“What Is The GOP Thinking?”: The Nation Will Have To Stand By Until Realists And Ideologues Reach Some Sort Of Understanding
There they go again. Given control of Congress and the chance to frame an economic agenda for the middle class, the first thing Republicans do is tie themselves in knots over . . . abortion and rape.
I’m not kidding. In a week when President Obama used his State of the Union address to issue a progressive manifesto of bread-and-butter policy proposals, GOP leaders responded by taking up the “Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act” — a bill that would ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy. But a vote on the legislation had to be canceled after female GOP House members reportedly balked over the way an exception for pregnancies resulting from rape was limited.
The whole thing was, in sum, your basic 360-degree fiasco.
At least there are some in the party who recognize how much trouble Republicans make for themselves by breaking the armistice in the culture wars and launching battles that cannot be won. It looks as if the nation will have to stand by until GOP realists and ideologues reach some sort of understanding, which may take some time.
It’s important to understand that the “Pain-Capable” bill was never anything more than an act of political fantasy. The only purpose of the planned vote was to create an “event” that the annual antiabortion March for Life, held Thursday in Washington, could celebrate.
You might think the demonstrators already had reason to cheer. The abortion rate is at “historic lows,” having dropped by 13 percent in the decade between 2002 and 2011, according to a recent report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The main reason is that there are fewer unwanted pregnancies, which suggests logically that if Republicans really want to reduce abortion, what they should do is work to increase access to birth control.
More to the point, according to the CDC, only 1.4 percent of abortions take place after 20 weeks. This means the bill, if it somehow became law, would have minimal impact.
But it won’t become law, as everyone in Congress well knows. The White House has announced that Obama would veto the measure, if it ever reached his desk. To get that far, the bill would have to pass the Senate, where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) would have to win over enough Democrats to cross the 60-vote threshold, which is highly unlikely.
Theoretically, though, any reasonable-sounding antiabortion measure should at least be able to make it through the House, with its expanded GOP majority. But even in the context of today’s far-right Republican Party, the “Pain-Capable” bill struck many House members, particularly women, as unreasonable.
At issue, apparently, is that, in making exceptions for abortions of pregnancies resulting from rape, the bill specifies that the rape must have been reported to law enforcement. This restriction cannot help but bring to mind the grief Republicans suffered in 2012 over Senate candidate Todd Akin’s appalling attempt to distinguish between “legitimate rape” and some other kind of rape.
Although the House leadership maintained that all was sweetness and light, reporters heard rumblings Wednesday that the bill was in trouble with moderate Republicans, especially women. Then an unusual number of female GOP House members was seen leaving the offices of the majority whip. Then the bill was pulled and a different antiabortion measure — prohibiting federal funding for abortions — was substituted.
I should note that there is no generally accepted scientific basis for the premise of the “Pain-Capable” bill. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has said there is no legitimate research supporting the idea that fetuses feel pain at 20 weeks.
I understand that, for those who believe in their hearts that abortion is murder, there is an imperative to do something, anything, to stop it. Some people have similar moral passion about capital punishment or the thousands of lives lost each year to gun violence.
Given that the Supreme Court has decided abortion is a legally protected right, the antiabortion movement has done what it could — made abortions very difficult to obtain in some states where the pro-life position has sufficient support. Hooting and hollering on Capitol Hill do nothing for abortion opponents except fleece them of campaign contributions.
People, we are in an economic recovery whose fruits are not reaching the middle class. We have a crucial need to address U.S. infrastructure and competitiveness. We face myriad challenges abroad, including Islamic terrorism and global warming.
If a renewal of the culture wars is your answer, Republicans, you totally misheard the question.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 22, 2015
“Deliberate And Systemic”: Inequality Isn’t Inevitable, It’s Engineered. That’s How The 1% Have Taken Over
Who will look after the super-rich and think about their needs? It’s not easy for them: the 1% of the world’s population who by next year will own more global wealth than the 99%. Private security costs a fortune, and with the world becoming an increasingly unequal place a certain instability increases. It could be dangerous!
Very smartly, Oxfam International is raising such questions at the World Economic Forum at Davos, where the global elite gather to talk of big ideas and big money. Oxfam executive director, Winnie Byanyima, is arguing that this increasing concentration of wealth since the recession is “bad for growth and bad for governance”. What’s more, inequality is bad not just for the poor, but for the rich too. That’s why we have the likes of the IMF’s Christine Lagarde kicking off with warnings about rising inequality. Visceral inequality from foodbanks to empty luxury flats is still seen as somehow being in the eye of the beholder by the right – a narrative in which poverty is seen as an innate moral failure of the poor themselves has taken hold. This in turn sustains the idea that rich people deserve their incredible riches. Most wealth, though, is not earned: huge assets, often inherited, simply get bigger not because the individuals who own them are super talented, but because structures are in place to ensure this happens.
Most of us – I count myself – are economically inept. The economic climate is represented as a natural force, like uncontrollable weather. It’s a shame that the planet is getting hotter, just as it’s a shame that the rich are getting richer. But these things are man-made and not inevitable at all. In fact, there are deliberate and systemic reasons as to why this is happening.
The rich, via lobbyists and Byzantine tax arrangements, actively work to stop redistribution. Inequality is not inevitable, it’s engineered. Many mainstream economists do not question the degree of this engineering, even when it is highly dubious. This level of acceptance among economists of inequality as merely an unfortunate byproduct of growth, alongside their failure to predict the crash, has worryingly not affected their cult status among blinkered admirers.
Even the mild challenge of Thomas Piketty, with his heretical talk of public rather than private interest being essential to a functioning democracy, is revolutionary in a world which buys the conservative idea that the elixir of “growth” simply has to mean these huge extremes in income distribution.
That argument may now be collapsing. The contortions that certain pet economists make to defend the indefensible 1% are often to do with positing the super-rich as inherently talented and being self-made. The myth is that everyone is a cross between Steve Jobs and Bono; creative, entrepreneurial, unique. The reality is cloned inherited wealth and insane performance-related pay, eg the bankers who continue to reward themselves more than a million a year after overseeing the collapse of the industry.
There are always those who will side with the powerful against the powerless, and economists specialise in this. No wonder Prof Gregory Mankiw’s Harvard students walked out of his class following his ludicrous insistence that the system is not gamed for the rich. Such “theorists” flatter the rich by granting them some superpower, which is why they like rock star comparisons. In fact, international finance is peopled by interchangeable guys who are essentially just paying themselves double what they were 10 years ago. They may need to think of themselves as special. We don’t have to.
When we talk of neoliberalism, we are talking about something that has fuelled inequality and enabled the 1%. All it means is a stage of capitalism in which the financial markets were deregulated, public services privatised, welfare systems run down, laws to protect working people dismantled, and unions cast as the enemy.
Oxfam’s suggestions at Davos are attempts to claw back some basic rights, with talk of tax, redistribution, minimum wages and public services. But isn’t it rather incredible that a charity has to do this? The Occupy movement has dissipated, but we are seeing in Europe, primarily in Greece and Spain, a refusal to accept the austerity narrative that we appear to have wolfed down here in the UK.
Oxfam can appeal to the vanity of billionaires, but the truth is that’s not enough. The neoliberal project may fail not because of huge protest, but because reduced income means reduced demand. Never mind the angry proletariat, a disappointed middle-class is something all politicians fear. To stem inequality, it is imperative to stop seeing it as inevitable. It’s a choice. A choice very few of us have any say in. The poor are always with us. And now the deserving and undeserving super-rich are too? That’s just the way things are? No. This climate can also change.
By: Suzanne Moore, The Guardian, January 20, 2015
“GOP Has Been Wrong For The Past Six Years”: Mitch McConnell’s “No Compromise” Strategy Is Finally Failing
In his seventh State of the Union on Tuesday night, President Barack Obama touted the low unemployment rate, low gas prices, increase in clean energy production, lower teen pregnancy rates and host of other statistics that supported his optimistic vision. “The shadow of crisis has passed,” he said. “And the state of the union is strong.”
Giving the official Tea Party response to Obama’s address, Representative Curt Clawson painted a very different picture of the state of America. “In 2014, our economy continued sluggish growth and millions of Americans are still out of work,” he said. “We know them. We see them.” This message was echoed in every other Republican response to Obama’s speech—five in all.
These dual visions of America have been competing since the midterms, when Republicans trounced Democrats in races across the country. But every day, since then it’s become increasingly clear that Obama’s message is a much more accurate depiction of the United States than what Republicans are offering—and the GOP message will likely look more ridiculous as the 2016 presidential election approaches.
Take the Affordable Care Act. Republicans have been arguing for years that Obamacare would cripple the health care system and destroy the economy. Clawson repeated those claims in his response. “We also need to lift the economic shackles of Obamacare,” he said. “It makes us uncompetitive.” These are ridiculous arguments. The odds that Obamacare would cause a death spiral in the insurance industry, for instance, were always exaggerated. But the topline metrics now show that Obamacare is working. Millions more people now have insurance. Health care cost growth has slowed, although it’s unclear how much of that is due to the health care law. Insurers aren’t fleeing the exchanges and premiums aren’t skyrocketing. All of the fatal scenarios that the GOP predicted aren’t happening. It’s possible those trends will change dramatically in the years to come, but right now, there are no signs of that.
Or take the economy. Remember threats that Obamanomics would strangle the recovery? That hasn’t played out either. The unemployment rate is down to 5.6 percent. Growth is strong. Obama can’t take all the credit for the recovery. The Federal Reserve’s willingness to ignore inflation hawks and keep interest rates at zero is a key reason why the U.S.’s recovery is the envy of the developed world, for instance. But the fact is that the economy really has strengthened considerably over the past year. Republican arguments that Obama’s policies would stifle growth and prevent the economy from bouncing back no longer are credible.
As Senator Elizabeth Warren points out, the recovery has not been felt equally—wages are still stagnant. Obama made that point in his address. Yet, lower gas prices, even though they aren’t due to Obama’s actions, are effectively acting as a tax cut for middle class Americans across the country. In turn, optimism in the economy has ticked up considerably over the past two months—and so have Obama’s approval ratings. Americans are starting to believe in the recovery—and to give Obama credit for it.
Republican talking points largely haven’t adjusted to this new reality. “We see our neighbors agonize over stagnant wages and lost jobs,” said Senator Joni Ernst in the official Republican response to Obama’s State of the Union. “We see the hurt caused by canceled healthcare plans and higher monthly insurance bills. We see too many moms and dads put their own dreams on hold while growing more fearful about the kind of future they’ll be able to leave to their children.” Clawson even said Obama’s speech was “pretty much the same rhetoric we’ve heard for the past six years,” which is simply not true.
But some Republicans are starting to realize that this message doesn’t jibe with an improved economy. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, for instance, opened the 114th Congress by trying to take credit for the recovery. But even if more Republicans adopt new talking points, the president and his party are generally the ones who benefit, politically, from an improving economy. Given Republicans’ doomsday predictions through the first six years of Obama’s presidency, it’s hard to imagine voters crediting the GOP for the recovery over Obama.
McConnell has largely been treated as a political mastermind during Obama’s presidency. He was one of the leaders of “no compromise” strategy that the party adopted to stifle Obama’s agenda and prevent him from claiming credit for any bipartisan accomplishments. In many ways, it was a success. Republicans won landslide victories in 2010 and 2014. They soured the country on the president and have, until now, sunk his approval ratings on many issues.
But it came at a major cost, and the cost seems to be getting greater by the day: Republicans lost all ability to shape policy, especially in the first two years of Obama’s presidency. Instead of compromising on issues like health care reform, financial regulation, and fiscal stimulus, Republicans sidelined themselves in lockstep opposition, determined not to leave fingerprints on the legislation. In turn, they adopted a message that each of Obama’s major legislative achievements—Obamacare, the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory law, and the stimulus—were going to crush the economy and destroy different industries. It was an appealing message when the economy was still struggling. Now it’s rapidly becoming a political liability.
That doesn’t mean McConnell’s strategy was wrong. If the GOP had compromised with Obama and pulled his policy rightward, voters almost certainly would have rewarded Democrats. The country might even be in better shape, but the Republican Party probably wouldn’t be. Ultimately, Republicans were in an impossible position. The economy was eventually going to recover, and Obama was going to get credit for it.
The president has spent the first six years of his presidency waiting for the moment he could take that credit, knowing it was coming. On Tuesday night, it came. Even with five separate responses to the president’s address, there was nothing Republicans could say to fight the growing sense that Obama’s policies are working and that the GOP has been wrong for the past six years.
By: Danny Vinik, The New Republic, January 20, 2015
“The Biggest, Most Important 2016 Debate”: Writing The Obituary Of Supply-Side Economics
It’s now shaping up that wages and the condition of the middle class are going to be the dominant issues as we enter this first phase of the 2016 slog. Don’t take it from me, or even from Elizabeth Warren. Speaker John Boehner said as much (well, almost) on the day he opened the new session of Congress.
This is a very big deal, and it’s about more than our usual, tug-of-war politics. Boehner’s mention of wage stagnation was clearly opportunistic, because it’s a current problem that can be hung around the President’s neck. But middle-class wage stagnation is much more than an Obama problem. It’s our main economic reality for 30-plus years now.
The first chart in this article tells the basic story. Since 1979, American workers’ productivity has increased by 80 percent. The income of the top 1 percent has increased 240 percent. And the average American wage, adjusted for inflation, has gone up just a few percentage points, maybe 8 percent. It wasn’t always this way, and it isn’t nearly this bad in other advanced countries. The median wage in the United States today is around $50,000. If wages had kept pace with productivity gains, the median wage would be more than $90,000.
But look: It’s highly serendipitous that the wage problem is something the Republicans can use against Obama (at least for now). That means they’ll talk about it. What they’ll come up with in terms of solutions beyond tax cuts and deregulation is another matter, but the mere fact that they’ll talk about it means that both parties will be talking about it, and when both parties are talking about an issue, that issue tends to rise to the top of the charts.
On paper at least, this is great for Democrats, because wage stagnation is basically a Democratic issue, one that most voters would probably trust the Democrats to do a better job on than Republicans. Although of course, if it comes to be October 2016 and wages are still as flat as they’ve been since the crash, that could be a problem for the Democrats. So what they need to do is frame wages not as a post-crash, Obama-era problem, but instead to make sure Americans know that this is a deep historical problem, and that the moment to address it is right now.
To that end, you should know that this past week was a really good one for progressive economics in Washington (and none of it had anything to do with Warren!). Two major proposals were floated to address these problems. They’re real and meaty. And if events go in the direction I hope they do, their release in mid-January 2015 will be remembered as the moment when the debate turned.
First, on Monday, Democratic Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland put out a report by the Democratic staff of the House Budget Committee called “An Action Plan to Grow the Paychecks of All, Not Just the Wealthy Few.” All right, a bit cumbersome as a title. But give it credit anyway for getting to the point.
“I sat down with our team many months ago,” Van Hollen told me Thursday, “and we began to really tackle what would need to be done to deal with wage stagnation.” The plan is built around nine ideas. The one that’s gotten the most attention because of the obvious “class warfare” angle is the so-called Wall Street tax, a fee of .1 percent on financial market transactions.
But there are much more interesting ideas in the paper. The most notable may be a limit on the amount of deductions corporations can take for executive pay if those executives are keeping wages stagnant or laying off workers. “From 2007 to 2010,” Van Hollen says, “corporations took $66 billion in deductions on executive pay. That’s a huge amount of money. We say here that if you want to take a tax deduction, you’d better be giving your employees a raise.”
Van Hollen unveiled his proposals at the Center for American Progress on Monday. Then, two days later, CAP president Neera Tanden led a press conference unveiling a major new report on inclusive prosperity, under a panel co-chaired by Larry Summers and Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor of the exchequer for the British Labour Party. The CAP plan, which Tanden stressed is international in the scopes of its analyses and proposed fixes (hence Balls’s inclusion), is aimed at the same basic problem Van Hollen is shooting at—the need to raise the incomes of the middle class.
Summers, speaking at the press conference, emphasized an issue he’s been talking up for a long time, a “very substantial” increase in infrastructure investment. “When we can borrow at 1.8 percent in our own currency, and when construction unemployment approaches double digits,” as it is now, Summers said, “that’s the moment when Kennedy Airport should be fixed.”
No one is under the illusion that John Boehner and Mitch McConnell are going to rush out and pass these measures. That isn’t the point. The point is to influence the direction of the debate, especially the presidential campaign debate. And that, of course, raises the question of the extent to which a certain former senator and secretary of state will embrace these ideas. Tanden was a longtime Hillary Clinton staffer. The imprimatur of Summers on these progressive ideas should raise Clinton’s comfort level with them. If Clinton runs on half of these ideas, and she’s signaling that she might, she’ll be a more progressive candidate than she was in 2008.
It’s hard to believe that we’ve lived with this kind of wage picture, this kind of raging unfairness, for nearly 40 years. Of course, part of the reason that we have lived with it for 40 years is that the Democratic Party wasn’t always much good at articulating a theory of economic growth that could counter the Republicans’ trickle-down argument. They’re finally finding their voice on this. And so, the real importance of the next election is not the Supreme Court, not climate change, not foreign policy, crucial as all those things are. It’s that it could write the obituary of supply-side economics.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, January 17, 2015
“When Things Go Well”: Republicans Now Take Credit For The Recovery They Sabotaged
This is unlikely to prompt anyone to break out the bubbly in the Oval Office, but last week’s poll numbers are nevertheless good news for President Obama. Since Democrats were thrashed in November’s midterm elections, the president’s approval ratings have been on the upswing.
As he prepares to deliver his sixth State of the Union address on Jan. 20, Obama’s approval has crept up to 47 percent, according to a new survey from Pew Research. That’s up 5 points since December.
Most analysts believe Obama’s recovering fortunes are the result of a much-improved economy — the one gauge that’s reliably important to voters. It’s taken a few years, but average workers are finally beginning to put the Great Recession behind them.
Take note of this now. Keep it in a spare file in your memory bank. Remember that the economy has been advancing for the six years of Obama’s tenure — a frustratingly slow process that is finally bearing fruit. The unemployment rate is now at 5.6 percent, the lowest since 2008. Foreclosures are down to pre-recession levels. The stock market is in historically high territory.
Why do I want you to remember this? In a stunning show of chutzpah, the president’s harshest critics, the hyper-conservatives who’ve done everything they could to wreck his presidency, want to take credit for the recovery they tried to sabotage.
Just take a look at the speech Kentucky Republican Mitch McConnell gave on the day he took the helm of the Senate as the new majority leader.
“After so many years of sluggish growth, we’re finally starting to see some economic data that can provide a glimmer of hope. The uptick appears to coincide with the biggest political change of the Obama administration’s long tenure in Washington: the expectation of a new Republican Congress,” he said.
According to his logic, consumers spent more money and businesses hired more workers starting back in the summer because they expected Republicans to win a majority in Congress. That’s nonsense.
Obama inherited a mess from George W. Bush — a financial crisis brought on by the excesses of Wall Street. President Bush started the bailout, but most of the work was left for the Obama administration. Obama continued the Wall Street bailout, passed a massive stimulus package and rescued the auto industry. Congressional Republicans, meanwhile, fought him every step of the way. That the economy has bounced back anyway is testament to its underlying resiliency.
Perhaps the greatest driver of consumers’ new optimism is the free-fall in gas prices, which haven’t been this low since the Great Recession drove down demand worldwide. Obama didn’t spur the investment in domestic oil drilling, but he has encouraged it, noting that it would help to free us from a dependence on foreign oil.
None of these hard-won gains have come a moment too soon. And, yes, there’s still much work to be done to revive the American middle class. The growing gap between the comfortable and everybody else remains one of the biggest threats to domestic tranquility. Wages are still stagnant.
Obama is well aware of that. In his State of the Union speech, he is expected to announce an ambitious new proposal to provide free access to the nation’s two-year community colleges. It’s an excellent plan.
Education experts say there are about 8 million community college students, and their average annual tuition is around $3,800. To the comfortable classes, that might not seem like much. But it presents a barrier to many working-class students trying to change their circumstances. It’s an investment that the nation can afford to make — and should make.
But like the other proposals the president has made to boost the economy, this one is likely to meet resistance from the Republicans in Congress. They want to take credit when things go well, but they’re only too willing to block a good idea if it comes from Obama.
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, January 17, 2015
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