CT Progressive

Via Matthew Yglesias:

I wondered yesterday how serious David Obey was about the idea of paying for the Afghanistan war with higher taxes. Today the answer seems to be that he’s pretty darn serious, with Ways & Means Committee Chairman Charlie Rangel and Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank joining Obey, who chairs the Appropriations Committee, and also picking up Conference Chair John Larson and Jack Murtha who chairs the Defense Appropriations subcommittee. That’s a blockbuster leadership lineup and a clear signal that any House backbencher who feels like jumping on this bandwagon is safe to do so.

The details of the proposal:

Dubbed the “Share the Sacrifice Act,” the six-page bill exempts anyone who has served in Iraq or Afghanistan since the 2001 terrorist attacks as well as families who have lost an immediate relative in the fighting. But middle-class households earning between $30,000 and $150,000 would be asked to pay 1% on top of their tax liability today — a more sweeping approach than many Democrats have been willing to embrace.

Contrary to popular opinion, we actually have to pay for the wars we choose to wage: a dollar spent in Afghanistan costs just as much as a dollar spent improving health care domestically. Congressman Murphy committed some time ago to bringing war funding under PAYGO rules:

I’m obsessive about putting all the war funding under the budget. The fact is, no one is having to sacrifice for this war except the soldiers who fight it, the families they leave behind, and the working men and women in the U.S. who have seen their safety net gutted in order to fund it. Paygo rules don’t apply to emergency funding, but the fact is that this funding can’t be considered “emergency” any longer. You are absolutely right - paygo rules should apply to this bill and all other supplemental requests.

by: Chris Murphy @ Thu Nov 15, 2007 at 19:49:51 PM EST

It’s good news that Congressional leadership has caught on to this idea. Of course, it’s not great news, since it reinforces the expectation that we’re about to see the war in Afghanistan expanded – but getting to a place where we Americans understand the costs of war (in dollar terms, at least) is a huge leap towards returning to sane political debate in this country.

Think Progress found this delightful right-wing press kit, issued from local conservative crank Robert MacGuffie:

We here in Fairfield County Connecticut conducted an action at Congressman Jim Himes’s [sic] Town Hall meeting in May 2009. We believe there are some best practices which emerged from the event and our experience, which could be useful to activists in just about any district where their Congressperson has supported the socialist agenda of the Democrat leadership in Washington. [...]

– Artificially Inflate Your Numbers: “Spread out in the hall and try to be in the front half. The objective is to put the Rep on the defensive with your questions and follow-up. The Rep should be made to feel that a majority, and if not, a significant portion of at least the audience, opposes the socialist agenda of Washington.” [...]

– Be Disruptive Early And Often: “You need to rock-the-boat early in the Rep’s presentation, Watch for an opportunity to yell out and challenge the Rep’s statements early.” [...]

– Try To “Rattle Him,” Not Have An Intelligent Debate: “The goal is to rattle him, get him off his prepared script and agenda. If he says something outrageous, stand up and shout out and sit right back down. Look for these opportunities before he even takes questions.”

You can see the whole document, including some documentation of the madness from local news reports, as a PDF here.

Now, I’ve been keeping an eye on Bob’s efforts a little, ever since his PAC showed up on the FEC website, and it turns out he’s exactly the kind of furious-at-everything crank that you’d expect, from his neighbors’ shrubberies to Senator Dodd right on up to the world. But I don’t need to hassle him for that — what’s interesting is that he sees himself as something of a leader in the “Tea Party movement,” but his group was most agitated not about the national debt or taxes, but rather, about the (ahem) tremendous fraud of climate change. This summer, they’re after health reform town halls. And that’s the fascinating thing about the conservative movement: not just the disorganization, but the ability to summon a full-blown, entirely personal outrage over literally anything at the drop of a hat.

Anyway, the plan put together by MacGuffie seems entirely likely to work – if you wanted to prevent an elected official or candidate from getting any benefit from interacting with the public in a face-to-face setting, their tactics will do it. And that’s just what conservatives do: Connecticut’s genteel political style doesn’t change the equation.

Over at MLN, tparty (who’s written three articles since I’ve started this one) has been following the ramp-up in conservative fury, from GOP Chairman Chris Healy cheering the efforts to shut down the town hall meetings to on-camera calls from Tea Party activists for Dodd to commit suicide. This isn’t the first time Healy has gone out of the way to bridge the divide between the GOP proper and the extremist fringe: his discussion with the Connecticut Conservative Congress (kind of the embryonic stage of the conservative movement between the “dittohead” phase of the 90s and the “tea partier” phase of today – they’re the people who carried the torch on Clinton and Vince Foster for all those years before they could fabricate an issue from Obama’s birth certificate).

But it’s important politically for the cranks to get the sign of institutional support when they’re seeking credibility, just as it’s important for the Republicans for the most insane smears to circulate in the news without their clear fingerprints. Add in the potential for a truly disastrous display of extremism — Congressmen lynched in effigy, Mexican immigrants killed by Minutemen — and the appearance of a group like this does wind up looking like news.

I mention this because Ezra Klein brought up an excellent point earlier today, and I wanted an excuse to link it into this post:

I’ve been attending health-care panels and events on a pretty regular basis for four or five years now. [...] But one thing is perfectly predictable: The Q&A session will be dominated by single-payer activists asking about HR 676.

There’s not a mystery as to why this happens: Single-payer activists are very well organized, and they make a point to dispatch their people to these events and get their members to the microphone and ensure that their perspective is heard. But as the bills under consideration suggest, politicians have had no problem ignoring the single-payer grassroots. Max Baucus ruled out their participation on day one. The media hasn’t shown the slightest inclination to cover their presence at event after event after event.

That’s worth keeping in mind as people begin to focus on the anti-health-care tea parties. The political system does not have some sort of consistent reaction to grassroots pressure. Rather, it picks and chooses when it wants to listen to the views of the very, very non-representative groups of people who sit through at town halls and panel discussions.

I think the aura of insanity and outright dangerousness is actually a big part of why conservatives get through with these kinds of efforts, while millions of protestors in the street for Iraq and healthcare activists nationwide earnestly appearing at forums with statistics at the ready are so easily marginalized. Despite last year’s complaining and guilt-by-association campaigns, conservatives have learned a great deal from the Vietnam-era domestic terror groups like the Weathermen, and have mainstreamed tactics that progressives now find repugnant.

Of course, on the flip side, the organized left of this decade has adopted a “free market” approach to promoting causes, subsidizing preferred mass-media messages through OFA and DFA and PCCC and MoveOn with five- and ten-dollar contributions. So while this story about a local kook and the astroturf operation working off the same playbook has gotten the blogosphere jumping, it may be that the best response is to play to our strengths: since we’re not interested in matching the right for sheer offensiveness in the service of shutting down debate, supporting the groups like DFA and PCCC – and adapting their model to deliver focused, factual, and respectful messages to voters and representatives on the local level – might be the best way to come out of the summer Congressional recess with health reform stronger than when it started.

Via WNLK:

Fourth District Democratic Congressman Jim Himes feels that the people who wrote the current health care reform bill have not done enough work to reduce, as he puts it, “the ridiculous cost of health care”.

August remains the target for the White House of having Congress pass health care legislation. Congressman Himes wants a leaner version of the bill to vote on before the Congressional recess.

Assuming that it’s reasonable to re-write the bill to be “leaner” in the next twelve days, I wonder what parts of the policy Himes would like to see carved out? I asked five days ago and haven’t gotten an answer, which isn’t too unreasonable, but I do hope they can decide soon. The clock’s ticking.

Of course, the simplest part of the healthcare system to eliminate to save costs would be insurance company profits. My understanding is that, to date, those haven’t been on the table. But maybe I’m underestimating the New Dems caucus!

Times are tough all over:

Based on analysts’ earnings forecasts for 2009, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is on track to pay out as much as $20 billion this year, or about $700,000 per employee. That would be nearly double the firm’s $363,000 average last year, and slightly higher than the $661,000 for the average Goldman employee in fiscal 2007, according to analyst estimates reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Ned Lamont celebrates Iraqi Independence Day with an editorial on the Huffington Post (found via Sonoma County DFA):

It’s hard to believe, but today finally marks the beginning of the end of America’s front line military role in Iraq.

Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki has named today, June 30th, 2009, an “Iraqi Independence Day” of sorts, a national holiday which he said would celebrate the “great victory” of Iraqis who have repulsed the foreign occupiers (aka their American liberators). With fireworks filling the night skies over Baghdad, all American combat troops are moving out of the major cities and towns, and, ready or not, the Iraqi military and police are taking charge - with plenty of American trainers in tow just in case.

It’s great news that we’re finally leaving the cities – and surprising that it hasn’t been more widely remarked upon elsewhere in the world o’blogs. Even Ned, though, can’t resist a little bit of backseat diplomacy:

As the violence there has subsided, sadly the warring factions have not used the lull to make the tough political compromises necessary for lasting stability. Prime Minister Al Maliki has still not been able to draw up a just division of the oil revenues between Kurds and Sunnis and Shias, he has commandeered the military and been loath to include Sunnis in a national force, and he has been slower still to pay the Sunni Awakening councils whose allegiances could flip again.

That may be true, but that’s a domestic problem – just like we worry about paying off the right religious groups (via the Office of Faith Based Initiatives) and dividing up Federal spending equitably between our different states.

… to the mighty barcode, friend to retail workers and political canvassers alike.

Actually, I’ve heard it said that the barcode was the first step of two in a fight that radically scaled back the need for labor at grocery stores: the widespread adoption of barcodes led to the end of individual pricing laws, and today prices on the shelves are updated remotely by radio frequency — meaning fewer “stock boys” counting and labeling the inventory. So maybe it hasn’t, in the end, been such a great friend of retail workers.

For political purposes, though, they’re still great, and on a related note I’m considering doing a series of how-to posts on creating a voter file using Connecticut-based data sources. I ran across a series at the blog “Overdetermined,” which touched on many of the challenges involved in setting a file up, but glossed over how to solve most of them. (And, it seems to assume both a flat-file database design and working knowledge of SQL - both problematic.)

I noticed this a while back, but Colin McEnroe’s post brought it back to my attention: legislative staff salaries came out via an FOI request from Ken Dixon, and are viewable here.

Notable:

• House Democrats have $32K of staff costs per legislator.
• House Republicans have $70K of staff costs per legislator.
• Senate Democrats have $177K of staff costs per legislator.
• Senate Republicans have $213K of staff costs per legislator.

And fueling “McKinney Congressional Run” talk, angry former Shays staffer Brenda Kupchick has landed a job with the Senate Republican caucus. As the Republican caucuses keep shrinking, it’s notable whenever new staff come on, because the operation doesn’t really have any logical reason to expand – especially when the new staffers don’t come from the Hartford area, as most do.

So with that in mind, let me make a modest proposal: the legislature should establish a fixed per-legislator budget for the House and Senate caucus staffs, indexed to inflation (or, more entertainingly, to the current minimum wage). Caucuses should be able to allocate their staff budgets however they like – a few high-paid staffers, a vast army of low-paid ones, or anything in-between.

The current legislative salaries, if the FOI report is comprehensive, total up to $13.8 million. But setting a staff budget of $32,000 per House member and $177,000 per Senator would immediately save $2.5 million, and we’re looking for all the millions we can get in this difficult budget season.

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UPDATE 1/28/09: Dixon posted the wages of the sessional employees as well, and if you total up the pay in each session (105 days in the odd-numbered years, 64 days in the even-numbered years), and divide by two for a yearly average, the staff costs change as follows:

• House Democrats have $32K $36.5K of staff costs per legislator.
• House Republicans have $70K $75.2K of staff costs per legislator.
• Senate Democrats have $177K $191.5K of staff costs per legislator.
• Senate Republicans have $213K $225.1K of staff costs per legislator.

The gap widens by about $2,000 per year on the House side, and closes by about $2,000 a year on the Senate side.