Paul Krugman noted on ABC's This Week yesterday that the GOP's problem is that its "base is old white people."
This is largely true. Exit polls show that Mitt Romney won all voters 65 and older by 12 percentage points, and white older voters by 22 points. Barack Obama won all voters under 30 by 23 points, and nonwhite young voters by 36 points.
Such numbers are a big problem for the GOP amid fast changing demographics, as we've heard often in recent months.
Anyone who has followed the creation and early life of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau knows that conservatives in Congress have repeatedly tried to kill or weaken this agency using the power of the purse. Most recently, last spring, Republicans tried to cut the CFPB's $550 million budget by about 40 percent.
A New York Timesarticle reported that Fix the Debt, the deficit hawk group which positions itself as a neutral body of wisemen, includes a number of corporate lobbyists and board members. The Times noted that many of those involved in Fix the Debt helped create the deficit problem to begin with by fighting to defend tax perks for business and the wealthy, such as the record low rates for capital gains and dividends, along with the notorious "carried interest" loophole.
Last year, in 2012, the U.S. government spent about $841 billion on security—a figure that includes defense, intelligence, war appropriations, and foreign aid. At the same time, the government collected about $1.1 trillion in individual income taxes. (And about $2.4 trillion in revenues overall if you include payroll, corporate, estate, and excise taxes.)
In other words, about 80 cents of every dollar collected in traditional federal income taxes went for security.
The new job numbers are out and, at first glance, there is nothing surprising here. Job growth continued to inch upward in December, with 155,000 new jobs added. Of course, with several million young people joining the labor force every year, numbers like these don't actually amount to growth. We are just running in place.
But here's a statistic that jumped out at me: 89,000 public sector workers lost their jobs in October, November, and December—with most of those losses, 66,000, occurring in October.
