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Robert Reich

By Robert Reich
Former U.S. Secretary of Labor, Professor at Berkeley

Paul Ryan says his budget plan will cut $4.4 trillion over ten years. The president says his new plan will cut $4 trillion over twelve years.

Let’s get real. Ten or twelve-year budgets are baloney. It’s hard enough to forecast budgets a year or two into the future. Between now and 2022 or 2024 the economy will probably have gone through a recovery (I’ll explain later why I fear it will be anemic at best) and another downturn. America will also have been through a bunch of elections — at least five congressional and three presidential.

The practical question is how to get out of the ongoing gravitational pull of this awful recession without cow-towing to extremists on the right who think the U.S. government is their mortal enemy. For President Obama, it’s also about how to get reelected.

(Yes, we also have to send a clear signal to global lenders that America is serious about reducing its long-term budget deficit. But in truth, global lenders don’t need much reassurance. Bond market yields in the U.S. are now lower than they were when the government was running a budget surplus ten years ago.)

Seen in this light, Obama’s plan isn’t really a budget proposal. It’s a process proposal. (more…)

George Lakoff

By George Lakoff
Author, “The Political Mind,” “Moral Politics,” “Don’t Think of an Elephant!”

Last week, on April 13, 2011, President Obama gave all Democrats and all progressives a remarkable gift. Most of them barely noticed. They looked at the president’s speech as if it were only about budgetary details. But the speech went well beyond the budget. It went to the heart of progressive thought and the nature of American democracy, and it gave all progressives a model of how to think and talk about every issue.

It was a landmark speech. It should be watched and read carefully and repeatedly by every progressive who cares about our country — whether Democratic office-holder, staffer, writer, or campaign worker — and every progressive blogger, activist and concerned citizen. The speech is a work of art.

The policy topic happened to be the budget, but he called it “The Country We Believe In” for a reason. The real topic was how the progressive moral system defines the democratic ideals America was founded on, and how those ideals apply to specific issues. Obama’s moral vision, which he applied to the budget, is more general: it applies to every issue. And it can be applied everywhere by everyone who shares that moral vision of American democracy.

Discussion in the media has centered on economics — on the president’s budget policy compared with the Republican budget put forth by Paul Ryan. But, as Robert Reich immediately pointed out, “Ten or twelve-year budgets are baloney. It’s hard enough to forecast budgets a year or two into the future.” The real economic issues are economic recovery and the distribution of wealth. As I have observed, the Republican focus on the deficit is really a strategy for weakening government and turning the country conservative in every respect. The real issue is existential: what is America at heart and what is America to be. (more…)

Ethan Rome

By Ethan Rome
Executive Director, Health Care for America Now!

The Republican budget proposal released by House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin would give millionaires and political campaign contributors huge tax breaks while punishing seniors and working families. Ryan’s extremist plan would decimate Medicare and Medicaid and terminate the Affordable Care Act, undermining the economic security of America’s struggling middle class.

The Republican plan isn’t based on the principle of shared sacrifice. There’s no fairness. The idea that we solve big problems in this country by working together and sharing the burden can’t be found. The super-rich and big corporations aren’t asked to pitch in. Instead the Republicans manipulate the tax code so the rich get even richer. This budget blueprint changes the rules and reshapes this country in a breathtakingly dangerous way.

The Republican budget attacks every single one of us. Health care programs that everyone in this country depends on would be eviscerated. For example, we all depend on Medicare and expect that it will be there for us. What happens if it is not? What will people really do? Many of us have friends and relatives who receive Medicaid benefits, including millions in nursing homes. What happens when states slash benefits and dump people from the program? And the new health care law, the Affordable Care Act, has already made a huge difference in the lives of millions in its first year – and ultimately will directly touch 200 million of us. Affordable health care we can count on is a key to economic security. (more…)

Robert Reich

By Robert Reich
Former U.S. Secretary of Labor, Professor at Berkeley

I was there in 1995 when the government closed because of a budget stalemate. I had to tell most of the Labor Department’s 15,600 employees to go home and not return the next day. I also had to tell them I didn’t know when they’d next get a paycheck.

There were two shutdowns, actually, rolling across the government in close succession, like thunder storms.

It’s not the way to do the public’s business.

Newt Gingrich got blamed largely because his ego was (and is) so big he couldn’t stop blabbing that Clinton should be blamed. (Gingrich’s complaint of a bad seat on Air Force One didn’t help.)

But the larger loss was to the dignity and credibility of the United States government. When average Americans saw the Speaker of the House and the President of the United States behaving like nursery school children unable to get along, it only added to the prevailing cynicism.

Cynicism about government works to the Republicans’ continued advantage. (more…)

Dean Baker

By Dean Baker
Co-Director, Center for Economic and Policy Research

Congressman Paul Ryan is the new darling of both the Republican Party and the major media outlets. He has put forward bold plans for dismantling Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Congressman Ryan is prepared to tell tens of millions of workers that they can no longer count on a secure retirement and decent health care in their old age. In Washington policy circles, this passes for courage.

Outside of Washington, people have a different conception of bravery. After all, over the last three decades the policies crafted in Washington have led to the most massive upward redistribution in the history of the world. The richest 1 percent of the population has seen is share of national income increase by close to 10 percentage points. This comes to $1.5 trillion a year, or as Representative Ryan might say, $90 trillion over the next 75 years. That’s almost $300,000 for every man, woman and child in the United States.

This upward redistribution creates the real possibility that many of our children will be poorer than we are. If Representative Ryan and his followers really cared about future generations, then we might expect him to push for policies that reverse some of this upward redistribution. (more…)

Robert Reich

By Robert Reich
Former U.S. Secretary of Labor, Professor at Berkeley

“And if all others accepted the lie which the party imposed — if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became the truth.” ~ George Orwell, 1984 (published in 1949)

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor was in town yesterday (specifically, at Stanford’s Hoover Institute where he could surround himself with sympathetic Republicans) to tell this whopper: “Cutting the federal deficit will create jobs.”

It’s not true. Cutting the deficit will creates fewer jobs. Less government spending reduces overall demand. This is particularly worrisome when, as now, consumers and businesses are still holding back. Fewer government workers have paychecks to buy stuff from other Americans, some of whom in turn will lose their jobs without enough customers.

But truth doesn’t seem to matter. Republicans figure if their big lies are repeated often enough, people will start to believe them. (more…)

Ethan Rome

By Ethan Rome
Executive Director, Health Care for America Now!

Tuesday Meghan McCarthy wrote a story in the National Journal that asked, “Are GOP Leaders Going Soft on ‘Obamacare?’” “Top tea partiers in Congress,” she wrote, “openly worry about the commitment to defund the health care law.”

Soft on “Obamacare.” That’s not exactly how I would term it. These tea party folks clearly have high standards for vigorous opposition. After all, in their brief time under the far-right leadership of Speaker John Boehner, the Republicans in the U.S. House have voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act, defund it and eliminate all funding for life-saving health care services for women. They’ve launched several senseless investigations, and they obsessively and almost psychotically trash the new health care law using any microphone they can get near. When it comes to getting rid of “Obamacare,” I’d say Speaker Boehner appears to be giving it his all.

But for “top tea partiers” like Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) and Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), that’s not good enough. According to McCarthy, they’ve been “leading an effort to strip an estimated $105 billion in mandatory funding from the statute,” but Bachmann “fears that the Republican leadership will try to placate the conservative base with empty gestures that leave the funding in place.”

Talking about her Republican leaders in advance of Tuesday’s budget extension vote, Bachmann explained: “I think there’s going to be a fake appeasement with the Planned Parenthood thing and a fake appeasement with the ‘Obamacare’ thing.” (more…)

Ethan Rome

By Ethan Rome
Executive Director, Health Care for America Now!

In a week when the Republicans attacked Planned Parenthood, the freedom of workers to bargain for a better life, programs that help middle class families and a whole lot more, the one thing they didn’t challenge was the excessive profits of the health insurance industry.

In fact, they continued their relentless effort to undermine the Affordable Care Act, which will eliminate the worst of insurance company abuses (like arbitrary denials of our care) and put a check on out-of-control profits that fuel rising premiums that are crushing families and small businesses.

Yesterday Health Care for America Now released a report that shows that the big five insurers earned $11.7 billion in 2010 – a 51% increase since 2008 – as they cut the number of people insured by millions and reduced the share of premiums they spend on actual medical care. So they made more money by charging more and providing less. It’s a great business model if you can swing it – sell a product for higher and higher prices, offer less and then try to deny services to your paying customers when they actually need it. (more…)

Robert Kuttner

By Robert Kuttner
Co-Founder and Co-Editor of The American Prospect

My friend, the late Mike Harrington, used to describe his politics as “on the left wing of the possible.” It’s a fine aspiration. But if anything, economic problems have become more politically intractable since Mike died in 1989.

Scanning the various economic ills afflicting our Republic and its citizens, it’s evident that nearly all of the solutions lie beyond what is currently deemed thinkable in mainstream politics — beyond the left edge of the possible.

It’s not that my own views and values have become more radical in two decades. What has changed is that the American political center has shifted further to the right, while the twin assault on the good society by the private financial system and the organized right has become more intense.

There are only two possibilities: either we act to expand the boundaries of the possible, or we suffer the consequences.

Consider these five prime economic challenges:

Economic Recovery and the Budget. We are told by Beltway solons of both parties that the prime malady harming the economy is the budget deficit. But nobody can explain how fiscal austerity will promote economic recovery. On the contrary, the more we cut, the more we retard economic recovery and the more we remove the cushions that make the recession slightly more bearable for regular people. (more…)

Dean Baker

By Dean Baker
Co-Director, Center for Economic and Policy Research

The insiders in Washington really really want to cut Social Security, and they are prepared to say or do anything to do it. Among the latest lines is that they want to make Social Security more “progressive.” This sort of rhetoric appeared in a report from the liberal Center for American Progress (CAP) in a plan that proposes substantial cuts in benefits.

To understand what CAP and other proponents of increasing the progressivity of Social Security mean, consider the idea of raising a marginal tax rate paid by many middle-income people from 25 percent to 35 percent. The current 25 percent bracket begins at an income of $34,500 for singles, and $69,000 for couples.

Raising this tax rate by 10 percentage points would be a substantial hit to tens of millions of families who are certainly middle class by anyone’s definition. However, this tax increase would also be progressive. The bottom 60 percent of the income distribution would not be touched at all, and those just over the cutoffs would only see a small increase in their tax burden. (more…)