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All posts for the month February, 2013
Sequestration Sacrifices Jobs To Save Billionaire Tax Breaks
By: John Nichols
There is a great deal of talk about how Republican senators have gone off the rails in their opposition to the nomination of former Senator Chuck Hagel to serve as Secretary of Defense. And there have been some bizarre deviations, with senators making pronouncements based on internet rumors and unfounded speculation.
But none of the fantastical filibustering of the Hagel fight can compare with the delusional dialogue regarding the federal budget.
To hear the billionaire proponents of austerity tell it, America is teetering on the brink of economic ruin. America, we are told, is broke. And the only answer is to “Fix the Debt” with deep spending cuts followed by the radical reordering of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
But America is not broke.
America has broken priorities.
That’s what the billionaire proponents of cuts-at-any-cost economics won’t acknowledge as they advance a “Fix the Debt” agenda that imposes austerity on everyone else, while stacking the deck in their favor.
It is vital to understand that there is an economically and socially viable alternative to austerity cuts. It’s a growth agenda that addresses waste, fraud and abuse while finding new revenues to invest in job creation, education and expansion of access to healthcare.
The growth agenda, as proposed in the “Balancing Act” advanced by leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, asks billionaires to pay their fair share in order to expand employment and opportunities.
The austerity agenda asks everyone but the billionaires to pay: via cuts not just to benefits and services but to jobs.
The anticipated March 1 sequestration, which proposes across-the-board cuts, is an example of austerity.
It continues a two-year-long process of slashing federal programs that are of value to Americans.
But it demands nothing new of billionaires and corporations that are on the winning end of rapidly expanding income inequality.
If we have learned anything from cuts in Europe it is that with austerity comes unemployment.
Even Barack Obama’s critics tend to shy away from arguing against the reality that the president was right when he said: “These cuts are not smart, they are not fair, they will add hundreds of thousands of people to the unemployment rolls. This is not an abstraction. People will lose their jobs. The unemployment rate might tick up again.”
The only place for quibbling is with the word “might.”
Austerity, in the form of the sequestration of federal spending that is set to begin March 1, will result in job losses.
Austerity in the the form of a renewed push by Alan Simpson, Erskine Bowles and the billionaire-backed “Fix the Debt” campaign to assault Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, has the potential to lead to even more significant job losses.
How many jobs? The most hopeful estimates begin in the range of the 700,000 losses predicted by the Macroeconomic Advisers research group. But they could go much higher, according to an October report to Congress by the Congressional Research Service.
But the sequestration is not the worst of it.
The sequestration is the start, not the finish, of a process that undoes economic recovery and causes job losses to spike by even greater numbers.
Simpson and Bowles are back, promoting schemes such as “chained CPI,” the slashing of cost-of-living increases for Social Security recipients that will squeeze the buying power of seniors and people with disabilities and further impede economic growth.
That will cost even more jobs. And why?
In the case of the sequestration fight, to preserve tax loopholes that benefit millionaires and billionaires and multinational corporations that shift jobs overseas.
In the case of Simpson-Bowles, to lower top marginal tax rates that benefit millionaires and billionaires and multinational corporations that shift jobs overseas.
This is what austerity is all about: exploiting fiscal challenges in order to redistribute the wealth upward.
Louis Brandeis argued in another era of wrangling over economic and fiscal policy: “We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”
Today we may say, extending upon the wisdom of Justice Brandeis, that “we must make our choice. We may have a measure of economic democracy and with it job growth, or we may have austerity with the purpose of further concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”
(Thanks to OpEdNews for this article)
Here is a great cartoon about the relationship between the Republicans (i.e. The GOP) and The Rich!
WASHINGTON — Outgoing Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has a frightening message: Air travel could get worse.
The Obama Cabinet member and former Republican congressman made a surprise appearance at Friday’s White House press briefing to warn that the looming automatic budget cuts set to go into effect on March 1 could lead to even longer air travel delays.
“Travelers should expect delays of up to 90 minutes at peak airports during sequester,” starting on April 1, LaHood said. “It’s going to be very painful for the flying public.”
The sequester’s across-the-board budget cuts will slash $600 million from the Federal Aviation Administration, which will in turn have to furlough air traffic controllers. More than 100 air traffic control towers will be shuttered, LaHood said.
He said airlines would accomodate the cuts by providing less service. “We expect that they will change their schedules and cancel flights,” he said.
Extensive flight delays will occur if the sequester takes place. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)Air travel in the U.S. already is no picnic, with rising fares, new fees and long security lines. The delays LaHood outlined perhaps would be a much more tangible — and annoying — result of sequestration than some of the cuts’ other consequences.
“Nobody likes a delay, nobody likes waiting in line. If we can’t get our hamburger within 5 minutes, if we can’t get on the plane within 30, 40, 50 minutes of getting through, they’re going to start calling their member of Congress,” LaHood said of air travelers.
The transportation secretary’s solution? Get Republicans back to the negotiating table to hammer out a deal and avert the sequester.
“I suggest my colleagues on the Republican side go see the movie ‘Lincoln,'” LaHood said, noting that in the Spielberg film, people on both sides talked to each other.
President Obama called Sen. Mitch McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner on Thursday, but negotiations to avert sequestration remain at a standstill.
“I would describe my presence here with one word: Republican,” LaHood said. “They’re hoping maybe I can influence some people in my own party.” He added he had been speaking to about a half-dozen Republican members of Congress in hopes that they will agree to a deal.
(Thanks to Huffington Post for this article)
My sequestration posts have been pretty serious recently. Here is something that will hopefully make you laugh…..
Thanks to http://www.cagle.com for this cartoon!
Protest Music has always been part of American music and it still is today. It is not something that you hear about on a daily basis but it is always there lurking in the background.
In some ways, it is somewhat like the “room of requirement” from Harry Potter in that was always there when it was really needed. Think about the song Ohio from Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. Neil Young wrote the song immediately after David Crosby showed him Life Magazine photos of the National Guard gunning down students at Kent State during an antiwar protest. The band recorded the song that night and it was released in a a matter of a couple of weeks. There was a need and the perfect song was there. Let’s listen…..
I can still remember hearing the song on the radio the first time. Of course I had already heard of what happened at Kent State. I couldn’t believe that our government had shot down innocent college student but I felt powerless and alone. Ohio captured every emotion I felt but was unable to convey and, most importantly, after hearing the song I knew I was not alone in having those feelings….I was part of a group. It was perfect.
In other cases protest music is already written and is just waiting for the right moment. In this way it is like a lot of modern technological innovations that get invented before there is an application for them. Let me give you an example from a recent article that i read in Wired Magazine.
Don Stookey knew he had botched the experiment. One day in 1952, the Corning Glass Works chemist placed a sample of photosensitive glass inside a furnace and set the temperature to 600 degrees Celsius. At some point during the run, a faulty controller let the temperature climb to 900 degrees C. Expecting a melted blob of glass and a ruined furnace, Stookey opened the door to discover that, weirdly, his lithium silicate had transformed into a milky white plate. When he tried to remove it, the sample slipped from the tongs and crashed to the floor. Instead of shattering, it bounced.
The future National Inventors Hall of Fame inductee didn’t know it, but he had just invented the first synthetic glass-ceramic, a material Corning would later dub Pyroceram. Lighter than aluminum, harder than high-carbon steel, and many times stronger than regular soda-lime glass, Pyroceram eventually found its way into everything from missile nose cones to chemistry labs. It could also be used in microwave ovens, and in 1959 Pyroceram debuted as a line of space-age serving dishes: Corningware.
The material was a boon to Corning’s fortunes, and soon the company launched Project Muscle, a massive R&D effort to explore other ways of strengthening glass. A breakthrough came when company scientists tweaked a recently developed method of reinforcing glass that involved dousing it in a bath of hot potassium salt. They discovered that adding aluminum oxide to a given glass composition before the dip would result in remarkable strength and durability. Scientists were soon hurling fortified tumblers off their nine-story facility and bombarding the glass, known internally as 0317, with frozen chickens. It could be bent and twisted to an extraordinary degree before fracturing, and it could withstand 100,000 pounds of pressure per square inch. (Normal glass can weather about 7,000.) In 1962 Corning began marketing the glass as Chemcor and thought it could work for products like phone booths, prison windows, and eyeglasses.
Yet while there was plenty of initial interest, sales were slow. Some companies did place small orders for products like safety eyeglasses. But these were recalled for fear of the potentially explosive way the glass could break. Chemcor seemed like it would make a good car windshield too, and while it did show up in a handful of Javelins, made by American Motors, most manufacturers weren’t convinced that paying more for the new muscle glass was worth it—especially when the laminated stuff they’d been using since the ’30s seemed to work fine.
Corning had invented an expensive upgrade nobody wanted. It didn’t help that crash tests found tat “head deceleration was significantly higher” on the windshields—the Chemcor might remain intact, but human skulls would not.
After pitches to Ford Motors and other automakers failed, Project Muscle was shut down and Chemcor was shelved in 1971. It was a solution that would have to wait for the right problem to arise.
The right problem for Chemcor ended up being one posed by Steve Job from Apple Computers in 2007. He needed Corning to produce millions of square feet of ultrathin, ultrastrong glass that didn’t yet exist for a new device that Apple was working on called the iPhone. The work that corning had done on Chemcor allowed them to produce what is now know as Gorilla Glass, a product that is now featured on more than 750 products and 33 brands worldwide. Chemcor had finally found its problem.
(Read the full Wired Magazine article at: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/09/ff-corning-gorilla-glass/all/)
Some protest music is like Chemcor. As an example, Charles Albert Tindley wrote a song called “I’ll Overcome Someday” in the early 1900s. Here is a 1930 performance of the song by Caldwell Bracy at the King Edward Hotel in Jackson, Mississippi.
The song was brought to the Highlander Folk School (a school that trained union organizers, in the 1930s by tobacco workers from Charleston, South Carolina. Songwriters including Pete Seeger and Guy Carawan, heard it at the school and altered Tindley’s refrain “I’ll Overcome Someday” to “We Shall Overcome” and the resulting song became the theme song of the US Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. I’ll Overcome Someday had found it’s problem. (Thanks to Wikipedia for providing source material about We Shall Overcome) Here is Bruce Springsteen’s version of We Shall Overcome that he recorded as part of his tribute to Pete Seeger. Let’s listen…..
The next installment of the American Protest Music series will start to investigate the some of our earliest examples of Protest Music. Stay tuned…….
As always, let me know what you think!
Republicans Will Lose on the Sequester
by David Frum Feb 20, 2013 2:34 PM EST
What is the sequester battle? In a nutshell, it’s an attempt to refight the 2012 election, only this time on terms way less favorable to Republicans.
Republicans want to move early to a balanced budget. They want to reach balance through spending cuts only, no tax increases. And they want the spending cuts to fall more heavily on social programs than defense, while exempting Medicare and Social Security for current beneficiaries.
The president wants to move later to a balanced budget. He wants to rely more on tax increases, and he wants the spending cuts to apply to Medicare as well as discretionary spending.
We presented those two options to the American people in November, and the president’s option prevailed. Now Republicans want to present the same choice again.
But this time, they will be presenting the choice under extra disadvantages.
1) President Obama is more popular now than he was in November.
2) Republicans no longer have the coordinated voice and decision-making of a presidential campaign.
3) Because the sequester mechanism grants substantial discretion to the executive to determine where the cuts fall, the president gains powerful new leverage to frame the budget choice in ways maximally embarrassing to Republicans.
4) Because sequester cuts will fall on defense, Republicans will lose the support of important elements of their coalition as the contest continues.
Republicans should not try to reshape the government of the United States from the House of Representatives. That always fails. Instead, they should be focusing on these two missions:
A) Work to temper and mitigate the worst of the president’s agenda – and especially the tax increases and regulations coming in Obamacare, and
B) Begin now to frame the 2014 and 2016 choice in ways advantageous to Republicans.
What they are doing now makes neither tactical nor strategic sense. The likeliest outcome of the sequester fight for Republicans is yet another after yet another political defeat.
(Thanks to the Daily Beast for this article)
Before we end today, let’s talk about why the Republican’s are refusing to negotiate…….they are against President Obama’s proposed closing of tax loopholes for the wealthy, such as the one that keeps tax rates on capital gains and dividends low (i.e. they are protecting the likes of Mitt Romney and the rest of the 1%). Here is the punch line….dividends and capital gains are the biggest contributor to income equality is in the United States (see the graph below). In short, the Republican strategy is to continue to ensure that the 1% get richer and richer while the middle class and the poor bear the complete burden of reducing the deficit. There is nothing new to this but I think it is important to continually remind folks what the Republicans are all about.
The PowerPoint That Proves It’s Not Obama’s Sequester After All
by John Avlon Feb 20, 2013 4:45 AM EST
Republicans have taken to calling the deep cuts that could reverse our hard-won economic recovery ‘Obama’s Sequester.’ But a July 2011 PowerPoint obtained by John Avlon shows the opposite may be true
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The latest semantic spin is to call the looming $1.2 trillion in cuts, which could throw the whole economy back into recession, “Obama’s Sequester.” House Speaker John Boehner indulged this approach half a dozen times in a floor speech before he went on break, establishing its place in the talking-points firmament.
There are a couple problems with this tactic, as my colleague Michael Tomasky pointed out Tuesday. Congress passed sequestration before the president signed it, and the whole self-defeating exercise was carried out in response to Tea Party Republicans’ insistence that we play chicken with the debt ceiling, which ultimately cost America its AAA credit rating.
But here’s the thing. I happened to come across an old email that throws cold water on House Republicans’ attempts to call this “Obama’s Sequester.”
It’s a PowerPoint presentation that Boehner’s office developed with the Republican Policy Committee and sent out to the Capitol Hill GOP on July 31, 2011. Intended to explain the outline of the proposed debt deal, the presentation is titled: “Two Step Approach to Hold President Obama Accountable.”
It’s essentially an internal sales document from the old dealmaker Boehner to his unruly and often unreasonable Tea Party cohort. But it’s clear as day in the presentation that “sequestration” was considered a cudgel to guarantee a reduction in federal spending—the conservatives’ necessary condition for not having America default on its obligations.
The presentation lays out the deal in clear terms, describing the spending backstop as “automatic across-the-board cuts (‘sequestration’). Same mechanism used in 1997 Balanced Budget Agreement.”
The Joint Committee, ultimately misled by Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) into enacting the sequester, is explained in detail under a page titled “Entitlement Reforms and Savings”:
And that’s pretty much exactly what’s scheduled to start happening on March 1. Democrats could just as easily spin this as “Boehner’s Sequester” or “Cantor’s Sequester” and offer indelible digital evidence to back up their claim.
Boehner’s office contests that characterization, arguing that the PowerPoint was simply Boehner’s attempt to explain the president’s plan to the Republican caucus. “This slide simply shows a description of the Budget Control Act after President Obama insisted on including his sequester,” says Boehner spokesman Michael Steel.
The supercommittee failed in large part because the Republican representatives couldn’t agree on revenue increases from closing tax loopholes. After the presidential election, the two parties couldn’t reason together to avoid the next self-imposed hurdle, the fiscal cliff, and instead passed a last-second patchwork that dealt with the tax rates that were scheduled to rise but left the sequester unaddressed because there was no time to hammer out a grand bargain.
And so here we are again, days away from a new deadline, and a sensible grand bargain to deal with our long-term debt seems very far away.
All of the bipartisan plans that have been compiled—Bowles-Simpson, Gang of 6, Rivlin-Domenici—follow the same basic balanced formula of targeted spending cuts, entitlement reforms, and revenue increases from closing tax loopholes. Everyone is going to have to give a little to pass a balanced plan in a divided government. The Obama-Boehner grand bargain that was negotiated in the summer of 2011 and came so close to being agreed upon increasingly looks like the best bet conservatives could get. But they pressured Boehner to walk away without so much as a returned phone call.
Today we see some of the same hyperpartisan fantasies dominating the debate, the idea that waiting just one more election will allow one party to impose its will and avoid any concessions that could anger the base. So Republicans say the problem is only spending—but then in the next breath decry the deep defense cuts that are scheduled to make up half the sequester and pass a bill that would simply exempt their given interests from pain. Liberal Democrats attack the Bowles-Simpson commission, which offered new details on Tuesday as an alternative to sequestration, as a capitulation to Republican priorities and imagine they will retake the House in 2014.
Like a junkie begging for just one more fix before they get straight, these politicos keep begging for one more election before they face facts. Math isn’t partisan. Our current levels of debt are unsustainable. They can’t be solved by simply cutting or taxing our way out of the hole.
The hypocrisy runs deep. While a bipartisan plan like Bowles-Simpson gets paid plenty of lip service, when it came to a vote in the House, it went down to defeat, 382-38, with just 22 Democrats and 16 Republicans voting for it. President Obama also deserves blame for not backing Bowles-Simpson when it was first proposed or aggressively pushing a lame duck grand bargain. And while the GOP has often responded to his outreach with the back of its hand, the president must rise above and lead. Obama’s call to pass a short-term $110 billion stopgap measure is better than the alternative meat-cleaver cuts, provided that it lays the groundwork for a real grand bargain.
The sequester was designed to be so stupid and painful that it would compel the supercommittee—or a lame-duck Congress—to come up with a reasonable alternative. But it was apparently not painful enough to compel the two parties to work together, despite the shared goal of some $4 trillion in debt reduction. And now, faced with the pain that both parties voted for but nobody wants, they’re busy pointing fingers and trying to assign political blame.
Congress should come back from vacation and get back to work. There is no more time to waste. Washington is now the greatest impediment to America’s hard-won economic recovery—a situation that’s equally pathetic and predictable.
(Thanks to The Daily Beast for this article)
Here is how John Boehner reacted when his PowerPoint Presentation was discovered! Poor baby….
I have made several posts over the past year about response songs. All of these posts were based on things that I read. This week I had a moment of blinding insight when I discovered a potential response song myself. Here is my story…….
On Tuesday I was listening to Joni Mitchell’s 1968 debut album, Song to a Seagull, that was produced by David Crosby. The first track of the album, I Had a King, came on and it was like I was hearing it for the first time. As I listened to the lyrics I was thinking about how Joni and Graham Nash had been a couple and I started to wonder if Graham might have been the King that Joni was referring to. Let’s listen to the song before I continue my story so you can share that moment with me….
This is truly a gorgeous song which makes me wonder why I was thinking so hard when listening to it (but sometimes I can’t help myself). My blinding insight occurred as I continued to listen and here is how it sounded in my head…..
Holy shit, Graham had a song called I Used To Be A King on his 1971 debut album, Songs For Beginners. I always thought it was just a follow-on song to his song King Midas In Reverse from his time with the Hollies but maybe it was a response song….
So…out comes Songs For Beginners and before you know it I Used To Be A King is blasting out of my stereo. Listen with me……
So back to the conversation going on in my head….
These songs have to be related and surely I am not the first person to notice! Let’s find out what other people might be saying….
Out comes my laptop and off I go to internet, the fountain of all knowledge. Sure enough, I found a few references to these two songs……….the best one was from likemariasaidpaz.blogspot.com….
Graham Nash’s Songs For Beginners
I used to be a king
And everything around me turned to gold
I thought I had everything
Now I’m left without a hand to hold
But it’s alright
I’m okay
How are you?
For what it’s worth
I must say
I loved you
And in my bed
Late at night
I miss you
Someone is going to take my heart
No one is going to break my heartAgainI love that song and I love that album. “I Used To Be A King” is ‘inspired’ by Joni Mitchell’s “I Had A King.” Joni’s song was written to early in her career to have been about Graham (she hadn’t met him yet); however, he wrote “I Used To Be A King” as he and Joni were in the process of breaking up. Though not about Graham, the two songs do work as a call and response.Graham Nash was always my favorite of the three in Crosby, Stills and Nash. I like David Crosby and Stephen Stills (and love Neil Young) but Graham Nash’s vocals and lyrics always spoke to me in a way that few ever manage to. I consider it one of the great losses of this period that Graham released so few solo albums. I think he easily outpaced other solo male singer-songwriters (including Jackson Browne and James Taylor) and that he could have been among the finest.Songs For Beginners makes that so clear. It remains a perfect album.
After reading this I am convinced that the author of the above post nailed it! Sure enough, Joni and Graham were not a couple when the song I Had A King was written and recorded! Even though the song was not about Graham, I Used To Be A King is clearly about Joni and is almost certainly a clever reference back to I Had A King.
At the end of the day, I feel somewhat vindicated by my blinding insight! Regardless, it was a really fun exercise. As always, let me know what you think.
Here’s a little bonus. Let’s listen to King Midas In Reverse, the Hollies song that I thought might might be related to I Used To Be A King…….
Obama Turns Up the Pressure for a Deal on Budget Cuts
WASHINGTON — Days away from another fiscal crisis and with Congress on vacation, President Obama began marshaling the powers of the presidency on Tuesday to try to shame Republicans into a compromise that could avoid further self-inflicted job losses and damage to the fragile recovery. But so far, Republicans were declining to engage.
To turn up the pressure on the absent lawmakers, Mr. Obama warned in calamitous terms of the costs to military readiness, domestic investments and vital services if a “meat-cleaver” approach of indiscriminate, across-the-board spending cuts takes effect on March 1. Surrounding him in a White House auditorium were solemn, uniformed emergency responders, invited to illustrate the sort of critical services at risk.
The president plans to keep up the pressure through next week for an alternative deficit-reduction deal that includes both spending cuts and new revenues through closing tax loopholes. He will have daily events underscoring the potential ramifications of the automatic cuts, aides said, and next week will travel outside Washington to take his case to the public, as he did late last year in another fiscal fight on which he prevailed.
In stern tones, Mr. Obama said that the automatic cuts, known in budget terms as a sequester, would “affect our responsibility to respond to threats in unstable parts of the world” and “add thousands of Americans to the unemployment rolls.”
He framed the debate in the way that he hopes will force Republicans into accepting some higher tax revenues, something they so far refuse to do.
“Republicans in Congress face a simple choice,” Mr. Obama said. “Are they willing to compromise to protect vital investments in education and health care and national security and all the jobs that depend on them, or would they rather put hundreds of thousands of jobs and our entire economy at risk just to protect a few special-interest tax loopholes that benefit only the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations?”
Mr. Obama once again finds himself in a budget showdown with the opposing party, and numerous polls show his position to be more popular than Republican calls for spending cuts only, including cuts in Medicare. Mr. Obama and senior aides hardly disguised their sense of political advantage.
“We are trouncing them,” said one senior administration official about the Republicans.
Still, the president’s leverage might in fact be limited, since by all appearances he seems to want a deal far more than Republicans do. As the leader of the nation, Mr. Obama is eager to see an end to the repeated evidence of Washington dysfunction, or what he referred to again on Tuesday as the cycle of “manufactured crisis.” And with his legacy ultimately at stake, he needs to lift the fiscal uncertainty that since 2011 has held down economic growth.
Despite the risks of an impasse for Republicans, those who control the House have all but forfeited this battle to Mr. Obama and seem poised to let the automatic cuts take effect. Many Republicans, particularly newer members elected with Tea Party support, have pushed party leaders to accept the sequester and lock in the spending cuts rather than compromise. The leaders seem to have decided to wage battle later this spring in the larger fight over the annual federal budget.
Contributing to Republican calculations is the fact that at least in the short term, an impasse over the sequester is not as potentially catastrophic as the threats that loomed in past partisan showdowns, like a full shutdown of government or the nation’s first-ever default on its global debt obligations.
The potential impact is potentially hazardous nonetheless, both economically and politically. As Mr. Obama noted, the prospect of the sequester has already affected military deployments and hiring by military contractors, and threatens layoffs of teachers, air traffic controllers and researchers, among others.
Hours after the president’s remarks, economic forecasters at Macroeconomic Advisers, based in St. Louis, projected that sequestration would reduce the firm’s forecast of growth this year by nearly a quarter, 0.6 percent, and cost roughly 700,000 civilian and military jobs through 2014, with heightened unemployment lingering for several years.
“By far the preferable policy,” the analysis said, “is a credible long-term plan to shrink the deficit more slowly through some combination of revenue increases within broad tax reform” as well as “more carefully considered cuts” in spending programs, including Medicare and Medicaid. That prescription for both long-term spending reductions and revenue increases, as an alternative to immediate deep spending cuts that inhibit job growth, generally tracks Mr. Obama’s approach.
He has proposed $1.5 trillion in spending cuts over 10 years and revenue increases that would build on the roughly $2.5 trillion over the decade that he and Congress have agreed to in the past two years. The total, $4 trillion, is the minimum reduction that many economists say is necessary to stabilize the growth of the nation’s debt at a time when the population is aging and health care costs are rising.
That approach mixing spending cuts and increased revenues got another endorsement on Tuesday when the chairmen of Mr. Obama’s 2010 debt-reduction commission — former Senator Alan K. Simpson, a Republican, and Erskine B. Bowles, a Democrat and former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton — released a revised fiscal plan that would reduce annual deficits by $2.4 trillion in a decade through spending cuts, including in Medicare and Social Security benefits, and an overhaul of the tax system.
But Republicans say they will not consider additional tax increases since Mr. Obama in January won more than $600 billion over 10 years in higher revenues from the wealthiest taxpayers. “The revenue debate is now closed,” Speaker John A. Boehner said in a statement reacting to the president’s remarks.
(Thanks to the New York Times for this article)
Sequester: Final Death Throes for Republiconomics — and Republican Party
Those who corrupt the public mind are just as evil as those who steal from the public purse. — Adlai Stevenson
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) declared that he has been in the House for 22 years and that we have never cut spending. This from the man who tried to spend$3 billion on an alternative jet engine the military did not want, and never specifies any of the cuts he says are required.
Now, it appears, Republicans will get their sequester. They will also, in the process, shatter any doubt that government spending indeed creates jobs, the only remaining myth that has not been thoroughly debunked by events, at least since 1937-8.
Republicans have perpetrated four major myths about economic policy, aka “RepubliCONomics.” These myths have served their paymasters’ interests, but have brought down a once prosperous country with a large, strong middle class to a nation beset with a shrinking and struggling middle-class and increased concentration of wealth and power at the top.
The first was that cutting taxes on the wealthy fostered economic growth and job creation. That was launched by President Reagan, but all he proved was that cutting taxes + tripling the deficit, about as Keynesian as one can be, may stimulate the economy. Indeed, it is arguable that the impact of low taxes on the wealthy alone is quite the opposite — their idle wealth squirreled away (these days) in off-shore tax havens, extracted from the economy and not doing anything, was one of the causes Galbraith proposed for the Depression (The Great Crash, 1929).
At the very least, the Congressional Research Service report studying 50 years of tax policy finds cutting taxes for the wealthy had negligible impact on job creation, but it ballooned our deficits and increased income inequality. Strike one.
RepubliCONomics’ second myth was that “tax cuts pay for themselves.” This was a necessary corollary of their first myth, because they did not want to be seen as deliberately causing deficits, nor to have to make choices between deficits and feathering their paymasters’ nests. All they caused were deficits and growing income inequality, hollowing out the middle class. The culture of “getting something for nothing” is a RepubliCON invention.
Perpetrating this lie was particularly cruel since it was applied anew just as the boomers were due to retire, with their known impact on government spending needs. The Clinton Administration handed them a projected $5 Trillion surplus that would have shored up our finances and not put this vulnerable part of the population at risk. RepubliCONomic nonsense transformed that surplus into a $4 trillion deficit, an incredible $9 trillion turnaround. Strike two.
Their third canard was that removing regulations would spark a flurry of economic activity, job creation and growth. They were correct on the “flurry” side, there certainly was a lot of “activity,” but it was not sustainable, and resulted in the worst financial and economic meltdown since the Great Depression. Strike three.
Baseball, and in some states our criminal justice system, says three strikes and you are out. But, they do not have lobbyists nor the gerrymander.
Republicans do. Regrettably, they get an “extra swing” before counted out. “Regrettably,” because many more people will have to suffer unnecessarily.
The sequester will demolish their fourth lie, that government spending not only does not create jobs, but is actually inimical to it. The Congressional Budget Office is predicting a loss of 750,000-1,000,000 jobsfrom their folly. Even Republicans are lamenting the projected loss of jobs in the defense industry because of it. Imagine, government spending creating jobs! What a thought!
As job losses rise and economic growth slows, and as key programs — e.g., the National Institutes of Health will lose $2.5 billion, rental assistance for the poor $2.3 billion, nutrition for women and children $0.5 billion, and so forth — that Republicans assume no one cares about get the axe, and real pain in individuals’ lives is felt, not only will the final nail-in-the-coffin of RepubliCONomics have been hammered, but the Republican Party will have sealed its fate.
What, after all, remains for them to yammer about?
(Thanks to Huffington Post for this article)
So……I still think sequestration, and its various projected impacts, are should be avoided but this article makes a good point. Maybe this is the best way to drive a stake through the heart of the Republican party and their ridiculous economic policies. Maybe good can come from bad…..
I have been promising to produce a series on American Protest Music for months and I am just about ready to roll it out. What better way to get us in the mood than to cover a couple of post-Beatles protest songs from Paul McCartney and John Lennon for our Two’fer Tuesday post this week.
First up is a strange little protest song from Paul McCartney and Wings called Mary Had A Little Lamb.
Nope….I’m not kidding, Paul released this little ditty in 1972 as a protest against the BBC (the cover for the single is shown above). Let’s listen and then I will give you the rest of the story…..
You might be asking how Mary Had A Little Lamb became a protest song? Well, Wing’s previous single, another protest song called Give Ireland Back To the Irish, was banned from the BBC. Paul wrote and released Mary Had A Little Lamb in protest of the banning of Give Ireland Back To the Irish. His thought process was that he would write a silly little song, one that the BBC couldn’t possibly ban, that everyone would know was making fun of the BBC ban of Give Ireland Back To The Irish. Response to the song was mixed but I personally think that it was a brilliant move! Believe it or not, the song rose to #9 on the singles charts. As a bonus, let’s listen to Give Ireland Back To The Irish……
John’s song, Working Class Hero, was much more serious, as usual! Working Class Hero was written as a protest of the inequalities of modern social classes and the ways that society works to make people not think about/protest these inequalities (Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV/And you think you’re so clever and classless and free/But you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see). As I noted, this was not a silly little ditty…..let’s listen….
I personally think this was John’s most powerful song in his post-Beatles solo career. We will revisit it’s message as part of the upcoming American Protest Music series.
As always, let me know what you think!
thebestmusicyouhaveneverheard 