Daily Kos

One idea that has been percolating as a stimulus program is a nationwide school rehab and renovation program, explained here by Laura Clawson. Fix America's Schools Today (FAST) was "put together by Mary Filardo of the 21st Century School Fund, Jared Bernstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and Ross Eisenbrey of the Economic Policy Institute, FAST (PDF) points to the maintenance and repair needs of our aging school buildings, which are on average 40 years old, and how that dovetails with job creation."

The idea apparently now has a powerful proponent in the White House:

The jobs package that President Obama plans to unveil shortly after Labor Day could include tens of billions of dollars to renovate thousands of dilapidated public schools and a tax break to encourage businesses to hire new workers, according to people familiar with White House deliberations.

As aides work to put together the proposal, they are also hammering out a companion plan to reduce federal budget deficits over the next decade, which Obama would share with the 12-member congressional "super committee" charged with finding long-term fixes for the growing national debt.

The deficit reduction plan would rely on some of the ideas Obama worked on in private negotiations with House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) this summer, aides said. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a proposal that is still taking shape.

The two-phase plan would probably require Obama to argue for spending more money in the short term while reducing the federal deficit over a longer period. Many economists support that combination, saying cuts in spending should wait until the economy is stronger. But political strategists say it has been difficult to communicate that idea to voters.

Let's hope there's a lot more focus on the jobs part of this than the deficit cutting part. Jed Lewison wrote earlier about the basic problem here: "Sure, you could enact long-term deficit reduction at the same time as you pass a short-term jobs bill, but it's the jobs bill that will create jobs—not the deficit reduction package. And if you reduce the deficit too quickly, you'll actually weaken the impact of the jobs bill."

His conclusion that this is largely a political gambit strikes me as right, that the White House "is betting that getting a big deficit reduction package enacted will give him the political capital to force action on a serious jobs creation package." The thing is, he already has the political capital to bring that fight to Republicans, in the form of public opinion. Going big on job creation, and forcing the Republicans to fight him on the one thing that Americans prioritize most, just makes sense.

FAST could be a smart starting point, because as one of its originators, Jared Bernstein says, "It's the public school in your community, not a bunch of folks on a distant highway." But it should be just the start of an infrastructure rebuilding proposal from the White House. Now's the time to take the big fight to the Republicans.

Sen. Mark Warner's Gang of Six buddy Sen. Tom Coburn had some, ahem, interesting things to say about President Obama yesterday. He didn't stop with his inflammatory remarks at that.

Here's what he had to say about Medicare:

"Show me where in the Constitution the federal government is responsible for your health care?" Coburn said.

He went on to say that government programs such as Medicare are primarily responsible for rapidly rising health-care costs, and that Medicare has made the medical system worse.

"You can't tell me the system is better now than it was before Medicare," he said.

Coburn agreed that some people received poor care—or no care—before Medicare was enacted in the 1960s, but said communities worked together to make sure most people received needed medical attention.

For a doctor, he sure is ignorant about the nation's health care system. No, Medicare is not responsible for rising health care costs. Neither are Medicaid, the military system Tri-care or the VA. Let's go the real experts to find out what is responsible for out-of-control health care costs, Kaiser Family Foundation.

• First, there's new technology and prescription drugs: "[T]he availability of more expensive, state-of-the-art technological services and new drugs fuel health care spending not only because the development costs of these products must be recouped by industry but also because they generate consumer demand for more intense, costly services even if they are not necessarily cost-effective." Consumer demand driven by things like prescription drug advertising on television which drives up prescription drug costs so pharmaceutical companies can pay for more advertising.
• A larger chronically ill population: heart disease, diabetes, chronic cancers are all on the rise, and yes, will increase as the population ages, and gets fatter. "This has placed tremendous demands on the health care system, particularly an increased need for treatment of ongoing illnesses and long-term care services such as nursing homes; it is estimated that health care costs for chronic disease treatment account for over 75% of national health expenditures."
• A disjointed, private-insurance based system that drives administrative costs out of control.  Note this, particularly: "It is estimated that at least 7% of health care expenditures are for administrative costs (e.g., marketing, billing) and this portion is much lower in the Medicare program (<2%), which is operated by the federal government.

Huh. Medicare is cheaper to administer than the private health care system? Who knew? Obviously Sen. Coburn, didn't, or is lying about it. But pretty much anybody else who's paid serious attention to health care policy knows he's full of shit on that one. Which is why this guy shouldn't be anywhere near any policymaking that has anything to do with public health care systems.

Word has it that President Obama is reading Rick Perlstein's Nixonland, an indispensable history of modern American politics. Finding that out, Perlstein writes about the lesson he hopes the president takes from the effort.

I assume Obama turned to it for insight about how he might help turn down the volume in our political conversation. But there’s also a story in Nixonland about how the Democratic Party wins, why it loses and the good things that happen when the party gets the formula right. I surely hope Obama did not miss it.

It concerns the two major axes upon which major national elections get fought. Sometimes they become battles over the cultural and social anxieties that ordinary Americans suffer. Other times they are showdowns about middle-class anxieties when the free market fails. Normally, in the former sort of election, Republicans win. In the latter, Democrats do—as we saw in 2008, when the tide turned after John McCain said “the fundamentals of the economy are strong.”

Right now, Perlstein argues, we're smack dab in the latter situation. Still. And the handful of decades since Nixon's first run for president demonstrate that Democrats win when they stand for the middle class, when steadfastly protect the social safety net that Democrats created, and Republicans have been trying to shred every election.

Here’s what LBJ knew that ­McGovern didn’t: There are few or no historical instances in which saying clearly what you are for and what you are against makes Americans less divided. But there is plenty of evidence that attacking the wealthy has not made them more divided. After all, the man who said of his own day's plutocrats, "I welcome their hatred," also assembled the most enduring political coalition in U.S. history.

The Republicans will call it class warfare. Let them. Done right, economic populism cools the political climate. Just knowing that the people in power are willing to lie down on the tracks for them can make the middle much less frantic. Which makes America a better place. And which, incidentally, makes Democrats win.

It's worth reading in its entirety (as is Nixonland, but this column is a lot shorter). There's one party that's always stood for the plutocrats, and one that's always been with the people. With a economic inequality in America now setting new records, it's even more important for our Democratic president to fulfill that heritage.

Jed Lewison wrote earlier about President Obama's town meeting yesterday, in Alpha, Illinois. I want to highlight just one thing from that earlier post that the president said:

When folks tell you that we've got a choice between jobs now or dealing with our debt crisis, they're wrong. They're wrong. We can't afford to just do one or the other. We've got to do both. And the way to do it is to make some—reform the tax code, close loopholes, make some modest modifications in programs like Medicare and Social Security so they're there for the next generation, stabilize those systems. And you could actually save so much money that you could actually pay for some of the things like additional infrastructure right now.

Now, we know that President Obama knows that Social Security doesn't have one damned thing to do with the debt. He has said so repeatedly. And yet, Social Security continues to pop up all of the time when he's talking about the debt and deficit, and has been dragged onto the table in the debt ceiling negotiations. It came up again in yesterday's town meeting when this question was asked:

Q My question is about Social Security. I know that one of your ideas to fix the solvency of it is to reevaluate the equation that determines the COLA, the cost-of-living adjustment. But as the law stands right now, we are only taxed on the first $107,000 that we make.

THE PRESIDENT: Right.

Q That means every dime that I make is taxed for Social Security.

THE PRESIDENT: Right.

Q I don't make $107,000. (Laughter.) But that means that—

THE PRESIDENT: Somebody said you will—

Q Someday, I hope.

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, you sound pretty smart. It sounds like you're going to do just great.

Q Thanks. But that means that people like Mitt Romney only pay into Social Security on the first one-tenth of 1 percent of what they make.

THE PRESIDENT: Right.

Q Can we look forward to you telling the Republicans that it's time that the wealthy pay their fair share? (Applause.)

THE PRESIDENT: Well, first—this is a very well-informed young man here. (Laughter.) You're exactly right that the way the Social Security system works, there's what's called—there's basically a cap on your Social Security, which there isn't, by the way, on Medicare. But Social Security, it only goes up to the first $107,000; and you're right, somebody who makes—who has net assets of $250 million and are making maybe $5 million a year just on interest or capital gains or something, just a fraction of it's going to Social Security. I think there's a way for us to make adjustments on the Social Security tax that would be fairer than the system that we use right now.

I do think, in terms of how we calculate inflation, that's important as well.

That means that the White House will continue to push for the chained CPI, the new inflation formula that will mean a very real benefits cut for seniors as they age. A lifting of the payroll tax cap is a no-brainer for the program, and makes absolute sense, but the chained CPI will do real harm, and mean a real cut in benefits.

Seriously, Sen. Warner?

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) is hoping to form a bipartisan, bicameral post-“Gang of Six” group to pressure the already bipartisan, bicameral supercommittee to "go big or go home," his spokesman told POLITICO Thursday.

Warner, who first spoke of his vague plan during a Virginia Beach meeting Wednesday of the local Filipino American Community Action Group, said his new group would build on the efforts of the Gang of Six, a group of which he was a member.[...]

Warner spokesman Kevin Hall said Thursday the idea is for the nascent group to serve as a cheerleading corps for the 12-member supercommittee "to speak out to encourage the new super committee to 'go big, or go home.'" Hall said Warner has not developed details of the new group, which he called a "very preliminary concept."

Look, you weren't picked for the Catfood Commission II. None of your Gang was because it intended up being not entirely relevant. What Gang with Sen. Tom Coburn on it would be?

What the Super Congress needs is not cheerleaders, it's a plan to get us out of disastrous recession.

This is kind of a scary reflection of what decades of conservative pounding on so-called "activist judges" does to public opinion.

Americans are divided on whether the Supreme Court should base its rulings on its understanding of what the Constitution means in current times or whether those rulings should be strictly based on the Constitution as written, as had been argued by tea party movement adherents and many conservatives. Fully half (50%) said the Constitution should be interpreted to take into account modern times while 45% say the justices should base their understanding on what the Constitution meant as written.

The survey is a couple of months old, but still instructive. Delving more deeply into Pew Research Center's findings, it would seem that more conservatives hold tea party-like views on the constitution than actually claim to belong to the tea party.

In the Pew Research Center's political typology survey, released May 4, 70% of Republicans said the Supreme Court should base its rulings on its understanding of the Constitution as originally written; 65% of Democrats said the Court should base its rulings on what the Constitution means today.

The differences are even starker when viewed through the political typology, which sorts people based on their values, political beliefs and partisan affiliation.

Constitutional originalism draws overwhelming support from Staunch Conservatives, who are mostly older white males and include the largest percentage of Tea Party supporters (72%) of any group. Fully 88% of Staunch Conservatives say the Supreme Court should base its understanding of the Constitution on how it was originally written. Among other Republican and GOP-leaning groups—Main Street Republicans, Libertarians and Disaffecteds—smaller majorities favor an originalist approach.

Solid Liberals—who are mostly  highly politically engaged, pro-government seculars—reject constitutional originalism by nearly the same margin as Staunch Conservatives support it: 81% say the Court should base its rulings on its understanding of what the Constitution means in current times, while just 15% say justices should base their rulings on an understanding of what the Constitution means as it was originally written.

It's the full-on 70 percent of Republicans, and fully 45 percent of Americans, who are basically in the Scalia camp (probably without realizing what exactly that means) that's really disturbing. It's even more disturbing when you look at the very thin thread by which a rational Supreme Court now hangs.

There's a reason that Washington, D.C. is the only part of the country that thinks the economy is doing just fine. It's because that's the reality that people there see. The town is booming, and it's booming in large part at taxpayers' expense, because of the growth in federal contracting.

Millions of dollars worth of federal contracts transformed Anita Talwar from a government accounting clerk into a wealthy woman — one who can afford a $2.8 million home in the Washington suburbs with its own elevator, wine cellar and Swarovski crystal chandeliers.[...]

Talwar’s success — and that of hundreds of other contractors like her — is a key factor driving the explosion of the region’s wealth over the last two decades. It also has exacerbated the gap between high- and low-wage workers, which is wider in the D.C. area than almost anywhere else in the United States.

Washingtonians now enjoy the highest median household income of any metropolitan area in the country, and five of the top 10 jurisdictions in America — Loudoun, Howard and Fairfax counties, and Falls Church and Fairfax City — are here, census data shows.

The signs of that wealth are on display all over, from the string of luxury boutiques such as Gucci and Tory Burch opening at Tysons Galleria to the $15 cocktails served over artisanal ice at the W Hotel in the District to the ever-larger houses rising off River Road in Potomac.[...]

The new Washington is a global business hub with thriving technology, biotech and communications industries. Only 12 percent of workers are federal employees. But the federal government remains an engine of job creation, outsourcing its tech support and other services to contracting firms ringing the Capital Beltway, a phenomenon that exploded in the years after 9/11.

More than $80 billion in federal contracting dollars will flow to the region this year, up from $4.2 billion in 1980, according to Stephen Fuller, director of the Center for Regional Analysis at George Mason University. Adjusted for inflation, that’s a seven-fold increase. A third of the region’s gross regional product now comes from federal spending.

A good part of the greater Washington, D.C. area is not living the same reality as the rest of America, or even the rest of D.C., where income inequality is in sharp display if you look for it. The problem for our policymakers and opinion makers inside the Beltway is that they tend not to go looking for it, outside their comfort zone.

It's particularly galling, however, that this largesse has been funded by the rest of the country, those of us who are now going to be forced into austerity by a political class that doesn't live in reality.

Three guesses what the U.S. Chamber of Commerce wants the Catfood Commission II to do, and it'll probably only take you one.

The business group's top lobbyist Bruce Josten wrote to the 12 members of the supercommittee, urging them to "reform entitlement programs and fundamentally restructure the U.S. tax code to bring revenue and spending back into alignment."

Now, in a rational, non-Chamber world, bringing revenue and spending back into alignments would mean restructuring the tax code so that the GEs, the oil companies, the hedge fund managers would end up actually paying their fair share of taxes in order to ensure that critical programs that provide a measure of economic security to the larger population are maintained. But the Chamber's world isn't rational.

The Chamber wants the group to address Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

On tax reform, the group wants tax reform that lowers marginal rates, and which does "not single out specific industries or individuals for punishment." It urges any reform to allow for a transition to new rules.

Okay, then. So much for shared sacrifice.

They'll have at least one receptive member on the committee for their ideas, if campaign spending is any indication:

One of the biggest recipients of [Chamber] spending [in 2010] was supercommittee member Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA), who benefited from nearly $1.5 million in outside spending by the group last year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Toomey's campaign received $2,500 from the Chamber’s PAC as well. This doesn’t even include campaign cash from the PACs and employees of Chamber members.[...]

This is just another example of why it’s so important that committee members provide complete transparency of their meetings with outside parties, including Chamber lobbyists, and cease fundraising while the committee is operational.

Transparency might not be enough, but it's essential.

It's not entirely clear how the idea of at least $1.5 trillion in cuts and job creating stimulus are at all compatible, but it appears to be the idea that the White House and Senate Democrats have settled on as their message. In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, the three Democratic senators on the committee write:

Make no mistake, this is an important moment for our country. Millions of Americans are still hurting, working overtime to pay the bills, struggling to find a job and a way forward for their families. Trillions of dollars in private capital are sitting on the sidelines because businesses are not yet confident enough in our economy or in their lawmakers to invest in the future. These families and businesses are demanding that this new committee work together to overcome the partisanship and brinksmanship of recent months and put our fiscal house in order.[...]

We know that our goal is to reduce spending. But we also know that America faces not just a budget deficit but also a jobs deficit. Nobody on this committee would be happy if we reduced the budget deficit but even more Americans end up losing their jobs.

The WSJ is also reporting that President Obama "is considering recommending that lawmakers on a deficit committee back new measures to stimulate the lagging economy, people familiar with White House discussions said Tuesday." At the same time, though:

The plan Mr. Obama is considering also would recommend the congressional committee come up with a package that reduces the federal budget deficit by much more that its mandate of $1.5 trillion over the next decade, a senior administration official said, through changes in the tax code and social safety-net programs.

"There's no reason to stop at $1.5 trillion," the official said.

The measures the White House could ask the committee to consider, this report says, are those things they've been pushing on for a few weeks now:

[E]xtending unemployment-insurance benefits and a payroll-tax cut for employees, which expire at year end and together cost more than $160 billion a year, and an infrastructure bank that could cost as much as $30 billion [...] a payroll-tax cut for employers, worth perhaps as much as roughly $110 billion, and other tax breaks for businesses of as much as $55 billion.

The AP is reporting that we'll hear more than these same ideas from the president in September, with a White House official saying that "all of Obama’s proposals would be fresh ones, not a rehash of plans he has pitched for many weeks and still supports, including his 'infrastructure bank' idea to finance construction jobs."

It's a better message than all austerity, all the time. There's the little problem of how you get any of the six Republicans on the committee to go along with anything that would actually help the country, but we are at least now seeing more of an effort on the part of Democrats to challenge them on that by putting jobs at the fore of their rhetoric. You start with the message, and hopefully that will translate into action.

The coalition of progressive activists in the American Dream Coalition have made sure that jobs are on the agenda for members of Congress this August. They pick good targets.

Two Super Congress Republican members, Rep. Fred Upton (MI) and Sen. Pat Toomey (PA) found themselves confronting angry constituents at home this week, being pressured on tax increases and job creation. In hard-hit Michigan, Upton conceded that he'd be open to tax "reform" that closed some loopholes, but that didn't go far enough for many attendees at his town meeting.

During his 45-minute appearance at the Coover Center, Upton was continually interrupted by people in the audience. Most shouted comments and questions about growing jobs in Michigan and what Upton plans to do.

About 20 people who appeared to be in an organized group sometimes broke into chants. They declined to identify who they were with, with one woman telling a photographer her name is "I am jobs."

At one point, as Upton was talking about reducing the cost of Medicare and ensuring its solvency, a man shouted, "Where are the jobs on your chart?"

A woman stood up and started yelling at Upton, and the group begain chanting "bring back jobs."

They did force Upton to speak on jobs, to talk about his efforts to get an Indiana-based company to increase production in Michigan, but as for a national jobs program, according to this report, Upton didn't have answers.

Toomey's constituents apparently had far less success in getting a response out of their senator on jobs. In fact, they couldn't even get a meeting with him.

Republican U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey's stock has been rising rapidly in Washington, as the freshman was named last week to the crucial 12-member "super committee" that will try to resolve the nation's growing debt crisis.

But his stock hit rock bottom today with Shawn Wygant of Forest Hills, who was recently laid off from Pittsburgh-based Sodexo Co., plus about 20 other members of liberal and union groups who gathered in a steady rain outside his office here.

"We want Pat Toomey to meet with the people who voted him in, but the only ones he meets with are big business owners," Mr. Wygant said. "I lost my job and my health insurance but Pat Toomey doesn't worry about that. We want to have a town hall meeting with him by early September so we can get more jobs."

Another laid-off worker, Dan Haney of Philadelphia, said he's been traveling to Toomey offices in Eastern Pennsylvania, and "He said he'd meet with us who lost our jobs but he won't give us a time and a place. He campaigned on bringing jobs to people but we haven't seen it yet. Rich people pay little or no taxes and it's sickening."
[...]

However, the protesters are on a different page than Mr. Toomey. Just after being named to the super committee last week, he said that major tax hikes "are not going to be part" of the effort to reduce the nation's $14 trillion deficit. He said he was looking toward reductions in "entitlement programs," such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, which are among the biggest items in the federal budget.

There is, however, a bipartisan message coalescing in the Super Congress. Tax "reform" in the form of closing loopholes. Clyburn says that's the only revenue hike on the table, and even Toomey says "all kinds of deductions and write-offs and special-interest loopholes" need to be eliminated.

But he doesn't have anything to say about jobs.

Rep. Jim Clyburn told Chuck Todd on MSNBC today that, as far as he is concerned, there won't be new tax increases in the Super Congress plan.

But this snippet is a little more disturbing:

TODD: How powerful are these triggers, do you really believe? How powerful are they for you? Are you going to be incredibly reticent to walk away, to be deadlocked at six-six, simply with a cut, with the fact that the trigger would, so one of the Democrat so-called sacred cows, the trigger would hit Medicare providers?

CLYBURN: Well, I will be very, very reticent to walk away because I, for one, will be sitting on both sides of that issue. I don’t want to see and address the cuts and entitlements, nor do I want to see drastic cuts in Defense. So Defense may be something that most members on the Democrat side will not mind going after. But I do mind going after that. So I’m going to be very reticent. I’ve got to take care of my hometown, if something, where it’s the headquarters, of the ninth air force and the third army here in Columbia, Ft. Jackson, Charleston, the air force base, Paris Island — I’m going to be there to try to make sure that we keep those military installations very viable. So I’ve got a double interest in making sure we get this done.

That kind of defeats the purpose of a Super Congress, hypothetically above the petty, parochial concerns of their own districts. The above pretty much proves the fallacy of that idea. It also shows just how unlikely it is there'll be much in the way of defense cuts coming out of the Catfood Commission II. If a Democrat is afraid of the trigger because of potential defense cuts, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are in for it.

This doesn't seem like a strategy to open Super Congress bargaining with, on the part of Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC), a Catfood Commission II member.

"Let me be very clear: Even in the Biden committee, none of us ever talked about raising tax rates, we are not there," the assistant minority leader said Monday on MSNBC's "The Daily Rundown." "We believe, however, that closing loopholes can get us to where we need to be."

The "everything but tax increases is on the table" strategy is the one the Republicans are pushing. It's not entirely helpful to have it come from the Democratic side, too. And it's a dreadful opening bid for the negotiations. Clyburn is working on the assumption that the Bush tax cuts will expire in 2012, and that combined with ending loopholes and ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they'll find the new revenue they need. These are all good goals and should be done. But counting on them as givens might not be entirely realistic.