Republicans Vote to End Medicare, and Other DC Follies
Posted: April 15, 2011 Filed under: Barack Obama, Democratic Politics, Domestic Policy, Federal Budget, Federal Budget and Budget deficit, Hillary Clinton, House of Representatives, income inequality, legislation, Media, Medicare, Psychopaths in charge, Surreality, the villagers, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, We are so F'd | Tags: Barak Obama, medicare, Nancy Pelosi, Paul Ryan 23 Comments
What a disgrace these House Republicans are! This afternoon, 235 of them voted to destroy Medicare and Medicaid when they voted for Representative Paul Ryan’s budget bill. The bill passed the House with all Democrats and only four Republicans voting against it.
The bill will most likely die in the Senate, but Democrats should make sure those House Republicans’ constituents know what they voted for. Of course Democrats will do no such thing, because, first they are wimps with no idea how to win, and second, their President is already signaling that he will compromise with Ryan in the bargaining over raising the debt ceiling.
Obama said that it is critical for the world economy that Congress vote to increase the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling, but said that he would have to reach an accord with Republicans, who have called for a vote to be conditional on passage of fiscal reform.
“I think it’s absolutely right that it’s not going to happen without some spending cuts,” Obama said during an interview with The Associated Press.
Before the vote on the Ryan bill, there was a vote on an even more draconian bill proposed by far right Republicans. It turned into a bit of a free-for-all on the House floor. From Brian Beutler at TPM:
What was supposed to be a routine vote in the House — to knock down an amendment authored by conservative Republicans — turned into pandemonium on the House floor Friday, as Democrats tried to jam the plan through, and hang it around the GOP’s necks.
The vote was on the Republican Study Committee’s alternative budget — a radical plan that annihilates the social contract in America by putting the GOP budget on steroids. Deeper tax cuts for the wealthy, more severe entitlement rollbacks.
Normally something like that would fail by a large bipartisan margin in either the House or the Senate….But today that formula didn’t hold. In an attempt to highlight deep divides in the Republican caucus. Dems switched their votes — from “no” to “present.”
Panic ensued. In the House, legislation passes by a simple majority of members voting. The Dems took themselves out of the equation, leaving Republicans to decide whether the House should adopt the more-conservative RSC budget instead of the one authored by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan. As Dems flipped to present, Republicans realized that a majority of their members had indeed gone on the record in support of the RSC plan — and if the vote closed, it would pass. That would be a slap in the face to Ryan, and a politically toxic outcome for the Republican party.
So they started flipping their votes from “yes” to “no.”
In the end, the plan went down by a small margin, 119-136. A full 172 Democrats voted “present.”
It’s nice to see a little bit of partisan spirit from the Democrats anyway. Too bad they had to use Obama’s old standby–voting “present,” but still maybe a good sign. It’s pretty clear that many in the House are unhappy with Obama and his kowtowing to Republicans. Maybe they will stand up to Obama next. Where there’s life, there’s hope.
Of the Ryan Budget bill, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said
“This Republican plan ends Medicare as we know it and dramatically reduces benefits for seniors,” Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the House minority leader, said in a floor speech. She said it would force the average senior citizen to pay twice as much for half the benefits while giving “tens of billions of dollars” in tax breaks to big oil companies.
The GOP plan “reduces Medicaid to our seniors and nursing homes . . . while it gives tax breaks to companies that send jobs overseas,” Pelosi said. “That’s just not fair.”
Pelosi was also very unhappy with President Obama’s “compromise” budget for 2011. Besides being angry about the cuts to programs that help the most vulnerable Americans, Pelosi was extremely unhappy that she and her Democratic House colleagues were completely cut out of the negotiations on the 2011 budget. In fact, Patricia Murphy at The Daily Beast says that many Democrats are “disgusted” with Obama. She writes that
…a number of Democrats are past protesting the president, discussing among themselves ways to recruit a primary challenger in 2012.
“I have been very disappointed in the administration to the point where I’m embarrassed that I endorsed him,” one senior Democratic lawmaker said. “It’s so bad that some of us are thinking, is there some way we can replace him? How do you get rid of this guy?” The member, who would discuss the strategy only on the condition of anonymity, called the discontent with Obama among the caucus “widespread,” adding: “Nobody is saying [they want him out] publicly, but a lot of people wish it could be so. Never say never.”
House Republicans, who got much of what they wanted in their negotiations with the White House, are whining because Obama said some mean things about them in his deficit speech on Tuesday. They were shocked that the president’s speech was “partisan.” Give me a break! Why do we have political parties if they aren’t supposed to be “partisan?”
The three Republican congressmen saw it as a rare ray of sunshine in Washington’s stormy budget battle: an invitation from the White House to hear President Obama lay out his ideas for taming the national debt.
They expected a peace offering, a gesture of goodwill aimed at smoothing a path toward compromise. But soon after taking their seats at George Washington University on Wednesday, they found themselves under fire for plotting “a fundamentally different America” from the one most Americans know and love.
“What came to my mind was: Why did he invite us?” Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.) said in an interview Thursday. “It’s just a wasted opportunity.”
The situation was all the more perplexing because Obama has to work with these guys: Camp is chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, responsible for trade, taxes and urgent legislation to raise the legal limit on government borrowing. Rep. Jeb Hensarling (Tex.) chairs the House Republican Conference. And Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) is House Budget Committee chairman and the author of the spending blueprint Obama lacerated as “deeply pessimistic” during his 44-minute address.
Give me a break! Why do we have political parties if they aren’t supposed to be “partisan?” I’d like to see a hell of a lot more partisanship on the Democratic side. Of course Republicans are never accused of “partisanship,” but it is simply assumed that they will be rabidly “partisan” and the press eats it up when they are. But don’t worry guys, Obama is just mouthing the appropriate words before he surrenders and gives you most of what you want again.
Whatever Obama thinks he’s doing, it doesn’t seem to be working for the majority of Americans. Today Gallup reported that the president’s job approval rating is only 41%. The biggest drop in support for Obama is among Independents, only 35% of whom approve of his performance.
The latest buzzword in DC is “serious.” Republicans and columnists rave about how “serious” Ryan’s budget bill is. Democrats claim Obama’s plan is the truly “serious” one. But as Dakinikat keeps explaining, neither of these plans is going to do much to pull the country out of the doldrums, because neither has even a nodding acquaintance with economic reality. For anyone to call any of these politicians and pundits “serious” is nothing but a sick joke.
Today was just another pointless day in the lives of the least serious people in the least serious city on earth.
NY Rally Speakers highlight Core Democratic Values
Posted: April 15, 2011 Filed under: Democratic Politics, financial institutions, Global Financial Crisis | Tags: Chris Hedges, Liberal Values, Wall Street scandals 4 CommentsA rally in NYC today highlighted issues and concerns that have been going unaddressed for some time in this country. 
The Nation highlights some of the featured speakers including Chris Hedges who says that President Obama is defying those core values supported by Democratic voters.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges also spoke at the rally. Beforehand, I asked him if he thinks acts of civil disobedience such as the Wisconsin union protests are the only paths of recourse Americans have left to fight for change. “There’s a moral imperative to carry them out,” says Hedges. “[I]f we don’t begin to physically defend the civil society, all resistance will be ceded to very proto-fascist movements such as the Tea Party that celebrate the gun culture, the language of violence, seek scapegoats for their misery.”
He calls the state of America an “anemic democracy,” and says it’s time for citizens to get off the Internet and occupy the streets because their leaders no longer represent them. Politicians have spoken incessantly about the need for shared sacrifice when in fact they’re guarding a plutocracy that levies the burden of budget cuts on the shoulders of the poor. This is a system in which Bank of America’s CEO Brian Moynihan gets a $9 million bonus while one in four American children survives on food stamps.
Hedges calls the idea of shared sacrifice farcical. “[Bank of America] sends out home invasion teams to throw Americans out of their homes through bank repossessions or foreclosures, and of course many of these people were given loans that the lenders knew they could never repay often under fraudulent conditions…and yet there has been absolutely no investigation — no criminal charges — brought against these corporations.”
We live in a corporate state, Hedges stresses, both in our interview and later when he takes the stage. “Not only the money, but the wages, and retirement benefits, $17 trillion worth have been robbed by these financial institutions. It’s repugnant.”
And the one in six Americans without a job aren’t the ones going to raise money to get President Obama reelected. The money, Hedges says, will come from the corporate state, what he calls the “predators.” Hedges says President Obama serves their — not our — interests.
Obama’s most recent budget speech, in which he adopted some of the populist rhetoric about raising taxes on the wealthy, didn’t impress Hedges. After all, it was Obama who extended the Bush era tax cuts for the wealthy. “To watch him sort of talk out of both sides of his mouth is a little disconcerting,” says Hedges. “I fear, like most people, that not only are we going to see an extension of those cuts, but they’ll be cemented into place permanently.” Like many in the liberal class, Hedges says Obama “speaks in the rhetoric of traditional liberalism, but every action he takes defies the core values of the liberal tradition.”
Other groups also questioned the current economic policies dominating our national conversation. Some of the most persuasive speech was associated with the financial crisis and its perpetrators.
Dave Petrovich, executive director of the Society For Preservation of Continued Homeownership, agrees with that sentiment. “The president, and most of our lapdog Congress, are employees of the banking industry, so they’re not going to really discuss this unless it’s in their own financial self-interest.” Bank of America was once again a central target of the protest since the company hasn’t paid a nickel in federal income taxes in the past two years and received a “income tax refund from hell” of $666 million for 2010. The protesters demand to know why a company that received $45 billion in taxpayer money during the bailout now gets to play by a different set of tax rules, while simultaneously paying out obscene bonuses to its CEO and kicking hardworking Americans out of their homes
There’s something fundamentally wrong with a system that bails out perpetrators of mass fraud and destruction and applauds the removal of safety nets from its victims. This started me thinking that maybe we should come up with a list of what we consider liberal and democratic values. Frankly, I consider civil liberties, respect for the Bill of Rights, and provision of services essential to public health, safety, and education to be central. I also consider the idea that liberty and justice for all means for ALL and not just the rich and powerful. It’s been apparent from that Goldman Sachs and Bank of American can get bailed out for all kinds of crime. What kinds of things do you think should go on the list?
US Debt Revisited
Posted: April 15, 2011 Filed under: just because | Tags: Annual Deficit, Federal Buget 11 CommentsA lot has been said regarding how large the Federal Debt is and how unsustainable it is. It is interesting to go back and look at the historical record. Data source is Historical Tables which are available on Office of Management and Budget (OMB) website. OMB is the president’s accounting organization. A wide range of information is available under Historical Records. This article focuses on Table 7.1 – Federal Debt at the end of the year 1940 to 2016. Click that entry and you get a download of an Excel spread sheet with a lot of information.
I do not do well in interpreting numerical tables. I like to plot them out to get a idea of what they are saying. We will only plot total debt in nominal terms and as a % of GDP. On the chart I confirm the recent years Federal Debt as reported by the Treasury.
Note that the years after 2010 are projections. The near term years in the future are pretty accurate. However the out years tend to change a lot simply because the budget gets modified . Note that the nominal debt has been growing every year dramatically since Reagan. Note that %GDP kind of gives a false impression of a reduction when in fact the Debt is climbing every year. It is useful to note that the rate of growth under Clinton is much lower. It dramatically increases under George Bush II . This is is because of prosecuting wars and tax cuts. Then, the Financial Crisis produces a more dramatic change projected to continue in the Obama years.
It is useful to look at the rate of change of the Debt curve. I approximate that by calculating the extra money we have to borrow each year. That is plotted in the next chart along with Nominal Debt available in the first chart.
The Deficit curve accentuates the borrowing activity by each president. Note that under Reagan and Bush I, the borrowing continues, It starts coming down in Bush I’s last year because he increased Taxes which cost him the election loss to Clinton.
Note that the Deficit continues to go down under Clinton because of increased taxes and a good economy despite the taxes. .
Then under George Bush II the deficit dramatically returns because of lower taxes and entering wars. It is interesting to note that the Republicans had control of the Senate from 2003 to 2007, under Bill Frist. They had control of the House from 1995 to 2007, under Gingrich and Hastert. So from 2003 to 2007 they had the House, Senate and the Presidency. 4 of the 8 years during the Bush II term. Some would argue that they had the Supreme Court also. The bottom line is that they had complete control of the budget and the debt still was out of control. Then the Financial Crisis hit in 2008, the result of deregulation in the Bush years.
So, when we hear the Republicans lament the Debt, we need to remember that a large part of it was due to Republican policies. If you insist on reducing taxes and conducting wars with borrowed money, you get the result we are currently experiencing.
I like to remind my sanctimonious Republican friends that the debt is mostly of their doing
Friday Reads
Posted: April 15, 2011 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: Bob Dylan, Don't Look Back, Labor marekts, Labor Unions, unemployment 44 Comments
Good Morning!
It’s the end of the work week for those of you that still have jobs. Also, it’s the ides of April. Have you filed your taxes yet with the IRS? Better yet, do you actually have a job and can you report income this year? If so, you’re running against the wind these days. It’s not like most of our elected officials any where notice these days. Jobs, unemployment, and collective bargaining rights appear to the farthest things from their little minds. They’re still trying to figure out whose ass or fist is tightest. A few fighters remain. I’m going to start out with a 12 pack salute to those who still care for the working guy and gal.
Is a picture worth a 1000 words or can words make a picture too? NY Congressman Bob Crowley copied Bob Dylan’s famous “Don’t Look Back” short film to make a few points.
Politico reports on the purpose of Crowley’s show of words.
The video prompted MSNBC’s Luke Russert to tweet, “Rep. Joe Crowley channels his own Bob Dylan “Don’t Look Back” on the House floor.”
But Crowley Communications Director Courtney Gidner says that wasn’t the point of the exercise.
“While my boss is certainly a huge fan of Bob Dylan, the inspiration behind his ‘speechless’ speech was the GOP’s failure to produce a jobs-focused bill.”
I posted this in a down thread conversation but wanted to make sure you read this analysis from USA Today just in case you missed it. Huge numbers of Americans are leaving the work force. This is really worrisome.
The share of the population that is working fell to its lowest level last year since women started entering the workforce in large numbers three decades ago, a USA TODAY analysis finds.
Only 45.4% of Americans had jobs in 2010, the lowest rate since 1983 and down from a peak of 49.3% in 2000. Last year, just 66.8% of men had jobs, the lowest on record.
The bad economy, an aging population and a plateau in women working are contributing to changes that pose serious challenges for financing the nation’s social programs.
Over half of the the population is not working. Working-age men are dropping out like flies. This is not good for maintenance of programs like social security that rely on an increase in workers to fund current benefits. It’s also a game change from 30-40 years ago. I’ll be waiting to see what labor economists have to say about this.
Meanwhile, 1000s of workers protested the roll back of worker rights and budget cuts in Michigan. Working men and women in states all over the country have taken to the streets to protect their rights to participate in determining their work environment and compensation.
Thousands of people rallied at the Michigan State Capitol in Lansing on Wednesday to protest Republican proposals to roll back labor rights and cut government services. Organizers put attendance at more than 10,000. Herb Sanders of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees urged the crowd to begin recall campaigns against Gov. Rick Snyder and other top Republicans.
Herb Sanders: “We will recall the scoundrels one by one. If their agenda is keeping money in the pocket of fat-cat corporate CEOs, as opposed to keeping working Americans employed in fair wages with decent healthcare and decent schools in our neighborhoods, they’ve got to go.”
It appears that many voters have remorse over sending Tea Party candidates to elected office. Florida is a stand out case.
Only three months removed from Governor Rick Scott’s (R) inauguration, a majority of Florida voters now say the state is headed in the wrong direction and that, if they could do it all over again, they wouldn’t have elected Scott in the first place, according to a new Suffolk University poll.
In the poll, 54% of voters said the state was headed in the wrong direction, compared to 30% who said it was going the right way. Further, just under half (49%) of all voters said they disapproved of Scott’s job performance, versus only 28% who said they approved.
Scott’s approval rating is so bad that the poll found him losing a hypothetical do-over election to Democrat Alex Sink by a ten-point margin, 41% to 31%.
Previous polls have also found Scott’s job approval deep underwater, including a Quinnipiac poll released earlier this month that pegged his approval to disapproval split at 35% to 48%. A March PPP poll showed Scott with an even worse 32%-55% split, and found him losing a do-over election — by a 20-point margin.
Scott was one of several freshman GOP governors swept into office last year amid the Republican wave nationwide. But since taking office, voters have rapidly soured on Scott as he’s pursued some drastic — and deeply unpopular — policies.
Labor leaders are none too happy with the President or Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Neither of the legacy parties have workers’ interests in mind these days.
“Now, not only are we getting screwed by the Republicans but the Democrats are doing it too,” said one union official, characterizing the mood at a summit of labor leaders who are worried that Democrats seem unlikely to go to the mat for them as an election year approaches.
Presidents of several unions and an AFL-CIO spokesman declined to repeat their private criticism to a reporter Tuesday, a sign that labor feels it must still try to maintain a relationship with the Democratic Party, even if it’s deeply troubled . With Republicans increasingly shifting from private antagonism toward open war with organized labor, unreliable Democratic allies are the only allies the movement has, and it remains unclear whether disappointments will dampen enthusiasm among union activists and voters in the 2012 elections.
I’ll tell you that I have no idea where to go any more. I’m torn between ‘throw the bums out’ and ‘none of the above’. I’m beginning to think my dog knows more about economics than any one in the District beltway these days.
A lot of folks are arguing that the retirement age in developed nations should be raised to 70. They want to work us until we drop dead, folks! Here’s some on that from The Economist.
Yet too many people see longer working lives as a worry rather than an opportunity—and not just because they are going to be chained to their desks. Some fret that there will not be enough jobs to go around. This misapprehension, known to economists as the “lump of labour fallacy”, was once used to argue that women should stay at home and leave all the jobs for breadwinning males. Now lump-of-labourites say that keeping the old at work would deprive the young of employment. The idea that society can become more prosperous by paying more of its citizens to be idle is clearly nonsensical. On that reasoning, if the retirement age came down to 25 we would all be as rich as Croesus.
Raising the official retirement age is only part of the solution, for many workers retire before the official age. Martin Baily and Jacob Kirkegaard of the Peterson Institute in Washington, DC, reckon that raising actual EU retirement ages to the official age would offset the impact of an ageing population over the next 20 years.
For that to happen, working practices and attitudes need to change. Western managers worry too much about the quality of older workers (see Schumpeter). In physically demanding occupations, it is true, some may be unable to work into their late 60s. The incapacitated will need disability benefits. Others will need to find a different job. But this should be less of a problem than it used to be now that economies are based on services not manufacturing. In knowledge-based jobs, age is less of a disadvantage. Although older people reason more slowly, they have more experience and, by and large, better personal skills. Even so, most people’s productivity does eventually decline with age; and pay needs to reflect this falling-off. Traditional seniority systems, under which people get promoted and paid more as they age, therefore need to change.
So, they’re going to work us until we drop and PAY us less for being old. What a deal!!! I frequently joke with my students that I will die at the podium and the administration will have to pry my cold, dead fingers off. I have to admit that this is a melodramatic image, however, to die standing at a podium is better than being chained to a desk in the private sector again. There’s only so many bad senior management decisions that one person should be forced to join in on in one life time. I’ve been party to opening too many of their eyes to their short roads to bankruptcy to do the private sector stupidity again. They all get away with those bad decisions too since they get to leave with good severance packages. I’d rather die poor than die inflicting pain and stupidity on people just because some guy went to seminar and got a wild hair.
Not that any of these old dudes ever pay for their bad mistakes or their lies. Here’s a good example via Naked Capitalism and Yves: Senator Levin Claims Goldman Execs Perjured Themselves Before Congress on Mortgage Testimony.
Senator Carl Levin, in releasing the report, took aim at Goldman’s truthiness in its testimony before Congress and called on Federal prosecutors to examine whether Goldman committed perjury. Two issues are at stake. First it the Goldman claim that it lost money on its housing bets and was not net short housing (or at least not for long). Second is the notion that the firm was acting merely as a market marker, which basically means caveat emptor, if clients made bad bets, Goldman was merely acting as a neutral middleman.
While Goldman made the usual pious denials, the evidence in the report supports the Levin charges. It notes:
Overall in 2007, its net short position produced record profits totaling $3.7
billion for Goldman’s Structured Products Group, which when combined with other mortgage
losses, produced record net revenues of $1.2 billion for the Mortgage Department as a whole.2007 was the critical year when the market turned decisively south and all dealers were dumping mortgage-related inventory. Goldman had been further ahead in the process and appears to be the only firm to put on very sizeable short positions. The magnitude of the profits on the short side lend credence to the charge that Goldman was substantially and successfully net short.
This would basically mean that Goldman Sachs was not acting as a ‘market-maker’. This was the claim made by GS executives during the hearing. I was some what appalled by the inability of the congress critters on the committee to fully comprehend what market makers do and ask intelligent questions. Now that we’ve got the details, it’s pretty clear GS was not acting as an intermediary for client orders. They were basically speculating and the report is evidently full of aggressive marketing and sales pushes to move CDOs and other highly risky financial instruments on which they had an offsetting corporate position. This should be investigated by the DOJ. However, given the cozy relationship between shadow banking and Timothy Geithner, I doubt Obama will move on it at all.
Meanwhile, “Food, Gas And Rent Push Consumer Prices Higher” so ordinary working people are feeling the pinch from both lower incomes and higher prices. I’m thinking we’re seeing those bubbles I’ve been warning about frankly. Rich people have a tremendous amount of money right now and they’re taxes are way down so they’re not investing in businesses but looking for quick arbitrage profits by trading paper back and forth. Unfortunately, the real world is under that paper some where.
Excluding the volatile food and gas categories, the so-called core index rose 0.1 percent and it is up only 1.2 percent in the past year.
But steep food and gas prices are hitting consumers hard.
Gasoline jumped 5.6 percent last month and has risen nearly 28 percent in the past year. Consumers paid an average price of $3.81 a gallon nationwide on Friday according to the travel group AAA.
Food prices rose 0.8 percent last month, the largest increase in almost three years. Prices for fruits and vegetables, dairy products, chicken and beef all increased. Coffee costs rose 3.5 percent.
So, anyway, I continue to be amazed at how much labor is getting screwed compared to how many breaks capital gets these days. I seriously think that the elected officials are trying to completely remove taxes from capital owners and load it solidly on to the backs of working men and women. The time to sharpen pitchforks nears. You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows …
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