Month: February 2011

I’m not optimistic about [Wyden-Brown] going anywhere. The Affordable Care Act has taken on too much symbolism for the Republican base as something that must be destroyed. It doesn’t matter if Wyden-Brown actually gives Republicans what they’re asking for in terms of policy.

Adam Serwer is mostly right here, but the fact is that anything Obama wants has automatically “taken on too much symbolism” for the GOP to allow it to happen. By taking up a position as anything but against Wyden-Brown, Obama has absolutely doomed it.

Obama and his staff are still assuming that the facts matter. That a media exists to notice and discuss his sober position that essentially gives the GOP what they want on a key issue. That the serious people actually care about policy outcomes despite 40 years of evidence to the contrary. That the GOP movers and shakers will be seen doing anything, anything that even remotely agrees with a position the President has taken up. All of this is squarely why Wyden-Brown will fail, no matter how good or bad it might be: Obama wants it, and has signaled as much. It doesn’t stand a chance.

Or: Why most of Congress could give a shit about unions, jobs, and generally thinks Social Security needs to be discontinued as soon as possible because who even needs that kind of small-potatoes stuff unless they totally screwed up or chose a bad accountant?

From the supplemental graphs section (seriously) of Kevin Drum’s excellent piece on Our Plutocracy and ever growing inequality.

An interesting idea that was brought up to me by my chief of staff, we won’t do it until tomorrow, is putting out an appeal to the Democratic leader. I would be willing to sit down and talk to him, the assembly Democrat leader, plus the other two Republican leaders—talk, not negotiate and listen to what they have to say if they will in turn—but I’ll only do it if all 14 of them will come back and sit down in the state assembly. They can recess it… the reason for that, we’re verifying it this afternoon, legally, we believe, once they’ve gone into session, they don’t physically have to be there. If they’re actually in session for that day, and they take a recess, the 19 Senate Republicans could then go into action and they’d have quorum because it’s turned out that way. So we’re double checking that. If you heard I was going to talk to them that’s the only reason why. We’d only do it if they came back to the capitol with all 14 of them. My sense is, hell. I’ll talk. If they want to yell at me for an hour, I’m used to that. I can deal with that. But I’m not negotiating.

Scott Walker, governor of Wisconsin, revealing his plan to end the stalemate by doing what Republicans always do: pretend to talk and be a sober representative of the people while using that opening to end the standoff in a typically underhanded fashion.
But, yeah, Obama: acting like and adult and negotiating from the compromise position will work every time because the GOP is all about policy outcomes.
Source: Slate

Gimme! Gimme! (Oh, and fuck unions)

The fine print in Wisconsin is all too familiar:

The state’s entire budget shortfall for this year – the reason that Walker has said he must push through immediate cuts – would be covered by the governor’s relatively uncontroversial proposal to restructure the state’s debt.

By contrast, the proposals that have kicked up a firestorm, especially his call to curtail the collective-bargaining rights of the state’s public-employees, wouldn’t save any money this year.

“What we’re asking for is modest, at least to those of us outside of government,” Walker said in a televised address Tuesday night.

In January, the Wisconsin Legislative Fiscal Bureau reported that the state would face a $137 million shortfall before the end of the fiscal year on June 30. The governor’s budget repair bill proposes a debt restructuring that would save the state $165 million in the near term, more than covering the shortfall.

The legislation would also borrow money from a federal welfare program to cover further state shortfalls, and it includes a provision that would allow the sale of the state’s public utilities without a bidding process or public oversight.

So, restructure, borrow from dread federal guvmint, and a massive under the table handout to favored GOP allies, in this case the Koch Brothers who stand to create a pretty fantastic (for them, anyway) vertical monopoly there in WI. And, oh, may as well fuck the Unions while we’re at it. This last part excites the Tea Klanners so that they don’t even notice they’re taking up the side of their supposed enemy.

Who says this isn’t the new gilded era? Legal and even expected child labor, here we come.

Gimme! Gimme! (Oh, and fuck unions)

Social Security Pays for Itself

OMB director Jacob Lew, from the turnstile:

Social Security benefits are entirely self-financing. They are paid for with payroll taxes collected from workers and their employers throughout their careers. These taxes are placed in a trust fund dedicated to paying benefits owed to current and future beneficiaries.

[…]

For years, the surpluses in the Social Security trust fund have helped to mask our deficits elsewhere. Now that we are paying Social Security back, the problem is not with Social Security, but with the rest of the budget. In 2001 and 2003, Washington cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans and later expanded Medicare without paying for it. Blaming Social Security for our fiscal woes is like blaming you for not saving enough in your checking account because the bank lost all depositors’ money.

Replace “Washington” in the second-to-last sentence with “Republicans and the Bush Administration rammed through” and we are in full agreement. Now if we can just get serious people talking in these terms on the serious Sunday morning shows (and etc…) every week for the next 20 or so years, the logical argument can finally begin on equal footing.

Social Security Pays for Itself

Shared Sacrifice

Just in case you thought the Social Security stinger on this post was unsupported, EJ Dionne provides:

Lori Montgomery reported in The Post last week that a bipartisan group of senators thinks a sensible deficit reduction package would involve lifting the Social Security retirement age to 69 and reforming taxes, purportedly to raise revenue, in a way that would cut the top income tax rate for the wealthy from 35 percent to 29 percent.

Only a body dominated by millionaires could define “shared sacrifice” as telling nurses’ aides and coal miners they have to work until age 69 while sharply cutting tax rates on wealthy people. I see why conservative Republicans like this. I honestly don’t get why Democrats – “the party of the people,” I’ve heard – would come near such an idea.

Absolutely right. I’d only quarrel with the title: “The Tea Party is Winning.” Nope. It is the plutocrats and banksters that invented the Tea Party out of whole cloth to gather useful drones to advance their preferred distraction campaign that are winning. The folks that make up the broader Tea Party itself are losing right along with the rest of us filthy proles. And once they undermine the entire non-military discretionary budget to their own detriment, then they hope to get serious and finally eliminate their own Social Security, after which they will go lie down in the streets to die, free from all unnecessary governmental inconveniences.

Shared Sacrifice

Newsflash: Democrats Help Conservatives

George Lakoff represents:

Democrats help conservatives when they function as policy wonks – talking policy without communicating the moral values behind the policies. They help conservatives when they neglect to remind us that pensions are deferred payments for work done. “Benefits” are pay for work, not a handout. Pensions and benefits are arranged by contract. If there is not enough money for them, it is because the contracted funds have been taken by conservative officials and given to wealthy people and corporations instead of to the people who have earned them.

Yep. This is the neutron bomb of the pension debate, and The Democrat never, ever deigns to pick it up and use it. There is simply no rational defense within the “true conservative” worldview for the elimination of pensions. And yet we see that trotted forward as a “serious person” position over and over and over again. It is, in fact, the utter failure of the market to regulate itself.
Two parties willingly entered a contract; one party decided not to live up to their end, systematically and with malice aforethought underfunding the pensions to make quarterlies look better or election-year budgets seem sounder than they were; now the other party, the one that did their part and often took cuts in other areas specifically in exchange for better retirement packages, is simply told to suck it while the latter party sops up even more of the money the two had agreed to divide in some way. This is inherently and indisputably a failure of the market principle, enabled by GOP and to the sole benefit of the very same plutocrats who put us in this ditch to begin with. It’s no coincidence that Wall Street is earning a ridiculously high 15% vig on the management of the very pension fund that’s in trouble in WI. What a surprise. By making these tough cuts, I’m sure we can get that right up to 20%, though…here boys, take some tax credits and corporate welfare handouts.

And what’s most disturbing of all: this is emerging as the fundamental shape of the Social Security debate.

Newsflash: Democrats Help Conservatives

It had never occurred to me that Atlas Shrugged was actually about the dire need in this country for high speed rail.

John Hodgman tweets all things Ayn Rand.
Rest assured, John, based on the trailer, they’ve converted the Taggart Transcontinental into a massive freight train operation. Though I do seem to recall seeing a bullet train zip by, presumably it was built with government stimulus funds atop cheap and reliable Rearden metal.
Cognitive dissonance alert: It seems likely that observant Objectivists can only reach Galt’s Gulch by taking the Obama Express! What to do? What to do? Help us, Jeebus.
Rand’s prescription in this instance most likely involves quasi-consensual rough sex. So you know.

I’m as Liberal as they come…

jasencomstock:

danielholter:

evangotlib:

But when you see what Unions have done to America…it’s hard to feel for the folks in Wisconsin.  Have you been to Detroit?  Have you really dug into the US Public School system?  Utter disasters.

Detroit will come back.  The school will be saved.  But unions need to go in order for this to happen.

Agreed… neither side in this current Wisconsin battle is blameless, imho. I just think our new Governor could have taken a more productive path through this process. Yes, the negotiations in years past have put us in a massive financial hole… so maybe there should be some better negotiations by someone on the side of the taxpayers and our representative government who can get people to understand the differences, the problems, and the potential solutions. Instead we get a highly politicized My Cock Is Bigger Than Yours schoolyard bout. Frustrating.

And Jesse Jackson ain’t helpin’ nothin’. In fact, his arrival this morning is a pretty good indicator that things are beyond the practical and deep into the symbolic. So here we sit, Wisconsinites, held hostage by two diametrically opposed political cults more interested in digging in their heels than solving the actual problem.

Anyone who is surprised at this turn of events simply didn’t have their eyes open during the elections this past fall. This is precisely what Scott Walker said he would do if in power. In fact, I’m rather impressed he followed through, even if I disagree with some or most of his proposals.

Wisconsin aside- let us discuss the “what Unions have done to America” and how singularly AWFUL they are:

  • weekends
  • holidays
  • overtime pay
  • safety at work
  • health care for workers
  • unemployment insurance
  • child labor laws

am I missing anything?

I’d only add the dreaded 40-hour work week. Nothing has done more to reduce America to a barren hellscape than that.