It’s Not a Fiscal Cliff, It’s an Austerity Crisis

It’s Not a Fiscal Cliff, It’s an Austerity Crisis

Washington is not known for the stunning clarity with which it frames and addresses tough issues. But has there ever been a debate so mired in confusion as the one around the so-called fiscal cliff?

The trouble starts with the term “fiscal cliff,” which misstates the nature of the problem and provides no hint of how to solve it. I prefer the term “austerity crisis,” which at least describes the real issue -- too much austerity, imposed too quickly. (This has the added advantage of sidestepping an increasingly inane discussion over whether the problem is really a “cliff,” “curb,” “slope” or perhaps a “bomb.”)

Here is the crux of it: Depending on what you throw into the pot, the sum of the expiring Bush tax cuts along with currently mandated spending cuts would equal somewhere between $500 billion and $700 billion in deficit reduction in 2013. That’s more than enough fiscal contraction to throw the U.S. into recession. The tax increases alone would reduce the average family’s take-home pay by more than 6 percent. Because everyone agrees that’s a bad thing, Congress could pass a law, tomorrow, preventing it. Done.

But Congress won’t pass that law. Although the problem may be too much austerity too quickly, most everyone in Washington is insisting that the solution should encompass much, much more. In theory, this crisis should be easily resolved: If you have too much austerity, lighten the load. The reason the austerity crisis has become so messy is that the connection between the problem and its solution has been severed.

Wrong Solutions

In fact, proposed solutions inevitably include four or even five distinct categories of policy. There are proposals to address the crisis itself -- to reduce the dangerous size and speed of the scheduled deficit reduction in 2013. There are proposals to replace the scheduled deficit reduction with a different set of deficit-reducing tax increases and spending cuts, to be phased in over a longer term. There are policies to redesign the tax code or reform certain entitlements. There’s the need to raise the debt limit, as the Treasury is expected to run out of borrowing authority in February. Finally, there are policies to increase the amount of short-term stimulus and boost infrastructure investment.

So while the proximate problem is too much austerity, too quickly, the solutions being offered address an array of other concerns. Meanwhile, amid these wide-ranging proposals, the conversation in Washington tends to focus exclusively on achieving deficit reduction -- even though the economic threat we face in January is too much deficit reduction.

A more sensible approach would deal directly with the problem at hand: the austerity crisis. And that could be defused fairly simply, without doing overly much to harm the deficit. The path would involve identifying policies that pack a big stimulus punch without significantly increasing the deficit. Such “mismatched” policies abound.

The liberal Economic Policy Institute estimates that continuing the payroll-tax cut would create 1 million jobs in 2013 at a cost of about $115 billion. By contrast, maintaining the Bush tax cuts -- yes, all of them, including those on income less than $250,000 -- would create only 600,000 jobs while costing $202 billion. Adding to the appeal of the payroll- tax cut is that it’s designed to expire once the economy has strengthened. The Bush tax cuts, once renewed, will probably continue costing the Treasury year after year.

This is what the public sees - we have to make balancing the budget a top priority and we have to make massive spending cuts. You know why the public sees the fiscal "cliff" in that frame, because the media have become hand maidens for the radical Right conservatives. Conservatives do not want to admit that we have a revenue crisis, another way of saying austerity crisis - because that would point to one somewhat simple solution -raising revenue from taxes on people who have so much money they ponder how many McMansions they feel like owning or whether they should have the chauffeur wash the Mercedes seven days a week or just every week day.

Paying Workers at Big Retailers Like Walmart Something Closer to a Living Wage is Good For Everyone

Paying Workers at Big Retailers Like Walmart Something Closer to a Living Wage is Good For Everyone

Chances are you missed this particular bargain on Black Friday: Agree to spend 15 cents more on every shopping trip, and Walmart, Target, and other large retailers will agree to pay their workers at least $25,000 a year.

Big box retailers aren't actually offering that deal, but a new study by the liberal think tank Demos argues that it would be a great bargain for us all if they did. Increasing the average wage at large retailers from $21,000 to $25,000 would probably cost you less than $20 a year at the register yet lift some 1.5 million people out of poverty (including your cashier), create 100,000 new jobs, and boost GDP by some $13.5 billion.

Demos argues that retailers would benefit, despite higher labor costs, because their low-wage employees could suddenly afford to buy more of the basic necessities that they scan and load into plastic bags every day.

If you are still wondering what's in it for you, however, then consider this tidbit from Sasha Abramsky:

    In 2004, a year in which Walmart reported $9.1 billion in profits, the retailer's California employees collected $86 million in public assistance, according to researchers at the University of California-Berkeley. Other studies have revealed widespread use of publicly funded health care by Walmart employees in numerous states. In 2004, Democratic staffers of the House education and workforce committee calculated that each 200-employee Walmart store costs taxpayers an average of more than $400,000 a year, based on entitlements ranging from energy-assistance grants to Medicaid to food stamps to WIC—the federal program that provides food to low-income women with children.

Seen through this lens, the worker protests that erupted after Thanksgiving at Walmart locations around the country might end up being the best Black Friday specials of them all. Think of them as 2-for-1 coupons: Spend more on wages now, improve the economy AND save us all lots of tax money down the road—money that we can spend instead on more important things, like, well, parachutes for our cats.

 Big box retailers like Walmart, Target, Best Buy and even upscale retailers like Macy's have a  not so rare disease called near-sighted tunnel vision. They see quarterly profit statements and bonuses dancing like Christmas faeries, they do not see the USA as a community writ large and what is best for the community in the long run.

Mitt Romney Poses As Hypocrisy Poster Boy At Company That Benefited From Stimulus Funds

Mitt Romney Poses As Hypocrisy Poster Boy At Company That Benefited From Stimulus Funds

On Friday, Mitt Romney will make his closing argument on the economy in what his campaign is touting as a major address. The site Romney has chosen, however, exposes the hypocrisy and fallaciousness of one of Romney’s central economic arguments: the notion that government has no role in growing the private economy and helping businesses expand. Romney frequently mocks Obama’s “didn’t build it” remarks and routinely derides the 2009 Recovery Act as a failure that did nothing to create jobs.

But now, the GOP presidential candidate is delivering one of the last speeches of the campaign at Kinzler Construction Services in Ames, Iowa. A search of Recovery.gov shows that the firm benefited from hundreds of thousands of dollars in contracts funded by the Recovery Act. Kinzler received $649,944 in contracts under stimulus-funded Department of Energy weatherization programs. The company also received $39,370 as a sub-contractor on a federal government contract to renovate a building owned by the federal government, making for a total of $689,314 in stimulus funds.

The firm’s website even includes a section touting its “featured projects.” Several of the projects appear to be publicly-funded renovation or construction projects, including public schools in Nebraska and Iowa, a community center in Iowa, and the new central station for Des Moines’ public transportation system:

This is not the first time that Romney has spoken at venues that undermine his economic claims. Earlier this week, Romney and his running mate campaigned at the Red Rocks Amphitheater in Colorado, a national landmark built as a public works project during the New Deal. Ann Romney recently visited a Florida cancer center that received nearly $24 million in stimulus funds. And, among many other examples, Romney bashed the stimulus at a college that received stimulus funds for federal work-study programs that help make college more affordable.

How can this be. Conservative Republicans do everything alone without any help from government and government does not create jobs. Sure Romney and his buddy are lying hypocrites - conservative voters are obviously very pleased that they are. The bigger issue is how far detached conservatives are from reality. Should people who live in a fantasy world be in charge of governing this great nation. 

Condi Rice Pours Cold Water On ‘Benghazi-Gate’

The Laughable Myth That Taxes and Regulations Are Hurting Economic Recovery: Bank Profits Rebound To 2006 Levels, But Bankers Still Complain About Regulations

The Laughable Myth That Taxes and Regulations Are Hurting Economic Recovery: Bank Profits Rebound To 2006 Levels, But Bankers Still Complain About Regulations

In the last four quarters, the six largest Wall Street banks have made $63 billion, the most they’ve made since 2006. Despite having pushed the nation to the brink of economic collapse, and after receiving billions of taxpayer dollars, the banks are back to where they were when the housing bubble inflating.

However, according to Bloomberg News, a return to sky-high profits isn’t enough for the banking industry, which reacted to the numbers by whining about regulation and “a backlash against bankers“:

    Those billions of dollars in profits aren’t enough, according to interviews with more than a dozen bank executives and analysts. The lowest leverage in a decade, return on equity at a third of 2006 levels, higher capital requirements, shares trading below book value, declining bonuses, job cuts, the European sovereign-debt crisis and a backlash against bankers have damped the joys of profit, they said.

These six banks — Citigroup, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley — “will have combined profits of $9.9 billion in the third quarter, $17.4 billion in the last three months of the year and $75.8 billion in 2013? according to estimates. “When the banks say, ‘We’re doing very well but not getting a return on our capital,’ it’s completely incomprehensible, and it’s angering to the average American,” said Michael Greenberger, a former regulator who now teaches at the University of Maryland’s law school.

The banks’ return to massive profitability also refutes the argument that the Dodd-Frank financial reform law will cripple the ability of financial services companies to make money. According to a recent study, the nation’s banks went right back to making risky loans after receiving their taxpayer-funded bailout.

Higher taxes have actually helped with past economic recoveries.

Excellent satire on the Romney mentality: A manifesto for the entitled

Paul Ryan Fears the 30 Percent

RERUN: Fox, Carlson, Drudge Attacked Obama's Hampton Speech Five Years Ago. Carlson, Fox, Drudge and Hannity have hyped so much pure bullsh*t that has hurt America, one wonders how they can possibly think of themselves as patriots. Yet they never apologize or correct themselves. It is always onward to the next faux scandal, the next set of immoral lies, the next wave of racist tinged talking points.

What Liberal Media? The Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin Helps Spread Romney's Sleazy Lies

What Liberal Media? The Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin Helps Spread Romney's Sleazy Lies

Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney is facing a torrent of criticism from Democrats, tax analysts, and even a stray conservative or two over the lack of specifics in his tax proposals. But as per usual, there is one person who's standing by Romney, ready to fabricate any excuse she can in defense of the GOP candidate: Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin, who is defending Romney's lack of detail by arguing (falsely) that President Obama doesn't have a tax plan.

Romney finds himself in this situation after both he and running mate Paul Ryan appeared on Sunday morning news shows and repeatedly declined to identify the tax loopholes they'd close to pay for the steep tax cuts their plan would put in place.

Rubin, who recalibrates her opinion on the specificity of Romney's tax plan depending on how it better serves Romney's interest, argues today that Romney's level of detail is less important than Obama's alleged failure to release a tax plan:

    The media have accused Romney of being nonspecific about his tax plan. (At least he has both an individual and corporate one; the president does not.) He explained: "I can tell you that people at the high end, high-income taxpayers, are going to have fewer deductions and exemptions. Those -- those numbers are going to come down. Otherwise, they'd get a tax break. And I want to make sure people understand, despite what the Democrats said at their convention. I am not reducing taxes on high-income taxpayers. I'm bringing down the rate of taxation, but also bringing down deductions and exemptions at the high end so the revenues stay the same, the taxes people pay stay the same. Middle-income people are going to get a break."

    This won't fly with the media (the same people who never ask Obama where his tax plan is or where his entitlement reform plans are), which will continue to press him for details.

For the moment, let's set aside the spectacle of someone with a Washington Post byline criticizing the media for wanting too much detail. The assertion that President Obama has not released a tax plan is flatly untrue.

It's right here, as part of the president's FY 2013 budget proposal. The Tax Policy Center has a whole section of its website devoted to the tax provisions contained therein. You can critique Obama's plan, disagree with it, argue that it has insufficient detail, but you can't say it doesn't exist.

With regard to corporate taxes specifically, the president released a plan in February for overhauling the corporate tax code, which one can read here. It calls for cutting the corporate tax rate and closing specific loopholes and tax expenditures (for instance, taxing carried interest as income and ending "last in, first out" accounting).

This is after all the election cycle where the masks have come off the radical conservative movement - they hate facts, they hate fact checkers - they're running on winks and secret handshakes. Its like a club that speaks in a secret language only they know and understand. "Just trust" them, they'll get around to some details about how they're going to increase spending yet cut tax revenue to pay for it when they are elected. We had that before, it was called the Bush presidency. The one that took a budget surplus, ran up the biggest debt in history, cut taxes for millionaires and crashed the economy. M's Rubin is not just a boot licking liar, she is a dangerous ideologue for the cult of conservatism.

Paul Ryan (R-WI) is a serious wonk who knows his stuff as long as you do not start to use any analytical tools, like arithmetic.

Romney-Ryan Have an Economic Plan For America. It looks a Lot Like The Plan of 17th Century French Aristocracy

Romney-Ryan Have an Economic Plan For America. It looks a Lot Like The Plan of 17th Century French Aristocracy

Why Does Mitt Romney Running Mate Paul Ryan (R-WI) Hate American Values

Why Does Mitt Romney Running Mate Paul Ryan (R-WI) Hate American Values

Many millions of working-age Americans would lose health insurance. Senior citizens would anguish over whether to pay their rent or their medical bills, in a way they haven’t since the 1960s. Government would be so starved of resources that, by 2050, it wouldn’t have enough money for core functions like food inspections and highway maintenance. And the richest Americans would get a huge tax cut.

This is the America that Paul Ryan envisions. And now we know that it is the America Mitt Romney envisions.

Of course, we should have known that already. Romney committed himself to the Ryan agenda during the presidential primaries, both by embracing the Ryan budget rhetorically and specifically proposing key features of Ryan’s agenda, starting with a tight cap on federal spending. But if anybody doubted that Romney was serious about these commitments, the Ryan pick should put those doubts to rest. Maybe Romney sincerely believes these ideas are right for the country and maybe he feels that endorsing thiem is necessary to please his party’s base. It really doesn’t matter. It’s the way he intends to govern.



But will the voters get it? Ryan’s has a carefully cultivated image as a wonk hero, somebody who deserves to be taken seriously because he understands policy minutiae and cares about reducing the deficit. The image is a little misleading: As my former colleague Jonathan Chait has written in New York magazine, during the Bush Administration Ryan supported creation of the Medicare drug benefit and other policies that substantially increased the deficit. But Ryan's image helps to insulate him, and his ideas, from the charge that he’s proposing what would amount to the most radical revision of governing priorities in our lifetime. Pointing out the very real, very painful consequences his budget would have somehow seems impolite.



With that in mind, here are five things everybody should know about Ryan and his agenda, based mostly on non-partisan authorities such as the Congressional Budget Office, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

1. Ryan really believes in ending Medicare as we know it. The essential promise of Medicare, ever since its establishment in 1965, is that every senior citizen is entitled to a comprehensive set of medical benefits that will protect him or her from financial ruin. The government provides these benefits directly, through a public insurance program, although seniors have the right to enroll in comparable private plans if they choose. But the key is that guarantee of benefits, and it’s what Ryan would take away. He would replace it with a voucher, whose value would rise at a pre-determined formula unlikely to keep up with actual medical expenses.

Ryan's early proposals had no safeguards to make sure the voucher was adequate. His most recent one has safeguards, a more reasonable spending line, and preserves the government-run plan as an option. But the safeguards are weak, at best, and the government-run program would struggle to survive. The long-term effect would likely be the same: Over time, more and more seniors would find the voucher too small to buy the insurance they need, forcing many to pick between health care and other essential needs—the very same situation they routinely faced until the 1960s, when dismay over the hardship seniors faced created the political groundswell for Medicare.

Keep in mind, by the way, that Ryan would also raise the eligibility age of Medicare from 65 to 67. Without the Affordable Care Act, which Ryan would repeal, many if not most 65- and 66-year-olds without employer insurance would end up uninsured. And that's not an age at which you want to be skipping doctor visits.

2. Ryan really believes in ending Medicaid as we know it. Like Medicare, Medicaid is effectively a guarantee: It’s a promise to the states that, as long as they offer Medicaid and contribute their share, the federal government will enough money to cover everybody who is eligible for the program, no matter how many people it is. It’s also a promise to individual Medicaid recipients, that the insurance they receive will be sufficiently comprehensive to cover any service they might need—plus some extra services, such as lead screening for children, that are particularly critical for low-income Americans.

Ryan would end both guarantees, by turning Medicaid into a “block grant.” Every year, the federal government would cut checks for the states, according to a pre-determined formula. The formula envisions massive cuts to the program; it’s one of the major places Ryan looks to reduce federal spending. Given those levels, states would be forced to reduce, dramatically, whom they cover and/or what they cover.

According to estimates commissioned by the Kaiser Foundation and made by researchers at the Urban Institute, the end result would that between 14 and 27 million low-income Americans lose health insurance. That’s above and beyond those who are supposed to get insurance from the Affordable Care Act, starting in 2014, but would not because Ryan wants to repeal the law’s coverage expansion.

Oh, one other thing. People forget that the majority of Medicaid spending isn't on the proverbial single mother living at the poverty line. It's on the elderly and disabled. One way or another, such severe cuts to Medicaid will impact their services, making it (more) difficult for them to pay for nursing homes and long-term care.

3. Ryan really pushed for privatization of Social Security. From Ryan Lizza’s profile of Ryan in the New Yorker:

    Ryan and other conservative leaders, among them Senator John Sununu, of New Hampshire, wanted to be sure that Bush returned to [privatization] in 2005. Under Ryan’s initial version, American workers would be able to invest about half of their payroll taxes, which fund Social Security, in private accounts. As a plan to reduce government debt, it made no sense. It simply took money from one part of the budget and spent it on private accounts, at a cost of two trillion dollars in transition expenses. But, as an ideological statement about the proper relationship between individuals and the federal government, Ryan’s plan was clear.

    The release of the Social Security proposal was a turning point in Ryan’s career. Bush could have chosen to push a bipartisan idea, such as immigration reform, as the first domestic proposal of his second term. But, during the 2004 campaign, Ryan, with such allies as Kemp and Ferrara, kept up pressure from the right to force the White House to make a decision on Social Security. Many Republicans were still wary. Two weeks after Bush’s Inauguration, Ryan gave a speech at Cato asserting that Social Security was no longer the third rail of American politics. He toured his district with a PowerPoint presentation and invited news crews to document how Republicans could challenge Democrats on a sacrosanct policy issue and live to tell about it.

    Conservative editorialists and activists cheered him on. “What Ryan and Sununu have proposed is historic,” Newt Gingrich wrote in an op-ed piece. “They have fashioned a plan that makes the idea of a personal-account option for Social Security not only politically viable but, indeed, politically irresistible.” Jack Kemp lauded his former aide: “It will be proven the most efficacious of all the reforms.”

By the way, the plan was so radical that Bush eventually rejected it for a more cautious version.

There are two more items and details of Paul Ryan's (R-WI) radical anti-Americanism and anti-common decency at the link. Ryan, while already 42, is considered a "young gun" by Republican leaders, the future of conservatism that continues to move further and further to the radical anti-American right-wing conservatism. His views on Social Security should be either scary or laughable to rational Americans, he wants to hand over your retirement safety net to the same people who lost $17 trillion of America's wealth. Now that America is suffering for that, Romney and Ryan want the middle-class and working poor to pay for the shortage in the government coffers instead of their buddies on Wall Street, who are back to living the reckless lifestyle they were before the crash caused by Republicans in 2007-2008.


Romney and Ryan Both Supported Privatization of Social Security

Why does conservative Republican provocateur Ann Coulter hates American values like honor and truth,  Coulter: Sandra Fluke Introduced Obama To Help With "The Base Democratic Voter -- Stupid Single Women"

Mitt Romney Wants To Stack His Administration With The Same Corrupt Plutocrats Who Crashed The Economy. Republicans See Corruption As A Virtue

Mitt Romney Wants To Stack His Administration With The Same Corrupt Plutocrats Who Crashed The Economy. Republicans See Corruption As A Virtue

In May, Mitt Romney suggested a new eligibility test in the U.S. Constitution requiring that the President first "spend at least three years working in business." It was bad enough that America's would-be second Harvard MBA President forgot the disastrous record of the first. Now, Mitt has chosen the worst possible week to announce that President Romney's Cabinet will feature people who had "real jobs" and "have experience in the real world, in the private sector." After all, while Romney's campaign was getting battered by mounting questions over his AWOL tax returns and mysterious tenure at Bain Capital, some of the biggest banks on both sides of the Atlantic were revealed to be cheats, gamblers and frauds. And as it is turns out, recent studies suggest those abysmal business ethics are not exceptions to the rule.

To be sure, the Republican nominee and his former firm weren't the only ones to be on the receiving end of headlines like "50 Shades of Bain" and "Did Romney Make a False Statement on His Financial Disclosure?" The mushrooming scandal over Barclay's rigging of the crucial London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) came to the U.S. with word that the New York Fed knew of manipulation in the UK dating back to 2008. (That scandal has already claimed the job of Barclay's CEO Bob Diamond, a man who was to have co-hosted Mitt Romney's upcoming fundraising event in London.) On Friday, JP Morgan once again found itself the under the microscope as the bank reported its growing losses from bad bets placed by the notorious "London whale" may have cost the firm $7 billion. That same day, the New York Times reported that "MasterCard, Visa and major banks, including JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, agreed to pay more than $6 billion to settle accusations that they engaged in anticompetitive practices" in processing credit card payments to retailers. Meanwhile, the nation's largest bank, Wells Fargo, beat earnings expectations on Friday even as it announced a $175 million settlement with the Justice Department over "accusations that it discriminated against some minority homeowners seeking loans from 2004 to 2009."

Reflecting on the LIBOR scandal, University of San Diego Law School professor Frank Partnoy lamented, "I wish I could say I'm shocked, because it is shocking, but regulators have not been particularly effective or aggressive in the past two decades of finance." Simon Johnson summed up the banking scandal that may have impacted $800 trillion worth of business and consumer credit transactions with this powerfully simply headline:

    "Lie More, as a Business Model."

Conservative Republicans like Mitt have be successful in repealing most of the financial regulation that would have prevented the Great Recession. What regulation we had left they were negligent about enforcing. If terrorists had done this much damage to the USA conservatives would be back in shrill paranoid mode. Instead they're asking to help elect more congressmen, senators, governors and a president so they can commit some more domestic terror on working and middle-class America's finances.

Fox's Latest Attempt To Deflect Blame For Recession Away From GOP

To Mitt Romney Apologists Having Blind Investments is The Same Thing as Hiding Money in Switzerland and The Cayman Islands

The book cover is related to this essay at The Root, How Did Blacks Travel During Segregation? - The Negro Motorist Green Book was helpful for navigating Jim Crow America.


To Mitt Romney Apologists Having Blind Investments is The Same Thing as Hiding Money in Switzerland and The Cayman Islands

Mitt Romney and his right-wing media allies appear to be going into full-panic mode over the Obama campaign's increasingly successful efforts to define Romney as a hopelessly out-of-touch multimillionaire.

Obama is leading in swing states where the president's campaign and pro-Obama super PAC Priorities USA have run ads attacking Romney's record as a corporate predator who put Americans out of work by sucking the life out of their companies and sending their jobs overseas.

    [I]n toss-up states, 16 percent say Bain is a reason to support Romney, while 32 percent say it's a reason to oppose him. More people have an opinion on Romney's business record, too. In February, 36 percent said Romney cut jobs while 32 percent said he created them. Now 40 percent say he cut them and 36 percent say he created them.

Today, Romney began hitting back against the Obama attacks. Well, "hitting back" might be too strong a term.  "Nanny-nanny boo boo" is more accurate:

    No you’re the “outsourcer-in-chief.”

    In what has become a signature move for Mitt Romney, Republicans are trying to rebut attacks against their nominee by accusing President Obama of doing the exact same thing. Or something vaguely related to it.

The substance (for want of a better term) of the Romney counter-slap is his claim that money from the American Recovery Act allegedly went to companies that employed some foreign workers. 

In addition to the candidate's pushback, at least one right-wing media outlet is trying to help Romney deflect criticism of his personal finances, including questions about his unreleased tax returns, and the vast sums of money he is reported to have hidden away in tax havens such as Bermuda and Switzerland. 

The Weekly Standard is out with a report that it apparently hopes will expose Rep. Debbie Wasserman Shultz as a hypocrite for demanding that Romney come clean about his finances.  The website's scoop: that the DNC chair has some of her own money invested in "Swiss Banks, Foreign Drug Companies, and the State Bank of India:"

    But disclosure forms reveal that in 2010, Wasserman Schultz invested between $1,001-$15,000 in a 401k retirement fund run by Davis Financial Fund. As the fund discloses, it is invested in the Julius Baer Group Ltd. and the State Bank of India GDR Ltd., as well as other financial, insurance, bank institutions.

The report does not appear to be a satire. The Weekly Standard is seriously suggesting there is an equivalence between a few thousand dollars in a managed 401k and hundreds of millions of dollars shielded from U.S. taxes in Swiss bank accounts and offshore shell corporations.

This panicked, flailing reaction tells you everything need to know about the narrative Obama is crafting against Romney:  it's working.

UPDATE

Right on cue, the wingnut blogosphere is all, "Yeah, so THERE!!1!"

PJ Tatler:

    If overseas investments are “toxic” for Romney, they’re also toxic for the Democrat Party chairman hand-picked for that role by President Barack Obama.

Daily Caller (Jim Treacher):

    Overseas investments are bad except when they’re not. And one way to tell they’re okay is when they’re made by Democrats.

    Oh, and DWS won’t release her tax returns, either. Again: she’s a Democrat. The same standard doesn’t apply to her. Duh.

These right-wing Anti-American nitwits want everyone to believe that Mitt Romney is a financial genius that knows what he is doing - that means he knows that hiding funds in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands is very different from the people who handle your 401k have a diversity of investments. Hiding money versus investments. See how simple that is. If they were the same thing we would use the same WORDS to describe them. When the average person puts money into their 401k do they think they are hiding money in foreign accounts.

Memo to Republicans... Entrepreneurship is Actually Declining Thanks to Policies Like Yours

Mitt Romney or Mr Morality, lied about leaving Bain in 1999

Don't Have a Job? Say Thanks to Conservative Republicans

Don't Have a Job? Say Thanks to Conservative Republicans

New numbers released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the economy added a mere 80,000 jobs in June. That’s down from an average of 150,000 jobs a month for the first part of the year, and far too little to keep up with population growth.

Republican intransigence on economic policy has been a key contributor to the sluggish recovery. As early as 2009, Republican fear-mongering over spending and their readiness to filibuster in the Senate helped convince the White House economic team that an $800 billion stimulus was the most they could hope to get through Congress. Reporting has since revealed that the team thought the country actually needed a stimulus on the order of $1.2 to $1.8 trillion. The economy’s path over the next three years proved them right. Here are the top five ways the Republicans have sabotaged the economic recovery since:

    1. Filibustering the American Jobs Act. Last October, Senate Republicans killed a jobs bill proposed by President Obama that would have pumped $447 billion into the economy. Multiple economic analysts predicted the bill would add around two million jobs and hailed it as defense against a double-dip recession. The Congressional Budget Office also scored it as a net deficit reducer over ten years, and the American public supported the bill.

    2. Stonewalling monetary stimulus. The Federal Reserve can do enormous good for a depressed economy through more aggressive monetary stimulus, and by tolerating a temporarily higher level of inflation. But with everything from Ron Paul’s anti-inflationary crusade to Rick Perry threatening to lynch Chairman Ben Bernanke, Republicans have browbeaten the Fed into not going down this path. Most damagingly, the GOP repeatedly held up President Obama’s nominations to the Federal Reserve Board during the critical months of the recession, leaving the board without the institutional clout it needed to help the economy.

    3. Threatening a debt default. Even though the country didn’t actually hit its debt ceiling last summer, the Republican threat to default on the United States’ outstanding obligations was sufficient to spook financial markets and do real damage to the economy.

    4. Cutting discretionary spending in the debt ceiling deal. The deal the GOP extracted as the price for avoiding default imposed around $900 billion in cuts over ten years. It included $30.5 billion in discretionary cuts in 2012 alone, costing the country 0.3 percent in economic growth and 323,000 jobs, according to estimates from the Economic Policy Institute. Starting in 2013, the deal will trigger another $1.2 trillion in cuts over ten years.

    5. Cutting discretionary spending in the budget deal. While not as cataclysmic as the debt ceiling brinksmanship, Republicans also threatened a shutdown of the government in early 2011 if cuts were not made to that year’s budget. The deal they struck with the White House cut $38 billion from food stamps, health, education, law enforcement, and low-income programs among others, while sparing defense almost entirely.

There have also been a few near-misses, in which the GOP almost prevented help from coming to the economy. The Republicans in the House delayed a transportation bill that saved as many as 1.9 million jobs. House Committees run by the GOP have passed proposals aimed at cutting billions from food stamps, and the party has repeatedly threatened to kill extensions of unemployment insurance and cuts to the payroll tax.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, those policies — the payroll tax cut, food stamps, unemployment insurance, and discretionary spending for low-income Americans — have the highest multipliers, meaning more job boosting potential per dollar.

Since the tea baggers voted in a majority in the House of Representatives in 2010 and Republicans in the Senate - even though they are the minority - have used the filibuster or threats of one to kill any jobs bills, there is not much Obama can do. In a round about way Mitt Romney agrees. H/T to here for this video,
Gov. Romney on Poor Job Growth in Massachusetts: ‘To Suggest That Somehow the Day I Got Elected, Jobs Should Have Immediately Turned Around, Well, That Would Be Silly’

[When] Romney himself was running a government, in his case the state of Massachusetts, he was even more defensive about his lack of control of the employment picture than Obama is today. A new video unearthed by the liberal research group American Bridge shows Romney at a press conference in June 2006 admonishing reporters on disappointing jobs data. “You guys are bright enough to look at the numbers. I came in and the jobs had been just falling right off a cliff, I came in and they kept falling for 11 months,” he explains.

    “And if you are going to suggest to me that somehow the day I got elected, somehow jobs should have immediately turned around, well that would be silly. It takes awhile to get things turned around. We were in a recession, we were losing jobs every month,” he added.

USA Today's Uninformed Campaign To Shame The Poor - A USA Today editorial is downplaying poverty and food insecurity in America, and using Fox News talking points to justify a push to cut vital and effective anti-poverty programs.

The USA Sinking Back Into the Regressive Age of The Robber-Barons, The Corrupt and Elite

The USA Sinking Back Into the Regressive Age of The Robber-Barons, The Corrupt and Elite

Over the past 40 years, corporations and politicians have rolled back many of the gains made by working and middle-class people over the previous century. We have the highest level of income inequality in 90 years, both private and public sector unions are under a concerted attack, and federal and state governments intend to cut deficits by slashing services to the poor.

We are recreating the Gilded Age, the period of the late 19th and early 20th centuries when corporations ruled this nation, buying politicians, using violence against unions, and engaging in open corruption. During the Gilded Age, many Americans lived in stark poverty, in crowded tenement housing, without safe workplaces, and lacked any safety net to help lift them out of hard times.

With Republicans more committed than ever to repealing every economic gain the working-class has achieved in the last century and the Democrats seemingly unable to resist, we need to understand the Gilded Age to see what conservatives are trying to do to this nation. Here are 8 ways our corporations, politicians and courts are trying to recreate the Gilded Age.

1. Unregulated Corporate Capitalism Creates Economic Collapse

In the late 19th century, corrupt railroad capitalists created the Panic of 1873 and Panic of 1893 through lying about their business activities, buying off politicians and siphoning off capital into their own pockets. Railroad corporations set up phony corporations that allowed them to embezzle money from the railroad into their bank accounts. When exposed, the entire economy collapsed as banks failed around the country. The Panic of 1893 lasted five years, created 25% unemployment, and was the worst economic crisis in American history before the Great Depression.

In the early 21st century, the poorly regulated financial industry plunged the nation into the longest economic downturn since the Depression. Like in the Gilded Age, none of the culprits have served a day in prison.

2. Union Busting

In the Gilded Age, business used the power of the state to crush labor unions. President Hayes called in the Army to break the Great Railroad Strike of 1877; President Cleveland did the same against the Pullman strikers in 1894.

Today’s corporations don’t have to use such blunt force to destroy unions, but like in the past, they convince the government to do their bidding. Whether it is holding up FAA renewal in order to make it harder for airline employees to unionize, Republican members of the National Labor Relations Board leaking material on cases to Republican insiders, or governors Scott Walker and John Kasich seeking to bust their states’ public sector unions, not since before the Great Depression has the government attacked unions with such force.

3. Income Inequality

Today, we have the highest levels of income inequality since the 1920s and the gap is widening to late 19th century levels with great speed. In those days, individuals like John D. Rockefeller had more money than the federal government, while the majority of Americans lived in squalor, poverty and disease.

In the Progressive Era, we started creating laws like the federal income tax, child labor laws and workers’ compensation to begin giving workers a fair share of the pie. For decades, labor fought to increase their share and by the 1970s, had turned much of the working class into the middle class. Today, that middle class is under attack by a new generation of plutocrats who wish to recreate the massive fortunes of the Gilded Age.

4. Open Purchase of Elections

In 1890, copper magnate William Clark paid Montana lawmakers $140,000 to elect him to the U.S. Senate. While most plutocrats did not share Clark’s interest in being politicians, they ensured their lackeys would serve in office, often by offering corporate stock to politicians. Disgusted by this corruption, America in the Progressive Era of the early 20th century created a number of reforms, including the 17th Amendment that created direct elections of senators, as well as a 1912 Montana state law limiting corporate expenditures in politics.

Beginning with the Citizens United decision and continuing with the recent overturning of that 1912 law, the Supreme Court has allowed corporations and wealthy plutocrats to buy elections openly once again.

 It is odd that conservative blue collar workers would actually help the multinational corporations and billionaire elitists like the Coors beer family, casino wacko Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers to help undermine their economic futures. These elites buy the white southern blue collar workers with talk about religion - but which the billionaires themselves feel no real obligation to. They buy the lower middle-class with promises of returning to a time when men were men and women will do what they're told - never going to happen for good reason  - women do not want to return to spending their lives with so few options being ordered around like servants. The elite, our modern barons buy off those white blue collar workers with cultural issues that will make their lives harder and less free. A neat trick that Old World aristocrats used on serfs. keep us in power or your world will fall apart.

Yep big gov'mint is bad until the day your house burns down. Wildfire Tests Police Force in Colorado Home of Anti-Tax Movement. Look to federal government for help..

Is Limbaugh back on drugs and having visions? Limbaugh Falsely Claims IRS Is Hiring "16,000 New Agents" To Implement Health Care Reform

How a Brutal Strain of Conservative Republican Aristocrats Have Come to Rule America

How a Brutal Strain of Conservative Republican Aristocrats Have Come to Rule America

It's been said that the rich are different than you and me. What most Americans don't know is that they're also quite different from each other, and that which faction is currently running the show ultimately makes a vast difference in the kind of country we are.

Right now, a lot of our problems stem directly from the fact that the wrong sort has finally gotten the upper hand; a particularly brutal and anti-democratic strain of American aristocrat that the other elites have mostly managed to keep away from the levers of power since the Revolution. Worse: this bunch has set a very ugly tone that's corrupted how people with power and money behave in every corner of our culture. Here's what happened, and how it happened, and what it means for America now.

North versus South: Two Definitions of Liberty

Michael Lind first called out the existence of this conflict in his 2006 book, Made In Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics. He argued that much of American history has been characterized by a struggle between two historical factions among the American elite -- and that the election of George W. Bush was a definitive sign that the wrong side was winning.

For most of our history, American economics, culture and politics have been dominated by a New England-based Yankee aristocracy that was rooted in Puritan communitarian values, educated at the Ivies and marinated in an ethic of noblesse oblige (the conviction that those who possess wealth and power are morally bound to use it for the betterment of society). While they've done their share of damage to the notion of democracy in the name of profit (as all financial elites inevitably do), this group has, for the most part, tempered its predatory instincts with a code that valued mass education and human rights; held up public service as both a duty and an honor; and imbued them with the belief that once you made your nut, you had a moral duty to do something positive with it for the betterment of mankind. Your own legacy depended on this.

Among the presidents, this strain gave us both Roosevelts, Woodrow Wilson, John F. Kennedy, and Poppy Bush -- nerdy, wonky intellectuals who, for all their faults, at least took the business of good government seriously. Among financial elites, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet still both partake strongly of this traditional view of wealth as power to be used for good. Even if we don't like their specific choices, the core impulse to improve the world is a good one -- and one that's been conspicuously absent in other aristocratic cultures.

Which brings us to that other great historical American nobility -- the plantation aristocracy of the lowland South, which has been notable throughout its 400-year history for its utter lack of civic interest, its hostility to the very ideas of democracy and human rights, its love of hierarchy, its fear of technology and progress, its reliance on brutality and violence to maintain “order,” and its outright celebration of inequality as an order divinely ordained by God.

As described by Colin Woodard in American Nations: The Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, the elites of the Deep South are descended mainly from the owners of sugar, rum and cotton plantations from Barbados -- the younger sons of the British nobility who'd farmed up the Caribbean islands, and then came ashore to the southern coasts seeking more land. Woodward described the culture they created in the crescent stretching from Charleston, SC around to New Orleans this way:

    It was a near-carbon copy of the West Indian slave state these Barbadians had left behind, a place notorious even then for its inhumanity....From the outset, Deep Southern culture was based on radical disparities in wealth and power, with a tiny elite commanding total obedience and enforcing it with state-sponsored terror. Its expansionist ambitions would put it on a collision course with its Yankee rivals, triggering military, social, and political conflicts that continue to plague the United States to this day.

David Hackett Fischer, whose Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways In America informs both Lind's and Woodard's work, described just how deeply undemocratic the Southern aristocracy was, and still is. He documents how these elites have always feared and opposed universal literacy, public schools and libraries, and a free press. (Lind adds that they have historically been profoundly anti-technology as well, far preferring solutions that involve finding more serfs and throwing them at a problem whenever possible. Why buy a bulldozer when 150 convicts on a chain gang can grade your road instead?) Unlike the Puritan elites, who wore their wealth modestly and dedicated themselves to the common good, Southern elites sank their money into ostentatious homes and clothing and the pursuit of pleasure -- including lavish parties, games of fortune, predatory sexual conquests, and blood sports involving ritualized animal abuse spectacles.

But perhaps the most destructive piece of the Southern elites' worldview is the extremely anti-democratic way it defined the very idea of liberty. In Yankee Puritan culture, both liberty and authority resided mostly with the community, and not so much with individuals. Communities had both the freedom and the duty to govern themselves as they wished (through town meetings and so on), to invest in their collective good, and to favor or punish individuals whose behavior enhanced or threatened the whole (historically, through community rewards such as elevation to positions of public authority and trust; or community punishments like shaming, shunning or banishing).

Individuals were expected to balance their personal needs and desires against the greater good of the collective -- and, occasionally, to make sacrifices for the betterment of everyone. (This is why the Puritan wealthy tended to dutifully pay their taxes, tithe in their churches and donate generously to create hospitals, parks and universities.) In return, the community had a solemn and inescapable moral duty to care for its sick, educate its young and provide for its needy -- the kind of support that maximizes each person's liberty to live in dignity and achieve his or her potential. A Yankee community that failed to provide such support brought shame upon itself. To this day, our progressive politics are deeply informed by this Puritan view of ordered liberty.

In the old South, on the other hand, the degree of liberty you enjoyed was a direct function of your God-given place in the social hierarchy. The higher your status, the more authority you had, and the more "liberty" you could exercise -- which meant, in practical terms, that you had the right to take more "liberties" with the lives, rights and property of other people. Like an English lord unfettered from the Magna Carta, nobody had the authority to tell a Southern gentleman what to do with resources under his control. In this model, that's what liberty is. If you don't have the freedom to rape, beat, torture, kill, enslave, or exploit your underlings (including your wife and children) with impunity -- or abuse the land, or enforce rules on others that you will never have to answer to yourself -- then you can't really call yourself a free man.

When a Southern conservative talks about "losing his liberty," the loss of this absolute domination over the people and property under his control -- and, worse, the loss of status and the resulting risk of being held accountable for laws that he was once exempt from -- is what he's really talking about. In this view, freedom is a zero-sum game. Anything that gives more freedom and rights to lower-status people can't help but put serious limits on the freedom of the upper classes to use those people as they please. It cannot be any other way. So they find Yankee-style rights expansions absolutely intolerable, to the point where they're willing to fight and die to preserve their divine right to rule.

Not everyone in the South believes in reliving the Southern Plantation culture - replacing slaves with wage slaves who have no power. By way of relatively small majorities the radical conservatives just happen to get their way. With the exception of Texas most southern states have a disproportionate amount of federal representation because everyone gets two senators - conservatives are thus over represented in Congress. Wherever conservatives are from - the east, west or south they share a dream of an America where there are no morals restraining anything that will generate a profit or more profits. That is why they hate labor laws that protect workers and environmental laws that protect your family's health. They hate science and education because they do not want anyone reading about their rights or learning about rationalism and The Enlightenment. 

In Their Political Witch Hunt of Attorney General Holder Republicans Show Contempt for America

In Their Political Witch Hunt of Attorney General Holder Republicans Show Contempt for America

Congress is on track to find Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt. Given how contemptuous most Americans are of Congress -- only 17 percent approve, an all-time low -- this week's mostly party line vote will be the political equivalent of the congressional pot calling the attorney general kettle, well, black.

Here's what's really going on.

The dispute between the House Oversight Committee and the Department of Justice, coming to an absurd boil, has an inverse relationship between ferocity and substance.

At first, Republicans demanded every document on the misguided Fast and Furious "gun walking" investigation. Nine months later, they abandoned that tactic and requested only correspondence about how the Justice Department first reacted to congressional oversight. The Department accommodated more and more of their requests. That is, the parties were seemingly on the verge of striking a deal.

Then it exploded. Why? Politics, of course.

As Republicans narrowed their requests for information from the Department, they moved farther away from their role of reforming policies that led to failed plan and closer to a more political question of whether the Department was massaging or manipulating facts.

Just read the committee transcripts. There was little discussion about how the Department should be protecting the border from gun and drug violence, how the law should be enforced or how prosecutions and agents ought to conduct themselves. If they did, they would be fulfilling their oversight role and improving national policy.

Instead, they raised the ante on what certain key officials at the Department of Justice and the White House may have said to each other about how to talk to Congress about what were already acknowledged as mistakes.

A legitimate and far-reaching inquiry into how best to protect the American people devolved into the kind of crass political theater that the American people despise.

There are four reasons this fight became so aggressive and acrimonious:

    First, Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa announced his intention to move to contempt at The National Rifle Association's annual convention, To the already locked down and secured audience, Issa declared that the Obama Justice Department views the tragic death of a border agent as an excuse for more gun laws.
    Second, returning the favor, the NRA announced that it intended to "score" the contempt vote in Issa's committee, signaling they would put their muscle - votes and money -- behind this attack on the the Department. The defenders of the Department's position on documents -- lawyers, constitutional scholars, a smattering of interest groups -- are a political cricket next to the NRA's gorilla.
    Third, every hour of every day that Attorney General Holder is preparing fastidiously for nine hearings on the Hill at which Fast and Furious is in play, he is not out in the country talking about protecting the United States and about achievements on behalf of the American people. This is the most devious and insidious misuse of oversight authority and the right wing -- from their own viewpoint -- are kicking ass in this respect.
    Fourth, this coordinated attack is really about the priorities of Attorney General Holder and President Obama. The conservatives on the Committee are furious that Holder has not rolled over as access to voting is restricted across the country, which has a devastating and disproportionate effect on minority voters. They are furious at his lawsuits against Arizona and other states with newly draconian anti-immigrant laws. They are furious that he sued Sheriff Arpaio, that his Civil Rights Division aggressively prosecutes hate crimes and policy brutality, that the Environmental and Natural Resources Division is alive again and that the Anti-Trust Division says 'no' to some business mergers and deals.

Simply put, the right wing has been at Holder's throat from the very beginning, which is odd, given that Holder is the most qualified person in decades to be attorney general, having been an attorney at DOJ, a judge, U.S. attorney, and deputy attorney general. No one has ever had more experience with and devotion to the Department of Justice than Eric Holder.

Unfortunately, because of a political mismatch, this battle's messaging is lopsided. Conservatives wrap themselves in the honor of a tragically slain border agent and the completely fabricated but nonetheless compelling stench of "cover-up," while the administration finds itself in the muck talking about documents and something called "the deliberative process privilege." It is easy to see why the politics are irresistible for the GOP.

We are likely, but not guaranteed, to see a contempt vote on the floor of the House of Representatives this week. The vote will greatly satisfy Rush Limbaugh and the membership of the NRA. It may cause the White House to make its institutional and political interests the priority and leave the attorney general to take a hit like this. It will cause countless progressives, and much of black and Latino America, to wonder why the first contempt citation to make it through the House will be directed at the first black attorney general. It will lead to more cynicism about the true nature of Congress and whose interests it serves.

A 17 percent favorability rating means never having to say you're sorry.

Imagine these events were taking place in a court of law instead of Congress and the court of public perception - Republicans would be found pants down with no evidence. As it is they can toss around all the ginned up conspiracy theories they like. The NRA says it is all about some secret desire to tighten gun control. Guess how many gun related laws have been presented by Democrats or suggested by President Obama? ZERO. Government is broken and it will remain that way as long as there are conservatives in Congress. Republicans are in Congress to make sure government is not by and for the people.


The NRA does gone bonkers - NRA Acts Like Finger Pointing Punks, Says Obama's Routine Executive Privilege Claim Proves Our Crazy Fast And Furious Conspiracy Theory.

Conservative Republican Economic Policies Are a Threat to American Democracy

Conservative Republican Economic Policies Are a Threat to American Democracy

We certainly should worry about how the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans isn't paying its fair share of the cost of running the country. But we should be just as worried about how people at the other end are doing.

It's not just about the continuing wave of foreclosures. Millions of people are stuck in low-wage jobs that don't pay enough to make ends meet. And millions more live on incomes so low that it's hard to imagine how they survive.

Low-wage work is a pandemic. A third of our population ekes by on less than $36,000 for a family of three. That's 103 million people living on less than twice the poverty line, but most of them technically aren't poor or don't consider themselves poor. Yet they struggle every month to make ends meet and are one medical emergency or protracted illness away from bankruptcy.

Why so much low-wage work? Because over the past 40 years, well-paying industrial jobs disappeared, unions lost much of their clout, the minimum wage stagnated, and the field of competition in many areas became globalized.

The result: half of U.S. jobs now pay $34,000 or less a year. A quarter of U.S. jobs pay less than $22,000, the poverty line for a family of four. And the wages for those jobs have been stuck for four decades. Today, they pay only 7 percent more than they did in 1973.

Most families cope by having both parents work, but the rising number of single moms means that millions of households have just one possible worker. It's no wonder that 42 percent of single-mother families with children under 18 are poor.

Meanwhile, our safety net is in tatters at a time when 20.5 million people have incomes that amount to less than $9,500 a year. That's half the poverty line, which is currently pegged at $19,090 for a family of three. This number grew by almost 8 million between 2000 and 2010. Why? Cash assistance for the mothers and children who need it in many states has been scratched.

Many politicians still crow about the supposed "success" of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), the threadbare national welfare program that replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children during the Clinton administration.

At last count, Wyoming has a total of 617 people enrolled in its TANF program. The kids it covers comprise just 4 percent of the children in the state's poor families. Twenty-five states now provide less than 20 percent of their poor children with this kind of support.

Nationwide, the percentage of kids covered by these benefits has declined to 27 percent from 68 percent before President Bill Clinton and the GOP-controlled Congress "reformed" the welfare system. As a result, we have 6 million people whose only income is from food stamps. Food stamps provide an income of a third of the poverty line — about $6,000 for a family of three. This is the most urgent problem we face.

Rep. Paul Ryan and his House Republican colleagues want to make matters worse. They're touting a budget that would slash virtually every program that helps low-income people. Their rationale: we're helping too much.

But the House Republicans evidently think we're not helping the rich enough — their budget proposes massive new tax cuts for the wealthy. Robin Hood would turn over in this grave.

Seeing that work produces a decent income and that our people are prepared for the jobs of the future is cost-effective and will benefit corporate bottom lines. But there's an even more fundamental reason to act. The concentration of power and wealth at the top and the sense of political exclusion and impossibility at the bottom threaten a new order that's antithetical to the animating ideals of our country. Poverty and inequality are threatening our democracy.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

Peter Edelman teaches at Georgetown University Law Center and co-directs the Georgetown Center on Poverty, Inequality, and Public Policy.

Even as we ever so slowly pull out of the economic crash caused by conservative Republicans, greedy bankers and arrogant Wall Street billionaires the people who are finding work are, on average, working for lower wages.

Government can be good and as efficient as the private sector - see chart above that measures citizens satisfaction.

The "Liberal Media" Continue To Hammer Obama

Experts Say Romney’s Defense Plan Doesn’t Add Up