“Warmed Over Reaganism”: Paul Ryan’s Poverty Trap; Stop Taking These Lame Makeovers Seriously!
McKay Coppins already told us that there’s a new Paul Ryan who really cares about poverty and the poor. Now Robert Costa has the details on the newest new Paul Ryan, who just released a report on poverty that is 204 pages long, which proves that he really cares about the poor, because when was the last time a Republican wrote that many words and sentences about them?
Last seen handing out neckties to poor kids, Ryan is now talking up his report, “The War on Poverty: 50 Years Later,” which enumerates roughly 100 federal anti-poverty programs that Ryan tells Costa “have actually created a poverty trap.”
Now, Ryan’s plan does one positive thing: It makes Sen. Marco Rubio look kind of lazy and insincere. Because Rubio gave a much-heralded speech on the anniversary of Lyndon Johnson’s declaring a War on Poverty, but it was only a few thousand words, it wasn’t 204 pages, and since then, he basically dropped the issue. Ryan says his report will provide the basis of his next budget. But the basic Ryan-Rubio message is the same warmed-over Reaganism: We fought a war on poverty and poverty won, so let’s give up.
But seriously, how many times are we going to be told that there’s a “new” Paul Ryan who really, really, really cares about the poor – and whose budget proposals consistently slash programs designed to help them. All that’s different about Ryan’s approach now is he’s telling the poor that cutting their programs is good for them, because it will free them from “the poverty trap.”
Also, how many generations of Republicans are going to rely on Bob Woodson’s self-promotion? Like Coppins, Costa tells us Ryan is looking to Woodson’s Center for Neighborhood Enterprise for new ideas about fighting poverty. But it’s been generations now that Woodson has been reassuring Republicans, with zero evidence, that unfettered capitalism can heal the inner city. Can’t they even trouble themselves to find a new Bob Woodson?
In fact, Think Progress found that buried in Ryan’s report, beneath the dark warnings about a “poverty trap,” are findings that actually, even by GOP standards, a lot of anti-poverty programs are doing a lot of good. From the Veterans’ Health Administration to the Earned Income Tax Credit, Ryan’s report identifies at least 16 major programs that in fact help the poor and are a good bet for government. You wonder whether he even read his own report.
And in several of the areas where Ryan found fault with programs, the Fiscal Times found that the economists behind the studies Ryan cited say he misrepresented their data.
To be fair, Ryan actually makes three good points. One, he supports the once-bipartisan, now-GOP-questioned Earned Income Tax Credit, which helps low-wage families out of poverty (but even better would be if he called for a major expansion). The EITC is actually a huge part of the story behind the “47 percent” Ryan’s running mate Mitt Romney slurred in 2012. Ryan doesn’t acknowledge the dissonance, but his EITC support is welcome.
Ryan’s second fair point is that federal anti-poverty programs are a sketchy patchwork of mostly uncoordinated initiatives that would certainly work better if anyone put time into pulling them together. But Ryan merely criticizes that patchwork in order to rip it apart, proposing to slash rather than coordinate the services that help poor people, admittedly inadequately.
The third is more complicated, and if taken seriously, subverts Ryan’s entire message. He complains, correctly, that too many anti-poverty programs are “means-tested — meaning that benefits decline as recipients make more money — [so] poor families face very high implicit marginal tax rates. The federal government effectively discourages them from making more money.”
Of course, the alternative to means-tested programs in other industrialized nations is universal programs that essentially set a floor for income, nutrition and health below which families can’t drop. Social Security and Medicare are rare American examples of universal program – ones that Ryan has repeatedly tried to gut (while most Republicans and even some conservative Democrats endorse “means testing” them). A guaranteed family income and a genuine national health insurance program could eliminate means-tested programs like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and Medicaid – but Ryan and his GOP allies (and lots of Republicans) would never consider those notions.
Nor will they consider the other guaranteed anti-poverty program: a hike in the minimum wage. Raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour would lift almost a million Americans out of poverty immediately – but Ryan’s party is opposed to it. Indeed, more Republicans are coming out every day saying there should be no minimum wage at all.
There is, indeed, a poverty trap in the U.S., and the media fall into it again and again: taking seriously the warmed over Reaganism of conservatives like Paul Ryan, and pretending there’s something in it that will help the poor.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, March 4, 2014
“It’s Getting A Bit Old”: Conservatives Condemn Weak Weakness Of Weakling Obama
Am I the only one seeing a new sense of purpose in the old neoconservative crowd, an almost joyful welcoming of a good old-fashioned Cold War showdown with the Russkies? Nobody’s saying they don’t love the War on Terror, but let’s be honest, it’s getting a bit old. Best to forget all about Iraq, and Afghanistan isn’t much better. That jerk Barack Obama ended up getting Osama bin Laden, which was—well, let’s be kind and call it bittersweet. But this Ukraine thing is just like old times. It’s us against them, a battle of the big boys! Well, sort of anyway. So now is the time for action! Aren’t there some missiles we can move into Turkey or something?
Ukraine is providing a great opportunity for the muscle-bound manly men of the right, who are totally not overcompensating so shut up, to demonstrate how tough and strong they are. Action!, they demand. Not words! We have to show Putin who’s boss! He thinks we’re weak! Obama is weak! We must be strong! Strong strong strong!
One big problem when you’re demanding strength is that there’s only so much we can do to affect this situation if we aren’t actually willing to start World War III (back in the day, seeming willing to start World War III was an essential component of our strategy). So you see things like Marco Rubio strongly demanding “8 Steps Obama Must Take to Punish Russia,” and they’re, well, pretty weak. There’s “speak[ing] unequivocally,” introducing a UN (!) resolution, sending Secretary of State Kerry to Kiev (which Obama is doing), and my favorite, holding up the confirmation of Rose Gottemoeller to be Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security. That’ll show ’em! Sure, Gottemoeller is already serving as acting Under Secretary, but just imagine when Putin picks up his copy of Pravda and sees that Gottemoeller will have to have that “acting” before her title for a few more months. He’ll crush the paper in his hands and bellow with rage. “Damn you, Americans! You will pay for this!”
But never mind that. In the last couple of days, Republicans have been united in their conviction that this whole thing is happening for one reason and one reason only: Barack Obama is weak. Let’s look at just a few examples:
- “We have a weak and indecisive president that invites aggression,” says the strong and decisive Lindsey Graham.
- Representative Tom Cotton says this is happening because Putin was “Emboldened by President Obama’s trembling inaction.”
- Here’s Jonathan Tobin in Commentary: “Obama, Ukraine, and the Price of Weakness.”
- Here’s Heritage Foundation chief Jim DeMint instructing Obama that “Weak statements, history has proven, only invite aggression,” also noting that Obama has “plans to neuter our military might.” Nothing Freudian going on there.
- Here’s Charles Krauthammer: “The Ukrainians, and I think everybody, is shocked by the weakness of Obama’s statement.”
- Here’s a former Bush administration official writing in the Washington Times: “There is no substitute for strength in world affairs, and regrettably, this White House seems to prefer projecting weakness.”
- William Kristol, neocon extraordinaire, stands in awe of Putin’s manly decisiveness, and laments that under Obama, we will “be all talk, no action.”
- Here’s another conservative dude, writing in Forbes: “Leonid Brezhnev would not have ordered the invasion of Afghanistan if he had sized up Jimmy Carter as a strong president. Vladimir Putin would not be invading Ukraine if he thought that Barack Obama had a backbone.”
And there you can feel the ghost looming over this affair, history’s manliest man: Ronald Reagan. If Reagan were here, the conservatives know, he’d march right over to the Kremlin, give Putin a steely stare and say, “You got a problem, mister?” Putin would take one look in those strong, determined eyes, stare down at his shoes and say, “No sir, no problem,” then slink back to Siberia. Because that’s what happens when you’re strong. The whole world just bends to your will. Right?
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, March 3, 2014
“The Plight Of The Poor”: Your Newest Fraudulent Poverty Crusader Is The Tea Party’s Mike Lee
Have you heard about the hot new trend that is sweeping the Republican Party? No, not “endorsing a celebrity’s confused defense of Jim Crow,” I am talking about “caring about poverty.” Marco Rubio cares. Paul Ryan cares. Rand Paul cares. Even Eric Cantor cares. Now, it can be revealed that Sen. Mike Lee also secretly cares very deeply about the plight of the poor.
“Tackling poverty may seem a counterintuitive agenda for one of the most conservative figures in Congress,” the Guardian says, but we have seen many examples over the last few months of how easily a far-right figure can earn positive press simply by stating that it is bad that some people are very poor and that something should be done about that. (Though to be fair to the press, it is actually pretty unusual to hear any politician admit that many Americans are very poor, and the last prominent politician to campaign on a platform of doing something about it turned out to be a toxic narcissist.)
Lee, best known for being a less telegenic Ted Cruz, declared a “war on poverty” last November. Unlike the prior War on Poverty, which was made up of various policies designed to alleviate poverty (and which was much more successful than its critics have claimed), Lee’s war on poverty is mainly about making the rhetorical case that government causes poverty and that eliminating welfare benefits for the poor will somehow spur “market forces” to solve the problem. Here are Lee’s policy proposals, as described by the Guardian:
-“[A“] bill, introduced last week, that would restore a work requirement for recipients of food stamps….”
-capping means-tested welfare spending at 2007 levels”
Capping spending on benefits at 2007 levels — that is, capping them where they were just before the devastating economic crisis and subsequent worldwide recession — seems, like so much of the modern GOP “anti-poverty” platform, to be more of a cruel joke than a serious suggestion. The right now rejects the idea that spending on benefits ought to increase when need increases, in favor of believing, because they really want to believe, that need increases because spending increases. Keep in mind too that “means-tested welfare spending” includes a wide array of programs beyond TANF and SNAP — scroll down to Sec. 301 here — and capping spending at 2007 levels would effectively reverse the ACA Medicaid expansion.
(The Guardian, to its credit and unlike certain American press outlets reporting on GOP poverty crusading, does quote experts explaining how Lee’s ideas will not actually help any poor people.)
At least Marco Rubio suggested a program that might actually alleviate poverty. (Though in order for it to do so, it would have to spend money. And that is why Marco Rubio is a huge failure at being a modern conservative superstar.) The Pauls and Lees simply argue that their goal of completely dismantling the welfare state is in fact an anti-poverty platform, because the government giving poor people money and vouchers is the only thing standing in the way of the poor lifting themselves from poverty with the assistance of the benevolent market.
When a Republican announces his war on poverty, impoverished people should understand that they are the ones the war is against.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, February 20, 2014
“High Cost Of An Ego Trip”: Republicans Mucking Up The Gears Of Government To Earn Them Favor In The Primaries
Very few Americans know how close the country came to catastrophe this week.
The final tally shows that the Senate voted by a wide margin Wednesday, 67 to 31, to break Sen. Ted Cruz’s filibuster of an increase in the debt limit, thus avoiding a default on the United States’ full faith and credit.
But 15 minutes after the voting should have ended, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell had apparently secured only two of the five Republican votes he needed to join all 55 members of the Democratic caucus to pass the measure. He raised three fingers in the air and worked his way among his members but was met with folded arms and shakes of the head. Looking queasy, he patted his thigh nervously and drummed his fingers. In the hubbub, Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) knocked a full glass of water and coaster from McConnell’s desk to the floor.
Democrats, watching the spectacle, took the extraordinary step of ordering the Senate clerk not to read aloud the ongoing vote tally to avoid setting off a market panic; because the House had already left on a two-week recess, a failure of this vote would have left little chance of avoiding default on Feb. 27, when the Treasury was to run out of funds.
Watching the chaos from the side of the chamber was the man who caused it: Cruz, his hands in his pants pockets and a satisfied grin on his face. The Texas Republican strolled to the clerk’s table to check on the vote count and was met with a look of disgust from Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.). And the feeling was widespread: Moments after Cruz walked into the Republican cloakroom, four senators emerged from it and changed their votes to “aye.”
Cruz reemerged from the cloakroom, chewing gum, his hands again in his pockets. He smirked as his colleagues finally overcame his filibuster after a 59-minute struggle.
Cruz’s ego trip had come at a high cost. He had forced McConnell, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas and other Republicans to cast votes that could cause them to lose primaries to weaker general-election candidates, and he had risked getting his party blamed for a default.
The Wall Street Journal’s conservative editorial page dubbed Cruz “the Minority Maker” for making his GOP colleagues “walk the plank” on a “meaningless debt ceiling vote.”
But Cruz doesn’t care about all that. Leaving the chamber, he told reporters McConnell’s fate would be “ultimately a decision . . . for the voters in Kentucky.”
His actions suggest Cruz has put himself before his party and even the nation’s solvency. And in this sense his actions are typical of the 2016 GOP presidential field. Cruz, Sen. Marco Rubio and Sen. Rand Paul are mucking up the gears of government in ways that will earn them favorable attention in the primaries.
Rubio, of Florida, is pushing legislation that would undo Obamacare in such a way that would cause chaos in the insurance market and likely leave tens of millions of people without health coverage and cost the government billions.
Vying with Cruz to be the most reckless of the 2016 aspirants is Paul, of Kentucky, who in recent days has injected the 1990s Monica Lewinsky scandal into the national debate as a means of discrediting Hillary Clinton. He also claimed her failure to send “reinforcements” to diplomats in Benghazi before they were attacked “should limit Hillary Clinton from ever holding high office.” Multiple investigations have confirmed that secretaries of state do not make decisions about security at each diplomatic post.
Now, Paul has politicized his court challenge to the NSA surveillance program. It would have been an important legal case, but Paul pushed aside the constitutional lawyer who had drafted the legislation and abandoned efforts to get a Democratic senator to be a co-plaintiff; instead, he added President Obama’s name to the list of defendants, brought in the tea party group FreedomWorks as a plaintiff and hired failed Virginia gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli, another tea party politician, to be his lead lawyer.
To nobody’s surprise, Paul and Rubio sided with Cruz in Wednesday’s debt-ceiling filibuster. Had they prevailed, and had 12 of their GOP colleagues not been more responsible, the likely default would have added far more to the national debt than the legislation did. It also would have caused markets to crash, the economy to swoon and American standing to decline.
But for Messrs. Paul, Rubio and Cruz, those aren’t the top considerations.
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, February 14, 2014
“Republicans Are Losing All Credibility On ObamaCare”: At Some Point, Voters Are Going To Stop Paying Attention To Their Scare Tactics
Even before President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law, GOP critics assailed it as a socialist, job-killing overreach indicative of a government run amok. In the years since, we’ve seen no shortage of scare-mongering and hand-wringing about how the law would harm Americans and bring the republic to an ignominious end.
Yet as ObamaCare gradually went into effect, reality began to undercut the thrust of that argument. Remember those terrifying death panels Sarah Palin warned us about? And over the past few months in particular, facts have shot down a handful of the more apocalyptic claims about the law.
In the most recent instance, a report last week from the Congressional Budget Office estimated that ObamaCare would trim the labor force by 2 million full-time jobs by 2017, and by 2.5 million come 2024. Critics seized on that as proof that the law would indeed spook businesses and stifle job growth.
What the report actually showed, though, was not a dearth of jobs, but a dearth of labor. Incentives in ObamaCare that make insurance cheaper and easier to obtain, the report suggested, would encourage some people to retire earlier or work less, thus shrinking the labor pool.
With spin and misinformation flying about, the CBO on Monday made that point clear.
“Because the longer-term reduction in work is expected to come almost entirely from a decline in the amount of labor that workers choose to supply in response to the changes in their incentives, we do not think it is accurate to say that the reduction stems from people “losing” their jobs,” CBO head Doug Elmendorf wrote.
So much for that talking point.
The same CBO report also undercut another meme on the right, that ObamaCare contains a big bailout for insurance companies.
The scuttlebutt involves the risk corridors built into the law, which cap how much insurance companies can make or lose in their first three years on the exchange marketplace. (You can read a more thorough explanation on risk corridors here.) Since taxpayers could theoretically be on the hook for covering the losses of flopping companies, a cadre of Republicans, led by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), labeled the provision a “bailout” and vowed to repeal it.
As it turns out, the CBO found that insurance companies would receive $8 billion — but pay back double to the government. In other words, the supposed bailout — which was really just standard actuarial practice to begin with, and not a literal bailout — would actually save the government billions of dollars.
Then there’s the zombie claim that lawmakers and their staffs are exempt from ObamaCare. Last month, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said he was filing suit over that boondoggle, arguing the administration had “exceeded its legal authority” in “arranging for me and other members of Congress and their staffs to receive benefits intentionally ruled out by” ObamaCare.
In truth, the law does offer a unique subsidy to Capitol Hill employees to offset the cost of obtaining insurance through the exchanges. But lawmakers and staffers only qualified for that subsidy because the law, via an attempted GOP poison pill amendment, stripped them of federally subsidized coverage and forced them onto the exchanges in the first place. Even National Review thoroughly debunked the exemption claim.
Republicans also warned that Healthcare.gov’s early glitches exposed the entire law as an unworkable train wreck. Writing in The Hill, Rep. Bill Johnson (R-Ohio) called the problems “catastrophic,” and likened the site to cooked eggs: “You see, you can’t recook eggs!”
Following a massive IT effort though, the site is now running much smoother, and enrollments are surging as a result.
That brings up another ObamaCare bogeyman: the dreaded death spiral.
ObamaCare needs a bunch of young enrollees to offset the cost of enrolling older folks. If not enough young people sign up, premiums for everyone else could spike and the system could crash.
Yet despite the best efforts from some on the right to convince young adults not to enroll — one ad campaign featured a creepy Uncle Sam sexually assaulting young patients — the death spiral, too, was more myth than reality.
Enrollment among young adults has indeed been lower than the administration’s target, but it’s expected to surge as the enrollment deadline nears. And even if the current demographic breakdown remains unchanged, an analysis from the Kaiser Family Foundation determined the consequences “are not as great as conventional wisdom might suggest.” In a worst-case scenario, the report found, the effect on premiums from an unbalanced pool of enrollees would still be “well below the level that would trigger a ‘death spiral.'”
Phew. That’s a lot of debunked arguments. Next thing you know, critics will be trying to falsely claim the law won’t help enough people get coverage. Oh, wait.
Now, the GOP was right to be skeptical of Obama’s claim that everyone could keep their health insurance under ObamaCare. That turned out to not be the case.
But the party’s overall success rate on loaded ObamaCare allegations is terrible, and is only getting worse. The danger is that at some point, voters are going to stop paying attention.
By: Jon Terbush, The Week, February 11, 2014
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