Tag Archives: politics

April 13, 2011 · 10:44 pm

ThinkProgress » CBO: Budget Deal Cuts ‘Less Than 1 Percent’ Of The $38.5 Billion Claimed

This story is getting more and more interesting…

It seems Washington has learned some accounting tricks from Hollywood…

From ThinkProgress.org:

Republicans and President Obama have been hailing last week’s shutdown-averting government funding deal as the “largest spending cut in history,” but as details about the package emerged, analysts realized that deal’s supporters were greatly overselling the purported $38.5 billion in cuts. And today, the Congressional Budget Office finds that the deal would shave just $352 million from the deficit in the next six months — “less than 1 percent of the $38 billion in claimed savings,” the AP reports:

The Congressional Budget Office estimate shows that compared with current spending rates the spending bill due for a House vote Thursday would pare just $352 million from the deficit through Sept. 30. About $8 billion in cuts to domestic programs and foreign aid are offset by nearly equal increases in defense spending. […]

The CBO study confirms that the measure trims $38 billion in new spending authority, but many of the cuts come in slow-spending accounts like water-and-sewer grants that don’t have an immediate deficit impact.

While the CBO study lends credence to the theory that President Obama slyly deflected the worst of the cuts, the fact remains that the cuts will be harmful to the economy and to the people who depend on valuable social safety net programs that will have their budgets cut. Moreover, as the Wonk Room’s Ben Armbruster explains, the deal also leaves defense spending largely untouched. So while the deal cuts domestic social spending, much of these savings are wiped out by inflated defense spending.

via ThinkProgress » CBO: Budget Deal Cuts ‘Less Than 1 Percent’ Of The $38.5 Billion Claimed.

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April 13, 2011 · 10:38 pm

Budget Deal Only Actually Cut $14.7, Not $40 Billion. Does Boehner Realize This Yet?

Looks like the President pulled a fast one on Speaker Boehner…

And good for him!

Actual budget cuts were “only” $14.7 billion, as opposed to the GOP’s bragging about almost $40 Billion.

I haven’t had time to dig into today’s speech yet, but I’m hoping he’s on his way to taking control of the debate and protecting the middle class, seniors and other from the hatchet wielding GOP.

It should be a piece of cake.  President Obama is a very smart man.  Boehner is not the sharpest knife in the drawer.  Paul Ryan is delusional.  ‘

This could be fun….

Or it could be a disaster.

It all depends on President Obama….

From the National Journal:

The meat of the spending deal struck between the two parties late Friday night was revealed in a legislative omnibus released early Tuesday morning. The specifics show that finding nearly $40 billion in cuts during the 2011 fiscal year required clever accounting and, for the White House, a willingness to concede on rhetoric to find gains on substance.

For example, the final cuts in the deal are advertised as $38.5 billion less than was appropriated in 2010, but after removing rescissions, cuts to reserve funds, and reductions in mandatory spending programs, discretionary spending will be reduced only by $14.7 billion.

White House officials said throughout the process that the composition of the cuts was more important than the top-line number, and that including mandatory cuts allowed that top line to grow while limiting the immediate impact of the cuts.

The move also keeps the 2011 discretionary baseline slightly higher, a terrain advantage for the Democrats heading into the 2012 spending process.

via NationalJournal.com – Budget Cutting Ain’t Easy – Wednesday, April 13, 2011.

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April 12, 2011 · 11:48 pm

150 Years Later, Tea Partiers Still Aren’t Over The Civil War

Unbelievable….

But not really…

I could have guessed this of the Tea Party and most of the GOP…

More like sad, but true….

From ThinkProgress.org:

Today is the 150th anniversary of the Civil War’s beginning, when secessionists fired on Union troops at Fort Sumter, South Carolina. According to a new poll from CNN, the Civil War’s legacy remains unresolved. The poll finds that Republicans and Tea Party supporters are more likely to support the Confederacy and confederate leaders than Democrats or Independents.

According to the poll, nearly one in four Americans sympathize with the Confederacy more than with the Union. That number grows to nearly four-in-ten among white Southerners. Among Tea Party members, 26 percent sympathize with the Confederacy more than the Union, and that number grows to 28 percent among Republicans.

via ThinkProgress » 150 Years Later, Tea Partiers Still Aren’t Over The Civil War.

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April 12, 2011 · 11:41 pm

Infrastructure Improvements ‘Key To Recovery,’ Report Says

This is what really scares me about the short sighted group in Washington today…

If we don’t start making infrastructure investments, not only will the economy stall, but we won’t be positioned to move forward and compete with other nations…

Another example of where we are heading toward becoming a Third World Country if we don’t start investing in infrastructure and our future…

Slaughter wrote that modernization efforts like high-speed rail development are vital to economic growth — and helped make the U.S. a leading economy in the first place: “High-quality infrastructure has helped boost U.S. productivity and standards of living, in part by encouraging global companies to create high-paying jobs here. Today, however, America’s infrastructure is deteriorating — both in absolute terms and relative to other countries that are rapidly bolstering their infrastructure.”

The nation’s aging infrastructure was thrown into sharp relief in August 2007 when an interstate bridge jammed with rush hour traffic suddenly collapsed, pitching dozens of cars into the Mississippi River below and killing 13 people.

via Infrastructure Improvements ‘Key To Recovery,’ Report Says.

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April 12, 2011 · 10:40 pm

Reclaiming the Politics of Freedom | The Nation

Another great article from The Nation…

The Conservatives really are PR geniuses.  They also have Street Smarts.

The Democrats have to look to history to frame their arguments in ways that have worked before.  This article has some good advice….

They also have to get over their fear of the GOP yelling “class warfare.”  The Class War is already on and the Middle Class is losing….

We must also change the argument about government. Government need not be a source of constraint, as conservatives claim. Nor is it designed to protect citizens from the vagaries of the market, as many liberals claim—a formulation that depicts citizens as needy and passive and opens liberals to the charge of paternalism and condescension. When government is aligned with democratic movements on the ground, as Walter Reuther and Martin Luther King Jr. understood, it becomes the individual’s instrument for liberating herself from her rulers in the private sphere, a way to break the back of private autocracy.

In forging his realignment, Roosevelt was careful to identify the enemy not as a political party but an economic aristocracy. Throughout the 1936 campaign, he barely mentioned Alf Landon. Instead, he denounced the Liberty League and the businessmen it represented. Realignments in America are like that: Jackson railed against the Bank; the Republicans ran against the slaveocracy; Reagan campaigned against the liberal elite. Part of this is strategic: it’s easier to peel away voters from the opposition if you can show that it is not their party you oppose but the interests it represents, which are not theirs. But part of it is substantive, reflecting a conviction that the task at hand is not simply to defeat a party or win an election but to free men and women from a malignant social form. If we hope to forge a comparable realignment, we must stop talking about the Tea Party or even the Republicans and start talking about the business class that stands behind them.

via Reclaiming the Politics of Freedom | The Nation.

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April 12, 2011 · 10:28 pm

In the Next Round of Budget Talks, Big Cuts for Health Research Are Coming | The Nation

This Congress- and Washington in general- has no foresight….

Their current budget cutting mania is leading us down the path to becoming a Third World Country.

We have fallen behind the rest of the world in so many areas and they seem intent on pushing us back even more…

From The Nation:

But the real damage will come after the proposed cuts take effect. The NIH is comprised of twenty-seven institutes and centers with particular focuses, including the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and National Heart Lung and Blood Institute; each will decide how to manage their individual cuts. The NCI will prioritize funding the same level of new grants (they currently fund 14 percent of new grant applications), but will have to cut funding from cancer centers. Others will have to choose between new and existing grants. When ongoing grants aren’t renewed, work may simply stop. “University departments will do their best to support promising research during a dry spell,” explains Riggins, “and there are a few foundations that provide bridge grants, but these resources aren’t abundant either.”

In the long term, funding scarcity will make it hard to attract top research scientists. Many have already left for more stable careers in industry. And US labs will continue to lose people not just to other fields but to other countries as well. Kelly Ruggles, a microbiologist at Columbia, says, “It used to be that people would come here to get trained in the sciences. Now, people are leaving for better opportunities in Singapore or China. There’s just more science than money right now.”

Of course, this is a difficult funding environment, but the proposed NIH cuts are based in part on ignorance. Legislators who understand the NIH tend to give it full-voiced support. When retired Representative John Edward Porter chaired the appropriations subcommittee that oversees the NIH, he held hearings with each of the twenty-seven institutes so members could hear directly from the researchers why they needed money and what they were doing with it. When, during the mid-’90s, the House Budget Committee proposed cuts to the NIH budget, Porter brought a troupe of Nobel laureates, esteemed scientists and business leaders in to meet with then-speaker Gingrich. The result? Instead of cutting the budget, Congress doubled the NIH budget over five years, because they saw that the funding was working. “I certainly learned that the money going to the NIH was money that was being tremendously well spent,” recalls Porter, “making a difference in the lives of human beings all over the planet.”

via In the Next Round of Budget Talks, Big Cuts for Health Research Are Coming | The Nation.

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April 12, 2011 · 9:53 pm

Budget debate was fought entirely on the GOP’s turf

Greg Sargent, at The Washington Post, makes some good points here…

First of all, it’s all about the 2012 Elections, not about what is best for the Country or what the Democrats core beliefs may be…

We know the Republicans have no core beliefs…

Sadly, given what happened in 2010, this approach might be necessary to deal with an uneducated, stressed out, results oriented electorate.  Obama’s strategy may be to try to protect the American electorate from themselves…

This might be smart, but it’s also very scary….

And it sacrifices good policy on the altar of political necessity….

And Americans have no one to blame but themselves…

President Obama’s advisers apparently believe that his best route to reeelection is to acknowledge the need for more fiscal discipline, while picking a fight with the GOP over the need for targeted government investment in our future and painting the GOP’s cut-at-all-costs vision as out of the mainstream. In fairness, his advisers, as Paul Krugman noted recently, may very well be right about this.

But it’s still worth appreciating how far to the right the debate has shifted, in part because of Democratic acquiescence. The idea that government spending should be a job-creation tool in our arsenal was entirely marginalized, to the point that it was simply not part of the discussions; meanwhile, the insane conservative demand for $100 billion in cuts was treated as a kind of outer right-wing boundary of legitimate discourse. The result: Giving Boehner more than he originally asked for in cuts became the stuff of middle ground compromise.

via Budget debate was fought entirely on the GOP’s turf – The Plum Line – The Washington Post.

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April 11, 2011 · 11:30 pm

Conservative Economists Criticize ‘Off The Deep End’ Republican Budget

This crazy budget proposal from Paul Ryan and the GOP is already in serious trouble.  It both cuts Medicare and Taxes for the Rich while increasing Defense spending.  That’s just crazy….

Now some of the old line Conservatives are coming out in agreement that it’s not a serious, much less “courageous” proposal….

I’m hoping this is another example of smoke and mirrors where the smoke is starting to clear, the mirror’s are breaking and Toto has pulled back the curtain to reveal the Koch Brothers and their fellow wealthy friends, who now own the GOP, are the wizards behind the curtain….

From TalkingPointsMemo.com:

“It doesn’t address in any serious or courageous way the issue of the near and medium-term deficit,” David Stockman told me in a Thursday phone interview. “I think the biggest problem is revenues. It is simply unrealistic to say that raising revenue isn’t part of the solution. It’s a measure of how far off the deep end Republicans have gone with this religious catechism about taxes.”

Stockman, who directed Ronald Reagan’s Office of Management and Budget, approves of Ryan’s entitlement proposals, but breaks faith over taxes and the GOP’s unwillingness to slash defense spending. And he laughs off the notion that the plan will do anything about unemployment, let alone dramatically reduce it, which Ryan and his plan claim it will. “This isn’t 1980. It’s not morning again in America. it’s late afternoon, or possibly even sunset.”

On this score, Doug Holtz-Eakin — a former McCain and George W. Bush economic adviser — told Huffington Post Ryan’s plan is “implausibly optimistic.”

The libertarian economist Tyler Cowen wrote up a point-by-point critique of the plan. His principle objections are that the plan doesn’t do anything to control health care costs, and cutting Medicaid is neither good policy, nor urgent. Indeed, he notes, “Medicaid should be one of the last parts of the health care budget to cut.” Emphasis in the original.

via Conservative Economists Criticize ‘Off The Deep End’ Republican Budget | TPMDC.

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April 11, 2011 · 11:04 pm

Danville Workers’ Complaints Surround IKEA’s U.S. Factory

Extremely interesting article about the IKEA factory in Danville, VA, the city I escaped from, I mean I was born in…

Thanks to Tim Flowers for making me aware of this article in the Los Angeles Times…

Funny….I don’t recall seeing it mentioned in the Danville Register and Bee…

“It’s ironic that Ikea looks on the U.S. and Danville the way that most people in the U.S. look at Mexico,” Street said.

The Swedwood factory is situated on the outskirts of Danville, in the midst of rolling tobacco country, just north of the North Carolina border.

For most of the last century the town of 45,000 relied on textiles and tobacco for jobs. Today the riverfront is lined with empty red brick warehouses and crumbling mills. With the unemployment rate high — currently at 10.1% — the city has put muscle behind attracting new companies, including Ikea.

“They’ve definitely given jobs to people that desperately needed them here,” city manager Joe King said.

Swedwood says it chose Danville to cut shipping costs to its U.S. stores. The plant has been run mostly by American managers, along with some from Sweden.

via Ikea: Workers’ complaints surround Ikea’s U.S. factory – latimes.com.

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April 11, 2011 · 10:10 pm

4 ways we’re still fighting the Civil War – CNN.com

This article gave me a lot to think about.  Since Americans don’t know, don’t care about and don’t learn from their history, it’s also rather scary.

Some amazing parallels here in this article.

I encourage you to click the link and read the entire thing on CNN.com:

But you don’t have to tour a battlefield to understand the Civil War. Look at today’s headlines. As the nation commemorates the 150th anniversary of its deadliest war this week, some historians say we’re still fighting over some of the same issues that fueled the Civil War.

“There are all of these weird parallels,” says Stephanie McCurry, author of “Confederate Reckoning,” a new book that examines why Southerners seceded and its effect on Southern women and slaves.

“When you hear charges today that the federal government is overreaching, and the idea that the Constitution recognized us as a league of sovereign states — these were all part of the secessionist charges in 1860,” she says.

“Living history” on Civil War battlefields

These “weird parallels” go beyond the familiar debates over what caused the war, slavery or states’ rights. They extend to issues that seem to have nothing to do with the Civil War.

The shutdown of the federal government, war in Libya, the furor over the new health care law and Guantanamo Bay — all have tentacles that reach back to the Civil War, historians say.

They point to four parallels:

via 4 ways we’re still fighting the Civil War – CNN.com.

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