Call their bluff and go over the cliff

Portrait, Robert Reich, 08/16/09. (photo: Perian Flaherty)

By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog

readersupportednews.org

26 December 12

 
resident Obama is cutting his Christmas holiday short, returning to Washington for a last attempt at avoiding the fiscal cliff. But he’s running headlong into the Republican strategy of fanaticism.

It’s a long-established principle of game theory (see Thomas Schelling’s classic 1956 essay in the American Economic Review) that a fanatic who restricts his freedom to avert a disaster puts maximum pressure on his opponent to give ground.

In a game of highway chicken, for example, the driver that can’t swerve because he’s tied his hands to the steering wheel and chained his foot to the accelerator forces the other to swerve in order to avoid crashing.

The trick is for the first driver to convince the second that he’s crazy enough to have committed himself to instant death if the second doesn’t act rationally.

House Speaker John Boehner’s failure to persuade rank-and-file House Republicans to raise taxes even on millionaires fits the fanatic’s strategy exactly. Boehner can now credibly claim he has no choice in the matter -Republican fanatics in the House have tied his hands and manacled his feet — so the only way to avoid going over the cliff is for Obama and the Democrats to make more concessions.

The White House’s hope of getting the Senate to pass legislation that raises taxes on the wealthy in order to pressure Boehner won’t work because the legislation can’t possibly get through the House. That’s the point: Boehner has demonstrated he has no choice; the fanatics are in charge there.

Obama could decide going over the cliff isn’t so bad after all -as long as he and congressional Democrats introduce legislation early in the 2013 that gives a tax cut to the middle class retroactively to January 1st (extending the Bush tax cut to the first $250,000 of income) and restores most spending — and Republicans feel compelled to go along.

But with Boehner’s hands tied and the fanatics in charge, this gambit becomes far riskier. What if we go over the cliff and House Republicans continue to hold out against any tax increases on the rich while demanding major cuts in Medicare and Social Security?

The path of least resistance is for Obama and the Democrats to offer to keep everything as is, through 2013 -extend all the Bush tax cuts and continue all current spending (lifting the debt limit along the way) -unless or until a “grand bargain” on the budget is agreed to before the end of next year.

This is likely to satisfy enough Republican fanatics to gain a majority in the House. And it would avoid the fiscal cliff, kicking the can down the road and giving everyone more time.

Deficit hawks in both parties won’t like it, but that’s okay. Unemployment is still way too high and growth too meager to justify trimming the deficit any time soon.

The real problem with this gambit is it doesn’t change the game. Even down the road, Boehner’s hands will still be tied and the fanatics will remain in charge — which will give Republicans the stronger position in negotiations leading to a “grand bargain.” Compromise would have to be almost entirely on the Democrats’ side.

That’s why I’d recommend going over the cliff and forcing the Republicans’ hand. It’s a risky strategy but it would at least expose the Republican tactic and put public pressure squarely on rank-and-file Republicans, where it belongs.

The fanatics in the GOP have to be held accountable or they’ll continue to hold the nation hostage to their extremism. Even if it takes until the 2014 midterms to loosen their hold, the cost is worth it.

The Intersection of Guns, Guns and Guns

Political satirist Will Durst. (photo: WillDurst.com)

By Will Durst, Humor Times

readersupportednews.org

24 December 12

t’s only human nature to want to take action after such a harrowing traumatic event involving guns. To do something. Anything, to protect our kids. And make sure that Newtown never ever happens again. Here. There. Anywhere.

But while the rest of the nation grieves, familiar opponents on The Gun Issue are focused more on making sure their groups’ messages don’t get trampled in the anticipated tsunami of sorrow. So they preemptively are trying to drown out each other with battalions of bellicose bullhorns, and it doesn’t matter they can’t hear each other because neither side is listening anyway.

That’s the crossroads at which we find ourselves. Again. The intersection of Guns, Guns and Guns. Too many. Too few. Too big. Too small. Too scary looking. Waiting periods. Background checks. Magazine sizes. Access. Transportation. Construction. Registration. Who decides and who abides.

All the old buzz phrases are dusted off. “When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.” “Increased gun control means aiming better.” “Guns don’t kill people, people do.” Actually, it’s those darn bullets that puncture the skin and bones, creating holes for the blood to leak out of way too fast.

The NRA is busy pumping out press releases arguing that if the teachers had been armed, this tragedy could have been averted. Yeah, there you go. That’s what we need. MORE guns in schools. The major problem with school shootings, are schools. There’s your answer, boys. Want to cut down on school shootings, get rid of the schools. A solution many states are busy implementing as we speak.

Besides, why just arm the teachers? Aren’t we forgetting about our kids? Surely they have the right to defend themselves. The only question is where do you draw the line? Middle school? Fourth grade? Does the Second Amendment guarantee the rights of Toting Toddlers? Should kid-proof trigger guards be illegal? Maybe get Fisher Price to equip classrooms with plastic Day-Glo under-desk holsters.

The left is also once again questioning whether military-type assault weapons have a place in today’s society. To which the right vehemently argues semantics. “Semi- automatic rifles aren’t assault weapons and the left obviously has no experience with guns or they wouldn’t mislabel them and their ignorance on the subject disqualifies them to comment or have any opinion whatsoever.” Known in gun control circles as the “neener neener” argument.

An argument that totally misses the point. Doesn’t matter what you call them. Semi-automatic rifles. Military-type horizontal handheld ordnance. Futuristic flintlocks. Agitation resolvers. Magic wands. Disputatious caramelized pump-action fruit rolls. Stick a feather in their muzzle and call them macaroni if you want.

The basic problem is, the only reason to own a macaroni that can fire hundreds of pieces of lead faster than the speed of sound in mere seconds is to kill PEOPLE. Yes, of course they can be used as legitimate hunting rifles. You can also use a flame thrower to light a cigarette. If you think about it, a hand grenade will signal the end of recess. Need to cut some butter, just pull out the trusty old chainsaw. Of course, be prepared for it to get a little messy around Muffin Time. And right now, we’re smack in the middle of an especially messy Muffin Time.

SS cuts would be a death spiral for elderly

By Richard (RJ) Eskow
nationofchange.org

Liberals and progressives who want to cut Social Security? Democrats who want to cut one of their party’s signature achievements? 

“It has been done in your name, or at least in that of your family,” said Scrooge. 

As Christmas Eve approaches, supporters of the “chained CPI” are engaging in increasingly tortured – and positively Scrooge-like – arguments for the President’s callous and economically unsound proposal.

And they’re doing it in the name of the “progressive movement.”

“There are some upon this earth of yours,” returned the Spirit, “who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin …”

The Randian Liberals
We’ll need a name for this new political genre: “Randian Liberalism” might work.
 
A classic in the field is a blog post entitled Dear Liberals, Chained CPI is NOT a “Cut” to Social Security. Get Over It, written by someone calling him- or herself “Deaniac83″ on a website called “The People’s View.”

Serving as a perfect representative of his ilk, this self-described but anonymous “progressive” sneers that the chained-CPI benefit cut has “set off more alarm bells on the Left’s media than Pearl Harbor.” Progressive?

“Charge their doings on themselves,” said the Spirit, “not us.”
Same Old Playbook

The piece’s blend of arrogance and misinformation typifies the new style of the corporate-Democratic loyalist, with rhetorical ploys straight out of the Pete Peterson playbook: Benefit-cut opponents are “zealous liberals” and “ideologues” who speak with “hair-on-fire” hysteria. And this is not a cut in benefits.

When is a cut not a cut? Well … actually, never.

The chained CPI would reduce a 75 year old’s benefits by 6.5 percent and a 95 year old’s by 9.2 percent. The average woman on Social Security received $997 per month in 2010.  Had the chained CPI been put into effect then, when the President first planned to propose it, her monthly income would have fallen to  $933 (in inflation-adjusted 2010 dollars) by age 85 and $915 by age 95.

But that’s not a cut, scoff the Scrooge Liberals. It’s a technical adjustment.  
 
Death Spiral
The cost-of-living calculation for Social Security is already too low. Something like the proposed “CPI-E” (which adjusts for the costlier goods and services used by the elderly and disabled) would be fairer and more accurate.  Many (though not all) extremely good economists agree with me.

The “chained CPI,” by contrast, lowers the rate at which benefits are increased by factoring in the reduced consumption of certain items – reductions that would be driven by cuts in benefits!

Whatever you think of this approach to economic modeling, it’s a pretty brutal in real-world terms to calculate benefit increases this way. You’re reducing people’s benefits based on the things you’ve helped ensure they can no longer afford.
 
This would quickly become a death spiral to the financial security of the elderly and disabled financial:  They can’t afford beef so they buy  chicken. They can’t afford chicken so they buy cereal. Then they go from cereal to Fancy Feast. From Fancy Feast to Purina. And so on and so on, ad infinitum, Ad nauseum.
 
Say what you will about taking $64 out of a 95 year old woman’s check, but it’s absurd to say it isn’t a “cut.”
 
You know me. I’m just too generous …
 
That brings us to the second, and even more absurd, “liberal” argument for the cut: Current benefits are too generous.  


That will certainly come as a surprise to 8.7 million disabled workers, who currently receive an average of $1,111 per month in benefits – a figure that will be cut even more drastically under the President’s proposal, since they’re expected to live longer on average than elderly recipients.

It will also come as a surprise to knowledgeable economists like Kathy Ruffing and Paul Van de Water, who compared our nation’s Social Security benefits with those of similar programs in other countries.  They note that, in their words:

1. Social Security benefits in the United States are low compared with other advanced countries.
2. Future retirees already face lower benefits (relative to their past earnings) than current retirees as a result of a rising Social Security retirement age and escalating Medicare premiums.

Ruffing and Van de Water found that Social Security benefits in this country provide 41.3 percent a retiring worker’s income on average, while those in other developed countries provide 60.8 percent.


That’s roughly one-third less than other nations’ program — and yet this “liberal” argument claims that our  cost-of-living calculations are so lavish that they must be slowed down.


Know Your Subject Before Lecturing
Of course, these liberals don’t say that benefits are too generous. That’s too nakedly cynical. Instead they deploy rhetoric like “minor adjustment.”
 
But what they’re really saying is “we’re too generous to these elderly, underaged, and disabled recipients.”


That’s partly the result of their callousness, and partly due to their inability to grasp  some of the fundamental concepts of social insurance, as when “Deanian 83″ says that “each additional year lived is an increase in one’s lifetime benefits.”


No.


Social Security is social insurance. Social insurance provides for certain needs when they arise. Social Security is supposed to support our living costs when we’re no longer working. Our cost of living rises with – this should be self-evident – overall increases in the cost of living.


That’s nothing like increases the defense budget, a comparison which “Deaniac” introduces with an embarassingly ill-place “gotcha” flourish. The purchase of weapons systems and the maintenance of a worldwide network of military bases (with thousands of physical facilities) is a matter of choice, not driven by external factors like an individual’s cost of living. Moreover, a military budget is not an insurance program.


Higher Taxes, Too … But Not For the Richest Income
The chained CPI would also raises taxes on all but the highest levels income, by forcing all other earnings into higher tax brackets more quickly.


Deaniac83 celebrated the chained CPI’s tax hike, too. But it’s funny: Randian “liberals” don’t ever get around to explaining why this tax increase on the middle class is not a “tax increase” on the middle class.


I’m sure they will eventually.


Party Line
A piece in this genre isn’t complete unless it marginalizes anti-cut advocates as rigid and hysterical ideologues of the far left, thereby condemning both the arguments and the people making them the Beltway exile of a “shunning.” Deaniac83 doesn’t disappoint.


But prior polls have shown that 75 percent of Republicans – and 76 percent of self-described Tea Party members – oppose cuts of this kind.  That means we have both the facts and the real political center, on our side.

We shouldn’t have to explain these things over and over again. But we do. Why?
 
Often the answer is that they want to argue in favor of a party and a President, not for policies that benefit most Americans. Deaniac83 lays his or her cards on the table: "Let’s get the president’s back. Tell him and Leader Pelosi you support them.”


But some of us support the public interest, not just a political party.  We also support a better understanding of public policy, not the cloud of confusion generated by arguments like these.


Ayn Rands of Christmas Future
Even die-hard Democratic loyalists should oppose a plan that will gravely wound their party’s credibility and popularity for generations to come. Left to their own devices, the party’s leaders have agreed to these unwise and unpopular cuts.


“Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead,” said Scrooge. “But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me.”.


We don’t have to defend the elderly, the disabled, and the children on Social Security, of course.  Instead we can embrace the thinking Scrooge expressed so well, in Dickens’ striking foreshadowing of Ayn Rand’s language and creed:


“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”


If that’s not your philosophy, you can sign this petition calling on our leaders to oppose cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
 
“Answer me one question,” said Scrooge. “Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May be, only?”

 Take action against this benefit cut. It’s the only way to find out.

The Grand Sellout emerges

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

readersupportednews.org

19 December 12

 
generally believe Ezra Klein when he talks about how everyone who matters is coming together to make a deal, so may I just congratulate all the important people on both sides of the aisle who have come together in semi-good faith to ram it to the rest of us. Really, kids, if this isn't really just a trial balloon big enough for the Macy's parade, well done.

On the spending side, the Democrats' headline concession will be accepting chained-CPI, which is to say, accepting a cut to Social Security benefits. Beyond that, the negotiators will agree to targets for spending cuts. Expect the final number here, too, to be in the neighborhood of $1 trillion, but also expect it to lack many specifics. Whether the cuts come from Medicare or Medicaid, whether they include raising the Medicare age, and many of the other contentious issues in the talks will be left up to Congress.

So here's where we sit. The Democrats, led by the president, who never is going to need to depend on Social Security, are prepared to concede on an issue that has absolutely nothing to do with the deficit. They are going to make life harder for millions of seniors. Social Security is now squarely "on the table" in any future budget negotiation. (Hey, who unplugged the third rail?) The simplest solution — raising the cap — is beyond discussion, now and forever. The "chained-CPI," which is a terrible idea on its own merits, as well as a piece of noxious moral sleight-of-hand, seeing as how it cuts benefits while pretending not to do so, is being adopted whole hog without a corresponding mechanism to raise more Social Security revenue to make up for the loss. If the president maintains his faith in the great god SimpsonBowles, the old folks will get a bump for only two years after the deal takes effect. Swell.

There are a couple of lines of thought here. For example, Paul Krugman is more optimistic.

Those cuts are a very bad thing, although there will supposedly be some protection for low-income seniors. But the cuts are not nearly as bad as raising the Medicare age, for two reasons: the structure of the program remains intact, and unlike the Medicare age thing, they wouldn't be totally devastating for hundreds of thousands of people, just somewhat painful for a much larger group. Oh, and raising the Medicare age would kill people; this benefit cut, not so much.

"Not so much"? That's what we get for a deal in which the president is simultaneously not even getting everything that he wants as regards the expiration of the Bush tax cuts. Granny needs to lose some weight anyway.

Quite honestly, the president's willingness to tinker this way with Social Security marks his presidency in a way that nothing else ever will. There is no economic need to do this to Social Security at all. There is no need for the program even to come up in the discussions. This locks Social Security forever into being defined for all political purposes as an "entitlement," and we all know that "entitlements" need to be reformed because everybody this president considers his primary constituencies say they must. It sets the stage for more concessions down the line by any Democratic president who doesn't possess the political momentum that the current president seems hellbent on squandering. This is that most horrible of Beltway concoctions — a deal for a deal's sake, a demonstration for the courtier press that Washington "works."

Chris Matthews last night said that he wanted a cliff-avoiding deal so that "Washington" could prove it can work again. He framed it around the events in Connecticut and gn control. These people think ... strangely.) If John Boehner brings home this deal, his caucus should name him emperor. If that caucus turns him down, they all should be placed in a locked ward for the duration of the president's second term. Meanwhile, David Gregory just had an orgasm you could hear on Mars.

UPDATE -- And, apparently, at the moment, the emperor has no votes. I am particularly amused by one element of the GOP reaction. 

In spite of statements to the contrary just a week ago, House Republicans on Tuesday seemed almost uniformly resigned to some sort of tax rate increases on the nation's highest earners, though they remained committed to keeping that group as small as possible. "The principle of trying to limit the increases is a good one," said Representative Jason Chaffetz of Utah. "But now we've got to see more spending cuts."

Chaffetz, you may recall, was all over TV this weekend, using the "let's talk about mental health" dodge so that nobody talked about the country's lunatic infatuation with firearms. Not that Chaffetz will pay for it or anything.

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New water study and Kenny's big lie

By Jim Keyworth
Gazette Blog Editor

No matter where you turn, you see the message - the West is running out of water.  

In today's (Dec. 24) Arizona Republic, Karen L. Smith of the Grand Canyon Institute writes about a report on the Colorado River Basin just released by the Department of Interior:

"The report's final message should not be lost on anyone living in the Colorado River Basin....  The best estimates suggest water demand will continue to outstrip water supply, with a possible median shortfall of more than 3 million acre feet by 2060."

Among the possible ways to keep this from happening according to the Grand Canyon Institute: maximizing Arizona's reclaimed water resources, appropriately pricing wasteful water use, and plain old conservation.

Which brings us to Payson Mayor Kenny Evans and your Payson Town Council's upcoming attempt to divert part of the water coming from the Blue Ridge pipeline to the Chaparral Pines golf course for 49 years at cost.

It flies in the face of all logic.  In fact, to make a 49-year commitment to watering a golf course is downright irresponsible and immoral.

And just to add insult, Evans has the chutzpah to lie about it - to claim that all that water dumped on the golf course will go into the ground where it can be pumped out and sold again.  Check the science, folks.  Ain't going to happen.

And let's not overlook the Payson Roundup's culpability in this nefarious scheme - not challenging Evans' assertions, not picking up the phone and running the sale of Blue Ridge water to a golf course past Salt River Project, not taking a responsible stand in opposition.

It's one more example of catering to the rich at the expense of the rest of us.  Only this time the stakes are really high.  Unless, of course, pandering to the whims of the rich is more important to you than what your grandchildren are going to do for water.

Payson residents have been asked to conserve water for years.  For what?  So it can be dumped on a golf course?  So that now we finally have a fairly reliable source of water we can just piss it away?

Where is the outrage? 

[To read Karen Smith's column, click www.opinions.azcentral.com and scroll down to COMMENTARY.  It's headlined: "Let's not wait for a crisis to solve our long-term water challenges."]