Robert McTeer in Forbes, “The Flawed Assumption Behind Ending The Bush Tax Cut For The Rich”: “We hear over and over that ‘the rich’ have a lower marginal propensity to consume and, thus, smaller multipliers than the multipliers of real people, or no multiplier at all. This is supposed to justify raising taxes on the rich. Leaving aside whether $200,000 makes one rich and leaving aside the problems with applying the Keynesian multiplier concept economy-wide rather that to the individual, such a conclusion is, as they say, fatally flawed. It is flawed mainly because it confuses saving with hoarding and assumes that income not spent in the first round on consumption is not spent at all, even in subsequent rounds.” http://bit.ly/a8xJMf
Ending Tax Cuts for “The Rich” — The Flawed Assumption
July 28th, 2010Houston Chronicle: Nursing Homes Merit Higher Priority During Hurricane Season
July 12th, 2010Here’s the latest op-ed authored by Strategic Media, Inc. for a client, the Texas Health Care Association (THCA), appearing in the Sunday, July 11 edition of the Houston Chronicle:
Nursing Homes Merit Higher Priority During Hurricane Season
By TIM GRAVES AND GREG LENTZ
July 11, 2010
As the Houston area approaches the heart of hurricane season, there are several lessons learned from our trying experiences with Rita and Ike. Chief among these lessons is that ensuring our most vulnerable citizens’ safety is a priority during a major storm. Although there has been progress working with state lawmakers on transportation issues, there remains room for improvement in terms of how we will improve access to buses and emergency vehicles to ensure residents reach safety as quickly as possible.
Beyond transportation concerns, we had extreme difficulty during Hurricane Ike ensuring that electrical power was restored to facilities throughout the area. No doubt it was an enormous undertaking to restore power to the three million individuals in the area. But it is essential to view nursing homes as a priority in the same manner hospitals are viewed as a priority. Our facilities provide complex care services as well as around-the-clock care. Unfortunately, however, nursing homes have typically been viewed as residential — in other words, not a paramount priority when it comes to restoring power. On policy grounds, there are no logical arguments to justify this difference in status.
Historically, nursing homes have been expected to take care of themselves when it comes to weather emergencies. The situation in Ike’s troubling aftermath was challenging, and truly heroic efforts were taken by nursing homes to ensure residents retained 24-hour access to care. Long-term care facilities along the vulnerable Gulf Coast have instituted important life-saving disaster contingency plans to ensure critical health care services are continually provided throughout the ordeal — regardless of whether the facility is completely evacuated out of harm’s way, or shelters in place. During Ike, for example, 86 of the state’s 1,144 nursing homes, affecting 20 counties, were evacuated — impacting approximately 7,000 elderly patients.
Nursing facilities generally evacuate 72 hours before a disaster strikes. Both buses and ambulances are necessary to transport patients beyond the storm’s reach. Other expenses incurred by evacuating facilities include lodging for additional staff and their families, overtime and emergency supplies. Likewise, facilities sheltering in place have additional expenses such as generators, fuel, ice, water, additional food for staff and their families and day care for staffers’ families. Costs simply to evacuate a single nursing home can run from $75,000 to $100,000.
When sheltering in place, the generators necessary to fully power a nursing home cost approximately $70,000 each, and burn 10 gallons of diesel fuel per hour to run air conditioning. Therefore, as a result, both for-profit and nonprofit long-term care facilities urgently required immediate help with transportation and other disaster-related expenses. Yet, under the Stafford Act, for-profit long-term care facilities are not authorized to access federal assistance. Under current law, inexplicably, for-profit long-term care providers are precluded from accessing this funding. In Texas, only 14 percent of all nursing facilities are not for-profit. In short, current federal policy is ill conceived and merits immediate reform.
Disasters wreak havoc indiscriminately, damaging for-profit and non-profit facilities alike. In many localities, for-profit nursing facilities may be the only long-term care provider available in an entire community. They, too, should be provided with equal access to federal resources. Yet the unfortunate backdrop for this entire discussion is that long-term care facilities are already facing the significant challenges of a historic state and federal funding squeeze.
In addition to the fact Texas facilities are now being forced to absorb more than $1 billion in federal Medicare cuts over 10 years, state leaders in Austin are considering $25.6 million cuts to Medicaid-funded nursing home care. It is clear we need to fine-tune the complicated state and federal disaster response process. We are pleased with progress to date working with state leaders, and will continue to work cooperatively to improve the overall process. However, in addition to improving access to federal disaster relief, funding stability from Austin and Washington in the context of Medicaid and Medicare funding, respectively, is a necessary prerequisite to progress in helping our residents and facilities in times of danger.
Tim Graves is president of the Texas Health Care Association in Austin; Greg Lentz is chair of THCA and president and CEO of Healthmark, operating eight facilities in the greater Houston area.
Boxer Attacks on Fiorina Are So Stale 90’s
June 24th, 2010Have always been impressed with the ferocity of the campaigns waged by Barbara Boxer against hapless opponents over the years. Something seems different this time: Boxer’s liberal brand is stale and the cookie cutter SEIU-style negative class warfare attacks seem weak. Sure, they’ll drive Carly’s negs up a bit, but the rationale for Boxer’s re-election has never been so shaky and illegitimate.
From the Hotline today:
Boxer mgr Rose Kapolczynski said Fiorina’s choices at HP placed “profits over people.” Kapolczynski: “If times were tough and layoffs were necessary why was she able to hire workers overseas? Why was she able to order a new corporate jet? It wasn’t that belt-tightening had to go on across her company, it was that she decided laying off American workers was the best approach.”
Then, just as Meg Whitman begins slamming Jerry Brown as a relic of the 70’s so, too, does Fiorina on Boxer:
“In a sign of the rough contest ahead,” Fiorina “made some overt digs at Boxer’s age.” At one point she noted that Boxerentered politics 34 years ago — “just to put that into context, Microsoft had not been formed when Barbara Boxer became a politician. The median age of Californians is 33-years-old. Barbara Boxer has literally been a politician for a lifetime” (Reston, Los Angeles Times, 6/24).
And it seems Fiorina largely got away with the ‘hair’ dig at Boxer. No real fallout I can detect.
Its never appeared more possible that both Whitman and Fiorina can both win.
You can feel it all the way back here in DC.
Running and Hiding From Media, Mark Kirk Blowing Illinois Senate Race
June 22nd, 2010Just several months ago, Illinois GOP Senate candidate, Rep. Mark Kirk, was flying high — and a solid front runner to win Barack Obama’s Senate seat while Democrat Alexi Giannoulias was being dogged by a family banking scandal.
Giannoulias still has severe problems and high negatives, but Kirk, reeling from reporting about exaggerations and embellishments of his military record and other biographical info, is literally on the run from the media. Its absurd, and his communications team must deal with this immediately to stem the damage.
Crain’s Chicago Business reports today that Kirk “literally ran out the hotel door rather than answer questions.” He “bolted” with the “media in hot pursuit” and jumped into the back seat of a black SUV “which instantly peeled out.”
Kirk now has two big problems: first, not adequately dealing with his embellishment problem (or being able to change the subject by launching a new line of attack on Giannoulias), and, second, appearing ridiculous by fleeing the media.
Kirk is blowing this Senate race, and his actions, and those of his staff, are not inspiring a lot of confidence among GOP campaign watchers. Fortunately, there’s still time to right the ship.
New National Poll on Grateful Dead: Even Republicans Like Them
June 16th, 2010The results of a recent Mark Mellman survey on public attitudes surrounding the Grateful Dead — where even Republicans give the band a higher favorable than unfavorable rating — was reported today on Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller website. Tucker saw a bunch of shows.
here’s the link:
http://bit.ly/aWGs4G
here’s the text:
New Poll Investigating Legacy of Grateful Dead Says as Much About Boomers as the Band Itself
By Gordon Hensley
In the nascent days of the Grateful Dead’s uniquely American musical odyssey (I’ll forego the hackneyed “Long Strange Trip”), the band played free Haight-Ashbury parties hosted by The Diggers – a self-styled community action group of improvisational performance artists, dedicated to creating a society devoid of money and capitalism.
Nearly forty-five years later, The Diggers would likely be stunned to discover the Grateful Dead’s most ardent fans make over $100,000 annually. Such is the result of a poll I recently commissioned with the Mellman Group, one of the nation’s premier Democratic polling firms, to explore attitudes about the band I saw 187 times between 1977 and the end of the road, in 1995, when Jerry Garcia checked out. Put aside for the moment I’m a Republican, whose first campaign gig was working in New Hampshire for Ronald Reagan in 1980.
The diversity of the Grateful Dead fan base has always been a source of personal curiosity. After all, I’d met a first officer on a nuclear sub, a British-born Nepalese goat herder, a neurosurgeon, a Harvard math professor, and a senior economist at the World Bank. And I met him not at a DC show, where the World Bank is based, but in rural Maine. As the highest grossing touring act of the 1980’s, and still packing them into stadiums until the end, I became especially curious about the fan base demographics while working on Capitol Hill as a youthful press secretary – when throngs of Hill staff from the Senate and House office buildings would ditch the suit, and mosey on down to RFK stadium for weeknight summer shows.
I first came up with the idea of actually going through with and paying for a Grateful Dead survey in 2008, several hours after a meeting with then-Senator Norm Coleman (R-MN), who was engaged in a heated contest against then-candidate Al Franken, himself a major Grateful Dead enthusiast. While tooling around Georgetown listening to an especially hot 1990 Madison Square Garden show on my iPod, the Senator called my cell requesting a meeting about his campaign. While I hadn’t been regularly working the presidential and statewide campaign circuit since the late 90’s after shifting largely to health care communications, I was again on the radar screen from my 2006 stint as a consultant to Senator Bob Corker’s (R-TN) bruising race against former Rep. Harold Ford. As we were among the few GOP Senate campaigns to eke out a win that cycle, my office phone was lighting up again like the old days, asking for campaign help.
Coleman, with a reputation as a great guy with a top-notch constituent service record, wanted to discuss media and communications strategy. What the Hell? Why not? As I’d be headed to New York City the next day to see former Dead guitarist Bob Weir’s band, RatDog — my favorite contemporary Grateful Dead offshoot band, by far — meeting the Senator on Capitol Hill before my train from Union Station would be convenient. While business commitments would prevent me from working his campaign on the ground for the last two key months, like I did Corker’s, folks in my line of work don’t make it a practice to turn down U.S. Senators seeking your advice and counsel – especially a guy you like in a big national race.
The GOP incumbent, a native New Yorker, former Democratic Mayor of St. Paul and, famously, a Woodstock attendee, was also at one time a roadie for British guitarist Alvin Lee’s band, Ten Years After. He’s also very into Bob Dylan. All of this was very cool. This would no doubt be an interesting meeting with the Senator, and I intended to interject with a discussion about music, not just campaign business.
Never one for formality, I showed up at Bistro Bis, our meeting spot on the Hill, with my packed bags dressed in jeans — and a blazer to meet a minimal standard of decorum. I joined him in a booth, and he immediately asked if I was heading out of town. “Yes, Senator, I’m headed to New York to see a three night run of Bob Weir’s band, RatDog.” As I waited for his reaction with gleeful anticipation, the twinkle in his eye told me this would be fun, and he replied, “You mean those Grateful Dead guys?”
“Yes, Senator — that would be them.” Coleman smiled mischievously. This was fun from the outset. After scribbling his latest polling data on a paper placement, and munching on bagels and fruit as we discussed how Corker beat Ford, he really lit up when I called an audible and changed the topic to rock and roll. He discussed his Woodstock experience, his roadie days with Ten Years After, and his philosophical metamorphosis from Democrat to Republican. Coleman’s humility, humanity and passion for government service made it crystal clear why he was a rising GOP star, and deserving reelection. Despite having nothing against Al Franken – I no longer take politics personally; its bad karma — I regret to this day that I could not drop what I was doing, and ship out to Minnesota.
Later that night at the RatDog show in Manhattan, I told my buddies about the meeting, and we were in a perpetual state of hilarity conjuring up hypothetical 30-second negative ads to run against Franken. How ironic it would have been to execute this faux plot against Franken with ideas generated at this very crucible of contemporary “Grateful Deadness” — ostensibly part of Franken’s base vote. It was decided then and there the poll must be completed.
After that 2008 show, and two years of procrastination, I recently had the Mellman Group ascertain a basic national name ID on the Grateful Dead, and then assessed the favorable/unfavorable rating among various subgroups. That was a simple, logical way to dive into this project. The survey sample was 1016 randomly selected adults over age 18, with a 3.1% margin of error. While I had no idea what the national name ID would be, I feared simply the name “Grateful Dead” would put boost the unfavorable higher than favorable.
I was wrong — big-time: Not only does the Grateful Dead have a hard name ID of 54% — nearly 150 million Americans are aware of them, which is impressive, and higher than I thought it would be – but the band’s FAV/UNFAV is 38/16, a 2:1 ratio any Washington incumbent running in this harsh 2010 environment would eagerly expropriate. Bottom line, this means approximately 50 million Americans have a net favorable impression of the band, and even Republicans give the Grateful Dead a higher FAV than UNFAV.
Here’s the FAV/UNFAV breakout by self-indentified political affiliation:
Republicans: 31/26
Independent leaning Republicans: 35/23
Independents: 36/19
Independent leaning Democrats: 45/17
Democrats: 37/14
FAV/UNFAV — By income:
100k or more 53/20
75k-100k 39/24
50k-75k 35/21
35k-50k 32/15
Less than 35k 30/19
Other results worth noting are that the Grateful Dead have the highest name ID in the Northeast, with 67% (versus 55% in the Midwest; 55% in the West; and 47% in the South), and that seniors 65+ are the only subgroup in the entire survey to give the Grateful Dead a net unfavorable rating (18/21 — versus a 39/23 for ages 55-64; a 52/36 for ages 45-54; a 47/22 for ages 35-44; and a 27/13 for ages 18-34). In the final analysis, the “news” from this survey is the fact that, by and large, the Grateful Dead fan base consists of the wealthiest among us with the passage of time.
New York Times columnist David Brooks, in his excellent 2000 sociological treatise, “BoBo’s in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There,” explains that during the 80’s and 90’s, “The values of the bourgeois mainstream culture and the values of the 1960’s counterculture merged. In the resolution between the culture and the counterculture, it is impossible to tell who co-opted whom, because in reality the bohemians and the bourgeois co-opted each other — and they emerge from this process as bourgeois bohemians, or BoBos.”
No doubt, Jerry Garcia, a wry social observer himself, would find this all terribly amusing – including the fact the Grateful Dead’s business model, which they stumbled into serendipitously, is being taught at prestigious business schools. But it also reflects his and the band’s wisdom in ensuring the band’s massive, decades-long touring platform would never become a propaganda effort for any political cause or candidate. Gratefully, it was all about the music, and, to me, a celebration of America and freedom itself. Now, with, GOP Springsteen freak Chris Christie serving as Governor of New Jersey, I’d be curious to see how Bruce Springsteen’s high visibility political activism on behalf of Democrats has impacted his own fan base. But someone else can finance that arcane but interesting inquiry.
New York Times Botches Editing of Blumenthal Story; Facts and Context Inexplicably Omitted
May 20th, 2010The New York Times‘ initial story about Connecticut AG Richard Blumenthal’s Vietnam exaggeration scandal is an abysmal effort from the standpoint of accuracy and context.
The situation developed when the Times reported that Blumenthal had repeatedly distorted his military service. The story included quotations and a video of Blumenthal saying at a 2008 event that he had “served in Vietnam.” The newspaper also said Blumenthal intimated more than once that he was a victim of the abuse heaped on Vietnam veterans upon their return home.
A longer version of the video posted by GOP Senate candidate Linda McMahon also shows Blumenthal at the beginning of his speech correctly characterizing his service by saying that he “served in the military, during the Vietnam era.”
Blumenthal getting the quote right earlier in the speech doesn’t change the fact that he misled about his service later in that same speech, as Greg Sargent points out. And its true that The Times uncovered other examples of Blumenthal appearing to mislead about his service, or at least not doing anything to correct misimpressions about it.
But the 2008 speech is by far the single most damning piece of evidence against Blumenthal.
The other quotes are just not quite as conclusive. And the fact that he got it right, if narrowly so, earlier in the speech raises at least the possibility that he didn’t intend to mislead later on, even if it doesn’t prove this one way or the other.
BUT even if you don’t believe the longer video is exculpatory in any way, as The Times says, there’s no conceivable reason for leaving out the fuller context and letting readers make the call for themselves. It seems obvious that when dealing with a story this explosive, you would want to err on the side of more context, rather than less.
You don’t have to be a Medill graduate to figure that out.
New Marist Poll: Pataki Best New York Governor
May 10th, 2010A new Marist poll (686 RVs 5/3-5 +/- 4%) asked, “Which one of the following do you think has been the best governor for New York State?”
The options: Nelson Rockefeller, Hugh Carey, Mario Cuomo, George Pataki, Eliot Spitzer, and David Paterson.
Pataki edged Cuomo for the top spot, winning 33% of those surveyed.
Pataki has generally worn well with New Yorkers after the passage of time. It’s the tax cuts.
Kay Bailey Hutchison’s Road to Political Oblivion
March 6th, 2010As Clayton Williams’ press secretary during the 1990 campaign for governor against Ann Richards, I flew around Texas with the candidate on many an occasion accompanied by a variety of surrogates. Kay Bailey Hutchison, then State Treasurer, was enormously appealing on the stump. It was obvious she would one day be elected to statewide office, and equally obvious she had the ambition, desire and skill to do so.
Twenty years later, having served as a U.S. Senator since her 1993 special election against Bob Krueger, Kay’s political career is now over after having run among the most depressing, desultory campaigns in Texas history. We at the Williams campaign lost our race due to an accumulation of gaffes — which admittedly could have been ameliorated by an improved media control and press access strategy. I’ll take a hit for that.
But Kay’s “campaign” never had a rationale, never had a message, never had an overarching theme, and was never able to avoid being sucked into Rick Perry’s simple but highly effective DC vs. TX message strategy. She made no gaffe’s — she just had nothing to say. The one visual image of her stuck in one’s mind is the worried look on her face throughout the contest, with a permanent furrowed-brow.
Could she have won with a better campaign? Still doubtful.
One of her primary problems was that she’d never, really, been forced to run in a highly competitive environment. The ‘93 Krueger race was relatively painless. Quite simply, candidates unaccustomed to the complexities and ugliness of statewide contests — especially in a state like Texas — are destined to fail. Such was the case in Harold Ford’s 2006 race against Bob Corker in Tennessee — whereby we were able to dismantle Ford in the last two to three weeks with a barrage of attacks.
The volume of incoming hits on Kay, just like the volume of incoming hits on Ford, were too much to assimilate for the simple reason they’d never been subjected to it. For this simple basic reason, battle-tested statewide candidates almost always have a leg up on opponents accustomed to safe, uncompetitive elections. This was clearly the case in this Texas contest.
\”A Conversation with Mike Baselice and Matthew Dowd\”
For an excellent review and breakdown of the Hutchinson-Perry race, the Texas Tribune-sponsored “Conversation” with Perry pollster Mike Baselice and former Bush strategist Matt Dowd is enormously insightful and worth watching.
For SNFs, FMAP Extension Badly-Needed as State Medicaid Budgets Wither
February 12th, 2010Putting aside the various policy benefits and liabilities associated with the respective Senate and House health care reform bills, currently buried in a snowdrift of indecision somewhere on Capitol Hill, the House bill’s temporary federal medical assistance percentage (FMAP) increase is a vital necessity to Skilled Nursing Facilities (SNFs) nationwide struggling with the most basic of business crises: Cash flow.
Specifically, the House bill extends the temporary 6.2% FMAP increase from the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA) through June 30, 2011. While the provision is not in the Senate bill, President Obama’s FY 2011 budget proposal includes the FMAP provision.
SNFs are arguing, correctly, that disastrous state fiscal conditions and the subsequent pinch on state Medicaid funding merits more temporary federal help, as the sector’s operating margins are the lowest of any provider group. Providers at the state level are out early, notably in Texas, making the case that SNF funding is being squeezed much as it was a decade ago in the wake of 1997 BBA implementation. The result, then, was 15-20% of the SNF sector driven into bankruptcy, worsening patient care and many lost jobs.
In testimony yesterday at a Health and Human Service Commission (HHSC) hearing in Austin, TX on what appears to be likely state budget reduction options, the Texas Health Care Association (THCA) warned that any new cuts now to Texas Medicaid payment rates for nursing home care will confront the nursing home profession with what he called “dire financial consequences.”
Tim Graves, the THCA President, noted the Obama Adminstration has already begun to implement $725 million in federal Medicare cuts that went into effect (by CMS regulation) in October, 2009, and said Texas has historically relied upon federal Medicare funding to “prop up the already inadequate funding of state Medicaid rates that have not met the state’s own rate-setting methodology since 1999.”
Graves’ argument is one state lawmakers will and should hear as the state budget debates unfold throughout Spring 2010: “Before we engage in discussions about cutting Texas seniors’ key Medicaid-financed programs, we must look first at the fact nursing homes are already having to deal with a state and federal funding environment that squeezes facilities’ abilities to recruit and retain the high quality direct care staff that make the ongoing provision of quality care possible.”