Pathetic Republicans

The Republicans are just playing a game of brinkmanship for no particular purpose except for politics.  Is there any other reason that they would refuse to extend the payroll tax reduction for two months, let alone a year?  And why are they not agreeable to extend unemployment benefits when we still have about 9% of the workforce without work?

I am really surprised that they will not approve the extension of the payroll tax exemption as it does apply to the top 1%.  Don’t they think that this continued reduction would help that elite group continue to provide all of the job creation that they have been providing over these last months?  Hasn’t the unemployment rate just tumbled from being at 10%?  If it continues for just a few more months perhaps we would have a jobs surplus!

Or perhaps the Republicans are not for the reduction because it does apply to everyone.  If it just is extended for the top 1%, then they will gleefully pass it?

Unemployment insurance benefits.  The extension is necessary because we have so many folks out of work and there is no easy solution to putting them back to work.  The problem is not that this considerable part of the work force is lazy or is not looking for work.  It is because, in large part, because manufacturing jobs have left this country.  It is also because a different type of education and training is needed for the jobs that are here. 

We need a national effort to meet the educational needs of all Americans in light of what the job market is and will be.  We need to be able to compete in the world market and not try to put up trade barriers all over.  We need national leadership in this area rather than a party than only seems to say that the answer to all of our problems is to cut spending.  Ridiculous!!!

More food for thought.  Please think and do something to help.  Call, email, and write your elected officials. Tell them you want plans and efforts that will start addressing our problems, not actions that just benefit their re-election funds and the pockets of the top 1%.

Take care.   

A Robert Reich Column

The following is a recent Robert Reich column. Please read it as food for thought.

The top 1% do run this country and that must change.

The Defining Issue: Not Government's Size, But Who It's For

The defining political issue of 2012 won't be the government's size. It will be who government is for.

Americans have never much liked government. After all, the nation was conceived in a revolution against government.  But the surge of cynicism now engulfing America isn't about government's size. It's the growing perception that government isn't working for average people. It's for big business, Wall Street, and the very rich instead.

In a recent Pew Foundation poll, 77 percent of respondents said too much power is in the hands of a few rich people and corporations.  That's understandable. To take a few examples:

-- Wall Street got bailed out but homeowners caught in the fierce downdraft caused by the Street's excesses have got almost nothing.

-- Big agribusiness continues to rake in hundreds of billions in price supports and ethanol subsidies. Big pharma gets extended patent protection that drives up everyone's drug prices. Big oil gets its own federal subsidy. But small businesses on the Main Streets of America are barely making it.

-- American Airlines uses bankruptcy to ward off debtors and renegotiate labor contracts. Donald Trump's businesses go bankrupt without impinging on Trump's own personal fortune. But the law won't allow you to use personal bankruptcy to renegotiate your home mortgage.

-- If you run a giant bank that defrauds millions of small investors of their life savings, the bank might pay a small fine but you won't go to prison. Not a single top Wall Street executive has been prosecuted for Wall Street's mega-fraud. But if you sell an ounce of marijuana you could be put away for a long time.

Not a day goes by without Republicans decrying the budget deficit. But the biggest single reason for the yawning deficit is big money's corruption of Washington. And it's not just corporate welfare.

One of the deficit's biggest drivers -- Medicare -- would be lower if Medicare could use its bargaining leverage to get drug companies to reduce their prices. Why hasn't it happened? Big Pharma won't allow it.

Medicare's administrative costs are only 3 percent, far below the 10 percent average administrative costs of private insurers. So why not tame rising healthcare costs for all Americans by allowing any family to opt in? That was the idea behind the "public option." Health insurers stopped it in its tracks.

The other big budgetary expense is national defense. America spends more on our military than do China, Russia, Britain, France, Japan, and Germany combined. The basic defense budget (the portion unrelated to the costs of fighting wars) keeps growing, now about 25 percent higher than it was a decade ago, adjusted for inflation.  That is because defense contractors have cultivated sponsors on Capitol Hill and located their plants and facilities in politically important congressional districts.

So we keep spending billions on Cold War weapons systems like nuclear attack submarines, aircraft carriers, and manned combat fighters that pump up the bottom lines of Bechtel, Martin-Marietta, and their ilk, but have nothing to do with 21st-century combat.

Declining tax receipts are also driving the deficit. That's partly because most Americans have less income to tax these days.  Yet the richest Americans are taking home a bigger share of total income than at any time since the 1920s. Their tax payments are down because the Bush tax cuts reduced their top rates to the lowest level in more than half a century, and cut capital gains taxes to 15 percent.

Congress hasn't even closed a loophole that allows mutual-fund and private-equity managers to treat their incomes as capital gains.  So the 400 richest Americans, whose total wealth exceeds the combined wealth of the bottom 150 million Americans put together, pay an average of 17 percent of their income in taxes. That's lower than the tax rates of most day laborers and child-care workers.

Meanwhile, Social Security payroll taxes continue to climb as a share of total tax revenues. Yet the payroll tax is regressive, applying only to yearly income under $106,800.

And the share of revenues coming from corporations has been dropping. The biggest, like GE, find ways to pay no federal taxes at all. Many shelter their income abroad, and every few years Congress grants them a tax amnesty to bring the money home.

Get it? "Big government" isn't the problem. The problem is big money is taking over government.

Government is doing less of the things most of us want it to do -- providing good public schools and affordable access to college, improving our roads and bridges and water systems, and maintaining safety nets to catch average people who fall -- and more of the things big corporations, Wall Street, and the wealthy want it to do.

Some conservatives argue we wouldn't have to worry about big money taking over government if we had a smaller government to begin with.  Here's what Congressman Paul Ryan told me Sunday morning when we were debating all this on ABC's This Week:

If the power and money are going to be here in Washington, that's where the influence is going to go ... that's where the powerful are going to go to influence it.

Ryan has it upside down. A smaller government that's still dominated by money would continue to do the bidding of Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry, oil companies, big agribusiness, big insurance, military contractors, and rich individuals.

It just wouldn't do anything else.

If we want to get our democracy back we've got to get big money out of politics.
We need real campaign finance reform.  And a constitutional amendment reversing the Supreme Court's bizarre rulings that under the First Amendment money is speech and corporations are permitted to spend without limit and without accountability.

These are facts. We must educate ourselves and work for change to make our government responsible for its actions and committed to change for the better, for all of the people, not just the top 1%.

Take care.

A Pathetic Congress

Our Congress continues to play games like immature children instead of acting like leaders.  They look to blame the other party and do whatever they can to set themselves up for re-election, whether it is good for our nation or not.


A survey by the Pew Research Institute from December 5 states that  "public discontent with Congress has reached record levels, and the implications for incumbents in next year's elections could be stark. The number who say their own member should be replaced matches the all-time high recorded in 2010, when 58 members of Congress lost reelection bids. Republicans are taking more blame than the Democrats for a do-nothing Congress."


The following figures indicate the percentage of Americans unhappy with Congress's performance and thinking that they should be replaced at the next election.

2011 - 67%
2010 -  53%
2008 -  49%
2006 -  49%

If you are dissatisfied, do something. Let your representative know that you are unhappy and that you will support an opposing candidate next fall.

How many more issues can this Congress play games with? Now it is the reinstatement of the payroll tax. The nation's economy and its people can not handle such an increase at this time.

The Congress ties extraneous issues to the major issue, like the shale oil pipe line. Vote on the issue and be responsible for your own vote.

More later.

Take care.

This is a real mess we've got ourselves into!

Dear Readers,

I have copied a recent article from the Economist below because I feel that it gives an excellent assessment of the current status of our economic crisis.  It is from the November 26 edition and I have not changed the content in any way.  However, I have added italics and bold to emphasize the parts that I think are particularly important, and I have also added my own commentary after some paragraphs and that is in a different font and in parenthesis to distinguish it as my input, not from the Economist.  Furthermore, I also added my own name for the committee known as the supercommittee.  I believe that a more appropriate name is the shameless committee.  They really should be ashamed to show their faces in public because they did nothing, nothing at all, except to politicize and politic.

The supercommittee fails

A downgrade for Congress

By failing to agree on measures to limit the deficit, America’s politicians have failed their country

Nov 26th 2011 | from the print edition

          

IT WAS not a very ambitious target.  All that the congressional “supercommittee” was required to do was to figure out a list of measures that would reduce America’s budget deficits by $1.2 trillion over the next ten years.  That sounds a lot, until you realise it is only 0.6% of GDP, not even a quarter of the $5 trillion or so that is really needed to right the books in Washington, and less than 3% of the $44 trillion that the federal government is expected to spend over that period.

To reach a goal that a business cost-cutter would regard as desultory, the bipartisan committee of 12 senators and congressmen was accorded exceptional powers.  Its work was to be subject to a simple up-or-down vote, with no possibility of amendment; and the Senate would not be able to use its power to filibuster.  Yet on November 21st, after three months of deliberation, the team was forced to admit that it had failed.

(It appears that neither party wanted the “shameless” committee to succeed.  They did not appoint people who would honestly seek a compromise, but those who would stick to their ideological guns due the detriment of the country.  These politicians acted in what their tiny minds seemed to think was in the best interest of their personal re-elections.)

On paper this failure might not seem to matter very much.  Supposedly, spending cuts equivalent to the same $1.2 trillion figure will now automatically be triggered, starting in 2013, with $600 billion hacked out of the defence budget and the other $600 billion coming from other non-mandatory categories of spending, including education, housing and environmental protection.  But in reality the failure is deeply alarming, for several reasons.

First, it shows that Republicans and Democrats, even when offered the best possible conditions for dealmaking, can’t do it.  The Democrats refused to consider structural reforms to the big entitlement programmes (Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security).  The Republicans refused to countenance anything that would see tax rates rise, even though no sensible analyst believes that the deficit (running at 8.5% this year) can be closed to a sustainable level by spending cuts alone, and even though ruling out any tax rises, even for people making more than $250,000 a year, is difficult to justify.  

(The Economist has been saying this for months:  It is not rational to create a plan to address the deficit without increasing taxes.  The Democrats have to give on spending cuts, which are a necessary evil now, and there has been some indication that they are willing to move in this direction.  However, the Republicans will not move a penny off of their stand of no tax increases.  This is unconscionable!)

Though a few interesting proposals were floated, suggesting that the Republicans were not totally immune to getting rid of loopholes (as long as any rate increases for the rich were off the table), they never came close to enjoying majority support.  Until the political mood changes dramatically, it is impossible to see Congress tackling the deficit successfully—a process which will require reductions (through a combination of revenue increases and spending cuts) to the tune of four times what the supercommittee (shameless committee)  has just failed to deliver.

(This is outrageous.  We have millions of people out of works, tens of thousands of houses under water, rich folks getting richer, and the Congress can not even take one step to develop a plan to address these issues.)

Second, the past few months have confirmed even more strongly the near-irrelevance of the president.  A Ronald Reagan or a Bill Clinton would have been much more effectively engaged in twisting arms and, where necessary, dispensing favours.  Barack Obama remained damagingly aloof throughout the supercommittee’s (shameless committee’s) fruitless deliberations.  This should not have been surprising, given his lamentable failure a year ago to endorse the effective and brave conclusions of the Bowles-Simpson deficit commission that he personally appointed.  But it does not bode well for the future—assuming that he has one, and is not turfed out of office in a year’s time.

(This is deeply disappointing to me, an Obama supporter.)

Third, this week’s collapse sets up a nasty fiscal shock, to be administered in just five weeks’ time.  At the end of this year a temporary cut in the payroll tax is due to expire; so, too, are the extended unemployment benefits which are all that stand between millions of Americans and destitution.  Folding an extension of these measures into the supercommittee (shameless committee) negotiation was the best hope of preventing what could amount to around at least 2% of fiscal tightening next year.  The chances of avoiding that tightening now look grimmer.

Finally, it is now clear that an almighty budget row will have to take place towards the end of next year, in the run-up to and immediately after the presidential election on November 6th. Congress will be trying to undo the supposedly automatic budget cuts it agreed to only in order to make it impossible for the supercommittee (shameless committee) to fail: Mr Obama has said he will veto any such attempt.  At the same time, the Bush-era tax cuts are set to expire, threatening a sharp tax rise for all income-tax payers, rich and middle-class alike, unless some sort of deal can be done. Expect more destabilising brinkmanship, just like the sort that attended the debt-ceiling crisis in the summer.

(This we can be sure of: the Congress will take us to the brink again, playing politics with everything they can.  And even at the brink, there will be nothing but a bandaid used, when a complete diagnosis and extensive plan of treatment is needed to heal the patient.  Who has any confidence in our Congress?  None of them knows the definition of statesperson, let alone acts like one.)

The not-so-bright side

There is, however, a last consideration.  One reason why the supercommittee (shameless committee) failed is that it felt no real sense of urgency.  America is not Italy: this week, its ten-year government bonds were trading at a yield of well below 2%, the lowest levels for over half a century; as the euro moves towards disintegration, the attractions of Treasury bonds will only increase.  But even that silver lining has a cloud: the corollary of this observation is that it will probably take a genuine, terrifying, American bond crisis to force the politicians to act.

(What type of crisis will prompt action?  The Congress is worsening our economic problems by not taking action.  No longer will the problems be blamed on the crash of the housing market and the self-interested (immoral if not illegal) actions of our financial community (the now fatter cats!) but on our Congressional members, who seem to have only the talent to run for re-election and all the personal perks that come with that. 

The Outing of Wall Street will become the Outing of Congress.  At this rate, not one person deserves to be re-elected.  ) 

We must all do something in our own way to let the Congress know that they are shirking their responsibility and we are not happy with them.

Take care.

A Verse for Today

I vow to offer joy to one person in the morning

And to relieve the grief of one person in the afternoon. 

I vow to live simply and sanely, 

Content with a few possessions. 

I vow to keep my body healthy.  

I vow to let go of all worries and anxieties  

In order to be light and free.     

Plum Village, A Verse from Plum Village's, Thich Nhat Hanh's Buddhist community in France, chanting book


Take care.

Winter in Chicago

It is December 1, and the winter season is anticipated in Chicago.  We expect the worse and sometimes are pleasantly surprised.  The winters have been relatively mild for several years, except for the 22 inch snow we had last year that snarled traffic and literally closed the City for a day.  That was the “snow day” that school children and most other folks rejoice over.  That also means a lot of “shoveling out” – your car, the sidewalk, etc.  Dogs are overjoyed, but sometimes little dogs aren’t.  They just sink in. 

Our residential street was impassable for two days since the city street crews had higher priorities.  Little kids had snow mountains to slide down, right there in the middle of the street.  No moms warned about running into the street on the snow day!

Just as residents of Las Vegas and Phoenix say when the mercury hits 110 degrees F. in the summer, “It’s not bad, it’s just a dry heat”, we say, “Hey, this isn’t too much snow, it’ll be gone in a month or so.  We are flexible here, and enjoy all four seasons, such as they are in Chicago.

Speaking about Mother Nature, I can not continue without mentioning the Lake.  At this time of year no one is interested in a dip in the water (except the Polar Bear Club on January 1) and the Lake exhibits its majesty and might.  On Tuesday the City closed the bike/running path for the second time this fall because the waves were crashing over it.  Didn’t want anyone washed away.  That day I was driving to work and the Lake was making its presence known to all.  Besides the angry water, there were low hanging clouds racing along, far below the high ceiling of storm clouds.  What made it a little different was that every once in awhile up there was a small break that went all the way up to the bright blue sky above.  Very impressive.

Enjoy your winter weather, and don’t forget to pay heed to Mother Nature.

Take care.