Unemployment Insurance

I don't know if there is a better example of the difference between Liberals and Conservatives than the debate over extending unemployment benefits in the midst of this current recession.



Conservatives in this current debate have insisted that any extension of unemployment benefits be paid for in some way. Given that Conservatives seem to reflexively oppose any proposal that raises any taxes in any way for anybody, that means that they insist the some other program get cut enough to pay for the extension of unemployment benefits.



Liberals in this debate argue that in the current economic recession, the stimulative benefit of extending unemployment benefits more than justifies the small impact such an extension has on the current deficit or the accumulated debt.

Conservatives are, as usual, wrong on the issue. Allowing 1.2 million Americans fall off the edge of Unemployment Insurance because extending that insurance might add a whole 0.3% to the national debt is both cruel and insane.

Senator Jon Kyl, the Minority Whip in the Senate, stated his firm belief that we as a nation could not justify increasing the national debt by $10 billion dollars to extend unemployment insurance but he is equally firm in his belief that retaining the Bush Tax Cuts for the wealthiest of Americans, at a cost of almost $700 Billion, is obviously justified despite its direct impact on the national debt. Almost 70 times the impact on the national debt of the unemployment insurance extension he opposes.

In doing so he talks about the stimulative impact of the tax cuts and ignores the stimulative impacts of unemployment insurance despite studies that show that every 1 dollar or tax cuts results in $1.03 in economic activity while every 1 dollar in unemployment insurance payments results in $1.63 in economic activity. Unemployment insurance payments have a far far greater stimulative impact than tax cuts and add far less to the deficit than the tax cuts yet Republicans/Conservatives like Senator Kyl are always in favor or tax cuts that overwhelmingly favor the rich and almost always opposed to unemployment insurance that benefits those in need.

Any wonder that I am a Liberal??

Disdain

I am elated that our Congress under our President's leadership has finally passed a Health Care Reform package and it has been signed into law. The bill is not perfect (I am still an advocate for single payer), but its a great start.

I gained a very small amount of noteiriety in the last days of the debate be getting my picture taken at a Health Care Reform rally discussing the bill with an opponent of reform. The thing that struck me about the opposition was their almost complete lack of knowledge on the bill. They kept telling me that it was 2700 pages long and that nobody knew what was in it, despite the fact that it had been passed by the Senate 3 months earlier and was available online for anyone to read. They kept telling me it would take away their freedoms but not one of them could tell me which part of the bill would violate any of their freedoms or which part of the bill was contrary to the Constitution. I was told I was a Communist or a Socialist and the I was destroying the Constitution and that I was pig-headed (they were right about that) and that I didn't have any facts.

But, with one exception, none of them could or would even try to answer any of my questions. None of them could define Socialism even though they knew I was one (or maybe a Communist but they couldn't define that either).

One man didn't call me names and was actually interested in discussing issues. He was of the opinion that Health Insurance Companies were not subject to regulation under the Interstate Commerce Clause of the Constitution because the states currently do most of the regulation of Health Insurance Companies. I disagreed that Blue Cross/Blue Shield or Anthem or United Health Care companies were not engaged in Interstate Commerce, but atleast he had a coherent well articulated argument. He did want to tell me how the Public Option sections of the House passed Health Care Reform bill would have inevitably destroyed all Private Insurance companies but I didn't really discuss that much since the Public Option was not in the Senate Bill that was being voted on.

One man in a crowd of 40 or so opponents that could intelligently articulate real arguments against the proposed bill. The rest either ignored me or just followed me around shouting slogans at me or just told me I was a pigheaded Constitution hating Socialist/Communist who wanted to destroy our Freedoms and didn't have any facts. At least they got the pig headed thing right.

Then today I saw this poll and it all sort of became clear.

For the most part, Republicans no longer seem interested in facts.

A new Research 2000 poll of more than 2,000 Republicans, conducted for the liberal blog Daily Kos, has some eyebrow-raising findings:
-- 63% of them believe President Obama is a socialist
-- 53% believe Sarah Palin is more qualified to be president than Obama is
-- 39% believe he should be impeached
-- 36% believe he wasn't born in the United States
-- 31% believe the president hates white people
-- 24% believe the president wants the terrorists to win
-- 23% believe their state should secede from the union

36% believe that President Obama is not an American. I wonder if many of the 63% who consider him a Socialist can actually define the term. So many of the objections that were made against the bill were simply not true. But Republicans/Conservatives just didn't seem to care about facts or the truth.

24% of Republicans think the President wants the terrorists to win.

What have they been smoking?

Over the course of this debate I ahve become more and more dismissive of Republicans/Conservatives because of the things this poll exposes. Largely they seem uninterested in the facts, prefering to stick to their talking points and slogans.

There are some Republican's/Conservatives who understand these bills and have intelligent articulate objections to them. I just have trouble finding them.

We, as a nation, have serious problems and they deserve serious intelligent debate. But thats not what we have been getting. And with the debate on Cap and Trade coming up I have little confidence that Republicans/Conservatives will be interested in discussing those bills factually either. It would be great, but I am not holding my breath.

24% of Republicans believe their state should secede from the United States. And they say I am the one trying to destroy America.

Shared Resources

My Sister and I talk about a lot of stuff and agree about a little. I love the conversations because she not only knows what she believes, as most of us do, but she is able to describe why, which many on both sides seem incapable of.
I don't know how but we ended up talking about water policy. She lives along the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, which is actually quite arid. Her water supply is almost completely dependent on the Spring snow melt. So if they get lots of snow in the mountains, their reservoirs fill up and if the snow fall is low the reservoirs don't fill up. Colorado recently went through a drought that lasted about 5 years, during which many of the reservoirs got quite low.
At some point during this drought, the water department instituted restrictions on water usage including limitations on watering the yard and using a running hose to wash your car. In talking about that period, she noted that some of her neighbors ignored the water restrictions and watered their yard anyway.
Later in the drought, the water department abandoned the restrictions and went to a tiered cost structure so people who used lots of water payed a significantly higher rate/gallon than those who only used a small amount of water.
To my sister, that was the right way to resolve the problem of water usage during a drought. If you can afford the higher bills, then use all the water you want in any way you want. I guess you could call it a market based solution as opposed to a regulatory solution.
I thought about that conversation alot. It seems to me to be an almost perfect metafor for one of the core differences between Republicans/Conservatives and Democrats/Liberals.
We all have to share the same environment.
And just because you can afford the gasoline/natural gas/electric bill/water doesn't mean that profligate use of those shared resources is actually good for society as a whole.
Now my sister personally recycles virtually everything she can. She has been known to wash and reuse ziplock bags. They have converted a large chunk of their yard to lower water demand plants and have a sprinkler system that makes more efficient use of the water they do use. She doesn't use the dry cycle on her diswasher, saving about 40% of the energy the system would otherwise use. She has a compost heap. All in all, she leads a pretty green lifestyle. As is her choice.
But she has no problem with those that are willing to waste our shared resources.
If they can afford what they use, then thats up to them.
Which is pretty much the Republican position on things like the environment.
If you can afford an Escalade or a 4.5L V-8 pickup, then have at it, the environment will take care of itself. Interfering in the market by Cap and Trade on Carbon emissions, or raising the CAFE standards, or making the CAFE standards apply to pickup trucks, or requiring that a growing percentage of the cars/power plants/factories produce less or even zero carbon emissions is usually defined as a bad idea gaurenteed to make America less competitive in the world and lose jobs.
The problem with their arguments is that everytime they have made similar arguments (against the Clean Air Act, or the Clean Water Act, or against the original CAFE Standards, they have been wrong. The world didn't end, the economy didn't collapse.
But because of their resistance to such things, we now have giant dead zones in the ocean and in the Chesapeake Bay where run off from non-point sources is killing entire water ecosystems. We have human accelerated global warming that literally theartens the lives of millions of people world wide.
And we are facing water crises. Much of California gets its water from snow melt, like Colorado. And snow fall in California has been decreasing and will likely continue to decrease as the climate warms up. The agricultural miracle that is California's Central Valley cannot exist without huge water projects bringing water from the mountains of Northern California. California's population continues to grow and the pressure on the limited water resources of the Sierra is growing as snow fall appears to be decreasing.
As a Liberal/Democrat, I think it is not only a good idea for the government to interfere in the water and carbon markets, I think it is absolutely necessary for our continued health and prosperity.
Left to their own devices, the markets won't solve these problems, despite what Conservatives/Republican try to tell us.
Just because you can afford to use lots of a shared resource, doesn't mean you should, nor does it mean you should be allowed to waste just because you can afford it.