Category: Uncategorized

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.

Ezra Explains Wisconsin

The best way to understand Walker’s proposal is as a multi-part attack on the state’s labor unions. In part one, their ability to bargain benefits for their members is reduced. In part two, their ability to collect dues, and thus spend money organizing members or lobbying the legislature, is undercut. And in part three, workers have to vote the union back into existence every single year. Put it all together and it looks like this: Wisconsin’s unions can’t deliver value to their members, they’re deprived of the resources to change the rules so they can start delivering value to their members again, and because of that, their members eventually give in to employer pressure and shut the union down in one of the annual certification elections.

What is it with this glut of cogent explanations in the media today? More, please. After all, something has to offset the emerging right-wing and MSM meme that this is primarily about budget cuts and that’s why Democrats have gone missing…

Ezra Explains Wisconsin

There are three things you need to know about the current budget debate. First, it’s essentially fraudulent. Second, most people posing as deficit hawks are faking it. Third, while President Obama hasn’t fully avoided the fraudulence, he’s less bad than his opponents — and he deserves much more credit for fiscal responsibility than he’s getting.

Paul Krugman, reminding us how to start a column. Later, he offers a solution in seven words: “health care, health care, health care, revenue.”
Yep.

Social Security

The size of that fix [required to keep Social Security fully funded] is significant, but not astonishing. Over the next 75 years, the shortfall will be equal to about 0.7 percent of gross domestic product. How much is 0.7 percent of GDP? To put that in perspective, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities calculates that it’s about as much as George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the rich will cost over the same period. Saying we can afford those cuts – which is the consensus Republican position – but not Social Security’s outlay is nonsensical. Coming up with 0.7 percent of GDP isn’t a crisis. It’s a question of priorities.

And this is precisely how it should be talked about every single time a microphone is turned on. Clear, simple terms that highlight the basic stability of the program, the relative ease of fixing it (as opposed to, say, Medicare), and its critical position as the only thing between catfood and dying in the streets for millions of elderly individuals who have by and large paid into it, fair and square. Oh, but now your deal has to change and you have to keep working at your labors until you’re 70. Just makes perfect sense.

The parallels to Wisconsin are striking: A group and the government enter into a deal. Now the government wants to change the deal ex post facto, and uses a bludgeon of “dread Unions” to paper over the fact that they the government are the one dealing in underhanded fashion. And, of course, the media blissfully reports it from the government perspective. This is why we fail.

But, if a few million folks show up on the doorstep of said government, well, things can change.

Social Security