Morning Must Reads: Q&A

the Bush tax cuts for those making $250k or less.
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This is wrong, and I am getting really tired of reading it.
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People making one billion dollars get this tax cut extension. Everybody who pays federal income tax gets this extension.
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Should be obvious. In order to make MORE than 250 you have to make 250K, and there is no special exclusion from the reduction in rates in those brackets for higher income earners.
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As I say, I am tired of reading this. I’m not just bugging you. I wrote to the NYT ombud on the same issue. (http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/11/6/918168/-NY-Times:-Right-Yesterday,-Wrong-Today) But can we PLEASE start getting this right during the upcoming period of intense debate.
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To summarize, the <250K extension is for everyone. The break for the highest 2 percent of earners is a special break in ADDITION to the break everyone else gets.

The TARP loans aren’t “repaid” in any meaningful sense of the word.
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Treasury accepted mostly stock and stock warrants, not cash, in return for the cash TARP recipients were given.
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The reason the story “TARP was repaid!” has any technical credibility at all is because that stock has been projected to increase in value since the DOW rebound, and so Treasury gets to trumpet “See, they’ve almost paid us back in full!” to a credulous public (through reporters apparently unfamiliar with “stock warrants”).
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Get it?
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Since the projected (as in the next decade) market value of the bank stock that Treasury holds has gone up, they’re telling the country that they’ve been paid back, as if the banks actually gave them more money in return for the money they received.
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But, if Treasury actually dumped that stock on the market, and sold it all off at current values, A) they wouldn’t be “repaid” nearly as much, since that “repayment” counts on projected values, and B) the banks’ stocks would tank, causing another round of crisis and bailouts.
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It’s probably a good thing that more Americans don’t “know” that TARP was “repaid (more than half),” since folks might get the idea that they should just pay their underwater ARM mortgages in their own newly issued stock warrants, and demand that the banks accept theirs…
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…or that the IRS or states who recently assessed property at 2007 values accept stock warrants in lieu of cash, too.
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If everybody got to “pay back” the banksters and tax collectors in the same way Treasury proclaims it has been paid back, things would get really, really interesting.
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Hey, can you lend me a few hundred thousand dollars? I lost my house and all of my assets and cash one of those nights in Vegas, I don’t remember which…
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…so I’ll pay you back just as soon as I can issue some stock warrants, really.

Well said.
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If the tax cuts for income under $250,000 are renewed, then everyone who earns an income gets an income tax cut. Everyone.
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I’m not sure why this is so hard for the Villagers to understand. Maybe you all live at such an elite level that anything under the first quarter million you earn each year is chump change.

What did I miss?

US poverty rate increases.

“The Census Bureau recently reported that the poverty rate in the United States rose to 14.3 percent last year, the highest level in more than 50 years.

Texas and Florida saw the most people fall below the line. In Florida alone, 323,000 people became newly poor last year, bringing the state’s poverty total to 2.7 million.

The numbers tell another tale as well: Nationwide, in black households such as Walker’s, income plunged an average of 4.4 percent in 2009, almost three times the drop among whites. The number of blacks living below the official poverty line – $21,756 for a family of four – increased by 7 percent in just one year.”

What did I miss?

The poverty rate in the US has increased.

“The Census Bureau recently reported that the poverty rate in the United States rose to 14.3 percent last year, the highest level in more than 50 years.

Texas and Florida saw the most people fall below the line. In Florida alone, 323,000 people became newly poor last year, bringing the state’s poverty total to 2.7 million.

The numbers tell another tale as well: Nationwide, in black households such as Walker’s, income plunged an average of 4.4 percent in 2009, almost three times the drop among whites. The number of blacks living below the official poverty line – $21,756 for a family of four – increased by 7 percent in just one year. ”

(one family’s story at the link)

Jon Kyl: Traitor, idiot, or both?

Russians are mystified. They can’t quite believe that the U.S. Senate might fail to ratify the nuclear arms treaty, and they see no good from such an outcome.
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The list of possible harmful effects they cite encompasses a minefield of global concerns: no more cooperation on Iran, a setback for progressive tendencies in Russia, new hurdles for Russian membership in the World Trade Organization, a terrible example for nuclear countries such as China and India, dim prospects for better NATO relations. And to top it off, the United States and its president would look ridiculous.

Oh, maybe that’s it. Americans would be much less safer and our foreign policy would lie in tatters, but the president would look bad, so it’s a net plus for Kyl, right?
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The evidence seems to lean to “idiot” over “traitor,” but I think I’m going with “both.” What an unbelievable @ss.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/18/AR2010111805950.html

An interesting discussion between Matt Tabbi and David Gergen.

(just read it…I find it not only an interesting discussion, but on a higher level, notable for its contrast of inside-versus-outside-the-Beltway conventional wisdom.)

And speaking of Beltway conventional wisdom, here’s a critique of the NYT’s story about the START treaty.

“There are 17 paragraphs in the New York Times front page story about the START treaty. Fifteen of them are devoted to the giant risk that President Obama is taking in pushing our most vestigial legislative body to hold a…vote on a treaty that’s critical for our national security.

If you want to read about the real importance of START, one of the few remaining DC news organizations, McClatchy, has the actual news. Or, you can read one of about a dozen START-related posts on Daniel Larison’s blog, like the aptly-titled Wasting Time.

I don’t think I’m being partisan or tribal to point out that if the tables were turned, and Democrats were opposing START over the wishes of a Republican President, that they’d be mau-maued into next week by the press and Republicans, because our vital and sacred national security is at stake. Instead, we have a bunch of ‘is he rough enough’ ‘is he tough enough’ bulls**t speculation about Obama’s manly ability to get John Kyl to stop grandstanding about this uncontroversial and necessary vote.”

This didn’t post at first, sorry for the duplicate. Note to Self: shorten longer URLs so you get thrown into moderation (or something).

If they were wrong about this, what else could they be wrong about?

“’Supporting the American auto industry required tough decisions and shared sacrifices, but it helped save jobs, rescue an industry at the heart of America’s manufacturing sector, and make it more competitive for the future,’ said President Obama in a statement today. At the time of the auto company rescue, however, Republicans severely criticized the administration’s effort, warning that keeping the companies from a catastrophic collapse would lead the country down ‘the road to socialism,’ and end in ‘predictable’ disaster:

Rep. John Boehner (R-OH): “Does anyone really believe that politicians and bureaucrats in Washington can successfully steer a multi-national corporation to economic viability?” [6/1/09]

Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL): “It’s basically going to be a government-owned, government-run company. …It’s the road toward socialism.” [5/29/09]

[...]

According to the Center for Automotive Research, ‘if the government had not invested in the automotive industry, up to 80,000 automotive jobs would have been lost, and General Motors alone would have lost one million units of sales in 2009. Once Chrysler and GM emerged from their “orderly” bankruptcies, the growth of automotive sector employment has been strong, with 52,900 workers added since July 2009. Had GM and Chrysler not successfully emerged, those jobs would have been permanently lost.’”

“The Real Story of Climategate”

“The contents of the emails were spun in a brilliant exercise of selective quotation. Out of context, phrases can be twisted to mean any number of things – especially if they were written as private correspondence with colleagues, rather than with public communication in mind. Think about all the emails you have sent in the past decade. Chances are, if someone tried hard enough, they could make a few sentences you had written sound like evidence of malpractice, regardless of your real actions or intentions.

Consequently, a mathematical ‘trick’ (clever calculation) to efficiently analyse data was reframed as a conspiracy to ‘trick’ (deceive) the public into believing the world was warming. Researchers discussed how to statistically isolate and ‘hide the decline’ in problematic tree ring data that was no longer measuring what it used to, but this quote was immediately twisted to claim that the decline was in global temperatures: the world is cooling and scientists are hiding it from us!’”

grape_crush has been this blog’s hero yet again, excellent work!

‘Two GOPers, one cup’

“Leaving aside the fact that the federal insurance coverage offered to members of Congress is a separate issue from Democratic reforms, and the regional exchanges and federal subsidies the new law creates, the generic conceptual resemblance has made for a pressure point that Democrats have not been able to resist poking.

Coincidentally, two Republicans have already said they would refuse health care benefits: Illinois’ Bobby Schilling and Pennsylvania’s Mike Kelly.[...]”

(apologies for the reference…and if you don’t get the reference, good on you)

“…but the president would look bad, so it’s a net plus for Kyl, right?”
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I think it would be more accurate to say that our country would look bad, and Kyl can’t make Obama look bad without the same reflection on himself and his party.

Haha: Children See Saw 3D Instead Of Megamind

“Ha! GOTCHA, BABIES! IN YOUR STUPID, SUPERTINY FACE!

Admittedly, if I was one of those 7-year-olds, I would have sh*t my shorts. Even as a full grown (some might say too grown) man, I do not have the stomach for horror movies, and I feel very strongly that James Wan should be on some kind of island prison somewhere. It could be any island prison, really, so long as it is an island and a prison.

But as an adult who doesn’t ever have to watch any of the Saw movies ever, AND gets to read about children having their megaminds megabroken, this is hilarious. (Also hilarious: referring to someone as a ‘cinema boss.’)”

LB will probably kill me for saying this, but, even if we ever produce “the little Zech,” I would still find this hi-larious.

Mike Konczal deconstructs the idea that government gained more regulatory control of the economy over the past decade.

“I wanted to take this apart and investigate it further. What has changed in our regulatory state? I also wanted to see how the Great Recession impacted this chart – does it account for the rise in 2009?[...]

Homeland Security accounts for over 80% of the increase in government regulatory-designated employees during the past 11 years. Homeland Security added ~40,000 workers in Customs and Border Protection, as well as going from 0 to 60,000 workers in Transportation Security Administration. (Immigration and Customs Enforcement record 4,000 less workers.)[...]

…there’s a 0.002% growth in the non-Homeland Security regulatory burden over the past 9 years if you look at the entire labor force.

Looking at the numbers, there’s a lot of agencies gaining and losing, with a surprising number adding few if any people over the past 10 years. And what’s interesting is what other kind of regulatory agencies put on additional workers. The FDA added workers. So did the Drug Enforcement Administration, as did the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Office of Thift Supervision went down in number of employees, which is funny as they were the go-to regulatory agency when AIG-FP and others when regulator shopping.

My absolute favorite: One of the biggest winners over the past 9 years was the Patent and Trademark Office, which went from 6,128 employees to 10,098 employees. Given how much patents are used to shut down competition and let the largest companies rent-seek, this is probably the anti-growth part I would flag. For those who know it better, is it a symptom of court decisions? Are they playing catch-up to industry demands?

So there you have it. The Bush-era brought you a regulatory state of militarized borders, drug wars, strategically weakened financial regulatory bodies for convenient regulatory shopping, and aggressive use of patents to shut down competition. This is not the regulatory state I fight for.”

Nice. Like when at the South Park movie, I saw a dad yank his (what must have been) 5- and 7-year old out of the theater within the first 5 mins.

Bruce Bartlett questions the wisdom of a proposed payroll tax ‘holiday’.

“Today, I just want to ask one question: What are the odds that Republicans will ever allow this one-year tax holiday to expire? They wrote the Bush tax cuts with explicit expiration dates and then when it came time for the law they wrote to take effect exactly as they wrote it, they said any failure to extend them permanently would constitute the biggest tax increase in history.

Sadly, Obama allowed himself to fall into the Republican trap, but that’s another story. My point is that if allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire is the biggest tax increase in history, one that Republicans claim would decimate a still-fragile economy, then surely expiration of a payroll tax holiday would also constitute a massive tax increase on the working people of America. And what are the odds that the economy won’t still be fragile a year from now? Zero, I would say.[...]

…a payroll tax holiday is Pandora’s Box and best left unopened. Republicans would prefer to destroy Social Security’s finances or permanently fund it with general revenues than allow a once-suspended payroll tax to be reimposed. Arch Social Security hater Peter Ferrara once told me that funding it with general revenues was part of his plan to destroy it by converting Social Security into a welfare program, rather than an earned benefit. He was right.”

Although there’s always more if you want another helping, here’s dessert:

Q-q-q-quizzin’ about your generation

(mine would have been more accurate if I hadn’t confused Salt-and-Pepa with TLC)

Gah. I can’t tell you how much QE2 confuses me every time it’s mentioned. Up here, our major highway is called “QE2″ named after, well, Queen Elizabeth II. So yeah, every time I see “defense of QE2″, I’m going “why does an American have to defend the Queen?”

Ok, one more:

‘Gather your armies…’

(…of lobbyists…)

“The focal point of their efforts is Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, or MERS, the controversial, privately run electronic database that is used by practically every lending institution and investment company to track the transfer of the ownership of mortgages as they are packaged into securities and traded at lightning speed around the globe.

But MERS does more than just track the trading of loans. In the vast majority of mortgage documents at local courts and offices across the country, it is listed as the holder of the loans. That allows the financial industry to trade mortgages as much as it wishes without spending the time and money to refile the paperwork.[...]

In recent years, MERS has become the target of numerous legal challenges from homeowners in foreclosure who allege that mortgage transfers made through the system are invalid because they bypass local recording laws. MERS, the lawsuits contend, does not have standing to foreclose because it is only a database and not the actual holder of the mortgage.

The liabilities could be astronomical for MERS. One lawsuit in California alone is seeking recording fees that could cost the company from $60 billion to $120 billion. But the consequences for the financial industry are even greater, as challenges to the validity of transfers done by MERS call into question the entire process of how loans were securitized and could render the 66 million mortgages in its system foreclosure-proof.”

“fair and balanced” – Morning Joe suspended for campaign contributions (to balance Olbermann’s), finally! Looks like Peter Phil Griffin’s cracking down on everyone.
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http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1110/45411.html
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(normally don’t like to link to politico but if this is the only way to get some of the reporters to read our links…)

Excellent work, grape, thanks. The entire securitization mess / who owns mortgages if anyone / “show me the note” homeowner defense needs more scrutiny. The political fallout alone should keep our swamp reporters busy (I’m betting Pickert draws the short straw to cover this).

Gee, wasn’t that what we were saying exactly a year ago when the idiotic media picked up the story and ran with it?
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This isn’t new news. This is severely old news. This is information that was known at the beginning of the whole thing before it was even called climategate. And the only thing that allowed it to grow is this nation’s capacity for idiocy and a lack of demand for factual reporting.

In total agreement with deconstructiva (Pickert’s going to be the “unlucky” one, I’ll bet).
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The MERS system apparently could be rife with systemic fraud, it’s incredibly important to understand –sort of like TARP.

i can’t believe that reference made it on time.
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The trouble is, I hear Democrats say it all the time. These idiots couldn’t message their way out of wet paper bag.

And last but not least…the extreme pleasure of voting in Spain’s midterms:

Proof that, despite rightists’ constant accusations to the contrary, we do not have an extreme left socialist party in the United States.

I thought it was appropos, considering what the two Representatives are doing.
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I do admire their ideological consistency, ‘tho I’m sure they will be offered a sweet deal due to their House membership.

Great video, stuart, thanks. I guess that wasn’t a video of Christine O’Donnell voting.

::vigorous golf clap::

“Two GOPers, one cup”
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…I thought you were referring to Bush/Cheney and the previous administration….

Oh, they certainly are eating their own… I’m just… my general faith in humanity… you know… something may have died inside me .. .
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Please note that if you find the hidden link, follow it and research it to your own unfortunate end; it is entirely your fault that you will have seen what can not be unseen, and which is entirely unsafe for work…
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Btw, yeah they are consistent, but it doesn’t make what they stand for any better. Their cup still stinks.

Left unsaid: “I’ll vote how she’s voting.”

Almodóvar must have directed this. He types as the soundtrack to Talk to Her coos in the background.

This is the cr*p Gergen mouths day after day on CNN and nobody disputes him. Tallibi is wise beyond his years.

That was fun. Unfortunately, the results were only 1 year off in my case.

Humorist Dave Barry talks on the socialist NPR about how he was singled out by TSA to have his “junk” touched because he had a blurry groin:
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http://www.npr.org/2010/11/15/131338172/humorist-dave-barry-and-the-tsa?ps=rs

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/18/were-the-bush-tax-cuts-good-for-growth/
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Chart demonstrating how Bush tax cuts were not so good for growth. In fact, he oversaw the slowest growth looking at the last 50 years.

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A message from Transport Canada on the TSA experience. Very funny.

Nice interactive map measuring by state concerning health, income and education. Sadly, the south is everlastingly, it seems, at the bottom.
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http://www.measureofamerica.org/maps/

“Why does an American have to defend the Queen”? Because many Americans wish their country was more like Canada. Better standard of living, better quality of life, better and cheaper healthcare, the list just goes on.

Because tax cuts for everyone <250k is the shortest way of saying it?

I would hope people who are following this closely realize tax rates are graduated.

Perhaps villagers think this is well known?

jay,

You’re right. I’m guilty, too. Even though I KNOW that everybody would get the lower rate up to 250k, I keep forgetting it in the debate about whether those making >250k should get A tax cut.

Ok, first, Canadians don’t defend the Queen. Instead we debate whether the futility of the monarch is worth tossing out and truly recognizing that our Governor General is really appointed by the Prime Minister and not the Queen (or perhaps just doing away with the GG and absorbing those responsibilities into the PM’s duties….seeing as the GG just does what the PM says she should do though anyone who actually believes that is really overlooking the usefulness of having a puppethead sitting there so the PM doesn’t have to sign a bill that the opposition successfully rammed through Commons, but I digress) or just leaving things as they are for tradition’s sake. But still, for an American to actually want to defend the Queen, there would actually have to be a reason to defend the Queen and since the only news I’ve heard of from the royal family lately is the engagement of the second in line to the throne, there seems to be an absence of reason for anyone to need to defend the Queen. Let alone, Ben Bernake. Or for that defense to appear on Swamp. Not that this rules out the possibility that the Queen did something stupid, just that the Queen would’ve done something stupid that would’ve been worthy of noting on Swamp and I hadn’t heard it already. Yeah…..

Apropos of nothing, I just ran across this cartoon illustrating the current state of bipartisanship:

http://politicalhumor.about.com/od/politicalcartoons/ig/Political-Cartoons/Democracy-in-Peril.htm

herby002: Sadly true.

gum,

You might think it’s old news, but it never dies in the ether.
In the next month our “conservative friends” will be sure to cite one or more stories about how the world has been hoodwinked by cynical liberal “scientists” using “data tricks” to pump up their grant bank accounts.

If they include links to prove their statements, they’ll be full of babble-lies.

(Can I coin a new word, per Palin? babblelies?)

From the link – from the link:
“The Congressional health care system — the Federal Employees’ Health Plan (FEHBP) — is very similar to the Exchanges established in the Affordable Care Act. Like federal employees, beginning in 2014, many Americans will be able to choose coverage from a series of private options competing for their business within a new health care marketplace — the state-based Exchange.

Kelly, however, will not have the choice of enrolling in an FEHBP plan by 2014 and then could have coverage that is “the same as everyone else’s.” Under a Republican amendment to the Affordable Care Act, “the only health plans that the Federal Government may make available” to Members of Congress and congressional staff are “health plans that are I) created under this Act (or an amendment made by this Act); or (II) offered through an Exchange established under this Act.””

http://thinkprogress.org/2010/11/18/kelly-hcr/

Wanna bet the the Republicans will try to amend their own amendment so they don’t have to bother with no silly exchanges?

But the Bush administration couldn’t have slacked-off in their regulatory functions, right?

Must have made up the oversight deficit with private-sector consultants, who did the job faster, more thoroughly, cheaper than government bureaucrats, right?

I mean, that’s what happened with the IRS farming out the delinquent tax files for collection to private collection agencies, after firing lots of experienced IRS collection agents; the IRS collected more $$ than they used to, right?

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What?

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What do you mean, the IRS collected less than they had before, and paid more to the private collectors than they got back?
Are you trying to tell me that we paid private companies a profit to lose our money?

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Well, it must have been a Democrat plot, that’s all I have to say. Damn socialists!

A quirk, I guess, but I always think of the QE2 as the luxury liner. Then I think defend against pirates. Then I think that ain’t right in the context of what I’m reading. Then I have to google it.

Mine was off by three years. Probly because I can’t remember too good.

“In recent years, MERS has become the target of numerous legal challenges from homeowners in foreclosure who allege that mortgage transfers made through the system are invalid because they bypass local recording laws. MERS, the lawsuits contend, does not have standing to foreclose because it is only database and not the actual holder of the mortgage.”

A possibly more important consideration is that the entities (banks, loan companies, loan consolidators, etc.) that fed the information about loans into the electronic database can’t produce the paperwork to prove the ownership of the properties affected.
This has led to disputes where houses have been sold to third parties in “foreclosure sales” while the home’s occupants are still living in them, with paperwork saying that the loans are paid up-to-date.

I say: Let the courts decide. Similar to TV’s “People’s Court”, if the company is claiming to own the house, make them provide the documents to the court showing that that they legally acquired it.

That’s a pretty cool link apr, thanks for posting it.

The role of the UK monarchy is to preserve and project a set of values, both democratic and legal, which had been developed since the Magna Carta, for the benefit of developing nations who saw a basically European way of life as fair and equitable. Unfortunately the nascent US chose to abandon these principles long before it was ready – resulting in a scenario where Americans are derided throughout the rest of the world, and the US has capital punishment rates comparable only with Asian countries who never had the same heritage. Blacks are still viewed with suspicion – just look at the the Tea Party movement, or the number of African – Americans on death row for example.

Canadians love Canada because they know they live in a fairer, more equitable society. Hell, even Sarah Palin could have made it as a successful businesswomen who could have taken care of her family instead of the butt for late night comedy if she had only been born athousand miles east.

Not Spanish mid-terms, Catalan mid-terms. There’s a big step to the left in the distinction.

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you must not miss it!!

http://www.briskfeetinn.com

Ah, enter the lair of morons.

Thank you for the invitation, but I’d rather stay out here. I don’t think I’d like it in there with you.