It's amazing how the FACTS always come down on the liberal side.
by Paul Krugman
May 30, 2011, 10:26 am
The Facts Have A Liberal Bias, Again
Steve Benen watches an entire panel on Meet the Press condemn Democrats for accurately describing the Ryan plan:
I’m at a loss to understand what, exactly, Ruth Marcus, David Brooks, and their cohorts would have Dems do. Congressional Republicans have a plan to end Medicare and replace it with a privatized voucher scheme. The proposal would not only help rewrite the social contract, it would also shift crushing costs onto the backs of seniors, freeing up money for tax breaks for the wealthy. The plan is needlessly cruel, and any serious evaluation of the GOP’s arithmetic shows that the policy is a fraud.
Which part of this description is false? None of it, but apparently, Democrats just aren’t supposed to mention any of this.
I have to admit that even I am surprised by this. When the gaping holes in the Ryan plan were revealed, I expected the Very Serious People to move on and find a new GOP daddy to idolize. Instead, however, they’ve mostly dug in, condemning anyone who points out that the plan is a piece of junk as being somehow out of bounds.
Monday, May 30, 2011
Thomas Perry - The Butcher's Boy
This crime novel, published in the early 80's, seems to be something of a classic. The Butcher Boy is a professional killer, trained by his father starting as a child to follow his father in the trade. The novel is a suspence lover's delight as The Butcher's Boy travels the country doing his work. It's light but fun, a page-turner that doesn't require any thought. Lots of fun.
Big Mistake by Republicans
The Root Cause Of The GOP's Huge Mistake
Jonathan Chait
Pulling back a bit, there's a pretty simple reason why the Republican budget is so toxic. Republicans have a programmatic view of the federal government that is shared by just a tiny minority of Americans. This is not an insurmountable problem. There are many ways around it -- you can try to organize politics around foreign policy or issues of personal character, or you can try to keep the debate over taxes and spending on the level of abstraction, where Republicans are on firmer ground.
One favored tactic has been to keep the issues of taxes and spending separate. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush passed large tax cuts that mathematically implied the need for cuts in popular spending programs. But they fiercely denied the implication, and left the work of spending cuts for the future, so that the tax cutting could proceed without any acknowledgement of the priorities it required. Indeed, Republicans understood very clearly that obscuring the trade-off was the entire key to gaining public acceptance:
Disillusioned former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill has released a stunning internal memo, dating from the unveiling of the Bush administration’s first round of tax cuts in 2001. Its author was Michele Davis, a high-level Treasury official and participant in daily meetings on the administration’s communications strategy. There is every reason to believe that her memo, generated for a pivotal, high-profile public appearance of the administration’s top economic spokesman, reflects strategies developed at the highest level. It begins innocently enough: O’Neill is asked to plug tax cuts at a press event unveiling the President’s first budget. Then, however, Davis warns: “The public prefers spending on things like health care and education over cutting taxes.”
Davis writes that it is, instead, simply a reason to avoid talking about any trade-offs that tax cuts might entail: “It’s crucial that you make clear that there are no trade-offs here….Roll-out events like this are the clearest examples of when staying on message is absolutely crucial. Any deviation…will change the way coverage plays out from tomorrow forward.”
Of course, this political method naturally leads to very large deficits. The Republicans have now fashioned themselves as the party of fiscal discipline, an imperative that drove them to do something they haven't tried since 1995 -- actually lay out a budget that reconciled their priorities on spending and taxing. This was a huge mistake. As happened in 1995, this laid bare the wild unpopularity if their choices.
Lots of things happened to let Democrats win a special election in NY-26 where they were expected to get crushed. But the most important is simply that Republicans were forced to defend highly unpopular priorities on the basic question of government's role. Henry Olson of the American Enterprise Institute explains why:
As I’ve written before, blue-collar voters react differently to issues than the GOP base does. They are more supportive of safety-net programs at the same time as they are strongly opposed to large government programs in general. These voters crave stability and are uncertain of their ability to compete in a globalized economy that values higher education more each year. They are also susceptible to the age-old Democratic argument that the secret Republican agenda is to eviscerate middle-class entitlements to fund tax cuts for the wealthy.
As David Frum explains, that age-old argument happens to be true:
Ryan’s plan cuts the top rate of personal and corporate income tax from 36% to 25% with promises of offsetting revenue raisers to be determined later.
Because Ryan’s tax cuts were specific and his promises of revenue-raising reform ultra-vague, he had no defense to the attack that his tax reform involves massive downward redistribution of the tax burden. And after all, it’s hard to imagine what tax enhancements would counteract the distributional effect of a cut in the top rate of income tax from 36% to 25%. Ending the mortgage interest deduction for mortgages of between $417,000 and $1,000,000 (a good idea!) would not do it. Ending the deductibility of state and local taxes (another good idea) would not do it. A carbon tax (good idea again) for sure would not do it. Ditto a VAT. All of those measures would be good ways to raise additional revenues while leaving the current rates in place. But as offsets to a huge upper-income tax cut, they look like a shift of the tax burden from the upper class to the more affluent parts of the middle class at the same time as the rest of the Ryan budget removes Medicare coverage from the more affluent parts of the middle class – and leaves the remainder of Medicare very probably increasingly inadequate even for poorer Americans.
The one thing that might have enhanced the attractiveness of the Ryan Medicare plan is some kind of assurance of adequacy of the future Medicare vouchers for Americans under age 55.
Remember, under the Ryan plan, not only are Medicare vouchers means-tested, but they are also scheduled to grow in value at a deliberately slow pace. Today’s 40-somethings have good reason to fear that the vouchers will prove inadequate when it comes their time to retire.
It's remarkable that Republicans have voluntarily placed themselves in a position where they're fighting a high-salience battle on an issue where the public overwhelmingly opposes their position. It's not as if Republicans were completely unaware of this problem. They did take one step to reduce their political exposure -- exempt anybody over 55 years of age from cuts to Medicare, in the hopes that this would neutralize the opposition of those voters most focused on Medicare. They also hoped they could skate through by, as one Republican put it, "muddying the waters." And, indeed, Jane Corwin desperately tried to outflank her opponent to the left on Medicare. But muddying the waters is hard when you put some numbers down on paper and voted for them.
Jonathan Chait
Pulling back a bit, there's a pretty simple reason why the Republican budget is so toxic. Republicans have a programmatic view of the federal government that is shared by just a tiny minority of Americans. This is not an insurmountable problem. There are many ways around it -- you can try to organize politics around foreign policy or issues of personal character, or you can try to keep the debate over taxes and spending on the level of abstraction, where Republicans are on firmer ground.
One favored tactic has been to keep the issues of taxes and spending separate. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush passed large tax cuts that mathematically implied the need for cuts in popular spending programs. But they fiercely denied the implication, and left the work of spending cuts for the future, so that the tax cutting could proceed without any acknowledgement of the priorities it required. Indeed, Republicans understood very clearly that obscuring the trade-off was the entire key to gaining public acceptance:
Disillusioned former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill has released a stunning internal memo, dating from the unveiling of the Bush administration’s first round of tax cuts in 2001. Its author was Michele Davis, a high-level Treasury official and participant in daily meetings on the administration’s communications strategy. There is every reason to believe that her memo, generated for a pivotal, high-profile public appearance of the administration’s top economic spokesman, reflects strategies developed at the highest level. It begins innocently enough: O’Neill is asked to plug tax cuts at a press event unveiling the President’s first budget. Then, however, Davis warns: “The public prefers spending on things like health care and education over cutting taxes.”
Davis writes that it is, instead, simply a reason to avoid talking about any trade-offs that tax cuts might entail: “It’s crucial that you make clear that there are no trade-offs here….Roll-out events like this are the clearest examples of when staying on message is absolutely crucial. Any deviation…will change the way coverage plays out from tomorrow forward.”
Of course, this political method naturally leads to very large deficits. The Republicans have now fashioned themselves as the party of fiscal discipline, an imperative that drove them to do something they haven't tried since 1995 -- actually lay out a budget that reconciled their priorities on spending and taxing. This was a huge mistake. As happened in 1995, this laid bare the wild unpopularity if their choices.
Lots of things happened to let Democrats win a special election in NY-26 where they were expected to get crushed. But the most important is simply that Republicans were forced to defend highly unpopular priorities on the basic question of government's role. Henry Olson of the American Enterprise Institute explains why:
As I’ve written before, blue-collar voters react differently to issues than the GOP base does. They are more supportive of safety-net programs at the same time as they are strongly opposed to large government programs in general. These voters crave stability and are uncertain of their ability to compete in a globalized economy that values higher education more each year. They are also susceptible to the age-old Democratic argument that the secret Republican agenda is to eviscerate middle-class entitlements to fund tax cuts for the wealthy.
As David Frum explains, that age-old argument happens to be true:
Ryan’s plan cuts the top rate of personal and corporate income tax from 36% to 25% with promises of offsetting revenue raisers to be determined later.
Because Ryan’s tax cuts were specific and his promises of revenue-raising reform ultra-vague, he had no defense to the attack that his tax reform involves massive downward redistribution of the tax burden. And after all, it’s hard to imagine what tax enhancements would counteract the distributional effect of a cut in the top rate of income tax from 36% to 25%. Ending the mortgage interest deduction for mortgages of between $417,000 and $1,000,000 (a good idea!) would not do it. Ending the deductibility of state and local taxes (another good idea) would not do it. A carbon tax (good idea again) for sure would not do it. Ditto a VAT. All of those measures would be good ways to raise additional revenues while leaving the current rates in place. But as offsets to a huge upper-income tax cut, they look like a shift of the tax burden from the upper class to the more affluent parts of the middle class at the same time as the rest of the Ryan budget removes Medicare coverage from the more affluent parts of the middle class – and leaves the remainder of Medicare very probably increasingly inadequate even for poorer Americans.
The one thing that might have enhanced the attractiveness of the Ryan Medicare plan is some kind of assurance of adequacy of the future Medicare vouchers for Americans under age 55.
Remember, under the Ryan plan, not only are Medicare vouchers means-tested, but they are also scheduled to grow in value at a deliberately slow pace. Today’s 40-somethings have good reason to fear that the vouchers will prove inadequate when it comes their time to retire.
It's remarkable that Republicans have voluntarily placed themselves in a position where they're fighting a high-salience battle on an issue where the public overwhelmingly opposes their position. It's not as if Republicans were completely unaware of this problem. They did take one step to reduce their political exposure -- exempt anybody over 55 years of age from cuts to Medicare, in the hopes that this would neutralize the opposition of those voters most focused on Medicare. They also hoped they could skate through by, as one Republican put it, "muddying the waters." And, indeed, Jane Corwin desperately tried to outflank her opponent to the left on Medicare. But muddying the waters is hard when you put some numbers down on paper and voted for them.
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Mediscare
MEDICARE AND MEDISCARE
by
Paul Krugman
Op-Ed Contributor: Squandering Medicare’s Money (May 26, 2011) Readers' Comments
"Ryan’s plan is a shell game at best
To be sure, Mr. Ryan had reason to be upset after Tuesday’s special election in New York’s 26th Congressional District. It’s a very conservative district, so much so that last year the Republican candidate took 76 percent of the vote. Yet on Tuesday, Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, took the seat, with a campaign focused squarely on Mr. Ryan’s plan to dismantle Medicare and replace it with a voucher system.
How did Ms. Hochul pull off this upset? The Wisconsin congressman blamed Democrats’ willingness to “shamelessly distort and demagogue the issue, trying to scare seniors to win an election,” and he predicted that by November of next year “the American people are going to know they’ve been lied to.”
You can understand Mr. Ryan’s bitterness. He has, after all, experienced quite a comedown over the course of the past seven weeks. Until his Medicare plan was rolled out in early April he had spent months bathing in warm approbation from many pundits, who had decided to anoint him as an icon of fiscal responsibility. And the plan itself received rapturous praise in the first couple of days after its release.
Then people who actually know how to read a budget proposal started looking at the plan. And that’s when everything started to fall apart.
Mr. Ryan may claim — and he may even believe — that he’s facing a backlash because his opponents are lying about his proposals. But the reality is that the Ryan plan is turning into a political disaster for Republicans, not because the plan’s critics are lying about it, but because they’re describing it accurately.
Take, for example, the statement that the Ryan plan would end Medicare as we know it. This may have Republicans screaming “Mediscare!” but it’s the absolute truth: The plan would replace our current system, in which the government pays major health costs, with a voucher system, in which seniors would, in effect, be handed a coupon and told to go find private coverage.
The new program might still be called Medicare — hey, we could replace government coverage of major expenses with an allowance of two free aspirins a day, and still call it “Medicare” — but it wouldn’t be the same program. And if the cost estimates of the Congressional Budget Office are at all right, the inadequate size of the vouchers — which by 2030 would cover only about a third of seniors’ health costs — would leave many if not most older Americans unable to afford essential care.
If anyone is lying here, it’s Mr. Ryan himself, who has claimed that his plan would give seniors the same kind of coverage that members of Congress receive — an assertion that is completely false.
And, by the way, the claim that the plan would keep Medicare as we know it intact for Americans currently 55 or older is highly dubious. True, that’s what the plan promises, but if you think about the political dynamics that would emerge once Americans born a year or two too late realize how much better a deal slightly older Americans are getting, you realize that this is a promise unlikely to be fulfilled.
Still, are Democrats doing a bad thing by telling the truth about the Ryan plan? “If you demagogue entitlement reform,” says Mr. Ryan, “you’re hastening a debt crisis; you’re bringing about Medicare’s collapse.” Maybe he should have a word with his colleagues who greeted the modest, realistic cost control efforts in the Affordable Care Act with cries of “death panels.”
Anyway, the underlying premise behind statements like that is the assumption that the Ryan plan represents a serious effort to come to grip with America’s long-run fiscal problems. But what became clear soon after that plan was unveiled was that it was no such thing. In fact, it wasn’t really a deficit-reduction plan. Once you remove the absurd assumptions — discretionary spending, including defense, falling to Calvin Coolidge levels, and huge tax cuts for corporations and the rich, with no loss in revenue? — it’s highly questionable whether it would reduce the deficit at all.
What the Ryan plan is, instead, is an attempt to snooker Americans into accepting a standard right-wing wish list under the guise of deficit reduction. And Americans, it seems, have seen through the deception.
So what happens now? The fight will shift from Medicare to Medicaid — a program that has become an essential lifeline for many Americans, especially children, but which in the Ryan plan is slated for a 44 percent cut in federal aid over the next decade. At this point, however, I’m optimistic that this initiative will also run aground on popular disapproval.
What of Mr. Ryan’s hope that voters will realize that they’ve been lied to? Well, as I see it, that’s already happening. And it’s bad news for the G.O.P.
by
Paul Krugman
Op-Ed Contributor: Squandering Medicare’s Money (May 26, 2011) Readers' Comments
"Ryan’s plan is a shell game at best
To be sure, Mr. Ryan had reason to be upset after Tuesday’s special election in New York’s 26th Congressional District. It’s a very conservative district, so much so that last year the Republican candidate took 76 percent of the vote. Yet on Tuesday, Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, took the seat, with a campaign focused squarely on Mr. Ryan’s plan to dismantle Medicare and replace it with a voucher system.
How did Ms. Hochul pull off this upset? The Wisconsin congressman blamed Democrats’ willingness to “shamelessly distort and demagogue the issue, trying to scare seniors to win an election,” and he predicted that by November of next year “the American people are going to know they’ve been lied to.”
You can understand Mr. Ryan’s bitterness. He has, after all, experienced quite a comedown over the course of the past seven weeks. Until his Medicare plan was rolled out in early April he had spent months bathing in warm approbation from many pundits, who had decided to anoint him as an icon of fiscal responsibility. And the plan itself received rapturous praise in the first couple of days after its release.
Then people who actually know how to read a budget proposal started looking at the plan. And that’s when everything started to fall apart.
Mr. Ryan may claim — and he may even believe — that he’s facing a backlash because his opponents are lying about his proposals. But the reality is that the Ryan plan is turning into a political disaster for Republicans, not because the plan’s critics are lying about it, but because they’re describing it accurately.
Take, for example, the statement that the Ryan plan would end Medicare as we know it. This may have Republicans screaming “Mediscare!” but it’s the absolute truth: The plan would replace our current system, in which the government pays major health costs, with a voucher system, in which seniors would, in effect, be handed a coupon and told to go find private coverage.
The new program might still be called Medicare — hey, we could replace government coverage of major expenses with an allowance of two free aspirins a day, and still call it “Medicare” — but it wouldn’t be the same program. And if the cost estimates of the Congressional Budget Office are at all right, the inadequate size of the vouchers — which by 2030 would cover only about a third of seniors’ health costs — would leave many if not most older Americans unable to afford essential care.
If anyone is lying here, it’s Mr. Ryan himself, who has claimed that his plan would give seniors the same kind of coverage that members of Congress receive — an assertion that is completely false.
And, by the way, the claim that the plan would keep Medicare as we know it intact for Americans currently 55 or older is highly dubious. True, that’s what the plan promises, but if you think about the political dynamics that would emerge once Americans born a year or two too late realize how much better a deal slightly older Americans are getting, you realize that this is a promise unlikely to be fulfilled.
Still, are Democrats doing a bad thing by telling the truth about the Ryan plan? “If you demagogue entitlement reform,” says Mr. Ryan, “you’re hastening a debt crisis; you’re bringing about Medicare’s collapse.” Maybe he should have a word with his colleagues who greeted the modest, realistic cost control efforts in the Affordable Care Act with cries of “death panels.”
Anyway, the underlying premise behind statements like that is the assumption that the Ryan plan represents a serious effort to come to grip with America’s long-run fiscal problems. But what became clear soon after that plan was unveiled was that it was no such thing. In fact, it wasn’t really a deficit-reduction plan. Once you remove the absurd assumptions — discretionary spending, including defense, falling to Calvin Coolidge levels, and huge tax cuts for corporations and the rich, with no loss in revenue? — it’s highly questionable whether it would reduce the deficit at all.
What the Ryan plan is, instead, is an attempt to snooker Americans into accepting a standard right-wing wish list under the guise of deficit reduction. And Americans, it seems, have seen through the deception.
So what happens now? The fight will shift from Medicare to Medicaid — a program that has become an essential lifeline for many Americans, especially children, but which in the Ryan plan is slated for a 44 percent cut in federal aid over the next decade. At this point, however, I’m optimistic that this initiative will also run aground on popular disapproval.
What of Mr. Ryan’s hope that voters will realize that they’ve been lied to? Well, as I see it, that’s already happening. And it’s bad news for the G.O.P.
Friday, May 27, 2011
Republican Death Wish
Berkeley; Author, 'Aftershock'
FROM Robert Reich
The Republican Death Wish
Posted: 05/26/11 12:22 PM ET
Forty Senate Republicans have now joined their colleagues in the House to support Paul Ryan's plan that would turn Medicare into vouchers that funnel money to private health insurers. They thumbed their nose at the special election in upstate New York earlier this week that delivered a victory to Democrat Kathy Hochul, who made the plan the focus of her upset victory.
So now it's official. The 2012 campaign will be about the future of Medicare. (Yes, it will also be about jobs, but the Republicans haven't come up with any credible ideas on that front, and the Democrats seem incapable of doing what needs to be done.)
This spells trouble for the GOP. Polls show an overwhelming majority of Americans -- even a majority of Republican voters -- want to preserve Medicare. They don't want to turn it over to private insurers.
It would be one thing if Republicans had consistency on their side. At least then they could take the high road and claim their plan is a principled way to achieve the aims of Medicare through market-based mechanisms. (It isn't, of course. It would end up squeezing seniors because it takes no account of the rising costs of health care.)
But they can't even claim consistency. Remember, this was the same GOP that attacked the President's health reform plan in 2010 by warning it would lead to Medicare cuts.
Former President Bill Clinton counsels Democrats not to say Medicare is fine the way it is. He's right. But instead of talking about Medicare as a problem to be fixed, Democrats should start talking about it as a potential solution to the challenge of rising health-care costs -- as well as to our long-term budget problem.
Can we be clear about that budget problem? It's not driven by Medicare. It's driven by the same relentlessly soaring health-care costs that are pushing premiums through the roof and causing middle-class families to shell out more and more money for deductibles and co-payments.
Some features of Obama's new healthcare law will slow the rise -- insurance exchanges, for example, could give consumers clearer comparative information about what they're getting for their insurance payments -- but the law doesn't go nearly far enough.
That's why Democrats should be proposing that anyone be allowed to sign up for Medicare. Medicare is cheaper than private insurance because its administrative costs are so much lower, and it has vast economies of scale.
If Medicare were allowed to use its potential bargaining leverage over America's hospitals, doctors, drug companies, and medical providers, it could drive down costs even further.
And it could force the nation's broken health-care system to do something it must do but has resisted with a vengeance: Focus on healthy outcomes rather on costly inputs. If Medicare paid for results -- not tests, procedures, drugs, and hospital stays, but results -- it could give Americans better health at lower cost.
Let the GOP go after Medicare. That will do more to elect Democrats in 2012 than anything else. But it would be wise and politically astute for Democrats to go beyond just defending Medicare. Strengthen and build upon it. Use it to reform American health care and, not incidentally, rescue the federal budget.
FROM Robert Reich
The Republican Death Wish
Posted: 05/26/11 12:22 PM ET
Forty Senate Republicans have now joined their colleagues in the House to support Paul Ryan's plan that would turn Medicare into vouchers that funnel money to private health insurers. They thumbed their nose at the special election in upstate New York earlier this week that delivered a victory to Democrat Kathy Hochul, who made the plan the focus of her upset victory.
So now it's official. The 2012 campaign will be about the future of Medicare. (Yes, it will also be about jobs, but the Republicans haven't come up with any credible ideas on that front, and the Democrats seem incapable of doing what needs to be done.)
This spells trouble for the GOP. Polls show an overwhelming majority of Americans -- even a majority of Republican voters -- want to preserve Medicare. They don't want to turn it over to private insurers.
It would be one thing if Republicans had consistency on their side. At least then they could take the high road and claim their plan is a principled way to achieve the aims of Medicare through market-based mechanisms. (It isn't, of course. It would end up squeezing seniors because it takes no account of the rising costs of health care.)
But they can't even claim consistency. Remember, this was the same GOP that attacked the President's health reform plan in 2010 by warning it would lead to Medicare cuts.
Former President Bill Clinton counsels Democrats not to say Medicare is fine the way it is. He's right. But instead of talking about Medicare as a problem to be fixed, Democrats should start talking about it as a potential solution to the challenge of rising health-care costs -- as well as to our long-term budget problem.
Can we be clear about that budget problem? It's not driven by Medicare. It's driven by the same relentlessly soaring health-care costs that are pushing premiums through the roof and causing middle-class families to shell out more and more money for deductibles and co-payments.
Some features of Obama's new healthcare law will slow the rise -- insurance exchanges, for example, could give consumers clearer comparative information about what they're getting for their insurance payments -- but the law doesn't go nearly far enough.
That's why Democrats should be proposing that anyone be allowed to sign up for Medicare. Medicare is cheaper than private insurance because its administrative costs are so much lower, and it has vast economies of scale.
If Medicare were allowed to use its potential bargaining leverage over America's hospitals, doctors, drug companies, and medical providers, it could drive down costs even further.
And it could force the nation's broken health-care system to do something it must do but has resisted with a vengeance: Focus on healthy outcomes rather on costly inputs. If Medicare paid for results -- not tests, procedures, drugs, and hospital stays, but results -- it could give Americans better health at lower cost.
Let the GOP go after Medicare. That will do more to elect Democrats in 2012 than anything else. But it would be wise and politically astute for Democrats to go beyond just defending Medicare. Strengthen and build upon it. Use it to reform American health care and, not incidentally, rescue the federal budget.
Thursday, May 26, 2011
The Tax Freeloader Myth
Jonathan Chait from The New Republic
The Tax Freeloader Myth The Tax Freeloader Myth May 26, 2011
The right-wing talking point that half of all Americans pay no income tax keeps circulating endlessly. Chuck Marr and Brian Highsmith of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities gives it the thorough debunking it so badly deserves. Summary:
The 51 percent figure is an anomaly that reflects the unique circumstances of 2009, when the recession greatly swelled the number of Americans with low incomes and when temporary tax cuts created by the 2009 Recovery Act — including the “Making Work Pay” tax credit and an exclusion from tax of the first $2,400 in unemployment benefits — were in effect. Together, these developments removed millions of Americans from the federal income tax rolls. Both of these temporary tax measures have since expired. In a more typical year, 35 percent to 40 percent of households owe no federal income tax. In 2007, the figure was 37.9 percent.
The 51 percent figure covers only the federal income tax and ignores the substantial amounts of other federal taxes — especially the payroll tax — that many of these households pay . As a result, it greatly overstates the share of households that do not pay any federal taxes. Data from the Urban Institute-Brookings Tax Policy Center show only about 14 percent of households paid neither federal income tax nor payroll tax in 2009, despite the high unemployment and temporary tax cuts that marked that year.
This percentage would be even lower if federal excise taxes on gasoline and other items were taken into account.
Most of the people who pay neither federal income tax nor payroll taxes are low-income people who are elderly, unable to work due to a serious disability, or students, most of whom subsequently become taxpayers. (In a year like 2009, this group also includes a significant number of people who have been unemployed the entire year and cannot find work.)
Moreover, low-income households as a whole do, in fact, pay federal taxes. Congressional Budget Office data show that the poorest fifth of households as a group paid an average of 4 percent of their incomes in federal taxes in 2007 (the latest year for which these data are available), not an insignificant amount given how modest these households’ incomes are — the poorest fifth of households had average income of $18,400 in 2007. The next-to-the bottom fifth — those with incomes between $20,500 and $34,300 in 2007 — paid an average of 10 percent of their incomes in federal taxes.
Even these figures understate low-income households’ total tax burden, because these households also pay substantial state and local taxes. Data from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy show that the poorest fifth of households paid a stunning 12.3 percent of their incomes in state and local taxes in 2010.
When all federal, state, and local taxes are taken into account,the bottom fifth of households paid 16.3 percent of their incomes in taxes, on average, in 2010. The second-poorest fifth paid 20.7 percent.
It's worth pulling out the part about state and local taxes. Our federal system devolves a significant share of government responsibility to state and local government, which overall charge higher tax rates to the poor than to the rich:
You need a progressive federal tax system merely to compensate for the regressivity of state and local taxes. And, of course, conservative politicians at the state and local level favor the most regressive tax systems, and conservative politicians at the federal level favor devolving more federal functions to the state and local level, where they'll be funded by regressive rather than progressive taxation.
The Tax Freeloader Myth The Tax Freeloader Myth May 26, 2011
The right-wing talking point that half of all Americans pay no income tax keeps circulating endlessly. Chuck Marr and Brian Highsmith of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities gives it the thorough debunking it so badly deserves. Summary:
The 51 percent figure is an anomaly that reflects the unique circumstances of 2009, when the recession greatly swelled the number of Americans with low incomes and when temporary tax cuts created by the 2009 Recovery Act — including the “Making Work Pay” tax credit and an exclusion from tax of the first $2,400 in unemployment benefits — were in effect. Together, these developments removed millions of Americans from the federal income tax rolls. Both of these temporary tax measures have since expired. In a more typical year, 35 percent to 40 percent of households owe no federal income tax. In 2007, the figure was 37.9 percent.
The 51 percent figure covers only the federal income tax and ignores the substantial amounts of other federal taxes — especially the payroll tax — that many of these households pay . As a result, it greatly overstates the share of households that do not pay any federal taxes. Data from the Urban Institute-Brookings Tax Policy Center show only about 14 percent of households paid neither federal income tax nor payroll tax in 2009, despite the high unemployment and temporary tax cuts that marked that year.
This percentage would be even lower if federal excise taxes on gasoline and other items were taken into account.
Most of the people who pay neither federal income tax nor payroll taxes are low-income people who are elderly, unable to work due to a serious disability, or students, most of whom subsequently become taxpayers. (In a year like 2009, this group also includes a significant number of people who have been unemployed the entire year and cannot find work.)
Moreover, low-income households as a whole do, in fact, pay federal taxes. Congressional Budget Office data show that the poorest fifth of households as a group paid an average of 4 percent of their incomes in federal taxes in 2007 (the latest year for which these data are available), not an insignificant amount given how modest these households’ incomes are — the poorest fifth of households had average income of $18,400 in 2007. The next-to-the bottom fifth — those with incomes between $20,500 and $34,300 in 2007 — paid an average of 10 percent of their incomes in federal taxes.
Even these figures understate low-income households’ total tax burden, because these households also pay substantial state and local taxes. Data from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy show that the poorest fifth of households paid a stunning 12.3 percent of their incomes in state and local taxes in 2010.
When all federal, state, and local taxes are taken into account,the bottom fifth of households paid 16.3 percent of their incomes in taxes, on average, in 2010. The second-poorest fifth paid 20.7 percent.
It's worth pulling out the part about state and local taxes. Our federal system devolves a significant share of government responsibility to state and local government, which overall charge higher tax rates to the poor than to the rich:
You need a progressive federal tax system merely to compensate for the regressivity of state and local taxes. And, of course, conservative politicians at the state and local level favor the most regressive tax systems, and conservative politicians at the federal level favor devolving more federal functions to the state and local level, where they'll be funded by regressive rather than progressive taxation.
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Healthcare Reform Wednesday, May 25, 2011 14:26 ET
War Room Paul Ryan still doesn't get it
By Robert Reich
Republican House Budget chief Paul Ryan still doesn't get it. He blames Tuesday's upset victory of Democrat Kathy Hochul over Republican Jane Corwin to represent New York's 26th congressional district on Democratic scare tactics.
Hochul had focused like a laser on the Republican plan to turn Medicare into vouchers that would funnel the money to private health insurers. Republicans didn't exactly take it lying down. The National Republican Congressional Committee poured over $400,000 into the race, and Karl Rove's American Crossroads provided Corwin an additional $700,000 of support. But the money didn't work. Even in this traditionally Republican district -- represented in the past by such GOP notables as Jack Kemp and William Miller, both of whom would become vice presidential candidates -- Hochul's message hit home.
Ryan calls it "demagoguery," accusing Hochul and her fellow Democrats of trying to "scare seniors into thinking that their current benefits are being affected."
Scare tactics? Seniors have every right to be scared. His plan would eviscerate Medicare by privatizing it with vouchers that would fall further and further behind the rising cost of health insurance. And Ryan and the Republicans offer no means of slowing rising health-care costs. To the contrary, they want to repeal every cost-containment measure enacted in last year's health-reform legislation. The inevitable result: More and more seniors would be priced out of the market for health care.
The Ryan plan has put Republicans in a corner. Some, like Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown and, briefly, presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich, are rejecting the plan altogether. Most, though, are holding on and holding their breath. After all, House Republicans approved it -- and voters don't especially like flip-floppers.
Continue reading
Senate Democrats will bring the Ryan plan for a vote Thursday in order to force Senate Republicans on the record. Watch closely.
Some GOP stalwarts say the Party must clarify its message -- a sure sign of panic. Former Republican congressman Rick Lazio says the GOP "must do [a] better job explaining entitlements."
It's just possible the public knows exactly what entitlements are -- and is getting a clear message about what Republicans are up to.
All this should give the White House and Democratic budget negotiators more confidence -- and more bargaining leverage -- to put tax cuts on the rich squarely on the table.
And, while they're at it, turn Medicare into a "Medicare-for-all" system that forces doctors and hospitals to shift from costly tests, drugs, and procedures having little effect, to healthy outcomes.
War Room Paul Ryan still doesn't get it
By Robert Reich
Republican House Budget chief Paul Ryan still doesn't get it. He blames Tuesday's upset victory of Democrat Kathy Hochul over Republican Jane Corwin to represent New York's 26th congressional district on Democratic scare tactics.
Hochul had focused like a laser on the Republican plan to turn Medicare into vouchers that would funnel the money to private health insurers. Republicans didn't exactly take it lying down. The National Republican Congressional Committee poured over $400,000 into the race, and Karl Rove's American Crossroads provided Corwin an additional $700,000 of support. But the money didn't work. Even in this traditionally Republican district -- represented in the past by such GOP notables as Jack Kemp and William Miller, both of whom would become vice presidential candidates -- Hochul's message hit home.
Ryan calls it "demagoguery," accusing Hochul and her fellow Democrats of trying to "scare seniors into thinking that their current benefits are being affected."
Scare tactics? Seniors have every right to be scared. His plan would eviscerate Medicare by privatizing it with vouchers that would fall further and further behind the rising cost of health insurance. And Ryan and the Republicans offer no means of slowing rising health-care costs. To the contrary, they want to repeal every cost-containment measure enacted in last year's health-reform legislation. The inevitable result: More and more seniors would be priced out of the market for health care.
The Ryan plan has put Republicans in a corner. Some, like Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown and, briefly, presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich, are rejecting the plan altogether. Most, though, are holding on and holding their breath. After all, House Republicans approved it -- and voters don't especially like flip-floppers.
Continue reading
Senate Democrats will bring the Ryan plan for a vote Thursday in order to force Senate Republicans on the record. Watch closely.
Some GOP stalwarts say the Party must clarify its message -- a sure sign of panic. Former Republican congressman Rick Lazio says the GOP "must do [a] better job explaining entitlements."
It's just possible the public knows exactly what entitlements are -- and is getting a clear message about what Republicans are up to.
All this should give the White House and Democratic budget negotiators more confidence -- and more bargaining leverage -- to put tax cuts on the rich squarely on the table.
And, while they're at it, turn Medicare into a "Medicare-for-all" system that forces doctors and hospitals to shift from costly tests, drugs, and procedures having little effect, to healthy outcomes.
Sorry Republicans
If you let Republicans alone, they will eventually show their true selves and hopefully destroy themselves politically for their views do not match the views of 70% of the electorate.
Jonathan Chait
The Root Cause Of The GOP's Huge Mistake What Do Republicans Do Next On Medicare? May 25, 2011
Pulling back a bit, there's a pretty simple reason why the Republican budget is so toxic. Republicans have a programmatic view of the federal government that is shared by just a tiny minority of Americans. This is not an insurmountable problem. There are many ways around it -- you can try to organize politics around foreign policy or issues of personal character, or you can try to keep the debate over taxes and spending on the level of abstraction, where Republicans are on firmer ground.
One favored tactic has been to keep the issues of taxes and spending separate. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush passed large tax cuts that mathematically implied the need for cuts in popular spending programs. But they fiercely denied the implication, and left the work of spending cuts for the future, so that the tax cutting could proceed without any acknowledgement of the priorities it required. Indeed, Republicans understood very clearly that obscuring the trade-off was the entire key to gaining public acceptance:
Disillusioned former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill has released a stunning internal memo, dating from the unveiling of the Bush administration’s first round of tax cuts in 2001. Its author was Michele Davis, a high-level Treasury official and participant in daily meetings on the administration’s communications strategy. There is every reason to believe that her memo, generated for a pivotal, high-profile public appearance of the administration’s top economic spokesman, reflects strategies developed at the highest level. It begins innocently enough: O’Neill is asked to plug tax cuts at a press event unveiling the President’s first budget. Then, however, Davis warns: “The public prefers spending on things like health care and education over cutting taxes.”
Davis writes that it is, instead, simply a reason to avoid talking about any trade-offs that tax cuts might entail: “It’s crucial that you make clear that there are no trade-offs here….Roll-out events like this are the clearest examples of when staying on message is absolutely crucial. Any deviation…will change the way coverage plays out from tomorrow forward.”
Of course, this political method naturally leads to very large deficits. The Republicans have now fashioned themselves as the party of fiscal discipline, an imperative that drove them to do something they haven't tried since 1995 -- actually lay out a budget that reconciled their priorities on spending and taxing. This was a huge mistake. As happened in 1995, this laid bare the wild unpopularity if their choices.
Lots of things happened to let Democrats win a special election in NY-26 where they were expected to get crushed. But the most important is simply that Republicans were forced to defend highly unpopular priorities on the basic question of government's role. Henry Olson of the American Enterprise Institute explains why:
As I’ve written before, blue-collar voters react differently to issues than the GOP base does. They are more supportive of safety-net programs at the same time as they are strongly opposed to large government programs in general. These voters crave stability and are uncertain of their ability to compete in a globalized economy that values higher education more each year. They are also susceptible to the age-old Democratic argument that the secret Republican agenda is to eviscerate middle-class entitlements to fund tax cuts for the wealthy.
As David Frum explains, that age-old argument happens to be true:
Ryan’s plan cuts the top rate of personal and corporate income tax from 36% to 25% with promises of offsetting revenue raisers to be determined later.
Because Ryan’s tax cuts were specific and his promises of revenue-raising reform ultra-vague, he had no defense to the attack that his tax reform involves massive downward redistribution of the tax burden. And after all, it’s hard to imagine what tax enhancements would counteract the distributional effect of a cut in the top rate of income tax from 36% to 25%. Ending the mortgage interest deduction for mortgages of between $417,000 and $1,000,000 (a good idea!) would not do it. Ending the deductibility of state and local taxes (another good idea) would not do it. A carbon tax (good idea again) for sure would not do it. Ditto a VAT. All of those measures would be good ways to raise additional revenues while leaving the current rates in place. But as offsets to a huge upper-income tax cut, they look like a shift of the tax burden from the upper class to the more affluent parts of the middle class at the same time as the rest of the Ryan budget removes Medicare coverage from the more affluent parts of the middle class – and leaves the remainder of Medicare very probably increasingly inadequate even for poorer Americans.
The one thing that might have enhanced the attractiveness of the Ryan Medicare plan is some kind of assurance of adequacy of the future Medicare vouchers for Americans under age 55.
Remember, under the Ryan plan, not only are Medicare vouchers means-tested, but they are also scheduled to grow in value at a deliberately slow pace. Today’s 40-somethings have good reason to fear that the vouchers will prove inadequate when it comes their time to retire.
It's remarkable that Republicans have voluntarily placed themselves in a position where they're fighting a high-salience battle on an issue where the public overwhelmingly opposes their position. It's not as if Republicans were completely unaware of this problem. They did take one step to reduce their political exposure -- exempt anybody over 55 years of age from cuts to Medicare, in the hopes that this would neutralize the opposition of those voters most focused on Medicare. They also hoped they could skate through by, as one Republican put it, "muddying the waters."
And, indeed, Jane Corwin desperately tried to outflank her opponent to the left on Medicare. But muddying the waters is hard when you put some numbers down on paper and voted for them.
Jonathan Chait
The Root Cause Of The GOP's Huge Mistake What Do Republicans Do Next On Medicare? May 25, 2011
Pulling back a bit, there's a pretty simple reason why the Republican budget is so toxic. Republicans have a programmatic view of the federal government that is shared by just a tiny minority of Americans. This is not an insurmountable problem. There are many ways around it -- you can try to organize politics around foreign policy or issues of personal character, or you can try to keep the debate over taxes and spending on the level of abstraction, where Republicans are on firmer ground.
One favored tactic has been to keep the issues of taxes and spending separate. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush passed large tax cuts that mathematically implied the need for cuts in popular spending programs. But they fiercely denied the implication, and left the work of spending cuts for the future, so that the tax cutting could proceed without any acknowledgement of the priorities it required. Indeed, Republicans understood very clearly that obscuring the trade-off was the entire key to gaining public acceptance:
Disillusioned former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill has released a stunning internal memo, dating from the unveiling of the Bush administration’s first round of tax cuts in 2001. Its author was Michele Davis, a high-level Treasury official and participant in daily meetings on the administration’s communications strategy. There is every reason to believe that her memo, generated for a pivotal, high-profile public appearance of the administration’s top economic spokesman, reflects strategies developed at the highest level. It begins innocently enough: O’Neill is asked to plug tax cuts at a press event unveiling the President’s first budget. Then, however, Davis warns: “The public prefers spending on things like health care and education over cutting taxes.”
Davis writes that it is, instead, simply a reason to avoid talking about any trade-offs that tax cuts might entail: “It’s crucial that you make clear that there are no trade-offs here….Roll-out events like this are the clearest examples of when staying on message is absolutely crucial. Any deviation…will change the way coverage plays out from tomorrow forward.”
Of course, this political method naturally leads to very large deficits. The Republicans have now fashioned themselves as the party of fiscal discipline, an imperative that drove them to do something they haven't tried since 1995 -- actually lay out a budget that reconciled their priorities on spending and taxing. This was a huge mistake. As happened in 1995, this laid bare the wild unpopularity if their choices.
Lots of things happened to let Democrats win a special election in NY-26 where they were expected to get crushed. But the most important is simply that Republicans were forced to defend highly unpopular priorities on the basic question of government's role. Henry Olson of the American Enterprise Institute explains why:
As I’ve written before, blue-collar voters react differently to issues than the GOP base does. They are more supportive of safety-net programs at the same time as they are strongly opposed to large government programs in general. These voters crave stability and are uncertain of their ability to compete in a globalized economy that values higher education more each year. They are also susceptible to the age-old Democratic argument that the secret Republican agenda is to eviscerate middle-class entitlements to fund tax cuts for the wealthy.
As David Frum explains, that age-old argument happens to be true:
Ryan’s plan cuts the top rate of personal and corporate income tax from 36% to 25% with promises of offsetting revenue raisers to be determined later.
Because Ryan’s tax cuts were specific and his promises of revenue-raising reform ultra-vague, he had no defense to the attack that his tax reform involves massive downward redistribution of the tax burden. And after all, it’s hard to imagine what tax enhancements would counteract the distributional effect of a cut in the top rate of income tax from 36% to 25%. Ending the mortgage interest deduction for mortgages of between $417,000 and $1,000,000 (a good idea!) would not do it. Ending the deductibility of state and local taxes (another good idea) would not do it. A carbon tax (good idea again) for sure would not do it. Ditto a VAT. All of those measures would be good ways to raise additional revenues while leaving the current rates in place. But as offsets to a huge upper-income tax cut, they look like a shift of the tax burden from the upper class to the more affluent parts of the middle class at the same time as the rest of the Ryan budget removes Medicare coverage from the more affluent parts of the middle class – and leaves the remainder of Medicare very probably increasingly inadequate even for poorer Americans.
The one thing that might have enhanced the attractiveness of the Ryan Medicare plan is some kind of assurance of adequacy of the future Medicare vouchers for Americans under age 55.
Remember, under the Ryan plan, not only are Medicare vouchers means-tested, but they are also scheduled to grow in value at a deliberately slow pace. Today’s 40-somethings have good reason to fear that the vouchers will prove inadequate when it comes their time to retire.
It's remarkable that Republicans have voluntarily placed themselves in a position where they're fighting a high-salience battle on an issue where the public overwhelmingly opposes their position. It's not as if Republicans were completely unaware of this problem. They did take one step to reduce their political exposure -- exempt anybody over 55 years of age from cuts to Medicare, in the hopes that this would neutralize the opposition of those voters most focused on Medicare. They also hoped they could skate through by, as one Republican put it, "muddying the waters."
And, indeed, Jane Corwin desperately tried to outflank her opponent to the left on Medicare. But muddying the waters is hard when you put some numbers down on paper and voted for them.
Paper vs. Machine
The Nook May Be New, But Paper Books Are Still Going Strong
James Downie
Joplin, Missouri: The Latest Tornado in A Deadly 2011Barnes & Noble introduced the latest version of its Nook e-reader today at its Union Square store in Manhattan, with a considerable amount of hoopla. (The New York Times drily noted, "Barnes & Noble did its best to heighten the theater of the event, surrounding the seated news media with dozens of employees dressed in black, who loudly applauded, hooted and whistled throughout the presentation by William Lynch, the chief executive of Barnes & Noble. Many of the employees headed for the exits immediately after the event.") Still, Barnes & Noble has plenty to be proud of: The Nook now commands over 25% of the e-reader market, and, with e-books outselling paper books on rival vendor Amazon, it looks as if the bookseller has carved out a solid portion of a fast-growing market. But are paper books going the way of horse-drawn carriages, cassettes, and AOL email accounts?
Not yet, at least according to a March survey of college students around the country by the National Association of College Stores. The percent of students owning an e-reader did nearly double from five months earlier, from 8% to 15%, and nearly 40% said they had used a "dedicated e-reader." However, even among a demographic that could reasonably expected to be "early adopters" of e-readers, 75% of students surveyed said "if the choice was entirely theirs, they would select a print textbook" rather than an e-book. NACS's release did not discuss the reasons for such a large majority, but it's likely that college students in this survey ran into the same problems that students in a pilot Kindle program did, such as the lack of easy-to-use notetaking software, and the difficulty in finding a previously-read passage. Take heart, then, senior citizens: "kids these days" aren't always obsessed with technology.
James Downie
Joplin, Missouri: The Latest Tornado in A Deadly 2011Barnes & Noble introduced the latest version of its Nook e-reader today at its Union Square store in Manhattan, with a considerable amount of hoopla. (The New York Times drily noted, "Barnes & Noble did its best to heighten the theater of the event, surrounding the seated news media with dozens of employees dressed in black, who loudly applauded, hooted and whistled throughout the presentation by William Lynch, the chief executive of Barnes & Noble. Many of the employees headed for the exits immediately after the event.") Still, Barnes & Noble has plenty to be proud of: The Nook now commands over 25% of the e-reader market, and, with e-books outselling paper books on rival vendor Amazon, it looks as if the bookseller has carved out a solid portion of a fast-growing market. But are paper books going the way of horse-drawn carriages, cassettes, and AOL email accounts?
Not yet, at least according to a March survey of college students around the country by the National Association of College Stores. The percent of students owning an e-reader did nearly double from five months earlier, from 8% to 15%, and nearly 40% said they had used a "dedicated e-reader." However, even among a demographic that could reasonably expected to be "early adopters" of e-readers, 75% of students surveyed said "if the choice was entirely theirs, they would select a print textbook" rather than an e-book. NACS's release did not discuss the reasons for such a large majority, but it's likely that college students in this survey ran into the same problems that students in a pilot Kindle program did, such as the lack of easy-to-use notetaking software, and the difficulty in finding a previously-read passage. Take heart, then, senior citizens: "kids these days" aren't always obsessed with technology.
Ominous News for Republicans
May 24, 2011 11:38 PM Print Text
Kathy Hochul's special election triumph sends Republicans ominous Medicare message
By Brian Montopoli
Some Republicans are already saying that Democrat Kathy Hochul's apparent special election victory over Republican Jane Corwin in a conservative upstate New York district doesn't mean much: It's just one district, after all, and there was a wildcard in the race in the form of independent candidate Jack Davis, who siphoned votes that would otherwise have gone to Corwin.
But even the most optimistic Republicans privately recognize that Hochul's upset victory is an ominous sign for their party. Pre-election polling showed that the number one issue in the district - where 40 percent of the electorate is over 55 years old - was Medicare. All but four House Republicans voted for the Paul Ryan budget that would turn Medicare into a voucher system in ten years; Hochul seized on that vote to cast Republicans generally and Corwin specifically as seeking to gut the program, and it worked. Expect nearly every Democrat seeking to unseat a Republican next year to follow her playbook.
In a celebratory statement just after the results were announced, Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz said the result was a victory "for Americans who believe that our elected leaders should fight to protect Medicare and ensure that our government works for our seniors, working families and young people."
Wasserman Schultz noted that the representative Hochul will replace - Republican Chris Lee, who resigned after sending a shirtless photograph of himself to a woman he met on Craigslist - won 74 percent of the vote in his last election. Carl Paladino, the Republican gubernatorial candidate who lost badly to Democrat Andrew Cuomo last year, took 61 percent of the vote in the district in November.
N.Y. Congressional race defies expectations
"Kathy's Republican opponent, and those who spent a small fortune on her behalf in a solidly Republican district, found out the hard way that their extreme plans to abolish Medicare and slash Medicaid and investments in health care, education, innovation and job creation are wrongheaded and unpopular even in a district that should have been a cakewalk for the Republican candidate," she said.
Both the national parties and outside interest groups spent lavishly to influence the outcome of the race because they knew that it would send a message about GOP prospects in the 2012 election. (The parties also called in heavy hitters like John Boehner and Bill Clinton to make the case for their preferred candidate.) Hochul's victory could make it harder for Republicans to recruit the best candidates - they won't want to run if they think they will lose - and energize Democratic donors for whom taking back the House suddenly doesn't seem like such a remote possibility.
The Republican-aligned outside group American Crossroads sent out a statement after the vote acknowledging the message sent by the special election, calling it "a wake-up call for anyone who thinks that 2012 will be just like 2010," when Republicans took the House from the Democrats.
"It's going to be a tougher environment, Democrats will be more competitive, and we need to play at the top of our game to win big next year," American Crossroads president and CEO Steven Law said.
Officially, however, the Republican Party is playing down the results, with National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Pete Sessions pointing to Davis' presence in the race and saying that "to predict the future based on the results of this unusual race is naive and risky."
"History shows one important fact: the results of competitive special elections from Hawaii to New York are poor indicators of broader trends or future general election outcomes," he said. "If special elections were an early warning system, they sure failed to alert the Democrats of the political tsunami that flooded their ranks in 2010."
Before the vote, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor also said the election wasn't a referendum on the Medicare vote, arguing that Davis' presence skewed the vote. "I know this town loves to take signals from individual races," he told reporters. "I think the best signal you can take is the 63 seats that we picked up in November."
Perhaps. But the voters are suggesting otherwise. "I have almost always voted the party line," Republican Hochul voter Gloria Bolender told the New York Times. "This is the second time in my life I've voted against my party." Added Republican Pat Gillick, who also voted for the Democrat: "The privatization of Medicare scares me."
Cantor himself was quick to cast Massachusetts Republican Sen. Scott Brown's upset special election victory last January as a referendum on the Democratic Party. Republicans knew their vote on Medicare was risky, but it was one they chose to cast anyway (in a purely symbolic vote) in an apparent effort to show their Tea Party supporters that they were serious about addressing the deficit and debt. It's a decision that Tuesday's results suggest they may live to regret.
Kathy Hochul's special election triumph sends Republicans ominous Medicare message
By Brian Montopoli
Some Republicans are already saying that Democrat Kathy Hochul's apparent special election victory over Republican Jane Corwin in a conservative upstate New York district doesn't mean much: It's just one district, after all, and there was a wildcard in the race in the form of independent candidate Jack Davis, who siphoned votes that would otherwise have gone to Corwin.
But even the most optimistic Republicans privately recognize that Hochul's upset victory is an ominous sign for their party. Pre-election polling showed that the number one issue in the district - where 40 percent of the electorate is over 55 years old - was Medicare. All but four House Republicans voted for the Paul Ryan budget that would turn Medicare into a voucher system in ten years; Hochul seized on that vote to cast Republicans generally and Corwin specifically as seeking to gut the program, and it worked. Expect nearly every Democrat seeking to unseat a Republican next year to follow her playbook.
In a celebratory statement just after the results were announced, Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz said the result was a victory "for Americans who believe that our elected leaders should fight to protect Medicare and ensure that our government works for our seniors, working families and young people."
Wasserman Schultz noted that the representative Hochul will replace - Republican Chris Lee, who resigned after sending a shirtless photograph of himself to a woman he met on Craigslist - won 74 percent of the vote in his last election. Carl Paladino, the Republican gubernatorial candidate who lost badly to Democrat Andrew Cuomo last year, took 61 percent of the vote in the district in November.
N.Y. Congressional race defies expectations
"Kathy's Republican opponent, and those who spent a small fortune on her behalf in a solidly Republican district, found out the hard way that their extreme plans to abolish Medicare and slash Medicaid and investments in health care, education, innovation and job creation are wrongheaded and unpopular even in a district that should have been a cakewalk for the Republican candidate," she said.
Both the national parties and outside interest groups spent lavishly to influence the outcome of the race because they knew that it would send a message about GOP prospects in the 2012 election. (The parties also called in heavy hitters like John Boehner and Bill Clinton to make the case for their preferred candidate.) Hochul's victory could make it harder for Republicans to recruit the best candidates - they won't want to run if they think they will lose - and energize Democratic donors for whom taking back the House suddenly doesn't seem like such a remote possibility.
The Republican-aligned outside group American Crossroads sent out a statement after the vote acknowledging the message sent by the special election, calling it "a wake-up call for anyone who thinks that 2012 will be just like 2010," when Republicans took the House from the Democrats.
"It's going to be a tougher environment, Democrats will be more competitive, and we need to play at the top of our game to win big next year," American Crossroads president and CEO Steven Law said.
Officially, however, the Republican Party is playing down the results, with National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Pete Sessions pointing to Davis' presence in the race and saying that "to predict the future based on the results of this unusual race is naive and risky."
"History shows one important fact: the results of competitive special elections from Hawaii to New York are poor indicators of broader trends or future general election outcomes," he said. "If special elections were an early warning system, they sure failed to alert the Democrats of the political tsunami that flooded their ranks in 2010."
Before the vote, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor also said the election wasn't a referendum on the Medicare vote, arguing that Davis' presence skewed the vote. "I know this town loves to take signals from individual races," he told reporters. "I think the best signal you can take is the 63 seats that we picked up in November."
Perhaps. But the voters are suggesting otherwise. "I have almost always voted the party line," Republican Hochul voter Gloria Bolender told the New York Times. "This is the second time in my life I've voted against my party." Added Republican Pat Gillick, who also voted for the Democrat: "The privatization of Medicare scares me."
Cantor himself was quick to cast Massachusetts Republican Sen. Scott Brown's upset special election victory last January as a referendum on the Democratic Party. Republicans knew their vote on Medicare was risky, but it was one they chose to cast anyway (in a purely symbolic vote) in an apparent effort to show their Tea Party supporters that they were serious about addressing the deficit and debt. It's a decision that Tuesday's results suggest they may live to regret.
Monday, May 23, 2011
Bruce Watson - Freedom Summer (2)
This is a marvelous book of important history and anecdotes about what is called the Freedom Rides of 1964. In 2011 it's hard to imagine that this summer in Mississippi really happened.
We're talking about the acme of the modern civil rights movement which started with the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955/56. Mississippi was already inflamed with the Emmitt Till muder in 1955 and the bloody integration of Ole Miss in 1963. The state was the epitome of the apartheid---rigid segregation, the "Southern way of life"--that existed in the Confederate South.
Led by a truly heroic man named Bob Moses, a bunch of lily white Ivy League type of college students were recruited to go into Mississippi and register African Americans to vote in a state where less than 3% of Blacks were registered to vote.
The violence of that summer is amazing in retrospect. The most celebrated violence was the murder of 3 those college students in Philadelphia on June 21, 1964. Justice was never done. Five of the alleged perps were convicted of violating the students's consitutuional rights, a federal charge, and the only other conviction was one of the murders for manslaughter. It took many years for these charges to be tried. It was a travesty of justice.
During that summer, the famous Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed. The voting rights act came the following year. The South was changed forever.
We're talking about the acme of the modern civil rights movement which started with the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955/56. Mississippi was already inflamed with the Emmitt Till muder in 1955 and the bloody integration of Ole Miss in 1963. The state was the epitome of the apartheid---rigid segregation, the "Southern way of life"--that existed in the Confederate South.
Led by a truly heroic man named Bob Moses, a bunch of lily white Ivy League type of college students were recruited to go into Mississippi and register African Americans to vote in a state where less than 3% of Blacks were registered to vote.
The violence of that summer is amazing in retrospect. The most celebrated violence was the murder of 3 those college students in Philadelphia on June 21, 1964. Justice was never done. Five of the alleged perps were convicted of violating the students's consitutuional rights, a federal charge, and the only other conviction was one of the murders for manslaughter. It took many years for these charges to be tried. It was a travesty of justice.
During that summer, the famous Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed. The voting rights act came the following year. The South was changed forever.
Friday, May 20, 2011
The Two Parties
Our Asymmetrical Parties
Jonathan Chait
Michael Gerson has a pretty interesting column noticing that the Democratic Party is riven in two, while the Republican Party is unified:
Republican leaders have proved themselves capable of producing proposals that unite perhaps 90 percent of their congressional delegation, losing just a thin margin at each end of their ideological spectrum. But the job is made easier by the narrowness of the Republican ideological spectrum. A party that used to range from moderates to Reagan conservatives now ranges from Reagan conservatives to Tea Party conservatives, both offended by President Obama’s fiscal excesses.
On fiscal issues, the Democratic Party is really two parties. One consists of European-style social democrats, represented by leaders such as Nancy Pelosi. ...
The other Democratic Party is socially liberal and pro-business. These Democrats attempted to weed out the excesses of Obama’s health reform in the Senate.
Gerson doesn't attempt to explain the cause of this asymmetry, which has long interested me. My argument is that it reflects two interrelated things. Economically, the GOP has a relatively unified base: business. Of course, businesses can disagree with each other, but the business perspective is relatively unified on economic questions. The Democrats, by contrast, have an economic base holding together business as well as labor and environmentalists. It's a highly fractured coalition.
The ideological asymmetry, which in many ways stems from the underlying economic asymmetry, is that the Republican Party is the political arm of the conservative movement, whereas the progressive movement -- to the extent one even exists -- is merely one actor jockeying for influence within the Democratic Party. The Republican Party has a coherent economic philosophy -- government intervention bad -- whereas the Democratic Party is primarily a catchbasin for those who disagree with the Republican philosophy. (One result of this asymmetry is that, as Jacob Weisberg notes, the GOP is uniquely prone of constructing an alternate reality impervious to expertise and data.)
Naturally, Gerson imbues his argument with a pro-Republican spin. The GOP is the party of fiscal seriousness, he argues, belying the entire history of the last three decades, and especially the history of the presidency he worked for. Gerson argues that most Democrats are European-style social Democrats, citing as his evidence the fact "that they would have preferred a single-payer health-care system." It's a telling example. By Gerson's definition, nearly everybody in every advanced country except the United States is a socialist. Canadian conservatives favor single-payer health insurance. British conservatives favor state-run health insurance. Health care is just so inherently filled with market failure that it's possible to favor heavy government intervention there without having a general disposition to "increase the size and role of government," as Gerson writes. Indeed, it's impossible to oppose a heavily government-directed system of health insurance unless you share the theological fealty to free market superiority that is the unique province of the American right.
The people who lead the Democratic Party need to be able to craft policies that appeal across a fairly wide economic spectrum, and are usually mashed together under some forgettable slogan attempting to communicate the basic idea that markets usually work but we should correct them when they don't. The people who lead the Republican Party need to appeal to a coalition of business leaders generally interested in lower taxes and regulation, and they compete to embody a governing philosophy that takes a straightforward position that small government is good. The structure of the Democratic Party isn't always going to get things right, but the structure of the Republican Party is almost guaranteed to wind up advocating policies heavily tilted toward the interests of a narrow economic elite.
Jonathan Chait
Michael Gerson has a pretty interesting column noticing that the Democratic Party is riven in two, while the Republican Party is unified:
Republican leaders have proved themselves capable of producing proposals that unite perhaps 90 percent of their congressional delegation, losing just a thin margin at each end of their ideological spectrum. But the job is made easier by the narrowness of the Republican ideological spectrum. A party that used to range from moderates to Reagan conservatives now ranges from Reagan conservatives to Tea Party conservatives, both offended by President Obama’s fiscal excesses.
On fiscal issues, the Democratic Party is really two parties. One consists of European-style social democrats, represented by leaders such as Nancy Pelosi. ...
The other Democratic Party is socially liberal and pro-business. These Democrats attempted to weed out the excesses of Obama’s health reform in the Senate.
Gerson doesn't attempt to explain the cause of this asymmetry, which has long interested me. My argument is that it reflects two interrelated things. Economically, the GOP has a relatively unified base: business. Of course, businesses can disagree with each other, but the business perspective is relatively unified on economic questions. The Democrats, by contrast, have an economic base holding together business as well as labor and environmentalists. It's a highly fractured coalition.
The ideological asymmetry, which in many ways stems from the underlying economic asymmetry, is that the Republican Party is the political arm of the conservative movement, whereas the progressive movement -- to the extent one even exists -- is merely one actor jockeying for influence within the Democratic Party. The Republican Party has a coherent economic philosophy -- government intervention bad -- whereas the Democratic Party is primarily a catchbasin for those who disagree with the Republican philosophy. (One result of this asymmetry is that, as Jacob Weisberg notes, the GOP is uniquely prone of constructing an alternate reality impervious to expertise and data.)
Naturally, Gerson imbues his argument with a pro-Republican spin. The GOP is the party of fiscal seriousness, he argues, belying the entire history of the last three decades, and especially the history of the presidency he worked for. Gerson argues that most Democrats are European-style social Democrats, citing as his evidence the fact "that they would have preferred a single-payer health-care system." It's a telling example. By Gerson's definition, nearly everybody in every advanced country except the United States is a socialist. Canadian conservatives favor single-payer health insurance. British conservatives favor state-run health insurance. Health care is just so inherently filled with market failure that it's possible to favor heavy government intervention there without having a general disposition to "increase the size and role of government," as Gerson writes. Indeed, it's impossible to oppose a heavily government-directed system of health insurance unless you share the theological fealty to free market superiority that is the unique province of the American right.
The people who lead the Democratic Party need to be able to craft policies that appeal across a fairly wide economic spectrum, and are usually mashed together under some forgettable slogan attempting to communicate the basic idea that markets usually work but we should correct them when they don't. The people who lead the Republican Party need to appeal to a coalition of business leaders generally interested in lower taxes and regulation, and they compete to embody a governing philosophy that takes a straightforward position that small government is good. The structure of the Democratic Party isn't always going to get things right, but the structure of the Republican Party is almost guaranteed to wind up advocating policies heavily tilted toward the interests of a narrow economic elite.
Freedom Rides
There were two freedom rides: one in 1961 and one in 1964. I am reading a book about the one in Mississippi in the summer of 1964. The 1961 one took place across Alabama. It is important to know the story of both.
Freedom Riders in Montgomery after 50 years find a better city, a better state, a better people
Published: Friday, May 20, 2011, 2:44 PM Updated: Friday, May 20, 2011, 3:26 PM
By Christine Kneidinger, al.com al.com
Freedom Riders 50th Anniversary
MONTGOMERY, Alabama — On May 20, 1961, John Lewis and Jim Zwerg were among Freedom Riders beaten at Montgomery's Greyhound station.
This morning, five decades after the two rode to end segregated transportation, they arrived in Montgomery again.
They talked about what the 21 riders achieved 50 years earlier and celebrated the opening of The Freedom Rides Museum at 201 S. Court St.
Lewis and Zwerg today were joined by a throng of supporters.
Lewis, a U.S. representative from Georgia, was in 1961 a 21-year-old seminary student who had joined other riders to end segregated interstate transportation.
The small station-turned-museum commemorates a large achievement, Lewis said.
"I think the Freedom Rides have changed America forever. The City of Montgomery is a better city, Alabama a better state and now we are a better people," said Lewis. "I say thank you, because now we are now one people, we are one family and we are one bus."
Zwerg, then 21, was an exchange student at Beloit College in Wisconsin. He was violently beaten by members of the Klan that day. He was hospitalized and did not continue his journey. But he remembers the day for more than the violence he endured.
"Montgomery was a city of firsts for me," Zwerg said this morning. "It was the first time I ever got the crap kicked out of me, yes, but it was also the first time I ever got a bouquet of flowers. One of you folks sent me flowers in the hospital, and I'll always remember the card: 'Not everyone in Montgomery is like those who met you at the bus station'"
Inside the museum sits the old "colored entrance," now completely shut and bricked over, but still standing as a reminder of what the Freedom Rides accomplished.
A sign beside the exhibit reads: "This is what the Freedom Riders wanted to change. And they did."
The work of 16 artists adorns the 1951 bus station as part of a yearlong "Road to Equality- 1961 Freedom Rides" exhibit.
Montgomery Mayor Todd Strange said it's key to remember what the travelers went through in their effort to open the highways and the minds of the South.
"It's important to tell the story of what happened for those who weren't there and those who will come in the future," said Strange. "May we never repeat anything like that horrible part of history."
Freedom Riders in Montgomery after 50 years find a better city, a better state, a better people
Published: Friday, May 20, 2011, 2:44 PM Updated: Friday, May 20, 2011, 3:26 PM
By Christine Kneidinger, al.com al.com
Freedom Riders 50th Anniversary
MONTGOMERY, Alabama — On May 20, 1961, John Lewis and Jim Zwerg were among Freedom Riders beaten at Montgomery's Greyhound station.
This morning, five decades after the two rode to end segregated transportation, they arrived in Montgomery again.
They talked about what the 21 riders achieved 50 years earlier and celebrated the opening of The Freedom Rides Museum at 201 S. Court St.
Lewis and Zwerg today were joined by a throng of supporters.
Lewis, a U.S. representative from Georgia, was in 1961 a 21-year-old seminary student who had joined other riders to end segregated interstate transportation.
The small station-turned-museum commemorates a large achievement, Lewis said.
"I think the Freedom Rides have changed America forever. The City of Montgomery is a better city, Alabama a better state and now we are a better people," said Lewis. "I say thank you, because now we are now one people, we are one family and we are one bus."
Zwerg, then 21, was an exchange student at Beloit College in Wisconsin. He was violently beaten by members of the Klan that day. He was hospitalized and did not continue his journey. But he remembers the day for more than the violence he endured.
"Montgomery was a city of firsts for me," Zwerg said this morning. "It was the first time I ever got the crap kicked out of me, yes, but it was also the first time I ever got a bouquet of flowers. One of you folks sent me flowers in the hospital, and I'll always remember the card: 'Not everyone in Montgomery is like those who met you at the bus station'"
Inside the museum sits the old "colored entrance," now completely shut and bricked over, but still standing as a reminder of what the Freedom Rides accomplished.
A sign beside the exhibit reads: "This is what the Freedom Riders wanted to change. And they did."
The work of 16 artists adorns the 1951 bus station as part of a yearlong "Road to Equality- 1961 Freedom Rides" exhibit.
Montgomery Mayor Todd Strange said it's key to remember what the travelers went through in their effort to open the highways and the minds of the South.
"It's important to tell the story of what happened for those who weren't there and those who will come in the future," said Strange. "May we never repeat anything like that horrible part of history."
Ryan's Innumeracy
Paul Ryan's Innumeracy
Jonathan Chait
Ryan pens an op-ed to defend the Republican budget against the charge that it will harm the poor:
President Obama accused us of wanting to leave children with disabilities to "fend for themselves."
This rhetoric is not just overheated – it is flat-out false. Our budget – "The Path to Prosperity" – strengthens the safety net by directing more assistance to those who need it most. It provides the chronically unemployed with the incentives and tools they need to bounce back into self-sufficient lives.
You can read Ryan's entire column, but -- strangely for a man so prone to boasting of his wonkery and love of numbers -- it contains zero numbers attempting to substantiate his claim that his budget "strengthens," or even fails to shred, the safety net.
If you want actual numbers, you need to go to places like the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which lay them out:
Cuts in low-income programs appear likely to account for at least $2.9 trillion — or nearly two-thirds — of this total amount. The $2.9 trillion includes the following three categories of cuts:
$2.17 trillion in reductions from Medicaid and related health care. The plan shows Medicaid cuts of $771 billion, plus savings of $1.4 trillion from repealing the health reform law’s Medicaid expansion and its subsidies to help low- and moderate-income people purchase health insurance.
$350 billion in cuts in mandatory programs serving low-income Americans (other than Medicaid). Chairman Ryan’s budget documents show that he is proposing $719 billion in cuts in mandatory programs other than Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, but do not specify how much will be cut from various programs (although they imply that cuts in the Food Stamp Program will be large). In this analysis, we make the conservative assumption that savings from low-income mandatory programs (other than Medicaid) would be proportionate to their share of spending in this category. Thus, we derive the $350 billion figure from the fact that about half of mandatory spending other than for Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security goes for programs for low- and moderate-income individuals and families. This likely substantially understates the cuts that the plan would make in low-income programs. The Ryan documents show that $380 billion in cuts would come from mandatory programs in the income security portion of the budget (function 600), and the overwhelming bulk of the mandatory spending in that category goes for low-income programs. The documents also show $126 billion in mandatory cuts in the education, training, employment, and social services portion of the budget (function 500), which, based on the discussion in those documents, would likely come mainly from cuts in the mandatory portion of the Pell Grant program for low-income students.
$400 billion in cuts in low-income discretionary programs. The Ryan budget documents released on April 5 showed the plan containing $1.6 trillion in cuts in non-security discretionary programs, but again did not provide details about the size of cuts to specific programs. (The documents did identify some major low-income program areas, including Pell Grants and low-income housing, as prime targets for cuts.) Here, too, we make the conservative assumption that low-income programs in this category would bear a proportionate share of the cuts. Thus, we derive the $400 billion figure from the fact that about a quarter of non-security discretionary spending goes for programs for low- and moderate-income individuals and families. (Rep. Ryan added $193 billion in cuts in non-security discretionary programs before the budget resolution went to the House floor, but Ryan said these additional cuts would come from freezing federal employees’ pay and reducing the federal workforce, so we do not include them when estimating reductions in programs for low- and moderate-income households.)
I'd deconstruct Ryan's attempt to rebut any of these figures, but he doesn't have one. There's a little bit of hand-waving about turning control over to the states, but he doesn't even try to explain how this would compensate for the massive cuts. Does he think that the federal government is skimming money from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly food stamps), and that giving states control would somehow overcome the 20% cut? He doesn't say. Does he have an argument that giving states control of Medicaid, which is extraordinarily cheap and has grown much slower than private insurance, would somehow compensate for the trillion dollars in cuts he imposes? No data there, either.
Ryan does, hilariously, argue that he would prevent something terrible happening to funding for the poor:
Mounting debt also threatens our poorest and most vulnerable citizens, because those who depend most on government would be hit hardest by a fiscal crisis. Harsh austerity would be the only course left. A broke government unable to finance its spending commitments would be forced to make indiscriminate cuts affecting current beneficiaries of government programs – without giving them time to prepare or adjust.
The argument is that, if there was a fiscal crisis, it would entail huge and immediate cuts to programs that aid the poor. Therefore we must enact huge, immediate cuts in programs that aid the poor. Oh, and also preserve the Bush tax cuts for top-income earners and cut the rate another ten percentage points. For the sake of the poor.
Jonathan Chait
Ryan pens an op-ed to defend the Republican budget against the charge that it will harm the poor:
President Obama accused us of wanting to leave children with disabilities to "fend for themselves."
This rhetoric is not just overheated – it is flat-out false. Our budget – "The Path to Prosperity" – strengthens the safety net by directing more assistance to those who need it most. It provides the chronically unemployed with the incentives and tools they need to bounce back into self-sufficient lives.
You can read Ryan's entire column, but -- strangely for a man so prone to boasting of his wonkery and love of numbers -- it contains zero numbers attempting to substantiate his claim that his budget "strengthens," or even fails to shred, the safety net.
If you want actual numbers, you need to go to places like the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which lay them out:
Cuts in low-income programs appear likely to account for at least $2.9 trillion — or nearly two-thirds — of this total amount. The $2.9 trillion includes the following three categories of cuts:
$2.17 trillion in reductions from Medicaid and related health care. The plan shows Medicaid cuts of $771 billion, plus savings of $1.4 trillion from repealing the health reform law’s Medicaid expansion and its subsidies to help low- and moderate-income people purchase health insurance.
$350 billion in cuts in mandatory programs serving low-income Americans (other than Medicaid). Chairman Ryan’s budget documents show that he is proposing $719 billion in cuts in mandatory programs other than Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, but do not specify how much will be cut from various programs (although they imply that cuts in the Food Stamp Program will be large). In this analysis, we make the conservative assumption that savings from low-income mandatory programs (other than Medicaid) would be proportionate to their share of spending in this category. Thus, we derive the $350 billion figure from the fact that about half of mandatory spending other than for Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security goes for programs for low- and moderate-income individuals and families. This likely substantially understates the cuts that the plan would make in low-income programs. The Ryan documents show that $380 billion in cuts would come from mandatory programs in the income security portion of the budget (function 600), and the overwhelming bulk of the mandatory spending in that category goes for low-income programs. The documents also show $126 billion in mandatory cuts in the education, training, employment, and social services portion of the budget (function 500), which, based on the discussion in those documents, would likely come mainly from cuts in the mandatory portion of the Pell Grant program for low-income students.
$400 billion in cuts in low-income discretionary programs. The Ryan budget documents released on April 5 showed the plan containing $1.6 trillion in cuts in non-security discretionary programs, but again did not provide details about the size of cuts to specific programs. (The documents did identify some major low-income program areas, including Pell Grants and low-income housing, as prime targets for cuts.) Here, too, we make the conservative assumption that low-income programs in this category would bear a proportionate share of the cuts. Thus, we derive the $400 billion figure from the fact that about a quarter of non-security discretionary spending goes for programs for low- and moderate-income individuals and families. (Rep. Ryan added $193 billion in cuts in non-security discretionary programs before the budget resolution went to the House floor, but Ryan said these additional cuts would come from freezing federal employees’ pay and reducing the federal workforce, so we do not include them when estimating reductions in programs for low- and moderate-income households.)
I'd deconstruct Ryan's attempt to rebut any of these figures, but he doesn't have one. There's a little bit of hand-waving about turning control over to the states, but he doesn't even try to explain how this would compensate for the massive cuts. Does he think that the federal government is skimming money from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly food stamps), and that giving states control would somehow overcome the 20% cut? He doesn't say. Does he have an argument that giving states control of Medicaid, which is extraordinarily cheap and has grown much slower than private insurance, would somehow compensate for the trillion dollars in cuts he imposes? No data there, either.
Ryan does, hilariously, argue that he would prevent something terrible happening to funding for the poor:
Mounting debt also threatens our poorest and most vulnerable citizens, because those who depend most on government would be hit hardest by a fiscal crisis. Harsh austerity would be the only course left. A broke government unable to finance its spending commitments would be forced to make indiscriminate cuts affecting current beneficiaries of government programs – without giving them time to prepare or adjust.
The argument is that, if there was a fiscal crisis, it would entail huge and immediate cuts to programs that aid the poor. Therefore we must enact huge, immediate cuts in programs that aid the poor. Oh, and also preserve the Bush tax cuts for top-income earners and cut the rate another ten percentage points. For the sake of the poor.
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Bruce Watson - Freedom Summer
The summer of 1964 was the so-called Freedom Summer when hundreds of young people descended on the state of Mississippi in an effort to educate and register African-Americans to vote. This book about that amazing summer is electrifying.
Monday, May 16, 2011
Another Doctor
This time it's a dermatologist. Since I had a melinoma, a cancer of the skin, I suppose it makes sense to see a skin doctor. He takes two biopsys. Results in a week. I doubt anything comes of it. This doctor is too serious. No sense of humor it seems. I like people with a sense of humor.
Sunday, May 15, 2011
On Using the Language
Robert Lane Greene
Loving The English Language, Or Loving To Complain About It?
Posted: 05/14/11 08:22 AM ET
Everyone has a language peeve. Mine is "literally," a great word with no close synonym. When used as a mere intensifier or to mean simply "It felt as though..." it has almost no kick at all. And when misused, it can be spectacular: what Lindsey Graham recently said of an American program to turn weapons-grade plutonium into reactor fuel for peaceful energy. Truly this is a good thing, but Graham probably shouldn't have said that "the United States is literally taking nuclear swords and turning them into plowshares." My first thought was that it was pretty sweet that DARPA had finally invented nuclear swords. My second was, "But who wants a nuclear plowshare? Would you eat vegetables out of a field plowed with one?"
So I'd like to keep "literally" meaning "not figuratively," and every time I see it used to mean "figuratively" I sigh a little sigh. You certainly have your peeves too. Maybe it's "Between you and I." Maybe it's "Jenny and myself are going to have to think that over." There are enough to fill many books, and indeed they have filled many books--some of them bestsellers. All of us who love language hate to see it used incompetently.
But I got the idea for my recent book by noticing that there seemed to be more than defending the language going on when people talked about this or that usage. Take Black English: linguists have long known that it's a regular dialect of English with its own consistent internal rules, like Scots or Southern White English. But while most people know that it's unacceptable to make fun of someone's skin color, they feel free to make fun of their language. Zach Galifinakis has a joke about using lots of Axe body spray, though since he lives in a black neighborhood, he calls it "Ask". It's a pretty good joke, and he defuses it by saying "If you didn't get that, you're not a racist." But many people really think that "aks" in Black English is mouth-breathing stupidity, rather than merely dialectal. It has a long history in English, even appearing in Chaucer: "I axe, why the fyfte man Was nought housbond to the Samaritan?"
In other words, there's nothing wrong with treasuring good English. But people confuse "grammatical" and "good." "Correct" English is often plodding or incompetent. Meanwhile, many people who aren't one hundred-percent fluent in standard English are nonetheless brilliant, charismatic and persuasive--I should know, as my father, who could charm a fish out of water, was an earthy, profane southerner, and not exactly Henry Higgins when it came to "proper" English.
Too many people take the step beyond caring for their language to enjoying laying scorn on others who use it differently. This is several different problems at the same time. One is, as mentioned, the bigotry against dialectal English, apparently the last form of prejudice acceptable even in polite, liberal company. It's important for African-Americans (as for all Americans) to master standard English, but part of that bargain should be accepting that their language, like my dad's Southern White English, deserves a place too, and one without scorn.
The second way in which people go wrong with language peeving is simply picking the wrong peeves. There are many "rules" that are "known" to copy editors and sticklers everywhere that simply aren't so. Famously, the ban on splitting infinitives and another on ending sentences in prepositions have both been known to be bogus by quality grammar-book writers for at least a century. But these "rules" seem unkillable. So do many other more rarified ones, which seem to live on so that copy-editors can one-up each other: Use "each other" for two people but "one another" for three or more. Use "that" for restrictive clauses like "the house that Jack built", but "which" for non-restrictive ones like "the house, which Jack built,..." But these and so many others are not "rules": they began life as one grammar-book writer's fetish and made their way into print to plague us with an endless game of grammar-gotcha.
So by all means, treasure language. But don't let your love for good English mean disdain for people who don't use it exactly as you do. Part of a healthy love for language is an understanding of the many different forms it takes. Dialects are healthy parts of real communities. Changes to a language are natural, not simply degrading. Even if my friend "literally" doesn't survive, quality English will.
Loving The English Language, Or Loving To Complain About It?
Posted: 05/14/11 08:22 AM ET
Everyone has a language peeve. Mine is "literally," a great word with no close synonym. When used as a mere intensifier or to mean simply "It felt as though..." it has almost no kick at all. And when misused, it can be spectacular: what Lindsey Graham recently said of an American program to turn weapons-grade plutonium into reactor fuel for peaceful energy. Truly this is a good thing, but Graham probably shouldn't have said that "the United States is literally taking nuclear swords and turning them into plowshares." My first thought was that it was pretty sweet that DARPA had finally invented nuclear swords. My second was, "But who wants a nuclear plowshare? Would you eat vegetables out of a field plowed with one?"
So I'd like to keep "literally" meaning "not figuratively," and every time I see it used to mean "figuratively" I sigh a little sigh. You certainly have your peeves too. Maybe it's "Between you and I." Maybe it's "Jenny and myself are going to have to think that over." There are enough to fill many books, and indeed they have filled many books--some of them bestsellers. All of us who love language hate to see it used incompetently.
But I got the idea for my recent book by noticing that there seemed to be more than defending the language going on when people talked about this or that usage. Take Black English: linguists have long known that it's a regular dialect of English with its own consistent internal rules, like Scots or Southern White English. But while most people know that it's unacceptable to make fun of someone's skin color, they feel free to make fun of their language. Zach Galifinakis has a joke about using lots of Axe body spray, though since he lives in a black neighborhood, he calls it "Ask". It's a pretty good joke, and he defuses it by saying "If you didn't get that, you're not a racist." But many people really think that "aks" in Black English is mouth-breathing stupidity, rather than merely dialectal. It has a long history in English, even appearing in Chaucer: "I axe, why the fyfte man Was nought housbond to the Samaritan?"
In other words, there's nothing wrong with treasuring good English. But people confuse "grammatical" and "good." "Correct" English is often plodding or incompetent. Meanwhile, many people who aren't one hundred-percent fluent in standard English are nonetheless brilliant, charismatic and persuasive--I should know, as my father, who could charm a fish out of water, was an earthy, profane southerner, and not exactly Henry Higgins when it came to "proper" English.
Too many people take the step beyond caring for their language to enjoying laying scorn on others who use it differently. This is several different problems at the same time. One is, as mentioned, the bigotry against dialectal English, apparently the last form of prejudice acceptable even in polite, liberal company. It's important for African-Americans (as for all Americans) to master standard English, but part of that bargain should be accepting that their language, like my dad's Southern White English, deserves a place too, and one without scorn.
The second way in which people go wrong with language peeving is simply picking the wrong peeves. There are many "rules" that are "known" to copy editors and sticklers everywhere that simply aren't so. Famously, the ban on splitting infinitives and another on ending sentences in prepositions have both been known to be bogus by quality grammar-book writers for at least a century. But these "rules" seem unkillable. So do many other more rarified ones, which seem to live on so that copy-editors can one-up each other: Use "each other" for two people but "one another" for three or more. Use "that" for restrictive clauses like "the house that Jack built", but "which" for non-restrictive ones like "the house, which Jack built,..." But these and so many others are not "rules": they began life as one grammar-book writer's fetish and made their way into print to plague us with an endless game of grammar-gotcha.
So by all means, treasure language. But don't let your love for good English mean disdain for people who don't use it exactly as you do. Part of a healthy love for language is an understanding of the many different forms it takes. Dialects are healthy parts of real communities. Changes to a language are natural, not simply degrading. Even if my friend "literally" doesn't survive, quality English will.
Breaking Down
Technology is a wonderful thing. I suppose most products are better today than they used to be due to improved technology, but many things are not better because they are built to break down to force you to buy a new one. My Lazy Boy is a case in point. It's been good for 8 years, but it seems it's starting to break down. They don't make reclining chairs like they used to.
Friday, May 13, 2011
Effects of the Ryan Budget Proposal
Speaking Honestly About The Ryan Budget
Jonathan Chait
Senior Editor
Ryan Budget May 13, 2011 | 3:20 pm
Republicans are still deeply bitter at President Obama's counter-attack against the House Republican budget, which almost immediately transformed the party mood from triumphalism to suing for peace. Charles Krauthammer today expresses some of that anger:
Constructive and civil debate — like the one Obama initiated just four weeks ago on deficit reduction? The speech in which he accused the Republicans of abandoning families of autistic and Down syndrome kids?
This reflects an inability to recognize of acknowledge the brutal effects of the Republican plan to slash Medicaid. Medicaid is a bare-bones program that provides very basic levels of medical services for people in nursing homes, poor children with special needs, and people facing extreme poverty. Jonathan Cohn provides some reporting insight as to what is at stake here:
I'll never forget the first time I visited the St. John's Well Child and Family Center about seven years ago, because it's the first time I heard about a grisly intruder pediatricians sometimes find in young children's ears: Cockroaches.It's a problem endemic to poorly maintained, low-income housing, of which there is quite a lot in the South Central neighborhood surrounding St. John's. And it's one reason the staff there are so aggressive about confronting the health hazards of their patient population. Instead of merely treating problems like asthma, lead poisoning and, yes, insects crawling into the ear canals of sleeping children, St. John's also offers home environmental assessments—complete with instructions for tenants on how to clean up hazards and, where possible, to pressure slumlords into fixing dilapidated properties.
St. John's was a more modest enterprise back then: just a handful of clinics operating on a shoestring budget. When I returned last week, I could see it had grown. Thanks to a combination of philanthropy and increased federal funding, under both the Bush and Obama administrations, it has expanded to 10 clinics with an annual budget of $25 million, serving a predominantly Latino and African-American population in what remains one of the nation's most medically under-served communities.
And the future seems more promising still. The Affordable Care Act will pump more money into these clinics, both directly by giving them subsidies and indirectly by giving more of their patients insurance.
That's what the Republicans are doing away with. I'm usually not a huge fan of emotional appeals, and Jonathan's column admirably steers clear of bleeding-heart-ism. But it's just analytically true that the Republican budget imposes severe hardship on poor and vulnerable people. And there's a deep backlash against even relatively anodyne attempts to point this out -- as if Obama is obliged to collaborate with Republican attempts to cover up the vicious results of their program. Ryan's budget really is at odds with what most Americans would consider to be basic decency. Virtually every House Republican voted for it, and they deserve to face the consequences of it.
Jonathan Chait
Senior Editor
Ryan Budget May 13, 2011 | 3:20 pm
Republicans are still deeply bitter at President Obama's counter-attack against the House Republican budget, which almost immediately transformed the party mood from triumphalism to suing for peace. Charles Krauthammer today expresses some of that anger:
Constructive and civil debate — like the one Obama initiated just four weeks ago on deficit reduction? The speech in which he accused the Republicans of abandoning families of autistic and Down syndrome kids?
This reflects an inability to recognize of acknowledge the brutal effects of the Republican plan to slash Medicaid. Medicaid is a bare-bones program that provides very basic levels of medical services for people in nursing homes, poor children with special needs, and people facing extreme poverty. Jonathan Cohn provides some reporting insight as to what is at stake here:
I'll never forget the first time I visited the St. John's Well Child and Family Center about seven years ago, because it's the first time I heard about a grisly intruder pediatricians sometimes find in young children's ears: Cockroaches.It's a problem endemic to poorly maintained, low-income housing, of which there is quite a lot in the South Central neighborhood surrounding St. John's. And it's one reason the staff there are so aggressive about confronting the health hazards of their patient population. Instead of merely treating problems like asthma, lead poisoning and, yes, insects crawling into the ear canals of sleeping children, St. John's also offers home environmental assessments—complete with instructions for tenants on how to clean up hazards and, where possible, to pressure slumlords into fixing dilapidated properties.
St. John's was a more modest enterprise back then: just a handful of clinics operating on a shoestring budget. When I returned last week, I could see it had grown. Thanks to a combination of philanthropy and increased federal funding, under both the Bush and Obama administrations, it has expanded to 10 clinics with an annual budget of $25 million, serving a predominantly Latino and African-American population in what remains one of the nation's most medically under-served communities.
And the future seems more promising still. The Affordable Care Act will pump more money into these clinics, both directly by giving them subsidies and indirectly by giving more of their patients insurance.
That's what the Republicans are doing away with. I'm usually not a huge fan of emotional appeals, and Jonathan's column admirably steers clear of bleeding-heart-ism. But it's just analytically true that the Republican budget imposes severe hardship on poor and vulnerable people. And there's a deep backlash against even relatively anodyne attempts to point this out -- as if Obama is obliged to collaborate with Republican attempts to cover up the vicious results of their program. Ryan's budget really is at odds with what most Americans would consider to be basic decency. Virtually every House Republican voted for it, and they deserve to face the consequences of it.
Medical Doctors
In recent years I've had negative opinions of doctors. Perhaps my opinion is slowly changing.
Since having a malignant melinoma removed from the back of my neck on December 21, I've been following up appropriately. I had a second surgery on March 21 and have had tests and seen doctors as directed ever since.
Today I saw Dr. Ferguson, the main cancer doctor for Shelby County, for the third time. I like her doctoring. All seems well. All indications are that the melinoma has not spread and that there is no cancer in my body.
I am lucky that it was caught in time. Early detection is the key like they say. All of the doctors I have seen in this situation have been good. Perhaps medical doctors are OK after all!
Since having a malignant melinoma removed from the back of my neck on December 21, I've been following up appropriately. I had a second surgery on March 21 and have had tests and seen doctors as directed ever since.
Today I saw Dr. Ferguson, the main cancer doctor for Shelby County, for the third time. I like her doctoring. All seems well. All indications are that the melinoma has not spread and that there is no cancer in my body.
I am lucky that it was caught in time. Early detection is the key like they say. All of the doctors I have seen in this situation have been good. Perhaps medical doctors are OK after all!
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
The Health Care Mandate
The Obviously Constitutional Individual Mandate
Jonathan Chait
The Obviously Constitutional Individual Mandate &c May 11, 2011 | 12:00 am 9 comments
Northwestern law professor Andrew Koppelman has an excellent essay making the case that the Affordable Care Act is not just Constitutional but obviously so, and arguments to the contrary not merely unpersuasive but absurd. His conclusion:
What will the Supreme Court do? There is no nice way to say this: the silliness of the constitutional objectionsmay not be enough to stop these Justices from relying on them to strike down the law. The Republican Party, increasingly, is the party of urban legends: that tax cuts for the rich always pay for themselves, that government spending does not create jobs, that government overregulation of banks caused the crash of 2008, that global warming is not happening. The unconstitutionality of health care reform is another of those legends, legitimated in American culture by frequent repetition.
I reached a similar conclusion, not nearly as thoroughly or as well, in my TRB column a few months ago on Roger Vinson's ruling. I strongly urge everybody to read Koppelman. There are many thorny issues in law, but this simply is not one of them.
One takeaway I had from reading Vinson's ruling, as well as Koppelman's evisceration of it, is that it's really easy to produce a plausible-sounding argument to overturn any legal argument you'd like to overturn. As an interpretation of the law, Vinson's ruling makes no sense. There's simply no way a judge could begin from a standpoint of disinterest about the merits of the law and, working through an understanding of the Constitution, arrive at the conclusion he chose.
But if you instead try to figure out the most plausible-sounding way to construct a Constitutional argument against a law you don't like, then coming up with an argument as good as Vinson's is relatively easy. Again, "as good as Vinson's" is a low bar.
Jonathan Chait
The Obviously Constitutional Individual Mandate &c May 11, 2011 | 12:00 am 9 comments
Northwestern law professor Andrew Koppelman has an excellent essay making the case that the Affordable Care Act is not just Constitutional but obviously so, and arguments to the contrary not merely unpersuasive but absurd. His conclusion:
What will the Supreme Court do? There is no nice way to say this: the silliness of the constitutional objectionsmay not be enough to stop these Justices from relying on them to strike down the law. The Republican Party, increasingly, is the party of urban legends: that tax cuts for the rich always pay for themselves, that government spending does not create jobs, that government overregulation of banks caused the crash of 2008, that global warming is not happening. The unconstitutionality of health care reform is another of those legends, legitimated in American culture by frequent repetition.
I reached a similar conclusion, not nearly as thoroughly or as well, in my TRB column a few months ago on Roger Vinson's ruling. I strongly urge everybody to read Koppelman. There are many thorny issues in law, but this simply is not one of them.
One takeaway I had from reading Vinson's ruling, as well as Koppelman's evisceration of it, is that it's really easy to produce a plausible-sounding argument to overturn any legal argument you'd like to overturn. As an interpretation of the law, Vinson's ruling makes no sense. There's simply no way a judge could begin from a standpoint of disinterest about the merits of the law and, working through an understanding of the Constitution, arrive at the conclusion he chose.
But if you instead try to figure out the most plausible-sounding way to construct a Constitutional argument against a law you don't like, then coming up with an argument as good as Vinson's is relatively easy. Again, "as good as Vinson's" is a low bar.
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Republican Gibberish
Jonathan Chait
John Boehner's Tax Gibberish The Kochs And The Marketplace Of Ideas May 10, 2011
Did Republicans Drink the Ryan Kool-Aid? Debate Settled. John Boehner appeared on the Today Show this morning, and his explanation of why he won't agree to any revenue increase is a perfect encapsulation of the vacuity of conservative movement thought on this subject.
Here's the best part of the exchange:
LAUER: Why not use an increase in revenues? Tax hikes to help with that debt problem? What is the evidence that you can present that the tax cuts of the Bush era have actually accomplished their goals?
BOEHNER: Well, what you're – what some are suggesting is that we take this money from people who would invest in our economy and create jobs and we give it to the government. The fact is you can't tax the very people that we expect to invest in our economy and create jobs. Washington doesn't have a revenue problem. Washington has a spending problem.
LAUER: But when you look at – you talk about creating jobs, when the Bush era tax cuts were passed in 2001, unemployment in this country was 4.5%. Today it's at 9%, just down from 10%. So why are the Bush-era tax cuts creating jobs?
BOEHNER: They created about 8 million jobs over the first ten years that they were in existence. We've lost about 5 million of those jobs during this recession. But you can't raise taxes. We can take all of the money from the wealthy and guess what? We'd hardly make a dent in the annual deficit and do nothing about the $14.3 trillion worth of debt.
Lauer begins with a good question. What is the evidence that the Bush tax cut accomplished its goal? Boehner refuses to present any. Indeed, answering this question would lead him into an inescapable minefield. The Bush tax cuts are currently in effect, so any benefits of continuing them must have been felt from 2001 until the present date. That would imply those effects are less than impressive. So instead, Boehner simply restates his position. We can't take money away from job creators. Why not? You just can't. "The fact is," he continues, mistaking opinion for fact, "you can't tax the very people that we expect to invest in our economy and create jobs." You can't tax them at all? Obviously we have to tax them some, right? So then the question is what is the optimal level. I believe recent history suggests that Clinton-era tax levels create no significant harmful incentive effect. Boehner can't even come near this question, because he simply insists that tax the rich is wrong is an absolute sense.
Boehner proceeds from there to trot out the familiar "Washington doesn't have a revenue problem. Washington has a spending problem." line. Here's the reality:
Obviously revenue declined following the Bush tax cuts and stayed well below the Clinton-era trend, even aside from cyclical factors. It's worth noting here that both parties may emphasize the factors in the rise of the debt that favor solutions most amenable to their policy preferences. The difference is that you don't see Democrats categorically deny that spending levels bear any relate to deficits, whereas the opposite belief is an article of faith among Republicans.
Lauer, to his credit, tries again, asking for any evidence the Bush tax cuts created jobs. Boehner replies, "They created about 8 million jobs over the first ten years that they were in existence. We've lost about 5 million of those jobs during this recession." Right. That's a net of 3 million jobs over eight years. That's horrible! 3 million new jobs is, as the Wall Street Journal news staff put it, "the worst track record for job creation since the government began keeping records." Now, Boehner wants to keep track of new jobs under Bush at their highest level. If you want to assign Bush zero responsibility for the economic crisis and measure it from trough to peak, Boehner gets a total of 8 million new jobs. But during the Clinton administration we saw the creation of 23 million new jobs. Doesn't that again suggest that Clinton-era tax rates on the rich might not cripple job creation? Boehner, of course does not say.
For his final talking point, Boehner claims that even if we took all the money the rich had, it wouldn't make a dent in the deficit. Here he's recycling a point made originally by Paul Ryan and then, in much stronger, by the Wall Street Journal's comically inept editorial page. The Journal's claim has been widely cited since, including by GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell. It is utterly false, and seems to be based on a simple inability to correctly perform basic arithmetic.
And there we have the conservative movement's explanation of its position on taxes, which also happens to be its central policy goal.
I should note here that I don't have any reason to believe that any of this reflects Boehner's personal dishonesty. The problem is that the conservative movement holds as its highest principle the belief that it's unfair to charge higher tax rates to the rich. But since that principle is highly unpopular, they need to devise other rationales to sell this policy -- rationales that bear no relationship to their actual reasons, and which are usually nonsensical or simply false. Dishonesty of some form or another is common in politics, but Republican economic policymaking is characterized by massive, systematic dishonesty or rank ignorance that permeates every element of the process, from intellectual entrepreneurs to elected officials. The good news is that it keeps me in business.
John Boehner's Tax Gibberish The Kochs And The Marketplace Of Ideas May 10, 2011
Did Republicans Drink the Ryan Kool-Aid? Debate Settled. John Boehner appeared on the Today Show this morning, and his explanation of why he won't agree to any revenue increase is a perfect encapsulation of the vacuity of conservative movement thought on this subject.
Here's the best part of the exchange:
LAUER: Why not use an increase in revenues? Tax hikes to help with that debt problem? What is the evidence that you can present that the tax cuts of the Bush era have actually accomplished their goals?
BOEHNER: Well, what you're – what some are suggesting is that we take this money from people who would invest in our economy and create jobs and we give it to the government. The fact is you can't tax the very people that we expect to invest in our economy and create jobs. Washington doesn't have a revenue problem. Washington has a spending problem.
LAUER: But when you look at – you talk about creating jobs, when the Bush era tax cuts were passed in 2001, unemployment in this country was 4.5%. Today it's at 9%, just down from 10%. So why are the Bush-era tax cuts creating jobs?
BOEHNER: They created about 8 million jobs over the first ten years that they were in existence. We've lost about 5 million of those jobs during this recession. But you can't raise taxes. We can take all of the money from the wealthy and guess what? We'd hardly make a dent in the annual deficit and do nothing about the $14.3 trillion worth of debt.
Lauer begins with a good question. What is the evidence that the Bush tax cut accomplished its goal? Boehner refuses to present any. Indeed, answering this question would lead him into an inescapable minefield. The Bush tax cuts are currently in effect, so any benefits of continuing them must have been felt from 2001 until the present date. That would imply those effects are less than impressive. So instead, Boehner simply restates his position. We can't take money away from job creators. Why not? You just can't. "The fact is," he continues, mistaking opinion for fact, "you can't tax the very people that we expect to invest in our economy and create jobs." You can't tax them at all? Obviously we have to tax them some, right? So then the question is what is the optimal level. I believe recent history suggests that Clinton-era tax levels create no significant harmful incentive effect. Boehner can't even come near this question, because he simply insists that tax the rich is wrong is an absolute sense.
Boehner proceeds from there to trot out the familiar "Washington doesn't have a revenue problem. Washington has a spending problem." line. Here's the reality:
Obviously revenue declined following the Bush tax cuts and stayed well below the Clinton-era trend, even aside from cyclical factors. It's worth noting here that both parties may emphasize the factors in the rise of the debt that favor solutions most amenable to their policy preferences. The difference is that you don't see Democrats categorically deny that spending levels bear any relate to deficits, whereas the opposite belief is an article of faith among Republicans.
Lauer, to his credit, tries again, asking for any evidence the Bush tax cuts created jobs. Boehner replies, "They created about 8 million jobs over the first ten years that they were in existence. We've lost about 5 million of those jobs during this recession." Right. That's a net of 3 million jobs over eight years. That's horrible! 3 million new jobs is, as the Wall Street Journal news staff put it, "the worst track record for job creation since the government began keeping records." Now, Boehner wants to keep track of new jobs under Bush at their highest level. If you want to assign Bush zero responsibility for the economic crisis and measure it from trough to peak, Boehner gets a total of 8 million new jobs. But during the Clinton administration we saw the creation of 23 million new jobs. Doesn't that again suggest that Clinton-era tax rates on the rich might not cripple job creation? Boehner, of course does not say.
For his final talking point, Boehner claims that even if we took all the money the rich had, it wouldn't make a dent in the deficit. Here he's recycling a point made originally by Paul Ryan and then, in much stronger, by the Wall Street Journal's comically inept editorial page. The Journal's claim has been widely cited since, including by GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell. It is utterly false, and seems to be based on a simple inability to correctly perform basic arithmetic.
And there we have the conservative movement's explanation of its position on taxes, which also happens to be its central policy goal.
I should note here that I don't have any reason to believe that any of this reflects Boehner's personal dishonesty. The problem is that the conservative movement holds as its highest principle the belief that it's unfair to charge higher tax rates to the rich. But since that principle is highly unpopular, they need to devise other rationales to sell this policy -- rationales that bear no relationship to their actual reasons, and which are usually nonsensical or simply false. Dishonesty of some form or another is common in politics, but Republican economic policymaking is characterized by massive, systematic dishonesty or rank ignorance that permeates every element of the process, from intellectual entrepreneurs to elected officials. The good news is that it keeps me in business.
Poker is Skill, Not Luck
BIG NEWS: Unemployment | The Fed | Financial Crisis | Goldman Sachs | Royal Wedding| More...
University of Chicago economics professor Steven Levitt, famous for the best-selling Freakonomics series, has published a working paper alongside fellow University of Chicago professor Thomas Miles entitled "The Role of Skill Versus Luck in Poker: Evidence From the World Series of Poker." In it, they attempt to answer the central question surrounding the legality of the online poker industry: is it a game of skill or luck?
The hugely popular industry of online poker has been controversial for some time now. Despite efforts to curb the industry, most notably the 2006 Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, still upwards of 10 million Americans play poker online for money. Just last month, three popular online poker sites -- Full Tilt Poker, PokerStars and Absolute Poker -- were shutdown by the FBI, and the federal government announced plans to recover $3 billion from them, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The central question surrounding the legality of the industry, on which Americans consumers spend $6 billion annually, has been whether poker is a game or skill or luck. Despite this, the paper says, "[s]tate courts that have ruled on whether poker is a game of skill-versus-luck generally have done so in the absence of any statistical evidence[.]"
To answer the question, Levitt and Miles looked at information made available by the 2010 World Series of Poker. The annual event, held in Las Vegas, includes 57 tournaments, 32,000 participants and $185 million prize money, including the "Main Event," in which the grand winner earns almost $9 million.
The duo found significant evidence that poker requires skill. Players assumed to be skilled earned 30 percent on their investment, compared to all other players, who lost 15 percent. In dollar terms, and even excluding the highly-skilled "Main Event," high skill players earned an average of $350 per tournament, while other players lost $400 on average.
To put that in perspective, Levitt and Miles compare the return on a poker investment with that common from the financial markets. "The observed differences in ROIs [return on investments] are highly statistically significant and far larger in magnitude than those observed in financial markets," the paper says, "where fees charged by the money managers viewed as being most talented can run as high as three percent of assets under management and thirty percent of annual returns."
In human speak, that means the money of skilled players is better invested in a poker tournament than Wall Street, despite conventional wisdom that would indicate the opposite. In fact, the paper finds, "the high skilled player wins 54.9 percent of the match ups." That compares more closely to what is witnessed in Major League Baseball than anything on Wall Street:
"Since the year 2007, [baseball] teams that made the playoffs the previous season win 55.7 percent of their games in Major League Baseball against teams that failed to make the playoffs in the previous year. Thus, in some crude sense, the predictability of outcomes for pairs of players in a poker tournament is similar to that between teams in Major League Baseball. To the extent that baseball would unquestionably be judged a game of skill, the same conclusion might reasonably be applied to poker in light of the data."
University of Chicago economics professor Steven Levitt, famous for the best-selling Freakonomics series, has published a working paper alongside fellow University of Chicago professor Thomas Miles entitled "The Role of Skill Versus Luck in Poker: Evidence From the World Series of Poker." In it, they attempt to answer the central question surrounding the legality of the online poker industry: is it a game of skill or luck?
The hugely popular industry of online poker has been controversial for some time now. Despite efforts to curb the industry, most notably the 2006 Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, still upwards of 10 million Americans play poker online for money. Just last month, three popular online poker sites -- Full Tilt Poker, PokerStars and Absolute Poker -- were shutdown by the FBI, and the federal government announced plans to recover $3 billion from them, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The central question surrounding the legality of the industry, on which Americans consumers spend $6 billion annually, has been whether poker is a game or skill or luck. Despite this, the paper says, "[s]tate courts that have ruled on whether poker is a game of skill-versus-luck generally have done so in the absence of any statistical evidence[.]"
To answer the question, Levitt and Miles looked at information made available by the 2010 World Series of Poker. The annual event, held in Las Vegas, includes 57 tournaments, 32,000 participants and $185 million prize money, including the "Main Event," in which the grand winner earns almost $9 million.
The duo found significant evidence that poker requires skill. Players assumed to be skilled earned 30 percent on their investment, compared to all other players, who lost 15 percent. In dollar terms, and even excluding the highly-skilled "Main Event," high skill players earned an average of $350 per tournament, while other players lost $400 on average.
To put that in perspective, Levitt and Miles compare the return on a poker investment with that common from the financial markets. "The observed differences in ROIs [return on investments] are highly statistically significant and far larger in magnitude than those observed in financial markets," the paper says, "where fees charged by the money managers viewed as being most talented can run as high as three percent of assets under management and thirty percent of annual returns."
In human speak, that means the money of skilled players is better invested in a poker tournament than Wall Street, despite conventional wisdom that would indicate the opposite. In fact, the paper finds, "the high skilled player wins 54.9 percent of the match ups." That compares more closely to what is witnessed in Major League Baseball than anything on Wall Street:
"Since the year 2007, [baseball] teams that made the playoffs the previous season win 55.7 percent of their games in Major League Baseball against teams that failed to make the playoffs in the previous year. Thus, in some crude sense, the predictability of outcomes for pairs of players in a poker tournament is similar to that between teams in Major League Baseball. To the extent that baseball would unquestionably be judged a game of skill, the same conclusion might reasonably be applied to poker in light of the data."
Monday, May 9, 2011
Virtue Ethics
Virtue Ethics
Mark Vernon The Return of Virtue Ethics
What is the good life? How can we know?
The Enlightenment was a revolution in the way we think about morality. Two ethical models, in particular, have come to dominate ever since. One can be traced back to Immanuel Kant, and is based upon the notion of duty (and hence is called deontological, from the Greek deon, meaning duty.) The second is hedonist and can be traced back to Jeremy Bentham, and his principle of utility: an action can be called good if it increases pleasure or decreases pain.
Put them together and you have the liberal approach to asking what’s the right thing to do. It’s liberal not in the sense of being pro-gay or pro-abortion. Rather, it’s liberal in the deeper sense of focusing on the individual and the choices an individual makes. It's ethics conceived of in terms of rights and responsibilities, or in terms of what makes you happy or sad. The philosopher John Stuart Mill summed it up when he wrote: “Neither one person, nor any number of persons is warranted in saying to another human creature of ripe years, that he shall not do with his life for his own benefit what he chooses to do with it.”
You can understand why Mill wrote what he did. He lived in a period of history in which many people were not free to do as they chose. They were ruled by monarchs and chastised by prelates. The result was the subjugation of women and the owning of slaves. But we don’t live in such a world now. Most enjoy a degree of freedom that would have been unimaginable for most of human history, in the West at least. As a result, the liberal approaches to ethics are increasingly being questioned. Can they tell us what this freedom is for? Is it for more than just more consumption, more accumulation? What is the good life?
The problem is that we’ve lost touch with the bigger picture: what is it that makes life good for us humans? The Enlightenment left us with few resources for thinking about that larger question, because it was so focused on winning individuals their freedom. The philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe described our dilemma this way. Our talk of having “moral duties,” or our description of actions as “morally right,” has become vacuous because we are now free of the law-giving God who fixes those duties and obligations. And Anscombe, as a Catholic, was a firm believer in God — only not a law-giving God but a loving one.
In any case, now that we are relatively free, we need to ask again what life is for. There is another ethical tradition that can help. It’s known as virtue ethics. Virtue ethics begins by asking what it is to be human, and proceeds by asking what virtues — or characteristics, habits and skills — we need in order to become all that we might be as humans. It’s much associated with the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, who discussed the meaning of friendship as a way to illustrate his approach to ethics.
Science tells us we are social animals, Aristotle observed. But in order to live well as social animals, we also need a vision of what our sociality can be. He had a word for that vision: friendship. The good friend is someone who knows themselves, who is honest and courageous, who has time for others, who is engaged not only in their self-interest but has a concern for others. These are some of the virtues we should nurture in order to be fulfilled as friends.
However, there’s a further dimension to the good life, which virtue ethics also highlights — and which is problematic for us, given the hyper-individualism of contemporary societies.
The virtue ethics approach is not individualistic. It tells us that to become all we might be as humans we need others. And we need others in a number of ways. One is highlighted by Aristotle’s focus on friendship. Social animals, like ourselves, are fulfilled by being with others: we discover who we are by discovering who others are — those to whom we are connected by way of family, affection, community, and society. They shape us, and we shape them, and so we need to have a concern for them all. If we live in an unhappy family, or in an oppressive society, that is going to have a major impact upon our own lives, even compromising our full flourishing as human beings.
That’s one reason we need others. But we also need them because the communities to which we belong are also the repositories for the skills that we need to live well. The contemporary philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has draw attention to this in his book After Virtue. He points out that community life is the context within which we learn the characteristics and habits that make for the good life. Consider how one learns to play chess. It’s only by belonging to a community of chess players, and learning from past masters, that you too might become good at chess. You can learn the basics on your own, but the art of chess only by practicing with others. Alternatively, think of baseball. “If, on starting to play baseball, I do not accept that others know better than I when to throw a fast ball and when not,” MacIntyre writes, “I will never learn to appreciate good pitching let alone to pitch.”
There’s a third reason we need communities too. They are not only the context within which we learn life’s virtues, they are also the context within which we hear the stories that can inspire us about who we might become. These are the stories held, most commonly, in religious communities — the stories that convey how life is a gift, how life is for love, and how even in the midst of suffering there is hope. Stories are so important because they inform our vision of the good life — and that, in turn, informs us, and shapes our conduct.
Of course, the Enlightenment tells stories about who we are too. Only, they are individualistic, having to do with our rights and happiness. Much modern science tells us stories about who we are as well. Evolutionary psychologists, for example, frequently tell us we are basically the same as our primate cousins, struggling to survive, and driven by our selfish genes. This last story has been particularly powerful over recent decades.
When Alasdair MacIntyre asked how we might use virtue ethics to inspire us to live well today, he concluded pessimistically. He thought that our common life had become too thin, as a result of individualism, and so is unable to teach us the virtues. Hence he called his book After Virtue. He thought we are at a moment in history that needs some striking individual to stir up the desire in us to flourish again. It's happened before. In 5th century BCE Athens, figures like Socrates emerged. In the early Christian period, there was the person of Jesus. Or again, in the period around the collapse of the Roman empire, Benedict of Nursia emerged, and essentially became the founder of Western monasticism. Who will it be today?
Mark Vernon The Return of Virtue Ethics
What is the good life? How can we know?
The Enlightenment was a revolution in the way we think about morality. Two ethical models, in particular, have come to dominate ever since. One can be traced back to Immanuel Kant, and is based upon the notion of duty (and hence is called deontological, from the Greek deon, meaning duty.) The second is hedonist and can be traced back to Jeremy Bentham, and his principle of utility: an action can be called good if it increases pleasure or decreases pain.
Put them together and you have the liberal approach to asking what’s the right thing to do. It’s liberal not in the sense of being pro-gay or pro-abortion. Rather, it’s liberal in the deeper sense of focusing on the individual and the choices an individual makes. It's ethics conceived of in terms of rights and responsibilities, or in terms of what makes you happy or sad. The philosopher John Stuart Mill summed it up when he wrote: “Neither one person, nor any number of persons is warranted in saying to another human creature of ripe years, that he shall not do with his life for his own benefit what he chooses to do with it.”
You can understand why Mill wrote what he did. He lived in a period of history in which many people were not free to do as they chose. They were ruled by monarchs and chastised by prelates. The result was the subjugation of women and the owning of slaves. But we don’t live in such a world now. Most enjoy a degree of freedom that would have been unimaginable for most of human history, in the West at least. As a result, the liberal approaches to ethics are increasingly being questioned. Can they tell us what this freedom is for? Is it for more than just more consumption, more accumulation? What is the good life?
The problem is that we’ve lost touch with the bigger picture: what is it that makes life good for us humans? The Enlightenment left us with few resources for thinking about that larger question, because it was so focused on winning individuals their freedom. The philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe described our dilemma this way. Our talk of having “moral duties,” or our description of actions as “morally right,” has become vacuous because we are now free of the law-giving God who fixes those duties and obligations. And Anscombe, as a Catholic, was a firm believer in God — only not a law-giving God but a loving one.
In any case, now that we are relatively free, we need to ask again what life is for. There is another ethical tradition that can help. It’s known as virtue ethics. Virtue ethics begins by asking what it is to be human, and proceeds by asking what virtues — or characteristics, habits and skills — we need in order to become all that we might be as humans. It’s much associated with the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, who discussed the meaning of friendship as a way to illustrate his approach to ethics.
Science tells us we are social animals, Aristotle observed. But in order to live well as social animals, we also need a vision of what our sociality can be. He had a word for that vision: friendship. The good friend is someone who knows themselves, who is honest and courageous, who has time for others, who is engaged not only in their self-interest but has a concern for others. These are some of the virtues we should nurture in order to be fulfilled as friends.
However, there’s a further dimension to the good life, which virtue ethics also highlights — and which is problematic for us, given the hyper-individualism of contemporary societies.
The virtue ethics approach is not individualistic. It tells us that to become all we might be as humans we need others. And we need others in a number of ways. One is highlighted by Aristotle’s focus on friendship. Social animals, like ourselves, are fulfilled by being with others: we discover who we are by discovering who others are — those to whom we are connected by way of family, affection, community, and society. They shape us, and we shape them, and so we need to have a concern for them all. If we live in an unhappy family, or in an oppressive society, that is going to have a major impact upon our own lives, even compromising our full flourishing as human beings.
That’s one reason we need others. But we also need them because the communities to which we belong are also the repositories for the skills that we need to live well. The contemporary philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has draw attention to this in his book After Virtue. He points out that community life is the context within which we learn the characteristics and habits that make for the good life. Consider how one learns to play chess. It’s only by belonging to a community of chess players, and learning from past masters, that you too might become good at chess. You can learn the basics on your own, but the art of chess only by practicing with others. Alternatively, think of baseball. “If, on starting to play baseball, I do not accept that others know better than I when to throw a fast ball and when not,” MacIntyre writes, “I will never learn to appreciate good pitching let alone to pitch.”
There’s a third reason we need communities too. They are not only the context within which we learn life’s virtues, they are also the context within which we hear the stories that can inspire us about who we might become. These are the stories held, most commonly, in religious communities — the stories that convey how life is a gift, how life is for love, and how even in the midst of suffering there is hope. Stories are so important because they inform our vision of the good life — and that, in turn, informs us, and shapes our conduct.
Of course, the Enlightenment tells stories about who we are too. Only, they are individualistic, having to do with our rights and happiness. Much modern science tells us stories about who we are as well. Evolutionary psychologists, for example, frequently tell us we are basically the same as our primate cousins, struggling to survive, and driven by our selfish genes. This last story has been particularly powerful over recent decades.
When Alasdair MacIntyre asked how we might use virtue ethics to inspire us to live well today, he concluded pessimistically. He thought that our common life had become too thin, as a result of individualism, and so is unable to teach us the virtues. Hence he called his book After Virtue. He thought we are at a moment in history that needs some striking individual to stir up the desire in us to flourish again. It's happened before. In 5th century BCE Athens, figures like Socrates emerged. In the early Christian period, there was the person of Jesus. Or again, in the period around the collapse of the Roman empire, Benedict of Nursia emerged, and essentially became the founder of Western monasticism. Who will it be today?
Sunday, May 8, 2011
Concerning the Foolishness of Civil War Reenactments
BY HISTORIAN GUY LANFANTASIE
Yet none of these silent tributes really get to the heart of the Civil War. Some historians talk about the Civil War’s "unfinished business," as if the conflict involved a checklist that no one got around to completing. Actually the war changed everything in the United States: how Americans thought about themselves and their country; how work and industry could be organized, just like the huge armies that tramped from battle to battle; how the nation would henceforth define citizenship and civil rights; how equality would be heralded and, sadly, curtailed (both at the same time); how the federal government steadily grew in size and scope but adopted laissez-faire policies, especially when if came to regulating business or neglecting the downtrodden; how people would relate to one another -- more circumspect, less innocently than in the old days before the war; and even how people would speak to one another using new, crisp, declarative slang words and a rugged American language, captured so perfectly in the writings of Mark Twain, that resembled soldier talk and the realism of war. What the war did not change -- not permanently, anyway -- were white attitudes toward African-Americans and other minorities. Nor have those attitudes changed all that much in our own time, despite some of the very real advances that have marked race relations since Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and other tangible victories of the civil rights movement.
In 1961, at the start of the Civil War Centennial, Walker Percy, the talented Mississippi novelist, observed that "the country has still not made up its mind what to do about the Negro." Fifty years later, while a black man occupies the Oval Office, we still haven’t made up our mind as to what we should do about African-Americans and every other minority that inhabits this nation. White racial fears are hidden behind "birther" accusations, draconian immigration proposals and political attacks on federal entitlement programs; some white Americans even cry out that they want to take their country back.
The Civil War sesquicentennial can give them only one answer: You may try to get it back by pretending to fire on Fort Sumter, as the Civil War reenactors did in Charleston two weeks ago. Or you may try to get it back by joining the Tea Party and working to turn back the hands of time to the glory days you imagine as having once existed. But you can’t get your country back. You lost it 150 years ago. Ever since then, whether you like it or not, the steady march of the United States has been toward the higher ground, the greater purpose, of democracy and equality. And while that march has sometimes been stalled or even derailed, while it has been barricaded, hosed down and even sold out, nothing, nothing, has ever succeeded in keeping it permanently from moving forward. Perhaps, in the end, that’s the real legacy and the true significance of the Civil War.
Yet none of these silent tributes really get to the heart of the Civil War. Some historians talk about the Civil War’s "unfinished business," as if the conflict involved a checklist that no one got around to completing. Actually the war changed everything in the United States: how Americans thought about themselves and their country; how work and industry could be organized, just like the huge armies that tramped from battle to battle; how the nation would henceforth define citizenship and civil rights; how equality would be heralded and, sadly, curtailed (both at the same time); how the federal government steadily grew in size and scope but adopted laissez-faire policies, especially when if came to regulating business or neglecting the downtrodden; how people would relate to one another -- more circumspect, less innocently than in the old days before the war; and even how people would speak to one another using new, crisp, declarative slang words and a rugged American language, captured so perfectly in the writings of Mark Twain, that resembled soldier talk and the realism of war. What the war did not change -- not permanently, anyway -- were white attitudes toward African-Americans and other minorities. Nor have those attitudes changed all that much in our own time, despite some of the very real advances that have marked race relations since Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and other tangible victories of the civil rights movement.
In 1961, at the start of the Civil War Centennial, Walker Percy, the talented Mississippi novelist, observed that "the country has still not made up its mind what to do about the Negro." Fifty years later, while a black man occupies the Oval Office, we still haven’t made up our mind as to what we should do about African-Americans and every other minority that inhabits this nation. White racial fears are hidden behind "birther" accusations, draconian immigration proposals and political attacks on federal entitlement programs; some white Americans even cry out that they want to take their country back.
The Civil War sesquicentennial can give them only one answer: You may try to get it back by pretending to fire on Fort Sumter, as the Civil War reenactors did in Charleston two weeks ago. Or you may try to get it back by joining the Tea Party and working to turn back the hands of time to the glory days you imagine as having once existed. But you can’t get your country back. You lost it 150 years ago. Ever since then, whether you like it or not, the steady march of the United States has been toward the higher ground, the greater purpose, of democracy and equality. And while that march has sometimes been stalled or even derailed, while it has been barricaded, hosed down and even sold out, nothing, nothing, has ever succeeded in keeping it permanently from moving forward. Perhaps, in the end, that’s the real legacy and the true significance of the Civil War.
Saturday, May 7, 2011
Robert W. Creamer - Stengel: His Life & Times (2)
What a life Casey Stengel had! He lived to the ripe of age of 85, passing away in 1975, and he spent about 50 of those years in baseball. He always had a reputation, deservedly, as a clown who like to have fun with the game, but at the same time he was a serious life-long student of the game, and he loved the game of baseball. His passion for the game was unsurpassed.
He played and managed for a number of teams. After 3 years of managing the Oakland team in the old Pacific Coast League and winning its championship in 1957, he was hired for the DREAM job of managing, that of managing the most storied team in the history of major league baseball, the New York Yankees. His good fortune came because he was a long-time friend of George Weiss, who by chance became the Yankee general manager in 1948.
So at the age of 58 Casey Stengel began his march to baseball immortality with the 1949 season. Under Stengel the Yankees won 5 straight World Series championships. That's still the record and I can't imagine it will ever be surpassed.
Casey Stengel won 10 American pennants in 12 years of managing the Yankees. He was fired after losing the Series to the Pirates in 1960. He concluded his career by managing the hapless expansion NY Mets from 1962 to 1965. The Mets were woeful but nobody blamed Stengel.
The usual 5-yr. waiting rule was waived and Casey was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1965.
In the annals of baseball history, there is only one Casey Stengel. I can still see him on the game of the week charging the mound as the Yankee manager to change pitchers. He was known for how he charged the mound.
To this point, this is the definitive biography of this baseball great.
He played and managed for a number of teams. After 3 years of managing the Oakland team in the old Pacific Coast League and winning its championship in 1957, he was hired for the DREAM job of managing, that of managing the most storied team in the history of major league baseball, the New York Yankees. His good fortune came because he was a long-time friend of George Weiss, who by chance became the Yankee general manager in 1948.
So at the age of 58 Casey Stengel began his march to baseball immortality with the 1949 season. Under Stengel the Yankees won 5 straight World Series championships. That's still the record and I can't imagine it will ever be surpassed.
Casey Stengel won 10 American pennants in 12 years of managing the Yankees. He was fired after losing the Series to the Pirates in 1960. He concluded his career by managing the hapless expansion NY Mets from 1962 to 1965. The Mets were woeful but nobody blamed Stengel.
The usual 5-yr. waiting rule was waived and Casey was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1965.
In the annals of baseball history, there is only one Casey Stengel. I can still see him on the game of the week charging the mound as the Yankee manager to change pitchers. He was known for how he charged the mound.
To this point, this is the definitive biography of this baseball great.
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Robert W. Creamer - Stengel: His Life & Times
I am learning some things about Casey Stengel, the great baseball manager (and player).
He grew up Charles Dillon Stengel in Kansas City, Missouri. Because he was from "KC" he picked up the nickname Casey.
He played in Montgomery in 1912. Hard to believe that Casey Stengel played a minor league season in Montgomery, Alabama.
Apparently he never finished high school and yet was able to enter dental school in Kansas City. Had he not made it in baseball, Casey Stengel would have been a dentist.
From the beginning he was a clown, always liked to have a good time, but played the game seriously. Indeed, he was thoroughly dedicated to the game of baseball, a great and continuing student of the game all his life.
His managerial mentor was John J. McGraw, the legendary manager for many years in the early decades of the 20th century of the NY Giants.
Stengel's inside the park homerun won the first game of the 1923 World Series against the Yankees in the first game played in the then brand new Yankee Stadium.
He grew up Charles Dillon Stengel in Kansas City, Missouri. Because he was from "KC" he picked up the nickname Casey.
He played in Montgomery in 1912. Hard to believe that Casey Stengel played a minor league season in Montgomery, Alabama.
Apparently he never finished high school and yet was able to enter dental school in Kansas City. Had he not made it in baseball, Casey Stengel would have been a dentist.
From the beginning he was a clown, always liked to have a good time, but played the game seriously. Indeed, he was thoroughly dedicated to the game of baseball, a great and continuing student of the game all his life.
His managerial mentor was John J. McGraw, the legendary manager for many years in the early decades of the 20th century of the NY Giants.
Stengel's inside the park homerun won the first game of the 1923 World Series against the Yankees in the first game played in the then brand new Yankee Stadium.
Auburn Grad Does Good
Navy SEAL team that killed Osama bin Laden founded by Auburn graduate (Talbot)
Published: Wednesday, May 04, 2011, 8:30 AM Updated: Wednesday, May 04, 2011, 9:31 AM
By George Talbot from al.com
U.S. Navy SEAL Team Six — the elite special forces group that took down Osama Bin Laden on Sunday — was founded by an Auburn University graduate.
Richard Marcinko, known affectionately as “Demo Dick,” includes a master’s degree in political science from Auburn on his extensive resume.
Marcinko, 70, built the Navy’s premiere counter-terrorism unit in 1980, following a tragic failure by the U.S. military to rescue a group of American hostages in Iran.
That debacle — known as Operation Desert Claw — contributed to President Jimmy Carter’s defeat by Ronald Reagan later that year. It also highlighted the Navy’s need to upgrade its special forces capability.
Marcinko, a combat veteran in Vietnam, was tasked with creating the elite unit and served as its commanding officer from 1980-83.
Published: Wednesday, May 04, 2011, 8:30 AM Updated: Wednesday, May 04, 2011, 9:31 AM
By George Talbot from al.com
U.S. Navy SEAL Team Six — the elite special forces group that took down Osama Bin Laden on Sunday — was founded by an Auburn University graduate.
Richard Marcinko, known affectionately as “Demo Dick,” includes a master’s degree in political science from Auburn on his extensive resume.
Marcinko, 70, built the Navy’s premiere counter-terrorism unit in 1980, following a tragic failure by the U.S. military to rescue a group of American hostages in Iran.
That debacle — known as Operation Desert Claw — contributed to President Jimmy Carter’s defeat by Ronald Reagan later that year. It also highlighted the Navy’s need to upgrade its special forces capability.
Marcinko, a combat veteran in Vietnam, was tasked with creating the elite unit and served as its commanding officer from 1980-83.
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Why We are Democrats
Because we DO feel moral outrage.
Paul Ryan's Moral Barbarism
Jonathan Chait
Karl Rove's column the other day joined the many conservatives expressing their hurt and anger that President Obama would depict Paul Ryan's budget as harming sick and vulnerable citizens:
Mr. Obama likes campaigning more than governing. And for this president, campaigning means knocking down straw men and delivering a steady stream of misleading attacks. It means depicting opponents as indecent, heartless people who take special delight in targeting seniors and autistic children.
In fact, Obama has never accused Ryan, or anybody, of having a "special delight" in targetting seniors and autistic children. But he has accused them of pursuing policies that would harm, among others, seniors and autistic children. That's because it's incontrovertably true. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities delves into the details of Ryan's plan to slash Medicaid by more than a third over the next decade, and in half over the next two decades:
Seniors: An overwhelming majority of Medicare beneficiaries who live in nursing homes rely on Medicaid for their nursing home coverage. Because the Ryan plan would require such deep cuts in federal Medicaid funding, it would inevitably result in less coverage for nursing home residents and shift more of the cost of nursing home care to elderly beneficiaries and their families. A sharp reduction in the quality of nursing home care would be virtually inevitable, due to the large reduction that would occur in the resources made available to pay for such care.
People with disabilities: These individuals constitute 15 percent of Medicaid beneficiaries but account for 42 percent of all Medicaid expenditures, mostly because of their extensive health and long-term care needs. Capping federal Medicaid funding would place significant financial pressure on states to scale back eligibility and coverage for this high-cost population, many of whom would be unable to obtain coverage elsewhere because of their medical conditions.
Children: Currently, state Medicaid programs must provide children with health care services and treatments they need for their healthy development through the Early Periodic Screening, Diagnostic and Treatment (EPSDT) aspect of Medicaid, which provides regular preventive care for children and all follow-up diagnostic and treatment services that children are found to need. A block grant would likely permit states to drop EPSDT coverage, meaning that children, particularly those with special health care needs, would not be able to access some care that medical professionals find they need (because Medicaid would no longer cover certain health services and treatments for children, and their parents wouldn’t be able to afford to pay for that care on their own).
Working parents and pregnant women: Many state Medicaid programs already have extremely restrictive eligibility criteria for parents. In the typical state, working parents are ineligible for Medicaid if their income exceeds 64 percent of the poverty line (or $14,304 a year for a family of four), and unemployed parents are ineligible if their income exceeds 37 percent of the poverty line ($8,270 a year for a family of four). Under a block grant, states could cut these already low eligibility levels even further, cap enrollment, and/or require low-income parents to pay more for health services. States could do the same for low-income pregnant women who rely on Medicaid for their prenatal care, resulting in them forgoing services that are critical to ensuring a healthy pregnancy.
Now, Rove appears to be a pathological liar, or at least so deeply enmeshed in partisan spin it's not clear that a distinction exists in his mind between objective truth and claims that are useful to his side. But many other conservatives have likewise expressed what has the ring of genuine outrage that Obama would accuse Ryan of snatching medical care away from people in nursing homes, very poor families, special needs children, and so on. I think it reflects, in part, an inability or lack of desire to think with any specificty about the concrete ramifications of imposing extremely deep cuts to Medicaid. Who do they think is on Medicaid? Prosperous, healthy people?
No, Medicaid is a bare-bones program throwing a lifeline to people who are in bad shape. Cutting Medicaid may be the politically easiest way for Ryan to clear budget room to preserve Bush-era revenue levels, as Medicaid patients have little political clout. But it is, well, deeply immoral. I'm actually surprised that conservatives not only can't seem to imagine (or care about) the consequences of such policies, but they can't even imagine that people like Obama would actually feel moral outrage at their plan. They can't imagine a liberal objection as representing anything other than an attempt to score political points. It's bizarre. I mean, of course Obama finds it morally objectionable to take away medical care to people in nursing homes and children with special needs. That's why he's a Democrat.
Paul Ryan's Moral Barbarism
Jonathan Chait
Karl Rove's column the other day joined the many conservatives expressing their hurt and anger that President Obama would depict Paul Ryan's budget as harming sick and vulnerable citizens:
Mr. Obama likes campaigning more than governing. And for this president, campaigning means knocking down straw men and delivering a steady stream of misleading attacks. It means depicting opponents as indecent, heartless people who take special delight in targeting seniors and autistic children.
In fact, Obama has never accused Ryan, or anybody, of having a "special delight" in targetting seniors and autistic children. But he has accused them of pursuing policies that would harm, among others, seniors and autistic children. That's because it's incontrovertably true. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities delves into the details of Ryan's plan to slash Medicaid by more than a third over the next decade, and in half over the next two decades:
Seniors: An overwhelming majority of Medicare beneficiaries who live in nursing homes rely on Medicaid for their nursing home coverage. Because the Ryan plan would require such deep cuts in federal Medicaid funding, it would inevitably result in less coverage for nursing home residents and shift more of the cost of nursing home care to elderly beneficiaries and their families. A sharp reduction in the quality of nursing home care would be virtually inevitable, due to the large reduction that would occur in the resources made available to pay for such care.
People with disabilities: These individuals constitute 15 percent of Medicaid beneficiaries but account for 42 percent of all Medicaid expenditures, mostly because of their extensive health and long-term care needs. Capping federal Medicaid funding would place significant financial pressure on states to scale back eligibility and coverage for this high-cost population, many of whom would be unable to obtain coverage elsewhere because of their medical conditions.
Children: Currently, state Medicaid programs must provide children with health care services and treatments they need for their healthy development through the Early Periodic Screening, Diagnostic and Treatment (EPSDT) aspect of Medicaid, which provides regular preventive care for children and all follow-up diagnostic and treatment services that children are found to need. A block grant would likely permit states to drop EPSDT coverage, meaning that children, particularly those with special health care needs, would not be able to access some care that medical professionals find they need (because Medicaid would no longer cover certain health services and treatments for children, and their parents wouldn’t be able to afford to pay for that care on their own).
Working parents and pregnant women: Many state Medicaid programs already have extremely restrictive eligibility criteria for parents. In the typical state, working parents are ineligible for Medicaid if their income exceeds 64 percent of the poverty line (or $14,304 a year for a family of four), and unemployed parents are ineligible if their income exceeds 37 percent of the poverty line ($8,270 a year for a family of four). Under a block grant, states could cut these already low eligibility levels even further, cap enrollment, and/or require low-income parents to pay more for health services. States could do the same for low-income pregnant women who rely on Medicaid for their prenatal care, resulting in them forgoing services that are critical to ensuring a healthy pregnancy.
Now, Rove appears to be a pathological liar, or at least so deeply enmeshed in partisan spin it's not clear that a distinction exists in his mind between objective truth and claims that are useful to his side. But many other conservatives have likewise expressed what has the ring of genuine outrage that Obama would accuse Ryan of snatching medical care away from people in nursing homes, very poor families, special needs children, and so on. I think it reflects, in part, an inability or lack of desire to think with any specificty about the concrete ramifications of imposing extremely deep cuts to Medicaid. Who do they think is on Medicaid? Prosperous, healthy people?
No, Medicaid is a bare-bones program throwing a lifeline to people who are in bad shape. Cutting Medicaid may be the politically easiest way for Ryan to clear budget room to preserve Bush-era revenue levels, as Medicaid patients have little political clout. But it is, well, deeply immoral. I'm actually surprised that conservatives not only can't seem to imagine (or care about) the consequences of such policies, but they can't even imagine that people like Obama would actually feel moral outrage at their plan. They can't imagine a liberal objection as representing anything other than an attempt to score political points. It's bizarre. I mean, of course Obama finds it morally objectionable to take away medical care to people in nursing homes and children with special needs. That's why he's a Democrat.
Why the North Fought the Civil War
Why the North Fought the Civil War
By ERIC FONER
Published: April 29, 2011
Among the enduring mysteries of the American Civil War is why millions of Northerners were willing to fight to preserve the nation’s unity. It is not difficult to understand why the Southern states seceded in 1860 and 1861. As the Confederacy’s founders explained ad infinitum, they feared that Abraham Lincoln’s election as president placed the future of slavery in jeopardy. But why did so few Northerners echo the refrain of Horace Greeley, the editor of The New York Tribune: “Erring sisters, go in peace”?
THE UNION WAR
By Gary W. Gallagher
Illustrated. 215 pp. Harvard University Press. $27.95.
Excerpt: ‘The Union War’ (Google Books)
The latest effort to explain this deep commitment to the nation’s survival comes from Gary W. Gallagher, the author of several highly regarded works on Civil War military history. In “The Union War,” Gallagher offers not so much a history of wartime patriotism as a series of meditations on the meaning of the Union to Northerners, the role of slavery in the conflict and how historians have interpreted (and in his view misinterpreted) these matters.
The Civil War, Gallagher announces at the outset, was “a war for Union that also killed slavery.” Emancipation was an outcome (an “astounding” outcome, Lincoln remarked in his second Inaugural Address) but, Gallagher insists, it always “took a back seat” to the paramount goal of saving the Union. Most Northerners, he says, remained indifferent to the plight of the slaves. They embraced emancipation only when they concluded it had become necessary to win the war. They fought because they regarded the United States as a unique experiment in democracy that guaranteed political liberty and economic opportunity in a world overrun by tyranny. Saving the Union, in the words of Secretary of State William H. Seward, meant “the saving of popular government for the world.”
At a time when only half the population bothers to vote and many Americans hold their elected representatives in contempt, Gallagher offers a salutary reminder of the power of democratic ideals not simply to Northerners in the era of the Civil War, but also to people in other nations, who celebrated the Union victory as a harbinger of greater rights for themselves. Imaginatively invoking sources neglected by other scholars — wartime songs, patriotic images on mailing envelopes and in illustrated publications, and regimental histories written during and immediately after the conflict — Gallagher gives a dramatic portrait of the power of wartime nationalism.
His emphasis on the preservation of democratic government and the opportunities of free labor as central to the patriotic outlook is hardly new — one need only read Lincoln’s wartime speeches to find eloquent expression of these themes. But instead of celebrating the greatness of American democracy, Gallagher claims, too many historians dwell on its limitations, notably the exclusion from participation of nonwhites and women. Moreover, perhaps because of recent abuses of American power in the name of freedom, scholars seem uncomfortable with robust expressions of patriotic sentiment, especially when wedded to military might. According to Gallagher, they denigrate nationalism and suggest that the war had no real justification other than the abolition of slavery. (Gallagher ignores a different interpretation of the Union war effort, emanating from neo-Confederates and the libertarian right, which portrays Lincoln as a tyrant who presided over the destruction of American freedom through creation of the leviathan national state, not to mention the dreaded income tax.)
Gallagher devotes many pages — too many in a book of modest length — to critiques of recent Civil War scholars, whom he accuses of exaggerating the importance of slavery in the conflict and the contribution of black soldiers to Union victory. Often, his complaint seems to be that another historian did not write the book he would have written.
Thus, Gallagher criticizes Melinda Lawson, the author of “Patriot Fires,” one of the most influential recent studies of wartime nationalism, for slighting the experiences of the soldiers. But Lawson was examining nation-building on the Northern home front. Her investigation of subjects as diverse as the marketing of war bonds, the dissemination of pro-Union propaganda and the organization of Sanitary Fairs, where goods were sold to raise money for soldiers’ aid, illuminates how the nation state for the first time reached into the homes and daily lives of ordinary Americans.
Gallagher also criticizes recent studies of soldiers’ letters and diaries, which find that an antislavery purpose emerged early in the war. These works, he argues, remain highly “impressionistic,” allowing the historian “to marshal support for virtually any argument.” Whereupon Gallagher embarks on his own equally impressionistic survey of these letters, finding that they emphasize devotion to the Union.
Ultimately, Gallagher’s sharp dichotomy between the goals of Union and emancipation seems excessively schematic. It begs the question of what kind of Union the war was being fought to preserve. The evolution of Lincoln’s own outlook illustrates the problem. On the one hand, as Gallagher notes, Lincoln always insisted that he devised his policies regarding slavery in order to win the war and preserve national unity. Yet years before the Civil War, Lincoln had argued that slavery fatally undermined the nation’s ability to exemplify the superiority of free institutions. The Union to be saved, he said, must be “worthy of the saving.” During the secession crisis, Lincoln could have preserved the Union by yielding to Southern demands. He adamantly refused to compromise on the crucial political issue — whether slavery should be allowed to expand into Western territories.
Gallagher maintains that only failure on the battlefield, notably Gen. George B. McClellan’s inability to capture Richmond, the Confederate capital, in the spring of 1862, forced the administration to act against slavery. Yet the previous fall, before significant military encounters had taken place, Lincoln had already announced a plan for gradual emancipation. This hardly suggests that military necessity alone placed the slavery question on the national agenda. Early in the conflict, many Northerners, Lincoln included, realized that there was little point in fighting to restore a status quo that had produced war in the first place.
Many scholars have argued that the war brought into being a new conception of American nationhood. Gallagher argues, by contrast, that it solidified pre-existing patriotic values. Continuity, not change, marked Northern attitudes. Gallagher acknowledges that as the war progressed, “a struggle for a different kind of Union emerged.” Yet his theme of continuity seems inadequate to encompass the vast changes Americans experienced during the Civil War. Surely, he is correct that racism survived the war. Yet he fails to account for the surge of egalitarian sentiment that inspired the rewriting of the laws and Constitution to create, for the first time, a national citizenship enjoying equal rights not limited by race.
Before the war, slavery powerfully affected the concept of self-government. Large numbers of Americans identified democratic citizenship as a privilege of whites alone — a position embraced by the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott decision of 1857. Which is why the transformation wrought by the Civil War was so remarkable. As George William Curtis, the editor of Harper’s Weekly, observed in 1865, the war transformed a government “for white men” into one “for mankind.” That was something worth fighting for.
By ERIC FONER
Published: April 29, 2011
Among the enduring mysteries of the American Civil War is why millions of Northerners were willing to fight to preserve the nation’s unity. It is not difficult to understand why the Southern states seceded in 1860 and 1861. As the Confederacy’s founders explained ad infinitum, they feared that Abraham Lincoln’s election as president placed the future of slavery in jeopardy. But why did so few Northerners echo the refrain of Horace Greeley, the editor of The New York Tribune: “Erring sisters, go in peace”?
THE UNION WAR
By Gary W. Gallagher
Illustrated. 215 pp. Harvard University Press. $27.95.
Excerpt: ‘The Union War’ (Google Books)
The latest effort to explain this deep commitment to the nation’s survival comes from Gary W. Gallagher, the author of several highly regarded works on Civil War military history. In “The Union War,” Gallagher offers not so much a history of wartime patriotism as a series of meditations on the meaning of the Union to Northerners, the role of slavery in the conflict and how historians have interpreted (and in his view misinterpreted) these matters.
The Civil War, Gallagher announces at the outset, was “a war for Union that also killed slavery.” Emancipation was an outcome (an “astounding” outcome, Lincoln remarked in his second Inaugural Address) but, Gallagher insists, it always “took a back seat” to the paramount goal of saving the Union. Most Northerners, he says, remained indifferent to the plight of the slaves. They embraced emancipation only when they concluded it had become necessary to win the war. They fought because they regarded the United States as a unique experiment in democracy that guaranteed political liberty and economic opportunity in a world overrun by tyranny. Saving the Union, in the words of Secretary of State William H. Seward, meant “the saving of popular government for the world.”
At a time when only half the population bothers to vote and many Americans hold their elected representatives in contempt, Gallagher offers a salutary reminder of the power of democratic ideals not simply to Northerners in the era of the Civil War, but also to people in other nations, who celebrated the Union victory as a harbinger of greater rights for themselves. Imaginatively invoking sources neglected by other scholars — wartime songs, patriotic images on mailing envelopes and in illustrated publications, and regimental histories written during and immediately after the conflict — Gallagher gives a dramatic portrait of the power of wartime nationalism.
His emphasis on the preservation of democratic government and the opportunities of free labor as central to the patriotic outlook is hardly new — one need only read Lincoln’s wartime speeches to find eloquent expression of these themes. But instead of celebrating the greatness of American democracy, Gallagher claims, too many historians dwell on its limitations, notably the exclusion from participation of nonwhites and women. Moreover, perhaps because of recent abuses of American power in the name of freedom, scholars seem uncomfortable with robust expressions of patriotic sentiment, especially when wedded to military might. According to Gallagher, they denigrate nationalism and suggest that the war had no real justification other than the abolition of slavery. (Gallagher ignores a different interpretation of the Union war effort, emanating from neo-Confederates and the libertarian right, which portrays Lincoln as a tyrant who presided over the destruction of American freedom through creation of the leviathan national state, not to mention the dreaded income tax.)
Gallagher devotes many pages — too many in a book of modest length — to critiques of recent Civil War scholars, whom he accuses of exaggerating the importance of slavery in the conflict and the contribution of black soldiers to Union victory. Often, his complaint seems to be that another historian did not write the book he would have written.
Thus, Gallagher criticizes Melinda Lawson, the author of “Patriot Fires,” one of the most influential recent studies of wartime nationalism, for slighting the experiences of the soldiers. But Lawson was examining nation-building on the Northern home front. Her investigation of subjects as diverse as the marketing of war bonds, the dissemination of pro-Union propaganda and the organization of Sanitary Fairs, where goods were sold to raise money for soldiers’ aid, illuminates how the nation state for the first time reached into the homes and daily lives of ordinary Americans.
Gallagher also criticizes recent studies of soldiers’ letters and diaries, which find that an antislavery purpose emerged early in the war. These works, he argues, remain highly “impressionistic,” allowing the historian “to marshal support for virtually any argument.” Whereupon Gallagher embarks on his own equally impressionistic survey of these letters, finding that they emphasize devotion to the Union.
Ultimately, Gallagher’s sharp dichotomy between the goals of Union and emancipation seems excessively schematic. It begs the question of what kind of Union the war was being fought to preserve. The evolution of Lincoln’s own outlook illustrates the problem. On the one hand, as Gallagher notes, Lincoln always insisted that he devised his policies regarding slavery in order to win the war and preserve national unity. Yet years before the Civil War, Lincoln had argued that slavery fatally undermined the nation’s ability to exemplify the superiority of free institutions. The Union to be saved, he said, must be “worthy of the saving.” During the secession crisis, Lincoln could have preserved the Union by yielding to Southern demands. He adamantly refused to compromise on the crucial political issue — whether slavery should be allowed to expand into Western territories.
Gallagher maintains that only failure on the battlefield, notably Gen. George B. McClellan’s inability to capture Richmond, the Confederate capital, in the spring of 1862, forced the administration to act against slavery. Yet the previous fall, before significant military encounters had taken place, Lincoln had already announced a plan for gradual emancipation. This hardly suggests that military necessity alone placed the slavery question on the national agenda. Early in the conflict, many Northerners, Lincoln included, realized that there was little point in fighting to restore a status quo that had produced war in the first place.
Many scholars have argued that the war brought into being a new conception of American nationhood. Gallagher argues, by contrast, that it solidified pre-existing patriotic values. Continuity, not change, marked Northern attitudes. Gallagher acknowledges that as the war progressed, “a struggle for a different kind of Union emerged.” Yet his theme of continuity seems inadequate to encompass the vast changes Americans experienced during the Civil War. Surely, he is correct that racism survived the war. Yet he fails to account for the surge of egalitarian sentiment that inspired the rewriting of the laws and Constitution to create, for the first time, a national citizenship enjoying equal rights not limited by race.
Before the war, slavery powerfully affected the concept of self-government. Large numbers of Americans identified democratic citizenship as a privilege of whites alone — a position embraced by the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott decision of 1857. Which is why the transformation wrought by the Civil War was so remarkable. As George William Curtis, the editor of Harper’s Weekly, observed in 1865, the war transformed a government “for white men” into one “for mankind.” That was something worth fighting for.
Monday, May 2, 2011
Bin Laden
Like everyone else I was totally caught by surprise when NBC interrupted Donald Trump last night around 9:45 to announce that the President had an important annoucement. We were told he would tell us that Osama Bin Laden had been killed. Indeed, this was the case. Today we are all celebrating this amazing accommplishment. I've been listening to the commentary on NPR. Let's see where we go from here. This is certainly a deserved boost to Obama's stature.
Sunday, May 1, 2011
Trump and the Republicans; Dumb and Dumber
We can only hope that the Republicans have reached ground zero in their descent into ignorance and dumbness with Donald Trump. Just when you thought Palin and Bachmann were it, here comes Donald.
Friday, 29 April 2011
by Johann Hari
Since the election of Barack Obama, the Republican Party has proved that one of its central intellectual arguments was right all along. It has long claimed that evolution is a myth believed in only by whiny liberals – and it turns out it was on to something. Every six months, the party venerates a new hero, and each time it is somebody further back on the evolutionary scale.
Sarah Palin told cheering rallies that her message to the world was: "We'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way!" – but that wasn't enough. So the party found Michele Bachmann, who said darkly it was an "interesting coincidence" that swine flu only breaks out under Democratic presidents, claims the message of The Lion King is "I'm better at what I do because I'm gay", and argues "there isn't even one study that can be produced that shows carbon dioxide is a harmful gas."
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More Johann Hari Articles
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That wasn't enough. I half-expected the next contender to be a lung-fish draped in the Stars and Stripes. But it wasn't anything so sophisticated. Enter stage (far) right Donald Trump, the bewigged billionaire who has filled America with phallic symbols and plastered his name across more surfaces than the average Central Asian dictator. CNN's polling suggests he is the most popular candidate among Republican voters. It's not hard to see why. Trump is every trend in Republican politics over the past 35 years taken to its logical conclusion. He is the Republican id, finally entirely unleashed from all restraint and all reality.
The first trend is towards naked imperialism. On Libya, he says: "I would go in and take the oil... I would take the oil and stop this baby stuff." On Iraq, he says: "We stay there, and we take the oil... In the old days, when you have a war and you win, that nation's yours." It is a view that the world is essentially America's property, inconveniently inhabited by foreigners squatting over oil-fields. Trump says America needs to "stop what's going on in the world. The world is just destroying our country. These other countries are sapping our strength." The US must have full spectrum dominance. In this respect, he is simply an honest George W Bush.
The second trend is towards dog-whistle prejudice – pitched just high enough for frightened white Republicans to hear it. Trump made it a central issue to suggest that Obama wasn't born in America (and therefore was occupying the White House illegally), even though this conspiracy theory had long since been proven to be as credible as the people who claim Paul McCartney was killed in 1969 and replaced with an imposter. Trump said nobody "ever comes forward" to say they knew Obama as a child in Hawaii. When lots of people pointed out they knew Obama as a child, Trump ridiculed the idea that they could remember that far back. Then he said he'd "heard" the birth certificate said Obama was Muslim. When it was released saying no such thing, Trump said: "I'm very proud of myself."
The Republican primary voters heard the message right: the black guy is foreign. He's not one of us. Trump answered these charges by saying: "I've always had a great relationship with the blacks."
The third trend is towards raw worship of wealth as an end in itself – and exempting them from all social responsibility. Trump is wealthy because his father left him a large business, and since then companies with his name on them have crashed into bankruptcy four times. In 1990, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston studied the Trump accounts and claimed that while Trump claimed to be worth $1.4bn, he actually owed $600m more than he owned and you and I were worth more than him. His current wealth is not known, but he claims he is worth more than $2.7bn.
Johnston says that in fact most of Trump's apparent fortune comes from "stiffing his creditors" and from government subsidies and favours for his projects – which followed large donations to the campaigns of both parties, sometimes in the very same contest. Trump denies these charges and presents himself as an entrepreneur "of genius".
Yet for the Republican Party, the accumulation of money is proof in itself of virtue, however it was acquired. The richest 1 per cent pay for the party's campaigns, and the party in turn serves their interests entirely. The most glaring example is that they have simply exempted many of the rich from taxes. Johnston studied four of Trump's recent tax returns, and found he legally paid no taxes in two of them. In America today, a janitor can pay more income tax than Donald Trump – and the Republicans regard that not as a source of shame, but of pride.
How are these tax exemptions for the super-rich paid for? Here's one example. The Republican budget that just passed through the Senate slashed funding to help premature babies to survive. The rich riot while the poor shrivel. Trump offers the ultimate symbol of this: he won't even shake hands with any ordinary Americans out on the stump, because "you catch all sorts of things" from them. Yes: the Republican front-runner is a billionaire who literally won't touch the poor or middle class.
The fourth trend is to insist that any fact inconvenient to your world view simply doesn't exist, or can be overcome by pure willpower. Soon, the US will have to extend its debt ceiling – the amount of money the government is allowed to borrow – or it will default on its debt. Virtually every economist in the world says this would cause another global economic crash. Trump snaps back: "What do economists know? Most of them aren't very smart." Confront the Republicans with any long-term social or economic problem, and they have one response: it would go away if only we insisted on our assumptions more aggressively.
This denial of reality runs deep. So Trump says "it's so easy" to deal with rising oil prices. He says he would call in Opec, the cartel of oil-producing nations, as if they were contestants on his show The Apprentice, and declare: "I'm going to look them in the eye and say, 'Fellows, you've had your fun. Your fun is over.' "
It's the same, he says, with China. He will order them to stop manipulating their currency. When he was informed that the Chinese had some leverage over the US, he snapped: "They have some of our debt. Big deal. It's a very small number relative to the world, ok?" This is what the Republican core vote wants to be told. The writer Matthew Yglesias calls it "the Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics". It's named after the Marvel comics superhero the Green Lantern, who can only use his superpowers when he "overcomes fear" and shows confidence – and then he can do anything. This is Trump's view. The whiny world simply needs to be bullied into submission by a more assertive America – or the world can be fired and he'll find a better one.
Trump probably won't become the Republican nominee, but not because most Republicans reject his premisses. No: it will be because he states these arguments too crudely for mass public consumption. He takes the whispered dogmas of the Reagan, Bush and Tea Party years and shrieks them through a megaphone. The nominee will share similar ideas, but express them more subtly. In case you think these ideas are marginal to the party, remember - it has united behind the budget plan of Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan. It's simple: it halves taxes on the richest 1 percent and ends all taxes on corporate income, dividends, and inheritance. It pays for it by slashing spending on food stamps, healthcare for the poor and the elderly, and basic services. It aims to return the US to the spending levels of the 1920s – and while Ryan frames it as a response to the deficit, it would actually increase it according to the independent Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. Ryan says "the reason I got involved in public service" was because he read the writings of Ayn Rand, which describe the poor as "parasites" who must "perish", and are best summarized by the title of one of her books: 'The Virtue of Selfishness.'
The tragedy is that Obama needs serious opposition – but not from this direction. In reality, he is funded by similar destructive corporate interests, and has only been a few notches closer to sanity than these people. But faced with such overt lunacy, he seems like he is serving the bottom 99 per cent of Americans much more than he really is.
The Republican Party today isn't even dominated by market fundamentalism. This is a crude Nietzscheanism, dedicated to exalting the rich as an overclass and dismissing the rest. So who should be the Republican nominee? I hear the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were considering running – but they are facing primary challenges from the Tea Party for being way too mild-mannered.
Friday, 29 April 2011
by Johann Hari
Since the election of Barack Obama, the Republican Party has proved that one of its central intellectual arguments was right all along. It has long claimed that evolution is a myth believed in only by whiny liberals – and it turns out it was on to something. Every six months, the party venerates a new hero, and each time it is somebody further back on the evolutionary scale.
Sarah Palin told cheering rallies that her message to the world was: "We'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way!" – but that wasn't enough. So the party found Michele Bachmann, who said darkly it was an "interesting coincidence" that swine flu only breaks out under Democratic presidents, claims the message of The Lion King is "I'm better at what I do because I'm gay", and argues "there isn't even one study that can be produced that shows carbon dioxide is a harmful gas."
Related articles
More Johann Hari Articles
Search the news archive for more stories
That wasn't enough. I half-expected the next contender to be a lung-fish draped in the Stars and Stripes. But it wasn't anything so sophisticated. Enter stage (far) right Donald Trump, the bewigged billionaire who has filled America with phallic symbols and plastered his name across more surfaces than the average Central Asian dictator. CNN's polling suggests he is the most popular candidate among Republican voters. It's not hard to see why. Trump is every trend in Republican politics over the past 35 years taken to its logical conclusion. He is the Republican id, finally entirely unleashed from all restraint and all reality.
The first trend is towards naked imperialism. On Libya, he says: "I would go in and take the oil... I would take the oil and stop this baby stuff." On Iraq, he says: "We stay there, and we take the oil... In the old days, when you have a war and you win, that nation's yours." It is a view that the world is essentially America's property, inconveniently inhabited by foreigners squatting over oil-fields. Trump says America needs to "stop what's going on in the world. The world is just destroying our country. These other countries are sapping our strength." The US must have full spectrum dominance. In this respect, he is simply an honest George W Bush.
The second trend is towards dog-whistle prejudice – pitched just high enough for frightened white Republicans to hear it. Trump made it a central issue to suggest that Obama wasn't born in America (and therefore was occupying the White House illegally), even though this conspiracy theory had long since been proven to be as credible as the people who claim Paul McCartney was killed in 1969 and replaced with an imposter. Trump said nobody "ever comes forward" to say they knew Obama as a child in Hawaii. When lots of people pointed out they knew Obama as a child, Trump ridiculed the idea that they could remember that far back. Then he said he'd "heard" the birth certificate said Obama was Muslim. When it was released saying no such thing, Trump said: "I'm very proud of myself."
The Republican primary voters heard the message right: the black guy is foreign. He's not one of us. Trump answered these charges by saying: "I've always had a great relationship with the blacks."
The third trend is towards raw worship of wealth as an end in itself – and exempting them from all social responsibility. Trump is wealthy because his father left him a large business, and since then companies with his name on them have crashed into bankruptcy four times. In 1990, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston studied the Trump accounts and claimed that while Trump claimed to be worth $1.4bn, he actually owed $600m more than he owned and you and I were worth more than him. His current wealth is not known, but he claims he is worth more than $2.7bn.
Johnston says that in fact most of Trump's apparent fortune comes from "stiffing his creditors" and from government subsidies and favours for his projects – which followed large donations to the campaigns of both parties, sometimes in the very same contest. Trump denies these charges and presents himself as an entrepreneur "of genius".
Yet for the Republican Party, the accumulation of money is proof in itself of virtue, however it was acquired. The richest 1 per cent pay for the party's campaigns, and the party in turn serves their interests entirely. The most glaring example is that they have simply exempted many of the rich from taxes. Johnston studied four of Trump's recent tax returns, and found he legally paid no taxes in two of them. In America today, a janitor can pay more income tax than Donald Trump – and the Republicans regard that not as a source of shame, but of pride.
How are these tax exemptions for the super-rich paid for? Here's one example. The Republican budget that just passed through the Senate slashed funding to help premature babies to survive. The rich riot while the poor shrivel. Trump offers the ultimate symbol of this: he won't even shake hands with any ordinary Americans out on the stump, because "you catch all sorts of things" from them. Yes: the Republican front-runner is a billionaire who literally won't touch the poor or middle class.
The fourth trend is to insist that any fact inconvenient to your world view simply doesn't exist, or can be overcome by pure willpower. Soon, the US will have to extend its debt ceiling – the amount of money the government is allowed to borrow – or it will default on its debt. Virtually every economist in the world says this would cause another global economic crash. Trump snaps back: "What do economists know? Most of them aren't very smart." Confront the Republicans with any long-term social or economic problem, and they have one response: it would go away if only we insisted on our assumptions more aggressively.
This denial of reality runs deep. So Trump says "it's so easy" to deal with rising oil prices. He says he would call in Opec, the cartel of oil-producing nations, as if they were contestants on his show The Apprentice, and declare: "I'm going to look them in the eye and say, 'Fellows, you've had your fun. Your fun is over.' "
It's the same, he says, with China. He will order them to stop manipulating their currency. When he was informed that the Chinese had some leverage over the US, he snapped: "They have some of our debt. Big deal. It's a very small number relative to the world, ok?" This is what the Republican core vote wants to be told. The writer Matthew Yglesias calls it "the Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics". It's named after the Marvel comics superhero the Green Lantern, who can only use his superpowers when he "overcomes fear" and shows confidence – and then he can do anything. This is Trump's view. The whiny world simply needs to be bullied into submission by a more assertive America – or the world can be fired and he'll find a better one.
Trump probably won't become the Republican nominee, but not because most Republicans reject his premisses. No: it will be because he states these arguments too crudely for mass public consumption. He takes the whispered dogmas of the Reagan, Bush and Tea Party years and shrieks them through a megaphone. The nominee will share similar ideas, but express them more subtly. In case you think these ideas are marginal to the party, remember - it has united behind the budget plan of Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan. It's simple: it halves taxes on the richest 1 percent and ends all taxes on corporate income, dividends, and inheritance. It pays for it by slashing spending on food stamps, healthcare for the poor and the elderly, and basic services. It aims to return the US to the spending levels of the 1920s – and while Ryan frames it as a response to the deficit, it would actually increase it according to the independent Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. Ryan says "the reason I got involved in public service" was because he read the writings of Ayn Rand, which describe the poor as "parasites" who must "perish", and are best summarized by the title of one of her books: 'The Virtue of Selfishness.'
The tragedy is that Obama needs serious opposition – but not from this direction. In reality, he is funded by similar destructive corporate interests, and has only been a few notches closer to sanity than these people. But faced with such overt lunacy, he seems like he is serving the bottom 99 per cent of Americans much more than he really is.
The Republican Party today isn't even dominated by market fundamentalism. This is a crude Nietzscheanism, dedicated to exalting the rich as an overclass and dismissing the rest. So who should be the Republican nominee? I hear the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were considering running – but they are facing primary challenges from the Tea Party for being way too mild-mannered.
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