“The GOP’s Obamacare Obsession Will Sink Them In 2014”: As A Democrat, I Like The Republican Strategy, For It’s Political Suicide
2014 has arrived – an election year. President Obama is surely happy to have 2013 behind him, excited to have a new year ahead to work on issues that the American people care about: immigration reform, the budget, extending unemployment benefits, job creation and raising the minimum wage to name a few.
Republicans are also excited about the year ahead. And their agenda?
Replace, repeal, demonize and continue to oppose Obamacare.
Yes folks, the 47 attempts to repeal this law at your time and expense (literally); weren’t enough.The fact is that the Republicans promised, ‘hey, vote for us, we’ll take over the House and create jobs!’ was a broken, empty promise.
The fact is that Americans still care about the economy (a category into which job creation, extending unemployment benefits and raising the minimum wage fall), still ranks numero uno on their list of must haves for 2014.
The fact is that poll after poll shows that the majority of Americans feel there is a disparity of wages in America, want unemployment benefits extended and support raising the minimum wage to a more livable wage.
The fact is that in the last election, Democrats won landslide victories by hitting home the point of income inequality in America and how it must be changed.
And the fact is that, polls show, the majority of Americans don’t like Obamacare, but do like “The Affordable Care Act” and don’t want it repealed or replaced, just repaired – and they do not want Republicans fighting over it or voting on it anymore. Despite all that, Republicans are still betting that their opposition to Obamacare will help them win and win big in November 2014.
And the machine’s already in motion. It started with the Republican National Committee’s announcement that it would emphasize the Democrats’ support of Obamacare, hoping to gain seats in both the House & the Senate in the next election. RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, said Obamacare is going to be the issue of 2014. As the new year starts, so starts the launch of a multistate radio ad campaign targeting Democrats.
Although Republicans see the continued attack of “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it” comment by the president as their golden egg, I believe it will eventually fall on deaf ears. Those that aren’t Democrats or don’t like the Democrats won’t vote for them, whether they like their insurance, their plan, their doctor or not.
And by November, the website will be fixed, even more people will be insured as millions more will sign up for Obamacare by the end of March and by November rather than death panels we’ll be hearing about how many people were able to have early detection of cancer and get it treated and be cured, rather than die; due to having health insurance and receive preventative care.
We will hear how no jobs were lost due to Obamacare and the economy will continue to improve; despite Republican claims otherwise. In other words, there will be – and Democrats better drive these points home – more success stories and satisfaction with Obamacare than not.
So as a Democrat I like the Republican strategy, for it’s political suicide; oh but it will gain seats in the House and the Senate … for the Democrats.
By: Leslie Marshall, U. S. News and World Report, January 8, 2014
“Not A Creator Or Manufacturer In The Lot”: America’s Would-Be Aristocrats Forget The Most Important Thing About Business
To paraphrase Tolstoy, every successful small business shares the same traits. And they all begin with high-quality employees. I’m thinking of three local establishments where I’ve traded for years: an auto repair garage, a dentist’s office, and a one-size-fits-all country store where I buy cattle- and horse-feed.
Along with just about everything else the aptly-named “Toad Suck One-Stop” might conceivably carry: from crickets and minnows to motor oil, pain remedies, kitty litter and homemade sandwiches. If you get up early enough, they’ll even fix you breakfast while somebody else loads feed sacks into your truck. (Toad Suck is a place name designating a long-ago ferryboat stop on the Arkansas River.)
It’s much the same at George Jett’s auto garage down in Little Rock; also at my dentist (his name is Lamar Lane). The first thing you notice is familiar faces. People who work at these places stay for years. And they do so because they’re well-paid, earn decent benefits, and are treated respectfully. So they like their jobs, take pride in their work, and are glad to see familiar customers.
Now I’m not going to lie that I love going to the dentist. But I do like feeling among friends, even if it means hearing Dr. Lane carry on about his LSU Tigers. (Because my wife was born in Baton Rouge, where her daddy played ball, I get a double dose.)
Something else: how a business treats employees also tends to be a reliable predictor of how they treat customers. Dr. Lane does high-quality work and stands by it. If a crown breaks, he replaces it free without asking if you were shelling pecans with your teeth.
My man George Jett hires good mechanics, values their skills, and guarantees their work. If the rattle’s still there, he’ll drive the vehicle around the block and then put it back on the lift to figure out why—also at no additional charge.
Jason down at the One-Stop isn’t exactly a philanthropist — at least not where Bermuda grass hay and Canadian night-crawlers are concerned. Keeping a business with so many moving parts running requires constant attention to detail. New hires that stand out back smoking when shelves need restocking tend not to last. Loyal longtime employees won’t cut them much slack.
Gas is cheaper at the Walmart across the river in Faulkner County, but the One-Stop’s pumps stay busy. It’s the community’s unofficial town hall. If you want to know who’s looking for a lost blue heeler or how Holly’s orphaned baby raccoons are doing, it’s got to be the One-Stop.
Ordinarily, such commonplaces would hardly be worth recording. So there are friendly folks at the country store.
Who’d have thunk it?
Unless, that is, you live in the United States of America, a large proportion of whose tycoon class appears determined to drag us back to the Gilded Age.
If they gave a Scrooge McDuck Award for the nation’s greediest knucklehead, the 2013 winner would be Home Depot’s billionaire founder Kenneth Langone, a Catholic who voiced public alarm at Pope Francis’s seeming enthusiasm for the gospel of Matthew 19. That’s where Jesus observes that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”
The Pope didn’t cite that verse, nor discuss politics as such. However, his encyclical Evangelii Gaudium did warn against “crude and naive trust in the… sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system.”
What, not worship money? Never mind that this is elementary Christian doctrine. Langone warned that American plutocrats don’t want to hear about it, even in church.
You may not be surprised this same worthy also regards President Obama as “petulant” and “unpresidential.” His hawklike visage appeared prominently in a Forbes photo lineup of “Anti-Obama Billionaires.”
Scrutinizing the list, I noticed that almost everybody on it made his pile either by manipulating money or squeezing minimum-wage workers dry: casino operators, real estate speculators, corporate buyout scammers, hedge fund geniuses, fast-food franchisers, big-box retailers, and Donald Trump.
Not a creator or manufacturer in the lot. This is our would-be new American aristocracy, largely bereft of — indeed actively hostile toward — the retail virtues I’ve celebrated. (None of whose practitioners necessarily share my partisan views; I’m talking morals here, not politics.)
But the good news is that according to Adam Davidson in the New York Times, old-fashioned business ethics may be making a comeback through the unlikely agency of a Turk. According to Davidson, the going thing in corporate circles is The Good Jobs Strategy, a book by Zeynep Ton, an M.I.T. business professor.
Ton argues that what some call the “Costco” strategy of hiring better-trained, better-paid employees “will often yield happier customers, more engaged workers and—surprisingly—larger corporate profits.”
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, January 8, 2014
“The Silence Of The Austerians”: Here’s Why 2014 Could Be The Year America Finally Ditches Its Inane Deficit Obsession
The year 2013 will be seen as a year of crushing intellectual defeat for advocates of fiscal austerity. There were many smaller victories, but this big one came in April. Researchers at the University of Massachusetts examined the Austerian paper, “Growth in a Time of Debt,” by Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff, which said that countries whose debt-to-GDP ratio reaches 90 percent experience dramatically slower growth. The UMass folks found not only dodgy statistics and backwards causation, but a goof in the paper’s Excel spreadsheet. The causation and statistics errors were more serious, but the fact that elites around the globe had gleefully embraced something with a flub any office temp could understand was horribly embarrassing.
It was an intellectual rout that badly wrong-footed the Austerians, who have since been notably half-hearted in the face of a resurgent left now campaigning on economic justice. This includes, for example, increasing Social Security benefits, which was unthinkable two years ago, when the fight to stop benefits from being cut was nearly lost.
The question for 2014, then, will be whether this triumph can be consolidated and expanded into the policy sphere. Because despite the intellectual collapse, Austerian assumptions and reasoning still dominate United States policy, which is undertaking fiscal consolidation at a pace not seen since the WWII demobilization. If the current Austerian death grip on the framework of policy negotiation can be broken, there might be a chance.
The answer to this question turns on how one views intellectual debate. Given the history of the last few years, one could be forgiven for thinking it’s pointless. As the Polish economist Michal Kalecki demonstrated brilliantly, there are powerful cultural and class-based reasons for both political and business elites to favor austerity now.
We see this today, as Steve Randy Waldman has demonstrated, in the blatant double standards applied to austerity as compared to inequality or raising the minimum wage. Consider a recent paper by the liberal economist Jared Bernstein, which, while outlining much excellent evidence about the economic harm of inequality, is stuffed with unnecessary hedging and hesitation. The Reinhart and Rogoff paper, by contrast, was weak even without knowing about the Excel and stats errors (as Paul Krugman, among others, observed at the time), but elites nearly tripped over their own feet seizing on it anyway. Their bogus “90 percent” conclusion was stated as economic fact by everyone from Paul Ryan to the Washington Post editorial board.
However, biased reasoning is different than no reasoning at all. Seizing on a fig leaf paper fulfills a deep psychological need. Current elites may be largely greedy, corrupt hypocrites, but the cultural credibility of science is such that what amounts to outright class warfare must have an “evidence-based” patina. It’s far too gauche to simply ram through one’s favored policies because you want all the money or to kick the poor.
Therefore, fiscal policy in 2014 and 2015 will hinge on whether the Austerian coalition can be split (assuming, as is probable, that progressive Democrats don’t sweep the 2014 midterms).
Roughly speaking, we’re talking about the center and the right, and there are good reasons to suppose that neither will be brought around. For the center, it takes an intellectual defeat roughly akin to the Battle of Trafalgar to get them to grudgingly abandon austerity. (And if some hack economist churns out another pro-austerity paper, they will probably grab it eagerly.) Meanwhile, “straight” reporters have been culturally conditioned to code deficit reduction as a non-ideological good thing, so even very recent straight reporting still contains buried Austerian assumptions.
And on the right, things look especially hopeless. Denial and motivated reasoning are so epidemic that even Mitt Romney believed the “unskewed” polls before the 2012 election. Ivory tower arguments alone are useless here.
However, all hope is not lost. The key is to change what is considered acceptable for budgetary negotiations. Right now, they all assume that any new spending must be “offset” by cuts elsewhere. That aversion to deficit spending is 100 percent Austerian.
So while Republicans are largely immune to evidence, it’s also true they don’t actually care about the deficit in and of itself. They favor reduced taxes on the rich and cutting social insurance. What’s more, conservative reformists at places like National Affairs have gotten louder and bolder in their advocacy of new thinking, even including infrastructure spending.
So if the center, especially including President Obama, can be persuaded to drop their deficit obsession (and again, it’s hardly possible to overstate how badly this debate has been lost), we could trade tax cuts for some austerity relief, like re-extending unemployment benefits and food stamps. And, it’s important to note, both spending increases and tax cuts count as austerity relief. Tax cuts, especially on the rich, aren’t very good stimulus, but they still put money into people’s pockets.
But the main point is to shift ground for negotiation. This strategy of “tax cuts for more spending” has been suggested many times in the past few years and gone nowhere. But before that, it had been the basis for many successful bipartisan deals, including expanding Medicaid in the 1980s and the CHIP program in the 1990s.
So while the deck is stacked against the anti-Austerians, continuing the intellectual battle is by no account useless. It’s highly possible to influence even a crooked debate.
By: Ryan Cooper, Web Editor of The Washington Monthly; Published in The New Republic, January 5, 2014
“Two Americas Will Be The Defining Trend Of 2014”: Conservative States Will Become Hellholes Of Exploitation And Cruelty
This morning, one of my editors suggested that I might comment on what I thought the big issues of the coming year are going to be. When it comes to the things that will dominate political discussion, most of it we can’t predict. There could be unforeseen crises, natural disasters, war breaking out somewhere, or the emergence of previously unknown yet charismatic political figures. A baby might fall down a well, or a little boy could pretend to float up in a balloon, or a young singer might stick out her tongue and move her hips in a sexually suggestive manner, precipitating a national freakout.
One trend I do think will shape people’s lives this year and in years to come is the increasing divergence between the places where lots of Democrats live and the places where lots of Republicans live. Yes, it sounds trite and overdone to talk about Two Americas, but it is true, and it’s becoming more true all the time. And one question I’m curious about is whether we’ll see an increase in people picking up and moving to places where public policy either accords better with their values or offers them important benefits they need to live their lives (or both).
The new year always sees a whole raft of state laws taking effect, but the ideological implications of some of them this year are particularly stark. And liberal states are showing some of the aggressiveness we’ve come to associate with conservative states. The minimum wage is going up in places like Connecticut and California. Same-sex marriage is now legal in 18 states plus D.C. In Colorado you can walk down to a store on the corner and buy cannabis, and you’ll be able to do the same in Washington in a few months. There are new restrictions on guns in blue states, and new laws making guns more ubiquitous in red states. There are also new laws in conservative states aimed at making abortions all but impossible for women to get, and making it as hard as possible for certain kinds of people to vote. And in one of the most critical changes, as of yesterday millions of Americans are getting health coverage through Medicaid—if they live in the right place. Approximately 5 million Americans are missing out because of the refusal of Republican states to allow the Medicaid expansion, in what Ed Kilgore has evocatively termed the “wingnut hole.”
Obviously, the underlying divisions that drive this policy divergence are as old as the nation itself. But there are more reasons than ever for people to get up and move to the states where the political leadership is working to make it the kind of place where people like them would want to live. The more we talk about it, the more conscious people become of it, and the closer a conservative in Maryland or a liberal in Mississippi gets to saying, “That’s it—I’m finally getting the hell out of here.”
There are limits to how far this can go. Even though getting up and moving to a new state is a common part of many people’s lives at one time or another, and we tend to associate it with something fundamental in the American spirit—taking a risk, striking out for new horizons, the wind in your hair as you hurtle down the highway toward a brighter future—there are a lot of forces that keep people in place, too. Even if your state’s public policy makes your life more difficult, if you grew up there chances are you’ve got family, friends, and the general familiarity with your surroundings that makes leaving it all behind very daunting. But if the number of people moving not just for a new job but for ideological reasons increases, then that will feed a cycle in which more states become even more ideologically homogenized, which leads to public policy even more ideologically one-sided.
Since I’m a liberal, I believe that the liberal states will become models of freedom, justice, and prosperity, while the conservative states will become hellholes of exploitation and cruelty. Conservatives will naturally see things differently. But watch what’s on the ballot in states in 2014, and what state laws get passed in the coming months. State-by-state divergence is my guess for the key political/social trend of the coming year.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, January, 2, 2013
“At The Top, There Is No Crisis”: Why A Never-Ending Disaster For 90 Percent Of America Doesn’t Worry The GOP
We’re in the middle of the worst economic disaster in modern history and we’re doing almost nothing about it, warns UC Berkeley Economist J. Bradford DeLong.
“So unless something — and it will need to be something major — returns the U.S. to its pre-2008 growth trajectory, future economic historians will not regard the Great Depression as the worst business-cycle disaster of the industrial age,” he writes. “It is we who are living in their worst case.”
The former Clinton administration official wonders why a disaster that “robs the average American family of four of $36,000 per year in useful goods and services, and that threatens to keep Americans poorer than they might have been for decades,” isn’t motivating policymakers to act.
“One would think that America’s leaders would be clambering to formulate policies aimed at returning the economy to its pre-2008 growth path: putting people back to work, cleaning up underwater mortgages, restoring financial markets’ risk-bearing capacity, and boosting investment,” he says.
Instead, Congress is debating about how much our investments should be reduced, how few weeks we should help the unemployed, how much food stamps should be cut.
The reason why we aren’t acting is clear to DeLong: “…at the top, there is no crisis.” While the incomes of the bottom 90 percent have stagnated for decades, the top has flourished. “The incomes of America’s top 10 percent are two-thirds higher than those of their counterparts 20 years ago, while the incomes of the top 1 percent have more than doubled,” he writes.
This inequality isn’t an accident of history or the result of rapid technological advancement, as conservatives like to pretend.
It’s the result of the class war the right has been waging for decades.
“Among developed countries, the U.S. does have the most unequal distribution of disposable income after taxes and transfer payments,” writes economist Laura Tyson, former chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers.
Our tax system is more progressive than most European countries that rely on a value-added tax but we spend far less on programs that help families and keep inequality low.
This is the victory of a conservative movement that caters to the richest Americans and seems to have no problem with a recovery that is only benefiting the richest 10 percent. Actually, it seeks to maintain the advantage for the richest by opposing policies like Medicaid expansion and assailing the labor movement.
The Republican Party doesn’t even feel the need to bother with solutions to problems that plague the lower 90 percent, like unemployment, says New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait.
“Republican thought on mass unemployment is a restaurant with tiny portions that taste terrible,” he writes.
The problem for the left is that Republicans can run and win on policies that directly increase income inequality. They can resist Democratic initiatives — even wildly popular ideas like raising the minimum wage, which would reduce poverty and increase consumer spending — and still be on track to hold the House of Representatives, while possibly even wining the Senate.
Why doesn’t the Republican Party act to reverse the greatest economic disaster in at least half a century, a disaster they could prevent?
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) can reveal his secret passion for alleviating poverty over and over again while promoting policies that increase it. And still be taken seriously.
Republicans don’t care about improving the economy for the bottom 90 percent for one simple reason.
They don’t have to.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, January 1, 2014
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