Saturday Reads
Posted: December 15, 2012 Filed under: children, Crime, Gun Control, Hillary Clinton, hunger, misogyny, morning reads, Rush Limbaugh, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics | Tags: Bob Dylan, debt limit, Diane Brame, gun violence, Jacintha Saldanha, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, Mick Jagger, school shootings 20 Comments
Bob Dylan reading Disc Magazine with Mick Jagger on the cover, 1966
Good Morning. It’s such a very sad day that I hardly know what to post. I’m still in shock about yesterday’s terrible shooting in Connecticut. How many more of these nightmarish events have to happen before our “leaders” in Washington finally decide to do something about controlling guns? How about completely banning all ammunition?
I’m just going to post a few reactions to the horror. I’m sure we’ll be learning much more about Adam Lanza and his possible motivations in the coming days. We’ll also learn if there are any courageous politicians left in the White House and Congress who will stand up the the National Rampage Association (NRA).
Raw Story: Gun control advocates gather near White House.
Gun control advocates gathered near the White House, many holding white candles, in a demonstration calling for a renewed discussion of gun control policy after a shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., left almost three dozen children and adults dead, reported the Associated Press. Multiple signs read “#TodayISTheDay,” a response to Press Secretary Jay Carney’s assertion that “today is not the day” to discuss gun control in the United States. However, the demonstrators made no specific appeals, reported Talking Points Memo.
“We can change the worst conditions of our country. Together we can change the pain into joy. Together we can change the sorrow into gladness,” said one demonstrator.
The speaker then called on everyone to hold their candles high so that everyone can see that “today is the day.”
Adam Gopnik at the New Yorker: Newtown and the madness of guns.
After the mass gun murders at Virginia Tech, I wrote about the unfathomable image of cell phones ringing in the pockets of the dead kids, and of the parents trying desperately to reach them. And I said (as did many others), This will go on, if no one stops it, in this manner and to this degree in this country alone—alone among all the industrialized, wealthy, and so-called civilized countries in the world. There would be another, for certain.
Then there were—many more, in fact—and when the latest and worst one happened, in Aurora, I (and many others) said, this time in a tone of despair, that nothing had changed. And I (and many others) predicted that it would happen again, soon. And that once again, the same twisted voices would say, Oh, this had nothing to do with gun laws or the misuse of the Second Amendment or anything except some singular madman, of whom America for some reason seems to have a particularly dense sample.
And now it has happened again, bang, like clockwork, one might say: Twenty dead children—babies, really—in a kindergarten in a prosperous town in Connecticut. And a mother screaming. And twenty families told that their grade-schooler had died. After the Aurora killings, I did a few debates with advocates for the child-killing lobby—sorry, the gun lobby—and, without exception and with a mad vehemence, they told the same old lies: it doesn’t happen here more often than elsewhere (yes, it does); more people are protected by guns than killed by them (no, they aren’t—that’s a flat-out fabrication); guns don’t kill people, people do; and all the other perverted lies that people who can only be called knowing accessories to murder continue to repeat, people who are in their own way every bit as twisted and crazy as the killers whom they defend. (That they are often the same people who pretend outrage at the loss of a single embryo only makes the craziness still crazier.)
So let’s state the plain facts one more time, so that they can’t be mistaken: Gun massacres have happened many times in many countries, and in every other country, gun laws have been tightened to reflect the tragedy and the tragic knowledge of its citizens afterward. In every other country, gun massacres have subsequently become rare. In America alone, gun massacres, most often of children, happen with hideous regularity, and they happen with hideous regularity because guns are hideously and regularly available.
Politicker: Message to President Obama from Mayors Against Gun Violence, “Offering condolences is not enough.” Statements of Co-Chairs Michael Bloomberg of NYC, and Thomas Menino of Boston:
Statement of Mayor’s Against Illegal Guns Co-Chair New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg:
“With all the carnage from gun violence in our country, it’s still almost impossible to believe that a mass shooting in a kindergarten class could happen. It has come to that. Not even kindergarteners learning their A,B,Cs are safe. We heard after Columbine that it was too soon to talk about gun laws. We heard it after Virginia Tech. After Tucson and Aurora and Oak Creek. And now we are hearing it again. For every day we wait, 34 more people are murdered with guns. Today, many of them were five-year olds. President Obama rightly sent his heartfelt condolences to the families in Newtown. But the country needs him to send a bill to Congress to fix this problem. Calling for ‘meaningful action’ is not enough. We need immediate action. We have heard all the rhetoric before. What we have not seen is leadership – not from the White House and not from Congress. That must end today. This is a national tragedy and it demands a national response. My deepest sympathies are with the families of all those affected, and my determination to stop this madness is stronger than ever.”
Statement of Mayors Against Illegal Guns Co-Chair Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino:
“As a parent and grandparent, I am overcome with both grief and outrage by the tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut. This unspeakable act of violence will forever imprint this day in our hearts and minds. My heart goes out to the families impacted by this senseless tragedy and the many others we have recently witnessed across the United States. As a Mayor who has witnessed too many lives forever altered by gun violence, it is my responsibility to fight for action. Today’s tragedy reminds us that now is the time for action. Innocent children will now never attend a prom, never play in a big game, never step foot on a college campus. Now is the time for a national policy on guns that takes the loopholes out of the laws, the automatic weapons out of our neighborhoods and the tragedies like today out of our future.”
I’m glad I live in a state that at least tries to control guns. In Massachusetts you have to apply for a license from your local police before you can apply to purchase a firearm. All firearms must have trigger locks and must be stored unloaded in locked containers. If you are caught with an unlicensed gun, you go directly to jail for a mandatory two-year sentence. See the links above for more.
Now a few more reads on other subjects.
School cafeteria worker fired for feeding needy student.
For two years, Dianne Brame worked as a cafeteria manager at Hudson Elementary in Webster Groves, keeping kids’ bellies full for their all-important task of learning.
The lunch lady loved her job: “I knew kids by their names, I knew their likes and dislikes, so it was just fun.”
But recently, she came across a fourth grader who consistently came without money. She says he used to be on the free lunch program, but language barriers got in the way of reapplying: “I sent them paperwork so that they could get back in contact with me, but it didn’t happen,” she says.
For days, Brame snuck the boy lunches. She explains, “I let his account get over $45 which I’m only supposed to let it get over $10, and I started letting him come through my lunch line without putting his number in, and they look at that as stealing. I thought it was just taking care of a kid.”
There’s an update to the story: “Dianne Brame has been rehired by Hudson Elementary following the huge response from this story.”
Center for American Progress: The ‘Debt Limit’: Time to End 95 Years of False Labeling
Congress and the White House have struggled over what has wrongly been called the “debt limit” since 1917, when a cap on the Treasury Department’s borrowing authority was inserted into legislation permitting “Liberty Bonds” to be sold to support U.S. military operations in Europe during World War I. A country that wants to maintain a reputation of paying its bills must recognize that debts are incurred when goods and services are purchased, not on the basis of whether or not the country wants to borrow the money needed to pay for those purchases.
The vote on what we have wrongly referred to for these many years as the “debt limit” is not a vote on how much we will spend or how much revenue we will raise to cover that spending: Those decisions are generally made by Congress months, and in many instances, even years before the extra borrowing authority is needed.
Each spring Congress deals with a budget resolution—setting targets for spending, revenues, and indebtedness. That legislation caps the amount of money that can be appropriated and prescribes what changes are needed in permanent spending legislation such as entitlements and whether we should raise or lower taxes to pay for those spending decisions. That resolution contains specific language stating what those decisions will mean in terms of the annual budget deficit and the change that will take place in the public debt.
Congress then considers the specific appropriation bills, entitlement changes, and tax legislation to implement the plan and determine the size of the debt. The vote on the so-called debt ceiling occurs long after those decisions are made. It is not a vote on how much we will spend or whether we will raise the money to pay for it but rather a vote on whether we will pay our bills. Voting against raising the debt limit is sort of like being the guy who turns down opportunities to work overtime so that he can spend more time at the movies, only to decide when his credit card bill arrives that he needs to correct his profligate ways by refusing to pay it.
Much more at the link.
Here’s a must read from Andrew Sullivan: The Unreason of Antonin Scalia. I’m not going to excerpt from it–you need to read the whole thing.
A few more reads, link dump-style.
The Independent: Jacintha Saldanha: Suicide note criticising senior hospital staff found among possessions of nurse at centre of Duchess of Cambridge phone call hoax
The Guardian: Hospital defends treatment of Jacintha Saldanha
Media Matters: Limbaugh Delivers Sexist Remark About Making A “Real Woman” Out Of Hillary Clinton
Last but not least, from Rolling Stone: How Mick Jagger Learned to Dance – By His Brother, Chris Jagger
I’m heading back to the Boston area today, so I’ll be on the road the next couple of days. I’ll check in when I can. I hope everyone has a peaceful, restful weekend.
Where’s the Beef?
Posted: December 13, 2012 Filed under: 2012 elections, Fiscal Cliff, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics | Tags: Economists, fiscal cliff, Paul Krugman 54 Comments
Yup, Clara’s question is still germane.
I have a more earthy version of this having do to with lies and morons when I continue to watch the media cover the “fiscal cliff”. The coverage is singularly lacking substance and Media Matters shows us why in a study that shows that “Economists – And Economics – Absent From Media Coverage Of Debt Debate”. Journalists continue to bring politicians in to discuss the politics of the fiscal cliff in a complete vacuum of facts, data, economic theory, and reality or economic perspective. Why are economists absent from the discussion?
A Media Matters study found that economists have been strangely absent from discussions on budget negotiations, following a typical pattern of the media’s inability to host experts to discuss complex issues. This lack of expert analysis has steered the debate toward politics and away from core economic concerns.
In a recently published study of news segments discussing current budget negotiations, Media Matters found that the presence of economists was sorely lacking – out of 503 total guests in the 337 segments analyzed, only 22 were economists. The lack of appearances by economists is spread across all networks …
I’ve watched a lot of the coverage and there are a lot of things coming out of the mouths of people making these decisions that would never come out of the mouth of an economist whatever their voter affiliation. But let me start with one thing that strikes me as really, really, really obscene. The Republican mantra of “Increased Taxes Kill Jobs” is old school Keynes. I mean REAL old school Keynesian economics because the old Keynes model shows us that increasing taxes or decreasing government spending is contractionary fiscal policy. So, why hasn’t any moderator of bloviating pols mentioned this or asked about this as Republicans rant on about the evilness of Keynesian economics?
NeoKeynesians have discovered a lot about the subtleties of the impact of changes in tax rates or government spending since that first bit of insight came from the Keynesian models back in the day. Those subtleties are present in the studies you read that show that changing tax rates for the rich has a different impact that changing tax rates for others. It also has been determined that some government spending is more effective in a variety of ways than others. However, the point remains. That Republican talking point is actually quite old school Keynesian so why doesn’t one Media person ask them why they hate Keynes and say that continually? Is it because they’ve bought into the idea that tax cuts only should be discussed in terms of the republicans adherence to the dismissed Laffer Curve and hypothesis? Where are the economists that can actually ask these questions? There’s plenty of us out there writing, tweeting, blogging, and facebooking? Why not ask one of us?
Previous studies by Media Matters have noted that the lack of economists’ input helps spread conservative misinformation, leaving a substantial impact on public opinion. The most recent study, however, shows that keeping economists out of the debate also eliminates any discussion of economic issues.
One such issue is the so-called “fiscal cliff,” a combination of automatic tax hikes and spending cuts that, according to the Congressional Budget Office, could plunge the U.S. economy into recession in 2013.
However, of the 337 segments analyzed, 209 — 62 percent — failed to address the macroeconomic implications of either tax increases or spending cuts. While some microeconomic issues were discussed (such as the potential impact on healthcare costs), most of the segments were focused on largely non-economic issues, such as political leverage in negotiations, the Grover Norquist pledge, or concessions made by the two parties.
Meanwhile, economists have not been silent on the economic consequences of current budget negotiations. A recent International Monetary Fund study found that for every dollar decrease in government spending, the U.S. would experience as much as a $1.80 decrease in output. Conversely, the Congressional Budget Office noted that if Bush-era tax rates expired for high-income earners, negative effects on economic output would be negligible.
Given the fact that cutting spending and raising taxes are both large components of the so-called “fiscal cliff,” highlighting these findings when discussing budget negotiations would help inform viewers of the real economic stakes. Instead, the media have taken the economics out of a largely economic issue.
Not even Greg Mankiw would risk his reputation in the academic community spreading the lies that get put out there about the economy by Republican Politicians. Chief among the lies are the kinda crap we saw coming from the Republicans. There are all these completely untrue economic lies running around out there. It’s all surrounding ideological things the Republicans are still trying to accomplish. Social Security has nothing to do with the Federal deficit. It’s not going bankrupt. Raising the age of social security and medicare does not solve any economic problems and does not save money. It just costs shifts things to different programs and sectors of government. Higher marginal tax rates on the rich does not kill jobs. Lower marginal tax rates on the rich does not create jobs. Special tax treatment for speculative investment behavior destabilizes financial markets. Regulation of Financial Markets improves their outcomes. There is not a structural deficit problem. There is a cyclical problem that would be solved if real stimulus of the economy occurred. I could go on and on and on and have written extensively on this citing study after study and economic expert after economic expert.
Nobel prize winning Paul Krugman’s facts get attacked as polemics by a political operative on Sunday TV. This is the reality of our public discussion on the most important issues of our time. Krugman is frequently out there on his own. He’s always trying to argue from a fact based, scientific method based, reality gets to argue with pols. Why can’t the media bring on more economists and let us see a real discussion of facts and theories? We have so much obvious data sitting right in front of us. The UK’s recession is a great example. The UK with its conservatives and austerity package has the worst economy in the west right now. It’s due to those policies the Republicans want to enact here being enacted by Tories there. Both Europe and the US are in much better situations–albeit still stale because of the lack of true fiscal stimulus–because they’ve not completely done the austerity thing. He points out that Ben Bernanke and the overly conservative Fed appears to be the only grown up institution in the beltway these days.
Along with its new policy pronouncement, the Fed released its economic projections (pdf). What struck me is that the Fed expects the unemployment rate to be well above its long-run level even in the fourth quarter of 2015, which is as far as its projections go.
This means that the Fed is projecting elevated unemployment nine full years after the Great Recession started. And, of course, the Fed has been consistently over-optimistic.
This is an awesome failure of policy — not solely at the Fed, of course.When I wax caustic about Very Serious People, bear this in mind. Faced with an economic crisis where textbook macroeconomics told us exactly how to respond, people of influence chose instead to obsess over budget deficits and generally punt on employment; and the result has been a huge economic and human disaster.
So much of this is disheartening to me. However, the most disheartening thing is waking up every day for the last 4 years or so realizing that an entire political organization–one of the two in our duopoly–doesn’t care about anything but getting its way. Every day it becomes more obvious that Republicans are not about our country, our country’s economy, or our people. That kind of psychopathy should be punished severely. Over and over they’ve shown they will absolutely tank our economy for their donor base.
But, again, how will the majority of people know this if they’re only allowed political discussion that continually presents lies, ideology, and out and out crap as an ‘alternative’ viewpoint?
Thursday Reads: GOP Wars on Democracy, Social Safety Net; Russia and Syria; MacDonald Follow-Up; and Ancient Cheese making
Posted: December 13, 2012 Filed under: Crime, Criminal Justice System, Foreign Affairs, Republican Tax Fetishists, Russia, science, Social Security, Syria, The Media SUCKS, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics | Tags: ancient cheesemaking, Apple stores, archaeology, Ben Bernanke, Bob Corker, cops gone wild, Debt Ceiling, Federal Reserve Board, Gene Weingarten, hippies, iPhones, Jeffrey MacDonald, Job Creation, Koch Brothers, Manson murders, Medicaid, medicare, Michigan emergency manager law, Rick Snyder, tasers, unemployment 13 Comments
Good Morning!!
Now that Rick Snyder has succeeded in turning Michigan into a right-to-work-for-less state, he and his Republican House have passed a supposedly “new and improved” emergency manager law. The Detroit Free Press reports:
The House passed the Local Financial Stability and Choice act in a 63-46 vote late Wednesday, with Rep. Kevin Cotter, R-Mt. Pleasant, as the only Republican to join Democrats in voting against it.
Immediate effect for the new bill was rejected 63-45, meaning it would take effect around the end of March if passed by the Senate, likely to happen Thursday, and signed by Gov. Rick Snyder, as expected.
The legislation introduced by Rep. Al Pscholka, R-Stevensville, is similar to a draft Treasurer Andy Dillon and Gov. Rick Snyder had released. The administration said it’s designed to address shortcomings in Public Act 4 by giving local officials in financially troubled cities and school district more input in decisions.
Incoming House Minority Leader Tim Greimel, D-Auburn Hills, said it is a “mirror image” of what voters just rejected and “another slap in the face to democracy perpetrated by this House.”
It appears that both Wisconsin and Michigan are now totally owned by the Koch Brothers. Think Progress reports on How Michigan Voters Can Repeal The GOP’s Anti-Union Powergrab, but this is starting to feel like whack a mole. Republicans seem determined to kill democracy one state at a time.
The New York Times Fed Ties Rates to Joblessness, With Target of 6.5%
The Federal Reserve made it plain on Wednesday that job creation had become its primary focus, announcing that it planned to continue suppressing interest rates so long as the unemployment rate remained above 6.5 percent.
It was the first time the nation’s central bank had publicized such a specific economic objective, underscoring the depth of its concern about the persistence of what the Fed chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, called “a waste of human and economic potential.”
To help reduce unemployment, the Fed said it would also continue monthly purchases of $85 billion in Treasury securities and mortgage-backed securities until job market conditions improved, extending a policy announced in September.
But the Fed released new economic projections showing that most of its senior officials did not expect to reach the goal of 6.5 percent unemployment until the end of 2015, raising questions of why it was not moving to expand its economic stimulus campaign.
Ben Bernanke indicated there isn’t much more the Fed can do at this point. Perhaps its time for GOP lawmakers to quit trying to destroy the economy?
I couldn’t believe this story about cops gone wild in New Hampshire. Raise your hand if you knew it was illegal to buy “too many” iPhones.
Police in Nashua, New Hampshire say they were forced to use a Taser on a 44-year-old Chinese woman who does not speak English after she was told to leave an Apple Store because she was trying to buy too many iPhones.
Through a translator, Xiaojie Li told WMUR that she had bought two iPhones from the Pheasant Lane Mall Apple Store on Friday and returned on Tuesday to buy more to send to her family in China.
“The manager of the Apple Store came and told her something, but she didn’t understand,” Li’s daughter explained.
Soon after that, shoppers captured cell phone video of police — who were providing security at the store’s request — using a stun gun on Li as she laid on the mall floor screaming.
The Apple store employees had to call the police because a customer was spending too much money in their store? That’s just one more reason I’ll never buy an Apple product.
Senator Bob Corker has introduced a bill that would cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid by nearly $1 Trillion in reture for raising the debt ceiling.
Corker said the Dollar For Dollar Act would include $937 billion in savings from Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, with an equivalent, dollar-for-dollar hike to the debt ceiling.
Corker offered some details about his bill during a speech on the Senate floor Wednesday. Corker said his bill would raise the age of Medicare eligibility to 67 and would include the Medicare Total Health package that would increase private-sector competition for covering the elderly. Corker also said there would be a form of means-testing, making wealthy Medicare recipients pay more of their healthcare needs.
Corker said he’d also “slowly” raise the age of eligibility for Social Security benefits, but did not specify an age.
“We should address [Social Security] now because it’s causing the government to spend more than it takes in,” Corker said. “It will be bankrupt by 2017 if we do nothing.”
Izzat so. Social Security will be “bankrupt” five years from now? Prove it, Corker. What an asshole. And this is the guy the corporate media has been presenting as a GOP moderate who is willing to work with Obama.
According to the Washington Post, Russia is admitting that: Assad is losing control and rebels might win in Syria
MOSCOW — Syria’s most powerful ally, Russia, said for the first time Thursday that President Bashar Assad is losing control of his country and the rebels might win the civil war, dramatically shifting the diplomatic landscape at a time of enormous momentum for the opposition.
While Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov gave no immediate signal that Russia would change its stance and agree to impose international sanctions on Assad’s regime, his remarks will likely be seen as a betrayal in Damascus and could persuade many Syrians to shift their loyalties and abandon support for the government.
Russia’s assessment could also further strengthen the hand of the rebels, who have made some significant gains in their offensive, capturing two major military bases and mounting a serious challenge to Assad’s seat of power, Damascus.
“We must look at the facts: There is a trend for the government to progressively lose control over an increasing part of the territory,” Bogdanov, the Foreign Ministry’s pointman on Syria, said during hearings at a Kremlin advisory body, the Public Chamber. “An opposition victory can’t be excluded.”
Here’s an interesting follow-up to Gene Weingarten’s excellent story about the Jeffrey MacDonald case, which I wrote about recently. Weingarten did a live chat at the WaPo on Tuesday in which he was a little more revealing of his own opinions. I learned that he had the same incredulous reaction when he heard the words supposedly chanted a by “hippie intruder” to MacDonald’s home, “Acid is groovy…kill the pigs.”
This is an odd thing to say about a 6,400-word story, but I found myself without the space to tell it as completely as I’d have liked. The introduction to this chat is mostly for those of you who have read the story and are still not persuaded, beyond a reasonable doubt, that MacDonald killed his family and that “A Wilderness of Error” is a deeply flawed and manipulative book. All the rest: Feel free to plow ahead into the questions.
I remember the killings. I was an 18-year-old hippie at the time, roughly the same age as Helena Stoeckley. I didn’t do as many drugs as she did, but I did plenty, including mescaline, LSD, and heroin. When I read in the newspaper that Jeffrey MacDonald – still presumed an innocent victim – told police that his attackers had been vicious hippie intruders who chanted “acid is groovy – kill the pigs,” I knew he had done it. As did every hippie in every city who read that statement with any degree of analytical thought. No self-respecting killer hippie would ever have uttered, let alone chanted, that uncool, anachronistic thing as late as 1970. That was exactly what some ramrod-straight 26-year-old Ivy League frat-boy doctor who was contemptuous of the counterculture would have thought a hippie would say.
Not to mention that hippies, um, didn’t kill people, at least not while stoned in drug-induced trances. The Manson gang were not hippies. They were weirdo murderers. They went around murdering people, not just Sharon Tate and her friends. They did not come out of the dark, descend on a house, do their savage thing, and then disappear back into the world never to be heard of again. That’s not how it works with murderous gangs who would kill sleeping children. Oh, and hippies also don’t arrive at a house intent on mass murder without remembering to bring along any weapons, relying on whatever knives and pieces of wood they might happen to find inside the house. The Manson people brought a shotgun.
But, okay. Forget all that. That’s just me bloviating. Maybe the MacDonald killers were different from all other killers. Maybe they were really disorganized, absentminded murderous hippies who talked funny and only killed just this once. Oh, and who came to hassle the doctor for drugs because they were drug addicts, and who killed his family, but never opened a closet to discover a big stash of syringes and drugs, including amphetamines. Or maybe they saw that stuff but didn’t steal it because murder may be one thing, but stealing is just plain wrong.
After that, he goes through the evidence and responds to readers’ questions. Check it out if you’re interested.
A fragment of a sieve that researchers say were used as cheese strainers.
Finally, the Wall Street Journal had a fascinating science story yesterday: Europe’s First Cattle Farmers Quickly Added Cheese to Menu.
Researchers on Wednesday said they found the earliest known chemical evidence of cheese-making, based on the analysis of milk-fat residues in pottery dating back about 7,200 years. The discovery suggests Europe’s early farmers added a cheese course to their diet almost as soon as they learned to domesticate cattle and started regularly milking cows.
Scientists led by geochemist Richard Evershed at the U.K.’s University of Bristol tested ancient, perforated clay pots excavated at sites along the Vistula River in Poland, and found they had likely been used by prehistoric cheese mongers as strainers to separate curds and whey—a critical step in making cheese.
The pots have long puzzled archeologists, but their new analysis, reported in Nature, revealed unique carbon isotopes of milk in the traces of fatty acids that had soaked into the ceramic sieves.
“It is a no-brainer,” said Dr. Evershed. “They have to be cheese strainers.”
No one knows exactly when or where cheese-making began, but experts said the traces of milk fat on these unglazed clay strainers are the clearest evidence yet of the origins of this basic biotechnology, which launched a dairy trade that today produces more than 11 billion pounds of cheese every year and as many as 5,000 different named varieties world-wide, from Appenzeller to Zamorano.
As a cheese lover, I was very interested to learn about this.
That’s all I have for you today. What are you reading and blogging about?
Saturday Reads: Austerity, Medicare, and Punishing the Baby Boomers
Posted: December 8, 2012 Filed under: Fiscal Cliff, The Media SUCKS, U.S. Economy, U.S. Military, U.S. Politics, unemployment, We are so F'd | Tags: Charlie Crist, Fox News, Jonathan Chait, Medicaid, medicare, Monica Crowley, Social Security 62 Comments
Good Morning!!
Following on Dakinikat’s post last night, The Austerity Plot, here are some more links about Jonathan Chait’s very very bad recommendation that Obama should cave on raising the Medicare enrollment age.
David Dayen’s reaction was immediate and shrill: Jon Chait’s Miserable Endorsement of Raising the Medicare Eligibility Age.
Let’s look at Chait’s reasoning. I would probably start with the fact that he’s not 64 or 65. My parents are, and until my dad reached Medicare in November, they were paying $2,500 a month on the private market for health insurance. So I’ll be happy to provide him with their phone number so he can tell them how it’s “tolerable” for them to spend two years more than they expected doing that.
But soft! Here are his actual reasons. One, Democrats have to accept concessions (that’s always a good strategic place from which to begin a negotiation!), and the scolds seem to like raising the eligibility age. So let’s give ‘em what they want. This is a bizarrely content-free assertion. The phrase “If Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles wanted you to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you do it?” springs to mind. Second, he thinks that Republicans will somehow forget that this only raises $100 billion, at most, over 10 years, and will then drop any demands to hit a particular number in the negotiations….
The one thing we know will be a side effect of increasing the Medicare eligibility age is that insurance premiums will skyrocket. It will make Medicare more expensive because they lose relatively healthy 65 and 66 year-olds from their risk pool, and it will make private insurance more expensive because they add relatively sick 65 and 66 year-olds to their risk pool. Insurers hate the idea for just this reason. As a result, everyone’s premiums will rise, and cost-shifting will ensue from the government to its citizens.
The original Shrill One, was even more shrill than usual.
…why on earth would Obama be selling Medicare away to raise top tax rates when he gets a big rate rise on January 1 just by doing nothing? And no, vague promises about closing loopholes won’t do it: a rate rise is the real deal, no questions, and should not be traded away for who knows what.
So this looks crazy to me; it looks like a deal that makes no sense either substantively or in terms of the actual bargaining strength of the parties. And if it does happen, the disillusionment on the Democratic side would be huge. All that effort to reelect Obama, and the first thing he does is give away two years of Medicare? How’s that going to play in future attempts to get out the vote?
As Dakinikat wrote, Beltway Bob immediately accepted Chait’s assessment of the likely “deal,” even though he explained very clearly last night as host of the Rachel Maddow Show that doing this would be insane and counterproductive.
I do think it’s kind of important that progressives allow each other a bit of liberty in discussions about big fiscal issues: after all, even the Right-Wing Noise Machine is in a bit of disarray on the subject at the moment. I know some people think resisting anything that affects Social Security or Medicare benefits is the ultimate Red Line that cannot be crossed. Personally, my own fear is that in defending that Red Line, congressional Democrats will wind up making concessions on Medicaid and other low-income programs that in my opinion are more morally compelling than keeping Medicare precisely the way it is today.
Maybe my fears are misguided, or maybe I just don’t share the obsession of some liberals in keeping Medicare pristine as a potential model for a universal single-payer health care system somewhere in the distant future, even if that means today’s poor folks have to suffer as a lower priority.
Apparently, Kilgore doesn’t understand that millions of poverty stricken elders are on Medicare and that millions of middle class Americans rely on Medicaid for nursing home care in addition to Medicare. It’s not an either/or thing.
Atrios gave Chait the Wanker of the Day Award, and yesterday evening, Chait issued an “acceptance speech” that doubled down on his recommendations for Medicare cuts in a post that I personally found offensive–but then I’m one of those loser 65-year-olds, so what do I know?
I, along with millions of other losers, committed the horrendous crime of being born after WWII ended and thus became part of the despised population bomb called the “baby boom.” Never mind that we didn’t ask to be born when we were and that public officials have known about our huge numbers ever since 1960 at least, the problem is all our fault. Supposedly, Ronald Reagan fixed the problem by having us pay more into the system so that Social Security and Medicare would be there when we got old, but now that is all forgotten because the superrich need more money to sock away in foreign tax havens.
Kenneth Baer and Jeffrey Liebman wrote about it in a NYT op-ed yesterday:
For decades we have known that the retirement of the baby boomers would be a monumental event for the economy. But now that it’s happening, many fiscal policy makers are acting as if the boomers are eternal teenagers and are turning a blind eye to how the boomers’ aging changes how we should approach economic policy. And this affects two of the central issues of the negotiations: how much the government should spend and how we can cut unemployment.
Consider the debate over spending. The Congressional Budget Office projects that if current policies continue, total federal spending will rise to 24 percent of gross domestic product in 2022. Republicans and Washington deficit hawks argue that this means spending is out of control, since over the past 40 years government spending has averaged 21 percent.
Their proposed solution is a cap on government spending as a percentage of the economy. Mitt Romney wanted to cap spending at 20 percent of G.D.P. Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, has proposed a cap of 20.6 percent with Senator Claire McCaskill, a Democrat from Missouri. Just this week, Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, a 2016 Republican presidential aspirant, suggested an 18 percent cap.
These plans ignore the simple fact that you cannot repeal the aging of the boomers. The main reason expenditures are rising this decade is that spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid is increasing by a whopping 3.7 percent of G.D.P. as the baby boomers age and retire. This demographic fact also has been driving increases in disability insurance payments as more knees give way and backs give out.
In addition, policy-makers need to be looking at unemployment differently, according to Baer and Liebman, but are they capable of doing that? Not likely. Read more about it at the link.
In other “news,” on Thursday, Fox News’ Monica Crowley (did you know she has a Ph.D.?!) claimed that Americans committed “national suicide” by re-electing Obama, because now the rich will have to pay more taxes.
“From a conservative perspective, November 6 was a national suicide,” Crowley asserted. “There is a very thin, fine, red line between us and total destruction of the American idea. That thin, red line was the Republican Party. If this party also commits suicide, this will be catastrophic.”
Raw Story (http://s.tt/1wd0V)
Charlie Crist has officially become a Democrat.
Former Republican Governor Charlie Crist announced his official switch from independent to the Democratic Party with a beaming Twitter post Friday night after a Christmas event at the White House.
Posing in a photo with an unidentified woman holding the official Florida voter registration papers, Crist tweeted he was “proud and honored to join the Democratic Party in the home of President @BarackObama!”
I wonder if he’s going to get a job in the administration? Or will he run for governor against Rick Scott?
Finally, Susie Madrak has a must-read post at Crooks and Liars: Obama Cheaps Out On Sandy Recovery to Prop Up Austerity Sham. It’s a quick read, so please go read it at the link.
That’s all I have for today. Now it’s your turn. What’s on your reading list?
Thursday Reads
Posted: December 6, 2012 Filed under: 2012 elections, morning reads, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics | Tags: Academy Awards, Benghazi attacks, blue states, consumer demand, Dinesh D'Souza, Earth at night, Gerald Molan, health insurance industry, Jared Bernstein, Joel Kotkin, Medicare age increase, NASA, red states, secession, supply side fairy tales, taxes, taxing the rich, unemployment 31 Comments
Good Morning!
The New York Times has added more fodder for the Republicans’ Benghazi attacks. James Risen Mark Mazzetti and Michael S. Schmidt report that: U.S.-Approved Arms for Libya Rebels Fell Into Jihadis’ Hands.
The Obama administration secretly gave its blessing to arms shipments to Libyan rebels from Qatar last year, but American officials later grew alarmed as evidence grew that Qatar was turning some of the weapons over to Islamic militants, according to United States officials and foreign diplomats.
Of course there’s no evidence that this had anything to do with the Benghazi attacks, but I’m sure that won’t stop Senators McNasty, Huckleberry Closetcase, and their new pal Senator Kelley Ayotte from pretending otherwise.
No evidence has emerged linking the weapons provided by the Qataris during the uprising against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi to the attack that killed four Americans at the United States diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, in September.
But in the months before, the Obama administration clearly was worried about the consequences of its hidden hand in helping arm Libyan militants, concerns that have not previously been reported. The weapons and money from Qatar strengthened militant groups in Libya, allowing them to become a destabilizing force since the fall of the Qaddafi government.
Also at the NYT, Jared Bernstein once again explains why politicians (and the media) in the Village need to stop obsessing on taxes and start focusing in increasing employment and, along with it, consumer demand.
WITH the budget-and-tax showdown dominating headlines, most Americans probably missed an even more ominous story: according to a report by the Congressional Budget Office, America’s underlying growth rate — that is, the best the economy could do, under optimal conditions, without driving up inflation — has slowed from just under 4 percent a year in 2000 to just under 2 percent today.
Why does this matter? For one thing, the combination of a lower underlying growth rate, which you could think of as the economy’s speed limit, and a less equitable distribution of that growth was a reason middle-income households did so badly and poverty went up in the 2000s.
During the 1990s, in contrast, stronger demand for goods and services led to much faster job growth and the last real gains experienced by middle- and lower-income households. Faster growth in those years also spun off a lot more government revenues, which interacted with slightly higher tax rates to take the budget from deficit to surplus.
Read the whole thing and fantasize what we could be doing if we had smarter leadership in DC.
Back in Republican la-la land, Joel Kotkin at Forbes claims that blue states are committing suicide by supporting raising tax rates on the rich.
With their enthusiastic backing of President Obama and the Democratic Party on Election Day, the bluest parts of America may have embraced a program utterly at odds with their economic self-interest. The almost uniform support of blue states’ congressional representatives for the administration’s campaign for tax “fairness” represents a kind of bizarre economic suicide pact.
Any move to raise taxes on the rich — defined as households making over $250,000 annually — strikes directly at the economies of these states, which depend heavily on the earnings of high-income professionals, entrepreneurs and technical workers. In fact, when you examine which states, and metropolitan areas, have the highest concentrations of such people, it turns out they are overwhelmingly located in the bluest states and regions.
Really? Then how come we did so much better under the Clinton tax rates in the ’90s? After all, that’s all that is happening–except that the first $250,000 of these poor rich people’s money will still be taxed at the Bush rates. But that’s not how Kotkin sees it.
The people whose wallets will be drained in the new war on “the rich” are high-earning, but hardly plutocratic professionals like engineers, doctors, lawyers, small business owners and the like. Once seen as the bastion of the middle class, and exemplars of upward mobility, these people are emerging as the modern day “kulaks,” the affluent peasants ruthlessly targeted by Stalin in the early 1930s.
OMB!! “Wallets…drained!” “Stalin!” Let’s all freak out!
The ironic geography of the Democratic drive can be seen most clearly by examining the distribution of the classes now targeted by the coming purge. The top 10 states with the largest percentage of “rich” households under the Obama formula include true blue bastions Washington, D.C., which has the highest concentration of big earners, Connecticut, New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, California and Hawaii. The only historic “swing state” in the top six is Virginia, due largely to the presence of the affluent suburbs of the capital. These same states, according to the Tax Foundation, would benefit the most from an extension of the much-lambasted Bush tax cuts.
Hey Joel, maybe it’s not all about taxes, even though that’s all that seems to matter to you. Maybe some blue state folks think the whole economy would benefit if more people got back to work, earned some money and spent it–as suggested by Jared Bernstein in yesterday’s NYT (see above).
As Zandar notes, Kotkin then goes on to show how Republicans can use the home mortgage deduction and other methods to punish the blue state richies for voting for Obama.
– Keep the tax rate on capital gains the same.
– Raise income taxes on the top income bracket for 2013, those making $398,350 and up (single filers, married joint filers, or head of household).
– Means-test, or eliminate entirely, the mortgage interest deduction (which benefits taxpayers in areas with the highest real estate values and mortgages – i.e., Hawaii, D.C., New York, California and Connecticut).
– Means-test or eliminate entirely the federal deduction of state and local taxes, which is disproportionately utilized by those in high-tax blue states: “In 2005, taxpayers in California and New York together made up 20 percent of those claiming the deduction and accounted for 30 percent of its value. Itemizers in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and California claimed on average over $12,000 per household.”
Talk about a sore loser! Kotkin must be really bitter about Romney’s failure to get those blue state dopes to vote for him.
Meanwhile all those Romney voters in the red states are dreaming about seceding from the union. But if they did, asks The Nation, “Who’d Pay for Their Massive Government Handouts?”
In the wake of Obama’s victory, citizens in several states submitted petitions to secede from the United States. It is something of an irony that the very states seeking secession from “big government”—like Louisiana and Alabama—have been among the top beneficiaries of that selfsame government. Put bluntly, the government would be far smaller without them, and they would seriously struggle far more without it. Indeed, were they to become independent, most would be failed states in need of a bailout. Only this time their benefactor would be not the federal government but the International Monetary Fund, of which the United States is the principal donor. Louisiana and Alabama would go the way of Greece and Spain.
Oh, the irony of it all! And here’s another irony for Republicans to chew on. From TPM: Why Insurers Are Wary Of Raising The Medicare Age
House Republican leaders want to avoid the fiscal cliff with a proposal that would gradually raise the Medicare eligibility age to 67. Democrats are broadly reluctant to cut benefits, but President Obama was willing to accept the policy last year in failed deficit reduction talks with House Speaker John Boehner, and top Democrats have left the door open to including that measure in a grand budget bargain.
It may seem counter-intuitive: why would an industry threatened by government insurance not want it to shrink?
The reason: hiking the Medicare eligibility age would throw seniors aged 65 and 66 off Medicare and into the private market, forcing insurers, who will soon be required to cover all consumers regardless of health status, to care for a sicker, more expensive crop of patients.
“The risk pool issue is important,” the insurance industry source said. “[I]f you add more older and sicker people to the pool, that’s definitely going to have any impact on premiums.”
The policy would save the federal government $113 billion over a decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office. But it achieves that by raising the cost of private insurance: the Kaiser Family Foundation projected that a Medicare age of 67 would raise costs for under-65 patients by an average of $141 in 2014. (In practice it would be phased in.)
Duh!
And even more Republican stupidity: Right wing nutcases are all bent out of shape because their favorite crazy propaganda movie didn’t get any Oscar nominations.
Gerald Molan, the director of the extremely anti-Obama movie, 2016: Obama’s America , is mad that his and Dinesh D’Souza’s film [“2016”] wasn’t on the shortlist of documentaries nominated for an Academy Award.
“The action confirms my opinion that the bias against anything from a conservative point of view is dead on arrival in Hollywood circles,” he complained to the Hollywood Reporter.
It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the fact that the movie is based on a pack of lies and right wing conspiracy theories, could it?
To cleanse your palate of right wing and DC craziness, try watching this video from NASA that show views of the Earth from space. Here’s a still shot:
So what are you reading and blogging about today? I’ve been a little out of the loop for the past couple of days, so I look forward to clicking on your links!
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