Winning Progressive

(By The Pragmatic Pundit)

The so-called Fiscal Cliff is a political creation…the cousin to Starve the Beast.  I don’t know why they think everyone is so dumb.  We print our own currency, set the interest rate and owe a third of the debt to ourselves.  Can I rant a little?

Every time I hear politicians say the approach to solving the deficit should be “fair and balanced”, I want to spit.  There was absolutely nothing fair and balanced about its accumulation.  The rich made out like bandits, while the Middle Class struggled.

But, you hear it all the time…”everyone has to sacrifice”.  Really?  Well, the Middle Class has been sacrificing for decades.  Now, all of a sudden, it is fair for “everyone” to feel the pinch?  I don’t think so!  The Middle Class has been slapped, punched and kicked long enough.

The rich have extracted the national treasury and refused to invest in the country and the Middle Class owes them something more?  The so-called job creators, created no jobs.  They just took their tax-cuts and ran.  Not because they are uncertain…because they are greedy, heartless and unpatriotic.

The Middle Class stood in unemployment lines, suffered the humiliation of food stamps and food pantries, dropped out of college or couldn’t go, moved back home, suffered through illness without medical care, watched the value of our homes diminish, moved into our cars and onto the streets.  We already went over the cliff.  We are broke and we should sacrifice more?

I don’t think so.

To whom much is given, much is expected; and that is as it should be.  The rich reaped all the benefits of the downturn, so let them finance the upturn.  Raise taxes on the rich and give the Middle Class the tax cuts for a change.  Raise the minimum wage to $12.00 an hour, so anyone working can earn a living wage. Give everyone access to healthcare and an education.  After a few decades, like the rich had, then we can talk about “fair and balanced”.  Until then, leave the Middle Class alone!

It’s our turn!

For this weekend’s reading list, we have articles on bad working conditions in warehouses, climate change, teachers’ unions, security at American embassies, the budget debate, and how war preys on the poor.

I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave – a reporter goes undercover to take a job at a warehouse for an online shipping company and reports back about the low wages and poor working conditions.

Turn Down the Heat – the World Bank’s latest report on climate changes paints a disturbing picture of the devastating impacts of a 4 degree Celsius increase in global temperatures which, unfortunately, is what we are on track to cause if we don’t take serious action soon to curb climate change

Teachers Unions: Scourge of the Nation? – an evaluation finding that the prevalence of teachers unions is positively correlated with higher and more equitable funding of public education but, contrary to the claims of union opponents, is not correlated with lower educational performance

Can America Diplomacy Ever Come Out of Its Bunker? - an essay examining the impacts of ever heightened security at American embassies, which will almost certainly only escalate after the killing of Christopher Stevens in Benghazi, on the ability of American diplomats to do their job of building relationships with the people of other countries

Understanding the Budget Debate - three reports from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities on deficits, discretionary spending, Simpson-Bowles, and other issues relevant to the debate over the austerity bomb

War Is Betrayal: Persistent Myths of Combat – a powerful essay arguing that war is about “elites preying on the weak, the gullible, the marginal, and the poor.”  For responses from some veterans and others, click here.

Below are some in the moment thoughts about the second Presidential Debate.  Our take is that President Obama stood up proudly for his record, offered a positive vision, called out Romney’s lies in a calm and cool way, and, most importantly, showed some real fire in the belly.

Keep in mind that the post-debate impressions spread by the chattering classes in DC often shapes voters’ views about who won or lost a debate, so let’s all go out there and trumpet President Obama’s strong performance in social media, with your friends and family, in letters to your local newspapers, and by signing up to volunteer for the Obama campaign.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

I missed the first 25 mins of the debate, and tuned in to Romney lying about his tax plan. What a shock.

Is Romney also going to give us all magic unicorns? No. In reality, he’s going to raise taxes on the middle class and take away our Medicare and Social Security.

Nice. President Obama ties Romney to the House Republicans, while linking Democratic policies to economic growth under President Clinton.

So what will Romney do first – produce his tax returns, or tell us what tax exemptions he will eliminate?

If Romney cannot stop his own Bain Capital company from shipping jobs overseas, then why would we think he would create American jobs as President?

The only “sources” that Romney can claim supports his mystical tax plan are blogs and articles written by Republicans.

Let’s see if Multiple Choice Mitt takes a position on Lily Ledbetter Act. He has refused to in the past, because his party opposes every effort to achieve gender equality.

The difference between Romney and W. Bush is that Romney is offering the Bush agenda on steroids.

Romney simply lied about access to contraception. He vowed to “get rid of” funding for Planned Parenthood, and supported the Blunt Amendment, which would have allowed any employer to deny its employees health insurance coverage for contraception.

President Obama has the real record of supporting actual small businesses.

President Obama has taken steps to make Medicare more efficient, without cutting benefits. Romney opposes those efficiencies, and wants to eliminate Medicare.

Under President Reagan, government employment increased significantly. Under President Obama, the GOP required massive layoffs of state and local government workers, which is largely what is holding the economy back.

Here’s how reactionary Romney is on immigration – he vowed to veto the DREAM Act, and wants to make life so difficult for immigrants that they will “voluntarily” leave the country through “self-deportation.”

Here’s the details on President Obama’s sensible policy to stop deporting DREAMers – law abiding immigrants who were brought here by their parents when they were children.

And the Obama Administration took on Arizona’s anti-immigrant SB1070 all the way to the Supreme Court, while Romney calls Arizona’s law “a model for the nation”.

Romney’s “blind trust” is not blind - as he said, “blind trusts are an age old ruse.”

Nice to see the moderator call Romney out for being flatly wrong about Obama’s statement on Libya.  Here’s what President Obama said in a Rose Garden statement on September 12 – “No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for.”

Back in April, Romney went and kissed the ring of the NRA leadership, buying into their silly conspiracy theories rather than calling them out for opposing sensible gun safety legislation.

On jobs, Romney could begin by making sure his Bain Capital companies stop shipping American jobs to China, like Sensata is doing in Freeport, Illinois.

Here’s an example of what Romney’s Bain Capital is doing to every day Americans by shipping their jobs overseas.

If Romney cares about 100% of Americans, why did he tell his wealthy donors that he does not care about 47% of us?

President Obama knocked that closing answer out of the park – absolutely beautiful how he showed passion for every day Americans while making clear that Romney doesn’t care.

For this weekend’s reading list we have articles on the impact of the 2012 elections on our judicial system and health care policy, Paul Ryan’s reactionary budgets and bad debate performance, and how Mitt Romney dodges taxes and failed to be a bipartisan leader in Massachusetts.

The Hidden Stakes of the Election – While the fate of the Supreme Court gets almost all of the attention in talk about what is at stake this November, the differences in the judges that President Obama would appoint to lower courts versus those that Mitt Romney would appoint is critical to determining whether our judicial system will uphold or overturn important public health and safety regulations.

The Health Policy Election – an overview of the differences between President Obama and Mitt Romney on health care reform, Medicare, and Medicaid, and what those differences would mean for each program.

Ryan Meets Reality – a great summary of the Vice-Presidential debate explaining how it appeared that “one vice-presidential candidate [was] speaking from knowledge and experience and the other from index cards.”

Ryan Roundup: Everything You Need to Know About Chairman Ryan’s Budget - While Paul Ryan may be trying to hide his reactionary fiscal and tax policies, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities have offered a helpful reminder of what Ryan really stands for by collecting all of their articles about Ryan’s proposals to abolish Medicare, eviscerate Medicaid, and slash the safety net in order to finance more tax giveaways to billionaires and big corporations.

Mitt Romney’s Tax Dodge – a helpful summary of all of the ways that quarter-of-a-billionaire Mitt Romney manages to pay a lower effective tax rate than most middle class Americans.

Romney Claims of Bipartisanship as Governor Face Challenge – a closer look suggests that there is little to back up Romney’s claims that he was a bipartisan leader in Massachusetts.

(By Mark Bridger, cross-posted at ThatMansScope)

In my last post, I described Mitt Romney as a defective human being: someone who, in spite of his success at making his money and avoiding taxes, lacks understanding and sympathy for his fellows — as evidenced by his obsessive reluctance to share his wealth with anyone except his proselytizing church, and his obvious contempt for just about everyone’s intelligence.

His running mate Paul Ryan is cut from the same cloth. Ryan’s so-called “budget” is so grossly anti-poor and anti-middle class that even the quite conservative Conference of Catholic Bishops declared it immoral. It is perhaps the single most unpopular document released in recent years, and only a tone-deaf party would have doubled down on it and nominated its author for Vice President. The arrogance and contempt exhibited by the Party for The Rich is, however, consistent with the attitudes of its candidates.

I am glad to report that Ryan and his budget are not fooling anyone this time around. The New Republic shows some statistics about how the man and his work have contributed to the tremendous decline in the popularity of the PTR‘s ticket; you can find the article HERE.

Of course Romney and Ryan do have a certain animal cunning: this time around they left off a lot of details about how the “budget” would close “loopholes” and somehow become “balanced.” They don’t want people to know exactly which popular and worthwhile programs would be cut in order to give tax breaks to the rich. That’s why I refer to it as a “budget” not a budget. It’s a phony and a mere shell. No one I’ve read, even Martin Feldstein, can seem to make it work without very big tax increases for all but the rich — see Jared Bernstein’s analysis on his blog.

Ryan is a person who’s taken some economics courses in college — he was a dual political science and economics major. As far as I can tell he never took a graduate course in either subject, but he is considered among Republicans and easily-impressed media folk to be some sort of expert on economics and finances. Ryan also read a lot of Ayn Rand — a novelist well-known for her “me first” two-dimensional characters. Somehow Ryan, who calls himself a religious Catholic, missed out on the fact that Rand was a committed atheist. Ryan has been skewered several times by prominent economist and NY Times columnist Paul Krugman; two of his most devastating columns (with further links) can be found HERE and HERE (where Krugman so famously said about Ryan: “Mr. Ryan isn’t a serious man — he just plays one on TV.”)

Ryan has never impressed even a single economist. Now it is clear, in spite of a lot of Republican hype and media money, that he hasn’t impressed too many others either.

As our readers know, Winning Progressive frequently comments on the editorials and columns found in the opinions pages of the New York Times.  Here are three comments that we recently posted on military budgets, so-called entitlement “reform,” and “deficit hawks” who are really vultures.

In response to an editorial titled The Truth About Military Cuts, which criticizes the GOP’s efforts to falsely blame President Obama for the automatic cuts to military spending that were included in last year’s budget deal that narrowly averted the GOP-created debt-ceiling crisis, we commented:

That the GOP is lying about the cause of the cuts to the military budget included in the sequester is no big surprise – peddling untruths seems to be the thing that today’s GOP is best at.

What is remarkable is that the military cuts of approximately $55 billion per year that the GOP is squawking about is far less than the amount that most Americans believe should be cut from our bloated military budgets.

In a comprehensive national survey carried out by the Center for Public Integrity and two other groups earlier this year, 2/3 of Republicans and 90% of Democrats supported immediate cuts to military spending. The average total cut that the public supported was $103 billion per year out of a baseline military budget of $562 billion. More than half of the survey respondents supported cuts of at least $83 billion per year.

Cuts to military spending should certainly be done in a careful manner by, for example, eliminating weapons systems that were designed for the Cold War, closing military bases in countries that can afford to defend themselves, and cracking down on corrupt military contractors. But the important point is that reductions in military spending should be part of restoring fiscal balance, and the public supports going further on this issue than our elected officials do.

In response to Bill Keller’s column titled The Entitled Generation, which argues that Baby Boomers need to accept cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid in order to restore fiscal balance, we commented:

It is misleading at best to put Social Security in the same category as Medicare and Medicaid and then blame our fiscal problems on “entitlements,” as the real problem is skyrocketing health care costs.

Social Security is fully solvent for twenty or more years, would continue paying 75% of benefits after that with no changes, and would be fully solvent for 75 years with minor changes, such as lifting the wage cap on the payroll tax.

Medicare and Medicaid face far larger fiscal problems, but the problems are not with the programs themselves, but rather with the fact that health care costs continue to skyrocket largely unabated. The GOP has no plan to deal with the cost issue but, instead, would simply shift all the costs to individuals. The result would be to raise the overall societal cost of health care because private insurance is more expensive than Medicare, while leaving even more people without insurance.

The Democrats have started to take the proper response, which is to find ways to rationalize health care spending, rather than to ration care. Doing so involves comparative effectiveness research, strengthening the IPAB, changing how providers are reimbursed, and allowing Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices. Replacing inefficient private insurance with Medicare-for-all would also save a large amount of money. Misguided attacks on “entitlements” won’t.

In response to Paul Krugman’s column titled Money For Nothing, which explores how conservatives have continued to warn that deficits would lead to skyrocketing U.S. interest rates even as interests rates have actually fallen to near zero, we commented:

The disconnect between the reality of the past few years and the claims of the so-called “deficit hawks” can be explained by the fact that the “deficit hawks” do not actually care about deficits.

As we’ve seen over the past thirty years, conservatives who pretend to care about deficits (primarily Republicans, but also Blue Dog Democrats) only emphasize the deficit when they are seeking to eliminate a government program that benefits average Americans. When it comes to wars, corporate subsidies, and tax cuts for the wealthy, however, conservatives are silent about deficits and, instead, are actively cheerleading policies that are the primary cause of those deficits to begin with.

The reason that conservatives pretend to care about deficits while at the same time making such deficits bigger is that they are out to destroy government as a tool for benefiting the common good. And the way to do that is: (1) prevent the government from taking the steps needed to improve the economy in order to “prove” that government does not work, and (2) to create a deficit “crisis” that makes it “necessary” to do things like abolish Medicare, eviscerate Medicaid, shrink education and infrastructure investments, and slash the safety net.

In short, the “deficit hawks” are actually deficit vultures who are using the deficits they created to achieve their own ideological goals.