The GOP plan to preserve the job market status quo

Steve Benen brings up a damned good point, as he so often does. In writing about Republicans and the sequestration fight, he points out the the GOP blaming Obama for the sequestration plan is BS and that a major party talking point makes no sense.

...Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who appears to spend more time on Sunday shows than in the Senate, said he's open to some revenues as a way to replace the sequester, but added, "[W]e have raised taxes. Why do we have to raise taxes again?"

Of course, by that logic, there's no reason not to ask, "We have cut spending. Why do we have to cut spending again?"

The question behind these questions is "what future are you preparing for?"

See, it works like this: right now, a major driver of our deficits is unemployment. Employment has been rising, but joblessness is still a major problem. If government is running higher than normal deficits, while cutting spending, it's because there's a revenue shortage caused by all these people out there without income. Contrary to what rightwing hacks tell you, we don't have a spending problem. The problem is that a large chunk the tax base has shrunk.

If you were to cut spending to match this shrunken tax base, that would mean you're preparing for a future where these levels of unemployment are the new normal. After all, cutting spending means cutting demand, which in turn means unemployment. Republicans like to say that it's a bad idea to raise taxes in a recovering economy, but the truth is that it's a much, much worse idea to cut spending when economic times are tight -- which is what Republicans always seem to want to do in their panicky, reactionary little hearts. The plane isn't actually crashing -- we've cleared that danger, it's just some turbulence now -- but Republicans in their reactionary fervor want to tear out seats, jettison luggage, and throw a few stewardesses out the hatch to lighten the load. What Republicans are doing here is literally cheerleading economic panic, in order to score some cheap political points with the few remaining nutjobs still willing to vote for them.

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GOP Candidates Unified in Their Love for Failed Economic Policies

A National Review editorial is making some news today, mostly because it pleads with GOP voters to not to support Newt Gingrich. The magazine is still seen as representing the intellectual arm of the Republican Party -- despite the fact that it now features dim bulbs like Jonah Goldberg, Kathryn Jean Lopez, and Rich Lowry -- so there's some news value here. But the same now-undeserved reputation for braininess is why most conservatives won't pay any attention to it. After years of attacking "ivory tower intellectuals," they've managed to get the base to stop listening to them. Nice work, guys. Congrats on your success.

But it's not the anti-endorsement of Newt Gingrich that caught my eye. It was the concise description (in the form of praise) of just about everything that's wrong with the Republican candidates and the party in general.

A hard-fought presidential primary campaign is obscuring the uncharacteristic degree of unity within the Republican party. It has reached a conservative consensus on most of the pressing issues of the day. All of the leading candidates, and almost all of the lagging ones, support the right to life. All of them favor the repeal of Obamacare. Most of them support reforms to restrain the growth of entitlement spending. All of them favor reducing the corporate tax rate to levels that will make the U.S. a competitive location for investment. Almost all of them seem to understand the dangers of a precipitate withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, and of a defense policy driven by the need to protect social spending rather than the national interest. Conservatives may disagree among themselves about which candidate most deserves support, but all of us should take heart in this development -- and none of us should exaggerate the programmatic differences within the field.

I especially like the part about "a defense policy driven by the need to protect social spending rather than the national interest," as if social needs aren't in the national interest -- at least, not like the buying super-important fighter jets we never use. Blowing people up on the other side of the world -- that's in the national interest. Making sure kids at home have enough to eat? That's waste.

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You Can't Fight Crazy -- But You Can Vote it Out of Office

I hate to say it, but part of me -- the "I told you so" portion of my brain -- wants the Republican Party to remain stupid, for the president to fail to convince them to come off the ledge, and for the US to default. This part of my brain feels that if we go over that cliff, Republicans (and the craziest Tea Party nuts especially) will have been proven wrong once and for all. After all the Tea Party, always more than happy to believe whatever horsecrap makes them more comfortable, is home to the idea of the default myth -- i.e., that if the debt ceiling isn't raised, the US won't default and anyone who says otherwise is just a commie spendthrift trying to scare you. My lizard brain thinks that when interest rates skyrocket, deficits get even worse, and unemployment goes through the roof, then they'll see...

But, of course, a more rational part of me knows that this is a fruitless hope. After all, didn't I just say that they believe whatever they want to believe? You can't convince them with proof. They'll just come up with some crazy argument that the US didn't default, that the administration held back its secret hoard of money to punish Republicans at the polls. When you're dealing with people who engage in magical thinking, "proof" is a meaningless word.

Unfortunately, it's looking more and more like the "I told you so" portion of my brain may get some satisfaction. As the August 2 deadline approaches, there are few signs that the nuts are becoming saner and that reality will finally sink in. And while that may not happen to the looniest Republicans, it's happening to their traditional backers and enablers.

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Scott Walker, History, and Wisconsin

Running kind of late today, so instead of a morning post -- morning being a lost cause at this point -- I point you to a New York Times op-ed by UW professor of history, geography and environmental studies William Cronon about Scott Walker, Wisconsin's progressive history, and how the two are totally at odds.

It's worth reading the whole piece, but here's the meat:

Scott Walker is not Joe McCarthy. Their political convictions and the two moments in history are quite different. But there is something about the style of the two men -- their aggressiveness, their self-certainty, their seeming indifference to contrary views -- that may help explain the extreme partisan reactions they triggered. McCarthy helped create the modern Democratic Party in Wisconsin by infuriating progressive Republicans, imagining that he could build a national platform by cultivating an image as a sternly uncompromising leader willing to attack anyone who stood in his way. Mr. Walker appears to be provoking some of the same ire from adversaries and from advocates of good government by acting with a similar contempt for those who disagree with him

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No, It's Not a 'Prank'

It's been called a "prank call," but a phone call to Scott Walker by a guerrilla journalist posing as billionaire GOP donor David Koch would be better described as an "interview by subterfuge." Clearly, Buffalo Beast's Ian Murphy remembers the journalist's motto; to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable. And Scott Walker is most definitely feeling afflicted today.

For his part, the governor is trying desperately to put the call behind him, telling reporters at a press conference that he hadn't said anything in the call that he hadn't said in public, when clearly this was BS. When had Walker told the public that he needed to bust the unions to be like Ronald Reagan, who Walker laughably claims brought down the USSR by breaking the air traffic controllers' union? When has Walker told everyone he'd thought of planting agent provocateurs in with the protesters, but ruled it out because it would probably backfire? When did he tell the public he was planning to trick Democrats into coming back to Wisconsin, in order to end his standoff with them?

And there's a lot in this call that almost no one is talking about. For instance, it's an example of either Walker's dishonesty and/or denial. He told Murphy that most of the protesters are from out of state -- a claim that PolitiFact immediately called false. Is Walker so out of touch with what's happening out his window that this is what he really believes? Or is this evidence that Walker would lie even to David Koch, if he thought it would serve his purposes? And how can Walker decry out-of-state agitators on a phone call with a Texas billionaire running ads supporting him without pegging everyone's hypocrisy meter?

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Shooting Down Missile Defense

Long, long ago, shrouded in the mists of ancient history (i.e., December 2006), I wrote a post I titled "The Only Purpose of Missile Defense is to Waste Money." At that point in time, we had blown $95 billion on missile defense systems since Ronald Reagan jotted his "Star Wars" notion on the back of a matchbook. What we got out of all this spending and research was nothing. We still have no working missile defense system. Worse, after the fall of the Soviet Union, missile defense became a solution in search of a problem -- its reason for being is to counter a threat that no longer exists.

In that post, I wrote:

So why is the Bush administration pushing this? Did I mention that we've spent $95 billion on it? Throwing pots of cash at defense contractors is what Bush does. It doesn't make any difference whether or not it works -- a failed test is exactly as expensive as a successful one -- the only thing that matters is that it allows people who are already unbelievably rich to reach into your wallet and grab your tax dollars. Who cares if it works?

Oddly, with all the Republican complaining about wasteful spending, missile defense hasn't really made an appearance. Obama has signaled that he might be open to placing a missile defense system in Poland, so it's not like the subject hasn't come up. For the GOP, wasteful spending means monitoring volcanoes so we're prepared for eruptions, not throwing money at stupid-expensive missile systems that may not actually work and have never been adequately tested. Bailing you out because you got suckered into a crap mortgage is "pork," while throwing billions at defense contractors for what amounts to a lucky charm is sound fiscal policy.

Starting to see how we got into this economic mess in the first place?





Since Obama's election, Bush loyalists have been quietly freaking out that he may not really be willing to waste money hand over fist on missile defense anymore. The military has never been very excited about missile defense (Pentagon officials refer to civilian MD advocates as "missile defense moonies"), so it's not like they see any worth to the systems. But those Bush loyalists sure do. And they've made repeated attempts to get you to panic at the thought of abandoning it.

Wall Street Journal, "Obama and Missile Defense," former Ambassador to the UN John Bolton, Nov. 2008:

Freeing America from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty's antiquated constraints is rightly regarded as one of President Bush's most significant achievements. In 2001, we believed that the Russian strategic threat had eased. But the emerging threats from rogue states possessing a few nuclear-capable ballistic missiles required that we develop adequate defenses -- especially because many emerging nuclear-weapons states do not accept the same calculus of deterrence that maintained the Cold War's uneasy nuclear standoff. The demise of the ABM Treaty allows America to defend itself from these threats.

For a new Obama administration to retreat from this achievement, as many in the arms-control "community" have advocated, would be a significant step backward. His campaign position about deployment after the technology is "proved" is an excuse never to deploy missile defenses -- because nothing in the military field is ever conclusively proven for all time. Rebuffing [Polish President] Kaczynski is also precisely the wrong response to [Russian President] Medvedev's provocation. It will surely be read as weakness, and not only in Moscow. In fact, Moscow announced yesterday there would be no more missile-defense negotiations before Jan. 20.

Missile defense is only unproven because it can't be proven. It seems that firing a missile and knocking it down isn't proof -- mostly because our missile defense system can't do it. If it won't work in controlled situations, why assume it'll work in the field? The word for that is "faith." I'm not convinced we should be spending billions on faith-based weapons systems. And many in the know think Obama isn't either.

"I think it's on the back burner," James F. Collins, director of Russia studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former ambassador to Moscow, told FOX News earlier this month. "I read the Obama and other statements more or less as tentative about this system in the sense that they aren't going to put huge investment in it unless they can figure out it's going to work."

More recently, Obama himself gave missile defense moonies reason to worry. "In this budget, we will end education programs that don’t work and end direct payments to large agribusinesses that don’t need them," the president said in his address to a joint session of congress this week. "We’ll eliminate the no-bid contracts that have wasted billions in Iraq, and reform our defense budget so that we’re not paying for Cold War-era weapons systems we don’t use." That budget comes out today. Whether or not MD takes a hit remains to be seen.

But you'd hope that sanity will finally prevail. Missile defense is an idea that should be allowed to die. It's never worked, no one can explain how it's ever going to work, and it answers a threat that doesn't actually exist. What I said in 2006 is just as true today -- the only purpose of missile defense is to waste money.

-Wisco

Welfare Reform's Failure

In 1996, Bill Clinton signed a bill ending Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and replaced it with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). "Today, we are ending welfare as we know it," Clinton said. "But I hope this day will be remembered not for what it ended, but for what it began."

What this began was a change in the way the United States looked at welfare and the poor. Recipients were capped at five years in the program. After that, you couldn't collect anymore benefits, no matter what your situation. There was a "welfare to work" requirement, which put people into job training programs -- regardless of what education they already had. TANF would be funded through block grants, which states would administer and spend as they saw fit.

What had happened was that Clinton caved to pressure created by decades of Republican propaganda. Welfare recipients were lazy, Republicans said, they had kids just to get benefits, they made a lifestyle of AFDC. When it came to slinging BS about welfare and the poor, then-presidential candidate Ronald Reagan set the standard in his stump speech:

There’s a woman in Chicago. She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards and is collecting veterans benefits on four nonexisting deceased husbands. And she’s collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income alone is over $150,000.

Reagan called this woman a "welfare queen" and claimed she -- along with many like her -- were draining America's resources at public expense. Of course, it wasn't true. There was no woman in Chicago. It was all lies.





But this became the public perception of the AFDC recipient. At the time that Clinton signed Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, ending AFDC, researchers with Public Eye ran the numbers and found that just about everything that people had been told about welfare recipients was wrong; the average recipient was in the program for less than a year, had statistically fewer children than the rest of the population, and the vast majority of the children of welfare recipients weren't becoming recipients themselves. What the right had called a "culture of dependency" was their own invention -- it didn't actually exist. Republicans had simply found a new scapegoat to attack and, cowardly as they always are, the group they chose to attack for political gain was relatively powerless. A problem was invented, complete with a fix -- end AFDC.

Later, in looking for signs of success to the new program, people were hard-pressed to find any. Payday loan and rent-to-own stores, both of which charge usurious interest rates for short-term loans, sprung up all over the nation like mushrooms. Despite the rhetoric predicting that forcing people off AFDC would decrease poverty, there was no decrease. In fact, it increased. But this was an ideology-based program, not a reality-based program. No matter how badly it failed, it had to be portrayed as a great success.

"How We Ended Welfare, Together," Bill Clinton, New York Times, 2006:

In the past decade, welfare rolls have dropped substantially, from 12.2 million in 1996 to 4.5 million today. At the same time, caseloads declined by 54 percent. Sixty percent of mothers who left welfare found work, far surpassing predictions of experts. Through the Welfare to Work Partnership, which my administration started to speed the transition to employment, more than 20,000 businesses hired 1.1 million former welfare recipients. Welfare reform has proved a great success, and I am grateful to the Democrats and Republicans who had the courage to work together to take bold action.

So, a program that required states to kick people off welfare rolls succeeded in reducing welfare rolls. Success! This is like saying a law aimed at clearing streets for ambulances succeeded because it resulted in a lot of traffic tickets. If 60% of mothers leaving TANF found work, what happened to the 40% who didn't? Are we supposed to forget about those families?

"Clinton masterfully blurred [reducing welfare rolls with reducing poverty] in a recent New York Times opinion column, as did most others on the 10th anniversary of the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, writing as if getting mothers and their children off the welfare rolls is the same as getting them out of poverty," wrote Robert Sheer for The Nation. "In the absence of any evidence that poverty is tamed, he celebrates a 'bipartisan' victory, which was good for his image but not necessarily for those it claimed to help."

It's only now that the economy's in the tank that the real consequence of welfare reform is being seen. The New York Times reports that, as the economy sinks, welfare aid isn't growing.

Despite soaring unemployment and the worst economic crisis in decades, 18 states cut their welfare rolls last year, and nationally the number of people receiving cash assistance remained at or near the lowest in more than 40 years.

The trends, based on an analysis of new state data collected by the New York Times, raise questions about how well a revamped welfare system with great state discretion is responding to growing hardships.

Michigan cut its welfare rolls 13 percent, though it was one of two states whose October unemployment rate topped 9 percent. Rhode Island, the other, had the nation’s largest welfare decline, 17 percent.

"Of the 12 states where joblessness grew most rapidly, eight reduced or kept constant the number of people receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the main cash welfare program for families with children," we're told. "Nationally, for the 12 months ending October 2008, the rolls inched up a fraction of 1 percent."

The problem? TANF moved the responsibility for dealing with poverty from the feds to the states. And the states are broke. TANF isn't bringing in new recipients because the states can't afford to pay any more. In fact, as the economy continues to slide and state budgets become more and more pinched, they're cutting assistance.

What are the odds that a program that was based on phony assumptions and political scapegoating would fail so badly? As any critic could've told you at the time Clinton signed it into existence, pretty damned good. Clinton claimed the program would be tweaked as time went on, that obvious problems with the bill he signed would later be fixed. Instead, the bill was signed and forgotten.

"What crystal ball does he have that he knows he can fix it," said Deborah Weinstein, an official at the Children's Defense Fund, at the time. "What powerful constituency would be treated that way? If he knew there were problems, why did he sign it?"

To win an election, that's why. It was Clinton's "triangulation" strategy of taking Republican issues away from them by solving them -- or pretending to solve them -- himself. Welfare reform would've been a big issue in 1996, but Clinton knocked that stool out from under Bob Dole. The consequences of this political maneuver continue to reverberate today. The New York Times again:

“There is ample reason to be concerned here,” said Ron Haskins, a former Republican Congressional aide who helped write the 1996 law overhauling the welfare system. “The overall structure is not working the way it was designed to work. We would expect, just on the face it, that when a deep recession happens, people could go back on welfare.”

“When we started this, Democratic and Republican governors alike said, ‘We know what’s best for our state; we’re not going to let people starve,’ ” said Mr. Haskins, who is now a researcher at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “And now that the chips are down, and unemployment is going up, most states are not doing enough to help families get back on the rolls.”

In fact, it's probably hurting our economy not to increase welfare rolls at this time. Retail sales are down and the best way to get people to spend money is to get money to people who absolutely need it; these are the only people who are guaranteed to spend. This is the reasoning behind extending unemployment benefits.

But we can't, because we've given up control of one of our economic tools. The states can't use it, because they can't afford to, and the feds can't use it, because they don't have it anymore.

The moral of this story is beware Democrats trying to appease Republicans. When you pass laws that don't have a rational basis and instead are based in ideology, demagoguery, and false information, the results can't possibly be good. Welfare reform, widely claimed as a success story, is a failure. It failed because it had no logical or factual basis, only emotional appeal.

That failure should've been as obvious in 1996 as it is today.

-Wisco