Politics and government links

Death Threats by the Dozens in Wisconsin

Lobbyists flock to Capitol Hill jobs

A surge of lobbyists has left K Street this year to fill jobs as high-ranking staffers on Capitol Hill, focusing new attention on the dearth of rules governing what paid advocates can do after moving into the legislative world. 

Ethics rules sharply limit the activities of former lobbyists who join the executive branch and former lawmakers who move to lobbying firms. But experts say there are no limits on lawmakers hiring K street employees and letting them write legislation in sync with the policies they advocated for hire. 

New tallies indicate that nearly half of the roughly 150 former lobbyists working in top policy jobs for members of Congress or House committees have been hired in the past few months. And many are working on legislative issues of interest to their former employers.

A second stimulus for K Street?

For all his anti-lobbyist rhetoric, President Barack Obama has done more than almost anyone to help K Street fatten its wallet.  

First came his push to pass health care and Wall Street reforms, an epic two-year stretch of bruising legislative battles that saw lobbying revenues skyrocket.  

But the boom didn’t end when the legislation became law.  

Now, regulators are writing hundreds of new rules required by the twin reforms, creating a bonanza of new business for Washington lobbyists positioned to help companies influence and comply with the new regulations.  

Call it K Street’s second stimulus. 

It’s still an empty lockbox 

Lew acknowledges that the Social Security surpluses of the last decades were siphoned off to the Treasury Department and spent. He also agrees that Treasury then deposited corresponding IOUs — called “special issue” bonds — in the Social Security trust fund. These have real value, claims Lew. After all, “these Treasury bonds are backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government in the same way that all other U.S. Treasury bonds are.” 

Really? If these trust fund bonds represent anything real, why is it that in calculating national indebtedness they are not even included? We measure national solvency by debt/GDP ratio. As calculated by everyone from the OMB to the CIA, from the Simpson-Bowles to the Domenici-Rivlin commissions, the debt/GDP ratio counts only publicly held debt. This means bonds held by China, Saudi Arabia, you and me. The debt ratio completely ignores the kind of intragovernmental bonds that Lew insists are the equivalent of publicly held bonds.

GOP Is Blowing It by Pandering to Tea Party

Social spending vs. corporate tax cuts

Think Progress has been doing important yeoman’s work tallying up the states where Medicaid and other social services are being slashed at the same time that corporate taxes are being cut. In Pennsylvania, for instance, “Gov. Tom Corbett (R) presented a budget last week that would cut taxes for corporations, while freezing teacher salaries, cutting dental care for Medicaid recipients, and eliminating more than half of the state’s universities.” 

The trade-off between the benefits of social spending and the drawbacks of taxes is, of course, among the longest-running debates in American politics. But that’s not actually the debate being had in most of these states: Rather, the cuts to social programs are being justified as a necessary response to budget deficits. And the tax cuts? Well, it’s increasingly Republican orthodoxy that “we have a spending problem, not a taxing problem.” Unfortunately for them, their budgets don’t agree, and since these states are constitutionally required to balance their budgets, what’s actually happening is that the cuts to social services are, in part, going to pay for these regressive cuts.