“The GOP’s Favorite Government Jobs”: Republicans Didn’t Realize Government Budget Cuts Result In Layoffs
Politico’s Austin Wright has a crazy little story about a spat between congressional Republicans and the Labor Department that hinges on the possibility of mass defense contractor layoffs.
The fight is over whether defense contractors are required to send out notices warning their workers of layoffs that would kick in as a result of the large defense spending cuts due Jan. 1 — aka”sequestration.”
Republicans say yes, citing the WARN Act, which requires large employers to give 60 days’ notice of possible layoffs. The GOP has been chortling in glee at the prospect of such notices going out to every single employee of the largest defense contractors, because the 60-day countdown just happens to arrive four days before Election Day. Because, you know, layoffs are bad, even if they mean Big Government is shrinking.
But the Labor Department says no! Labor’s main argument is based on the reasoning that sequestration is not inevitable — Democrats and Republicans still have time to come to a budget deal that would avoid sharp defense cuts. (Indeed the whole point of sequestration was that the prospect of such cuts was supposedly so drastic that it would force a compromise.)
According to Politico’s Wright, congressional Republicans consider the Labor Department’s decision a “political stunt.” That accusation has a high likelihood of being true, but it seems just a little bit hypocritical coming from Republicans who are hoping that layoff notices timed to be delivered just before Election Day will help their own electoral chances.
And that’s hardly the tip of the hypocrisy iceberg. Buried beneath the surface of this latest example of Washington dysfunction is a basic truth: Government budget cuts result in layoffs. That’s not good during a period of very slow economic growth. And yet, Republicans seem to have little problem when the newly unemployed are teachers or firefighters. But when defense’s ox is getting gored, then it becomes a big deal, and then the layoffs are presumed to be Obama’s fault and thus embarrassing to the White House.
By: Andrew Leonard, Salon, August 6, 2012
“Sham Plan For The Privileged Elite”: Mitt Romney’s Cruel Joke On The Middle Class
The Republican presidential nominee has stopped trying to hide his allegience to the wealthy and privileged.
In response, it seems, to criticism of his economic plan—which will raise taxes on the vast majority of Americans in order to cut taxes for the wealthiest taxpayers—Mitt Romney has released a one-page “plan for a stronger middle-class.” The provisions are what you would expect:
- Increase domestic drilling, reduce regulations on the coal industry, and complete the Keystone XL pipeline.
- Sign new trade agreements and “curtail the unfair trade pracices of countries like China.”
- Devolve federal programs, like Medicaid, to the states, cut spending on an existing agencies and social programs, and institute a larger, long-term cut by capping federal spending at below 20 percent.
- Cut taxes, repeal the Affordable Care Act, reduce regulations, and make it more difficult for unions to organize.
Romney’s cuts to Medicaid, Pell Grants and other social services—the inevitable outcome of capping federal spending while drastically reducing revenue—would shred the social safety net and make financial security an impossible prospect for millions of Americans. His promise to repeal the Affordable Care Act would deprive countless people of health insurance, and force them to shoulder the burden of an expensive and dysfunctional health care system. His promise to drastically reduce regulations would allow unscrupulous corporations to mislead consumers, and pollute our air, water, and soil with dangerous chemicals. His promise to take on unions—which are already in decline—would make it even harder for workers to negotiate and stand up for themselves.
It’s a cruel joke to describe this as a plan to strengthen the middle class, when in reality, it would destroy opportunity, eliminate security, and place vulnerable Americans at the mercy of employers who lack a commitment to anything other than profits.
Even more galling than the plan itself is the fact that it’s wrapped in a promise to create 12 million jobs over the next four years. As Greg Sargent points out at the Washington Post, the economy is already projected to create 12 million jobs.
In other words, Romney is peddling a sham plan that does nothing for the economy and nothing for ordinary people. Instead, it drains our shared resources, and diverts them to “job creators”—the privileged elite that has jettisoned any and all concern for the public good.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, August 3, 2012
“Romney Unveils Agenda”: His “Five-Point Plan” Is Vastly Less Specific Than His “One-Point Plan”
Ask and it shall be given, Mitt Romney’s campaign seems to be saying today to critics Left and Right. Need a positive campaign message? Want an agenda? Well, here you are, per Byron York:
[O]n Thursday, the campaign rolled out “Mitt Romney’s Plan for a Stronger Middle Class,” which boiled down nearly every domestic policy proposal Romney has made to just five points: energy independence, education, trade reform, deficit cutting and a plan to “champion small business.”
And on Thursday afternoon, there was Romney, addressing supporters in Golden, Colo., in front of a giant banner that said ROMNEY PLAN. In his remarks, Romney criticized Obama; nothing wrong with that. But he laid out his larger purpose at the very beginning. “Today, I come to talk about making things better,” Romney said, laying out his plan. “If we do those five things, those simple five things … you’re going to see this economy come roaring back.”
“This is the path to more jobs and more take-home pay and a brighter future for you and your kids,” Romney added. “And I know that because I’ve seen it.”
Romney was clear, sharp and focused. If he stays that way, he’ll likely quiet some of his GOP critics, at least for a while.
Well, that’s nice, and clearly more substantive than just touting his own success and rugged good looks as a sufficient agenda. But Lord a-mercy, this five-point plan raises a few follow-up questions, eh? I mean, would Barack Obama dispute any of these five goals? I don’t think so.
The funny thing about this “five-point plan” is that it’s vastly less specific than what you might call his “one-point plan:” the Ryan Budget, which shows in detail how Romney and a Republican Congress would go about achieving those five goals. Until Romney is willing to talk about that, then he can call his vague talking points a PLAN all he wants, but it’s about as accurate as taking photos of a city from an airplane window at 40,000 feet, and proclaiming it all neat and pretty.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, August 3, 2012
“Mitt Romney Passes Wind”: He’s Perfectly Happy To Maintain Subsidies For The Oil Industry
What happens when the preferences of the economic base meet the preferences of the ideological base?
Mitt Romney was in Colorado yesterday, where some people aren’t too pleased with him. This week he came out in opposition to an extension of the wind-power production tax credit (PTC), which is set to expire at the end of the year. The tax credit helps make wind power competitive and is credited with enabling the creation of thousands of jobs in manufacturing and construction. This is almost certainly not going to be a huge issue in the campaign, but it does reveal some interesting things about where Romney is vis-a-vis the Republican Party. On one side, you have the parochial economic interests of many Republican members of Congress and some very well-heeled Republican economic constituency. On the other, you have the purely knee-jerk reaction of Tea Party types to anything hippies might like. Guess where Mitt comes down?
Yesterday, the Senate Finance Committee passed an extension of the credit with bipartisan support. The PTC has support from members of Congress from both parties who have wind projects in their states, and a number of prominent Republicans like Chuck Grassley have urged Romney to change his position. There are thousands of jobs at stake; as Phyllis Cuttino of the Pew Clean Energey Program writes, “This uncertainty has put off investors and led to boom-and-bust cycles in the industry: Wind installations have declined by 73 to 93 percent in years without a PTC. Because of the long timelines (wind projects can take nine to 16 months from groundbreaking to power generation), investors seeking new wind projects must look two to three years into the future to decide whether the costs and benefits warrant investment. As we’ve seen in the past, investors are wary of supporting new projects if the availability of the tax credit is uncertain.” That brings up a peculiar footnote to this issue: Some of the biggest beneficiaries of this tax break are banks like Goldman Sachs, which is investing heavily in clean energy and so has a substantial stake in the PTC being renewed.
But when the issue came up, Mitt Romney’s spidey-sense, with which he tunes into every whim and grunt from Republican-base voters, began to tingle. Let’s dispense with the idea that anyone on either side has a principled position on these kind of tax credits that they hold to irrespective of the activity that the tax credit supports. In the case of liberals, there’s no hypocrisy involved: We’ll freely admit that there are some things government should support, and in a case like renewable energy, some of these industries need a boost in their early stages in order to become competitive. Part of government’s job is to create the conditions where the market can operate freely, efficiently, and justly. All of us (well, most of us) would agree that if we got all our energy from renewables and that energy was affordable, that would be better than our current situation, in which most of our energy comes from sources that have substantial environmental costs in both their extraction and their use. The question is what we’re willing to do in order to approach that better world, and liberals believe that some tax credits for renewables are a perfectly reasonable part of the price. We also assume that these tax credits are finite and that as the industry matures they can be phased out.
Conservatives, on the other hand, claim that they believe in the free market and that industries should rise or fall on their own merits without any help from government. But in practice, their opinions on particular cases show no adherence to this principle they allegedly hold. Instead, they favor tax credits for industries they like for one reason or another and oppose them for industries they don’t like. In the past few years, opinions on energy have become one more culture-war marker for conservatives, with people gleefully chanting “Drill baby drill!” at Republican rallies and leaders like Rush Limbaugh waging holy war against electric cars, for no particular reason other than liberals like renewable energy, and they hate liberals. So Mitt Romney is perfectly happy to maintain subsidies for the oil industry but opposes subsidies for the wind-power industry. There isn’t some fundamental principle about the relationship of industry and government at work here. He’s just channeling the opinions of his party, as always.
For a long time, it seemed that whenever there was a direct conflict between the preferences of the GOP’s economic base and its grassroots ideological base, preference went to the economic base. Those conflicts were rare—part of the great trick the economic base pulled was convincing the grassroots base that if Jesus returned tomorrow, he’d favor cutting the capital gains tax. I doubt Romney feels particularly strongly about this. But his default impulse, at least for the moment, is to do whatever he thinks the most extreme Tea Partier would prefer. As I said yesterday, it’s almost as though he doesn’t realize the primaries are over.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, August 3, 2012
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