On April 25 - Thursday evening - American icon and humble hero George W Bush took one small step for man, one slip-and-fall for humanity - as he re-entered a spotlight until-recently blissful to have been abandoned by him, for the dedication of his presidential library. Put aside for the moment that having an actual structure that houses things you read dedicated to him is like honouring Chris Christie with a gluten-free restaurant or naming a Bar Mitzvah after Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Hell, I half expected him to don his trusty flight suit and declare "all major combat operations over in Iraq", you know, just for the memories.

But really, he did not have to do anything of the sort. For it was perfect timing for the My Pet Goat Athenaeum to emerge from the steamy Sun Belt hydrofluorocarbons just as one disaster after another befell the country, a helpful reminder of the eight torturous (in more ways than one) years he and his corrupted West Texas ideology made the rest of the United States resemble, well, West, Texas.

From the explosion at the fertiliser plant due to flagrant flouting of environmental regulations to the attack in Boston, the rejection of common sense gun safety to the square dance around sequestration; this was shaping up to be a Bush Legacy week whether he stayed home to paint nude portraits of Jeb or chose to step out and try to defend a presidency many Americans must be still convinced was just one long phantasm brought on by a bad batch of Peyote.

Michael Lind points out in, Made In Texas, that we have had conservative presidents over the past century and southern presidents. We have not had the combination. And it is an important distinction. As Lind put it in an interview with BuzzFlash (2002), "His [Bush's] political values - ranging from aggressive militarism in foreign policy to small-government ideology and fervent support for laissez-faire economics" have come to define much of our political culture in Washington - hence last week.

First, we had the Festrunk Brothers launch an attack on the Boston Marathon two weeks ago, and just about everything involved had Bush's West Texas political culture written all over it. Because of the NRA, which "worked out of his White House", there is no way to track where gun powder was bought as there is with plastic explosives. Because... freedom! (And defence contractor profits!).

There was the fact that these two clowns apparently committed these atrocities because of anger over Iraq - for which I hope the younger brother (I refuse to give them attention by using their names) spends a nice, long, pain-enveloped life carving rocks into chess pieces at Shawshank. Ahh yes, Iraq. Remember that war? The one that George W Bush lied us into with tales of yellowcake and "curveball", that has now cost up to about $2 trillion?

It is because of this war, unpaid for tax cuts and Big Pharma boondoggles that we apparently have to eliminate Medicare, according to the Pied Piper of granny starving, Congressman and former vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan. But let us eliminate, post haste, the part of our silly self-created "sequestration" - flight delays! - that causes inconveniences to wealthy members of the Congress on their way to the next Ladybank-single-malt-festooned, campaign contributor bribe-fests.

We were also recently treated to the West Texas answer to allowing weapons of war on our streets to blow apart toddlers in schools. Nothing. Unless you count Congress' finding ways to allow itself to insider trade again. Because... freedom!

Finally, there is the tragedy in West, Texas. A fertiliser-plant explosion near Waco (just like the Crawford pseudo-ranch!) that engulfed the neighbourhood, due to an understaffed and barely functioning Chemical Safety Board (by Congressional design), a lack of common-sense zoning requirements and the no-follow-ups rule we like to impose on the Environmental Protection Agency when they find that a plant like say, this one, had no risk management plan in 2006. But hey, the plant self-reported (is that like self-deporting?) that it posed "no risk" of fire, and why would they lie?

You may remember that a certain convict-Congressman named Tom DeLay - of West Texas - compared the EPA to the "Gestapo" and current lunkhead Texas Governor Rick Perry attacks the very same EPA for its "misguided and job-killing policies", as opposed to his people-killing ones. And then there is, once again, George W Bush. The Decider decided as President that, as dictated by his West Texas ideology, he would assault the EPA by any means necessary, short of naming the former Arabian Horse Association guy to run it (he saved that for FEMA... phew!).

So, in a way, it was fitting to see the George W Bush library opening this past week. It is his West Texas world. We are just stuck living in it.

This syndicated column first appeared at Al Jazeera English

Follow me on Twitter: @CliffSchecter

This week, the New England Journal of Medicine published a major study of Medicaid in Oregon which has rapidly emerged of a Rorschach test of sorts. That is, partisans on either side of the political divide tend to see what they want to see in its results. While conservatives claim Medicaid expansion has been debunked by numbers showing little change in blood pressure, cholesterol, and diabetes over two years between those who did and did not gain access to Medicaid, liberals tout findings revealing "Medicaid improved rates of diagnosis of depression, increased the use of preventive services, and improved the financial outlook for enrollees."

Ultimately, as Ezra Klein, Kevin Drum, Aaron Carroll and Austin Frakt all conclude, the limited sample size, short-time frame and narrow measures of "health outcomes" make conclusions about the efficacy of Medicaid difficult to reach. But combined with other recent research, there is little question that Medicaid expansion will make the financial prospects and quality of life significantly better for the previously uninsured. As for the legion of Republican politicians instead insisting "no one goes without health care in America" because "you just go the emergency room," studies documenting the rapid disappearance of ER's and trauma centers show that GOP talking point is just a cruel joke.

Writing in the New York Times, Annie Lowrey provided a concise summary of what the NEJM paper says--and doesn't say--about the 10,000 out of 100,000 Oregonians who won the state's Medicaid lottery:

The Oregon Health Study released a new round of results on Wednesday, showing that Medicaid coverage does not seem to improve low-income adults' blood pressure, blood sugar or weight in a two-year time frame. It says nothing about the chance of diagnosis of, eventual health outcomes for or costs associated with any form of cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's or dozens of other debilitating medical conditions. It also says nothing about health results outside of a two-year time frame...

Where it says something, it says a lot: it provides strong evidence that Medicaid recipients will spend more, use more tests, experience less depression, have fewer bills sent to collection agencies, and so on. It shows health insurance working just the way insurance is supposed to work: protecting the financial stability of the people purchasing it.

As it turns out, other recent analyses also had a lot to say about what happens when the uninsured gain coverage in ways similar to what will happen under the Affordable Care Act starting in 2014.

Continue reading »

So I guess this is the part where people explain to me that the Republicans are only pretending to support cutting Social Security, and it's all eleventy dimensional chess and nothing to worry about. But see, I just don't believe that, and I think the Obama administration will use his budget as the basis of a September sequester deal. (You know, the same sequester he practically begged them to impose, so he would have cover for cutting our safety net?)

Call your Congress creatures. Congressional switchboard: 800-998-0180

President Obama’s offer to trim Social Security benefits has perplexed and angered Democrats, but GOP leaders are embracing the proposal and rushing to jump-start a debate that will delve even more deeply into the touchy topic of federal spending on the elderly.

This week, two House subcommittees plan to hold hearings on “reforms to protect and preserve” programs for retirees, starting with Obama’s proposal to apply a less generous measure of inflation to annual increases in Social Security benefits.

Also on the table are higher Medicare premiums and reduced benefits for better-off seniors, and a higher Medicare eligibility age.

At the same time, House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said he has moved to tamp down criticism of Obama’s proposal, which quickly bubbled up from GOP lawmakers in swing districts, such as Rep. Chris Collins (N.Y.), who accused the president of cutting spending “on the backs of our seniors.” And Rep. Greg Walden (Ore.), the chairman of the House Republican campaign arm, called Obama’s plan “a shocking attack on seniors.”

The developments signal an important shift in the budget battle as party leaders nervously prepare again to raise the federal debt limit. After more than two years of talking about taxes and “wasteful” government spending, policymakers appear ready to move into the more serious and sensitive realm of entitlement programs.

Continue reading »

**The subject of this video is the kind of thing DC bipartisanship gets you

There is no word in the English language that allows the sun to poke through the clouds, inspires cherubic song and makes lobbyists high five while lording over a beer-joint urinal on in official Washington than "bipartisan". Bipartisan is just so darn cool. It's hip! It's now! It's Rand Paul's talking filibuster and Charlie Krauthammer's sardonic wit and Justice John Robert's dreamy blue eyes all rolled up into one big pig in a blanket!

Or, and I'm just thinking aloud here, perhaps when that word is uttered in Washington there is only once choice to be made: Run.

Because you see, there is actually bipartisanship that makes sense. It is all over the US. It will tell you that over 90 percent of the American public thinks there should be a 3-minute background checks before you purchase a combat weapon that can dismember kindergarten-aged kids, that the minimum wage should surpass that of Heilongjiang Province and that marriage equality is a concept long overdue.

But that is not the bipartisanship that exists in Washington. This brand of bipartisanship is based on Beltway "wisdom" and the status of who happens to be presenting the case. It's the variety that just gave us the 10-year anniversary of the tragedy in Iraq and rewarded Condoleezza Rice of the "smoking gun", "mushroom cloud" and "what does 'Bin Laden determined to attack in US' mean" with a new role as a political analyst on CBS - as if she can figure out day in and day out how to tie her shoes.

That's bipartisanship DC style. It ignored Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora, Trayvon Martin and finally got around to thinking we have a gun problem after grotesque inaction reached its logical conclusion, with 20 six and seven year olds mowed down like cattle in their classroom. Even so, while there is much support for gun safety measures, there is still some "bipartisan" opposition.

This kind of Washington bipartisanship looks at this war-of-choice that's now estimated to have cost in the trillions (yes, that's with a T), out-of-control health care costs via a crony-capitalism protection racket and a Pentagon so bloated with fat it's a surprise Rush Limbaugh doesn't eat it with a side of his happy pills for dinner, and concludes (behind the leadership of our very own ostensibly Democratic President) "let's rob the old moochers of their earned benefits!"

Continue reading »

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Public opinion matters a great deal in the American system of government, just as it does in any democracy. But it sure isn’t the only thing that matters, as the following true story demonstrates. It’s what I call A Tale Of Two Constituencies.

Before I get deeper into my tale, though, my reader should know that in the land this tale comes from, the President had been elected and re-elected on not only a progressive platform, but arguably with the most populist rhetoric in 40 years. He had run his campaigns on fighting for the middle class, protecting the vulnerable from harm, taxing the wealthy, and taking on the wealthy special interests who were harming our economy. His re-election campaign had bragged about taking on Wall Street, and harshly criticized the vulture capitalist business practices of his opponent. And because of running these kinds of campaign, this President won 2 decisive victories in a row, becoming the first President of his center-left party to win a clear majority of the votes more than once since the 1930s.

So that gives you a sense of the kind of land this was, and the kind of President they had. Now for my tale. You see there two constituencies I wanted to compare and contrast in this democratic land governed by this center-left populist…

The first was extremely small in number, depending on how you count it only a few thousand people at the most. They represented the least popular institution in American society, even less popular in many polls than the Congress, which was saying something in a land where the Congressional leadership had been rated as less popular than head lice and root canal surgery. The group in question was widely blamed for an economic collapse more severe than any in 80 years, and was widely believed by journalists covering them, lawyers for many different clients who had dealt with them, and ex-prosecutors following their practices to have engaged in massive and wide-scale fraud on top of an estimated million counts of perjury in just one scam that they pulled off (something referred to by the media as robo-signing). They were reviled by every major bloc of American voters, including those of the conservative party as well as by all the key blocs of swing voters. And to top it all off, with their money and their rhetoric, they overwhelmingly supported the losing candidate in the Presidential election.

Continue reading »

True confession: When I first started writing this post, I was willing to give the president and his advisors the benefit of the doubt. As I dug deeper and listened more carefully, I realized Ezra Klein's carefully crafted justifications for cutting Social Security made absolutely no sense politically or policy-wise.

On a policy level, chained CPI is terrible, awful, Pete Peterson policy and shame on David Axelrod for spouting those policy ideas on Rachel Maddow's show and shame on the president if he's actually buying that bill of goods.

1. It makes almost no dent in the deficit or debt now or in the future.
2. It takes from those who can least afford it.
3. It relies on the false premise that Social Security is somehow compromised or bankrupt, neither of which are true.

Chained CPI also has an impact on tax preferences and Medicare benefit payment schedules to providers, so it is ostensibly a way to slow the growth of tax preference items and Medicare costs. While it's important to contain those costs, chained CPI is the gnat straining at an elephant. There is no unbendable law that says chained CPI can't be used for tax preferences without linking Social Security benefits.

All of that leaves this Obama supporter confused about what possible reason he could have for including this in the White House budget proposal, particularly when he campaigned on protecting Social Security and Medicare.

According to Politico the purpose of the offer was to resolve the budget battles and move on to other pressing agenda items, like immigration and guns and pre-K for all. If that's the case, then someone should have clued this unnamed "Obama aide" in:

“We’re not going to have the White House forever, folks. If he doesn’t do this, Paul Ryan is going to do it for us in a few years,” said a longtime Obama aide, referring to the 2012 Republican vice presidential candidate who proposed a sweeping overhaul of Medicare that would replace some benefits with vouchers.

Continue reading »

Here it is, the attack on our earned benefits. Please, keep calling. The White House switchboard is 202-456-1414. The comments line is 202-456-1111.

Numbers for the Senate are here.
Numbers for the House are here.

President Obama on Wednesday unveiled a $3.77 trillion spending plan that proposes modest new investments in infrastructure and education, major new taxes for the wealthy and significant reforms aimed at reducing the cost of Social Security and Medicare.

“Our economy is poised for progess, as long as Washington doesn’t get in the way,” Obama said in announcing his budget plan on the South Lawn of the White House. He said his budget represents “a fiscally responsible blueprint for middle-class jobs and growth.”

“We don’t view this budget as a starting point in the negotiations. This is an offer where the president came more than halfway toward the Republicans,” a senior administration official told reporters Tuesday, speaking on condition of anonymity to detail the forthcoming document.

“So this is our sticking point,” the official said. “And the question is: are Republicans going to be willing to come to us to do serious things to reduce our deficits” – including raising taxes on millionaires.

So far, senior Republicans have rejected the proposal, which would sharply increase both spending and deficits next year over current projections. While the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office forecasts $3.6 trillion in outlays in the fiscal year that begins in October, Obama calls for $170 billion more.

And while the CBO forecasts a deficit of $616 billion in 2014, Obama calls for a larger gap between spending and revenues of $744 billion, administration officials said, or 4.4 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product.

The budget gap would narrow over the coming decade, shrinking to 1.7 percent of GDP by 2023, when the national debt would also be shrinking as a measure of the overall economy.

But Obama proposes to lop only about $600 billion off projected borrowing over the next decade — trillions of dollars less than the austere, balanced-budget package that House Republicans endorsed earlier this year. While Obama proposes $1.8 trillion in new savings and tax revenue over the next decade, much of the money would be dedicated to replacing the sequester, $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts that went into effect March 1.

Obama’s deficit-reduction plan mirrors the offer he made in December to House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) in negotiations over the so-called fiscal cliff. At the time, Obama called for $1.2 trillion in new taxes. The fiscal cliff deal included roughly $600 billion in new revenues over the next decade, with the bulk of the money coming from higher rates on households earning more than $450,000 a year.

[...] As he has in the past, Obama proposes to slice $400 billion from federal health programs, primarily Medicare, with the bulk of the cuts falling on drug companies and other providers. But Medicare beneficiaries would also take a hit, through higher premiums for couples making more than $170,000 a year and inducements for low-income recipients to use more generic drugs.

And for the first time, Obama formally proposes to slow the growth in Social Security benefits by applying a less-generous measure of inflation to programs throughout the federal government. The change would trim cost-of-living increases by roughly 0.3 percent a year, saving the government about $130 billion over the next decade.

White House officials said the new inflation measure — known as the chained consumer price index, or chained CPI — would not apply to programs for the poor, such as Supplemental Security Income, or SSI, and would be adjusted to reduce the impact on people 77 or older.

The deficit-reduction plan mirrors an offer Obama made in December to House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) in negotiations over the so-called fiscal cliff. At the time, Obama called for $1.2 trillion in new taxes, but the fiscal cliff deal included roughly $600 billion in new revenues over the next decade, with the bulk of the money coming from higher rates on households earning more than $450,000 a year.

Obama’s decision to include chained CPI in his budget proposal has infuriated many Democrats, and a number of liberal lawmakers protested the Social Security cuts Tuesday at the White House. Republicans, meanwhile, who have pressed the president to put the change on the table, have so far dismissed the offer as too “modest” to justify GOP support for higher taxes.

The Obama administration on Friday lifted the covers on its compromise budget proposal for fiscal year 2014. While Obama's blueprint would slash the national debt by a projected $1.8 trillion over the next decade (bringing the total reductions since 2011 to $4.3 trillion) through painful changes to Social Security and Medicare, Republicans are predictably balking at Obama's call for $580 billion in new tax revenue. Despite the administration's up-front concessions on spending, GOP leaders including John Boehner, Mitch McConnell and Eric Cantor continue to repeat their talking points that "the President got his tax hikes in January" and "the discussion about revenue is over."

But as a quick glance at U.S. budgets past and future shows, the discussion over tax revenue should be far from over. For starters, thanks to two wars, the new unfunded Medicare prescription drug program and the government responses to the 2008 financial meltdown, federal spending surged over the previous decade even as tax revenue as a percentage of the U.S. economy hit 60 year lows. And looking ahead, the U.S. Treasury will need to raise revenues higher than the historical average not just to fill the massive hole left by the Naughts, but to fund $2 trillion more in war-related spending, to address the aging of the U.S. population and to meet the public's demands for more, not less, spending across almost every area of government.

Here are 10 reasons why Uncle Sam needs more tax revenue. (Click a link to jump to the details for each.)

Continue reading »

DOWNLOADS: (122)

PLAYS: (1393)

Embed

On "This Week," Greta Van Susteren failed miserably in her attempt to explain Republicans' ideological refusal to raise taxes.

VAN SUSTEREN: The reason we have paralysis is because we don't have the money. And I think people want to take care of people. I don't think people want to take the safety net away from people who really need it. Because Americans are really good, decent people.

If we didn't have a revenue fight in terms of how much money we have, the condition of the economy, the condition of the national debt, we wouldn't be having half of these fights. And the two parties might be able to come together a little bit better if we fundamentally got this economy up and roaring, we'd be fighting a little bit --

Where does one even begin to unpack this mess?

Let's start with her claim that "people" don't want to "take the safety net away" with the fact that Republicans have signed on to a budget which slashes the safety net to give tax cuts to rich people, authored by an Ayn Rand disciple who once complained that the nation's "takers" outnumbered our "makers" and famously derided Social Security as a "hammock."

Oh, and by the way, the new chairman of the Heritage Foundation just went on Van Susteren's network and basically called 70 million Americans welfare queens.

So to argue Republicans don't want to get rid of the safety net is to literally argue that up is down.

But the oddest thing about Van Susteren's Palin-esque word salad is the first sentence:

The reason we have paralysis is because we don't have the money.

The government's "money" (or revenue) comes from taxes, which are currently at historic lows and which the GOP absolutely refuses to raise.

So Van Susteren is saying, in effect: Republicans are refusing to raise taxes because tax revenue is so low.

What?

To be fair, shilling for an unpopular party that wants to slash benefits for poor people to give billionaires lower taxes is never easy these days. But Van Susteren really made a mess of it this morning.

In the first three years of the Clinton White House, there were two memorable budget wars, in 1993 and 1995. The open fights with the Republicans were brutal, highest-of-high stakes white-knuckle showdowns where Clinton’s entire Presidency was on the line. Behind the scenes, though, our internal fights inside the White House were almost as intense. One thing I will never forget was a meeting where my old friend Bob Boorstin, one of the earliest staffers to join Clinton’s campaign, was fighting to keep some important line items in place that would help the poor, and bluntly told President Clinton, “Your budget represents your values.”

While those of us fighting for more spending to help low- and middle-income people lost a few rounds in these internal debates, we won more than we lost, and in both 1993 and 1995 the budgets Clinton presented and the ones he ended up negotiating with Congress were quite progressive. The 1993 budget raised taxes on the wealthy, lowered taxes on the poor through a big expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit, and increased investment in programs like education, the environment, Head Start, and Student Grants and Loans. In the 1995 budget showdown with the Republicans in Congress, Clinton rejected the advice of people like Mark Penn that he avoid a showdown, and decided to draw a line in the sand to save “Medicare, Medicaid, Education, and the Environment” from cuts Gingrich wanted to impose, and he decisively won that battle. In all of the budgets that Clinton proposed and negotiated with Congress while President, he (for the most part) embraced Democratic values.

Twenty years after Clinton’s first epic budget battle, our current Democratic president is wrestling with what budget to propose to Congress. The House and the Senate have already proposed radically different ideas of what a budget should look like, so obviously what Obama proposes is just one part of a much longer budget debate, but symbolically, as a presentation of his values, it remains a very important moment. The president has been spending the last year and a half talking about how he wants to fight for the middle class, and his budget should reflect those values.

This is why it is so deeply troubling, as the Wall Street Journal and other news outlets are now reporting, that Obama is strongly considering putting a Social Security cut into his budget document. By doing this, the President can no longer fall back on what he has been telling progressives and Democrats in Congress, that he doesn’t want to cut Social Security but is willing to trade it for some good things that the Republicans would give up in a budget deal. By embracing- embracing! Social Security cuts as part of his budget, his statement of values, the President is telling the American public, senior citizens, and progressives that he wants to cut what they overwhelmingly and passionately support.

Continue reading »