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Two years ago the unemployment rate was 9.9 percent. Now it’s 8.5 percent. At first blush that’s good news for the president. Actually it may not be.

Voters pay more attention to the direction the economy is moving than to how bad or good it is. So if the positive trend continues in the months leading up to Election Day, Obama’s prospects of being reelected improve.

But if you consider the number of working-age Americans who have stopped looking for work over the past two years because they couldn’t find a job, and young people too discouraged even to start looking, you might worry.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which measures the unemployment rate every month, counts people as unemployed only if they’re looking for work. If they’re too discouraged even to enter the job market, they’re not counted.

If all the potential workers who have dropped out of the job market over the past two years were counted, today’s unemployment rate wouldn’t be 8.5 percent. It would be 9.5 percent. That’s only a bit down from the 9.9 percent unemployment rate two years ago. (more…)

Did you know Obama’s health care bill contained a $20 billion a year tax on the richest Americans? I didn’t until I stumbled onto a mention of this the other day, although writing about politics is my life and I was angry at the loss of a national public option. I asked a dozen other friends, half of whom work in health care and most of whom are fellow political junkies. None of them knew either. If those who follow these issues intensely don’t know about something that all of us would cheer as a step toward getting the wealthiest to pay their fair share, most American voters sure aren’t going to know either.

The tax supports Medicare and low-income health care subsidies. Beginning in 2013, it will bring in $210 billion over 10 years by charging households that make over $250,000 a year 3.8% on everything over that amount instead of the current 2.9%. More important, the provision applies to investment and dividend income for those in that category, a key precedent toward ensuring that billionaires pay at least the same share of taxes as self-employed carpenters. It got some modest coverage when it passed, and accountants certainly know about it. But the rest of us don’t, which frustrates me. (more…)

In America, when gangs of bullies torment school children, pushing them around and extorting their lunch money, parents know only one response effectively counters the abuse: confrontation. Running, whining, negotiating — none of that works.

For the past year, since Republicans took the majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, they’ve behaved like young thugs, extorting Democrats to get what they wanted. Employing the blackmail techniques of schoolyard gangs, House Republicans repeatedly threatened to hurt the American people and the American government if Democrats didn’t submit.

Then President Obama confronted them. In recent weeks, he finally internalized and implemented the advice of American parents on dealing with bullies. He stood his ground. He called the GOP bluff on the payroll tax. And they backed down. He recess appointed four officials, defying GOP attempts to thwart service to American workers and borrowers.

Apparently, it’s a new day in Washington, one in which Democrats, who control the presidency and the majority in the U.S. Senate, are fed up and not going to take GOP extortion anymore.

For a year, Republicans leveraged their demands with blackmail.  If Democrats didn’t accept draconian and economic recovery-starving budget cuts, Republicans would shut down the government. If Democrats didn’t agree to slash the budget by exactly the amount Republicans required, the GOP would destroy the country’s credit rating.

In December, House Republicans overplayed. Initially, they’d opposed President Obama’s proposed extension of the payroll tax break that puts about $1,000 a year back into the pockets of working Americans. Just before the holidays, they changed their minds and said they’d accept a one-year extension, if it were offset by cuts in the federal budget. A dispute ensured between Democrats and Republicans about what to cut. As time ran out before the scheduled holiday break, the Senate compromised and passed a two-month extension, with the remaining 10 months to be settled later. The approval was overwhelming, 89 to 10. The Senators went home.

That bi-partisan action in the Senate left House Republicans with the choice of approving a two-month extension of a tax break they claimed to support or rejecting it, which would increase payroll taxes for 160 million workers.

For days, House Republicans refused to accept the Senate measure, threatening workers with a tax increase. The House Republicans claimed they wanted a one-year extension, but what they really wanted was a one-year extension paid for by cuts they chose without Democratic input. They demanded Senators return to Washington and vote on cuts to support a one-year deal.  Or they’d increase taxes.

The Senate refused. Obama refused. They confronted the bullies.

And the bullies blinked. The House passed the two-month extension. (more…)

As of now an agency of our government, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), is effectively shut down, unable to do its job. This is a “nullification” by Republicans, of laws that protect workers and companies, in exchange for campaign help from the 1%. They are simply obstructing, blocking appointments in order to keep the agency from functioning. The President has a responsibility to keep the government operating and must use his power to make recess appointments to get the NLRB up and running.

The NLRB

The mission of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), by law, is “to protect the rights of employees and employers, to encourage collective bargaining, and to curtail certain private sector labor and management practices, which can harm the general welfare of workers, businesses and the U.S. economy.”

Once again, the reason we have the NLRB is:

“…to protect the rights of employees and employers, to encourage collective bargaining, and to curtail certain private sector labor and management practices, which can harm the general welfare of workers, businesses and the U.S. economy.”

For readers who missed that, here it is in bold:

“to protect the rights of employees and employers, to encourage collective bargaining, and to curtail certain private sector labor and management practices, which can harm the general welfare of workers, businesses and the U.S. economy.”

It’s The Law

That’s right, it is the policy of the U.S. government, and the law, to “encourage” unionization because higher wages and benefits helps Americans and our economy overall. By law.

It’s the law. (more…)

‘Tis the season of resolutions. With the new year comes pledges to quit smoking, get out of debt and spend more time with family. Gym memberships jump. Weight Watchers’ profits fatten.

This also happens to be the season of political resolutions. It’s that every-fourth-year event featuring presidential candidates in a contest of campaign promise one-upmanship. Ron Paul pledges to legalize marijuana. Michele Bachmann swears she’ll cut gasoline prices to $2 a gallon. Newt Gingrich guarantees he’ll create millions of jobs “right now.” Mitt Romney assures every college graduate a job.

Unfortunately, this also has been, for some time, a season of damned lies. These are deliberate deceptions involving a higher level of scheming. The Contract with America and the more recent Pledge to America are examples. Republicans knew they couldn’t fulfill what they led the public to perceive as promises. But the GOP designed these “pledges” specifically so that Republicans couldn’t be labeled as failures when what they pseudo-promised never materialized.  That’s the stuff of damned lies.

Unfulfilled New Year’s resolutions are legendary.  Low calorie salad fixings fill fridges Jan. 2, and remain there, rotting, on Feb. 2.  The victim of this broken promise is also the perpetrator and therefore unlikely to protest the infraction.

These days, political resolutions strewn along the presidential campaign trail are picked up and carefully cataloged on the Internet by reporters and bloggers who hold candidates accountable for every syllable. That’s a good exercise, but the public generally recognizes political promise hyperbole and realizes that unexpected events may prevent a president from keeping his word.  Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for example, pledged not to involve the country in the European war, but then the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Mostly, the public shrugs off presidential contenders’ inflated political resolutions.

Damned lies, however, are dangerous because they subvert trust in the political system, which needs the faith of the electorate to function. Damned lies may, in fact, be an integral part of Republican strategy since the GOP hates government of the people by the people and hopes to shrink it small enough to drown in a bathtub.

In their 1994 Contract with America, Republicans vowed:

“in this era of official evasion and posturing, we offer instead a detailed agenda for national renewal, a written commitment with no fine print.”

That, and calling it a contract, led Americans to believe it was a step above a pledge. It was inviolable, sacrosanct. It was a bond with no double-crossing footnotes.

Except it wasn’t. (more…)

Mr. President, we heard what you said last week in Kansas — about the dangers to our economy and democracy of the increasing concentration of income and wealth at the top.

We agree. And many of us are prepared to work our hearts out to get you reelected — as long as you commit to doing what needs to be done in your second term:

– Raise the tax rate on the rich to what it was before 1981. The top 1 percent has an almost unprecedented share of the nation’s wealth and income yet the lowest tax rate in 30 years. Meanwhile, America faces colossal budget deficits that have already meant devastating cuts in education, infrastructure, and the safety nets we depend on. The rich must pay their fair share. Income in excess of $1 million should be taxed at 70 percent — the same rate as before 1981.

– Raise capital gains taxes to the same level. It’s absurd that the 400 richest Americans — whose wealth exceeds the wealth of the bottom 150 million Americans put together — should pay an average 17 percent tax on their incomes, the rate day laborers and child-care workers pay. That’s because so much of the income of the super-rich is considered capital gains, now taxed at only 15 percent. Close this loophole. (more…)

It wasn’t so much a vote as a proclamation of ideology last Thursday when Republicans filibustered Obama’s nominee to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The rebuff had nothing to do with the person, Richard Cordary, who even Republican Senator Orrin Hatch said appeared well qualified.  Rather, it was part of the GOP campaign to hobble the agency created to safeguard borrowers from dodgy payday lenders and predatory mortgage salesmen.

The GOP thwarts regulatory agencies in order to enforce its “you’re on your own” philosophy. That is, each citizen, like an island, fends for himself in a world where the invisible hand of the market serves as regulator. Democrats believe something very different. They espouse the principles set out by President Teddy Roosevelt in his 1910 speech in Osawatomie, Kan., and echoed by President Obama in his address there last week. That is America and Americans are better when citizens work together and watch out for each other, that cooperating invigorates the individual, the economy and the nation, and that primacy is in people and profit is subordinate.

The late Senator Paul Wellstone expressed the essential sentiment most succinctly:

 “We all do better when we all do better.”

Republicans don’t ascribe to that. They want to set up a country where every person is responsible for every aspect of daily life, from ensuring drinking water is safe to reducing workplace hazards. The GOP wants to shred regulations that protect citizens, even eliminate the federal agencies that enforce them. Congressional Republicans have worked to defund the Environmental Protection Agency, a move that would “empower” each citizen to persuade big industrial polluters to limit the particulates, mercury, arsenic, cadmium and lead belching from smokestacks. (more…)

The recent firestorm of debate stirred by Thomas Edsall’s New York Times report of a behind-the-scenes plan by “Democratic operatives” to “explicitly abandon the white working class” reveals more about the degraded state of political journalism than it does about either Democratic operatives or the working class.

Edsall is a highly respected member of the political punditry who has made a good living covering and analyzing American politics for more than 30 years.  So you’d think he’d know that three items in his lead paragraph are spectacularly false:

• The “Democratic operatives” referred to as hatching the abandonment plan, Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin, are not employed by the Democratic Party and are, in fact, part of a diverse group of independent Democratic analysts who are seeking to influence the party’s, and especially President Obama’s, 2012 election campaign.  They are influential, but their views are countered by many others, most of whom pay no attention whatsoever to a “working class.”
• Teixeira’s and Halpin’s new paper, The Path to 270: Demographics versus Economics in the 2012 Presidential Election, not only does not advocate that the Dems abandon the white working class, but systematically weighs the importance of the white working-class vote in the 12 most important battleground states in next year’s election.  Indeed, as Edsall must surely know, Teixeira, writing with various co-authors over the past decade, has done more than any other political analyst to call attention to the existence of a “working class” in our supposedly “middle-class society.” (more…)

In his speech at Osawatomie, Kan., President Obama says all Americans want and deserve equal opportunity, a fair shot, as he put it.

As the Senate considers an extension of the payroll tax holiday, the big question is: why in the world would Republicans in Congress consider raising middle class taxes by $1,000 to $1,500 per household in the midst of an economic downturn and an election year?

This is a particularly vexing question when you recall the ardor with which the GOP has campaigned against raising the taxes paid by millionaires and billionaires by even one dime.

At the beginning of the week it appeared that virtually every Republican in the Senate was prepared to vote no on a Democratic proposal to extend and broaden the current payroll tax holiday.

Now some are beginning to get cold feet. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell has now reportedly “opened the door” to considering the possibility of a payroll tax cut extension.

But the real question is why Republicans would contemplate voting against extension of the payroll tax holiday in the first place?

Voting no would be like leaping off a political cliff — taking an iconic vote that would no doubt become emblematic of the fact that they are willing to sacrifice the interests of the 99% to protect the fortunes of the wealthiest people in America. John Paulsen — the Wall Street hedge fund manager who made $5 billion last year (that’s $2,400,000 per hour!) — might consider this a courageous stand. But the everyday worker — who will take 48 years to make as much as Paulsen makes in one hour — might not be so charitable. (more…)