War on Youth

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Paul Krugman makes the point that rising education costs are strangling the future —

Let’s start with some advice Mitt Romney gave to college students during an appearance last week. After denouncing President Obama’s “divisiveness,” the candidate told his audience, “Take a shot, go for it, take a risk, get the education, borrow money if you have to from your parents, start a business.”

Oh, sure. Go to college. Start a business. Mom and Dad will just lend you the money.

This reminds me of the English twits who withheld aid from Ireland during the Hunger, telling themselves that deprivation would teach the lazy good-for-nothing Irish to take some initiative and learn to work. Really, some of them said that. There’s a good article on British policies during the Irish Famine at the BBC that makes those twits sound just like today’s Republicans.

Krugman points out Mittens’s famous cluelesses, then goes on to point out that getting an education isn’t necessarily helping young people today —

There is, however, a larger issue: even if students do manage, somehow, to “get the education,” which they do all too often by incurring a lot of debt, they’ll be graduating into an economy that doesn’t seem to want them.

You’ve probably heard lots about how workers with college degrees are faring better in this slump than those with only a high school education, which is true. But the story is far less encouraging if you focus not on middle-aged Americans with degrees but on recent graduates. Unemployment among recent graduates has soared; so has part-time work, presumably reflecting the inability of graduates to find full-time jobs. Perhaps most telling, earnings have plunged even among those graduates working full time — a sign that many have been forced to take jobs that make no use of their education.

College graduates, then, are taking it on the chin thanks to the weak economy. And research tells us that the price isn’t temporary: students who graduate into a bad economy never recover the lost ground. Instead, their earnings are depressed for life.

Of course, as Krugman goes on to explain, conservatives are doing everything possible to make the situation worse instead of better. They keep voting to shrink the economy instead of grow it. Nothing I’ve seen recently says “We Are Idiots” more clearly than Club for Growth’s call to vote “no” on student loan subsidies. They should change the name to Club for Stunting.

The Nature of the Problem

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I am about to go somewhere, but in the meantime do feel free to discuss the “Republicans are the problem” article that is getting so much attention. See also Doghouse Riley, who says “It took you thirty years to notice this?”

Re Doghouse: In the Republican Party’s defense, it wasn’t all Joe McCarthy back in the 1950s. Eisenhower was a Republican, too, and behind the scenes Eisenhower and some of his close advisers — including Nixon, for pity’s sake — arranged to maneuver McCarthy into the Army-McCarthy hearings, which were his undoing. It’s not true that the Republican Party was always twisted and crazy. What happened is that the twisted and crazy parts of it metastasized and killed the rest of it. And the current crew makes Reagan seem benign.

Sore Losers

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John McCain, whose success in life came to him because he is a former POW who married money, has gone ballistic because the Obama campaign had the bad taste to remind everyone who killed Osama bin Laden. Yeah, and who was that guy who promised to do that and then quit? Oh, yeah …

Meanwhile, the Breitbrats are flapping about because they found a memo offering some details to the OBL operation, and they learned that the President did not design the mission and was not in charge of minute-to-minute tactical operations. Nor did he ride into Pakistan on a magic carpet and kill OBL personally. Instead, based on the tactical advice of the military, he gave the go-ahead to proceed with the mission.

Which is not news. That’s how I understood the mission all along. Are these yappers brain damaged?

Charles Johnson:

You can tell that President Obama’s successful operation to find (and kill) Osama bin Laden really eats at the right wing; the faux arguments from the wingnut blogosphere are getting more and more obtuse and absurd. Of course, they’re writing for an audience that doesn’t care, as long as they get their daily serving of rancid Obama Derangement stew.

See also Tbogg.

House GOP Down the Cyber Rabbit Hole

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So the House passed a new “cyber security” bill called the Cyber Information Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), which according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation would give employers and the government pretty much unlimited access to your personal cyber stuff without your knowing about it. ZDNet calls it “more heinous than SOPA.”

Techdirt says,

The government would be able to search information it collects under CISPA for the purposes of investigating American citizens with complete immunity from all privacy protections as long as they can claim someone committed a “cybersecurity crime”. Basically it says the 4th Amendment does not apply online, at all

Naturally, this thing was rammed through the House mostly by the Republicans. You know, those same people who are eternally screaming about the evils of Big Gubmint and how trying to get more Americans covered by health insurance is an assault on our Freedoms.

To be fair, 42 Democrats joined 206 Republicans in voting “yes,” and 28 Republicans joined the Dems in voting “no,” which in the minds of many progressives is proof that one party is just as bad as the other.

Now, here’s the really rich part: President Obama is threatening to veto this monster, and House Speaker Orange Julius Boehner claimed that this means President Obama wants to “control the Internet.” Seriously.

All together now: Freedom is slavery; ignorance is strength. What today’s GOP is all about.

The White House said,

“CISPA would trample the privacy and consumer rights of our citizens while leaving our critical infrastructure vulnerable.”

Sounds like the perfect Republican bill.

How this will fly in the Senate I do not know. The Senate bill is being co-authored by Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins, which does not reassure me.

Who’s Cutting Medicare?

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This is the sort of thing that makes me crazy.

I spoke with an older woman for a while who will vote for Obama because she’s as much a radical feminist as any Catholic nun, although she was really concerned about the health care law. She believes Democrats cut Medicare, probably because conservatives and media spent two years telling her Democrats cut Medicare. I asked her if she had noticed any cuts in Medicare and she said “no” and then we just stood there looking at each other.

The ACA found ways to cut Medicare spending but not Medicare benefits. Mittens is on record as planning to shove seniors into the private insurance market with a “premium support” voucher that will not be allowed to increase as much as health care costs are expected to increase.

Another good read:

“Tucker Carlson’s Downward Spiral“

Dying of Ignorance

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Here’s a chart I found at the Kaiser Foundation site (source):

Once again, we see that most people like what’s in the ACA (except for the mandate), but don’t know what’s in the ACA.

Yesterday I ran into some articles saying that if the ACA is struck down or repealed, all hell will break loose in the health care system. See “How An ‘Obamacare’ Repeal Would Take Medicare And The Rest Of The Health Care System With It” and “If The Health Care Overhaul Goes Down, Could Medicare Follow?”

All those seniors who are now getting free preventive care exams and better pharmaceutical benefits would lose them in a twinkle if the ACA goes down. I wonder how many of them actually understand that?

Mrs. Mittens Misspeaks

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Yesterday Ann Romney said this:

“I love the fact that there are women out there who don’t have a choice and they must go to work and they still have to raise the kids. Thank goodness that we value those people too. And sometimes life isn’t easy for any of us.”

Somehow I don’t think that’s exactly what she meant to say.

Mitt’s Radical Health Care Plan

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IMO the biggest mistake made by the Obama Administration regarding the Affordable Care Act was not failing to include a public option. It was the fact that the Administration didn’t saturate the nation’s media with public service ads explaining clearly how it would work when it all went into effect. And because most of the big stuff in the law wont go into effect until 2014, the Right has had plenty of time to lie and frighten people into thinking “Obamacare” will kill Grandma.

Polls continue to show that more people than not don’t like the ACA (although one suspects many of the “don’t likes” are liberals who want single payer). So the Right has been vowing to “repeal and replace” the ACA. However, they flounder a bit on the subject of what “replace” will mean.

Now we’re beginning to get some idea of what Mittens would do as president, and it’s not pretty. He’s essentially warming up John McCain’s ideas from the 2008 campaign. For those of you who don’t remember, McCain’s basic idea was to eliminate the tax exclusion for employers who provide health insurance benefits, thereby phasing out such benefits and dumping everyone into the private market. Then, the miracle of “free market competition” would cause insurance costs to go down and provide people with better options. That’s the theory, anyway.

But Mittens also has to steer away from anything resembling his Massachusetts plan, because it’s too much like “Obamacare.” So, says Brian Beutler,

… neither Romney nor McCain’s plans allow individuals to pool risk in insurance exchanges, require insurers to sell insurance to all comers without price-discriminating against sick people or fight the adverse selection problem by requiring both sick and healthy people to enter the pool. Romney isn’t calling for those reforms — because though they would solve the problems with his outline, they would also add up to “Obamacare.”

In short … this would be a nightmare. It would be all the bad things about the long-standing status quo, but on steroids.

On top of that, Romney has embraced some version of Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan, privatizing Medicare and providing seniors with subsidies to buy insurance on the private market. And he wants to eliminate Medicaid and just give block grants to the states to come up with their own programs to provide health care for the poor. In many states, that’s pretty much guaranteeing that the poor will be left to heal themselves.

See also Jon Healey, “Mitt Romney vs. employer-provided healthcare insurance.”

Romney = Bush III

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Let’s see, where was I … oh, yes, politics. I wrote last week — “I’m saying Romney is George W. Bush without the Texas accent, people. You elect him, you’ll get tax cuts for the rich up the wazoo, huge cuts in benefit programs, and a return to foreign policy by the Marlboro Man.”

Well, now we have a confession, at least on the domestic side of the agenda. Pat Garofalo writes for Media Matters —

During an interview last week on The Fernando Espuelas Show, Alexandra Franceschi, Specialty Media Press Secretary of the Republican National Committee, said that the Republican party’s economic platform in 2012 is going to be the same as it was during the Bush years, “just updated”:

ESPUELAS: What do you mean by economic security? Regardless of who the ultimate nominee is, what’s the general idea that the RNC, or the Republican party in general, has in terms of this message?

FRANCESCHI: Well, it’s a message of being able to attain the American dream. It’s less government spending, which a Tarrance Group poll, came out last week actually, shows that the majority of Hispanics believe that less government spending is the way out of this deficit crisis. It’s lowering taxes so small businesses can grow and they can employ more people, because we understand that the private sector is the engine of the economy. It’s not the government. […]

ESPUELAS: Now, how different is that concept from what were the policies of the Bush administration? And the reason I ask that is because there’s some analysis now that is being published talking about the Bush years being the slowest period of job creation since those statistics were created. Is this a different program or is this that program just updated?

FRANCESCHI: I think it’s that program, just updated.

Of course, the RNC has its fingers crossed voters won’t remember that Bush’s policies are what screwed the economy. Paul Krugman writes,

Just how stupid does Mitt Romney think we are? If you’ve been following his campaign from the beginning, that’s a question you have probably asked many times.

But the question was raised with particular force last week, when Mr. Romney tried to make a closed drywall factory in Ohio a symbol of the Obama administration’s economic failure. It was a symbol, all right — but not in the way he intended.

First of all, many reporters quickly noted a point that Mr. Romney somehow failed to mention: George W. Bush, not Barack Obama, was president when the factory in question was closed. Does the Romney campaign expect Americans to blame President Obama for his predecessor’s policy failure?

Yes, it does.

Of course, I suspect a lot of voters need reminding by this point.