Sunday School 9/16/18

FEMA administrator Brock Long made the rounds today, hitting three of our classrooms: Face the Nation, Meet the Press and Fox News Sunday  We'll look at each of those appearances in reverse order.

Before we get into the interviews, here's a quick refresher on the current investigation into Long's potential abuse of official cars.

The IG is investigating whether Long misused government resources and personnel on trips back home to Hickory, NC, on the weekends, said two of the officials. The IG's interest was drawn after one of the vehicles - a black Suburban - was involved in an accident, according to one of the officials. 

There's also noise that Kirstjen Nielsen was concerned about Long's frequent trips home and extensive time out of the office, and that she had talked to him about that - and about resigning.

Chris Wallace didn't mention the investigation, and instead spent the bulk of the interview focused on Hurricane Florence, with only a little bit of time on Puerto Rico and Hurricane Maria. On the former, Long expressed confidence that FEMA was well positioned and cooperating effectively with state and local officials in the Carolinas. On the latter, Wallace asked a "simple factual question" whether Long disputed the 3,000 hurricane-related deaths. The response was, well, less than simple. Here's part of it:

Well, there are several different studies that are all over the place when it comes to death; in the official stance of FEMA is we don't count deaths. You know, the only thing that would come remotely close to data that we would have is the funeral benefits that we push forward... And there is a difference between direct deaths and indirect deaths. One study could have studied the entire year that's gone by about a number of indirect deaths over time or whatever, versus a six-month study in George Washington. 

So, that's -- you know, there's a lot of issues with numbers being all over the place. It's hard to tell what's accurate and what's not, but we have got to come together as a country to focus on the rebuilding of Puerto Rico and building a resilient infrastructure... 

Frustrated, indeed - by the numbers that were made up to make him look bad.

Let's look at Long's answer to Chuck Todd's question about that 'make president look bad' thing:

Well I mean there's, I don't think the studies, I don't know why the studies were done. I mean, I think what we're trying to do, in my opinion, what we've got to do is figure out why people die, from direct deaths, which is the wind, the water and the waves, you know, building collapsing, which is probably where the 65 number came from. And then there's indirect deaths. So, the George Washington study looked at what happened six months after the fact.

And you know, what happens is -- and even in this event, you might see more deaths indirectly occur as time goes on because people have heart attacks due to stress. They fall off their house trying to fix their roof. They die in car crashes because they, they went through an intersection where stoplights weren't working/ You know the other thing that goes on, there's all kinds of studies on this that we take a look at. Spousal abuse goes through the roof. You can't blame spousal abuse, you know, after a disaster on anybody.

Stop right there and re-read that italicized sentence again, maybe a couple of times. Because I'm pretty darn sure that you can always blame spousal abuse on the spouse, hurricane or no.  That's a shocking comment for Long - or anyone - to have made. I can't wait for the president to retweet this one.

On CBS, John Dickerson talked about interrupted medical care, which accounted for a large percentage of  Katrina deaths, and Maria deaths as well; he also specifically asked who at FEMA contributed to the George Washington University report. This answer, too, is shocking, but for a different reason.

Yeah, I don't know who they interviewed within the agency. They may have looked at funeral benefits to help, you know, calculate whatever number. And that's a number, you know, that's the only number we would really be able to contribute to any study going forward...

So, multiple times today, Long had the chance to clarify what FEMA knows about the death toll from Hurricane Maria, by simply offering up the funeral benefits figure he cited as facts FEMA could provide. And he didn't do it.  That none of the interviewers asked for death figures shows a lack of curiosity on their part as well.

Long also has zero curiosity about his own agency, to the point that since the GW study came out at the end of August, he hasn't even found out who at FEMA provided information or what information was provided.  How is that even possible? If he knows there was no 'interview' per se but just a data capture, he should have said that, too.

See you around campus.

Sunday School 10/1/17

We only had time for a couple of quick classroom visits today.

First, we checked in with John Dickerson on CBS' Face the Nation. Guests today included House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. A lot of the discussion was on the new tax plan that the Republicans have been pitching. 

Needless to say, there's a difference of opinion between what Ryan and Schumer think will make sense for the middle class, who are the targets? objects? pinatas? of the new tax plan. Here's part of what Ryan said.

Well, first of all, the whole purpose of this is to get a middle class tax cut, to help the people who are working paycheck to paycheck and keep more of their own hard-earned dollars. They haven't had a break in a long time. Our economy's been growing between one and two percent for a long time. We haven't had three percent growth in about a decade, and that means workers are struggling.

Dickerson asked specifically what would happen to the blue collar worker's paycheck, and pressed Ryan for a promise (which I think was a waste of time, but maybe that's just me). Here's Ryan:

You know some money's coming to you. We're going to double that standard deduction. We're going to make it so he can fill out his taxes on a postcard. We're going to lower his taxes. That's really important. So he has more take-home pay. But here's another component to that is look at this machine shop, this business pays about a 40% tax rage but it competes with companies all around the world who pay an average 22 1/2% on their taxes.

So we're going to lower the taxes on this business so it's globally competitive, so it can compete with its foreign competition. And then we're going to give this business an ability to write off investments they make in this business to buy more machines, to hire more workers, to raise wages. That, to us, is really important.  

Dickerson pushed some more, noting that it sounded like rich people (estate tax people, carried interest people, the alternative minimum tax folks - they make out great, what about the middle class? Ryan, again:

Can I go through that? Can I get through that? We're going to double your standard deductions so you can file your taxes on a postcard. We're going to take people who are in the 10% bracket and put a lot of that money in a zero% bracket. We're taking the 15% bracket down to 12%. We're going to get rid of the marriage penalty. We're going to increase the child tax credit. We're going to maintain critical things like incentive for home buying, charitable giving, education,. Those are all middle class tax things. The purpose of this is to help people who are living by a paycheck keep more of their own hard-earned money but also get more jobs, a faster-growing economy.

And on and on it went.  Ryan pushed the "American businesses pay 40%" mumbo jumbo, which we know is not the case most of the time, and even when Dickerson pushed back, he didn't back away. We need to help our businesses compete by lowering taxes, period end of sentence seemed to be the answer. He promised a deficit-neutral plan, and that a growing economy will help us retire out debt more quickly, and he talked about entitlement reforms. He talked about doing things in 'regular order' and he talked about doing things via reconciliation (the process that brought reforming the ACA to its knees) as if you could follow both of those processes at the same time.

And, he noted bipartisanly,

We do work with Democrats, but we're not going to give Chuck Schumer the ability to filibuster this bill because we think that would derail tax reform. 

Which segues nicely into Dickerson's discussion with Schumer, disagreed with basically everything Ryan said.

We Democrats sent a letter to the Republican leadership and the president, said that here were three things that we thought that tax reform ought to have. 1) Tax breaks out not to go to the top 1% but ought to be focused on the middle class.  2) it out not to blow a hole in the deficit and 3) it ought to be done in a bipartisan way, not through reconciliation.

Unfortunately, the Republican plan doesn't agree with any of those. First, it's completely focused on the wealthy and the powerful not on the middle class Second, it blows a huge hole in the deficit. And third, they said they're going to do it through reconciliation. That's a partisan process. It excludes Democrats. It's the same process that led to the demise on health care. And let me just address one thing, John. Speaker Ryan keeps saying it helps the middle class. That's not true. What he's saying and what the plan is are totally different. 

Schumer pointed out that the tax policy center said

...80% of the tax breaks in their plan are aimed at that top 1%. And the top .1%, the people who make over $5 million, who are one in 1000, get a tax break of over a million dollars.

And he also pointed out the loss of state and local deductibility, which will likely be lost (because it doesn't fit on a postcard, I'm assuming). And, he pointed out the huge failure of the Kansas experiment, which was all about cutting taxes and the miraculous growth that would come from that.

They dramatically cut taxes and said "There's going to be growth and an increase in the surplus." Well, after they did it, they predicted the surplus would go up $300 million; it went down $700 million. They had to cut money for schools and infrastructure And then they had to put in a tax increase. 

And so it goes. And so it goes.

Quickly, here's what was happening at Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, who was joined by Brock Long, the head of FEMA.

As background, the mayor of San Juan is chastising Trump for not responding quickly enough after Hurricane Maria; Trump is criticizing her leadership, slamming Puerto Ricans, and tweeting his brains out to the people of Puerto Rico (the majority of whom are without power or communications) about #fakenews, those pesky reports that administration is not doing enough, fast enough, to help compared to what they did in other areas.

Long talked about his pushing forward, pushing in and pushing forward (it started to feel a little creep there for a bit) and in the end Chris Wallace asked what it was going to look like for Puerto Rico in the coming weeks.

Weeks from now? Well, you know, the key is, it's a couple of factors. Right now, you know, many days ago, we mission-assigned the Army Corps of Engineers to do one very important job, emergency power, but also begin rebuilding the grid. So, getting power back is obviously the most important thing.

In conjunction with that we're trying to work with the private sector to get telecommunications back up. The governor's reporting this morning that about a third of telecommunications has been put back up after two major hurricanes an all the equipment that was damaged, telecommunications is about a third, you know, back up and running. 

So, we have to get the power up. We have to get communications back up And then the bottom line is, that that takes a long time because it was almost a total loss when it comes to the power grid. And so, it's going to be multiple - multiple months before power is restored to many of these areas and that's just a reality. 

That's what we were saying before the storm hit and I think people have to remember that. Going into the storm, we were -- we were setting expectations that this is going to be a nightmare for Puerto Rico. 

There's your "fake news" right there, folks. From the horse's mouth.

See you around campus.