Category: Fuck the Poor

Trading away our future

~ susie

It’s really, really important that you call Congress Tuesday:

Somehow finding time between their On Air with Ryan Seacrest appearances and Top Chef: Just Desserts guest judging, Federal Deficit Commission Co-Chairs and heartthrobs du jour Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson will take DeficitMania to Washington, D.C. this week. Today they resumed negotiations with the panel’s commissioners.Tomorrow the two will hold a press conference at 3:30 to update reporters on the negotiationsand just how much of your retirement will be spent reheating last night’s Ragu-and-Ramen Surprise. On Wednesday the commission will hold a public meeting as it holds a final vote on the details of its final recommendations.

People who have been briefed on the state of negotiations tell HuffPost Hill that the commissioners are within striking distance of the 14 of 18 votes needed for passage. The Simpson-Bowles plan put out recently is being blended with Jan Schakowsky’s progressive alternative and a third plan from deficit hawks Paul Ryan and Alice Rivlin.

Teaching you a lesson

~ susie ~ 5 Comments

You know, I’ve about had it with all these corrupt millionaires who want to teach us things like “having to face the full costs of their medical decisions.” You mean, like the decision of whether you’ll have enough to buy food, or take your kid to the doctor’s? What amoral scum they are:

WASHINGTON — Job-based health care benefits could wind up on the chopping block if President Barack Obama and congressional Republicans get serious about cutting the deficit.

Budget proposals from leaders in both parties have urged shrinking or eliminating tax breaks that help make employer health insurance the leading source of coverage in the nation and a middle-class mainstay.

The idea isn’t to just raise revenue, economists say, but finally to turn Americans into frugal health care consumers by having them face the full costs of their medical decisions.

Such a re-engineering was rejected by Democrats only a few months ago, at the height of the health care overhaul debate. But Washington has changed, with Republicans back in power and widespread fears that the burden of government debt may drag down the economy.

“There is no short-term prospect of enactment,” former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, a leading Democratic adviser on health care. “However, in a tax reform (and) deficit reducing context in the long term, the prospects are much better,” said Daschle. He opposes repealing the tax break by itself, but says he would be “willing to look” at it with other changes that improve access to quality health care while reducing costs.

Labor unions believed they had squelched any such talk. Now, they’re preparing for another fight.

Tampering with health care tax breaks is “a terrible step in the wrong direction,” said Mary Kay Henry, the new president of the Service Employees International Union, which represents many hospital workers. “We want the middle class stabilized, not destabilized.”

Hungry

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

So the Republican scumbags are doing everything they can to block more unemployment extensions, and they’ll probably be successful. (All I can say is, I dream of guillotines.)

But if you have anything left to spare, please consider a donation of food or money to your local food bank. These folks are knocking themselves out to help against some stunning odds, and anything you can do to help in the name of our common humanity is a blessing:

The economy may be showing signs of life, but food pantries and other nonprofit food-distribution agencies around the region say they are struggling to meet record-breaking demand as the holidays approach.

In Loudoun County – the nation’s wealthiest county measured by median income – the food pantry is distributing its first-ever Thanksgiving meal, giving food to 2,000 families. In Montgomery County, the Manna Food Center added some Saturday hours for the convenience of working families. And in Fairfax County, the nonprofit Our Daily Bread is facing the grim reality that, although it will feed 2,400 people, it may not be able to help as many 650 needy families at Thanksgiving.

Lynn Brantley, president and chief executive of the Capital Area Food Bank in Northeast Washington, said this year was the most difficult in the organization’s 30-year history. The food bank – the main supplier of food to more than 700 agencies and nonprofit groups around the Capital Beltway – will distribute a record-breaking 30 million pounds of food, up from 27 million last year.

“With this economy, things are pretty bleak,” Brantley said. “People on Main Street are not rebounding.”

Bread lines have become commonplace, including the 3,000 people who waited for groceries and personal-care items in Northeast last week at a giveaway co-sponsored by PepsiCo and the dozens who gathered in front of the Loudoun Interfaith Relief center Friday.

Many are unemployed or underemployed, and their desperation is palpable.

Joyce Crawford used to make a big Thanksgiving spread for her children and grandchildren every year, with turkey, ham, macaroni and cheese, and steaming bowls of collard greens.

That was before – before she lost her job as a secretary, before she went on unemployment and then to a minimum-wage job raking leaves, before she had to give up her place to move in with her 37-year-old daughter. Now, she said, she doesn’t have anywhere of her own.

But this Thanksgiving she is determined to cook as usual, even though she’s broke and has to squeeze into her daughter’s tiny apartment kitchen to do it. For Crawford, it all came down to a donated 12-pound Safeway brand turkey in a cardboard box. She might not have all the traditional trimmings, but she had that.

Going for broke

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

I was talking to someone in D.C. last night who’s in a position to know, and he told me the final Catfood Commission report would contain a proposal to switch Medicare to a voucher system. (You might recognize it from the much-ridiculed Paul Ryan’s Roadmap to the Future.)

This is how the right wing operates. They don’t expect to get it passed this time, of course not. They merely intend to re-introduce this outrageous idea (Newt Gingrich first proposed it in 1995) over and over until the media minions have done their job and it starts to sound reasonable.

They’re patient that way.

GOP to jobless: Drop dead

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Citizens, do your part. Die!

Senators Jack Reed (D-RI) and Bob Casey (D-PA) want the Senate to take up and pass a one-year extension of unemployment insurance benefits from 26 to 99 weeks, but they did not sound hopeful on a conference call that this could get done before the extension lapses at the end of November.

Getting jobless benefits passed in the lame duck session is going to be a tough road. Congress has always passed emergency funding for extended unemployment benefits in a time of high joblessness, any time the topline rate is over 7.2%. But even with 59 votes, the Senate has faced an arduous series of votes to extend it out month by month this year. The last attempt in April needed multiple cloture votes, with several failing before the final success. At the time, Republicans like Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins said that would be the last extension they would vote for that wasn’t offset with some other revenue or spending cut. Ben Nelson (D-NE) has joined them, making it virtually impossible to find the votes.

Adding to this is the fact that the House and Senate will not be in session at all next week, meaning the deadline for getting this passed without a lapse in benefits for the jobless is Friday. Sen. Reed said that with respect to any vote on this, “at this point it’s not been scheduled… I can’t point to a specific time it would come up for a vote this week.” Two million Americans could lose their benefits by the end of the year if this doesn’t get extended, according to the National Employment Law Project. And after that, with an incoming Republican House and more Republicans in the Senate, it would seem virtually impossible to get UI benefits passed.

At the same time as this is happening, Republicans want to extend the high-end Bush tax cuts, at a cost of $700 billion dollars, without paying for them. So they want to allow tax cuts with little stimulative effect to go unpaid, and then insist on paying for UI extensions with major stimulative effect. “It’s like someone on a diet who orders a Diet Coke and a Big Mac simultaneously,” Reed said. “Republicans are trying to rewrite economics and reality.” Extending unemployment benefits gets money into the hands of people who need to spend it, while tax cuts for the rich often lies fallow. Economists have shown that UI extensions are far more stimulative; one report said that failure to pass an extension would shave 0.5% from GDP growth, and reduce consumer spending.

Saving, not spending

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

I say the solution to this problem is obvious: more tax cuts!

Tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 under President George W. Bush were followed by increases in the saving rate among the rich, according to data from Moody’s Analytics Inc. When taxes were raised under Bill Clinton, the saving rate fell.

The findings may weaken arguments by Republicans and some Democrats in Congress who say allowing the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans to lapse will prompt them to reduce their spending, harming the economy. President Barack Obama wants to extend the cuts for individuals earning less than $200,000 and couples earning less than $250,000 while ending them for those who earn more.

Don’t be silly! No, it won’t. It will simply point out that previous tax cuts just weren’t big enough!

“I would tend to wonder how much the tax cut actually influences spending behavior,” said Chris Cornell, an economist who mined government reports back to 1989 for West Chester, Pennsylvania-based Moody’s Analytics. “Spending by the top 5 percent of households seems much more closely tied to business- cycle issues than it does to tax-cut issues.”

The Moody’s research covering couples earning more than $210,000 found that spending by the wealthy is more likely to be influenced by the ups and downs of the stock market than changes in income-tax rates.