Big Money In Our Politics and Government--We're Being Bought--And Sold

There is a terrific article in Friday's print edition of The New York Times more voting age Americans should read.

Big Money and America's Lost Decade

A bit of the article:

The first thing you need to know about the very rich is that they are, politically, different from you and me. Don’t be fooled by the handful of prominent liberal or liberal-ish billionaires; systematic studies of the politics of the ultrawealthy show that they are very conservative, obsessed with tax cuts, opposed to environmental and financial regulation, eager to cut social programs.

The second thing you need to know is that the rich often get what they want, even when most of the public want the opposite...

Why do a small number of rich people exert so much influence in what is supposed to be a democracy? Campaign contributions are only part of the story. Equally if not more important is the network of billionaire-financed think tanks, lobbying groups and so on that shapes public discourse. And then there’s the revolving door: It’s depressingly normal for former officials from both parties to take jobs with big banks, corporations and consulting firms, and the prospect of such employment can’t help but influence policy while they’re still in office.

Last but not least, media coverage of policy issues all too often seems to reflect the views of the wealthy.
We're got to work our way out of this mess, these messes.

Join us:

Get the Big, Ugly Money Out of Our Election System and Government

Bring Back the Fairness Doctrine

Outlaw Gerrymandering and End Voter ID Laws

Link:

GOP economic policy: Give more money to millionaires, forget everyone else

Trump's and the Republicans' Tax Cuts for the Nation?

Did we learn nothing from the Kansas' Republican Party disaster that was their tax cuts for the already-wealthy and corporations so very recently?

Trump could learn from Kansas' flawed 

tax-reform experiment

Epic fail of Kansas' tax-cut plan offers 

a lesson for us all 

Kansas tax 'experiment' offers lessons to the nation

Eugene Robinson: Kansas' failed tax cuts a lesson

The Kansas Experiment Is Bad News 

For Trump's Tax Cuts

Economist's View: Paul Krugman: Charlatans, 

Cranks and Kansas

Kansas' tax cut failure an economic warning 

to Republicans

Quote of the Day -- On the Orange Nightmare

From economist Paul Krugman.

Clearly the most important thing happening in and to America right now is the constitutional crisis. Not potential crisis: it’s already here. The president’s inner circle is under investigation for possible collusion with a hostile foreign power, collusion that may have put him in office; he himself, whether or not he’s currently a direct target of that investigation, is clearly suspect. Yet he has already made clear his determination to block any investigation that gets too close.

This is way worse than Nixon – yet all indications are that the moral rot of the Republican Party now runs so deep that the constitutional answer to a rogue president is null and void. This is an existential threat to the republic, and it can be hard to focus on anything else.

From the article:  

Some Pundit Meta On Our Twin Crises

Links:  

Paul Krugman - The New York Times

Paul Krugman - Wikipedia

The Kansas Economic Experiment--and Hopefully, Lessons--Still Very Much in the News

The very, very failed Republican Party, Governor Sam Brownback "trickle down", "supply side economics" experiment they tried on Kansas from 2012 until just recently is still very much in the news just now. This time it's mentioned with a wise caution by Paul Krugman in The New York Times.

Enlarge

Zombies, Vampires and Republicans

Zombies have long ruled the Republican Party. The good news is that they may finally be losing their grip — although they may still return and resume eating conservative brains. The bad news is that even if zombies are in retreat, vampires are taking their place.

What are these zombies of which I speak? Among wonks, the term refers to policy ideas that should have been abandoned long ago in the face of evidence and experience, but just keep shambling along.

The right’s zombie-in-chief is the insistence that low taxes on the rich are the key to prosperity. This doctrine should have died when Bill Clinton’s tax hike failed to cause the predicted recession and was followed instead by an economic boom. It should have died again when George W. Bush’s tax cuts were followed by lackluster growth, then a crash. And it should have died yet again in the aftermath of the 2013 Obama tax hike — partly expiration of some Bush tax cuts, partly new taxes to pay for Obamacare — when the economy continued jogging along, adding 200,000 jobs a month.

Despite the consistent wrongness of their predictions, however, tax-cut fanatics just kept gaining influence in the G.O.P. — until the disaster in Kansas, where Gov. Sam Brownback promised that deep tax cuts would yield an economic miracle. What the state got instead was weak growth and a fiscal crisis, finally pushing even Republicans to vote for tax hikes, overruling Brownback’s veto.

And here's why it's so important to know and understand and learn the lessons from the Republican Party mess in and from Kansas. The learn and know seemingly nothing President Trump himself wants to institute a lot of these same "trickle down" ideas with his own tax plan. He wants to cut the taxes of the already-wealthy and corporations with his tax plan as well as with his/their "Trumpcare" replacement.

Republican Health Care Bill 

Delivers Big Tax Cut For The Rich

The ACHA Bill Is a Tax Cut 

for Rich Americans

Even the Republican Party's own news source, Fox, reports and admits what it is.

Buffett says AHCA is tax cut for the rich | Fox News

So for pity's sake, America. Let's learn the lessons of the economic boom from the Bill Clinton era when he raised taxes and the George W. Bush era, with its own huge economic downturn and deficits when he lowered taxes. These two, along with the glaring example and lessons from Kansas just now should teach us better.

Here's hoping.

The Failed Brownback/Republican Experiment That Is Kansas Gets Yet More National Press

When your very failing and failed economic and taxation policies of and for your state cut the state's financial coffers drastically so you have to cut state spending budgets and steal money from children's funds, literally, you're bound to get some press. Bad press. We've seen it repeatedly, understandably, coming out of Kansas.

Well, they just got more today, this time from The New York Times and economist Paul Krugman.

The Time-Loop Party

...there’s the assertion that taxing the rich has terrible effects on economic growth, and conversely that tax cuts at the top can be counted on to produce an economic miracle.

This doctrine was tested more than two decades ago, when Bill Clinton raised tax rates on high incomes; Republicans predicted disaster, but what we got was the economy’s best run since the 1960s. It was tested again when George W. Bush cut taxes on the wealthy; Republicans predicted a “Bush boom,” but actually got a lackluster expansion followed by the worst slump since the Great Depression. And it got tested a third time after President Obama won re-election, and tax rates at the top went up substantially; since then we’ve gained eight million private-sector jobs.

Oh, and there’s also the spectacular failure of the Kansas experiment, where huge tax cuts have created a budget crisis without delivering any hint of the promised economic miracle.

With all this coverage of the debacle that is Kansas Governor Sam Brownback's and his Republican Party's rather large economic and governing failure, how long will it be until Kansans finally, finally wake up and vote all those people out of office over there in Topeka?

It can't be soon enough those poor things.

Important Article on Race Today

Columnist/economist Paul Krugman penned an excellent, even important article in the New York Times that was released today.

Slavery's Long Shadow

...racial hatred is still a potent force in our society, as we’ve just been reminded to our horror. And I’m sorry to say this, but the racial divide is still a defining feature of our political economy, the reason America is unique among advanced nations in its harsh treatment of the less fortunate and its willingness to tolerate unnecessary suffering among its citizens. 

Of course, saying this brings angry denials from many conservatives, so let me try to be cool and careful here, and cite some of the overwhelming evidence for the continuing centrality of race in our national politics. 

My own understanding of the role of race in U.S. exceptionalism was largely shaped by two academic papers. 

The first, by the political scientist Larry Bartels, analyzed the move of the white working class away from Democrats, a move made famous in Thomas Frank’s “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” Mr. Frank argued that working-class whites were being induced to vote against their own interests by the right’s exploitation of cultural issues. But Mr. Bartels showed that the working-class turn against Democrats wasn’t a national phenomenon — it was entirely restricted to the South, where whites turned overwhelmingly Republican after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Richard Nixon’s adoption of the so-called Southern strategy

And this party-switching, in turn, was what drove the rightward swing of American politics after 1980. Race made Reaganism possible. And to this day Southern whites overwhelmingly vote Republican, to the tune of 85 or even 90 percent in the deep South. 

The second paper, by the economists Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser, and Bruce Sacerdote, was titled “Why Doesn’t the United States Have a European-style Welfare State?” Its authors — who are not, by the way, especially liberal — explored a number of hypotheses, but eventually concluded that race is central, because in America programs that help the needy are all too often seen as programs that help Those People: “Within the United States, race is the single most important predictor of support for welfare. America’s troubled race relations are clearly a major reason for the absence of an American welfare state.”

Just this, above, a portion of the article points out truths, sure, but also ends up being quite an indictment of Republicans in general, the Republican Party itself and much of the Right Wing in this country.

I believe there will be 3 reactions to the article.

First, there will be the Right Wingers and Republicans who deny it completely, out of hand, immediately.

The second group will never see or so, be able to consider these points.

Finally, there will be a small, tiny, even number of these people who read the article and accept its truths.

We have a long, long way to go in America, regarding race and wealth and poverty, that's certain.

Quote of the Day

An Article Nearly Every American Should Read

It's this one. It came out yesterday from Paul Krugman at The New York Times:

When Government Succeeds

Two snippets:

Of course there are bad decisions and bad programs. But modern American political discourse is dominated by cheap cynicism about public policy, a free-floating contempt for any and all efforts to improve our lives. And this cheap cynicism is completely unjustified. It’s true that government-hating politicians can sometimes turn their predictions of failure into self-fulfilling prophecies, but when leaders want to make government work, they can...

Conservatives want you to believe that while the goals of public programs on health, energy and more may be laudable, experience shows that such programs are doomed to failure. Don’t believe them. Yes, sometimes government officials, being human, get things wrong. But we’re actually surrounded by examples of government success, which they don’t want you to notice.

Now. Go. Read it all. It's brief, I assure you. 

It will do you---and your country---good.

Quote of the day -- on that election

It needs to be said

Have a nice weekend anyway, y'all.

Quote of the day -- on fairness. And America's lack of it

"America has a long tradition of imposing high taxes on big incomes and large fortunes, designed to limit the concentration of economic power as well as raising revenue. These days, however, suggestions that we revive that tradition face angry claims that taxing the rich is destructive and immoral — destructive because it discourages job creators from doing their thing, immoral because people have a right to keep what they earn.

But such claims rest crucially on myths about who the rich really are and how they make their money. Next time you hear someone declaiming about how cruel it is to persecute the rich, think about the hedge fund guys, and ask yourself if it would really be a terrible thing if they paid more in taxes."

-Paul Krugman, from his post today in The New York Times,

"Now That's Rich"

Quote of the day -- rich v poor

Quote of the day -- on the direction of one political party

Why we need a jobs/infrastructure bill from this Congress

And as soon as possible.

This lazy Congress' gift to the nation

 

 

Email your Senators and Representative.

 

Let's tell them enough.

 

We need a jobs/infrastructure bill from this next Congress.

 

And as soon as possible.

 

 

 

Quote of the day--on the national deficit

So, why, exactly, can't we have a jobs bill for Americans, especially so we can repair our infrastructure?

Seriously.

Link to original article--get it all here:  What People (Don't) Know About The Deficit

America, our economy, Republicans, leadership and the Right Wing (guest post)

Not enough Americans will read this.

Phony Fear Factor

By PAUL KRUGMAN

We live in a golden age of economic debunkery; fallacious doctrines have been dropping like flies. No, monetary expansion needn’t cause hyperinflation. No, budget deficits in a depressed economy don’t cause soaring interest rates. No, slashing spending doesn’t create jobs. No, economic growth doesn’t collapse when debt exceeds 90 percent of G.D.P.      
 

And now the latest myth bites the dust: No, “economic policy uncertainty” — created, it goes without saying, by That Man in the White House — isn’t holding back the recovery.

      

I’ll get to the doctrine and its refutation in a minute. First, however, I want to recommend a very old essay that explains a great deal about the times we live in.

      

The Polish economist Michal Kalecki published “Political Aspects of Full Employment” 70 years ago. Keynesian ideas were riding high; a “solid majority” of economists believed that full employment could be secured by government spending. Yet Kalecki predicted that such spending would, nonetheless, face fierce opposition from business and the wealthy, even in times of depression. Why?

      

The answer, he suggested, was the role of “confidence” as a tool of intimidation. If the government can’t boost employment directly, it must promote private spending instead — and anything that might hurt the privileged, such as higher tax rates or financial regulation, can be denounced as job-killing because it undermines confidence, and hence investment. But if the government can create jobs, confidence becomes less important — and vested interests lose their veto power.

      

Kalecki argued that “captains of industry” understand this point, and that they oppose job-creating policies precisely because such policies would undermine their political influence. “Hence budget deficits necessary to carry out government intervention must be regarded as perilous.”

      

When I first read this essay, I thought it was over the top. Kalecki was, after all, a declared Marxist (although I don’t see much of Marx in his writings). But, if you haven’t been radicalized by recent events, you haven’t been paying attention; and policy discourse since 2008 has run exactly along the lines Kalecki predicted.

      

First came the “pivot” — the sudden switch to the view that budget deficits, not mass unemployment, were the crucial policy issue. Then came the Great Whine — the declaration by one leading business figure after another that President Obama was undermining confidence by saying mean things about businesspeople and doing outrageous things like helping the uninsured. Finally, just as happened with the claims that slashing spending is actually expansionary and terrible things happen if government debt rises, the usual suspects found an academic research paper to adopt as mascot: in this case, a paper by economists at Stanford and Chicago purportedly showing that rising levels of “economic policy uncertainty” were holding the economy back.

      

But, as I said, we live in a golden age of economic debunkery. The doctrine of expansionary austerity collapsed as evidence on the actual effects of austerity came in, with officials at the International Monetary Fund even admitting that they had severely underestimated the harm austerity does. The debt-scare doctrine collapsed once independent economists reviewed the data. And now the policy-uncertainty claim has gone the same way.

      

Actually, this happened in two stages. Soon after it became famous, the proposed measure of uncertainty was shown to be almost comically flawed; for example, it relied in part on press mentions of “economic policy uncertainty,” which meant that the index automatically surged once that phrase became a Republican talking point. Then the index itself plunged, back to levels not seen since 2008, but the economy didn’t take off. It turns out that uncertainty wasn’t the problem.

      

The truth is that we understand perfectly well why recovery has been slow, and confidence has nothing to do with it. What we’re looking at, instead, is the normal aftermath of a debt-fueled asset bubble; the sluggish U.S. recovery since 2009 is more or less in line with many historical examples, running all the way back to the Panic of 1893. Furthermore, the recovery has been hobbled by spending cuts — cuts that were motivated by what we now know was completely wrongheaded deficit panic.

      

And the policy moral is clear: We need to stop talking about spending cuts and start talking about job-creating spending increases instead. Yes, I know that the politics of doing the right thing will be very hard. But, as far as the economics goes, the only thing we have to fear is fear-mongering itself.

       

•      

Correction: In my column on Monday, I somehow misstated the Republican plan on food stamps, which was for a doubling of planned cuts — a significant cut but not, as I said, a halving of benefits.

Quote of the day--on our nation's current state

From Paul Krugman's latest post in The New York Times :

1.  “Madness of the GOP is the central issue of our time”

"In the short run the point is that Republican leaders are about to reap the whirlwind, because they haven’t had the courage to tell the base that Obamacare is here to stay, that the sequester is in fact intolerable, and that in general they have at least for now lost the war over the shape of American society. As a result, we’re looking at many drama-filled months, with a high probability of government shutdowns and even debt defaults.

Over the longer run the point is that one of America’s two major political parties has basically gone off the deep end; policy content aside, a sane party doesn’t hold dozens of votes declaring its intention to repeal a law that everyone knows will stay on the books regardless. And since that party continues to hold substantial blocking power, we are looking at a country that’s increasingly ungovernable."

On fairness, morality, the Republican Party and America today (guest post)

From economist Paul Krugman and The New York Times this week:

Hunger Games, USA

(abbreviated version)

Something terrible has happened to the soul of the Republican Party. We’ve gone beyond bad economic doctrine. We’ve even gone beyond selfishness and special interests. At this point we’re talking about a state of mind that takes positive glee in inflicting further suffering on the already miserable.

The occasion for these observations is, as you may have guessed, the monstrous farm bill the House passed last week.

For decades, farm bills have had two major pieces. One piece offers subsidies to farmers; the other offers nutritional aid to Americans in distress, mainly in the form of food stamps (these days officially known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP).

Long ago, when subsidies helped many poor farmers, you could defend the whole package as a form of support for those in need. Over the years, however, the two pieces diverged. Farm subsidies became a fraud-ridden program that mainly benefits corporations and wealthy individuals. Meanwhile food stamps became a crucial part of the social safety net.

So House Republicans voted to maintain farm subsidies — at a higher level than either the Senate or the White House proposed — while completely eliminating food stamps from the bill.

To fully appreciate what just went down, listen to the rhetoric conservatives often use to justify eliminating safety-net programs. It goes something like this: “You’re personally free to help the poor. But the government has no right to take people’s money” — frequently, at this point, they add the words “at the point of a gun” — “and force them to give it to the poor.”

It is, however, apparently perfectly O.K. to take people’s money at the point of a gun and force them to give it to agribusinesses and the wealthy.

Now, some enemies of food stamps don’t quote libertarian philosophy; they quote the Bible instead. Representative Stephen Fincher of Tennessee, for example, cited the New Testament: “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.” Sure enough, it turns out that Mr. Fincher has personally received millions in farm subsidies...

What is it about, then? Somehow, one of our nation’s two great parties has become infected by an almost pathological meanspiritedness, a contempt for what CNBC’s Rick Santelli, in the famous rantthat launched the Tea Party, called “losers.” If you’re an American, and you’re down on your luck, these people don’t want to help; they want to give you an extra kick. I don’t fully understand it, but it’s a terrible thing to behold.

"Obamacare" won't work? Can't help?

"Obamacare" really awful?

Well, after the Californians started getting their benefits from it, along with other states, there's this news yesterday from The New York Times:

Health Plan Cost for New Yorkers Set to Fall 50%

State officials estimate as many as 615,000 individuals will buy health insurance on their own in the first few years the federal health law is in effect.

Individuals buying health insurance on their own will see their premiums tumble next year in New York State as changes under the federal health care law take effect, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced on Wednesday.

State insurance regulators say they have approved rates for 2014 that are at least 50 percent lower on average than those currently available in New York. Beginning in October, individuals in New York City who now pay $1,000 a month or more for coverage will be able to shop for health insurance for as little as $308 monthly. With federal subsidies, the cost will be even lower.

Supporters of the new health care law, the Affordable Care Act, credited the drop in rates to the online purchasing exchanges the law created, which they say are spurring competition among insurers that are anticipating an influx of new customers. The law requires that an exchange be started in every state.

“Health insurance has suddenly become affordable in New York,” said Elisabeth Benjamin, vice president for health initiatives with the Community Service Society of New York. “It’s not bargain-basement prices, but we’re going from Bergdorf’s to Filene’s here.”

“The extraordinary decline in New York’s insurance rates for individual consumers demonstrates the profound promise of the Affordable Care Act,” she added.

Administration officials, long confronted by Republicans and other critics of President Obama’s signature law, were quick to add New York to the list of states that appear to be successfully carrying out the law and setting up exchanges.

You know, those health insurance exchanges that Missourians and Kansans won't be getting, at least no time soon, because the Republican majorities in their respective state houses won't set them up?

Just one more pesky "inconvenient truth", it seems.

That danged man in the White House.

First he presides over the stock market bouncing back and the economy improving and now this.

Disgusting, isn't it?

Link:  The Obamacare Shock 

Quote of the day--on fairness