“Darrell Issa’s Misguided Priorities”: Desperate Even By GOP Standards
The Beltway’s interest in the role of sequestration cuts leading to canceled White House tours reached farcical heights last week, in large part because congressional Republicans are afraid the scrapped tourist opportunities will make them look bad.
But leave it to House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) to go completely over the top.
For those who can’t watch clips online, Issa released an attack video this morning, presumably paid for with our tax dollars, whining once more about the White House tours. The message of the attack itself is rather odd — Issa apparently believes the cancelation of tours will give the president more leisure time, though that really doesn’t make any sense — and comes across as rather desperate, even by House GOP standards.
But what’s especially amazing about this case is Issa’s bizarre priorities. For reasons I can’t understand, the far-right Republican is fascinated by White House tours, but seems entirely indifferent to the meaningful effects of sequestration in his own congressional district.
A Democratic source this morning alerted me to several recent headlines from the area Issa ostensibly represents:
* A rally was held in San Diego last week to “demonstrate the impact of sequestration on low income seniors.” An administrator at a local facility said, “[B]ack in D.C. what they’re talking about are cuts from White House tours and the president’s golf game but in the meantime real seniors who are hungry are not going to have food.”
* A major employer in San Diego announced a series of layoffs, effecting 185 workers, which became necessary “as a result of the cuts being brought about in the federal budget because of sequestration.”
* The sequester is set to shutter an air-control traffic tower in San Diego, which local officials believe will “jeopardize aerial firefighting in a region prone to wildfire.”
The list goes on. Sequestration is causing serious problems at San Diego’s ports, ship yards, and the local economy in general.
All of this is happening in Darrell Issa’s own hometown, and he’s focusing his attention on White House tours? I can’t remember the last time I saw a congressman so indifferent to the effects of a policy on his own community.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 20, 2013
“Conservatives’ Contradictions On American Power”: Forgetting Where A Strong America Came From
Do conservatives still believe in American greatness?
The question is not intended to discourage the healthy debate being pushed by Rand Paul and his allies over whether Republicans in the George W. Bush years were too eager to deploy our country’s armed forces overseas. After the steep costs of the Iraq war, it is a very necessary discussion.
But Paul has inadvertently called our attention to a deep contradiction within American conservatism.
Those who share Paul’s philosophical orientation are quite right in seeing the rise of American power in the world as closely linked to the rise of the New Deal-Great Society state at home. But this means that those who want the United States to play a strong role in global affairs need to ask themselves if their attitudes toward government’s role in our country, which are similar to Paul’s, are consistent with their vision of American influence abroad.
After World War II, there was a rough consensus in America, confirmed during Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency in the 1950s, in favor of an energetic national government.
We emerged from the war as a global power that had learned lessons from the Great Depression. Government action could lessen the likelihood of another disastrous economic downturn and build a more just and prosperous society at home by investing in our people and our future.
Thus did the Marshall Plan and the GI Bill go hand in hand. The Marshall Plan eased Western Europe’s recovery from the devastation of war, thereby protecting friendly governments and opening new markets for American goods. The GI Bill educated a generation of veterans, spurring prosperity from the bottom up by enabling millions to join a growing middle class.
Eisenhower built on these achievements by creating the first college loan program and launching the interstate highway system. It’s no accident that the former was established by the National Defense Education Act while the latter was known as the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act.
Lyndon Johnson operated in the same tradition. It’s worth remembering that passage of the landmark civil rights acts was helped along by our competition with the Soviet Union. We realized we could not appeal to the nonwhite, nonaligned parts of the world if we practiced racism at home.
And we fought poverty — for moral reasons but also because we wanted to show the world that we could combine our market system with economic justice. We forget that we succeeded. A strengthened Social Security system combined with Medicare slashed poverty rates among the elderly. Food stamps dealt with a real problem of hunger in our nation while Medicaid brought regular health care to millions who did not have it before.
Through it all, Keynesian economics kept our economy humming while widely shared prosperity created the sense of national solidarity that a world role required.
Paul and his allies deserve credit for consistency. They are against the entire deal.
“As government grows, liberty becomes marginalized,” Paul declared at the Conservative Political Action Conference, which announced Saturday that the libertarian senator from Kentucky had placed first in its 2016 presidential straw poll. I think the evidence of all the years since World War II proves Paul flatly wrong. But then I am not a conservative.
But what of conservatives who endorse continued American global leadership but would drastically reduce government’s investments in our citizens and our infrastructure, in economic security and in health care?
Do they honestly think voters will endorse the military spending they seek even as they throw 40 million to 50 million of our fellow citizens off health insurance and weaken health coverage for our elderly? Can they continue to deny that their goal of an internationally influential America demands more revenue than they currently seem willing to provide? Have conservatives on the Supreme Court pondered what eviscerating the Voting Rights Act would do to the image of our democracy around the globe?
And do conservatives who say they favor American greatness think they are strengthening our nation and its ability to shape events abroad with an ongoing budget stalemate created by their refusal to reach agreement with President Obama on a deal that combines spending cuts and new taxes? Would they rather waste the next three years than make any further concessions to a president the voters just reelected?
Rand Paul is very clear on the country he seeks. Conservatives who reject his approach to foreign policy need to consider where the strong America they honor came from in the first place.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, March 17, 2013
“Fool Me Once”: The Sequester Is Proof That Washington Thinks We Are All Idiots
The tales of sequester woe are starting to mount. Congressmen are complaining about cancelled White House tours, freaking out over potential furloughs of meat inspectors, and fretting over budget cuts in Yellowstone National Park. Republican officeholders are starting to realize that the parochial government services that businesses and consumers in their districts need and care about are getting hit.
And for what? We’ve argued that the primary deficit—the mismatch between the amount of money the government collects each year and the amount of money it spends each year—is melting away. We received further confirmation of this melting trend Wednesday, with the release of the latest Treasury Monthly Statement. It was overlooked, as it dropped just a couple hours before the new pope was announced. But it’s worth examining.
The headline was that February wasn’t a great month for the profit-and-loss sheet of the federal government. It took in $122.8 billion and spent $326 billion, notching a $203.5 billion deficit. That’s pretty grim. But February is always a bad month for receipts. And when you dig into the number, it is possible to see significant improvement.
Compared with February 2012, revenues in February 2013 were up an impressive 18.8 percent. Meanwhile, spending was actually down 2.6 percent from February 2012. So the February 2013 monthly deficit was 12 percent smaller than the February 2012 monthly deficit. This is not an anomaly. For the first five months of fiscal 2013, which started in October, revenues were $1.01 trillion, up 13 percent from the first five months of fiscal 2012, while spending was up just 2.1 percent. The deficit in the first five months of fiscal 2013 is $494 billion, down nearly 15 percent from the first five months of fiscal 2012.
To what do we owe this? Revenue is tied to growth. When the economy grows consistently, more people go to work, more people earn higher wages, and they pay more income and payroll taxes. Companies tend to make more profits, and even though they spend lots of time and effort dodging taxes, they still wind up paying more corporate income taxes. Meanwhile, as we’ve pointed out before, when jobs increase and the economy grows, spending on programs like unemployment benefits fall. That helps narrow the deficit, too. In February, spending on unemployment benefits was off 25 percent from the year before.
There’s another factor at play. And Republicans might want to avert their eyes for this next paragraph. On January 1, the government raised taxes. The payroll tax, which had been cut temporarily to 4.2 percent from 6.2 percent, went back up—a 48 percent increase. And so the 130 million or so Americans with payroll jobs have been paying higher federal taxes for the past two months. Meanwhile, as part of the fiscal cliff deal, higher income taxes were also put in place for high earners. They’re now paying more, too.
A funny thing happens when you raise taxes—you get more tax revenue.
Since the higher tax rates kicked in on January 1, Americans haven’t Gone Galt. They haven’t stopped working in protest of higher taxes and companies haven’t stopped hiring. In fact, they’ve been working more. As a result, revenue has been flooding into Washington. In the two months of the new tax regimen (January and February 2013), receipts are up 17 percent from the comparable period in 2012. Meanwhile, for all the charges of socialism, spending remains muted. A look at the daily Treasury statement suggests the higher revenue trend has continued through the first half of March.
The sequester, universally derided as a stupid way to get deficit reduction, is designed to bring $84 billion in deficit reduction in this fiscal year. Well, in the first five months of fiscal 2013, the deficit is already, wait for it, $85.8 billion smaller than it was in the first five months of fiscal 2012. And that’s all before the sequester takes full effect.
Quiet as it is kept, we are living in a great age of deficit reduction. If we project the numbers from the first five months of this fiscal year into the rest of it, it’s quite likely that the deficit will come in under $900 billion—even without the sequester. That’s high, and it is still a lot of money. But it would represent a deduction of nearly 20 percent from fiscal 2012. And with the economy continuing to grow steadily, the deficit as a percentage of GDP would shrink by an even larger margin.
Washington told itself it needed the sequester in order to make a significant dent in the annual deficit. With each passing month, and with each passing Treasury Monthly Statement, we’re learning that’s not true.
By: Daniel Gross, The Daily Beast, March 14, 2013
“What’s It Going To Be?”: The GOP Needs To Make Up Its Mind On Immigration Reform
Yet another member of the Bush family has demonstrated an uncanny ability to flinch on immigration.
Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor, has long advocated a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, roughly in line with current thinking of a bipartisan group in Congress. Yet in a new book he has written with Clint Bolick, Immigration Wars, Bush has flip-flopped on the question of the path to citizenship.
“Those who violated the law can remain but cannot obtain the cherished fruits of citizenship,” Bush and Bolick wrote.
That’s disappointing, much like the failure of Jeb’s brother George W. to push the bipartisan immigration reform bill his administration favored through Congress in 2007.
In interviews since the book’s release, Jeb Bush has retraced and gone back to supporting avenues to citizenship.
To CNN, he had this to say: “Today the only path to come to this country other than family reunification is to come illegally. We need to create another category of legal immigration where there is actually a line. So if you could create that through a path to citizenship, I would support that.”
Well, what’s it going to be? It’s important to know; Bush might be the next Republican nominee for president.
With Congress set to take up comprehensive immigration reform, there simply isn’t time to waste on waffling. The Republican Party and its leading figures must decide: Are they going to join the movement for reform or are they going to keep up their long-standing campaign to demean undocumented immigrants?
For the last couple of decades, the conservative demagogues opposed to sensible immigration reform have worked hard to brand this issue as one of law and order. They have made an epithet out of an adjective — “illegals” — as a way to characterize undocumented immigrants as by nature criminal and, as such, unfit for U.S. citizenship.
Most Americans know better. Bush knows better too. A good portion of the book shows how deeply he understands the nuances of immigration law and policy. He discusses the fact that it is nearly impossible for many of the people who wind up illegally in the country to arrive legally.
He advocates clearing up the backlogs on visa requests based on family relationships by changing those systems and creating new avenues for legal immigration. He knows that many immigrants are seeking work and calls for doubling the number of work-based visas for both highly skilled and guest workers.
Let’s recognize that most undocumented immigrants live among us to work; let’s also acknowledge that American employers and consumers have benefitted greatly from the low-wage labor these people provide.
OK, now we can talk about legal status.
Some Americans worry about the message it would send if we were to extend the possibility of citizenship to people who have broken the law to live in our country. One way to allay these fears is to reserve this chance for those immigrants with no criminal convictions, who don’t have problems with domestic abuse or substance abuse, who have a work record, who are able and willing to support themselves and their families.
In recent days, Bush has stressed that he doesn’t want to create incentives that might cause more people to come to this country illegally. But this too reveals a sleight of hand about what he clearly understands about the current immigration system.
If the U.S. truly wanted to eliminate the possibility of too many people illegally in the country it would fix the system, making it responsive to the needs of the economy. Allow those workers a legal way in.
The vast majority of people who are illegally in the country didn’t chose that route because criminality is their natural disposition. They end up in that category because there wasn’t a viable way for them to arrive legally. Congress can address this by reordering how and why visas are granted and holding businesses accountable for monitoring the immigrants they hire.
If there were a better route, a legal way, most people would have taken it. Bush admits this throughout his book. And endless individual stories of immigrants underscore that truth.
It’s ridiculous and self-defeating that the policy debate about immigration is sidetracked by the question of who among the “illegal” people is worthy of citizenship.
Congress needs to act wisely, and sidestep this silly argument once and for all.
By: Mary Sanchez, The National Memo, March 11, 2013
“It’s Time To Tax Financial Transactions”: Here At Last Is An Idea Whose Time Has Come
On Friday at midnight, the sequester kicked in, triggering $85 billion in deep, dumb budget cuts that sent “nonessential personnel”— such as air traffic controllers — packing.
Not to worry, though: Wall Street’s day was pretty much like any other. Billions of dollars in profits were made off of trillions of dollars in financial transactions. And the vast majority of those transactions were conducted tax-free.
Moral of the story: What else is new?
Crash the economy? Free pass. Prevent planes from crashing? Pink slip.
We don’t need a team of policymakers to tell us this isn’t good policy, or that it needs changing. But on Thursday, we heard policymakers propose exactly that: a change.
Sens. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), along with Rep. Pete DeFazio (D-Ore.), unveiled a bill that would place a light tax on all financial transactions — three pennies on every $100 traded.
The good news is that it’s a tax so small it could be mistaken for a rounding error. It’s so small, Wall Street could easily afford it and the average E-Trade investor would barely notice it. If this were a tax on coffee, it would cost you $1 for every 800 cups you bought at Starbucks.
But there’s even better news. This insignificant tax raises a significant amount of revenue — $352 billion over the next 10 years, or enough to refund about one-third of what the sequester will slash from the federal budget. It’s also enough to put many air traffic controllers back to work, Head Start teachers back in preschools, and crucial government programs back in business.
As the saying goes, “Nothing can resist an idea whose time has come.”
And after years of Wall Street excess, and at a moment when new revenues are badly needed, the time has surely come for a financial transaction tax .
Indeed, support for such a tax has never been stronger — or broader. Many on the progressive left have long favored it . Now, though, another group of bleeding-heart liberals, otherwise known as the American people, is on board. When it comes to cutting the deficit, 6 in 10 Americans prefer taxing the financial industry to cutting social spending.
But this idea doesn’t just have the masses on its side; it has the elites, and even some Republican elites. Once championed by the granddaddy of liberal economics, John Maynard Keynes, the banner of a financial transactions tax has been picked up by conservative economists including Sheila Bair, George W. Bush’s appointee to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.
After all, the tax isn’t just a good revenue raiser. It’s smart regulatory reform.
The high-frequency traders that now dominate our markets would be hardest-hit by the tax. A top economist recently concluded that their lightning speed, algorithm-driven trading drains profits from traditional investors. And analysts fear that such mass trading strategies could lead to disaster if markets behave unexpectedly.
The new tax would discourage these kinds of trades, which would be a good thing.
Europe, at least, seems to agree. Eleven nations, led by the conservative German government, are on track to start collecting the tax by January 2014. Expected revenues: $50 billion per year.
Of course, we’re talking about a tax on Wall Street.
It’s no wonder that, over the past few weeks, K Street appears to have upped the financial sector’s retainer. Their lobbying effort against the tax — here and in Europe — is in full swing.
Even the Obama administration has been convinced to come out against the tax in the United States. And they’re pressuring Europeans to water down their version by insulating American banks. What’s the logic driving this opposition?
Some have argued that, historically, these taxes have been ineffective because of widespread evasion. But they’re cherry-picking a few badly designed examples, such as Sweden’s lemon of a tax from nearly 30 years ago. This is like saying cars don’t work because you bought a Datsun in the ’70s.
Many countries have implemented such taxes effectively. The United Kingdom, for example, manages to raise more than $5 billion per year on a 0.5 percent tax on stock trades alone.
Another common argument is that the tax will be passed on to mom-and-pop investors. The just-introduced U.S. legislation addresses these concerns by providing tax credits for contributions to typical middle-class investment accounts, including 401(k)s. Investment funds would still be taxed on their trades, but this could encourage longer-term productive investment instead of the short-term speculation that adds little to no value to the real economy.
If the Obama administration is serious about fair taxation and a smart approach to the deficit, it should change its position. Rather than trying to derail Europe’s efforts, it should cooperate with Europe to ensure that the tax there is effectively enforced. And the administration should build support in Congress, including among Republicans.
Yes, we’ve all heard House Speaker John Boehner’s line that the debate over revenue raising is over. We also remember former President George H.W. Bush’s line, “Read my lips, no new taxes,” and how quickly his lips starting saying something else.
For tea partyers, wouldn’t a tax on Wall Street, the beneficiaries of the bailout they so reviled, be less objectionable than most other revenue options?
Sequestration is a septic wound, self-inflicted by lawmakers who can’t agree on anything. Here, at last, we have a smart idea with widespread support — Americans and Europeans, populists and economists, progressives and conservatives.
After Friday’s dumb budget cuts, a little smart policymaking would be nice for a change.
By: Katrina vanden Heuvel, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, March 5, 2013
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