Quick Hits

Quick Hits is a segment that highlights a couple of stories that aren’t quite enough for a post of their own.

• A President’s budget proposal is usually more of a political document than an actual spending plan. And the Trump budget will be vastly different from what actually eventually gets passed in Congress. But most Presidents don’t usually propose budgets that target their own base of support. Of course, it will also hurt the poor and minorities even harder than most. Whether that’s enough to make Trump’s white working class voters grin and bear the pain they will endure remains to be seen. But Democrats should be able to club this budget to death with its enormous tax breaks for the top 1% at the expense of everyone else, especially Trump voters.

• There has been recent chatter about California adopting its own single payer plan. A new analysis shows that to do so would require about $50 billion to $100 billion in additional revenue. Considering California’s entire budget is $200 billion that seems like a tall order. A similar situation happened with Vermont’s attempt at single payer. There it was determined that it would cost about $2 billion which was nearly as large as the state’s entire budget. In order to pay for that, it was estimated that there would have to be an across-the-board income tax increase of nearly 12%. I know that makes it a political non-starter in this country these days. But I will just note that I currently pay about 12% of my income for my current health insurance. So, for me at least, it would be a wash. For others, of course, an increase like that would be devastating. For a different group, however, an increase like that would just put a minor crimp in their lifestyle. As Atrios says again and again, if we want nice stuff, we may just have to pay a little more to get it.

• I’ve noticed a real sea change in the MSNBC coverage today and I’m not sure it’s not also percolating throughout the mainstream media. The coverage keeps harping on the fact that it is now clear that there were multiple and concerning contacts between the Trump campaign and the Russians throughout the election. Intelligence officials knew about these problematic contacts, but the American voter by and large went to the polls without that important knowledge. And the media is wondering why that happened, while leaving the question largely unanswered and ignoring their own obsession with “emails”. And, of course, never mentioning the interference of James Comey. But it seems that the media is starting to lay the groundwork for the revelation that there was collusion. The intelligence community knew about it, and yet the American voter was kept in the dark. All of this is colored by the fact that no one, the intelligence agencies, the Obama administration, and the media ever expected Trump to win so it was always kind of a moot subject.