In the tough but essential fight against outright lying in American politics, Ezra Klein has struck an important goal in a <em>Newsweek column today. As he points out, there are elements of the new health reform law that reduce the federal budget deficit (according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office) either directly by raising revenues (e.g., the tax on high-cost insurance policies) or indirectly by controlling health care costs. There are also provisions that in isolation would increase the federal budget deficit, either directly through more spending (e.g., subsidies for the purchase of private health insurance) or indirectly by boosting health care costs (requirements that people with pre-existing conditions be sold affordable policies).
Now Republicans are free to make the argument that the expensive stuff in the bill outweighs the stuff that reduces expenses, though simply asserting that against the independent expertise of CBO isn’t terribly persuasive. But as Klein points out, that’s really not where they seem to be going. Republicans are most focused on repealing cost controls, which generally aren’t popular, and are least interested, to the point of actual opposition in some cases, in repealing the very popular new benefits:

[O]ne of the unnoticed dynamics of health-care reform was that Democrats were so desperate to pass a bill that they were willing to accept cost controls that they would’ve laughed at in normal circumstances. They ran over unions to begin taxing employer benefits and created a process making it harder to protect Medicare from future cost-cutting reforms. Republicans could’ve used the opportunity to strengthen the sort of cost controls they’ve long said they wanted, while focusing their repeal efforts on the bill’s spending.
But they’re doing the opposite, and there’s a real risk to their strategy: if the bill’s hard choices are political losers, the policies that cost money aren’t. Subsidies for poor people are popular. Rules preventing insurers from discriminating based on preexisting conditions are popular. Tax credits for small businesses and closing the doughnut hole in the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit are popular. Cost controls aren’t. And Republicans, who’ve frequently argued that the bill is too costly, are taking direct aim at them.
If they repeal the parts but not the whole, we could end up with the bill’s cost control wrecked but its spending intact. “You can’t argue that you’re for fiscal responsibility then argue for taking out all the fiscally responsible parts,” says Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

It’s all the more reason that Republicans should be constantly pushed to offer their own vision for the health care system, not just attack the enacted reforms because some of them are unpopular.

As I’ve been arguing incessantly, one of the most basic strategic imperatives for Democrats everywhere is to force Republicans who are not currently in positions of authority to explain in detail what they would do if they were. When GOP candidates do move from a position of simply and vaguely deploring the status quo, interesting things are revealed about their priorities.
Consider the Republican nominee for governor of South Carolina, the self-styled “conservative reformer” Nikki Haley (mainly known out-of-state as the victim of nasty sexual rumors and ethnic slurs). According to The State newspaper (via Think Progress), Haley’s first big policy proposal is to eliminate income taxes on corporations. This would blow a significant hole in a South Carolina budget that’s already under considerable stress, but the more significant thing to understand is Haley’s rationale: “To be able to say we are a right-to-work state and a no-corporate-income-tax state is going to cause businesses to want to come, and it will create jobs in the process.”
In other words, Haley’s entire understanding of state economic development policy seems to boil down to the ancient race-to-the-bottom mentality of cutting business costs to raid companies from other states. But at the same time, according to the same article in The State, Haley favors eliminating a current exemption from the state sales tax for food purchases, because creating that exemption in 2007 “didn’t create one job.” Interesting way of thinking about taxes, eh? Low- and middle-income people may need to eat, but their eating doesn’t create jobs, it seems. So they need to pony up more tax dollars so that out-of-state corporations can get a tax break if they move in to exploit the state’s low non-union wage rates.
You can imagine the implications of this approach if elevated to the national level, where you can’t pretend that you’re going to be able to raid jobs from your neighbors, and you have to come right out and admit you believe that whatever’s good for corporations is good for America. So think about that next time you read about Haley being a future president of the United States, or when she throws her political prestige behind one of her recent benefactors like Sarah Palin or Mitt Romney.

A new NBC/Wall Street Journal survey shows the Democratic Party’s favorable rating dropping to 33%, the lowest level since July of 2006. The same survey, however, shows the Republican Party’s favorable rating dropping to 24%, the lowest level ever recorded by the pollster.
On another front, PPP has released one of its perioidic 2012 presidential election polls. It shows President Obama’s job approval/disapproval ratio as being slightly in negative territory at 47-48. But it also shows the favorable/unfavorable ratios for the most commonly named GOP opponents all in negative territory as well (Huckabee: 32-34; Palin: 37-54; Gingrich: 31-48; Paul: 23-34; Romney: 35-37). Obama also leads all these worthies in head-to-head match-ups.
It is often forgotten that elections do involve comparisons of parties and candidates. Perhaps the GOP will have a big mid-term election based on simply a rejection of Democratic governance or unhappiness with the status quo. But in presidential years, the “out” party needs a bit more than being “out,” and Republicans continue to show that they don’t have the platform or the leadership to look good by comparison.

Last night’s primary returns from four states were enough to keep me up past my bedtime. The biggest upset was probably Dan Malloy’ easy win over Ned Lamont in the CT Democratic gubernatorial primary, though the size of Michael Bennet’s eight-point win over Andrew Romanoff in the CO Dem Senate primary certainly surprised me. Three races expected to be very close–the Republican gubernatorial and Senate races in CO, and the GOP gubernatorial runoff–were in fact very close. Karen Handel’s concession to Nathan Deal in GA, with absentee ballots still to be counted and just over two thousand votes separating the candidates, was a bit of a surprise after a long and bitter campaign. Ken Buck’s 52-48 win over Jane Norton showed the value of political “home cooking;” virtually all of his margin can be attributed to a stellar performance in his home county (Weld) and the one next door to it (Larimer). You wish there could have been an exit poll for the CO GOP governor’s race to find out what voters thought they were doing when they cast ballots for Dan Maes. And you’d like to know if there was a point in the long evening when former Senator and now gubernatorial nominee Mark Dayton thought his long political career was finally over.
But here’s the really interesting thing: Democrats are at the moment front-runners in the gubernatorial contest in all four of these states, three of which currently have Republican governors. That’s a bit of good news for the Donkey Party during a tough year.

Much as I enjoyed romping through the craziness that is the Colorado Republican Party in an earlier post, I have a more somber feeling about the Republican contest in one of the other states holding elections today, my home state of Georgia.
I’ve posted a detailed preview over at FiveThirtyEight, which I wrote in as detached a tone as possible. Here I’ll say that the Republican gubernatorial runoff is one of the most stomach-turning I’ve watched in a while (with the notable exception of the bald-faced-lie extravaganza of the June 8 California GOP gubernatorial primary).
One candidate, “conservative reformer” Karen Handel, has now spent more than a year attacking everyone in her path as a scum-sucking corrupt redneck robbing the taxpayers. The other, former congressman Nathan Deal, has engaged in an extremist attack on Handel that reeks of archaic homophobia and misogyny. Listening to them, you’d never guess Handel is the political protege of the incumbent governor of the state, Sonny Perdue, or that Deal faced voters as a Democratic candidate for office eight times before switching parties the moment it became convenient for him. And that’s just what bugs me about the style of their campaigns; the “substance” is worse. Handel’s main platform plank other than supreme self-righteousness is the demagogic and irresponsible idea of abolishing the state income tax, without any proposal to replace the vast revenues that would involve, even though the state is nearly broke as it is. And to gain interest-group support against Handel, Deal has committed himself to every crazy position on social issues demanded by the Georgia Right-to-Life organization and other elements of the hard-core Christian Right.
It doesn’t help that half the likely 2012 Republican presidential field came running down to Georgia to participate in this abomination.
As a Democrat myself, I ought to be enjoying the spectacle, since it improves my party’s prospects in November. But sometimes shadenfreude‘s not so easy when your own friends and families could be affected, and the familiar landscape of politics is razed by campaigns so cynical that the only thing it’s possible for them to regret is to lose.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
The Republican Party is campaigning with a stiff wind at its back this year, thanks to a terrible economy, ripe targets created by two straight heavily Democratic cycles, favorable midterm turnout demographics, and the famous “enthusiasm gap.”
But, in Colorado, it seems as if the Republicans are conducting a meteorological experiment to test the strength of that wind, as they stumble disarrayed into today’s primary. The race for the Republican Senate nomination is ugly: Candidates Jane Norton and Ken Buck are locked in a klutzy and tasteless competition to see who will screw up least. And the gubernatorial race … well, it’s never a good sign when both of your primary candidates are facing widespread demands to resign from politics altogether. What’s more, the candidate who fails to lose that primary will face not only popular Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, the Democratic candidate, but also indignant third-party spoiler Tom Tancredo (who is in an unusually wrathful mood these days, even for him).
What the heck happened? How did the party end up looking so hapless in an election year that began with enormous optimism for a GOP sweep in Colorado?
Originally, former congressman Scott McInnis was cruising toward the gubernatorial nomination, while former Lieutenant Governor Jane Norton was the odds-on favorite for the Senate nod. Both were looking good in the occasional general election trial heat. Yes, McInnnis’s November battle with Hickenlooper would’ve been difficult, but he had no particular reason to worry about obscure self-styled Tea Party opponent Don Maes. And Norton, who is very mobbed-up in national GOP circles (her brother-in-law is uber-lobbyist and longtime campaign strategist Charlie Black), held a solid lead over district attorney Ken Buck, another Tea Partier, in Senate primary polls for many months.
Then, things started to unravel for the frontrunners.
By May, Buck, famous for spearheading a crackdown on employers of illegal immigrants, developed enough steam among Tea Party loyalists and other conservatives that Norton decided to skip the ritual of seeking ballot access via the Republican State Assembly. Essentially a state party convention, the assembly was an activist stronghold, and Norton’s decision threw the endorsement to Buck by default. Then came a far more painful blow: On the night of that gathering, Sarah Palin cruised into Denver for a big speech and failed to deliver an expected endorsement of Norton (according to some reports, she was warned off by purists in Colorado and elsewhere). Norton’s poll ratings began sliding steadily downward, and Buck picked up national support from Jim DeMint’s Senate Conservatives Fund and RedState’s Erick Erickson. By late June, he was in the lead.
There was another surprise at the State Assembly. The lightly regarded Maes edged out McInnis for the convention’s endorsement. Yet Maes lost this advantage almost immediately, when he was charged with embarrassing campaign-finance violations, backed up by fines that wiped out most of his very limited funds.
That’s when the real weirdness broke out.

Read more…

One of the most important conservative memes this year has been that public employees (particularly at the state and local levels of government) have fattened themselves on high salaries and rich benefit packages, which means it ought to be easy to dismiss state and local fiscal crises and shrink government generally without any real pain for real (you know, non-public-sector-employed) Americans.
There’s only a grain of truth, and a lot of nonsense, in this claim, and the grain of truth involves highly valued public employees like cops and firefighters–and occasionally teachers–who are fortunate enough to benefit from collective bargaining rights and union representation.
Jon Cohn of The New Republic has a good rundown on the facts on this topic, including this passage:

While raw statistics show that public employees get more compensation than private employees doing comparable work, research that adjusts for variables like education has suggested otherwise. Earlier this year, a study with such adjustments by economists Keith Bender and John Heywood concluded that compensation for local and state workers was, on average, 6.8 to 7.4 percent lower than compensation for comparable private sector workers.
Also, as Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research points out, many public employees don’t get Social Security. Overall, he says, “most public sector pensions do not provide retirees with an especially high standard of living.” Exceptions to this rule frequently include firefighters and police, particularly in New York. Then again, they risk their lives to protect the rest of us from lethal threats, which is more than you can say for CEOs like the former telecom executive who in 2007 retired with a $159 million benefit package.

The broader point, as Cohn makes clear, is that conservatives are trying to embitter struggling private-sector workers by making them resent struggling public-sector workers. If there is a “gap” between the economic security they enjoy, then it’s only logical to ask if that’s the result of public-sector employee luxury or private-sector employee impoverishment:

To what extent is the problem that the retirement benefits for unionized public sector workers have become too generous? And to what extent is the problem that retirement benefits for everybody else have become too stingy?
I would suggest it’s more the latter than the former. The promise of stable retirement–one not overly dependent on the ups and downs of the stock market–used to be part of the social contract. If you got an education and worked a steady job, then you got to live out the rest of your life comfortably. You might not be rich, but you wouldn’t be poor, either.
Unions, whatever their flaws, have delivered on that for their members. (In theory, retirement was supposed to rest on a “three-legged stool” of Social Security, pensions, and private benefits.) But unions have not been able to secure similar benefits for everybody else.

So let’s not just assume a race-to-the-bottom where all middle-class folk are expected to struggle is the natural state of things, particularly when the very wealthy are obtaining an ever-increasing share of America’s wealth and other blessings.

As Congress prepares for a big debate on the fate of the Bush tax cuts, there’s an internal debate breaking out in progressive circles on how to deal with tax rates on the very wealthy, not just those currently in the top income tax bracket.
This debate-within-the-debate is being driven by two external data points: First, the fact that income inequality in the United States during the last two (or arguably, the last four) decades has especially manifested itself in the concentration of wealth at the very top of the income ladder; and second, the fact that higher taxes for “millionaires” consistently polls well.
James Suroweicki explains the first point nicely in a recent column in The New Yorker:

Between 2002 and 2007…the bottom ninety-nine per cent of incomes grew 1.3 per cent a year in real terms–while the incomes of the top one per cent grew ten per cent a year. That one per cent accounted for two-thirds of all income growth in those years. People in the ninety-fifth to the ninety-ninth percentiles of income have represented a fairly constant share of the national income for twenty-five years now. But in that period the top one per cent has seen its share of national income double; in 2007, it captured twenty-three per cent of the nation’s total income. Even within the top one per cent, income is getting more concentrated: the top 0.1 per cent of earners have seen their share of national income triple over the same period. All by themselves, they now earn as much as the bottom hundred and twenty million people. So at the same time that the rich have been pulling away from the middle class, the very rich have been pulling away from the pretty rich, and the very, very rich have been pulling away from the very rich.
The current debate over taxes takes none of this into account.

Thus, framing the tax progressivity question as mainly involving rates for those with incomes well below super-rich levels misses the mark, and, as both Surowiecki and (for months now) Jonathan Chait have pointed out, misses a political opportunity associated with a widespread popular conviction that the very wealthy don’t pay their fair share of taxes.
In terms of the stakes involved in proposing something like a “millionaire’s tax” (essentially a new and higher top rate on very high incomes), Nate Silver has shown at FiveThirtyEight that it could indeed raise some pretty serious federal revenues.
But the political bonus of a “millionaire’s tax” proposal goes beyond the numbers: it would help expose the really dramatic gap between the two parties on the whole concept of progressive taxation.
After all, even as Democrats debate making federal income taxes more progressive, a growing and increasingly dominant segment of Republicans favor “flattening” tax rates to eliminate progressivity, exempting capital and corporate income from taxation, and/or shifting taxation away from income altogether and focusing it on consumption. And even for those Republicans who don’t embrace radical tax proposals, the “thinking” behind them is the rationale for the vague support for high-end or business tax cuts that’s almost universal in today’s GOP, in growing contradiction with conservative demands for debt-and-deficit reduction.
Anything that makes this contrast more vivid, on terms supported by big majorities of the American public, is a pretty good idea for Democrats. So I’d strongly recommend that in the debate over extending or eliminating Bush’s tax cuts for the top bracket, proposals to crate a new bracket for the “super-rich” ought to become an essential ingredient.