Tag Archives: george

George Pataki Leads 2016 GOP Crowd…

by AlyceYorke Posted on May 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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The good news: The GOP 2016 field has a contender who believes human-induced climate change is real and extensive action must be taken to reduce emissions. The bad news: It’s George Pataki.

The former New York governor announced his entry into the race on Thursday—and, predictably, the political earth did not move. Few members of the politerati view Pataki as a top-tier candidate. His name recognition is low. And after he left New York state’s top job in 2006, Pataki, who had unexpectedly defeated then-Gov. Mario Cuomo in 1994, has been largely absent from politics. But he did—of course—join a law firm. And he formed a consulting group to provide guidance to firms in the energy, infrastructure, clean-tech, and environmental fields. Clean tech? Yes, he was a fan of green-friendly enterprise. But—for a Republican contender—it’s even worse: Pataki became an advocate for climate change action.

In 2007, he was named co-chair of the Independent Task Force on Climate Change organized by the Council on Foreign Relations. The other co-chair was Tom Vilsack, the former Democratic governor of Iowa who is now President Barack Obama’s agriculture secretary. Other members of this very blue-ribbon commission included Lawrence Summers, Theodore Roosevelt IV, and Timothy Wirth. And after a year of study and deliberations, the panel put out a 142-page report that would horrify the Republican Party of today, for it noted that human-caused climate change posed a crisis and that comprehensive action was required immediately. It proposed a cap-and-trade system to dramatically reduce US emissions.

Here’s the first page:

In a chapter entitled “Leadership,” the report noted that redressing climate change would “demand much of U.S. leaders” and “require strong cooperation between the executive branch and Congress.” It called for bipartisan action. The report concluded, “Addressing climate change will be no easy task. But with careful and creative strategy, tempered by modesty in its knowledge of how to address to sic the challenge but driven by an equally clear recognition of its gravity, the United States can ultimately help lead the world to a safer place.”

That’s certainly not the Republican line these days. Earlier this year, the GOP-controlled Senate voted that climate change is not caused by human activity. And it’s become a GOP article of faith that climate change is a phony issue and cap-and-trade (or any other response) is a left-wing plot to impose more taxes on Americans for the sake of imposing more taxes on Americans.

So it will be interesting to see how Pataki handles—or dodges—this issue as he campaigns for Republican votes. Here’s one clue: His bio on his campaign website doesn’t mention his climate change work. And he neglected to mention climate change during his announcement speech. Perhaps he needs to re-read his own report.

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George Pataki Leads 2016 GOP Crowd…

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This Is the Perfect Response to Fox’s Racist Theory About Michelle Obama’s Time at Princeton

by SterlinH09 Posted on May 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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Over the weekend, Michelle Obama delivered a passionate, candid commencement speech to the graduating class at Tuskegee University, Alabama, in which she addressed the daily slights of racism she has endured throughout her life. From Saturday’s ceremony:

We’ve both felt the sting of those daily slights throughout our entire lives. The folks who crossed the street in fear of their safety, the clerks who kept a close eye on us in all those department stores. The people at formal events who assumed we were the help. And those who have questioned our intelligence, our honesty, even our love of this country, and I know that these little indignities are obviously nothing compared to what folks across the country are dealing with every single day.

It was a powerful speech, and naturally, the folks at Fox News were not happy. Fox News contributor Angela McGlowan on Tuesday suggested the speech was yet another example of the White House dividing the country on issues of race, asking, “Why didn’t the first lady share the reason why she got into Princeton was probably because of Affirmative Action?”

“The reason why she became an associate at a law firm was probably because of diversity, they needed a woman—not saying that she wasn’t qualified—but they needed a woman, and a woman of color,” she said.

Comedy Central’s Larry Wilmore was not having it. In a segment on the Nightly Show, he fired back: “When a coke-snorting, alcohol-guzzling son of a CIA director DUI’s his way into Yale and ultimately into the Oval Office because his daddy’s was in both places, that’s affirmative action.”

George W., we hope you’re watching.

Watch the full segment below:

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This Is the Perfect Response to Fox’s Racist Theory About Michelle Obama’s Time at Princeton

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Apparently Jeb Bush Needs a Hearing Aid, Stat

by CedricBoyland Posted on May 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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Yesterday’s quote of the day:

Megyn Kelly: Knowing what we know now, would you have authorized the Iraq invasion?

Jeb Bush: I would have.

Really? As Byron York points out, even George W. Bush himself has some qualms about the war knowing what we know now—namely that the intel about Saddam’s WMD was all 100 percent fiction derived from phony sources and wishful thinking. So how is ol’ Jeb going to clean up this steaming pile of gaffe-osity? Like this, according to former Bush aide Ana Navarro:

I emailed him this morning and I said to him, ‘Hey, I’m a little confused by this answer so I’m genuinely wondering did you mishear the question?'” Navarro said. “And he said, ‘Yes, I misheard the question.'”

….On Tuesday morning, Navarro she wasn’t sure whether he would clarify the answer.

Hoo boy. That’s his story? Good luck with that.

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Apparently Jeb Bush Needs a Hearing Aid, Stat

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Hillary Clinton Isn’t Ready to Disclose Who’s Funding Her Campaign

by BenedicD53 Posted on May 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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On the campaign trail, Hillary Clinton has been pushing hard to overhaul of the country’s broken campaign finance system. “We need to fix our dysfunctional political system and get unaccounted money out of it, once and for all, even if that takes a constitutional amendment,” Clinton said during one of her first official speeches in Iowa last month.

Clinton’s campaign finance rhetoric appears to be aimed at super PACs, the quasi-independent organizations that bolster campaigns by buying ads. But when it comes to the major funders behind her own presidential campaign, the Democratic front-runner has yet to answer questions about how transparent she’s willing to be. When Mother Jones questioned the Clinton camp about whether it will disclose the names and fundraising totals of the key supporters—known as “bundlers”—who raise vast sums of cash, a spokesperson declined to provide an answer, saying only that the campaign was still figuring out its plans.

What exactly are bundlers? Donations to campaigns from individuals are capped at $2,700 for the primary election and $2,700 for the general election (meaning donors can give up to $5,400 to a candidate over the entire cycle). In theory, these restrictions limit the amount of influence that individual donors can exert over a campaign. But bundlers get around these caps by raising tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars from their wealthy friends and colleagues and channeling these massive sums to candidates. Even in an era when a few super-rich donors can give as much money as they please to independent super PACs, bundlers are essential to most presidential bids. Super PACs might be able to fund expensive ad buys with million-dollar donations, but it’s large bundled contributions that allow campaigns to hire staff, conduct polls, and carry out the rest of their day-to-day operations.

Because of the outsized role that bundlers play in paying the bills for would-be presidents, advocates for campaign finance reform have long called for a robust system of disclosure. But under current law, it’s up to each candidate to decide whether the names of these fundraisers will ever become public.

The Clinton campaign is initially asking bundlers to collect $27,000 each (that is, 10 donations at the maximum amount of $2,700). Those who reach this goal will earn the designation of “Hillstarter” and score an invitation to a special campaign confab at the end of May. The campaign refused to say whether it will disclose the identities of these Hillstarters—or whether it plans to release information about bundlers who end up raising far more than $27,000 during what is likely to be a billion-dollar campaign.

Lavishing bundlers with perks is standard practice for presidential campaigns. George W. Bush created tiers of bundlers with hokey names such as “Rangers” and “Pioneers.” In June 2012, Mitt Romney invited over 800 people who had bundled at least $50,000 for his campaign to an exclusive retreat in Utah, where they could hobnob with the candidate and his senior campaign staff. Bundlers may also receive more valuable rewards. A 2011 study by the Center for Public Integrity found that 184 of the 556 publicly named bundlers from Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign had landed administration roles for themselves or their spouses. That figure increased to about 80 percent for the top bundlers who raised more than $500,000.

In most cases, there are no rules mandating that candidates release the names of their bundlers. Federal law does require campaigns to list lobbyists who bundle more than $16,000, but even this modest rule is easy to skirt. Large lobbying firms can divvy up the fundraising among various partners to avoid being listed.

In the absence of legal mandates, it’s up to each campaign to decide whether or not it will reveal its biggest fundraisers. Some candidates choose to disclose some information about bundlers. (Since this disclosure is entirely voluntary, however, there is nothing to stop campaigns from omitting unsavory names.) In 2012, Obama released information on bundlers that was divided into four tiers: those who raised between $50,000 and $100,000; those who raised between $100,000 and $200,000; those who raised between $200,000 and $500,00; and those who raised more than $500,000. Romney, on the other hand, refused to release the names of any bundlers, except for the lobbyist disclosure required by law.

In 2008, Clinton offered minimal information about her bundlers. Donors who bundled more than $100,000 for her campaign earned the title of “HillRaiser,” and their names were released to the public. According to the watchdog group Public Citizen, whose White House For Sale project has tracked bundlers during recent presidential elections, a total of 324 people earned that designation.

But the ’08 Clinton campaign refused to release more specific bundler categories. It remained a mystery which fundraisers just barely crossed the $100,000 threshold, and which ones raised truly massive sums. “‘The problem is that it’s just in large increments, as opposed to an actual number,” says Public Citizen’s Craig Holman. “It needs to be better than this. When all we can say is, ‘At least $100,000,’ it could be $10 million or $20 million, we don’t know. And the individual who is going to bring in millions of dollars is going to be treated differently than someone who just brought in $100,000. We need to know more information.”

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Hillary Clinton Isn’t Ready to Disclose Who’s Funding Her Campaign

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If You Read One Post About Labor Force Participation This Decade, Let It Be This One

by NelsonHaylupwbx Posted on April 24, 2015

Mother Jones

While Kevin Drum is focused on getting better, we’ve invited some of the remarkable writers and thinkers who have traded links and ideas with him from Blogosphere 1.0 through today to pitch in posts and keep the conversation going. Here’s a missive from Max Sawicky, a DC-based economist and blogger. You can read his always entertaining work on welfare policy, politics, and many other topics at MaxSpeak, You Listen! or find him on Twitter.

I started blogging in May of 2002. In those days the liberal side of the blogosphere was relatively thin, so I got a bit of notoriety. In my recollection, that fall I started noticing the blog of Mr. Kevin Drum. As the weeks went on I noticed this guy Drum was writing a lot, all well-reasoned, articulate prose. Other people were noticing as well. He left me in the dust. At least Kevin was reading me. At some point he came through D.C. with his wife and we had lunch.

I’m honored to be invited to contribute to this festschrift. Yes, that’s the word his editors used when they got in touch. Such high-falutin academic terminology. I prefer to think of it as a roast. But there is nothing funny about Kevin. He’s just too damn reasonable and level-headed. No doubt this contributes to his success. I usually have something obnoxious to say about everybody, but with Kevin I draw a blank. Since I’ve been able to infiltrate the ginormous Mother Jones web site, I need to come up with something. My default mode is attack, so here’s some MaxSpeak love for KD and MoJo.

In this post from just last weekend, Kevin links to a bit from Tyler Cowen. That was your first mistake, Brother Drum. I realize linking is not endorsing, though KD offers a limited, tentative ‘interesting possibility’ type of approval. You see, the prolific and very smart Tyler hails from the zany economics department of George Mason University. No good can come from referencing him. These characters spend all their time excoriating Government and social protection for the working class from tenured, Koch-subsidized positions at a public university. Sweet.

Professor Cowen briefly discusses a paper suggesting the Clinton era welfare reform (sic) reduced labor force participation. (I too am an economist, in case you didn’t know. Ph.D. from Dave’s All-Night University.) The paper suggests that the causes are the imposition of work requirements under Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF; formerly Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or just ‘the welfare’), and the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC).

The TANF explanation makes no sense. To get benefits you have to work, sooner or later. Previously, you didn’t. How could that reduce labor force participation? (On pushing welfare people into Social Security Disability Insurance, thus far there is no evidence of that.) The other cause—the EITC providing enough benefits to a couple to enable one spouse to work less—is pretty well known, though the magnitude of the effect is weak. This is all basic stuff in the literature, as noted in Cowen’s comments section by Virginia Postrel, but it’s evidently new to Tyler. In his defense, Tyler publishes a dynamite guide to ethnic dining in the MD/DC/VA metro area.

So the upshot is this whole mess is thesis interruptus. Even Tyler is skeptical in the end. Though he alludes to it vaguely, the implication of one spouse working somewhat less because the other earns more is not necessarily Bad, unless you’re a Stakhanovite. More time not working can be more time with the kids.

The 1996 welfare reform looked good in the late ’90s, but that was when the whole labor market looked really, really good. Since 2000, not so much. Poverty rates, for instance, have consistently gone up since then. People have not been empowered to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Looking to Tyler for enlightenment on anti-poverty programs is like taking Driver’s Ed from Vin Diesel.

Your go-to sources on the plight of the poor would include Jared Bernstein, Matt Bruenig, Kathy Geier, Shawn Fremstad, and Elise Gould, among others, and occasionally your humble servant.

I wish Kevin the best for an industrial-strength recovery so he can continue to set a good example for progressive commentary, while also providing me periodically with inviting targets. And I look forward to Mother Jones‘ exposé of Scott Walker’s background in Wisconsin animal husbandry. With the obligatory slide show.

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If You Read One Post About Labor Force Participation This Decade, Let It Be This One

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Who’s Tired Of Politics?

by EdwardoN54 Posted on April 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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Yesterday lifelong political junkie George Packer reluctantly confessed something: “It might not be wise for a sometime political journalist to admit this, but the 2016 campaign doesn’t seem like fun to me.”

Ed Kilgore and Dylan Byers both took issue with this. In a nutshell, Kilgore thinks 2016 will be a fairly consequential election and the horse race will be fairly unpredictable, while Byers thinks the horse race will have as many twists and turns as usual. Lots of fun for everyone!

I’m a bit of an odd duck on this subject: a daily blogger and political junkie who has only a slight interest in the campaigns themselves. I have some interest, and I usually end up writing plenty of campaign posts, but it mostly seems like uninteresting kabuki to me. Candidates are so thoroughly media trained these days that you mostly know what they’re going to say before they open their mouths. “Gaffes” are seldom more than slightly ambiguous extemporaneous constructions that the media plays along with either out of boredom or a desire to seem like they’re not playing favorites. All the marketing minutiae of ad buys and demos and GOTV innovations is interesting in an academic sense, but it hardly seems to matter much in the face of overwhelming evidence that a few basic fundamentals decide the race months before Election Day. And the tired and almost childish obsession of the press corps with dumb adherence to narratives and personalities is enough to make any serious reader scream.

But these aren’t really Packer’s main beefs with presidential campaigns. This is:

The reason is the stuckness of American politics. Especially in the years after 2008, the worst tendencies of American politics only hardened, while remaining in the same place. Beneath the surface froth and churn, we are paralyzed. You can sense it as soon as you step out of the train at Union Station in Washington, the instant you click on a Politico article about a candidates’ forum in Iowa: miasma settles over your central nervous system and you start to go numb. What has happened is that the same things keep happening. The tidal wave of money keeps happening, the trivialization of coverage keeps happening, the extremism of the Republican Party keeps happening (Ted Cruz: abolish the I.R.S.; Rand Paul: the Common Core is “un-American”). The issues remain huge and urgent: inequality, global warming, immigration, poorly educated children, American decline, radical Islamism. But the language of politics stays the same, and it is a dead language. The notion that answers will come from Washington or the campaign trail is beyond far-fetched.

This is it, and it’s a common complaint. Both parties are stuck in the same sound bites; neither is willing to seriously compromise; and given the structure of the US government it’s vanishingly unlikely that either party can get much of anything done. Tax policy can be changed via reconciliation, and Barack Obama had a short window where he got some things done via a huge Democratic majority in the Senate. Neither party is likely to replicate that in the near future. Likewise, for all the sound and fury, the differences between mainstream Democratic and Republican foreign policy have become pretty narrow since George Bush’s Iraq debacle.

As Packer says, American politics is stuck. It’s paralyzed. Exhibit 1: We’ve just witnessed a historically unprecedented delay in confirming an Attorney General that everyone agrees is eminently qualified. Why? Because of a bit of clever Republican gameplaying over an abortion clause that was fundamentally trivial but great red meat for the base. When the Democratic base finally cottoned on to the game, they went predictably ballistic and everything stalled. It was all just dumb kabuki: gameplaying from Republicans, predictable outrage from Democrats, and all over a long accepted principle that bans federal funding of abortion. Two months of gridlock over trivial symbolism. And why not? Everyone knows there was nothing important that had any chance of getting done anyway.

So yeah: unless you’re a horse race junkie by nature, it’s pretty hard to get excited by the horse race when it has almost no chance of changing things except on the margins. This will change eventually, but probably no time soon.

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Who’s Tired Of Politics?

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Why the GOP’s Attack on Obama’s Climate Plan Will Probably Fail

by TyNevilleeiph Posted on April 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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This morning, several of the nation’s top environmental lawyers gathered at the US Court of Appeals in Washington, DC, for the first round of arguments in a pair of lawsuits challenging the cornerstone of President Barack Obama’s climate plan.

One of the suits was brought by coal company Murray Energy, the other by a group of a dozen states (all with Republican governors, and all either large producers or consumers of coal); they both contend that the Environmental Protection Agency doesn’t have the authority to set tough new standards for carbon dioxide emissions from existing power plants. The rules, first proposed last summer, are designed to cut the nation’s carbon footprint 30 percent by 2030 compared to 2005 levels. The question before the court today was whether the lawsuits can go forward.

We probably won’t know the judges’ decision for a month or more. As my colleague Kevin Drum pointed out, it’s conceivable they could rule against the EPA. All three judges on the panel were appointed by Republican presidents (two by George W. Bush, and one by his dad), and at least two of them have a history of anti-environmental rulings. One of the judges, Brett Kavanaugh, filed a dissent on a separate case in 2012 arguing that greenhouse gases shouldn’t be regulated as air pollutants.

Still, many experts believe that it’s unlikely the judges will decide to hear the case—at least not yet. That’s because the climate rules won’t actually be finalized until later this year. According to Reuters, one of the W-appointed judges, Thomas Griffith, said in court this morning that he and his colleagues “could guess what the final rule looks like, but we’re not usually in the business of guessing.”

For as long as the Clean Air Act has been on the books (half a century and counting), there have been attempts by polluting industries to tear it apart. Every time the Obama administration puts forward new regulations based on it (for mercury emissions, for example, and carbon emissions from new power plants), lawsuits start to pile up as soon as the draft language is out of the gate. But courts have never, not once, taken up a challenge to any EPA rule before it was made final.

If they did, “it would create enormous mischief,” said Richard Revesz, a leading environmental law scholar who has testified to Congress in support of the proposed to rule and was in the courtroom this morning. “It would double the amount of litigation on every proposed rule.”

That’s because the final rule is almost certain to look quite different from what’s on the table now. The EPA is currently sifting through more than 4 million public comments on the rule, submitted by everyone from corporations and governors to environmentalists and your Grandpa Joe, and trying to amend the final rule accordingly. Once that rule is made public, it is inevitably going to face another round of legal challenges from the very same cast of characters. So it really doesn’t make sense for the court to listen to arguments about regulatory language that’s virtually guaranteed to change.

Once lawsuits on the final rule do get taken up, there are likely to be some really interesting debates. The meaning of some of the key Clean Air Act language being employed by the EPA is hotly contested, thanks in part to an apparent clerical error that led to potentially competing versions of the same passage both being signed into law. And there are constitutional issues at stake as well, such as whether the federal government has the right to tell states how to manage their energy supply (if past is any precedent, Revesz has repeatedly said, they do; that’s kind of the whole point of the Clean Air Act).

But for now, there’s a pretty good chance today’s hearing was just a warm-up round for a much more serious fight yet to come. At this point, says Sierra Club chief counsel Joanne Spalding, the EPA’s opponents “are trying to derail a train that’s still in the station.”

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Why the GOP’s Attack on Obama’s Climate Plan Will Probably Fail

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Arkansas Will Force Doctors To Tell Women Abortions Can Be "Reversed"

by JosetteSeely Posted on April 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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As conservative lawmakers pass a record number of anti-abortion laws, it is staggering to consider how many require doctors to tell patients information that has no basis in science. Five states now require abortion providers to inform women about a bogus link between abortion and breast cancer. Several states mandate that doctors say ending a pregnancy can lead to mental health conditions like clinical depression—another falsehood, in the eyes of most mainstream medical groups.

Now there’s a new crop of legislation to add this list: laws forcing doctors to tell women planning to take abortion-inducing drugs that they may be able to change their minds mid-treatment.

On Monday, Arkansas became the second state to pass such a law, just over a week after Arizona’s Republican governor signed a similar measure. A spokeswoman for Americans United for Life, the legal arm of the anti-abortion movement, confirmed that both laws are based on the group’s model legislation.

Critics have slammed these bills as propagating a lie based on “junk science.” According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), “Claims of medication abortion reversal are not supported by the body of scientific evidence.”

Americans United for Life has not only backed the bills, but has enthusiastically endorsed a new procedure pioneered by George Delgado, a pro-life doctor who claims to have reversed abortions.

Most drug-induced abortions require two pills taken a few days apart. The initial dose, of mifepristone, blocks the progesterone hormones that help sustain the pregnancy. The second dose, of misopristol, causes contractions that flush out the pregnancy. Delgado says he’s stopped abortions by injecting supplemental progesterone between the two rounds of medicine. The evidence backing his discovery, however, is incredibly thin. As Olga Khazan writes for The Atlantic:

Women who only take the first pill already have a 30 to 50 percent chance of continuing their pregnancy normally, according to ACOG. The progesterone advice is based on a study by Delgado in which he analyzed six case studies of patients who regretted their abortions and were given progesterone. Four out of the six patients went on to deliver healthy infants. In other words, the limited evidence we have suggests that taking progesterone does not appear to improve the odds of fetal survival by much. The abortion pill binds more tightly to progesterone receptors than progesterone itself does, one reproductive researcher told Iowa Public Radio, and thus the hormone surge is unlikely to do much of anything.

As Cheryl Chastine, an abortion provider at South Wind Women’s Center in Kansas, put it recently, “Even if these doctors were to offer a large dose of purple Skittles, they’d appear to have ‘worked’ to ‘save’ the pregnancy about half the time.”

That’s why, on the small chance that a woman does regret her abortion midway through, ACOG-affiliated doctors say they would simply tell her not to take the second pill.

The injections might not only be useless—large doses of progesterone can actually be dangerous: “There can be cardiovascular side effects, glucose tolerance issues, it can cause problems with depression in people who already had it,” Ilana Addis, a gynecologist who opposed the Arizona measure, told The Atlantic. “And there are more annoying things, like bloating, fatigue, that kind of stuff. It’s an unpleasant drug to take.”

The new Arkansas law requires the state’s health department to write up information on abortion reversal for doctors to make available to patients, and it’s not yet clear if the health department will promote Delgado’s specific method. Meanwhile, Arkansas Right to Life is already promoting the services of doctors who are “trained to effectively reverse” abortions, and more than 200 physicians around the country have told pro-life groups that they are willing to conduct the procedure.

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Arkansas Will Force Doctors To Tell Women Abortions Can Be "Reversed"

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Obama Just Officially Decided White House Emails Aren’t Subject to the Freedom of Information Act

by BradleyNigg Posted on March 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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Civil liberties advocates are adding another strike to the Obama administration’s record on transparency: on Monday, the White House announced that it is officially ending the Freedom of Information Act obligations of its Office of Administration. That office provides broad administrative support to the White House—including the archiving of emails—and had been subject to FOIA for much of its nearly four-decade history.

In 2007, the George W. Bush administration decided that its OA would reject any FOIA requests, freeing it from the burden to release emails regarding any number of Bush-era scandals. When President Obama took office in 2009, transparency advocates were hopeful that he’d strike down the Bush policy—especially after he claimed transparency would be a “touchstone” of his presidency. In a letter that year, advocates from dozens of organizations urged Obama to restore transparency to the OA.

He never did, and Monday’s move from the White House makes the long-standing policy official. Coincidentally, March 16th was Freedom of Information Day, and this week marks the annual Sunshine Week, which focuses on open government.

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Obama Just Officially Decided White House Emails Aren’t Subject to the Freedom of Information Act

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Income Inequality Is Temporarily Down, But Hardly Out

by TristanFallis Posted on February 17, 2015

Mother Jones

Has income inequality increased under President Obama? David Leonhardt says no, and provides two reasons.

The first reason is fairly uninteresting: the rich suffered huge losses during the Great Collapse of 2008. So even though they’ve gobbled up nearly all of the earning gains since then, they still haven’t gotten back to their 2007 income levels.

This is uninteresting because it’s only temporarily true. Given current trends, the rich will regain all their losses within another year or two, and probably surpass them. Incomes of the rich have always been volatile, but the broad trend of the past few decades is pretty clear: they invariably make up the losses they incur during recessions and then soar to new heights. This is almost certain to happen again as the recovery strengthens.

Leonhardt’s second reason, however, is more interesting: government policy under Obama has increased the earnings of the poor and the middle class. Leonhardt cites a recent study from Stephen Rose of George Washington University:

The existing safety net of jobless benefits, food stamps and the like cushioned the blow of the so-called Great Recession. So did the stimulus bill that President Obama signed in 2009 and some smaller bills passed afterward. “Not only were low-income people protected — middle-income and some higher income-households had much lower losses because of these public policies,” Mr. Rose said. “For those who think government programs never work, maybe they need to think again.”

….Pretax income for the middle class and poor dropped substantially from 2007 to 2011 — about 10 percent for most groups. Yet including taxes and transfers, incomes fared better: Average income for the bottom fifth of earners rose 2.6 percent, to $24,100, and the average for the middle fifth fell only 2 percent, to $59,000. Such stagnation is hardly good news, but it’s a lot better than a large decline.

We can add Obamacare to that list too. It effectively increased the earnings of millions of low-income workers. And retaining the pre-Bush top marginal tax rates in the fiscal cliff deal of 2012 decreased the post-tax earnings of the rich slightly.

None of this is massive. The rich will make up their losses, safety net programs are already receding as the economy recovers, and middle-class wages continue to be pretty stagnant. The growth of income inequality may have taken a brief hiatus when the economy crashed, but it’s almost certain to return, bigger and badder than ever. As Leonhardt concludes:

Mr. Rose himself, who’s more optimistic about the state of the middle class than I am, says, the United States has “a real income-inequality problem.”

But the fact that inequality hasn’t continued rising in the last several years matters — first, because facts matter, and, second, because it helps show what Washington has the potential to do. For much of the last few decades, rather than attacking inequality, government policy has exacerbated it. Tax rates on the very rich, the same group receiving the largest pretax raises, have fallen the most.

In the last several years, however, the federal government has tried to combat inequality, through a combination of tax and spending policies. These efforts weren’t aggressive enough to bring major raises to most families. The financial crisis was too big, and Washington’s response was too restrained. Yet the efforts were aggressive enough to make a difference.

They are a reminder that rising inequality is not inevitable, and that the country has the power to shape its economy.

This is true. Unfortunately, Obama’s efforts to modestly address income inequality were nearly all completed during his first year in office, when he had big Democratic majorities in Congress. Since then, almost nothing has happened, and that’s the way things are likely to stay as long as Republicans remain resolutely opposed to anything that concretely helps either the poor or the middle class.

Link:

Income Inequality Is Temporarily Down, But Hardly Out

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