You know you're in trouble when "MSM" reporters are better at articulating a coherent liberal agenda than high-profile Democrats

This morning on ABC's "This Week," with David Plouffe interviewed by Amanpour and DNC stalwart Donna Brazile at the Roundtable  - both suggesting some sort of "win" by Democrats in averting some of the more outlandish of the GOP's proposals while agreeing to larger spending cuts than those originally outlined by Speaker Boehner  - it was up to two journalists to make the central point about a an appropriate and coherent Democratic strategy in negotiating the budget deal that was just agreed to and what it means for a liberal agenda moving forward.

Chrystia Freeland of Reuters:*

I think the Planned Parenthood stuff was a gift to the Democrats and that was so easy for them to push on that. Thank goodness from the Democrats point of view that those riders came up because it allowed the Democrats to argue that actually the Republicans don't care about the economy but pushing their social agenda.  

What I think is missing...is Democrats actually arguing that the recovery is incredibly fragile, unemployment is high and it's not about .. if you make cuts in the right way, that's okay.  There is an argument to be made - and I think if anyone makes it, it should be the Democrats - that  says "Don't make cuts right now.  Yes, the budget is a problem but it's a medium term problem...Right now is a time when actually we should still be talking about government spending."

Ron Brownstein of National Journal:

They concede an important predicate for this debate. They have not drawn the line and said this is not the time to be retrenching, so when we begin this bigger debate - I mean this is the foothills of the Himalayan debate that's coming over the overall budget and the Paul Ryan plan. 

It's going to be harder for them to come back and say, Look we shouldn't be withdrawing federal spending when the economy's so weak, because they clearly didn't make that argument here.

Freeland:

And there's a strong argument to be made because they could say, so far it's working - and just look across the ocean, look across the Atlantic, the Brits have imposed budgetary austerity and their economy is shrinking even faster than they thought.   

This argument is crystal clear, with good evidence based on real-world experience of the European austerity agenda in the midst of continuing high unemployment and lagging economic growth.  Why it was up to two conventional journalists to have to make it, rather than the representatives of the Democratic agenda, is a question we have to ask ourselves going forward.  Something is very wrong with the picture.


*My transcript from This Week's video.

Happy days are here again...

The Drought is Over (at Least for CEOs) -

Rarely has the view from the corner office seemed so at odds with the view from the street corner. At a time when millions of Americans are trying to hang on to homes and millions more are trying to hang on to jobs, the chief executives of major corporations like 3M, General Electric and Cisco Systems are making as much today as they were before the recession hit. Indeed, some are making even more. 

The disparity is especially stark as companies are swimming in cash. In the fourth quarter, profits at American businesses were up an astounding 29.2 percent, the fastest growth in more than 60 years. Collectively, American corporations logged profits at an annual rate of $1.678 trillion.

So far, this recovery has not trickled down. After two relatively lean years, C.E.O.’s in finance, technology, energy and beyond are pulling down multimillion-dollar paychecks. What many of these executives aren’t doing, however, is hiring. Unemployment, although down from its peak, stood at 8.8 percent in March. And few economists predict the jobless rate will drop substantially anytime soon.

From Daniel Costello in New York Times' Business Day

View from Salt Lake City: "Ryan’s plan is anchored in an open contempt for anyone who isn’t wealthy"

 The Salt Lake Tribune takes on the "serious" Mr. Ryan:

The so-called federal deficit reduction plan announced recently by the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee is represented as a blueprint that makes the hard choices necessary to steer the United States away from fiscal disaster. But learned analysis exposes Rep. Paul Ryan’s prescription as a plan that differs little from President Obama’s vision in terms of total deficits, but apportions the pain in very different ways.

Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity” runs through various fantasy lands, envisioning that large tax cuts, mostly for the rich, and huge spending cuts, mostly in programs that benefit the poor and middle class, will lead to unprecedented booms in hiring, homebuilding and other economic activities.

Ryan’s plan is mostly a means to shelter those who have already benefited from a half-century of fiscal irrationality and dump the burden on those who are to come later.

Quote of the Day

Conservative author and economist Bruce Bartlett*:

The truth is that Republicans don’t care anything about the deficit. They made that abundantly clear when they controlled Congress during the dismal George W. Bush years. What all of the current budget discussion is about is defunding programs that benefit Democratic constituencies and if possible destroying institutions, such as labor unions, that historically support the Democratic Party. In other words, it’s all about political power; any concern for the deficit is purely for show, window dressing to disguise the true Republican agenda.

* Bartlett has served on the staffs of Congressmen Ron Paul and Jack Kemp and Senator Roger Jepsen; as staff director of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress; senior policy analyst in the Reagan White House; and deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at the Treasury Department during the George H.W. Bush administration.

Shutdown averted - but the GOP hostage-takers are still firmly in control of our "debate!"

I'm glad that a potentially disastrous, hurtful government shutdown was averted, but it was averted largely on terms the GOP set out early on - with Democrats agreeing to larger spending cuts than Boehner had initially proposed (before his "Tea Party" wing weighed in with their extremist agenda.) Paul Krugman, I think, makes a valid point for Democrats and the White House to consider on the deal's implications and aftermath:

The GOP "negotiates"

(I)t’s one thing for Obama to decide that it was better to give in to Republican hostage-taking than draw a line in the sand; it’s another for him to celebrate the result. Yet that’s just what he did. More than that, he has now completely accepted the Republican frame that spending cuts right now are what America needs.

It’s worth noting that this follows just a few months after another big concession, in which he gave in to Republican demands for tax cuts. The net effect of these two sets of concessions is, of course, a substantial increase in the deficit.

There has to be a better way to get this fundamental message across to the public - that the GOP, consumed for over thirty years with an ideology of tax cuts as the solution to every problem, is NOT even serious about the deficits they brandish like a club, so much as attacking government's role in helping seniors, the disadvantaged and increasingly a struggling middle-class which has seen their wages stagnant, their homes devalued and their jobs at risk.

Update: Steve Benen has a bit more "nuanced" view than Krugman's, HERE.
More:  The Winners? - "Tea Party Activists Give Boehner a Nod of Approval" - Wall Street Journal, HERE.

What can the Affordable Care Act do to contain out-of-control health care costs?

US vs. France-Switzerland-Germany-Belgium-Canada...

Ezra Klein, the Washington Post blogger who wrote extensively and cogently on the health insurance reform debate, had some excellent analysis yesterday at his "Wonkbook" of precisely how the Affordable Care Act to overhaul and extend health insurance can work to begin bringing down our country's exorbitant health care costs.

(You can see by the chart above right that this is a uniquely "American" problem, due primarily to  the system's reliance on profit-driven insurance/health care industries, in comparison to other countries with universal coverage and excellent health outcomes, but better-regulated insurance and delivery systems.)

Klein was looking at ACA in contrast to the Paul Ryan/GOP budget plan - which intends to strip seniors of Medicare in favor of a voucherized private insurance scheme - but his outline is useful as a general overview of just what direction the new health care reform will take in beginning to control costs.

Rapid rise in health care $$$ are the big "fiscal" issue.

Anyone who is truly serious about the future of budget deficits and rational allocation of our GDP understands that the only truly difficult "crisis" looming over the nation's finances is in health care costs - whether they come out of the public or private "pocket" - not the more general fiscal issues that are subject more to demagogy than serious discussion.

Here are the essentials on how ACA can help, from Klein:

The Affordable Care Act’s central hope is that Medicare can lead the health-care system to pay for value, cut down on over-treatment, and cut out treatments that simply don’t work. The law develops Accountable Care Organizations, in which Medicare pays one provider to coordinate all of your care successfully, rather than paying many doctors and providers to add to your care no matter the cost or outcome, as is the current practice. It also begins experimenting with bundled payments, in which Medicare pays one lump-sum for all care related to the successful treatment of a condition rather than paying for every piece of care separately. To help these reforms succeed, and to help all doctors make more cost-effective treatment decisions, the law accelerates research on which drugs and treatments are most effective, and creates and funds the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute to disseminate the data.

The Federal Reserve - Some background and perspective

In their "Breakdown" podcast, American Prospect blogger Matt Yglesias and The Nation's Washington DC editor Chris Hayes explain much of what you need to know about the Federal Reserve, the most obscure and murky enormously powerful institution in the country - and one which isn't easy to understand in terms of its central role in the economy.  Listen HERE.

Current & former Fed Chairs, Bernanke & Greenspan

"I know you think you understand what you thought I said but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant" - former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan.

After listening to the Yglesias/Hayes podcast, if you want to dig deeper, follow up with Yglesias' useful article HERE in "Democracy" on why progressives should pay more attention to the Fed.

"Money quote" as to why we should care?

Government shutdown looms...Boehner & Company's strategy of "trickle-down" sacrifice

Now is the time for your tears...

In the likely event of a "shutdown of the government," John  Boehner, Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor, et. al. - who have refused to compromise even with their own opening offer of $33 billion in spending cuts to avert a crisis - will continue to get their paychecks.

While the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan may not.

Senate Democrats have passed a bill to impose  "shared sacrifice," denying Congress and the President pay if there is a shutdown,  but so far the GOP-majority House are deferring to their preferred notion of "trickle-down sacrifice" and will keep their own money coming.

(Troops link via commenter "Seth" at Ta-Nehisi Coates/Atlantic.)

"Starve the Beast" made taxpayers poorer (and killed conservatism in the bargain)

Self-proclaimed fiscal conservative and blogger extraordinaire, Andrew Sullivan, has been praising Paul Ryan and the budget proposal he's hatched for the GOP - and he's been taking a lot of well-deserved flak for embracing an agenda that Paul Krugman has correctly identified as "ludicrous and cruel" (HERE in an excellent fact-based column.)

E.D. Kain, writing at Forbes quotes one of Sullivan's readers in response:

[Ryan’s budget] is the culmination of about a thirty year Republican strategy called "starve the beast," by which Republicans have worked to reduce taxes and increase the national deficit as large as possible -  all to create the supposed "deficit crisis" that we now face and to use that crisis to eliminate programs like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and a slew of other programs (EPA, SEC, Planned Parenthood, collective bargaining, etc.) that the Republican class has never been able to eliminate through the democratic process.  This "starve the beast" Republican strategy has been openly acknowledged for years and I know you are well aware of it.  And the Ryan "budget plan" is transparently an attempt to cash in on this long-standing political agenda.

Interestingly, also at Forbes, last year the conservative commentator Conor Friedersdorf clearly offered an analysis that should be obvious to anyone like Sullivan who touts "fiscal conservatism" as a guiding principle. In short, "Starve the Beast" proponents - the kind of reckless "conservatives" like Paul Ryan, who voted for the Bush tax cuts and wants  even bigger breaks for high earners - are themselves responsible for the growth in debt and the ensuing obligations on average taxpayers to sustain fiscal balance over the long run, a prospect which no sane person believes can be done without increases in progressive taxation. Fiedersdorf "headlined" his piece forthrightly - "How 'Starve the Beast' Made the Taxpayer Poorer."

Phony inflation hysterics...and ice-skating in Hell today

Yes, apparently it's frozen over Down Under, as I'm agreeing with The National Review.

Senior Editor Ramesh Ponnuru has written something sensible on the false inflation fears that are being paraded in many circles as opposition to the "quantitative easing" policy of the Fed to get more money moving in a lagging economy:

Talking back to the Banksters - Keep the Cap on Debit Card Fees!

Spot from American Family Voices

Simon Johnson has the story in today's NYT on grassroots efforts to push back against the Banksters' lobbying operation to water down Dodd-Frank financial reform:

As a lobbying group, the largest American banks have been dominant throughout the latest boom-bust-bailout cycle – capturing the hearts and minds of the Bush and Obama administrations, as well as the support of most elected representatives on Capitol Hill.

Their reign, however, is being seriously challenged – finally – by an alliance of retailers, big and small, on whose behalf a variety of ads are now running, including on television (such as this one, by Americans for Job Security), the Web (such as the one above, by American Family Voices) and a powerful radio spot directly attacking the too-big–to-fail banks.

The Common Sense Guide to the Great Deficit Debate - Part 6

The 6th segment of our "Common Sense" deficit primer is up today at Winning Progressive, HERE. This part focuses on solutions moving forward.  Thanks to the folks at Winning Progressive for their great work and for helping to make the "primer" more accessible and available.

One more Paul Ryan post...

Government is evil - selfishness is the only virtue.

"The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand," Ryan said at a D.C. gathering five years ago honoring the author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.

Quote via Digby.

The Congressional Budget Office rains cold water on poor, screwy Paul Ryan

"But if you turn it this way..."

Wisconsin Representative and GOP Budget Czar Paul Ryan is becoming something of an obsession here at  "Titanic."  But his plan to privatize Medicare and shrink the government is getting serious kudos in the press.  David Brooks, in a NY Times column, has attempted to sanctify Ryan's scheme as the "adult in the room" - an earnest voice that "serious" people ignore at their peril.  (In better than average form,  he's about half right.  Attention must be paid to the GOP's extremist foray into social nihilism.)

Brooks writes: 

The Ryan budget will not be enacted this year, but it will immediately reframe the domestic policy debate.

His proposal will set the standard of seriousness for anybody who wants to play in this discussion. It will become the 2012 Republican platform, no matter who is the nominee. Any candidate hoping to win that nomination will have to be able to talk about government programs with this degree of specificity, so it will improve the G.O.P. primary race...

Paul Ryan has grasped reality with both hands. He’s forcing everybody else to do the same.

This assessment - described by one wag as a "wet kiss" - is typical of the "serious" face being painted in the media and throughout the Beltway on the hustle that the zealous Congressman has hatched and that the GOP has chosen as it's fiscal cris de coeur.  And as further testament to Ryan's seriousness, serious Sarah Palin has Tweeted in with, "Serious and necessary leadership has rolled out serious and necessary reform proposal." It doesn't get more serious than that!

But sooner or later reality intrudes on most of these purely ideological enterprises and in Ryan's case it's come sooner - in the form of the staid, non-partisan Congressional Budget Office beginning to crunch his numbers. Here's the scoop from TPM Muckraker:

Ringing endorsement of Ryan's Roadmap

Andrew Sullivan, who has moved his blog over to The Daily Beast, is one of those pundits who has been offering praise of the unhinged Congressman from Wisconsin, Paul Ryan and his fiscal Roadmap - now the official GOP scheme and apparently designed as a guide for anyone interested in driving America off the cliff.  But in one telling line, Sullivan offers a great example of the old cliche about "having friends like these, you don't need enemies":

What I admire is Ryan's willingness to cop to the suffering and sacrifice that the Bush years made inevitable in its fiscal irresponsibility.

GOP Pols: "A government shutdown for thee - but not for me!"

 "Shared sacrifice!"

Rep. Paul Ryan*, our current poster boy for GOP wing-nuttery, whoppers and wackiness, is on record as stating that the looming government shutdown by Congresss "sounds worse than it probably is." But...uh...Congressman, for starters  government workers will go without paychecks and that's tough for them and their families.  Right?

Well, that's sort of true. Despite the shutdown, which cuts off funds to most federal operations, at least one group of government workers will still be getting paid.  Guess who?  The answer is HERE.  (Hint: Paul Ryan is one of them.)

* Note: Today is our fun-filled "Ryanathon," so there'll be no commentary here that doesn't include his name.  I promise to come up with something tomorrow morning that doesn't necessitate another picture of the congressman's vacant stare.

Where's the "fierce urgency of now?"

"Yes, we can!"

As President Obama begins his Campaign 2012 for re-election against a GOP field that ranges from the terminally disingenuous to the dangerously demagogic, we have a "must-read" commentary from Ezra Klein (the WaPo's Wonkbook), reflecting on some undeniable weaknesses of the administration's approach to dealing with its opposition - most notably a failure to take a compelling counter-argument directly and dramatically to the American people:

I don’t blame Obama for being unable to change Washington. I don’t blame him for being unable to pass cap-and-trade. But I blame him for ceasing to try. And for sometimes letting what can be done distract from what needs to be done...

Back when Obama won the South Carolina primary, he warned of a “status quo that extends beyond any particular party and right now that status quo is fighting back with everything it’s got.” If anything, he was understating his case. But he was right to try to inspire voters to cast away their skepticism, to say that “where we are met with cynicism and doubt and fear and those who tell us that we can’t, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of the American people in three simple words — yes, we can.”

Lately, the administration’s creed can be summed up more modestly: “Hopefully, the Senate won’t let them.”

The contrast with the 2008 campaign — which correctly saw some virtue in ambition, even if what it promised was unrealistic — is stark.

Read Klein's entire piece, "What happened to the 'fierce urgency of now?'", HERE.

GOP budget czar Paul Ryan proposes killing Medicare - and replacing it with "Obamacare" for seniors

Forbes' columnist & health care consultant Rick Ungar has the story:

Ryan, 3/23/10: "Obamacare is a fiscal Frankenstein, it’s a train wreck."

Despite the Republican propensity to compare the Affordable Care Act to something akin to the antichrist, word is that GOP budget leader, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), will propose a dramatic change in the Medicare program that will closely mirror the key features of Obamacare – only for seniors.

The proposal would do away with (for everyone presently under 55 years of age) the current single payer government system for senior medical care and replace it with a program whereby seniors would choose private health insurance coverage from a menu of approved private health insurers. The government would subsidize the program by giving seniors a voucher to be used in purchasing coverage, the amount of such payment to be defined according to need.

The columnist then asks, "Does this sound familiar?"  Well, yes.  It's a government subsidized exchange system following the model of what the GOP derisively dubbed "Obamacare" - the Affordable Care Act of 2010 that reformed our health insurance system for those under 65. But there's a poison pill in this "Ryancare" bill. A Congressional Budget Office study last November determined that seniors would likely either face higher premiums or less extensive coverage under Ryan's scheme to kill Medicare. 

Forbes' Ungar explains:

Unfortunately, while Ryan has emulated a number of features from the ACA, he’s forgotten to make the adjustments the law makes to actually ensure that health care is more accessible to beneficiaries rather than more profitable to health insurance companies.

Making private insurance work for the younger demographics is far easier than trying to make it work for the elderly due to the most basic tenant of health insurance – the insurance pool must be balanced by having 80 healthy people in the pool to pay for every 20 who are ill.

Given that most Americans 65 and older are a walking pre-existing medical condition, it is difficult to imagine how functioning insurance pools can be constructed from a universe filed with these people.

Shutdown! - the "Tea Party GOP" plays a dangerous game in a fragile economy

The Financial Times' Clive Crook weighs in on the GOP holding the country and the economy hostage to their destructive agenda:

Rep. Paul Ryan: "It sounds worse than it probably is."

Republicans in Congress are playing an outrageous game of brinkmanship over the budget for the current fiscal year.

Some Tea Party supporters happily contemplate a shutdown of government at the end of this week....

(W)ith the US labour market at a turning point, whatever Congress can do to undermine confidence and add to uncertainty, it is doing. Just as the private sector shows signs of reviving, Capitol Hill is threatening to drag it back down.

'Tis the season - A tax chart

Be sure to keep this one in mind over the next ten days...

    Center for Budget and Policy Priorities

This is from the New York Times "Economix."  There is no indication what external events such as periodic upswings in profits or specific tax policies affected the "bumps" within the overall decades-long decline in corporate taxes as % of GDP, but as a general trend the article's author, Nancy Folbre, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, notes:

In 2008, the Government Accountability Office reported that 83 of the 100 largest publicly traded corporations in the United States had subsidiaries in jurisdictions listed as tax havens; it cautiously emphasized that this did not prove that their decisions to locate there were motivated by tax minimization.

The British journalist Nicholas Shaxson takes a bolder and more aggressive swipe at the issue in a new book, “Treasure Islands,” arguing that the globalization of tax evasion is undermining fiscal and economic stability in developed and developing nations alike...

The most vivid character in Robert Louis Stevenson’s beloved adventure story “Treasure Island” was the one-legged sailor Long John Silver. He never described himself and his colleagues as pirates. No, they were “gentlemen of fortune.”