Benjamin I. Page and Larry M. Bartels at
The Los Angeles Times look at money, political access, and the nation's richest citizens:
[W]hy did policymakers focus so intently on the deficit issue? One reason may be that the small minority that saw the deficit as the nation's priority had more clout than the majority that didn't.
We recently conducted a survey of top wealth-holders (with an average net worth of $14 million) in the Chicago area, one of the first studies to systematically examine the political attitudes of wealthy Americans. Our research found that the biggest concern of this top 1% of wealth-holders was curbing budget deficits and government spending. When surveyed, they ranked those things as priorities three times as often as they did unemployment — and far more often than any other issue. [...] On policy, it wasn't just their ranking of budget deficits as the biggest concern that put wealthy respondents out of step with other Americans. They were also much less likely to favor raising taxes on high-income people, instead advocating that entitlement programs like Social Security and healthcare be cut to balance the budget. Large majorities of ordinary Americans oppose any substantial cuts to those programs.
While the wealthy favored more government spending on infrastructure, scientific research and aid to education, they leaned toward cutting nearly everything else.
Jump below the fold for more analysis of the day's top stories.
Harold Meyerson at The Washington Post rightly points out that our economy is now built to primarily benefit the wealthy:
[T]here’s a bigger problem with the conservative contention that government stands athwart the private sector’s capacity to create jobs and prosperity: It fails to acknowledge that the private sector no longer creates jobs and prosperity like it used to, completely apart from whatever effects governmental policy may have on job creation. Entirely on their own and well before Obamacare was a gleam in anyone’s eye, employers began cutting back or altogether dropping health coverage and retirement benefits for employees. Nor have government regulations compelled employers to increase the share of company revenue going to profits (which is at its highest level in decades) and reduce the share going to wages (which is at its lowest level in decades). [...]
In short, the economy is working for our economic elites. The massive changes they would have to make to investment strategies and the division of corporate revenue so that the economy worked for the majority of the American people are nowhere on the horizon. The great growth machine that once was the U.S. private sector ain’t what it used to be — which is one reason each recession since 1990 has been longer, deeper and more intractable than the last. That’s the new economic reality in this country, and that’s what the budget of the Congressional Progressive Caucus responds to. It’s not that liberals have been prompted to move leftward through the readings of ancient socialist gospels or by smoking some stash left over from the ’60s. It’s that the economy has reached a dismal stability far short of its full employment potential or renewing the promise of widespread prosperity, and government investment is required to make up the difference. If anyone is smoking something, it is conservatives who foresee a rebirth of prosperity if only the private sector is left alone.
Over at
Reuters,
Ryan McCarthy argues that income inequality is increasingly permanent:
We’ve heard about rising income inequality for years — it’s become a post-recession rallying cry. Even Jamie Dimon seems to think inequality is bad.
The hope, however, was that this was a cyclical problem — when the economy got cranking again, those of us hit hard by the downturn would start earning more and income inequality would fall.
A new paper, however, looking at male and household earnings, finds that income inequality is increasingly permanent. (The study didn’t break out women’s income.) “Rising Inequality: Transitory or Permanent?,” which was submitted as part of the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, looks at pre- and after-tax incomes from 1987 to 2009 and finds some disturbing trends. [...] It could also mean that a key component of the the way we think about the U.S. economy could be broken. We tend to think that America is a pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps economy. Lose your job? Just work harder, move or get new skills. This study — and the 4.8 million Americans who are officially considered among the long-term unemployed — suggest that it’s much harder to get back on our feet economically than we think. As University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers said: “The rich are getting richer and staying richer. The poor are getting poorer and staying poorer.”
The
editors at The Los Angeles Times, meanwhile, lament America's gun obsession:
If such a large proportion of Americans favors a weapons ban — and an even bigger majority, 65%, backs banning high-capacity magazines carrying more than 10 rounds, according to a January poll by Washington Post/ABC — why the dearth of congressional support? Feinstein is pretty sure she has the answer. "You'd think the Congress would listen, but they clearly listen to the National Rifle Assn.," she complained.
She has a point. The NRA exercises its influence in many ways, starting with its ratings of congressional candidates — anything less than an A grade from the organization could turn off a powerful voting bloc. Then there is its legendary fundraising prowess; it spent $18.6 million during the 2012 election cycle, according to the Sunlight Foundation. Yet this is an organization with somewhere between 3 million and 4.5 million members (exact numbers are hard to come by), in a country where 70 million say they own guns, and millions more support broad gun rights. There is something else in the American character that makes us love our guns.
Steven L. Katz, a Republican war veteran, argues for revival of the assault weapons ban in
The Christian Science Monitor:
Like many Americans, I am disappointed that the reinstatement of the assault weapons ban will not be included in the Senate bill on gun control. It is my hope that Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D) of California, who introduced the legislation, will bring the assault weapons ban provision to the floor as a separate measure in the form of an amendment. [...] I have so-called “street cred.” I am a registered Republican, worked at the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI), voted for George W. Bush not once, but twice, and served two tours in Iraq as an Army officer where I experienced extensive ground combat. I support America’s Second Amendment rights, the idea of small government, and the sacrosanct personal liberties entrusted to the American people by the Constitution.
However, the more I engage former military colleagues, friends, and family members on gun violence in America, the less I understand this debate to be about personal liberties and the ability to protect oneself and family from either marauding criminal gangs or a tyrannical government, and the more I see this debate to be about personal selfishness at the expense of other Americans’ right to life. [...]
I feel this mindset is truly selfish and one I cannot condone; it is inconsistent with the Constitution that I swore to support and defend while I was deployed to Iraq. It is time for gun advocates, including my colleagues and friends, to place the welfare of the country first and take a cue from one of the Army’s axioms – “selfless service” – and support legislation in curbing the legal accessibility of offensive weapons like the AR-15.
Editorials are still pouring in about this week's 10-year anniversary of the Iraq War. The Des Moines Register adds its take:
While you can’t undo mistakes of the past, this nation needs assurances that its leaders recognize them — and will avoid making them in the future. Perhaps the most important lesson: Any politician who suggests deploying U.S. troops overseas, let alone launching a pre-emptive attack on a country that poses no immediate threat, must be held to a higher standard than was applied to George W. Bush in 2003.
Finally,
Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius takes to the nation's opinion pages with an column on the positive effects of health insurance reform:
The law has also begun to curb rising health costs across the system by cracking down on waste and fraud and creating powerful incentives for hospitals to spend their resources more wisely. These reforms have already led to significant improvements in health outcomes.
That includes the first drop in hospital readmissions for Medicare beneficiaries on record, which means when people with Medicare go home from the hospital, they are more likely to stay healthy and less likely to have to return for additional care.
Just as important, this progress has contributed to the slowest sustained growth in health spending in 50 years. National healthcare spending has now grown at historic lows for three consecutive years — and Medicare and Medicaid spending is growing even more slowly. In 2012, Medicare spending per beneficiary rose by less than half of 1 percent, while Medicaid spending actually dropped by nearly 2 percent.