on thinking

            Why is it that otherwise reasonable people so frequently hold tightly to completely unreasonable conclusions on certain subjects?  Why, for example, are there Ph.D.’s who are not entirely certain Barack Obama was born in Hawaii?  Why are there doctors and lawyers and CEO’s who are fairly certain the twin towers were brought down by the CIA?  Why are there teachers of science who consider evolution apostasy?

            Why are there otherwise sober, law-abiding citizens who secretly horde weapons and ammunition in preparation for the day they have to defend themselves against U.S. Army units sent by the government to take their weapons and property from them? Why are there multitudes of presumably intelligent parents who refuse to have their kids vaccinated against childhood diseases?

            Fortunately, we have modern psychology to explain these conundrums to us.  The answer, it turns out, lies in our proclivity for engaging in what the shrinks call “motivational reasoning,”  which, like so many terms psychology gives us, chooses its words poorly.  “Motivational reasoning,” it turns out, isn’t really reasoning at all.  The more appropriate word choice would be “rationalization.” 

            The word “reasoning” infers a process whereby one obtains facts, processes them, verifies them, tests them in a real world environment where possible, then synthesizes from them a conclusion blind to everything except what the facts support.  It is, in other words, an inductive process, one in which a study of particular instances leads to a general law or conclusion.

            “Motivational reasoning” involves the diametric opposite of that process.  It involves starting with a preferred conclusion and seeking facts that will support it.  It is, in essence, a deductive process, which does not so much involve reasoning as rationalizing, finding a way to justify a conclusion one has already drawn.

            On the subject of the President’s birth, for example, we now have as part of the public record every legal or para-legal document that can exist, all saying he was born in Hawaii.  There is the Certificate of Live Birth, the co-called Long Form Birth Certificate, and the birth announcement that appeared in a Hawaiian newspaper.  There are also hospital records from the hospital identified on all those documents as the place in which Obama was born, indicating that indeed a male baby was born to his mother in that hospital.

            Reason would suggest that, on the basis of the facts, the person now holding the office of President of the United States was indeed born in Hawaii.  The “birthers,” however, motivationally reasoned for a long time that since Obama refused to produce the Long Form Birth Certificate, it was safe to conclude he wasn’t born in Hawaii.  When he did produce that document, it introduced a fact not consonant with their preferred conclusion, so they motivationally reasoned instead that the document was a forgery, part of the vast, cabalistic conspiracy that promoted Obama to office in the first place.  They deduced a fact, in other words, to support their preferred conclusion.

            It’s easy to ridicule the birthers and the climate deniers and the left wing conspiracy believers, but in truth we should do so with some trepidation.  Much as we don’t want to hear this, all of us engage in “motivational reasoning” from time to time, and indeed, our ability to do so is part of what keeps us sane.  

            We all of us like to believe that when we think about something, we do so with our brains alone and produce conclusions that are therefore completely rational, logical and objective.  That, however, is a warm and fuzzy fiction.  Some 2500 years ago, Aristotle pointed out that thoughts are influenced by feelings and that very often feelings are generated by thoughts.  If I’m already in a bad mood, discovering that my car won’t start may well become clear evidence the world is out to get me.  If I’m in a good mood when my car refuses to start, it may become an excuse to call my boss and say I can’t get to work that day.

            On the other side of the coin, if something triggers in me the thought of a camouflaged yahoo sitting in a deer stand 30 feet in the air with a high-powered rifle and a telescopic sight engaging in the “sport” of waiting for Bambi to amble innocently into range, angry feelings will well up immediately.

            The point is that much of what we think is a function of how we feel, and much of what we feel is a function of how we think.  And motivational reasoning doesn’t just happen in regard to fringe element things like the ones I’ve mentioned so far.  For example, there is no reasonable way to deny that Paul Ryan’s plan for Medicare would end “Medicate as we know it.”  Medicare as we know it is a plan where the government automatically pays about 80% of any medical bill a senior citizen accrues.  Ryan’s plan would involve the government giving seniors a subsidy with which to buy private insurance, which would then pay some percentage of their medical bills.  Two very different processes.

            Here’s where motivational reasoning comes in.  A conservative will look at that fact and see that individuals are being required to take greater responsibility for themselves and that the total cost to government is lowered.  Since those square perfectly with two important pre-disposed conclusions the conservative holds sacred, he feels good about the Ryan plan, and will hold up those two "facts" as justification for that.  A rationalization.

            A liberal looks at the same fact and sees that  private insurers will benefit greatly and seniors will be far less certain of adequate health care.  Since those square perfectly with two pre-disposed bad feelings the liberal has about anything conservative, he will conclude the Ryan plan is a bad one, and hold up his feeling induced thoughts as justification.  Another rationalization.

            Notice that in both cases, all the facts are in fact facts.  Notice as well that both the liberal and the conservative are trumpeting the facts that support their already formed conclusion or feeling, and somehow missing—or managing to reject—the ones that don’t support that conclusion or feeling.

            We’ve all heard the phrase, “my mind is made up, don’t confuse me with facts.”  It’s a phrase we always manage to convince ourselves (more motivational reasoning) applies beautifully to the way other people act but not at all to ourselves.  In point of fact, though it is probably true that some among us are more inclined to not be confused by facts than others, dismissal of inconvenient truths is something we all engage in.

            What has perhaps made motivational reasoning such an au currant topic in psychology today is that NOT engaging in it may be getting harder and harder to do.  What inclines us to engage in motivational reasoning—again, rationalization really—rather than purely cognitive reasoning is to a large extent the degree to which feelings derived from prejudices—ethnic, religious, political, economic, social, cultural, whatever the source—inform our beliefs.  And there has been, over the past 50 or 60 years, a sea change in the birth and nurturing of prejudices—or at least it seems that way from the anecdotal perspective of someone who has lived through the past 50 or 60 years.

            Until 1980, when Ted Turner launched CNN as a 24 hour news channel, national and international news were things most Americans received on TV once a day, around dinner time, and not really at all on the weekends.  Newspapers published a morning edition, and in most urban areas, an evening edition—which similarly rarely appeared on the weekends.  There was no internet, at least not in most people’s homes, let alone their telephones.

            There was not, in other words, the ominipresence of “information” with which we are bombarded now.  Until 1980, TV news came from NBC, CBS or ABC.  Now, by my count, there are something like 18 television channels (on my cable system) broadcasting some form of “news.”  And there’s the internet, where “news” comes constantly from sources that are not always even findable, much less reliable.  And talk radio.  I won’t even go there.

            Just as important, maybe more so, until the ‘80’s, the gold standard for any news organization, broadcast or print, was dissemination of verifiable information without comment or interpretation.  Just the facts, ma’am, as a popular ‘50’s TV show often said. Newspapers had their editorial pages, of course, and TV had its “commentary” shows, but even there, great care was taken not to print or broadcast any opinion that could not be thoroughly supported by facts.  Even CNN, in its early days, was more of a headline deliverer than a headline explainer.

            That approach to journalism is now so old-school as to seem almost quaint.  Today, every newspaper is expected to have a “slant,” (the New York Times is liberal, the New York Post is conservative), and while the broadcast networks have remained relatively objective in their news reporting (Fox News excepted), every cable channel has a clear philosophy.  As of course, does every internet site.  If you want a liberal spin, go to huffingtonpost.com.  If you’re conservative, try drudgereport.com. 

            The point is that prejudices, biases, pre-conceived conclusions, even bigotries, are much easier to come by and much easier to nourish than they ever were before.  Hence, motivational reasoning is a much bigger part of what all of us do every day.

            I hear pundits and ordinary people alike grouse every day about the “hyper-partisanship” that dominates our politics.  I have a solution.  Let’s turn the clock back to 1980, shut down all cable news channels, all talk radio, all internet sites with any political, social, religious, etc. content, and require that nothing appear in print or broadcast that can’t be independently verified by at least three sources.  That would probably give many of us a lot of holes to fill in our day, but it might also force us to start seeing information in its broadest rather than narrowest context and make us more willing to let facts persuade us as to truth and less willing to go cherry picking for facts that support the truth we like best.

            

Path to Prosperity?

            A couple weeks ago, the GOP rolled out its 2012 budget proposal, Paul Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity,” which did a huge favor for the Democratic Party and the increasingly diminishing number of Americans to whom facts and logic are things to be admired, not sneered at and twisted.  It put in plain black and white what the Republicans have advocated in oblique ways for 30 years—the party’s desire to see this country become a plutocracy where big money, whether corporate or individual, rules the day.

            Specifically, the GOP proposes to reduce the budget deficit dramatically by cutting 4.3 trillion dollars in spending over the next ten years.  Never mind that the actual budget deficit reduction would be more on the order of 1 billion dollars when you factor in the 4.2 trillion dollars in tax cuts—well over 90% of which would go to wealthy individuals and corporations—over the same period.

            The kicker is that fully 2/3 of the spending cuts come from programs aimed at ordinary Americans.  Those programs range from education to assistance for the poor to infrastructure renewal to job training to regulatory agencies to health care.  Among the things not cut are defense spending or corporate welfare—though, to be fair, the Ryan budget does cut ethanol subsidies.

            Not surprisingly, since virtually every Republican in Congress signed Grover Norquist’s pledge to never raise taxes, obvious deficit reduction opportunities like income taxes on the wealthy, estate taxes, capital gains taxes and corporate taxes are not anywhere to be found in the Path to Prosperity.

            Nowhere however is the disparity between the sacrifice Ryan’s budget demands from the less fortunate and what it demands from the most fortunate more apparent than in the area of health care.  The Path to Prosperity takes dead aim at health care programs for Americans at both ends of the spectrum—children and senior citizens.

            Let’s look at the senior citizen aspect first.  Here the target is Medicare.  Amazingly, to me at least, when Ryan first presented his budget proposal, even normally left-leaning media like the Washington Post and the New York Times hailed it as a “courageous” action that finally put one of the bigger elephants in the room on the table.  I can only assume that the editorial boards of both papers reacted to the fact that the words “Medicare” and “overhaul” appeared in the same sentence, wrote their headlines on that basis, then actually read  what the overhaul would comprise.

            Beginning in 2022, Medicare under Ryan’s plan would stop being an entitlement paying defined benefits.  Instead, seniors would be given what the Path to Prosperity calls “premium support” with which they could purchase private insurance.  The Congressional Budget Office has already released figures showing that a 2022 retiree would face at least $6,400 more in out of pocket payments to acquire private insurance comparable to what Medicare presently offers.

            Who benefits from this proposal?  Clearly, the federal government will be paying way less for senior citizen medical care then it does now, so the federal budget enjoys a benefit.  Clearly also the medical insurance industry will benefit enormously.  2022 will be right near the peak of “baby boomer” retirement, so millions of people will be needing the coverage they now receive from Medicare. 

            Who won’t benefit however is just as clear.  Seniors in the middle and lower income brackets, who frequently have a difficult time handling what Medicare doesn’t pay now, will have the insurance industry’s hand even further in their pockets.  And while the Republican mantra is that insurance companies will be competing so hard for the new business that the cost of insurance will be held down, a reality check would perhaps be in order.  Keep in mind that the Path to Prosperity also calls for a total repeal of the Affordable Care Act—what Tea Partiers like to call Obamacare.

            That means that insurance companies would again be able to refuse coverage, or require grossly inflated premiums, co-payments or deductibles, for “pre-existing” conditions.  Find me a 65 year old who doesn’t have something a health insurer can call a pre-existing condition.  Repealing AFA would also mean insurance companies would again be allowed to raise premiums on anyone who has the temerity to get sick and file a claim.  And, if the claim gets too big, insurance companies would again be free to simply drop you.

            So, would insurance companies compete for all this new business?  Sure, but in the gentlemanly way they do now.  They would all set their premiums at a comfortable profit level for themselves—one which wouldn’t differ more than a dollar or two per month no matter what company you looked at.  They would then all find the same reasons to require your particular insurance policy to be more expensive than the base price. They would continue to pay less or require greater co-payments if you came down with appendicitis while on vacation and had to use an “out-of-network” emergency room to keep from dying.  They would continue, in other words, doing all the things they do now to maximize their bottom line.

            And since there is nothing in the Path to Prosperity to put the brakes on medical cost increases (in fact, there are a couple of things that take the brakes off), nor anything to protect consumers from predatory insurance industry practices, it is safe to assume that out of pocket expenditure for seniors will creep up a bit every year.

            At the other end of the spectrum, the Path to Prosperity would withdraw federal funding for the S-Chip program which provides children from low income families with access to basic medical care.  It would also cut back or eliminate programs that provide pre- and post-natal care for low income women, and most importantly, substantially reduce federal support of state Medicaid programs—which are primarily responsible for what minimal level of health care children and teens from low income families receive.

            When you focus on medical care, there are some really stark differences between the Path to Prosperity and what President Obama proposed in his budget speech.  Both plans trumpet large savings over time in medical care costs to the federal budget.  Interestingly, though hardly surprisingly (see my first paragraph), Ryan proposes using those savings exclusively to reduce the budget deficit.  In fact, those savings are the single biggest item in his proposal.  Granted, there is some vague language about using part of the savings to make Medicare more solvent, but since Ryan is basically calling for the shutting down of Medicare, its solvency becomes something of a moot question.

            The Democrats, on the other hand, propose using most of the savings the Affordable Care Act realizes from Medicare reform to pay for the cost of extending insurance to the 30-odd million people, most of them low income—who don’t have it.

            The President’s proposal also calls for the federal government to provide subsidies to assist seniors in dealing with the “doughnut hole” in Medicare Part D coverage.  The Path to Prosperity ignores that substantial hardship many seniors now face.

            Finally, the President’s speech advocated authorizing Medicare to negotiate directly with drug companies over the price of prescription medicine.  The Veterans’ Administration currently has that authority, and currently pays nearly 40% less for prescription drugs than Medicare is forced to pay.  Enabling Medicare to save 40% on what it pays for drugs would seem an obvious place for budget deficit hawks like Ryan to look for savings, but, strangely, he chose to ignore that one.  Perhaps the fact that Medicare’s savings would come out of Big Pharma’s profits had something to do with it.

            I’ve alluded several times in recent blogs to my growing sense that an ever enlarging segment of the American population is no longer capable of looking at the facts of Republican and Democratic positions on issues that clearly affect them, and determining which set of facts are most beneficial to themselves.   If you are in that top 5 or even top 10 percent of incomes, perhaps what happens to Medicare or S-Chip doesn’t matter.  If you’re anywhere lower on the income scale, what happens to those programs, and what happens with medical costs generally, should very much concern you. 

           

            And the facts with respect to medical coverage are, as one sign holder at a Ryan town hall in Wisconsin put it, that the Path to Prosperity is more like a Road to Ruin.

            

on ryan and rand

            In my last blog,  I wrote a speech for President Obama that was essentially designed to draw lines in the budgetary sand that could  establish Democrat controlled parameters for future budget debates.  Last Wednesday, the President ignored my speech and gave his own. Though the cheekiness of that offends me a bit, and though his speech neglected to draw several very important lines in the sand, it did at least establish a moderate (I wouldn’t go so far as to call it liberal) position to stand in stark contrast to the John Galt vision of America that Representative Paul Ryan introduced a bit earlier and the Republicans passed in the House shortly after the President’s speech.

            If the John Galt reference doesn’t resonate for you, he is the character at the center of Ayn Rand’s novel, Atlas Shrugged, who is essentially calling on America’s financial and corporate elite to go on strike—to withdraw their services and let the nation of moochers and laggards who have been living off what the genius of their betters produces fend for themselves. 

            The novel, which took Rand 12 years to complete, was published in 1957 to generally tepid reviews, but soon developed a cult following and is today held in much the same esteem by die-hard conservatives as the Bible.  Its premise is that great minds drive business, business drives the world, and anyone or anything that stands in the way of unfettered pursuit of profit is reactionary and needs to be eliminated.

            Not surprisingly, Rep. Ryan is an Ayn Rand acolyte who credits her books (The Fountainhead is her other major work, drumming the same beat as Atlas Shrugged) for getting him interested in entering politics.  He also reportedly requires his staff to read Atlas Shrugged.

            A few numbers are perhaps a good way to start looking at Ryan’s budget proposal.  When originally introduced, it claimed over 5 trillion dollars in cuts.  Once the most glaringly incorrect numbers were pointed out, the savings claim was reduced to 4.3 trillion dollars. 

            On the revenue side, Ryan proposes cuts to individual and corporate tax rates from 35% to 25%, elimination of estate tax, near elimination of capital gains tax and the closing of unspecified deduction loopholes.  Ryan didn’t do this math in his speech unveiling the proposal, but the Congressional Budget Office did, and the total comes to 4.2 trillion dollars. 

           

            So, the Ryan (Republican) budget would lower federal expenditures by 4.3 trillion dollars (though much of this is illusory, consisting of  “cutting” funds allocated years ago but never spent—including over 400 million dollars one agency had already volunteered to give back), but it would also lower federal revenues by 4.2 trillion dollars.  The net effect on the budget deficit?  About a billion dollars, or barely one percent of the federal budget.

            It’s also worth noting that the tax rate on individuals that Ryan wants to cut is the one that the wealthiest 5% of Americans exist in.  If you earn, say, 50,000 dollars/year, cutting the tax rate from 35% to 25% will give you a whopping one percent reduction in your taxes.  If you’re making 200,000 dollars/year, the savings is 10%.

            But, Ryan’s defenders are quick to point out, cutting taxes on corporations and the wealthy will actually produce more tax revenue than the current tax structure because more jobs will be created and the economy will grow. 

            Please!

            That is the same “voodoo economics” that Reagan and his minions trumpeted in 1981 when they hammered through a giant cut for the wealthy.  The economy promptly went into a swoon and 4 years later Reagan raised taxes. 

            We went through the same idiocy again under Bush I.  Taxes were cut at the start of his administration, and even though he challenged us to read his lips, they had to be raised again to prevent a recession.

            Never one to be bothered by history, Bush II put the cuts we presently have in effect and a trillion dollar budget surplus quickly became a multi-trillion dollar budget deficit.

            That surplus was achieved in part because President Clinton and the Democrats passed a tax increase that Republicans loudly decried as poisonous to economic growth—only to watch the economy reach heights not seen before or since.

            Was it Einstein who said insanity could be defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result?  By that standard, the last 30 years worth of Republicans should be institutionalized.

            But the Randian nature of Ryan’s budget isn’t just in the windfall it directs to the wealthy and to corporations.  In both Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, Rand makes it clear that the working class is a necessary evil.  Someone has to stand on the factory assembly line or behind a retail counter or keep records at the DMV, but those people should be grateful for the opportunity to do those menial things, opportunities that are created by the elite, and when they are no longer capable of standing for eight hours a day, they should hobble off somewhere and disappear.  For her, there were those intelligent and resourceful enough to rise to the top, and there were drones.  And drones were more or less equivalent to domestic livestock—their job was to serve their purpose and then die.

            In Rand’s world, what sucks society down, keeps the wealthy and successful from making it all it could be, are misguided efforts to provide for drones, to establish what we have come to call a “social safety net.”  In her world, factory workers and retail associates and file clerks don’t need an education, have no right to housing or food or medical care beyond subsistence level.  She wouldn’t have said, “Let them eat cake,” because, well, they don’t really need cake.  Flat bread is sufficient.

            As her acolyte, Ryan proposes in his budget to repeal the Affordable Care Act (that constitutes a big chunk of his supposed “savings”) and replace it with—nothing.  He does, however, have some recommendations about medical care for seniors and the poor.  For seniors, he suggests dismantling Medicare and replacing it with a $15,000 annual grant with which they could purchase private insurance.  Ryan must have nearly broken his arm patting himself on the back when he came up with that one, because it not only substantially reduces government spending on health care, it provides a huge subsidy for the insurance industry.  Two birds with one stone!

            For the poor, who are mostly covered by Medicaid, he proposes a similar block grant to states which they would be free to administer any way they wanted. 

            How Ryan came up with $15,000 as the appropriate figure for the Medicare grant is uncertain, but let’s think about that for a second.  Roughly 60% of Americans currently have some level of health insurance through their place of employment.  They don’t need Medicare (or its replacement) until they retire.  And while some folks can retire as young as 55, most of us have to work into our early to mid-60’s before that becomes possible.  If I had been forced to find a private insurance policy when I retired, I would have had to list arthritis, high blood pleasure, degenerative disk disease and hypoglycemia as existing conditions.  I would also have had to note a bout with ocular cancer 12 years ago. 

            Now keep in mind that Ryan’s budget repeals the Affordable Care Act, so, as they could prior to its passage, insurance companies would be able to deny coverage or jack up premiums and co-pays for pre-existing conditions.  It’s hardly beyond the realm of possibility that I would not be able to find insurance coverage at all under Ryan’s plan, or that, if I did, the premium along with co-pays and deductibles would be well in excess of $15,000.  And I’m more than relatively healthy for my age!  But then, I’m a drone.  I should be happy for whatever bone is tossed me.

            Ah, say Ryan’s supporters, you neglect the fact that insurance companies would be competing for your business, which would surely hold costs down.  Again, please!  Insurance companies before the Affordable Care Act were hardly knocking down the door trying to get seniors enrolled in their plans.  Seniors are not good insurance risks.  Weren’t then, aren’t now.  What incentive would insurance companies have to compete on the price level for customers they know will be filing claims—and filing them sooner rather than later.

            As for block grants to states, that is nothing more than an additional incentive for states to keep people off Medicaid rolls.  And they do a very effective job of that now.  It is also wonderfully disingenuous of Ryan and his Republican allies.  First of all, his budget proposal doesn’t say how much each state will get, or how that figure will be arrived at.  Since he’s listing that as a way of reducing the federal deficit, however, it stands to reason that he envisions the block grant being substantially less than the federal government sends to states now.  It’s cowardly not to say up front how much less.

            Second, if the federal contribution is less, states have one of three options, none of them good.  They can simply find ways to exclude people from Medicaid, they can make large cuts in other areas of their budgets in order to pay for Medicaid, or they can raise their own taxes and apply the increase to Medicaid.  The consistent thing about all three options is that they hurt people, particularly poor people.  But then, they’re drones.

           There are many other Randian elements to Ryan's budget, but dealing with them all would turn this into a book.  Suffice it to say that, measured by an standard, Ryan's budget extracts fully 2/3 of its 4.3 trillion in cuts from programs that primarily serve the middle and lower classes.  The drones.

            What worries me at the moment is that the speech Obama gave and the budget plan he unveiled, while clearly more humane (that is, less Randian) than Ryan’s, is at best a moderate, perhaps slightly left leaning proposal.  If it becomes the left pole to the Ryan budget’s right pole in the coming budget debates, the center starts off way to the right. 

            Ayn Rand is probably chuckling in hell right now, but we drones have cause for concern.

            

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.