TPMDC Brian Beutler
Liberals and environmentalists are rejoicing tonight over the Obama administration's decision to delay -- or in bureaucratese, "seek further review of" -- a proposal to build a massive pipeline from the Canadian Tar Sands to the gulf coast. But their celebration could be short lived.
Here's the full backstory. The so-called Keystone XL pipeline has become the frustrated environmental community's final litmus test for the President. Though the bureaucratic questions surrounding the project have to do with domestic health and safety concerns, environmentalists fear, with good reason, that the pipeline would assure the extraction of too much carbon for the climate to bear. So they've been hounding the White House and State Department for months in an effort to get the project scrapped altogether.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)Topics: Barack Obama, Environment, Mike Johanns, Oil, State Department, White House
Jobs
Senate Overwhelmingly Passes Two Pieces Of President Obama's Jobs Bill
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV)
The Senate voted overwhelmingly Thursday to pass two modest pieces of President Obama's jobs bill.
The final vote was 95-0 with one senator voting "present." The legislation, which is expected to pass in the House, will provide tax credits to businesses who hire unemployed veterans, and, separately, will eliminate a requirement that the IRS withhold three percent of government contracts, to assure compliance with the tax code. That requirement isn't currently in effect, but is scheduled to be implemented January 1, 2012.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)Topics: American Jobs Act, Barack Obama, Jobs, Tax Cuts, Taxes
Super Committee
CHART OF THE DAY: The Regressive Tax Plan Super Committee Dems Shot Down
A new Democratic memo rips apart a GOP Super Committee proposal -- offered by Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) -- that would have reduced, and made permanent, Bush-era tax rates. Many of the key details of the plan remain undisclosed, even to Democrats, but they've included a table laying out all of the lower rates the GOP has proposed, and deduced from what's known that the changes would significantly reduce the progressiveness of the tax code.
Here's how. The GOP claims the plan would raise $300 billion in revenue, and also make the newer, lower Bush tax rates permanent. To accomplish this, simple arithmetic implies he'd have to raise a ton of tax revenue elsewhere. But since he objects to raising taxes on capital income, that would require him to slash deeply into credits and preferences that benefit lower and middle income taxpayers.
Democrats drew a comparison to a similar plan -- one with smaller tax cuts that has been scored by the Joint Committee on Taxation, and concluded:
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)Topics: Bush Tax Cuts, Pat Toomey, Super Committee, Tax Cuts, Taxes
Super Committee
New Document Summarizes Recent Democratic Super Committee Offer
'Super Committee' members Sen. Patt Murray (D-WA) and Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), September 7, 2011.
As reported here, Republicans have rejected a Democratic Super Committee offer that would have reduced deficits by $2.3 trillion over 10 years. The reductions would be split evenly -- a trillion a piece -- between higher tax revenues and federal programs, plus $300 billion saved in interest on the national debt.
The plan also notably would not reduce Social Security benefits by using a less generous measure of inflation to calculate cost of living adjustments -- a proposal some Democrats have supported in the past.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)Topics: Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, Super Committee, Taxes
Super Committee
Dems, GOP Play Super Committee Hot Potato As Talks Stall Over Taxes
Members of the deficit Super Committee are still meeting, still talking, but for all intents and purposes, negotiations have stalled. The underlying difficulty remains the GOP's unwillingness to agree to raise significant new tax revenue, enough to match Democrats' willingness to cut spending on popular programs like Medicare and Social Security. But with days ticking down quickly until the panel's November 23 deadline, each party is claiming that the ball is in the other's court.
One of the most recent offers, the details of which were leaked to the press earlier this week, came from Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA). It's been characterized by Republicans as a plan that would raise $300 billion in new revenue, Republicans say, by limiting certain tax preferences. But it also would require reducing, and making permanent, Bush-era tax rates for high income earners -- a requirement Democrats oppose. Additionally, the overall revenue figure may be the product of a controversial "dynamic" model, which assumes that the tax changes will lead to economic growth.
Democrats have applauded Republicans for finally acknowledging that higher net tax revenues need to be part of the committee's overall mix. But they've also rejected the offer as not serious, and wildly dismissive of Dem demands that the panel reduce deficits nearly as much by rolling back spending on safety net programs as by requiring wealthier Americans to pay higher taxes.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)Topics: Jim DeMint, John Kerry, Pat Toomey, Super Committee, Taxes
Obamacare
How Grover Norquist Anti-Tax Pledge Could Foil GOP's Latest Obamacare Repeal Push
Grover Norquist
Here's one example of how Grover Norquist's Taxpayer Protection Pledge boxes in Republican members, even on issues near and dear to the GOP base.
The details here were first reported by Inside Health Policy but it illustrates a point Republicans on the deficit Super Committee are all too familiar with. Starting in 2014, the health care law will automatically start providing tax credits for individual market health care policies -- the subsidies that will help uninsured people buy coverage.
Republicans want to stop the money from going out before it starts, so they've introduced legislation to repeal the subsidies. Except, since these are tax credits and not direct spending, repealing them could count as a tax increase as far as the taxpayer protection pledge is concerned.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)Topics: Denny Rehberg, Grover Norquist, Health Care, Obamacare, Super Committee, Tax Cuts, Taxes, tcot
Jobs
Free Money! Why The U.S. Can, But Isn't Putting New Jobs On The Credit Card
Dmitry Rukhlenko / Shutterstock
Here in the United States, Republican lawmakers are busy blocking plans to spend money on jobs and infrastructure improvement, while both parties work in earnest to find ways of cutting $1.2 trillion or more from the budget over the next 10 years.
They're doing this at a time when demand for America's debt is so high that investors will essentially pay the U.S. to borrow.
You read that right. Here are the numbers. They may appear hard to parse, but it's pretty straightforward: when you adjust for inflation, the interest creditors get for parking their money here is negative. That's not a deal you'd accept from your bank, but it's the deal we're getting now.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)Topics: American Jobs Act, CBPP, Debt, Jared Bernstein, Jobs
Newt Gingrich
Former Directors Blast Gingrich's Plan To Eliminate Congressional Budget Office
Former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA)
Newt Gingrich wants to swing into Washington like a wrecking ball and demolish the key barriers between the GOP and the end of universal health care. But his primary target isn't Obamacare itself. Rather it's a non-partisan agency most people outside the beltway have never heard of -- but that the D.C. establishment would arise and take arms to protect.
"If you are serious about real health reform, you must abolish the Congressional Budget Office because it lies," Gingrich said at a Saturday debate with embattled pizza entrepreneur Herman Cain. "Every hospital will tell you that if you get the family and patient involved, it is better and less expensive. The Congressional Budget Office refuses to see this as a savings. It wants more bureaucracy and less patient involvement."
In a technical sense, Gingrich is correct. The Congressional Budget Office will make it hard for Republicans to completely repeal Obamacare, even if they unify control of government in 2013. CBO is the agency that evaluates for lawmakers the impact their legislation is expected to have on the federal budget. And unfortunately for Republicans, the health care law was devised to score as a deficit reducer, particularly after its first 10 years of existence. By direct corollary, the CBO says repealing the whole thing would increase projected deficits. For political and (more importantly) procedural reasons, that would make a complete repeal almost impossible.
Some Republicans want to change the rules that make CBO's words so powerful. Gingrich, by contrast, wants to get rid of CBO altogether. In response, former CBO heads are leaping to its defense -- including a key conservative economist, influential among Republicans.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)Topics: Alice Rivlin, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, CBO, Congressional Budget Office, Douglas Holtz Eakin, Health Care, Newt Gingrich, Obamacare
Barack Obama
Hill Democrats Pleased With Daley's Diminished Role
Congressional Democrats weren't surprised Tuesday to learn, in a story first reported by the Wall Street Journal, that White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley had handed a big chunk of his portfolio over to senior adviser -- and former acting Chief of Staff -- Pete Rouse. Indeed, they've been living under the new regime for several weeks, and according to one highly placed Senate Democratic aide the improvement has been self evident.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)Topics: American Jobs Act, Barack Obama, Bill Daley, Democrats, Economy, Harry Reid, Jobs, John Boehner, Nancy Pelosi, Pete Rouse, Rob Nabors, White House, William Daley
Health Care
D.C. Appellate Court Upholds Constitutionality Of Obamacare
President Barack Obama
A three-judge panel on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals -- comprised of two judges appointed by Republican presidents and one by a Democrat -- upheld the constitutionality of a key section of President Obama's health care law in a ruling released Tuesday.
Senior Judge Laurence Silberman and Judge Harry Edwards ruled to uphold the law -- specifically the mandate that requires Americans to purchase health insurance -- on the merits. Judge Brett Kavanaugh dissented from their ruling, but he, too, would have ruled against the plaintiffs seeking to overturn the mandate. His opinion argued that federal courts lack jurisdiction to enjoin the mandate, which functions similarly to a tax.
Silberman, a conservative all-star, was first nominated to the D.C. Circuit by Ronald Reagan, and became a senior judge when Kavanaugh -- a George W. Bush nominee -- was confirmed to the court. Edwards was nominated by Jimmy Carter.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)Topics: Barack Obama, Health Care, Health care lawsuits, Individual Mandate, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan
Super Committee
Why The Super Committee Is Heading For Super Catastrophe
As of Tuesday morning, betting on the Super Committee to succeed would be playing the odds.
A key member of the Senate Democratic leadership team has openly predicted the panel will gridlock and fail, and placed the blame squarely on Republicans.
As GOP committee members met privately, Maryland Rep. Chris Van Hollen -- a Democrat on the panel -- told Bloomberg, "You need to close some of these tax loopholes and you need to generate additional revenue. And so that balance is going to be important. We saw the dueling letters just last week. We had a bipartisan group in the House that said, 'Look, everything is on the table including revenues - tax revenues.' And within 24 hours you had 33 [Republican] Senators say, 'no new net tax revenues.'"
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)Topics: CBO, Congressional Budget Office, Debt, Debt Ceiling, Defense Spending, Deficit, Health Care, Health care implementation, Jobs, Medicare, Social Security, Super Committee, Taxes
Super Committee
Report: Super Committee GOPers Agree To Violate Norquist Pledge...With A Catch
Grover Norquist
Super Committee Republicans are floating a trial balloon that would produce new tax revenue, in apparent contravention of Grover Norquist's taxpayer protection pledge, according to Wall Street Journal editorialist Stephen Moore.
But as Moore explains that the offer has a catch:
One positive development on taxes taking shape is a deal that could include limiting tax deductions, perhaps by capping write-offs on charities, state and local taxes, and mortgage interest payments as a percentage of each tax filer's gross income. That idea was introduced on these pages by Harvard economist Martin Feldstein.PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)In exchange, Democrats would agree to make the Bush income-tax cuts permanent. This would mean preventing top rates from going to 42% from 35% today, and keeping the capital gains and dividend tax rate at 15%, as opposed to plans to raise them to 23.8% or higher after 2013.
Topics: Bush Tax Cuts, Entitlement reform, Entitlements, Grover Norquist, Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, Super Committee, Taxes
Barack Obama
Three's A Trend: Polls Show Voters Believe GOP Intentionally Stalling Economic Recovery
House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and President Barack Obama
President Obama and the Democrats have succeeded at convincing voters that Republicans are trying to delay economic recovery, according to a series of recent polls.
The new data suggests that about half the country, including a majority of self-identified independents, believe that congressional Republicans are using their political power to thwart Obama's efforts to reduce unemployment, presenting Democrats an opportunity to make this argument more explicitly as the 2012 campaign moves forward -- to undercut Republicans' claims that Obama and the Dems bear full responsibility for the economy, and to make their pattern of obstruction a real liability for them.
Suffolk University polled registered voters in Florida and found that nearly half of voters, including large minorities of conservatives and Republicans, believed "Republicans are intentionally stalling efforts to jump-start the economy to insure that Barack Obama is not re-elected?"
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)Topics: Barack Obama, Economy, GOP, House Republicans, Senate Republicans
Super Committee
Schumer Predicts Super Committee Will Fail (VIDEO)
Senate Democrats' top messaging strategist predicted Monday that the deficit Super Committee will fail to meet its required minimum target of $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction.
"I don't think the Super Committee is going to succeed because our Republican colleagues have said 'no net revenues,'" said Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) on MSNBC. "When Democrats move too far left, we lose. We're now -- the basic mainstream of Democrats...we're willing to move to the middle," Schumer said. "They are not willing to do any revenues."
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)Topics: Chuck Schumer, Medicare, Patty Murray, Social Security, Super Committee, Taxes
