McCarthy: Dems playing fiscal ‘Jenga’

House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) on Sunday accused President Obama and congressional Democrats of neglecting to address the nation’s deficit, instead playing a game of fiscal “Jenga.”

“It's the old Washington fiscal game of Jenga. You try to build as much debt as you can take, as much tax as you can take, until you topple the entire economy,” said McCarthy on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

McCarthy said that Democrats were delaying the tough spending cuts and entitlement reforms the nation needed to restore its fiscal health.

“This week, Republicans will have a budget that balances in ten years; the Democrats' budget never balances. No household can run that way,” he said.

The House and Senate this week will vote on their competing budget plans. The House plan, crafted by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), would cut spending by $5.7 trillion, while reducing the top tax rate to 25 percent. The proposal would balance in 10 years.

The Senate Democratic plan, from Chairwoman Patty Murray (D-Wash.) would raise $1 trillion in new taxes, and would not balance.

Obama last week, though, defended the Democratic approach and said he was less concerned with balancing the budget than he was with continuing economic growth.

In an interview with ABC, Obama said he would not “chase a balanced budget just for the sake of balance.”

"My goal is how do we grow the economy, put people back to work, and if we do that we are going to be bringing in more revenue," he said.

“The president has a different belief than we do. He believes deficits don't matter; we do,” said McCarthy on Sunday. “This president has never missed on a deadline turning in a March Madness bracket, but four out of five times he's missed turning in a budget.”

The top Democrat  on the House Budget committee, Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), however said that while his party was concerned about the deficit, the current focus should be on job growth.

“Right now, our big problem is to sustain the economic recovery,” said Van Hollen. “We've seen momentum in the job market, and the last thing we want to do right now is to put the brakes on that.”

“What the president is saying is our focus right now should be to get people back to work, sustain the recovery, and then reduce the deficit in a measured, balanced way,” he added. “There's no doubt that we have to do it, and the budgets the president will present and the ones we will present will do that.”

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FIFA Investigates Claims That Nigera Banned Lesbians From Playing Soccer

Members of Nigeria's women's national soccer team

The Nigerian Football Federation has officially banned lesbians from participating in competition in the country, the chair of the Nigeria Women’s Football League announced Thursday. The move has drawn an inquiry from FIFA, soccer’s international governing body, since such a ban would violate its anti-discrimination policy.

Nigeria is one of several African countries that have moved to legally ban homosexuality, and Nigerian club officials have boasted of driving lesbians from the game before, but under the new policy, lesbian players will be disqualified from competition and won’t be allowed to join the national team, NWFL chair Dilichukwu Onyedinma said, according to Inside World Football:

“Any player that we find is associated with it will be disqualified.

“We will call the club chairmen to control their players, and such players will not be able to play for the national team,” said Onyedinma. She said the governing body will work with clubs to stop the practice.”

While outright bans on lesbians are obviously (and thankfully) rare, discrimination aimed at gay female athletes is hardly limited to soccer or to Nigeria. The push for LGBT equality in sports has largely focused on men while gay women athletes get ignored, since the stereotypical female athlete is often already presumed to be gay. As Deadspin’s Barry Petchesky wrote when American soccer star Megan Rapinoe came out ahead of the 2012 Olympics, “An openly gay female athlete almost isn’t news. A lesbian in the locker room conforms to a stereotype, just as a straight male athlete is a stereotype.”

But in both American and international sports, there is “an amazing division between lesbians and straight women in sports” that persists because straight women don’t want to be stereotyped as gay, Dr. Pat Griffin, a professor and advocate for LGBT rights in sports, has said before. That has led to discrimination against female athletes who actually are gay and a culture, particularly in American college sports, where both coaches and players are expected to “be straight, or at the very least, act straight.” It’s no wonder then, that many lesbian athletes wait until their careers are over to come out of the closet.

So while Nigeria’s ban is uniquely horrific, and while FIFA will hopefully help put an end to it, it is emblematic of a larger sports culture that remains tilted against LGBT equality not just for men but for women too.

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Historic Blizzard Poised to Strike New England: What Role Is Climate Change Playing?

An epic blizzard is bearing down on New England — fed in part by relatively warm coastal waters.

I asked Dr. Kevin Trenberth, former head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, to comment on the role climate change has on this storm. He explained:

This is a perfect set up for a big storm, with the combination of two parts: a disturbance from the Gulf region with lots of moisture and a cold front from the west.Ingredients for a big snow storm include temperatures just below freezing. In the past temperatures at this time of year would have been a lot below freezing but the ability to hold moisture in the atmosphere goes down by 7% per degree C (4% per deg F), and so in the past we would have had a snow storm but not these amounts.The moisture flow into the storm is also important and that is enhanced by higher than normal sea surface temperatures (SSTs). These are higher by about 1 deg C [almost 2°F] than a normal (pre-1980) due to global warming and so that adds about 10% to the potential for a big snow.

Every storm and “event” is unique. It always has unique ingredients. So it is hard if not impossible to take apart, because any piece missing means the storm behaves differently. So event attribution is not well posed. Instead we look for the environment in which the storm is occurring and how that has changed to make conditions warmer and moister over the oceans.

Like a baseball player on steroids, our climate system is breaking records at an unnatural pace. And like a baseball player on steroids, it’s the wrong question to ask whether a given home run is “caused” by steroids. As Trenberth wrote in his must-read analaysis, “How To Relate Climate Extremes to Climate Change,” the “answer to the oft-asked question of whether an event is caused by climate change is that it is the wrong question. All weather events are affected by climate change because the environment in which they occur is warmer and moister than it used to be.”

On the warmer SSTs, Climate Central’s Andrew Freedman explains:

As was the case when Hurricane Sandy struck in late October, sea-surface temperatures are running a couple degrees above average off the East Coast, which according to climate scientists may reflect both natural climate variability and the effects of manmade global warming.

The presence of unusually warm waters could aid in the rapid development of the storm system, and infuse it with additional moisture, thereby increasing snowfall totals.

Heavy precipitation events in the Northeast, including both rain and snowstorms, have been increasing in the past few decades, in a trend that a new federal climate report links to manmade global climate change. As the world has warmed, more moisture has been added to the atmosphere, giving storms additional energy to work with, and makingprecipitation extremes more common in many places.

Sea surface temperature anomalies off the East Coast. Credit Wunderground/NOAA via CC.

The blizzard is also pulling in an extraordinary amount of moisture, which is consistent with recent trends in the Northeast toward more frequent one-day precipitation extremes during the cold season, including snowstorms. The satellite-derived image of total precipitable water shows that the storm has been drawing tropical moisture from the Pacific Ocean, Gulf of Mexico, and the Atlantic Ocean

Trenberth’s second point is an important one — warmer than normal winters favor snow storms (See “We get more snow storms in warm years“). A 2006 study, “Temporal and Spatial Characteristics of Snowstorms in the Contiguous United States“ found we are seeing more northern snow storms and that we get more snow storms in warmer years:

The temporal distribution of snowstorms exhibited wide fluctuations during 1901-2000…. Upward trends occurred in the upper Midwest, East, and Northeast, and the national trend for 1901-2000 was upward, corresponding to trends in strong cyclonic activity….

Assessment of the January-February temperature conditions again showed that most of the United States had 71%-80% of their snowstorms in warmer-than-normal years….  a future with wetter and warmer winters, which is one outcome expected (National Assessment Synthesis Team 2001), will bring more snowstorms than in 1901-2000. Agee (1991) found that long-term warming trends in the United States were associated with increasing cyclonic activity in North America, further indicating that a warmer future climate will generate more winter storms.

The U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) U.S. Climate Impacts Report from 2009 reviewed that literature and concluded, “Cold-season storm tracks are shifting northward and the strongest storms are likely to become stronger and more frequent.

So it is no surprise that a 2012 study found extreme snowstorms and deluges are becoming more frequent and more severe. Freedman points out:

For the northern hemisphere as a whole, winter storms have become more common and intense during the past 50 years, according to the draft federal report. Observed changes in winter air circulation in the northern hemisphere, possibly related to Arctic sea ice loss, has been linked to large swings in seasonal snowfall from one winter to the next in the Northeast. Other studies indicate that as global warming continues, nor’easters such as the one about to hit New England may become more frequent in this region, and less common in the Mid-Atlantic states, as storm tracks shift closer to the poles.

Again, the Northeast has been especially vulnerable to deluges and Snowmaggedons, experiencing a sharp increase in one-day precipitation extremes during the October to March cold season:

The other big impact of global warming on the destructiveness of superstorms like this (and Sandy) is sea level rise:

The coastal flooding threat for this storm in New York pales in comparison to what it was during Hurricane Sandy, when large parts of the city’s iconic subway system flooded in the face of a record storm surge, and many New Yorkers drowned in flood waters.

Rising sea levels due to warming seas and melting ice caps are already making typical nor’easters such as the upcoming event more damaging, since they provide the storms with a higher launching pad for causing coastal flooding. According to the draft National Climate Assessment report released in January, even without any changes in storms, the chance of what is now a 1-in-10-year coastal flood event in the Northeast could triple by 2100, occurring once every 3 years, due to rising sea levels.

According to research by Climate Central scientists, the sea level trend in Boston Harbor from 1959 to 2008 in Boston Harbor has been 2.31 milimeters per year, which is slightly below the global average over the same period. In the past 50 years, the water level has risen by about 4.5 inches at that location, although it has increased much more in other spots along the northeastern coast.

On Nantucket Island, where coastal flooding is anticipated from this storm along with hurricane-force winds, the sea level has risen by about half a foot during the past 50 years.

People should take the weather forecasts of this storm seriously and act accordingly.

Similarly, the nation should take seriously the climatic projections of ever worsening storms from global warming — and act accordingly.

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Teenager Accidentally Kills Brother While Playing With Mother’s Gun

A 14-year-old in Henry County, Georgia unintentionally shot and killed his 15-year-old brother early Saturday morning while playing with his mother’s gun, according to police. The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports that charges may be brought against the teenager and his mother, who have not yet been named. Though the mother left the handgun unloaded, the brothers were apparently still able to use it:

The brothers, along with a friend who was spending the night, had gotten the mother’s handgun, “which at the time had been unloaded,” [Police Sargent] Smith said.
“During the course of the evening and early morning hours, one of the boys had evidently loaded the weapon, Smith said. “The 14-year-old at some point pointed the weapon at his brother and pulled the trigger, which resulted in the 15-year-old being struck in the chest area.”

The number of children killed in accidental shootings increased from 68 in 2009 to 84 in 2010, reversing a 20-year decline. There were 851 accidental gun deaths of all ages in 2011, up from 606 the previous year.

Saturday’s Gun Appreciation Day provided several more examples of how responsible gun ownership can still lead to tragedy; 5 people were accidentally shot at 3 different gun shows around the country.

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The Republican Party is playing a dangerous game

From the diaries.

There’s a lot to like about Paul Ryan’s budget proposal. It cuts some spending. It flattens the tax code down to just two individual marginal tax rates. It also includes some innovative policies designed to halt the unsustainable growth of health care entitlement spending. However, on balance, the budget is disappointing for fiscal conservatives for two main reasons: It waives the spending restraint that was agreed to in last year’s debt limit deal, and it doesn’t balance the budget until 2040. Broken promises and unbalanced budgets as far as the eye can see are neither good policy nor a good campaign rallying cry.

Last year, an agreement was reached in which Republicans gave President Obama a massive increase in the debt ceiling, in exchange for promised spending cuts that supposedly had “real teeth.” As part of the deal, Congressman Ryan and most Republicans voted to require an annual spending cap and $110 billion in automatic spending cuts for next year – otherwise known as “sequestration” – if the so-called “super-committee” failed to find $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction.

Since the predictable collapse of the super-committee, the House GOP should have been working toward a budget proposal that allows for the sequester to take place for the coming year. Such a budget would include the $110 billion in reductions. Ryan’s budget achieves vastly less. It contains $19 billion in discretionary savings and, at most, $53 billion in cuts to mandatory spending — $38 billion short. Thus, it leaves House Republicans breaking the terms of the deal they agreed to just seven months ago.

That debt ceiling agreement provided that half of those cuts would come from defense spending, and half from non-defense spending. Some conservatives object to that level of defense cuts. Fine. The key to the agreement was securing the total $110 billion reduction in spending, not which part of the budget was cut. If some want to rearrange the location of the cuts, that would be fine, as long as the overall magnitude of the spending restraint was sustained.

House leaders claim they are making more overall cuts. However, they are clearly short of the requirements for next year and are pushing the deepest cuts out into the future. We’ve seen this movie before. Lots of times. In other words, they are kicking the can down the road . . . again. No matter how you slice it, the Ryan budget breaks the promise of spending restraint that was agreed to in exchange for raising the debt limit. And make no mistake, we’re not just arguing over $38 billion. Now that this budget breaks that deal, both parties will work to unravel the entire $1.2 trillion in sequestered cuts. Don’t be surprised if the full unraveling happens later this year.

A group of fiscal conservatives in the House, the Republican Study Committee, has proposed a budget that balances in five years. It contains strong tax reform and spending restraint. In addition, the RSC deals with Social Security, an entitlement program left untouched by the Ryan budget. And just like the Ryan budget, the RSC plan shifts the burden of the sequester away from defense, but preserves, and in fact exceeds, the overall spending reduction level agreed to last year. That is the right way forward.

By waiving the sequester and refusing to balance the budget until 2040, the Ryan budget and the Republican Party are playing a dangerous game. It is hard to have confidence that our long-term fiscal challenges will be met responsibly when the same Congress that passed the August debt deal wants to ignore it less than one year later.

America does not have thirty years to balance the budget. We may not have ten. We hope that fiscal conservatives will take a harder look at the House GOP budget, and ask themselves if they can and should demand more.

Chris Chocola
President – Club for Growth

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