“One faction of one party, in one house of Congress, in one branch of government doesn’t get to shut down the entire government just to refight the results of an election."—President Barack Obama
"[Cruz] pushed House Republicans into traffic and wandered away"—Grover Norquist
(Both quotes from Ezra Klein's useful Washington Post article.)
My question is, what's the endgame? With huge amounts of money being spent to propagandize Tea Party views and specifically attack opponents of the Tea Party Republicans and small turnouts in primary elections, the non-crazy House Republicans can't fight back; anyone who opposes the TP Republicans will be primaried from the right.
Now what?
I keep remembering how the South lost the Civil War yet the Southern white supremacists remained powerful.
Sunday, October 6, 2013
Thursday, October 3, 2013
The PPACA at the Edges
Thanks for losing the first version of this post, Blogger. In any event...
[Added: I think on the average the effects of the PPACA will be positive, but we do not live on the average, and there will be winners and losers. This post is an attempt to determine who the losers will be. If the law had been written to benefit people, rather than protect insurance companies, there would be no losers.
Ta-Nehisi Coates reminds us that the people hit hardest by the failure of the PPACA are overwhelmingly the poor in the states where Medicaid has not been expanded and that this group is heavily black and brown. Compared to their problems, the issues I summarize below are minor and I am ashamed of myself for not mentioning it in the original version of this article, though I did write about it last August, when I commented on Virgina v. Sibelius. Mea culpa.]
For some time now, I've been saying that the PPACA, aka Obamacare will be hard on families at the place where they come off Medicaid and go onto insurance, and where the tax credits give out, at 400% of the federal poverty level. I've only recently found specifics. So I can finally write this post. (Brief note: numbers in the thousands have been rounded for convenience; since all the numbers given are estimates, there seems no reason to be over-precise.)
Example one: joining the system at the bottom
My friend T. is a struggling artist and a low-wage worker at, yes, a thrift store. She makes not enough money to begin with, but it is just enough so that she doesn't qualify for Medicaid. Under the PPACA she will be required to buy into her employer's health plan, which will take $45 or perhaps more from her skimpy bi-weekly paychecks. She already has trouble making ends meet. What an additional $1,000 of expenses a year will do to her, I have no idea.
Example two: when the tax credits give out
A couple I know, who will be 57 and 58 in 2014, are currently relying on COBRA coverage from a good but lost job. Their annual health insurance cost under COBRA runs about $10,000 a year; without a subsidy, the Berkeley Labor Center health insurance estimator gives the cost for a silver plan under the PPACA at a whopping $17,000 a year. But wait! They get a tax credit, payable to their health insurance company. If their income is $62,000 a year their health insurance cost will be $6,000 a year. So far, so good. But if their income is $63,000 a year—they don't get a tax credit. So if they have a thousand-dollar windfall; if one of them gets a bonus or a nice big royalty payment, they are on the hook to the IRS for the whole of the tax credit; some $10,000 dollars. Hey-hey, let's hear it for a marginal tax rate of 1,000%! (No, that's not a typo.)
My sympathies to that couple, who is caught between a rock and a hard place; they can take the tax credit and the risk, or accept a $10,000 bite out of their family income during the year, in the hope of a possible reimbursement. They are not well-off; $60,000 a year is a lower middle class income these days. And if they don't fall below the level where reimbursement is offered, if they have, say, $65,000 a year income, they will be paying a full quarter of their pre-tax income for health insurance and nearly half of their income for taxes and health insurance. If they tighten their belts and reject the tax credit—I am not sure if they can accept only part of it—they will be reimbursed at the end of the year, but that is no help when a family needs to deal with a large, unexpected expense during the year. You can bet the Republicans will make sure the country knows about this one in time for the elections. Thanks, guys.
Tune in in 2018, when the "Cadillac Tax" kicks in, wrecking much good employer-provided and union health insurance.
[Added: I think on the average the effects of the PPACA will be positive, but we do not live on the average, and there will be winners and losers. This post is an attempt to determine who the losers will be. If the law had been written to benefit people, rather than protect insurance companies, there would be no losers.
Ta-Nehisi Coates reminds us that the people hit hardest by the failure of the PPACA are overwhelmingly the poor in the states where Medicaid has not been expanded and that this group is heavily black and brown. Compared to their problems, the issues I summarize below are minor and I am ashamed of myself for not mentioning it in the original version of this article, though I did write about it last August, when I commented on Virgina v. Sibelius. Mea culpa.]
For some time now, I've been saying that the PPACA, aka Obamacare will be hard on families at the place where they come off Medicaid and go onto insurance, and where the tax credits give out, at 400% of the federal poverty level. I've only recently found specifics. So I can finally write this post. (Brief note: numbers in the thousands have been rounded for convenience; since all the numbers given are estimates, there seems no reason to be over-precise.)
Example one: joining the system at the bottom
My friend T. is a struggling artist and a low-wage worker at, yes, a thrift store. She makes not enough money to begin with, but it is just enough so that she doesn't qualify for Medicaid. Under the PPACA she will be required to buy into her employer's health plan, which will take $45 or perhaps more from her skimpy bi-weekly paychecks. She already has trouble making ends meet. What an additional $1,000 of expenses a year will do to her, I have no idea.
Example two: when the tax credits give out
A couple I know, who will be 57 and 58 in 2014, are currently relying on COBRA coverage from a good but lost job. Their annual health insurance cost under COBRA runs about $10,000 a year; without a subsidy, the Berkeley Labor Center health insurance estimator gives the cost for a silver plan under the PPACA at a whopping $17,000 a year. But wait! They get a tax credit, payable to their health insurance company. If their income is $62,000 a year their health insurance cost will be $6,000 a year. So far, so good. But if their income is $63,000 a year—they don't get a tax credit. So if they have a thousand-dollar windfall; if one of them gets a bonus or a nice big royalty payment, they are on the hook to the IRS for the whole of the tax credit; some $10,000 dollars. Hey-hey, let's hear it for a marginal tax rate of 1,000%! (No, that's not a typo.)
My sympathies to that couple, who is caught between a rock and a hard place; they can take the tax credit and the risk, or accept a $10,000 bite out of their family income during the year, in the hope of a possible reimbursement. They are not well-off; $60,000 a year is a lower middle class income these days. And if they don't fall below the level where reimbursement is offered, if they have, say, $65,000 a year income, they will be paying a full quarter of their pre-tax income for health insurance and nearly half of their income for taxes and health insurance. If they tighten their belts and reject the tax credit—I am not sure if they can accept only part of it—they will be reimbursed at the end of the year, but that is no help when a family needs to deal with a large, unexpected expense during the year. You can bet the Republicans will make sure the country knows about this one in time for the elections. Thanks, guys.
Tune in in 2018, when the "Cadillac Tax" kicks in, wrecking much good employer-provided and union health insurance.
They Bought Themselves a Revolution…
…and ended up against the wall.
Why [asked donors at a high-priced fundraising luncheon] did the GOP seem so in the thrall of its most extremist wing? The donors, banker types who occupy the upper reaches of Wall Street’s towers, couldn’t understand why the Republican Party—their party—seemed close to threatening the nation with a government shutdown, never mind a default if the debt ceiling isn’t raised later this month.Read the rest.
Monday, September 2, 2013
Saint Manning?
Perhaps one way to understand Manning is as a saint: someone who pursued a moral vision without regard to consequences. Yes, he committed crimes. Under the law, his conviction was reasonable. But in the end, I believe Manning's revelations made important differences and these were of enormous value to the United States, humanity, and justice.
Is Manning a saint? It is not usually possible to know in the saint's lifetime with any reliability. Recall, if you like, the great black leader Martin Luther King, Jr., who is now widely recognized as a liberator and claimed by some conservatives as one of their own. It was not so in his life! Conservatives reviled him and many white centrists objected to his activism. The FBI monitored King from 1963 to the end of his life, even sending him a tape full of blackmail material and a letter encouraging him to suicide. Ultimately, he was assassinated by a white supremacist. King was willing to sacrifice everything for his moral goals and he broke the power of the white supremacists in the southern states. This is widely acknowledged as moral act. He did not care about the consequences, even to himself.
Is Manning a saint? He is like one in his disregard of consequences to himself, certainly. He has been tortured; sleep-deprived in solitary confinement for nine months. He is likely to be imprisoned for decades, and I doubt he will be well treated. What about consequences to other people? There do not appear to have been many. The national security state rolls on. In time, perhaps, some people will lose their jobs. Wikileaks has been conscientious in redacting names, still, some assets may be put at risk, but then were already at risk.
In my view, if the law were just, Bush II, Cheney, Obama, their Secretaries of State and Defense, and other high US government officials would all be on trial on the Hague for crimes against humanity. Against that, does one life count? Bradley Manning thought his own life was the lesser price than the need to tell the world what he had learned.
I once commented that in Aaron Swartz, the campaign for the internet as a tool of justice had its first martyr. In Manning, I believe, the internet has come near to having its second, and perhaps Edward Snowden will be the third.
Does this matter? Will the acts of Swartz, Manning, and Snowden change the world? Perhaps. If the world's moral sense is stirred by their acts, which is how martyrdom gains its power, it will matter. Martyrdom is a sign that people are willing to give, literally, everything for some purpose. Now, this in itself proves nothing: people will give their lives for causes, and these causes may be "good" or "bad." But if power is wrong, and the martyrs right, there comes a point where the powerful get sick of killing saints to silence them, where revulsion against the killing stays their hands. And so they make changes.
Are we in such dire moral straits? I think so. Our rulers and leaders have put the entire future of humanity is at risk, both through wars with new and terrifying weapons and through environmental destruction. Laws of property and person that have stood for centuries are being abrogated. Mass killings of innocents have become routine. New tools of oppression are being developed, and called tools of freedom and peace. In the language of the oppressors of the world, Orwell's cautionary vision has been realized: war is peace and freedom is slavery, and we can hear that lies are truth every day and night on the news. Vast evil is lose in the world, and so saints have arisen to speak to us of it, if we have the ears to hear.
Is Manning a saint? It is not usually possible to know in the saint's lifetime with any reliability. Recall, if you like, the great black leader Martin Luther King, Jr., who is now widely recognized as a liberator and claimed by some conservatives as one of their own. It was not so in his life! Conservatives reviled him and many white centrists objected to his activism. The FBI monitored King from 1963 to the end of his life, even sending him a tape full of blackmail material and a letter encouraging him to suicide. Ultimately, he was assassinated by a white supremacist. King was willing to sacrifice everything for his moral goals and he broke the power of the white supremacists in the southern states. This is widely acknowledged as moral act. He did not care about the consequences, even to himself.
Is Manning a saint? He is like one in his disregard of consequences to himself, certainly. He has been tortured; sleep-deprived in solitary confinement for nine months. He is likely to be imprisoned for decades, and I doubt he will be well treated. What about consequences to other people? There do not appear to have been many. The national security state rolls on. In time, perhaps, some people will lose their jobs. Wikileaks has been conscientious in redacting names, still, some assets may be put at risk, but then were already at risk.
In my view, if the law were just, Bush II, Cheney, Obama, their Secretaries of State and Defense, and other high US government officials would all be on trial on the Hague for crimes against humanity. Against that, does one life count? Bradley Manning thought his own life was the lesser price than the need to tell the world what he had learned.
I once commented that in Aaron Swartz, the campaign for the internet as a tool of justice had its first martyr. In Manning, I believe, the internet has come near to having its second, and perhaps Edward Snowden will be the third.
Does this matter? Will the acts of Swartz, Manning, and Snowden change the world? Perhaps. If the world's moral sense is stirred by their acts, which is how martyrdom gains its power, it will matter. Martyrdom is a sign that people are willing to give, literally, everything for some purpose. Now, this in itself proves nothing: people will give their lives for causes, and these causes may be "good" or "bad." But if power is wrong, and the martyrs right, there comes a point where the powerful get sick of killing saints to silence them, where revulsion against the killing stays their hands. And so they make changes.
Are we in such dire moral straits? I think so. Our rulers and leaders have put the entire future of humanity is at risk, both through wars with new and terrifying weapons and through environmental destruction. Laws of property and person that have stood for centuries are being abrogated. Mass killings of innocents have become routine. New tools of oppression are being developed, and called tools of freedom and peace. In the language of the oppressors of the world, Orwell's cautionary vision has been realized: war is peace and freedom is slavery, and we can hear that lies are truth every day and night on the news. Vast evil is lose in the world, and so saints have arisen to speak to us of it, if we have the ears to hear.
Friday, August 2, 2013
Privacy and Pecadillos
“I don’t want to live in a world where there’s no privacy and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity.”—E. Snowden
Privacy is a requirement of freedom. I think maybe like freedom of speech and freedom of the press, privacy is a right we have to protect, even when it protects repulsive behavior. Do we want a world where a squeaky-clean ideal Protestant marriage is a requirement for public office? That shuts out a lot of people. I don't have a brief for Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who seems to be a criminal masquerading as a humanitarian, and Anthony Wiener seems to have a sexual obsession. But why are these things taken more seriously than the war-mongering and all the multiple sorts of corruption we see in our politics? Is it necessary to dig through anyone's sex life to find out that they're doing their job badly? Really?
Why do we try to elect saints rather than politicians?
Privacy is a requirement of freedom. I think maybe like freedom of speech and freedom of the press, privacy is a right we have to protect, even when it protects repulsive behavior. Do we want a world where a squeaky-clean ideal Protestant marriage is a requirement for public office? That shuts out a lot of people. I don't have a brief for Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who seems to be a criminal masquerading as a humanitarian, and Anthony Wiener seems to have a sexual obsession. But why are these things taken more seriously than the war-mongering and all the multiple sorts of corruption we see in our politics? Is it necessary to dig through anyone's sex life to find out that they're doing their job badly? Really?
Why do we try to elect saints rather than politicians?
Oathbreakers 3
(This is the one I finally posted in comments.)
I think, in punishing Manning, the administration is punishing the messenger.
Would we even be having this debate if administration officials had not broken their oaths? Would Manning have had anything to leak? Does anyone here really believe that President George W. Bush, with his signing statements, his secret prisons, his torturers, was keeping his oath to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States?" And by continuing and extending many of Bush II's policies, President Obama has become a participant.
You argue that Manning could have gone through channels. But many people have already gone through channels, done it by the book. When we voted Bush II out by a popular landslide, we were were doing it by the book. But the surveillance state and the wars just kept rolling. We've done all the right things, all the by-the-book things--not just the general public, but many military and civilian officials. And the surveillance state and the wars still roll.
I think, in punishing Manning, the administration is punishing the messenger.
Would we even be having this debate if administration officials had not broken their oaths? Would Manning have had anything to leak? Does anyone here really believe that President George W. Bush, with his signing statements, his secret prisons, his torturers, was keeping his oath to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States?" And by continuing and extending many of Bush II's policies, President Obama has become a participant.
You argue that Manning could have gone through channels. But many people have already gone through channels, done it by the book. When we voted Bush II out by a popular landslide, we were were doing it by the book. But the surveillance state and the wars just kept rolling. We've done all the right things, all the by-the-book things--not just the general public, but many military and civilian officials. And the surveillance state and the wars still roll.
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