Half Changed World

Ok, I’m going to give liveblogging the state of the union address a crack.  Folding laundry at the same time…

How rare is it not to begin with “the state of the union is strong?”

Mention of “those who were already facing poverty” and “the challenges of American families” in the first few minutes.

Immediately points out that the problems are not new since his presidency. “Change has not come fast enough.”

Ok, here it is: “Despite our hardships, our union is strong.”

Boo, banks.  Yay tax cuts.  Yay recovery act.

Need a new jobs bill.  Yes we do.   I’m really skeptical about the small business job creation tax cut.  Infrastructure, high speed rail.  Ok.

Some red meat language about the need for financial reform, and how the lobbyists are trying to kill it.  We’ve already agreed that the banks are an easy target, right.

Energy discussion.  Interesting to start off with the parts that the R’s like the most — nuclear power plants, additional drilling — and then move to comprehensive climate change.

Goal of doubling exports over the next five years!  Wow — not clear how we do this.   Seek new markets.  Are we going to get the Chinese to allow the dollar to fall against the Yuan?

“best anti-poverty program is a world-class education.”

Revitalize community colleges — hey, that’s the bill my colleagues have  been working on (SAFRA).  $10k tax credit for 4 years of colleges — wonder if that is supposed to be refundable.  Capping loan repayment — that’s a good idea, because loans are on average a good investment, but they’re a lot more risky than generally acknowledged.

9:43 and he finally mentioned health insurance reform.

Wow, Michelle’s smile is tight.

Good strong language on health care.  Talks about what it does — vast improvement over the status quo.

Switching over to talk about deficits.  Points out the surplus in 2000.   Deficit caused by two wars, two tax cuts, and the prescription drug benefits.

Threatens a veto to enforce spending caps.  The claim is this is to offset the increased deficit since start of Obama administration.  Repeats call to extend middle class tax cuts, cancel others.  Bipartisan spending commission.  PayGo.  Freeze won’t start until next year.

“common sense — a novel idea.”  A bit snarky here.  I wonder how that plays to the public.

Campaign finance reform. Earmark reform.  “Reform how we work together.”

Stop the holds on nominations.  That would be good.  Republicans can’t just keep saying no, need to share responsibility of governing.

Somewhat awkward pivot to national security.  All our troops are coming home from Iraq.  Didn’t  hear a date there.  Support troops when they return.

Arms control, disarmament.  G-20.  Bioterrorism. This is important stuff, but the rhetoric is pretty dull.  Is he losing people?  Helping the people of Haiti rebuild.

Civil rights division that actually does something.  End don’t ask don’t tell.  Enforce equal pay laws. Good stuff, but I missed the transition — why is this coming after the national security stuff?  immigration reform. This is feeling like a bit of an afterthought.

I like the content, but think it dragged too long.  Need to see what’s actually in the budget next week.

David Brooks seems to like it, which is probably a bad sign.  ”General tone of moderation.”  But I just don’t see the R’s giving an inch.

Last week I read about deficit spending from a variety of perspectives, ranging from the Pew-Peterson Commission on Budget Reform to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities to  the Economic Policy Institute.  These are groups that are usually depicted in the media as being on opposite sides of the budget debate, so I was pretty surprised at how many points of consensus there were:

• The US government’s long-term budget trajectory leads to unsustainable levels of debt.  These are bad both because government borrowing will crowd out private investment, and because the interest payments will consume an unacceptable share of the federal budget.
• Pew-Peterson call for a goal of the debt stabilizing at no more than 60 percent of GDP.  (I gather the National Academy of Sciences has issued a report with the same goal.)  CBPP notes that there’s no evidence for supporting that particular target, and argues that a goal of 70 percent of GDP is more achievable, and doesn’t require such painful cuts that everyone just says it’s impossible and gives up.  EPI doesn’t set a specific target.
• However, it does not make sense to try to balance the budget in the next year or so, while we’re still recovering from the recession.  Cutting spending sharply now would put us back into a recession.  Even Pew-Peterson says that policy changes shouldn’t be implemented until 2012.
• The major drivers of the long-term problem are 1) the growing costs of Medicare, Medicaid (especially the portion of Medicaid that pays for nursing homes), and to a lesser degree Social Security and 2) the large 2001 and 2003 tax cuts.  (EPI and CBPP note that Medicare and Medicaid are actually growing slightly slower than overall health care costs, and argue that the solution has to include overall control of health care costs.)
• The hole is too big to fill either by just cutting spending, or by just raising taxes, but will require a combination of the two.

That said, why the heck is Obama calling for a three-year freeze in domestic discretionary spending? Everyone agrees that domestic discretionary spending isn’t the problem — and if you cut it in half, we’d still run long-term budget deficits — and cause a great deal of harm in the process.  Paul Krugman is scathing — and accurately so.  It’s bad economics, distracts from the real challenges, and feeds into the Republican message machine.  I truly don’t get it.  Poking around the web, it sounds like the kindest thing that anyone is saying is that it’s just posturing and won’t really result in horrible cuts, but I’m not sure that’s any better.

More good reading:  How to Spot a Deficit Peacock, from the Center for American Progress.

The theme I chose for this version of the blog lets you upload your own photo for the frame in the heading (it originally had a truly adorable picture of a little girl).  I spent a while trying to decide what picture might represent a half-changed world, and then picked the one that’s there, which I took on Inauguration Day last year. One year later (well, plus 5 days), I do think we’re living in a half-changed world.  Not as much changed as I wanted, as I believed was coming, but changed.  If you had told me four years ago that we’d be at this stage, I’d have been pretty darn pleased.

I think this Administration has messed some things up.  If they hadn’t wasted so much time over the summer trying to be all bipartisan, health care would have been passed by now.  They seem to have just been blindsided by the populist rage over TARP.   I grind my teeth every time the President suggests that small-business tax cuts should be part of the jobs bill and ducks talking about direct job creation.   And while the public doesn’t care that there are still significant unfilled positions in the agencies waiting for political appointments, it’s a bad sign, and makes it hard for the government to do its job.  They’re not as smart as they think they are, and they’re trying to thread some awfully tight needles.

But I don’t have any reason to think that Clinton would have done any better over the past year, and I’m quite confident that McCain would have done a lot worse.  I think under a Republican administration, we’d have wound up with a “recovery” bill that was nothing but tax cuts, and we’d have national unemployment levels that look like Michigan’s.  It’s hard to rally the troops under a banner cry of “it could have been worse!” but it could have been a lot worse.

Update: Schmitt and Perlstein are far more thoughtful than I am.

Does anyone really doubt that what Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize for is not being George W. Bush?  The US hasn't made a huge amount of progress towards creating peace in the past 9 months, but at least we're no longer driving full speed in the wrong direction.

The interesting question is whether being chosen for the Nobel Peace Prize on a "aspirational" basis will actually make it easier or harder for Obama to accomplish his goals — nuclear disarmament, effective policies on climate change, a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine, a US exit from Iraq.  I'm not at all sure — what do you think?

I didn't think Obama's speech was great, but it hit the right general notes — appreciation, recognition that this wasn't for anything he's done yet, a statement that the US can be a leader but the whole world has to be involved.

I work on other programs affecting low-income families, not health care.  But if Congress passes a true health care reform year, and no improvements in the programs that I work on, I'll consider it a success.  And if we get everything on my organization's policy agenda for 2009 but health care reform crashes and burns, I'll be disappointed.

Ezra Klein is blogging for the Washington Post now, and he's got two really good pieces today, one from this morning on why the CBO cost estimates are putting health care reform in danger and one from tonight on the Finance committee's revised plan. Basically, the budget office has told Congress, no, you're not going to save enough money with comparative effectiveness research and improved health care IT to pay for the expansions in coverage you want to see.  If you want real health care reform, the choices are to come up with the money from some other source (e.g taxes of one sort or another) or to get serious about cost-controls (e.g. take a chunk out of insurers' hides, and possibly out of doctors' as well.)  The no-hard-choices fairy isn't going to save you.

It's looking like Congress isn't really going to tackle these hard choices until after the Fourth of July recess.  Which means that the next few weeks are a great time to weigh in with your Representative and Senators about the need for real health care reform — including a public plan — and the need to pay for it with comprehensive tax reform.  If you really want single payer, go ahead and tell them that, but then tell them about what you think is second best, because single payer isn't happening, not this time around, and it won't be more likely in 10 years if this round collapses.

Are you paying attention to the health care debate, or have all the different bills made your eyes cross?  Are you waiting until things sort out a bit to pay attention?  What burning questions would you like answered?  As I said, this isn't my area of expertise, but if I don't know the answer, I probably know where to find it.  If you want to get into the wonky details yourself, my favorite health policy sites are Families USA, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

I finally got a chance to watch Milk on DVD, and thought it was terrific.  I knew that he was a gay politician and that he had been killed, and that was about it.  Having learned a little about him, I now want to know more — after watching the movie, I added The Times of Harvey Milk (which is a documentary about him) to my queue.

If the movie is portraying him fairly, Harvey Milk was a natural-born politician, able to talk to almost anyone, able to bring people together, able to make people have hope in spite of themselves.  Watching the scenes of him leading crowds, knowing what was coming, was almost unbearable.

One of my favorite professors in college used to talk about "Dante's influence on Virgil" meaning that after the Inferno, no one ever looked at the Aeneid the same way.  In the same way, Milk's story resonates differently today, in the age of Obama, with half a dozen states recognizing same-sex marriages, than it could possibly have resonated in 1984, when the documentary was made.

In the movie, Milk insists that all of his friends have to start coming out to their families and straight friends, because once your image of "the gays" is replaced by the face of someone you know, it's hard to hate.  It made me wonder how the equality movement would be different if AIDS hadn't hit the gay community so hard during the 1980s.  HIV/AIDS forced people out of the closet who would have stayed quiet otherwise.  And it's certainly hard to imagine that the right to marry would have become such a central focus of the gay and lesbian movement if the bathhouse culture of the 1970s had continued on.

I highly recommend the movie if you haven't seen it yet.

was my reaction when I heard the news that Arlen Specter is switching to the Democratic party.  I know, he was quite clear that he won't be an automatic 60th vote for cloture for the Democrats.  Oddly enough, he singled out the Employee Free Choice Act as an example of where he won't change his position, even though he used to be a co-sponsor of the bill in a previous Congress.  But I would say that the odds of a significant step on health care reform actually getting passed this year just went up by a good bit.

Some interesting coverage of the story, from:

• Talking Points Memo
• Firedoglake
• Campaign Diaries See also this post from a month ago, about Pennsylvania's sore loser law.

I know I promised a book review today, but I don't have the energy — feeling a bit sick (upset tummy, not the flu, chill out).  Maybe tomorrow.  But I may also report on my jury duty experience.

I ran across this LA Times article today, about (formerly) middle-class workers who have lost their jobs and are shocked to discover that their families don't qualify for most public benefit programs.  In many cases it's because with unemployment benefits, their incomes are still too high to qualify for food stamps or cash assistance; in other cases, they would qualify based on income, but have too much assets — especially cars — to qualify.

I don't know whether this makes those rejected for benefits more or less supportive of these programs.  I can imagine some people thinking "gee, if I can't live on this, how can people live on far less?" and supporting expansion and other people thinking "well, if these programs won't help me when I really need it, what good are they?" and supporting cuts.

Since the Recovery Act passed, I've been spending a lot of my time at work writing about the temporary assistance (TANF) provisions and trying to convince states to use that money to expand benefits for the neediest families.  It's been a tough sell.  Even though any increases would be 80 percent federally funded, state budgets are so tight that in many cases, they're saying they can't find the 20 percent.  And states are nervous about expanding programs with money that is designed to be temporary, because it's always hard politically to cut services back later.  I'm frustrated, but I get it — I know how hard it is to sell any expansion of "welfare."

That said, I'm really shocked by how hard it is in some states, including Virginia, to get the unemployment insurance expansions passed.  For those who believe that welfare is bad, but contributory social insurance, like social security, is good, UI should fall on the "good" side of that divide — it's based on wages and subject to a history of employment. The fact that it's still under fire makes me somewhat more skeptical about the claims that making programs universal will protect them from being attacked as "welfare."

I keep saying that I know that Obama's going to disappoint me at some point and then he keeps exceeding my expectations.  As I read his budget document this morning, I kept on finding more and more things that blew me away.  Here's some of them:

• As Robert Reich said, this budget would substantially increase the progressivity of the federal income tax.  The very rich have gotten the lion's share of the gains in the US economy over the past few decades, while the tax system has gotten less progressive.  This would be a big step towards that.
• I nearly shouted out loud when I read the section on carbon permits, and saw the phrase "100 percent auction."  This means that, unlike the Senate bill from last year, none of the permits would be given away to  industry.  This is key because giving away permits rewards polluters, and dramatically decreases the funds that are available to provide targeted assistance to low-income consumers and displaced workers.  And Obama's proposal to use some of the money to extend the Making Work Pay tax cut is essentially a version of Cap and Dividend.
• I was also stunned at Obama's willingness to pick fights on things that aren't going to get headlines or win him any votes.  For example, he says that he will fully fund the Community Development Block Grant, but will seek to distribute the funds through a "more effective formula."  CDBG is one of the few federal programs that provides flexible funds to cities and other local governments, and the current formula is pretty poorly targeted — it provides a little bit of money to almost every local government, regardless of need.  I assume it's obvious why it's politically hard to change that.  It would have been easy for Obama to decide to let this one slide, given the major pieces of legislation he's trying to get through.  But he didn't.

I'm still waiting to find out the details of the conference agreement on the recovery package, but I'm cautiously optimistic.  I don't think it's going to be a magic wand, but it will be a big step forwards.  I won't really relax until it clears the Senate, but what I'm hearing sounds like they made some reasonable choices.

MomsRising sent out an alert to their members on the recovery package, and asked for reports "if you or a family member have lost a job, a house, healthcare, or sleep because of the recession."  Here are some of the responses they've gotten.  It kills me to read them.  It's scary out there.