Tag Archives: economy

Facebook Is a Widely Beloved Company

by DonetteCoughlan Posted on December 8, 2014

Mother Jones

Alex Tabarrok mulls the question of whether advertising-supported products are fundamentally less attuned to customer needs than, say, Apple products:

Apple’s market power isn’t a given, it’s a function of the quality of Apple’s products relative to its competitors. Thus, Apple has a significant incentive to increase quality and because it can’t charge each of its customers a different price a large fraction of the quality surplus ends up going to customers and Apple customers love Apple products.

Facebook doesn’t charge its customers so relative to Apple it has a greater interest in increasing the number of customers even if that means degrading the quality. As a result, Facebook has more users than Apple but no one loves Facebook. Facebook is broadcast television and Apple is HBO.

No one loves Facebook? This is a seriously elitist misconception. It’s like saying that Tiffany’s customers all love Tiffany’s but no one loves Walmart.

But that’s flatly not true. Among people with relatively high incomes, no one loves Walmart. Among the working and middle classes, there are tens of millions of people who not only love Walmart, but literally credit them with being able to live what they consider a middle-class lifestyle. They adore Walmart.

Ditto for Facebook. I don’t love Facebook. Maybe Alex doesn’t love Facebook. And certainly Facebook’s fortunes rise and fall over time as other social networking products gain or lose mindshare. But there are loads of people who not only love Facebook, but are practically addicted to it. And why not? Facebook’s advertiser-centric model forces them to give their customers what they want, since happy customers are the only way to increase the number of eyeballs that their advertisers want. Apple, by contrast, was run for years on the whim of Steve Jobs, who famously refused to give his customers what they wanted if it happened to conflict with his own idiosyncratic notion of how a phone/tablet/computer ought to work. In the end, this worked out well because Jobs was an oddball genius—though it was a close-run thing. But how many companies can find success that way? A few, to be sure. But not a lot.

“Quality” is not a one-dimensional attribute—and this is an insight that’s seriously underappreciated. It means different things to different people. As a result, good mass-market companies are every bit as loved as companies that cater to elites. They’re just loved by different people. But the love of the working class is every bit as real as the love of the upper middle class. You forget that at your peril.

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Facebook Is a Widely Beloved Company

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The Obama Recovery Has Been Miles Better Than the Bush Recovery

by LorrineWomble Posted on December 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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Paul Krugman writes today about the dogged conservative claim that the current recovery has been weak thanks to the job-killing effects of Obamacare and Obama regulation and the generally dire effects of Obama’s hostility to the business sector. But I think Krugman undersells his case. He shows that the current recovery has created more private sector jobs than the 2001-2007 recovery, and that’s true. But in fairness to the Bush years, the labor force was smaller back then and Bush was working from a smaller base. So of course fewer jobs were created. What you really want to look at is jobs as a percent of the total labor force. And here’s what you get:

The Obama recovery isn’t just a little bit better than the Bush recovery. It’s miles better. But here’s the interesting thing. This chart looks only at private sector employment. If you want to make Bush look better, you can look at total employment instead. It’s still not a great picture, but it’s a little better:

Do you see what happened? The Bush recovery looks a bit healthier and the Obama recovery looks a bit weaker. Why? Because we added government jobs. Bush got a nice tailwind from increased hiring at the state and federal level. Obama, conversely, was sailing into heavy headwinds because he inherited a worse recession. States cut employment sharply—partly because they had to and partly because Republican governors saw the recession as an opportunity to slash the size of government—and Congress was unwilling to help them out in any kind of serious way.

This is obviously not a story that conservatives are especially likely to highlight. But there’s not much question about it. Bush benefited not just from a historic housing bubble, but from big increases in government spending and government employment. But even at that his recovery was anemic. Obama had no such help. He had to fight not just a historic housing bust, but big drops in both government spending and government employment. Despite that, his recovery outperformed Bush’s by a wide margin.

There are, of course, plenty of caveats to all this. First of all, the labor force participation rate has been shrinking ever since 2000, and that’s obviously not the fault of either Bush or Obama. It’s a secular trend. Second, the absolute size of the labor force started out smaller in 2001 than in 2010, but it grew during the Bush recovery, which makes his trend line look worse. Its growth has been pretty sluggish during the Obama recovery as people have dropped out of the labor force, which makes his trend line look better. These are the kinds of things that make simple comparisons between administrations so hard. And as Krugman points out, it’s unclear just how much economic policy from either administration really affected their respective recoveries anyway:

I would argue that in some ways the depth of the preceding slump set the stage for a faster recovery. But the point is that the usual suspects have been using the alleged uniquely poor performance under Obama to claim uniquely bad policies, or bad attitude, or something. And if that’s the game they want to play, they have just scored an impressive own goal.

Roger that. If you want to credit Bush for his tax cuts and malign Obama for his stimulus program and his regulatory posture, then you have to accept the results as well. And by virtually any measure, including the fact that the current recovery hasn’t ended in an epic global crash, Obama has done considerably better than Bush.

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The Obama Recovery Has Been Miles Better Than the Bush Recovery

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Lefties Earn 10% Less Than Righties

by au87rr Posted on December 5, 2014

Mother Jones

Well, this is weird. Danielle Kurtzleben summarizes a new study called “The Wages of Sinistrality”:

In the data, around 11 to 13 percent of the population was left-handed. And when broken down by gender — that is, comparing women to women and men to men — those lefties have annual earnings around 10 to 12 percent lower than those of righties, Goodman writes, which is equal to around a year of schooling. (That gap varied by survey and by gender, however.) Most of this gap can be attributed to “observed differences in cognitive skills and emotional or behavioral problems,” he writes, adding that since lefties tend to do more manual work than right-handers, the gap appears to be due to differences in cognitive abilities, not physical.

Apparently the cognitive differences were already well known (though I didn’t know about them), but this paper is the first to document the earnings gap. It’s surprisingly large. So if you’re a lefty and you’re doing well, congratulations! You’ve beaten the odds.

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Lefties Earn 10% Less Than Righties

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Elizabeth Warren Doesn’t Like This Treasury Nominee. Here’s Why.

by Bonita43Wdvs Posted on December 5, 2014

Mother Jones

Last year, liberal darling Sen. Elizabeth Warren helped doom President Barack Obama’s effort to nominate former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers to head the Federal Reserve. Now the Democratic senator from Massachusetts is leading the charge to derail another Wall Street-friendly Obama nominee: investment banker Antonio Weiss. Last month, the president tapped Weiss to become the Treasury Department’s undersecretary for domestic finance, a position with immense power over big banks. If confirmed, consumer advocates fear, Weiss may not go to bat for average Americans while helping craft banking rules and battling Republican-led efforts to gut financial reform.

Weiss’ job at Treasury would include overseeing the implementation of Wall Street reforms and consumer protection measures. He would help shape banking rules that the Treasury Department and other financial regulators must finalize over the next two years. And he would be in the room with congressional leaders and administration officials negotiating over GOP proposals that would water down financial reforms.

Weiss has spent the past 20 years at Lazard, an asset management firm that advises companies on mergers and acquisitions. He is now the firm’s head of investment banking. Warren contends that Weiss is not the right man for the job because he has no experience in banking regulation and is too cozy with the financial sector. And she is leading the effort to take him down. In November, Warren vowed to vote against Weiss’ confirmation, and her political operation blasted out an email ginning up opposition to him. In an op-ed in the Huffington Post last month, she said the Weiss nomination “tells people that whatever goes wrong in this economy, the Wall Street banks will be protected first.”

A source familiar with the administration’s thinking says that Weiss’ background does not determine what policy positions he may take if confirmed. But since he has little regulatory experience and most of his relationships are with people in finance, a Democratic aide tells Mother Jones, those are the people he will likely listen to.

A White House spokeswoman declined to comment on how Weiss’ connections to Wall Street might conflict with his mandate to protect consumers, noting only that “Antonio Weiss is a highly qualified nominee and we look forward to the Senate’s consideration of his nomination and swift confirmation.” Weiss did not respond to a request for comment.

Weiss will have a long to-do list if he’s confirmed. Not only would he weigh in on banking rules, he would also advise the president on whether to compromise with Republican efforts to modify the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill. (Obama will veto any all-out attack on Dodd-Frank, but Republicans could slip smaller measures to water it down into larger pieces of legislation that must get passed.) Here are some of the issues that could come across Weiss’ desk:

One of the bills that might pass the Republican-controlled Congress in the next two years would gut new restrictions on private equity fund advisers. Weiss’ current firm, Lazard, runs two private equity funds. The administration source counters that this area of the company’s business is separate from the investment banking work Weiss does.
Another bill that has already passed the House would weaken a section of Dodd-Frank that requires more oversight of derivatives trading. (Derivatives are financial products whose value is based on things like currency exchange rates and crop prices.)
The Financial Stability Oversight Council, chaired by Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, is looking into whether asset management firms like Lazard should be subject to tighter regulations. Weiss would serve in an advisory role on this matter.

The administration source says that Weiss’ résumé does not mean that he would work to weaken rules on the financial industry. The source adds that if Weiss is confirmed, he would no longer have ties to his former employer; ethics rules require that he divest his holdings or put his investments in a blind trust.

Weiss’ defenders—including Gene Sperling, a former senior economic policy maker in both the Obama and Clinton White Houses, and Neera Tanden, the president of the liberal Center for American Progress—say that his policy stances largely line up with Warren’s positions. He has called for higher taxes on the rich and a more progressive tax code. Treasury Secretary Lew told the New York Times last month that Weiss opposes US companies moving overseas to avoid domestic taxation—even though his firm has helped companies do just that.

That hasn’t mollified Warren and the crew of progressives she has lined up behind her. Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) have also formally declared their opposition to Weiss.

Warren’s anti-Weiss broadside is just the latest in her battle to push the Democratic party to the left. “This is not at all about Antonio Weiss,” Steve Rattner, an investment banker who worked on the 2009 auto industry bailout, told Politico on Wednesday. “It is part of a much broader narrative of the fight for the soul of the Democratic Party and whether so-called progressives are going to capture that or whether more mainstream Democrats…are going to retain it.”

Weiss’ confirmation process likely won’t get going until after Republicans take control of the Senate in January. He may be able to win confirmation with largely Republican votes.

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Elizabeth Warren Doesn’t Like This Treasury Nominee. Here’s Why.

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Nike, Starbucks, and other big businesses step up to support Obama’s climate rules

by NZDAurelio Posted on December 3, 2014

Nike, Starbucks, and other big businesses step up to support Obama’s climate rules

By on 3 Dec 2014 12:34 pmcommentsShare

Obama’s plan to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from power plants “is a dagger in the heart of the American middle class, and to representative Democracy itself,” said a poetic-feeling Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) back in June. He went on to claim the plan would mean “higher costs, fewer jobs, and a less reliable energy grid.”

“Nope,” said Nike, Starbucks, and 221 other companies on Tuesday in a letter to President Obama. (I’m paraphrasing).

The plan, which would cut carbon pollution from power plants by 30 percent over 2005 levels, will, the EPA estimates, cost between $7.3 billion and $8.8 billion to implement, but will save between $55 billion and $93 billion in public health and climate change–related costs. (It will also save thousands of lives, if you want to factor that into the equation.)

The letter, signed by other major household names like Ikea, Kellogg’s, and Nestle, and organized by the sustainable investment group Ceres, frames the plan as good fiscal policy. It explains that these 200-plus companies’ support is “firmly grounded in economic reality. We know that tackling climate change is one of America’s greatest economic opportunities of the 21st century and we applaud the EPA for taking steps to help the country seize that opportunity.” It continues:

The new standards will reinforce what leading companies already know: climate change poses real financial risks and substantial economic opportunities and we must act now. We applaud your administration for its commitment to tackling climate change and we encourage your timely pursuit of the finalization and implementation of these standards.

So what was these companies’ motivation for taking a stand? Many of them, the letter explains, have set a goal of getting more energy from renewable sources or decreasing their carbon footprint. “In short, a majority of the world’s largest companies are investing in clean energy and reducing emissions,” the letter says. “Today’s rules will help spur investment and provide the long-term certainty necessary for our businesses to thrive and to meet these goals.” So, if the administration helps the economy become less carbon-dependent through regulation, these companies are for it. (Nike, Starbucks, and a number of these same companies also backed the Waxman-Markey climate bill that passed the House in 2009 but failed to move forward in the Senate.)

This declaration of support for the EPA and the president is a rebuke to those in Congress who, like McConnell, have been echoing the fossil fuel industry’s claim that regulating CO2 from power plants will simply demolish America’s economy. In fact, the administration’s plan poses a threat to only a handful of companies — mostly those that are dependent on mining, moving, or burning coal — whose interests elected politicians seem disproportionately concerned with protecting. If this interest group’s many challenges to the power-plant rules are unsuccessful, the EPA plans to have it finalized by next summer.

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Nike, Starbucks, and other big businesses step up to support Obama’s climate rules

Posted in Anchor, Annies, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, solar, solar panels, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Nike, Starbucks, and other big businesses step up to support Obama’s climate rules

Tell Me, Chuck: What Should Dems Do To Win Back the Middle Class?

by EltonUfdutqsxc Posted on December 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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A longtime reader writes: “Hope you’ll weigh in on Edsall on Schumer and the Dems ‘destroying’ the party over Obamacare.”

Well, OK. But I don’t have an awful lot to say. Basically, Sen. Chuck Schumer thinks it was a mistake to focus on Obamacare in 2009. Instead, Democrats should have focused like a laser on the economy, and in particular, on helping the working and middle classes. Instead, Dems passed yet another social welfare program that mostly helps the poor, demonstrating yet again that they don’t really care much about the middle class.

Yesterday, Tom Edsall weighed in on this. He didn’t really take a political position of his own, but he did present a bunch of evidence that Schumer was substantively correct. That is, Obamacare really does help mainly the poor, and Democrats really have done very little for the middle class lately.

So what’s my view? Well, I’ve written about this before, and I’d say that on a technical level Edsall is exactly right. Obamacare does help the working and middle classes a bit, partly because its subsidies are available even to those with relatively high incomes and partly because of its other provisions. For example, its guarantee that you can get affordable coverage even if you have a preexisting condition is something that helps everyone. If you’re middle class and you lose your job, that provision of Obamacare might be a lifesaver.

Still, there’s no question that Obamacare helps the middle classes only at the margins. Most of them already have employer health coverage, and the ones that end up buying coverage through the exchanges get only small subsidies. I happen to think that Obamacare will eventually be the foundation for a program of universal health care that genuinely appeals to everyone, the same way that Social Security does, but that’s in the future. It doesn’t really help Democrats now.

So I agree with Edsall about the technical distribution of Obamacare benefits. And I also agree with Schumer that Democrats need to do more to appeal to the working and middle classes. So that means I agree with their basic critique. Right?

Nope. Not even slightly. You see, the core of the critique isn’t merely that Democrats should do more for the middle class. It’s specifically that Democrats should have done more in 2009 for the middle class. But this is the point at which everything suddenly gets hazy. What should Obama have done in lieu of Obamacare? Paul Krugman has it exactly right:

When people say that Obama should have “focused” on the economy, what, specifically, are they saying he should have done?….What do they mean? Obama should have gone around squinting and saying “I’m focused on the economy”? What would that have done?

Look, governing is not just theater. For sure the weakness of the recovery has hurt Democrats. But “focusing”, whatever that means, wouldn’t have delivered more job growth. What should Obama have done that he actually could have done in the face of scorched-earth Republican opposition? And how, if at all, did health reform stand in the way of doing whatever it is you’re saying he should have done?

In broad terms, I agree with Schumer’s critique. Democrats need to do more to appeal the working and middle classes, not just the poor. But Schumer is maddeningly vague about just what that means. And as it relates to 2009, in particular, he’s full of hot air. In the first few months of the year, Obama passed a big stimulus. He rescued the auto industry. He cut everyone’s payroll taxes.

Should Obama have done more? Oh my, yes. His pivot to the deficit in mid-2009 was dumb. And by far the biggest smoking gun of unfinished business was something to rescue underwater homeowners. But let’s be serious: even if Obama had supported a broad rescue effort, it wouldn’t have mattered. Congress wasn’t on board, and I doubt very much that anything could have gotten them on board. The politics was just too toxic. Never forget that the mere prospect of maybe rescuing underwater homeowners was the issue that set off Rick Santelli’s famous CNBC rant and led to the formation of the tea party movement. I wish things were otherwise, but bailing out underwater homeowners was simply never in the cards.

Beyond that, Democrats have a much bigger problem than even Schumer acknowledges. It’s this: what can they do? That is, what big ticket items are left that would buy the loyalty of the middle class for another generation? We already have Social Security and Medicare. We have Obamacare. We have the mortgage interest deduction. What’s left?

There are smallish things. Sometime people point to college loans. Or universal pre-K. I’m in favor of those things. But college loans are a stopgap, and the truth is that the rising price of college for the middle class is mainly a state issue, not a federal one. And universal pre-K simply doesn’t yet have enough political support. (It’s also something that would most likely benefit the poor much more than the middle class, but leave that aside for the moment.)

So I’ll ask the same question I’ve asked before. I’m all in favor of using the power of government to help the middle classes. But what does that mean in terms of concrete political programs that (a) the middle class will associate with Democrats and help win them loyalty and votes, and (b) have even a snowball’s chance of getting passed by Congress? Expansion of Social Security? Expansion of Medicare? Bigger subsidies for Obamacare? Universal pre-K? A massive infrastructure program? Let’s get specific, and let’s not nibble around the edges. Little programs here and there aren’t going to make much difference to the Democrats’s political fortunes. Nor will heroic but vague formulations about rescuing unions or raising taxes on the wealthy by a few points.

So tell me. What should they have done in 2009 that was actually feasible? What should they do now? Let’s hear it.

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Tell Me, Chuck: What Should Dems Do To Win Back the Middle Class?

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After a Year Off, the Triumphant Return of My Annual Black Friday Post

by oraglobcvz Posted on November 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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According to the retail industry, “Black Friday” is the day when retail profits for the year go from red to black. Are you skeptical that this is really the origin of the term? You should be. After all, the term Black ___day, in other contexts, has always signified something terrible, like a stock market crash or the start of the Blitz. Is it reasonable to think that retailers deliberately chose this phrase to memorialize their biggest day of the year?

Not really. But to get the real story, we’ll have to trace its origins back in time. Here’s a 1985 article from the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Irwin Greenberg, a 30-year veteran of the retail trade, says it is a Philadelphia expression. “It surely can’t be a merchant’s expression,” he said. A spot check of retailers from across the country suggests that Greenberg might be on to something.

“I’ve never heard it before,” laughed Carol Sanger, a spokeswoman for Federated Department Stores in Cincinnati…”I have no idea what it means,” said Bill Dombrowski, director of media relations for Carter Hawley Hale Stores Inc. in Los Angeles…From the National Retail Merchants Association, the industry’s trade association in New York, came this terse statement: “Black Friday is not an accepted term in the retail industry…”

Hmm. So as recently as 1985 it wasn’t in common use nationwide. It was only in common use in Philadelphia. But why? If we go back to 1975, the New York Times informs us that it has something to do with the Army-Navy game. The gist of the story is that crowds used to pour into Philadelphia on the Friday after Thanksgiving to shop, they’d stay over to watch the game on Saturday, and then go home. It was the huge crowds that gave the day its bleak name.

But how old is the expression? When did it start? If we go back yet another decade we can find a Philly reference as early as 1966. An advertisement that year in the American Philatelist from a stamp shop in Philadelphia starts out: “‘Black Friday’ is the name which the Philadelphia Police Department has given to the Friday following Thanksgiving Day. It is not a term of endearment to them. ‘Black Friday’ officially opens the Christmas shopping season in center city, and it usually brings massive traffic jams and over-crowded sidewalks as the downtown stores are mobbed from opening to closing.”

But it goes back further than that. A couple of years ago I got an email from a Philadelphia reader who recalled the warnings he got from the older women at Wanamaker’s department store when he worked there in 1971:

They warned me to be prepared for the hoards of obnoxious brats and their demanding parents that would alight from the banks of elevators onto the eighth floor toy department, all racing to see the latest toys on their way to visit Santa. The feeling of impending doom sticks with me to this day. The experienced old ladies that had worked there for years called it “Black Friday.”

“For years.” But how many years? Ben Zimmer collects some evidence that the term was already in common use by 1961 (common enough that Philly merchants were trying to change the term to “Big Friday”), and passes along an interview with Joseph Barrett, who recounted his role in popularizing the expression when he worked as a reporter in Philadelphia:

In 1959, the old Evening Bulletin assigned me to police administration, working out of City Hall. Nathan Kleger was the police reporter who covered Center City for the Bulletin. In the early 1960s, Kleger and I put together a front-page story for Thanksgiving and we appropriated the police term “Black Friday” to describe the terrible traffic conditions. Center City merchants complained loudly to Police Commissioner Albert N. Brown that drawing attention to traffic deterred customers from coming downtown. I was worried that maybe Kleger and I had made a mistake in using such a term, so I went to Chief Inspector Albert Trimmer to get him to verify it.

So all the evidence points in one direction. The term originated in Philadelphia, probably sometime in the 50s, and wasn’t in common use in the rest of the country until decades later. And it did indeed refer to something unpleasant: the gigantic Army-Navy-post-Thanksgiving day crowds and traffic jams, which both retail workers and police officers dreaded. The retail industry originally loathed the term, and the whole “red to black” fairy tale was tacked on sometime in the 80s by an overcaffeinated flack trying to put lipstick on a pig that had gotten a little too embarrassing for America’s shopkeepers. The first reference that I’ve found to this usage was in 1982, and by the early 90s it had become the official story.

And today everyone believes it, which is a pretty good demonstration of the power of corporate PR. But now you know the real story behind Black Friday.

UPDATE: And what’s the future of Black Friday? Global domination! According to the redoubtable folks at eDigitalResearch, three-quarters of UK consumers have now heard of Black Friday. And they’re treating it with the same respect we do. From Marketing magazine today: “Black Friday is living up to its ominous name, with police being called to supermarkets across the UK, websites crashing and at least two arrests being made for violent behaviour, as bargain-hungry shoppers vie for the best deals.” Boo-yah!

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After a Year Off, the Triumphant Return of My Annual Black Friday Post

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GOP Takes Revenge Over Immigration Order in Tax Bill. Obama Tells Them to Pound Sand.

by EPEElvapbisqwzl Posted on November 26, 2014

Mother Jones

Danny Vinik describes the tax extender package currently wending its way through Congress:

Imagine somebody asked you to imagine the worst possible deal on taxes. It’d probably have the following qualities:

It would be bad for the environment.

It would be bad for the deficit.

It would give short shrift to the working poor.

And it would be a bonanza for corporations.

Unfortunately, you don’t have to conjure up such a package. Congressional Republicans already have. And for some unfathomable reason, Senate Democrats including Harry Reid seem inclined to go along—although the White House has vowed to veto such a deal if Congress goes ahead and passes it.

Actually, there’s nothing all that unfathomable about what’s going on. The tax extender bill may be a dog’s breakfast of legitimate tax provisions running interference for a long laundry list of indefensible giveaways and corporate welfare, but it’s always been supported by both parties and it would have passed long ago if not for an outbreak of routine sniping over amendments and 60-vote thresholds last spring. That aside, the whole thing is a perfect bipartisan lovefest. Republicans and Democrats alike want to make sure that corporations continue to get all their favorite tax breaks.

In fact, the only thing that’s really new here is the nature of Obama’s veto threat. He’s made the threat before, but primarily because the extenders weren’t being paid for and would add to the deficit. The fact that middle-class tax breaks might not also be extended was sort of an afterthought. Now, however, that’s front and center:

The emerging tax legislation would make permanent 10 provisions, including an expanded research and development tax credit….a measure allowing small businesses to deduct virtually any investment; the deduction for state and local sales taxes….tax breaks for car-racing tracks….benefits for racehorse owners.

….Left off were the two tax breaks valued most by liberal Democrats: a permanently expanded earned-income credit and a child tax credit for the working poor. Friday night, Republican negotiators announced they would exclude those measures as payback for the president’s executive order on immigration, saying a surge of newly legalized workers would claim the credit, tax aides from both parties said.

So there you have it. This bill is the first victim of Republican frothing over Obama’s immigration order. As revenge, they left out Democratic tax priorities, and Obama is having none of it.

This is all part of the new Obama we’ve seen since the midterm election, which seems to have had an oddly liberating effect on him. Over the course of just a few weeks he’s been throwing sand in Republican faces will gleeful abandon: cutting climate change deals with the Chinese; demanding full net neutrality regulations from the FCC; issuing an executive order on immigration; and now threatening to veto a Republican-crafted bill unless they include expanded EITC and child tax credits. It’s as though he’s tired of their endless threats to go nuclear over every little thing and just doesn’t care anymore. Go ahead, he’s telling them. Make my day.

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GOP Takes Revenge Over Immigration Order in Tax Bill. Obama Tells Them to Pound Sand.

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Chart: How Black Friday Invaded Thanksgiving

by VirginiGrills Posted on November 25, 2014

Mother Jones

Remember the holiday formerly known as Thanksgiving? It had a pretty good run for about 390 years—until around 2011, when it began to be replaced with a shopping extravaganza. In the past few years, the traditional dividing line between Thanksgiving and Black Friday, the official start of the holiday retail season, has blurred. At many major retail stores, this Thursday won’t be a day of turkey and family time but a mad rush for XBoxes and iPhones. Here’s how Black Friday’s Thanksgiving creep became a full-blown takeover:

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Chart: How Black Friday Invaded Thanksgiving

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The GOP Controls Congress So Now It Can Change How Math Works

by LilyRapphshaum Posted on November 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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When Republicans took control of both houses of Congress earlier this month, they won an important new power: They can change how Congress does math.

Seriously. Republicans, led by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), their budget guru, are considering altering the way Congress calculates the costs of tax cuts—a move that could make big tax cuts for the rich appear less costly than they really are.

Here’s how it would work. In January, Republicans will be in charge of Congress. And that includes the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), which calculates how tax laws affect revenue, and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which produces official budget projections. Right now, when the CBO and the JCT calculate the impact of tax laws on government income, they consider how Americans might alter their behavior in response to tax rate changes. But the tax-math bodies do not evaluate how tax legislation could affect economic growth—largely because those sorts of impacts are hard to predict. Republicans have long claimed that tax cuts lead to greater economic activity that inexorably yields more tax revenues—a point much disputed. But Ryan, who in January will head up the House Ways and Means committee—which has jurisdiction over tax reform—and his fellow GOPers are looking to enshrine this Republican belief into the hard and fast calculations of Capitol Hill’s number-crunchers.

Last THIS week, in an interview with the Washington Post, Ryan said he will push to make sure that the two congressional budget scorekeepers use this accounting method when evaluating GOP tax reform legislation. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who will chair the Senate finance committee starting in January, said last week that he was open to implementing the change.

Ryan and Hatch can implement dynamic scoring by simply ordering the two budget scorekeepers to accept this budgeting method. Not only that, Republicans can require the CBO and JCT to use very optimistic assumptions about how tax cuts affect the economy—including people’s motivation to work, the response of the Federal Reserve, and household and business decisions on how much to work, save, and invest. Budget analysts then plug those assumptions into several models estimating economic growth, and GOPers can cherry-pick the model that produces the largest number. “The risk is that a Congress that is politically motivated takes the most unrealistic models and plugs in highly rosy assumptions,” says Chye-Ching Huang, a budget expert at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

If Republicans don’t want to make these complex choices themselves, they can install directors at the CBO and JCT who they think will use the kind of assumptions they like, Huang adds. Neither congressional Dems nor President Barack Obama can prevent any of this.

Republicans have pushed for this budget-math tweak since the Reagan days. And for years, policy wonks have debated the merits of this novel budgeting method, known as dynamic scoring. Kenneth Kies, a GOP-nominated former director of the JCT, told the Washington Examiner last week that this accounting trick falls “somewhere between pure mathematics and theology.” Because this arcane tweak can make tax cuts for the wealthy appear to cost the government less than they actually do, it is extremely appealing to Republicans. If they make this change, they could argue that new tax cuts would partly pay for themselves.

Democrats say the budgeting trick is a gimmick designed to allow Republicans to chop taxes for the rich without paying the political cost. Ryan’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

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The GOP Controls Congress So Now It Can Change How Math Works

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