The Troubling Economic Outlook

States are reopening - some with surging cases of Covid-19 - and the American economy appears to have passed its nadir, but the economic future remains troubling. Some industries for now are doing remarkably well - real estate being one of them, at least for those who still have jobs and/or stashed savings that allow them to take advantage of historically low interest rates (I closed a refinance last week where a 15 year mortgage bore an interest rate of 2.25%).   Other sectors of the economy, however, remain bleak as restaurants and retail outlets struggle and the unemployment rate remains in double digits. Disturbingly, the federal government has no plan on how to cure the main factors threatening economic recovery and the Trump/Pence regime appears to want to pretend problems do not exist.  A long piece in The Atlantic looks at the situation and ponders whether America can rise to the challenges it faces or, if instead a long period of economic depression lies ahead.  Here are article highlights:

At least four major factors are terrifying economists and weighing on the recovery: the household fiscal cliff, the great business die-off, the state and local budget shortfall, and the lingering health crisis. Three months ago, the pandemic and ensuing shelter-in-place orders caused mass job loss unlike anything in recent American history. A virtual blizzard settled on top of the country and froze everyone in place. Nearly 40 percent of low-wage workers lost their jobs in March. More than 40 million people lost their jobs in March, April, or May.

Faced with this historic catastrophe, the United States marshaled a historic response: Republicans in the White House and Congress, generally hostile to the notion of economic stimulus for low-income households, came together with Democrats to achieve a $2 trillion rescue package, including a $1,200 onetime payment for most adults and $500 for many children, a radical expansion of the unemployment-insurance system to include gig workers, and a $600-a-week bump to unemployment-insurance payouts. It also created a sweeping small-business rescue plan, covering payroll for companies that kept their employees on the books.

The good: This money kept families afloat—at least for the first, intense months of shelter-in-place. New estimates suggest that the Congressional rescue plan prevented poverty rates from rising, with many jobless workers seeing their incomes increase during lockdown due to the expanded unemployment-insurance payouts. The bad: It left out roughly 15 million people in immigrant families, many of whom were working essential jobs stocking grocery shelves, delivering takeout, and drawing blood in hospitals. And the ugly: The big helicopter drop was a onetime thing, and the unemployment-insurance expansion was time-limited. Congress designed Uncle Sam’s help to dry up this summer, with the unemployment rate still in the double digits. Democrats and Republicans are negotiating another stimulus bill, but concerns about surging budget deficits are complicating the talks.

That means households are headed for a cliff. But not everyone will be affected by it equally. Rich workers, the ones with do-anywhere office jobs, have remained relatively untouched by job and earnings losses thus far. Wealthy families have seen their stock portfolios rebound to close to where they were in the winter. But poor workers—disproportionately black and Latino workers, as well as younger workers—have borne the heaviest employment and earnings losses. They entered this recession with no wealth cushion, many saddled with heavy rents and heavy debts. Income and job losses for them translate into a loss of demand economy-wide, absent federal intervention.

If and when that federal intervention dries up, millions of families just keeping their head above water will sink, as lost jobs and canceled hours force them to stop paying their rent and go into arrears on their debt payments. Hunger, homelessness, forgotten plans to attend community college, babies growing up in stressed households: These are the stakes. The CBO forecasts that every quarter through the end of 2021, American consumers will buy $300 billion to $370 billion less than they would have if the pandemic had never happened.

This steep decline in consumer spending will hasten mass business failure, the second factor weighing on the economy. The Paycheck Protection Program and other federal initiatives shoved an oxygen mask on many companies. But the PPP was scaled to help businesses through a short, intense disruption, though the economy is expected to remain sluggish for months and months. Moreover, the PPP did not include much aid for businesses with significant nonpayroll overhead costs, such as restaurants in high-cost cities. This means that many businesses will fail, if customers fail to return. Already, an estimated 100,000 small companies have shut permanently.

On top of that, numerous businesses—airlines, restaurants, live-events businesses, hotels, private schools, oil and gas companies—face severe and stubborn slumps. Students are not willing to pay as much for online learning as in-person instruction. Companies are not financing travel to conferences and sales meetings. Concerts and festivals are not expected to restart until scientists develop a coronavirus vaccine. Economists expect that 42 percent of people recently let go will not return to their former employers.

A third factor behind a possible second Great Depression is the budget crisis facing states and cities. The federal government does not have to balance its ledger year to year, and perpetually spends more than it takes in. Yet every state but Vermont and most cities and towns are required to remain in the black. Right now, sales taxes, real-estate-transfer taxes, income taxes, fines and fees—they are all collapsing, leaving local governments with a budget gap expected to total $1 trillion next year. Without help from Washington, this will necessarily mean massive service cuts and job losses: namely, an estimated 5.3 million job losses.

The shrinking of the government at the state and local level has already started, as Congress dithers on providing fiscal aid. Michigan is facing a $3 billion budget gap this year and a $4 billion one next year: It has instituted a work-share plan, asking two in three state employees to accept a partial furlough. In New Jersey, the government has asked 100,000 public workers to move to abbreviated schedules. Schools have already let go more workers than they did during the Great Recession, with nearly 500,000 positions lost.

A fiscal cliff for families. Rolling business failures. A budget crisis for state and local governments. Each is bad enough. Each might be a big-enough headwind to tip the economy into recession alone. But the last element is the true alpha and omega of our worst-case scenario: the catastrophe of the American government’s management of the novel-coronavirus pandemic.

Like many of its peer nations, the United States imposed shelter-in-place and social-distancing measures to curtail the spread of the virus. But it did so late, leading to the unnecessary deaths of tens of thousands of people. And it wasted the time these extreme measures bought, because the government failed to set up a strong test-and-trace regime. Countries including South Korea and New Zealand crushed the coronavirus. The United States merely patted it down. The country is reopening with the disease still spreading and maiming and killing, as several states experience a dramatic surge in caseloads.

The botched response means millions of parents will need to continue watching their young children instead of committing to work. It means thousands of offices will remain on work-from-home orders, hurting the commercial operations built to support them. It means Americans will avoid doctors’ offices, bars, and sporting events, staying at home and starving local businesses of revenue. It means localities might end up having to return to extreme social-distancing measures over the summer and fall. And it means fear and mistrust: depressed consumer confidence, ruined faith in government, and concerns about the economy’s ability to recover.

The Trump administration has repeatedly argued that there is a trade-off between the country’s economic health and its public health. But economists and physicians have repeatedly argued that that is untrue: Ending the pandemic would have been the single best thing the federal government could have done to preserve the country’s wealth, health, and economic functioning. The Trump administration, in its hubris, obstinacy, and incompetence, failed to do it.

All four of these factors, and the many others hurting families and killing Americans, are amenable to policy solutions. Congress could extend unemployment insurance, offer new help to flailing businesses, send monthly cash grants to poor families, offer fiscal relief to the states, and implement a nationwide test-and-trace program. The collapse is over. The rebound is under way. But a terrifying future awaits us, one that does not have to come to pass.

Why the GOP May Lose Everything

All of these Republicans need to be forced into retirement.

I try to not get overly optimistic, but the 2020 elections have the possibility of  dealing the Republican Party and Donald Trump a horrific defeat and loss of control of both houses of Congress and the White House.  If it comes to pass, it will be most deserved and a repudiation of an agenda that has benefited the very wealthy and in the final analysis little or nothing to the vast majority of Americans. Indeed, the entire GOP game plan has been to use racism and religious extremism to dupe working class and middle class Americans to vote against their own best interests. The gambit worked in 2016, but signs indicate that 2020 may prove to be a different ball game, especially with the coronavirus pandemics underscoring the need for the very programs and policies the GOP wants to destroy. A column in the Washington Post looks at the rapidly changing outlook for the GOP come December.  If the economy continues to suffer and there is a second wave of the virus, things could get even worse for Republicans - and deservedly so.  Here are excerpts:

Montana Gov. Steve Bullock (D) says that when he first announced he would run for the U.S. Senate, he “didn’t know what Montana and the country was going to look like in the short period thereafter.” With the covid-19 crisis, all his time has been taken up by being a governor, not a candidate. So far, that has only helped him in his campaign to unseat Republican Sen. Steve Daines.

In Maine, House Speaker Sara Gideon, a Democrat seeking to end the long career of Republican Sen. Susan Collins, says the pandemic has “laid bare the inequities that already existed” and underscored the need for a “vision of what it means to work together and for each other instead of trying to sow divisiveness.” This brings home Gideon’s case against Collins’s willingness to ally with President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), two of the most divisive figures in American politics.

Colorado’s former governor John Hickenlooper, a Democrat with a good chance of ousting incumbent Republican Sen. Cory Gardner, expresses a sense of gravity about this campaign that he never felt in his races for mayor of Denver or governor.

And Democrat Cal Cunningham, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan who is facing incumbent Republican Sen. Thom Tillis (N.C.), says that many North Carolinians today feel “an urgency that did not exist prior to March of this year” about “health coverage . . . about jobs, the economy.”

Issues that were once “percolating for many” are now “personal for everyone.”

If Bullock, Gideon, Hickenlooper and Cunningham all win, Democrats will likely take over the U.S. Senate and end McConnell’s days as majority leader.

And they are not the only challengers with a decent shot at Republican seats. In Arizona, Democrat Mark Kelly has been running ahead of Republican Sen. Martha McSally, and Republicans face vulnerabilities in Iowa, Georgia, possibly Kansas and perhaps even in South Carolina. McConnell, though favored, faces a spirited opponent in Amy McGrath, a former Marine fighter pilot. Only one Democratic incumbent, Sen. Doug Jones of Alabama, is an underdog. Having disastrously bungled the pandemic, Trump is not only falling well behind former vice president Joe Biden in the polls; he could also be creating a tidal wave that would give Democrats unified control of the federal government’s elected branches.

Hickenlooper and Gideon are running in states Trump lost in 2016, and the president’s increasing vulnerability in Arizona and North Carolina could open the way for Kelly and Cunningham.

My conversations with four of the top Senate challengers suggested that the coronavirus crisis has reinforced core arguments that helped the Democrats win the House in 2018, particularly around access to health care, while also increasing the saliency of inequality — in both economic and health outcomes — as a mainstream concern.

At the same time, Trump’s brutal belligerence has turned Democratic candidates into missionaries of concord. This allows them to be implicitly critical of the president and reach out to his one-time supporters at the same time.

If the GOP does lose everything, it will be because the Trumpian circus-plus-horror-show is entirely off-key for an electorate that has so much to be serious about.

Bobby Jindal’s Troubles at Home in Louisiana

Jindal at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University

Bobby Jindal, Governor of Louisiana, Hindu by descent and panderer to Christofascist is on the road for a 2016 presidential run telling a one sided version of his track record in his home state.  Indeed, the man is little better than a snake oil merchant when one looks at the whole story in Louisiana which in some ways mirrors the conservative disaster in Kansas under the misrule of Sam Brownback and a GOP dominated legislature.  A piece in Politico Magazine looks at the fiasco Jindal's reign has been for Louisiana.  America truly does NOT need Jindal's toxic, voodoo economics at the national level.  Here are article excerpts:

Gov. Bobby Jindal has a plan: Do for the country what he’s done for Louisiana. Cut taxes and cut the government workforce and the economy will bloom, he promises. It’s a message he’s peddling as he lays the groundwork for a presidential run. Indeed, as Jindal is quick to say, private-sector job growth and the economy in Louisiana have outpaced the national average during his tenure as governor. “I’m a fiscal conservative,” he told the influential Conservative Political Action Conference last year, in explaining these successes.

But here’s what Jindal doesn’t say: Louisiana’s budget is hemorrhaging red ink, and it’s getting worse. He inherited a $900 million surplus when he became governor seven years ago, and his administration’s own budget documents now show the state is facing deficits of more than $1 billion for as far as the eye can see. There are no easy solutions today because Jindal has increasingly balanced the budget by resorting to one-time fixes, depleting the state’s reserve funds and taking money meant for other purposes.

“There are all kinds of tricks in the budget,” said Greg Albrecht, the state legislature’s chief economist, a nonpartisan position. Meanwhile, the state’s unemployment rate has risen from 3.8 percent when Jindal took office, a point below the national average then, to 6.7 percent today—nearly a full point higher than today’s national average. Jindal omits these inconvenient facts when he bashes President Barack Obama and Washington for “bankrupting” the federal government and mismanaging the national economy.

[O]ne topic thus far has garnered little national attention: His economic record in the Bayou State.  

Democrats in the state are quick to point to the budget problems. But what’s striking are the harsh critiques from fellow Republicans, who say Jindal’s presidential ambitions and frequent campaign trips outside of Louisiana have taken precedence over managing his home state’s economic affairs. “I’m hoping he will multitask and spend some of his time with us,” said state Treasurer John Kennedy, a Republican. “I’m a numbers guy. We have serious, serious problems with our budget. For seven years, we have spent more than we’ve taken in.”

Republican state legislators are particularly scathing in saying Jindal no longer exercises leadership, but they don’t want to go on the record for fear of losing their choice committee assignments or having the governor kill their pet projects. 

Jindal blamed the state’s budget woes on factors beyond his control. “The oil price drop has been good for consumers, but it’s had a big impact on our revenue,” Jindal told me.

But that’s not how Republican elected officials and independent budget experts see it. They say that the plunge in oil prices and the subsequent loss of revenue for the state treasury has exacerbated—but did not create—the budget issues. The real cause, according to these sources: Jindal’s aversion to tackling politically tough issues and his tendency to resort to ploys to paper over the problems. And then, of course, there is The Pledge.

In 2003, as a private citizen running for governor (he narrowly lost), Jindal promised to “oppose and veto all efforts to increase taxes.” This was part of the bargain he agreed to when he took the pledge—the shorthand description of the Tax Protection Pledge hawked by Americans for Tax Reform, the group headed by anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist. As governor, he has taken the “no tax” commitment to such lengths that in 2011 he vetoed legislation supported by dozens of Republicans that sought renewal of a 4-cent portion of the state’s 36-cent-per-pack cigarette tax, the country’s third lowest.

Senate Reaches Possible Deal To Restore The Jobless Benefits - Will the GOP House Kill it?

This blog looks at hypocrisy on many fronts.  Outside of religious institutions and misnamed "family values" groups, few organizations provides more examples of hypocrisy than the Republican Party which claims to embrace Christian values even as it presses policies that are the antithesis of the Gospel message.  Nowhere is this hypocrisy more egregious than  the GOP's treatment of the poor and the unemployed who are viewed as disposable garbage even as the GOP and its"godly folk" supporters congratulate themselves on their feigned piety.  Now, the U.S. Senate has structured a compromise that would restore unemployment benefits to millions of the long term uninsured who were kicked off of benefit back around the Christnas holiday.  The question will now be whether or not the GOP controlled House of Representatives kills the effort.  Here are highlights from Think Progress:

After yanking the safety net out from underneath two million Americans in December, Congress may finally be ready to restore jobless benefits for the long-term unemployed. At least, for a few months, if the Republican-controlled House will agree to take up a long-awaited Senate compromise.

A group of senators reportedly agreed to a compromise that would reinstate the federal emergency unemployment compensation (EUC) program on Thursday afternoon. The deal would apply retroactively, meaning that the two million job-seekers who have gone without EUC checks since Congress let the program expire on December 28 would see back payments from the program. But, going forward, the agreement only extends the program by five months, meaning that it would lapse all over again in late May without a more permanent fix.

The EUC program, which serves those who have exhausted state-level jobless benefits but are still looking for work, was a casualty of Congress’ determination to reduce deficit. Even though conservatives in Congress have a long history of supporting the EUC program, they blocked an extension of it this time around by insisting that it be paid for through spending cuts elsewhere.

Lawmakers couldn’t agree on a method to pay for the program — which, like other safety net programs, actually saves the economy money on the whole by boosting the consumer spending that fuels job creation — and the program was left to expire.

At the time, 1.3 million people relied on those benefits. As the weeks passed and more job-seekers exhausted state aid, that number has climbed up over 2 million. A cumulative 2.3 million children live with unemployed parents who saw their federal benefits cut off.

Thursday’s deal shows that Congress’s obsession with deficit reduction hasn’t changed. The Senate deal pays for its brief EUC extension by allowing companies to continue under-paying into their pension funds, as well as extending some customs fees that were set to expire, according to a National Journal report on the compromise.

As Senators left the jobless without benefits over the last 10 weeks, the Congressional Budget Office reported that Washington had already slayed its deficit dragons; the nonpartisan agency now projects a budget deficit of just 3 percent of GDP this year and 2.6 percent of GDP next year.

In the meantime, the loss of federal benefits sucked billions of dollars out of state economies, which made the road back to gainful employment even longer for the long-term jobless.

The Victims of GOP Obstructionism

The economy continues to struggle to recover even as the Congressional Republicans engage in non-stop obstructionism and gridlock legislation on everything from economic stimulus, infrastructure rebuilding and immigration reform.  While these GOP saboteurs win the praise of delusional Christofascists and their likewise bigotry filled Tea Part first cousins, the obstructionism has very real victims. Millions of Americans have suffered directly and many, many more have suffered indirectly.  It is an ugly legacy and it underscores the hypocrisy of the GOP's feigned reverence for Christian values.  A column in the New York Times looks at these victims.  Here are some column highlights:

In an election year, there are always winners and losers. Rarely, however, are there so many victims.

Legislative gridlock, which was already bad enough, has devolved into a cynical, poisoned status. 

With a few obvious votes, Congress could improve the lives of millions of people — the unemployed, the undocumented, the uninsured. But instead of being helped, those in need are punished for nakedly political reasons.

It says a lot about this shameful state of affairs that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), one of the most powerful and savvy officials in Washington, had to put his career on the line to win an increase in the federal debt ceiling. Failure to act would have caused a catastrophic default. No new government spending was involved; rather, the Treasury simply needed to pay for spending that Congress already had authorized. Raising the limit was a no-brainer.

Yet Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), who continues to redefine the word “shameless,” almost led the nation into calamity by forcing Republican senators to go on record in favor of the increase. Since the GOP base has been told — wrongly — that refusing to hike the ceiling would somehow help get the debt under control, senators who voted to do the right thing risked a tea party challenge.

Congress managed to avoid inflicting grievous harm on the entire nation. A number of subgroups have not been so fortunate.

The Americans most obviously suffering because of Congress’s unwillingness to do the right thing are the 1.7 million jobless workers who have lost their long-term unemployment benefits.

Again, Republicans are wary of angering the party’s conservative base. It’s not so much a matter of increasing the deficit — a three-month extension would cost only $6 billion, and Democrats have proposed offsets — but that far-right dogma considers such payments a moral hazard that encourages idleness. Never mind that recipients of unemployment benefits, by definition, were employed until relatively recently and can demonstrate that they are actively looking for jobs.

The working poor are suffering unnecessarily as well. The federal minimum wage of $7.25 is far too low. In the past, Republicans have joined Democrats in voting for needed increases. In an election year, however, struggling wage-earners are out of luck.

The 11 million men, women and children who are in this country without documents are also victims of the calendar. President Obama and the entire congressional leadership agree that there is an urgent need for immigration reform. 

Also unfairly punished are the millions of uninsured Americans seeking coverage through the Affordable Care Act. Despite the Republican Party’s best efforts, Obamacare is working. But it would work better if Congress would cooperate with Obama in making a host of technical adjustments to the program.

 It’s one thing to seek an advantage at the polls. It’s another thing to make innocent people suffer for your ambition. Guilty members of Congress — and I’m specifically including you, Sen. Cruz — should hang their heads in disgrace.

The GOP’s Immoral Conservatism

This blog frequently condemns the hypocrisy of today's GOP elected officials who wrap themselves in religiosity, claim to support Christian values and then vote for policies and laws that are the antithesis of the Gospel message that they claim to support.  Indeed, they make the Pharisees of the New testament look like virtuous charity workers in comparison.  In short, these are horrible human beings who either cannot see humanity in the less fortunate or simply do not care.  They literally sicken me.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the immorality of today's GOP and the party's contempt for the poor, the sick, and the unemployed.  Here are highlights:

“It is immoral.”  That was the judgment of Rep. Pete Sessions, a Texas Republican and committee chairman, on the House floor this week. But the subject of his sermon wasn’t the Assad regime in Syria or human trafficking. What Sessions found immoral was the repugnant notion that the government would help Americans who lost their jobs and are looking for work.

Sessions, on the floor to usher through the House “sportsmen’s heritage and recreational enhancement” legislation, explained why he wouldn’t bring up jobless benefits: “I believe it is immoral for this country to have as a policy extending long-term unemployment to people rather than us working on creation of jobs.”

In fact, the economy has added about 8.5 million private-sector jobs in the last 47 months, and overall unemployment, at 6.6 percent in January, would be substantially lower if Sessions and his colleagues hadn’t been so successful in their “work” of cutting government spending when the recovery was fragile.

Republican opponents of the benefits extension said they would consider extending that help if it were “paid for” by saving money elsewhere. So Senate Democrats drafted a three-month extension that was paid for using an accounting method Republicans have supported in the past. Republicans responded with another filibuster — and on Thursday they again succeeded in blocking an extension of benefits.

And, as is often the case, these [Republican] complaints, in turn, echo Rush Limbaugh. After President Obama on Jan. 31 signed a memorandum directing the federal government not to discriminate against the long-term unemployed, the radio host responded: “So he says, ‘I’m directing every federal agency to make sure we are evaluating candidates on the level, without regard to their employment history.’ What if they’re fired because they’re drunk? What if they’re fired because they were having affairs with the boss’s secretary? Doesn’t matter. Can’t look at that.”

Limbaugh and his congressional apostles are justifying indifference to the unemployed much the way one denies a panhandler under the rationale that he would use the money only to buy more booze. But these are not panhandlers; these are, by definition, people who had been working and are trying to work again.

The Sessions/Inhofe/Limbaugh definition of morality is based in the ideal world of universal productivity they’d like to see, but it offers little help for human misery in the real world. This morality can be seen, too, in the attempt, led by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and embraced by many conservative lawmakers, to repeal the “risk corridors” that protect health insurers from unanticipated losses under Obamacare. That would likely bring down the entire health-care law, as its foes desire. But a collapse would also cause 30 million to 40 million additional people to lose their health insurance suddenly, with no obvious solution or easy way back to the old system. “It would precipitate a crisis,” says Larry Levitt of the Kaiser Family Foundation.

This morality is also at work in the decisions by 25 states under Republican control to reject the expansion of Medicaid offered under Obamacare. The states generally object because they are philosophically opposed to entitlement programs. But a new study from researchers at Harvard Medical School and City University of New York calculates that 7,115 to 17,104 more people will die annually than would have if their states had accepted the Medicaid expansion. The researchers, who favor a single-payer health system, examined demographic data and past insurance expansions.

Conservatives dispute the study’s findings, and I hope the critics are right. Allowing people to die to advance your political philosophy isn’t just bad policy. It’s immoral.

As noted before, I am truly ashamed that I was ever a Republican.  My long time Republican ancestors must be rolling over in their graves at what a horrible and immoral institution the GOP has become.   And who is to blame for this horrific transformation of the GOP?  The Christofascists and their Tea Party first cousins who have taken over the GOP grass roots. 

The Republican Culture of Death

We constantly hear Republicans and far right talking heads making outrageous claims about Obama death panels and the liberal left supporting a culture of death.  Truth be told, however, it is the Republican Party and its Christofacist/Tea Party base that is the real force behind a culture of death.  Why? Because many aspects of the GOP platform lead to unnecessary and otherwise avoidable deaths.  All the sanctimonious claims of "respecting life" will not wash away the blood on the hands of these people as they oppose health care expansion for the poor and unfortunate, seek horrific cuts to food stamps, throw unemployed workers to the gutter, and push for unrestricted gun ownership that results in avoidable gun related deaths virtually every single day.  A piece in the Loudoun Progress looks at this reality.  Here are highlights:

When is it okay to start talking about the fact that Republican policies actually kill people?
The most obvious example is Republican support for our government killing people, explicitly and in cold blood. That’s what the death penalty is. State sanctioned killing of a citizen in cold blood. Regardless of your position on the morality or constitutionality of the death penalty, it is, quite simply, support for state-sanctioned death. And as an example of the bedrock principle for Republicans that the state should be allowed to kill its citizens, there is no better example.

How about Republican’s opposition to reasonable gun safety legislation? To the point of actively repealing gun safety legislation already in place when they take control of a state? Did you know that Missouri repealed background checks for gun purchases recently? And when it did, gun murders went up 25%?  “Hey, this legislation will cause more people to be violently murdered!”  “Great, let’s do it!”

Or the 17,000 women who will die because Republican-controlled states refuse to expand Medicaid?

“We calculated the number and characteristics of people who will remain uninsured as a result of their state’s opting out of the Medicaid expansion, and applied these figures to the known effects of insurance expansion from prior studies,” lead author Samuel Dickman said. “The results were sobering. Political decisions have consequences, some of them lethal.”

So again I ask, when can we start talking about the fact that Republican policy positions seem to revel in a culture of death?

Sadly, much of the mainstream media is too lazy to challenge members of the GOP on such issues and instead mere repeats their talking points as if they were true.  

Leading Republicans' States Among Worst Hit by Cuts to Jobless Benefits

The idiocy of the Republican Party base continues to be dumbfounding.   By using religion as a poly and playing upon the inherent racism of the typical aging white evangelical voter, the Congressional Republicans continue to convince the cretins within the party base to ultimately vote against their own best interest.  These fools cannot see beyond the bait of dog whistle racism and claims of religiosity to realize they are being played for idiots.  And they are idiots unfortunately.  A piece in The Guardian looks at the manner in which the cuts to unemployment benefits will hit Republican controlled states.  As I have said before, one truly needs to have a lobotomy to be a Republican nowadays.  Here are story excerpts:

Senior Republican senators including Mitch McConnell, Marco Rubio and Rand Paul represent some of the states most affected by the controversial cancellation of long-term unemployment benefits, according to a Guardian analysis of data released this week.

Around 1.3 million people lost unemployment insurance benefits last week, after a bipartisan budget deal on federal spending failed to include a reauthorisation of the program. A further 72,000 job-seekers are expected lose their benefits from Saturday, a rolling tally that will continue through the year.

Figures released this week by the Department of Labor, and analysed by House Democrats, provided the first state-by-state breakdown of the first tranche of American job-seekers whose benefits were cut off. The knock-on impact has been estimated to be costing the US economy up to a billion dollars a week.

in addition to the 34 Democratic senators feeling the most pain as a result of of the benefits cuts, there are 16 Republicans.

They include high-profile figures such as Rubio, who represents Florida, where 73,000 job-seekers have lost, on average, $231 a week.

Four in every 1,000 people lost benefits in Kentucky, which has an 8.2% unemployment rate and is represented by McConnell, the Senate minority leader, and Paul, who like Rubio is considered a potential presidential candidate for 2016.

The data is particularly embarrassing for Paul, who in recent weeks has been one of the most visible defenders of the decision to cut the extended jobless benefit programme.

For decades, Republican and Democratic administrations have authorised the extended insurance for job-seekers during times of exceptionally high unemployment.

On Saturday, President Barack Obama used his weekly address to urge Congress to reinstate jobless benefits – specifically drawing attention to Republicans with high unemployment rates in their states.
"Republicans in Congress went home for the holidays and let that lifeline expire," the president said. "And for many of their constituents who are unemployed through no fault of their own, that decision will leave them with no income at all."

A Senate vote on a bipartisan bill to reintroduce the benefits is expected early next week, possibly as soon as Monday. The bill has been authored by Democrat Jack Reed and Republican Dean Heller, who represent the two states – Rhode Island and Nevada respectively – with the highest overall unemployment rates, both at 9%. Their bill reintroduces the benefits for three months, allowing Congress time to find a more permanent fix.

The battle over unemployment benefits is expected to dominate Capitol Hill when both houses return next week. On Tuesday, Obama will host several long-term job-seekers who lost their benefits in the East Room of the White House.

 The sad truth is that most Congressional Republicans do not give a rat's ass about the average American.  Oh, they give lip service that they care, but actions speak louder than words.

Thanks to the GOP, Five Million Americans Won't Get Health Insurance

As the year 2013 comes to a close, it is worthwhile to recall one last time some of the "gifts" that the Republican Party has bestowed on Americans: (i) an economy that is still struggling thanks to GOP opposition to economic stimulus and drastic cuts in spending at the state and federal level, (ii) over  one million unemployed workers who have been kicked to the curb and cut off from emergency assistance, (iii) the continued degradation of the separation of church and state, (iv) no progress on comprehensive immigration reform, and (v) over five million Americans who will not receive health insurance.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at this last "gift" to the American people:

Do you need health care coverage? Are you too “rich” to qualify for Medicaid but too poor to receive subsidies under the Affordable Care Act? Do you live in a Republican-controlled state? If you answered yes to all of the above, then you’re out-of-luck. Here’s the Associated Press:

About 5 million people will be without health care next year that they would have gotten simply if they lived somewhere else in America. […]

The court effectively left it up to states to decide whether to open Medicaid, the federal-state program for the poor and disabled, to more people, primarily poor working adults without children.

Twenty-five states declined. That leaves 4.8 million people in those states without the health care coverage that their peers elsewhere are getting through the expansion of Medicaid, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation estimate. More than one-fifth of them live in Texas alone, Kaiser’s analysis found.

This will impact as many people as the disruption in the private insurance market that generated a month’s worth of outrage over President Obama’s (broken) promise that “If you like your plan, you can keep it.” The key difference, however, is that . . . .  these Americans—who, barring a change in the law, are stuck in the coverage—are poor, marginalized, and ignored.

On that note, in fact, it should be said that this gap will deepen existing racial inequalities: The 25 states that have rejected the expansion are home to the majority of the nation’s poor, uninsured blacks, a direct product of our long history of racist policy making.

The Republican Party is the reason these people won’t receive health insurance and gain access to valuable medical services. The Medicaid expansion is fully funded by the federal government for the first three years, and mostly funded after that. It’s a win-win for the state and its residents. But in the twenty-five states that won’t participate, the GOP governors and legislators would rather deprive their citizens of needed benefits than cooperate with President Obama and the Affordable Care Act.

Remember this when Republicans insist they have an agenda for low-income families; if that were true, the party wouldn’t be united in denying health insurance to millions of poor Americans.

Under Reported GOP Generated Human Disasters

At times I have nothing but disgust for the main stream media which seems like either the lap dog of big business or some larger version of the National Inquirer which focuses on petty and unimportant stories while ignoring real significant problems.   Right now, two huge under reported problems in America - of GOP creation, I might add - are the 1 million plus unemployed workers losing emergency unemployment benefits and the related number of the working poor who remain without health care coverage.  The Gospels stress the need to care for the poor, sick and hungry, yet today's self-congratulatory folks in the Republican Party deem the poor, sick and the hungry only worthy of society's trash heap.  A column in the Washington Post looks at these stories largely ignored by the media.  Here are excerpts:

As The Post’s Brad Plumer expertly outlined on Friday, there are 4 million people who have been out of work for 27 weeks or longer, translating to the highest long-term unemployment rate since World War II. These people — young, old and from all kinds of demographics — have a 12 percent chance of finding a job in any given month, and, contrary to the theories of Rand Paul Republicans, there’s little evidence that they’re more likely to find work after losing benefits. Cutting off their benefits only causes more suffering for them and more damage to the economy. 

Also last weekend, the Obama administration reported that 1.1 million people had signed up online for coverage under the new health-care law. That’s a dramatic acceleration in enrollment, but it also leaves uninsured millions of people who are eligible for coverage. Some of them are working poor in states where Republican governors have refused to implement the law’s Medicaid expansion, and many more are being discouraged from enrolling by Republicans’ incessant opposition. This month’s CBS News-New York Times poll found that a majority of uninsured Americans disapprove of the new law, even though nearly six in 10 of the uninsured think insurance would improve their health. 

These real outrages make the Christmas-week controversies seem like tinsel. 

Bad things happen because good people stand by and do nothing - and because the media fails to report on stories that need to be told while focusing on matters more appropriately the a topic for Entertainment Tonight.  We once had a responsible main stream media, but those days are seemingly over.  It is part and parcel with the dumbing down of America.

The GOP's Agenda to Punish the Poor and Unemployed

As we move into the midst of the holiday season, thoughts tend to run to family and also assistance for the poor as all manner of charity efforts from "Toys for Tots" to clothing drives move into full swing.  It's a time of year when at least in theory Christian values and concern for the less fortunate ought to dominate.  But not so with Congressional Republicans.  While the blather about Christian values during stump speeches pandering to Christofascists and in sound bites, their legislative agenda is the antithesis of Christian values.  Their goal: punish the poor and unemployed and make their lives even more desperate.  A column in the New York Times looks at this foul agenda.  Here are some excerpts:

Six years have passed since the United States economy entered the Great Recession, four and a half since it officially began to recover, but long-term unemployment remains disastrously high. And Republicans have a theory about why this is happening. Their theory is, as it happens, completely wrong. But they’re sticking to it — and as a result, 1.3 million American workers, many of them in desperate financial straits, are set to lose unemployment benefits at the end of December. 

Merry Christmas. 

Now, the G.O.P.’s desire to punish the unemployed doesn’t arise solely from bad economics; it’s part of a general pattern of afflicting the afflicted while comforting the comfortable (no to food stamps, yes to farm subsidies). But ideas do matter — as John Maynard Keynes famously wrote, they are “dangerous for good or evil.” And the case of unemployment benefits is an especially clear example of superficially plausible but wrong economic ideas being dangerous for evil.

 Here’s the world as many Republicans see it: Unemployment insurance . . . . reduces the incentive to search for a new job. As a result, the story goes, workers stay unemployed longer.

Correspondingly, the G.O.P. answer to the problem of long-term unemployment is to increase the pain of the long-term unemployed: Cut off their benefits, and they’ll go out and find jobs. How, exactly, will they find jobs when there are three times as many job-seekers as job vacancies? Details, details. 

On the contrary, unemployment benefits help create jobs, and cutting those benefits would depress the economy as a whole. 

[E]employment in today’s American economy is limited by demand, not supply. Businesses aren’t failing to hire because they can’t find willing workers; they’re failing to hire because they can’t find enough customers. And slashing unemployment benefits — which would have the side effect of reducing incomes and hence consumer spending — would just make the situation worse. 

[T]he odds, I’m sorry to say, are that the long-term unemployed will be cut off, thanks to a perfect marriage of callousness — a complete lack of empathy for the unfortunate — with bad economics. But then, hasn’t that been the story of just about everything lately? 

Eric Cantor and House GOP Seek More Cuts in Food Stamps

One of the things that always strikes me about the House Republicans is that they constantly prostitute themselves to the Christofascists and proclaim their worship of Judeo-Christian morality, yet then push policies and positions that are 180 degrees opposite of what the Gospel message would have one do.  Instead of feeding the hungry, aiding the sick, etc., the GOP seeks to demolish the social safety net and throw millions of Americans on the trash heap.  The hypocrisy is amazing.  Equally stunning is the fact that the mainstream media never calls them on this hypocrisy.  Now, in keeping with its war on the poor and needy, the GOP House is seeking further slashing of the food stamp program.  Politico has high lights:

House Republicans are proposing to double their food stamp savings to nearly $40 billion by rolling back waivers for able-bodied adults and targeting funds to states that are willing to impose greater work requirements on the parents of young children.

The prime mover is Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) who helped jettison the nutrition title from the House farm bill last month and is now trying to write his own version before the House goes to conference with the Senate.

The prime target appears to be able-bodied beneficiaries under 50 years old and without dependents — a population that has grown significantly since 2008 because of the bad economy and increased state waivers of a 20-hour-a-week work requirement.

By rolling back these waivers, large savings are possible, essentially by forcing millions off the rolls if they don’t find work after three months. Unless approached with some care, the impact could be severe in areas of chronically high-unemployment, such as the Rio Grande Valley, poor urban areas and Indian reservations, for example. And the final details of the bill have not been made public.

A second area of more modest but still controversial savings would come from using federal funds to pressure states to take a more aggressive welfare reform-like approach imposing work requirements on able-bodied parents with young children.

Currently Washington provides a 50 percent match for states that spend their own funds for employment and training programs for food stamp recipients. As proposed now, the bill would only provide this aid if the state is willing to operate welfare reform-like work activities for mothers with children over 1- years-old.

This is a significant expansion of the current food stamps work rules, which exempt mothers with children under 6.

Peterson said his great fear is that the Cantor effort will only raise the stakes on the food stamp cuts to the point where any compromise with be unacceptable to conservatives and make it harder for Democrats to step back in and help pass the final report from the House-Senate conference.

Cantor is a vile individual and an embarrassment to Virginia. 

Survey: 4 in 5 in America Face Near Poverty, No Work

Wealth disparities in America now exceed those in Europe and even former banana republics.  And things seem to be getting only worse as more and more Americans live on the edge just a pay check away from financial ruin and ensuing poverty.  Yet, the GOP continues to seek to slash social programs and to cut taxes for the very wealthy.  The GOP agenda is the antithesis of what the "godly folk" of the GOP base ought to be pursuing if they really gave a damn about the Gospel message that they pretend to revere.  A new study reveals just how bad things have become.  A piece in Talking Points Memo looks at the findings:

Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream.

Survey data exclusive to The Associated Press points to an increasingly globalized U.S. economy, the widening gap between rich and poor, and the loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs as reasons for the trend.

As nonwhites approach a numerical majority in the U.S., one question is how public programs to lift the disadvantaged should be best focused — on the affirmative action that historically has tried to eliminate the racial barriers seen as the major impediment to economic equality, or simply on improving socioeconomic status for all, regardless of race.

Hardship is particularly growing among whites, based on several measures. Pessimism among that racial group about their families’ economic futures has climbed to the highest point since at least 1987. In the most recent AP-GfK poll, 63 percent of whites called the economy “poor.”

“I think it’s going to get worse,” said Irene Salyers, 52, of Buchanan County, Va., a declining coal region in Appalachia. Married and divorced three times, Salyers now helps run a fruit and vegetable stand with her boyfriend but it doesn’t generate much income. They live mostly off government disability checks.

“If you do try to go apply for a job, they’re not hiring people, and they’re not paying that much to even go to work,” she said. Children, she said, have “nothing better to do than to get on drugs.”

The gauge defines “economic insecurity” as a year or more of periodic joblessness, reliance on government aid such as food stamps or income below 150 percent of the poverty line. Measured across all races, the risk of economic insecurity rises to 79 percent.

Marriage rates are in decline across all races, and the number of white mother-headed households living in poverty has risen to the level of black ones.

“It’s time that America comes to understand that many of the nation’s biggest disparities, from education and life expectancy to poverty, are increasingly due to economic class position,” said William Julius Wilson, a Harvard professor who specializes in race and poverty. He noted that despite continuing economic difficulties, minorities have more optimism about the future after Obama’s election, while struggling whites do not.

“There is the real possibility that white alienation will increase if steps are not taken to highlight and address inequality on a broad front,” Wilson said.

Sometimes termed “the invisible poor” by demographers, lower-income whites generally are dispersed in suburbs as well as small rural towns, where more than 60 percent of the poor are white. Concentrated in Appalachia in the East, they are numerous in the industrial Midwest and spread across America’s heartland, from Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma up through the Great Plains.

Buchanan County in southwest Virginia is among the nation’s most destitute based on median income, with poverty hovering at 24 percent. The county is mostly white, as are 99 percent of its poor.

More than 90 percent of Buchanan County’s inhabitants are working-class whites who lack a college degree. Higher education long has been seen there as nonessential to land a job because well-paying mining and related jobs were once in plentiful supply. These days many residents get by on odd jobs and government checks.

There is much more depressing news and the irony is that many of the poor whites stupidly support the GOP which is in reality their worse enemy.  Another irony is that Buchanan County, Virginia, is in the land of Bible beaters and open bigotry, yet residents wonder why no progressive business wants to locate there.  Who would want to move to a region filled with racists, homophobes and Neanderthals?  Bigotry and intolerance carries a high economic price.  Meanwhile, of course, the GOP blathers on and on about American exceptionalism.