One Good Reason to Raise the Minimum Wage: the 99% Want Their Money Back

What's a big factor in driving up deficits and government spending? Lazy, no-good moochers on welfare, getting a free ride.

Aljazeera America: State and local governments have awarded at least $110 billion in taxpayer subsidies to business, with 3 of every 4 dollars going to fewer than 1,000 big corporations, the most thorough analysis to date of corporate welfare revealed today.

Boeing ranks first, with 137 subsidies totaling $13.2 billion, followed by Alcoa at $5.6 billion, Intel at $3.9 billion, General Motors at $3.5 billion and Ford Motor at $2.5 billion, the new report by the nonprofit research organization Good Jobs First shows.

Dow Chemical had the most subsidies, 410 totaling $1.4 billion, followed by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire-Hathaway holding company, with 310 valued at $1.1 billion.

The figures were compiled from disclosures made by state and local government agencies that subsidize companies in all sorts of ways, including cash giveaways, building and land transfers, tax abatements and steep discounts on electric and water bills.

Meanwhile, families in poverty are having trouble getting by -- because government supposedly can't afford to pay for things like food stamps or the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. Welfare reform was supposed to lift people out of poverty, but it's done the opposite. And it was all predictable.

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Even Republican Voters Concerned about Income Inequality

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67% of Americans are godless commies who hate capitalism and freedom. That is, if you use the metrics offered by rightwing media. If you tend to be more in line with mainstream thought, then the better take is that Americans are concerned about equality and fairness -- just as we always have been. And the bad news for Republicans is that all those capitalism-hatin' Marxists include a majority of their own voters.

In all, 54% of Republican voters told Gallup that they were either very or somewhat dissatisfied with "the way income and wealth is distributed in the US." While this is way lower than the 67% of all Americans who answered likewise, there's still a majority of Republican voters echoing these Occupy movement sentiments. And if you remove Republicans from the equation to keep them from dragging down the curve, roughly three-quarters of respondents would agree that income inequality is not good for America.

Gallup analysis shows an opportunity for leadership by the president:

Obama will almost certainly touch on inequality in his State of the Union address on Jan. 28. This will certainly resonate in a general sense with the majority of Americans who are dissatisfied with income and wealth distribution in the U.S. today. Members of the president's party agree most strongly with the president that this is an issue, but majorities of Republicans and independents are at least somewhat dissatisfied as well.

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What Happens When GOP Economic Fairy Tales are Applied to the Real World

A piece in the New York Times this weekend compared the economic fates of Wisconsin and Minnesota, two states that were in roughly similar economic condition in 2012. Minnesota elected a Democratic government, while Wisconsin chose Republicans. And it was with this choice that the two neighboring states' fortunes began to diverge.

Three years into Mr. Walker’s term, Wisconsin lags behind Minnesota in job creation and economic growth. As a candidate, Mr. Walker promised to produce 250,000 private-sector jobs in his first term, but a year before the next election that number is less than 90,000. Wisconsin ranks 34th for job growth. Mr. Walker’s defenders blame the higher spending and taxes of his Democratic predecessor for these disappointments, but according to Forbes’s annual list of best states for business, Wisconsin continues to rank in the bottom half.

Along with California, Minnesota is the fifth fastest growing state economy, with private-sector job growth exceeding pre-recession levels. Forbes rates Minnesota as the eighth best state for business. Republicans deserve some of the credit, particularly for their commitment to education reform. They also argue that Minnesota’s new growth stems from the low taxes and reduced spending under Mr. Dayton’s Republican predecessor, Tim Pawlenty. But Minnesota’s job growth was subpar during Mr. Pawlenty’s eight-year tenure and recovered only under Mr. Dayton.

Trust me, it sucks when your state is used as an example of economic failure. While Walker complains that previous higher taxes and spending are dragging the state down (a tough argument to make -- the mechanics are so bad he doesn't even bother to explain them), Minnesota has raised taxes and spending to great success. And that spending has been distinctly Keynesian. NYT reports that the "lion’s share of Minnesota’s new tax revenue was sunk into human capital." Wisconsin, of course, has been anti-Keynesian, reaching into workers' pockets to take pay and benefits away.

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Deficit Falling at Fastest Rate Since WWII -- And Not Because of Spending Cuts

Republicans like to say that you can't spend your way to prosperity. Why that statement doesn't get them laughed out of whatever room they're in every time they say it remains one of life's great mysteries. Of course you can spend your way to prosperity; ask any prosperous person. The only wealthy people who haven't spent their way to prosperity are those who've inherited wealth. Even lottery winners spent something to gain all their riches, even if it wasn't much. Wealthy people became wealthy by spending money -- and even by borrowing money.

Conservatives are dead wrong on this point and, indeed, the opposite is actually true -- you can't save your way to prosperity, since you're never going to be able to save more than you make -- or at least, figuring in interest, not much more. It's a case of Republican talking points contradicting other talking points; you can't spend your way to prosperity, but successful people are "risk takers" who put money on the line to get things done. One the one hand, conservatives praise entrepreneurs, on the other, they argue that entrepreneurial efforts are obviously doomed and only a fool would believe that you can spend money to make money. No wonder people who listen to talk radio make no sense at all when they start talking about economics. It's all a muddled mess of contradictory propagandizing with no real connection to how things actually work.

All of this started bouncing around in my head when I read this:

The Hill: The federal budget deficit for fiscal 2013 was $680 billion, the Treasury Department reported Wednesday.

This is the first time that the deficit has fallen below $1 trillion during President Obama's time in the White House.

[...]

The deficit has dropped $409 billion from 2012, when it was $1.089 trillion.

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Demand Drives Hiring. Period. End of Story.

Last week, we got one of those good news/bad news jobs reports we're so used to seeing by now. The good news is very good news: new jobless claims are at a 6-year low, suggesting that employment has stabilized and that the days of massive layoffs are behind us. The bad news, according to the Associated Press:

[W]hile most companies have stopped cutting jobs, many remain reluctant to hire. That’s bad news for the roughly 11.5 million Americans who are unemployed and a major reason the unemployment rate is still so high four years after the recession officially ended.

"We have seen a disconnect between the level of hiring and firing," said Bricklin Dwyer, an economist at BNP Paribas.

Ask any rightwinger what's going on here and they blame Obamacare. Healthcare reform is creating the dreaded uncertainty and that uncertainty is keeping employers from hiring.

Thing is though, employers and capital investors aren't panicky types who need hand-holding and therapy before they take a risk. If they were, they'd be in a different line of work. It turns out that, historically, periods of uncertainty have been moments of opportunity, when the opportunistic investors and employers actually have hired more workers in order to take full advantage.

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Reality Drives the GOP Off the Rails

The House Republican caucus went fullblown clown show yesterday, as they tried -- and failed -- to fit their ideological square peg into reality's round hole. At issue was the THUD bill -- a bill to fund both the Departments of Transportation and Housing and Urban Development. This resulted in utter failure and the bill was pulled. It this was a tremendous embarrassment for the House GOP.

What happened was simple: House GOP applied their fiscal flateartherism to a bill that would genuinely affect their own constituencies. It's fine when the cuts are to abstract groups in other people's districts -- welfare queens and lazy jobless folks and those leeches living the sweet life on food stamps -- but when the big sequester-level cuts have to be applied in terms of anything other than empty rhetoric, they look all too real and all too suicidal. Brian Beutler explains:

...In normal times, the House and Senate would each pass a budget, the differences between those budgets would be resolved, and appropriators in both chambers would have binding limits both on how much money to spend, and on which large executive agencies to spend it.

But these aren’t normal times. Republicans have refused to negotiate away their budget differences with Democrats, and have instead instructed their appropriators to use the House GOP budget as a blueprint for funding the government beyond September.

Like all recent GOP budgets, this year’s proposes lots of spending on defense and security, at the expense of all other programs. Specifically, it sets the total pool of discretionary dollars at sequestration levels, then funnels money from thinly stretched domestic departments (like Transportation and HUD) to the Pentagon and a few other agencies. But that’s all the budget says. It doesn’t say how to allocate the dollars, nor does it grapple in any way with the possibility that cutting domestic spending so profoundly might be unworkable. It’s an abstraction.

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In Wisconsin, Champions of 'Fiscal Restraint' Begin Shoveling Money Into a Furnace

It's all so painfully predictable. Republicans pass a restrictive abortion law that clearly violates Roe -- and therefore, the Constitution -- in a blatant pander to the Christian conservative base. Planned Parenthood and the ACLU sue to stop the bill and a federal court does its job.

NBC News: A federal judge Monday temporarily blocked part of Wisconsin's new abortion law and scheduled a hearing for next week.

The law, which went into effect Monday, includes provisions similar to those in several other states that require women to undergo an ultrasound procedure before having an abortion and require doctors who provide abortion services to have admitting privileges at a hospital.

Opponents, including Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin, which is representing two doctors and an abortion clinic in challenging the law, said the measure was rushed into effect and that the provision affecting doctors would force two of the state's four clinics to close.

The blocked provision is the one that requires clinics to have admitting privileges at hospitals. This is an obvious attempt to regulate these clinics out of business and the judge found that the evidence "strongly supports a finding that no medical purpose is served" and that claims that the provision safeguards women's health "does not bear even superficial scrutiny on the current record."

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Report: Young Voters Not Buying GOP Spin

Despite the party's focus on trumped up -- and dissipating -- "scandals," there is still some attention being given to the big Republican rebranding project. It's easy to see how the controversies became the shiny bauble; there was a lot of resistance to rebranding, mostly because it looked a lot like the party would have to abandon core beliefs that were extremely with the voting public. Despite assurances that no, no, no they would only have to speak differently, not legislate differently, many felt this was still going too far. Sure, Todd Akin's rape theorizing hurt the party, they reasoned, but he was right. Or at least, on the right track. And you don't fight the evils of abortion and gay marriage and illegal immigration by never talking about them. Editing party members' speech is censorship and censorship is -- for all intents and purposes -- taking these issues off the table. With scandals, you create reasons to vote against someone, not for you. As a result, you have to change nothing.

And to a certain extent, those skeptics of rebranding are right. You can't legislate against things without ever talking about them. The GOP will need to do more than rebrand -- they'll have to change some policies and give up some lost and losing battles. These people, who make up a big chunk of the party, will have to take the furthest back burners and simmer there forgotten -- probably forever. They don't like that idea, so they resist rebranding. Which also explains why the rebranders call it rebranding. They don't want to lose the nutjobs, because they still need them to turn out. They want their votes, they just want them to shut up about their ideas.

But when you look at the party's problems with different demographics, you see that it's not just the hate-filled social conservatives that are the problem. The problem is everything.

Politico:  A new postmortem on the November elections from the nation’s leading voice for college Republicans offers a searing indictment of the GOP “brand” and the major challenges the party faces in wooing young voters, according to a copy given exclusively to POLITICO.

The College Republican National Committee on Monday will make public a detailed report — the result of extensive polling and focus groups — dissecting what went wrong for Republicans with young voters in the 2012 elections and how the party can improve its showing with that key demographic in the future.

It’s not a pretty picture. In fact, it’s a “dismal present situation,” the report says.

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On Sequester, GOP Beginning to Regret Believing the GOP

One of the dangers of a long campaign of BS is that you stand a real danger of beginning to believe your own lies. Especially when that long campaign is carried out by an institution, not individuals. People who believe the lie will join the organization to support the lie and the whole thing just snowballs. What began as spin or propaganda for political advantage becomes a guiding principle. And when you go to war against your imaginary enemy, firing blindly into the dark because you know it's there someplace, you're going to have real casualties.

In this case, the lie is the GOP claim to runaway government waste. That was why Republicans pushed the supposed "nothing-burger nature of the sequester," in the words of Ed Kilgore. The GOP ran around parading the sequester as a war trophy because "of course there’s so much waste, fraud and abuse that big cuts can be absorbed without pain."

But of course, there is not. Kilgore's commentary is in reaction to a report by two of the Huffington Post's best political journalists: Amanda Terkel and Sam Stein. Terkel and Stein took a look at sequester cuts and found them to be much more severe than they'd imagined.

The Huffington Post set out to do an extensive review of sequestration stories from the past week, with the goal of finding 100. What seemed like a daunting task was completed in hours. No one region of the country has been immune. Rural towns in Alaska, missile test sites in the Marshall Islands, military bases in Virginia, university towns across the country, and housing agencies in inner cities are all beginning to feel the cuts.

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Putting Social Security and the Economy in Chains

It's one of those bad news/good news sorts of things. The bad news is that President Obama is definitely looking at some sort of benefit cut in entitlement spending. The good news is that congressional Democrats most definitely do not agree -- and if they say it doesn't happen, it doesn't happen. After President Obama met with Republicans to iron out some sort of a deal on deficit reduction, he met with Senate Democrats to pitch ideas to them. It was not a sale.

The Hill:

...Though they are his most powerful congressional allies, there is tension in that relationship too given fears of liberal Democrats that Obama will make too many concessions with House and Senate Republicans on entitlement cuts, all in the hope of reaching a deficit deal.

Obama stood firm Tuesday when pressed to back away from benefit cuts during the meeting with the Senate Democratic Conference, according to lawmakers who attended.

[...]

[B]ehind closed doors, liberals in the Senate caucus raised concerns about Obama’s readiness to consider cuts to Social Security benefits and his support for a deficit-reduction package evenly split between spending cuts and tax increases.

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Sequestration, the March Hare, and the Mad Tea Party

It's Sequester Day, America. The worst holiday so far this year. Still, we should make the best of it. Other special days have mascots -- Santa Claus, pilgrims, Jack-O'-Lanterns, etc. -- so I propose that Sequester Day be celebrated under the lunatic grin of the March Hare. The mascot is pretty perfect; a participant in the Mad Tea Party, completely insane, and -- of course -- it's March.

You see, there's nothing sane about any of this. The last time we celebrated this holiday was not a year ago, but just back in January, when it was known by a different name: the fiscal cliff. We went over the cliff a little bit, Republicans lost their nerve, and the crisis was avoided... Well, not avoided so much as kicked down the road until today. The crisis was very much not avoided, as the mad March Hare reminds us. We merely banned the nickname "fiscal cliff" from our national vocabulary, cut some deals to reschedule the whole thing, and now we refer to it by it's more formal name, sequestration. It the same stupid self-laid trap, we've just all agreed to pretend it's a new one. It's mad, mad I say -- frantabulousy, craptastically, thingdubitably, deliciously mad!

And no one better embodies the true spirit of the March Hare better than the House Republican caucus. Left is right, up is down, right is wrong, and Washington has a spending problem, not a revenue problem.

CBS News:

...House Speaker John Boehner has said he's done negotiating. The House, Boehner says, has twice passed legislation that would undo the sequester, and should not have pass a third bill before the Democrat-controlled Senate "gets off their ass and passes it once." He has also stated that Republicans will not play ball on new tax revenue, telling the president, "You got your tax increase; it's time to cut spending here in Washington."

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Note to GOP: When You Cheer on Sequestration, You Own It

I'd imagine that one of the many problems with being a Republican is that lying wears on your conscience. And even if you're a conscienceless sociopath, it rubs at your psyche. After all, you believe your views are correct, but you also know they're unpopular. You'd just feel so much better if everyone agreed with you. So every once in a while, you tell the truth -- just to test the waters. This almost never works out well for them. In the political world, a Republican telling the plain, unvarnished truth almost always comes across as a gaffe. When you're punished for telling the truth, you don't do it often.

So take a lookie here. It's a rare thing:

Salt Lake Tribune:

..."I’m for sequestration," [Sen. Orrin] Hatch said, if Congress can’t cut spending. "We’ve got to face the music now, or it will be much tougher later."

With across-the-board spending cuts set to kick in next week, Hatch said sequestration would lead to an economic disaster in Utah as two-thirds of civilians working at Hill Air Force Base would be furloughed. He said it would be "devastating to our nation’s readiness."

It's not a lot of work to unpack the argument here; it's pretty plain. Sequestration will be "devastating to our nation’s readiness" and "lead to an economic disaster" -- so hell yeah, let's do it! And he's not the only one. There's a pretty good list of examples of GOP truth-telling over at PoliticusUSA, but few are as clear about the consequences as Hatch's "we have to burn the village to save it" argument.

Republican leadership may be trying to wash their hands of sequestration by arguing it was the president's idea, but what the party members say shows that this sort of blame-laying is as irrelevant as it is dishonest -- the sequester will happen because a lot of Republicans want it to happen. When you say things like, "I'm for sequestration," while the president's saying we need to avoid it, you own it. It's yours.

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Once Again, Republicans Face Reality's Liberal Bias

There's an old saying: some days you get the bear, some days the bear gets you -- and some days news organizations poll the bears and find out they think you suck. Today is that last type of day for Republicans, ho woke up this morning, shook open their papers, and promptly sprayed coffee all over them in a spit-take of shock. The numbers are not good and the party is definitely not on the path to making them any better.

First off, a Bloomberg poll. In that poll, Barack Obama holds his highest approval ratings since Bloomberg started polling the question in 2009. Conversely, Republicans have their lowest approval ratings for the same period. Further, more think the President's ideas for the economy are better than the GOP's. The party's problem here is that people perceive the GOP's priorities accurately:

“The Republicans are not offering any new solutions,” said poll respondent Cynthia Synos, 62, a political independent who lives in the St. Louis suburb of Greendale, Missouri. “Their answer is always tax cuts and incentives for business. I’ve never heard them say anything innovative to spark the economy that would help the other 85, 90 percent of people that have to deal with the economy as it is.”

The shine is definitely off the trickle-down rose.

When it comes to our current economic situation, respondents seemed to have a pretty good grasp of what the root of the problem; "Public views of congressional Republicans’ record places an added burden on them in the standoff over automatic spending cuts. Americans by 43 percent to 34 percent say they are more to blame than Obama and Democrats for 'what’s gone wrong' in Washington," Bloomberg reports. That means that if the GOP lets the sequester happen -- and all indications are that they will -- their little "blame Obama for the sequester" strategy is probably doomed to failure.

Wait, did I say "probably?" I should've said "definitely," since that's what the second poll shows.

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Austerity, Spending, and the Stimulative Value of Holes

An Associated Press article out today could be titled, "Everything Republicans say About Economics Proven Wrong." Instead, we get the less entertaining but just as accurate, "US economy shrinks 0.1 pct., 1st time in 3 1/2 years." If that doesn't sound like good news, that's because it is not. Even a minor contraction in an already deflated economy is enough to cause real worry, like a creaking support beam deep inside a coal mine. But one tenth of one percent isn't exactly a plunge into the danger zone and -- good news! -- we know exactly what caused it. Which means, we also know exactly what to do to fix it.

The U.S. economy unexpectedly shrank from October through December for the first time since 2009, hurt by the biggest cut in defense spending in 40 years, fewer exports and sluggish growth in company stockpiles. The drop occurred despite stronger consumer spending and business investment.

The Commerce Department said Wednesday that the economy contracted at an annual rate of 0.1 percent in the fourth quarter. That was a sharp slowdown from the 3.1 percent growth rate in the July-September quarter.

Economists said the drop in gross domestic product wasn't as bleak as it looked. The weakness was mainly the result of one-time factors. Government spending cuts and slower inventory growth, which can be volatile, subtracted a total of 2.6 percentage points from GDP.

The Reader's Digest Condensed version: austerity sucks. Government spending is the dreaded s-word (i.e., "stimulus") to the US economy. If you cut federal spending, you cut demand, and the economy suffers. Duh.

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The Platinum Debt Limit Option

First and foremost, let's get this little factoid out of the way: raising the debt ceiling doesn't add to the deficit in any way. It's a way to pay for funds that have already been spent -- and authorized -- by congress. Therefore, not raising the debt ceiling likewise does nothing to reduce spending, deficits, or the national debt. It would, however, mean economic disaster. Think of it as a credit card payment -- except with this card, if you miss one payment, you default and go into bankruptcy. Seriously, this is really, really bad.

So Republicans who threaten to vote against raising the debt ceiling as a way to reduce spending and the deficit are lying or stupid. The move would save nothing, while the actual cost may be incalculable. Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid payments wouldn't be made. Federal employees -- including members of the military -- would not be paid. Federal bondholders worldwide would see their bonds become irredeemable. The ripple effect would spread out from the US and likely create a worldwide economic crisis, earning us few friends in the world. Our credit rating would crash. We may even finding ourselves facing economic sanctions from bond-holding nations as a result. This would be an incredibly boneheaded move and anyone who seriously argues for taking that route loves America not at all.

It's a variation of the he-who-smelt-it rule that those who mostly loudly proclaim to love America most are those who love her least. Tea Party Republicans claim to be the biggest freakin' patriots in the whole world, while arguing that America's best days are behind her, that great things are now impossible, that we must scale back our national ambitions and become a small people with measly dreams of a not-extremely impressive future. They march under a banner of "Status Quo Forever!" -- except they advocate a step back and down from the status quo. They're cowardly anarchists who hate government, but want to keep the police and military. Otherwise, everything can go. We used to all be in this together as a team, 'baggers envision a nation where everyone's on their own. One nation, no longer individual but divided into millions, each trying to get what they can cheat others out of and to screw everyone else as fast as they can. Social Darwinism run amok.

So, of course, we can't count on these guys do actually do what's best for the nation. There's no guarantee that they will. And that's where a crazy scheme to mint a trillion-dollar platinum coin comes in.

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Fiscal Cliff Deal Demonstrates the Fantasy of Trickle-Down Economics

Last night's passage of the fiscal cliff agreement in the House of Representatives highlights a few important points: that Washington is broken, that a leaderless House GOP is in chaos, that Eric Cantor and John Boehner are working against each other and at cross-purposes, etc. You're going to hear a lot about that in the coming days, so I'm not going to waste your time writing a post you'll be able to read pretty much anywhere else.

Instead, I'm going to use the fiscal cliff deal to demonstrate how Republican explanations of economics are complete BS. As part of the deal (or, more accurately, because the deal completely ignores it), the payroll tax cut holiday will expire, hitting middle- and lower-income workers the hardest. Meanwhile, households over $450,000 and individuals making $400,000 or more will also see their taxes go up. Here's a fun game: guess whose tax hike will slow the economy more, the wealthy's or the rest of us?

Associated Press:

The higher taxes on the wealthy will probably slow the economy a little bit. But a bigger drag would come from a tax increase Democrats and Republicans aren’t even bothering to fight over: the end of a two-year Social Security tax cut. The so-called payroll tax is scheduled to bounce back up to 6.2 percent this year from 4.2 percent in 2011 and 2012, amounting to a $1,000 tax increase for someone earning $50,000 a year.

“It’s a huge hit,” says Joel Naroff, president of Naroff Economic Advisors. “It hits people whether they’re making $10,000 or they’re making $2 million. It doesn’t matter who you are... The lower your income, the more of your income you’re (spending). So if your taxes go up, it’s going to come out of your spending.” And that is bad news for an economy that is 70 percent consumer spending.

Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, calculates that the higher payroll tax will reduce economic growth by 0.6 percentage points in 2013. The other possible tax increases — including higher taxes on household incomes above $450,000 a year — will slice just 0.15 percentage points off annual growth, Zandi said.

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GOP Stuck on the Edge of the Fiscal Cliff

An article in the New York Times titled, "Criticized as Weak in Past Talks, Obama Takes Harder Line," is the sort of thing that puts a smile on liberals' faces. Long story short, it describes a president who does what he said he would do during a successful reelection bid. And Republicans hate it.

Amid demands from Republicans that President Obama propose detailed new spending cuts to avert the year-end fiscal crisis, his answer boils down to this: you first.

Mr. Obama, scarred by failed negotiations in his first term and emboldened by a clear if close election to a second, has emerged as a different kind of negotiator in the past week or two, sticking to the liberal line and frustrating Republicans on the other side of the bargaining table.

Disciplined and unyielding, he argues for raising taxes on the wealthy while offering nothing new to rein in spending and overhaul entitlement programs beyond what was on the table last year. Until Republicans offer their own new plan, Mr. Obama will not alter his. In effect, he is trying to leverage what he claims as an election mandate to force Republicans to take ownership of the difficult choices ahead.

Ezra Klein has already covered this new Obama, writing that he's stopped negotiating with himself. Paul Krugman agrees:

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Americans Oppose Every GOP Idea for the Fiscal Cliff

I've joked that if you "unskewed" the presidential election results to get rid of the American people's liberal bias, you'd see that Mitt Romney totally won the election. While it's fun to tweak conservatives over the poll trutherism that caused them to be caught with their pants down on election night, the fact is that this form of denialism has always been there. It's usually expressed as "you can get a poll to say whatever you want," but this time they just put more effort into it with the addition of fantasy numbers -- an effort that, ironically, was spent getting polls to say what conservatives wanted to hear. You hope this particular strain of reality opposition has suffered a fatal blow with Mitt Romney's loss, but you never know. Conservatives have a talent for ignoring lessons.

But not learning this particular lesson would be a tragedy for the GOP, so I think it's sinking in. Given the findings of a new poll, the time would be right for a GOP awakening, anyway.

Raising taxes on income over $250,000 remains a broadly popular approach to dealing with the country’s budgetary woes, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

Sixty percent of all Americans back higher taxes on higher incomes in the new Post-ABC data. Earlier this month, an identical 60 percent of voters in the presidential election said income taxes should be raised on income over $250,000, according to the national exit poll.

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Lighting Money on Fire and Romney's Idea of 'Over-Regulation'

It was one of the dumber things the Romney campaign said this week and it's getting almost no coverage. On NBC's Today show, campaign adviser Eric Fehrnstrom said that the JPMorgan trading debacle was no reason to go and start regulating Wall Street banks. "The leadership of that company will be held accountable for this trading loss, but we don't want to punish companies," he said. "There was no taxpayer money at risk. All of the losses went to investors, which is how it works in a public market."

Fehrnstrom apparently has no earthly idea "how it works in a public market." Plenty of people who weren't investors in JPMorgan are harmed by this -- most notably you.

First, let's let NPR's Planet Money explain what happened:

The trade came to light earlier this year, when reports surfaced of a "London Whale" — a trader at JPMorgan who had accumulated a position so big it was affecting the whole market.

The trade involved an index of corporate credit default swaps. These are essentially insurance policies that pay off if a company can't make payments on its debts. (Credit default swaps became a household name during the financial crisis, when they were central to the blowup of AIG, a giant insurance company.)

JPMorgan took the big hit when it tried to back off from the trade and had to sell at a loss.

Here's what I want to make extremely clear here: JPMorgan didn't get screwed on some deal by someone who outsmarted them. No one out there is $2 billion dollars richer because of this. The bank might as well have stacked up $2 billion in American wealth -- that's two and nine zeros -- and put a match to it. It's just gone. $2 billion taken out of the US economy and nothing to show for it.

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With Foreclosure Settlement, Scott Walker Ignores the Lessons of History

Yesterday, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published a smart editorial on Gov. Scott Walker's suddenly unbalanced budget. It requires a little background, but I think I can catch you up to speed pretty quickly.

In 2001, then-Gov. Tommy Thompson was picked by the Bush administration to run the Department of Health and Human Services. Wisconsin governors are elected on presidential off-years, which meant that Lt. Gov. Scott McCallum would serve the rest of Thompson's term. This did not go well. It was a period marked mostly by short-sightedness and poor decision-making, which included this:

In July 2002, then-Gov. Scott McCallum signed a budget-repair bill into law that used $825 million in settlement money from the big tobacco companies to balance a gaping hole in the state budget. That was on top of another $450 million in tobacco money used for the same purpose the summer before.

McCallum and the Legislature balanced the budget all right -- for a few months -- but at a high cost to good government.

"Dumb and dumber," we wrote at the time. "Think about winning the lottery and spending every nickel in the first year."

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