DOWNLOADS: (91)

PLAYS: (650)

Embed

It's budget time again, and so Paul Ryan is making the rounds of talk shows to pimp the new-and-improved Ryan plan, one he claims has "emerging bipartisan consensus." Thanks to Senator Ron Wyden, it seems to at least have the appearance of bipartisan consensus but it's really just the old 2011 version with some cosmetic changes.

The Wyden-Ryan Medicare reforms would retain the public version of Medicare as a traditional fee-for-service plan, but instead of automatic enrollment, vouchers would go to seniors who could choose traditional Medicare or a private insurer's plan. It takes the very worst policy in both private and public healthcare plans and makes it the law of the land.

The Affordable Care Act addressed some of the issues around cost containment, which is Medicare's biggest failing. As a fee-for-service plan, Medicare's costs skyrocket because providers are paid based upon seeing and treating patients, rather than prevention or outcomes-based care. As ThinkProgress points out, adopting a plan like this allows private insurers to cherry-pick insureds, leaving the highest-cost and sickest in the public system, ensuring its demise.

Senator Wyden has long been a fan of privatizing Medicare and not just stopping there. In 2008 he introduced the Healthy Americans Act, which would have separated health insurance from employment, and bundled CHIP and FEHBP into the package, with tax deductions for insurance as incentives.

The problem with Senator Wyden's effort to sacrifice the social safety net on the altar of bipartisanship is twofold: It's bad policy and it's terrible politics. Yes, Medicare has problems, some of which were addressed by the ACA. But the problems it has could be remedied without dumping the system itself for one where the bulk of rising medical costs fall onto the shoulders of current and future retirees. Paul Ryan, on the other hand, has no difficulty being as partisan as he'd like, while capitalizing on Senator Wyden's naive and tone-deaf reach across the aisle. Statements like these are just desperate baloney, to quote another Republican in the news right now.

Continue reading »

DOWNLOADS: (469)

PLAYS: (15764)

Embed

Having made town halls the blunt instrument of destruction during the health care reform debate last year, Republicans got a little taste of their own medicine this year when the 99 percent got tired of being asked to sacrifice everything for the sake of some absurd notion of government where there are no social safety nets and millionaires pay no taxes. Especially guilty of this is Rep. Paul Ryan, who is so enthralled by Ayn Rand that he actually gives out paperback copies of Atlas Shrugged as gifts and mandates that all his staff read the paean to selfishness. Ryan's budget, in all its unworkable glory, have made the common folk of Ryan's Wisconsin district a little mad. So mad that Ryan found himself sneaking out the back door to escape their chants of "Ryan, stop lying!"

Can't take the heat, Ryan?

enlarge

Credit: TPM

On Monday, Jeb Bush's Wall Street Journal op-ed raised conservative hopes that the former Florida Governor would jump in and grab the wheel of the clown car that is the 2012 GOP presidential field. But if Republicans were disappointed when Jeb squelched the nascent "Draft Jeb" movement, the American people should be relieved. After all, the American social mobility that Jeb touted in "Capitalism and the Right to Rise" is at modern lows after the decade of economic devastation presided over by his brother. And despite Jeb's mythmaking about taxes, regulations and so much else, the record shows that more Americans can climb the economic ladder when a Democrat sits in the White House.

What Upward Mobility? Whose Right to Rise?

To be sure, conservatives are praising Jeb Bush's ahistorical and data-free endorsement of the call to arms Congressman Paul Ryan issued at the Heritage Foundation:

Congressman Paul Ryan recently coined a smart phrase to describe the core concept of economic freedom: "The right to rise."

Think about it. We talk about the right to free speech, the right to bear arms, the right to assembly. The right to rise doesn't seem like something we should have to protect.

But we do. We have to make it easier for people to do the things that allow them to rise. We have to let them compete. We need to let people fight for business. We need to let people take risks. We need to let people fail. We need to let people suffer the consequences of bad decisions. And we need to let people enjoy the fruits of good decisions, even good luck.

Unfortunately for Jeb Bush and Paul Ryan, the supposed "right to rise" is now in tatters after the very years in which their ideology reigned supreme. As Fareed Zakaria pointed out in "The Downward Path of Upward Mobility":

Some believe we're still doing fine. In his address to the Heritage Foundation last month, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) declared, "Class is not a fixed designation in this country. We are an upwardly mobile society with a lot of movement between income groups." Ryan contrasted social mobility in the United States with that in Europe, where "top-heavy welfare states have replaced the traditional aristocracies, and masses of the long-term unemployed are locked into the new lower class."

In fact, over the past decade, growing evidence shows pretty conclusively that social mobility has stalled in this country. Last week, Time magazine's cover asked, "Can You Still Move Up in America?" The answer, citing a series of academic studies was, no; not as much as you could in the past and -- most devastatingly -- not as much as you can in Europe.

As Zakaria noted, according to the OECD, upward mobility from the bottom was "was significantly lower in the United States than in most major European countries, including Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands and Denmark." And as TPM reported, an analysis by the Economic Mobility Project suggested that Jeb and George Bush could be the poster children for the limits of social mobility in the United States:

"Most studies find that, in America, about half of the advantages of having a parent with a high income are passed on to the next generation," their report concludes. "This means that one of the biggest predictors of an American child's future economic success -- the identity and characteristics of his or her parents -- is predetermined and outside that child's control. To be sure, the apple can fall far from the tree and often does in individual cases, but relative to other factors, the tree dominates the picture. These findings are more striking when put in comparative context. There is little available evidence that the United States has more relative mobility than other advanced nations. If anything, the data seem to suggest the opposite."

Continue reading »

This last week we've seen how Washington's elites are able to suppress popular opinion, work against the public interest, and wrap it all up with a bow so that it looks like "democracy in action." It's not. What we're seeing isn't democracy, and it isn't a free press either. It's merely another cynical ploy to rob Americans of government programs they both need and want.

The latest assault is on Medicare. The "Ryan/Wyden plan" is a perfect case study in the cynical workings of an antidemocratic machine - a machine whose cogs are lazy journalists, whose gears are selfish politicians, and whose levers are pulled by the wealthy and powerful.

I held my fire on this for a few days, to see if more details would emerge on the proposal from Sen. Ron Wyden and Rep. Paul Ryan, who were initially (and deliberately vague) on its specifics. That turned it into Rorschach test for observers, and where the Washington Post sees a butterfly I usually see a vampire bat.

But Malcolm Gladwell would be pleased: It turns out that the first "blink" impression of Ryan/Wyden is the right one. It's a Medicare-killing publicity stunt that undermines the financial security of the 99 percent. And if you happen to be reading this in the Nation's Capital, please note: The "lefty" position on Medicare is supported by most Republicans.

Let's not kid ourselves. Unless we act quickly and aggressively, the Machine will succeed in killing Medicare.

The Program

We've seen this software before. It's been run against Social Security, jobs, and other government services that are both popular and effective. Here's how it works:

1. Concept: An intellectually thin but highly-funded network of corporate-funded and billionaire-backed "think" tanks draft a proposal that would eviscerate a popular government program.
2. Rollout: Congressional Republicans act in lockstep to implement the think tank's policy by gutting something that's typically supported in overwhelming numbers by Democrats and independents - and which is often backed most registered Republican voters, too.
3. Blowback: The backlash from aggrieved citizens comes from all across the political spectrum, but is spun by compliant media figures as a reflexive hostility to "new ideas" from "ideologues" and "extremists" on the left.
4. Sellout: A cynical, self-serving Democrat sees an opportunity to curry favor with billionaires, corporations, and media outlets by endorsing the radical moves the Republicans have proposed.
5. Spin: The media uses that Democrat's endorsement as proof that the corporate position is actually that of "responsible" and "moderate" politicians in both parties.

The software has a political side effect, too: The distinction between Republicans and Democrats is blurred a little more, depriving Democrats of a winnable election issue.

Think of these five steps as a computer program you can run in almost any situation. The only variables are the program that is to be killed, the Democrat that'll do the dirty work, and which media outlet will deliver the machine's message this time. Plug in those three items and the program pretty much runs itself - or, as they used to say in the tech world, it "executes."

The Execution

This time around the government program is Medicare, the Democratic hack who's willing to undermine it for selfish reasons is Ron Wyden, and the media outlet is (who else?) the Washington Post. Here's how the five steps played out this time around:

Continue reading »

enlarge

Credit: Huffington Post

Earlier this year, 235 GOP House members and 40 Republican Senators voted for the Paul Ryan budget and its plan to ration Medicare. By ending the traditional government insurance program and leaving the elderly with under-funded vouchers to purchase much more expensive coverage from private insurers, Ryan's Republicans would dramatically shift the cost burden to America's seniors. It's no wonder that the incredibly unpopular scheme put Medicare at the center of the 2012 election for Democrats and President Obama.

But now Oregon Democratic Senator Ron Wyden is putting that all at risk. Combing bad politics with even worse public policy, Wyden has joined with Congressman Ryan to propose a "bipartisan" plan to convert Medicare into a premium support plan in which the traditionally lower-cost system is just one option in a menu with private insurers. The result doesn't merely threaten to undermine Medicare as we know it. With one stroke, Ron Wyden essentially endorsed Mitt Romney's Medicare plan and with it, is helping to get vulnerable Republicans off the hook.

The Ryan-Wyden proposal, or "Ryden" plan, if you will, looks a lot like the Medicare prescription from last year's Domenici/Rivlin blueprint. Unlike Ryan's previous attempt to end Medicare as we know, Ryden maintains traditional fee-for-service government insurance as one option. As the New York Times explained:

Congress would establish an insurance exchange for Medicare beneficiaries. Private plans would compete with the traditional Medicare program and would have to provide benefits of the same or greater value. The federal contribution in each region would be based on the cost of the second-cheapest option, whether that was a private plan or traditional Medicare.

In addition, the growth of Medicare would be capped. In general, spending would not be allowed to increase more than the growth of the economy, plus one percentage point -- a slower rate of increase than Medicare has historically experienced.

Which is just one reason why Democrats hate the new Wyden initiative. Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA) told Bloomberg News, I don't know why Ron Wyden is giving cover" to Ryan. " "For starters, this is bad policy and a complete political loser," one Democratic aide said. "On top of the terrible politics, they even admit that it dismantles Medicare but achieves no budgetary savings while doing so -- the worst of all worlds." The Obama White House, too, is worried:

"We are concerned that Wyden-Ryan, like Congressman Ryan's earlier proposal, would undermine, rather than strengthen, Medicare," said White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer. "The Wyden-Ryan scheme could, over time, cause the traditional Medicare program to "wither on the vine" because it would raise premiums, forcing many seniors to leave traditional Medicare and join private plans. And it would shift costs from the government to seniors. At the end of the day, this plan would end Medicare as we know it for millions of seniors. Wyden-Ryan is the wrong way to reform Medicare."

Republicans, on the other hand, are overjoyed. The reliably Republican Wall Street Journal calls it a "breakthrough." Current GOP presidential frontrunner Newt Gingrich, who in the 1990's famously declared he wanted to see Medicare "wither on the vine," described the proposal as a "very important breakthrough." As for his rival Mitt Romney, the Washington Times rightly noted that "Romney's plan is virtually identically to what Wyden and Ryan outlined today."

And that's not a good thing for the millions of Americans counting on Medicare to provide their health insurance in the future.

Continue reading »

enlarge

Credit: CBO

He called for rationing Medicare, replacing it with an underfunded voucher system that would dramatically shift costs to elderly Americans. He proposed repealing the Affordable Care Act, slashing Medicaid by $1.4 trillion over the next decade and turning what's left over to the states as block grants. By 2021, his budget would leave up to 44 million more Americans without health insurance. His budget, one which garnered the votes of 235 House Republicans and 40 GOP Senators, would in turn use the savings to deliver $4.2 trillion in tax cuts, most of them to the richest Americans who need them least.

He is Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan. And he is Politico's Health Care Policymaker of the Year.

As Politico revealed Tuesday, decimating the U.S. health care system and gutting the American social safety net apparently deserves praise, not scorn. For Politico, the catastrophic impact of Paul Ryan's draconian and dishonest budget matters far less than the fact that people are talking about it:

When House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan released his budget plan in April, the Wisconsin Republican instantly changed the conversation about health care in America. It wasn't always a polite conversation. And it gave way to new Democratic charges that Republicans want to "end Medicare."

But Ryan got everyone talking about ways to get health care entitlements under control -- and he gave Republicans the most detailed illustration to date of how market forces could be used to do that. He has influenced how Republican presidential candidates such as Mitt Romney talk about health care, as they use variations of his Medicare plan in their campaigns. And if Republicans gain power after the 2012 elections, his blueprint is sure to be the starting point for their future health care policies.

As it turns out, Ryan didn't "instantly" change the conversation. Most Republicans, including his party's leadership, refused to endorse his 2010 Roadmap for America's Future until after the November mid-terms were safely won. And Ryan's goal to "end Medicare" is only the beginning of the unraveling of the safety net he would undertake.

To be sure, Ryan's voucher scheme would end Medicare as we know it. As Ezra Klein, Matthew Yglesias and TPM (among others) noted, Ryan's Republican deficit reduction gambit would inevitably lead to the rationing of Medicare.

Because the value of Ryan's vouchers fails to keep up with the out-of-control rise in premiums in the private health insurance market, America's elderly would be forced to pay more out of pocket or accept less coverage. The Washington Post's Klein described the inexorable Republican rationing of Medicare which would then ensue:

The proposal would shift risk from the federal government to seniors themselves. The money seniors would get to buy their own policies would grow more slowly than their health-care costs, and more slowly than their expected Medicare benefits, which means that they'd need to either cut back on how comprehensive their insurance is or how much health-care they purchase. Exacerbating the situation -- and this is important -- Medicare currently pays providers less and works more efficiently than private insurers, so seniors trying to purchase a plan equivalent to Medicare would pay more for it on the private market.

It's hard, given the constraints of our current debate, to call something "rationing" without being accused of slurring it. But this is rationing, and that's not a slur. This is the government capping its payments and moderating their growth in such a way that many seniors will not get the care they need.

Last year, Ryan acknowledged as much.

"Rationing happens today! The question is who will do it? The government? Or you, your doctor and your family?"

Of course, Ryan left out the real culprit - the private insurance market. But with 50 million uninsured, another 25 million underinsured, one in five American postponing needed care and medical costs driving over 60 percent of personal bankruptcies, Congressman Ryan is surely right that "rationing happens today."

As Paul Krugman explained using the chart above:

Medicare actually does a better job of controlling costs than private insurers -- not remotely good enough, but better...

If Medicare costs had risen as fast as private insurance premiums, it would cost around 40 percent more than it does. If private insurers had done as well as Medicare at controlling costs, insurance would be a lot cheaper.

But you don't have to take Paul Krugman's or Ezra Klein's word for it that "the GOP outsources Medicare to private insurers and gives senior citizens checks that cover less and less of the cost of insurance every year." In words and pictures, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office issued the same dire warning (see chart at top).

Continue reading »

"Reality," Stephen Colbert famously told President Bush to his face, "has a well-known liberal bias." That inconvenient truth is at the heart of the expanding Republican war on the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Increasingly frustrated by CBO analyses showing that the 2009 economic stimulus worked as designed, that the Paul Ryan GOP Medicare rationing plan would massively shift costs to seniors, that income inequality is at record levels and, most damning of all, the Affordable Care Act reduces the national debt, Republican leaders have slandered the agency's work as "smoke and mirrors" and "budget gimmicks, deceptive accounting, and implausible assumptions used to create the false impression of fiscal discipline."

Now in the latest escalation in the GOP's attack, former House Speaker and resurrected 2012 Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich wants to abolish the CBO altogether.

Gingrich’s most recent tirade against the CBO came during a campaign stop in New Hampshire. A supporter of the nonpartisan Congressional scorekeeper during his days as House Speaker in the 1990’s, Gingrich on Monday described the agency as part of a leftist conspiracy:

"The Congressional Budget Office is a reactionary socialist institution which does not believe in economic growth, does not believe in innovation and does not believe in data that it has not internally generated.”

That salvo came two weeks after Newt called for the abolition of the agency during his ersatz debate with Herman Cain (around the 6:45 mark of the video above). As TPM reported:

"If you are serious about real health reform, you must abolish the Congressional Budget Office because it lies," Gingrich said at a Saturday debate with embattled pizza entrepreneur Herman Cain. "Every hospital will tell you that if you get the family and patient involved, it is better and less expensive. The Congressional Budget Office refuses to see this as a savings. It wants more bureaucracy and less patient involvement."

Gingrich's animus is hardly surprising. When House Republicans proposed HR 2 in January to repeal the dreaded "Obamacare," they quickly got a rude awakening from the CBO. Demolishing Republican talking points on the subject, the CBO concluded repealing the Affordable Care Act would increase, not decrease, federal budget deficits:

Over the 2012-2021 period, the effect of H.R. 2 on federal deficits as a result of changes in direct spending and revenues is likely to be an increase in the vicinity of $230 billion.

That result did not fit the GOP script. So House Majority Leader Eric Cantor doubled down, essentially accusing the agency of lying:

Continue reading »

Men's magazine Esquire has named AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka as one of 14 individuals or groups awarded as "Americans of the Year" for 2011. In a profile that is at times insulting ("A big beefy guy with a bristling mustache and Blagojevich hair...") and at times glowing ("He came in with a lifetime's worth of dreams for reviving labor and saving America."), author John H. Richardson explains why Trumka was chosen:

Although Trumka has been saying these things for decades, more and more economists are starting to agree with him. This year, the United Nations' annual Trade and Development report said that austerity policies are a "major risk for the global economy" because cutting deficits slows growth, reducing tax receipts and making the deficits bigger. In September, the International Monetary Fund argued that "equality appears to be an important ingredient in promoting and sustaining growth." The Congressional Budget Office has agreed with him on many things: that last year's health-care-reform law will reduce the deficit, that the Republican austerity budget put forward by House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan would increase it, that Obama's proposed jobs bill would in fact create jobs. A recent survey of thirty-four leading economists by Bloomberg News showed that most of them agreed, reporting that Obama's plan would raise the GDP and "add or keep 275,000 workers on payroll" next year. And the latest numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the crash of 2008 hit "right to work" states hardest — five of the ten states with the highest unemployment are in the South, while the more heavily unionized states in the East and Midwest are starting to come back.

His ideas are gaining traction with the public at large as well. "When you tell people you want a millionaire's tax, 80 percent of the people agree. When you say, 'I want a financial-transaction tax, a half a cent on each share that's sold,' more than 80 percent of the people agree. Seventy-eight percent of the American people disagree with our free-trade policy. Go ask them. Republicans, Democrats, Independents, conservatives, rednecks, whoever, go ask them about the trade policy! They agree with us! That it hasn't worked and it hurts this country 'cause it's sucking jobs out of this country! So if 78 percent of the people agree, why do the other 22 percent dominate?

He sounds frustrated.

"Not frustrated," Trumka says. "Determined."

Of course, the list also includes Paul Ryan as one of the "Americans of the Year," so the compliment can't be that valid, what with Ryan being one of the people this year who did the most to tear down the American dream.

Others named to the list are: astronaut Mark Kelly, theator director Julie Taymor, South Park and Book of Mormon creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, blogger and pundit Andrew Sullivan, consumer advocate and senate candidate Elizabeth Warren, investor Warren Buffett, "Patriots," referring to active military, FEMA administrator Craig Fugate, farmer Todd Carmichael, anti-death penalty activist Rais Bhuiyan, Joplin, Missouri, tornado hero Ruben Carter, and Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

enlarge

Credit: McClatchy Papers

While the Occupy Wall Street movement and a shocking report from the Congressional Budget Office have shone a bright spotlight on America's record income inequality, the GOP's 2012 presidential field is proposing massive new tax cuts certain to expand that Grand Canyon-sized gap between the fabulously rich and everyone else. Of course, the gilded-class giveaways from Rick Perry, Mitt Romney and Herman Cain are just the latest chapters in the GOP's decade-long campaign of upward income redistribution. As a quick glance at the plans of George W. Bush, John McCain and Paul Ryan shows, winner-take-all tax cuts have long been the defining feature of the Republican Party.

Rick Perry

Five days after reporting "GOP presidential candidates' tax plans would benefit the rich," the McClatchy Papers detailed the Texas Governor Rick Perry's pay day for plutocrats.

As McClatchy explained the chart above:

Rick Perry's proposed optional flat tax would be a windfall for wealthier Americans, giving millionaires an average tax cut of $637,418, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Research Center released Monday.

While the tax cuts would be greatest at the top of the income scale, Perry's proposal would give all taxpayers at least some tax cut, according to the analysis. Those making less than $10,000, for example, would get an average tax cut of $28.

It's no wonder that when John Harwood said on CNBC that the richest Americans would get back "hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of dollars" annually from the U.S. Treasury courtesy of Perry's tax plan, the Governor replied, "I don't care about that."

Which is quite evident from Perry's plan. His optional 20 percent flat tax rate would allow the top income earners to pay Uncle Sam at a much lower rate than the already low 35 percent level they pay currently. And Perry would not merely eliminate the estate tax, he would zero out the capital gains tax as well.

Which is also why Perry's reward for the rich would cost the Treasury an estimated $995 billon a year in lost revenue. Despite his balanced budget pledge, Perry claims that red ink is no problem. "There's nothing wrong," he said, "with lower revenue."

Herman Cain

As James Fallows pointed out Tuesday, Herman Cain's taxpayer-funded payback to the rich also runs off the page.

Continue reading »

enlarge

Credit: Martin Sullivan

House Budget Committee chairman and supposed GOP wunderkind Paul Ryan chose the wrong the week to attack President Obama for "sowing social unrest and class resentment." After all, just one day earlier the CBO confirmed that income inequality in the U.S. is at highest level in 80 years, a yawning gap certain to be enlarged by the latest crop of proposed Republican tax cut windfalls for the wealthy. Worse still, 24 hours after Ryan accused Obama putting the nation on path to "painful austerity, the kind you see in Europe," new GDP figures showed the U.S. economy grew at a healthier 2.5 percent last quarter. Meanwhile in the UK, where the Conservatives' draconian austerity program is now well underway, the economy has ground to a complete halt.

Writing in the New York Times, Catherine Rampell summed up the new U.S. GDP data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. "The American economy, "she wrote, "has finally reached the size it was before the recession began four years ago." But as Martin Sullivan explained in words and pictures (above):

Republicans constantly remind us that the Obama stimulus--the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009--did not work. They voted against it. In the United Kingdom the government is led by Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron. His government did not adopt stimulus. Instead it boldly enacted an economic program that cut spending and raised taxes. The chart below shows the results and compares it to the U.S. experience. After three and a half years, U.S. GDP is just about returning to the pre-recession peak. That's awful. But it's far better than the U.K. where GDP is still five percent ($750 billion in US terms) below its pre-recession peak.

If anything, Sullivan understates the divergent paths and performance of Team Obama in Washington and David Cameron's Tory "austerians" in London. As the data show, the 2008 economic calamity in the U.S. was more severe. As The Economist and Ezra Klein of the Washington Post documented, only months after the February 2009 passage of the stimulus did the White House and the American people learn than the U.S. economy actually contracted by a staggering 8.9 percent in the last quarter of 2008. Reviewing CBO data, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that without the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, U.S. GDP could have been up to 2.5 percent lower. By the third quarter of 2011, CBO estimated that ARRA saved up to 2.5 million jobs and reduced the unemployment rate by 1.3 percent. As former McCain economic adviser Mark Zandi put it last year, federal intervention prevented "Depression 2.0."

To be sure, trillions in lost economic growth, persistently high unemployment and consumer spending stuck at 2006 levels are nothing to write home about. But British Prime Minister David Cameron would take U.S. economic performance in a heartbeat.

Continue reading »