CBO: GOP Efforts To Defund Health Law Will Increase Federal Spending

By Igor Volsky on Mar 10, 2011 at 4:24 pm

Late last month, the GOP-controlled House passed a continuing resolution, which the Senate rejected yesterday, that sought to lower federal spending by defunding the Affordable Care Act for the remainder of the year. Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-MT) offered an amendment — which became section 4017 of the CR — that prohibits funds in the bill from being paid to any employee, officer, contractor, or grantee of any department or agency funded by the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and Related Agencies portion of the bill to implement the provisions of the health care law. The measure passed by a vote of 239-187.

Well today, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its cost estimate for Rehberg’s amendment and found that despite the Republican’s stated goal of reining in federal spending, defunding the ACA piece by piece increases costs over the long-term:

CBO estimates that enacting the prohibition on using new fiscal year 2011 funding to carry out those laws would reduce spending by $1.6 billion during the remainder of 2011, but would increase spending by $3.1 billion in fiscal year 2012 and by smaller amounts in each of the fiscal years 2013 through 2021. Net additional costs would total $3.9 billion over the 2011- 2016 period and $5.6 billion over the 2011-2021 period. In addition, CBO and JCT estimate that the prohibition would reduce federal revenues by $0.1 billion over both the 2011-2016 and 2011-2021 periods.

CBO explains that eliminating discretionary funding in 2011 would delay or postpone the completion of regulatory processes for ongoing programs, new programs, and reduce “compliance with changes to the tax code.” Consequently, the agency would not seek to recoup Medicare overpayments that would occur after the expected changes in payment rates, or benefit from all of the savings of delivery reforms (the agency would have less time to invest in such research). The IRS would also be prevented from administering tax credits and taxes, resulting in “some underpayment of the new excise taxes and some over-claiming of the new tax credits,” CBO concludes.

The report is another blow to the Republican effort to undo the health legislation. An earlier estimate of the GOP’s proposal to eliminate the entire ACA (which passed the House of Representatives on January 19, 2011) found that complete repeal would lead to an increase in the “federal budget deficits of $210 billion over the 2012-2021 period” and grow the number of uninsured by 33 million, “leaving a total of about 57 million nonelderly people” without coverage.

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Politics

Wisconsin Can Repeal Walker’s Anti-Union Bill In 2012 And Amend The State Constitution In 2013

By Ian Millhiser on Mar 10, 2011 at 4:15 pm

Last night, Wisconsin Senate Republicans abandoned any remaining pretenses that a bill stripping state workers of their collective bargaining rights has anything whatsoever to do with the state’s finances, and rammed the bill through the senate without any Democrats present. Yet even if Gov. Scott Walker (R) succeeds in signing this bill into law, Wisconsin voters have the power to ensure that his victory is short lived.

First, a broad coalition of these voters are circulating petitions to recall the eight GOP state senators who are currently eligible to be removed from office. If just three of these seats are flipped to the Democrats, the GOP will lose control of the state’s upper house.

Second, because Wisconsin law allows any elected official to be recalled after they have served one full year of their term in office, all remaining state legislators and Gov. Walker will be eligible for a recall election next January. If Wisconsin voters wage a successful campaign to fire the state’s anti-worker lawmakers, this bill could be repealed as soon as the snow starts to melt in spring of 2012.

Third, Wisconsin also has the power to ensure that no future lawmakers can repeat Walker’s assault on working familes:

Constitutional amendments. SECTION 1. Any amendment or amendments to this constitution may be proposed in either house of the legislature, and if the same shall be agreed to by a majority of the members elected to each of the two houses…and if, in the legislature so next chosen, such proposed amendment or amendments shall be agreed to by a majority of all the members elected to each house, then it shall be the duty of the legislature to submit such proposed amendment or amendments to the people in such manner and at such time as the legislature shall prescribe; and if the people shall approve and ratify such amendment or amendments by a majority of the electors voting thereon, such amendment or amendments shall become part of the constitution

In other words, the Wisconsin Constitution can be amended in a three step process: 1) the current legislature must approve the amendment; 2) after the next election, the new legislature must approve the amendment; 3) the voters must ratify the amendment by a majority vote. Under this procedure, Wisconsin could amend its constitution to permanently protect working families as soon as 2013.

In Ohio, pro-worker lawmakers are already planning a ballot referendum to overrule an anti-worker bill that is moving forward in that state. Wisconsin law will require working families and their supporters to jump through a few more hoops to reverse Walker’s actions. Nevertheless, they unambiguously have the power to repeal Walker’s bill in 2012 and to ensure that similar bills can never become law again in 2013.

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LGBT

FRC’s Peter Sprigg: Allowing Gays To Marry More Destructive To Institution Than Divorce?

By Igor Volsky on Mar 10, 2011 at 3:39 pm

This afternoon, openly-gay MSNBC anchor Thomas Roberts hosted a debate between Freedom To Marry’s Evan Wolfson and the Family Research Council’s Peter Sprigg about yesterday’s announcement that the House General Council will defend the constitutionality of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act. Roberts read this popular Facebook message and later pressed Sprigg on why extending marriage rights to gays and lesbians would undermine the institution:

So, let me get this straight…Charlie Sheen can make a “porn family”, Kelsey Grammar can end a 15 year marriage over the phone, Larry King can be on divorce #9, Britney Spears had a 55 hour marriage, Jesse James and Tiger Woods, while married, were having sex with EVERYONE. Yet, the idea of same-sex marriage is going to destroy the institution of marriage? Really?

Sprigg responded by suggesting that granting marriage to two individuals who can never have children suggested that a mother and a father are unnecessary for child rearing:

ROBERTS: But what happens to people who get married and don’t have children or Larry King who is on his eighth marriage and hasn’t had children with six of his former wives. Are you mandated to have kids if you are married?

SPRIGG: You’re not mandated to have kids if you get married but it makes no sense to extend the benefits of marriage to a type of relationship that is incapable of ever creating children. That undermines the whole purpose of the institution and it sends a message to society that, no, children don’t need a mother and a father. And that’s simply false, the social science shows that children do best when they have a mother and father.

Watch it:

As Wolfson pointed out, “many children in this country are being raised by their gay parents and those kids are being harmed by Mr. Sprigg and his groups and these kinds of discriminatory laws that don’t respect their family and allow them to have the best structure of support for their kids.” Numerous studies have shown that children with same-sex parents show no significant differences compared with children in different-sex households. In fact, a recent study published in the journal Pediatrics, concluded that “children raised by lesbian mothers — whether the mother was partnered or single — scored very similarly to children raised by heterosexual parents on measures of development and social behavior.” The researchers also found that “children in lesbian homes scored higher than kids in straight families on some psychological measures of self-esteem and confidence, did better academically and were less likely to have behavioral problems, such as rule-breaking and aggression.”

Sprigg’s Family Research Council (FRC) was recently classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. It “bills itself as ‘the leading voice for the family in our nation’s halls of power,’ but its real specialty is defaming gays and lesbians.” Sprigg has “claimed that ex-gay therapy works, that sexual orientation can change, that gay people are mentally ill simply because homosexuality makes them that way, and that, “Sexual abuse of boys by adult men is many times more common than consensual sex between adult men, and most of those engaging in such molestation identify themselves as homosexual or bisexual.” In February of 2009, he told Chris Matthews, “I think there would be a place for criminal sanctions on homosexual behavior.” “So we should outlaw gay behavior?” Matthews asked. “Yes,” Sprigg replied.

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Media

Chris Christie’s Straight Talk Is Often Inaccurate

By Matthew Yglesias on Mar 10, 2011 at 3:30 pm

Richard Pérez-Peña of The New York Times has this crazy idea that for New Jersey Governor Chris Christie to qualify as a bold truth-teller the things he says should actually be true:

New Jersey’s public-sector unions routinely pressure the State Legislature to give them what they fail to win in contract talks. Most government workers pay nothing for health insurance. Concessions by school employees would have prevented any cuts in school programs last year. Statements like those are at the core of Gov. Chris Christie’s campaign to cut state spending by getting tougher on unions. They are not, however, accurate.

In fact, on the occasions when the Legislature granted the unions new benefits, it was for pensions, which were not subject to collective bargaining — and it has not happened in eight years. In reality, state employees have paid 1.5 percent of their salaries toward health insurance since 2007, in addition to co-payments and deductibles, and since last spring, many local government workers, including teachers, do as well. The few dozen school districts where employees agreed to concessions last year still saw layoffs and cuts in academic programs.

Pérez-Peña could learn a lot about journalism from Dana Milbank, who recognizes that the truth of Governor Christie’s claims is irrelevant to assessing his status as a speaker of hard truths.

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Security

Bush Security Official: Al Qaeda Could Use King’s Anti-Muslim Narrative As A Recruiting Tool

By Tanya Somanader on Mar 10, 2011 at 3:15 pm

Today, House Homeland Security Committee Chairman began his “personal quest” to scrutinize the patriotism of American Muslims through his hearings on the radicalization in the U.S. Muslim community. King insists that his pursuit is “the logical response” to the “threat level” posed by the community, adding “it makes no sense to talk about other types of extremism, when the main threat to the United States today is talking about al Qaida.”

Not only are King’s assumptions incredibly inaccurate, a former Department of Defense official in the Bush Administration states that his crusade is helping homegrown terrorism. Jennifer Bryson, who spent a few years doing counter-terrorism work while working for the Defense Intelligence Agency from 2003 to 2008, pointed out that King’s fear-mongering is “dividing the world between Muslims and non-Muslims,” the “same tactic” used by Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda to recruit:

“King risks helping to promote precisely the narrative Osama bin Laden and his sympathizers try to promote, namely dividing the world between Muslims and non-Muslims,” said Jennifer Bryson, a former counterterrorism official at the Defense Department. Al-Qaeda has used the same tactic as a recruiting tool, she said.

While the issue merits attention by Congress, said Matthew Levitt, former deputy chief of the Treasury Department’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis, King’s approach is “semantically shaped to point a finger at an entire community.”

Matthew Levitt served as the Treasury Department’s deputy assistant secretary for intelligence and analysis under the Bush Administration. The American Muslim community’s practices and participation in mainstream society has not only served to successfully combat homegrown terrorism but to help eliminate the risk. For instance, the Center for Strategic and International Studies points out that families of the “Northern Virginia Five” extremists reached out to CAIR — the group that King paints as extremist — who then alerted the FBI, “cooperation” that “has proved vital in facilitating authorities’ initial investigation of the plot.”

Even the U.S. attorney general in a New York district not far from Ground Zero is “disturbed” by King’s hearings. He told the Daily Beast’s Jonathan Alter that the Muslim community there “routinely provide the FBI and prosecutors with valuable leads and evidence” but that now he must “spend valuable time reassuring local imams” who “are terribly worried about the stigma coming from King’s hearings” that the “U.S. government means them not harm.”

As Bryson indicates, by aggressively marginalizing Muslims in America, King actively complicates the vibrant cooperation between the Muslim community and law enforcement and disseminates stereotypes that foment the us-vs.-them mentality feeding homegrown terrorism in the first place. Doing so not only emboldens the small extremist minority within a community but tramples on the patriotism and humanity of the majority.

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Climate Progress

Should you believe anything John Christy says?

By Climate Guest Blogger on Mar 10, 2011 at 3:14 pm

This Skeptical Science repost debunks John Christy’s recent House testimony.

On March 8, 2011, the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy and Power held a hearing entitled entitled “Climate Science and EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Regulations.” As the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has begun regulating greenhouse gas emissions from large sources, Congressional Republicans are seeking justification to revoke their authority to do so through the Energy Tax Prevention Act (H.R. 910). This hearing was held to allow scientists from both “sides” to present their case as to whether our understanding of climate science justifies the EPA’s greenhouse gas regulations.

One of the top witnesses called by the Republicans was Dr. John Christy. His full written testimony can be viewed here. Most of the quotes below come directly from that written testimony. As we’ll see below, Christy’s case for continuing on our current path and revoking the EPA’s greenhouse gas regulation authority is primarily based on a repetition of a number of long-debunked myths.

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Education

Subprime Schools Throw Fundraiser For Rep. Kline After He Blocks Funding For Proposed Regulation

By Pat Garofalo on Mar 10, 2011 at 2:40 pm

House Education Committee Chairman John Kline (R-MN)

For-profit colleges — which, as we’ve been documenting, make the vast majority of their revenue from the federal government, pay their CEOs huge salaries, but leave their students with crippling debt and bleak job prospects — have declared a lobbying “WAR” in order to block new regulations from the Education Department and preserve their almost limitless access to federal dollars. They have hired a bipartisan phalanx of lobbyists and are astroturfing on Capitol Hill, supplying students with their industry-approved talking points.

In the last election cycle, the for-profit college industry also donated millions to congressional candidates, including $100,000 to House Education Committee Chairman John Kline (R-MN). Kline dutifully inserted a provision into the House Republicans’ 2011 spending bill that scuttled the Education Department’s regulations. And Tuesday night, as Higher Ed Watch reported, the industry threw Kline a personal fundraiser:

The Political Action Committee connected to the group formerly known as the Career College Association hosted a dinner reception for Rep. John Kline (R-MN) at “the refined and elegant” Capitol Hill Club, which is the premiere social club and restaurant for Republicans in the nation’s capital.

The career college group, which now known as the Association for Private Sector Colleges and Universities (APSCU), invited for-profit college officials who were in town for the organization’s “Hill Day and Policy Forum” to join in the festivities. Those who wished to attend were required to make a donation to Kline’s re-election campaign of either $2,500 to be considered a “sponsor” of the event, or $1,000 to be a “patron,” according to a copy of the invitation that Higher Ed Watch obtained.

Many for-profit schools make 90 percent of their revenue from the federal government, while posting profit margins of 30 percent. Strayer University CEO Robert Silberman was paid $41 million in 2009. With those sorts of numbers, giving $2,500 to Kline’s re-election campaign is likely a good investment. Senate Republicans have already introduced legislation similar to Kline’s, which would deny the Education Department funding to implement new regulations.

On Monday, a lobbyist for Kaplan University — which makes 91.5 percent of its revenue from the federal government — likened Democratic efforts to regulate for-profit colleges to “jihad” while speaking at a gathering of for-profit schools. “I’d guess almost everyone here agrees,” he added.

For more information, see our report, “For-profits, not students.”

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Yglesias

Libya Fact of The Day

By Matthew Yglesias on Mar 10, 2011 at 2:33 pm

Andrew Exum:

On a per capita basis, though, twice as many foreign fighters came to Iraq from Libya — and specifically eastern Libya — than from any other country in the Arabic-speaking world. 84.1% of the 88 Libyan fighters in the Sinjar documents who listed their hometowns came from either Benghazi or Darnah in Libya’s east.

On its own, that doesn’t prove much of anything. But it’s a reminder that there’s no reason to just assume that Libyan rebels are nice folks on whose behalf we should launch a war with the Libyan government.

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Alyssa

Gifted Tongues

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Mar 10, 2011 at 2:33 pm

I was talking to BabylonSista about world music over the weekend and sent her Peter Fox’s video for “Alles Neu”—and then realized I’d never talked about it here:

Hip-hop, maybe even more than world travel, is the thing that makes me wish that I was a linguist. When I travel, I actually often enjoy the isolation of being unable to understand anything that’s going on around me (I mean, of course, as long as I’m able to get where I’m going without getting completely lost in Shanghai or Phnom Penh). But I feel like I only understand a tiny part of what makes this wonderful, the familiar made wonderfully strange and new in an alternate context and with alternate musical inflections. I want to know what he’s saying, to be able to hear it as he’s saying it rather than to get the rough translation.

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Yglesias

Language, Skills, and Distribution

By Matthew Yglesias on Mar 10, 2011 at 2:29 pm

(cc photo by princeroy)

Reader query:

Re: Bargining Power. A new flow of higher skilled individuals, check. Prefer low-skill Hispanophones to low-skill Anglophones? Why?

I may have put this poorly. It’s not that I per se prefer immigrants from Mexico to immigrants from the Bahamas as that I’d like to navigate the ever-sticky politics of the immigration issue. Many people worry about the impact of immigration on the wages of native workers. And people aren’t so much wrong about this as they are misestimating its scope. Human beings are not an undifferentiated mass of labor. Nor do people even slice simply into undifferentiated masses of “has a bachelor’s degree” and “doesn’t have a bachelor’s degree.” Doctors and architects are both college educated, but an influx of doctors doesn’t reduce wages for architects. An influx of doctors could reduce the wages of doctors, but that’s equivalent to saying it raises the real incomes of everyone else.

By the same token, you often can’t substitute someone who doesn’t speak English for someone who does. An increased flow of Hispanophone busboys increases demand for Anglophone waiters. Which is to say that the people negatively impacted by high levels of immigration from Latin America are people who are very similar to the immigrants, people with little education or ability to speak English. It would be interesting if what was happening in America is that recent immigrants were loudly demanding an immigration crackdown, but that’s not what’s happening (perhaps because people recognize that their bilingual children will benefit from a continued flow, or perhaps because immigration politics is really about identity). So it’s important to try to get the Anglophone people who are complaining to better understand that we’re benefitting from the increase in overall economic activity associated with the influx of people with complementary skills. Given the difficulty of doing that, it would be a mistake to understake some hypothetical new initiative to bring in a bunch of new workers who really would compete with native born low-skill Anglophones.

Higher-up the skill ladder, skills get more differentiated and the problem really goes away. Letting in more architects would be bad for architects, more doctors would be bad for doctors, more lawyers would be bad for lawyers, etc., but if we let in more professionals across the board then everyone would benefit since lawyers need health care and doctors need legal advice, etc.

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