What is the best choice? Rework the bill or pass it and embellish over the next few years? Let’s hear your thoughts for our East Calaveras community:
Some are saying: Bill Clinton is right on this one..We have to pass this watered down bill in order to get the ball rolling on changing healthcare reform and improving the bill over the years.
Rome wasn’t built in a day.
I can understand the frustration of my fellow progressives but we still fail to remember history
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
1994
I can’t understand this ALL OR NOTHING attitude with the democrats with regards to this healthcare bill? What is that going to accomplish? The bottom line is that if we don’t pass a healthcare bill with or without public option the obama administration, the democratic party will go down in flames in 2010 and 2012. The insurance companies will still jack up rates and drop folks with pre existing conditions and still cherry pick folks cause there will be no laws in place to make them change.
If we don’t pass a piece of legislation that begins the process of healthcare reform than that chance will be forever squandered cause no other president will attempt to go down this path again. If we have gotten this far and nothing happens, then we deserve what we get by the voters next year. Meanwhile everything stays the same. Skyrocketing healthcare costs, medicare going broke and republicans sweeping 2010 and President Obama trying to govern with a republican house and senate cause folks are fed up with this party.
Get the ball rolling and build on it over the years. Get half a loaf now and then next year add amendements that will improve the bill. Medicare and Social Security were shit bills when they passed but over the years it was improved the same thing can happen with this healthcare bill.
excerpted from Whitehouse.gov today. Should we hold our own local forum on jobs? We held a similar-type event about this time last year on health care:
This Thursday, the President is hosting a discussion at the White House to explore every possible avenue for job creation and get ideas from CEOs, small business owners, economists, financial experts, labor union representatives, nonprofit groups and regular Americans who have felt the impact of this economic crisis firsthand.
But you don’t need to be at the event in DC to participate. Today we’re announcing nationwide community job forums that will run from November 30th through December 13th. These discussions, among neighbors, co-workers and friends, will be a source of insights and ideas that will inform the President’s approach to job creation. Through WhiteHouse.gov, hosts can upload the results of their discussions. Back here at the White House, we’ll compile the feedback into a report that will be sent to the Oval Office for review.
Let us know if you are interested in organizing a jobs forum in your community, and we’ll follow up with discussion questions and other materials to make your event as productive as possible. We’re not able to offer an events center where you can find events already happening, so if you haven’t heard of one in your area, start your own and reach out to your network for participants.
This just in:
Dear Friends,
The Thanksgiving holiday provided a much-needed break from the go-go-go of our Congressional campaign. It also gave me time to revisit a question I’d asked myself 6 months ago: where and how can I do the most good for our community. Then, the answer was “Congress.” Now, the answer is different.
The more I have spoken to people about what I can contribute to public policy and the more I have listened to their concerns, the clearer it has become that my best opportunity for service lies right here at home. Working to develop the new energy economy and the green jobs we need is the challenge I truly want to tackle. Consequently, I am ending my campaign for Congress and will turn my full attention to the tremendous opportunities facing SMUD and the alternative energy start-ups locating here.
The window of opportunity for establishing our region as one of the nation’s hubs for this emerging industry will not stay open long. We have to seize the momentum now.
This morning I shared my decision to withdraw from the Congressional race with Dr. Ami Bera and offered him my support. I wish him well and look forward to working with him on these issues when he is our next Representative in Congress.
Thank you to everyone who contributed time, talent and money so that I could mount a campaign for Congress. It was an honor to have your confidence and support. Over the next week, I will make every effort to thank you personally. I remain optimistic about the extraordinary things good people working together can accomplish for our community.
Gratefully,Bill
GovTrack.us is a site used by congressional aides and representatives and I added it over on the right for easy access to things like the status of U.S. federal legislation, voting records for the Senate and House of Representatives, information on Members of Congressdistrict maps, as well as congressional committees and the Congressional Record.
The site is a research tool (much like the government website THOMAS but better), but also a free tracking service. Pick up Trackers throughout the site to make a personalized feed or get email updates. You can also embed a few widgets on your own webpage to keep your visitors up to date about legislation.
Innovation and experimentation is also a large part of GovTrack. We have a unique community Q&A system: ask a question about a bill and see if other visitors will provide an answer. That’s worked surprisingly well. We also invented an advanced bill text viewer and track tweets about bills.
Read this on www.dailykos.com today. The comments are good too!
Alliterative titles often have power.
“Cash for Clunkers” just rolled off the tongue and the program helped cars roll off dealers’ lots, providing a tangible economic boost while also (somewhat) providing a bump to automotive fuel efficiency.
“Cash for Caulkers” might just be the next talk of the nation as President Obama has heard, from multiple paths, proposals for another CfC program to help spark economic activity, create jobs, and help shift America’s energy patterns and practices toward a more sustainable future.
While off-and-on, there have been many programs for tax credits for home energy efficiency (right now, 30% of the bill up to $5000). These tax credits seem to work on the margins and still leave us with the reality that the average home is energy inefficient and that there are viable paths toward making significant dents in that inefficiency. Cash for Caulkers would seek to change this in a dramatic fashion.
And, it is something that President Obama is considering.
Earlier this month, at a PERAB (President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board) meeting (pdf transcript), John Doerr called for a Green Jobs focus:
In the very near term, the way we can generate the most jobs, we believe, is through home retrofits. We have 17 percent of our construction workers who are out of work today, and there’s about 200,000 home retrofits done per year in the United States. But over the course of the next 20 years, we probably ought to be doing (inaudible) each year, these retrofits, or saving the energy that’s wasted, up to 40 percent in 100 million American homes. And I haven’t begun to talk about our schools or our small businesses.
Were we to develop a program to do that, we could create hundreds of thousands, even a million jobs in a year, in a permanent new industry — high-wage jobs, that are not going to be outsourced, and where the savings from doing this work, stay in the pockets of America’s consumers.
Absolutely — if anything, this probably understates the potential.
By the way,let’s take a moment to remember that America’s built infrastructure is accountable for roughly 40 percent of US emissions (roughly half in homes). A path to carve out that 40 percent of low-hanging fruit of waste could save the economy and individuals tremendous amounts of money while making a real dent in our pollution loads.
I think one of the keys to doing this is to engage private capital and the private sector in making that happen. The way I like to put it is, Cash for Clunkers mobilized all of America’s car dealerships and caused change very rapidly. Well, the equivalent of that for home retrofits would be “Cash for Caulkers” — (laughter) — and what we would do is engage private enterprise, the likes of a Lowe’s or a Home Depot, these organizations that have tens of millions of people a week coming into their storefronts, and use that private capital to incentivize consumers to then work with our out-of-work trades — remodelers, production builders — to do this kind of work. So we want to touch all three of those parties.
The devil is in the details and Doerr’s proposal, at least to me at this time, is not available.
How much cash should go upfront? What percentages? What sort of controls over the program? How long to run this?
For 100 million homes, if you would really reach them, we have the potential for a huge bill, dwarfing potentially by an several orders of magnitude the Cash For Clunkers few $billions.
Now, have to say that I have some confidence that Doerr’s proposal had mainly strong elements as he worked with groups like Efficiency First in developing it.
Anna Burger, SEIU, also chimed in:
I just want to jump in a little bit because I think that the work that John has done and everybody has done about the whole issue about weatherization and retrofitting has been incredibly exciting. And we have an opportunity to really put a lot of people to work, probably more people to work in the first quarter of next year in a faster way than most of the investment in new technology and new innovation. So we can actually put people to work quickly.
And I think we also have the capacity to have people prepare and train to do these jobs because, you know, we have, through the labor movement, we have got great training programs
Before moving “past” PERAB, it is worthwhile to look at how Doerr concluded his statement in the PERAB’s public meeting:
In closing on this idea, I don’t want to lose sight of the big picture, and that is the most — and we recommended it to you before — we agree the most important thing we could do to have America lead in this industry and generate a lot of jobs fast is to put a price on carbon; a price and a cap on carbon. So we’ve got to stay the course with the climate legislation. And the reason is really simple: More money flows through private markets in a day than through all the governments in the world in a year. We can offer this incentive or that incentive, but once we put a price on carbon, all those financial markets, like a thundering herd of profit maximizers, are going to go invest in these homes, in these (inaudible), in all these innovations.
Doerr: “Stay the course with the climate legislation”.
According to the NYTimes,
The Doerr plan would cost $23 billion over two years. Most of the money would go for incentive payments, generally $2,000 to $4,000, for weatherization projects. The homeowner would always have to pay at least 50 percent of the project’s total cost. About $3 billion would be set aside for retailers and contractors in the hope that they would promote the program, much as car dealerships promoted cash for clunkers.
This would, roughly, suggest the potential to touch about 10 million American homes. The shift from 30 to 50 percent isn’t, likely, the key thing, the reality is that upfront money, essentially taken off at the cash register, rather than an eventual ‘funny money’ rebate likely would draw people in. (And, considering the advertising we see about “30% tax credit”, hard to see the necessity for 15% of the funding to be put aside to subsidize the advertising industry.)
Now, Doerr isn’t the only one sending the concept to Obama. As per today’s New York Times, President Clinton sent a Clinton Climate Initiative proposal for a Cash for Caulkers program. One of the elements of the CCI proposal is the very sensible path of rolling repayment of energy efficiency costs into real estate tax payments, so that energy savings would be less than the payback costs and this would eliminate the “I might move in two years and thus don’t want to sink the money into the house” calculation. The payoff of lower energy bills and the payment for the projects to produce them would be for the next homeowners. (This is happening, increasingly, across the nation with this option recently becoming law in New York.)
“Cash for Caulking” potentially is a powerful path forward.
Will it include something like the United Kingdom’s program for door-to-door offering of free home energy audits? Will it provide tangible paths for benefiting renters? Will it help cut energy costs, spark employment, and do so in a path that will have the potential to pay for itself (through increased tax revenue and reduced government assistance to un/underemployed people)?
The devil truly is in the details … and those details might prove a devil of an opportunity.
So over the past few decades, different age cohorts have generally become more Democratic, or stayed about the same at the presidential level. That doesn’t mean the same thing will happen over the next thirty years, but it does mean that it’s simply not true that people become more conservative as they age.
That’s the conclusion drawn by a blogger hosting a diary on www.dailykos.com, the sixteenth in a series taking a close look at the 2008 electorate and exploring three themes: diversity within demographics, progressive feedback loops, and demographic change. Good stuff!
Thanks so much to the Torchia’s, Domenic and Nancy, for hosting the Boxer house party today. Thanks also to everyone who joined the party and contributed donations or committed time to help the Senator win re-election.
Senator Boxer took a question from Tuolumne Democrat Jerry South – who asked, “What should be done to keep green infrastructure jobs from going overseas to China?” Before answering, Barbara commented this was a terrific question.
If you’re thinking, “Darn, I missed the party!”, well, all is not lost. Click on the ActBlue Contribute button over there to the right and you too can make a Boxer donation on behalf of our local Democratic Club. Let’s show Barbara some love from Calaveras County!
