Tag Archives: budget

Paul Ryan’s Vision of a Dickensian Hellhole Is Up For a Vote Next Year

by PearleneJenks Posted on June 16, 2015

Mother Jones

Jon Chait points out today that it doesn’t really matter very much whether Hillary Clinton moves a little leftward, a little center-ward, or frankly, in any other direction during the upcoming presidential campaign. Oh, it might help her get elected, but once in office Republicans aren’t going to pass any of her proposals, no matter what they happen to be. Nonetheless:

The presidential election carries hugely important stakes, not just in policy realms where the president wields significant influence on her own, like foreign policy and judicial appointments, but also on domestic policy. It’s just that the stakes have nothing to do with Clinton’s proposals. What’s at stake is the Paul Ryan budget.

….Jeb Bush has already endorsed the Ryan budget. Marco Rubio has voted for it and said, “by and large, it’s exactly the direction we should be headed.” The other candidates have positioned themselves to their right….The overall thrust is perfectly clear: deep cuts in marginal tax rates along with large reductions in means-tested spending, and a deregulation of the energy and financial industries. Its enactment would amount to the most dramatic rollback of government since the New Deal.

….News coverage has oddly failed to frame this question as the center of the election. Journalists like personal drama, and they prefer to place the candidates and their individual ideas in the center of the portrait.

In fairness, the general election is a long way off. It’s pretty understandable that campaign reporters are currently spending most of their time on primary jockeying and not on the details of policy proposals—especially since most of the candidates haven’t yet done more than outline their domestic agendas anyway.

That said, no one took this very seriously in 2012, even though the Ryan budget was at stake then too. I’ll toss out three reasons I suspect the same thing will happen this time too:

  1. The eventual Republican candidate will insist that the Ryan budget is “a great roadmap” and “the direction our administration will move in,” or some such waffle. But he will refuse to flatly endorse the document itself (“As the Constitution requires, details will be negotiated as part of the congressional budgeting process blah blah blah”), and this refusal will be taken at face value.
  2. As I’ve mentioned enough times to be a bore about it, Republicans generally get a pass from the press corps when they advocate some militantly right-wing position. It’s taken as little more than an applause line they “have” to deliver to appease the base, not something they’ll actually do once they’re in office.
  3. And in the case of the Ryan budget, the truth is that when Republicans are out of power they do always say that the budget is a looming apocalypse and needs to be slashed—but when they’re in power it usually turns out they like spending money too. Sure, they always have a period of remorse and backbiting after they’ve been turfed out of office, swearing that next time they’ll slash the budget for sure. But they never do. They just run big deficits. So it’s hardly surprising that seasoned campaign reporters take this stuff with a grain of salt when they hear it.

So are Republicans serious about it this time? Beats me. I don’t really want to risk finding out, but I honestly have no idea.

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Paul Ryan’s Vision of a Dickensian Hellhole Is Up For a Vote Next Year

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Louisiana Ran Out of Money. You Won’t Believe What They Did Next.

by CarrolDaulton Posted on June 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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Bobby Jindal has become such an increasingly pathetic figure that I find it hard to work up the nastiness to even mock him in a blog post these days. But Jordan Weissmann links today to a piece in the Baton Rouge Advocate that’s truly mind bending. Jindal desperately needs to raise revenue this year because he’s left Louisiana in a huge budget hole thanks to his true-believer tax-cutting mania. But Grover Norquist won’t allow him to raise revenues. What to do? Here’s the Advocate explaining the Jindal/Norquist-approved SAVE program:

It would assess a fee of about $1,500 per higher education student and raise about $350 million total, but only on paper. Students wouldn’t have to pay anything because an offsetting tax credit for the $1,500. Nor would universities receive any new money.

However, the SAVE fund would create a tax credit for the $350 million that Jindal could use to offset $350 million of the new revenue that legislators are proposing to raise.

I’m not sure that’s entirely clear, but I think I understand what’s going on. Let’s break it down:

  1. SAVE raises $350 million in revenue to help close the budget hole.
  2. It also creates a tax credit that—in theory—offsets the new revenue with a $350 million tax cut. So far this is kosher because there’s no net tax increase.
  3. However, SAVE also creates $350 million in new student fees.
  4. Then the tax credit is used—in actual practice—to offset the student fees so students don’t have to pay any more than they did before.
  5. The net result is $350 million in new revenue that’s not offset.

WTF? All these years Grover Norquist has been terrorizing Washington with his no-new-taxes pledge, but it turns out that this is all it takes to wiggle your way around it? If we’d known this we sure could have avoided an awful lot of stubborn confrontation on Capitol Hill over the past couple of decades. I can think of a hundred ways we can use this dodge in the future.

You know, I live in California and we’ve engaged in a whole lot of budget smoke and mirrors over the years. So I hardly need smelling salts when I hear about state governments pushing the envelope during budget season. But this truly boggles the mind when it comes to sheer dumbness. Maybe next they’ll just start minting their own Louisiana bucks and paying for stuff that way.

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Louisiana Ran Out of Money. You Won’t Believe What They Did Next.

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My Stake In the 2016 Election Is Way More Personal Than Usual

by UTQAlexand Posted on March 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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Ed Kilgore:

I’m increasingly convinced that by the end of the Republican presidential nominating process the candidates will have pressured each other into a Pact of Steel to revoke all of Obama’s executive orders and regulations. The post-2012 GOP plan to quickly implement the Ryan Budget and an Obamacare repeal in a single reconciliation bill will almost certainly be back in play if Republicans win the White House while holding on to Congress. Republicans (with even Rand Paul more or less going along) are all but calling for a re-invasion of Iraq plus a deliberate lurch into a war footing with Iran. And now more than ever, the direction of the U.S. Supreme Court would seem to vary almost 180 degrees based on which party will control the next couple of appointments.

This is more personal for me than usual. Scary, too. There are no guarantees in life, and there’s no guarantee that MoJo will employ me forever. If I lose my job, and Republicans repeal Obamacare, I will be left with a very serious and very expensive medical condition and no insurance to pay for it. And I feel quite certain that Republicans will do nothing to help me out.

Obviously lots of other people are in the same position, and have been for a long time. But there’s nothing like being in the crosshairs yourself to bring it all home. If Republicans win in 2016, my life is likely to take a very hard, very personal turn for the worse.

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My Stake In the 2016 Election Is Way More Personal Than Usual

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Republicans Take Game Playing to New Heights With Latest Budget

by EmiliaMackey Posted on March 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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I would like to nominate this for least surprising headline of the year:

And it gets even better. This is unusually straightforward reporting:

House Republicans called it streamlining, empowering states or “achieving sustainability.” They couched deep spending reductions in any number of gauzy euphemisms.

What they would not do on Tuesday was call their budget plan, which slashes spending by $5.5 trillion over 10 years, a “cut.” The 10-year blueprint for taxes and spending they formally unveiled would balance the federal budget, even promising a surplus by 2024, but only with the sort of sleights of hand that Republicans have so often derided.

I get that budget documents are often as much aspirational as anything else, but surely they should have at least some grounding in reality? Here’s the best part:

The plan contains more than $1 trillion in savings from unspecified cuts to programs like food stamps and welfare. To make matters more complicated, the budget demands the full repeal of the Affordable Care Act, including the tax increases that finance the health care law. But the plan assumes the same level of federal revenue over the next 10 years that the Congressional Budget Office foresees with those tax increases in place — essentially counting $1 trillion of taxes that the same budget swears to forgo.

House Republicans sure don’t make it easy to take them seriously, do they?

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Republicans Take Game Playing to New Heights With Latest Budget

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Republicans Are Already Prepping for Possible Government Shutdown in the Fall

by MattieIAFiyce Posted on March 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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The Supreme Court will rule later this year on the question of whether Obamacare subsidies should be repealed in states that don’t run their own insurance exchanges. That would gut a major portion of the law, and Jonathan Weisman reports today that because of this, “the search for a replacement by Republican lawmakers is finally gaining momentum.”

I’m not quite sure how he could write that with a straight face, since I think we all know just how serious Republicans are about passing health care reform of their own. In any case, I think the real news comes a few paragraphs down:

Aides to senior House Republicans said Thursday that committee chairmen were meeting now to decide whether a budget plan — due out the week of March 16 — will include parliamentary language, known as reconciliation instructions, that would allow much of a Republican health care plan to pass the filibuster-prone Senate with a simple majority.

Representative Tom Price of Georgia, the House Budget Committee chairman, said that reconciliation language would be kept broad enough to allow Republican leaders to use it later in the year however they see fit, whether that is passing health care legislation over a Senate filibuster or focusing on taxes or other matters.

If this is true, it means that Republicans are prepping for yet another government shutdown over Obamacare. Any budget that tried to essentially repeal Obamacare in favor of a Republican “replacement” would obviously be met with a swift veto, and that would lead inevitably to the usual dreary standoff that we’ve seen so often over the past few years.

Of course, this will all be moot if the Supreme Court upholds Obamacare in the way common sense dictates. Still, it’s something of a sign of things to come. Shutdown politics is pretty clearly still alive and well in the GOP ranks.

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Republicans Are Already Prepping for Possible Government Shutdown in the Fall

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Scott Walker’s Budget Includes $250,000 To Study ‘Wind Energy System-Related Health Issues’

by Myrna Posted on February 13, 2015

Previous studies have found no link between wind farms and increased health problems. Gateway Technical College/Flickr The two-year, $68 billion budget proposal Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker unveiled Tuesday includes a request for $250,000 to study the health impacts of wind turbines. Page 449 of the budget proposal includes a recommendation from the governor “directing the commission to conduct a study on wind energy system-related health issues.” The request states that a report should be submitted to the governor and legislature within a year after the budget goes into effect. “The request for a Wind Energy Health Issues Study was included with the intent to provide the Public Service Commission with comprehensive information to consider as they receive requests for future wind energy projects,” said Laurel Patrick, Walker’s press secretary, in a statement to The Huffington Post. Read the rest at The Huffington Post. Visit site – Scott Walker’s Budget Includes $250,000 To Study ‘Wind Energy System-Related Health Issues’

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Scott Walker’s Budget Includes $250,000 To Study ‘Wind Energy System-Related Health Issues’

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Scott Walker Wants to Know If Wind Power Is Making People Sick

by JulioQwojsz Posted on February 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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This article originally appeared in the Huffington Post and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The two-year, $68 billion budget proposal Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker unveiled Tuesday includes a request for $250,000 to study the health impacts of wind turbines.

Page 449 of the budget proposal includes a recommendation from the governor “directing the commission to conduct a study on wind energy system-related health issues.” The request states that a report should be submitted to the governor and legislature within a year after the budget goes into effect.

“The request for a Wind Energy Health Issues Study was included with the intent to provide the Public Service Commission with comprehensive information to consider as they receive requests for future wind energy projects,” said Laurel Patrick, Walker’s press secretary, in a statement to The Huffington Post.

Wind power in the state has been the subject of some public debate, drawing campaigns paid for by conservative groups with ties to fossil fuel interests on one side and by renewable energy advocates on the other.

Last October, health officials in Brown County declared that eight turbines located at the Shirley Wind Farm posed a health hazard to residents. The chairwoman of the local board of health cited “ear pain, ear pressure, headaches, nausea” and “sleep deprivation” as symptoms among nearby residents. Local reports suggest Brown is the first county in the country to reach such a conclusion.

The conservative Heartland Institute, which advocates for “free-market solutions,” has touted the Brown County decision, and used it as an opportunity to criticize the state for “imposing its wind power mandates.” Heartland has received funding in the past from fossil fuel interests. Walker has appeared as a guest speaker at the group’s events.

Previous studies have found no link between wind farms and increased health problems. The Wisconsin Wind Siting Council, an advisory group to the state’s public service commission, issued a report to the state legislature last fall that concluded that “some individuals residing in close proximity to wind turbines perceive audible noise and find it annoying,” but “it appears that this group is in the minority and that most individuals do not experience annoyance, stress, or perceived adverse health effects due to the operation of wind turbines.”

Canada’s health department also undertook a large-scale study of the subject in 2012, and concluded last year that wind turbine noise could not be linked to sleep disorders, illnesses, dizziness, ringing in the ears, migraines or headaches, perceived stress, or quality of life concerns. The only thing Canadian health officials did find to be related to wind turbine noise: annoyance with features of turbines, such as noise, shadows cast by the blades, blinking lights, vibrations and visual impacts. They found that louder turbines had a greater impact in that regard. A panel of health experts in Massachusetts also released a study on wind turbine health impacts in 2012 that reached similar conclusions.

Those studies have not diminished the complaints of some residents who live near turbines, however, and that has prompted additional research in this field.

Some renewable energy advocates in the state said they welcome the additional research funded by the Walker budget, as long as it’s based on sound science.

“All peer-reviewed studies to date indicate using the wind is a safe way to generate electricity, far safer for human health than other forms of electricity production, such as coal,” Tyler Huebner, executive director of RENEW Wisconsin, told HuffPost. “If approved and funded, this study should be specifically designed so that the results would be acceptable to the appropriate peer-reviewed science or medical journal. That way, this study would meaningfully expand the body of knowledge on wind and health.”

Others were more skeptical of the governor’s motives. Chris Kunkle, the regional policy manager for the pro-wind group Wind on the Wires, said the study proposed in the budget is “just another example of Gov. Walker’s targeting of an industry that is incredibly successful in largely every other state in the Midwest.”

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Scott Walker Wants to Know If Wind Power Is Making People Sick

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Here’s What’s at the Heart of the Crisis in Greece

by MalcolmA33 Posted on January 29, 2015

Mother Jones

If you’re in the market for some interesting commentary on Greece, there have been a couple of good ones recently. The first comes from Paul Krugman, who, among other things, makes a point that often gets missed: Greece is already running a primary surplus. That is, they’ve cut spending enough over the past few years that their budget would be balanced if it weren’t for interest payments on their gigantic debt. What’s more, their primary surplus is slated to rise to 4.5 percent in the future:

If Greece were to adhere totally to the previous terms, over the next five years it would make resource transfers of about 20 percent of one year’s GDP. From the point of view of the creditors, that’s a trivial sum. From the point of the Greeks, however, it’s crucial; the difference between a primary surplus of 4.5 percent of GDP and, say, 1.5 percent of GDP for the Greek economy and the welfare of its citizens is huge. The only reason for the creditors to play hardball would be to make Greece an example, to discourage other debtors from trying to negotiate relief.

In other words, the EU is demanding that Greece not just balance its budget, but run a large surplus that it will mostly send to large countries for whom it’s a trivial sum. For Greece, though, it’s a huge sum, the difference between years of penury and a return to growth. This is at the heart of the conflict between Greece and the EU.

The second commentary comes from Daniel Davies, who makes the point that Greece’s gigantic debt doesn’t really matter as debt. Everyone knows Greece will never be able to pay it back. But if everyone knows this, why are Germany and the rest of the EU so hellbent on refusing to write it off?

Don’t think of the Greek debt burden, either in cash € terms or as a ratio to GDP, as an economic quantity. It basically isn’t an economically meaningful number any more. The purpose of its existence is as a political quantity; it’s part of the means by which control is exercised over the Greek budget by the Eurosystem. The regular rituals of renegotiation of the bailout package, financing of debt maturity peaks and so on, are the way in which the solvent Euroland nations exercise the kind of political control that they feel they need to have if they are going to be fiscally responsible for the bills.

….It is, therefore, totally inimical to the Eurosystem to hold out any hope of the kind of debt writedown that Syriza wants, as opposed to some smaller, cosmetic face value reduction or maturity extension. The entire reason why Syriza wants to get a major up-front reduction in the debt number is to create political space to execute the rest of their program. The debt issue and the political issue are the same issue. Syriza understands this, and so does the Eurosystem.

In other words, Greece doesn’t want to run a large budget surplus. They want to increase government spending in order to dig their way out of their massive economic depression. The rest of the EU wants no such thing. They’re afraid that if they let Greece off the hook, then (a) everyone else will want to be let off the hook, and (b) Greece will go right back to its free-spending ways and soon require another bailout. If the price of that is years of pain and unemployment, so be it.

There’s more at both links, and both are worth reading.

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Here’s What’s at the Heart of the Crisis in Greece

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15 Ingenious Ways to Save Money on Groceries

by FrancisRudolph Posted on January 17, 2015

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15 Ingenious Ways to Save Money on Groceries

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Republicans Take Aim at Obama, Shoot Workers in the Foot

by GretchenBamford Posted on January 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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President Obama announced yesterday that, yes, he would veto a bill to approve the Keystone XL pipeline. This is hardly news, since he’s already said this before, but it was nonetheless reported as yet another shot across the bow of congressional Republicans. The GOP wants to be reasonable and bipartisan—honest!—but it’s tough when Obama keeps deliberately baiting them like this.

So what’s the GOP doing as a show of good faith? Trying to blow a hole in Obamacare, of course. But that’s not all! They’ve actually picked a specific plan that’s something of a trifecta. Here’s what it does:

Cripples a part of Obamacare.
Costs the federal government money.
Increases corporate profits.

Don’t you love the smell of napalm in the morning? The proposal in question would change the definition of full-time worker from 30 hours to 40 hours. As a result, employers would be required to offer health insurance only to employees working 40 hours or more, not those working 30 hours or more. It’s hard to truly capture the cynicism motivating this proposal, but Matt Yglesias does a pretty good job this morning. I’ll turn over the mike to him:

It turns out that the authors of the ACA weren’t idiots….Sherry Glied and Claudia Solis-Rosman have shown that while working slightly more than 40 hours is common, working slightly more than 30 hours is rare. In other words, few workers are at risk of having hours slashed from 31 per week to 29, but many could be cut back from 41 to 39.

….While a shift from a 30-hour definition to a 40-hour definition would exacerbate the problem of hour cuts, it would help solve one very serious problem — the problem of rich businessmen who would like to see higher profits rather than lower profits. Lifting the hours threshold would automatically cause millions of workers to fall below the limit, saving their employers money in insurance premiums and fees to the government. And lifting the hours threshold would also make it easier for employers to monkey with workers’ schedules to get them redefined as part-time.

At a time when corporate profits as a share of the economy are abnormally high, boosting profits at the expense of workers’ health insurance coverage isn’t necessarily a great political slogan. But it’s still something that business owners and managers care passionately about, and business priorities tend to get a thorough airing on the Hill.

There’s always going to be some threshold that defines “full-time” workers. And no matter what that threshold is, some employers will game the system by reducing the hours of some employees from barely above to barely below the threshold. There’s just no way around that. But you can certainly try to minimize the problem by picking a threshold that’s hard to game. One way to do that is to set the threshold at a level that affects very few workers. Democrats did that when they passed Obamacare in 2009, and that was good for employees, good for Obamacare, and good for the budget since it meant fewer workers receiving federal subsidies.

But not so good for anyone who wanted to game the system and toss lots of vulnerable employees onto the federal dime. Apparently that’s the GOP’s core constituency, though. Are you surprised?

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Republicans Take Aim at Obama, Shoot Workers in the Foot

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