The move is the latest in the back-and-forth action since The Iowa Independent noted on Tuesday the new ad and airtime purchase by Crossroads GPS, a conservative policy and advocacy group founded by Karl Rove.

“Despite the flowery statements pouring out from Leonard Boswell and the Iowa Democratic Party, Leonard Boswell fails to explain why he voted to waste $830 billion on Obama’s first stimulus bill and now enthusiastically supports another round of stimulus spending tied to a $450 billion tax hike,” Nate Hodson, director of state and regional media relations, said in a Crossroads statement.

“Iowans deserve to know why Leonard Boswell continues supporting Obama’s failed policies which waste taxpayer dollars without creating jobs.”

The remarks from Hodson followed responses from the Iowa Democratic Party and Boswell’s campaign regarding the new ad, which were also published by The Independent on Tuesday and linked to in the Crossroads release.

“This morning Karl Rove’s shadowy corporate special interest group American Crossroads, began running ads blaming Congressman Boswell for America’s economic crisis. This blatant attempt to smear and distort the Congressman’s record is downright shameful,” wrote Joshua Sulier in an email from the Boswell for Congress campaign.

The campaign is asking for contributions to raise an additional $10,000 for the campaigns “rapid response fund” to fight attack ads. …

Iowa Democratic Party Chairwoman Sue Dvorsky said the ad shows Karl Rove, who’s behind the Crossroads GPS, is trying to help U.S. Rep. Tom Latham (R-Ames) defend a “record of supporting corporate loopholes and opposing a plan to create jobs and strengthen the middle class.” …

“Tom Latham and Karl Rove think they can buy this election with anonymous, special interest money. They should know better,” Dvorsky said. “Iowans take a serious look at the candidates and the issues facing our state. On all accounts, Congressman Boswell has been a fighter for this state and has the record of fiscal responsibility and leadership to prove it.” …

Latham campaign spokesman James Carstensen didn’t respond to the IDP and Boswell campaign’s attacks on Crossroads and Latham, or on whether the ad is a precursor for a potentially nasty 3rd Congressional District race.

“Congressman Latham is focused on fighting for and advancing policies that will foster job and economic growth,” Carstensen said. “We will wait to focus on politics and elections next year.”

Boswell, a Des Moines Democrat, appeared along with U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack in Des Moines earlier this month to promote the American Jobs Act, and specifically the $50 billion earmarked within the plan for transportation infrastructure like bridges and roads. Earl Agan, president of the Central Iowa Building and Construction Trades Council, estimates the nearly $500 million that would come into Iowa as a part of the proposal would fund more than 6,500 construction workers.

Boswell indicated that at a time when Americans are searching for employment and the nation’s infrastructure needs repair, the Obama proposal could fill both needs.

“I will be doing all I can to push for this much-needed relief. Iowans are counting on us to come together, do the right thing and get people working again,” Boswell said in an Oct. 14 briefing.

“I remain committed to taking care of our middle class and will support legislation that creates jobs and provides Iowa’s families and workers with the tools and assistance they need to get back on their feet and contribute to the recovery of our national and local economies.”

In early September, shortly after Obama’s jobs address to the nation, Boswell said, “In order to invest in job creation, Washington must get on the same page as the rest of America and stop putting corporations and special interests above everyday workers and small businesses. It is clear to most Americans that oil companies are doing just fine without the taxpayer’s help. It is clear to most Americans that Bill Gates and Warren Buffet can afford to pay the same percentage of payroll taxes that their own secretaries pay. It is clear to most Americans that our nation will never recover if the federal government keeps offering tax breaks to companies that outsource U.S. jobs.

“Let’s redirect the taxpayer dollars that fund these luxury handouts and corporate incentives to put Iowans back to work, repair our roads and bridges, update our public buildings, and get Americans making things again. I look forward to the hard work ahead.”

According to an analysis of the stimulus — known officially as The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act — in relation to job creation by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the government plan, during the second quarter of 2010 alone, increased employment by between 1.4 million and 3.3 million people, compared with what employment would have been otherwise. The CBO also states that well over half a million jobs were funded in each of the other three quarters of 2010. Subsequent analysis by the nonpartisan Annenberg Public Policy Center, which runs FactCheck.org, finds Republican and conservative claims of the plan’s failure to be a matter of opinion and not fact.

“Simply put, more people would be unemployed if not for the stimulus bill,” the analysis reads. “The exact number of jobs created and saved is difficult to estimate, but nonpartisan economists say there’s no doubt that the number is positive.”

At the start of business on Tuesday, Aug. 2, according to the Daily Treasury Statement, the national debt subject to the legal limit was $14.293975 trillion. Obama signed legislation that day lifting the limit by as much as $2.4 trillion—with an initial and immediate increase in the limit of $400 billion. By the close of business on Friday, Aug. 5, according to the Daily Treasury Statement, the national debt subject to the limit had grown to $14.536130 trillion.

Over just four days, the debt had jumped $242.155 billion.

By contrast, according to the Bureau of the Public Debt, over the ten-year period from the end of fiscal 1950 to the end of fiscal 1960, the national debt grew from approximately $257.36 billion to approximately $286.33  billion—an increase of approximately $28.97 billion.

Using the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator, $28.97 billion in 1960 dollars equals $220.92 billion in 2011 dollars.

Thus, the $242.155 billion in 2011 dollars that the Obama administration increased the debt between last Tuesday and last Friday is more in inflation-adjusted terms than the combined debt increases of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations in the ten-year period from the end of fiscal 1950 to the end of fiscal 1960.

The figures in the article are accurate, although the author of the piece understates the amount of debt taken out during the 1950s by adjusting for the value of the dollar in 1960, and not adjusting for its value during each year in the 1950-1960 period. The claims made in the article are nevertheless misleading because they obscure the fact that any debt taken on from August 2-5, 2011, was done so in order to spend on programs and agencies whose budget was already authorized — and thus mandated — by an act of Congress.

Because the U.S. Treasury reached the debt ceiling on May 16, the budgetary obligations that accumulated during the weeks and months that followed had to be immediately paid for once the debt limit was raised. The fact that the Treasury immediately took on $242 billion doesn’t mean that the Obama administration arbitrarily took on that amount of additional debt during those four days. Rather, spending had already been authorized by Congress and the Treasury was obligated to pay for it with additional debt, or face the legal consequences of failing to do so.

In order to accurately compare the 2011 deficit with the deficit of the 1950s, it’s important to recognize that the government is currently taking in revenue at a much smaller proportion to GDP than it did in the 1950s, a fact that cannot be directly attributed to the Obama administration. The primary reason for decreased federal government revenue is the ongoing economic slump, with secondary reason being the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts.

According to the Office of Management and Budget, federal government receipts averaged at 17.2 percent of GDP from 1950 to 1960, while in 2010, they were 14.9 percent of GDP. Federal tax revenue as a percentage of GDP is currently the lowest it’s been since the year 1950, after which it did not go below 16 percent until the year 2008, the start of the Great Recession.

As for spending, while it’s true that total federal discretionary spending averaged 17.6 percent of GDP in the 1950s and was a substantially higher 23 .8 percent in 2010, much of that can be explained by the one-time American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the 2009 stimulus law, which is already phasing out. Discretionary spending is projected to shrink in proportion to GDP in 2011 according to the Congressional Budget Office(PDF). Of course, that leaves off mandatory spending programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The latter two programs were created after the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, so including them in the comparison is also misleading.

The increase in debt during the August 2-5 period therefore reflects not an arbitrary effort on the part of the Obama administration to take advantage of increased borrowing authority, but rather a natural consequence of the profundity of the recession and the legal obligation to pay the costs of mandatory spending programs.

AFC is headed by Betsy DeVos, former chair of the Michigan Republican Party; she is married to former Republican candidate for Michigan Gov. Dick DeVos, son of famed billionaire Richard DeVos, who made his fortune through the success of household appliance and manufacturing giant Amway. Betsy and Richard DeVos have been longtime advocates of school choice, setting up an intricate web of nonprofit organizations that put money behind candidates who support shifting tax dollars from public schools to private and charter institutions. As John Nichols of The Nation reports, AFC is a rebranding of older groups affiliated with the DeVos family that were slapped with fines for illegal campaign practices.

Headliners for the two-day event include controversial Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, former chancellor of D.C. public schools Michelle Rhee and Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett — all supporters of school choice initiatives. In attendance were also a coterie of investment and real estate moguls, like Julian Robertson and Albert Ratner, who have given millions of dollars to the school choice movement.

Gov. Corbett gives a history lesson on U.S. poverty and education, explains "poverty's long true companion has been family dysfunction."

AFC’s political orientation is difficult to detect. While the sponsors of the policy summit include conservative stalwarts American Legislative Exchange Council — a conservative free-market nonprofit that supports state ballot initiatives curtailing college student voting rights — and Walmart-funded The Walton Family Foundation, groups like Hispanic CREO and Black Alliance for Educational Options counter the feeling of heavy-handed partisanship. Even Robertson, operator of one of the first hedge funds, joined AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka in calling on Congress to raise taxes on the wealthy in 2010.

As many of the speakers referred to studies that paint the public school system in dire straits, the popular refrain throughout the first day of the summit was the belief school choice transcended politics and ideology. Giving a keynote address in a portion of afternoon called, “The Urgency of School Choice,” Gov. Corbett said, “Next to national defense, [school choice] is right there as to what we need to be doing.” Echoing one of his campaign slogans, Gov. Corbett stressed educational reform must include making funding portable, saying public money for education belongs to the students and parents.

His state of Pennsylvania began legislative proceedings this week on a school choice bill, Senate Bill 1. If passed, the new law would expand a 10-year program that offers tax credits to businesses that donate money to organizations providing subsidies for private school tuition costs and sweep in a comprehensive school voucher program. The bill is receiving some bipartisan support; Democrat and school choice supporter Sen. Anthony H. Williams of Philadelphia is a co-sponsor of the bill.

The summit was just as concerned with how its messaging is perceived as with the message itself. Dr. Frank Luntz, a pollster and political consultant specializing in testing public attitudes to key words, lectured the audience on how to better communicate the goals of the school choice movement. He cautioned that roughly half of Republicans believe access to good schools is a privilege, not a right, explaining that more work needs to be done convincing the right than the left.

Luntz released a collection of his findings in 2010, outlining his nine communication commandments that make the best use of the most impacting words that the public finds most compelling.

Commandment number seven reads, in part: “Play the America card–often. Embrace ‘American Exceptionalism’ and encourage people to embrace the principle of exceptionalism in schools.” Number three says: “While positive imagery and arguments are comforting and popular, it’s the negative ideas and fear of failure that move people to action.” That sentiment is paired with the efficacy of negative images: “A school with boarded up windows and broken glass is the single most frightening visual of a school in trouble.”

2011 has been a good year for school choice advocates. The Students for Opportunity and Results Act (SOAR), sponsored by Speaker of the U.S. House John Boehner, entered law as part of the federal budget Continuing Resolution. The new law opens Washington, D.C. to school choice programs and is projected to cost $300 million from 2012-2016, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Last week, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels signed into law School Scholarships Act (HEA 1003), giving low-income students up to $4,500 in tuition assistance to attend K-8 private schools. The law sets no award limit for high school students. And though the Arizona state Supreme Court ruled a statewide voucher program is unconstitutional in 2009, Gov. Jan Brewer approved legislation in April that creates savings accounts for students with disabilities who opt for private schools to attend private schools that better fit their needs.

The ad, embedded below, is scheduled to appear in the upper northwest quadrant Monday through Thursday of this week, and asks “What were you thinking?”

In addition to King, the organization has nearly identical ads airing in criticism of U.S. Reps. Ryan, Chip Cravaack (R-Minn.) and Sean Duffy (R-Wis.). In total, the ad buys are costing five figures and are being done in conjunction with an automated call campaign in 23 Congressional districts throughout the country that began last week.

In Iowa the automated calls follow this script:

I’m calling from Americans United for Change.

On April 15th, your Congressman Steve King voted to end Medicare and its guaranteed health care benefits. Instead, he wants to give seniors a voucher, forcing them to go out and find coverage from private insurance companies. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates this proposal will increase seniors’ out-of-pocket costs by $6,000 each year — and Congressman King is using the savings to give corporations and millionaires another tax break. Congressman King even voted to slash Medicaid funds that pay nursing home care for seniors and the disabled.

Call Congressman King at 202-225-4426 and tell him that cutting Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security to pay for tax cuts for corporations and millionaires is just wrong. Tell him to keep his hands off our Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

While there has been little shortage over the years of progressive outrage directed at King, it hasn’t been commonplace for national groups to spend money in an effort to target him. This has been because the existing 5th District hasn’t been considered competitive. This particular ad buy signals that either national organizations view the newly remapped 4th District as being somewhat more competitive or that they believe a high-profile Democrat could make inroads come 2012 — or perhaps a bit of both.

The CBO expects that the unemployment rate will fall to 9.2 percent in the fourth quarter of 2011, 8.2 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012 and 7.4 percent at the end of 2013 — still high above the natural rate of unemployment of 5 percent. The CBO also says that the tax cut/unemployment extension deal will provide a “short-term” boost to the economy, similar to what Moody’s Economist Mark Zandi predicted will raise growth in the first half of 2011.

The CBO also took a look at the budget, which has a record deficit of $1.5 trillion — or about ten percent of output. The CBO predicts that the deficit will decline rapidly in the next five years — mostly because of increased revenues due to economic output. However, the calculations do not include an extension of the 2010 tax cuts deal, the Medicare “doc fix” or some of the tax credits in the stimulus package, all of which will sunset, but will be difficult not to extend because of their political popularity or impact on growth.

Will it be possible for House Republicans to get any immigration bills signed into law? No one is quite sure, but over the next few days I’ll be looking at some of the bills that pro-enforcement and pro-immigration reform groups think stand a chance. First on the list: an expansion of E-Verify, a controversial program that allows employers to use their workers’ Social Security numbers to verify that they can legally work in the United States.

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), who is expected to lead the Judiciary Committee, co-sponsored a bill in the current session to make use of E-Verify mandatory for all employers. The program is already mandatory for federal agencies and their contractors, but Republicans have said E-Verify should be expanded nationwide to better prevent undocumented workers from finding work.

Mark Krikorian, executive director of the pro-enforcement Center for Immigration Studies, told TWI that an expansion of the employment verification program could be passed in an effort by Democrats to show their commitment to immigration enforcement.

“I could see the administration deciding they need to back [mandatory E-Verify] to show their bona fides on enforcement so they can make a more conceivable case for amnesty in the future,” Krikorian said, referring to Obama’s support for paths to legal status for some of the illegal immigrants already in the country. “It undercuts the criticisms of the president as opposing enforcement and strengthens his hand for a possible second term.”

Of course, the Obama administration has already stepped up its immigration enforcement, sending more troops to the border and increasing deportation levels. Democrats may be unwilling to go further due to reported problems with E-Verify, said Grisella Martinez, director of policy and legislative affairs at the pro-reform National Immigration Forum.

Critics of the program say it contains flukes that allow some undocumented immigrants to escape detection and deny some legal workers employment. The Social Security Administration reportedly has an error rate of more than 4 percent in the databases E-Verify uses to check legal status. Critics in the business community say E-Verify puts unfair burdens on human resource departments that will have to be trained to use the program.

The projected high cost of implementing E-Verify nationwide could also deter Senate Democrats and Obama from supporting a bill. The Congressional Budget Office reported in 2008 that mandating E-Verify use could decrease federal revenues by about $17.3 billion between 2009 and 2018. Many experts say employers would still have a demand for labor from illegal immigrants, who in some sectors are likely to accept work that legal Americans often do not. E-Verify would therefore starve the government of tax dollars through a huge increase in the number of undocumented workers being paid untaxed wages under the table.

“I don’t think mandating E-Verify without a legalization program is possible,” Martinez said. “If it were to occur, we’d be looking at a real economic tailspin. Numerous government reports have all pointed to the fact that to mandate a program like E-Verify without legalizing the workers who are already in our economy would be absolutely catastrophic.”

The signature Obama program to ameliorate this crisis was the Home Affordable Modification Program, or HAMP, which helps homeowners modify their mortgages for lower monthly payments.

But the program has proven frankly disastrous — in many cases hurting the families it was meant to help. The administration expected it to help 3 to 4 million homeowners. It has aided a fraction of that, completing just 434,700 permanent modifications, according to the last scorecard. The process frequently takes months and requires applicants to file extraordinary amounts of paperwork. About half of applicants are rejected during the trial modification period. Worst, for many HAMP participants, their monthly mortgage payment barely goes down. Those homeowners often keep paying a mortgage they can’t afford for a while  before defaulting anyway, meaning the bank is the real winner.

Now, rather than doubling down and helping homeowners, the administration is shuttering, or at least shrinking, the program. As David Dayen noticed, a recent Treasury report on the Troubled Asset Relief Program tucks in the detail that the government is granting HAMP just half of the funds it originally allocated.

As for President Obama’s mortgage modification program, the CBO estimates that the Treasury Department will use no more than $20 billion of TARP funds, less than half of the $50 billion originally allocated. That’s because the CBO expects many fewer people will participate in the program than the government originally expected, a view held by many housing industry observers.

When Obama announced the program in February 2009, he said up to 4 million people could save their homes through the loan modification program, which lowers eligible borrowers’ monthly payments to no more than 31% of their pre-tax income. But more recently, officials have backtracked and said up to 4 million people could qualify for trial modifications, during which loan servicers assess their borrowers’ eligibility and ability to pay.

Through February, around 170,000 distressed homeowners have received long-term modifications under the program. Another $1.5 billion in TARP funds will be used to provide grants to state housing agencies in California, Arizona, Nevada, Florida and Michigan. These agencies are tasked with coming up with programs to assist the unemployed, the underwater who owe more than their homes are worth, and the second-lien holders.

All I can say is that I hope they funnel the additional $30 billion into other, better initiatives to help homeowners.

Among the options are a temporary payroll tax holiday and a permanent extension of the research and development tax credit, say people familiar with the talks who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to describe private deliberations. Permanently extending the research credit would cost roughly $100 billion over the next decade, tax experts said. And depending on its form and duration, a payroll tax holiday could let businesses keep more than $300 billion they would otherwise owe the Treasury.

While significantly less than last year’s $814 billion stimulus package, both ideas would be far more dramatic than anything the White House had been expected to propose.

Economists argue that spending increases tend to be more effective than tax cuts in stimulating the economy. But, the Congressional Budget Office examined (PDF) the effectiveness of a variety of tax cuts this winter, and found payroll tax cuts to be a good option, compared with, say, extending tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. Moreover, they have positive impacts on employment — and the sustained high rate of joblessness remains the biggest drag on the American economy and a pressing public-policy issue.

According to the CBO, a payroll tax cut is about 25 to 33 percent more stimulative than providing a refundable tax credit for lower- and middle-income households, for instance.

The initial version of the state aid bill — championed by Republican and Democratic governors, as well as congressional Democrats — cut approximately $6.7 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps). It did so by taking back some of an expanded benefit created in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the Feb. 2009 stimulus bill. The state aid bill made a number of cuts to provide $10 billion for teachers’ jobs and $16.1 billion for Medicaid funds.

Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) thought the bill was deficit-neutral, but the Congressional Budget Office said it came up approximately $5 billion short. (The Democrats had not cut enough because they had not factored in the timing of the bill’s passage. The changes cannot go into effect until mid-September, at the earliest, as the bill needs a House vote.) Democrats tinkered with the bill, cutting unspent funds from a number of programs.

And they expanded the cuts to SNAP. A CBO score released last night shows the revised version more than pays for itself, reducing the deficit by $1.37 billion over the next ten years. SNAP benefits face a $11.9 billion rollback starting in April, 2014. A family of three can expect their benefits to drop about $50 a month.

Never before have congressional policies actually created a month-to-month cut in food stamps. Even in the 1996 rollback of numerous welfare programs, SNAP benefits just grew more slowly than food inflation. Congress has always attempted to avoid a “cliff.” And, as I reported yesterday, policy experts describe that “cliff” in benefits as “devastating”:

The ARRA increase to SNAP benefits boosted benefits from meager to less-meager, advocates say. “We have been very supportive of the ARRA boost,” says Ellen Vollinger of the Food Research and Action Center. “But it underscored that these benefits are not generous. Anecdotally, we heard that the ARRA boost let some SNAP recipients keep going to the supermarket in the third or fourth week of the month, rather than going to a soup kitchen starting after the second week. They were stretching out their benefits, and purchasing some more nutritious food, like fresh fruit and vegetables.” Vollinger notes that even with the ARRA funding the average SNAP benefit is not really enough to eat.

And FRAC argues that that the situation where the government might actually cut benefits… would be “devastating” for recipients. “In the 1990s, there were terrible cuts to the program,” Vollinger explains. “But nobody ever started receiving less money [because the benefits increased more slowly than the price of food increased]. That situation — what will happen if people aren’t well-informed about the cut? What if they don’t recognize that the benefit will be lower?” It has never happened in the history of the program, Vollinger notes.

Reid has gotten some flack for the statements against E-Verify, which critics say show a lack of support for legal Nevadans whose jobs may being taken by undocumented workers. (Illegal immigrants make up about 10 percent of the Nevada work force.) But there is some merit to the claim that expanding E-Verify would be problematic if it’s not part of a larger reform effort. When the Congressional Budget Office looked into the failed SAVE Act of 2007, it found a high cost to expanding E-Verify. The CBO said the bill would:

Decrease federal revenues by $17.3 billion over the 2009-2018 period. The decrease largely reflects the judgment that mandatory verification of employment eligibility through the E-Verify system would result in an increase in the number of undocumented workers being paid outside the tax system. In particular, JCT anticipates that some employers currently withholding income and employment taxes from the wages of undocumented workers and reporting these amounts to the Internal Revenue Service through the use of an Individual Tax Identification Number (ITIN) or other employee identification number would no longer withhold or report such taxes.

The revenue problem could perhaps be countered by putting more Americans back into the work force. But without additional measures to keep businesses from working around the system and employing undocumented workers, an expansion of E-Verify could be a costly move.