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: 5 Progressive Tax Hikes Washington Won't Consider
OurFuture.org's Daniel Marans: "Ten years ago today, the first Bush tax cuts were signed into law. The fiscal damage they have inflicted is still unparalleled. But while the tax cuts for the top 2 percent of American earners will stay off the table until December 2012, there is any number of other progressive tax increases that Washington could adopt, but won't even consider ... Scrap the cap on earnings subject to the Social Security payroll tax ... Enact a modest financial speculation tax ... Increase the corporate income tax rates by 1 percentage point ... Impose a fee on large financial institutions .. Tax carried interest as income."
President Paying Price Over Economy
President's job approval drops to 47% after bad economic news. W. Post: "... he is in a dead heat with former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who formally announced his 2012 candidacy last week, making jobs and the economy the central issues in his campaign."
Top WH econ adviser stepping down. NYT: "Typically chairmen of the Council of Economic Advisers do not serve long given that many are on leave from professorships, a fact that [Austan] Goolsbee alluded to. He also dismissed any suggestion that the timing was bad given the recent evidence that the recovery was stumbling."
W. Post's Ezra Klein blames GOP obstruction for prompting resignation: "...by empowering congressional Republicans, its made doing less -- moving prematurely to austerity -- a virtual certainty. We may be stuck in an economic crisis, but we're long past the point of being interested in what economists have to say about ending it ... The job of the CEA chair is to give the president good economic advice. That's a very important job if the president can take your advice. It's a very dispiriting job if he can't."
Mark Thoma previews Bernanke speech today: "...look for indications in the speech about (1) whether the recent weakness in the economy is long-term or short-term, and (2) if it’s long-term, whether the Fed has enough ammunition left to do something about it ... I’ll also be looking for indications about (3) whether the Fed views the unemployment problem as mostly cyclical or mostly structural ... if the unemployment problem is mostly cyclical, as I believe it is, then the Fed can potentially help."
Politico's Bill Schneider tells President "dwell on jobs, not cuts: "Most Americans see the deficit the same way they’ve seen it for the past 30 years: serious, but not an immediate crisis ... To most voters, however, there is only one real crisis: jobs ... All Obama needs to do is look at what happened to President George H.W. Bush after the 1990 budget deal. The problem then was not that deficit reduction was wrong, but that the deal came at precisely the wrong time, when the economy was weak."
GOP Paying Price With Seniors
GOP failing to convince seniors its Medicare would do them no harm. HuffPost: "The Pew Research survey shows that the greatest opposition comes from older respondents. A majority (51 percent) of Americans age 50 and over oppose Ryan's plan, and only 29 percent favor it ... [Younger] age groups are less likely to have heard a lot about the plan, signalling a lower level of engagement with the issue..."
Five Dem senators up for re-election tell VP Biden to leave Medicare alone in debt limit talks. AP: "Sens. Claire McCaskill, of Missouri, Jon Tester, of Montana, Sherrod Brown, of Ohio, Ben Cardin of Maryland and Bill Nelson of Florida express their concerns in a letter sent Monday to Biden."
Conservatives want GOP leaders to hold out for draconian cuts before accepting debt limit deal. The Hill: "More than a hundred House conservatives sent Boehner and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) a letter Monday laying out conditions to be met before a higher debt ceiling is agreed to. The letter called for discretionary and mandatory spending cuts to halve the budget deficit next year, spending caps to hold Washington’s spending to 18 percent of gross domestic product and passage of a balanced-budget amendment."
Goldman Fights Back
NYT's Andrew Ross Sorkin defends Goldman Sachs pushback against Senate report: "...I have come to a different and perhaps unsatisfying conclusion for those readers looking for a big scalp: Mr. Blankfein wasn’t lying. That’s not to suggest Goldman always behaved well. There are other assertions in the subcommittee’s report that detail some pretty egregious activity by certain executives. But after comparing the report with publicly available filings and documents, there are enough questions about the accuracy of certain parts of the Senate report to raise some red flags."
Naked Capitalism rebuts: "[Sen. Carl] Levin forwarded his entire report to various prosecutors, including the Department of Justice. Sorkin focuses on the statement that got Blankfein into the most hot water: 'We didn’t have a massive short against the housing market' and concludes that Blankfein was not lying. But he cannot know that based on the information he presents in his article ... You’d need to see pretty extensive trading data to reach that conclusion, and reading between the lines, that was not provided to Sorkin. "
Battle over regs delaying implementation of Wall St. reform. NYT: "One result may be that many new safeguards do not take hold in earnest before the next election, an outcome that could open the door for newly elected officials to back away from the overhaul."
GOP's blocking of nominations harming ability to implement reforms. W. Post: "Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner warned Monday that a failure by the Senate to confirm nominees to run federal regulators would be especially harmful because the agencies are trying to write hundreds of new financial rules."
Debit card fee vote may happen this week. Politico: "The Senate could vote as early as Wednesday on a bill that would delay new rules passed last year that cap swipe fees banks can charge merchants. The intra-party divide is embodied by the opposing views of Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the progressive who pushed through the measure [capping fees] in May of last year, and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), whose local constituents include banks that are fighting tooth and nail to prevent the rules from going into effect."
Breakfast Sides
Presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty to brand anti-government platform, the "Better Deal." W. Post: "Pawlenty will propose making drastic reductions in the corporate and individual income tax rates, 'sunsetting' all federal regulations unless Congress intervenes and privatizing a laundry list of federal functions from the Post Office to Amtrak."
Conservatives often ascribe false quotes to America's founders. W. Post: "Republicans have used incorrect quotes to portray the founders as sympathetic to modern conservatism."
State fiscal crunch putting parks at risk. NYT: "Many are imposing steep new fees, leaning ever more heavily on volunteers and, in one ominous effort to raise money, even pushing to drill for oil and gas beneath hiking trails and picnic pavilions."
Trade deal stalemate. Politico: "For labor unions, the pending trade agreements with South Korea, Panama and Colombia are a bitter pill. To console a key Democratic constituency, the Obama administration is pushing Congress to extend a displaced worker assistance program that expired in February ... [Republicans] want to move forward on the trade agreements without the workers’ aid, and they have threatened to hold up the confirmation of Obama’s nominee for commerce secretary, John Bryson, until the agreements are finalized ... The longer the debate drags on, the deeper the repercussions for Obama, one senior labor union official said."
