Taxes

How do we fix Social Security/Medicare and the lack of Health Care for the general public?

jtbutler — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 19:35:52 -0400

September 12th, 2009

Everyone wants to fix the Social Security system, the Medicare system and provide Health Care for the general public. Hello, everyone is going at these issues from the wrong angle. What needs to be introduces is:

1. A law that stops the Senate and House of Reps from drawing such large salaries from the taxes us common folk pay. Yes they should be paid, but come one everyone, Social Security folk will not be getting their normal Cost of Living Increase for the next 2 or so years because the system is failing. But yet members of the Senate and House of Reps will still draw their huge salaries.

2. A law that says that once a Senator or House of Rep retires, the gravy train is done. Right now these people collect their pay for the rest of their lives with not exception. This is not right when we have millions of people that are living in poverty because there are no jobs. This is an issue of no money because the rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poorer.

3. A law that says Senators and House of Reps has to pay into the Social Security System and collect the same amount as the rest of us common folk. After all right now they draw their full salary after leaving the job and never were made to pay into the system... How freaking backwards is this?

Well gee wiz, if Senators and House of Reps were forced to pay into the Social Security System and collect from it after they leave their jobs I would think that the Social Security System would be fixed in no time.

As far as Health Care for the General Public goes. I think the major issue is that when you pay for insurance you are covered for your health care. The insurance companies only pay a portion of the bill that is incurred. If you are an uninsured person you pay 100% of the cost of your health care. So dollar for dollar the poor person is getting hit with a full bill. I think that people that are paying cash/from their pocket should be getting the same deal that insurance companies make with Health Care Providers and Doctors. Then at least the poorer folk that are paying 100% would me more able to pay for their health care because they do not have to pay 100% of the bill.

My opinion is that if Elected Officials had to pay into the Social Security System like everyone else (and not be allowed to vote themselves a raise whenever they feel like it) and collect from it for their retirement instead of getting their full salary without ever paying into the system, the Social Security System would be fixed really quickly. Also, if uninsured people were given the same break that Insurance Companies get they would be able to afford Medical Care.

One other point I would like to make. We have lent millions upon millions of dollars to many countries that have never even attempted to pay us back. Why are we still helping these countries and giving to them when they already owe us? If I over borrow from the bank they will not allow me to borrow anymore until I pay it off... So why are we giving money to people whom on the most part do not even like the American People???

Thank you for reading my statements, it would be nice if the American people woke up and started telling the Government what to do instead of them doing whatever they feel like and totally ignoring the issues that face the general population of our great country.

Sincerely,

Joseph Butler

San Antonio, Tx

'My Fellow Americans...': The Speech President Obama Should Give to Congress Next Week

dlindorff — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 14:20:48 -0400

As imagined by Dave Lindorff

My Fellow Americans.

I stand before you a chastened president. I made a mistake. Two mistakes really. (wild applause from Republican side)

I thought that Congress could do its job and through the
deliberative process, produce a health care reform plan that would win
broad support across the aisle and among all of you. But I’m afraid
that I was wrong. Health care is an enormous industry—maybe the biggest
and most powerful industry in the country—and it has far too much power
in Washington. Literally thousands of lobbyists, carrying tens of
billions of dollars in campaign contributions—have invaded these halls (and my house!) (relieved laughter)
and distorted the process, and in the end have stymied reform. (some hissing)

Meanwhile, I have realized that the answer has been staring us in the face all along.

And that was my second mistake. I told the American Medical
Association that while single-payer medical plans, where the government
is the insurer, might work well in other countries, the idea of
government running health care was not part of our American tradition.
In fact, it is, and has been since 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson
signed into law the Medicare program. Medicare is a single-payer
program, and polls and surveys show it is enormously popular with older
and disabled Americans. Medicare has relieved our parents and
grandparents from the fear that they will not get medical care when
they stop working, and it has lifted the enormous burden and worry off
of younger Americans over how to pay for the care of their elders, and
it has done this with enormous efficiency, all while allowing
recipients to choose their own doctors and hospitals. (applause)

So we really don’t need to re-invent the wheel here. There is no
point in members of Congress having to hold endless hearings, and to
sit and listen to the pitches of lobbyists from the medical
establishment. We can just expand Medicare to cover everyone. (applause)

How much would that cost? Well, we know that 10% of the elderly—the
oldest and sickest among us--account for 50% of total Medicare costs,
so that means the other 90% only cost some $200 billion a year. Even if
we assumed that the rest of the population’s medical bills were as high
as those 90% or older Americans, it would mean that expanding Medicare
to cover them would cost less than $1 trillion a year, and probably
closer to $750 billion. So roughly speaking, we’re talking about adding
$750 billion a year to the cost of Medicare.

Now that’s a big number, and I know that some of you—a lot of
you—worry about higher taxes. But let me assure you, expanding Medicare
to cover everyone is going to save you money—virtually
everyone. Let’s look at why that is, and why you cannot just look at
the federal tax when you consider those savings.

Today, the United States spends nearly 20 percent of GDP on health
care. That is more than double what any other country in the world
spends on health care. And you know what? We don’t get our moneys’
worth for all that dough. Canadians, who spend half that percentage of
their GDP on health care, and who have what amounts to Medicare for all
with their single-payer system (they call it Medicare too), have longer
lifespans and better infant mortality statistics than we do. In fact,
Cuba and Mexico have better child health statistics than we do!

By the way, I want to introduce, in the gallery, Shirley Jean
Douglass, whose father, Tommy Douglass, was the founder of Canada’s
Medicare program. We will be consulting closely with experts and
administrators of Canada’s Medicare program as we move forward with our
own reform. (applause)

Now I've been accused of lecturing (laughs and applause),
and I don’t want to sound like a college professor here, but let me
just highlight a few reasons why simply expanding Medicare to cover all
of us makes not just moral, but also economic sense. If we were to make
that change, we could immediately eliminate the Medicaid program, which
as you know is funded by the states, and costs them (and you) about
$400 billion a year, mostly to cover low-income families and
individuals. Now that money would not be totally eliminated, because
Medicare currently doesn’t cover all health care costs—just 80%. And
Medicaid covers the remaining 20% for those elderly and disabled people
who cannot afford to pay for Medi-Gap private plans--something the government would continue to do with an expanded plan. Even so,
eliminating Medicaid for the poor, who would be switched to Medicare,
would save at least $300 billion. We could also eliminate the Veterans
Administration—which incidentally is an excellent example of true
government healthcare, with publicly owned hospitals and doctors on
salary, and it runs very well and very efficiently.

Something those folks at last month’s town meetings who were saying government can’t do anything right should think about. (wild applause from Democratic side)

Sorry. I just had to say that. (more applause)

Anyhow, eliminating the VA would save another $100 billion so we’ve
already saved more than half the amount that was added to the cost of
Medicare in order to cover everyone. (applause)

But there are far more savings.

One of the biggest would be the elimination of about $300 billion
that is spent each year by hospitals and doctors to provide care to
people with no insurance who end up in hospital emergency rooms. The
cost of this “charity care” is factored into higher hospital and
physician bills, and ultimately into higher insurance premiums paid by
the rest of us. Since all those people would now be covered by
Medicare, that expense would vanish.

American companies currently pay about $25 billion a year in workers
compensation insurance—money that ultimately comes out of workers’
paychecks. That would no longer be necessary, because people injured on
the job would be covered by Medicare. (smattering of applause, mostly from Republican side)

Car insurance rates would be dramatically lower, because car
insurance would no longer have to pay for medical costs following an
accident. The same is true for homeowners insurance, which would no
longer have to cover the costs of someone being injured on your
property. (applause from Pennsylvania delegation, with among highest car insurance rates in the nation)

And of course, the biggest savings of all—about $3000 per person or
$12,000 per family every year—namely the cost of private insurance
premiums paid by you and/or your employer, would be gone. Think about
that a minute: no more co-pays, no more annual deductibles, no more
employee share of insurance premiums for yourself or your family. And
for businesses that provide health care coverage, a huge savings that
will make them more competitive in the global marketplace, and that
will also allow them to pay higher wages to their employees. (prolonged applause)

Oh, and there is one other huge, if unquantifiable savings to
consider. If everyone has Medicare, the total cost of health care will
go down dramatically, because everyone will be getting timely
treatment, instead of having to put of exams and early treatment of
illness or injury. And no one will suffer the terrible anxiety or
worrying about whether they can pay for health care for themselves and
their families.

So yes, your Medicare withholding will be perhaps 25% higher if we
expand Medicare to cover everyone. That tax is currently set at 2.9%
for you and 2.9% for your employer, so it would go up to about 0.75% of
your paycheck. For someone earning $600 a week, that would represent an
increased deduction of about $4.50 a week. For someone earning $1200 a
week, it would be an increased deduction of $9. That is a pretty good
deal for not having to pay for insurance coverage any more, wouldn’t
you agree? (applause, plus some boos from largely silent Republican side)

Now for you folks already receiving Medicare, there have been a lot
of scare stories out there, some of them being promoted by some
irresponsible people right in this chamber (pause for applause and nervous laughter), suggesting that if we expand health care coverage, it will come off of your benefits. Don’t you believe it! (applause)

We live in a democracy, and when a lot of people want something, or
benefit from something, they collectively defend that particular thing.
In the case of Medicare, if everyone is receiving it, and receiving it
in the same manner as everyone else, that creates a huge voting bloc in
favor of defending that benefit, so by expanding Medicare to all, we
would be creating a powerful political force that will defend Medicare
from attack, just as the universality of Social Security has made that
program bullet-proof (something my predecessor learned when he tried to
promote the idea of privatizing it). (wild applause from Democratic side)

So here’s the deal.

I’m admitting it was the wrong move to try to lay it on your poor
folks in Congress come up with some completely new, complicated reform
our existing health care system—if you can even call it that. My good
friend and former colleague in this building, Chairman John Conyers,
had it right all along: We have a great system that we just need to
expand to cover everyone.

So to get it started, I’m going to send Congress a couple of bills.
One would immediately shift everyone eligible for Medicaid over to
Medicare. I’m calling this the States' Medical Cost Relief and Medicare
Expansion Act. It will not only begin the process of expanding
Medicare, but will provide badly needed financial relief to states that
are suffering from declining tax revenues and rising health care costs
because of the recession. (applause)

I will also send Congress a bill that will expand Medicare coverage to all Americans and to legal residents. (applause, some boos from Republicans)

I am sure that as financially sound as this change is, there will
be opposition from the medical industry, so let me add that this is,
for me, a moral imperative too. For too long, this great country has
allowed health care to be a matter of whether or not you had a job with
health benefits, or enough money to pay for insurance yourself. That is
unacceptable. We are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers, and just as we
believe that every child needs an education, we believe that everyone
deserves to have access to quality medical care. (loud applause)

So let me add this: If Congress does not pass these two bills by
the end of the current session, in time for the holiday recess in
December, I will declare a national emergency because of the recession
and the huge rise in the uninsured that it has caused, and will issue
executive orders implementing both these measures. It’s not the way I
would prefer to see things done, but if Congress cannot act, I promise
you and the American people, I will. (applause and boos)

Let me also say that this program is a priority for me and for all
Americans, and anyone—Republican or Democrat—who gets in the way can
expect to hear from me, and from the American people, in this coming
election year. (applause)

Thank you and good night. (applause)
_______________
DAVE LINDORFF is not a speechwriter for the president. He is,
however, the author of “Marketplace Medicine: The Rise of the
For-Profit Hospital Chains” (Bantam Books, 1992). His work is available
at www.thiscantbehappening.net

The Simple Answer to America’s Health Care Crisis: Medicare for All

dlindorff — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 12:51:33 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

When it comes to reforming America’s disastrous health care
“system,” there are two issues that need to be considered: access and
cost.

The so-called reform proposals being offered by the Obama White
House, the House and the Senate, are failing on both counts, and
deserve to die.

No progressives should allow themselves to be suckered into promoting one or the other.

Here’s the problem. As long as the health insurance industry is
permitted to be the primary paymaster, the cost of medical care will
continue to soar, not least because the insurance industry is so
concerned about minimizing its own outlays that it is forcing the
system to devote nearly 30% of every health care dollar spent to
administrative costs (compared to 3-4 percent for Medicare, and even
less for single-payer systems like Canada’s). That’s true whether there
is a so-called “public option” government-run health insurance plan or
not. Note that 30 percent of America’s $2.5-trillion health care bill
per year is $750 billion a year, a sum which does absolutely nothing to
make a single person more healthy or less ill. Even if one were to
assume that the lion’s share of those administrative expenses were only
for the private funded portion of America’s health care system, and for
Medicare, the state-run but partly federally-funded portion that is
famous for its paperwork mess, and the uninsured, who also consume a
lot of paperwork when they do get treated at hospitals under mandated
free-care provisions of at the expense of local governments, we’d be
talking about 30% of $1.5 trillion, or about $450 billion going to
administrative costs every year—still a staggering sum.

Medicare, the health program for the elderly and the disabled, and
Medicaid, the federally and state-funded program that funds medical
care for the poor, together cost some $850 billion a year. Add to that
the $150 billion that hospitals and local governments spend annually to
cover the uninsured poor who don’t qualify for Medicaid, and the $50
billion the federal government spends for veterans’ care. That’s just
over $1 trillion in government spending to cover the health care of
roughly half the population of the United States.

The rest of us—working people and our families—rely on private
insurance, some of it paid for by employers, some by us, either as our
share of the cost of company plans (growing every year), or as the
deductible and co-pay portions of our medical bills. That privately
funded medical care costs us about $1.5 trillion a year—50% more than
the government spends on the medical care for a roughly equal number of
people. If you do the math, it turns out that we who rely on the
private sector are spending about $10,000 per person per year on health
care, either directly out of our own pockets, or in the form of money
our employers are paying into insurance plans for us—money that could
otherwise be coming to us in the form of higher wages or lower-priced
goods.

What this means is that right off the bat, if the politicians in
Washington were to simply thumb their noses at the insurance industry,
and at the greedy docs and drug companies who are paying millions in
legal bribes to protect their stake in the lucrative medical game, and
if they were to extended Medicare to all of us, we could immediately
eliminate $500 billion from the nation’s collective medical bill,
because that’s how much more cheaply Medicare, Medicaid and the VA are
able to treat patients than the private sector. But the savings would
be far more than that. The cost of treating the uninsured--$150 billion
a year—would be dramatically reduced, because it is currently almost
entirely for emergency care at hospitals, the most expensive possible
way to deliver medical care. My guess is that at least $100 billion
would be saved simply by switching all those people over to Medicare,
so they could walk into a doctor’s office for treatment instead of into
an ER. The VA, with its separate government-owned hospital system,
would become largely redundant if all veterans were simply treatable
under Medicare, which would probably save a considerable portion of
that $50 billion-per-year expense. Furthermore, by switching
private-pay patients over to Medicare, most of the $450 billion a year
currently wasted on administrative costs would be eliminated—a savings
of perhaps $3-400 billion a year. While some of that would be reflected
in the cost differential between privately financed and Medicare
financed care, most is not. The main reason Medicare’s per-patient cost
for care is much lower than for private pay patients (who, remember,
are younger and healthier on average than Medicare patients, and so
should be cheaper to treat, not more expensive), is that Medicare sets
out payment schedules for doctors and hospitals, and negotiates
payments for medicines—all at much lower levels than do private
insurers, who often just set reimbursement rates, and let their insured
patients cover the difference out of pocket.

Taking all these savings together, it’s a good guess, I would say,
that by simply expanding Medicare to cover all Americans without
exception, the nation as a whole could save upwards of $900 billion on
its current $2.5 trillion annual medical bill.

Now that’s not to say such a change wouldn’t involve a tax
increase. The current publicly funded share of that $2.5 trillion bill
is about $1 trillion, when you add together federal, state and local
outlays, all funded by the taxpayer. An expanded Medicare that covered
everyone would, by my reckoning, cost about $1.4 trillion, once all the
costs were added, and the savings implemented, including lowered
payments to doctors, hospitals and drug companies. So we’d have to
cover an extra $400 billion a year through tax increases.

But remember, there would be no more local revenues going to pay
for uninsured care at local hospitals, no more state taxes going to pay
for Medicaid for medical care for the poor, no more out-of-pocket
payments by families for co-pays and deductibles, or for employee share
of insurance premiums. And companies would no longer be paying anything
for employee health insurance. The net gain to the average person would
be enormous.

That’s the point that the medical industry lobby conveniently
ignores. It’s a point also conveniently ignored by the politicians
they’ve bought in Washington and the White House, who only talk about
the increased taxes that a single-payer government takeover of health
care finance would entail.

And, to get back to the beginning of this article, there would no
longer be an issue of Americans going without access to medical care.
Everyone would be on Medicare. And not one of the costly “reform”
proposals being pushed through Congress today can say that. Every
proposed “reform” plan leaves millions uninsured.

Note too that, under basic Medicare (as long as you don’t get
suckered into one of those HMO rip-offs like Humana and other insurance
firms advertise), everyone gets to choose his or her own doctor and
hospital. There is no gatekeeper system—another bugaboo raised by the
health industry lobbyists.

With a universalization of Medicare, at one fell swoop, America
would have a single-payer system—one that its elderly citizens already
have, and by all accounts are very satisfied with—and one that would be
substantially cheaper than what we have now.

For everyone.

Socialized medicine? Maybe, but it’s a socialism we already know.
Call it “socialism with American characteristics,” if you like. Or to
crib from a comment President Obama made to the fat cat docs at the
American Medical Assn. convention recently, it’s a socialism that is
“part of the American tradition.”

So, want to have some fun? Tell your congressional delegation to
demand that the Congressional Budget Office, which just came up with an
estimate that the Senate’s health “reform” bill would add $1.6 trillion
in costs over 10 years, do a study of what expanding Medicare to all
would cost, after netting out the savings to individuals and
employers of having their insurance payments and out-of-pocket health
expenses eliminated.
___________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-area journalist. His latest book is
“The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Obama, Like Clinton Before Him, is Blowing the Chance for Real Health Care Reform

dlindorff — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 09:48:01 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

If you want to fix the disaster that is called the American
healthcare system, the first thing to do is to clearly point out what
its major failings are, and there are two of these.

The first is cost. America is one of the or possibly the most
expensive places in the world to get sick or injured. The corollary of
that is that it is one of the best places to make a killing if you are
in the medical business, whether as a doctor, a hospital company, a
pharmaceutical firm or a nursing home owner.

The second is access. One in six Americans—a total of 50 million
people at latest count—have no way to pay for that care. Too young for
Medicare, too “well off” for Medicaid, but too poor to buy private
health insurance or too sick to be admitted into a plan, or employed by
a company that doesn’t provide health benefits, these people get no
medical care until they get so sick that they are brought into a
hospital emergency room where they get treated (often too late) at
public expense, or at the hospital’s expense, with the cost shifted
onto taxpayers or onto insured patients’ premiums.

Any reform of this atrocious “system” must address these two major failings or it is no reform at all.

And that’s where all the various versions of Obamacare fall flat.

Simply put, you cannot solve either of these problems by leaving
the payment system for medical care in the hands of the private
insurance industry, since the whole paradigm of insurance is to make
money by keeping high-risk people out of the insured pool, and by
keeping reimbursements and coverage for premium payers as low as
possible.

Having a so-called “public option” plan working in competition with
private insurance plans will not solve this problem. Either the public
option will become like the private options—trimming benefits and
rejecting some applicants—or it will become a dumping ground for all
the high-cost, high-risk people that the private sector insurance
industry doesn’t want. At that point, the public plan will become a
huge cost burden on the taxpayer, who will begin demanding that it cut
back in the benefits it provides, taking us right back to where we
started.

The fact that the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress
are both raising the issue of the high cost of health care “reform,”
and are talking about ways to raise revenues to pay for it
tells us all we need to know about the alleged “reform” schemes they
are contemplating. They are doomed and, even if implemented, will not
work.

Real reform of the American health care system would not cost money. It would save money.

There is a level of dishonesty in what passes for the debate over
health care “reform” in both Congress and the media that is stunning in
its brazenness and/or venality.
Of course real reform would cost more in government spending. But that
is because real reform would remove the cost of medical care from both
employers and from workers (who over the last 20 years have been
shouldering an increasing share of their own medical care). And that
shift would mean more profits for US companies, which would free up
more money for wages, and it would mean less money deducted from
paychecks, meaning higher incomes for workers.

If President Obama had any political courage at all, he’d simply
get on TV and say this: I will create a plan that will cover everyone,
lift the burden of paying for healthcare from individuals and
employers, and have the government pay for it all. You the taxpayer
will pay for this plan with higher taxes, but you will no longer have
any significant medical bills, you will no longer have health insurance
premiums deducted from your paycheck, your employer will no longer be
paying for employee medical coverage, and you will never have to worry
about losing health benefits again, even if you are laid off.
(Incidentally, eliminating employer-funded health insurance would go a
long way towards allowing workers to fight to unions, and to strike for
contracts, by ending the threat that they would lose their benefits.)

Of course, to do that the president would have to be talking about
what is variously known as national health care or a single-payer plan,
in which the government is the insurer of health care for all.

This option isn’t even being discussed in this so-called debate. As
I’ve written earlier, even though there is an excellent single-payer
system in place that has been running for a third of a century just to
the north in Canada—a system where patients have absolute freedom to
choose their doctor, get instant access to a hospital and to expert
specialist care in emergencies, and have a healthier society by every
statistical measure—all at a fraction of the staggering cost of
healthcare in the US, not one Canadian expert working in that system
has been invited down to discuss its workings with the White House or
with members of Congress.

There has been a lot of negative propaganda spread about Canada’s
single-payer system, by right wing, business-funded “no-think” tanks,
and by medical industry lobbies from the American Medical Assn. to the
pharmaceutical industry, but no government committee or agency has
bothered, or dared, to bring in Canadian experts to respond to and
debunk that propaganda. The corporate liars talk about waiting lists
and lack of access to CAT-scan or MRI machines. But all we really need
to know about the Canadian, and other similar single-payer systems, is
that nowhere that they have been instituted have they been later
terminated, even when, as in Canada, right-wing governments have been
elected to power. The public, whether in Canada, or France, or England,
or Taiwan or elsewhere, loves their public health insurance system,
whatever flaws or problems with underfunding those systems may have at
certain times. Trying ot eliminate such systems would be political
suicide for a conservative government, as even arch-free-marketer
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who never me a government
activity that she didn’t want to privatize, learned.

Right now, with half of all Americans reportedly fearing that they
could lose their jobs, and with one in five Americans reportedly either
unemployed, or involuntarily working part-time, we have a situation
where a majority of Americans either have no health insurance, have
lost their health insurance, or are in danger of losing their
employer-funded health insurance. It is a unique moment when a bold
president and Congress could act to end private health insurance and
establish a public single-payer insurance plan to insure and provide
access to affordable medical care to all Americans.

Instead of this, we are being offered half measures or no measures
at all by leaders who are shamelessly in hock to the health care
industry or who are afraid of its power.

17 years ago, the Clintons had a similar opportunity to grab the
health care industry by the neck, strangle it, and produce a
single-payer alternative. They blew that chance by trying to keep the
health care greed-heads happy. Now, almost a generation later, we have
another shot at it, and Obama and his Democratic Congress are doing the
same thing again. There is a strong likelihood that they will fail,
like the Clintons before them. If they succeed in coming up with some
kind of hybrid public-private Frankenstein of a system that includes a
public insurance option, it will simply delay the inevitable disaster,
as medical costs, already 20 percent of GDP—the highest share of any
economy in the world—continue to soar, and as the cost of the public
plan, which will inevitably become a dumping ground for high-cost
patients, becomes politically untenable. In the end, we will have even
more expensive and inaccessible healthcare than we have today.

It doesn’t have to be this way, but only if Americans rip their
eyes away from their crisp new digital-image TV screens and start
demanding real health care reform will we get honest reform. A good
place to begin would be to start writing and phoning your local media
outlets to ask why they are not reporting on single-payer, and in
particular on the single-payer bill sponsored by Rep. John Conyers
(D-MI), which is being silently blocked and killed by his colleagues in
the Democratic congressional leadership and by the White House. A good
place to begin would also be to start calling your elected
representatives to demand that they support Rep. Conyers’ single-payer
bill.

___________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His is author of
the critically acclaimed book “Marketplace Medicine: The Rise of the
For-Profit Hospital Companies” (Bantam Books, 1992). His latest book is
“The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work can be
found at www.thiscantbehappening.net

It's April 15: Time to Pay for War, Killing and Oppression Once Again

dlindorff — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 14:29:00 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

As you’re mailing out that tax return again this year, it’s time to
remember once again how much of your hard-earned bucks are being devoted to destruction, imperialist domination, slaughter and
war, to funding ridiculous programs like the failed anti-missile
system, and also to supporting a massively bureaucratic and overstaffed
military.

Even with the current US budget predicted to hit a record $3.5
trillion, thanks to a whopping $800 billion, two-year economic stimulus
package, and with several hundred billion being poured into a group of
banks and the bottomless pit called AIG, the $800 billion budgeted for the military to date
(a figure that includes an $85 billion “supplemental” request for the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) represents 22% of total US spending.

That means that more than one in every five of the dollars you are paying to the IRS will be going to the Pentagon.

For a typical family of four with taxable income of $60,000 and a
tax bill of $8201.00, that would mean a “war tax” of $1804.00. For a
wealthier two-income family of four with a taxable income of
$100,000.00, with a tax bill of $17681.00, that would mean a “war tax”
of $3890.00.

Of course, it’s never that simple. Actually, the government’s tax
collections this year, because of the deepening recession which has
been with us since December 2007, means that tax collections will be
way down, not to mention the cuts that were part of the above-mentioned
stimulus package. That is to say, tax revenues this year could be below
$2.4 trillion, meaning the government will have to borrow at least $1
trillion to pay its bills.

At least a fifth of that debt, or $200 billion, will be for war and
general military spending, and it will have to be paid off at interest
rates that mean by the time that debt is retired, it will have cost us
perhaps triple that amount, or $600 billion.

In fiscal 2008, the government spent $408 billion just on interest
on the national debt. At least one quarter of that amount, or $102
billion, was for military-related debt. While this might be a little
low, since our military budgets and military debt are rising year after
year, what that tells us is that we’re also spending perhaps an extra
$40-50 billion a year of our collective tax bill on interest on war
debt. That works out to another 15% of your taxes for war.

So make that $60,000-income family’s war tax $2075.00, while the $100,000-income family’s war tax goes to $4474.00.

The reporting on America’s military budget in the mainstream
corporate media (some of which is actually owned, like NBC, by
conglomerates that are themselves beneficiaries of military spending,
and all of which are beneficiaries of considerable ad revenue from
military contractors and from the Pentagon itself), has been atrocious,
with a lot of talk about “cuts” in pointless hugely expensive weapons
systems like the F-22 Raptor, a fighter jet designed to combat an
advanced enemy that simply doesn’t exist. The truth is that the
proposed 2009 military budget put out by the Obama administration is
the largest in history in actual dollars, continuing the trend of the
last 11 years in which each year’s military budget has been larger than
the prior year’s. It is also the largest military budget, after
adjusting for inflation, since WWII.

If that disgusts you, consider what just 25% of that budget, or
about $175 billion—the amount that House Finance Committee Chair Barney
Frank (D-MA) has proposed cutting—could do, if spent on things this
country needs, instead of on killing and preparing to kill. Total
federal spending on education for 2009: $46 billion. Total spending on
welfare for families with dependent children for 2009: $60 billion.
Total federal spending on unemployment compensation for 2009: $43
billion. Total federal transportation spending in 2009: $84 billion.
Looked at another way, cutting the military budget by 25% (which is
really a modest amount, considering that the US is spending as much on
its military machine as the rest of the entire world combined!), would
allow the government to increase all those other budgets by 50% and
still have $58 billion left over for other useful spending goals like
the environment, energy and medical research, etc.

Just a thought for tax day.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

The late folksinger/songwriter Tim Hardin had it right long ago.

___________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book
is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Takin' It to City Halls and Statehouses, Not Just to the DC Streets

dlindorff — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 14:27:49 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

One impact of this deepening recession which is largely hidden
because it is spread out and distributed across the land is a wave of
budget crises swamping nearly every state government and every
municipal government in the country.

State governments, according to the Center for Budget Priorities,
are facing a $77-billion revenue shortfall for the 2009 fiscal year.
Municipal governments are probably facing a total revenue shortfall of
even more than that—perhaps closer to $100 billion. New York City, for
example, is reportedly facing a budget shortfall of $1.5 billion over
the next two years and Philadelphia, the nation’s fifth largest city, a
shortfall of $1 billion over the next five years.

While these are huge numbers for the governments involved, and are
leading to the closure of fire stations, community libraries, municipal
swimming pools, etc., and the deferral of needed infrastructure repairs
and maintenance and to the layoff of many city workers, as well as the
curtailment of education programs in struggling school districts, they
are not large sums of money when put up against the money that is being
shoveled out by the Treasury and the Federal Reserve System to banks,
investment banks and insurance companies.

At the same time, because states and municipalities are major
employers, layoffs in these sectors will seriously undermine federal
economic stimulus efforts.

What is stunning is that even as they face the politically
devastating reality of having to tell citizens that important services,
like road repairs, libraries, pools, snow removal, etc., are going to
be slashed, and possibly that taxes, meanwhile, are going to have to be
raised on residents who are themselves facing layoffs or pay cuts, and
even as state and local political leaders are pleading with the federal
government for assistance, few if any of those leaders are asking the
key question.

That question is: Why is the US, which is facing this historically
unprecedented economic debacle, continuing to spend $1 trillion a year
on the military—an amount greater than what is being spent by all the
rest of the nations of the world combined? Why is the US spending over
$40 billion a year of completely unsupervised money on the “black box”
of intelligence agencies? Why is the US spending $4-5 billion a week on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and even talking about boosting spending on fighting in Afghanistan?

If the answer to that question is “national security,” why aren’t
these state and local officials asking a second question, namely: Isn’t
the first requirement of social security the health, safety and
education of a nation’s citizens?

It seems to me self-evident that the nation’s governors, state
legislators, mayors, county supervisors and city counselors need to
organize collectively to start demanding that the military budget be
taken off the sacrosanct list, and slashed dramatically to provide
funds where they are needed—not for buying super expensive toys for
generals and admirals to play with (weapons that have no conceivable
real use), not for blowing up people in Iraq and Afghanistan, but
rather for paying teachers and firefighters here at home.

There would be no state and local budget crisis if the Pentagon
budget were slashed by 20 percent, with the funds shifted to state and
local aid. If it were cut another 20 percent, there would be no problem
implementing Barack Obama’s proposed plan for a national health
insurance program. If it were cut another 10%, we’d have an education
system for every child that would be the envy of the world, instead of
the embarrassing system we have today, which is graduating kids in many
districts who cannot even read or divide.

The peace movement, such as it is, instead of just periodically
protesting on the National Mall in Washington, or marching past the
Capitol or the White House, should be taking its protests to the state
capitals and to local city halls, to press state and local officials to
begin campaigning for an end to America’s imperialist adventures, and
for a major reduction in bloated US military and intelligence budgets,
in line with America’s real needs, as opposed to the manufactured
“needs” of the military-industrial complex.

Meanwhile, the citizens of towns and cities across America need to
tell their local and state elected officials that we’ve had it with the
US being a global “policeman” (and a corrupt and vicious cop at that!).
We want them to demand a sane and reasonable military budget, and
appropriate help for struggling communities. Maybe Congress and the
White House won’t listen to us, but they will listen to the voices of
their own parties’ elected officials. And those local officials are
much more likely to listen to us than the people in Washington.
___________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006).
His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

The Power of "No"!

dlindorff — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 11:53:21 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

The Congressional switchboard is jammed. You can get through, but it
takes a dedicated finger on the redial button of your phone. Operators
at the Capitol say it's been that way for a week now, as Americans
across the country have been flooding their Congressional delegations
with phone calls (and emails) urging them to vote "No" on the
Bush/Paulson Wall Street bailout.

That today is no exception, after Democratic Party leaders (and both
major party presidential candidates, John McCain and Barack Obama)
bought into the plan after adding some window-dressing measures
designed to make it look more palatable. This shows that the public is
not fooled.

People see clearly that this is a trillion-dollar giveaway to the
very people who have been hollowing out and destroying the US economy
for over a decade or more by convincing both parties to let them do
whatever they want to get rich, free of any kind of significant
oversight or regulation.

As Nobelist economist Joseph Stiglitz has written
of this outrageous rip-off, there are four problems facing the
financial system, and the bailout proposal only addresses one--getting
the toxic mortgages off the banks' books and onto taxpayers' hands.
Left unsolved is the gaping hole in banks' balance sheets in the form
of loans made to people and companies which cannot be repaid, which
will mean they still won't start lending money again. Left unaddressed
too is the continuing collapse of housing prices, which will inevitably
lead to more bank collapses even after the bailout. Finally, Stiglitz
says there is the general loss of faith in the financial system--a
major crisis which the bailout will also not solve.

Stiglitz doesn't even address a fifth problem which is that this
trillion-plus-dollar boondoggle (and when you add in the bailouts of
Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, Bear Stearns, the multiple mega-bank
failures and the pending auto-industry bailout, you're already talking
$1.5 trillion and counting), all of it with borrowed money, the stage
is being set for a collapse in the US dollar, with consequences that
will reverberate through the economy. Consider: if the dollar
collapses, as many experts say is almost inevitable with this kind of
huge addition to the national debt, oil prices (which are set in
dollars) will soar to compensate, the price of all the other goods that
Americans import--more than half of everything we use in daily life
thanks to the decimation of American manufacturing--will rise
dramatically, and ultimately, in an effort to stem the bleeding,
interest rates will have to be raised, thus bringing what's left of the
economy to a grinding halt.

All of this is readily predictable--and indeed a group of over 200 prominent economists has written Congress
joining Stiglitz in opposing the bailout plan--but that doesn't matter
to the proponents of the bailout in Washington. What they want is to
get past Election Day, and the bailout may do that, unless the public
gets really aroused.

The tsunami of calls and emails to Congress, and last week's
nationwide demonstrations against the bailout suggest that the public
is waking up to this looming disaster and to the fact that they are
being sold a bill of goods.

If you haven't made an effort to call your two senators and your
representative to demand that they vote "No" on this bailout, do it now
(the number is 202-225-3121 or 202-224-3121), and don't give up when
you get a busy signal. That's a sign that you are not alone. Just keep
hitting "redial" until you get through. At that point, get the
operator, before switching you, to give you direct numbers for your
three members of Congress, so you can bypass the main switchboard
number after that.

Unlike the 2002 rush to war against Iraq, this latest bum's rush can still be stopped.
__________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist.
His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006
and now available in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

What Nobody's Saying: The Bailout Will Kill the Dollar

dlindorff — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 15:05:01 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

What nobody in the corporate media is mentioning amid all the
blather about the $700-billion Paulson bailout proposal is the impact
it will have on the US dollar.

We are told that this huge gift to the financial sector—the
assumption, at top dollar, of all the bad debt they’ve piled up--will
be at taxpayer expense, but that’s only the half of it. (Really only
the quarter of it because since the US government is technically
bankrupt already, spending more than it takes in each year, all that
money will be borrowed, and will be added to the national debt, meaning
that just as the real cost of the $500-billion Iraq War is closer to $2
trillion, the real cost of the $700 billion bailout will be more like
$1.5-2.5 trillion.)

But besides the direct bill handed to taxpayers for this gigantic
con, there is the fact that adding that much to the national debt is
also going to drive the dollar down precipitously against foreign
currencies. We’re already seeing that happen, even while they’re just
talking about the bailout. The dollar is falling against all major
currencies—the Euro, the Yen, the Renminbi and the British pound. And
it will continue to fall as the details of the bailout come out.

This will add to already powerful pressures in countries like Saudi
Arabia and China, which hold huge quantities of US dollars and US
dollar-denominated debt, to shift out of dollars and into other
currencies—particularly the Euro and the Yen. Last week, an article in
China’s People’s Daily, which like Pravda in the old Soviet Union, is
the official voice of the leadership in China, called for just such a
move. Russia is also calling for an end to the dollar as the
underpinning of the global economy.

For some years now, many economists have been predicting an end to
the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, but this latest plan by the
US Treasury will push such a shift forward from “some day” to “now.”

As long as the dollar has been the reserve currency—the currency in
which key commodities like gold or oil were priced, and the currency
that exporting nations stocked in their treasuries as a store of value
– it was protected against collapse. But once it loses that status,
there will be nothing to prop it up any longer, and it will quickly
slide to a value that it deserves. We got an inkling of what is going to happen today, as crude oil
prices leapt in the course of one hour by 25%, the biggest jump in the
history of the oil market. This was purely a move caused by loss of
confidence in the dollar. There was no oil supply disruption. In fact,
demand for oil has been sinking as the economic crisis grows. Oil
producers and traders simply realized that the dollar is going poof, so
they radically jacked up the cost of oil in dollars.

If you want to see what where the dollar is headed,, look to the
currencies of the debtor nations—countries like Mexico or perhaps
Mozambique. A nation that makes almost nothing, and that imports most
of its needs, cannot have a strong currency.

This might not matter much if we had a functioning domestic
economy, where people could find the goods and services they needed
without turning to sources from abroad. A big country like the US could
simply turn inward and function on by its own domestic economic
standards.

I remember back when the former Soviet Union was in a state of
economic and political free fall in the early and mid 1990s, the
currencies of the constituent countries, like Russia, Ukraine and
Belarus had had collapsed to virtual worthlessness on the international
market. A Byelorussian friend, an engineering professor from Minsk,
living and working near me in China at the time, explained that
although when he traveled the world, he felt like a pauper, things
weren’t so bad back home Belarus, where he and his family would go in
the summer. “My apartment only costs a few dollars a month to rent,” he
explained, “and our food is bought on the local market using rubles, so
it is very affordable.” The same was true for other needs, like
clothing and books for school, he explained. The only problem was
buying gas for his Russian Volga. “Gas,” he explained, “is priced as an
international commodity, so it takes me one month’s wages in Belarus to
buy the gas to drive once to and from our country dacha.”

You can start to see the problem. Since agriculture has been killed
off in most of the US, in favor of giant agribusiness enterprises
situated in the western part of the country and some parts of the
Midwest, most people elsewhere will not have local produce available,
and the cost of transporting food from California to places like New
York or Pennsylvania will be prohibitive once the dollar collapses,
since oil is priced internationally. Meanwhile, goods like TV sets,
computers, phones, cars (or at least the key components of cars),
clothing, etc., are no longer even made in the US, and will thus be
completely unaffordable. As for the service jobs that are supposed to
have replaced our old manufacturing sector, no one will be interested
in buying what they’re offering, because they’ll be scrimping just to
buy the key staples they need to survive, so of course joblessness will
soar.

Eventually, of course, entrepreneurially minded people will begin
establishing local farms again where they once flourished generations
ago, and small factories will be built to provide key essentials, but
all this will take time, and will have to cater to a market of people
operating at a much lower standard of living.

The banking sector, meanwhile, which is the proximate cause of this
monumental disaster, won’t mind any of this, for it will continue
operating on the international stage, shifting its focus to lending
money (no longer dollars, though), to growing economies in Asia and
Latin America and eastern Europe. And this is what, in truth, the
“rescue” of Wall Street is all about.

It’s not about saving Main Street, as Paulson claims. Main Street,
under the bailout, is toast. It’s about helping the banks and
investment banks and insurance companies that brought on this crisis to
ride it out in style, their astronomical losses bankrolled or absorbed
by the American public, so that they can shift their operations
overseas and continue with their rape and pillage of the global economy.

The US will be left behind, a smoking ruin, with Americans, like
Weimar Germans before them, going shopping with wheelbarrows full of
worthless green paper to exchange for a few days’ groceries.
_____________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist.
His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006
and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Hang On to Your Wallet! The Government is About to Rescue Us

dlindorff — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 09:55:19 -0400

by Dave Lindorff

When the financial markets started coming undone earlier this week,
the Treasury Secretary and the Federal Reserve stepped in, and with $85
billion of our money (actually our children's money,
since they borrowed it from China and Saudi Arabia), bought foundering
AIG, the world's largest insurance company, and assumed its colossal
pile of crap debt.

That didn't help, and the stock market crashed further, falling to
levels not seen in three years. Banks, meanwhile, stopped lending,
figuring to just hold onto their money and try to weather the crash.
The US Treasury and the Fed stepped in again, this time pumping nearly
$300 billion more of our money into foreign money markets, and getting
European and other governments to do the same in an effort to get the
credit markets open again and to stop the stock market swoon. That was
on top of some $700 billion already spent on bailouts.

It didn't work. Thursday, the markets continued to fall, well into
the afternoon, and it looked like another seriously down day. But then
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson came up with a new idea. He said he
and the Bush administration were considering setting up a new agency to
assume all the bad debt of the banking sector--meaning all those bad
loans they made, and that they lured unsuspecting consumers into taking
out, by way of deceptive marketing techniques and outright fraud.

Note that we're talking about perhaps half a trillion dollars
here--of our money again. And remember, much or even most of this money
will never get repaid, and we're talking about money that could have
funded reduced class sizes in every school in America, a national
healthcare system, a crash R&D program into non-carbon energy and (not or) a strengthened Social Security and Medicare program.

The drones in the Democratic Party leadership in Congress
immediately jumped on the bandwagon, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
(D-CA) urging her charges to act quickly to get some kind of a bill out
there to facilitate the bail-out, which could cost anywhere from $600
billion to $1 trillion, but most estimates.

The thing to remember here is that this is not a rescue of the
little guy (though the Democrats say their rescue plan, when it
appears, will include some kind of relief for people unable to pay
their mortgages). Don't hold your breath. Odds are those people facing
foreclosure will still be unable to pay their mortgages, and besides,
there's no way there will be relief for the majority of homeowners who aren't missing their mortgage payments, but who are struggling mightily to meet them each month.

Primarily, who gets helped by this enforced taxpayer largesse are
the fat cats who own all the stock in these financial institutions, all
the executives who pay themselves outsize salaries each year for their
lousy management records, all these hotshot traders who make the deals
that later turn sour, long after they've run off to another job taking
their bonuses with them.

We ordinary people, who live from check to check, will feel the
pain of this "rescue" in the form of higher taxes in coming years, and
in a devalued dollar--because you can bet that all that money they're
printing, and all that added debt they're piling on to the mountain of
debt already out there is going to make the rest of the world pretty
queasy about holding onto dollar-denominated debt, or about buying any
more of it.

When you hear a banker say he's going to help you, it pays to hang
onto your wallet. When you hear a politician say he's going to help
you, hang onto your wallet. If they're both saying the same thing, and
especially if one of them is the head of the Federal Reserve Bank, then
you better really hang on tight.

Not that that will do any good.

The real answer to this crisis is, firstly, a massive dose of
trust-busting, so that no bank or investment bank or insurance company
is so big that its failure becomes a threat to the financial system,
and thus the government has to rescue it with taxpayer money, and
secondly, a return to the era of Glass-Steagall, when it was illegal
for banks to also be in the investment banking busiiness.

All the talk of "efficiencies" and of "better service to the
customer" that has been endlessly parroted to justify mergers like
Citicorp and Travelers, or JP Morgan and Chase Bank, or now Bank of
America and Merrill Lynch is fraudulent. Just to give an example, my
bank, once known as Willow Grove Bank, a small family-owned
institution, was bought by another bank and became Willow Financial.
Almost immediately the staffing levels went down. Recently, the
combined entity, which ran into trouble, was bought by another
institution, Harleyville Bank. Now there are half as many tellers most
of the time. As one teller confided, "Every time we get bought, they
lay people off."

Of course they do. That's what mergers always do. To recoup the
costs of the merger, management cuts back on service and employment.

The truth is, for all the talk about the efficiencies of bigness,
getting a mortgage today isn't any cheaper than it was in the 1950s,
when there wasn't even any such thing as a national bank that would be
"too big to fail."

The real reason we have mega financial institutions is that mega
financial institutions pay mega bucks to managers and make mega
donations to the campaign coffers of politicians. They also get to put
some of those mega-buck managers into key advisory positions in each
administration, Republican and Democrat, to ensure that government
polices allow them to get even bigger and even richer--and to ensure
that when they screw it up, they get rescued at the taxpayers' expense.
__________________

"Borrow and Spend Republicans"

ericindiana — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 08:37:08 -0500

Democrats nationally should start referring to "borrow and spend Republicans" when critiquing Republican fiscal irresponsibility. Republicans were successful in making "tax & spend Democrats" part of the lexicon, and it is highly irresponsible to borrow & spend our way into the largest debt in history.

So take note, pundit and advisor-type people: "Borrow & spend Republicans" is a phrase that will refocus the economic debate and hold Republicans accountable.

- Eric