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Showing posts with label Republican. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Republican. Show all posts

Friday, January 3, 2014

Unemployment benefits, the cruelest cut of all

Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from www.washingtonpost.com

To 1.3 million jobless Americans: The Republican Party wishes you a Very Unhappy New Year!
It would be one thing if there were a logical reason to cut off unemployment benefits for those who have been out of work the longest. But no such rationale exists. On both economic and moral grounds, extending benefits for the long-term unemployed should have received an automatic, bipartisan vote in both houses of Congress.
It didn’t. Nothing is automatic and bipartisan anymore, not with today’s radicalized GOP on the scene. In this case, a sensible and humane policy option is hostage to bruised Republican egos and the ideological myth of “makers” vs. “takers.”
The result is a cruel blow to families that are already suffering. On Saturday, benefits were allowed to expire for 1.3 million people who have been unemployed more than six months. These are precisely the jobless who will suffer most from a cutoff, since they have been scraping by on unemployment checks for so long that their financial situations are already precarious, if not dire.
Extending unemployment benefits is something that’s normally done in a recession, and Republicans correctly point out that we are now in a recovery. But there was nothing normal about the Great Recession, and there is nothing normal about the Not-So-Great Recovery.
We are emerging from the worst economic slump since the Depression, and growth has been unusually — and painfully — slow. Only...
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Sunday, November 24, 2013

Social Security’s Job

The Social Security system is an "unfair" benefit distribution plan according to some authorities. Compounding this issue is the patchwork of workers' compensation system that all seem to apply different rules for setoff f benefits from lifetime benefits as well as COLA modifications. Choosing the "right" jurisdiction to file a workers' compensation total disability claim can make all the difference in the world for the amount of benefits an injured worker receives during his or her lifetime. Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from economix.blogs.nytimes.com

Ratio of Social Security benefits to Social Security taxes paid, by race or ethnicity and year.
Ratio of Social Security benefits to Social Security taxes paid, by race or ethnicity and year.
Source: The Urban InstituteRatio of Social Security benefits to Social Security taxes paid, by race or ethnicity and year.
Does Social Security need to be fixed?
As Democrats and Republicans grapple over how to reduce the government’s budget deficit in the face of rising costs for pensions and health care, whether Social Security should be touched remains one of the most controversial topics in American budgetary politics.
But something big is missing to the debate over the finances of what is still the largest component of the social safety net: an understanding of how well it does its job.
When you peek under the hood, it doesn’t always look so great. Indeed, this supposedly great redistributive program — which uses a broad tax on all workers to protect the elderly from poverty — exhibits some fairly stark regressive features.
One well-known regressive feature comes from the rule that benefits must be annuitized, paid out over time in monthly installments rather than as a lump sum. This means that richer people who tend to live longer will get a bigger benefit than poorer people with shorter life spans. Survivor benefits redistribute money from the singles — who don’t get the benefit — to the married, who do.
Eugene Steuerle, Karen Smith and Caleb Quakenbush of the Urban Institute in Washington just discovered another unsuspected regressive...
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Obamacare Has a Friend in the Health Care Industry

Today's post was shared by Mother Jones and comes from www.motherjones.com

In the LA Times today, Noam Levey writes that Obamacare has an ace in the hole: the insurance industry. Sure, they have their gripes:
But since 2010, they have invested billions of dollars to overhaul their businesses, design new insurance plans and physician practices and develop better ways to monitor quality and control costs.
Few industry leaders want to go back to a system that most had concluded was failing, as costs skyrocketed and the ranks of the uninsured swelled. Nor do they see much that is promising from the law's Republican critics. The GOP has focused on repealing Obamacare, but has devoted less energy to developing a replacement.
.... For many of these organizations, the prospect of new customers and a more rational system outweighs their sometimes intense irritation with the Obama administration. Insurance executives, in particular, have gnashed their teeth at the president's attacks on their industry....Despite the frustrations, most insurers remain committed to moving to a new market that would achieve the central promise of the Affordable Care Act: that all consumers can buy health plans even if they have preexisting medical conditions.
This is really a crucial point. Like it or not, the entire health care industry has spent the past three years gearing up for the rollout of Obamacare. At this point, they're committed—and doubly so since the Republican Party very clearly has no real alternative for them. This means that all the doom-mongering on Fox...
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Sunday, October 20, 2013

The Damage Done

Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from www.nytimes.com

The government is reopening, and we didn’t default on our debt. Happy days are here again, right?
Well, no. For one thing, Congress has only voted in a temporary fix, and we could find ourselves going through it all over again in a few months. You may say that Republicans would be crazy to provoke another confrontation. But they were crazy to provoke this one, so why assume that they’ve learned their lesson?
Beyond that, however, it’s important to recognize that the economic damage from obstruction and extortion didn’t start when the G.O.P. shut down the government. On the contrary, it has been an ongoing process, dating back to the Republican takeover of the House in 2010. And the damage is large: Unemployment in America would be far lower than it is if the House majority hadn’t done so much to undermine recovery.
A useful starting point for assessing the damage done is a widely cited report by the consulting firm Macroeconomic Advisers, which estimated that “crisis driven” fiscal policy — which has been the norm since 2010 — has subtracted about 1 percent off the U.S. growth rate for the past three years. This implies cumulative economic losses — the value of goods and services that America could and should have produced, but didn’t — of around $700 billion. The firm also estimated that unemployment is 1.4 percentage points higher than it would have been in the absence of political confrontation,...
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