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Climate Progress

Bill Clinton’s Message: ‘Saving The Planet Is Better Economics Than Burning It Up’

By Joe Romm on Oct 17, 2012 at 8:25 pm

Clinton: “If you’re an American, the best thing you can do is to make it politically unacceptable for people to engage in denial. I mean, it makes us — we look like a joke, right? You can’t win the nomination of one of the major parties in our country if you admit that the scientists are right? That disqualifies you from doing it? You could really help us there. It’s really tragic because we need a debate in America, and in every country, between people who are a little bit to the right and people who are a little bit to the left about what the best way is to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. What is the most economical way to do it? What will get more done quicker? There are all these things that in any other country would occupy a lot of space on the ideological spectrum from right to left, and we can’t have this conversation because you’ve got to deny it?”

John Wihbey has a good collection of Clinton quotes on climate at The Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media, in his piece, “How President Clinton, ‘Explainer-in-Chief,’ Frames Climate Change.”

The quote above is from last year’s Clinton Global Initiative (9-21-11). Here’s another, from a talk at the London School of Economics (7-12-12):

“My strategy on [engaging deniers] is very simple. Some people who are climate skeptics are climate skeptics because it’s in their interest to be. They just want to preserve the old energy economy, and there’s not much I can do about that. But what I am trying to do, literally all the time, is to prove that saving the planet is better economics than burning it up. Not 10 or 20 or 50 years from now — [but] now. There are a lot of climate skeptics but their reasons are being chipped away…. There are a lot of people who have a different view. Their view is, ‘Look, this may be good, this may be bad. But God almighty the world is coming apart at the seams economically and we’ve got other fish to fry. We have to deal with other things.’ [For] those people, you must prove it is good economics to change the way we produce and pursue energy…. So what I do to try to overcome the climate skeptics is to figure out how to solve the financing problems, because fundamentally all the financing problems look alike. Whether you’re dealing with clean energy or energy efficiency, the costs are all up-front and the savings are all in the back….”

No question Clinton has the arithmetic right:

  • Intro to climate economics: Why even strong climate action has such a low total cost — one tenth of a penny on the dollar
  • Scientists find “net present value of climate change impacts” of $1240 TRILLION on current emissions path, making mitigation to under 450 ppm a must

One final quote, also from LSE this year:

“Every now and then I’ll give a speech on this … but I try not to give many speeches on this energy stuff, the environment. I just try to do one project after another. I figure if we just keep lining ‘em up and pushing ‘em down, and lining ‘em up and pushing ‘em down, at some point denial will no longer be an effective strategy. And that’s what I recommend to you: Do something, no matter how small it is.”

Hear! Hear!

Election

‘It’s Arithmetic’: The Best Of Bill Clinton’s DNC Speech, In One Infographic

By Adam Peck on Sep 6, 2012 at 2:52 pm

Last night, President Bill Clinton formally nominated President Obama for a second term at the Time Warner Center in downtown Charlotte, North Carolina in a fiery, energetic speech that had the DNC crowd roaring from the moment he stepped on stage.

For nearly 50 minutes, Clinton reminded voters of the challenges Obama inherited in 2009, and highlighted the ways in which the administration and Democrats in congress helped put the economy on a path towards recovery. To drive home the point, Clinton employed a running tally of both the Obama White House’s and the Republican party’s record on private sector jobs over the last 50 years:

Health

Bill Clinton On How Romney And Ryan Decimate Medicaid

By Jeff Spross on Sep 6, 2012 at 1:30 pm

Bill Clinton covered a lot of ground in his policy-rich speech at the Democratic Convention last night. But one under-appreciated issue he brought to the fore was the identical plans Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have put forward for Medicaid — which provides health coverage for seniors, the disabled, and low-income families — and how they would decimate the program:

They also want to block grant Medicaid and cut it by an third over the coming ten years. Of course that’s gonna really hurt a lot of poor kids. But that’s not all. Lot of folks don’t know it, but nearly two-thirds of Medicaid is spent on nursing home care for Medicare seniors who are eligible for Medicaid… And a lot of that money is also spent to help people with disabilities. Including a lot of middle class families whose kids have down syndrome or autism or other severe conditions.

Watch it:

To fill in the details on Clinton’s points:

Romney and Ryan’s Medicaid cuts plans are worse than their Medicare cuts. Their proposal to privatize Medicare with a premium support system doesn’t kick in for a decade, and even then Ryan’s growth path for the program would be the same as Obama’s. Their cuts to Medicaid, by contrast, start immediately and cut the program 35 percent by 2022 — a loss of $810 billion over that time period. And that excludes their repeal of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, which cuts out hundreds of billions more.

Their cuts hurt current seniors. Clinton misspoke here. 38 percent of Medicaid spending goes to 9 million Americans who are “dual eligibles” for both Medicaid and Medicare, but a good portion of them are non-elderly Medicare beneficiaries. But 1.9 million of Medicare’s seniors rely on Medicaid for long-term care, and would immediately start seeing annual decreases in their benefits of around $2,500 due to the Romney-Ryan Medicaid cuts.

Their cuts hurt children and the disabled. As Clinton pointed out, Medicaid assists millions of American families with members suffering from mental and physical disabilities. Half of the program’s 63 million enrollees are children, and rural children are particularly at risk: according to Erik Stegmen, Manager of CAPAF’s Half in Ten Campaign, rural children have less access to private insurance than urban children, rely on Medicaid more, and an expansion of the program decreased the rate of uninsured rural children from 21 percent in 1997 to 9 percent in 2005. Medicaid even provides help with 40 percent of all maternity stays. All these benefits would come under Romney and Ryan’s knife, leaving millions of vulnerable Americans with no obvious alternatives.

They block grant Medicaid. This move would shift Medicaid’s costs to state budgets, leaving them to shoulder any added demands on the program alone. It could also allow right-wing state governments to undo benefits currently required by the federal government. The counter claim by Romney, Ryan and their defenders is the states’ newfound freedom will lead to greater efficiencies in the program. This is wildly improbable. Medicaid’s reimbursement rates to providers are already as lean as they get — about one third lower than Medicare’s. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services found that in 2011, Medicaid made $21.9 billion in improper payments, or a bit under 10 percent of its budget for that year. Eliminating all of this waste would still leave Medicaid well short of making up a loss of one third of its budget, much less getting anywhere close to Medicare’s reimbursement levels. And if the cuts don’t come out of reimbursement rates then they’ll probably come out of enrollment, kicking 14 to 27 million people off the program. (The repeal of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion would end coverage for an additional 17 million or so.)

In sum, Romney and Ryan’s plans for Medicare, misguided as they are, are far less draconian and radical than their plans for Medicaid. Bill Clinton did the country a service by highlighting the latter in his speech last night.

Alyssa

Bill Clinton Gives Us Nostalgia For What We Never Had

By Zack Beauchamp on Sep 6, 2012 at 10:31 am

Since this is a culture blog, I’m going to leave the policy and political analysis of President Clinton’s barnburner DNC speech to others (see Daniel Larison, Jonathan Cohn, and James Fallows for some good examples). But one of the reasons that Clinton’s speech succeeded in the way that it did was the cultural cache surrounding Bill Clinton and the era where he was more relevant. As Duncan Black points out, this was the last era in memory where Americans felt thoroughly optimistic about the future of our country:

Whether or not he deserves any credit – and he certainly deserves a lot of credit for some bad things – what I think has been lost is the fact that the latter half of the Clinton years were good times. Good times in a way that that hadn’t been experienced since the late 60s or so. I don’t just mean in terms of purely quantifiable things – though the numbers there are good – it was also the case that there was a real sense of optimism. America, we’re back, bitches! It wasn’t all a horror story in the previous couple decades, but “morning in America” ads aside, there was a feeling of stagnation.

What struck me about Black’s observation was that I felt similarly — despite the fact that I was 12 when Bill Clinton left office. My generation became politically aware around September 11th; we matured alongside the Iraq war and the financial crisis. We’re the generation of crisis politics, and looking back at the trappings of the 90s — the comparatively insignificant politics, the silly clothes, the sunny art — makes us acutely aware of the contented America we missed out on. Watching the quintessential 90s President deliver an address about a better future is the ultimate exercise in the displaced nostalgia pervades American culture in the 2010s. Clinton’s address sometimes felt like the political equivalent of watching Downton Abbey and Mad Men to escape to an enthralling past, or using Instagram to get an instantaneous sense of having “been there, man.” And, for a few minutes last night, it seemed like we were.

Security

Clinton Calls Out Romney For Planning To Boost Military Spending With No Plan To Pay For It

By Ben Armbruster on Sep 6, 2012 at 10:07 am

Last night during his speech to the Democratic National Convention, President Clinton called out Mitt Romney’s reckless plan to increase military spending. “The Republican argument against the president’s re-election was actually pretty simple — pretty snappy,” Clinton said, “It went something like this: We left him a total mess. He hasn’t cleaned it up fast enough. So fire him and put us back in.” The former president then noted that all Romney and the GOP plan to do is go back to Bush era policies and boost military spending without paying for it:

They convinced me they were honorable people who believed what they said and they’re going to keep every commitment they’ve made. We just got to make sure the American people know what those commitments are — (cheers, applause) — because in order to look like an acceptable, reasonable, moderate alternative to President Obama, they just didn’t say very much about the ideas they’ve offered over the last two years.

They couldn’t because they want to the same old policies that got us in trouble in the first place. They want to cut taxes for high- income Americans, even more than President Bush did. They want to get rid of those pesky financial regulations designed to prevent another crash and prohibit future bailouts. They want to actually increase defense spending over a decade $2 trillion more than the Pentagon has requested without saying what they’ll spend it on. And they want to make enormous cuts in the rest of the budget, especially programs that help the middle class and poor children.

Watch the clip:

Indeed, Clinton is right. If elected president, Mitt Romney plans to increase military spending by $2.1 trillion and he has not said how he would pay for it. Back in July, top Romney foreign policy adviser Richard Williamson was asked repeatedly how Romney would pay for the increase but Williamson just dodged the questions and had no real answer.

Election

Associated Press ‘Fact Checks’ Clinton’s Speech By Bringing Up Monica Lewinsky

By Aviva Shen on Sep 6, 2012 at 10:03 am

Bill Clinton’s 48-minute speech at the Democratic National Convention Wednesday night was, as FactCheck.org put it, “a fact-checker’s nightmare: lots of effort required to run down his many statistics and factual claims, producing little for us to write about.”

Clinton’s numbers checked out, according to most fact-checking outlets, including Politifact, which has been accused of unfair exaggeration by liberals before. Though he frequently departed from the script, the former president correctly cited the statistics on Obama’s job growth, decreasing health costs since 2010, and the stimulus tax cuts for 95 percent of Americans.

Yet one outlet disagreed with the general consensus: the Associated Press. The AP fact-check said Clinton “either cherry-picked facts or mischaracterized the opposition.” It even “fact-checked” Clinton’s offhand reference to the Romney campaign’s dishonesty by bringing up Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky scandal:

CLINTON: “Their campaign pollster said, ‘We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers.’ Now that is true. I couldn’t have said it better myself — I just hope you remember that every time you see the ad.”

THE FACTS: Clinton, who famously finger-wagged a denial on national television about his sexual relationship with intern Monica Lewinsky and was subsequently impeached in the House on a perjury charge, has had his own uncomfortable moments over telling the truth. “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,” Clinton told television viewers. Later, after he was forced to testify to a grand jury, Clinton said his statements were “legally accurate” but also allowed that he “misled people, including even my wife.”

During its fact-check of this claim, the AP article had to ignore the Romney campaign’s dishonest attack on Obama’s welfare work requirements, which even Republican governors have questioned. It also fails to consider the campaign’s habit of deliberately editing Obama out of context, as they did in Romney’s first ad, which attributed the line, “If we talk about the economy, we’re going to lose,” to Obama when he was actually mimicking the McCain campaign in 2008. Also missing is the fact that the Republican National Convention last week was based on a distortion of Obama’s “you didn’t build that” quote. ThinkProgress has compiled a comprehensive catalog of Romney’s lies on virtually every issue he’s had to discuss.

Rather than attempt to debunk Clinton’s attack on the campaign’s dishonesty, the AP could only imply that Clinton cannot criticize any false claims because of his past scandal. And, to make the attack seem more credible, it is presented as “THE FACTS.”

Update

Mike Oreskes, AP’s U.S. news senior managing editor, is defending the Lewinsky reference: “The reference was not about that woman, Miss Lewinsky. It was about facts. Clinton challenged the Republicans for their attitude toward facts. We were simply pointing out that as president Clinton had his own challenges in this area.”

Economy

Clinton: Over Last 50 Years, Two-Thirds Of Private Sector Job Growth Came Under Democratic Presidents

By Travis Waldron on Sep 6, 2012 at 9:35 am

Former President Bill Clinton poured cold water on the Republican Party’s jobs rhetoric last night in a speech at the Democratic National Convention, telling the nation that in the 50 years since John F. Kennedy took office, the vast majority of private sector jobs have been created under Democratic administrations. In those 52 years, as Bloomberg reported in May, 42 million of the new private sector jobs were created during 24 years of Democratic presidencies versus just 24 million under Republicans.

Clinton highlighted the statistic last night as evidence that the Republican vision for the economy, which ignores that “poverty, discrimination, and ignorance restrict growth,” won’t provide the recovery the American economy needs:

CLINTON: Well, since 1961, for 52 years now, the Republicans have held the White House 28 years, the Democrats 24. In those 52 years, our private economy has produced 66 million private sector jobs. So, what’s the job score? Republicans, 24 million, Democrats, 42 (million). Now, there’s a reason for this. It turns out that advancing equal opportunity and economic empowerment is both morally right and good economics. Why? Because poverty, discrimination, and ignorance restrict growth. When you stifle human potential, when you don’t invest in new ideas, it doesn’t just cut off the people who are affected, it hurts us all.

Watch it:

The GOP’s supply-side economic policies, which rely on tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, have failed to boost economic growth for more than three decades, a point Clinton made while hammering Republican nominee Mitt Romney’s plan to push through a tax cut four times the size of George W. Bush’s. “We simply can’t afford to give the reins of government to someone who will double down on trickle down,” Clinton said.

Clinton isn’t alone in analyzing the GOP’s economic failures: in July, 40 economists looked at the Republican Party’s plans and determined that it had abandoned economic reality. During the GOP primaries, economic professors said the party’s plans couldn’t pass a basic economics class.

Politics

Bill Clinton Takes On Paul Ryan: ‘It Takes Some Brass’

By Annie-Rose Strasser on Sep 5, 2012 at 11:34 pm

Bill Clinton singlehandedly dismantled the Romney-Ryan campaign narrative that President Obama is trying to put an end to Medicare at the Democratic Convention Wednesday night, pointing out that it is in fact the Romney-Ryan proposal for Medicare that would permanently change the program to a depreciating voucher system. “It takes some brass,” Clinton said, “to attack a guy for doing what you did”:

First, Both Governor Romney and Congressman Ryan attacked the President for allegedly robbing medicare of $716 billion. But it is not true.[...]

So, President Obama and the Democrats did not weaken Medicare. They strengthened Medicare. When Congressman Ryan looked into that TV camera and attacked President Obama’s Medicare savings as “the biggest, coldest power play,” I did not know whether to laugh or cry. Key cuts that $716 billion is exactly to the dollar the same amount of medicare savings that he had in his own budget. It takes some brass to attack a guy for doing what you did.

Watch it:

Economy

Welfare Reform’s 16th Birthday Is Anything But Sweet

By Guest Blogger on Aug 22, 2012 at 10:45 am

Our guest blogger is Melissa Boteach, director of Poverty to Prosperity at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Bill Clinton signs welfare reform.

Sixteen years ago today President Clinton signed the law that did away with guaranteed income assistance for poor families with children and replaced it with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). It was a watershed moment in poverty policy that fundamentally changed the landscape for struggling families.

For too many poor children, this 16th birthday is anything but sweet. As a present they get increased child poverty rates and a campaign from Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan that demagogues their families.

When TANF was first enacted, child poverty fell significantly and racial and ethnic disparities closed. Many politicians attributed these positive trends to the law’s new work requirements and time limits on income assistance. While these factors likely pushed more mothers into the labor market, the Clinton-era rates of economic growth and rising wages, along with the president’s policies on increased access to childcare and tax credits for working families, also played a significant role.

When the economy tanked, those gains began to unravel. As a flat-funded block grant, TANF lost the ability to respond to increased need in tough economic times and has lost approximately 30 percent of its value since 1996.. During the Great Recession, several states actually decreased their caseload as poverty rates rose each year. And today, only about 27 percent of poor families with children can access the program as opposed to the two-thirds of poor families with children that did in 1996:

Given that reducing child poverty was never a goal of the original legislation, perhaps this is not surprising. The current design of TANF’s work participation rates encourages states to help the easiest to employ families over those that face serious barriers to work and need more help. Moreover, the incentive structure of the program is focused on caseload reduction as states receive incentives for kicking people off the rolls regardless of whether or not they have found employment.

What states did not receive from the program was an incentive to cut poverty.

One silver lining from welfare reform was that many progressives thought enacting these reforms would take welfare “off the table” as an issue for demagoguery. No more fake welfare queens in Cadillacs used to drive a wedge between voters and foster working-class resentment. The American public would know that people on income assistance were required to work and that assistance was temporary.

Unfortunately, today, on TANF’s 16th birthday, the Romney/Ryan campaign is running false ads about families on income assistance in swing states, claiming the Obama administration wants to “gut work requirements” and “hand people checks.” Those claims are not only blatantly false — the Obama administration is trying to improve employment outcomes for low-income families through a waiver system Romney supported as governor — but a cynical maneuver that threatens to undermine bipartisan consensus that states could innovate with new approaches to improve employment opportunities for vulnerable families.

The pre-1996 welfare system had its flaws and was in need of reform. But record of conservative reform efforts is clear: Today, there are more children poverty, more working poor families, and unfortunately more demagoguery. As we move forward, we need to focus on creating an income assistance program that puts child poverty reduction and not caseload reduction as the central goal and addresses the fundamental barriers that families have to accessing sustainable employment.

Economy

Former President Clinton Blasts Romney’s ‘Disappointing’ New Welfare Claim: ‘That Is Not True’

By Pat Garofalo on Aug 8, 2012 at 9:30 am

Mitt Romney spent Tuesday on a media blitz claiming that President Obama is out to “gut welfare reform.” An ad released by the Romney campaign first pointed to President Clinton as having successfully reformed welfare, before excoriating Obama. However, in a statement, Clinton called Romney’s charge against Obama “disappointing” and “not true”:

Governor Romney released an ad today alleging that the Obama administration had weakened the work requirements of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act. That is not true. [...]

The recently announced waiver policy was originally requested by the Republican governors of Utah and Nevada to achieve more flexibility in designing programs more likely to work in this challenging environment. The Administration has taken important steps to ensure that the work requirement is retained and that waivers will be granted only if a state can demonstrate that more people will be moved into work under its new approach. The welfare time limits, another important feature of the 1996 act, will not be waived.

The Romney ad is especially disappointing because, as governor of Massachusetts, he requested changes in the welfare reform laws that could have eliminated time limits altogether. We need a bipartisan consensus to continue to help people move from welfare to work even during these hard times, not more misleading campaign ads.

In reality, the Obama administration is simply giving states the ability to experiment with new work programs, along the lines of a reform that Romney himself requested in 2005.

As the directive from the Department of Health and Human Services states, “HHS is encouraging states to consider new, more effective ways to meet the goals of [Temporary Assistance for Needy Families], particularly helping parents successfully prepare for, find, and retain employment.” HHS says it will cancel waivers that do not further TANF’s goals.

CBS’s AdWatch said of Romney’s ad, “It’s a leap to assume that governors and legislators will seek to return to ‘plain old welfare’ and that the Obama administration will give them the go-ahead.” The Romney camp, however, doubled down on its claims, saying in a statement that Obama is erasing “sixteen years of progress…with one stroke of a pen.”

And none of this deals with the inescapable fact that TANF failed to reach a significant number of needy families during the Great Recession, calling into serious question whether the current program is the best way to administer aid to those who need it.

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