Public Policy and Governance – Page 306

Michelle Bachmann in Pants

It’s two and a half months until the election.

Anyone who may have been harboring a forlorn hope that Mitt Romney might revert to the persona he wore as Governor of Massachusetts can “fuhgeddaboudit,” as they used to say on Seinfeld. He’s not using that famous Etch-A-Sketch to shake up his newfound Tea Party allegiance; to the contrary, with his choice of Paul Ryan as a running mate, he has signaled his complete capitulation to and identification with the furthest reaches of the Right.

What does Romney’s doubling-down tell us about the choice facing the country—and especially the choice facing those of us who aren’t old white heterosexual males?

Let’s look beyond issues of character and personality. Let’s ignore suspicions that Romney has lacked the savvy to assemble a competent staff. Let’s choke down the bile that we taste when we look at his “team,” composed of George W. Bush’s worst leftovers. Let’s even ignore his proposal to end Medicare.

Let’s just look at the policies that Romney and Ryan (the “Rolls Royce” team) explicitly support.

Perhaps you’ve heard, as I have, that Ryan’s voting record is substantially identical to that of Michelle Bachmann. Allow me to share some of the details of that record.

Ryan opposed the DREAM Act–legislation that would have allowed undocumented immigrants brought to the US as young children to remain in the country, and provided them with a path to citizenship. Instead, despite his professed identity as a deficit hawk, he supported spending millions to build a border fence to keep “them” out. (Hint: the fence wasn’t between us and Canada.)
In addition to his desire to privatize Social Security and eliminate Medicare, he has proposed to give Medicaid back to the states. This would almost certainly mean an end to the payments that currently keep millions of seniors in nursing homes after they have gone through all their assets and savings.
The Ryan budget proposes to gut programs that support neighborhood health clinics, to eliminate most student loans, and to slash funds for elementary and secondary education.
Ryan wants to de-fund Planned Parenthood, criminalize abortion, and grant “personhood” to fertilized eggs (a measure that would outlaw most popular forms of birth control). In a particularly egregious vote, he supported a bill allowing hospitals to refuse to perform abortions even when those procedures were necessary to save the life of the mother.
Adding insult to injury, Ryan has voted against equal pay for women.
On GLBT rights, the story is the same. Ryan opposes same-sex marriage and voted twice for a constitutional amendment prohibiting it. He voted to keep same-sex couples from adopting children in Washington DC. He voted against repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. And while the Log Cabin apologists will point out that he once voted for ENDA (the Employee NonDiscrimination Act), he later reneged on his promise to do so again, saying he saw no need for “special” legislation.
Mr. “Fiscal Conservative” would abolish taxes on Capital Gains—giving wealthy individuals a windfall—and would recoup the lost revenue by cutting programs that benefit the poor and middle class.
Ryan also agrees with Romney that we don’t need to fund Amtrak or PBS (bye-bye, Big Bird…), but we cannot take a penny from the Defense budget, or allow the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy to expire.

That is what the Rolls Royce team has to offer. It is as mean-spirited and radical a set of proposals as we have seen in my lifetime—not to mention thoroughly unworkable and unrealistic. (When Paul Krugman and David Stockman agree that Ryan’s package of proposals are a “fantasy” and wouldn’t begin to balance the budget even if enacted, that’s a pretty good sign that it isn’t a serious effort.)

So we have a choice: “Mitt the Twit” running with Michelle Bachmann in pants, versus Obama and Biden.

I’m hiding under my bed until it’s all over.

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A Single Issue to Vote On

Hot enough for you this summer? Because it’s going to get hotter, and I’m not referring to our increasingly debased electoral rhetoric.

As a post to Science Matters emphasizes, climate change is not a prediction. It’s here. Even scientists who were previously skeptical (and there weren’t many) are now convinced that the earth is warming even more rapidly than previously expected, and that human activity is a large generator of that warming.

Let’s ignore every other issue dividing Americans–what to do about the economy, about Syria and Iran, about the various “wars”–on women, on the GLBT community, on drugs…you name it. In a very real sense, arguments over those issues are equivalent to arguments about how to arrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. If there is one issue of global life-and-death importance, it’s climate change.

And on that issue, the parties could not be further apart.

The science–and the scientific consensus–is overwhelming; we face a truly unprecedented global threat. The Democrats haven’t exactly covered themselves with glory, but they have acknowledged the threat and the urgency of addressing it. Most Republicans, on the other hand, continue to deny the science and reject the reality of climate change. (I suppose that shouldn’t surprise us; they also reject evolution.) Mitt Romney is now parroting the GOP’s standard climate change denial, and Paul Ryan, his running mate, is a climate-change-denying conspiracy theorist.

I’m not a believer in single-issue voting, but I’m not a big fan of committing slow suicide, either. If there was ever a single issue worth embracing, this is it.

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Fun With Numbers

The Affordable Care Act maintained existing Medicaid coverage for low income children. Whether or not their parents will have coverage is being left up to the states.

In Indiana, that’s a problem.

As a recent report from the Institute for Working Families explains, right now, Indiana only covers working parents who make up to 24 percent of the poverty line, which comes to $4,581 a year for a family of three. The Medicaid expansion provision in the Act encourages coverage for these low income adults by expanding Medicaid to 133 percent of the poverty line ($25,390 for a family of three). According to a recent study by the non-partisan Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured–a study which is consistent with Congressional Budget Office’s estimates– 215,803 previously uninsured Hoosiers would have access to care by 2019–if Indiana implements that provision of the Act.

And why wouldn’t we? The Act provides 100 percent federal funding for the expansion of Medicaid for its first three years, phasing down after that to 90 percent federal funding by 2019. According to the same study by Kaiser, this will cost Indiana $478 million from 2014-2019 (an average of $79 million each fiscal year).

Interestingly, in a study commissioned by the State of Indiana, the estimated cost (2.58 billion) is approximately 5 times greater than the cost shown by the non-partisan Kaiser study (478 million).

What the Indiana study evidently ignores are the savings involved: Medicaid expansion would save the state substantial amounts we now pay for uncompensated care for the uninsured. We pay those costs two ways: through our tax dollars, and through higher premiums charged to those who are insured. (In fact, according to Kaiser, during the 2014-2020 time period, each insured Hoosier will otherwise pay over $2000 to subsidize the uninsured.)

Let’s try an analogy: let’s say you’ve been taking a bus to work, and you and a couple of friends buy a car. Your share of the car expenses will be 150. a month. The cost to you will thus be 150 per month minus the 40 bucks a month you’ve been spending on the bus. This is a concept called net cost.

If the state refuses to expand Medicaid, people with incomes between 100 percent and 400 percent of the poverty line will be eligible for subsidies to help them afford coverage in the new health insurance exchanges. But people below the poverty line won’t receive coverage at all, since the Affordable Care Act assumes they’re covered by Medicaid.

That seems deeply unfair–even immoral.

My question is: why is depriving these people of coverage so important a goal that the Daniels Administration is willing to issue a deceptive analysis of the costs involved?

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Fraud and Waste

Candidates for office are notorious for promising to cut taxes and claiming that they will pay for them by reducing “fraud and waste.” Usually, this is bullshit; especially at the local level. Americans love to believe bloat exists in service delivery, but usually, the only way to pay for tax cuts is by eliminating services.

That said, a recent Congressional report has identified one way to save the federal government money by curtailing an activity that is actively harmful: funding tuition at for-profit schools of “higher education.” (Note quotes here.)

The Committee that issued the report was headed by Senator Tom Harkin. It hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves. The report documents aggressive recruiting, exorbitant tuition, abysmal student outcomes, regulatory evasion, and taxpayer dollars pocketed as profit.

According to the summary of findings published by the New York Times, students at for-profit colleges are charged, on average, four times as much tuition as students at public universities, and eighty percent of that comes from American taxpayers. Furthermore, according to the blog Political Animal, “these colleges do an exceptionally crappy job of educating students.”

Retention rates are horrendous: the majority of enrollees, according to the Times, leave without a degree, but even those who earn a credential usually discover it isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. And–perhaps the most telling statistic from a taxpayer’s point of view– students at for-profit colleges make up 13% of the country’s college students, but account for 47% of defaults on student loans.

Think about that next time you see one of those gauzy–and expensive–commercials for a college you never heard of.

The Obama Administration has tried to change the student loan system so that tax dollars cannot be used at most of these schools, but the effort–like so many others–has been met with fierce lobbying and obstruction. You might think that all of those politicians running for office on a platform of reducing fraud and waste would applaud this recommendation. After all, refusing to fund con artists would actually protect those who are currently getting ripped off, as well as saving tax dollars.

You’d think this would be a no-brainer, one of those rare “win-win” situations. But you’d be wrong.

And we wonder why Congress has a 17% approval rating. (Maybe the 17% attended for-profit colleges.)

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The People Around Him…

We’ve been on the road, stopping at a couple of charming Bed and Breakfasts in the North Carolina mountains, so I haven’t been blogging with my usual frequency. I also haven’t been glued to my usual sources of political news.

Even so, I have seen the British press’s less-than-admiring coverage of Romney’s visit to England–ranging from a big headline “Mitt the Twit” to “worse than Sarah Palin” to “Do we have another Dubya on our hands?” One columnist described Romney as “devoid of charm, warmth and sincerity.”

Since this visit was initially intended as an extended photo-op–former Olympic savior visits England to cheer on this year’s games–it has been something of a PR disaster.

The most troubling observation by the notoriously sarcastic Brits, however, was the comparison to Dubya. And it is troubling not because Mitt, like George W, constantly displays these “not ready for prime time” moments. Let’s face it, no one is ready to lead the free world. Obama wasn’t, Clinton wasn’t, Reagan wasn’t. (Granted, most of them managed to hide that fact more adroitly.) Even the shared arrogance that leads to these “what were you thinking” moments isn’t the most disturbing characteristic they share.

It’s the people with whom they surround themselves. And actually, on that score, Dubya was better.

When candidates demonstrate that they come up short on knowing, for example, the intricacies of the capital markets, or–in Herman Cain’s memorable formulation–the name of the President of “Ubeki-beki-stan”–most of us understand. The Presidency requires expertise in more subjects than it is fair to expect any candidate to master. So we look to the advisors the candidate has chosen to rely upon. Who is he listening to? How sound are the people around him?

Dubya had some good people (Colin Powell, the early Condoleeza Rice) whose counsel he simply ignored. Their nuanced approach was overpowered by the Dick Cheney/John Bolton/neocon contingent–the purveyors of a Manichean worldview where good and evil were clearly labelled and all the answers were easy ones. (The questions, unfortunately, were generally the wrong ones.)

Romney has chosen to surround himself with the absolute worst of these. Most knowledgable foreign policy experts–Republican and Democrat alike–consider John Bolton crazy. But there he is, at the center of Mitt’s foreign policy team. Most legal scholars will readily admit that Robert Bork is brilliant–but consider his approach to the constitution far out of the mainstream of legal thought (at best) and twisted/dangerous at worst. Bork is advising Mitt on potential Supreme Court nominees.

I could go on, but the bottom line is that for whatever reason–perhaps an effort to solidify the support of the extremist GOP base, perhaps because he actually agrees with them, perhaps because he really doesn’t know better–Romney has surrounded himself with the worst of the Bush Administration’s leftovers. He is listening (presumably) to the people who took us to the edge of depression, who blithely led us into a war of choice in the most unstable and dangerous part of the world, and who still haven’t learned from their mistakes.

A lot of pundits, focused on the horse race, have noted Romney’s frequent gaffes, and attributed them to the absence of good staff work. Fewer have asked the question: if Romney’s campaign people are inept, what can we expect of the people he’d depend upon in the White House? And if the answer to that question is “the worst of Bush’s advisors”–we’d better hope that the Koch brothers and their ilk don’t manage to buy this election.

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