Reconciliation
— Ezra’s guest-hosting the Rachel Maddow Show tonight at 9:00 pm EST. Tune in.
— James Fallows takes a crack at explaining Obama’s first term.
— The neuroscience of Adele’s “Someone Like You.”
— How much of the federal budget goes toward helping the non-working poor? About 5 percent.
— The Jeremy Lin bull market.
— The world’s fastest elevator goes about 36 kilometers per hour. For now.
— A Justin Bieber endorsement almost broke Instagram. Just wait until he starts touting Wonkblog.
Yep, the federal government is still an insurer with a large army
Just for fun, I ran the 2011 numbers to see how the “insurer with a large army” description of the federal government held up. Before interest payments, the federal government spent $3.3 trillion in 2011. Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security accounted for about $1.5 trillion of that. Defense spending ate up another $838 billion. All other spending -- everything from farm subsidies to education to infrastructure -- came to $900 billion. The final tally: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and security spending took up fully 68 percent of the budget last year.
White House: TARP’s in the red because it helps homeowners
The final price tag for the bank bailout has fluctuated ever since it passed. But the White House’s latest estimate is that it will cost $68 billion, according to President Obama’s proposed 2013 budget. That’s almost twice the estimate that the $34 billion price tag that Congressional Budget Office has most recently put on TARP.
Is the GOP caving on the payroll tax cut?
Up until now, House Republicans have said that any extension of the payroll tax cut for the rest of the year — a key stimulus measure — had to be paid for with spending cuts elsewhere. Democrats have balked at that, countering that the tax cut should be offset with a surtax on millionaires, if at all. So who will blink? The GOP, it seems. Sort of. As TPM’s Brian Beutler reports, House Republicans are dropping their demand that the payroll tax cut be paid for:
Obama budget would double bank tax size
President Obama's budget plan calls for a bank tax twice as big as the one he proposed last year, a further sign he wants to make anti-Wall Street sentiment a major part of his re-election campaign.
The bank tax, also known as the "Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee," first appeared in Obama's 2011 budget and was projected to raise $90 billion over 10 years. A year later, in the wake of the mid-term elections and accusations from executives that Obama was "anti-business," the White House cut the proposal by two-thirds to just $30 billion.
Romney hemorrhaging independents
Greg Sargent digs into the latest Pew poll:
In November, Romney was beating Obama among [independents], 53-41. Now those numbers are upside down: Obama is beating Romney among them, 51-42. That’s a net 19 point net swing of independents in Obama’s direction in three months.
Meanwhile, Rick Santorum is leading in Michigan.
The mounting danger for Romney is that his candidacy will lose its central justification: That he’s the most electable Republican in the field. Readers know I’ve long been bullish on Romney’s prospects, but if Santorum can pull out a win in Michigan, and Romney's numbers keep sliding, it becomes hard to see how he pulls this out.
How is this budget different from all other budgets?
The 2013 budget is out and, as Ezra noted Monday morning, a lot of the big ideas aren’t surprises. In fact, a lot of the big pieces feel awfully familiar. A $1.5 trillion plan for tax increases, investment in infrastructure, adopting the so-called Buffett Rule: The president has endorsed all these changes in previous speeches or legislation.
Five things you missed in Obama’s budget
President Obama’s proposed tax hikes and infrastructure spending for 2013 have grabbed headlines. But there’s a slew of other changes that Obama has proposed in his $3.8 trillion budget that are worth flagging as well. Here are a few of them:
1) Obama wants to change the composition of nickels and pennies to save money. The president’s budget would give the Treasury Department the ability to “change the composition of coins to more cost-effective materials,” pointing out the current cost of making the penny is 2.4 cents and the nickel is 11.2 cents. Of course, the value of the U.S. dollar isn’t pegged to the materials that it’s composed of, but it’s still a compelling argument on its face. The composition of U.S. coins hasn’t changed since 1981, the Wall Street Journal notes, while major components like zinc have become more expensive. Industry lobbyists stalled the proposal when Obama brought it up in 2010, but it may have new appeal to the frugally-minded.
Domestic spending: Winners and losers in Obama’s budget
The White House’s 2013 budget request is the first that has to follow the terms of last year’s debt-ceiling deal. That means it’s the first year that domestic discretionary spending — the money for agencies that Congress funds each year — gets strictly capped. So how does this shake out?
First, let’s define terms. “Non-defense discretionary spending” is a relatively small part of the budget, about 18 percent. It’s not Social Security. It’s not Medicare. It’s not the Pentagon. It’s not multiyear highway or farm bills. But it is just about everything else that gets set each year by Congress. The Veterans Health Administration. Medical research at the National Institutes for Health. Low-income housing assistance. And under last year’s Budget Control Act, it’s all getting squeezed. Two years ago, the White House predicted that such domestic spending would amount to $477 billion in FY 2013. After the debt-ceiling deal, the White House is asking for just $410 billion — a full 14 percent less. Which means, inevitably, there are winners and losers.
Budget showdown: Ryan vs. Obama vs. current policy
In the previous post, I compared the tax rates under President Obama’s 2013 budget and Mitt Romney’s budget promises. But how about President Obama’s 2013 budget and the budget proposed by Paul Ryan and the House GOP?
Right now, revenues are 15.4 percent of GDP, and projected to rise, if current policies are simply extended, to 18.3 percent of GDP in 2022. Obama’s budget envisions revenues rising to 20.1 percent of GDP by then. In the Congressional Budget Office’s score (pdf) of Ryan’s budget, they projected revenues rising to 18.5 percent of GDP over the same time period.
Lunch break: A polar bear cub tries to stand
The Toronto Zoo uploads this video of one of its latest additions, a 2-month-old polar bear cub, attempting to stand.
Comparing taxes under Obama’s and Romney’s budgets
I love budgets. And not just because I love tables, charts and appendixes — though, to be clear, I do. I love budgets because they force us to run the numbers, to make trade-offs, to set priorities. The annual budget is, frankly, about as honest as the government ever gets with itself, and with the American people.
As I wrote a year ago, President Obama’s 2012 budget showed that the federal government had become an insurance conglomerate protected by a large, standing army. About 40 percent of its spending went to the three major social insurance programs — Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security — and another 23.8 percent of federal dollars went to the military.
His 2013 budget shows much the same thing. So this year, I want to focus on the other side of the ledger: how we’re paying for our insurance conglomerate/army right now, and how the two parties propose we do so in the future.
Federal budget: Read the full document
President Barack Obama.
(Charles Dharapak - AP)
As Ezra has already written this morning, the $3.8 trillion budget request President Obama released Monday has little chance of being passed.
Still, it’s worth examining what Obama is putting forward and where he is looking to boost spending or slash it.
The full proposal—all 256 pages of it—is available below. Give us your take in the comments section on what items you find surprising and whether you think any will become political hot buttons.
Why is the U.S. exporting so much petroleum these days?
Blake Clayton, an energy fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations, says that not enough people appreciate just how stunning the recent boom in U.S. exports of refined petroleum products really is. Here’s a historical chart showing that we’ve gone from a huge net importer to a huge net exporter in just a few short years:
U.S. net imports of petroleum products (1993–2011)Now, remember, this is just an increase in refined products. The U.S. is still a colossal net importer of crude oil, in part because overall U.S. oil production has sharply plunged from its peak back in the 1960s, even after the recent (and comparatively small) surge in shale oil production in North Dakota and elsewhere. But our refineries are now doing big business abroad, and it’s one reason why overall exports have been ticking upward lately. And this hasn’t happened in decades: The last time the U.S. was a net exporter of finished gasoline was way back in 1959.
How the Romney-Bain flap could change public pensions
The political attacks on Mitt Romney’s time at Bain Capital could have a ripple effect on other private-equity firms. Bloomberg points out that these firms heavily depend on public and private pension funds, which make up about 42 percent of their capital. It’s always been an odd couple, but the tensions over Bain could make public-sector investors particularly wary:
Study: CHIP doesn’t crowd out private insurance
The Children’s Health Insurance Program, the state-federal program that covers lower-income children, has expanded eligibility significantly in recent years. Between 2002 and 2009, 13 states increased the income threshold for CHIP to between 200 and 400 percent of the federal poverty line.
But the practical implications of those big expansions, a new National Bureau of Economics Research paper suggests, is actually quite limited. It turns out that the higher income populations targeted by these expansions actually enroll in the program at very low rates:
‘I realized there were possibilities in this world’
The Boston Globe profiles Elizabeth Warren’s childhood. James Garner — yes, of ‘Maverick’ fame — guest stars.
Wonkbook: 5 things to watch in Obama's 2013 budget
It's easy to be cynical about President Obama's 2013 budget, which will be released later today. Like the 2012 budget, it has no chance of being adopted by Congress. The big ideas in it are DOA in the House. In fact, most of its big ideas -- $1.5 trillion in tax increases, taking some of the money we'll save from winding down the wars and investing it in infrastructure -- have already been announced, either in the American Jobs Act, the White House's subsequent deficit-reduction recommendations to the supercommittee, or the State of the Union. Which isn't to say that the budget isn't important. It's just that what's important in it may not be what will grab headlines. But here's what to watch for:
In praise of prepared food
If you read food blogs or cookbooks or watch food-related television— and I do all these things pretty much all the time — you’ll see there’s a pretty much endless campaign against canned beans and frozen dinners and packaged broths and pre-cut vegetables and takeout. The argument, which is true so far as it goes, is that all these items are expensive, often unhealthy, replacements for things that are relatively easy to do on your own. Perhaps the most succinct summation of this worldview came at the end of this Michael Pollan article, when he quoted veteran food-marketer Harry Balzer saying, “Here’s my diet plan: Cook it yourself. That’s it. Eat anything you want — just as long as you’re willing to cook it yourself.”
Sunday Pearlstein: What Washington doesn’t need: A Trump Tower
They are two of Washington’s architectural and historical gems: The Old Post Office Pavilion on Pennsylvania Avenue and the Smithsonian Arts and Industries Building on the Mall. The good news is that both are slated for renovation and what the bureaucrats like to call “re-purposing.” The bad news is that, in both cases, the process is headed in the wrong direction.
Let’s start today with the Old Post Office and the General Services
Donald Trump has said he’ll dedicate $200 million to turning Washington’s Old Post Office into a luxury hotel. Administration’s curious selection of Donald Trump and Colony Capital to develop it into a luxury hotel.
I say curious not because of any concerns about the hotel concept, or even out of concern for what might be called the “Trump aesthetic,” the over-the-top sensibility that tends toward the big, the fancy and the gaudy. My guess is that by the time the historic-preservation police are finished with their painstaking reviews and requirements, any traces of an architectural comb-over will have been thoroughly expunged from the plans, along with any profit from the five-year pro forma.
The Post Most: BusinessMost-viewed stories, videos and galleries int he past two hours
