Support Group

I chastised Rand Paul after his 2010 victory speech where he boasted about how awesome it was that he got to join the “most deliberative body in the world.”  The idea that 1) we have an institution whose sole responsibility it is to argue ad nauseum and 2) that the Senate should be “asked, respectfully why we can’t balance our budget like I balance my checkbook” was disconcerting and naive on his part, but in retrospect, probably the most truthful thing he ever said on the campaign trail.  After all, men like Richard Shelby don’t sit in the U.S. Senate for the money, they do it because of the power that the institution gives them as individuals regardless of how this power may reflect on the governing body that they’re a part of.

Richard Shelby has been a one man wrecking crew, not just for the economy, but for businesses as well.  It was a sad day when Peter Diamond, perhaps the most well-qualified person in years to be up for confirmation for the Federal Reserve was filibustered by Shelby because winning a Nobel Prize in Economics doesn’t make you qualified to talk about…economics.  James Fallows of the Atlantic noted on Monday that:

“Last year, Shelby — on his own authority, and in pique for a federal contract that didn’t go to  Alabama firms — held up the confirmation of some 70 executive branch appointees. It’s bad for America that Senate rules make such one-person tyranny possible. But it should be held against Shelby that he was willing to abuse the rules this way, in reckless disregard of the national interest and the destructive wastefulness of making it so arbitrarily difficult to fill public jobs.”

The whole episode reminds me of Sen. Jim Bunning’s antics last year, when he held up an unemployment aid bill because he was upset that the Senate leadership scheduled the vote on the same night as the Kentucky-South Carolina Men’s College Basketball game.

“I have missed the Kentucky-South Carolina game that started at 9:00 and it’s the only redeeming chance we had to beat South Carolina since they’re the only team that has beat Kentucky this year,” Bunning said on the Senate floor.  Apparently, Bunning’s obstructionist ideas on infrastructure and other spending didn’t go far enough, so he felt it necessary to drive home his point over a sporting event because, you know, that’s a really mature thing to do.  Hundreds of thousands of unemployed people should lose what little benefits they have because sports are the real reason that the Senate matters.

My favorite part of that story was this:

“Earlier today, Bunning refused to answer questions from ABC News, even flipping his middle finger at a producer trying to catch up with him from behind.”

“”Excuse me! This is a senators-only elevator!” Bunning thundered as he boarded an elevator in the Hart Senate Office Building.”

I wonder why he didn’t run for re-election.

Still, Shelby’s record of being a one-man filibuster is even more extensive than Bunning’s.  Take this snipet from the Washington Post, that was raised even before Bunning’s infamous rant on the Senate floor:

“Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) announced that he would block administration nominees from Senate votes in an attempt to secure funding for two defense-related projects for his state.”

Say what you want about Bunning, at least he wasn’t holding up the process for pork-barrel spending.  One reason that defense spending is “off the table” for Republicans is because of people like Shelby, who, for whatever reason, need to bring home the bacon in order to feel like they’ve been productive.  But now as Fellows notes, Shelby is applying his own litmus test for federal employees.

“Now, as Peter Diamond has recounted in the New York Times, Shelby has, on his own whim, decidedthat the most recent recipient of the Nobel award in economics (Diamond), doesn’t meet the Shelby Test for economic excellence.”

What’s even more ridiculous is that people on both sides admit that Diamond wasn’t just qualified, but perhaps over-qualified for the job he was appointed to.  What’s worse is that this showdown pitted Shelby (who has no experience on economic matters) against someone whose only experience was on economic matters.

“A career politician with a law degree from the University of Alabama (Shelby has 8 years as a prosecutor, 40 years as a legislator). Versus the economist who has just been recognized with the highest international lifetime-achievement honor that exists in his field — and whose specialty is studying America’s worst economic problem of the moment, chronic unemployment.  Hmmm, I wonder which of them might be in a better position to judge the other’s street-cred about Fed policy. Yet Senate rules let one willful politician say: No, I think not.”

As Johnathon Cohn noted in the New Republic:

“President Obama first nominated Diamond in April, 2010. At the time, the choice prompted almost universal acclaim. Nobody in his generation may be better at applying theory to real-world problems like the design of social insurance or the nature of unemployment.”

This policy of usurping Keynesian economics in the United States Senate is hardly new.  Republicans have been opposing any sort of short-term stimulus, even in exchange for 3:1 cuts in spending.  As Ezra noted in his piece in Bloomberg:

“For every three dollars in spending cuts between 2013 and 2022, there would be one dollar in tax increases, along with one dollar in stimulus prior to 2013. IfRepublicans were willing to be flexible on the precise nature of the spending cuts, I bet they could get Democrats to accept a 4:1:1 ratio of even deeper cuts. A commitment to stimulus would lure liberals to support the spending cuts in the deal, helping a bill pass Congress while neutering the 2012 campaign attacks that Democrats will otherwise wage against the cuts in the House Republican budget.”

The idea makes sense, in that it would give each side what they want.  But, Republicans aren’t about win-win situations, they’re all about the win-lose scenario.  Like Charlie Sheen, Republicans (especially in the Senate) don’t really care what it is they’re fighting for, as long as they’re “winning.”

Morgan Unaware of Game-time Situation

Brewers hero Nyjer Morgan was mobbed after hitting a game-winning, two-out double that scored Craig Counsell.  Teammates stormed the field and fans were exstatic, but Morgan was confused.  Why was everyone so happy?  The game was 8-6 in the bottom of the ninth and even though the Brewers were the home team, Morgan still thought he was responsible for a mere RBI.  Things just get weirder from there.

In an interview with AM 620 WTMJ radio, Morgan said he didn’t know he had hit the game-winning hit until after he was mobbed by teammates and escorted to the dugout.

“I thought we were winning 8-6, I didn’t really understand what all the fuss was about,” Morgan told an interviewer after the game.  Before Morgan came out onto the on-deck circle, Morgan had been playing around in the dugout.  Imitating a kid with a sling shot with a teammate, Morgan’s head was anywhere but in the game.  The post-game interview merely confirmed what viewers had already anticipated.

Politics and Policy

Everyone knew there would be political fallout from the bad jobs numbers last week, many just thought it wouldn’t be this bad.  60% of Americans don’t believe that America is in the midst of a recovery at all.  This, despite the best efforts of economists, will remain the prevailing view until either the jobs market improves or the debt ceiling crisis is averted.  I’m pretty pessimistic on both fronts.  Here’s why:

Even people who are working are working more for less.  Although average wage earnings have gone up (all of 1.2% over the last three years) people are seeing the average cost of goods go up as well, meaning that unless people start making substantially more money, they’re not going to see a noticeable difference in their bank account.  And our economic recovery isn’t going to take off at the rate we need it to until consumer confidence goes up in a significant way and most polling shows that that isn’t going to happen anytime soon either.

Now, as much as I dislike the White House’s rhetoric on why we are where we are economically, if you crunch the numbers, their argument makes a lot of sense.  The problem is that their argument doesn’t poll particularly well.  But, look at the economic data before President Obama took office:

Imagine inheriting that mess.  It’d be a pretty tough sell for anybody.  People forget just how low George W. Bush’s approval numbers were, particularly on the economy.  But, this isn’t an excuse for how slow the recovery has been.  What we really need are policy based initiatives, not politically based ones and today in the New York Times, David Brooks did a really silly thing: he criticized the only chance we have at cost-control within our health care system.

Not only is this not helpful, it’s counter-productive.  I understand why conservatives hate the Affordable Care Act.  It’s really simple: Obama passed it, therefore it is evil.  But, to make the Sarah Palin argument that government controlled anything is a bad idea isn’t just an endorsement of ignorance and stupidity, it’s an endorsement of a false ideology.  The truth is that there are certain things the government does really well (Medicare) and there are things it doesn’t do very well in (like waging wars in third world countries.)  This evidence shouldn’t suggest, as Brooks would have us believe, that simply because something hasn’t worked in the past, we should never try it again.  It means that instead of doing the same thing over and over again, we should analyze what went wrong in the first place and try to fix those problems the second time around.

This is what we’re trying to do with health care and the deficit.  The problem that we’re facing on these two fronts are the political wars being waged against genuine improvements to these problems.  Ideas like raising revenues so that expenses = revenues shouldn’t be thrown off the table because it’s politically toxic for you.  If we could balance the budget and reduce the deficit simply by cutting spending, we’d do it, but we can’t and we know we can’t, that’s why we haven’t come up with a solution yet.  But to go into this fight saying that deficit reduction is your goal and only be willing to attack spending as a solution is to admit defeat before the battle has even started.

We’ve tried all sorts of approaches when it comes to these problems and the reason that we haven’t gotten anywhere in the past isn’t due to a lack of ideas of leadership, it’s due to the toxicity of the process.  To quote JFK: “we don’t do these things because they are easy, we do them because they are hard.”  That’s the kind of attitude we need to have if we’re going to have any realistic chance at winning this war on the deficit and real health care reform.  If we go in with the attitude that we only want to win the battles that are going to aid in the advancement of the permanent campaign, we’re not going to get anywhere at all.  And there can be no worse outcome given our present economic situation, than remaining stagnant.

Don’t Do That Voodoo That You Do

I hope this becomes a bigger mainstream story as the days and weeks go by, but I continually get discouraged by the lack of courage being displayed in Washington, particularly on the substance and implementation of monetary policy.  Today, in a New York Times op-ed, Peter Diamond, a Nobel Prize winning economist announced that he is withdrawing his name from consideration for the board of governors on the Federal Reserve.  Diamond understands, probably better than most, just how crippling the confirmation process has become in Washington.

“The leading opponent to my appointment, Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the committee, has questioned the relevance of my expertise. “Does Dr. Diamond have any experience in conducting monetary policy? No,” he said in March. “His academic work has been on pensions and labor market theory.”

But understanding the labor market — and the process by which workers and jobs come together and separate — is critical to devising an effective monetary policy. The financial crisis has led to continuing high unemployment. The Fed has to properly assess the nature of that unemployment to be able to lower it as much as possible while avoiding inflation. If much of the unemployment is related to the business cycle — caused by a lack of adequate demand — the Fed can act to reduce it without touching off inflation. If instead the unemployment is primarily structural — caused by mismatches between the skills that companies need and the skills that workers have — aggressive Fed action to reduce it could be misguided.”

Ezra Klein makes the keen observation that if Diamond isn’t qualified for this position, we should take a look at what the requirements are with greater scrutiny.

“It’s not entirely clear what Shelby thinks monetary policy actually does, but over the next couple of decades, managing labor markets and the pressure from pension policy is going be a pretty big part of the Fed’s job. On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said that the economy had only created 54,000 jobs in March. If you average out the last three months of job growth, it’ll take us 10 years to return to full employment. And if you look beyond 10 years, social insurance programs like Medicare and Social Security will be putting immense stress on the federal budget. By Shelby’s admission, Diamond is a world-renowned expert on both topics. If he’s what unqualified looks like, I’d love to see qualified.”

In blocking Diamond’s confirmation, Shelby is saying that experience in the labor market is not relevant to a job whose primary function is to establish and sustain growth in the economy.  If that’s irrelevant, what exactly is relevant?  A conservative with the same credentials would be easily confirmed, which raises the obvious question of why someone with these impeccable credentials is being blocked if not for political reasons.  This really is the perfect anecdote for why we don’t have a real plan for jobs at the federal level.  People can’t even agree on who should be making policy, let alone what that policy should be.  What’s more is that since President Obama’s inauguration in 2009, Republicans have been asking the question: “where are the jobs, Mr. President?” ad nauseum and it is now readily apparent (in case it wasn’t before) that Republicans really don’t care about the economy, they care about winning and that’s no way to govern a country.

With Friends Like These

I’ve been rather fond of saying that with the current policies that we have in place, there is no real need for an opposition party, it seems like the powers at be do just fine by themselves.  On Medicare, it sounds like both sides don’t even know what they’re arguing about.  On the debt ceiling, neither sides knows nor do they understand why they are even fighting at all.  Republicans claim that they’re fighting to cut spending (at the expense of the middle class and the poor,) while Democrats insist that they’re fighting for the little man (at the expense of business and the overall health of the U.S. economy.)  This is one of those situations where everybody is wrong.  Sometimes we engage in political theatrics in a way that suggests everyone is right because no one wants to be wrong.  It takes leadership to stand for things, however it is cowardice that rears its’ head when parties attack each other over the need to conquer a problem.

The lose-lose scenario in politics has been around for awhile, however and we shouldn’t be so shocked as we are right now.  An item of particular interest is the John Edwards case.  The Obama administration had to prosecute Edwards because if it hadn’t there would have been charges of corruption.  But, the Edwards case is so flawed that it can’t be prosecuted.  The minute Edwards goes before a judge, the case will be dismissed.  There just isn’t any evidence of a federal crime.  As I’ve said before, there may be grounds for charges at the state level for misusing funds.  The problem for the prosecution in this case is that they have to prove a crime that wasn’t really a crime and that’s not what our system of justice is supposed to encourage.

The Edwards case reminds me a lot of the public corruption scandal that ended Alexander Hamilton’s career.  While Secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton had engaged in an affair with Maria Reynolds.  What followed were a series of bizarre acts of political vengeance.  The apparatus of the minority party in government accused Hamilton of embezzlement.  Hamilton’s response was classic.  Hamilton said that he was only guilty of cheating on his wife and that he hadn’t engaged in any acts of criminal negligence.  Hamilton, of course, was correct.  The problem for Hamilton politically was that he had always presented himself as a virtuous man, who was bound by duty to his adopted country.  As is always the case with Hamilton, he was years ahead of his time in terms of the politics of the matter.

The Edwards case seems nearly identical to that of Hamilton.  Edwards engaged in despicable acts, but it does not appear that he engaged in any legally culpable behavior.  If everyone wants to have a conversation on morality, that’s fine.  Just don’t bring the full resources of the federal government into play to back up your case.  The uproar around this and many cases like it, is that while the government prosecutes men like Edwards, people at the head of institutions responsible for our credit crisis are getting away scott free.  We should look more deeply into the way businesses conducted themselves in the wake of the credit scandal.  But, we shouldn’t do so at the expense of the taxpayer.  I think everyone has paid enough for the mistakes of bankers, it seems unnecessary to drag the public through this problem again.

More Than a Feeling

The idea that the economic situation is not as bad as people make it out to be is about as absurd as the idea that Robert Pattinson is only going out with Kristen Stewart to promote their movie.  Would you date her if you were him?  Hell no, why not pull a DiCaprio and score a Blake Lively or something?  My point being that looks can be deceiving.  I’m sure that Kristen Stewart is real nice and all, but like the “jobless recovery” some things need to be more than they appear to be on the outside for things to make sense.  After all, does this look like a happy couple to you?

She looks pissed and I don’t think it’s just because of the sexting thing.  She looks like she wants to jump overboard.  Finally, something economists and Blake Lively have in common!

As Matt Yglesias points out:

“We should be constantly asking yourself “could we make real output grow faster by boosting demand, or are we facing some binding supply constraints that mean efforts to boost demand will just lead to inflation?” This is an important question because if we could boost real output by boosting aggregate demand, then our failure to do so means we’re leaving money on the table. It means that unemployment is higher than it needs to be, and also that economy-wide production of goods and services is lower than it needs to be.”

These are important issues and questions because the answers to these issues and questions leads us to the topic of why we’re in the bind that we’re in.  Is it a global problem?  Are there places that are growing in spite of the global recession?  Can we grow our market so that we can compete with the economies that are growing?  Fortunately for us, I think the answer to all those questions is an unequivocal ‘yes.’  The reason I say “fortunately for us” is because that means we’re not in this thing alone.  The downside of that observation is, of course, the fact that we’re all in this together and that means that our economies are linked in more ways than anyone would like to admit.

There are a few bright spots in all of this seemingly bad news.  The United States currently enjoys strong demand for goods and our economy hasn’t completely collapsed.  That being said, those good things come with caveats that aren’t all that reassuring.  We enjoy strong demand for goods and services because we pay so little in exchange for those goods and services.  This means that we have a really, really high trade deficit and that we’re not bringing in nearly as much as we could be if we did something smart like, I don’t know, raise tariffs and overseas taxes so that the output of other, developing countries matched the output of the most developed nation in the history of the world.  That would make sense, wouldn’t it?

The problem with this is that we have such a dependency on corporations and foreign manufacturing that it’s a sad affair to even look at.  If you raised taxes or tariffs, you’d see a spike in demand, but inflation would go through the roof as well.  Such an observation deserves a well, thought out explanation, so let me attempt to provide one.  Let’s say you produce iPads or better yet, iPad 2’s.  It costs you about $20 to make the product and you spend about five bucks for the labor.  Shipping, handling, and other various costs later and you’re selling the product for $500.  Does that seem fair?  Probably not.  But, you’re not producing this wonderfully hot item, so you don’t have the heavy demand that corporations have for their products.  So, imagine you do have that heavy demand.  Now imagine that you have to keep market prices the same, even though it’s going to cost you more to produce that product.  Would you keep output the same if your costs just increased?  Doubtful.  You’d probably pass on the cost to the consumer.  That’s what every smart business would do, right?  Not so much.

The problem that you’re not taking into account is market elasticity.  As an economy expands in one area, it collapses in another.  When the tech sector booms (as it did in the ’90’s) it’s offset by losses somewhere else.  So, while it may seem like a good idea to raise revenues right now, it’s actually a very delicate balance and it’s one of those situations where if you get it wrong, you’ve basically just screwed over the world economy.  No one wants to be in that position, especially if you’re running for re-election next year.  So, what do we do about all these problems if we can’t either increase production, increase demand, or increase the range of products that we offer the marketplace?  The short answer: not a whole lot.  Welcome to the world of the Obama administration.  A world in which you’ve tried everything you can think of, but nothing seems to work.  It’ll be great if you can just ride out the storm, but who knows what tomorrow might bring?  It could be a looming vote on whether to raise the debt ceiling, it could be a jobs report that looks terrible, it could be another foreign policy “challenge.”  We just don’t know.

It is for these reasons that it becomes so politically advantageous to attack spending and the deficit.  There’s literally no downside, even if you don’t get anything that you want.  All you have to do is keep screaming “the sky is falling, the sky is falling” and so long as things don’t drastically improve, your position looks better and better.  The problem with this is, of course, when things do drastically rebound (and they will, eventually.)  Having invested solely in a “Chicken Little” scenario, there is little to be gained by the independent voter in voting for you in the future.  After all, the powers at be solved the problem, not you.  The only thing they’ll remember about you is that, while other people were trying to fix the problem, you couldn’t shut up about how big of a problem everything is.

The problem with having a purely reactionary government is that eventually something will happen that you aren’t prepared for and can do little to guard against.  The credit crisis, the housing market collapse, the automaker bailout, 9/11, etc.  The list is so inextricably long that there isn’t enough room for me to describe it.  So, what are we to do about it?  Well, we can keep complaining, but think about all the people who spend their lives complaining and ask yourself: ‘do things ever get better for them?’  Better question: ‘do things in their life ever improve because of action that they, themselves took?”  It’s doubtful.  People who talk about problems need to have solutions, there is no more room in the world for philosophers, which is why people like Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and the like are such a joke.  They have no real world solutions to our problems, just a broken record about how big our problems are.  If you don’t have a solution for the problem we’re now facing, how can we trust you to come up with a solution for the problems we haven’t seen yet?  That’s a question I’d like to hear some of those “serious” GOP candidates for President answer.  Heck, that’s a question I’d like members of Congress to answer.  But, I’m not going to hold out for a response.  That would be irrational.

Palin Refudiates Detractors

Someone needs to inform Republicans that admitting you’re wrong when you say or do something that is factually incorrect isn’t a bad thing, in fact, it’s what’s expected of you as a human being.  To lie in the face of all evidence is to verify the worst fears your detractors have of you.  All of this is intended to make sense, but only if you live in reality.  If you’re a former half-term Governor of Alaska and failed Vice-Presidential nominee, I suppose this is just another day at the office.

Sarah Palin insisted Sunday that history was on her side when she claimed that Paul Revere’s famous ride was intended to warn both British soldiers and his fellow colonists.

“You realize that you messed up about Paul Revere, don’t you?” “Fox News Sunday” anchor Chris Wallace asked the potential 2012 presidential candidate.

“I didn’t mess up about Paul Revere,” replied Palin, a paid contributor to the network.

“Part of his ride was to warn the British that were already there. That, hey, you’re not going to succeed. You’re not going to take American arms. You are not going to beat our own well-armed persons, individual, private militia that we have,” she added. “He did warn the British.”

Palin, who again said she has not decided whether to run for president, was asked about the Revolutionary War hero during a stop Thursday in Boston on her East Coast bus tour.

“He who warned the British that they weren’t gonna be takin’ away our arms by ringing those bells, and makin’ sure as he’s riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be sure and we were going to be free, and we were going to be armed.”

Palin’s brush with the nation’s history came toward the end of her “One Nation” bus tour that generated intense interest as she traveled from Washington to New England. Along the way, she steadfastly refused “a million times” to say whether she was running for president.

“I’m publicizing Americana and our foundation and how important it is that we learn about our past and our challenges and victories throughout American history, so that we can successfully proceed forward,” Palin said in the broadcast interview. “It’s not a campaign tour.”

And was she leaning toward or against running, Palin was asked?

“Still right there in the middle,” she said.

There’s no ambiguity about the interest Palin generates, a point that doesn’t sit comfortably in some quarters of a party without a clear front-runner to face President Barack Obama next year.

Palin’s closely watched bus trip is a key example. Its camera-ready events competed for coverage in the same week and region as former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s formal entry into the race. His candidacy is perhaps the most formidable of the emerging field.

Asked Sunday whether he could envision supporting Palin for president, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, a former hopeful, told “Face the Nation” on CBS: “If Barack Obama was the head of the other ticket, I could.”

For her part, Palin was contrite.

“I apologize if I stepped on any, any of that PR that Mitt Romney needed or wanted that day,” Palin said. “I do sincerely apologize. I didn’t mean to step on anybody’s toes.”

While she continued to insist that she wasn’t competing for anything in particular, Palin said she would welcome Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, another Republican with tea party appeal, to the race.

“More competition, the better,” Palin said.

For now, Palin is clearly grappling with the downside of celebrity.

Even her otherwise successful media events can leave lingering questions about Palin’s grasp of — and interest in — history, public policy and other subjects of substance.

On Sunday, Palin insisted she was right about the purpose of Revere’s famous “midnight ride.”

“I know my American history,” she told Wallace.

The colonists at the time of Revere’s ride were British subjects, with American independence still in the future. But Revere’s own writing and other historical accounts leave little doubt that secrecy was vital to his mission.

The Paul Revere House’s website says that on April 18, 1775, Dr. Joseph Warren, a patriot leader in the Boston area, instructed Revere to ride to Lexington, Mass., to warn Samuel Adams and John Hancock that British troops were marching to arrest them.

In an undated letter posted by the Massachusetts Historical Society, Revere later wrote of the need to keep his activities secret and his suspicion that a member of his tight circle of planners had become a British informant. According to the letter, believed to have been written around 1798, Revere did provide some details of the plan to the soldiers that night, but after he had notified other colonists and under questioning by the Redcoats.

Intercepted and surrounded by British soldiers on his way from Lexington to Concord, Revere revealed “there would be five hundred Americans there in a short time, for I had alarmed the country all the way up,” he wrote.

Revere was probably bluffing the soldiers about the size of any advancing militia, since he had no way of knowing, according to Joel J. Miller, author of “The Revolutionary Paul Revere.” And while he made bells, Revere would never have rung any on that famous night because the Redcoats were under orders to round up people just like him.

“He was riding off as quickly and as quietly as possible,” Miller said. “Paul Revere did not want the Redcoats to know of his mission at all.”

More downside for Palin: Nothing is private.

Looming in the week ahead is Alaska’s release of 24,000 pages of emails sent and received by Palin during her time as governor. They will provide an inside look into her rise from obscurity to a spot on the national stage.

The emails cover a majority of her short term as governor and could provide the most insight into how she governed the nation’s largest state. Her only other elected office was as a two-term mayor of her hometown of Wasilla, Alaska, which has a population of about 7,000.

The emails cover the first 21 months of Palin’s tenure, ending in September 2008, after GOP presidential nominee John McCain selected her to be his running mate.

Palin resigned partway through her term, in July 2009.

“Every rock in the Palin household that could ever be kicked over and uncovered anything, it’s already been kicked over,” Palin said, noting that a lot of the emails are between staff and family members and were not meant for public consumption. The letters, she said, “won’t distract me.”

It’s Only Going to Get Worse

Economists, politicians, and citizens alike were stunned with the economic news that came from the labor department’s job numbers as well as the private sector growth figures.  I’m not surprised at all and no one else should be either.  On May 16th, the United States government hit the debt ceiling.  We’re now in a “spending freeze,” which means that, although we can still pay for things, it costs a lot more to pay for things than it would have if we had simply raised the debt limit.  There’s also been an averse reaction to GDP by the market and by big business.  As Bill Maher put it on Friday, “if McDonald’s hadn’t hired 60,000 people last month, we would have seen know job growth whatsoever.”

He’s right, outside of one company, the U.S. actually lost jobs last month.  Yet, the market won’t react as bad as it should on Monday because the amount of public sector job losses were not as bad as previously expected.  All of this is tied in to the really frightening aspect of being unable to finance the deficit (which is what happens when we run out of creative accounting methods in early August.)  All told, the initial reaction is going to be the strongest.  We’re going to see a negative jump in GDP by about 2.3%, but between now and then we’ll still see that negative movement in GDP, just in more subtle ways.

Take America’s borrowing power, for instance.  As I noted on Friday, public sector jobs are declining, but not in direct correlation with budget cuts.  The majority of public sector jobs that have been lost have been lost at the local level, the second most at the state level, and the third most at the federal level.  This runs counter to the actual spending cuts and newly allocated budgets that have been approved for this year.  The federal budget contained the most rigorous cuts in public employee’s, the state budgets came second, and the local budgets third.

So why aren’t we cutting federal jobs the most, state jobs second, and local jobs third?  Because jobs aren’t related to spending.  Jobs are linked more directly to borrowing power.  Because the federal government has better borrowing power than state and local governments, they get to keep their jobs.  Because the state government has better borrowing power than local governments, state workers keep their jobs and because local governments have the least borrowing power and the least political influence, their jobs are going quickly.

What all of this means is that people aren’t feeling the full effects of the budget cuts.  They’re feeling the effects of the market perception of the jobs market and that hasn’t been good for awhile.  The reason that the economic data from May looks so bad is because everyone had to borrow money in the last couple weeks of May at a higher interest rate than they would have normally had to because the U.S. has already hit the debt ceiling.  When Republicans say that there’s no risk of us hitting the debt ceiling in the future, they’re right because we’ve already hit it.

Going forward, there’s one graph that should be sitting on the floor of Congress until some decision is made in terms of what we’re going to do to address the debt ceiling and it’s posted below.

The latest trick that Republicans are trying to pull is to say that even if we don’t raise the debt ceiling by August, the U.S. won’t default on it’s debt.  That is the biggest lie you could possibly tell right now.  We’re already positioned to lose our credit rating and sink our potential buyers markets for the next 6-8 months, that’s really bad news.  When we default on our debt and have to essentially mortgage off the United States government, we’ll see an economic calamity that will make the Great Depression look like a good thing.  The graph above makes note of what will happen in two months as compared to crisis that occurred over a time period three times as long as the one we’re anticipating.  That means the damage will probably be worse than we’re predicting and for anyone who’s seen the analysis of the U.S. economy going forward, that shouldn’t be something that we want to increase in magnitude.

The other interesting part of the debt debate that has been unfolding is the rhetoric vs. the action of the Paul Ryan-minded Republicans.  When Paul Ryan unveiled his budget earlier this year, he did so on the basis of the “Ryan-Rivlin deficit reduction proposal.”  That’s interesting because today on “Face the Nation,” Rivlin fundamentally disagreed with Ryan’s premise that we needed major cuts to federal spending in the short term if we are to have any success in the long-term.

“We don’t have to cut near-term spending too much — we shouldn’t do that, because it would endanger the recovery,” she said. “If you just slash spending right now, or raise taxes right now, it would be a very bad thing to do.”

This sets the stage for the rationale and reasoning behind the act of raising the debt ceiling.  Both Republicans and Democrats have said that it will get done, but the two sides have said that they’ll be raising it for fundamentally different reasons.  For Democrats, the question of raising the debt ceiling revolves around the question of ‘how?’ whereas the Republican question of raising the debt ceiling revolves around the question of ‘why?’  Democrats are trying to negotiate an end to the hostage crisis, Republicans are trying to figure out if they should even bother giving up the hostage at all.  The stakes get scarier if the hostage takers aren’t just okay with, but are actually encouraged to shoot the hostage.

It appears as if no amount of consequences-based realities are going to be acceptable solutions for Republicans, which raises the question of whether or not we should continue negotiating at all.  If someone is intent on destroying something just to see what the aftermath will look like, someone has to start talking about how the clean up is going to work and it seems like Democrats should be preparing for that as opposed to encouraging the taking of more hostages.  It’s better to prepare for what you know is coming than to negotiate for something that isn’t worth having.  Republicans understand this, Democrats will never understand this and this is the real political problem we have.  One side is willing to sacrifice everything, while the other side is unwilling to sacrifice anything and it’s in this area that the real problem exists.

It’s Always the Cover Up

I don’t know what kind of weird laws they have in North Carolina, but I’m pretty sure it’s not a particularly good idea to be texting while driving to court.  Somebody should probably tell John Edwards.  Oh, wait, that’s right.  He’s an attorney!  Now, although your opinion of him probably won’t improve when you read it, the indictment of Edwards looks extremely weak.

It’s pretty hard to imagine a scenario in which a jury would come back with a guilty verdict in this case.  Proving a criminal conspiracy involves establishing clear dates and times and that’s one thing this indictment does a pretty lousy job of doing.

If there were instances in which Edwards willingly took part in a conspiracy, it is not clear anywhere in the document that he knowingly conspired or attempted to break any laws.  It looks bad from a public relations perspective, but I didn’t see any instance in which the prosecution was using more than one substantiating witness and that makes the case a tough one to convict upon.

John Edwards appeared in court Friday to face grand jury charges that he solicited and secretly spent more than $925,000 to hide his mistress and their baby from the public at the height of his 2008 White House campaign.

But he may have also broken another law along the way. A helicopter for ABC-owned WTVD in Raleigh, N.C., which was following him driving to court, captured footage of him reading his BlackBerry while behind the wheel — a violation of North Carolina Law.

The indictment contained six felony counts, including conspiracy, four counts of receiving illegal campaign contributions and one count of false statements for keeping the spending off the campaign’s public finance reports.

The indictment said the payments made with money from two wealthy supporters were a scheme to protect Edwards’ presidential ambitions and his public image as a devoted family man.

“Edwards knew that public revelation of the affair and the pregnancy would destroy his candidacy,” the indictment said.

Prosecutors said the spending was illegal because the 2004 Democratic vice presidential nominee should have reported it on public campaign finance filings and because it exceeded the $2,300 limit per person for campaign contributions.

Edwards’ lawyer, Gregory Craig, said there’s no way that anyone, including Edwards, would have known that the payments should be treated as campaign contributions.

“This is an unprecedented prosecution,” he said at the courthouse. “He has broken no law and we will defend this case vigorously.”

The case opens a new front in how the federal government oversees the flow of money around political campaigns.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a private watchdog group often critical of the Justice Department for failing to pursue wrongdoing by government officials, was a surprising critic of this prosecution. Executive director Melanie Sloan said the case was “remarkably weak.”

While Sloan called Edwards’ conduct despicable, she said the government case rests on finding the payments by Edwards’ two wealthy old friends to be campaign contributions “but no court has ever interpreted the definition of campaign contribution this broadly.”

Edwards’ defense team issued statements from experts who argued the payments were not campaign contributions. A former Federal Elections Commission chairman, Scott Thomas, said if the agency had investigated, it would have found the payments did not violate the law, even as a civil matter.

“A criminal prosecution of a candidate on these facts would be outside anything I would expect after decades of experience with the campaign finance laws,” Thomas said.

In recent days, Edwards’ team also argued that the secret spending was designed to hide the affair from his wife, Elizabeth, who died of cancer in December, and not to aid his campaign.

Negotiations between Edwards’ lawyers and prosecutors to settle on a charge to which Edwards was willing to plead guilty continued through Thursday, but proved fruitless, according to people with knowledge of the negotiations. Prosecutors had insisted on a plea to a felony, which would endanger his ability to keep his license to practice law.

If convicted, Edwards faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine on each of the six counts. First-time white collar offenders usually don’t receive prison terms in federal court, but the Justice Department typically presses for at least short prison sentences for public officials. While Edwards was a private citizen as a candidate, he was receiving taxpayer money for his presidential campaign.

The indictment was the culmination of a federal investigation begun by the FBI more than two years ago that scoured virtually every corner of Edwards’ political career, including his time as a U.S. senator, which ended seven years ago.

But the centerpiece has been the hundreds of thousands of dollars privately provided by two wealthy supporters – former campaign finance chairman Fred Baron and Rachel “Bunny” Mellon, the 100-year-old widow of banking heir Paul Mellon. That money eventually went to keep mistress Rielle Hunter and her out-of-wedlock baby in hiding in 2007 and 2008, during the apex of the Democratic nomination campaign.

The indictment cited $725,000 in payments made by Mellon and another $200,000 made by Baron. It said the money was used to pay for Hunter’s living and medical expenses and for chartered airfare, luxury hotels and nearly $60,000 in rent for a house in Santa Barbara, Calif., to keep her hidden from the public. Other than Edwards, no one was named in the indictment, but the descriptions of others make clear who they are.

Mellon sent her money through her decorator. The indictment said she listed items of furniture in the memo lines of checks – written in amounts of $10,000-$200,000 for “chairs,” “antique Charleston table,” and “book case” – to hide the true purpose. It said Baron gave an envelope with about $1,000 cash and a note that said, “Old Chinese saying: use cash, not credit cards!”

The conspiracy count accused Edwards of lying when he admitted to the affair during an interview on ABC but denied knowing about any payments. “I’ve never asked anybody to pay a dime of money, never been told that any money has been paid,” he said.

The indictment referred to Edwards’ discussions with a former employee in summer 2009 in which they prepared a statement to the media in which he would admit he was the father of Frances Quinn Hunter. A person familiar with the investigation has identified the former employee as speechwriter Wendy Button. The indictment said Edwards told her that he was aware Baron provided money to hide Hunter from the media.

“Edwards further told the employee that this was a huge issue and that for `legal and practical reasons’ it should not be mentioned in the statement they were preparing,” the indictment said. The statement Edwards eventually issued seven months later claiming paternity did not mention the money spent on Hunter.

Former campaign staffer Andrew Young, who initially claimed paternity of Hunter’s child, also has said Edwards was aware of the private financial support that helped keep the mistress satisfied and secluded.

The indictment said Edwards and Young began discussing who could provide money to support Hunter in May 2007, around the time she told the candidate she was pregnant. It says Young read Edwards a note he got from Mellon saying she was “furious” over media criticism of the candidate’s $400 haircuts.

“From now on, all haircuts, etc., that are necessary and important for his campaign – please send the bills to me,” the indictment quoted Mellon as writing. “It is a way to help our friend without government restrictions.” The indictment said Edwards and Young then solicited money from Mellon.

Edwards and Hunter began their relationship in 2006, just as the 2004 Democratic vice presidential nominee was plotting a second run for the White House. She was hired to shoot behind-the-scenes video footage of the prospective candidate. Edwards’ political action committee and a nonprofit affiliated with him each paid Hunter’s video-production firm about $100,000 for the work.

Edwards initially denied having an affair with Hunter but eventually admitted to it in the summer of 2008. He then denied being the father of her child before finally confessing last year.

In the end, it’s important to note that prosecutors were looking for a plea to a felony count before they went to court for the preliminary hearing.  Plea agreements change during the course of pre-trial work and obviously during the course of a trial.  The really amazing part of this is that even given the extraordinary amount of time and logistical support, the FBI was unable to make a case that was in any way conclusive.  You don’t really know what Edwards was trying to do from a legal standpoint and it therefore becomes difficult to convict.

I could see a lesser plea deal of a couple of class C misdemeanors for the “misapproprate use of funds” crime.  That is generally defined as not informing someone about a financial transaction in which they are involved or a party to.  It’s a much looser statute and would be easier to obtain a conviction on.  I think it’s pretty apparent that the prosecution isn’t going to get the felony conviction they would like and will thus, six months out or so, probably accept a plea deal involving a high misdemeanor count.  Even misdemeanors can affect his law license however and it is unclear why he is so keen to protect it.  The only thing I can think of is that he may be deep in debt and need to actually practice law to make up those expenses.

No matter how you look at it, this is a pretty sad day for Edwards and an even sadder one for his family.  You could see the disappointment in the faces of all of those around him and it’s clear that everyone around him knows he made a very big mistake.  The key right now, from my vantage point at least, is that Edwards himself doesn’t seem to want to admit, even to himself, the wrongs that he’s committed and that’s a sorry state to see, regardless of legal culpability.

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

Over the last couple of days there have been some not so good signs from Wall st. and Main st.  The big questions seem to be political, so I’ll look at those first.  But, the numbers everyone should be focused on are the numbers from the labor department that showed both slow private sector growth and slow public sector growth.  In fact, you could make the argument that there is no public sector growth.  But, I don’t think that’s the case yet.  First lets look at the 2012 race as it stands today.

In 2012, unemployment looks like a continuing vulnerable area for Obama that will result in a smaller win for him than he otherwise would have had. As Nate Silver clearly shows there’s no one magic number for unemployment that guarantees victory or defeat. Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush and Gerald Ford probably lost because of unemployment, but Richard Nixon, Reagan and Eisenhower won despite it.

What matters more is context. Are the numbers getting better or worse? Are they a result of or responsive to the president’s policies? Does the other party have a jobs plan (at the moment, the Republicans emphatically do not — tax breaks for millionaires described as “supporting job creators” is lipstick on a pig to the American public) and who is its nominee to articulate it? In this case, add Ryan’s Curse and the unpopularity of Republican governors in Indiana, Michigan, Florida, Ohio and (yes) New Jersey, who have pushed a toxic mix of ideology and austerity.

Now that the political angle is covered, let’s look back on what’s really wrong with the economy.  Basically what I’ve been saying the last couple of days is that if you’re going to cut public funding, you better do it at such a rate that jobs in the private sector grow by at least a 1:1 ratio.  Now, even if you were able to justify the mass layoffs, you’ve got to look at where their coming from and why they’re coming from that area.  In the graph below, you can clearly see that although private sector jobs are growing, they’re essentially unchanged since the Congress switched hands and public sector jobs are way, way down.  This means that the net employment gap is getting bigger, not smaller and that’s a bad thing.

As you can see, the private sector is growing at about the same rate it grew last year, the only difference is that they’re doing so at the expense of other jobs.  The macroeconomic view on this was supposed to be if we cut down on regulation and government spending, businesses would go on some sort hiring binge and our unemployment crisis would be solved.  Needless to say, it’s not that simple.  Instead of long-term job growth we’re seeing an uptick in temporary and seasonal jobs, while permanent jobs are staying the same.  Government is laying off workers because there is now a huge shortage of funds.  Where the shortage of funds occurs directly effects which government workers have lost or are going to lose their jobs.  The graph below illustrates where public sector layoffs are occuring.

Note how few jobs have been lost at the federal level and how many have been lost at a state level.  If you look at which places had their budgets cut the most over the last year, the federal government tops the list.  Yet, they’re not laying people off left and right and people on the local level are.  Why?  Because it’s easier to cost shift federal spending down to the state level by not covering things that were covered under the last budget.  Interstate highways, for instance, are on the chopping block.  The federal government is longer willing to pay for them, so the state has to step up and pick up that expense.  Think of it like the great ladder of society.  You kick the person below you and the person below you kicks the person below them.  That’s how government budgets work and that’s why you don’t cut bureaucracy.  The problem with cutting bureaucracy is that you rarely (if ever) cut an entire program.  So, what ends up happening is you have half of a program to fund, only those funds are now going towards something that no one really understands.  This ups the waste/fraud/abuse rates big time.  Simply put, if you’re going to cut spending, cut programs, not funding.  Cutting funding simply reduces efficiency.  Cutting spending reduces buying potential and long term goals.  Cutting programs reduces the spending that goes towards the debt because that’s the spending that’s going to have earned interest attached.

If you really want to cut spending, you should cut programs and then cut spending.  You shouldn’t do it the other way around.  But the whole GOP argument for cutting spending is that you need to cut spending so you can cut programs.  That argument simply doesn’t make sense.  All you’re doing is cost-shifting, but given the recent GOP budget proposals (I’m looking at you Rep. Ryan) they don’t involve any actual cuts in programs or the “size” of the government, they simply cut the amount of resources the government has available to itself.  This is why long term spending cuts make sense only if offset by an increase in revenues.  You need to pay for what you want to spend, but you also need to make sure that what you’re running is efficient.  It’s tough to do that when one side deliberately tries to make everything inefficient, but it’s more politically helpful for that side, which is why they do it.

Ideally, we’d see both investment and spending cuts, but unfortunately we’ve got a governing body that’s hell bent on only one side of the equation, which means (in the short term at least) we’re all going to suffer because of their ideology.  Now, I know some people disagree with me on this point, but I’m going to direct you back to the debt ceiling fight because that’s a political fight about a financial problem.  The market has lost a lot of money this week and if Moody’s downgrades our credit rating in a month it’s going to be one side’s fault, but I have a feeling they’ll blame the other side for the consequences, regardless of reality.

Moody’s Blues

Moody’s said this morning that if Congress can’t reach a deal to raise the debt ceiling by mid-July that they will cut the governments credit rating.  Conservatives will use this as an indictment of President Obama and his administration as always, but as I explained yesterday, such an idea is absurd.  The reason that this line of thinking is so ridiculous is because when you look at the economics as opposed to the politics, so much of our short-term economic problems – namely the problems we’ve experienced since Republicans took control of the Congress – could have been prevented if Republicans were more reasonable when it came to the economy and more willing to seek a bi-partisan approach to our long-term economic inhibitors.

Rather than pushing for a government shutdown, a default on the debt ceiling, and an end to Medicare, if Republicans had simply come in and worked with Democrats – as they claimed they would – to decrease spending we’d be looking at a much less bleak view of our economic situation than the one we currently have.  Instead, Republicans have decided to hold the government hostage over whether or not to even fund the federal government.  Republicans have held our nations’ credit rating hostage by refusing to raise the debt limit.  Republicans are continuing to hold our nations’ seniors hostage by attempting to privatize Medicare.  With all of this overwhelming evidence, it is clear that one side is trying to fix problems while one side is simply creating new ones.  The debt ceiling debate is a debate we shouldn’t even be having.  Even Reagan understood the economic implications of not raising the debt ceiling.  But Republicans simply don’t care.  They don’t care about the consequences of their actions because they are so hell bent on winning every single issue, no matter how microscopic its’ importance that they are willing to sacrifice the well-being of our country to further their own political agenda.

Mitt Romney announced he was running for President yesterday and in his speech he laid out an indictment of the President for problems that simply weren’t his fault.  The President inherited all of these economic problems from a Republican administration that waged an eight year war on taxes that has bankrupted our country.  The numbers are so undoubtedly clear on this point.  They are so salient in their objectivity and simple in their construction that I shouldn’t have to continually post the graphs on here to make my point, but I will because Republicans continue to argue about facts instead of arguing about policy.

What this graph shows us is something that everyone knows, but doesn’t want to admit.  We can’t continue the Bush tax cuts, period.  Not for the upper class, not for the middle class, not for the working poor.  They are fundamentally unsustainable.  I realize that this is not something people want to hear, but when you start looking at fixes for our problems most of them involve controlling costs moving forward and the biggest problem we face going forward are the deficits created by the Bush tax cuts and the increasing cost of sustaining a long-term military presence in the Middle East.

Republicans like to point to the stimulus and TARP and other recovery measures as being the drivers of debt.  One Republican Congressman said that “spending is the primary cause of the federal debt and deficit.”  That is just fundamentally not true.  The only way that that argument makes sense is if you consider the Bush tax cuts as government spending.  Basically Republicans have no answer for what they would have done if they were in the President’s shoes.  The reason for this is simple: it is impossible to say that there was a better way to approach our economic problems than the one the President implemented.  Now, it didn’t work as well as we all had hoped, but it did stem what looked like a double-dip recession and it was the President’s policies on TARP, the stimulus, and the Affordable Care Act that have put us in a position to rescue the economy from the dire circumstances that Republican leaders have put us in.

The simple truth in all of this is that for Republicans to blame Obama for the economy is the equivalent of blaming Charlie Sheen’s wives for the problems that he created.  This idea essentially says that “well, everything was fine before they got here” and that’s simply not the case.  We’ve had bad weather in America, but you don’t see me blaming Meterologists for climate change, that just wouldn’t make any sense and it is equally ridiculous for Republican leaders who signed on to the Bush tax cuts and the Bush wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to blame the current President for the mistakes of his predecessor.

The President is going to have to make some tough calls in order to get the debt ceiling raised because Republicans aren’t about solving problems, they’re about winning.  No matter how miniscule the issue, Republicans must win.  This “damn the consequences” approach to government makes about as much sense as playing Russian roulette.  It may seem like a good idea at the time, but in retrospect, it’s a really, really bad idea.  If the President agrees to Republican demands on entitlement spending (which he shouldn’t) the President gives up the only political trump card he has in 2012 and that would be a huge mistake.  The stated goal of Republican leadership in both the House and Senate, from day one, has been to make President Obama a one-term President.  We shouldn’t confuse their aims with the goals of the American people because they are so fundamentally different that most people are wondering why these things are related at all.

If we’re serious about the debt, we’ll raise taxes.  It really is that simple.  If this is political posturing, Republicans will go after Obama and force him to cut entitlements which is so politically disasterous idea that it shouldn’t be considered.  But this President has, at every point in his Presidency, been forced to make deals with people that want nothing else than to see him fail, which raises the fundamental question of “how can you work for the American people and promote your ideological goals at the same time?”  And the answer to that question is that you can’t.

Now there are real goals that we should be working for in the debt ceiling negotiations.  One is debt to GDP targets in the budgeting process.  What this means in lehman’s terms is that budget deficits in relation to GDP should not exceed 90%.  As soon as this happens we should have instant tax fall back plans that makes up the budget deficit.  These budget triggers will reduce the political risk involved in balancing a budget and therefore make such a goal much more realistic.  Second, we need to expand our baseline in the tax code.  51% of Americans don’t pay any income taxes at all and this needs to change.  We can create a simple baseline that raise revenues in proportion to our deficits without having a Congressional vote on tax increases.  These ideas, although they don’t sound too difficult are in fact, very hard to enact because of the Grover Norquist “no new taxes” pledge.  We need to work around that by allowing tax increases without forcing a Congressional vote.  It’s the only way we can bring our budget back into balance without jeopardizing the political careers of everyone involved and that thus makes it the only chance we have at actually achieving our long term goals.

Power and Responsibility

Who Bears the Most Responsibility for the Continued Economic Downturn?

Smart people say Congress, stupid people say both sides, ignorant people say Obama.  It’s easy to say that the President controls the national agenda and thus is the single most important player in economic policy.  But such a statement is intellectually dishonest.  First, it makes the assumption that the President alone can make or destroy laws that have the potential to make the largest impact on the economy.  That’s not how our system of government works.  Congress sets the agenda, the Senate either agrees or disagrees, which either sends the bill to the President or sends the bill back to Congress (depending on their decision) and the President gets a say in all this once everyone else has put in their two-sense.

The basic thinking on economic matters over the last eight to ten years has been that one person has the power to set an agenda based on popular opinion.  That idea is based upon the faulty premise that the President alone represents a co-equal branch of government along with the Congress and the Supreme Court.  This statement is simply untrue.  The Executive branch represents a power that checks the legislature, just like the Supreme Court represents a power that checks the Executive.  In the end, Congress is the branch where laws begin (and in many instances, end.)  If you look at the Constitution (as many conservatives claim to do on a minute-by-minute basis) you’d notice that most of the powers that are invested by the people are vested in the Congress a la Article One.  The Executive (which is a collection of the President, Vice-President and President Pro Tempre of the Senate) has the ability to agree or disagree with the policies, but has no direct influence over what policies to make or not make.  In short, the only people who make policy are people in Congress.

When you look at the economic projections and assumptions that have been made, the majority of them were made with the expectation that Republicans would govern responsibly.  The idea that Republicans would try to privatize Medicare was not even a remote possibility.  The idea that Republicans would allow the United States to default on it’s credit was not even considered.  The reason for this was simple: when you assume power, you assume a certain amount of responsibility.  Now that Republicans have shown that they are not responsible leaders, everyone and everything is panicking as they should be.

Everyone who knows anything about economics knows that the worst thing that you can do to your credit is to not pay your bills.  When that happens the consequences become calamitous.  The steps that follow are dire.  They include the sale of assets to bay back credit, bankruptcy proceedings to liquidate whatever you have of value and the basic underlying assumption that you are, indeed broke.  The United States government is not broke.  It’s not even close to broke.

Right now, the only real problem that our government has is that our revenues and our expenses are not equal.  We’re paying out more than we’re bringing in.  There are three options: you can stop spending (which freezes credit markets,) you can increase revenue, or you can do a little bit of both in an attempt to share the burden of debt.  If you choose to increase revenue, people who you increase revenue on will not be happy with you.  If you choose to cut spending, people who depend on that spending are not going to be happy with you.  If you combine the two, people will be doubly mad at you.

So, it’s not really that big of a shock that Congress doesn’t want to make a grown up decision and adopt something like the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction plan, which would share the burden of economic hardship equally.  Naturally, if you’re the party of big-business, your interests are going to lie in protecting big-business.  If you’re the party of mainstream America, your interests are going to be protecting those interests.  If you’re the party of neither or the party of no one, you really don’t care.  Needless to say, we don’t have a party of no one, so everyone has a vested interest in the shared result.

Normally these two parties would set up shop at opposite ends of the spectrum.  One side defending business, the other defending workers and at some point in time, they would gradually move to the middle.  Unfortunately, the business party is also a party that is divided between big business (businesses that can weather just about any storm) and regular business (business that see cyclical hits as dire and extremely costly.)  Because these two interests are at war inside one party, it is next to impossible for the two sides to come together because only one side knows what it wants.

Thus the end-game in terms of the economy is going to remain mixed until the crazy people come up with a realistic gameplan.  They know that to continue to hold the federal government hostage for political gain is suicide, but they want to do it anyway.  Why do they want to do it anyway?  Because it hasn’t been done before.  These are people that are more like your crazy uncle than your rationale parents.  These are people that will burn down a house just to see how something that big looks when it’s on fire.  Needless to say, these aren’t people who can be reasoned with.  These are people who are going to have to learn for themselves what happens when they make bad decisions.

Normally, this wouldn’t be such a big problem.  But, these people are now holding the reigns of government and that means that their cause and effect is now our cause and effect.  As long as this process continues with these Dr. Strangelove type people at the helm, we’re going to see crazier and crazier decisions that don’t make any logical sense.  These things will occur not because these people want bad things to happen, but because they don’t care if bad things happen or not.  Their only aim is to see things happen, that have never happened before and when you’re dealing with someone like this, sometimes the worst position to be in is a negotiating position because you can’t negotiate with someone who doesn’t know what they want and Republicans don’t have a clue what they want right now and that’s really, really  dangerous for those of us who have to live in a world that is run by people who don’t care about the outcome.

The Economics of Happiness

There’s a new study this month that shows that the less money you have, the happier you are.  That would seem to run against our capitalist model of economics only economics isn’t about happiness, it’s about success.  Success does not equal happiness nor does happiness equal success.  There were exceptions to the rule however.  The study found that people are happiest when they fully appreciate what they have and sometimes that doesn’t happen until economic ruin befalls someone.  This raises a larger question of: should money and happiness be in the same sentence.  My answer would be no.  But, I know a lot of my Republican friends would make the claim that they are the happiest human beings alive because they have money.  Yet, this study showed that people who came from money were the least happy and that those who grew up impoverished or in a middle-income environment were most likely to lead a happy and healthy life.

So, what does any of this have to do with economics?  Are you going to show some graphs linking supply of happiness with the demands of the free market?  Well, kind of.  We all know that scarcity is the magic word in economics.  It’s what defines why things happen, when things happen and how they happen the way they do.  Given that general happiness, as it is defined in this study, has remained at relatively the same level for about twenty years, is it safe to assume that we’re not getting any happier or worse, are we getting unhappier?

To answer these key questions, it’s important to look at the demand for happiness and the demand for money.  The demand for money is defined easily by scarcity.  We have a limited amount of money for a limited amount of people, thus only so much money can go to a certain group of people.  Happiness is not so easily defined nor so easily understood.  The better question, in relation to happiness, would be: is there a scarcity of happiness?  If so, why does this scarcity exist and who benefits from it?  If you look at the models, scarcity does exist in that relative happiness, especially within cultures remains constant for long periods of time, whereas there is a ceiling at which most cultures start to hit the curve.  India for example, is much happier than the United States.  China is very unhappy and even more so when compared to the industrialized world.

Given that scarcity exists within a relatively open interpretation of a human emotion, is it safe to assume that the same rules that apply to scarcity in money apply to scarcity in happiness?  The short answer is no.  You can’t regulate behavior.  You can attempt to control outcomes.  You can control conditions.  You can control environments, but you can’t control the outcome of these situations.  This idea is known as situational anomaly.  Situational anomaly basically says that everyone reacts differently to each, individual situation and thus everyone’s set of emotions are different because they are based on life experience as well as biology.  For the wonks out there, the lack of science and math must be frustrating you to a point of no return.  So let’s talk science.  Biology says that each individual creature, nay every individual organism is different in both its makeup and its abilities.  If everything is different, how can we come up with a metric with which to measure something that is, only in some situations, finite?  Economics my friends: its’ all economics.

Look at this from the supply side.  Happiness is relative to current conditions.  The jobs market, for instance, is bad so people are willing to accept less money and willing to work harder.  Because there is a limited amount of supply, those on the demand side of the equation can ask more from their suppliers.  What happens when supplies become even?  Three-hundred years of economic theory would suggest that the pendulum would naturally swing back in favor of workers.  But, what about the never-ending “ceiling” on wealth?  Well, the last time we had growth that outpaced demand we cut taxes for those who were producing at the cost of those who weren’t producing.  No evidence exists that we’re going to do something different the next time around.  Sure economic data suggests that we’d be screwed if we continued to give out tax cuts, but that’s never stopped anyone before.  When the supply side evens out, what needs to happen is demand needs to say the same in order for the supply side to even out.  So what about the supply side of happiness?

Happiness is relative.  It’s different for everyone.  But, when economic conditions worsen, the collective happiness goes down, while individual happiness stays relatively the same.  What gives?  People are happiest with the status quo.  When economic conditions remain unchanged, that’s where happiness remains the highest and most consistent.  So, in the end, what we need to be happy as individuals is no different than what the market needs to be happy: stability.  The absence of stability causes problems in supply, problems in demand, problems with money and other fiat currencies as well as problems with those who provide both the supply and demand within the market.  Ergo, if everything could remain consistent (meaning we leave economic conditions relatively unchanged) we should be okay moving forward.  The only problem is that things never remain unchanged.  We’re constantly tweaking, especially in the financial markets, everyone is out to make a buck and it’s because of this that the individual happiness of the everyday citizen fluctuates as wildly as it does.  If we could merely do what we’re told and go home at the end of the day, the world would be a really happy place.  In the end, happiness itself is just as finite as the resources used to drive it and were we to simply leave everything alone and go about our days as happy, content people, the amount of happy, content people would grow along with supply and all would be right in the world.  Too bad we live in a world where we can’t take our own advice.

GOP Voters Oppose Ryan Budget

“When your enemy is drowning, throw him an anvil.”

– James Carville

More evidence that Republicans are following Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) down a dark path when it comes to Medicare: a new CNN poll shows not even self-identified conservatives are in favor of Ryan’s scheme.

Like most recent polls, the CNN survey shows a vast majority of respondents less than thrilled with Ryan’s plan to end Medicare and replace it with a voucher system. Just 35% say they support it, while 58% say they oppose it. The majority stands opposed to Ryan’s plan across all demographic groups, including Republicans.

Among conservatives, 54% are opposed. Among current seniors — who would not be affected by the changes in the Ryan Medicare plan — a full 74% are opposed, even after they’re told that Ryan’s plan affects Americans 55 years of age and younger.

Even Republicans break against Ryan’s plan, though only slightly. Fifty percent oppose the plan, while 48% support it.

The new CNN poll comes on the heels of numbers from Democratic allies showing similar opposition to Ryan’s plan as well as hints that the continuing fight over the Republican Medicare proposal could be giving a boost to Democrats and President Obama.

The same holds true in the CNN poll. “For the first time since they won back control of the House last November, the number of Americans who say that Republican control of the chamber is good for the country has dropped below the 50 percent mark,” notes the CNN analysis.

In case you needed more evidence, additional polling has been conducted in past few days revealing even deeper animosity than previously thought.

It doesn’t take much political savvy to note that Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) Medicare-destroying budget plan hasn’t panned out all that well for the GOP. But a new poll out from advocates for the Democratic health care law shows that the Ryan budget fail goes even deeper than embarrassed presidential candidates and special election upsets.

Not only does the poll show huge opposition to Ryan’s plan to replace Medicare with a voucher system, the poll shows Democrats winning the credibility war when it comes to Medicare and “protecting the middle class.” And — in a jolt of good news for the White House and Democrats — the numbers show that when voters are given Ryan budget messaging from opponents, support for the Democratic health care law actually goes up slightly in response.

The poll was conducted by The Herndon Alliance and Protect Your Care, two groups focused on defending the Democratic health care law from political attack. Full details on the survey will be released later today, but an early look at the numbers suggests the political hay Democrats can make from the Medicare fight is abundant.

As previous polling has shown, voters in the new survey are overwhelmingly opposed to Ryan’s medicare plan. Here’s how pollsters described it, in what they called a “neutral description of the Republican’s proposed changes to Medicare”:

The budget proposed by Republicans in Congress would generate much of its savings by making changes to Medicare. For anyone who is now fifty-five or over, traditional Medicare benefits would not change, but for everyone else, Medicare would be turned into a voucher program. This would mean that instead of the government paying doctors and hospitals directly for treating seniors as Medicare does now, the government would provide vouchers to help seniors buy their own private health insurance policy.

The results? Just 38% support the plan and 54% oppose it. According to the groups, that opposition shoots up after voters are given some political messaging “about the substance of Republicans’ proposed changes to Medicare.”

Going deeper, the numbers show President Obama with the upper hand in more than just the Medicare fight. On healthcare, the poll shows voters trust Obama over the congressional GOP by a margin of 48-41. They trust Obama more on Medicare by a margin of 47-39.

But the most surprising numbers — and possibly the best one for Obama — are the results showing that political messaging against the Ryan budget may actually increase the numbers who support the Obama’s health care law. The legislation is enemy number one for Republicans heading into 2012, who hope to use continuing wariness about the bill to attack the president and Democrats this fall.

But after pollsters read voters an as-yet unreleased messaging about the Ryan plan, support for Obama’s health care law goes up a smidge. The number rises 3% to 45% support for the law among voters who were asked about Obama’s law following the messaging about Ryan’s budget.

The increase is not great, but it suggests a real problem for Republicans. If the numbers hold, the party could lose one of its main lines of attack against Obama and the Democrats at the same time the public’s fears about the future of health care in America shift away from concern about the Democratic law and to the plans laid out by Ryan.

The poll was conducted by Democratic firm Anzalone-Liszt and surveyed 800 likely voters between May 18 and 24. The margin of error for the results is 3.5%.

No More Random Acts of Shaqness

Someone said today on Twitter that “I don’t want to live in a world where Shaq retires and Ghaddafi doesn’t,” and I agree completely.  Shaq has been playing for almost twenty years and that’s pretty much my entire sports lifetime.  Considering that I’m 26 and started watching sports around ’91 or ’92, I feel like Shaq isn’t just another player, but an institution like the game of basketball itself.  How do we move on from this point?  Let’s just hope he doesn’t consider this an opportunity to restart his rap or acting careers.  However you feel about Shaq personally, I don’t think there’s any doubt that he has one of the best Twitter feeds out there and I continue to encourage fans to follow him because it’s one of the few things on the internet that’s actually worth doing.

Like some of his previous forays into mass media, namely Shazaam and Shaq Fu, THE_REAL_SHAQ blurs the line between unintelligible train wreck and sublime performance art. The posts run high on stream-of-consciousness and low on spell check, and range from short words of wisdom (usually self-attributed) to his signature one-liners (always capped with “lol” ’cause, you know, it’s a joke). I could go on, but the man’s bio says it best: “VERY QUOTATIOUS, I PERFORM RANDOM ACTS OF SHAQNESS”.

Shaquille O’Neal, the man with four rings, 28,596 career points and scores of nicknames, has finally decided to call it quits, ending one of the most colorful careers in NBA history that will surely culminate with a Hall of Fame induction.

“I’m going to miss the competition. I’m going to miss, you know, the chase for the ring. You know, I’m actually going to miss everything,” O’Neal said on “SportsCenter” on Wednesday.

He added: “Father Time has caught up with Shaquille O’Neal.”

O’Neal, 39, revealed his retirement earlier Wednesday using the new social media tool Tout, a real-time video messaging service, to announce to fans: “We did it. Nineteen years baby. I want to thank you very much, that’s why I’m telling you first, I’m about to retire. Love you, talk to you soon.”

“Once a businesman, always a businessman,” O’Neal said with a smile later Wednesday. “I am the emperor of the social media network.”

An inveterate prankster who gave himself a new nickname — or several — in each of his six NBA cities, O’Neal said he wasn’t prepared yet to reminisce about his long and prolific career, which produced three championships with the Los Angeles Lakers and one with the Miami Heat. “Let’s save that for the press conference on Friday,” said O’Neal, who will hold that media event at his Isleworth home.

Celtics spokesman Jeff Twiss says that O’Neal has not notified the team of his plans.

“Shout out to @SHAQ on the hall of fame career. One of a kind player,” Celtics teammate Rajon Rondo tweeted Wednesday.

“He’s a giant,” commissioner David Stern said Wednesday at the NBA Finals in Miami. “He’s physically imposing; he has an imposing smile. In the game, he imposed his will, and he has done it for quite a long time. It’s been a great run here, and we’re going to miss him greatly. We hope we can find ways to keep him involved in the game.”

Stern added later in a statement: “On behalf of the NBA, its teams, and his millions of fans around the world, I want to thank Shaq for everything he has meant to the league and to the sport of basketball, both on and off the court. We wish him and his family all the best.”

O’Neal retires fifth all-time with 28,596 points, 12th with 13,099 rebounds and second only to Artis Gilmore among players with more than 2,000 baskets with a .582 field goal percentage.

“I’m a little bit sad,” said Pat Riley, the Heat president who was also the coach in 2006 when O’Neal won a title in Miami. “It’s the end of an absolute 20-year career. Great, great player. … The league’s going to miss Shaq. I’m sure Shaq will do something big and beyond.”

LeBron James tweeted: “What a career for Shaq Diesel!! The most dominating force to ever play the game. Great person to be around as well. Comedy all the time!!”

O’Neal, who’s a shoo-in for the Hall of Fame, said he isn’t sure which team he’ll enter under.

“I’m a humble and modest person so hopefully I get inducted. Let’s just start there first,” O’Neal said on “SportsCenter.” He added, “We’ll just have to wait ’til that happens, and then I’ll make that decision.”

At each stop, he endeared himself to the fans and his new teammates with his effervescent smile and playful attitude, including the habit of adopting a new nickname he felt embodied his role with his new team. In Phoenix he was the “Big Shaqtus”; in Boston, the “Big Shamroq.”

O’Neal signed a two-year contract with the Boston Celtics last summer but a persistent Achilles injury will prevent him from fulfilling the terms of the deal. O’Neal first injured his right Achilles on Christmas Day and was able to play in only two of the final 35 games of the regular season.

On April 3 against Detroit, O’Neal returned to the court after a two-month absence and scored six points in a spirited 5 minutes and 29 seconds before coming up lame and limping off the floor. Although his injury was listed as a strained calf, O’Neal said it was the Achilles flaring up again.

“I felt like someone had shot me in the back of my leg,” he said.

O’Neal did not play again in the regular season. He sat out the first-round playoff series against the New York Knicks, then tried to return in Game 3 of the Eastern Conference semifinals against his old team, the Heat. O’Neal logged 8½ minutes in the 97-81 victory but woke up in considerable pain the next morning. His final game was two days later, when he toiled for three minutes of Game 4 before Celtics coach Doc Rivers pulled him for good.

In the final weeks of the the playoffs, O’Neal, over the objections of team physician Brian McKeon, had “more than five” cortisone shots in his Achilles in an attempt to play against the Heat.

“Doc (McKeon) kept telling me, ‘No, no,’ but I wanted to play so badly,” O’Neal said. “My feeling was, ‘If it ruptures, it ruptures.’ The Celtics were so good to me I wanted to do everything I could to get back on the court for them.”

Throughout his time on the sideline, O’Neal said, he continued to do rehab as well as work on the treadmill and the exercise bike. He swam each evening at the Thoreau Club in Concord and shot a number of late-night free throws at the Lincoln-Sudbury High School gymnasium across the street from his rented Sudbury home. He lost 35 pounds and was “feeling great everywhere except for that one little spot behind my heel.”

O’Neal said McKeon recommended surgery that would “clean up” the area around the Achilles, but O’Neal said the recovery time would be close to nine months.

“I really, really thought about coming back,” he said, “but this Achilles is very damaged and if I had it done the recovery would be so long we’d have same outcome as this last year — everyone sitting around and waiting for me.

“I didn’t want to let people down two years in a row. I didn’t want to hold Boston hostage again.

“I’m letting everybody know now so Danny (Ainge) and the organization can try to get younger talent. I would love to come back, but they say once the Achilles is damaged it’s never the same. I don’t want to take that chance.”

O’Neal said his final months in Boston included some of the darkest days of his career because “I just hated to let the city of Boston down. I really grew to love the place. Everyone was so welcoming to me and treated me so great. They believed in me and they took care of me, especially the great people of Sudbury. I love that town.”

O’Neal also had effusive praise for Rivers, whom he said was “one of the best I ever played for.”

“I thought Doc was fabulous,” O’Neal said. “He stressed ‘team’ all the time, never wavered on that. He kept everyone together. He’s an amazing coach. I want to congratulate him on his five years (contract extension).

“He deserves it. He loves the organization, loves the players, and we all love him back.”

O’Neal is acutely aware the Celtics posted a record of 21-4 when he was able to play 20 or more minutes this season. The chemistry he shared with the Big Three (Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce and Ray Allen) and Rondo, O’Neal said, will be an enduring memory, leaving him to wonder what would have happened had he stayed healthy.

“We were supposed to win this year but ‘supposed’ doesn’t count,” he said. “The path was there for us. All the so-called superpowers were gone — L.A. (Lakers), San Antonio. I really feel if I was on the court we would have done it, but I don’t believe in ‘ifs.'”

O’Neal will be remembered as one of the most dominant, recognizable and controversial figures in the game, whose body of work included rap records, movies, a lengthy business portfolio and an even lengthier history of philanthropic deeds.

O’Neal embraced social networking, amassing more than 3.8 million followers on his Twitter account and keeping them informed on his “random acts of Shaqness” — like sitting in Harvard Square, pretending to be a statue, or going out in drag on Halloween.

“I tried to make people happy,” O’Neal said, “and I tried to have fun. I think I did both.”

O’Neal was a franchise-saver when the Orlando Magic made him the No. 1 overall pick in the 1992 draft. He took them from the lottery to the playoffs in two years, and then led them to the NBA Finals in his third year before they were swept by the Houston Rockets.

O’Neal then signed with the Lakers in 1996 and had his greatest success there, winning three titles alongside Kobe Bryant and coach Phil Jackson. But amid tension between O’Neal and Bryant over credit for the team’s success, O’Neal was traded to the Heat in the summer of 2004, fresh off a loss to the Detroit Pistons in the Finals.

“Shaq had a long and amazing career, with a huge impact both on and off the court,” Lakers owner Dr. Jerry Buss said in a statement released by the team. “His contributions were significant to the entire NBA, but we specifically appreciate what he did with and what he meant to the Lakers during his eight years with us. We have three championships that we wouldn’t have won without him, and we will forever be grateful for his significant contributions to those teams.”

After 3½ years in Miami, a tenure that included his fourth NBA championship, O’Neal became a veteran-for-hire, moving to Phoenix and then Cleveland and finally Boston. But he couldn’t deliver another title for Steve Nash and Amare Stoudemire with the Suns, with James with the Cavaliers or with the Celtics.

“I think Shaq was the most dominant big man of his era. He changed the game,” former Lakers teammate Brian Shaw told ESPNLosAngeles.com’s Arash Markazi.

He added: “The amazing thing about him was with somebody of his size, that he was as nimble as he was. He could dance and run and do anything physically that somebody who was 5-10 could do. That’s unheard of for a man his size. I don’t know if we’ll ever see that again.

With his basketball career behind him, O’Neal said he has a lot of things to fall back on, including pursuing his doctorate in human resource development at Barry University in Miami.

“If all goes well, I will be Dr. Shaquille O’Neal in December or January,” O’Neal said on “SportsCenter.” “That’s my main focus right now, but, you know, I’ve got a lot of stuff going on. I’m a business man. I own a couple of businesses. But right now I guess I could sit and take care of my body, get my body back.”

In all, O’Neal averaged just 9.2 points, 4.8 rebounds and 20.3 minutes this season while playing in 37 games — all career lows.

“I’m glad that he retired. I think it was time,” former guard Tim Hardaway said. “He was hurting his legacy. You don’t want to see anybody hurt their legacy when they’re going out. I think a lot of people are happy he didn’t go through that pain of waiting too long. And I think it was tough for everybody to watch Shaq when he was playing hurt like that at the end of this season.”

And that left O’Neal in the market for a new nickname.

After announcing his retirement, he asked fans to give him a nickname that befit his retirement. He reported at about 5 p.m. that “The Big 401K” was the leader.

“I know you can do better, though,” he said in another video. “I’m here all day. I’m retired.”

Nice Talking Points

There is one person in the Republican field for President that could get more than 40% of the popular vote in a general election and his name is Mitt Romney.  There are times where being flexible is the best attribute you can have and that’s why I’ve always believed that Romney is the only hope the GOP has this time around.  The guy can articulate a sentence and when the rest of the field engages in a hypothetical conversation with themselves, the rest of the country feels like it’s not part of the debate and that’s a problem.

The one thing Mitt Romney gives you – flexibility – is also his biggest handicap.  It’s going to take some serious political gymnastics to escape his philosophical endorsement of the Affordable Care Act, but the one thing Romney has shown over his career is that he is able to change positions on important issues with the amount of regularity that you or I change the T.V. station.

Now, let’s return to the realities that will face the Republican nominee for President.  How do you make such a nuanced argument against the President that voters will see you as anti-establishment, yet allow yourself sufficient political cover to maneuver deftly in favor of the guy as a human being?  This is a question that McCain struggled with in 2008 and apart from Sarah Palin, was the biggest reason he lost his bid for President.  McCain stood up in town halls and defended Barack Obama from malicious attacks and he deserves our praise for that, but in the end, it doomed his political campaign.  Let’s face it: Republicans don’t just hate President Obama as a politician, many hate him as a human being and that’s a problem for a candidate that needs to win over independent voters to win a general election.

So, if I were advising Mitt Romney I’d hammer away at the economy (because that is supposedly Romeny’s strong suit) and let most of the national security issues loom over the President’s head.  The one thing that I wouldn’t do is attack the President’s decision making abilities or his ability to keep our country safe.  Why?  Because less than one month ago, the President did something that made us all proud not as Democrats or Republicans, but as Americans.  The guy ordered the death of a man who took 3,000 American lives.  That’s a political trump card and it’s one that no other candidate can touch.

Imagine my surprise when I see former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney calling Barack Obama “one of the most ineffective presidents” he’s ever seen.  That’s a dumb move right there.  Not only did the President score the biggest victory yet in our country’s War on Terror, he’s also moving us out of engagements in two other countries.    It’s also difficult to downplay the financial success of the American auto industry that President Obama bailed out over the objections of many.

Romney tells NBC in an interview that while Obama wasn’t responsible for the recession he inherited, “he made things worse. He’s failed.”  This is where the nuance hurts Romney.  You can’t prove a negative.  Romney won’t be able to make the salient argument that Obama actually managed to make things worse than they already were because the level of the economic crisis we faced when he took office was so great that it’s nearly impossible to forget.

Romney also says he thinks Obama lacks “a cogent assessment” of world affairs. The Republican charges, in his words, “The Arab spring came, one of the greatest opportunities we’ve seen in decades, and we’ve been flatfooted.”  The latter is a good argument.  The former could sink his campaign.

Romney, who plans to formally get into the GOP race later this week, says he doesn’t think his Mormon faith will be an obstacle to winning the GOP presidential nod, saying “we’re not electing a pastor in chief, we’re electing a commander in chief.”  That’s an excellent talking point, unfortunately for Romney, that quote is lifted directly from a speech by JFK.  Repetition can help with your message, but blatantly misrepresenting something for your political benefit doesn’t help your campaign.  Especially when you’re a repeat offender.

Remember when Romney said he walked with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr?  Then, when it surfaced that it wasn’t physically possible for that to happen, Romney said it was his dad who walked with MLK?  When that didn’t work he said that he had walked with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “in spirit.”  These things don’t help your cause and when they keep happening over and over again, they really don’t help your cause.

The Bigger Conversation

I’m still not exactly sure why, but I took a lot of heat yesterday about my piece on Jim Tressel.  The argument that is being made is that Tressel knew what the rules were and he decided to break them and I get that.  The guy should lose his job, especially if he encouraged kids to break the rules.  You’re supposed to set an example as a Head Coach.  What I don’t understand is how sports writers across America can sit back and blame Tressel as if this were an isolated incident.  That’s kind of like blaming Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens for the proliferation of steroids.  Yeah, they were doing it, but so was everyone else and they did what they did to stay competitive, it’s a risk you take.

I can’t help but look back at the Mitch Albom book “Fab Five,” which looked at the lives of the NCAA winning players from Michigan after each of their careers fizzled out.  In the book, Chris Webber walks by a memorabilia store and sees his Michigan jersey going for $50 and Webber asks Albom: “how do they get away with charging $50 for my jersey when I can’t put together enough money to buy myself lunch?”

This raises the bigger question in college sports and that is ‘how do you rationalize an atmosphere in which only one side benefits from the athletic talents of kids that take the field or play on the hardwood to make you money when they themselves see nothing in return?’  I understand they get an education, but few of athletes actually use their education to further their careers.  You can make the argument that players should focus more on academics, but doing so runs counter to what the university system is based on and that’s money.  So it stands to reason that the university isn’t going to encourage it’s athletes to do something that is not in their economic best interests.  The real question that should be asked is: why do we expect players to do everything right and get nothing in return?  It goes against human nature.

It seems like a pretty one-sided system that they’ve got going on and it sounds like we should have a real debate about the system of college sports as opposed to having a purely one-way conversation about the ethics of one coach for one team.  If your university isn’t making money off of its’ players they’re doing something wrong.  Those kids are fundraising machines and it shouldn’t be beneficial for only one side in that equation.

What I really take issue with in the Ohio State scandal in particular is that the kids were going to sell a piece of their property that they earned and it that is somehow against the rules in the NCAA.  If I go out and win an award, that award is mine to do with as I please and I’d be absolutely livid, as would my community, that I couldn’t sell something that was a part of my personal property.  It’s a really stupid rule that’s in place and it needs to change.  But from a broader perspective, we need to look at how athletes get compensated in a college system.

When you work in an industry where one injury is separating you from tens of millions of dollars, there’s obviously a high risk, high reward system in place and athletes know that.  But, the collegiate community knows this as well and their willful ignorance to these issues is, to me, absolutely appalling.  When we exploited African-Americans before 1860, we rationalized our behavior in a very similar fashion.  We said that their services were required to make the collective well-being better for all sides.  Some even said that slaves enjoyed the institution of slavery.  No one likes being subservient, regardless of what form that servitude takes, but there’s a difference between being a slave, being a servant, and being a human being.  The fact that we still rally around a system that placates the system more than the people who make the system what it has become is absolutely stymieing to me.

We All Gotta Make a Living

I’m not sure what I find more hilarious, the idea of Sarah Palin actually running for President or her complete inability to get the facts straight on a history tour.  Palin said she was trying to “get out the word” about our national parks and battlefields.  She visited Mount Vernon, the National Archives, and Gettysburg where she talked about the great sacrifice of our Revolutionary heroes.

Someone might want to inform Palin that Gettysburg was fought during the Civil War not the American Revolution, but then again, I tend to be a stickler for those “wacky facty things.”  The bigger news is that apparently she’s going to go to Iowa and New Hampshire.  The implication being that those are stops designed to test the waters of a Presidential campaign and I’m still not buying it.  Why would you give up millions of dollars and a cushy lifestyle to make a complete fool out of yourself and get crushed in another campaign against Barack Obama?  It makes absolutely no sense to me, but hey maybe that’s why she wants to do it – just to frustrate us “hopey, changey people.”  It’d make about as much sense as being a half-term Governor, so hey, maybe she’s serious about this thing.

Sarah Palin will take her nationwide bus tour to Iowa in June, according to Real Clear Politics — one more sign that the former Alaska governor intends to run for president in 2012.

“The road trip was designed as a test run to find out whether she can execute a decidedly unconventional campaign game plan,” RCP reports. “Palin — and especially her husband, Todd — is said to be leaning toward running. But multiple sources said that their foremost remaining concern was whether it would be logistically feasible for their large family to hit the road together for the next several months in a prospective campaign that would rely heavily on bus travel.”

Palin has kept the details of the bus tour under wraps, leading reporters and supporters on a bit of a wild goose chase. She started Day 2 of her tour Monday at the National Archives in Washington, DC, then traveled to Mount Vernon to pay homage to her favorite Founding Father, George Washington.

Meanwhile, Palin supporters, reacting to reports that she would be making stops in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, apparently gathered Monday afternoon at Gettysburg, in the hopes that she was on her way, only to be disappointed.

Visits to key 2012 states like Iowa and New Hampshire will continue to fuel speculation about Palin’s presidential ambitions. But Palin has refused to say whether she will enter the race for the GOP nomination. “This isn’t a campaign bus,” she told reporters as she left the Archives Monday.

Are Pac and Biggie Kickin it in New Zealand?

If you don’t understand the absurdity of the headline, you may be one of the few people who actually believes this awful rumor.

Hackers from “The Lulz Boat,” which goes by @LulzSec on Twitter, hacked into the PBS website Saturday night and posted a fake story claiming the late hip-hop star Tupac Shakur was found alive and well in New Zealand. They also posted the passwords and email addresses of people from other news organizations belonging to PBS. The hackers were angry about the coverage of WikiLeaks in a recent PBS program.

The fake story reads:

“Prominent rapper Tupac has been found alive and well in a small resort in New Zealand, locals report. The small town – unnamed due to security risks – allegedly housed Tupac and Biggie Smalls (another rapper) for several years. One local, David File, recently passed away, leaving evidence and reports of Tupac’s visit in a diary, which he requested be shipped to his family in the United States.  “We were amazed to see what David left behind,” said one of sisters, Jasmine, aged 31. “We thought it best to let the world know as we feel this doesn’t deserve to be kept secret.”

I love how they put (another rapper) next to Biggie’s name.  If they hadn’t done that I would have totally been confused.  Also, I love their plethora of evidence to back up their story.  This reminds me of the fake story Donald Trump was spreading about his “researchers” in Hawaii being “absolutely stunned” at the things they were finding.  Maybe Trump and The Lulz Boat should get together and run for President.  Heck, the way the current GOP field looks, that could very well be an improvement.

Why the Hypothetical Candidate Always Polls Well

Smart political figures know and understand the importance of incumbency.  This is why only the most ridiculous candidates are running for President this time around.  Call it the Fred Thompson syndrome.  Call it the Rudy Giuliani syndrome.  Whatever you call it, it’s a losing strategy.  The simple truth is that candidates who aren’t running for office always poll better than candidates that are.  There are a couple of reasons for this.  First, hypothetical candidates don’t have to answer tough questions with the same amount of scrutiny that an established candidate does.  Second, the idea of a candidate is often looked upon with greater favor than an actual candidate running in an actual election.  Case and point: Michelle Bachmann.

Bachmann attracts a crowd wherever she goes, but not because she gives really great policy speeches that are outlined in tons of detail.  Indeed, she can’t answer a question no matter how simple the question is to answer.  The reason that conservatives love Michelle Bachmann is that she stands up for principles that are not only ridiculously premised, but also positions that are popular among the electorate.  When she does take a position that doesn’t poll well she attributes it to her “deep devotion to God.”  That’s fine, but God can’t explain climate change.

Still, my bet is that if she runs for the Republican nomination, she will either fall flat or be a fringe candidate.  She’s got baggage just like any other candidate.  In her case, however, her baggage may not be as great as other candidates like Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney.  Romney has the tough task of standing by a health care plan that is identical in principle, philosophy, and premise as the Affordable Care Act.  That’s tough to do in a Republican primary and eventually he’s going to have to answer questions that deal with how similar the two health care plans are and that will force him to give an answer that either won’t make a lot of sense or be too far to the left of the extremely right-wing base of the Republican party.

Then there’s the rest of the crowd.  Huntsman would make a great candidate if he hadn’t served in the Obama administration, unfortunately for him, he did.  It’s kind of hard to take a candidate that goes by the nickname of “T-Paw” seriously.  Newt Gingrich cheated on his wife because he was just too patriotic.  Herman Cain is crazy.  Ron Paul will be a fringe candidate as always and if Rick Perry gets in, well, things will just keep getting weirder.

If Bachmann enters the race, it’s essentially anyone’s game.  In the end, it boils down to mathematics.  The only states she’ll lose before Super Tuesday are New Hampshire and Florida and that’s only if Rudy and Mitt form some sort of bizarre alliance to piss off the tea-baggers.  After that, she’ll sweep the south just like Mike Huckabee did in 2008.

Then she runs into the west and the industrialized northeast.  These are the places that Romney will do well.  If this is how it plays out, the nomination will boil down to New York and California: aka Republicans’ worst nightmare.  If this happens, it’s anybody’s game.  On paper it would seem like Romney would have the advantage.  After all, he has the fundraising clout and Bachmann will have to win over independent voters with open-primaries.  For all the talk of the crazies in the Republican party, many political commentators have ignored the fact that many states have an open primary system which allows voters from either party to vote in their primaries.  Since Obama won’t be facing a primary challenge, expect liberals to turn out in droves to derail the Republican nominating process.  Hilarious hijinks will ensue and the party will then have a crazy, right-wing fundamentalist as a candidate.

There are a lot of people who want Michelle Bachmann to run, but they shouldn’t.  Why?  Hypothetical candidates do better than candidates that are already running.  Fred Thompson topped the Republican field for President in 2008, then he started to run a campaign and fell flat on his face.  The reason that this happened was because people liked the idea of Fred Thompson just like old people like listening to him talk about reverse mortgages.  He sounds like a credible guy, but upon further scrutiny it becomes evident that he has absolutely no idea what he’s talking about.  The same is true of Michelle Bachmann.

Republican insiders say that Bachmann would get crushed in a debate by “the intellectual heavyweights like Newt Gingrich.”  People forget that in a campaign your actual viewpoints don’t matter, the only thing that matters is consistency and a candidate’s mass demographic appeal.  This is why I think Bachmann could win.  Newt Gingrich may have a brain, but right now it’s not functioning very well.  He had a moment of brief truth-telling on “Meet the Press” a couple weeks ago, but then he had to retract his brief moment of sanity because he pissed off the ideological wing of the Republican party.  This is the great conundrum that Republican Presidential candidates face.  How do you appease a crazy wing of your party that doesn’t understand anything that can be backed up with facts and how can you sound like you hate Obama enough to challenge him to a duel?

Remember in 2004, when Zell Miller challenged Chris Matthews to a duel?  That’s really what Republicans want this time around.  Only they don’t want it to be a philosophical duel, they want it to be a live, pay-per-view, MMA event.  This is probably where Republicans are the most delusional.  How quickly they forget that Barack Obama is a brotha that grew up in a tough neighborhood.  Unless Republicans honestly believe in divine intervention or they believe that bibles can actually deflect bullets, they should at least concede that Obama would be able to KO any of his opponents.

What’s more is that in debates people aren’t looking for candidates to give good answers to tough questions, they want to hear candidates tell them what they want to hear.  During the 2008 campaign there was a great ideological battle fought between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.  It was fought on the debate floor and it was then that we realized that this guy was for real.  He didn’t just talk the talk, he backed it up.  Few people remember how poorly Hillary’s “change you can xerox” comment went down.  Now imagine that the person saying that illogical comment isn’t someone with the clout of a Clinton, but someone who has the backing of people who can’t tell the difference between the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution.  Change we can xerox, indeed.

The Ryan Budget is Worse Than You Think

The important discussion that needs to happen with Medicare and health care spending for that matter is how we can get better care for less money.  I know that sounds like a bit of an oxymoron, but that’s what they do everywhere else.  Republicans call this “rationed care” because that language sounds a lot scarier than cost control or effective care as I would call it.  We shouldn’t be spending more money for the same care, that doesn’t make any sense, but that is what we’ve been doing since the 1960’s.  No, what we need are real cost controls that can stop the growth of spending on health care while not diminishing the results that we see.

The major problem that I have with Paul Ryan’s plan is philosophical.  I don’t believe that our current system of health care delivery works as well as it should and that’s the big problem with it.  It’s not that our health care is bad or somehow not up to par with that of other developed nations, it’s that we pay such a disproportionately larger amount toward health care costs than any other nation on Earth and that it is stunting the growth of our economy and if not properly dealt with, will bankrupt our nation.  The big question thus becomes: okay, what can we do to control costs, ensure fairness in the health code, provide universal coverage to all who want it and still lead the way in innovation?

Paul Ryan put out a plan that deals with how much the government is willing to spend on health care costs and that’s good.  But, that’s not what we need.  We need a plan that creates effective exchanges so that people who don’t have health coverage can get it cheaply and those who already have coverage can get better coverage than they have.  There is a small percentage of Americans who believe that their health care is awesome.  Most of these people are on Medicare or Medicaid, but those who aren’t and want to keep their health care coverage as it is can do so, I have no problem with that and the government has no problem with that.

But for those who want to have decent medical coverage and not have to sell a major asset to get that coverage or pay that cost when they get sick, we need to look at options that provide coverage at a low cost.  The simple part of this argument is two fold.  One, we shouldn’t spend more on health care than we already do.  Second, we need to look at ways to cut down costs while maintaining a high level of service that Americans have come to expect out of their health care providers and their government.  As it is, health coverage is too expensive.  If you believe otherwise I’d invite you to take a look at this graph:

We spend more money per person on health insurance – by far than any country on the face of the Earth.  We’re three thousand dollars per person higher than the next country on the list: Switzerland.  They spend a little more than $4000 per person on health coverage whereas we spend more than $7000 per person.  What’s worse is that the Euro is worth more than the dollar.  So, while this graph is adjusted for purchasing power in 2008, that was before the recession.  Now our purchasing power is greatly diminished.  What’s worse is that prices continue to climb our obligation to Medicare beneficiaries continues to increase because of the retirement of baby-boomers.

The above graph does a couple of things.  One, it shows spending in comparison to revenue.  Note how inconsistent that line has been over the last forty years.  It is likely that over the next fifty to sixty years that revenue will continue to be increasingly unpredictable and thus our long term expenses (primarily medicare, medicaid, and social security) will follow a similar pattern.

Second, this graph illustrates where revenues will be in relation to expenses.  The baseline stays relatively consistent because it doesn’t account for political anomalies.  When you look at the 2000’s, the big thing that should jump out at you is where revenues dipped.  Where revenues dipped is where the real estate market tanked.  Revenues increased after 2004 because there was less unrest in our political system.  When revenues spiked again in 2009, they did so because we were starting to recover money that we lost with the Bush tax cuts.  However, after the 2010 tax deal there is another dip in revenues.

The graph makes the assumption that we allow all of the Bush tax cuts to expire in 2012.  If that happens we’re in okay shape over the long term to deal with our expenses.  If not, we’re going to have a lot of trouble keeping some pretty basic promises.  In short, Americans have to choose between tax cuts and overall fiscal health.  My bet is that they overwhelmingly choose tax cuts because that’s what creates debt crises and that’s how politicians get re-elected.

The third observation that should be made from this graph is how social security payouts go up for about twenty years then go down to roughly where they are now.  This is for intents and purposes, a bubble.  It’s a bubble just like the one you’d find in a business cycle.  It should be treated as such.  Speaking before the PGPF on Wednesday, Fmr. President Clinton talked about the dip and noted that we should account for this in our discussions on how to deal with short-term health costs.  That’s a really good point, as is the idea that it’s unlikely that Medicare will grow at such an exhorbanant rate after the baby boomer boon.

The main problem that I have with the Ryan plan isn’t so much in what it does, it’s with what it doesn’t do.  For instance, the Ryan plan doesn’t call for better care it just calls for more money to be spent on care.  This has shown time after time to grow costs not cut them.  On Medicare alone, the Ryan plan would double the costs to seniors.  The worst part of this whole proposal is that Ryan wants the government to cap how much it will pay out for Medicare.  That’s a great idea if care is getting cheaper, it’s a terrible idea if care is getting more expensive.  All of the privatization models have shown that health care costs go up as a result of privatization because the private, for-profit health care industry can, like any other business, charge more for it’s services.

The important take away from this graph is that the amount of money government is willing to pay out for your health care actually goes down, whereas actual health care costs continue to go up.  The idea behind most systems that seek to address costs in relation to care is that we sacrifice costs and care equally.  The idea behind the Ryan plan is that we would sacrifice neither because the only important part of this equation is the percentage that the government pays.  In the Ryan plan the costs to the consumer are not addressed.  Rather, they are looked at as collateral damage.  The fact that his plan would cost seniors twice as much is merely the cost of doing business in his view.  That outlook, that principled division that seeks to simply cut off the recognizable symptoms of the problem as opposed to dealing with it’s causes is the main reason that I am diametrically opposed to the Ryan plan.

Political Harakiri

Harakiri is the Japanese form of honorable suicide.  In the Samurai Bushido it is seen as more honorable to kill ones’ self by slitting open their stomach and bleeding to death than to allow yourself to be captured by the enemy.  It’s part of the honor code.  It never really made a whole lot of sense, but then again, neither did the vote on Paul Ryan’s budget.

The vote in the Senate was 57-40.  Five Republicans broke rank and voted against the bill.  Those who supported it took to the Senate floor to address the body and talk about all of the things they didn’t like about the bill then promptly proceeded to vote for it.  What’s really crazy about this is and the part that really baffles me is why you would do this on the day after a special election was won by the opposition party thanks wholly to the policy mistakes that were a large part of the bill they voted for.

Republicans knew the risks, Paul Ryan knew the risks, GOP strategists knew the risks so why did they vote yes for this thing?  The entire chamber voted unanimously against the President’s budget proposal, if you think the Ryan plan needs work, why not say so by voting ‘no?’  That’s what Rand Paul did.  He didn’t think the plan went far enough so he voted against it.  Simple enough, right?  Republican orthodoxy is often a question of winning and at the very least, not losing.  Mitch McConnell famously said that his only goal over the course of President Obama’s tenure in office would be to destroy his agenda.  Is Mitch McConnell adopting the Charlie Sheen defense?  Does he think he’s winning even though it’s obvious to all rational human being that he is losing?

I’m not sure what the rationale was for this or what Republicans thought they were going to get out of this bill.  It had absolutely no chance of being passed.  There was no chance it would become law.  It’s almost like they grabbed the knife and started cutting to avoid the shame of losing a philosophical battle with people they view as being ‘dishonorable.’  If that’s the case, then maybe they need to stop reading books about the samurai and start reading books about cooperation and team-building because a compromise bill would make a lot more sense right now.

The Dual Hypothesis on Medicare

There are some simple truths that Paul Ryan and the Republicans need to understand about the politics of government run health care.  The first and most basic being that people – on both sides of the aisle – love their medicare.  70% of tea partiers love their medicare and oppose cuts to the program.  If that is the ideological base of your party it should be pretty clear that messing with people’s medicare isn’t going to be a winner politically.

On the other side, perhaps a more realistic side even, politicians in both parties know that medicare is unsustainable.  Paul Ryan is right that we can’t support the entitlement system as it stands in this country going forward.  There are going to have to be key concessions from all parties involved to make the system solvent moving forward.  This idea that by showing “leadership” on this issue Republicans are somehow going to be rewarded for making a politically stupid mistake is kind of ridiculous.  That’s like saying that because the quarterback had the courage to throw the ball on the final play of a game that it’s okay that the pass was intercepted.  Ask Brett Favre how that’s worked for him.

If you listen to Paul Ryan’s talking points on medicare he actually does a pretty good job selling the thing.  One area that he does a particularly good job in is rebranding the fundamental dismantling of the medicare system.  Rather than using words most people don’t understand like “vouchers,” which sounds a little too much like “coupons” Ryan uses the term “premium support.”  That’s smart because people like to be supported.  The downside is that it’s fundamentally not true.  What Ryan’s plan calls for is essentially a state based medicare system that uses the same cost cutting mechanisms as the Affordable Care Act, but uses them in a manner that is grossly ineffective.

For instance, during the 2009 health care fight Republicans touted a plan that would allow people to save costs by letting people purchase health insurance across state lines.  The idea here is that some states have awesome health care systems and we ought to let everyone participate in programs that have low costs, but high benefits.  That sounds great, but the reality is that if you push a whole bunch of people into a system that’s worked well for a few the system itself will become bloated with operating costs because of the new influx of customers.

The rhetoric behind this is the same used in the debate over charter schools.  Republicans are fond of saying that charter schools are fundamentally better schools than public schools.  But, it’s not true.  Charter schools are different than public schools in that the majority of their students are part of a demographic that does well in school anyway.  Taking those students out of a public school and putting them in a charter school just makes the charter school look good because it picks students that are more likely to succeed.  The sad reality in the charter school program is that whole families will put all of their faith in the school and then be completely shocked when their child doesn’t automatically become a straight-A student.  It’s true that putting children in a better environment to learn increases the chances that they themselves will learn more, but it doesn’t mean that they’re going to all of a sudden have higher test scores.

I understand why Paul Ryan believes his plan is being thrown under the bus however.  The problem is communication and not ideology however.  If Republicans really want to get rid of certain entitlements they should just say so.  By going out and saying “medicare and social security are the two most important government programs that we have” and then saying that “we cannot continue to support these programs as they’re currently constructed” you’re essentially talking out of both sides of your mouth.  You can’t expect to sell something by saying we need to phase out certain aspects of a program people like.  An assault on part of the system is, essentially an assault on the entire system because the system works as it’s currently constructed and people like the way it works.  What people don’t like are the costs that are involved with Medicaid and Medicare.  More specifically, people don’t like the fact that we’re going to have to pay more in taxes to support a system that everyone does not see a net benefit from.

That’s a perfectly acceptable and understandable argument, but if we only paid for the things we liked and refused to pay for things we didn’t like, government wouldn’t function very well.  You could argue that by educating the public about where their tax dollars go people will be better informed to make decisions about how to spend their money, but most people have a tough time taking a philosophical argument and applying it to their daily lives.  People don’t understand the idea behind premium support and don’t want to understand it because people generally don’t like change.

The real sticking point for Republicans is that after introducing the notion of “death panels,” “rationed care,” and a government funded “abortions for everybody” it’s tough to dial back the rhetoric when you’re the ones who ratcheted it up in the first place.  Republicans scared people in 2010 by saying Democrats want to take their Medicare away and now in 2011, Republicans are surprised when they’re losing on that very same issue.  What Republicans fundamentally don’t understand is that it’s much easier to give people rights than to take them away.  That’s why Democrats wholeheartedly embraced the Affordable Care Act because although it mandates coverage, in the long run, it cuts costs and if we’re going to make Medicare solvent we’re going to have to cut costs.  Democrats and Republicans just disagree on how to do that.

Republicans believe that people should have to manage their finances and not count on the government to manage their finances for them and that’s a perfectly legitimate argument, just don’t be surprised when people look at that argument and disagree with the premise.  The reason that the Affordable Care Act will be a winner for Democrats going forward is because by mandating care for everybody you fundamentally lower the costs of delivering medical care.  The theory is that by bringing more people into the system, prices will go down.  The theory behind the Republican position on health care is that our health care is awesome and only needs some minor tweaks to make it sustainable.  But, by their own measurement, this theory is wholly untrue.

So how do Republicans want to reform the system if they’re against an individual mandate to purchase health insurance?  If you don’t want to lower costs then the only other solution available to you is to cost-shift and that’s what Republicans are trying to do by block-granting Medicaid and instituting a “premium support” system for Medicare.  What their plan does is give you money so you can purchase health insurance yourself at the state level.  The problem is that unlike Medicare and Medicaid, they don’t pick up the whole tab, they ask the consumer to pay more in out of pocket expenses.

So when Democrats say that Republicans want to take away your Medicare they are somewhat correct in that they want to take away the Medicare delivery system, which is run by the government and pass the costs off to you.  This allows the government to say “hey, we’ve slowed the growth of Medicare.”  Which is true, you have slowed the growth of Medicare, but you’ve also lowered the level of care people will receive and increased the real costs of health care.  My problem with the Republican health care plan isn’t that it tackles entitlements, it’s the way in which they tackle entitlements.

Everyone agrees that these systems need to be reformed, but Democrats believe that the systems should remain structurally intact whereas Republicans believe that we should slowly phase out benefits of the program by making people responsible for purchasing their own health care with help from the government.  The problem with this idea is that it doesn’t attack the fundamental problem with health care in our country, which is that we pay too much for too little care.  If you want to attack that problem the only way you can proceed is to increase the amount of people in the marketplace so that prices begin to grow at a slower pace.

Cost shifting doesn’t do this, in fact the only thing cost shifting does is take politicians off the hook for dealing with health care costs and delivery and the big take away from 2009 was that the most important thing that we can do to attack entitlement spending is to lower the costs of the underlying issue that’s causing costs to go up and that is the cost of delivering health care.

The Best Argument I’ve Heard on Gay Marriage

I’m a Packers’ fan, so praising someone from Minnesota is naturally a difficult thing for me to do.  But when someone really hits the nail on the head, especially when it comes to such an important social issue, I’ve got to give them the praise they deserve.  So, props to Steve Simon, a member of the Minnesota state legislature who gave an impassioned speech in support of the rights of grown adults to make mature decisions regarding personal matters in their lives.  Conservatives lament the guy as a real bleeding heart liberal, but if you listen to his argument, it’s pretty sane and actually makes a lot of sense.

“I’m Jewish. Eating pork or shellfish is not allowed in my tradition, but I would never ask the government to impose that on our fellow citizens,” Simon said. “We have to be careful about trying to enshrine our beliefs, however religiously valid you may believe them to be, in the Constitution.”

He then referenced a clergy member who testified to the committee that sexuality was a gift from God.

“I think that’s true […] and I would ask everyone on this committee […] if that’s true, if it’s even possibly true, what does that do to the moral force of your argument?”

“How many more gay people does God have to create before we ask ourselves whether or not God actually wants them around?” he asked.  It seems to me that this really was the crux of his argument.  Whether you take the religious perspective or not, the idea that someone creates our environment for a set purpose is something that is a founding principle in all major religions and should be something that everyone can identify with.

The thing that really amazed me though wasn’t the force of his argument or the surprisingly rationale manner in which he delivered it.  It was that it was purely from the heart.  The guy didn’t use notes.  He didn’t use talking points, he just spoke from his gut.  Anytime that someone does that in professional politics you’ve got to get up and cheer because that’s when the little guy in all of us wins.

Battle of the Bulge

Throughout 2006 and through half of 2007, I was lambasted by just about everyone I knew.  It wasn’t a matter of the classic “personal failing” that happens in politics, it was just a dumb mistake.  But, it was part of a pattern of behavior in my life that just didn’t seem to work out for me.  What was my major malfunction?  I’m a terrible liar.  I really am, I suck at it.  That’s what I should have said then because it’s the only thing I’ll say about those tumultuous times now.

This kind of behavior isn’t unusual.  When you do something in life that you’re not proud of, you do everything you can to put it behind you.  There’s little else you can do.  Sure, the press is going to try and dig up whatever dirt they can on you, that’s why you do your best to avoid them and that’s the first thing that Anthony Weiner has done right in a long time.  This week, aside from Monday, he has done an excellent job of staying out of the spotlight and that’s important from a damage control standpoint.  But, the critical polling that is the leading indicator for whether a politician can remain in office came out today and it should resolve the question of Anthony Weiner’s political future.  Despite his personal failings, Weiner enjoys a 56% approval rating and just a 33% disapproval rating among constituents.  Those are the only voices that matter in the life of Anthony Weiner right now and they’re quite telling.

Basically what they’re saying is that they don’t care what everyone thinks about him, they like their Congressman.  Why?  Because he delivers.  He’s good at his job.  Anyone who is good at their job should be allowed to retain their job unless they’re involved in a scandal that directly affects their ability to successfully complete the tasks associated with said job.  This isn’t as complicated as it sounds.  Weiner didn’t do anything that violated the law.  He didn’t pay off his sexting buddies with campaign cash, heck we don’t even know if he lied to his wife.  The only thing Weiner is guilty of right now is bad judgment and an inflated ego, but who in Washington doesn’t suffer from this disease?  We need to remember that it’s not the media that elects our representatives in government, it’s not the pundits that make the votes in the U.S. Congress, it’s people like Anthony Weiner that do that and as far as his Congressional record is concerned, we could use more Congressmen who stand up for Progressive values like he does because being a progressive has nothing to do with what you do in your spare time.  If it did, we’d probably all be guilty of something.  I know I would.

While lawmakers from Rep. Anthony Weiner’s (D-NY) own party have now begun to call for his resignation, a Marist poll released Thursday night finds that his constituents think he should stay.

In the poll, 56% of registered voters in Weiner’s NY-9 district think he should remain in office, while only a third (33%) think he should resign. That result comes as further salacious details about the Twitter scandal have come to light.

However, voters are as yet undecided on whether they’ll support Weiner when he’s up for reeleciton in 2012. thirty percent of respondents said they’d definitely vote for him next year, compared to 31% who said they would definitely not. A 38% plurality said it was too early to say for sure who they’ll vote for in the next election cycle.

It’s the first poll to survey voters solely in Weiner’s home district, and the first conducted several days out from Weiner’s Monday press conference when he first admitted to sending lewd photos and flirting with multiple women on the Internet.

Two polls taken just hours after Weiner’s announcement that surveyed New York City residents, and not just those from Weiner’s district, found conflicting results about whether the congressman should resign.

In addition, the poll found that 46% of Weiner’s constituents think his actions showed a failure of personal judgment, while 10% said it was a reflection of poor professional judgment, and 29% said it was both.

The poll also comes one day after a number of Democratic lawmakers, including . Rep. Allyson Schwartz (D-PA), who serves among the leadership of the DCCC, publicly called on Weiner to resign.

Earlier Thursday, Weiner reiterated to the New York Post that he did not plan to resign.

The Marist poll was conducted June 8 among 411 registered voters in Weiner’s district. It has a margin of error of 5.0%.

You Just Described Barack Obama!

Oftentimes when I’m perusing the conservative opinion columns, I’ll come across something that really flies off the bullshit meter and today, I was lucky enough to find one by someone who writes for the Wall Street Journal.

“To win the presidency in 2012, the Republican candidate will require certain strengths. Among them, a credible passion for ideas other than cost-cutting and small government.”

There’s a Republican who talks about something other than cost cutting and the crazy socialist spending habits in Washington?

“He or she will have to speak in the voice of Americans who know in their bones the extraordinary character of their democracy, and that voice will have to ring out steadily. That Republican candidate will need, no less, the ability to talk about matters like Medicare and Social Security without terrorizing the electorate.”

There was a candidate once who said stuff on matters such as these, I believe he talked about “right-wing social engineering.”

“Americans already have plenty of cause for fear. They have on one side the Obama health-care plan now nearly universally acknowledged as a disaster. A plan that entails huge cuts in health care—$500 billion cut from Medicare—that will nevertheless cause no pain, according to its architects. As the polls on ObamaCare show, this grand scheme appears mostly to have alarmed Americans.”

I’m still waiting for the “repeal and replace” that was promised last year by the new Republican majority.  One thing at a time, one thing at a time.

“From the Republican side comes an incessant barrage of doomsday messages and proclamations that the nation is imperiled by the greatest crisis in a generation—not, as we might have supposed, by our ongoing, desperate unemployment levels, but by spending on social programs. No sane person will deny the necessity of finding ways to cut the costs of these programs. But it’s impossible not to hear in the clamor for boldness—for massive cuts in entitlements—a distinctly fevered tone, and one with an unmistakable ideological tinge. Not the sort of pragmatism that inspires voter confidence.”

The thing that irritates me the most about GOP talking points is that they always start out with some agreed upon notion that leaves everyone wondering where the meeting on that fell.  They always start out “we all know that…or any sane person understands” like there is some universal knowledge that smart Republicans have that the rest of us could learn if we weren’t so bent on finding things like facts.

“Thinking about all this, a physician friend recalls a lesson that experienced doctors learn: A patient comes in with symptoms—is it angina? Will it lead to a heart attack? Patients whose doctors show deliberation and care in the choice of their treatment, he observes, tend to have increased faith both in the treatment and the doctor. That is a point of some relevance to politicians.”

It also helps if you’re not seeing this doctor for the first time, like many are forced to because of the lack of adequate health care coverage for many poor people, veterans, and seniors.

“The Republican who wins will have to know, and show that he knows, that most Americans aren’t sitting around worried to death about big government—they’re worried about jobs and what they have in savings.“

That’s not what Sarah Palin says and she’s the only person any conservative should listen to.

“The candidate would do well to give time and all due detail—the material is rich—on the activities of the Justice Department under President Obama, the most ideologically driven one in U.S. history. He would make the connection between the nature of this Justice Department and the president’s view of the American nation.”

Okay, why don’t you just say it – Barack Hussein Obama.  There.  He’s got a middle eastern world view!  They don’t teach that stuff at normal schools, after all, all the sane people know that these kinds of world views are spewed only in Madrassa’s in Kenya.  And what ideological justice department are you talking about?  The one that just laid charges out against John Edwards, despite the fact they have no case?  Perhaps it’s the justice department that wanted to try terror suspects in American jails?  That’s a pretty un-American thing to do, you know.  We shouldn’t be trying people under American law, that’s just un-American.

“That view was made clear early, in candidate Obama’s repeated reference to that happy time ahead when America would once again be worthy of respect—which we had presumably lost through our immoral policies—and when we would regain the trust of friends and allies around the world. That vision, still alive and well two and a half years into his administration, has been nowhere clearer than in Attorney General Eric Holder’s determined effort to give 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed the benefit of a trial in an American court, with full constitutional protections. Only with such a trial, Mr. Holder argued, could America prove to the world the fairness of its justice system.”

I’m still not entirely sure what we lose by trying him in an American court room.  Is this because of the all the waterboarding and stuff?  Because we can leave all that out and still have enough evidence to have him executed, if that’s what you’re worried about.

“The Republican candidate would have to make clear just how far removed from reality, how alien to the consciousness of most Americans, is this reflexive view of the nation as morally suspect, ever obliged to prove its respectability to a watching world. The attorney general still refuses to drop charges against two CIA employees accused of using enhanced interrogation techniques to extract information from terrorists—notwithstanding the recommendations of investigators looking into the case that the charges merited no prosecution.”

Okay, that’s kind of a trivial matter considering what Alberto Gonzalez did when he was A.G.  Remember when he sent the “deathbed trio” to get Ashcroft to sign off on things when he wasn’t entirely sure of their legality?

“The candidate will have to speak clearly on foreign policy—and begin, above all, by showing he actually has one. The near silence on the subject among Republicans consumed by domestic policy battles has been notable. Not till President Obama delivered his speech relegating Israel to pre-1967 borders did outraged Republicans come to roaring life—as Democrats, too, largely did—about a foreign policy issue.”

Yeah because Bush, with his “1949 borders” was way off base.

“The Republican candidate might bear in mind, for use on the campaign trail, the grand irony in the spectacle of candidate Obama holding forth on the stump about our friends and allies whom the United States had so alienated under George W. Bush—allies who would have to be won back. Fast forward to September 2009, when the Obama administration virtually overnight cancelled the planned missile defense system that was to be established in Poland and the Czech Republic—a shock to both allies but a gift to the Russians. The Kremlin was indeed grateful.”

Really?  We’re still at war with the Soviet Union?  “Back in the USSR” was a Beatles song not a doctrine…

“In March 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton let it be known that the United States no longer supported the British in the matter of the Falkland Islands, which have been British territory since 1833, and that “negotiations” with Argentina were in order. P.J. Crowley, then the State Department’s spokesman, expressed the new neutral stance of the U.S. by referring to the Falklands and then adding, with his usual ostentation, “or the Malvinas”—the Argentinian name—”depending on how you look at it.”

Okay, this is really ridiculous.  The Falklands?  Our sacred relationship with Britain that goes all the way back to 1941?

“The Republican who wins the presidency will have to have more than a command of the reasons the Obama administration must go. He will have to have a vision of this nation, and its place in the world, that voters recognize, that speaks to a sense of America they can see and take pride in. He can look at the film of the crowds, mostly of young people, who gathered at the White House to wave the flag of the United States when bin Laden was captured and killed. Faces of blacks, whites, Asians—of every ethnic group.”

He then should invite the American people to remember who it was that actually took Bin Laden out.  Barack Obama!

“At Louisiana State University not long after that, a student who planned to burn an American flag had to be rushed from the campus for his safety, much to his shock. Students by the hundreds had descended on him in rage, waving their own banners and roaring “USA! USA!” at the top of their lungs. It was a shout that spoke for more than they could say.”

Why wasn’t the right complaining when this happened after 9/11?

“After all the years of instruction, all the textbooks on U.S. rapacity and greed, all the college lectures on the evil and injustice the U.S. had supposedly visited on the world, something inside these young rose up to tell them they were Americans. That something lies in the hearts of Americans across the land and it is those hearts to which the candidate will have to speak.”

Republicans can’t win the under 65 demographic.  It’s just not mathematically possible.

Message Deleted

If you’re going to run for President, I’d recommend that you don’t take two weeks off after a huge media fail.  But, that’s just me.  Apparently, Newt’s different.  After having one of the worst media rollouts that I’ve ever seen, Gingrich decided that all of that failing was really a lot of work, so he did what any other American struggling in this economy would do: take an incredibly expensive vacation because the Tiffany’s bills and credit card debt weren’t doing enough to sell you to the middle class.

Gingrich aides have been quoted as saying that the former House speaker from Georgia’s decision to go on a cruise to the Mediterranean over the last two weeks was the final straw for them. Tyler said he understood that the timing looked bad but said the major cause of discord was over how to run the campaign.

“The expectation of what a candidate is was a little different, and the expectation of the time commitments,” he said. “I don’t want this to be misinterpreted. Newt is the single most energetic person I’ve ever met in my life. He will wear out staffers three years younger than he is.”

There are a lot of keywords here that, if Gingrich doesn’t drop out after Sunday’s speech, there’ll be a lot of talk about.  Let’s get to the crux of the matter.  “The expectation of what a candidate is…”  That’s never a good sign.  You don’t want to hear negative stuff said about your campaign and you really don’t want to hear negative things said about you as a person.  What’s even more telling is how vehemently his (now former) campaign aides are rushing to his defense.

“Newt is the single most energetic person I’ve met in my life.”  Yeah, I’ve said the same thing about my cats, that doesn’t mean they don’t sleep twenty hours a day, it just means that when a mouse gets loose in the house they really go after it.  My favorite defense is the line that comes next: “he will wear out staffers that are three years younger than he is.”  But, if they’re four years younger, he’ll be exhausted.  Seriously, it’s sad that these people worked in communications at all, let alone for a “Presidential candidate.”

There’s also been some talk about how Newt can’t be bothered to do any fundraising.  My guess is that’s why he’s going to the Republican Jewish Coalition (no ethnic slurs or anything here, just pointing out that he had to do something about his lack of policy cred.)  My favorite quote comes at the end, however:

“I have great admiration and deep respect for Newt,” Tyler said. “I hope he does well and I think he’d make a good president and I hope he finds, you know, the path forward and I hope he finds people who can get him there. I really do. I wish him the best.”

I hope he find, you know, a job or something because this whole wandering around and running for President thing isn’t really working out for him.  When you have to emphatically say something over and over again, it’s usually because it’s not true.  The one thing that bothers me about a potential derailment in the Newt camp is that after Gingrich the saddest candidate in the GOP field is kind of a tossup betweeen….well….all of them.  I’m going to put my money with the “Cainenator” as Politico is calling him because I don’t ever want to use the nickname “TPaw” in a sentence.  Although, given the previous sentence…yeah, you get the idea.

Even at it’s most basic, Americans oppose the Ryan budget

This is how the Washington Post put the question to voters: “ Republicans in the House of Representatives approved a budget plan that would change Medicare, the government health insurance program for the elderly. These changes would affect Americans currently under age 55. From what you’ve heard about it, do you support or oppose this new plan for Medicare?”  49 percent opposed it and only 32 percent supported it.  This was about the nicest way possible to sell the budget to voters and still and overwhelming majority oppose it.  The idea that Republicans are going to be rewarded for their “leadership” is pretty much dead in the water right now.