Do You Trust Washington With Your Family's Well-Being?

Nabilah Islam, pictured above, is the most progressive candidate running for the open seat in the GA-07 seat in the suburbs and small towns north of Atlanta. This morning she shared an observation with us: "The House and Senate have had four opportunities to do what is right by the American people. At this point, I have faith in very few members in either chamber to put the American people first. We are on the brink of another great depression. We have 33 million Americans out of work. 90 million Americans uninsured or underinsured and those in the halls of Congress are debating on whether or not to expand COBRA. I've been saying for some time now that we need to be looking at policy proposals like FDR's New Deal. More immediately, we need emergency UBI, rent and mortgage cancellation, student debt cancellation, etc. Long term this is a great opportunity to implement a Green New Deal. It would create jobs with a federal jobs guarantee. Allow us to invest in ourselves and create an opportunity for working people to thrive not just survive. My biggest fear is ushering in the 117th Congress with people who would rather make austerity cuts that take on corporate special interests. That is why we need to fight to elect people like myself and other progressive candidates around the country who are committed to putting Americans first."

If he was a reader, I bet Catherine Rampell would trigger Trump every time the Washington Post published one of her columns. I'm sure that's already the case with Mitch McConnell. Yesterday's, Washington Shows Just Why The Country Shouldn’t Depend On It For Stimulus would have sent him into a screaming tirade. "Washington’s very Washingtonian behavior," she wrote, "has just underscored why a stimulus should not depend on Washington." Like many members of Congress, she thinks automatic economic triggers should determine aid to citizens, not DC finagling.

Last week, on the day the unemployment rate hot 14.7%, Don Beyer (D-VA), vice chair of Congress' Joint Economic Committee, issued a statement:

We have not seen horrible, history-making numbers like these since the Great Depression.

“In two months, almost a decade’s worth of job growth has been wiped out, the unemployment rate has more than quadrupled, and more than 75,000 Americans have died because President Trump did not take seriously multiple early warnings about the global threat of the coronavirus and failed to lead a competent fight against it. This is President Trump’s economic legacy-- cracks in the economy as a result of his trade wars and tax cuts have now split wide open as a result of his ignorance and incompetence.

It could be months before the tens of millions of Americans who have lost their jobs are able to return to work. If we expect them to stay home to stop the spread of the virus, then we need to make sure they can take care of themselves and their loved ones for as long as the public health and economic crises last.

A legislative proposal I introduced this week with Senators Reed and Bennet would extend unemployment benefits until states’ unemployment rates drop to acceptable levels. We should not penalize people for not having a job when there are no jobs to be had. I hope the legislation is included in the next coronavirus relief package.


In her column, Rampell went right to another statement on that same day, one from the White House-- "that those hoping for more help from the feds shouldn’t hold their breath. 'We're in no rush, we're in no rush,' President Trump said Friday. His economic advisers and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) echoed this message. In other words, don’t plan on more aid to states, which are already so strapped for cash that they’re cutting Medicaid during a pandemic. Don’t expect extensions of financial lifelines for jobless workers."



She's speculated that "this is a negotiating ploy to extract concessions from Democrats-- even though red states would suffer from delaying federal aid, too. Whatever the reason, GOP dawdling is the latest reminder that Congress should stop leaving the fate of the economy to the whims of callous, dithering, dilettantish, hostage-taking charlatans, who see every crisis as an opportunity for a shakedown. Instead, build a stimulus system that triggers on (and off) automatically-- based on whatever the economy actually needs, using metrics agreed to in advance."



Economists are generally fans of policies known as “automatic stabilizers,” or programs that ramp up automatically when the economy tanks. For example, as people lose jobs, they become eligible for food stamps or unemployment benefits.



These forms of stimulus kick in without politicians having to debate, and they have huge bang for their buck. Both are useful features in a dysfunctional political system, especially when the country is struck by an unusually bad shock in which a speedy fiscal response is critical.



Unfortunately, our automatic stabilizers were never robust enough. Worse, the Trump administration and state governments have made automatic stabilizers much less automatic and stabilizing by adding red tape and reducing programs’ generosity in recent years.



This has left the country unusually reliant on Washington to devise a rescue program ad hoc during the worst economic crisis in nearly a century.



Congress has passed several rounds of relief, but more is undoubtedly necessary. The Congressional Budget Office predicts that without further stimulus, unemployment will be 9.5 percent at the end of 2021. Goldman Sachs estimates that even with another half-trillion dollars in yet-to-be-proposed fiscal stimulus, unemployment will average “only” 7.2 percent next year.



For now, most of Congress's existing measures are poised to sunset based on somewhat arbitrary deadlines unrelated to economic conditions. Enhanced unemployment benefits, for example, are set to expire July 31, even though the CBO expects the unemployment rate to average 16 percent that quarter.



Of course, nothing would stop Congress from renewing these emergency programs-- except, that is, Congress.

Each time measures come up for renewal, prolonged negotiation is more likely, with politicians exploiting “must-pass” legislation to make crazy, controversial demands. This already happens during debt-ceiling showdowns, the more common congressionally created opportunity for unnecessary crises.



If Trump’s “no rush” comments weren’t sufficient evidence of this risk now, recall that in the aftermath of the Great Recession, authorization for extended unemployment benefits lapsed five times. More recently, the small-business loan program ran out of funds for more than a week. And that was for a program virtually everyone supports, almost immediately after it began.



The next round of stimulus negotiations will be difficult and high-stakes. But it must include relief measures automatically linking stimulus to economic conditions, so that further rounds of negotiations can have lower stakes. Some Democratic lawmakers have proposed plans that would do this. Rep. Don Beyer (VA) and Senators Michael Bennet (CO) and Jack Reed (RI) recently offered a framework for linking enhanced jobless benefits to (duh) the joblessness rate. So did Sen. Ron Wyden (OR).

In these proposals, benefit extensions would automatically turn on while the economy is bad, and-- perhaps as important, at least to budget hawks-- automatically trigger “off” as the economy heals. Lawmakers, of course, can override their “autopilot” settings if they later change their minds.



Fair warning: Trigger-based programs are likely to have big up-front price tags. But they are no more expensive than the cumulative cost of multiple program extensions, such as those enacted after the Great Recession.


They could actually be less expensive, because they’d prevent costly program lapses and restarts. And they’d give states greater certainty around budgeting, and households greater confidence in their ability to pay bills. (Remember when Republicans used to complain about policy uncertainty?)



Most important, we need to minimize the number of desperate American families either party might take hostage. Especially when at least one party appears more than willing to actually destroy those hostages.

One senior Democratic congressman told me that he thinks Rampell's got it wrong. "If the GOP is going to act like callous jackasses," he said, "then you make them pay the price for it, just as Trump/McConnell tried to do with the Payroll Protection Program funding. Also, the trigger concept doesn’t really work here, because this may well be a once-in-a-century depression, not an unpleasant point in the business cycle. It also assumes that the Government has a limitless supply of funds, and in fact it doesn’t. Last month’s federal deficit is more than the annual GDP of Switzerland. Triggers make sense when you have only a demand problem; this is both a demand and a supply problem. Wendy’s is not running out of hamburgers because of a lack of demand, I assure you. At this point, even Keynes would not be a Keynesian. I’m not saying that I would vote against it, but I certainly don’t think that it’s a great idea."

Tom Guild is running for the Oklahoma City district, currently held by GOP-lite Blue Dog Kendra Horn. "No rush is the operative phrase with too many members of the permanent political class in Washington, DC. It took a month for me to receive my stimulus check. If my rent or house payment or my need to buy food had been dependent on receipt of that money, I would have been a prime candidate for eviction or foreclosure and a casualty of nutrition deprivation syndrome. Many people I visit with on social media and otherwise are still waiting for their stimulus payment. They needed their money to survive and keep their financial heads above water. No rush. How asinine. Oklahoma’s unemployment compensation system has been fairly roasted for having an unduly complicated filing system and many intentional roadblocks to delay or deny claims for desperate Sooners. They may soon seek shelter with other homeless Okies or stand on the side of the road pleading for money to help themselves and their desperate loved ones. As Marie Antoinette coldly proclaimed before being beheaded by French revolutionaries, 'Let them (the hungry and desperate if bread was unavailable to them) eat cake!' No hurry. How barbaric. The national government has been an epic failure in addressing the desperation in America during these terrible dark days. The Reed/Bennet/Beyer proposal to extend unemployment benefits until states’ unemployment rates drop to acceptable levels is a sensible idea. As they indicate, 'We should not penalize people for not having a job when there are no jobs to be had.' This practical idea should be considered and included in the next coronavirus relief package. The Trump tax cuts for the wealthy, Wall Street, and big corporations moved through Congress and was signed into law in short order. Bailing out the wealthy and the big corporations among the political ruling class always takes priority over the lives of ordinary hard working and beautiful yet beleaguered Americans. The greed of some very BIG small businesses in snapping up forgivable loans authorized and funded by Congress, before the real small businesses, who lacked connections with the well-heeled and the big banks, had a chance to participate before the money set aside for them was gone, is despicable. When I taught a course called Contemporary Workplace Issues that I pioneered at the University of Central Oklahoma, I used a book to enhance discussion of white collar crime in the business world. The book is entitled The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison. Graft, corporate welfare, and grifting has become a way of life for some privileged and entitled corporate citizens here in our country. Wealth and income inequality have reached critical mass and become one of the most serious systemic problems facing our country. The failure of the national government and many state governments to put the least among us first makes a tragic situation that much more horrific and intractable. No rush indeed. We better start addressing issues of poverty, privilege, inequality, and government incompetence now. The future viability and health of our republic hang in the balance."

Eva Putzova is the progressive running in AZ-01. The incumbent, a lifelong conservative Republican pretending to be an equally conservative Blue Dog, guarantees that voters have to real choice. Eva is ending that. "The failure of Congress and the White House to address the deteriorating conditions faced by American families," she told us this morning, "is disgraceful. I agree that there should be automatic triggers that guarantee increased unemployment benefits, food stamps and healthcoverage, until the economy recovers to full employment. However, that is not enough. With or without this current economic/public health crisis, we need universal healthcare, i.e, Medicare for All, a Green New Deal to completely retool the economy and invest in underserved areas, strong labor law reform and protections for workers rights to organize unions, a jobs guarantee, and much, much more. The Republican Party and its President are criminally negligent in failing to address the Covid-19 crisis as well the coming economic depression. But too many Democrats are willing to accept half-measures that don't address the social and economic problems that have gotten worse over the past 50 years-- well before Donald Trump became President."

Robin Wilt is a fully dedicated progressive running against a garden variety New Dem in Rochester, New York. She'll make a much better representative of Monroe County's working families, although not as much of a fighter to put corporate interests first, the way her opponent is! "Throughout March and April 2020, the U.S. government passed three main relief packages, and one supplemental one, totaling nearly $2.8 trillion. The overwhelming majority of that money-- over $2 trillion-- went directly to Wall Street. I want that to sink in. In the middle of a pandemic, the main spending priority of the Federal government was not to ramp up infectious disease testing, increase manufacturing of needed medical goods and PPE, or to provide health care coverage or a basic income for the tens of millions of people who would eventually be unemployed as a result of the health crisis. Once again, the first priority of those in Washington was to bail out Wall Street, not Main Street.

"The first COVID-19 relief bill passed on March 6, 2020, and rightfully went to response efforts to fund research for a vaccine and provide money to help with efforts to fight the spread of the virus. It totaled only $8.3 billion. On March 12, 2020, however, the Fed enormously expanded its repo operations to banks by a whopping $1.5 trillion dollars, then adding another $500 billion on March 16, 'to ensure there was enough liquidity in the money markets.' Yes, you read that correctly. That’s $2 trillion to banks within ten days of the initial response to the COVID-19 pandemic, while only some $8 billion went to fighting the health crisis.

"Meanwhile, the second relief package for people-- the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (which, ironically, came after the Wall Street bail out packages)-- passed on March 18, and again, in comparison to the spending on the financial sector, allocated a paltry $3.4 Billion to: 1) provide money for families who rely on free school lunches in light of widespread school closures; 2) mandate companies with fewer than 500 employees provide paid sick leave for these suffering from COVID-19, as well as providing a tax credit to help employers cover those costs; 3) nearly $1 billion in additional unemployment insurance money for states, as well as loans to states to fund unemployment insurance; 4) Funding and cost waivers to make COVID-19 testing free for all.

"It was not until almost a month later, on April 9, 2020, that the Federal government got around to passing any direct aid to families in the form of cash payments through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act.

"I am fond of the saying: Don’t tell me what your priorities are. Show me your budget. Our representatives who demonstrate that their priorities and loyalties are first and foremost to the financial sector-- as opposed to the people who are the engines of it-- should be voted out. We need new, bold, representatives who are not afraid to truly put people first in their spending priorities."

Socialism Is Coming! Socialism Is Coming! Beware! Democrats Are Going To Force You And Your Kids To Not Die In The Gutter!

For yesterday's post, Reactionary Blue Dogs And Wall Street-Owned Corporate Dems Want You To Know They're Not Socialists, we looked at a quote from Texas progressive Mike Siegel, running in a gerrymandered red district that goes from liberal north Austin into the deep red exurbs northwest of Houston. Siegel was speaking at an event with Congressman Ted Lieu and VoteCommonGood leader Rev. Doug Pagitt, a progressive evangelical activist. Asked how he would face down Republicans calling him a socialist and claiming he would turn Bastrop and Tomball into Venezuela, Siegel laughed and told the crowd that "according to the GOP, Social Security is a 'socialist' program. Medicare and Medicaid, too. Basically, any program that cares for the poor, for the elderly, for those needing a little extra help to have a fair shot at success. When Jesus threw the money-changers out of the temple, and gave alms to the poor and sick, I guess that was 'socialist' too. But it's not 'socialist' when megacorporations, whether Big Tech or Big Oil, get hundreds of millions in subsidies from the American taxpayers. The good thing about this Republican fear-mongering is that at a certain point voters tune it out, and it loses its effect. My plan is to run on a strong progressive platform that serves the needs of the people of the Texas 10th Congressional District. The Republicans refused Medicaid expansion in Texas, and as a result we have rural hospitals closing and sky-high maternal mortality rates. The alternative I support is a commitment to universal healthcare, in the form of Medicare For All. The Republican budget would cut just about every essential social program to pay for tax cuts for the rich. We will campaign on a program of caring for people, not corporations."

Yep, that's how it's done. Mike gets an "A." California freshmen Katie Hill and Harley Rouda don't. In a badly misguided and twisted piece for Real Clear Politics by Susan Crabtree, Beleaguered California GOP Sees Path To 2020 Rebound, there's a section about how the Republicans hope to take back the 7 seats they lost in 2018 by screaming "socialism!" Crabtree wrote that "Republicans aren’t the only ones recoiling from national Democrats’ far-left turn. Newly elected California House Democrats from traditionally red districts, such as Katie Hill and Harley Rouda, now fear the socialist label could cost them re-election and swing the House majority back to the GOP. Over the last week, some Democratic House freshmen have started lashing out against their brasher colleagues’ support for socialism, impeachment and the divisive Green New Deal." Let me mention that before we go on that Hill's district is certainly not red any longer and that the Democrats have a new registration advantage over the gradually dying-off GOP.

Crabtree continued by noting that "Hill, who last November flipped a Los Angeles-area district that Republicans had held for decades, made it clear she’s not jumping on the Ocasio-Cortez bandwagon. 'As we run up to this presidential [election], we need to show that Democrats, as a whole, are not socialists,' she told Politico last week. 'We’re not pushing for impeachment without serious cause and serious evidence.' Rouda, a businessman and former Republican who defeated 15-term Rep. Rohrabacher, also distanced himself from his freshman class’s far-left flank. 'I’d like to think that the Republican Party is not run by a bunch of folks that subscribe to be nationalists, like Steve King does,' he said, referring to the Iowa congressman who lost his committee seats after making controversial statements on white supremacy and nationalism. 'So while Steve King’s views don’t represent the entire Republican Party, those on the far left of the Democratic Party do not represent the mainstream caucus.' Except Steve King's views do represent the entire Republican Party and the kind of socialism AOC and her outspoken colleagues are talking about is as American as apple pie and at the heart of Democratic Party values. Re-read Mike Siegel's explanation above. The defensive crouch Rouda, and to some extent, Hill, take may turn out to be counter-productive and dysfunctional as the national GOP pours money into their messaging. Crabtree:

This open Democratic grousing is music to California GOP operatives’ ears.

“[Speaker Nancy] Pelosi is not in control of her caucus, and she has got to figure out a way to rein in these three complete narcissists,” said Jason Roe, a Southern California-based Republican campaign strategist, referring to Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib and Omar. “Any punishment that Pelosi can mete out is a victory for them. They are disrupters, and if they are being punished for disrupting, it’s exactly what they want. You can’t use traditional levers of power with them.”

Roe is telling his GOP clients running for office in California to “stay away from litigating Trump and start litigating AOC and the left-- this is the gift that keeps on giving.”

Something tells me Susan Crabtree is never going to grow up to be a Catherine Rampell, one of the sharpest and most incisive minds at the Washington Post. Last week she wrote about how the Republicans are turning their party into the boy who cried socialism. Trump's socialism ploy, she wrote, is just "more lazy name-calling from a lazy thinker, but this time the lazy name-calling may backfire. For years, Trump has premised his political pitch on the idea that he alone can protect Americans from the many invaders who wish us harm-- chiefly immigrants, terrorists and globalists. Lately, he's added another boogeyman to the bunch, one that's supposedly homegrown: socialists. In this year's State of the Union, he declared, 'Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country,' as if that were ever truly a risk. He has ramped up similar comments in recent months and has now enlisted his economic advisers in his fight against the great socialist straw man."

Ever since 1947, the White House Council of Economic Advisers has released its annual Economic Report of the President. This enormous tome is supposed to summarize the trends in the economy and lay out the president’s vision for solving ongoing and future challenges. Though the document usually has some political spin-- the president’s economic advisers want their boss to look good, after all-- it usually sticks to legitimate economic concerns facing the country.

Not so this time. When the council released its report this week, it bizarrely included an entire chapter seemingly designed to flesh out cable-news talking points about how Democrats secretly want to turn the United States into a socialist hellscape. Readers of the report-- or of even just the council's slides posted on Twitter-- might reasonably come away thinking that the most pressing economic questions facing the U.S. economy include: Was collective farming under Mao Zedong successful? How much did Joseph Stalin end up shrinking the livestock population?

If these throwbacks seem wholly unrelated to any of the debates we're actually having right now as a country, that's because they are.

The real debate Americans are having-- including those on the far left trying to gain greater control of the Democratic Party-- is about how regulated markets should be and how to make the rules fairer. No one in the 2020 race, not even relative outlier and self-proclaimed democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is proposing that we recreate the Great Leap Forward.

Despite what you may have heard from Team Trump-- and despite the many TV interviewers asking Democratic politicians whether they're "capitalist" or "socialist," as if that's a meaningful binary-- all modern countries have elements of capitalism and socialism.

That includes the United States. We have public schools, public roads, subsidized health care for the elderly and other forms of social insurance. Yet we also have private property, and the government does not control the means of production-- which is, you know, actually how socialism is defined.

Trump and his advisers pretend otherwise, in the hopes of confusing and freaking out the public. After all, most people know they’re supposed to be afraid of “socialism,” even if they have no idea what the term means.

In fact, in a Gallup poll last year that asked Americans to explain their understanding of the term "socialism," responses were all over the map. The most common answer, volunteered by about a quarter of respondents, was that it had something to do with "equality"-- "equal standing for everybody, all equal in rights, equal in distribution," something to that effect. Smaller percentages mentioned communism, government control of utilities or even "talking to people, being social, social media, getting along with people."

Given this level of confusion, it's not clear that Trump's strategy to smear the Democratic Party as a Socialist Menace will be terribly effective.

Sure, maybe it'll mobilize older people who lived through the Cold War and associate socialism with the evil Soviet Union. But Trump probably already had the old people vote locked up.

Whether it will scare younger people is a separate question. A majority of adults under age 30 already view the term "socialism" positively; about 40 percent of those ages 30 to 49 say the same.

That might be because of dissatisfaction with the results of the existing (predominantly capitalist) economic system. But it might perversely also be because Republicans have been so relentless in their alarmist attacks on socialism-- or, rather, “socialism.”

Over the past 60 years-- since Ronald Reagan warned that Medicare would doom the country to the s-word-- the GOP has turned into the boy who cried socialism. If you persist in describing popular and not-all-that-radical policies as "socialist" (protections for preexisting conditions or letting kids stay on their parents' health insurance until age 26), at some point the term starts to lose its negative valence.

"Ex"-Republican businessmen, like Rouda--who likely grew up in homes where Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt were not revered the way they were in the home I grew up in-- and who found themselves swept into Congress in the blue wave-- really an anti-Trump wave-- should listen carefully to what Rampell is saying-- and to how Mike Siegel is campaigning. Here's Bernie answering a similar question:

Who exactly are Republicans trying to impress with their sudden discovery of income inequality?

But wait, suddenly GOP candidates care!

"Someone up the GOP food chain seems to have decided that inequality and poor people now belong in everyone’s talking points, class warfare be damned. But why?"

-- Catherine Rampell, in her Washington Post column
"Republicans have started to care about income inequality"

by Ken

Quick, check up in the sky and see if there are pigs flying. Down in hell we can guess that the skating is fine on the frozen-over waters of Hell. It's almost impossible to believe, but Republicans have suddenly discovered income inequality -- and they're against it!

Naturally it's all President Obama's fault, but that's the one part of the story that's no surprise. In the minds of the mental degenrates of the Right, everything is President Obama's fault. It beats observing reality and actually thinking. Not that right-wingers have ever been much good at any of these activities, but now they have become formally obsolete. Obama! Obama! Obama!

Still, hearing Republicans raising the issue is a head-turner. All through the current period of growth in economic inequality to historic levels, Republicans have stood by cheering, screeching "class warfare" at anyone who so much as dared to mention the subject. As Catherine Rampell notes in her recent Washington Post column "Republicans have started to care about income inequality":

Inequality has obviously crossed the GOP’s radar screen before, but like other phenomena that get noticed and politely ignored — washroom attendants, global warming — it didn’t generate much comment. When Republicans have taken note of our country’s income and wealth gaps, the sentiment has usually been dismissive and disdainful, full of accusations of class warfare waged by resentful, lazy people unwilling to hoist themselves up by their bootstraps.

Then, in just the past week, many of the likely 2016 Republican presidential contenders began airing concerns about the poor and condemning the outsize fortunes of the wealthy.

The roster of sudden converts to the cause is mind-blowing:

* Sen. Rafael "Ted from Alberta" Cruz

On Fox News after the State of the Union speech, Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) denigrated the administration’s economic track record by doing his best Bernie Sanders impression.

“We’re facing right now a divided America when it comes to the economy. It is true that the top 1 percent are doing great under Barack Obama. Today, the top 1 percent earn a higher share of our national income than any year since 1928,” he said, quoting an oft-cited (by liberals) statistic from the work of economists Piketty and Emmanuel Saez.

* 2012 GOP presidential nominee Willard Romney

Likewise, here’s Mitt Romney, in a speech last week: “Under President Obama, the rich have gotten richer, income inequality has gotten worse and there are more people in poverty than ever before.” Sound-bite highlights from his past presidential campaign, you may recall, included a reference to the “47 percent” who don’t pay federal income taxes and a conclusion that “my job is not to worry about those people.”

Apparently his job description has changed.

* Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush

Jeb Bush, too, has newfound interest in the lower income groups and deep inequity flourishing in our nation. His State of the Union reaction: “While the last eight years have been pretty good ones for top earners, they’ve been a lost decade for the rest of America.” Sen. Rand Paul, as well: “Income inequality has worsened under this administration. And tonight, President Obama offers more of the same policies — policies that have allowed the poor to get poorer and the rich to get richer.”

Which leads Catherine to the question I've put atop this column: "Someone up the GOP food chain seems to have decided that inequality and poor people now belong in everyone’s talking points, class warfare be damned. But why?"

She tries a couple of theories, but she isn't persuaded, and neither am I.

"Maybe to broaden the tent for 2016 by appealing to people who feel “left behind” by the recovery"

But the poor are not exactly the most politically engaged constituency and seem unlikely to switch allegiances. To put it in Dos Equis terms: The poor don’t always vote, but when they do, they vote Democratic.

"Maybe it’s the result of rebounding economic growth and declining unemployment,"

which means Republicans have to be more precise about exactly which part of Obama’s record is vulnerable to criticism. Although of course the rise in inequality long predates Obama’s time in the White House; the top 1 percent’s share of national income has been trending upward since Obama was in high school.

"Or maybe it’s really more about reassuring Republicans’ core middle-class voters,"

who might suspect that Republican-led cuts to safety-net programs such as food stamps and unemployment insurance are, well, heartless. For the “compassionate conservatism” reboot to be convincing and guilt-alleviating this time around, though, Republicans need to offer strong anti-poverty proposals of their own. So far — with the exception of Paul Ryan’s plan last year — we’ve mostly heard more of the same tax-cutting, deregulating shtick, whose relevance to inequality and poverty is tenuous at best.

I'm still confused on this point. These lying buttwipes are clearly trying to send some sort of message, but what's the message and to whom is it being sent? Catherine has hit the obvious suspects, and there's probably some truth in each. But I'm left thinking that it's some sort of combination of all of them -- that it's a recognition of just how cosmically wrong they've been and how humiliatingly exposed they stand to be as the truth begins to dawn on all those left behind on the "screwed" side of the economic chasm.

I take it personally, though, in the case of lying low-lifes like Ted from Alberta and Willard, given the history of their slavering savagery toward the people they worked so hard to screw. They should be stripped naked and bound to posts to hear their own psychotic ravings read back to them until they apologize for having been born.

Naturally, the situation isn't without irony. Where power-mad moral defectives are involved, there's usually irony.

Meanwhile, the Democrats have reconfigured their messaging as well, to focus more on the middle class than the destitute. While the State of the Union speech touched on policies intended to lift those at the bottom — increasing the minimum wage, for example — Obama’s rhetoric mostly emphasized “middle-class economics,” abandoning his previous “bottom-up economics” coinage. Even programs that are usually associated with the poor, such as community college access, have been pitched as a middle-class benefit. And he didn’t even mention one of the starring, bleeding-heart, anti-poverty promises from his speeches the past two years: universal pre-K.

And this, says Catherine, "brings us to an uneasy question." It's a hoot.

If Republicans have pivoted to care more about the poor, and Democrats have pivoted to care more about the middle class, who’s left to look out for America’s newly neglected rich?

DWT SCHEDULE NOTE: Next post at 3pm PT/6pm ET

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