Ryan Budget is Robin Hood in Reverse, On Steroids - Bob Greenstein

House Budget Committee chair Paul Ryan's budget is a remarkable document — one that, for most of the past  half-century, would have been outside the bounds of mainstream discussion due to its extreme nature. In essence, this budget is Robin Hood in reverse — on steroids.  It would likely produce the largest redistribution of income from the bottom to the top in modern U.S. history and likely increase poverty and inequality more than any other budget in recent times (and possibly in the nation’s history).

Specifically, the Ryan budget would impose extraordinary cuts in programs that serve as a lifeline for our nation’s poorest and most vulnerable citizens, and over time would cause tens of millions of Americans to lose their health insurance or become underinsured. It would also impose severe cuts in non-defense discretionary programs—much deeper than the across-the-board cuts ("sequestration") that are scheduled to take place starting in January — thereby putting core government functions at still greater risk.

Yet alongside these extraordinary budget cuts, with their dismantling of key parts of the safety net, the budget features stunning new tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

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Gas Price Rhetoric Pumps Up The Hype - Bob King

The debate about rising gasoline prices is generating a lot of fuzzy math. Hence the cloud of murky, misleading or downright inaccurate rhetoric flying around.  Here’s POLITICO’s guide to some of the season’s most bewildering rhetoric:

1) Oil and gasoline prices are the highest they’ve been since 1918. Or the past 150 years:
The reality: Gasoline prices are still below the peaks they reached under Bush in June 2008, when the inflation-adjusted monthly average price for a gallon of regular gasoline hit $4.26, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. And even at $107 a barrel, crude oil is still well below that summer’s high price of $145 a barrel.

2) Gasoline prices have doubled under Obama:
This statement is true, though it’s incomplete — which hasn’t stopped it from becoming part of the standard GOP stump speech on energy policy.  The pre-Obama era was no low-gas-price utopia either, and prices more than doubled under Bush before the financial crash. The summer 2008 peak was 127 percent higher than the inflation-adjusted price of $1.88 a gallon when Bush was inaugurated.

3) U.S. oil and gas production is way down under Obama. Or way up:
Here, the two parties sound like they live in separate universes.  On federal lands and federal offshore waters, oil production fell sharply last year, partly because of the after-effects of the BP spill — but was still 12 percent higher than before Obama became president.

Natural gas production, meanwhile has soared to the highest levels ever, mainly because of the industry’s success in extracting previously unimagined quantities from shale reserves on private and state-owned lands.

The production numbers, drops in fuel demand and improvements in energy efficiency have caused U.S. reliance on petroleum imports to shrink to their lowest levels since the late 1990s

4) Watergate-gate:
D.C.-area residents are familiar with the insanely high prices of the Exxon station at the Watergate complex, which routinely charges as much as $1 a gallon more than other stations less than a mile away — including a Sunoco across the street. So that makes it a magnet for news organizations or other groups shopping for a shocking price, especially one within walking distance of the White House.

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Conservative Christianity and Its Discontents - Religion Dispatches

Anti-intellectualism is deeply rooted in American evangelicalism, reaching into the classrooms of popular schools, like Cedarville University and Liberty University. Millions of evangelical youth grow up hearing that there is a real debate when it comes to human origins, that homosexuality is a sinful lifestyle choice, and that secular historians are suppressing the vision of the Founding Fathers that America was supposed to be a Christian nation.

Controversies that should have died decades and even centuries ago are kept alive by organizations invested in the answers of yesteryear, often because those old answers, say stalwarts, came from the Bible and are believed to have been laid down by God. These answers informed the thinking of a long-gone society that, through the rose-tinted glasses of those nostalgic for a better time, looks moral, family-oriented, and respectful of God’s laws in ways that the present age is not.

Many evangelicals, skeptical that a PhD after a name gives any reasonable authority, have come to sympathize with and even celebrate Fox News’ and its most well-known anti-intellectual, Bill O’Reilly. O’Reilly, who pits his understanding against that of experts in their fields of study, is fond of scoffing, “sorry, professor, not buying it,” suggesting that expertise is really just opinion.

There are many academic historians, geneticists, psychologists, and other intellectuals within the Christian tradition who do not deny the knowledge claims of their respective fields. Such believers, however, are viewed with suspicion if they do not speak the language of biblical inerrancy, anti-evolution, and conservative politics embraced by other Christians.  The intellectual trajectory of American evangelicalism is not encouraging.

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Lessons To Be Learned From Greece - Nicholas Kristof

In the United States, Republicans lambaste President Obama's stimulus package as a failure and insist on bone-crunching budget-cutting. If you want to know how well that works, come visit Europe — especially Greece.

Yes, Greece needed a wake-up whack and economic reform, but Republican-style austerity knocked the patient unconscious. Contrast the still-shrinking economies of Europe with the stirrings of recovery in the United States, and you feel lucky to be an American and a beneficiary of President Obama's stimulus.

No doubt Greece had been living recklessly and needed structural reforms. While much of Europe was fundamentally healthy until the crisis hit, Greece truly was a mess. But the problem was not a welfare state — Greece has much less of a safety net than northern Europe. Rather, it was corruption, inefficiency and a system in which laws are optional.

Yet instead of structural reforms or improved tax collection, what has changed in Greece, so far, has mostly been slashed budgets. And austerity in the middle of recession has made matters worse — just as John Maynard Keynes predicted.

One of the earliest recorded economic crises in the Western world came in Athens in the fifth century B.C. Fortunately, Athens was then led by the great Pericles, an early Keynesian who did not respond by slashing budgets.

Instead, he ordered a public-works initiative and built the Parthenon.

The full article is available here

Walmart is no savior: More small businesses = healthier people - Tom Laskway

Reforming our food system is a Herculean task; one that might intimidate Hercules himself.  Of the 40,000 food items in a typical U.S. grocery store, more than half are now brought to us by just 10 corporations.  And one in four food dollars is spent at Walmart.

A new report from Food and Water Watch argues that, not only is Walmart’s dominance problematic in general, but the company’s recent projection of itself as a food system savior is misleading.

Walmart’s model is based on practices that drive consolidation; take money away from farmers, workers, and processors; and drive agriculture to get more industrialized. Walmart’s model is part of the problem, which means the company is not going to be a meaningful part of the solution to shortcomings in the modern-day food supply.

A recent study published in the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society suggests that communities that invite Walmart in may be making a devil’s bargain. The study found strong evidence that communities that rely on big box retailers — and large corporate employers in general — are less healthy and have higher rates of obesity and diabetes than those that don’t.

The researchers found that, despite the advantages that employees of large companies have in income and benefits, communities as a whole who relied on small businesses were more healthy otherwise. As they put it, “The concentration of small businesses is associated with lower rates of mortality, obesity and diabetes.”

The full article is available here

Challenging the Self-Made Myth - Katrina vanden Heuvel

Over the last thirty years, anti-government arguments by conservative pundits and politicians have gained prominence, and the rhetoric this 2012 campaign season seems more toxic than ever.  Republicans are relentlessly pushing the notion that lower taxes, less regulation and small government (except for Defense) will magically end the recession, create a better country, and “job creators” will lift all boats.

It’s BS. As Congressman Barney Frank recently said, “I’ve never seen a tax cut put out a fire. I’ve never seen a tax cut build a bridge.”  Americans benefit every day from government—from consumer protection to roads and bridges to food and safety regulation.

A central myth that underlies today’s anti-government rhetoric: that an individual’s success is the result of gumption and hard work alone.  In reality, personal success is closely tied to the supports society provides.  In fact, the greater an individual’s success, the greater his or her dependence on public infrastructure, public investment in research and innovation, and regulations and fair rules.

No one has honed in on the need to reset the narrative on government more effectively than Elizabeth Warren who laid out her cogent argument simply and powerfully in a gritty video clip that went viral: “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. You built a factory? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

The full article is available here