The country is facing a 2009 federal deficit of $1.42 trillion, more than three times larger than any annual deficit in history. To get the country in the black for the year, every man, woman and child would each have to write out a check for $4,700. That’s a lot of money. According to the Government Accountability Office, 20 years from now, about 92 percent of every federal dollar will be spent on entitlement programs and interest payments on the federal debt. The federal government has only a few choices: increase revenue (raise taxes), reduce expenses (cut services) or a combination. And Congress is elected by a nation of voters who want to have it both ways: low taxes coupled with generous, federally funded programs. Yet we wonder why the national debt grows. So while the 2009 deficit is a stunning $1.42 trillion, the real question is whether it’s stunning enough to finally prompt Congress to make changes when the economy recovers. — Des Moines Register editorial
Remember Ross Perot? In 1992, he predicted that the federal budget deficit was on track to end the world as we knew it. In fact, the rapid growth of the economy during the following years reduced the deficit to zero. Deficits and debts mean just about nothing anyway — at least out of context. In 1945, the federal debt was 120 percent of the entire U.S. economy. A few years later, the debt as a proportion of GDP had been tamed — and not primarily because of cuts in government spending. Yes, of course — wartime spending ended. But the big change was in the denominator of the equation. Economic growth kicked in big time, and reduced the debt as a proportion of the economy to manageable levels. I’d prefer the government run a larger deficit. With unemployment and underemployment rising, the federal government has to spend more — and the deficit has to be larger — in order to get people back to work. — Robert Reich, RobertReich.blogspot.com
It’s troubling that Rep. Todd Tiahrt, R-Goddard, reportedly is under investigation by two ethics panels for steering federal funds to clients of a lobbying firm that made donations to his campaign. Tiahrt secured $5 million and helped steer another $2 million in earmarks to clients of the PMA Group between 2001 and 2008, while receiving $21,250 in campaign donations from PMA Group during that period. The Center for Public Integrity also complained this year that Tiahrt directed earmarks to a company represented by a former Tiahrt aide. It included Tiahrt among other House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee members “in circles of relationships fraught with potential conflicts of interest, involving former congressional staffers-turned lobbyists, earmarks and campaign cash.”
UPDATE: Tiahrt issued a statement this afternoon saying that the Office of Congressional Ethics asked about the process his office followed for submitting defense-related project requests to the House Appropriations Committee, and that he had fully complied with the request. But he had “no reason whatsoever to believe that we are subject to a House Ethics Committee investigation.” Tiahrt said he takes “pride in our professional and ethical process for reviewing requests made to my office — a process that we undertake to ensure the highest level of integrity is part of all our conduct.”
A public health insurance plan appeared dead two weeks ago, but both House and Senate Democratic leaders announced this week that their reform bills would include the option. The comeback may be fueled by opinion polls showing that a majority of the public wants a public option. Fifty-seven percent of Americans favor a public insurance option, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll. Support among doctors is even higher — 63 percent favor giving patients a choice that would include both public and private insurance, according to a survey released last month. Overall, however, the public is still divided on the health care reform bills in Congress, with 45 percent favoring the broad outlines of the proposals and 48 percent opposed.
The Air Line Pilots Association has judged the Federal Aviation Administration to have acted prematurely in revoking the licenses of the Northwest Airlines pilots who flew 150 miles past their Twin Cities destination last week because they were riveted by their personal laptops. Union officials want the FAA to “recommit to protect the integrity” of voluntary safety reporting programs, under which pilots are supposed to be able to disclose mistakes without fear of punishment. That process has its place. But these weren’t two store clerks lost in harmless conversation. They zoned out for 91 minutes at 37,000 feet with more than 140 passengers aboard. To many fliers, the FAA’s swift action seemed appropriate.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton got blunt in Pakistan, speaking to newspaper editors: “Al-Qaida has had safe haven in Pakistan since 2002. I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn’t get them if they really wanted to. Maybe that’s the case; maybe they’re not gettable. I don’t know.”
Meanwhile, a new book by former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe confirms that Clinton came close to being vice president. “I think Bill may be too big a complication,” Plouffe writes, quoting Barack Obama. “If I picked her, my concern is that there would be more than two of us in the relationship.”
It takes a strong spine (or a hard heart) to criticize President Obama’s idea of sending a $250 check to every Social Security recipient — something he wants to do because the cost of living doesn’t entitle seniors to a cost-of-living increase for next year. New York Times economics columnist David Leonhardt noted that because overall prices have dropped 2.1 percent this year but Social Security benefits won’t drop accordingly, “recipients are already set to receive an effective raise.” And seniors may be sympathetic, but they’re better off than some demographics. “The real median income of over-65 households rose 3 percent from 2000 to 2008,” he wrote. “For households headed by somebody age 25 to 44, it fell about 7 percent.”
The whole episode does not bode well for the prospects that Obama and Congress will do something substantive about the unsustainability of Social Security and Medicare. “If the long-term issue is entitlement reform,” said Joel Slemrod, a University of Michigan economist, “the fact that the political system cannot say no to $250 checks to elderly people is a bad sign.”
State Rep. Brenda Landwehr, R-Wichita, and other GOP legislators have jumped on a national bandwagon aimed at opting out of national health reform state by state. “We were created to have state sovereignty,” Landwehr said. “We were not set up to have the federal government tell the states who, what, when, where and how.” But their Health Care Freedom Amendment requires two-thirds support in the Legislature and majority approval at the polls, which can be hard to come by in Kansas. And if the constitutional amendment prevailed and Kansans were protected from federal health insurance mandates, would they find it any easier to get and keep insurance and access affordable health care?
“Former Vice President Dick Cheney has accused the White House of ‘dithering’ over the strategy for the war in Afghanistan. The White House said they’re thinking it over, and they should have an answer for him in six to eight weeks.” — Jay Leno
“President Obama just declared the swine flu outbreak a national emergency. A couple of weeks ago, it was like, ‘Calm down, it’s going to be fine.’ . . . Make up your mind. This thing is like the Brett Favre of infectious diseases.” — Jimmy Fallon
“In response to Obama’s declaration, the Republican leaders this morning came out in support of the swine flu.” — Jimmy Kimmel
Two New York Times columnists have offered thoughtful cases against giving Gen. Stanley McChrystal the extra troops he wants in Afghanistan.
Arguing that digging deeper in Afghanistan will weaken the United States, Thomas Friedman wrote: “We simply do not have the Afghan partners, the NATO allies, the domestic support, the financial resources or the national interests to justify an enlarged and prolonged nation-building effort in Afghanistan.”
Suggesting there are better uses for U.S. dollars right now than “inflaming Pashtun nationalism,” Nicholas Kristof doubts more troops will do the trick. He wrote: “We have been fighting in Afghanistan for twice as long as we fought in World War II, with a current price tag estimated to be more than $60 billion a year. Standard counterinsurgency ratios of troops to civilians suggest we would need 650,000 troops (including Afghans) to pacify the country. So will adding 40,000 more to the 68,000 already there make a difference to justify the additional annual cost of $10 billion to $40 billion, especially since they may aggravate the perception of Americans as occupiers?”
If President Obama is disappointed in his point-woman in the House, he wasn’t showing it Monday at a Democratic fundraiser in Miami Beach. “I don’t think people quite understand. Nancy Pelosi is not simply the first woman speaker of the House,” he told the crowd. “I think she’s going to go down as one of the greatest speakers of all time. And she’s very nice and she’s very friendly, but, boy, she is tough. And that’s what you need when you’re putting up with all the criticism and the carping and the griping — and that’s from the Democrats. I mean, you should see what she has to put up with — from the Republicans. So I could not have a better partner in trying to move the country than Nancy Pelosi.”
As a member of the two U.S. Senate committees tasked with crafting health reform bills, Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., has played the critic more than the architect, objecting noisily on cost and other grounds. That’s probably why he hasn’t been a go-to guy for reform champion and former Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, the Democrat now leading President Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services. “Even though we know each other very well, she knows how I feel about how health reform, so she’s trying to go where she can get votes,” Roberts told the Kansas Health Institute News Service. “I would welcome — if she had the time — at least an hour discussion to go over these facts (about health reform) with the secretary. I can’t imagine if she were still in her previous role that she wouldn’t be jumping up and down about all this.” Perhaps, but Gov. Mark Parkinson has strongly advocated reform.
Marveling that 15 million Americans are out of work yet the Kansas Democratic Party can’t find one candidate for governor, Topeka Capital-Journal columnist Ric Anderson quipped: “Pretty soon, that guy from ‘Dirty Jobs’ is going to show up. Talk about an opportunity hardly anybody wants to touch.”
This may be the moment for conservative Democrats. More Americans are conservative than are moderate or are liberal, according to a new Gallup poll. Forty percent of Americans polled described their political views as conservative, compared with 36 percent who said they were moderate and 20 percent who said they were liberal. Moderates and conservatives were tied in polling from 2005 through 2008, but conservatism has gained ground among independent voters, according to Gallup. Meanwhile, a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll puts the Republican Party’s favorable rating at its lowest in at least a decade, 36 percent, compared with 53 percent favorability of the Democratic Party.
A proposed November online auction to benefit the legal defense of Scott Roeder, accused of killing abortion doctor George Tiller, surely doesn’t square with eBay’s policy against allowing listings that promote or glorify violence or “instruct others to engage in illegal activity.” The distasteful items to be sold — including an Army of God manual, a recipe book by convicted Tiller shooter Shelley Shannon and drawings from Roeder — seem inseparable from the use of violence and illegal activity aimed at ending abortion. Unfortunately, even if eBay nixes the appalling auction, it probably could find another home on the wild Web. Roeder deserves a high-quality defense, but he does not deserve to be celebrated in cyberspace or otherwise.
Some reactions on ABC’s “This Week” to Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to ease up on prosecutions of medicinal use of marijuana in the 14 states that allow it:
“We have legalized gambling in this country over two generations. It used to be considered a sin and a crime. With no national debate and no decision moment — we just did it — we have legalized prostitution, as anyone who opens a telephone book and looks under ‘escort’ can tell you. And we’re probably in the process now of legalizing marijuana.” — Washington Post columnist George Will
“We won’t see a full legalization of marijuana until somebody figures out that if you tax it, maybe you can pay for health care.” — John Podesta, former White House chief of staff under Bill Clinton
“I wish that I believed that this was going to lead to some broader federal look at the whole futile war on drugs.” — Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Cynthia Tucker
In a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, concern about the economy was paramount across gender lines. But “46 percent of women rank health care as one of their top two concerns, versus 34 percent of men who think that — a 12-point difference,” noted MSNBC’s First Read blog. “On the other hand, a combined 39 percent of men rank the deficit and spending as a top two concern, versus 29 percent of women who do — a 10-point difference.”
Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post ranked Sarah Palin as the most influential Republican, noting the upcoming release of her memoir, “Going Rogue: An American Life,” and her ability to draw big and energetic crowds. Meanwhile, the editors of the Nation are publishing “Going Rouge: Sarah Palin, An American Nightmare” on the same day that Palin’s book comes out.
Some higher education officials in Kansas already are using the term “state-assisted” rather then “state-funded.” Now, to deal with a state funding squeeze, officials at Colorado State University are debating whether to take the school partially private and go to a tuition system in which students would pay more for degrees that cost more to deliver. Virginia, Pennsylvania and New York also have versions of a public-private model for higher education. But it’s controversial. “Once you start charging more for some degrees, you’re going to price people out of the market,” Chapman Rackaway, associate professor of political science at Fort Hays State University, wrote in the Hays Daily News. “State governments across the country already are doing their best to prevent access to higher education for all but their wealthiest citizens. If we start making it harder to get necessary degrees like medicine and engineering, we’ll find ourselves with a shortage of people in those fields quickly.”
The Bushes have joined the “Get Motivated” seminar program. Asked about George W. Bush’s first speaking gig — today in Fort Worth, on a bill including Colin Powell, Rudy Giuliani, Terry Bradshaw, Zig Ziglar and Robert Schuller — University of Virginia political science professor Larry Sabato suggested the country is beyond asking whether such top-dollar talks should be beneath former presidents. But “Bob Dole selling Viagra — now that lacked dignity,” Sabato told the New York Daily News.
