When Barack Obama proposed a deficit commission to develop a long-range plan for balancing the budget, for some bizarre reason Republicans were against it. I think they simply opposed it because their knee-jerk reaction is to oppose every single thing Obama says. Heck, when the Obama girls got their puppy, I was surprised not to see the GOP attack puppies as anti-American.
But Obama established the commission anyway, because it looks highly unlikely that Congress will be able to put aside its bickering enough to do the work we will desperately need once the economy is righted. Here’s how The Hill describes the work of the commission:
[The commission will] produce a package of proposals aimed at bringing the deficit down to a sustainable level by 2015.
The panel may consider tax increases, spending cuts and entitlement reforms. As Obama has said, “everything is on the table.”
Except now, a whole lot of things aren’t on the table. Republicans have almost exclusively appointed hard-line, reactionary conservatives to serve on the budget panel, suggesting that they are only willing to consider slashing services and not raising revenues. Sounds like the same old story: Democrats want to put everything on the table, with the full understanding that they will have to make major concessions, while Republicans refuse to move an inch.
I hope those of you who had a chance to listen to the Supreme Court unallotment hearing will chime in with your reactions. I thought the justices sounded very suspicious of the Pawlenty administration’s arguments, although you can never be sure how much of that is simply them playing devil’s advocate.
More importantly, listening to Pawlenty’s lawyers dodge questions, tiptoe around the real issues, and just generally try to stretch the fabric of reality, it was pretty clear to me that the administration has a tough case to make.
The case against unallotment is simple, because our constitution is simple. Our Governor is not a legislator. He does not have the power to make law; his power is to enforce the laws passed by the legislature. He was sent a balanced budget, and did not have the right to unbalance it himself and then claim emergency actions were needed to re-balance it.
In contrast, the administration’s argument relies on a lot of clever interpretations of individual words within the statute. If you read the statute a very specific way, ignoring its intent, you could possibly argue that Pawlenty’s unallotment, while inappropriate, was not illegal.
As I predicted, Tim Pawlenty did not compromise with DFL legislators. In fact, he slashed the bonding / jobs bill to even less than his original request — down to $680 million. Estimating the number of jobs that this money would have produced is tricky, but based on estimates made by a variety analysts earlier in the session, I’d estimate that Pawlenty just slashed at least 5,000 jobs — and that’s a fairly conservative estimate. I’ll go into more detail on the numbers later.
Of course, it’s not just the jobs that we’ll lose. As with any infrastructure bill, we don’t just hand out money to people; we use it to build infrastructure the state needs. Pawlenty’s big targets were higher education, public transit, and civic improvements. Rather than build these things when prices are low, we will instead wait until interest rates come up and construction costs rise.
At best, Pawlenty has shown himself to be penny-wise and pound-foolish. At worst, he’s shown himself willing to sacrifice our state’s well being to win over a few voters in the presidential primaries. Whatever his true motivations, Pawlenty continues to dig our state into a hole that will take years, if not decades, to dig ourselves out of.
Today, the Minnesota Supreme Court will hear arguments in the Pawlenty administration’s appeal of the ruling against his illegal unallotment actions. The district court ruled that Pawlenty needs to honor the separation of powers found in our constitution, and that he does not get to unilaterally make law. Pawlenty appealed, bringing an enormously important case to the Supreme Court.
The UpTake will be providing a live stream of the arguments, with their live-blog starting in about 15 minutes.
MPR’s Mid-Morning will also carry the proceedings live in about half an hour. You can listen to the live stream here.
I’ll do my best to have some commentary this afternoon. It can be difficult for me to post during the day, so no promises there, but I’ll give it my best shot.
For months, the White House has been establishing deadlines for the passage of health reform, and for that entire time, Congress has been missing those deadlines. It makes Democrats look weak and ineffectual, which is really not so far from the truth. Which is why I had to groan when Press Secretary Robert Gibbs did it yet again:
“We’ll have the votes when the House votes, I think, within the next week,” Gibbs said on “Fox News Sunday.”
Gibbs added that those on next week’s Sunday talk shows “will be talking about healthcare not as a presidential proposal but I think as the law of the land.”
I’m sure that yet another arbitrary deadline will really help Nancy Pelosi pick up the votes she needs.
Apparently, the Republican nomination to take on Tim Walz in CD1 this year will go to the candidate who says the most outrageous things and does the most damage to civil discourse. Back in January, you’ll recall, Steve Quist made his entry:
“Our country is being destroyed. Every generation has had to fight the fight for freedom… Terrorism? Yes. That’s not the big battle,” he said. “The big battle is in D.C. with the radicals. They aren’t liberals. They are radicals. Obama, Pelosi, Walz: They’re not liberals, they’re radicals. They are destroying our country.”
Now there’s a new contender: Jim Hagedorn, who had a number of incendiary comments prepared for his country convention speech. Here are a couple:
The national liberals are all but carpet bombing the greatness of America – taking dead aim on the United States Constitution, our dynamic Free Enterprise system, and the enduring concepts of personal responsibility, individual opportunity, personal freedom, and traditional cultural values.
Tim Walz’s extreme liberalism represents a plague to our American way of life. Instead of listening to you – the moderate-to-conservative voters of southern Minnesota – Tim Walz follows the commands of President Obama, Nancy Pelosi and the fringe left.
Okay, I’m not going to be getting one any time soon, because they start at $86,000, but after decades of waiting, there’s a company out there manufacturing a jet pack for consumer use.
The Jetpack achieves with 30 minutes of flight time and is fueled by regular premium gasoline, though you will undoubtedly earn some disbelieving stares at the petrol station. Since it has been built according to ultralight regulations no FAA recognized pilot’s license is required to fly one in the U.S., though this will depend on a country’s specific requirements. However, despite being significantly less complex than a helicopter to fly as pitch and roll are controlled by one hand, thrust and yaw by the other, Martin Aircraft won’t let anyone take receipt of their jetpack before completing their specially-developed Martin Aircraft Company approved training program.
Eight months before the 2010 election, a new Rasmussen poll has come to a shocking conclusion: It’s too early to predict who will win. Three of the top Democrats — Kelliher,Rybak, and Dayton — are neck-and-neck with the two Republicans, Seifert and Emmer. The exact configuration of who is predicted to win varies according to the matchup, but they’re all within the margin of error, so it doesn’t really matter. More importantly, 16 to 20 percent say they’re unsure in each matchup.
The spin has already started, though. Minnesota Democrats Exposed quotes Seifert’s camp as saying “Seifert leads a former U.S. Senator, the Speaker of the House in Minnesota, and is tied with the Mayor of Minneapolis.”
Just to be clear, since I’m a pedantic wonkish type, nobody is leading in any of these matchups — they are all statistical dead heats. That includes the matchups where DFLers appear to lead. I’m not trying to spin, here — it’s too early to even bother with that. As we prepare for an onslaught of poll results, though, it would be good to make sure we’re all intelligent consumers of the results. After the break, I’ve included a quick explanation of how to read the numbers after factoring in the margin of error. More »« Less
Some new information has recently come to light about Republican Paul Ryan’s “shadow budget,” and it’s looking like an even worse idea than I first thought. Initially, I wrote that I respected Ryan for producing a bill that would eliminate the deficit, even if I though it was a bad plan overall:
I’m certainly willing to admit that the Republicans’ ideas would eliminate our deficit, eventually. There are only two problems:
I don’t really think we can wait 50 to 60 years to balance the budget.
Even if it does balance the budget, is it really worth it if we have to destroy Social Security and Medicare
Well, it turns out the shadow budget won’t reduce the deficit — not even over 50 years. Here’s the thing. When he asked the Congressional Budget Office to score his proposal, Ryan made what could charitably be called a major assumption: He asked the CBO to assume that revenue under the plan would stay exactly the same as it is now. But an analysis by the non-partisan tax policy center shows that’s not even close to reality:
Patrick Kennedy is furious — and I mean screaming, red-in-the-face furious — and personally, I don’t blame him. Kennedy figured out exactly why our public has become so cynical about politics when exactly two reporters showed up to cover a House debate on Afghanistan.
Cynicism is that there’s one, two press people in this gallery. We’re talking about Eric Massa 24/7 on the TV! We’re talking about war and peace, $3 billion, 1,000 lives and no press! No press! [TPM]
The video is uncomfortable, but very much worth a watch.
I saw glimmers of hope last week that there would be a real compromise on the bonding bill instead of the DFL’s usual complete and utter surrender to the Governor. But it turns out we’ll have complete surrender after all. The DFL is set to pass a new bonding bill which doesn’t change the total amount spent by much, but does include a number of Pawlenty’s priorities that had previously been ignored. Now, Pawlenty says he’ll sign the bill, but line-item veto an unspecified amount.
Governor Pawlenty said today that he intends to sign a nearly $1 billion bonding bill but suggested that he would line-item veto projects from the bill. Pawlenty told reporters that he hasn’t decided which projects he would line-item veto from the bill.
“The bonding bill incorporates most of our key priorities,” Pawlenty said. “It’s still too large but it’s a bill we can work with and we’ll just have to slim it down to something that is more reasonable and responsible and affordable.”
“A bill we can work with” means that his priorities have been included, so he can easily cut hundreds of millions of dollars in other projects. It’s too early to say yet, but my guess is that Pawlenty will cut heavily, leaving this year’s bonding bill a serious missed opportunity. I would love to be wrong on that, but we all know Pawlenty’s track record.
Real changes are coming to the way we bank. According to the NY Times, Bank of America will stop allowing overdrafts on debit card purchases in anticipation of Federal rules related to the Credit CARD Act.
In a move that could bring an end to the $40 cup of coffee, Bank of America said on Tuesday that it was doing away with overdraft fees on purchases made with debit cards, a decision that could cost the bank tens of millions a year in revenue and put pressure on other banks to do the same.
…
Banks are bracing for a new federal rule that will require them to get permission from account holders before providing overdraft services for debit purchases and A.T.M. withdrawals. That change was already expected to wipe out billions of dollars in overdraft revenue for the banks.
“What our customers kept telling me is ‘just don’t let me spend money that I don’t have,’ ” said Susan Faulkner, the bank’s deposit and card product executive, who said the overdraft changes were part of a broader push to build trust among its customers. “We wanted to help them avoid those unexpected overdraft fees.”
“I’ll just tell you this,” Limbaugh said to a concerned caller. “If this passes and it’s five years from now and all that stuff gets implemented — I am leaving the country. I’ll go to Costa Rica.”
Here’s the funny part, though — Costa Rica has universal health care.The Wonk Room explains:
Costa Rica’s hybrid government-private health care system provides comprehensive universal coverage to all residents — and even sells affordable policies to soon-to-be visitors like Limbaugh. The government owns several major public hospitals and operates small clinics in almost every community. Workers are required to contribute 15% of their salaries to health insurance and the unemployed “obtain public funding for all health services, including prescription drugs.”
There’s practically no developed nation where Rush could go to escape the “evils” of affordable health insurance for everybody. Perhaps his only choice is to move to a libertarian paradise.
Our student loan system right now is really pretty bizarre. Our Federal government is already a huge lender. In fact, every penny of my student loans came from the Federal “Direct Loans” program. Many people receive some of their loans from private sources — my wife, for instance, had about one-third of her loans through a private source. The government pays private loan companies billions and billions of dollars to make these private loans, which seems pretty pointless, given that my wife’s private loans have the exact same terms as her Federal loans.
Why in the world should we spend billions and billions of dollars subsidizing private loans when the government can make those loans more effectively? Not only that, the government is already making those loans to millions of students. I would love to hear somebody explain to me the fiscal sense of paying private companies billions of dollars to make loans with the exact same terms as the government’s Direct Loans.
In fact, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that ending subsidies for private lenders would save over $80 billion over ten years, even after reducing interest rates for students. Is anybody really going to tell me that we should not be doing this?
That brings us to Lamar Alexander, R-TN, and this ridiculous op-ed:
For those of you who haven’t seen it, the New York Times on Sunday published a chart created by Congressional scholars showing the history of reconciliation. The chart shows a brief summary of every bill that has been passed via reconciliation, and there’s a very wide range of circumstances it’s been used for. In the accompanying text, the authors sum things up:
Reconciliation was intended to be a narrow procedure to bring revenues and spending into conformity with the levels set in the annual budget resolution. But it quickly became much more. The 22 reconciliation bills so far passed by Congress (three of which were vetoed by President Bill Clinton) have included all manner of budgetary and policy measures: deficit reductions and increases; social policy bills like welfare reform; major changes in Medicare and Medicaid; large tax cuts; and small adjustments in existing law. Neither party has been shy about using this process to avoid dilatory tactics in the Senate; Republicans have in fact been more willing to do so than Democrats.
By the way, a quick note for those of you who would love to stop hearing about reconciliation: So would I, but the fact is, this is the most important subject in national news right now. Let’s hope the Democrats will get this thing done so I can stop writing about it.
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