I am not one of those who’s disappointed that Obama chose
not to go hammer and tong with Romney in the debate over the 47% insult, Bain
Capital, and his shifty and misleading maneuvers regarding the release of tis
tax returns. I guess it might have been personally satisfying for Obama to call
Romney out for the elitist snob he has so often shown himself to be. But I was
not that motivated to hear cathartic bloodletting. What I was anxious to hear
was the rationale for government and the good that it does. Perhaps we could
hear an explanation of silliness of the Tea Bagger slogan: “KEEP GOVERNMENT OUT OF MY MEDICARE”.
The biggest problem, bigger in my mind than a fussy attitude
or allowing his competitor to get away with several medium to gigantic
whoppers was the fact that the President
did not make the case for why government matters. This is so much bigger than Romney.
After an ugly bitter primary season when almost every effort of Government has
been called into question, besmirched at the altar of Ayn Rand individualism,
the President’s silence allowed big lies to linger.
Medicaid
Medicaid is the government sponsored Health Care for the poor.
After the recession on 2008 enrollment spiked from just over 42 million to
current levels of about 50 million people. According the Kaiser Foundation 2/3
of the people on Medicaid are working. Another huge chunk of benefits goes to
seniors who have exhausted their life
savings and require nursing home care. The Republicans talk about what
we can afford and what we can’t and the argument that the standard of what we
can afford should be based on what we want to borrow money from China to pay is
a clever one in that it distracts voters from the fact that the man making that
case paid 14% in taxes in 2011 on income of nearly $14 million, partially a gift to government that he can take
back some time in the future (after the election).
The Ryan Budget plan calls for turning the entire Medicaid
program over to the states, and then applies a 20% cut in spending. The effect this
would have on the poor and seniors is unconscionable.
Providing Health Care for the weakest among us and dignified
nursing home care for seniors, that is what government does.
Social Security and Medicare
Social Security and Medicare are funded by payroll tax deductions
throughout every working person’s entire working life. Seniors who are now
enjoying the benefits of Social Security and Medicare, paid for by deductions
from their salary, are a huge junk of the 47% of the freeloading electorate pointed
out by Romney, and underlined repeatedly by the Radio Right. The fact the right
sees these programs as giveaways of “taxpayer” money displays the greed which
is at the core of so much of their rhetoric. I know that poor and middle class Republicans
will dispute that, but it is one of the reasons that the Koch Brothers, Sheldon Adelson
and others are putting tens of millions into this campaign.
The demographic boom means that adjustments will need to be
made to both programs. This may come in the form of means testing or adjusting
the retirement age, or a mix of the two.
No one with a senior parent believes
Medicare is a government takeover of Health Care. We have seen our parents visit the doctor of their choice, fight
the challenge of getting all their prescriptions taken on schedule and to the prescribed
dosage. This is what government does.
Obamacare
Obamacare steers a lot more customers towards the Health
Insurance Industry. The Federal government will pay for some, and subsidize
some. Others who can afford it will pay their own way or pay a now Supreme
Court authorized tax. In return for all these customers the Health Care industry,
and insurers specifically, are required to do certain things like provide
coverage for children on parent’s policies until age 26, cap lifetime costs, provide
basic preventative care including many important women’s diagnostic procedures
at low or no cost as part of the basic policy, guarantee that 85% of premiums
would go to patient care or refund the difference to the policy holder, and of
course to cover those with pre-existing conditions. In sum the changes are
designed to direct more people to medical providers before they are seriously
ill, which in practice and over time should reduce costs. All these extra
customers allow insurers to extend costs over a vastly larger pool of people.
It’s what makes the regulations acceptable to them.
Shape shifting an industry that accounts for nearly 20% of
GDP, while leaving millions without coverage or care and emphasizing far too
little preventative medicine which exacerbates inflationary pressure on the system,
that’s a big deal. That’s what government
does.
Energy
Oil imports were at 60% of US consumption under President
Bush. Republican rhetoric aside, as of 2010 imports were down to 49% of consumption
in 2010, and according to the Energy Information Agency of the US government imports
are projected to drop to 35% of consumption by 2035. In addition a larger and larger
segment of imported fuel is coming from Canada. The trend, driven by the economics
of the energy industry is evident and will likely continue under Democratic and
Republican administrations.
That said, The US, will continue to be at the mercy of
international markets when it comes to the price of fuel. The much discussed
Keystone pipeline is NOT intended to bring oil to the US. Most of the oil from
it will be targeted to Asia, China in particular. With our without the pipeline
the oil will flow.
So the strategy of Drill, Baby, Drill seems unencumbered by
the policies of the Democratic administration. That leaves us with the utter hypocrisy
of those who proclaim the immorality of passing massive debt onto our children
and grandchildren while denying climate science and so passing on to our
descendants a melting planet. This week the U.S. National Snow & Ice Data
Center reported the summer ice melt resulted in the polar ice cap shrinking to
the smallest ever recorded. Just in the last five years satellite imagery shows
that the cap has shrunk by nearly 20%. After the record heat and intensifying
storms (Katrina and Irene) we have been seeing those who believe that the cure could
be worse than the disease ought to tell us in what ways exactly this is so.
The Energy Department distributed about $90 billion of the total
$787 billion in stimulus funds in support of green energy. But according to
CNN, not even half of the $90 Billion went to green energy firms. $29 Billion went to retrofitting homes
with better weatherproofing and windows, $18 billion went to mass transit, and
$10 billion went to the modernization of the electrical grid. That leaves about
$35 billion for loan guarantees and other support of companies generating green
energy. Exactly three of the 26 companies that received any of this support went
bankrupt. If 3 of 26 is equal to “half” as Romney claimed, then perhaps he
needs a new calculator and a new
accountant. At any rate nothing like $90 billion went to support new technology.
Making risky investments in areas critical to the health of
our economy and our planet, that is what Government does.
So I don’t worry about a single debate performance or the
impact it has the race. For now I put the somnambulant performance of the
President at the bottom of a list of concerns. Next, I count Obama’s
unwillingness to mix it up with Romney. I’m
not asking Obama to sling mud to and fro, but the President walked off the
stage in Denver looking like the football player with the impeccably clean,
impossibly white uniform. If you hadn’t seen it with your own eyes, you might
ask, “Did he even play?”
The enemy of middle class recovery and the availability of
opportunity to the poor is not Mitt Romney. The Republican challenger is merely
the front man with the fancy suit and the shiny shoes. There are principled
small government devotees out there, but the vile, vicious, ugly rhetoric being
driven today is at the behest of a small group of extremely wealthy oligarchs,
bent on shrinking government, their tax bill, and regulation of their business
interests, purely for the purpose of increasing their ability to enlarge upon
their vast and ever increasing wealth. These oligarchs are the enemy of American values, and thanks to Citizens United they are out of control.
The primary argument of these oligarchs is that government
is broken, in the way, and incompetent. For all the problems we face, this
argument carries weight, even with me. But when some of us say government is
broken it is not because we see regulations run amok. On the contrary we see an
unprecedented Wall Street calamity brought on by lax regulation, a disaster for
the middle class and a catastrophe for the poor as evidenced by the shattering
number of people in need of food stamp support. We see Global Climate change as
a proven scientific fact and understand that politicians on the right who
repeat ad nauseum their belief that the science is open to question do so at
the behest of their corporate masters.
We believe the tax code is broken, but know that Romney did not get to a
14% liability--actually 10% because he overpaid and can get the balance back
later-- because of the policies of one or two administrations. Rather we know
that the accumulative policies of administrations stretching over decades have
led to a distortion of tax policy that now impinges on the government’s ability
to function.
China invested $35.0 billion in renewable energy in 2010,
about twice what the US did, and it’s spending on high speed rail dwarfs American
outlays. Consequently they are developing the technologies at a much more rapid
pace and have become the world’s leading exporters. This, too, is what governments
do in a competitive global marketplace.
In foreign policy there is increasing evidence of unrest in
Iran caused by the sanctions. The Israelis are hardly unified behind their
right wing President. This President has steered us away from what could easily
have been America’s third war in the last 15 years, even as we implore him to
bring our troops home from Afghanistan sooner than 2014. We recall that entry
is often so much easier than exit when it comes to military matters. Preventing
war, while addressing the World’s problems, this is what governments do, and one
of the many reasons the Election in November is crucial.
Maybe the real disaster wasn’t that the president lost the
debate, maybe the real calamity is that the American people were given no clear
and compelling reason to believe, no real understanding of why Government matters
and what government does.
No comments:
Post a Comment