Bipartisanship Afoot on Minimum Wage, Jobless Aid
Obama to meet privately with Boehner today. Bloomberg: "President Barack Obama will host House Speaker John Boehner at the White House today for a closed-door meeting as lawmakers weigh the administration’s call to raise the minimum wage and revamp U.S. immigration law."
Dems still talking to GOP on extending unemployment insurance. National Journal: "Democrats have narrowed their search significantly and are working with three potential swing votes—Sens. Rob Portman of Ohio, Mark Kirk of Illinois, and Dan Coats of Indiana—to pass the extension. Of the three, Kirk is considered the most likely to jump on board with the bill ... Portman is still focused on pursuing a three-month extension of the program, rather than the yearlong fix many Democrats are hoping for ... Kirk noted that he is seeking 'a real no-gimmicks pay-for' to offset the cost ..."
Progressive need a bolder approach to addresses inequality, argues Salon's Thomas Frank: "Start with the word itself ... 'inequality' is confusing. It is euphemistic and aloof ... needlessly clinical, giving the whole debate a technical and bloodless air ... To our ancestors, though, this same issue was the most basic matter of them all. What we call 'inequality' they called 'the social question'; the phrase denoted nothing less than the eternal conflict of rich and poor ... This is the World War II of political subjects, and if we are going to win it must be a people’s war, not a Combat of the Thirty between the plumèd knights of the Beltway."
Pentagon Wields Budget Ax
Pentagon 2015 budget envisions smallest Army in 75 years. NYT: "Under Mr. Hagel’s proposed budget, the Army would drop to 440,000 to 450,000 troops by 2019, down from a peak of 570,000 during the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars ... One goal of reducing personnel costs, for example, is to find more money for training and weapons. Given that President Obama has said he wants to move away from a permanent war footing, budgetary gains would come from not having to carry a large land-war invasion army when the country is no longer engaged in such invasions ..."
Budget also cuts veteran health care. The Hill: "The budget would dramatically reduce the Army’s size and trigger a new round of controversial base closures while cutting healthcare copays and deductibles and reducing the subsidies military families get for housing and low-cost goods."
Breakfast Sides
House Ways and Means Chair to release tax reform plan, upsetting some in his party. Politico: "More than a dozen skeptical lawmakers and senior aides told POLITICO they thought it was a strategic blunder to unveil a plan outlining which loopholes to cut, whose rates will be slashed and which sector of the economy will see higher taxes when there’s little expectation the code will be reformed in 2014 ... House Democrats think they’ve been handed a gift ... aides emphasized they shouldn’t criticize the tax reform bill but, rather, allow Republicans to trip all over themselves ... [The plan] includes a number of Democratic tax principles ... For example, big banks would see an additional tax to offset the bailout they received during the financial crisis ..."
Supreme Court questions EPA climate reg move, but downplays significance. NYT: "One part of the Clean Air Act, [Justice Kagan] said, seemed to require that such emissions be regulated. But another part set the emission thresholds so low that even schools and small businesses would be covered. The agency’s solution was to raise those thresholds, and the resulting standards covered far fewer sources ... 'I couldn’t find a single precedent that strongly supports your position,' [Justice Kennedy] told the agency’s lawyer ... [But] the narrow issue the Supreme Court agreed to address left in place the agency’s determinations that greenhouse gases present an urgent threat and that emissions from motor vehicles may be regulated ... 'I don’t know what this case is about,' Justice Breyer said. 'I mean, it’s a question of whether they do exactly the same thing under one provision or another provision.'"
More needs to be done to prevent "too big to fail" argues Ira M. Millstein and Ricardo R. Delfin in Bloomberg: "Enact the strong rules needed to eliminate gaming of orderly liquidation authority and bankruptcy, and let the market see things for itself. This means requiring strong, simple leverage restrictions and meaningful loss absorbency at the holding-company level. It means getting institutions to simplify their structures so they are truly resolvable without bailouts, market breakdowns or assessments on the rest of the industry. It also means regulators must improve transparency so that the public and markets can decide for themselves if the changes dispel their too-big-to-fail doubts. Existing living wills and Securities and Exchange Commission public disclosures are not giving investors and counterparties the information they need..."
