Cost of Staying Healthy on the Rise

The federal government's approval of a 5.6% increase in health premiums has fuelled controversy and debate and is set to put households under more financial pressure in the coming year. The increase, dubbed by the Health Minister as "modest", translates into a $1.70 increase per week for a single person and $3.70 more for a family. Health Minister Tanya Plibersek says that, by comparison, the increase for consumers is significantly lower than the 9.3% increase being shouldered by insurance companies. The increase is slightly higher than last year's 5.06% hike and will be implemented from April.

The Spokesperson for the Coalition, Peter Dutton, says that this increase, coupled with increases in other government policies, is putting family budgets under immense strain. He says this latest news might be taking the pressure off the government, in terms of comparisons to previous years' performances, but for the average household the news is anything but pleasing.

In defence, the federal government says the health insurance premium increases that have taken place under the current government are lower than those of the previous government. Plibersek claims that during Tony Abbott's tenure as Health Minister the average increase was 6.5%, while one year saw an increase of 8%. She says the government is aware of the increasing cost of living and has encouraged people to compare health insurance memberships to see if they can secure a better deal. She says she expects health insurance memberships to stay strong, with memberships at their highest levels of all time.

Despite the Health Minister's optimism the 30% private health insurance rebate has undergone means testing since July and parliament is currently deliberating dropping subsidies for Lifetime Health Cover loading, applicable to those who do not take out private cover by the time the financial year that they turn 31 in comes around. She encouraged shopping around for competitive rates as policies vary by as much as $200 per policy across different providers.

The Coalition's spokesperson said also that the Labour government's changes had yet to be experienced fully because so many Australians had tried to beat the increases by prepaying their premiums. The Chief Executive Officer of Consumers Health Forum of Australia also agreed that people should renew their cover to see if there was a chance of getting better value.

One in seven people who have private health insurance could be looking at a 27% premium increase in July, if the intended government rebate changes go through. An industry lobby group says that nearly 1.1 million members will be affected by changes to Lifetime Health Cover and for some people the difference amounts to as much as $500.

Along with the annual premium increase of more than 5% the removal of the rebate will see some premiums go up by a third this year. The industry lobby group claims these two events will see people either terminating or downgrading their cover, and putting more pressure on the public hospital system.

Last month a story was carried that claimed the government would be investigating the number of people downgrading their policies and also how easy it is for people to switch policies over if they find a better deal.

In his midyear review the Treasury's Wayne Swan alleged the changes to the rebate system would enable a saving of $1.1 billion (when the Treasurer was still pursuing his budget surplus). But the government has already benefitt4d from the LHC because it has prompted more young people to take out private cover, earlier on in life and offsetting against higher claim costs from older members. The government says the financial impact of dropping the rebate will make a difference of $116 per annum.

What You Need to Learn Before You Buy a Run-down Property

Buying a run-down property and turning it into something special is a big challenge but one which you could get a lot of pleasure from. Rather than rushing into this work, you should first of all think about what you need to know in order to get started.

How to Work Out the Budget

Dilapidated houses can eat up a lot of money. If you aren't clear from the start on how much you need to spend on it then you will almost certainly run into problems at some point. You can't afford to overlook any task when working out your budget, no matter how small it appears to be. All of the costs will mount up and you could end up having to make some compromises later on if you aren't smart about getting the budget right from the start.

How to Do DIY Jobs

Are you planning to get in builders, plumbers, electricians, plasterers and painters to do all of the work for you? If you are in a hurry you might do this but it would make more financial sense to do some of the work yourself. Your first step could be to think about the DIY jobs which you would be comfortable doing. After this you could then think about whether it would be worth your while going on a course and thereby avoiding the need to hire a specialist for other jobs. A good idea here is to look for local plastering courses, as this is a skill you should be able to pick up more easily than you might think and it will save you a decent amount of money if you do it yourself.

How to Stay Patient

Of course, it probably won't all be plain sailing for you. Carrying out a lot of work on an old property can be a hugely frustrating business. For a start, you run the risk of discovering jobs needing done which weren't in the original scope of the refurbishment. You might also be let down by tradesmen or suppliers and this can have a knock on effect for the whole piece of work. If you aren't a particularly patient person then you will want to find a way of relaxing and being more patient while the work is going on. For some people the secret lies in not getting too caught up in it and instead finding a way of staying away from the house as much as possible.

How to Deal with Problems

With a bit of luck you won't come across too many problems when you are doing up your run-down house but it is more than likely that something goes wrong along the way. The best way to react when this happens is not to panic. Instead, you need to try and stay cool and calm while you try and work out what to do next. Your patience may be severely tested during this time but if you can keep it under control then you stand a far better chance of finishing the work successfully.

Enjoy More Space with the Right Office Shelving

With most organisations currently looking to reduce outgoings, and working in less office space than previously, choosing the right office shelving for your business is hugely important.

And, with more choice than ever on the market in terms of size and style, selecting office shelving systems can seem a challenge.

But the good news is that, with today's solutions, you can find something that looks great as well as being practical, whatever your budget.

There are also various materials to choose for office storage units, so you can opt for stainless steel, glass and so much more.

Of course, you need to think about what sort of load you will be placing on the shelves, as well as whether you want something you can adjust or not. These days, with business needs changing all the time, for many organisations adjustable shelving is the way to go. You can then have the units at the height that's right for you. With space saving and practical modular units, you can change the height of the shelves whenever you choose.

When buying office storage solutions, you need to try and take into account what your future needs are likely to be, as well as your needs now.

Finally, you may also want to think about whether you want to create some colour contrast in your office, or whether you would prefer to have something that matches your existing interior decor.

So do your research first. The Internet makes a good starting point.

Bio: This guest blog post is written by Webmaster of bruynzeel.co.uk, offering office shelving and office shelving systems services!

The Zombie Rises: The Return Of Simpson-Bowles

By Robert Borosage, cross-posted from Campaign for America's Future

Take a good look at Europe - bloody riots in Athens and Madrid, rising unemployment, spreading poverty and suicide, and a deepening recession - because the current American elite consensus bizarrely wants to drive America down that same path.

Europe's miseries come from imposing austerity before recovering from the recession caused by the financial collapse. Conservatives in Germany and England inflicted harsh measures to enforce budget discipline - hiking taxes, cutting spending.

In the US, the Obama recovery plan and the deal with Republicans over extending the Bush tax cuts combined to limit and slow the imposition of austerity. The result: Europe is sinking, while the US economy retains slow, but halting growth.

But now the deficit hawks are gearing up for another run at driving the US back into economic recession.

At the end of the year, we face a train wreck. After the November election, the Bush tax cuts, the payroll tax cut and extended unemployment benefits expire. The automatic cut - "sequester" in budget speak - of nearly 10% of military and domestic discretionary spending (everything except guaranteed programs like Medicare and Social Security and interest on the national debt) kicks in. We even hit the debt limit to add to the high stakes.

If all this is allowed to occur, it will subtract over 3% of GDP from an economy growing at 2.5% or less. A drop back into recession would be almost inevitable. So a deal is needed.

But the deal in everyone's head is some kind of "grand bargain," like that almost cut by House Speaker John Boehner and President Obama last year, or like that outlined by the co-chairs of the President's deficit commission, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson (which failed to gain the needed votes to pass the commission).


Centrist Democrat Kent Conrad, chair of the Senate Budget Committee, has announced that he will use the Simpson Bowles recommendations as a guideline for budget negotiations that he assumes will take place in the lame duck Congress have the election.

There's lots not to like in Simpson-Bowles which marches under the banner of "shared sacrifice" at a time when 1% of the population is capturing 93% of the rewards of growth, while paying the lowest tax rates in living memory.

But the horror is less the bad terms of the supposed bargain, than its zombie like infliction of austerity on an economy barely out of the emergency room.
We've still got some 23 million people in need of full time work. We haven't recovered the jobs that were lost in the collapse, much less the jobs needed for young people coming into the economy. Wages are still failing to keep pace. Nearly one in four mortgages are under water; foreclosures are rising.

Yes, we have trillion dollar deficits. But austerity - some deal that raises taxes and cuts spending now - will put more people out of work and make reducing deficits even harder.

After experiencing the horrors of this misguided policy, European leaders will eventually turn back to trying to get their economies moving again. What we need this fall is a different grand bargain - a global agreement, like that that was forged in early 2009, for coordinated action by governments to reflate the economy - to borrow and spend to put people back to work.

For this to occur, the bipartisan elite fixation about inflicting austerity now must be challenged. If we are to avoid a lost decade or worse, we need action to support still weak and staggering economies. Global coordination would be the best way to achieve that. That requires putting a stake in Simpson Bowles, the Boehner-Obama grand bargain and other zombies.

In this country, the necessary remedies are clear. With interest rates near zero, a decrepit infrastructure that must be rebuilt, a construction industry flat on its back, anyone with a whit of business sense would finance a massive Rebuild America program over the next few years, put people back to work, and build the sinews vital for a more competitive economy. We will never have a better opportunity to make the investments that we will have to make anyway.

We should send money to states to rehire teachers, make universities affordable, and strengthen not weaken our public schools. It's simply nuts to make kids pay the price of Wall Street's follies.

And if we could get beyond ideological perversities, we'd set up a green corps, an urban corps, and a jobs corps to guarantee a job for every veteran and young person under 25. No one should risk their life for the country and return to an economy with no place for them. Young people are coming out of school into the worst economy since the Great Depression. Condemning them to idleness is a recipe for depression, drugs, crime, and misery. And we will all pay dearly for a lost generation.

Certainly, we have to be serious about getting our books in order. The wealthy and the corporations should pay more so we can afford the investments we need. But the overwhelming source of our long-term budget woes comes from projections of soaring health care costs. If we paid for health care at the rate other industrial countries do (with better results), we would be projecting surpluses, not deficits.

But right now, the focus should be on putting people back to work and getting the economy moving. Until that happens, austerity - as Europe is now experiencing - is a contagion, not a cure.

The Relentless Austerity Fetish

Lemmings

By Richard (RJ) Eskow, cross-posted from Campaign for America's Future

Europe's in crisis. Unemployment is at a fifteen-year high after climbing for ten straight months, thanks to the austerity measures imposed on it by conservative leaders in France, Germany, and the international financial community.

But if you think things are bad over there, imagine what they'll be like if Republican budget measures are imposed here. The GOP budget makes European austerity look like summer camp.

Ever wonder why lemmings jump off cliffs?

While England Slept

Great Britain blazed the trail for Europe with a series of steep cuts to government spending - and it soon led the continent in economic misfortune. Unemployment skyrocketed, consumer confidence plummeted, and growth stagnated.

That's what austerity economics does to struggling economies. When you ask already-beleaguered middle class and lower-income people to bear the burden for the mistakes that made other rich the results are predictable: real income falls, demand for goods and services drops, and the entire economy drops back into a death spiral.

You'd think that Europe and the world would have learned from Britain's mistakes, but they haven't. In fact, even Britain hasn't learned from its mistakes. As the New York Times reports, the UK is doubling down on the madness.

In its latest round of budget announcements the government announced that it's continuing to push for additional spending reductions but wants to cut taxes for the wealthiest citizens, including those who got rich from the bank speculation that broke the economy! As critics have correctly observed, the UK government is paying for this rich person's tax cut through a 'stealth tax' on low-income retirees.

Britain's misplaced emphasis on reducing government deficits is even backfiring where deficits are concerned. From the Times: "The Office for National Statistics said Wednesday that Britain's budget deficit almost doubled in February, to £15.2 billion, far exceeding economists' expectations of about £8 billion. "


Kamikaze Europe

Now the rest of Europe is following Great Britain's lead. Unemployment is officially 10.8 percent and expected to reach 11 percent soon. Seventeen million people are out of work.

Austerity mania spread through Europe like a plague. Unemployment's now at 23.6 percent in Spain and 21 percent in Greece. How is a country expected to lower its deficits when a quarter of its working population isn't paying taxes and doesn't have disposable income? Apparently the financial geniuses running things there didn't think about that.

Ireland was once touted as austerity's success story. They're not bragging on Old Eire much now that it's officially back in a recession. Spain's problems disprove the theory that government debt is the source of all economic woes since, as Paul Krugman notes, Spain has been a much more thrifty government spender than Germany. Further austerity measures there are going to be disastrous.

Then there's Greece. According to reports, there are no working traffic lights left in the city of Athens. People have taken to bartering for goods and services in a world where many people have little or no sources of currency income while the streets swarm with formerly middle-class Greeks who are now being described as 'the new poor.'

In fact, there are encampments of the working poor throughout Europe. Even the leading European economy, Germany, is losing ground because of Chancellor Merkel's obsession with austerity measures - while France, the other austerity leader, is also struggling.

What do they plan to do, now that they have the benefit of experience? More austerity, according to reports. Merkel even thinks that's the road to her own re-election.

The Home Front

Which gets us to the United States. The Republicans in Congress have just passed a budget that makes Europe's austerity measures seem positively genteel. Rep. Paul Ryan, the Pied Piper of nihilist economics, said when it passed that we're in a "debt-driven crisis, and so we have an obligation -- not just a legal obligation but a moral obligation -- to do something about it."

That budget's "moral obligation" doesn't extend to our military budget, which the Republicans voted to massively expand - or to tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires, whose current historically low tax rates will plunge if their budget ever goes into effect. And, as we now know, the GOP budget would essentially shut down every other function of government that Americans have valued for the last century and a half. 62 percent would come from programs for lower-income people and Pell grants to help young people go to college.

And what a time for austerity: As Matt Stoller notes, one in seven Americans is being pursued by debt collectors. Student loan debt exceeded $1 trillion last year, even as young people face sky-high unemployment. 8.8 percent of student loans defaulted in their first two years of payment last year and more than one-fourth of student loan payments are now delinquent.

Robert Schiller, arguably the world's top economic expert on real estate, says that prices for suburban real estate aren't coming back in our lifetime. Consumer debt is soaring. US growth is expect to turn even more sluggish, which even has Ben Bernanke pushing for more government action.

But while the projected deficit reductions in the GOP budget are a hoax, the cuts to vital programs, including its hidden cuts to Medicare, aren't. As Mike Konczal notes, states like Florida are a preview of a Ryan-budget America. Konczal coauthored an article with Bryce Covert which showed that "Of the eleven states in which Republicans came into power in 2010 -(five) lost more than 2.5 percent of their workforce from December 2010 to December 2011."

Bargain Basement

The budget-cutting rhetoric of the right is too often echoed by Democrats, at a time when they (or someone) should be proposing a more common-sense and more humane approach to the economy. Talking about deficits today is the moral equivalent of lecturing firefighters about water conservation while the town is burning down.

We need to put out the fire first. We urgently need spending to create jobs, especially when the government can borrow money for virtually nothing. Or, to put it another way -

This is your country:



(employment, United States)
This is your country on austerity:



(Konczal, Covert)
And yet there are still those in the White House and Congress who dream of a "grand bargain" with the Republicans, like the one the President nearly finalized last year - a bargain that would send the nation's economy over a cliff.

Lemmings

People used to believe that lemmings committed mass suicide. Scientists now say that they're following migration patterns which sometimes lead them straight into the ocean. Either way, a lot of them drown because they followed the tail of the rodent in front of them.

The US seems determined to cling to Europe's ragged tail as it plunges into the icy waters below. The Republicans would drown our economy in a way that would make Europe's problems seem mild by comparison. (At least they still have working governments over there.) But few Democrats are willing to challenge the austerity fundamentalism that's gripped Washington. Instead they prefer to debate means to an austere end, rather than the end itself.

It's all insane. But this Ryan budget - now the official budget of Republicans in Congress, and warmly embraced by presumptive GOP candidate Mitt Romney - is the biggest sign of insanity yet.
Not that our national leaders are lemmings. Far from it. They're intelligent economic actors behaving in a way that ensures they'll receive future rewards. That means if we don't like the way this story ends, we'll have to change it ourselves.

No, politicians aren't the lemmings in this story. Until the time comes when we demand something different from our leaders in Washington ...... we are.

Candidate Obama Would Make A Great President

Barack Obama must be running for President again.  He gave a wonderful speech today, indicting the Republican worldview as exemplified by Paul Ryan's budget proposal that has been adopted by the Republicans in the House and endorsed by Mitt Romney.

Obama described the Ryan budget as "laughable" and said Ryan's Medicare “premium support” plan would “end Medicare as we know it.”

Here's a summary of the speech from Talking Points Memo:

Obama decried key planks of the Republican agenda — particularly calls for large tax cuts for wealthy Americans, and a plan to phase out traditional Medicare — which he took care to describe accurately, though in hostile terms.

And in response to questions from the audience, Obama urged the press not to confuse rancor over the parties’ competing visions for the country as typical partisan bitterness for which Democrats and Republicans are equally culpable.

Chiding Republicans for not learning anything from the failure of trickle-down policies that defined the last decades, Obama attacked the GOP budget head-on. “They have proposed a budget so far to the right it makes the Contract for America look like the New Deal,” he said. “In fact, that renowned liberal, Newt Gingrich, first called the original version of the budget radical. He said it would contribute to right-wing social engineering. … This is now the party’s governing platform. This is what they are running on. One of my potential opponents, Gov. Romney, has said he hopes a similar version of this plan from last year would be introduced as a bill on Day One of his presidency.”

This is how Greg Sargent summed up the political case made by Obama:   "The GOP approach has already failed us. In its current, more radical iteration, it’s a departure from longtime consensus about government’s proper role in spurring economic growth and in guarding against the excesses of unfettered capitalism. And that addressing inequality and tax unfairness isn’t just morally right; it’s the only way to secure the country’s future."

Quote Of The Day

"So the Ryan budget is a fraud; Mr. Ryan talks loudly about the evils of debt and deficits, but his plan would actually make the deficit bigger even as it inflicted huge pain in the name of deficit reduction. But is his budget really the most fraudulent in American history? Yes, it is."

Paul Krugman, Pink Slime Economics

Road To Dystopia With The GOP

DonkeyHotey

Joan McCarter at Daily Kos wrote two pieces yesterday, one on the actions of the Republicans in the House and one on what they did in the Senate, that come pretty close to telling us all we need to know about what the GOP stands for.

First, the House Republicans passed Paul Ryan's budget resolution, the so-called "Path to Prosperity," which as McCarter explains, would among other things end Medicare as we know it:

The House Republicans made their ultimate dystopian statement today, in passing Rep. Paul Ryan's budget in a 228-191 vote. Ten Republicans voted against it, no Democrats voted for it and 13 members did not vote.

House Speaker John Boehner called this plan "a real vision of what we were to do if we get more control here in this town. It's still a Democrat-run town."

Just a few reminders about the Ryan budget, and what the House Republicans put down as their political marker for 2012, their vision for a Republican-ruled America: It would give the wealthy a humongous tax break, the lowest tax rate since the Hoover administration; it would gut nutritional assistance, cutting it by 17 percent over the next decade; it would cut Medicare benefits and begin the process of killing the program; it would kill millions of jobs; it turns Medicaid into a block grant and deeply cuts federal spending for it, and for SCHIP, the children's health program; and it breaks the already agreed upon Budget Control Act of 2011, threatening, once again, a government shutdown.

This is also the budget endorsed by Mitt Romney. Today the Republicans made their most definitive statement for the America they envision. This is their platform for 2012, from the top down.

Not to outdone, the Senate Republicans filibustered a bill to repeal subsidies and tax breaks to Big Oil that had majority support.

 Another day in the Senate, another filibuster by Republicans on behalf of corporate America. The Senate voted on advancing a bill to repeal subsidies and tax breaks to Big Oil, and while the majority supported the bill, the filibuster held in the final 51-47 vote (Republicans Mark Kirk and Orrin Hatch were not present to vote).

Maine Republicans Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins voted with Democrats, while Democrats Mark Begich (AK), Mary Landrieu (LA), Jim Webb (VA) and Ben Nelson (NE) switched sides. Landrieu and Begich, being from oil producing states, were needlessly voting for self protection, since there wasn't a chance the filibuster could be broken. Webb and Nelson, both retiring, are completely inexcusable.
But this is the status quo that the Republicans voted to protect:

Just this past January the typical household paid about $290.76 for gasoline, up by $25 over the same one-month time span in January 2011. It looks like households will face a similar increase in gasoline expenditures in February with gas prices on the rise even though demand is the lowest it’s been since 1997. This especially affects the 82 million households that spend 6 percent or more of their annual household budgets on gasoline. High oil and gasoline prices in 2011 enabled the big five companies to rake in $137 billion in profits last year. These enormous earnings contributed to the $1 trillion in profits they earned from 2001 through 2011. Despite a profit figure with 12 zeroes—count them: $1,000,000,000,000—these oil giants are major players in the lobbying efforts to retain $4 billion in annual tax breaks for oil and gas companies that they clearly do not need. In the scheme of all things Big Oil, these tax breaks are small, particularly in relation to their profits and in light of the fact that in 2011 these companies also had a combined $58 billion in cash reserves, nearly 30 times more than they received in special tax breaks.

The American taxpayer is subsidizing those billions Big Oil is raking in, while we pay more and more at the pump every week. At least we know now, definitively, which side the Republicans are on.

A Progressive Budget Or The Ryan Plan: American Dream Or American Nightmare

 Who Pays The Bill For Wall Street's Mess?

By Robert Borosage, cross-posted from Campaign For America's Future

DonkeyHotey

Yesterday, House Republicans rolled out their budget plan in the Washington version of a Hollywood movie opening. There was a star turn for Budget Chair Paul Ryan at a conservative think tank. Gaseous rhetoric -- "liberties endangered, time to choose" -- fouled the air. There were dueling videos, and furious salvos of partisan messaging. And a backup document -- the "Path to Prosperity" -- festooned with tables for wonks to wallow in.

Today, with fewer trumpets and less fanfare, the Congressional Progressive Caucus releases its budget plan -- A Budget for All.

Each of the two documents is designed to define a message. Their contrasts help clarify the real choices the country faces. Federal deficits exploded after Wall Street's excesses blew up the economy. The questions now are who gets the bill and when does the payment start? Ryan's Republican budget and the CPC's offer starkly different answers that would take the country in starkly different directions.

The Bathtub Fantasy

"My goal is to cut government... to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." Grover Norquist.

Ryan's Republican budget, like a speedo bathing suit on a corpulent geezer, is revealing, but not flattering. Even by Washington standards, this is a remarkably dishonest document. It claims to be serious, but offers targets that are simply preposterous. It calls for leveling with the American people, but cravenly ducks laying out who will pay for top end tax cuts. It calls itself a "blueprint for American renewal" while systematically trampling the American dream.

Republicans have lined up like lemmings to sign Grover Norquist's infamous pledge never to raise taxes on anyone at any time. But turns out they even treat the quips of the conservative gadfly as gospel. As the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities pointed out, the Ryan budget, by its own numbers, assiduously pursues Grover's bathtub fantasy.

The Congressional Budget Office reports that under the Ryan budget, by 2050 most of the federal government would simply cease to exist. Ryan's budget would shrink all federal expenditures outside of interest payments, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and children's health to 3.75 percent of gross domestic product (GDP).

To translate that arcane measure, CBO notes that "spending for defense alone has not been lower than 3 percent of GDP in any year [since World War II]. " Ryan and Republicans call for increasing defense spending -- so the rest of the government would have to be cut to bathtub size. Ryan argues that the "challenges this nation faces are among the largest in its history," but the budget target he offers is, well, goofy.


Tribunes of the 1%

With this budget, Republicans choose to be the tribunes of the 1%. They send the bill not to the banks that blew up the economy or the wealthy that enjoyed the party, but to the elderly, the middle class and the poor.
 Consider:

• Cut Taxes on The Rich. At a time of extreme inequality -- with the top 1 percent capturing a staggering 93 percent of all income gains in 2010 -- Republicans would dramatically lower taxes on the wealthiest Americans and, by definition, raise them on working families.

[Ryan isn't candid enough to admit to that, of course. He extends the top end Bush tax cuts, cuts top income tax rates to 25 percent, sustains lower rates on wealth (capital gains, dividends, millionaires' estates) while claiming the reforms will raise as much money by eliminating loopholes and tax breaks that he refuses to specify. But the only way to raise enough money to do that is to go after the biggest deductions -- limit the mortgage deduction for middle class homeowners and/or cut the tax benefits for employers provided health care. The first would add to housing woes; the second would lead more employers to stop providing health care. Both reforms that would directly hit working families.]

• Cut Health Care for Millions. With health care costs soaring and employers cutting back on health insurance benefits, the Republican budget would add millions to the rolls of the uninsured by eliminating the Obama health care reforms, with no program in its place.

• End Medicare as We Know It. With boomers headed into retirement and soaring Medicare and Medicaid costs driving projected deficits, we have to get health care costs under control. But instead of taking on the drug and insurance companies and the hospital complexes that drive up costs, the Republican budget would end Medicare as we know it, requiring seniors to pay more. When today's 55-year-olds retire, they would discover that Medicare has been turned into a voucher or "premium support" program that will not keep up with health care costs, forcing them to pay thousands more out of their own pockets. The Republican budget would also cut Medicaid support drastically for the most vulnerable -- the impoverished, the disabled, and the terminally ill.

• Cut Access to College. With college tuition soaring and more and more people being priced out of the education they have earned and need, the Republican budget would solve the problem by cutting back on student loan and grant programs. They would ration college admission by income rather than by merit.

• The Poor Pay for Deficit Reduction. And with poverty rising, the Republican budget would require that the poorest and most vulnerable Americans bear much of the burden of reducing the deficits that exploded when Wall Street blew up the economy. (Although, again, Republicans don't admit which domestic programs would take the hit. But, by reducing spending on domestic discretionary programs by one third in 10 years, they insure devastating cuts in everything from Head Start to education to disease control.)

• Let America Decline. With our basic infrastructure -- from roads to schools to sewage systems -- in dangerous decline, the construction industry flat on its back, and interest rates near record lows, Republicans call for spending less, not more, on rebuilding America, costing jobs, and rendering our economy less competitive and putting more lives at risk.

• Make the World a Tax Haven. With global corporations growing ever more adept at using transfer pricing and overseas tax havens to avoid taxes here at home, Republicans would make the entire world outside the U.S. a corporate tax haven, ending any taxation on profits reported abroad, encouraging companies to move jobs and book profits abroad.

• Pad the Pentagon. With the U.S. spending almost as much on its military as the rest of the world combined, Republicans demand that we raise, not pare, Pentagon spending.

The Austerity Trap

Ryan's Republican Budget has one other fundamental message -- that America must turn its attention immediately to the "crushing burden of debt." Ryan would cut spending by over $500 billion in the first two years compared to the president's budget, while claiming to lower taxes by about $131 billion. That takes nearly a 2 percent of GDP boost out of an economy growing at about the same rate. Ryan brags that the Republican budget reduces deficits faster and lower than the president's budget. (Although given that he won't reveal how he pays for over $4 trillion in tax cuts and what programs would take the spending cuts, that is far from proven.)

Lost in the race for austerity is the reality that we desperately need jobs and growth. Although the economy has started to generate jobs, 25 million Americans are still in need of full time work. We have fewer jobs than we had a decade ago, and millions more people. This debate should be focused on jobs, not cuts.
Ryan and Republicans duck this by arguing that austerity will increase confidence, and "job creators" will get to work. But we have seen how austerity works in Europe, now teetering on the edge of recession. It not only costs jobs; it makes deficit reduction harder. Ryan's budget assumes a rate of growth that his spending cuts and layoffs are likely to undermine.

The Budget for All

In stark contrast, today the Congressional Progressive Caucus releases its FY2013 "Budget for All." (Not yet posted on web as this is written.) This will be offered as an alternative to the Ryan budget on the floor of the Congress and in the halls of public opinion. It, too, is a message document -- designed to show that common sense priorities do add up.

The CPC budget reduces deficits faster than Ryan does over the first 10 years. But the CPC begins sensibly, by boosting the economy with jobs measures in the early years. It calls for direct hiring programs -- a Student Jobs Corps and a School Improvement Corps among others. It would rebuild America with an infrastructure bank and bigger investment in roads, bridges and trains. It sustains investment in research and development, clean energy and manufacturing. And it repeals the austerity inflicted by the debt ceiling agreement.

The CPC assumption is that putting people back to work is the priority. And its budget shows this is not incompatible with deficit reduction.

As the economy recovers, the CPC would send the bill for deficit reduction to those who contributed to or benefited from the mess. It focuses on the "true drivers of our deficit -- unsustainable tax policies, the wars overseas, and the causes and effects of the recent recession" -- rather than going after programs for the poor and the elderly.

Hold Wall Street Responsible. The CPC would hold the banks accountable, imposing a "financial crisis responsibility fee" on the banks, raising $90 billion over 10 years and putting a brake on computer driven, nano-second financial speculation by imposing a financial transactions tax raising nearly $850 billion over 10 years.

Tax the Rich. Instead of lowering taxes on the rich, the CPC would raise them -- repealing the top end Bush tax cuts, taxing income from wealth at the same rate as income from work, raising tax rates on millionaires. The CPC would even impose a small temporary surcharge on individual fortunes over $10 million.

The CPC embraces Obama's minimum tax on overseas profits, curbs deductions for CEO stock options, and ends fossil fuel preferences. Perhaps its most controversial clause is its most sensible -- putting a price on carbon emissions, while aggressively refunding costs to working and poor families.

Reform Health Care. On soaring health care costs, the CPC would seek to limit costs, not send them to the most vulnerable. It would embrace the reforms built into the health care bill, add a public option to compete with private insurers, and require bulk purchase negotiations with drug companies for lower prices on drugs.

Pare the Pentagon. The Pentagon budget would be modestly pared over 10 years. Where Ryan ducks on Social Security, the CPC would act, lifting the income cap on Social Security taxes to secure the program.

The Choice

In his budget, Ryan suggests, "Americans, not Washington, deserve to choose the path their nation takes." These two budgets make that choice clear. The CPC would invest in jobs, preserve Social Security and Medicare, and call on the banks and the wealthy to pay a hefty share for getting us out of the hole we are in. Ryan's Republican budget would impose austerity, lavish benefits on the rich, end Medicare as we know it and send the bill for the mess to working families, the poor and the elderly. The CPC would invest in rebuilding the country and reviving the American Dream. Ryan would invest in policing the world and protecting the tax havens of multinationals, and turn the Dream into a fantasy. The Ryan budget stands with the 1%. The CPC with the rest of us. You get to choose.

What Republicans Argue When They Have Nothing Left To Say

By Robert Reich, cross-posted from his website

DonkeyHotey

Republicans are desperate. They can’t attack Obama on jobs because the jobs picture is improving.

Their attack on the Administration’s rule requiring insurers to cover contraception has backfired, raising hackles even among many Republican women.

Their attack on Obama for raising gas prices has elicited scorn from economists of all persuasions who know oil prices are set in global markets and that demand in the United States has actually fallen.

Their presidential ambitions are being trampled in a furious fraternal war among Republican candidates.

Their Tea Party wing wants to reopen the budget deal forged with Democrats after Republicans got bloodied by threatening to block an increase in the debt limit.

So what are Republicans to do now? What they always do when they have nothing else to say.
Call for a tax cut, of course.

It doesn’t matter that their new “tax reform” plan (leaked to the Wall Street Journal late Monday, to be released Tuesday morning) has as much chance of being enacted as Herman Cain has of being elected president.

It doesn’t matter than the plan doesn’t detail how they plan to pay for the tax cuts. Or whether an even bigger whack would have to be taken out of Medicare than Paul Ryan’s original voucher plan – which would drowned many elderly under rising medical costs.

It doesn’t even matter that the plan would probably raise taxes on many lower-income Americans,
All that matters is the headlines.

“House Republican Budget to Propose Lower Income Tax Rates,” says Bloomberg Businessweek. “Republican Budget Plan Seeks to Play Up Tax Reform,” says Reuters. “GOP’s Budget Targets Taxes,” blares the Wall Street Journal.

Presto. Republicans have gotten what they wanted on the basis of saying absolutely nothing.

Robert Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley.  He writes a blog at www.robertreich.org.  His most recent book is Aftershock.

Populism And Pain In Obama's Budget Proposal

By Karen Dolan, cross-posted from Other Words

Mitt Romney said it this way:

"I'm not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs a repair, I'll fix it. I'm not concerned about the very rich, they are fine....I'm concerned about the very heart of America."

President Barack Obama said it this way:

"We can restore an economy where everybody gets a fair shot, everybody does their fair share, everybody plays by the same set of rules — from Washington to Wall Street to Main Street. That’s the America we believe in."

Both want to appeal to a hurting middle-class electorate. Only one has a populist message with appeal and effect. He most likely will win re-election in 2012.

Obama's $3.8 trillion 2013 budget proposal, with its 10-year outlook, is by design a populist campaign tool. Though not politically viable now, his newly released budget is critically important in this election year both for the values it reflects, the vision it promotes and the potential it promises.

Obama's budget has a populist tone, appeals to the middle class, and has some good proposals, both on investment and revenue-raising. But it also reflects the strict spending caps mandated this past summer by the Budget Control Act and hits some struggling families hard. It doesn't go nearly far enough in revenue-raising. For instance, it does't propose a tax on financial transactions that would curb Wall Street's worst speculation or propose significant corporate tax reform that would actually raise needed funds. And, by reducing non-security discretionary spending from its current 3.1 percent of GDP to a 50-year low of 1.7 percent over the next decade, a lot of pain will set in when the populism starts to wears off.


Let's start with the good. Among the good proposals on investment side:

• The extension of the payroll tax cut and unemployment benefits through the end of 2012.
• School modernization and plans to retain teachers and first responders.
• Project Rebuild which helps to match unemployed in distressed communities with those communities'  infrastructure needs.
• A small business tax credit that incentivizes new hiring.
• Increased child care funding.
• Improvements in Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit.
• Tax incentives for manufacturers that keep and create jobs here in the United States.
• A National Infrastructure Bank that would fund projects that increase sustainable transportation and infrastructure investment.
• A total of $850 million in Race to the Top education proposals intended to improve the quality of education from early childhood through higher education.
• Efforts to make college more affordable through sustaining Pell grant funding, keeping interest on student loans from increasing, and reining in tuition hikes.
• A 7 percent increasing in new biomedical research grants.
• Support for a more sustainable economy through goals of increasing electric car production, doubling the share of "clean energy" electricity sources, and reducing the energy consumed by buildings by 20 percent by 2020.

And, among good proposals on the revenue side:

• Support sustainable energy and environment innovations by eliminating 12 tax breaks to the oil, gas, and coal industries by $41 billion over the next 10 years.
• Spend $487 billion less on the military over the coming decade.
• Make the "Buffet Rule" law, ensuring that millionaires pay a 30  percent tax rate on un-earned income.
• Let the Bush Era tax cuts for families making over $250,000 a year expire.

On to the bad. Here are some aspects of Obama's proposed budget that aren't as good as they might first seem:

• According to the Citizen's For Tax Justice, although the Obama plan proposes revenues from letting Bush era tax cuts expire for couples making over $250,000, it makes permanent 78 percent of the Bush tax cuts at a cost of $3.4 trillion over the next 10 years.
• Obama's proposal to replace the Alternative Minimum Tax with the "Buffet Rule" may not produce any new revenue at all.
• Details remain undisclosed about corporate tax reform proposals, but Obama has suggested they will be revenue-neutral. How is that a good thing?
• Even with this modest reduction in Pentagon spending, Obama's budget proposal still leaves an extreme imbalance between military and non-military spending.

Now, for the Ugly: Last year's Budget Control Act mandated $1 trillion in discretionary cuts. Much of that must come from programs that low-income people rely on for critical human needs. After a hard year of cuts in 2011, this budget proposal calls for a devastating 14 percent cut in social spending. Here are some examples where cuts occur:

• Health care services, career opportunities programs for low-income people.
• Children's mental health services.
• Housing for disabled people.
• Housing for people with HIV/AIDS.
• Rental Assistance benefits for low-income people.
• Home heating assistance for low-income people.
• Community Development Block Grants which help to fund critical human need services.
• Programs in the Environmental Protection Agency.
• Programs in the National Park Service.

This budget proposal will appeal to the middle class and puts Obama in a more popular position than Romney as the 2012 presidential election season heats up. But while this budget has the populist thrust of cutting long-term deficit and debt by attempting to balance spending cuts and revenue increases, it falls short. It bolsters some needed programs, but unnecessarily defunds others. By not calling for all of the Bush era tax cuts to expire, not calling on Wall Street to pay its fair share through enacting a small levy on speculative financial transactions, not cutting military base and war spending deeply enough and not calling for the kind of corporate tax reform that will produce revenue, Obama is letting the 1 percent off rather easy, while the rest of us, especially the poor, shoulder  the pain.

What The 2013 Budget Says About The Fight For Our Future

By Isaiah J. Poole, cross-posted from Campaign for America's Future

DonkeyHotey

One does not have to accept all of the specific choices in the administration's budget to appreciate the fact that the administration is trying to lay the groundwork for a broad and sustainable economic recovery, while the administration's opponents continue to be hell-bent on austerity policies that would stall that recovery.

President Obama explained his vision today in an address today at the Northern Virginia Community College. As reported by Politico:

“At a time when our economy is growing and creating jobs at a faster clip, we’ve got to do everything in our power to keep this recovery on track,” Obama said at Northern Virginia Community College. “We can settle for a country where a few people do really, really well, and everybody else struggles to get by, or we can restore an economy where everybody gets a fair shot, everybody does their fair share, everybody plays by the same set of rules, from Washington to Wall Street to Main Street.”

Meanwhile, The Washington Post reported today that Republican leaders on Capitol Hill, in addition to their usual complaints that Obama's policies would leave "America drowning in debt," reprised a version of their Medicare privatization plan. Yes, that same voucher plan that was roundly rejected by a majority of Americans when Rep. Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, persuaded House Republicans to back it last year. That plan exemplifies the Republican economic agenda: A few people would do really, really well as congressional conservatives fight to maintain inequitable, record-low tax rates for the wealthiest Americans; everybody else would struggle to get by in a world where what were once shared commitments, such as Medicare to maintain the health of seniors, are turned into yet another opportunity for private gain and another source of economic insecurity for the vast majority of Americans.

This contrast will be exemplified vividly this week when the House of Representatives begins debate on funding for the nation's transportation network. The White House budget includes a $476 billion, six-year funding commitment for highways and public transportation, and administration officials were working with the Senate toward turning that commitment into legislation.

This is a huge spending commitment to make, but President Obama recognizes correctly that some investments can't be compromised, even at a time of large budget deficits. Even so, this is a fraction of what groups such as the American Society of Civil Engineers say America needs for a globally competitive economy. Nonetheless, this transportation spending will generate hundreds of thousands of jobs in the near term in areas ranging from construction to engineering to beautification, and in the long term this spending will establish a platform for a more efficient and greener economy.



Conservatives are girding to attack this. They argue that the funding source that has traditionally paid for road and transit improvements, the gasoline tax, won't yield enough money to pay for the president's spending plan. (At the same time, they object to increasing the gas tax so that it could.) House Speaker John Boehner has indicated that he wants to curtail federal support for public transportation, a direct slap at tens of millions of workers (and job-seekers) who depend on buses and trains to get to work. Other cuts would slap the face of commuters who use bike paths or parents whose children are protected by the federal Safe Routes to School program. And, to pay for what spending they are willing to sign off on, key conservatives in Congress are attaching to the bill oil drilling in environmentally sensitive areas, such as the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, and forcing approval of the game-over-for-the-planet Keystone XL pipeline, risking environmental havoc at a time when we should be moving away from a fossil-fuel economy.

The contrast plays out throughout the budget. While the White House is embracing such policies as the "Buffett Rule," which would tax unearned income at the same level as wages and pushing for more fairness in the tax code, congressional conservatives accuse the administration of "class warfare"—even as they continue their own "class warfare" against government programs that provide millions of economically struggling Americans with a level of economic security and a means to climb the economic ladder.

The particulars of the Obama 2013 budget may not survive the Washington political grinder, but here's what should: the debate between a government that works for the benefit of ordinary people, operating on the principles that we should all work together to rise together and that those who benefit the most have the most obligation to support the opportunity of others, and a government that works the hardest for those with the most, and, to paraphrase the words of presidential candidate Mitt Romney, "doesn't worry" about those with the least.

In the coming days progressives in Congress will offer their own budget framework, which will draw the contrast in even more stark terms, and demonstrate that we as a nation do not have to accept the conservative austerity economics that are playing out to such disastrous effect in countries such as Greece. Whether it's the Obama administration budget or a progressive alternative, it is important to show that one set of budget decisions will point millions of Americans closer to their American dream of broadly shared prosperity, while conservative critics will drive us toward a dystopian economic future.

Super Committee Headlines You'll Never See

By Richard (RJ) Eskow, cross-posted from Campaign for America's Future

Discussion of the "Super Committee" debacle continues to misguide and misinform the public in an all-too-familiar way. Once again the consensus in the media and among political leaders reflects the misperceptions of an insular Washington culture, rather than the economic or political realities of most Americans.

The Republican and Democratic co-chairs said today that "we end this process united in our belief that the nation's fiscal crisis must be addressed." That's how this exercise in misplaced priorities ends: With a "bipartisan" statement about the urgency of our "fiscal crisis" - deficits - rather than our massive and much more immediate economic crisis of jobs and stagnating wages. And with that, the media onslaught begins. Now we'll see hundreds of new headlines screaming that the Committee "failed."

What we won't see are headlines explaining what really happened: That this failure was inevitable; that it reflects the wishes of most people, Republicans as well as Democrats; that Occupy Wall Street played a large part in the outcome; that Republicans never intended to compromise and Democrats shot themselves in the foot; that this "failure" will be good for most businesses - and for the rest of us too; or that a misguided and right-leaning consensus turned leaders of both parties into cheerleaders for ill-timed budget cuts even as the economy continued to burn down all around them.

Here are seven more accurate - and more eye-catching - headlines you won't see in your major media outlets.

OCCUPY MOVEMENT WINS MAJOR VICTORY
Unpopular 'Supercommittee' Deal Stymied by Popular Opinion
 
Democrats tried. They really tried. They were ready to accept deal points that the polls - and their hearts - should have forced them to refuse: Benefit cuts to Social Security and Medicare. A permanent extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. A deal that was heavily weighted toward spending cuts, rather than revenues, even during an economic crisis.

They might very well have done it, too, except for one thing: The Occupy movement has changed the subject from the Washington-driven theme of deficits to the economic hardships faced by most people in this country. Sure, the Tea Party is getting credit (yes, I said "credit") for killing a disastrous deal, and it's true that it played an important role.

But so did the Occupy movement. There was talk of occupying Congress, and even occupying the "Super" meeting's meeting space in the now-infamous Room 200. A march and rally is scheduled for tomorrow, and an Occupy group walking from Wall Street to Washington is scheduled to arrive the day after tomorrow.

Democrats who signed on to this deal were going to feel the wrath of the 99%, and there's no way they couldn't have known it. People who have spent the last two years wishing that they had a Tea Party of their own, one that would pressure Dems the way the Tea Party pressures Republicans, can now rest easy. It's here. And it's changing things.

The moral for Democrats? Embrace jobs and growth, not cuts and austerity. You'll thank yourself next November. Some Republicans will probably thank you, too ...


GOP VOTERS HOLD "EXTREME" VIEW OF CUTS - EXTREMELY "LIBERAL," THAT IS
"Left" Anti-Supercommittee Views Supported by Almost 3 Out of 4 Republicans
 
We're already hearing that the unwillingness of some Democrats to sign on to cuts in Social Security and Medicare - the few, the proud, the real Dems - is a sign of "ideological rigidity on the extreme left." Pundits are referring to Senators like Bernie Sanders and Representatives like the members of the House Progressive and African-American Caucuses.

Extreme left? Their position is supported by three out of four voters - Republican voters, that is. A new poll confirms what previous polls have shown: Once voters have these proposed deals explained to them, they hate them.

Nearly three out of voters are against changing Social Security's cost of living adjustment (COLA), as the White House and some Democratic supercommittee members were prepared to do. That includes 70% of Republicans and 78% percent of seniors, who turn out to vote in larger numbers than other age groups.

The next time somebody says these Democrats were being too ideologically rigid, ask them what's wrong with representing the party's rank and file. Especially when that includes other party's rank and file too.

GOP 'COMPROMISE' HOAX SPREAD BY PRESS, PUNDITS
Supposed "compromise" was actually more extreme than ever

It seems almost unkind to point to this piece by Ruth Marcus, who said last week that she was "uncharacteristically optimistic" that the Committee actually would reach a deal. Then we're reminded that she writes for the Washington Post, newspaper for the Federal government's "company town."

Why was Ms. Marcus optimistic? Because, as her headline reads, "Republicans were (making) room for tax increases after all." Why? Because far-right Sen. Pat Toomey and far-right Rep. Jeb Hensaerling were moving away from their "no new taxes" rhetoric and offering, in her words, "a deal that included — gasp! — a net increase in tax revenue from the current level."

She added: "I don’t mean this in a disrespectful way, but pigs are flying here, folks."

Flying? No. Squealing? I wouldn't say that - too disrespectful. But why the enthusiasm from Ms. Marcus? Because, she says, "he once-sacred principle of not raising taxes — any taxes, ever — has been breached."

But it hadn't been. As she herself is fair enough to point out, Republicans were still offering a tax cut, given that Bush's cuts are due to expire. And the deal they offered wasn't a cut for most Americans - only for the wealthiest among us. They were actually proposing another slashing of the high-end rate, which is scheduled to go back to 39+%, down to 28%. In return they were offering "revenues" - by eliminating tax deductions the middle class depends on, especially in these difficult time.

Ms. Marcus and dozens of other commentators have successfully pushed the idea that "both sides were willing to compromise," but were styming by "extremists" in their own party. Not true. Extremists run the Republican Party. And as for the Democrats ...

DEMS DEMAND TO GO ON RECORD AS EAGER TO CUT SOCIAL SECURITY, MEDICARE
Party Leaders Deny Defending Popular Programs, Insist They Were Prepared to Gut Them 
 
There's a great narrative for the Democrats here, if they're willing to take it: We said 'no' to cutting your benefits to protect rich people. Instead they're insisting on making it clear to the American people that they did no such thing. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said that it was Republican intransigence on taxes, not Democratic willingness to bend on these programs, that scuttled the deal. Combined with Carney's past statements supporting that unpopular COLA cut, that means the Administration is still on record as saying it wasn't prepared to defend these benefit from cuts that the public despises. Instead, Carney bemoaned the GOP's refusal to sign on to a 'grand bargain' that would have done exactly that.

The Democratic supercommittee members were even more flatfooted. "If we fail to do this it will define 2012 going forward," Sen. John Kerry said last week. That's insisting on defining a victory - "We defended your benefits from the party of the rich!" - as failure.

If Dems had any illusions that Republicans wouldn't use this against them, they should already have been dispelled. "“It is another example of failed leadership," said Mitt Romney. "(Obama) has not taken personal responsibility to get the super committee to find ways to balance the budget and cut spending.”

Which gets us to our next headline.

WASHINGTON MOURNS MISSED CHANCE TO ENSURE A 'LOST DECADE'
Leaders lament lost opportunity to create a decade of economic misery 
 
From CNBC: "The austerity measures being rolled out in countries across Europe will have a devastating effect on the living standards of its population, an economist told CNBC Friday.

"These reforms are going to be devastatingly impacting (sic) on the population in these countries. We are looking at a decade of lost living standards across most of Europe."


The economist, James Shugg from Wespace, added that austerity measure, while "part of the solution, will "deepen the downturn." Here's the paradox: They're only "part of the solution" because no one in Washington seems willing to address our real economic problems in a genuine way.

BUSINESS LEADERS CELEBRATE SUPERCOMMITTEE FAILURE
At least they won't make things worse, executives say. 
 
We keep hearing that "business" wants these cuts, but that's only true for the mega-corporations and billionaires that dominate the Washington conversation. What do the other businesses say, the ones that hire people and help to grow the economy?

As Business For Shared Prosperity reports in a new pess release, some of their leaders are celebrating the "defeat."

“Demand drives business, not tax cuts,” said Lew Prince, said the managing partner of a St. Louis music store. “I hire more workers if I think I’ll do more business." Austerity cuts means a stagnating economy. That means people don't buy as much as they once did at Lew Prince's store. And that means fewer jobs.

Frank Knapp, who is the President and CEO of the South Carolina Small Business Chamber of Commerce and Vice Chairman of the American Sustainable Business Council, was even more blunt: “I’m sick of people who wrecked the economy and their defenders in Congress blaming others for killing jobs. The high-end Bush tax cuts are a big part of the problem – not the solution. We need revenue for real job creation and economic renewal, not more job-killing budget cuts, job-killing corporate tax dodging and job-killing millionaires and billionaires not paying their fair share of taxes."

Which gets us to our last headline:

IN SURPRISE DEVELOPMENT, TERRIBLE IDEA NOT WORKING OUT WELL
Pundits, Washington leaders today expressed surprise and dismay at failure of unpopular committee to agree on widely-hated cuts 
 
That's it. No body, just the headline. Some stories just write themselves.

Stopping The Austerity Train Wreck

Robert Reich explains on his website with his usual clarity how "Washington is on another planet" and that whether or not the Super Committee reaches an agreement or not, "Washington is on the road to making budget cuts that will slow the economy, increase unemployment, and impose additional hardship on millions of Americans."

 
 He lists four "super principles" that ought to guide the Super Committee:

FIRST: no cuts before jobs are back – until unemployment is down to 5 percent. Until then, the economy needs a boost, not a cut. Consumers – whose spending is 70 percent of the economy – don’t have the money to boost the economy on their own. Their pay is dropping and they’re losing jobs.

SECOND: Make the boost big enough. 14 million Americans are out of work, and 10 million are working part time who need full-time jobs. The President’s proposed jobs program is a start but it’s tiny relative to what needs to be done. It would create fewer than 2 million jobs. We need a big jobs program – rebuilding America’s crumbling infrastructure, and including a WPA and Civilian Conservation Corps.

THIRD: To pay for this, raise taxes on the super-rich. It’s only fair. Never before has so much income and wealth been concentrated at the very top, and taxes on the top so low. Go back to the 70 percent marginal tax we had before 1980. And include more tax brackets at the top. It doesn’t make sense that any income over $375,000 is taxed at the same 35 percent, even if it’s a billion dollars. And tax all sources of income at the same rate, including capital gains.

FOURTH: Cut the budget where the real bloat is. Military spending and corporate welfare. End weapons systems that don’t work and stop wars we shouldn’t be fighting to begin with, and we save over $300 billion a year. Cut corporate welfare – subsidies and special tax breaks going to big agribusiness, big oil, big pharma, and big insurance – and we save another $100 billion. 

 Robert Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley.  He writes a blog at www.robertreich.org.  His most recent book is Aftershock.

Occupy Needs To Just Say No To The Super Committee

by Fuzzyone

I have been thinking a lot about the Occupy Movement and its potential to move the larger political debate lately, but I have been having a difficult time crystallizing those thoughts into a form coherent enough to write down (and whether I have managed to do so here is an open question).  A couple of recent posts here at Fair and Unbalanced have helped me out.  First, there was the excellent testimony of Robert Borosage at the Congressional Progressive Caucus's hearing on jobs.  He lays out the problems we face, why the ideas coming out of the Super Committee are bad, and what we need to do.  His main proposal is the passage of the People's Budget, something I have talked about before (but which, lets face it, is not going to happen).  Then there was this morning's post by lovechilde on the Occupy Movement at two months.

I think that the problems that lovechilde talks about are very real.  I live in Oakland and have been involved in and listening to conversations about the Occupy Movement since it began, and particularly since the first, violent eviction of the occupiers in Oakland.  Some of those conversations have been with people who are sympathetic to the movement but put off by the tactics, not only the violence of the very small number of idiots but also the negative impact on small business and the cost to a city that is already in a dire financial situation.  One of the things I found particularly interesting was the different take that the members of two local list-serves have on the movement.  One, a neighborhood list which is mostly focused on crime prevention and neighborhood watch in one of the more affluent neighborhoods in Oakland, mostly anti-Occupy.  The posts ranged from sympathy for ends but dislike of means to full on Fox crazy talk of, I kid you not, Bolshevik revolution.  The other is an Oakland Public School Parents list where there is almost universal approval of the movement (with a few concerns expressed about tactics) especially because of its support for those fighting the proposed closure of five Oakland Elementary Schools. 

One of the things that I found most troubling, and that I think emphasizes the challenges the movement faces and that lovechilde discussed, is that even those who were sufficiently well informed to know that the violence comes from a very small minority, and that the majority had attempted to stop it, were still dismissive of the movement in large part because of that.  Another significant source of opposition was the perceived (though there is disagreement about that even among business owners) harm that the movement was doing to small business in a city that is desperate to increase business and investment.

As lovechilde said the Occupy Movement will need to evolve if it is going to continue to have broad appeal and an effect on what happens in this country.  The fact that this is on the mainstream media radar is, I think, a good sign and I think that Occupy can and will continue to be a force.  The problem is that we are quickly running out of time.  The Super Committee deadline is fast approaching and there is every sign that democrats are preparing to surrender once again.  I assume that anyone who has been awake for the Obama Presidency needs no explanation of why that is entirely likely, but if you do you can look here or here.



This is all going to happen very soon, like this week, and it is not clear that the Occupy Movement can have much more impact on the immediate process than it already has.  There are however, two points that the movement, and progressives in general, can focus on.

First, there can be no deal that does not include significant increases in tax revenues focused on increasing the taxes on the wealthiest, especially those who destroyed the economy.  It seems clear that the Republicans are not going to accept anything close to a fair deal on revenues and that leads to point two: Do Nothing.

As E.J. Dionne, among others, have recently argued, the best outcome might be to do nothing.  While the automatic across the board cuts would be bad, they are probably no worse than what a super committee deal that Republicans would endorse.  Moreover, inaction would lead to the end of the Bush tax cuts.  This would, all told, reduce the deficit by $7.1 trillion over ten years.  In addition, a recent CNN poll indicates that the Republicans would get the blame:

The poll indicates that 42% say they would blame the Republicans in Congress, with 32% blaming the Democrats, and another one in five volunteering that they would hold both parties equally responsible.

The danger is that one Democratic defection on the Super Committee, if it leads to something a Republican House would pass, would mean the Democrats would have to block the deal in the Senate, which would likely change the public opinion picture.  That is why it is so important to focus on the idea that no deal is better than a bad deal and to avoid Republican traps, like the proposal to leave the details of tax increases for later (we know how that will work out).

By inserting into the debate the issues of income inequality and the responsibility of the rich, especially those in the financial industry (who by the way are, unlike anarchists, free to loot and pillage without fear of retribution), for our current financial difficulties the Occupy Movement has created at least the possibility that Democrats will not fold this time.  And then maybe we can talk about this country's urgent and immediate problem: Jobs.