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Elizabeth Warren Fires Back at Centrist Dems on Social Security

by Johnathan Black Posted on December 9, 2013

Mother Jones

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Last week, the president and vice-president of the centrist think-tank Third Way accused Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) of ignoring what they call Social Security’s “undebatable solvency crisis.” In an interview with Mother Jones, Warren fired back, countering the charge, and elaborating on how Social Security could be expanded.

“If we made no changes at all to Social Security,” Warren said, “it would continue to make payments at the current level for about 20 years,” meaning there is no immediate crisis facing the program, which assists some 58 million Americans. “Modest adjustments,” she added, “will make certain… we could increase benefits for those who need it most.”

One way to increase monthly benefits to seniors, Warren said, would be to broaden the program’s funding pool. She did not elaborate on how, but one proposal that has been floated in recent years would raise the cap on the level of earnings subject to the Social Security tax. In 2013, for example, Americans paid a Social Security tax of 6.2 percent on wages up to $113,700. Earnings over that amount were not subject to the tax. Several members of Congress have introduced legislation that would lift or eliminate this cap, including Sens. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), Mark Begich (D-Alaska), and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and Reps. Gwen Moore (D-Wisc.), Pete DeFasio (D-Ore.), and Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.). Harkin’s bill would increase Social Security payments by $70 a month for low- and middle-income beneficiaries.

Another way to increase the program’s funding base, tax experts say, would be to close loopholes that drain money from Social Security. Each year, for instance, employers misclassify millions of workers as independent contractors instead of employees, according to the IRS. That means employers don’t pay their portion of the Social Security tax, and the $2.8 trillion Social Security trust fund is juked out of billions of dollars in revenue annually.

A less obvious, but effective way of directing more money into the Social Security pot, Warren said, would be to increase the federal minimum wage. “Raising the minimum wage means we have workers paying more in to support the Social Security system,” she said. Warren backs Obama’s call for a minimum wage hike from $7.25 to $9 an hour.

The average monthly Social Security payment is $1,162. Americans have become more dependent on the program in recent years because a growing portion of retirees can no longer rely on pensions through their employer. Twenty years ago, 35 percent of private sector employers offered workers a traditional pension that provided monthly payments to retirees. Today, only 18 percent of employers offer such a plan. About 44 million workers get no retirement help from their employers.

In the interview, Warren emphasized that Third Way, as well as many in Congress and the media, are framing the debate over Social Security in the wrong way. “We should stop having a conversation about cutting Social Security a little bit or a lot,” she said.

President Barack Obama, along with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, have proposed trimming the program to rein in the deficit. Each year, the Social Security Administration increases benefit payments to keep up with inflation. The president and lawmakers have suggested using a new, supposedly more accurate formula to calculate inflation, which would make monthly Social Security payments increase more slowly. In a speech on the Senate floor last month, Warren said this new formula is far from accurate, and that Congress should not balance the budget on the backs of the elderly. (Budget negotiators, who must reach an agreement by mid-January, have since decided against including Social Security cuts in the deal.) Warren’s floor speech prompted the Third Way op-ed.

A coalition of liberal advocacy groups, including the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, have also lashed out against Third Way. The organizations called on their members to ask congressional Democrats affiliated with the think tank to disavow the op-ed.

Warren has said time and again that she will not run for president in 2016, but this conflict between the progressive wing and the centrist wing of the Democratic party could serve as a warning for the next Democratic presidential nominee not to stray too far towards the center.

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Elizabeth Warren Fires Back at Centrist Dems on Social Security

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Oops: Republican Obamacare Amendment Expanded Abortion Access for GOP Staffers

by StormyV37lwvv Posted on December 9, 2013

Mother Jones

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Nearly 9 in 10 health care plans that members of Congress and their staff must choose from include abortion coverage, a fact that has Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) and right-wing media outlets raising hell.

But the only reason that congressional staffers have to choose from these plans at all is because a Republican amendment to Obamacare requires it. Thanks to this amendment, congressional staffers, who once had to pay for abortions out of pocket, can now buy insurance that covers abortions.

The bizarre story of how a conservative, anti-abortion Republican ended up expanding abortion access for congressional staff dates back to the initial fight over the Affordable Care Act in 2010. Here’s how it happened: The Obamacare exchanges were expressly designed to provide insurance to the uninsured, so congressional staffers—who, like most Americans, already had insurance—were initially excluded. Republicans claimed that this amounted to Democrats “exempting” themselves and their staff from Obamacare, and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) introduced an amendment that would force members of Congress and their staff to use the exchanges. Grassley’s proposal was intended to embarrass Democrats. But Democrats called Grassley’s bluff, and the law passed with his amendment.

But Grassley’s measure forced congressional staff out of the Federal Health Benefits Program, which federal law prohibited from offering any abortion coverage. Under the the federal plan, any congressional employee who wanted an abortion had to pay for it out of pocket. Now that they’re on the Obamacare exchanges, though, congressional employees will only pay out of pocket for abortion insurance. They’ll be able to choose any of the 112 plans available via Washington, DC’s health care exchange, only 9 of which do not cover abortion.

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Oops: Republican Obamacare Amendment Expanded Abortion Access for GOP Staffers

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What is Deficit Mania Doing on the News Pages?

by EpifaniaBrydon Posted on December 9, 2013

Mother Jones

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Here is Lori Montgomery in the Washington Post on the congressional budget negotiations currently in progress:

The deal expected to be sealed this week on Capitol Hill would not significantly reduce the debt, now $17.3 trillion and rising….Republicans and Democrats are abandoning their debt-reduction goals, laying down arms and, for the moment, trying to avoid another economy-damaging standoff.

The campaign to control the debt is ending “with a whimper, not a bang,” said Robert Bixby, executive director of the bipartisan Concord Coalition, which advocates debt reduction. “That this can be declared a victory is an indicator of how low the process has sunk. They haven’t really done anything except avoid another crisis.”

There’s nothing wrong with talking about the federal deficit in a story about the budget. But this entire story is framed around a sense of dismay that Congress has “abandoned” its debt-reduction goals. This is done with no mention of the fact that Congress has already slashed the 10-year deficit by nearly $4 trillion over the past couple of years. No mention that we’ve been engaged in this frenzy of deficit cutting despite the fact that the economy is still fragile, which means that reducing the deficit is almost certainly a terrible idea. No mention that deficit cutting of any size in the wake of recession is unprecedented in recent history. No mention of the fact that the deficit has been falling for years and will continue to decline in 2014 and 2015.

Wait. That’s not true. There is a mention that the deficit will continue to fall over the next two years. It gets one sentence at the very tail end of the story:

Where would that leave the nation’s financial outlook? Not in a particularly good place, budget analysts say. The most recent Congressional Budget Office projections show the red ink receding over the next two years. But annual deficits would start growing again in 2016 as the baby-boom generation moves inexorably into retirement. And the debt would again soar.

This is crazy. A story that’s supposed to be evenhanded shouldn’t simply assume as its premise that any budget that fails to slash the deficit is a failure. That’s what Robert Samuelson and Jennifer Rubin are for. If it’s on the news pages, it should tell the whole story: plenty of people think that deficit cutting has already gone too far. But no reader of this piece would have any idea that this side of the story even existed.

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What is Deficit Mania Doing on the News Pages?

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Wage Subsidies Might Be a Good Idea, But Republicans Will Never Support It

by Kornelajjb Posted on December 3, 2013

Mother Jones

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James Pethokoukis, after citing some research suggesting that a higher minimum wage reduces employment among low-skill workers, wonders why progressives seem so obsessed with the idea:

These studies aren’t some secret. So why do so many smart people keep advocating for a higher minimum wage? The best answer I can come up with is that they think it is more politically likely than the better economic answer: wage subsidies

….Noah Smith explains: When a company offers you a wage, the government matching would have already done behind the scenes. Someone comes and offers to pay me $20 an hour, the government is paying $12 of that. I would be making $8 an hour, but I would feel like a person who making $20 an hour. Unlike the Earned Income Tax Credit where you get a check from the government based on how much income you earned, I think people would feel a lot better in term of the framing of it if the government matched their wages instead.

I’d make several points about this. First, as Pethokoukis says, no one thinks wage subsidies are politically feasible. If there’s even a single Republican politician who favors them, I’d like to hear about it. Conversely, even if the minimum wage is a second-best alternative, it’s well-known, popular, widely understood, doesn’t require higher taxes, and is part of the political status quo. It wouldn’t be easy to raise the minimum wage, but it’s not impossible either.

Second, Pethokoukis is cherry picking the minimum wage research. It’s true that some studies show a small disemployment effect from a higher minimum wage, but there are others that show no effect at all. A fair reading of all the research suggests that the employment impact of a modestly higher minimum wage would be either very small or zero.

Third, wage subsidies can be tricky to implement. Are they temporary or permanent? Targeted or universal? Are they in addition to the EITC or a replacement? How do you prevent employers from gaming the system and reducing wages because they know the wage subsidy will make up the difference? There may be answers to these questions, but they aren’t trivial.

Finally, wage subsidies haven’t been widely adopted elsewhere, which means there isn’t a lot of compelling research to show how well they’d work. There are good reasons to be optimistic about wage subsidies, but as far as I know, they’re still fairly untested.

In any case, I really think the first point is the critical one. Wage subsidies would supposedly distort the labor market less than a higher minimum wage, but that’s because it would remove the onus of higher wages from employers and place it on the federal government. That means higher taxes to pay for the subsidy, and that’s just flatly a no-go for the modern Republican Party. This in turn means it could be implemented only as a tax credit, and that inherently places some restrictions on its reach and effectiveness. So Democrats would be in the position of backing either a good policy that will never get Republican support because it requires a tax increase, or else a mediocre policy that would still probably be a very heavy lift.

Incentives matter in politics as much as they do in the market economy, and there’s no incentive for Democrats to expend political capital on a policy change that’s highly unlikely to ever get any Republican backing. If and when that changes, perhaps wage subsidies will become a live option. Until then, a higher minimum wage is the only game in town.

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Wage Subsidies Might Be a Good Idea, But Republicans Will Never Support It

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Republicans Nearing a Dead End on Obamacare

by MaurineLarose Posted on December 3, 2013

Mother Jones

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Greg Sargent says that although the Obamacare website debacle scared some Democrats, in the end virtually none of them meaningfully abandoned the law:

It’s clear they believe the worst is now over and it is safe to return to the message they always expected to adopt.

I know I’m a broken record here, but folks are overlooking the possibility that no matter how unpopular the law, the Republican stance on health care may prove a liability, too. The basic Dem gamble is that disapproval of Obamacare does not automatically translate into zero sum political gains for Republicans, and that voters will grasp that one side is trying to solve our health care problems, while the other is trying to sabotage all solutions while advancing no constructive answers of their own. Polling shows disapproval of the law does not translate into majority support for GOP attempts to repeal or sabotage it, and Dems think this will only harden as more people enjoy the law’s benefits.

It’s funny that Republicans don’t believe their own propaganda. For years, they’ve been hellbent on repealing Obamacare because they knew that once it was fully implemented in 2014, it would have millions of beneficiaries who would fight to keep it. Once the benefits of a new program start flowing, it’s very, very hard to turn them off.

They were always right about that. By the middle of 2014, Obamacare is going to have a huge client base; it will be working pretty well; and it will be increasingly obvious that the disaster scenarios have been overblown. People with employer health care will still have it and very few will notice even a minor change in their normal routine.

Given all this, it’s hard to see Obamacare being a huge campaign winner. For that, you need people with grievances, and the GOP is unlikely to find them in large enough numbers. The currently covered will stay covered. Doctors and hospitals will be treating more patients. Obamacare’s taxes don’t touch anyone with an income less than $200,000. Aside from the tea partiers who object on the usual abstract grounds that Obamacare is a liberty-crushing Stalinesque takeover of the medical industry, it’s going to be hard to gin up a huge amount of opposition. And that’s doubly true since, as Sargent says, the Republican Party will have no credible alternative for a benefit that lots of people will already be getting.

Maybe I’m missing something. But either Republicans are seriously miscalculating, or else they’re simply betting the farm on the hope that Obamacare will be an epic disaster. Maybe it’s a bit of both. Either way, I think they’re fooling themselves pretty badly.

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Republicans Nearing a Dead End on Obamacare

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Dems Say Boehner Blocking Farm Bill, Wants More Food Stamp Cuts

by Onopriyll7 Posted on November 27, 2013

Mother Jones

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Over the past month, the House and Senate have been working to come up with a compromise farm bill—the five-year piece of legislation that funds agriculture and nutrition programs. The main sticking point is the level of cuts to the food stamp program. House Republicans want to cut $40 billion from the program, while the Senate wants to trim $4 billion. Last week, the talks fell apart, and the two sides are fighting over why.

A Democratic aide tells Mother Jones that House Speaker John Boehner shot down several informal compromise farm bill proposals because the food stamps cuts were not deep enough. Boehner’s spokesman denies this.

The Democratic aide says the joint House-Senate panel that is trying to work out a deal presented Boehner with a few proposals that contained food stamps levels close to what the Senate wants. Even though Rep. Frank Lucas (R-Okla.)—the chairman of the House agriculture committee and a top member of the compromise panel—was willing to give a lot of ground to the Senate on food stamps, he says, Boehner rejected the proposals. “Boehner is playing spoiler,” he adds. “That’s why negotiations fell apart.”

Another source familiar with the negotiations echoes the Dem aide’s claim, saying that the House leadership has Lucas on a tight leash. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who is on the compromise committee, told Congressional Quarterly the same thing last week. “I’m hearing that the speaker still keeps inserting his people into the process,” and that House members on the farm bill compromise panel “have to go and check with the speaker’s people who say they want this and this and this. I hear that’s one of our major problems.”

But a spokesman for Boehner says the assertion that Boehner shot down the food stamps proposals “is absurd.” He adds that “the Speaker has full confidence” in Lucas and the rest of the House GOP team that is working out a compromise farm bill. On Friday, Lucas said negotiations stalled because of differences over the crop subsidy provisions in the legislation.

If Boehner did reject the compromise committee’s food-stamp proposals, he adhered to something called the Hastert rule—an informal measure used to limit the power of the minority—which says that a “majority of the majority” party must support a bill before it is brought up for a vote. It was first used by former House speaker Dennis Hastert in the mid-90s.

Boehner may not use the Hastert rule on the farm bill, but time is running out to reach an agreement. The two sides were supposed to have a final compromise bill on the House floor by December 13. A Senate agriculture committee aide says that negotiations are technically still ongoing, but the deadline may be pushed into next year. The farm bill is already more than a year behind schedule.

If fruitless negotiations end up delaying a farm bill for another year, Democrats may be the unlikley winners. Some Dems have been considering voting against any compromise farm bill in order to kill the bill. If that happens, food stamps would continue to be funded at current levels.

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Dems Say Boehner Blocking Farm Bill, Wants More Food Stamp Cuts

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The Filibuster Is Dead, But Blue Slips Are Still Alive and Kicking

by HiramDerry Posted on November 27, 2013

Mother Jones

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Last week, when Harry Reid destroyed democracy as we know it by eliminating the Senate filibuster for judicial nominees, one of my first thoughts was, “But what about blue slips?” It’s all very well to allow simple majorities to approve judges, but if Republican senators use the blue slip rule to keep them off the floor in the first place, then what good does it do?

As you may recall, the blue slip is a Senate tradition. If you’re nominating a judge for, say, a New York court, the two New York senators get a say in things. If they return their blue slips, they approve of the judge. If they don’t, the nomination grinds to a halt. Republicans have played games with the blue slip rule over the past couple of decades, requiring only one blue slip when a fellow Republican is president but two when a Democrat is president, but ever since the 2006 midterms Patrick Leahy has been chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and he’s a pretty straight shooter. Even though the current president is a fellow Democrat, Leahy consistently requires two blue slips for all nominees, which makes it easier for Republicans to block Obama’s judges. All they need is for one senator to withhold a blue slip, and the nomination is dead.

Leahy was presumably hoping that setting an example of fair-mindedness would prompt Republicans to act fairly too, and in this he was obviously wrong. Nonetheless, he hasn’t changed his tune on blue slips, and TPM’s Sahil Kapur wonders whether this is likely to change in the wake of filibuster reform:

“I assume no one will abuse the blue slip process like some have abused the use of the filibuster to block judicial nominees on the floor of the Senate,” Leahy said. “As long as the blue slip process is not being abused by home state senators, then I will see no reason to change that tradition.”

It remains to be seen whether Republicans will resort to withholding blue slips more frequently after the filibuster rule change. Some may be tempted to because it’s now their most powerful weapon to thwart Obama from filling up the judiciary with his preferred nominees. If so, it’ll put to the test Democrats’ willingness to uphold the tradition.

Republican senators have been pretty free about using their blue slip privileges already, so I’m not sure just how much more abuse is left. Jeffrey Toobin provides a quick summary:

The list of federal judicial vacancies tells an extraordinary story. For example, there are seven vacancies on the federal district courts in Texas….Republicans don’t agree to any of Obama’s choices, and so the seats stay vacant, sometimes for years….The story is much the same throughout the parts of the South and the West where Republican senators preside. There are three vacancies in Kentucky, three more in Georgia, and two in Alabama. And it’s not true just for the district court; Leahy has honored blue slips for circuit-court judgeships, as well. There are two vacancies each on the Fifth and Eleventh Circuits, which together cover most of the states in the old Confederacy.

….Fifty-one of Obama’s nominees are pending, and the vast majority of the remainder are either very recent or in Republican-controlled states….By employing the blue slip, Republican senators can stymie Obama’s nominees (or prevent them from even being nominated) without having to resort to the filibuster.

How much worse can this get? One reason for optimism is that because Democrats have now proven they can be pushed only so far, maybe Republican senators will pause a bit before upping the ante even more. We’ll see.

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The Filibuster Is Dead, But Blue Slips Are Still Alive and Kicking

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Senate Dems Just Went Nuclear and Changed the Filibuster. Here’s Why.

by BroderickDuong Posted on November 21, 2013

Mother Jones

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Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and his fellow Democrats changed the Senate’s rules Thursday, freeing President Barack Obama to staff his administration with the people he wants and fill the federal bench with judges of his choosing.

There are 100 senators, and winning a simple majority (51 senators, or 50 if the vice president votes to break a tie) was once sufficient to confirm presidential nominees and pass legislation. But over the past several decades, both parties have increasingly used the filibuster—a procedural move that requires 60 senators to end debate and force a vote—to block the other side’s agenda. Since 2009, when Obama took office, Senate Republicans have used constant filibuster threats to force Democrats to win 60 votes to do almost anything. On Thursday, Democrats finally decided they’d had enough, and changed the rules. In the future, executive-branch and judicial nominees will be subject to simple up-or-down majority votes. But the filibuster lives on partially: Legislation and Supreme Court nominees will still be subject to filibusters.

The filibuster has bedeviled Democrats ever since Obama took office. A world without the filibuster would include major pieces of progressive legislation: The Affordable Care Act would have a single-payer option, the stimulus act would have been much larger, and gun control would have passed the Senate. The Senate might have even managed to pass a version of a cap-and-trade climate change mitigation bill in 2010 if it hadn’t been for the filibuster. Despite this constant obstruction, Democrats were timid, afraid to upend Senate tradition.

Then, over the past several months, a fight over nominees to a little-known but influential court pushed Reid to finally change the rules.

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Senate Dems Just Went Nuclear and Changed the Filibuster. Here’s Why.

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Once Again, Republican Obstinacy Bites Them in the Ass

by Benny Roye Posted on November 21, 2013

Mother Jones

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So, the filibuster. Did Harry Reid do the right thing getting rid of it for judicial and executive branch nominees?

I’d say so. And yet, I think Republicans missed a bet here. I’ve never personally been a fan of the idea that the Senate’s raison d’être is to be the slowest, most deliberative, and most obstructive branch of government. Hell, legislation already has to pass two houses and get signed by a president and be approved by the Supreme Court before it becomes law. Do we really need even more obstacles in the way of routine legislating?

Still, I’ll concede that my own feelings aside, the Senate really was designed with just that in mind. It wasn’t designed to be an automatic veto point for minority parties, but it was designed to slow things down and keep the red-hot passions of the mob at bay. So here’s what I wonder: why weren’t Republicans ever willing to negotiate a reform of the filibuster that might have kept it within the spirit of the original founding intent of the Senate?

What I have in mind is a reform that would have allowed the minority party to slow things down, but would have forced them to pay a price when they did it. Because the real problem with the filibuster as it stands now is that it’s basically cost-free. All it takes to start a filibuster is a nod from any member of the Senate, which means that every bill, every judge, every nominee is filibustered. The minority party has the untrammeled power to stop everything, and these days they do.

But what if filibusters came at a cost of some sort? There have been several proposals along these lines, and all of them would have allowed the minority party to obstruct things they truly felt strongly about. But there would have been a limit to how many things could be obstructed, or how long the obstruction could go on, and the majority party could eventually have gotten its way if it felt strongly enough. It would have been ugly, but at least Republicans would have retained some ability to gum up the works.

Instead, by refusing to compromise in any way, they’ve lost everything. Just as they lost everything on health care by refusing to engage with Democrats on the Affordable Care Act. Just as they lost everything on the government shutdown and the debt ceiling. Just as they lost the 2012 election.

Hard-nosed obstinacy plays well with the base, but it’s not a winning strategy in the end. Republicans never seem to learn that lesson.

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Once Again, Republican Obstinacy Bites Them in the Ass

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Elizabeth Warren to Congress: Grandma "Will Be Left to Starve" If We Cut Social Security

by BakenKesselring341 Posted on November 18, 2013

Mother Jones

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On Monday afternoon, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) delivered a speech on the Senate floor slamming those on Capitol Hill who want to cut Social Security in order to balance the budget, and calling on Congress to expand the program instead.

“This is about our values,” the senator said, “and our values tell us that we don’t build a future by first deciding who among our most vulnerable will be left to starve.”

Lawmakers have to come to an agreement to fund the government by mid-January, and some are floating Social Security cuts as a bargaining chip in a possible budget deal. Even President Barack Obama’s last budget proposal contained cuts to the program.

Warren says slashing retirement benefits for elderly Americans is an absurd idea. Warren noted that Social Security payments are already stingy, averaging about $1,250 a month. Plus, an increasing number of Americans can no longer count on healthy pensions through their job. Two decades ago, 35 percent of jobs in the private sector offered workers a traditional pension that provided monthly payments retirees could rely on. Today, that number is only 18 percent. Some 44 million workers get no retirement help from their employers.

Because of the growing “retirement crisis” in America, Warren argued, “we should be talking about expanding Social Security benefits—not cutting them.” She noted that several senators, including Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), have been pushing for just that.

Seniors are not going to get more generous retirement benefits as long as the GOP-dominated House opposes the idea. But most Democrats have said they won’t agree to entitlement cuts without new revenues, and Republicans refuse to raise revenues, so real cuts are unlikely, too. Rather than hashing out a grand bargain that includes cuts to the safety net, Congress will probably kick the can down the road, and come to another modest, last-minute, short-term budget accord early next year.

But Warren’s speech was about more than staving off immediate cuts to retirement benefits. It was yet another move to cement her role as Congress’ star defender of the middle class. Warren has said she will not run for president in 2016. But this is one of many issues on which she has staked out a position to the left of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who is widely expected to run. In a speech at Colgate University last month, Clinton did not rule out the idea of limited cuts to entitlement programs as a means to reaching a budget deal.

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Elizabeth Warren to Congress: Grandma "Will Be Left to Starve" If We Cut Social Security

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