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: Ryan-Wyden - Killing Medicare Before Our Eyes
OurFuture.org's Richard Eskow: "The 'Ryan-Wyden plan' is a perfect case study in the cynical workings of an antidemocratic machine - a machine whose cogs are lazy journalists, whose gears are selfish politicians, and whose levers are pulled by the wealthy and powerful ... 'Jump-starting the conversation' is a favorite phrase of the Washington Post editorial board, because it's code for 'introducing radical conservatism into the debate' I doubt they'd praise anyone for suggesting, oh, I don't know, the confiscation of homes and property of rich bankers. Ryan-Wyden is at least that radical."
House GOP To Kill Payroll Tax Cut Deal Without Direct Vote
House GOP postpones vote to block payroll tax cut compromise, suggesting they didn't have the votes. Politico: "Some Republican lawmakers did not want to be in the position of voting against a tax cut ... Democrats cried foul on the Republicans’ procedural moves, with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) telling reporters that GOP leaders would not allow for a direct vote on the Senate’s version of the payroll tax cut plan."
New GOP bill designed to prevent defectors from creating majority to enact Senate bipartisan compromise." Bloomberg: "They also structured the question facing the House so that Republicans will be the ones casting 'yes' votes to seek a conference with the Senate on the bill rather than casting 'no' votes under a previously planned procedure. Under the previous plan, if enough Republicans had defected, the short-term extension would have passed. Under the new plan, Republican defections would result in the House taking no action."
Senate Dems say House GOP will be responsible for killing bipartisan compromise. W. Post: "Senate Democrats accused House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and his leadership team of walking away from the deal as a capitulation to tea-party elements and said they had no plans to reopen talks. They said that if the House rejects a deal that was adopted in the Senate on an 89 to 10 vote, it would amount to nixing the tax cut."
Republicans dramatically lose public confidence on taxes, in new ABC/W. Post poll: "...voters said they trusted Obama to do a better 'job handling taxes' than Republicans by a margin of 46 percent to 41 percent — a dramatic swing from two months ago, when voters favored the GOP, 46 percent to 39 percent."
House Republicans claim to reject temporary payroll tax cuts, but proposed one two years ago. HuffPost: "Just under two years ago, House Republicans, including some of the party's more conservative members, were arguing that a two-month payroll tax holiday would 'effectively stimulate' the economy ... . It called for a complete payroll tax holiday, meaning the tax rate would be reduced to zero."
Jobless face massive cut in aid if deal collapses. CBPP's Hannah Shaw: "About 1.8 million Americans will face a cutoff in unemployment benefits in January if Congress doesn’t extend emergency federal unemployment insurance (UI) before returning home for the holidays ... in six states, workers will have even fewer than the 26 weeks of benefits ...
Ryan-Wyden Shifts Costs To Elderly
Ezekiel Emanuel derides Ryan-Wyden as "cost-shifting": "Unless growth in health care costs is low, Medicare beneficiaries will just have to pick up the difference between the voucher’s value and the cost of the health insurance plan they purchase ... Premium support will not reduce the government’s costs without shifting those costs to older people who can’t afford them. Only a plan that transforms how we pay doctors and other health care providers can do that."
Dean Baker derides Wyden as "cowardly.": "A genuinely courageous senator from Oregon might stand up and suggest ways to get our payments more in line with the rest of the world. But some of the main beneficiaries of these overpayments are in the 1 percent. They are not interested in a solution to our health care cost problem that will reduce their income."
TNR's Jonathan Cohn notes Wyden and Ryan are describing their plan quite differently: "[Wyden] said this scheme was 'absolutely not … the end of Medicare as we know it.' But Ryan, in an interview with James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute, struck a different tone: 'We are stopping the open-ended, defined benefit system,' Ryan said ... Most premium support proposals would flip that guarantee on its head, putting individual seniors at much greater risk ... [Wyden] believes that the proposal he crafted with Ryan is different – that it would shield individual seniors from higher risk, through a series of consumer protections ... Do Ryan and other leading Republicans believe those protections are even necessary? ... As best as I can tell, they do not."
Occupy Spreads
Campus Progress tracks the impact of Occupy Our Homes: "One thing is for sure: Banks are taking notice. An internal Bank of America email that surfaced last week fretted that anti-foreclosure actions could 'impact our industry.' 'We believe protests will likely take place tomorrow at auction sites, homes that are being foreclosed, homes in the eviction stage and vacant homes,' reads the email, which was addressed to the bank's Field Services suppliers. 'We want to make sure you are all prepared.'"
Occupy Education gaining traction to fight "neoliberal" school reform. The Nation: "...demonstrators explained why the [NYC's] Panel on Educational Policy (PEP), which had convened the Queens meeting, is an illegitimate, undemocratic body ... Occupy Rochester, along with parents and other community activists, disruptively mic-checked a school board meeting to protest an undemocratic process for selecting a new school superintendent ... In Chicago, on the same day as the Queens PEP meeting, protesters shut down a school board meeting to protest recent failed reforms."
Breakfast Sides
New Iowa frontrunner Ron Paul is moving the GOP towards him, argues TNR's Ed Kilgore: "... Paul’s endless fulminations about profligate monetary policy and the evil Fed, as well as his draconian prescriptions for a radically smaller federal government, now all sound completely within the conservative mainstream ... Paul’s narrative of a long disastrous national slide into socialism, which sounded very weird to many Republicans when their party controlled the White House and Congress, has become commonplace, as have hints and (for some) outright arguments that the entire New Deal and Great Society legacies need to be dismantled. "
ATT-TMobile merger dies after rejection by fed regulators reports Politico.
NYT's Joe Nocera slams latest conservative attempt to blame financial crisis on Fannie and Freddie: "The truth is the opposite: Fannie and Freddie got into subprime mortgages, with great trepidation, only in 2005 and 2006, and only because they were losing so much market share to Wall Street. Among other things, the [American Enterprise Institute] case relies on inflated data — Pinto classifies just about anything that is not a 30-year-fixed mortgage as 'subprime.' The reality is that Fannie and Freddie followed the private sector off the cliff instead of the other way around."
Retired first responders in RI town going through bankruptcy accept pension cut in possible trend-setting deal. NYT: "Municipalities have been reluctant because public pensions are protected by statutes and constitutional provisions meant to make them nearly airtight. And even if the rules could be broken in bankruptcy, that would present a different problem. Local officials who want to cut pensions do not, as a rule, want to shortchange their bondholders for fear of not being able to borrow in the future — yet bankruptcy law requires that both types of creditors be treated equitably. Rhode Island sought to sidestep the issue with a law that gave bondholders more protections than retirees."
