The Devil in the Details

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This week House Republicans choked on Paul Ryan’s budget plan. Yes, the plan Republicans and baggers have long praised as a work of genius and exquisite wonkiness suddenly didn’t look so hot. That’s because they finally had to deal with the details.

Krugman:

The big if hard-to-report story in DC last week was the ongoing collapse in governance, as Republicans proved themselves unable to reconcile their ideological commitment to drastically lower government spending with the reality that they and their constituents actually benefit from said spending. They’re willing to impose savage cuts on the poor — but even that gets them nothing like the spending cuts they claim they’ll make. Yet rather than acknowledge this reality, they’re basically sticking their heads in the sand.

Times Editorial Board:

A $44 billion measure based on the tooth-and-claw Ryan blueprint approved by the same House just three months ago had to be yanked from the floor when not enough Republicans showed up to vote yes. An embarrassed leadership was forced to concede that the size of the proposal’s cuts to transportation, housing and urban development had become intolerable even to the fiscal zealots among the rank and file, who no longer had the stomach to walk the austerity talk.

Part of the problem, as I understand it, is that the famous policy wonky Ryan Budget that House Republicans have passed at least twice that I can remember was actually long on promise but short on detail. It was more wishful than wonky, to be honest. And when it finally came time for the congress critters to get specific about exactly what programs had to be cut, and how much, they choked. They realized that the cuts would hurt actual flesh-and-blood voting constituents, plus their political careers, and not just the generic welfare queens and other fabled archetypes of parasitism rattling around in their heads. The Times continues,

… the House’s skittishness at the decidedly unpopular costs of some of the party’s budget strictures presented a revealing tableau of both hypocrisy and weakness: Republicans could not pass their own cramped vision of the future.

The Ryan Budget never added up, or subtracted down, or whatever, the way Ryan claimed it would. Ezra Klein explained back in March 2012,

CBO hasn’t looked at whether Ryan’s budget will achieve the results Ryan says it will. Rather, it looked at what will happen assuming Ryan’s budget achieves the results that Ryan says it will.

On the third page, CBO writes, “Chairman Ryan and his staff specified rules by which revenues and spending would evolve.” They then detail what those rules were:

Ryan tells CBO to assume his tax plan will raise revenues to 19 percent of GDP and then hold them there. He tells them to assume his Medicare plan will hold cost growth in Medicare to GDP+0.5 percentage points. He tells them to assume that spending on Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program won’t grow any faster than inflation. He tells them to assume that all federal spending aside from Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security will fall from 12.5 percent of GDP in 2011 to 3.75 percent of GDP in 2050.

He tells them to assume that if we all wish real, real hard, the budget will balance.

Back to Krugman:

There’s a long history here — Republicans have been for lower spending in the abstract, but unable to find things they actually want to cut, for a long time. But the more immediate source of their present difficulties is the Ryan budget. Remember how that budget was initially greeted with cheers and adulation? But the CBO wasn’t fooled; in fact, its report came as close as I’ve ever seen to being openly sarcastic, especially with regard to the kinds of spending that now have Congress paralyzed:

The path for all other federal spending excluding interest—that is, for discretionary spending and mandatory spending apart from that for Social Security and the major mandatory health care programs—was specified by Chairman Ryan’s staff. The remaining part of mandatory spending includes such programs as federal civilian and military retirement, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, unemployment compensation, Supplemental Security Income, the refundable portion of the earned income and child tax credits, and most veterans’ programs. Discretionary spending includes both defense spending and nondefense spending—in roughly equal amounts currently. That combination of other mandatory and discretionary spending was specified to decline from 12 percent of GDP in 2010 to about 6 percent in 2021 and then move in line with the GDP price deflator beginning in 2022, which would generate a further decline relative to GDP. No proposals were specified that would generate that path.

By budget office standards, that last sentence is uproarious.

A lot of right-wing governing ideas are like this. As long as they’re just talk bouncing around the echo chamber, being preached by fanatical gasbags long of wind but short of facts, the troglodytes can think themselves brilliant and congratulate themselves on their great ideas. But when dragged into the cold light of day and put to work actually doing something, the ideas are revealed to be the broken, twisted, ill-conceived things that they are.

Virginia Is for Liars

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Lewis Black needs to do a New York vs. Virginia video. Virginia — don’t bleep with New York.

This week Mayor Bloomberg blasted Virginia for being the biggest supplier of guns used in crimes in New York.

Bloomberg railed that 90% of all guns used in city crimes in 2011 came from other states — and that more of them came from Virginia than anywhere else, including the weapon that killed NYPD officer Peter Figoski in December of that year.

“We’re getting killed, and we’re getting killed with guns … from elsewhere,” Bloomberg charged.

This has been a problem for years in New York. It’s just way too easy for gun runners to buy a trunk full of firearms in the South and drive them up to New York. But then …

The office of Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell tried to turn the tables, arguing that Virginia’s “homicide and robbery (rates) are significantly lower than New York City’s.”

McDonnell spokeswoman Taylor Keeney then took a patronizing swipe at the Big Apple.

“We wish the mayor well as he attempts to address these issues within his home state and we hope he won’t hesitate to call on us if our law enforcement agencies can be of assistance in ensuring public safety in New York City,” she sniffed.

I doubt the NYPD needs any assistance from any candy-ass Virginia law enforcement agencies. However …

But the Daily News checked the numbers — and McDonnell isn’t facing facts.

New York State, with 3.5 murders per 100,000 people, had a lower murder rate than Virginia, which had 3.9 killings for every 100,000 people.

And, McDonnell, who is busy with a scandal over accepting loans and gifts from a businessman, overlooked the mayhem in his own backyard. Virginia’s capital, Richmond, where McDonnell lives, had 20.2 murders per 100,000 residents last year — four times the murder rate of New York City.

Maybe Richmond could use some help from the NYPD.

A spokesperson for the lying, weaseling state of Virginia tried to slither out of this little oopsie by arguing that Virginia has about the same population as New York City, and if you compare New York City to all of Virginia, NYC has higher crime rates.

Criminologists trashed Virginia’s argument.

“You don’t compare cities with states. They are different entities,” said criminologist James Fox of Northeastern University.

“Urban areas have higher crimes rates. States have lots of rural areas and small towns that have lower crime rates. It’s like comparing apples to fruit salad,” he said.

This may be a stretch:

And Bloomberg spokesman Kamran Mumtaz noted that strong gun laws in the city have helped to make New York “the safest big city in the country.”

It’s certainly true that New York City is among the safest big cities in the country, but if you call it “the safest” you have to qualify what you mean by “big” and what you mean by “safe.” Manhattan has Wall Street, after all. But if you just look at homicide rates of cities with at least 2 million people, yeah, New York wins, beating Chicago, Houston, and Los Angeles. If you look at overall violent crime in cities of at least 250,000, New York City still looks pretty good, with below average violent crime rates.

And it would be even safer if Virginia weren’t supplying criminals with guns.

Geezers in Space

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Remember a few days ago I mentioned the FreedomWorks plan to get young people to burn their Obamacare cards? And I said this sounded like a plan only a bunch of hopeless geezers would come up with? Well, if you want to see the damnfool thing, here it is.

Note the part on the page where it says, “If 3 million Americans refuse to obey this unconstitutional mandate, ObamaCare falls apart for good.” Um, didn’t the SCOTUS say the mandate is constitutional last year, fellas?

As Stephen Colbert notes in the clip below, there is actually no such thing as an Obamacard card, so you’ll have to print it, trim it, and laminate it yourself. But the design is based on Vietnam-era draft cards. Really.

While the military has draft cards, the Affordable Care Act does not. Instead, FreedomWorks took an image of the Vietnam draft cards and grafted the word “Obamacare” to the top. The hope is that students will film themselves burning these cards and upload the videos online.

Would today’s students really do that? Really?

As Joan McCarter says, “nothing says Freedom! like spending hours in the emergency room waiting to see a doctor for the burn you got from torching a fake Obamacare card.”

Not to be outdone by FreedomWorks, the Heritage Foudation is putting “clever” GIFs on Buzzfeed to appeal to the young folks. Judging by the reactions left on the page, this effort is what is called a “fail.”

The plan amounts to persuading younger and healthier people to deny themselves medical coverage so that everyone else’s health insurance is more expensive. Jonathan Cohn explains why this is not likely to work.

See also Timothy Egan, “Saboteurs in the Potato Salad“:

Just now, a cell of several hundred people has been dispatched into the American summer, to picnics, town halls, radio stations, hospitals and Little League playing fields, with a mission to derail the economic recovery and drum up support for sabotaging federal law. They’re not terrorists, nor are they agents of a foreign government. This is your United States Congress, the Republican House, on recess for the next five weeks.

They even have a master plan, a 31-page kit put together by the House Republican Conference, for every member to follow while back home with the folks. It’s called “Fighting Washington for all Americans,” and includes a prototype op-ed piece, with a political version of the line usually reserved for dumping lovers: “This isn’t about me. It’s about you.”

Here’s a sample suggestion, from Page 28, of how to stage a phony public meeting with business owners:

“Confirm the theme(s) prior to the event and make sure the participants will be 100 percent on message. (Note: while they do not have to be Republicans, they need to be able to discuss the negative effects of Obamacare on their employees.)”

And what if I have a child with cancer, and the insurance company plans to dump him if Republicans stop Obamacare in its tracks? Can I attend? Or what if I’m counting on buying into the new health care exchanges in my state, saving hundreds of dollars on my insurance bill?

The kit has an answer: planting supporters, with prescreened softball questions, will ensure that such things never get asked. More important, this tactic will assure that any meeting with the dreaded public will go “in the direction that is most beneficial to the member,” as the blueprint states.

I thought this wasn’t about you.

The last word goes to Professor Krugman:

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

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

The trouble is that it’s hard to give this issue anything like the amount of coverage it deserves on substantive grounds without repeating oneself. So I do try to mix it up. But neither you nor I should forget that the madness of the GOP is the central issue of our time.

Madness and chronic geezertude.

Book Recommendations

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By now you may have heard about possibly the Most Ignorant Interview in the History of Television, in which Fox News’s Laureen Green grilled religious scholar Reza Aslan about why a Muslim would want to write a book about Jesus. Yesterday Fox doubled down and hosted Brent Bozell, who declared that if Aslan really is “just a scholar” and not a propagandist/polemicist he can’t be a good Muslim. Seriously.

Aslan is no fool. After the interview his book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth shot up to the top of the Amazon best seller list, and it’s still there as of this morning. I downloaded the book to my Kindle a couple of days ago, and wow, this guy is a good writer. I haven’t gotten to any parts talking about Jesus yet, but Aslan’s account of all the political/social nonsense going on in the Roman Empire at the time is genuinely engrossing, and some of it is new to me.

Another book I downloaded a few days ago is Beautifully Unique Sparkleponies: On Myths, Morons, Free Speech, Football, and Assorted Absurdities by Chris Kluwe. I couldn’t resist a book written by a football jock titled Beautifully Unique Sparkleponies. This may be a girl thing. But it’s really a fun little read, along the lines of good blog writing.

Another recommendation, briefly reviewed at the other site, is a novel, Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being I hardly ever find a novel I actually like, and I actually liked this one.

This last book might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I got a kick out of it — There Is No God and He Is Always With You, by Brad Warner, also reviewed and blogged about at the other site.

Oh, and if you buy any books from the evil Amazon — and yeah, it’s Amazon — if you get to Amazon by clicking on the Amazon ad in the right-hand column here, I get a small cut of the profits.

Not So Grand Bargains

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It’s a familiar pattern — the President proposes some kind of gawdawful “grand bargain” that the Right won’t take, anyway, while lefties roll their eyes and say, “What is he thinking?” Well, this week he did it again — Paul Waldman explains —

President Obama offered a “grand bargain” yesterday, and although it wasn’t particularly grand, it was a bargain: Republicans would get a lowering of the corporate income tax rate, something they’ve wanted for a long time, and Democrats would get some new investments in infrastructure, job training, and education. Inevitably, Republicans rejected it out of hand. “It’s just a further-left version of a widely panned plan he already proposed two years ago, this time with extra goodies for tax-and-spend liberals,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. At this point, Obama could offer to close the E.P.A., eliminate all inheritance taxes, and rename our nation’s capital “Reagan, D.C.” if Republicans would also agree to give one poor child a sandwich, and they’d say no, because that would be too much big government.

Bloomberg explains it in a way that makes the bargain seem less awful, because it closes a lot of “corporate welfare” tax loopholes for corporations. Bloomberg adds:

More broadly, it’s not hard to see Obama’s strategy: With its cuts in tax rates and narrowed loopholes, the plan is designed to appeal to a wide swath of corporate America, the small-business lobby and a large number of congressional Republicans who support cutting taxes and ending corporate welfare. And with its increases in public-works spending, the plan appeals to organized labor, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and a large number of Democrats who support more stimulus spending.

Michael Tomasky:

There are those who might say that it just makes Obama look impotent to keep proposing these things only to the see GOP say, Are you kidding? I guess they have a bit of a point. But I think his only strategy by now is to put offers on the table that make the Republicans look increasingly extreme and unreasonable, so that the American people see more and more clearly what the problem is.

And not just the American people in general—in this case, corporate leaders in particular. Presumably, corporations are going to support Obama’s plan by and large; hard to see why they’d oppose something that lowers their taxes (although it’s true that specific companies in specific areas will fight to retain their loopholes). Corporate leaders have had plenty of patience with Mitch McConnell. But how much patience are they going to have with a McConnell who blocks a tax cut for them?

Maybe still a lot, I don’t know. But this is now the only way left to penetrate the GOP’s wall of obstruction: Drive the wedge right between the congressional GOP and its usual power centers. Corporate America wants immigration reform. It wants lower tax rates, and it (or a large majority of it) will happily accept infrastructure reform as part of a package. Obama wants those same things. The Republicans are against them. Surely at some point, some corporate leader or leaders will step forward and say enough. Even that probably won’t make congressional Republicans move; they are married to the most rabid section of their base, and they are not going to budge.

Corporate America doesn’t always act rationally, however.

Yellin’ About Yellen

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I haven’t been following the issue of choosing a new Federal Reserve chairperson that closely, but today lots of people are writing about it, and it’s jaw-dropping stuff.

Apparently the main contenders are Lawrence Summers (booooo!) and Janet Yellen (yay!). Yellen is vice chairwoman of the Fed’s board of governors, and everybody who understands this stuff says she would be an awesome choice.

But the resistance to Yellen has taken what we might call a patriarchal turn. Some guy with the improbable name of Cardiff Garcia writes,

This particular plank of support for a Yellen candidacy was reinforced by the Wall Street Journal’s analysis on Monday of FOMC forecasts since 2009. It turns out that she has also been successful, more than any other FOMC member, at predicting the short-term trajectories of the major economic indicators.

Obviously there’s no guarantee that this would continue, but at the very least this serves to further disprove one very peculiar notion given by Ezra Klein’s sources last week for preferring Larry Summers to Yellen — specifically the notion that “the market” trusts Summers more, because (we guess?) he’ll be a tough manly man on inflation while she’s a homeless-hugging San Francisco hippie female person who will let the US economy revert back to the hellspun apocalyptic landscape of the 1970s, ushering in another era of frozen wastelands and broken homes and shattered dreams.

Say what? Paul Krugman explains that last bit:

I’ve spent five years and more watching the inflationphobes, who weren’t particularly sensible to begin with, descend into shrill unholy madness. They could have reacted to the failure of their predictions — the continued absence of the runaway inflation they insisted was just around the corner — by stepping back and reconsidering both their model and their recommendations. But no. At best, we see a proliferation of new reasons to raise interest rates in a depressed economy, with nary an acknowledgment that previous predictions were dead wrong. At worst, we see conspiracy theories — we actually have double-digit inflation, but the BLS is spiriting the evidence away in its black helicopters and burying it in Area 51.

So at this point I thought I’d seen everything. But no: the prospect that Janet Yellen, a monetary dove, might become the next Fed chair has driven the right into a frenzy of — well, words fail me.

But the real objections coming out against Yellen are more, shall we say, primordial. Ezra Klein writes about The subtle, sexist whispering campaign against Janet Yellen. But after seeing this New York Sun editorial on The Female Dollar, I can’t say I see anything subtle. That’s about the most blatantly sexist thing I’ve read in a long time. I’m not going to quote the thing; just see for yourself.

Jonathan Chait writes

The Sun’s point — captured in its headline, “The Female Dollar?” — struck the Wall Street Journal’s editors as so clever as to bear repeating in their own editorial today. Yellen, the Journal concedes, “doesn’t lack for professional credentials. But her cause has been taken up by the liberal diversity police as a gender issue because she’d be the first female Fed chairman.”

See how it works? It’s not the pigs pundits at the Sun who are sexist, but evil libruhls who support a woman for the position who are sexist. Because no matter how well qualified they are — and Cardiff Garcia, above, links to a Wall Street Journal analysis that says Yellen is very qualified, indeed — the only reason libruhls want women and minorities hired into important positions is that they are women and minorities, which is of course sexist and racist. So the only way to avoid sexism and racism is to hire only white men.

Kentucky Is Doomed

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Rand Paul and Chris Christie are engaged in a public verbal smackdown. Time to pass the popcorn.

The Associated Press reports:

Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul hit back at New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie in the two Republicans’ ongoing spat over national security.

Christie last week criticized Paul’s opposition to warrantless federal surveillance programs, saying it harmed efforts to prevent terrorism. Paul told reporters after speaking at a fundraiser outside Nashville on Sunday that Christie’s position hurts GOP chances in national elections, and that spending priorities of critics like the governor and Rep. Peter King of New York do more to harm national security.

“They’re precisely the same people who are unwilling to cut the spending, and their ‘Gimme, gimme, gimme — give me all my Sandy money now.’” Paul said, referring to federal funding after the hurricane last year. “Those are the people who are bankrupting the government and not letting enough money be left over for national defense.”

Needless to say, I disagree with both of them. But there seems to be a pattern of right-wing lawmakers and governors bad-mouthing Sandy relief and then accepting federal money for their own natural disasters. Rick Perry and Oklahoma senators Coburn and Inhofe come to mind, and I’m sure we could find more — so if I lived in Kentucky I’d be sure my insurance policies were paid up.

Kentucky is bordered by the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, both of which have flooded massively in the past, and western Kentucky is in a major seismic zone, so killer earthquakes are not out of the question. Plus they do get some good-size tornadoes in Kentucky sometimes. Be afraid, Kentucky.

Righties Are Stupid, Part Trois Cent Cinquante

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President Obama has been talking about income inequality:

In a week when he tried to focus attention on the struggles of the middle class, President Obama said in an interview that he was worried that years of widening income inequality and the lingering effects of the financial crisis had frayed the country’s social fabric and undermined Americans’ belief in opportunity.

Upward mobility, Mr. Obama said in a 40-minute interview with The New York Times, “was part and parcel of who we were as Americans.”

“And that’s what’s been eroding over the last 20, 30 years, well before the financial crisis,” he added.

“If we don’t do anything, then growth will be slower than it should be. Unemployment will not go down as fast as it should. Income inequality will continue to rise,” he said. “That’s not a future that we should accept.”

Hold that thought.

Also, too, the Associated Press came out with this —

Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream.

Survey data exclusive to The Associated Press points to an increasingly globalized U.S. economy, the widening gap between rich and poor and loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs as reasons for the trend.

So how does right-wing blogger Rick Moran respond to this? You will never guess. No, really. So I will tell you —

I read this AP story and could hardly believe it. Obama is still out there talking about “income inequality” when 80% of his constituents are living on the economic edge.

All together now: What do you think “income inequality” means, genius?

I swear, some of these people have had their brains sucked out and replaced by old wadded-up copies of The Internet for Dummies.

Getting back to the AP story —

Hardship is particularly on the rise among whites, based on several measures. Pessimism among that racial group about their families’ economic futures has climbed to the highest point since at least 1987….

…Sometimes termed “the invisible poor” by demographers, lower-income whites are generally dispersed in suburbs as well as small rural towns, where more than 60 percent of the poor are white. Concentrated in Appalachia in the East, they are also numerous in the industrial Midwest and spread across America’s heartland, from Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma up through the Great Plains.

In other words — red state America.

More than 19 million whites fall below the poverty line of $23,021 for a family of four, accounting for more than 41 percent of the nation’s destitute, nearly double the number of poor blacks.

Ryan Cooper, not a rightie, writes,

It’s probably fair to say also that poor whites are overwhelmingly Republican, and in large part due to an overhang of racial resentment.

Ya think? They watch Faux News and listen to Rush, and they’re all hopped up about all the illegal immigrants and black street thugs in hoodies and women getting abortions and liberal elites trying to take away their guns. And like the lemmings they are, they continue to vote for politicians who are screwing them.

Do we need Reality for Dummies? Maybe if it were a comic book …

Some Republicans Bracing for Backlash

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Some on the Right are advising against the defund Obamacare scheme, thinking it will come back to bite the party.

Here’s Joan McCarter:

The Senate fight is quite public, with one GOP senator calling the defunding plan the “dumbest idea” he had ever heard. Senate GOP leadership, now that Cornyn has slunk back under his rock, will likely just ignore the nihilists, and can probably slap the idea down between now and the fall, when the funding debate happens. House Speaker Boehner and Minority Leader Cantor, however, might have a bigger problem on their hands. They’ve got a letter from more than 60 members telling them to have this fight.

Lest you wonder where the impetus is coming from for the yahoos:

Atop the letter it reads “supported by Heritage Action and Club for Growth,” in all capital letters, and highlighted in yellow, referring to the conservative outside groups.

The Republican Party made its bed with these groups, or lined their pockets with them anyway. And now they’re feeling the pain. Doesn’t it just make your heart bleed for them?

Now Sen. Tom Coburn is warning his fellow Republicans the scheme could backfire and cost them the House. But you can’t tell a bagger anything.

Elsewhere, some on the Right speculate that onerous voter suppression efforts could backfire, too, by giving Democrats and minority voters something to rally behind. Steve M. links to some articles about this, and adds:

If this is accurate, it’s not the only example in recent life of a powerful group choosing to punish the less powerful at a cost to itself. Look at the economy over the last six years. Yes, the rich are doing fine, but even they must realize that they’d be doing better if the rest of us had a little more money to buy goods and services. But here and in Europe they’d rather work the system to make sure it keeps punishing us. It’s as if hurting the people they hate — us “takers” — is so soul-satisfying to them that they’d rather do it to us forever than have a sustained economic recovery.

The Republican Party clearly feels the same way about non-whites: let’s keep alienating black and Hispanic voters, let’s abort all attempts at outreach, and let’s sustain that effort even if it means the GOP can’t win another presidential election for the foreseeable future. It’s as if the hate is just too satisfying not to indulge, no matter what the cost.

Well, yes. Because, deep down, the current Republican party isn’t about promoting conservative government policies. They don’t give a hoo-haw about conservative government policies. The current Republican party is all about acting out. It’s about pushing back against everything and everyone they resent and fear. It’s about maintaining a world that is a perfect reflection of the old white patriarchy. That’s all they really care about.