Aaron Schock, You’re Costing Us Money!

Our government has been shut down for two weeks. Here is what that means for our pocketbooks.

Some Head Start programs have shut down or lost teachers. That means that children whose parents would normally be working have to be taken care of. Workers stay home or spend extra money on baby sitters. That costs money for those parents, who mainly don’t have much money. It also costs businesses that employ them. Thanks, Aaron.

Alex Thevenin lost about $80,000 last week because of your vote. His family-owned Arizona Raft Adventures, a white-water rafting business in the Grand Canyon, and other similar small businesses, lost bookings in the final weeks of their season.

The Small Business Association says it will not be processing loans during the shutdown. Rep. Shock, your website says that “providing the incentives and benefits for small business” is one of your principles. Why isn’t that principle more important than shutting down the government?

Blood drives have been cancelled. Clinical trials for cancer patients at the National Institute of Health have been cancelled.

Although our military personnel will be paid during the shutdown, many services important to them will not be operational: Reserve training has been cancelled across the country; the Veterans Administration announced cutoff of some services and benefits; all subsidized grocery stores on military bases have been closed. By last week, defense contractor Lockheed Martin had sent home 2400 civilian workers in 27 states because of the shutdown. One Army officer said, “A week won’t make a significant difference. Two weeks and you might start to see readiness issues.” Now it’s two weeks.

Of course, the shutdown costs us all money as taxpayers, because of the daily work which is not getting done. Although some Republicans have been saying that are saving money by shutting the government down, they all voted to give all furloughed government workers back pay when the shutdown is over, negating all of those savings.

Bloomberg News compared the costs of the shutdown, which they estimated at over $2 billion, to the costs of the disastrous September floods in Colorado. But that’s just costs to the government. The wider costs to the national economy could reach $55 billion after three weeks, estimates an analyst from Moody’s Analytics.That’s equal to the total cost of the disruption caused by Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy.

Organizations of American businesses have been pleading with the Republican extremists in Congress to stop their games. An October 1 survey by the National Association of Government Contractors found that nearly one-third of its 925 members were delaying hiring; more than half predicted a negative effect on their business. These are people who preferred Herman Cain to Barack Obama for President last year. The U.S. Travel Association estimates that the shutdown costs the travel industry $152 million per day.

Representative Schock, on your website, you ask “How can I help?” On your Issues page, there is nothing about the shutdown. But on September 29, you voted for House Resolution 59, which continued government operations only if the key provisions of the Affordable Care Act were suspended. Twelve Republicans voted against that measure, which was an attempt to blackmail the Senate and the President into suspending an existing law. Why weren’t you among them?

I think the answer is that you’re afraid. You’re afraid that you’ll lose your position as Deputy Republican Whip. You’re afraid that somebody to the right of you will challenge you in 2014. Tea partiers are already trying to find a primary opponent. You’re afraid that you’ll lose your nice job as a Congressman, with its $174,000 a year salary. But you’re not afraid about the jobs of your constituents. You’re not afraid of sinking Illinois further into debt.

Caterpillar, Inc., the biggest employer in Peoria, was already laying off blue-collar workers before the shutdown in Peoria and Decatur. Are you helping them by your vote?

CNN has identified 200 Democrats and 18 Republicans who say they would vote for a “clean continuing resolution”, which would fund the government without demanding changes to Obamacare. They asked every member of the House, and keep asking, creating an updated list of those who would end this economic and personal disaster. But your name isn’t on their list – you say you won’t vote to end the shutdown. None of the six Illinois Republicans in the House would vote to end the shutdown.

Is your career more important than the national economy? Your home town paper, the Peoria Journal Star, who endorsed you in 2010 and 2012, came out for a clean resolution. You don’t even have the excuse that you are acting on principle. In August, you criticized Republicans who favored a government shutdown for “beating their chests”. Big words, but when it comes to voting, your constituents’ welfare disappears.

The time to lead is now.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, October 15, 2013

It’s All About Partisanship

The U.S. government has been shut down for a week. Here’s a guide to understanding this extraordinary event.

1. It’s all about Obamacare.

For three years Republicans have been obsessed about the Affordable Care Act, which was passed by Congress and signed into law in 2010. The day after it was signed into law, Michele Bachmann introduced a bill to repeal it. Then Steve King of Iowa demanded that Speaker John Boehner and other Republican leaders sign a “blood oath” to attach riders to every appropriations bill to repeal the ACA. He was already talking about a government shutdown in 2010. Boehner’s response was to say, “I am committed to doing everything I can do, and our team can do, to prevent Obamacare from being implemented. And when I say everything, I mean, everything.”

Mitt Romney asserted in his presidential campaign that he would repeal the ACA “on day one” of his administration. Defunding the ACA is a major emphasis of Tea Party supporters.

The Republican majority in the House has sent over 40 bills to the Senate which tried to repeal the ACA. Virtually all Republicans vote in favor of these doomed measures. These bills have no chance in the Senate, where Democrats are in the majority.

Because a significant amount of Congressional time has been taken up with these purely symbolic and partisan votes, CBS News calculated that each of these votes costs us over $1 million in running Congress. But that’s just a tiny fraction of the real costs of this political theater. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office says that repealing the ACA would increase the deficit over the next ten years by more than $100 billion. Republican leaders have consistently called the ACA a “job-killing law”, but the CBO says the law will have minimal effect on employment.

At the state level, Republicans have tried to prevent the ACA from taking effect. In Missouri, not only has the Republican-run state refused to establish a health insurance marketplace, but state and local officials are forbidden to cooperate with the federal exchange.

2. Republicans have planned the government shutdown for a long time.

Early in 2013 a group of conservative activists created a “blueprint to defunding Obamacare”, which argued that the most conservative Republicans should push their Congressional colleagues and leaders into cutting off government funding. This months-long effort has been funded by the Koch brothers who have put over $200 million behind it. This plan includes targeting Republicans who are not supportive with critical ads and threats of primary challenges.

3. The Republicans created the government shutdown.

Despite the work of thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people in the public and private health and insurance sectors over the past several years to prepare the insurance exchanges which have just opened, House Republicans insisted on linking the funding of all of our government’s normal operations with a one-year delay in the functioning of the whole ACA. The Senate stripped these provisions from government funding bills, although every Republican Senator voted to keep them linked.

That stripped down bill, simply funding our government, was sent back to the House. And here’s where the Republican leadership made the choice to shut down the government. Speaker Boehner refused to bring that Senate bill for a vote. Most analysts say it would have passed the House, with some Republican votes. A majority of Senators, a majority of Representatives, and the President would all have agreed to avoid a shutdown. But Boehner blocked that vote and that shut down the government.

Republicans used this method of political blackmail because they can’t get what they want by the normal legislative process, since they don’t have the votes.

4. The Republicans don’t care about the social and economic consequences of the shutdown.

The last time they shut down the government in 1995-96, it cost an estimated $1.4 billion. Nobody has argued that any American’s life is improved if the government does not operate. Not our veterans, not our senior citizens, not our children, not our businesses. The most vulnerable Americans will suffer the most, such as children in Head Start programs and government workers who can’t afford to lose their paychecks.

Many conservatives believe that the shutdown is an astute political move. They argue that the shutdown will hurt Democrats politically, not Republicans.

Because most Republicans are in safe districts, there is little fear that the Republicans would lose their majority in the House. That’s why they don’t appear to care that a majority of Americans reject their efforts to defund the ACA. The most recent poll, as reported by Forbes, shows only 33% believe that the law should be repealed or defunded.

Nevertheless, most Americans still believe that the law will increase their health care costs.

What Republicans are really afraid of is that Americans will now discover the advantages of the ACA: uninsured people will be able to get insurance with federal subsidies and people with pre-existing conditions will get insurance. Their made-up statistics about job losses will evaporate into thin air.

That’s why we have no government today.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, October 8, 2013

Ideology Defeats Facts

Many people complain these days about the quality of political discourse. Our Congressional representatives are currently talking past each other, trashing the other side, trying to score points only with those who agree with them. There is little effort at persuasion, much less at compromise.

We can learn something about why so much political argument is nasty and fruitless right here at home. On Monday, September 23, two letters making political comments appeared in the Journal-Courier. They are worth a closer look as examples of political writing.

Bruce Richards wrote about a poll I cited in my column of September 3, about how many Louisiana Republicans blamed President Obama rather than President Bush for the “poor response to Hurricane Katrina”, which struck three years before Obama took office. Mr. Richards does not like those facts, because his ideology gets in the way.

He didn’t get much correct. I didn’t write about all the Republican respondents, but only those who identified themselves as “very conservative”. I didn’t say half of them blamed Obama, but that the half of the Republicans who were “very conservative” were twice as likely to blame Obama as Bush (the percentages are 36% to 17%); the other 47% were unsure. The poll-taker, Public Policy Polling, didn’t survey 274 people, but rather 721 Louisiana voters, of whom 274 were Republican primary voters, and of those, 121 described themselves as “very conservative”. I didn’t ridicule anybody, I just reported these results.

Once we get past Mr. Richards’ errors, his main argument is that PPP is a “left-leaning organization”, which proves to him that their results are determined by partisanship and bias. He claims that these numbers are too small to be valid. But Mr. Richards doesn’t know much about scientific polling. All the polls that we read about in the 2012 election were based on relatively small numbers of people.

One way to spot poor argumentation is to see how ideologists like Mr. Richards escalate their criticisms. He begins by voicing “serious doubts” based on his incorrect assumptions, then gets to “highly misleading”, and ends up with “junk science”.

In fact, PPP was one of the most accurate polling organizations in the 2012 elections. There is controversy from left and right about their polling methods, which differ from most polling organizations, but nobody challenges their record of accuracy.

In that same issue, Jim Shelts makes no pretense of being reasonable. Like Mr. Richards, Mr. Shelts doesn’t like the facts, this time about global warming, so they must be wrong. He begins by calling global warming a “fraud”, and compares modern climate scientists to ancient peoples who practiced human sacrifice to cause rain. That the Aztecs did sacrifice people to the rain god Tlaloc is one of the few things that Mr. Shelts gets right in his short letter. Mr. Shelts’ assertion that “the fraud is unraveling” is made up, since the UN climate report that was just released is even more certain than before that human action has caused warming of the climate.

Mr. Shelts says correctly that the earth’s climate has changed before, then concludes incorrectly that those who worry about today’s warming are conning people. The UN report notes that 120,000 years ago, the world’s average sea level was at least 15 feet higher than it is today. True, interesting, and irrelevant. We now have 7 billion people on earth, with a heavy concentration in coastal regions, including in the US. The report projects that average sea level will rise between one and three feet by the end of this century. A two-foot-rise, the average predicted in this report, would put millions of Americans under water: 224,000 in California, 41,000 in South Carolina, 31,000 in North Carolina, 527,000 in Florida, 762,000 in Louisiana, 39,000 in Massachusetts, and 216,000 in New York. Mr. Shelts doesn’t want to know that, so it’s all a fraud. Ideology defeats fact.

The problem here is trust. Political distrust, like that of these recent letter-writers, along with thousands of contributors to the daily din of political commentary, is spread too broadly and too indiscriminately. The New York Times and Rush Limbaugh are both “media”, but one deserves significant trust and the other none at all. Not because of ideology, but because of their record of reliability. The news stories in the New York Times and on FOX News deserve more trust than the political commentary of FOX talk show hosts or New York Times editorial writers. Those different expressions about politics have different purposes and different reliability.

The PPP deserves trust because of its outstanding record, irrespective of its supposed political “lean”. I don’t deserve trust or skepticism because of my affiliation with Illinois College, which has nothing to do with my writing in this paper. I don’t deserve trust because I am an historian or a gardener or wear a beard.

You as reader get to decide how much trust you give what I write. I hope that decision is based on the reliability of my essays, not on knee-jerk reactions to my supposed ideology.

But that’s up to you.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, October 1, 2013