“The Nature Of His Public Service”: John Boehner’s Plan To Hurt The Country On Purpose
Sequestration cuts, we learned yesterday, continue to undermine the U.S. economy severely, and are quickly losing support of the congressional Republicans who pushed for the policy in the first place. As the GOP budget strategy unravels, House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) said yesterday the sequester is “unrealistic,” “ill-conceived,” and a policy that “must be brought to an end.”
For now, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) doesn’t give a darn.
Speaker John A. Boehner came before the mics on Thursday, and he made one thing clear: The sequester is here to stay until the White House gets serious about spending cuts.
“Sequestration is going to remain in effect until the president agrees to cuts and reforms that will allow us to remove it,” the Ohio Republican said to reporters in his weekly news conference. “The president insisted on the sequester none of us wanted, none of us like it, there are smarter ways to cut spending.”
It’s frightening how little Boehner understands about this policy. He’s the Speaker of the House, for goodness sake.
First, the president didn’t “insist on the sequester.” That’s just crazy.
Second, if “none of us” want this stupid policy, it’s within Boehner’s power to stop the cuts that are hurting the country on purpose. For reasons that only make sense to him, the Speaker refuses.
Third, Boehner’s argument is that he’ll stop deliberately undermining the country when Obama “agrees to cuts and reforms.” But Obama has already approved $1.5 trillion in spending cuts, and offered Republicans even more. So far, GOP officials have offered no comparable concessions.
And finally, there’s the problem Boehner doesn’t like to talk about: he has no alternative.
In effect, he’s saying, “When Obama agrees to make me happy, I’ll agree to end the pain.” And what would make Boehner happy? He won’t say — Obama is supposed to just offer Republican goodies, in the hopes that the House Speaker will eventually say he’s satisfied and turn off the policy that’s hurting the country on purpose.
Maybe Boehner should take a moment to consider how he defines the nature of “public service.” Does he seriously believe he’s acting in the nation’s best interests by pushing a policy both parties hate and is clearly undermining economic growth and job creation?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 1, 2013
“The GOP Roadblock To Repairs”: With Limited Time And Opportunity, Republican Infrastructure Intransigence Strikes Again
In 2005, the World Economic Forum ranked America’s infrastructure Number 1 in the world for “economic competitiveness.” Only eight short years later, the U.S. occupies 14th place. Instead of leading our global competitors in planning, staying current and building a transportation system for the 21st century, we have continued to invest at the same rate (in real inflation-adjusted dollars) as we did in 1968.
By way of example, Canada spends 4 percent of its GDP on transportation, investment and maintenance, with China spending 9 percent. The U.S. spends only 1.7 percent.
More than 69,000 of America’s bridges are deemed structurally deficient, more than 11 percent of all the bridges in our country. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, the U.S. would need to invest $3.6 trillion between now and 2020 just to keep its infrastructure in “good” repair.
As a nation, our cities have become more congested, our commutes more delayed and our companies less productive. According to UPS, five minutes of daily delay for its trucks adds up to $100 million lost annually.
President Obama has long understood that investments made to our nation’s infrastructure will create jobs here in America that can’t be outsourced or replaced overseas. Interestingly, this is the same dynamic that has united two bitter enemies, the AFL-CIO and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, around their mutual quest to see Congress appropriate more funding for infrastructure projects.
Even Republicans seem to understand the need, or at least they have indicated so at times. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has said, “Everybody knows we have a crumbling infrastructure. Infrastructure spending is popular on both sides. The question is how much are we going to spend.” Senator Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., once claimed, “If you’re a Republican and you want to create jobs, then you need to invest in infrastructure that will allow us to create jobs.”
This week, President Obama proposed to cut corporate taxes and to invest in infrastructure projects to boost American jobs, all while being “revenue neutral.” These are concepts that have been championed by Republicans in the past, but generally ignored in recent times.
Unfortunately, true to form, the GOP backlash was immediate, claiming Obama’s plan offered them no concessions at all. McConnell said on the floor, “The plan, which I just learned about last night, lacks meaningful bipartisan input,” and thus he will oppose it. As the president suggested in a recent interview with the New York Times, “there’s almost a kneejerk habit right now that if I’m for it, then they’ve [Republicans in congress] got to be against it.”
So, once again, Congress is at a standstill while it admires our nation’s crumbling infrastructure. Seemingly, Republican leadership would rather put up roadblocks than work with the president to build and restore some of our nation’s fundamental structural needs to remain economically competitive – operative roads, bridges, dams, levees and rails. There are only 61 days left before the next government shutdown and nine legislative working days on the calendar in September. This limited time and opportunity will require leaders from both sides to step forward and work efficiently to pass the necessary legislation to get this country back on track.
Perhaps, while members of Congress are away in August, they will actually remember what they were for before they were against it.
By: Penny Lee, U. S. News and World Report, July 31, 2013
“The Character Of The Caucus”: Thanks To Republican Intrasigence, It’s All About 2016 Now
It wasn’t the House Republicans’ refusal to take up the president’s jobs plan before the last election. Or their reckless games with the debt ceiling when Paul Ryan’s budget called for trillions in fresh debt itself. Or House intransigence when it comes to the Senate’s bipartisan immigration fix. Or even its recent call to nix high, common school standards.
Not that these steps weren’t awful. But somehow they could be put down to “normal” petty politics. The “out” party never wants the jobs picture to improve before an election. The debt ceiling is one of a handful of “forcing devices” that pols of all stripes seize on in a town where nothing really has to happen. One can argue that immigration reform isn’t as urgent as, say, jobs. And stoking phony fears of a federal school takeover is the oldest slander in the book (never mind that these “common core” standards were adopted by states voluntarily, and that the world’s top-performing school systems all have something like them).
No, what finally made me lose it was House Republicans’ warped obsession with Obamacare. This fixation showcases so many noxious traits simultaneously that it reveals the ultimate character of the caucus.
At bottom, Obamacare is a moral assertion that it is wrong when a wealthy nation has 50 million people without health insurance, when medical bills are a leading cause of bankruptcy for families and when millions of luckless souls are unable to get coverage because they have preexisting conditions. The House GOP today says these are not real problems.
Obamacare addressed these problems with precisely the mechanism that conservative thinkers and Republican policymakers favored (subsidies to buy insurance from competing private carriers with a requirement that everyone be in the insurance pool). Yet the House GOP effectively has said: Even if you adopt the approach our party favors for a problem we used to say was real — a problem that our presidential nominee addressed successfully in his state — we still can’t be with you. We have to damn you as un-American. We have to deceive the public about your aims and methods. We have to do everything in our power to stop you from using our preferred approach to bring a measure of security to the middle class.
It’s the most perverse, irredeemable bait-and-switch since Lucy pulled the football away from Charlie Brown. Even Lucy didn’t do it 39 times.
I’ve long been a critic of the House GOP. But something in their poisonous Obamacare stance has made me snap. It’s one thing to think you can’t do business with these people. It’s another to realize these people aren’t operating in the same moral and economic universe.
So here we are. The only question for those seeking American renewal is what will break this gridlock. The only certain answer is that the president’s speech Wednesday will not. Obama is calling for an economy built from the “middle out” (hats off to progressive activists Nick Hanauer and Eric Liu, who pushed this smart messaging so relentlessly for two years that it’s become the official Democratic creed).
By: Matt Miller, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, July 24, 2013
“Blessed Are The Rich”: Charles Koch Is Such A Clueless Visionary
One thing I’ve come to value in the last couple of years is the altruism and keen economic insights of the fourth-richest man in America: Charles Koch.
Even though Koch was raised rich and has now amassed a personal fortune of about $34 billion, he recently gave us a deeper sense of his true worth, measured not in dollars, but in values.
“We want to do a better job of raising up the disadvantaged and the poorest in this country,” he declared. Excellent thought — FDR couldn’t have put it better! Noting that a big problem for the poor is that the Powers That Be “keep throwing obstacles in their way,” Koch cut to the chase, saying, “We’ve got to clear those out.”
Yes, Charlie, I’m with you! Clear out such barriers as the offshoring of middle-class jobs, union busting, poorly funded schools and the lack of affordable health care, housing and child care.
But, alas, that’s not at all what Koch had in mind as obstacles to be cleared out. Rather, he proposes to “help” poor people by eliminating — ready? — “the minimum wage.” Why? Because, explains this clueless son-of-the-rich, having a wage floor “reduces the mobility of labor.”
In case you don’t dwell in the plutocratic, narcissistic, Ayn Randian fantasyland where the Kochs hang out, “labor mobility” is right-wing psychobabble for social Darwinism. Remove all remnants of America’s economic safety net, they coldly theorize (while wallowing in their nests of luxury), and the poor will be “freed” to become billionaires.
As Charles puts it, if the disadvantaged had no protections in the workplace and no government programs to ameliorate their poverty, they would then have to scramble just to live, thus freeing them from reliance on society’s helping hand. Freeing them to do what? Well, Koch says, they could then “start a business … drive a taxicab … become a hairdresser.”
What a visionary he is! Where you and I might see people trapped in debilitating poverty, Charles sees a Brave New World of billionaire hairdressers!
But he’s not the only 1-percenter having utopian visions for hard-hit Americans. For example, I can’t begin to tell you how grateful America’s homeless people are going to be once they hear about Andy Kessler, who has been thinking long and hard about their plight, selflessly seeking ways to eradicate intractable poverty.
Kessler is a former hedge-fund whiz, which means he was in the business of making … well, money. Beaucoup bundles of it. But having seen his 16-year-old son volunteer at a homeless center, he was motivated to develop a plan to solve homelessness — and here it is: Stop dishing out soup to those people, and shut down all those damn shelters!
The homeless problem, he recently wrote in an op-ed piece for The Wall Street Journal, stems from “all this volunteering and charitable giving” by do-gooders like his son. Homeless folks ought to be working, he lectured, but they’re not, “because someone is feeding, clothing and, in effect, bathing them.”
Golly, Andy, I recall that Jesus said something about our Godly duty to feed and clothe the needy — and even to wash the feet of the poor.
But apparently, Jesus just didn’t grasp the essence of true morality. “Blessed are the rich!” is Kessler’s spiritual mantra. “Where does money come from … to help the unfortunate?” he asked. And yea, I say unto thee, the Holy Hedge-Funder answered his own deep question: It comes from “someone (who) worked productively and created wealth.”
Thus, he sagely concluded, the answer to poverty, to truly helping the poor, is not to pamper the takers, but to provide more tax breaks for the makers of wealth (like him) — the ones who produce “good old-fashioned economic growth.”
Wow, what a role model this guy is for America’s youth — including that misguided boy of his! Wouldn’t you like to buy Andy and Charles for what they’re worth … and sell them for what they think they’re worth? That would fund a whole lot of homeless programs.
By: Jim Hightower, the National Memo, July 24, 2013
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