The Great Recession, marketing to women, and economic realities

Three things crossed my virtual desk today that are all related – in spite of what their authors might tell you.  First came a piece in Salon about the numbers of people living in or near government poverty levels;  then a WaPo story analyzing where the economic impacts of tax expenditures (i.e. tax breaks) are concentrated in terms of wage earners;  and finally an unusually cogent column for right of center Jennifer Rubin about how the Republican Party is missing out on woman’s issues in a major way.  To Quote Rubin:

The message that too many women heard from the GOP (and that Democrats exploited) was negative – finger-wagging at contraception and demeaning women in the military (as Rick Santorum did), commenting in outlandish ways about rape and decrying gay marriage. For those women not already in sync with Republicans, it came across as harsh, off-putting and mean spirited. They concluded that the GOP had nothing for them and, if they were single mothers, that Republicans didn’t really approve of them.

The message that focused on entrepreneurs, tax cuts and repealing Obamacare was not that attractive either. Most women don’t own or start businesses. If women were bewildered by Obamacare, they didn’t hear anything meaningful from Republicans about what they could do to reduce health-care costs (of which they, in many cases, were the primary purchaser) or protect them if they changed or lost their job. Considering how rotten the message and the tone, it’s remarkable that Romney won as many single women (31 percent) as he did.

Rubin then goes on to show how many economic issues – which, as the people who are now 40% of the heads of household women tend to pay attention to - Republicans COULD provide leadership on. 

Put it this way: The image of the fiery, ferocious conservative warrior that the right-wing media applauds is precisely the type that turns off women voters who aren’t already die-hard Republicans.

But it’s the substance that matters most of all. Here Republicans would do well to redirect much of their energy aware from a presently insoluble stand-off on taxes and the budget. There is no grand deal in sight, so why belabor the point?

Sounds great right?  There are some Conservative economic policies even I’d get behind, and lest we forget, most of what’s in the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) is policy proscriptions lifted from publications of the Heritage Foundation – not Think Progress.  Yet, to many of these women, the Republican Party is still a Party of cronyism, designed to aggrandize and protect benefits to those at the top of the economic ladder.

What sort of benefits?  Consider (From the Post’s Tax breaks analysis):

The 10 largest breaks in the U.S. tax code will save taxpayers more than $900 billion this year, with a little more than half the benefits flowing to the richest 20 percent of households, congressional budget analysts said Wednesday.

And the richest 1 percent of households, those with at least $327,000 in annual income, get an especially big haul — about 17 percent of the total savings, according to the report by the Congressional Budget Office.

Stop and think about that for a second.  Ten things in the supposedly 6 foot tall tax code keep $900 Billion in the pockets of Americans that could (at least in theory) have gone to the federal government to fund all sorts of things.  Just doing away with the preferential rates for capital gains (which is where most hedge fund managers hide their incomes) gives you 4 times as much money as the Sequester will take out of federal budgets by 30 September.

According to the CBO, the biggest tax breaks by dollar value this fiscal year are the tax-free treatment of employer-provided health insurance (about $260 billion), preferential rates for dividends and capital gains ($160 billion) and tax-free contributions to retirement savings ($140 billion). Deductions for state and local taxes ($80 billion), mortgage interest ($70 billion) and contributions to charity ($40 billion) are also among the top 10, as is the tax-free treatment of capital gains on assets transferred at death ($50 billion).

All of those breaks primarily benefit wealthy households, according to the CBO. Rounding out the top 10 are three breaks that primarily benefit lower-income households: the tax-free treatment of most Social Security benefits ($35 billion), the child tax credit ($60 billion) and the earned-income tax credit ($60 billion).

Even if you back out the three bottom tier breaks that mostly impact low income wage earners, you are still left with $ 660 Billion.  

How does that stack up?  The current Congressional Budget Office estimate of the FY 2013 deficit is $642 Billion.  You read that right – the top seven tax breaks give back to Americans more money than we need to erase this year’s deficit.  Half of that amount - $330 Billion – go to the top 20% of wage earning households in the US.  And consider that the infamous 1% get $112.2 Billion of those 7 items (which is only slightly more than the total that the Justice Department will spend this year).   

Republicans have been hard at work the last several election cycles to keep these tax breaks – and the historically low rates that go with them – in place no matter what.  Those actions, which can’t be hidden no matter how hard Republicans spin it, are at the heart of why women don’t want to vote for Republicans.  In addition, they are why a whole lot of other Americans don’t want to vote for Republicans, since the outcomes of preserving this structure is a huge increase in people with significantly declining (or never rising) economic status.

Put another way, if you have advocated for policies that support these breaks, you have preserved an economic system that:

• Leaves ½ of American with NO net assets
• Drove UP the decline in wage income in the US (which has been going down for approximately 30 years)
• Created a median income in the U.S. of $34,000 (which is $4000) above the federal poverty standard for a family of 4
• Gave the top 20 wage earners in the US the same amount of income it takes to deliver the entire federal food assistance program (SNAP)

Harsh, I know, but this is where our country is.  This is what Republicans have fought to protect – and this is what Democrats ARE NOW JOINING IN TO KEEP ALIVE.

The Drone Wars: Assassinations and ANOTHER definition for Terrorism from the Washington Post

Over at the Washington Post today, Eugene Robinson had this exchange in his weekly Q&A on the Post’s website:

Q.  A war by any other name

The "war on terror" was misnamed at the start. Although I agree that it makes no sense to wage war on a tactic, calling it the war on terror implies that only one side used the tactic. What the jihadists called terrorism, Donald Rumsfeld and others called shock and awe. Drone strikes are a form of terror, as was the attack on Fallujah. Throughout Iraq and Afghanistan there have been similar events specifically designed to strike terror into the hearts of those who resist the American-sponsored invasions. The correct name is and continues to the the war OF terror, and it will not end until both sides renounce the tactic.

·         –

May 28, 2013 9:25 AM

·         Permalink

A.      Eugene Robinson :

I have to disagree. Drone strikes are used by the U.S. as a form of assassination, not terror. The United States is not guilty of terrorism in the same way al-Qaeda is. 

– May 28, 2013 1:31 PM

WTF?  Assassinations, particularly ones that more often then not come with civilian casualties (infamously known as collateral damage) are NOT terrorism?  Is that because a state actor (the U.S. Airforce and or CIA) carries them out?  Really?  SO all those Iraqi government officials killed over the last ten years by guys on motorcycles weren't killed by "terrorists?"  Funny how hte Post got that wrong for a decade.

Look folks, over and over again when captured Muslim “terrorists” ask why they do what they do, they respond with the terrorizing effects of US armed actions in Muslim countries.  To say that killing Muslims from Drone is “just assassination” is like saying . . . I can’t even think of a justification that I’ve heard recently that comes close to this one.

Really Mr. Robinson – given your track record I expect better of you.

Civil Liberties, the AP, and Government Accountability - Why are we looking for all the wrong people to blame?

As I wrote a couple of days ago, the media are now up in arms over the curtailing of civil liberties that is inherent in the AP Phone Records Scandal that broken in Washington DC last week.  The Washington Post published no less then five columns (here, here, here, here, and here) that featured the story in some form – and  all variations on the same theme:  this is an egregious assault on the press and civil liberties, and goes past anything the Bush Administration did, and must be stopped.

As I noted then (additional emphasis added):

History is repleat with examples of surveillance states, all probably set up due to the PERCEPTION of an existential threat , that grow and morph and begin to consume the very societies that they are meant to protect.  It happened in the Soviet Union, it happened in Nazi Germany – it happened here during WWII resulting in internment camps for Japanese citizens (among other horrible domestic abuses).  It happened under Nixon, and it happened under Johnson as Vietnam raged.

So why in the world did anyone think that the vast (and often contractor led) surveillance state cobbled together in the 9/11 ashes of the Cold War would be any different?  Because when it started was pitched to focus on “terrorists”, which is really code for Muslims?  Because it was run by the federal government?  On what basis did all these media types, and telcom bosses, and ordinary citizens believe they would be immune from NSA’s purported billion emails a day capturing and filtering capability?

Glenn Greenwald expand the point in his blog today, writing this:

You don't say! The Washington Post's breaking news here is only about four years late. Back in mid-2010, ACLU executive director Anthony Romero, speaking about Obama's civil liberties record at a progressive conference, put it this way: "I'm disgusted with this president." In the spirit of optimism, one can adopt a "better-late-than-never" outlook regarding this newfound media awakening.

What’s actually at work here, is that the denial of civil liberties (which is really a denial of human rights) has finally left the “them” community and come to “us.”  No longer can white, middle class, corporate America turn the other way while Muslims are subjected to invasive, terrible treatment, because that same segment of white, middle class America is now  firmly in the sights of the surveillance state.  It is the culmination of something predicted, ironically, by the CIA (H/T Glenn Greenwald at the link above)[emphasis mine]:

This is such an under-appreciated but crucial aspect of the Obama legacy. Recall back in 2008 that the CIA prepared a secret report (subsequently leaked to WikiLeaks) that presciently noted that the election of Barack Obama would be the most effective way to stem the tide of antiwar sentiment in western Europe, because it would put a pleasant, happy, progressive face on those wars and thus convert large numbers of Obama supporters from war opponents into war supporters. That, of course, is exactly what happened: not just in the realm of militarism but civil liberties and a whole variety of other issues. That has had the effect of transforming what were, just a few years ago, symbols of highly contentious right-wing radicalism into harmonious bipartisan consensus. That the most vocal defenders of this unprecedented government acquisition of journalists' phone records comes from government-loyal progressives - reciting the standard slogans of National Security and Keeping Us Safe and The Terrorists - is a potent symbol indeed of this transformation.

While I’m glad the media is finally waking up to how bad this really is, I think they are going off in the wrong direction for a solution.  Both David Ignatious and Joe Davidson of the WaPo (cited above) seem to think that part of the solution is “management” of federal agencies that isn’t afraid to manage and lead, so that federal employees at Justice and the IRS (in it’s Tea Party aggregation filter scandal) would have been stopped before they started.  They all but whine that senior feds aren’t doing their jobs (insert bloated, ineffective government anyone argument of the day here) and if they were, this would never have happened.

Really?  Let’s start with whom, exactly, you think are these managers who are so derelict?  The Senior Executive Service career folks who are running many parts of the federal government because they have no politically appointed bosses (thanks to Senate Republican’s sudden aversion to Advice and Consent on Presidential appointees).  Are they those same appointees, who all serve “at the pleasure of the President” and thus whose very job depends on toting the Party Line?

Or, could it be that the abuses of civil liberties – which started with state sanctioned torture and indefinite detention under President Bush – are well grounded in the Orwellian legal system Congress has constructed at the behest of two Presidents of opposing parties.  From the Patriot Act, to the FISA reauthorization and beyond, Congress has abdicated its checks and balances role on the Executive Branch, preferring to give ever broader powers to the White House, and it’s principle occupant, all in the name of keeping us “Safe.”  One wonders when we will see Congress grill itself over its own contributions to this horrible alternate reality with the vigor it applies to the Administration.

But then again, we’d all have to recognize that all these abuses – regardless of the targeted group – are heinous abominations against our Nation and its ideals.  Sadly, I fear most Americans are not yet ready to do that.

REBLOG: When the IRS targeted liberals

Other recent reporting on the Obama Administration has documented that the IRS uncovered and then corrected actions by some career federal staff to develop tools to assess whether Tea Party groups filing as social welfare organizations under Ch. 504 of the tax code were, in fact, political actors barred from using that tax provision.   While it was initially reported as the IRS targeting Tea Partiers, the MSM as usual rushed to judgement without most of the facts, and talking heads on both sides ran up the flag of capture as they attempted to board the pirate ship of the IRS.

leaving aside the subsequent reporting on the fact that this practice is actually routine in the IRS, and leaving aside the fact that in the run up to the 2012 election there was a significant boost in 504 application by Tea Party groups that was not matched by a significant boost in applications by liberal groups, Alex Seitz-Wald reminds us that the IRS was accused of doing this to liberal groups under the Bush Administration.  When the IRS targeted liberals

The Surveillence State nabs the Associated Press, a known terrorist organization (not)

According to published reports (U.S. News Here; Salon here and here)  the Associated Press has now been swept by the vast surveillance state set up by the Bush Administration, and then expanded broadly by the Obama Administration (see Here, and Here, and Here, and Here, and Here for some of my thoughts on this issue).  Glenn Greenwald has made a career of dealing with this issue.  And I have to say – AP why are you surprised?

History is repleat with examples of surveillance states, all probably set up due to the PERCEPTION of an existential threat , that grow and morph and begin to consume the very societies that they are meant to protect.  It happened in the Soviet Union, it happened in Nazi Germany – it happened here during WWII resulting in internment camps for Japanese citizens (among other horrible domestic abuses).  It happened under Nixon, and it happened under Johnson as Vietnam raged.

So why in the world did anyone think that the vast (and often contractor led) surveillance state cobbled together in the 9/11 ashes of the Cold War would be any different?  Because it started was pitched to focus on “terrorists”, which is really code for Muslims?  Because it was run by the federal government?  On what basis di all these media types, and telcom bosses, and ordinary citizens believe they would be immune from NSA’s purported billion emails a day capturing and filtering capability?

Look, we as American citizens have to make a choice, and then we have to start acting on it and keep acting on it.  We can either have a free state, where the government really and truly works for us, or we can have a safe state, where the government really and truly listens to us behind our backs, arrests and detains us for no reason and without due process, and murders us using determinations for the President that never see the light of day.  But we can’t have both, and expect them to be mutually co-existent.