Monthly Archives: April 2011
Ingrates
We’re still learning about how badly tornadoes tore up large parts of the South last week. I don’t begrudge federal assistance going to people who lost homes and loved ones. However, I do wish anyone receiving federal assistance (or state assistance funded by federal grants) could be required to sign an affidavit acknowledging they are being helped by the federal government, and if Republicans get their way there won’t be any help after the next tornado.
The pathetic Gov. Rick “Secession Now” Perry threw a hissy fit because President Obama was paying more attention to Alabama than to Mississippi. “What about our fires?” he asked. However,
Texas has already gotten at least $39 million in firefighting aid from FEMA over the past two fire seasons and has already received 22 grants in this fire season alone.
Perhaps Gov. Perry wasn’t aware how much his state depended on handouts from the feds. OK, so no more money for Texas until Perry signs an affidavit acknowledging what the Big Bad Federal Gubmit is giving Texas.
Um, This Is Not “Turning the Tables”
From the Washington Post, “McConnell Turns the Tables on Budget Vote“:
Two can play this budget game.
A day after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) put Republicans on the spot by saying he will bring the House Republicans’ budget proposal up for a vote, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) turned the tables by exercising his legislative prerogative to call for a vote on President Barack Obama’s budget.
The two votes amount to legislative brinkmanship by both party leaders. Mr. Reid wants to put Republicans on record supporting legislation authored by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) that would eventually transform Medicare and Medicaid. Mr. McConnell, meanwhile, wants to force Democrats to vote on a plan that rolls back Bush-era tax cuts for people who make more than $250,000 and ignores many of the long-term costs driving the deficit.
Oh, snap, Mr. McConnell. Of course, a significant “cost” driving the deficit are Bush’s tax cuts, a fact Republicans refuse to acknowledge. But perhaps Mitch missed hearing about some recent polling —
Alarmed by rising national debt and increasingly downbeat about their country’s course, Americans are clear about how they want to attack the government’s runway budget deficits: raise taxes on the wealthy and keep hands off of Medicare and Medicaid. …
… On tackling the deficit, voters by a margin of 2-to-1 support raising taxes on incomes above $250,000, with 64 percent in favor and 33 percent opposed.
Independents supported higher taxes on the wealthy by 63-34 percent; Democrats by 83-15 percent; and Republicans opposed by 43-54 percent. …
… Voters oppose cuts to those [Medicare and Medicaid] programs by 80-18 percent. Even among conservatives, only 29 percent supported cuts, and 68 percent opposed them.
Vote away, Senate.
Stuff to Read
The death toll from the southern tornadoes is approaching 300.
I thought of Ayn Rand when I read “Why Is Enough Never Enough?” by William D. Cohan. Cohan asks why highly successful business leaders with loads of money are willing to take crazy chances to make more money. For example,
… why would David Sokol, a multi-millionaire and one of the men on the short list to succeed Warren Buffett, bother using the knowledge he had that Buffett was interested in buying Lubrizol, a large chemicals company, to make an extra $3 million that surely would have no effect on his lifestyle? (The Securities and Exchange Commission is reportedly investigating Sokol’s trading in Lubrizol but no charges have been filed against him; he has resigned from Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett’s company.)
Why can’t people who seem to have so much simply be satisfied with what they have, without feeling the need to risk breaking the law to get even more?
He’s not talking about Bernie Madoff and similar sorts who are pure flim-flam artists. He’s talking about people who make it to the top legitimately and then piss it away. Cohan provides some answers — it’s more about being captain of the universe than making more money — but let’s not forget these are the people Ayn Rand believed ought to be captains of the universe because they are better.
Speaking of which, I understand Part I of Atlas Shrugged: The Movie was so bad, the filmmaker has decided to drop plans for making Parts II and III.
Also: “Shiloh Baptist Church receives threats after comments from Sean Hannity”
Rep. Allen West Continues To Purge His Town Hall Meetings Of Any Dissenters
Prediction: Birthers Will Not Be Appeased
I understand the President has released his long-form birth certificate, which the birthers have been clamoring for. I’m predicting this will make no difference to the hard-core birthers. They will find some reason to think it’s a forgery, and the nonsense will continue.
If I were an ambitious sort, I’d be trying to register the domain birthcertificateforgery.com, but it’s probably already taken.
Update: To see the future of birtherism, check out the comments at Weasel Zippers. Apparently, President Obama’s long reluctance to make public his long-form birth certificate was just a distraction from what he really wants to hide, which are his college transcripts.
Life: Haves, Have Nots
To me, the most disturbing information in this Paul Krugman post is the rising gap in life expectancy between the top and bottom halves of the wage distribution. For those born in 1912, the life expectancy gap between the poorest and the wealthiest was two years. For those born in 1941, the difference is six years.
In an allegedly egalitarian society, the two-year gap was bad enough. But six years tells me we’re reverting to the conditions found in a Dickens novel.
In an allegedly egalitarian society, in an allegedly “pro life” society, data like this should be the canary in the coal mine telling us we’re doing something very wrong. I’m not holding my breath waiting for most Americans to notice. I doubt many of them will hear about it.
Krugman tells us that the Ryan budget not only eliminates the Medicare program and replaces it with an entirely different program of the same name; it also raises the age of eligibility for The Program That Is Not Medicare, which is not something I had heard before. Jonathan Cohn explains that under the Ryan plan, beginning in 2020 the eligibility age will go up by two months every year. And this will cause another kind of gap:
Remember, the House Republican budget would also repeal the Affordable Care Act. That would leave insurance companies free to charge higher premiums, restrict benefits, or deny coverage altogether to individual applicants who have pre-existing conditions. Given the relatively high incidence of conditions like hypertension, arthritis, and vision problems among older Americans, it’s safe to assume many seniors would have trouble finding affordable coverage–if, indeed, they could find coverage at all.
To be sure, pre-existing conditions wouldn’t affect older Americans who could get coverage from large employers, either as current workers or younger retirees. That’s how most “younger seniors” get insurance now. But the addition of so many 65- and 66-year-olds to employer insurance plans would raise benefits costs for businesses and, eventually, their workers. In the late 1990s, when politicians last talked seriously about raising the Medicare eligibility, Hewitt’s Frank McArdle ran the numbers for the Kaiser Family Foundation and determined that
Raising the Medicare eligibility age to 67 would mean that plan costs for a 65-year-old retiree could be two to four times higher (depending on plan design) for each year of coverage without Medicare.
For a typical large company with a predominately younger workforce, the employer’s actuarial cost for lifetime retiree health benefits would rise about 16 percent (18 percent for a large employer with an older workforce).
Again, a Republican comes up with a plan that is allegedly pro-business that would actually hurt business. I wrote a couple of days ago that most rightie politicians don’t actually understand financial or economic issues, they just think they do. Just like they think they understand war and the military, even if they’ve never served in uniform.
Cohn and Krugman have raised some extremely difficult and important issues that we as a society should be facing. Instead, we get this reaction from Little Lulu, who completely ignores the issues and just blurts that Krugman allegedly wrote something in favor of raising the Social Security eligibility age back in 1996, which makes him a flip-flopping charlatan.
Useful idiots like Lulu exist to be sure we can’t have intelligent discussions about anything. It’s what the Galatian Overlords have decreed.
Anyway, Lulu is quoting a book review Krugman wrote 16 years ago, and I can’t tell from the quote Lulu excerpts whether Krugman is expressing his own opinion or encapsulating the opinions expressed in the book he is reviewing. And, naturally, there is no link to the review. Either way, a lot has changed in sixteen years. Krugman’s consciousness about many things seems to have gone up quite a bit. Lulu’s, alas, has not.
The Definition of “Weenie”
… a man who thinks that the strength of men rests on the subservience of women, is a weenie.
Haley Barbour Withdraws
Haley Barbour announced yesterday that he will not be a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012. Immediately some pundits cranked out columns about What It All Means. I’m with Nate Silver– Barbour was fairly irrelevant in the race for the GOP presidential nomination.
Barbour’s candidacy was taken seriously by the Republican establishment, but I just didn’t see him capturing any popular following, even among Republicans. Nate notes that Barbour has relatively low name recognition among voters, but even voters who know who he is showed little interest in voting for him. Nate continues,
Nor did Mr. Barbour have an obvious constituency within the party. Religious conservatives had more natural choices (Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum), as did Tea Party conservatives (Michele Bachmann and Newt Gingrich), Republican establishment voters (Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty), moderates (Mitch Daniels and Jon Huntsman) and marginally attached, low-information voters (Donald Trump and Sarah Palin.)
Mike Huckabee actually is looking stronger than any other GOP candidate in most polls I’ve seen these days. However, I understand Huckabee is not popular with the fiscal conservatives, and he doesn’t have much support within the establishment. What the GOP wants is a “serious” establishment candidate who also can capture the passionate devotion of the base, and right now I don’t think there is such a candidate.
Better Ads
I picked these up at Steve M’s place. They are more conventional, and I suspect more effective, than the “fireman” ad. Although they didn’t make me laugh.
The Republicans are arguing that they aren’t ending Medicare, because there would still be a program called “Medicare.” To me, that’s like taking all the electrical parts out of a toaster, filling it with dirt, and planting flowers in it, and arguing that it’s still a toaster.
I’d still like to see the ad that hammers home the financial devastation that will be visited upon working families if they are suddenly on the hook for most of their elders’ medical care.
Legal News
A big-shot law firm that had been hired by House Republicans to defend the Defense of Marriage Act has backed out, saying the firm’s vetting process for choosing to take the case was “inadquate.” However, Paul Clement, former solicitor general under President George W. Bush and a partner in the big-shot firm, resigned as partner and went to another law firm, and still plans to defend DOMA.
The Supreme Court rejected a plea to “fast track” constitutional challenges to the Affordable Care Act.