Barack Obama

Peter Roskam Issues Call for Massive New Federal Debt on “Debt Dependence Day”

On August 7, 2010, in Banking Crisis, Barack Obama, Economic Justice, Estate Tax, Financial Sector, Healthcare, Middle Class, Peter Roskam, Republican Party, by RSR
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This past week,  Republican Representative Peter Roskam issued a statement declaring August 4th as “Debt Dependence Day“:

Debt Dependence Day should be a stark wake-up call to the American people that Washington is on a collision course with fiscal disaster. For the rest of the year, the federal government is spending borrowed money. Government spending is out of control and it is holding back our economy and piling up a mountain of suffering for future generations.

This year, the government is borrowing 41 cents of each dollar it spends. With 41% of the year remaining, we have now spent every penny of tax revenue for the year, forcing us to borrow all of the money the government plans to spend for the remainder of 2010.

Expert economic testimony before the President’s own debt commission has shown that this level of debt is costing our economy one million jobs a year, and the American people know it is past time to stop the spending madness.

Got that? Debt is bad and kills jobs and it is time to “stop the spending madness”. We’ll come back to “spending madness” in a minute.

Here’s video from an appearance Roskam made on August 4th on CNBC discussing the debt together with Democratic Representative Frank Pallone of New Jersey’s 6th District:

It was a pretty balanced exchange but Roskam, as usual, was able to squeeze quite a few whoppers into a short interview. Lets do a little fact-checking:

  1. “This majority has sort of slinked out of Washington and hasn’t passed a budget” – Roskam use of the word “slinked” is, of course a deliberate perjorative, implying fear, cowardice or shame. More important, it has been very difficult for Democrats to get anything at all done in this Congress with the level of Republican obstruction being what it has. The Republican minority hasn’t merely voted against Democratic proposals at almost every turn. They’ve waged a vicious and deceptive media campaign against them, the GOP campaign against health reform being a prime example, and have done everything in their power to block or delay crucial votes. The level of obstruction has limited time available for debate on and passage of a budget and the GOP has not cooperated with negotiations on that front.  Without any reason to believe that Republicans would ever negotiate in good faith, Democrats announced publicly in June that they would not seek to pass a budget blueprint in 2010, instead awaiting for the report of recommendations from the President’s non-partisan deficit commission due in December. In the meantime, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer stated that Democrats would adopt lower spending limits than those requested by President Obama.
  2. “The nature of this spending is having a huge drag on the economy” – Presumably, the spending Roskam is referring to is not that related to the ongoing wars in Afghanistan & Iraq, which were inherited from the previous administration and were enthusiastically promoted by Roskam and his party. Rather what Roskam refers to must be the spending begun under President Bush and continued under President Obama to deal with the economic crisis, which also began under the Bush administration. That spending -the bank bailouts, the auto industry bailouts, the stimulus package- far from being a drag on the economy, were responsible for saving the country from imminent economic collapse. According to a recent analysis by economists Alan Blinder, a former Federal Reserve Vice Chairman, and Mark Zandi, Chief Economist at Moody’s Analytics, the program of interventions undertaken by the Bush and Obama administrations probably saved the country from a second Great Depression, ended freefall in the housing and auto markets, prevented deflation, and saved about 8.5 million jobs. U.S. auto companies are now showing a profit, have rehire 55,000 workers and will repay all of the bailout money. The banking system has not collapsed and TARP repayments are proceeding, having topped oustanding payments in June. Total TARP investments are expected to return a profit thanks to sales of bank stocks received. While many jobs have been created & saved due to this spending, unemployment continues to be problematic with rates above 9%. This is probably related to the stimulus spending having been too low rather than too high. A $775 million dollar stimulus package should never have been expected to make up for what CBO forecast in January 2009 as $2.1 trillion of lost production.
  3. [Debt Dependence Day] is a pretty sobering reminder about the lack of leadership coming out of Washington, D.C. right now. – First off, let’s remember that Peter Roskam inhabits Washington. D.C. for a good portion of each year. He is not an outsider. He is a member of the Republican leadership team in Congress. Democrats have exhibited a great deal of leadership, as befits a majority party, and have advanced an ambitious program of legislation aimed at improving the lives of working people in America while at the same time reducing the deficit. We’ll catalog some of these in bit. But Republicans have fought against every single Democratic initiative, blocking most of them with repeated filibusters in the Senate. There is no crisis of Democratic leadership. Rather there is a concerted effort on the part of Republicans to make the Democrats and the President fail, in hopes of electoral victories, no matter what the cost to the nation.
  4. “On defense spending, by and large, Republicans in Congress are supporting President Obama and what he is trying to do, and trying to not turn this into a partisan issue.” – Peter Roskam and Republicans in Congress have supported next to nothing of what the President has tried to do. Roskam and many other Republicans in Congress voted against cutting funding for the F-35 fighter engine which the Department of Defense called costly and unnecessary and the president opposed, at a minimum cost of $458 million but likely much, much more over the life of the program. And they have opposed the President in other areas – such as in the closure of the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay and the Nuclear Posture Review with its renouncement of new nuclear weapons systems development. Neither Roskam nor his Republican colleagues have shown any willingness to embrace the recommendations of the non-partisan Sustainable Defense Task Force led by Representatives Barney Frank and Ron Paul that has suggested $1 trillion in cuts over 10 years to the nation’s bloated military budget.
  5. “We’re seven months into the year and there is complete ambiguity about what the tax code is going to be.” - Wrong. There is no ambiguity. President Obama has stated his intention to allow the Bush tax cuts on the wealthiest Americans to expire while those for the middle class to continue. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi have echoed that same plan and both Reid and Pelosi are committed to bringing the matter up for a vote well before year-end. Any ambiguity that might remain is a product of Republican efforts to preserve tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans through continued obstruction of Democratic legislative efforts.
  6. “Middle class and lower economic voters are looking at the possibility of tax hikes.” This is the GOP lie-of-the-week. As noted above. The President and Democratic leadership in Congress have ruled out middle class tax hikes in the near-term. Their intent is to extend the Bush tax cuts for all but the wealthiest Americans. The only open question is whether the GOP will let them. We would add that it has never been part of Roskam’s make-up to worry about the how anything would affect lower economic voters.
  7. “Look, they’ve got super-majorities in both chambers, in the House and in the Senate. There’s no ambiguity about who’s in charge.” Well, that’s no longer true. With the death of Senator Kennedy, before health reform legislation could be passed, and the subsequent election Of Senator Scott Brown, the so-called Democratic “super-majority” in the Senate ended, and Republicans have blocked virtually everything from the extension of unemployment benefits to climate legislation with the threat of filibuster. When the the Democrats acted to pass health reform legislation through the reconciliation process by the simple majority required under the Constitution, Republicans, including Peter Roskam, screamed about tyranny. Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell has frankly stated his intent to block the entire Democratic agenda. So, no, the Republicans have hijacked Congressand are engaged in minority rule. They have almost brought Congress to a standstill.
  8. “When you look at the entitlement spending in the Obamacare bill it is absolutely enormous.” Health reform will reduce the deficit by $143 billion over 2010-2019, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
  9. “It [health reform bill] is 7 years of taxes and 10 years of spending. “ – Roskam got his GOP talking point backwards. Ezra Klein refutes it here.

So Roskam, as you can see, is pretty weak on facts surrounding the debt. But let’s grant him that, at least in the long-term, debt is a problem. How does he want to fix it? By doubling-down on one of the biggest factor in creating the debt in the first place: the Bush tax cuts.

Bush entered office with a budget surplus and left with a huge deficit, due largely to starting two wars and simultaneously giving huge unfunded tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans. Of course the economic downturn, related to Republican deregulatory policies and their consequences, also played a role by reducing revenues. And the cost of responding to that crisis have contributed to short-term deficits. But if you look at what’s driving long-term deficits, it is war spending and the Bush tax cuts. The Bush-Obama recovery measures have minimal impact on long-term deficits.According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

Some commentators blame recent legislation — the stimulus bill and the financial rescues — for today’s record deficits. Yet those costs pale next to other policies enacted since 2001 that have swollen the deficit. Those other policies may be less conspicuous now, because many were enacted years ago and they have long since been absorbed into CBO’s and other organizations’ budget projections.

Just two policies dating from the Bush Administration — tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — accounted for over $500 billion of the deficit in 2009 and will account for almost $7 trillion in deficits in 2009 through 2019, including the associated debt-service costs. (The prescription drug benefit enacted in 2003 accounts for further substantial increases in deficits and debt, which we are unable to quantify due to data limitations.) These impacts easily dwarf the stimulus and financial rescues. Furthermore, unlike those temporary costs, these inherited policies (especially the tax cuts and the drug benefit) do not fade away as the economy recovers.

Without the economic downturn and the fiscal policies of the previous Administration, the budget would be roughly in balance over the next decade. That would have put the nation on a much sounder footing to address the demographic challenges and the cost pressures in health care that darken the long-run fiscal outlook.

Despite this fact, Roskam and the deficit peacocks in the Republican want to press ahead with extending the Bush tax cuts on wealthy Americans and they don’t want to offset the cost – a projected $830 billion over 10 years (if debt-servicing costs are included). $830 billion in unfunded taxcuts to the richest Americans! And they had the nerve to complain when Democrats wanted to spend a mere $33 billion to extend benefits for the unemployed. (An extended version of Roskam’s August 4th remarks calling for the tax cuts can be found here.)

But, there’s more. Not only would Roskam and the Republicans extend the Bush tax cuts. They also are planning to eliminate all individual and corporate capital gains taxes, reduce the corporate income tax rate to 12.5 percent, and permanently eliminate the estate tax. All told, they are proposing over $10 trillion in tax cuts without any way of paying for them. The plan would be great for the huge corporations and for a tiny number of very wealthy Americans. It would be extremely bad news for the rest of us, putting us at risk of a financial crisis that make the recent recession seem mild.

It is time to call “bullshit” on Peter Roskam when he tries to use debt as an excuse for not doing anything to help ordinary working Americans. PeterRoskam cares nothing about the debt…and nothing about working people.

 

Congratulations and Thanks to President Obama and Democrats for Success of Stimulus

On February 17, 2010, in Barack Obama, Economy, Peter Roskam, by RSR
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On the first anniversary of the the signing into law of the $862 billion economic stimulus passage it is appropriate to extend thanks to President Obama and to the Democratic leadership in Congress for its success in bringing the country out of recession and away from the brink of economic collapse that may have rivaled the Great Depression. While recovery is not complete and there are large numbers of  Americans still unemployed, there are many hopeful signs. The economy grew at a rate of 5.7% in the fourth quarter of 2009, the fastest rate in 6 years.

While there is room to argue about what has helped and what hasn’t, there is no excuse for the nasty display of trash talk exhibited today by Peter Roskam and his fellow Republicans, many of whom hypocritically touted stimulus money being spent in their districts after having voted against it.Their behavior today was appalling. They take joy in signs of new economic difficulty hoping that the country’s failure will bring them political success in upcoming midterm elections. But their behavior is destructive to the nation’s morale and destructive to the recovery itself. This is not what they were elected to do. The nation deserves better.

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President Obama Masterfully Demolishes GOP Critics, Roskam Included

On January 29, 2010, in Barack Obama, Economy, Healthcare, Peter Roskam, Unemployment, by RSR
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Just finished watching the video of President Obama’s Q&A session at the GOP House Issues conference today. The President was brilliant. He called the GOP to account for for their campaign of misinformation about healthcare reform and the economic stimulus, but did it with respect and a sincere invitation to Republicans to work with him in the nation’s best interest. The President was articulate and knew his facts, including detailed knowledge of Republican counter proposals. He was warm and human in demeanor and gentle but firm in his criticisms, using self-deprecating humor effectively to put the room at ease. I have never seen a more brilliant performance by a President. Never.

You can hear Congressman Roskam pose his question at about 67:15.

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Roskam Spends Tax Dollars on Another Political Mailing to Scare Constituents

On November 5, 2009, in Barack Obama, Deficit, Mortgage Crisis, Peter Roskam, by RSR
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More mail from Peter Roskam yesterday. This time a piece designed to scare me about the national debt.  On the back, next to Roskam’s signature, it tells me “This mailing was prepared, published and mailed at taxpayer expense. This is a service to the the citizens of the Sixth Congressional District of Illinois.” Right next to the pretty glossy photo of rich white people walking in a park, probably in Wheaton.

So how is this a service? A service to the residents of the sixth might be a mailer that told the victims of the Bush financial collapse how to get job re-training and unemployment benefits, and food stamps, and suicide counseling. No, this is a political message, designed to help Roskam’s party defeat the efforts of President Obama to make things better for ordinary Americans.  Pretty ironic when you think about it – Roskam’s spending our tax dollars to print and mail this political message railing about the national debt and excessive spending. What an ass. Based on their polling, Roskam and his Republican colleagues believe that debt and budget deficits are one area where President Obama is potentially vulnerable and so they’re wasting our money on propaganda like this.

Roskam says that “we’re at near historic debt levels, the likes of which have not been seen since WWII: the national debt is over $11 trillion dollars and growing rapidly.” Well, that’s true enough.  But where did all that debt come from? The New York Times’  David Leonhardt did a great job analyzing the growth of budget deficitsback in June: America’s Sea of Red Ink Was Years in the Making.

It all began when George Bush took office in 2001. As the last Democratic president left office, he handed President Bush a booming economy and a budget surplus projected at $800 billion annually through 2012. Under Bush, the nation plunged into recession in 2001 and the country was forced to increase spending on economic relief while tax revenues decreased. Meanwhile Bush started two expensive wars, one of them inargueably elective, and spent billions on a Medicare prescription drug benefit that was largely a gift to insurance and pharmaceutical companies. So as spending soared and tax revenues decreased, what does Bush do: why give huge tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans, further decreasing revenues and increasing the deficit.

Bush’s economic policies resulted in his second recession, the present one, that began in 2007. Again tax revenues plummeted and safety net spending increased.  And then then the mortgage and banking crisis, a product of Bush’s anything goes anti-regulatory policies. Bush is forced to bailout the banks, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac to prevent a global economic collapse, further increasing the deficit. Bush leaves office and hands President Obama a $1.3 trillion deficit, two wars with no end in sight, and an economy in ruins.

Leonhardt breaks down responsibility for the deficit like this:

You can think of that roughly $2 trillion swing as coming from four broad categories: the business cycle, President George W. Bush’s policies, policies from the Bush years that are scheduled to expire but that Mr. Obama has chosen to extend, and new policies proposed by Mr. Obama.

The first category — the business cycle — accounts for 37 percent of the $2 trillion swing. It’s a reflection of the fact that both the 2001 recession and the current one reduced tax revenue, required more spending on safety-net programs and changed economists’ assumptions about how much in taxes the government would collect in future years.

About 33 percent of the swing stems from new legislation signed by Mr. Bush. That legislation, like his tax cuts and the Medicare prescription drug benefit, not only continue to cost the government but have also increased interest payments on the national debt.

Mr. Obama’s main contribution to the deficit is his extension of several Bush policies, like the Iraq war and tax cuts for households making less than $250,000. Such policies — together with the Wall Street bailout, which was signed by Mr. Bush and supported by Mr. Obama — account for 20 percent of the swing.

About 7 percent comes from the stimulus bill that Mr. Obama signed in February. And only 3 percent comes from Mr. Obama’s agenda on health care, education, energy and other areas.

So about 10 percent of the present deficit is attributable to President Obama’s policies: 7 percent to economic stimulus to pull the nation out of the economic crisis he inherited from an incompetent Repupublican administration and 3 percent related to his new domestic programs. 3 percent!

If Peter Roskam were serious about reducing the deficit he would:

  • Stop wasting tax dollars on political mailings and telephone campaigns
  • Start working to repeal the irresponsible Bush tax cuts
  • Start working to disengage the country from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that he has supported and to reduce military spending to reasonable levels
  • Get behind the President’s efforts to fix the healthcare system
  • Stop working for more tax breaks to the wealthy like an end to the estate tax

But then we all know that Roskam is not serious about reducing the deficit. His only interest is in using it to make things more difficult for the President in hopes of boosting his party’s political fortune.

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Peter Roskam’s Challenger Ben Lowe an Environmentalist

On November 4, 2009, in Barack Obama, Congressional Elections, Environment, Peter Roskam, by RSR
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After some more poking around, it looks to us as though Peter Roskam’s 2010 opponent, Ben Lowe, comes from the evangelical Christian environmental movement and  has worked with an organization called Renewal. Here’s his author bio from IVP which published his book, “Green Revolution:Coming Together to Care for Creation“:

Ben Lowe’s views on creation care were shaped early in his life. Growing up as a missionary kid in Singapore/Malaysia, he often dealt with water shortages and bad air quality due to mismanagement and abuse of natural resources. Carrying these experiences with him, he eventually found his way to Wheaton College where he majored in environmental studies and helped organize Wheaton’s first national Climate Change Summit. His summers were filled working as an environmental educator with the Massachusetts Audubon Society and as a student researcher for fisheries projects in Corpus Christi, TX and on Lake Tanganyika, Tanzania.

Lowe currently calls Chicago home and works as the cocoordinator of Renewal, a grassroots network committed to equipping this student generation in the compassionate stewardship of all of God’s creation. Previously he served as outreach director for A Rocha USA, an international Christian conservation organization, where he helped to mobilize churches and campuses around creation care issues.

Renewal’s web site describes the organization this way:

Renewal is a Christ-centered creation care network that focuses on living in right relationship with God. As followers of Christ, we seek to follow His example of love, stewardship, and reconciliation. For us, this means taking care of everything that God so lovingly created- the earth and each other. With a heart for the poor and a commitment to following Jesus’ call to ‘love your neighbor as yourself,’ the students of Renewal seek to care for the earth so that all of God’s people and creatures, as well as future generations, can have a healthy environment in which to live.

“Heart for the poor” and “care for the earth” are music to my ears after two terms of Roskam’s screw the poor and exploit the earth mentality. I look forward to hearing more from young Ben about his aims as a candidate.

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Roskam’s Medi-Fraud Alert Highlights Obama’s Vigorous Efforts to Combat Medicare Fraud

On July 1, 2009, in Barack Obama, Economic Justice, Healthcare, Peter Roskam, by RSR
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In his address to a joint session of Congress on February 24, 2009, President Obama, at the very outset of his administration, promised to “root out the waste, fraud, and abuse in our Medicare program that doesn’t make our seniors any healthier.” In recent days, we have begun to see the President’s promise become a reality.

Obama’s  F.Y. 2010 budget proposal, released on May 10, included a $1.7 billion increase over five years to the Health Care Fraud and Abuse Control Program. That program, under the joint direction of the Department of Justice and the Department of Health and Human Services, was established in 1996 by The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), under President Clinton.

On May 20, new Attorney General Eric Holder and HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced a new interagency effort, the Health Care Fraud Prevention and Enforcement Action Team (HEAT), to combat Medicare fraud. HEAT will build on efforts begun with significant success under the Bush administration:

The HEAT team will include senior officials from DOJ and HHS who will build upon and strengthen existing programs to combat fraud while also investing new resources and technology to prevent fraud, waste and abuse before it happens. Efforts will include the expansion of joint DOJ-HHS Medicare Fraud Strike Force teams that have been successfully fighting fraud in South Florida and Los Angeles. Established in 2007, these teams have a proven record of success using a “data-driven” approach to identify unexplainable billing patterns and investigating these providers for possible fraudulent activity. The Medicare Fraud Strike Force team operating in South Florida has already convicted 146 defendants and secured $186 million in criminal fines and civil recoveries. After the success of operations in South Florida, the Medicare Fraud Strike Force expanded in May 2008 to phase two in Los Angeles, where 37 defendants have been charged with criminal health care fraud offenses. To date in the Los Angeles cases, more than $55 million has been ordered in restitution to the Medicare program.

“We know these strike forces work. I believe a targeted civil and criminal enforcement strategy in these locations will have a substantial impact on deterring fraud and abuse, protecting patients and the elderly from scams, and ensuring that taxpayer funds are not stolen,” said Attorney General Holder.

Republican Congressman Peter Roskam recently established his “Medi-FraudAlert” blog on his Congressional web site as a “forum to discuss the massive waste, fraud and abuse in the current Medicare and Medicaid systems”. Roskam absurdly states these costs could reach $500 billion annually. (The total cost of Medicare is only about $450 billion.) But the costs of fraud are significant – 3% or more of total health expenditures, 10.5% of federal Medicaid expenditures by one estimate. Roskam’s blog does a good job of highlighting some of the Obama administration’s early successes in combating fraud:

June 25:  A day after a $100 million fraud was exposed, yesterday, 53 people were indicted in a $50 million Medicare fraud scheme spanning from Detroit to Miami. The scheme involving patients, doctors, medical assistants and company owners, focused on Medicare claims submitted for unnecessary or never delivered treatments mostly for HIV-related drugs and physical therapy treatments.

June 29: Friday, eight Miami-area residents were arrested and charged with attempting to defraud Medicare for $22 million – having already paid out $15.3 million of those claims from Medicare. The Miami Herald reports that this was the prosecutors’ “first crackdown on home healthcare offenders in a decade.” In this case, two firms were raided, had their bank accounts frozen, and stand accused of filing bogus claims mostly for homebound diabetic services. ABC Home Health Care submitted $17 million in false claims since January 2006, and has already been paid $11.3 million in taxpayer money. Florida Home Health Care Providers filed $5.5 million in false claims since October 2007, being compensated with $4 million of taxpayer money.

June 30: Yesterday, a Miami doctor was sentenced to eight years in prison and ordered to pay more than $9 million in restitution for his part in a Medicare fraud scheme where he ultimately filed $20 million in false claims. The physician, Roberto Rodriguez, billed for fake HIV infusion services at six Miami-area HIV infusion clinics.

But Roskam, of course, has not created this blog because he wants the public to know how effective the administration has been so early in combatting fraud. Rather, Peter Roskam is using the existence of Medicare/Medicaid fraud as an excuse to subvert Democratic efforts to make quality healthcare coverage available to all American citizens, something to which he is ideologically opposed.

Roskam appeared this morning on WBIG 1280 AM this morning promoting his blog. He bemoaned the fact that physicians are reimbursed at such a low rate by Medicare and Medicaid due to the excessive expenditures on fraud and abuse and reiterated that he thought it unwise to pursue universal coverage with fraud so rampant. Roskam offered no solutions however for the 45 million Americans who have no health coverage. He did not even acknowledge them. Under the Roskam plan, they are on their own. You can listen to Roskam here:

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I think Roskam’s focus on Medicare fraud is a lame excuse for not doing what basic justice and decency require – that we provide healthcare to every American. If you agree with me, I encourage you give Peter Roskam a call and demand universal coverage now.  Tell him we’ve got blogs aplenty, we need a health plan. (You can attempt to post a comment on his blog but I expect that will be a waste of time as they are screening out unfavorable comments).  You can reach Peter Roskam at (202) 225-4561 in Washington or at (630) 893-9670 in Bloomingdale.

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