Mitt Romney Budget Cuts Would Have Severe Consequences

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/22/mitt-romney-budget-cuts_n_1443743.html

ANDREW TAYLOR 04/22/12 09:59 AM ET – Huffington Post

WASHINGTON — Reducing government deficits Mitt Romney’s way would mean less money for health care for the poor and disabled and big cuts to nuts-and-bolts functions such as food inspection, border security and education.

Romney also promises budget increases for the Pentagon, above those sought by some GOP defense hawks, meaning that the rest of the government would have to shrink even more. Nonmilitary programs would incur still larger cuts than those called for in the tightfisted GOP budget that the House passed last month.

Differences over the government’s budget and spiraling deficits are among the starkest that separate Republican Romney and Democratic President Barack Obama. Obama’s budget generally avoids risk, with minimal cuts to rapidly growing health care programs such as Medicare and Medicaid while socking wealthier people with tax increases. It’s all part of an effort to close trillion-dollar-plus deficits.

Romney, by contrast, proposes broad cuts in government spending, possibly overpromising on reductions that even a Congress stuffed with conservatives might find hard to deliver.

His campaign materials give relatively few specifics, other than a pledge to bring total government spending down to 20 percent of the U.S. economy by the end of a first term in 2016. That is roughly in line with where it was during Republican George W. Bush’s presidency.

Estimates by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office put current government spending at $3.6 trillion, or about 23.5 percent of the gross domestic product this year, slipping to 21.8 percent by 2016.

The math can get fuzzy. But the Romney campaign says it needs to come up with $500 billion in cuts in 2016, the target year. Overall, Romney promises to shrink the government by about one-seventh when compared against the size of the economy.

The GOP front-runner suggests raising the Social Security retirement age and reducing cost-of-living increases for better-off retirees.

He generally endorses a plan by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., to gradually transform Medicare from a program that directly pays hospital and doctor bills into vouchers for subsidizing future beneficiaries in buying health insurance.

Because Romney promises to protect current Social Security and Medicare recipients from cuts, he cannot get much savings from those programs by 2016. Combined, they are projected to make up about 44 percent of the budget that year. Interest costs, which cannot be touched, would make up an additional 9 percent of the budget, while Romney promises to add almost $100 billion to the Pentagon budget that year, based on his pledge that military spending reach 4 percent of GDP.

So what’s left to cut?

_MEDICAID: The program now provides health care for about 50 million mostly poor and disabled people, including nursing home care for 7 of 10 patients nationwide. Obama’s health care law sharply would sharply boost Medicaid enrollment to cover more people above the poverty line, a move that Romney promises to repeal.

Like House Republicans, Romney promises to transform Medicaid into block grants for states and shed federal supervision of it. He would cap the program’s annual growth to inflation plus a percentage point. His campaign says the approach would unshackle states to innovate and, by the end of a decade, cut costs by more than $200 billion a year.

Advocates for the poor say the inevitable result will be that millions of people will be bounced from the program. An Urban Institute study last year estimated that Ryan’s cuts would force between 14 million and 27 million people off of Medicaid by 2021. Romney’s budget would make deeper cuts.

_DOMESTIC AGENCY BUDGETS: If Social Security is mostly off the table and current Medicare beneficiaries are protected, domestic Cabinet agency budgets would take a major hit in ways that could fundamentally alter government. The future growth of those discretionary programs funded through annual appropriations bills was already cut greatly in last year’s deal to raise the government’s borrowing limit.

At issue are these programs, just to name a few: health research; NASA; transportation; homeland security; education; food inspection; housing and heating subsidies for the poor; food aid for pregnant women; the FBI; grants to local governments; national parks; and veterans’ health care.

Romney promises to immediately cut them by 5 percent. But they would have to be cut more than 20 percent to meet his overall budget goals, assuming veterans’ health care is exempted. It’s almost unthinkable that lawmakers would go along with cuts of such magnitude for air traffic control and food inspection or to agencies like NASA, the FBI, Border Patrol and the Centers for Disease Control.

“It’s just not sustainable,” said GOP lobbyist Jim Dyer, a former staff director for the House Appropriations Committee. “What do you want to do with the national parks? Which ones do you want to close? …The only way it adds up is if you go after the big, popular stuff, and nobody talks about that now.”

Among the few specific cuts listed in Romney’s campaign literature are proposals to cut the federal workforce by 10 percent through attrition, eliminate federal family planning money, privatize the money-losing Amtrak system and trim foreign aid.

_OTHER BENEFIT PROGRAMS: Like Ryan’s budget, the Romney plan would also cut benefit programs other than Social Security and Medicare. They include food stamps, school lunches, crop subsidies, Supplemental Security Income for very poor seniors and disabled people, unemployment insurance, veterans’ pensions and refundable tax credits to the working poor.

Based on the Romney materials, it’s impossible to project the size of the cuts to such programs. Suffice it to say, they would be controversial.

“There’s good reason why Ryan’s budget and the Romney budget don’t have details,” said Jim Horney, a budget analyst with the liberal-leaning Center on Budget and Policy priorities think tank. “If people knew what it would actually have to be done to accomplish what they’re saying should be done, it’s hard to imagine there would be widespread support for it.”

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An appalling lesson in ethics and the Ga. Legislature

http://blogs.ajc.com/jay-bookman-blog/2012/03/31/an-appalling-lesson-in-ethics-and-the-ga-legislature/

12:45 pm March 31, 2012, by Jay Bookman

In the last two hours of the very last day of the 2012 Georgia General Assembly, with scores of proposed bills flying back and forth between the House and Senate, a handful of powerful state legislators tried to take advantage of the confusion. The conspiracy they launched demonstrates just how contemptuous they have become of the people whom they were elected to serve.

The goal of their little plot was to further weaken Georgia’s already lax ethics laws. Had it succeeded, it would have prevented voters from learning the identities of elected officials who had failed to meet deadlines established in state law for filing ethics disclosure and campaign finance statements. It also would have allowed fines levied against legislators for violating those laws to simply disappear, without payment and without anyone even learning they had existed.

And believe or not, the means by which legislative leaders attempted to accomplish that deed was more sordid than the deed itself.

We begin with House Bill 875, a harmless little piece of legislation meant to ensure that the Department of Natural Resources did not have to release personal data of applicants for hunting and fishing licenses, such as Social Security numbers and drivers’ license photos.

However, in what now looks to have been a well-orchestrated scheme, this innocuous little bill was passed in slightly different versions in the House and Senate. That forced the appointment of a six-member conference committee — three from each chamber — to work out the differences.

In hindsight, the membership of that conference committee should have signaled trouble, because it was oddly high-powered for such a little bill.

In the Senate, it comprised Don Balfour of Snellville, the powerful chairman of the Senate Rules Committee and a prominent foe of ethics reform. John Bulloch of Ochlocknee and Jeff Mullis of Chickamauga, also members of the Rules Committee and influential legislators in their own right, were also appointed.

In the House, Ethics Committee Chairman Joe Wilkinson of Sandy Springs was named to the conference committee on HB 875, along with David Knight of Griffin and Tom McCall of Elberton.

Meeting in private in the last hours of the session, those six legislators agreed to dramatically revise HB 875 by adding the ethics-related language outlined above. They knew that such provisions would be highly controversial, but they were counting on the fact that in the last hectic hours of a session, members were much too busy to read the piles of legislation flying across their desks.

Under such circumstances, legislators casting votes are forced to rely on assurances from their colleagues that the bills coming before them are worthy of support. It is an act of faith and trust, and in this case, that faith and trust was betrayed.

After the conference committee concluded its work, Bulloch went to the Senate chamber, told his fellow senators that a deal had been worked out on little ol’ HB 875 and urged their support. It passed overwhelmingly by a vote of 46-4, but a look at the four “no” votes suggest that word of the bill’s true intent had already begun to leak out.

One of the four “no” votes was Josh McKoon, a freshman Republican from Columbus who had angered his party leadership by daring to sponsor ethics-reform legislation. Another was Democrat Jason Carter of Decatur, who earlier in the evening had tried and failed to force a floor vote on legislation imposing a $100 limit on gifts from lobbyists. The third was Democrat Gloria Butler, secretary of the Senate Ethics Committee; the fourth was Mike Crane, a freshman Republican from Newnan.

With time ticking down in the session, the bill now moved to the House, where it was introduced to legislators with no mention of its revised content. By then, however, AJC reporters and others had caught wind of the changes made to the bill. As House members began to vote, word was spreading. Alarmed legislators who had initially voted “yes” on the bill quickly began changing those votes to “no”, and in the end the bill was defeated by a vote of 25 to 143.

Wilkinson, the House Ethics Committee chairman, later tried to defend the rejected language, calling opposition to it “disgraceful.” As he saw it, the public has no right to know when legislators miss legal deadlines for filing ethics forms.

“Why should [a politician’s] name be up there if he didn’t do anything wrong?” he said.

That is wrong on so many levels. First, it is wrong as a matter of process. If the only way to enact your “good idea” is by smuggling it into unrelated legislation at the last minute, then maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t really such a good idea.

Second, let’s think about what really happened here. In the past, Wilkinson has defended Georgia’s ethics laws by stressing the importance of disclosure. If legislators and lobbyists disclose everything as required by law, he has argued, we don’t really need laws against gifts and conflicts of interest, etc. The voters will have all the information they need to discipline their elected officials.

In reality, however, some legislators are going years without filing required disclosure forms; they also aren’t paying the required fines, because the state ethics commission lacks the resources and gumption to take action. As a result, the only remaining incentive to encourage legislators to file disclosure by the legal deadline is public exposure if they do not.

Last week, Wilkinson and other tried to reduce public disclosure about legislators’ failure to publicly disclose, and they tried to do it without full disclosure. That is not open government.

That is, to borrow Wilkinson’s word, “disgraceful.”

– Jay Bookman

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Wall Street Greed Fueling High Gas Prices

By Bernie Sanders, Special to CNN

updated 1:05 PM EST, Tue February 28, 2012

Editor’s note: Bernie Sanders is an independent senator from Vermont. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2006 after serving 16 years in the House of Representatives and is the longest-serving independent member of Congress in American history.

(CNN) – Gas prices approaching $4 a gallon on average are causing severe economic pain for millions of Americans. Pump prices spiked 5% in the past month alone. Crude oil prices stood at $108 on Friday, up from only double digits at the beginning of the month.

What’s the cause? Forget what you may have read about the laws of supply and demand. Oil and gas prices have almost nothing to do with economic fundamentals. According to the Energy Information Administration, the supply of oil and gasoline is higher today than it was three years ago, when the national average for a gallon of gasoline was just $1.90. Meanwhile, the demand for oil in the U.S. is at its lowest level since April of 1997.

Is Big Oil to blame? Sure. Partly. Big oil companies have been gouging consumers for years. They have made almost $1 trillion in profits over the past decade, in part thanks to ridiculous federal subsidies and tax loopholes. I have proposed legislation to end those pointless giveaways to some of the biggest and most profitable corporations in the history of the world.

But there’s another reason for the wild rise in gas prices. The culprit is Wall Street. Speculators are raking in profits by gambling in the loosely regulated commodity markets for gas and oil. Continued – Click here

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Freedom of and From Religion

Published on Thursday, February 16, 2012 by Common Dreams

by Bill Moyers

The president did something agile and wise the other day. And something quite important to the health of our politics. He reached up and snuffed out what some folks wanted to make into a cosmic battle between good and evil. No, said the president, we’re not going to turn the argument over contraception into Armageddon, this is an honest difference between Americans, and I’ll not see it escalated into a holy war. So instead of the government requiring Catholic hospitals and other faith-based institutions to provide employees with health coverage involving contraceptives, the insurance companies will offer that coverage, and offer it free.

The Catholic bishops had cast the president’s intended policy as an infringement on their religious freedom; they hold birth control to be a mortal sin, and were incensed that the government might coerce them to treat it otherwise. The president in effect said: No quarrel there; no one’s going to force you to violate your doctrine. But Catholics are also Americans, and if an individual Catholic worker wants coverage, she should have access to it — just like any other American citizen. Under the new plan, she will. She can go directly to the insurer, and the religious institution is off the hook.

When the president announced his new plan, the bishops were caught flat-footed. It was so … so reasonable. In fact, leaders of several large, Catholic organizations have now said yes to the idea. But the bishops have since regrouped, and are now opposing any mandate to provide contraceptives even if their institutions are not required to pay for them. And for their own reasons, Republican leaders in Congress have weighed in on the bishops’ side. They’re demanding, and will get, a vote in the Senate.

Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-KY, says:

“The fact that the White House thinks this is about contraception is the whole problem. This is about freedom of religion. It’s right there in the First Amendment. You can’t miss it, right there in the very First Amendment to our Constitution. And the government doesn’t get to decide for religious people what their religious beliefs are. They get to decide that.”

But here’s what Republicans don’t get, or won’t tell you. Continued here

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OP-ED COLUMNIST

Romney Isn’t Concerned

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: February 2, 2012 , New York Times

If you’re an American down on your luck, Mitt Romney has a message for you: He doesn’t feel your pain. Earlier this week, Mr. Romney told a startled CNN interviewer, “I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there.

Faced with criticism, the candidate has claimed that he didn’t mean what he seemed to mean, and that his words were taken out of context. But he quite clearly did mean what he said. And the more context you give to his statement, the worse it gets.

Continued here

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Why New Photo ID Laws Mean Some Won’t Vote

by COREY DADE, January 28, 2012 – NPR

The argument over whether voters should have to present photo identification at the polls usually splits along party lines. Republicans who favor the requirement say it prevents ballot fraud. Democrats and election rights groups who oppose it say it is meant to suppress turnout.

And people of all political stripes wonder what all the fuss is about.

Most Americans are accustomed to whipping out photo IDs at work, the bank or even their own apartment buildings. And their driver’s license — perhaps the most common form of government-issued photo ID — has become just as indispensable.

“I get that all the time: ‘What’s the big deal? I just got my driver’s license renewed, it took like five seconds,’ ” says Larry Norden, acting director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, which opposes these laws. “Frankly, that’s why these laws have been so successful, because 89 percent of the population does have photo IDs.”

That leaves another 3.2 million Americans who don’t possess a government-issued picture ID, according to a recent study co-authored by Norden.

continue here

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Byron Dorgan on Making Banks Play by the Rules

Sunday 29 January 2012

by: Bill Moyers, Moyers & Co. | Interview and Video

Bill Moyers talks with former Senator Byron Dorgan about making sure big banks play by rules that protect consumers from financial calamity, and how those big banks continue to leverage power and influence to avoid responsibility while maximizing profits. Dorgan was a nearly-lone voice in Congress in 1999 when he predicted economic calamity following a repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act and its protective measures. But given the economic meltdown nearly 10 years later, it turned out to be one of the most prescient speeches in American political history.

“If you were to rank big mistakes in the history of this country,” Dorgan tells Moyers, “that was one of the bigger ones, because it has set back this country in a very significant way and caused so much heartbreak and heartache, and a near total collapse of the American economy. ”

Dorgan also talks about the economic impact on people at the lower ends of the income ladder, and the weaknesses of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which he felt compelled to sign.

“It does some good things and moves us in the right direction.” Dorgan tells Moyers, “But it’s timid.”

TRANSCRIPT

January 27, 2012
Byron Dorgan on Making Banks Play by the Rules

BILL MOYERS: John Reed and many others say they were taken by surprise when the country’s biggest financial institutions went bust in 2008. But it wasn’t as if they hadn’t been warned.

SENATOR BYRON DORGAN: (Speaking on Senate Floor) I believe that when this legislation is enacted…

BILL MOYERS: Remember Byron Dorgan? He sounded the alarm about the dangers of striking down Glass-Steagall. But his concerns were dismissed by Wall Street, by the Clinton White House and most of his own colleagues in Congress. But on the day of the vote, the Senator from North Dakota gave one of the most prescient speeches in our political history.

Continue here

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Some cold water on overheated birther-mania

7:44 am January 27, 2012, by Jay Bookman, AJC

Having done a little more research into the legal process, I want to try to clear up any confusion about yesterday’s birther hearing before we move on. And yes, we will move on quickly.

Under state law, Deputy Chief Judge Michael Malihi’s job was to gather the evidence in the case through the hearing process and then issue a recommendation on whether Barack Obama’s name should remain on the Georgia ballot. His role in the process was to serve as a fact-finder rather than final arbiter.

According to the birther movement, Malihi told their lawyers during pre-hearing conference that he would enter a “default judgment” against Obama for refusing to appear and for refusing to even send lawyers to participate in the hearing, and that he would in fact recommend Obama’s removal.

Continued here

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OP-ED COLUMNIST

Jobs, Jobs and Cars

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: January 26, 2012 , New York Times

Mitch Daniels, the former Bush budget director who is now Indiana’s governor, made the Republicans’ reply to President Obama’s State of the Union address. His performance was, well, boring. But he did say something thought-provoking — and I mean that in the worst way.

For Mr. Daniels tried to wrap his party in the mantle of the late Steve Jobs, whom he portrayed as a great job creator — which is one thing that Jobs definitely wasn’t. And if we ask why Apple has created so few American jobs, we get an insight into what is wrong with the ideology dominating much of our politics.

Mr. Daniels first berated the president for his “constant disparagement of people in business,” which happens to be a complete fabrication. Mr. Obama has never done anything of the sort. He went on: “The late Steve Jobs — what a fitting name he had — created more of them than all those stimulus dollars the president borrowed and blew.”

Clearly, Mr. Daniels doesn’t have much of a future in the humor business. But, more to the point, anyone who reads The New York Times knows that his assertion about job creation was completely false: Apple employs very few people in this country.

Continue here

Newsweek via The Daily Beast

Andrew Sullivan: How Obama’s Long Game Will Outsmart His Critics

The right calls him a socialist, the left says he sucks up to Wall Street, and independents think he’s a wimp. Andrew Sullivan on how the president may just end up outsmarting them all.

by Andrew Sullivan | January 16, 201212:00 AM EST

You hear it everywhere. Democrats are disappointed in the president. Independents have soured even more. Republicans have worked themselves up into an apocalyptic fervor. And, yes, this is not exactly unusual.

A president in the last year of his first term will always get attacked mercilessly by his partisan opponents, and also, often, by the feistier members of his base. And when unemployment is at remarkably high levels, and with the national debt setting records, the criticism will—and should be—even fiercer. But this time, with this president, something different has happened. It’s not that I don’t understand the critiques of Barack Obama from the enraged right and the demoralized left. It’s that I don’t even recognize their description of Obama’s first term in any way. The attacks from both the right and the left on the man and his policies aren’t out of bounds. They’re simply—empirically—wrong.

A caveat: I write this as an unabashed supporter of Obama from early 2007 on. I did so not as a liberal, but as a conservative-minded independent appalled by the Bush administration’s record of war, debt, spending, and torture. I did not expect, or want, a messiah. I have one already, thank you very much. And there have been many times when I have disagreed with decisions Obama has made—to drop the Bowles-Simpson debt commission, to ignore the war crimes of the recent past, and to launch a war in Libya without Congress’s sanction, to cite three. But given the enormity of what he inherited, and given what he explicitly promised, it remains simply a fact that Obama has delivered in a way that the unhinged right and purist left have yet to understand or absorb. Their short-term outbursts have missed Obama’s long game—and why his reelection remains, in my view, as essential for this country’s future as his original election in 2008.

Continue here

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New York Times

January 14, 2012

What They Don’t Want to Talk About

Ever since Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry started criticizing Mitt Romney’s actions at Bain Capital — and talking about the thousands of people laid off as a result of Bain’s investments — party leaders have essentially told them to shut up. That response is a pretty good indication of how deeply party elders fear the issue of economic inequality in the campaign to come.

“What the hell are you doing, Newt?” Rudolph Giuliani asked Thursday on Fox News. “This is what Saul Alinsky taught Barack Obama, and what you’re saying is part of the reason we’re in so much trouble right now.”

Mr. Giuliani has one thing right: Republicans are indeed in growing trouble as more voters begin to realize how much the party’s policies — dismantling regulations, slashing taxes for the rich, weakening unions — have contributed to inequality and the yawning distance between the middle class and the top end.

The more President Obama talks about narrowing that gap, the more his popularity ratings have risen while those of Congress plummet. Two-thirds of Americans now say there is a strong conflict between the rich and the poor, according to a Pew survey released last week, making it the greatest source of tension in American society.

Continued here

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Mitt Romney and our overdue debate about capitalism

By E.J. Dionne Jr., Published: January 11, 2012 in The Washington Post

Thanks to Mitt Romney and such well-known socialist intellectuals as Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich, the United States is about to have the big debate on the nature of modern capitalism that should have started back in 2008. The focus will be on whether some kinds of capitalism are bad for the system as a whole.

Continue here

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Published on Thursday, January 12, 2012 by Moyers & Company

Is This Land Made for You and Me?

by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship - Found at CommomDreams.org

Over the next few weeks, on the air and on our new website, BillMoyers.com, we’ll be talking a lot about “winner-take-all” politics and how economic inequality – the vast gap between the rich and everyone else– isn’t the result of market forces and Adam Smith’s “invisible hand.” It has been deliberately, politically engineered.

But first, as they used to say on radio, a musical interlude. The traveling medicine show known as the race for the Republican presidential nomination has moved on from Iowa and New Hampshire, and all eyes are now on South Carolina. Well, not exactly all. At the moment, our eyes are fixed on some big news from the great state of Oklahoma, home of the legendary American folk singer Woody Guthrie, whose 100th birthday will be celebrated later this year.

Woody saw the ravages of the Dust Bowl and the Depression firsthand; his own family came unraveled in the worst hard times. And he wrote tough yet lyrical stories about the men and women who struggled to survive, enduring the indignity of living life at the bone, with nothing to eat and no place to sleep. He traveled from town to town, hitchhiking and stealing rides in railroad boxcars, singing his songs for spare change or a ham sandwich. What professional success he had during his own lifetime, singing in concerts and on the radio, was often undone by politics and the restless urge to keep moving on. “So long, it’s been good to know you,” he sang, and off he would go.

What he wrote and sang about caused the oil potentates and preachers who ran Oklahoma to consider him radical and disreputable. For many years he was the state’s prodigal son, but times change, and that’s the big news. Woody Guthrie has been rediscovered, even though Oklahoma’s more conservative than ever – one of the reddest of our red states with a governor who’s a favorite of the Tea Party.

The George Kaiser Family Foundation has bought Guthrie’s archives – his manuscripts, letters and journals. A center is being built in Tulsa that will make them available to scholars and visitors from all over the world.

Among its treasures is the original, handwritten copy of this song, Woody Guthrie’s most famous – This Land Is Your Land. The song extols the beauty of the country Guthrie traveled across again and again; its endless skyways and golden valleys, the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts. Yet his eye was clear, unclouded, and unobstructed by sentimentality, for he also wrote in its lyrics:

In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?

“Is this land made for you and me?” A mighty good question. The biggest domestic story of our time is the collapse of the middle class, a sharp increase in the poor, and the huge transfer of wealth to the already rich.

In an era of gross inequality there’s both irony and relevance in Woody Guthrie’s song. That “ribbon of highway” he made famous? It’s faded and fraying in disrepair, the nation’s infrastructure of roads and bridges, once one of our glories, now a shambles because fixing them would require spending money, raising taxes, and pulling together.

This land is mostly owned not by you and me but by the winner-take-all super rich who have bought up open spaces, built mega-mansions, turned vast acres into private vistas, and distanced themselves as far as they can from the common lot of working people – the people Woody wrote and sang about.

True, Barack Obama asked Bruce Springsteen and Woody Guthrie’s longtime friend Pete Seeger to sing This Land is Your Land at that big, pre-inaugural concert the Sunday before he was sworn in. And sing they did, in the spirit of hope and change that President Obama had spun as the heart of his campaign rhetoric.

Today, whatever was real about that spirit has been bludgeoned by severe economic hardship for everyday Americans and by the cynical expedience of politicians who wear the red-white-and-blue in their lapels and sing “America the Beautiful” while serving the interests of crony capitalists stuffing SuperPACs with millions of dollars harvested from the gross inequality destroying us from within.

But maybe – just maybe – the news that Woody Guthrie, once a pariah in his home state, has become a local hero is the harbinger of things to come, and that all the people who still believe this land is our land will begin to take it back.

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Bain, Barack and Jobs

January 5, 2012, New York Times

By PAUL KRUGMAN

America’s recovery from recession has been so slow that it mostly doesn’t seem like a recovery at all, especially on the jobs front. So, in a better world, President Obama would face a challenger offering a serious critique of his job-creation policies, and proposing a serious alternative.

Instead, he’ll almost surely face Mitt Romney.

Mr. Romney claims that Mr. Obama has been a job destroyer, while he was a job-creating businessman. For example, he told Fox News: “This is a president who lost more jobs during his tenure than any president since Hoover. This is two million jobs that he lost as president.” He went on to declare, of his time at the private equity firm Bain Capital, “I’m very happy in my former life; we helped create over 100,000 new jobs.”

But his claims about the Obama record border on dishonesty, and his claims about his own record are well across that border.

Start with the Obama record. It’s true that 1.9 million fewer Americans have jobs now than when Mr. Obama took office. But the president inherited an economy in free fall, and can’t be held responsible for job losses during his first few months, before any of his own policies had time to take effect. So how much of that Obama job loss took place in, say, the first half of 2009?

The answer is: more than all of it. The economy lost 3.1 million jobs between January 2009 and June 2009 and has since gained 1.2 million jobs. That’s not enough, but it’s nothing like Mr. Romney’s portrait of job destruction.Click here to continue

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Tax hikes on working people OK; tax hike on the rich not OK

8:11 am December 2, 2011, by Jay Bookman, Atlanta Journal

found at: http://blogs.ajc.com/jay-bookman-blog/2011/12/02/tax-hikes-on-working-people-ok-tax-hike-on-the-rich-not-ok/

Yesterday, most Senate Republicans voted against a Democratic proposal to extend and expand a reduction in the payroll tax. (The cut, due to expire at the end of the month, would put roughly $1,500 a year into the paycheck of 160 million working Americans next year.) Thanks to GOP opposition, a bill to extend the cut was defeated by a vote of 51-49, meaning it failed to meet the artificial 60-vote margin imposed in that body these days. (One Republican, Susan Collins of Maine, voted for it).

OK, you say. That’s not surprising. It was a Democratic plan, so of course Republicans voted against it. However, a majority of those Senate Republicans then turned around and also voted against their own party’s proposal to extend the payroll tax, killing it 20-78. (That plan was funded in part by cutting food stamps and unemployment benefits.)

You may recall that according to Republicans, extending the Bush tax cuts for millionaires was an absolute necessity. In fact, failing to extend that tax cut for the rich would have amounted to a tax increase and was thus verboten. At least, that was the ruling of Grover Norquist, the unelected Washington lobbyist to whom most Republicans have outsourced such determinations.

So, that leads to a question:

Why is failing to extend a temporary tax cut to millionaires considered a tax increase, while failing to extend a temporary tax cut for working people is somehow NOT a tax increase? Why is one unacceptable, and the other unacceptable?

What a silly silly question. Because Grover Norquist told them so, that’s why. As Norquist told reporters after a closed-door session with House Republicans Thursday, “For the president to run around and say not continuing a temporary tax cut is an increase is inaccurate.”

And that’s that.

House Speaker John Boehner, asked whether the tax increase on working Americans would hurt the recovery, demonstrated a rare moment of humility. “I’m not an economist,” he said. “I don’t know what impact it’s going to have on the economy.” That was odd coming from a man who has never previously shied away from bold proclamations about the economic impact of various proposals.

That’s OK though. If Boehner isn’t an economist, other people are. Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, predicts that a failure to extend the tax cut would result in a decline of real GDP growth “by nearly a percentage point and about one million jobs lost by the end of 2012.” According to The Washington Post, “Goldman Sachs economic forecaster Alec Phillips estimated that allowing the payroll tax cut to expire would reduce growth by as much as two-thirds of a percentage point in early 2012. Macroeconomic Advisers estimates that it would reduce GDP growth by 0.5 percent and cost the economy 400,000 jobs by the fourth quarter.”

According to economists, a payroll tax cut has a much more positive impact on the economy than a similar size cut in taxes for the rich. Average working Americans, given an additional $1,500, will spend it, adding much-needed demand to the economy. More affluent Americans, given a tax cut, will tend to sock it away somewhere, adding to the trillions of dollars in capital already sitting on the sidelines in this economy.

But again, since that’s not how Pope Grover I sees it, I guess it doesn’t matter. This is his country, and we just happen to live here.

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Found on CommonDreams.org

Published on Saturday, October 22, 2011 by the Associated Press

Government: Rich Getting Richer, More People Poor

by Tom Raum

WASHINGTON — Fifty percent of U.S. workers earned less than $26,364 last year, reflecting a growing income gap between the nation’s rich and poor, the government reported yesterday.

There were fewer jobs, and overall pay was trending down – except for the nation’s wealthiest. The number of people making $1 million or more soared by over 18 percent from 2009, the Social Security Administration said, citing payroll data based on W-2 forms submitted by employers to the Internal Revenue Service.

Despite population growth, the number of Americans with jobs fell again last year, with total employment of just under 150.4 million – down from 150.9 million in 2009 and 155.4 million in 2008. In all, there were 5.2 million fewer jobs than in 2007, when the deep recession began, according to the IRS data.

The figures are just one more indication of the toll that the worst downturn since the Great Depression has taken on the U.S. economy. They were published as demonstrations rage on Wall Street and in cities across the nation protesting a widening income gulf between average wage earners and the nation’s wealthiest.

The unemployment rate remains stuck at 9.1 percent, with more than 14 million out of work and 11 million other discouraged people who have stopped looking for work or are stuck in part-time jobs. Since 1980, roughly 5 percent of annual national income has shifted from the middle calls to the nation’s richest households, according to the Census Bureau.

While the average U.S income last year was $39,959, the mean income – the figure where half earn more and half earn less – was much lower, $26,364. This disparity reflects the fact that “the distribution of workers by wage level is highly skewed,” according to Social Security.

Median compensation last year was just 66 percent of the average income, compared with nearly 72 percent in 1980.

Online:
Social Security Administration: http://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/netcomp.cgi?year2010

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October 6, 2011

Confronting the Malefactors

By PAUL KRUGMAN

There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear, but we may, at long last, be seeing the rise of a popular movement that, unlike the Tea Party, is angry at the right people.

When the Occupy Wall Street protests began three weeks ago, most news organizations were derisive if they deigned to mention the events at all. For example, nine days into the protests, National Public Radio had provided no coverage whatsoever.

It is, therefore, a testament to the passion of those involved that the protests not only continued but grew, eventually becoming too big to ignore. With unions and a growing number of Democrats now expressing at least qualified support for the protesters, Occupy Wall Street is starting to look like an important event that might even eventually be seen as a turning point.

Continued here

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The following is as relevent in October 2011 as it was when it was first printed in the Atlanta Journal Constitution in October 2010.

By Cynthia Tucker

One of the odd facets of a strange political season has been conservatives’ insistence that the government shouldn’t lend assistance to struggling Americans who are out of work.

Despite a brutal labor market, with five unemployed workers for every job opening, Republicans and their tea party allies have opposed extending unemployment benefits.

Sharron Angle, a Nevada tea partier running against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, has said the government needs to be out of the unemployment business.

“People don’t want to be unemployed. They want to have real, full-time and permanent jobs with a future. That’s what they want,” she said recently.

Angle is right about that. Despite the claims of so many in Congress that extending unemployment benefits tends to make people lazy and less inclined to look for work, most jobless workers want nothing better than a paying job.

They crave the financial security and sense of self-worth that come from work.

But what are workers to do when they find that employers refuse to hire those without jobs? What happens when one of the burdens that the jobless must bear is a stigma that comes with unemployment?

Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Dan Chapman found that several employers are openly discriminating against the jobless, insisting they will only interview applicants who already have jobs.

In Monday’s AJC, Chapman wrote about companies posting job openings with warnings such as this:

“IF YOU HAVE NOT WORKED SINCE 2009, DO NOT APPLY!”

That’s not a new phenomenon. When I was just entering the labor force, my parents told me, “It’s easier to find a job when you have a job” and “Don’t quit a job until you have another.”

That folk wisdom suggests that employers tend to look askance at applicants who seem unreliable, irresponsible or hard to please. If you’re jobless in a good economy, a manager might consider you a risk.

But what about a roiling economy that shuts down entire businesses or lays waste to entire departments? Are you a poor prospect because you didn’t foresee the bankruptcy of your employer? Do hiring managers really believe that 15 million jobless Americans are without pay checks because they are all lacking in up-to-date skills or unwilling to go the extra mile?

I’d actually heard about this stigma against the jobless several months ago from a friend who works as a human resources manager for a technology firm. He told me that his firm was having trouble filling vacancies because the company didn’t want to hire anyone who was already out of work.

The attitude persists despite a tax break Congress provided earlier in the year to companies who hire the unemployed.

And it’s doubly hard for the older workers — who now constitute the biggest segment of the long-term unemployed. They’ve already found their resumes unanswered by employers looking for younger and cheaper workers not yet afflicted by the age-related ailments that tend to raise health care rates.

During the 1990s, a robust economy pushed the unemployment rate to below five percent — ensuring work for all who wanted it, pushing up wages and encouraging Congress to adopt welfare reform. There was less reason for a generous government safety net when private sector work was plentiful. But this is a very different era.

There is little more that President Obama and Congress can do to encourage companies to take a more realistic view of a difficult economic landscape.

If managers insist on painting the vast numbers of unemployed as losers, Congress has an added obligation to provide a reasonable safety net.

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