“Solely An Oppositional Movement”: Why Winning Elections Is The Last Thing The Tea Party Wants
Keith Humphreys asks a provocative question: Does the Tea Party even want to win elections? This comes up in response to a long article in the National Review by Ramesh Ponnuru and Rich Lowry telling the Tea Party to get its head out of the clouds and start doing things that will help Republicans win. While it’s tricky to ascribe specific desires and intentions to a large, complicated collection of people like the Tea Party, to the extent we can, I think the answer to whether they want to win is pretty clearly no. And there’s a certain logic to it.
The reason is that the Tea Party is an oppositional movement, and oppositional movements only thrive when they’re in the opposition. They can talk all they like about both Republicans and Democrats being part of the problem, and being opposed just to “Washington,” but we all know that at its heart it’s about Barack Obama and everything he represents. If Hillary Clinton or another Democrat becomes president in 2016, most of the anger and resentment that gives the movement life will get transferred to that person, and it will continue. But as I’ve held for a few years now, as a movement the Tea Party has a firm expiration date, which is the inauguration of the next Republican president.
The movement also holds a contempt for compromise of any sort as one of its fundamental pillars, which is fairly easy to stick with when your side is out of power. It’s not like you’re going to be getting much of what you want anyway, so you can scoff at the half-loaves your more reasonable colleagues are offering up. But when there’s a Republican administration the gifts to conservatism will be showering down from every cloud, and they’ll be much tougher to say no to. How about we give you an appointment at the EPA, where you can destroy the agency from the inside instead of railing at it from the street? What say we do the same to the Labor Department? Now that our bills won’t get vetoed, let’s start slashing away at food stamps and CHIP and all those other programs the “takers” suckle on. It’s time to party! In that atmosphere, there’s so much to say yes to that saying no to everything isn’t so attractive anymore.
And when it can’t shout “No!”, the Tea Party will have no more reason for being. Obviously, even if it’s dead as a movement, many of the people who championed it will still be in Congress. But saying no won’t be as attractive for them either. It’s one thing to imagine yourself a brave warrior standing up against Barack Obama and his plan to turn America into a nightmare of socialist misery. It’s another to, say, fight against cuts to Medicaid because you want even bigger cuts to Medicaid. That’s far less romantic.
So no, as a whole the Tea Party doesn’t have much of an interest in winning elections, because if it helped Republicans have a resounding win, it would literally be the last thing the movement ever did.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, October 31, 2013
“A War On The Poor”: This Is Now The Central And Defining Issue Of American Politics
John Kasich, the Republican governor of Ohio, has done some surprising things lately. First, he did an end run around his state’s Legislature — controlled by his own party — to proceed with the federally funded expansion of Medicaid that is an important piece of Obamacare. Then, defending his action, he let loose on his political allies, declaring, “I’m concerned about the fact there seems to be a war on the poor. That, if you’re poor, somehow you’re shiftless and lazy.”
Obviously Mr. Kasich isn’t the first to make this observation. But the fact that it’s coming from a Republican in good standing (although maybe not anymore), indeed someone who used to be known as a conservative firebrand, is telling. Republican hostility toward the poor and unfortunate has now reached such a fever pitch that the party doesn’t really stand for anything else — and only willfully blind observers can fail to see that reality.
The big question is why. But, first, let’s talk a bit more about what’s eating the right.
I still sometimes see pundits claiming that the Tea Party movement is basically driven by concerns about budget deficits. That’s delusional. Read the founding rant by Rick Santelli of CNBC: There’s nary a mention of deficits. Instead, it’s a tirade against the possibility that the government might help “losers” avoid foreclosure. Or read transcripts from Rush Limbaugh or other right-wing talk radio hosts. There’s not much about fiscal responsibility, but there’s a lot about how the government is rewarding the lazy and undeserving.
Republicans in leadership positions try to modulate their language a bit, but it’s a matter more of tone than substance. They’re still clearly passionate about making sure that the poor and unlucky get as little help as possible, that — as Representative Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, put it — the safety net is becoming “a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency.” And Mr. Ryan’s budget proposals involve savage cuts in safety-net programs such as food stamps and Medicaid.
All of this hostility to the poor has culminated in the truly astonishing refusal of many states to participate in the Medicaid expansion. Bear in mind that the federal government would pay for this expansion, and that the money thus spent would benefit hospitals and the local economy as well as the direct recipients. But a majority of Republican-controlled state governments are, it turns out, willing to pay a large economic and fiscal price in order to ensure that aid doesn’t reach the poor.
The thing is, it wasn’t always this way. Go back for a moment to 1936, when Alf Landon received the Republican nomination for president. In many ways, Landon’s acceptance speech previewed themes taken up by modern conservatives. He lamented the incompleteness of economic recovery and the persistence of high unemployment, and he attributed the economy’s lingering weakness to excessive government intervention and the uncertainty he claimed it created.
But he also said this: “Out of this Depression has come, not only the problem of recovery but also the equally grave problem of caring for the unemployed until recovery is attained. Their relief at all times is a matter of plain duty. We of our Party pledge that this obligation will never be neglected.”
Can you imagine a modern Republican nominee saying such a thing? Not in a party committed to the view that unemployed workers have it too easy, that they’re so coddled by unemployment insurance and food stamps that they have no incentive to go out there and get a job.
So what’s this all about? One reason, the sociologist Daniel Little suggested in a recent essay, is market ideology: If the market is always right, then people who end up poor must deserve to be poor. I’d add that some leading Republicans are, in their minds, acting out adolescent libertarian fantasies. “It’s as if we’re living in an Ayn Rand novel right now,” declared Paul Ryan in 2009.
But there’s also, as Mr. Little says, the stain that won’t go away: race.
In a much-cited recent memo, Democracy Corps, a Democratic-leaning public opinion research organization, reported on the results of focus groups held with members of various Republican factions. They found the Republican base “very conscious of being white in a country that is increasingly minority” — and seeing the social safety net both as something that helps Those People, not people like themselves, and binds the rising nonwhite population to the Democratic Party. And, yes, the Medicaid expansion many states are rejecting would disproportionately have helped poor blacks.
So there is indeed a war on the poor, coinciding with and deepening the pain from a troubled economy. And that war is now the central, defining issue of American politics.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, October 31, 2013
“Billionaires’ Row And Welfare Lines”: It’s A Great Time To Be Rich In America
The stock market is hitting record highs.
Bank profits have reached their highest levels in years.
The market for luxury goods is rebounding.
Bloomberg News reported in August, “Sales of homes priced at more than $1 million jumped an average 37 percent in 2013’s first half from a year earlier to the highest level since 2007, according to DataQuick.”
A report last week in The New York Times says that developers are turning 57th Street in Manhattan into “Billionaires’ Row,” with apartments selling for north of $90 million each.
And there’s no shortage of billionaires. Forbes’s list of the world’s billionaires has added more than 200 names since 2012 and is now at 1,426. The United States once again leads the list, with 442 billionaires.
It’s a great time to be a rich person in America. The rich are raking it in during this recovery.
But in the shadow of their towering wealth exists a much less rosy recovery, where people are hurting and the pain grows.
This is the slowest post-recession jobs recovery since World War II. The unemployment rate is falling, but for the wrong reason: an increasing number of people may simply be giving up on finding a job. The labor force participation rate — the percentage of people over 16 who either have a job or are actively searching for one — fell in August to its lowest rate in 35 years.
This disconnecting is particularly acute among young people. Measure of America, a project of the Social Science Research Council, recently released a study finding that a staggering 5.8 million young people nationwide — one in seven of those ages 16 to 24 — are disconnected, meaning not employed or in school, “adrift at society’s margins,” as the group put it.
Median household income continues to fall, according to recent data from the Census Bureau. The data showed, “In 2012, real median household income was 8.3 percent lower than in 2007, the year before the most recent recession.”
And according to an April Pew Research Center report, “During the first two years of the nation’s economic recovery, the mean net worth of households in the upper 7 percent of the wealth distribution rose by an estimated 28 percent, while the mean net worth of households in the lower 93 percent dropped by 4 percent.”
The dire statistics take on even more urgency when we consider what they mean for America’s most vulnerable: our children.
According to First Focus, a bipartisan advocacy organization focusing on child and family issues: “The 1,168,354 homeless students enrolled by U.S. preschools and K-12 schools in the 2011-2012 school year is the highest number on record, and a 10 percent increase over the previous school year. The number of homeless children in public schools has increased 72 percent since the beginning of the recession.”
A report last month by the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire bemoaned the stagnation of the child poverty rate in this country, saying, “These new poverty estimates released on Sept. 19, 2013, suggest that child poverty plateaued in the aftermath of the Great Recession, but there is no evidence of any reduction in child poverty even as we enter the fourth year of ‘recovery.’ ”
Nearly one in four American children live in poverty.
A report last year from the National Poverty Center estimated “that the number of households living on $2 or less in income per person per day in a given month increased from about 636,000 in 1996 to about 1.46 million households in early 2011, a percentage growth of 130 percent.”
And yet, the value of aid for those families is shrinking and under threat.
A report this week by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found, “Cash assistance benefits for the nation’s poorest families with children fell again in purchasing power in 2013 and are now at least 20 percent below their 1996 levels in 37 states, after adjusting for inflation.”
The number of Americans now enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is near record highs, and yet both houses of Congress have passed bills to cut funding to the program. The Senate measure would cut about $4 billion, while the House measure would cut roughly ten times as much, dropping millions of Americans from the program.
Next week, lawmakers will start trying to find a middle ground between the two versions of the farm bills that include these cuts.
There is an inherent tension — and obscenity — in the wildly divergent fortunes of the rich and the poor in this country, especially among our children. The growing imbalance of both wealth and opportunity cannot be sustained. Something has to give.
By: Charles M. Blow, Op-Ed Contributor, The New York Times, October 25, 2013
“Our Nation’s Biggest Shame”: How Much Money Would It Take To Eliminate Poverty In America?
Last week, the Census Bureau put out its annual income and poverty figures for 2012. The big news on the poverty front is that the percentage of Americans living in poverty is unchanged at 15 percent, which amounts to 46.5 million Americans. More than one in five kids under the age of 18 are in poverty, and nearly one in four kids under the age of six are impoverished as well. These are numbers we’ve all become accustomed to, but they can still shock the conscience if you make an effort to let them soak in again.
The sheer scale of poverty in the U.S. is so massive that it can seem as if eliminating or dramatically reducing it would be nearly impossible. After all, 46 million people is a lot of people. But in reality, if we stick to the official poverty line, the amount of money standing in the way of poverty eradication is much lower than people realize.
In its annual poverty report, the Census Bureau includes a table that few take note of which actually details by how much families are below the poverty line. A little multiplication and addition later, and the magic number pops out. In 2012, the number was $175.3 billion. That is how many dollars it would take to bring every person in the United States up to the poverty line. In 2012, that number was just 1.08 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP), which is to say the overall size of the economy.
To be sure, you probably don’t want to run a program that hunts out every family below the poverty line and brings them right up to it. Such a program would effectively involve imposing a 100 percent marginal tax rate for all income made below the poverty line. But, things like strategically expanding the Child Tax Credit, the Earned Income Tax Credit, SNAP, and related programs could make enormous strides toward poverty reduction. Implementing a mild basic income and a negative income tax would also help a great deal. The policy solutions for dramatically cutting poverty exist, they are used by countries elsewhere, and they could be used here, if we chose to do so.
It might be helpful to put the $175.3 billion magic number in perspective. In 2012, this number was just one-fourth of the $700 billion the federal government spent on the military. When you start hunting through the submerged spending we do through the tax code, it takes you no time to find enough tax expenditures geared toward the affluent to get to that number as well. The utterly ridiculous tax expenditures directed toward the disproportionately affluent class of people called homeowners—mortgage interest deduction, property tax deduction, exclusion of capital gains on residences—by themselves sum to $115.3 billion in 2012. Throw in the $117.3 billion in tax expenditures used to subsidize employer-based health care (also a disproportionate sop to the rich), and you’ve already eclipsed the magic number.
Eradicating or dramatically cutting poverty is not the deeply complicated intractable problem people make it out to be. The dollars we are talking about are minuscule up against the size of our economy. We have poverty because we choose to have it. We choose to design our distributive institutions in ways that generate poverty when we could design them in ways that don’t. Its continued existence is totally indefensible and our nation’s biggest shame.
By: Matt Bruenig, The American Prospect, September 24, 2013
“Foraging For Food”: What Harry Reid Learned At The Grocery Store
The speaker is Harry Reid, the Senate Democratic Leader. The place is the Senate floor. The time is last week, after the House Republicans committed the latest outrage, voting to cut the food stamp program, always part of the farm bill – until now. Hear Harry speak on one of life’s simple pleasures:
One of my favorite things that I really like to do in Nevada and here, in Washington, is go grocery shopping. It’s such a diversion for me. I love going grocery shopping to look around, buy the things. Landra and I are without our children and our grandchildren. We live alone. But we still buy food. And I enjoy that so very, very much.
So I know, have a good idea how much $4 will buy or $4.50 to be specific. That’s not money to buy … a pound of hamburger. They have different grades of hamburger. They have the expensive kind, not so expensive and the cheaper kind. Even the cheaper kind you couldn’t buy a pound of that most of the time. A gallon of milk (is) about $4. You couldn’t buy them both the same day. It’s possible to (make) important reforms in both the farm and food stamp programs without balancing the budget on the backs of people who are hungry.
This is one of the most humane speeches I’ve ever come across in the Senate. It may be a first. Seldom does a majority leader, who holds so much power in his hands, seem so humble and down to earth. More often than not, the voices in that clubby chamber drone on longer than necessary, with nobody listening, trying to summon the spirit of Daniel Webster.
The straightforward Reid put his finger on the universal importance of going out to find – or forage – food for yourself and your family. Whether you are man, woman or child, that is an elemental need and the ancient way that we became civilized, by sitting down to break bread, cook meat or gather berries together.
In times of trouble, the government should be your friend trying to help you, not an enemy scheming to take away what little you have. That is not “conservative.” That’s firebrand radical. Federal food stamp assistance goes back to the Great Depression, for heaven’s sake, when government lent a helping hand.
Harold Ickes, an advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, famously observed the obvious: “People need to eat three times a day.” A blunt statement with sense and compassion between the lines.
I hope everyone knows by now the food stamp troublemakers – the same ones who threaten to shut down the government – are about 40 House Republicans, most of them tea party people who were elected in 2010. They promised to create chaos here in Washington – and then they spit out “D.C.” They ran for office on a platform of practically burning the building down, or least closing the Capitol, the citadel of our democracy.
They have no knowledge of Congress and no interest in its traditions. They respect neither seniority nor authority. They don’t even listen to their own Speaker, John Boehner. Poor country club guy from small-town Ohio, Boehner can’t control these angry white people who showed up with everything but their pitchforks. Sorry, but they are an intolerable faction and this latest act is unconscionable. In fact, let’s call it what it is: un-American.
Paul Krugman, the op-ed columnist for The New York Times, spoke out strongly against “the war on food stamps.” He quoted the GOP golden boy, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, disparaging food and nutrition assistance as “a hammock” instead of a safety net. Ryan is a sharp-tongued instigator of all the madness – in both senses of the word. I have news for Krugman: These people, except for Ryan, are not likely to read The New York Times. They are anti-establishment, anti-intellectual, anti-government, anti-immigrant. If anything, they would take take criticism from The Times as a compliment.
The political party they resemble most is the one Abraham Lincoln despised, the defiant Know-Nothings, back before the Civil War. I think that’s why President Obama can’t wrap his mind around how much damage they plan to do to his presidency and the government and the American people. He’s a man of reason living in unreasonable times. He has the milk of human kindness in his bones; but his political foes have no mercy on the less fortunate among us, not even on children. They would take food out of the mouths of babes.
Reid said it best in his un-common sense statement: Don’t balance the budget on the backs of people who are hungry. Amen.
By: Jamie Stiehm, U. S. News and World Report, September 24, 2013
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