“Entitlements For Me And Mine”: The GOP Wants To Cut The Social Safety Net — But Only For Young And Poor People
Newly minted 2016 presidential candidate Mike Huckabee is selling himself to older Republicans as the guy who will keep Washington’s grasping hands off their government-provided Medicare and Social Security. In his recent announcement speech, the former Fox News host and ex-governor of Arkansas attacked rivals who “propose that to save the safety nets like Medicare and Social Security, we ought to chop off the payments for the people who have faithfully had their paychecks and pockets picked by the politicians.” For that and similar statements, Huckabee’s candidacy is being portrayed as some radical departure from GOP economic orthodoxy and, as The New York Times put it, is supposedly “exposing growing fault lines in the party over an issue that has long been considered a political third rail.”
Not so much, actually. Huckabee’s do-(almost)-nothing stance on entitlement reform reflects the GOP consensus. He’s just more explicit about it than most. It’s really only potential 2016er Chris Christie — with his call for cutting retirement pay for wealthier seniors — who seems to be the odd man out.
There was a time, of course, when Republicans were pushing hard to fix the fiscal problems of Medicare and Social Security. Rep. Paul Ryan’s 2010 “Roadmap for America’s Future” probably marked Peak Reform. That budget blueprint called for allowing pre-retirement workers to divert part of their payroll taxes into private retirement accounts and to receive vouchers to buy private health insurance when they finally called it quits. Such sweeping changes were needed, Ryan and other Republicans argued, to prevent these programs from “bankrupting” America.
But by the 2012 presidential election, Republicans were backtracking from those big ideas. In his convention speech, GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney attacked President Obama for wanting to cut future Medicare spending. Vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan explained how important Medicare was for his grandmother with Alzheimer’s. Social Security wasn’t mentioned by name at all. Likewise, the Ryan budgets stopped calling for specific Social Security reforms.
Things went even further in the 2014 midterms, when GOP groups ran ads against some Democratic candidates accusing them of wanting to cut Social Security benefits and raise the retirement age. And today, the new Republican House-Senate budget drops the “premium support” Medicare reform that had been a staple of the Ryan budgets, although it does include some $400 billion in unspecified, 10-year Medicare savings also requested by Obama.
So what happened? The long-term federal financial picture hasn’t miraculously turned around since 2010. The Congressional Budget Office projects that federal spending on Medicare and Social Security over the next 25 years will rise by roughly three percentage points of GDP, from 8 percent to 11 percent. The debt deluge that prompted calls for radical reform is still on its way. What has changed is that Republicans are wising up to just how much they depend on older voters. Those 65 and over gave 56 percent of their votes to Romney in 2012 and were critical to congressional victories in 2010 and 2012.
Another big change since 2010: ObamaCare. The passage of the the president’s Affordable Care Act — opposed by older, tea party Republicans — has affected how GOP politicians view and talk about the safety net. They now clearly differentiate between “earned” entitlement benefits such as Medicare and Social Security and “unearned” welfare benefits such as ObamaCare subsidies, Medicaid, and food stamps. As Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins accurately predicted back in 2013, “The new ‘conservative’ position will be to defend Social Security and Medicare, those middle-class rewards for a life of hard work and tax-paying, against Mr. Obama’s vast expansion of the means-tested welfare state for working-age Americans.” Republican voters get the “good” entitlements, Democratic voters the “bad,” dependency-creating ones.
Huckabee clearly intends seniors to be the rock upon which he builds his candidacy. In the “Seniors” section of his campaign website, he promises to fight for the “earned benefits” of Social Security and Medicare — perhaps forgetting that a typical middle-class, one-earner couple retiring in 2030 will receive $1.3 million in lifetime Medicare and Social Security benefits, having paid in just under $500,000. Huckabee then attacks ObamaCare as a welfare program that diverts $700 billion from Medicare and fosters “government dependency.” Entitlements for me and mine but not for thee and thine.
The politics of this strategy are debatable. (Though it surely doesn’t help attract younger voters!) But regardless, it makes for simply awful public policy. Future safety net spending increases on older Americans need to be reduced. Republicans should continue the earlier work of Ryan in building the case for those changes. Moreover, more of what is spent will need to shift to lower-income Americans. At the same time, some kinds of safety net spending for the poor will need to be increased, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit. And turning Medicaid into a program that uses tax credits to buy private insurance, as some on the right want to do, would also likely cost more money.
If today’s GOP-leaning seniors want their grandkids to grow up in an America that can better take care of the truly needy — young and old — and pay its bills, they’ll reject Huckabee’s selfish populism.
By: James Pethokoulis, The Week, May 8, 2015
“Speaking The Truth”: Michelle Obama Is Accused Of “Playing The Race Card.” Let’s Check It Out
One of the conservative’s favorite tools for blaming racial polarization on the current occupants of the White House is to accuse them of “playing the race card.” It happens every time one of them mentions racism as a factor in our country.
Usually the signal to noise ratio around such remarks by the President is so loud, it is difficult to unpack it all with much clarity. But recently some right wing publications accused First Lady Michelle Obama of “playing the race card” in her remarks at the opening of the Whitney Museum. It was a fairly quiet event, so let’s take a look and see what we can learn about how this kind of thing happens.
Here’s the quote from the First Lady’s remarks that they zero in on:
You see, there are so many kids in this country who look at places like museums and concert halls and other cultural centers and they think to themselves, well, that’s not a place for me, for someone who looks like me, for someone who comes from my neighborhood. In fact, I guarantee you that right now, there are kids living less than a mile from here who would never in a million years dream that they would be welcome in this museum.
And growing up on the South Side of Chicago, I was one of those kids myself. So I know that feeling of not belonging in a place like this. And today, as first lady, I know how that feeling limits the horizons of far too many of our young people.
That’s it. According to these folks, that’s “playing the race card.” It boggles the mind, doesn’t it? If anyone had any doubts that First Lady Michelle was speaking the truth, all you’d have to do is visit a local museum and count the number of young people (much less young people of color) who are there.
We know that many of the people who read the site I linked to up above will simply see what they wrote and buy that Michelle Obama is trying to stir up racial discord. That’s because it confirms what they already believe about her.
But of course, that’s not all she said. It turns out that the Whitney Museum’s current exhibit is titled, America Is Hard to See. Here’s how it’s described on their web site:
The title, America Is Hard to See, comes from a poem by Robert Frost and a political documentary by Emile de Antonio. Metaphorically, the title seeks to celebrate the ever-changing perspectives of artists and their capacity to develop visual forms that respond to the culture of the United States. It also underscores the difficulty of neatly defining the country’s ethos and inhabitants, a challenge that lies at the heart of the Museum’s commitment to and continually evolving understanding of American art.
As it turns out, Michelle was reacting to the fact that the current exhibit explores our complex cultural roots in this country. The museum is making a concerted effort to reach out to young people from all backgrounds to engage them in answering the question: “How can we truly, fully witness the melting pot of cultures and sensibilities and struggles that make America unlike any other country on earth?” That is the context for the remarks quoted above.
It’s also important to know what the First Lady said next.
You’re telling them [young people] that their story is part of the American story, and that they deserve to be seen. And you’re sending that message not just with the art you display, but with the educational programming you run here. You’re reaching out to kids from all backgrounds, exposing them to the arts, showing them that they have something to contribute.
What was a message from both the Whitney Museum and our First Lady about healing and reconciliation becomes twisted by these people into something ugly and divisive. That their anger and fear are so constraining that they miss out on the beauty of what is happening is actually rather sad.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, May 10, 2015
“Why Freddie Gray Never Had A Chance”: Lead Poisoning Is Killing Inner-City Baltimore
Whenever something like the death of Freddie Gray happens, we usually get around, by the third or fourth day, to the broader poverty discussion. This debate usually boils down to the Great Society programs. Liberals say they worked, and what we need are more of them. Conservatives say they failed and the real answer is found in a sterner moral code.
Between the two, I unsurprisingly endorse the liberal view above (although I don’t think the conservatives have been 100 percent wrong, more on which later). But there’s a more constructive way to talk about poverty than to fight over 50-year-old programs; it’s to use a tragedy like this not just to defend old policies but to promote new ways of understanding poverty and the anti-social behavior that helps keep so many people trapped in it. And Gray’s sad case is a prime example.
Freddie Gray grew up with lead poisoning. A great piece in The Washington Post last week laid out the whole history, Gray’s personally and that of West Baltimore generally. Gray lived in a home where lead paint peeled off the walls.
Now certainly he had other problems—he was born prematurely to a mother who may have been using heroin while pregnant, and he spent the first few months of his life in a hospital. But even at that young age, he was tested for lead, and the tests found unusually high levels in his blood. At one point his family sued a landlord and won an undisclosed settlement. And all over West Baltimore, there were thousands of kids like him, breathing lead paint fumes, swallowing the little chips that got stuck under their fingernails, and so on.
And what did this do to him? Obviously we don’t exactly know in his case. But we’ve known for a long time that lead makes children sick and impairs mental functions. An expert is quoted in that Post piece makes this rather eye-popping assertion—no doubt exaggerating somewhat, but driving home the basic point: “All these kids that grew up in those houses, they all have ADHD.” Also, read this 2013 New York Review of Books piece by Helen Epstein, uncannily prescient today, with its emphasis on Baltimore.
But it’s not just about learning disorders. More recently, research has gone beyond that realm and has been starting to make more direct links between childhood lead poisoning and social dysfunction of the sort Gray exhibited, and even a tendency toward violence and crime.
Kevin Drum of Mother Jones has done a lot of interesting writing on this link in recent years. Research results even have people wondering, as this BBC article notes, whether removing the lead from “petrol” (car gasoline) has been the main reason crime has gone down in the last two decades. The BBC report notes that crime rose and rose across many advanced nations throughout the 20th century, until:
Then, about 20 years ago, the trend reversed—and all the broad measures of key crimes have been falling ever since.
Offending has fallen in nations whose governments have implemented completely different policies to their neighbors.
If your nation locks up more criminals than the average, crime has fallen. If it locks up fewer… crime has fallen. Nobody seems to know for sure why.
But there are some people that believe the removal of lead from petrol was a key factor.
Laugh if you want. The kinds of people who like to laugh at such things once laughed at studies warning about DDT, tobacco, refined sugar, and a hundred other malefactions.
Now let’s bring our Congress into focus. Since the passage of a big lead-reduction law in 1992, Congress has appropriated moneys to the goal of abating lead paint in buildings across the country. Predictably enough, we’ve been pretty successful in neighborhoods that are middle class and up, but not so successful in poor neighborhoods.
Congress has typically funded the lead-abatement program, run by the Centers for Disease Control, inadequately. But in 2011-2012, Congress quadrupled down on inadequate: It cut the funding for the program from $29 million to $2 million. That’s not a typo. This was a result of the sequestration targets imposed on the federal budget, largely forced on us by the Tea Partiers. By last year, cooler heads prevailed and the program got back up to $15 million. But that’s still half what it was when it was merely inadequate. As a result, cities all over the country have had to cut back. Chicago, which got $1.2 million from the feds in 2010, received $347,000 last year.
The one thing I’ll say for conservatism with respect to the poverty debate, and the crime debate, is to remind us that on some level, individuals are responsible for their own actions. If we don’t accept and impose this standard, we have moral chaos. (Of course, we ought to be imposing it on bankers, too.) Social pathologies can explain anti-social behavior but can’t excuse it. We can agree to that, although we can however do without the obnoxious right-wing preaching at poor people that cascades out of certain word processors at times like these.
But no poor person, whether his character is closer to that of Mohandas Gandhi or Charles Manson, can control how much lead is in the paint of the walls of the crappy apartment that he can afford and where he’s trying to raise his little children. Conservatives like to tell us poor people need to make better choices, but how much lead his children breathe in or swallow has nothing to do with any choices he made. It has to do with choices made by others, from his landlord on up to appropriators in Congress.
And what if, 15 or 20 years from now, the science is crystal clear on the connection between lead exposure and the kinds of problems Freddie Gray had? I’ll tell you exactly what. Liberals will say: The scientific verdict is in. Let’s do what we have to do here once and for all.
But conservatives will stand athwart history yelling stop as they always do—the moral scolds will blame single parents, and the ones who just don’t want their tax money spent on the moocher class will whistle up outfits like the Competitive Enterprise Institute to produce alternative “studies” questioning what actual science knows to be obvious, and we will be stalemated. And that will be another “choice” that people poor didn’t make that will help consign their children to society’s margins.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, May 5, 2015
“Race, Class And Neglect”: Baltimore, And America, Don’t Have To Be As Unjust As They Are
Every time you’re tempted to say that America is moving forward on race — that prejudice is no longer as important as it used to be — along comes an atrocity to puncture your complacency. Almost everyone realizes, I hope, that the Freddie Gray affair wasn’t an isolated incident, that it’s unique only to the extent that for once there seems to be a real possibility that justice may be done.
And the riots in Baltimore, destructive as they are, have served at least one useful purpose: drawing attention to the grotesque inequalities that poison the lives of too many Americans.
Yet I do worry that the centrality of race and racism to this particular story may convey the false impression that debilitating poverty and alienation from society are uniquely black experiences. In fact, much though by no means all of the horror one sees in Baltimore and many other places is really about class, about the devastating effects of extreme and rising inequality.
Take, for example, issues of health and mortality. Many people have pointed out that there are a number of black neighborhoods in Baltimore where life expectancy compares unfavorably with impoverished Third World nations. But what’s really striking on a national basis is the way class disparities in death rates have been soaring even among whites.
Most notably, mortality among white women has increased sharply since the 1990s, with the rise surely concentrated among the poor and poorly educated; life expectancy among less educated whites has been falling at rates reminiscent of the collapse of life expectancy in post-Communist Russia.
And yes, these excess deaths are the result of inequality and lack of opportunity, even in those cases where their direct cause lies in self-destructive behavior. Overuse of prescription drugs, smoking, and obesity account for a lot of early deaths, but there’s a reason such behaviors are so widespread, and that reason has to do with an economy that leaves tens of millions behind.
It has been disheartening to see some commentators still writing as if poverty were simply a matter of values, as if the poor just mysteriously make bad choices and all would be well if they adopted middle-class values. Maybe, just maybe, that was a sustainable argument four decades ago, but at this point it should be obvious that middle-class values only flourish in an economy that offers middle-class jobs.
The great sociologist William Julius Wilson argued long ago that widely-decried social changes among blacks, like the decline of traditional families, were actually caused by the disappearance of well-paying jobs in inner cities. His argument contained an implicit prediction: if other racial groups were to face a similar loss of job opportunity, their behavior would change in similar ways.
And so it has proved. Lagging wages — actually declining in real terms for half of working men — and work instability have been followed by sharp declines in marriage, rising births out of wedlock, and more.
As Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution writes: “Blacks have faced, and will continue to face, unique challenges. But when we look for the reasons why less skilled blacks are failing to marry and join the middle class, it is largely for the same reasons that marriage and a middle-class lifestyle is eluding a growing number of whites as well.”
So it is, as I said, disheartening still to see commentators suggesting that the poor are causing their own poverty, and could easily escape if only they acted like members of the upper middle class.
And it’s also disheartening to see commentators still purveying another debunked myth, that we’ve spent vast sums fighting poverty to no avail (because of values, you see.)
In reality, federal spending on means-tested programs other than Medicaid has fluctuated between 1 and 2 percent of G.D.P. for decades, going up in recessions and down in recoveries. That’s not a lot of money — it’s far less than other advanced countries spend — and not all of it goes to families below the poverty line.
Despite this, measures that correct well-known flaws in the statistics show that we have made some real progress against poverty. And we would make a lot more progress if we were even a fraction as generous toward the needy as we imagine ourselves to be.
The point is that there is no excuse for fatalism as we contemplate the evils of poverty in America. Shrugging your shoulders as you attribute it all to values is an act of malign neglect. The poor don’t need lectures on morality, they need more resources — which we can afford to provide — and better economic opportunities, which we can also afford to provide through everything from training and subsidies to higher minimum wages. Baltimore, and America, don’t have to be as unjust as they are.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, May 4, 2015
“Asking For A Bail Out Of His Self-Made Crisis”: Cut Taxes Or Expand Medicaid?; Florida Governor Rick Scott Is In Quite A Pickle
The Florida state government has been a hotbed of opposition to Obamacare, and has succeeded in resisting the law’s Medicaid expansion, in large part because of the state’s Low Income Pool: a multi-billion dollar, 10-year-old pilot program through which, right now, the federal government subsidizes health care providers who treat the poor.
Also right now, in Florida, Governor Rick Scott wants to enact hundreds of millions of dollars in annual tax cuts.
The budget room for those tax cuts, in other words, exists because the federal government is spending money—money that comes with no guarantee—in a way that bolsters Florida’s resistance to Obamacare.
Not keen on financing opposition to itself, the Obama administration is leaning toward ending this sweet arrangement, and phasing out the Low Income Pool, which has in any case grown obsolete in a world where Florida can adopt the Medicaid expansion and provide insurance to nearly a million of its poor citizens.
All of which is to say that if Scott and Florida Republicans want their tax cuts, they will have to use expanded Medicaid to fill the budget hole where the Low Income Pool used to be. But rather than push against that open door, Scott announced Thursday that he will sue the federal government. Specifically, he’s arguing that by rescinding the Low Income Pool, the Obama administration is coercing Florida into participating in Obamacare, so the Low Income Pool must continue. Put another way, he’s asking the courts to force the feds to bail out his tax cut.
This is all playing out against the backdrop of King v. Burwell, in which conservatives have asked the Supreme Court to rescind billions of dollars in Affordable Care Act subsidies in their own states—money they claim is contingent upon them establishing their own exchanges. Like most Republican governors, Rick Scott didn’t establish an exchange, but for some reason he isn’t sounding the coercion alarm over King.
Scott’s argument is transparently frivolous, but it underscores the extent to which the GOP’s deranged resistance to Obamacare is boomeranging on itself. As Greg Sargent notes at the Washington Post, “Scott’s lawsuit is designed to get the administration to fork over federal money for health care—but only if it isn’t part of Obamacare.” Without that money, Scott probably won’t get his tax cuts. Which means that in Florida, the GOP’s commitment to tax cuts is running up against its Massive Resistance to Obamacare. And the tax cuts might lose.
This adamant opposition to the Medicaid expansion is a relatively recent development. Scott claims his opposition stems from the administration’s coolness to the Low Income Pool. If the federal government can just end that program, how can Floridians trust them to commit to their end of the Medicaid expansion? But that doesn’t wash. The Low Income Pool was scheduled to expire, whereas the federal government is obligated by law to fund 90 percent of the Medicaid expansion in perpetuity.
Florida’s Senate president—a Republican—thinks Scott is being ridiculous. He released a statement that refutes Scott’s objection to the Medicaid expansion and undermines the lawsuit:
The federal government has no obligation to provide LIP funding, or to work within our timeframe. While we respect Governor Scott’s authority to protect the state’s interests in the way he sees fit, we have a constitutional responsibility to pass a balanced budget by a specific deadline. From where I sit, it is difficult to understand how suing [the federal government] on day 45 of a 60 day session regarding an issue the state has been aware of for the last 12 months will yield a timely resolution to the critical health care challenges facing our state. The Senate budget anticipated the potential reduction or elimination of LIP funding and included solutions to provide Floridians access to health care services and coverage. We remain hopeful CMS will approve the Senate proposal.
A likelier explanation for Scott’s change of heart is a combination of anti-Medicaid spending by the Koch-backed advocacy group Americans for Prosperity, and entrenched Obamacare opposition in the Florida House. Sensing that the Medicaid expansion might be in danger, Scott flipped, rather than be caught on the losing side of it.
But Scott could have solved this problem a long time ago if he’d ever fought for Medicaid expansion earnestly, and could solve it now by teaming up with the Senate to stare down the House.
Instead Scott is suing the federal government to bail him out of a self-made crisis. This isn’t an anomaly, but a pattern. Across the country, Republican governors are coping with the consequences of their own Obamacare intransigence—staring into a future where their insurance markets get destroyed by virtue of their refusal to help implement Obamacare and their unwillingness to take on the right as it pursued litigation.
It was inevitable that as Obamacare became more entrenched, Republicans would see their opposition to the law come into tension with their other core interests. This is exactly what’s happened, and to some extent it has exposed weaknesses in the resistance strategy. But that resistance—to the idea of providing health insurance to the poor—remains very strong. Stronger, perhaps, than the allure of tax cuts.
By: Brian Beutler, The New Republic, April 17, 2017
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