The House of Representatives voted this morning on Congressman Paul Ryan‘s budget proposal.  It passed by a vote of 221 to 207.  The 221 yeahs were all Republican, 197 Democrats and 10 Republicans voted no.   You can read the official vote count here.  You can read the official vote count here.  Read more about the actual legislation here.

This is how the House Budget Committee describes the Republican budget plan:

Washington owes the American people a responsible, balanced budget. This is a plan to balance the budget in ten years. It invites President Obama and Senate Democrats to commit to the same common-sense goal. This budget will achieve the following:

1. Stop spending money we don’t have by cutting wasteful spending.
2. Fix our broken tax code to create jobs and increase wages.
3. Protect and strengthen important priorities like Medicare and national security.
4. Reform welfare programs like Medicaid so they can deliver on their promise.

You can read the summary here and the full plan here.

Before I give my critique of Ryan’s budget, I would like to be very clear about something.  I do not have anything against him.  I just disagree with the approach he has taken to the overall budget and Medicare.

So, I do have problems with Ryan’s budget.  They are:

1. It doesn’t go anywhere near defense spending.  Not only that, despite claiming to be supporters of “fiscal responsibility” the GOP controlled House voted to give the Defense Department more money than it requested.  From the Associated Press, “The House Armed Services Committee on Thursday overwhelmingly backed a $642 billion defense bill that calls for construction of a missile defense site on the East Coast, restores aircraft and ships slated for early retirement and ignores the Pentagon’s cost-saving request for another round of domestic base closings.”  
2. Since the Defense Department budget is off the table, major cuts will be made to other discretionary spending.  It should be noted that this part of the budget is really small and cuts to these programs will not do a lot to impact the deficit or debt.
3. The Obamacare “repeal” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.  Sure, it gets rid of a lot of it but “Ryan’s budget doesn’t actually assume the repeal of all of Obamacare. It keeps the tax increases and Medicare cuts so that it can balance in 10 years, as top Republicans in the House promised conservatives.”  Link here.
4. It does nothing to address the sequester.  According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) the sequester’s impact on the economy is very real.  They looked into this and found, “In the absence of sequestration, CBO estimates, GDP growth would be about 0.6 percentage points faster during this calendar year, and the equivalent of about 750,000 more full-time jobs would be created or retained by the fourth quarter.” More on that can be found here.
5. It fails to address economic growth.  In 1992, one Clinton/Gore campaign slogan was “It’s the economy, stupid.”  That idea applies today.  A better rate of economic growth would solve a lot of our deficit and debt problems.  Louis Woodhill writes this in Forbes: ”The FY2014 Budget Resolution makes a few vague statements about economic growth, but it doesn’t promise that following Ryan’s plan will deliver a growth rate above the woefully inadequate CBO baseline, which peters out to a pathetic 2.19% rate by FY2023. This is what makes the whole exercise a suicide mission for House Republicans.”
6. Yes, we have a divided government but all the reports I have read indicate House Democrats received more votes than House Republicans and the only reason the GOP has a majority is gerrymandering (see my post on the Reform We Need for more on my view on this — and no, both sides try to do it so I don’t put all the blame for gerrymandering on the right side of the aisle).  The bigger issue, is that voters rejected the GOP budgetary priorities when they rejected the Romney/Ryan ticket.  Read more here.

While those are my basic problems with the plan, the specifics of which programs will be cut bother me a lot.  I watched Ryan this morning on the House floor talk about the differences between how Republicans and Democrats view government and I am going to address some of that now.

Ryan said, “This budget debate was constructive. It revealed each side’s priorities. We want to balance the budget. They don’t. We want to restrain spending. They want to spend more. We think taxpayers give enough to Washington. They want to raise taxes by $1 trillion—just take more to spend more. We want to strengthen programs like Medicare. They seem complicit in their demise. We see Obamacare as a roadblock to patient-centered reform. They see it as a sacred cow. We think national security is a top priority. They want to hollow out our military. We offer modernization and reform, growth and opportunity. They cling to the status quo.”

You can watch that below.

My belief is that government exists to do for us collectively what we cannot do individually.  While I do not share Ryan’s view that a balanced budget is the end all, be all of everything (to me that is a GOP “sacred cow”), I am not opposed to it.  The last time we had a balanced budget was not under a GOP administration but during President Clinton’s tenure.  Moreover, the Republicans spent a lot like drunken sailors when they had control so I am not sure what he is talking about there.  I also do not want to “hollow out our military.”  I want to make it more efficient.  I suspect if I were to talk to Ryan, he would have a similar answer to questions about Medicare — he says he doesn’t want to destroy it, he wants to save it by making it more efficient.

I do not think we should cut:

1. Education spending:  our workers compete against workers all over the globe. I would like our people to be as (or more) qualified as anyone else.   I saw an interview with Apple where they said they would love to manufacture more products in the US but we don’t have the numbers of qualified people they need to do it all.  We need more engineers, scientists, etc.  We face shortages in healthcare (nurses, techs and a variety of physician specialties such as primary care doctors and surgeons).  This is not the time to cut education spending.
2. Transportation & infrastructure spending:  Our infrastructure is crumbling.  Our highways, bridges and rail lines are so far behind other countries, it is crazy.  Repairing these systems would be a way to get large numbers of people jobs that cannot be exported anywhere.
3. Clean energy research and development.  I know, I know there have been some bad companies but the more energy sources we have, the lower the costs will be and the less dependent we will be on unstable and unfriendly regimes.
4. Programs to help the poor.  With unemployment where it is, too many people depend on food stamps, unemployment insurance and other programs to cut them off.  One of my mom’s friends (and no, Ryan has never said anything like this — as far as I know), she said “when the little squirrel cannot find a nut, he dies.”  I don’t want that to be our country’s approach to the poor.
5. Medicare — it should not be a voucher system.  You can read about my thoughts on Ryan’s plan for that here.

Watch Congressman Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) talk about the GOP budget plan.  He is also the Ranking Member of the House Budget Committee.

Originally this post was going to be solely about the Republican budget plan in the context of Ryan’s religious views. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) opposed Ryan’s budget last year and have expressed similar concerns with this year’s proposals.  Their opposition stems from cuts to programs such as food stamps, child tax credits and others that help the poor.  Their letters to Congress last year were in response to comments the Budget Committee chairman made:

“A person’s faith is central to how they conduct themselves in public and in private,” Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, said in the interview. “So to me, using my Catholic faith, we call it the social magisterium, which is how do you apply the doctrine of your teaching into your everyday life as a lay person?

“Those principles are very, very important,” Ryan said. “And the preferential option for the poor, which is one of the primary tenets of Catholic social teaching, means don’t keep people poor, don’t make people dependent on government so that they stay stuck at their station in life, help people get out of poverty, out into a life of independence.”  Source: the Hill.

A statement by the USCCB released yesterday laid out their case for including provisions to help the poor in any budget:

“We support the goal of reducing future unsustainable deficits, but insist that this worthy goal be pursued in ways that protect poor and vulnerable people at home and abroad,” said Bishop Stephen E. Blaire of Stockton, chairman of the USCCB Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development, and Bishop Richard E. Pates of Des Moines, chairman of the USCCB Committee on International Justice and Peace.

“The moral measure of this budget debate is not which party wins or which powerful interests prevail, but rather how those who are jobless, hungry, homeless or poor are treated. Their voices are too often missing, but they have the most compelling moral claim on our consciences and our common resources. The bishops stand ready to work with leaders of both parties for a budget that reduces future deficits, protects poor and vulnerable people, advances the common good, and promotes human life and dignity,”

The bishops also suggested the following three principles guide lawmakers:

• Every budget decision should be assessed by whether it protects or threatens human life and dignity.
• Every budget proposal should be measured by how it affects “the least of these” (Matthew 25). The needs of those who are hungry and homeless, without work or in poverty should come first.
• Government and other institutions have a shared responsibility to promote the common good of all, especially ordinary workers and families who struggle to live in dignity in difficult economic times.

Ryan responded to the Bishops’ concerns and argued that his budget proposals neither hurt the poor nor do they violate his Catholic faith.  From Town Hall Magazine.

“Our budget incorporates solidarity by recognizing a critical role for government in providing a strong safety net for those in need. And it restores the balance between solidarity and subsidiarity by returning a lot of power to individuals, to families and to communities. We are a nation that prides itself on looking out for one another—and government has an important role to play in that. But relying on distant government bureaucracies to lead this effort just hasn’t worked.

Some Catholics seem to mistake the preferential option for the poor for a preferential option for Big Government. When you look at the results of that approach—one out of every six Americans in poverty today, many of them mired in programs whose outdated structures often act as a trap that hinders upward mobility—that’s just not consistent with how I understand my Catholic faith. We need to break down the barriers to opportunity and attack the root causes of poverty. Informed by constitutional oath and my Catholic faith, this is a moral obligation I take very seriously.”

Ryan also defended the morality of his budget in The World Over with Raymond Arroyo, EWTN:

“These programs aren’t working the way they should. One in six Americans are in poverty today. We have the highest poverty rates in a generation. What House Republicans proposed in our budget was sensible reforms  want to do is put the kind of reforms in these programs – using subsidiarity, solidarity, local control, ideas that worked when we tried them in some other areas in the 1990’s. We want to reform these programs with the idea of getting people out of poverty onto lives of self sufficiency. Right! And there isn’t a monopoly. That’s my point. I can no more claim exclusive justification for my economic and political views than a liberal can for theirs within the Church’s social teaching. This is a matter for prudential judgment left to the laity to exercise their discretion. People of good will can disagree on these things. You have these hits come at you — like that letter — but we should raise the tone of the debate. We shouldn’t just try to shoot the messenger and try to nullify the notion that there are other ways in which to implement Church teaching. That just does a disservice to the kind of debate we need to have.”

Now, I do not doubt Ryan’s sincerity in this area.  I think he does believe that his plans will help the poor and I don’t think he cares more about the rich.  I cannot say the same thing about Mitt Romney — I do believe he thinks his wealth has more to do with how great he is and not so much to do with the incredible opportunities he has had that others have not.  Yes, I am aware of and appreciate the work he has done in his communities to help others, I don’t think he is a fundamentally evil or awful person, I just think he doesn’t get it.  I have read reports that Ryan had suggested the Romney/Ryan 2012 campaign spend some time in lower income neighborhoods in the cities they visited to educate people on how their policies would be more helpful to poor Americans than Obama’s.  These ideas were allegedly shot down because the campaign did not see the value as they did not expect to get any votes in those areas.

(Side note: if these reports are true, Ryan’s idea was a great one and should have been followed.  It may not have gotten a huge number of votes in those areas, though I am sure it would have gotten some, but it would have made the ticket more appealing to a number of people who may have been on the fence.)

The bottom line, however, is that Ryan’s budgets and Medicare plans violate what I think of when I think of Jesus’ teachings.  I am all for the idea that “if you give a man a fish, you feed him for one day but if you teach him to fish, you feed him for a lifetime” but cutting off assistance to people in real need, won’t accomplish that goal.

And if you want to read more about Ryan’s views on how to help the poor and his religious ideology:

1. Op-ed “Government Must Refocus its Safety Net to Those in Need”.
2. Interview with National Catholic Register’s Charlotte Hays – Ryan: ‘We have pursued solidarity but abused Subsidiarity’.
3. National Catholic Register Op-ed:  Applying Our Enduring Truths to our Defining Challenges.
4.  Ryan’s Opening Statement at House Budget Committee hearing on reforming the safety net.

Thank you to everyone who helped with this by sending supporting materials and documents.  Also I was impressed that Congressman Ryan went out of his way to praise his staff (that’s the former Hill staffer in me talking) and with Congressman Chris Van Hollen for thanking Ryan for his professionalism.  I may disagree with him but we should be able to disagree with people while remaining civil and it seems these two men have.  Good for you.

I promise to do an analysis of the Senate Democrats’ budget proposal.

And now for something completely different… (and hopefully fun)

I write political satire as Alyson Durden for Pardon the Pundit.  I have written a number of pieces where I call Ryan a vampire.  Now, I know Ryan is not a vampire and truly hope his staff, who were most helpful when I was researching his response to Catholic opposition to his budget plans, will not be totally offended because I meant it all in good fun.

Some are:

1. Paul Ryan Denies Allegations He Is a Vampire.
2. Ryan Claims “Twilight” Success Means He Does Have a Mandate, Admits He Is a Vampire.
3. Revealed! The Real Reason Romney Picked Ryan Was to Woo the All Important “Twilight” Voters.
4. As the Markets Worry about the Fiscal Cliff, Washington Works to Reassure America it is Working to Save “Twilight”.

And here is a goofy, fake add I put together making fun of a Democratic commercial bashing Ryan for his Medicare plans.  I did send it to his staff and it has received at least one thumbs down so I do hope it wasn’t from them because I was actually trying to point out the absurdity of the idea that his goal is to kill old people.

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Voter suppression: Republicans have few options left

By Ben Cohen: We discuss the topic of Republican voter suppression in this weeks mailbag, but I thought it was worth expanding on a little given how serious the issue is. A reader asked whether we thought that the Republican’s admission that they tried to stop minorities from voting would change anything for elections going forward, and I answered that it most likely wouldn’t.

The answer why is fairly straight forward – Republicans lost the general election in part because of the ‘demographic time bomb’ and unless they change their policies, they don’t really have any other way of sustaining electoral viability. As Steve Benen noted:

Mitt Romney took an enormous gamble about a year ago: he would run very far to the right on immigration policy, alienating the fastest growing segment of the American electorate on purpose, in order to secure the Republican Party’s nomination. Then, he hoped to be able to avoid a drubbing from Latino voters in the general election. It was, as Ron Brownstein put it, Romney’s “original sin.”

The gamble, we now know, failed miserably. President Obama won close races in Colorado, Nevada, and (probably) Florida, and it was Latino voters who made this success possible.

We covered the issue of voter fraud a couple of months back, talking with Craig Unger about his book ‘Boss Rove’ where the Vanity Fair contributing editor detailed Karl Rove’s extraordinary efforts to suppress the vote in Ohio in 2004. The picture Unger painted of Republican efforts to stop minorities from voting was terrifying to say the least. Here’s an excerpt from the interview we did where Unger outlines GOP attempts to stop minority voting in the 2012 election:

“You’re going to see this on a large scale in the upcoming election,” he explained to me. “That is Karl Rove who is the father of voter IDs and voter suppression. He started a campaign, he started it before 2004 in Ohio saying that there’s widespread voter fraud, people who a registering are Mickey Mouse and so forth, or they are dead people being registered to vote en-masse and as a result we need voter IDs. But the fact of the matter is that this type of thing happens very very rarely.”……..

Rove, a careful and insightful strategist has long understood that the Republicans face a demographic ticking time bomb. There are around 50 million Hispanics in America today, and there will be about 70 million in about 2020. In Texas alone there are roughly 10 million Hispanics, and they vote about 2:1 for Democrats. Rove is extremely worried that if they were to start voting in large numbers states like Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico will turn blue, and he’s working diligently on strategies to keep voter turn out low.

“It’s also been called ‘Juan Crow’ because of the challenges the Republican face demographically,” said Unger.  “The answer has been to keep these people from voting. And they do that again and again. They do it in the black districts in Ohio, in Cleveland, in Cuyahoga County — I itemize this in my book, but the lack of voting machines, and I refer to the technique of cross over voting where blacks were shunted to the wrong voting booths deliberately and when that happens you’re using punch cards, you may not know it but if you vote for the Democrat, the vote actually goes to the wrong candidate.”

Unger’s predictions played out exactly on election day and in states like Florida, thousands of minorities were prevented from voting by the hiring of ‘election consultants’ that pushed for reductions in early voting days and hours, knowing African American and immigrant communities tended to vote early. In 2008 Democrats, minorities turned out in unprecedented numbers for the President. For example, in Palm Beach County, 61.2 percent of all early voting ballots were cast by Democrats that year, compared with only 18.7 percent by Republicans. In a stunning admission from the Former Republican Party Chairman in Florida Jim Greer, he revealed he had attended meetings where consultants made clear that early voting had to stopped at all costs. From The Palm Beach Post:

“The Republican Party, the strategists, the consultants, they firmly believe that early voting is bad for Republican Party candidates,” Greer told The Post. “It’s done for one reason and one reason only. … ‘We’ve got to cut down on early voting because early voting is not good for us,’ ” Greer said he was told by those staffers and consultants.

“They never came in to see me and tell me we had a (voter) fraud issue,” Greer said. “It’s all a marketing ploy.”

The demographic change presents a true nightmare scenario for the GOP, and its attempts to circumvent this have been truly horrifying. Republicans are catching on to the fact that labeling half the American population as ‘social parasites’ and ‘takers’  isn’t good when it comes to getting votes. This theme has been perpetuated in public – mostly on Fox News and Right Wing radio – but the audience is limited and the knock on effects counterproductive. Most Americans in the center are not comfortable with that type of rhetoric, and the Democrats are hoovering up wavering voters with a more inclusive approach to politics.

So what options do Republicans have going forward?

We’re starting to see cracks in the low tax militancy front with several prominent Republicans saying they would budge when it comes to negotiating with Obama on the fast approaching ‘fiscal cliff’, some have made noise about toning down the anti immigrant rhetoric (with even Sean Hannity doing an about turn), and pro choice, pro gay marriage Republicans have begun to make themselves more visible. But the change isn’t exactly dramatic and it won’t be enough to undo the years of abusive rhetoric and archaic policy proposals that have come to define the Republican Party.

The only choice they have left is to continue efforts to stop minorities and poor people from voting – the conclusion Karl Rove has obviously come to and is dedicating all his resources to pursuing. The Republican’s admission that they were involved in voter suppression shines some much needed light on the skeletons in their closet, but in reality it’s only scratching the surface.

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Michael Cohen in the Guardian makes a persuasive argument that Republicans don’t have much to gain by holding the economy to ransom again during the ‘fiscal cliff’ negotiations:

In the end, neither side has all that much to gain from dragging the fiscal cliff argument out. Now that President Obama has won re-election, and doing short-term damage to the economy is no longer in the political interests of Republicans, the outlines of a budget deal become that much easier to achieve. Moreover, all those House Republicans have to run for re-election in two years – and would prefer to do so in more optimal economic conditions, rather than in an economy undermined by growth-reducing austerity policies.

There were once good political reasons for Republicans to have a dalliance with economic calamity; no longer is that true. And it’s worth remembering that in virtually every single showdown between Obama and the Republican Congress in his first term (from the tax cut showdown of 2010 and the budget battle of early 2011, to the debt limit negotiations in the summer of 2011 and finally the payroll tax confrontation in the beginning of 2012), it has been Republicans who have surrendered, with far less than half a loaf. In its brinkmanship, the GOP likes to dance right up to the edge; they are far less inclined to take the plunge.

I think Cohen is correct in his analysis – Americans believe that President Obama’s economic policies are heading the country in the right direction, and explicitly rejected austerity at the polls in November. GOP strategists know this and will not be keen to shoulder the blame for a break down in the negotiations, making a decent deal for the Democrats a good possibility. It looks like Obama is sticking to his guns on raising taxes for the wealthy, meaning the onus is on Republicans to budge from their previous position on taxation.

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Bit of insidery information for our readers – I spoke to a friend late last night who is working closely with Obama’s campaign, and I was informed that internally, the Democrats are very confident of an Obama victory tonight, particularly in Ohio. Their own numbers (that always show a worst case scenario) are solidly for Obama, and bar extremely low voter turn out, a Romney victory in the rust belt state is highly unlikely. The Democrats believe Ohio will make the difference this year and his consistently strong numbers there are cause for optimism.

Stay tuned for updates as they come in.

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Here’s how some of the more prominent bloggers saw the debate going last night:

Andrew Sullivan:

I have to say that Biden did to Ryan what Cheney did to Edwards in style and demeanor and authoritah. Ryan was hampered by an insurmountable problem on the impossible mathematics of the Romney budget. I think his inability to answer that question – how do you pay for it? – has to be the driving question now. The only way to afford it is to cut middle class deductions and middle class entitlements much more than Obama-Biden would. I’d love radical tax reform – but I’m not crazy enough to believe you can actually tackle the debt by cutting taxes and increasing defense spending and leaving Medicare basically alone (no ACA-style cost-controls) and only removing deductions for the very rich. It doesn’t add up. They know it. And when challenged – even by Fox News – he cannot provide the details.

Glenn Greenwald:

From both a substantive and stylistic perspective, Biden completely dominated the debate. He was far more passionate, authoritative, and aggressive than Ryan. It is a pure reversal of the first presidential debate but on steroids: Biden was actually more assertive and even more lively than Romney was, while Ryan was at times as listless and passive as Obama was.

Josh Marshall:

Biden made the whole Democratic argument — on policy and values and he hit Romney really everywhere Democrats wanted him to. He left nothing unsaid. You can agree with those points or not. But this was exceedingly important for recovering the damage from last week’s debate when many Obama supporters simply felt that Obama wasn’t willing or able or something to make the case Democrats around the country are hyped up to make. Why didn’t you say this? Why’d you let him get away with that? Biden said it all. And for Democrats around the country that was extremely important.

Joe Klein:

Joe Biden won–certainly on the substance, although he lost a bit on the body language. His frustrated smiles, head shakes etc. etc. will become a Republican talking point and influence the post-game evaluations, even if they were sort of justified. Biden was in command throughout, a more forceful and passionate presence than Ryan. But Ryan did well, too–unflappable even when Biden nailed him on his requests for stimulus funding. And Ryan had some nice moments, arguing uphill against Biden’s onslaught.

That was no mean feat. Biden was so combative that at times he appeared thuggish. He badgered, bulldozered, hectored and harassed. At some moments, the debate appeared to owe more to WWE than CNN. This was probably Biden overcompensating for his boss’s lacklustre performance last week.

Occasionally he overdid it. Where some had questioned whether Obama had taken a sleeping pill, Biden looked like he was on steroids. For much of the evening, this worked. But his digs could be gratuitous, and his exasperation overly theatrical. “You’re Jack Kennedy now?” he said after Ryan once mentioned the former president. At times the age difference, along with the smirking, eye rolling and forceful interventions, made him look like an angry father taking his impudent son to the woodshed.

Biden did a lot of things Obama should have done last week, including using Romney’s 47% comments to give a clear illustration of just what the GOP ticket stood for. Even better, Biden cornered Ryan into making an argument for sending more troops into Afghanistan. It exposed the GOP’s foreign policy as essentially unchanged from the failure of the Bush years.

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Mitt Romney and David Cameron: Failed Economics

The Conservative Party in Britain won the general election in 2010, inheriting one of the worst economies in recent history. New Labour under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had failed to spot the inherent flaws in their economic platform and sat helpless as the financial sector collapsed in free fall in 2008. The Conservatives won the election based on Labour’s disastrous handling of the economy, successfully arguing that Labour had abused the public’s trust and could not be relied on to steer Britain back to economic prosperity.

In the US, the Democrats swept to power in 2008 after George Bush did much the same. Having presided over the economy for 8 years, the Republicans took full blame for the catastrophe on Wall St and John McCain felt the impact at the voting booths. The public bought into the Democrat’s argument for a better regulated, more equal society and Obama took office on the basis he would turn things around.

There is an obvious parallel between the two scenarios – in both countries, the party presiding over the economic meltdown in 2008 lost the subsequent election. But the differences were striking – the Conservative in Britain were not offering a platform of more regulation and more equality, instead they promised sweeping austerity measures and less regulation in order to get the economy back on track. In America, President Obama passed a multi billion dollar stimulus package and attempted to regulate Wall St, promising a dose of Keynesian measures to rebalance the economy.

The Conservatives achieved an astonishing feat in convincing the public that their ideology would work, and much of the credit should go to Margaret Thatcher who successfully shifted the country so far to the Right during the 1980′s that Labour had little choice but to follow to remain electorally relevant. New Labour under Tony Blair came to power in 1997 on a platform of conservative economics. They promised tax cuts, deregulation and a pro business culture that was completely alien to the party’s roots. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown went about turning London into the financial capital of the world, presiding over a decade of mass deregulation and transforming the city into a tax haven for the wealthy, and a flexible labor market for big business. The city turned Britain into an economic powerhouse while times were good. As financial whizz kids on both sides of the pond figured out new, complex trading techniques, buying and selling mortgage backed securities (while betting against their own investments at the same time), the country radically changed from an industrial based economy to a financial services based economy. Trading and increasing debt was the name of the game, and the banks were making a fortune out of it.

Simultaneously, Wall St was transforming America in much the same way, and it worked while everyone drank the Koolaid. But when reality set and the debt was called in, the economy collapsed like a deck of cards turning Wall St and the city of London into a parasitical entities rather than an engine of economic growth.

Gordon Brown, then prime minister quickly reverted back to traditional Labour/Keynesian economics and ordered the nationalization of several major banks and injected billions of pounds into the economy. He was widely credited with saving the banking system and pulling the economy back from the brink. Barack Obama passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, allocating $831 billion of stimulus money over 10 years. The effects were as follows:

Writes Frank J. Lysy on the graph above:

The graph above shows the path of GDP growth in the UK and in the US by calendar quarters from the pre-recession peaks in GDP (set equal to 100).  This peak was in the fourth quarter of 2007 for the US, and in the first quarter of 2008 for the UK.  The downturn started in the US.  The UK economy then dropped further and faster, as the financial sector was at the center of the collapse and the financial sector (with London as the most important international center) is a larger share of the UK economy than it is in the larger and more diversified US economy.

The US economy began to recover soon after Obama was elected and was able to pass and start to implement the fiscal stimulus package (along with aggressive measures by the US Fed and other actions).  The UK economy also began to turn around at about the same time.  The Labor Party Government under Gordon Brown was following similar measures as were being implemented under Obama in the US.  Both economies then began to grow, at roughly similar rates.

But then the UK held the May 2010 elections, which the Labor Party lost.  The Conservatives (in coalition with the Liberal Democrats) took control of the Parliament and of the government.  David Cameron became Prime Minister.  He immediately announced that an aggressive austerity budget would be drawn up and implemented, and it was, starting in the summer of 2010.  This was the tenth quarter from the pre-recession peak for the UK of the first quarter of 2008.

The impact has been clear and stark, as shown in the diagram above.  The economy reached a peak in its recovery in the tenth quarter, but then the recovery stopped.

The numbers are clear: The stimulus worked in America and in Britain, then dropped off in the latter when austerity measures were passed by the new Conservative government.

The Tories managed to convince the British public that the same economic philosophy that caused the crash in the first place would work if implemented with even more severity. And in the US, Mitt Romney is trying to argue the same to the American public.

But in America, it doesn’t appear to be working despite Republican attempts to tie the poor state of the economy to Obama. There is no doubt that things are bad in America – the deficit is rising, unemployment is still above 8.1% and poverty is increasing. However, Americans are not buying into Romney’s argument that austerity and deregulation are the keys to turning it around. An article in the National Journal attempts to explain why:

Each passing day and each new poll brings further evidence that the Romney team has miscalculated. Obama has erased a once-formidable Romney lead on the question of who would handle the economy better as president; in some polls, the president has actually seized the advantage on that front. Economy-first independent voters are drifting Obama’s way. Voters increasingly say that the economy is on the right track…..

Voters appear to be prizing that (albeit slow) progress over the economy’s still-terrible levels of output and job growth. This attitude fits at least one historical pattern of American politics: University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers studied more than 600 gubernatorial elections across recent American history—a much more robust sample size than presidential elections—and found that voters were much more likely to retain an incumbent when unemployment was falling, regardless of how high the rate was. It’s all about trajectory, no matter how slow or slight. Three years ago, the unemployment rate stood at 10 percent, meaning that it dropped almost 2 full points during Obama’s first term; those are the headlines voters remember, regardless of how the job data are interpreted.

As Jared Bernstein, the former top economist to Vice President Joe Biden, put it: “It makes a great deal of difference if you are sailing into a storm or sailing out of it.”

It finally looks like the public are catching on to actual facts despite the overwhelming propaganda coming from the Right, because there’s only so long you can sell an ideology that doesn’t work. In Britain, the Conservatives are in the process of making themselves unelectable for the next generation as the public has grown tired of cut after cut after cut with no results. In America, it looks like voters savvied up faster – they understood in 2008 that more Republican economics would hurt rather than help, and they understand again in 2012 that despite the slow progress, they are at least on the right track.

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by Ari Rutenberg

Editor’s Note: Ben Cohen is on vacation for a few days, so I’ll been posting in his stead.  If there are any topics of particular interest to readers that have not been covered, please let me know and I’ll do my best to get something going.  Also I love conversation and discussion, so please comment and engage!

Over the past few days, there have been two instances of what I would call accidental honesty on the part of the GOP.  The first was Todd Akin’s comment that women who have been legitimately raped rarely get pregnant (on which you can read more here from the great Oliver Willis).  The second is Ohio elections official Doug Priesse’s statement that “I guess I really actually feel we shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban — read African-American — voter-turnout machine” (more here from the Columbus Dispatch). Every politically active person in this country is aware that many on the right agree with Messrs. Akin and Priesse, even if the GOP won’t always come out so forthrightly a state these positions.

Aside from my fundamental disagreement, and no small amount of disgust at such blatantly discriminatory statements, what really bothers me about this is the media’s reaction to it, and to any other event where they are actually given the information they ask for.

For months, the media (in this case the MSM and left-wing press) have been talking about the awful voter discrimination that is taking place in states like Florida and Ohio.  They have been very accurately pointing out that its because many GOP voters and pols feel that  black people and other minorities are likely to commit voter fraud, despite the complete lack of evidence to support such statements.  Yet when these statements actually come out, rather that reacting seriously the media feigns surprise and starts freaking out.

Kind of like Romney’s tax return.  We all know that he’s paid very little taxes.  Whether its 5%, 3%, or 0% I don’t care, and I don’t think most voters really care.  Yet if he were actually to release the rest of them, rather than taking it as an opportunity to seriously examine the iniquity and insanity of our tax code (like why is income above $110,100 exempt from payroll taxes?), the media would spend a month going “holy shit Mitt Romney hasn’t paid any income taxes”, despite the fact that we all already know that and have already been discussing it for a year or more.

I’m really sick of stupid media game because none of it contributes to solving these problems.  Even from journalists I generally agree with.  I want to see a serious discussion of these issues.  Yes its a problem that Romney has been such a stingy bastard, but the problem is that the system allows him to do so.  In the same way, yes its an issue that the minor schmuck in Ohio doesn’t want to let black people have extended voting hours, but the real problem is that the GOP has a real problem with equal protection of the law when it come to people who disagree with them, and minorities in general.  Its not just voting law, and we need to have a serious discussion about why Republican’s don’t think equal protection means equal protection.

What do they think it means, and how can we educate them on sectors of the population they don’t understand and thus don’t trust?  Rather than just saying “ha! see you guys really are racist, sexist assholes” (which is true but irrelevant), we need to engage them and figure out how we’re going to live together.  If the great experiment that we all call home is to survive and flourish, we need to try engaging, discussing, learning, and educating rather than waiting for accidentally honest gotcha moments and shallow factual victories to give the MSM an excuse to feign shock and horror at things they already know to be true.

What do you think?

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North Korean marching orders could do Nancy Grace some good....

Welcome to this weeks edition of The Daily Banter mail bag! Today, Bob, Ben and Chez answer readers questions on the Democrat’s tactics against the Republicans in Congress, whether we think Nancy Grace should be exiled to North Korea and how Mitt Romney is basically, well, screwed.

The questions!:

After seeing this graph showing the dozens of votes the 112th Congress has held on repealing the ACA, while the President’s Jobs Act has had but a single vote (failed due to filibuster), I got to wondering… Why isn’t The Jobs Act, or lots of variations on the Jobs Act also brought up for a vote by Democrats over and over and over as well? Wouldn’t that paint a picture of a recalcitrant Republican Congress (you know, the guys who have that laser focus on “jobs, jobs, jobs”) refusing to lift a finger to try and turn this economy around? – Kurt Basham

Bob: I think the Democrats have done just that. They’ve brought up dozens of measures regarding job creation, knowing they would fail due to Republican filibusters. The problem is: tree, falling, forest, sound, etc…? They suck eggs when it comes to messaging. Or, generously, they try to be great messengers but the traditional press is hesitant to give them access for fear of feeding the false “liberal media bias” meme on the right. It’s hard to root for such a hapless, fumbly group of politicians, but they really try. Mostly they’re really hindered by their own ineptitude, not to mention a much more powerful right-wing media strategy.

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Paul Krugman: Lone voice of sanity (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Ben Cohen: Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman has been getting a huge amount of media attention over the past few weeks, in part due to a book he has written ‘End This Depression Now!’, but mostly because his message of economic sanity is resonating with the American public.

Krugman is an unassuming figure – he’s not exactly telegenic, he’s not the best public speaker, and he tends to perform awkwardly when debating. But Krugman’s common sense solutions to America’s deep economic problems are finding a massive audience of people sick to death of the status quo. More than ever, his voice represents sanity amidst a cacophony of nonsense – a clarion call to restore decency in public policy and prevent the further corruption of the country’s monetary system.

For years, the Left in America has been afraid of its own shadow. The Democrats have been systematically emasculated by the Republicans and have given up on virtually all their core beliefs – Bill Clinton passed more Right wing economic legislation than any Republican could have dreamed of, and Barack Obama’s boldest redistributive economic proposal was to return the top rate of tax to that just under Ronald Reagan’s. This was a direct result of the influence of big money in politics, but also a sad reflection of the intellectual bankruptcy pervading the Left in America. The Democrats stopped believing in their own principles, and gave up on having their own ideas. As Bill Maher said on his show last Friday, the Democrat’s pledge to the electorate is this, “Vote for us, we’re lame, but the other guys are nuts”.

The Republicans are now so far out of the mainstream that it would be criminal not to vote for the Democrats. They are the only entity standing in the way of the complete disintegration of government and the economy. We saw what happened under George Bush, and there’s absolutely no need for a repeat.

But for Krugman, this is not good enough, and he is pushing an agenda to reverse 30 years of Republican economics that has created gigantic wealth disparity, huge amounts of poverty, and massive financial instability. In his critically acclaimed book ‘The Conscience of a Liberal’ Krugman wrote:

I believe in a relatively equal society, supported by institutions that limit extremes of wealth and poverty. I believe in democracy, civil liberties, and the rule of law. That makes me a liberal, and I’m proud of it.

Krugman sees no need to be ashamed of his liberalness – instead, he flaunts it and goes to great lengths to disprove Republican economics in his daily writing and media appearances. While the media treats both side’s policy proposals with equal respect in an attempt to be ‘balanced’, Krugman looks at actual facts says it how it is. In a recent appearance on ABC news, Krugman stated the following about Republican Paul Ryan’s budget plan:

The plan’s a fraud. The plan is a big bunch of tax cuts, some specified spending cuts, basically for poor people, and then a huge magic asterisk which is supposed to turn into a deficit reduction plan, but, in fact, if you look what’s actually in it, it’s a deficit-increasing plan…..There is really no plan there, neither from Ryan, nor from Governor Romney, is just the truth … if that’s being harsh and partisan, gosh, then I guess the truth is anti-bipartisanship.

This type of straight talk is refreshing to hear, particularly to liberals who are not ashamed of being liberal. Krugman is pointing out that the emperor has no clothes, and it seems people are finally waking up to it. Krugman’s solutions to the current economic crisis are equally straightforward. He wants to stop self imposed austerity, pump lots of money into infrastructure spending to create jobs, then pay the deficit down once the economy has stabilized. As he told the Guardian:

These are not hard concepts, actually. It’s not hard to get it across to an audience. But it doesn’t seem to play in the political sphere. What’s fascinating is his historical analysis of why policy-makers, who once understood these principles, collectively decided to forget them.
In the years following the Great Depression, governments imposed regulatory rules upon the banking system to ensure that we could never again become indebted enough to make us vulnerable to a crisis. But if it’s been a long time since the last major economic crisis, people get careless about debt; they forget the risks. Bankers go to politicians and say: ‘We don’t need these pesky regulations,’ and the politicians say: ‘You’re right – nothing bad has happened for a while.

While Krugman’s concepts have been ignored in the political sphere, there are signs that people high up the food chain are starting to catch on. As President Obama told Rolling Stone:

I read all of the New York Times columnists. Krugman’s obviously one of the smartest economic reporters out there.

High praise indeed – and maybe an indication that the Democrats might actually start implementing his ideas. Obama’s Presidency is largely staked on the well being of the economy, and given Krugman has been right about virtually everything thus far, it would be smart to listen. And that is why Krugman is so important right now.

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Rep. Allen West: Truly dangerous

By Chez Pazienza: Rush Limbaugh is a pompous buffoon — we all know that. When he says something over-the-top, inflammatory and painfully divorced from reality, believe it or not I kind of accept it. I get that there’s an argument to be made that the damage he’s doing through the influence he wields over the Republican party bumper sticker sloganeers and their ostensible leaders makes him a dangerous, dangerous man. But there are plenty of times when I just can’t help thinking, “Really? This is the asshole we’re all so afraid of — this obese, impotent blowhard? This instantaneous-death heart attack waiting to happen? Fuck this guy.” I think this because while it’s true that his microphone has quite a bit of power, and it’s power that can’t really be voted out of office by a suddenly enlightened electorate, he doesn’t make policy in an official capacity. Again, he indirectly influences policy, but he doesn’t make it himself because in the end he’s just a dumb-shit shock jock.

Rep. Allen West, however, is a different story.

I’m not going to bother running down in detail the litany of thoroughly irresponsible and almost incomprehensibly insane things that have spilled out of West’s comic book character mouth since he arrived on the political scene via the Great and Ultimately Short-Lived Tea Party Uprising of 2010 and the shit-kicking dolts in Florida who championed it; we’d be here all day and honestly it’d just make my head hurt. Suffice it to say, almost every time West opens his pie hole, some unabashed gem of paranoia, barbarism, incivility and generally offensive backward-ass thinking makes itself known. It was understood pretty much from the beginning that West is the archetypal right-wing bully, a patriarchal tyrant who believes that he and he alone has been given dominion over the land by the Almighty and everyone else can basically kiss his ass. I imagine him being some unholy cross between Colonel Nathan Jessup, Jack Scagnetti in Natural Born Killers, and Rance Burgess, the sadistic, misogynistic, and ice cold true believing land baron on Firefly.

The short list: In just the past couple of years, West has intoned that guns may be necessary to stand against the liberal onslaught, that U.S. military leaders should refuse the orders of President Obama, that American news agencies should be censored, that Obama supporters are a threat to the gene pool, that progressive women are trying to “neuter” American men, and that Democratic Party Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Shultz doesn’t know her place because she refused to show him the proper amount of respect and deference. Now you can add to all of that unmitigated horseshit — commies. Yes, commies.

Last week, at a town hall meeting in Florida, West was asked by one of his mouth-breathing constituents, “What percentage of the American legislature do you think are card-carrying Marxists?” Rather than answer with an entirely appropriate, “What the hell are you talking about? That’s crazy,” West of course immediately came back with — wait for it — “That’s a fair question.” He then proceeded to pull an actual number out of his ass, McCarthy style — an almost comically specific number. “I believe there’s about 78 to 81 members of the Democrat Party that are members of the Communist Party,” he said. So, yeah — the commie infestation is upon us. Let’s throw one more character from pop culture into the “Who Does Allen West Remind You Of?” mix: General Jack D. Ripper, from Dr. Strangelove.

What I want to know is, why is someone not kicking Allen West’s ass all over the halls of the Capitol for saying something so irresponsible and outrageous? Have we really gotten to the point where eliminationist rhetoric is so expected from the Tea Party-worshiping lunatics on the right that calling members of the United States Congress communists barely even registers anymore? Is this how far it’s come? Or is it simply that West is such an ineffectual fringe element within the legislature — one who will likely face an uphill battle for reelection, even in a place as out-to-lunch as South Florida — that nobody really takes a thing he says seriously? At this point, incendiary nonsense out of the mouth of Allen West comes off more like performance art than anything — as if he’s constantly playing a game with himself, seeing if he can one-up his last batshit pronouncement.

Regardless, calling U.S. lawmakers card-carrying communists isn’t something that should go unanswered. Granted, neither is 97% of the crap West has said in the past — but at some point somebody in a position of authority has to decide that enough is enough. I’d love to see it be the voters, but until they get the opportunity to correct their mistake an official censure from the very body politic West claims to detest so powerfully would be nice. Ignoring his psychotic ramblings only goes so far. And it obviously hasn’t given him an once of pause.

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