State Senator Kurt Schaefer (R-19) wants to be Missouri’s next Attorney General. He wants it a lot since he announced his plans to run in 2016 over a year ago. Consequently he’s been very busy  getting his name out before the public. But not just any public. His constituency of choice seems to be the reddest dregs of this increasingly red state. It’s  hard to think of just about any rightwing bandwagon he hasn’t tried to ride since declaring his candidacy, no matter how rickety:

Tax Cuts for Rich Folks: Evidence suggests that Schaefer supports the Kansas tax “experiment” and would be willing to beggar Missouri’s middle and working class in order to give big tax cuts to rich folks and their businesses. When state GOPers recently fêted Kansas Governor Sam Brownback, Schaefer, who is currently the Missouri Senate Appropriations Committee chairman, opined that the governor had “some really compelling numbers.” This is in spite of what Politico has dubbed the “Brownback effect,” observing that “Republicans once idolized Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback as a tax cutting superstar – now he’s a lesson in what not to do.” Evidently Schaeffer didn’t get the message. Or else he actually takes seriously dishonest statistics of the sort that billionaire Rex Sinquefield published in Forbes Magazine in order to make the Kansas experiment look like it is succeeding, or at least not as disastrous as it is proving to be.

Social Spending Cuts: Schaeffer, like so many GOPers before him, seems to think it’s okay to fund tax cuts – favored by rich political donors like Rex Sinquefield – by cutting the ground out from under those who lack the wherewithal and the influence to fund his climb to the top of the Missouri political heap. He’s proposed cutting $130 million from the already meager amount allocated by the House to social services, health and mental health services. He says that the agencies are wasteful and that cuts are necessary to slow their growth.

It is true that Missouri’s social services are currently not functioning too well. Ill-considered cuts and the resulting “reforms” over the past few years have taken a steep toll, a situation that many take as evidence that they need more rather than less money. According to figures supplied by state budget officials, Schaefer’s claims of waste perhaps reflect his ideological biases rather than a close analysis of the real-life situation. As for out-of-control growth? Wouldn’t you expect that as Missouri continues its GOP-led transformation into a poverty stricken backwater, one might expect demand for services to increase – a demand, that folks like Schaefer are determined not to meet.

Guns “R”Us: Schaefer was one of the motivating forces behind Missouri’s Amendment 5, a constitutional amendment voted in by the gun-mad hordes who dominate mid-term elections in Missouri. This amendment, under the rubric of an “inalienable” right to own guns, was so badly written that it has made it impossible to bar convicted felons from gun ownership. As the St Louis Post-Dispatch described it, Schaefer’s decision “to start acting like a pandering fool” has had a scary, but entirely predictable – and predicted – result:

… .In a state in which there are more gun deaths than traffic deaths, in which toddlers are grabbing mommy and daddy’s guns and firing away, in which cities are being told by a Legislature there is nothing they can do about gun violence, now convicted felons can own guns and there is nothing the police can do about it.

Again, let me reiterate. This guy’s a lawyer – and he even wants to be the state’s main lawyer. If his legal acumen was insufficient to locate the problems in what was essentially his baby, a lot of other folks pointed them out before it was too late to fix them. Now Schaefer’s twisting and turning, trying to find a way to prove that “Amendment 5 doesn’t mean what it says.” Sadly, the courts don’t agree.

So stop and think. Either Schaefer is, as the Post-Dispatch implies, a spineless panderer, or he’s out-and-out stupid. He’s either taken in by or cynically peddling obviously failing, ideologically driven voodoo economic theories, GOP welfare queen vilification, and the Guns equal God ideology of hardcore gun crazies. Either way what rational, unbiased person could trust him to act in the best interests of the people of Missouri – either in the State Senate where he now works his backwards magic, or as Attorney General? Is the distinction even meaningful? If the sum of a politician’s major legislative efforts are stupid and harmful then it’s doesn’t make much difference if the motivation is incompetence or venality. For all practical purposes that individual is a fool.

Greg Sargent writes today:

The Republican strategy on sequestration has been clear for months now: sequestration is terrific because spending cuts are good…and every specific program cut by sequestration is a terrible injustice that Barack Obama should have avoided.

Many of Missouri’s Republican political contingent, folks like new-minted Rep. Ann Wagner (R-2), who were adamantly unwilling to entertain meaningful compromise when the sequester was still a gleam in the Tea Party’s eye, and who strutted around demanding spending cuts and no, never, under any circumstances, new revenue, are, now that they’ve got their cuts, trying to confuse the issue by talking about “Obama’s sequester.”  GOPers are also jumping on specific unpopular and damaging cuts – first they wept about curtailing White House tours and now they’re rending their hair about the furlough of large numbers of air traffic controllers. They want us to believe that they they’re blameless and if the Obama administration only cared enough or were smart enough they’d cut something else instead. But guess what? President Obama is powerless to pick and choose what to cut:

What is happening now is what the law requires, nothing less and nothing more. The president has no choice but to follow it.

Here’s what the laws and the technical analyses say. According to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), 897 non-defense “budget accounts” — and the thousands of “programs, payments and activities” within them — shall be cut by the “same percentage.”

That hasn’t stopped our GOP pols from pretending that it was or is all avoidable. Ann Wagner, for instance, wants us to know that she “offered solutions to replace his [i.e. Obama’s] sequester with responsible cuts and reforms” – which, Wagner being such a reasonable member of the extreme right wing, otherwise known as the GOP, were surely ignored out of pure willfulness, don’t you think?

Another Missouri GOPer, Senator Roy Blunt, has been far cagier. He wants President Obama to really own these Republican spending cuts because, once they go into effect, nobody but nobody is going to like them:

Last week, Blunt introduced the “Essential Services Act of 2013,” which would protect American jobs and public safety by ensuring “essential” federal employees like air traffic controllers continue to provide vital services. The bill, which Senate Democrats blocked as an amendment to the continuing resolution (CR) last month, would give the Obama Administration the flexibility it claims it does not have to apply the same standards used during occurrences of inclement weather or other government shutdowns to the sequestration cuts to each agency.

This effort by Blunt and Wagner to trick us into thinking that that if it weren’t for President Obama and his  Democratic minions we could have our budget cake and eat just as well as we always have is just downright silly. As Sargent notes:

… It may be true that no one specifically wants to shut down air traffic control, or the FBI, or food inspections, or the military … but once you start really looking at that list, what you find is that the level of cuts involved mean that something that “nobody” wants to cut will in fact have to be cut.

The truth is that sequestration cuts – which are significant enough already – already represent significantly lower levels of cutting spending than what House Republicans wanted. Some Tea Partiers in the House voted against them because they were not severe enough. And don’t forget: the budgets that Republicans have been voting for, year after year, promise to entirely wipe out non-defense discretionary spending over the long term. All of it.

Now, it’s true that if you ask Republicans whether they support this cut or that cut, at least the ones that affect their supporters, they’ll claim that, no, they only want to do away with waste, fraud, abuse, and foreign aid. But that’s not what their budgets say. It’s not what their rhetoric says, either.

I believe that almost every one of our Missouri GOP House members voted for that GOP budget that would, as Sargent correctly notes, “wipe out non-defense discretionary spending over the long term. All of it.” I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of hearing them squawk now that the chickens they enabled are on their way to Missouri. Is it too much to ask these charlatans to stand up and take responsibility for what they’ve done – not to mention what they’re still trying to do?

Yesterday the St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran a great editorial. The problem it addressed was straightforward: the $500 million plus state budget shortfall. The editorial writers made no bones about the obvious source of the problem:

Digging out of this hole is Missouri’s true challenge. But neither our Legislature nor our governor can get over their “no new taxes” pledges to do anything meaningful about it.

The solution they suggested was just as straightforward:

Mr. Nixon should declare a holiday. A tax credit holiday.

This single action would more than fill the budget hole estimated by legislative leaders to be in the range of $500 million.

Everybody in the Capitol knows that Missouri’s biggest ongoing budget problem, outside of the Great Recession, is the state’s propensity to hand out tax credits like legislative candy along a parade route. Some credits go to good causes, like senior citizens on a fixed income. Most go to developers or corporations as incentives, theoretically, to create jobs.

Unfortunately for the theory that tax credits create jobs, the evidence that they do so overall is just not there. This fact is fairly well known, accounting for the fact that there are folks on all sides of the partisan divide willing to take pot shots at the practice.

Happily, there are some folks who are willing to at least try to take action to rationalize the use of tax credits. Sadly, they aren’t in Missouri. Michigan Democratic lawmakers, referencing the relationship between an educated work force and job creation, put forward a plan to finance free community college tuition for state residents, which would paid for by canceling $3.5 million worth of tax credits:

Study after study after study has emphasized the importance of a highly educated workforce in the economic vitality of any state in the 21st century” said Senate Democratic leader Gretchen Whitmer, D-East Lansing

So what has our governor decided to do? In spite of the importance of education to our economically beleaguered state, Governor Nixon proposes to partially balance the budget by cutting $89 million from an already mediocre state higher education system.

This year, when you hear talk about the state’s dire budget situation and the pain and suffering it has caused – 860 state jobs will be lost, for just one instance – remember there was a solution staring us in the face, and miracle of miracles, it might even  have garnered some bipartisan support. Also keep in mind that a few days ago, GOP gubernatorial candidate Dave Spence actually proposed a moratorium on tax credits as an important part of his economic plan. He seems to have learned something in those home economics courses.

To give the Governor his due, he’s up against a system that practically dictates that the worst case solution will be the only practicable option. In spite of some GOP criticism of tax credits, others in the legislature have made their unwillingness to reform the state’s program known. Last year, in fact, the Governor was warned by Steve Tilley, who has since become House Speaker, and three other powerful committee chairman – before he even put a budget proposal forward – that they would not permit him to use tax credit reform to balance the budget.

It’s hard not to conclude that once again powerful vested interested are calling the shots when it comes to the distribution of state tax dollars.  Nevertheless, one can’t help wondering just what might be achieved if the Governor had been willing to go out on a limb and show just a little more political courage. Surely there’s a time when we have to fight – even if we’re already backed to the wall? Perhaps that’s when we most need to show some fight.

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.

PoliticMo reports that Roy Blunt is up in arms about reports that a portion of the disaster relief funds promised to aid the Joplin recovery might be delayed so that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) can address the devastation caused by Hurricane Irene. Where Senator McCaskill, for her part, expresses resolve to “fight to make sure” that Joplin gets its due, Blunt directs his rhetorical attack directly at FEMA:

If FEMA can’t fulfill its promise to our state because we have other disasters, that’s unacceptable, and we need to take a serious look at how our disaster response policies are funded and implemented.

The situation in Joplin is serious and we all expect both McCaskill and Blunt to do their best to insure that it is adequately addressed. Nevertheless, the focus of Blunt’s pugnacious response does prompt a few questions:

— Why is Blunt questioning implementation? The issue here seems to be one of funding pure and simple. If nature persists in dumping one disaster after another on the United States, we will have to ration relief funds if they aren’t adequate. But when it comes to implementation, the consensus of reasonable people seems to be that the current FEMA, as opposed to the bad old Bush FEMA, seems to be doing an excellent job and can be expected to continue to so so as long as sufficient funds are available.

— In view of the primacy of the funding issue, what does Blunt have to say to GOP party leaders, like Eric Cantor, who are willing to continue to hold the well-being of Americans hostage, this time by making disaster relief contingent upon ideologically driven spending cuts, cuts that in many instances make us less able to respond to disasters in the first place?

— What does he say to those of his GOP confrères, such as Ron Paul, who are loudly trumpeting their desire to do away with or seriously weaken FEMA?

Given these facts, the real question is whether Blunt is huffing and puffing about FEMA in order to gain political points at home while undercutting the excellent job that the Obama administration has done in rehabilitating the agency, or whether he’s really willing to blow down the GOP House that is proposing to pull the legs out from under the agency at a crucial time. How can we know the answer? Easy – when Blunt shows that he can stand up to the Tea Party brigade and support strings-free funding of FEMA, we’ll know just how sincere he really is.

Wanna see how Senator McCaskill’s doing as she tries to dance the red state/blue state tango?  If so, take a look at Joan McCarter’s reportage on DailyKos. Hint: it has to do with spending and jobs creation, specifically why McCaskill thinks we have to worry about the former and don’t dare discuss the latter, and it involves statements like:

Setting realistic expectations is one thing. Shooting your own party in the foot is quite another, and it sure seems like in trying to do the former, Sen. Claire McCaskill achieves the latter.

After you read McCarter’s piece, also consider the fact that McCaskill is touting her co-sponsorship of a “Democratic” Balanced Budget Amendment (BBA) – or, as I call it, BBA Lite, since it is a little milder than the drop-dead dumb BBA proposals put forward by the GOP:

The amendment supported by McCaskill requires balanced budgets to begin in five years, aims to protect entitlements, and  allows congress to opt-out in times of war.

Additionally, the Democrat’s version prevents congress from passing tax cuts for individuals earning more than $1 million a year unless the country maintains a surplus, a provision that could face opposition from Republicans.

McCaskill may attempt to cut out the really ugly parts, but a BBA is still a very bad idea all by itself, as commentators from the left, along with a few honest, half-way intelligent folks from the right, agree. It’s not just a bad idea, though, it’s the lazy politician’s way to build rigidity into a system that requires flexibility, all just so that they can avoid having to do what we elect them to do – govern.

But the worst of it is the rhetorical trope McCaskill uses to justify this particular walk on the red side. She dredges up the incessant and dishonest GOP metaphor that misleadingly compares family and government finances, and declares “Congress ought to do what families in Missouri do every day: live within their means.” Actually, even though governments are very different types of entities than families, families themselves do take out mortgages to buy houses, and secure loans to send their children to college and make large purchases. Even in Missouri. Responsibly managed debt gives us greater flexibility and the option is absolutely essential for the government as well.

I am sure that McCaskill thinks that she is cleverly stealing GOP thunder, cutting the rug out from under the other guys by calling for a BBA that doesn’t exactly go after the same targets and then calling them out when they object. I am sure she thinks that using their own language makes it all just that much more insidious.

Unfortunately, all McCaskill’s really doing, besides trying to save her backside in a conservative state, is helping to legitimate right wing positions. If even Democrats talk the GOP talk and refuse to question the basis of GOP claims about the need to cut spending, even as we are potentially sliding into another recession, the dialogue will go no further. We will continue to talk about spending when we should be talking about jobs. It would take courage to try to change the terms of discourse, to go on the offensive in order to throw the GOP steam-roller off-track and, sadly, courage so often seems to fall victim to a misguided, purely political pragmatism.

I do believe that the best way to insure that we eventually arrive in progressive Nirvana is to vote as left as you can given your options, and in Missouri right now, the only option, the putative “left” political establishment, is staking out territory on the center-right side of the room. Since I don’t foresee a primary challenge to Senator McCaskill, I’ll continue to support her, but I do wish she wouldn’t go out of her way to make it so hard, especially since I’m not sure it’s going to do her much good in the long run. She won’t win the Tea Partiers, and, in the meanwhile, she sure has pissed off lots of progressives. I  hope those legendary independents the “moderate” Democrats all claim to be courting are worth it.

Addendum: Guess who else thinks that a balanced budget amendment is a bad idea?  As per Steve Benen, none other than Standard & Poors. Hear that Claire?

* Edited slight for clarity.

I’ve commented several times on Roy Blunt’s tendency to play fast and loose with the truth (see, for instance here, here and here). And It seems that his new job as a senator hasn’t changed this particular proclivity. In short, as ThinkProgress notes, Old Roy’s at it again.

Seems like Blunt has been sent out to provide cover for congressional Republicans who are, wittingly or otherwise, out to scuttle the recovery (and Obama’s re-election hopes?) by refusing to raise the debt ceiling unless they get a whole host of ideologically driven spending cuts – cuts they’ll never get if Democrats have what it takes up to stand up to this type of economic terrorism. Roy has been making the rounds of the talk shows claiming that the rating agencies are threatening to cut the U.S. credit rating because of the deficit (here’s the audio of Roy going at it during an interview on KTRS in St. Louis). Of course, this assertion is blatantly false since the agencies involved have been explicit that they are considering this move solely because of the possibility that Republican intransigence will lead to the first ever U.S. credit default.

You can’t default on your debts without consequences and neither can the U.S. government. The debt ceiling pertains to already obligated funds – not new spending, something we would expect Blunt to know. We would also expect that someone who is at least nominally qualified to serve as a U.S. senator would know what the ratings agencies have been very publicly saying. The obvious conclusion is that Roy knows he’s wrong on a number of fronts, knows that the truth is easily available, but has such minimal expectations in regard to the capacity of Americans to distinguish their front side from their back side that he thinks they’ll gladly take anything he says at face value.

I’m also willing to take odds that Blunt knows that his little story about the relationship between the deficit and U.S. credit ratings is not only dishonest in its own right, but gets its punch from another politically motivated fabrication to the effect that the deficit is an immediate problem. Consider, for instance, this graph, prepared by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (via Paul Krugman’s NYT Blog):

The blue line above is the interest rate on 10 year bonds. Note that it is going down; interest rates are decreasing.  As Steve Benen notes:

… .I realize the phrase “interest rate on 10-year bonds” probably isn’t one of those phrases that gets bandied about around American dinner tables, but the more serious a problem the deficit becomes, the higher that blue line would appear.

And therein lies the point: the blue keeps going down. Indeed, it hasn’t been this low in many decades. If the deficit were a drag on the economy, and the United States were facing some sort of debt crisis, that blue line would be through the roof. But that’s not even close to what’s happening.

Remember the movie Pulp Fiction – which popularized the idea of the crimeworld “cleaner,” an individual who, for a price, removes all evidence of a crime? Make you think of a particular junior senator from Missouri perhaps?  

GOP Senator Roy Blunt has been appointed to the Senate Appropriations, Commerce, Rules and Intelligence Committees. I suppose they have to put him somewhere and the GOP has never seemed to be especially attuned to irony. What to expect from Blunt in his role on Appropriations? There’s a hint in this tweet from earlier today:

After Senate Dems failed to put up a budget for last 2 yrs the serious business of cutting government spending will take place in Approps.

Am I the only one who thinks it’s just too rich to hear talk of spending cuts from one of the congressional leaders responsible for pushing the deficit to astronomical heights in the first place? Remember when Daddy Blunt wholeheartedly endorsed two extravagant wars while helping to enact irresponsible tax cuts for the wealthy? And don’t forget his contributions to the lax oversight that led to the financial meltdown that plunged us into the debt basement we’re trying to climb out of.

Somehow, despite Blunt’s deficit-cutting fervor, I doubt that he’ll be going after all those taxpayer subsidies that are going to very rich oil giants, or, closer to home-sweet-home, the farm subsidies that are near and dear to his rural constituency. One thing we can be sure of, after all his years in Washington, when it comes to cost-cutting, Daddy Blunt knows who butters his great big slice of GOP bread – and who doesn’t matter at all.