Month: April 2015

Republican field; sob, stop quoting me!

by

Rand Paul spent the first day of his official candidacy testily explaining to reporters that nothing he said before about 2009, when he began running for office, is in any way relevant to his presidential run now and so it’s all off limits. In one case, he even claimed that something he said in 2009 was said in 2007, pushing it back out of the acceptable-to-ask category, per his rules.

The party of Jefferson Davis, not of Lincoln

by

one of America’s most fundamental problems is that the alliance between the current form of Southern labor and the current form of New York finance is with us still.   The Southernization of the Republican Party and the increasing domination of Wall Street’s over the nation’s economic life have combined to erode both the income and the power of U.S. workers. Unions are anathema to Wall Street and the GOP.

Worker loses her job

by

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/03/30/after-a-story-is-published-a-minimum-wage-worker-loses-her-job/?tid=hybrid_experimentrandom_3_naShanna Tippen was another hourly worker at the bottom of the nation’s economy, looking forward to a 25-cent bump in the Arkansas minimum wage that would make it easier for her to buy diapers for her grandson. When I wrote about her in The Post last month, she said the minimum wage hike would bring her a bit of financial relief. (she’d need to earn nearly $12 an hour to live above the poverty line.)http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/02/17/the-25-cent-raise-what-life-is-like-after-a-minimum-wage-increase/In 1968, somebody could live above the poverty line with a family of three on a full-time minimum wage job.

Government Handouts The Rich Get

by

In case you are still skeptical the rich receive benefits from government (for which we don’t make them pee in a cup or promise not to buy luxuries),
1. The mortgage interest deduction for big houses and second homes. Thanks to this tax break, the 5 million households in America making more than $200,000 a year get a lot more housing aid than the 20 million households living on less than $20,000. Deductions for mortgage interest incentivize people already capable of buying big homes to buy even bigger ones.

Making the poor prove they’re worthy

by

We don’t drug-test farmers who receive agriculture subsidies (lest they think about plowing while high!). We don’t require Pell Grant recipients to prove that they’re pursuing a degree that will get them a real job one day (sorry, no poetry!). We don’t require wealthy families who cash in on the home mortgage interest deduction to prove that they don’t use their homes as brothels (because surely someone out there does this).

Arthur Laffer – supply-side plans for GOP

by

Laffer’s theories are so far detached from mainstream economics that “there is no point of contact,” said Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist … “This is not a wing of professional economic thought, … This is not at all the same kind of enterprise as what even conservative economics professors do.”
Republicans love Laffer, Krugman said, not because his message is simple but because it conforms perfectly to a preexisting limit-the-government worldview: “The point is, he’s telling them what they want to hear.”via

Arthur Laffer has a never-ending supply of supply-side plans for GOP – The Washington Post.

A major party gone mad?

by

There was never any evidence to support strong supply-side claims about the marvels of tax cuts and the horrors of tax increases; even freshwater macroeconomists, despite their willingness to believe foolish things, never went down that road.
Since the 1970s there have been four big changes in the effective tax rate on the top 1 percent: the Reagan cut, the Clinton hike, the Bush cut, and the Obama hike.  they predicted dire effects from the Clinton hike; instead we had a boom that eclipsed Reagan’s.

“… we cannot escape history.”

by

what unites the Republican Party, on this 150th anniversary of the murder of Lincoln, is that they are against the type of progressive legislation that gave rise to their party. Lincoln is an oil painting in the parlor, to be dusted off while Republican leaders plot new ways to kill things that he would have approved of.