a speech i'd like to hear

            Unless you’ve been in a cave  deep beneath the earth for the past two weeks, you know we very nearly had a federal government shutdown.  Media attention to that problem focused mainly on the political fight involved.  How much would the Democrats agree to?  Does the Tea Party run the GOP? Does Harry Reid actually exist?  Will John Boehner cry all the way to political nirvana?

            What generally got ignored was what a government shutdown would have meant to folks who didn’t suck at the public teat on capitol hill.  That list would include, but not be limited to, the following:  Social Security checks would not have gone out; Medicare claims would not have been processed; the federal component of Medicaid (roughly 70% of it) would have shut down; the incomes of at least 800,000 federal employees would have been put on hold—with, incidentally, no guarantee they would have been made up once the shutdown ended; military personnel would (depending on which source you believe) either receive no pay, or receive pay for the first week of a shutdown and then no pay (this would include those members of the military currently being shot at in Iraq and Afghanistan); all the federal regulatory agencies would stop regulating (though with some, like the Securities and Exchange Commission, you might not have been able to tell the difference); air traffic controllers and most postal workers would have stayed on the job, but without pay and without a guarantee that their pay would be made up—I’d work hard under those circumstances, wouldn’t you?; the federal court system would have closed up shop (my God, Barry Bonds might go free); some FBI agents would remain on the job, but their labs and administrative offices would have closed . . .

                       

            You get the picture.  Our politicians in Washington were playing chicken with the very fabric of American society, or, maybe a better metaphor, with the ligaments, tendons and other connective tissue that hold the American skeleton together.  And why?  In the case of the Democrats, it was because they had no choice.  By even the most conservative estimates, the cuts the House Tea Partiers wanted would have cost the economy a million jobs and absolutely short-circuited the fitful recovery we seem to be making from the Great Recession.

            In the case of the Republicans, it appears to have involved a combination of hubris, cynicism and opportunism.  The hubris was evident in the chest-thumping the Tea Partiers were doing about the fact that they COULD shut the government down.  The cynicism was manifest in comment like Boehner’s “So be it” response to a reporter who pointed out that House budget cuts would eliminate 650,000 federal jobs.  The opportunism was clear in the House insistence on including social policy “riders” that had nothing to do with money in a budget bill.

            That the Republicans are easily identified as the bad guys in this struggle does not absolve the Democrats.  What the budget debate showed clearly (if it wasn’t clear enough already) is that the Democratic Party leadership, including the President, has a very difficult time finding a principle it can’t run away from.  How else to explain two weeks of debate over a budget proposal  that contained 30-odd billion dollars in cuts but not one penny in tax increases for the wealthy or for corporations, during which the unfairness and unacceptability of that formula was never even brought up? 

            How else to explain a fight over whether the cuts should be 32 billion, 33 billion, 38 billion or 40 billion, but no fight over the fact that 2/3 of those cuts (whatever the dollar amount) were going to come from programs that affected almost exclusively the middle and lower classes?

            Here is the problem as I see it.  On every important issue since Obama became President, the Democrats have stuck their collective heads in the sand and allowed the Republicans to define the parameters within which debate would occur, then cautiously pulled their heads out of the sand and attempted to debate within those parameters.

            And the Republicans have gotten progressively better at defining parameters in their favor.  During the TARP debate, they tried to define the debate as being a budget deficit issue, but the country (and world) was in obvious enough economic peril that even red state mouth breathers couldn’t get too much behind that one.

            The GOP stepped up its game considerably on health care reform, tossing out death panels, socialism and government intrusion into the precious doctor/patient relationship as the brackets within which the debate would be held.  The result was no public option, no single payer plan, and most important to Republicans, no machinery to control pharmaceutical costs.

            When financial sector reform came to the front, the Republicans immediately stipulated that any rule limiting Wall Street’s ability to reward its denizens with obscene bonuses would cause its most talented players to leave the street, that reimposing Glass-Steagall would cost Wall Street billions, as would any sort of meaningful regulation of the derivatives markets.  And, what do you know, none of those issues were really part of the ensuing debate.

           

            In the present instance, the Republicans started thumping the deficit reduction drum last November when the Democratic congress was trying to pass a 2011 budget that would have spared us the recent showdown, and once again, the Democrats responded by in effect saying, “oh yeah, the deficit’s a problem”—thereby acquiescing to the notion that the debate should be about how deeply to cut the deficit, not whether now was the best time to do that.

            I’m occasionally given to flights of fancy, so indulge me please in this one.  I would love to see Obama commandeer prime time television and give a speech that went something like this:

            Good Evening.

            As all of you know, we recently engaged with the other party over  a bill to provide 201l funding for the federal government.  An agreement was eventually reached and what would have been a catastrophic event—the shutting down of government—was avoided.

            If you will recall, the budget I proposed for 2011 last year contained about 10 billion dollars in cuts.  The Republicans immediately castigated me for being too cautious, even though caution about reducing government spending in the midst of a very fragile recovery was the advice of just about literally every economist in the world who was not employed by the Republican party.  Speaker Boehner subsequently proposed an additional 23 billion in cuts—a total of 33 billion.  Reluctantly, I agreed to that figure.

            Under considerable pressure from the Tea Party backed members of his caucus, Speaker Boehner, a couple weeks ago, upped the cuts to 40 billion.  In addition, again acceding to his Tea Party wing, he folded a variety of social policy riders that had nothing to do with money into the negotiation.  That launched the two week scurry to reach some sort of agreement.  In the end, the Republicans got nearly all the money cuts they sought, but were forced to exclude the riders.

            Even before that agreement was reached, Speaker Boehner was making public pronouncements about the debate over this year’s budget being simply the first of three opportunities his party would have to assert its will over the direction of this country.  It is perhaps a little incongruous that the self-described leader of “one half of one third” of the government would see that minority as sufficient to dictate what the economic and social future of the nation should be, but let that go for now.

            So our friends in the Republican party and the people of the United States can be clear that they will not dictate the terms of either debate--as they have so successfully done in the past, here are the parameters my administration will set.

            First, we have already agreed to what I described earlier as the “largest single year spending deduction” in our nation’s history.  In a couple weeks, as required by law, Congress will need to vote on raising the debt limit so the nation’s financial obligations can be met.  Let us be clear about one thing.  Raising the limit on the amount of debt the country can carry has nothing intrinsically to do with budget deficits.  So, we will brook no debate over further mandated spending cuts in the 201l budget.  Congress will pass a clean bill raising the debt limit, or it will not.  If the Republicans want to ruin the country’s international credit standing by forcing default on our debts because we will not cut anything further from a budget that has already been reduced 38 billion dollars, let it be on their heads.

            Nor will we agree to any policy revisions of the sort proposed in the recent debate.  Regulatory agencies will  continue regulating and social service organizations will  continue their social services.  There will be no negotiation in that area.

            Formulating the 2012 budget will commence in earnest in the Fall, and the positions I will advocate relative to it will be, to some degree, determined by the state of the economy at that point.  Assuming that the economy then will be much like it is now, in a slow and somewhat fragile recovery mode, the budgetary model I will be following will be closely aligned with the advice of the world’s best economists. 

           

            Specifically, the focus will be on economic stimulus generally and job creation specifically.  Budget deficit reduction will be a secondary priority and one that, for the most part, will be delayed until economic recovery is capable of tolerating it.  We have tangible evidence of what happens when cutting a budget deficit becomes the paramount objective by observing what has happened in England.  Prime Minister Cameron and his Conservative Party bought entirely into the “austerity is the answer” formula and made draconian cuts in education, social welfare programs, medical care—all the same targets as the Republicans have aimed at here.  Just as importantly, the British government ignored the negative impact all those cuts would have on employment.

            The result has been that England’s economy has plunged deeper into recession than it was in 2009.  Significantly, the results of the Conservative Party’s policies in England are precisely what the world’s economists predicted they would be—and what they are predicting they would be here were we to follow Republican policies.

            Let it then be understood that the budget debate this fall will not be over how much we will cut.  It will be over how much we will spend to keep the economy moving, and how much we will increase revenues to make that possible.  The word “tax,” at least when it comes from a Democrat’s mouth, will not be a dirty word.  And our attention will be trained primarily on the segments of our population that presently aren’t contributing a fair share to tax revenue.  Those would include individuals in the wealthiest 5% and the larger corporations. 

            I do not mean to suggest that spending cuts are entirely off the table.  What is off the table is any further cuts in infrastructure funding, education, scientific research, and social welfare programs.  We will be open to cuts in corporate subsidies and the defense budget.  We will also be open to beginning a dialogue on how Medicare can be restructured to begin reining in escalating medical costs, as well as a dialogue on how the fiscal independence of Social Security can be guaranteed.  Our interest in Medicaid will be restricted mostly to how the federal government can better assist the states in funding it.

            It would be appropriate to characterize what I’ve just described as our lines in the sand.  If it wasn’t before, it became clear during the recent showdown that preserving ideology is more important to at least a significant element of the Republican party than effectively governing the country.  There are important fiscal issues to be dealt with over the next 8 months.  Republican ideology will not be what sets the parameters of the debates over those issues.

            We’ll never hear that speech, nor, I fear, anything  remotely like it.  That’s a shame because absent that speech, or something very like it, political discourse in this country, and our political direction, will continue to be driven by a party whose leadership would turn us into a plutocracy and whose base would return us to the Wild West.

           

           

            

ideology and ideologues

            One of the advantages of ignorance is you know so little you seldom get confused and decisions are easy to make.  One of the disadvantages of intelligence is that you know so much you often get confused and decisions are difficult to make.

            If all I know is that is that “it’s by God snowing in my front yard in March,” it’s easy to decide global warming is a hoax.  If I know about all the scientific studies that indicate wind patterns and temperature zones are changing at a far faster pace over the past 20 years than over the 200 years preceding that, it should be easy to decide that global warming is real—unless . . . I also know that the earth has warmed significantly, and cooled significantly, at least twice in the last 10,000 years, which could mean a warming is going to occur now no matter what we do.

            The sad fact is that the smarter you are, the harder it is to act with certainty; conversely, the less smart you are, the easier it is to be certain there’s only one way to go. As a result, the less smart are too often the ones who become the movers and shakers.  Unimpeded by consideration of consequences, or, too frequently, even consideration of all the facts, they can charge forward with an alacrity and a decisiveness that the more informed can’t match.

            A concept called ideology comes into play here, as do, of course, the ideologues who promulgate it.  The dictionary definition of ideology is “the ideas and manner of thinking characteristic of a group, social class, or individual.”  In practice, ideologies are almost always simplistic and dismissive.  They are simplistic in the sense that they seize upon a single fact, or a single moment in time, or even a single experience and use it as the prism through which everything must be viewed.  They are dismissive in the sense that anything that challenges their simplistic vision is denied, or, more commonly, just ignored.

            In themselves, ideologies are harmless.  When, however,  they are taken up by energetic individuals, they become forces to be reckoned with precisely because a simplistic vision offers easy answers to complex problems, which makes it very appealing to those who are unwilling or unable (or both) to think for themselves.  We call such energetic individuals ideologues, the dictionary definition of which is “an adherent of an ideology, especially one who is uncompromising and dogmatic.”

            Two concepts are alien to the ideologue: truth and logic. More specifically, the ideologue consistently chooses those truths that support his ideology and suborns logic to justify ignoring or denying the truths that don’t.  What’s remarkable about ideologues is the facility they exhibit for choosing whatever truth best suits their purpose of the moment.  As a too easy example, we can turn (as one almost always can) to Newt Gingrich.  On March 7, shortly after Gaddafi had begun using deadly force against demonstrators, Newt proposed his easy solution.  “Exercise a no fly-zone this evening.”

Two weeks later, on March 23, after President Obama had endorsed American participation in a no-fly zone, Newt said, “I would not have intervened.” 

            It should be noted that his original position was announced on Fox to what one could reasonably presume was an audience of hawks.  The March 23 flip-flop came on NBC, to what one could reasonably presume was a more moderate audience.  But that’s not the end of it.  On March 26, he insisted that we should “defeat Gaddafi as rapidly as possible,” and that to do so, we should use “all of Western air power as decisively as possible.”  Those remarks were in Iowa where, in a few months, the first Republican presidential caucus will take place.

            Since January 2009, the Republican party has reduced all political discussion to three ideological bases: government is bad, deficit is bad, and Obama is bad.  Since government is bad, taxes are bad, regulation of any sort is bad, and social welfare programs are bad.  There are a couple of exceptions.  The government shouldn’t be subsidizing Planned Parenthood or providing medical care for indigent women and children, but huge subsidies to Big Pharma, agribusiness and the whole defense industry are OK.  Again, that selective truth thing.

            The deficit is bad, so all sorts of spending should be cut.  Infrastructure projects should be postponed or simply scrapped, funding for education at all levels should be reduced or even eliminated, and for God’s sake, we must quit funding public radio.  What’s a conundrum for those who think of course is that while a deficit is the result of expenditures exceeding income, the taxes are bad plank of Republican ideology precludes narrowing that deficit by raising revenues.  Equally problematic for those who are not slaves to Republican ideology is that all the government programs (including education) that are on the cut list actually employ people.  Cutting those programs will increase unemployment (some estimates run as high as a million people losing jobs because of cuts).  More people out of work means fewer people paying taxes, meaning revenues go down, meaning deficits go up . . . you get the picture.

            Obama is bad so whatever he proposes must also be bad, even when he proposes things the Republicans had until then supported.  Health care, financial reform, Iraq, Afghanistan—and of course the Newtster’s gymnastics on Libya come to mind.

            The power of ideology has never been more apparent than in today’s Republican party.  Its ideologues were exultant when a moderate (relatively) Republican congressman, Bob Bennett of Colorado, was defeated in that state’s primary by a Tea Party candidate.  Grover Norquist swears that more than 75% of  Republicans in the U.S. Congress have signed a pledge NEVER to raise taxes.  Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin are being treated as legitimate presidential candidate possibilities.  Mitch McConnell is on record declaring that the party’s number one goal is to make Obama a “one-term president.”  Republican Senators were perfectly willing to cut off unemployment benefits for millions of American workers to insure that the marginal tax rate on the top 1% did not go up three points.  Republicans in both houses of Congress now appear ready to shut the entire federal government down if the draconian cuts passed by the House aren’t accepted.  They are also willing to force the government to default on its debts by refusing to raise the debt ceiling.  That of course will without question generate a world-wide economic collapse.

            They are working feverishly to insure that the big banks and Wall Street investment firms whose “make huge profits for me, the country be damned” practices nearly brought the world economy down have nearly total freedom to resume the same practices.  They are using the budget to insure that regulatory agencies from the SEC to the EPA don’t have the money to do their watchdog work.  They have already pronounced Obama’s recent proposal to close tax loopholes that allow corporations to avoid American taxes dead on arrival.

            Collectively, the Republican party has simply ignored the facts presented not just by America's best economists, but by the world’s best economists that draconian cuts in government spending now will  plunge not just this country but most of the world into an even deeper recession than we just muddled through.  The clear evidence from the recent cuts in Britain that “austerity programs” make things worse is likewise ignored.

            I could go on but it’s too depressing.  Here’s what’s more depressing however.   

Half the country, some polls suggest more than half, is simple-minded enough to buy without discussion the ideological pap the Republicans dispense.  It is as though we are a nation of beetles drawn to a dung pile. 

            Perhaps the most depressing thing is that it’s impossible to persuade an ideologue, or someone who has bought into an ideology, that they might be wrong.  Just as it makes no difference how many facts you give a teenage girl to prove that the boy she loves is a loser, you won’t persuade a plumber in Minnesota or a sales clerk in Ohio or  a construction worker in Alabama that Republican ideology is at base a war on each of them if they are willing to buy that ideology without thought or question.

            And it appears a lot of them are willing to make just that purchase.  

The Wisconsin Affair

            The kerfluffle in Wisconsin has some elements to it that would be hard to include in a work of fiction because they’d rob it of credibility.  For example, while the long-range forecast for the state’s budget (from 2013 forward) clearly isn’t good, the expected shortfall for the next budget—the one that has Governor Walker and his Rebublican minions chirping “We’re broke”—is a rather minor 137 million.  The part we couldn’t put in a novel is that 117 million of that shortfall is the result of tax cuts the Governor gave to big business.  So, the “crisis” that requires shutting down public sector unions is one in fact created by a private sector giveaway.

            Then there is the matter of police and firefighter unions.  Best I can figure, police and firefighters qualify as public sector employeees.  Ergo, unions representing them would be public sector unions.  Both of those unions are, however, exempted from the Governor’s wrath.  He fully intends to continue collectively bargaining with them.

            The question that begs is obvious.  If teachers and public health workers and highway department personnel and all the rest of the bloodsuckers nursing at the public teat are what have to be curbed to keep Wisconsin from being “broke,” why not police and firefighters?

            The snarky among us might venture the notion that Tea Partiers like Walker are more enamored of people who can legally carry guns or wield large, sharp axes than they are nerds carrying textbooks or wearing pocket protectors.  The cynics among us would simply point to the fact that the police union and firefighter union were the only two public sector unions that did not openly support Walker’s opponent in the 2010 election.

            But here’s the tap dance that has gone on in Wisconsin, but gone on just as strongly in Indiana, Ohio and just about every other red state.  It starts off as a very aggressive triple time step: public sector employees are overpaid!  But then the unwashed whose mouths that canard issues from are slapped in the face with statistics that show in just about every area where there is a private sector equivalent, the private sector earns markedly more.  Ask any lawyer in a District Attorney’s office how he likes tooling around in his Mercedes and he’ll point to the Altima in the parking lot that belongs to him.   Ask any civil engineer in the highway department how he likes living in a gated community next to his Halliburton neighbor and he’ll point to the two bedroom ranch on a thousand square foot lot he calls home.

            That usually slows the tap dance to a double time step, the gist of which is that you have to factor in the health insurance and life insurance and guaranteed pensions that public employees rake in.  “Now who makes the most” quoth the conservatives?  Fair question that, except for one thing.  Whatever “fringes” public employees receive were gained through collective bargaining—meaning the legislators that are now screaming “off with their benefits” are the same legislators who agreed to the benefits in the first place.   They are also the same legislators who could trim those benefits by revisiting the collective bargaining process—as in fact had happened in Wisconsin before Walker decided to play union buster.

            Okay, so now we’re down to a single time step but those of us whose ears are still offended can take the discussion a step further.  For years—hell, for decades—nationwide, the recruiting pitch used by public sector employers always—repeat, always—included this statement: “we know the salary’s not competitive, but the fringes are really good.”  If the tap dancers have their way, one of two things will result.  Public employee salaries will need to go up considerably, or filling public employee job slots—like teachers, for example—will become way harder than now, and it isn’t easy now.  A little factoid here is illuminating: since 1990, over 40% of the people entering the teaching profession in the k-12 area were in the bottom third of college students based on SAT scores.  That’s not an argument for how excellent the teaching our children are getting is, but it is an indication of what teacher salaries—even including benefits—are attracting.

            Teachers clearly have never been important to Tea Partiers, or to most hard core conservatives, but what about the lawyers charged with the “Law” part of  “Law and Order?”  What about the engineers charged with insuring that dams and bridges are safe?  What about the nurses who make the emergency rooms in federal, state and municipal hospitals functional?

            At this point, the tap dancers usually slow down to f-lap, f-lap, f-lap because the fact of the matter is, government can’t operate without public sector employees, and while the 5% of the country that lives in mindless Tea Party land think a world without government would be nirvana, the rest of us realize that what makes our lives civil and sociable and livable is the  web of services and protections that only government can provide.

            Actually, nirvana is probably too advanced a concept for most Tea Partiers.  A better “perfect world” pix for them would probably be something like a bass boat with a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon.

            What would ultimately preclude making a novel of the Wisconsin Affair, however, is the way it ends.  Stifled by Democratic senators who spirited themselves next door to Illinois, and faced with angry crowds occupying the legislature’s building in protest, the Republicans found themselves in a quandary.  They couldn’t pass the union-busting bill because they couldn’t get a quorum, and they couldn’t back away from their bill without admitting what was obvious to everyone anyway—that busting the union had nothing to fixing the budget.  What to do?

            Well, apparently in Wisconsin a quorum is needed in a legislative body only to vote on bills that include money.  What sharp knives Walker and his lemmings are is perhaps indicated by the fact that it took them nearly two weeks to realize that, but when the light went on, they moved swiftly.  So swiftly in fact that the move took place in the wee hours of the morning; they simply stripped all the language dealing with union busting out of the original bill and used it to write a whole new bill that contained not one mention of money—and could therefore be voted on without Democrats present.

            But, a perceptive reader would surely point out, if busting the union can be done completely independently of any action rectifying the budget crisis, it would seem not to have much to do with that crisis—either in its creation or in its remedy.  If Wisconsin is no closer to shrinking its budget shortfall for the next fiscal year now than it was before the union busting bill was passed, other than busting the union, what purpose did that bill serve?

            Actually, as I’ve been re-reading this blog, I think its central premise may be wrong.  You actually could write a book about the Wisconsin Affair.  The story lends itself beautifully to farce, and if the writer has even a touch of a mean streak, it could easily turn it into satire.

              

carpe diem for the GOP

            In my last blog, I raised the question of what is magic about the 100 billion dollar figure Tea Party Republicans compelled their establishment Republican cousins to insist be cut from the current year’s budget.  I would still love to hear an answer to that question that had any basis in sound economic or political policy.

            What I didn’t do in that blog was look very hard at the specific things the Republicans would do in order to reach that magic number.  Thought perhaps we could do that now.

            First, and not surprisingly, there are several things the Republican bill doesn’t do.  It doesn’t propose reducing the budget deficit by raising revenue.  There is nothing in the bill that would force corporations to actually pay the corporate tax rate; nor is there anything that would force any individual—even the wealthiest 1% of us—to up their ante.  The Warren Buffett’s of the country—as he once famously pointed out—will continue to pay a lower percentage of their income than their secretaries.

            The defense industry will not suffer.  Spending for the military is nearly sacrosanct in the Republican bill.  The only exception of note is the cancellation of the “second engine” program for the Air Force’s newest—and already unnecessary—fighter plane.

            Agribusiness, particularly ethanol manufacturers and suppliers, won’t be asked to help our with deficit reduction.  Their huge subsidies will remain virtually unchanged.

            Likewise, the health insurance industry gets a pass.  The absurd subsidies to insurers handed out by Bush’s Medicare Part D program will continue apace.  That of course is a boon to Big Pharma as well, as is the fact that the bill passes on the opportunity to allow Medicare to bargain directly with pill makers, which could reduce Medicare’s outlay on drugs by as much as half.

            If you’re beginning to see a pattern here—that no sacrifice will be asked of those portions of the economy that traditionally bankroll the Republican party—congratulate yourself for not needing glasses.

            So where is that 100 billion dollars in cuts going to come from?  Equally unsurprisingly, from what conservative pundits are fond of snarkily describing as the “low hanging fruit.”  Such as?

            How about the Corporation for Public Broadcasting?  Republicans have been after it for almost its entire existence, objecting primarily to what the party sees as public radio’s “leftist” agenda.  One has to keep in mind of course that to the David Koch’s and Adolph Coors’ of the world, leftist is defined as anything west of Attila the Hun.  Never mind that probably 85% of public radio’s broadcast schedule consists of music for those of us not infatuated with Justin Bieber or Lady Gaga, and such clearly insidious programs as What Do You Know or Prairie Home Companion.  There is that hour of news in the morning and again in the afternoon where the choice of stories doesn’t pass muster with Rush or Sean or Glenn.

            What would shutting down the Corporation for Public Broadcasting accomplish?  Well, it would save a few hundred million—hardly a drop in the bucket much less a drop in the ocean that is the 1.3 trillion dollar deficit—and hey, you have to start somewhere.  It would also throw a few thousand people out of work, but since the Republicans see no correlation between unemployment and government budget shortfalls, that’s nothing to worry about.

            Then there’s Planned Parenthood, another long-standing target of conservative/Republican animosity.  Its sin of course is that, in addition to providing testing for breast, cervical and testicular cancer, pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease, and menopause,  it also provides pregnancy counseling, comprehensive sex education, birth control counseling and, gasp, abortion counseling.  This last, incidentally, accounts for roughly 3% of visits to Planned Parenthood clinics.

            What will cutting off funding for Planned Parenthood accomplish?  Well, it probably won’t make the organization go away—government money only accounts for about a third of its operating budget.  What it will do is reduce the availability of its services, probably by more than one third.  And though it’s impossible to predict exact numbers, that cutback in services will unquestionably lead to more instances where breast cancer, for example, is not discovered until it’s already in an advanced stage—meaning more Medicaid and Medicare money will be needed to treat it; it will certainly lead to more teen pregnancies with all the attendant increases in both medical and social welfare costs that entails; and it will lead to more abortions, which the right so desperately wishes to eliminate.  Perhaps more problematic, it wmight well lead to more abortions done in back rooms with coat hangers.

            I don’t have access to the numbers that would allow a reasonable projection as to how much it will cost to severely restrict Planned Parenthood services, but the government’s 2008 contribution to the program was 349.6 million, so even if none of the costs listed above are factored in, cutting Planned Parenthood funding is roughly akin to removing a bucket full of  sand from the Mojave desert.

            Full disclosure before I go further: I spent most of my adult life working in the arts.  Not a surprise then that I zeroed in quickly on the Republican plan to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts.  Again, Republican antipathy towards the NEA (the arts in general, one might argue) has a long history.  One of Ronald Reagan’s first policy initiatives in 1981 was to eliminate the agency.  In 1994, Newt Gingrich led another attack.

            So what are we talking about here?  The current year budget for the NEA is 155 million dollars.  President Obama’s proposed (not passed) 2011 budget called for increasing that to 161 million, so what we aren’t talking about is huge money.

            The majority of the NEA’s budget goes to state arts commissions in the form of block grants.  Each state then uses that money to support its own local arts organizations—everything from library programs to art museums to what might be called indigenous music, dance and theatre companies.  What’s important to note here is that Republican opposition to the NEA has mostly been based on religio/cultural grounds.  The litmus test for Republicans and religious conservatives has been that no art or artists whose work can’t be read, displayed or performed in a church should be supported.  What Republicans have consistently ignored is that 90% of the decisions about where and on what NEA money should be spent are made at the state level.

            Be that as it may, what would cutting NEA funding do? As with Planned Parenthood and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, what it wouldn’t do is save enough money to talk about.  What it would do is significantly impact, in an adverse way, library programs, museum programs, and community based arts outreach programs.  More ominously, it would devastate regional theatre, dance and music companies which depend heavily on government grants for their existence.

            Kind of an interesting side note here.  The current NEA budget is just about exactly the same as the budget for the Canada Council on the Arts—despite the fact that Canada has a population roughly one tenth the size of America’s.

            Lest you get the impression I’m only singling out the social/cultural programs being cut by the Republicans, please recall that in my last blog I noted their intention to virtually eliminate all the mortgage assistance programs, the effect of which will be at least 100,000 foreclosures this year that could have been avoided.

            We could also mention other job-killing—and potentially, future killing—cuts.  The Rebublican budget for example would cut the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy—which is designed to provide seed funding for the most innovative and transformative alternative energy projects—by 75%, essentially shutting it down.  The Office of Science, which funds early-stage energy innovation, would be cut by 20%.  The Office of Nuclear Energy, which devoted 41% of its budget to energy innovation projects, would be cut by 23%.  Lost as a result of those cuts will be not only all the jobs associated with both the research and manufacturing aspects of the various projects, but any edge in the future of energy generation the country might have gained from them.  How much would be saved?  Less than 3 billion. 

            And this doesn’t even touch on the cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Labor Relations Board, the Occupational Health and Safety Administration and virtually every other regulatory agency tasked with protecting workers and consumers from corporations.  What jumps off the page of the Republican budget proposal is the party’s gleeful seizing of the legitimate problem of a huge federal budget deficit to gut every program it has historically opposed.  The effect of many of these cuts on reducing the deficit will be largely offset by increased costs in other government programs, and by major loss of tax revenue due to increased unemployment and shrinking economic growth.

            Here’s the bottom line.  The indiscriminate cutting of programs entirely within the “discretionary spending” portion of the federal budget that Republicans propose, according to a Moody’s analysis, will eliminate 700,000 jobs from the private sector.  A similar, or greater number of job losses are estimated in the public sector.  A Goldman Sachs analyis of the Republican proposed budget says it will shave two full points off of economic growth for 2011.  Since growth has been projected at only 2.7%, the Republican proposal would result in essentially a flat economy—and a double-dip into recession.

            And all for what?  So the most knuckle-dragging elements of the Republican base can pat itself on the back for “getting government’s hands out of my pocket.”  What these folks don’t seem to realize is that they’re making sure most of us won’t have anything in our pockets for the government to take. 

            

puff, the magic number

            The Republican party in the House of Representatives, goaded on by its largely Tea Party freshman class, made clear two weeks ago that nothing short of a 100 billion dollar cut in the CURRENT federal budget would satisfy it. 

            A couple of blogs ago, I asked the question, where did that figure come from? What careful, meticulous, deeply researched economic analysis led the GOP to conclude that 100 billion dollars was the magic number that would lead to . . . what?  A stronger economy?  Less unemployment?  Better health care?  More reliable infrastructure?  Better education results? More energy independence?  Or simply a sated base.

            Of course, I didn’t expect my blog to elicit an answer from conservative land, but I do find it curious that, far as I can tell, I’m the only one who has asked that question, and, maybe more to the point, the only one who seems to be concerned that there is no evidence such a study ever occurred.

            Anyone with one eye and half sense should be able to figure out that cutting 100 billion dollars out of a budget that is already one-third spent can’t be done without simply eliminating, immediately, programs already in place.  We aren’t talking here about what is or is not going to be in the fiscal 2012 budget.  We’re talking about what’s currently in the fiscal 2011 budget.  Actually, since we don’t have a fiscal 2011 budget yet—thank you spineless Democrats—we’re really talking about what was in the fiscal 2010 budget that has been carried over to this year.

            But that’s really sort of a moot point.  The Republicans want to take a 100 billion dollar bite out of an existing budget—and want to do it without providing any rationale for what makes 100 billion the right number.  Is it, for example, the minimum amount that must be cut to make this year’s interest payment on the exiting debt?  Is it the minimum amount that must be cut to make a targeted deficit reduction number for this year—say 3%.  If so, is there a reason why 3% is the optimal number?  Or 5%?  Or whatever percent is selected?

           What if the ideal number were actually, say, 50 billion?  I'm not saying it is, but what if?  Is it possible we are about to eliminate twice as many federal programs as were actually necessary?  That would certainly seem a shame. 

            On the other hand, what if the ideal number were, say, 200 billion?   That would mean the Republicans are really about to blow it because they're only going to cut half as many programs as they should.  Damn!  Wouldn't that be a kick in the butt?

            My point is, the Republicans are demanding the elimination, or near elimination, of literally hundreds of federal programs in order to meet a deficit reduction figure they appear to have pulled out of thin air.  I’m willing to concede that, long-term, a federal debt approaching 100% of GDP is a problem, but if your approach to solving that problem is to carpet bomb existing programs that provide the people working in them with paychecks and the means to support their families, and provide the people served by those programs with, in many cases, the means simply to get by, shouldn’t your most obvious responsibility be to show the country why the figure you have selected is the right one?

            I’ve racked my brain trying to figure out why the GOP hasn’t done this, and the only reason I can come up with is that it can’t justify that figure because this is a policy that has no goal other than allowing its initiators to say they cut 100 billion dollars.

            One would hope of course that on any fiscal policy advanced by a major party, the party would be anxious to tell us how implementing that policy is going to make the country stronger, its future brighter.  But, in this case, that doesn’t seem to be the goal.

            To the contrary, this seems to be a policy the most likely result of which will be short term misery for the thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, it will throw out of work, not to mention an immediate stagnation in the overall economy that will actually push long term recovery further into long term.

            I have, over the past 12 months or so, been more than a little disappointed with Barack Obama and with the Democratic party generally.  It’s one thing for the Republican party to be cowed by the 10% of this country (according to the most recent ratings figures) that watches Fox noise; that after all is the second most important element of its base (corporate and wealthy America being the most important).  It’s quite another for those same  fringes to co-opt the Democratic party as well, but that is clearly what has happened.

            That said, however, that Obama and the Democrats do at least appear to be listening to the overwhelming majority of  economists who have lately been shouting from every rooftop they can mount that while the budget deficit is A problem, it is not THE problem of our time.  While they nearly all agree that budget deficits are not a good thing, they also agree the most prudent approach right now is to focus on constraining, not eliminating, deficit growth, while at the same time providing the immediate  short term investment needed to make long-term economic growth happen.

            And while it’s certainly possible to quibble, even express disgust, over some elements of the budget Obama has proposed, it does reflect what economic logic and good sense says must be SPENT to keep the economy growing—which, in the long term, is not only the best way to reduce deficits but the ONLY way to do so—while at the same time making cuts where they make economic (as opposed  to political) sense, and, most important, raising revenue where that can be done without slowing economic growth.

            What prompted this blog was a piece in the New York Time detailing four foreclosure-adjustment programs that are targeted for elimination by the bill passed by the Republican House.  Taken all together, the cost of these four programs  (Home Affordable Modification Program, Neighborhood Stabilization Program, Emergency Homeowners Loan Prorgram and F.H.A Short Refinance Programs) is less than 5 billion dollars—truly a drop in the deficit reduction bucket.  Eliminating them however would result, by conservative estimates, in more than 100,000 additional foreclosures in the next 6 months.

           

            That’s just an abstract number on this page, but in the lives of the people currently living in those homes, it’s a very ugly reality.  And 100,000 additional foreclosures means perhaps a half million people without a roof over their heads who, with a minimal amount of help, could have continued making mortgage payments and continued living indoors. 

            What is perverse here is that, while all those programs could probably work better or at least more efficiently, the fact is they are all working.  None of them are programs where tax-payer money is simply being flushed down a dark hole.   What purpose is served by eliminating them?  Absolutely none, save the fact that doing so brought the Republicans 5 billion dollars closer to their magic number.

            Everyone who follows politics knows that The Nation is perhaps the country’s most unapologetically liberal magazine.  That said, its most recent issue contains an article about what is widely being called a “liberal Tea Party” movement in England.  The movement has a number of grievances over the new British government;s draconian budget slashing, but its major focus is on exposing and doing economic damage to large British corporations that have used tax havens and various accounting dodges to pay in some cases zero tax on multibillion dollar bottom lines. (sound familiar?)

            Their basic position is that if England’s wealthiest individuals and businesses were paying the taxes they rightfully owe, the country’s budget deficit would be much, much lower and far fewer cuts would be needed to eliminate it.  (You can read the article by going to thenation.com and linking to the Feb. 21, 2011 issue—it’s written by Johan Hari)  Since Democrats in Washington and most of the media seem unwilling to demand an answer to the question I’ve raised here, perhaps we should all start thinking about learning from our British cousins and start making it harder for the Republicans to set a fictional magic number as a way to justify eliminating the few protections middle and lower class Americans still have, protections the Republican party has had targeted for at least 40 years.

a conservative perfect storm

            When Ronald Reagan assumed the Presidency in 1981 the GOP had control of the executive branch of government and one half (the Senate) of the legislative branch.  They would maintain that control over the next 6 years, finally losing control of the Senate in 1986.

            During that time, not so much at the behest of Reagan but under his benign neglect, the party began putting into place a two-pronged strategy aimed at remaking the landscape of America into, essentially, the “Gilded Age” revisited.  If that phrase isn’t familiar to you, it refers to the years roughly from 1880-1920 when everything in America was about preserving whatever best served industry and insuring that industry’s leaders gained and maintained incredible wealth.  It was the age of the Astors, the Vanderbilts, the Rockefellers—that illustrious crowd.  Think Jay Gatsby.

            One prong of the Republican strategy was to remove as many constraints on unrestricted industrial growth as possible.  Corporate tax rates were lowered, but probably more importantly, an incredible array of tax loopholes—which didn’t have to be enacted by Congress or debated publically—were written into the tax code to make it easier for corporations to avoid the tax liabilities that remained. 

            That same philosophy was applied to individual tax rates.  The marginal tax rate on the wealthiest went from 70% to 36%.  Middle class tax rates were reduced as well, but not by anything near the same percentage.  Notably, when it became clear even to Reagan that the promised “trickle-down”  wasn’t happening, the middle class tax rates went back up.  The top rates did not.

            The second prong was an idea first promulgated in the 1930’s by far-right advocacy groups and reinvigorated in the ‘80’s under the leadership of Jack Abramoff and Grover Norquist, who were then the President and CEO of College Republicans.  The idea was to “defund” the left, that is, to find ways of either denying funding up front to organizations or persons who supported liberal agendas, or to drain their money supplies on the back end by involving them in costly, if frivolous, legal actions.

            There is a lengthy chapter in Thomas Frank’s book, “The Wrecking Crew,” devoted to the specific actions taken by College Republicans and other conservative groups to accomplish this end.  Suffice it here to say that it was, in the ‘80’s, and has continued to be in all the decades since an extremely effective and increasingly popular far right tool.

            In 1981, the Heritage Foundation published a treatise called Mandate for Leadership which laid down over 2000 policy recommendations for the Reagan administration.  Among them was this argument for defunding the left: “Unless conservatives can break the moral monopoly still enjoyed by persons indifferent to the well-being of the American private sector and by proponents of expanded government power, an effort to reform domestic policies is likely to reduced to the level of tinkering.”

            In 1984, an organization called the Capital Research Center was founded by Willa Johnson, a former Reagan administration staffer.  It was funded by the Richard Mellon Scaife, Adolph Coors and Joseph Olin foundations (the unholy trinity of far-right activism).  Its principle objective was to chip away at the funding of any organization it deemed liberal.

            Defunding the left and feathering industrial nests took a bit of a back seat between 1986 and 1994 when the Republicans lost control of both houses of Congress, but with the Gingrich revolution of 1994, when the GOP reclaimed both houses, both strategies returned with a vengeance.  Grover Norquist rose from the ashes to which he had been consigned and, as president of Americans for Tax Reform, led a full-out assault on the left, declaring in an essay appropriately entitled “Buying a Movement,” "We will hunt [liberal groups] down one by one and extinguish their funding sources.”

            The first prong was equally re-activated, primarily in the welter of deregulation that Bill Clinton didn’t propose, but seldom opposed.  That welter would of course become a deluge when George W. Bush took over in 2002.

            What’s the point of this history?  Simply this.  What we are seeing in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and other places under Republican governance is the perfect storm Abramoff, Norquist and their fellow conservative strategists dreamed of in the 1980’s.

            The Republican party rode to power in Washington and in a frightening number of states in 2010 on a wave created by a horrible economy, a wildly unpopular Speaker of the House, a highly successful spin campaign that painted an economic stimulus program that kept the economy from plunging from Great Recession to Great Depression and a health care law that—while clearly imperfect—did make health care available to nearly everyone and did not include death panels, and the rabid frothings of a far-right fringe called the Tea Party whose influence, thanks largely to Fox, was greatly in excess of its numbers.

            What we have seen since then, on both the state and federal level, is a concerted effort to remove what protections remain for the middle and lower classes, to remove as well what regulations remain to constrain the rapacity of big business and to insure that liberal policies and ideas are buried as deeply as possible.

            Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s current proposal to eliminate (essentially) the right of public employee unions to engage in collective bargaining has nothing to do with fixing Wisconsin’s budget shortfall.  The unions agreed up front to the exact concessions he initially asked for.  Effectively dismantling the union does nothing for the current budget problem, but it does insure that Walker would never again have to bargain over state employee salaries, working conditions, health care or pensions.  It also guarantees that he never again would have to worry about a union openly opposing his election, which all the public employees unions save two did in the last election.  Interestingly, the two that did not oppose him—police and firefighters—have been exempted from his proposal.

            This is defunding the left in a way that must have Norquist dancing in the streets.  It certainly has Fox ebullient.  But what we are seeing here is not just action on the defunding the left prong of conservative strategy.  Protecting, indeed enlarging, corporate interests is hard at work here too. 

            Wisconsin’s projected budget shortfall for the coming fiscal year is 137 million dollars.  Included in Walker’s current proposal are tax breaks and reductions for business totaling 117 million dollars.  In other words, over 80% of the state’s projected budget shortfall is the result of corporate tax cuts.   Leave Wisconsin’s current tax code as is, and all but 20 million of the deficit disappears.

            Nor is this all.  Buried in Walker’s current proposal is a clause that will allow him to sell any state owned business or agency to the private sector without soliciting bids and with nothing to prevent him from accepting a bid of say, one dollar.  In other words, Walker (or his successors) could decide that maintaining a state police force is too much government and simply sell it, for whatever price he wants, to a private company.  There’s nothing in his proposal in fact that would even require the company to which he sold it to have any background or experience in security.

            Lest anyone think, “Oh well, this might not be so bad. Private industry can probably be much more efficient,” let me remind you of the debacle we have recently been through with private contractors in Iraq.  Literally hundreds of billions of dollars squandered there with no apparent results except the significant enriching of companies like Haliburton and Blackwater.

            Recent polls have indicated that America opposes what Walker is trying to do to his state’s unions by nearly two to one (60% to 33% in the latest New York Times/CBS News poll).  Perhaps more significantly, the country opposes (56% to 37%) cutting the pay or benefits of public employees to reduce deficits.  And despite the efforts of virtually every Republican governor and an unending chorus from Fox aimed at painting public employee salaries and benefits as excessive, 61% of Americans consider them either “about right” or “too low” for what they do.

            Those numbers are of no consequence to the true believers in Republican controlled statehouses.  The most rabid among them, and Scott Walker would have to be included in that group, see this as the golden moment when the ideal they have been pursing for three decades can finally come to fruition.

            There is a part of me that says, let it be.  These people are in a position to strip the middle class of what little it has left because the middle class voted them in.  Be careful what you wish for comes to mind.

            There is another part of me that longs for someone in a position to do so—the President comes to mind—to rise up and call this conservative activism out, spell out in terms even the dullest among us can understand how grotesquely these policies will widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots, and perhaps even make clear how defunding “liberal” agendas like education, science, infrastructure, energy conservation, etc. is insuring a future that not even the wealthiest among us will want to endure.

            Of course, the wealthiest will have the option of relocating to an island with great beaches.  The rest, of us, not so much.

maybe it's just me

            For as long as I can remember, people have regarded me as at least reasonably bright.  I have a couple of graduate degrees, not that alphabet soup after your name means you can pour pee out of a boot, but still, I have managed some academic achievement.

            Most folks who know me also think I’m a little better rounded than just book smart.  Most think I’m fairly clear-eyed and common-sensical and have at least a modicum of ability to analyze situations in a cogent way.

            I get the political philosophy that says government these days is too big, that it has its hands, so to speak, in too many apple pies.  To an extent, I even agree with that philosophy.

            I get that political conservatism is  dictionary-defined as a movement that elevates the importance of “traditional values” and is systemically resistant to change.  My personal take is that traditional values are too often those that grew out of and function bestl in societal conditions that no longer exist and that intelligent conservatism should, like the rest of us, be looking for values based on and consonant with “traditional values” that are fine tuned for the modern world.  As for change, my take agrees with the bromide that change is the only constant and resistance to it is both counterproductive and ultimately futile.

            I’m willing to debate my decidedly liberal take with any conservative who wishes to disagree with me and I’m willing to concede that there would almost certainly be areas in that debate where I would lose.  But that is assuming the debate was a rational one, a debate that required every hypothesis to be supported by fact, that took nothing on faith, and that operated on the assumption that the only conclusions worth reaching are those supported by facts and logic—a debate, in other words that does not proceed from a made-up-mind that facts will only confuse.

            And perhaps it is the dimness of mind that comes with age, but since about last September it has become harder and harder for me to find even a modest degree of logic, common sense, or anything that would remotely pass for actionable evidence in much of  this country’s politics. Specifically, I cannot for the life of me figure out what Tea Bag politicians are thinking with the policy suggestions they come up with.  More than that, I can’t figure out what the hell people who vote for them are thinking.

            Exhibit A: we are presently trying (with only moderate success) to wind down a war we foolishly started in Iraq, a war that has cost us innumerable lives and several trillion dollars.  At the same time, we are waging a war in Afghanistan for reasons that are at least a good subject for honest debate that has also cost us many, many lives and trillions of dollars.

            Exhibit B: we currently are a nation with over 9% of its working age population not working.  Economists and demographers tell us that number may be too low by as much as half because we don’t have a way to accurately count the people who aren’t counted as unemployed because they’ve stopped looking for work.  Whatever the actual figure is, a good number of the unemployed have been that way for more than 6 months.

            Exhibit C: since 1983, an unbelievable 43% of the new financial wealth created in this country accrued to the wealthiest 1% of its citizens and a whopping 94% of that wealth landed in the bank accounts of the wealthiest 20%.  Put another way, just 6% of the new financial wealth created in this country since the Reagan years has found its way to 80% of the population.  But that’s in raw dollars, what about real income (i.e. disposable income)?  The bottom 80% do fare a little better there—almost 13% of real income growth has gone their way.  Whoopee.  (No nation, by the way, has ever survived with income inequality numbers like ours.  We are currently in the same category as third world unstable nations like Uruguay or Cameroon.)

            Exhibit D: the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2009 conducted a comprehensive survery of America’s infrastructure (defined as Aviation, Dams, Drinking and Waste Water, Energy, Hazardous and Solid Waste, Inland Waterways, Levees, Public Parks and Recreation, Rail, Roads and Bridges, Schools and Transit) an gave it a grade of D.  Moreover, it concluded that measuring projected spending over the next five years on infrastructure against actual cost of bringing it to a grade of C resulted in a spending shortfall of 1.17 trillion dollars.

            Exhibit E: the most expensive health care system in the world lives right here in the U.S. of A.  The U.S. spends more than twice as much (almost three times as much) per capita on health care than Switzerland—and the Swiss are our closest competitors. As a percentage of Gross Domestic Product, health care in this country weighs in at over 15%.  Most of the rest of the first world countries hold the cost under 10%.  As a final kick in the face, we lead the developed world in infant mortality rates—by a huge margin, and struggle in no better than 5^th in life expectancy.

            And I haven’t even touch Education, Social Security, Green Energy, Defense or similar major problems that need addressing.  What’s my point?  If you listen to the yowls coming from the House of Representatives and virtually all of the conservative media outlets, the only two problems we have right now is a federal budget deficit and taxes that are too high.  Slash the budget deficit, and—wrap your mind around this one, mine can’t get there—slash that deficit while cutting taxes at the same time, and all will be well.

            But OK, assume for a moment that every conservative and every Tea Bagger has overdosed on Milton Friedman and genuinely believes trickle down economics and voodoo economics aren’t the same thing.  Explain to me please how cutting programs that employ people (Americorp, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, education funding, programs like that) won’t increase unemployment and thereby lower tax revenues and thereby make even more cuts necessary if we are going to reduce that devilish budget deficit.

            Explain to me how simply bludgeoning 61 billion dollars out of the remainder of this fiscal year’s budget without touching Medicare or Medicaid and giving only a glancing blow to Defense—taking away school lunches, denying medical care to the underprivileged, eliminating Pell Grants, doing away with the National Endowment for the Arts, virtually eliminating funding for community action programs, and so on and so on—how does that help the country?  It doesn’t put people back to work.  Quite the opposite.  What the Tea Bag Republican party in the House just passed was a budget recommendation that, just in the public sector, would eliminate 650,000 jobs.  Add in the private sector jobs that would be eliminated by the loss of public sector jobs and the figure reaches a million.  “So be it,” says John Boehner.  Worse,  it doesn’t do a thing to deal with Exhibits A through E.  All it does, so far as my limited lights can discern, is slash the funding for 12% of the federal budget by about 40%.

            I hope the answer is no, but I have to ask the question.  Is fulfilling the promise they pulled out of their ass during the election season—cutting 1 billion dollars immediately from the federal budget—is that really better for the country than working with moderate Republicans (I’m convinced they still exist) and Democrats to fine tune (not repeal) health care reform, reduce income inequality, fix infrastructure, pay for and end two wars, and create programs that will put people back to work?

            I’m not inclined to say that the entire Republican freshman House class is stupid, nor I suppose am I saying the people who voted for them are stupid,  but so far both groups are making it easy to argue that case.  Either that, or as I’ve suggested before, the politicians are simply callous and cynical and the voters are so caught up in ideology they can't see past their nose.  Cutting every program that protects or in some way serves the little guy is easy when you’re not one of the little guys and either have no brain or no sense of human decency.  If this were just a Dickensian thing, perhaps it wouldn’t matter that much.  But by focusing entirely on eliminating programs that help the middle and lower classes, and ignoring entirely anything that might actually make the country better, conservatives and Tea Baggers are inviting a future that no American wants to see, or thought they ever would.