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Climate change leaves trees out to dry

by Stacey2648 Posted on July 6, 2015

spoiler alert

Climate change leaves trees out to dry

By on 6 Jul 2015commentsShare

The drought may be killing lawns, but whatever — they’re useless. When drought starts going after trees, however, that’s another matter. As year four of California’s drought rolls around, the magical, shade-providing carbon sinks are starting to perish, thanks to a lack of rain and a more recent lack of lawn irrigation.

It turns out all that profligate sprinkling was feeding California’s trees — and when cities cracked down on turf, they inadvertently starved out the more useful urban greenery. And while this one’s partly on us — maybe we should have realized that all those trees need to drink, too — we can give climate change (which is ultimately on us as well) a lot of the credit for this fun development. Climate change, you’ve done it again! Everyone else: Welcome back to Spoiler Alerts.

Here’s the story from Al Jazeera:

Nature has already killed an estimated 12 million trees in California’s forests since the drought began four years ago — most falling victim to an outbreak of the bark beetle pests that attack trees weakened by drought.

Now, trees in city parks, along boulevards and in residential neighborhoods are dying because homeowners, businesses and municipalities have stopped watering.

“The reaction was to turn off irrigation in many locations,” said John Melvin, urban forester at the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. “If you do that, you lose a long-lived community asset. A tree is not something that can be easily replaced.”

Trees are a big part of what makes a city green — literally, but also figuratively, thanks to the energy they save on AC:

A recent report by the U.S Department of Agriculture Forest Service show that the number of street trees in California have not kept up with population growth. The 9.1 million street trees make up 10 percent to 20 percent of the state’s total urban forest. The report also found that tree density has declined 30 percent since 1988 “as cities added more streets than trees.” Tree density fell from 105.5 trees per mile to 75 trees per mile in that period.

Despite that, the agency estimates that California street trees save the amount of electricity equivalent to what’s required to air condition 530,000 households every year.

The conclusion? Radically simple, says Melvin:

“It’s OK to appropriately water trees.”

Source:
Trees are latest victims of California’s four-year drought

, Al Jazeera America.

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Progressives Are Getting Clobbered in Europe. Here’s Why Their Chances Are Better in America.

by AnhWiemitx Posted on May 11, 2015

Mother Jones

While Kevin Drum is focused on getting better, we’ve invited some of the remarkable writers and thinkers who have traded links and ideas with him from Blogosphere 1.0 to this day to contribute posts and keep the conversation going. Today we’re honored to present a post from Ruy Teixeira.

The United Kingdom voted on May 7 to determine its next government. Despite predictions that there would be a hung parliament with an advantage to Labor in forming a coalition government, that did not turn out to be the case. Instead the Conservatives won an outright majority, meaning that David Cameron will continue as Prime Minister, not Labor Party leader Ed Miliband, as most believed.

Naturally, Labor Party supporters, and progressives in general, are aghast at this outcome. And certainly a Labor government would have governed differently than the Tories, who have been ruling the UK since 2010 and have famously adopted budget austerity as their main economic policy. But how differently? Oddly, the ascension of “Red Ed”, as the British tabloid press likes to call him, may not have made as big a difference as one might think. This is because the Labor Party did not propose to break decisively from the pro-austerity policies of the Tory government. Indeed, the Labor Party election manifesto promised to “cut the deficit every year” regardless of the state of the economy.

This “Budget Responsibility Lock”, as the manifesto jauntily called it, may seem bonkers given everything we have learned about the negative economic effects of austerity policies since 2010, including in the UK, and the rapidly declining intellectual credibility of austerity as an economic doctrine. Well, that’s because it is bonkers, as Paul Krugman explains in a lengthy article for The Guardian with the somewhat despairing title: “The austerity delusion: The case for cuts was a lie—Why does Britain still believe it?“

The bulk of Krugman’s article is a detailed and very convincing analysis of how nutty austerity was as a policy and how poorly it has worked. However, I’m not sure he really clears up the question of why British economic discourse is still dominated by this mythology. But this is a tough one. And it’s not as if the British Labor Party is alone in its attempts to reconcile social democracy with austerity; most continental social democratic parties are having similar difficulties breaking out of the austerity framework.

In fact, the center left party that’s most ostentatiously stepped out of this framework is that wild-eyed band of Bolsheviks, the American Democratic Party, which has moved steadily away from deficit mania since 2011. This raises an interesting question. Given the macroeconomic straightjacket European social democrats seem determined to keep themselves in, is the Democratic Party really the torchbearer now for social democratic progress?

In this regard, it’s interesting to turn to a recent book by political scientist Lane Kenworthy, Social Democratic America, that makes the case (summarized here and here) that, over the long term, the US is, in fact, on a social democratic course.

By social democracy, Kenworthy means an economic system featuring “a commitment to the extensive use of government policy to promote economic security, expand opportunity, and ensure rising living standards for all… It aims to do so while also safeguarding economic freedom, economic flexibility, and market dynamism, all of which have long been hallmarks of the U.S. economy.” He calls this “modern” social democracy, contrasting with “traditional” social democracy in that it goes beyond merely helping people survive without employment to also providing “services aimed at boosting employment and enhancing productivity: publicly funded child care and preschool, job-training and job-placement programs, significant infrastructure projects, and government support for private-sector research and development.”

Kenworthy anticipates that, as we move toward this kind of social democracy, we will do most of the following:

1) Increase the minimum wage and index it to inflation.

2) Increase the Earned Income Tax Credit while making it available to middle income families and indexing it to GDP per capita.

3) Increase benefit levels and loosen eligibility levels for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, general assistance, food stamps, housing assistance, and energy assistance.

4) Mandate paid parental leave.

5) Expand access to unemployment insurance.

6) Increase the Child Care Tax Credit.

7) Universalize access to pre-K.

8) Institute a supplemental defined contribution plan with automatic enrollment.

9) Increase federal spending on public child care, roads and bridges, and health care; and mandate more holidays and vacation time for workers.

It’s interesting to note that most of this list is consistent with the mainstream policy commitments of the Democratic Party and that a good chunk of it will probably find its way into the platform of the 2016 Democratic Presidential candidate. Maybe Kenworthy’s prediction is not so far-fetched.

One other reason to see the US as a potential beacon for social democratic progress stems from the nature of political coalitions in an era of demographic change. In the United States, the Democratic Party has largely succeeded in capturing the current wave of modernizing demographic change (immigrants, minorities, professionals, seculars, unmarried women, the highly-educated, the Millennial generation, etc.) Emerging demographic groups generally favor the Democrats by wide margins, which combined with residual strength among traditional constituencies gives them a formidable electoral coalition. The challenge for American progressives is therefore mostly about keeping their demographically enhanced coalition together in the face of conservative attacks and getting it to turn out in midterm elections.

The situation is different in Europe, where modernizing demographic change has, so far, not done social democratic parties much good. One reason is that some of these demographic changes do not loom as large in most European countries as they do in the United States. The immigrant/minority population starts from a smaller base so the impact of growth, even where rapid, is more limited. And the younger generation, while progressive, does not have the population weight it does in America.

Beyond that, however, is a factor that has prevented social democrats from harnessing the still-considerable power of modernizing demographic change in Europe. That is the nature of European party systems. Unlike in the United States, where the center-left party, the Democrats, has no meaningful electoral competition for the progressive vote, European social democrats typically do have such competition and from three different parts of the political spectrum: greens; left socialists; and liberal centrists. And not only do they have competition, these other parties, on aggregate, typically overperform among emerging demographics, while social democrats generally underperform. Thus it would appear that social democrats, who have also hemmoraged support from traditional working class voters, will be increasingly unable to build viable progressive coalitions by themselves.

Bringing progressive constituencies together across parties is of course difficult to do and so far European social democrats seem completely at sea on how to handle this challenge. Much easier to have all those constituencies together in one party—like we do in the United States.

The road to progress isn’t clear anywhere but, defying national stereotypes, it’s starting to look a bit clearer in the US than in Europe.

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Progressives Are Getting Clobbered in Europe. Here’s Why Their Chances Are Better in America.

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The Gap Between the Rich and the Rest of Us Is The Widest It’s Been In 30 Years. Here’s One Reason Why.

by CharoleXSH Posted on December 26, 2014

Mother Jones

The wealth gap between the richest 20 percent of Americans and everyone else is the widest it’s been in three decades, according to a report released last week by the Pew Research Center. Many factors contribute to this great divide: tax rates on the rich have been falling for decades; the Great Recession decimated the assets of a lot of low- and middle-income folks; and technology is replacing workers. One often-overlooked factor, though, is that 16.7 million poor Americans don’t have a bank account. Lack of access to this basic financial tool cramps poor Americans’ ability to prove credit-worthiness and build assets, and forces them to rely on expensive alternative financial services, trapping them in a cycle of debt and instability.

Here’s a look at banking access in the US and how it affects Americans’ ability to grab onto the lowest rung of the socioeconomic ladder.

Many more people in the US lack bank accounts than in other wealthy developed nations, according to the latest World Bank data, which is from 2011.

The percentage of Americans without bank access has fluctuated since the Great Recession. In 2009, 7.6 percent of Americans lacked a bank account. In 2011, that number was 8.2 percent, and in 2013, 7.7 percent—or approximately 16.7 million adults—had no banking access, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).

Eighteen percent of people in the bottom 40 percent of the income spectrum lacked an account at a formal financial institution in 2011, according to the World Bank. Non-whites are less likely to have a bank account:

The main reason people don’t open bank accounts is that they lack sufficient funds to open one or can’t afford the fees associated with the account. But some people simply don’t trust financial institutions.

Bank fees associated with checking accounts have skyrocketed over the past few years, with the percentage of truly free checking accounts falling from 76 percent in 2009 to 38 percent in 2013, according to the most recent data from Bankrate, a consumer financial services company. The average minimum balance required to open a checking account rose nine percent over the past year to $66, and the average overdraft fee reached $32.74, a record high. ATM fees are at all-time highs, too.

“Even plain vanilla checking accounts have gotten more expensive,” Abby McCloskey, a program director at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote at Forbes last year. “Free checking was long championed by the FDIC to bring the unbanked into mainstream banking, and it has all but disappeared as banks cut costs.” (The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which Congress created in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to protect average Americans from banks’ predatory practices, is weighing new regulations on overdraft fees.)

When low-income customers close their accounts to avoid minimum balances and fees, they’re forced to rely on alternative financial services including payday lending, money orders, check cashing, and pawn shops—which often charge even more exorbitant fees and penalties. The average household that uses these alternative financial services spends $2,412 per year on interest and related fees, according to a report released this year by the Postal Service’s inspector general. A 2011 Pew survey of 2,000 low-income families in Los Angeles found that using alternative financial services consumed 6 percent of an average household’s income, whereas buying the same services at a bank ate up just half a percent of an average family’s income.

Americans without bank accounts also tend to miss out on tax benefits such as the Earned Income Tax Credit—mostly because people without bank accounts are less likely to file tax returns. More than two-thirds of families with bank accounts in Pew’s LA study filed their tax returns. Just 38 percent of the families without bank accounts filed. Three quarters of the families that filed got a tax refund.

Not surprisingly, low-income people with access to bank accounts are more likely to save money and have better overall economic health. Check it out.

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The Gap Between the Rich and the Rest of Us Is The Widest It’s Been In 30 Years. Here’s One Reason Why.

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Negotiating With Republicans != Negotiating With Tea Partiers

by KlaraGuzm Posted on November 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Megan McArdle was pretty unimpressed with President Obama’s press conference following the Democrats’ midterm defeat. “No one reasonable expected the president to grovel,” she says, but surely he could have adopted a more conciliatory tone?

Most notably, of course, he said he would take executive action on immigration by year’s end unless Republicans passed a bill. It’s certainly a bold negotiating tactic: You can do what I want, or I’ll go ahead and do what I want anyway. This is how you “negotiate” with a seven-year old, not a Senate Majority Leader.

I’m not sure that isn’t what Obama thinks he’s doing….But Mitch McConnell is not a seven year old….McConnell is not the proverbial Tea Party extremist who won’t negotiate; he’s an establishment guy, known as a strategist and a tactician, not an ideologue (which is why the Tea Party isn’t that fond of him). In short, he’s someone who can make deals. Responding to McConnell’s rather gracious remarks about finding common goals by announcing that you know what the American public wants, and you’re going to give it to them no matter what their elected representatives say, seems curiously brash. It might chill the atmosphere today when he sits down with congressional leaders.

I wonder if Obama even knows how to negotiate with Republicans….

I’m not here to defend Obama’s negotiating record. I’d rate it higher than McArdle, probably, but it’s obviously not one of Obama’s strong suits. Still, she’s rather pointedly ignoring the elephant in the room here.

As near as I can tell, Obama has regularly demonstrated the ability to negotiate with Mitch McConnell. Not perfectly, and not without plenty of hiccups, but they can do business when the incentives are strong enough. In fact, they did do business on immigration reform. A year ago the Senate passed a comprehensive bill 68-32. Here’s what Obama said about McConnell on Wednesday:

My interactions with Mitch McConnell, he has always been very straightforward with me. To his credit, he has never made a promise that he couldn’t deliver. And he knows the legislative process well. He obviously knows his caucus well — he has always given me, I think, realistic assessments of what he can get through his caucus and what he can’t. And so I think we can have a productive relationship.

The unnamed elephant in the room, obviously, is John Boehner and the tea party caucus in the House. Boehner has repeatedly shown that he can’t control his own caucus and can’t deliver a deal of any sort. That’s not because either Obama or Boehner are incompetent negotiators, it’s because the tea partiers are flatly unwilling to compromise in any remotely constructive way. So when Obama adopts a combative tone on immigration, it’s aimed at Boehner, who really does have the miserable job of trying to ride herd on a bunch of erratic and willful seven-year-olds—as he himself has admitted from time to time.

Does Obama know how to negotiate with Republicans? Sure. Does he know how to negotiate with tea party extremists? Hard to say. But then again, even John Boehner hasn’t figured out how to do that. Perhaps Obama’s playground style hit-them-over-the-head approach is about as good as it gets.

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Negotiating With Republicans != Negotiating With Tea Partiers

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The One Percent Just Keeps Getting Richer, According to the 2014 Global Wealth Report

by LyndonSkene Posted on November 3, 2014

Mother Jones

This story was originally published on BillMoyers.com.

Global inequality, like global warming, is a disease that may be too far along to ever be cured.

We seem helpless, both in the US and around the world, to stop the incessant flow of wealth to an elitist group of people who are simply building on their existing riches. The increasing rate of their takeaway is the message derived from the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook (GWD).

It’s already been made clear that the richest Americans have taken almost all the gains in US wealth since the recession. But the unrelenting money grab is a global phenomenon. The GWD confirms just how bad it’s getting for the great majority of us.

1. US: Even the upper middle class is losing

In just three years, from 2011 to 2014, the bottom half of Americans lost almost half of their share of the nation’s wealth, dropping from a 2.5 percent share to a 1.3 percent share (detail is here).

Most of the top half lost ground, too. The 36 million upper middle class households just above the median (sixth, seventh, and eighth deciles) dropped from a 13.4 percent share to an 11.9 percent share. Much of their portion went to the richest one percent.

This is big money. With total US wealth of $84 trillion, the three-year change represents a transfer of wealth of over a trillion dollars from the bottom half of America to the richest one percent, and another trillion dollars from the upper middle class to the one percent.

2. US: In three years, an average of $5 million went to every household in the one percent

A closer look at the numbers shows the frightening extremes. The bottom half of America, according to GWD, owned $1.5 trillion in 2011. Now their wealth is down to $1.1 trillion. Much of their wealth is in housing equity, which was depleted by the recession.

The richest Americans, on the other hand, took incomprehensible amounts of wealth from the rest of us, largely by being already rich, and by being heavily invested in the stock market. The following summary is based on GWD figures and reliable estimates of the makeup of the richest one percent, and on the fact that almost all the nation’s wealth is in the form of private households and business assets:

In three years the average household in the top one percent (just over a million households) increased its net worth by about $4.5 million.
In three years the average household in the top .1 percent (just over 100,000 households) increased its net worth by about $18 million.
In three years the average household in the top .01 percent (12,000 households) increased its net worth by about $180 million.
In three years the average member of the Forbes 400 increased his/her net worth by about $2 billion.

3. World: The one percent’s wealth grew from $100 trillion to $127 trillion in three years

A stunning 95 percent of the world’s population lost a share of its wealth over the past three years. Almost all of the gain went to the world’s richest one percent.

Again, the gains seem almost incomprehensible. The world’s wealth grew from $224 trillion to $263 trillion in three years. The world’s richest one percent, who owned a little under $100 trillion in 2011, now own almost $127 trillion. For every dollar they possessed just three years ago, they now have a dollar and a quarter.

From New York and LA and San Francisco to London and Kenya and Indonesia, the rich are pushing suffering populations out of the way to acquire land and build luxury homes. The “winner-take-all” attitude is breaking down society in the US and around the world.

More Madness

There’s a lot more in the GWD, and it doesn’t get any prettier. It tells us what unregulated capitalism does to a society.

In an upcoming post, we’ll consider what has to be done to end the madness.

Link to article:

The One Percent Just Keeps Getting Richer, According to the 2014 Global Wealth Report

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Would Joe Biden Put His Son In Prison For Doing Coke?

by DollieBrigstock Posted on October 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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So the son of our Vice President was booted from the military for doing coke. This must be an awkward situation for Joe Biden, given his role in cracking down on drug use over the last few decades. Joe Biden created the position of “drug czar,” a key step in the drug war. As the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1986, he played a major role in passing mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines. He was the main sponsor of the RAVE Act in 2003, meant to crack down on MDMA use, which would have held club owners liable for providing “paraphernalia” like glowsticks and water. He still vocally opposes marijuana legalization.

To be clear: Hunter Biden wasn’t caught with actual cocaine. He just failed a drug test. But what if he’d happened to be found with a little bag in his pocket? Would Joe Biden would find it fair for him to serve 87 months, which is the average federal sentence for drug possession?

Of course, were Hunter Biden to be caught with powder cocaine, he would likely fare better than someone caught with crack. To his credit, Joe Biden himself has pushed for reducing the longstanding sentencing disparity between crack and regular cocaine, but possession of 28 grams of crack still triggers a five-year minimum sentence. It takes 500 grams of regular cocaine to trigger the same sentence. That’s an 18-to-one difference. (African Americans make up 83 percent of people convicted for crack offenses, even though the number of white crack users is 40 percent greater than that of black users, according to a National Institute on Drug Abuse study).

America has more prisoners than any other country—a quarter of all people behind bars in the entire world are in US prisons or jails. Nearly half of all federal prisoners are serving sentences for drugs. Many of them won’t have a chance to “regret” their mistakes and move on, as Hunter Biden has said he will.

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Would Joe Biden Put His Son In Prison For Doing Coke?

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Hillary Clinton Threads the Needle: Obama’s Done Okay But Economic Benefits Need to Be “Broadly Shared”

by NCJWillatrm Posted on September 18, 2014

Mother Jones

Hillary Clinton doesn’t think much of her old employer. “Congress increasingly…is living in an evidence free zone,” she said Thursday, “where what the reality is in the lives of Americans is so far from the minds of too many.” Speaking on a panel about women and economics hosted by the Center for American Progress (a liberal think tank run by Clinton’s ex-policy advisor Neera Tanden), Clinton gave a few hints of which domestic policy proposals could anchor her presumed 2016 presidential campaign.

Speaking in non-partisan terms, Clinton slammed Congress for its lack of action on raising the minimum wage, with the former secretary of state saying that a failure to boost the wages of the working poor is particularly damaging for women. She noted that two-thirds of minimum wage jobs are held by women. “The floor is collapsing—we talk about a glass ceiling, these women don’t even have a secure floor under them,” she said.

Boosting the minimum wage has become a standard Democratic talking point. But Clinton went beyond that standard fare and emphasized the plight of tipped workers, such as restaurant servers, bartenders, and hair stylists. “Women hold nearly three-quarters of the jobs that are reliant on tips,” she said. “And in fact, they don’t get the minimum wage with the tips on top of it.”

Although the federal minimum wage has been set at $7.25 per hour since 2009, there is an exemption carved out for workers who receive tips. Employers only have to pay those people $2.13 an hour (steady since 1991); the tips are presumed to make up for the difference. But often times the tips don’t suffice, and employers, who are supposed to fill the gap, don’t always do so.

These workers are “at the mercy not only of customers who can decide or not to tip,” Clinton said. “They’re at the mercy of their employers who may collect the tips and not turn them back.”

Clinton didn’t dive into the policy details on how to fix this problem. But the Center for American Progress released a report right after the event that suggested raising the tipped wage up to 70 percent of the regular minimum wage (which the report proposed bumping to $10.10 per hour).

The general tone of Clinton’s speech suggested how she’d thread the needle by supporting President Barack Obama’s record while crafting her own agenda when she hits the campaign trail. “The president came in—he deserves an enormous amount of credit for stanching the bleeding and preventing a further deterioration and getting us out of that ditch we were in,” she said. “But we know that unless we change our policies, a lot of the benefits are not going to be broadly shared, and that’s what we’re talking about here.”

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Hillary Clinton Threads the Needle: Obama’s Done Okay But Economic Benefits Need to Be “Broadly Shared”

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This Judge Just Said Everything You Want to Say to the Anti-Gay Marriage Crowd, But Better

by ReneeBandy Posted on September 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Thursday, federal judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court’s ruling striking down gay marriage bans in Wisconsin and Indiana. This marks the 22nd time since the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act last year that a federal court has found bans on same-sex marriage unconstitutional. On Wednesday, a different federal judge issued an opinion upholding Louisiana’s ban, making the total post-DOMA record 22-1.

Posner’s opinion is special, though, because, as Gawker notes, it’s, well, amazing. And bitchy. And delicious.

Our pair of cases is rich in detail but ultimately straight-forward to decide. The challenged laws discriminate against a minority defined by an immutable characteristic, and the only rationale that the states put forth with any conviction—that same-sex couples and their children don’t need marriage because same-sex couples can’t produce children, intended or unintended—is so full of holes that it cannot be taken seriously.

Indiana defended its ban by arguing that the state had no reason to extend marriage to gay people because gay people can’t have children—that marriage is designed, in part, to force fathers in hetereosexual relationships to raise children they may or may not have wanted.

At oral argument the state‘s lawyer was asked whether “Indiana’s law is about successfully raising children,” and since “you agree same-sex couples can successfully raise children, why shouldn’t the ban be lifted as to them?” The lawyer answered that “the assumption is that with opposite-sex couples there is very little thought given during the sexual act, sometimes, to whether babies may be a consequence.” In other words, Indiana’s government thinks that straight couples tend to be sexually irresponsible, producing unwanted children by the carload, and so must be pressured (in the form of governmental encouragement of marriage through a combination of sticks and carrots) to marry, but that gay couples, unable as they are to produce children wanted or unwanted, are model parents—model citizens really—so have no need for marriage. Heterosexuals get drunk and pregnant, producing unwanted children; their reward is to be allowed to marry. Homosexual couples do not produce unwanted children; their reward is to be denied the right to marry. Go figure.

My favorite bit is Posner’s response to Indiana’s assertion that “homosexuals are politically powerful out of proportion to their numbers.”

No evidence is presented by the state to support this contention. It is true that an increasing number of heterosexuals support same-sex marriage; otherwise 11 states would not have changed their laws to permit such marriage (the other 8 states that allow same-sex marriage do so as a result of judicial decisions invalidating the states’ bans). No inference of manipulation of the democratic process by homosexuals can be drawn, however, any more than it could be inferred from the enactment of civil rights laws that African-Americans “are politically powerful out of proportion to their numbers.” It is to the credit of American voters that they do not support only laws that are in their palpable self-interest. They support laws punishing cruelty to animals, even though not a single animal has a vote.

Go read the whole thing. It’s wonderful.

Link:  

This Judge Just Said Everything You Want to Say to the Anti-Gay Marriage Crowd, But Better

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Why Is Paul Ryan Attacking Poverty Programs? He Needs to Tell Us Loud and Clear.

by ValentinBunbury Posted on March 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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Paul Ryan released a thick report on federal poverty programs earlier this week, and liberals were none too pleased with it. Over at CBPP, Sharon Parrott explains why: “It’s replete with misleading and selective presentations of data and research, which it uses to portray the safety net in a negative light. It also omits key research and data that point in more positive directions.” In fact, it’s so bad that quite a few of the researchers who are name checked in Ryan’s report have spoken out publicly to complain about how badly their work was misrepresented.

But we should rein in the criticism a bit, says the Economist’s John Prideaux. He believes that Ryan’s report really is useful and really could represent a change of direction for conservatives:

In fact there is not a single proposal to cut spending on federal anti-poverty programmes in there. What the report does do is document how fragmented the federal government’s poverty programmes are….Take the federal schemes to expand the supply of housing for people with low incomes. There is Public Housing, Moving to Work, Hope VI, Choice Neighborhoods, Rental Assistance Demonstration, Rental Housing Assistance, Rental Assistance Payment, the Housing Trust Fund, the Low Income Housing Tax Credit, the Private Activity Bond Interest Exclusion, the HOME Investment Partnerships Program and the Self-Help Homeownership Opportunity Program. The programmes on the demand side, in other words that help people pay their rent, are almost as numerous.

….Most of the commentary on the budget committee’s report suggests that it is filled with the same stuff that Republicans have been peddling for ages. And to be sure it includes plenty of studies that are critical of food stamps, Head Start and Pell grants. But read the whole thing and you get the impression that there are House Republicans who understand that there is more to poverty reduction than getting the government out of the way. They should be braver about saying this.

I think this gets to the heart of the matter. Even conservatives—the more honest variety, anyway—will concede that liberals have plenty of reasons to be skeptical of Ryan’s goals. His annual budget roadmaps have consistently relied on slashing spending for the poor, and Republicans in general have been consumed with cutting safety net spending for decades. It’s perfectly natural to view a report that lambastes federal poverty programs as merely the first step in an effort to build support for cutting spending on those programs.

So how about if we see some of Prideaux’s bravery before we bite on Ryan’s proposals? Liberals should certainly be open to making safety net programs more efficient, and if that’s Ryan’s goal he’ll find plenty of Democrats willing to work with him. But that all depends on knowing that this isn’t just a Trojan Horse for deep cuts to spending on the poor.

So how about if we hear this from Ryan? How about if he says, plainly and clearly, that he wants to improve the efficiency of safety net programs, but wants to use the savings to help more people—or to help people in smarter ways—not as an excuse to slash spending or to fund more tax cuts for the wealthy? Really, that’s the bare minimum necessary for liberals to suspend their skepticism, given Ryan’s long history of trying to balance the budget on the backs of the poor.

This would require a genuine turnabout from Ryan, and it would require him to genuinely confront his tea party base with things they don’t want to hear. And it would demonstrate that helping the poor really is his goal. But if he’s not willing to do that, why should anyone on the left believe this report is anything other than the same old attack on the poor as moochers and idlers that’s become practically a Republican mantra over the past few years?

Read this article: 

Why Is Paul Ryan Attacking Poverty Programs? He Needs to Tell Us Loud and Clear.

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Second Look: Tax Reform Act of 2014 Turns Out to Be a Pretty Good Effort

by StefanWillison Posted on February 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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Credit where it’s due department: I was pretty skeptical of Dave Camp’s tax reform proposal last night, figuring that it would just be the usual Republican mush of lower tax rates on the rich combined with some handwaving about elimination of tax breaks that would theoretically make it revenue neutral.

But I was wrong. It turns out that Camp’s plan specifies the tax breaks he wants to close in considerable detail. And according to the analysis of the Joint Committee on Taxation, which is usually fairly reliable, it would be both revenue neutral and distributionally pretty neutral too. Over ten years it would raise about $3 billion more than present law, and the chart on the right shows how tax rates would be affected. Generally speaking, effective tax rates would go down for the poor and the middle class, and would go up slightly for the affluent. (These are estimates for 2015. They change slightly in subsequent years.)

Needless to say, this all depends on his plan being passed as is, which isn’t likely. In fact, it seems unlikely to pass at all. Nonetheless, Camp’s plan isn’t just a Trojan Horse to cut taxes on the rich. There are, unsurprisingly, aspects of it I don’t like, but it seems to be a tolerably serious effort at tax reform that both parties could live with. It’s certainly a lot better than I expected.

Link:

Second Look: Tax Reform Act of 2014 Turns Out to Be a Pretty Good Effort

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