Bad Deeds for 6-10-2011

 

Rick Perry to Hold Event With Hate Group – Texas Gov. Rick Perry has a long history of using faith as a political weapon to divide voters. But his decision to host a Christians-only prayer event in Houston on August 6 with a vicious hate group is beyond appalling. has asked the American Family Association to organize it. The Southern Poverty Law Center has identified the AFA as a hate group on par with Fred “God Hates Fags” Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church, the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nations. Instead of uniting people of faith in prayer for our nation, this event will actually sharpen divisions among Americans along religious and political lines. (Read more about the American Family Association here.) You can sign a letter to Perry about this here.

 

The Ryan/Republican Economic Plan is a Path to Plutocracy – The following are excerpts from an article that appeared in Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, by by Professor Charles Clark, St. John’s University.

The Ryan/Republican “Path to Prosperity” is not based on a valid understanding of the economy (and its current problems) and its underlying goal seems to be minimizing the size of government and the taxes paid by the rich (neither of which is designed to promote the common good). The Ryan/Republican economic agenda of small government, low tax rates and privatization is all grounded in an 18th Century view of the economy. But, in fact, a 21st Century economy is fundamentally different from its 18th Century ancestor.

As an historian of economic ideas who specialized in 18th Century theories, it looks to me that Ryan and company are applying the constitutional philosophy of “original intent” to economic policy. I expect that the next step will be Medicaid and Medicare reforms that will only fund bleeding and leeches; the military will replace the M4 and M16 with muskets; and mass transit funding will now go for carriages and coaches. The responsibilities of the government have grown since the 18th Century because the need for collective action on the national level has grown. In the 18th Century you didn’t need a health care policy because there wasn’t much that could be done; you didn’t need social security because most people didn’t live that long; you didn’t need much economic policy because most people lived on farms and were mostly self-sufficient.

Ryan’s budget asserts that reducing social protection will encourage independence and reduce poverty, yet this too is contrary to all experience in capitalist economies over the past 200 years. Countries with lower social spending have higher poverty rates, and, incidentally, have had bigger increases in unemployment during the current economic crisis. More ideology over evidence.

There is no economic evidence that growing the size of the government hurts the economy, at least not in the range of what other rich countries already have (40-60% of GDP, US is under 40%). Rising income inequality is shrinking the middle class and threatening to destabilize our democracy. Ryan’s budget will make all of these problems much worse rather than address them in a realistic fashion. Ryan is providing a path to plutocracy.

 

Un-Happy Anniversary: How We Got a Mountain of Debt – June 7, 2011, marks the 10-year anniversary of the signing into law of the Bush tax cuts, a day when President George W. Bush helped replace an unprecedented federal budget surplus with a mountain of debt. Here are some highlights, with data from the Economic Policy Institute:

Big debt: Between 2001 and 2010, the Republican/Bush tax cuts added $2.6 trillion to the public debt, 50 percent of the total debt accrued during that time. Over the past 10 years, the country has spent more than $400 billion just servicing the debt created by the cuts.

Supply-side failure: Far from paying for themselves with increased economic activity as promised, the tax cuts have depleted the public treasury. Tax collections have plunged to their lowest share of the economy in 60 years.

No jobs: Between 2002 and 2007, employment increased by less than 1 percent when the economy was supposed to be expanding. Employment growth barely kept pace with population growth. Between the end of 2001, when the country was in a recession, and the peak of the real estate bubble, er, economic expansion in 2007, the US economy performed worse than at any time since the end of World War II.

Rich people benefit: The best-known result of the Bush tax cuts is that virtually all the benefits were conferred upon people who didn’t need them at all and who didn’t use the money to, say, create more jobs or pay their workers better. Median weekly earnings fell more than 2 percent between 2001 and 2007. Meanwhile, people making over $3 million a year, who account for just 0.1 percent of taxpayers, got an average tax cut of $520,000, more than 450 times what the average middle-income family received.

Entitlements for trust-fund slackers: For a party that likes to talk about the virtues of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, personal responsibility and entrepreneurship, the Bush tax cuts were like an entitlement program for the already entitled. You’d be hard pressed to find a better way to create a lazy leisure class than by eliminating the estate tax. But that’s what Republicans did when they reduced and then phased out the estate tax, ensuring that the country would be plagued by people like this guy for decades to come.

For a graphic view of the dramatic change in wealth inequality fueled in part by the Bush tax cuts, check out these amazing charts.

 

Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner Lied About Inappropriate Photo on Twitter – Representative Anthony D. Weiner (D – NY) is now admitting that, “The picture was of me, I sent it,” he told a room full of reporters in Manhattan.

During a press conference, Weiner admitted to lying and to having at least six additional, questionable online behaviors.

 

With Loser Pays, Texans Kiss More of Their Rights Goodbye – If you’re wronged by a giant corporation, you may have only one option: Hire a lawyer on contingency and exercise your constitutional right to sue. Sometimes your lawyer will be overmatched and lose. Losing doesn’t necessarily mean you had a bad case: Corporations can generally afford to outspend you, so they hire firms with a thousand lawyers to bury your solo practitioner in paper. But even that option will soon be gone because of the “loser pays” legislation.

So even though you’ve spent 2 weeks in the hospital because some fast food chain fed you a cheeseburger with bacon, lettuce and mouse, you still lost. With loser pays in place, in addition to a mouthful of rodent and a gut full of Salmonellosis, you’ve got to pay the tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees the multi-billion dollar chain incurred defending your meritorious lawsuit. (On the other hand, if you win, you don’t get your legal bills paid. See how that works?)

The loser pays system about to be enacted by Texas is also called the English Rule. It was considered and rejected by the founding fathers because it’s biased against ordinary citizens.

Watch George Washington explain the concept to Rick Perry.

Regards,

Jim