“Champion Of The Poor?”: Paul Ryan’s Post-Epiphany Agenda Is Likely To Be Awfully Similar To His Pre-Epiphany Agenda
Just last month, the Washington Post ran a surprisingly uncritical, front-page article on House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), celebrating the congressman for his efforts “fighting poverty and winning minds.” The gist of the piece was that the far-right congressman is entirely sincere about using conservative ideas – both economic and spiritual – to combat poverty.
BuzzFeed’s McKay Coppins is thinking along similar lines.
Until recently, Paul Ryan would have seemed like an improbable pick to lead the restoration of compassionate conservatism with a heartfelt mission to the poor. Of all the caricatures he has inspired – from heroic budget warrior to black-hearted Scrooge – “champion of the poor” has never been among them. And yet, Ryan has spent the past year quietly touring impoverished communities across the country with Woodson, while his staff digs through center-right think tank papers in search of conservative policy proposals aimed at aiding the poor. Next spring, Ryan plans to introduce a new battle plan for the war on poverty – one he hopes will launch a renewed national debate on the issue. […]
[T]hose closest to him say Ryan’s new mission is the result of a genuine spiritual epiphany – sparked, in part, by the prayer in Cleveland, and sustained by the emergence of a new pope who has lit the world on fire with bold indictments of the “culture of prosperity” and a challenge to reach out to the weak and disadvantaged.
Well, if those closest to Paul Ryan think we should see his concern for the poor as heartfelt, who am I to argue?
All kidding aside, I don’t know the congressman personally, and can’t speak to his sincerity. But ultimately, whether or not Ryan had a “genuine spiritual epiphany” doesn’t much matter – either the Wisconsinite has a policy agenda that will make a difference in the lives of those in poverty or he doesn’t.
And at least for now, he doesn’t. Though we have not yet seen the agenda Ryan intends to unveil in the spring, we’ve seen reports that his vision “relies heavily on promoting volunteerism and encouraging work through existing federal programs, including the tax code.” He’s also reportedly focused on “giving poor parents vouchers or tax credits” for private education.
In other words, Ryan’s post-epiphany agenda is likely to be awfully similar to his pre-epiphany agenda.
What’s more, we’ve also seen plenty of other policy measures from the congressman. As we talked about in November, this is the same congressman whose original budget plan was simply brutal towards families in poverty, the same congressman who supports deep cuts to food stamps, the same congressman who wants to scrap Social Security and Medicare; and the same congressman who’s balked at raising the minimum wage and extending federal unemployment benefits.
If Paul Ryan is the new model for the Republican Party’s anti-poverty crusader, struggling families should be terrified.
Jared Bernstein recently said of Ryan, “the emperor in the empty suit has no clothes,” adding:
Ryan Poverty Plan
1. Cut spending on the poor, cut taxes on the wealthy
2. Shred safety net through block granting federal programs
3. Encourage entrepreneurism, sprinkle around some vouchers and tax credits
4. ???
5. Poverty falls
If Ryan is in the midst of a personal transition from Ayn Rand to Scripture, more power to him. But I hope the political establishment, which has always taken the congressman a bit too seriously and accepted his radical vision with far too much credulity, will be duly skeptical as he slaps a fresh coat of paint on his old ideas.
Postscript: Peter Flaherty, a devout Catholic and former Romney adviser, told BuzzFeed, “What Pope Francis is doing is, instead of changing Catholicism, he’s changing the way the world views Catholicism… And I think Paul has the opportunity to do something similar for conservatism.”
Oh my.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, December 20, 2013
“Five Times George W. Bush Extended Unemployment Insurance Benefits”: It’s Just Bad Policy To Refuse To Renew The Extension
In his December 14, 2002 weekly radio address, President George W. Bush reminded Congress that “no final bill was sent to me extending unemployment benefits for about 750,000 Americans whose benefits will expire on December 28th.”
He went on, “These Americans rely on their unemployment benefits to pay for the mortgage or rent, food, and other critical bills. They need our assistance in these difficult times, and we cannot let them down.”
What was the unemployment rate in December 2002?
It had just risen to 6.0 percent.
The unemployment rate today is 7.0 percent and at the end of this year 1.3 million Americans — including 20,000 veterans — who have been out of work for more than six months will have their unemployment insurance benefits cut off. Republicans in Congress have refused to extend these benefits, though the Congressional Budget Office predicts failing to do so will cost the economy 200,000 jobs.
The Republican Congress heeded George W. Bush’s call to extend unemployment insurance as they had the March before. They passed a bill and he signed it.
In 2003, the American economy was still dealing with the residue of the dot-com bust and economic shock of the 9/11 attacks — but it was still considerably stronger than the America that lived through the Great Recession and continues to see its growth hindered by government austerity.
The extended unemployment benefits Congress is about to let expire actually began under George W. Bush, long after his 2003 extension expired as unemployment dipped below 5 percent again. In 2008, as the financial crisis began to rock the economy, President Bush signed an extension of 13 weeks, 39 weeks total in most states, for anyone living in a state with unemployment over 6.0 percent. He also signed unemployment extensions that specifically helped the victims of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina.
All five times Bush extended unemployment benefits, he did so with the majority of Republicans in Congress supporting him.
At the peak of the crisis, when unemployment was around 10 percent, Congress and President Obama extended benefits to 99 weeks. The current maximum is 73 weeks.
A requirement of receiving benefits is seeking a new job, but with an estimated three people out of work for every one job opening, cutting off benefits likely won’t encourage jobseekers — as Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) imagines — but instead doom them to permanent unemployment. And the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) estimates that the 1.3 million who will be cut off in 2014 will soon swell to 5 million.
There are two huge reasons why now is not the time to cut off the long-term unemployed, explains the CBPP’s Brad Stone.
While the unemployment rate has declined, the overall employment rate has not grown as it usually would during a recovery.
Secondly, cutting off benefits now for those who need them most is unprecedented.
“At 2.6 percent, the long-term unemployment rate is at least twice as high as when any of the emergency federal UI programs that policymakers enacted in each of the previous seven major recessions expired,” Stone wrote.
Even conservatives recognize that it’s just bad policy to refuse to renew the extension.
Democrats in Congress have vowed to tie the extension to the passage of the farm bill in order to force Republicans to approve it retroactively. They’re expected to be supported by an organized grassroots effort from the left to force vulnerable congressmembers to encourage the GOP leadership to take up the bill.
But it’s safe to assume that if it were President Bush asking for the extension rather than President Obama, the GOP would be happy to just say yes.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, December 20, 2013
“Clothed In Righteousness”: Who Is Really Waging War On Christmas? Look In The Mirror, Right-Wing Scrooges
Spreading holiday cheer, a Western tradition for hundreds of years, no longer engages our so-called conservatives as the end of the year approaches. In fact, the innocent phrase “Happy Holidays” only serves to infuriate them. The new Yuletide ritual that excites the right is the “War on Christmas” – an annual opportunity to spread religious discord and community conflict, brought to us by those wonderful folks at Fox News.
Once started, wars tend to escalate and intensify — and the War on Christmas is no exception. The same right-wing Christian ideologues enraged by any multicultural or ecumenical celebration of the season — the people trying to transform “Merry Christmas” from a kind greeting into a mantra of hate — are now merrily inflicting additional misery on the nation’s downtrodden.
Just in time for the birthday of baby Jesus, they are cutting food stamps and unemployment benefits. It’s all for the benefit of the poor.
Just ask John Tamny, the Forbes magazine columnist and Fox News personality. During a Dec. 17 appearance on The Daily Show, Tamny endorsed the congressional decision to cut $5 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program by declaring, “If I were in control, I would abolish SNAP altogether. I think food stamps are cruel.” Looking very well fed himself, he explained that if people were “literally starving,” they would be saved by a ”massive outpouring of charity.” That will happen, said Tamny, when “people have literally distended bellies where they’re getting almost nothing.”
He sounded oddly let down when he added, “We don’t hear about the poor in this country starving on the streets.” That probably won’t happen immediately, even with the scheduled cuts, but maybe we can look forward to such Dickensian scenes by next Christmas if Tamny and the Republicans get their wish.
As for the unemployed, food stamps are not the only source of succor that will soon be snatched from them and their Tiny Tims. The Republicans have insisted on a budget that discontinues emergency unemployment benefits beyond 73 weeks, which means that millions of families will soon stop receiving the minuscule payments – usually a few hundred dollars a month – that kept them from destitution.
According to Republican theory, as articulated by Senator Rand Paul, helping jobless workers and their families for longer than the 26 weeks ordinarily provided by most states is just as “cruel” as giving them food stamps. “If you extend it beyond that, you do a disservice to these workers,” the Kentucky Republican said recently. “When you allow people to be on unemployment insurance for 99 weeks, you’re causing them to become part of this perpetual unemployed group in our economy.”
Actually, the absence of work is what causes long-term unemployment – not the presence of unemployment benefits. But in North Carolina, the right-wing state government has applied Paul’s theory by cutting benefits drastically. The result, as Bloomberg’s Evan Soltas has shown, has been to drive more people out of the state’s labor force, which has shrunk sharply, rather than somehow forcing people to find nonexistent jobs. To receive benefits, after all, it is necessary to prove that you’re seeking a job.
Facts are not about to deter statesmen like Paul or philosophers like Tamny. The spirit of this holiday is supposed to stimulate charitable concern for everyone, including the very least among us. What we are seeing instead is a real war on Christmas – not a silly struggle over greeting slogans or public displays, but an aggressive drive to deprive those who have almost nothing of the little we provide as a society.
The true enemies of Christmas – and of Christian hope, as articulated in this season by Pope Francis – are those who pretend to befriend the poor by taking bread from their children’s mouths. Both the mean old Grinch and Ebenezer Scrooge were saved from villainy before their stories ended. Our modern political misers, clothed in self-righteousness, have no such prospect of redemption.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, December 19, 2013
“Rolling Back A Century”: What Sort Of “Conservative Populist” Besides Ted Cruz Would Want To Do That
I was looking around Google today to see if Ted Cruz had ever come forth with the Obamacare Replacement proposal that was supposed to be imminent back in November, when I saw some other News of the Cruz I had missed:
Sen. Ted Cruz, elected 13 months ago by actual voters, said Thursday he’d prefer to see state legislators pick U.S. senators – as they were until a century ago, when the 17th Amendment came along.
Direct election of senators has eroded states’ rights, Cruz argued, speaking to a ballroom filled with conservative state lawmakers from around the country.
“If you have the ability to hire and fire me,” he said, “I’m a lot less likely to break into your house and steal your television. So there’s no doubt that was a major step toward the explosion of federal power and the undermining of the authority of the states at the local level.”
Most of the limited coverage of Cruz’ December 5 ALEC appearance focused on his choice of the words “Stand your ground!” in defending the lobbyist-driven source of right-wing cookie-cutter state legislative proposals from recent criticism, some of it derived from the organization’s heavy responsibility for the spread of “Stand Your Ground” laws of the sort that made George Zimmerman’s acquittal for the killing of Trayvon Martin much more likely.
But repealing the 17th Amendment, ratified 100 years ago? Taking voters out of the process of selecting senators? What sort of “conservative populist” would want to do that?
Technically, Cruz didn’t endorse any particular repeal proposal, and technically, ALEC’s own idea is to create a “soft repeal” of the amendment, whereby state legislatures would be allowed to sponsor Senate candidates on general election ballots.
It so ain’t happening, of course, but it says a lot about Cruz’s notion of his “base” that he felt compelled to talk about rolling back a 100-year voting rights precedent.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, December 18, 2013
“A Closer Look At Those Falling Into The Wingnut Hole”: Nearly 80% Of People In The Health Care Coverage Gap Reside In The South
Yesterday the Kaiser Family Foundation released some badly needed data on the characteristics of Americans who fall into what I’ve dubbed the “wingnut hole,” and that others just call the Coverage Gap. These are the people too poor to qualify for Obamacare subsidies for purchasing insurance in the exchanges, but too “rich” to qualify for the Medicaid benefits the drafters of the ACA assumed they would get but that their state governments blocked once the Supreme Court let them make the choice. Here’s the Kaiser Family Foundation’s take on the problem:
Medicaid eligibility for adults in states not expanding their programs is quite limited—the median income limit for parents in 2014 will be 47% of poverty, or an annual income of about $9,200 a year for a family of three, and in nearly all states not expanding, childless adults will remain ineligible. Further, because the ACA envisioned low-income people receiving coverage through Medicaid, it does not provide financial assistance to people below poverty for other coverage options. As a result, in states that do not expand Medicaid, many adults will fall into a “coverage gap” of having incomes above Medicaid eligibility limits but below the lower limit for Marketplace premium tax credits…. Nationwide, nearly five million poor uninsured adults are in this situation.
Who are they? Well, they’re mostly southerners:
The nearly five million poor uninsured adults who will fall into the “coverage gap” are spread across the states not expanding their Medicaid programs but are concentrated in states with the largest uninsured populations…. More than a fifth of people in the coverage gap reside in Texas, which has both a large uninsured population and very limited Medicaid eligibility. Sixteen percent live in Florida, eight percent in Georgia, seven percent live in North Carolina, and six percent live in Pennsylvania. There are no uninsured adults in the coverage gap in Wisconsin because the state will provide Medicaid eligibility to adults up to the poverty level in 2014.
The geographic distribution of the population in the coverage gap reflects both population distribution and regional variation in state take-up of the ACA Medicaid expansion. As a whole, more people—and in particular more poor uninsured adults— reside in the South than in other regions. Further, the South has higher uninsured rates and more limited Medicaid eligibility than other regions. Southern states also have disproportionately opted not to expand their programs, and 11 of the 25 states not expanding Medicaid are in the South. These factors combined mean nearly 80% of people in the coverage gap reside in the South
They’re also hard to define by race or ethnicity:
The characteristics of the population that falls into the coverage gap largely mirror those of poor uninsured adults. For example, because racial/ethnic minorities are more likely than White non-Hispanics to lack insurance coverage and are more likely to live in families with low incomes, they are disproportionately represented among poor uninsured adults and among people in the coverage gap. Nationally, about half (47%) of uninsured adults in the coverage gap are White non-Hispanics, 21% are Hispanic, and 27% are Black (Figure 3).
And they’re often the people left behind in wave after wave of incremental reforms based on expanding Medicaid and S-CHIP benefits to kids and their parents.
The characteristics of people in the coverage gap also reflect Medicaid program rules in states not expanding their programs. Because non-disabled adults without dependent children are ineligible for Medicaid coverage in most states not expanding Medicaid, regardless of their income, adults without dependent children account for a disproportionate share of people in the coverage gap (76%)…. Still, nearly a quarter (24%) of people in the coverage gap are poor parents whose income places them above Medicaid eligibility levels. The parent status of people in the coverage gap varies by state….due to variation in current state eligibility.
What doesn’t vary state by state is how outrageous it is to exclude the people who by the accident of a court decision fall into the “wingnut gap” of benefits available to people just above them on the income scale. They are for the most part the “working poor,” people with part-time or small-business jobs that don’t come with private health insurance.
They are ineligible for publicly-financed coverage in their state, most do not have access to employer-based coverage through a job, and all have limited income available to purchase coverage on their own.
You can argue that these people are those most in need of the Affordable Care Act, yet most likely to be excluded from its benefits.
These are also people with an unusually large personal stake in the outcome of the 2014 elections–the kind of people conservatives are thinking of when they conclude Obamacare has created a “tipping point” wherein actual or potential beneficiaries of government programs are essentially being bribed into voting Democratic. But if there’s been any growing groundswell of political mobilization of people in the “wingnut hole,” it has been very quiet. So they will likely become objects of anti-redistribution propaganda from the Right without becoming subjects of any major Democratic comeback.
The latest hope for people in the “wingnut hole” has been enthusiasm for securing Medicaid expansion by very broad waivers allowing states to work their will on the Medicaid program as a whole. To be very blunt about it, such “deals” have tended towards broadening the base of people eligible for Medicaid while degrading its benefits, with the federal government paying almost all the cost of implementation and sharing the political risk that it might fail. The situation is a reminder that about a hundred fifty years after the end of the Civil War, southern states are still fighting the “Reconstruction” potential of federal funds to interfere with the region’s grim perpetuation of inequality.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, December 18, 2013
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