2012 Election

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Who benefits from government programs?

Interesting post today on the New York Times Bucks blog.  Posted by Anna Carrns, asks readers to figure out how many government programs each has benefited from.  She writes

Mitt Romney stirred up a hornet’s nest with his comments about the 47 percent of Americans who he thinks are dependent on the government.

It turns out, according to 2008 data from the Cornell Survey Research Institute reported Monday in a Times opinion piece, that 96 percent of Americans have taken part in government benefit programs in one form or another.

Listed below are 21 programs referenced by the researchers. Numbers 1 through 13 are “direct,” meaning that the aid comes directly from the government; the remainder are considered “submerged,” in that they come indirectly, through government tax policies. (For instance, the money you put in your workplace 401(k) plan grows tax-deferred).

  1. Head Start
  2. Social Security Disability
  3. Social Security Retirement and Survivors Benefits
  4. Supplemental Security Income (SSI)
  5. Medicaid
  6. Medicare
  7. Welfare (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or T.A.N.F.)
  8. G.I. Bill
  9. Veterans’ benefits
  10. Pell Grants
  11. Unemployment Insurance
  12. Food Stamps
  13. Government Subsidized Housing
  14. Home Mortgage Interest Deduction
  15. Hope and Lifetime Learning Tax Credits
  16. Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit
  17. 529 accounts (qualified tuition programs) or Coverdell education savings account (Education I.R.A.’s)
  18. Earned-income tax credit
  19. Employer subsidized health insurance
  20. Employer subsidized retirement benefits
  21. Federal student loans

I count 8 for myself:  Social Security, Medicare, Pell Grants, Home Mortgage Deduction, Lifetime Learning Tax Credit, Federal student loans, and employer subsidized health insurance and retirement.  Not only that but I spent almost the entirety of my working life administering various government programs or being paid by government grants.  I guess I really am dependent!  How about you?

2011 10 06 - 1237 - Washington DC - Occupy DC

2011 10 06 – 1237 – Washington DC – Occupy DC (Photo credit: thisisbossi)

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Reinhold Niebuhr explains Mitt and the 47%

By now we are all familiar with the remarks made by Mitt Romney on that fundraiser tape.  Here is the Mother Jones transcription

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. And I mean, the president starts off with 48, 49, 48—he starts off with a huge number. These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn’t connect. And he’ll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich. I mean that’s what they sell every four years. And so my job is not to worry about those people—I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.

My husband and I have a large library and one of my retirement projects is to get them onto a database. It is hard because I keep getting distracted by having to read parts of almost everything – like browsing at a bookstore.  Anyway, I came across a copy of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society and looked through the table of contents.  Chapter V is titled “The Ethical Attitudes of Privileged Classes”.  Caught my eye.  So, I wondered, does he explain Mitt?

Turns out yes.  Even though he was writing in 1932, Niebuhr’s words still have truth.

He begins by explaining his understanding of classes.

Classes may be formed on the basis of common functions in society, but they do not become sharply distinguished until function is translated into privilege.  Thus professional classes may be distinguished by certain psychological characteristics from other middle-class groups; but these psychological distinctions will be ultimately insignificant in comparison with the common political attitudes which professional groups will have with other middle-class groups on the basis of their similar social and economic privileges.

Later

Whatever may be the degree of the self-consciousness of classes, the social and ethical outlook of members of given classes is invariably colored, if not determined, by the unique economic circumstances which each class has as a common possession.  This fact, regarded as axiomatic by economists, still fails to impress most moral theorists and ethical idealists.  The latter, with their too unqualified confidence int he capacity of religious or rational idealism, persist in hoping that some force of reason and conscience can be created, powerful enough to negate or to transcend the economic interests which are basic to class divisions.  The whole history of humanity is proof of the futility of this hope.  The development of rational and moral resources may indeed qualify the social and ethical outlook, but it cannot destroy the selfishness of classes.

…

The reason wy privileged classes are more hypocritical than underprivileged ones is that special privilege can be defended in terms of the rational ideal of equal justice only, by proving that it contributes something to the good of the whole.  Since inequalities of privilege are greater than could possibly be defended rationally, the intelligence of privileged groups is usually applied to the task of inventing specious proofs for the theory that universal values spring from, and that general interests are served by, the special privileges which they hold.

This seems to have become the reason we need more tax cuts for the 1% who have branded themselves as the job creators.  This is where we get trickle down.

On the other hand it has always been the habit of privileged groups to deny the oppressed classes every opportunity for the cultivation of innate capacities and then to accuse them of lacking what they have been denied the right to acquire.

Mitt Romney is clearly of the privileged class and he is not, although he sometimes pretends to be, one the few members of  his class who, in Niebuhr’s words, is an “able man”, one who transcends his classes and uses his educational and economic advantages for good.

47 253/365 Niebuhr contemplates

47 253/365 Niebuhr contemplates (Photo credit: stratoz)

 

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Cartoonists look at Mitt and the 47% and his quest for the White House

Some of my favorite cartoonishs came out with their takes on the Mitt Romney remarks about the 47% who are victims and think we are entitled to food and shelter, plus we don’t pay taxes.

Tony Auth depicted some of the people who don’t pay taxes.

Dan Wasserman

<br /><br />

Signe Wilkerson showed Romeny supporters.

Signe Wilkinson's Editorial Cartoons 09/19

Finally Tom Toles with Mitt trying to figure out how to get to the White House.

It is hard to figure out how Mitt Romeny goes from here.  The latest polls in the swing states are not looking good for him.  The President’s approval rating is at or near the magic 50%.  And given his track record, I’m not sure how he wins a debate with Obama.  The Republicans are saying that he needs to be specific.  Well, I think he was plenty specific in the the fundraiser video tape.  He told us what he thinks and what he wants or doesn’t want to do.  I am not calling the race yet, because one never knows what can happen in the the month, but I will say that he has dug himself a hole that I don’t think he has the skills to get out of.

[And I’m sorry that Dan Wasserman’s cartoon isn’t very clear.  His website moved and now I can’t edit the pictures.]

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Why the poor are like Romney: they don’t pay taxes

We don’t really know how much income tax Mitt Romney actually paid over the years because he hasn’t released many tax returns.  We know that Harry Reid thinks he didn’t pay any.  But what we do know is that he pays a pretty low tax rate of around 12 or 13 percent.  In a recently released videotape of remarks made at a fundraiser this spring, Romeny said

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax.”

Neither Romney or his campaign deny his saying this.  Romney only wishes he had put it better.

A lot of the chatter has been about Obama supporters being called dependent victims, but what about the no tases part?  The Tax Policy Center of the Urban Institute and Brookings Instituion has an 11 page document explaining why 47% of us pay little or no income tax.  There are very interesting charts that explain a great deal about our tax policy.  And, last summer, Roberton Williams posted on the Tax Policy Center’s blog in response to controversey about there report.

He explains

The large percentage of people not paying income tax is often blamed on tax breaks that zero out many households’ income tax bills and can even result in net payments from the government. While that’s the case for many households, a new TPC paper shows that about half of people who don’t owe income tax are off the rolls not because they take advantage of tax breaks but rather because they have low incomes. For example, a couple with two children earning less than $26,400 will pay no federal income tax this year because their $11,600 standard deduction and four exemptions of $3,700 each reduce their taxable income to zero. The basic structure of the income tax simply exempts subsistence levels of income from tax.

…

The conclusion: Three-fourths of those households pay no income tax because of provisions that benefit senior citizens and low-income working families with children. Those provisions include the exclusion of some Social Security benefits from taxable income, the tax credit and extra standard deduction for the elderly, and the child, earned income, and childcare tax credits that primarily help low-income workers with children (see graph). Extending the example offered above, the couple could earn an additional $19,375 without paying income tax because their pre-credit tax liability of $2,056 would be wiped out by a $2,000 child tax credit and $57 of EITC.

Those provisions matter most for households with income under $50,000, who make up nearly 90 percent of those made nontaxable by tax expenditures. Higher-income households pay no tax because of other provisions. Itemized deductions and credits for children and education are a bigger factor for households with income between $50,000 and $100,000. The relatively few nontaxable households with income over $100,000 benefit most from above-the-line and itemized deductions and reduced tax rates on capital gains and dividends.

So our tax code is structured so those with less income pay less and those with the most income can take advantage of various ways of investing and reporting income to also pay less tax. 

David Brooks writing in today’s  New York Times called Romney “Thurston Howell” Romney after the millionaire guy in Gilligan’s Island.  After citing the Romney quote, Brooks comments

This comment suggests a few things. First, it suggests that he really doesn’t know much about the country he inhabits. Who are these freeloaders? Is it the Iraq war veteran who goes to the V.A.? Is it the student getting a loan to go to college? Is it the retiree on Social Security or Medicare?

It suggests that Romney doesn’t know much about the culture of America. Yes, the entitlement state has expanded, but America remains one of the hardest-working nations on earth. Americans work longer hours than just about anyone else. Americans believe in work more than almost any other people. Ninety-two percent say that hard work is the key to success, according to a 2009 Pew Research Survey.

It says that Romney doesn’t know much about the political culture. Americans haven’t become childlike worshipers of big government. On the contrary, trust in government has declined. The number of people who think government spending promotes social mobility has fallen.

The people who receive the disproportionate share of government spending are not big-government lovers. They are Republicans. They are senior citizens. They are white men with high school degrees. As Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution has noted, the people who have benefited from the entitlements explosion are middle-class workers, more so than the dependent poor.

I don’t often agree with Brooks, but I do agree with 80% – at least- of what he wrote today.

Of course, the voters have a long history of voting against self interest so as an Obama supporter I have to be cautious about the impact of Romney’s statement.  Still, it provides insight into how the man thinks.  I know Romney is trying to pass this off as a discussio of campaign strategy, but that strategy disses almost half of us who Romeny calls victims.

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I am going to be away for a few days – no blogs on the Democratic convention – but I wanted to leave you with this in case you missed it.

kstreet607's avatarThe Fifth Column

 

It’s a slow news day, so when I ran across this article by the much respected Juan Cole…it was a no-brainer.  I had to share it.

Juan Cole – Informed Comment

You can’t see me, but I’m talking to Clint Eastwood sitting spectrally in an empty chair, and I am replying to his confused rant.

1. Mr. Eastwood, you called the failure to close the Guantanamo Bay penitentiary a broken promise. President Obama was prevented from closing Guantanamo by the Republicans in Congress, which refused to allocate the funds necessary to end it. Do you remember this this Washington Post headline, “House acts to block closing of Guantanamo”?

2. Mr. Eastwood you called “stupid” the idea of trying terrorists who attacked New York in a civilian courtroom in New York. But what would have better vindicated the strengths of America’s rule of law, the thing about…

View original post 639 more words

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Eastwooding

No, I don’t tweet.  Sometimes I think it might be fun to do, but I don’t think fast enough to be clever.  But to save some time for people, I have complied some of the best tweets about Clint Eastwood’s empty chair rant/ramble last night at the Republican convention.  I was inspired by an article posted this afternoon on the Nation by Ilyse Hogue, Anatomy of a meme

Surprise guest, Eastwood, was reportedly given three minutes to speak, but spent the better part of fifteen minutes of prime time coverage ranting at an empty chair that was supposed to be an invisible President Obama. Pain was visible on the faces of candidate and campaign operative alike as it became clear that these confused ravings of the famous octogenarian were going to be the stand out performance from an otherwise carefully orchestrated week.

And that it is. Within moments of Eastwood’s start, @InvisibleObama had a twitter account with a picture of an empty chair. By the end of the speech, the chair had almost 17,000 followers. It now has 48,000.

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Even the President got in the fun when his twitter account posted a picture of the back of the President sitting is his chair, with the tag line “This seat’s taken.”

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In my opinion, the most succinct and spot-on insight came from a Jamelle Bouie tweet, “”This is a perfect representation of the campaign: an old white man arguing with an imaginary Barack Obama.” 

And here are some more taken from Hogue’s article.

Zach Braff:  Now all my chairs want to be interviewed too.

FastLaugh:  Give Clint Eastwood a break… The RNC asked him to speak about ObamaCare and he thought they said ObamaChair…

Bob Newhart:  I heard that Clint Eastwood was channeling me at the RNC. My lawyers and I are drafting our lawsuit…

Josh Rogin

This from Andrew Sullivan’s blog

Screen shot 2012-08-30 at 10.31.30 PM

And Jed Lewison at the Daily Kos comments

Empty chair

Rumor has it that Mitt loved Clint’s empty chair routine so much that now he wants to do it in the Caymans
 
I wonder what surprise the Democrats have in store for us next week.  Looking forward to it.
 
 
 
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The Republican Convention Day 1: Small Stories

I have to admit I had more fun watching Hurricane Issac on the Weather Channel than I did watching the convention.  I always love Jim Cantore getting soaked and pounded.  But I did look at brief glimpses of the convention and once again it struck me how very white the delegates are.  Looking through all the convention coverage this morning I was struck by two little stories both involving the media, race and gender.  This was suppose to be the night of the convention for women.

First is this from the Washington Post and Talking Points Memo,  Kyle Leighton reported for TPM

An attendee at the Republican National Convention in Tampa on Tuesday allegedly threw nuts at a black camerawoman working for CNN and said “This is how we feed animals” before being removed from the convention, a network official confirmed to TPM.

Erik Wemple who writes a blog for the Post on the media predicts

Based on the limited details thus far, the episode will have at least a full day in the news cycle. There’ll be the quest to find both the employee against whom the incident was directed as well as the person who directed the incident. There’ll be a search for other witnesses as well. If those details drip and drip and drip, the event could pose a distraction for the goings-on, though we have no idea who did it and what connection the person may have to the convention.

One thing is now safe to rule out: Criminal charges. A call to the Tampa police department late tonight brought a referral to the Secret Service, which has jurisdiction over the interior of the convention venue. A Secret Service official told me that they’re referring calls on the incident to the Republican National Committee. Not a police matter, in other words.

It is, however, a matter for CNN. It knows all the details of this event. How will the network balance a workplace issue — someone on the job enduring an insulting outburst — with a matter of public interest? Resolving that conflict must start with the preferences of the crew person. But the presumption should fall in favor of doing the story in all of its detail, regardless of whether the details are more or less damaging than what’s been reported.

Juan Williams is shown. | AP Photo

And Juan Williams who is trying hard to be a black commentator for Fox is back in the news.  Politico reported that was involved in a “ribbing” incident during the Fox convention coverage.  His sin?  He called Ann Romney a corporate wife.

Fox News contributor Juan Williams took some ribbing from his colleagues Tuesday night after saying Ann Romney looked “like a corporate wife” who hasn’t struggled in her life.

“Mitt Romney’s wife, Ann Romney, on the other hand looked to me like a corporate wife,” Williams said, speaking on a panel after the Republican National Convention’s speeches wrapped for the night. “And you know the stories she told about struggle, eh, it’s hard for me to believe. She’s a very rich woman and I know that and America knows that.”

Fox News hosts Bret Baier replied, “Wow, OK,” and Megyn Kelly asked Williams, “What does that mean, corporate wife?”

“What does it mean?” Williams replied. “It looks like a woman whose husband takes care of her and she’s been very lucky and blessed in this life. She’s not speaking, I think, for the tremendous number of single women in this country, or married women or separated — actually she did not convince me that you know what, ‘I understand the struggles of American women in general.’”

…

Later, the panel reconvened — but without Williams. Wall Street Journal columnist and former presidential speechwriter Peggy Noonan joined to offer commentary in Williams’s place.

“I want to point out that we did not kick Juan off the panel because of the corporate wife comment, we wanted to get a speechwriter’s perspective,” Baier said, to laughter.

“Although we considered it,” Kelly said.

And as Baier and Kelly wrapped the show, Kelly offered a last take on Williams’s remark.

“My final thought is, [Ann Romney] may have improved Mitt Romney’s standing with women,” Kelly said. “You know whose standing did not improve with women tonight?”

“Whose?” Baier asked.

“Juan Williams,” Kelly replied, as the duo laughed.

Juan, I always did wonder if you got a raw deal from NPR but Kelly is wrong.  Your standing improved with this woman.  I do think that both of these little stories illustrate the conservative problem with both race and gender and it seems to extend to the media.

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The Republicans and Disfunction

I’m reading It’s even Worse than it Looks: How the american Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of extremism by Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein.  And yes, it is depressing especially when I’m reading it while also looking at the Republican Platform which has been described by Think Progress as the “most conservative in modern history.”  OK so maybe Think Progress is on the left but they have a pretty good summary.  Here are just a few subheading from the summary.

NO ABORTION IN CASES OF RAPE OR INCEST

NO LEGAL RECOGNITION OF SAME-SEX COUPLES

REPLICATE ARIZONA-STYLE IMMIGRATION LAWS.

NO WOMEN IN COMBAT

NO NEW TAXES, EXCEPT FOR WAR.

The New York Times said this in an editorial last Tuesday

Over the years, the major parties’ election-year platforms have been regarded as Kabuki theater scripts for convention week. The presidential candidates blithely ignored them or openly dismissed the most extreme planks with a knowing wink as merely a gesture to pacify the noisiest activists in the party.

That cannot be said of the draft of the Republican platform circulating ahead of the convention in Tampa, Fla. The Republican Party has moved so far to the right that the extreme is now the mainstream. The mean-spirited and intolerant platform represents the face of Republican politics in 2012. And unless he makes changes, it is the current face of the shape-shifting Mitt Romney.

The draft document is more aggressive in its opposition to women’s reproductive rights and to gay rights than any in memory. It accuses President Obama and the federal judiciary of “an assault on the foundations of our society,” and calls for constitutional amendments banning both same-sex marriage and abortion.

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In passages on abortion, the draft platform puts the party on the most extreme fringes of American opinion. It calls for a “human life amendment” and for legislation “to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children.” That would erase any right women have to make decisions about their health and their bodies. There are no exceptions for victims of rape or incest, and such laws could threaten even birth control.

The draft demands that the government “not fund or subsidize health care which includes abortion coverage,” which could bar abortion coverage on federally subsidized health-insurance exchanges, for example.

The platform praises states with “informed consent” laws that require women to undergo medically unnecessary tests before having abortions, and “mandatory waiting periods.” Those are among the most patronizing forms of anti-abortion legislation. They presume that a woman is not capable of making a considered decision about abortion before she goes to a doctor. The draft platform also espouses the most extreme Republican views on taxation, national security, military spending and other issues.

Over all, it is farther out on the party’s fringe than Mr. Romney ventured in the primaries, when he repudiated a career’s worth of centrist views on issues like abortion and gay marriage. But the planks hew closely to the views of his running mate, Paul Ryan, and the powerful right-wing. Mr. Romney has a chance to move back in the direction of the center by amending this extremist platform. It will be interesting to see if he seizes it.

Governor Bob McDonnell of Virginia might not have gotten the Vice Presidential nod, but he delivered the platform.  He should be proud.

Mann and Ornstein have a long quote from a former Republican Congressional staff, Mike Lofgren, who wrote in 2011 why he was leaving after almost thirty years [pages 54-55] Part of that quote reads

It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe.

Later Lofgren writes

Far from being a rarity, virtually every bill, every nominee for Senate confirmation and every routine procedural motion is now subject to a Republican filibuster.  Under the circumstances, it is no wonder that Washington is gridlocked: legislating has now become war minus the shooting, something one could have observed 80 years ago in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic.  As Hannah Arendt observed, a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself.

The platform is the Ryan agenda no matter how much he tries to say that it is Romney who is running for President.  Mitt Romney picked Paul Ryan and no one can convince me he didn’t know what Ryan’s positions were or what legislation he had sponsored.  The Republicans like to say they are for smaller, less intrusive government, but the platform seems pretty intrusive to me.  If they have their way, they will be imposing their views on the rest of us.

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Obama and Women’s Healthcare

While I was working on the last post about Akin, Ryan etc., I ran across this great summary of what the Affordable Care Act does for women.  In a column titled Obamacare(s) for Women, Katha Pollitt published in the Nation she provided this handy list of benefits.

Women will get a lot out of the Affordable Care Act. Here are just some of the ways:

1. As many as 10 million will get coverage in 2014 under Medicaid expansion, and by 2016, thanks to other provisions of the ACA, that number will grow to 13.5 million women.

2. By 2014, all plans sold to individuals will be required to cover maternity care. According to the National Women’s Law Center, 12 percent of those plans include that. Remember when Arizona’s Jon Kyl said he didn’t think his insurance should have to cover pregnancy and childbirth because he would never need it? The ACA destroys the mindset that care needed only by women is of no general concern.

3. More than 20 million women will get expanded coverage of preventive services—prenatal care, mammograms, pap smears, breast-feeding supplies, testing for sexually transmitted diseases, well woman checkups, immunizations, birth control and more.

4. Insurance companies will be barred from dropping women’s coverage when they become pregnant or sick.

5. Companies will be barred from denying coverage because of “pre-existing conditions,” like having had breast cancer, being pregnant (funny how that keeps coming up), having had a Caesarean or being the victim of domestic violence.

6. No more “gender rating”—charging women more for coverage just because they are women. This practice, already banned in some states but permitted in thirty-seven others, costs women a staggering $1 billion a year.

7. Older women will receive expanded preventive services through Medicare, like bone-density screenings for those at risk of osteoporosis.

8. The expansion of Medicaid will cover people who make up to 133 percent of the poverty line (about $31,000 a year for a family of four). True, enabled by the recent Supreme Court decision, at least eight red-state governors have said they will reject it. Let’s see how that works out for them.

9. The birth control provision is mammoth all by itself. Not only will it be costless to the patient; all methods must be covered. That means women will be able to choose the kind of birth control that works best for them, which means they are more likely to use it consistently. In particular, it means insurance must cover the most effective methods, including the IUD, which many plans exclude. At up to $1,000 upfront, it is too expensive for many women to shell out for, even though the IUD is one of the cheaper methods when you consider that it lasts for ten years or more. If anti-choicers really wanted to lower the number of abortions, they would be cheering this huge expansion of access to contraception. But no.

If Romney wins, women can wave goodbye to what Planned Parenthood has called “the single biggest advancement in women’s health in a generation.” Think about that next time someone tells you there’s no difference between the candidates. It’s just not true.

The President signs the Affordable Healthcare Act.  Photo by AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite