The stories you want. The opinions that matter.
No, thanks
Tag: ryan budget
Kingston Family: Vote For Our Cheap Dad [Video]

Kingston Family: Vote For Our Cheap Dad [Video]

U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA) released a new ad on Wednesday, in which his children praise their father’s extreme miserliness as a reason to make him Georgia’s next U.S. senator.

“Our dad is Jack Kingston. He really is cheap, and it’s not just the car he drives,” one daughter says.

“He’ll drive five miles on empty, just to save two cents a gallon,” adds one of his sons.

“We thought ‘Hand-Me-Down’ was the name of a department store,” says another.

After a few more anecdotes about their father’s household austerity plan, Kingston’s son John gets to the crux of the argument.

“For dad, it’s about personal responsibility and respecting the value of a dollar,” he says.

“It will be the same way in the Senate,” his daughter Ann adds.

The ad is reminiscent of the biographical video about Mitt Romney from the 2012 Republican National Convention, which highlighted his frugality (and was immediately overshadowed by Clint Eastwood’s infamous empty-chair meltdown).

Kingston’s effort to paint himself as a fiscal hawk — even at home — has a bit more urgency than Romney’s did. The 11-term congressman is locked in a tight five-way Senate primary, in which all the candidates are struggling to present themselves as the most conservative. To that end, Kingston voted against Paul Ryan’s latest budget plan, arguing that its $5 trillion in cuts are insufficient. He has also suggested that children on food aid should be forced to sweep the cafeteria floor to earn their lunches and learn the value of a dollar (while declining to mention that he receives scores of free meals ever year, courtesy of the taxpayers).

According to The Huffington Post’spolling average, Kingston currently sits in second place in Georgia’s Senate race. If no candidate earns over 50 percent in the May 20 primary — which seems almost certain — then the top two candidates will advance to a July 22 runoff.

Screenshot: YouTube

Paul Ryan And The Voluntarism Fantasy

Paul Ryan And The Voluntarism Fantasy

When I wrote a long piece about the Voluntarism Fantasy at Democracy Journal, several people accused me of attacking a strawman. My argument was that there’s an influential, yet never clearly articulated, position on the conservative right that we jettison much of the federal government’s role in providing for economic security. In response, private charities, churches and “civil society” will rush in and do a better job. Who, complained conservatives, actually argues this?

Well, here’s McKay Coppins with a quite flattering 7,000 word piece on how Paul Ryan has a “newfound passion for the poor.” What is the animating core and idea of his new passion?

Ryan’s broad vision for curing American poverty is one that conservatives have been championing for the last half-century, more or less. He imagines a diverse network of local churches, charities, and service organizations doing much of the work the federal government took on in the 20th century. Rather than supplying jobless Americans with a never-ending stream of unemployment checks, for example, Ryan thinks the federal government should funnell [sic] resources toward community-based work programs like Pastor Webster’s.

Many are rightfully pointing out that this doesn’t square with his budget, which plans to eliminate a lot of spending on the poor in order to fund tax cuts for the rich. But in the same way that budget shenanigans like dynamic scoring are supposed to make his numbers work, there’s an invisible work of charity that will simply fill in however much is cut from the federal budget.
There’s a dead giveaway here. Note the “in the 20th century” rather than the normal “since the War on Poverty” as when things went wrong. Ryan doesn’t think the War on Poverty is a problem, or doesn’t just think that. He thinks the evolution of the state during the entire 20th century is the problem, and wants to return to the freer and better 19th century.
But as I emphasized in the piece, this idea is not true in history, theory or practice. The state has always played a role in providing economic security through things like poorhouses and soldier pensions well before the New Deal. When the Great Depression happened, the old system collapsed. Service organizations called on the government to take over things like old-age pensions, unemployment insurance and income support because they realized they couldn’t do it themselves. Freed of the heavy lifting of these major pieces of social insurance, they could focus in a more nimble manner on individual and targeted needs.
And the reasons this doesn’t work out are quite clear — charity is uncoordinated, very vulnerable to stress (charitable giving fell in the recession just as it was most needed), and tied to the whims and interests of the rich. And charitable organizations aren’t calling for the Ryan Budget, and they don’t think that they’ll run better and with better resources if Ryan’s cuts happen. They know firsthand they won’t have the resources to balance out the gigantic increase in need that would result.
(Elizabeth Stoker has more on attempts to link this fantasy up with Christianity broadly and Catholic subsidiarity specifically.)
Ideas have consequences. The fact that Ryan’s are fundamentally flawed on so many levels will have consequences too for the poor if they come to pass. Mike Konczal is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.Cross-posted from Rortybomb

The Roosevelt Institute is a nonprofit organization devoted to carrying forward the legacy and values of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr
LOL Of The Week: The GOP Is Closer To A ‘Death Spiral’ Than Obamacare Ever Was

LOL Of The Week: The GOP Is Closer To A ‘Death Spiral’ Than Obamacare Ever Was

While Republicans have been plotting about what to do with control of the U.S. Senate, they’re trying to ignore how the debate over Obamacare has now shifted to whether the law has “won” or is simply “winning.”

Some Republicans want to dull its sudden veneer of success by delaying any verdict about the law until 2023.

Though it will always be October of 2013 and HealthCare.gov will always be crashing in the heart of Senator Ted Crux (R-TX) and his followers, the prognosis for President Obama’s key legislative accomplishment has seen a remarkable reversal from six months ago, when the words “death spiral” were taken seriously.

A “death spiral” occurs in the insurance industry when low enrollment or adverse selection leads to skyrocketing prices. Thanks to how the law was written, such a spiral was never likely for Obamacare, even when it seemed like HealthCare.gov might never be fixed. And now it’s pretty much impossible.

Obamacare has nearly matched Romneycare’s signups in its share of young people who enrolled. It has exceeded the predictions of the Congressional Budget Office by a million signups with 8 million. At least 5 million more Americans now have Medicaid through expansion, which will continue to accept people all year long. And millions more Americans have gained coverage off the exchanges or through employers, as the individual mandate seems to be proven more effective than predicted. It’s not all we need to do to fix our bloated, absurd and cruel health care system — but it’s a valiant start.

The effects of the law will vary wildly state by state, with the states that are not trying sabotage it — shockingly! — doing a much better job of insuring their residents. But the only way Obamacare is going away is if a Republican president wins a landslide and decides his first act is to take health insurance away from the 22 million Americans expected to be covered by the exchanges in 2016 and tens of millions more on Medicaid and their parents’ plans.

Meanwhile, dust settling around the rollout of Obamacare is revealing a Republican Party that is terrifying Republican donors.

With the Republican Governors Association slowly morphing into a legal defense fund, funders look at the GOP’s 2016 field and see one candidate with a father promoting 9/11 truthers and another whose father defends “ex-gay therapy” because he thinks sexual orientation, unlike bigotry, is a choice.

No wonder these donors are drooling over someone whose father—especially when compared to his brother—was a pretty good president. Jeb Bush’s “optimism” and the fact that the GOP hasn’t won without a Bush on the ticket since 1972 make him the favorite of most of the people who spent millions to (not) elect Mitt Romney.

Jeb even says the right things about immigration reform. He thinks it’s an “act of love” but didn’t actually suggest that House Republicans vote on the bipartisan Senate bill that they’ve been ignoring for the better part of a year.

And for this dusting of bravery, he was mocked by Donald Trump and booed by a crowd of conservatives in the state where the first 2016 GOP primary will be held, New Hampshire.

LOL.

Donald Trump has been pretending to run for president for decades. But no mainstream political party took him seriously until he embraced the “birther” issue and briefly became a frontrunner in the 2012 GOP presidential primary. Now he’s updating his act by demanding that 11 million undocumented people show him their papers.

Even some Republicans get that Trump is a clown in search of a circus. But The Donald’s wealth, fame and willingness to attack the president over nonsense keep earning him invites to Republican events.

How do you come up with an immigration policy for a party that takes Donald Trump seriously?

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Minority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) keep pretending that they want to do reform but they can’t because Obama’s mean, or they don’t trust him, or #OBUMMER, as The Washington Post‘s Greg Sargent keeps pointing out. No one buys these arguments, especially because the GOP couldn’t get its base to support reform when George W. Bush was president.

But the GOP’s inaction will likely force the president to act to stem deportations that break up families later this year. Then the party that ran on self-deportation in 2012 will be running on actual deportations in 2016.

The GOP’s problem is that not doing anything on immigration this year is the safest bet to keep its base motivated and possibly even take over the Senate. Likewise, not proposing an Obamacare alternative or expanding Medicaid to the 5 million people spitefully being denied coverage in red states is safe, in the short term.

Just say #fullrepeal and screw the consequences.

Meanwhile, voting for the Ryan Budget charges up Republicans who would vote anyway, while making it clear that this GOP, if ever given the power, will cut Medicare benefits immediately and then more and more and more.

The costs for these actions are low in 2014, as Republicans try to win Senate seats in six states Mitt Romney carried. Though the chances of them winning the upper house of Congress seem to be decreasing every day. And after 2016 demographic time bombs begin to detonate that could cost the party Georgia, North Carolina and eventually Texas.

Perhaps a Jeb Bush can swoop in, mend fences with the immigrant community and appeal to voters that have voted for a presidential ticket with a Bush on it five times — even though he has his own skeletons in his closet, is hated by many Tea Partiers and most Americans still blame his brother for the slow economy.

Or maybe the GOP’s death spiral has already begun.

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

A Program Conservatives Should Love

A Program Conservatives Should Love

WASHINGTON — We are at a point where we will soon have vicious ideological debates over motherhood and apple pie.

Don’t laugh. If we can agree on anything across our philosophical divides, surely we can support efforts to promote voluntary service by our fellow citizens and to strengthen our nation’s extraordinary network of civic and religious charities.

This shared set of commitments led to one of the few bipartisan initiatives of President Obama’s time in office. On April 21, it will be five years since the president signed the Serve America Act, the final product of one of Congress’ most creative odd couples. Over and over, Republican senator Orrin Hatch and Democratic senator Edward Kennedy found ways to legislate together. The law aimed at authorizing 250,000 service slots by 2017 was the unlikely duo’s capstone project before Kennedy’s death.

At a very modest cost to government — those who serve essentially get living expenses and some scholarship assistance later — AmeriCorps gives mostly young Americans a chance to spend a year helping communities and those in need while also nurturing thousands of organizations across the country. Senior Corps provides Americans over 55 a chance to serve, too.

AmeriCorps sent out its first volunteers 20 years ago this fall. Since then, over 800,000 Americans have participated in the program. By giving life to this great venture in generosity, our government did something that taxpayers, regardless of party, can be proud of.

One politician who speaks often about the importance of civil society groups is Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI). Ryan rightly talks about the “vast middle ground between government and the individual,” and of empowering “community organizations to improve people’s lives.”

Yet Ryan’s new budget comes out against apple pie. It zeroes out AmeriCorps. Poof. Gone.

Rather than denouncing Ryan for this, I would urge him instead to take a second look on the basis of his own principles and realize the opportunity he has. The best move for someone who loves the activities of the nonprofits as much as Ryan says he does is to try to trump the president.

Obama’s budget proposes $1.05 billion to finance 114,000 AmeriCorps positions, a net increase of more than 30,000. It’s good that Obama and Senate Democrats have worked to keep the program funded in the face of House Republican resistance. But even the number Obama proposes amounts to just over half of the 200,000 spots for 2014 that Hatch and Kennedy envisioned in their original bill.

It’s not as if young people don’t want to serve. AmeriCorps had 580,000 applications for 80,000 openings; Teach for America, 55,000 applications for 6,000 slots. Alan Khazei, co-chair of the Franklin Project at the Aspen Institute that promotes national service, points to the 16 percent unemployment rate for 16- to 24-year-olds. Service, he argues, is a gateway. It can lead to “employment opportunities and help young Americans develop important job skills for their future careers.”

If Ryan isn’t convinced yet, he should talk to Wendy Spencer, the CEO of the Corporation for National and Community Service. He’d have a lot in common politically with Spencer, a Republican. She worked in the private sector, for a local Chamber of Commerce and a United Way, and held positions in Gov. Jeb Bush’s administration in Florida. She headed the state’s Commission on Volunteerism for the last three Republican governors.

Spencer has been inventive at a time of tough budgets. At the end of March, she announced a partnership with Citi Foundation and the Points of Light Institute involving $10 million in private financing to engage 25,000 low-income young Americans to lead volunteer service projects even as they get mentoring and training from Citi employees.

Encouraged by Obama, federal agencies are using AmeriCorps volunteers in new ways. FEMA Corps, for example, can deploy 1,600 volunteers in disaster relief emergencies while the School Turnaround corps has used hundreds of volunteers in repairing troubled schools.

Spencer views the federal service programs as a “trifecta.” The organizations receiving AmeriCorps and Senior Corps members see their capacity enhanced as full-time volunteers leverage the work of thousands more. And, of course, the participants themselves benefit, as do the people they serve.

If you wish, Mr. Ryan, you can let the president get all the credit for saving this worthy endeavor and for fostering innovation. Or you can go him one better by expanding it. You could use AmeriCorps as a model for a practical, locally oriented, conservative approach to government. Because that’s exactly what it is.

E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne@washpost.com. Twitter: @EJDionne.

Photo: St. Bernard Project via Flickr