“An Ossified Movement”: Bold New Conservative Ideas Still Mostly Involve Screwing The Poor
The Republicans, we’re told, are going to have to start making some big changes if they want to start winning elections again. (Besides all the congressional elections they handily win.) Americans are tired of their stale rhetoric and old, white standard-bearers. The party needs fresh blood and bold ideas. It needs people like Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a GOP rising star and highly regarded “ideas” guy.
After the election, Jindal told Politico that the Republicans had to totally rebrand themselves to escape being known as “the party of big business, big banks, big Wall Street bailouts, big corporate loopholes, big anything.” And so Bobby Jindal’s big new idea for Louisiana is … eliminating all income taxes. And shifting the tax burden onto poor and working people.
NEW ORLEANS, Jan 10 (Reuters) – Republican Governor Bobby Jindal said on Thursday he wants to eliminate all Louisiana personal and corporate income taxes to simplify the state’s tax code and make it more friendly to business.
Bold! Fresh! New! But how will Louisiana get money to pay for stuff? Easy!
Political analyst John Maginnis, who on Thursday reported in his email newsletter LaPolitics Weekly that Jindal will propose balancing the tax loss by raising the sales tax, now at 4 percent, said the strategy fits with the governor’s interest in keeping a high national profile.
While we don’t yet know the sales tax rate Jindal will propose, any hike would make Louisiana’s sales tax technically higher than New York state’s, which is also 4 percent. The tax will be still greater in many Louisiana parishes, including New Orleans, where the combined sales tax rate is currently 10 percent, making it already higher than New York City’s 8.875 percent.
The thing about sales taxes is that they are inherently and extremely regressive, hitting poorer people much harder than richer people, because the poor spend a greater proportion of their income on goods subject to the sales tax than rich people do.
The Institute on Taxation and Public Policy has already whipped up a little report, and, surprise, eliminating Louisiana’s income tax and replacing it with higher sales taxes means taxing rich people much less and poor people much, much more. According to ITEP, while Louisiana millionaires would receive a tax cut of around a quarter of a million dollars, “[the] poorest 20 percent of taxpayers, those with an average income of $12,000, would see an average tax increase of $395, or 3.4 percent of their income, if no low income tax relief mechanism is offered.” (And if a low income tax relief mechanism is offered, it will have to be paid for, almost definitely on the backs of the middle 20 percent, with average incomes around $43,000.)
This is the fresh new plan from a guy regularly touted as the future of the party: A massive tax cut for rich people, in an already low-service state, paid for with a tax hike on poor people. Remember this the next time you read a story about how a major conservative figure — like Jindal or Marco Rubio or Paul Ryan — has announced that his party has to get serious about helping the poor or at least not actively hurting them: The movement these guys are products of is incapable of generating “new ideas” to help poor people, and is still dedicated to a policy agenda developed mostly before Reagan was president.
Jim DeMint is not a fresh face, but he’s the new head of the Heritage Foundation, the most influential and powerful of the conservative think tanks. Heritage’s mission is to decide the policy agenda of the conservative movement. If “new ideas” on poverty or anything else are going to gain acceptance on the right, they will likely have to come from the Heritage Foundation. And so DeMint published an Op-Ed in the Washington Post last week, laying out his agenda as the new face of the intellectual arm of the movement. It is atrocious. It is so lacking in anything resembling substance or argument that I can’t figure out why the Post published it. This is the closest it gets to an attempt at persuasion:
Conservative ideas work. Numerous states are demonstrating that low taxes, right-to-work laws, school choice, energy development and other common-sense policies improve the lives of everyone. Conversely, progressive central planning has failed throughout history and is still failing today.
OK, sure. “Conservative ideas work and liberal ideas don’t” is a very compelling message. Remember what I said about the policy agenda not changing for 30 years? The rest of the piece is mostly about welfare reform and missile defense. DeMint says Heritage will work very hard on convincing Americans that ideas like welfare reform and missile defense are good ideas. And then we’ll defeat the commies and show the Ayatollah who’s boss. Maybe we can fight a War on Drugs, too?
How’s that welfare reform working out for people, exactly? In the state of Georgia, where 300,000 families survive below the poverty line, 4,000 people are on welfare. The goal is zero people on welfare. Not “zero poor people,” but zero recipients of government benefits. Welfare reformers, whose goal is the shrinking of welfare rolls, not the aiding of impoverished people, would consider this a success story. Conservative ideas work!
The Republican Party will not “get serious” about poverty, or foreign policy or climate change or anything else, until it extracts itself from the conservative movement that rescued it after the collapse of the New Deal coalition. But there’s not a single GOP “leader” or rising star who isn’t a product of that movement through and through. They may fix their electoral problems with fresh rhetoric or new faces, but once in office they’ll govern as if nothing has changed since 1980, with disastrous results for every non-wealthy American.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, January 14, 2013
“The GOP Crusade Against The UnInsured”: Republicans Are Doing Everything They Can To Sabotage Obamacare
When House Speaker John Boehner declared Obamacare the “law of the land” two days after his party took a drubbing in the election, the real reveal came in what happened next: he walked it back in record speed and re-affirmed his commitment to getting rid of it.
Having failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act at the national level, Republicans are now dedicating their efforts to botching its implementation at the state level. And having failed to invalidate the law at the Supreme Court, they’re now seeking alternate legal avenues to weaken its regulations.
Republican governors are turning down the law’s Medicaid expansion, a move made easier by the Supreme Court decision that made the expansion optional. Among them are Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, Phil Bryant of Mississippi and Nikki Haley of South Carolina. Given that the federal government pays the vast majority of the cost in the medium term, these states are, in effect, rejecting an extraordinarily generous financial incentive to insure their residents.
Implementing the expansion in full would insure about 17 million people. “If [many states] don’t accept the Medicaid expansion you’re going to have millions of low income Americans who will remain uninsured and without access to health care,” said Tim Jost, a health care expert at Washington and Lee University who supports the Affordable Care Act.
Some dozen Republican governors are refusing — and about a dozen more are considering refusing — to build state-based insurance exchanges, the law’s primary vehicle for expanding and improving coverage. These governors, which include John Kasich of Ohio, Rick Perry of Texas, Nathan Deal of Georgia and Mary Fallin of Oklahoma, are consequently empowering the federal government to build one for them.
The law does not set aside funds for the federal government to construct or operate exchanges, creating implementation headaches for the Obama administration. But it can be self-sustained through user fees, and Jost argues that state residents with governors who are uncommitted would be better served by a federal exchange that wants to cover them.
Conservative thinkers are also resurrecting their argument, championed by top Republicans, that federally-administered exchanges lack the legal authority to provide tax subsidies, which are critical to making them work. Although the language of the law is vague on this question, the IRS has said federal exchanges are permitted to provide the premium subsidies.
“I don’t believe they’re going to win on that one,” Jost said. “If they did win that would do serious damage to what Congress intended, which is to have a federal fallback exchange.”
Utah Gov. Gary Herbert (R) is flirting with continuing his state’s existing insurance exchange even though it does not comply with rules in the Affordable Care Act.
Meanwhile, conservative advocates are advancing a separate legal challenge to the law’s requirement that insurance plans cover contraception for women as part of a copay-free preventive services package. Cheered on by congressional Republicans, Catholic institutions such as the Archdiocese of Washington and University of Notre Dame are moving forward with lawsuits that could end up in the Supreme Court.
All in all, Republicans and conservatives are telegraphing that they’re not chastened by years of failed efforts to wipe away Obamacare. The crusade shows no signs of ending, and could still do serious damage to the law.
By: Sahil Kapur, Talking Points Memo, November 21, 2012
“Real Mothers Vs Moochers”: Is Motherhood The Most Important Job?
It can be hard to remember a mere six months ago, but that was when we were talking about the hard work mothers perform in the home and how valuable it is. A recap: Democratic surrogate Hilary Rosen said that Ann Romney, who is a stay-at-home mother, has never worked a day in her life. In the blink of an eye, both sides jumped on the moment to declare their undying fealty to mothers and their awe at the hard work women perform in the home. Romney even went so far as to say that Ann’s job was “harder” and “more important” than his own, be it running the state of Massachusetts or the Olympics. (Although he never explained why he didn’t simply trade places with her.)
Someone watching this debate couldn’t be blamed for coming away with the impression that this country has put motherhood on a gold-plated pedestal. But it turns out that pedestal is contingent on certain factors—class being chief among them. A Pennsylvania House bill proposed last week sought to limit the amount of TANF assistance—formally known as welfare support—that low-income women receive based on how many children they give birth to while covered. In other words: the more children a woman on welfare has, the fewer benefits she receives.
The good news is that three sponsors of the bill have since backed away from it, claiming to not have read it closely enough. The bad news is that Pennsylvania was simply following a trend. At my request, Joan Entmacher of the National Women’s Law Center calculated that as of July 2010, seventeen states had “family cap” policies that limit the amount of TANF assistance available to mothers who have children while receiving benefits. When Ann Romney stays at home to raise her five boys, financed by her family’s wealth and income, we revere her as the pinnacle of womanhood and a hardworking American. When a poor mother has five boys, we punish her by denying her the benefits she needs to keep them healthy and happy.
Unfortunately the horror doesn’t stop there. What about a woman who is raped and then bears her rapist’s child while on TANF? Should she have her benefits decreased? Pennsylvania, in its magnanimity, granted that this woman shouldn’t be docked. She just has to give the state a signed statement that she was a victim of rape or incest and that she reported the crime and the identity of her offender to law enforcement. (Never mind that over half of all rapes are never reported given the stigma and ordeal victims are put though.) She also has to sign a statement affirming that she understands that “false reports to law enforcement authorities are punishable by law” and that lets her know the state will report “evidence of false statements or fraud” to the correct department. As summarized by Jake Blumgart: “State Reps to Poor Women: Prove You Were Raped or Lose TANF Assistance.”
Once again, Pennsylvania is sadly not alone. Many states require parents to cooperate with child support enforcement to receive childcare assistance, often to establish paternity and provide accurate information. Last month, the Children, Youth and Families Department of New Mexico decided to pull a Todd Aiken and considered an amendment to this policy that would exempt victims of “forcible rape” from having to file child support claims against the absent parent. And even worse, a bunch of states already use this language. According to Entmacher, at least four states list forcible rape as one potential reason for an exemption: Colorado, Idaho, Maryland and Rhode Island, with varying levels of detail about how a woman should go about proving that her rape is “legitimate.”
In the motherhood hierarchy, then, women who don’t need welfare support rank highest, followed by mothers who can “prove” that their rape is rape rape. Tough luck for low-income women who were date raped, raped when drugged or simply had a wanted child. Our message to them is that they’re not really mothers. They’re just moochers.
By: Bryce Covert, The Nation, October 29, 2012
“Medicaid Is the Real Target”: Mitt Romney’s Priorities, Aid For The Rich, Paid For By The Poor
Since August, when Mitt Romney chose Paul Ryan as his running mate, the two campaigns have fought a fierce battle over who is the most stalwart protector of Medicare. In the first presidential debate, Romney assailed President Obama for his $716 billion in Medicare cuts, and Ryan did the same in last week’s vice presidential face-off. Likewise, the Obama campaign has hit Team Romney for the Ryan plan and its Medicare “premium support”—which, if implemented, would gradually replace traditional Medicare with subsidized, regulated private insurance.
The irony is that—in the short term, at least—Medicare will stay unchanged, regardless of who wins the election. Seniors are among the most mobilized voters in the electorate, and there’s too much political risk involved in making big, immediate changes to Medicare. For that reason, Medicare reform plans on both sides are backloaded and will take time to unfold.
The same isn’t true of Medicaid, the other major federal health-care program. The primary constituency for Medicaid—poor and working-class families—lacks the clout and influence of seniors. And while the Obama administration expanded the program in the Affordable Care Act, it has also made Medicaid a ripe target for conservative cuts to social insurance.
This means that, as Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum pointed out last week, Medicaid, not Medicare, is the actual flashpoint in this election. Romney has promised to “block grant” the program, giving states more flexibility in dealing with eligibility and benefits. Some states would use this as an opportunity to innovate. But as Drum notes, just as many would use it as an excuse to drop health coverage for poor people:
Lots of states, especially poor states in the South, don’t have much interest in experimenting. They just want to slash eligibility for Medicaid. Given the freedom to do it, they’d adopt what Ed Kilgore calls the “Mississippi model,” cutting off coverage for a family of three earning anything over $8,200. For all the talk of fresh thinking and new solutions, what they really want to do is simple: They want to stop providing medical care for poor people.
Admittedly, this is a little speculative. It’s possible—albeit, unlikely—that a future governor of South Carolina or Alabama might want to use the new flexibility to improve services for lower-income people. With that in mind, it’s also worth noting the extent to which Romney’s block-grant plan involves a massive cut to overall Medicaid spending. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities finds that with a Paul Ryan-style block grant in place, overall Medicaid spending would decline by one-third over the next decade. When you put this in the context of Romney’s budget proposals—which include new defense spending and a promise to protect Medicare—and his promise to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the result is a $1.5 trillion reduction in Medicaid spending by 2022. These cuts would add an additional 14 to 19 million people to the ranks of the uninsured, on top of the 30 million people who would lose coverage as a result of full Obamacare repeal.
It’s his approach to Medicaid, more than anything else, that reveals Mitt Romney’s priorities—aid for the rich, paid for by taking relief from the poor.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, October 15, 2012
“Whose Body Is It?”: Pharmacists Can’t Be Allowed To Deny Women Emergency Contraception
Women deserve the chance to prevent pregnancy after birth control failure, sexual assault, or unprotected sex. Emergency contraception, also known as the “morning-after pill,” is FDA-approved and prevents pregnancy after sexual intercourse. But it is time-sensitive; it only works if women are able to obtain it without delay or discrimination.
Unfortunately, healthcare providers are refusing to dispense emergency contraception based on their own religious or moral beliefs, thereby overriding women’s decisions about their bodies and lives. Pharmacists in at least 24 states have refused to sell birth control or emergency contraception to women. Some hospital emergency rooms refuse to provide emergency contraception to rape victims.
Some healthcare providers even lie to women—for example, by saying it will cause an abortion. In one case, a woman believed a Wisconsin pharmacist who called her a murderer. Although it will not work once a woman is pregnant, she did not fill her prescription and got pregnant. In a California incident, a couple with a newborn sought emergency contraception after birth control failure. The pharmacist called them irresponsible, refused to fill the prescription, and did not enter it into the system so that it could be transferred elsewhere.
Laws should require all hospitals and pharmacies to establish a system to ensure that women in need of birth control, including in emergency situations, receive it without discrimination and delay. Individual healthcare providers with religious objections may be accommodated—for example, by making sure two pharmacists are on duty—but not at the expense of patient access to critical healthcare. This approach is consistent with long-standing protections for individual religious beliefs in the workplace. Refusing providers must treat patients with respect and ensure that patients receive care from another provider. They cannot—as one Wisconsin pharmacist did—leave customers waiting indefinitely for assistance in the store and on the phone. A patient should not even know her healthcare professional objects.
Refusals often result in women feeling judged, shamed, angry, and vulnerable, and they reduce women’s trust in the healthcare system. Additionally, refusals violate informed consent, restricting women’s information and options. Delays or denials of emergency contraception can lead to pregnancy. For some women, pregnancy can entail severe health risks and even life endangerment. A refusal to provide emergency contraception can further traumatize an already traumatized woman—like a rape survivor. Refusals are most burdensome on people in rural areas, or those with low incomes and no job flexibility. For example, an Ohio woman refused emergency contraception at her local pharmacy had to drive 45 miles to find another pharmacy. And some women may be limited by their insurance plan to a particular pharmacy or provider.
Recognizing the harm of refusals, states, national professional associations, and pharmacy chains have acted to protect women’s access to emergency contraception. Twenty-three states and Washington, D.C., have laws and/or policies that improve women’s access to it, such as requiring hospitals to provide it to rape survivors. Major pharmacy chains have adopted policies ensuring that women leave the pharmacy with contraception in hand. Professional healthcare associations have issued guidance protective of patients’ right to receive care. The religious beliefs of pharmacists, doctors, nurses, or other healthcare providers should not trump a woman’s ability to make decisions about her reproductive health. Those decisions are personal, and they should stay that way.
By: Gretchen Borchett, U. S. News and World Report, October 15, 2012
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