It's not Obama's Deficit

Nothing like some facts and a chart to blast away all the BS arguments that pin the exploding budget deficit on Obama and the Democrats.

The events and policies that have pushed deficits to these high levels in the near term, however, were largely outside the new Administration’s control. If not for the tax cuts enacted during the presidency of George W. Bush that Congress did not pay for, the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that were initiated during that period, and the effects of the worst economic slump since the Great Depression (including the cost of steps necessary to combat it), we would not be facing these huge deficits in the near term.
While President Obama inherited a dismal fiscal legacy, that does not diminish his responsibility to propose policies to address our fiscal imbalance and put the weight of his office behind them. Although policymakers should not tighten fiscal policy in the near term while the economy remains fragile, they and the nation at large must come to grips with the nation’s long-term deficit problem. But we should not mistake the causes of our predicament.

 

Bad Idea: Selling Health Insurance across State Lines

Ezra Klein explains very patiently the consequences of  the Republican idea to bring down health-care costs by letting families and businesses buy health insurance across state lines. What a rip it would be. Can't the Repubs ever have a genuinely positive idea that would benefit all or most citizens?

Insurance is currently regulated by states. California, for instance, says all insurers have to cover treatments for lead poisoning, while other states let insurers decide whether to cover lead poisoning, and leaves lead poisoning coverage -- or its absence -- as a surprise for customers who find that they have lead poisoning. Here's a list (pdf) of which states mandate which treatments.
The result of this is that an Alabama plan can't be sold in, say, Oregon, because the Alabama plan doesn't conform to Oregon's regulations. A lot of liberals want that to change: It makes more sense, they say, for insurance to be regulated by the federal government. That way the product is standard across all the states.
Conservatives want the opposite: They want insurers to be able to cluster in one state, follow that state's regulations and sell the product to everyone in the country. In practice, that means we will have a single national insurance standard. But that standard will be decided by South Dakota. Or, if South Dakota doesn't give the insurers the freedom they want, it'll be decided by Wyoming. Or whoever.
This is exactly what happened in the credit card industry, which is regulated in accordance with conservative wishes. In 1980, Bill Janklow, the governor of South Dakota, made a deal with Citibank: If Citibank would move its credit card business to South Dakota, the governor would literally let Citibank write South Dakota's credit card regulations.

Climate Change Links

A commenter to a Bad Science posting pulled together these overpowering links on climate change. Good to have them all in one spot:

1. NASA http://www.nasa.gov/worldbook/global_wa ... dbook.html http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Featur ... mingQandA/ http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2.lrg.gif (The graph)
2. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration National Climatic Data Center http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/globalwarming.html
3. World Meteorological Organization (WMO) http://www.wmo.ch/pages/about/wmo50/e/w ... ing_e.html
4. American Meteorological Society http://www.ametsoc.org/policy/2007climatechange.html
5. National Center for Atmospheric Research “How do we know Earth is warming now?” http://www.ncar.ucar.edu/research/climate/now.php
6. Earth System Research Laboratory - Global Monitoring Division “Climate Forcing” http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/about/climate.html
7. University Corporation for Atmospheric Research http://www.ucar.edu/research/climate/warming.jsp
8. Jet Propulsion Laboratory - California Institute of Technology “Global Climate Change” “How do we know?” http://climate.jpl.nasa.gov/evidence/
9. American Geophysical Union (world's largest scientific society of Earth and space scientists) “Human Impacts on Climate” http://www.agu.org/sci_soc/policy/clima ... ition.html
10. American Association for the Advancement of Science “The scientific evidence is clear: global climate change caused by human activities is occurring now” http://www.aaas.org/news/press_room/cli ... tement.pdf http://www.aaas.org/news/press_room/climate_change/
11. The United States Energy Information Administration “Greenhouse Gases, Climate Change, and Energy” http://www.eia.doe.gov/bookshelf/brochu ... apter1.htm
12. Massachusetts Institute of Technology “Report: Human activity fuels global warming” http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/climate.html
13. California Institute of Technology “How We Know Global Warming is Real” “The science behind human-induced climate change” http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~tapio/paper ... c_2008.pdf
14. Atmospheric Sciences - University of Illinois - Champaign “Evidence continues to mount that human activities are altering the Earth’s climate on a global scale.” http://www.atmos.uiuc.edu/research/01climate.html
15. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution “Global Warming” http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=12457
16. The UK’s Met Office Hadley Centre “Climate change - the big picture” http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/p ... index.html http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climatechange/guide/
17. The UK’s Royal Society “Climate change controversies: a simple guide” http://royalsociety.org/page.asp?id=6229
18. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Based in Switzerland) “Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report” http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-repor ... yr_spm.pdf
19. Japan Meteorological Agency “Global Warming Projection Vol.7” http://ds.data.jma.go.jp/tcc/tcc/produc ... dex-e.html
20. The Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society “Our climate has changed substantially.” “Global climate change and global warming are real and observable.” http://www.amos.org.au/publications/cid ... blications
21. Royal Society of New Zealand “The globe is warming because of increasing greenhouse gas emissions.” http://www.royalsociety.org.nz/Site/new ... m0708.aspx
22. National Geographic Magazine http://environment.nationalgeographic.c ... l-warming/
23. Scientific American Magazine http://www.sciam.com/topic.cfm?id=globa ... ate-change

So Much for Reaganites and Small Government

This chart says so much. The Republicans are simply full of crap when they talk balanced budgets. Manifestly, their fiscal recklessness has been obviously the case for their last 20 years in power (Reagan-Bush-Bush).

Data on Income Inequality from the IRS

The story is the same no matter who tells it. The rich have been making out like bandits over the last 30 years.

Following recent analyses confirming that income inequality in the United States has reached record levels, noted tax journalist David Cay Johnston summed up the new data, "The incomes of the top 400 American households soared to a new record high in dollars and as a share of all income in 2007, while the income tax rates they paid fell to a record low. The numbers tell the tale of the widening chasm between the rich and everyone else:

In 2007 the top 400 taxpayers had an average income of $344.8 million, up 31 percent from their average $263.3 million income in 2006, according to figures in a report that the IRS posted to its Web site without announcement that were discovered February 16...

Adjusted for inflation to 2009 dollars, the top 400 enjoyed a 27 percent increase in their income, or nine times the rate of increase for the bottom 90 percent...Since 1992, the bottom 90 percent of Americans have seen their incomes rise by 13 percent in 2009 dollars, compared with an increase of 399 percent for the top 400.

Unsurprisingly, the public disclosure of the top 400 report first introduced by the Clinton administration was halted by President Bush (only to be reinstituted by the Obama White House last year). Unsurprising that is, because the sheer size of the massive windfall for America's rich due to the Bush tax cuts would make a Warren Buffet blush.

Us vs. Them and Human Rights

This is one of Greenwald's better columns because he takes a perfectly framed situation -- the Baptists arrested in Haiti for kidnapping vs. those the US picks up as terrorism suspects -- to nail the blazingly obvious point that wingers are simply bigots, pure and simple.

The only thing worse than someone completely indifferent to human rights abuses when committed by their own government is someone whose concern for such matters is dictated by the religion or other demographic attributes of those whose basic rights are being denied.  That's the same mentality that leads our media to treat American journalists held by Evil Foreign Governments for a few weeks under dubious circumstances as screeching headline-making news, while ignoring almost completely those foreign (Muslim) journalists held by the U.S. Government for years without charges.  How many Americans know and are outraged about Iran's detention of Roxana Saberi, all while being completely ignorant of the numerous Muslim journalists held for years by the U.S., including a Reuters photojournalist, Ibrahim Jassam Mohammed, finally released last week after being held by the U.S. military for 17 months with no charges and even after an Iraqi court ordered him released?  It's the same mentality that allows the U.S. Government, with a straight face, to issue reports condemning as "torture" the very techniques we used, to protest indefinite detention, extra-judicial killings and lawless eavesdropping when engaged in by other countries, and to demand that other countries prosecute their war criminals and torturers in the name of "the rule of law" (while our own are feted on TV shows and given regular newspaper columns to glorify the torture and other war crimes they implemented).

Batocchio's The Persistance of Ideology

I came across this old post from Batocchio, the Vagabond Scholar,  and think it hits many nails on the head. I have such a hard time understanding conservatives. Just what is it that they are thinking? How can they be so blatantly wrong, and unapologetic, about so many things for so long? The post explains a lot -- and has great links to back up the arguments. It is blogging at its best.

This is the introduction to his analysis of three areas of policy -- economics, foreign policy, and human rights:

If conservatism at its best involves sticking with policies that have proved effective, at its worst it entails sticking with policies that have proved unsuccessful or even disastrous. It's not as if some pure, beneficent strain of conservatism is common, though, to the degree it exists at all. Movement conservatism has long consisted of policies that benefit a select few at the expense of the nation as a whole. In many cases, conservatives are still obstinately pushing ideologies and policies that have yielded horrible results – sometimes even for themselves. Admitting error is rare among this ideological crowd, taking blame is rarer still, and actually changing approaches is seen as anathema.

A Top Ten Worst List

Read-em and weep: Juan Cole's Top Ten Worst things about the Bush Decade. His intro:

Here are my picks for the top ten worst things about the wretched period, which, however, will continue to follow us until the economy is re-regulated, anti-trust concerns again pursued, a new, tweaked fairness doctrine is implemented, and we return to a more normal distribution of wealth (surely a quarter of the privately held wealth is enough for the one percent?) It isn't about which party is in power; parties can always be bought. It is about how broadly shared resources are in a society. Egalitarianism is unworkable, but over-concentration of wealth is also impractical. The latter produced a lot of our problems in the past decade, and as long as such massive inequality persists, our politics will be lopsided.

Defense Expenditures and the War on Terror

We dwarf the defense expenditures of all other countries by far. Can this be justified on the basis of defending ourselves against a bunch of third rate middle eastern countries? This means the terrorists are winning by ruining our country as we turn it over to the proverbial military-industrial complex.

Why There Can't Be "Bipartisanship"

In an excellent, but so far unrecognized by our crack media, observation James Fallows cites the point that: "Bipartisanship consists of getting ENOUGH members of the minority party to join the (incomplete) majority in voting for major legislation.  It can't happen if the minority party members vote as a block against major legislation."