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Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Heart Attack Grill - Extreme Pigouts

Now this is just for fun - but you would never catch me eating here

Rivlin: ‘I don’t support the version of Medicare premium support in the Ryan plan’


Posted at 03:20 PM ET, 04/06/2011


“Alice Rivlin and I designed these Medicare and Medicaid reforms,” Paul Ryan said on “Morning Joe” yesterday. “Alice Rivlin was Clinton’s OMB director… she’s a proud Democrat at the Brookings institution. These entitlement reforms are based off of those models that she and I worked on together.” But Rivlin — who is all that Ryan says she is, in addition to a former vice chair of the Federal Reserve — is not supporting the reforms as written in Ryan’s budget. I spoke with her this morning to ask why. A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Ezra Klein: What struck me when I dug into the details of Ryan’s budget is that he changed the target Ryan-Rivlin had set for Medicare from GDP+1% to the rate of inflation. That seems pretty hard to achieve.
Alive Rivlin: That’s a reason for me saying very strongly that I don’t support the version of Medicare premium support in the Ryan plan. It’s both because the growth rate is much, much too low, and because it doesn’t preserve fee-for-service Medicare as the default option.
EK: It also doesn’t do much to actually make the delivery of health-care cheaper. I think that when people look at health-care reform from a budgetary perspective, they tend to rely on blunt financial tools, like simply giving people less insurance. But that just shifts costs to the people and their families. To make costs slow across the system, you need to make it cheaper to treat sick people.
AR: I entirely agree with that. And there’s a great deal in the Affordable Care Act in terms of research, pilot programs, alternative payment structures, alternative delivery systems, research on the effectiveness of treatments, that is needed. That’s why we need to keep the Affordable Care Act and strengthen the parts that hopefully give us more cost-effective care in the future. If you just control the federal spending without changing the delivery system, you just get cost shifting.
EK: Speaking of the Affordable Care Act, you’ve said before that the theory behind the exchanges in Ryan-Rivlin and the theory behind the exchanges in the Affordable Care Act are identical. That would mean Republicans who believe in Ryan’s model should be more optimistic about the Affordable Care Act. But Ryan has said the two of you simply disagree on how to build the exchanges. Can you explain to me the disagreement you have that would make Ryan-Rivlin different from the ACA?
AR: No. I can’t. I think he’s sort of backed himself into an intellectual corner here.
EK: When you would talk to him, did he seem to recognize that?
AR: Yes.
EK: What I liked about the Rivlin plan as it appeared in the Bipartisan Policy Center’s deficit proposal was that it seemed to go towards a grand compromise in which Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act became part of the same system, and we ended up with something more seamless and less fractured. What’s odd to me in Ryan’s budget is that he wants to bring the Affordable Care Act model to Medicare, but take away the Affordable Care Act. In your negotiations on the BPC report, did you sense any interest among the Republicans on a compromise that extended exchanges and private insurance to Medicare and Medicaid?
AR: What seems plausible to me is that Medicare, in many ways, has to be treated separately for at least awhile. With respect to Medicaid, it does seem to me that if we could get the exchanges under the Affordable Care Act up and running successfully, it would be a natural transition to bring the Medicaid population onto the exchanges. Many of those people are already in managed care. Giving them a choice would seem to me to be a good thing.
EK: To move to another aspect of Ryan’s proposal, it tries to bring the budget into balance without using any taxes. When your commission looked into balancing the budget, how did you end up thinking about revenues?
AR: Sen. Domenici’s idea was to start with the spending side because Republicans aren’t going to want to do any tax increases. So we did. We started with discretionary spending and looked at various freezes. Then we moved to the entitlements and worked on Medicare and Medicaid and their rates of growth. And the staff kept adding this stuff up, and we weren’t even close. So then we moved to the tax side and the tax expenditures and we realized there’s a lot of spending through the tax code and you have to take that into consideration.
That’s been a change in Republican thinking, at least some of it: spending does go through the tax code and reducing that isn’t necessarily a tax increase. So then we started working on radical tax reform and we cut a lot of expenditures. The biggest one is the exclusion of employer-paid health benefits from the income tax, and once we did that, we had quite a lot of money over time, and it even helps you on Social Security because it moves benefits from health care and into wages, which are then taxable in both the income tax and Social Security
EK: And what did you end up doing with the Bush tax cuts?
AR: In Domenici-Rivlin, we were operating on a baseline that extended everything but the top brackets.
By Ezra Klein  |  03:20 PM ET, 04/06/2011

Rep. Grijalva: Gabby Giffords ‘Great Candidate’ for Senate ‘If She’s Strong Enough’


April 06, 2011 3:15 PM


ABC News’ Rick Klein reports:
If Rep. Gabrielle Giffords recovers sufficiently to make the Senate run some of her friends and allies are hoping for, it sounds like she’ll have an enthusiastic supporter in a fellow member of the Arizona congressional delegation.
On ABC’s “Top Line” today, Giffords friend Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., said Giffords would make a “great candidate” if she’s able to run.
“All indications are she's doing great, feels good,” Grijalva told us. “If she is strong enough -- and I think her family and her physicians will tell her that -- she would be a great candidate, if she's strong enough.”
Grijalva said he hopes to visit and speak with Giffords – as other friends and family members have done recently, as she recovers in a Houston hospital – in the coming weeks. She has yet to resume her duties as a House member, but those around her have been quietly talking up the prospect of her running for the Senate seat being vacated by the retiring Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., next year.
On another subject, Grijalva – co-chair of the House Progressive Caucus – said he is likely to vote against a budget deal along the lines now being discussed by congressional leaders and the White House, since he believes the cuts will be too deep.
“We've opposed a lot of those in the past and there is a group of us here – Democrats -- that feel that there are other areas ignored both my Democratic leadership, by the White House, and certainly by the Republicans. And we would be hard-pressed to just blindly go along without having some input.”
Grijalva said he still hopes a government shutdown can be avoided, but added that it’s “more difficult to see a light at the end of the tunnel.”
“While I want to say that I’m optimistic, and to some extent I am, we have adults who want to solve this, we also have a lot of juveniles that want to see this thing go into a crisis,” he said.

We've Become a Nation of Takers, Not Makers


If you want to understand better why so many states—from New York to Wisconsin to California—are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, consider this depressing statistic: Today in America there are nearly twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million) than in all of manufacturing (11.5 million). This is an almost exact reversal of the situation in 1960, when there were 15 million workers in manufacturing and 8.7 million collecting a paycheck from the government.
It gets worse. More Americans work for the government than work in construction, farming, fishing, forestry, manufacturing, mining and utilities combined. We have moved decisively from a nation of makers to a nation of takers. Nearly half of the $2.2 trillion cost of state and local governments is the $1 trillion-a-year tab for pay and benefits of state and local employees. Is it any wonder that so many states and cities cannot pay their bills?
Steve Moore has the details on Rep. Paul Ryan's plan to cut spending.
Every state in America today except for two—Indiana and Wisconsin—has more government workers on the payroll than people manufacturing industrial goods. Consider California, which has the highest budget deficit in the history of the states. The not-so Golden State now has an incredible 2.4 million government employees—twice as many as people at work in manufacturing. New Jersey has just under two-and-a-half as many government employees as manufacturers. Florida's ratio is more than 3 to 1. So is New York's.
Even Michigan, at one time the auto capital of the world, and Pennsylvania, once the steel capital, have more government bureaucrats than people making things. The leaders in government hiring are Wyoming and New Mexico, which have hired more than six government workers for every manufacturing worker.
Now it is certainly true that many states have not typically been home to traditional manufacturing operations. Iowa and Nebraska are farm states, for example. But in those states, there are at least five times more government workers than farmers. West Virginia is the mining capital of the world, yet it has at least three times more government workers than miners. New York is the financial capital of the world—at least for now. That sector employs roughly 670,000 New Yorkers. That's less than half of the state's 1.48 million government employees.
Don't expect a reversal of this trend anytime soon. Surveys of college graduates are finding that more and more of our top minds want to work for the government. Why? Because in recent years only government agencies have been hiring, and because the offer of near lifetime security is highly valued in these times of economic turbulence. When 23-year-olds aren't willing to take career risks, we have a real problem on our hands. Sadly, we could end up with a generation of Americans who want to work at the Department of Motor Vehicles.
The employment trends described here are explained in part by hugely beneficial productivity improvements in such traditional industries as farming, manufacturing, financial services and telecommunications. These produce far more output per worker than in the past. The typical farmer, for example, is today at least three times more productive than in 1950.
ImageZoo/Corbis
Where are the productivity gains in government? Consider a core function of state and local governments: schools. Over the period 1970-2005, school spending per pupil, adjusted for inflation, doubled, while standardized achievement test scores were flat. Over roughly that same time period, public-school employment doubled per student, according to a study by researchers at the University of Washington. That is what economists call negative productivity.
But education is an industry where we measure performance backwards: We gauge school performance not by outputs, but by inputs. If quality falls, we say we didn't pay teachers enough or we need smaller class sizes or newer schools. If education had undergone the same productivity revolution that manufacturing has, we would have half as many educators, smaller school budgets, and higher graduation rates and test scores.
The same is true of almost all other government services. Mass transit spends more and more every year and yet a much smaller share of Americans use trains and buses today than in past decades. One way that private companies spur productivity is by firing underperforming employees and rewarding excellence. In government employment, tenure for teachers and near lifetime employment for other civil servants shields workers from this basic system of reward and punishment. It is a system that breeds mediocrity, which is what we've gotten.
Most reasonable steps to restrain public-sector employment costs are smothered by the unions. Study after study has shown that states and cities could shave 20% to 40% off the cost of many services—fire fighting, public transportation, garbage collection, administrative functions, even prison operations—through competitive contracting to private providers. But unions have blocked many of those efforts. Public employees maintain that they are underpaid relative to equally qualified private-sector workers, yet they are deathly afraid of competitive bidding for government services.
President Obama says we have to retool our economy to "win the future." The only way to do that is to grow the economy that makes things, not the sector that takes things.

The ratio of people working for the government and working in manufacturing today is "an almost exact reversal of the situation in 1960."

The Truth-O-Meter Says:
Moore

The ratio of people working for the government and working in manufacturing today is "an almost exact reversal of the situation in 1960."

Steve Moore on Friday, April 1st, 2011 in a column in the "Wall Street Journal"

Steve Moore says ratio of people working in government, manufacturing is “an almost exact reversal" of pattern in 1960

In an April 1, 2011, op-ed column, Steve Moore -- the senior economics writer for theWall Street Journal editorial page and a longtime conservative activist -- wrote a column titled, "We've Become a Nation of Takers, Not Makers." In it, he bemoaned divergent trendlines for government employment, which he described as increasing, and manufacturing, which he described as decreasing.

"If you want to understand better why so many states — from New York to Wisconsin to California — are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, consider this depressing statistic: Today in America there are nearly twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million) than in all of manufacturing (11.5 million). This is an almost exact reversal of the situation in 1960, when there were 15 million workers in manufacturing and 8.7 million collecting a paycheck from the government. … We have moved decisively from a nation of makers to a nation of takers."

Several readers asked us to take a look at Moore’s column. We’ll focus on his contention that the ratio of people working for the government and working in manufacturing today is "an almost exact reversal of the situation in 1960."

We turned to the historical employment data collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Here’s what we found:

Total government employment, January 1960: 8,307,000
Total government employment, March 2011: 22,166,000

Total manufacturing employment, January 1960: 15,687,000
Total manufacturing employment, March 2011: 11,667,000

To us, all of these numbers appear quite close to what Moore wrote. So he’s right on the numbers. But is he correct that today’s numbers show "an almost exact reversal of the situation in 1960"?

That’s less clear.

We found a somewhat different story if you swap out Moore’s raw employment numbers and instead use the numbers for each of the sector’s share of total U.S. employment. Doing it this way takes into account the increasing size of the American work force over more than 50 years -- it grew from 54.2 million workers in 1960 to 130.7 million workers in 2011. Here are the percentages:

Total government share of U.S. employment, January 1960: 15 percent
Total government share of U.S. employment, March 2011: 17 percent

Total manufacturing share of U.S. employment, January 1960: 29 percent
Total manufacturing share of U.S. employment, March 2011: 9 percent

What this shows is that government’s proportion of the work force has increased -- but by a relatively modest rate. Meanwhile, manufacturing -- for countless reasons, ranging from the expansion of free trade to educational attainment patterns to the emergence of new sectors such as information technology -- has fallen off a cliff during the past 50 years.

To us, the comparison of jobs in government and manufacturing looks less like "an almost exact reversal," as Moore puts it, than two largely unrelated changes.

We’ll add a final point of context. Several other employment sectors grew at faster rates over the 50-year period than government did. The leisure and hospitality sector, for instance, grew from 6.3 percent of the workforce in 1960 to 10 percent in 2011, and professional business services roughly doubled, from 6.8 percent in 1960 to 13.1 percent in 2011. So, other types of private-sector employment -- jobs that don’t "make" anything -- took up some of the slack from manufacturing’s decline.

So where does this leave us? Moore’s raw employment numbers for manufacturing and government are accurate, but adding context about the size of the labor force as a whole weakens the notion that the trendlines are an "exact reversal." On balance, we rate the statement Half True.

Meet the Press: Santorum on 2012 field not coming together

Split over union law reaches Wis. court race





Dan VrakasAP – Justice David Prosser, speaks to supporters at the Seven Seas Restaurant Tuesday April 5, 2011 in Waukesha …
MADISON, Wis. – A Wisconsin Supreme Court election that turned into a referendum on Republican Gov. Scott Walker's polarizing proposal restricting union rights remained too close to call Wednesday as a little known prosecutor tapped into voter unrest to mount a serious challenge to the incumbent tied to Walker.
Unofficial results showed challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg ahead by a scant 311 votes over incumbent Justice David Prosser, a former Republican speaker of the Assembly who served with Walker. The results were based on 99 percent of precincts reporting, with just five precincts outstanding.
A recount was nearly certain. Kloppenburg's lead was 0.02 percent of the total votes cast.
Turnout shattered predictions. State officials had expected 20 percent in line with past elections, but Democrats' efforts to make the election more about Walker and the union fight than the officially nonpartisan Supreme Court race helped push it to 33 percent.
In another race that became largely about Walker and his policies, Democrat Chris Abele defeated Republican state Rep. Jeff Stone to become Milwaukee County executive, the seat Walker held until he was elected governor in November.
Stone voted twice for Walker's bill taking away nearly all of most state workers' collective bargaining rights from, which put him on the defensive in the race. Abele won with 61 percent of the vote compared with 39 percent for Stone, based on unofficial results.
Kloppenburg's supporters, including liberal outside interests that helped make the race the most expensive Supreme Court contest in Wisconsin history, worked to make the election about Walker's anti-union law which is widely expected to be decided by the Supreme Court. It remains in limbo pending legal challenges.
The race appeared headed toward a recount, which couldn't be requested until after the state receives the last county's officially canvassed votes. The county reports are due by April 15 and the deadline to seek a recount would be April 20, although the request could be made sooner.
Kloppenburg, an assistant state attorney general, began her campaign with almost no name recognition and faced long odds against Prosser. The 12-year Supreme Court veteran emerged from a nonpartisan February primary with 55 percent of the vote, while Kloppenburg finished second out of four candidates with just 28 percent.
But opponents of the collective bargaining law redefined the Supreme Court race as a referendum on Walker and all Republicans, working to leverage the anger over the measure against Prosser. They branded him a Walker clone and held Kloppenburg up as the best hope for stopping the measure.
Prosser's campaign didn't immediately return a message early Wednesday. However, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported that he told supporters at his election-night party that there was "little doubt" there would be a recount.
When the numbers showed her behind, Kloppenburg told supporters she hadn't given up.
"We're still hopeful," Kloppenburg said. "So thank you all and let's all get a good night's sleep and see what tomorrow brings."
Walker has insisted the new law is necessary to help balance the state's budget, but Democrats see it as a direct assault on unions, a key campaign supporter for the party.
Tens of thousands of people spent weeks protesting the measure at Wisconsin's Capitol and Democrats in the Senate even fled the state to try to block a vote in that chamber. Walker eventually signed the bill anyway, but the measure is on hold as legal challenges wend their way through the courts. Sixteen state senators — eight Republicans and eight Democrats — face recall efforts over the proposal.
The measure's opponents ultimately hope a Kloppenburg upset would tilt the Supreme Court's ideological balance to the left and set the stage for the court to strike the law down. A legal challenge already is before the court, although the justices have not decided whether to consider it. They also want to show the Republican senators facing recalls that they're next to go.
Prosser pushed back, disavowing his GOP connections. He accused pro-labor groups of hijacking the race and argued Kloppenburg was so closely tied to them she couldn't ethically rule on the law.
Interest in what could have been an otherwise sleepy race skyrocketed.
According to the Brennan Center for Justice, a New York University program that tracks spending on judicial races, outside groups, including the Tea Party Express and national labor organizations, had poured a record $3.5 million into race through Monday.
Deborah MacFarland, 67, and her husband, Robert, 69, of Bayside, said the issue helped persuade them to vote for Kloppenburg.
"I can't stand Walker. I can't stand conservative Republicans. ... I have had enough of it," Deborah MacFarland said.
But Kelly Bodoh, 37, a self-described Libertarian from Sun Prairie, picked Prosser, saying she was upset that Democratic senators fled the state.
"The way the past couple of months have gone down in Madison made me very distrustful of that faction," she said. "Emotions and disrespect ruled the response to the ... bill."
Walker has said he wouldn't interpret the election results as either an endorsement or indictment of his policies.
Wisconsin law does not provide for automatic recounts. Instead, candidates have three days after official results are tallied to request one. They must provide a specific reason for such an effort to state election officials, such as a mistake in counting or some other irregularity.
___
Associated Press writer Dinesh Ramde in Milwaukee contributed to this report.
___
Online:
Prosser's campaign: http://www.justiceprosser.com
Kloppenburg's campaign: http://www.kloppenburgforjustice.com

TOO CLOSE TO CALL


Wisconsin - County Vote Results
April 06, 2011 - 02:27PM ET(i) = incumbent
= winner
= runoff
Supreme Court - General
CountyPrecinctsD. Prosser (i)J. Kloppenburg
Total3629/3630739,505
50%
739,711
50%
Adams20/202,393
48%
2,559
52%
Ashland28/281,383
30%
3,266
70%
Barron36/364,709
50%
4,640
50%
Bayfield28/281,957
33%
3,954
67%
Brown88/8833,319
55%
27,206
45%
Buffalo23/231,684
51%
1,604
49%
Burnett24/241,932
54%
1,675
46%
Calumet39/397,498
62%
4,642
38%
Chippewa46/466,856
49%
7,226
51%
Clark64/644,335
58%
3,101
42%
Columbia39/397,302
45%
8,959
55%
Crawford27/271,689
41%
2,428
59%
Dane248/24848,627
27%
133,513
73%
Dodge55/5513,373
61%
8,519
39%
Door32/325,183
53%
4,633
47%
Douglas31/313,814
31%
8,674
69%
Dunn40/404,076
44%
5,164
56%
Eau Claire61/6111,214
42%
15,688
58%
Florence8/8799
62%
483
38%
Fond du Lac77/7715,931
61%
10,180
39%
Forest18/181,531
56%
1,196
44%
Grant52/524,396
44%
5,697
56%
Green24/244,881
45%
5,860
55%
Green Lake16/163,778
65%
2,049
35%
Iowa35/352,378
38%
3,812
62%
Iron19/19760
45%
937
55%
Jackson30/302,224
45%
2,686
55%
Jefferson40/4112,860
58%
9,365
42%
Juneau29/292,534
48%
2,697
52%
Kenosha99/9914,256
47%
16,135
53%
Kewaunee14/143,331
58%
2,404
42%
La Crosse42/4212,114
41%
17,369
59%
Lafayette32/322,034
48%
2,199
52%
Langlade27/272,668
58%
1,895
42%
Lincoln25/253,575
50%
3,542
50%
Manitowoc42/4212,211
61%
7,752
39%
Marathon140/14017,131
54%
14,823
46%
Marinette30/304,980
55%
4,082
45%
Marquette19/192,220
56%
1,726
44%
Menominee1/1141
37%
241
63%
Milwaukee486/48698,933
43%
128,644
57%
Monroe34/344,511
49%
4,689
51%
Oconto29/295,199
57%
3,852
43%
Oneida29/295,515
52%
5,135
48%
Outagamie95/9524,775
57%
18,885
43%
Ozaukee48/4820,844
72%
8,295
28%
Pepin11/11888
47%
983
53%
Pierce28/284,053
45%
4,905
55%
Polk36/364,663
51%
4,439
49%
Portage38/388,111
40%
12,039
60%
Price26/262,165
52%
2,025
48%
Racine63/6328,204
56%
22,518
44%
Richland33/331,798
45%
2,180
55%
Rock87/8714,626
40%
22,145
60%
Rusk33/332,220
53%
1,941
47%
Sauk39/397,170
44%
9,188
56%
Sawyer21/212,120
51%
2,059
49%
Shawano43/435,535
61%
3,550
39%
Sheboygan58/5819,531
63%
11,407
37%
St. Croix43/438,272
51%
7,953
49%
Taylor30/303,650
61%
2,291
39%
Trempealeau26/262,878
46%
3,330
54%
Vernon33/333,578
45%
4,307
55%
Vilas15/154,204
60%
2,820
40%
Walworth40/4014,233
61%
8,929
39%
Washburn25/252,275
48%
2,453
52%
Washington38/3830,788
76%
9,903
24%
Waukesha198/19881,255
73%
29,332
27%
Waupaca38/387,204
59%
4,938
41%
Waushara26/263,395
60%
2,300
40%
Winnebago76/7619,991
52%
18,421
48%
Wood56/568,844
49%
9,274
51%