On Why Regulators Must Stand Up To Insurers
On Why Regulators Must Stand Up To Insurers
Aaron Carroll, who just recently joined Austin Frakt as a contributor to the Incidental Economist, has a post that reiterates the importance of pushing back against insurers’ attempts to water down the regulations in the new health care law. As Carroll demonstrates, if regulators don’t put their foot down on the most obvious regulatory loopholes (like the new MLR standards), they’ll only contribute to the industry’s ongoing attempt to circumvent regulations and attract a higher profit.
In the 1990s, private HMOs began competing for beneficiaries with traditional Medicare. Under the rules, the private HMO operated on a community rating basis and could not discriminate against applicants or cherry pick the healthiest individuals. Theoretically, the two pools should have had similar risk profiles, but when researchers looked closer, they found that the private HMO always managed to steal way healthier (read: more profitable) beneficiaries from the Medicare program and push them back into traditional Medicare once they became sick (read: less profitable):
What did the researchers find? People who wound up joining the (private) HMOs used 66% less care before joining than those who stayed in the (public) Medicare group. Somehow the private insurance HMOs figured out a way to get the healthy people to jump ship out of the another plan into theirs!
Not only that, but people who left the (private) HMOs and went back to the (public) Medicare used 180% more care after leaving than the people who stayed. Somehow the private insurance HMOs figured out a way to convince the sicker people to jump ship back to the public plans.
Carroll concludes that this research holds lessons for the exchanges: “So we had a system where plans were in an exchange like environment. Regulations prevented cherry-picking. And yet, the insurance companies figured out a way to preferentially cover healthy people. And this was competing with a giant government program.”
Indeed, “[i]nsurance companies are very, very good at what they do” and if federal regulators drop the ball on these early MLR rules or fail to give states enough resources to go up against the industry, then we may as well pronounce reform a failure. Any sign of weakness will only seen as an opportunity to ignore the intent of the law.
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CBPP: Johanns’ 1099 Repeal Amendment Would Maintain Tax Loophole, Undermine Health Reform
CBPP: Johanns’ 1099 Repeal Amendment Would Maintain Tax Loophole, Undermine Health Reform
Sen. Mike Johanns (R-NE)
Before health care reform became law, the government required businesses to fill out a 1099 tax form if they made payments of more than $600 to vendors for services they received. The government used these forms to monitor compliance with the tax code, because vendors are notorious underreporters of income. The IRS estimates that sole proprietors pay taxes on less than half of their income or underreport their income by some 57%. Consequently, “the GAO, the IRS, and the Treasury Departments of both President Bush and President Obama all recommended strengthening the reporting requirement to remedy this problem” and accordingly, Democrats included a provision in the health law that requires small businesses “to report payments of more than $600 to corporations and payments for goods and property (as well as for services).”
Conservatives and their small business allies (namely, the NFIB) have reacted with outrage, claiming that the expanded reporting requirement would add tremendous paperwork burdens. Democrats have largely agreed, but were slow to engage on the issue. Now, Sen. Mike Johanns (R-NE) and Ben Nelson (D-FL) have proposed competing amendments to alter the 1099 measure, but as Edwin Park and Chuck Marr point out in this new CBPP report, Johanns’ approach of completely eliminating the expanded reporting requirement leaves much to be desired:
Repeal would also cause the loss of $17.1 billion in revenue over ten years (the amount of revenue that otherwise would be collected, due to the improved tax compliance that would result from the provision of the Affordable Care Act). To make up for this loss, the Johanns amendment would strip $11 billion in Affordable Care Act funding for critical investments in health prevention and related activities and would seriously weaken other aspects of the health reform law. [...]
The Johanns amendment would eliminate all funding for the Prevention and Public Health Fund for fiscal years 2010-2017, taking away investments that could help reduce the incidence of chronic illness and infectious disease, improve overall health, and contain costs. [...]
The mandate has an exemption for people who would have to pay excessive amounts to purchase insurance — it allows people who would have to pay more than 8 percent of their income on premiums to remain uninsured without incurring a penalty. The Johanns amendment would lower the threshold to 5 percent of income. This change would exempt large numbers of additional people from any penalty if they remained uninsured, and would lead to substantially fewer healthy people enrolling in coverage until they became sick, thereby driving up premiums and increasing the number of uninsured people.
In other words, the GOP is seizing on what most wonks agree — including many Democrats — is a tangible concern about the 1099 to weaken the health care law. Tellingly, Johanns’ amendment does not address the problem of underreporting income; it strips the 1099 provision and allows vendors to underpay their taxes, and shift that burden to all of us.
It’s unclear how the 1099 language was included in the health care law in the first place. Some sources have suggested that Democratic staffers were bullied into accepting the amendment by Peter Orszag and had initially resisted such broad language; others believe that the provision provided a much needed spending offset to the law’s coverage provisions. Either way, the issue has provided Republicans and Democrats with a rare moment of agreement — only the GOP seem more interested in neutering reform and preserving a tax loophole. For details on Nelson’s solution and more on the 1099 controversy, be sure to read the CBPP’s full report HERE.
The American Public Health Association has also started a petition protesting Johann’s cuts to prevention.
19 Of The 22 States Suing Government Over Health Reform Willing To Accept Grant Money From Law
19 Of The 22 States Suing Government Over Health Reform Willing To Accept Grant Money From Law
Today, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that 45 states and the District of Columbia “will receive $1 million in grant funds to help improve the review of proposed health insurance premium increases, take action against insurers seeking unreasonable rate hikes, and ensure consumers receive value for their premium dollars.” The $46 million are part of the $250 million in rate review grant dollars authorized by the new health care law. “Money is going out the door today and tomorrow,” HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said on a conference call with reporters. “We got the proposals in from the states, we essentially gave them a laundry list of possible applications, figured out that these 45 states and the District met that criteria. So we’re sending out the resources right away.”
According to HHS, “15 States and the District of Columbia will pursue additional legislative authority to create a more robust program for reviewing or requiring advanced approval of proposed health insurance premium increases to ensure that they are reasonable” and “21 States and the District of Columbia will expand the scope of their current health insurance review.” “If the states that have said they are seeking legislation, get that legislation passed, a very large majority of states” would have the authority to review and deny unreasonable grants,” Jay Angoff, Director of the Office of Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight said on the call. Currently, “just 19 states have complete authority to do this in both the individual and small-group markets.”
“We are very optimistic that these first batch of grants are going out the door with almost full participation, very thoughtful proposals. So people are seriously interested in expanding capacity on the ground, expanding technical expertise,” Sebelius said. They are, indeed. According to my count, 19 of the 22 states that are suing the federal government over the constitutionality of the health care law applied for the grants. Below is a sampling:
– ARIZONA: “The State intends to improve their filing review process by hiring an actuarial consultant to review 95% of submissions for compliance and make recommendations regarding whether filings are unjustified or excessive.”
– VIRGINIA: “Virginia will expand the information required to be submitted with rate filings and will develop a procedures manual for the review of rate filings.”
– FLORIDA: “The State will expand the scope to include large group and out-of-State products.”
This disconnect highlights the growing gap and differing approaches of state politicians running for office and state insurance commissioners and health departments, many of which are moving ahead with implementation of reform, despite the rhetoric about repeal and nullification.
Just five sates — Alaska, Georgia, Iowa, Minnesota and Wyoming — did not apply for the rate review grants, meaning that insurers operating in those areas would have to justify premium increases to HHS. “I think that the fallback position is, here at the Department, there will be a requirement — based on some definitions that are still under discussion — that companies will have to justify unreasonable increases to the Department of Health and Human Services,” Sebelius said. “I think the more that can be done on the ground, understanding the markets locally, understanding the solvency issue which are an important piece of the puzzle, the better off we are.” Indeed, while the health law gives the federal government the authority to review premium increases, only states are able to reject or deny unreasonable hikes.
West Virginia Pol Walt Helmick: Compared To Drug Overdoses, Coal Isn’t So Bad
State Sen. Walt Helmick (D-WV)
At an exclusive coal industry retreat this month, a top West Virginia politician bemoaned the negative image of the state’s coal industry in the wake of this year’s Upper Big Branch disaster that killed 29 miners. Looking for a silver lining, Senate Finance Chairman Walt Helmick (D-WV) contrasted the death toll from mining coal to the deaths from drug overdoses in McDowell County, West Virginia’s poorest. In a stream-of-consciousness speech during the annual West Virginia Coal Association membership meeting in White Sulphur Springs, Helmick complained that “we” — the coal industry and its political allies — “don’t give the press signs” to put coal’s deadly toll into context:
If we lose [deep mining] because of some things that have happened in the last couple of years — the mine disaster is obviously connected to the increase — we don’t give the press signs. Well, we lost 29 miners. That’s terrible. We understand that. We got to deal with mine safety — we all understand that. You guys work together to do what you folks do to make sure that doesn’t happen. But, you know, for instance, in McDowell County there are about eight or nine deaths a month with drug overdoses and that’s nothing to do with this. Talking about the issue, talking about the negatives.
Helmick went on to describe the “positives of coal.” He noted that coal severance taxes provide most of the income for West Virginia’s infrastructure bond fund: “21 million for water and sewage in West Virginia”:
Talk about the positives of coal? 24 million dollars a year that goes into the infrastructure — 21 comes from coal. 21 million for water and sewage in West Virginia. Coal has no damage whatsoever to any of my district, to be honest about it. But yet we use that infrastructure money in Pocahontas, Pendleton, Grant, Hardy, Hampshire, Morgan, all of those counties to offset that.
Unfortunately, West Virginia’s dependence on the coal industry is linked to its deadly endemic poverty. Drug-scourged McDowell County is West Virginia’s coal capital, having produced more coal than any other county in the state. Coal millionaires like Massey Energy’s Don Blankenship are killing West Virginia while they take billions in profits — killing the people with mining disasters and toxic pollution, destroying the mountains and streams with mountaintop removal, and destroying the economy by slashing jobs and fighting modernization and economic diversity.
Fixing the coal industry’s dirty reputation will take something more than better press relations, or as others at the coal retreat suggested, new propaganda in classrooms. Instead, West Virginians need to take the late Sen. Robert C. Byrd’s advice and embrace a cleaner, safer future.
Stimulus Hypocrite Barton Attends Groundbreaking For Health Clinic Funded By Stimulus
Last year, Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) — the same Joe Barton who felt the need to apologize to BP after the oil giant caused an environmental catastrophe — requested stimulus funds for NASA despite having voted against the stimulus. Last week, Barton was at it again, attending a groundbreaking “for an expansion of an Ellis County clinic made possible under the law.”
As the Dallas Morning News reported, the clinic received $250,000 from the Department of Health and Human Services for the construction work. Barton tried to thread the needle by saying that the clinic is a “worthy project”:
“As I told the crowd at the groundbreaking, I was opposed to the stimulus bill and voted against it. It has been largely wasteful and failed to produce the jobs that were promised,” Barton, R-Arlington, said in a written statement. “However, expansion of the Hope Clinic is a worthy project that deserves our support.”
The construction grant “comes in addition to more than $1.4 million the clinic has received in stimulus funds, which clinic staff said was secured with the help of Barton’s office.” In fact, Lisa Caton, director of development for the clinic, said that Barton “really did play a critical role in a lot of the things that we accomplished.”
According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, the stimulus will have created or saved 3.7 million jobs by September, presumably some of them for work at this very clinic. But prior to appearing at the groundbreaking, Barton called the stimulus a “boondoggle,” “a lesson in how to waste a lot of money in a hurry,” and the “most anti-competitive, anti-consumer, anti-free market piece of legislation I’ve ever seen on the House floor.”
But Barton is actually doubling down on the hypocrisy here, as the clinic will also receive money from the Affordable Care Act, the health care reform bill that Barton voted against. “There were two pieces of legislation that helped bring this about,” said Joseph Gallegos, senior vice president of the National Association of Community Health Centers. “Part of this was economic stimulus funding, and the other was in the Affordable Care Act.”
At an event in Texas last week, President Obama riffed on this blatant hypocrisy on the part of the GOP. “I have to say, though, they do show up at the ribbon-cuttings for the infrastructure projects,” he noted. “They will fulminate and say it’s going to be Armageddon if we pass all this stuff, but then they’re cheesin’ and grinnin’ right there — got the shovel all ready — sending out the press releases.”
As ThinkProgress has exhaustively documented, at least 114 Republicans — more than half of the GOP caucus in Congress — is guilty of trying to take credit for projects funded by the stimulus bill that they voted against.
Cordoba House Controversy A Proxy Fight Over American Pluralism
Ross Douthat has a thoughtful take on the controversy over the Cordoba House Islamic cultural center — or at least more thoughtful than the vast majority of conservative commentary on the subject so far– in which he places the Cordoba House controversy within the ongoing American debate over immigration.
“There’s an America where it doesn’t matter what language you speak,” writes Douthat, “what god you worship, or how deep your New World roots run. An America where allegiance to the Constitution trumps ethnic differences, language barriers and religious divides. An America where the newest arrival to our shores is no less American than the ever-so-great granddaughter of the Pilgrims.”
But there’s another America as well, one that understands itself as a distinctive culture, rather than just a set of political propositions. This America speaks English, not Spanish or Chinese or Arabic. It looks back to a particular religious heritage: Protestantism originally, and then a Judeo-Christian consensus that accommodated Jews and Catholics as well. It draws its social norms from the mores of the Anglo-Saxon diaspora — and it expects new arrivals to assimilate themselves to these norms, and quickly.
These two understandings of America, one constitutional and one cultural, have been in tension throughout our history. And they’re in tension again this summer, in the controversy over the Islamic mosque and cultural center scheduled to go up two blocks from ground zero.
While I would agree with the general proposition that managing the tension between the Americas that Douthat describes has been among the key projects of the United States — along with managing the tension between liberty and security, and between federalism and states’ rights — I reject the moral equivalence that Douthat seems to be asserting here between pluralism and xenophobia:
The steady pressure to conform to American norms, exerted through fair means and foul, eventually persuaded the Mormons to abandon polygamy, smoothing their assimilation into the American mainstream. Nativist concerns about Catholicism’s illiberal tendencies inspired American Catholics to prod their church toward a recognition of the virtues of democracy, making it possible for generations of immigrants to feel unambiguously Catholic and American.
Whatever positive function nativism and bigotry, institutionalized and otherwise, may have performed in encouraging greater, faster assimilation is far outweighed by the harassment and discrimination endured by new immigrants as a result. This attempt at even-handedness also leads Douthat to underappreciate the extent to which, just as newly arriving Catholic, Jewish, Italian, German, and Chinese immigrants became more American upon arriving here, America itself became more Catholic, Jewish, Italian, German, and Chinese as a result of their arrival.
This, also, is part of what I think makes America unique: “Assimilation” has never been a one-way street. New arrivals to America have adopted American ways as their own, but they’ve also changed the way that we define and understand what it is to be American. Resistance to this is, I think, a big part of what underlies much of the opposition to the Cordoba House: Many Americans are uncomfortable with the fact — and it is a fact — that America will become, is becoming, more Islamic. More »
When Asked For An Idea That Separates Him From Bush, McCarthy Calls For Repealing Middle Class Tax Cuts
When Asked For An Idea That Separates Him From Bush, McCarthy Calls For Repealing Middle Class Tax Cuts
Earlier this month, Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) was unable to identify any Republican ideas that separate today’s GOP from that of former President George W. Bush, simply saying “the vision for Republicans going forward is to produce pro-growth tax policies.” This hearkened back to Rep. Eric Cantor’s (R-VA) performance last year, when he was asked to explain the GOP’s “big idea” for job creation, and could only stammer “the big idea is to get, to get, to produce an environment where we can have job creation again.”
Yesterday, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) — one of the so-called Republican “Young Guns,” who claims to be “changing the face of the Republican Party and giving Americans a road-map to get back to the American Dream” — was asked by CNN’s Candy Crowley to name an idea not already suggested by Bush that would “make a major difference in what’s going on right now.” McCarthy, after Crowley pointed out that Bush had already suggested the first thing he named, then called for rolling back the stimulus, therefore repealing tax breaks for the middle class:
CROWLEY: It does seem to me that Democrats have taken out after you all because there isn’t an idea out there that you haven’t seen either executed or proposed in the Bush years. What is that idea that’s out there that would make a major difference in what’s going on right now?
MCCARTHY: Well, fundamentally, we should look at how we spend our money. We should spend the money in government just as we do in households.
CROWLEY: But didn’t they do that in the Bush administration? I think that’s the problem here, and you know there were some disastrous Sunday appearances…
MCCARTHY: The first thing I would do, I would end the uncertainty. I would end the uncertainty for business to invest. I would invest in small business, where I would give a 20 percent deduction for the income for small business, less than 500 employees, to actually start going. I would roll back the stimulus, that’s $260 billion.
Watch it:
I’m fairly certain that Bush never did, in fact, call for raising taxes on the middle class. But I don’t think that’s the kind of difference McCarthy wants to be advertising.
According to Recovery.gov, McCarthy actually lowballed the remaining stimulus funds a bit, as there are about $289 billion that haven’t been paid out. But much of the money has already been allocated, including $65 billion in funding for tax breaks, which are intentionally going out the door a little bit at a time. Rolling back the stimulus as McCarthy suggests would necessitate rescinding these already promised tax cuts.
McCarthy also paid a lot of lip service to small businesses, without pointing out that in June he voted against a bill that provided small businesses with tax credits and set up a lending facility to get them loans amidst the credit crunch. And I guess that’s one more way in which McCarthy is employing the Bush playbook: saying one thing yet doing another.
In One Weekend, Tea Party, Neo-Nazis, And ‘Border Activists’ Rally In Support Of Arizona
In One Weekend, Tea Party, Neo-Nazis, And ‘Border Activists’ Rally In Support Of Arizona
This past weekend, during the same two days that anti-immigrant activists protested in support of Arizona in Farmers Branch, TX and Tea Party members staged a rally at the border in Arizona, neo-Nazis marched down the streets of Knoxville, TN with a common purpose. The three separate, but related protests, illustrate how the white supremacist movement has latched onto the immigration issue — particularly Arizona’s immigration law, SB-1070. As proponents of SB-1070 insist that their support of the law has nothing to do with race, they can’t deny that for some people it boils down to “white people who are not afraid to stand up,” as one Tennessee rally attendee noted.
Watch coverage of neo-Nazi rally:
At the neo-Nazi rally in Knoxville, one demonstrator explained the motivations guiding the march: “Federal economic policies are unsustainable. Our country is going broke. Stop giving away our jobs to countries that hate us. Secure our border. Put race and nation first.” The rhetoric in Farmers Branch and Arizona was not remarkably different. In Hereford, AZ, where approximately 400 Tea Party activists gathered yesterday, Tucson radio host proclaimed, “[i]nstead of finding bugs in our beds, we’re finding home invaders.” Cindy Kolb, “a border activist” who attended the gathering screamed over the border fence, “[w]e don’t like illegals hiding under bushes when our kids wait for the school bus. This border needs to be secure.” The Farmers Branch rally was organized by the Salt Lake City-based Americans Against Immigration Amnesty, which states on its website, “Many of those seeking amnesty refuse to assimilate to our culture or language and refuse to respect our citizens and laws. Rather, they demand we assimilate to them and their culture, teach our children their language and shamelessly fly their country’s flag over ours.”
Watch coverage of this weekend’s Tea Party rally:
Anecdotal evidence from this weekend aside, a recent poll revealed that even many Arizonans think the immigration debate has “exposed a deeper sense of racism in our community.” Meanwhile, the East Valley Tribune reports that “[w]hite supremacist activity is on the rise in Arizona.” Experts note that the immigration debate has always been a recruiting tool for racist groups, even before the passage of SB-1070. However, heightened tensions over the polarizing new law give the groups a leg up. “They become more emboldened every day,” says Bill Straus, Arizona regional director of the Anti-Defamation League. Straus’ observations are evidenced by the dramatic increase in anti-immigrant hate groups coupled with escalated neo-Nazi anti-immigrant activity both on- and off-line, and the presence of heavily armed neo-Nazis who started patrolling the border in search of undocumented immigrants shortly after SB-1070 was signed into law.
Democratic Lawmakers Speak Out Against Insurers’ Attempts To Circumvent Health Law Requirements
Democratic Lawmakers Speak Out Against Insurers’ Attempts To Circumvent Health Law Requirements
As the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) prepares to submit its medical loss ratio (MLR) recommendations to HHS, 65 Democratic members of Congress are asking the group to develop a strict definition of ‘quality improvement measures’ — a new category established by the health care law that allows insurers to count expenses that ostensibly improve health quality, as medical costs.
After decades of trying to lower their medical loss ratios and please Wall Street investors, insurers are now frantically trying to inflate that number to meet the new MLR provisions. The industry sees the category of ‘quality improvement expenses’ as an opportunity to reclassify certain expenses as medical costs, thus inflating insurers’ medical loss ratio percentage without improving efficiency. “This definition should recognize the full range of health plan activities — both directly and indirectly related to patient care — that have the primary purpose of improving patient outcomes,” AHIP argued in a letter sent to HHS in May, and provided a long list of services like “nurse call lines,” “quality research and reporting programs,” and “consumer education programs” that it believes should be included in the “quality” category.
But the lawmakers in this letter are calling on NAIC to follow the spirit of the health care law and only include those services that actually improve health quality:
As you continue to work with your colleagues from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC), we ask that you consider the strictest definition of “quality improvement expenses” when implementing the mandatory medical loss ration standards set forth in the PPACA….insurance companies are urging regulators to pursue lax definitions of ‘quality improvement expenses’ that include operational and administrative costs, which would render requirements weak and frustrate the goals of this landmark law.
While insurance companies have claimed that some of the costs that they wish to include are for the purposes of patient protection, they offered little evidence that specific services do provide improved quality. It is misguided to assume that these costs are specifically for the benefit of health and well-being of the patient, as intended in the law.
Indeed, while some services can certainly improve health care quality, others, are simply administrative costs in ‘quality’ clothing. ‘Nurse hotlines, for instance, “may offer advice to individual policyholders, but also work with a stated goal of cost containment by preventing calls to doctors and visits to their offices.” ‘Utilization review’ is an administrative function designed to restrict treatment and activities related to disease management and health/wellness promotion programs “are not directly related to quality improvement for particular patients and should be excluded.” As the Federation of American Hospitals has pointed out, “the inclusion of a separate category specific to activities that improve health care quality is not as common, and requires a close focus by federal regulators to avoid becoming a “catch-all” into which a wide variety of expenses not directly related to patient care and clinical service quality may arbitrarily be placed.” Bottom line is: the insurer must provide credible scientific evidence that the function improves the health quality of individual policyholders, before any particular service is included in the quality definition.
This letter is a good start, but placing pressure on the NAIC and insurers is politically advantageous and relatively painless. Convincing HHS to reject the group’s recommendations however, and adopt more stringent rules — should that be necessary — will probably be more difficult for Democrats to accomplish. Fortunately, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) is already paving the way.
Gingrich Ludicrously Claims Obama Presided Over More Jobs Loss ‘Than Any President Since Herbert Hoover’
Gingrich Ludicrously Claims Obama Presided Over More Jobs Loss ‘Than Any President Since Herbert Hoover’
Today, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appeared on Fox News to discuss President Obama’s reaction to the controversy surrounding the construction of a new Islamic center near the Ground Zero site. Gingrich theorized that Obama’s wading into the debate is a “clever effort” to draw attention away from the economy, and then made the simply ludicrous claim “in many ways, more jobs have died under [Obama] than any President since Herbert Hoover”:
Maybe it was a clever effort on the President’s part to avoid talking about nine and a half percent unemployment, the worst unemployment rate — really in many ways, more jobs have died under him than any President since Hebert Hoover. So maybe this was all a clever effort to keep all of us talking about something other than how bad his record is on unemployment and the economy.
Watch it:
I have no idea in which “ways” Gingrich is fudging the data in order to make this argument, and, of course, he didn’t cite any numbers. But economist Rob Shapiro — noting that there’s “lots of finger-pointing about the economy, including the audacious claim that the fault for the high unemployment lies in the Administration’s economic policies” — took a look at Bureau of Labor Statistics data to ascertain where responsibility for jobs losses actually lies:
From December 2007 to July 2009 – the last year of the Bush second term and the first six months of the Obama presidency, before his policies could affect the economy – private sector employment crashed from 115,574,000 jobs to 107,778,000 jobs. Employment continued to fall, however, for the next six months, reaching a low of 107,107,000 jobs in December of 2009. So, out of 8,467,000 private sector jobs lost in this dismal cycle, 7,796,000 of those jobs or 92 percent were lost on the Republicans’ watch or under the sway of their policies.
Even if you start counting from the beginning of 2009, unfairly pinning losses on Obama from before he implemented a single economic measure, 4.6 million jobs were lost over the final 20 months of the Bush administration. As Ezra Klein put it, “insofar as the job losses go, it’s hard to credibly blame this White House for the vast, vast majority of them.” And it’s completely nuts to say that Obama has the worst jobs record since the Great Depression, when the administration immediately before his presided over a terrible employment plunge.
Plus, someone looking for a reprisal of Hooverism need look no further than many Congressional Republicans, who are advocating draconian spending cuts in the face of a weak economy, which will only lead to pro-cyclical drops in spending, weakening the economy further. And let’s not forget that Gingrich himself predicted an economic catastrophe would result from President Clinton’s economic policies, which instead ushered in the longest sustained period of economic growth in the nation’s history.
New Data: Military Continues To Discharge ‘Mission Critical Specialists’ Under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
New Data: Military Continues To Discharge ‘Mission Critical Specialists’ Under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
The Palm Center has just released new data showing that the military continues to discharge “mission-critical specialists” just because they’re gay:
The data show that gay discharges included 8 linguists, 20 infantrymen, 16 medical aides, 7 combat engineers, 6 missile artillery operating crew members, and one member of the Special Forces, among others. [...]
The data confirm a long-term trend, and a 2005 Government Accountability Report found that the military fired 757 mission-critical specialists, including 322 linguists, in the first decade of don’t ask, don’t tell.
Interestingly, the group also found “disproportionate discharges on the basis of race and gender. “In the Navy, two officers were discharged in FY 2009 and both were Asian. In the Army, of the five Officers discharged, two were African American, one was Asian and two were white.” Women were also discharged at a disproportionately higher rate than men.
Since 1994, the military has discharged 13,500 soldiers under DADT, at a cost to the taxpayer of more than $363.8 million. The Senate is expected to take up the Defense Authorization bill and the amendment that would begin the process of repealing DADT after it comes back from its August recess.
The WonkLine: August 16, 2010
The WonkLine: August 16, 2010
Welcome to The WonkLine, a daily 9:30 a.m. roundup of the latest news about health care, the economy, national security, immigration and climate policy. This is what we’re reading. Tell us what you found in the comments section below. You can also follow The Wonk Room on Twitter.
National Security
“U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has told a major U.S. newspaper the July 2011 date to start withdrawing American troops from Afghanistan is set in stone, putting him at odds with his top Afghan war commander, General David Petraeus.”
“South Korea and the United States began a new round of war games Monday, involving about 30,000 U.S. forces and 56,000 South Korean personnel. The 10-day computerized drill is the second massive joint military exercise in less than a month”
“Iran will begin building a third facility for enriching uranium in 2011, said Ali Akbar Salehi, head of the Islamic Republic’s Atomic Energy Organization on Sunday.”
Economy
The LA Times reports on the Small Business Administration’s effort to craft new rules that may help women-owned firms get federal contracts.
According to the latest data, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and schools chancellor Joe Klein have seen “the evaporation of one of their signature accomplishments: the closing of the racial achievement gap.”
As of this week, thanks to new Federal Reserve regulations, “unless a consumer chooses to opt-in for overdraft protection, their ATM and debit purchases will be declined if an account has insufficient funds.”
Health Care
“Sixty-five Democratic members of Congress are asking the NAIC to develop a strict definition of ‘quality improvement measures’ in the MLR calculations.”
“Faced with the need to review insurance rates and enforce a panoply of new rights granted to consumers, states are scrambling to make sure they have the necessary legal authority to carry out the responsibilities being placed on them by President Obama’s health care law.”
“Though years away, the expiration of the popular Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) is already getting some attention on Capitol Hill.”
Immigration
A new Politico poll shows 59% of the general population wants immigration reform, including 59% of Republicans.
Hundreds of Tea Party activists gathered in Arizona at the U.S.- Mexico border “to rally for conservative political candidates and to denounce what they called lax federal enforcement of immigration laws.”
Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL) spoke out against gubernatorial candidate Scott McCollum’s (R-FL) immigration bill that would create an Arizona-style law against undocumented immigrants in Florida.
Climate Change
“We have a president who is forcing the EPA down our throats,” Kentucky Republican Senate candidate Rand Paul vividly claimed on Saturday, saying Obama “cares nothing about Kentucky and cares even less about Kentucky coal.”
On Friday, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce filed a lawsuit against the EPA’s greenhouse pollution endangerment finding, because of “the significant negative impact the EPA’s endangerment finding will have on jobs and local economies.”
Extreme heat waves throughout the United States have killed two in St. Louis, seven in Mississippi, and eight in Oklahoma.
Oil-Funded Pat Michaels Admits Solving Global Warming Is A Problem Of ‘Political Acceptability’
Oil-Funded Pat Michaels Admits Solving Global Warming Is A Problem Of ‘Political Acceptability’
In a telling exchange with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, long-time polluter apologist Pat Michaels conceded that the real challenge of solving manmade global warming is simply the “political acceptability” of reducing our dependence on fossil fuels as climate catastrophes grow. Michaels, aptly introduced as “a scientist who now works for the Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank that strongly opposes caps to carbon dioxide,” has promoted global warming denial for decades, funded by a network of oil and coal companies and their ideological allies. With calm questioning, Zakaria exposed Michaels’ position as political “stand-pattism” as the world burns:
ZAKARIA: You hear all this. Doesn’t it worry you? I mean, I understand your position, which is you know, we don’t have a substitute for fossil fuels right now. But surely that isn’t an argument for stand-pattism. Don’t you want to do something about this?
MICHAELS: What I worry about more is the concept of opportunity cost. We had legislation, again, that went through the House last summer, which would have cost a lot and been futile. And when you take that away or when the government favors certain technologies and politicizes technologies, you’re doing worse than nothing. You’re actually impairing your ability to respond in the long run. And that’s my major concern along this issue —
ZAKARIA: But if you were to have a carbon tax, if you were to have a gas tax —
MICHAELS: You can put in the carbon tax.
ZAKARIA: No, but you would reduce the consumption — that which you tax you get less of. That which you subsidize you get more of. This is a pretty simple law of economics, right?
MICHAELS: Right.
ZAKARIA: So if you were were to put it in, you would get reduced CO2 emissions and the government would get some money which you may not think it would spend wisely but it has the potential of spending wisely. Why would you be opposed to that?
MICHAELS: The problem is one of magnitude and political acceptability thereof. When we had gasoline of $4 a gallon, we reduced our consumption a grand total of four percent. If you’re really serious about atmospheric carbon dioxide, you’ve got to reduce it about 80 percent. How high does that tax have to be to be 80%? How do you do that in a political republic? It’s very, very difficult. And I guarantee you that —
ZAKARIA: But is the answer therefore to do nothing?
MICHAELS: No.
Watch it:
Zakaria also got Michaels to admit that about “40 percent” of his funding comes from the oil companies whose profits are based on free pollution.
Of course, there’s no secret about what kind of economic policy would be needed to end our dependence on fossil fuels over the coming decades. The rest of the industrialized world has policies that put a gradually increasing price on carbon pollution, redirecting investment in the free market to cleaner alternatives. Michaels’ claim that the American Clean Energy and Security Act passed by the House of Representatives last year “would have cost a lot and been futile” is, of course, false. The legislation would have improved the economic security of working families, reduced the deficit, and spurred billions of dollars of investment in clean American jobs instead of deadly oil and coal — while making an international agreement to limit global warming pollution a reality.
Michaels was interviewed this morning with climate scientist Gavin Schmidt and economist Jeffrey Sachs, who plainly described the “catastrophic planet” we are creating by burning billions of tons of fossil fuels every year. Schmidt remained “a little optimistic that the forces of delay will eventually be put aside” and that we can “demonstrate that societies are smarter than just allowing business as usual to carry on.” “If we do this sensibly,” Sachs said, “we can do this at low cost, save the planet, and save the economy.”
Sachs agreed with Michaels that the challenge requires political will. He concluded that is “what we hired the President of the United States for,” but that “we’re still waiting to hear from the administration”:
If we end up with a different planet where people cannot grow food, where people cannot eat given where they’re living right now, we have a catastrophe. And the ironic point is the combination of the technologies we have already in hand and those that are close on the horizon, if we do this sensibly, we can do this at low cost, save the planet, and save the economy. But we need a strategy and a plan. That’s what we hired the President of the United States for also. That’s what we’re still waiting to hear from the administration. If we get it, I bet the American people will rally to it.
It remains to be seen whether President Barack Obama will live up to this civilizational challenge, or if he will continue to let the Pat Michaels of the world rule the political discourse.
Transcript: More »
Will Record High Youth Unemployment Lead To A Lost Generation?
Will Record High Youth Unemployment Lead To A Lost Generation?
Our guest blogger is Sabina Dewan, Associate Director of International Economic Policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
Dorian Gray sold his soul for eternal youth. If he had to make the choice all over again in today’s economy, would he do it? Youth – a term that generally embodies energy, opportunity and dynamism – these days seems to be more representative of a flagging global economy. And “austerity” and budget cuts for labor market programs around the world are only going to make a bad situation worse.
The International Labor Organization’s Global Employment Trends for Youth 2010 estimates that there are 620 million economically active young people aged 15-24 years worldwide, and that the unemployment rate for that age cohort rose from 11.9 percent in 2007 to 13 percent in 2009 and is expected to continue to rise through this year. There were 81 million youth unemployed at the end of 2009; this is 7.8 million higher than in 2007.
In the US, the average unemployment rate for young people aged 16-24 rose from 10.6 percent in 2007 to 17.6 percent in 2009. And as Pat Garofalo noted, being out of work for an extended period of time when you’re young can have lasting detrimental effects in terms of income, as each missed year of work translates into 2 to 3 percent less earnings for each subsequent year. College students who graduated during the 1982 recession were still earning less than students who graduated into a strong economy ten years later. As the Washington Post reported, “this might be the first generation that does not keep up with its parents’ standard of living.”
What’s more is that young people also constituted almost a quarter of the world’s working poor in 2008. As young people try to make their way into the labor market, many –- especially in developing countries — are subject to poor working conditions and precarious contracts with low pay. When there is widespread poverty and lack of opportunity, the growing number of disaffected youth is associated with an escalation of crime in urban areas, outbursts of ethnic violence, and political instability.
A faltering global recovery is raising real concerns about a double dip recession and the potential for a Japanese style “lost decade” in the US, but what’s worse is that all of this could come with a lost generation, as youth around the world struggle with record unemployment, underemployment and discouragement. This is something we can’t afford.
So if Dorian Gray had to make the choice all over again in today’s economy, would he do it again? Unless governments around the world rise to the challenge…hell no!
If Doctors Were Climate Scientists, We’d Be Dead
If Doctors Were Climate Scientists, We’d Be Dead
In a case of climate malpractice, too many journalists and scientists are now overemphasizing the difficulty of understanding anthropogenic warming’s influence on weather. Right now, this is how many climate scientists and the journalists who cover climate are talking about the unprecedented weather phenomena during the hottest year in recorded history:
“it is impossible to blame mankind for single severe weather events”
“language—which suggests that we can, in fact, attribute specific weather events to global warming—should be strictly avoided”
“the usual caveat that no current weather event can be said to be ’caused’ by climate change”
“As we continually stress, one extreme weather event, or even a series of weather events, is not caused by global warming or climate change”
“you cannot say a single event or a single summer is unequivocally due to climate change — by definition it’s weather, and not climate”
“a single weather event cannot be blamed on climate change”
“climate change cannot be said to cause an individual event”
“You can’t attribute any single weather-related event to a hotter planet”
If this is how our doctors worked, then sick patients would hear nonsense like this:
Sure, you’ve been diagnosed with AIDS. Sure, you have a rare, malignant cancer that is only seen in 1 out of 500,000 healthy people and is common in AIDS patients. But one cannot conclude 100 percent that this is caused by your full-blown AIDS. One must observe your life-threatening symptoms over many years to draw conclusions in terms of AIDS. You cannot say unequivocally a single outbreak or a single cancer is unequivocally due to HIV — by definition it’s a disease, and not an immune deficiency syndrome.
Many journalists and climate scientists repeat the maxim “no single weather event can be attributed to global warming” as if it is an absolute verity, not a useful but overly simplistic rule of thumb. Fortunately, other scientists like Michael Tobis and journalists like the Associated Press’s Charles Hanley understand how to properly express the catastrophic influence of fossil fuel pollution on our climate.
Stories time and again claim that it is “impossible” to link anthropogenic climate change with an individual extreme event. While attribution, strictly defined, may be very challenging, it is not necessarily an impossibility. Many kinds of events, in particular ones that have a historical precedent, could have occurred in an alternate reality that doesn’t include manmade greenhouse gases. “It can still be problematic to blame a specific individual extreme weather event on climate change,” Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring and attribution at the UK Met Office, properly explains, “because there have always been extremes of weather around the world.”
However, there can also be individual events which would be either extremely unlikely or physically implausible without greenhouse forcing. Scientists have the capacity to determine influence and attribution for weather phenomena from global forcing for which the physical processes are well understood. When we’re talking about unprecedented mesoscale phenomena — like a season-long Eurasian heatwave during a solar minimum — or phenomena with multi-annual latency — like the record temperatures of the Lake Superior or decline of Greenland ice mass, then natural variability is not a plausible explanation.
More importantly, this is a frustratingly moot question. We have exactly one planet to live on, and it’s one whose climate system is now being driven by manmade pollution. The coming changes which are known with absolute certainty — sea level rise, glacial decline, ocean acidification — presage suffering on an apocalyptic scale. There is no alternate planet with everything the same except with pre-industrial levels of carbon dioxide to compare against. Weather phenomena are determined through physical processes by the state of the ocean-atmosphere system, making greenhouse pollution one of the causative agents of today’s weather. And yet energy is expended on semantic knots over the words “cause,” “attribute,” and “influence” — as if that matters. The simple reality is, as Wally Broecker once said:
The climate is an angry beast, and we’re poking it with sticks.
New Housing Policy Brief Shows GOP Is More Interested In Scoring Political Points Than Helping Homeowners
New Housing Policy Brief Shows GOP Is More Interested In Scoring Political Points Than Helping Homeowners
Next week, the Obama administration is hosting a meeting focused on finding ways to begin addressing the country’s broken housing finance system. For the last year or so, the Treasury Department has been saying that the next big effort following financial regulatory reform would be figuring out what to do with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two government sponsored enterprises, and this meeting is the first step in that process.
Republicans, of course, consistently go on and on about Fannie and Freddie, concocting an alternate reality where they were the main culprits in the housing bubble (despite the fact that by the time the bubble really started raging, the GSE’s had largely departed from the scene). And they have made no end of hay about GSE reform not being included in the financial regulatory reform effort.
But now that the administration is starting to turn its attention to GSE reform, the GOP is going to have to put its money where its mouth is. But much like the economic “solutions” pamphlet it released last week was short on actual solutions, the housing Policy Brief it released this week — authored by Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) — is a bit short on actual policy.
It’s not until the very bottom of the document that the GOP’s “solutions” for what to do with Fannie and Freddie are detailed, and though there are three points there, they all come to the same conclusion, which is: “end the current GSE conservatorship by a date certain.”
Now, nobody thinks that the current situation regarding the GSE’s is tenable, and we have to dramatically rethink the way in which we do housing finance in this country. But the Republicans have no vision for what would replace Fannie and Freddie which — like it or not — back more than 90 percent of the mortgages in the country. And setting a date certain for kicking their legs out would not only harm the housing market, but could upset far wider swathes of the global economy:
GSEs are currently essential tools of federal policy, providing an enormous amount of liquidity in support of the federal government’s efforts to stabilize the housing markets. Investor appetite for the MBS issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac helps to finance the significant borrowing of overseas’ capital by the U.S. government, providing an outlet for foreign investors to invest the excess dollars accrued by our significant current account deficit. Any abrupt disruptions could affect the balance of payments and global macroeconomic stability.
The GOP’s brief includes some hand-waving about competition and innovation replacing all of this mortgage financing, but the fact remains that the GOP simply has no idea what it wants the mortgage finance system to look like, and spends the vast majority of its policy statement on the issue trying to score political points off the false notion that government-backed loans to poor people brought the global economy to its knees. I’d say the GOP are a bunch of empty suits on this issue, but that would give them too much credit for getting dressed in the morning.
Diehl Assists In Netanyahu’s ‘Settlement Moratorium’ Farce
Diehl Assists In Netanyahu’s ‘Settlement Moratorium’ Farce
When reviewing history, there’s interpretation, and then there’s just flat-out misleading your readers. Jackson Diehl’s editorial today is an example of the latter:
Eighteen months ago, when the then-new Obama administration tried to jump start Middle East peace negotiations, the Palestinian president balked. He said he would not agree even to meet the newly-elected Israeli Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, unless Netanyahu made several big concessions in advance — including recognition of a Palestinian state on the basis of Israel’s 1967 borders and a freeze on all Jewish settlement construction in the West Bank.
Convinced that Netanyahu was the problem, the Obama administration spent the next year in a crude and clumsy effort to extract those concessions. Netanyahu stoutly resisted; the administration belatedly discovered that it could not compel a democratic ally to comply with its demands. Eventually a rough compromise emerged: Netanyahu publicly accepted the idea, but not the pre-defined borders, of a Palestinian state; and he imposed a partial and temporary freeze on the settlements, which is due to expire in September.
This is just unreal. For a start, neither recognition of a Palestinian state on the basis of the 1967 borders nor a settlement freeze are in any sense Israeli “concessions” — they are commitments that Israeli had already made as part of the Bush administration-led Quartet’s 2002 road map. Netanyahu came into office and refused to honor those commitments, holding out and essentially insisting that Israel be paid twice for the same goods. Diehl assists in this scam when he writes as if it’s somehow inappropriate for an American president to try to “compel a democratic ally to comply” with agreements it was refusing to honor.
Add to this the fact the so-called “moratorium” — in which Netanyahu begrudgingly agreed to partially fulfill Israel’s commitment to halt settlements — has turned out to be a complete farce, with the New York Times reporting in July that, because of a massive surge in settlement starts before it took hold, the pace of settlement building during the “moratorium” has “remained largely unchanged.” Having reaped American praise for finally adhering to obligations that Israel had already made, Netanyahu went ahead and found ways to get around those obligations anyway.
And then today comes the news that Netanyahu has rejected the 1967 borders as a basis for negotiation — which is to say he rejects the very basis upon which both the U.S. and the international community has for decades, and through multiple resolutions, held that the conflict would be resolved. What will probably happen is that, a few weeks or months from now, Netanyahu will, after having extracted further (actual) concessions from the U.S., agree to kind of sort of (not really) consider the 1967 borders, and then Jackson Diehl can write another op-ed portraying this as another bold stroke for peace.
While I would rather see Abbas agree to direct talks and call Netanyahu’s bluff (the Palestinians have already submitted a proposal on borders to the Israelis, to which the Israelis have yet to respond, just as they have yet to respond to the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative), it’s really not hard to understand why Abbas would resist having his already-shaky domestic credibility further undermined by being drawn into such a process.
When I was in Israel recently, a former Israeli government official remarked to me that given that the Palestinians have fulfilled most of their road map obligations, the Israelis “are desperate to find evidence of Palestinian wrongdoing” in order to combat the perception that it is the Israelis who are the intransigent party. This helps explain the increased Israeli focus on Palestinian incitement against Israel, which is still very much a problem, though one that has vastly improved over the past years, in keeping with Palestinians’ road map commitment to improve it. Somehow I doubt that Diehl would praise Abbas’ “stout resistance” if Abbas began treating the P.A.’s past commitments on incitement as a new “concession.” It’s a mystery why Diehl is willing to assist Netanyahu in a similar misrepresentation.
Helping Pakistan Is In US National Interest
Helping Pakistan Is In US National Interest
The flooding in Pakistan is an immense catastrophe and has overwhelmed the ability of the Pakistani government to respond. As the Progress Report today explains, “massive monsoonal flooding continues to ravage the country, leaving one-fifth of Pakistan underwater. After weeks of flooding, about 14 million people have already been affected by the floods — including six million children — and estimates of the dead have ranged from 1,200 to 1,600.” While the world has been slow to give, the US has been proactive, providing the most assistance thus far. Helicopters have been sent to the area and have “evacuated 3089 people and delivered 322,340 pounds of relief supplies,” with more on the way. Naval vessels have been parked off Pakistan’s coast to provide logistical assistance. Tanvir Ahmad Khan, a former Pakistani foreign secretary noted from Islamabad that:
The American assistance has been considerable, it has been prompt, and it has been effective.
Not only is helping people in desperate need a very good and moral thing to do, but as Larry Korb and I have argued previously, providing foreign assistance and humanitarian relief in the wake of a disaster is fundamentally in the US national interest. Rahm Emanuel’s statement that one “should never allow a crisis go to waste” is a reflection of the opportunity for change and transformation that a sudden crisis brings about. While this can be viewed cynically, the fact is that the same applies to the floods in Pakistan.
While working with Pakistan is vital to broader US counter-terrorism aims, the Pakistani public has an immensely negative view of the United States. Providing disaster assistance won’t automatically make everyone love us, but it will have an impact. Being on the ground providing aid and assistance in desperate situations following natural disasters, is something that is not soon forgotten. After an initially slow start following the Tsunami disaster in 2004, the US military and US aid agencies mobilized. The military essentially created a sea base, involving a flotilla of ships, of the coast off Indonesia. The US had 15,000 troops in the region and went about urgently ferrying needed supplies to the destroyed coastal regions that were unreachable by land due to the destruction of infrastructure. Following this effort, a Pew Survey found that 80 percent of the citizens of the world’s largest Muslim-majority country had a more favorable opinion of the United States after our response.
The US needs to think more strategically about how to make disaster response a core function of its foreign policy mission than an after thought. In short, the US should embrace being the world’s first responder.
Principally, the US military should make disaster response a core mission. Some may rightly worry about the militarization of aid, and there is no doubt that any disaster response would have to be a multi-agency activity with the expertise of USAID and State taking the lead roles. But no other agency, or frankly country, can provide the logistical reach and capabilities as the US military. As the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, Adm. Mike Mullen, commented during the Tsunami response, “We literally built a city at sea for no other purpose than to serve the needs of other people.” Yet disaster response remains an afterthought and is rarely taken into account in procurement decisions and in the design of new systems.
Some may see the mantle of global first responder as a distraction from “hard” security concerns. But this is nonsense. Responding to natural disasters helps promote stability, improves the image of the United States, and often improves ties and coordination with the affected country’s government. Finally, responding to natural disasters is the price of being the world’s largest superpower. As the guarantor of global security, the U.S. is looked to not just for its ability to deter threats but also for its ability to help when countries are in need. If we are going to have a global military presence, it would make sense for this presence to be seen globally in as positive a light as possible – and being seen as a global first responder is one such way to make this happen.
McCollum Alienates Florida’s Latino GOP Politicos With Hardline Immigration Stance
McCollum Alienates Florida’s Latino GOP Politicos With Hardline Immigration Stance
Earlier this week, Florida Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate Bill McCollum (R) unveiled a proposed immigration bill which many argue is “even tougher” than Arizona’s controversial immigration law, SB-1070. He didn’t write it, but McCollum still conveniently took the lead in selling and promoting the bill to voters as part of his political campaign. However, McCollum’s pandering on the issue is costing him the support of Latino members of his own party:
Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) [Co-chair of McCollum's Statewide Hispanic Leadership Team]: “I’m disappointed and was blindsided by Bill’s decision to promote this, and I encourage the candidates to focus on plans that will improve Florida’s economy, bring jobs to our state and jump-start our tourism…I fail to see how promotion of this issue will accomplish that, and I was taken aback.”
State Rep. J.C. Planas (R-FL) [Vice chairman of the Hispanic Legislative Caucus]: “I believe this may be the death knell of the party, if they continue like this. I think this definitely hurts our ability to be a majority party. I think that for a lot of politicians talking about this, it is lip service; they feel some sort of constituency will vote for this. But you have to question the sanity of this.”
Ana Navarro [Republican political consultant and adviser to John McCain's presidential campaign]:”I will not campaign against McCollum but will also not lift a finger or raise one additional dollar to support his campaign. Though I believe McCollum is far better prepared to be governor than Rick Scott, I cannot bring myself to cast a vote for either.”
There are also a number of Florida Republicans who aren’t exactly willing to go to bat for McCollum on this issue either. When asked about McCollum’s latest move, a spokesperson for Senate candidate Marco Rubio (R-FL) simply stated, “He believes the best approach is for the federal government to deal with border security and immigration, and he hopes state efforts like Arizona are a wake-up call for Congress to get its act together.” Republican consultant and Miami-Dade School Board candidate Carlos Curbelo (R-FL) explained that McCollum is “reacting to his opponent’s strategy.” Former Gov. Jeb Bush (R-FL), who also co-chairs McCollum’s Statewide Hispanic Leadership Team, stated that though he still supports McCollum, he “personally disagree[s] with him having to go that far.” Reps. Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R-FL) and Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL), other co-chairs of McCollum’s leadership team, could not be reached for comment.
Meanwhile, even Latino business leaders are speaking out again McCollum. Leonardo Garcia, president of the local Hispanic-American Business Alliance, noted, “[Arizona] is losing money. The business community is losing money. Why bring that to the state of Florida?”
Under President Obama’s Plan For The Bush Tax Cuts, Everyone Still Gets A Tax Cut
Under President Obama’s Plan For The Bush Tax Cuts, Everyone Still Gets A Tax Cut
Our guest blogger is Michael Linden, Associate Director for Tax and Budget Policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
Here’s something I bet you didn’t know. If we let the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest two percent of Americans expire at the end of this year as scheduled, everyone still gets a tax cut. Yes, everyone.
Right now, the entire panoply of massive Bush tax cuts is set to disappear 141 days from now. Though those cuts were skewed heavily to the very wealthy, they did lower tax rates for everyone. Which means that if the all the cuts expire as scheduled, everyone’s taxes will go up. President Obama and Congressional Democrats don’t want that to happen. They have pushed to keep the tax cuts in place for everyone making less than $250,000, but to let them expire for the wealthiest two percent of Americans.
Anyone who was paying attention during the 2008 presidential election knows that Obama has been extremely consistent on this particular point. Congressional Republicans, however, don’t seem all that willing to allow the tax cuts for the middle class to stick around unless the wealthy get to keep theirs too.
The Republicans are simply wrong on the merits, but it’s important to note that rich people will still pay lower taxes under the President’s plan than they would if all the tax cuts expired. In other words, even with the expiration of the high-end Bush tax rates, the richest two percent still get to keep some of their tax breaks.
An excellent chart in the Washington Post yesterday, based on a recent analysis from the non-partisan Joint Committee on Taxation, illustrates this pretty clearly. As you can see, under the Democratic plan, millionaires will still get a tax cut of more than $6,300. That’s about six times as much as the median household.
How can this be? How is it that letting the Bush tax cuts expire on the richest two percent nevertheless results in a tax cut for those very same people? The answer can be found in our progressive income tax system.
The top income tax rate — currently 35 percent — that everyone talks about is a marginal rate, which means that someone in the top tax bracket only pays 35 percent on the top part of their income. In 2009, for example, that rate applied only to each dollar after the first $372,950 of taxable income (for married couples). For dollars earned up to that limit, rich people pay the same rates as people who make far less. More »
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