One Year Later: Affordable Care Act

March 23rd, 2010, the day that President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act. Despite the fact the bill has a name, Republicans insist on calling it ObamaCare (I wonder how they'll feel about that name when he's a 2nd term President?). While Republicans point at the act and say the public hates it, the simple fact is that the majority either like it, or think it didn't go far enough, to which I agree. A year later, the public doesn't like the bill, but they don't like repeal either. Mixed signals to Washington.

I think the process really sucked. The President made the amazing mistake of allowing Max Baucus to drag the process out, then it only got worse. They let Joe Lieberman and his buddies get rid of the Public Option, a very popular component. They took out the employer mandate in favor of the individual mandate. I could go on, but won't. The bill wasn't great. It was "good enough" though. Repealing the bill would simply return us to a system driven entirely by corporate profit, run by men who are borderline criminals for their treatment of the common man. While the GOP says the bill is "job killing" and "budget busting," the CBO said neither of which, and that's really the best judgment we have to go on right now, at least for the next few years.

It's my best hope that the bill will be expanded on and improved in the next few years. I'd like to see a Public Option passed, I'd like to see changes to the mandate system, I'd like to see low premium, catastrophic packages made available, and I'd like to see more in the area of cost control. For now though, I'm just happy that something came of this, finally, and that the industry didn't kill reform efforts, again.

Real History, Meet Tea-Bag History

Maturity.

Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R) has ordered the removal of a 36-foot mural depicting the state's labor history from the lobby of the Department of Labor headquarters, according to WMTW-TV.

A spokesman said the mural was "not in keeping with the department's pro-business goals and some business owners complained."

At least he's honestly pro-business. But seriously, does he think suppressing history makes it less true? Secondly, why is it politically fine to be "pro-business?" I mean, I don't think one should be "anti-business" either, but it's now politically cool to stack the deck their way?

Speaker John Boehner: In His Own Words

Charlie Dent Misleads On Marcellus Shale.

You'll have to forgive me. When I first saw the video of Charlie Dent saying he didn't support a FRACK Act, and saying the questioner needed to take it up with state officials, I found that answer to be reasonable. My understanding was that this was a state issue, and was being played out in Harrisburg. Apparently, I, and Congressman Dent, are wrong.

One of the major problems with fracking was caused by Congressional action. From LVI:

Noel Jones asked Charlie Dent to sign Bob Casey's FRAC Act and he refused. The FRAC Act would close the Halliburton loophole from the 2005 Bush Energy bill that exempts natural gas drilling from pollution regulations.

Now, I know that there may be Senatorial politics playing in this. The 2005 Bush Energy Bill was one of Dent's first votes, and it of course, gave these "frackers" the rights to not care about pollution. Yes, that's FEDERAL action.

Let me be clear here, the same as with state politicians who say an "extraction tax" will kill jobs, your argument is bunk: natural gas companies are not going to "pass" on this huge supply of gas, just because they have to follow rules and pay in some money so that we don't get run over in this. These companies are stretching our infrastructure in central PA thin, they are polluting our water, and they are making BILLIONS doing it. It's not too much to ask to have them pay our state a tax for that profit. It's not too much to ask that they don't pollute our state free of penalty. None of this kills jobs.

Boo-Hoo! Now The Courts Are To Blame, And Only Christie "Gets It."

Beautiful.

Today, a judge found that Gov. Chris Christie (R) violated Abbott v. Burke requirements when he slashed $820 million in state aid to schools last year, because the cuts were slanted too heavily towards poor districts:

Judge Peter Doyne, who was appointed as special master in the long-running Abbott vs. Burke school funding case, today issued an opinion that also found the reductions “fell more heavily upon our high risk districts and the children educated within those districts.”

“Despite spending levels that meet or exceed virtually every state in the country, and that saw a significant increase in spending levels from 2000 to 2008, our ‘at risk’ children are now moving further from proficiency,” he said.

“The difficulty in addressing New Jersey’s fiscal crisis and its constitutionally mandated obligation to educate our children requires an exquisite balance not easily attained,” Doyne wrote. “Something need be done to equitably address these competing imperatives. That answer, though, is beyond the purview of this report. For the limited question posed to the Master, it is clear the State has failed to carry its burden.“

Laymen's terms: You cannot simply slash spending on poor kids to balance your budget because you want to cut taxes for corporations and such. New Jersey has built into it's case law constitutional protection of funding for poor school districts, a group that usually find the budget cutting knife in other states, and would certainly with Christie. Christie responded with:

A Christie spokesman responded to the ruling this evening, blaming the court for exacerbating New Jersey's fiscal troubles, and sidestepping the central issue of unequally distributed cuts: "The court’s legal mandates on the legislative and executive branches of government have incontrovertibly contributed to our current fiscal crisis without uniformly improving education, particularly for the at-risk students the court claims to be helping with its rulings."

Essentially, Christie has been told "you can't do that." So now he's saying the judge is wrong, as is the precedent protecting poor districts. Why? Because Christie doesn't believe that in New Jersey, one of the nation's wealthiest states, extremely wealthy suburbanites should pay any of the bill for kids in Newark, Camden, Trenton, Jersey City, and even out in little old Phillipsburg. Don't get too excited or happy though. Think Christie will now go back on his corporate tax cuts, his opposition to a millionaire's tax, or cuts to corporate welfare in his state? Think again. Christie will not do these things, or anything else to balance his budget. He will blame public workers, President Obama, and the legislature. He'll end up either laying off thousands of public workers, or demanding enormous givebacks from them. With Christie, all the sacrifice is for "us," and not for "them."

Force The Issue- Talking About Budgets

Tomorrow will mark the ONE YEAR point since President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act. A year later, the public isn't crazy about the bill. On the whole, they oppose it's repeal, but they greatly dislike the "Individual Mandate." With time, approval will improve for the bill. In a few short years, people will start to see increased coverage, along with the government subsidies to pay for it. They will see something else. Twenty years from now, this will have saved us hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars. It was the most important deficit busting bill so far passed in this administration, as CBO has said.

How much does this currently matter in the debate about budgets? Zero. Guys like Haley Barbour, wasting state money on trips to set up his Presidential campaign, are lecturing us about the need for austerity. Governors like Scott Walker, Tom Corbett, and Rick Scott are destroying public education, public health, and worker compensation for the purpose of "shared sacrifice," while slashing corporate and top end taxes record amounts, and worse yet, giving jobs to their cronies. John Boehner is cutting $61 billion from federal spending that benefits the public, while not touching the wealthy and the Pentagon. All the while, they tell us we already have the most "progressive tax code" in the world, and it's time to go back the other way. Boehner even went so far as to say we "don't have a revenue problem." Really?

Don't let reality get in the way for ya' guys. The goons on Capitol Hill write to the President and "beg him to not make them raise the national deficit," all the while pretending that ending the Bush Tax Cuts, the largest driver of our debt the last decade, isn't an option. Really guys?

It seems as though everybody in Washington has forgotten that the Bush tax cuts are by far the biggest reason that the deficit has exploded. During the Clinton years, federal taxes were a bit less than 20% of GDP. During the Bush years, they dropped to a bit under 18% of GDP. Meanwhile, with the exception of Bush's final year in office (which featured TARP plus a decline in GDP), spending was virtually unchanged as a percentage of GDP. In other words, the increase in debt under Bush is almost entirely attributable to his tax policy, with most of the balance coming from TARP and the Great Recession.

It's only logical, therefore, that any serious policy to restore fiscal health would return to Clinton-era tax rates by allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire. For the longer-term, we'd still have to deal with the impact of rising health care costs on Medicare and Medicaid, but at least in the medium-term, we'd have eliminated most of the structural deficit.

For extra credit, we could also immediately adopt Jan Schakowsky's millionaire's tax proposal. Her plan would raise $89 billion for 2011 if adopted immediately, reducing the deficit by 50% more than the GOP plan while avoiding crucial cuts to programs like childhood vaccinations.

Yeah, but that's not even in the "adult conversation." Instead we're cutting nutrition for pregnant women, the same pregnant women the right-wing wants to force into motherhood. We keep hearing we're broke, but the fact is we're not. We're not "overtaxed" either. Taxed Enough Already? Some of us might be. The billionaires are not.

There are certain realities that those of us on "the left" do need to face, such as the need for entitlement REFORM (not destruction). The right needs to face a lot too. The rich pay less taxes than the rest of us, as a percentage of their income, and that's simply not right. The Bush Tax Cuts need to go away. The spending cuts that Defense Secretary Robert Gates SUGGESTED be cut from HIS budget, have to be axed now. Health Care Reform is necessary to solving our long term deficit, even if it needs to be changed substantially. Ronald Reagan's "slash taxes to the top, see it trickle down" theory just doesn't work, even if you do want to elevate him to saint hood. And finally, yes, behavior matters. If you want us to take your "austerity" seriously, you can't take expensive trips on the public dime, hire mistresses and unqualified family members of your campaign manager, or cut taxes for corporations while gutting out our public services. We understand that less is less. No Governor Christie, $50,000 a year workers ARE NOT the reason your state has an exploding budget, no matter how many times you say it. Do we have stuff to accept? Yeah, we liberals do, in fact we may have to accept at some point the government doing less for people, if these other things are all done. No though, shared sacrifice doesn't mean "screw the poor."

Photo of the Day: Your President, Abroad

Isn't it great to have a President the whole world wants to see?

Bombs Cost Money

Great point.

A Tomahawk Missile cost $569,000 in FY99, so if my calculations are correct, they cost a little over $736,000 today assuming they are the same make and model. The United States fired 110 missiles yesterday, which adds up to a cost of around $81 million. That's twice the size of the annual budget of USIP, which the House of Representatives wants to de-fund, and is about 33 times the amount of money National Public Radio receives in grants each year from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which the House of Representatives also wants to de-fund in the name of austerity measures.

Ideology.

Daniels Under Political Attack

Gentlemen (and ladies), Start Your Engines....

Well, finally. As the first quarter of 2011 ends (President Obama had raised $25 million in 2008 by now), Tim Pawlenty will announce his Presidential Exploratory Committee on Facebook today at 3 pm. He becomes the first major contender to enter the race for 2012, and kicks off what has been a slow and unexciting process, so far.

Well, welcome to the race. Time to start covering a real election. It's nice.