By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 23, 2011
Mr. Nice Guys?: Will Republicans Practice What They Tweet?
It appeared, at first glance, as if Eric Cantor’s Twitter account had been hacked — by a really nice guy.
In recent days, the extravagantly combative GOP House majority leader has been tweeting a veritable sampler box of bipartisan bonbons.
Sept. 21: “People don’t expect Republicans and Democrats to agree on everything, but they do expect us to overcome our differences and work together.”
Sept. 16: “Good people can have honest disagreements without having their morals or commitment to country being called into question.”
Sept. 13: “We need to work together towards the solutions that will meet the challenges facing our country today.”
Sept. 12: “Let’s try and lower the volume of the rancor in Washington, and focus on what we can do together to grow this economy and create jobs.”
And that is just a taste.
But this was no case of malicious (or, in this instance, magnanimous) hacking. After one of the ugliest summers political Washington has ever seen, Republicans, looking at poll numbers showing voters are even angrier with them than they are with President Obama, have decided to try the Mr. Nice Guy approach, in word and (occasional) deed.
They agreed to pass legislation keeping the Federal Aviation Administration going, abandoning the contentious provisions that led to this summer’s partial shutdown of the agency. They avoided another confrontation by extending highway spending without repealing the federal gas tax, a Tea Party priority. On Thursday, Senate Republicans yielded to President Obama’s demands and passed a worker-assistance bill that clears the way for enacting new trade agreements.
None of this means we’ve entered some new era of harmony in the capital; Republicans remain unswervingly opposed to any new taxes to reduce debt. And GOP leaders can push their rank-and-file only so far.
After conservatives on Wednesday defeated their leaders’ legislation that would keep the government running for the next two months, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) attempted to negotiate with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in hopes of securing Democratic votes for the spending bill. But Boehner lost his nerve and decided instead to appease the recalcitrant conservatives.
Still, the shift in tone shows that Republicans have decided to pick their battles — a sensible response to the revulsion Americans felt watching this summer’s brinkmanship over the debt limit.
The Republicans seem to be heeding the advice of strategists such as Bill McInturff, a GOP pollster who, in a widely read memo earlier this month, warned that the debt standoff hurt consumer confidence much like the Iranian hostage crisis, the collapse of Lehman Brothers and Hurricane Katrina.
“The perception of how Washington handled the debt ceiling negotiation led to an immediate collapse of confidence in government and all the major players, including President Obama and Republicans in Congress,” McInturff wrote. He added that “this sharp a drop in consumer confidence is a direct consequence of the lack of confidence in our political system and its leaders.”
Fearing that voters will probably punish all incumbents — not just Obama — Republicans have softened their style in September, even as Obama has hardened his. “There is a recognition on the Hill that people are frustrated with Washington and want some results,” acknowledged Cantor’s spokesman, Brad Dayspring.
The Republicans’ experiment in conciliation has been aided by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who has brought up issues — patents, trade and transportation — that had bipartisan support from the start. But Democrats also claim some vindication in the new approach. As one Democratic leadership aide put it: “They’re picking their shots better so they don’t come across as complete [expletives].”
The question is: How much substance comes with that recalibration? After Obama’s address to Congress on job creation, Boehner replied with the conciliatory message that “it is our desire to work with you to find common ground.”
On the morning after his House conservatives defeated the legislation to keep the government running, Boehner went to the microphones to assure Americans: “Listen, there’s no threat of government shutdown. Let’s just get this out there.”
Privately, Democrats believe that, too. And though Obama’s jobs bill has no chance of passage (even many Democrats object to its tax increases), chances are good that Republicans will agree to extend the payroll tax cut and a tax credit for hiring wounded veterans.
“We want to join with our colleagues on the other side of the aisle, to find areas where we agree, to make sure the American economy succeeds,” Cantor announced via Twitter.
Well said. But how much will Republicans practice what they tweet?
The GOP’s Lies And ‘Monstrous’ Lies
In politics these days, there are lies, “monstrous lies,” and statistics. By lies I mean the mundane nonsense that dribbles out of politicians’ mouths when the facts don’t suit them or they just don’t know any better. By “monstrous lies,” if I can borrow the phrase of the moment, I refer to the grander deceptions swallowed by whole political movements, delusions and deceptions that infect larger issues of policy and worldview.
Statistics in this case, along with pesky facts, help expose and distinguish the two species of falsehood—both of which have been on dramatic display during the GOP presidential primary campaign.
Take, for example, Michele Bachmann, who is practically a walking, talking full-employment plan for journalistic fact-checkers. Appearing at last week’s Republican debate (sponsored by CNN and the Tea Party Express—does that mean that the Tea Party is now part of the lamestream media?), Bachmann repeated a favorite talking point, that the Constitution forbids states to mandate that their citizens buy health insurance, Romneycare-style. “If you believe that states can have it and that it’s constitutional, you’re not committed” to repealing the Affordable Care Act, she argued. But the conservative case against the healthcare law rests on the notion that because the Constitution does not explicitly authorize such a law, the federal government is barred from instituting one. Since the 10th Amendment reserves powers not delegated to the federal government back to the states, it is constitutional for, say, Massachusetts to require its citizens to purchase health insurance (or car insurance, for that matter). Bachmann’s stance, one blogger at the influential conservative blog Red State argued, is “either ignorance on display or dishonest pandering.”
Bachmann was even more egregious after the debate, when she went on Fox News Channel, and later the Today show, and asserted that Gardasil, the vaccine that Texas Gov. Rick Perry had tried to mandate for Texas schoolgirls, caused “mental retardation.” It’s such whole-cloth twaddle that even the likes of Rush Limbaugh (“she might have jumped the shark”) and the Weekly Standard (“Bachmann seemed to go off the deep end”) blasted her for it.
But Bachmann is literally and figuratively small potatoes, Perry’s arrival having returned her to the lower tier of GOP contenders. And she is minor league compared to Perry in the “monstrous lie” department.
The phrase of course comes from his memorable description of Social Security. “It is a Ponzi scheme to tell our kids that are 25 or 30 years old today, you’ve paid into a program that’s going to be there,” Perry said at his first presidential debate. “Anybody that’s for the status quo with Social Security today is involved with a monstrous lie to our kids, and that’s not right.” Elsewhere he has called the program “by any measure … a failure” and cited it as “by far the best example” of an extra-constitutional program “violently tossing aside any respect for our founding principles.”
It’s a catchy turn of argument, but one monstrously divorced from reality. His “failure” kept nearly 14 million seniors and 1.1 million children out of poverty last year, according to Census Bureau data. Here are the facts about Social Security: Without any modification, it will pay out full benefits for the next 24 years. Starting in 2035, its trust fund will no longer be able to pay full benefits. Instead it will pay roughly three quarters benefits through 2084, which is as foreseeable a future as anyone can peer into in these matters—a problematic future, but hardly a monstrous one and certainly not an impossible one.
Indeed, the Congressional Budget Office has produced 30 policy recommendations, some combination of which could fix the Social Security shortfall. Here’s one: Remove the payroll tax cap so that more wages are subject to the payroll tax. That would make the program solvent for the 75-year window—again, hardly a monstrous situation. (To put it another way, the Social Security shortfall figures to be roughly 0.8 percent of GDP—roughly the same as the cost of extending the Bush tax cuts over the same period.)
Social Security wasn’t the only topic this week of Texas-size Perry misinformation. Obama “had $800 billion worth of stimulus in the first round of stimulus,” Perry said. “It created zero jobs.”
This gem—a staple of GOP talking points—earned a “Pants on Fire” rating from PolitiFact, which pointed to several independent analyses that came to quite different conclusions. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the first round of stimulus created or saved between 1.3 million and 3.6 million jobs; HIS/Global Insight put the number at 2.45 million, Macroeconomic Advisers at 2.3 million, and Moody’s Economy.com at 2.5 million. The GOP may disdain jobs that come from public spending (recall Speaker John Boehner’s “so be it” comment when asked about budget cuts leading to fewer jobs), but they cannot seriously argue that the economy would be better off if the ranks of the unemployed were 2.5 million persons more swollen. So instead forgo the inconvenient truth in favor of the monstrous lie.
These lies are monstrous because they are not one-offs, but are central to the GOP case—that Social Security (except, they are quick to add, for those currently on it) and the stimulus plan don’t work. So they have real-world policy consequences—see the emerging conservative line of attack against Obama’s American Jobs Act, that it is a stimulus retread. “Four hundred-plus billion dollars in this package,” Perry concluded at the debate. “And I can do the math on that one. Half of zero jobs is going to be zero jobs.”
He may be able to do math, but his grasp on the facts is tenuous at best.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, September 22, 2011
It’s Not About Job Creation Stupid!: I Am A Job Creator Who Creates No Jobs
I am a job creator.
I am not a job creator in the sense that I actually create jobs. I have never knowingly created a job, and my long-term business plan, approved unanimously by my board of directors, does not call for the creation of a single one.
But I am a job creator in the sense Republicans mean when they say “don’t tax our job creators more” (House budget committee Chairman Paul Ryan) or “we cannot increase taxes on the job creators” (House Speaker John A. Boehner). This is because, in the eyes of the government, I am a small business — and, as the House Republicans liketosay, “small businesses are the job creators.”
Like the overwhelming majority of small businesses, I am a one-man operation. And, like most small businesses, I would not hire anybody even if the government dropped my tax rate to zero.
According to Small Business Administration statistics, based on 2009 Census data, 21.1 million of the 27 million small businesses in the United States are “non-employer firms,” which have no workers other than the owner. Of those, 18.7 million are “sole proprietors,” 950,000 are partnerships and 1.4 million are corporations, like me.
When lawmakers talk about small businesses as the engine of growth, they bring to mind entrepreneurs building start-ups from their garages. But when officials talk about protecting the “job creators” from tax hikes, they are mostly protecting a bunch of doctors, lawyers, freelancers, contractors and the like.
On the advice of my accountants, I formed a “C corporation,” which means that, as a legal entity, I am pretty much the same as General Motors and Google. But I run a lean operation. While my business, Ink-Stained Inc., produces the occasional book, TV appearance and speech, it is probably not going to win any best-practices awards.
Disagreement is rare during board meetings at Ink-Stained Inc. world headquarters (my house), because I am the chairman, chief executive, president, treasurer, secretary, chief technology officer and mail-room clerk. Occasionally board members complain about environmental regulations, not because these regulations affect us but because that is what we have heard corporations are supposed to do.
We administer a modest pension plan for our sole employee, and we reimburse a few health-care expenses. We have big, professional-looking checks, and we attempt to keep our accounts balanced, although our chief financial officer (also me) is a lagging performer. We once considered hiring our wife as a consultant to help us organize our finances, but the HR department was unable to come to terms with her. We have so far repelled all attempts at unionization.
I should add that I am in no danger of being caught in the net of President Obama’s proposed millionaires’ tax. I pay the accountants a few thousand dollars, and they make sure I am not paying more in taxes than I should be. (Note to the IRS: They do this in ways that are conservative, entirely above-board and so innocuous that they should not attract your interest in the slightest.)
While there is something absurd about being a one-man corporation, it’s a rational response to an irrational tax code. If lawmakers got serious about tax reform that removed loopholes, the money spent on accountants and actuaries (valuable though they are) could instead be used to grow the economy or to pay the federal debt. But that’s a matter for another day.
At the moment, the Ink-Stained Inc. case study, should the Harvard Business School wish to study it, is a reminder to be skeptical of the “job creator” argument in the tax debate. “It’s a good example of the murkiness of what we mean by small business and the connection to jobs,” William Gale, co-director of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution’s Tax Policy Center, told me. “There’s sort of this notion of small-business innovation and job creation that just doesn’t necessarily hold.”
That’s even more so with Obama’s “Buffett Rule,” under which millionaires would have to pay a higher tax rate than a typical middle-class worker. As a practical matter, most already do. Gale said the rule would raise the taxes on only a few thousand people, perhaps as few as 1,000.
In a nation of more than 300 million, that’s not going to make a dent in job creation. Even the data analysts at Ink-Stained Inc. could figure out that one — that is, if we had any data analysts.
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 21, 2011
Oh Really!: Gov Scott Walker Reports Net Gain Of 9,500 Jobs
Wisconsin added 9,500 jobs last month, in part because of a renewed focus on drawing tourists to the state, Gov.Scott Walker said Thursday.
The state added 12,900 jobs in the private sector but lost 3,400 government jobs in June, according to seasonally adjusted numbers released by the state Department of Workforce Development. The net gain of 9,500 jobs accounts for more than half the 18,000 net jobs created across the nation during the month.
The governor credited the state’s numbers to “a rebirth of tourism” following broad efforts to publicize Wisconsin’s state fairs, ethnic festivals and sporting events.
“Tourism is more than a $12 billion industry in the state of Wisconsin,” he told reporters in Milwaukee. “This is about putting people to work.”
He said he didn’t have details on which specific industries gained jobs. However, the Department of Workforce Development confirmed that almost half the private-sector growth was in the leisure and hospitality industry. There were 6,200 jobs created in that sector last month, and 3,300 more jobs than in June of last year.
A reporter asked whether the new jobs were seasonal and would be gone in several months. Walker replied that some were summer jobs but that an unspecified number would carry over into subsequent months.
“You certainly have a summer blitz when it comes to lakes and our other attractions, but you come back in the fall for hunting and you come back in the winter for snowmobiling and skiing,” he said.
When asked if the new jobs pay livable wages Walker said the job numbers released Thursday were sorted only by industry, not income. He added that his focus has always been to attract well-paying jobs.
Walker was joined at his news conference by Tourism Secretary Stephanie Klett. She said Walker’s budget increased the department’s funding by 20 percent, allocating an additional $2.5 million toward attracting visitors from other states.
“We ran a $3 million marketing campaign this summer,” she said, “and I think today with this announcement we are seeing the results in a big way.”
She said some of the new jobs were year-round positions at popular resorts.
Even though Wisconsin added nearly 10,000 jobs in June, the state’s unemployment rate actually nudged upward for the month to 7.6 percent, up 0.2 percentage points from the previous month. That’s because the job numbers and employment numbers come from two separate surveys, DWD spokesman John Dipko said in an email.
The jobs number comes from workplace data, while the unemployment rate is based on a survey of households, he said.
Unemployment figures encompass Wisconsin residents who are available for work and actively seeking jobs.
The state Democratic party said the preliminary job numbers look promising, but party chairman Mike Tate said it is important to know specifically what types of jobs were being created.
“Will these jobs support Wisconsin families or will they bolster the profits of corporations that benefit from the downward pressure on wages and benefits that comes at the hands of Scott Walker’s attack on collective bargaining?” he said in a statement.
The state’s unemployment rate has hovered around 7.4 percent for the first five months of the year. The state figure generally has been about 1.5 percentage points better than the national rate. That trend continued last month as the U.S. unemployment rate rose 0.1 percentage points to 9.2 percent.
By: Dinesh Ramde, Associated Press, July 22, 2o11
No Limits To Hypocrisy: Boehner Claims To Be “Worried About The Country”
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), as expected, is now fully invested in a temporary debt-ceiling extension. He’ll accept $1 trillion in cuts — with no revenue — now, and then consider another extension next year after additional negotiations over taxes and entitlements.
Democrats want one debt-ceiling vote, seeing no need to put the country through this twice in less than a year. Take note of how Boehner responds to this.
Boehner suggested Sunday that by trying to put the next debt ceiling debate off for so long Obama was trying to gain political advantage.
“I know the president is worried about his next re-election, but, my God, shouldn’t we be worried about the country?” Boehner asked.
It’s entirely possible that the House Speaker really is this dumb. With this in mind, I’m trying to think about how to ask the questions in a way John Boehner can understand. How about this:
1. How would the country benefit from two votes on raising the debt ceiling, instead of one?
2. If Republicans are sincerely concerned about economic “uncertainty,” why tell investors, job creators, and international markets that default is a possibility early next year?
3. If getting one debt-ceiling revision through Congress is necessary but difficult, why make lawmakers go through this twice?
Hearing John Boehner claim the high road, claiming to be “worried about the country,” might be the most hilarious thing I’ve seen in a while. We are, after all, talking about a House Speaker who allowed his caucus to launch an insane hostage strategy, threatening to crash the economy on purpose, and then refused to compromise, even after President Obama handed him an overly-generous offer.
“My God, shouldn’t we be worried about the country”? What a good question, John. Why don’t you answer it?
By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, July 24, 2011
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