Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period.
According to GOP Minority leader John Boehner, we the American people must work until we are 70 years old before we can draw social security benefits. Republicans also intend to impose perpetual tax cuts for the wealthiest of the wealthy Americans.
The Republican Party that racked up a mind numbing deficit during the W. years is now obsessed about the growing deficit.
I guess the GOP lawmaker's teabagging ventriloquists have taken total control of the message machine now that the opposition party is in charge. This is especially true since most Democrats, though not all, are working on behalf of the American people.
Over the past several days GOP lawmakers have railed about cutting spending and all voted against extending unemployment benefits for the jobless based on the party's hypocritical and pretentious "grave" concern for the deficit. At the same time, Republicans in Washington are committed to continuing the W. tax cuts to the rich despite the fact that tax cuts would add to the deficit substantially, maybe to the tune of $100 billion.
Credibility apparently no longer matters.
Ronald Reagan Republican economists Alan Greenspan and David Stockman insist that continuing tax cuts with borrowed money could be disastrous. Stockman went as far to call the GOP economic strategy as
vulgar Keynesianism robed in the ideological vestments of the prosperous classes.
Paul O'Neill, U.S. Treasury under W. Bush, essentially said the same thing. W. and Cheney, by the way, had fired O'Neill because he had the nerve to oppose Bush's hair brained tax cuts and war in Iraq. Maybe that is the time in which the GOP started its purge of moderate and sane Republicans.
John Boehner completly ignores the Republican economists and he continues to cry out for extending the Bush tax cuts while screaming about spending and the deficit at the same time.
The Texas Progressive Alliance is pretty sure its invitation to President Obama's events in Texas were lost in the mail, and we will keep saying that to ourselves as we bring you this week's blog highlights.
This week from the think tanks, the narrative was that of an economy under stress, and attempting to recover from the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression. The report this month from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that while employment remained steady at 9.5% the private sector added only 71,000 jobs. While the employment rate is holding steady, the labor market is shrinking as more and more workers drop out of the labor force because they have been unable to find employment. What we can see from the latest reports is that while the government stimulus prevented the economy from falling into a second Great Depression, and according to a report from two leading economists without the stimulus the GDP in 2010 would be about 11.5% lower, and payroll employment would be less by some 8½ million jobs. However, despite this it is clear that the economy needs more economic stimulus and jobs programs to prevent the Great Recession to turn into the Great Depression.
"The primary reason the unemployment rate did not rise in July is that the labor force officially shrank by 181,000 workers. Those that dropped out of labor force were prime-age workers, while the number of young workers and older workers increased. The teen (age 16-19) labor force increased by 70,000, the young adult (age 20-24) labor force increased by 17,000, the prime-age (age 25-54) labor force decreased by 325,000, and older workers (age 55+) increased by 46,000. If the 181,000 workers that made up the decline had instead remained in the labor force and were counted among the unemployed, the unemployment rate in July would have been 9.6%. This points to another ongoing issue in the labor market, the backlog of "missing workers," that is, workers who dropped out of (or never entered) the labor force during the downturn. In the last three months, the labor force has declined by 1.2 million workers, reversing much of the 1.7 million increase in the labor force in the first four months of the year. This clearly shows how the forward momentum from earlier this year has largely evaporated."
Gov. Rick Perry and Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst called the requirement - contained in a $26 billion job protection bill passed by the U.S. Senate on Thursday - an unconstitutional intrusion into state affairs that could cost Texas schools more than $820 million. The House is expected to take final action on the measure next week.
My short story on this one: Slick Rick out of tricks - can't use Federal monies to cover his incompetence any longer.
So, let's get this straight . If the Federal Government puts strings on THEIR ( read US Tax payers') educational aid, that would be unfair and Texas will sue. We will sue because such a requirement is an "unconstitutional intrusion into state affairs" . I am so confused. When my teenage kids were at home, I recall many times putting requirements on how they could spend my money. That they meet these requirements was a condition of receiving the money and certainly of receiving any future funding. I could do that because IT WAS MY MONEY, not theirs. I don't see any difference between these two situations. In fact Rick's choices were my kids' choices - comply or don't take the money. Additionally, they could move out , make their own money and do as they pleased. What they could not do was have it both ways - have my money, but ignore my rules.
But wait you say, Rick is the governor of a sovereign state, not your child, lightseeker.
You are right so let's take the analysis to the next level. Unlike the relationship between myself and my children, Perry's relationship with the Federal government is set by the US Constitution. Constitutionally, by case law and by tradition, states do not have to take Federal money, but IF THEY DO, they can be required to abide by rules set by the Congress for obtaining and using that money. So, Mr. Perry your complaints are born out of either ignorance or flimflamery, the hope that your voters don't get it, don't understand how the system works.
While we taxpayers pay the Governor of Texas a full-time salary, Rick Perry works merely part-time on behalf of the people of Texas and full-time to line his own personal pockets by engaging in back room deals, favoritism and influence buying. All at the expense of the people of Texas, mind you.
I don't know about you folks, but my shopping spree days at Target are now history. I refuse do business with corporations that support intolerant and racist right wing agendas and candidates.
Saying no only goes so far. The Congressional Republicans obstructionism has been purely a political strategy, but it is a shortsighted political strategy with no long term vision. Perhaps that is because that Republicans have no long term vision, and that their campaign agenda amounts to nothing but clichés and platitudes. Over the course of the primary campaign season we have heard Republican candidates use phrases like "pro-growth," and "free enterprise," and "lower taxes," and "less spending," and of course "smaller government." These candidates have spent most of their time informing voters about everything that they're against, but they haven't spent much time explaining to voters what they support. Some may argue that Republicans don't have a coherent narrative for a policy agenda because they do not have one. However, the real reason they don't have a coherent narrative might be because they do have an agenda, and the policy ideas that Republicans are advocating are to simply double down on the failed economic policies that lead to the Great Recession.
This year Congressman Jim Jordan (R-OH) introduced the Economic Freedom Act of 2010, which among other things would eliminate the tax on the capital gains of individuals and corporations; reduce the maximum corporate income tax rate to 12.5%; allow a permanent and unlimited expensing allowance for depreciable business assets; and reduce payroll tax rates for employers, employees, and self-employed individuals in 2010, permanently repeals the estate taxes. According to an analysis by the Center for American Progress, what this proposed legislation amounts to is a $10 trillion giveaway to corporations and placing a further burden on working and middle class Americans. For all of the Congressional Republicans talk about budget deficits, this legislation would add $7 trillion in deficits over the next ten years. When you consider Republican support for extending the Bush Administration 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, the Republican economic agenda would add $10 trillion to the deficit. How does the legislation proposed to pay for these policies? By repealing TARP and using the remaining stimulus funds. However, that would only pay for about 5% of the cost of the legislation, which disproportionately benefits the wealthy. The average middle-class taxpayer would receive a tax cut of $467, compared to the average taxpayer in the richest 1% receives a tax cut of $157,500.
Then there is the Roadmap for America's Future Act of 2010, which was introduced this year by Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI). While Congressman Jordan's legislation would simply disproportionately benefit the wealthiest of Americans and add trillions of dollars to the budget deficits, Congressman Ryan's legislation would also increase the tax burdens on the work and middle class and make significant cuts to the social safety net. Basically not only does Ryan want to dismantle the policies that kept the Great Recession from turning into the Great Depression, he wants to dismantle the policies that where created because of the Great Depression to protect the most vulnerable of Americans. According to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the Roadmap would reduce by half the taxes of the richest 1% of Americans and the tax cuts would increase the further up the income ladder you climb. The richest 1/10 of 1% of Americans (whose incomes exceed $2.9 million a year) would receive an average tax cut of $1.7 million a year. How would these massive tax cuts be offset? By taxing working and middle class Americans. A new consumption tax on most goods and services, and this would shift the tax burdens so considerably from the upper class to the middle class that people with incomes over $1 million would face much lower effective tax rates than middle-income families would. When you consider that the Roadmap makes drastic changes to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, discontinue the Children's Health Insurance Program, radically reduce federal spending, the picture becomes clear that Ryan's plan is a roadmap to the Gilded Age.
President Reagan's former Office of Management and Budget Director, David Stockman, recently wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times. Mr. Stockman chastises his party for its irresponsible and reckless fiscal policies.
Four Deformations of the Apocalypse
Not only does Mr. Stockman pin the blame for today's economic hardships squarely on Republican policies and ideologies but he also revealed the Republican Party has absolutely no intention of deviating from its present addiction to serial financial bubbles and Wall St. made havoc that have driven us into the present chasm. The Wall St. gambling casino practices, by the way, resulted in the biggest looting of the public purse in U.S. history. Do Republicans embrace the endless looting of U.S. taxpayers to bail out Wall St.?
IF there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians, the Republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing. The nation's public debt - if honestly reckoned to include municipal bonds and the $7 trillion of new deficits baked into the cake through 2015 - will soon reach $18 trillion. That's a Greece-scale 120 percent of gross domestic product, and fairly screams out for austerity and sacrifice. It is therefore unseemly for the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, to insist that the nation's wealthiest taxpayers be spared even a three-percentage-point rate increase.
More fundamentally, Mr. McConnell's stand puts the lie to the Republican pretense that its new monetarist and supply-side doctrines are rooted in its traditional financial philosophy. Republicans used to believe that prosperity depended upon the regular balancing of accounts - in government, in international trade, on the ledgers of central banks and in the financial affairs of private households and businesses, too. But the new catechism, as practiced by Republican policymakers for decades now, has amounted to little more than money printing and deficit finance - vulgar Keynesianism robed in the ideological vestments of the prosperous classes.
What should Congress do? Right now, nothing. Why should Congress do nothing? Because if Congress does nothing then the Bush Administration tax cuts for the wealthiest of Americans will expire and this will recover much needed revenue and help reduce the budget deficits. Except for the first time during the course of the Obama Administration Congressional Republicans actually want to do something: extend the Bush Administration tax cuts and some believe they should be made permanent.
If tax legislation is passed all the tax cuts passed under Bush Administration in 2001 and 2003 will expire. The tax rates would then revert at the end of the year, with the top marginal income tax rate rising to 39.6% from 35%, and other corresponding rates for lower income brackets would also increase. There basically have been three different lines of thought on the Bush tax cuts, and that has been to either let them all expire, let some of them expire, and to let none of them expire. Generally speaking liberal Democrats have been making the case to allow the tax cuts to expire, while conservative Democrats have been arguing to allow some to expire but maintain the lower tax rate cuts. Of course Republicans have been arguing that they should all be extended.
The Texas Progressive Alliance sends its congratulations to Chelsea Clinton and Marc Mezvinsky on the occasion of their wedding as it brings you this week's blog roundup.
I have repeatedly drummed on the problems in public education here in Texas. Well, just to keep you up to date there are three other pieces that have come across my desk in the last 24 hours in reference to education. Taken together with liberaltexans reporting and the context out of our past, they paint a pretty scary picture for our future.
First there was a report out of New York on the long term impact of excellent early education, especially excellent teachers!
Economists have generally thought that the answer was not much. Great teachers and early childhood programs can have a big short-term effect. But the impact tends to fade. By junior high and high school, children who had excellent early schooling do little better on tests than similar children who did not - which raises the demoralizing question of how much of a difference schools and teachers can make.
There has always been one major caveat, however, to the research on the fade-out effect. It was based mainly on test scores, not on a broader set of measures, like a child's health or eventual earnings. As Raj Chetty, a Harvard economist, says: "We don't really care about test scores. We care about adult outcomes."
Early this year, Mr. Chetty and five other researchers set out to fill this void. They examined the life paths of almost 12,000 children who had been part of a well-known education experiment in Tennessee in the 1980s. The children are now about 30, well started on their adult lives.
[snip]
The Case for $320,000 Kindergarten Teachers Students who had learned much more in kindergarten were more likely to go to college than students with otherwise similar backgrounds. Students who learned more were also less likely to become single parents. As adults, they were more likely to be saving for retirement. Perhaps most striking, they were earning more.
All else equal, they were making about an extra $100 a year at age 27 for every percentile they had moved up the test-score distribution over the course of kindergarten. A student who went from average to the 60th percentile - a typical jump for a 5-year-old with a good teacher - could expect to make about $1,000 more a year at age 27 than a student who remained at the average. Over time, the effect seems to grow, too.
Recently there has been a national conversation about race and racism, but this conversation has been inadequate at best and detrimental at worst. The problem is that the conversation has not been about racism as a systemic and institutional problem, but the conversation has been about whether or not individual acts of prejudice constitute racism. This conversation then completely ignores the structural problems that create racial disparities, and therefore completely misses the point of what our national conversation about race should be about. Perhaps the most significant source of structural racism is the United States justice system, where justice is not always blind.
According to a recent study, a defendant accused of killing a white person in North Carolina is nearly three times as likely to get the death penalty than someone accused of killing a black person. This study looked at death sentence in North Carolina over a 28 year period, and examined 15,281 homicides in the state of which 368 resulted in death sentences. The results of the study where that the odds of receiving a death sentence in cases where the victim was white were 2.96 times as high as the odds in cases with black victims. This finding is not unique. According to another study, blacks who kill whites are significantly more likely to face the death penalty in Maryland than are blacks who kill blacks or white killers
Race is not only one of the determining factors in who receives the death penalty, but in who is stopped by the police, especially when police are racially profiling. In New York 575,304 people stopped and frisked by the New York Police Department last year, and information was gathered on individuals being detained to build a database on citizens who had not committed any crime. According to a report by New America Media, 87% of those who where detained where people of color. While Governor Paterson recently signed a law that made it illegal for police to randomly detain and frisk individuals and to compile their private information, this illustrates another example of the structural racism that exists in the justice system.
According to a new report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Texas ranks 34th nationally in a state-by-state study on the well-being of America's children. There are also significant areas in which Texas is among the worst in the nation, and these ranks represent a failure in many of the public policies instituted over the last two decades.
Texas is among the very worst in preventing teenage pregnancies. The teen birth rate in Texas in 2007 was 64 births per 1,000 females ages 15-19, which is considerably higher than the national rate of 43 births per 1,000. Texas ranked 48th in the nation in teenage pregnancies, and only New Mexico and Mississippi ranked higher. This follows a nationwide trend of increased teenage pregnancies. According to a report by the Guttmacher Institute, after a decade of declining teenage pregnancies the nationally teen pregnancy rate rose 3% in 2006, which reflected an increase in teen birth of 4%. The report notes that the cause of the decline in teenage pregnancies in the 1990s was due to more and better use of contraceptives among sexually active teens. However, during the 2000s sex education programs aimed exclusively at promoting abstinence, and these programs have lead to increasing teen pregnancy rates especially in states such as Texas.
The Texas Progressive Alliance wishes Lois the corpse flower a restful and well-earned dormant period as it brings you this week's blog highlights.
WhosPlayin posted a document explaining the link between benzene and natural gas drilling and production operations, and examining a few recent air quality studies in the Barnett Shale.
Off the Kuff took a look at campaign finance reports for Harris County candidates and State Reps. Along the way, he answered the burning question "What kind of man subscribes to Glamour magazine?"
If you write off Rick Perry as a political prettyboy you do him a disservice and you fall into a trap that his critics seem to never quite overcome. Goodhair is a posturing, preening, parasite who has found the good life by using his political office to grow prosperous. He serves the usual set of Republican suspects - corporations, the affluent, fundamentalists, etc. All this is well known. What is not appreciated is his absolute mastery of hiding this servitude under the bushel basket of bureaucratic detail and obfuscation.
The short sloganized version of this tale has to be: "Rick Perry is too busy polishing his image to worry about innocent inmates facing the death penalty."
Perry's contributing culpability in everything from the TYC scandal to the torching of the govenor's mansion has never been the stuff of headlines, or at least, of enduring cycles of news coverage. Why? I answer because the decisions and inept governance that these sordid events highlight are spin by Perry as bureaucratic foul-ups which makes him the victim of everyone's favorite bete noir - The Big Bad Unelected Bureaucrat! Don't blame me Perry says, blame that little gray guy or gal over there in the cubicle.
So, when last year the Innocence Project raised the all too real specter that Mr. Death Penalty had refused to stay an execution even though there was credible expert testimony indicating that the convicted was NOT guilty Perry pulled a Perry, he used the arcana of the Texas bureaucratic process to stall the investigation. Rick Casey explains:
Dousing a troublesome arson probe Last fall, two days before one of the nation's top arson scientists was about to appear before the commission to explain his harsh criticism of evidence used to help convict Corsicana man Cameron Todd Willingham of deliberately setting the fire that killed his young children, Gov. Rick Perry abruptly named Bradley, district attorney of Williamson County, to replace the commission's founding chairman, Austin defense attorney Sam Bassett
Vyan over at Daily Kos has written an excellent piece about MSNBC's Rachel Maddow's deconstruction of Fox's race baiting and the Republican Party's most recent southern strategy of scorched earth politics.
This week the Congress passed a $34 billion dollar extension of benefits to Americans who have been out of work for more than 26 weeks, and these benefits where passed along party lines with the Republicans in the Senate blocking the benefits for weeks. Congressional Republicans argued that the benefits should not be passed unless a corresponding amount of budget cuts could be made, however, another argument that Republicans have offered is that unemployment benefits themselves are a disincentive to find work. At a time when long term unemployment is high than at any time since the Great Depression, and there are five workers applying for every one job these arguments seem ludicrous. The unemployment benefits will help 2 million struggling Americans, and the extension of benefits will last through November.
The idea that unemployment benefits will unacceptably add to the deficit is a relatively weak argument, considering that the fall in consumer demand if unemployment benefits are not extending in the long run will add more to the deficit in lack of tax revenue. Also, it seems a bit disingenuous for Republicans to lecture anyone on deficits or government spending. According to analysis by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, significant causes of our current deficits where due to the 2001 and 2003 Bush Administration tax cuts (which by the way Republicans are still arguing doing not need to be paid for with corresponding cuts in the budget). The other idea that unemployment benefits are a disincentive for people to find employment is another weak argument when you consider that there are not enough jobs for American workers. What these arguments are about is plain and simply politics.
That would be the G.W. Bush era of criminal incompetence, an unnecessary oil war in Iraq and U.S. economic devastation 2000-2008.
On the NBC Meet the Press show on Sunday, TX Senator John Cornyn and TX U.S. House Rep. Pete Sessions clearly revealed the core belief system and agenda of the GOP.
First, the GOP is completely bereft of ideas and solutions for repairing our broken economy. Nor does the Republican Party have any plan on any table for creating new jobs for unemployed Americans.
Instead the GOP is totally focused on the negative and the cold-hearted: obstruction, obfuscation and the repeal of both health care and financial reform should the Republican Party take control of the U.S. Congress.
Repeat. The GOP has absolutely no viable ideas, solutions or plans for the future. The GOP is instead consumed and driven by racism as well as hate talk, fear mongering and lies.
The debate over immigration has been pushed into the national conversation since the Arizona state legislature passed Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act, otherwise known as SB1070. Since Arizona Governor, Republican Jan Brewer, signed SB1070 into law there have been seven separate lawsuits filed against the law, including a lawsuit filed by the United States Department of Justice. In federal court last week Judge Susan Bolton heard arguments from both sides of Salgado v. Brewer, and this week Judge Bolton will hear arguments in the case brought by the Justice Department. These lawsuits argue that the law is unconstitutional on different grounds including that it violates civil liberty, that it causes racial profiling and that it is an unlawful regulation of federal immigration law.
This law has come at a significant price to Arizona. While the state is facing a budget deficit of more than $4.5 billion dollars, the law is going to cost the state millions of dollars. In addition to the $10 million in initial cost of implementing the law, county and municipal law enforcement agencies will be forced to spend millions of dollars enforcing the law. According to the Immigration Policy Center law-enforcement agencies in Yuma County alone will have to spend between $775,880 and $1,163,820 in processing expenses; jail costs would be between $21,195,600 and $96,086,720; attorney and staff fees would be $810,067-$1,620,134; and additional detention facilities would have to be built at unknown costs. Arizona will also be affected by Latino and immigrant populations that may migrate to states with less hostile environments towards these populations. According to a 2008 study by the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy at the University of Arizona, the Latino and immigrant generated $10.2 billion in state economic output, and generated tax revenues of roughly $776 million.
Stay with me on this one as it can be a little technical to follow. I will try to make plain what our friend Commissioner Staples appears to be up to. In essence is it about corporate friendly control over broadband access and the limiting of competition in its provision. My bumper sticker/30 second sound byte would be: Staples whores for Big Broadband - Rural Texas is road kill on the Broadband highway!
You should know for starters that rural areas are severely underserved by current broadband suppliers. No news there, rural Texas also gets the short end of the educational resources as well. But this inequity has a real bite on the larger stage of international commerce. The US lags behind in access to broadband and this hurts us.
Staples draws fire over broadband map contract A March study by two Philadelphia organizations - Digital Impact Group and Econsult Corp. - estimated that the U.S. loses more than $55 billion a year in economic activity because of spotty access.
So, closing this digital divide is not just a matter of equity, but of economics. Big Broadband is not in love with the thought that they will be forced to provide broadband to Podunk - no big bucks in that prospect. Along comes the government providing money to map broadband available, hopefully documenting the holes in the coverage. This would in turn produce pressure for Big Broadband to fill these holes, and/or provide funds for smaller local providers/competitors. What to do? Rig the mapping process/outcome!
