Defending America is a number one responsibility and money’s not the first consideration. The first consideration is winning….

But we have always, one way or the other, raised the money to defend America, and in this case to defend America from a different kind of war, the war on terrorism. And it will be done.

He’s right on one account. You fight a war because you must, and the budget concerns should be immaterial. But the original question was, effectively, “Why aren’t lawmakers willing to ask Americans to pay for the costs of protecting the homeland, either through tax hikes or spending cuts elsewhere in the government?”

Grassley ducked it, and his argument that Congress has “always … raised the money to defend America” ignores the truth that, since 2001, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been funded primarily by borrowing from abroad — a particularly curious whitewash in the context of Republican criticisms that health care reform will break the federal budget.

The costs of that failure to ask for shared sacrifice have been tangible. When George W. Bush was elected to the White House in 2000, the nation’s debt was $5.7 trillion. Eight years later — after several rounds of tax cuts and two unfunded wars — the number had jumped to $10.0 trillion.

It’s worth noting that most of the Republicans now criticizing the costs of health care reform, Grassley included, also supported those mid-war tax cuts.

Yesterday, industry representatives held a conference call with reporters boasting about just how effective they’re fight against the proposed reforms has been. Washington Post columnist Dan Milbank today captures the essence of the industry’s reasoning:

[T]he argument most likely to prevail for the financial firms on Capitol Hill was offered by Chris Stinebert, [head of the American Financial Services Association]. “Especially now, when we’re in a very, very sensitive time, when the capital markets are just starting to recover,” he said, “introducing a high level of uncertainty in the marketplace could be very detrimental.”

Most of America, though, will have a tough time sympathizing with the alleged misfortunes of Wall Street firms, some of which are posting record profits at the same time that unemployment continues to leap.

With that in mind, Milbank offers his translation of Stineberts argument:

[T]o put it another way: Don’t regulate us now because the economy is still suffering from the mess we made because we weren’t regulated the last time. Chutzpah, it appears, is recession-proof.

“Things were a lot better for the average person in this country when we had usury caps,” Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.), head of the House Rules Committee, said in a statement announcing her bill. “Watching how credit card companies have exploited people by increasing rates up to 30 percent and more is criminal and this bill will allow us to put an end to this practice.”

Massachusetts Democratic Reps. John Tierney  and Michael Capuano will co-sponsor the bill.

They have a tough road ahead, for several reasons. (1) Even though it was the finance industry that was primarily responsible for the recent global economic meltdown, there’s a growing reluctance on Capitol Hill to apply strict new regulations just as the banks are re-stabilizing — a circumstance the banks are already celebrating. (2) Although Congress was successful in passing sweeping credit card reforms in May, an amendment to cap interest rates at 15 percent was killed in the Senate. And (3) the banks aren’t going to allow Congress to squeeze a profit source without coming up with creative ways to make up the difference elsewhere. This, The New York Times reported yesterday, is what’s happening in Australia, where card issuers have responded to new regulations by attaching new fees to airline tickets, among other purchases.

“[I]f regulators limit one fee or rate, banks are likely to find another way to keep revenue flowing,” The Times wrote.

The first bracket, which covers joint returns with a liability of up to $22,600, roughly corresponds with households earning up to $150,000. In this case a 1 percent surtax is levied so the maximum additional cost would be $226.

The second bracket applied to tax liability between $22,600 and $36,400 or roughly equivalent to joint returns for couples earning between $150,000 to $250,000, The third bracket applies to those earning over $250,000 with a tax liability of $36,400 or higher.

The rates in the second and third brackets would vary depending on how much needs to be raised to cover the prior year’s war expenditures. But as a rule, the added surtax above $250,000 would be twice the percentage added onto taxes incurred between $150,000 and $250,000.

So, basically, upper-middle-class families and more would be asked to pay for the war. Yglesias comments that it’s a “clear signal” from the House Democratic leadership that any “backbencher who feels like jumping on this bandwagon is safe to do so.”

What will the Republicans say? A new loyalty oath for GOP elected officials and candidates demands support for “military-recommended troop surges” but also for, of course, lower taxes, the catechism of the conservative movement. Which GOP impulse will prove to be stronger?

According to USA Today, the Halloween bash at the six-bedroom mansion was a huge success, drawing 1,000 people. It ended only when traffic gridlock got so bad police had to be called.

But the party wasn’t an isolated event. Similar unauthorized parties are taking in place in other cities with vacant homes — evidence of how the problem of empty and foreclosed homes are causing neighborhood blight and other problems. Although some places, like the Phoenix metro area, are showing some signs of progress in dealing with vacancies, there’s been no widespread solution.

As a result, for some neighbors, falling property values from empty homes aren’t the only issue they have to deal with:

In San Diego County, young people have taken over foreclosed houses for late-night rave parties, says Detective Jeff Lauhon of the San Diego County Sheriff’s Office. Lauhon says the culprits were well-organized in some instances: A young couple would get a realtor to give them a tour of a foreclosed house — usually in a rural area on a large property. The woman would distract the realtor while the man surreptitiously left a window open or door ajar. They would then return and invite others for parties that lasted until the wee hours.

At least they’re not pushing dump trucks out of windows.

A party is a temporary way to fill a house, of course. For many cities, the long-term problem of vacant and abandoned foreclosed homes remains a crisis.

As we reported last week, Fannie Mae has a new program to allow owners of foreclosed homes to stay in their properties and rent them back for as long as a year. But filling foreclosed homes with former owners-turned-tenants is also beginning to take hold, on its own, in some of the Sunbelt states that have been hit hardest by the foreclosure crisis, according to Alan Mallach, a visiting scholar with the National Housing Institute and the Brookings Institution.

Mallach told TWI last week that investors increasingly are buying up bank-owned foreclosed homes in the Phoenix area, then renting them back to their former owners. The strategy is to allow the rental for at least five years or so, by which time the investor probably can sell the house again at a profit, while the borrower has a chance to improve his credit. And the best part: Some investors say their plan is to offer the house for sale first to the former owner.

Everybody wins, and if the idea spreads, it may be one way to address the vacancy problem.

Until then, there’s not a lot else out there to clear the backlog of bank-owned homes sitting empty in many neighborhoods.

So in the meantime, unauthorized parties will just have to do.

Sen. Charles Grassley (Iowa), senior Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, has asked the Joint Committee on Taxation to analyze the future effects of the Democrats’ tax increase. Specifically, Grassley is wondering why the proposed hike isn’t indexed to inflation, leaving more and more Americans to fall subject to the increase each year.

“The unintended consequences could be significant,” Grassley warned.

If that scenario sounds familiar, it’s because the Alternative Minimum Tax — designed decades ago to target just a tiny sliver of high-income households — was similarly not indexed to inflation. As incomes have risen over the years, more and more upper-middle-class families have fallen into the bracket under which they have to pay the AMT. Some liberals don’t see a problem with that. But Congress, fearing a backlash at the polls, has stepped in each year with the so-called AMT patch, providing billions of (borrowed) dollars to prevent the tax from hitting those families.

The Democrats’ motivations are easy to surmise: Had they indexed the tax to inflation they would have generated much less revenue to pay for their health-care reform bill. And the proposed payroll tax increase is much less than the AMT. Still, it’s not too far a stretch to imagine that the lawmakers of the 2030s, also wanting to appease the voters, would also find it tempting to come up with the Medicare-payroll patch.

With Congress out of town for the Thanksgiving break, there’s been little to distract Washington’s prognosticators from offering their predictions over the public plan’s fate. Truth is, no one is quite sure how this saga is going to play out. Based on comments from several of the four moderates since Saturday’s vote, it’s tempting to argue that Democratic leaders will at the very least have to scale back the public plan to pass the larger bill. Then again, the way Landrieu melted Saturday at the chance to secure millions of federal dollars for Louisiana indicates that there’s much more at play here than mere principle.

With all of that in mind, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) offered his own optimistic take on how the drama over the public option will end, telling CNN yesterday that the historical significance of the reform vote will ultimately be enough to sway the four moderates in favor of the bill.

In the end, I don’t want four Democratic senators dictating to the other 56 of us and to the country, when the public option has this much support, that it’s not going to be in it. [...]

I don’t think they want to be on the wrong side of history. I don’t think they want to go back and say, you know, on a procedural vote, I killed the most important bill in my political career. I don’t think they want to be there on that. So I think in the end, we get them.

Let’s be clear: the task force’s recommendation will have absolutely no impact on the bills we in the Senate write, debate or vote on.  [HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius] has also assured me there that nothing in Medicare or Medicaid will change as a result of the recommendation, and that’s the way it should be.

Yet the Senate bill says explicitly that, as a part of newly proposed minimum benefits requirements, every insurer  ”shall provide coverage for … evidence-based items or services that have in effect a rating of ‘A’ or ‘B’ in the current recommendations of the United States Preventive Services Task Force.” The House bill contains a nearly identical provision.

The task force guideline recommending that women between ages 50 and 74 receive biennial routine mammograms, instead of annual checkups, received a “B” rating.

That in no way means that women wouldn’t have access to annual mammograms. Again, the essential benefits package represents the minimum coverage insurers would have to offer. The task force is clear that the ultimate decision on the frequency of screenings should be made by women and their doctors.

Still, there’s also the fear that private insurers will lean on the task force recommendations to justify a scaling back of coverage for routine mammograms. Julius Hobson, former lobbyist for the American Medical Association and now a senior policy analyst at the Washington law firm Bryan Cave, said it’s “inevitable” that private insurance companies will look at those guidelines, and may change their coverage policies based on what they see. Certainly, they would like the potential cost savings if women were getting routine mammograms every two years instead of every one.

“It’s almost inevitable that that’s going to happen,” Hobson said last week. “The government doesn’t move that fast, but the health insurers do.”

That has some members of Congress concerned about the threat to women’s health. As Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) said in a phone interview last week, “Cancers can progress very far in two years.”

Under the Senate legislation as it is currently written, Americans with employer-provided coverage, whose income is below 400 percent of the federal poverty level and whose premiums are between 8 and 9.8 percent of their total income will be exempt from having to purchase health coverage but will not be able to access the exchange to qualify for government assistance to purchase insurance.  The agreed to amendment will make it possible for these individuals to convert their tax-free employer health subsidies into vouchers that they can use to choose a health insurance plan in the new health insurance exchanges.

Critics contend that the proposal will cause a flood of young, healthy workers to flee employer-sponsored plans, hiking rates for the older, sicker folks who remained. But a number of Senate Democrats had recently joined Wyden in urging adoption of the so-called “free-choice” amendment.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the change will cover an additional 1 million people, Wyden says.

It’s a ridiculous set of recommendations. It’s causing mass confusion among women, because we have been trained to know that, when we’re 40 years old, we should get a mammogram routinely.

Wasserman Schultz also criticized the suggestion that women between the ages of 40 and 49 should simply talk with their doctors to gauge their breast-cancer risk.

About 75 percent of women who have breast cancer didn’t have any risk, weren’t in a higher-risk category. I was in a higher-risk category, didn’t even know it until I found my lump myself and went to the doctor.

So, these recommendations are really patronizing, because they’re presuming that women can’t handle more information and make a rational decision with their health care provider.

The congresswoman’s office hasn’t returned calls this week about whether Congress needs to enter this fray legislatively.