Alabama has finally done something right. The State Board of Education signed on to what is known as Common Core State Standards. During the meeting, some members of the public argued that passage could mean totalitarian government and mind-control would soon follow these new educational standards. Those arguments and similar ones were tossed aside as Governor Bob Riley, a Republican, gave the state a parting gift by joining with other board members, 7-2, approving Common Core.
“If we do not do this, we will not be doing what I think is in the best interest of our children,” Riley said before the vote.
A little research shows Common Core is not a communist conspiracy – unlike those on the right would have us believe. One of its founders is the Hunt Institute for Educational Leadership and Policy, which is chaired by James B. Hunt Jr., the former governor of North Carolina. Hunt’s rather uncontroversial statement: “Education is our future – it’s everything. We must not settle for anything short of excellence in our schools.”
It turns out the aims of Common Core are to improve education across the country, raising standards in some states and preparing all students for a prosperous future. In short, it’s about putting students in the same grade all on the same level – the same goal President Bush pushed with “no Child Left Behind”.
Bill Gates: “The more states that adopt these college and career-based standards, the closer we will be to sharing innovation across state borders and becoming more competitive as a country.”
All the fighting by conservatives to let Alabama set its own educational course is nonsense. A check of the National Assessment of Educational Progress testing results for all 50 states and the District of Columbia confirms that awful stereotype of Alabama public education – the state is at or near the bottom of all rankings when it comes to tests of students’ knowledge. What do conservative opponents of Common Core want to conserve when it comes to the Alabama way of public schooling? It cannot possibly be the weak test scores. It must be the right to go it alone no matter what the results and no matter who it hurts. Alabama has been going it alone in education for the better part of the almost two centuries it has been a state.
As Sarah Palin would ask: "How's that been workin' out for ya, Alabama?"
The answer is, "not very well."
According to the latest NAEP scores, Alabama 8th graders’ reading aptitude ranked the state 44th – and 50th in math. Yet, Robert Bentley, the governor-elect, publicly opposed the state joining a coalition of states that are establishing uniform standards, things like ensuring 4th graders meet the same basic reading skills or 8th graders understand the same math concepts.
“It is a state function and the standards to educate our children should be based on state and local standards that are set by Alabama local school boards and parents and not by the federal government or a consortium of states,” Governor-elect Bentley said.
Bentley, who as governor will join the school board after he is sworn in next year, agreed with two state board members, Republicans Betty Peters and Stephanie Bell, in opposition to the new educational standards. Bell and Peters are favorites of the Eagle Forum’s Phyllis Schlafly, who recently stated that she believes Common Core’s real aim was to introduce “European-style socialism” into the United States.
Do these people actually read or study what they think they are against or do they just shoot from the gut?
New governors will soon preside over states competing against each other for lucrative economic development. Those governors-to-be know their states gain a leg up on those that choose to deny progress in the name of states’ rights. Maybe that is why, while attending the Republican governor’s conference, they encouraged Bentley in his perverse and stubborn idea that Alabama would not benefit from joining with other states to better our children’s standard of education.
Alabama’s motto is “We Dare Defend Our Rights” – even if it is the right to be at the bottom.
Sunday, November 21, 2010
Monday, November 8, 2010
It will be business as usual
Voters stopped far short of completely embracing Republicans or the Tea Party. They did not hand over control of the Senate, and they still blame the Bush administration – and Wall Street – for the dismal state of the economy. One thing is for sure: with many of the candidates having won by a mere 1% or 2%, and with the Democrats holding the Senate, this was not a mandate for Republicans.
“This was a thumping,” George W. Bush said back in 2006 when the Democrats took charge of Congress with many winning by just a 1% or 2% margin. “But this was no Democratic mandate. The voters are telling us to work together.” Same thing goes for the 2010 elections.
Although the Tea Partiers hate government, they love what it provides. Americans want goods and services, but do not want to pay for them. They want spending cuts in Washington; but if a politician ever says “cut Social Security and Medicare” his career ends.
There are three conflicting demands here:
1. Reduce the deficit: Last summer the Republican deficit hawks demanded that Democrats find $34 billion in cuts to pay for extending unemployment benefits. But if you ask Republicans to do likewise for the 10-year $3.7 trillion cost of extending the Bush tax cuts, they CANNOT do it. In fact, when Republicans were in charge of both the White House and Congress, when asked about the Bush tax cuts and the cost of the war, Vice President Cheney said that Reagan proved that deficits do not matter. When the Democrats got power, deficits suddenly mattered to the Republicans.
2. Cut taxes: The GOP, Tea Partiers, and corporations think they pay too much in taxes; but, really, Americans do not pay much in taxes at all. The United States has one of the lowest tax rates in the world. Among all industrialized nations, the non-partisan Tax Policy Center says only Iceland and Ireland pay less. In fact, according to the IRS, 47 percent of all American households pay no federal income taxes at all (this includes most of the very rich with their many loopholes and write offs).
3. Cut entitlements: The Census Bureau notes that 44% of American households receive federal government entitlements of some kind – including Medicare and Social Security. Half of that amount is Social Security alone. Due to aging Baby Boomers, more people are receiving entitlements than a decade ago while fewer people are paying federal taxes than even just five years ago.
Whenever Tea Party voters are asked by reporters where the federal government should cut spending, they cannot answer, just like the elected officials they support. Occasionally someone mentions a government agency or two, but when you walk them through actual costs, they become uneasy with the reality that one cannot cut much from the budget – at least until we end war in Afghanistan and bring home all troops from Iraq (50,000 still there). Let the Tea Partiers just try to take Social Security and Medicare away from Grandma and see what happens.
What about completely dumping agencies long targeted by fiscal conservatives such as the Department of Education, Department of Commerce, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the IRS (assuming you have simplified the tax code)? What do we save if we dump those agencies?
IRS: $12.97 billion
Department of Education: $46.7 billion
Department of Commerce: $14 billion
EPA: $10 billion
This adds up to about $83 billion – less than 10% of the total 2010 deficit of $1.4 trillion. Sure…it would help, but letting the tax cuts expire for just the wealthy top 1% of Americans cuts the deficit by almost half.
And remember, by shuttering those agencies, you put several 100s of thousands of federal employees out of work. That means federal money must be spent on their unemployment and other available assistance, not to mention still paying them for their vacation days, sick days, and pensions.
The Bush administration inherited budget surpluses from the Clinton administration. What turned these surpluses into deficits, even before the recession? There were three fundamental new costs: the tax cuts, the Medicare prescription-drug bill, and post-9/11 security spending (including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the new Department of Homeland Security). Of these, the tax cuts were by far the largest contributor to the deficit. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the Bush tax cuts have contributed nearly half of the yearly deficit.
From the Washington Post:
“The day the Bush administration took over from President Bill Clinton in 2001, America enjoyed a $236 billion budget surplus – with a projected 10-year surplus of $5.6 trillion. When the Bush administration left office, it handed President Obama a $1.3 trillion deficit – and projected shortfalls of $8 trillion for the next decade. During eight years in office, the Bush administration passed two major tax cuts skewed to the wealthiest Americans, enacted a costly Medicare prescription-drug benefit and waged two wars, without paying for any of it. To put the breathtaking scope of this irresponsibility in perspective, the Bush administration's swing from surpluses to deficits added more debt in its eight years than all the previous administrations in the history of our republic combined. And its [the Bush administration] spending spree is the unwelcome gift that keeps on giving: Going forward, these unpaid-for policies will continue to add trillions to our deficit.”
In another article by the Washington Post: “President Obama notched substantial successes in spending cuts last year, winning 60 percent of his proposed cuts and managing to get Congress to ax several programs that had bedeviled President George W. Bush for years.”
But none of this will matter. I believe that the Tea Party's hope for actually effecting change in Washington will start to crumble within the next year as they run head first into reality. The ordinary Americans in this movement lack the numbers and financial clout to muscle their way into the back rooms of Republican Congressional power – no matter how well their candidates performed. As the Washington Post learned from its months-long effort to contact every Tea Party group in the country, of the 1,400 registered groups nationwide (some estimates are higher), 647 replied. Most had fewer than 50 members. If these groups think they can compete with billionaires who buy and sell politicians like they do shares on Wall Street, they had better think again.
During the 2010 midterm elections, the buying of politicians was unabated. Corporate lobbyists lavished $54 million on Republicans destined for leadership roles in the House. As one lobbyist told the NY Times, "Business should be very good." You can bet it will. Corporations have free reign to do as they please – while Americans will be given the business.
The Tea Party was used by the Republicans and their corporate partners for the 2010 midterm election. Its loud populist message gave the GOP just the cover it needed both to camouflage its corporate patrons and to rebrand itself as a party miraculously antithetical to the despised GOP that gave us the Bush administration’s record deficits only yesterday. Besides, the more the Tea Party looks as if it was calling the shots in the GOP, the easier it was to distract attention from those who are really controlling the GOP.
What the Tea Party wants most – less government spending and no federal deficit – is not only impossible to achieve in the way that they think it can be done, it is not even remotely going to happen on the GOP's watch. The elites have no serious plans to cut anything except taxes and regulation of their favored industries. In the party's principal 2010 campaign document, "Pledge to America," it does not even promise to cut earmarks.
Something the Tea Partiers will quickly learn: If you win, the problem is yours. Come January when a new Congress swears the oath of office, they will be responsible for the problems they have complained about. And the Tea Partiers will not like the results because they will not get what they want.
The Tea-Party-backed winners entering Congress are the latest version of hope and change. Will they be able to change much of anything? Probably not.
It is going to be business as usual.
Resource for budget figures: http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=1258
Resource for deficit numbers: http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=966
Other resources:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/14/AR2010011403909.html
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jan/14/obama-wins-more-cuts-in-spending-than-bush/
http://www.nsba.biz/content/printer.2864.shtml
http://www.osec.doc.gov/bmi/budget/10BIB/BA-OUTLAYS.pdf
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/10938291/The-US-Department-of-Education-2010-Budget
http://www.epa.gov/history/org/resources/budget.htm
“This was a thumping,” George W. Bush said back in 2006 when the Democrats took charge of Congress with many winning by just a 1% or 2% margin. “But this was no Democratic mandate. The voters are telling us to work together.” Same thing goes for the 2010 elections.
Although the Tea Partiers hate government, they love what it provides. Americans want goods and services, but do not want to pay for them. They want spending cuts in Washington; but if a politician ever says “cut Social Security and Medicare” his career ends.
There are three conflicting demands here:
1. Reduce the deficit: Last summer the Republican deficit hawks demanded that Democrats find $34 billion in cuts to pay for extending unemployment benefits. But if you ask Republicans to do likewise for the 10-year $3.7 trillion cost of extending the Bush tax cuts, they CANNOT do it. In fact, when Republicans were in charge of both the White House and Congress, when asked about the Bush tax cuts and the cost of the war, Vice President Cheney said that Reagan proved that deficits do not matter. When the Democrats got power, deficits suddenly mattered to the Republicans.
2. Cut taxes: The GOP, Tea Partiers, and corporations think they pay too much in taxes; but, really, Americans do not pay much in taxes at all. The United States has one of the lowest tax rates in the world. Among all industrialized nations, the non-partisan Tax Policy Center says only Iceland and Ireland pay less. In fact, according to the IRS, 47 percent of all American households pay no federal income taxes at all (this includes most of the very rich with their many loopholes and write offs).
3. Cut entitlements: The Census Bureau notes that 44% of American households receive federal government entitlements of some kind – including Medicare and Social Security. Half of that amount is Social Security alone. Due to aging Baby Boomers, more people are receiving entitlements than a decade ago while fewer people are paying federal taxes than even just five years ago.
Whenever Tea Party voters are asked by reporters where the federal government should cut spending, they cannot answer, just like the elected officials they support. Occasionally someone mentions a government agency or two, but when you walk them through actual costs, they become uneasy with the reality that one cannot cut much from the budget – at least until we end war in Afghanistan and bring home all troops from Iraq (50,000 still there). Let the Tea Partiers just try to take Social Security and Medicare away from Grandma and see what happens.
What about completely dumping agencies long targeted by fiscal conservatives such as the Department of Education, Department of Commerce, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the IRS (assuming you have simplified the tax code)? What do we save if we dump those agencies?
IRS: $12.97 billion
Department of Education: $46.7 billion
Department of Commerce: $14 billion
EPA: $10 billion
This adds up to about $83 billion – less than 10% of the total 2010 deficit of $1.4 trillion. Sure…it would help, but letting the tax cuts expire for just the wealthy top 1% of Americans cuts the deficit by almost half.
And remember, by shuttering those agencies, you put several 100s of thousands of federal employees out of work. That means federal money must be spent on their unemployment and other available assistance, not to mention still paying them for their vacation days, sick days, and pensions.
The Bush administration inherited budget surpluses from the Clinton administration. What turned these surpluses into deficits, even before the recession? There were three fundamental new costs: the tax cuts, the Medicare prescription-drug bill, and post-9/11 security spending (including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the new Department of Homeland Security). Of these, the tax cuts were by far the largest contributor to the deficit. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the Bush tax cuts have contributed nearly half of the yearly deficit.
From the Washington Post:
“The day the Bush administration took over from President Bill Clinton in 2001, America enjoyed a $236 billion budget surplus – with a projected 10-year surplus of $5.6 trillion. When the Bush administration left office, it handed President Obama a $1.3 trillion deficit – and projected shortfalls of $8 trillion for the next decade. During eight years in office, the Bush administration passed two major tax cuts skewed to the wealthiest Americans, enacted a costly Medicare prescription-drug benefit and waged two wars, without paying for any of it. To put the breathtaking scope of this irresponsibility in perspective, the Bush administration's swing from surpluses to deficits added more debt in its eight years than all the previous administrations in the history of our republic combined. And its [the Bush administration] spending spree is the unwelcome gift that keeps on giving: Going forward, these unpaid-for policies will continue to add trillions to our deficit.”
In another article by the Washington Post: “President Obama notched substantial successes in spending cuts last year, winning 60 percent of his proposed cuts and managing to get Congress to ax several programs that had bedeviled President George W. Bush for years.”
But none of this will matter. I believe that the Tea Party's hope for actually effecting change in Washington will start to crumble within the next year as they run head first into reality. The ordinary Americans in this movement lack the numbers and financial clout to muscle their way into the back rooms of Republican Congressional power – no matter how well their candidates performed. As the Washington Post learned from its months-long effort to contact every Tea Party group in the country, of the 1,400 registered groups nationwide (some estimates are higher), 647 replied. Most had fewer than 50 members. If these groups think they can compete with billionaires who buy and sell politicians like they do shares on Wall Street, they had better think again.
During the 2010 midterm elections, the buying of politicians was unabated. Corporate lobbyists lavished $54 million on Republicans destined for leadership roles in the House. As one lobbyist told the NY Times, "Business should be very good." You can bet it will. Corporations have free reign to do as they please – while Americans will be given the business.
The Tea Party was used by the Republicans and their corporate partners for the 2010 midterm election. Its loud populist message gave the GOP just the cover it needed both to camouflage its corporate patrons and to rebrand itself as a party miraculously antithetical to the despised GOP that gave us the Bush administration’s record deficits only yesterday. Besides, the more the Tea Party looks as if it was calling the shots in the GOP, the easier it was to distract attention from those who are really controlling the GOP.
What the Tea Party wants most – less government spending and no federal deficit – is not only impossible to achieve in the way that they think it can be done, it is not even remotely going to happen on the GOP's watch. The elites have no serious plans to cut anything except taxes and regulation of their favored industries. In the party's principal 2010 campaign document, "Pledge to America," it does not even promise to cut earmarks.
Something the Tea Partiers will quickly learn: If you win, the problem is yours. Come January when a new Congress swears the oath of office, they will be responsible for the problems they have complained about. And the Tea Partiers will not like the results because they will not get what they want.
The Tea-Party-backed winners entering Congress are the latest version of hope and change. Will they be able to change much of anything? Probably not.
It is going to be business as usual.
Resource for budget figures: http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=1258
Resource for deficit numbers: http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=966
Other resources:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/14/AR2010011403909.html
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jan/14/obama-wins-more-cuts-in-spending-than-bush/
http://www.nsba.biz/content/printer.2864.shtml
http://www.osec.doc.gov/bmi/budget/10BIB/BA-OUTLAYS.pdf
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/10938291/The-US-Department-of-Education-2010-Budget
http://www.epa.gov/history/org/resources/budget.htm
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
An American temper tantrum
Like children, American citizens are demanding the impossible: quick, painless solutions to long-term, structural problems. To their detriment, in 2008, Democrats encouraged the electorate’s belief in magic. Once they got into office, they were forced to try to explain that things are not quite so simple -- that restructuring our economy, renewing the nation's increasingly crumbling infrastructure, reforming an unsustainable system of entitlements, redefining America's position in the world and all the other massive challenges that face the country are going to require years of effort.
But Americans did not want to hear any of this. They wanted somebody to kiss it and make it all better – right now. Compounding this problem, Republicans, in their push to get back in power, encouraged the anger.
President Obama can point to any number of occasions when he told Americans that getting our nation back on track will take years. But in 2008, his campaign stump speech ended with the exhortation, "Let's go change the world" – instead of the truer "Let's go change the world slowly and incrementally, waiting years before we see the fruits of our labor." Too many voters, especially the young, thought things could be changed quickly.
Obama should have stressed over and over again that hard work lies ahead; and it will require a degree of sacrifice from every one of us. Some sacrifices that Americans need to make to get our country moving again are:
• We need to pay more for our gas. New foundations have to be laid for a 21st-century economy, starting with weaning the nation off of its dependence on fossil fuels, which means there will have to be an increase in the price of oil. I do not want to pay more to fill my gas tank, but I know that it would be good for the nation if I did.
• The richest Americans need to pay higher taxes because they earn a much bigger share of the nation's income and hold a bigger share of its overall wealth. If the rich do not pay more, there will not be enough revenue to have the kind of infrastructure that fosters economic growth.
Fixing Social Security for future generations, working steadily to improve the schools, charting a reasonable path on immigration -- none of this is what the American people want to hear. Americans want quick and easy solutions to the recession and job loss that will not hurt.
The lack of American patience has caused politicians from both parties to be thrown out. Republicans got the back of the electorate's hand in 2006 and 2008 and in the 2010 primaries; Democrats felt the sting this November. By 2012, if the economy does not improve by leaps and bounds, it could be the GOP's turn to get slapped around again.
During the last two years, the Republican Party's favorability plunged to just 24 percent – lower than the Democrat Party’s 33%. Even so registered citizens voted for Republicans over Democrats giving the GOP about a 56-seat majority in the House. This put Wall Street and Banker friendly John Boehner into the Speaker's office. This is the same man who led the Republicans in the Senate to stand against anything Obama signed onto, even when it was originally a Republican idea or goal. He wants the president to fail. Period.
It really is ‘United We Stand or Divided We Fall’. The Republicans have been goading on the immature ‘I want my country back’ hotheaded-foot-stompers (or I could call them hotfooted-head-stompers) and allowing them to run the show. If Republicans refuse to work with Democrats for the next two years so that we can get back to having serious, adult discussions (instead of schoolyard screaming matches), we are going to go through years of hell with bigoted, rightwing, immature crazies like Michelle Bachmann and Rand Paul trying to dismantle our government.
The Tea Partiers want to turn us back to the early 20th century when there was no national money provided for infrastructure, schools, police, healthcare (including Medicare), Social Security, or education. We will become a third world nation where those without much money barely survive on the edge of starvation and no healthcare – and those states that are poor will not be able to provide services – just like it was when my grandfather was young.
With Republicans now in charge of the House and Democrats barely holding onto control of the Senate, Republicans, with their constant filibuster, will likely continue to force the Democrats to have 60 votes (out of 100) lined up to pass anything. And in turn, the Democrats in the Senate will not bring anything to the floor that was passed in the House. Couple that with the hard work, sacrifice of careers, and ground work laid by the Democrats to get our economy back on track, the Republicans will take credit (and be given credit by voters) for what the Democrats did. But none of this matters to the electorate because they can only look at things in a very simple light: If a party wins control when the economy is in a tumble, that party gets the blame. If a party wins control when the economy is on an upswing, that party gets the credit.
The American people are acting like a bunch of spoiled brats. They wanted Obama to “kiss it and make it all better right now.” But he could not turn the economy around quickly – no one could have.
So… even though a majority of the voters understood that the Bush administration put us in this hole, they blamed the Democrats for not fixing the economy fast enough.
According to the polls, Americans were in a mood to hold their breath until they turned blue. This election was not an electoral wave. It was not a Republican mandate.
It was an immature temper tantrum.
But Americans did not want to hear any of this. They wanted somebody to kiss it and make it all better – right now. Compounding this problem, Republicans, in their push to get back in power, encouraged the anger.
President Obama can point to any number of occasions when he told Americans that getting our nation back on track will take years. But in 2008, his campaign stump speech ended with the exhortation, "Let's go change the world" – instead of the truer "Let's go change the world slowly and incrementally, waiting years before we see the fruits of our labor." Too many voters, especially the young, thought things could be changed quickly.
Obama should have stressed over and over again that hard work lies ahead; and it will require a degree of sacrifice from every one of us. Some sacrifices that Americans need to make to get our country moving again are:
• We need to pay more for our gas. New foundations have to be laid for a 21st-century economy, starting with weaning the nation off of its dependence on fossil fuels, which means there will have to be an increase in the price of oil. I do not want to pay more to fill my gas tank, but I know that it would be good for the nation if I did.
• The richest Americans need to pay higher taxes because they earn a much bigger share of the nation's income and hold a bigger share of its overall wealth. If the rich do not pay more, there will not be enough revenue to have the kind of infrastructure that fosters economic growth.
Fixing Social Security for future generations, working steadily to improve the schools, charting a reasonable path on immigration -- none of this is what the American people want to hear. Americans want quick and easy solutions to the recession and job loss that will not hurt.
The lack of American patience has caused politicians from both parties to be thrown out. Republicans got the back of the electorate's hand in 2006 and 2008 and in the 2010 primaries; Democrats felt the sting this November. By 2012, if the economy does not improve by leaps and bounds, it could be the GOP's turn to get slapped around again.
During the last two years, the Republican Party's favorability plunged to just 24 percent – lower than the Democrat Party’s 33%. Even so registered citizens voted for Republicans over Democrats giving the GOP about a 56-seat majority in the House. This put Wall Street and Banker friendly John Boehner into the Speaker's office. This is the same man who led the Republicans in the Senate to stand against anything Obama signed onto, even when it was originally a Republican idea or goal. He wants the president to fail. Period.
It really is ‘United We Stand or Divided We Fall’. The Republicans have been goading on the immature ‘I want my country back’ hotheaded-foot-stompers (or I could call them hotfooted-head-stompers) and allowing them to run the show. If Republicans refuse to work with Democrats for the next two years so that we can get back to having serious, adult discussions (instead of schoolyard screaming matches), we are going to go through years of hell with bigoted, rightwing, immature crazies like Michelle Bachmann and Rand Paul trying to dismantle our government.
The Tea Partiers want to turn us back to the early 20th century when there was no national money provided for infrastructure, schools, police, healthcare (including Medicare), Social Security, or education. We will become a third world nation where those without much money barely survive on the edge of starvation and no healthcare – and those states that are poor will not be able to provide services – just like it was when my grandfather was young.
With Republicans now in charge of the House and Democrats barely holding onto control of the Senate, Republicans, with their constant filibuster, will likely continue to force the Democrats to have 60 votes (out of 100) lined up to pass anything. And in turn, the Democrats in the Senate will not bring anything to the floor that was passed in the House. Couple that with the hard work, sacrifice of careers, and ground work laid by the Democrats to get our economy back on track, the Republicans will take credit (and be given credit by voters) for what the Democrats did. But none of this matters to the electorate because they can only look at things in a very simple light: If a party wins control when the economy is in a tumble, that party gets the blame. If a party wins control when the economy is on an upswing, that party gets the credit.
The American people are acting like a bunch of spoiled brats. They wanted Obama to “kiss it and make it all better right now.” But he could not turn the economy around quickly – no one could have.
So… even though a majority of the voters understood that the Bush administration put us in this hole, they blamed the Democrats for not fixing the economy fast enough.
According to the polls, Americans were in a mood to hold their breath until they turned blue. This election was not an electoral wave. It was not a Republican mandate.
It was an immature temper tantrum.
Monday, November 1, 2010
This is not reason
At a time when the Republicans are beset by Tea Party candidates whose serious behavior overwhelms the most conscious satire efforts constructed by writers of Saturday Night Live, a situation that would traditionally redound in favor of Democrats, we have instead a silly season where some of the most unfit candidates ever foisted on the public are enjoying leads in the polls.
Two recent classic cases, both from the West, jump out for inspection. Meg Whitman, a woman who has unleashed her E-Bay executive millions in a bid to buy the governorship of California, used some of her money to purchase time for an ad where she inadvertently salutes her opponent.
Whitman is seen and heard longing for the past, for that wonderful California of 1980 when she and her husband moved to the Golden State in pursuit of the good life. Wouldn't it be wonderful to restore that period, Whitman wishes. Yes, and who was governor in 1980, the glorious period she wishes to recapture as California's governor?
Actually there was a highly familiar face serving as governor then, Meg. It was Jerry Brown. Remember him? He is that same candidate you are fervently running against, the target of all those mega million bucks your hired guns have been attacking non-stop. [Californians are rolling in the aisles with laughter at this ad.]
In the neighboring state of Nevada we have one of the Tea Party's most celebrated favorites, Sharron Angle, who seeks to unseat Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Angle is emerging as a good candidate running for sprint champion of Nevada. Her sprinting is to avoid contact with a reporter seeking to ask her about her foreign policy views. As the local television reporter seeks to keep pace running after the fleet-footed Angle at McCarran Airport, he persists.
With America currently engaged on two war fronts, he asks her views about Iraq and Afghanistan. Alas, after being long ignored Angle finally responds to the reporter. The candidate that, according to recent polls, Nevadans prefer over Senate Majority Leader Reid concedes that the wars are both "there." In short, Angle concedes that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan actually exist. Such, apparently, is her succinct analysis of two costly wars in which the U.S. is currently engaged. They truly exist, a kernel of wisdom we have gleaned from the pristine foreign policy mind of Tea Party favorite Angle.
There is one more example of another Tea Party celebrity, this time on the East Coast, whose sparkling wit has also been in evidence. Christine O'Donnell in a recent debate with Delaware senatorial opponent Chris Coons knew nothing about the First Amendment and its free exercise clause regarding religion and the state.
Coons was shown patiently explaining to O'Donnell about the First Amendment as he would to a young daughter early in her civics class study. In place of being appreciative for Coons' assistance, O'Donnell put her later spin on the experience for media consumption. O'Donnell had lectured Coons, she insisted. She believes that she had been the informed party. [She thought that the audience was laughing at Coons when it was her ignorance they were laughing at.]
With such ill-suited candidates exhibiting a string of gaffes, we have the results of the New York Times Poll explaining preference of a large segment of the nation's voters for such candidates as those described and others such as senatorial aspirants Rand Paul in Kentucky and Joe Miller in Alaska as embodiments of arguably the silliest national campaign season on record.
One would expect that voters preferring such Tea Party candidates who lock horns with the traditional system would at least share a consistency regarding President Obama. It would be expected that such voters would hold Obama primarily responsible for America's current economic malaise.
But this was not the case. Instead the rebelling voters, a significant number of those seeking fundamental change who have been resonating to the messages of Tea Party candidates, believe that the nation's economic malaise is the fault of George W. Bush! [The problem with Obama is that he did not fix things fast enough to suit them.]
If this is the case then why prefer Republicans? If they, as Obama put it, drove America's economy into the ditch, then why vote for them now? Especially since these voters expressed the belief that the country's economic woes will diminish and prosperity will begin to return during the final two years of Obama's first term. This is NOT the angry message that emanates from Tea Party meetings, with their shouts about lack of confidence in Obama's leadership.
Then why vote Republican? The answer is [drum roll, please] they think that the Republicans will be more likely to create jobs. [Never mind that Obama is on track during his first two years to create more jobs than in Bush’s entire eight years.]
President Bush had only 2.3% job growth his entire eights years in office. Go here to see a chart showing previous presidents' job record.
Following this rocky 'thinking' becomes more cumbersome at each turn. What did the man who will become senate majority leader in the event of Republican victory on Tuesday say about the goal of the next two years should his party take control of Congress? Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky declared that the goal of a Republican congressional majority is to see that Obama is a one term president, in other words a seek and destroy mission rather than one focused on joint action in the interest of building a better America [there will be no focus on building jobs for Americans]. And Rep. John Boehner, Republican leader in the House, says that they will refuse to compromise with Democrats on anything.
As for programs, we know the two-pronged strategy of Republicans:
• One goal involves restoring the Bush tax cuts, putting more money into the hands of those who do not need it as a means of "stimulating" economic activity.
• The second goal is to repeal Obama's healthcare law. This will put the monopolistic healthcare lobby back in charge in the same way that Bush's prescription drug legislation placed power in the hands of the monopolistic prescription drug industry. [Of course, this is all bluster, because they know that Democratic filibuster and the presidential veto will stop any attempt at repeal.]
This is the kind of "consensus" that these voters, according to the New York Times Poll, believe will function to insure the best result for America.
The answer for them, after acknowledging that Bush is to blame for America's current economic ills, is to put the proponents of Bush-o-nomics back in charge to fix our problems by reenacting policies that put America in this mess in the first place. They want to put the fox back in the hen house!
This cannot be called rational reasoning. It’s irrational. It is not reason.
Sources:
Written by William Hare, Voter Schizophrenia, for Seattle Times (with a few edits, added comments, added charts by me)
Bureau of Labor Statistics
Wall Street Journal
Two recent classic cases, both from the West, jump out for inspection. Meg Whitman, a woman who has unleashed her E-Bay executive millions in a bid to buy the governorship of California, used some of her money to purchase time for an ad where she inadvertently salutes her opponent.
Whitman is seen and heard longing for the past, for that wonderful California of 1980 when she and her husband moved to the Golden State in pursuit of the good life. Wouldn't it be wonderful to restore that period, Whitman wishes. Yes, and who was governor in 1980, the glorious period she wishes to recapture as California's governor?
Actually there was a highly familiar face serving as governor then, Meg. It was Jerry Brown. Remember him? He is that same candidate you are fervently running against, the target of all those mega million bucks your hired guns have been attacking non-stop. [Californians are rolling in the aisles with laughter at this ad.]
In the neighboring state of Nevada we have one of the Tea Party's most celebrated favorites, Sharron Angle, who seeks to unseat Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Angle is emerging as a good candidate running for sprint champion of Nevada. Her sprinting is to avoid contact with a reporter seeking to ask her about her foreign policy views. As the local television reporter seeks to keep pace running after the fleet-footed Angle at McCarran Airport, he persists.
With America currently engaged on two war fronts, he asks her views about Iraq and Afghanistan. Alas, after being long ignored Angle finally responds to the reporter. The candidate that, according to recent polls, Nevadans prefer over Senate Majority Leader Reid concedes that the wars are both "there." In short, Angle concedes that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan actually exist. Such, apparently, is her succinct analysis of two costly wars in which the U.S. is currently engaged. They truly exist, a kernel of wisdom we have gleaned from the pristine foreign policy mind of Tea Party favorite Angle.
There is one more example of another Tea Party celebrity, this time on the East Coast, whose sparkling wit has also been in evidence. Christine O'Donnell in a recent debate with Delaware senatorial opponent Chris Coons knew nothing about the First Amendment and its free exercise clause regarding religion and the state.
Coons was shown patiently explaining to O'Donnell about the First Amendment as he would to a young daughter early in her civics class study. In place of being appreciative for Coons' assistance, O'Donnell put her later spin on the experience for media consumption. O'Donnell had lectured Coons, she insisted. She believes that she had been the informed party. [She thought that the audience was laughing at Coons when it was her ignorance they were laughing at.]
With such ill-suited candidates exhibiting a string of gaffes, we have the results of the New York Times Poll explaining preference of a large segment of the nation's voters for such candidates as those described and others such as senatorial aspirants Rand Paul in Kentucky and Joe Miller in Alaska as embodiments of arguably the silliest national campaign season on record.
One would expect that voters preferring such Tea Party candidates who lock horns with the traditional system would at least share a consistency regarding President Obama. It would be expected that such voters would hold Obama primarily responsible for America's current economic malaise.
But this was not the case. Instead the rebelling voters, a significant number of those seeking fundamental change who have been resonating to the messages of Tea Party candidates, believe that the nation's economic malaise is the fault of George W. Bush! [The problem with Obama is that he did not fix things fast enough to suit them.]
If this is the case then why prefer Republicans? If they, as Obama put it, drove America's economy into the ditch, then why vote for them now? Especially since these voters expressed the belief that the country's economic woes will diminish and prosperity will begin to return during the final two years of Obama's first term. This is NOT the angry message that emanates from Tea Party meetings, with their shouts about lack of confidence in Obama's leadership.
Then why vote Republican? The answer is [drum roll, please] they think that the Republicans will be more likely to create jobs. [Never mind that Obama is on track during his first two years to create more jobs than in Bush’s entire eight years.]
President Bush had only 2.3% job growth his entire eights years in office. Go here to see a chart showing previous presidents' job record.
Following this rocky 'thinking' becomes more cumbersome at each turn. What did the man who will become senate majority leader in the event of Republican victory on Tuesday say about the goal of the next two years should his party take control of Congress? Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky declared that the goal of a Republican congressional majority is to see that Obama is a one term president, in other words a seek and destroy mission rather than one focused on joint action in the interest of building a better America [there will be no focus on building jobs for Americans]. And Rep. John Boehner, Republican leader in the House, says that they will refuse to compromise with Democrats on anything.
As for programs, we know the two-pronged strategy of Republicans:
• One goal involves restoring the Bush tax cuts, putting more money into the hands of those who do not need it as a means of "stimulating" economic activity.
• The second goal is to repeal Obama's healthcare law. This will put the monopolistic healthcare lobby back in charge in the same way that Bush's prescription drug legislation placed power in the hands of the monopolistic prescription drug industry. [Of course, this is all bluster, because they know that Democratic filibuster and the presidential veto will stop any attempt at repeal.]
This is the kind of "consensus" that these voters, according to the New York Times Poll, believe will function to insure the best result for America.
The answer for them, after acknowledging that Bush is to blame for America's current economic ills, is to put the proponents of Bush-o-nomics back in charge to fix our problems by reenacting policies that put America in this mess in the first place. They want to put the fox back in the hen house!
This cannot be called rational reasoning. It’s irrational. It is not reason.
Sources:
Written by William Hare, Voter Schizophrenia, for Seattle Times (with a few edits, added comments, added charts by me)
Bureau of Labor Statistics
Wall Street Journal
Sunday, October 31, 2010
The new silent majority
We have been told that the nation is swept up in anti-incumbent fervor, and that we are mad, mad, mad. Except that, by and large, we are really not all that mad. A recent Pew Research Center poll found that only 21 percent of Americans are angry at the federal government. And the term "anti-incumbent fervor" loses a bit when you learn that, according to political scientist Michael Robinson, 98 percent of all congressional incumbents who ran in this year's primaries prevailed.
An event that took place on the National Mall on Saturday, October 20, presented a more serious reflection of our collective state of mind. Comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert held a rally in Washington, D.C. to Restore Sanity. The crowd appeared to exceed organizers' expectations, spilling past the boundaries set for the rally. Organizers estimated attendance at about 250,000; while many in the media estimated it to be around 220k.
There were satellite rallies going on in 47 states and six foreign countries. Add these numbers to the huge attendance of the Washington D.C. rally and you get 100s and 100s of thousands. Once the numbers are tallied, Jon Stewart may get the "million moderate march" he wanted with a few people brandishing signs that read, "I disagree with you, but I'm pretty sure you're not Hitler."
It seems the majority of people want sanity.
While the audiences of the two comedians undoubtedly lean somewhat to the left, Stewart presented the rally as a chance for the low-key middle to come together – those who do not care to shout or call names and who do not think we have Nazis or Socialists in charge of our government.
As described on The Rally to Restore Sanity Web site: "We're looking for the people who think shouting is annoying, counterproductive, and terrible for your throat; who feel that the loudest voices shouldn't be the only ones that get heard; and who believe that the only time it's appropriate to draw a Hitler mustache on someone is when that person is actually Hitler – or Charlie Chaplin in certain roles."
Alan Gitelson, a professor of political science at Loyola University Chicago, compared the sizable group of people who are neither angry nor partisan as the new "silent majority". Gitelson said. "The tea party is clearly to the right.... And then you have progressives on the other side, and then there is this large center. The rally that Colbert and Stewart are doing is kind of part of a balancing act."
Some on the right have portrayed the rallies as a last-ditch effort by liberals to rile up Democratic voters before an election in which conservative candidates clearly have the enthusiasm edge and are poised to win a sizable number of congressional seats. That fits nicely in much of their conspiracy-laden, "us vs. them" talk that comes from a swath of Tea Party leaders, but I believe what Stewart and Colbert are doing what their shows do so well: hold a mirror up to our society, point out hypocrisies and silliness and have a good laugh.
Jeffrey Juris, an assistant professor at Northeastern University, said the rallies go beyond political comedy, and should be taken seriously.
"The point of the rallies, and The Daily Show and The Colbert Report more generally, is to use humor to shine a light on the contradictions, foibles and absurdities of our political culture in order to provoke critical reflection, particularly among young people who might not otherwise take an interest in politics," Juris wrote in an analysis piece posted on the university's website. "In this case, the rallies go one step further and entail participatory action."
That is why these rallies have the chance to empower those who have sat back and watched the Tea Partiers and other crazies go insane over having a black Democratic president. Gitelson said Stewart and Colbert could be the right people to fire this group up, not in a way that would swing an election but enough to force politicians, once the election is over, to consider moderating their messages – maybe.
Colbert and Stewart’s shows delight in taking on both sides of the political aisle, relentlessly ferreting out inconsistencies and absurdities. An hour of Fox News and an hour of MSNBC can cancel each other out, but "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report" routinely use razor-sharp satire to slice away artifice and give a clear, albeit comedic, picture of the news of the day. The real "we the people," the silent majority, tend to recognize this and enjoy laughing at Stewart’s comedy because it is funny yet true. The rallies today will likely be a reflection of that, a coming together of the more-or-less like-minded middle.
At the rally's conclusion, Stewart gave an impassioned speech about the caustic level of discourse in Washington, and its nasty echoes on cable television's 24-hour news cycle. Stewart said that noisy debate obscured a reality that he perceived: that everyone throughout the country had found a way to work together.
"...The only place we don't is here [pointing at the Capitol building] or on cable TV," said Stewart, putting much of the blame on Washington. "If we amplify everything, we hear nothing...."
"...We live now in hard times, not end times. And we can have animus and not be enemies," Stewart said. "But unfortunately, one of our main tools in delineating the two broke. The country's 24-hour political pundit perpetual panic ‘conflictinator’ did not cause our problems. But its existence makes solving them that much harder."
Despite its comedic origins, the rally is being taken seriously, garnering plugs from Oprah and even President Obama himself. And while these events will be unlikely to change the course of the country, they might serve to remind anyone with a far-left or far-right ideology that there are masses in the middle to contend with – the people who are reasonable – the new silent majority.
If only they would actually vote and cause the Tea Party to lose, then maybe the crazies would go home.
An event that took place on the National Mall on Saturday, October 20, presented a more serious reflection of our collective state of mind. Comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert held a rally in Washington, D.C. to Restore Sanity. The crowd appeared to exceed organizers' expectations, spilling past the boundaries set for the rally. Organizers estimated attendance at about 250,000; while many in the media estimated it to be around 220k.
There were satellite rallies going on in 47 states and six foreign countries. Add these numbers to the huge attendance of the Washington D.C. rally and you get 100s and 100s of thousands. Once the numbers are tallied, Jon Stewart may get the "million moderate march" he wanted with a few people brandishing signs that read, "I disagree with you, but I'm pretty sure you're not Hitler."
It seems the majority of people want sanity.
While the audiences of the two comedians undoubtedly lean somewhat to the left, Stewart presented the rally as a chance for the low-key middle to come together – those who do not care to shout or call names and who do not think we have Nazis or Socialists in charge of our government.
As described on The Rally to Restore Sanity Web site: "We're looking for the people who think shouting is annoying, counterproductive, and terrible for your throat; who feel that the loudest voices shouldn't be the only ones that get heard; and who believe that the only time it's appropriate to draw a Hitler mustache on someone is when that person is actually Hitler – or Charlie Chaplin in certain roles."
Alan Gitelson, a professor of political science at Loyola University Chicago, compared the sizable group of people who are neither angry nor partisan as the new "silent majority". Gitelson said. "The tea party is clearly to the right.... And then you have progressives on the other side, and then there is this large center. The rally that Colbert and Stewart are doing is kind of part of a balancing act."
Some on the right have portrayed the rallies as a last-ditch effort by liberals to rile up Democratic voters before an election in which conservative candidates clearly have the enthusiasm edge and are poised to win a sizable number of congressional seats. That fits nicely in much of their conspiracy-laden, "us vs. them" talk that comes from a swath of Tea Party leaders, but I believe what Stewart and Colbert are doing what their shows do so well: hold a mirror up to our society, point out hypocrisies and silliness and have a good laugh.
Jeffrey Juris, an assistant professor at Northeastern University, said the rallies go beyond political comedy, and should be taken seriously.
"The point of the rallies, and The Daily Show and The Colbert Report more generally, is to use humor to shine a light on the contradictions, foibles and absurdities of our political culture in order to provoke critical reflection, particularly among young people who might not otherwise take an interest in politics," Juris wrote in an analysis piece posted on the university's website. "In this case, the rallies go one step further and entail participatory action."
That is why these rallies have the chance to empower those who have sat back and watched the Tea Partiers and other crazies go insane over having a black Democratic president. Gitelson said Stewart and Colbert could be the right people to fire this group up, not in a way that would swing an election but enough to force politicians, once the election is over, to consider moderating their messages – maybe.
Colbert and Stewart’s shows delight in taking on both sides of the political aisle, relentlessly ferreting out inconsistencies and absurdities. An hour of Fox News and an hour of MSNBC can cancel each other out, but "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report" routinely use razor-sharp satire to slice away artifice and give a clear, albeit comedic, picture of the news of the day. The real "we the people," the silent majority, tend to recognize this and enjoy laughing at Stewart’s comedy because it is funny yet true. The rallies today will likely be a reflection of that, a coming together of the more-or-less like-minded middle.
At the rally's conclusion, Stewart gave an impassioned speech about the caustic level of discourse in Washington, and its nasty echoes on cable television's 24-hour news cycle. Stewart said that noisy debate obscured a reality that he perceived: that everyone throughout the country had found a way to work together.
"...The only place we don't is here [pointing at the Capitol building] or on cable TV," said Stewart, putting much of the blame on Washington. "If we amplify everything, we hear nothing...."
"...We live now in hard times, not end times. And we can have animus and not be enemies," Stewart said. "But unfortunately, one of our main tools in delineating the two broke. The country's 24-hour political pundit perpetual panic ‘conflictinator’ did not cause our problems. But its existence makes solving them that much harder."
Despite its comedic origins, the rally is being taken seriously, garnering plugs from Oprah and even President Obama himself. And while these events will be unlikely to change the course of the country, they might serve to remind anyone with a far-left or far-right ideology that there are masses in the middle to contend with – the people who are reasonable – the new silent majority.
If only they would actually vote and cause the Tea Party to lose, then maybe the crazies would go home.
Saturday, October 30, 2010
The tax cut that no one noticed
In his interview on The Daily Show, President Obama stated that tax cuts were given to 95% of Americans in the Recovery Act. Yes, there was a tax cut. In fact, I got twice the amount of money back that I got under the Bush tax cuts. But no one else seems to know they got a tax cut except for me and a few others who really stay informed.
The National Review, an ultra right leaning magazine, actually ran a piece that said the President’s claim "strained credulity." The same magazine ran another piece insisting, "If the taxes of 95 percent of Americans actully [spelling mistake is theirs] had been cut, surely somebody other than Obama would have noticed."
It is incredible that the Righties think this is a matter of opinion. Obama cut taxes for millions of Americans, but since most people did not really notice their net pay increase, then, according to the Righties, maybe it did not happen. This argument is along the same line as “if a tree falls in the forest, but no on hears or sees it, did the tree really fall?”
The truth is that Democrats passed one of the largest middle-class tax cuts in the history of the country, and Republicans voted against it and fought to kill it. Congressional Republicans, whose inclination is to love tax cuts, refuse to give the president or Democrats in Congress any credit for this. And the general populace seems to have missed the news entirely.
How could a president cut Americans' income taxes by $116 billion and nobody notice? This is not a rhetorical question. At a rally organized recently by a Republican women's club, a half-dozen guests were asked by a reporter what had happened to their taxes since President Obama took office.
"Federal and state have both gone up," said one silver-haired attendee, echoing the comments of others. After further prodding with a reminder that a provision of the stimulus bill had cut taxes for 95 percent of working families by changing withholding rates, the rally attendee’s memory was jogged.
"You're right, you're right," he said. "I'll be honest with you: it was so subtle that personally, I didn't notice it."
This person was so very sure that his federal taxes had gone up because FOX news and Republican leaders (Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, Karl Rove, John Boehner, and Mitch McConnell) had told him so. But in reality, his taxes had gone down. Anyone can go back and look at paycheck stubs and see that their taxes have been reduced. This happened when Obama signed the Recovery Act into law the first couple of months after being sworn into office. But even when talking to a reporter, the rally attendee’s first instinct was to say the exact opposite of what really happened. He is obviously not the only one who is misinformed.
Less than 10% of the country realizes they got tax cuts. About a third of the population believes their federal taxes actually went up.
The tax cut was designed to be subtle, on purpose, because rebate checks tend to be saved, not spent. So, President Obama and the Democrats set it up so that everyone's paycheck would simply be a little higher every pay period – an average of about $50 a month for the typical working person – about $1200 per year for a middle class two-income family – hoping that more people would be more likely to spend that extra bit.
For the most part, it was effective because the economy is improving – albeit slowly.
How bad is the disconnect between perception and reality? Almost immediately after Obama signed one of the largest tax cuts in American history, right-wingnuts started organizing rallies to announce that they are Taxed Enough Already. The Republican leaders were lying; and the Republican sheep were not paying close enough attention to know the president had just given them a tax break.
Sadly, what makes for good economic policy often has no bearing on politics or public opinion. Obama could have gone with rebate checks that would have been better noticed, but the economic result would have been worse. The president chose to go with an approach that worked better for the economy, but paid little political dividend. Good for the economy. Bad for him. For the good of the nation, Obama is knowingly sacrificing public opinion about himself.
Rush, Sean, Glenn, Bill, and every other Republican mouthpiece has been telling Bubba that Obama raised his taxes – even though they know that their statements are not true – and Bubba believes them because he never noticed that his paycheck has a bit more money in it every week. When arriving home from work, Bubba is checking his brain at his front door, turning on FOX News, and allowing the lies and misinformation to pour into his skull.
I cannot lay all the blame at the feet of FOX and friends, though, because Obama and the Democrats are very bad at letting the public know about the help they are getting. Their publicity machine is a failure.
Under Obama, middle class Americans got the biggest tax cut in history, but no one noticed.
The National Review, an ultra right leaning magazine, actually ran a piece that said the President’s claim "strained credulity." The same magazine ran another piece insisting, "If the taxes of 95 percent of Americans actully [spelling mistake is theirs] had been cut, surely somebody other than Obama would have noticed."
It is incredible that the Righties think this is a matter of opinion. Obama cut taxes for millions of Americans, but since most people did not really notice their net pay increase, then, according to the Righties, maybe it did not happen. This argument is along the same line as “if a tree falls in the forest, but no on hears or sees it, did the tree really fall?”
The truth is that Democrats passed one of the largest middle-class tax cuts in the history of the country, and Republicans voted against it and fought to kill it. Congressional Republicans, whose inclination is to love tax cuts, refuse to give the president or Democrats in Congress any credit for this. And the general populace seems to have missed the news entirely.
How could a president cut Americans' income taxes by $116 billion and nobody notice? This is not a rhetorical question. At a rally organized recently by a Republican women's club, a half-dozen guests were asked by a reporter what had happened to their taxes since President Obama took office.
"Federal and state have both gone up," said one silver-haired attendee, echoing the comments of others. After further prodding with a reminder that a provision of the stimulus bill had cut taxes for 95 percent of working families by changing withholding rates, the rally attendee’s memory was jogged.
"You're right, you're right," he said. "I'll be honest with you: it was so subtle that personally, I didn't notice it."
This person was so very sure that his federal taxes had gone up because FOX news and Republican leaders (Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, Karl Rove, John Boehner, and Mitch McConnell) had told him so. But in reality, his taxes had gone down. Anyone can go back and look at paycheck stubs and see that their taxes have been reduced. This happened when Obama signed the Recovery Act into law the first couple of months after being sworn into office. But even when talking to a reporter, the rally attendee’s first instinct was to say the exact opposite of what really happened. He is obviously not the only one who is misinformed.
Less than 10% of the country realizes they got tax cuts. About a third of the population believes their federal taxes actually went up.
The tax cut was designed to be subtle, on purpose, because rebate checks tend to be saved, not spent. So, President Obama and the Democrats set it up so that everyone's paycheck would simply be a little higher every pay period – an average of about $50 a month for the typical working person – about $1200 per year for a middle class two-income family – hoping that more people would be more likely to spend that extra bit.
For the most part, it was effective because the economy is improving – albeit slowly.
How bad is the disconnect between perception and reality? Almost immediately after Obama signed one of the largest tax cuts in American history, right-wingnuts started organizing rallies to announce that they are Taxed Enough Already. The Republican leaders were lying; and the Republican sheep were not paying close enough attention to know the president had just given them a tax break.
Sadly, what makes for good economic policy often has no bearing on politics or public opinion. Obama could have gone with rebate checks that would have been better noticed, but the economic result would have been worse. The president chose to go with an approach that worked better for the economy, but paid little political dividend. Good for the economy. Bad for him. For the good of the nation, Obama is knowingly sacrificing public opinion about himself.
Rush, Sean, Glenn, Bill, and every other Republican mouthpiece has been telling Bubba that Obama raised his taxes – even though they know that their statements are not true – and Bubba believes them because he never noticed that his paycheck has a bit more money in it every week. When arriving home from work, Bubba is checking his brain at his front door, turning on FOX News, and allowing the lies and misinformation to pour into his skull.
I cannot lay all the blame at the feet of FOX and friends, though, because Obama and the Democrats are very bad at letting the public know about the help they are getting. Their publicity machine is a failure.
Under Obama, middle class Americans got the biggest tax cut in history, but no one noticed.
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Privatizing social security a bad idea
Privatizing Social Security was a bad idea in 2005 when it was proposed by President Bush and rejected by the American people. It is still a bad idea, despite recent Republican attempts to revive it.
Three new analyses out this week make it very clear that GOP proposals would cut benefits for middle-income Americans, jeopardize the solvency of the Social Security Trust Fund and weaken the program's ability to keep millions of Americans out of poverty.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), the Chief Actuary of Social Security, and the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee (JEC) have each weighed in on the Social Security proposal introduced by Republican Congressman Paul Ryan. While Republicans have sought to recast their proposals as modest changes to the current system, they are anything but that.
[First]… the new CBPP report finds that Rep. Ryan's proposal would reduce benefits for the top 70 percent of earners by linking Social Security benefits to change in prices, rather than changes in wages, as is now the case. Additionally, increasing Social Security's full retirement age, as called for in Ryan's plan, would reduce benefits for everyone regardless of when they retire.
[Second]… according to the Chief Actuary of Social Security, the "progressive price indexing" proposal would reduce benefits by 17 percent compared to current law for a new retiree in 2050 with medium earnings ($43,000 today). The cuts get deeper over time and are steeper for higher income workers. By 2080, benefits converge at a much lower level, with little difference in benefits for high earners and medium earners. At that point, Social Security would bear little resemblance to today's program, where benefits are based on a worker's lifetime earnings.
[Third]… the JEC report, prepared by the committee's Majority Staff, looks at privatization, where future retirees are able to divert a portion of their payroll taxes to private investment accounts. Privatization would allow all retirement savings accumulated by retirees to be subject to fluctuations in the performance of asset markets, including the stock market, where significant swings in returns and account accumulations are possible from year to year and even month to month.
A worker with a private account could purchase an annuity with a fixed monthly payment at the end of his or her working life. However, the size of that monthly payment depends on the timing of retirement relative to the performance of the different asset markets that the retiree had invested in. For example, a retiree who invested their social security payroll tax solely in the stock market over a 40-year work history and was expecting an annuity of $867 per month in 2006 would have received only $399 per month if he had retired in 2008.
Republicans claim that the Social Security Trust Fund would ensure that individuals who invest in private accounts will get back as much as they put in, plus indexing for inflation, even if the stock market craters. But such a guarantee - where private account holders win when the stock market is up, and don't lose when the stock market falls - must have another source of funds during bear markets. Without additional funds to pay for this one-sided bet, the solvency of the General Fund will be at risk.
While Social Security benefits are modest, they have a major impact. Without Social Security, nearly half (46 percent) of senior citizens would live in poverty, but with Social Security the poverty rate for elderly Americans falls to 10 percent. Indeed, Social Security accounts for more than 76 percent of income for middle-class seniors.
The Republicans ignore these facts and plan to radically change a program that provides economic security and peace of mind to millions of Americans. Their proposals are either a misguided belief in the stock market's ability to miraculously "save" Social Security or a cynical attempt to gut a successful program that has kept generations of Americans economically secure.
From: Privatizing Social Security: Haven't We Seen This Movie Before?
By Rep. Carolyn Mahoney
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-carolyn-maloney/privatizing-social-securi_b_772334.html
Three new analyses out this week make it very clear that GOP proposals would cut benefits for middle-income Americans, jeopardize the solvency of the Social Security Trust Fund and weaken the program's ability to keep millions of Americans out of poverty.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), the Chief Actuary of Social Security, and the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee (JEC) have each weighed in on the Social Security proposal introduced by Republican Congressman Paul Ryan. While Republicans have sought to recast their proposals as modest changes to the current system, they are anything but that.
[First]… the new CBPP report finds that Rep. Ryan's proposal would reduce benefits for the top 70 percent of earners by linking Social Security benefits to change in prices, rather than changes in wages, as is now the case. Additionally, increasing Social Security's full retirement age, as called for in Ryan's plan, would reduce benefits for everyone regardless of when they retire.
[Second]… according to the Chief Actuary of Social Security, the "progressive price indexing" proposal would reduce benefits by 17 percent compared to current law for a new retiree in 2050 with medium earnings ($43,000 today). The cuts get deeper over time and are steeper for higher income workers. By 2080, benefits converge at a much lower level, with little difference in benefits for high earners and medium earners. At that point, Social Security would bear little resemblance to today's program, where benefits are based on a worker's lifetime earnings.
[Third]… the JEC report, prepared by the committee's Majority Staff, looks at privatization, where future retirees are able to divert a portion of their payroll taxes to private investment accounts. Privatization would allow all retirement savings accumulated by retirees to be subject to fluctuations in the performance of asset markets, including the stock market, where significant swings in returns and account accumulations are possible from year to year and even month to month.
A worker with a private account could purchase an annuity with a fixed monthly payment at the end of his or her working life. However, the size of that monthly payment depends on the timing of retirement relative to the performance of the different asset markets that the retiree had invested in. For example, a retiree who invested their social security payroll tax solely in the stock market over a 40-year work history and was expecting an annuity of $867 per month in 2006 would have received only $399 per month if he had retired in 2008.
Republicans claim that the Social Security Trust Fund would ensure that individuals who invest in private accounts will get back as much as they put in, plus indexing for inflation, even if the stock market craters. But such a guarantee - where private account holders win when the stock market is up, and don't lose when the stock market falls - must have another source of funds during bear markets. Without additional funds to pay for this one-sided bet, the solvency of the General Fund will be at risk.
While Social Security benefits are modest, they have a major impact. Without Social Security, nearly half (46 percent) of senior citizens would live in poverty, but with Social Security the poverty rate for elderly Americans falls to 10 percent. Indeed, Social Security accounts for more than 76 percent of income for middle-class seniors.
The Republicans ignore these facts and plan to radically change a program that provides economic security and peace of mind to millions of Americans. Their proposals are either a misguided belief in the stock market's ability to miraculously "save" Social Security or a cynical attempt to gut a successful program that has kept generations of Americans economically secure.
From: Privatizing Social Security: Haven't We Seen This Movie Before?
By Rep. Carolyn Mahoney
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-carolyn-maloney/privatizing-social-securi_b_772334.html
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Republicans are for off-shoring American jobs
Michelle Bachmann rose to national attention with her call for the news media to conduct an investigation of Congress for un-American policies. But the hypocrite does not have to look any further than her own cloakroom and her own voting record.
What could be more un-American than promoting the off-shoring of American jobs?
Yet, that is what Republicans favor. They voted to allow companies to deduct from their taxable income the expenses of off-shoring jobs and of shipping equipment overseas.
It would be one thing if only the nutcase Michelle Bachmann voted for it – but that is not what happened. The entire Republican Party voted for it, including the purported Speaker to be, John Boehner. The Republican Party favors sending your jobs offshore. They favor a global labor market, driving down the cost and power of American labor. They cheerfully toast the screwing of the middle class. It drives up their profits, their wealth, their power.
It is anti-American.
Democrats do have something to say about this, but their voices are too polite, too weak. It is not clear and concise. It gets all muddled with other words that are good for policy wonks, but do not touch peoples' guts. They are so weak in their answer that no one hears them.
So, I will shout this:
A vote for any Republican is a vote to send your job to a foreign country!
That is why business, both domestic and foreign, is buying the election for Republicans.
The political ads I would put out there:
One ad shows George Bush speaking to the black-tied, bejeweled dinner calling them "his base"; then shows Joe Barton apologizing to BP; then fade to American workers walking out of a plant while the foreign workers walk in.
Another ad shows the white-haired gent who runs the Chamber of Commerce showing a list of their foreign contributors, then showing a scene of American factory workers walking out of their plants and foreign workers walking into American manufacturing plants.
Then, with these ads (pictures worth more than 1000 words), maybe the electorate will understand that Republicans are for off-shoring American jobs.
What could be more un-American than promoting the off-shoring of American jobs?
Yet, that is what Republicans favor. They voted to allow companies to deduct from their taxable income the expenses of off-shoring jobs and of shipping equipment overseas.
It would be one thing if only the nutcase Michelle Bachmann voted for it – but that is not what happened. The entire Republican Party voted for it, including the purported Speaker to be, John Boehner. The Republican Party favors sending your jobs offshore. They favor a global labor market, driving down the cost and power of American labor. They cheerfully toast the screwing of the middle class. It drives up their profits, their wealth, their power.
It is anti-American.
Democrats do have something to say about this, but their voices are too polite, too weak. It is not clear and concise. It gets all muddled with other words that are good for policy wonks, but do not touch peoples' guts. They are so weak in their answer that no one hears them.
So, I will shout this:
A vote for any Republican is a vote to send your job to a foreign country!
That is why business, both domestic and foreign, is buying the election for Republicans.
The political ads I would put out there:
One ad shows George Bush speaking to the black-tied, bejeweled dinner calling them "his base"; then shows Joe Barton apologizing to BP; then fade to American workers walking out of a plant while the foreign workers walk in.
Another ad shows the white-haired gent who runs the Chamber of Commerce showing a list of their foreign contributors, then showing a scene of American factory workers walking out of their plants and foreign workers walking into American manufacturing plants.
Then, with these ads (pictures worth more than 1000 words), maybe the electorate will understand that Republicans are for off-shoring American jobs.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Displaced anger
The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and, to a lesser extent, the stimulus have become symbolic conduits of political anger. The reason is simple. Both were passed amid much fanfare and controversy, and yet the unemployment rate is still almost 10%. Therefore, critics say, the programs are flops.
The bailouts were rational, clear-headed responses to the worst financial meltdown since the Great Depression. The recession is still hurting many, but the hard facts are that both measures have made the economy better, or to be more precise, not nearly as bad as it otherwise would have been.
What would have happened if the bailouts had not been instigated? The early 1930s provide a case study in what happens when a financial crisis is met with inaction and sanctimony about a return to basic values. Suffice it to say, things did not end well back then – and the Great Depression went on for years. This time around, both the Bush and Obama administrations, Congress, and the Federal Reserve were determined not to let history repeat itself.
TARP, enacted two years ago with bipartisan support, injected capital into financial institutions when credit was frozen. And contrary to what is believed, the government did not simply hand cash to the banks with no strings attached; it purchased shares of preferred stock. Now that the banking system has stabilized, the stock is being sold, at a profit to taxpayers. Similarly, TARP money was used to prop up GM and Chrysler when the collapse of those domestic automakers would have added hundreds of thousands more workers to the unemployment rolls.
Of the $388 billion in TARP money that was spent, more than half has already been recovered, according to the latest Treasury Department report. What's more, with GM looking healthier and insurance giant AIG showing signs of life, it is possible that TARP could turn a profit in the end. That would make it one of the best uses of federal tax dollars in memory.
Similarly, the stimulus has had a positive effect, though measurable only against a less desirable situation that might have been. It strengthened the social safety net for those cast into desperate straits and bolstered struggling states and localities. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that 1.4 million to 3.3 million more people would be unemployed today without it. The challenge now is to ensure that spending meant to be temporary and targeted does not become permanent.
Given the unpopularity of TARP and the stimulus, it is not surprising that candidates this fall are trying to disassociate themselves with these programs. In fact, voters in GOP primaries ousted several Republicans – known as the TARP martyrs – who supported the bailout. As the Great Depression proved, the true act of irresponsibility in the midst of economic crisis is to freeze up and do nothing, then take cheap shots at those who saved the day. It’s too bad that some Republicans lost their jobs due to TARP.
Voters have every reason to be angry about the economic mess, but their rage is displaced. It should be directed at the Wall Street financiers who threw caution to the wind and the politicians of both parties who enabled them, not at lawmakers who acted responsibly to save the system at a moment of maximum peril.
The bailouts were rational, clear-headed responses to the worst financial meltdown since the Great Depression. The recession is still hurting many, but the hard facts are that both measures have made the economy better, or to be more precise, not nearly as bad as it otherwise would have been.
What would have happened if the bailouts had not been instigated? The early 1930s provide a case study in what happens when a financial crisis is met with inaction and sanctimony about a return to basic values. Suffice it to say, things did not end well back then – and the Great Depression went on for years. This time around, both the Bush and Obama administrations, Congress, and the Federal Reserve were determined not to let history repeat itself.
TARP, enacted two years ago with bipartisan support, injected capital into financial institutions when credit was frozen. And contrary to what is believed, the government did not simply hand cash to the banks with no strings attached; it purchased shares of preferred stock. Now that the banking system has stabilized, the stock is being sold, at a profit to taxpayers. Similarly, TARP money was used to prop up GM and Chrysler when the collapse of those domestic automakers would have added hundreds of thousands more workers to the unemployment rolls.
Of the $388 billion in TARP money that was spent, more than half has already been recovered, according to the latest Treasury Department report. What's more, with GM looking healthier and insurance giant AIG showing signs of life, it is possible that TARP could turn a profit in the end. That would make it one of the best uses of federal tax dollars in memory.
Similarly, the stimulus has had a positive effect, though measurable only against a less desirable situation that might have been. It strengthened the social safety net for those cast into desperate straits and bolstered struggling states and localities. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that 1.4 million to 3.3 million more people would be unemployed today without it. The challenge now is to ensure that spending meant to be temporary and targeted does not become permanent.
Given the unpopularity of TARP and the stimulus, it is not surprising that candidates this fall are trying to disassociate themselves with these programs. In fact, voters in GOP primaries ousted several Republicans – known as the TARP martyrs – who supported the bailout. As the Great Depression proved, the true act of irresponsibility in the midst of economic crisis is to freeze up and do nothing, then take cheap shots at those who saved the day. It’s too bad that some Republicans lost their jobs due to TARP.
Voters have every reason to be angry about the economic mess, but their rage is displaced. It should be directed at the Wall Street financiers who threw caution to the wind and the politicians of both parties who enabled them, not at lawmakers who acted responsibly to save the system at a moment of maximum peril.
Sunday, October 17, 2010
American oligarchs
The United States is fast becoming a third world nation run by corporate oligarchs, their political lackeys, and supported by gullible citizens who, come November, will vote against their own best interests to further their masters' agendas.
How gullible are you? When Republicans promise to cut taxes and reduce deficits, do you ask them how it is possible to do both at the same time? What specific spending cuts do they propose? GOP sweetheart Paul Ryan, who is touted as the spending and deficit guru of his party, has proposed privatizing Social Security and then further delaying retirement age to 70 from what is now 67. He has previously advocated completely dismantling Social Security – until Mitch McConnell (GOP Congressional leader) advised him that such words would cause him to lose the election. Ryan also wants to end Medicare, and has specifically said so. He wants old people to have to pay for their own insurance on the open market – never mind that it would be extremely expensive, even if they could qualify. Therefore, many of our elderly would have to go without healthcare.
The recent Republican Pledge to America is full of bloviated ideas but short on details. For example, they do not mention how to cut taxes and reduce deficits at the same time. Cutting taxes to next to nothing has long been a Republican goal, and when they tried to do that during the Bush years they turned a huge surplus left by Clinton into a huge deficit.
They proposed privatizing Social Security. What if they had been successful? Where would your Social Security money be today after the market crash of 2008? Those funds would be in the same sinking boat as the 401ks. Given what we have seen happen to financial markets, how would you have done if your Social Security account were turned over to private sector brokerages, like, say, Lehman Brothers?
The GOP promises to repeal the American Care Act (healthcare reform). Of course they have no actual proposal except going back to what we had: yearly double digit increases, children being denied coverage because of pre-existing conditions, more and more Americans losing their coverage and their coverage being dropped when they get sick, small businesses cutting benefits or eliminating coverage for employees, and on and on.
President Obama's healthcare reform is presently prohibiting insurance companies from denying coverage to children with pre-existing conditions. Now, this very day, parents may continue covering their kids on their policies until the kids turn 26. Those who are very sick are now able to enter a high risk health insurance program run by private insurers (if their state will allow it). Small businesses that provide coverage for their employees will receive a tax subsidy to offset the cost (which was not true before now). Now, which of these benefits would you like to see cut? What about the old system did you find so attractive?
The United States spends 17% of GDP on healthcare. Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, is basically the sum total of our economy. Germany, France and the United Kingdom spend 10% of their GDP. Switzerland, second to the U.S. spends 11% of GDP. Are we healthier because we spend so much more? No. Independent studies show that our healthcare system ranks 37th in the world in terms of favorable outcomes, just below Slovakia.
Do you want to go back to that?
As the Bush Tax cuts approach expiration, the President has proposed continuing the tax cuts for 98% of all Americans. Those deficit hawks on the right insist that the top 2% should continue to get their tax breaks too, and the Republicans are holding your and my taxes hostage to assure that. Apparently, they don't mind the $700 billion those tax cuts will add to the deficit over the next few years – and well over 1.4 trillion in 10 years.
What the Republicans are really doing is protecting those extremely wealthy oligarchs. These billionaires and millionaires paid a marginal rate of 39% under President Clinton, and 91% under President Eisenhower, supposedly deserve our sympathy because their rate will go from the current 36% to the previous 39%.
Gee, those poor rich people. Boo-hoo.
Don't be a gullible tool of the Koch Brothers (big oil and huge money machine for Republicans) and the other corporate oligarchs like Rupert Murdoch. Vote in your own best interest – against the Republican corporate machine on November 2.
*Oligarchs are rulers in an oligarchy: a form of power structure in which power effectively rests with a small segment of society distinguished by royalty, wealth, family ties, or military control. In the United States, the oligarchs are ‘distinguished’ by wealth.
How gullible are you? When Republicans promise to cut taxes and reduce deficits, do you ask them how it is possible to do both at the same time? What specific spending cuts do they propose? GOP sweetheart Paul Ryan, who is touted as the spending and deficit guru of his party, has proposed privatizing Social Security and then further delaying retirement age to 70 from what is now 67. He has previously advocated completely dismantling Social Security – until Mitch McConnell (GOP Congressional leader) advised him that such words would cause him to lose the election. Ryan also wants to end Medicare, and has specifically said so. He wants old people to have to pay for their own insurance on the open market – never mind that it would be extremely expensive, even if they could qualify. Therefore, many of our elderly would have to go without healthcare.
The recent Republican Pledge to America is full of bloviated ideas but short on details. For example, they do not mention how to cut taxes and reduce deficits at the same time. Cutting taxes to next to nothing has long been a Republican goal, and when they tried to do that during the Bush years they turned a huge surplus left by Clinton into a huge deficit.
They proposed privatizing Social Security. What if they had been successful? Where would your Social Security money be today after the market crash of 2008? Those funds would be in the same sinking boat as the 401ks. Given what we have seen happen to financial markets, how would you have done if your Social Security account were turned over to private sector brokerages, like, say, Lehman Brothers?
The GOP promises to repeal the American Care Act (healthcare reform). Of course they have no actual proposal except going back to what we had: yearly double digit increases, children being denied coverage because of pre-existing conditions, more and more Americans losing their coverage and their coverage being dropped when they get sick, small businesses cutting benefits or eliminating coverage for employees, and on and on.
President Obama's healthcare reform is presently prohibiting insurance companies from denying coverage to children with pre-existing conditions. Now, this very day, parents may continue covering their kids on their policies until the kids turn 26. Those who are very sick are now able to enter a high risk health insurance program run by private insurers (if their state will allow it). Small businesses that provide coverage for their employees will receive a tax subsidy to offset the cost (which was not true before now). Now, which of these benefits would you like to see cut? What about the old system did you find so attractive?
The United States spends 17% of GDP on healthcare. Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, is basically the sum total of our economy. Germany, France and the United Kingdom spend 10% of their GDP. Switzerland, second to the U.S. spends 11% of GDP. Are we healthier because we spend so much more? No. Independent studies show that our healthcare system ranks 37th in the world in terms of favorable outcomes, just below Slovakia.
Do you want to go back to that?
As the Bush Tax cuts approach expiration, the President has proposed continuing the tax cuts for 98% of all Americans. Those deficit hawks on the right insist that the top 2% should continue to get their tax breaks too, and the Republicans are holding your and my taxes hostage to assure that. Apparently, they don't mind the $700 billion those tax cuts will add to the deficit over the next few years – and well over 1.4 trillion in 10 years.
What the Republicans are really doing is protecting those extremely wealthy oligarchs. These billionaires and millionaires paid a marginal rate of 39% under President Clinton, and 91% under President Eisenhower, supposedly deserve our sympathy because their rate will go from the current 36% to the previous 39%.
Gee, those poor rich people. Boo-hoo.
Don't be a gullible tool of the Koch Brothers (big oil and huge money machine for Republicans) and the other corporate oligarchs like Rupert Murdoch. Vote in your own best interest – against the Republican corporate machine on November 2.
*Oligarchs are rulers in an oligarchy: a form of power structure in which power effectively rests with a small segment of society distinguished by royalty, wealth, family ties, or military control. In the United States, the oligarchs are ‘distinguished’ by wealth.
Monday, October 11, 2010
Just Dreaming
Sitting here daydreaming and wishing that maybe Republicans have vastly overplayed their hands this year – just as they did 12 years ago when they banked on impeachment of Clinton winning them more seats. Let’s say they succeed in picking up a dozen or fewer seats in the House, and perhaps just a seat or two in the Senate leaving the Democratic majorities shrunk only marginally. Republicans would have thrown everything they had at this election – and still come up short.
That would be lovely.
The repercussions of this scenario for the party would begin immediately with the futures of John Boehner, and his deputy, Eric Cantor, ability to hold leadership positions coming very much in doubt. That thought alone makes me smile. More than that, though, a full struggle would begin within the Republican Party over the degree it has aligned itself with the Tea Party movement. (This especially will be true if, as expected, Democrat Chris Coons trounces tea party favorite Christine O’Donnell for a Delaware Senate seat when mainstream Republican Mike Castle would have won that race handily.)
As recriminations mount inside the Republican Party, frustrated GOP incumbents who had been holding on just to see a return to majority status could begin heading for the exits. Beginning in a trickle, Republican retirements would soon pick up speed as lawmakers look to move on to greener pastures. (These retirements alone would seriously hurt Republican chances to retake majorities in 2012 and subsequent elections.)
But, as important as all of these consequences would be, a Republican failure to take back Congress this year would have even an even far-reaching significance: it likely would call into question the GOP’s entire longstanding strategy of obstructionism.
Almost since the day President Obama took office, Republicans have stood shoulder-to-shoulder, nearly unanimously trying to stand in the way of even the most modest of the president’s initiatives. They think that if they thwart progress – and deny the Democratic president credit for success on anything – they will frustrate voters. That frustration, the Republican thinking goes, would then compel voters back into the GOP camp.
But what if that thinking failed to produce the majorities Republicans so desperately crave (as in “I want my country back”). And, given how obstructionism has played a central role for their political game, I think it could not be underestimated how damaging it would be to the GOP if this tactic failed. I do not think Republicans have any other cards to play. A failure of obstructionism to win back a majority would cause a massive crisis of confidence inside the GOP. A crisis of confidence for Republicans only would be amplified should Obama see any uptick in his approval ratings, for even an incremental improvement in the economy.
Quite simply, Republicans’ spirits would be broken – and that thought makes me giggle out loud.
If they do not take back Congress this November, they would perhaps have an incentive to cooperate a little more with Obama and the Democrats, which in turn, could improve the prospects for such stalled initiatives as climate legislation and immigration reform.
All of this is enough to put a smile on nearly any liberal, moderate, or independent voter’s face. Maybe it is enough to get them out and voting in November.
But I am probably just dreaming.
That would be lovely.
The repercussions of this scenario for the party would begin immediately with the futures of John Boehner, and his deputy, Eric Cantor, ability to hold leadership positions coming very much in doubt. That thought alone makes me smile. More than that, though, a full struggle would begin within the Republican Party over the degree it has aligned itself with the Tea Party movement. (This especially will be true if, as expected, Democrat Chris Coons trounces tea party favorite Christine O’Donnell for a Delaware Senate seat when mainstream Republican Mike Castle would have won that race handily.)
As recriminations mount inside the Republican Party, frustrated GOP incumbents who had been holding on just to see a return to majority status could begin heading for the exits. Beginning in a trickle, Republican retirements would soon pick up speed as lawmakers look to move on to greener pastures. (These retirements alone would seriously hurt Republican chances to retake majorities in 2012 and subsequent elections.)
But, as important as all of these consequences would be, a Republican failure to take back Congress this year would have even an even far-reaching significance: it likely would call into question the GOP’s entire longstanding strategy of obstructionism.
Almost since the day President Obama took office, Republicans have stood shoulder-to-shoulder, nearly unanimously trying to stand in the way of even the most modest of the president’s initiatives. They think that if they thwart progress – and deny the Democratic president credit for success on anything – they will frustrate voters. That frustration, the Republican thinking goes, would then compel voters back into the GOP camp.
But what if that thinking failed to produce the majorities Republicans so desperately crave (as in “I want my country back”). And, given how obstructionism has played a central role for their political game, I think it could not be underestimated how damaging it would be to the GOP if this tactic failed. I do not think Republicans have any other cards to play. A failure of obstructionism to win back a majority would cause a massive crisis of confidence inside the GOP. A crisis of confidence for Republicans only would be amplified should Obama see any uptick in his approval ratings, for even an incremental improvement in the economy.
Quite simply, Republicans’ spirits would be broken – and that thought makes me giggle out loud.
If they do not take back Congress this November, they would perhaps have an incentive to cooperate a little more with Obama and the Democrats, which in turn, could improve the prospects for such stalled initiatives as climate legislation and immigration reform.
All of this is enough to put a smile on nearly any liberal, moderate, or independent voter’s face. Maybe it is enough to get them out and voting in November.
But I am probably just dreaming.
Saturday, October 9, 2010
A good look at privatization
There are currently two competing visions of governance in the United States. The conservative vision believes in the on-your-own society, no ‘village’ and no group cooperatives. This policy agenda primarily serves the well off and privileged sectors of the country. This conservative vision of utopia (touted by many of the GOP candidates in this election) is a society in which most government agencies are privatized, and unregulated free enterprise reigns supreme.
The conservative vision was on full display last week in Obion County, Tennessee. In this rural section of Tennessee, Gene Cranick’s home caught on fire. As the Cranicks fled their home, their neighbors alerted the county’s firefighters, who soon arrived at the scene. Yet when the firefighters arrived, they refused to put out the fire, saying that the family had failed to pay the annual subscription fee to the fire department. Because the county’s fire services for rural residences is based on household subscription fees, the firefighters, fully equipped to help the Cranicks, stood by and watched as the home burned to the ground!
The homeowner, Gene Cranick, said he offered to pay whatever it would take for firefighters to put out the flames, but was told it was too late. They wouldn’t do anything to stop his house from burning. Each year, Obion County residents must pay $75 if they want fire protection from the city of South Fulton. But the Cranicks did not pay. The mayor said if homeowners don’t pay, they’re out of luck.
I am surprised that the fire department was not prepared to accept payment for services. If the issue really is limited resources, then surely they would be interested in recouping the costs of having responded to the scene. The Cranicks offered to pay whatever it took to put the fire out. Why didn’t the fire department do so, and then charge as doctors or hospitals might for uninsured patients? The mayor of South Fulton said the chief could not have made an exception. “Anybody that’s not in the city of South Fulton, it’s a service we offer, either they accept it or they don’t,” Mayor David Crocker said. If homeowners do not pay, they’re out of luck.
The fire reportedly continued for hours because garden hoses would not work to put it out. When the fire spread to a neighbor’s property they responded because that neighbor had paid the fee. I am sure the firefighters on the scene who refused to put out the fire really wanted to help – some said they went home and cried later that night – but the county commission (all Republicans) and the fire department just could not escape the powerful lure of semi-privatization and market forces. They even allowed a barn full of horses burn to the ground a while back because the owner had not paid the $75. The city of South Fulton actually benefited to let a few houses burn down as an example to homeowners who will not pony up the protection money.
A local newspaper pressed Mayor Crocker about the city’s policy, which has been in place since 1990. Crocker, a Republican who was elected in 2008 and serves with a county commission in which every seat is also filled by a Republican, likened the policy to buying auto insurance. The paper said he told them that, after all, “if an auto owner allowed their vehicle insurance to lapse, they would not expect an insurance company to pay for an unprotected vehicle after it was wrecked.”
Ironically, in the county commission’s latest report on its fire services which outlines which parts of the municipal area will receive fire services only through subscriptions, the commissioners and fire service officials brag that the county is “very progressive.”
So this is what it is coming to: a far Right, to hell with the collective good and never mind about social services because we do not want to pay taxes to support them. We hear that mindset far too often these days: the only good government is no government; corporatize everything; privatize everything – Rand Paul’s biggest fantasy come true. The fiscal conservatives of Obion County, Tennessee threw out the money they spent sending the trucks out and turned their backs on a profit-making opportunity in exchange for the chance to stick it to the Cranicks for not paying the ‘voluntary’ fee.
If you think letting someone’s house burn to the ground because they forgot to pay a $75 fee is heartless, just wait until the GOP gets back their governmental power and start dismantling Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, public Education, and any other domestic program they can. It will be government for the rich people, by the rich people. It will be all about paying your own way. If you are old, sick, and lose your home to medical bills – tough luck. If you neglect to pay the fire department fee and your house catches on fire – too bad, because they do not care about you. You could live in a tent and the Republicans will not care as long as they cannot see the tent from their house. This could very well be the inevitable conclusion to the Tea Party's empowerment.
Their counterargument is, in this instance, that the system only works if there are consequences for opting out. For the firefighters to have put out the blaze would supposedly have generated a bunch of future free-loaders.
The other vision of governance, the progressive one, believes in an American Dream that works for all people, regardless of their racial, religious, or economic background. Government is not good at taking care of every problem, but there are some basic services like police, fire, sanitation, and transportation that government should do because it furthers our social contract – that is, the basic understanding that we all are in this world together. It is an idea that today’s conservatives do not seem to understand. They are only willing to take care of numero uno – themselves.
What happened to compassionate conservatism? It never existed.
The conservative vision was on full display last week in Obion County, Tennessee. In this rural section of Tennessee, Gene Cranick’s home caught on fire. As the Cranicks fled their home, their neighbors alerted the county’s firefighters, who soon arrived at the scene. Yet when the firefighters arrived, they refused to put out the fire, saying that the family had failed to pay the annual subscription fee to the fire department. Because the county’s fire services for rural residences is based on household subscription fees, the firefighters, fully equipped to help the Cranicks, stood by and watched as the home burned to the ground!
The homeowner, Gene Cranick, said he offered to pay whatever it would take for firefighters to put out the flames, but was told it was too late. They wouldn’t do anything to stop his house from burning. Each year, Obion County residents must pay $75 if they want fire protection from the city of South Fulton. But the Cranicks did not pay. The mayor said if homeowners don’t pay, they’re out of luck.
I am surprised that the fire department was not prepared to accept payment for services. If the issue really is limited resources, then surely they would be interested in recouping the costs of having responded to the scene. The Cranicks offered to pay whatever it took to put the fire out. Why didn’t the fire department do so, and then charge as doctors or hospitals might for uninsured patients? The mayor of South Fulton said the chief could not have made an exception. “Anybody that’s not in the city of South Fulton, it’s a service we offer, either they accept it or they don’t,” Mayor David Crocker said. If homeowners do not pay, they’re out of luck.
The fire reportedly continued for hours because garden hoses would not work to put it out. When the fire spread to a neighbor’s property they responded because that neighbor had paid the fee. I am sure the firefighters on the scene who refused to put out the fire really wanted to help – some said they went home and cried later that night – but the county commission (all Republicans) and the fire department just could not escape the powerful lure of semi-privatization and market forces. They even allowed a barn full of horses burn to the ground a while back because the owner had not paid the $75. The city of South Fulton actually benefited to let a few houses burn down as an example to homeowners who will not pony up the protection money.
A local newspaper pressed Mayor Crocker about the city’s policy, which has been in place since 1990. Crocker, a Republican who was elected in 2008 and serves with a county commission in which every seat is also filled by a Republican, likened the policy to buying auto insurance. The paper said he told them that, after all, “if an auto owner allowed their vehicle insurance to lapse, they would not expect an insurance company to pay for an unprotected vehicle after it was wrecked.”
Ironically, in the county commission’s latest report on its fire services which outlines which parts of the municipal area will receive fire services only through subscriptions, the commissioners and fire service officials brag that the county is “very progressive.”
So this is what it is coming to: a far Right, to hell with the collective good and never mind about social services because we do not want to pay taxes to support them. We hear that mindset far too often these days: the only good government is no government; corporatize everything; privatize everything – Rand Paul’s biggest fantasy come true. The fiscal conservatives of Obion County, Tennessee threw out the money they spent sending the trucks out and turned their backs on a profit-making opportunity in exchange for the chance to stick it to the Cranicks for not paying the ‘voluntary’ fee.
If you think letting someone’s house burn to the ground because they forgot to pay a $75 fee is heartless, just wait until the GOP gets back their governmental power and start dismantling Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, public Education, and any other domestic program they can. It will be government for the rich people, by the rich people. It will be all about paying your own way. If you are old, sick, and lose your home to medical bills – tough luck. If you neglect to pay the fire department fee and your house catches on fire – too bad, because they do not care about you. You could live in a tent and the Republicans will not care as long as they cannot see the tent from their house. This could very well be the inevitable conclusion to the Tea Party's empowerment.
Their counterargument is, in this instance, that the system only works if there are consequences for opting out. For the firefighters to have put out the blaze would supposedly have generated a bunch of future free-loaders.
The other vision of governance, the progressive one, believes in an American Dream that works for all people, regardless of their racial, religious, or economic background. Government is not good at taking care of every problem, but there are some basic services like police, fire, sanitation, and transportation that government should do because it furthers our social contract – that is, the basic understanding that we all are in this world together. It is an idea that today’s conservatives do not seem to understand. They are only willing to take care of numero uno – themselves.
What happened to compassionate conservatism? It never existed.
Monday, October 4, 2010
The dingbat revolution is nigh
Sarah Palin – who earlier had held a closed-door fundraiser for Rand Paul, the Tea Party champion running for the U.S. Senate – railed against a GOP establishment that has just seen Tea Partiers oust entrenched Republicans in Delaware and New York. The red-hot mama of American exceptionalism, as Matt Taibbi calls her, spoke at the National Quartet Convention in Louisville, a gospel-music hoedown in a giant convention center filled with thousands of elderly white Southerners.
Matt Taibbi, a reporter for Rolling Stone, attended the event and writes: "Palin chortles, 'We're shaking up the good ol' boys,' to the best applause her aging crowd can muster. She then issues an oft-repeated warning (her speeches are usually a tired succession of half-coherent one-liners dumped on ravenous audiences like chum to sharks) to Republican insiders who underestimated the power of the Tea Party Death Star.
"There isn't a single black person in the crowd. And there is a truly awesome quantity of medical hardware: Seemingly every third person in the place is sucking oxygen from a tank or propping their giant atrophied glutes on motorized wheelchair-scooters. Palin launches into her Ronald Reagan impression: 'Government's not the solution! Government's the problem!'
"…the person sitting next to me leans over to explain that the scooters are because of Medicare. They have these commercials about how you won't even have to pay for your scooter! Medicare will pay! Practically everyone in Kentucky has one."
Apparently, although they want government spending cut for everyone else, they do want government to spend on them. They feel entitled. They think they earned it when actually they use up what they paid into Social Security and Medicare within the first few years. For the remainder of their years, they are on the dole of taxpayers.
Taibbi continues, “A hall full of elderly white people in Medicare-paid scooters, railing against government spending and imagining themselves revolutionaries as they cheer on the vice-presidential puppet hand-picked by the GOP establishment. If there exists a better snapshot of everything the Tea Party represents, I can't imagine it.”
After Palin wraps up, Taibbi searches for departing Medicare-motor-scooter conservatives. He come upon an elderly couple, Janice and David Wheelock, who are fairly itching to share their views:
I'm anti-spending and anti-government," crows David, as scooter-bound Janice looks on. "The welfare state is out of control."
"OK," I say. "And what do you do for a living?"
"Me?" he says proudly. Oh, I'm a property appraiser - have been my whole life."
I frown. "Are either of you on Medicare?"
Silence: Then Janice, a nice enough woman, it seems, slowly raises her hand, offering a faint smile, as if to say, You got me!
"Let me get this straight," I say to David. "You've been picking up a check from the government for decades, as a tax assessor, and your wife is on Medicare. How can you complain about the welfare state?"
"Well," he says, "there's a lot of people on welfare who don't deserve it. Too many people are living off the government."
"But," I protest, "you live off the government. And have been your whole life!"
"Yeah," he says, "but I don't make very much."
More from Taibbi:
"They're full of s**t. All of them.
“At the voter level, the Tea Party is a movement that purports to be furious about government spending — only the reality is that the vast majority of its members are former Bush supporters who yawned through two terms of record deficits and spent the past two electoral cycles frothing not about spending but about John Kerry's medals and Barack Obama's Sixties associations. The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending – with the exception of the money spent on them. In fact, their lack of embarrassment when it comes to collecting government largesse (for themselves) is key to understanding what this movement is all about – and nowhere do we see that dynamic as clearly as in Kentucky, where Rand Paul is barreling toward the Senate with the aid of conservative icons like Palin.
"Early in his campaign, Dr. Paul, the son of the uncompromising libertarian hero Ron Paul, denounced Medicare as "socialized medicine." But this spring, when confronted with the idea of reducing Medicare payments to doctors like himself – half of his patients are on Medicare – he balked. This candidate, a man ostensibly so against government power in all its forms that he wants to gut the Americans With Disabilities Act and abolish the departments of Education and Energy, was unwilling to reduce his own government compensation, for a very logical reason."
Rand Paul said that physicians should be allowed to make a comfortable living and therefore, Medicare should not be allowed to reduce payments to physicians. (But he is against the government bail out to the states that saved the jobs of teachers, fire fighters, and policemen.)
Taibbi continues: "Those of us who might have expected Paul's purist followers to abandon him in droves have been disappointed; Paul is now the clear favorite to win in November. (Ha, ha, you thought the Tea Party actually gave a s**t about spending, joke's on you.) That's because the Tea Party doesn't really care about issues – it's about something deep down and psychological, something that can't be answered by political compromise or fundamental changes in policy. At root, the Tea Party is nothing more than a ‘them-versus-us’ thing. They know who they are, and they know who we are ('radical leftists' is the term they prefer), and they're coming for us on Election Day, no matter what we do — and, it would seem, no matter what their own leaders like Rand Paul do."
(Remember, facts do not matter to this crowd. Reasoning with them is futile.)
"In the Tea Party narrative, victory at the polls means a new American revolution, one that will "take our country back" from everyone they disapprove of. But what they don't realize is, there's a catch: This is America, and we have an entrenched oligarchical system in place that insulates us all from any meaningful political change.
"The Tea Party today is being pitched in the media as a great threat to the GOP; in reality, the Tea Party is the GOP. What few elements of the movement are not yet under the control of the Republican Party soon will be, and even if a few genuine Tea Party candidates sneak through, it's only a matter of time before the uprising as a whole gets castrated, just like every grass-roots movement does in this country. Its leaders will be bought off and sucked into the two-party bureaucracy, where its platform will be whittled down until the only things left are those that the GOP's campaign contributors want anyway: top-bracket tax breaks, free trade and financial deregulation.
"The rest of it – the sweeping cuts to federal spending, the clampdown on bailouts, the rollback of Roe v. Wade – will die on the vine as one Tea Party leader after another gets seduced by the Republican Party and retrained for the revolutionary cause of voting down taxes for Goldman Sachs executives."
"The over 65 dingbat revolution, it seems, is nigh."
To read the remainder of the Taibbi’s article, go here:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/210904?RS_show_page=0
Matt Taibbi, a reporter for Rolling Stone, attended the event and writes: "Palin chortles, 'We're shaking up the good ol' boys,' to the best applause her aging crowd can muster. She then issues an oft-repeated warning (her speeches are usually a tired succession of half-coherent one-liners dumped on ravenous audiences like chum to sharks) to Republican insiders who underestimated the power of the Tea Party Death Star.
"There isn't a single black person in the crowd. And there is a truly awesome quantity of medical hardware: Seemingly every third person in the place is sucking oxygen from a tank or propping their giant atrophied glutes on motorized wheelchair-scooters. Palin launches into her Ronald Reagan impression: 'Government's not the solution! Government's the problem!'
"…the person sitting next to me leans over to explain that the scooters are because of Medicare. They have these commercials about how you won't even have to pay for your scooter! Medicare will pay! Practically everyone in Kentucky has one."
Apparently, although they want government spending cut for everyone else, they do want government to spend on them. They feel entitled. They think they earned it when actually they use up what they paid into Social Security and Medicare within the first few years. For the remainder of their years, they are on the dole of taxpayers.
Taibbi continues, “A hall full of elderly white people in Medicare-paid scooters, railing against government spending and imagining themselves revolutionaries as they cheer on the vice-presidential puppet hand-picked by the GOP establishment. If there exists a better snapshot of everything the Tea Party represents, I can't imagine it.”
After Palin wraps up, Taibbi searches for departing Medicare-motor-scooter conservatives. He come upon an elderly couple, Janice and David Wheelock, who are fairly itching to share their views:
I'm anti-spending and anti-government," crows David, as scooter-bound Janice looks on. "The welfare state is out of control."
"OK," I say. "And what do you do for a living?"
"Me?" he says proudly. Oh, I'm a property appraiser - have been my whole life."
I frown. "Are either of you on Medicare?"
Silence: Then Janice, a nice enough woman, it seems, slowly raises her hand, offering a faint smile, as if to say, You got me!
"Let me get this straight," I say to David. "You've been picking up a check from the government for decades, as a tax assessor, and your wife is on Medicare. How can you complain about the welfare state?"
"Well," he says, "there's a lot of people on welfare who don't deserve it. Too many people are living off the government."
"But," I protest, "you live off the government. And have been your whole life!"
"Yeah," he says, "but I don't make very much."
More from Taibbi:
"They're full of s**t. All of them.
“At the voter level, the Tea Party is a movement that purports to be furious about government spending — only the reality is that the vast majority of its members are former Bush supporters who yawned through two terms of record deficits and spent the past two electoral cycles frothing not about spending but about John Kerry's medals and Barack Obama's Sixties associations. The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending – with the exception of the money spent on them. In fact, their lack of embarrassment when it comes to collecting government largesse (for themselves) is key to understanding what this movement is all about – and nowhere do we see that dynamic as clearly as in Kentucky, where Rand Paul is barreling toward the Senate with the aid of conservative icons like Palin.
"Early in his campaign, Dr. Paul, the son of the uncompromising libertarian hero Ron Paul, denounced Medicare as "socialized medicine." But this spring, when confronted with the idea of reducing Medicare payments to doctors like himself – half of his patients are on Medicare – he balked. This candidate, a man ostensibly so against government power in all its forms that he wants to gut the Americans With Disabilities Act and abolish the departments of Education and Energy, was unwilling to reduce his own government compensation, for a very logical reason."
Rand Paul said that physicians should be allowed to make a comfortable living and therefore, Medicare should not be allowed to reduce payments to physicians. (But he is against the government bail out to the states that saved the jobs of teachers, fire fighters, and policemen.)
Taibbi continues: "Those of us who might have expected Paul's purist followers to abandon him in droves have been disappointed; Paul is now the clear favorite to win in November. (Ha, ha, you thought the Tea Party actually gave a s**t about spending, joke's on you.) That's because the Tea Party doesn't really care about issues – it's about something deep down and psychological, something that can't be answered by political compromise or fundamental changes in policy. At root, the Tea Party is nothing more than a ‘them-versus-us’ thing. They know who they are, and they know who we are ('radical leftists' is the term they prefer), and they're coming for us on Election Day, no matter what we do — and, it would seem, no matter what their own leaders like Rand Paul do."
(Remember, facts do not matter to this crowd. Reasoning with them is futile.)
"In the Tea Party narrative, victory at the polls means a new American revolution, one that will "take our country back" from everyone they disapprove of. But what they don't realize is, there's a catch: This is America, and we have an entrenched oligarchical system in place that insulates us all from any meaningful political change.
"The Tea Party today is being pitched in the media as a great threat to the GOP; in reality, the Tea Party is the GOP. What few elements of the movement are not yet under the control of the Republican Party soon will be, and even if a few genuine Tea Party candidates sneak through, it's only a matter of time before the uprising as a whole gets castrated, just like every grass-roots movement does in this country. Its leaders will be bought off and sucked into the two-party bureaucracy, where its platform will be whittled down until the only things left are those that the GOP's campaign contributors want anyway: top-bracket tax breaks, free trade and financial deregulation.
"The rest of it – the sweeping cuts to federal spending, the clampdown on bailouts, the rollback of Roe v. Wade – will die on the vine as one Tea Party leader after another gets seduced by the Republican Party and retrained for the revolutionary cause of voting down taxes for Goldman Sachs executives."
"The over 65 dingbat revolution, it seems, is nigh."
To read the remainder of the Taibbi’s article, go here:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/210904?RS_show_page=0
Monday, September 27, 2010
Spitting into the wind
Let me try once again to explain economics in simple terms – although I am probably spitting into the wind since it has been proven that the facts do not matter because people are as set in their beliefs as they are set in their ways (see earlier post called “Just the facts, ma’am” – NOT).
Congressional Republicans have fought against enacting all kinds of economic reforms that would have curbed corporate abuse of consumers, shareholders, or workers. They have fought all attempts to curb excessive concentration of corporate political and economic power. They have been against any measures that would increase demand for goods and services. They have been against anything that would increase small business loans (until recently when two Republican senators defected so that the small business law would be enacted).
If you think things will get better with Republicans gaining power in Congress, you should think again. They have promised to reduce Social security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Healthcare Reform in order to “slash spending by $100 billion.” At the same time, they have promised to make the tax cuts for the wealthy permanent which will cost over $700 billion in the short term and over $2 trillion during the next decade. They want to dismantle the new bank regulations so that banks can once again gamble with taxpayer’s mortgages and deposits. But it is these Republicanized policies that got us into this Great Recession.
Republicans are falsely stating that if they do not make the tax cut permanent for the upper 2% of income earners, demand for goods will be hurt and the economic downturn will be prolonged. (Either they are liars or they very stupidly believe this insanity.) The rich already have an enormous amount of money sitting idle in corporate and personal coffers. And corporations have almost $2 trillion dollars sitting idle in corporate accounts at this time.
All doubt about Republicans using the economic downturn as a path to political power has been removed by recent legislative votes. Due to their actions, it is hard not to conclude that Republicans only desire to worsen the economic downturn so that they can win the next election and get their governmental power back. The Congressional Republicans seem to have decided that sabotaging economic recovery and employment growth is their best tactic for electoral gains in the November elections.
What Republicans say about tax cuts for the wealthy is NOT TRUE.Tax cuts at the highest marginal incomes brackets concentrate wealth and political power in the hands of the wealthy. The resulting political power by the very rich pushes government policy in directions that significantly cut into the percentage of the nation’s income held by middle class Americans – reducing the ability of most Americans to buy goods and services. As a result, the middle class has been slowly shrinking since the days of Reagan. The economy continues to unwind because the average American does not have enough disposable income to keep the flow of goods and services at a healthy economic level.
Economic concentration of wealth and income are currently at levels very similar to those just before the Great Depression in 1929. The only reason our current situation has not quite deteriorated to that of the Great Depression is that the Republicans have not been completely successful in undoing the reforms put in place as a result of the New Deal.
All of the Republican policies for the past 100 years have been designed to concentrate wealth and income in the hands of the very few. Every time they reach the economic concentration levels that currently exist, we have a serious economic downturn. The current downturn is a direct result of increasingly “Republicanized” governmental policies over the previous 30 years.
So let me once again repeat some well established, provable facts:
1. Deregulation allows corporations to charge excessive prices. Not enforcing anti-monopoly laws permits price gouging.
2. Not capping interest rates concentrates wealth in a few hands and reduces spending of the average American – which in turn further cripples the economy.
3. Outsourcing jobs to foreign nations reduces incomes. Americans have less money available to buy goods and services. Therefore, our consumer based economy takes a plunge. (Duh!)
4. Union-busting keeps wages and benefits down which undermines the purchasing power of workers, which, in turn, depresses the economy.
5. Privatizing government services such as Social Security costs Americans more in out-of-pocket expenses (in fees and penalties) for services once provided by government. And it puts their capital at risk of market downturns. This reduces disposable income for consumers. In addition, when employers reduce benefits and increase co-pays for health insurance, it increases the cost-of-living for workers. As a result, these workers have less disposable income to spend on goods and services.
6. Middle class tax cuts help the economy because they increase the disposable income of those members of society who spend the vast majority of their incomes. The money changes hands over and over again instead of setting idle. This is the multiplier effect in economics.
7. Extending unemployment benefits helps the economy because it has a huge multiplier effect that greatly helps the economy because unemployment benefits are so little that all of it gets spent on goods and services immediately, putting it right back into the economy.
8. Tax cuts for the wealthy create huge pools of money for the rich to gamble with investments but it does not create jobs. The Republican Right’s economic theory – that economic prosperity and employment “trickle-down from the wealthy” – has been proven to be WRONG by recent historical experience over the last 30 years. Jobs are not created by just having large pools of investment money sitting around. There must be the opportunity to invest in a business that will have customers who can buy the goods and services before the investment money flows into job creation activities.
Sound economics says government should run surpluses in good economic times (saving the surpluses for bad times) and run deficits, if necessary, during economic downturns. This policy is taught in the Bible, for heavens sake! Remember the story of Joseph helping the Egyptian Pharaoh put back enough supplies during the seven years of abundance to take care of the predicted seven years of famine? Following this advice helps reduce the severity of economic cycles. But under the Republican Presidencies of Reagan and both George Bushes, we did exactly the opposite. This is what created the current downturn and the debt crisis! The vast majority of our total national debt was created under these three conservative Republican Presidents. But Republicans will deny this fact.
I repeat: excessive concentration of wealth and income is what harms our economy! No, I am not advocating a Marxist theory of spreading all wealth out evenly. I do believe that the wealthy should be able to enjoy the fruits of their “labor”. But I also believe that with wealth comes the responsibility of giving a bit more to support the country that made it possible for them to create their wealth. What’s an extra $100,000 in taxes to a multi-millionaire or a billionaire? They still get to have their huge yachts, several mansions, expensive cars, etc.
I would like to remind the wealthiest among us that they did not acquire their wealth all by themselves. They needed competent workers (educated at public expense), transportation and communications networks, laws and regulations (yes, regulations, such as those making their rarefied air fit to breathe) ... and for this vast web of support, the rich do in fact have a greater debt to society than the poor or even the middle class. So stop whining, stop being so damn greedy, shoulder your responsibility to this nation and pay up!
But I am just spitting into the wind, aren’t I? The majority of Americans don’t get it. Even after reading this, they just don’t get it. And they will very stupidly vote Republicans back into power (against their own best interests) because the Democrats did not fix things fast enough to suit them – regardless of the fact that it was the Republicans who flushed the economy down the toilet in the first place.
American voters gave the Republicans years to ruin the economy but expect the Democrats to fix it in less than two years.
Sheesh….
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Laughable pablum
While liberals have predictably slammed the Republicans' plan, unveiled Thursday, to fix the country, the pledge is getting mixed reviews from conservative pundits, some of whom argue the 21-page document is all bark and no bite.
Blasting the document for not providing specific, long-term solutions, conservative blogger Erick Erickson called the pledge the "most ridiculous thing to come out of Washington since George McClellan…. Yes, yes, it is full of mom-tested, kid-approved pablum that will make certain hearts on the right sing in solidarity," he wrote on his blog, Redstate.com. "But like a diet full of sugar, it will actually do nothing but keep making Washington fatter before we crash from the sugar high."
The pledge gathers together in one document familiar talking points for Republicans, such as cutting taxes and slashing government spending. It comes at a time when the GOP is gearing up for the midterm elections and hoping to gain majorities in Congress. Taking a page from the 1994 GOP playbook when the Republicans touted their "Contract with America," which offered a specific plan of action for a GOP Congress, Republicans hope to once again gain control of the House.
But the document has only broad statements and no real specifics.
Conservative commentator and former Bush speechwriter David Frum echoed Erickson's disapproval, "Did you seriously imagine that they would jeopardize the prospect of victory and chairmanships by issuing big, bold promises to do deadly, unpopular things?" asked Frum. He said he was not surprised by the weakness of the so-called pledge. He writes:
“The Pledge to America is a pledge to do nothing and even goes against what the Tea Party stands for. Tea party activists have been claiming all year that there exists in the United States a potential voting majority for radically more limited government. The Republican ‘Pledge to America' declares: Sorry, we don't believe that… Yet at the same time, we so-called RINOs can take no pleasure in this document. Yes, there is good in it. (Putting legislative language online 72 hours in advance seems Good Government 101.) ...The promise to cite specific constitutional language is an empty sop to those so-called constitutionalists who vainly hope to revive the John Randolph School of constitutional interpretation.”
This is not a document that will help to govern in the recessionary year 2010. Without an alternative modern Republican affirmative program, the GOP will be captured and controlled by special interests instead. Actually, the GOP is already captured and controlled by the lobbyists for rich corporations and wealthy individuals.
Of course, not all conservatives outright decried the pledge. Tony Perkins, president of the conservative, Christian lobbying organization, The Family Research Council, said the pledge is "not exceptional, but it is satisfactory. It does lay a foundation to build upon, and it moves congressional Republicans to a place of public acknowledgment that values issues are to be a part of the conservative way forward."
Again, quoting from Erik Erikson:
“The pledge begins by lamenting an arrogant and out-of-touch government of self-appointed elites" issuing mandates, "then proceeds to demand health care mandates on insurance companies that will drive up the costs of health care for ordinary Americans. The plan puts “government on the path to a balanced budget” without doing anything substantive. There is a promise to “immediately reduce spending” by cutting off stimulus funds. There is a plan to cut Congress’s budget, which is pretty much what was promised in 1994. …In 4 years did the Democrats really blow up the Congressional budget? No — the GOP did that.”
The document combines old ideas, bad ideas, contradictory ideas, and discredited ideas. The Republican Party that lost control of Congress four years ago has had an abundance of time to craft a policy vision that offers credible, serious solutions. Instead, we are confronted with a document that can best be described as tired nonsense. This "pledge" is just meaningless stuff at which even the Senate GOP will ultimately turn up its nose.
It is laughable.
Pablum.
Erikson: http://www.redstate.com/erick/2010/09/22/the-republicans-pledge-is-perhaps-the-most-ridiculous-thing-to-come-out-of-washington-since-george-mcclellan/
David Frum: http://www.frumforum.com/a-gop-pledge-to-do-nothing
Read the entire “pledge” here: http://pledge.gop.gov/
Blasting the document for not providing specific, long-term solutions, conservative blogger Erick Erickson called the pledge the "most ridiculous thing to come out of Washington since George McClellan…. Yes, yes, it is full of mom-tested, kid-approved pablum that will make certain hearts on the right sing in solidarity," he wrote on his blog, Redstate.com. "But like a diet full of sugar, it will actually do nothing but keep making Washington fatter before we crash from the sugar high."
The pledge gathers together in one document familiar talking points for Republicans, such as cutting taxes and slashing government spending. It comes at a time when the GOP is gearing up for the midterm elections and hoping to gain majorities in Congress. Taking a page from the 1994 GOP playbook when the Republicans touted their "Contract with America," which offered a specific plan of action for a GOP Congress, Republicans hope to once again gain control of the House.
But the document has only broad statements and no real specifics.
Conservative commentator and former Bush speechwriter David Frum echoed Erickson's disapproval, "Did you seriously imagine that they would jeopardize the prospect of victory and chairmanships by issuing big, bold promises to do deadly, unpopular things?" asked Frum. He said he was not surprised by the weakness of the so-called pledge. He writes:
“The Pledge to America is a pledge to do nothing and even goes against what the Tea Party stands for. Tea party activists have been claiming all year that there exists in the United States a potential voting majority for radically more limited government. The Republican ‘Pledge to America' declares: Sorry, we don't believe that… Yet at the same time, we so-called RINOs can take no pleasure in this document. Yes, there is good in it. (Putting legislative language online 72 hours in advance seems Good Government 101.) ...The promise to cite specific constitutional language is an empty sop to those so-called constitutionalists who vainly hope to revive the John Randolph School of constitutional interpretation.”
This is not a document that will help to govern in the recessionary year 2010. Without an alternative modern Republican affirmative program, the GOP will be captured and controlled by special interests instead. Actually, the GOP is already captured and controlled by the lobbyists for rich corporations and wealthy individuals.
Of course, not all conservatives outright decried the pledge. Tony Perkins, president of the conservative, Christian lobbying organization, The Family Research Council, said the pledge is "not exceptional, but it is satisfactory. It does lay a foundation to build upon, and it moves congressional Republicans to a place of public acknowledgment that values issues are to be a part of the conservative way forward."
Again, quoting from Erik Erikson:
“The pledge begins by lamenting an arrogant and out-of-touch government of self-appointed elites" issuing mandates, "then proceeds to demand health care mandates on insurance companies that will drive up the costs of health care for ordinary Americans. The plan puts “government on the path to a balanced budget” without doing anything substantive. There is a promise to “immediately reduce spending” by cutting off stimulus funds. There is a plan to cut Congress’s budget, which is pretty much what was promised in 1994. …In 4 years did the Democrats really blow up the Congressional budget? No — the GOP did that.”
The document combines old ideas, bad ideas, contradictory ideas, and discredited ideas. The Republican Party that lost control of Congress four years ago has had an abundance of time to craft a policy vision that offers credible, serious solutions. Instead, we are confronted with a document that can best be described as tired nonsense. This "pledge" is just meaningless stuff at which even the Senate GOP will ultimately turn up its nose.
It is laughable.
Pablum.
Erikson: http://www.redstate.com/erick/2010/09/22/the-republicans-pledge-is-perhaps-the-most-ridiculous-thing-to-come-out-of-washington-since-george-mcclellan/
David Frum: http://www.frumforum.com/a-gop-pledge-to-do-nothing
Read the entire “pledge” here: http://pledge.gop.gov/
Saturday, September 18, 2010
Smart move
Elizabeth Warren will be serving as an interim appointee to set up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Warren will be both a senior presidential adviser with direct access to Obama when she needs it, as well as a Treasury employee. In an administration dominated by those of the same vein as Clinton’s Secretary of Treasury Robert Rubin, Warren will literally be the first financial progressive with both a personal connection to the president as well as an independent power base.
Robert Kuttner, co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect writes:
“This strategy is a win-win, on several grounds:
“It gives Warren full authority to set up the agency [consumer protection agency], without having to run the gantlet of confirmation hearings and a likely Republican filibuster.
“This way, Warren will be able to get the agency quickly up and running in a manner that serves both consumers and progressive politics. Early directives to bring greater simplicity and transparency to credit documents will be extremely popular. Politically, the carping [about Warren] by the banking industry and its Republican allies will remind the public which side the GOP is on.
“This will take a lot of the wind out of the Republican claim that they opposed the bailout [they were for it] and share popular backlash against Wall Street [they have been in Wall Street’s pockets]. It will belatedly put the administration vividly (and very publicly) on the side of regular Americans when it comes to banking issues.
“As Warren continues to be the remarkably popular champion of struggling families, it will become more difficult [for Republicans] to deny her the job on a permanent basis if she wants it. And it will be more costly, even for a more Republican senate in the next Congress, to make her their nemesis.”
Once the agency is set up, someone will need to be confirmed to run it on a long term basis. Simon Johnson, the MIT professor who is an unabashed Warren fan, writes:
“This step does not avoid a debate in the Senate – it merely postpones it to a more advantageous moment. Presuming that Ms. Warren is nominated as for a five year term as head of the CFPB, she would go before the Senate Banking Committee with a real track record of achievement as interim head. The debate would not be about what the agency could do, but rather what it has already done – and what it is set up to do next. These are exactly the right terms on which to bring out into the open all those who think that the financial sector only ever behaves well – or that enforcing sensible rules on lenders would somehow bring the economy to its knees.”
This is a smart move by the president. He went all the way around the Republicans to put the best person “temporarily” in charge of the new agency. And there is nothing they can do about it.
Hee, hee….
Robert Kuttner, co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect writes:
“This strategy is a win-win, on several grounds:
“It gives Warren full authority to set up the agency [consumer protection agency], without having to run the gantlet of confirmation hearings and a likely Republican filibuster.
“This way, Warren will be able to get the agency quickly up and running in a manner that serves both consumers and progressive politics. Early directives to bring greater simplicity and transparency to credit documents will be extremely popular. Politically, the carping [about Warren] by the banking industry and its Republican allies will remind the public which side the GOP is on.
“This will take a lot of the wind out of the Republican claim that they opposed the bailout [they were for it] and share popular backlash against Wall Street [they have been in Wall Street’s pockets]. It will belatedly put the administration vividly (and very publicly) on the side of regular Americans when it comes to banking issues.
“As Warren continues to be the remarkably popular champion of struggling families, it will become more difficult [for Republicans] to deny her the job on a permanent basis if she wants it. And it will be more costly, even for a more Republican senate in the next Congress, to make her their nemesis.”
Once the agency is set up, someone will need to be confirmed to run it on a long term basis. Simon Johnson, the MIT professor who is an unabashed Warren fan, writes:
“This step does not avoid a debate in the Senate – it merely postpones it to a more advantageous moment. Presuming that Ms. Warren is nominated as for a five year term as head of the CFPB, she would go before the Senate Banking Committee with a real track record of achievement as interim head. The debate would not be about what the agency could do, but rather what it has already done – and what it is set up to do next. These are exactly the right terms on which to bring out into the open all those who think that the financial sector only ever behaves well – or that enforcing sensible rules on lenders would somehow bring the economy to its knees.”
This is a smart move by the president. He went all the way around the Republicans to put the best person “temporarily” in charge of the new agency. And there is nothing they can do about it.
Hee, hee….
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
“Just the facts, ma’am” -- NOT
Democracy only works well when the citizenry is well informed. We are taught that if people are furnished with the facts, they will be clearer thinkers and better citizens. “Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1789.
But humankind is uniquely susceptible to ignorance and misinformation – and too many of our citizenry are ill-informed. In 1996, Princeton University’s Larry M. Bartels argued, “the political ignorance of the American voter is one of the best documented data in political science.”
Over the last few decades, political science research has established that most Americans lack even a basic understanding of how their country works. A large part of the reason Americans are so ignorant is because certain segments of the media lie daily in order to push a political agenda – and the First Amendment legally allows it. A public who wishes to be entertained does not want to read facts. The public does not listen to or read those segments of the media who put out facts from good sources – pure information is boring. But even if they read the facts it would make little difference because facts do not necessarily have the power to change minds. Research at the University of Michigan has proven that facts have quite the opposite effect. People who are shown facts that go against their beliefs, even with inarguable proof, will all too often dig in and become more entrenched. It’s called backfire.
In a series of recent studies, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they would refuse to change their minds. This holds particularly true for those who are political partisans. Instead, these people often became even more stubbornly set in their beliefs.
In 2005, amid the strident calls for better media fact-checking in the wake of the Iraq war, Brendan Nyhan, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar at the University of Michigan, and a colleague, Jason Reifler, devised an experiment in which participants were given mock news stories, each of which contained a provably false, though nonetheless widespread, claim made by a political figure: that there were WMDs found in Iraq (there weren’t), that the Bush tax cuts increased government revenues (revenues actually fell), and that the Bush administration imposed a total ban on stem cell research (only certain federal funding was restricted).
When Nyhan inserted a clear, direct correction after each piece of misinformation, and then measured the study participants to see if the correction took, for the most part, it didn’t. It backfired. The participants who self-identified as conservative believed the misinformation on WMD and taxes even more strongly after being given the correction. With those two issues, the more strongly the participant cared about the topic, the greater the backfire.
The effect was slightly different on self-identified liberals: When they read corrected stories about stem cells, the corrections didn’t backfire, but they chose to ignore the inconvenient truth that the Bush administration’s restrictions were not total.
Facts, the researchers found, were not correcting the misinformation, but, instead, could actually cause people to hold more strongly to the misinformation.
This suggests that once beliefs are internalized, they are very difficult to budge. The conclusion one can draw from these Michigan University studies is if the citizens are ignorant, facts will not enlighten them; if they are mistaken, facts will not set them straight. In other words, if the real facts do not agree with what you believe – you throw out the facts and cling to your own make-believe ‘facts’.
It appears that misinformed people, particularly conservatives, often have some of the strongest, yet inaccurate, political opinions. Most people vote based on their beliefs – which are seeped in emotion and objectively, provably false. Why? People tend to interpret information according to their views in order to find consistency. If we believe something about the world, we are more likely to passively accept as truth any information that confirms our beliefs, and actively dismiss information that doesn’t. This makes us more confident in said beliefs, and even less likely to listen to facts that contradict them.
“It’s absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong,” says Brendan Nyhan, the lead researcher on the Michigan study. He said that the “phenomenon known as backfire is a natural defense mechanism to avoid cognitive dissonance.”
Back in 2000, James Kuklinski of the University of Illinois led an experiment in which more than 1,000 Illinois residents were asked questions about welfare – the percentage of the federal budget spent on welfare, the number of people enrolled in the program, the percentage of enrollees who are black, and the average payout. More than half indicated that they were confident that their answers were correct – but in fact only 3 percent of the people got more than half of the questions right. Perhaps more disturbing, the ones who were the most confident they were right were by and large the ones who knew the least about the topic. (Most of these participants expressed views that suggested a strong anti-welfare bias.) Kuklinski calls this sort of response the “I know I’m right” syndrome, and considers it a great problem in a democratic system. With FOX news or MSNBC to back you up, it has never been easier to believe you are right.
“It implies not only that most people will resist correcting their beliefs,” he wrote, “but also that the very people who most need to correct them will be least likely to do so.”
As a teacher (now retired), I am greatly alarmed by this. How could this be? I taught my students well. I reiterated – and did some fun things to help them remember facts. We also spent much time on how to think critically – how to look at both sides of an issue before making up one’s mind. But apparently, no teacher can change the mind of anyone whose brain is pickled with misinformation.
In an ideal world, citizens would be able to critically monitor the information they receive by looking up the facts. But doing so takes time and effort – and you have to discern whether your source is a good one – which in an overworked or stressed American can be exhausting. So we create shortcuts using emotional inference to cope with the rush of information we receive on a daily basis. Unfortunately, this causes too many people to be easily suckered by political falsehoods.
Political pundits who are out to get rich from the gullibility of Americans have become highly popular entertainment, while professional fact-checking operations, such as C-Span, are seldom watched (considered boring); and nonpartisan fact-checking websites such as Snopes and Fact-Check.org are considered to be an arm of the opposition. In other words, getting a politician or pundit to say that George W. Bush caused the 9-11 attack or that Barack Obama’s presidency is the culmination of a five-decade plot by the government of Kenya to destroy the United States is easy. Getting them to give straight facts is not. Those who do try to give straight, truthful facts are booed off the stage.
What about the interaction between the political ignorance of American citizens and our democratic ideals? Most of us like to believe that our opinions have been formed over time by careful, rational consideration of facts and ideas, and that the decisions based on those opinions, therefore, have the ring of soundness and intelligence. But, in actuality, too many Americans uncritically accept bad information that reinforces strongly held beliefs. They become more confident they are right, and are unlikely to listen to any new information.
In reality, a majority of Americans, particularly those who are on the far right, often base their opinions on personally held beliefs and emotions, which often has no basis in facts.
And then they vote.
If the citizens are ignorant, facts will not enlighten them; if they are mistaken, facts will not set them straight.
Sigh....
University of Michigan study:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bnyhan/nyhan-reifler.pdf
University of Illinois:
http://www.uvm.edu/~dguber/POLS234/articles/kuklinski.pdf
James Kuklinski credentials:
http://igpa.uillinois.edu/person/james-kuklinski
Brendan Nyhan credentials:
http://www.sph.umich.edu/rwj/scholars.htm
But humankind is uniquely susceptible to ignorance and misinformation – and too many of our citizenry are ill-informed. In 1996, Princeton University’s Larry M. Bartels argued, “the political ignorance of the American voter is one of the best documented data in political science.”
Over the last few decades, political science research has established that most Americans lack even a basic understanding of how their country works. A large part of the reason Americans are so ignorant is because certain segments of the media lie daily in order to push a political agenda – and the First Amendment legally allows it. A public who wishes to be entertained does not want to read facts. The public does not listen to or read those segments of the media who put out facts from good sources – pure information is boring. But even if they read the facts it would make little difference because facts do not necessarily have the power to change minds. Research at the University of Michigan has proven that facts have quite the opposite effect. People who are shown facts that go against their beliefs, even with inarguable proof, will all too often dig in and become more entrenched. It’s called backfire.
In a series of recent studies, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they would refuse to change their minds. This holds particularly true for those who are political partisans. Instead, these people often became even more stubbornly set in their beliefs.
In 2005, amid the strident calls for better media fact-checking in the wake of the Iraq war, Brendan Nyhan, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar at the University of Michigan, and a colleague, Jason Reifler, devised an experiment in which participants were given mock news stories, each of which contained a provably false, though nonetheless widespread, claim made by a political figure: that there were WMDs found in Iraq (there weren’t), that the Bush tax cuts increased government revenues (revenues actually fell), and that the Bush administration imposed a total ban on stem cell research (only certain federal funding was restricted).
When Nyhan inserted a clear, direct correction after each piece of misinformation, and then measured the study participants to see if the correction took, for the most part, it didn’t. It backfired. The participants who self-identified as conservative believed the misinformation on WMD and taxes even more strongly after being given the correction. With those two issues, the more strongly the participant cared about the topic, the greater the backfire.
The effect was slightly different on self-identified liberals: When they read corrected stories about stem cells, the corrections didn’t backfire, but they chose to ignore the inconvenient truth that the Bush administration’s restrictions were not total.
Facts, the researchers found, were not correcting the misinformation, but, instead, could actually cause people to hold more strongly to the misinformation.
This suggests that once beliefs are internalized, they are very difficult to budge. The conclusion one can draw from these Michigan University studies is if the citizens are ignorant, facts will not enlighten them; if they are mistaken, facts will not set them straight. In other words, if the real facts do not agree with what you believe – you throw out the facts and cling to your own make-believe ‘facts’.
It appears that misinformed people, particularly conservatives, often have some of the strongest, yet inaccurate, political opinions. Most people vote based on their beliefs – which are seeped in emotion and objectively, provably false. Why? People tend to interpret information according to their views in order to find consistency. If we believe something about the world, we are more likely to passively accept as truth any information that confirms our beliefs, and actively dismiss information that doesn’t. This makes us more confident in said beliefs, and even less likely to listen to facts that contradict them.
“It’s absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong,” says Brendan Nyhan, the lead researcher on the Michigan study. He said that the “phenomenon known as backfire is a natural defense mechanism to avoid cognitive dissonance.”
Back in 2000, James Kuklinski of the University of Illinois led an experiment in which more than 1,000 Illinois residents were asked questions about welfare – the percentage of the federal budget spent on welfare, the number of people enrolled in the program, the percentage of enrollees who are black, and the average payout. More than half indicated that they were confident that their answers were correct – but in fact only 3 percent of the people got more than half of the questions right. Perhaps more disturbing, the ones who were the most confident they were right were by and large the ones who knew the least about the topic. (Most of these participants expressed views that suggested a strong anti-welfare bias.) Kuklinski calls this sort of response the “I know I’m right” syndrome, and considers it a great problem in a democratic system. With FOX news or MSNBC to back you up, it has never been easier to believe you are right.
“It implies not only that most people will resist correcting their beliefs,” he wrote, “but also that the very people who most need to correct them will be least likely to do so.”
As a teacher (now retired), I am greatly alarmed by this. How could this be? I taught my students well. I reiterated – and did some fun things to help them remember facts. We also spent much time on how to think critically – how to look at both sides of an issue before making up one’s mind. But apparently, no teacher can change the mind of anyone whose brain is pickled with misinformation.
In an ideal world, citizens would be able to critically monitor the information they receive by looking up the facts. But doing so takes time and effort – and you have to discern whether your source is a good one – which in an overworked or stressed American can be exhausting. So we create shortcuts using emotional inference to cope with the rush of information we receive on a daily basis. Unfortunately, this causes too many people to be easily suckered by political falsehoods.
Political pundits who are out to get rich from the gullibility of Americans have become highly popular entertainment, while professional fact-checking operations, such as C-Span, are seldom watched (considered boring); and nonpartisan fact-checking websites such as Snopes and Fact-Check.org are considered to be an arm of the opposition. In other words, getting a politician or pundit to say that George W. Bush caused the 9-11 attack or that Barack Obama’s presidency is the culmination of a five-decade plot by the government of Kenya to destroy the United States is easy. Getting them to give straight facts is not. Those who do try to give straight, truthful facts are booed off the stage.
What about the interaction between the political ignorance of American citizens and our democratic ideals? Most of us like to believe that our opinions have been formed over time by careful, rational consideration of facts and ideas, and that the decisions based on those opinions, therefore, have the ring of soundness and intelligence. But, in actuality, too many Americans uncritically accept bad information that reinforces strongly held beliefs. They become more confident they are right, and are unlikely to listen to any new information.
In reality, a majority of Americans, particularly those who are on the far right, often base their opinions on personally held beliefs and emotions, which often has no basis in facts.
And then they vote.
If the citizens are ignorant, facts will not enlighten them; if they are mistaken, facts will not set them straight.
Sigh....
University of Michigan study:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bnyhan/nyhan-reifler.pdf
University of Illinois:
http://www.uvm.edu/~dguber/POLS234/articles/kuklinski.pdf
James Kuklinski credentials:
http://igpa.uillinois.edu/person/james-kuklinski
Brendan Nyhan credentials:
http://www.sph.umich.edu/rwj/scholars.htm
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