“Maine, The Way Life Should Not Be”: Senate Candidate Has Been “Jailed Repeatedly”
The last few election cycles have offered campaign watchers quite a motley crew of far-right Senate candidates. The cast of characters – Angle, Mourdock, Akin, Buck, O’Donnell, et al – doesn’t include any winners, but it does feature some candidates who are tough to forget.
Will the 2014 cycle offer similarly memorable conservatives? It’s too soon to say, though Erick Bennett, who’s taking on Sen. Susan Collins in a Republican primary in Maine, appears well worth watching. Amanda Marcotte explained why.
Bennett was convicted of domestic violence in 2003 after attacking his wife, who has since divorced him. While this sort of thing traditionally turns voters off, Bennett is employing an unusual strategy by wielding his conviction as evidence that you should vote for him in Maine’s Republican primary.
“The fact that I have been jailed repeatedly for not agreeing to admit to something I didn’t do should speak to the fact of how much guts and integrity I have,” he exclaimed to the press, trying to convince them that his lying ex-wife set him up for reasons unknown. “If I go to D.C., I’m going to have that same integrity in doing what I say, and saying what I do, when it comes to protecting people’s rights, as well as their pocketbooks.”
According to a report in the Bangor Daily News, Bennett also told reporters this week that his domestic-violence conviction has helped encourage him to pursue a “pro-family” agenda.
I’ve met many campaign aides over the years who’ve boasted that just about anything in a candidate’s background is survivable with the right spin. But this Republican Senate candidate appears to be testing the limits of this thesis.
When was the last time anyone saw a credible statewide candidate argue that being “jailed repeatedly” is proof of his “integrity”?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 3, 2014
“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 Scourge Of The Wingnut Hole”: Coverage Totals Would Be Far Greater If Not For “Red” States Refusing Medicaid Expansion
We have a reasonably good sense of how many Americans have enrolled in the health care system in recent months, signing up for coverage made available through the Affordable Care Act. For a more ambitious tally, Josh Marshall includes exchanges, Medicaid, young adults staying on their family plans, and those who were able to bypass exchanges to buy ACA-compliant policies directly from insurance carriers, for a grand total of about 10 million.
But every time these numbers are culled, it’s worth remembering that the coverage totals would be far greater were it not for “red” states refusing to accept Medicaid expansion.
The original plan, you’ll recall, was to simply mandate the greater access. The U.S. Supreme Court, however, said states must have a choice as to whether or not to accept the good deal. Most Republican-led states, naturally, rejected the policy, leaving millions behind for no particular reason.
But how many million? The Associated Press published a report this week with a striking figure.
About 5 million people will be without health care next year that they would have gotten simply if they lived somewhere else in America.
They make up a coverage gap in President Barack Obama’s signature health care law created by the domino effects of last year’s Supreme Court ruling and states’ subsequent policy decisions.
This coverage gap clearly needs a name. Ed Kilgore started calling it the “wingnut hole” months ago, and it’s certainly a descriptive phrase. Ryan Cooper added the other day:
It’s worth remembering that the federal government will pay 100 percent of the cost of the Medicaid expansion through 2016 and 90 percent of the cost afterward. It could very well work out that refusenik states will not even save money because of additional spending on the uninsured in emergency rooms and elsewhere.
But regardless of the pitiful sums involved, make no mistake: This action is utterly gratuitous.
Quite right. In fact, as we’ve discussed many times, Republicans at the state level who refuse Medicaid expansion generally struggle to explain their position in any kind of coherent way.
What’s more, let’s not forget the irony of the larger context: congressional Republicans spent most of their waking hours complaining about a sliver of the population receiving “cancellation notices” through the Affordable Care Act because of changes to the individual market. Indeed, GOP officials routinely claim this will leave 5 million Americans behind with nothing (a total that appears to have been exaggerated by a factor of 500).
And yet, if their concern were genuine, wouldn’t Republicans necessarily be outraged by these 5 million Americans who are suffering because some red-state policymakers are acting out of petty partisan spite?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 3, 2014
“An Intellectual Hollowness”: Why Republicans Have No Ideas About Mass Unemployment
Last Saturday, the extension of unemployment benefits originally passed at the outset of the economic crisis expired. The position of Democrats in Washington, backed by a growing mountain of economic research, is that macroeconomic and humanitarian considerations alike both argue for an extension of unemployment benefits.
The position of Republicans in Washington is rather strange — less a moral or economic argument than an expression of indifference. “These have been extraordinary extensions, and the Republican position all along has been ‘we need to go back to normal here at some point,'” argues Representative Tom Cole. “[W]hat we did was never intended to be permanent. It was intended to be a very temporary solution to a very temporary crisis,” echoes Representative Rob Woodall. Of course nobody intended for the crisis of mass unemployment to last five years. Nobody intended for the crisis to happen at all. It is simply weird to argue that, since the problem has gone on longer than intended, the response to the problem must end as well. The fire trucks don’t shut off the hoses simply because the fire should have been put out by now.
Yet the weirdness, far from being random, reveals something deeper at work. The most obvious thing, of course, is a general lack of concern for the fate of the unemployed — or, at least, a casual assumption that the unemployed themselves must be to blame for their plight. But even a more generous reading of the Republican position, taking its most serious defenses at face value, reveals an intellectual hollowness. Half a decade into the economic crisis, the Republican Party has no serious ideas about the Great Recession.
One of the few Republicans to directly defend his party’s refusal to extend unemployment benefits is Rand Paul. Unfortunately, as is so often the case, Paul’s ideas about unemployment insurance are cracked. Paul has repeatedly cited studies that show that employers discriminate against job candidates who have been out of work a long time. Paul simply assumes that people are staying unemployed so they can continue collecting unemployment benefits. But the economics paper Paul cites, according to the economist who wrote it, suggests the opposite of his conclusion.
Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal editorial page gamely defends the Republican stance:
The Administration claims that every $1 of jobless benefits creates $1.80 in economic growth, based on the notorious “multiplier” in Keynesian economic models. This is the theory that you can increase employment by paying more people not to work, and that you can take money out of the private economy by taxes or borrowing without cost.
The argument here is that there’s a “cost” to “taking money out of the economy” to pay for unemployment benefits. What is that cost? Well, in normal conditions, higher deficit spending will cause interest rates to rise. But these are not normal conditions. Interests rates are as low as they can be. The zero bound is the policy dilemma of the moment. The Journal editorial page has been warning for years that rising interest rates are on their way, or already occurring. The utter failure of these predictions has not even slightly dented its jaunty confidence.
It is true that some research has shown that cutting off unemployment benefits can force the unemployed to search more aggressively (or desperately) for work — say, an out-of-work machinist might take a job for lower wages at the 7-11. But those studies all take place in the context of a normal economic cycle, not the mass unemployment we see today. The conditions of mass unemployment from the Great Recession dictate that cutting off benefits from the unemployed simply immiserates them because there are no jobs.
Republicans in North Carolina proactively demonstrated their party’s stance by cutting off benefits to the unemployed before it was tried elsewhere in the nation. The result was dismal: The state’s labor force is shrinking. Rather than getting jobs, the unemployed have simply stopped looking for them, because they don’t exist.
Sharp conservative ideas about the recession can be found on the margins of the political debate. (See, for instance, Michael Strain in the Weekly Standard.) It’s certainly possible to reconcile conservative doctrine about the size of government with specific plans to address mass unemployment. But Republicans in Congress have not bothered to adopt any of these alternative proposals. Nor have conservatives in general displayed much of an interest in the topic of unemployment benefits. There’s an asymmetry of partisan interest on the subject somewhat akin to Benghazi, which obsesses the right and bores the left. Republican thought on mass unemployment is a restaurant with tiny portions that taste terrible.
This is not to say that the GOP lacks any ideas about economic policy. Both parties have fairly well-defined ideas about the general role of taxes, spending, and regulation. The difference is that the Democratic Party also has a policy agenda that is specifically related to the special conditions of high unemployment and low interest rates. The Republicans are still merely asserting that their normal agenda applies just as well now as ever. The unique, dire conditions of the Great Recession shouldn’t be expected to undo all the party’s program, or to alter its general long-term ideas. (Democrats have not, and should not, given up their preference for universal health insurance, reduced greenhouse gas emissions, and so on, nor should Republicans have to abandon their preference for the opposite.) What they lack is any legislative response to the economic crisis. They just want to get back to normal, and since normality has not arrived, they’d just as soon pretend it has.
By: Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine, December 31, 2013
“Bad News For The Jobless And America”: How Our Economy Lost $400 Million In One Week Alone
Long-term unemployment benefits expired on December 28, meaning an absence of checks this week for more than 1 million jobless Americans. That’s bad news for them, of course—but also the rest of us. According to a new analysis from the minority staff of the House Ways and Means Committee released Friday, $400 million was drained from state economies this week alone thanks to the lapse.
Unemployment benefits are one of the more effective forms of stimulus because the money is badly needed and thus spent right away. The Congressional Budget Office says 200,000 jobs will be lost this year if the benefits are not restored, and this week the damage began.
Big states were obviously the hardest hit, naturally: nearly $65 million came out of the California economy in one week alone, according to the analysis. And of course, states represented by Republicans who oppose the extension each suffered some economic harm. Senator John Cornyn twice blocked a vote on an unemployment insurance extension before the holiday recess, and his home state of Texas lost $21.8 million this week.
Yet Republicans, so far, have not expressed any desire to extend the benefits. “Every week that Republicans fail to act tens of thousands of additional long-term unemployed Americans lose this vital lifeline as they look to get back on their feet after the worst recession in generations, and the economy in each state is taking a hit,” said Representative Sander Levin, the ranking member on Ways and Means.
Senator Harry Reid has promised a vote early next week on a bill by Senators Jack Reed and Dean Heller to extend the benefits for three months, with no offsetting spending cut, so that a longer-term bill can be worked out. But Heller is the only known Senate GOP sponsor to date, and House Speaker John Boehner has said he doesn’t want any bill without a pay-for attached.
If that bill fails, Democrats have a couple options this month: an extension of benefits could perhaps be folded into either the farm bill, which is in conference negotiations, or into the several omnibus spending bills that need to be finalized soon. In those latter two cases, Republicans would no doubt extract some sort of price from Democrats for extended benefits, but perhaps a solution is still possible.
But, again, Republicans seem to have other plans. House majority leader Eric Cantor announced Thursday his plans for the new year: yet another vote to modify Obamacare, this time adding new security requirements to the health insurance exchanges. The White House has said there is no danger of breaches, and some observers, like Steve Benen, think Cantor’s bill is simply a ploy to scare people away from the exchanges.
In any case, while Cantor fiddles around with his messaging bill on Obamacare (which will never be signed into law), his home state of Virginia lost $2.8 million in economic activity this week, as 9,700 people lost benefits. That’s going to be hard to justify as time goes on, both for Cantor and his colleagues.
By: George Zornick, The Nation, January 3, 2014
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