“Where’s The Data?”: Paul Ryan Claims 30 Percent Of America Happy To Freeload
One of the more enduring ‘knocks’ on the candidacy of Mitt Romney is that he incorrectly views many of those who are in need of government provided assistance as being people who prefer to live life at the expense of the taxpayer rather than pursue a more meaningful existence of hard work and self-sufficiency.
Whether this perspective on Romney is fair or unfair, most would agree that the GOP standard bearer’s now infamous 47% speech—delivered at a Boca Raton fundraiser—has done little to dispel this meme as we head in to the dwindling days of the 2012 presidential campaign.
Now, Romney’s running mate, Congressman Paul Ryan, has weighed in with his own assessment of what drives a significant portion of the American public—and it’s not pretty.
Speaking at the annual American Spectator Robert L. Bartley Gala Dinner in November of 2011, Ryan had this to say-
“Today, 70 percent of Americans get more benefits from the federal government in dollar value than they pay back in taxes. So you could argue that we’re already past that [moral] tipping point. The good news is survey after survey, poll after poll, still shows that we are a center-right 70-30 country. Seventy percent of Americans want the American dream. They believe in the American idea. Only 30 percent want their welfare state. What that tells us is at least half of those people who are currently in that category are there not of their wish or their will.”
While it is certainly interesting that Ryan predicates his remarks on the belief that one who does not self-identify as “right of center” necessarily opposes the the American dream, leaving it to follow that such an individual would prefer to allow the government to pay for his or her existence (quite a stretch by any reasonable standard), what most interested me about Ryan’s address was the source for his assumptions.
Who says that America is a center-right nation by a 70-30 margin? And if that is the basis of Ryan’s calculations in determining how many of us prefer the welfare state to hard work, wouldn’t a source for such a claim be appropriate?
As I simply could not recall there being any such ‘survey after survey’ and ‘poll after poll’ that would support Congressman Ryan’s conclusions, it struck me as a worthwhile venture to go looking for the same.
Bearing in mind that the Ryan address was given November of 2011—and wanting to be fair to Congressman Ryan—I went off in search of any poll conducted within a reasonable window of the time frame of Ryan’s address that might support his allegations.
I found that virtually every single one of the major polls conducted in the nation during the months leading up to Ryan’s speech revealed that the overwhelming majority of Americans (64.5 percent when the polls are averaged) believed we should be raising taxes to help cut into the deficit—an odd conclusion in a nation so heavily slanted to the right of center as claimed by Mr. Ryan.
I found that the Gallup Poll conducted on September 20th of 2011 revealed that 70% of Americans wanted to increase taxes on corporations by eliminating certain tax deductions the public believed to be unfair. The same poll also discovered that Americans widely supported the jobs plan that President Obama sent to Congress where it failed thanks to Congressman Ryan and his cohorts.
Again, a shocking result if we are to believe Ryan’s assessment that seven out of ten Americans are committed to the very ideology that Ryan professes to be his own.
I found a CBS/New York Times poll conducted just a few months before Ryan’s speech reporting that 72 percent of those polled disapproved of the way his party handled the default crisis.
And in a Time Magazine poll conducted less than one month before Ryan’s labeling 30 percent of our fellow Americans to be a bunch of bums, 79 percent of the public believed that the gap between the rich and the poor had grown too large, 86 percent believed that Wall Street and its lobbyists have far too much to say about what happens in Washington and a majority of Americans supported the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Do you know what I could not find?
Not so much as one survey or poll suggesting that the United States is a right-of–center electorate by a margin of 70-30 or that 30 percent of the public is content to live their lives courtesy of the United States government with no interest or desire in taking control of their own support and sustenance if given the chance.
While it might not be forgivable, it would at least be understandable had Ryan made this speech in the heat of a campaign where he has proven himself willing to say or do just about anything to solidify his base. However, these comments were made well before Congressman Ryan was chosen for the GOP ticket. Thus, it seems reasonable to accept that this is either what Mr. Ryan believes or what he thinks he can sell—despite an apparent lack of any evidence whatsoever to support so shrill and offensive a claim.
Congressman Ryan owes us some authority for his remarks. If these polls and surveys exist, his campaign should make them available to us.
Otherwise, Paul Ryan—a man whose own living has long come solely at the expense of the American taxpayer—is simply making this stuff up out of whole cloth and, in the process, deeply offending the millions of Americans who want more than anything to find work and get ahead but are struggling to do so.
Talk about being out of touch….
By: Rick Ungar, Contributor, Forbes, October 3, 2012
“Gender Pay Gap Is Alive And Well”: Facts About the Health Insurance Compensation Gap
Unfortunately the gender pay gap is alive and well: Women in the United States earned 77 cents for every $1 earned by men in 2011—an average of $10,622 in lost wages every year. Yet that earnings ratio actually understates the extent of women’s disparate treatment in the workforce because they also experience a health insurance compensation gap. Below are the answers to some key questions about this gap, as well as how the Affordable Care Act—the new health reform law—works to close it.
Q: What is the health insurance compensation gap?
A: Women are less likely than men to receive health care coverage through their employer and are more likely to have higher out-of-pocket medical costs. This results in a health insurance compensation gap on top of the wage gap.
Q: What is the difference between men’s and women’s access to job-based coverage?
A: Women are significantly less likely than men to have access to their own employer-based coverage. Less than half of women (48 percent) are eligible to get health insurance through their jobs, compared with 57 percent of men, in part because women are more likely to work for small businesses and in low-wage jobs. Although two-thirds of women between the ages of 18 and 64 have employer-based insurance coverage, only 38 percent of women are enrolled in an insurance plan they receive through their own employer,1 while 24 percent receive employer-based coverage as a dependent on their spouse’s or partner’s plan. In contrast, 50 percent of men receive insurance coverage through their own employer, and only 13 percent of men receive dependent coverage.
Q: What is the financial impact of the compensation gap?
A: The gap in health insurance compensation translates into women losing an average of $4,508 for single coverage and $10,944 for family coverage in employer contributions to health benefits each year. Given that two-thirds of mothers are either primary breadwinners or co-breadwinners for their families, the compensation gap is a significant burden on the budgets of many American families.
Q: Where do women turn when they don’t have access to job-based coverage?
A: When working women cannot obtain employer-based coverage and earn too much to qualify for Medicaid, they must turn to the individual health insurance market. Yet women often face discrimination in the individual market—they are charged more for coverage, denied coverage for gender-specific conditions, and sold plans that inadequately cover their health needs.
Q: How much more do women spend out of pocket on health care?
A: Even with employer-based coverage, women have higher out-of-pocket medical costs than men. Overall, women of reproductive age spend 68 percent more out of pocket than men on health care, in part because their reproductive health care needs require more frequent health care visits and are not always adequately covered by their insurance. Among women insured by employer-based plans, oral contraceptives alone account for one-third of their total out-of-pocket health care spending.
Q: How are women affected by the compensation gap?
A: The combination of being paid less than their male counterparts and having higher out-of-pocket medical expenses leaves many women struggling to pay their medical bills or trading off other necessities such as food, heat, and electricity to cover their medical costs. Fifty-two percent of women report delaying or going without needed care because of cost (not filling prescriptions or skipping tests, treatments, or follow-up visits), compared with 39 percent of men. Women also report higher rates of medical debt than their male counterparts. And one study showed that more than half of low-income women are underinsured, meaning they spend 10 percent or more of their income on out-of-pocket health care costs and premiums.
Q: How will the Affordable Care Act help reduce the health insurance compensation gap?
A: The Affordable Care Act institutes a series of reforms designed to drastically expand coverage and contain health insurance costs for all Americans. Many of the reforms enacted by the new health law have been and will continue to be especially beneficial for women, as they help resolve many of the problems outlined above. The health care bill:
- Provides insurance premium assistance through income-based tax credits on a sliding scale beginning in 2014
- Expands Medicaid eligibility to people with incomes below 138 percent of the federal poverty level—about $31,809 for a family of four in 2011
- Allows young people to remain on their parents’ health plans until the age of 26
- Ends discrimination that has left women paying up to 150 percent more for the same coverage purely because of their gender
- Bans insurance companies from denying coverage to women through pre-existing condition exclusions Ensures that women receive vital preventive care at no additional cost—significantly including contraceptive coverage, which will eliminate one of the primary sources of women’s out-of-pocket health care spending
- Mandates that maternity benefits be covered as an essential part of women’s health care
- Caps co-pays and deductibles, which will help reduce the amount women pay in out-of-pocket expenses
Through these reforms that level the playing field for women in the health care market, the Affordable Care Act will help reduce the compensation gap that exacerbates the disparity between men and women’s earnings.
BY: Jessica Arons and Lindsay Rosenthal, Center For American Progress, June 1, 2012
“At Risk Of Sliding Backwards”: Don’t Call Women The Richer Sex
Are women really on track to become “the richer sex” and replace men as primary breadwinners in American families, as recent headlines suggest? Not quite. The notion that women are outpacing men on the job has become a popular media narrative over the past few years. But the data on which it’s based don’t hold up.
Last week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics revealed that, in fact, we’re in the middle of a “mancovery”—while women are slipping backwards. Between June 2009 and June 2011, women lost close to 300,000 jobs, while men gained more than 800,000. “We’ve never seen a recovery like this,” the National Women’s Law Center’s Joan Entmacher told NPR, “where two years into the recovery women are doing so much worse than men and are actually losing ground.”
Still, the popular perception is that women are soaring. Much is made of the “fact” that more than 40 percent of American women are their family’s breadwinner. In her recent Time magazine cover piece (adapted from her new book, The Richer Sex), for example, journalist Liza Mundy cites 2009 Bureau of Labor Statistics data saying that one in four women outearn their spouses. This claim was picked up by scores of media outlets.
But look a bit more closely at the numbers, and the picture doesn’t seem so rosy for women. Which women are advancing? And which men are backsliding? The answers are important if you are going to talk about who’s getting “rich.”
In fact, the only segment of society in which a substantial percent of wives significantly outearn their husbands is low-income workers, according to two respected scholars who looked at large national data sets. Senior economist Heather Boushey of the Center for American Progress says that in 2010, among couples whose earnings are in the bottom 20 percent, 70 percent of women outearn their husbands.
And Anne Winkler of the University of Missouri, in her detailed 2005 analysis, found that the wealthier the couple, the less likely it is that the wife will outearn her husband.
As family income goes up, fewer and fewer women outearn their husbands, Winkler told The Daily Beast. When you look at women who really are the breadwinners—who earn 60 percent of family income—the figure drops to about 10 percent. So when you talk about women who are making appreciably more than their husbands, it’s only one woman in ten. And it’s primarily among couples earning the lowest salaries, averaging some $20,000 a year per household. Clearly, using the term “rich” doesn’t describe what’s really happening for many women.
In addition, the 40 percent figure widely cited today drops dramatically when more sophisticated analyses are used. Only when you define a woman who outearns her working husband by as little as a dollar a day as the “breadwinner”–and you include single mothers who are sole providers—can you get to that 40 percent figure.
Certainly, women have made significant gains in the past four decades, and there are indeed educated middle-class women who are the primary breadwinners, but they are far from taking over American homes.
The real story behind headlines touting the rise of women is that men, especially at the lower end of the wage scale, were doing poorly at the beginning of the recession. Even then, women weren’t doing great, but men were losing their jobs at a faster clip and their wages were declining. Now, women are sliding backward. But will the “mancovery” story have legs, or will it lose out to the “richer sex” narrative?
The latter seems likely, in part because women are graduating from college and grad schools at record rates, and there’s a strong belief that advanced degrees will turn into fat paychecks. But that doesn’t seem to be happening for women.
Women start behind when they enter the workforce and never catch up. This pattern holds true even with graduates from our most elite universities. Female Harvard alumni earn 30 percent less than their male counterparts 10 to 16 years after graduation.
And women’s representation hasn’t grown significantly in corporate boardrooms, executive suites or among companies’ top earners, reports Catalyst. CEO Ilene H. Lang said in 2011, “This is our fifth report where the annual change in female leadership remained flat. If this trend line represented a patient’s pulse—she’d be dead.”
In a recent speech, Harvard law professor Nancy Gertner said about women, “You’re supposed to say: ‘Things are fabulous.’ But they are not. Advancement has stalled.” Half of all new lawyers are women, she said, but only 16 percent of equity partners in law firms are female. And of lawyers who leave the profession, most are women—and most do it because of family and social concerns.
Under a veneer of success and progress, women are in fact at risk of sliding backward. A 2010 study by psychologist Jennifer Spoor and her colleagues at Queensland University in Australia found that men feel threatened by women’s gains.
As we wrote in a Daily Beast column last year, based on the anxiety men report over women’s successes, exaggerated news coverage of women “taking over the world” could result in a real pushback from men.
In contrast, when women focus on these gains, they report low levels of threat—as well as a diminished need to bond with other women. Spoor calls this the “rose-colored-glasses syndrome.” Too many women think all the battles have been fought, discrimination is a thing of the past and the future will bring ever-greater progress for them. This difference may explain the current low levels of feminist activism.
The “richer sex” narrative may blind women to reality, making it harder for them to build on the very real gains they’ve made in the past and truly move forward.
By: Rosalind C. Barnett and Caryl Rivers, The Daily Beast, April 28, 2012
“Eric’s Zombie Lie”: Cantor Says It’s Time To Tax The Poor
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor justifies his latest big tax break for millionaires by dragging out an old, big lie.
CANTOR: We also know that over 45 percent of the people in this country don’t pay income taxes at all, and we have to question whether that’s fair. And should we broaden the base in a way that we can lower the rates for everybody that pays taxes. […]
KARL: Just wondering, what do you do about that? Are you saying we need to have a tax increase on the 45 percent who right now pay no federal income tax?
CANTOR: I’m saying that, just in a macro way of looking at it, you’ve got to discuss that issue. […] I’ve never believed that you go raise taxes on those that have been successful that are paying in, taking away from them, so that you just hand out and give to someone else.
Let’s just do this again, debunk that zombie lie. The more than 45 percent of people who “don’t pay income taxes” don’t pay federal income tax because they’re too poor!They pay federal payroll taxes. They pay sales taxes in most states. They pay a larger share of their income in taxes than rich people do. And they are students, and disabled people, and the elderly who don’t have income.
And you know who doesn’t pay income tax? Two dozen Fortune 500 companies that avoided corporate income taxes altogether in 2011.
And Eric Cantor says that we need to take even more money away from poor Americans and give it directly to “those that have been successful.” That’s the Republican version of redistribution of wealth.
10:57 AM PT: The Cantor NASCAR/NFL owners tax break just passed, 235-173. Ten Republicans voted no, one voted present, and 10 Democrats voted for it.
By: Joan McCarter, Daily Kos, April 19, 2012
“Gospel Of Inequality”: Santorum Praises Income Inequality
“Santorum Praises Income Inequality.”
That was Fox News’s headlineabout Rick Santorum’s speech at the Detroit Economic Club on Thursday. Santorum said, “I’m not about equality of result when it comes to income inequality. There is income inequality in America. There always has been and, hopefully, and I do say that, there always will be.”
Unbelievable. Maybe not, but stunning all the same.
Then again, Santorum is becoming increasingly unhinged in his public comments. Last week, he said that the president was arguing that Catholics would have to “hire women priests to comply with employment discrimination issues.”
Also last week, he suggested that liberals and the president were leading religious people into oppression and even beheadings. I kid you not. Santorum said: “They are taking faith and crushing it. Why? When you marginalize faith in America, when you remove the pillar of God-given rights, then what’s left is the French Revolution. What’s left is a government that gives you rights. What’s left are no unalienable rights. What’s left is a government that will tell you who you are, what you’ll do and when you’ll do it. What’s left in France became the guillotine.”
Yet for Santorum to champion income inequality in Detroit, of all places, is still incredibly tone-deaf.
Detroit has the highest poverty rate of any big city in America, according to data provided by Andrew A. Beveridge, a demographer at Queens College. Among the more than 70 cities with populations over 250,000, Detroit’s poverty rate topped the list at a whopping 37.6 percent, more than twice the national poverty rate. And according to the Census Bureau, median household income in Detroit from 2006-10 was just $28,357, which was only 55 percent of the overall U.S. median household income over that time.
This is a city that last year announced plans to close half its public schools and send layoff notices to every teacher in the system.
This is a city where the mayor’s pledge to demolish 10,000 abandoned structures was seen as only shaving the tip of the iceberg because, as The Wall Street Journal reported in 2010, “the city has roughly 90,000 abandoned or vacant homes and residential lots, according to Data Driven Detroit, a nonprofit that tracks demographic data for the city.”
This is not the place to praise income inequality. Last week, at a hearing before the Senate Budget Committee, Kent Conrad, the chairman of that committee, laid out the issue as many Americans see it:
“The growing gap between the very wealthy and everyone else has serious ramifications for the country. It hinders economic growth, it undermines confidence in our institutions, and it goes against one of the core ideals of this country — that if you work hard and play by the rules, you can succeed and leave a better future for your kids and your grandkids.”
This is arguably even more true of people in Michigan than for the rest of us. Even though income inequality in the Detroit area isn’t particularly high, looking at the issue as an urban one in the case of cities like Detroit is problematic. The whole region took a hit. The comparison for cities like Detroit may be more intra-city than inter-city.
As Willy Staley argued in 2010 in an online column for Next American City magazine: “In richer cities, the inequality is put side-by-side, in an uncomfortable, loathsome way; for cities left in the dust of deindustrialization, the inequality is presents (sic) as existing between cities, not within them. Gone is the city/suburb divide between rich and poor, income inequality manifests itself within wealthy cities and between cities.”
And it is this feeling of being left behind by the American economy and abandoned by Republicans that is pushing Michigan into the blue. Public Policy Polling, a Democratic polling company, found this week that Obama would handily defeat all the Republican candidates in head-to-head matchups in the state. The company’s president, Dean Debnam, said in a statement: “Michigan is looking less and less like it will be in the swing state column this fall.” He continued, “Barack Obama’s numbers in the state are improving, while the Republican field is heading in the other direction.”
Santorum went on to say about income inequality during his speech on Thursday: “We should celebrate like we do in the small towns all across America — as you do here in Detroit. You celebrate success. You build statues and monuments. Buildings, you name after them. Why? Because in their greatness and innovation, yes, they created wealth, but they created wealth for everybody else. And that’s a good thing, not something to be condemned in America.”
Santorum might want to take a walk around Detroit to see who’s celebrating and to see how many statues he can find to honor people who simply invented something and got rich.
Furthermore, as a newspaperman and a former Detroiter, I’d like to direct him to the James J. Brady Memorial. Detroit1701.org, maintained by a University of Michigan emeritus professor, calls it “one of the more attractive memorials in Detroit.” It pays tribute to Brady, a federal tax collector, who set out to address the issue of child poverty in the city by founding the Old Newsboys’ Goodfellows of Detroit Fund in 1914 — what is essentially a local welfare fund.
The group provides “warm clothing, toys, books, games and candy” to local children every Christmas in addition to sending poor children to summer camps, the dentist and to college.
Then again, charitable giving doesn’t appear to be high on Motor Mouth Santorum’s list of priorities. As The Washington Post pointed out, based on Santorum’s tax return disclosure this week, he has given the least amount to charity of the four presidential candidates who have disclosed their tax returns. (Ron Paul has not.) His charitable giving was just 1.8 percent of his adjusted gross income.
The Obamas were the highest, giving 14.2 percent, even though their income was second lowest.
Maybe that’s the imbalance we should praise.
By: Charles M. Blow, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, February 17, 2012
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 