US Politics Mega-thread - Page 285

The latest flashpoint in the immigration debate is health benefits. Senate Republicans are insisting that immigrants be ineligible for federal health subsidies for five years after they become legal residents — and that’s after the decade-long path to becoming a legal resident, during which they’re also ineligible. House Republicans are considering legislation “that would deny publicly subsidized emergency care to illegal immigrants and force them to purchase private health insurance plans, without access to federal subsidies, as a requirement for earning permanent legal residency.”

And all this will come at the same time when Republican governors in states with huge Hispanic population are rejecting a Medicaid expansion that would hugely benefit many poorer Hispanics. In Texas, Democratic strategists already think this might be the push the state needs to turn blue.

So amidst an effort to pass a comprehensive immigration reform bill meant to help the Republican Party appeal to Hispanic voters, Republicans are making a point of demanding that legalized immigrants can’t get Obamacare, and in some cases can’t even get emergency care. They’re also considering a crushingly punitive version of the individual mandate, in which undocumented immigrants need to purchase private health care on their own, without subsidies, or they can’t even become legal residents. And they’re refusing to agree to Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion in some of the states where it would do Hispanics the most good.

This is, to say the least, a mixed message.

And it highlights a broader problem for Republicans in the Hispanic community. Republicans who want to win Hispanic votes often make the point that Hispanic voters care about more than immigration reform — they care about the economy and education and health care and national defense. And that’s true. But the Republican Party is not just at odds with Hispanic voters over immigration reform. They’re at odds with Hispanic voters over most of those other issues, too. And the internal dynamics of the GOP are such that in order to pass immigration reform they need to emphasize and publicize those other disagreements in a way that’s particularly noxious to Hispanic voters. It’s as if to end a fight with your wife over the kids you had to really push home the point that you never liked her mother.

PHOENIX -- Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer has signed a law expanding the state's Medicaid program following her victory over conservatives in her own party opposed to embracing a key part of President Barack Obama's health care overhaul.

The Republican governor gathered key lawmakers from both parties who voted for the law at Monday morning's ceremony. Conservative Republicans in the Arizona House and Senate fought the proposal bitterly for months but the Legislature's Democrats and some Republicans teamed up to approve the law.

Opponents of the bill are planning a citizen's referendum that would block it and a lawsuit is also possible.

Brewer fought the law but agreed to add more than 300,000 poor Arizonans to the program after the Supreme Court found it was constitutional and Obama was re-elected.

On June 18 2013 06:41 Gorsameth wrote:
Its funny to see the Republican party twist and turn at times. There against "Big" Government and government intervention/aid yet a large portion of there voters are those under such aid. Must be hard to get someone to vote for you while your agenda is to cripple him.

WASHINGTON -- Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has continued to release only select portions of committee interviews with key Internal Revenue Service staffers despite calls to make the full transcripts public.

In recent days, the California Republican has allowed reporters from local and national news outlets to review portions of his panel's investigative work into the IRS targeting of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status. The move looks like a rebuke to the ranking Democrat on his committee, Rep. Elijah Cummings (Md.), and even some Republican lawmakers, who have publicly worried that selective leaking imperils the integrity of the investigation.

According to one journalist who attended a briefing session at Issa's committee office, the ground rules have been fairly strict: Reporters have been given access to a limited number of pages of interview transcripts from which they can take notes (no photocopies). And they have been given access to only a few interview transcripts at a single time, although Issa's staff has spoken with at least half-a-dozen IRS employees about the targeting of tea party groups.

Jennifer Grove, a reporter for Fox19 in Cincinnati, was given a peek into what two IRS employees -- Cincinnati office staffers Gary Muthert and Liz Hofacre, who were assigned to tea party cases -- said about the practice of screening conservative groups. Though there were 300-plus pages of transcripts from the Muthert and Hofacre interviews, Grove was shown just 50 pages. Over three hours, she took notes, leading to a June 13 story about how Carter Hull, an IRS lawyer in the technical unit in Washington, had played a significant role in managing the screening.

Days later, a potentially bigger item emerged. The Associated Press, Politico and The Washington Post reported that a former Washington-based manager in the tax-exempt unit, Holly Paz, knew about the targeting scheme in 2011 but didn't think there was anything nefarious to it.

On June 18 2013 07:48 sunprince wrote:


The key for Republicans is simply that most American voters are so poorly versed in critical thinking that it's not that that difficult to convince voters to vote against their own self interest.

The Tea Party movement is an excellent example of such, as much of its rank-and-file (as opposed to the wealthy leaders funding it) are the demographics who lose out those most under Republican policies.

On June 18 2013 07:53 JonnyBNoHo wrote:

The ol' stupid / tricked people vote Republican argument...

On June 18 2013 08:27 aksfjh wrote:

I think it's a legitimate claim. However, I have to temper that with the idea that stupid/tricked people can end up on either side, with portions of the past electorate going towards causes like (legitimate) socialism and communism, much like we see now with Libertarianism. We see the same thing happening in European electorates, but to differing degrees between different countries and different parties. Right now, there seems to be an incredibly large number of people voting red despite very clear efforts of the party to crap on initiatives that would directly help their constituencies (Medicaid expansion comes to mind).

On June 18 2013 07:53 JonnyBNoHo wrote:

The ol' stupid / tricked people vote Republican argument...

On June 18 2013 11:07 JonnyBNoHo wrote:
A topic we can all agree on - the rich: Defending the One Percent.

This is a pretty good representation of my own take on inequality. Though I have to stress that I don't see fighting inequality as a bad, or inefficient thing. In my view the remedy needs to focus on the root causes (supply and demand imbalances, rent seeking, social ills and the like) rather than tax and transfer schemes (though they can still be used - I'm not speaking in absolutes here).

A blog rebuttal from The Economist with good comments below.

On June 18 2013 11:32 Chocolate wrote:

I agree with you in many ways, but I still support the situation in place (mostly). The truth is that it is easier to simply say "poor people can't afford healthcare, so let's make it a possibility" than it is to say "poor people can't afford healthcare because of [societal factor] so let's do [solution]." Also, societal change takes a long time. Even if we put a lot of resources towards, say, providing low-income children a better education, we'd still have to deal with poorly educated adults who can't earn enough to support a family for decades.

Also, as a liberal myself, I don't see why people obsess so much over inequality. Some professions, such as being an electrical engineer, simply merit more compensation than dish-washing. If you are poor you can make quite a good living by getting an education, getting a degree in something in demand and getting some work experience while you study, and then getting a job. You don't even need a degree for things like web security or creating a web-business or even software (though it would help). You can also be a handyman: plumber, electrician, carpenter, etc. without much education. I frankly don't have much sympathy for the poor in this country. $15k per year is actually enough for one person to live in some comfort, and I see a lot of poor people toting around iphones and the like.

Also, I don't think you guys should be so dismissive of Republicans. Yeah, the social conservatives are mostly retarded and make up a large voting base, but Democrats have a lot of poor-city folk under their wing as well. Republicans have the Tea Party but Democrats have hardcore feminists (perhaps they are more green party, but you could agree that the TP was more Libertatian anyway). You might argue that Republican voters are merely trying to hoard their wealth, but you could also argue that Democrat voters are simply trying to take from others.

On June 18 2013 11:45 farvacola wrote:

I assure you that there are a great many places in this country that require that one make more than 15k a year in order to live with any degree of comfort, particularly if one happens to be sick or in some previously accrued amount of debt.

On June 18 2013 11:45 farvacola wrote:

I assure you that there are a great many places in this country that require that one make more than 15k a year in order to live with any degree of comfort, particularly if one happens to be sick or in some previously accrued amount of debt.

On June 18 2013 11:07 JonnyBNoHo wrote:
A topic we can all agree on - the rich: Defending the One Percent.

This is a pretty good representation of my own take on inequality. Though I have to stress that I don't see fighting inequality as a bad, or inefficient thing. In my view the remedy needs to focus on the root causes (supply and demand imbalances, rent seeking, social ills and the like) rather than tax and transfer schemes (though they can still be used - I'm not speaking in absolutes here).

A blog rebuttal from The Economist with good comments below.

The theory comes from a paper by economists Emmanuel Saez, Thomas Piketty and surprise guest star Stefanie Stantcheva. They hypothesized that lowering marginal tax rates increases the incentive for high earners to bargain up their wages — and pocket more of their raise. Moreover, because the higher earners are bargaining for greater pay without actually becoming more productive, the additional money they’re taking in is coming form other workers, generally those lower down the income scale.

Sure enough, Saez, Piketty, and Stantcheva found that there’s a strong correlation between the size of countries’ tax cuts on the rich and increases in the income shares of the rich, even before taking taxes into account. That is, the rich are getting richer even before you take into account that they’re paying less in taxes:



What’s more, increases in the rich’s income share didn’t coincide with increases in the rate of GDP growth. That fits the Saez/Piketty/Stantcheva theory that the rich aren’t getting more productive; they’re just getting better at bargaining because lower tax rates give them the motivation to get better at bargaining.