“Scottie’s Star Trek Tricks”: Rick Scott’s Parallel Universe Of Ideological “Facts”
Via Think Progress, another item from the ever-increasing database of “facts” Republicans use to buttress ideologically dictated positions comes from everybody’s favorite health care expert, Florida Gov. Rick Scott.
Scott has been bruiting it about that his refusal to implement the Medicaid expansion provided for in the Affordable Care Act, which would have supplied health insurance to a cool million residents of that steamy state, was based on its vast cost: $26 billion over ten years in new state costs!
Them’s a lot of dollars, to be sure. But turns out Scott just kinda made the number up, or more accurately, didn’t bother to share the preposterous assumptions needed to generate it. Health News Florida explains:
The state’s chief economist has warned the staff of Gov. Rick Scott that his Medicaid cost estimates are wrong, but Scott keeps using them anyway, according to a series of e-mails obtained by Health News Florida.
Scott says he opposes expanding Florida Medicaid because it would cost too much: $63 billion over 10 years, he says, with the state paying $26 billion of that.
But those numbers are based on a flawed report, according to a legislative budget analyst and State Economist Amy Baker. A series of e-mails obtained by Health News Florida shows the analysts warned Scott’s office the numbers were wrong weeks ago, but he is still using them. He cited them in a Tampa Bay Times op-ed on Sunday and at at a Washington press conference on Monday.
The trumped-up number, it seems, comes from assuming the federal super-match for the expanded Medicaid coverage provided for in the ACA will never actually materialize. Why? Here’s the response from Scott’s “health policy coordinator,” Michael Anway:
Anway said he doesn’t believe the federal funds will come through. “The federal government has a $16 trillion national debt, must borrow 46 cents of every dollar it spends, and in 2011 had its credit rating downgraded for the first time in history,” he wrote in explanation.
So Scott is assuming the feds will renege on their statutory obligation to provide the Medicaid match. That’s a new one, and is particularly ironic since the only threat to the federal government defaulting on its spending obligations comes from Scott’s conservative buddies in Congress.
Truth is, the most authoritative estimate of state costs associated with the Medicaid expansion, from the Kaiser Family Foundation, put Florida’s costs at $1 billion over ten years, and that doesn’t even include potential savings from costs currently incurred by the state in uncompensated care for the uninsured.
So Scott’s costs estimates are off a mere 96%, at least. But what are facts when it comes to the ontological necessity of thwarting Obamacare and saving a million Floridians from the slavery of dependence on government?
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, January 8, 2013
“A Pretty Simple Con”: The Conservative Movement Is Still An Elaborate Moneymaking Venture
The conservative media movement exists primarily as a moneymaking venture. As Rick Perlstein explained in the Baffler, some of the largest conservative media organs are essentially massive email lists of suckers rented to snake oil salesmen. The con isn’t limited to a couple of newsletters and websites: The most prominent conservative organizations in the nation are primarily dedicated to separating conservatives from their money.
FreedomWorks, which is funded primarily by very rich people, solicits donations from non-rich conservative people. More than 80,000 people donated money to FreedomWorks in 2012, and it seems likely that only a small minority of those people were hedge fund millionaires. And what are people who donate to this grass-roots conservative organization funded mostly by a few very rich people getting for their hard-earned money? In addition to paying Dick Armey $400,000 a year for 20 years to stay away, FreedomWorks also apparently spent more than a million dollars paying Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh to say nice things about FreedomWorks, in order to convince listeners to send FreedomWorks money that FreedomWorks would then give to Limbaugh and Beck. It’s a pretty simple con. Beck, meanwhile, also has a subscriber-based media operation, in which people pay his company money for access to programs where Beck expresses opinions that he was paid to hold. He also spent years telling everyone to buy gold from a company that pays him and defrauds consumers.
As Armey admitted to Media Matters, FreedomWorks at this point essentially raises money for the sake of raising money. It exists to bilk “activists.” Armey at least has the courtesy to be embarrassed by this:
“If Limbaugh and Beck, if we were using those resources to recruit activists and inform activists and to encourage and enthuse activists, that’s one thing,” Armey explained. “If we are using these things to raise money; one, it’s a damned expensive way to raise money; and two, it makes raising money an end on to itself not an instrumental activity to support the foundation work that our organization does.”
Armey also said the relationship with Beck expanded to include rallies that were co-sponsored by Beck and FreedomWorks, and included appearances by FreedomWorks President and CEO Matt Kibbe.
Armey said he objected to these events, dubbed FreePACs, because they often charged admission to FreedomWorks activists.
A review of promotional information for the events found $20 was a standard donation requested at some of the locations, while a Dallas, TX., FreePAC last summer charged prices as high as $971.
But Armey is basically alone. No major right-wing media figures ever speak out against the widespread practice of constantly bilking credulous old people. Newsmax, a company whose email list is regularly given over to blatant get-rich-quick scheme hucksters, publishes basically every major and minor conservative columnist (and Lanny Davis). Newsmax pays to syndicate their columns, and their stature lends the site credibility. None of them ever complain. No one on the right criticizes the Newsmax business model. It seems to be semi-common knowledge that major conservative media figures sell their endorsements. No one says it’s deceptive. No one says Dick Morris should stop marketing his various ventures on Fox, all the time.
This complete contempt for the audience is unique to the right-wing press — if the Huffington Post made its money selling snake oil, liberals would complain. The recent trickle of complaints about the major nonprofit money-making groups, like FreedomWorks and CrossroadsUSA, has come solely because those groups failed to win the election. If Romney, or even a couple of Senate candidates, had won, no one would mind that the two groups enriched their boards of directors on the backs of tens of thousands of small donors. Right-wing reaction to Armey’s admission to Media Matters has thus far been outrage … that Armey talked to Media Matters.
The problem this presents for the movement, beyond the threat of eventually bankrupting the people who give it power, is that the business of money-making, for consultants and media personalities and Herman Cains, is at this point getting in the way of the business of advancing conservative causes. The groups exert massive influence, and they only ever push the Republican Party to get more extreme. Apocalyptic hysteria is much more effective at getting people to open their wallets than reasonable commentary. There are a lot of people whose livelihoods depend on keeping lots of conservatives terrified and ill-informed. The groups that exist to raise funds raise more funds when they endorse the crazier candidate.
So even if you don’t particularly care that regular conservative Americans are constantly being scammed by their media apparatus, you should still worry about the influence of the scammers. The fact that there is a lot of money to be made in acting like Michele Bachmann is part of why the House seems poised to blow up the U.S. economy. The fact that conservatives have that much contempt for their own true believers neatly explains how they govern when they actually have power.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, January 7, 2013
“Tea Party Absolutism”: The High Cost Of Hating Government Levies An Enormous Unnecessary Cost On Everyone Else
The tourniquet applied by the outgoing Congress to the economy allows a two-month breather before we are consumed by the next deadline. The president and his party can allow themselves a brief moment of celebration for imposing higher taxes on the richest Americans, but the next stage in fixing the nation’s fiscal problems may not be as easy. By the end of February, lawmakers must find enough cuts in public spending to allow the debt ceiling to be raised. Two more months of uncertainty will prevent businesses and consumers from making spending decisions that would bolster the economic recovery.
The devil is not so much in the detail of the arguments to come as the big picture that frames the debilitating running debate. While the difference between the sides is ostensibly over taxes and public spending and borrowing, the more profound division is over where government should begin and end. For many of the Republican Party’s Tea Party insurgents, the choice is even more fundamental: whether there should be a government at all. Their unbending position, demanding an ever-diminishing role for the federal government, has levied an enormous unnecessary cost on everyone else.
Since Republicans regained control of the House in the 2010 mid-terms, when the Tea Party tide was in full force, they have attempted to freeze the size of government, coincidentally putting a brake on economic recovery. They have vetoed attempts at further economic stimulus, encouraged America’s economy to be downgraded by the ratings agencies by threatening not to extend the debt ceiling, and tried to veto any and every tax increase in the fiscal cliff talks. Their aim is to shrink government by starving it of funds. Such uncompromising absolutism has led to the dampening of business confidence and investment that would have created jobs.
It is not just the economy that has suffered from the absolute positions held by the anti-government rump in the GOP. Their insistence that the Founding Fathers intended us to be allowed to carry guns of any sort, including the rapid-fire assault weapon that killed 20 children and six adults in Newtown, Connecticut, last month, continues to hamper attempts to curb the nation’s murderous gun violence. Ghosts from the eighteenth century are preying on our school-children, abetted by those who believe that compromise on amending our gun laws is surrendering to the forces of big government. Such unbending absolutism costs human lives.
Similarly, suspicion of government is behind the growth in home schooling, that narrows the education of children, deprives them of a sense of community, and diminishes their social skills. It came as little surprise to read reports that the Newtown shooter was kept home from school by his mother, a “survivalist” or “Doomsday Prepper”, who stockpiled food and guns because she expected an imminent economic apocalypse. Such paranoia about the role of government is a recurring theme in our society’s most appalling massacres, from the bombing of the Federal Government Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 by the anti-government militiaman Timothy McVeigh, who killed 168, including 19 children, to the FBI siege of the anti-government Branch Davidian sect in Waco, Texas, in 1993, that left 76 dead.
Hostility to government also ensures that health care is unnecessarily expensive. The average cost of American health care is $8,233 per person per year, the most expensive in the developed world. In comparable Western countries such as France, which has a private health insurance mandate administered by the state, it is $3,974. In Britain, which for 65 years has enjoyed a taxation-funded national health system, it is $3,433. As much as Americans may prefer to believe that they have a health care system second to none, there is little discernible difference between the quality of health care provided, nor the efficacy of the medicine administered in the three countries, while dealing with the health insurance bureaucracy here is considerably more time-wasting, expensive, and irritating.
Changes in demography, with Americans living longer and using more medical resources to enjoy a tolerable quality of life, mean that health care costs will continue to rise unless reforms are made. The easiest way to reduce American health care costs would be for the federal government to provide a “single payer” alternative to compete with the near-monopolistic private health insurance companies. But such a system is considered an abomination by absolutists who demand that the federal government should keep out of healthcare. The harsh alternative is to cut the amount of care the system provides to the elderly. Again, an unbending attitude to the government’s role and responsibilities comes at an exorbitant cost.
Conservative theologians have devoted themselves to explaining why government interference is a bad thing. For Milton Friedman, the American system of government was so monetized from the moment the Republic was founded, and so open to corruption, that he always advocated small government – at least in the United States. For the Austrian thinker Friedrich Hayek, writing in his influential masterwork The Road to Serfdom, a burgeoning state could lead to tyranny. To be fair to Hayek, who wrote his topical tract as World War II was drawing to a close, he was principally concerned that free enterprise might continue to be stifled by the imperatives of the wartime command economy once peace was declared. In The Road to Serfdom, in a passage often ignored by contemporary conservatives, he insisted that all governments should provide a generous safety net for the needy, homes for the homeless, and universal health care.
Tea Party members owe less to conservative thinkers such as Friedman and Hayek than to uncompromising proponents of the untrammelled free market such as the libertarians Ayn Rand and Ron Paul. When the new Congress comes to head off another fiscal cliff crisis at the end of next month, it will take courage from the Republican leadership to keep their extreme wing in check. If they fail to do so and they demand too deep cuts to public spending too quickly, they will not only cause the American economy to return to recession but may find that the middle ground voters who decide elections will add together the vast cost of their allies’ absolutist intransigence and keep them in opposition forever.
By: Nicholas Wapshott, The National Memo (originally appeared at Reuters.com), January 7, 2013
“The Real Deficit Argument”: Only Politics Of A Very Degraded Kind Can Keep Us From Moving Forward
Should our politicians dedicate themselves to solving the problems we face now? Or should they spend their time constructing largely theoretical deficit solutions for years far in the future to satisfy certain ideological and aesthetic urges?
This is one of the two central choices the country faces at the beginning of President Obama’s second term. The other is related: Will the establishment, including business leaders and middle-of-the-road journalistic opinion, stand by silently as one side in the coming argument risks cratering the economy in an effort to reverse the verdict of the 2012 election? Yes, I am talking about using the debt ceiling as a political tool, something that was never done until the disaster of 2011.
My first questions are, admittedly, loaded. They refer to a difference of opinion we need to face squarely.
It is entirely true that in the wake of two budget agreements, in 2011 and the just-passed deal on the “fiscal cliff,” we have not reduced the deficit enough. The issue is: How much is enough?
Contrary to all the scare talk you keep hearing, Robert Greenstein, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, notes that we could put the deficit on a sustainable path for the next 10 years with one more deficit-reduction package equal to about $1.2 trillion, plus the resulting interest savings.
By sustainable, I mean keeping the debt from growing as a share of gross domestic product and holding it at around 73 percent of GDP for the next decade. This is a more than reasonable number by international standards. To put it in perspective: According to the International Monetary Fund, in 2011 Canada’s debt was at 85 percent of GDP, Germany’s was at 81.5 percent — and Greece’s was at 163.3 percent.
Holding the debt ratio in the low 70s is well within our sights. It could be achieved through a combination of $600 billion in cuts and $600 billion in additional revenue through tax reform — or through modest taxes on carbon or on financial transactions. (Okay, for now, I am dreaming on the last two, but they are still good ideas.) The cuts could be made without wrecking Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security, and without eviscerating government’s capacity to invest in the future.
We could then shelve our deficit obsession for a while and confront the problems that should be center-stage over the next few years: restoring shared economic growth, spurring the creation of good jobs, dealing with gun violence, reforming immigration laws, improving our education system, and taking steps on climate change.
But there is the other side of this debate, pushed not only by conservatives but also by a deficit-reduction industry that sees the only test of seriousness as a willingness to slash Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security for those who will retire 10, 20 or 30 years from now. They want to be able to admire nice predictions on a computer screen that show the debt dropping to 60 percent of GDP.
There is no objection in principle to discussing the modest changes that could improve the long-term stability of Social Security. But when it comes to health-care cost projections, there is so much we don’t know that it is truly foolish to make decisions now for, say, 2040.
Health-care cost inflation has been dropping. We can’t be sure how sustainable this trend is, but economists who study the matter think the cost curve may be bending downward for the longer run. The Affordable Care Act contains measures that could further restrain health expenditures.
Is it either sensible or humane to decide in 2013 on the basis of such limited knowledge to toss future seniors and low-income Medicaid recipients under the bus? Health-care costs are something we must keep working on. We can buy time for this difficult undertaking by getting the deficit down to a sustainable level.
And that brings us to the debt ceiling. The central weakness of a largely helpful fiscal cliff deal is that it did not save us from a debt-ceiling fight. It would be colossally stupid — there is no other word — to derail an economic recovery that is slowly but steadily taking hold with another battle over a silly provision in our law. Will all the respectable people who know this sit on the sidelines and let it happen, or will they speak out now?
We are finally on a promising path. Only politics of a very degraded kind can keep us from moving forward.
By: E. J. Dionne Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 6, 2013
“But For Protecting The Middle Class”: Still Believe President Obama Seeks A Permanent American Socialist State?
One of the strangest—and for me, most annoying—perversions of politics in the Obama era is the meme pursued by so many on the right suggesting that this president is a raging socialist who seeks to install a permanent welfare state in America—despite all evidence to the contrary.
In the wake of the fiscal cliff deal—supported not only by the President but by an overwhelming vote of elected Democrats—we should now be able to put this foolishness to rest once and for all as we acknowledge a simple and clear reality—
If Barack Obama is indeed a socialist, he must be the absolute worst socialist in recorded history.
How do we now know this beyond any reasonable question of a doubt?
Any good conservative will be among the first to tell you that financing a permanent welfare state takes huge amounts of money—money that can only be raised by taxing a wide swath of the nation’s citizenry. And yet, the President just pushed through a law permanently lowering taxes for some 99 percent of all Americans— and was hailed as a big winner for his effort to do so.
For someone who would prefer to be President of, say, Sweeden, such a deal could only be viewed as a crushing defeat, not a political victory.
And if you somehow imagine that the President believes he can accomplish the financing of his “European style welfare state” through the rather meager increase in progressive tax rates now to be levied on the nation’s largest earners, I would suggest you take heed of the many conservatives who have incessantly reminded us over these past few months that the sum total of the tax increases on the rich will only serve to fund government for a few days a year—clearly nowhere near enough cash to fund a true, socialist agenda.
Still, I know what you’re thinking…the President is planning to create his socialist paradise by borrowing and printing all the money required to pay the high cost of the expanded welfare state he covets.
Sorry…it just doesn’t work and the President would know this better than just about anyone.
While borrowing money may be the modus operandi for filling in the shortfalls when it comes to financing entitlement programs in an era of relatively low taxes (at least comparatively speaking) and a dramatic increase in the senior population depending upon entitlement programs, I suspect even the most conservative economists would tell you —correctly I would add—that all of our available borrowing power is strained just trying to stay even with our entitlement and defense obligations, let alone expand entitlements to the point where we would even approach a government philosophy that could be comparable with a European socialistic society.
Indeed, even if the President chose to press for more borrowing or printing, he could, at best, only do so in support of the existing entitlement programs as it would take an act of Congress to expand the system.
Does anyone believe the Congress is heading in the direction of expanding entitlements? We have a House of Representatives gerrymandered into GOP control for a period likely to last at least until the end of the decade—meaning it will outlive Obama’s second term.
Thus, when Obama got behind preserving the Bush tax cuts for all but the wealthiest Americans, he did so knowing that he would never be able to expand the entitlement programs at any time during the remainder of his term. If it was a socialist society he was seeking, he had but one chance and that was to raise taxes on everyone, not just the very wealthy.
So, exactly how is it possible that a President and a Democratic Party—hell bent on creating this permanent welfare state in America—could support any deal that would not allow the Bush tax cuts to sunset as scheduled so that tax rates would return to the larger numbers of the Clinton era?
Such support would make no sense for anyone favoring expansion of the welfare state. And yet, this President chose to support the permanent lowering of taxes on the middle class as did his party.
While you may be displeased with the fiscal cliff compromise for any number of reasons, including the failure of the parties to do much of anything about spending, the simple fact remains that—for better or for worse—decades of Democratic Party/progressive tax philosophy went out the window last week when an overwhelming majority of Democrats voted to support the fiscal cliff deal—and with it went any rational support for the notion that President Obama and his party have some secret, European socialist vision in mind for the country.
All you need do to understand this is take a look at the number of Congressional Democrats who cast their votes in support of the two pieces of legislation that produced the Bush tax cuts and compare those votes to the vote of the Congressional Democrats making those very cuts permanent for approximately 99 percent of all Americans.
The vote tally for the 2001 bill that created the first round of the Bush tax cuts delivered just 28 votes in support from House Democrats. The second round—which came in 2003—could only muster up 7 Democratic votes in support.
The vote this week to make these very same tax cuts permanent received overwhelming support from House Democrats, who cast 172 votes in favor of very likely ending middle class tax increases during our lifetime—and they did so at the specific behest of the same Democratic president who many argue is committed to creating the American welfare state.
That simply does not add up for a President looking to create France in America.
As a result, one cannot rationally argue that the President, and his party— who cast their support in favor of leaving more money in the pockets of 99 percent of Americans so that they could spend the money supporting the businesses of America rather than handing it over to government to spend it for them—desire the path of socialism.
While I’m certain there will be no shortage of issues available to those wishing to attack the President, can we now dare to hope that the next time someone feels the need to vent, they might do so without the whole “Obama is a socialist” narrative?
I hope so. What was a silly narrative before the fiscal cliff deal, it is an embarrassingly preposterous narrative today.
By: Rick Ungar, Op-Ed Contributor, Forbes, January 6, 2013
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