Tag Archives: jobs

The Paul Ryan Problem

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The United States faces an uncertain financial future. The recovering economy has not yet seen the kind of boost necessary to pick up the slack and prevent the nation from sinking in the event of a shock. This is a problem because a shock might be coming. In the eyes of many political pundits, we are headed towards a precipitous fiscal cliff.

usa debt crisis

It only drops a few feet

The fiscal cliff invites violent images of falling to one’s death. Yet it is much less dramatic than that. The automatic raises in taxes and cuts in spending were put in place to appease creditors and to show that if the government cant get its act together, there would be something that could save America’s financial books from our own gridlock and polarized ideologies.

The term automatic is really meaningless in this case. Lawmakers can always get around things, nothing is written in stone and with the primary focus of the country resting firmly on increasing jobs, not eliminating the debt, there will always be something that can be done. The idea of a fiscal cliff is only real if the Democrats use it to affront the Republican agenda, the same way Republicans toyed with the idea of default to rattle the Democrats.

There is most certainly a debt problem in America. And at the core of the negotiations to find a solution is former vice presidential candidate and extreme conservative Paul Ryan, who arguably cost Mitt Romney Florida and couldn’t even carry his own state of Wisconsin. Ryan is known around the nation as the debt guy, who presented radical plans to level the budget. He is not very well known and not every widely liked, but at least he presented a plan. He is one of the few that have.

UNCERTAINTY ON THE HILL

Ryan might be known as the debt guy but — as we have written about countless times before — he has voted for nearly every single measure put in place by W Bush that created the debt problem that we face today. This glaring hypocrisy aside, he is a wild card. Being young, he is promising for the Tea Party movement. However, the Tea Party is probably dead as we know it. Whatever form their resurrection will take will probably mean meandering towards the center of the political spectrum, or else face losing again and again in coming elections.

The biggest question is how Ryan will play to the far right of America. He needs to balance his conservative credentials (based on his voting record, this is only in regards to social issues) and the practical needs of the country. Some of the Tea Party candidates, like Mourdock in Indiana, were able to unseat long-time Washington Insiders thanks to an anti-government agenda. But when they ran against Democrats, they lost. Could Ryan actually fall victim to a movement like this? He has been in Washington as an elected official since 1998. With the growing unease and unpopularity of Congress, Ryan might become a target of the very same movement that brought him almost to the Vice Presidency.

So Ryan must progress the budget talks while retaining a near-impossible level of  conservative zeal, which normally means not compromising. If the nation hits the fiscal cliff, it will be his fault in the eyes of the entire country. If he softens his stance on the budget to accommodate a plausible solution, he will lose his luster among the far right, which could cost him his political future. The nation waits to see if pragmatism can right the nation’s finances and push Ryan towards a more sympathetic centrist position. If he does this correctly, he might be able to rely on socially-conservative centrist Republicans to keep his place in the GOP ranks. If not, he might not be re-elected come 2014.

Romney’s Economic Plan

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Attacks from both sides of the aisle have left the Romney camp scrambling to come up with details for the economic plan that Romney says he will implement once he gets to office if elected. His promise to further cut taxes across the board, particularly for the very wealthy, while not mentioning a single program he would cut spending from, has left the Tea Party with a bitter taste in their mouths. How then, they ask, does America close its deficit, and reduce our national debt?

details about romney 5 point plan

Might we finally get some details?

When Republicans point out a hypocrisy, you know you’ve gone too far. So Romney’s aides are starting to release minor details about a 5 point plan: which includes 12 million new jobs, education reform and increasing exports. The problem with this plan is that it is almost identical to the plans that Obama has proposed.

Romney has been desperately seeking some level of differentiation on the one playing field that is supposed to be towards his advantage. No one thinks Romney is nearly as capable as Obama on foreign policy. Few think Romney is as inspirational as Obama. Few think that Romney is as atuned to their interests and problems as Obama. The only feature that is appealing about Romney is his economic chops.

Before, Romney has argued that cutting taxes on the rich would stimulate growth and investment. But it is not rich individuals who hire people, it is companies, and rich people will always diversify their portfolios to offshore tax havens. Cutting the tax rate for the rich does nothing to stimulate the economy, and cutting taxes for everyone else is impossible since W Bush ruined our nations finances and pulled us into crippling debt.

Therefore, Romney is going to try to repackage Obama’s ideas as his own. This is startling but good. If Romney comes out with a plan that is similar to Obama’s it means that we have found a consensus in national politics. We should be able to test these theories in a bipartisan way and get our country back to growth. The problem, of course, is the way that Romney will fight tooth and nail to make it seem like it was his idea. Hopefully the American people will realize that he has been stalling, and that when he doesn’t come up with any new ideas, it’s time to let him know that America is more important to us than that.

The Wrong Message: Romney and the NAACP

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To no one’s surprise but the delight of some, Mitt Romney gave a terrible speech to the NAACP this week, where he was booed multiple times while attempting to illuminate the Republican logic about President Obama. The glaring problem: there is no logic, and a speech in front of fired-up conservatives is much different than a group of people that holds a more diverse opinion on the matter.

bad speech

Yes, you have

Romney’s popular target, Obamacare, was front and center. His message to the black community was clear: Obamacare is killing jobs. How dumb does he think black people are? Does he think they are as ignorant as his white supporters? Obamacare is killing jobs? Already? When only a tiny fraction has taken effect?

Citing the Chamber of Commerce, Romney frames a survey that the Affordable Care Act is making businesses less likely to hire. It is important to note that the source Romney is using to assert his claim is run by the staunchly conservative Tom Donohue whose remarks about the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Obamacare destroy his objective credibility: “the health care law is fundamentally flawed.” Romney and the Chamber of Commerce are both fighting for the same thing, preferential treatment for corporations at the expense of the American public.

This strategy of attacking Obama with no real point beyond a general discontent works with people who are idiotic enough to revere George W. Bush, but not among a group whose biggest civil rights achievement is sitting in the White House. Romney, assuming that every single American is the same, tried to deliver the same message. But he forgot the number one thing to remember in public speaking, writing, communications at all: know your audience.

Maybe it’s because Romney doesn’t know anything about black people, maybe it’s because the Republican party is controlled by white fear mongers who try to make life so bad for immigrants that they self-deport. Maybe it’s that Romney’s position of privilege does not relate to a group that had to work hard for every thing they have. But Romney couldn’t have missed the mark by more. It may yet prove a costly move.

Winners and Losers: Welfare in Capitalism

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Republicans are firm believers in false realities. One of their preferred tenets is that the free market will save everyone, or at least provide them with the opportunity to succeed. While in theory this might be true, in practice it is much less realistic. The problem is: to have winners, there must be losers.

hand out

Just looking for a handout

It is not a matter of grammatical correctness, it is the fundamental basis of competition. For every Bill Gates there are thousands of people who lost their wealth trying to grow companies. There are huge risks involved in entrepreneurship, and the system of credit involved is complicated and biased. Even if firms pop up, many of them will decline when it comes to consumer choice and demand. But this is the very top of the ladder. Not often does a person who starts a business worth millions of dollars end up on welfare. It is the bottom of the ladder where the situation is more dire, and where Republican disdain is clearer.

In a capitalist system, as any economist will tell you, there is a certain amount of unemployment that is necessary to keep the bottom of the labor market from dropping out on productivity. There must be an incentive for minimum wage earners to keep their jobs. As the world saw in the failed USSR, giving everyone a job meant that no one could lose their job. With no incentive to work, there was a major decline in productivity and innovation.

There must always be the chance of losing one’s job to someone else who wants it more in order to keep those in their positions hard working. But for this to be the case, there must be some way to enable the unemployed to eat, feed their kids, pay their rent, and receive medical care. Republicans are so hostile to the poor that they are disregarding this necessary fact of capitalism in general. However, their belief in self-success is particularly harsh when dealing with uneducated laborers.

Republicans love the phrase: “well, it’s not my fault” when confronted with the example of a single mother with two kids who loses her job and can’t find another one. “She shouldn’t have had those kids.” This is only the beginning of the insensitivity. Republicans actually believe that people like her are incentivized to stay on welfare, instead of finding a job. This could not be further from reality and reveals a disconnect between the Republican establishment and the people of our nation, including some of those in the Republican party that are too ignorant to see beyond the Bible-waving and fear-mongering.

For all the hot air that Republicans spew about free markets, it sure appears to anyone with a brain that they are trying to dissect the very features that keep our economy capitalist. So the next time a republican complains about an imagined welfare state, ask him why he hates capitalism so much.