Month: June 2011

Boehner’s Economic Terrorism

We have a potential catastrophe of national default, an event whose consequences are unknowable but which could quite easily wreck the US and global economies, profoundly damage people's savings, raise interest rates and destroy jobs for a very long time. In most countries, the goal of the entire political class is to avoid such a thing if at all possible. Greece is currently facing down riots in order to slash its deficit. Britain is entering a period of profound austerity. All of this pain is to prevent the worst possible crisis to hit a country: default. All responsible politicians understand this is something to be avoided at all costs. Conservatives especially see any weakening of the full faith and credit of sovereign governments or the EU as very destabilizing to growth and democratic stability.

So here we are in the USA, with our own awful debt crisis, and the possibility of default and one of 117136823 the two major parties is saying effectively: bring it on. Even more amazing, it is the conservative party that seeks the collapse of the global economy if they do not get their way on every single thing.

Some sane Republicans (Coburn) are absolutely right in my view that spending needs to be cut deeply, broadly and permanently to get us back on track, that Medicare is at the center of the problem and that corporate welfare is at obscenely high levels. I favor a plan along Bowles-Simpson lines that would truly transform the long-term fiscal outlook, while treading a little gingerly in the next year or so.

But I am also an adult and understand that in the American political system, this kind of package has to win support from House, Senate and president to pass. There will have to be compromise. At a time, moreover, of extreme economic pain in many parts of the country, after a period in which the successful have become relatively richer than everyone else than at any point in recent decades, the sacrifice should surely be shared. You can do this by emphasizing many more spending cuts than tax increases – something I'd favor and something that the British Tories have put into effect. But it is simply insane to believe that the deal can be only tax hikes or only spending cuts and make it through the political process.

For the GOP to use the debt ceiling to put a gun to the head of the US and global economy until they get only massive spending cuts and no revenue enhancement is therefore the clearest sign yet of their abandonment of the last shreds of a conservative disposition. A conservative does not risk the entire economic system to score an ideological victory. That is what a fanatic does. And when that fanatical faction was responsible for huge spending binges in the recent past, for two off-budget wars costing $4.4 trillion, a new Medicare benefit, and tax revenues at a 50-year low relative to GDP and tax rates below the levels of Ronald Reagan, this insistence is lunacy, when it isn't gob-smackingly hypocritical. I say this as someone who was railing against too much spending when these people were throwing money away like it was confetti. "Deficits don't matter," remember?

It seems to me there are two options the president can take. The first is what you are told to do when a criminal or terrorist holds a gun to your head. You surrender.

The point of economic blackmail is that it works. If you have a scintilla of public responsibility and you hold public office, you cannot allow default. And so you give them everything they want. You announce this while declaring you abhor the package but have to back it for the sake of the national interest in preventing catastrophe. You detail and expose the Republican priorities far more aggressively than in the past. You blame the performance of the economy entirely on them from now on out. And you run on a platform of shared sacrifice – of revenue-enhancing tax reform and tax hikes for millionaires. Then you run against the Republicans as hard as you can.

The second option is to bypass them, invoke the 14th Amendment, and order the Treasury to keep paying its debts because an extraordinarily reckless faction wants to destroy the American economy in order to save it (and pin the subsequent double-dip recession on Obama). Bruce Bartlett outlines the mechanism here. He has some other ideas for coping here.

What you probably cannot do is negotiate with economic equivalent of terrorists. What Cantor and Boehner are doing is essentially letting the world know they have an economic WMD in their possession. And it will go off if you do not give them everything they want, with no negotiation possible. That's the nature of today's GOP. It needs to be destroyed before it can recover.

(Photo: Speaker of the House John Boehner participates in his weekly press briefing on Capitol Hill, June 23, 2011 in Washington, DC.  By Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

The View From Your Window

Univ-chicago-hospital-1028am

University of Chicago Hospital, Illinois, 10.28 am

Update from a reader:

Today's VFYW was sent in by my husband.  He took it from my room as I was recovering from surgery to address metastatic uterine cancer.  It's been four weeks since the surgery, and only five since I got the initial diagnosis.  Needless to say, this has been a stressful time.  I'm recovering very well from the surgery, and chemo starts in two weeks.  It was SUCH a day-brightener to see our photo on the blog, which we both read faithfully.  Thanks.

“It Was Like Church”

That was how I described my first response to my first gay bar. It turns out I am not alone. A reader writes:

YES! This is wonderful! I felt the same way when I used to go to the now (sadly) defunct Club Shelter in NYC. It was a club with NO BOOZE just amazing house music and the best dancers in NYC. We would stay until sunday around noon and yes, it was like church – House music can be spiritual too … all that movement – "Dancing the ghosts away…"

That has always been my biggest complaint about church and the reason I don't go. People say church serves to 'charge up' your soul for the week ahead, and I firmly believe it does that for people. But the act of going, and SITTING and LISTENING charges nothing for me. I spend all week in front of a computer, the only thing that charges my soul is some rump shakin. So now? My brother and I meet up to go jogging early on Sundays and I bring my son along in the jogging stroller – with family, early in the morning, surrounded by god's creation … yep, that's church to me.

I also had the chance to go to DC's legendary equivalent of this, The Clubhouse, where non-alcoholic punch, helium balloons and legions of men, almost all African-American, made for an unforgettable musical and yes, spiritual experience. It was one of the earliest venues for House music, which I instantly loved. Another writes:

There is currently a senior lecturer in gender and women's studies at Cal State Northridge and screenwriting at UC Irvine named Marie Cartier. Her work, "Baby You are My Religion: Butch Femme-Gay Women's Bar Culture from the 1940s to 1980s," includes stories, testimonies and photos of gay women and men from the early years of the of the gay rights movement who considered the bar an alternative church.

Cartier, 55, based the program on her May 2010 Claremont Graduate University dissertation, which included more than 100 lesbian interview subjects – more than 1/3 from my town of Long Beach, CA – and a few local gay men, she says. In these illicit bars, women claimed roles or identities that felt natural. For many of them, these havens were the first – and sometimes the only – time they could feel this way, Cartier said. "They were able to find some one to love, have community, find themselves, have a sense of belonging and, in general, provide a structure in which they could create meaning for their lives," she said. "Isn't that what much of us credit religion with helping us do?"

My first experience at a gay bar was my freshman year in college. I must say, still being in my early twenties, the only thing I remember clearly (after the unease and nervousness escaped) was the feeling of belonging. I was raised Catholic, and although I don't practice religion, much of my experience felt like a baptism – I was submerged in the sounds, bathed in the flashing lights and arose with a renewed sense of myself. I danced the entire night in bliss. I felt like I finally found my place, my church.

All I can say is: Amen.

Uneven Unemployment

Annie Lowrey profiles TheLadders, a high-end job search site guaranteeing a six-figure job within six months for a fee of $2,500 (you have to first qualify for the service). Lowrey can't help but note that "the American jobs crisis is just not that severe for the people targeted by TheLadders":

A 2010 study by Andrew Sum, Ishwar Khatiwada, and Sheila Palma at Northeastern University's Center for Labor Market Studies demonstrates the point: The recession hit all workers, but it did not hit them equally. According to the study, the unemployment rate topped 30 percent in the lowest income decile. For workers in the second-highest decile, those making about $100,000 a year, the unemployment rate was only 4 percent. And those in the highest-income bracket, making more than $138,700 a year, the jobless rate was just 3 percent.

In short, unemployment was 10 times worse for those in the bottom rung of the income ladder than for those at the top of the ladder …

Revolutionary Ideas

Yacht

Leon Aron stresses the role "ideas and ideals" played in the Soviet collapse:

Certainly, there were plenty of structural reasons — economic, political, social — why the Soviet Union should have collapsed as it did, yet they fail to explain fully how it happened when it happened. How, that is, between 1985 and 1989, in the absence of sharply worsening economic, political, demographic, and other structural conditions, did the state and its economic system suddenly begin to be seen as shameful, illegitimate, and intolerable by enough men and women to become doomed? 

(Photo by Russian photoblogger Tanya Zommer, in a series entitled "Nerds On Yachts")

The Submerged State

Tax_Expenditures

Suzanne Mettler takes a close look at tax expenditures:

Over the past few decades, while many standard social benefits have atrophied in real value, those packaged as “tax expenditures”—the formal name in federal budgeting parlance for subsidies provided through the tax code—have flourished, growing rapidly in value and number.

These tax expenditures for individuals and families represented 7.4 percent of GDP in 2008, up from 4.2 percent in 1976. (Tax expenditures for business, such as those for the oil and gas industry, made up another 1 percent.) By way of comparison, Social Security amounted to 4.3 percent of GDP in 2008; Medicare and Medicaid, 4.1 percent.

These social tax expenditures comprise a major part of what I call the “submerged state.” By that I mean that they are public policies designed in a manner that channels resources to citizens indirectly, through subsidies for private activities, rather than directly through payments or services from government.

Reihan adds that "tax expenditures are skewed to the rich, welfare state expenditures are skewed to the 'deserving' poor."

(Chart from the Tax Policy Center)

Where The Gay Families Are, Ctd

A reader writes:

Another explanation I have heard for the concentration in red states is that these are folks who came out later in life (due to social/religious conservatism of their communities) and already had kids from straight relationships.

Another points to a NYT report from January supporting that thesis. Another writes:

The list of metro areas that have the highest percentage of same-sex couples raising young children is hardly "surprising". New York and San Francisco are not on that list because they have fewer child-raising families of all kinds. Where's the comparison to opposite-sex and single-parent households?

Another:

We (a heterosexual married couple) were living in San Francisco when our first child was born.  We lasted less than a year as SF parents before decamping for Raleigh, NC.  It's really tough to have kids in the high-cost-of-living gay meccas like SF or NYC, mainly because of the monetary costs associated with having kids. I expect that the "Where the Gay Families Are" list would very closely mirror a list of where families are – period.

Another:

All families - gay and straight – are fleeing San Francisco at an alarming rate. This is happening because of a lacking school system that suffers from political posturing, the insanely high cost of living, a crappy transportation system, and, of course, crime.