The Daily Change

A Quinnipac University poll released last week finds that 92 percent of Americans support President Obama’s proposal for universal background checks for gun purchases (seven percent oppose). Yet most Republican lawmakers in Congress have yet to voice support for such a policy, and continue to side with the fringe of American public opinion.

Opposition to background checks is represents such a small portion of Americans that there are actually more Americans who believe that Elvis is alive — eight percent of respondents to a Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll thought that the King of Rock n’Roll may be living it up somewhere.

Click here to sign onto our petition supporting the White Houseai??i??s bold gun plan.

(Photo credit: Flickr user psd)

Last night, President Obama made the proposal to raise the minimum wage to $9 an hour and then to index it to inflation. This would be a wage increase for workers in every single state except Washington.

While Republicans have already stated their intention to obstruct this proposal, they should know that raising the minimum wage is actually wildly popular. Polling conducted by Lake Research in February 2012 found that voters actually want a proposal even more progressive than Obama’s suggestion.

Their poll found that 73 percent of voters want to see the minimum wage raised to $10 an hour by 2014. This includes 50 percent of Republicans.

Some Members of Congress want to cut Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security benefits. President Obama has indicated he is still open to cutting Social Security benefits with a so-called “Chained CPI.”

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) is organizing to stop these benefit cuts. He’s circulating a letter among his colleagues that states the following:

We will vote against any and every cut to Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security benefits — including raising the retirement age or cutting the cost of living adjustments that our constituents earned and need.

But he needs your help for the letter to gain momentum. With our friends at Democracy for America, CREDO Action, Ai??Social Security Works, Working Families Party, Move On, and Rebuild The Dream, we’re working on getting citizen co-sponsors of Grayson’s letter. Click here to sign on.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN)

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) wants to raise the Medicare age. He says he wants to do this to save money, but he opposes letting Medicare negotiate for drug prices — meaning he would rather seniors bear the burden with benefit cuts than cut into Big Pharma’s profits.

Today, several lobbyists who represent the industry will be throwing him a fundraising lunch in Washington, D.C. The lunch will be held at Charlie Palmer Steak, a popular fundraising spot, and individuals can attend for $500 or host for $1,000. Meanwhile, political action committees can attend for $1,000 and host for $2,500. Here are the lobbyists who represent the industry who will be hosting:

John Herzog: Herzog represents Salix Pharmaceuticals, Sunovion Pharmaceuticals, Astellas Pharmas USA, Amylin Pharmaceuticals, Allergan Inc., Novartis AG, and other Big Pharma clients. He also happens to be a former aide to Alexander.
Jeff Kimbell: Kimbell works for the same firm as Herzog and has a similiar Big Pharma client list.
Mathew Lapinksi: Lapinski represents AmerisourceBergen Corporation.
Katie Openheim: Openheim had a single client in 2012, Japanese drugmaker Eisai.
Jennifer Swenson: Swenson’s only 2012 client was Pfizer.
Rachel Mack: Mack’s only client in 2012 was Vertex Pharmaceuticals.

There will doubtlessly be additional industry lobbyists at the event, but weak disclosure laws mean it will take months for us to learn their identities.

Click here to join our Take Back Democracy campaign to help stop the influence of money in our politics.

Click hereAi??to pledge to hold any Democrat who agrees to a deal that cuts Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid benefits accountable.

State Senator Bill Jackson (R)

Yesterday, Georgia state senator Bill Jackson (R) addressed his colleagues by attacking sensible gun regulations. During the climax of his speech, Jackson implied that frying pans and hammers are as dangerous or more dangerous than guns:

JACKSON: In the meantime, the gentleman from the 22nd, my colleague he’s worried about guns, and you know insinuating guns. They killin’ people with frying pans. They killing people with hammers. There’s more murders with hammers last years than there was shotguns, pistols, and ak-47’s. Let’s help the people that need the help. That’s the end of this story. Thank you very much.

Watch video of Jackson provided by Better Georgia:

For the record, 496 people were killed by hammers and clubs in 2011. There were 9,146 firearm deaths.

Click here to sign onto our petition supporting the White Houseai??i??s bold gun plan.

Outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta last week announced that he is recommending Congress limit military pay increases to 1 percent in 2014. In comparison, the pay increase in 2013 was 1.7 percent.

To put this in perspective, this is the smallest pay increase since 1962, when there was no pay increase. Despite the country’s involvement in protracted wars, pay increases for men and women in uniform have continued to decline. In 1978, when the country wasn’t even at war, the military’s pay increased by 6.2 percent.

The U.S. spends more on its military than almost the rest of the world combined, and the budget is rife with waste. But there is no evidence that the meager salaries of most members of the armed services is a major contributor to this waste. Polling shows that while Americans favor reducing waste in the Pentagon budget, they oppose major reductions in military pay.

It is a frequent conservative mantra that government taxation and regulation prevent economic growth. EconomistsAi??Atif Mian and Amir Sufi looked at this claim for a new paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

Using survey data from the National Federation of Independent Business, the two researchers found that when businesses complained most of lack of sales and demand, unemployment was highest. The research also showed that “there was almost no correlation between job growth in a state from 2008 to 2011 and the increase in the percentage of businesses citing regulation and taxes as their primary concern. In fact, if anything, the correlation is positive.”

This new research, which again relies on the complaints of businesses themselves, seems to undermine this conservative mantra.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) just announced that he will hold up President Obama’s nominees to head the Pentagon and CIA until he gets more information about the attack on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, Libya.

Graham’s justification is puzzling because Obama’s nominees have nothing to do with this issue. But what if the Senator is holding up the nominees — specifically, Chuck Hagel — for another reason?

As we’ve noted before, Defense Secretary nominee Chuck Hagel is a critic of the Pentagon’s spending, calling it “bloated” and demanding that it must be “pared down.” Graham has been a critic of Pentagon cuts, categorically opposing themAi??in a speech this past December.

The Senator is widely considered to be vulnerable to a primary challenge from the right, so he has needed to amass aAi??sizableAi??campaign warchest. To do this, he’s been courting defense industry donors. In this cycle, Boeing is his seventh-largest donor, and Lockheed Martin is his eleventh (together they’ve given $45,100).

Additionally, his second-largest donor is Nelson, Mullins et al, a lobbying firm, giving him $74,084 between its political action committee and employees. The firm has a number of corporate clients, but one of its major ones in 2012 was defense contractor General Dynamics, which paid it $120,000.

Its certainly possible that Graham has ideological objections to Hagel or any of the other Obama nominees he has opposed. But his influx of defense contractor cash creates another possibility.

Click here to join our Take Back Democracy campaign to help stop the influence of money in our politics.

During anAi??appearanceAi??on Fox News, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) was asked about raising the Medicare eligibility age to 67. She strongly rebuked the idea, saying that beneficiaries aren’t going to “evaporate from the face of the earth for two years”:

PELOSI: Those people are not going to evaporate from the face of the earth for two years, they’re going to have medical needs and they’re going to be attended to. And the earlier the intervention for it, the less the cost will be and the better the quality of life. I do think we should subject every federal dollar that is spent to the harshest scrutiny. I do think the challenge in Medicare is not Medicare it’s health care costs in general. […] There is money to be saved there, I don’t think it has to come out of benefits or beneficiaries, and I don’t think you have to raise the age.

Watch it:

Recall that raising the Medicare age to 67 wouldAi??pass on costs to seniors of $11.4 billionAi??every year.

Click hereAi??to pledge to hold any Democrat who agrees to a deal that cuts Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid benefits accountable.

After the tragedy at Sandy Hook, special interest lobbyists for the NRA and the gun industry are actually trying to expand the number of guns out on the streets. In Arkansas, they actually succeeded in lifting the ban on guns in church.

But in other communities, citizens are fighting the NRA and winning. In Wyoming, the House passed an NRA-backed bill to allow guns on college campuses.

But educators, led by University of Wyoming PresidentAi??Tom Buchanan, got involved. “Our colleges and universities have to be safe and secure sanctuaries for learning,” he told the press, rallying educators to testify against the bill and petition their lawmakers. “Weapons on campus or in the classroom would have a chilling and unacceptable impact on education.”

Following the educator outrage, the Senate Education Committee chose to take no action on the bill, effectively killing it.

Click here to sign onto our petition supporting the White Houseai??i??s bold gun plan.

Gov. John Kasich (R-OH)

Ohio’s Republican governor John Kasich (R-OH) has proposed a new tax plan that would radically restructure taxes in the state.

The plan would cut income taxes for most Ohioans, but increase extend sales taxes to additional goods — which tend to fall on poor and working people. The result is, as Policy Matters Ohio and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found, that the rich would get a huge tax cut while the poorest Ohioans would actually face a tax increase. Here’s a table from their report demonstrating this:

As you can see, the poorest 20% would have their taxes raised by $63Ai??annually. Ai??The top one percent would get a more than $10,000 tax increase.

CPC co-chair Keith Ellison

Congress is locked in budget negotiations related to the upcoming sequester. This week, the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) unveiled the “Balancing Act.” Noting that 2/3 of the deficit reduction that has taken place since 2011 has come from cuts, not revenues, the CPC plan adopts an approach that would have a truly balanced 50-50 cuts-revenue ratio.

Additionally, the plan invests in the economy with the goal of creating jobs — the best long-term path to deficit reduction.

Here’s some of the key elements of the CPC plan:

Raise $948 Billion In Revenues: This is done by closing various special interest loopholes — such as international tax loopholes that maintain offshore tax havens — and by ending subsidies for fossil fuel companies.
Cutting $278 Billion In Pentagon Waste: Unlike some lawmakers in Washington who want to spare the Defense Department altogether, the CPC cuts backs onAi??unnecessary weapons programs such as the V-22 Osprey. It also replaces the F-35 with the F-18 and reduces nuclear weapons expenditures, among other measures.
Cuts The Deficit By Investing $276 Billion In Jobs: The plan also invests money by extending the Make Work Pay tax credit for a year and by spending on teachers and school modernization as well as transportation infrastructure.

Here’s a chart showing how the Balancing Act would finally offer a balanced approach to deficit reduction after years of relying on cuts:

One area the Balancing Act does not cut is Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security benefits.

Click hereAi??to pledge to hold any Democrat who agrees to a deal that cuts Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid benefits accountable.

Is church really the place for your firearm?

On Monday, the Arkansas legislature, rather than enacting common sense gun reforms, decided to legalize guns in churches by passing a bill to do so. Democratic Governor Mike Beebe is expected shortly to sign the bill.

Protesting this new law, Rev. Scott Walters, pastor of Christ Episcopal Church in downtown Little Rock, wrote to his local paper:

The legislature’s action has already impacted our ministry at Christ Church. It’s given us one more hurdle, one more fear to deal with as we try to do our Christian duty and welcome a stranger into our midst as if he or she were Christ himself. Its impact is not hypothetical. It is real. Loving our neighbor just got a little harder.

Click here to sign onto our petition supporting the White Houseai??i??s bold gun plan and to donate to help run the ad in Kentucky.

Call on New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn to bring a paid sick days bill to a vote.

Emilio Palaguachi was an employee at a New York City until very recently. He worked 60 hours a week, but his workplace had no sick leave policy. So when he fell ill with the flu, Palaguachi he got the permission of his manager to take the day off to see a doctor. Yet he was still fired.

ai???They didnai??i??t give me any explanation,ai??? Palaguachi was quoted telling a local paper through a translator. ai???I asked if I had done something wrong and nobody knew what to say. Actually, everyone [co-workers] was upset because of how I was fired.ai???

The United States is one of the few countries that does not guarantee paid sick days to its employees. In New York City, progressives, with the help of Palaguachi,Ai??are campaigning to change this within their own community.

Join with PCCC to ask New York City Council Speaker Speaker Christine Quinn to hold a vote on a city-wide paid sick leave.

Many Americans woke up today and were shocked by news that the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) will be ending regular mail service on Saturdays (package delivery will continue). In response to this announcement, the National Association of Letter Carriers, which represents postal employees, called on Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe to resign.

The move is supposed to save the Post Office $2 billion annually, something it claims it is being forced to do due to budget woes.

But the truth is, the Post Office’s budget wouldn’t have any problems if Congress hadn’t forced anAi??unnecessaryAi??and burdensome federal mandate onto it.

In 2006, the Congress passed theAi??Ai??Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006Ai??(PAEA). Under PAEA, USPS was forced to ai???prefund its future health care benefit payments to retirees for the next 75 years in an astonishing ten-year time spanai??? ai??i?? meaning that it had to put aside billions of dollars to pay for the health benefits of employees itAi??hasnai??i??t even hired yet, something ai???thatAi??no other government or private corporationAi??is required to do.ai???

In 2011, it was estimated that the Post Office would actually have a $1.5 billion surplus if PAEA was never enacted. Altering or repealing this poison pill legislation would allow the Postal Service to continue its services without being burdened by the 75 year pre-fund requirement. But that requires Congress to act.

Ai??UPDATE:Ai??As a historical anecdote as to how far back the conservative war on the Post Office goes, experts point out that the service delivered mail twice a day until 1950.

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY)

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is feeling the heat after the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC) released a new ad featuring a Kentucky gun owner calling him out for taking money from gun manufacturers and opposing reforms. Watch it:

In response to the ad, McConnell releasedAi??a document ignoring the actual issues at hand and instead attacking the PCCC. McConnell’s response leads with the false statement that we only have one donor from Kentucky. The money in politics watchdog Public Campaign debunks this claim in an email roundup, pointing out we actually have 2,000 times as many donors from Kentucky, but that they are small donors — the sort McConnell is unfamiliar with:

The McConnell camp fired back crowing that only one Kentuckian gave PCCC over $200, apparently forgetting that unitemized, small donors count. PCCC says 2,000 Kentuckians contributed under $200. Kentuckyai??i??s LEO Weekly reports that McConnell might have forgotten that donors at this size exist after spending the past three months criss-crossing the country for big money fundraisers from Beverly Hills and Chicago to the December 17 D.C. fundraiser for Amgen just days before McConnell negotiated the fiscal cliff deal that included a $500 million giveaway to the company. Only one percent of McConnellai??i??s contributions were under $200 in the past three months.

The LEO Weekly, a local outlet that Public Campaign cites above, took McConnell to task, pointing out that he has very few small donors himself and that more than twice as many of his itemized contributions come from out of state:

McConnellai??i??s campaign cited a federal database that only compiles donations over $200, but PCCC would subsequently point out that they actually have raised over 2,000 contributions from their 7,000 members in Kentucky, averaging less than $15 …

Sen. Goedde

One Idaho Republican lawmaker is such a fan of Ayn Rand — the radical philosopher who wrote “The Virtue of Selfishness” and who wanted to abolish every government social insurance program — that he has introduced a bill to mandate every high school student reads one of her books:

Sen. John Goedde, chairman of the Idaho Senateai??i??s Education Committee, introduced legislation Tuesday to require every Idaho high school student to read Ayn Randai??i??s ai???Atlas Shruggedai??? and pass a test on it to graduate from high school.

When Sen. Bob Nonini, R-Coeur dai??i??Alene, asked Goedde why he chose that particular book, Goedde said to laughter, ai???That book made my son a Republican.ai???

Philosopher Ayn Rand coincidentally happens to be one of of House Budget Committee chairman Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) main political idols.

A new report finds that states are actually being denied billions of due to rich individuals and large corporations using offshore tax havens.

The report by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group concludes that tax havens cost state governments $39.8 billion in lost revenues in 2011. Corporations were responsible for $26 billion of this revenue loss.

Here are the states that faced the most revenue loss:

California: $7.14 billion in lost revenue
New York: $4.27 billion in lost revenue
New Jersey: $2.8 billion in lost revenue

Since the recession began, states haveAi??laid off over 130,000 teachersAi??because they lack the funds to keep them hired. Cracking down on these tax havens would be one way to re-hire those teachers and to spend money on badly-needed infrastructure.

Does a nation without paid parental leave really value its children?

Today is the twentieth anniversary of the signing of the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA). The FMLA allows for employees to have 12 weeks of unpaid leave when they have children or have a serious illness.

The FMLA is an important accomplishment, but the United States still lags behind most of the world — both rich, developed countries and even poor, developing countries — in offering guaranteed meaningful, paid parental leave to all employees.

Here’s a rundown of some other countries that have paid parental leave:

India: India, even with its extreme poverty, guarantees 12 weeks of paid leave after the birth of a child. The employee gets 100 percent of normal pay during this time.
Rwanda:Ai??In the poor nation of Rwanda, employees get one month of paid leave at 100% of pay.
France: As a rich developed country (but one still poorer than the United States), France offers 16 weeks of of paid leave (at 100% pay) for the first 2 children and 26 weeks for the third child. The French also get a compulsory 6 weeks before birth.
Sweden: Sweden has perhaps the world’s most generous paid parental leave policy, offering one year paid parental leave at an 80% rate.

Even with the meager FMLA protections we have, up to 40 percent of employees are not even eligible.

Rep. Tom Reed (R-NY) has been a huge supporter of both fracking and subsidies for Big Oil. At a town hall this weekend, some of his constituents took issue with his support for these dirty industries.

After defending the exemption of fracking from the Clean Water and Clean Air acts, one constituent asked him about the over $100,000 he’s gotten from the oil and gas industries. He responded that he has “no idea” where that money came from:

CONSTITUENT QUESTION: Do you think the fracking industry should remain exempt from the Clean Air and Drinking Water Acts? […]

REED: […] I am not a believer in expanding federal government, I believe we have to downsize federal government. What we’re on a path here by doing that I think is expanding government. […] I would defer to the state and defer to the local bodies on that.

(Audience hissing)

CONSTITUENT 1: Water and air are across state borders!

CONSTIUTENT 2: Where did your $126,000 from gas companies come from? Which lobbyists? Which companies besides Chesapeake and the other lobbyists?

REED: No idea. No idea. We don’t keep track of that. I don’t keep track of that.

Watch it:

Reed should know that he is actually legally required to “keep track of that” — and that it’s actually public information. The oil and gas industry was his third-largest donor in 2012. Here’s some of the biggest backers:

Chesapeake Energy: $10,000 to Reed. Chesapeake, one of America’s largest fracking companies, has angered homeowners nationwide with its excessive use of legal maneuvers to gain access to land to drill on.
National Fuel Gas Corporation:Ai??$10,000 to Reed. This fracking company is based in Western Pennsylvania and New York.
America’s Natural Gas Alliance: $4,400 to Reed. This is one of the main advocacy coalitions for natural …

Last week, Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) hosted veterans groups, labor unions, and others at a press conference to oppose the chained CPI proposal, which would reduce benefits to Social Security beneficiaries and veterans.

At the event, the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, which represents 200,000 veterans and supporters, blasted the proposal. The IAVA’s Tom Tarantino said the proposal would “balance the budget on the backs of those who fought for us”:

TARANTINO: And I want to point out that this is the 2nd time in so many months that we’ve been brought to talk about this. And that is totally insane to me that we have to keep coming back and talking about how cutting benefits for veterans is not the answer to our fiscal woes. You hear chained CPI and you hear all these complicated policy terms. And really what you’re saying is we’re going to balance the budget on the backs of those who have fought for us. And these proponents of the chained CPI they apparently okay with that. You know, I’m not okay with that. They say times are tough. You know what, tell me about it. Tell me times are tough. For me and my friends who spentAi??theAi??last ten years fighting war. Tell the Gold Star widows and the surviving spouses how tough times are. Tell the Vietnam and World War II and Korean veterans who depend on their benefits to supplement their incomeAi??becauseAi??they’re still suffering from wounds from their service. Tell that disabled veterans, who has invisible wounds, who needs their veterans benefits, so that they can help recover. We lost more veterans lastAi??yearAi??to suicide than we did to combat. Tell those veterans about how times are tough. I have lost …

The NRA’s president David Keene recorded an interview with the conservative news site The Daily Caller that it will be releasing in full today. In an excerpt, Keene compared the weapon used in the Sandy Hook massacre to the musket:

KEENE: This nation was founded as a result of the fact, people, citizens who had a musket above their fireplace grabbed the gun when an emergency confronted them. For four million Americans, the AR-15 is the musket of today.

Click here to watch it.

For reference, the AR-15 can fire between 700 to 950 rounds a minute. In contrast, the muskets that the American revolutionaries used typically fired three rounds per minute if they were used by skilled marksmen.

Sign our petition supporting the bold White House gun plan.

Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) just introduced a federal so-called “right to work” law that would undermine labor organizing nationwide. Here’s an excerpt from his press release touting the legislation:

“Every American worker deserves the right to freedom of association – and I am concerned that the 26 states that allow forced union membership and dues infringes on these workers’ rights. Right to work laws ensure that all Americans are given the choice to refrain from joining or paying dues to a union as a condition for employment. Nearly 80 percent of all Americans support the principles and so I have introduced a national Right to Work Act that will require all states to give their workers the freedom to choose.”

The fact is, no one is forced to join a union. What so-called “right to work” laws allow is for workers to receive union benefits without paying union dues, which undermines the ability for unions to represent workers.

Researchers from the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute have found that the economies of states who have these laws “are associated with significantly lower wages and reduced chances of receiving employer-sponsored health insurance and pensions.” They estimated that hourly wages for all workers — not just union workers — in these states are 3% lower.

There has never been a serious push for a national “right to work” law, making Paul’s effort fairly unique. The National Right To Work Committee gave $7,500 to Paul’s campaign, and Koch Industries — which bankrolls state-wide efforts to install these laws — is his third largest contributor.

Click here to join our Take Back Democracy campaign to help stop the influence of money in our politics.

(Photo source: Flickr user DonkeyHotey)

Social Security is fully solvent until 2037 and is not in crisis. But one way to make sure there are no cutbacks in benefit cuts after that is to lift the payroll tax cap so wealthy Americans contribute more into the system.

A new survey from the National Academy of Social Insurance finds that most Americans want to do just that. When survey respondents were asked how they felt about the statement “It is critical to preserve Social Security even if it means increasing Social
Security taxes paid by wealthy Americans,” 87 percent of them agreed, with 62 percent of them strongly agreeing.

It’s worth noting that this number includes even 71 percent of self-identified Republicans (and 86 percent of self-identified independents).

Click hereAi??to pledge to hold any Democrat who agrees to a deal that cuts Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid benefits accountable.

Do rich Maryland boat owners really need a tax cut?

MarylandAi??Delegate Ron George (R-Arnold) Ai??and Senator John Astle (D-Annapolis) have just filed bills to give a tax cut to some of the state’s richest boat owners. The tax cut is being pushed by the boating industry, and it should be noted that Astle has received $3,250 from a sea transport association over the past 8 years.

Currently, Maryland has a vessel excise tax that charges boat owners 5 percent of the value of their boat if they keep it in the state for more than 90 days a year.

Under the new bill, this tax would be capped at a total of $10,000. That means that the cap would exclusively benefit boat owners whose boats are worth more than $200,000. The owner of a $1 millionAi??yacht, for example, would save $40,000 if this cap was put into place.

According to statistics from the National Marine Manufacturers Association — which represents the boating industry nationwide — the average “price of a new boat, motor, trailer package was $25,554” in 2007. The average price of a new powerboat that same year was $35,486.

Thus, by their own statistics, the boating industry admits that most boat owners will not see a tax cut from this bill, and that it will only benefit owners of boats that are much more expensive than average.