All Things in Moderation

Michi linked a piece last night as a counter argument to Melissa Harris-Perry’s claim that President Obama is the victim of a double standard and that white liberals may be abandoning him because we have set a higher standard for a black president. A few of us discussed this on Tuesday night and came to the conclusion that her claim was a stretch at best. Here’s David Sirota with more analysis.

By seeing this record and then explaining away declining liberal support for President Obama as a product of bigotry, Harris-Perry exhibits the ultimate form of both denialism and elitism. It assumes voters (and readers of the Nation) are all lockstep partisans who don’t — and shouldn’t — care about actual issues, public policies and governmental actions, and that they should instead just line up with their party’s leaders without question. It further assumes — without any factual evidence — that if and when voters don’t follow this partisan script, it means that some deeper psychological factor like racism (rather than, say, rational, considered analysis of public policy) is the primary motivating factor in their behavior.

Betraying the arrogant elitism at the heart of such an argument, Harris-Perry declares that the “legislative record for [Obama’s] first two years outpaces Clinton’s first two years” — a line that suggests that Obama is automatically more deserving of liberal support than Clinton. Yet, in making this part of the basis of her “electoral racism” allegations, she implies that liberal voters are so ignorant that they automatically believe sheer numbers of bills passed trumps what’s actually in the bills. She hopes — or, perhaps, believes — that nobody remembers that many of those bills (the Patriot Act extension, the extension of the Bush tax cuts, the bank bailouts, the no-public-option health insurance giveaway legislation, to name a few) were initiatives that many liberals opposed.

Here’s another follow up to an issue we discussed yesterday. The USPS Office of the Inspector General has released its “management advisory” report on the funding of the postal service’s pension obligation. I’m fairly certain there’s a political football counterpoint to all of this but I thought this was a fairly straight forward stating of the relevant facts. Please correct me if you find something contrary.

In July 1971, when the Post Office Department became the Postal Service, employees that belonged to the federal pension fund began contributing to the Postal Service’s portion of the pension fund. These retirement costs were divided according to the number of years employees had belonged to each fund. However, the federal pension fund paid for retirements was based on 1971 salaries, not final salaries as administered by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).

OPM has explained that these mischarges were in response to what they believed to be the will of Congress expressed in 1974 legislation. However, the 1974 language was repealed by Congress in 2003. Congress directed OPM to use its authority to oversee the reforms using accepted “dynamic assumptions” that include pay increases and inflation. OPM switched to dynamic funding for the Postal Service portion, but did not for their share. The Postal Service paid the $75 billion difference.

In 2004, the Postal Service appealed the OPM’s methodology for pension fund allocation and the appeal was denied by the OPM. The denial relied on 1974 legislation that made the Postal Service responsible for the pension costs related to salary increases. However, the 1974 language was repealed by Congress.

In addition, the OPM directed the Postal Service to use 100 percent pre-funding for both pension and health care retirement funds. In contrast the OPM has pension funding levels of 41 percent for federal employees and 24 percent for the military. The OPM’s own retiree health care prefunding for federal employees is 0 percent. The Standard & Poor’s 500 companies’ pension funding is 80 percent.

Correcting either the $75 billion overcharge or reducing the 100 percent target prefunding level to 80 percent would result in the ability of the Postal Service to pay off the Treasury debt associated with paying the $75 billion overcharge.

Admin Note: I think it’s important that as many of us as possible, work schedules allowing, try to contribute new posts and find ways to add to our contributors list. I don’t believe new posts necessarily need to be long-winded each and every time, although I like those, it can be something short and sweet that will spark a discussion.

lmsinca

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As today is my husbands 63 and 5 months birthday celebration we’re taking the day off, JK. We’re always looking for an excuse for a holiday.

A few links to keep us going.

I found this headline from the NY Times amusing.

Europe Nears Agreement on Bailout Fund That May Be Inadequate

By the time the entire process is finished, about mid-October if all goes well, Europe’s leaders will have a newly expanded European Financial Stability Facility that most analysts say will be, at $600 billion, grossly inadequate to extinguish the crisis, since it lacks the means to cope with the larger economies of Italy and Spain.
It seems another example of too little, too late on the part of the leaders of the 17-nation euro zone. But it is also another example of sharply differing analyses of the core problem of the euro, making a solution hard to reach.

And from the Left Coast Desk
Gov. Chris Christie was here at the Reagan Library. I guess he’s still not running.

The video, on the Politico website, represented his “answers back to back to back together on the question of running for the presidency,” he told hundreds of Republicans gathered at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley — several of whom asked him to run.

Among the responses on the video: “I’m 100% certain I’m not going to run,” “I don’t want to run” and “I don’t feel ready in my heart to be president.”

And my favorite DFH David Dayen points to this. Apparently the USPS is required to pre-fund future retiree benefits of postal workers who aren’t even born yet.

The USPS economic crisis is the result of a provision of the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 that requires the Postal Service to pre-fund the health care benefits of future retirees—a burden no other government agency or private company bears. 

The legislation requires the USPS to fund a 75-year liability over a 10-year period, and that requirement costs the USPS more than $5.5 billion per year. Guffey also pointed out that “the federal government is holding billions of dollars in postal overpayments to its pension accounts.” 

All of the USPS losses over the past four years come from this mandate. You cannot find another organization in the world, AFAIK, that pre-funds 75 years of benefits over a 10-year period. And it’s not just the overpayments, it’s the opportunity costs of having to hold that much reserve capital that cannot be used when times are tough, or to invest in more attractive services. This results from a 2006 law that was one of the last time bombs of the Denny Hastert-Bill Frist Congress. That needs to change.

— LM

Apropos of nothing: Using a 3D Printer to print food. That’s cool, but I saw a talk (I think it was a TED talk) where the guy talked about using the same sort of technology in laser printers to print nutritious wafers. Couldn’t find that, but that also sounded exciting. Not quite to the point of having Star Trek food replicators. But close. — KW

Illinois likely to appeal dismissal of charges against man facing 75 years for “eavesdropping” by recording a public official. – NoVA. They want to throw him in jail essentially for life.

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This topic came up in a bit of back and forth recently, so I thought I’d hold forth and dodge a few soft tomatoes. Sauce!

There seem to be two sharp divisions between conservatives and liberals on taxation. The first of these is what kind of taxes people should pay. I have heard the refrain from conservative economists that taxes such as capital gains and estate taxes are the worst and consumption taxes are the best. I’m sure it’s pure coincidence that the wealthy pay the former taxes whereas lower wage earners are hit more heavily by the latter. I see this division as a philosophical one. I support taxing capital gains as ordinary income with indexing for inflation. Or perhaps a rate lowered by the inflation rate.

The flat tax vs. graduated rates is more interesting to me. As it has been proposed, the flat income tax is reasonably progressive due to the large personal exemption that is attached to it. But how do they compare? I took as a proposition to compare the current tax rates with a hypothetical flat tax. I put in a significant exemption for the flat tax and required it to raise roughly the same revenue as the current system. I even went to the census to get the income distribution. It’s a little tricky as 26% of households earn $100k or more and that wasn’t broken out. I assumed a gradually falling fraction from $100K upwards (using a Lorentzian distribution). It misses those earning $1M+, but I’ve heard enough times that this is a small fraction of the total. Anyway, this is a thought experiment, so my theoretical America has an income cap of $1M.

The requirements on my flat tax are that it has a $25K personal exemption and must raise the same amount as the current system. Turns out that you need a 32% rate. Here’s the plot of the two rates compared and the difference.

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This article is making the rounds in the rightwing blogosphere. Short version, “White liberals are abandoning Obama because of racism.”

This speaks more about the victim politics of the author than of reality.

What do those on the left think?

http://www.thenation.com/article/163544/black-president-double-standard-why-white-liberals-are-abandoning-obama

–Troll

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It looks like some of the big money boys aren’t all that happy with the current GOP field. They’re still urging Gov. Christie to enter the race.

Several dozen potential Christie backers attended a meeting in July convened by Mr. Langone to introduce the governor to top-shelf Republican donors, many of them on the sidelines so far in the 2012 campaign. Others saw him in action in June, when Mr. Christie quietly flew to Colorado to speak at a private retreat hosted by Mr. Koch and his brother, Charles, another prominent Republican donor.

And while Mr. Christie has so far resisted their entreaties, he is facing a renewed effort in recent days following stumbles by Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, whose debate performances and stances on Social Security, immigration and other issues have left many major donors looking again for someone they think can take on Mr. Obama next year.

I’m going to put this in as a link because I still haven’t quite figured out how to put up a video. This guy talks about the looming market crash and Greek default on the BBC.

This is not an entertaining Rick Santelli-style rant, it’s a cool assessment of how the Euromarket crisis is likely to end, which he thinks is very badly. The flummoxed reaction of the BBC host suggests that the trader, Alessio Rastani, was a booking mistake.

And it looks like we dodged the shutdown bullet again.

The reason that Republicans and Democrats were able to compromise is because the major sticking point — whether to offset an increase in emergency funding in fiscal 2011 with cuts elsewhere — is more or less moot now that FEMA has said it will likely have enough cash on hand to continue to hand out relief money through Friday, when the government’s fiscal year ends.

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