Tag Archives: republicans

Paul Ryan Isn’t Even Trying to Pass a Health Care Bill Anymore

by hwahuondekermade Posted on April 28, 2017

Mother Jones

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The LA Times reports that House Republicans have steadfastly refused to reach out to Democrats in an effort to pass their health care bill. This is no surprise. They’re well aware of how they suckered Democrats in 2009, killing months of time in “talks” even though none of them ever planned to support Obamacare. They figure Democrats would do the same to them, and they’re right.

But then we get this:

And senior House Republicans and White House officials have almost completely shut out doctors, hospitals, patient advocates and others who work in the healthcare system, industry officials say, despite pleas from many healthcare leaders to seek an alternative path that doesn’t threaten protections for tens of millions of Americans.

….Health insurers, who initially found House Republicans and Trump administration officials open to suggestions for improving insurance markets, say it is increasingly difficult to have realistic discussions, according to numerous industry officials. “They’re not interested in how health policy actually works,” said one insurance company official, who asked not to be identified discussing conversations with GOP officials. “It’s incredibly frustrating.”

Another longtime healthcare lobbyist, who also did not want to be identified criticizing Republicans, said he’d never seen legislation developed with such disregard for expert input. “It is totally divorced from reality,” he said.

It’s increasingly obvious that Republicans aren’t actually trying to pass a health care bill. They just want to be able to tell their base that they tried. And President Trump wants to erase the taste of defeat from the first health care bill.

If House Republicans were serious, they’d engage with the health care industry. They haven’t. If they were serious they’d care about the CBO score. They don’t. If they were serious they’d be crafting a bill that could pass Senate reconciliation rules. They aren’t even trying. If Senate Republicans were serious they’d be weighing in with a bill of their own. They aren’t wasting their time.

In the beginning, I think Paul Ryan really did want to pass something, mainly so that it would make his tax cut plan easier to pass. But he’s given up on that. At this point he just wants a piece of paper that gets 218 votes and demonstrates that the Republican caucus isn’t hopelessly inept. He knows it will be DOA in the Senate, but at least it will get health care off his plate once and for all. Then he can move on to cutting taxes on the rich, which is what he really cares about. And he’ll have no trouble rounding up votes for that.

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Paul Ryan Isn’t Even Trying to Pass a Health Care Bill Anymore

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Trump’s Tax Cut Plan Will… Pay… For… Itself!

by TabathaMilam Posted on April 21, 2017

Mother Jones

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Back during Steve Mnuchin’s confirmation hearings for Treasury Secretary, he said he was surprised that IRS staffing had gone down. This just reduces the number of audits they can perform, and therefore the amount of tax revenue they collect from high earners. Just think about it. If you increased hiring, it would pay for itself!

It was très adorbs. But Mnuchin is a quick learner, and he never brought that subject up again. Instead, he’s now talking about a much more acceptable kind of plan that pays for itself. The subject, of course, is tax cuts:

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the economic growth that would result from the proposed tax cuts would be so extreme — close to $2 trillion over 10 years — that it would come close to recouping all of the lost revenue from the dramatic rate reductions. Some other new revenue would come from eliminating certain tax breaks, although he would not specify which ones.

“The plan will pay for itself with growth,” Mnuchin said at an event hosted by the Institute of International Finance.

The Congressional Budget Office will have a very different take on this, and their take is the only one that matters. So why does Mnuchin even bother with this tired old charade? Maybe so that Donald Trump can yell and scream about how the CBO is rigged when they say that his tax plan is a deficit buster? Maybe to give congressional Republicans an excuse to fire Keith Hall and install a new CBO director who will give them whatever numbers they want?

Who knows? Maybe it’s just reflex. While we wait to find out, however, here’s a chart showing income tax receipts following the five most recent big changes to tax rates. You can decide for yourself if tax cuts pay for themselves or if tax increases tank the economy.

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Trump’s Tax Cut Plan Will… Pay… For… Itself!

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Chart of the Day: Georgia’s 6th Congressional District

by TaraKillough604 Posted on April 20, 2017

Mother Jones

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Jon Ossoff’s near win in the special election in Georgia’s 6th congressional district has spurred a lot of conversation about how this represents a huge electoral shift that may be a harbinger of disaster for Republicans in the 2018 midterms. Maybe. That’s a long time away, and a lot of things can happen between now and then. In the meantime, though, this chart from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution gives a pretty good idea about what really happened:

This is a district that’s been steadily shifting Democratic for years, in both presidential and congressional races. In 2000 it favored George Bush over Al Gore by nearly 40 points. In 2012 that gap was down to about 20 points. The 2016 election accelerated that trend, with Donald Trump squeaking by with only the barest possible victory. There was unquestionably both a long-term Democratic tailwind in the district and a Trump effect specific to 2016.

During that same period, congressman Tom Price went from a 40-point victory in 2006 (his first as an incumbent) to a 20-point victory in 2016. Remove the incumbency effect and it’s not surprising that Jon Ossoff cut that lead to a couple of points earlier this week. There’s a long-term Democratic tailwind and an incumbency effect specific to 2017.

If Ossoff wins the runoff—or loses a close race—it’s unclear exactly what this means. Is it a huge turnaround in electoral fortunes? Or a modest turnaround fueled mostly by the lack of an incumbent and only a little by the Trump effect? I suspect the latter, though I’m not quite sure what evidence we can bring to bear to sort this out. Come back in eight weeks and we’ll take another crack at it.

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Chart of the Day: Georgia’s 6th Congressional District

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Trump Is Now Threatening to Sabotage Millions of Insurance Plans

by DeneenConley6 Posted on April 13, 2017

Mother Jones

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President Donald Trump is now threatening to wipe out health insurance for millions of people in order to make a political statement. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal Wednesday, Trump suggested that unless Democrats agree to his plans to dismantle Obamacare, he might use his executive authority to intentionally trigger a death spiral for the individual insurance markets.

Specifically, Trump threatened to stop making payments to insurance companies to reimburse them for subsidies that help offset the costs of deductibles and copayments for low-income people. Those subsidies are mandated by Obamacare; if the feds stopped reimbursing insurers for this expense, they would likely abandon the individual markets and leave millions without coverage.

The president seemed to acknowledge in the interview that halting the reimbursements would likely result in the healthcare markets collapsing, but he said he might go through with it in order to extract concessions from Democrats. “Obamacare is dead next month if it doesn’t get that money,” Trump told the paper. “I haven’t made my viewpoint clear yet. I don’t want people to get hurt…What I think should happen and will happen is the Democrats will start calling me and negotiating.”

Obamacare includes a host of mechanisms to make buying insurance easier and more affordable for people who don’t receive coverage through their employer and have to buy it on the individual market. The law primarily does this by offering subsidies—varying by income—to offset the costs of premiums for people who earn up to 400 percent of the poverty level. But the law was also designed to provide $7 billion per year in “cost sharing reduction” payments to insurance companies so that people below 250 percent of the poverty line would have lower deductibles and copayments.

These payments were explicitly included in the health care law, but through the convoluted quirks of legislative procedure, Republicans have alleged that Congress technically didn’t “appropriate” money for the program. The Obama administration went ahead and started making the payments anyway, and in 2014 House Republicans sued the White House, saying that the administration shouldn’t be able to spend that money. A federal district judge sided with Republican last year, and the Obama administration appealed.

After Trump’s inauguration, both the White House and Congress sought to stall the lawsuit, asking the courts to give them more time to figure out whether or not Obamacare will be repealed. When the GOP repeal bill failed last month, Trump was faced with a dilemma: He could order the his administration to keep fighting the House’s lawsuit, or he could ditch the appeal and end the reimbursement payments. It sounds like Trump may now be leaning toward the latter. In addition to his Journal interview, Trump reportedly has become active behind-the-scenes, as well. According to Politico, the president called Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price and dictated a statement that he wanted the agency to release on the issue.

As Trump himself said, ending the program would be a disaster for Obamacare. It would cause insurance companies to flee the individual markets (which, in some parts of the country, already suffer from a lack of insurance options). And the remaining insurance offerings would jump in price. An analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that premiums for a baseline plan would jump 19 percent if cost sharing disappears.

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Trump Is Now Threatening to Sabotage Millions of Insurance Plans

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Obamacare Is Doing Well, But Trump and Ryan Can Change That If They Want

by HassanD97urycmei Posted on April 11, 2017

Mother Jones

Today brings a couple of pieces of tentative good news for Obamacare. First there’s this:

The Trump administration says it is willing to continue paying subsidies to health insurance companies under the Affordable Care Act even though House Republicans say the payments are illegal because Congress never authorized them….The Affordable Care Act requires insurers to reduce deductibles and other out-of-pocket costs for certain low-income consumers. The “cost-sharing” subsidies, which total $7 billion a year, compensate insurers for these discounts.

….House Republicans sued the Obama administration, saying that the spending — in the absence of an appropriations law — was unconstitutional. A Federal District Court judge agreed and ordered a halt to the payments, but suspended her order to allow the government to appeal.

This is a huge deal. CSR payments are critical for insurance companies, and the Trump administration could have decided to stop defending the law and let House Republicans kill the payments by default. That could still happen, but it sounds like it won’t happen this year, at least. This was the single biggest bit of uncertainty facing insurance companies this year, and this announcement should ease a lot of their short-term concerns.

So with this temporarily out of the way, how does the overall Obamacare market look? According to Standard & Poors, profit levels for insurers are still too low, but they’re improving and the market seems to be in pretty good shape:

The U.S. ACA individual market shows signs of improvement, as most insurers’ 2016 results were better than 2015 results….2016 results and the market enrollment so far in 2017 show that the ACA individual market is not in a “death spiral.”

….We believe the continued pricing correction and network design changes, along with regulatory fine-tuning of ACA rules, will result in closer to break-even underwriting results, on average, for the individual market this year….As insurers continue to adjust their products and pricing, we expect some premium rate increase in 2018 as well. If it remains business as usual, we expect 2018 premiums to increase at a far lower clip than in 2017.

S&P’s biggest worry is Congress futzing around with things: “Every time something new (and potentially disruptive) is thrown into the works, it impedes the individual market’s path to stability.”

Two things are pretty clear. First, contrary to what folks like Donald Trump and Paul Ryan say, the Obamacare market is not on the verge of collapse. It’s working pretty well and is likely to get better in the future. But second, Trump and Ryan certainly have the power to put Obamacare on the verge of collapse if that’s what they want to do. Now we just have to wait to find out what they want to do.

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Obamacare Is Doing Well, But Trump and Ryan Can Change That If They Want

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We Still Don’t Know How Much Trump’s Victory Was About Race

by DeweyRousseau Posted on April 10, 2017

Mother Jones

How much was race a factor in the 2016 election? It’s pretty obvious that Donald Trump explicitly appealed to racial sentiment more than any Republican presidential candidate in recent memory, but did it work? Did he pick up more votes from resentful, disaffected whites than any other GOP nominee would have?

At first blush, the answer seems to be no. Compared to Mitt Romney, Trump got a smaller share of the white vote and a bigger share of the black and Hispanic vote. That doesn’t support the idea that 2016 represented some kind of huge white backlash.

But there are other ways of looking at this. Here’s one from Phil Klinkner, a political science professor at Hamilton University. It’s taken from the latest release of the American National Election Survey:

This chart is pretty simple: it shows how much correlation there is between a person’s level of racial resentment and who they supported for president. In 2000, racial resentment was a weak predictor of who you voted for. In 2016 it was a strong predictor.

But this just adds to the haze. There are two reasonable ways of looking at this:

  1. Racial resentment has been a steadily better predictor of voting behavior for 16 years, with only a slight blip away from the trendline in 2012. Trump just happened to be the nominee in 2016, when it was bound to go up to its present level regardless.
  2. The trendline does inflect modestly upward in 2016. This might be because Obama bent it down a bit in 2012, or it might be because Trump bent it up in 2016.

Klinkner thinks race played a big role in the election. There’s no question this is true, but did it play a bigger than expected role? The two major parties have been splitting further apart by race for years, with Republicans becoming the party of whites and Democrats the party of non-whites. This means that to survive with an ever growing white base, Republicans have to cater to white resentment more and more. Likewise, Democrats have to cater to black and Hispanic interests more and more. This is a cycle with positive feedback, so it’s only likely to get worse.

Racial attitudes certainly played a bigger role in the election than in the past. But did Trump himself accelerate this partisan trend, or was he merely the beneficiary of it? That still seems like an open question to me.

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We Still Don’t Know How Much Trump’s Victory Was About Race

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This Is What Democrats Have to Gain From Filibustering Gorsuch

by NicholaSteger Posted on April 6, 2017

Mother Jones

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Speaking to a gathering of Democratic donors in late March, Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) gamed out the perils of filibustering Neil Gorsuch, President Donald Trump’s nominee to the US Supreme Court, whose confirmation is scheduled for a Senate vote on Thursday afternoon. McCaskill imagined a scenario—one that is barreling toward becoming reality—in which Republicans remove the 60-vote threshold necessary to confirm nominees to the Supreme Court.

“They confirm either Gorsuch or they confirm the one after Gorsuch,” she explained, according to audio that was later leaked to the Kansas City Star “Then, God forbid, Ruth Bader Ginsburg dies, or Anthony Kennedy retires or Stephen Breyer has a stroke or is no longer able to serve. Then we’re not talking about Scalia for Scalia, which is what Gorsuch is, we’re talking about Scalia for somebody on the court who shares our values. And then all of a sudden the things I fought for with scars on my back to show for it in this state are in jeopardy.”

McCaskill’s warning echoes the case made by several academics in the past few days: It’s better to save the filibuster for another day when, perhaps, moderate Republicans would help Democrats keep the arcane Senate rule that makes it possible for a minority party to prevent a vote from occurring if it doesn’t get the support of 60 members of the chamber, effectively killing a bill or a Supreme Court nomination. But last Friday, McCaskill, a vulnerable Democrat up for reelection next year in a state Trump won by double digits, announced she would join her Democratic colleagues in filibustering Gorsuch. Her decision, to join every Senate Democrat but three to oppose Gorsuch and dare Republicans to end the filibuster, raises a puzzling question: Given the possibly terrifying likelihood that awaits progressives if they lose the filibuster—not just with Trump’s Supreme Court nominee this time, but also with future fights—what’s the upside?

Some fear there is none, and that the Democratic Party is rushing toward a decision it will likely regret, at the behest of the party’s progressive and increasingly powerful base. A filibuster “prevents a revolt by the base—it’s the base here that’s not being smart,” said a political consultant who asked not to be named because of a client list that includes Democratic senators. The small donor base and activist core of the party “have boxed these folks in to a position that is not the wisest one.”

The pressure began in early March, when progressive groups issued a warning to Senate Democrats for being what they saw as too soft on Gorsuch. “We need you to do better,” a coalition led by NARAL Pro-Choice America wrote in a letter. Indivisible, a new grassroots group that helps people organize locally and contact their representatives, drafted a script for activists to use when calling members of Congress. And the Progressive Campaign Change Committee has been vigilant in going after senators who were slow to get on the filibuster train. An email sent out to the group’s listserv in Vermont, for example, attacked Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), a stalwart liberal, for saying he’s “not inclined to filibuster.” The email urged constituents to call Leahy and get him to commit to filibustering. “Voting against the filibuster is the same as voting for Gorsuch,” the email said.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who’s best known as a dealmaker rather than as a progressive stalwart, “is not really in a position to go to these people and say, ‘Hey, this isn’t really this important, this other one is,’ because that triggers the very response he’s trying to avoid,” the consultant explained. As with virtually every other Democrat, Schumer does not want to invite the anger of the base by stopping a filibuster. The decision to oppose Gorsuch, and to let Republicans put an end to the filibuster entirely, the consultant said, is more about survival today than long-term planning.

Tad Devine, who served as chief strategist on Bernie Sanders‘ insurgent presidential campaign, considers the base to be the major reason that Democrats should filibuster. To avoid it “would have been a signal that Democrats were willing to engage in business as usual and not willing to mount principled opposition to Trump” and his nominee, he explained.

Devine is looking forward to the midterm elections in 2018. In the past two midterm cycles, Democrats have struggled to turn out their voters and Republicans have won huge victories, taking over dozens of state capitals and governors’ mansions, even in blue states. If Democrats didn’t take up this fight, he said, they would demoralize their base and risk losing the momentum they have today. “We don’t want people who are now coming into the political process, engaging so strongly in support of the Democrats and their opposition to Trump, to be disheartened,” he said. “For Democrats not to do this would have been a potentially catastrophic mistake.”

Beyond the issue of the base, some progressives see more potential upsides in triggering the nuclear option. “This is an exercise of a raw political power grab, and the hope is that the American people see that for what it is in coming elections,” said Neil Sroka, communications director for Democracy for America, a progressive group that is supportive of Democrats’ current strategy of filibustering Gorsuch. This is a position echoed by Schumer himself. When asked at a press conference Tuesday what would happen if Republicans ended the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees, he responded, “They will lose if they do it.” That’s because the voters will see that McConnell “will do anything to get his way,” and Republicans will not be seen as acting in a reasonable or bipartisan fashion. In the long term, Sroka believes progressives will be better off without the filibuster hindering their own nominees when, perhaps after the 2020 elections, Democrats are in a position to pick the next nominee.

All these potential upsides are worth the risk of losing the filibuster, because McCaskill’s hope that Republicans won’t remove the filibuster in a future Supreme Court battle is a fantasy. “There is a fiction that the filibuster isn’t already dead,” says Sroka. “Any vote that Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans take is really just the icing on the cake—this thing has been cooked since Senate Republicans defied any sense of decorum in their treatment of Barack Obama.”

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This Is What Democrats Have to Gain From Filibustering Gorsuch

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So How Are Millennial Men Doing?

by Allison05T Posted on April 3, 2017

Mother Jones

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James Pethokoukis has a pair of posts up today that reignite a longstanding question: What’s the right way to measure inflation? And what does that mean about earnings and income mobility over time?

These are both complicated questions, but we can start with a very simple chart. If we want to compare, say, 30-year-old men to their fathers, and their fathers to their fathers, we can do it pretty easily. The Census Bureau collects data on median cash earnings (i.e., not counting health care, employment perks, or government benefits) and then all we have to do is adjust for inflation. But which measure of inflation?

The CPI story is grim: In the previous generation, young men earned about 8 percent more than their fathers. That’s not great, but it’s better than nothing. However, in this generation, millennial men earn 10 percent less than their fathers.

The PCE story is different. In the previous generation, young men earned 22 percent more than their fathers. That’s pretty good. In the current generation, millennial men earn about the same amount as their fathers. Stagnation like that is bad news, but at least millennials aren’t literally losing ground.

So which should we believe? There are arguments for both, and it’s a political hot potato too since inflation measures show up in all sorts of benefit calculations. It would be nice if the economic community could thrash out agreement on an overall best measure, and then make it available as a standard series going back 70 years, but if it turns out that the new measure leads to (for example) lower cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security benefits, you can expect a massive pushback. Republicans have shown a particularly aggressive form of this kind of political hackery in the past, approving of new inflation measures that would decrease benefits, but opposing the same measures if they meant that people might pay higher taxes.

All that conceded, we really should be able to agree on a good, general-purpose inflation measure. We can still have lots of different measures for specialized purposes, but the headline inflation rate should be something that, say, 90 percent of economists can agree about. (There will always be a few outliers.)

In a way, though, this doesn’t matter too much for the question of how millennial men are doing. On one measure, their market earnings have dropped from 124 percent of per-capita GDP to 72 percent. On the other measure they’ve dropped from 108 percent to 72 percent. That’s pretty grim either way.

For more on this, Pethokoukis points us, first, to a new study by Bruce Sacerdote, which suggests that consumption has increased substantially over the past several decades, once you adjust for inflation bias and include the growth of government benefits. On a less happy note, he also points us to a study by Scott Winship about income mobility. Winship concludes that although there’s still a fair amount of income mobility within the broad middle class, there’s very little at either end. Poor kids stay poor, and rich kids stay rich.

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So How Are Millennial Men Doing?

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Here’s the Biggest Lie Sean Spicer Told Today

by MagnoliFIHM Posted on March 30, 2017

Mother Jones

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While chastising Democrats for threatening to filibuster Neil Gorsuch’s Supreme Court nomination, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer on Thursday delivered one of his most egregious falsehoods yet. Republicans, he insisted, have historically been cooperative when it comes to giving up-or-down votes to Democratic presidents’ court appointments. Spicer specifically mentioned former President Barack Obama in making this assertion.

“Republicans in the past have allowed Democrat presidents to have their SCOTUS nominees voted on up or down,” Spicer said. “And for the most part, when you go back through President Obama or President Clinton…Republicans have joined with Democrats to allow people who are qualified to go onto the court.”

“It was Obama’s nominees that got through—all with Republican support,” he added. “It’s difficult to understand why, when you’ve got someone as eminently qualified as Gursuch, that this the stake that they want to drive. And I think it further sets a partisan divide in our country when we can’t allow people who are qualified, and universally so, to get on the bench.”

There’s one glaring problem with Spicer’s remarks: Merrick Garland. In 2016, Obama selected Garland to replace the Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who died last February. Arguing the nomination to fill the vacant seat should be left to the next president, Republicans staged an unprecedented blockade to the nomination process, refusing to even hold hearings on Garland’s nomination. That gamble paid off, and here we are with Trump and Gorsuch—and Spicer’s bald-faced lie.

Watch Spicer’s remarks, which start around the 1 hour and 49 minute mark:

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Here’s the Biggest Lie Sean Spicer Told Today

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Who Wins and Who Loses From TrumpamaCare?

by AveryUgcegvw Posted on March 27, 2017

Mother Jones

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Earlier this morning I sketched out a possible compromise between Obamacare and Trumpcare that might have a chance of getting through Congress if everyone agrees to a plan that would rely on both Republican and Democratic votes. I consider the odds of such a thing small, but nevertheless it’s worth looking at why nearly everyone should find this idea attractive:

Donald Trump gets a big win. Paul Ryan couldn’t get his plan through Congress, but then Trump steps in and pulls off a huge deal. His presidency is back on track.
Republicans in Congress get an albatross off their backs. Right now, health care is a loser for them, and the Freedom Caucus is riding high. But if they pass a bipartisan plan, it sticks a finger in the eye of the FC ultras. And if they’re worried about their base, they don’t have to be. Trump will sell the hell out of the plan, and his fans will buy it.
Democrats have to make some concessions, but in return they get stability and permanence—and the possibility of future enhancements—for a social welfare program they’ve been trying to get enacted for decades.
The health care industry gets some certainty about the future, along with a system that promises to be a moneymaker for them.

Who are the losers in this deal? Hardly anyone. The ultras lose, but everyone wants them to lose. Rich people lose a bit because they continue paying a modest tax, but frankly, I haven’t noticed that rich people are all that upset about it. They care more about capital gains taxes and top marginal rates. Talk radio shouters lose a reliable audience pot stirrer, but they’ll support Trump in the end. And they have plenty of other ways of keeping their listeners at a fever pitch of outrage anyway.

Oh, and I almost forgot: the American people would be big winners too. Already, Obamacare covers 20 million people. A new and improved TrumpamaCare would probably get to 30 million within a few years.

Given all this, it’s almost insane that this deal isn’t likely to happen.

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Who Wins and Who Loses From TrumpamaCare?

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