For weeks, I’ve been writing that the movement to increase the minimum wage near you. Next week, however, that movement will arrive in my own back yard. Low-wage workers organized by Good Jobs Nation are coming to Washington, DC to rally for living wages, on Tuesday, May 21st, at 12:00pm, at Columbus Circle, in front of Union Station.

But this protest isn’t targeting fast food restaurants like McDonald’s or Burger King or retail shops like TJMaxx. On Tuesday, low-wage workers will take their demands to the biggest low-wage job creator in the country — the one funded by taxpayers like you and me: the federal government.

Early this month, a study by Demos, “Underwriting Bad Jobs: How Our Tax Dollars Are Funding Low-Wage Work and Fueling Inequality,” revealed that the federal government revealed that millions of low wage workers employed by private businesses, who serve the federal government in a variety of ways, can’t afford basic necessities like health care, food and housing, because they’re paid such low wages.

We find that nearly two million private sector employees working on behalf of America earn wages too low to support a family, making $12 or less per hour. This is more than the number of low-wage workers at Walmart and McDonalds combined.1 Yet, if anything, this figure underestimates the total number of poorly-paid workers funded by our tax dollars. Our analysis encompasses U.S. workers employed by government contractors, paid by federal health care spending, supported by Small Business Administration loans, working on federal construction grants, and maintaining buildings leased by the federal government. This encompasses the largest share of poorly-paid workers funded by our taxes. However, other streams of funding have yet to be analyzed. For example, loans and subsidies from the Department of Agriculture fund giant agribusinesses that employ more than a million farm workers, while grants from the Department of Education fund low-wage assistant teachers, bus monitors and cooks in Head Start and other programs. Due to lack of data, retail and food service workers for concessionaires of the National Parks Service and other federal agencies also fall outside our analysis.

These are employees working on behalf of America, doing jobs that we have decided are worthy of public funding—yet they’re being treated in a very un-American way. Our nation has a history of ensuring our tax dollars provide decent jobs. From the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act to Executive Order 11246 of 1965, and a host of other laws and executive actions, our laws have mandated that companies working on behalf of the American people are upholding high standards of employment practices. Yet as the nature and prevalence of federal contracting, lending and grant-making have changed, and some laws have been weakened, working people have fallen through the cracks.

When our tax dollars underwrite bad jobs, the economy as a whole is weakened and all of us are negatively affected. There is a ripple effect as low-paid workers and their families have little money to spend, hindering economic growth that could be creating more jobs. Poorly-paid workers also contribute less in taxes and are more likely to rely on public benefits to care for their families. In contrast, we would all benefit from an economy where workers earn good wages—and we have a special responsibility to see that the people working on behalf of our nation are paid and treated fairly. Raising standards for people working on behalf of America is one important piece to providing opportunities for workers to reach the middle class.

At a press conference announcing the launch of Good Jobs Nation earlier this month, workers bore witness to the “ripple effect” federally-funded low-wage jobs.

• Lucilia Ramirez, who has cleaned Union Station for 21 years spoke of making $8.75 an hour, with no benefits. Struggling to pay their mortgage on her small salary, Ramirez and her husband were forced to rent out bedrooms to strangers just to keep a roof over their heads.
• Katina Washington, who earns $9.65 an hour cleaning offices rented by the Department of Justice, lives with her cousin because she can’t afford her own apartment, and has to rely on food stamps to help with groceries.
• Nelly Garcia, 55, works at the Old Post Office Building, for a company that makes lots of money from federal contracts. But Garcia only earns $9.00 an hour, which isn’t enough to afford food or pay for the subway commute to work. A cancer survivor, Garcia has no health benefits, and must rely on Medicaid as a result.

These are just a few of the voices of the over 4 million low-wage workers employed by private companies on behalf of the federal government. Many of them can’t afford basic essentials like food, shelter, and medical care. Some 30 percent of them actually make less than minimum wage. Forty percent must depend on food stamps, Medicaid, and other public assistance to survive. Sixty-five percent of them struggle to pay for things like rent, utilities, and food.

If, like me, you live and/or work in the Washington area, you probably walk past these workers every day. We smile, and say “Hello,” “Good morning,”  or “Good night.” We live and work in a place that is one of the biggest examples of economic inequality, in an “recovery” where most of the new jobs created are low-wage jobs. Seven of the ten wealthiest zip codes in the country are in the Washington, DC area, yet DC would have the third highest poverty rate in the country — if DC counted as a state. Federal benchmark compensation for CEO Reimbursement for work on a federal contract is about $760,000.00, but the lowest compensation reported by workers on federal contracts is $6.50 an hour.

Hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars in federal contracts, loans, and leases go to corporations that pocket billions and pay their CEOs millions in bonuses, but pay such low wages that workers can’t afford food and shelter. Taxpayer dollars go to corporations that pay their employees so little that many of them have to rely on public assistance.

Like I said yesterday, when an employer pays workers so little that workers have to rely on public assistance, is should count as “corporate welfare.” Big, profitable contractors are forcing taxpayers to subsidize their unlivable wages. These companies are receiving funding from the federal government, but they are further burdening taxpayers by leaving their employees to rely on food stamps and other public assistance programs instead of paying them a living wage.

This has to stop. That’s why federally funded low-wage workers are joining together for a living wage and a voice on the job. The federal government has a responsibility to ensure taxpayer-funded contracts help the economy by paying workers enough to afford the basics like rent and food and to put money back into their local economies.

Next week, Washingtonians have a chance to stand with low wage workers, instead of just passing by them every day on our way to or from our homes, condos, and apartments in and around Washington, DC. More than ever, Americans need good jobs, with liveable wages, and real benefits. Maybe the place to start is right in our own back yards.

Over at The Week, I make the argument that presidential scandal politics usually fail to lift the political prospects of the party outside the White House. No party has reaped a political reward from pushing scandal since Nixon, yet both parties have repeatedly tried.

However, short of impeachment or electoral gains, opposition parties may be sated by simply using scandal to distract the President from advancing his agenda. But today, that doesn’t make sense. Republicans already have the numbers in Congress to block what they want. And the main item on Obama’s legislative agenda for the year is one that leading Republicans now support: immigration reform.

Furthermore, distraction cuts two ways. By flogging scandal, the opposition party risks distracting themselves from developing and selling their own governing philosophy and policy agenda. And Republicans are already in a deep intellectual hole, lacking an agenda that makes a break from failed Bushonomics and might be taken seriously by the public.

Republican might also want to ask themselves: do we really believe there’s any there there?

Does it even make sense that Obama would have lost re-election if he quickly blamed Al Qaeda for Benghazi, having already proven his counterterrorism bona fides?

Does it makes sense that an IRS managed by a Bush administration holdover would allow a plot to prevent Republicans from defeating Obama by deliberately targeting county-level Tea Party groups but blessed Karl Rove’s new machine with tax-exempt status?

Is it even a scandal for the Justice Department to apply current law and subpoena phone records in a sensitive national security leak investigation? Controversial and worthy of debate, but no heads are going to roll if it’s legal.

Meanwhile, there are real scandals out there: festering crises that demand policy solutions and government action. For example:

1. Carbon dioxide atmospheric levels hovering around 400 parts per million. Some argue that we need to be at 350 ppm to avoid the ill effects of global warming. But considering the rapid rate we are putting carbon in the air, and the difficulty involved in removing what is already in the air, we may literally never be able to get below 400, ever.

2. Our crumbling infrastructure needs $3.6 trillion just to reach a “state of good repair,” according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. That doesn’t even count what it would cost to build new modern infrastructure such as high-speed rail or a smart electric grid. One proposal, backed by President Obama, is to help get started is to launch an infrastructure bank, using small amounts federal seed money to attract big private investment. The approach has won the backing of both the AFL-CIO and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, but Republicans have failed to embrace it or propose any significant alternatives.

3. The top 1 percent in America holds 35 percent of the nation’s wealth. It was not always thus. Over the last 30 years, the top 1 percent has increased its wealth by 38%, while the bottom 60 percent has seen their wealth diminish. In other words, inequality has gotten worse. And that’s harmful for all of society. As one professor explains: “A wide range of social problems are worse in societies with bigger income differences between rich and poor. These include physical and mental illness, violence, low math and literacy scores among young people, lower levels of trust and weaker community life, poorer child well-being, more drug abuse, lower social mobility and higher rates of imprisonment and teenage births.”

4. More than 4 million Americans have been jobless for more than half a year. The long-term unemployment problem is not only devastating for those directly affect, it’s also a major drag on the recovery of the entire economy. Those out of the workforce for extended periods of time have a much harder time getting rehired than those briefly unemployed. We are risking the creation of a permanent underclass to care for instead of tapping our labor pool to the fullest extent possible.

5. Forty percent of America’s children between 3 and 5 are not enrolled any sort of preschool let alone a high-quality program that research shows can make a critical difference in their ability to perform well in school and find good jobs in later life. This is a major gap in the American promise of equal opportunity for all.

These are all massive problems with no easy fixes. You might think a major political party would have something to say about them, spend some time developing ideas to solve them, and seek to build public support for those ideas.

Or Republicans can chase Benghazi down the rabbit hole.

There are plenty of scandals out there to choose from. What a party chooses to focus on speaks volumes.

In the latest round of atrocities committed by conservatives, Republicans on the House Agriculture Committee sent to the House floor a farm bill on Wednesday that offers little food for families while dishing out corporate subsides. In protest, organizational leaders and activist met with elected officials on Capitol Hill to demonstrate opposition to cutting the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps).

The proposed $21 billion in cuts to SNAP would cause nearly 2 million low-income Americans—among them people with disabilities, children, seniors and struggling parents— to lose an average of $90 per month. The bill also axes funding for nutrition education and eliminates program performance bonuses.

A new report, set to be released in the “Social Service Review” next month, reveals that in 2011 an estimated 1.65 million families lived on less than $2 a day per person; this figure includes 3.55 million children. How do these individuals survive in America on a Third-World income? The report finds they rely on the social safety nets that caught millions as they were falling because of the recession. This is also the same net that deficit hawks seek to whittle away at. As the wealthiest and most powerful nation, it is downright dirty that we let anyone go hungry and fail to provide for those in need.

Benefits already average less than $1.50 a day for each meal. You try living on that (I have, it’s called the Food Stamp Challenge). Although meager, SNAP is still our nation’s first line of defense against hunger. Rep. Barbara Lee, (D-Calif.) professed that when she was a single mother, food stamps “were a bridge over troubled water while I was struggling.”

Who will feel this funding void? “If divided evenly across Feeding America’s national network of food banks, every food bank would have to provide an additional 4 million meals each year for the next ten years, and that is just not possible,” said Bob Aiken, president and CEO of Feeding America. “There is no way that charity would be able to make up the difference. We are already stretched thin meeting sustained high need, and we simply do not have the resources to prevent hunger in all of the families who would be impacted by these cuts.”

At a time when 50 million individuals are hungry, 17 million being children, “we should be talking about how we improve and expand SNAP,” said Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass. His view is not only supported by research, such as that of a recent Institute of Medicine report that finds the program needs to be strengthened, but also by the majority of Americans. Seven in 10 voters say that cutting food stamp funding is the wrong way to approach deficit reduction. The Alan Simpson-Erskine Bowles deficit commission didn’t even recommend cutting SNAP to reduce the deficit. It is also important to note that just this week the CBO said the “deficit disaster” is now solved for the next 10 years.

Yet, Republicans continually ask our most vulnerable to pay while safeguarding corporations and bankers. “The pattern that is happening here is really diabolical.” said the passionate Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn. Although she is a representative of the nation’s wealthiest state, one in seven children go to bed hungry in her district.

“If you think this is the right path, you don’t live in the same America I do!” said Rep. Marcia Fudge, D-Ohio.

Aside from the moral imperative, the SNAP program helps our economy and is fiscally responsible. In 2011, SNAP lifted nearly 4 million Americans out of poverty, including 1.7 million children and 280,000 seniors. Economist at Moody’s Analytics and the Department of Agriculture estimate that for every $1 spent on SNAP benefits, there is an economic return of $1.73 to $1.79. Inflicting more hunger on our nation worsens health, causing higher health cost that the taxpayer will have to pick up, and reduces our educational outcomes.

Feeding our nation while spurring our economy is a vision we all should be able to agree on. No one wants to live on welfare; people want jobs. Until our government can actually put in place policies that will produce jobs, the least we can do is make the wise investments in programs like SNAP, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid to support the economic recovery and future success of financially struggling Americans.

There was a time when a $200+ billion reduction in the federal budget deficit would have been big news and hailed as a singular achievement worthy of either fiscal sainthood or a dance-on-the-table party…or both.

Yet yesterday’s Congressional Budget Office report showing that the fiscal 2013 federal deficit will be $642 billion, $203 billion less than CBO’s previous estimate of $845 billion, did not create any spontaneous cannonizations or celebrations. It also didn’t change the still-stalemated and crisis-oriented federal budget debate by even a small amount.

The bottomline: It’s in almost no one’s interest to be happy about the budget news that should have made everyone happier.

Here’s why.

1. The $642 billion estimate is indeed an overwhelming reduction from the 2009 $1.4 deficit and a substantial change from CBO’s February projection. But it is also $642 billion more than no deficit at all. That means that all sides in the budget debate will still be able to use even this much lower number to “prove” whatever point they were making before the new estimate was released.

2. The White House couldn’t take a victory lap because anything it said would have been mischaracterized by congressional Republicans as the president supporting a $600+ billion deficit.

3. Even though they could take some credit for keeping the sequester in place and, therefore, lowering spending, the congressional Republican leadership couldn’t take a victory lap because that would have been taken by some tea partiers as an indication that the speaker and majority leader were not going to demand additional reductions.

4. There’s anything but universal agreement among economists that reducing the deficit in the current economic environment is the right fiscal policy and, therefore, that the reduction in the deficit is good news. Given the still-slow corporate and consumer spending, the continuing cutbacks by state and local governments and the continuing economic problems around the word that are limiting trade with the U.S., Americas austerity-like fiscal policy that has been in place for several years may well be the exact wrong plan at this time.

5. The year-by-year deficit is quickly being replaced by the national debt as the number one fiscal issue. This isn’t surprising: the deficit is falling while the debt is rising and the deficit is in billions while the debt is in trillions. The fact that CBO projects the debt will soon be in a range that most economists would call insignificant makes no difference when the multi-trillion dollar debt sounds so scary.

6. In the wake of the report, the deficit hawk groups are still saying that the deficit is as much of a problem as it was before and pushing for a grand bargain. This too isn’t a surprise. After all, these groups would have less reason for being and far less ability to raise funds if the deficit didn’t exist as an issue.

7. Although the CBO forecasts show the deficit falling from 2013 to 2015, it also shows it rising in nominal terms each year thereafter. Even though that is far less meaningful than the deficit as a percent of GDP, which stays in the low 3.5 percent range, it still allows everyone to cherry-pick the results that best “prove” what they want to say.

So…Do the new CBO numbers mean that there won’t be a fight this fall over the debt ceiling and a continuing resolution? Absolutely not.

Originally published at Capital Gains and Games.

The deficit is now down 60 percent as a percent of gross domestic product. It is down more than the deficit hawks Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles asked for. This rapid reduction is seriously hurting the economy and jobs, but demands for cuts continue. It is time for Congress and the President to “pivot” to focusing on our real problems: the jobs gap, the wage gap and the trade gap.

Mythical Deficit Problem Solved

The “deficit problem” is man-made. When Bill Clinton was president we were paying off the debt. George W. Bush turned Clinton’s budget surpluses right around, calling deficits “extremely positive news” because they would later force cuts in government. Ronald Reagan’s “strategic deficits” began a strategy to make the borrowing appear so bad that the public would be panicked into allowing cuts in the things government does to make our lives better – so the wealthy few could have even more wealth and power. (Reagan tripled the national debt, Bush doubled it again.)

So after Bush we had a problem. When ‘W’ left office the budget deficit was $1.4 trillion. Then after Obama took office Wall Street and the right started terrifying the public about deficits and outlining their “solutions”: Cut government, cut regulation of the giant corporations, cut entitlements, cut investment in infrastructure, privatize public assets, cut the safety net, etc… Cut the things that government does to make our lives better (government spending) and cut the things government does to protect us from the immense power of the insanely wealthy and their giant corporations.

But something got in their way. The deficit started coming down before all of the “solutions” could be forced on us. The deficit is now down 60 percent as a percent of GDP from the level Bush left behind (see the chart in this post).

The 2010 “Simpson-Bowles” plan called for austerity to lower our budget deficit to 2.3 percent of GDP by 2015. But the latest CBO budget projections say the deficit will be 2.1 percent of GDP in 2015.

Ezra Klein, in “CBO says deficit problem is solved for the next 10 years,” writes, “…the debt disaster that has obsessed the political class for the last three years is pretty much solved, at least for the next 10 years or so.”

Problem solved – austerity and the sequester can go away. For those of us outside Washington and in the real world we’ve been saying all along this isn’t the problem, the problem is that there aren’t enough jobs, people’s wages are stagnant or falling and the country is losing more than a billion dollars a day from bad trade deals. We have real problems to solve, so let’s get to it. Let’s address the job gap and the wage gap and the trade gap.

The mythical budget deficit is problem gone; let’s worry about our real problems.

The Economy Can’t Recover Without An Emphasis On Fixing Jobs, Wages And Trade

The economy can’t recover until housing recovers. Housing can’t recover until people can afford to buy houses. People can’t afford to buy houses until they can get jobs, and those with jobs can’t afford to buy houses until wages go up. Wages cant go up until the trade problem is fixed. And the trade problem is killing jobs.

Explained a different way:

1. The economy can’t recover until housing recovers.
2. Housing can’t recover until people can afford to buy houses.
3. People can’t afford to buy houses until they can get jobs,
4. and those with jobs can’t afford to buy houses until wages go up.
5. Wages cant go up until the trade problem is fixed.
6. And the trade problem is killing jobs.

They say that housing is the key to recovery from recessions. Forbes: Buffett Says Housing Is Key To Recovery, USA Today: Housing holds key to full job growth rebound, Time: Can the Economy Get Healthy Without a Housing Recovery? CAP: A Strong Housing Market Is Critical to Our Economic Recovery and so on. But on NPR Monday, in Is The Housing Recovery Just A Mirage?, they made the key point: “What we really need to do is focus on jobs and unemployment to get people able to have the money to spend on a house.”

Yes, jobs are being created. We were losing 800,000 jobs a month when President Obama took office, and now we are gaining just enough jobs each month to keep up with and get a little bit ahead of growth in the labor force. But there are not enough new jobs and too many of the new jobs are low-wage jobs. So the middle class is still shrinking, and people can’t afford to buy houses to get a real housing recovery underway.

We need more jobs. We have a jobs emergency.

The Jobs Gap

The Hamilton Project explains the jobs gap as “the number of jobs that the U.S. economy needs to create in order to return to pre-recession employment levels while also absorbing the people who enter the labor force each month.” They say:

If the economy adds about 208,000 jobs per month, which was the average monthly rate for the best year of job creation in the 2000s, then it will take until April 2020 to close the jobs gap. Given a more optimistic rate of 321,000 jobs per month, which was the average monthly rate of the best year of job creation in the 1990s, the economy will reach pre-recession employment levels by December 2016.

One more thing: “As of April, our nation faces a “jobs gap” of 10.0 million jobs.”

10 million jobs still needed just to catch up to where we should be. That is huge.

Where did the jobs go?

The Trade Deficit

According to economist Dean Baker the trade deficit represents American consumers spending their money overseas rather than here. And that means those dollars are “creating jobs” there, not here. His point was driven home last year when he wrote that, “The main factor leading to job loss [in the 2000s] was the growing U.S. trade deficit.”

The trade deficit represents millions of jobs. That more than $1 billion per day we send out of the country represents how many jobs at $50,000 per year? That’s good jobs sent out of the country every day of every week of every year. That is the trade deficit.

We can start by fixing currency manipulation. A “strong dollar” is a lot of the problem because it means things made here cost more and things made elsewhere cost less. So we aren’t able to sell as much and we are buying more than we should.

A February report from the Economic Policy Institute, “Reducing U.S. trade deficit will generate a manufacturing-based recovery for the United States and Ohio,” written by Robert E. Scott, Helene Jorgensen, and Doug Hall, looked at the job-cost of the portion of the trade deficit that is caused by currency manipulation. The report concludes that fixing just this problem would reduce the trade deficit by between about $190 billion and $400 billion over the course of three years and bring us between 2.2 million and 4.7 million U.S. jobs. Doing this would lower the unemployment rate between 1 percent and 2.1 percent and increase GDP between 1.4 percent and 3.1 percent.

That is just the portion of the trade deficit caused by currency manipulation and you can see the immense cost. Imagine if we took that step as well as other steps to eliminate the trade deficit.

The Wage Gap

A trade deficit also means that our workers not only face high unemployment but are also pitted against exploited workers in countries where those workers don’t have a say in how things are done. This inevitably drives down wages as employers move jobs offshore and remaining workers compete for jobs, all the while afraid to make waves and ask for raises lest their job be shipped out of the country as well.

American workers face high unemployment and then on top of that they face competition from people who are paid a fraction of what Americans earn. The trade deficit represents a significant contributor to this problem.

Fixing the trade deficit also fixes some of the wage gap. But we also need strong unions and strong government to combat the power of the giant corporations and demand that regular working people a fair share of the proceed of our economy.

The “Sequester” And Other Budget Cuts Just Make Things Worse

On top of this, our own government is aggravating the problem, with this wealthy-donor driven focus on deficit reduction instead of job expansion.

For example, Politico: Sequestration gets real for furloughed workers,

Sequestration went from wait-and-see to here-it-is Tuesday when the number of furloughed federal workers hit an eye-popping 820,000. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told 680,000 civilian workers they’d have to stay home 11 days without pay. About 140,000 workers from other government agencies have already been given furlough notices.

The number is expected to grow …

The deficit is not a problem. The Simpson-Bowles target has been reached and passed. The austerity is harming the economy and hurting people. Congress and the President should pivot to jobs. They need to fix the jobs gap, the wage gap and the trade gap, and if they continue to ignore these real problems it is up to We, the People to apply the necessary pressure to make them do it.

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Senate Republican obstruction of President Obama’s nominee for secretary of labor, Thomas Perez, got a strong rebuke from a coalition of Latino organizations that held a march and rally on Wednesday to call for an end to the filibuster threats to his nomination.

“We are here to put forward our full support for Tom Perez as the Secretary of Labor. He is eminently qualified for the post after a distinguished career in law and public service,” said Janet Murguia, President and CEO of the National Council of La Raza. Joining Murguia were representatives from the National Hispanic Leadership Agenda, CASA de Maryland, United Farm Workers and the Hispanic National Bar Association.

“Tom Perez is a respected and beloved leader in the Latino community. He has been a champion for Hispanic families, and we are here for him because he has been there for us,” Murguia said. “We urge the senators opposed to this nomination to stop their unconscionable delaying tactics and allowing this nomination to go forward. Tom deserves a vote, and we as a Latino community, are watching very closely.”

Perez is one of the dozens of Obama appointees who have fallen victim to the GOP’s obstructionism in the Senate. In Obama’s first term, the average nominee took more than four times as long to be confirmed as a nominee of President George W. Bush. The obstruction is only being ratcheted up in Obama’s second term; last week Republicans refused to show up at a committee hearing to stall the confirmation of Obama’s nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency, Gina McCarthy. Republicans are using what they call Perez’ “ideological background” as their excuse to delay the nomination vote, which has been rescheduled for Thursday.

“It is totally unacceptable what is happening now in the Senate. There is enough proof to show that he is a qualified candidate to be our next Secretary of Labor, and to be on the front lines fighting for working families,” said Hector Sanchez, Chair of the National Hispanic Leadership Agenda.

Sanchez went on to point out the civil rights issues that Perez has taken up, including fighting the SB 1070 “papers please” immigration law in Arizona; HB 56 in Alabama, the nation’s “toughest immigration law”; and voting rights issues.

“Tom Perez can work with the entire society, not only with Latinos and workers, but with everybody,” said Gustavo Torres, Executive Director of CASA de Maryland, citing his work with migrant workers as well as high marks given to him by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and his work with the largest employers in Maryland.

“Unfortunately, he faces opposition from some Senators who say that he has been to vigorous in enforcing our nation’s civil rights laws, said Peter Reyes, President of the Hispanic National Bar Association, “When Tom Perez was nominated to serve at the Justice Department, he was confirmed by a vote of 72-22, with seventeen Republican senators who voted for him, including nine who are still in the Senate today. Those senators voted for Tom Perez to do a job, he did his job and he did it well. Some senators will never vote for a Tom Perez, and that is fine, but they should not be blocking the rest of the Senate from an up-or-down vote.”

Yesterday, in response to recent IRS admissions, President Obama called the enhanced investigation of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status “intolerable and inexcusable.”  And, Attorney General Eric Holder announced a criminal investigation into the allegations against the IRS.  But both of them are missing the point.

The scandal here is not that political groups were targeted by the IRS, it’s the fact that political groups are being subsidized by John Q. Taxpayer.  Groups that are politically motivated, and not really “social welfare” organizations, shouldn’t receive preferential tax treatment in the first place – regardless of their political affiliation.

A report by the Inspector General stated that “ineffective management” at the IRS allowed conservative groups to be targeted for over 18 months, and resulted in substantial delays in the processing of their non-profit applications.  But, the real “ineffective management” here was Congress’s failure to regulate these organizations, and enforce transparency.  And, what’s truly “intolerable and inexcusable” is the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizen United decision, which opened the campaign-finance floodgates in the first place.

The IRS shouldn’t be apologizing for investigating phony “nonprofit” organizations, they should be investigating all politically-motivated groups who want to be subsidized by the taxpayers.  Congress has repeatedly rejected campaign finance reform, and Citizens United moved oversight from the Federal Elections Commission to the IRS.   It’s impossible to create and enforce reasonable guidelines based on an unreasonable Supreme Court decision.

The only way to really fix this problem is to amend our Constitution to say that money isn’t speech, and corporations aren’t people.  Let’s make it happen.  Join the fight at MoveToAmend.org.

Originally posted at ThomHartmann.com.

On Thursday, House Republicans have scheduled a vote on a bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

Haven’t they already done that, you ask? Yes, they have, in one form or another, 36 times since it has been enacted. This week’s vote would make 37.

It’s gotten to the point that today the director of the Congressional Budget Office, which is tasked with the job of informing Congress of the budgetary impact of the bills it is considering, said in a letter it didn’t have time to go through the exercise for the 37th time.

One reason, the letter noted, is that “there are hundreds of provisions in the ACA and those provisions are already in various stages of implementation.”

These provisions in effect now include the elimination of lifetime medical benefit limits, requirements that insurance companies cover children under 19 regardless of preexisting conditions, the ability of people up to age 26 to remain on their parents’ health plan, coverage for preventative care, the shrinkage of the notorious Medicare “doughnut hole,” and constraints on how high insurance premiums can increase relative to what they actually pay out in health care claims. In the works are the creation of health-care exchanges, which as early as October will allow people to compare and buy insurance plans online.

The latest CBO letter notes that the last time it did an analysis of the cost of repealing the Affordable Care Act last July, the costs to the federal government outweighed the savings by $100 billion. The raw numbers may have changed somewhat since then, but the bottom line hasn’t. A House Republican caucus obsessed with lowering the deficit keeps voting for a bill that would increase the deficit.

There is one thing that the House could do this week instead that so far the Republican leadership is refusing to touch: vote on a budget. The Senate passed its version of a fiscal 2013 federal budget on March 23, two days after the House passed its version. House and Senate leaders were next supposed to designate conferees to iron out the considerable differences between the two budgets. But it has been 53 days, and House Republicans have yet to move forward to appoint conferees so that budget discussions could begin.

The failure of Democrats to pass a budget on time was a favorite GOP talking point. Now that the Democrats have put forward its vision of the country’s priorities and how they should be paid for, House Republicans have shown no real interest in doing what it was elected to do: come to an agreement with Democrats on how the country can move forward. Their recent gambit is to insist on a “framework” for a budget deal before the actual dealing – but that’s not how the process should work. That negotiate-the-negotiation tactic is surely their way of refusing to engage with the Senate on the loophole-closings for high-income earners and corporations that are in the Senate bill. Much better to cast a meaningless vote to repeal Obamacare than to struggle to find agreement on the federal budget.

Two numbers to remember: 37 votes to repeal Obamacare, 53 days and counting without a House agreement to negotiate on the 2014 federal budget. That should tell you a lot about today’s House Republicans and the source of dysfunction in Washington.

Republicans in Congress have a new tactic for shrinking government: making sure that nobody’s there to run it. Well into the president’s second term, an alarming and unprecedented number of vital positions in every branch of government remain vacant. As Republicans use and abuse processes that helped government run smoothly once upon a time not so very long ago, government grinds to a halt, and the consequences trickle down to Main Street America. And apparently that’s just fine with Republicans.

As President Obama settles into his second term, a number of presidentially-appointed positions that require Senate confirmation remain vacant – more than were vacant at the end of Bill Clinton’s and George W. Bush’s first terms in office. Of the 68 positions that remained vacant at the end of Obama’s first term in office, 43 had been vacant for more than a year. Those vacancies, spread across several agencies, have the effect of nearly bringing government to a griding halt. Agencies operating under acting directors, without fully authorized leadership, effectively operate in “stand-down mode”

The lack of appointed leaders can create problems. Too many vacancies can put agencies “in stand-down, waiting for policymakers to show up,” said Terry Sullivan, a political science professor at the University of North Carolina who has studied appointments.

Acting heads of agencies “don’t make any big decisions,” said Cal Mackenzie, a professor of government at Colby College who has studied appointments since the 1970s. “Your authority is not going to be recognized in the same way a Senate-confirmed appointee is going to be recognized.”

Therein lies the problem. In a 2010 Brookings Institution paper titled “A Half-Empty Government Can’t Govern: Why Everyone Wants to Fix the Appointments Process, Why It Never Happens, and How We Can Get It Done,” E.J. Dionne and William A. Galston describe a system clogged by abuses of the Senate confirmation process, and end up weakening both the executive and legislative branches, and alter the very structure of our government.

Abuses of the confirmation process, far from strengthening the executive’s accountability to the legislative branch, instead call forth ever more creative executive actions to get around Congressional scrutiny. And that creativity has, in turn, led to an executive branch potentially weaker and less able to control and influence the departments and agencies it depends on to implement its policies.

Without any formal Constitutional change, the very structure of the American government is being altered. A confirmation process designed to safeguard Congress’ prerogatives has, in important ways, undermined them.

As we know all too well by now, Senators wield considerable power over confirmations. Individual Senators can single-handedly shut down the whole “terrible, horrible, no-good Senate confirmation process” by placing “holds” on confirmations, which amount to “silent filibusters” that prevent a vote unless the Senate can round of a two-thirds majority and squeeze in time for debate. Republicans have used such “holds,” and exploited every trick in the book to keep block President Obama’s nominees.

Most recently, Republicans on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee refused to even show up for a vote on the nomination of Gina McCarthy to head the Environmental Protection agency. Republicans resorted to the parliamentary equivalent of holding their breath, because they claimed McCarthy failed to comply with their “very reasonable” request that she answer over 1,000 questions (a record number, which The Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky labeled “the new McCarthyism.” ). Republicans notified Democrats 30 minutes before the hearing that they would not show up to hear the answers they complained about getting.

(McCarthy’s not alone. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew received 444 questions from senators before his confirmation; more than the last seven nominees combined.)

The Republican’s “boycott” of McCarthy Hearing was merely a tactic employed in the service of the underlying GOP agenda: making sure the EPA could not fulfill its mission. Republicans aren’t going to confirm McCarthy unless she stoops to answer their questions about the “underlying data used to justify EPA’s job-killing regulations,” and promises to force the EPA to subject everything it does to a “business-friendly analysis,” and force the agency to undertake a “whole economy” cost-benefit analysis of its rules and regulations. The result would be enough bureaucratic red tape to ensure that the EPA did almost nothing else. By insisting on conditions that no nominee to head the agency is likely to agree to, the GOP could ensure that the EPA operates in “stand-down” mode for the duration of Obama’s presidency.

The vacancies on the National Labor Relations Board are another example of how GOP obstructionist tactics are impacting government.

After President Obama took office anti-union Senators rolled out a strategy of blocking confirmation of any appointees to the NLRB to keep the agency from having a quorum so it could not operate.

In 2010 the anti-union judges on the Supreme Court ruled that the NLRB could not issue rulings without at least three confirmed members.

Anti-union Senators continued to block confirmations to the NLRB.

In January, 2012 President Obama made recess appointments to the NLRB to enable it to operate again.

In January, 2013 anti-union judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled that recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) were unconstitutional.

(As Dave’s post points out, the courts play a huge role in this, Republican obstruction of court appointments has far-reaching implications that are better addressed in a separate post.)

The list of top-level vacancies is long and disturbing.

• The IRS has been without an appointed commissioner since last November, when Bush administration holdover Douglas Shulman resigned.
• A quarter of the senior positions at the State Department remain unfilled.
• Republicans blocked President Obama’s appointees to Election Assistance Commission — an agency charged with helping Americans vote, and which Republicans wanted to do away with in 2011.
• The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services hasn’t had a director since 2006, and still doesn’t since Republicans blocked a vote on Donald Berwick’s nomination. (Obama managed a recess appointment for Berwick, who has since resigned.)
• A hearing on Tom Perez’s nomination as Secretary of Labor was postponed after Republicans threatened to invoke an obscure procedural rule to stop the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee from meeting. The move was driven purely by objections to Perez’s “ideological background.”
• Republicans are attempting to sabotage health care reform by refusing to offer Republican nominees to the Independent Payment Advisory Board, charged with achieving savings in Medicare without sacrificing quality.

Without a presidentially-appointed, Senate confirmed director, the EPA can’t effectively fulfill its mission to “protect human health and the environment.” The NRLB cannot effectively safeguard “employees’ rights to organize and to determine whether to have unions as their bargaining representative, if it lacks enough members to operate. Health Care Reform can’t be fully implemented, and thus can’t help 32 million uninsured Americans, if the agencies that must implement it are without leaders who have the authority to set policy.

All of this is just fine with Republicans in Congress. Keeping government running on empty by keeping offices vacant, through ongoing obstruction of presidential nominees, is a tactic that serves the conservative agenda.

It’s not that the GOP is “no longer a serious partner in governing,” as a New York Times editorial put it. That which Republicans didn’t win the right to govern last November, they have resolved to make ungovernable. But Republicans aren’t just disrupting the agenda that won President Obama a second term. By keeping vital government positions vacant, they are implementing an un-mandated shrinking of government.

Conservatives have always said that government doesn’t work, when they really believe that it shouldn’t work. Given enough power to do so, once elected they set about making damn sure government can’t work. And, like I said earlier, government can’t work if there’s nobody around to run it.

President Obama went to Austin, Texas, last week in pursuit of an industrial and employment revival. He wants to launch manufacturing institutes to foster American innovation and job creation.

Republicans responded by ridiculing the President, in the same arrogant way that the blooded aristocrats on the British television series “Downton Abbey” scorned a chauffeur who sought to marry into the patrician Crawley family. “No opportunity for the downtrodden!” the GOP and wealthy vow.

Watching Downton Abbey would be pure escapism, a simple respite from the grind of work and duties of home. That is, except for the disquieting reality that Downton Abbey’s classist mores increasingly intrude on American life. The wealth gap between America’s rich and poor has widened to the point where it was in Downton Abbey days. And that is abetted by the GOP practice of continually cutting taxes on the rich while constantly cutting government services that provide opportunity to everyone else.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Income inequality in America is wide and widening. Just get this: While income stagnated for the middle class, the average annual income of the top .01 percent of U.S. households from 2002 to 2007 rose by 123 percent – a gain of $20 million each.

Even after the crash of 2008, the wealthiest .01 percent did just fine. Now, the stock market and corporate profits are soaring. But only the wealthy are benefiting. The New York Times reported earlier this month that corporate profits in the third quarter of 2012 took the largest share of national income for any time since 1950, while the portion that went to workers fell to the lowest point since 1966.

While making those huge profits, corporations aren’t creating jobs. For those who do have jobs but aren’t in the top 10 percent income bracket, wages fell 7 percent from 2007 to 2008. Unlike the rich, workers didn’t recover after the crash, with median household income declining 1.5 percent in 2011.

And then there’s the poor. In the richest country in the world, the U.S. Census Bureau found 46.2 million people living in poverty in 2011, the highest number in the 53 years that the Census has collected the statistic. These are America’s economic equivalent to Downton Abbey serfs and servants.

This poverty is by far the highest rate among developed countries, while the rate at which taxes and transfer programs reduce American poverty is the lowest for developed countries. Transfer programs include unemployment compensation, a crucial lifeline for millions when the jobless rate remains above 7 percent.

For those unemployed, for the struggling who saw no benefit from record corporate profits and stock market highs, President Obama went to Texas to announce formation of three manufacturing hubs, where innovation would be nurtured and good-paying industrial jobs created. By executive order, these three will be financed with $200 million from five federal agencies.

The President has asked Congress to dedicate $1 billion to create a network of 15 industrial institutes, but Republicans laughed at the proposal.

Instead of investing in America, they insist on tax cuts for the rich. They demand austerity for the rest. They love the sequester, which cut Head Start for poor children and Meals on Wheels for old folks. They’re fine with the sequester costing 700,000 jobs. All those single mothers thrown out of jobs can always work as prostitutes, like Downton Abbey maid Ethel Parks did after being fired for sleeping with a moneyed patrician, right?

Both private sector and government economists have said unemployment would be significantly lower and economic growth significantly higher if Congress had continued stimulating the economy, as it did when President Obama was first elected and Democrats were in control. Republicans reversed that successful course. When Republicans took control of the House of Representatives and began abusing the filibuster in the Senate, the GOP forced the country onto the austerity path that has devastated Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Ireland.

President Obama continues to push for stimulus and jobs because he believes the American government, founded on the premise that all men are created equal, should promote equal opportunity to achieve.

In the three decades after World War II, the government stimulated the economy by constructing interstate highways, sending veterans to college and supporting home ownership. Taxes on the rich were among the highest in the nation’s history. The economy thrived and income inequality declined. Opportunity for every child increased.

Republicans want to kill the government that accomplished that. They want to go back to Downton Abbey days. The rich stay rich; the poor stay servants. There’s a set of rules for the rich: An unmarried Lady Mary deserves forgiveness for sleeping with a distinguished foreign visitor. But there’s another set of rules for the rest: unmarried Ethel Parks gets fired for sleeping above her station in life. The Wall Street bankers whose gambling took down the economy get a bailout. The Main Street bank robber gets a prison term.

Republicans don’t seem to understand that a political system that favors the wealthy in the 21^st century while failing the majority is unsustainable. Americans believe everyone is equal. They believe the system of government that their forebears created should guarantee equity of opportunity to make a life, get a job, buy a picket-fenced home and raise a couple of kids. The New World rejected the Downton Abbey philosophy of privilege based on blood lines and inherited money.

Turn off the TV, GOP.