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Politics

AFL-CIO President: ‘John McCain Is Wrong’ About His Claim That Economy Is Strong

By Ali Frick on Aug 26, 2008 at 4:49 pm

sweeneyweb.jpgLast week, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said again, “I still believe the fundamentals of the economy are strong.” Though he has waffled on this point in the past — declaring in April we had made “great progress economically” during Bush’s presidency before reversing himself 24 hours later — he was clear last week in declaring the U.S. “still the most innovative, the most productive” country.

ThinkProgress spoke with AFL-CIO President John Sweeney today at the Democratic National Convention, and asked if he agreed with McCain’s assessment. Sweeney replied, “McCain is wrong”:

I think John McCain is wrong. He doesn’t even know how many homes he has. … We’ve seen the McCain position as just a continuation of the Bush Administration. It’s President Bush’s policies that got us into the mess that we have now. And it’s not only a short term crisis, it’s long term and it has to be addressed. Workers are having a tough time. The wage inequality that’s out there is unbelievable, and health care and retirement security are threatened. Those are some of the reasons that we’re not supporting John McCain.

Earlier today, the U.S. Census’ poverty figures revealed just how far the American economy has sunk under Bush-McCain policies: 37.3 million people were living in poverty in 2007, and 45.7 million, or 15.3 percent of the population, lack health insurance — 6 million more than when Bush took office 2001.

Speaking to the Rocky Mountain News, Sweeney “said the growing pay gap between CEOs and workers can be tied directly to the increasing difficulty in workers’ ability to form unions.” Unfortunately, McCain opposes the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier for workers to unionize. In a debate last fall, he said that while unions played “a very important role in the history of the country,” unions “have been serious excesses.”

Economy

Census Data: Most Americans Suffering Under Bush Economy

By Igor Volsky on Aug 26, 2008 at 4:38 pm

Today’s new census numbers confirm the disproportionality of President Bush’s economic expansion. Unfortunately, the president’s economic policies — which were supposed to serve as “a rising tide that raised all boats” — have redistributed wealth to the richest Americans and left the middle and lower classes behind.

And while the new data “did show an uptick for 2007,” years of declining income and earnings outweigh this most recent growth.

Taking the new census numbers into account, most Americans lost money during the Bush expansion:

- Median household incomes down: 0.6% lower in 2007 than in 2000

- Men’s earnings down: 0.38% less in 2007 than in 1999

- Women’s earnings can’t keep up: continued upward swing but were unable to “overcome other drags on household income”

- More Americans in poverty: 5.7 million more people lived in poverty in 2007 than did in 2000

The Center for Policy and Budget Priorities notes, “never before on record has poverty been higher and median income for working-age households lower at the end of a multi-year economic expansion than at the beginning. The new data add to the mounting evidence that the gains from the 2001-2007 expansion were concentrated among high-income Americans.”

A new Center for American Progress report graphically presents the severity of the income redistribution:

bushgraphs1.JPG

bushchart2.JPG

Yglesias

More Discount Rate Madness

By Matthew Yglesias on Aug 26, 2008 at 4:22 pm

Relevant to the earlier discussion of discount rates and climate change, here’s a document in which Frank Ackerman and Lisa Heinzerling make the case against “cost-benefit analysis” in general as an approach to environmental policy decision-making. Some of the problems with this approach, which unfortunately has been given a name that makes you sound crazy to argue against it, are, I think, especially severe in the case of climate change because the concerns about equity that exist with this overall approach get really problematic when you operate on a global scale where gaps in income get really immense.

Yglesias

Hubris, Hubris Everywhere

By Matthew Yglesias on Aug 26, 2008 at 4:11 pm

Sons of Iraq

Progressives have sort of gotten beaten down enough that they’ve stopped saying this, but it’s still true that the stated purpose of the surge was to create a window of opportunity in which various Iraqi factions could achieve the sort of political reconciliation that would provide the basis for lasting peace in Iraq. And it’s also still true that that hasn’t happened. And it’s also still true that the fate of the so-called “Sons of Iraq” movement — armed Sunni militias who abandoned anti-American insurgency in favor of an alliance with the United States against AQI but who don’t like the idea of living in a Shiite-dominated Iraq — illustrates the point well. Shawn Brimley and Colin Kahl have an op-ed on this:

The “surge” strategy in Iraq, as described by President Bush in January 2007, rested on the belief that tamping down violence would provide a window of opportunity that Iraq’s leaders would use to pursue political reconciliation. But this has not occurred, despite the dramatic security improvements. Indeed, if the problem in 2006 and 2007 was Maliki’s weakness and inability to pursue reconciliation in the midst of a civil war, the issue in 2008 is his overconfidence and unwillingness to entertain any real accommodation with his political adversaries. America’s blank check to the Iraqi government feeds this hubris.

That’s the right diagnosis. Their proposed cure (“make continued security assistance conditional on Maliki carrying through on his commitments to integrate and gainfully employ the Sons of Iraq”) however, sounds a bit like wishful thinking to me. Why not just accept that it’s extremely difficult for the United States government to effectively micromanage political events in Iraq? Suppose we tilt a bit in the direction Kahl & Brimley advise and then Maliki starts feeling too weak to compromise again? Or suppose the SOI develop hubris of their own? Or what if a renewed focus on curbing Shiite ambitions causes a re-emerge of trouble on the Sadrist front that’s been quiet for a little bit now? It may well be true that Maliki is suffering from a case of hubris here, but I think there’s a parallel hubris in the American policy community that assumes an unrealistic capacity to shape events that have a logic of their own.

Politics

Disregarding Her Public Statements, White House Claims Rice Will Vote For McCain

By Ryan Powers on Aug 26, 2008 at 4:01 pm

ricebiden.jpgUpon learning of Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-IL) selection of Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) as his running mate, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that Biden “is obviously a very fine statesman,” and called him a “true, true patriot.” In yesterday’s White House press conference, Assistant Press Secretary Tony Fratto was asked if President Bush agreed with Rice’s assessment. Fratto demurred but said Rice, herself, would be voting for Sen. John McCain (R-AZ):

FRATTO: Obviously — let me just say this — I mean, for Senator Biden to be selected to run on his party’s ticket for Vice President is a great honor. … As for Secretary Rice, I think Secretary Rice has made clear who she intends to vote for, and that will be Senator McCain and whomever he chooses to join him on the ticket.

It’s not at all clear, however, who Rice intends to vote for. As recently as August 17 on Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace asked which candidate Rice is supporting for president. Rice would only say that she considers herself a Republican and that she would make her choice “at the ballot box”:

WALLACE: And finally, Secretary Rice, do you support John McCain over Barack Obama for president?

RICE: Look, I’m the secretary of state, and as secretary of state, I think it’s a tradition that I’ll take a nonpartisan role here.

Everybody knows that I’m a Republican. Everybody also knows that I have great respect for our — for our political system, for the choices the American people will make. And as an American, will make my choice, like all Americans, at the ballot box.

Previously, Rice told Fox News that she is not interested in being McCain’s running mate.

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Politics

Why was Cheney aide in Georgia before the conflict?

By Faiz Shakir on Aug 26, 2008 at 3:20 pm

The LA Times reports that Joseph R. Wood, Vice President Cheney’s deputy assistant for national security affairs, “was in Georgia shortly before the war began.” James Gerstenzang wonders what Wood was doing there. Sergei Markov — a senior political scientist who is close to Vladimir Putin — claimed recently that the war was “part of a plot by Dick Cheney” to help John McCain. But media reports indicate that a “parade” of U.S. officials, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, had warned Georgia President Mikheil Saakashvili not to instigate the conflict with Russia.

Media

Predictable Ideology is Predictable for a Reason

By Matthew Yglesias on Aug 26, 2008 at 3:16 pm

Joshua Foust’s CJR critique of blog commentary on the Russia-Georgia conflict makes some good points. One failing, though, is that it doesn’t put its complaints in any kind of perspective — the newspaper punditry on the conflict was mostly uninformed and the cable news coverage, as usual, was actively misleading. But more interesting to me is the complaint that “big blogs . . . retreated to their comfortable and predictable ideological corners.”

You hear complaints of this form being leveled all the time and not just against blogs. Something happens that’s politically relevant. And most-but-not-all conservatives see it one way, and most-but-not-all liberals see it another way. Then we bemoan everyone’s predictable ideological responses. It’s as if we’re supposed to believe that in an ideal world, folks would walk around with these ideologies in our heads, but then when things happen in the world our understanding of those events would not at all be impacted by our large set of pre-existing beliefs about how the world works. But why would that happen? And why would that be a good thing? After all, the reason it’s predictable that most liberals will react to a given politically-relevant occurrence is that most liberals have a lot of beliefs and principles in common. Similarly, most conservatives have a lot of beliefs and principles in common. So, again, it’s predictable that people who share many background beliefs will usually have similar responses to new events. But how else could things possibly go?

A lot of the journalistic ideal and bien pensant critiques of partisanship implicitly partakes of some very naive ideas about empiricism whereby if we just all somehow cast aside the blinders of pre-existing prejudice we could see things as they are and our unmediated perception of them would lead to consensus. But nobody who thinks seriously about these issues has believed anything of the sort for a long time — fact and theory are interdependent and all that would happen if we looked at new events without any pre-existing commitments is that we’d have no way whatsoever to make sense of things.

Economy

Pfotenhauer Slams Tax Policy Center As ‘Liberal’, Ignores Conservative Criticism of Tax Plan

By Igor Volsky on Aug 26, 2008 at 3:00 pm

Today, during an appearance on Fox News, McCain adviser Nancy Pfotenhauer dismissed the Tax Policy Center’s conclusion that Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) tax plan would increase the deficit. Pfotenhauer argued that the center was a “liberal think tank” that did not analyze “the spending side” of McCain’s plan:

[We'll] keep the growth rate in federal spending to about 2.4 percent. I love Austin’s statement that we are going to somehow balloon the deficit. First, the Tax Policy Center is a liberal think tank run by former Clinton-ites and Jason Furman worked there up until about two months ago. But set that aside. They don’t look at the spending side, they only look at the tax side.

Watch it:

But even conservative economists who have looked at the “spending side” of the senator’s plan, believe that his proposal would only add to the deficit:

- “The spending cuts are far too vague to be counted on for significant savings and, even if they were more specific, I can’t see how they would come close to offsetting the level of tax cuts he recommends.” [Robert L. Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition]

- “[But] I am worried that continuing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will tear apart our social fabric and defeat any economic proposal to reduce the deficit and stimulate growth. Guns are crowding out butter.” [Michael Connolly, Professor of Economics, University of Miami]

- “He’s not going to balance the budget.” [William Albrecht, professor emeritus at the University of Iowa]

In July, the McCain campaign falsely suggested that 300 economists agreed that the senator’s economic plan could reduce the deficit and balance the budget by 2013. When contacted by reporters many of those economists — Connolly and Albrecht included — actually expressed deep reservations about McCain’ pledge to reduce the deficit.

Politics

Fox News flack hides behind anonymity to attack Jon Stewart.

By Ben Armbruster on Aug 26, 2008 at 2:45 pm

The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz reports that during a gathering with reporters in Denver yesterday, Daily Show host Jon Stewart ripped Fox News, saying the network’s “‘fair and balanced’ slogan is an insult ‘to people with brains’” and that “Barack Obama could cure cancer and they’d figure out a way to frame it as an economic disaster.” In response, a Fox News spokesman attacked Stewart, but he refused to give his name:

stewartweb2.jpgA Fox News spokesman, who was authorized to give the network’s response to Stewart’s comments but declined to be named, replied that “Jon’s clearly out of touch,” citing a Pew Research Center study showing the network has the most balanced audience in cable news, 39 percent Republicans and 33 percent Democrats. “But being out of touch with mainstream America is nothing new to Jon, as evidenced by the crash-and-burn ratings of this year’s Oscars telecast.”

Media Matters’ new blog County Fair notes that allowing the Fox spokesman anonymity in this case is against the Post’s attribution policy.

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Yglesias

Public Sector to the Rescue

By Matthew Yglesias on Aug 26, 2008 at 2:41 pm

Emergency

Today’s Census numbers show a slight downtick in the proportion of Americans who lack health insurance. This, Jonathan Cohn notes, despite a continued decline in the number of people with private sector health insurance. “The reason the overall numbers look good is rising enrollment in public insurance programs, particularly Medicaid.” He also notes that when you peer into the numbers, the state with the largest overall two-year increase in health insurance rates is Massachusetts, which has adopted the most aggressive health care reform agenda of any state and serves as a kinda sorta model for what progressive reform at the federal level — especially something authored by Ted Kennedy — might look like.

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