Boffoblog

Ryan's Hopeless

The Cato event on Social Security privatization had a number of interesting moments.  You read some of it here yesterday regarding Lindsey Graham and his rather independent approach to the topic.  Another speaker was Paul Ryan who has a privatization plan of his own.  Perhaps because he is not such a bright light or perhaps he is demagoguing the issue, or perhaps both, he pays for his plan through future unspecified spending cuts.  When a more senior GOP colleague pointed out to him that this wasn't realistic, according to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel he replied, "I want to change that mindset."

That article and another one this morning on CongressDaily also quote Ryan as saying he has found it very difficult to find any Democratic allies, he says in part because Dem leaders have promised serious retribution for anyone who breaks ranks.  The Journal-Sentinel continues:

Speaking alongside Ryan Wednesday, House Republican Jim Kolbe of Arizona said "bipartisanship is essential."

"Politically, it would be catastrophic if this thing were to pass (without Democratic votes), because I think it would be demagogued very badly in the next election," Kolbe said.

Ryan then says that they will have to counter that pressure by appealing to the "grassroots" for support.  Apparently he hasn't been following the poll results which show that most people are highly skeptical of claims of crisis, and that support for privatization erodes quickly once people are informed of the costs and risks, as this Washington Post poll shows. 

CD quotes an unnamed leadership aide as saying that there has not been any such pressure, apart from some on Boyd for cosponsoring Kolbe's bill.  My reaction: That's probably right, and that's great if there was anyway.  Grassroots mobilization behind the president's scheme will fail for precisely the reason the leadership hasn't had to lean too hard on members -- the tide is running against the scheme, and this is in the face of the president's PR offensive and before counter-mobilization by groups like AARP has gotten off the ground.  Dems, and many Republicans, don't need their leaders to interpret the public's mood on Social Security.

And if the leadership has leaned on a few recalcitrant members?  Good for them. I hope there's more to come if others flirt with the dark side.  Glad to see the Democratic Caucus is willing to empower their leadership for a change and that their leaders are willing to use the power.

Chafee Is No Lincoln

Josh Marshall has made note of the obvious dithering of Lincoln Chafee over Social Security privatization (here and here).  Shorter Marshall: Chafee waffles.

And...?  This is hardly news, especially for those living in or near Rhode Island.  The man is constitutionally incapable of taking a firm stand and then stating it clearly.  Right after the election  I wrote about how he couldn't make up his mind whether to vote for or endorse Bush.  If he can't make up his mind about something as clear and discrete as that, how can we expect Chafee to take a stand on Social Security?  While ultimately I figure he will vote with the Dems on this, it is best to have very low expectations for Chafee as an ally.

Anyway, there are more important ditherers to worry about, on both sides.

Lindsey Graham Pleases Everyone and No One

I have only ten minutes, so this will be quick:  This morning's Congress Daily (sorry, subscription only) reports that Lindsey Graham is tinkering with his Social Security privatization bill in order to find a magic combination that pleases both Rs and Ds.  He may have found the magic formula that pleases neither.

In a gesture to Ds, he wants to increase the income cap on payroll taxes, to shift a little more of the burden on this highly regressive tax to (slightly) higher income earners.  In a gesture to both sides of the aisle, he wants to lower the payroll tax rate at the same time from 12.4% to 11.2%.  This would again lessen slightly the burden on workers for the Ds, and would lower the burden on employers for the Rs.

Problem is, Democrats are still extremely skeptical about anything that shifts payroll taxes to private accounts, and Republicans don't want to increase the income ceiling on payroll taxes.  So, instead of broadening his Senate coalition he may have shrunk it.  Here's what CD has to say:

But the process Graham launched to try to forge a bipartisan consensus on revamping Social Security has made little headway so far, congressional sources said. Graham was scheduled to meet with senators from both sides of the aisle Tuesday, but the meeting was canceled.

The hope was to get some Democrats and Republicans to sign off on a set of principles that would at least address such issues as what problems the system faces and how soon action is needed. But even that has run into difficulty at the staff level, sources said.

So much for that magic formula.  Can anyone spare any eye of newt?  No, not that Newt.

At the same time, Graham -- hardly a strong ally of the White House -- has been openly critical of the president's plan, especially its impact on the debt.  Once again, the Senate will be a tough nut to crack if Bush wants privatization.

Finally, the article quotes Snowe yet again as a critic of the White House plan, though again she does not sound as committed an opponent as she was prior to the SOTU.  This time she recalls the electoral grief the GOP got back in '82 after hitting Social Security too hard.  Perhaps she can remind some of her junior colleagues.

More on the House Ethics Purge

At last I have an opportunity to return to the Ethics Committee purge orchestrated by Hastert and DeLay under cover of SOTU.  As you recall, Hastert bumped off the committee Hefley, Hulshof and LaTourette, who all had the audacity to vote against the DeLay Rule permitting indicted members to keep their leadership posts.  They were replaced with pliable friends of the leadership Cole, Hart and Lamar Smith; Biggert and Doc Hastings were kept on, with Hastings being named chair.  Needless to say, all three of the new appointees and the two returning members were/are allies of the Hammer, in the case of Smith a very close ally indeed.

Off the Kuff links to a few editorials excoriating the GOP for so transparently manipulating the ethics process in the House.

As we saw awhile back, Smith in particular has been a contributor to DeLay's legal defense fund, among other things, which would seem to create more than a whiff of a conflict of interest.  We might consider an alternate hypothesis: That it was driven by ideological considerations.  However, if you look at the ideological proclivities of the members going on and off the committee, there has been a negligible change.  Let's see why.

Rather than use the National Journal, ADA or ACU ratings which have serious problems (mainly by the very selective subset of floor votes they use to calculate their ideology scores), I prefer a measure called Nominate developed by Keith Poole of UC-San Diego and Howard Rosenthal of Princeton.  It takes into account all votes taken in a chamber in a given term and locates each legislator in a single policy space.  In the typical Congress, almost all of the difference in ideology among  legislators can be explained along a single liberal-conservative dimension, just as we might expect.  You can get the data from Poole's website, and he also has some cool animations of the changes in ideological alignments for the House and Senate back to the very first Congress.

Back to the Ethics Committee.  It turns out that the ideological leaning of the committee, at least based on the voting patterns of the last Congress, will change not at all because of Hastert's reshuffle.  Using the Nominate measure where 1=most conservative and -1=most liberal, the median score for the old GOP contingent on Ethics was .44 and the median score for the new contingent is, well, .44 (and the overall House GOP median Nominate score in the 108th was, er, .44).  Hefley was very much on the conservative side (.74) with LaTourette a moderate (.25) and Hulshof in the mainstream of the party (.44).  The three new members are neither as conservative as Hefley nor as moderate as LaTourette, ranging from .44 for Smith to .47 for Hart.

So if the committee hasn't change ideologically, then what has?  As we suspected, it's loyalty to the leadership.  To see this, I took all non-unanimous roll call votes in the House in the 108th Congress and asked how often DeLay voted on the same side as each of these new and old Ethics members.  Here the message is clear.  Hefley, the chief target of the reshuffle, voted the least often with DeLay, 84.5% of the time, and LaTourette the next lowest proportion at 88.9%.  Still very high, no question, but not completely loyal.  The replacements, on the other hand, voted with DeLay 93.3 to 96.1% of the time.  The new chair, Hastings, sided with him on 95.5% of non-unanimous roll call votes.  The only anomaly is Hulshof at 91.4%, who is slightly higher than Biggert -- who kept his seat -- at 90.5%.  Here we have to return to the vote on the DeLay Rule, which certainly matters more here than whether Hulshof was slightly more loyal to the leadership in general.

This provides further evidence that the Ethics reshuffle was driven by loyalty to DeLay and the House GOP leadership.  What is odd is that this kind of move ordinarily is done for committees like Rules, which wields great power over the House floor agenda, or to install friendly chairs of important policy committees.  Ethics in the past has not been considered such a committee.  At least not until a Majority Leader was threatened with indictment or worse.  As I and others have written, the move was both brazen and craven.

LIHEAP: A Case Study in Priorities

Those of you basking on the beaches of San Diego may not be able to identify personally with this, but home heating costs are a significant drain on many households with the current very high prices of heating oil, especially for the poor and those on fixed incomes.  The Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), administered through HHS, provides aid for purchase of home heating oil and natural gas during the cold months.  (And for those of you who are in warmer climes, the program helps with cooling costs during hot weather as well.)

In the president's FY06 budget released yesterday, he would cut LIHEAP funding from a projected $2.2 billion for the current fiscal year to $2 billion for next year.  What's that you say, that's still higher than the $1.89 billion for FY04?  Doesn't sound so Grinch-like to me, does it?

Take a look at what the numbers mean.  The nature of the program is that the need for assistance is tied directly to the cost of heat, and heating oil has been climbing steadily for the past several years.  In fact, if you graph LIHEAP appropriations and residential heating oil prices over the past fifteen years (both in nominal dollars), you see that they track closely for most years.  While LIHEAP has never been fully funded, Congress and the president have been somewhat responsive to changes in need, even during the Republican years.

So much for the good news.  No coincidence that all of the good news is in the past tense.

Given the close link between heating oil prices and LIHEAP funding, one might expect that the president recommends this budget with an expectation that heating oil prices will drop in the near future.  In fact, current projections say that will not be the case at all.  The Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration anticipates that heating oil costs a year from now will be nearly as high as last month's, and at least one independent projection predicts that they will be higher.  After three straight years of substantial increases, and with pressures on supply not likely to abate quickly, that seems likely.  So, the administration's proposed 8% cut in the program is with the information from its own DOE that heating oil costs will not be dropping in the near future.

In fact, as recently as the FY04  budget (p344) the president anticipated that funding would increase slowly but steadily through 2008.  Well, when the administration has run up massive budget deficits then the cuts have to come from somewhere.  At least LIHEAP wasn't zeroed out like Amtrak was.

Indicative of the administration's approach to heating the homes of the poor is that it is sitting on nearly $100 million as yet unallocated of $300 million in supplemental money Congress made available at the end of the 108th Congress.  As this Reuters story from a week ago says, due to the current lack of funds only 15% of eligible households are covered, making release of this money even more imperative.  The number covered is sure to drop if the White House has its way for FY06.

I wonder if they have any trouble with their heating bills?  Budgets, particularly during times of deficits, are always a matter of priorities.

Death By a Thousand Cuts

I have limited time for blogging today, alas, and always so much to say.  For now, let me provide a few links to discussions of the president's budget, which reveal the administration's priorities for the coming fiscal year.

It also bears reminding, as we look at the long list of worthy programs cut, that Bush has followed the script David Stockman outlined when he was head of OMB under Reagan: Run up deficits in the short term through tax cuts in order to induce cuts from Congress in domestic discretionary spending over the longer term in order to balance the budget.  Stockman's working assumption at the time was that defense would be exempt, given the support in '80 and '81 for defense budget increases.  Lo and behold, between the war in Iraq and the tax cuts from the first term, Bush has dusted off Stockman's old script.

So, let me piggyback on the work of others by providing you these links:

• Pudentilla and Talk Left on an array of cuts
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge Foundation on cuts to vets' health
• More details from Daily Kos on veterans
• MyDD on Amtrak

If you want to check them out yourself, go to the OMB's site.  I hope to do a little more myself later, but in the meantime have fun playing the part of amateur government accountant.