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: The Republican Myth Of Obama’s "Entitlement Society"
Robert Reich: "One of the few things Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich agree on is that President Obama is turning America into 'European-style welfare culture.' ... What’s their evidence? Both rely on federal budget data showing direct payments to individuals shot up by almost $600 billion, a 32 percent increase, since the start of 2009 ... But they have cause and effect backwards. The reason for the rise in food stamps, unemployment insurance, and other safety-net programs is Americans got clobbered in 2008 with the worst economic catastrophe since the Great Depression ... If anything, America’s safety nets have been too small and shot through with holes. That’s why the number and percentage of Americans in poverty has increased dramatically over the past three years."
Romney Doubles Down On Dismissing Poverty
Romney on defensive after says he's "not concerned about the very poor." NYT: "...it seemed to reinforce what might be his rivals’ most potent line of attack against him: that Mr. Romney, with a net worth estimated at $200 million, is out of touch and unable to relate to struggling Americans."
OurFuture.org FLASHBACK: Romney in October, "the people who need the help most are not the poor, who have a safety net."
The quote is not taken out of the context, explains The Daily Beast's Gary Rivlin: "Romney’s point is that the very poor—like the very rich but unlike the middle class—don’t need more help from the government. 'We have a safety net there,' he said. 'If it needs a repair, I’ll fix it.' ... [But the safety net] is under greater strain and facing ever more threats the longer the country’s economic woes continue ... Unemployment insurance lasts only so long ... many workers barely scraping by don’t qualify for unemployment insurance ... Losing your job often means losing your health insurance ... Medicaid is generally only for those who are taking care of children ... only one in four people eligible for [the housing voucher] program actually receives assistance ... then there have been the deep cuts to the program that colloquially people refer to as 'welfare' ... [And] to the extent he’s spoken about these issues, he’s offered proposals that would weaken the safety net, not strengthen it."
Romney takes fire from Newt. CBS quotes: ""I am fed up with politicians in either party dividing Americans against each other. I am running to be president of all of the American people, and I am concerned about all of the American people."
Secret money funding Super PACs. NYT: "Some of the money came from well-established concerns, like Alpha Natural Resources, one of the country’s largest coal companies, which is backing Republican-aligned American Crossroads ... Some came from companies closely identified with prominent industrialists or financiers, like Contran, a mammoth holding company controlled by the Texas billionaire Harold Simmons ... and Blue Ridge Capital, a New York hedge fund founded by the wealthy investor John A. Griffin, a supporter of Mitt Romney. But some checks came from sources obscured from public view, like a $250,000 contribution to a super PAC backing Mr. Romney from a company with a post office box for a headquarters and no known employees."
Romney funded by small group of multimillionaires. W. Post: "A quarter of the money amassed by Romney’s campaign and an allied super PAC has come from just 41 people, each of whom has given more than $100,000 ... Some of Romney’s biggest supporters include executives at Bain Capital, his former firm; bankers at Goldman Sachs; and a hedge fund mogul who made billions betting on the housing crash."
Steven Rattner delves deep into Romney's tax return, for Politico oped: "...a large chunk of Romney’s income (about $7.4 million last year) is derived from the famous carried interest ... Romney believes he is entitled to that treatment even though he left Bain in 1999. He now almost certainly derives the vast preponderance of that $7.4 million from investment vehicles that weren’t even in existence when he left the firm ... In 1993, the IRS ruled that individuals would be entitled to the capital gains rate on carried interest if they provide services to their firm — but said nothing about after retirement ... Next, there’s his IRA [which] has a current value of $20.7 million to $101.6 million — one of the largest ever recorded ... he may well have 'sold' some of his Bain carried interest to his IRA ... Such a transfer would be of questionable legality..."
GOP race heads to economically devastated Nevada. NYT: "One in every 175 homes is in foreclosure. In every suburb here, signs advertising move-in specials abut vacant lots and half-completed development projects. The collapse in the construction industry has been devastating; it once accounted for 12 percent of all jobs, but it is down to 5 percent."
Santorum seeks to revitalize campaign by defending high drug prices, lecturing mother with sick child. CNN quotes: "People have no problem going out and buying an iPad for $900. But paying $900 for a drug, they have a problem with it. It keeps you alive. Why? Because you have been conditioned to thinking that health care is something that you should get and not have to pay for. Drug companies, health care companies need to have a profit motive, because if they don't, then how are we going to regulate costs? We are gonna ration care ... [Your son is] alive today because drug companies thought that they would make money in providing that care and if the drug company didn't think they could make any money by providing that care, I hate to put it in these terms, but that drug wouldn't be here."
Obama Proposes, Boehner Rejects Refi Plan
Obama announces refi proposal. NYT quotes: "I am sending Congress a plan that will give every responsible homeowner in America a chance to save about $3,000 a year on their mortgage by refinancing at historically low rates ... No more red tape. No more runaround from the banks.”
Boehner rejects any help for homeowners. HuffPost quotes: "We've done this at least four times where there's a new government program to help homeowners who have trouble with their mortgages ... All it does is delay the clearing of the market."
Jared Bernstein praises Obama's refi plan, knocks Congress: "Such borrowers are blocked [from refinancing] due to ... underwater mortgages and risk aversion by lenders ... One potentially helpful wrinkle is extending the federally insured refis ... to a large group of homeowners who have heretofore been ineligible ... the FHA needs capital to offset the risk they’re taking on by insuring the banks holding the new mortgages. To raise those funds, the bill calls for a fee on large financial institutions (banks, investment houses), specifically on their leverage. This actually strikes me as a fair way to connect the dots between the housing/finance meltdown/bailout and measures to address the damage. But this Congress is…um…very unlikely to pass it."
Deadline pushed back for state AGs to consider foreclosure fraud settlement. Bloomberg: "Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto said in a Jan. 27 letter to Miller, the Justice Department and U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan that she needed answers to 38 questions to evaluate the deal.
The deadline was changed as Oregon Attorney General John Kroger said today in a statement that he would sign on to the settlement, joining Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen, who also supports it. Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden has said he won’t sign on to the settlement."
GOP Tries To Extend Fed Worker Pay Freeze
No movement in payroll tax cut talks. The Hill: "...with Democrats feeling they have leverage in the negotiations, neither side has moved away from its preferred methods for paying for an extension of the payroll tax cut. On Wednesday, the House approved one of the GOP’s favored offsets, an extension of a pay freeze on federal employees. Democrats have not embraced that proposal, and conferees from the party said Wednesday that they were still hopeful that a surtax on millionaires could be used to fund an extension of payroll tax relief."
House votes to extend federal worker pay freeze. Politico: "...Wednesday’s largely bipartisan vote could help the GOP’s push to include a pay freeze in the payroll tax cut negotiations. The measure would save about $26 billion ..."
Conservative group pressures House to vote against transportation bill, which would increase oil drilling and defund bike paths, for not cutting spending. Politico: "The [Club for Growth] sent a 'key vote alert' Wednesday urging members to oppose the bill. It also said their votes would be part of the organization’s 2012 scorecard ... Large Republican defections would be devastating to the bill’s chances of clearing the House. Leadership doesn’t expect to win over any Democrats."
Breakfast Sides
17-year old explains what it is like when your parents "self-deport," in NYT oped: "I have a brother, 16, a year younger than me, still living in Mexico. He was too little to cross the border with me when I came to the United States, and as the government has cracked down on immigration in the years since, the crossing has become more expensive and much more dangerous ... So he stayed with my grandparents, but last year my grandmother died and two weeks ago my grandfather also died ... [My parents] decided they had to go back to Mexico ... Deportation, and 'self-deportation,' will result only in dividing families and driving them into the shadows."
Arizona state Senate committee advances anti-union legislation. Arizona Republic: "Arizona unions representing tens of thousands of public workers would be banned from collective bargaining with local governments and school districts ... make it tougher for unions to deduct dues though members' public paychecks and ban compensation of public employees for union work while on the job."
Additional research assistance was provided by Michael Brooks
