Every single Senate Republican has endorsed a constitutional amendment that would’ve made Ronald Reagan’s fiscal policy unconstitutional. That’s how far to the right the modern GOP has swung. Ezra Klein ☀
The government can’t make the private sector invest. They can’t demand that Wal-Mart start hiring. They can offer incentives, and tax breaks, and encouragement, but that’s it. The same cannot be said when it comes to public sector jobs. The government can, if it’s willing to run deficits, keep those workers employed. But Senate Republicans, alongside some conservative Democrats, have decided to make the government pro-cyclical: Rather than fighting the downturn in the business cycle, the government is now accelerating it. And don’t ignore the effect this has on private businesses. They’re not going to hire new workers or invest in more capacity if jobs aren’t coming back, because without jobs, there’s no demand. But because the federal government has decided against backing up state and local governments, the bleeding continues, and that scares businesses away from investing in recovery. We create the stimulus that helped the economy survive 2008 and 2009, and we’ve created the anti-stimulus that’s keeping it from recovering in 2010. Ezra Klein ☀
America is more than a country,” begins the GOP’s ‘Pledge to America.’ America, it turns out, is an “idea,” an “inspiration,” and a “belief.” And the GOP wants to govern it. Their policy agenda is detailed and specific — a decision they will almost certainly come to regret. Because when you get past the adjectives and soaring language, the talk of inalienable rights and constitutional guarantees, you’re left with a set of hard promises that will increase the deficit by trillions of dollars, take health-care insurance away from tens of millions of people, create a level of policy uncertainty businesses have never previously known, and suck demand out of an economy that’s already got too little of it. Ezra Klein ☀
AT&T says it’s writing off a billion dollars. Caterpillar took a $150 million hit. But what’s going on here isn’t a new mandate or a hefty tax, but the elimination of a subsidy that advantaged firms who provide drug benefits to retirees. What happened was this: When George W. Bush and the Republican Congress passed Medicare Part D in 2003, they were presented with a problem: The fact that the government was now offering prescription drug coverage might encourage these companies to dump the prescription drug coverage they were already offering employees. So Congress gave them a kickback: Companies that provide retiree drug benefits get a subsidy of about $1,300 per retiree per year in order to keep companies from ending their retiree drug plans at once and dumping everyone into Medicare. This subsidy is not just tax free but also tax deductible. Let me make sure that’s clear: Not only did companies get a subsidy, but they could also deduct that subsidy from their taxes. Sweet deal. This looked a bit nuts in retrospect, so Democrats ended the subsidy’s deductibility. Again, let’s be clear: They didn’t end the subsidy. And they didn’t make it taxable. They just said that it couldn’t be used as a tax deduction. Ezra Klein ☀
Apparently, all of you people out there aren’t reading much that disagrees with positions you already hold. At least this is the conclusion reached by Eric Lawrence, John Sides, and Henry Farrell in the latest issue of Perspectives on Politics.
Are you just being lazy or did you try it for awhile and realize that reading something written from the opposite side of the political spectrum made you too angry every morning?
My Google Reader subscriptions tally to 1,769 feeds. While I cannot give an accurate calculation of the ratio of various political spectrums nor guarantee that’s an even 1:1:1:1 ratio, I can assure you that reflected in the contents are voices from all political persuasions. From radical Chomsky loving leftists to paleo-conservatives at the American Conservative. From adulatory Ludwig von Mises lovers at Lew Rockwell to up and coming hopeful conservatives at the Next Right. From liberal leanings by Ezra Klein and Paul Krugman to the crunchy Cons at Front Porch Republic. From the staunchly conservative neo-reformed Christian crowd to progressive people of the way.
About the only material I actively discriminate against is the Jay Rosen termed “church of the savvy” stylings of mainstream pundits like David Broder, Richard Cohen, George Will, etc.… Or the party propaganda orchestrated and espoused by loyal apparatchiks, on either side of the American party duopoly.
But, then, I’m such a political outcast that I find some level of agreement and disagreement in just about everything I read.
Before you can tear down an argument, you must be able to deconstruct it. And to deconstruct it, means you must learn and study it first. To see the perspective from an devoted, heartfelt advocate of such a plank.
Ponnuru offers, I think, not only the best, but also the consensus, conservative take on health reform. But by the close of his op-ed, we’re in a space where insurers could still discriminate based on pre-existing conditions, where millions of Americans will still lack access to health insurance, where about 20 million Americans will lose the employer-based coverage they currently rely on, where risk pools have gotten smaller and insurers have gotten more powerful, and where we’ve repealed state laws forcing insurers in Arizona to cover colorectal cancer screening and insurers in Idaho to cover mammograms. As a vision of reform, it has the peculiar quality of being neither appealing nor sufficient. It doesn’t claim to fix the health system, to make its costs sustainable or its coverage complete, and it doesn’t pretend to address the anxieties of workers who fear losing their employer-based health insurance or being unable to afford full coverage in the future. Ezra Klein ☀
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