Sensen No Sen

In Transition

2011-10-18T21:06:00.004-05:00

Apologies to regular readers for not posting in recent weeks, but as some of you know, I recently accepted a new job in another part of the country. So, as my wife and I transition from Saint Louis back to my native stomping grounds of New England over the next couple of months, posts are likely to be few and far between. Please be assured, however, that I intend to resume regular blogging at the earliest opportunity!

The Regressive Legacy of Reaganomics

2011-09-05T15:56:00.000-05:00

Over at the New York Times, former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has an excellent article on the current state of the middle class. The points he makes are all worthwhile, but the truly killer element of his column is the accompanying chart. I've written about this topic a number of times - most recently in Punishing Worker Success Doesn't Count - but as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, and Mr. Reich's all-encompassing chart starkly illustrate the damage wrought by Reaganomics and its adherents.

Click on chart to view at full size.

Taxes, Debt and Welfare Queen States

2011-08-20T17:56:00.006-05:00

Last Sunday, billionaire investor Warren Buffet caused a significant stir with an opinion piece he wrote for the New York Times entitled "Stop Coddling the Super-Rich". In it, he noted that, since his income is generated through capital gains, even though he made nearly $41 million last year, he was taxed at an effective rate of only 17%. Meanwhile, everyone else in his office - who performed actual labor - was taxed at an average rate of more than twice that much. Mr. Buffett then went further, directly confronting the long-held, but factually unsupported talking point that somewhat higher taxes will broadly discourage investment:

Tax Burdens in the Developed World
(click on image to view at full size)

If you make money with money, as some of my super-rich friends do, your percentage may be a bit lower than mine. But if you earn money from a job, your percentage will surely exceed mine - most likely by a lot.

To understand why, you need to examine the sources of government revenue. Last year about 80 percent of these revenues came from personal income taxes and payroll taxes. The mega-rich pay income taxes at a rate of 15 percent on most of their earnings but pay practically nothing in payroll taxes. It’s a different story for the middle class: typically, they fall into the 15 percent and 25 percent income tax brackets, and then are hit with heavy payroll taxes to boot.

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, tax rates for the rich were far higher, and my percentage rate was in the middle of the pack. According to a theory I sometimes hear, I should have thrown a fit and refused to invest because of the elevated tax rates on capital gains and dividends.

I didn’t refuse, nor did others. I have worked with investors for 60 years and I have yet to see anyone - not even when capital gains rates were 39.9 percent in 1976-77 - shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gain. People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off. And to those who argue that higher rates hurt job creation, I would note that a net of nearly 40 million jobs were added between 1980 and 2000. You know what’s happened since then: lower tax rates and far lower job creation.

Mr. Buffett is completely correct. Americans not only have one of the smallest tax burdens in the developed world, that burden is lower now than it was in 1965. In fact, the entire notion that "confidence" about the regulatory and tax landscapes coupled with free cash flow create jobs is utter nonsense. Demand is what drives the economy and spurs employment; always has been and always will be. Investor confidence about regulation and taxes can tweak demand, but it can't drive it.


Federal Taxes Minus Spending (click on image to view at full size)

But with regard to taxation, not only is there great disparity between economic classes, there are significant geographic differences in the flow of public funds. Twenty-two states effectively support the other 28, sometimes to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. Over the two decades from 1990 to 2009, for instance, New York paid nearly a trillion dollars more to the federal coffers than it received back. Virginia, on the other hand, took in almost $600 billion more than it contributed.

Origins of U.S. Debt
(click on image to view at full size)

Of the 28 states that ran a transfer of tax funds deficit during this period, two thirds of them voted for John McCain and Sarah Palin in the 2008 election. Assuming those ballots were cast because voters approved of Republican tax-cut policy and deficit spending, and opposed Barack Obama's "socialism", given the orgy of unfunded expenses incurred under President George W. Bush, perhaps there is a simple solution to the "debt crisis" which has become the obsession of both the political and chattering classes.

Maybe we could just take that whole issue off the table by having those states with a declared preference for "self-reliance" and an aversion to "government interference" pay their own way for a change. That would free up cash flow to use in parts of the country that understand that there is a role for government in the economy - especially during recessions.

And no, this is not a serious policy proposal.

I'm kidding.

Mostly.

On Thursday, in a truly outstanding segment, Jon Stewart ripped into the nonsensical idea that the rich are under siege, and thoroughly exposed the accounting double standards used by those advocating spending cuts and defending the failure to raise taxes on those who can afford it.

Things Just Got Dumber

2011-08-13T16:23:00.011-05:00

One of these men is the aspiring leader of an increasingly desperate people whose culture is collapsing under the weight
of its own ignorance and short-sightedness. The other is a character from the movie "Idiocracy".

If you believed the field of Republican president candidates was already about as venal, dumb, hypocritical and incompetent as it could get, you were wrong. Texas Governor Rick Perry, a man who can best be described as George W. Bush for people who didn't think George W. Bush was George W. Bush-enough, has thrown his hat in the ring.

If the thought of fellow GOP contenders Michele Bachmann or Rick Santorum working to restore the American theocracy that never was, but which haunts their fever dreams, scares you, get ready for Mr. Perry, who is not only fresh from an organized prayer vigil for which he used state resources to publicize, but which is apparently his plan for when, you know, actual policy fails.

Unfortunately for the governor, at the same time that 30,000 conservative Christians showed up to all wish together that the historic drought plaguing their state would end and that things would get better, just down the road, more than three times that number of desperate Texans lined up for donations of school supplies, immunizations, fresh produce, and school uniforms. If there is a better illustration for the leadership of Rick Perry, one would be hard-pressed to find it.

Still, what makes the chief executive of the Lone Star State so dangerous is that voters may be able to ignore his radical religious outlook, his contention that Medicare and Social Security are unconsitutional, or even his statement that perhaps Texas should secede from the United States, if the fairy tale of job creation within the so-called "Texas Miracle" gains any traction. Texas has, in fact, added jobs even during the current recession, but at a terrible price: massive cuts to education coupled with the layoff of 100,000 teachers; the highest level of airborne carcinogens in the country; and sweeping empowerment of corporations at the expense of individuals. Oh, and those jobs? The majority are low-paying, low-skill, hourly positions.

Today, despite all the hype, Texas is ranked dead last among states in health coverage for children; fourth in teen pregnancies; and again, dead last in the percentage of the population with a high school diploma. The Texas Miracle is really a Texas Debacle, and a blueprint for winning a race to the bottom. In a field of terrible candidates, Rick Perry may well be the worst.

Contemplating the Culture of Exceptionalism and Victimization

2011-08-04T20:17:00.001-05:00

More quick and dirty posting while I remain focused on finding my next job. This is about a week old, but still well worth your time, as Jon Stewart absolutely demolishes the talking points around the right wing culture of exceptionalism and victimization that underpins so much of today's political discourse, and which has been especially abhorrent in the wake of the recent mass murder in Norway.

Five and Half Minutes of Truth-Telling

2011-07-28T18:52:00.002-05:00

I know I wrote in my last post that I was going to take a break, but the following really is required viewing. On Wednesday, Bruce Bartlett, a former domestic policy adviser to President Ronald Reagan, as well as a Treasury official under President George H.W. Bush, appeared on Hardball for an interview with Chris Matthews. In a five and a half minute conversation, the two men discussed the chart below, and Mr. Matthews, who is well-known for frequentlty interrupting his guests, sat back for a change, and let Mr. Bartlett speak freely. The result was a very concise explanation of exactly where our current debt problems originate, along with some particularly direct criticism for Republicans.

Break Needed

2011-07-24T15:34:00.000-05:00

I'm taking a break this week, and articles at Sensen No Sen may not be posted with their usual regularity in the next few months. My current job is coming to an end in early August, and I am now in the thick of hunting for new employment. That, along with some family illness issues, is creating enough stress that I don't have the focus to write constructively. Hopefully I'll be through this stretch in a relatively short period, and will be able to give this blog the attention it deserves, but until then, stay cool and enjoy your summer!

A Handy Guide to Biblical Marriage

2011-07-17T16:03:00.003-05:00

Just a quick thought to share today on the definition of "traditional marriage" - that favorite weapon of the Christian right in their campaign to discriminate against same-sex couples. The graphic below provides a handy guide to all the types of marriage found in the Bible, and puts the lie to the argument that it's only ever loving matrimony between one man and one woman.

Click on image to view at full size.

Even a Stopped Clock Is Right Twice a Day

2011-07-10T18:23:00.005-05:00

Over the past three decades, the Republican Party has spiraled from the center-right policies of Ronald Reagan - who, among other actions that would have him drummed out of his party today, tripled the debt, raised taxes 11 times, and expanded the size of government - to a tragically mis-informed extremism embodied by Tea Party zealots and a crop of erstwhile presidential candidates that features the likes of Michele Bachmann, Tim Pawlenty, and Rick Santorum.

During that same 30-year span, however, the Very Serious People in Washington - along with a lot of otherwise sensible GOP rank-and-file - pretended that this descent into venal arrogance and ineptitude was all OK; that the single-minded effort to continue dumbing-down the citizenry, the outrageous hypocrisy on everything from fiscal issues to "morality", the pride in ignorance, the demonization of government and taxation, and the culture of fear and victimhood that are the hallmarks of today's movement conservatism weren't core aspects of the modern Republican Party. Instead, it was much more convenient to pretend that this race to the bottom was just another way of looking at things - the other side of the conversation, if you will - a manifestations of homespun Americanism resurgent against the repression of liberal elitism.

Last week, however, with the likelihood that the United States might catastrophically default on its debt looming increasingly large, cracks in that facade appeared, and there seems to be some genuine alarm now that there is clearly a faction of the Republican Party which genuinely believes it would be better to tank the U.S. economy than to raise taxes in any way, whatsoever. The GOP has reached a tipping point of extremism, and so, apparently, have some of the Beltway opinion-makers who have made a career out of treating people like Mitt Romney and John McCain as if they were qualified, well-informed leaders who haven't sold their souls for the approval of an ever-more-radical right wing base.

It's hard to know if traditional GOP fluffers like David Brooks, Richard Cohen and Megan McArdle - Very Serious People, all - are genuinely shocked by what is going on and didn't see this coming, or if they have suddenly realized that the amusing, lucrative game they have been playing in which they lend legitimacy to right wing fanatics and corporate stooges isn't really a game, after all. In the first instance, this makes them morons; in the second greedy hypocrites, but in either case - amazingly - they have all recently written columns that are, for a change, firmly grounded in reality.

A longtime darling of the center-right establishment, Mr. Brooks had this to say:

... The Republican Party may no longer be a normal party. Over the past few years, it has been infected by a faction that is more of a psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative.

The members of this movement do not accept the logic of compromise, no matter how sweet the terms. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch in order to cut government by a foot, they will say no. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch to cut government by a yard, they will still say no.

The members of this movement do not accept the legitimacy of scholars and intellectual authorities. A thousand impartial experts may tell them that a default on the debt would have calamitous effects, far worse than raising tax revenues a bit. But the members of this movement refuse to believe it.

The members of this movement have no sense of moral decency. A nation makes a sacred pledge to pay the money back when it borrows money. But the members of this movement talk blandly of default and are willing to stain their nation’s honor.

The members of this movement have no economic theory worthy of the name. Economists have identified many factors that contribute to economic growth, ranging from the productivity of the work force to the share of private savings that is available for private investment. Tax levels matter, but they are far from the only or even the most important factor.

But to members of this movement, tax levels are everything. Members of this tendency have taken a small piece of economic policy and turned it into a sacred fixation. They are willing to cut education and research to preserve tax expenditures. Manufacturing employment is cratering even as output rises, but members of this movement somehow believe such problems can be addressed so long as they continue to worship their idol.

Meanwhile, Ms. McArdle, a prolific, if often logic- and fact-challenged, self-sytled libertarian conservative, made this cogent observation:

... I am getting the same sinking feeling that Brooks is having - that there is a sizeable faction on the right, and worse, in the GOP caucus, that is willing to default rather than make any deal at all. In fact, I think it's worse than Brooks suggests. It would be bad enough if these people were simply against higher taxes, because then you might persuade them by pointing out that if we default, we're probably going to end up with higher taxes, right now, in order to close the current gap between spending and tax revenue.

But when I point this out, the response in my comments and e-mail and twitter is "Fine, I'll accept higher taxes, as long as they come with radical changes in spending." The BATNA (best alternative to negotiated agreement) is default on either our debt, or entitlements like Social Security that people have planned their lives around; the Democrats properly view this as a disaster. But I'm hearing from people who seem to think that it's better than raising one thin new dime in taxes. This makes me very much afraid of where this is headed.

The political logic is infantile. The American public does not want you to cut Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security. There is no monopartisan substitute for persuading people to agree with you...

Even the serially hackish Richard Cohen lifted his eyes from his navel long enough to point out what has been blisteringly obvious to anyone who has been paying attention since the installation of George W. Bush in the White House:

... The hallmark of a cult is to replace reason with feverish belief. This the GOP has done when it comes to the government’s ability to stimulate the economy. History proves this works - it’s how the Great Depression ended - but Republicans will not acknowledge it.

The Depression in fact deepened in 1937 when Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to balance the budget and was ended entirely by World War II, which, besides being a noble cause, was also a huge stimulus program. Here, though, is Sen. Richard Shelby mouthing GOP dogma: Stimulus programs “did not bring us out of the Depression,” he recently told ABC’s Christiane Amanpour, but “the war did.” In other words, a really huge stimulus program hugely worked. Might not a more modest one succeed modestly? Shelby ought to follow his own logic.

Something similar has happened with global warming. It has become a conviction of much of the GOP that you and I, with our cars and factories and leaf blowers and barbecue pits, are off the hook — innocent of cooking the atmosphere. That being the case, it therefore is not the case that anything has to be done about it. Only much of science, common sense and your average walrus differ, but the GOP soldiers on. This is a version of Nancy Reagan’s pledge: Just say no.
[...]
This intellectual rigidity has produced a GOP presidential field that’s a virtual political Jonestown. The Grand Old Party, so named when it really did evoke America, has so narrowed its base that it has become a political cult. It is a redoubt of certainty over reason and in itself significantly responsible for the government deficit that matters most: leadership...

It is rare indeed to survey the works of David Brooks, Megan McArdle and Richard Cohen and come away nodding in agreement at the sensible arguments they have made, but even a stopped clock is right twice a day. This moment of journalistic syzygy should be noticed not just for its rarity, however, but for what it portends for the Republican Party. The GOP old money has painted itself into a corner with the Tea Party movement, and it is going to have to either double down on the crazy in order to keep the Teabaggers happy, or spend a lot of resources to rein in the monster it has created.

In either case, the ongoing debt ceiling crisis looks like it might be the beginning of the end of the Tea Party as an effective political entity. Deeper extremism will only continue to make both it and its Republican parent less appealing to the electorate, and the alternative - ongoing internecine strife - is a recipe for rapidly diminishing influence. As long as the grown-ups have enough leverage to keep the radicals from sinking the economic ship by way of default, what's on the other side of the debt ceiling crisis may actually end up being greener pastures for more rational politics.

Bill Maher points out the role of ignorance, misinformation and wealth fantasy in supporting the Republican Party:

Mixed Message on Libya

2011-06-25T17:42:00.001-05:00

In what has got to be one of the great political mixed messages of all time, the House of Representatives on Friday voted to deny congressional approval to extend U.S. involvement in Libya for up to one year, but then refused to deny funding to continue prosecuting our ongoing military activity in that country. President Obama is already in violation of the War Powers Resolution, so it remains to be seen what effect, if any, this will have on American interventionism. Perhaps the idea Ruben Bolling expresses below is what we need...

Object Lesson 9,568 on the Corrupting Effects of Power

2011-06-19T17:26:00.004-05:00

The checks and balances that underpin the federal government - the system by which each of the legislative, executive and judicial branches limit the power of the other two - are crucial to the continued success, however occasionally wobbly, of representative democracy in the United States.

Under the Constitution, war powers are divided between the President and Congress. Congress may declare war, raise and support military forces, control war funding and make laws necessary to carrying out armed conflict. The President, meanwhile, is commander-in-chief of the military, with the power to repel attacks against U.S. territory, responsibility for leading the armed forces, and, as with all legislative acts, the power to veto acts of Congress, including declarations of war.

This fundamental structure was bolstered by the War Powers Resolution of 1973, which was passed in order to further restrain the president from taking the United States without the agreement of the legislature. The Resolution requires the President to notify Congress within 48 hours of committing armed forces to military action, and prohibits military forces from remaining in combat for more than 60 days (allowing an additional 30 days for withdrawal) unless Congress had provided an authorization for the use of military force or a declaration of war.

And there's the rub. President Obama began providing military support to rebels in Libya fighting to overthrow Muammar Gadaffi well over two months ago, and while he duly informed Congress of this action, there has been no authorization for the use of military force or declaration or war from Capitol Hill since. In other words, Mr. Obama's 60 days are up. Congressman Dennis Kucinich, stymied in his attempt to advance a resolution in the House of Representatives demanding the president end his unconstitutional involvement of American forces in Libya, is leading nine other congressmen in suing Mr. Obama in federal court - along with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates - to end the U.S. presence in Libya.

Glenn Greenwald breaks down the ludicrous post-hoc legal contortions the White House is using to try and justify our continued involvement in The Illegal War in Libya, but while the jurisprudence surrounding armed conflict is indeed interesting, it this paragraph that is chillingly at the heart of the reasons why unilateral presidential war-making is of such concern:

It was equally clear from the start that this Orwellian-named "kinetic humanitarian action" was, in fact, a "war" in every sense, including the Constitutional sense, but that's especially undeniable now. While the President, in his after-the-fact speech justifying the war, pledged that "broadening our military mission to include regime change would be a mistake," it is now clear that is exactly what is happening. "Regime change" quickly became the explicit goal. NATO has repeatedly sought to kill Gadaffi with bombs; one attack killed his youngest son and three grandchildren and almost killed his whole family including his wife, forcing them to flee to Tunisia. If sending your armed forces and its AC-130s and drones to another country to attack that country's military and kill its leader isn't a "war," then nothing is.

In my view, that is entirely correct, and while it may well be that there are very good reasons for supporting the rebellion against Libya's longtime despot, if they're not good enough to pass muster on the Hill, then, by law and by definition, they are not good enough to justify our continued military intervention.

Several years ago, Barack Obama at least purported to agree that constitutionally-unsupported military adventurism was beyond the pale. In a speech in August of 2007, then-candidate Obama laid out the principles by which he stated he would operate if he were elected to the Oval Office:

No more tracking citizens who do nothing more than protest a misguided war. No more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient. That is not who we are. And it is not what is necessary to defeat the terrorists. The FISA court works. The separation of powers works. Our Constitution works. We will again set an example for the world that the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers, and that justice is not arbitrary.

He followed up those broad strokes a few months later, with specifics in a Q&A with Boston Globe reporter Charlie Savage wherein then-candidate Obama was unequivocal in his belief that Congress must ultimately authorize long-term conflict:

The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.

As Commander-in-Chief, the President does have a duty to protect and defend the United States. In instances of self-defense, the President would be within his constitutional authority to act before advising Congress or seeking its consent. History has shown us time and again, however, that military action is most successful when it is authorized and supported by the Legislative branch. It is always preferable to have the informed consent of Congress prior to any military action.

What we are seeing with Barack Obama in office is a man not only diametrically different on the subject of war powers from the man who campaigned for the presidency, but one who has enshrined the worst civil liberties abuses of his predecessor despite speaking out against them in the past, and a man who is now bringing an unprecendented number of prosecutions against government whistleblowers.

To be clear, the problem is not with the Constitution, the law or with those who expose malfeasance, as hacktivist collective Anonymous warned NATO in a recent statement:

The government makes the law. This does not give them the right to break it. If the government was doing nothing underhand or illegal, there would be nothing "embarassing" about Wikileaks revelations, nor would there have been any scandal emanating from HBGary. The resulting scandals were not a result of Anonymous' or Wikileaks' revelations, they were the result of the CONTENT of those revelations. And responsibility for that content can be laid solely at the doorstep of policymakers who, like any corrupt entity, naively believed that they were above the law and that they would not be caught.

It is unclear whether or not Barack Obama was lying about his consitutional convictions on the campaign trail; it is perhaps more likely that someone or something convinced him to abandon his stated principles for the heavy-handed law-breaking and anti-civil-liberties practices of George W. Bush. In any case, in the end, it simply doesn't matter; the president's job is not to "protect" us, but to uphold the Constitution - as he promised to do when he was sworn in - and even the administration's top lawyers have advised the President that he is violating the law with regard to Libya.

By continuing to maintain American military involvement in Libya without the approval of Congress, Mr. Obama is arrogating powers to himself that the foundational laws of this country do not grant him, violating his oath of office, and continuing the distractions that keep us from addressing the corruption and class warfare that continues to turn the once-proud United States into a banana republic kleptocracy for the benefit of a few.

Senator John McCain today criticized the field of 2012 Republican presidential candidates for what he termed their "isolationism" in not strongly supporting involvement in Libya. Bulletin to the senior senator from Arizona: if you want America to continue its intervention in Libya, get a declaration of war or an authorization for the use of military force. We've had enough conflict without end, and so have the troops:

44th Annual Japan Karate-Do Ryobu-Kai International Tournament and Seminars

2011-06-11T11:37:00.003-05:00

No post this week. I'm attending the 44th Annual Japan Karate-Do Ryobu-Kai International Tournament and Seminars. Time for some good clean martial arts fun!

Condemned to Repeat History

2011-06-05T12:37:00.003-05:00

The big economic news of the past several days has been that our current slow, jobless recovery has gotten even more sluggish, with unemployment moving back up over nine percent, the stock market softening, consumer confidence eroding, housing prices continuing to crater, and growth in gross domestic product (GDP) dropping from over three percent to under two. As alarming as all of this, it should surprise no one.

The reason that it should surpise no one is that the United States has been in this position before, and we are in the process of repeating the same mistakes we made then. In 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt became President, the economy had been languishing for years in the wake of the Great Depression, which had begun under his predecessor, Herbert Hoover, with the stock market crash of 1929. In response, FDR began implementing a set of programs and policies that, together, were known as the New Deal. The New Deal utilized government spending - particularly around infrastructure and jobs creation - to kickstart the American economy, producing results with which it was hard to argue.

Once America's gross domestic product had surpassed pre-carsh levels, however, some of Rooselvelt's advisers advocated cutting back on New Deal initiatives, and their arguments would be familiar to anyone listening to the GOP's self-styled budget hawks of 2011. Tremendous concern was expressed about the budget deficit, inflation and the national debt, with the result that government stimulus programs were sharply curtailed in 1937 in the name of a balanced budget. The result? One year after the U.S. GDP had climbed to a record high, it contracted sharply. The reason? The private sector had still not recovered from the damage wrought by the Great Depression, and the only player with the wherewithal to stoke the demand that drives the economy - the government - was no longer spending.

In a nutshell, this is very likely what we are seeing today, and it is potentially the beginning of, if not a double-dip recession, at least stagnation. A number of leading economists - perhaps most notably, Paul Krugman - have been saying for a long time that a second stimulus package was probably needed, but that advice has been effectively buried under a blizzard of conservative opposition rooted in the belief that - despite the weight of history and basic economic principles - "the government cannot create wealth or value; only the private sector can", and therefore cannot help drive the economy.

Since that maxim is so often repeated, let me in turn reiterate the necessary response: that is utter and complete nonsense. All economies - despite claims that we must do things like cut taxes so the wealthy can "creat jobs" - are driven by demand. Period. End of story. No one in the private sector - and I do mean no one - creates a job unless he believes there is a demand for whatever the output of that job happens to be. If the purchasing public doesn't have enough disposable income to buy a lot of new automobiles, no car company in the world is going to start adding to its workforce because it got a tax break and now has more cash on hand. It just doesn't happen.

Don't believe me? Well, American companies are sitting on more cash right now than at any other time in history, but unemployment hasn't been below 7.4% since George W. Bush left office, and it's over nine percent right now. Despite being highly liquid, and despite gigantic companies like General Electric paying an effective tax rate of zero - yes, zero - private sector firms simply aren't "creating jobs." There's a very good reason for this: there isn't enough unmet demand to justify generating additional supply through hiring, and the consequences of over-staffing and creating excess capacity for a private sector company are compressed margins, losses, or even bankruptcy - none of which are desirable if you're a CEO.

If private industry isn't providing jobs, the only other mechanism capable of putting money in the hands of people who will spend it is the public sector. This can be accomplished through a variety of tactics including social welfare payments, the creation of government jobs, and tax cuts. The last, however, only make sense to pursue if private sector cash reserves aren't already at record highs. Further, social welfare payments are quickly spent by their recipients - they need the money, remember - while tax cuts often result in saving or building cash reserves - as we see today - which do nothing to spark the economic engine.

Additional government spending will unquestionably increase the budget deficit and the national debt in the short term, but both of those are readily addressed once demand has been reignited, consumption resumed, and taxation of that economic activity commences. Tax cuts, by contrast - even ignoring the cash currently being horded by non-job-creating "job creators" - take longer to work, and by their very nature, diminish the rate at which government debt and the budget deficit can be reduced because the government is collecting less revenue. (There are still claims made that cutting tax rates raises aggregate tax revenues - i.e. although less money is collected on each transaction or from each individual or corporation, the volume of activity makes up for that fact - but there is no actual data whatsoever to support that contention.)

So, where does that leave us? Well, until the news media, President Obama and Congress stop fixating on government debt and the deficit - or in the case of House Republicans, pretty much anything but jobs - and begin focusing on growing employment, exactly where we are today: limping along with a massive pool of unemployed workers and stagnating growth.

Get used to it, America; there are strong indications we're going to be here for a while.

Home and Away

2011-05-28T09:56:00.008-05:00

Memorial Day weekend is traditionally regarded as the beginning of the summer season, but while barbecues, pool parties, picnics and time with family and friends are indeed wonderful things, it's important also to remember that the holiday is dedicated to the men and women who have died in service to our country.

With that in mind, please take a brief moment and click on the link below to visit CNN's excellent Home and Away site, which was set up to make sure that each of the more than 6,000 U.S. and coalition soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines killed in Iraq and Afghanistan to date are recognized as the living, breathing individuals they once were, rather than merely faceless numbers or names on a list of the dead.

Have fun this weekend, and enjoy yourselves, but please don't forget the men and women who have made the ultimate sacrifice.

Click image to visit CNN's Home and Away

Backing Bill O'Reilly in a Debate: Like Rooting for a One-Legged Man in an Ass-Kicking Contest

2011-05-21T10:14:00.001-05:00

Click image to visit the Bill O'Reilly Poll Center.
The Jon Stewart poll can be found in the archive for May 16, 2011

Last week, I noted that Jon Stewart had accepted Bill O'Reilly's invitation to debate the faux controversy over rapper Common's invitation to a White House poetry slam. Mr. Stewart had earlier completely shredded Fox News Channel's choreographed hissy fit, and revealed it for the foolish manufactured outrage it was. My hope was that, given what appeared to be genuine frustration on the part of the Daily Show host, there would be some fireworks, and Mr. Stewart didn't disappoint.

The "debate" on The O'Reilly Factor was over pretty much within minutes. Mr. O'Reilly tried moving the goal posts several times, but was countered by a persistent, fact-based, cohesive argument that left him nowhere to go. While he certainly didn't concede anything - he never does - he quickly tried to avoid further embarrassment by abruptly shifting to questions designed to try and paint Mr. Stewart as representing the "far left". How bad was it for the Factor host? He invited the audience to vote on who had the more persuasive argument, and 79% of his own viewers came out against him.

Enjoy...

More Fox News Channel Idiocy

2011-05-15T14:11:00.003-05:00

The news of Osama bin Laden's death at the hands of a U.S. Navy SEAL team appears to have driven the hacks at FOX News Channel to new heights of ridiculousness in their quest to deflate the surge in President Obama's popularity. Exhibit A was the thoroughly ginned-up faux controversy over First Lady Michelle Obama's invitation to rapper and poet Common to participate in a White House poetry reading, with virtually every single talking head on Rupert Murdoch's propaganda network churning themselves into self-righteous fits of indignation in which they described Common as everything from an anti-George W. Bush zealot to someone who favors violence in general and cop-killing in particular.

The only problem? Well, if you guessed that the Common was pretty much the exact opposite of his portrayal by the likes of Sean Hannity, Karl Rove and Bill O'Reilly, you may not be a genius, but you're certainly familiar with the awfulness of FOX News.

Normally, this is the type of thing that makes someone like The Daily Show host Jon Stewart happy; his job just gets easier when other people essentially write his material. This time seems a little different, however, as, after utterly destroying the FOX News smear efforts and calling it what it was: a desperate, sloppy, hypocritcal attempt to tear down the president by any means available, Mr. Stewart seems genuinely frustrated at the lows to which FOX has sunk. Bill O'Reilly invited him to debate the Common "controversy" on his show, The O'Reilly Factor, and the fact that Mr. Stewart accepted may well indicate fireworks to come.

One can only hope he will do to O'Reilly what he did to Crossfire...

Punishing Worker Success Doesn't Count

2011-05-08T14:03:00.016-05:00

Admittedly a little dated now that President Obama has released his long form birth certificate, but... well, you get the point.

As the political and media classes continue to focus on the deficit rather than on creating jobs - or in the case of Republicans in the House, on ways to redefine rape to make it harder for women to obtain an abortion - there are essentially two methodologies for closing the budget gap under consideration, albeit with strikingly different levels of attention.

The first, represented by the GOP budget proposal from Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan, focuses on cutting government outlays by slashing social programs - while leaving defense spending untouched, no less - and claims reducing taxes further for the richest Americans will somehow create jobs, wealth and a larger tax base. The second, represented by pretty much nobody with much power to do anything, centers on increasing revenues through tax increases on the wealthy.

Over the last 30 years, the top marginal tax rate has been cut and cut again, all in service to the ideology embodied by the Ryan plan, and the top tax bracket is now the lowest it has been in eighty years. As a result, we have a substantial amount of data to use in evaluating these two approaches.

First, let's look at the history of the higest marginal tax rate. As one can see, during the birth and growth of the American middle class in the first thirty years of the post-World War II era, the top bracket was at 70% or higher, and during the Eisenhower Administration, it was over ninety percent:

With the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980, policy changed drastically behind the Gipper's pledge to "take government off the backs of the people." Nobody likes to pay taxes, and that sounded great, especially when pretty much every one of us can share anecdotes of government malfeasance, bureacratic stupidity, or seemingly arbitrary decisions from on-high. Since then, it has become an article of faith that government is always incompetent, universally inferior to the private sector, and incapable of maximizing our success as a nation.

So what's been the result of this change in philosophy and policy? As it happens, it has turned out pretty wretchedly for almost everybody. Yes, there were boom periods, but there were tremendous busts as well, and what we've been left with is a plutocracy that has been institutionalized to funnel money from those with lower incomes to those with increasingly vast wealth.

If that sounds strident, the data shows otherwise. In the years between World War II and Mr. Reagan's election, each year could generally be counted on to be better than the last with regard to wages. The rich were still much richer than the poor, but everybody's lot was improving fairly constantly, and in much the same way; it was a classic example of a rising tide lifting all boats. By contrast, Reaganomics ushered in our current era, in which the wealthy have continued getting wealthy, but everyone else's growth curve has dropped off considerably:

What happened? Did the economy stop growing? On the contrary, in the years following World War II, United States gross domestic product (GDP) climbed steadily, it's just that with the introduction of the tax-cuts-solve-everything-mentality, earnings for most people didn't didn't go up with it. This wage repression is even more startling when one understands that the growth in GDP was fueled by ever-better productivity from American workers.

Up until the late 1970s, the growth in real wages grew alongside that steady rise in productivity, but after President Reagan took office, real wages actually declined for 20 years, and we transformed from a country in which the results of everyone's hard work were shared, to one where people were producing more than they ever had before but actually making less money than they used to:

To put it more precisely, from 1950 through 1980, the share of total income in the U.S. going to all but the richest increased from 64 percent to 65 percent, and since the country's economy was expanding steadily, the average income for the bottom 90% of American wage earners grew, as well. Over that period, that 90% saw their pay balloon 75%, exploding from $17,719 to $30,941, as measured in constant 2008 dollars.

Since then, however, although our economy has continued to grow, only a small fraction of the population at the very top has benefitted. In the years after 1980, the average income for the bottom 90% went from $30,941 to just $31,244. That's right; after posting an increase of more than $13,000 from 1950 to 1980, from 1980 to 2008, income for all but the top 10% rose just a tick over $300. Something drastic and deeply unfair had clearly occurred between those two periods, and that something is the now-ingrained belief that tax cuts are always a good thing.

Worse, the tragic side effect of this new inequity was that as workers made less money in real dollars, they were unable to save as much as they had in the past, putting them on much shakier financial ground, and leading directly to widespread over-leveraging, perhaps best exemplified by the recent mortgage crisis:

Gross domestic product grew - as it also grew under more progressive taxation - but that expansion has served as a smoke screen for some very real and destructive changes in American society. GDP is a terrible measure of a nation's well being; it cares only for the aggregate number, and nothing about what underpins it. If our 2010 GDP of $14.72 trillion were divided equally among all 313 million Americans, the way our country looks and functions would be much different than if 1 person held $14.71 trillion, and the remaining $10 billion was apportioned among everyone else. Gross domestic product, however, would look exactly the same.

And, that's where we are today: Minimal savings, working harder than we ever have before for less money, and with steadily increasing disparity in the rewards we can expect. As a country, we continue to flog the dead horse that tax cuts are the engine for society-wide growth, when even a casual glance at a few simple graphs makes it piercingly obvious that that is utter, complete nonsense without a shred of data to support it.

Simply put, in conjunction with meaningful efforts to reduce waste, it's high time to raise taxes on upper income brackets to help get the country back on its feet. Such a declaraion will inevitably engender cries that we are "punishing success," but the truth of the matter is that we are already punishing success for the vast majority of Americans; one look at the rise in productivity versus the rise in wages is all you need to know that's a fact.

Progessive taxation is, counter-intuitive though it might be, an engine for growth. It creates an incentive for people to re-invest their money so the government can't get it, rather than to engage in the profit-taking and hording we see today. If that sounds incredible, it isn't, but understanding this requires being prepared to draw conslusions from data rather than trying to fit facts into a predetermined worldview. Investigating what has actually happened in the age of Reaganomics reveals some very startling things:

Large income tax cuts are followed by a bubble and then a crash.
High income taxes correlate with economic growth.
Income tax increases are followed by economic growth.
Moderate income tax cuts are followed by a flat economy.
All of this is especially true as applied to the top tax rates, the amount paid on income that exceeds the highest bracket.

There is a vast and sensible middle ground in which some people pay more to create an environment in which everyone has a better shot at success, and such an environment is crucial to avoiding the stagnation of our society and encouraging upward mobility. Success should be rewarded, but the plain fact is that, for most people, right now, it simply isn't.

One of the most predicted side effects of raising taxes is that wealthy "job creators" will simply pick up and leave, whether that be to another city, another state or even another country. Unfortunately for those making that claim, a new study (PDF) by researchers at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, reveals that that is simply not true. Certainly, some small number of people relocate to gain more favorable tax positions, but their number is insignificant and the vast majority simply do not move when taxes go up.

Gilded Age v2.0

2011-04-29T21:23:00.003-05:00

This week, the Supreme Court handed down a 5-4 decision in AT&T Mobility v Concepcion that protects certain types of corporate wrongdoing from class action lawsuits by consumers. As with Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, it represents yet another blow to the rights of citizens, and one more step forward in what has clearly become a concerted effort to consolidate corporate power to the detriment of the individual.

Citizens United held that corporate funding of independent political broadcasts in elections cannot be limited, effectively giving those with the deepest pockets the loudest voice. AT&T Mobility, meanwhile, essentially permits companies to break the law, as long as they only do it a little bit at a time. Specifically, this finding allows corporations to use consumer and employment contracts to take away customer rights to join class-action lawsuits. What this means is that, if you sign a contract with a service provider, and that company mistreats you, your only path of redress is through arbitration. You cannot join other customers who have experienced the same problem in a class action to address what may be widespread, programmatic negligence, or even criminal activity.

Imagine, for instance, that your phone company illegally charges you and one million other customers $10 a piece. The company is now $10 million richer, but under the Supreme Court’s new ruling, the company can use an arbitration “agreement” hidden in the depths of the contract you signed with them to prohibit you from working with other customers to hold the firm accountable for its actions. The fact is that almost no one has the time, the money or the expertise to take on an enormous corporation over ten dollars - or $100 or even $1,000 for that matter - and since customers must work separately to address this problem, the company is basically protected from having its widespread malfeasance stopped or even exposed.

Even if one considers AT&T Mobility a relatively small thing on its own (I don't), the fact remains that we are, by all manner of measure, witnessing a return to the worst excesses of the Gilded Age. But where that period also saw the rise of unions in response to the untrammeled might of private, moneyed interests, todays titans of industry have been undermining their union counterweights in a three decades-long assault that is now reaching a fever pitch. In New Jersey, GOP Governor Chris Christie has been attacking unions for some time now; in Ohio, Republican Governor John Kasich has signed anti-union legislation; his fellow party member, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, has done the same and is now wielding flagrantly anti-democratic power. Florida's Republican chief executive is pursuing the same course; and most famously, Wisconsin's GOP Governor Scott Walker has made crushing unions his primary focus. Meanwhile, in Maine, the Tea Party-backed Governor Paul LePage is working to loosen restrictions on child labor, and of course, going after unions.

At the same time, Republicans in the House of Representatives have put forth a budget bill that would lower taxes on the wealthiest, end Medicare as a defined benefit program, expand taxes on the middle class, and maintain or grow what can only be described as our current insane levels of defense spending. How out of whack, how tilted away from the needs of Americans and toward the aims of arms manufacturers and defense contractors are our current priorities? So misaligned, in fact, that two men serving under the Joint Chiefs of Staff wrote A National Strategic Narrative (PDF), which brings us the remarkable sight of military personnel calling attention to the fact that the United States spends far too much on the military at the expense of everything else:

The term “national security” only entered the foreign policy lexicon after 1947 to reflect the merger of defense and foreign affairs. Today our security lies as much or more in our prosperity as in our military capabilities. Our vocabulary, our institutions, and our assumptions must reflect that shift. “National security” has become a trump card, justifying military spending even as the domestic foundations of our national strength are crumbling. “National prosperity and security” reminds us where our true security begins.

There are signs that, having played a patient game of attrition for years, corporatists in the United States may have become impatient enough that, their goals in sight, they have begun overplaying their hand. House Republicans are facing anger among their consistuents, and organized labor - particularly in the public sector - has won enormous support in the wake of the anti-union actions of demonstrably corrupt hacks like Wisconsin's Walker, but it has taken a long time for Americans to begin waking up to the bill of goods they have been - and are being - sold. So far, there has been little sustained, organized resistance.

Make no mistake, this attack on individual rights to meet the needs of corproations and the richest among us is a concerted, sustained phenomenon, one that lurked beneath the surface of American society for decades and that began gathering momentum after World War II, picked up steam with the presidency of Ronald Reagan, grew into full-throated song in the wake George W. Bush's misrule, and continues today. It's got to be stopped.

Excerpts from President Dwight D. Eisenhower's farewell address, in which he remarks specifically and forcefully about the dangers of combined military and economic power:

The Daily Show's Jon Stewart explores the pitfalls of Citizens United v Federal Elections Commission:

Is America Finally Waking Up?

2011-04-23T16:34:00.004-05:00

As the battle over the 2012 federal budget continues to heat up, a variety of interesting and important things have taken place; some publicly trumpeted as terribly important, and others less well-observed.

The item that has perhaps most dominated the news cycle in recent days has been, of course, the downgrading of U.S. Treasury Bonds from "stable" to "negative" by the Wall Street ratings firm Standard & Poor's, followed quickly by warnings from the company that America could even lose its AAA rating. (A threat on which S&P did not make good.) Much I-told-you-so clucking ensued from the chattering classes, but what went largely ignored outside the financial press was that the effect this announcement produced among investors was anything but sobering.

After a quick climb in interest rates - the result one would expect if U.S. debt is now, in fact, riskier - the 10-year rate on T-bills continued heading south, indicating - if anything - growing confidence in treasury bonds as a safe investment. Even leaving aside the rank failure of ratings agencies to do anything approaching a good job in the years leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, the reaction of the people actually investing their money is a far better indicator of expected performance than any pronouncement from the deservedly maligned Standard & Poor's. As Paul Krugman put it, "... this was a non-event."

Perhaps an even more surprising break from the established narrative, however - if even less reported - are the results of a number of surveys concerning the manner in which the American public wants its government to address our current financial situation. As we moved into 2010, there was already a broad disconnect between the spending most Americans wanted to cut from the budget, and the significance of the impact such cuts would have on overall spending:

That ignorance of actual budget priorities has continued, and was most recently best exemplified by the hue and cry over federal funding for National Public Radio (NPR):

Nonetheless, despite the yawning chasm between general public perception of federal spending and actual budget realities, some very interesting trends can still be discerned from new polling. A Washington Post/ABC News survey from April 19th revealed that not only is the prospect of combining spending cuts with tax increases gaining traction, fully 72% of Americans believe taxes on those making $250,000 or more a year should be raised as one element of any plan to reduce the deficit. Likewise, two-thirds agreed that Medicare should remain a defined benefit program, rather than a voucher-driven initiatve subject to market forces, as proposed by Republicans:

Further, albeit with markedly less precise wording, a New York Times/CBS News poll from last Friday revealed lower support for raising taxes in general, but again found that 72% of all adults would increase the taxes paid by those making more than $250,000 a year. Even more arresting is the fact that a majority of Republicans questioned feel this way:

More worrying still for movement conservatives is the fact that a clear majority of all adults who took part in the Times poll again believe that government has a role to play in providing health care to the poor and the elderly, with even members of the GOP solidly behind federal involvement in medical care for seniors:

And if all that weren't enough to have Paul Ryan tossing and turning in his bed at night, not only was it revealed that the Wisconsin GOP budget hawk - who frequently blames "entitlements" for the country's fiscal woes - had received significant benefits from Social Security as a child, but a third poll from McClatchy/Marist also shows strong opposition to cuts in Medicare and Medicaid from all points on the political spectrum. Fully 80% of the McClatchy poll respondents are against reducing Medicare and Medicaid to close the deficit gap, as are - somewhat astoundingly, given their anti-government rhetoric - 70% of Tea Party supporters.

What does all this mean? It's probably premature to draw fully-formed conclusions, but there are strong indications that not only have Republicans in the House of Representatives badly miscalculated with their passage of the Ryan budget proposal, but that Americans are starting to wake up to the extremist ideology at the heart of modern GOP leadership. It would be nice to think that realization stems from compassion, but the reality is that things have gotten so bad on such a broad basis that almost everyone either has firsthand experience of the economic downturn, or knows someone close to them who has.

As President Obama recently said, "Nothing is easier than solving a problem on the backs of people who are poor, or people who are powerless, or don’t have any lobbyists, or don’t have clout. I don’t think that’s particularly courageous." For whatever reason, more Americans seem to be realizing that, and that fact is - perhaps, just maybe, hopefully - indicative of better things to come.

Back Soon

2011-04-16T16:33:00.000-05:00

It's been a high-stress couple of weeks at work, and I do not have either the energy or the focus for blogging at the moment. Back soon!

Forget the Politics, the Numbers Don't Add Up

2011-04-09T20:58:00.007-05:00

Late Friday night, a budget compromise was finally reached between the White House, Senate Democrats and the GOP-held House of Representatives. The result was more than $38 billion in cuts for fiscal 2011, and the political brinksmanship involved in hammering out this agreement just barely avoided a shutdown of the government. While federal workers and military personnel breathed a sigh of relief - and hardcore right wing policy riders targeting abortion and environmental regulation were left out of the deal - the real fight is just about to start: the budget for 2012.

The Republican plan has been assembled by the Chairman of the House Budget Committee, Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. The GOP budget, tagged The Path to Prosperity, is unquestionably radical - it's author has said of it, "This isn't a budget. This is a cause." - but it is also a deeply flawed and reckless delusion spawned directly from the works of Mr. Ryan's hero, Ayn Rand. This is perhaps unsurprising, as Rand's philosophy of Objectivism, embodied in her novel Atlas Shrugged, can probably be best described as follows:

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

Despite all manner of effort to bolster Paul Ryan's credentials - Charles Krauthammer recently praised him as "super wonky" and David Brooks effused that The Path to Prosperity is the "standard for seriousness" - there are a host of very big and very obvious problems with the Republican 2012 budget plan. Worse, for Mr. Ryan and the GOP, they aren't even philosophical, they're quantitative, and that's pretty troubling for a document that its author has repeatedly claimed is fact-based and doesn't rely on accounting tricks or gimmicks.

First and foremost, Mr. Ryan's plan calls for cutting taxes - surprise! - for the wealthiest Americans, dropping the top marginal tax rate from 35% to 25%. The last time the top marginal rate was that low was 1931, before the advent of Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid. What is more troubling however, is that somehow, with this rate cut in place and no reductions in defense spending, Mr. Ryan claims that public revenues will be held steady, while offering no specifics for how such a thing can be accomplished. The immediate answer from conservatives of course, is that more money in the hands of the "job creators" will cause them to hire more people, growing the economy, but that simply takes us back to the fallacy that lowering taxes will somehow increase federal revenues.

The problem with this idea - besides that obvious flaw - is that the unemployment figures used in Mr. Ryan's plan to illustrate the effects of all this hypothetical hiring are, flatly, ridiculous. Rather than rely on the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) for his assumptions and modeling, The Path to Prosperity instead rests on numbers from the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation, and the Heritage Foundation claimes that the result of the Republican budget would be 2.8% unemployment by 2021! (Interestingly, this data was recently scrubbed from their website, as can be seen here. H/T Paul Krugman.) For perspective, unemployment in the United States at the end of the Clinton Administration's 8-year expansion was around 4%, and any downward trend wasn't starting from a point nearly as high we're experiencing today. More broadly, jobless rates haven't been under three percent since the post-war boom of the 1950s.

MIT economist Jonathan Gruber has called the Heritage Foundation numbers "insane", and using Congressman Ryan's Heritage data, projections for unemployment would take this extremely-hard-to-credit shape:

But what if the Heritage Foundation is right? Do they have a solid track record we should take into consideration? Indeed, they are tremendously consistent - just not in a good way. In 2001, they analyzed what they believed the effects of the Bush tax cuts would be, and came up with an incremental 1.6 billion jobs over a decade. What actually happened was the worst jobs creation record of any president in the last 60 years, with employment growth below even what was claimed would occur if no tax cuts took place:

As tranparently wrong as these assumptions are, however, the capper comes with regard to health care. Under the Republican plan, Americans currently younger than 55 would not be eligible for traditional Medicare benefits, receiving government insurance vouchers instead. The Congressional Budget Office reviewed The Path to Prosperity's health care provisions, however, and found that "Under the proposal, most elderly people would pay more for their health care than they would pay under the current Medicare system." Worse, the effects would go far beyond just what senior citizens pay in health care costs. The Economic Policy Institute's analysis of the GOP budget found that the side-effects of its changes to Medicare would actually cost the country 2.9 million jobs:

Over the next five years (during which time CBO projects that the economy will still be below potential), Chairman Ryan's Medicaid proposal would cut the program by $207 billion, which includes both eliminating the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act and even deeper cuts to the Medicaid program. Using a standard macroeconomic model that is consistent with private- and public-sector forecasters, we find that a $207 billion cut would result in a loss of 2.1 million jobs over the next five years, or 2.9 million full-time equivalent jobs... These figures are in job-years, which refer to a job held for a single year, meaning that five jobs lost in a single year is the equivalent to one job lost over five years.

Furthermore, the job loss would overwhelmingly be in the private economy. Medicaid has very low overhead, as about 96% of the program’s funds go toward benefits which are spent in the private sector. Assuming the 96% ratio is relatively constant across states (or at least not systematically biased in one direction), Medicaid cuts of this magnitude would result in the loss of just under 2 million private-sector jobs, or 2.8 million full-time equivalent jobs.

This estimate is conservative for two reasons. First, because Medicaid is a program that generally benefits low-income households - who out of necessity are much more likely to consume rather than save - a larger-than-normal share of these cuts will undermine demand in the private sector. This suggests that the cut to Medicaid would have an even larger impact on the economy than we estimate here. Second, it is likely that an even larger share of the job loss would fall on the private sector because overhead includes not only labor but equipment and supplies as well, which are provided by private companies.

In other words, if 2.8% unemployment looked comically optimistic before, contemplate for a moment how ludicrous it is if 2.9 million net jobs are sacrificed while trying to get there.

Depsite media-political bubble claims of "bravery," "seriousness" and a lack of gimmickry, Paul Ryan's 2012 Republican budget proposal is - politics aside - a mathematical joke. The assumptions it uses and the conclusions it reaches are clearly untethered from reality, it is bereft of specifics on spending cuts and revenue increases, and - worryingly for the Chairman of the House Budget Committee - the numbers simply do not add up.

The Ethics of Expedience

2011-04-01T22:39:00.000-05:00

Ted Rall's work can be a bit hit or miss from my perspective, but when he's dialed in, he's capable of highly incisive social commentary, as the cartoon above illustrates.

I don't think the conundrum described - that "our stragetic interests are at odds with our values" - is unique to the Obama Administration, or, for that matter, any of its predecessors. But while it's something with which all presidents struggle to one degree or another, it's a fight our values seem to have lost more often than not in recent years, whether in the arena of foreign policy or here at home. Worse, as in the case of civil liberties, the morality to which we aspire is increasingly outweighed not by strategic necessity, but by tactical expedience.

Ethics are often inconvenient, but how well a nation adheres to its principles in difficult times is the measure of its character. Anything less is hypocrisy, and the fundamental issues of genuine consequence - things like equal justice, due process, and the rule of law; not ginned-up wedge issues like "traditional values" or ersatz socialism - seem not just to be of fading importance, but the subjects of outright dismissal, as if America can no longer look itself in the mirror.

Out of Equilibrium

2011-03-26T21:39:00.004-05:00

In the March/April issue of Mother Jones there appears a series of charts under the heading It's the Inequality, Stupid, that go hand-in-hand with my post from last July, The Land of Greatly Diminished Opportunity. (Please be sure to check out both articles. In particular, there are extensive illustrations in the latter that do not appear below.) Taken together, they provide a shocking picture of America as plutocracy, with enormous - and growing - wealth gaps between a very small class of the extremely rich and the rest of the work force not seen since the Gilded Age, ever-higher barriers to class mobility, and average hourly earnings that have only recently climbed back to where they were at the end of the Carter Administration.

This is, bluntly, bad for the country. The U.S. economy is driven by consumer spending, and the less disposable income available among the masses, the less that will be produced to meet shrinking demand. Likewise, these are the type of conditions that create and foment social unrest, and as the extreme political right seeks to put the capstone on their efforts to destroy the American labor movement, we are seeing the first signs of broad, popular resistance to the massive, sustained, three-decade flow of wealth from the bottom of the economic pyramid to the top.

This is not an issue of favoring socialism over capitalism; as with most things, it is a question of balance. There is an equilibrium that rewards the innovative, the hard-working and the industrious while still providing opportunity to the poor, the disenfranchised and the weakest among us, and that equilibrium does not exist today. It is in the best interest of the wealthy, who have more to loose, to promote that kind of harmony, and to recognize the benefits of not only a stable society, but a robust market for the goods and services many of them help produce. If we have not yet reached a tipping point, we are close to doing so.

Below are the charts from the Mother Jones article It's the Inequality, Stupid.

How Rich Are the Super-Rich?

A huge share of the nation's economic growth over the past 30 years has gone to the top one-hundredth of one percent, who now make an average of $27 million per household. The average income for the bottom 90 percent of us? $31,244.

Note: The 2007 data (the most current) doesn't reflect the impact of the housing market crash. In 2007, the bottom 60% of Americans had 65% of their net worth tied up in their homes. The top 1%, in contrast, had just 10%. The housing crisis has no doubt further swelled the share of total net worth held by the super-rich.

Winners Take All

The super-rich have grabbed the bulk of the past three decades' gains.

Out of Balance

A Harvard business professor and a behavioral economist recently asked more than 5,000 Americans how they thought wealth is distributed in the United States. Most thought that it’s more balanced than it actually is. Asked to choose their ideal distribution of wealth, 92% picked one that was even more equitable.

Capitol Gain

Why Washington is closer to Wall Street than Main Street.

member	max. est. net worth
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.)	$451.1 million
Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.)	$435.4 million
Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-Fla.)	$366.2 million
Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.)	$294.9 million
Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.)	$285.1 million
Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.)	$283.1 million
Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wisc.)	$231.2 million
Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas)	$201.5 million
Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.)	$136.2 million
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.)	$108.1 million
combined net worth:	$2.8 billion

Congressional data from 2009. Family net worth data from 2007. Sources: Center for Responsive Politics; US Census; Edward Wolff, Bard College.

Who's Winning?

For a healthy few, it's getting better all the time.

Your Loss, Their Gain

How much income have you given up for the top 1 percent?

UPDATED: Crisis Averted!

2011-03-19T15:19:00.001-05:00

Exit polling after the 2010 midterm elections revealed a very consistent story: Voters felt that Democrats had not done enough to repair the devastation caused by the financial meltdown in the closing days of George W. Bush's presidency, and their number one concern - by far - was job creation and the economic health of the country. The ballot box confirmed that sentiment, returning the House of Representatives to Republican control, diminishing the Democratic majority in the Senate, and leading President Obama to admit his party had endured a "shellacking," for which he took responsibility.

Instead of taking their direction from this clear tide of voter frustration, however, the GOP has concentrated on - literally - pretty much anything but job creation and the economy, and so far, the 112th Congress has been the same old pandering, hypocrisy and legislated morality that has been the hallmark of modern movement conservatism for the past three decades. Republican priorities since reclaiming the House have not been aimed at putting people back to work, but at rewarding their hardcore base and wallowing in social wedge issues.

Here is what Speaker of the House John Boehner and his team have been working on with their mandate to kick-start the economy and foster job creation:

Reading the Constitution aloud on the floor of the House of Representatives (An edited version of the Consitution, no less, at a cost of over $1 million by one estimate)
Passing a symbolic repeal of President Obama's health care reform plan
Backing telecommunications industry opposition to Net Neutrality
Conducting a congressional hearing into "Islamic radicalization" (And chairing that hearing with Representative Peter King, an admitted supporter of the Irsih Republican Army (IRA), which has been designated a terrorist organization by both the United States and Britain.)
De-funding the president's teleprompter (Seriously)
Continuing to descriminate against gay couples by supporting the Defense of Marriage Act
Providing birth control for wild horses
Stripping federal funding from Planned Parenthood
Redefining rape in order to make it harder for women to get abortions
Empowering IRS agents to investigate abortions during tax audits
Cutting Head Start aid to low-income families and children, but continuing billions of dollars in federal subsidies to oil companies
Eliminating funding for National Public Radio (NPR) in an emergency - that's right, emergency - session of Congress
Denying the reality of climate change
Turning back the transition from incandescent to compact fluorescent light bulbs
Pushing for funding to manufacture a jet engine the military did not need or want
Assembling a plan to cut federal spending that analysts say will not only reduce economic growth, but destroy 700,000 jobs in the process
Refusing to consider any spending proposal that doesn't prioritize full military funding over all other budget considerations

In short, Republican leadership is apparently operating under the impression that they made such significant gains in the last ballot because the public was unsatisfied with Democratic efforts to forge ahead with empty legislative gestures, draconian social policies, several flavors of bigotry and discimination, and the expenditure of federal dollars on defense no matter the cost to employment. To be blunt, they are wrong.

A recent Ipsos/Reuters poll found that 51% of Americans would prefer to cut spending for defense before taking the ax to either Medicare/Medicaid or Social Security, compared to 28% who would exclusively target Medicare/Medicaid and just 18% who would focus on Social Security. Likewise, a new ABC News/Washington Post survey determined that 64% of Americans prefer a combination of tax increases and expenditure reductions to reduce the deficit to spending cuts alone.

At this rate, it's no wonder the approval rating for Congress took only two months to plunge back below 20%, where it was when the Republicans took back the House of Representatives. While there was a certain inevitability that people like John Boehner, Eric Cantor and Michele Bachmann would work dilligently to display the trademark incompetence they've exhibited for some time now, any pleasure that might be derived from watching their foolishness at full boil is vastly outweighed by the stark human costs of their legislative masturbation and ridiculous posturing.

There are twenty months between now and the 2012 elections. It looks like they're going to be very long ones.

Congressman Anthony Weiner of New York provides some much-needed perspective on the priority attached to defunding NPR:

UPDATE: The "New Rules" segment from last night's Real Time with Bill Maher lampooned the propensity of the GOP to focus on fantasy problems rather than real issues (language not safe for work):

Obama Embraces His Inner George W. Bush

2011-03-13T18:10:00.011-05:00

Last week was an important milestone in the ongoing, decade-long betrayal of the rule of law in the United States of America. Together, President Barack Obama and the United States Congress legitimized the largest officially-sanctioned human rights sinkhole of George W. Bush's administration by effectively giving bipartisan approval to the continued operation of the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay. We are now officially a country that is not only willing to hold people against their will without genuine legal recourse and without the real possibility of release, but one that has cravenly accepted the increased likelihood for future civil liberties abuses, as well as the damage this wreaks on our national character and our reputation abroad.

On Monday, the president signed an executive order that both keeps the national blight that is Guantanamo Bay operational, and re-affirms the kangaroo court system of military commissions, the sole purpose of which is to bypass the higher standards of evidence required for prosecution in civilian court, and to side-step fruit of the poison tree arguments about confessions, testimony and evidence gathered through the torture of foreign nationals by American personnel.*

And before anyone tries to defend Mr. Obama's executive order by comparing it to the policies of the Bush White House, stop.

Just... stop.

The supposed legal protections included in the order are a joke, and using George W. Bush as the standard for anything doesn't raise the bar high enough to see daylight between it and the ground. This is nothing but a continuation - an enshrinement, in fact - of Bush Administration policies, as infallibly indicated by the gleeful approval of that most wretched bastion of hardcore neoconservatism, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal:

No one has done more to revive the reputation of Bush-era antiterror policies than the Obama Administration. In its latest policy reversal, yesterday Mr. Obama said the U.S. would resume the military tribunals for Guantanamo terrorists that he unilaterally suspended two years ago, and he may even begin referring new charges to military commissions within days or weeks.
[...]
On a conference call yesterday, senior Administration officials tried to sell their military commissions process as more "credible" than Mr. Bush's, but their policy changes are de minimis.
[...]
The White House yesterday also stressed its commitment to civilian terror prosecutions going forward, but that also doesn't mean much. Last year the Democratic Congress barred funding for transferring enemy combatants from Gitmo to the U.S., and that won't change with a Republican House.

The real news here is the final repudiation of Attorney General Eric Holder's attempt to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other 9/11 plotters as criminal defendants on U.S. soil. The killers at Guantanamo will now be brought to justice via a process that the President once depicted as akin to the Ministry of Love in "1984." On the campaign trail in 2008, Mr. Obama claimed that Mr. Bush "runs prisons which lock people away without ever telling them why they're there or what they're charged with."

In an August 2007 speech that his advisers touted at the time, Mr. Obama promised to repeal this "legal framework that does not work." He even claimed that Bush policies undermined "our Constitution and our freedom" and that the Bush Administration had pressed a "false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand," a line he recycled in his Inaugural Address. He went out of his way to vote against the Military Commissions Act.

So much for all that. Yesterday the senior Administration officials even praised the "bipartisan effort" that produced that law...

There is enormous peril associated with rolling back the rule of law so that the president - any president - has the authority to imprison indefinitely. Once one chief executive is permitted to do so, the cat is out of the bag, and it is immeasurably harder to reclaim the territory of acceptable behavior from his successors than it would have been to defend it from initial attack. President Obama's executive order on indefinite detention represents not a temporary measure taken to address extraordinary circumstance, but a fundamental redefinition of American justice to allow for imprisonment by decree.

If that sounds like an overstatement, it is most assuredly not. In fact, we are seeing the ripple effect of this fundamental change with regard to U.S. citizens at this very moment. Private Bradley Manning, the young man accused of delivering an enormous trove of classified documents to WikiLeaks - and who now faces additional charges that carry the death penalty or life imprisonment with conviction - has been held under unusually harsh conditions for months, since being detained in the matter. Things have gotten bad enough, in fact, that Amnesty International has written to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to protest the conditions of his detention.

Private Manning is currently awaiting a pre-trial hearing - in other words, he has not been convicted of anything - and should be presumed innocent until proven otherwise. With the assent of the Obama Administration, however, he is in 23-hour-a-day solitary confinement; prohibited from exercising in his cell; under suicide watch restrictions imposed over multiple recommendations from brig psychiatrists; and subject to prolonged, forced nudity intended to humiliate and degrade. Representative Dennis Kucinich, a member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, requested that he be able to visit Private Manning, but has been stonewalled by the Department of Defense. In the congressman's opinion, "It appears they're trying to break him. This is not defensible. There is no way, stretch of the imagination that this could be allowed, or that this should be happening in America."

In point of fact, this has happened before in America - and recently - with the case of Jose Padilla (about whom I wrote extensively), a man accused of involvement in a terrorist "dirty bomb" plot who was held without judicial review for years by the Bush Administration. The torture and extremely harsh conditions Mr. Padilla endured essentially left him a shell of a man, and while he was convicted of some hastily-introduced, last-minute charges that landed him in prison, he was never put on trial for any of the reasons he was originally arrested.

This DOES happen in America, and we, the people are entirely complicit in allowing it to happen by accepting it. It doesn't matter whether the person doing it is "our guy," or if he is, overall, a significant improvement over his predecessor; if he is black or if he's white; Republican or Democrat. What we see with the continued operation of the legal abyss that is the Guantanamo Bay prison camp - and cases like Bradley Manning's, which are informed by the indefinite detention policies at work there - is simply, flatly, starkly wrong. Barack Obama has done some good things since he won the Oval Office, but embracing and codifying the thoroughly un-American approach to human rights and civil liberties that characterized the administration of George W. Bush isn't one of them.

* I'm not going to re-hash the reasons why the argument waterboarding isn't torture is irredeemibly false, or once again refute the claim that somehow the Constitution doesn't apply to foreign nationals, or restate the irrefutable reasons why the Geneva Conventions are, in fact, U.S. law. I have done so extensively in numerous posts, and bluntly, those contentions are complete and utter nonsense, no more than spineless attempts to provide cover for actions that are both morally and legally bankrupt. If, however, you'd like a recent and very concise example of the hypocrisy involved in supporting things like waterboarding, please be sure to see Glenn Greenwald's succint and unerring exposure of the New York Times' preposterous cowardice with regard to the use of the word "torture".

Jon Stewart makes some cutting observations about the implications that policies of indefinite detention have with regard to the importance of such pillars of judicial review as evidence.

Dylan Ratigan points out that, while progressive activists are making noise about the treatment of Bradley Manning, so-called establishment liberals like Harry Reid and Nancy Pilosi have remained painfully silent.

Getting Back To It

2011-03-09T14:23:00.002-06:00

Thank you to everyone who has been so supportive during the past couple of weeks; it means a great deal to have such wonderful family and friends on whom to lean. Dad's got some significant recovery to manage, but he left the hospital yesterday and is beginning rehab, so he's out of immediate danger. I'm hoping he's on the long term mend, and I'll be posting to Sensen No Sen again soon!

Please Standy By...

2011-02-25T21:15:00.000-06:00

Unfortunately, I have some family medical issues to deal with, so posting is suspended for the moment. I hope to return to Sensen No Sen in the relatively near future, but until then, please stand by.

Misunderstanding Both Economics and the Electorate

2011-02-19T17:51:00.004-06:00

In a recent piece, Joe Bodell astutely points out that the source of our current economic woes is less a problem of spending than one of revenue:

... The federal budget deficit is between a quarter and a third of the federal budget (over a trillion dollars against a budget of over three trillion). That means you could eliminate every single program other than the three identified above [Defense, Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid] and still not close the federal budget hole.

Simply put, we have a revenue problem, not a spending problem.
[...]
A deficit simply means revenue falling short of spending. If a certain spending level is necessary thanks to priorities shared by everyone in a political system (anyone remember the Tea Party screaming that Medicare had to be protected from evul Obamacare?) then the other choice is to increase revenue.

Perhaps by allowing the Bush-era tax cuts (which didn't create a single net job over their lifespan) expire, and going back to 1990s era tax levels. In a rough economy we should definitely extend them temporarily for low- and middle-income earners, or perhaps phase out for those earners over time. But the rich could afford it before, and they can afford it now... Perhaps by continuing the drawdown in Iraq, finding a practical way out of the disaster in Afghanistan...

However, instead of focusing on programs that promote consumption - the spending of money, which is the mechanism by which demand manifests itself - and thus drive the economy, Washington is locked onto the wrong-headed notion that cutting spending will somehow encourage growth. The always-excellent Dan Froomkin explains:

The laws of supply and demand haven't changed. Nothing has happened to suddenly put Keynesian economic theory in doubt. There is still an entirely plausible argument to be made that government spending cuts are absolutely the last thing this economy needs. So why has the conventional wisdom done a 180?

The answer is that politics has trumped economics.
[...]
"It's as if people suddenly forget the world is heliocentric," [Popular Science deputy editor Luke] Mitchell wrote (referring to the fact that the earth revolves around the sun). "An entire concept, one taught in every introductory economics course, has simply disappeared from our discourse."

"The basic Keynesian position is actually one that is held pretty widely in the economics profession," said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. "Spending boosts the economy; that's not what we were arguing over, and it's not as if there's been any evidence going the other way."
[...]
"The uncontested premise at the moment is that the federal government's spending is 'unsustainable,'" said University of Texas professor James Galbraith, one of a handful of progressives still willing to shout Keynesian economics from the rooftops.

"A wave of programmed conformity has swept over the Washington community on this question," he told The Huffington Post. "The substance of this issue has been placed on an index of forbidden thought. And anybody who expresses those thoughts is excommunicated.

"It's exactly the same phenomenon that led to the acceptance of the war in Iraq," Galbraith said. "Those who hold a different view are by definition ruled out of the discourse, and the fact that they are right will only be accepted later, when it no longer matters."

The cuts championed by Republicans in the House of Representatives are aimed squarely at pretty much anything but the "big three" programs Mr. Bodell points out. In fact, not only are the anti-spending hawks locked firmly onto the wrong targets while refusing to acknowledge time-tested economic principles and the lessons of history, they are pointedly ignoring the economic stagnation currently taking place in Britain as a result of that country's own misguided austerity policies. And if that weren't enough, the resurgent GOP appears more focused on social wedge issues than creating jobs.

Despite the prevailing narrative from the Tea-Party-besotted media, Americans consistently state that their number one concern is employment and the economy, not the deficit. (In a recent CBS News Poll, for example, 48% of respondents stated that their number one priority is the economy and jobs; just seven percent listed the federal deficit as their primary concern.) So what have congressional Republicans focused on? Repealing President Obama's health care initiative; trying to kill President Obama's health care program by choking off its funding (a course of action most Americans have stated they do not want); declaring that if planned GOP cuts to government spending cost one million American jobs "so be it"; attempting to redefine rape to make it more difficult for women to get necessary abortions, and most recently, eliminating all funding for Title X, which gives grants to organizations providing community reproductive health care.

Title X grantees are among the most experienced providers of comprehensive reproductive health care where they operate. Title X-funded clinics provide family planning counseling; contraceptives; education; and HIV, cancer, and other preventive health screenings to both women and men who are otherwise unable to afford those basic services. Not only is Title X the only federal program devoted solely to providing family planning services nationwide, but it is the sole entry point for many low-income individuals into the health care system. Planned Parenthood, perhaps the most well-known of all the Title X funding recipients, has been used by fully 20% of all women in America, at least one time in their lives.

Given the wide-reach of needed services provided by organizations like Planned Parenthood, as well as the effectiveness and long-term fiscal benefits of preventitive care, why was Speaker of the House John Boehner pushing for $450 in federal funding to build an un-needed military jet engine in his own district, while leading the GOP's efforts to shut down Title X, a program whose closure would eliminate just $327 million? It's very simple, really, and it has nothing to do with saving money. Despite the fact that existing law already prevents federal funds from being used for abortions, as Republican Representative John Culberson of Texas explains:

All Planned Parenthood has to do is say they're going to stop performing abortions. And yet they won't do it.

That's not the voice of limited government; that's just more of The Same Old Pandering, Hypocrisy and Legislated Morality that has been the trademark of the modern GOP for the last couple of decades, and it's the surest sign yet that Republicans have seriously misunderstood the reasons for their victory at the polls in 2010.

Congresswoman Jackie Speier took to the floor of the House during the debat over funding for Title X, and used a very personal story to put the battle over Title X in perspective:

Leadership by Fantasy

2011-02-12T15:11:00.003-06:00

Last Sunday would have been President Ronald Reagan's 100th birthday, were he still alive, and the political world has been abuzz with praise and blindered hagiographies of America's 40th chief executive. This year's meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) boasted an elaborate memorial cake, there is a year-long celebration of the "Ronald Reagan Centennial," and proclaiming The Gipper to be one's favorite president has become table stakes for anyone looking to advance within the Republican Party.

In examining the historical record, however, it is abudantly clear that Ronald Reagan's status among the denizens of the policital right has become mythical in not just the figurative sense of the word, but the literal. Today's conservatives justify all manner of policies and positions by invoking the name of Ronald Reagan, but these justifications - whether with regard to taxes, immigration, terrorism, the expansion of government, public spending, free trade, or even abortion rights - are almost completely untenable when compared to Mr. Reagan's actual deeds.

In fact, it is fair to say that the man who brought movement conservatism into the mainstream would be on the outside of the GOP looking in were he active in politics today. Sound absurd? It's not, and John Perr over at Perrspectives has done a very thorough job of desconstructing the Reagan Myth, using extensive citations around ten significant elements of Mr. Reagan's legacy that today, would have him tagged as RINO Reagan ("RINO" is an acronym: Republican In Name Only):

In reality, federal taxes today under President Barack Obama are lower than they were under our 40th president, and Ronald Reagan represents not the cornerstone of conservatism the modern right wing would have us believe, but rather, a marker denoting the beginning of a long - and ongoing - slide into an increasing extremism that is almost completely disassociated from the actions, beliefs and policies of Mr. Reagan himself.

It is a measure of how skewed to the right American politics has become that Mr. Obama is, in many ways, as - or more - conservative than Ronald Reagan, yet is derided as a "socialist." It is a measure of how ignorant our discourse has become that stating that fact - and it is a fact, as illustrated above - publicy is almost certain to result in ridicule. And it is a measure of how deeply hypocritical the current crop of Republican leaders is that they lionize a man who, were he alive and on the political stage today, they would clearly smear with every ounce of venom they use to denigrate the Democrat who currently occupies the White House.

In a perfect example of what I describe above, liberal blogger Mike Stark recently called in to conservative drug addict and Third World sex tourist Rush Limbaugh's radio show to ask just why Republicans are so enamored of Ronald Reagan, given the man's actual record. As you can hear in the audio clip below, Mr. Limbaugh is caught completely flat-footed, and resorts to professing ignorance about Mr. Reagan's tax policies while declaring that GOP love for The Gipper is just something no one else can understand.

A Brief Pause for Some Even-Handed Ribbing

2011-02-04T22:45:00.000-06:00

It's been crazy-busy for the past several days, and I have had little time to put effort into a worthwhile post. So, having established my excuse for not getting something substantive composed, I give you a couple of quality cartoons, one new and one over 20 years old, that both amuse me greatly. They've been sitting in a file folder on my desktop, waiting for me to work them into a post somehow, and by default, I guess this is it.

This one's for the conservatives out there, a classic from Berke Breathed's amazing Bloom County:

The second is for the progressives, and while it is much more recent, I have no idea who put it together:

Hopefully, next week will allow me to return to actual posting, as opposed to cutting and-pasting other people's work. Until then, take care!

The Same Old Pandering, Hypocrisy and Legislated Morality

2011-01-29T16:56:00.006-06:00

About three months ago, the 2010 midterm elections saw the Republican Party reclaim the majority in the House of Representatives, reportedly not on a tide of partisan extremism, but on a wave of populist anger with a distinctly libertarian bent. Said rage was embodied by the Tea Party movement, whose core positions focused on what it views as government over-reach, uncontrolled spending, and dismay at the supposed abandonment of Constitutional principles. But while there were indeed things in the nation's capital worthy of extensive criticism, the contrast between rhetoric on the American right wing and the actions of the now-GOP-controlled House since the 112th Congress took office earlier this month, has been striking.

Of particular note is the selection of John Boehner as Speaker of the House. While it might be unrealistic to expect one of the more consistently radical conservatives - Ron Paul, for example - to have claimed the third most powerful position in the country, it is nonetheless more than a little confounding that Republicans, who owed much of their electoral success to voters allegedly "sick of business as usual in Washington," would choose an old school, lobbyist-friendly flack like Mr. Boehner. This is a man, after all, who once handed out tobacco industry checks to his fellow members of the GOP on the floor of the House, and who has used his political clout to try and quash EPA lawsuits against contributors to his campaigns.

Where Mr. Boehner seems to represent everything against which the conservative populism stands, however, another luminary in the new Congress is Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, who remains a darling of the Tea Party. Ms. Bachmann offered her own Tea Party rebuttal to President Obama's most recent State of the Union address, which was representative of her positions in general, but it was in another speech before a group called Iowans for Tax Relief that she definitively revealed herself to be what can be charitably described as a poor man's Sarah Palin.

In her remarks, Ms. Bachmann claimed - among other clearly untrue assertions - that the nation's founding fathers had worked tirelessly to end slavery, demonstrating either a willingness to lie in support of wishful thinking, or an appalling ignorance of an American past that includes the Constitutionally-mandated three-fifths compromise, as well as the timing of the Civil War, which took place nearly a century after the the country was founded. This is nothing new for the Minnesota congresswoman, however, as the non-partisan organization PolitiFact recently noted, "We have checked her 13 times, and [found] seven of her claims to be false and six ... to be ridiculously false." A student of the heritage the Tea Party claims is so dear, she clearly is not.

Likewise, Representative Paul Ryan, author of the GOP's "Roadmap for America's Future" - the document that is purportedly the Republican plan to address government entitlements and spending - and one of the Republican Party's rising stars, has demonstrated that he is, at best, deeply misguided, and at worst, a shill for the rich. Andrew Fieldhouse of the Economic Policy Institute analyzed Mr. Ryan's Roadmap, and issued a report that came to the following conclusions, of which several are decidedly counter to declared Tea Party positions:

The Roadmap would raise taxes only on people making between $20,000 and $200,000, while slashing taxes in half for the wealthiest Americans. Some three quarters of the workforce would face tax increases, and the middle class would actually pay higher average tax rates than millionaires – an unprecedented reversal of progressive U.S. tax policy.
The Roadmap would replace corporate taxation with a regressive consumption tax, and corporate income tax would be replaced by an 8.5% flat tax. Not only would corporate drop dramatically, but the profits passed on to owners and shareholders would be tax free, generating significantly more wealth for the owners of businesses.
The Roadmap would place the entire burden of deficit reduction on spending cuts. The hefty tax hikes on the middle class included in the plan do not go toward deficit reduction, and the Roadmap’s overall revenue plan does not improve the long-term fiscal outlook. The plan actually reduces federal revenue relative to both current law and current policy.
The Roadmap calls for dismantling Medicare and Medicaid, defunding important social programs without addressing the rising cost of health care throughout the economy, and making the wealth-based access to health care even worse.
The Roadmap would cut benefits and partially privatize Social Security. The retirement age would be raised, benefits would be cut for most workers now under 55, and the 76-year-old social insurance program would be gradually replaced with a two-tiered system of privatized accounts for the wealthy and a schedule of reduced benefits unrelated to lifetime earnings for lower-income working Americans. For a worker who is now 25, that would mean a 24 percent cut in benefits upon retirement, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

On the social issue front, the new Congress has also returned swiftly to the highly intrusive, anti-libertarian ways of the mainstream GOP. While legislators dither on major questions like military spending, wedge issues are still getting plenty of attention. Ohio Republican Jim Jordan, for instance, is attempting to introduce a bill that, if passed, would nullify the District of Columbia's year-old decision to permit same sex marriage, and while the capital is legally under federal oversight, such a return to legislated descrimination would very clearly run against the wishes of the local populace, as expressed at the ballot box.

Similarly, House Republicans are currently working to dramatically narrow the definition of rape in an effort to severely limit the number of cases eligible for federal abortion funding. Hinging on an effort to introduce a shaky, poorly-defined legal concept called "forcible rape", the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act would have serious consequences:

This would rule out federal assistance for abortions in many rape cases, including instances of statutory rape, many of which are non-forcible. For example: If a 13-year-old girl is impregnated by a 24-year-old adult, she would no longer qualify to have Medicaid pay for an abortion...

Given that the bill also would forbid the use of tax benefits to pay for abortions, that 13-year-old's parents wouldn't be allowed to use money from a tax-exempt health savings account (HSA) to pay for the procedure. They also wouldn't be able to deduct the cost of the abortion or the cost of any insurance that paid for it as a medical expense.

None of this is very surprising to anyone who didn't buy into the idea that the Tea Party movement was an organic, grassroots phenomenon. Certainly, some of the feeling behind the movement has always been genuine whether one agrees with it or not, but the management of that angry sentiment by the Republican establishment has never been anything but a useful and deeply cynical effort to distract voters from the two-term disaster of George W. Bush's presidency and the ongoing financial crisis, whose roots are planted firmly in three decades of established conservative doctrine.

Assuredly, useful idiots like Michele Bachmann will continue to be trotted out as evidence that the GOP has gotten the Tea Party message, but there is every indication that there is almost no genuine respect for the movement among Republicans in Washington. If that sounds like overstatement, or if the examples of pandering, hypocrisy and attempts to legislate morality detailed above are somehow unconvincing, consider the attendance figures for the first meeting of the Senate Tea Party Caucus. At least a dozen GOP senators owe at least some of their most recent electoral success to the Teabaggers, but of forty-seven Republicans in the Senate, a grand total of four showed up.

The Dollar Value of Discrimination

2011-01-22T09:27:00.000-06:00

The recent repeal of the military's Don't Ask Don't Tell (DADT) policy, which prohibited openly homosexual men and women from serving in the armed forces, was a clear victory for civil rights and equality before the law. While to many it is obvious that DADT's demise will improve force readiness and competence - as soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines with critical skills who also happen to be gay are no longer drummed out of the service - a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) indicates that this policy shift is likely to have financial benefit as well.

In Military Personnel: Personnel and Cost Data Associated with Implementing DOD's Homosexual Conduct Policy, the GAO determined that 3,664 servicemen and -women were expelled from the armed forces between 2004 and 2009 - nearly 40% of whom held skills deemed critical. Using constant, 2009 dollars and standardized figures for separation and replacement - roughly $52,800 per individual - the Government Accountability Office estimates that the United States military spent more than $193 million dollars enforcing DADT. If one uses the same average cost amount for the more than 13,000 active servicemembers who were forced out under the policy from its inception in 1994 through 2009, the money devoted to discriminating against qualified Americans working to serve their country totals over $686 million.

One can certainly argue that that amount is a drop in the enormous bucket of the overall Pentagon during the time Don't Ask Don't Tell was in force, but it is equally certain that that sum was money poorly spent. We are well rid of DADT - despite Republican Duncan Hunter's efforts to block enactment of the repeal - and if anyone remains doubtful about that fact, perhaps they can console themselves that, at a minimum, ending discrimination against gays in the military is the fiscally responsible thing to do.

It's So Weird That You Think That

2011-01-15T15:29:00.000-06:00

Remember what an important issue the "Ground Zero Mosque" was?

You know, the Islamic cultural center originally known as Cordoba House (now named Park 51) that was going to be built, well... not actually at ground zero of the 9/11 World Trade Center attack, but kind of close? The one that was going to occupy the sacred turf in an old Burlington Coat Factory building, near some liquor stores and an off-track betting parlor, and which was the worst possible affront to the memory of the 9/11 victims and to their families?

Come on, you remember!

This was the issue that had Senator John McCain weighing in; former Alaska half-term governor Sarah Palin decrying the project and inventing a new word in the course of her opposition; potential 2012 Republican presidential candidate and serial panderer Tim Pawlenty chipping in his two cents; and one-time Speaker of the House and repeat traditional marriage enthusiast Newt Gingrich urging Americans to rise to the level of tolerance currently enjoyed in Saudi Arabia.

Really? Still nothing?

But it was the hit of the pre-election season! And innumerable polls were conducted about public sentiment against Cordoba House. GOP candidates pounced on the topic, issuing lowest common denominator statements like this one from Elliott Maynard, a Republican attempting to unseat West Virginia Democrat Nick Rahall:

Ground zero is hallowed ground to Americans. Do you think the Muslims would allow a Jewish temple or Christian church to be built in Mecca?

No? Nada? Zip?

Huh.

It's so weird that you seem to think it was just politicians and the media catering to the worst elements of politics and society through divisiveness and fear-mongering. After all, it's not like this crucial, vital, terribly, awfully important issue materialized out of thin air to play a major role in the 2010 mid-term election campaign, and then simply disappeared not to be acted upon or discussed since...

RIGHT?

Google Time Line showing stories reporting on the "Ground Zero Mosque"

Keeping the Kettle of Divisiveness on the Boil

2011-01-08T20:53:00.005-06:00

On Thursday, the day the 112th Congress was sworn in, the United States Constitution was read aloud in the House of Representatives, for the first time in history. The version read was a sanitized one, and superseded portions of the nation's foundational document - language no longer in force because of amendments - was omitted. Those in favor of that decision argued that they were focusing on the current law of the land, while those opposed were distressed at what they perceived to be a whitewashing of America's past mistakes, such as the language making African American votes worth only 3/5 of a white person's ballot. Whatever one may feel about this choice, however, it is hard to argue that a brief refresher on the country's guiding principles is a bad thing.

What then, to make of H.R. 140, The Birthright Citizenship Act referred to the House by Iowa Congressman Steve King, just one day earlier? Mr. King's bill seeks to end the practice of granting citizenship to children born in the United States to illegal immigrants, but it flies directly in the face of both established case law and, more importantly, the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which begins as follows:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.

The Fourteenth Amendment is particularly clear in its language, and was written to address several key issues in the post-Civil War era. First, it was a legislative response to the Supreme Court's infamous Dred Scott decision, which held that people imported into the United States as slaves - as well as their descendants, whether or not they were slaves themselves - were not, and could never be, citizens. Second, it served to pre-empt any attempt by the judiciary to assess as unconsitutional the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which states that anyone born in the U.S. who is not subject to a foreign power is a citizen, regardless of race, color, or previous condition of involuntary servitude. Finally, the 14th Amendment was a response to the so-called Black Codes, which arose in the American South in the wake of the Thirteenth Amendment's elimination of slavery and attempted to limit the civil rights of blacks.

This citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment has been amply tested in court, most notably in the 1897 case of Wong Kim Ark, who was born to immigrant parents during a period in history when it was actually illegal for Chinese citizens to become naturalized Americans, as a result of the Chinese Exclusion Act. The Supreme Court's decision in the case firmly established birthright citizenship as the law of the land more than a century ago, and as Justice Horace Gray noted in the majority opinion:

To hold that the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution excludes from citizenship the children, born in the United States, of citizens or subjects of other countries would be to deny citizenship to thousands of persons of English, Scotch, Irish, German, or other European parentage who have always been considered and treated as citizens of the United States.

Congressman King's initiative will not be surprising to anyone who has followed his statements and positions. The Iowa Representative has claimed that the election of Barack Obama to the presidency would be a victory for Islamic terrorists, said that the president favors black people by default, and has made it clear he fears that Iowa could become a "gay marriage mecca." In other words, Steve King is a man with a body of public statements that pretty clearly demonstrate he is an extreme nativist, as well as someone with a strong a fear of people not like himself.

What is remarkable, however, is the introduction of a bill just one day before a celebration of the Constitution that not only flagrantly disregards that very document, but which will clearly have no possible chance of accomplishing its intended goals. The Fourteenth Amendment can only be changed by another amendment - not through legislation - despite claims by Congressman King, who has already begun appearing on talkshows to promote the creation of a permanent American underclass that doesn't enjoy full rights.

Clearly then, H.R. 140 must almost certainly have another purpose, and it does. Just as one of the signature Republican pledges for the new Congress is to hold a vote on repealing President Obama's health care reform legislation despite certain failure, Mr. King's birthright citizenship is not about substance, it is about stoking the fires of racial tension and part of a coordinated effort to keep Americans divided.

Happy New Decade

2011-01-01T13:32:00.000-06:00

Happy new year and new decade! It won't be hard for the next ten years to be better than the last, but certainly, nothing is guaranteed, either. Let's work to make 2011 and its decade a great one!

Happy Holidays!

2010-12-25T11:41:00.000-06:00

Have a wonderful holiday season and a joyous New Year! Sensen No Sen will return to regular posting shortly.

Seriously Skewed Political Priorities

2010-12-18T15:39:00.006-06:00

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY)

Earlier this month, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell promised to block any legislation from advancing through the Senate until all of the Bush tax cuts - including those for the richest Americans - were extended. He and his fellow Republicans made good on that threat, and a number of important bills were stymied.

Among them were the DREAM Act, which presents a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants of good character; the new START agreement, which would reduce global nuclear arsenals; and the repeal of the Don't Ask Don't Tell (DADT) policy that prevents homosexuals from serving openly in the U.S. military. Certainly, some of these bills would have been contentious, but they all address issues of significance to the nation, even if, by apparent Republican reckoning, those issues are of less significance than ensuring the continuation of policies which have done nothing to create jobs and seriously undermined U.S. financial health.

As if that weren't pathetic enough, another piece of legislation also ran into the brick wall of GOP obstructionism, and it's hard to imagine one which should be less controversial, or which better deserved a vote, no matter the partisan polarization on Capitol Hill. That legislation was H.R.847, commonly referred to as the Zadroga Bill, which would improve health services and provide financial compensation for 9/11 first responders who have become ill or disabled as a result of exposure to dangerous toxins during rescue and cleanup operations at Ground Zero.

The Zadroga Bill would create a federal program to provide health monitoring and treatment for first responders and provide medical screening for people who were in the area of the World Trade Center when the attack occurred and who might be at risk. The Zadroga Bill would also re-open the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund to provide compensation for losses and harm instead of forcing affected individuals to work through the current system, which requires costly and time-consuming litigation. It is a standalone piece of legislation, and as such, it isn't necessary for it to go through a lengthy process of debate and amendment - a simple up or down vote is all that's needed - and it is paid for by closing a tax loophole.

A New York City firefighter at Ground Zero

Republicans like John Kyl claimed that there simply wasn't enough time to get everything done before Congress adjourns for the holidays - except extending tax cuts for the richest among us, of course - and that meant no debate or vote on the Zadroga Bill. Mr. Kyl, apparently ignorant of the work schedules of most Americans - including 9/11 first responders - even went so far as to complain that Majority Leader Harry Reid's threat to keep the Senate in session through the end of the year in order to complete its business was "disrespecting" the institution of Christmas. Mr. Kyl failed to explain, however, the manner in which ensuring wealthy people have low taxes while genuine, working class heroes are left without much-needed assistance pays homage to Christian tradition, but perhaps that's just as well.

Almost as bad as the failure to advance H.R. 847, however, is the national media's near-complete lack of reportage on the fact that it has been held hostage to the conservative tax cut agenda, despite the total, empirical failure of those policies to do anything but crush the middle class and bust the budget. Republicans have not been shy about using 9/11 imagery in political ads, making the captivity of the Zadroga Bill to their legislative maneuvering even more disturbing than their skewed priorities already are, but almost no one in our national press corps seems to have found that worth discussing. Meanwhile, the men and women who risked their lives - and often sacrificed their health - in order to respond to the single largest terror attack on American soil continue to suffer.

It's been said often in recent years, but it bears repeating as long as it remains true: the landscape of contemporary journalism is a pretty bleak place, and some of the best and most trustworthy reporting available today is on Comedy Central. If you know about the Republican stonewalling of the Zadroga Bill, it's almost certainly because you watch The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, since other national outlets provided scant, if any, coverage to it.

Mr. Stewart devoted an entire show to the tragic state of affairs surrounding H.R. 847 on December 16th (available here), which built on segments on the topic from earlier in the week. Below is the first such segment, from Monday, December 13th, as well as a portion of Thursday's show focusing on a roundtable with four 9/11 first responders, all of whom are suffering serious, life-threatening illness as a result of their heroism.

Mr. Stewart's frustration and anger were palpable on Monday, and only increased over the course of the week as the Zadroga Bill continued to be blocked by the GOP, and the roundtable discussion is a far cry from The Daily Show's usual satire. Both are required viewing.

The President's Tin Ear

2010-12-11T22:15:00.008-06:00

Let us begin by admitting that President Barack Obama took office with a set of challenges whose combined magnitude hadn't been waiting for any incoming chief executive in our lifetime: two ongoing wars, a financial crisis that narrowly missed taking the United States - and the world rest of the world with it - down the tubes, a massive federal deficit, and a public harshly divided along ideological lines. Let us also admit that Mr. Obama swept into office on a groundswell of popular support demanding change from the disastrous policies of the Bush years that had led to this set of circumstances, and also that he has done a decent job - to date, anyway - of keeping the country from falling off the edge of a cliff.

Having said that, we must also concede that his recent tax cut deal with Republicans in Congress is not just a miserable political failure, but one that is a very real threat to making him irrelevant, while endangering our society and our economy now and in the future.

For those unfamiliar with the particulars, President George W. Bush shepherded into law two enormous tax cuts - one in 2001 and a second in 2003 - that reduced taxes for almost all Americans, but which were weighted heavily to the benefit of the wealthiest among us. The stated rationale for this policy was that it would free up money for the rich to create jobs; essentially a version of the supply-side theory that first gained popularity in the Reagan Administration. These tax cuts, however, were a miserable failure; they exploded the deficit, created income inequality unseen since before the Great Depression, and left Mr. Bush with the worst job creation record of any president since Herbert Hoover. Of all of the major contributors to the federal deficit, the Bush tax cuts are on track to be - by far - the single biggest factor.

The good news is that the Bush tax cuts are supposed to expire at the end of 2010. The bad news is that, while this would help reduce the deficit, letting all tax rates return to their 1999 levels during a pronounced economic downturn could derail the faltering recovery we are beginning to see. President Obama, who had campaigned on a promise to eliminate the Bush cuts for the wealthiest Americans - and who reduced taxes for 95% of the workforce soon after he took office - gave voice to a desire to extend the redcutions for everyone but the richest, at least temporarily. The thought behind this approach would be to pare the budget shortfall while keeping cash in the hands of working people, at least until the economy gets back on its feet.

While it didn't please everyone, this seemed like a reasonable, pragmatic approach to many. The noteworthy exception came from movement conservatives, who have been enraged at the prospect of the Bush tax cuts expiring for anyone, while simultaneously ranting about fiscal irresponsibility, despite the obvious contradiction between the two elements of that position and their central role in creating the budget deficit we have today. Emboldened by their victories in the 2010 mid-term elections, Republicans promised to block all other pending legislation - including the new iteration of the START Treaty, which has broad, bipartisan support - unless all of the Bush tax cuts were extended, even for the very richest, and despite the empirical evidence that such cuts hadn't produced anything even approaching the promised growth in employment over the nine years since the first cut went into effect.

Instead of making the Republicans put their money where their mouths are, however, the president caved in pre-emptively in much the same manner as he did with regard to the public option during the health care reform debate early in his tenure. Rather than separate extension of the Bush cuts from any other legislation in order to force Republicans to defend them direcrtly and openly, Mr. Obama instead tied them up in a neat package that not only gave the GOP the ruinous fiscal policies they want, but which introduced a payroll tax holiday that is clearly the first step in a Republican assault on Social Security. Then, he threw in a reduction of the estate tax, to boot - all allegedly in exchange for an extension of longterm employment benefits he claimed wouldn't have been possible without this deal.

On top of all that - almost impossibly - the president then made it even worse; berating Democrats upset at his swift and unilateral capitulation, calling them "sanctimonious" and unrealistic ideologues who don't understand the nature of governance and the need to keep the country moving forward rather than cater to political rigidity. In one fell swoop, Mr. Obama abandoned a campaign promise, needlessly ceded a position of strength to concoct an unnecessary closed-door deal that sets dangerous precedents, and not only insulted the very people who got him elected, but had the tin ear to lecture them for failing to be grateful that the hole he's digging for them isn't as absolutely awful as it could be.

How bad is it for President Obama right now? Bad enough that Bernie Sanders, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, took to the floor of the Senate on Friday for an eight-hour mock filibuster of the White House deal. Bad enough that a senior member of the president's own party publicly rejected the claim that any sort of give-away to the rich was necessary to secure additional unemployment benefits. Bad enough that, doubtful although it might be, there is now open discussion within the Democratic Party of mounting a primary challenge to Mr. Obama in the next election.

Mr. Obama - whatever the issues he faced as he entered office, and whatever successes he has had to date - richly deserves every ounce of criticism he is receiving for this collosal blunder. He played it like not just a rank amateur, but an arrogant fool, brokering a deal with the worst elements of his party’s opposition and doing so without even bothering to line up his supporters and his allies. Somehow, the White House came to the conclusion that it could thoroughly undermine the core principles of Mr. Obama's base, angrily dismiss their concerns when the deal came to light, and everything would be just fine. Perhaps it was a realpolitik calculation that there is no place else for Democratic voters to go, but it was a major misjudgment that looks increasingly as if it will blow up in his face.

Beyond the political pratfall, however, is the president's thorough misreading of both the public sentiment and the issues at hand. A clear majority of Americans - 59% - favored letting tax cuts for the wealthy expire, and even Reagan Administration Budget Director David Stockman believes that the country simply can't afford to keep the Bush tax cuts in place.

With the economy foundering, unemployment pegged at nearly ten percent, and the deficit continuing to worsen, it seems pretty clear that we need to drive demand in order to stimulate job creation while protecting the middle class and reducing the budget shortfall. Instead, Mr. Obama worked with the GOP to re-emphasize a program of tax cuts for the wealthy that has thoroughly and empircally failed to boost employment, and which will balloon the deficit to heretofore unrealized dimensions. And he did it for something - extended unemployment benefits - he could almost certainly have gotten separately, while laying payroll tax groundwork likely to have dire consequences down the road for Social Security's meager safety net.

The United States continues to face a host of massive challenges as a result of the misrule of the Bush Administration. Barack Obama has made some headway in overcoming these problems, but he has also surrendered positions of strength for the sake of appearing bipartisan, and as a result, achieved significantly less than he could have. Early on, this might have been forgiven as a misguided belief that attempts at accomodation would help his relations with the Republicans on Capitol Hill, but the tax cut catastrophe demonstrates either an obstinate ignorance of the GOP's disciplined and declared obstructionism, or a sloppiness that can only be termed incompetent.

It is unclear if the fault lies with the president himself, his advisors, or some combination thereof, but this tax cut debacle is a misfire of gigantic proportions, and one about which we should all be concerned, for reasons both economic and political. That said, there is certainly time for President Obama to recover and govern as we believed candidate Obama intended. That doesn't mean he could be expected to embrace every progressive goal wholeheartedly - the president is clearly a pragmatic centrist, despite efforts by conservatives to paint him as "far left" - but at least it would be a return to embracing the positions he stated on the campaign trail and an end to the wrong-headed desire for accomodation in the face of stony opposition. In the meantime, any hope that President Obama's penchant for unnecessary concessions aren't poor execution but rather part of a grand and subtle scheme, has been confirmed conclusively to be wishful thinking.

Mahatma Ghandi is credited with having once said, in regard to passive resistance, "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." In an excellent analysis, Rachel Maddow finds that President Obama has, tragically, reversed that progression:

Simple Questions About Tax Cuts

2010-12-04T15:45:00.000-06:00

Back in July, I wrote a post entitled The Land of Greatly Diminished Opportunity, in which I shared a host of quantitative information about wealth distribution, the stagnation of economic class, and reduced spending power to demonstrate that the supply-side paradigm of economic stimulus through the policy of tax cuts is no more than an empty shell game that has produced little - and in many cases, diminished - value for the vast majority of Americans.

It's not that I believe I have a wide readership or that I'm an influential or even particularly original thinker, but it's striking to me how little of this conversation has even begun to penetrate the national discourse. Even now, in the wake of the 2010 mid-term elections, as Republicans pledge to block all legislation unless the Bush tax cuts are made permanent for all income levels, almost no one outside the blogosphere seems to be asking a couple of very obvious and very direct questions.

The questions are these: If the Bush tax cuts - the first round of which have been in place since 2001 and the second round since 2003 - are the key to growing employment and prosperity, why did George W. Bush have by far the worst job creation record of any president since Herbert Hoover ushered in the Great Depression? If the Bush tax cuts mean job growth, why has the country under President Obama - who inherited not only his predecessor's financial collapse, but his tax cuts as well - continued to wallow in unemployment?

Defenders of the tax cuts may note that Gross Domestic Product (GDP) - that favorite shorthand for the robustness of the national economy - rose from 2000 to 2009. But that's a measure whose use is based on convenience more than anything else, and one that is demonstrably full of pitfalls. As Cornell University economics professor Robert Frank put it:

When you have a crime wave and people go out and buy more expensive locks for their doors, that makes GDP per capita go up, and it certainly doesn't seem to correspond to an increase in welfare. When pollution goes up and we have to spend more to deal with the problems caused by that, an increase in GDP is reflected in that.

Even if one accepts the premise that tax cuts spur an expansion of GDP - which, given the fact that U.S. gross domestic product was growing at a healthy clip right up until the financial meltdown, ought to give its advocates pause - that's not the claim being made by those backing the extension of President Bush's tax policies. They continue to tout the necessity of making the Bush tax cuts permanent in order to create jobs despite zero evidence of any correlation between those policies and job creation.

So, again: Why, after 30 years of tax cut-driven, supply-side policy dating back to the Reagan years, does the average American have less purchasing power today than he did during the Carter Administration? And just how long are we supposed to wait for the now-nine-year-old Bush tax cuts to kick in?

Fox News and Glen Beck: Still Digging for Lower Ground

2010-11-20T10:44:00.008-06:00

Last week, Fox News performance artist and mercenary dunce Glen Beck devoted an entire hour to a special program entitled "Puppet Master", focused on billionaire hedge fund manager, progressive activist and Holocaust survivor George Soros. In it, Mr. Beck painted Mr. Soros as, essentially, the root of all evil - a man who has toppled governments, decimated economies, persecuted Jews, and who is actively working to sow the seeds of the United State's destruction.

Days later, Fox News chief Roger Ailes sat down for a no-holds-barred interview (part 1, part 2) with Howard Kurtz, in which he accused the leadership of National Public Radio (NPR) of being cut from the same cloth as Adolf Hitler:

They are, of course, Nazis. They have a kind of Nazi attitude. They are the left wing of Nazism. These guys don’t want any other point of view. They don’t even feel guilty using tax dollars to spout their propaganda. They are basically Air America with government funding to keep them alive.

Among people who don't watch the ever-more ludicrous Fox News, both outbursts were roundly greeted with either astonishment that Fox had attained yet another new low, or the scathing disdain they deserve. The fact of these statements by two of Fox's leading lights, however, begs an important question: Just how divorced from reality, how deeply mired in the language and attitudes of eliminationism, does someone have to be to swallow this kind of tripe? More importantly, what portion of our citizenry is uncritically shoveling down garbage like this on a regular basis and asking for more?

Given Glen Beck's popularity among movement conservatives and the ratings Fox News continues to enjoy in spite of - or perhaps because of - this crass and insulting idiocy, it's fair to say a significant part of America's populace is either astoundingly and willfully ignorant, or meets the medical definition for mental impairment. People are obviously free to tune in to whatever they want, but it's objectively difficult to understand why Fox News and the ridiculous Glen Beck are watched at all - let alone taken seriously - even in the era of Real Housewives.

In the first video below, Jon Stewart, the nation's best - and funniest - media critic, delves into Mr. Beck's claims about George Soros. In the second, he demonstrates just how flimsy and nonsensical "Puppet Master" is by using Mr. Beck's own methodology. Enjoy...

Remember This, the Next Time an American Soldier is Tortured

2010-11-13T16:21:00.002-06:00

President George W. Bush shuffled back onto the national stage last week, just long enough to shill his new memoir, Decision Points, and remind everyone exactly why he is justly regarded as one of the worst disgraces to ever hold the highest office in the land. Saying "After I sell this book, I'm going back underground," Mr. Bush made it clear that, in his own mind, he remains blameless for the economic meltdown, and that he retains almost every ounce of the appalling, self-centered stupidity that was the hallmark of his administration.

Perhaps the single best example of Mr. Bush's persistent, hollow machismo lay in his declaration during a recent interview that he not only authorized the waterboarding of three prisoners, but that he'd do it again because "that decision saved lives" both in this country and in the United Kingdom. David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, swiftly disavowed the ex-president's claim, but as has been America's consistent shame, Mr. Bush was neither pressed to present evidence supporting his belief, nor even vaguely threatened with the legal consequences for his public admission to violations of both domestic and international law, and the commission of a war crime.

Calling George W. Bush a war criminal is not hyperbole or crazy, partisan, hysteria. There is no controversy - flatly, whatsoever - about the legality of waterboarding. Rather, there is merely a dismal and pervasive cowardice when it comes to prosecuting the political class for deeds and policies that would land any ordinary American either in jail or in front of a tribunal at The Hague. At the time he takes office, every president swears not to "keep us safe," but to uphold and protect the Constitution - a document which explicitly states that the law must apply equally to everyone. Mr. Bush is either equal to anyone else in the eyes of justice, or he isn't; if he isn't, then he is a member of a protected class; and if a protected class exists in the United States, then our entire legal system is an utter sham.

If another country failed to bring to justice a former leader who publicly confessed to authorizing torture, they would be roundly condemned by our politicians, our pundits and our press corps. The hypocrisy of our collective, shoulder-shrugging inaction is not only the deepest of stains on our national character, but corrosive to our foundational principles of equal justice and fuel for the fires of our enemies. Our use of torture eliminates our moral standing to condemn the violation of human rights by others, and puts our own military personnel at risk of what is so pathetically called "harsh interrogation techniques."

We are either who we say we are - even in the most trying of circumstances - or we aren't, and for the past decade - as Mr. Bush reminds us - we have not been who we claim to be.

A 20-Year Look at Minimum Wage Effects on Unemployment

2010-11-06T17:07:00.003-05:00

Traditionally, proponents of a livable minimum wage have argued that putting money in the hands of workers at the lower end of the economic scale can help drive the economy, since such people are unlikely to save much, and will spend most of their earnings on goods and services that must be produced, putting money into the pockets of others and expanding the economic pie. Those in opposition believe that jobs will be lost because employers, forced to pay each employee a higher wage, will reduce staffing in order to offset higher payroll costs. New research may finally put this debate to rest.

At the end of September, a 20-year study grippingly entitled Minimum Wage Effects Across State Borders: Estimages Across Contiguous Counties (*.pdf) was released by a team of economists from the University of Massachusetts, the University of North Carolina, and the University of California. In it, the researchers examined communities adjoined across borders between states with different minimum wage laws to determine what employment effects, if any, were driven by these regulations.

As it turns out, effects on employment by increases in minimum wages were generally negligible, and where they were noticable, they had a positive influence. The driving factor of this somewhat counter-intuitive result is the ubiquity of the wage laws. Since everyone is affected equally within a region, the cost to employers is easily offset by slightly higher prices, which are passed along to consumers, effectively creating a level playing field, and therefore, no incentive to reduce payrolls.

This might in turn, however, be expected to suppress demand from end users, but such price increases tend to be very small - almost always just a few pennies by the time they are distributed across the entire customer base - and the researchers found no evidence that consumers travel to neighboring, lower-wage regions to make purchases.

A fast food restaurant, for example, would, in fact, be likely to reduce its employee ranks when the minimum wage goes up, but only if it is the sole restaurant to raise pay rates. If most, or all, employers in a sector raise their compensation - as happens with state mandated minimum wage laws - the added cost is passed to the consumer who generally absorbs it without diminshing demand.

So, there you have it: a two-decade study of empirical evidence providing conclusive evidence that a small government intervention in the market provides not only economic benefits, but societal ones as well. Want to bet that's still not going to convince some people?

More of This, Please

2010-10-31T10:59:00.020-05:00

Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear took place yesterday, and an estimated crowd of 215,000 - almost two and half times the 87,000 that came to see Glen Beck a few months ago - was treated to a beautiful autumn day of music, comedy and reasonableness.

Nothing better exemplified the last better than Mr. Stewarts's closing remarks, which were classy, smart, and inspiring, all at the same time. While both The Daily Show and The Colbert Report - as two of the sanest outlets for news analysis and media criticism available today - perform a genuinely valuable service, it's in some ways too bad that Jon Stewart appears to have no interest whatsoever in public office. The country could use more of this:

Back in the Saddle

2010-10-29T22:10:00.000-05:00

First and foremost, let me apologize that my planned 1-2 month sabbatical from blogging ended up stretching out longer than planned. Unfortunately, as of the end of September, my position at work was eliminated, and my sole focus since then has been finding a new job.

I'm happy to report that I have landed at another company - I'm extremely lucky, I know - and I started work two days ago. My new position involves a significant increase in responsibility, so although I am writing again, posts are going to be less frequent than before, and potentially a bit more sporadic.

I hope you'll bear with me, and I'm looking forward to hitting the keyboard again!

Taking A Breather

2010-08-19T20:02:00.002-05:00

I'm taking a short breather from posting for a month or two. The last year has been a very busy one, encompassing not only my normal work and teaching schedule, but training for my godan test and getting back in good enough shape to take it. All of that paid off - I passed my exam last weekend - but I am, frankly, a bit pooped, and we're entering budget season at the ol' grind, so a small breather is in order.

Regular posting at Sensen No Sen will resume in the next 1-2 months, or whenever I feel caught up - whichever comes first...

2010 Summer Gasshuku

2010-08-11T22:09:00.001-05:00

Regular posting will resume next week. In the meantime, I am attending the Japan Karate-Do Ryobu-Kai 2010 Summer Gasshuku, and hoping that my various injuries are healed enough for me train hard!

Signs It's Time to Clean House

2010-08-06T22:31:00.013-05:00

For those of you who don't know me - or who have only been reading Sensen No Sen for a short time - it may come as a surprise that I do not consider myself particularly liberal. I am certainly left of a lot of people, but I am also to the right of a good many as well. I believe that private enterprise can and does serve a vital purpose - albeit in a far from perfect manner - but I believe the same of government, too. I understand the tremendous value of a market economy and have seen it fuel unprecedented success. I have also watched the market produce booms and busts that incur terrible human costs, and am convinced that well-structured and consistent regulation is key to producing gains which do not rely on the perpetual exploitation of one group of citizens by another.

I do not believe that one political party or another has all the answers, and while I voted for Barack Obama, it certainly wasn't because I think he's some kind of savior. As I wrote on the eve of the 2008 election:

Barack Obama is certainly not perfect and he's not the messiah, but he has never claimed to be either of those things. For me, he is simply a better candidate than his opponent on the issues... and in the larger picture, the GOP very definitely needs some time in the wilderness to regroup as a viable and respectable party of opposition.

I am not party or brand loyal, and I vote by issue. I have cast my ballot for Republicans on occasion in the past, and I will again in the future if the GOP presents compelling candidates. The fact of the matter is, however, that that doesn't look like it's going to happen again anytime soon; the worst elements of the American right remain at the head of the contemporary conservative movement.

Don't think so? Watch the clip below and contemplate that Glenn Beck is not just the second highest rated political talking head in all of television, but a man capable of mobilizing significant protest action, and to whose followers conservative politicians are held accountable:

Mr. Beck is a man who, like it or not, speaks for and to a lot of people, and it's not just those outside the GOP and the political right who understand that he is bad for both the country and conservatism. Conservatives may claim that the Becks and Palins and Limbaughs and Bachmans and Angles of the world don't represent them and aren't "true" conservatives, but at the end of the day, conservatism is what conservatism does. After all, Kremlin leadership of the Soviet Union hardly toed the lines of true Marxism, but no one tries to argue that the U.S.S.R. wasn't communist.

Clearly the role played by Mr. Beck and others like him alarms David Klinghoffer, a senior fellow at the very conservative Discovery Institute:

Once the conservative movement was about finding meaning in private life and public service. But it has undergone a shift toward demagoguery and hucksterism.
[...]
[William F.] Buckley's National Review, where I was the literary editor through the 1990s, remains as vital and interesting as ever. But more characteristic of conservative leadership are figures on TV, radio and the Internet who make their money by stirring fears and resentments. With its descent to baiting blacks, Mexicans and Muslims, its accommodation of conspiracy theories and an increasing nastiness and vulgarity, the conservative movement has undergone a shift toward demagoguery and hucksterism. Once the talk was of "neocons" versus "paleocons." Now we observe the rule of the crazy-cons.

Conservative law professor and writer Stephen M. Bainbridge - a member of the Federalist Society no less - agrees, and says simply that It's Getting Embarrassing To Be A Conservative:

Let's tick off ten things that make this conservative embarrassed by the modern conservative movement:
A poorly educated ex-sportwriter who served half of one term of a minor state governorship is prominently featured as a - if not the - leading prospect for the GOP's 2012 Presidential nomination.
Tom Tancredo calling President Obama “the greatest threat to the United States today" and arguing that he be impeached. Bad public policy is not a high crime nor a misdemeanor, and the casual assertion that pursuing liberal policies - however misguided - is an impeachable offense is just nuts.
Similar nonsense from former Ford-Reagan treasury department officials Ernest Christian and Gary Robbins, whose IBD column was, as Doug Mataconis observed, "a wildly exaggerated attack on President Obama’s record in office." Actually, it's more foaming at the mouth.
As Doug also observed, "The GOP controlled Congress from 1994 to 2006: Combine neocon warfare spending with entitlements, farm subsidies, education, water projects and you end up with a GOP welfare/warfare state driving the federal spending machine." Indeed, "when the GOP took control of Congress in 1994, and the White House in 2000, the desire to use the levers of power to create “compassionate conservatism” won out over any semblance of fiscal conservatism. Instead of tax cuts and spending cuts, we got tax cuts along with a trillion dollar entitlement program, a massive expansion of the Federal Government’s role in education, and two wars. That’s not fiscal conservatism it is, as others have said, fiscal insanity." Yet, today's GOP still has not articulated a message of real fiscal conservatism.
Thanks to the Tea Party, the Nevada GOP has probably pissed away a historic chance to oust Harry Reid. See also Charlie Crist in Florida, Rand Paul in Kentucky, and so on. Whatever happened to not letting perfection be the enemy of the good?
The anti-science and anti-intellectualism that pervade the movement.
Trying to pretend Afghanistan is Obama's war.
Birthers.
Nativists.
The substitution of mouth-foaming, spittle-blasting, rabble-rousing talk radio for reasoned debate. Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Hugh Hewitt, and even Rush Limbaugh are not exactly putting on Firing Line. Whatever happened to smart, well-read, articulate leaders like Buckley, Neuhaus, Kirk, Jack Kemp, Goldwater, and, yes, even Ronald Reagan?

At some point, things have to change, and at some point, reasonable conservatives need to regain their voice, either by reclaiming the Republican Party or striking out on their own. In the meantime, the ideologically impure are being driven from the ranks, even when they have what just a few years ago would have been considered unassailable conservative credentials.

Take, for instance, the case of Republican Representative Bob Inglis of South Carolina, a politician with a 93 percent lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union. Mr. Inglis recently lost his state's Republican primary in a landslide, defeated by an opponent who claimed he was not far enough to the right. Now a man without a job, the lame-duck congressman hasn't been shy about the problems he sees within modern conservatism:

While he was campaigning, Inglis says, tea party activists and conservative voters kept pushing him to describe Obama as a "socialist." But, he says, "It's a dangerous strategy to build conservatism on information and policies that are not credible... This guy is no socialist." He continues:
The word is designed to have emotional charge to it. Throughout my primary, there were people insisting that I use the word. They would ask me if he was a socialist, and I would always find some other word. I'd say, "President Obama wants a very large government that I don't think will work and that spends too much and it's inefficient and it compromises freedom and it's not the way we want to go." They would listen for the word, wait to see if I used the s-word, and when I didn't, you could see the disappointment.
Why not give these voters what they wanted? Inglis says he wasn't willing to lie:
I refused to use the word because I have this view that the Ninth Commandment must mean something. I remember one year Bill Clinton - the guy I was out to get [when serving on the House Judiciary Committee in the 1990s] - at the National Prayer Breakfast said something that was one of the most profound things I've ever heard from anybody at a gathering like that. He said, "The most violated commandment in Washington, DC" - everybody leaned in; do tell, Mr. President - "is, 'Thou shall not bear false witness against thy neighbor.'" I thought, "He's right. That is the most violated commandment in Washington." For me to go around saying that Barack Obama is a socialist is a violation of the Ninth Commandment. He is a liberal fellow. I'm conservative. We disagree... But I don't need to call him a socialist, and I hurt the country by doing so. The country has to come together to find a solution to these challenges or else we go over the cliff.

The fact of the matter is that the leadership of today's GOP has failed, and continues to fail, both its rank and file and the nation it claims to serve. Instead of working in good faith toward compromise - rather than demanding their policies be adopted completely despite having been voted into the minority - Republicans in the Senate have attempted to foul the gears of government with a record number of filibusters.

Principles are important, but given, for instance, the willingness of Republican legislators to oppose the stimulus bill but still claim credit for funding it delivered to their states and districts, principles are clearly not what's at work here. The team-first zealotry in evidence has no place in politics, which in the words of Otto von Bismarck, is "the art of the possible." Without leaders who are willing to compromise, little at all is, in fact, possible, and given the sorry state of the country, we cannot afford the paralysis of ever deeper polarization driven by fear-mongering and demonization from pundits and extremist politicians.

When one of the most popular public figures in movement conservatism links the President of the United States to The Devil - The Devil! - he is setting expectations for the behavior of politiians among the electorate (just ask Bob Inglis) that are both untenable and profoundly detrimental to the country. It's time for reasonable conservatives to disown craven fools like Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and Tom Tancredo, and it's unquestionably time for the GOP to clean house.

The entire story on Bob Inglis - Confessions of a Tea Party Casualty - can be found at the link. It's well worth reading for a picture of what conservative politicians who don't operate at the extremes are facing.

Maintaining the Undue Influence of Wealth

2010-07-31T22:08:00.000-05:00

In a 5-4 decision back in January, the Supreme Court found that the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) exceeded its authority when it barred Citizens United, a conservative organization, from running ads for a movie attacking Hillary Clinton during the 2008 presidential campaign. As a result of this ruling, corporations, labor unions and advocacy groups are no longer forced to funnel money through political action committees to pay for advertising, and all restrictions on the amount they can spend have been lifted. Although the Court upheld disclosure requirements that corporations spending $10,000 or more producing election-season ads must disclaim the source of that funding, the floodgates for outsized corporate, union and interest group influence were unquestionably thrown open.

Last Tuesday, an attempt to address some of the concerns raised by this ruling died in the Senate. H.R. 5175, the DISCLOSE Act, sought to increase transparency around the role of corporate and special-interest money in national elections. It required organizations involved in political campaigning to disclose the names of large donors and reveal their identities in any political advertising they funded. It also forbade foreign corporations, government contractors and recipients of TARP funds from making political expenditures.

It was not perfect legislation by any means, as, in order to advance it, compromises were made, including one that exempted long-standing, large non-profit groups like the National Rifle Association (NRA). Its aims were fairly modest; it did not even attempt to curtail funding or campaign contributions from companies, unions or advocacy groups. The DISCLOSE Act simply required that they state who was paying for their political activities.

So, why did a relatively simple and straightforward bill with such laudable goals fall? Democrats were unable to break a Republican filibuster - all 40 GOP senators present stood against it - preventing the legislation from coming up for a vote. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's justification for the GOP position was that H.R. 5175 would effectively tilt the next election cycle in favor of Democrats by forcing conservative action groups and corporations to reveal their influence. In Senator McConnell's eyes, this was somehow equivalent to an assault on free speech.

The truth is that this bill would have been a worthwhile first step in giving Americans a view into just who is funding what and who is backing whom. Corporations are indeed more likely to make bigger donations, while union members and their smaller donations would have been protected (below a threshhold of $600) from disclosure. But the same is true in reverse: unions donating at the organizational level would have to reveal themselves, and corporate employees donating individually could remain anonymous.

One of the fundamental aims of campaign finance reform is to encourage large numbers of small donations from a broad spectrum of donors, while diminishing the undue influence of wealth. This is not - or at least it shouldn't be - an ideological proposition. Rather, it is foundational to ensuring fairer elections, and Tuesday's defeat of the DISCLOSE Act is a loss for anyone who thinks influence should come from building consensus rather than from having deep pockets.

The Land of Greatly Diminished Opportunity

2010-07-25T15:45:00.023-05:00

On Saturday, the Obama Administration announced that, although it is forecasting robust economic growth of 4% annually in 2011 and 2012, it also expects unemployment to remain at close to 9% over the same period. Given that demand is the engine that drives the economy, with nearly 1 in 10 Americans out of work for the next 24 months, it is entirely reasonable to ask just who will be fueling this healthy expansion of GDP. Christina Romer, who chairs the president's Council of Economic Advisers, said the White House believes business investment and an emphasis on exports will lead the way.

Leaving aside for the moment just what we can expect to happen to the long term unemployed during the next two years, this focus on growth driven by consumption from outside the United States is revealing. In many ways, it is the logical culmination of the tax cut mania that has been part and parcel of national political discourse since Ronald Reagan was elected, for these policies have not - despite conventional wisdom - been the engine that drives growth for the country as a whole. Rather, they have driven growth almost exclusively at the top of the economic ladder and been the root cause of the middle class' slow strangulation.

As the graph below shows, the gap between the richest and poorest Americans is the widest it's been since World War I. The largely boom years from the end of the second world war - which fueled an enormous expansion of the American middle class - have been replaced by a period in which the very rich have gotten staggeringly wealthy, the poor even poorer, and those in the middle have been forced gradually downward.

[Click image to view at full size]

This concentration of wealth has been driven by tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. Since the Reagan Administration, it has been accepted wisdom that cutting taxes frees up money for investment by private individuals and corporations that would ordinarily be used by the government in a less efficient or effective manner.

The theory - basically the supply side economics of the Reagan years - says that letting people hold onto more of their money will allow them to make greater investments in a wiser fashion, since they are far more expert in their fields of endeavor than any government bureaucrat could hope to be. These investments are in turn expected to spur economic growth and job creation that makes everyone better off.

While there is no question that for many people - myself included - the idea of having greater control of one's earnings is highly appealing, the truth of the matter is that, in aggregate, the promised effects of tax cuts haven't materialized in any sustainable fashion. The concentration of wealth that has resulted has actually depressed real wages per capita - described in the graph below as an average in 1982-1984 dollars - which are lower now than they were in 1979. That's right; purchasing power today - what one can buy with one's paycheck - is actually less than it was during the Carter Administration, despite steady growth in GDP. So much for trickle-down theory:

Likewise, job growth doesn't track with tax cuts as one might intuitively expect. Since 1992, the largest increase in employment to population ratio (the percentage of the populace that has a job) occurred after President Clinton's tax increases of 1993. By contrast, President George W. Bush's tax cuts - the very hallmark of his administration - appear to have reduced employment if they had any effect at all:

Job creation spurred by the investment of dollars that would normally go to taxes simply didn't occur at anywhere near the rate promised:

The reason? In the wake of tax cuts, what seems to occur among the wealthiest is not enterprise re-investment or job creation, but profit-taking. No longer incented to "protect their money from the government" by plowing it back into their businesses, the rich instead either save it - often in overseas tax havens - or spend it elsewhere. Such spending does drive some level of growth, but on a scale altogether far inferior to that from reinvestment or even public sector spending. It also results in a distribution of wealth that sees ten percent of the population controlling over two-thirds of the wealth in the United States:

For the bottom 90%, what appears to happen in the wake of tax cuts is a brief boom that develops into a bubble, which inevitably bursts. Worse, this illusion of growth seems to have a psychological effect on the vast majority of the population that isn't in the top-earning tier. "Keeping up with the Joneses" drives people to live well beyond their means - apparently unaware that almost everyone else is doing the same thing - with the result that the personal savings rate plunges:

Author Larry Beinhart decided he'd check into the accepted wisdom of tax cuts, and found some very startling things:

Large income tax cuts are followed by a bubble and then a crash.
High income taxes correlate with economic growth.
Income tax increases are followed by economic growth.
Moderate income tax cuts are followed by a flat economy.
All of this is especially true as applied to the top tax rates, the amount paid on income that exceeds the highest bracket.

Mr. Beinhart describes the data in the following manner:

... I constantly see and hear tax cuts, particularly at the top, described as "pro-growth." So I went and looked at the numbers - tax rates, tax cuts and tax hikes - and placed them alongside job growth, the Dow Jones, growth in the GDP and median income.

The brute facts say the opposite of the myth.

But what about self-determination, hard work and success on the basis of merit - some of the core values on which Americans pride themselves? Aren't people free to pull themselves up by their bootstraps to acheive the station they deserve through industriousness and ingenuity? Aren't tax cuts a mechanism to make that happen?

Unfortunately, while that element of our national character remains strong in the hearts of the citizenry, it has become more folklore than truth. The likelihood of anyone moving from the bottom half of wealth-holders to the upper middle class has shrunk dramatically since World War II, as has the probability of anyone moving in the opposite direction. In other words, the American class structure has become increasingly rigid:

So, does this mean that the government automatically knows best and that taxes should always be high? No, it does not. What it does mean is that the roles of government and private enterprise are out of balance. Tax dollars may not always be spent efficiently, but they are at least spent, rather than squirreled away overseas or used to buy limited luxury goods. Likewise, the success of the private sector does not come without the assistance of public assets such as infrastucture, law enforcement and market regulation. We need to re-recognize the true relationship between these two elements of our economy.

The idea that private enterprise is always better than public sector effort has been ingrained in our national psyche over the last three decades to such a degree that it has become accepted without question. Almost everyone has a government horror story they can use to support that contention, but we have become a country which generally ignores or forgives similar tales associated with private malfeasance, or at least one which doesn't ascribe such misdeeds to the very character of capitalism.

Further, we have become a nation that seems to rarely bother looking at the actual results of policy. (This goes far beyond taxation, but that's a topic for another time.) The fact that someone like Senator John Kyl can not just advocate a $678 billion tax cut that would benefit the rich, but actually deny the need to offset that cut, should tell us all we need to know about the rigor with which macro policy positions are often developed. (And the claim by people like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell that tax cuts actually increase government revenues is a fantasy.)

According to a new study (PDF) by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP):

In 2007, the share of after-tax income going to the top 1 percent hit its highest level (17.1 percent) since 1979, while the share going to the middle one-fifth of Americans shrank to its lowest level during this period (14.1 percent).
Between 1979 and 2007, average after-tax incomes for the top 1 percent rose by 281 percent after adjusting for inflation — an increase in income of $973,100 per household — compared to increases of 25 percent ($11,200 per household) for the middle fifth of households and 16 percent ($2,400 per household) for the bottom fifth.
If all groups’ after-tax incomes had grown at the same percentage rate over the 1979-2007
period, middle-income households would have received an additional $13,042 in 2007 and
families in the bottom fifth would have received an additional $6,010.
In 2007, the average household in the top 1 percent had an income of $1.3 million, up $88,800
just from the prior year; this $88,800 gain is well above the total 2007 income of the average
middle-income household ($55,300).

The middle class - the engine that drives the economy - is withering, and withering at an accelerating pace. The truth of the matter is this: The current distribution of wealth and the socio-economic stangnation that comes with it are unsustainable if we wish to remain a country that is truly a land of opportunity. Tax-cut driven policies have demonstrably failed to deliver what they have promised, and the belief that social mobility can be achieved through the mechanism of hard work is increasingly just that: an article of faith unsupported by actual fact.

It will take careful, well-considered effort - not to mention strong political will - to bring the relationship between the public and private sectors back into equilibrium. In the meantime, however, one thing is for certain: despite the fever dreams of people like Glen Beck, olicarchy (or "oligarhy") in the United States will not arrive cloaked in the the mythological socialism of Barack Obama; it is already here, and it was delivered by Reaganomics.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Thanks to Gus Lubin at Business Insider for a number of the charts used here. Mr. Lubin's 15 Mind-Blowing Facts About Wealth and Inequality in America lives up to its billing.

The Explosive Growth of a Secret, Unaccountable and Self-Perpetuating Bureaucracy

2010-07-19T15:03:00.007-05:00

The Washington Post's Dana Priest won a Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for her reporting on "black sites" - secret prisons used by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to torture and interrogate foreign prisoners - and, along with two colleagues, brought another Pulitzer to her paper in 2008 for an expose of the conditions under which American combat veterans were receiving treatment at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. In short, she is one of the best investigative journalists working today.

This morning, Ms. Priest and fellow reporter William Arkin unveiled a project two years in the making: Top Secret America, a holisitic and deeply disturbing view into the explosive growth of not only a secrecy-driven culture in the wake of the September 11th attacks, but a vast bureaucracy with far-reaching powers and little accountability:

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.
[...]
The investigation's other findings include:
Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.
An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.
In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space.

Perhaps even more troubling than the implications for fiscal responsibility, privacy and civil liberties, however, is the fact that this vast, poorly-defined entanglement of overlapping agencies is very likely making the country less safe. The overwhelming volume of information collected, along with the sheer number of projects and initiatives undertaken, means that only a few people have any sense of the big picture, when they are able to focus on details at all.

Below is an introductory video for Ms. Priest and Mr. Arkin's project. Please take some time to check out Top Secret America.

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J. Christian Adams Takes On the Public Record and Loses

2010-07-14T17:20:00.010-05:00

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Key points in this post are a bit esoteric, and the timelines and roles of the individuals involved are somewhat challenging. However, the accusations that are being made in conservative circles and by rightwing media outlets - that there is institutionalized racism against whites at the Department of Justice under President Obama - are not only serious, but also reliant on that same complexity for their success to date, as it is sufficient barrier to prevent most consumers of news from digging further. With that in mind, I have endeavored to clarify the issues as much as possible, and in addition to the extensive citations I always include, have provided additional links after the post.

During the 2008 presidential elections, two members of the New Black Panther Party (NBPP) - an organization categorized as a racist hate group by both the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), and condemned by the members of the original Black Panthers - were observed outside a polling place in Philadelphia, PA. Both men were attired in the paramilitary dress of the NBPP's "militia," and while one of them was actually a fully-credentialed election observer, the other was not, and carried a nightstick. Local police were called to the scene, and the man with the truncheon was removed from the premises.

On January 7, 2009, the Department of Justice (DOJ) dropped criminal charges, but filed a civil suit over the incident against the New Black Panther Party and three of its members, alleging violations of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The suit sought an injunction preventing further violations of the Act, and when the defendants failed to appear in court, a default judgment - essentially a forfeit by the NBPP - was handed down in favor of the government. The following May, the DOJ requested and received an injunction against the man who had carried the nightstick, but ordered the suit against the remaining members dropped citing the lack of a pattern of intimidation. (The Philadelphia District Attorney's office stated categorically that it did not receive a single complaint about voter intimidation at the poll where the incident occurred.)

The decision to drop charges against the NBPP and its members, however, has not gone quietly into the night. In a two-part interview with Fox New Channel's Megyn Kelly (links: part 1; part 2), former Justice Department attorney J. Christian Adams alleged that the Obama Administration not only improperly failed to pursue justice agasinst the New Black Panther Party and its members, but that the decision to do so was part of a broader agenda of institutionalized racial prejudice against whites:

There is a hostility in the voting section and in the Civil Rights Division to bringing cases on behalf of white victims for the benefit of national racial minorities. That's a fact. It was on open display in the department.

The story has been picked up by just about every major right wing pundit, and Fox's Kelly has aggressively pursued Mr. Adams' allegations, echoing in subsequent broadcasts his statement that "there is a mandate" at the DOJ to refuse prosecution of voter intimidation cases in which the perpetrator is black and the victim white. To lend added weight to these claims, Ms. Kelly brought onto her program a man named Bartle Bull - who was described as a Democratic civil rights attorney who had worked with both Robert and Ted Kennedy - to condemn what they agreed was an unprecedented failure to enforce the Voting Rights Act:

This is indeed a serious charge, if true. However, although this particular propaganda effort is more complicated to untangle than the recent claim on FoxNation.com that President Obama had "given a major strip of AZ back to Mexico", it is every bit as much a fantasy.

To begin with, the players involved are hardly the apolitical - or even liberal - figures they claim or are potrayed to be. Bartle Bull, for instance, testifed under oath (PDF) that he was a poll watcher for the McCain/Palin campaign during the 2008 election, and chairman of a group called Democrats for McCain in New York State. There's certainly nothing wrong or unsavory about that fact, but it's a glaring omission from the Fox interviews with Mr. Bull, given the wealth of other information provided about him. On Fox, Mr. Bull is purposefully cast as the antithesis of a conservative mouth piece, but that's because knowing he campaigned actively for John McCain would make the viewer question his motivations. (Especially given the fact that, again, no complaints of voter intimidation at the polling station in question were filed with the Philadelphia District Attorney.)

J. Christian Adams, meanwhile, is, in fact, directly tied to the politicization of the Department of Justice, but through the U.S. Attorneys scandal during George W. Bush's second term, rather than by malfeasance from the Obama White House. For those who aren't familiar with said scandal, investigators from the Department of Justice's Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility came to the following conclusions (full report here) about recruiting and advancement practices in the DOJ's Civil Rights Division under Bradley Schlozman, who hired Mr. Adams in 2005:

The Civil Rights Division improperly used political or ideological affiliations in assessing applicants for career attorney positions, including hiring for both experienced attorneys and entry-level attorneys through the Honors Program;
Political or ideological affiliations resulted in other personnel actions that affected career attorneys in the Division, such as attorney transfers and attorney case assignments;
The Division’s senior management exercised inappropriate oversight of Schlozman’s actions in the hiring and treatment of career attorneys; and
Schlozman made false statements in his testimony to Congress about these matters.

To be fair, the fact that Mr. Adams was hired by a man known to have actively subverted the impartiality of the Department of Justice through biased recruitment and management practices doesn't mean he himself is biased. However, Mr. Adams has been pretty public about his rightist leanings, arguing on a conservative blog that health care reform is a threat to liberty, and penning an article comparing President Obama to advocates for the appeasement of Nazi Germany, among other activities. Again, there is nothing illegal or even necessarily nefarious about either of these facts, but they represent behavior that is far from typical among career attorneys at the Department of Justice, who almost universally - at least prior to the Bush Administration - strive to remain as politically neutral as possible.

Taking this information as background, we come to the substantive - and substantial - problems with the "Racism at the DOJ" storyline. First, Mr. Adams admitted in his interview with Megyn Kelly that he actually has no firsthand knowledge of the allegations he is making. During his conversation with the Fox News host, he stated that he wasn't present during some of the events he describes, and that he relied on the statements of others - heresay, in other words - for significant elements of his accusations. Additionally, he refused to name the person who supposedly called for the anti-white voter intimidation mandate he claims exists. (Mr. Adams named names in later public comments, but I'll address that below.)

Second, and far more importantly, according to testimony (PDF) by Civil Rights Division chief Thomas Perez before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights back in May:

After reviewing the matter, the Civil Rights Division determined that the facts did not constitute a prosecutable violation of the criminal statutes. The Department did, however, file a civil action on January 7th, 2009, seeking injunctive and declaratory relief under 11(b) against four defendants.

The date described in the testimony above indicates that the decision not to bring criminal charges against the New Black Panther Party members at the Philadelphia polling station was made by the Bush Administration - not the Obama Administration - since it occurred a full 11 days before Mr. Obama was inaugurated, and 26 days before Eric Holder became Attorney General of the United States.

Third, J. Christian Adams later identified Associate Attorney General Thomas Perrelli, an Obama political appointee, as the individual who supposedly overruled a unanimous recommendation for continued criminal prosecution by Adams and other attorneys involved in the NBPP case. The problem with that, however - in addition to the timeline for Mr. Obama's swearing-in - is that Mr. Perrelli wasn't confirmed until March, almost three months after the decision was made to downgrade the charges from criminal to civil status.

Fourth, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Julie Fernandes, who was also later alleged by Mr. Adams to be the Justice Department official who declared "Never bring another lawsuit against a black or other national minority... no matter what they do," did not begin working at the DOJ until June 2009, five months after the case was downgraded from criminal to civil, and one month after further civil prosecution was dropped. Additionally, no one else has come forward to confirm the alleged mandate from Ms. Fernandes, and even if she actually made such an incredible statement, she wasn't in any position to influence the handling of the New Black Panther Party case.

Finally, the decision not to pursue further civil action was made in a transparent manner consistent with precedent:

... The allegation that would have supported pursuing a broader case was the idea that there was a nationwide effort to place New Black Panthers at polling stations for the purpose of suppressing white votes - the original complaint read that the NBPP "made statements and posted notice that over 300 members of the New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense would be deployed at polling locations during voting on November 4, 2008, throughout the United States." The career attorneys recommended dismissing the case on the basis that there wasn't enough evidence to support that claim.

Not only did no voters come forward to say they had been intimidated by the NBPP that day, there were no further incidents on Election Day 2008 that would have suggested a large-scale conspiracy to intimidate white voters. According to a letter (PDF) sent to Rep. Lamar Smith by Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich, the NBPP "suspended" its Philadelphia political chapter over the incident and subsequently disavowed their actions, which seems like an odd thing to do for an organization that is supposedly disclosing its attempt to intimidate white voters in its publicly available materials.

In summary, then, the allegations made by the man accusing the Obama Administration and the Department of Justice of institutionalized racism, J. Christian Adams, are unsubstantiated by anyone else and are not just unsupported, but completely undermined by the public record. The individuals Mr. Adams claims are behind this nefarious plot weren't working at the Justice Department when the events he describes took place; it was a Bush Administration team that downgraded the NBPP case from criminal to civil; and the subsequent decision not to pursue further civil charges - while approved by an Obama appointee - was made by career DOJ attorneys in a manner consistent with precedent. In short, Mr. Adams' accusations are very much related to politicization of the Justice Department, but by the Bush White House, rather than President Obama.

As I wrote in 2008, the consequences of political influence in the legal system are not to be taken lightly, and in this case they were made worse by the aid of complicit media outlets more interested in pushing a political agenda and ratings than in quality reporting. But what is perhaps of even greater concern is what this whole indicident says about the state of both race relations and critical thinking among the public. There exists in this country a substantial population which finds it plausible that, not only would a federal attorney publicly declare official policy to be, effectively, "open season on whitey," but that an entire bureaucracy of career lawyers would go along with such a mandate, and that it would be supported by a president whose own mother is white. That fact,- while perhaps unsurprising in the current political climate - is deeply depressing.

ADDITIONAL READING

Almost Everything You Need To Know About The New Black Panther Party Case by Adam Serwer at The American Prospect
The Black Panther Case: A Legacy of Politicized Hiring at MainJustice.com (Free registration may be required.)
The Battle for Voting Rights by Adam Serwer at The American Prospect

Climategate: Not So Much

2010-07-08T11:26:00.003-05:00

Back in February, as large swaths of the United States were being hammered by blizzards with record snowfall, the wags at Fox News Channel trotted out this bit of stupidity, equating temperatures in this country with global climate and ignoring that last winter would prove to be the fifth warmest on record:

Interestingly - although perhaps not unexpectedly - now that both the U.S. and Canada have been broiling in record high-temperatures for the past several days, the climate change deniers are nowhere to be found. Not that the current North American heatwave "proves" climate change anymore than a series of localized blizzards disproves it, but at a minimum, it pretty clearly demonstrates a lack of consistency on the part of so-called "warming skeptics".

In any case, now seems like an appropriate time to revisit one of the biggest "scandals" of the past twelve months in the debate over the state of the planet: "Climategate." For those who may have forgotten, last November, hundreds of private eMails and documents belonging to members of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at Britain's University of East Anglia (EAU) were hacked from a server. A report in the New York Times accurately predicted that they would provoke a storm of controversy:

The eMail messages, attributed to prominent American and British climate researchers, include discussions of scientific data and whether it should be released, exchanges about how best to combat the arguments of skeptics, and casual comments — in some cases derisive — about specific people known for their skeptical views. Drafts of scientific papers and a photo collage that portrays climate skeptics on an ice floe were also among the hacked data, some of which dates back 13 years.

In one eMail exchange, a scientist writes of using a statistical “trick” in a chart illustrating a recent sharp warming trend. In another, a scientist refers to climate skeptics as “idiots.”

Some skeptics asserted Friday that the correspondence revealed an effort to withhold scientific information. “This is not a smoking gun; this is a mushroom cloud,” said Patrick J. Michaels, a climatologist who has long faulted evidence pointing to human-driven warming and is criticized in the documents.

Climate change deniers jumped all over the news, with the Times of London calling it "The Great Climate Change Science Scandal", and noted amateur climatologist and deep thinker Sean Hannity stating definitively that it "exposed global warming as a myth":

Unfortunately for Mr. Hannity and the rest, that simply wasn't the case. Several independent reviews of the University of East Anglia's CRU have concluded that, while the scientists involved could be fairly criticized for not being as open as might be desired, they had engaged in no scientific malpractice whatsoever. The most recent, and final, investigation was perhaps the most clear in its exoneration, covering in detail the scientific and mathematical criticisms of the work exposed in the stolen documents, but also stating plainly that the climate team at EAU was broadly unworthy of scientific criticism:

1.3 Findings

13. Climate science is a matter of such global importance, that the highest standards of honesty, rigour and openness are needed in its conduct. On the specific allegations made against the behaviour of CRU scientists, we find that their rigour and honesty as scientists are not in doubt.

14. In addition, we do not find that their behaviour has prejudiced the balance of advice given to policy makers. In particular, we did not find any evidence of behaviour that might undermine the conclusions of the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] assessments.

15. But we do find that there has been a consistent pattern of failing to display the proper degree of openness, both on the part of the CRU scientists and on the part of the UEA, who failed to recognise not only the significance of statutory requirements but also the risk to the reputation of the University and, indeed, to the credibility of U.K. climate science.

Meanwhile, the Times of London, which, in addition to attacking CRU, had also savaged the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has begun - to its limited credit - to retract sweeping statements it made about the IPCC's research and conclusions. (Link goes to World Wildlife Fund article quoting the retraction; original Times article is available only by subscription.) Unfortunately, the damage of Climategate has been done, and if past performance is any indication, it is highly unlikely we will see Mr. Hannity acknowledge the wreckless overreaching of his previous statements.

Be that as it may, as the James Inhofes of the world continue to declare "global warming... the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people," there is a very simple fact worth keeping in mind: the vast majority of the scientists who publish peer-reviewed work on climate change support the idea that human activity is warming the earth. A study by the National Academy of Sciences describes it this way:

Here, we use an extensive dataset of 1,372 climate researchers and their publication and citation data to show that (i) 97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field surveyed here support the tenets of ACC [anthropogenic climate change] outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and (ii) the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are substantially below that of the convinced researchers.

In other words, almost 100% of the most highly regarded and widely-published climatologists agree that mankind is behind ongoing climate change. Not only that, but the expertise of scientists skeptical of humanity's role in planetary warming is significantly less than that of the scientists who back anthropogenic climate change.

So, if you've been under the impression that the debate over climate change is one between equally matched and qualified factions, it's not. In fact, it's one in which the vast preponderence of knowledge and reputation is ranged fully against the idea that the dramatic changes in climate we are seeing in recent years aren't caused by humans. That's worth remembering the next time someone claims a snowstorm in the United States proves climate change is a myth.