“The GOP Has It Backwards”: Republicans Want To Tax Students And Not Polluters
A basic economic principle is government ought to tax what we want to discourage, and not tax what we want to encourage.
For example, if we want less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, we should tax carbon polluters. On the other hand, if we want more students from lower-income families to be able to afford college, we shouldn’t put a tax on student loans.
Sounds pretty simple, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, congressional Republicans are intent on doing exactly the opposite.
Earlier this year the Republican-led House passed a bill pegging student-loan interest rates to the yield on the 10-year Treasury note, plus 2.5 percentage points. “I have very little tolerance for people who tell me that they graduate with $200,000 of debt or even $80,000 of debt because there’s no reason for that,” Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), the co-sponsor of the GOP bill, said.
Republicans estimate this will bring in around $3.7 billion of extra revenue, which will help pay down the federal debt.
In other words, it’s a tax — and one that hits lower-income students and their families. Which is why several leading Democrats, including Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, oppose it. “Let’s make sure we don’t charge so much in interest that the students are actually paying a tax to reduce the deficit,” he argues.
(Republicans claim the President’s plan is almost the same as their own. Not true. Obama’s plan would lead to lower rates, limit repayments to 10 percent of a borrower’s discretionary income, and fix the rate for the life of the loan.)
Meanwhile, a growing number of Republicans have signed a pledge – sponsored by the multi-billionaire Koch brothers — to oppose any climate-change legislation that might raise government revenues by taxing polluters.
Officially known as the “No Climate Tax Pledge,” its signers promise to “oppose any legislation relating to climate change that includes a net increase in government revenue.”
By now 411 current office holders nationwide have signed on, including the entire GOP House leadership, a third of the members of the House as a whole, and a quarter of U.S. senators.
The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer reports that two successive efforts to control greenhouse-gas emissions by implementing cap-and-trade energy bills have died in the Senate, the latter specifically targeted by A.F.P.’s pledge
Why are Republicans willing to impose a tax on students and not on polluters? Don’t look for high principle.
Big private banks stand to make a bundle on student loans if rates on government loans are raised. They have thrown their money at both parties but been particularly generous to the GOP. A 2012 report by the nonpartisan Public Campaign shows that since 2000, the student loan industry has spent more than $50 million on lobbying.
Meanwhile, the Koch brothers – whose companies are among America’s 20 worst air-polluters –have long been intent on blocking a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system. And they, too, have been donating generously to Republicans to do their bidding.
We should be taxing polluters and not taxing students. The GOP has it backwards because its patrons want it that way.
By: Robert Reich, Robert Reich Blog, July 6, 2013
“To Dude Or Not To Dude?”: Rick Perry Wants YOU To Want Him To Run For President
In San Antonio on Monday, Texas Gov. Rick Perry will share his “exciting future plans.” Not to be confused with his past plans, I guess, or his not-so-hot ones. Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure these don’t involve accepting the $90 billion or so in federal money to expand Medicaid that would insure a million more Texans in a state that’s first in job creation but second in the number of children without health insurance.
When I asked a few Texans what they figured their governor would announce, though, I did get some exciting replies: Secede from the union? Change the part in his hair? Break in some new boots? And those were the Republicans, who have nothing but praise for their longest-serving governor — just as long as they’re speaking for attribution.
Perry did succeed in turning his state’s governorship from one of the weakest in the country to one of the strongest by applying a strict personal loyalty test to those he appointed to every seat on every board.
As a result, he’s always been more feared than loved. But after his bellyflop of a presidential run, some of his power to intimidate seems to have worn off. Texas House Speaker Joe Straus — a Republican, of course — publicly criticized Perry’s remarks about Wendy Davis, the state senator who successfully filibustered an anti-abortion bill, as damaging to their party.
I think Perry was actually trying to pay Davis a compliment. ““Who are we to say,” he asked, “that children born in the worst of circumstances can’t lead successful lives? Even the woman who filibustered the Senate the other day was born into difficult circumstances. She’s the daughter of as single woman, she was a teenage mother herself. She managed to eventually graduate from Harvard Law School and serve in the Texas Senate. It’s just unfortunate that she hasn’t learned from her own example that every life must be given a chance to realize its full potential, and that every life matters.” Which I took to mean that had her single mom chosen not to have her, the world would have been deprived of her intelligence and fortitude.
I’m not surprised, however, that Texas Republicans are telling pollsters they don’t want Perry to run for president again in ’16: Just 18 percent of Republican primary voters want him to go for it, while 69 percent say they hope he doesn’t.
Even among Texans, he’s the sixth-choice Republican presidential candidate right now, after Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, Rand Paul, Chris Christie and Paul Ryan. And though his job approval rating in the state has improved substantially lately, more still disapprove than give him a thumbs up, and 60 percent of respondents in a recent PPP poll said they do not think he should run for a fourth term as governor, either, compared to the 30 percent who say he should.
That doesn’t mean Texas is likely to turn blue any time soon, however, because it’s still an awfully conservative state — and one that’s gotten more so in recent years, with Obama taking 44 percent of the vote in ’08 and 41 percent in ’12.
Longtime Democratic consultant Marc Campos, of Houston, who calls Perry “Governor Dude,” is less sure than some others in the state about how the governor will come down on the question of “to dude or not to dude” for a fourth term. “Oops means oops,” Campos jokes, referring not only to Perry’s inability to remember the name of the third federal agency he’d vowed to cut, but also to Perry’s presidential chances if he does run again in ’16.
Yet Campos assesses his own party’s chances of taking the governorship next year no less realistically, quoting Rocco Lampone’s line in “The Godfather Part II” that shooting Hyman Roth would be “difficult, not impossible. It would have to be a hardly-any-room-for-error type of campaign,” he says, and darn well funded.
As the Dallas Morning News’s Wayne Slater points out, Davis has doubled her name ID lately, yet is still unlikely to prevail over Perry, who won by 13 points in ’10 as the least popular Republican on the ballot. Though 38 percent of Texans are Latino, turnout continues to be a problem, with Hispanics accounting for more than a third of the population, yet only about a fifth of the vote. And the recent Supreme Court decision undermining the Voting Rights Act clears the way for a Texas voter ID law that Democrats fear will further suppress turnout.
Rep. Joaquin Castro, whose twin, Julian Castro, the mayor of San Antonio, would have the best chance of besting Perry if he does run again, according to a recent poll, told me that “realistically, our window” for turning Texas blue “is eight to 12 years.”
Perry might actually speed that process along if he does decide to run for re-election, and the state’s Republican attorney general, Greg Abbott, opposes him in a primary. If that happens, Castro says, it will be expensive, brutal, and “a replay of what happened to the once-dominant Democratic Party” in Texas in the ’80s, with more infighting than punches thrown at the other party.
No one can say that Perry suffers from a lack of confidence, though, and it wouldn’t be like him to worry about that. Just before he was elected to his third term, Perry told me that walking away after only two would have been “like Van Gogh walking away when he’s two-thirds finished with a masterpiece.” On Monday, we’ll learn if he feels any brush work remains undone.
By: Melinda Henneberger, She The People, The Washington Post, July 3, 2013
“A Pledge To Ensure Failure, No Matter The Consequences”: Koch Brothers Push GOP Officials To Sign Anti-Climate Pledge
The Republican Party is certainly fond of its pledges. Grover Norquist, of course, has his infamous anti-tax pledge that has interfered with federal policymaking in recent decades, and in 2011, GOP presidential candidates were pushed to endorse an anti-gay pledge from the National Organization for Marriage.
But as it turns out, there’s another pledge that’s taken root in Republican politics that’s received far less attention. The New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer reports this week on the “No Climate Tax Pledge” pushed by Charles and David Koch.
Starting in 2008, a year after the Supreme Court ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency could regulate greenhouse gasses as a form of pollution, accelerating possible Congressional action on climate change, the Koch-funded nonprofit group, Americans for Prosperity, devised the “No Climate Tax” pledge. It has been, according to the study, a component of a remarkably successful campaign to prevent lawmakers from addressing climate change. Two successive efforts to control greenhouse-gas emissions by implementing cap-and-trade energy bills died in the Senate, the latter of which was specifically targeted by A.F.P.’s pledge.
By now, [411] current office holders nationwide have signed the pledge. Signatories include the entire Republican leadership in the House of Representatives, a third of the members of the House of Representatives as a whole, and a quarter of U.S. senators.
The pledge, uncovered as part of a two-year study by the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University, forces policymakers to oppose any legislation relating to climate change unless it is accompanied by an equivalent amount of tax cuts.” [Updated: see below]
And what, pray tell, do tax cuts have to do with the climate crisis and effects of global warming? Nothing in particular, but the Koch brothers hope to make it impossible to pass any bills related to carbon emissions, and by demanding tax cuts, they’re effectively eliminating any credible policy options — as Mayer explained, “Since most solutions to the problem of greenhouse-gas emissions require costs to the polluters and the public, the pledge essentially commits those who sign to it to vote against nearly any meaningful bill regarding global warning, and acts as yet another roadblock to action.”
When President Obama unveiled his fairly ambitious new climate agenda last week, some hoped it would spur broader action in Washington. There’s still room for a comprehensive climate policy that may be more effective than the administration using the Clean Air Act to limit emissions, but it would require Congress to work towards a sensible, consensus remedy. Republicans don’t like the White House policy? Fine, it’s time policymakers sat down with environmentalists and industries to work on an alternative.
Of course, Congress can’t do much of anything with a radicalized House majority, and climate legislation appears completely out of the question — the Koch brothers have a pledge to ensure failure, no matter the consequences.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
* Update: The exact language of the pledge reads as follows: “I, ______________________, pledge to the taxpayers of the state of ______________— and to the American people that I will oppose any legislation relating to climate change that includes a net increase in government revenue.” The Koch-financed opponents of combating the climate crisis see this as different from Mayer’s description, though it’s worth emphasizing that since any meaningful policy would generate revenue, the pledge would effectively call for tax cuts to guarantee revenue neutrality. As for why far-right anti-climate activists would oppose new government revenue — which could ostensibly be applied to deficit reduction, which conservatives occasionally pretend to care about — your guess is as good as mine.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 3, 2013
“Pennies On The Dollar”: Congress Is Squandering The Opportunity Of A Lifetime
It’s the first Friday of the month, which means a jobs report. And this one isn’t bad. The economy added a net 195,000 jobs in June, with upwards revisions of 70,000 in April and May. Which means that, so far this year, the economy has added more than 1 million jobs. To repeat a point, this is why the 2012 election was so critical for Democrats—a Mitt Romney win would have given Republicans a chance to claim credit for the current job growth, and use the political capital to push a highly-ideological agenda.
But back to the numbers. Federal government employment dropped by 5,000, a likely result of sequestration, and part of an overall decline of public employment—since 2010, the public sector has shed more than 600,000 jobs. The unemployment rate remained unchanged at 7.6 percent, with a slight drop in long-term unemployment. Still, more than four million people have been out of work for longer than six months.
In other words, despite the improving economy, we’re still stuck in a period of mass unemployment. And, thanks the GOP’s categorical opposition to spending–and stimulus in particular—there’s no chance of relief for the economy.
What’s frustrating—and, given the cost of long-term unemployment to individuals, families, and communities, cruel—is that conditions are perfect for another round of large-scale government spending. Not only are there millions of potential workers (to say nothing of an overall demand shortfall), but—as Suzy Khimm notes for MSNBC—interest rates are still at historic lows. But that won’t last: “Already,” she writes, “there are early warning signs that this era of absurdly cheap borrowing will eventually come to an end: The interest rate on 10-year U.S. Treasury notes—the benchmark for long-term borrowing rates—rose to 2.66% on Monday, the highest rate since August 2011.”
There’s still time to act on this unprecedented opportunity by investing in new infrastructure: We could take advantage of these low rates, borrow, and use the cash to rebuild our roads, bridges, airstrips, and pipelines. The subsequent economic growth—from more jobs and a faster recovery—would be more than enough to pay back whatever we owe when the economy is stronger.
But Republicans have not budged from their commitment to spending cuts, monetary tightening, and other austerity-minded policies. They warn that greater public debt will lead to inflation and low growth, ignoring the extent to which inflation has held steady at just under 2 percent for the last four years, and disregarding the disastrous results of austerity in Europe, which has plunged several countries, including the United Kingdom, into a second recession. Because of this, their House majority, and their ability to filibuster in the Senate, there’s no chance Congress will move on new stimulus, or anything else that could boost the economy.
The sad fact is that the GOP’s dysfunctions—its hyper-ideological approach to government, hostility to liberalism, and opposition to compromise—will keep the United States from capitalizing on one of the great opportunities of the last 20 years. Thanks to GOP-driven gridlock and Washington’s myopic focus on debt reduction, we have squandered a once-in-a-lifetime chance to rebuild this country at pennies on the dollar, and bounce back from a long decade of mismanagement and neglect.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, July 5, 2013
“Rick Perry, Job Poacher”: Southern Grand Larceny With A Very Old Pedigree
Poaching on the labor of others is an ancient and honored Southern tradition, whose antebellum antecedents Texas Governor Rick Perry has recently brought up-to-date with a $1 million advertising campaign to encourage businesses to pack up and come on down to the Lone Star State where the taxes are lower than a worker’s wages.
Called “Texas is calling, your opportunity awaits,” the 30-second TV spots feature business leaders and celebrities like Dallas Cowboys running back Emmitt Smith calling Texas the “land of opportunity” and home of “creative renegades.”
On Fox News, Perry boasted, “Texas has the best business climate in the world. Over the last 10 years, 30% of all the new jobs created in America were in Texas.”
Wooing business from other states is all part of “healthy competition,” says Perry. “It’s the 50 laboratories of innovation that are out competing for the jobs to keep America at the front of the race,” the Governor insists.
Yet, when mayors and governors elsewhere talk about “growing” their economy they mean that literally – as in, creating new jobs where none existed before, from the ground up, nurtured by public-private partnerships, public investments in R&D and good schools, and other initiatives that create real value.
In Boston where I work, the South Boston Seaport District is one of the hottest real estate markets in the country right now, says Moody’s Investor Services, thanks in part to steps that Mayor Tom Menino has taken to make the area a magnet for entrepreneurs — an “Innovation District” — where start-up companies with bright ideas but not much cash can get reasonable financing and available space to help their businesses grow.
Just last week, the Boston Herald reported that the Small Business Administration called Menino’s Innovation District a model for other cities to follow who are interested in creating a cutting-edge start-up culture — “a Mecca for people from all over the world to launch out and build the next big company.”
He credited the city’s Innovation District initiative for creating a “community of entrepreneurship and creativity.”
Winslow Sargeant, chief counsel for the federal agency’s Office of Advocacy, said: “This ecosystem of innovation brings together entrepreneurs to share ideas and bring their vision to the marketplace. It presents a successful model and an ideal avenue for the public and private sectors to partner together for economic success,” he said.
In just three years, Boston’s Innovation District initiative has brought more than 4,000 jobs to the waterfront area.
Boston has become a great place to start a business, said Sargeant, who grew up in the city. “If someone wants to start a company or if someone wants to explore what it takes to, there are people that they can talk to and places they can go to network with others.”
Among the biggest benefits of the district, the Herald says, are the start-up incubators and accelerators that offer shared work spaces. “Magic things happen” when entrepreneurs get together and share work space and ideas, said Ben Einstein, founder of Bolt, one of the companies now operating in the district.
There is another economic development model, however, one favored by Governor Perry and governors throughout the South: Don’t make money the old fashioned way by earning it or actually “creating” anything. Let the Yankees do that with their fancy schools and business incubators. Then, when companies are off the ground and up and running, steal them away like cattle-rustlers in cross-border raids by luring owners with promises of lower taxes, fewer environmental regulations and protections against uppity workers who want a fair day’s pay for an honest day’s labor.
That is what Perry really means when he says that 30% of all the “new” jobs “created” in America were in Texas – proof of which is the $1 million Texas is now spending to steal other state’s jobs away from them.
There is political as well as economic method to Governor Perry’s madness since his desperado tactics are never aimed against other Republican governors, but only blue state Democratic ones in target-rich “enemy” territory.
Perry recently traveled to New York and Connecticut on a four-day trip to lure businesses away from those states. The trip comes on the spurred-heels of earlier raids into California and Illinois where Perry showed ads depicting an emergency exit door under the headline: “Get out while you still can.”
Both Perry’s trips and the ad campaign are being paid for by a group called TexasOne, which is a coalition of corporations and local chambers of commerce.
This sort of Southern grand larceny has a very old pedigree. A cold and forbidding climate like New England’s grows a population that must be skilled at living by its wits and the “Yankee Ingenuity” that cemented New England’s reputation as home to world-class education, the textile mills of Lawrence and Lowell that gave birth to America’s industrial revolution, and the Yankee traders who invented, then sailed, world-famous clipper ships like the Flying Cloud and Sovereign of the Seas.
A hot and humid climate like the South, rich in natural resources, on the other hand, tends to spawn a class of indolent, parasitic oligarchs whose labor saving inventions consist almost entirely of exploiting the labor of others.
In short, what we have in New England is called “entrepreneurial capitalism,” which means using the state as partner to nurture good ideas and develop them into profitable companies, perhaps whole new industries.
What Governor Perry exports from Texas, on the other hand, is “crony capitalism,” using the power of the state to enrich and reward powerful insiders, not by creating new opportunities but by lowering the rewards workers get from those opportunities that already exist.
And now that the GOP has become a Southern Party, Republicans have inherited the most disreputable features of what author Michael Lind calls this “Southernomics” as well.
It was not always thus. Between the 1930s and 1970s, so-called “modern Republicans” like Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon tried to level the playing field among the states — not through regressive tax and labor policies — but through revenue sharing and other public investments in infrastructure, writes Lind in Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics.
Ironically, then, modern Republicans and New Deal modernists built an infrastructure for the South and West that traditional conservatives inherited and were able to use for their own “illiberal purposes,” says Lind.
It is no coincidence, says Lind, that the two biggest companies to fail during the Bush administration – Enron and WorldCom – were both Southern.
Entrepreneurial or “bourgeois” capitalism is alien to Texas and other Southern states, he says, because “crony capitalism is the only kind familiar to the Southern oligarchs, decedents of planters who could not balance their books and knights who despised mere trade.”
The lesson from these scandals, says Lind, as well as Governor Rick Perry’s politically-motivated raids against Democratic economies, is not that capitalism is unworkable, but that “capitalism only works where there are real capitalists.”
By: Ted Frier, Open Salon Blog, July 4, 2013
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