Paul Krugman

by Jeremy Leaming

Slowly the economy continues to recover, with jobs being added over the past 26 months, but that progress is amazing in an atmosphere where one of the two major political parties is concerned only with advancing the outlandish interests of the nation’s super wealthy.

The Great Recession, underway before the Obama administration was in existence, has shoved millions into poverty and the gap between the nation’s top 1 percent and everyone else is the widest since the 1920s. Last fall, the Census Bureau reported that the number of people in poverty is at its highest in more than 50 years. As noted earlier this week the super wealthy are increasingly out-of-touch, indeed one retired multimillionaire is pushing a book that calls for more economic inequality.

But how did the country arrive at this point where the middle class is shrinking, the poor is growing and a tiny group of people are amassing most of the wealth? Because, according to some, the nation’s conservative party has been bought by the out-of-touch super wealthy.

The mainstream media, in the name of objectivity, will continue to blame both parties for gridlock in Washington, but a growing number of economists, academics, lawyers, activists, and others concerned about the well-being of all people are pushing back against that tired line.

Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, who have studied Congress for several decades, say the Republican Party is to blame for pushing fantastical policy and refusing to budge from it, therefore creating an atmosphere where progress or change is difficult to foster.

“The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics, Mann and Ornstein write for The Washington Post. “It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

One of the group’s to blame for the Republican Party’s unmovable concern about the nation’s super wealthy is Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, which pushes conservative lawmakers to sign a pledge against raising any taxes. Norquist (pictured) is all about policy that starves the federal government of revenues, so policies to help the less fortunate dwindle, because those are not the people Norquist or the Republican Party are concerned with.

In his May 4 column for The New York Times, economist Paul Krugman notes the work of Mann and Ornstein, writing, “Specifically money buys power, and the increasing wealth of a tiny minority has effectively bought the allegiance of one of our two major political parties, in the process destroying any prospect for cooperation.”

“And the takeover of half our political spectrum by the 0.01 percent is, I’d argue, also responsible for the degradation of our economic discourse, which has made any sensible discussion of what we should doing impossible,” Krugman continued.

In a piece last year for Rolling Stone Tim Dickinson, said the party of Ronald Reagan has “undergone a radical transformation, reorganizing itself around a grotesque proposition: that the wealthy should grow wealthier still, whatever the consequences for the rest of us.”

by Jeremy Leaming

Before this week’s marathon oral arguments in the case challenging health care reform, many legal scholars, had strongly argued that the challengers’ arguments did not have a serious chance of surviving Supreme Court scrutiny.

Primarily the reasoning was based on high court precedent in favor of a broad reading of Congress’ power to regulate commerce and to tax and spend for the general welfare.

But those perceptions have been rocked following three lengthy days of oral argument, in which Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito appeared to have bought the challengers’ arguments against the minimum coverage provision, and, at times, revealed utter callousness toward national lawmakers’ attempt to reform a terribly inefficient and exclusive health care system that has left tens of millions uninsured.

Moreover as The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman noted, several of the justices appeared utterly or willfully ignorant of how “insurance works.” Krugman said Scalia’s comparison of purchasing health care insurance to buying broccoli “horrified health care experts all across America because health insurance is nothing like broccoli.”

“Why? When people choose not to buy broccoli, they don’t make broccoli unavailable to those who want it. But when people don’t buy health insurance until they get sick – which what happens in the absence of a mandate – the resulting worsening of the risk pool makes insurance more expensive, and often unaffordable, for those  who remain. As a result, unregulated health insurance basically doesn’t work, and never has,” Krugman wrote.

Walter Dellinger, former Solicitor General, at an ACS briefing on the oral arguments in HHS v. Florida, said it appeared, based mostly on their questions that three justices look ready to strike the minimum coverage provisions. Justice Samuel Alito’s questions were almost as hostile as Scalia’s and most, including Dellinger, believe Justice Clarence Thomas will vote to invalidate the law’s integral provision.

But Dellinger (pictured) is still holding out hope that two more justices will not join those three in killing health care reform.

“If there were five,” he said, “I would be shocked, because I think it would take us back to the jurisprudence of the 1920s. I think it would be the most stunning and indefensible judicial decision in half a century. It would be paired with Bush v. Gore in the law books forever.”