Our Contemporary GOP: Insufferably Stupid or Aggressively Evil?

Krugman:

According to a column in Kaiser Health News, Republican staffers jeered at any and all proposals to use Medicare and Medicaid funds better. Spending money on prevention was no more than a “slush fund.” Research on innovation was “an oxymoron.” And there was no reason to pay for “so-called effectiveness research.”

What Wisconsin Democrats can teach Washington Democrats

E.J. Dionne on the wind blowing from the MidWest...

Consider the contrast between two groups of Democrats, in Wisconsin and in the nation's capital.

Washington Democrats, including President Obama, have allowed conservative Republicans to dominate the budget debate so far. As long as the argument is over who will cut more from federal spending, conservatives win. Voters may think the GOP is going too far, but when it comes to dollar amounts, they know Republicans will always cut more.

In Wisconsin, by contrast, 14 Democrats in the state Senate defined the political argument on their own terms - and they are winning it.

PBS Newshour on widening income inequality

Watch the full episode. See more PBS NewsHour.

Thanks to Ted Leyhe for emailing this link.

State public employee pay and pensions are, on average, pretty modest.

In a Washington Post article documenting some outrageous abuses of the public employee pension system - the most egregious anecdote of which has been fixed and is no longer possible - a more significant fact is all but buried:  The average member in California of the largest public employee union, AFSCME,  "earns less than $45,000 a year and receives an annual pension of roughly $19,000." This reality flies in the face of the current demonization of public employees and attempts to destroy their collective bargaining rights by GOP Governors and their national party apparatchiks.

We're not "broke" - Index of investor confidence in the US Treasury

Krugman: Investors, putting real money on the line, are willing to lend funds to the Feds long-term at an inflation-adjusted interest rate of only 1 percent. There is nothing in the markets or the cash flow requiring immediate austerity. Yes, there is a long-run problem* — but this requires long-run solutions.    (Go HERE for the 10-year index of interest rates on US Treasury securities - currently 1%, and about 3% at the height of the recession.)


*On both the federal and private market horizons, the "long-run problem" is primarily rising health care costs that drastically exceed & outpace every other industrialized country that has a modern, high-quality health care system AND universal coverage. Just saying...

Starving the Moral Beast!

Modeled Behavior ignores Polite Company and says something that needs to be said:

If we want to build a model of what the government spends money on we would be best to start this way: ask people what social obligations do they believe “society” has...Sum the cost of those programs. That will be government spending.

Contrary to Jonah Goldberg and others who see Canada and the United States as examples of two clashing ideologies, they are actually examples of two different ethic distributions.  The United States is not Canada because there is ethnic strife between Southern Blacks and Southern Whites. That strife reduces the sense of moral obligation on the part of the white majority and so reduces government spending. 

 Complete commentary - "Starving the Moral Beast," HERE.

Christy Whitman starved the New Jersey "beast" & teachers are supposed to pay the price...

The Washington Post, September 5, 1994:

The first thing Christine Todd Whitman did upon taking office as governor of New Jersey in January was to cut the state's income tax. Then in July, as she signed into law her first state budget, the Republican cut taxes again while simultaneously closing the huge deficit left by her predecessor.

This is what her supporters call the Whitman miracle, the fiscal accomplishment that has sent her stock soaring among New Jersey's voters and transformed her on the national scene from a political unknown into one of the Republican Party's newest stars.
…
But the key to the Whitman miracle lies neither in her political philosophy nor in her spending cuts, but rather in the fine print of her budget. Contained there is a series of arcane fiscal changes that some experts say amount to this: Christine Todd Whitman has balanced New Jersey's books and paid for her tax cut by quietly diverting more than $1 billion from the state's pension fund.

Whitman calls what she did a "reform" of the pension system that puts it on a more "sound actuarial footing." Others are less charitable. The one thing that even the actuarial consultants hired by the Whitman administration agree on, however, is that the chief effect of the changes will be to shift billions of dollars in pension obligations onto New Jersey taxpayers 15 to 20 years from now.

Well,  as Media Matters reminds us, it's been "15 to 20 years" and the blame is all on teachers and other state workers' negotiated pensions.  Has current NJ GOPer Guv Chris Christie lashed out at his predecessor, that other Christy, who set this wreck in motion - as he has at various alleged malefactors?  No - not a peep.  GOP "starve the beast" dogmas and a total lack of fiscal or moral responsibility for "Tax Cuts Uber Alles" ideology are in full effect among these craven "conservative" culprits.  Totally disgusting and utterly predictable...

Thanks to Media Matters for bringing some history to bear on present predicaments - they have the full story HERE.

State employee pensions are NOT the problem...

Eric Alterman:

(S)tatistics demonstrate the speciousness of the conservative case for states facing budget crises to default on their public pension obligations. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities released a report recently demonstrating that, in fact, they have “adequate tools and means to meet their obligations.” To the degree that some states appear to be in real trouble, explains a June report by two Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco analysts, this is the result of a “profound macroeconomic shock” rather than pension obligations... Yet snowjobs like those promoted by Murdoch, Gingrich and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie are painting a bull’s-eye on the back of public unions.

Update: Mark Thoma has more on this at "Economist's View"

Daily Show on "shared sacrifice..."

The Daily Show - Crisis in Dairyland - For Richer and Poorer - Teachers and Wall Street
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

What Wisconsin is really about...

Kevin Drum @ Mother Jones explains in his "must read" article:

IN 2008, A LIBERAL Democrat was elected president. Landslide votes gave Democrats huge congressional majorities. Eight years of war and scandal and George W. Bush had stigmatized the Republican Party almost beyond redemption. A global financial crisis had discredited the disciples of free-market fundamentalism, and Americans were ready for serious change.

Or so it seemed. But two years later, Wall Street is back to earning record profits, and conservatives are triumphant. To understand why this happened, it's not enough to examine polls and tea parties and the makeup of Barack Obama's economic team. You have to understand how we fell so short, and what we rightfully should have expected from Obama's election. And you have to understand two crucial things about American politics.

The first is this: Income inequality has grown dramatically since the mid-'70s—far more in the US than in most advanced countries—and the gap is only partly related to college grads outperforming high-school grads. Rather, the bulk of our growing inequality has been a product of skyrocketing incomes among the richest 1 percent and—even more dramatically—among the top 0.1 percent. It has, in other words, been CEOs and Wall Street traders at the very tippy-top who are hoovering up vast sums of money from everyone, even those who by ordinary standards are pretty well off.
Second, American politicians don't care much about voters with moderate incomes...

Read his entire piece, "Plutocracy Now: What Wisconsin Is Really About," HERE.

Krugman on "How to Kill a Recovery"

"(D)o you remember the lavish praise heaped on Britain’s conservative government, which announced harsh austerity measures after it took office last May? How’s that going? Well, business confidence did not, in fact, rise when the plan was announced; it plunged, and has yet to recover. And recent surveys suggest that confidence has fallen even further among both businesses and consumers, indicating, as one report put it, that the private sector is 'unprepared to fill the hole left by public sector cuts.' ” 


Read the whole piece here.