Posts tagged politics

The debt ceiling is becoming all-purpose leverage.
Ezra Klein: This is a dangerous approach to the debt ceiling
Open the door to the top executives’ suite and you will hear howls of rage over the backlash these revelations have provoked. There is, from the corporate point of view, something a little disingenuous happening here. After all, countries, states and cities have spent the past several decades openly competing to set the lowest corporate tax rates in an effort to attract business. The fact that multinationals would respond to these incentives and turbocharge them with some international tax arbitrage is about as shocking as the discovery of gambling in Casablanca.
Chrystia Freeland: Business, taxes and responsibility
If you look at [respondents’] broad socialization as high school students, there were far fewer gender differences than there were once they reached college. So it seems something is happening once they enter college. … It seems like the key intervention at this point really needs to be on those college campuses because they’re more similar before they get there than when they leave.
Jennifer Lawless, professor at AU and director of the Women & Politics Institute, describing new research that suggests not enough women want to run for public office.

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg Starting Political Group

Mr. Zuckerberg has told confidantes that the new group will initially be focused on comprehensive immigration reform and making the pathway to U.S. citizenship less complicated for all immigrants, said people familiar with the CEO’s thinking. The group also plans to focus on issues including education reform and funding for scientific research.

The new group has also enlisted several consultants well versed in Beltway politics. Rob Jesmer, the former executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, is especially active on a day-to-day basis, said one person with knowledge of the matter.

[I]t’s not an immediate problem.
House Speaker John Boehner on United States’ debt.

What Politicians Believe About Their Constituents (Working Paper)

Politicians consistently and substantially overestimate support for conservative positions among their constituents on these issues. The differences we discover in this regard are exceptionally large among conservative politicians: across both issues we examine, conservative politicians appear to overestimate support for conservative policy views among their constituents by over 20 percentage points on average. In fact, on each of the issues we examine, over 90% of politicians with conservative views appear to overestimate their constituents’ support for conservative policies. This misperception is so large that nearly half of sitting conservative officeholders appear to believe that they represent a district that is more conservative on these issues than the most conservative legislative district in the entire country despite the fact that over half of these officeholders actually support positions more conservative than their own districts’ median voter. Comparable figures for liberal politicians also show a slight conservative bias: in fact, about 70% of liberal officeholders typically underestimate support for liberal positions on these issues among their constituents.

I’m hopeful we won’t have to deal with the threat of a government shutdown while we’re having to deal with the sequester at the same time.

House speaker John Boehner.

This carefully scripted statement right here? It indicates a government shutdown next month is increasingly likely.

What are the chances that lawmakers aren’t doing anything about the terrible, no-good, very bad sequester because the markets don’t seem to care its gonna hit?

Nobody wins with the budget cuts known as sequestration, which begin tomorrow and amounts to $85b in cuts this year. It:

  • will destroy 750,000 jobs this year, the CBO estimates.
  • has led lawmakers to further lock in highly partisan fiscal positions, meaning some in Congress run a real risk of being primaried if they move an inch towards compromise.
  • exempts the biggest drivers of the deficit, earned benefits including Social Security and Medicare.
  • suggests negotiations over the next budget hurdle, spending authorization, is heading nowhere fast, and that a government shutdown is a real possibility in about a month.

It’s important to recognize that the sequester was designed to be a really bad idea, equally unpalatable to everybody. Apparently that’s not the case.

“It’s time to cut spending,” said House Speaker John Boehner, during a news conference designed to criticize policy that cuts spending massively and indiscriminately. Raise your hand if you’re confused, too.