Category Archives: Politics

Government Spending Is Down Under Obama

Quick, name the presidents who have presided over the lowering of total government spending in the last two decades.  Hint: There’s only one.  Second Hint: His name is in the title of this post.  If you’re Republican, you probably still guessed Ronald Regan.  You would be wrong.  Boy, would you be wrong.  The answer is Barack Obama.

It’s not much.  A measly $80 billion dollar.  But remember, Obama has proposed hundreds of billions of other cuts that Congress (read Republicans) has rejected because he wanted to include tax increases as well.  More proof that Republicans only care about deficit reduction when they’re trying to get people to vote for them.

This Is Why Single Payer Health Care Is So Important

Here are two charts that should be in every health care discussion.  Yet, they are never really talked about by either side.

The United States government spends around 30% more per capita on health care than Canada does.  This despite the fact that the United States government doesn’t cover all of its citizens while Canada does.  For every man, woman, and child in the United States, our government spends close to $4,000 on health care.  For every man, woman, and child in Canada, their government spends close to $3,100 on health care.  The difference is that Canada negotiates for drugs and we do not.  Canada also had a single point of payment for health care bills while we have thousands of them each with their own rules and regulations that providers need to navigate.  There are other savings involved, but these are the big ones.  We’d be wise to implement both of these ideas here.

That’s public spending, but what about private spending?  We in the United States spend around $4,200 per person while Canada spends around $1,300 per person.  We spend over 20% more than Canada on private health care costs!

And how are things going to change under Obamacare?  As Ezra Klein says:

Obamacare will mostly fix the universal coverage problem, but it won’t fix the cost problem. The reason other countries spend less is that their governments set the prices, and they set them low. The reason we spend so much more is largely because our prices are higher, and by leaving private insurers and medical providers in charge of deciding prices, we’re not doing anything about that in Obamacare.

As I have always said, Obamacare is a bag of crap left on your doorstep.  It’s still better than the flaming bag of crap that is our health care system without Obamacare.  Here’s to hoping we get the purchasing power of the Canadian government and its fantastic savings in the United States soon!

Still Classy, Virginia

When last we left Virginia, the Republicans were passing a redistricting bill under cover of Presidential inauguration.  Looks like that was just step one of their plan to disenfranchise voters who are not white males.

The party of John Calhoun‘s (Ta-Nehisi Coates link!) next step is to make sure someone like President Obama can never be elected in Virginia again.  You see, Obama had the gall of winning Virginia twice.  He did this by winning the popular vote in Virginia.  And that just won’t do.  No sir, not at all.  Now that they have gerrymandered the district boundaries to all but guarantee a Republican majority, they need to guarantee a Republican president too.  To do this, they plan on splitting their electoral votes by whoever wins the district instead of a winner-takes-all electoral system.  Ta da!  Virginia now will give more electoral votes to a Republican instead of a Democrat even though the Democrat had a lot more votes.  As Ta-Nehisi Coates says,  “If the GOP can’t convince enough people to win, it will rig the rules so that certain people matter less than others.”

And by “certain people”, we, of course, mean non-whites.  More Ta-Nehisi Coates:

Efforts to disenfranchise black people, have always been most successful when they worked indirectly. After the initial post-war Black Codes were repealed, white supremacists turned to less obvious modes of discrimination — poll taxes, grandfather clauses, and literacy tests.
These were cloaked under a colorblind argument — “We don’t discriminate against black people, we discriminate against people who can’t read the Constitution.” By “read the Constitution,” they meant “recite the Bill of Rights by heart.” And they’d ask you to do this after reducing your school funding to a pittance. I say this to point that this is not a “new” racism. This is how it scheme went before the civil-rights movement, and this is how the scheme works today.
To see the only other major political party in the country effectively giving up on convincing voters, and instead embarking on a strategy of disenfranchisement is bad sign for American democracy. There is nothing gleeful in this.

Nothing gleeful, indeed.

South Carolina kneels and kisses the hand of the new master.

Stay Classy, Virginia

Say you’re a Virginia state representative.  Say you are a veteran of the civil rights movement.  Say the first black President of the United States is being inaugurated to begin his second term.  Say said inauguration happens to fall on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.  Say you get an invitation to said inauguration.  Say, though, that your government is still in session.  Do you go?  Of course you do!

Say you’re the Virginia Republican party.  Say that a Virginia state representative has left the state to attend the second inauguration of the first black President of the United States.  Say that this event gives you the power to pass any legislation you damn well please.  Say that you really want to gerrymander political boundaries to make it much easier for Republicans to get elected.  Do you bring that bill up for a vote in said representative’s absence?  Of course you do!  Because you are dicks.

But you are no ordinary dicks.  Your dickishness can only be described as otherworldly.  So what else do you do?  On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, when a veteran of the civil rights movement is away, you adjourn your day by honoring Confederate General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson.

South Carolina politely claps.

I Love The Whole Platinum Coin Debate

We are, once again, quickly running up to the debt ceiling.  And Republicans are, once again, holding the economy hostage by demanding draconian economic cuts in order to raise the debt ceiling.  It’s like deja vu all over again.

An interesting, though inelegant, solution to this problem is for President Obama to authorize the minting of a $1 trillion platinum coin and have the Federal Reserve buy it.  This is because there is a law that authorizes the President to mint only platinum coins in any denomination he so desires.

The debate for and against it is absolutely fascinating.  Some say that it is illegal.  They are clearly wrong.  Some say that it’s immoral.  They have a better argument, but it’s certainly less immoral than defaulting on the debt in an attempt to score political points.  Some say it’s a bad idea, which it is, but see the prior sentence for why it’s less bad than the alternative.  Some say that it goes against the spirit of the law.  They are almost certainly right.  The platinum coin law was almost assuredly meant for seigniorage and not for increasing the debt limit.

Which brings us to the fascinating topic of seigniorage.  Take a look at that $1 bill in your pocket.  How much is it worth?  Most people will say $10.  They are only partially correct.  It’s actually worth about 3 cents in materials and labor.  The Federal Government just makes a promise that that 3 cent item will always be worth $1.  Coins work the same way.  The Federal Government will mint a $1 coin commemorative coin that costs them pennies and sell it for $1.  They then pocket the difference since the coin will, in all likelihood stay out of circulation.  The Federal Government makes around $25 billion a year this way.  So if Obama goes the $1 trillion commemorative coin route, it will probably show on the books as a $1 trillion seigniorage profit.  Strange days indeed.

The Federal Reserve Made A Record Profit in 2012

The Federal Reserve is an incredibly complicated pseudo-business/pseudo-governmental entity.  Whenever you have a complicated entity that very few people can understand, you have simplistic views of the entity that dominate.  Many Republicans and Libertarians will have you believe that the Federal Reserve is the epitome of all that is evil about the Federal Government.  They would like governmental economics to behave exactly like familial economics does.  They would like money to be backed by something tangible like gold.  This is magical thinking.  Gold backed securities may work fine in normal economic conditions, but they also hamstring efforts to fix economic issues in non-normal economic conditions.  And we are almost always in non-normal economic conditions.

Take, for instance, the tripling of the monetary base that has occurred in the last decade.  Under normal economic conditions, this would prove disastrous to the economy.  Under current economic conditions, when we are in a liquidity trap, inflation barely rears its head at all.  Another benefit to the printing of all that money?  The Federal Reserve made a record profit in 2012!  They made over $91 billion.  Even better, most of that profit,  $89 billion, went right back to the Federal Government!  All that money that is being printed is being put to use and making us a giant profit.

Given, that $89 billion only represents one month of money that will be printed in the coming year, but it is things like this that often go over the heads of anti-Fed agitators.  That money that is being printed will continue to be put to use and will continue to make us money as long as the Fed continues to buy the debt.

Don’t worry if this doesn’t make sense to you.  I only marginally understand all the intricacies of how this works.  Maybe this will help.  Say the Federal Government pays you $100,000 to perform work.  You may think that the Federal Government would then be out $100,000.  You would be wrong.  You are taxed on that $100,000.  Let’s say your tax rate is 20%.  That means that you’re really only getting $80,000.  So the Federal Government gives you money and almost immediately takes some of it back it back.  That is the gist of the relationship between the Federal Reserve and the Federal Government right now.

This is also why infrastructure spending is such a no-brainer.  It requires hiring a lot of workers and a good percentage of that money the Federal Government gives to those workers comes right back to the government!  All that and it improves conditions to grow the economy!

What Is Your Historical Tax Rate

I have been waiting for someone to come up with this for a long time now.  Finally, here it is!  You can enter in your current salary and see what percent you would pay in taxes for every year between 1913 and 2012.

There are a few things I would like to point out.  First, look at how much higher the tax rates for top earners has been historically.  During those vastly higher times, there were major economic booms.  This is really all the evidence you need to expose the lies of those that say we need lower taxes on the highest earners in order to grow the economy.  There is no correlation between taxes on high earners and economic growth.  None.

Second, the tax rates in 1982 look very attractive.  This is the year that Ronald Reagan cut taxes.  Yet Republicans can’t even get behind a Democratic proposal that makes tax rates even lower than that for high income earners and much higher than that for low income earners.  Republicans today are determined to inflict as much pain on the lowest earners as possible.  All in the name of Shared Sacrifice.

Well, It’s Not The Apocalypse…

But it could mean the end of John Boehner’s Speaker gig.  That is, it would normally mean the end of Boehner’s rein as Speaker if the House Republicans weren’t so crazy.  How crazy are they?  This crazy.

Boehner brings up for a vote a proposal that keeps taxes at the levels they are now for anyone making under one million dollars a year; 99% of the population.  Then he quickly has to pull it back because he doesn’t have enough support in his own party to pass it.

House Republicans basically rejected a proposal to keep taxes exactly the same on 321 million Americans.  What’s laughable about this is it was really more of a symbolic vote more than anything serious.  The proposal had a zero percent chance of passing the Senate.  This was Boehner’s gambit to say to America, “See? Look how we’re attempting to work with Democrats and how unreasonable they’re being!”  And it failed miserably.

In any other political system in the world, this would mean the end of Boehner’s leadership position.  Republicans, however, will probably stick with him, though, because no one else is stupid enough to take the post.  There will eventually be a bill that contains tax increases for high income families.  That bill will pass.  No one wants to be Speaker when that happens.

Not that I consider myself an expert on political processes or internal party dynamics, but I pay attention much more than your average human and this stuff is absolutely crazy.  We have had the Republican leaders in both the House and the Senate trying maneuvers to make Democrats look bad and both have failed miserably.  One by his own misreading of the situation and the other by his own party.

There is only one word to describe the Republican party right now and that is shambles.  That’s normally a word used exclusively for Democrats.  Let’s see if the Democrats can take advantage of it.

Who Wants To Reduce Gun Homicides?

Do you want to reduce gun homicides?  Sure, we all do!  There are some really easy steps we can make to accomplish this.

First and foremost among these steps would be to repeal drug laws.

Oh, you mean THOSE gun homicides!  Those mostly affect people who are not nearly as white as me.  Can we get back to talking about preventing white people from getting killed by guns?

Dripping sarcasm aside, repealing drug laws and regulating and taxing their sale would solve a whole lot of our social ills.  Not only will it likely drastically lower the homicide rate, it will also raise governmental income while reducing incredibly costly governmental spending on drug interdiction.

I don’t mean to make this sound like a panacea for all our problems.  Drug addiction is a serious issue.  Repealing some drug laws will likely lead to an immediate increase in drug addiction cases in the short term.  But if that is the price we pay for saving lives, it seems worth it for me.

Using drugs is an individual choice. (I don’t actually believe this in most cases, but it’s a belief popularly held by most people.)  The taking of a life is an act that removes individual choice.  By repealing drug laws we would be reducing the instances of forced removal of choice by increasing the freedom of choice.

6,500 A Year

These are the wages of war.  No, that’s not the number of soldiers killed in battle.  That is 293 for 2012.  No, that’s not civilian deaths.  That’s around 50 for 2012.  Though the U.S. has conveniently classified pretty much every male death as non-civilian.  That 6,500 number is the number of suicide attempts every year by U.S. veterans.  18 a day.

We have failed our soldiers so completely.  Words fail.  When words fail, I swear.  Fuck you, George W. Bush for the unnecessary wars you got us into.  Fuck you, Dick Cheney for your endless cheerleading into war.  Fuck you, Donald Rumsfeld and your whole flock of chicken hawks that pushed the wars.  Fuck you, all you congressmen who voted for war.  Fuck you, Barack Obama for not ending the wars sooner.  And a final fuck you to every single politician who has sat idly by for years without doing anything to address the suicide attempts that are occurring every 90 seconds.

Yes, wars are sometimes necessary, but there is a subset of U.S. culture that thinks war is one of the first choices instead of the last choice.  And those people are in power.  And we put them there.  So fuck all of us, too.