“We Don’t Want Nothing Out Of This Debt Limit”: Paul Ryan Says He Isn’t Done Holding The Economy Hostage
In the spectacular Republican burnout at the end of the October government shutdown, it was easy to miss that America came within just hours of a full economic meltdown.
The brinksmanship over the demand to defund Obamacare or at least completely maim it lasted for 16 days and cost an estimated $24 billion. But if the standoff had gone on just another day longer, the debt ceiling would have been breached, causing economic chaos.
It’s difficult to predict what kind of damage the economy might have suffered, because no Congress had ever been stupid enough to default on our debts on purpose. The debt limit crisis of 2011 cost the stock market thousands of points and stunted job creation for months. There wasn’t a similar effect in 2013 because Wall Street assumed the GOP was crying wolf, and they were right.
But one mistake, one procedural error, one coup against a congressional leader could have sparked the beginning of a default. And many economists believe the results would have resembled the 2008 financial crisis — but worse.
As she’s sold the budget deal she negotiated with House Republicans that doesn’t extend the debt limit, Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) has said, “We have brought certainty and stability.”
And the economy does seem to be more stable since the GOP capitulated in October. “The volatility of the U.S. dollar in the last 90 days fell to 4.93 percent on Dec. 13 from a yearly high of 7.34 percent in September as a shutdown and debt ceiling crisis loomed, according to the Bloomberg U.S. Dollar Index that represents 10 major currencies weighted by liquidity and trade flows,” Bloomberg‘s Derek Wallbank and Kathleen Hunter noted.
But Murray’s partner, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), seems intent on disrupting that stability.
“We don’t want nothing out of this debt limit,” he told Fox News Sunday.
In other words, House Republican demands are forthcoming. The last time they put together a list of such demands, it was an insane laundry list of right-wing wishes cribbed from the Koch Brothers’ letter to Santa. Somehow being the party held responsible for the greatest financial crisis in a half-century has given Republicans the freedom to boldly threaten a return to such a crisis again and again, without fear of destroying their party.
The president offered, in return, nothing. Obviously regretting setting the precedent that the economy could be held hostage, President Obama has vowed never to negotiate over the debt limit again.
With Republican factions warring with themselves and everyone in Washington seeing their approval ratings shrink, would they dare play chicken with the economy as the midterm elections rapidly approach?
Paul Ryan knows he can’t afford not to at least seem as if he’s willing to do so without losing the Tea Party support that makes him such an asset to House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH). And the president knows he can’t afford to give in.
The result is that another crisis has been averted, but a far worse one looms.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, December 16, 2013
“What Would Jesus Cut?”: Republicans Should Listen To Pope Francis’ Economic Message
Usually poverty gets less attention from the media than global warming, which gets very little. Now the problem is on the front pages and trending on Twitter. Two weeks ago, Pope Francis issued a plea for income equality, and it was President Obama’s turn to discuss poverty last week. Underpaid workers are mounting protests against Wal-Mart and the fast food industry. New Jersey, the District of Columbia and many municipalities have recently increased the minimum wage within their jurisdictions.
Middle-class families are mired in debt because their incomes haven’t increased in the last 20 years while college, energy and health care costs have skyrocketed. Meanwhile, economic royalists are reaping the benefits of trickle-down economics as they harvest the lion’s share of income growth.
The concentration of wealth has become such a problem that wealth is even concentrated among the wealthy. In the recent Forbes list of top earners, 6 of the richest 10 Americans were either Kochs or Waltons. You will find a family portrait of the Waltons beside the word selfish in the dictionary. The Walton family makes billions of dollars every year, but they can’t reach deep enough into their pockets to pay the employees at Wal-Mart a living wage.
Two weeks ago, the pope made a strong statement about the evils of poverty. Pope Francis said “trickle down” economics is a “crude naïve belief in the goodness of those wielding economic power.” Francis wasn’t the first pope to weigh in on poverty. In the shade of economic abuses during the industrial age, Pope Pius VIII called for a “living wage” in his 1891 message “Rerum Novarum,” which roughly translates from Latin into English as “On the New World.” The economic deprivations of our time resemble the abuses of that era. Modern conservatives might note that the abuses of the industrial age led to the progressive populist presidencies of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. The policies of those two presidents were the foundation of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.
Pope Francis’s pronouncement was strong enough to generate an attack from Rush Limbaugh, who described the pontiff’s statement as “Marxist dogma.” Limbaugh should be more careful about calling people names, because if the pope is a Marxist so is Jesus. I don’t know if Rush ever reads the Bible, but he might want to check out the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of St. Matthew. In the sermon, Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit; for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven”.
I went to Holy Cross High School in Flushing, Queens, in New York City. Flushing was the home of the famous blue collar fictional TV conservative, Archie Bunker. If Archie had had a talk radio show, he would have been Rush Limbaugh. Many of my schoolmates were from families like Archie’s and had the same conservative beliefs.
One of my teachers was Brother Anthony Pepe. Brother Anthony was not preaching to the choir when he taught that the Gospel of St. Matthew was the gospel of social justice. I don’t know if the good brother had an impact on my conservative classmates, but he made a strong impression on me. Jesus made it pretty clear the only people going to heaven were those who cared for the sick, hungry and infirm.
If tea partiers like Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., want to accuse Jesus of waging class warfare, so be it. The flip side of the Gospel of St. Matthew is Ryan’s path to poverty budget. The Ryan budget would decimate social programs crucial to the lives of middle-class families and the survival of poor families. Ryan says his opposition to abortion is based is based on his Catholic faith but he completely ignores his church’s teaching on poverty. I hope he paid attention to his spiritual leader when he spoke about the dangers of “unfettered capitalism” last month.
By: Brad Bannon, U. S. News and World Report, December 9, 2013
“Voters Wil Not Forget”: Opposition To Obamacare Will Come Back To Haunt Conservatives
It is truly amazing to me to read through the blogs, the press releases from the Republican anti-Obamacare war room, the phalanx of Koch-brothers’ sponsored think tanks and web sites – one message: FAILURE.
Let’s leave aside that their cagey rhetoric has shifted from “repeal” to “a fix,” but that their policy position remains the same: kill it. Republicans will continue their onslaught against the Affordable Care Act because they believe it is a political attack that will work for them and unite their party, at least in the short run.
They complain about the problems with the website, yet they love that it didn’t work well. They are euphoric when it fails. Do they want it to succeed? Heck no.
They offer up people who have had problems switching their health care plans, with big smiles on their faces. Another Congressional hearing is called for to condemn the ACA, according to the Republicans.
Peter Roff, one of my esteemed colleagues on this blog, publishes a list from the Heritage Foundation on why the ACA will fail (never mind that much of what Heritage called for is in the law, like the individual mandate).
But forget all that. I would cite much of this list as precisely why Obamacare will work (see Roff’s Heritage list here):
- The new plans available under the law will provide better coverage for a better price. This is not a broken promise by the president but the end result. Think about the benefits: no pre existing conditions; no canceling of your plan when you get sick; no caps on coverage; no huge costs for women over what men pay; keeping children on the plan until they are 26.
- There will be more options for consumers to choose from, not less. They won’t be forced into inferior plans.
- The new approach to Medicaid will allow people to shop for and purchase their plans, not arrive in emergency rooms often too late for help and with exorbitant costs. This will be a vast improvement on where we are now. Sadly, many Republican governors want to keep these people from getting insurance by rejecting federal funds to help with the Medicaid expansion.
- The ACA will lead to more stable families with better health care, not penalize people for success or getting married, as Heritage asserts.
- There will be better care for women, more coverage, and it won’t destroy our religious liberties. Pardon the sexism, but that is a “straw man.”
- Probably the most absurd claim from Heritage is that the ACA is a job killer. If we are providing health care to an additional 30-40 million Americans, it will create jobs in the health care field, not kill them. More doctors, more nurses, more ways to care for patients. Businesses will have more productive workers, fewer who are sick and out of work, and costs will decrease as more people are covered.
I do have one prediction for my friend Peter Roff and those Republicans who are staking the political future of their party on killing the ACA: When this succeeds, voters will not forget, and they will remember the horror stories of the old system. The more the focus is on patient care, better treatment through R&D, keeping people healthy, access for millions, the more that Democrats will benefit from the contrast. Republicans should be very careful not to argue too strongly for failure, it will come back to haunt them.
By: Peter Fenn, U. S. News and World Report, December 5, 2013
“This Is Sabotage, Plain And Simple”: The Unprecedented GOP Efforts To Undermine A Federal Law
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), who’s never been the Affordable Care Act’s biggest fan, appeared on MSNBC yesterday to join the critical chorus. In reference to the Obama administration, the conservative Democrat said, “The bottom line is that they messed up, they messed up royally. There’s no excuse for this.”
The administration’s missteps have been well documented, and officials have earned much of the criticism they’ve received. But to say there’s “no excuse” is to overlook Republican sabotage efforts that have made a real difference.
Todd Purdum recently made the case, for example, that “calculated sabotage by Republicans at every step” is a “less acknowledged cause” of the rollout’s troubles. Jamelle Bouie added this week, “If Republicans have shown anything over the last four years, it’s that they’ll do anything to stop the Affordable Care Act, even if it amounts to legislative sabotage.”
We’ve talked before about the scope of these unprecedented efforts to undermine a federal law, which include blocking necessary resources needed for implementation, public misinformation campaigns, discouraging public-private partnerships, blocking Medicaid expansion, blocking CMS nominees, refusing to create marketplaces, and prohibiting “Navigators” from doing their jobs. But the campaign is arguably intensifying now.
Dana Milbank reports on House Republican leaders who emerged from their weekly meeting yesterday and tried to scare the bejesus out of Americans.
The Republicans’ scary-movie strategy has some logic to it: If they can frighten young and healthy people from joining the health-care exchanges, the exchanges will become expensive and unmanageable. This is sabotage, plain and simple – much like the refusal by red-state governors to participate in setting up the exchanges in the first place.
The quotes from House GOP leaders are rather remarkable. Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said health care reform may lead to identity theft; Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) falsely claimed “premiums are going right through the roof”; Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) warned that consumers who visit healthcare.gov may become victims of fraud; and Caucus Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) said vulnerable constituents may be put “on the casualty list.”
Milbank added, “Let’s hope the new health-care plans have generous coverage for anti-anxiety medication.”
Let’s not forget that the difference between a lie and a falsehood is intent – if you know the truth and say the opposite because your goal is deceit, you’re lying. And for the most part, congressional Republicans, whose interest in helping provide greater health security for Americans is easily trumped by their interested in destroying a Democratic law, have been reducing to lying.
But for saboteurs, honesty and serious policy debate are easily sacrificed for the larger goal. Indeed, they’re a small price to pay.
Also note, we’re looking at quite a one-two punch from the far-right – on the one hand we see the Koch brothers and their allies urge the uninsured to stay that way on purpose, in order to advance conservatives’ ideological goals, and on the other we see congressional Republicans try to terrify the public in the hopes that people who stand to benefit from “Obamacare” steer clear of the system.
President Obama added yesterday, during an interview with the Wall Street Journal, that if both parties were “invested in success,” the rollout wouldn’t have been quite so rocky. “One of the problems that we’ve had is that one side of Capitol Hill is invested in failure and that makes the kind of iterative process of fixing glitches as they come up and fine tuning the law more challenging,” he added.
There’s no denying that the dysfunctional health care website matters, and the administration’s missteps deserve criticism. But Republican sabotage matters, too.
Kevin Drum recently explained, “No federal program that I can remember faced quite the implacable hostility during its implementation that Obamacare has faced. This excuses neither the Obama administration’s poor decisions nor its timidity in the face of Republican attacks, but it certainly puts them in the proper perspective.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, November 20, 2013
“What A Terrible Thing To Do To People”: Republican Attacks On Obamacare Are Turning Into An Argument Against Repeal
If health insurance isn’t important, why would receiving a letter telling you that you need to change your plan be a tragedy that can get you on Fox News nearly immediately?
Republicans have seized on the millions of cancellations of current plans happening as a result of the Affordable Care Act remaking the individual insurance market, which currently offers the worst customer satisfaction of any type of health coverage.
By glorifying these “horror” stories, which have often turned out to be overinflated at worst and actual Affordable Care Act (ACA) success stories at best, Republicans are sending a clear message to Americans: We must defend the sanctity of health insurance.
This powerful theme is extremely opportune, as long as cancellation notices are contradicting a promise the president made, Healthcare.gov is flagging and the ACA’s paid enrollment numbers are low. However, it becomes much more complicated as the site starts working and 2014 begins with millions of people enjoying health care coverage and subsidies that the GOP would be voting to take away.
This would effectively doom the “repeal” strategy Republicans have fixated on for years, argues Salon’s Brian Beutler:
Obamacare is driving policy cancellations right now, but it at least creates a coverage guarantee for those affected. Repeal without replace would impose a greater burden without providing any counterweight.
If they pass the Keep Your Health Plan Act this week, House Republicans will see their stylized sympathy for people whose policies have been canceled come into tension with their explicit desire to take Obamacare benefits away from many of the same people, and millions more.
Becoming the party that opposes all cancellations of insurance policies also completely undermines any Republican “plan” that might be an alternative to the ACA. “Such a starting position would make true market-oriented reform impossible,” explains The Washington Examiner‘s Philip Klein.
John McCain’s health care plan, one part of his platform conservatives love, would have ended health care tax exemptions for employers and employees. This would have likely resulted in millions and millions of Americans ending up in new plans. The Republican Study Committee has offered a “serious” Obamacare alternative that would try to end the system of employer-based health care, disrupting the current health care system far more than the ACA does.
Even as Republicans are vindictively leaping on any cancellation story, other right-wing groups are trying to spread the idea to people in their 20s to optout of the ACA, even though millions of younger Americans can get coverage for free. One Koch-funded group, Generation Opportunity, brought its scary Uncle Sam and some models to tailgate before the University of Miami-Virginia Tech football game to let the students know that opting out of health insurance is, as the kids say, cool.
So health insurance is lame and having it changed in any way whatsoever is the greatest atrocity an American can be expected to suffer.
Republicans have been fine with these kinds of contradictions throughout President Obama’s time in office. The deficit suddenly became a problem on January 21, 2009. Tea Partiers demanded that we get our gubmint hands off their Medicare. The GOP won the House by campaigning against cuts to Medicare that they then included in Paul Ryan’s budget.
But there is evidence that efforts to actually take something away from Americans results in a substantial backlash.
The wave of voting restrictions across the South after the 2010 election was mostly blocked by the federal courts empowered by a Voting Rights Act that had not yet been gutted. But Republicans did successfully restrict early voting in the crucial swing states of Ohio and Florida. Despite this, or as a result of it, African-American turnout hit an all-time high in the 2012 election.
North Carolina passed some of the most radical voting restrictions on students in the nation and local Republicans specifically attempted to block Elizabeth City State University senior Montravias King from running for city council where he was attending college. Their efforts backfired.
“On October 9, King was elected to the Elizabeth City city council, winning the most votes of any candidate,” The Nation‘s Ari Berman reported. “He’s now the youngest elected official in the state.”
Students must have figured: If voting weren’t important, why would Republicans be doing everything they can to stop me from doing it?
In only 10 states, 444,000 people have already signed up for Medicaid. The fact that the GOP would deny them and about five million more poor people health insurance isn’t big news for a couple of reasons.
First, they’re poor. Second, these people haven’t had anything taken away from them — yet.
But on January 1, the story changes. Suddenly Republicans will be trying to do exactly what they’re accusing President Obama of: taking away health insurance with nothing to replace it. And thanks to the GOP, now it’s clear what a terrible thing that is to do to a person.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, November 12, 2013
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