Cantor Move Typical Washington, But May Transform GOP
Move to Wall Street typical. McClatchy: "The financial industry values the knowledge of Washington officials and politicians. Last year, former Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner joined private equity business Warburg Pincus. Former Rep. Harold Ford Jr, D-Tenn., went to work for Merrill Lynch & Co. and then Morgan Stanley. Over the years, so many Goldman Sachs Group Inc. employees went to work for the Treasury Department - including former secretaries Henry Paulson and Richard Rubin - and so many left government for the Wall Street giant that the company has become known as Government Sachs. Politicians are more likely to go into lobbying, such as former Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., who became chief executive of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association trade group in May 2013."
Shift in corporate influence on GOP with Rep. Eric Cantor's exit. NYT: "...Wall Street and Big Business have lost their most sympathetic ear [while] oil and gas industries are on the rise ... Without [Cantor], the Export-Import Bank and its business supporters have lost their most persuasive advocate [and Republicans] are left with a comparatively inexperienced leadership team ... conservative activists have denounced the [Ex-Im] bank as corporate welfare, an argument Mr. Cantor was willing to rebut but his successor has avoided ..."
Students Still Suffer From Reagan Cuts
Today's students paying price from Reagan-era cuts, argues Prof. Devin Fergus in W. Post oped: "In 1981, the Reagan administration, with a coalition of congressional Republicans and conservative Democrats, pushed through Congress a combination of tax- and budget-cutting measures. No federal program suffered deeper cuts than student aid. Spending on higher education was slashed by some 25 percent between 1980 and 1985 ... these changes shifted the federal government’s focus from providing students higher education grants to providing loans ... Student aid 'isn’t a proper obligation of the taxpayer,' Reagan’s OMB Director David Stockman told Congress ... It should be little surprise that state support for higher education has steadily declined since Reagan."
NYT's Thomas Edsall argues left and right have complementary explanations for poverty: "Despite the conflicting nature of these left and right analyses, there is a strong case to be made that they are, in fact, complementary and that they reinforce each other. What if we put it together this way? Automation, foreign competition and outsourcing lead to a decline in well-paying manufacturing jobs, which, in turn, leads to higher levels of unemployment and diminished upward mobility, which then leads to fewer marriages, a rise in the proportion of nonmarital births, increased withdrawal from the labor force, impermanent cohabitation and a consequent increase in dependence on government support ... The emergence of a rough ideological consensus on the causes of poverty and inequality would increase the likelihood of, but by no means guarantee, agreement on such initiatives as raising the minimum wage, increasing and expanding the scope of the earned-income tax credit, programs promoting marriage and paternal involvement, as well as stronger efforts to improve the quality of education, especially in poor neighborhoods."
Liberals need to prioritize unions, argues MSNBC's Timothy Noah: "Why must liberals recommit themselves to labor unions, in spite of their imperfections and weakened state? Mainly because the problem of ever-growing income inequality — a problem that didn’t exist for the half-century prior to 1979 — is intimately associated with labor unions’ decline."
Immigration Action May Not Happen Soon
WH suggests immigration executive action won't happen before Election Day. The Hill: "'It's hard for me to at least at this point draw any clear conclusions about what the president's timing will be, 'White House press secretary Josh Earnest said. 'There is the chance that it could be before the end of the summer. There is the chance that it could be after the summer.' The White House is thought to be considering a delay of the executive actions because of concerns from vulnerable Senate Democrats, many of whom have asked the president not to act before November’s midterms ... Earnest on Tuesday said the president was 'basing this decision much more' on the substantive issues at hand, and that the administration was not 'focused' on the politics behind the issue."
"Screw Politics" argues TNR's Brian Beutler: "...the truth is, nobody really knows how the politics of a big new deferred-action program will shake out, because it’ll be a novel program. Our best heuristic is to watch how people with a political stake in Obama’s decision react when asked about it, and draw inferences. And the truth is that Republicans sound much more spooked than Democrats."
No evidence of "systemic abuse" in child migrant detention centers, says Homeland Security inspector general. NYT: "Inspectors found that most facilities met required standards for detention of unaccompanied minors, with operable sinks and toilets and access to emergency medical care and telephones ... The report was not the final conclusion on the advocacy groups’ complaint, with other Department of Homeland Security agencies still investigating more than 100 additional allegations. But advocates said they were disappointed by the inspector general’s findings."
