Eideard

The U.S. national debt will swell further under tax-cut plans floated by three of the top four Republican presidential candidates, according to an independent analysis of their fiscal policy proposals released on Thursday.

Plans put forth by Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum would pile up the largest increases in debt, while Mitt Romney’s initial plan, since revised with bigger proposed tax cuts, would increase it by a smaller amount over the next decade.

Only Ron Paul’s plan to drastically shrink government and cut taxes would produce a reduction in debt levels through 2021…He just destroys federal agencies.

Romney’s new tax plan, which matches the 28 percent top rate proposed by Santorum, promises to be revenue neutral, but does not offer any specifics on how to make up for lost revenues…

“Are they making proposals that risk making the debt problem worse?” said Alice Rivlin, a former head of the Congressional Budget Office and Federal Reserve vice chairman who now serves on the group’s board. “On that score, all of these candidates fail. They all reduce the revenue that is available to the government over time…”

The group said the middle path for Gingrich would add $7 trillion to the national debt by 2021 versus the baseline, largely because he has proposed deep tax cuts for individuals and corporations, including an alternative 15 percent “flat tax.”

This would boost debt as a share of the overall economy to 114 percent in 2021 from the current level of about 70 percent, compared with an anticipated 2021 baseline level of 85 percent.

The middle scenario for Santorum’s plan would add $4.5 trillion to the debt, also due to tax cuts…The debt-to-gross domestic product ratio would rise to 104 percent under Santorum’s plan…

The middle scenario for Paul was the only one to reduce debt below the baseline – by $2.2 trillion – largely due to spending cuts on healthcare programs and Social Security and elimination of five federal departments and many State Department programs. This would cut debt to 76 percent of GDP by 2021. And Ron Paul doesn’t need Social Security or healthcare or foreign policy to live in his accustomed style.

In other words – besides being liars – the Republican candidates don’t know diddly-squat about economics. And hope you never learn.

The bishop knows where to send the check…

The Democratic-led Senate is expected to reject as early as Thursday a largely symbolic Republican challenge to a White House rule guaranteeing free birth control for women who work for religiously affiliated employers.

Even Senate defeat of the legislation would allow Republican lawmakers to take a stand in a rancorous election year debate over a policy that is vehemently opposed by social conservatives and Roman Catholic bishops…

The Department of Health and Human Services announced in January that employers including those with religious affiliations — such as universities, charities and hospitals — would have to provide free birth control coverage for women enrolled in their health plans. Church employees are exempt from the rule…

The birth control coverage requirement infuriated Catholic leaders…who think they have a right to overrule civil law in America…

Roy Blunt’s bill would exempt employers from providing health benefits that conflict with “beliefs and moral convictions.” Anyone standing in line to watch Congress explain their “beliefs and moral conviction”?

Democrats including California Senator Barbara Boxer denounced the measure as too broad, saying it could allow potentially any employer to deny additional types of health insurance coverage on moral grounds.

It’s only been about a day since the last time I said this: I realize Christianity may hold the copyright on hypocrisy; but, today’s Republicans – with appropriate aid from the Kool Aid Party – have perfected the process.

Now we get to witness temporary nutball unity between the 14th Century and the 19th Century in an attempt to turn this nation into a theocracy.

This post is a year old. Republicans haven’t gotten better. Their goals have retreated further into darkness and hatred.

Here is a list of misogynist bills introduced by Republicans in the past two weeks showing what they want for women.

1) Rape: Republicans are actually trying to redefine rape to exclude drugging a women and raping her, or getting her drunk and raping her. After a major backlash, they promised to stop. But they haven’t the language is still out there.

2) More Rape. A state legislator in Georgia wants to change the legal term for victims of rape, stalking, and domestic violence to “accuser.” But victims of other crimes, like robbery, would remain “victims.” Apparently in Georgia if a women is raped, she isn’t really – is just an annoying accuser. Which means the rapist is not really a criminal.

3) Murder. In South Dakota, Republicans proposed a bill that could make it legal to murder anyone who injures or threatens a fetus, including a doctor who provides abortion care and the mother. He denies it has anything to do with abortion so I guess it is aimed at makingit OK for a husband or boyfriend to kill his partner if he thinks she might injure the fetus- like in a car accident, or he just doesn’t like her anymore.

4) Starvation. Republicans want to cut nearly a billion dollars of food and other aid to low-income pregnant women, mothers, babies, and kids. But payments to corporations to not grow food to keep prices up is still in the budget.

5) Death. In Congress, Republicans have proposed a bill that would let hospitals allow a woman to die rather than perform an abortion necessary to save her life (so she and fetus die.)

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Watching the Republican Party struggling to agree on a presidential candidate, one wonders whether the G.O.P. shouldn’t just sit this election out — just give 2012 a pass…

…The party has let itself become the captive of conflicting ideological bases: anti-abortion advocates, anti-immigration activists, social conservatives worried about the sanctity of marriage, libertarians who want to shrink government, and anti-tax advocates who want to drown government in a bathtub.

Sorry, but you can’t address the great challenges America faces today with that incoherent mix of hardened positions. I’ve argued that maybe we need a third party to break open our political system. But that’s a long shot. What we definitely and urgently need is a second party — a coherent Republican opposition that is offering constructive conservative proposals on the key issues and is ready for strategic compromises to advance its interests and those of the country.

Without that, the best of the Democrats — who have been willing to compromise — have no partners and the worst have a free pass for their own magical thinking. Since such a transformed Republican Party is highly unlikely, maybe the best thing would be for it to get crushed in this election and forced into a fundamental rethink…

Because when I look at America’s three greatest challenges today, I don’t see the Republican candidates offering realistic answers to any of them.

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Just leave your check in the plate by the door!
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

The statement: The Social Security payroll tax cut that President Barack Obama is seeking to extend “will cost the Social Security trust fund another $112 billion, and we don’t have enough money this year in the Social Security trust fund to put out those checks — which means we have to go to the general Treasury to get the money.” — Republican presidential candidate Rep. Michele Bachmann, at Saturday night’s ABC News debate in Iowa. She added that the tax cut “blew a hole” in the trust fund.

The facts: The Obama administration says the Social Security payroll tax cut is projected to cost about $112 billion in the coming year. The administration says the money that would have gone to the trust fund would be made up from general revenues, with “no effect on individuals’ current or future Social Security benefits.”

Social Security paid out $712 billion in benefits and took in $663 billion in taxes in 2010, leaving it with a revenue shortfall of $49 billion. That’s according to figures released in August by the system’s trustees. But interest on its trust fund added another $117 billion, bringing the trust fund’s total balance to $2.6 trillion.

Under current projections, the trust fund — created in the 1980s to prepare for the retirement of the Baby Boom generation — will run out in 2036, the trustees reported in May. At that point, the remaining income will pay about 77% of scheduled benefits.

The verdict: Misleading. Bachmann is correct in saying the payroll tax cut will require a transfer from the Treasury to replace the money that would have otherwise gone to the Social Security trust fund. But she’s mistaken when she says there’s not enough money in the trust fund to cover current benefits.

This is the kind of crap repeated time and again by the same creeps who would privatize social security and turn it over to the benevolent hands of investment bankers and insurance companies who all perform such a lovely job of taking care of ordinary Americans. They have a popularity rating almost as dismal as lawyers, politicians in general and, of course, Congress.

As usual, it’s just the pimps for a percentage of the wealthiest campaign contributors who oppose a measure which would carry the SSA fund into the 22nd Century. By which time, we might even have a sufficient number of bright people in government to come up further solutions. At the moment, the crowd we have is sufficient – if they behave with a modicum of ethics and intelligence.

Support for the Tea Party — and with it, the Republican Party — has fallen sharply even in places considered Tea Party strongholds, according to a new survey.

In Congressional districts represented by Tea Party lawmakers, the number of people saying they disagree with the Tea Party has risen sharply over the year since the movement powered a Republican sweep in midterm elections, so that almost as many people disagree with the Tea Party as agree with it, according to the poll by the Pew Research Center.

Support for the Republican Party has fallen more sharply in those places than it has in the country as a whole. In the 60 districts represented in Congress by a member of the House Tea Party Caucus, Republicans are viewed about as negatively as Democrats.

The survey suggests that the Tea Party may be dragging down the Republican Party heading into a presidential election year, even as it ushered in a new Republican majority in the House of Representatives just a year ago.

Which shouldn’t surprise anyone. Folks outside the ranks of True Believers looked at who bought and paid for the “movement” and recognized them for what they are – and always have been. The moneybags for rightwing extremists and reactionaries who found a home in the Republican Party decades ago.

Many of those inside the Tea Party were either deluded by their own ignorance – or the agitprop they were fed. Many of those, especially seniors, have realized how truly dumb it would for them to be working to scuttle Social Security or Medicare. How foolish it would be to continue the downward spiral of American education – especially for their own kids and grandkids.

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As much space as they deserve
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

All of the post-mortems on the CNBC Republican debate focused on the sad, but hilarious, senior moment Gov. Rick Perry suffered when he couldn’t remember the third federal agency he wants to eliminate.

…But what also stood out as perplexing — and stunning — was how all of the candidates were unwilling to hold Wall Street accountable for the deplorable economic condition the nation continues to find itself in.

When the housing crisis was raised, Mitt Romney and most of the others chose to unleash their rage on the consumers and the financial reform bill that was passed after the crisis hit, instead of on the shady practices of Wall Street…

The favorite GOP bogeyman is Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-backed housing lenders. Yet anyone with half a brain knows that those institutions brought on Democrats and Republicans on their payroll in order to ensure that Congress would let them continue practices as usual.

During the debate, Newt Gingrich was asked about the $300,000 he was paid by Freddie Mac in 2006, which he said was for “advice.” He was quick to say he did no lobbying on behalf of Freddie Mac, but we all know that his presence, along with other former politicians and political strategists from both parties, greatly helped the company prevent congressional scrutiny…

What Gingrich and the other candidates absolutely refused to do was tell the public that one of the biggest proponents of an aggressive home ownership plan in America was President George W. Bush…

It is beyond clear that we got into this huge mess because we were too lax in holding banks accountable. Getting rid of the Glass-Steagall Act, thus allowing commercial banks and investment banks to merge, was a disaster.

Not a single GOP candidate said we should put the provision separating those activities back in place…

In no way can I remove the role the consumer played in the economic debacle, but for the GOP candidates to act like we had too many regulations, and that’s why Wall Street bankers lost their minds, is deplorable…

How in the world can we trust that any of these candidates will care about the Average Joe, Jane, Jose, Jimmy, Janice or Jamila if they are elected president, when they won’t even hold Wall Street accountable in a debate?

Roland Martin pretending that we’re just discovering that the Republican Party is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the US Chamber of Commerce is a bit disingenuous.

Anyone hear a moderator ask if anyone understands evolution, BTW?

Last month President Obama finally unveiled a serious economic stimulus plan — far short of what I’d like to see, but a step in the right direction. Republicans, predictably, have blocked it. But the new plan, combined with the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, seems to have shifted the national conversation. We are, suddenly, focused on what we should have been talking about all along: jobs.

So what is the G.O.P. jobs plan? The answer, in large part, is to allow more pollution. So what you need to know is that weakening environmental regulations would do little to create jobs and would make us both poorer and sicker…

Do you really need that explained to you? Are you as delusional as the Republican Party?

The important thing to understand is that the case for pollution control isn’t based on some kind of aesthetic distaste for industrial society. Pollution does real, measurable damage, especially to human health.

And policy makers should take that damage into account. We need more politicians like the courageous governor who supported environmental controls on a coal-fired power plant, despite warnings that the plant might be closed, because “I will not create jobs or hold jobs that kill people.”

Actually, that was Mitt Romney, back in 2003 — the same politician who now demands that we use more coal.

How big are these damages? A new study by researchers at Yale and Middlebury College brings together data from a variety of sources to put a dollar value on the environmental damage various industries inflict. The estimates are far from comprehensive, since they only consider air pollution…

For it turns out that there are a number of industries inflicting environmental damage that’s worth more than the sum of the wages they pay and the profits they earn — which means, in effect, that they destroy value rather than create it. High on the list, by the way, is coal-fired electricity generation, which the Mitt Romney-that-was used to stand up to.

As the study’s authors say, finding that an industry inflicts large environmental damage compared with its apparent economic return doesn’t necessarily mean that the industry should be shut down. What it means, instead, is that “the regulated levels of emissions from the industry are too high.” That is, environmental regulations aren’t strict enough.

Republicans ignore studies like that, the overwhelming body of industrial environment studies, BTW. Why start letting facts get in the way of profits for their largest contributors? Mining, power production industries are among the largest contributors to congressional Republicans. Simple-minded politicians who live the country-club life.

Their families, their kids are OK, Jack. The rest of us can go scramble for clean air and clean water whether we can afford it or not. There hasn’t been a Republican in office that I can recall fighting against pollution since that era before Ronald Reagan. Someone like that certainly wouldn’t be supported by today’s RNC or the KoolAid Party.

Obama speaking at fire station in Virginia
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

Maybe as early as Thursday night, the Senate will take its first vote on one bite-size piece of President Obama’s jobs bill, a $35 billion measure to fund the hiring of 400,000 teachers and a smaller number of cops and firefighters. It will fail. As usual not a single Republican will vote for it, and since a majority in the Senate is now not 51 but 60 because the Republicans filibuster nearly everything, it will fall well short of passage…

The basic facts are these. The public supports this bill. Senate Democratic sources say that of all the individual pieces of the larger jobs bill, this one polled the best by far. Better than payroll tax cuts. That’s why they decided to go with it first. The funding mechanism is also highly popular. It is a 0.5 percent (don’t miss that decimal point!) surtax on dollars earned above $1 million—so, for example, a person whose salary is $1.2 million would pay the extra 0.5 percent only on those dollars above $1 million, for a whopping tax increase of $1,000. I have not seen polling on this specific amount of tax, but surveys constantly show that the generic “millionaire’s tax” wins broad support. Just yesterday, National Journal put it at 68 percent, including 90 percent of Democrats and 71 percent of independents…

In an earlier time, in normal times, when legislators used to behave the way legislators are supposed to behave, the minority’s leaders would have brought the price tag down, made the majority and the White House agree to something they wanted—peeling back one of those EPA regulations the Republicans hate—and we’d have had a deal…the minority would have actually paid a bit of attention to those polls showing the American people backed this.

Of course, Republicans can’t say that they’ll oppose Obama on everything, but they don’t have to. People get it. It seeps out of them, like oil from a polluted stream.

It’s difficult to attempt politeness describing what passes for Republican ideology, nowadays. I frequently discuss politics [and economics, technology, education] with one of my kinfolk who is a former Republican. That is, a former member of the Republican Party. After 50 years of commitment to traditional American conservatism – the whole range from environmental conservation to fiscal soundness with a healthy taste of what Bush and Cheney would have characterized as isolationism – he left that party. He doesn’t ask me to be polite – as long as I recognize the difference between conservatism and populist hypocrites. That’s good enough for me.

Watching the effete prancing in the worst political minuet played to patriot tunes since George Wallace tried to lead the White Citizens Councils into Congress and the White House – how could anyone who hasn’t lost his mind defend these deliberate attempts to sabotage the American economy, the American people?

UPDATE: Democrats Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Mark Pryor of Arkansas voted against the administration proposal last night, as did independent Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. No Republican supported the measure.

Three especially worthless politicians + the predictable in-your-pants vote for the wealthiest 1% of America.

Vote for me or burn in hell. I can’t imagine someone running for office saying that. And yet four candidates — Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Rick Perry and Rick Santorum — have said they had a sense that God was leading them to run.

How far can we be from “vote for me or burn in hell” when it seems we’re already comfortable with “vote for me, I’ve been called by God”?

There was a time when if a candidate wanted to inject faith into a campaign he or she would be photographed going to church or shaking the Rev. Billy Graham’s hand.

Now it seems many GOP campaigns aren’t complete without claiming God’s seal of approval, which suggests the other candidates may be running without it. Such a sentiment is an ideological piñata for comedians like Bill Maher and Jon Stewart, but for conservatives trying to secure the GOP nomination, it’s a highly manipulative campaign tool…

But why aren’t we questioning the candidates who make these kinds of statements the same way we would question whether God actually wanted a particular athlete to win a game?

I do believe a person’s faith is personal, but I’m not the one using it to get votes. Four candidates have claimed a level of divine intervention with their campaign, which either means the creator of heaven and Earth is hedging his bets or somebody’s mistaken…

If I could trade places with Anderson Cooper, who is moderating Tuesday’s debate, I would ask, “Now which ones of you were really called by God and which ones are hearing voices in your head?” then let them discuss among themselves.

God-baiting each other is probably something the nutball right-wing does in private, anyway. In public, they save it for the Democrats – who are only a smidge less opportunistic at pulling the same stunt.

Cripes!