Each morning, Bill Scher and Terrance Heath serve up what progressives need to effect change on the kitchen-table issues families face: jobs, health care, green energy, financial reform, affordable education and retirement security.
MORNING MESSAGE: Reject Bad Advice. Defend Medicare and Social Security.
OurFuture.org's Roger Hickey: "On May 25th, the day after Cong. Paul Ryan’s budget was soundly trounced in NY-26 ... former President Bill Clinton declared from the stage that, while he opposed Ryan’s plan for dismantling Medicare, he hoped that the NY-26 election didn’t mean that Medicare would be untouchable this year – a message he then delivered offstage directly to Rep. Ryan ... here we go again. Democrats start to unite around a winning economic issue, but major leaders of their party, repeating the case made by Washington Post editorialists and many Beltway think tankers, warn them not to go there ..."
House GOP Sets Up Debt Limit Vote To Fail
House vote expected today on raising debt limit. W. Post: "...the House is expected to reject a proposal Tuesday that would increase the nation’s ability to borrow money without also making major cuts in federal spending ... GOP House leaders timed the vote Tuesday night to demonstrate that point before all 241 members of the Republican conference visit Obama on Wednesday ... the vote will be held after the markets close. House leaders do not want a repeat of the September 2008 vote in which the House at first rejected the $700 billion Wall Street bailout and triggered the single largest one-day drop in stock prices ever."
VP Biden trying to hammer our debt limit deal behind closed doors. USA Today: "Despite skepticism that the talks can produce a deal, both the president and Republican leaders are giving Biden a wide berth ... Liberal Democrats [are concerned] that Biden's penchant for splitting the difference with conservative Republicans risks giving away too much, with no political benefit for Democrats. 'The Biden process, which is an insider's process, means that you're not making the sides very clear,' says Robert Borosage of the liberal Campaign for America's Future."
NYT edit board chastises Washington for putting deficit reduction ahead of jobs: "Conditions apparently have to get worse before deficit-obsessed policy makers will be ready to address them, including with bolstered foreclosure relief and more fiscal aid to states. More delay would only imperil the recovery, such as it is. And without a strong recovery, it will be even harder to repair the budget. Continued hard times means low tax revenues and high safety-net spending."
What More Can Be Done On Jobs?
Former WH econ aide Jared Bernstein responds skeptically to Paul Krugman's call for public works program and aggressive mortgage modification: "There will be no WPA-type programs in our near future. There was no appetite for them in the Obama admin in the midst of the worst recession since the Great Depression and there’s a lot less now ... It’s also congenitally hard for politicians to get behind 'a serious program of mortgage modification.' ... The politics of this idea are deeply wound up in moral hazard ... Yes, it’s true that leaders must stand up to such views and do what’s right for the economy…[But] we need also need to espouse plans b, c, d and so on."
And Krugman responds, suggesting short-sighted political concerns: "Yes, a real mortgage-mod program would have fed Tea Party sentiment — but it might have meant a stronger economy in the second half of 2010, and that would have mattered a lot more. As best as I can tell, the political types in the White House have, year after year, operated on the principle that the economy is on the mend, so it’s time to pivot to centrist-sounding themes — only to keep finding that no, the economy isn’t on the mend, and they’re paying for that at the polls."
Declining home ownership suggests economic fear. NYT: "Housing is locked in a downward spiral, industry analysts say, not only because so many people are blocked from the market — being unemployed, in foreclosure or trapped in homes that are worth less than the mortgage — but because even those who are solvent are opting out. 'The emotional scars left by the collapse are changing the American psyche,' said Pete Flint, chief executive of the housing Web site Trulia. 'There was a time when owning a home was a symbol you had made it. Now it’s O.K. not to own.'"
GOP Clings To Medicare Plan
GOPers double down on dismantling Medicare. The Hill: "GOP leaders on the Sunday talk shows rallied around the Ryan plan even as they acknowledged the role it played in last week’s loss of a GOP-leaning district ... most Republicans seem to think that the party needs to fight its corner harder — but does not need to engage in any fundamental reappraisal of strategy or electoral platform."
Hospitals fighting new efficiency standards for Medicare reimbursement in health reform law. NYT: "Administration officials hope such efforts will slow the growth of Medicare without risking the political firestorm that burned Republicans who tried to remake the program this year. In calculating Medicare spending per beneficiary, the administration said, it wants to count costs generated during a hospital stay, the three days before it and the 90 days afterward. This, it said, will encourage hospitals to coordinate care 'in an efficient manner over an extended time period.' ... Charles N. Kahn III, president of the Federation of American Hospitals, which represents investor-owned companies ... said the administration was 'off track' in trying to hold hospitals accountable for what Medicare spends on patients two or three months after they leave the hospital."
Germany To Shut Down Nuke Plants
Germany to close all nuclear plants in 10 years. W. Post: "The move is an about-face for German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose government until recently had supported nuclear power as a way to generate electricity without releasing additional greenhouse gases ... Delivering on [the new] pledge will be a tall order. Germany gets nearly a quarter of its electricity from nuclear power. With an aggressive program of subsidies, renewable energy’s share has climbed to 17 percent. Now the German government hopes to double that share to make up for the loss of nuclear power — but that will require advances in power storage and management because nuclear power runs constantly; wind and solar run intermittently. The German government also said it would try to cut energy use by 10 percent."
Rural Oregon reaping tax windfall with wind power. NYT: "Sherman County, which earned $315,000 in property taxes from the first wind farm in 2002, raked in $3 million from wind farms in 2010. The bounty, while mostly flowing to the farmers who lease their land for the turbines, also benefits the public ... At Sherman Junior/Senior High School in Moro, wind money paid for new computers, musical instruments, robotics equipment, portions of a greenhouse and a new teacher to instruct the most gifted of its 124 students last year."
Canadian govt admits it left out emissions data from oil sands in official greenhouse gas inventory. The Hill: "Look for U.S. green groups to cite this story as they press the State Department to reject the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that would expand delivery of oil sands crude to Gulf Coast refineries."
Cost Major Factor In Afghan Decision
Cost looms over Afghan policy. W. Post: "The heightened fiscal pressures, coupled with bin Laden’s killing four weeks ago, could shift the balance of power in the Situation Room toward Vice President Biden and other civilians who had been skeptical of the surge and favor a faster troop drawdown than top commanders would prefer. 'Money is the new 800-pound gorilla,” said another senior administration official involved in Afghanistan policy ... 'It shifts the debate from "Is the strategy working?" to "Can we afford this?" And when you view it that way, the scope of the mission that we have now is far, far less defensible.'"
House Dems uniting to leave Afghanistan. Politico: "...influential moderates [are] now expressing their impatience alongside the anti-war left that drove the early Iraq war debate. There’s no immediate threat to war funding, but the shift in the president’s party can’t be ignored by the White House going into the 2012 elections. This was dramatized last week when all but eight Democrats endorsed demands that Obama come up with plans this summer to accelerate the withdrawal of U.S. forces and pursue a negotiated settlement with 'all interested parties' in Afghanistan, including the Taliban."
Some GOPers taking military spending cuts seriously. Bloomberg: "That makes the Pentagon budget -- more than half of federal discretionary spending -- a target for potential compromise as Congress and the White House seek a package of cuts before voting to raise the government’s $14.3 trillion debt limit. How much is cut hinges on how much freshly elected deficit-busters can win over earlier generations of defense hawks."
Swing State GOP Governors Deeply Unpopular
Conservatives jockey for honor of "most unpopular governor." Mother Jones' Andy Kroll: "Florida's Rick Scott and Ohio's John Kasich are currently the leading contenders for the title of the most unpopular governor in America ... Michigan's Rick Snyder is struggling with a 33 percent approval rating, and in Wisconsin, 43 percent approve of Scott Walker ... Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin—the list reads like a roadmap for a 2012 victory, for either side."
Unpopular FL Gov. Scott may be Obama's "secret weapon." Politico: "Democrats say Scott, a stern, angular, unvarnished former health insurance executive, is an easily caricatured embodiment of conservative excess and tea party overreach..."
GOP presidential candidates "abandoning" formerly held centrist positions, finds AP...: "Former Govs. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota and Jon Huntsman of Utah, along with other likely candidates, have backed away from earlier embraces of regional 'cap-and-trade' programs to reduce greenhouse gas pollution ... The Republican Party’s rightward drift is causing headaches for the presidential hopefuls on the issue of Medicare, a potential minefield in the general election."
...while President is on firmer political ground, but economy looms: "The economy, while lethargic, is growing. The private sector is creating jobs. Natural disasters, while deadly and plentiful, have not developed into governmental crises. Skyrocketing gas prices, which fed the public’s economic fears, are now subsiding. And the GOP’s signature budget plan, ambitious in its spending reductions, has lost its luster with the public ... [Yet] Obama has to hope those numbers maintain an upward trajectory and that private sector hiring and personal income growth do not stall."
