“Why Republicans Can’t Address Rising Inequality”: Even In The Face Of Reality, They Cannot Confess That They Aren’t Troubled At All
So far, the Republican response to President Obama’s historic address on economic inequality has not veered from the predictable clichés of Tea Party rhetoric. It was appropriately summarized in a tweet from House Speaker John Boehner, complaining that the Democrat in the White House wants “more government rather than more freedom” – and ignoring his challenge to Republicans to present solutions of their own.
But for Republicans to promote real remedies – the kind that would require more than 140 characters of text – they first would have to believe that inequality is a real problem. And there is no evidence that they do, despite fitful attempts by GOP leaders on Capitol Hill to display their “empathy” for the struggling, shrinking middle class.
Back when Occupy Wall Street briefly shook up the national conversation, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and Budget Committee chair Paul Ryan both professed concern over the nation’s growing disparities of wealth and income. But their promises of proof that they care – and more important, of policy proposals to address what Cantor admits are “big challenges” – simply never materialized.
Meanwhile, working Americans learned what rich Republicans say in private about these sensitive topics when the “47 percent” video surfaced the following summer, in the final months of the 2012 presidential campaign. In Mitt Romney’s unguarded remarks to an audience of super-rich Florida financiers, the contempt for anyone who has benefited from public programs (other than banking bailouts) was palpable. Whether that sorry episode turned the election is arguable, but the Republican brand has never recovered – and the perception that Republicans like Romney and Ryan are hostile to the interests of working people remains indelible.
Of course, the House Republicans have done nothing to diminish that impression and everything to reinforce it. They have set about cutting food stamps, killing extended unemployment benefits, rejecting Medicaid expansion, as if competing in demonstrations of callous indifference. They complain about the lack of jobs – so long as they can blame Obama – but undermine every program designed to relieve the suffering of the jobless.
Callous or not, they are certainly indifferent to the injuries of inequality. In a party consumed by right-wing ideology and market idolatry, the further enrichment of the super-rich at the expense of everyone else is a feature of capitalism, not a bug. Whenever they bray about “getting government out of the way,” that means removing the last defenses against that process.
With Pope Francis and President Obama — a pair of the world’s most powerful voices — warning against the dangers of social exclusion and excessive greed, we can expect to hear expressions of remorse as well as rage from all the usual right-wing suspects. But what we shouldn’t expect is honesty. Republicans know that worsening inequality disturbs the great majority of Americans, so they cannot confess that they aren’t troubled at all.
Congress could begin to address the income gap, which conservative policies have exacerbated for three decades. Raising the minimum wage significantly would be a first step toward restoring fairness. Rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure and school systems, rather than letting them continuously decay, would raise employment substantially and improve incomes. Removing obstacles to unionization would begin to level the gross disparities in economic power between the 1 percent and the rest of us.
Now the president has vowed to fight inequality for the rest of his days in office. He is taking that fight directly to the Republicans who have frustrated so many of his initiatives. He will have to cast aside the last illusions of bipartisanship.
No matter what he does or says, he may not be able to win a higher minimum wage or a serious jobs program or universal pre-school with the other party controlling Congress. But if he consistently challenges us — and his adversaries — to restore an American dream that includes everyone, he may yet fashion a legacy worthy of his transformative ambitions.
By: Joe Conason, Featured Post, The National Memo, December 5, 2013
“Treading Carefully”: Paul Ryan’s Big, Tricky Budget Moment Is Here
Congress has been historically inactive this year. But with the clock winding down on 2013, there is still a glimmer of hope that bicameral negotiations could produce a modest budget deal that would replace some of the sequester cuts.
For Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the House GOP budget guru and potential presidential aspirant, that presents both an opportunity and a challenge. A bipartisan deal could serve as a rare (for him) legislative achievement that pads his credentials and charts the GOP’s course heading into the next election cycle. Yet at the same time, Ryan would risk spurning the GOP base — and its vocal Ted Cruz types — if he’s perceived as bending too far to Democratic demands.
Ryan and his Senate counterpart Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) are believed to be close to a very small deal that would eliminate some of the automatic budget cuts scheduled to go into effect over the next two years. Though nothing is finalized, the deal would reportedly nix about one-third of the sequester-mandated cuts, splitting the reinstated funds between defense and non-defense spending.
Since Republicans won’t go for tax increases, and Democrats won’t tackle entitlement reform without also touching revenue, Murray and Ryan have been reduced to “pulling together odds and ends to make a deal, including non-tax revenue like auctioning broadband spectrum and airport security fees, as well as increasing employee contributions to federal workers’ retirement programs,” wrote MSNBC’s Suzy Khimm.
In short: The negotiators are looking at a tiny deal, far less than the sweeping budget overhaul Ryan has famously proposed before in his spending blueprints.
Still, a deal would be a success for a Congress so dysfunctional it triggered a two-week government shutdown and flirted with debt default. Republicans would love to roll back some of the cuts to defense spending. And Democrats are eager for a deal that would wipe out some of the cuts to cherished domestic programs like Head Start.
Such a deal, if passed, would also be a significant accomplishment for Ryan to add to his otherwise unimpressive legislative record.
Though a noted policy wonk, none of Ryan’s radical budget bills have gone anywhere in Congress. In fact, only two Ryan-drafted bills, neither of which were anything truly groundbreaking, have become law in the congressman’s entire House career. One bill named a post office; the other amended a tax on arrows.
A deal would thus “burnish an image of someone willing to find — and tout — common ground in a historically divided Washington,” wrote Politico’s Jake Sherman and John Bresnahan. “It’s a credential that could serve him well as he looks to grab the chairmanship of the Ways and Means Committee or run for his party’s nomination before the 2016 presidential contest.”
Still, an agreement almost assuredly wouldn’t do anything about long-term GOP priorities Ryan has championed before, like cutting entitlement spending.
And there’s the rub for Ryan: A small deal could turn off both conservative lawmakers and voters.
Conservative House members dug in on their impossible demands during the shutdown even as it obliterated the party’s approval rating. Those same members could balk at a proposed deal that doesn’t cut deeper. And though a deal could still pass with the help of Democratic votes, Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) would risk further splitting his fragile caucus by cobbling together a Democratic-heavy coalition.
A mini-deal could also be problematic for Ryan’s perceived presidential ambitions if it causes the party’s right flank, which plays a disproportionately large role in the primary nominating process, to sour on him.
“If the Tea Party turns up the rhetorical heat, would Ryan risk a presidential bid to rescue the country from another government shutdown?” wrote Salon’s Joan Walsh. “I’ve never seen him stand up to that kind of ideological pressure from the right, but there could be a first time.”
If he’s keen on keeping his conservative hero status and pursuing a 2016 run, Ryan really ought to tread carefully.
By: John Terbush, The Week, December 4, 2013
“Reality Be Damned”: Do Republicans Need A Plan B On ObamaCare?
For years, Republicans have trotted out the same message: ObamaCare is a massive disaster, and the public knows it. And when Healthcare.gov crashed out of the starting gate, that message proved quite resonant.
Yet as ObamaCare begins to turn the corner, Democrats are going back on the offensive, touting the law’s benefits and successes in hopes of boosting support for it — and the party — ahead of the 2014 elections. Republicans, meanwhile, have so far stood by the same critiques, betting that the law will still be seen as a failure come Election Day.
Which raises a thorny question for the GOP: What if ObamaCare works?
Undoubtedly, ObamaCare is now functioning better than it was in October. Though problems remain for the exchange site — the back end is still a mess, often sending bogus or incomplete information to insurers — enrollments are reportedly surging through both the federal and state-run marketplaces.
Good news in hand, the White House and congressional Democrats this week launched a campaign of daily pro-ObamaCare messaging to promote the law ahead of the December 23 enrollment deadline for coverage that kicks in January 1, 2014. Their goal is to present a “raw two-sided picture,” according to Politico, with “Democrats delivering benefits on one side, and Republicans trying to deny them on the other.”
“My main message today is: We’re not going back,” Obama declared in a reboot speech Tuesday.
If ObamaCare keeps improving, the GOP’s “we told you ObamaCare was a mess” pitch could quickly wear thin. And if it does, Republicans will find themselves in need of a new argument or a legislative alternative.
So far, they don’t really have either.
On the messaging front, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) on Tuesday repeated boilerplate GOP criticisms that the law is “fundamentally flawed,” and that it “continues to wreak havoc on American families, small businesses, and our economy.” Other GOP leaders similarly contended that the law is still a problem-plagued failure.
That the message hasn’t changed despite ObamaCare’s turnaround proves that “Republican complaints of two months ago were purely opportunistic,” wrote Jamelle Bouie over at the Daily Beast.
“For them, it just doesn’t matter if Healthcare.gov is working, since ObamaCare is destined to fail, reality be damned!” he added. “At most, the broken website was useful fodder for attacks on the administration. Now that it’s made progress, the GOP will revert to its usual declarations that the Affordable Care Act is a hopeless disaster.”
The GOP has also yet to offer a credible legislative alternative to ObamaCare. Though there are several Republican bills that would reform the health-care system, they’re generally considered suspect, and none have consensus support within the GOP. Boehner on Tuesday tellingly dodged a question about whether he would even bring up such a bill up for a vote, saying only, “We’ll see.”
Polls have shown that while voters aren’t too keen on the health-care law, they’re willing to give it a chance. Indeed, the first few months of ObamaCare’s disastrous rollout could be a distant memory once coverage and benefits kick in next year.
Which points to another problem for Republicans: Their anti-ObamaCare crusade will be tough to sustain once people begin to see the law’s benefits in action. Mother Jones‘ Kevin Drum sussed out that point, writing, “Once the benefits of a new program start flowing, it’s very, very hard to turn them off.”
By the middle of 2014, ObamaCare is going to have a huge client base; it will be working pretty well; and it will be increasingly obvious that the disaster scenarios have been overblown….
Given all this, it’s hard to see ObamaCare being a huge campaign winner. For that, you need people with grievances, and the GOP is unlikely to find them in large enough numbers. The currently covered will stay covered. Doctors and hospitals will be treating more patients. ObamaCare’s taxes don’t touch anyone with an income less than $200,000. Aside from the Tea Partiers who object on the usual abstract grounds that ObamaCare is a liberty-crushing Stalinesque takeover of the medical industry, it’s going to be hard to gin up a huge amount of opposition. [Mother Jones]
Republicans have so far committed themselves to staunchly opposing ObamaCare no matter what, even producing a playbook for attacking the law from here to November 2014. But if ObamaCare continues to improve, the GOP might need to draw up a new play — or risk getting burned at the polls.
By: John Terbush, The Week, December 4, 2013
“Still Relying On Their Race-Baiting Playbook”: The GOP’s Massive 2013 Mistake, How The Party Ignored Its Terminal Illness
We did a whole “Hardball” hour Friday on how the GOP ratcheted up the crazy this year. Chris Matthews made me break down Rep. Steve King’s crazy anti-Mexican “calves the size of cantaloupes” slur, and I was forced to wonder why he’s thinking with such a sculpter’s eye for detail about another man’s calves, while otherizing him into a beast of burden, not quite human. Way to go for that Latino vote in 2014, GOP.
But the long list of crazy made me realize that despite the RNC autopsy that kicked off 2013, looking at ways to make sure it wasn’t merely the party of “stuffy old men,” the GOP apparently learned nothing from its 2012 drubbing. With the stumbles of the Affordable Care Act, that might seem OK, and there will be no penalty for their year of dithering and race-baiting. Rep. Michele Bachmann says the ACA’s problems make Republicans “look like geniuses,” and while it’s easy to mock her non-genius, her party looks better politically than it did a month ago. Polls show a dizzying swing from October, when the GOP’s not-genius government shutdown put Democrats ahead in generic 2014 balloting. Now some polls have Republicans in the lead.
Still, it may turn out that the ACA troubles were a brilliant Democratic plot to distract Republicans from their demographic terminal illness, and convince them that the Kill Obamacare playbook is all they need for 2014. Republicans have made absolutely zero progress in reaching out to any of the demographic groups – women, young people or Latinos – that the RNC’s autopsy agreed they had to, in order to stay alive as their older white base ages into that great Tea Party rally in the sky.
I know, Oprah got in trouble for suggesting that racism will ease when this generation of racists, well, dies. I wrote in my book that it makes me uncomfortable to hear allies suggest we just need to wait for old white Republicans to die off – they’re talking about a lot of people in my family. Yet it’s striking to me how comfortable Republicans seem relying on their ancient race-baiting playbook, and ignoring the country we’re becoming.
It’s easy to mock Steve “calves the size of cantaloupes” King. He’s a doofus. But Sen. Ted “I won’t study with people from the minor Ivies” Cruz is just as bad, and arguably worse.
National reporters and pundits collude in the GOP’s denialism. The National Journal’s Alex Seitz-Wald, a Salon alum, wrote a piece I wish I had, showing how many times Republicans and their media enablers have asked “can Obama recover” from this or that real or imagined catastrophe. From the BP oil spill to this seeming “dithering” over Syria, Obama’s presidency has been written off as terminally ill before, only to recover, again and again. (Actually, the first use of “Can Obama recover?” Seitz-Wald finds was on CNN’s Larry King after the Jeremiah Wright mess blew up in May 2008. Needless to say, he recovered that time too.)
Now if only his colleagues Josh Kraushaar and Ron Fournier would read Seitz-Wald, because they are making the National Journal the hub of breathless “Can Obama recover?” reporting.
Certainly Obamacare seems to be recovering, albeit slowly. Ezra Klein, who kicked off liberal wonk panic about the ACA in October, thinks Obamacare is “turning the corner,” and will gradually ramp up, perhaps a month behind schedule but not too late for a successful Jan. 1 rollout of new insurance plans. And this amazing Washington Post story, about Kentuckians, many of them presumably Republicans, lining up for ACA coverage shows that when a state wants the program to work, it can work. A 35-year-old father of five with diabetes, who’d never had health insurance and had racked up $23,000 in hospital bills, rejoiced when he got enrolled. “Well, thank God,” he said, laughing. “I believe I’m going to be a Democrat.”
I don’t think Democrats should be celebrating just yet. A lot can still go wrong, and there’s an industry devoted to finding and surfacing (or exaggerating or even concocting) scary Obamacare stories. Still, listening once again to Sen. Ted Cruz (on “Hardball”) warning that people will become “addicted to the sugar” of ACA subsidies is a reminder of how the Tea Party leaders actually hate the Tea Party base. They’d privatize Medicare and Social Security and deny Mitch McConnell’s constituents health insurance. It’s amazing that Oprah gets grief for talking about when the Tea Party’s racist base will die, when leaders like Cruz are the ones who would literally hasten that day.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, December 1, 2013
“The Deal With Rich People”: America Has A Long Standing Bad Deal With The Wealthy
Americans aren’t so sure about rich people.
For every revered Steve Jobs, there’s a reviled Bernie Madoff; for every folksy Warren Buffett, there’s a tone-deaf Mitt Romney. The pursuit of happiness is patriotic, but the pursuit of riches can come off as greedy. This ambivalence toward the wealthy is embedded in American democracy, and no one knows how to yank it out.
Even Alexis de Tocqueville agreed — a good thing, too, because discussing democracy in America without quoting “Democracy in America” is forbidden. “Men are there seen on a greater equality in point of fortune . . . than in any other country in the world, or in any age of which history has preserved the remembrance,” Tocqueville wrote of his travels in the United States. But then, the dagger: “I do not mean that there is any lack of wealthy individuals in the United States. I know of no country, indeed, where the love of money has taken stronger hold.”
So Americans dislike inequality but crave wealth — and this paradox propels our mixed feelings about the rich. Oppressors or job creators? Ambitious go-getters or rapacious 1 percenters?
Robert F. Dalzell, a historian at Williams College, believes he has an answer. America has a long-standing deal with the rich, he explains, one that allows the country to “forge an accommodation between wealth and democracy.” It’s simple: Yes, rich people, you can exploit workers and natural resources and lord your wealth over everyone if you like, and we’ll resent you for it. But if, along the way, you give a chunk of your fortune to charity, all will be forgiven, old sport. History won’t judge you as a capitalist; it will hail you as a philanthropist.
This uneasy bargain is the premise of Dalzell’s “The Good Rich and What They Cost Us,” which chronicles the deal from before the revolution through the recent financial crisis. Of course, just because the deal has lasted this long doesn’t mean that it will endure. Or that it is a particularly good one. Or that the rich aren’t constantly trying to rewrite the terms.
Early on, the wealthy waited until their deaths to strike the deal. Dalzell writes of Robert Keayne, a prominent 17th-century Boston merchant who sought to cleanse his price-gouging reputation by devoting his posthumous riches to college scholarships, improvements in his city’s water supply and defense, and construction of a town hall where important men like him could discuss weighty things. His will became a unilateral contract with town leaders; if anyone tried to sue his estate for past misdeeds, Keayne stipulated, all his giving would “utterly cease and become void.” Boston took the deal.
John D. Rockefeller saw no reason to wait. His Standard Oil empire — whose ruthless business tactics Ida Tarbell exposed and whose interlocking parts the Supreme Court split up — became the basis for the greatest philanthropic enterprise the world had ever seen. From major financial commitments to Spellman College and the University of Chicago, to support for medical research that developed the yellow-fever vaccine, to the financing of the Cloisters museum in Upper Manhattan and the restoration of Colonial Williamsburg, to list just a few initiatives, Rockefeller and his descendants set the model for modern, large-scale philanthropy. And they did so in a way that preserved the family’s influence and wealth over multiple generations.
“There was something Medici-like about the whole effort,” Dalzell writes, “for within the soul of that great Renaissance family there lay an urge to combine what many might have thought uncombinable — vast wealth and dedicated public service.”
But he also sees a more prosaic motivation: Billionaires want to polish their reputations for posterity. Wealth does not dull their sensitivity to what we think of them; it heightens it. Dalzell thinks it is no coincidence, for example, that the Giving Pledge — a public commitment by the world’s richest individuals, led by Buffett and Bill Gates, to donate most of their fortunes — coincided with the Great Recession’s backlash against the wealthy.
So, the rich just want to be loved. Is that so wrong? If more than 100 of the planet’s wealthiest families and individuals are promising to give away unfathomable amounts of money, why quibble?
Well, there’s at least one reason: The deal gets worse as the price paid for the rich’s charity — the inequality between the affluent and the rest — keeps rising. From 1979 to 2007, the real, after-tax income of the top 1 percent of the U.S. population grew by 275 percent, compared with 18 percent for the bottom fifth, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Social mobility has become more stunted in the United States than in Europe. And Americans see themselves falling further behind: A Washington Post-ABC News poll last year found that 57 percent of registered voters believed that the gap between the rich and rest was larger than it had been historically; only 5 percent thought it was smaller.
The deal will get even worse if efforts to push laws and policies that benefit wealthier Americans succeed. In “Rich People’s Movements,” Isaac William Martin, a sociologist at the University of California at San Diego, says today’s tea party is just the latest manifestation of another American tradition: the mobilization of wealthy and middle-class citizens in an effort to cut their taxes and contributions to the state.
Before the tea party, Martin tells us, there were tax clubs — groups of bankers throughout the South that agitated for tax cuts and helped bring about the Revenue Act of 1926, which “cut the tax rates on the richest Americans more deeply than any other tax law in history.” Before we had Grover Norquist and Americans for Tax Reform, we had J.A. Arnold and the American Taxpayers’ League, and Vivien Kellems and the Liberty Belles, a 1950s women’s movement that campaigned to repeal the income tax. And before Arthur Laffer and supply-side economics, there was Andrew Mellon, the banker, philanthropist and Treasury secretary whose 1924 book, “Taxation: The People’s Business,” argued that cutting income tax rates would create more revenue through greater economic growth.
Rich people’s movements respond to perceived threats, such as the New Deal, President Franklin Roosevelt’s effort to cap incomes during World War II (because “all excess income should go to win the war,” FDR explained) or, now, the policies of the Obama administration. But these movements sell their efforts not as benefiting the rich alone — that would be too transparent, too tacky. Instead, they claim to protect freedom, promote growth, safeguard the Constitution or fend off an ever-more-intrusive government. Martin calls this “strategic policy crafting,” and it brings more allies to the fight.
In fact, it is not just the wealthy, but often the middle class or the slightly-richer-than-average who have campaigned for lower taxes on affluent Americans. “People need not be dupes in order to protest on behalf of others who are richer than they are,” Martin argues. “The activists and supporters of rich people’s movements were defending their own real interests, as they saw them. A tax increase on the richest 1 percent may be perceived by many upper-middle-income property owners as the first step in a broader assault on property rights.” In other words, there’s nothing the matter with Kansas.
Shortly before the Republican National Convention gathered last year to nominate a man who could have become one of the richest presidents in U.S. history, the Pew Research Center conducted a survey on American attitudes toward the wealthy. The chronic ambivalence was there: Forty-three percent of respondents said rich people are more likely than the average American to be intelligent, and 42 percent believed that the rich worked harder than everyone else. The good rich! But 55 percent said wealthy people were more likely to be greedy, and 34 percent thought they were less likely to be honest. The bad rich.
Can “giving pledges” and foundation grants sustain America’s deal with the wealthy in a time of increasing inequality and falling social mobility? In his conclusion, Dalzell worries that the belief in the generosity of the good rich leads us to “tolerate, even celebrate, the violation of some of our most cherished ideals” of fairness and egalitarianism.
Perhaps the dilemma of extreme wealth and disparities in a democracy is that noblesse oblige becomes necessary. These two books show that the wealthy give much with one hand but seek to contribute far less with the other. That makes the giving they choose to do all the more critical but all the less accountable.
And that doesn’t sound like such a good deal.
By: Carlos Lozada, Outlook Editor, The Washington Post, November 27, 2013
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