McCain’s Medicaid Cuts: $738 Billion Over 10 Years
McCain’s Medicaid Cuts: $738 Billion Over 10 Years
The recent economic downturn is forcing states to “scale back safety-net health-coverage programs,” USA Today is reporting. Medicaid, which eats up 17 percent of state budgets is on the chopping block and millions of low-income adults and children are in danger of losing their health insurance.
Sen. John McCain’s solution is to push even more people off the rolls. As the Wonk Room reported, McCain recently proposed cutting $1.3 trillion from Medicare and Medicaid to plug the $1.3 trillion funding gap in his budget-neutral health care plan. And while the campaign has argued that McCain will make up the shortfall by finding trillions of dollars worth of “savings,” most observers disagree.
CAPAF’s very own Peter Harbage, for instance, who conducted the initial analysis of the effects of McCain’s cuts on both Medicare and Medicaid had released a new report documenting the consequences of McCain’s proposed “savings.”
According to Harbage, “the only way for Sen. McCain to achieve his goal is to slow Medicaid growth to 5.5 percent per year –well below what is would take to maintain enrollment growth and match the rising costs of medical care.” To accomplish this, McCain would have to lock in federal spending limits “through so called block grants, which deliver federal funds according to pre-set budget limits rather than on a needs basis, as is now the case.”
In other words, as unemployment creeps up and more Americans lose their health insurance (a 1 percent increase in unemployment resulted in 1 million more people enrolling in Medicaid and SCHIP and another 1.1 million more people uninsured), the federal government will sit on its hands, offering no extra Medicaid funding. Here are the consequences of McCain’s one-size-fits all block grant:
- Total program cut of $738 billion over 10 years
- 29 states could lose more than $5 billion in federal Medicaid spending over 10 years
- Every state could see a reduction of more than $1 billion in total Medicaid spending (federal and state) over 10 years
By limiting average annual growth to 5.5 percent — compared to the estimated 5.9 percent growth rate needed to keep up with medical inflation and Medicaid enrollment growth, states will have to make cutbacks in “program, eligibility and benefits or both.”
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What A Waste It Is To Lose One’s Mind
What A Waste It Is To Lose One’s Mind
Commentary’s Abe Greenwald has thought up a cunning defense of the $448,000 that McCain-chaired International Republican Institute gave to Rashid Khalidi’s Center for Palestine Research and Studies:
McCain’s token gesture was a political quickie aimed at pacifying a noisy party that you’d never really want to get personally involved with… Groups like the CPRS are specifically designed to cloak radical players in the robes of academic respectability.
$440k is a token gesture? I don’t know what kind of sums Greenwald is used to playing around with, but where I come from, half a million dollars is a pretty fair indication of support. Greenwald refers to CPRS as “Khalidi’s front organization,” which implies that CPRS had some other nefarious purpose. What that was, I’m sure Greenwald will tell us very soon. Very, very soon.
If Greenwald’s right, though, about McCain thoughtlessly throwing money around, doesn’t this mean that there could have been all kinds of other dangerous “front organizations” receiving money from IRI when McCain was too busy to do background checks? Shouldn’t someone be looking into this? Because this raises serious questions.
Meanwhile, back in the sane world, this Washington Post editorial, in which they asked Khalidi “whether he wanted to respond to the [McCain] campaign charges against him.”
He answered, via e-mail, that “I will stick to my policy of letting this idiot wind blow over.” That’s good advice for anyone still listening to the McCain campaign’s increasingly reckless ad hominem attacks. Sadly, that wind is likely to keep blowing for four more days.
Indeed, in some quarters it never stops. I believe Ezra Klein has hit upon an appropriate response: Buy Khalidi’s excellent book The Iron Cage.
McCain Calls Offshore Drilling ‘Alternative Energy’
McCain Calls Offshore Drilling ‘Alternative Energy’
This morning, CNBC’s Larry Kudlow asked Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) what his plan was “to create some recovery in the stock market.” McCain replied:
Keep taxes low, cut spending, create jobs with alternative energy including nuclear power plants, including drilling offshore, wind, tide, solar, free us from our sending $700 billion or whatever it is across to countries that don’t like us very much, free up credit.
Watch it:
Even though the term “alternative energy” is vague, under no rational interpretation does the entirely conventional practice of offshore oil drilling qualify. As the ExxonMobil website describes the offshore areas that were formerly covered by the 27-year moratorium lifted this month, those reserves are “conventional“: More »
Sununu: EFCA Would ‘Take Away’ Secret Union Ballots, Make Workers ‘Tell Everyone’ Their Choice
Sununu: EFCA Would ‘Take Away’ Secret Union Ballots, Make Workers ‘Tell Everyone’ Their Choice
During a debate last night with former Gov. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Sen. John Sununu (R-NH) reiterated his opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA).
The EFCA would allow workers at a company to unionize by signing cards of consent, instead of having to undergo a full unionization campaign and vote. However, Sununu said that the bill “would take away the worker’s right to a secret ballot,” and that workers would “have to tell everyone” what their choice was when deciding whether or not to unionize:
This legislation would take away the worker’s right to a secret ballot when deciding whether or not they want a union. Signing a card is a public act and when you have to tell everyone what your choice is, how you’re voting, you become subject to intimidation. Maybe intimidation by other workers, maybe intimidation by employers. Either way, the worker’s right is compromised.
Watch the video here.
Sununu has also said that the EFCA “would force workers to stand up and declare their vote in front of both union bosses and employers,” and that the act could “potentially erode the foundations of free elections everywhere else.”
Contrary to Sununu’s assertion, the EFCA “would not eliminate traditional elections.” Instead, it would prevent employers from forcing their workers into a secret ballot election, and mandates that employers “recognize the majority sign-up process whether they like it or not.”
It’s important that workers be allowed to avoid an election, if they so choose. As David Madland wrote “workers considering forming a union face an undemocratic system that permits intimidation. Employers legally can force workers to attend anti-union meetings, including ‘one-on-one conversations’ with supervisors, which happens in over 90 percent of organizing campaigns.”
Furthermore, “even after workers successfully form a union, in one-third of the instances, employers do not negotiate a contract.” The EFCA would “strengthen penalties for such labor law violations and prevent employers from delaying first-contract negotiations.”
Sununu is not alone among conservative lawmakers in opposing the EFCA. Earlier this month, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) called it the “most insidious bill” he’s seen during his time in Congress, while Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) called it a “threat” to democracy. Both Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) and Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) have characterized it as “un-American.”
However, there is nothing “un-American” about easing the path towards unionization for American’s workers. Or maybe the 60 million U.S. workers who “would join a union if they could” are all un-American too.
Payment Reform: A Key To Improving Health Care Delivery
Payment Reform: A Key To Improving Health Care Delivery
Today, the Center for American Progress and the Institute on Medicine as a Profession released The Health Care Delivery System: A Blueprint for Reform, a wonkish compilation of policy recommendations for reforming the health care delivery system.
The book, which assumes the implementation of a national heath care system, transcends popular campaign rhetoric to offer policy makers concrete solutions for transforming the health care system into an organization that places patient care ahead of insurer profit.
The questions are this:
- What specific measures can Congress and the next President adopt to transform the American health care system to promote quality, efficiency, patient-centeredness, coverage and wellness?- What can we do to build up the health care infrastructure (workers, tools, and knowledge), fix the health organization (in which doctors don’t work as integrated teams to coordinate patient coverage), improve the quality of care, and encourage patient participation in the management of chronic diseases?
The answers, while complex and numerous, all rest, to one extent or another, on payment reform.
Most payment today is fee for service, “meaning that each service a doctor provides is paid for separately.” Doctors are discouraged to refer patients to complimentary providers — undermining coordinated care and holistic treatment initiatives — because it does not affect what they receive for their services. The more services doctors provide, the higher their compensation, and high-quality services are not compensated any more that poor quality services. Our payment system rewards action, not health management.
Moreover, Medicare reimburses specialists at a higher rate than primary care physicians and the number of family doctors is plummeting. Solo doctors don’t have a monetary incentive to treat patients in an efficient and holistic manner and in some cases even lose money. Doctors don’t have a financial incentive to adopt electronic records because using paper files allows them to perform more procedures and receive greater compensation. Why eliminate profitable redundancy?
The financial incentives are plain backwards. The current payment system discourages the kind of organization that values patient well-being above physician or insurer profit. To that end, the blueprint for reform recommends a better alignment between payment and outcome and a system that more accurately reflect relative costs of providing different services.
To read the entire blueprint, click here. Today, CAP also hosted an event on the blueprint featuring prominent health care experts. Find out more here.
WATCH: McCain Dances With The Far-Right And The Super-Rich On Economic Policy
WATCH: McCain Dances With The Far-Right And The Super-Rich On Economic Policy
When it comes to taxes and the economy, John McCain has got his dancing shoes on.
In the early 2000s, John McCain eschewed his reputation as a radical tax cutter by opposing the Bush tax cuts because they “came at the expense of middle class Americans.”
But now he’s waltzed all the way back to the far right, proposing not only to extend the Bush tax cuts, but double them by giving away another $300 billion in budget-busting tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy while leaving out 100 million Americans.
In the last month, he’s made overtures to the middle class, promising mortgage relief and a new set of tax cuts for the middle class. But when the details were revealed, they turned out to be just more giveaways to corporations and the wealthy.
Watch him go:
Dancing shoes? Maybe he’ll just add taps to his $520 loafers.
UPDATE: Embeddable code after the jump.
Rove Uses A String Of Numbers To Hide The Truth About Small Businesses
Rove Uses A String Of Numbers To Hide The Truth About Small Businesses
During an interview with Fox News’ Neil Cavuto yesterday, Karl Rove derided Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-IL) plan to return the top two federal income tax brackets to the levels at which they were under President Clinton. Rove claimed such action would “devastate” small businesses.
To back up his assertion, Rove reeled off a long string of numbers - including “in the top 1 percent, 73 percent of the filers are small business people. 663,000 out of 912,000 filers in the top 1 percent are small business people” - to suggest that Obama would tax a huge percentage of small businesses. Watch it:
Rove is using an intimidating slew of numbers to spread falsehood. First, only 1.9 percent of small businesses file in the top two federal income tax brackets. That leaves 98.1 percent of small businesses unaffected by Obama’s suggested rate change.
Furthermore, because of the Treasury Department’s broad definition of small business, “many of the roughly 650,000 filers with small-business income who face one of the top two tax rates are merely passive investors who have nothing to do with running the business.” As the Center on Budget Policy and Priorities found:
About 35 percent of “small-business owners” with incomes above $200,000, and about 58 percent of “small-business owners” with incomes over $1 million, received some or all of their business income in the form of passive investments. The Treasury definition also counts as “small-business income” the fees that CEOs are paid for sitting on corporate boards.
Under the Treasury definition, “the $84 of income President Bush received in 2001 from a passive investment in an oil and gas company made him a ‘small-business owner.’” It’s hard to see how taxing this income would devastate actual small businesses.
Is There Anything Palin Doesn’t Like ‘Tapping Into’?
Is There Anything Palin Doesn’t Like ‘Tapping Into’?
Yesterday, Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) gave a speech on energy policy at a solar energy company, in her words, “in a manner with much substance.” She repeatedly went off the script of her prepared remarks (as Jed Lewison and Ana Marie Cox have noted), using many of her favorite locutions. One of her most common rogue phrases was a call for tapping into various sources of, well, just about anything. Her approach exposes the conservative ideology that all forms of energy are created equal; that details like cost, pollution, and long-term consequences are immaterial.
Watch it:
For those watching at home, here’s the list:
| Palin’s Top Eight For The Tapping |
|---|
| Solar energy |
| Some technology that will allow our nation to be firmly put on that path towards energy independence |
| Hundreds of trillions of cubic feet [of natural gas] |
| Hungry markets flowing our resources into those hungry markets |
| Energy supplies [safely, ethically] |
| Nucular energy |
| 100 new plants [of nucular energy] |
| American ingenuity |
| Many, many alternative sources |
Of that list, only natural gas is a resource that can be literally “tapped into.” Palin’s use of an oil industry metaphor to describe all forms of energy and innovation is consistent with the mindset of supply-side exploitation, a dangerously simplistic approach to energy policy that only considers the short-term profit interests of energy corporations. Some of her off-script “tapping” remarks had some policy “meat,” such as her attack on solar energy:
We have many many alternative sources that have not yet been tapped into and allowed to become economic and reliable. That’s the key, of course, is the reliability of these alternative sources.
This false attack on the unreliability of renewable energy is one both she and McCain have made before.
McCain Camp: Decrease The Size Of The Pool, Increase The Price Of Insurance Policy
McCain Camp: Decrease The Size Of The Pool, Increase The Price Of Insurance Policy
In the final days of the election, the McCain campaign has significantly altered its health care rhetoric. Initially arguing that McCain’s health care plan would allow voters to abandon their employer-based insurance plans for cheaper options on the individual market, the campaign is now emphasizing the importance of group coverage.
Senior McCain adviser and implosion watch subject Douglas-Holtz Eakin created a firestorm after effectively conceding the inferiority of individual health care plans on Tuesday, and Rep. Michael Burgess (R-TX) is all too eager to follow his lead.
While stumping for McCain’s health care plan, the three-term congressman attempted to combat critics who charge that McCain’s plan “basically blows up the current system“:
Burgess agreed that many workers wouldn’t initially drop employer-sponsored coverage. He said the cost of individual plans would drop if insurers were allowed to offer plans across state lines, as Mr. McCain favors.
“The price for the policy goes down if you increase the size of your pool,” he said.
Progressives have long argued that larger risk pools effectively spread both the risk and cost of health insurance across a wide spectrum of the population, allowing healthier people to subsidize the sick. McCain plan flips this principle on its head, breaking up employer-risk pools and shuttling everyone into an individual plan.
By Burgess’ own definition, if you adopt McCain’s health plan and decrease “the size of your pool,” “the price for the policy” goes up.
It’s Time To End Discrimination In Health Insurance
It’s Time To End Discrimination In Health Insurance
Insurance companies will seize on anything to increase insurance premiums, and gender is no exception. An article in today’s New York Times points out that insurance companies rate-up individual insurance policies for women, forcing us to pay much more than men for identical coverage.
Since the individual market offers a raw deal to those who actually use care, women — who use maternity care and are more likely to have certain chronic diseases — may have a harder time finding affordable coverage than their male counterparts. A 30-year-old woman pays “31 percent more than a man of the same age in Denver or Chicago” and in Iowa, “a 30-year-old woman pays $49 a month more than a man of the same age.”
But Senator John McCain refuses to end this discrimination. McCain’s plan would make it even easier for insurers to cherry-pick the healthiest individuals who use the least amount of care. When asked why he didn’t support leveling the playing field and preventing insurance companies from covering only the healthiest and cheapest Americans, McCain replied that insurance companies should be able to decide who they cover and what they charge:
Q: Why not level the playing field, prevent insurance companies from cherry picking and let them compete on a level playing field?
MCCAIN: Because then I think then we would be mandating what the free enterprise sytem does and that would be, obviously, something I would not approve of.
Watch the ad from Health Care For America Now!:
I have often argued that buying health insurance is not the same as purchasing a refrigerator or a microwave. Health insurance is not another consumer good for which everyone pays the same price. Sick people are more expensive to insure than healthy people, the old accrue more cost than the young. For this reason, Senator John McCain’s belief in the dysfunctional and discriminatory individual market is fundamentally at odds with the point of health insurance, which requires that we share risks and pool costs.
Insurance companies should not be allowed to use a woman’s ability to become pregnant as an excuse to charge women more for health insurance. Unfortunately, by deregulating the individual market, Senator McCain would give insurance companies a free pass to continue charging women more for their health care.
McCain: Slander First
McCain: Slander First
In one of the more shameful episodes in the recent history of campaign flackery, Team McCain sent its blogger/spokesperson Mike Goldfarb out to shovel dirt at Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi. After casually conceding that Khalidi received almost half a million dollars from the International Republican Institute back when it was headed by John McCain, Goldfarb proceeds to smear Khalidi as “unsavory” and an “anti-Semite” based on the fact that Khalidi happens to be an American of Palestinian descent and a critic of Israel’s policy of occupation and settlement in the West Bank.
Watch it:
New York University professor Barnett Rubin comes to Khalidi’s defense:
I actually find it demeaning, insulting, and depressing to have to defend Rashid. I could say, I know him, he has been a guest in my home in New York and in my rented house in Provence, he bears absolutely no resemblance to the image these despicable people are trying to project of him, and lot’s more. I could point out that I am Jewish and have VISIBLE JEWISH ARTIFACTS IN MY HOME, which did not appear to alarm Rashid, if he even noticed them, but it is all just so ridiculous I don’t know what to say.
I don’t want to treat these charges with the respect of a refutation. I just want to express my disgust with those who uttered them and my solidarity with my friend, Rashid Khalidi.
Scott Horton also speaks up for Khalidi:
Rashid Khalidi is an American academic of extraordinary ability and sharp insights. He is also deeply committed to stemming violence in the Middle East, promoting a culture that embraces human rights as a fundamental notion, and building democratic societies… He sees education and civic activism as the path to success, and he argues that pervasive military interventionism has historically undermined the Middle East and will continue to do so. Khalidi has also been one of the most articulate critics of the PLO and the Palestinian Authority—calling them repeatedly on their anti-democratic tendencies and their betrayals of their own principles.
A few years ago, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz “offered a large monetary award (payable to the PLO) for anyone who could actually come up with a quote by a prominent pro-Israeli writer who equated mere criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism.” Given that Goldfarb is a former writer-editor for a prominent conservative magazine, I think Dershowitz owes the PLO some money.
Roubini To The Neo-Hooverites: An Economic Stimulus Package Can Make The Deficit Smaller
Roubini To The Neo-Hooverites: An Economic Stimulus Package Can Make The Deficit Smaller
The Wonk Room has been arguing recently that an economic stimulus package is a necessary step towards recovering from the current financial crisis. The counter argument - which Matthew Yglesias calls “Neo-Hooverism” - is that the government should exercise fiscal restraint and curb spending, out of concern for widening deficits.
However, during a hearing today before Congress’ Joint Economic Committee, New York University Economics Professor Nouriel Roubini explained that failure to enact a fiscal stimulus could actually result in wider deficits as the economy contracts. In his estimate, this would send the U.S. into a “very severe recession.” Watch it:
Roubini is part of a growing chorus of voices calling for a fiscal stimulus. Yesterday, Gov. David Paterson (D-NY) and Gov. Jon Corzine (D-NJ) joined in, saying that “state governments would face devastating cutbacks if they did not receive assistance soon”:
“We are cutting all we can,” Mr. Paterson told the House Ways and Means Committee. “Therefore, we feel that targeted, sensible actions by the federal government will provide relief for us now.”
CAP’s Michael Ettlinger agrees, noting that “of particular importance are steps to help state governments so that they don’t become a drag on the economy as their revenues dry up and demand on their services grows.”
Today, the economic stimulus package also received an endorsement from Professor Martin Feldstein, an economic adviser to Sen. John McCain (R-AZ). In the Washington Post, Feldstein wrote:
The only way to prevent a deepening recession will be a temporary program of increased government spending. Previous attempts to use government spending to stimulate an economic recovery, particularly spending on infrastructure, have not been successful because of long legislative lags that delayed the spending until a recovery was well underway. But while past recessions lasted an average of only about 12 months, this downturn is likely to last much longer, providing the scope for successful countercyclical spending.
As Matthew Yglesias noted, Feldstein “gingerly avoids pointing out that this is the reverse of what his preferred candidate is proposing.” Indeed, McCain has said that he will freeze government spending on everything besides what he deems to be “vital” programs.
Feldstein believes that government spending is the only way to avoid a deeper recession. Will McCain get the message and endorse a full stimulus package?
Exxon-Mobil Profits Up 250% Since 2000, American Worker Wages Stagnant
Exxon-Mobil Profits Up 250% Since 2000, American Worker Wages Stagnant
The winners and losers of the Bush years are now clear.
Today, Exxon-Mobil announced third quarter profits of $14.83 billion, the most profitable three months of any U.S. company in history.
These profits represent annual profits over 250% of the levels at the beginning of the Bush years. Over the same period, real average wages for the American worker have stayed essentially flat, growing only 2% over eight years.
Real median household income was lower in 2007 (last data available) than it was in 2000, after growing 13% from 1992 to 2008.
These huge oil company profits come even as the American economy has shrunk 0.3% and slides into recession.
John McCain’s plan to solve this crisis? A budget busting tax plan that would give a $1.2 billion tax break to Exxon-Mobile ($4 billion for America’s largest oil companies) and give nothing to over 100 million Americans.
Bombings in Somalia: The Blowback Continues
Bombings in Somalia: The Blowback Continues
Our guest blogger is David Sullivan, a research associate at the ENOUGH project.
What distinguishes the recent coordinated car-bombings across northern Somalia from the steady stream of bad news to which we have become accustomed coming out of this part of the world? Is this any worse than the civil war, occupation, rendition, targeted assassinations, mass displacement, and epidemic of piracy that have occurred since the United States supported Ethiopia’s intervention in Somalia in December 2006?
Unfortunately, it is. The location, targets, and tactics employed in yesterday’s tragedy suggest a dramatic turn for the worse in Somalia. Diplomats, humanitarians, and security professionals must urgently reexamine the policy missteps behind this crisis.
Some important details to consider:
Location – The attacks took place in Somaliland and Puntland, autonomous regions that have functioning civil administrations and have largely been spared from the worsening insecurity and violence in Mogadishu and south-central Somalia. The self-declared independent state of Somaliland had until now provided refuge both to refugees fleeing the effects of the insurgency in the south and international aid workers for whom the rest of the country had become too insecure. This expansion of the battlefield may rapidly destabilize the rest of the Horn of Africa.
Targets – The bombings targeted government officials, the Ethiopian mission in Hargeisa, and the headquarters of the United Nations Development Program in Somaliland. This effectively paints these diverse actors with one brush as elements of an occupation approved by the United States and implemented by Ethiopia. The attack on UNDP threatens to cut off international access to 3.5 million Somalis in need of humanitarian assistance. The targeting of aid workers, an alarming trend that has picked up alarming pace lately in Iraq, Afghanistan and Sudan, continues.
Tactics – The use of highly coordinated large scale suicide attacks against high profile international targets illustrates the spread of Al Qaeda inspired technology and tactics from Iraq and Afghanistan to east Africa. This follows the pattern set by improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and suicide attacks, all of which used to be quite rare in Somalia.
The blowback from the Bush Administration’s narrow fixation on certain counterterrorism priorities in Somalia continues. In March 2008 the United States designated the Somali Islamist militant group the Shabab as a terrorist organization, a designation that offered little advantage to U.S. goals in the region but did inflame anti-American views in Somalia. That designation, and the subsequent killing of a Shabab leader with a Tomahawk missile strike, precipitated the Shabab’s decision to widen its targets to include anyone associated with the West. Yesterday’s bombings demonstrate the consequences of this decision are actively worsening.
A wholesale reexamination of U.S. policy could change these dynamics, and create a fresh opportunity to align U.S. interests with those of the Somali people. Unfortunately, time is not on our side.
The First Dude, Snowmobilin’ Mainers, And The Divisive Politics Of Karl Rove
The First Dude, Snowmobilin’ Mainers, And The Divisive Politics Of Karl Rove
Our guest blogger is Todd Darling, director of the documentary “A Snow Mobile for George,” a tour of deregulation in America. He owns a snow mobile.
As Politico’s Jonathan Martin tells us, “Iron Dog champ Todd Palin makes his direct mail debut in a piece aimed straight at the gut of a rural Mainers.” The letter warns snowmobiling Mainers, “Obama’s Extreme Environmental Policies” could make this “The Last Winter To Ride In Our National Parks?” The Maine Republican Party flier includes this edited quote from a Sierra Club blogger Pat Joseph:
In the end, the point that snowmobiles are loud and obnoxious and polluting seems obvious to everyone save perhaps the person actually astraddle the beast. . . . They just don’t have any business in our national parks.
Todd Palin’s flier dives straight into a barrel of red herrings.
In this flier, Palin is attempting to stoke a culture war between freedom-loving snowmobilers and tree-hugging environmentalists. But snowmobilers care about pollution and preserving the outdoors. And environmentalists love having fun. See how the flier edits the Sierra Club quote? Here’s what that dot-dot-dot eliminated from Pat Joseph’s criticism of snowmobiles in National Parks:
They are also fun. No doubt about it, they’re an absolute blast.
Mr. Palin says his wife and Senator McCain will protect snowmobile access with “practical standards.” But they don’t believe in regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant, even though global warming has meant the Iron Dog competitors have raced in the rain — and in 2003, the race was even totally cancelled because of the extreme heat. It’s sure hard to protect the fun of snowmobiling if your “standards” mean the end to snow. More »
McCaskill Straightens Out The McCain Campaign On Corporate Taxes
McCaskill Straightens Out The McCain Campaign On Corporate Taxes
On the stump, Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) has been emphasizing Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) plan to cut the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent, citing the oft-repeated claim that the U.S. rate is the “second highest in the world.”
However, yesterday on CNBC, Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) was asked if the “second highest” rate needs to be cut, and responded with the true story: the U.S. tax code is riddled with loopholes that enable corporations to pay far less. Watch it:
McCaskill is quite right to say that corporations benefit from the intricacies of the tax code, as it contains myriad “loopholes, shelters, and giveaways that minimize, or completely eliminate corporate taxes.” This week, in fact, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities released a report showing that “the U.S. corporate tax burden is smaller than average for developed countries” due in part to the “plethora of generous corporate tax breaks“:
Corporations in 19 of the member states of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development paid 16.1 percent of their profits in taxes between 2000 and 2005, on average, while corporations in the United States paid 13.4 percent.
The CBPP noted that the “second highest” charge “while true…gives the false impression that the corporate tax burden is greater here than in other developed countries.”
This all makes perfect sense, since the U.S. also collects below the OECD average in corporate tax revenue. The Treasury Department actually estimates that “various corporate tax breaks will cost the federal government more than $1.2 trillion over the next ten years.”
Instead of worrying about the amount of taxes that corporations are paying, perhaps Palin should focus on the 100 million middle class households to which the McCain/Palin economic plan gives no benefit.
Is Palin Using Cheney’s Climate Change Playbook?
Is Palin Using Cheney’s Climate Change Playbook?
Our guest blogger is Jason Burnett. Burnett was most recently the Associate Deputy Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency where he coordinated energy and climate change policy across the EPA and led the development of greenhouse gases regulations.
As head of climate and energy policy for the Environmental Protection Agency, I witnessed first-hand the dangers of a Vice President who has a disregard for the balance of powers in our Constitution and a disdain for inconvenient facts.
Vice President Cheney has worked hard to cast doubt on the science of climate change. The Vice President’s office wanted my help censoring the Congressional testimony from the Centers for Disease Control to eliminate any references to how climate change endangers human health. I refused. The Vice President’s office later wanted me to water down congressional testimony on the strength of the science by not acknowledging that greenhouse gases “harm” the environment by causing climate change. Again I refused.
Having heard the words “the Vice President’s office is on the phone” many times over the past few years I could not agree more when Senator Joe Biden called them “the eight most dreaded words in the English language” for those trying to uphold our nation’s laws and respect our Constitution.
Given my experience with the dangers of an unaccountable Vice President, it sent shivers down my spine during the Vice Presidential debate when I heard Governor Palin say she’s “thankful the Constitution would allow a bit more authority given to the Vice President also, if that Vice President so chose to exert it, in working with the Senate and making sure that we are supportive of the president’s policies and making sure too that our president understands what our strengths are.” A bit more authority than our current Vice President has wrestled away from the President and Congress?
A strong Vice President is a great thing, but that strength should primarily come from being a trusted advisor to the President, not a separate power center somewhere between the Executive Branch and the Legislative Branch. Governor Palin is fortunate her smile and wink won’t remind voters of Vice President Cheney’s smirk and grimace; maybe people won’t notice that her dismissal of science and views on the power of the office are quite similar to Vice President Cheney’s? More »
Syria, Iraq, And The Misnamed War On Terror
Syria, Iraq, And The Misnamed War On Terror
Partly as a result of the U.S. raid into Syria last weekend, the Iraqi government has decided to reopen negotiations on the U.S.-Iraqi status of forces agreement:
The call for changes in the proposed accord came as the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki criticized an attack by Iraq-based U.S. forces on alleged al-Qaeda operatives inside Syria last weekend. The cabinet now wants the agreement to include language to “confirm that Iraqi land would not be the center for aggression” against its neighbors, said Planning Minister Ali Baban, who attended Tuesday’s meeting.
Ministers also want the pact to grant Iraq more legal authority over U.S. soldiers accused of crimes, to harden a tentative 2011 departure date for U.S. troops and to allow Iraqi inspection of U.S. military shipments. The inspection demand, along with an explicit ban on attacks on neighboring countries, reflects concerns that the United States might launch an attack on Iran from Iraqi territory.
Bush administration officials have said repeatedly that the current text of the document, concluded just weeks ago after nearly eight months of difficult negotiations, reflects the limit of U.S. concessions.
Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh “said the Iraqis want the right to declare the agreement null and void if the U.S. unilaterally attacks one of Iraq’s neighbors.”
Iraq’s Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani that he has also indicated fresh concerns with the agreement:
A statement issued by al-Sistani’s office said the Iranian-born cleric wants to ensure that “Iraq’s sovereignty not be breached” by the accord and that he was monitoring the situation “until the final content of the security agreement becomes clear.”
It’s unclear whether Sistani’s displeasure with a pact that he had previously signed off on is the result of the U.S. action in Syria, but it doesn’t seem unlikely.
Praising the Syria strike, Eli Lake declares that “we have entered a new phase in the war on terror.” More »
Note To McCain: It’s ‘A Matter Of History’ That Hoover Cut Federal Spending
Note To McCain: It’s ‘A Matter Of History’ That Hoover Cut Federal Spending
During an appearance on Fox News’ Hannity & Colmes last night, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), as he is fond of doing, invoked Herbert Hoover to warn against Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-IL) economic plan. “There was a president named Herbert Hoover,” said McCain. “They raised taxes, they practiced protectionism and they went from a serious recession into a deep depression. Now, that’s a matter of history.” Watch it:
However, there is another matter of history that McCain should look at regarding Hoover’s actions. Responding to the recession, and “convinced that a balanced federal budget was essential to restoring business confidence, Hoover sought to cut government spending and raise taxes.”
In fact, before the 1932 election, Hoover was touting his successful push to reduce government spending:
The extension of governmental expenditures beyond the minimum limit necessary to conduct the proper functions of the Government enslaves men to work for the Government….[T]he ordinary expenses of the Government have been reduced upwards of $200 million during the present administration. They will be decidedly further reduced.
Hoover’s approach was clearly unsuccessful, and late in his administration, he tried to recover:
As conditions worsened, Hoover’s administration eventually provided emergency loans to banks and industry, expanded public works, and helped states offer relief. But it was too little, too late.
There is a growing consensus among economists, budget analysts, and lawmakers that the next administration should not subscribe to what Matthew Yglesias has called “Neo-Hooverism” — mass spending reductions as a response to the financial crisis. McCain, however, consistently promises to balance the budget and has advocated a complete spending freeze on everything besides several “vital issues.”
If McCain really wants to use Hoover as an example of what should not be done in response to a recession, he needs to include the entire story, and not cherry-pick the most convenient of Hoover’s actions.
Elizabeth Edwards On High Administrative Costs
Elizabeth Edwards On High Administrative Costs
On Monday, during a discussion about health care policy, CAPAF Senior Fellow Elizabeth Edwards underscored the burden of administrative costs on the health system:
I ran into a woman who had worked in a hospital in Vancouver and she had moved to Boston. I met her in one of the New Hampshire primaries. And she said she worked in the accounting office in the hospital, and went to a hospital in Boston to get a job. Same number of beds in the hospitals. She got a job. She had worked in an accounting office with 6 people, she now worked in an accounting office with 600 people. Your health insurance dollars are being used to pay those 600 people. It is not an efficient use of our money.
Watch it:
Reducing administrative costs should be an important part of any serious cost-containment strategy. Unfortunately, Sen. John McCain’s reliance on the individual market would bolster the health bureaucracy and further grow the size of accounting offices.
That’s because marketing, medical underwriting, rescission, and increased paperwork for individuals leads insurance companies in the individual market to spend 29 percent of premium dollars on administrative costs, more than double the average amount in the group market.
As McCain adviser and individual market-proponent Douglas Holtz-Eakin admitted, employer based coverage “is way better” than a comparable plan in the individual market because the latter charges more for identical coverage. In fact, according to a study published in Health Affairs, higher administrative costs, along with other factors, increase the cost of an individual plan by an estimated $2,000.
So McCain’s push to get more Americans into the individual market, will have you paying more for less. As Peter Harbage points out, “shifting coverage from the group coverage market to the individual insurance market could generate as much as $20 billion in new administrative costs—which represents an increase of more than 20 percent in 2007 dollars.”
The Prepared Text For Sarah Palin’s Love Letter To Big Oil [Updated]
The Prepared Text For Sarah Palin’s Love Letter To Big Oil [Updated]
UPDATE: At Climate Progress, Joe Romm notes that Palin’s prepared remarks make it unambiguous that McCain won’t regulate global warming pollution.
UPDATE II: We’ve updated the text with her speech as delivered. Jed Lewison notes one of her more amusing revisions. Gristmill’s David Roberts calls the speech “bizarre.” Ana Marie Cox describes the travails of the teleprompter operator.
UPDATE III: Former vice president Al Gore will be delivering a true energy policy speech tonight, in a live webcast at 8:30 PM as part of the Energy Action Coalition’s Power Vote campaign for youth climate activism.
Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) just completed a “major” speech on energy policy, in which she offered no new policy, nor recognized the existence of global warming. She delivered her speech at the headquarters of the Xunlight Corporation in Toledo, Ohio, a producer of flexible thin-film photovoltaic solar panels — despite her earlier mockery of such technology:
Alternative-energy solutions are far from imminent and would require more than 10 years to develop.
This hypocritical choice is just following the lead of her running mate. In May, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) delivered a speech on global warming at the U.S. headquarters of a Danish wind turbine manufacturer, after decades of opposition to the domestic renewable energy industry.
Below is the text of her prepared remarks — a half-hour love letter to Big Oil. Please note, however, that Palin went off-script repeatedly, throwing in such catchphrases from the campaign as “Drill, baby, drill,” “He’s got the scars to prove it,” “Maverick of the Senate,” and several digs at journalists.
UPDATE: Palin’s off-script remarks are in red.
Thank you all very much. I appreciate the hospitality of Xunlight Energy, and all the people of Toledo. The folks at Xunlight are doing great work for this community and our country. I’m so excited about this, Thank you for your hospitality, again doctor, thank you. Good, good things being said about this corporation as you’re progressing with the solar panels and understanding alternative energy sources. So necessary as a piece of the puzzle that we’re working on. I know my state of Alaska is certainly working on this. All that we can do to put the pieces together to allow our nation to become energy secure.
Rubin Tries Punching Above His Weight
Rubin Tries Punching Above His Weight
Michael Rubin snipes at Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi from the Corner:
Since Rashid Khalidi has, by his close friendship to Senator Obama, returned to prominence, it may be worth revisiting the quality of Khalidi’s scholarship and how he subordinates scholarly integrity to polemic.[…]
Khalidi’s influence upon Obama might subordinate basic human rights to the virulent form of Arab nationalism that led to the Anfal.
First, Khalidi hasn’t “returned to prominence,” he is prominent by virtue of being one of the leading Middle East scholars in the United States.
Second, the idea that Rubin would accuse anyone of “subordinat[ing] scholarly integrity to polemic” is pretty funny, given that Rubin himself formerly worked in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, helping Doug Feith shape dubiously-sourced intelligence into dishonest arguments for a disastrous war, and now edits the Middle East Quarterly, helping right-wing polemicist Daniel Pipes warn Americans about the Islamic terrorists lurking underneath their beds.
Third, Rubin’s lazy and baseless slander of Khalidi — suggesting that Khalidi somehow espouses an ideology sympathetic to Saddam Hussein’s 1986-89 genocide against the Kurds — is really contemptible, degenerate stuff. (Those kinds of unsubstantiated insinuations might have flown in Feith’s shop, pal, but not out here in the world.) In reality, Khalidi is a big supporter of human rights. The real problem, at least as Rubin and assorted Corner nuts are concerned, is that Khalidi is also a supporter of human rights for Palestinians.
I understand Rubin’s hostility toward Khalidi, though. Rashid Khalidi is a highly regarded academic whose work is taken seriously, whereas Michael Rubin is a second-tier neocon hack known for having served as one of Doug Feith’s oompa-loompas. That’s got to sting a little.
Inflating The Numbers: McCain’s Plan Boosts Coverage By Redefining ‘Insurance’
Inflating The Numbers: McCain’s Plan Boosts Coverage By Redefining ‘Insurance’
After the Lewin Group released its analysis of Sen. John McCain’s health care plan, the McCain campaign and even some in the media, have used the report to argue that McCain’s plan would cover about 20 million uninsured Americans and save millions:
- Jay Khosla, McCain policy adviser: But our internal estimate all along had been that we would cover anywhere between 25 million to 30 million uninsured. Lewin said it’s about 21 million. [Kaiser Foundation Webchat, 10/16/2008]
- Maria Bartiromo, host of Wall Street Journal Reports: According to a recent study by the independent Lewin Group, both candidates plans would reduce the total number of uninsured by the year 2010. Obama’s plan mandates coverage for children under 19. In the 55 to 64 age range, Senator McCain would reduce the number of uninsured by 25 percent, compared with the 52 percent under Obama’s plan. [CNBC, 10/19/2008]
- McCain campaign: “A recent Lewin Group study estimated savings of more than $1,400 per American family – almost three times the savings as under the Obama plan.” [JohnMcCain.com]
- Robert Carroll, Tax Foundation: “The Lewin Group, a respected private health-care research outfit, recently estimated that the McCain credit would increase the number of insured by as much as 21 million.” [WSJ, 10/27/2008]
But as the Wonk Room argued earlier this month, Lewin’s conclusion that McCain’s health care plan would reduce the number of uninsured by 21.1 million and cost $2.05 trillion dollars is More ». In fact, their conclusion paints a more favorable picture of McCain’s proposal precisely because it ignores the consequences of opening the health insurance market to unfettered market competition, overstates the purchasing power of McCain’s health credit and the quality of individual health insurance plans.
Yesterday, Len Berman of the Tax Policy Center, which conducted its own analysis of McCain’s plan, similarly argued that Lewin produced its favorable numbers by “ignoring the campaign’s statements and supplying their own assumptions.
Heritage Foundation Compares New Deal To Nazi-Soviet ‘Collectivism’
Heritage Foundation Compares New Deal To Nazi-Soviet ‘Collectivism’
The Heritage Foundation, a once proud bastion of conservative thought, is now resorting to absurd historical revisionism and mentions of “Nazi Germany” to attack needed progressive policies. Heritage blogger Nick Loris responds to the United Nations Environmental Program’s Green Economy Initiative and the Center for American Progress’s Green Recovery program with this absurd rant:
The United Nations is proposing an environmental ‘New Deal’ that would “be similar to Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal which helped the US recover from the Great Depression of the 1930s.”
First, the reality is that FDR’s New Deal did not help the U.S. recover from the Great Depression but simply made things worse. Second, the only thing a green ‘New Deal’ will do is lead us down a Green Road to Serfdom. (Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom is a telling portrayal of what collectivism in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany can lead to: impoverishment and oppression of freedom.)
In fact, economists broadly agree stimulative government spending is necessary to prevent a further collapse of the global economic system — just as the New Deal and the deficit spending of World War II restored the health of the global economy in the last century.
Scientists are warning with increasing stridency that carbon emissions must be drastically curbed to prevent a collapse of the world’s climate system. Instead of recognizing the real threat of the climate crisis, Loris writes, “The threat of clima