Who wins under Paul Ryan's budget plan?

Chait: "Americans overwhelmingly oppose cuts to Medicare and Medicaid. Ryan understands he can only make his plan acceptable if those cuts are seen as necessary to save the programs.

And certainly some level of cutting is necessary. But Ryan's level of cutting goes far beyond what's needed to preserve those programs, and it does so in order to clear room for a very large, regressive tax cut. He is making a choice -- not just cut Medicare to save Medicare, but also to cut Medicare in order to cut taxes for the rich."

Barack Obama and Bradley Manning

A petition: "President Obama was once a professor of constitutional law, and entered the national stage as an eloquent moral leader. The question now, however, is whether his conduct as commander in chief meets fundamental standards of decency. He should not merely assert that Manning’s confinement is “appropriate and meet[s] our basic standards,” as he did recently. He should require the Pentagon publicly to document the grounds for its extraordinary actions—and immediately end those that cannot withstand the light of day."

Can Obama be trusted on civil liberties?

No: "Since his January 2009 inauguration, President Obama has embraced positions that he denounced as a candidate, presided over a War on Drugs every bit as absurd as it's always been, asserted the unchecked, unreviewable power to name American citizens enemy combatants and assassinate them, and launched a war without seeking Congressional authorization. His attorney general's efforts to live up to his boss' campaign rhetoric have been thwarted at every turn. And presiding over the disgraceful treatment of Bradley Manning, he has lost the right even to tout his record on detainee policy. On civil liberties, President Obama cannot be trusted."

Adam Serwer on Obama's failures

Co-sign.: "Point is, though, if you voted for Obama in 2008 expecting a restoration of the rule of law, a rejection of the Bush national-security paradigm or even a candidate who wouldn't rush headlong into wars in Muslim countries expecting to turn back the current of history through mere force of will, then you don't have a candidate for 2012. You probably don't have a party either."

Corporate America has a smaller tax bill than you do

Nancy Folbre: Tax Havens and Treasure Hunts - NYTimes.com:

"Our budget deficit would be smaller – and pressure to cut social programs lower – if corporate tax revenues had not declined over time relative to gross domestic product and relative to individual income tax revenues.

Corporate America is a world leader in creative tax minimization. As David Kocieniewski reported in The New York Times, General Electric used some particularly innovative strategies to take advantage of overseas tax havens, including “offshore profit-shifting.”

The Boeing Corporation, a major federal contractor, has had a net rebate in federal taxes over the last three years, and a total tax rate of 4.5 percent over the last five years, though the company points to pension contributions and research credits that have reduced the bill.

In 2008, the Government Accountability Office reported that 83 of the 100 largest publicly traded corporations in the United States had subsidiaries in jurisdictions listed as tax havens; it cautiously emphasized that this did not prove that their decisions to locate there were motivated by tax minimization."

Single-Tasking Sundays: Week One

The first Single-Tasking Sunday is over, and I think I can call it a success. I confess to using my phone to make a call and peak in the world on Sunday morning, but otherwise managed to keep the day clear of e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, and a host of other electronic distractions. In the morning, we had breakfast and read the papers. (Actual papers.) Around midday we did some housecleaning. In the afternoon, my wife and I went to see a movie and have dinner. Very relaxing all around.

In some respects, it wasn't an extraordinary day. It was just ... quieter. Two moments stood out for me.

• We took a brief break from our mid-day chores. Often, these 10-minute breaks involve iPhones, iPads, and all manner of diddling around—to the point that chores are never returned to. On Sunday, I just sat. We had a Billie Holiday album playing on our sound system, and so I listened. Music is often background noise for me; on Sunday, for a few minutes, it moved to the foreground.

• At dinner, I found myself talking to my wife, instead of fiddling with my iPhone. (I left it at home to ensure some discipline.) Sure, there were moments of silence, but I didn't fill them with my usual e-diddling. We just took in each other's company.

I'm not sure what will come of this exercise in electronics-free Sundays. But if all I get are a few stolen moments of silence and serenity, that will probably be enough to justify this exercise.

Today in inequality reading: Real economic stability

New York Times:

"But many of the jobs being added in retail, hospitality and home health care, to name a few categories, are unlikely to pay enough for workers to cover the cost of fundamentals like housing, utilities, food, health care, transportation and, in the case of working parents, child care.

A separate report being released Friday tries to go beyond traditional measurements like the poverty line and minimum wage to show what people need to earn to achieve a basic standard of living.

The study, commissioned by Wider Opportunities for Women, a nonprofit group, builds on an analysis the group and some state and local partners have been conducting since 1995 on how much income it takes to meet basic needs without relying on public subsidies. The new study aims to set thresholds for economic stability rather than mere survival, and takes into account saving for retirement and emergencies."

As it happens, I've been thinking a lot about this National Affairs essay by Yuval Levin, which suggests tearing down much of the American welfare state and replacing it with a "true" safety net that offers government support for the real hard cases. The proximate cause of this is that the federal government is spending way more than it takes in, but there's a larger philosophical justification:

Because all citizens — not only the poor — become recipients of benefits, people in the middle class come to approach their government as claimants, not as self-governing citizens, and to approach the social safety net not as a great majority of givers eager to make sure that a small minority of recipients are spared from devastating poverty but as a mass of dependents demanding what they are owed. It is hard to imagine an ethic better suited to undermining the moral basis of a free society.

There's something very seductive about this vision—but only if people who do work hard and honestly stand a reasonable chance to provide for themselves and their families. And that doesn't seem to be the case, according to the Times' report:

According to the report, a single worker needs an income of $30,012 a year — or just above $14 an hour — to cover basic expenses and save for retirement and emergencies. That is close to three times the 2010 national poverty level of $10,830 for a single person, and nearly twice the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.

A single worker with two young children needs an annual income of $57,756, or just over $27 an hour, to attain economic stability, and a family with two working parents and two young children needs to earn $67,920 a year, or about $16 an hour per worker.

That compares with the national poverty level of $22,050 for a family of four. The most recent data from the Census Bureau found that 14.3 percent of Americans were living below the poverty line in 2009.

Two notes:

• Median household income in 2009 was around $50,000 a year. That means half of all households were making less than that. I presume there are a number of four-person families in the lower half of all American households. And since the sustainability number is actually north of the median number ... well, I'm going to presume that most American families aren't earning enough to sustain themselves without some form of government subsidy—at least if we accept the Wider Opportunities for Women study. Yikes.

• As Paul Krugman notes this morning, the GOP plan for getting the economy moving involves ... lowering American wages. That's good for business, but not so good for workers.

I'm all for retooling the safety net if the market provides a reasonable living for its participants. That doesn't seem to be happening right now. And it's not, frankly, how the market seems inclined to act.