Politics Plus

Republicans in Congress opposed Obama’s stimulus package at every turn, voted against it almost unanimously, and have continually claim it’s a failure.  Why then are they so quick to take credit for the jobs it is creating?

House Minority Whip Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) has been one of the Recovery Act’s most vocal critics. After whipping his caucus into uniformly opposing the stimulus, Cantor has been the lead spokesman decrying the program as a failure. Ignoring evidence that that the stimulus is helping to turn around the economy, Cantor repeatedly says that it is “failing” to “create jobs.”

As ThinkProgress reported last year, despite his withering attacks on the stimulus, Cantor hosted two job fairs filled with employers hiring directly because of stimulus grants and programs. Tomorrow, Cantor intends to again host a job fair stimulated by jobs made possible through the Recovery Act:

– Cantor job fair employer AT&T has received two contracts totaling $837,550 from the Recovery Act.

– Cantor job fair employer Bryant & Stratton College received contracts totaling $209,571 from the Recovery Act.

– Cantor job fair employer Chesterfield County received grants totaling $406,773 from the Recovery Act.

– Cantor job fair employer CSX Transportation received grants totaling over $5.7 million from the Recovery Act.

– Cantor job fair employer Goodwill Industries International has received grants of over $6.4 million from the Recovery Act.

– Cantor job fair employer Northrop Grumman Corporation has received grants of over $2.6 million from the Recovery Act.

– Cantor job fair employer University of Richmond has received grants totaling $750,964 from the Recovery Act.

– Cantor job fair employer Nationwide Insurance has received grants totaling $25,617 from the Recovery Act.

– Cantor job fair employer United Way of Greater Richmond has received a $61,125 grant from the Recovery Act.

According to a ThinkProgress review of contracts from the Recovery.gov website, employers at the Cantor job fair tomorrow have received approximately $52,716,129 from the stimulus.

While Cantor has tried to score political points slamming the stimulus as an utter failure, he has relied on it as a crutch to bring both private and public sector jobs to his district… [emphasis original]

Inserted from <Think Progress>

We still have a long way to go with an average of over twenty applicants for every job opening.  The only reason that the stimulus isn’t doing better is that Republicans watered it down.  Nevertheless, we are far better off than we were when Obama took office and even farther better off than we would be without the stimulus.  And what are Republicans offering as an alternative?  Tax cuts for the rich, of course..

Most major industries have bought virtually all Republicans and a few Democrats to evade their fair share of the tax burden.  Big Oil have been the most successful of all.

…President Obama’s 2011 budget, proposed before the spill, would eliminate $4 billion in annual tax breaks for oil and gas companies. Bills in both houses introduced after the spill would achieve many of the same results. Industry has spent $340 million on lobbying over the last two years to block these sorts of initiatives, and until recently Congress has been eager to do its bidding. This year could be different.

The White House has proposed eliminating nine tax breaks. Some are modest, all are complicated, but in toto they provide a range of cushy benefits — fast write-offs for upfront drilling expenses, generous depletion allowances, and the like — that are available at virtually every stage of the exploration and production process.

The net result, as The Times reported recently, is an effective tax rate on investment far lower than that paid by other industries. That, the Treasury Department argues, has encouraged overinvestment in oil and gas drilling at the expense of other parts of the economy.

Industry argues that these and other breaks are vital to robust domestic production and that both investment and employment would fall if they were eliminated. These arguments, which may have made sense years ago, are much less compelling when oil prices are hovering near $80 a barrel and oil companies — including BP — have been racking up huge profits.

Moreover, a Treasury Department analysis says that ending these breaks would reduce domestic production by less than 1 percent. A separate study by Congress’s Joint Economic Committee says that ending the biggest of the deductions — 9 percent of qualified income from gas and oil produced in the United States — would have zero effect on consumer prices.

Apart from these benefits, two other areas cry out for reform. One is the royalty relief program, enacted by Congress in 1995 to encourage the kind of deepwater drilling that has now landed the gulf, its wildlife and its neighboring citizens in so much trouble. Royalty rates are currently 12.5 percent of the per-barrel price for onshore leases, and up to 18.75 percent offshore.

The law suspended royalties as long as oil remained below a threshold price of $28 a barrel. Prices have long since exceeded that threshold, even adjusted for inflation; and because the law was not tightly written, companies have been able to exploit its ambiguities to save themselves billions of dollars…

…The administration also needs to look carefully at the oil industry’s use of tax havens abroad. The Senate Finance Committee has already announced that it will examine whether Transocean, the operator of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, exploited tax laws when it moved its headquarters first to the Cayman Islands, then to Switzerland. Other oil companies also have foreign subsidiaries; the question is whether and to what extent they use them to dodge taxes. The Times article reported that Transocean alone had saved $1.8 billion in taxes since moving overseas in 1999.

Instead of enriching the oil companies, Congress should end these unjustifiable breaks and focus on encouraging alternative fuel sources that create cleaner energy and new clean-energy jobs. [emphasis added]

Inserted from <NY Times>

The editorial staff missed what I consider the most important reason to stop subsidizing the world’s most profitable industry.  America desperately needs to move away from an oil based economy.  The industry’s inability to safeguard the environment has led to accident after accident, most recently the devastation to the Gulf of Mexico, its wetlands, and its wildlife.  Possibly even worse, we are already at the tipping point for atmospheric carbon with respect to global climate change.  Just maybe we can clean up the wetlands’ pollution from the GOP gusher, but if sea level rises three feet, what’s the point?  Subsidizing big oil is a disincentive for the development of green energy, because it makes green energy less competitive.  Isn’t that the last thing we want to do?

As the so-called Cat Food Commission moves toward recommendations to cut Social Security, Republicans and some DINOs are using misleading statistics to support raising the retirement age.

Earlier this week, Ezra Klein voiced a strong argument against raising the age for receiving Social Security benefits to 70:

I’m not surprised to hear there’s energy behind pushing the retirement age at which you get full Social Security benefits back to 70. It’s been in the discussion for a long time, people have grown comfortable talking about the idea, and perhaps most importantly, it seems like a no-brainer to pundits and politicians who would happily pay you to keep working to age 70, and in fact beyond.

But I’ve never liked it. The customary justification is that when Social Security was created, people died younger, and so it was never meant to stretch this far in the first place. But that argument works in the other direction, too: Our country has become far richer than the architects of Social Security could have possibly imagined. It would make perfect sense for us to give ourselves more leisure time, if we chose to take it, at the end of our lives.

This is a strong and civilized argument that carries a lot of weight, and one with which I think most progressives can heartily agree. However, there is a stronger argument, not based on an appealing philosophy but on solid statistics, that is getting very, very short shrift in this debate, and it’s laid out best by Nancy Altman in her excellent (and highly recommended) history of Social Security, The Battle for Social Security: From FDR’s Vision To Bush’s Gamble:

Related to issues about retirement age are questions about life expectancy. Many people are under the mistaken impression that Americans receive retirement benefits for considerably longer than they did when the program was created. The misconception results from looking at life expectancies from birth, which have changed dramatically because of the medical success achieved in conquering childhood diseases. But those numbers reflect changes in the numbers of those who survive to retirement, not what happens thereafter. The statistics regarding children distort the overall average ….

For Social Security purposes, the correct question is not how many live to age 65, but rather how long those reaching age 65 live thereafter. Here the numbers are not as dramatic. In 1940, men who survived to age 65 had a remaining life expectancy of 12.7 years. Today, a 65 year old man can expect to live not quite three years longer than he might have in 1940, or 15.3 years beyond reaching age 65. For women, the comparable numbers are 14.7 years beyond age 65 in 1940; 19.6 years in 1990. [Emphasis added.]

Clearly, despite the common misconception that we’re all living a dozen or so years longer than the 65-year-old retiree did 70 years ago, it’s just not true. Andrew Sullivan fell into this common trap too this past week when he wrote, "But the retirement age has in no way caught up with life expectancy in America." The fact is, men are living less than three years longer, women about five. Yes, there are more people living longer because they didn’t die at age 3 of whooping cough or polio, but the life expectancy for an individual has not been extended very much at all once age 65 is reached. Disturbingly, pushing the retirement age out five years as is currently proposed actually means an individual male retiree today is at risk of being cheated of two years more retirement than our supposedly drastically shorter-lived forebears received more than half a century ago… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Daily Kos>

In the interest of full disclosure, as a current social security recipient, have no dog in this hunt.  My benefits will not be changed.  That said, the reason that Republicans want do deprive future retirees of the benefits for which they will have paid their entire working lives is simple.  Every penny returned to a deserving retires worker is a penny the Republicans cannot give to a millionaire.  That is why they are misleading us.  What they fear most is the implementation of the only rational solution.  Currently, the rich pay no withholdings in income over $106,800 per year.  Eliminate the cap.