BooMan

I posted a link on FB, but wanted to put a few more key quotes from this

We've had thirty years of Reaganomics in this country and nothing is trickling down (if you need to read it in graph form, read it in graph form). In 2009, when taxes were at their lowest level since 1950, the right decided we are all Taxed Enough Already and formed the TEA Party. Then they complained about the deficit. It's so stupid you could cry.

Pretty succinct.
Also:

This was so predictable that Mayor Bloomberg literally predicted it just a day or two before the protests started:
“You have a lot of kids graduating college, can’t find jobs, that’s what happened in Cairo. That’s what happened in Madrid. You don’t want those kind of riots here,” Bloomberg said on his Friday morning radio show."

and finally:

Pretty soon he'll find out why rich people have gladly paid taxes for centuries. Yeah, they need the power grids and roads and the harbors and the airports. But they also need the police and power of the State to protect them from hordes of people who will only tolerate their wealth as long as it is shared in the form of jobs and an education and opportunity.

In the end, after all the arguments have died down, taxes keep the pitchforks at bay.

Follow the links & read the whole thing.

This Debt Thing Makes Me Wonder Why I Voted For Obama. Oh, Yeah...

...This

Also note, this isn’t just about contraception. As Igor Volsky noted, HHS is also requiring free coverage of human papillomavirus testing; HIV screening; breastfeeding support, supplies, and counseling; and domestic violence screening and counseling.

This is a very big deal. As Pema Levy recently explained, “It’s hard to stress just how big a deal these changes will be. Advocates have been fighting for universal contraceptive access for decades, and in a year when access to preventative care has been severely rolled back, it’s a rare and important win for women.”

And without the Affordable Care Act, this wouldn’t even be a possibility.

(emphasis added)
More detail

Other preventive services covered include:

—At least one “well-woman” preventive care visit annually.

—Screening for diabetes during pregnancy.

—Screening for the virus that causes cervical cancer for women 30 and older.

—Annual HIV counseling and screening for sexually active women.

—Screening for and counseling about domestic violence.

—Annual counseling on sexually transmitted infections for sexually active women.

—Support for breast feeding mothers, including the cost of renting pumps.

It Gets Better

This won't stop all the self appointed 'liberal base' hucksters from freaking out for maximum blog traffic. But for people who aren't dependent on continual outrage for a living, it's some good news in what appears to be a dark time.

There are two parts of the spending cuts in this package that really do matter. One is the cuts that will apply in Fiscal Year 2012. There probably won’t be very big; there will be $22 billion in spending cuts compared to the baseline for 2012, or about 0.15 percent of GDP. (That’s out of the $1 trillion in cuts that will be agreed upfront.)

A “Super Committee” will be charged with finding a further $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction, and we can expect that the cuts it recommends will again be backloaded. (Indeed, if the Super Committee deadlocks, we will go to an automatic “trigger” process which involves no cuts at all until FY 2013). Discretionary spending cuts that come out of the Super Committee process will again be subject to the whims of future Congresses. Any changes to mandatory spending that come out of the Super Committee are more likely to be sticky—that’s the second part of the cuts that matters—but I’ll believe we’re getting meaningful entitlement reform when I see it.

So, liberals who are upset that this deal is destimulative, or who expect it to tank the economy, are off base. Suzy Khimm cites a study finding that a 1 percent of GDP fiscal consolidation implies a 0.5 percent reduction in GDP after two years—or a reduction in the growth rate of 0.25 percent each year. That points to a hit to annual GDP growth of roughly 0.04 percentage points from the FY 12 changes in this plan—an effect that will be impossible to pick up amidst the noise.

Hit the link at the top & read the whole thing.

Everybody freakout.....NOW

If you don't read other liberal blogs, but you are following the debt ceiling "crisis", then you're probably thinking "the President has offered all kinds of stuff to the republicans, but those idiots can't take yes for an answer." If, on the other hand, you do read liberal blogs (or watch "liberal" TV show hosts) then you're probably thinking "OH NOES!!! The President is going to sell out everything we care about & get nothing in return!!! I can't believe that (unattributed reports say) that he's offered to raise the Medicare eligibility age to 67!!! Why can't he negotiate?? WHY?? WHY???"

Exhibit A: A lovely post entitled "Barack Obama more disappointing by the day" at Daily Kos (no link love from me).

I have also come to the conclusion that Barack Obama will never fight for anything. Compromise, do what ever to go along and get along, that is him but fight, he won't. We saw it through the health care battle, we saw him cave into extending the Bush Tax Cuts (which is part of the problem that put him in this dilemma) and now we are seeing him ready to under cut his own health care law just to make a deal.

Pathetic.

I agree. It's pathetic how willing some on "the left" are to condemn the President for getting as much as he can rather than holding out for his entire wishlist. Funny how he left out the part about "caving on the Bush tax cuts" bringing an unemployment insurance extension over the holidays & the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell. Must have slipped his beautiful pure mind.

I'll end with this from Lawrence O'Donnell - a man not known for his abundant praise of the President.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

An Example of Why Voodoo Econ & Education Cuts Go Hand in Hand

Added The Street Light to the blog roll. It's always worth reading & presents what some view as complex subjects in a straightforward manner. This post,which was linked by some other econ blogs is a must read:

Suppose that the country – let’s call it Austerityland – has a GDP of $100/year, and a budget deficit of $10/yr, or 10% of GDP. And suppose that the government decides it wants to get the deficit down to 5% of GDP. How can it get there?

No, the answer is not “cut spending by $5/yr”. Nor is it “raise taxes by $5/yr”. And last but not least, it is also not “enact a combination of tax increases and spending cuts that total $5/yr”. To see why, let’s do just a bit of arithmetic.

If you want to talk about the deficit & especially if you want to talk about capping it as a percentage of GDP, you should understand this formula:

GDP (Y) is a sum of Consumption (C), Investment (I), Government Spending (G) and Net Exports (X - M).
Y = C + I + G + (X − M)

Knowing that, this should be easy to follow:

Recall that GDP is the sum of spending on final goods and services by domestic consumers, domestic businesses, and the government, along with net exports:
GDP = C + I + G + (X – M) = Y. Recall as well that GDP is, for our purposes, the same thing as income (Y).

If G is reduced by $5 in Austerityland, the first thing that happens is that GDP falls by $5. But then a bunch of secondary effects kick in, including:
C falls, since individuals in the economy have seen their income drop by $5. This makes GDP fall even further. This is called the “multiplier effect”, and it means that the total fall in GDP is likely to be substantially greater than $5. (Empirical research seems to usually show that the government spending multiplier is in the neighborhood of 1.5, implying that the net fall in GDP will be around $7 or $8.)
If interest rates are positive, they will tend to fall as demand diminishes, which could boost spending by businesses. But if interest rates are already at zero (as they are effectively are in the US), they will not fall, and we get no boost to private investment.
Tax revenues fall as income falls. If the effective marginal tax rate on income is 25% and income falls by $4, for example, then tax collections will fall by $1.
So, what is the budget deficit in Austerityland after a $5 reduction in government spending? If we assume a relatively modest multiplier of 1.5, and a tax rate of 25%, then we get:

ΔG = -$5
ΔY = -$7.5
ΔT = -$1.875

And the new deficit is now $6.875, which is 7.4% of the new level of GDP. Wait, I thought we were trying to get the deficit down to 5% of GDP? What happened?

What happened is that we’ve missed our target, by quite a bit, due to the multiplier effect and the fall in tax revenues that resulted from the shrinking economy. In fact, just a bit of simple algebra allows us to figure out that government spending in Austerityland will have to be cut by about $9 in order to reach a budget deficit target of 5% of GDP. In other words, the government will have to cut spending by almost twice as much as it initially thought it would in order to reach its deficit target.

(When that happens, by the way, GDP will fall from $100 to around $86. Yes, that’s a 14% drop in output. But hey, at least we’ve hit our deficit reduction target!)

If you've made it this far, here's the punch line:

Somehow, this simple exercise in macroeconomic math seems beyond the reach of policymakers around the world.

Many Republicans (and some Democrats) in Washington continue to believe that they can close a $1 trillion deficit by simply cutting $1 trillion in spending, and are apparently hoping to use the debt ceiling vote to do exactly that.

The Cameron government in the UK embarked on an austerity program last year to try to reduce its budget deficit, and now mysteriously keeps missing its deficit reduction targets as the UK economy shrinks.

The Greek government was forced into enacting a number of austerity measures last year, and... surprise, surprise... is now missing its deficit targets.
...
But when basic Macro 101 both makes good theoretical sense and also fits what we actually observe, it's really time to start looking for your handy Occam's Razor.

When you cut education funding, you are actively working to ensure that less people can recognize when dangerous/disasterous ideas are presented as facts. If you saw a politician saying we need to balance the budget by drastically reducing the size of our economy, what would your reaction be?

Banana Republic of Texas

In the Houston Chronicle story on the new yacht tax cap moving through the legislature, I saw this gem:

"With those boat sales went fuel sales, retail sales, mooring fees, service fees, restaurant sales, and every other money-generating sale associated with a large boat purchase."

Anybody see the assumption here? Anybody? If not, then describe for me the relationship between where a yacht is purchased and where it moors. Yachts bought in Florida never visit non-Floridian ports? Who knew?

Here's another fun quote from the article:

Rep. Mike Villarreal, D-San Antonio, said the measure is "crazy" given the state's two year budget shortfall of $15 billion to $27 billion.
"We're helping yacht owners while we are cutting our public schools by 21 percent and nursing homes by 33 percent," Villarreal said. "We're helping yacht owners … while we're eliminating all scholarships for college freshmen in 2012-13."
The bill is ill-timed, Villarreal said, because no data have been collected to show how yacht sales in Florida have been affected by the bill passed last year.

Tax cuts for the rich as an economic growth driver has been discredited at the state & national level (see unemployment rate figures and Texas public school budgets). Once again, ideology trumps evidence for "conservatives".

More Odds & Ends

Reading a review of a new book that covers the debunked vaccine-autism "link". I came across this which points out why skipping vaccinations is dangerous not just for the unvaccinated child, but the other children in the community as well:

The book lingers on the case of Brie Romaguera, who was just over four weeks old when she died from pertussis (whooping cough) in 2003. Too young for the DPT vaccine, she would never have caught pertussis if more of the children in her Louisiana community had been vaccinated.

Great article on the deficit game (and why deficits are only important when there's a Democrat is in the White House):

By the end of the Clinton years, we had a handsome surplus. In came the second President Bush who, with Republicans in Congress, declared the surplus too big. It was one problem they worked very hard to solve. Two tax cuts and two wars later, we were plunged into deficits - again. And the economic downturn that started on Bush 43's watch made everything worse, cutting revenue and requiring more deficit spending to get the economy moving.

Where were the moderate deficit hawks in all this? They have a very bad habit. When conservatives blow up our fiscal position with their tax cuts, the deficit hawks are silent - or, at best, mumble a few words of mild reproach to have something on the record - and let the budget wreckage happen. Quite a few in their ranks (yes, including some Democrats) actually supported the Bush tax cuts.

But when it's the progressives' turn in power, the deficit hawks become ferocious. They denounce liberals if they do not move immediately to address the shortfall left by conservatives. Thus, conservatives get to govern as they wish. Liberals are labeled as irresponsible unless they abandon their own agenda and devote their every moment in power to cutting the deficit.

It's a game for chumps. The conservatives play it brilliantly. By winning their tax cuts and slashing government revenue, they constrain what liberals can do whenever they get back into power.

Read the whole thing.

Odds & Ends

This is pretty much what I've been saying. Certainly explains why the right wing hates the census so much:

Read the census data that have been coming out over the past couple weeks and you're compelled to a stark conclusion: Either the Republican Party changes totally, or it has a rendezvous with extinction.

What the census shows is that America's racial minorities, aggregated together, are on track to become its majority. The Republican Party's response to this epochal demographic change has been to do everything in its power to keep America (particularly its electorate) as white as can be. Republicans have obstructed minorities from voting; required Latinos to present papers if the police ask for them; opposed the Dream Act, which would have conferred citizenship on young immigrants who served in our armed forces or went to college; and called for denying the constitutional right to citizenship to American-born children of undocumented immigrants.

If the Republicans have a long-term strategic plan, it seems to derive from King Canute, who commanded the tide to stop.

Related:

In the first month of the new legislative season, they have introduced a dizzying number of measures on hot-button issues in statehouses around the country as part of what amounts to a full-throttle mission to repeal, restrict and repress.

It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.

As Reuters pointed out this week, in the midterms, “Republicans gained nearly 700 state legislative seats and now have their largest numbers since the Great Depression, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.”

...

As MSNBC and Telemundo reported recently, at least 15 state legislatures are considering Arizona-style immigration legislation. If passed, four of the five states with the largest Hispanic populations — California, Texas, Florida and Arizona — would also be the most inhospitable to them.

Also related:

Tucson — The leader of an anti-illegal-immigrant group was convicted Monday in a home invasion robbery that left a 9-year-old girl and her father dead in what prosecutors said was an attempt to steal drug money to fund the group's operations.

A Tucson jury found Shawna Forde, 42, guilty of murder in the May 2009 killings of Raul Flores, 29, and his daughter Brisenia at their home in Arivaca, a desert community 10 miles north of Mexico.

See, civilian trials of terrorists work just fine.

Meanwhile, back in Texas:

The Senate measure generally would restrict college financial aid to students already receiving it, just like the House. The Senate version holds out hope for some additional financial aid funding.

The Senate draft would put more money into public education than the House but still fall $9.3 billion short of current school funding formulas that pay for items, such as projected student enrollment growth and projected decreases in school district property values. It would include some funding for other education programs slashed in the House draft.
...
The measure would not cover the number of people expected to enroll in Medicaid through the next two years, and it would slash Medicaid reimbursement rates to health care providers.

The bill filed by Ogden would cut public safety and criminal justice, including community supervision and parole programs, though less than the House proposal.

But at least Slick Rick has his priorities right.

"This is business as usual for Rick Perry instead of focusing on the real emergency, our state's budget crisis, he is trying to distract us with divisive partisan issues," explained Kirsten Gray, communication director for the Texas Democratic Party. "It is obvious that Rick Perry is only concerned with becoming a GOP celebrity than with working for every day Texans."

Some in attendance at Saturday's rally agree with Gray like San Francisco transplant Peace Washington Costanzo, who dressed up as the Statue of Liberty and stood on the steps of the Capitol.

"I don't understand why we have to waste time with such issues as this," said Costanzo. "There are so many more pressing issues, closing schools."

Costanzo said she feels a woman has a right to choose what happens medically with her body also told KXAN she loves life.

Bills similar to this one have been introduced in the past by Senator Dan Patrick.

What makes this bill different is that Perry has now deemed it emergency legislation meaning the bill must be dealt with by state legislators in the first 60 days of the new session.

I wonder who gets to pay for the sonograms?

No, Both Sides Don't Do It.

This:

In fact, there is no balance—none whatsoever. Only one side has made the rhetoric of armed revolt against an oppressive tyranny the guiding spirit of its grassroots movement and its midterm campaign. Only one side routinely invokes the Second Amendment as a form of swagger and intimidation, not-so-coyly conflating rights with threats. Only one side’s activists bring guns to democratic political gatherings. Only one side has a popular national TV host who uses his platform to indoctrinate viewers in the conviction that the President is an alien, totalitarian menace to the country. Only one side fills the AM waves with rage and incendiary falsehoods. Only one side has an iconic leader, with a devoted grassroots following, who can’t stop using violent imagery and dividing her countrymen into us and them, real and fake. Any sentient American knows which side that is; to argue otherwise is disingenuous.

Yeah, pretty much.

As predictable as night following day

Timeline of violent rhetoric & action over the last 2+ years. Tell me again how "both sides do it"?

Read the whole list if your stomach can take it. They know exactly what they're doing. That Pilate brand hand soap won't work any better now than it did 2000 years ago.

More Quick Hits

Thanks again Governor Perry!!

Yet Mr. Perry wasn’t lying about those “tough conservative decisions”: Texas has indeed taken a hard, you might say brutal, line toward its most vulnerable citizens. Among the states, Texas ranks near the bottom in education spending per pupil, while leading the nation in the percentage of residents without health insurance. It’s hard to imagine what will happen if the state tries to eliminate its huge deficit purely through further cuts.

Quick Hits

Thanks Governor Perry!

So why haven't we heard more about Texas, one of the most important economy's in America? Well, it's because it doesn't fit the script. It's a pro-business, lean-spending, no-union state. You can't fit it into a nice storyline, so it's ignored.
But if you want to make comparisons between US states and ailing European countries, think of Texas as being like America's Ireland. Ireland was once praised as a model for economic growth: conservatives loved it for its pro-business, anti-tax, low-spending strategy, and hailed it as the way forward for all of Europe. Then it blew up.