Say It Ain't So: Re - PUBLIC - ans

[don]

In Republican States, More Government Jobs

By FLOYD NORRIS

FAMILIARITY, it is said, breeds contempt. Or perhaps, it is dependence that breeds resentment.

Whatever the explanation, the states whose economies are most dependent on government employment and economic activity are also the states that are most likely to vote for Republicans, who generally campaign on promises to reduce the size of government.

Consider one measure, the proportion of civilian employees in each state with government jobs, whether federal, state or local. Nationally, the proportion last month was 16 percent, the lowest figure since 2001.

But the variance among the 50 states is large. At the top of the list, with one out of four workers employed by the government, is Wyoming. At the other extreme is Pennsylvania, with just one in eight.

Wyoming is among the most Republican states, and that is part of a pattern. Of the 15 states with the highest proportion of government employment, 10 voted for Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee, in last year’s presidential election. (The District of Columbia, with more than 30 percent of the employees working for the government, is not included in the list because it is not a state, but it voted for President Obama.) Of the 15 states with the lowest level of government employment, only two — Indiana and Tennessee — voted for Mr. Romney.

If only the 25 states with the lowest level of government employment had voted in the election, Mr. Obama would have won the national popular vote by a landslide margin of 7.3 percentage points, much larger than his actual margin of 3.9 percentage points. But among the other 25 states, plus the District of Columbia, Mr. Romney had a 5.2 percentage point margin and would have easily won the election.

The charts show state rankings on that and three other measures. The 15 states with the largest government involvement are at the top and the 15 with the lowest government involvement are at the bottom.

States whose names are shaded voted for Mr. Romney and dominate all four of the top lists. States that voted for Mr. Obama are not shaded, and dominate the bottom lists. It should be noted that people may work in a different state from the one in which they live and vote. The ranking based on the proportion of government employees is shown in the left column of the chart. Next to it is a ranking based on the increase or decline in total government employment since January 2009, when the number of permanent government employees peaked. Coincidentally, that was also the month that Mr. Obama took office.

The other two are based on the state gross domestic product numbers calculated by the Bureau of Economic Analysis of the Commerce Department. One shows the proportion resulting from government activity, rather than private sector activity, in 2012, the most recent figure available. The next shows how much real government G.D.P. increased — or decreased — in the two years from 2010 to 2012.

A complete list of the figures for all 50 states, plus the District of Columbia, can be found online with this column at at nytimes.com/businessday.

The state G.D.P. figures may well understate the importance of — and the decline in — government activity. That is because they are computed differently from the national G.D.P. number. The national number is based on spending, while the state numbers are based on profits and income of workers. As a result, if a government pays for the construction of something, whether a school or a fighter jet, that will show up as government activity in the national figure. But for the state figures, it will show up as private-sector activity because the work was done by employees of construction or aerospace companies.

By the state figures, real government G.D.P. across the country fell by 3.3 percent during the two years through 2012. The national G.D.P. figures, which reflect a substantial decline in local and state government investments in such things as schools and highways, showed a 4.2 percent decline, the largest for any two-year period since the early 1950s, when the government was demobilizing after the Korean War.

Whether measured by G.D.P. or jobs, the last several years have been marked by an extraordinary reduction in government in most parts of the country.

Floyd Norris comments on finance and the economy at nytimes.com/economix.

[photon555]

Re: Say It Ain't So: Re - PUBLIC - ans

Well I'll just have to reconsider my views on how smart government employees are if so many of them voted for Mitt. Of course, the data is apparently not divided into who voted for whom in each state, and then there is the little matter of comparing Wyoming to Pennsylvania. Wyoming has just 3 electoral votes while Pennsylvania has 21. I would like to see those charts but can't find them at those links. And if we're going to talk about dependence then we need to look at which states received the largest amounts of Federal welfare money and how they voted. Oh the wonder of statistics. If the ancient Romans had only had computers to generate statistical smokescreens we might all speak Latin today.

[LorenS]

Re: Say It Ain't So: Re - PUBLIC - ans

Whatever the explanation, the states whose economies are most dependent on government employment and economic activity are also the states that are most likely to vote for Republicans, who generally campaign on promises to reduce the size of government.

This may be one of those "if your foot is in boiling water and your head is on ice on the average you should be OK".

OR maybe it's in these states where the productivity of government contributions to the economy is most easily observable and hence folks realize how little they're getting for their money.

[GRG55]

Re: Say It Ain't So: Re - PUBLIC - ans

This may be one of those "if your foot is in boiling water and your head is on ice on the average you should be OK".

OR maybe it's in these states where the productivity of government contributions to the economy is most easily observable and hence folks realize how little they're getting for their money.

People vote for who they think can get the most out of government for them..."their fair share" so to speak That is indiscriminate across party lines and across national borders. Human nature apparently.

I suspect few people in Wyoming give a tinkers damn whether the candidate is Republican or Democrat...as long as they have the stroke in D.C. to keep the money flowing westward towards the Tetons.

[BK]

Re: Say It Ain't So: Re - PUBLIC - BLS data - people who bring us CPI

Floyd Norris is not know for unbiased reporting.

Flyod Norris is relying on Bureau of Labor Statistics - the same Government group who so accurately report CPI. ;-)

I question how BLS is coming to their Government employment numbers. At the same time I see most Republicans as Very similar to Democrats - delivering Government jobs is a great way to grow your base.

[lektrode]

Re: Say It Ain't So: Re - PUBLIC - ans

People vote for who they think can get the most out of government for them..."their fair share" so to speak That is indiscriminate across party lines and across national borders. Human nature apparently.

I suspect few people in Wyoming give a tinkers damn whether the candidate is Republican or Democrat...as long as they have the stroke in D.C. to keep the money flowing westward towards the Tetons.

+1
and/or the wasatch, as the repubs appear to be losing, no matter which side of 'great divider' one happens to be on...

but at least the tetons are still there/accessable, as breathtaking as always, last week when eye went by em - since there's no nat'l park gate to go thru to get to em

altho some will give one the idea that near everybody is on the same page - while some are wondren if we'll miss much of anything

Others said a shutdown could show that many government functions weren't essential to start with. "It's just intuitive," said Bill Christian, director of government affairs at Citizens Against Government Waste, an organization that targets government overspending. "If you don't miss something when it's not working, you realize that it may not be a high priority for spending, particularly in such a dire fiscal environment."

while this farce plays out:

Congress pulls another stunt to break the sequester spending caps.

As the budget histrionics continue, both parties are slyly doing what Congress does best—spend more money. We reported last week that the GOP House has already agreed with Senate Democrats to raise spending in 2014 by $19 billion over the Budget Control Act caps—to $986 billion from $967 billion. But now Senate budget experts have identified in the spending bill some $18 billion more of mostly phantom savings from "changes in mandatory spending programs," also known appropriately enough as Chimps.

Here's how it works. While the budget caps cover mostly discretionary spending, they include a few mandatory programs. The House bill moves $18 billion from those programs from 2014 and pushes them into future years. For example, the bill moves into 2015 $8.9 billion from the Justice Department's "crime victims fund" and $1.6 billion from the Justice and Treasury mandatory budgets, and another $800 million from the Department of Agriculture into 2015 and beyond.

This frees up $18 billion more for Congress to spend in fiscal 2014 on discretionary accounts like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting without technically violating the sequester caps. It's a classic shell game to let Congress spend more while pretending it doesn't. The Members are betting they'll make a deal before 2015 to break the caps, so they'll get to spend more this year and more in the future too.

"We're almost $36 billion over the caps," says GOP Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, a rare spending whistleblower. Too bad no one is listening, least of all the Republicans who are beating their chests over a "defund ObamaCare" fight they have no chance to win. They are, however, losing leverage over spending.

A version of this article appeared October 1, 2013, on page A14 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Fiscal Monkey Business.

yep - a trillion here and a trillion there and perty soon, we're talkin real money...

oh well, here today, gone to maui...

[vt]

Re: Say It Ain't So: Re - PUBLIC - ans

These guys didn't think the public should be kept out of the parks the taxpayer paid for:

http://freebeacon.com/wwii-vets-knoc...wwii-memorial/

[don]

Re: Say It Ain't So: Re - PUBLIC - ans

(wonder if the partisan shenanigans underway have the potential unintended consequences of becoming a black swan?)

Why the Health Care Law Scares the G.O.P.

By EDUARDO PORTER

This spring, the Missouri Chamber of Commerce urged the state Legislature to accept the federal government’s plan to expand Medicaid for the poor and disabled.

The business lobbying group had not suddenly gone rogue. Here is how Daniel P. Mehan, its president, summarized his feelings about President Obama’s health care law: “We don’t like it.”

But the Chamber was cognizant of the plea of its members directly affected by the issue: dozens of Missouri hospitals stood to lose $4.2 billion over six years in federal support for uncompensated care if the state refused to increase the income ceiling for Medicaid eligibility.

Pragmatism suggested accepting the expansion. Washington would pay the extra cost entirely for three years and pick up 90 percent of the bill thereafter.

And it would expand health coverage in the state’s poor, predominantly white rural counties, which voted consistently to put Republican lawmakers into office.

Missouri’s Republican-controlled Legislature — heavy with Tea Party stalwarts — rejected Medicaid’s expansion in the state anyway.

After their vote, a frustrated editorial in the faithfully conservative Missourian asked of the state’s elected Republicans: “Who Do They Represent?”

Today, the same forces that blocked the expansion of Medicaid in Missouri are going all out in Washington in a bid to undo all of the Affordable Care Act. Bowing to the vehemence of its Tea Party faction, the House G.O.P. forced a government shutdown when Senate Democrats refused to delay or defund the president’s health overhaul.

House Republicans are threatening even further damage if they don’t get their way, possibly unleashing financial chaos if they manage to force the United States into its first default ever on the government’s debt.

Republicans’ efforts raise the same perplexing question posed by the Missourian: What drives Tea Party Republicans and their financial backers? What calculation persuades them that repealing the health care law is worth the risk? Indeed, whose interests do they represent?

Nearly 6 in 10 Americans disapprove of trying to stop the law by cutting its financing. Even among those who don’t like the law, less than half want their representatives in Congress to try to make it fail.

It is tempting to discard the Tea Party activists driving the Republican Party as crazy — as some commentators have — motivated by fear and willing to believe that default won’t cause much harm and might even act as a purgative to free the economy of a bloated government.

“They listen to nobody but themselves,” the Harvard political scientist Theda Skocpol told me. “They are convinced of their rectitude and convinced that they alone are qualified to save America from the dire threat of Obama and his polices. They have worked themselves into a dangerous place.”

Their relationship with reality can take peculiar turns. Reflexive opponents of “government,” they can exhibit little sense of what the government actually does.

And yet the argument that half the Republican Party has simply lost its mind has to be an unsatisfactory answer, especially considering the sophistication of some of the deep-pocketed backers of the Tea Party insurgency.

There is a plausible alternative to irrationality. Flawed though it may turn out to be, Obamacare, as the Affordable Care Act is popularly known, could fundamentally change the relationship between working Americans and their government. This could pose an existential threat to the small-government credo that has defined the G.O.P. for four decades.

The law is imperfect. It has dozens of complicated, interlocking parts. Half of Americans say they don’t understand how it will affect them and their family. Still, the law has many provisions that are likely to improve life for millions of Americans, including a big portion of what we know as the working middle class.

Almost two-thirds of uninsured Americans have a full-time job, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. A further 16 percent are employed part time.

The Department of Health and Human Services recently estimated that nearly six in 10 uninsured Americans could qualify for health coverage in the insurance market for less than $100 per person per month.

According to an analysis by the Urban Institute, 28 million Americans would gain health insurance under Obamacare. Of these, eight million earn more than twice the poverty level of $47,100 for a family of four. A majority of those would get a subsidy to buy a plan.

As it turns out, the core Tea Party demographic — working white men between the ages of 45 and 64 — would do fairly well under the law.

Take Missouri. It has about 800,000 uninsured. Almost half of them would have been eligible for expanded Medicaid benefits, had the Legislature not rejected them. Many of the rest — including families of four making up to $94,000 — will be eligible to get subsidized health insurance.

In St. Louis, for instance, a family of four making $50,000 a year will be able to buy a middle-of-the-road “silver” health plan for $282 a month and a bottom-end “bronze” plan for $32. Even Medicare recipients will get a benefit worth a few hundred dollars a year.
This could justify conservative Republicans’ greatest fears.

In 1994, when President Bill Clinton took an earlier stab at a health care overhaul, the conservative thinker Irving Kristol published a manifesto about why Republicans had to stop it.

“Passage of the Clinton health plan in any form would be disastrous,” Mr. Kristol wrote, italicizing for emphasis. “It would guarantee an unprecedented federal intrusion into the American economy. Its success would signal the rebirth of centralized welfare-state policy at the moment that such policy is being perceived as a failure in other areas.”

Two decades after Mr. Clinton’s ultimately failed attempt, Obamacare poses the same sort of threat.

Even Americans who say they dislike the law actually like many of its components. Nearly three-quarters approve of giving financial help to poor and moderate-income Americans to buy health insurance. Two-thirds approve of barring insurance companies from denying coverage because of somebody’s medical history. Three-quarters favor letting children stay on their parents’ insurance until they are 26.

Until now, social welfare programs in the United States have exhibited a “big hole,” Professor Skocpol said, consisting of nonpoor working-age Americans and their children. Obamacare closes a big chunk of it.

“The main beneficiaries tend to have lower wages, employed in smaller businesses that are not providing health insurance,” she said. “They are not elderly. They are also not the poorest.”

And they might be grateful to Democrats for the benefit.

To conservative Republicans, losing a large slice of the middle class to the ranks of the Democratic Party could justify extreme measures.

E-mail: eporter@nytimes.com;
Twitter: @portereduardo

[don]

PCR on Obamacare

Obamacare Is Another Private Sector Rip-Off Of Americans


The private sector allied with government is a second IRS

Paul Craig Roberts

The government of the “world’s only superpower,” the “exceptional,” the “indispensable” country, claims to know what is best for Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Mali, Russia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, China, indeed for the entire world. However, the “indispensable” country cannot even govern itself, much less the world over which the “superpower” desires hegemony. The government of the “world’s only superpower” has shut itself down.

The government has shut itself down, because it cannot deal with the budget deficit and mounting public debt caused by twelve years of wars, by financial deregulation that allows “banks too big to fail” to loot the taxpayers, and by the loss of jobs, GDP, and tax base that jobs offshoring forced by Wall Street caused.

The Republicans are using the fight over the limit on new public debt to block Obamacare. The Republicans are right to oppose Obamacare, but they are opposing Obamacare largely for ideological reasons when there are very good sound reasons to oppose Obamacare.

Last February 3, I posted on this website a column, “Obamacare: A Deception,” written by an expert on the subject. http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2013...care-a-primer/

When Republicans for ideological reasons blocked a single-payer health system like the rest of the developed world has and, indeed, even some developing countries have, the Obama regime, needing a victory, went to the insurance companies and told them to come up with a health care plan that the insurance lobby could get passed by Congress. Obamacare was written by the private insurance industry with the goal of raising its profits with 50 million mandated new customers.

Obamacare works for the insurance companies, but not for the uninsured. The cost of using Obamacare is prohibitive for those who most need the health coverage. The cost of the premiums net of the government subsidy is large. It amounts to a substantial pay cut for people struggling to pay their bills. In addition to the premium cost, it is prohibitive for hard pressed Americans to use the policies because of the deductibles and co-pays. For the very poor, who are thrown into Medicaid systems, any assets they might have, such as a home, are subject to confiscation to cover their Medicaid bills. The only people other than the insurance companies who benefit from Obamacare are the down and out who are devoid of all assets.

This might prove to be a growing percentage of Americans. On September 19 the New York Times on the front page of the business section reported what I have reported for years: that real median family incomes in the US are where they were a quarter of a century ago. In other words, in a quarter of a century there has been no income growth for the median American family.

In 2013 payroll employment is below where it was six years ago. During 2013 most of the new jobs, barely sufficient to stay even with population growth and insufficient to recover the job loss from the recession, have been part-time jobs that do not provide any discretionary income with which to drive a consumer economy.

Obamacare has resulted in the health insurance companies, who thought that they would be living in high profits from the mandated health coverage, being outsmarted by employers, who have reduced their full-time workers to part-time in order to avoid Omamacare’s requirement to provide health coverage to those employees who work 30 hours a week or more.

Employers can get away with this, because jobs are hard to find. The lack of employment opportunities results in Americans with engineering degrees working as retail sales clerks and as shelf stockers in Walmart and Home Depot. Despite the abundance of unemployed and under-employed American technical and engineering workers, the large corporations lobby Congress for more H-1B visas to bring in lowly paid foreigners with the argument that there is a shortage of qualified Americans for technical work.

As I have pointed out so many times, if there were a shortage of engineering and technical workers, salaries would be rising, not falling.

For millions of employees, Obamacare means cut hours and less take home pay plus out-of-pocket expenses to purchase an Obamacare health policy. For most people covered by Obamacare, this is a lose-lose situation.

It is also a lose-loss situation for the vast majority of the young. Most young people, unless they have jobs that provide health coverage, do without it, because the chances of the young having heart attacks, cancer, and other serious health problems is low.

Obamacare, however, requires the healthy young to pay premiums for coverage or to pay a penalty to the IRS.

In my day this might not have been a problem. However, today there are few jobs for the young that pay enough to have an independent existence. The monthly payroll jobs reports do not show well-paying jobs. The Labor Department’s projections of future jobs are not jobs that pay well. For the youth, it seems that the penalty is less than the premium, so youthful penalties paid out of waitress and bartender tips will subsidize the unusable Obamacare health policies for the poor adults who are not thrown into Medicaid, which confiscates their assets, if any.

Obamacare benefits only two classes of people. It benefits employers who drop their employees working hours below the hours specified for Obamacare coverage, and it benefits the insurance companies or the IRS who collect the premiums and penalties.
Many of the people who pay the premiums won’t be able to use the policies because of co-pays and deductions.

The very poor with no assets might receive health care if they reside in states that accept the Medicaid provisions of Obamacare.

In 21st century America, the few people who have experienced income gains are the executives and shareholders of firms who offshored their production for US markets, Wall Street which makes bets covered by the Federal Reserve, and the military-security complex which has been enriched by the neoconservatives’ wars.

Every other American has lost.

[LorenS]

Re: Say It Ain't So: Re - PUBLIC - ans

Almost two-thirds of uninsured Americans have a full-time job, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. A further 16 percent are employed part time.

The number of full-time employed Americans is dropping way faster than the number of insured Americans is growing.

To conservative Republicans, losing a large slice of the middle class to the ranks of the Democratic Party could justify extreme measures.

They are just "assuming" that Republican voters can be bought with freebies. What if these middle class folks don't want Medicare expanded, even if it will make them eligible.

I benefit from the mortgage interest deduction, that doesn't mean I'm going to vote Democrat if some Republican grew enough spine to actually decide it's a bad idea.