“Wage Boost Could Pay Democrats Dividends”: Republicans Blocking An Increase In The Federal Minimum Wage Do So At Their Own Peril
American liberalism and the Democratic Party — two partially overlapping but by no means identical institutions — have set themselves an unusually clear agenda for 2014: reducing economic inequality and boosting workers’ incomes. These are causes they can fight for on multiple fronts.
Raising the minimum wage should offer the course of least resistance. Although congressional Republicans may persist in blocking an increase in the federal minimum wage, they do so at their own peril. Raising the wage is one of the few issues in U.S. politics that commands across-the-board public support. A CBS News poll in November found that even 57 percent of Republicans support such an increase.
Democrats have concluded that they can turn Republican legislators’ opposition to raising the wage into an electoral issue by using state ballot measures. As states are free to set their own minimum-wage standards — though the rates take effect only when they exceed the federal minimum — Democrats are working to put wage-increase initiatives before voters in states that will have contested House and Senate races in 2014, including Arkansas, Alaska, South Dakota and New Mexico. Such ballot measures have proved an effective way to increase turnout of low-income and minority voters, which can translate into more ballots cast for Democratic candidates.
(Although economic libertarians object to the minimum wage on theoretical grounds, a look at the states that have refused to enact minimum-pay statutes suggests that the real opposition to the minimum wage is rooted in something else. Those states are Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee — places where persistent racism and the heritage of slavery seem to me a far more likely cause of opposition to the minimum wage than any ideological infatuation with the works of Ayn Rand.)
Most efforts to raise the minimum wage this year are likely to come in blue states and cities. The recent leftward movement of U.S. cities, symbolized by the landslide election of Bill de Blasio as New York’s mayor, is an underappreciated factor in U.S. politics. Twenty years ago, six of the country’s dozen largest cities had Republican mayors. Today, none do, even when those cities — including Houston, Dallas and Phoenix — are nestled in red states. The transformation of major U.S. cities is rooted in demographics, as immigrants and young professionals — both preponderantly liberal constituencies — have clustered in urban areas.
In some states, cities have the power to raise the minimum wage above the state level. That’s how San Francisco was able to set its wage level above California’s and why Seattle is likely this year to raise its minimum wage well above that in the rest of Washington. New York City lacks that power, though it’s probable that de Blasio will try to persuade legislators in Albany that his city — one of the least affordable on the planet — should be given that freedom.
Whether they can raise their minimum wage or not, the nation’s ever-bluer cities have a range of other options to increase incomes. They could require developers that receive municipal tax breaks or other assistance to pay their employees a living wage above the minimum wage. They could enact paid sick leave or paid family leave requirements. They could reduce the local cost of living by requiring developers of luxury housing to build affordable housing as well.
At the federal level, too, Democrats can do more than battle for a higher minimum wage. They could call for an increase to the earned-income tax credit, an idea much loved by some conservatives (Ronald Reagan especially) that provides a federal supplement to the income of workers who fall below the poverty threshold. They could refuse to vote for the Trans-Pacific Partnership — a trade pact being negotiated with Pacific Rim nations, including such notably low-wage countries as Vietnam — or for the “fast-track” authority that would likely guarantee TPP passage unless the Congressional Budget Office can demonstrate that the measure won’t lower the wages of U.S. workers.
The ongoing efforts of fast-food workers and Wal-Mart employees to win higher pay will continue to remind both the public and legislators that millions of adults earn poverty-level wages in today’s United States. With the near-elimination of collective bargaining from the private sector, it will largely be up to Democrats in Congress, state legislatures and city halls to provide the wage boosts that unions once secured. That would help millions of Americans in their pocketbooks — and some Democratic candidates at the polls.
By: Harold Meyerson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 2, 2014
“The Cruelty Of Unleashed Capitalism”: Rich Catholic Republicans Threaten Pope Francis, Because He Frightens Them
If anyone wonders whether Pope Francis has irritated wealthy conservatives with his courage and idealism, the latest outburst from Kenneth Langone left little doubt. Sounding both aggressive and whiny, the billionaire investor warned that he and his overprivileged friends might withhold their millions from church and charity unless the pontiff stops preaching against the excesses and cruelty of unleashed capitalism.
According to Langone, such criticism from the Holy See could ultimately hurt the sensitive feelings of the rich so badly that they become “incapable of feeling compassion for the poor.” He also said rich donors are already losing their enthusiasm for the restoration of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan – a very specific threat that he mentioned directly to Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York.
Langone is not only a leading fundraiser for church projects but a generous donor to hospitals, universities, and cancer charities (often for programs and buildings named after him, in the style of today’s self-promoting philanthropists). Among the super-rich, he has many friends and associates who may share his excitable temperament.
While his ultimatum seems senseless – would a person of true faith stiff the church and the poor? – it may well be sincere. And Langone spends freely to promote his political and economic views, in the company of the Koch brothers and other Republican plutocrats.
Still, a Pope brave enough to face down the Mafia over his financial reform of the murky Vatican Bank shouldn’t be much fazed by the likes of Langone.
Yet Langone has reason to worry that the Holy Father is in fact asking hard questions about people like him. Indeed, he could serve as a living symbol of the gross and growing economic inequality that disfigures the American system and threatens democracy.
As a leader of the New York Stock Exchange, he was largely responsible for the scandalous overpayment of his friend Richard Grasso, the exchange president who received nearly $190 million in deferred compensation when he stepped down. Although New York’s highest court eventually upheld Grasso’s pay package, it was a perfect example of the unaccountable, self-serving greed of Wall Street’s elite.
Anything but repentant following the revelation and repudiation of the Grasso deal by NYSE executives, Langone told Forbes magazine in 2004: “They got the wrong f—ing guy. I’m nuts, I’m rich, and boy, do I love a fight. I’m going to make them sh-t in their pants. When I get through with these f—ing captains of industry, they’re going to wish they were in a Cuisinart—at high speed.”
He embarked on a furious vendetta against Eliot Spitzer, who had fought to recapture Grasso’s millions as New York attorney general. And when Spitzer was forced to resign as governor in the wake of a prostitution scandal, Langone’s public gloating seemed to indicate that he had played a personal role in exposing his enemy’s indiscretions. He particularly hated Spitzer for attempting to punish and curtail the worst misconduct in the financial industry.
While Langone passionately defended the outlandish grasping of the super-rich like his friend Grasso, however, he has displayed far less indulgence toward workers, especially those struggling to support their families on poverty wages. Until just last year, he was a director of Yum! Brands, the global fast-food conglomerate that includes Taco Bell and Kentucky Fried Chicken among its holdings – and that spends millions annually to hold down the minimum wage and prevent unionization of its ill-paid employees and farmworkers.
What all this adds up to is hundreds of millions of dollars in questionable compensation for financial cronies, but not a dime more for low-income workers. It is exactly the kind of skewed outcome that the Pope means when he speaks about today’s capitalists, “the powerful feeding upon the powerless,” and the need for renewed state regulation to bring their burgeoning tyranny under control. He is talking about Langone, the Kochs, and an entire gang of right-wing financiers.
“How I would love a church that is poor and for the poor,” Francis said not long after his election to the papacy. That could be what he gets – and that might not be so bad, for the poor and for all of us, Catholic or not, who love justice.
By: Joe Conason, Featured Post, The National Memo, January 3, 2014
“Listening To The Founding Fathers”: Constitutionalism With An Anti-Government Ideology Is Historically And Philosophically Mistaken
A political backlash has commenced within the Republican Party against tea party and libertarian groups that have limited interest in securing Republican victories and majorities. Elected leaders, party officials and business groups have begun pushing back against self-destructive legislative strategies and unelectable primary candidates.
But the GOP’s political reaction often concedes a great deal of ideological ground to anti-government populism — what its advocates describe as “constitutionalism.” Our national recovery, in this view, depends on returning to the severely constrained governing vision of the Founding Fathers, as embodied in the Constitution. Many Republicans now seem to be saying: Yes, this is the conservative ideal, but it is just not practical to implement at the moment.
This cedes too much. In a new essay in National Affairs, “A Conservative Vision of Government,” Pete Wehner and I argue that the identification of constitutionalism with an anti-government ideology is not only politically toxic; it is historically and philosophically mistaken.
It is not enough to praise America’s Founders; it is necessary to listen to them. The Federalist Founders did not view government as a necessary evil. They referred to the “imbecility” of a weak federal government (in the form of the Articles of Confederation) compared to a relatively strong central government, which is what the Constitution actually created. Though they feared the concentration of too much power in one branch of government, they believed that good government was essential to promote what they called the “public good.”
And they assumed that the content of the public good would shift over time. “Constitutions of civil government,” argued Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 34, “are not to be framed upon a calculation of existing exigencies, but upon a combination of these with the probable exigencies of ages. . . . Nothing, therefore, can be more fallacious than to infer the extent of any power, proper to be lodged in the national government, from an estimate of its immediate necessities. There ought to be a CAPACITY to provide for future contingencies as they may happen.”
In the tradition of the Federalist Founders, Abraham Lincoln believed the federal government should be capable of adjusting to changing circumstances and active in pursuit of national purposes. In his “Fragment on Government,” Lincoln described a number of matters requiring the “combined action” of government, including “public roads and highways, public schools, charities, pauperism” and “providing for the helpless young and afflicted.”
Conservatives naturally want to be seen as defenders of the Constitution. But “constitutional conservatives” need to recognize what both the Federalist Founders and Lincoln actually envisioned for the republic they respectively created and preserved. Far from being constrained by the political and economic arrangements of an 18th-century coastal, agrarian republic, the Founders fully expected the United States to spread across a continent, undergo economic and social change and emerge as a global actor. And they purposely designed a constitutional system that could accommodate such ambitions.
This is not to argue that the Founders would be happy with the current size and role of government. But, after protecting a variety of essential civil liberties, they placed such matters mainly in the realm of democratic self-government. They made it procedurally difficult for majorities to prevail. But they placed few limits on the public policies that durable majorities might adopt in the future — leaving “a capacity to provide for future contingencies.”
In our time, durable majorities have endorsed the existence of Social Security and Medicare. These roles of government were not envisioned by the Founders. But they do not violate a principle of our system nor run counter to the prescient mind-set of the Founders. People are free to argue for and against such programs. But this debate can’t be trumped or short-circuited by simplistic and legalistic appeals to the Constitution as a purely limiting document.
The broad purposes of the modern state — promoting equal opportunity, providing for the poor and elderly — are valid within our constitutional order. But these roles are often carried out in antiquated, failing systems. The conservative challenge is to accept a commitment to the public good while providing a distinctly conservative vision of effective, modest, modern government.
But a shift in mind-set is first required among conservatives: thinking of government as a precious national institution in need of care and reform. This would honor the Founders. The real Founders.
By: Michael Gerson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 2, 2013
“No Defense For Nonsense”: How Not To Argue Against Medicaid Expansion
Medicaid expansion is a sensible move for literally every state, but Mississippi, with more than its share of residents who lack insurance, live near the poverty line, and suffer from poor health, needs the policy more than most. Even Mississippi’s insurance commissioner, a conservative Republican, has urged Gov. Phil Bryant (R) to put aside ideology and embrace the provisions of “Obamacare” for the good of the state.
But Bryant has refused. Last March, the governor said he wouldn’t accept Medicaid expansion in part because the Affordable Care Act is not “the law of the land.” By any standard, the argument was gibberish.
This week, the Republican governor came up with a new argument.
“For us to enter into an expansion program would be a fool’s errand. I mean, here we would be saying to 300,000 Mississippians, ‘We’re going to provide Medicaid coverage to you,’ and then the federal government through Congress or through the Senate, would do away with or alter the Affordable Care Act, and then we have no way to pay that. We have no way to continue the coverage.”
Let’s think about this for a minute. There are, by everyone’s estimation, several hundred thousand folks in Mississippi who would benefit from Medicaid expansion. According to Bryant, the state could help them, but he doesn’t want to – because in his mind, Congress might repeal the health care law at some point in the future, and the state wouldn’t be able to afford to pick up the slack.
But even by GOP standards, it’s impossible to take this seriously. For one thing, it’s pretty obvious Congress isn’t going to repeal the law, as even the most right-wing lawmakers on Capitol Hill are grudgingly conceding.
For another, even in the extraordinarily unlikely event that the law is repealed sometime after 2017, Mississippi could simply revert back to its current policy once the federal well runs dry. In other words, Bryant is effectively telling struggling families, “We’ll refuse to help you now because of the remote possibility we may no longer be able to help you later. It’s better to leave you with nothing now and for the foreseeable future than risk helping you and your family for the next several years.”
There is simply no defense for such nonsense.
Postscript: In the same interview, the governor was asked about drug testing, and why it’s limited to welfare recipients, as opposed to corporate leaders whose companies get state tax money and/or public employees like himself.
“If I was receiving any federal or state benefits to help raise my family, I’d be glad to take a drug test,” he replied.
Bryant receives $122,160 a year in taxpayer money as his salary. He also has the people of the state of Mississippi to thank for his health care benefits.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 2, 2014
“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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