“Low Information Republicans”: What We Have Here Is More Than A Failure To Communicate
One of the more common areas of discussion among political professionals is the phenomenon of low-information voters. These are folks who care about the country and its future, but choose not to keep up on current events, due to some combination of feeling busy, apathetic, and frustrated. Political pros find these Americans difficult to reach — and at times, easy to manipulate — precisely because they’re disengaged and far behind the curve.
The point isn’t that low-information voters are dumb, but rather, that they’re ignorant. In focus groups, you’ll hear these same folks express poorly thought out opinions based on vague “something I heard on the news” observations.
But what happens when we move past low-information voters and start looking at low-information politicians? Ezra Klein relayed an incredible exchange from last week about the ongoing fiscal debate in Washington.
Would it matter, one reporter asked the veteran legislator, if the president were to put chained-CPI — a policy that reconfigures the way the government measures inflation and thus slows the growth of Social Security benefits — on the table?
“Absolutely,” the legislator said. “That’s serious.”
Another reporter jumped in. “But it is on the table! They tell us three times a day that they want to do chained-CPI.”
“Who wants to do it?” said the legislator.
“The president,” replied the reporter.
“I’d love to see it,” laughed the legislator.
In other words, an elected member of Congress — a “veteran legislator,” not some freshman who’s only been in office a couple of months — wants to see President Obama endorse a “serious” policy like chained-CPI as part of a larger debt-reduction package, but the lawmaker has absolutely no idea that Obama has already endorsed chained-CPI as part of a larger debt-reduction package. Indeed, in this case, the Republican lawmaker was so incredulous, he or she laughed at reality, as if it couldn’t possibly be true.
So, is it fair to say Washington debates would be less ridiculous if low-information Republican lawmakers were simply brought up to speed on the basics? Would compromise be easier if GOP officials had some clue as to what President Obama is, in reality, offering?
Well, no, probably not.
Jon Chait reminds us of the classic Upton Sinclair line: “It is impossible to make a man understand something if his livelihood depends on not understanding it.”
As this is applied to the ongoing political debates in DC, Republicans seem ignorant to a jaw-dropping degree about some of the basics, but even if they suddenly became more informed, it’s likely they’d come up with new reasons not to govern constructively with the White House.
Indeed, we don’t have to speculate to know this is true. Over the weekend, Ezra highlighted concerns raised by Mike Murphy, one of the top political consultants in the Republican Party, who said President Obama could reach a bipartisan deal with Republicans if only he endorsed chained CPI, apparently unaware that Obama has already done this.
Reminded of the facts, Murphy dug in, saying Obama endorsed means testing, but “refused” chained CPI. This is factually incorrect, too — indeed, it’s the exact opposite of reality — and when this was brought to his attention, Murphy switched gears, saying chained CPI is a “small beans gimmick” and Republicans just aren’t able to “trust” the White House.
Keep in mind, Murphy’s no dummy, but his line of argument is literally incoherent. He wants Obama to endorse a policy. Told that Obama already endorsed that policy, Murphy denies it. Presented with proof, Murphy decides the policy he supports isn’t so great after all.
So what does Murphy recommend? That Obama “earn trust” with Republicans by “first” agreeing to spending cuts. But in our reality, Obama already embraced about $1.5 trillion in spending cuts in 2011, with no accompanying revenue. In other words, Murphy believes the way out of the current mess is for the president to give Republicans 100% of what they want, accepting another cuts-only package.
Ezra’s bottom line rings true: Republicans have effectively eliminated the possibility of compromise, since they “just want to get the White House to implement their agenda in return for nothing.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 4, 2013
“Rights Are Not Entitlements”: Fundamental Human Rights Are Not Items That legislation Should Be Able To Take Away
As Americans discuss our system of social supports, we constantly hear the word “entitlements” and rarely the word “rights.” Of course, in America the word “entitlements” is not a neutral word. Rather, it is a loaded word, laced with specific attitudes and associations in both the speaker’s mouths and listener’s ears.
Instead of repeating facts about how America’s system of social supports is substantially smaller than nearly every other wealthy democratic country or the simple fact that America is the wealthiest country in the history of the world, it is important to pause to think about the concept of human rights.
A good starting point for thinking about human rights is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a declaration authored by a number of international delegates (including former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt) and adopted by the United States and other members of the United Nations in 1948. This document builds on other declarations of human rights that have occurred in the past including our own Declaration of Independence’s statement of the right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
In our era of drone strikes without a judicial process, it is important to point out that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.”
In our era of for-profit prisons pushing legislation to increase America’s already world-leading incarceration rates even higher, our era of prison gerrymandering and prison labor, it is important to point out that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “No one shall be held in slavery or servitude.”
In our era of Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, it is important to point out that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.”
In our era of attempts to slash support for the unemployed and aggressive attempts to dismantle the rights of labor to organize, it is important to point out that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.”
In our era of attacks on America’s already minimal social security system, it is important to point out that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “Everyone has the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.”
There was a time when our nation eloquently wrote and spoke in support of the basic rights of humans yet we have consistently abandoned those words, time after time, action after action, century after century.
Often when someone suggests that America needs to slash “entitlements,” I find myself asking two simple questions, “What are the most fundamental human rights and what role should governments play in guaranteeing those fundamental human rights?” After all, fundamental human rights are not items that legislation should be able to give and take away with the stroke of a pen or the barrel of a gun.
By: Howard Steven Friedman, Open Salon Blog, Salon, February 28, 2013
“No Good Choices”: Sequestration Is Here And Danger Lies Ahead
At midnight, $85 billion in federal budget funds will be sequestered (that is, held back) by the Treasury Department, with the potential to cause real pain for the economy and many Americans if Republicans and Democrats can’t agree to some sort of solution. (For an explainer about how this all came about, see here.)
The two sides are, naturally, quite far apart. The White House has offered a sequester replacement plan that it touts as “balanced” and thus ostensibly palatable to Republicans, though the administration is actually selling itself short: the plan should be quite appealing to the GOP exactly because it is unbalanced. The plan offers $930 billion in budget cuts with only $680 billion in revenue ($100 billion of which comes from Chained CPI, anathema to most progressives).
Republicans, meanwhile, want a sequester solution with no new revenue whatsoever—“The revenue issue is now closed,” House Speaker John Boehner said on Thursday—and many Republicans would like the sequester cuts rejiggered to spare defense spending and hit domestic and entitlement programs even harder.
So both sides are now playing the blame game, hoping that the public will get seriously angry about the disruptions caused by the sequester and blame the other side, thus bringing them to the table ready to give concessions.
There is substantial reason to be optimistic that Obama has the upper hand and will “win” this battle. The public appears to be on his side, and serious fractures within the GOP may soon emerge—defense hawks who cannot abide the Pentagon cuts much longer, and rationalists within the party who think the brand is being irreparably damaged.
But for progressives, is it really a win for Obama’s preferred approach to prevail? The emerging consensus is ‘no.’ Some of the cuts Obama offers are plain bad, like his offer to “reform” federal retirement programs and save $35 billion, which means in essence to take $35 billion from the pensions of public workers. Many cuts are inoffensive, and some are good cuts: like reducing certain agricultural subsidies and reducing Medicare payments to big drug companies.
The revenue would mainly be taken from the wealthy via capping deductions and closing loopholes that benefit top earners. But there’s that Chained CPI bit (or “superlative CPI,” as the White House refers to it) that really troubles progressives—and should. It represents a tangible cut to the safety net: seniors already living on $1,200 per month would see $1,000 less per year under the new formula. Disabled veterans would lose $1,400 per year, and middle-class taxes would be hiked on top of it. (The increased tax revenue is, I suppose, why the White House has classified Chained CPI as new revenue, but on the benefit side of Social Security and other programs, this is clearly a cut.)
Cutting entitlements for any reason is a no-go for many Democrats in Congress, especially when coupled with nearly a trillion dollars in budget cuts. That’s what would happen if Obama’s plan wins, and it’s what worries liberals. “There’s a broader concern about the fact that entitlements may get ensnared when we go to an alternative fix, [that] they won’t escape,” Representative Jerry Nadler told BuzzFeed.
The AFL-CIO issued a statement this week that didn’t back Obama’s “balanced” approach, but called for the sequester to be straight-up repealed. “There’s no need to replace the sequester in full or in part. We don’t need it. Republicans are saying we need to address the source of the problem as leverage to get entitlement cuts,” it read. The Congressional Progressive Caucus has also called for sequestration to be completely repealed.
That’s the best-case solution for progressives. (Realistically speaking, of course. The actual best-case solution is the comprehensive plan released by the Congressional Progressive Caucus.) But Boehner probably won’t be able to sell a full repeal of spending cuts in exchange for exactly nothing to his rambunctious hard-core caucus in the House. There might not be any deal to be had here.
In that case, sequestration stays in place. That’s definitely worse than repealing it, but is it really worse than Obama’s grand bargain? Under sequestration half of the cuts come from defense spending; Medicare is protected except for a 2 percent cut to doctor reimbursements, and Social Security, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and food stamp programs are protected entirely.
The other domestic cuts are no doubt painful and bad policy, but progressives have a tough choice in weighing that against what Obama’s proposing. And this of course assumes Obama gets everything he wants, which will not happen. Whatever bargain Congress and Obama strike out, if they manage to get something done, will almost certainly be worse.
There are real dangers to enacting some kind of bargain with Republicans to end the sequester—clearly on policy, but also on the politics, even though the administration seems to think otherwise. If White House aides truly believe that achieving a “grand bargain” that includes chained CPI will yield some sort of political victory, they ought to pay closer attention to the blame game now happening around the sequester.
One of Bob Woodward’s central claims, and the one that spurred the now-infamous pushback from the White House, is that Obama’s team came up with the sequester. This has been relentlessly pushed by Republicans (who invented a corny #Obamaquester hashtag) and by far too many mainstream media journalists.
This is plainly ridiculous—Obama wanted a clean debt-ceiling hike in 2011, and Republicans denied it and forced a showdown. Republicans were not enticed by what the White House offered to end the standoff and demanded some kind of guarantee of budget reductions, and at that point an administration official proposed sequestration as a tool. To strip that final piece of the timeline of all preceding context, and say that somehow Obama wanted the sequester, is exactly backwards—but it’s what is happening.
This is identical to what would likely happen to Chained CPI. Sure, this whole showdown was created by Republicans. And everyone understands the GOP to be the party that wants to cut “entitlement” programs. But Republicans have very deftly avoided proposing specific cuts to Social Security or Medicare in this debate; only Obama has with his Chained CPI proposal. Does anybody really think that two years from now, Republicans wouldn’t pull the exact same parsing of history as they did with the sequester, and blame Obama for cutting Social Security, which an overwhelming amount of Americans oppose? (Remember too that this is exactly what the Romney-Ryan ticket did with the $700 million in Medicare cuts included in the Affordable Care Act.)
In short, the sequester is a disaster, but a potentially worse disaster may lie ahead. There are no good choices here, only less-bad ones, and progressives should be wary about confusing political victory with a policy victory.
By: George Zornick, The Nation, March 1, 2013
“Frontmen For American Austerity”: Sequestration Is Not Enough For Simpson And Bowles
Sequestration?
Cue the return of Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, frontmen for American austerity.
If sequestration is not averted by the end of the month, America will experience an arbitrary austerity agenda that shifts burdens from the wealthy onto working families. It makes across-the-board cuts to vital services. As President Obama noted Tuesday, sequestration would impose “automatic brutal spending cuts” to job creation, infrastructure and education initiatives. It would, as well, slash funding for air traffic control, federal prosecutions and Federal Emergency Management Agency grants that make it possible for states and local governments to hire needed firefighter and emergency personnel.
Even the parts of the sequester that are appealing—squeezing the bloated Department of Defense budget—will tend to harm low-wage federal employees rather than billionaire defense contractors.
Most troublingly, sequestration will slow, and perhaps stall, the economic recovery. “This is not an abstraction,” says President Obama. “People will lose their jobs.”
By any measure, the sequester is austerity.
But it’s not enough austerity for Simpson and Bowles.
The former Republican senator and defeated Democratic senate candidate who praises Paul Ryan’s budget don’t particularly like the death-by-slow-cuts of sequestration. They prefer a full frontal assault on the most vulnerable Americans and a redistribution of the wealth upward.
As President Obama has noted, Washington has already reduced the deficit by $2.5 trillion.
But the co-chairs of the failed National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform now want another $2.4 trillion.
To wit, in a “rehashed” plan to “Fix the Debt,” Simpson and Bowles are busy promoting schemes to “modernize…entitlement programs to account for” an aging population. That’s code for schemes to delay the point at which the hardest working Americans can get access to Social Security and Medicare.
Simpson and Bowles are arguing specifically for the adoption of “chained CPI.” That’s the assault on Social Security cost-of-living increases that Congressman Keith Ellison, D-Minnesota, correctly identifies as “a benefit cut.”
“It’s a bad idea and it’s a stealth way to give people less,” Ellison explained in a recent interview. “It is a benefit cut—and here’s the real problem with it being a benefit cut: It would be absolutely horrible if it were a benefit cut but the cut was designed to extend the life of Social Security and to make the program more solvent. But that’s not why they’re doing it. They’re doing it so that they can preserve somebody else to have a tax cut and to not raise taxes on the top 2 percent.”
Ellison is right. As is invariably the case with austerity schemes, Simpson and Bowles—and the billionaire-funded “Fix the Debt” group they head—are proposing cuts to the top marginal tax rate for wealthy individuals and corporations.
The United States can and should address debts and deficits. And there are sound plans to do so, including the “Balancing Act” advanced by Ellison and other members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. That initiative rejects austerity and proposes a growth agenda based on tax fairness and investments in education and job creation.
That’s not Simpson-Bowles, which Nobel Prize–winning economist Paul Krugman dismisses as “terrible” economics. That’s responsible policy that avoids the “brutal cuts” of sequestration and the even more brutal cuts of full-fledged austerity.
“Almost $2 trillion has been cut over the past two years from teachers, firefighters, police officers, loans for college students, and infrastructure investments,” the congressman says of the warped federal budget priorities proposed by austerity advocates. “The American people shouldn’t continue to pay the price for massive tax breaks for millionaires and billions of dollars in subsidies to oil companies.”
By: John Nichols, The Nation, February 19, 2013
“Just Another GOP Liability”: Biting The Hand That Feeds Them
Paul Krugman noted on ABC’s This Week yesterday that the GOP’s problem is that their “base is old white people.”
This is largely true. Exit polls show that Mitt Romney won all voters 65 and older by 12 percentage points, and white older voters by 22 points. Barack Obama won all voters under thirty by 23 points, and nonwhite young voters by 36 points.
Such numbers are a big problem for the GOP amid fast changing demographics, as we’ve heard often in recent months.
But here’s an interesting question raised by the same data: If the GOP leans so heavily on older white voters, then why is it leading the charge to cuts entitlements for seniors?
Politics is supposed to be about who gets what, but things often don’t work that way. In 2011, the New York Times ran a fascinating chart about the percentage of personal income that comes from government benefits in different states. It showed that hardcore Republican states—where a lot of those older white coservative voters live—relied most heavily on benefits, with Social Security the largest form of assistance. In a previous post, I looked at John McCain’s margin of victory in 2008 in those states with the highest reliance on government benefits:
West Virginia: 28 percent of all personal income in this state come from government programs. McCain won the state by 13 points.
Mississippi: 26.2 percent of personal income from government benefits; McCain margin: 13 points.
Kentucky: 24.8 percent income from benefits; McCain margin: 17 points.
Arkansas: 24.5 percent income from benefits; McCain margin: 20 points.
South Carolina: 23.4 percent income from benefits; McCain margin: 9 points.
Alabama: 23.4 percent income from benefits; McCain margin: 22 points.
These numbers make you wonder: Do older GOP voters really understand that the conservative assault on government “handouts” may end up reducing their standard of living? And, if they do get better clued into that fact, will the GOP face pushback against entitlement cuts from their own base?
Entitlements aren’t the only area where Republicans aren’t doing a good job of serving the narrow financial interests of their base. As I have noted often, the U.S. tax system disprortionately raises revenue from affluent people in coastal blue states and keeps taxes low on Americans of more modest means in the red states. You’d think heartland Republicans would be okay with this arrangement; instead they have relentlessly fought proposals that would shift even more of the tax burden to residents of Manhattan and Malibu.
Likewise, one big feature of the reviled Affordable Care Act is that the law taxes rich people—which just started happening this month with the Medicare payroll surtax—and subsidizes health insurance for low-income people. The states I mentioned above, with high concentrations of poor rural residents, will benefit from this arrangement. Connecticut will not.
So amid all the talk of the GOP’s grim long-term prospects, let’s add another liability to the list: Congressional Republicans aren’t attuned to one of the most basic responsibilities of elected leaders—putting more money in the pockets of their constituents and getting somebody else’s constituents to pick up the tab.
By: David Callahan, The American Prospect, February 4, 2013
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