Daily Kos

The battle over the long-term debt has obscured the stimulus elements contained in President Obama's proposal that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner aired over the weekend. House Speaker John Boehner's phony proposal didn't even mention such measures.

The hysteria over the fake fiscal cliff has helped create a false narrative for what U.S. budget policy should be in the coming year. What's actually needed is a plan for sustainable growth, one that allows us to relieve the acute problems our economy is suffering so that we can get to work on dealing with the chronic ones that predate the Great Recession but were greatly exacerbated by it. Chronic problems such as wage stagnation. Unlike what the Republicans and too many Democrats argue, the nation does not have a short-term deficit problem.

At a time when more than 27 million Americans are out-of-work and hunting for a job or working part-time but need a full-time job (or wanting to work but so discouraged they have given up looking and thus are no longer counted as part of the labor force), the focus on cutting spending to rescue us from the deficit is as wrong-headed as it gets. In fact, going the austerity route right now will increase the deficit by killing jobs, lowering demand and slowing a sluggish economy. Fewer jobs means lower tax revenues, after all. And higher unemployment increases the need for government spending.

What is needed is a national industrial plan of the sort every developed and many developing nations have had for decades, massive infrastructure repairs and upgrades emphasizing clean energy, a rethinking of trade agreements, laws protecting workers' right to organize and a sharply retooled progressive tax system. Such proposals ought to be on the lips of progressive politicians every day even though Republicans (and the cohort of Democrats who enable Republicans) put up roadblocks to far lesser proposals. Getting progressive policies on the economy enacted someday requires talking about progressive policies today though there is no way they can clear the stubborn no-gotiators in Congress in the immediate future.

Just how stubborn they can be is seen in their resistance to President Obama's modest and reasonable spending proposals to keep the economy from taking a downturn over the coming year. Those are:

• Extending the Social Security payroll tax break for one year: For the 2011 and 2012 calendar years, Congress cut the payroll tax from 4.2 percent to 6.2 percent. Like other tax cuts, this one expires at the end of the month. The average reduction for the 122 million families affected by the payroll tax was slightly less than $1,000 a year.

If the cuts end, it will mean an American earning $50,000 annually will pay about $80 more a month in 2013. Jan Hatzius, chief economist, at Goldman Sachs, projects that letting the tax cut expire would chop $125 billion out of the economy and 0.6 percent out of gross domestic product for the year.

Extending the cut through 2013 would cost $115 billion. Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics, estimates the extension would give the economy a $100 billion boost.

• Extending the federally funded emergency unemployment insurance benefits for one year: As previously noted, as a consequence of the budget deal in February, federally funded emergency unemployment benefits are set to expire Dec. 29. If they do, 2.1 million Americans will immediately lose this lifeline and by April another 900,000 will have lost theirs, according to the National Employment Law Project. Ever since 1958, these temporary emergency benefits have remained available as long as the national unemployment rate is more than 7.2 percent. It is currently 7.9 percent and not expected to fall below 7.2 percent before mid-2013, if then.

Extending benefits would cost $30 billion to $40 billion in 2013. Mark Zandi estimates that if the cost is $40 billion, it would boost the economy by $58 billion for the year. Unemployment benefits are widely seen as having the best bang for the buck as stimulating because recipients spend the money right away. Not only do they get help to survive on their modest average of $300 in benefits each month, but also their spending in 2013 would keep some 300,000 to 400,000 other workers on the job, according to the Congressional Budget Office and NELP, respectively.

• Adding a multiyear stimulus in the form of a bank for long-term infrastructure projects. For 2013, $50 billion to this effort. While that's really a pittance, such a bank has been a Democratic goal for a decade and actually getting it off the ground would be a major step in the right direction to provide long-term financing for projects that must now be paid for on a cash basis.

• Continuing the accelerated depreciation for business. This would cost about $65 billion in 2013. This encourages business to buy capital goods sooner than later.

• Continuing refinancing underwater mortgages with an upgraded plan. The mortgages of nearly 11 million homeowners are still underwater, more than a fifth of the nation's total. Efforts to help them refinance got off to a very bad start, but they've improved. The housing market has finally shown signs of life in the past few months, but it is far from restored to its pre-bubble health. That factor continues to be a major drag on the economy. Cost of the refinancing plan: unspecified.

As you can see, there's nothing radical or momentous here, mostly just a continuation of existing spending that has made a difference for tens of millions of Americans during the worst economic downturn in 80 years.

You would think these modest efforts would be eagerly supported on both sides of the congressional aisle and the deficit would take a back seat in all these discussions. Or rather, you would think that if you hadn't witnessed the know-nothings at work over the past four years.

Democrats are coalescing in opposition to raising the eligibility age for Medicare as a sweetener to get Republicans to even start talking about revenue increases. That's fantastic, as far as it goes.

But there's good reason to leave Medicare and Medicaid completely off of the budget chopping block for the time being, and to be patient in considering reforms. Jon Cohn explains why here.

Contrary to what conservatives say and even many centrists seem to believe, the high cost of Medicare and Medicaid isn’t a by-product of government inefficiency. On the contrary, Medicare historically has held down costs as well as, if not better than, private insurance on a per capita basis. That’s thanks, in part, to the administrative advantages of a centralized government program and Medicare’s enormous power to set prices. Medicaid is cheaper still, to the point where, honestly, it's underfunded. The programs keep getting more expensive, relative to inflation, because medical care keeps getting more expensive—and, in the case of Medicare, because of the increase in the number of people coming on the program.

The Affordable Care Act addresses, to an extent, the increasing costs of medical care—costs which are rising much more quickly in the private sector than in Medicare and Medicaid. And Obamacare is cutting costs for Medicare. Let the Affordable Care Act do its job and see how much it can do to contain Medicare spending.

But they don't have to stop at doing nothing about Medicare, if they really want to reduce health care costs. There's no reason not to put really progressive solutions into the mix. Like Medicare buy-in for people 55 and older, a younger, generally healthier cohort that would be paying premiums into the program. And why not finally allow Medicare to use its bargaining power to make prescription drugs for seniors cheaper to purchase, or at the very least allowing importation of cheaper medicines from Canada. Those are two, big-ticket possibilities.

And they can do it, as Greg Dworkin reminded us on Sunday, by citing the Very Serious Peoples' favorite Very Serious catfood commissioners Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson. They included Medicare buy-in in their recommendations for strengthening the program. We know how much everyone loves Simpson-Bowles, so how about all of their suggestions being on the table?

We know now the ice sheet of Greenland is melting five times faster than 20 years ago. We know that Antarctica is losing twice as much ice in the west as it is gaining in the east. The World Bank has recently issued its frightening Turn Down the Heat report that says we're headed for a temperature increase of 4° C unless action is taken immediately. Insurance companies already are dealing with gigantic costs from the impact of climate change. And the Global Carbon Project CO₂ has just reported that emissions rate grew again at 2.6 percent for 2011 and at an average 3.1 percent for the period 2001-2011. There's plenty more news where all that came from.

Meanwhile in Doha, Qatar, host of the 18th UN Climate Change Conference (COP18), the government ministers have just started arriving for a prodigious amount of work ahead. How much action will come out of Doha is anybody's guess. Lowered expectations mean that whatever successes occur will seem valuable even if the fierce urgency of now, ferocious I think it should be called at this stage, doesn't quite seem to have penetrated many of the political elites around the planet, although that may be changing.

One of the most contentious issues at Doha is providing money for the Green Climate Fund. That is designed to transfer money from the developed to the developing world so those less-affluent nations can adapt to and mitigate climate change impacts. GCF got started in Copenhagen at COP15 in 2009 and was launched in Durban, South Africa, at COP17. Objective: Raise $100 billion a year by 2020. Meanwhile, to get some projects off the ground well before then, GCF Fast Start Funding was approved for 2010-2012, to the tune of $30 billion. But, so far, the GCF is just an empty shell and only about $10 billion is being raised annually.

Dave Turnbull at The Price of Oil website has found that the world's affluent nations are putting five times as much money into the fossil-fuel subsidies as they are to the Green Climate Fund. And he's created a graphic to show how stark that is.

^{Click here for an image of the graphic you can enlarge. Data used to create it is here.}

That's bad enough, But, as A Siegel points out, the actual "incentive" is far worse. That's because externalities—the health and environmental costs of mining and burning coal, for instance—are not included in these calculations.

As is well known, budgets are policy. They tell us what policymakers are really committed to. Despite all the talk emanating from 17 1/2 UN climate conferences, despite all the increasingly grim news about where we're headed and how much faster we seem to be headed there than was previously thought, that commitment has yet to appear.

Delay is denial.

Ladies and gentlemen, outgoing congressman and all-around crazy person Allen West:

"Always remember, Abraham Lincoln only served one term in Congress, too."

I can think of no response for that—and heaven knows I've tried, and for some time—so we may just have to leave that one right there. Lincoln, of course, went on to achieve great things, for which we have bestowed on him America's highest honor, his face on currency. Less talked about: Lincoln's time in a Florida biker gang; Lincoln getting drummed out of the military; Lincoln going around explaining which of his female contemporaries were and were not ladies.

I have no doubt that someone, somewhere, will propose that we put Allen West's picture on the penny. And then we will not do that, because we are not dumb. But it seems certain that Allen West, at least, is convinced that we have not heard the last from him.

Oh, Sarah. If you didn't exist, we'd have to invent you because you just never stop being hi-larious:

Sarah Palin is apologizing for telling Republicans to not be “wusses” when it comes to the debate over taxes and spending.

“Well, I guess I shouldn’t call politicians names, so I apologize for calling the wobbly ones wusses,” the former Alaska governor said Monday on Fox News’s “Hannity.” She added, “Because that distracts from the point that has to be made. and the point is that we are a bankrupt country.”

WHAT?!?!? Sarah Palin realized that name-calling is not a productive way to have a conversation? Is this a new, more mature, more diplomatic Sarah Palin? Did someone hit her on the head or something? Should we be concerned?

Of course not! It was obviously a momentary lapse, nothing more, because she immediately proceeded to demonstrate that she is still good ol' dumb-as-dirt Sarah, edumacating us morons on how President Barack Obama is going to destroy 'Merica with his socialism, which leads to communism:

Again, that gets us towards socialism. What goes beyond socialism…is communism. I know I’m going to get slammed for speaking so bluntly about what’s going on here, but that’s exactly what is going on.

Yup. That's what's going on. We're heading toward socialism, which will lead us to communism, which apparently is even worse than socialism, and anyone who slams Sarah for saying that is doing so because they can't handle the blunt truth to power she's spouting.

Oh, and as for her brilliant epiphany that calling politicians names is maybe not a good idea? Yeah, you know that lightbulb went dim in about three seconds:

“That’s a very scary thought because Barack Obama is a socialist.”

Hey, doesn't calling the president a socialist distract from the point of ... uh ... wait? What was her point again? That the president is a socialist? Something like that.

As always, thanks for the laughs, Sarah.

Last summer's Supreme Court ruling on the Affordable Care Act gave states the opportunity to turn town the expansion of Medicaid, and a handful of Republican governors and legislatures have decided that by punishing their citizens by keeping them uninsured is the way to go. The problem is, that isn't just punishing their uninsured, it's punishing health care providers and taxpayers, too. Hence, some big fights are brewing in those states.

So far, eight states have said they will turn down the expansion, while 13 states plus the District of Columbia have indicated they will accept it. The eight declining are Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas. Nearly 2.8 million people would remain uninsured in those states, according to Urban Institute estimates, with Texas alone accounting for close to half the total.

Hospitals aren't taking "no" for an answer in the states that have turned down the expansion. Although South Carolina's Republican Gov. Nikki Haley has had her say, the Legislature has yet to be heard from, said Thornton Kirby, president of the South Carolina Hospital Association. [...]

"Obamacare" was once assailed as a job killer by detractors, but on Wednesday in Missouri it was being promoted as the opposite. Missouri's hospital association in released a study estimating that the economic ripple effects of the Medicaid expansion would actually create 24,000 jobs in the state. The University of Missouri study found that about 160,000 state residents would gain coverage.

"This is not a political issue for us ... this is the real world," said Joe Pierle, head of the Missouri Primary Care Association, a doctors' group. "It makes no sense to send our hard-earned federal tax dollars to our neighbors in Illinois."

In the real world, hospitals and health care workers have to provide care to everybody who demands it, and often don't get paid for it. And quite frequently, the really sick people to whom they are providing care could have avoided getting sicker if they'd had access to affordable health care all along. In the real world, the status quo that these Republicans are fighting for has created a major crisis, and is draining state budgets. The pragmatic, smart policy thing for all states to do is to take the Medicaid money, and through it realize benefits like a healthier population, job creation and significant savings.

It's an absolute no-brainer, unless you're a crazy tea partier. And it's going to be the major fight for Republicans in those states that are resisting, because in most of these states there are fewer more powerful interest groups than the health care industry.

Republican astroturfing groups, bow your heads. FreedomWorks, the conservative group most responsible for shoving the supposed "tea party" down America's collective gullets, back when that was a thing, that group that demanded dressing up like George Washington and wearing teabags on your head be taken as a supposedly serious "political" movement, has lost their leader. Former congressman Dick Armey has resigned as chairman, and from the sounds of it it was not a friendly parting:

Armey demanded that he be paid until his contract ended on December 31; that FreedomWorks remove his name, image, or signature "from all its letters, print media, postings, web sites, videos, testimonials, endorsements, fund raising materials, and social media, including but not limited to Facebook and Twitter"; and that FreedomWorks deliver the copy of his official congressional portrait to his home in Texas.

"The top management team of FreedomWorks was taking a direction I thought was unproductive, and I thought it was time to move on with my life," Armey tells Mother Jones. "At this point, I don't want to get into the details. I just want to go on with my life."

This is actually a damn interesting development. We don't know the details of why Armey decided to abruptly part ways with the group (initial reports hint at perhaps some drama involving money and book deals), but he makes it sound like the group was just too damn unprincipled even for him, Dick Armey.

Armey declined to specify his disagreements with FreedomWorks. Asked if they were ideological or tactical, he replies, "They were matters of principle. It's how you do business as opposed to what you do. But I don't want to be the guy to create problems."

Which leads to the obvious question—given all the nonsense FreedomWorks associated itself under Armey, what the heck could they possibly be up to that made notorious astroturfing jackass Armey want to bow out only now? As some pundit once brightly opined, it would be irresponsible not to speculate, so I'm going to say it has something to do with ritual puppy sacrifice. That, or pretending Sarah Palin is a serious conservative thinker. The group has glibly gone along with conspiracy theories galore (the "tea party" protests against against the scary black president, supposedly because of taxes that hadn't actually changed one damn bit, morphed easily into the "death-panel" town hall crap-o-ramas, giving you a fine idea of what FreedomWorks figures the public discourse ought to look like if there's a corporate donor or two willing to make it happen); it's unclear what possible new "direction" FreedomWorks could undertake that Dick Armey would suddenly start having problems with.

Perhaps this is all just another bit of post-election-fiasco theater. Dick Armey splits dramatically with his own group; Dick Armey then gets to appear on all the television shows again, basking in some supposed new principle or credibility granted by his departure from that crazy, crazy group over there, Dick Armey rakes in a new pile of money, rinse, repeat. Armey will be walking away with a bonus "consulting contract" worth $8 million, which is an insane payout for a group that spent only $19 million during the entire '12 election year.

Where does the newly Dickless advocacy group go from here? It's unclear, but inside the organization, civil war looks to be underway:

Several top FreedomWorks staffers are leaving the conservative advocacy group in the wake of former House Majority Leader Dick Armey’s resignation, the organization confirmed Tuesday.

Max Pappas, the group’s former vice president for public policy and government affairs, has left the organization, and Brendan Steinhauser, director of campaigns, will depart on Friday. Two of his staffers, Amanda Shell and David Spielman, have also resigned.

Oh, this is going to be fun. This is going to be very, very fun.

Unlike the Republicans, some tree-hugging muckety-mucks at the Pentagon take climate change seriously. They know whatever other impacts it will have, climate change is a matter of national security. As Gen. Anthony Zinni, a retired Marine and former head of Central Command said in 2009:

We will pay for this one way or another. We will pay to reduce greenhouse gas emissions today, and we’ll have to take an economic hit of some kind.
Or we will pay the price later in military terms. And that will involve human lives.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island took that to heart and sought to put forth an amendment—SA 3181—to the defense authorization bill that would have required the government to “assess, plan for, and mitigate the security and strategic implications of climate change." The amendment had nine Democratic co-sponsors but never got a hearing.

It would have been a good way to get the GOP on record once again on climate change. Even Republicans who think climate change is happening deny it out of fear of their dumb clucks brigade. Or they say climate change may be real but is outside the realm of politics to handle. In fact, the GOP party platform directly attacks the White House's National Security Strategy for "elevat[ing] 'climate change' to the level of a 'severe threat' equivalent to foreign aggression" and for mentioning "climate" more often than al Qaeda.

Brilliant.

In a Senate speech Nov. 28, Whitehouse noted pronouncements on the impact of climate change by the Defense Science Board, the Quadrennial Defense Review, the National Security Strategy, the National Intelligence Council, the National Research Council and the Center for Naval Analysis all point to the need to deal with the national security aspects of climate change:

Our Nation's top military strategists, our Nation's top researchers, the National Research Council, and the National Academy of Sciences all have recommended that our national security institutions prepare for threats caused by climate change.

On the other hand, we have a tiny fringe of scientists, many of whom are funded by industry, that denies these facts and urges us to maintain the status quo. In effect, that little fringe urges us to do nothing. This is the same strategy, often the same organizations, and in some cases even the same people who denied in the past that cigarettes are bad for us or that lead paint harms children. They are professional, industry-paid deniers at large. [...]

Leading military and security experts agree that if left unchecked, global warming could increase instability and lead to conflict in already fragile regions of the world. [...]

We ignore these facts at the peril of our national security and at great risk to those in uniform who serve this nation.

Since all else has failed to move them in the climate realm, you might have thunk that such a direct appeal to patriotism would stir at least a few Republicans to sign onto Whitehouse's amendment. After all, it did not call for enacting a carbon tax or blocking the Keystone XL pipeline or installing wind turbines from coast to coast. Merely assessment and planning. But even that we can't get.

Gen. Zinni is right. Payment is coming. One way or another. The appalling ignorance that has made it next to impossible to pass even a modest amendment like Whitehouse's is going to cost big time. Unfortunately, we cannot assign the bill to those who choose not to take action. We will ALL have to pay.

Delay is denial.

There's post-election changes afoot at Fox News, apparently. Nothing big, just a quiet, temporary purge of all that embarrassing, fake, humiliatingly self-serving and spectacularly wrong prognosticating that they had built their entire election coverage around. We're just going to pretend that all those humiliating moments never happened, all right?

According to multiple Fox sources, Ailes has issued a new directive to his staff: He wants the faces associated with the election off the air — for now. For Karl Rove and Dick Morris — a pair of pundits perhaps most closely aligned with Fox’s anti-Obama campaign — Ailes’s orders mean new rules. Ailes’s deputy, Fox News programming chief Bill Shine, has sent out orders mandating that producers must get permission before booking Rove or Morris.

… thus finally answering the question: What does it take to embarrass Fox News?

Engineering the House Democrats' effort to force a vote on an extension of tax cuts for the middle class isn't the only role Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi has taken on in the fiscal cliff curb fight. She is, TPM's Brian Beutler argues, "keeping the negotiating center of gravity in Democrats’ comfort zone."

As the controller of an overwhelming number of Democratic votes, she’s there to warn all negotiators, including Obama himself, not to cut a bad deal.
“Leader Pelosi is playing offense on the middle class tax cuts bill,” says a House Democratic leadership aide. “She’s unifying the House Democrats around an action they can all support, while also reminding all the negotiators at the table that you can’t reach a deal without changes in tax rates on the wealthy.”

That’s as much a warning to Obama as it is to Boehner. Until recently Obama had left himself enough wiggle room to accept a deal that would raise revenue from top earners by limiting their deductions instead of increasing their income tax rates.

Because Senate Democrats passed legislation in August to permanently extend middle-income tax cuts, Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell have been sidelined for the moment by dint of circumstance.

Pelosi’s role, in effect, is to make sure the Senate bill comes up for a vote in the House, ideally unchanged, so it can go straight to Obama’s desk for a signature. Most recently, she rejected House Republicans’ counteroffer to Obama, which would include benefit cuts to Medicare and Social Security.

Pelosi's express rejection of benefit cuts to Medicare and Social Security aren't just an admonishment to Republicans, but a reminder to Democrats to stand by their principles. She's giving Democrats the buttressing that they'll need to withstand the constant pressure the Very Serious People will exert to make sure the poor and elderly suffer in this process in the name of balance.

She has her work cut out for her since she's got "help" from the likes of Rep. Steny Hoyer, who's trying to put benefit cuts to Social Security and Medicare right back on the negotiating table. It's going to be a long few weeks.

Reposted from Comics by Tom Tomorrow

Both the Washington Post and USA Today editorial boards took up the issue of filibuster reform, and to their credit, both are perfectly clear in recognizing that the proposed reforms are potentially good ones, striking a reasonable balance between traditional Senate preservation of the rights of the minority party and the need, as Alexander Hamilton put it, for "energetic government."

But shortly after acknowledging the good sense of the proposed reforms, and indeed in the case of the Post, fretting that "if anything, they would go not far enough," both ed boards retreat into their too-familiar "both sides do it" safe places. The false equivalence game is unwarranted.

Consider first the warning repeated in the USA Today piece that should Senate Democrats reform the rules by majority vote, "Republicans have threatened a war they warn could shut down the Senate." The threat answers Republicans' own objection. If Republicans threaten to shut down the Senate if the rules are changed, that must mean that the rules changes proposed don't remove their ability to shut down the Senate. It's as simple as that.

As both editorials note, there are other methods available to the parties to settle the issue. Both point to the 2005 "Gang of 14" agreement by way of example, and both note that the key concession involved was the Democrats' agreement not to filibuster the Republican president's judicial nominees except in "extraordinary circumstances." That agreement held, the editorialists point out, and so similar negotiations should be expected to yield similar results this time.

Left out of the Post's recounting, however, and only mentioned in passing by USA Today, is the January 2011 "Gentleman's Agreement," which was supposed to tamp down on abuse of the filibuster in order to avoid forcing through more drastic changes by majority vote. USA Today notes only that, "the deal quickly fell apart with both sides pointing fingers." So here we have an example of Democrats bargaining for a reprieve from a rules change in 2005 and sticking to terms (this despite the fact that the Gang of 14's agreement was limited to the duration of the 109th Congress), and an example of Republicans bargaining for a similar reprieve in 2011 and not sticking to it. Conclusion: "both sides are hypocrites on this issue."

Hmm.

There are more differences between the battles of 2005 and today, and other objections that need to be raised to the too-brief summaries offered up in these editorials. For one thing, we're talking about a 2005 move to eliminate the filibuster entirely on lifetime appointments of federal judges versus the current move to eliminate the filibuster on procedural motions that block even the beginning of debate on routine legislation. And that's not to mention the meta-issue of whether or not it's the same thing to ask for a vote on a new set of rules at the outset of a new Congress, versus changing them in mid-game once they become a nuisance for the majority. Those issues have been amply addressed in the past and will be again. For now, it's important all by itself that when Senators, parliamentarians, independent experts and newspaper editorial boards all agree on an identified problem as critical to the future of the country as whether or not we will allow ourselves to be governed, we simply have the courage to say so without having to preemptively soothe sore feelings by pretending everyone shares equally in the blame.

Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein managed to do it and survive. The rest of us can, too.