Supply Side Economics Still Dead

Let's just say Bush's experiment hasn't added any data in support of the idea that slashing taxes on the wealthy will lead to additional revenue:

Even after a year of solid economic growth and booming corporate profits, federal income tax revenues were lower in the fiscal year that just ended than in the year before President Bush took office, according to estimates by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

In a sign that Mr. Bush's tax cuts have had a bigger impact on the federal deficit than administration officials have often suggested, personal and corporate income taxes are both lower than they were in 2000 even though personal income and corporate profits are both substantially higher.

And of course the result, given the massive increases in military spending, has been an explosion in the deficit.

Notable are the gains for corporations from Bush's tax cuts:

Corporate profits have climbed about 40 percent over the same period, but corporate tax revenues were $18 billion lower in 2004 than in 2000.

Posted by Nathan at 07:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Track (0)

MI AFL-CIO: No on Anti-Gay Amendment

From the Coalition for a Fair Michigan:

Michigan AFL-CIO President Mark Gaffney indicated that the organization views Proposal 2 as a cynical and divisive political ploy. He said that the AFL-CIO opposes the measure because it would take away benefits that have already been negotiated into union contracts.

The Massachusetts AFL-CIO also opposed the anti-gay amendment in that state, but this shows even in a "lunch bucket" state, unions are fighting hard for equality.

Posted by Nathan at 07:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Track (0)

FactCheck: Cheney Wrong About FactCheck

Your really in bad shape when you cite an authority and that authority says you got it wrong.

When Edwards said Cheney was running Halliburton when it was charged with wrongdoing, Cheney cited FactCheck in his defense. He got the suffix wrong, it's FactCheck.org, but worse, the website said today that Edwards basically got it right:

In fact, we did post an article pointing out that Cheney hasn't profited personally while in office from Halliburton's Iraq contracts, as falsely implied by a Kerry TV ad. But Edwards was talking about Cheney's responsibility for earlier Halliburton troubles. And in fact, Edwards was mostly right.

Cheney was in charge when Halliburton cooked its books (which the company has pled guilty to and paid a fine for), did business with Iran (which is being investigated by a grand jury), and bribed Nigerian authorities (being investigated by both the US and France). The only thing Edwards got wrong was that the dealings with Libya preceded Cheney's tenure.

So either Cheney's corrupt or he's such an incompetent boss that underlings run riot with criminal acts. Kind of the same story with the Bush administration and Abu Ghraib.

Posted by Nathan at 08:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Track (0)

The "Afghan Miracle"

Dick Cheney extolled our policy in Afghanistan, but the reality is that women are still oppressed and even beaten for asserting equal rights.

Nicholas Kristof tells this story of one woman jailed in Kabul:

I did meet Ellaha, a bold 19-year-old prisoner. . . the patriarchs had decided that she would marry her cousin. "I didn't agree to marry him," she told me through an interpreter.

"When it was almost time for me to go to Canada, and I was asking about flights," she added, "they tied me up and locked me in a room. It was in my uncle's house. My father said, 'O.K., beat her.' I'd never been beaten like that in all my life. My uncle and cousins were all beating me. ... They broke my head, and I was bleeding."

Ms. Ellaha's younger sister, who had been pledged to another cousin, was facing the same treatment. After a week of being tied up, the two sisters agreed to marry their cousins.

"So we went home," Ms. Ellaha added, "and escaped."

The two sisters moved into a cheap guesthouse as they prepared to flee Afghanistan. But their family learned where they were hiding, and the police came to arrest them.

Bush rightly talks about the oppression of the Kurds under Saddam Hussein, but how can he talk about freedom in Afghanistan if half the population there is still not free?

Posted by Nathan at 07:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Track (1)

Budget Office as Campaign Site

I just stopped by the Office of Management and Budget and the web page has had a complete face lift, turning the page into a campaign commercial labelled:

ACHIEVING RESULTS, ADDRESSING THE CHALLENGES AHEAD President Bush has focused on winning the war on terror, protecting the homeland and strengthening the economy to create jobs. He has built an impressive record of accomplishments. His FY2005 budget built on that record with important proposals to support our national priorities.

Not that all executives don't tout their achievements, but this isn't even subtle. It looks just like a campaign site. Democrats should demand that Bush compensate the public for the staff work spent on this design.

Posted by Nathan at 06:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Track (4)

Job Cuts Surge in Sept.

Report: U.S. job cuts at eight-month high in Sept.:

Planned job cuts soared to an eight-month high in September while new hiring rose only slightly, a report said Tuesday.
Employment consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas said employers announced 107,863 layoffs in September, 41% more than in September 2003 and 45% more than in August of this year, when 74,150 were laid off.

Adding to the glum jobs picture was the slow pace of hiring in September. The report said employer hiring announcements revealed only 16,166 new job openings in that month compared with 132,105 in August.

We'll see what the full job report looks like on Friday, but the bottom line is that this economy continues to be sickly.

Update: The White House looks to be engineering a nice partisan spin on the jobs report. As the same time the largely non-partisan Bureau of Labor Statistics releases its monthly jobs report, the Council of Economic Advisers will release a report estimating that there were an as many as 384,000 additional jobs created in the last year, according to the Wall Street Journal.

If the jobs numbers stink for September, I'm sure the goal is to have headlines talking up job creation in the hundreds of thousands drowning out any anemic September numbers.

Posted by Nathan at 12:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | Track (0)

Goss Stacks CIA w/Political Hacks

Unbelievable.

Porter Goss promises to lead the CIA in a non-partisan way, then he stacks the CIA with House GOP staff:

Porter J. Goss, the new director of central intelligence, has chosen four House Republican aides for senior positions at the Central Intelligence Agency, including the No. 3 job in the agency, former agency officials said Thursday.

The decision to appoint the four officials is creating waves in the agency, which prides itself on objectivity and independence, the former officials said.

So much for having a CIA where any independence will be shown. We now have an intelligence agency staffed with yes men, who will subordinate Americans' safety to the political health of the Republican Party.

Posted by Nathan at 07:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Track (1)

Kerry Kicking Bush's A--

Bush just seems to keep repeating himself. And insisting that Kerry is flip-flopping when Kerry is saying completely reasonable explanations of his position-- Bush screwed up a war that Kerry would have supported if done right-- just undermines his whole argument.

And yes, the eye rolling and smirking, angry mouth just makes him look like a pouty little boy.

Kerry's aggressiveness just seems to work well. He may get wonky at points, but compared to Bush's repetitiveness, it just makes Kerry look like he has a vision to deal with the complications of Iraq and the rest of the world.

And of course, Kerry doesn't even need to beat Bush point for point. He just needs to seem like a reasonable alternative as commander in chief. Polls consistently show people think the country's going in the wrong direction. If voters feel comfortable with Kerry, they can vote against Bush with the will that's out there.

Bush got a bit stronger near the end of the debate, but Kerry did what he needed to do: articulate a clear position, hit Bush hard on a number of points, and look like a solid potential commander in chief.

...geez, and Bush's final statement sounded like a rapid fire mumbling of Karl Rove's talking points, not a coherent philosophy.

Posted by Nathan at 10:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Track (0)

SF Solves the Nader Problem

San Francisco is implementing a New Instant Runoff System that could be a model for reforms across the country.

The idea is simple: voters rank their candidate preferences in order. If no candidate gets a majority based on the first choice of all voters, the second choice of voters supporting the least popular candidate is added to the totals for the other candidate. If no candidate has a majority yet, repeat with the third choices.

The result fundamentally changes elections:
* Most obviously, people no longer have to vote strategically. They can vote for their favorite candidate without fear of throwing the election to their least favorite.
* Dirty politics becomes more dangerous, since if you piss of the supporters of one candidate, you won't get their second choice votes.
* More voices get to participate in elections without creating divisive competition between communities. Without rancour, allies can compete in the same election, knowing that their supporters can support each other as second choices.

Instant Runoff Voting should be how we run all elections. With it in place, all the bitterness between Nader and Gore supporters would not exist and we would have a much richer national debate with more candidates promoting different views and proposals.

Posted by Nathan at 08:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (9) | Track (1)

Tax Havens Cost $10-$20 Billion a Year

How on the payroll of corporations are Congressional tax writers?

How about they let corporations cheat taxpayers of $10 to $20 billion per year by pretending that they produced most of their profits on the island of Bermuda or similar tax havens. An earlier study by the same group showed that "the rise in foreign earnings was not accompanied by any gain in real economic activity in the tax havens," so this is all about Enron accounting, not real offshoring of economic production.

The Congress increased the debt by $150 billion last week and didn't bother to pay for it. Given they could have covered the cost by just closing this loophole, the fact they didn't just shows that this ripoff of the public is part of the plan for crashing the public and eventually public services.

Posted by Nathan at 07:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Track (2)

Annenberg: Daily Show Best Source of News

As a long-time fan of Jon Stewart, it comes as no suprise to me that a survey has confirmed that it's the best source of news on television, its viewers better educated about the news than regular viewers of network news or readers of newspapers. (See the Annenberg release on the right-hand column):

Viewers of late-night comedy programs, especially The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Comedy Central, are more likely to know the issue positions and backgrounds of presidential candidates than people who do not watch late-night comedy, the University of Pennsylvania’s National Annenberg Election Survey shows. . .

In fact, Daily Show viewers have higher campaign knowledge than national news viewers and newspaper readers - even when education, party identification, following politics, watching cable news, receiving campaign information online, age, and gender are taken into consideration.

Of course, some folks watch the Daily Show because its jokes assume a high interest in political campaigns and policy issues, but the reality is that it also has a high-level analysis that conveys more new information than most television news shows.

Personally, I stopped watching television news a long time ago. It provides so little information and most of the segments are low-value filler. In all seriousness, Stewart's opening news opening is the densest and most substantive five to ten minutes of news analysis on television.

And the fact that he uses humor doesn't make it less sophisticated but more, since jokes are by their nature a concentrated nugget of analysis. Each joke has the essential kernal of a long editorial.

So the results are unsurprising, although it may put to rest the characterization of Stewart viewers as stoned slackers.

Posted by Nathan at 07:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Track (0)

US Kills More Civilians than Insurgents

More Iraqis have died since April 5th of this year than died in the September 11 attack. Most of them have been civilians and more have been killed by the US than by the insurgents.

As this Knight-Ridder story details:

Operations by U.S. and multinational forces and Iraqi police are killing twice as many Iraqis -- most of them civilians -- as attacks by insurgents, according to statistics compiled by the Iraqi Health Ministry and obtained exclusively by Knight Ridder.

According to the ministry, the interim Iraqi government recorded 3,487 Iraqi deaths in 15 of the country's 18 provinces from April 5 -- when the ministry began compiling the data -- until Sept. 19. Of those, 328 were women and children. Another 13,720 Iraqis were injured, the ministry said.

Iraqi officials said the statistics proved that U.S. airstrikes intended for insurgents also were killing large numbers of innocent civilians. Some say these casualties are undermining popular acceptance of the American-backed interim government.

This is both inhumane and stupid. How can we justify a war based on avenging the murder of civilians by killing more civilians. And what is sick is many of the victims are children:

The Health Ministry statistics indicate that more children have been killed around Ramadi and Fallujah than in Baghdad, though those cities together have only one-fifth of the Iraqi capital's population.

According to the statistics, 59 children were killed in Anbar province -- a hotbed of the Sunni Muslim insurgency that includes the cities of Ramadi and Fallujah -- compared with 56 children in Baghdad. The ministry defines children as anyone younger than 12.

The cravenness of the media is that they won't show the pictures of these murdered children.

Posted by Nathan at 11:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Track (0)

George Will on Bush Anti-Labor Agenda

George Will has a column where he's blunt about Bush's plan to hurt labor in his second term. Tops on the agenda is slashing pay for government workers through privatization: Bush is pressing to put hundreds of thousands of federal jobs up for competition with the private sector. Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform says: "The people who cut the Pentagon lawn are government employees. Why?" People listed in the phone book will do it cheaper. How many of the 15 million state and local government jobs could be privatized, with how many billions of dollars in savings? It's... MORE...

Posted by Nathan at 07:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Track (0)

When the Judge is Partisan

When you have a legal complaint against your employer, how would you feel if the judge also worked for your employer in other capacities? That the situation faced by many employees who are forced into mandatory arbitration for their individual employment suits. Unions often have arbitration clauses, but they use arbitrators who are full-time and independent. This is often untrue with individual arbitration, where the employer picks the arbitrators used. (See the full BNA article below): On the other hand, employment arbitrators, who handle disputes between employers and nonunion employees often are lawyers and others who also advocate for either... MORE...

Posted by Nathan at 09:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Track (1)

Federal Office of Personnel Management Fights Terrorism Under Every Desk

In an effort to do her part to fight terrorism following 9/11, Kay Coles James, Director of the U.S. Government's Office of Personnel Managment (OPM) "was determined to make sure OPM would be without peer in the quality of our personnel security program."

Imagine her surprise and shock when she was told that some OPM employee files could not be located and that some may have been inadvertently destroyed.

MORE...

Posted by Jordan Barab at 11:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Track (0)