Tag Archives: united

Obama Wants to Raise Your Gas Prices to Pay for Trains

by XLCDevinca Posted on February 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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In his final State of the Union address last month, President Barack Obama promised to “change the way we manage our oil and coal resources, so that they better reflect the costs they impose on taxpayers and our planet.” A few days later, he followed through on the coal aspect of that pledge, with a plan to overhaul how coal mining leases are awarded on federal land. Now, he seems ready to roll out his plan for oil.

The president’s budget proposal for his last year in office, set to be released next week, will contain a provision to place a new tax on oil, White House aides told reporters. According to Politico:

The president will propose more than $300 billion worth of investments over the next decade in mass transit, high-speed rail, self-driving cars, and other transportation approaches designed to reduce carbon emissions and congestion. To pay for it all, Obama will call for a $10 “fee” on every barrel of oil, a surcharge that would be paid by oil companies but would presumably be passed along to consumers…The fee could add as much as 25 cents a gallon to the cost of gasoline.

The proposal stands virtually no chance of being adopted by Congress. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the renowned climate change denier who also chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said in a statement, “I’m unsure why the president bothers to continue to send a budget to Congress. His proposals are not serious, and this is another one which is dead on arrival.”

Still, the idea may be helped a little by the sustained drop in oil prices, driven by a glut of supply from the Middle East and record production in the United States. Gas is already selling for less than $2 per gallon in all but 11 states, the lowest price point since 2009. Raising that cost would also be a boon for electric vehicle sales, which have stagnated because of low gas prices as sales of gas guzzlers have climbed.

Obama’s prospective Democratic successors, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, haven’t weighed in on this proposal yet, although they have both been broadly supportive of his climate change agenda. But the proposal could prove to be awkward for Clinton, who has promised not to raise taxes on families making less than $250,000 a year.

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Obama Wants to Raise Your Gas Prices to Pay for Trains

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Here’s Why the NBA’s Top Team Stopped Letting Its Players Eat PB&J

by KenSteiner Posted on February 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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After the Golden State Warriors’ Steph Curry scored 51 points during his game last night, he might have been craving a soft peanut butter and jelly sandwich. But the day before, the favorite snack would’ve been out of reach: As a part of overhauling the reigning NBA champions’ diet, the team recently asked players to cut back on sugar while traveling to games, reports the Wall Street Journal.

The champs aren’t alone in their quest to eliminate the sweet stuff. Americans are cutting back on sugar more than any other substance these days, according to a January Reuters poll. Fifty-eight percent of people polled said they had attempted to limit their sugar intake over the last 30 days, compared to 48 percent who had attempted to cut back on sodium and 50 percent who had tried to cut calories. Nearly half said that labels stating “no sugar added” helped inform their shopping decisions.

Though we may be foaming at the mouth for an Odwalla green juice (50 grams of sugar) or a Nature’s Valley granola bar (11 grams of sugar), the United States Department of Agriculture says we’re on the right track in trying to avoid too many sweets. New dietary guidelines released earlier this year recommend we drastically decrease our added-sugar intake—particularly of sweet drinks and processed snack foods. Sugar-laden diets translate to increased calorie consumption and a higher risk for heart disease, obesity, and diabetes. The feds recommend a daily maximum dose of 12 teaspoons—less than half our current average of 30. (Here’s what that recommendation might look like).

So just how much sugar is in one of the Warriors’ favorite sandwiches? Let’s assume you use the same ingredients reportedly stocked in the locker room in Oakland: creamy Skippy peanut butter, Smucker’s strawberry jam, and 12-grain whole wheat bread.

mikemphoto/ThinkStock PB&J with Smucker’s Jam and Skippy peanut butter is reportedly the team’s favorite snack.

A whole sandwich, with just one serving of the peanut butter and one serving of the jam, amounts to about 21 grams of sugar—a little more than 5 teaspoons, and still well within the USDA’s daily recommended dose of added sugar.

For the Warriors players, who were reportedly on board with giving up Gatorade and sodas, the absence of those homemade PB&Js just couldn’t be justified. With help from their assistant coach, the players successfully persuaded their management to lift the ban on the beloved sandwich this week. Of course, basketball stars burn on average of anywhere from 600-800 calories in a game—surely they can afford to celebrate with a sandwich on the long flight home.

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Here’s Why the NBA’s Top Team Stopped Letting Its Players Eat PB&J

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Yet Another Look at BernieCare

by SteviePillinger Posted on February 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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I hope you’ll pardon a bit of real-time navel-gazing. It won’t take long. A couple of weeks ago Bernie Sanders released an outline of his single-payer health plan, and I pronounced it “pretty good.” A week later, Emory’s Kenneth Thorpe took a detailed look at Sanders’ plan and basically concluded that it was fantasy. Why the huge difference between us?

It has little to do with the details of the Sanders plan. We’re both looking primarily at the financing. Here was my reasoning:

Total health care outlays in the United States come to about $3 trillion.
The federal government already spends $1 trillion.
Sanders would spend $1.4 trillion more. That comes to $2.4 trillion, which means Sanders is figuring his plan will save about $600 billion, or 20 percent of total outlays.
I doubt that. I’ll buy the idea that a single-payer plan can cut costs, but not that much. I might find $1.7 or $1.8 trillion in extra revenue credible, which means that Sanders is probably lowballing by $300 billion or so—which, by the standards of most campaign promises, is actually not that bad. I’d be delighted if a single Republican were that honest about the revenue effects of whatever tax plan they’re hawking at the moment.

But Thorpe says Sanders is off by a whopping $1.1 trillion. Yikes! Where does that come from? There are several places where Thorpe suggests the Sanders plan will cost more than Sanders thinks, but the main difference is shown in the table on the right. Thorpe, it turns out, thinks the Sanders plan would cost an additional $1.9 trillion in the first year. So he and I are roughly on the same page.

But I stopped there. I basically assumed that both costs and revenues would increase each year at about the same rate, and that was that. Thorpe, however, figures costs will increase substantially each year but tax revenues will increase hardly at all. So that means an increasing gap between revenue and spending, which averages out to $1.1 trillion over ten years.

Other details aside, then, this is the big difference. If Sanders’ new taxes fall further and further behind each year as health care costs rise, then he’s got a big funding gap that he would have to make up with higher tax rates. But if he can keep cost growth down to about the same level as his tax revenue growth, his plan is in decent shape.

So which is it? Beats me. This is the kind of thing where the devil really is in the details, and even a small difference in assumptions can add up to a lot over ten years. Still, I was curious to see why Thorpe and I seemed to diverge so strongly, and this is it. Take it for what it’s worth.

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Yet Another Look at BernieCare

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Late Night Miscellany—Powered by Dexamethasone!

by IrwinKDIDa Posted on February 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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I am currently taking a drug that appears to be supercharging my brain. I even almost got into a Twitter argument today, which is surely the biggest waste of gray matter known to man. But I was full of energy, so off I went. I was also full of energy all last night, and I have to say you guys are all a bunch of slackers. At 3 am there were no new blog posts, no one making clever remarks on Twitter, no new email, no nothing. I was reduced to reading a book. If this keeps up, I’m going to have to make more friends in Australia and Europe to pick up the slack.

So anyway, let’s see what’s going on right now. First off, here is Donald Trump explaining how politics works:

At a meeting with The Times’s editorial writers, Mr. Trump talked about the art of applause lines. “You know,” he said of his events, “if it gets a little boring, if I see people starting to sort of, maybe thinking about leaving, I can sort of tell the audience, I just say, ‘We will build the wall!’ and they go nuts.”

The charming thing is that he’s willing to admit this on the record to a bunch of reporters. He just doesn’t care, and he knows his supporters don’t care either. Basically, they’re all in on the con and enjoying themselves, so a little peek behind the scenes—”The Making of the Trump Campaign”—just piques their interest rather than disillusioning them. Not that they read the Times in the first place, so it probably doesn’t matter much what he says to their editorial board anyway.

And speaking of Trump, here is Thoreau explaining that he loves the guy because he’s smashing the Republican Party for us:

Some of you might doubt that Trump is deliberately doing good, and you’re probably right. But, hell, when the Hulk is smashing bad guys, do we really know for sure that he’s acting on his good side rather than just smashing for fun? Still, he’s smashing what we need him to smash. Well, same for Trump. I mean, FFS, he already dashed Scott Walker’s hopes of ever having a political career in Washington. That alone should make him the greatest liberal hero of the 21st century thus far.

What else? Gallup is always good for a laugh. They report this weekend that 50 percent of Americans think they’re better off economically today than they were eight years ago. But wait. Here’s how it breaks down by party affiliation:

In other words, this poll result is completely meaningless. I think it’s safe to say that both Democrats and Republicans have done about equally well over the past eight years, and Gallup even presents some more detailed polling results that pretty much prove this. But when you ask a very general question, even if it’s on a specific topic, what people hear is “Do you like President Obama?” And that’s the question they’re answering. It’s all pure affinity mongering, and I’m sure the results would have been the mirror opposite if the question were asked in 2008 instead of 2016.

And as long as we’re at the Gallup site, here are the top ten results for economic confidence by state in 2015. I’m showing them to you for two reasons. First, California handily beat Texas. Hah! Second, Washington DC is simply on another planet—with Beltway neighbors Virginia and Maryland also doing pretty well, though in a more earthbound way. Conservatives are always griping about the way that folks who feed at the federal trough always manage to do great no matter how poorly the rest of the country is doing, and it seems like they might have a point.

And now I’m off to bed. Whether I’m also off to sleep remains an open question. I’ll let you know Monday morning.

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Late Night Miscellany—Powered by Dexamethasone!

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Sanders Talks Up His Small Game on the Eve of His First Big Test

by MagdalenaSIVG Posted on February 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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For a presidential candidate aiming to come away with a big upset in Monday’s Iowa caucuses, Bernie Sanders closed out his final night before the the first votes are cast by wholeheartedly embracing his small-ball approach to campaigning. His final Iowa rally, to a crowd of 1,700 at Grand View University in Des Moines on Sunday, was introduced by a string of not-quite-A-list actors and musicians: Richmond Arquette (apparently there are as many Arquettes as Baldwins), Connor Paolo (Serena’s obnoxious younger brother on Gossip Girl), Josh Hutcherson (Peeta in The Hunger Games), and Foster the People.

The crowd played along, but didn’t really perk up until Sanders himself showed up. The senator from Vermont rolled through a 50-minute stump speech tackling the full range of his usual points—Walmart should pay a fair wage, health care should be run by the government, banks should have to pay for free public colleges—but took a little time early in his spiel to boast about how much less money he raised from big outside donors than his opponent, Hillary Clinton.

“My opponent yesterday announced that she had received some $45 million for her super-PAC,” Sanders said. “We announced that we zero dollars for our super-PAC.” (He didn’t mention the money that unions have spent on his campaign.) He continued, “We announced that we have received throughout this campaign—and this is so unbelievable, never in a million years would I have thought it possible—that we have received up to now 3.2 million individual contributions. That is more contributions than any candidate up to this point of a campaign in the history of the United States of America.”

Small ball does often win big games. Monday will reveal whether it’s sufficient to give Sanders the first big win of the race to the Democratic nomination.

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Sanders Talks Up His Small Game on the Eve of His First Big Test

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At the SAGs, It’s All About the Bragging

by NOPWallace Posted on February 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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The folks at the Screen Actors Guild sure do seem pleased with themselves:

Idris Elba…summed up the tone of the evening onstage with this play on words: “Welcome to diverse TV.”

The talk of the evening, onstage and behind the scenes, was the show’s strong display of inclusiveness….Laura Prepon…“This is what we talk about when we talk about diversity.”…Viola Davis…“They won because the actors have craft, they have a level of excellence that reaches people.”…Uzo Aduba…“It’s amazing to see actors have the opportunity to celebrate other actors’ work and to feel empowered by the voting process so they can see whatever actor they want reflected up there.”

….From the outset, the show made a point of presenting the diversity of its membership and nominees. The ceremony opened with several actors — Rami Malek, Queen Latifah, Jeffrey Tambor, Anna Chlumsky, Kunal Nayyar — talking about what it means to be in their profession.

SAG Awards Committee Chair JoBeth Williams said the actor-focused awards show has “worked very hard to reflect the real world.” Williams noted its roster of presenters and nominees as proof of that.

OK, two things. First, these guys sound a lot less interested in diversity than in bragging about their nobility and getting in some digs at the Oscars. Second, I’d be a lot more impressed by their crowing if they had a better record of honoring black actors. The only reasonable comparison with the Academy Awards is in the solo film acting awards, and the chart on the right tells the story. In the past decade, 9 percent of all Oscar acting nominations have gone to black actors. For SAG, it’s a whopping 10 percent. In the past two years, there have been no black actors nominated for Oscars and a grand total of 1 for a SAG. The SAGs are doing better, but they probably shouldn’t sprain their arms patting themselves on the back for their performance.

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At the SAGs, It’s All About the Bragging

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How Donald Trump Could Become President, In 10 Words

by CathernBrazil Posted on January 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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Over at Vox, David Roberts writes 2,000 words explaining why Donald Trump will never become president. He makes some good points, but I think he misses some important issues that call his argument into question. Here’s my rebuttal outlining how Trump could win in November:

The economy dips into recession and workers’ incomes start falling. The end.

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How Donald Trump Could Become President, In 10 Words

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A Cable Host Explains Why They Covered Donald Trump’s Publicity Stunt Last Night

by GreggKethel691 Posted on January 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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Last night I griped about the endless news coverage that Donald Trump got for a political stunt that obviously had no purpose except to get news coverage. A few minutes ago, MSNBC host Chris Hayes and Jim Tankersley of the Washington Post had a Twitter conversation about this:

Hayes:

this is not very complicated.

there are 3 cable networks competing for viewers. 1 had a debate that will draw millions and millions of viewers. Other 2 have to figure out how to best compete with that. Usually there’s nothing to do but be crushed. And then: boom! A competing event to cover

obviously this hits home to me, but people outside of this industry *vastly* underestimate a) the competitive pressure and b) the appetite for spectacle, theatrics, etc…

Tankersley:

This wud be more convincing if CNN/MSNBC didn’t show so much Trump at all other times.

On Wed, CNN gave Trump 70 percent of all its candidate coverage. That includes both Ds & Rs.

I report, you decide.

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A Cable Host Explains Why They Covered Donald Trump’s Publicity Stunt Last Night

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Three Things I’m Still Waiting For

by CorazonUMS Posted on January 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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  1. Donald Trump’s new corporate policy allowing unrestricted carry at his golf resorts.
  2. A look at the “very nice place” where Trump keeps all the Bibles that people send him.
  3. A list of the “25 different stories” documenting his pre-invasion opposition to the Iraq War.

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Three Things I’m Still Waiting For

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There’s One Big Problem With Sanders’ Promise to Overturn Citizens United

by TeresitJ23 Posted on January 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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Whoa, if true! On Thursday, Bernie Sanders declared that the Supreme Court would overturn Citizens United if he is elected president.

Except that’s not how the Supreme Court works. Justices don’t get to pick which issues or cases come their way. Only after a case is appealed to the Supreme Court can the justices decide to hear the case. There is no way for Sanders’ Supreme Court picks to decide that overturning Citizens United, the 2010 campaign finance decision that fueled the rise of super-PACs, will be one of their first acts on the bench, even if they really, really want it to be.

Update: Sanders campaign spokeswoman Symone Sanders sent the following note explaining the tweet: “That tweet was worded oddly. The senator often speaks about appointing justices that believe in overturning citizens united and who would do so if the opportunity arose. That is what this was referring to.”

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There’s One Big Problem With Sanders’ Promise to Overturn Citizens United

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