Recommended Reading: 11/30/2010

The Wonk Monkey wishes to apologize for the delay in posting. He has been ill and sometimes reading the news caused him to feel worse. Fortunately, the Wonk Monkey is now doing his daily pull-ups and is ready to get back to action.

 

The Senate has passed a new food safety bill and it is likely that the House will adopt this version of the bill in order to get it passed during the lame duck session.

The Food Safety Modernization Act would strengthen the power of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which oversees 80 percent of the nation's food supply, vastly improving its ability to ensure safety.

The law will focus on the areas of food-borne illness prevention, detection and response. It will also protect American consumers from unsafe food made overseas by subjecting imported foods to the same standards as food produced in the United States.

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The economy could take a hit if the unemployment benefits are not extended.

The Congressional Budget Office says every $1 spent on unemployment benefits generates up to $1.90 in economic growth. The program is the most effective government policy for generating growth among 11 options the CBO has analyzed.

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The House is setting up a vote to extend Bush’s tax cuts for only the Middle Class. The GOP predicts that it will fail because they are using a tactic that requires 2/3 approval in order to pass.

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It was Half True when John Kyle said the Washington Post argued that a failure to pass the START treaty this year would be "no calamity," and that the Associated Press said the "the administration concedes the security risk is not immediate."

We try to grant politicians some leeway in television interviews because their comments are necessarily time-constrained. And we certainly understand why Kyl would have wanted to play up the supportive evidence in the two news items and downplay what didn't fit his agenda. But we do think that the way he abridged them amounts to cherry-picking. He selectively quoted from the accounts, leaving viewers with a distinctly different impression than they would have had if they'd read the items in their entirety. So we rate his comment Half True.

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It is Barely True that letting the Bush Tax cuts expire would raise taxes on small businesses.

Let’s summarize:

Would ending the Bush tax cuts raise levies on small businesses, as Cantor’s says? Sure, some extremely successful small businesses would be affected, but probably not many.

The IRS does not offer a standard definition for a small business. Cantor consistently takes IRS data on the percentage of top earners who report some business income and says it comes from small business. You can’t make that leap, as one of the reports cited by Cantor says.

What we know is that a sizable percentage of the nation’s top earners make some of their money from business profits. Their business income could come from any number of places, including stores or partnerships in law firms, medical practices or Wall Street trading houses.

About 272,000 Americans in the highest income tax bracket report more than half of their earnings come from business profits. Their average business income is $718,827, according to the Tax Policy Center, whose figures Cantor sometimes uses. That hardly sounds like a corner shop owner, whose image Cantor seems to invoke when he says Democrats are trying to raise taxes on small businesses.

We rate the claim Barely True.

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It is True that the House Rules Committee is the only panel, other than the Intelligence and Ethics committees, not able to telecast proceedings in its main hearing room.

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Recommended Reading: 11/25/2010

The Wonk Monkey is looking forward to eating lots of food tonight. He was also looking forward to a news story of Thanksgiving and he found one at the top of his search list. It is a good day.

Three teens, presumed dead, have been found northeast of Fiji.

The boys – two 15-year-olds and a 14-year-old – disappeared while attempting to row between two islands in the New Zealand territory of Tokelau in early October and were given up for dead after an extensive search involving New Zealand's air force.

Tanu Filo, the father of one boy, said the news was broken by one of the teens' grandmother after she had a phone call from the fishing boat.

"It's a miracle, it's a miracle. The whole village, the whole village, there were so excited and cried and they sang songs and hugging each other, yeah, on the road. Everybody was yelling and shouting the good news," he told Radio New Zealand International.

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The Color Coded terror threats initiated by the Bush Administration are going the way of the dodo.

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It is Half True that the dollar has lost %98 of its value under the Fed.

So the Tea Party, despite its disputed methods, wound up with a figure that’s in the ballpark.

But in bemoaning the drop in value of a dollar, the Tea Party omits a huge mitigating factor: salaries have grown enormously since 1913 and consumers have more to spend. If the Fed’s historic handling of inflation is to be blamed for the drop in the dollar, it must be credited for the rise in wages.

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Tom Delay has been found guilty of money laundering.

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In order to get girls to stop getting married without permission, a town in India is taking away their cellular phones.

Recommended Reading: 11/24/2010

The Wonk Monkey has been ill the last few days. No amount of bannana’s or scratching could get him to play close attention to the news. That said, he is feeling better today so he is back to work. Good Monkey.

The Fed is starting to subpoena Hedge Funds on suspicions of insider trading.

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The bombings of a South Korean island by North Korea is an attempt to better position themselves for the upcoming peace negotiations.

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There are 860 banks that are on the Federal Governments list of problematic financial companies in danger of being shut down.

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Joseph Lieberman will need to either retire or run as a Republican in 2012.

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It is Half True that Thomas Jefferson called regulations and “endemic weakness.”

Scott accurately quoted Jefferson, but he took the line out of context to advance his own argument against government regulation. Jefferson was no big-government liberal (He once lauded the "suppression of unnecessary offices (and) useless establishments and expenses."). But in this case he was more upset about King George than he was about government intervention. We rate Scott’s statement Half True.

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It is Mostly True that free trade has brought about a 2 billion trade deficit.

Yet even if we were to put those numbers aside and only use the Commerce Department numbers, Brown’s figures were close to the mark before the recession. This year is not the best year to measure the normal effects of trade, and no one can predict the future; perhaps the trade deficit will stabilize at a lower number such as $500 billion a year, or $1.36 billion a day.  Perhaps it won’t.

But based on the historical trends, regardless of which data source is used, we say Brown’s claim is Mostly True.

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An Executive has been arrested for Insider Trading, and more are expected in the future.

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Elizabeth Warren was instrumental in getting President Obama to veto a bill that would have sped up foreclosures. In light of the robo signing problem that banks are now facing, it looks like she was correct in opposing this bill.

The bill, which passed both houses of Congress and awaited President Obama's signature to become law, essentially would have compelled notaries to accept out-of-state notarizations, regardless of the rules in those states.

State officials across the country--who have been pursuing probes looking into wrongdoing within the foreclosure process-- feared that those jurisdictions with lax standards could have become hotbeds for foreclosure documentation fraud. Lenders and mortgage companies could have used those states as central clearing houses to produce bogus foreclosure paperwork, and then export those documents to other states with more stringent regulations--an expedient bypass around the strictures.

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WikiLeaks is about to strike again.

Classified U.S. diplomatic cables reporting corruption allegations against foreign governments and leaders are expected in official documents that WikiLeaks plans to release soon, sources said on Wednesday.

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So much for the vow to stop Pork Barrel Spending.

Only three days after GOP senators and senators-elect renounced earmarks, Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl, the No. 2 Senate Republican, got himself a whopping $200 million to settle an Arizona Indian tribe's water rights claim against the government.

Recommended Reading: 11\20\2010

The Wonk Monkey was incredibly busy today and has not been able to do much reading, which makes the monkey sad.

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The Planet Money team at NPR once again delivers the goods. This time they explain the insanity of Social Security Trust Funds.

But a Treasury bond, remember, is the way the government borrows money. So the government is lending the Social Security surplus to itself. And the obligation to repay those loans is the trust funds.

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Obama is pledging to stand by the Afghans.

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President Obama is upset at Republicans for delaying the START vote for what appears to be obvious political reasons.

If the pending treaty is not ratified quickly during the ongoing lame-duck legislative session, the president said, years of work and negotiations would go to waste, forcing the two nations to start from scratch in January

“Without ratification," Obama said, "we risk undoing decades of American leadership on nuclear security, and decades of bipartisanship on this issue.”

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Many of the GOP governors are saying that they are going to make their states lean by cutting popular programs and touching many of the third rails of politics, and they suggest that Washington DC do the same.

But as the 2012 presidential campaign slowly gets under way, both veteran and newly elected Republican governors argue that the GOP can seize the high ground by becoming the party of truth-telling about the country’s pressing fiscal difficulties.

“We’re going to have to be for a very bold set of changes, we’re going to have to grab a lot of so-called ‘third rails,’” said Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, a potential presidential hopeful, in an interview about his party.

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FactCheck.org reports that despite claims to the contrary, most of the increases in Healthcare Insurance Premiums are due to rising medical costs, not the new healthcare law.

Premium rates for many in the individual market are going up. But state insurance commissioners and health care experts told us the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is responsible in most cases for only a small portion of these increases. The main cause of double-digit rate hikes is rising medical costs.

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In silly political news, it is true that there is a rule in the House of Representatives that says you are not allowed to wear a hat while the House is in session.

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Newsweek talks about how the Merchant of Death was captured, and why Russia didn’t want him to be extradited to the United States.

Why were the Russians so anxious to keep Bout out of American hands? Known as “Africa’s merchant of death,” Bout is thought by U.S. officials to have built an empire worth perhaps $6 billion. According to a U.N. report, he supplied arms to Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and Sudan (not to mention Afghanistan). “Bout had the ability to acquire the most sophisticated weapons systems that the former Soviet bloc could offer,” Braun says. “He could not have acquired the weapons systems he did without complicity at the highest ranks of the government and military in Russia.”

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Europe doesn’t have as much of a problem with their debt as their productivity.

Europe’s productivity had been catching up with that of the United States for decades, but the gap has been widening since the mid-1990s. New research by the McKinsey Global Institute finds that Europe would need to accelerate productivity growth by about 30 percent (or opt to work more) just to maintain past GDP growth—and by much more to start catching up to the U.S.’s per capita GDP.

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Insider Trading is about to get a big old spotlight shown on it.

Federal authorities have been investigating a wide range of insider-trading charges for three years and are getting ready to file charges that "could ensnare consultants, investment bankers, hedge-fund and mutual-fund traders and analysts across the nation," reports the Wall Street Journal before noting that the probes "could eclipse the impact on the financial industry of any previous such investigation."

Final Update for 11/19/2010

In todays final news, there are many Millionaires who view it as their patriotic duty to pay more taxes.

Dozens of America's wealthiest taxpayers -- including hedge fund legend Michael Steinhardt, super trial lawyer Guy Saperstein, and Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry's fame -- have appealed to President Obama not to renew the Bush tax cuts for anyone earning more than $1 million a year. Calling themselves "Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength," the 40-plus signers today launched a website and a campaign that they hope will draw support from others who agree that fiscal responsibility should begin with those who can best afford it --

Recommended Reading: 11/19/2010

The Wonk Monkey had a great parent-teacher conference yesterday. Thing 2 is doing great in school. The Monkey is happy, very happy.

 

So, lets start off with some disturbing news… the fetuses of 2,000 illegal abortions were found at a Thai Buddhist Temple.

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Democratic donors are looking to setup a funding operation much like the Republicans did in the last election cycle.

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The the poverty rate was kept from reaching record levels due to extended unemployment benefits in 2009 according to the CBO.

Extended unemployment insurance put in place to fight the recession prevented the poverty rate from rising to 15.4 percent in 2009, a level unseen since the 1960s, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The government announced in September that that the 2009 poverty rate had risen to 14.3 percent from 13.2 percent the previous year.

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Interestingly charitable giving has been slumping because… charities are getting too much monkey from Uncle Sam.

Each year, the government gives thousands of grants to public-spirited nonprofits, many of which depend on these funds for a huge chunk of their budgets. But this “crowds out” private donors, according to a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Public Economics. For each $10,000 in annual government grant money, the study shows, nonprofits cut fundraising by an estimated $1,370, and private charitable donations fell by about $7,271.

This dynamic shows how much charities dislike shaking cups for cash. It also suggests that another golden age of philanthropy is a simple fix away. University of California, San Diego, economist James Andreoni, who coauthored the study, notes that if the government made continued fundraising a condition of every grant, the charitable pot might be supersized.

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This time Joe Scarborough has been suspended for campaign contributions.

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What does it say about the electorate that over half of them don’t know the Republicans only took over the House and not the Senate.

Only 46 percent of respondents in a Pew Research poll released Thursday knew that the GOP had taken over only the House, while a mere 38 percent can identify Ohio Republican John Boehner as the incoming speaker. Three times as many young people, under age 30, could properly identify Google's new phone software, Android, as could identify Boehner.

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President Obama was dressed down yesterday by some of the Senate Democrats.

Added one veteran senator: “It was the most frank exchange of views I’ve ever seen.”

Several senators expressed the opinion that Obama needed to show more passion, while party liberals renewed their complaint that Obama should abandon the pretense of bipartisanship in the face of Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s intransigence and what they consider the Kentucky Republican’s blatantly political tactics aimed at making Obama a one-term president.

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The Justice Department can no longer force defendants to sign a document that would forever bar the defendant from requesting DNA testing in order to prove their innocence.

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The Health Industry is against the repeal of the new healthcare law.

He says the reason is that the more people there were without health insurance, the more that threatened the industry financially. In other words, its entire business model was about to fall apart.

"The health care industry needs paying customers and insured customers to make that business model work," he says. "To the extent that Republicans push repeal, they are threatening the bottom line of the health care industry, and I think they're going to find that many elements of the health care industry are going to oppose repeal."

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Apparently a bunch of children who were brought to see Megamind got to see the opening of a completely different movie… Saw 3D.

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Net Neutrality is moving forward in the FCC

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It is Mostly True that cutting earmarks will not reduce spending.

Indirectly, earmarks may have an I'll-scratch-your-back-if-you-scratch-mine effect that pushes spending upward. Under the status quo, however, our experts agreed that Lugar is largely correct -- ending earmarks won't directly reduce spending, only re-direct it. There are other plausible reasons to advocate for an earmark ban, such as ending unseemly horse-trading with taxpayer dollars. But without a thorough overhaul of the budgeting process, saving money directly isn't one of them. We rate Lugar's statement Mostly True.

Recommended Reading: 11/18/2010 Part 2

The Wonk Monkey is excited today. He gets to go and sit down with Thing #2’s teacher and discuss how he is progressing. For some reason, the Wonk Monkey enjoys finding out how things are and coming up with a plan to make progress.

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Yes, Nancy Pelosi is the most unpopular politician in the country. Nate at FiveThirtyEight shows her favorability ratings compared with many of the other politicians working right now.

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Robert Reich makes an impassioned plea to extend the jobless benefits for the long term unemployed while at the same time not giving tax cuts to the Rich.

The long-term unemployed can’t get work because there are still five people needing work for every job opening. And the long-term jobless are often at the end of the job line: Either they don’t have the right skills or enough education, or have been out of work so long prospective employers are nervous about hiring them.

Moreover, the top 1 percent spends a small fraction of their income. That’s what it means to be rich — you already have most of what you want. So extending the Bush tax cut to them won’t stimulate the economy.

Yet people without jobs, and their families, are likely to spend every penny of unemployment benefits they receive. That will go back into the economy and save or create jobs.

A Labor Department report shows that for every $1 spent on unemployment insurance, $2 are spent in the economy. If you don’t believe the Labor Department, maybe you’ll believe Goldman Sachs analyst Alec Phillips, who estimates that if unemployment benefits are allowed to expire, the American economy would slow by a half a percent.

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For once a politician (President Obama) is governing exactly as he said he would.

Yet Obama is doing exactly what he said he would do. Perhaps the critics should read—or reread—the president’s own books. Dreams From My Father (1995) and The Audacity of Hope (2006) are the most substantial works written by anyone elected president since Woodrow Wilson (who wrote several books before he won election in 1912). In laying out his philosophy, Obama contrasts the GOP’s excessive individualism with the ideal of “ordered liberty” and the rich traditions of civic engagement typical of America in the 18th and 19th centuries. He also criticizes orthodox Democrats for too quickly dismissing market solutions and too often defending failed government programs. Above all, he criticizes the hyperpartisan atmosphere of contemporary public life.

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Scientists have been able to trap anti-matter.

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There appears there will be little chance of the debt commission being considered.

Congress won't act on their ideas to bring down the deficit unless 14 of the 18 members of their commission sign off on it. And the early reviews of the draft proposal they released last week have not been favorable.

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NPR has provided some interesting coverage of the Senate Hearing of Medicare Chief Donald Berwick.

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After 18 hearings the START treaty does not look like it is going to be approved by the Senate any time soon. The START treaty limits the number of warheads the US and Russia is allowed to have on hand.

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Members of Congress, unlike their constituents, have felt little pain in the economic downturn.

“Few federal lawmakers must grapple with the financial ills -- unemployment, loss of housing, wiped out savings -- that have befallen millions of Americans,” said Sheila Krumholz, the Center for Responsive Politics’ executive director. “Congressional representatives on balance rank among the wealthiest of wealthy Americans and boast financial portfolios that are all but unattainable for most of their constituents.”

In 2009, the median wealth of a U.S. House member stood at $765,010, up from $645,503 in 2008. The median wealth of a U.S. senator was nearly $2.38 million, up from $2.27 million in 2008.

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When the Republican members of Congress decided to decline a bi-partisan meeting at the White House I don’t think they expected this.

With Republican leadership asking for, and receiving, a delay in a previously announced bi-partisan meeting at the White House, Democrats have decided to make it a partisan affair.

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The odds of Guantanamo being closed have been reduced with the failure of convicting Ahmed Ghailani of all 284 counts.

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Roger Ailes (Fox News’ President) loves hyperbole. In a recent interview with the Daily Beast he said.

“They are, of course, Nazis,” Ailes said of NPR. “They have a kind of Nazi attitude. They are the left wing of Nazism. These guys don’t want any other point of view.”

He also doesn’t have kind words to say about John Stewart.

Ailes told Kurtz that Stewart’s free to go after cable news talking heads for the entertainment value, “but don’t give me a social speech on the steps of the Washington Monument. Don’t lapse into non-comedy.”

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Democrats will be pressing forward with votes on the DREAM Act and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.

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There is an interesting poll about the roll of Religion and Politics.

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It is True that the amount of radiation coming from the new TSA body scanners is “equivalent to about three minutes worth of air travel by anybody at 30,000 feet.

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It is Half True that 153 businesses have moved from California to Texas.

Still, based on the limited information D&B has shared, it looks like Texas netted 61 business sites from California from January through August, less than half the one-way total that Perry cites. Also, as D&B advised us, not all of the 153 sites that came here from there necessarily reflect whole companies making the move east. Instead, the 153 moves could have involved individual offices or branches of firms that continue to do business in California.

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Pants on Fire for the following statement (Michelle Bachmann):  “These are people who, who are carpet layers who maybe employ two or three other guys, or a plumber, maybe himself and his brother, and it's $250,000 in gross sales for their business. They're the ones that are looking at massive tax increases."

As Politifact reports:

It wasn't true then, and it isn't true now. Here's why: Plumbers -- or any other small business owner -- get to deduct their business expenses, so they'd have to be bringing in more than $250,000 in gross sales. The tax laws allow small business owners to deduct all kinds of business expenses: employees' pay, supplies, a car or truck, fuel costs, advertising, association dues, utilities, shop repairs, and the list goes on. (For more details, read chapter 8 of the Tax Guide for Small Business published by the IRS.)