Tag Archives: economy

Boehner Offers to Delay Hostage Taking Until Thanksgiving

by Melissa Robin Posted on October 10, 2013

Mother Jones

Like everyone, I guess, I’m having trouble keeping track of what’s really going on today. My best reading of the tea leaves is that John Boehner plans to offer President Obama a clean 6-week debt ceiling extension in exchange for a willingness to negotiate over the budget. Or something. Maybe there will actually be some strings attached. It’s hard to tell.

But it’s hard to fathom the point of a 6-week extension even if it comes without formal strings attached. The fact that Republicans are insisting that Obama negotiate with a debt ceiling breach looming over him is a tacit admission that the debt ceiling is still being used as a threat. Right? Or am I missing something here?

I suppose Obama would have to sign a clean extension regardless. And he probably should. And who knows? Anything can happen in six weeks. But it’s a little hard to see that this accomplishes anything except to guarantee a Thanksgiving hostage crisis instead of a Halloween hostage crisis.

Link to article:

Boehner Offers to Delay Hostage Taking Until Thanksgiving

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Boehner Offers to Delay Hostage Taking Until Thanksgiving

Here’s Why I Think Jack Lew Needs to be Painfully Honest About the Debt Ceiling

by ker3roa Posted on October 10, 2013

Mother Jones

I’ve gotten a bunch of email and comments regarding my post earlier this morning that criticized Jack Lew’s vagueness about how Treasury would deal with a debt ceiling breach. Instead of adding an update to the post, I want to create a whole new one to address them. I think it’s important. Here’s a sampling from the comment thread:

TLM: Of course they have a plan. But telegraphing that plan is a no-win exercise on multiple levels.

histprof1: Why would any functional person give the GOP anything to work with at this point?….I suspect that he has a plan and has his rationale ready. I also suspect that he will let the politics work until past the last minute before he goes legal. In fact, I suspect that his first executive action after the GOP fails to raise the limit will be aimed at making them try again. After that, he goes into emergency powers territory and the checks and balances fun begins.

Jasper_in_Boston: What’s so hard to understand, Kevin? Default would quite possibly be catastrophic, and Lew (and Obama) quite understandably don’t want to give the forces of nihilism any reason to think we can get through it easily.

gyrfalcon: Bingo, bingo, bingo. The GOPers have already glommed onto the idea that we can pay off bonds from incoming revenues, and many of them are positively gleeful at the idea of having the government stiff everybody else, including SS and veterans’ benefits, thinking it will look to the public like Obama’s doing….It flat-out isn’t possible to discuss this honestly with this pack of denialists and nihilists. The admin’s only possible strategy is to keep it as vague as possible.

This is the conventional wisdom, and believe me: I get it. But I think it’s dead wrong. The assumption here is that (a) the alarm level needs to be kept at maximum, and (b) no one will ever find out if Lew was being truthful because the debt ceiling will eventually get raised.

Maybe. But that’s a pretty dangerous assumption at this point. And if we do breach the debt ceiling, and it turns out that prioritization was in the pipeline all along, and Social Security checks were never in danger, and Treasury can in fact choose which bills to pay—in other words, if the alarms turn out to have been overblown—then there’s going to be hell to pay. Republicans will be more convinced than ever that they can’t trust anything Lew or Obama says, and they’ll become even more instransigent about the debt ceiling. In other words, genuine disaster becomes even more likely.

Like it or not, my view is that Lew needs to be rigorously, meticulously honest. He absolutely can’t afford to say anything that might turn out not to be true, or that might eventually be seen as politicization or game playing. That includes making vague statements that later turn out to be deceptive because, in fact, plans were in place and he knew it.

Is it possible that being truthful will persuade some of the nutballs that the debt ceiling isn’t actually a big deal? Sure. But they already think that. So who cares? The real audience for Lew’s testimony is the folks who are conservative but not crazy. They’re on the edge already, but if they start to get an inkling that Lew is scaremongering in even the smallest way, they could turn against him.

I understand the arguments about how dangerous it is to run the risk of making a debt ceiling breach seem manageable. But I think it’s a lot more dangerous to be caught making even modestly deceptive statements “for the greater good.” My earlier post wasn’t written just because I’m personally curious about what Treasury’s plans are. It was written because I think Lew is playing with fire.

UPDATE: Just as I finish writing that a debt ceiling increase is a “dangerous assumption,” we start getting reports from Capitol Hill that Republicans are getting ready to pass a short-term debt ceiling increase. Only for a few weeks, though. Stay tuned.

Original article:

Here’s Why I Think Jack Lew Needs to be Painfully Honest About the Debt Ceiling

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Here’s Why I Think Jack Lew Needs to be Painfully Honest About the Debt Ceiling

16 Ways Default Will Totally Screw Americans

by Aaron Duff Posted on October 10, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Perhaps you’ve heard that if Congress fails to raise the debt ceiling by October 17, the United States will face an unprecedented financial default. The way some Republicans talk about the consequences of passing that threshold, you might think that hitting that limit might not be all that bad (Florida’s Ted Yoho, in fact, thinks it would be beneficial). But sober-minded economists are describing the ramifications of a default with terms usually reserved Roland Emmerich flicks—terms like “apocalypse.” The full economic consequences of defaulting are unknown. “It’s a little like asking how many people will be killed if there’s another terrorist attack,” says Isabel Sawhill, a budget expert at the Brookings Institution. But we do know, as early as October 22, the US government will run out of money to pay its bills and federal spending will have to be cut by about 32 percent, according to estimates made by the Bipartisan Policy Center. That’s when Americans of all stripes would start feeling the pain in many different ways. Here are 16 of them:

1. Social security checks will be delayed, possibly cut. According to President Obama, in the event of a default the US government will have no choice but to delay social security checks. Here’s why: The US government owes $12 billion in social security payments on October 23 and an additional $25 billion on November 1. At some point between October 22 and November 1, the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) predicts that the US government will have exhausted its borrowing power and will either have to start severely delaying its bills or sort through the millions of different payments it owes each month—on everything from national parks to the FBI—to figure out which ones to stop making. That’s when social security could see sustained cuts.

2. Federal employees will be screwed…even more. If the shutdown had never happened, the US government would have owed $3 billion in federal employee salaries on October 28. That number could now be lower or higher, depending on whether Congress approves back pay for furloughed employees before then. As Shai Akabas, a senior policy analyst at BPC, explains, if the shutdown ends before the debt ceiling date, employees will likely see their back pay. If it doesn’t, their pay will continue to be delayed or cut, depending on how the government decides to pay its bills. And at this point, we really have no idea which federal employees will continue to get paid after a default.

3. Pay and benefits for military service members and veterans will be delayed, possibly cut. The US government owes $12 billion in pay to active and retired military service members on November 1. Those payments will be delayed if the government runs out of money before then, and potentially cut, depending on which bills the US decides to pay.

4. Medicare and Medicaid checks will be delayed, possibly cut. The US government owes $2 billion in Medicaid payments on October 30 and $18 billion in Medicare payments on November 1. Same deal: If the government runs out of money before then, payments will be delayed, or put on the chopping block with everything else.

5. College kids will lose their loans, and have (even more) trouble getting jobs. The Treasury Department has warned that after a default, interest rates will skyrocket. Nick Schwellenbach, a fiscal policy analyst for the Center for Effective Government, says “federally subsidized loans would likely be buffered, but education grants funded by discretionary spending would likely stop during a default. Additionally, increased costs of borrowing would impact students who rely on credit cards and private loans to make ends meet. After graduation, economic downturn and uncertainty could once again increase unemployment rates for recent graduates.”

6. Say goodbye to your retirement savings. After the US government defaults, stock and bond prices will likely fall dramatically, affecting the value of retirement accounts. A default could also trigger a financial crash that could match or surpass the 2008 crash (And in 2008, Americans about to retire lost 25 percent of their assets, a retirement expert at the New School told The New York Times. So Americans near retirement age will likely have to continue working longer before moving to the beach.

7. Good luck buying a home. As the Treasury Department points out, a default would cause mortgage interest rates to skyrocket and banks to tighten their already super-tight lending standards, by, among other things, requiring higher down payments. It may not even take an actual default to affect mortgage rates. During 2011’s debt ceiling debacle, mortgage interest rates jumped higher and stayed that way for months: Specifically, an American taking out a mortgage of $235,000 saw an increase in monthly payments of about $100.

8. Or a car. See above.

9. Or getting a credit card. Ditto.

10. And forget that foreign vacation. A default is widely expected to tank the value of the US dollar. That could be good for US manufacturers, but bad if you’re planning a trip abroad where the buying power of the dollar will be diminished. And the recent political turmoil is already hurting American currency: As the government shutdown began, the dollar “sank to its lowest against the Euro in more than seven months and its weakest level versus the UK pound since January,” The Wall Street Journal reports. Say goodbye to Christmas in Paris.

11. That’s probably for the best since your company might not be able to pay you. Commercial paper, or short term corporate debt, is issued by many large companies to meet payroll and accounts receivable. A default would cause commercial paper rates spike, explains Cornelius Hurley, a professor in Boston University’s School of Law and a former counsel to the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, which means that corporations that don’t have a lot of cash socked away “may be unable to meet payroll obligations.”

12. Also, you might lose your job. According to Hurley, post-default “unemployment will spike immediately as firms suspend new and replacement hiring and comb their work forces for cuts.”

13. And you might not be able to get a new one. According to the Treasury Department, “many private-sector analysts believe that a default would lead to events of the magnitude of late 2008 or worse, and the result then was a recession more severe than any seen since the Great Depression.”

14. Small businesses will be hit especially hard. Entrepreneurs don’t want to take out loans when there’s high uncertainty about borrowing costs, and banks don’t want to lend to businesses that don’t have an established history of success. As the Center for Effective Government’s Schwellenbach explains, “In the wake of the 2008 crash, the credit freeze disproportionately affected small businesses. After June of 2008, lending to small firms decreased almost 18 percent.”

15. So will local governments. Schwellenbach says, “Instability in the stock market and higher borrowing costs could decrease confidence in municipal bonds, which are used to finance local schools and infrastructure projects. Unlike the federal government, many states and local governments are unable to borrow to avoid budget cuts, if the budget doesn’t balance. Additionally, a downturn in small business investment, potential decreases in employment, and a depressed housing market could all deprive local governments of revenue and strain resources.”

16. And, after all is said and done, the US deficit will increase. “When there’s a threat of default not to say an actual default, which is much worse you see interest rates go up on treasuries, so you have to have more government spending to pay back the interest,” says Harry Stein, the associate director of fiscal policy for the Center for American Progress. “So then you end up increasing the deficit. If that’s really all you care about, then you’ll see that playing with the default isn’t even productive. So why are we talking about this?”

Continued:

16 Ways Default Will Totally Screw Americans

Posted in FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on 16 Ways Default Will Totally Screw Americans

How Tens of Thousands of Americans Got Cheated Out of Their Mineral Rights

by jatadamod8 Posted on October 9, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

What if a gas company wanted to set up a fracking rig on your property? What if you found out that you couldn’t say no? A new report from Reuters explains how tens of thousands of homeowners across America suddenly found themselves vulnerable to this nightmare scenario, as they discovered that their deeds cover their surface land but not the rights to the minerals beneath it. And as the American energy boom opens new land to extraction, homeowners from Florida to California to Washington to North Carolina have discovered that they unknowingly signed away the rights to what’s under their property. And they might not be able to do anything about it.

Mineral rights—the right to extract and profit from whatever is under the ground—are more and more commonly being separated from land deeds, and in many cases, sellers aren’t legally required to disclose that the estates have been split. After reviewing property records in 25 states, Reuters found that D.R. Horton, the biggest home-builder in the US, “has separated the mineral rights from tens of thousands of homes in states where shale plays are either well under way or possible, including North Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Virginia, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, Oklahoma, Utah, Idaho, Texas, Colorado, Washington, and California.” When the rights are split from the property deed, homeowners not only have no say, they also don’t see royalties from the drilling, which paid out more than $20 billion nationally in 2012.

The impacts can go way beyond potentially having a well pad show up on your doorstep. According to Reuters:

Loss of mineral rights isn’t the only hit homeowners take. Property-tax assessments don’t take into account severed mineral rights. And “lenders may not be willing to extend mortgage loans on property that is subject to intensive gas extraction activities,” according to a report last year by the North Carolina Department of Justice.

Wells Fargo, the nation’s largest home lender, sometimes denies mortgages to homes encumbered by gas leases. And for the past year, Sovereign Bank has been including clauses in mortgages allowing it to declare borrowers in default if any part of the subsurface property has been “leased, assigned or otherwise transferred for use to extract minerals, oil or gas,” according to a copy of the bank’s mortgage addendum. If mineral rights are severed, “we would not move forward with financing a property,” said a bank spokeswoman.

Insurance policies usually exclude damage from “industrial operations,” and some companies are denying coverage altogether for homes where the mineral rights have been severed. Title insurance companies have been exempting anything to do with mineral rights from their policies, too.

Landowners have pushed back with mixed results. The D.R. Horton returned mineral rights to a group of 700 angry homeowners in North Carolina after an inquiry by the state Department of Justice. But some individuals haven’t been so lucky. Earlier this year, Martin Whiteman of West Virginia lost an appeal for an injunction and damages after Chesapeake Appalachia—a subsidiary of Chesapeake Energy—used ten acres of his 101 acre sheep farm to set up three wells and a series of disposal pits that rendered the land practically unusable. As the practice expands and more people discover that a few lines of legalese have radically changed the deal they thought they were getting, it’s possible states will clarify how developers have to disclose this practice. Until then, it’s buyer beware.

The whole piece is worth a read. You can find it here.

View the original here – 

How Tens of Thousands of Americans Got Cheated Out of Their Mineral Rights

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on How Tens of Thousands of Americans Got Cheated Out of Their Mineral Rights

The Weird Politics of Republican Hostage Taking

by london Posted on October 9, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

So there’s a weird thing going on with the Republican hostage-taking strategy. All of them agree that taking hostages is hunky dory, but there’s a split over which hostage should be taken. Some Republicans think the party should go ahead and fund the government and then have an all-out fight using the debt ceiling as leverage. John Boehner, Charles Krauthammer, and Marc Thiessen are in this crew. On the other side, we have Republicans who think we should go ahead and raise the debt ceiling and use the government shutdown as leverage for conservative demands. Tea party firebrands Erick Erickson and Matt Kibbe are on this team.

Here’s the weird part: The (relative) moderates want to rely on the debt ceiling for leverage, even though breaching the debt ceiling would be far more catastrophic than a government shutdown. The (relative) extremists are shying away from the horror of a debt ceiling breach and just want to continue the shutdown. Doesn’t this seem backward?

It depends on what the real motivations are. Team Boehner claims that they want to use the debt ceiling as a hostage because it’s better leverage. But Team Erickson doesn’t believe them. They apparently think this is just cover. The moderates know perfectly well that a debt ceiling breach would cause a market panic that in turn would force Republicans to cave in. So they’re only pushing this line because they want a way out of the fight, and this will do it. Conversely, a fight over the government shutdown could go on for a long, long time, and eventually Democrats might end up caving in.

That’s my take on the oddness of which players are on which team, anyway. Is it correct? I’m not sure. I need Dave Weigel or Robert Costa or someone like that to help interpret the wall posters here.

See more here: 

The Weird Politics of Republican Hostage Taking

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Oster, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Weird Politics of Republican Hostage Taking

How the GOP’s Kamikaze Club Hijacked John Boehner

by kx0bq6uuw Posted on October 9, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

How did the Republican Party become a kamikaze club guided by a small handful of hostage-taking radicals hell-bent on causing chaos to ruin the presidency of Barack Obama? It wasn’t by the design of House Speaker John Boehner and the GOP congressional leadership. This came about because a small number of tea party back-benchers in the House and Senate, assisted by a well-financed network of right-wing organizations (some funded by the billionaire Koch Brothers), pushed an issue that was red meat for the GOP’s base—defunding Obamacare—and managed to hijack the party (even more than the tea party already had).

Let’s look at how the Boehner-led GOPers began this latest round of political battle. After Obama won reelection and the Democrats picked up 11 seats in the House last November, Boehner appeared ready to accept political reality. He observed,

It’s pretty clear that the president was re-elected. Obamacare is the law of the land. If we were to put Obamacare into the CR the bill funding the government, known as a continuing resolution and send it over to the Senate, we were risking shutting down the government. That is not our goal.

That is, Boehner had no desire to re-litigate Obamacare through the budget process.

Continue Reading »

Continued here:  

How the GOP’s Kamikaze Club Hijacked John Boehner

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on How the GOP’s Kamikaze Club Hijacked John Boehner

Why Are We Talking About the Debt Ceiling Crisis As If It’s Normal Politics?

by GeoffreyBlaine Posted on October 8, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

I was noodling over Obama’s debt ceiling press conference during lunch, and the thing that struck me—again—was how hard it is to truly communicate his postion. And I sympathize. I’ve written about the basics of the debt ceiling hostage crisis at least a dozen times, and I still don’t feel like I’ve ever been able to get across just how radical the whole thing is.

Except for Newt Gingrich in 1995, no one has ever shut down the government as a threat to get something they want. And except for John Boehner in 2011, nobody has ever threatened to breach the debt ceiling as a threat to get something they want. That’s because it’s basically nuclear chicken, threatening to destroy the economy unless you get your way. It’s unthinkable.

And yet, it’s now become so institutionalized that Republicans can repeat over and over their mantra that “President Obama refuses to negotiate,” and eventually it starts to get some traction. Reporters who should know better write columns suggesting that Obama should try to bargain his way out of this. Conservative pundits complain not about the hostage taking itself, but about the fact that Republicans should be sure to choose the superior—i.e., most damaging— hostage-taking opportunity available. And Obama is forced to take the stage and try out an extended series of metaphors to explain exactly what’s going on. And then we all sit around and analyze his speech and nitpick his metaphors and game out how this might end.

It’s crazy. How do you get across how insurrectionary this is? Raising the debt ceiling isn’t a concession from Republicans that deserves a corresponding concession from Democrats. It’s the financial equivalent of a nuclear bomb: both sides will go up in smoke if it’s triggered. Ditto for the government shutdown. And ditto again for the piecemeal spending bills, which are basically a way for Republicans to fund only the parts of government they like but not anything else.

You can’t govern a country this way. You can’t allow a minority party to make relentless demands not through the political system, but by threatening Armageddon if they don’t get what they want. It’s not what the Constitution intended; it’s not something any president could countenance; and it’s reckless almost beyond imagining.

And most important of all, it’s not something that should get written about as if it’s just a modest escalation of normal political disagreements. It’s not normal. At all. But how do you get this across? How do you get across just how non-normal it is that we’re even talking about it?

Continued here: 

Why Are We Talking About the Debt Ceiling Crisis As If It’s Normal Politics?

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Why Are We Talking About the Debt Ceiling Crisis As If It’s Normal Politics?

Obama Talks About the Debt Ceiling

by ker3roa Posted on October 8, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

President Obama has been holding forth on the debt ceiling and the government shutdown for over an hour now, and you can’t fault him for his ability to stay on message. He’s been clearer than usual, and less stuttery than usual, and he’s repeated his basic position over and over and over: I’ll negotiate about anything, but not as ransom to prevent economic chaos. Democrats have asked Republicans for budget meetings 19 times over the past six months, and they’ve refused because they wanted to wait until they could use threats to get what they wanted. That’s unacceptable. Unilateral threats to burn down the country are unacceptable. But take the threats off the table, and then we can talk.

Will it work? I don’t know. I’ll leave the detailed commentary to others. But I did like it when Obama told one reporter (I forget which one) “You know they’ve been planning to use threats to get their way for months. You’ve been reporting on it.” It’s true. Reporters know perfectly well how this all happened. It’s not as if Republicans have made any secret of their plans, after all.

Continue reading: 

Obama Talks About the Debt Ceiling

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Obama Talks About the Debt Ceiling

Is October 17 Still the Drop Dead Date for the Debt Ceiling?

by Finley Kay Posted on October 8, 2013

Mother Jones

I’d still like to know if Treasury thinks October 17 is the drop-dead day for hitting the debt ceiling. I’ve looked through the various numbers about federal income and outgo, and I accept that the government shutdown probably doesn’t affect spending all that much. But it does affect it some, and I’d like to know how much.

Here’s why. If October 17 rolls around and Jack Lew suddenly announces that, thanks to the shutdown, we have some extra time before the sky falls, it’s going to feed the shockingly common Republican belief that all the debt ceiling chatter is little more than liberal scaremongering. For the same reason, I’d like Treasury to tell us definitively if they can prioritize payments or not. Because if it turns out they can, and the worst effects of the debt ceiling can therefore be deferred, Republicans will take it as even further evidence of scaremongering.

I know Treasury is in a tough position. But it could be disastrous if they’ve been less than 100 percent forthright and pundits everywhere start claiming that the whole thing has been a cynical game and there was never any serious danger after all. It wouldn’t be true, but it would nonetheless make resolution of the debt ceiling crisis even harder than it seems now.

Read the article: 

Is October 17 Still the Drop Dead Date for the Debt Ceiling?

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Is October 17 Still the Drop Dead Date for the Debt Ceiling?

How Bad Is the Income Gap in Your City? The Answer in GIFs

by billytalley1169 Posted on October 7, 2013

Mother Jones

Artist and researcher Nickolay Lamm recently created these eye-popping 3-D images of New York City’s towering levels of incoming inequality.

Lamm has now expanded his project to include other major US cities. As you’ll see in the GIFs below, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Miami are now part of the 3-D inequality club. Using 2012 data from the mapping site ArcGIS, Lamm superimposed green blocks representing the median net worth of census block groups over photos of the cityscape. The effect clearly visualizes the drastic levels of income inequality found across the country.

San Francisco

San Francisco

Boston

Boston

Chicago

Chicago

Los Angeles

Miami

Miami

This article is from – 

How Bad Is the Income Gap in Your City? The Answer in GIFs

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on How Bad Is the Income Gap in Your City? The Answer in GIFs