Will Toomey meet with unemployed constituents?

So Haney decided to seek out one of his U.S. senators, Pat Toomey (R), to talk to him about how to get people back to work. Haney has been protesting outside of events Toomey is holding during the August recess, asking him to host a meeting with jobless Pennsylvanians:

The unemployed Haney lost his job at Express Scripts in February, when he said the company outsourced several hundred jobs. He’s since been picketing outside various Toomey events, asking the senator to hold a town hall meeting with unemployed state residents. Haney said Toomey has agreed to the meeting, but has not responded with a date and place.

“He gives tax breaks to corporations, but I’m on unemployment and I’m still paying my taxes,” Haney said. “These corporations have to step up to the plate and pay their taxes as well and stop jobs from going overseas.”

Haney has uploaded a YouTube testimony for a group called Toomey Watch where he formally requests a meeting with the unemployed and under-employed. Watch it:

Haney says Toomey has agreed to a meeting, but has yet to specify a time and place. Responding to an inquiry from ThinkProgress, Toomey’s staff said he will announce a slew of new constituent meetings on his website by Friday.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) announced today their picks for the fiscal super committee created by the debt ceiling deal, naming Sens. Jon Kyl (AZ), Pat Toomey (PA), Rob Portman (OH), and Reps. Jeb Hensarling (TX), Dave Camp (MI), and Fred Upton (MI) to the body. The committee is tasked with finding $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction by November, and one of the key issues will be whether revenue increases are included. Basic economics and the American people call for increasing revenues, with a new CNN poll showing 63 percent of Americans want the committee to raise taxes on the wealthy, but several of the GOP picks are hard-right conservatives who likely oppose such a “balanced approach.” Other critical issue will be entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, and whether the committee makes cuts to military spending.

Here’s what you need to know about each of the GOP super committee members: Read more

Politico today profiled the troubling growth in the number of “default deniers,” Republican Congressman who don’t believe, as most economists and analysts do, that failing to raise the nation’s debt ceiling will result in negative economic consequences. “The case has not been made that this is an absolute necessity,” said Rep. Bill Huizenga (R-MI), for instance. The U.S. officially hit its borrowing limit on Monday, but the Treasury Department can use various measures to stall default until August 2.

One of the leaders of the default deniers is Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA), who authored a cockamamie bill that he claimed would prevent the U.S. from defaulting on its debt even if the ceiling weren’t raised. (Treasury called Toomey’s legislation “unworkable.”) Today, Toomey delivered a speech at the American Enterprise Institute where he claimed that failing to raise the debt ceiling wouldn’t have an adverse effect on the economy:

As I’ve said before, if we can get the things that I’m looking for, the spending cuts, the reforms in the process, I’m willing to vote to raise the debt limit because it is very disruptive. I don’t think it’s going to have an adverse impact on the economy for the days or weeks or perhaps even months that this would continue, I doubt that it would be that long, I doubt that it would be disruptive to the economy per se, but it would be disruptive certainly to the people who are accustomed to and relying on the programs that would necessarily be cut.

Watch it:

As former Reagan economic official Bruce Bartlett noted, “failure to raise the debt limit not only threatens a default that could potentially roil the entire world financial system, but would potentially deprive federal workers of their salaries, deny payments to businesses for goods and services sold to the federal government, renege on Social Security benefits to retirees, and shortchange savers who depend on interest income.” Bank of America analysts noted that not raising the debt ceiling “would necessitate politically unpopular and potentially economically crippling budget cuts that would likely push the U.S. into recession and drag down the stock market.” It would also make paying off the debt much more expensive (through higher interest rates). Those sure sound like adverse effects.

Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-MN) went a step further back in January, saying that failing to raise the debt limit would actually be good for the economy. These Republicans should check in with conservative icon Ronald Reagan, who in 1983 warned of “incalculable damage” to the economy if the debt limit wasn’t raised.

Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) today released a budget proposal, alongside a slew of ultra-conservative senators, including Sens. Jim DeMint (R-SC) and Marco Rubio (R-FL). Toomey’s budget document, unlike the budget proposed House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) and passed by the House Republican caucus, does not touch Medicare or Social Security.

However, Toomey did elect to co-opt Ryan’s tax “reform” plan, which involves lowering marginal rates, consolidating brackets, and supposedly paying for it all by getting rid of loopholes and deductions. (According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Toomey envisions a top marginal tax rate of 25 percent, though he doesn’t lay out specific rates in his budget.)

In Ryan’s case, as CAP’s Michael Linden pointed out, the catch is that preserving the Bush tax regime, but cutting rates (including the top rate), and having it all come out revenue-neutral necessarily implies a big middle-class tax increase:

For Ryan to cut the top rate by nearly one-third and still keep revenue the same as it would have been under the Bush tax cuts regime, he has to raise taxes somewhere else. And though he pointedly refuses to tell us where those tax hikes will come from, we can make an educated guess.

For one thing, the basic math makes a middle class tax hike unavoidable. The rate cut at the top, of course, benefits only those in the top brackets (the richest 2 percent of Americans), but to pay for it, Ryan says he will “broaden the tax base.” Broadening the tax base means removing some tax expenditures that currently benefit the middle class – the rich too, but they’re getting a huge rate cut.

Toomey’s budget is designed in exactly the same way as Ryan’s, hiding the tax increase under pleasant sounding talk of reform. Toomey actually settles on a revenue-level of 18.5 percent of GDP, below the level of revenue raised the last time the budget was actually balanced. Since he exempts Medicare and Social Security, nearly all of Toomey’s savings comes from draconian cuts to the non-defense discretionary budget and Medicaid, which Toomey turns into a block-grant system.

Adding insult to injury, Toomey — like Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) did last night — endorses changing the corporate tax code to allow corporations to never pay taxes on overseas profits, which, as Citizens for Tax Justice pointed out, gives companies a huge incentive to both move jobs offshore and employ tax havens to hide profits earned in the U.S. Of course, this isn’t all that surprising coming from someone who thinks its “not clear” that tax cuts reduce revenue.

Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) yesterday filed the “Full Faith and Credit Act” as an amendment to legislation reauthorizing the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Toomey’s bill is an attempt to codify the order in which the federal government will pay its obligations in the event the debt ceiling is not raised before the country’s legal borrowing limit is reached. Such an event would require the government to move to a cash-only budget, paying out only what comes in each month in tax revenue.

Toomey’s bill instructs the Treasury to pay interest on the federal debt above all other obligations (which is what Treasury would likely do in the event the borrowing limit was reached anyway). As Toomey himself explained in a Wall Street Journal op-ed (titled “How To Freeze The Debt Ceiling Without Risking Default”), the bill will “require the Treasury to make interest payments on our debt its first priority in the event that the debt ceiling is not raised.”

Toomey seems to think that this might, in some way, help the U.S. avoid a default on its debt:

[I]n the past when we’ve reached the debt ceiling, and it’s happened several times, the Treasury secretary has made sure we don’t default on our obligations on Treasury securities. All I’m saying is let’s codify that because the catastrophic consequences to senior citizens, to savers, to small business owners, to people seeking mortgage, to our entire economy, would be endangered if we had a default on our debt.

But as Matt Yglesias pointed out, this bill simply codifies the way in which the U.S. would default; it doesn’t actually prevent a default from occurring. “This is nonetheless a kind of default. A person whose creditworthiness is above question meets all his financial obligations,” Yglesias wrote. Deputy Treasury Secretary Neil Wolin said much the same thing, calling Toomey’s idea “unworkable”:

It would not actually prevent default, since it would seek to protect only principal and interest payments, and not other legal obligations of the U.S., from non-payment. Adopting a policy that payments to investors should take precedence over other U.S. legal obligations would merely be default by another name, since the world would recognize it as a failure by the U.S. to stand behind its commitments.

Indeed, paying interest payments on the debt while failing to cover domestic mandatory payments like Social Security or veteran’s benefits is still a default, just in a way that concentrates the pain on Americans who had nothing to do with Congress’ inability to responsibly raise the debt ceiling. Much like the plan put forward by former Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-MN), which prioritized payments in the same way, Toomey’s bill seems to be more about political posturing that anything else.

In the end, Congress needs to raise the debt ceiling and pay of all of the obligations. To do otherwise would be supremely irresponsible and detrimental to the world economy.

Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA)

Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) was one of the financial industry’s biggest apologists during November’s campaign, opposing the Dodd-Frank financial reform law while claiming that derivative deals were “non-risky,” even as they cost schools and cities all across the country (including many in Pennsylvania) millions of dollars. And Toomey has been totally unrepentant about his personal role in deregulating the financial industry.

In 2000, former Sen. Phil “mental recession” Gramm (R-TX) attached the Commodity Futures Modernization Act to an unrelated, 11,000 appropriations bill. The CFMA ensured that the growing market in over-the-counter derivatives, including credit default swaps, stayed entirely unregulated. Toomey — then a member of the House of Representatives — voted for that bill, and said that he would do it again, inaccurately claiming that the legislation “did absolutely nothing to cause the financial crisis.”

So, naturally, Republicans have seen fit to name Toomey to the Senate Banking Committee, which has oversight of the nation’s financial regulatory laws. The committee was instrumental in crafting Dodd-Frank.

Here’s what the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission — which released its final report yesterday — had to say about the bill Toomey claims did nothing to bring about the financial crisis:

The CFMA effectively shielded OTC derivatives from virtually all regulation or oversight. Subsequently, other laws enabled the expansion of the market…The OTC derivatives market boomed. At year-end 2000, when the CFMA was passed, the notional amount of OTC derivatives outstanding globally was $95.2 trillion, and the gross market value was $3.2 trillion. In the seven and a half years from then until June 2008, when the market peaked, outstanding OTC derivatives increased more than sevenfold to a notional amount of $672.6 trillion; their gross market value was $20.3 trillion.

Ultimately, the FCIC concluded, derivatives “were at the center of the storm.” And yet, Republicans put someone on the Banking Committee who has said that he would go back and deregulate those instruments all over again if he could.

In the course of his career, Toomey’s collected almost $2.5 million from the finance industry. He was also the the president of the Wall Street front group Club for Growth from 2005-2009.