Monthly Archives: June 2017

"Get Obamacare repealed and replaced, get tax reform passed. You control the Senate. You control the House. You have the presidency. There's no reason you can't get this done. Get it done and we'll open it back up."--Doug Deason, rich Texan and conservative donor to Republicans through assorted Koch brothers' organizations, as quoted Monday by The Associated Press.

Contemporary Republican politics in the Citizens United era has never been expressed so clearly.

Billionaire conservatives gave massive amounts of money to Republicans to facilitate the GOP's takeover of our government. These rich conservatives did so to invest in the greater goal of getting their general high-end taxes reduced.

They also invested in these Republicans--invested being a kinder word than might be used--so that they could achieve an ancillary greater goal. It was to take health insurance away from poor people through Obamacare repeal so that the money used to treat boo-boos on the riff-raff could be transferred to them through the abolition of taxes targeted to high incomes contained in Obamacare.

This fellow was saying two things. One was that rich people bought from Republicans in Congress a political result that hasn't been delivered. The second was that rich people will cut off money for Republicans henceforth until they deliver what was bought, by which he means lower taxes for the rich in general and repealed taxes on the rich in Obamacare specifically.

Billionaire donors are saying, essentially, that, even now, if the Republicans deliver lower taxes and Obamacare repeal, they'll pay bonuses.

Republicans are working in Congress on a commission basis. But they're not doing it well. Thus, no commission.

They can't turn their attention to tax reform until they pass something--any blamed thing--that they can call a repeal of Obamacare whether it is or isn't.

Just on Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had to postpone a procedural vote on taking Obamacare away from poor people because three or four GOP senators in his caucus must not have been in on the deal with rich people.

And there was another interesting angle to that on Tuesday.

U.S. Sen. Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, started to look a tad wilted under intense pressure from his heroically decent home-state Republican governor, John Kasich, to back away from the repeal's phasing out of Medicaid expansion for the states. Two other Republican senators--Dean Heller in Nevada and Bill Cassidy in Louisiana--had already openly expressed the same concern about their states losing a lot of money and jerking a lot of people off health insurance.

The New York Times said McConnell was openly frustrated with Portman for signaling such a concern because he had worked hard to keep expansion-state Republican senators quiet about those worries until he could take his best shot at passing the bill.

He wanted them to shut up, vote for repeal to keep the rich investors at bay, and see what could be done quietly for their expansion states in the conference committee reconciling the Senate and House bills.

That explains why the Arkansas Senate GOP phenom, Tom Cotton, wouldn't answer any questions--not just mine, but anybody's--about whether he wanted to protect Medicaid expansion as embraced by his home-state Republican governor. It would seem to explain why the state's other Republican senator, John Boozman, was evasive as well.

They were going along with their party's interest to oblige a rich Texan so that a majority leader from Kentucky could deliver passage of a bill to take health insurance from a quarter-million poor Arkansas people.

It looks like the poor people of Arkansas are going to have to ante up.

And there was another little gem of a factor in the Republicans' embarrassing retreat on Tuesday from billionaire-service. It was an article in Politico asserting that McConnell had "warned" President Trump that, if the Republican Senate can't push through this billionaire-serving Obamacare repeal, then they'll be "forced" to negotiate with the Democrats.

Can you imagine?

What an affront--having to sit down with dirty-fingernailed Democrats and let them have a few things in order to achieve a form of bipartisan consensus on fixing one of the biggest public-policy challenges of our time.

That rich guy in Texas is going to be high-peeved for sure if, after Republicans fail to deliver what he bought, he catches them trying to do real Senate work for non-rich people.

Finally, I repeat my assertion that the 48-member Democratic caucus in the Senate should write a credible Obamacare-fix bill and reach out for negotiated compromise to the moderate Senate Republicans who balked on the McConnell effort to pay off the billionaires.

They say it's a futile tactic because McConnell would never permit such a compromise's advancement.

I say it's the right thing.

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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 06/29/2017

Here is the original post:

Not what they paid for - Arkansas Online

Every year on June 19or Juneteenth, as it is often calledwe commemorate the end of slavery in the United States. While the Emancipation Proclamation was signed on New Years Day of 1863, it took more than two years for the news to travel to Texas. Finally, on June 19, 1865, Union General Gordon Granger arrived in Texas, announcing the abolition of slavery in the last Confederate stronghold.

Historically, Juneteenth was a day that the freed people of Texas celebrated with family and food as a way of measuring progress and instilling the values of racial uplift and freedom in the generations to follow. Today, however, Juneteenth is a day not only to celebrate freedom but also to contemplate, educate, and discuss the improvements that our society still needs to make.

The institution of slavery is inextricably rooted in the foundation of the United States. Likewise, abolitionism remains a fundamental component of our countrys identityand its very much needed today. Juneteenth is a time to remember that while the United States may have seen the end of legal slavery more than 150 years ago, the end of slavery altogether has yet to pass. According to the International Labor Organization (ILO), there are an estimated 20.9 million people living in slavery worldwide today. Many of these victims are in the United States.

Horrific though this number is, global and U.S. anti-slavery efforts offer some hope. A 2015 amendment to the Tariff Act of 1930 explicitly prohibits the import of any goods produced by forced labor into the United States. In 2016, the End Modern Slavery Initiative passed, providing grants for programs and projects that aim to combat slavery in key areas across the globe.

Recently, lawmakers have drafted new legislation to combat slavery in the United States. In the Senate, Senators Cornyn (R-TX), Klobuchar (D-MN), Grassley (R-IA), and Feinstein (D-CA) have introduced the Abolish Human Trafficking Act (AHTA) of 2017. In the House of Representatives, Chris Smith (R-NJ) has introduced the Frederick Douglass Trafficking Victims Prevention and Protection Act of 2017. If signed into law, both of these bills would reauthorize and update the hallmark piece of federal human trafficking legislation, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA).

Juneteenth is a time to recommit to the work that still remains. Passing legislation to combat human trafficking here at home and across the globe is an important step that the United States can take now; discouraging trafficking worldwide by rejecting all products created by forced labor is another.

In the Emancipation Proclamation, President Abraham Lincoln declared all persons held as slaves within said designated States, and parts of States, are, and henceforward shall be free. The United States should consider President Lincolns words, and use its position in the world to protect vulnerable individuals and bring their perpetrators to justice.

Continue reading here:

Juneteenth: A Day for Remembrance and Awareness - Human Rights First (blog)

Reforming the welfare system has been a key aim of British government since 2010. Richard Machin writes that the concept makes no economic sense, it does not produce the outcomes the government is seeking, all while the UK is actually spending less on welfare than countries with comparable economies.

Back in 2010, the coalition government stated that welfare reform is essential to make the benefit system more affordable and to reduce poverty, worklessness, and fraud. The 2017 manifestos of the main parties offered a genuine choice of whether to pursue or abandon this policy. For working-age benefit claimants, Labour and the Liberal Democrats proposed a series of sweeping reforms including the abolition of the bedroom tax and the sanctions regime. A lack of detail in the Conservative manifesto could be read as an intention to continue with the roll-out of the many changes that we have seen over the last seven years, although planned changes to benefits for pensioners have been abandoned under the confidence and supply agreement with the DUP.

In the aftermath of the election where does this leave us? For working-age claimants presumably we will see the minority government pursuing the welfare reform programme. Political opposition to austerity both in Westminster and with voters has gained some traction as a consequence of the election result, and there are strong arguments that welfare reform has failed to meet its intended aims and negatively impacted on claimants.

Welfare reform does not make economic sense

Research by Sheffield Hallam University found that the post-2010 welfare reform policies will take 27 billion a year out of the economy, or 690 a year for every adult of working-age. The Institute for Fiscal Studies estimate that the cash freeze to most benefits, and cuts to child tax credit and universal credit, to be pursued in this parliament, will affect 3 million working households. The Cambridge University economist Ha Joon-Chang argues that the mainstream political narrative that welfare spending is a drain and should be reduced is illogical. He asserts that a lot of welfare spending is investment and believes that appropriate funding in areas such as unemployment benefits can improve productivity and workforce capability.

When thinking about what an appropriate welfare state looks like in this parliament we would also do well to consider the findings of Professor John Hillss latest book, which emphasises that we all rely on welfare at some point in our lives. A sensible debate about the affordability of welfare benefits should be framed with reference to accurate statistics about the recipients of welfare spending. The Institute for Fiscal Studies report that 46.43% of total social security spending goes on benefits for older people, with only 12.82% on benefits for people on low incomes (for example housing benefit) and just 1.11% on benefits for unemployed people. The governments aim of producing a fairer and more affordable system is hamstrung by ignoring fiscal facts on one hand while perpetuating inaccuracies about the profile of benefit claimants on the other.

Professionals working in the advice sector have long advocated the principles of the multiplier effect. This argues that there are economic advantages to high levels of benefit take-up as claimants spend money on goods and services in the local community. Ambrose and Stone (2003) found that a multiplier effect of 1.7 exists, meaning each pound raised in benefit entitlements for claimants should be multiplied by 1.7 to give a much greater overall financial benefit to the economy.

My own experience of working in advice services demonstrated that where household incomes are protected through adequate levels of social security there are direct savings to the public purse: rent/council tax arrears are avoided, contact with overstretched public services is reduced and improved health outcomes reduce burdens on the NHS.

Welfare reform is regressive

There is clear evidence that welfare reform has a disproportionately negative impact on some groups in society and some areas of the UK. The Sheffield Hallam research found that those particularly hit by welfare reform are working-age tenants in the social rented sector, families with dependent children (particularly lone-parent families and families with large numbers of children) and areas with a high percentage of minority ethnic households. Geographically, the impact of welfare reform is stark with the greatest financial losses being imposed on the most deprived local authorities. As a general rule, older industrial areas and some London Boroughs are hardest hit, with southern local authorities the least affected.

The mainstream media often fails to report the true impact of welfare reform that this research highlights. A more accurate account of the human costs can be found in For whose benefit? The everyday realities of welfare reform in which Ruth Patrick documents her research on the impact of sustained benefit reductions. Dominant themes include the stigma felt by benefit claimants, the negative impacts of a punitive sanctions regime, and living with persistent poverty.

Welfare reform does not produce the behaviour changes sought by the government

Although welfare reform is a values-laden policy underpinned by a strong, but flawed, ideology (only those who fail to do the right thing are affected) there is little evidence that the retrenchment of the welfare state has been accompanied by the change in claimant behaviour that politicians desire. The bedroom tax was supposed to provide an economic incentive to move to smaller accommodation. The evaluation indicates that more than 7 in 10 claimants affected had never considered moving, with an estimate that no more than 8% of those affected having downsized within the social sector.

The Benefit Cap places a limit on the total amount of certain working age benefits available to claimants. One of the governments main intentions was for this to improve work incentives. There is no common consensus on the extent to which this aim has been achieved: the Institute for Fiscal Studies have suggested that the majority of those affected will not respond by moving into work, however, government ministers rarely waste an opportunity to tell us that low levels of unemployment are partly due to the benefit changes introduced.

The research of David Webster into sanctions argues that Sanctions are not an evidence-based system designed to promote the employment, wellbeing and development of the labour force and that this regressive system results in lower productivity, pointless job applications, and poverty-related problems.

In the last days of the previous administration we saw the introduction of the 2-child limit for child tax credit and universal credit. Child Poverty Action Group emphasise the contradiction in a policy which supposedly provides parity between those in work and those out of work, when 70% of those claiming tax credits are already working.

Comparable countries spend more on their welfare systems than the UK

Given the huge variations in social security systems across countries, a true comparative exercise is somewhat problematic. However, we can again rely on the analysis of Ha-Joon Chang who debunks the myth that the UK has a large welfare state. Taking public social spending as a percentage of GDP, the UK is only slightly higher (21.5% of GDP) than the OECD average (21%):

Moving forward a key challenge for all political parties is to start a serious conversation about benefits for older people and how to create a sustainable system with an ageing population. At the other end of the age spectrum, much has been said about the increased engagement of younger people in the political process; ironically many commentators argue that it is this age group that will be hardest hit by a continuing programme of welfare reform.

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About the Author

Richard Machin is Lecturer in Social Welfare Law, Policy and Advice Practice at Staffordshire University.

More:

Four reasons why welfare reform is a delusion - British Politics and Policy at LSE (blog)