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

Tough Luck for the Poor

Republicans in the House just voted to cut food stamps for poor Americans. They say the program is too large, because so many Americans need food stamps to help them buy groceries. Too large means too many tax dollars are being spent to feed poor Americans. The Republicans want to cut taxes, and they mean to do that by cutting programs that spend money on the poor.

Why does rich America have so many poor people? The answer cannot be found in the recent economic disaster from which we are slowly recovering. The problem of the American economy is much older.

The typical American household, right in the middle of the economic spectrum, is making the same real income as in 1988, 25 years ago. The per capita size of our economy has grown 40% in that time, but none of the gains have gone to middle Americans. Even worse, the real net worth of the middle American family has fallen 6% since 1989.

Over the past 15 years the number of full-time year-round workers has barely changed, as more and more corporations offer only part-time work in order to reduce the need to pay benefits. Even for those with full-time work, like factory workers, real wages have fallen since the 1970s. Adjusting for inflation, the minimum wage has fallen steadily since the 1960s; it is now only two-thirds of the value it was 45 years ago.

In fact, the vast majority of Americans, the real 99%, have seen little improvement. Since 1993, real income for the 99% has grown only 6.6%, about one third of 1% a year, barely noticeable.

For the top 1%, on the other hand, the past 35 years have been a bonanza. In 1978, the top 1% made 9% of the total income in the country; last year their share was 23%. In the last 20 years, their incomes nearly doubled. The top one-hundredth of 1%, the richest 16,000 families, have increased their share of total income from 1% in 1978 to over 5% now, the highest it has ever been. These 16,000 families make about the same each year as the bottom 16 million families.

While the very rich have been increasing their share of the American economy, the number of poor Americans has been rising. Although the social programs and economic expansion of the 1960s reduced the number in poverty from 40 million to under 25 million, the number began to climb again after 1978 to over 46 million in 2012. But the so-called poverty rate of 15% of Americans for 2012 is misleading about the nature of American poverty. Over the three years 2009 through 2011, nearly one-third of Americans experienced a spell of poverty lasting 2 or more months. Only 3.5% of the population were poor for that entire span. So the spending on anti-poverty programs like food stamps works to help the millions of Americans who fall into poverty to stand back up again.

You wouldn’t know any of this from listening to Republican politicians. They blame poverty on the poor. Of course, they don’t actually make that argument openly, because nobody could really believe that the poorest Americans have caused the rich to get richer and the rest to stagnate. They make the argument behind closed doors, like Mitt Romney did when he was caught on videotape during the 2012 campaign.

In public, they talk a lot about the national debt, and then try to reduce it by cutting every program that helps the poor. Here’s how they connect the dots. The biggest problem in our economy is the national debt. That is caused by too much taxation and too much government spending, but not every big government program needs to be cut. The programs that need to be cut are the food stamp program, unemployment compensation, and Head Start. Programs that need to remain or even grow are tax breaks for the rich, tax breaks for corporations, and subsidies for agribusiness.

None of those programs can possibly help the poor, or the sinking middle class. And that’s the whole idea. The Republicans are not trying to use government to make life better for most Americans. They don’t believe that government should help most Americans.

The Republicans don’t even have to pretend that they care about the economic plight of the majority. In Owsley County, Kentucky, over half the population gets food stamps, but this nearly all-white county voted 81% for Romney. Of the 254 counties whose number of food stamp users doubled since 2007, Romney won 213.

So tough luck for the poor. Republicans are trying to slash the programs which have allowed most people who fell into poverty during the recession to get out of it. And for the rest of the middle class, whose incomes are going nowhere, they can watch the very rich eat up more and more of our national wealth.

Maybe the trickle down will start tomorrow.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, September 24, 2013

Litterbugs

Litterbugs don’t care about community. They indulge their laziness and display disdain for their neighbors. Every morning I find fast food packaging and cigarette butts in the gutters and on the lawns around my house, tossed there by the same people each day, oblivious to the wider world which they pollute.

They rarely litter in front of us. They know that they are breaking our social rules. They know they could be named for what they are if their acts were done openly. So they litter secretly, stealthily opening their car doors in a parking lot to dump out their ashtrays, rolling down their windows to throw away their cups and wrappers, pretending they are alone in their own dirty world. Of course, smokers create the most litter.

Litter is expensive for the rest of us. Cleaning up litter is estimated to cost over $11 billion per year. Litter reduces property values.

Other kinds of litterbugs pollute our political life. Too lazy to discover the truth, too disdainful of others’ beliefs to care about listening, so unconcerned about community that they would rather create division than reach consensus, political litterbugs toss their junk into our public lives every day. It’s impossible to avoid their garbage.

You can usually recognize them by their reluctance to identify themselves. Hiding behind the anonymity of the internet, they say whatever they want: Obama is a Muslim, the earth is actually cooling, liberals are traitors.

Not all of the political litterbugs hide in the shadows. Some use outrageous claims to maintain their celebrity. Donald Trump has recycled his repeated claims that Obama was not born in the US to keep himself in the limelight of Republican politics. Despite his inability to produce any “evidence” for his claims, he remains a star among conservatives, a featured speaker at the 2013 Conservative Political Action Conference.

Alan West, former Republican congressman from Florida, tried to outdo Joe McCarthy by claiming during his 2012 reelection campaign about his fellow members of Congress, “I believe there’s about 78 to 81 members of the Democratic Party that are members of the Communist Party.”

Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma produced a book in 2012 about climate change called “The Greatest Hoax”, and has compared the Environmental Protection Agency to the Gestapo and EPA Administrator Carol Browner to Tokyo Rose. In July 2010, in the middle of the hottest summer on record since 1880, he said, “I don't think that anyone disagrees with the fact that we actually are in a cold period that started about nine years ago.”

As with all of these ridiculous claims, the immediate refutation by America’s climate experts made no difference. Inhofe can keep polluting our political atmosphere with his intellectual litter because, unlike the paper litter on our streets, political litter can serve a partisan purpose. Many Americans gleefully absorb and recycle this litter because it fits into their political ideology, whether it has any basis in fact or not. Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and others repeat anything that anyone says which makes their political opponents look bad, without taking responsibility for its veracity.

Litterbugs destroy community by polluting our neighborhoods and our airwaves, our streets and our conversations. Litterbugs of both kinds feel no responsibility for the consequences of their actions. The more litter there is around, the more gets tossed.

The organization Keep America Beautiful offers some suggestions for reducing litter, which can also be applied to political litterbugs. Choose not to litter; don’t trash our public discourse. Remind others not to litter; discourage political littering by naming the litterbugs and choosing not to follow their example. Set an example for others; make positive contributions to our political community.

The Town Brook organization is planning a local clean-up for October 26^th. If we use the same energy to clean up our political discourse, we could have a more beautiful America.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, September 10, 2013