Well, Governor Sam Brownback (r) is one of the principle parties to blame for the budgetary mess in Kansas.

This morning, via Twitter:

Jim Ward ‏@RepJimWard

Today’s rumor-Republicans to cut & run. Adjourn session leaving Governor to make huge cuts to education. #ksleg 8:33 AM – 9 Jun 2015

Ah yes, the republican party is supposed to be the one of “personal responsibility”. Got it.

Previously:

Inviting the leader of a sovereign state to speak in your capital city to tweak your elected leader (March 4, 2015)

If you radically defund state universities how can you expect them to field a basketball team? (March 22, 2015)

A sign for the times (April 3, 2015)

This is the matter with Kansas (June 7, 2015)

Kansas: Now what? (June 8, 2015)

Rep. Ann Wagner’s (R-2) is hopping mad – or, more likely, hopping around, trying to get off the liar’s hot seat (remember the refrain “liar, liar, pants on fire”?). What’s got her hopping? A recent editorial in the St. Louis Post Dispatch that had the temerity to suggest that the deficit was falling, the economic outlook is improving and that the findings of a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report on Obamacare economic impacts have been grossly misinterpreted by folks like Wagner. So what does she do to relieve the gut-churning evidently induced by the good news? Why, write a letter to the editor, of course, insisting that they take it all back – a letter which she then proudly forwarded to her lucky constituents, a move meant, undoubtedly, to let the Tea Party types among them know what a big, fearsome Obama-hater she really is.

Rep. Wagner attributes her motivation for writing to her tender concern for constituents who, according to her claims, have been telling her about all the ways their lives  have been ruined by Obama administration policies, especially Obamacare:

Every day I hear from hardworking families in the 2nd District who are struggling to make it to the 15th and the 30th of every month in this tough economy. These are real people struggling under the weight of President Obama’s failed agenda.

Wagner added a few details in the constituent email:

Every day I hear from far too many hardworking families in the 2nd District who have seen their premiums skyrocket, their health insurance cancelled, who have been forced to change their doctors, and have seen their hours cut back at work.

I haven’t followed every pronouncement from Rep. Wagner on the topic of Obamacare, but when she starts moaning and groaning about her constituents’ Obamacare-related suffering, concrete details are few and far between. Which is probably intentional given that similar “true” stories promulgated by Wagner’s GOP colleagues have not been able to withstand close scrutiny. Remember, for instance, the subsequently debunked Bette story in Cathy McMorris Rogers response to the SOTU? Of course, it’s also likely that the complaints that she has received in response to her solicitations for Obamacare hardship stories reflect a partisan bias that skews perceptions. A Gallup poll released last week showed that only 19% of Americans said that they had been hurt by Obamcare and, of that 19%, 60% were Republican or Republican-leaning.  Which, in turn suggests that what Steve Benen identifies as political “tribalism” leads people to respond to polls – and requests from politicians for political ammo – in the way they think they should.

The real point is not that Missourians are suffering due to Obamacare, but that Rep. Wagner has invested lots of capital in questionable rhetoric and she’s up in arms  when folks like the Post-Dispatch editorial staff who, after looking carefully at the recent CBO report, point out that she and her GOP cohorts have distorted its contents. Her claims are simple:

The numbers in the CBO report couldn’t be clearer: Due to Obamacare, the equivalent of 2.5 million people will leave the workforce over the next 10 years, and government-run health care will add another trillion dollars to our national debt.

This is where the burning pants really ignite. Wagner is willfully wrong on both counts.

The CBO report does not say that jobs will be lost, just that some people will voluntarily leave the labor force or reduce their hours of work because they don’t need to keep working in order to secure affordable health insurance. Hours will not be reduced by employers, but by employees. In fact, as the Washington Post points out, “the CBO declares that ‘there is no compelling evidence that part-time employment has increased as a result of the ACA,'” thus  decimating one of Wagner’s talking points about employers cutting employee hours to escape paying for health insurance. There’s lots to be said on this topic, and I think most of it got said last week – and none of it supports Rep. Wagner’s hyperbolic assertions, including a statement from the author of the report she considers so clearly negative, CBO director Doug Elmendorf. In fact, as Elmendorf pointed out, the report indicated that Obamacare would have a positive employment effect:

Elmendorf also noted that the ACA is actually expected to boost the economy in the near-term by making health insurance and medical care affordable for the poorest Americans, giving them the freedom to spend money in other areas of the economy. “On balance, CBO estimates that the ACA will boost overall demand for goods and services over the next few years,” states the report.

As for the business about increasing the deficit:

…the CBO reduced its estimate of the net cost of the ACA by $9 billion through 2024, in part because of the number of states that have refused to implement the law’s Medicaid expansions. And the CBO still maintains that, over the 10-year window of its analysis, the ACA will reduce the federal deficit. In fact, that trend is expected to increase in subsequent years, with the ACA leading to greater deficit reduction.

So what should we think about Rep. Wagner’s whining ways? Paul Krugman’s summary of GOP duplicity could have been tailor-made to her measure:

… .Remember, the campaign against health reform has, at every stage, grabbed hold of any and every argument it could find against insuring the uninsured, with truth and logic never entering into the matter. Think about it. We had the nonexistent death panels. We had false claims that the Affordable Care Act will cause the deficit to balloon. We had supposed horror stories about ordinary Americans facing huge rate increases, stories that collapsed under scrutiny. And now we have a fairly innocuous technical estimate misrepresented as a tale of massive economic damage.

To conclude, sorry Rep. Wagner, but Obamacare is beginning to work out, the economy is getting better despite harmful GOP budget cutting, and lots of things are really getting better for lots and lots of Americans – despite the best GOP efforts to hide the truth.

All of Missouri’s Republican House delegation joined the 144 Republican House members who voted no on the budgetary continuing resolution sent to them from the Senate, which amounts to five votes from Missouri to keep the shutdown going. To a man or woman, these members of the Missouri Shutdown Hall of Shame tried to justify their votes with references to those all-purpose boogymen, the deficit and “out of control spending” (see also here).

To a man or woman, they have all also refused to admit they initially went to war with the nation’s well-being for no reason other than to defund the Affordable Care Act (ACA) – even though the ACA reduces the deficit long-term. Nor are they willing to admit that the main ACA concession they demanded as a sop when it became clear that the rest of the Congress and most of the country regarded their anti-Obamacare jihad as laughable, a repeal of the medical devices tax, was a special interest boondogle that would have undercut the ability of the ACA keep government costs down. All that reasonable bystanders can conclude from this is that our GOPers are either dishonest, severely deluded, or dumber than fenceposts.

According to S&P estimates, the antics of these shutdown diehards cost the U.S. economy $24 billion and cut 0.6% off of yearly fourth quarter GDP growth. Tell me how this reflects concern with the economy. Think Progress has compiled a partial list of government expenditures that could have been financed by the amount of money lost in the shutdown:

— The net cost of to the government from the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP): $24 billion

— The Department of Agriculture’s proposed budget: $22.6 billion

— NASA’s approved budget: $16.6 billion

— All air transportation programs, including the Federal Aviation Administration, security, research, and other costs: $21.9 billion.

— The Child Tax Credit: $22.1 billion.

— The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program (formally known as welfare): $17.7 billion.

— The cost of Head Start, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and Women Infants and Children (WIC) program combined: $25.2 billion

I hope you noticed that all or parts of these expenditures were or are bitterly opposed by these same GOPers who insist that we can’t afford them. Nevertheless, they’re all more than willing to run up similar costs in the service of empty symbolic gestures meant to impress their base. But as Think Progress also noted, these pols have been making the same types of choices from the getgo:

The shutdown was just the latest budget crisis that has been costly to the economy. A recent report found that the uncertainty created by fights over funding the government and raising the debt ceiling that have cropped up since 2010 has cost the economy nearly a million jobs.

And, to cap it all off, there are already rumblings from the GOP crazy caucus, with whom Missouri’s GOPers seem to have allied themselves, that they’ll be willing to give the ol’ shutdown routine a go once again early next year when yesterday’s agreement runs out. However, as Michael Tomasky wrote today, one thing may have changed:

. . . At least the American people did get to see what assassins the Republicans are. That was valuable. Many of us have been trying to say for many years now about Washington’s polarization and dysfunction that yes, both sides are to blame, there are no Boy Scouts here, but the sides are not remotely equally to blame, and this is a crucial point, and journalists and commentators who keep insisting on framing things this way out of some devotion to “balance” that is out of whack with the facts of reality are disserving the republic; lying, basically. I don’t think now any commentator can seriously maintain that fiction. . . .

From a Nobel Prize winning economist:

December 1, 2012, 5:37

What Defines A Serious Deficit Proposal?

….So I thought I’d look at the dollars and cents – and even I am somewhat shocked. Those tax hikes would raise $1.6 trillion over the next decade; according to the CBO, raising the Medicare age would save $113 billion in federal funds over the next decade.

So, the non-serious proposal would reduce the deficit 14 times as much as the serious proposal.

I guess we have to understand the definition of serious: a proposal is only serious if it punishes the poor and the middle class.

[emphasis in original]

Are you listening, Claire?

The shrill one:

….For the modern American right doesn’t care about deficits, and never did. All that talk about debt was just an excuse for attacking Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and food stamps….

And an excuse to reduce Willard’s tax rate to single digits.  

This hasn’t been a good week for Representative Vicky Hartzler (r).

Via twitter:

Rep. Vicky Hartzler ‏ @RepHartzler

Washington Post reports today new study finds health-care law will add $340 billion to deficit. 8:31 AM – 10 Apr 12

Not so fast. That study:

“Double-Counting” Canard Quacks Again

April 10, 2012 at 2:32 pm

Former Bush Administration official Charles Blahous has garnered some media attention by gussying up old, discredited arguments about the budgetary effects of health reform.  But his paper adds nothing new to the debate.

Blahous claims the Congressional Budget Office’s cost estimate for the health reform law “double-counts” a considerable portion of the law’s Medicare savings.  By subtracting these savings, Blahous asserts that – contrary to CBO – health reform increases the deficit.

But there’s no double-counting involved in recognizing that Medicare savings improve the status of both the federal budget and the Medicare trust funds.  The outlooks for the budget and for the Medicare trust funds are two different things; some changes in law may affect one and not the other, but other changes affect both….

….That’s no different than when a baseball player hits a home run: it adds to his team’s score and also improves his batting average.  Neither situation involves double-counting.

CBO has accounted for deficit reduction in exactly the same way in previous Congresses, under both political parties.  Until opponents of health reform latched onto the notion, no one accused CBO of faulty accounting….

A bad week, desperation for a distraction (any distraction will do) and a lack of critical thinking skills. Check, check, and check.  

Repeat after me: There is nothing wrong with Social Security, it is perfectly sustainable for a century and beyond if we simply lift the earnings cap.

Right now, high income earners only pay Social Security taxes on the first $106,800 of their income. Anything over that is not taxed for Social Security purposes. That simple tweak, one line of legislation, would put the program on a solvent path for at least a century. Maybe the fact that people are gradually waking up to that fact has something to do with the White House dropping Social Security “reform” from the grand budget proposal that will be rolled out next week.

President Barack Obama will not include reforms to the Social Security retirement program in his deficits proposals to Congress next week, the White House said Thursday.

Obama upset many fellow Democrats during this summer’s bitter negotiations with Republicans on raising the U.S. debt ceiling when he expressed a willingness to change the way government benefits are linked to inflation.

He saw the move as a way to ensure the federal pension program remains viable in the long-term, but liberal supporters who champion entitlement programs for the elderly felt he was giving up too much ground to Republicans.

White House spokesman Amy Brundage said Obama’s long-awaited deficit reduction plan, to be unveiled Monday, “will not include any changes to Social Security.”

“As the president has consistently said, he does not believe that Social Security is a driver of our near and medium term deficits,” she said.

With Obama’s shift in stance, the six Democratic members of a congressional “super committee” charged with tackling the federal deficit would not have to make immediate concessions, giving them more negotiating room with their Republican counterparts. The super committee is trying to find more than $1.2 trillion in budget savings over 10 years by Nov. 23.

Since Social Security became the law of he land in 1935, it has been the most successful anti-poverty program ever conceived of by the American government. It truly is “We, the People” taking care of one another, putting the words that start our owner’s manual into action. It has been especially successful at lifting elderly WOMEN out of poverty.

Here are some facts about women and Social Security that you may not know, but should.

• 26% of women aged 65-69 are reliant upon Social Security for virtually all of their income (90% or more) and that number climbs as women age.

• Although women are more reliant on Social Security to provide their basic needs in retirement, men receive benefits that are about 25% more than those of women. The average benefit for a woman is around $12,000 per year, while for men it is about $16,000 per year.

• This is especially important for women, because far more American women than men — 11% versus 7% — lived in poverty in 2009 (the last year for which complete numbers are available.)

• It becomes even more important for people who live alone. When older people live alone, the likelihood that they live in poverty jumps dramatically, to 17% for women and to 12% for men.

• Minority women are hit especially hard, with more than 20% of African-American, Hispanic and Native American women 65 and over living in poverty. The poverty rate is 8% for non-Hispanic white females in this age group, and 15% for Asian women.

• Without Social Security, one half of all women over 65 and two-thirds of women over 65 who live alone would live in poverty.

• 3.1. million children received Social Security survivors benefits after losing the support of a parent to death or disability, and those benefits lifted 1.1 million of those children out of poverty.

Not only does Social Security do all that, it does it without adding a single dime to the deficit. The fact of the matter is, Social Security is not only not responsible for our deficit woes, it is independent of the deficit and it is solvent for decades. Period. Full stop.

That CBO report finds that the Social Security trustfund, without changing a thing, will be able to make full payouts through 2039 — it should also be noted that the full payout projections have been pushed downward by the economic downturn of the last couple of years, and those numbers should start moving the other way as the economy recovers. And if that isn’t the case, we have a lot bigger problems than Social Security coming down the pike.

And even if the trust fund were to run out, Social Security would still be in pretty good shape. First of all, the trust fund is a relatively recent creation. It was establisned in 1983, three years before the baby boomers started turning forty, to deal with the demographic bulge headed Social Security’s way in 2011. The last boomers will retire in 2029, ten years before the trust fund is currently projected to be depleted. Essentially, when the trust fund runs dry, it will coincide with the fact that it’s mission will be, for the most part, complete. It will have eased the strain caused by the retirement of the baby boom.

The depletion of the Social Security trust fund is not a pending disaster, it’s by design. The fact of the matter is, in case you are one of the people in this country to whom facts matter, Social Security is a self funding entity, independent of the general fund. It funds itself entirely through payroll taxes, and so long as payroll taxes are collected, retirees will get their checks. The only way that changes is if Congress acts to stop collecting payroll taxes or to outright abolish the program.

There has been a concerted effort to keep Social Security from being one of the lambs that is led to the slaughter. I know. I was one of the Blogging Fellows who received a stipend from the Strenghen Social Security project for the Social Security Works think-tank for writing a series of posts to that end.

I’m going to tentatively pencil in a hashmark in the “win” column because I trust that we made our point and Social Security is still the “Third Rail” of American politics that it’s always been.  But if anyone thinks I’m going to turn off the juice based on one measley win, I have a bridge to sell you.

Today, according to a report in the St. Louis Post-Dsipatch, we learn that Tea Partier and state senator Chuck Purgason shares progressive concerns about the effort to reallocate the state’s jobs incentives during the upcoming special session of the state legislature. Purgason has offered some alternative legislation since he believes that, “Republicans are always portrayed as taking from the poor and giving to the rich, and we didn’t want to do that.”

Apart from how fiddling with incentives might effect the public’s perception of the GOP, Purgason is right about the substantive issue of harm to the poor – and to be fair, his proposed alternatives are, at first glance at least, interesting. As Matthew Iglesias points out, the progressive Center on Budget and Policy Priorities condemns the proposed Missouri “compromise” incentives legislation, asserting that it will essentially tax the poor to help the rich under the guise of creating jobs:

Killing this tax credit would raise taxes on some of Missouri’s most vulnerable residents by up to $750 a year.  It would also hurt local retailers and other businesses, since low-income people are among those most likely to spend every dollar they have.  That’s not a smart deal for Missouri.

I don’t know if Purgason’s concern with the poor is sincere or not, but I do wonder if he doesn’t experience a little cognitive dissonance when he attempts to reconcile this concern with his other positions. Tea Party poster-boy Purgason went on the record right away in favor of radically cutting government spending. That particular song-and-dance has been getting a trial run during the past several months, and it doesn’t really seem like a winner as far as the economic well-being of the poor goes. Actually, it doesn’t seem to be having much of a beneficial effect for anyone. The chart below, prepared by DailyKos‘ Jed Lewison, shows monthly job figures during 2011, and suggests that while spending cuts hurt the poor directly, they don’t do too much to save or create jobs either:

Given the evidence, I wonder if, since Purgason is concerned about the poor, he will change his tune when it comes to levying draconian spending cuts during a period of high unemployment? Or is he just another one of those GOPers worried abut doing the right thing when the wrong thing is manifestly unpopular at home, but who really couldn’t be more delighted with the result of ideologically driven political strategies, the effect of which Dave Weigel  sums up as follows:

Confidence has collapsed as Washington has gone into the austerity mode that Republicans demanded. The result: Voters think Obama’s screwing up.

When I read Michael Bersin’s transcript of Rep. Vicky Hartzler’s (R-4) recent town hall meeting in Warrensburg, I was struck by a specific aspect of her effort to gin up hysteria about the national debt. If all else fails, trot out a scary picture of the foreign bête noire of the day, currently China, and  you’ll fire up the xenophobes every time:

China owns twenty-nine percent of our foreign debt. That is a real concern to me. I said I’m on the Armed Services Committee and I’ve got to sit in a lot of hearings and I can tell you, I don’t know what China’s doing, but it’s concerning. They are building fourteen nuclear submarines right now. We’re building one. They have been devoting over twelve percent of their budget to national defense. Uh, they just introduced their version of a stealth aircraft fighter plane recently. And they just unveiled a twelve hundred mile aircraft carrier busting bomb. So, it’s a little concerning that they hold this much of our debt. In fact, with the interest that we pay China we would be able to buy three, or they could buy, three joint strike fighters and still have fifty million dollars left over. So, um, there’s a lot of reasons I think that we need to get out of debt. But certainly this obligation, um, to China is a concerning one.

First of all, if you’ll forgive me for a little nitpicking, Rep. Hartzler may be technically correct that China owns somewhere in the neighborhood of 29% of our foreign public debt – but she conveniently leaves out the fact that all foreign investors together, including China, own only 31% of our gross national debt*. China is no longer even the largest investor in that group. China currently owns only 8% of our gross national debt. See how it works –  and how Hartzler is conflating different categories of debt to create a misleading impresion?

Further, as economist Dean Baker notes, “foreign borrowing is determined by the trade deficit, end of story,” and the value of the debt held by foreign entities is tied to the value of the dollar in relation to foreign currencies. This means that it is in China’s interest to prop up the dollar, which it does by buying U.S. Treasury bills, bonds, and notes. Their willingness to hold our marker, so to speak, is not directly affected by our deficit, nor is it likely to be affected by the domestic spending cuts Hartzler and her GOP cohorts advocate.

To be fair, some economists are concerned that if the U.S. is unable to get its debt under control long-term – and the idea of long-term vs. short term is key here – it will affect the confidence of investors like China. Most concede, however that in the case of China, our interests are so conjoined that there is little likelihood that they will do anything to endanger our prosperity. China depends on the U.S. to buy Chinese goods. Without a prosperous, ever-consuming U.S., Chinese growth stalls. As Adam Davidson of NPR’s Planet Money put it in an interview earlier this year:

… the only way China can hurt us is to completely destroy their own economy. China needs the U.S. and the U.S. dollar to stay healthy, to keep growing. What we have is mutually assured economic destruction.

Michael Bersin,  quotes former Secretary of State Richard Armitage who was interviewed during a visit to Warrensburg a couple of years ago, and went so far as to assert that China’s internal stability depends on the United States economic viability.

… If the t-bills, if China withdrew, [i.e. sold off their U.S. debt] they would not be able to keep that economy humming along. They would have instant social upheaval in the countryside and probably in the cities.

So why is Hartzler trying to stoke fears about China, directly implying that China is somehow leveraging American debt to build up its military at the expense of U.S. defenses? As Personman, who was also present at the Warrensburg town hall, observed in the comments to Bersin’s transcript, Hartzler played fast and loose in her comments about the implied Chinese threat, offering:

… no evidence that they’re [i.e. the Chinese] spending the money on this [i.e. military buildup], but just the suggestion that they could be. She also cites China when explaining why we shouldn’t cut defense. She doesn’t mention the fact that we’re outspending them 7 to 1 and have been for so long that her fears about China are probably unfounded

Hartzler, of course, is not the only winger parlaying fear of the Chinese into a tool to cut social spending. She may be silly enough to actually believe the twaddle she’s peddling, but, in the wider context, I think Dean Baker has the right of it:

So, why do all the deficit hawks talk about borrowing money from China? They do it for the same reason that George HW Bush talked about Willie Horton when he was running against Michael Dukakis. It works.

The deficit hawks want the country to agree to take steps that are incredibly unpopular. They want the public to support the gutting of essential support programmes for the middle class like social security and Medicare. Naturally, this is a hard sell. Therefore, if it takes a little China bashing to make the policy go down easier, the deficit hawks are perfectly prepared to go that route. That’s the way politics works in the United States.

* Gross national debt is made up of intragovernmental debt and public debt or net debt; foreign debt is that portion of public debt that is held by foreign entities.