“Heightening Inequality To Even More Astronomical Levels”: If Inequality Worries Republicans, Why Do They Keep Making It Worse?
You can tell things have gotten very bad when the issue of economic inequality — a serious national problem mostly ignored for more than three decades — is suddenly in political vogue. And you can be sure things have gotten very, very bad when Republicans — who usually insist that inequality is natural, inevitable, even beneficial — suddenly claim they’re worried about it, too.
As the 2016 contenders officially declare their intentions, all of them seem aware that voters want to restore a vestige of fairness to the American economy. Regardless of personal ideology or political reliance on plutocratic billionaires, every presidential candidate must, at the very least, display concern for working families, single mothers, indebted students, and everyone struggling to achieve or maintain a decent living.
Yet how concerned are they, really? In the video that announced her candidacy, Hillary Clinton spoke briefly but bluntly: “Americans have fought their way back from tough economic times, but the deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top. Everyday Americans need a champion, and I want to be that champion.” The only Democrat in the race so far, Clinton realizes that a populist agenda will be required to excite her party base — and to answer those who regard her as too wealthy and too well connected to empathize with the downtrodden.
That unflattering portrait omits many relevant facts about Clinton’s life, from her own modest origins to her many years of advocacy for the disadvantaged, especially women and children. She spoke out publicly about economic fairness long before doing so became politically fashionable, both as a United States senator and during her last presidential campaign. Now the skeptics can listen and decide for themselves.
But voters should also listen closely to the Republicans who mock Clinton’s populism and assert that they are the true spokesmen for the working class. What do they propose to address inequality? And how “authentic” is their concern?
At least two of the Republican candidates, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) and Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), want to institute a so-called flat tax — which would severely exacerbate inequality by reducing tax levies on the wealthy and increasing the burden on everyone else. Such plans would cost the Treasury an annual amount estimated between $700 billion and $1 trillion. Yet Paul and Cruz insist that they will simultaneously slash taxes, increase defense spending, and balance the budget — and so does Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), who proposes his own regressive tax breaks for the rich.
Those promises are mathematically impossible — unless, perhaps, the federal government permanently ended all discretionary spending on student aid, unemployment insurance, health care, veterans benefits, environmental protection, food safety, and dozens of other programs necessary to working- and middle-class families. Somehow they never mention that part.
While decrying economic inequality, Republicans tend not to emphasize their other proposed giveaways that would benefit wealthy donors, such as Paul’s plan to end capital gains taxes, or Rubio’s plan to end not only all taxes on capital gains but on interest and inherited estates, too — leaving only wage earners to be taxed. Schemes like this delight the Koch brothers precisely because they would heighten inequality to an even more astronomical level.
Although Republicans often mention the “right to rise,” as Jeb Bush would put it, they’re hostile to any measure that would actually elevate the incomes of those at the bottom — for example, increasing the minimum wage. Indeed, they tend to be opposed to the very idea of a legislated wage floor because, as Rubio once said, “I don’t think a minimum-wage law works.”
The Florida senator’s economic knowledge is as weak as his budgetary arithmetic. The most recent studies show that in states without a minimum- wage law, inequality is considerably worse than in states with a minimum wage that is at least a dollar above the federal minimum.
But don’t worry, Rubio says he knows a better way to reduce inequality than either higher wages or fairer taxes. Instead, for people languishing in low-wage jobs, government should “incentivize the creation of innovations in education that are accessible.”
So he offers something for everyone: The wealthy get still more big tax cuts; and the not-so-wealthy get a few phrases of incomprehensible, pseudo-wonkish jargon.
By: Joe Conason, Editer in Chief, The National Memo, April 18, 2015
“The GOP Primary Is Where Ideas Go To Die”: You Can’t Be A Smart Candidate In A Party That Wants To Be Stupid
So now we have us some candidates, on the Republican side. Who’s the big kahuna? Jeb Bush? He keeps getting called front-runner, and I suppose he is, even though the polls sometimes say otherwise. Scott Walker? Certainly a player. Rand Paul? Pretty bad rollout, but he has his base. The youthful, advantageously ethnicized Marco Rubio? Some as-yet-unannounced entrant who can hop in and shake things up?
Each has a claim, sort of, but the 800-pound gorilla of this primary process is none of the above. It’s the same person it was in 2008, and again in 2012, when two quite plausible mainstream-conservative candidates had to haul themselves so far to the right that they ended up being unelectable. It’s the Republican primary voter.
To be more blunt about it: the aging, white, very conservative, revanchist, fearful voter for whom the primary season is not chiefly an exercise in choosing a credible nominee who might win in November, but a Parris Island-style ideological obstacle course on which each candidate must strain to outdo his competitors—the hate-on-immigrants wall climb, the gay-bashing rope climb, the death-to-the-moocher-class monkey bridge. This voter calls the shots, and after the candidates have run his gauntlet, it’s almost impossible for them to come out looking appealing to a majority of the general electorate.
You will recall the hash this voter made of 2012. He booed the mention of a United States soldier during a debate because the soldier happened to be gay. He booed contraception—mere birth control, which the vast majority of Republican women, like all women, use. He lustily cheered the death penalty. He tossed Rick Perry out on his ear in part because the Texas governor had the audacity to utter a few relatively humane words about children of undocumented immigrants. He created an atmosphere in which the candidates on one debate stage were terrified of the idea of supporting a single dollar in tax increases even if placed against an offsetting $10 in spending cuts.
He is a demanding fellow. And he is already asserting his will this time around. Why else did Bush endorse Indiana Governor Mike Pence’s religious freedom bill in an instant, only to see Pence himself walk the bill back three days later? Bet Jeb would like to have that one back. But he can’t. The primary voter—along of course with the conservative media from Limbaugh and Fox on down—won’t permit it.
Now, as it happens, some of these candidates come to us with a few serious and unorthodox ideas. We all know about Rand Paul and his ideas about sentencing reform and racial disparities. He deserved credit for them. He was a lot quicker on the draw on Ferguson than Hillary Clinton was. But how much do we think he’s going to be talking up this issue as the Iowa voting nears? Time might prove me wrong here, but Paul has already, ah, soul-searched his way to more standard right-wing positions on Israel and war, so there’s reason to think that while he might not do the same on prison issues, he’ll just quietly drop them.
More interesting in this regard is Rubio. I read his campaign book not long ago, along with five others, for a piece I wrote for The New York Review of Books. Rubio’s book was the best of the lot by far. It was for the most part actually about policy. He put forward a few perfectly good ideas in the book. For example, he favors “income-based repayment” on student loans, which would lower many students’ monthly student-loan bills. It’s a fine idea. The Obama administration is already doing it.
Beyond the pages of the book, Rubio has in the past couple of years staked out some positions that stood out at the time as not consisting of fare from the standard GOP menu. He’d like to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit to more childless couples. Again, there are synergies here with the current occupant of the house Rubio wants to move into—the Obama administration is taking up this idea.
Now, there is to be sure another Rubio, one who’d feel right at home on Parris Island. He is apparently now the quasi-official blessed-be-the-warmakers candidate, with his reflexive hard lines on Iran and Cuba. Along with Senate colleague Mike Lee of Utah, he also has put forth a tax plan that would deplete the treasury by some $4 trillion over 10 years—for context, consider that George W. Bush’s first tax cut cost $1.35 trillion over a decade—in order that most of those dollars be placed in the hands where the Republicans’ God says they belong, i.e., the 1 percent of the people who already hold nearly half the country’s wealth.
I think it’s a safe bet that we’ll see the neocon Rubio and the supply-side Rubio out on the stump. But the Rubio who wants to make life better for indebted students and working-poor childless couples? Either we won’t see that Rubio at all, or we will see him and he’ll finish fourth in Iowa and New Hampshire and go home. You can’t be a smart candidate in a party that wants to be stupid.
Might I be wrong about the primary voter? Sure, I might. Maybe the fear of losing to Hillary Clinton and being shut out of the White House for 12 or 16 consecutive years will tame this beast. But the early signs suggest the opposite.
After all, how did Scott Walker bolt to the front of the pack? It wasn’t by talking about how to expand health care. It was by giving one speech, at an event hosted by one of Congress’ most fanatical reactionaries (Steve King of Iowa), bragging about how he crushed Wisconsin’s municipal unions. That’s how you get ahead in this GOP. I’d imagine Rubio and Paul and the rest of them took note.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, April 15, 2015
“Lots Of Candidates, Fewer Accomplishments”: Judge Me For My Position On The Issues, Not What I’ve Actually Done
CNBC’s John Harwood sat down with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) this week for an informative interview, which included an interesting exchange about the senator’s limited record.
Harwood: When I asked a couple of other campaigns, “What would you ask him if you were me?” they said, “Ask him to name his biggest accomplishment.” And the reason they said that was, “He doesn’t have any.” What is your yardstick for when you’re succeeding, as opposed to tilting at windmills, getting publicity, all that?
Cruz: What I have endeavored to do in my time in the Senate is to stand up and lead on the great issues of the day.
The Texas Republican went on to talk about his ongoing effort to destroy the Affordable Care Act, which he has not done, but which he believes he’s “built the foundation” to do.
Whether or not one takes the argument seriously, this probably won’t be the last time Cruz is asked about his record. John Podhoretz, a prominent voice in conservative media, recently ran a piece with an unflattering headline: “Ted Cruz’s challenge: The other guys have done things.”
Shortly after the GOP senator launched his presidential candidacy, The Hill published an “infographic” on Cruz’s legislative history, which concluded that the Texas Republican has successfully passed just one bill into law.
The piece didn’t specify the metrics – it’s unclear, for example, whether this includes amendments and/or resolutions – but it does help explain why Cruz, when asked about his accomplishments, emphasizes “standing up and leading on the great issues of the day.”
It’s an effective euphemism for, “Judge me for my position on the issues, not what I’ve actually done to advance my agenda.”
The challenge is not limited to Cruz, of course. Take Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), for example.
Congress.gov shows the Kentucky Republican co-sponsoring a handful of bills that became law during his four years on the Capitol Hill, when it comes to measures on which he was the lead sponsor, none of his proposals became law. Sen. Marco Rubio’s (R-Fla.) record points to the exact same problem.
In fairness, these three senators are relatively new to Capitol Hill – Paul and Rubio were elected in 2010, Cruz in 2012 – which means they’ve been legislators during a time in which Congress has accomplished practically nothing. Indeed, the last two Congresses have been the least productive for passing bills into law since clerks started keeping track nearly a century ago.
No one has racked up an impressive list of legislative accomplishments in recent years because the business of lawmaking effectively collapsed after the Republican gains in the 2010 midterms. This, however, may not make for a compelling 2016 pitch: “My excuse for not having any accomplishments is that I’ve been part of an unpopular institution that hasn’t gotten anything done.”
In other words, Cruz, Paul, and Rubio will soon hit the national trail, competing against credible rivals, talking with great passion about “standing up and leading on the great issues of the day” – all the while hoping no one asks what they’ve actually done since joining the Senate.
Whether Republican primary voters find this persuasive remains to be seen.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 10, 2015
“Hispanic Jeb vs Identity Politics”: The Most Damaging Gaffes Are The Ones That Reinforce A Preexisting Narrative
In case you haven’t heard, the New York Times is reporting that, ”In a 2009 voter-registration application, obtained from the Miami-Dade County Elections Department, Mr. Bush marked Hispanic in the field labeled ‘race/ethnicity.’”
Native American Elizabeth Warren, meet Hispanic ¡Jeb!
What with all the serous news in Iran and Indiana, this might seem like a silly thing to talk about. Team Bush has responded to the story, and – based on this Tweet from Jeb Bush, Jr. (which his dad Re-Tweeted) – the strategy appears to be to try to downplay the story by poking fun at it.
That might be there best hope, because there is potential this could turn into a big deal, electorally speaking. That’s because this kind of symbolic thing is easy to mock (see Elizabeth Warren) — and easier to understand — than some policy proposal.
The most damaging gaffes are the ones that reinforce a preexisting narrative about someone. A very vocal and activist segment of the Republican primary base is vehemently opposed to anything that looks like “amnesty,” and Jeb’s support for immigration reform already has him in hot water with this contingent of the GOP. This latest revelation is amnesty on steroids. It personalizes what was, heretofore, a policy story. Bush can now be portrayed as someone who has “gone native” with the amnesty gang, and is no longer “one of us.”
When Sen. Marco Rubio was pushing immigration reform, buttons started popping up branding him a “RINO” who wants “AMNISTIA.” The fact that these buttons looked similar to a Mexican flag, and featured Rubio wearing a sombrero, only added to the subtlety. Already, the New York Times and The Week (where I also write) have associated photos with stories about this topic showing Bush surrounded by mariachi bands and/or men wearing sombreros. Those are the mainstream outlets. Wait till the blogs get hold of this. (And don’t get me started on talk radio…)
Unless this gets fixed, the conservative base (which is decidedly and passionately opposed to immigration reform, and already hostile to Bush) will use this as a cudgel to relentlessly mock and attack Bush.
To a certain extent, they have a point: Bush’s cultural experience is far different from that of most Americans. I have no idea why he checked that box, but it is reasonable to say he’s married to a Latina, his kids are Hispanic, and he lives in an area where he can probably go till lunch before speaking anything other than Spanish. This is not to say he’s un-American, but it is to say he’s international and cosmopolitan, and really, to a lot of folks, that’s pretty much a distinction without a difference.
In reality, though, the difference is huge. As noted earlier, there will be comparisons to Sen. Warren. But Elizabeth Warren presumably benefited from her bogus Native American status. Bush had nothing to gain (and as it turns out, a lot to lose) by identifying as Hispanic.
Jeb’s political ideology is such that he doesn’t think anyone should benefit from identity politics — that merit, not ethnicity, is what should matter. Liberals like Warren believe that certain minority groups should get preferential treatment; Jeb, as a conservative, does not, and as such it doesn’t really matter what ethnicity he chooses to identify as. Heck, as Florida governor, Bush even went so far as to end affirmative action in the state.
As the New York Times reported in 2000:
“There is widespread support among whites for Mr. Bush’s program, which would end preferences for businesses owned by women and minorities in bidding for state contracts. And it would end college admissions preferences based on race, substituting a program guaranteeing admission to at least 1 of the 10 state universities for high school students who graduate in the top 20 percent of their class.”
Bush is wise to try and diffuse this with humor, but only time will tell if that works. This could still be politically damaging. But that doesn’t mean it should be. Jeb’s WASPy family background only makes this story more delicious, but practically speaking, he probably is culturally Hispanic, and of course there’s nothing wrong with that. What we should be interested in is the fact that, as governor, he supported conservative policies, and has a long history of rejecting identity politics. For that, at least, we should be saying ¡Viva Jeb!
By: Matt Lewis, The Daily Beast, April 6, 2015
“Hey, GOP: Give Peace With Iran A Chance”: There’s No Reason To Listen To The Warmongers Who Always Get This Stuff Wrong
I’m not an expert on these things, so I don’t know what I think of the Iran deal yet. Some people I know who are certainly pro-deal and know something about all this found the agreed-upon framework to be more detailed than they expected, so that’s good. But there are many more details to be worked out and many rivers to cross.
But you know who else I bet isn’t an expert on these matters? Scott Walker. And I’d invite the Wisconsin governor to join me in withholding judgment until we’ve had the chance to study the fine print and ask experts what it all might mean, but I suspect that would be pretty futile. Greg Sargent on Thursday afternoon picked up on a revealing comment Walker made to, who else, a right-wing talk radio host. The host, Charlie Sykes, actually asked Walker a skeptical question. They get so discombobulated when someone who’s supposed to be on the team asks a real question. And look at what Walker said:
SYKES: You have said that you would cancel any Iranian deal the Obama administration makes. Now would you cancel that even if our trading partners did not want to reimpose the sanctions?
WALKER: Absolutely. If I ultimately choose to run, and if I’m honored to be elected by the people of this country, I will pull back on that on January 20, 2017, because the last thing—not just for the region but for this world—we need is a nuclear-armed Iran.
By “our trading partners,” Sykes means chiefly England, France, and Germany—the other countries (along with Russia and China) involved in the Switzerland negotiations. This is a major point of disagreement between liberals and conservatives, because conservatives say that we should have walked away from the Lausanne table and regrouped with our trading partners and imposed even tougher sanctions to bring Iran more quickly to its knees. Liberals contend, as President Obama did during his Rose Garden announcement of the deal, that these partners don’t want to maintain sanctions, and that if we’d walked away, it would have been the sanctions regime that that would have cracked, not Iran.
So Sykes was saying here to Walker: If the sanctions collapse, which will leave Iran on stronger economic footing and take out of our hands the one club over them we have—even at the risk of that happening, you’d cancel a deal? And Walker said yes. Not “depends on the deal.” Just “absolutely.”
The man is not in the realm of evidence here. He is in the realm of dogma, and dogma is all we’re going to get from these people. As I’m writing these words, we have yet to see the statements from most of the GOP presidential contenders, but gaming out what they’re going to say is hardly history’s greatest guessing game. Marco Rubio did come out of the gate pretty fast with a statement whose money line referred to “this attempt to spin diplomatic failure as a success.” You remember him: the same Rubio who doesn’t know that Iran and ISIS are enemies.
I once thought there would be a chance that Rand Paul might say something more interesting. He’s “dark,” his press office says, until after Easter, so we’re apparently not getting anything out of him now. But no matter. Whatever his past interesting heterodoxies on foreign policy, he now knows he just has to bash Obama and say what the rest of them are saying, and so in all likelihood he will.
Thus, one interesting question for the coming weeks: Will there be one Republican, just one, either among the candidates or in the Congress, who will actually step forward to say something like, “You know, now that I’ve read this and talked to experts, I’ve concluded that it’s worth giving this a shot?” One? You probably laughed at the naiveté of the question. I admit it does sound naive, but this shouldn’t allow us to lose sight of the fact that it’s tragic that things have come to this point, that we simply accept in such a ho-hum way that the Republicans are going to oppose anything with Obama’s name on it, not just when it comes to tax policy and such, but matters of war and peace.
This seems a most apt time to remember some aspects of the neoconservative track record that they’d rather the rest of us forget. North Korea is one, remember that one? The Hermit Kingdom started working on a nuclear program in earnest in the 1980s. In 1993, the North Koreans threatened to withdraw from the nonproliferation treaty. Diplomacy then commenced under Bill Clinton, leading to the 1994 Agreed Framework. The Framework had a checkered history—mostly because (cough cough) hardliners in Congress repeatedly refused to let the United States live up to its side of the agreement—but the long and short of it was that in the 1990s, North Korea didn’t aggressively pursue a nuclearization program.
Then came the neocons, and Dubya, and the axis of evil business, and soon enough North Korea was enriching uranium like there was no tomorrow. Remember the test bombs it was launching about a decade ago out toward Japan? All that started because Pyongyang took Bush at his belligerent word. Today it’s estimated that North Korea has enough separated plutonium for six to eight bombs. We rattle our saber, it makes smaller countries want to go nuclear. It’s really not very complicated.
Far from weakening North Korea, the neocon posture strengthened it. And speaking of strengthening, what about Iran? It’s the neocons’ war in Iraq that gave Iraq to Iran. They strengthened Iran. And if they get their way they’re going to do it again, if and when they manage to kill this deal and then Iran says OK, the hell with you, we’re building the bomb as fast as we can.
I’m not all yippee, Nobel Peace Prize for Kerry about this deal. I expressed my reservations the other day, and they remain. The administration deserves credit on one level just for getting this far—negotiations like these are amazingly hard. But we’re still only across midfield here.
Even so, if it’s hard to decide what precisely to be for, it’s laughably easy to figure out what to be against: reflexive and dogmatic opposition undertaken for the purposes of making sure you get your anti-Obama ticket stamped that will hasten the day either that a) Iran gets the bomb or b) we start a war to prevent that. Maybe it’s a little cliched to say give peace a chance, but thanks to the neoconservatives, we’ve given war plenty of chance, and all it’s done is strengthened Tehran and given us ISIS. Will these people ever look in the mirror?
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, April 3, 2015
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