The Media Finally Reports on a GT No Vote and Gets a Quote From Him

Last week House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi (R-CA) called the House back into a rare August session to vote on an emergency funding bill for Medicaid and education. The bill passed, despite GOP opposition, and Obama signed it into law.

In Pennsylvania, its passage staved off a financial catastrophe.

The Pennsylvania Legislature approved a budget for 2010-11 based on the hope of receiving $850 million in Medicaid funding.
Gov. Ed Rendell, who once predicted as many as 12,000 layoffs if no additional Medicaid money were received, has said that, with $600 million, some layoffs are still possible next month. The governor and legislative leaders are expected to meet to decide how to close that gap.

But GT voted against the bill, and thanks to WENY-TV in Elmira, New York, we know, for once, what GT says about the reason he voted the way that he did.

Northern Tier Congressman Glenn Thompson voted against it, saying it's spending more money at a time when the country can't afford it. “This is about the fact that we're experiencing challenging times fiscally.” Thompson says, “and when you experience challenging times, everybody has to tighten the belt.”

However the Congressional Budget Office says while the bill does add to the deficit over five years, in ten years, it would break even and actually reduce the overall deficit

Well, there you have it, we, in the Centre Region, have to rely on an out-of-state TV station to get GT's bullshitting on record.

Technorati Tags: Rep. Glenn Thompson (R-PA5), emergency medicaid education bill

In Our Backyard

Things may not be going too well next door.

LOCK HAVEN - Faced with declining state financial support, Lock Haven University has told its faculty union that layoffs - or retrenchment, in bargaining terms - are possible.

The school has until Oct. 31 to notify the 264 professor-faculty members of the local chapter of the Association of Pennsylvania State Colleges and Universities Faculties if job cuts will be made.

In a prepared statement issued to The Express, university Interim President Dr. Barbara B. Dixon said, "As part of its ongoing actions to address projected budget shortfalls in the next three years ... retrenchment cannot be ruled out during the 2011-2012 academic year because of financial considerations, elimination or consolidation of academic programs and courses, program curtailment or other reasons."

The announcement was sent by letter to Dr. Mark Cloud, local APSCUF chapter president.

This is a reminder that the  worst of the Great Recession may still be ahead of us and that it may hit closer to home next year when the stimulus funds for higher education dry up.

Housekeeping Update: I've upgraded my hardware and now I'm in the process of getting everything just right.  Over the weekend, I should finally be getting around to redesign of Left of Centre. In the meantime, blogging will remain light.

Technorati Tags: Unemployment, Higher Education, Lock Haven University

@CongressmanBS

GT is at it again.

From Blogger Pictures

When people ask him  "How can we justify tax cuts[?]" he responds with bullshit.  Let's take a closer look at this.

First, let me concede that GT is almost correct when he says that more than 50% of those that will be affected by allowing the Bush/Cheney tax cuts to expire on high income taxpayers are small business owners. Almost because the figure applies to taxpayers that claim  small business income. Not all of these taxpayers are, in fact, small business owners. 

Setting that aside for the moment, let me  be clear that that this is not the same as 50% of small business owners will be affected by the expiration of the tax cuts, but my guess is that many who read GT's tweet get that wrong impression. And GT, or more likely a smarter staffer, probably  was aiming to induce that misunderstanding.

The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center reports that a  large proportion (33%) of taxpayers claiming small business income either have incomes too low to pay taxes or are in the lowest tax bracket. In fact, 14.5% taxpayers claiming small business income claim the Earned Income Tax Credit for low income workers.

How many taxpayers claiming small business income will be hit by the expiration of the Bush/Cheney tax cut on high income taxpayers? That would be 1.9%,  again according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.  But about half of these taxpayers aren't small business owners. Included in this number are high income investors who receive part of their income from investments in small business. As the Tax Policy Center noted, of the 1.9% of taxpayers  with

...small-business income who face one of the top two tax rates are merely passive investors who have nothing to do with running the business. This is because the Tax Policy Center data cited above use the Treasury Department’s relatively broad definition of “small business.” Under the Treasury definition, for example, the $84 of income President Bush received in 2001 from a passive investment in an oil and gas company7 made him a “small-business owner.” About 35 percent of “small-business owners” with incomes above $200,000, and about 58 percent of “small-business owners” with incomes over $1 million, received some or all of their business income in the form of passive investments. The Treasury definition also counts as “small-business income” the fees that CEOs are paid for sitting on corporate boards.

From Blogger Pictures

So we see the reason that  more than 50% of taxpayers who would see their tax bill go up after the Bush/Cheney tax cut expires are "small business owners" is that many high income earners get some of their income classified by Treasury as coming from a small business even though they are not small business owners.

How much would extending the Bush/Cheney cuts for ten years cost the US Treasury? That would be $678 billion.

An how many jobs would we get for that price tag? Not too many would be my guess. Recall,  that during the whole Bush presidency while these cuts were in effect, which included, let us not forget, the housing bubble, the rate of job creation never matched that during the Clinton years. 

But I'd  still be interested in hearing how many jobs GT thinks this $678 billion give away to the rich would create and why?. Comon', give us a ballpark figure GT.

(h/t Kevin Drum)

Technorati Tags: Bush/Cheney tax cut extension, Rep. Glenn Thompson (R-PA5)

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I Personally Know...

....is a phrase which should be avoided in arguments unless you are willing to provide specific information which will allow others to judge the reliability of your personal knowledge.  Hence anonymous commenters should never use this phrase, but it is, none the less, one of the favorite means of argument amongst the ignoratti at the CDT. Here's the CDT regular Fred on unemployment benefits extensions this morning.

...Unemployment benefits are becoming the newest welfare program extended for no other reason then to persuade more voters in November to vote dem. I personally know of several unemployed folks who will not begin to look for another job until their unemployment benefits expire.

This is pretty typical stuff over there. They love their anecdotes about lazy acquaintances

The connection of welfare to unemployment benefits, as I discussed the other day, suggests that he doesn't want his  money helping out brown folks, while the anecdotes about lazy folks leads me to believe neither does he want his money helping out some guys down at the bar that he doesn't like...so screw everyone, as far as Fred is concerned.

As an antidote to these anecdotes about the indolent, I suggest reading the The Breadline Blog written by by a former reporter for a small western Pennsylvania newspaper who was laid off from his job and is now in the ranks of the long term unemployed. The blog was featured earlier this summer in the Wall Street Journal.  The Breadline Blog will put a much different face on our current economic problems than the 'baggers want you to see.

Technorati Tags: Tebaggers, wingnuts, unemployment benefits, welfare

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Outback at the Forefront of a GOP Meme?

Yesterday, the Senate overcame the Republican filibuster of the legislation to extend emergency unemployment benefits and Mitch McConnell tried to divert attention of the Republican's unprecedented  opposition of the extension by linking the long term unemployed to Obama's policy, in the process calling these individuals "chronically unemployed."  Kevin Drum wondered today if there might be something more to  McConnell's choice of words.

...talking about "chronic" joblessness is also a way of suggesting that some of the unemployed are shiftless and lazy. Someone who's "chronically unemployed" isn't your unlucky next door neighbor, it's those guys in the ghetto or down in the hollow who just hang around all day and have never held an honest job in their lives for more than a few weeks at a time. Are these the kind of people you want to run up the national debt for?

I didn't think so. But guess what? Democrats do!

Well, it's hard to say with certainty if this is the game McConnell is playing, but , it just so happens, I was engaged in a back and forth over the past couple of days at the CDT (Hence my absence here.) with one of their regular's, outback, who helps to make the comment threads there  a  fever swamp, which makes Kevin's speculation very plausible to me.

Hey GT, Do You Agree with Tom?

GT, to my knowledge, still hasn't explained his vote against extending emergency unemployment  benefits, but Tom Corbett current Pennsylvania Attorney General and Republican nominee for governor recently gave his opinion on extending unemployment.

"The jobs are there. But if we keep extending unemployment, people are just going to sit there," Corbett told Harrisburg radio station WITF at a campaign stop in Elizabethtown. "I've literally had construction companies tell me, 'I can't get people to come back to work until . . . they say, "I'll come back to work when unemployment runs out." ' "

Let's leave aside the anecdotal nature of Tom's evidence and ask, does Tom have a point,  is there any real evidence that extending unemployment insurance in the current economic environment  contributes to unemployment?  The answer is yes, but the effect is not very big and it effect is offset by larger and more important ones.

According to a recent paper (via Ezra Klein) by two economists at the Federal reserve bank of San Francisco, Rob Valletta and Katherine Kaung,

As of the fourth quarter of 2009, the expected duration of unemployment had risen about 18.7 weeks for job losers and about 17.1 weeks for leavers and entrants, using the years 2006-2007 as a baseline. The differential increase of 1.6 weeks for job losers is the presumed impact of extended UI benefits on unemployment duration. ...The implied increase in the unemployment rate is quite small, slightly less than 0.4 percentage point, indicating that without UI extensions, the measured unemployment rate would have been 9.6% in December 2009 rather than the observed 10.0%.

Ezra notes that "Using the most recent estimate of the size of the labor force, a 0.4 oercent increase in the unemployment rate represents 614,964 people. This is not a trivial number..."

But, you knew there had to be a but, there is another thing to be considered here, the stimulative effect of unemployment benefits. Once again I give you Ezra,

With that process,  [Moody's economist Mark] Zandi estimated that each dollar spent on extending unemployment benefits generated $1.61 in economic growth. Extending benefits had the third-greatest bang-for-the-buck of any component in the stimulus package, after increasing food stamps and subsidizing work-sharing, both temporary measures. To quote Zandi, "No form of the fiscal stimulus has proved more effective during the past two years than emergency UI benefits." The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities looked at the impact on poverty of the extension and found that it saved a total of 800,000 people from falling below the poverty line. So far, then, unemployment benefits have been very effective at stimulating the economy and reducing economic misery among affected families.

Let's put this on the scales. On the on side, extending unemployment insurance leads 614,964 people to remain unemployed about 1.6 weeks longer. On the other side, extending unemployment insurance each dollar spent on extending unemployment insurance generates $1.61 in economic growth and the extensions have prevented 800,000 people from fall below the poverty line.  I'd have to say the the scales tip overwhelmingly in favor of extending unemployment benefits in the current economic climate.

But Tom would rather play the resentment card. He wants to stir up Teabaggers with this pleasing tale,  "I've literally had construction companies tell me, 'I can't get people to come back to work until . . . they say, "I'll come back to work when unemployment runs out.' "

So GT, do you agree with Tom? Did you vote against  extending unemployment because you think your unemployed constituents are lazy?   Your constituents, employed and unemployed alike,  want to know what you really are thinking.  You are thinking aren't you?


Technorati Tags: Tom Corbett, Rep. Glenn Thompson (R-PA5), extended unemployment benefits

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Is GT Looking Out for His Constituents in His Own Twisted Way?

From Blogger Pictures

On July 1^rst, GT voted  with 141 of his Republican colleagues and 11 Democrats against the restoration of emergency unemployment compensation.  Fortunately, 241 Democrats and 29 Republicans voted in favor of the bill. Unfortunately, the Republicans in the Senate successfully blocked the bill from coming to a vote. So the long term unemployed sit this summer in limbo.


GT, so far as I know, has not explained the reasoning behind this vote, but it is clear from the table below that he; owes many of his constituents an explanation.  While the Pennsylvania Fifth Congressional District is home to Centre County the Pennsylvania county with the lowest May 2010 unemployment rate, 6.5%, it is also home to Cameron County the Pennsylvania County with the highest unemployment rate,14.8%. In fact, of the seventeen counties which are in, or part of which are in, the 5th 11 are  above the median of the county  rates and 15 are above the overall Pennsylvania rate of 9.1%. Further, the unemployment rates increased from April 2010 in all of the counties in the 5^th with the exception of Cameron which decreased from 15% in April. But that was likely due to people dropping out of the workforce. So the employment situation in GT's district is bad and many of his constituents will be hurt by the action of Republican colleagues in the Senate. An action which his vote shows that he supports.


So why did  GT vote to screw his constituents? There are several possible answers which I will explore in a future post.

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Technorati Tags: Rep. Glenn Thompson (R-PA5), emergency unemployment insurance extesion

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A Peak From a Leak is Stressful

The Turner Radio Network claims to have a leaked copy of the Treasury's Stress Test of US banks. If the report is accurate we are in for a world of hurt.

Technorati Tags: Stress Test, financial crisis, economy

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Keeping an Eye on Our GOP Hack

GT our GOP congressman here in the Pennsylvania 5th district doesn't like Obama's budget proposal. After bragging that his hometown has only a single prostitute-"Thompson, who hails from the one red light town of Howard, in Centre County"- he unloads on the Obama budget proposal.

“The President’s budget will devastate small business owners, and frankly, will put many out of business with the tax hikes included in his budget,” said Thompson.  “At the end of the day, we need to ask ourselves a very simple question when evaluating this budget, will it help or hamper the economic recovery? And after reviewing the big ticket items in the President’s budget, it is clear that if adopted, this budget will stifle economic growth.”

President Obama’s budget, which Congress is in the process of reviewing, spends an estimated $3.6 trillion next fiscal year and accumulates over $9 trillion in debt over the next ten years.  The President’s budget will also raise $1.9 trillion in new taxes.

“This budget simply spends too much, taxes too much and borrows too much – leaving a legacy of debt for future generations. Increased government spending and taxing our small businesses – which are the economic engine of America – will only prolong the recession and add to unemployment.”

As you mull over   GT's concerns about small business owners, it may be worth your while to pursue this article on the corruption in the Small Business Administration under Bush.

But the real question is what does GT suggest as an alternative to  Obama's budget proposal?

This afternoon House Republicans unveiled their budget blueprint, The Republican Road to Recovery. Click here to view this comprehensive alternative, which controls the debt, lowers taxes, provides an environment to create and preserve jobs, and curbs spending. 

 “We cannot tax and spend its way out of this recession – but we can provide incentives and enact smart government solutions to assist in the recovery process. The Republican alternative does just that. It is my sincere hope that the Democratic leadership will bring Republicans to the table – for the good of the country – next week when the budget makes its way to the House Floor,” concluded Thompson.

Yep, he's going with the much maligned House Republican budget proposal.

While reporters hooted at the comically simplistic charts and lack of details in the House Republican leadership’s budget plan, the green eyeshade types at Citizen’s for Tax Justice crunched the numbers (PDF). They conclude that a quarter of all households, most of them poor, would pay more taxes under the GOP plan, while the richest one percent would pay $100,000 less.

GT, what a hack.

Technorati Tags: Rep. Glenn Thompson (R-PA5), GOP budget proposal, Obama budget proposal

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Spatio-Temporal Unemployment.

The Center for American Progress has a couple of dynamic maps which show the unfolding of unemployment over the past few years on a national and state-by-state basis.

Technorati Tags: unemployment, recession

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Geography of a Recession

The New York Times has maps of the unemployment rate in January 2009 by county and the change in the unemployment rate between January of 2008 and January of 2009 by county. There are some counties in California which have reached depression levels of unemployment.

Technorati Tags: New York Times, recession, unemployment rate

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Pack Your Bags, Penn State Lehigh Valley is Movin' on Up

The Penn State Board of Trustees announced today that maybe,just maybe, tuition might increase a little less, just a little less, than originally proposed. Not that it's written in cement or anything.

Oh, and they went ahead and bought the campus of the defunct Lehigh Valley College.

Also Friday, trustees approved the relocation of the Lehigh Valley branch campus from its Fogelsville location to Center Valley, 16 miles away.

The university paid $12 million for the 29-acre property. Proceeds from the sale of the Fogelsville campus are expected to help defray the cost.

There is no word at this time if the BOT based their decision on those faulty projections from the Penn State Propaganda Portal.

Let see how long it takes them to sell the old campus and how much they get for it.

Yep, times are tough at Penn State.

Technorati Tags: Penn State, Penn State Lehigh Valley

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CDT In Critical Condition. Doctor Takes Extraordinary Actions

The Centre Daily Times has announced that it ain't doin' too well.

Citing unprecedented economic challenges posed by the recession, the Centre Daily Times announced Thursday a series of cost-cutting measures.

Those measures, said CDT President and Publisher Susan Leath, include a workforce reduction of three positions and wage reductions of 2.5 percent to 5 percent for all employees earning more than $25,000 a year.

“These are very difficult decisions,” Leath told the newspaper’s staff. “This is very difficult for all of us.”

Leah said the people being laid off have been notified and the company will do “everything we can to make their transition as smooth as possible.”

Other cost reductions are planned, including reducing the width of the newspages by one, and reducing the number of comic strips in the daily newspaper.

..not a big surprise to those who read this blog.

Technorati Tags: Centre Daily Times, retrenching, cost cutting

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Mumblings From the Penn State Propaganda Portal

This largely incoherent announcement at the Penn State Propaganda Portal may be another indication that Old Main is scrambling to deal with the recession's  negative impact on the Commonwealth Campus system.

Technorati Tags: Penn State, economy, recession, Commonwealth Campus System

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Perhaps the LHV Move is All About a Bursting Housing Bubble

It struck me in the middle of a discussion I was having earlier with the guys at Onward State, that the all the happy talk about demographic growth requiring Penn State Lehigh Valley to move to larger digs may be intended to hide the first sign that the financial crisis has taken a toll on the University. It could very well be that Old Main has decided to merge the Lehigh Valley Campus with the Berks campus at the new location as a cost saving measure, but does not want to make it public until the deal on the new campus approved by the Board of Trustees.

Update 03/11/09 ~3pm: Back to square one. I checked the enrollment numbers at Berks. There are 2800 students enrolled this year which is up from 2471 in 2002-2003. It's unlikely that Berks and LHV will be merged a the new location since that location doesn't have the capacity for both student bodies even if Berks dropped back to its earlier enrollment number due to the financial crisis.

Technorati Tags: Penn State, Penn State Lehigh Valley, Penn State Berks, financial crisis, housing bubble

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Smoke and Bubbles

The Centre Daily Times has story today on the proposed purchase of a new campus for Penn State Lehigh Valley.  As I've previously noted, Old Main has decided to upgrade to a new facility at Penn State Lehigh Valley based on , or at least publicly justified with, very questionable demographic projections. Here is how projections are presented in the CDT.

Penn State Lehigh Valley Chancellor Ann Williams said the college is looking at expanding the programs it currently has and, hopefully, expanding the number it offers in the near future.

Lehigh Valley’s population is forecast to grow 22 percent by 2030, and the number of high school graduates in the area is expected to go up 13 percent a year through 2016. Williams said Lehigh Valley is becoming an “exurb” of Philadelphia and New York.

In my earlier post, I showed that  the population projections have been undoubtedly skewed by a housing bubble which has now popped.

I decided to dig a little deeper in the Lehigh Valley housing market.

While the most widely used measure  of home values  is the Case-Shiller index,  I couldn't find the index for the Lehigh Valley. I did find that the real estate Web site Zillow.com  includes the region in its home value reports. Graphs from the report are here and the tables are here (Excel). Both confirm that the area has had a bubble which is now kaput.

As I commented at the CDT this morning, the only way that this purchace makes sense is if somone gives the campus to the Univerisity and someone else has agreed to pay for future upkeep.

Technorati Tags: Penn State, Penn State Lehigh Valley

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Death Watch

On the heals of last weeks sudden announcement that Adrian Pratt had resigned as publisher of the Center Daily Times comes this,

McClatchy Co., publisher of the Sacramento Bee and 29 other daily newspapers, is planning to cut 1,600 jobs -- 15 percent of the company's work force -- and reduce salaries from the chief executive down, the company said Monday.

Technorati Tags: Centre Daily Times, McClatchy,

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Either Old Main is Corrupt or Incompetent

The New York Times has an article about college admissions this year in the face of the worst economic downturn in thirty years. These three paragraphs sum things up rather well.

Just as nervously, colleges — facing a financial landscape they have never seen before — are trying to figure out how many students to accept, and how many students will accept them.

Typically, they rely on statistical models to predict which students will take them up on their offers to attend. But this year, with the economy turning parents and students into bargain hunters, demographics changing and unexpected jolts in the price of gas and the number of applications, they have little faith on those models.

“Trying to hit those numbers is like trying to hit a hot tub when you’re skydiving from 30,000 feet,” said Jennifer Delahunty, dean of admissions and financial aid at Kenyon College in Ohio. “I’m going to go to church every day in April.”

Now consider the justification for the purchase of a new campus for Penn State Lehigh Valley which I wrote about in the previous post.

"Penn State Lehigh Valley has continued to see growth in enrollment since 2000 and, looking at the population projections for our service area, we expect that to continue," said Ann Williams, chancellor of Penn State Lehigh Valley. "However, our current facility is at capacity and presents a number of limitations in its ability to meet the current and future needs of students. Purchasing the property in Center Valley is a viable solution."

The Lehigh Valley is the third largest population area in Pennsylvania and, according to the Lehigh Valley Economic Development Corporation, the second fastest growth area in the Northeast with a projected population increase of 22 percent by 2030. In addition, the number of high school graduates in the area served by Penn State Lehigh Valley is expected to increase 16.5 percent between 2004 and 2016.

The current Penn State Lehigh Valley campus in Fogelsville is at capacity. Despite the uncertain economic landscape, the purchase of the Center Valley facility would prove to be the most efficient use of resources to resolve some of the immediate concerns at the Lehigh Valley campus.

Why does Old Main have confidence in these demographic predictions when others are white knuckling it?

Digging a little deeper reveals that they shouldn't.

The projection of a 22% growth in population by 2030 made in the summer of 2007 by the Lehigh Valley Planning Commission is an upward correction to an 2002 projection which underestimated the forecast growth in 2005. The reason that the 2002 projection missed its mark is very likely that it did not anticipate the housing bubble in the Lehigh Valley which was driven by migration from nearby higher cost of living areas. That bubble has now burst. Hence there is no reason to place any faith in this prediction.

There is no mention of where the high school graduation rate prediction comes, but presumably the prediction is from these made by Penn State itself. This assumption is reasonable, because Penn State predictions, like the one in the quote, use 2004 as the base year and go out to 2016.

There is just one little problem here, the Web page where these projections are housed carries the following warning.

At this time, updated High School Graduation Projection information is not available. This is because some core data, that our system required, was no longer available. Penn State is initiating a project to re-engineer these systems and reports since separate sources for some of this missing critical information has been located. Due to data limitations not all current reports will be available in the future but every effort is being made to create as many of the reports as possible. Thank you for your patience with this process.

This problen is longstanding. A quick trip in the Way Back Machine reveals that a similar warning first appeared on this page in February of 2007 and has been present every since.

It would appear that Old Main is willing to make the decision to buy a new campus for Penn State Lehigh Valley based on their own projections which they they know to be faulty and other projections which a few minutes of research would have revealed as faulty.

Or quite possibly the decision was made based on some unspoken considerations-political perhaps- and the data was offered up post hoc to sell the dubious deal to the public.

Anyway you slice it, corrupt or incompetent, this is a bad decision. Unless, of course, the new campus is a gift.

Technorati Tags: Penn State, Penn State Lehigh Valley, Spanier,

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You Can't Make This Stuff Up

Times are tough. No raises are likely next year Graham has said. Governor Rendell doesn't understand that Penn State needs more money than has been proposed and tuition will have to go up, Graham has told the General Assembly. It's so sad. These are hard times. That mean old Rendell has left Penn State out of his Tuition Relief Act and Graham isn't happy. What's a prexy to do to brighten up his day? How about a shopping spree?

Penn State Lehigh Valley announced today the planned purchase of a property located at 2809 East Saucon Valley Road in Center Valley, pending approval of the Board of Trustees...

[...]

"This is certainly a rare opportunity to more effectively serve the needs of the students in the Lehigh Valley. This purchase provides a more cost-effective solution than others we have previously explored," said Penn State President Graham Spanier. "It was important that we evaluated our priorities to be sure we were doing what is best for Penn State and its students."

How tough are times exactly?

Technorati Tags: Penn State, financial crisis, expansion, Spanier, Rendell

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The Importance of EFCA

I've noted that Graham has spent University funds to lobby against the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). I recommend this  statement signed by a diverse group of economists in support of the EFCA to those of you  who wonder why  EFCA is important.

Technorati Tags: Penn State, Spanier, Employee Free Choice Act

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