EMAIL SIGN UP!
Most Popular This Week
- Wisconsin Bill Would Treat Organic Milk, Sharp Cheddar, Brown Eggs as "Junk Food"
- Patent Filing Claims Solar Energy ‘Breakthrough’
- Climate Change's 'Evil Twin': Ocean Acidification
- Disaster Capitalism Strikes as Hedge Funds Circle Near-Bankrupt Municipalities Like Vultures
- Ignoring Bee Crisis, EPA Greenlights New 'Highly Toxic' Pesticide
- Patent Filing Claims Solar Energy ‘Breakthrough’
- Wisconsin Bill Would Treat Organic Milk, Sharp Cheddar, Brown Eggs as "Junk Food"
- Climate Change's 'Evil Twin': Ocean Acidification
- In 'March Toward Disaster,' World Hits 400 PPM Milestone
- Ignoring Bee Crisis, EPA Greenlights New 'Highly Toxic' Pesticide
Popular content
Today's Top News
Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing: The Myth of Fiscal Conservatism
Fashionable pundits like to say that the Republican Party has shifted its focus from “social conservatism” (e.g., banning abortion, shoving gays back in the closet, teaching school children that humans and dinosaurs once walked the earth hand-in-claw) to fiscal conservatism (e.g., tax cuts for the rich, slashing social programs). But is that really true? Tim Murphy of Mother Jones argues that the old culture war issues never really went away. Rather, the Republicans have simply rephrased their social agenda in fiscal terms.
For example, Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) is quite upfront about the fact that he hates Planned Parenthood because the group is the nation’s leading abortion provider. Yet, he seeks to de-fund the Planned Parenthood and the entire Title X Family Planning Program in the name of balancing the budget. Never mind that the federal money only goes toward birth control, not abortion, and research shows that every dollar spent on birth control saves $4 in Medicaid costs alone.
Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly surveys the current crop of GOP presidential hopefuls in Iowa and agrees that reports of the death of the culture war have been greatly exaggerated.
But the key takeaway here is that fiscal issues have largely been relegated to afterthought status. That’s just not what these right-wing activists — the ones who’ll largely dictate the outcome of the caucuses — are focused on. Indeed, even Ron Paul, after pandering to a home-school crowd last week, conceded, “I haven’t been asked too much about fiscal issues.”
Budget cuts
Sarah Babbage writes in TAPPED that Obama and the Democratic leadership in Congress seem poised to grant an additional $20 billion in spending cuts for FY 2011, in addition to the $10 billion in cuts they’ve already pledged for this fiscal year. Babbage notes that, after weeks of negotiations, we’re right back to the $30 billion in cuts the GOP initially demanded. She warns that these cuts will have a trivial impact on the $1.6 trillion deficit, but they could have a devastating effect on the fragile economy.
Taxes for thee, but not GE
General Electric raked in $14.2 billion in profits last year, $5.1 billion of which came from the United States, yet the company paid $0 in U.S. income tax, Tara Lohan notes in AlterNet. Despite its healthy bottom line, and its sweet tax situation, GE is asking 15,000 unionized U.S. workers to make major concessions at the bargaining table. GE wants union members to give up defined benefit pension programs in exchange for defined contribution programs.
As we discussed last week in The Audit, defined benefit plans guarantee that a retiree will get a set percentage of her working salary for the rest of her life; defined contribution plans pay the worker a share of the revenue from a pool of investments. As the fine print always says, investments can decrease in value. So, if the stock market crashes the day before you retire, you’re out of luck.
Generation Debt
Higher education is supposed to be a stepping stone to a better standard of living, but with unemployment hovering around 10%, many college graduates are struggling to find jobs to pay their student loans. Aliya Karim argues in Campus Progress that the government should compel colleges and universities to be more transparent about the realities of student loan debt:
The government should require colleges to provide information about graduation rates, college costs, and financial aid packages on college websites, enrollment forms, and guidebooks. This information should be easy to find and understand. Without such information available to them, students may not be aware that their future college has a graduation rate lower than 20 percent or that its graduates face close to $30,000 in debt.
The government has a lot of leverage over public and private schools because so much student debt is guaranteed by taxpayers. Greater transparency will enable students to make more informed choices, and give colleges with low graduation rates a greater incentive to clean up their act.
Comments
Note: Disqus 2012 is best viewed on an up to date browser. Click here for information. Instructions for how to sign up to comment can be viewed here. Our Comment Policy can be viewed here. Please follow the guidelines. Note to Readers: Spam Filter May Capture Legitimate Comments...
10 Comments so far
Show AllMany people are slowly beginning to catch on that the "deficit hawk" conservatives are using the budget as a way of getting at "entitlement" programs they feel are "socialistic" such as Medicare and Social Security, not because they're concerned about national bankruptcy -- which is a genuine looming possibility and should be something they're concerned with.
That's why they never talk about cutting defense spending, eliminating subsidies to banks, agribusiness, oil companies, and all the other too-big-to-fail enterprises that claim to be "free market" but which operate largely on government money.
But still, for a lot of people the conservative party line is still resonating. Is there time for enough people to get wind of the whole shenanigan before the economy implodes?
"But still, for a lot of people the conservative party line is still resonating. Is there time for enough people to get wind of the whole shenanigan before the economy implodes?" No.
I agree but I hope we're both wrong.
"Tim Murphy of Mother Jones argues that the old culture war issues never really went away. Rather, the Republicans have simply rephrased their social agenda in fiscal terms."
Ms. Beyerstein and Mr. Murphy appear to have the picture upside down. The plutocrats who employ the politicians do not give a flying fig about the social/cultural issues and so they do not instruct their minions to use the fiscal issues as cover for movement on the social/cultural issues. It is the other way around. They use the connection to social/cultural issues to convince working class voters, who often "cling to guns and religion" because they feel insecure in their position in a rapidly changing and increasingly menacing corporatist world, to vote against their own economic interests.
In Canada the "Conservatives" clearly maintain power because fiscal conservatives still believe they are the financially prudent party, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary. The pretense of fiscal conservatism does increase their voter base and provides them with enough votes to retain power. In this case the charade is fiscal conservatism. Yes some people do "cling to guns and religion" but the rightwing agenda needs the fiscal conservative vote to be fully empowered.
I think it goes both ways though. The rightwing has successfully merged their somewhat divergent mix of supporters through combining and confusing fiscal and social conservative messages. This allows conservatives of all stripes to see what they want to see in the party's rhetoric.
To the extent claims of "fiscal conservatism" are intended to attract voters who are not themselves among the economic elite, those claims do serve as another type of fraud. US politicians who claim to be fiscally conservative give far more away to the MIC, Wall Street, and to other plutocrats and in other forms of corporate welfare than ever was given to impoverished children and adults. The unsophisticated self-labeled "fiscal conservatives" are being bamboozled and fleeced to the same degree as the Christian conservatives are. Too bad the rest of us who share this sinking ship do not possess the megaphones necessary to get through to them.
"Too bad the rest of us who share this sinking ship do not possess the megaphones necessary to get through to them."
They are a very difficult crowd to get through to kivals.
I believe you end up in that group through extensive programming which is hard to undo... no matter how loud the megaphone is : )
Surely there are some registered Republicans who are in some sense fiscally conservative. Outside of the odd Ron Paulite lost goat amidst the sheep, there are no fiscally conservative Republican elected officials.
Consider -----
* One cannot judge this issue by votes at an exclusively local level for at least two reasons: most governmental largesse is federal; most Republican pet spending is federal, to support centralized power by increased coercion.
* On a federal level, almost no Republican officials vote to lower governmental spending. "Privatization" does not mean less governmental spending; it means more governmental spending and greater corporate control over what is spent. The privatization of the recent occupations should stand as
Who was the last "small spending" Republican president?
We can rule out George II. He set a brand new record for spending, after Clinton had balanced the budget (for better or, most likely, for worse).
George I doesn't qualify; though he spent less than his son and less than his predecessor, the deficit did not shrink in his hands.
Ronald Reagan set records for centralized government spending, and a lot of his projects were quite obviously off the books, funded by cocaine and arms smuggling.
Ford spent less than Reagan, but then everybody had. He spent less than Nixon, but because Nixon had been caught illegally monkeying in the plumbing of the Democratic Party, which, unlike the Black Panthers and individual leftists, could defend itself, although it went about the business carefully, trying not to dissolve its hierarchy in the process.
Eisenhauer made a nice speech against the MIC on leaving office; he must have felt sheepish about having supported it for 8 years. US arms expenditure and spending in general increased throughout his terms, despite the flattening out of the Korean debacle.
So, are we talking about Herbert Hoover or aren't we? It can't be Lincoln. It can't be Teddy Roosevelt.
No, Republican membership is a sham deal for anyone with authentic libertarian or even teabagger leanings, just as 0bama is a farce to draw off and deflect people with Hope for Change.
And there is that small matter of the 3 billion plus the government owes GE in tax breaks
Meanwhile GE assets worldwide are protected by the Pentagon protection racket scheme of; fund US, the Pentagon, for protection or else....! Al Capone couldn't have said it better. GE and other PREDATORY CAPITALIST WELFARE KINGS receive Pentagon protection and many pay no taxes and instead are paid by the USG to be protected by the Pentagon. Bizarre doesn't come close to explaining these dynamics, but graft and corruption does.