Via Sarah Kliff, here's a great graphic from Kaiser Family Foundation laying out how funds from the Affordable Care Act are being distributed across the country:
To anyone so foolish as to have persuaded himself otherwise, the past three weeks have been a reminder that Barack Obama is at best a slight favorite for re-election by a narrow margin.
This piece is the fourth in a six-part series on taxation, and a joint project by The American Prospect and its publishing partner, Demos.
The “Buffett Rule” proposed by President Obama and now being considered by the Senate would be an important symbolic step toward a fairer tax system. By instituting a minimum tax on very high earners, it would advance the principle of progressive taxation and reform the tax code in an overdue way.
Liberals often complain about the Democrats’ seeming inability to message their ideas with the same consistency and verve as conservatives. It just never seems like the party has the same discipline in its talking points. Congressional Dems' messaging during the health-care reform legislation in 2009 is a case in point. Rather than taking their cues from Republicans (despite the atrocious polices it entailed, naming a bill the PATRIOT Act immediately after 9/11 was a genius tactic), Democrats went for the unmemorably named "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act." It’s not like Democrats are clueless to such tricks—the campaign finance disclosure bill they’ve proposed after Citizens United had the fitting acronym DISCLOSE—they just didn’t bother in this instance.
Forecasts of the Great Jewish Shift began as soon as the presidential campaign did: This year, we are told, Jews will finally vote Republican, or at least significantly more of them will than have done so in many a decade, perhaps forever. The predictions are a quadrennial ritual. They are made most often by Jewish Republicans, speaking in the bright voice of a compulsive gambler who knows that on this spin, the little ball will absolutely land on the right number. They are made by social scientists certain that reality will finally behave according to their models. They are made by Jewish Democrats as unable to control their anxiety as someone is to stop a tic.
This piece is the third in a six-part series on taxation, and a joint project by The American Prospect and its publishing partner, Demos.
As the White House mounts a major campaign to sell the “Buffett Tax” this week, there is another, better tax on the 1 percent that Washington should be considering: A financial-transaction tax—better known as a financial speculation tax (FST).
The Obama campaign wasted no time trampling on Mitt Romney's apparent victory in the GOP primary Tuesday afternoon after Rick Santorum bowed out of the race. Campaign manager Jim Messina ripped into Romney for the barrage of negative ads he used throughout the primary campaign.
The Democrats are putting all their emphasis on touting the Buffett Rule ahead of a Senate vote for next week to coincide with Tax Day. The push is ostensibly an effort to twist the arm of a few of the more moderate Republicans—say the two Maine Senators or running for reelection in Democratic territory Scott Brown—under the hope that they'll fear public backlash if they vote down the measure, a policy favored by over half of the country. However even if they peel off a few Republicans there is little hope that the bill would make any progress in the GOP-controlled House.
Democrats are doing everything they can to make the Buffett Rule as the predominant issue of the week before it is subjected to a Senate vote on Tax Day. The rule—named after Warren Buffett's frequent refrain that his secretary pays a higher effective tax rate than the multi-billionaire investor—would force multimillionaires to give up some of their tax breaks until they pay at least a minimum rate of 30 percent. Obama is headed to Florida tomorrow to promote the bill, while his campaign is highlighting the rule as a campaign issue in contrast to Mitt Romney's tax disclosures he released earlier this year, which revealed that the probable Republican candidate paid taxes of just 13.9 percent on his $21.7 million in income in 2010.
The right’s outrage over Obama’s comments on the Supreme Court are hypocritical. All Obama said was the truth: It would, indeed, be unprecedented for the Supreme Court to overturn Obamacare, signifying a new interpretation of the powers granted to Congress under current Commerce Clause precedent. The president in no way insinuated that he would ignore the ruling, a fact verified by Attorney General Eric Holder in response to an outlandish request by a Reagan appointee on the Fifth Circuit. It was, however, somewhat disheartening to see Obama questioning the court by terming them an “unelected group of people,” as that legitimizes language typically employed by conservatives anytime the courts read the Constitution as protecting some form of social equality.
By this point, support for same-sex marriage isn't much of a question in Democratic politics. A Gallup poll from last May found that 69 percent of Democrats support marriage equality, a number that has probably only increased over the intervening year. Some of the hotshot young Democrats eying 2016—most notably Governors Andrew Cuomo and Martin O'Malley—have passed same-sex marriage bills in their states and tout them as major accomplishments.
It’s clear that the Republican elite no longer wants to see this nomination contest drag on any longer. Sought after endorsers such as Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio have finally lent their support to Romney, and on Sunday Senator Ron Johnson said that he had been selected by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to coordinate the message between the Romney campaign and Senate Republicans. The early calls for Santorum’s departure will become an avalanche if, as largely expected, Romney runs up the delegate score in tonight’s primaries.
Given the hostility the Republican appointees on the Supreme Court showed to the Affordable Care Act during oral arguments this week, some progressives are seeking a silver lining. At least, some have argued, striking down the ACA would substantially undermine the legitimacy of the conservative-dominated federal courts.
Larry Summers has been unnaturally silent on President Obama’s surprise decision to pass him over for the World Bank presidency in favor of Dartmouth University president and public health hero Jim Yong Kim. Well, one of Summers’ closest chums at Harvard’s Kennedy School, Lant Pritchett, has now gone public with a scorching blast at Kim. Pritchett toldForbes magazine, “It’s an embarrassment to the U.S. You cannot with a straight face say this person is the most qualified to lead the World Bank.”
Everyone agrees that the only way to fix the Gulf of Mexico dead zone—the largest off the United States—is to fix the Mississippi, but not everyone agrees how.
