distributed in Chicago – and that this maldistribution is getting more extreme. I don’t have the data to say for sure, but I would guess that the same story is repeated in most of the other contenders for America’s murder capital.
Do you really want to solve the violent crime problem? Start by recognizing that guns travel. They go unimpeded from jurisdictions where they are easily gotten to places where they are not. Violence stays put.
Easy access to guns is just the icing. It’s the explosive fuse atop a long stack of community woes. There’s a 20th-century problem we haven’t solved: the inequality between races, between city and suburb, between ghetto and the leafier urban districts that Americans are falling in love with again. Every shooting in Chicago should remind us that we have failed.
By: Mary Sanchez, The Kansas City Star, Published in McClatchy, August 30, 2013
“Love For Labor Is Lost”: Politicians Today Can’t Even Bring Themselves To Fake Respect For Ordinary Workers
It wasn’t always about the hot dogs. Originally, believe it or not, Labor Day actually had something to do with showing respect for labor.
Here’s how it happened: In 1894 Pullman workers, facing wage cuts in the wake of a financial crisis, went on strike — and Grover Cleveland deployed 12,000 soldiers to break the union. He succeeded, but using armed force to protect the interests of property was so blatant that even the Gilded Age was shocked. So Congress, in a lame attempt at appeasement, unanimously passed legislation symbolically honoring the nation’s workers.
It’s all hard to imagine now. Not the bit about financial crisis and wage cuts — that’s going on all around us. Not the bit about the state serving the interests of the wealthy — look at who got bailed out, and who didn’t, after our latter-day version of the Panic of 1893. No, what’s unimaginable now is that Congress would unanimously offer even an empty gesture of support for workers’ dignity. For the fact is that many of today’s politicians can’t even bring themselves to fake respect for ordinary working Americans.
Consider, for example, how Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, marked Labor Day last year: with a Twitter post declaring “Today, we celebrate those who have taken a risk, worked hard, built a business and earned their own success.” Yep, he saw Labor Day as an occasion to honor business owners.
More broadly, consider the ever-widening definition of those whom conservatives consider parasites. Time was when their ire was directed at bums on welfare. But even at the program’s peak, the number of Americans on “welfare” — Aid to Families With Dependent Children — never exceeded about 5 percent of the population. And that program’s far less generous successor, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, reaches less than 2 percent of Americans.
Yet even as the number of Americans on what we used to consider welfare has declined, the number of citizens the right considers “takers” rather than “makers” — people of whom Mitt Romney complained, “I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives” — has exploded, to encompass almost half the population. And the great majority of this newly defined army of moochers consists of working families that don’t pay income taxes but do pay payroll taxes (most of the rest are elderly).
How can someone who works for a living be considered the moral equivalent of a bum on welfare? Well, part of the answer is that many people on the right engage in word games: they talk about how someone doesn’t pay income taxes, and hope that their listeners fail to notice the word “income” and forget about all the other taxes lower-income working Americans pay.
But it is also true that modern America, while it has pretty much eliminated traditional welfare, does have other programs designed to help the less well-off — notably the earned-income tax credit, food stamps and Medicaid. The majority of these programs’ beneficiaries are either children, the elderly or working adults — this is true by definition for the tax credit, which only supplements earned income, and turns out in practice to be true of the other programs. So if you consider someone who works hard trying to make ends meet, but also gets some help from the government, a “taker,” you’re going to have contempt for a very large number of American workers and their families.
Oh, and just wait until Obamacare kicks in, and millions more working Americans start receiving subsidies to help them purchase health insurance.
You might ask why we should provide any aid to working Americans — after all, they aren’t completely destitute. But the fact is that economic inequality has soared over the past few decades, and while a handful of people have stratospheric incomes, a far larger number of Americans find that no matter how hard they work, they can’t afford the basics of a middle-class existence — health insurance in particular, but even putting food on the table can be a problem. Saying that they can use some help shouldn’t make us think any less of them, and it certainly shouldn’t reduce the respect we grant to anyone who works hard and plays by the rules.
But obviously that’s not the way everyone sees it. In particular, there are evidently a lot of wealthy people in America who consider anyone who isn’t wealthy a loser — an attitude that has clearly gotten stronger as the gap between the 1 percent and everyone else has widened. And such people have a lot of friends in Washington.
So, this time around will we be hearing anything from Mr. Cantor and his colleagues suggesting that they actually do respect people who work for a living? Maybe. But the one thing we’ll know for sure is that they don’t mean it.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, September 1, 2013
“Rand Paul’s Dangerous Lasik Obsession”: But When It Comes To The Uninsured, Nobody Has A Right To Health Care
Senator Rand Paul has spent much of the August recess engaged in typical political activities—attending a roundtable on school reform, participating in a fundraiser for a fellow Republican, and speaking at a local ham breakfast. But Paul also set aside some time for one more unusual activity: Helping some people to see. Paul, an ophthalmologist, performed several eye surgeries. All of them were for patients who don’t have insurance. And he donated his services for free.
I know what you’re thinking: Paul and his advisers decided to publicize his day of charity care, in order to create the impression that he’s a do-gooder. You’re probably right. I first learned about it from an article by Katrina Trinko of National Review, who was on the scene to write about it. So were some other reporters, including a television crew. They didn’t get there by accident. But who cares? Maybe Paul was looking for good headlines or maybe he was trying to keep up his skills. (Senate rules prohibit him from maintaining a private practice while in office.) Regardless, Paul appears to have a genuine history of charity work: According to his official biography, he helped establish the Southern Kentucky Lions Eye Clinic and has won awards for his humanitarian work. Now, thanks to this latest surgical effort, a handful of people have better sight. Good for them and good for Rand Paul.
Of course, as Trinko’s story makes clear, Paul would have you believe that his good deeds—and his experience as a physician—justify his positions on health care policy. That’s another matter entirely. Paul is a well-known critic of government-run and government-regulated health care programs, starting with the Affordable Care Act. The opposition is in many ways philosophical: Nobody has a “right” to health care, he says, because that would mean people have a right to commandeer the labor of those who provide care. Trinko, in her article, quotes Paul explaining this position during a speaking event:
“As humans, yeah, we do have an obligation to give people water, to give people food, to give people health care,” Paul muses. “But it’s not a right because once you conscript people and say, ‘Oh, it’s a right,’ then really you’re in charge, it’s servitude, you’re in charge of me and I’m supposed to do whatever you tell me to do. . . . It really shouldn’t be seen that way.”
It’s a strange, almost nonsensical argument, for reasons that Paul Waldman notes at the American Prospect:
saying that health care is a right doesn’t mean that doctors have to treat people without being paid, any more than saying that education is a right means that public school teachers have to work for free. Because we all agree that education is a right, we set up a system where every child can be educated, whether their families could afford to pay for it themselves or not. It doesn’t mean that any kid can walk up to a teacher in the street and say, “I command you to teach me trigonometry for free. Be at my house at 9 tomorrow. You must do this, because I have a right to education and that means I am in charge of you and you’re supposed to do whatever I tell you to do.”
Of course, Paul is also making a practical argument. With less government interference and regulation, and more people paying for services directly rather than through insurance, the market would bring down prices on its own—and medical care would become more affordable for everybody. As proof, he points to a procedure ophthalmologists know well: Lasik, the laser eye surgery that eliminates the need for glasses or contact lenses. Via Trinko, again:
“Insurance doesn’t cover Lasik surgery, the surgery to get rid of glasses,” Paul remarks. “So it started at about $2,000 an eye, maybe even $2,500 an eye, and it’s down in some communities to under $500 an eye because competition works and people call on average four doctors to get the price and see how much it’s going to cost.”
Libertarians and conservatives love to cite Lasik. But Lasik tells you almost nothing about the rest of the health care system, for reasons Jeff Levin-Scherz, a physician at the Harvard School of Public Health, has pointed out:
1. Lasik surgery is entirely elective. No one NEEDS it!
2. Lasik surgery is never an emergency. Hence, it’s much more “shoppable” than most health care
3. Lasik surgery is highly automated—the computers actually do a substantial amount of the work. Therefore quality is more uniform than most health care
4. There is very high fixed cost for the Lasik laser—and the low variable cost makes it more likely that providers will price this at “marginal” cost—leading to large discounts. That’s not true of cognitive services.
Ten extra visits with a neurologists cost almost ten times as much as a single visit given the large variable cost of the neurologist’s labor. Ten extra Lasik surgeries cost only a small amount more than a single surgery—since the cost of the ophthalmologist and technician is a relatively smaller portion of the total cost.
And that’s not to mention the fact that the Lasik market has been prone to more problems than promoters like Paul let on. Paul Ginsburg, the economist and president of the Center for the Study of Health Systems Change, testified about this some years ago:
LASIK has the greatest potential for effective price shopping because it is elective, non-urgent, and consumers can get somewhat useful price information over the telephone. Prices have indeed fallen over time. But consumer protection problems have tarnished this market, with both the Federal Trade Commission and some state attorneys general intervening to curb deceptive advertising and poorly communicated bundling practices. Many of us have seen LASIK advertisements for prices of $299 per eye, but in fact only a tiny proportion of consumers seeking the LASIK procedure meet the clinical qualifications for those prices. Indeed, only 3 percent of LASIK procedures cost less than $1,000 per eye, and the average price is about $2,000.
Mostly, though, the problem with Paul’s position on health care reform is the number of people it leaves out. Like every other Republican who has demanded repeal of Obamacare, he’s never proposed anything that would come close to covering as many people, or providing the same level of protection. On the contrary, he’s proposed radical changes to Medicaid that would almost certainly even higher rates of uninsurance than exist today.
According to Trinko’s article, one of the patients Paul treats is a 55-year-old woman. She says she has no insurance because it would cost her $700 a month—money that she doesn’t have. Under Obamacare, people in her position would be eligible for subsidies worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars a month—or they’d have a chance to enroll in Medicaid, as long as their state officials weren’t refusing to participate Obamacare’s expansion of the program.
Paul helped that woman to see. But if he has his way, millions of Americans in similar situations won’t be as lucky. They won’t have the same access to care or they’ll face financial ruin. Ultimately, what Paul does at a surgical center matters a lot less than what he does at the Capitol—or, potentially, the White House.
By: Jonathan Cohn, Senior Editor, The New Republic, August 27, 2013
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 