Why Must The Middle-Class Sacrifice and Not The Wealthy

Preliminary Deficit Recommendations: an Opening Gambit to Make The Coming Assault on Our Economic Security Seem Palatable

On Wednesday, Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, co-chairs of Obama’s deficit reduction commission, released their own recommendations for balancing the budget. It’s being treated as a very serious proposal by much of the corporate media, but it is in fact deeply unserious -- it’s a profoundly regressive, unrealistic set of proposals that wouldn’t get the support of 14 of the commission’s 18 members -- required to spur Congressional action -- much less enough votes to pass on the Hill.

It should be seen for what it is: a opening gambit in a campaign to shift yet more of the risks of a modern capitalist society off the shoulders of corporations and the highest-earners and on to working families. The chairmen's proposals are intended to lay the groundwork for the Commission’s report, due before December 1, by making them seem reasonable in comparison. It’s all Kabuki theater, but with a nefarious end.

As Dan Froomkin wrote on the Huffington Post, the Simpson-Bowles plan “would have devastating effects on the government and its ability to help the most vulnerable in our society, and it would put the squeeze on the middle class, veterans, the elderly and the sick - all in the name of an abstract goal that ultimately only a bond-trader could love.”

The co-chairs spin their plan as a grand compromise -- they say there’s something in there for everyone to love, and something for everyone to hate. That, supposedly, will insulate law-makers politically. Alan Simpson told reporters that they’d “harpooned every whale.” But the reality is that the recommendations are a collection of “third rail” issues -- everyone will find something in it that is unacceptably odious, that crosses a red line in the sand.

From its inception, the commission skewed to the right, stacked with conservative deficit hawks, and the chairs’ proposals reflect that composition. It raises taxes on gas, cuts Social Security benefits for current as well as future retirees -- and introduces means-testing that would result in deeper cuts for all but the poorest 20 percent of workers -- makes our nation’s veterans pick up part of the tab for their health-care, eliminates schools for active service-members’ kids and would kill off the most effective anti-poverty measures to come along in years, the Earned Income Tax Credit and the child tax credit.

It’d be brutal on the middle class, eliminating the home mortgage deduction and the tax write-off that companies can claim for picking up their workers’ health-care costs. There are valid arguments to be made for killing the mortgage deduction, but any member of Congress who voted to do so would be looking for another job after their next campaign, and they know it.

All of this would inflict great pain, and while it might help reduce the deficit, it would also pay for very deep tax cuts for the highest earners -- dropping their top rate by 34 percent -- and on corporate taxes, which would fall by 26 percent. That’s where the big dollars are, and those cuts, rather than trimming the deficit, appear to be the primary effect. This is supposed to be about deficit reduction, yet according to the Congressional Budget Office, if the far more modest Bush tax cuts, skewed towards those same high-flyers, are renewed, they’d represent the single greatest contributor to the deficit over the next 10 years.

Kind of ironic that America was founded in part not to be like the old European monarchy controlled government by the rich for the rich. It took almost a hundred years for progressive policies to build a strong middle-class, not they are threatened with polices that look out for the wealthy elite at the expense of the middle-class.

Tea Bagger Rock Star Rand Paul Still Can't name What Programs he Would Cut

Tea Bagger Rock Star Rand Paul Still Can't name What Programs he Would Cut

Back in May, Senator-elect Rand Paul (R-KY) raised more than a few eyebrows when he backed Democratic efforts to prevent cuts to physician payments under a program called the sustained growth rate, or SGR. At one campaign event, Paul — an ophthalmologist who generated 50 percent of his practice from government reimbursements — said, “Physicians should be allowed to make a comfortable living,” conveniently disregarding his pledge to institute “across the board cuts” on government spending.

Last night, CNN’s Eliot Spitzer took Paul to task on this apparent contradiction, asking the newly-elected senator why he was excluding doctors from the gruesome cuts — particularly since Medicare spending was primarily responsible for the growing deficit. Remarkably, Paul immediately backed away from his broad-brush indictment of government spending and argued that cutting reimbursements would reduce access to physicians:

    SPITZER: You’ve said that the one place you don’t want to cut is doctor reimbursement rates?

    PAUL: You’ve been reading too many liberal bloggers. Let me set you straight…What I have said is that look, if we want to cut physician fees automatically without a vote, let’s lump all federal employees in there, senators, congressmen and all two million federal employees and let’s all automatically cut their pay every year without a vote and I’m all for it. But right now, let’s not single out one set of people and say that somehow we’re going to balance the health care budget on one set of people. The problem is that ultimately if you keep reducing. For example, if physician fees go down in Medicare by 30 percent as they’re designated to do in December, you won’t find a doctor. I think we need to think about do we want to have doctors available to see patients and I think that’s a major problem.

    SPITZER: But Senator, I’m correct in saying you’ve opposed cutting Medicare reimbursement rates even though the Medicare system is the single largest deficit hole we’re facing as we look at our budget and reimbursing doctors is the largest piece of that.

    PAUL: You do have to figure out how to balance the Medicare budget and it’s going to take a lot of different things to do it, but you can’t balance it simply on one facet.



From there, the interview deteriorated into a painfully uncomfortable and, at times, personal exchange. Spitzer asked Paul to name specific programs he would cut from health care, Social Security, or defense. But Paul demurred, explaining that he would offer a balanced budget in the next Congress — over 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 year increments, but was still unsure of what to cut to get there. At one point, Paul even suggested that rather than pressing him for specifics, Spitzer should invite liberals and ask “how do you continue to have these programs?”

The Wonk Room has more on Paul’s contradictory SGR position and his desperate effort to name list specific savings

Paul is typical of the right-whiners that claim to know everything about government spending and public policy, but forced to stake out a comprehensive plan they end up choking on their ignorance and tough talk zealotry. Paul representatives the Bush/Republican banana republic mentality that crashed the economy in the first place. They have lots of wild unworkable theories about how to government, but no actual knowledge.Paul has been consistent about protecting the unearned wealth of fat cats from going back to the same tax rates of the Reagan administration. A step that would help pay down the debt Paul claims to care about.

Rick Perry and the Petty Vindictive Mind of Conservatives

To Help His State Budget, Gov. Rick Perry Wants To Hurt His State Budget By Opting Out Of Medicaid

Texas Governor Rick Perry (R) is a leader in the pack of “tenther” politicians who believe that pretty much everything the federal government does is unconstitutional. Hoping to start a “10th Amendment movement,” Perry has proposed opting out of Social Security, called constitutional amendments “mistaken“, and offered secession as a way to avoid the “oppressive” federal government. Particularly piqued by the passage of health care reform, Perry is now setting his “tenther” sights on a specific target: Medicaid.

As Mother Jones’s Suzy Khimm notes, “one of the hallmark accomplishments of health-care reform” was the expansion of Medicaid. Under the new health care law, new insurance subsidies “will add an estimated 16 million new Medicaid enrollees.” While many GOP and Democratic-led state governments oppose the expansion, Perry is pushing Texas to drop out of Medicaid entirely.

First floating the idea on CNN last Sunday, Perry told Fox News host Greta Van Susteren yesterday that states should “be given the opportunity to opt-out of the Medicaid program we are looking at today”:

    VAN SUSTEREN: Health care, there’s going to be a lot of challenges in the next two years. What is your view of the health care program?

    PERRY: I’d like to see states be given the opportunity to opt-out of the Medicaid program that we are looking at today. We think in Texas over the next six years that we could take and find a private insurance solution and better serve our people, put more people under coverage, and save $40 billion for the state of Texas and $40 billion for the federal government because it is a matching program.


As Khimm notes, Perry’s only “underlying rationale” for “sacrificing the health coverage” of Texas’s 3.6 million poor people dependent on Medicaid would be “if it solves the state’s budget crisis.” But as WonkRoom’s Igor Volsky explains, none of Perry’s proposal actually makes any sense. Rather than “bankrupting the state” as Perry’s legislative pals may claim, 95 percent of all new spending would actually be footed by the federal government. Indeed, as Health Beat’s Maggie Mahr notes, Texas would actually benefit more than most states because while Medicaid enrollment will rise by 46 percent, “state spending on Medicaid rises by about 3 percent. Meanwhile, Federal spending in Texas is expected to increase by 39 percent.”

Not only would Perry be turning away millions in federal spending, Perry would actually be “taking billions out of the state economy that goes on to support hospitals and other providers,” Volsky notes. Thus, “hospitals and doctors would have to swallow the costs of caring for uninsured individuals who will continue to use the emergency room as their primary source of care,” which further burdens the state budget.

The actual “lose-lose” outcome of Perry’s proposal has led many health policy experts to question its legitimacy and sincerity. Perry’s eagerness gut Medicaid while providing no actual viable alternative to cover the poor pushed one Texas hospital’s chief to call his idea “so bizarre as to be unworthy of consideration.”

Perry's attitude is typical of modern conservatism. Pass legislation they don't like and they won't cut off their nose to spite their face, they're take out their spiteful revenge on the working poor.

Republicans Only Think They Won. A Democratic Legacy That Will Benefit Generations of Americans

Democrats didn't lose the battle of 2010. They won it.

Democrats have lost the House, and health care is getting the blame. Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana, a retiring Democrat, says his party "overreached by focusing on health care rather than job creation" and by spending $1 trillion on "a major entitlement expansion." Sen. John McCain's economic adviser agrees. Pundits say the health care bill killed President Obama's approval ratings, cost congressional Democrats their jobs, and snuffed out the legacy of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. "Virtually every House Democrat from a swing district who took a gamble by voting for the health law made a bad political bet," says the New York Times. The Los Angeles Times laments that "the measure of a leader in Washington isn't how much gets done, it's who holds power in the end. On that scale, Pelosi failed."

I'm not buying the autopsy or the obituary. In the national exit poll, voters were split on health care. Unemployment is at nearly 10 percent. Democrats lost a lot of seats that were never really theirs, and those who voted against the bill lost at a higher rate than did those who voted for it. But if health care did cost the party its majority, so what? The bill was more important than the election.

I realize that sounds crazy. We've become so obsessed with who wins or loses in politics that we've forgotten what the winning and losing are about. Partisans fixate on punishing their enemies in the next campaign. Reporters, in the name of objectivity, refuse to judge anything but the Election Day score card. Politicians rationalize their self-preservation by imagining themselves as dynasty builders. They think this is the big picture.

They're wrong. The big picture isn't about winning or keeping power. It's about using it. I've made this argument before, but David Frum, the former speechwriter to President Bush, has made it better. In March, when Democrats secured enough votes to pass the bill, he castigated fellow conservatives who looked forward to punishing Pelosi and President Obama "with a big win in the November 2010 elections." Frum observed:

    Legislative majorities come and go. This healthcare bill is forever. A win in November is very poor compensation for this debacle now. … No illusions please: This bill will not be repealed. Even if Republicans scored a 1994 style landslide in November, how many votes could we muster to re-open the "doughnut hole" and charge seniors more for prescription drugs? How many votes to re-allow insurers to rescind policies when they discover a pre-existing condition? How many votes to banish 25 year olds from their parents' insurance coverage?

Exactly. A party that loses a House seat can win it back two years later, as Republicans just proved. But a party that loses a legislative fight against a middle-class health care entitlement never restores the old order. Pretty soon, Republicans will be claiming the program as their own. Indeed, one of their favorite arguments against this year's health care bill was that it would cut funding for Medicare. Now they're pledging to rescind those cuts. In 30 years, they'll be accusing Democrats of defunding Obamacare.

Most bills aren't more important than elections. This one was. Take it from Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader. Yesterday, in his election victory speech at the Heritage Foundation, he declared, "Health care was the worst piece of legislation that's passed during my time in the Senate." McConnell has been in the Senate for 26 years. He understands the bill's significance: It's a huge structural change in the relationship between the public, the economy, and the government.

Politicians have tried and failed for decades to enact universal health care. This time, they succeeded. In 2008, Democrats won the presidency and both houses of Congress, and by the thinnest of margins, they rammed a bill through. They weren't going to get another opportunity for a very long time. It cost them their majority, and it was worth it.

And that's not counting financial regulation, economic stimulus, college lending reform, and all the other bills that became law under Pelosi. So spare me the tears and gloating about her so-called failure. If John Boehner is speaker of the House for the next 20 years, he'll be lucky to match her achievements.

Republicans say they have a sleazy plan to choke off much of health care reform by denying funding to states. As health care costs climb, the Republican legacy will continue to be giving middle and low income Americans the shaft while making sure the rich and lazy continue to have an unprecedented concentration of unearned wealth.

Newly Elected Republicans Admit They Have No Answers or Real Plans

Tea Nut Favorites Rand Paul & Jim DeMint Struggle To Name Specific Budget Cuts (VIDEO)

 Signaling how difficult it will be for the Republican Party to live up to its campaign promises of cutting spending while preserving the Bush tax cuts and not cutting benefits for seniors, Tea Party favorites Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and Sen.-elect Rand Paul (R-Ky.) struggled on Sunday to actually name any specific cuts they plan on making.

On ABC's "This Week," Christiane Amanpour repeatedly pressed Paul to move beyond "slogans and platitudes" to "direct information" on how the Republican Party will balance the budget and cut the deficit.

Paul immediately reiterated that he was going to push for a balanced budget amendment and said that cuts needed to come from across the board -- including defense spending. Whenever Amanpour asked whether a specific program -- such as Medicare, Social Security and health care -- would be cut, Paul simply kept reiterating that he was going to be looking "across the board." He was unable, however, to actually name anything significant that would be on the chopping block:

    AMANPOUR: Give me one specific cut, Senator-elect.

    PAUL: All across the board.

    AMANPOUR: One significant one. No, but you can't just keep saying all across the board.

    PAUL: Well, no, I can, because I'm going to look at every program, every program. But I would freeze federal hiring. I would maybe reduce federal employees by 10 percent. I'd probably reduce their wages by 10 percent. The average federal employee makes $120,000 a year. The average private employee makes $60,000 a year. Let's get them more in line, and let's find savings. Let's hire no new federal workers.

    AMANPOUR: Pay for soldiers? Would you cut that?

    PAUL: I think that's something that you can't do. I don't think --

    AMANPOUR: You cannot do? [...]

    AMANPOUR: So, again, to talk about the debt and to talk about taxes, there seems to be, again, just so much sort of generalities, for want of a better word. [...]

    PAUL: Well, the thing is that you can call it a generality, but what if -- what if I were president and I said to you, Tomorrow, we're going to have a 5 percent cut across the board in everything? That's not a generality, but there are thousands of programs. If you say, Well, what are all the specifics? There are books written on all the specifics. There's a book by Christopher Edwards, downsizing government, goes through every program. That's what it will take. It's a very detailed analysis.

DeMint had a similar experience on NBC's "Meet the Press." When asked by host David Gregory where the American people should be prepared to sacrifice in order to cut the deficit, DeMint said, "I don't think the American people are going to have to sacrifice as much as the government bureaucrats who get paid about twice what the American worker does. First of all, we just need to return to pre-Obama levels of spending in 2008. We need to cut earmarks so people can stop taking home the bacon, we need to defund Obamacare and then we need to look at the entitlement programs, such as the way Paul Ryan has done in the House with his Road to America's Future."

When Gregory pointed out that going back to 2008 spending levels won't get anywhere close to balancing the budget, he asked whether everything would be on the table. DeMint said he opposed cutting Social Security. "If we can just cut the administrative waste, we can cut hundreds of billions of dollars a year at the federal level. We need to keep our promises to seniors, David, and cutting benefits to seniors is not on the table." DeMint also said that cutting benefits for veterans is out.

WATCH:

Both DeMint and Paul said they oppose raising the debt ceiling, a procedure that Congress -- including Republicans -- do routinely.

Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), who is likely to become the next House Majority Leader, refused to say on "Fox News Sunday" that he would make sure the government doesn't go into default on its debt, stating that it would be President Obama's fault if it does. "The president's got a responsibility as much or more so than Congress to make sure that we are continuing to function in a way that the people want," he said.

He has, however, left the door open to the GOP possibly supporting a raising of the debt ceiling by saying that the party will try to "demonstrate a commitment to the fiscal discipline and an established track record by the time that vote comes up."

Republicans -- including Sen. John Cornyn (Tex.) and Rep. Pete Sessions (Tex.) -- have consistently been unable to name specific cuts they will make to the budget in order to offset an extension of the Bush tax cuts. On Oct. 3, Paul also said that he didn't see extending the Bush tax cuts as "a cost to government."

In the run up to the election conservatives said vote for us we are the solution to the problem. Having been elected they talk in vague generalities and dodge making tough decisions. Anyone having buyers regret yet.

Fox News Wins The 2010 Election

Fox News Wins The 2010 Election

Who was the big winner in this week's midterm election?

The Republican Party? No.

Former half-term Governor Sarah Palin? Not hardly.

Speaker-in-waiting John Boehner? Nope.

The Tea Party movement? Think again.

Tuesday night's big winner was undoubtedly Fox News. It did more than just about anyone to weaken President Obama, peel off Senate seats and wrestle control of the U.S. House of Representatives from Democrats.

Let's face it, we all saw this coming. Just after the President was sworn in, Fox News vice president for programming Bill Shine called his employer the "voice of opposition" and Fox chief executive Roger Ailes -- a former advisor to Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush -- described the network's role "as the Alamo."

How can any news organization claim the mantle of "Fair and Balanced" when it sees its role under a new president as that of history's fearless Texas soldiers attempting to fight off Mexican troops led by President General Antonio López de Santa Anna whose cruelty inspired countless others to join the Texian Army?

Tellingly, Fox News didn't wait long before inspiring an army of its own.

In the early days of 2009, the network co-opted the then-fledgling Tea Party movement, swelling its ranks with endless promotion. As the first round of nationwide Tea Party protests approached on April 15, Fox News repeatedly described the events as "FNC Tax Day Tea Parties" airing segments encouraging viewers to attend and get involved. In fact, in the week leading up to the protests, Fox aired more than 100 commercial-like promos for its coverage surrounding the events many of which featured Fox News personalities.

The Tea Party promotion has continued unabated for more than a year.

Compounding its activism, the conservative network moved on to lobbying Congress just a few months later.

As Members of Congress went home for summer recess to hold traditional town hall meetings with constituents, angry protesters who had been organized by conservative special interest groups were ready to meet them. Footage of the events was enough to make Fox News swoon as network personalities repeatedly praised the disruptions and encouraged viewers to join in the right-wing fun.

As 2009 became 2010, Rupert Murdoch's American cash cow of a network morphed even more explicitly into the communications arm of the Republican National Committee.

Leading Fox News contributors with an eye on the 2012 presidential race -- Palin, Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee, and Rick Santorum -- raised an astonishing $33.1 million in the 2010 elections to help fund the candidates of their choice and advance their various causes.

Former Bush advisor Karl Rove -- another Fox contributor -- raised and spent an astonishing $38 million to elect Republicans and it didn't hurt matters that Fox News hosted him time and again to discuss the election without noting this blatant conflict of interest. Now that's what I call journalistic ethics.

All told, more than 30 different Fox News personalities -- from hosts to contributors -- supported Republicans in at least 600 instances, in nearly every state during the election.

Republican candidates knew where their bread was buttered too. After Delaware Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell's disastrous debut on the national stage, Palin advised her to "speak through Fox News." She got the message -- one Fox source reportedly said O'Donnell went on Hannity to "get a certain type of treatment." Perhaps it was that "certain type of treatment" that led Nevada's Sharron Angle to suggest she preferred appearing on Fox News because the network let her plug her website for contributions.

News Corp. -- the parent company of Fox News and sister network Fox Business -- was not going to let its employees have all the fun. In the weeks leading up to Election Day, it donated at least $1.25 million to the Republican Governors Association to defeat Democrats and at least $1 million to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a right-wing special interest deeply involved in this year's election.

Yes, it was a stellar election night for Fox News -- they won a slew of governorships, the U.S. House of Representatives, and came darn close to winning the U.S. Senate.

But don't expect the right-wing "news" network to rest on its laurels.  After all, it has a President to defeat in two short years.

Karl Frisch is a progressive political communications consultant based in Washington, DC. He can be reached at KarlFrisch.com.

What liberal media. There simply is no network utterly devoted to smothering the public in Stalin-esque Republican propaganda the way Fox does. A reasonable person has to ask if Republicans could compete on a level playing field. They have never had any ideas. They're obviously lousy at managing the nation's money. They lie us into wars based on their paranoid bed wetting fears. The best attack they have on Democrats is that Democrats didn't repair the wreck Republicans left fast enough.

Republican Leadership Already Plans to Sabotage Will of the American People

Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN): Voters Don’t Want Democrats And Republicans ‘To Work Better Together’

Days before the Republicans won control of the House and made gains in the Senate, GOP leaders made clear that there will be “no compromise” with Democrats and President Obama. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell even said his priority will not be to solve problems, but to defeat Obama in 2012.

After the GOP victories this week, Democratic leaders said they want to work with Republicans to get things done. Obama said there are a “whole bunch” of areas where Democrats could work with the GOP. “We’ve got to start working together. … Legislation’s the art of compromise,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said. Yet, Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) doesn’t think so. On a local radio show today, not only did Pence reiterate his “no compromise” pledge, but he upped the ante, saying voters don’t want Republicans and Democrats to work together:

    PENCE: I’m going to ensure that Republicans come out of the gate and seize this moment, we’ve really been given a second chance at a first impression and I’m going to tell them that we have to rise to the challenge with principle and conviction and not with this attitude that you saw coming from the White House yesterday and from some other quarters on the establishment left in Washington which was that somehow the message of the election was that they want Democrats and Republicans to work better together, to get along — good heavens.


Pence doesn’t seem to have a firm grasp on what the American people want. An Ipsos/Reuters poll released on Monday found that “[m]ore than half of voters (56%) want to see Congress prioritizing cross-party working to enable consensus-based policymaking.” And a New York Times/CBS News poll released last week reported similar results. A whopping 78 percent said that Republicans should “compromise some of their positions to get things done” versus only 15 percent who said they should “stick to their positions.”

Someone once said you can chose to be a patriot or a Republican. Pence and Republican leadership have clearly chosen to pursue the interests of an extreme right-wing agenda over the interests of the United States.

Should Republicans be congratulated for buying their way into office - Conservatives outspent liberals 2-1 in elections