Friday, October 11, 2013

Editorial: GOP: Saboteurs or Morons?


It would be amusing if it weren’t so maddening that Republicans blame President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid for the federal government shutdown and House Republicans’ refusal to go along with raising the debt ceiling, which threatens to cripple the government’s ability to finance its debt and would disrupt the world economy, unless the President agrees to stop implementation of the Affordable Care Act.

Republicans have talked themselves into risking financial calamity if Democrats won’t reverse the health care reform, which is designed to provide health insurance for the 48 million Americans, many of them working poor, who are not covered by health care plans — and it was a Republican idea to begin with.

Tea Party Republicans are the ground forces opposing all things Obama in Congress, intimidating House Speaker John Boehner and more moderate Republicans who would go ahead with the “clean” continuing resolution to put the government back to work. But the New York Times reported that conservative activists, led by former Attorney General Edwin Meese III and financed by right-wing billionaires, have been working since President Obama’s reinauguration in January to derail the President’s health care law. More than three dozen conservative groups have pushed their fellow Republicans into shutting down most federal agencies, and the shutdown is enforced by radical groups such as Heritage Action for America and the billionaire Koch brothers whose many affiliated political action committees have threatened to run attack ads and primary challengers against Republican officeholders who refuse to toe the Tea Party line.

This is the latest manifestation of conservative Republican ideology that has been promoting anti-worker economics for more than 80 years, ever since the GOP resisted Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal programs to end the Depression. Then, after the Depression was ended, Republicans spent the rest of the 20th century trying to dismantle the New Deal, with its pesky regulation of businesses to protect workers and consumers. They went after Roosevelt’s signature program, Social Security, as well as Lyndon Johnson’s signature domestic health programs, Medicare and Medicaid, which were enacted in 1965. Now they don’t want President Obama’s Affordable Care Act to get a running start at showing that government can improve the lives of working people, even though “Obamacare” is patterned after a program that was originally suggested by the conservative Heritage Foundation and patterned after Mitt Romney’s bipartisan health-care reform in Massachusetts.

[See Thomas Frank’s cover story for more on the conservative long march to reverse the New Deal and Edward McClelland’s story on page 12 on how conservative economic policies under Republicans and Democrats hollowed out the middle class.]

It took a long time for the generation that owed their families’ survival in the Great Depression to the New Deal, and then thrived on the post-war economic expansion that created the Great Middle Class, to turn their backs on the economic system that made the United States the richest nation on Earth. The economy boomed in the 1950s and ’60s with strong industrial labor unions and income tax rates that topped out at 92% for the wealthiest classes, but as Big Money took over the newspapers, magazines and broadcast outlets in the 1960s and ’70s, the word went out with numbing regularity that labor unions, high taxes and regulations were bad for the “job creators.”

In the 1960s, President John Kennedy decided to give the capitalists a break. He proposed that the top marginal tax rate be dropped to 77% in 1964. The top tax rate fluctuated between 70 and 77 percent through the ’70s, until Ronald Reagan took office in 1981. Reagan cut the top tax rate to 70% in 1980, then to 50% in 1982, 38.5% in 1987 and finally 28% in 1988. And you know what? Not only did capitalists take their profits out of their American factories and find cheaper places to manufacture their goods overseas; the Reagan administration also ran up record deficits as the national debt rose from $900 billion when Reagan took office to $2.8 trillion when he left. His successor, George H.W. Bush, reluctantly increased the top tax rates to 31%, but it wasn’t enough to turn the tide of red ink.

When Bill Clinton reached the White House in 1993, he convinced the Democratic Congress to increase taxes to 39.6% on incomes over $250,000. The budget and tax increase was adopted without a single Republican vote, as GOP economic leaders predicted — nay, they guaranteed — that the tax increase would plunge the US into economic collapse. Instead, of course, the late 1990s saw an economic boom and the increased tax revenues balanced the federal budget in 1998 for the first time since Lyndon Johnson left a balanced budget in 1969. Clinton balanced the budgets from 1998 through 2001, with surpluses for those four years totaling $559 billion.

What did Republicans learn from this experience? When George W. Bush was awarded the White House by the Republican Supreme Court in 2001, his administration expressed alarm that the federal government, with its budget surplus, was paying off the national debt too quickly, leaving capitalists no safe harbor for their excess profits, so Bush cut the top tax rate, first to 38.6% in 2002 and then 35% for the rest of his tenure, despite the costs of his War on Terror. He also cut the top tax on unearned income — interest, dividends and capital gains — to 15%. So millionaires and billionaires parked that undertaxed unearned income in banks overseas and the US national debt piled up once again.

After the 2008 election, when Barack Obama took office with the economy in free-fall, largely due to Wall Street financiers abusing the deregulation of the banking system, Republicans rediscovered the danger of a rising national debt. The GOP resisted Obama’s efforts to stimulate the economy with $800 billion in federal spending and tax cuts as well as his efforts to save General Motors and Chrysler with $85 billion in loans. Of course, they also resisted the drafting of the Affordable Care Act, which is expected to save the federal budget $210 billion through 2021, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Still, after 43 straight months of private sector job growth, the slowly improving economy has halved the $1.4 trillion annual deficit Obama was handed in 2009, to a $642 billion deficit projected for 2013, but Republicans are demanding that Obama return to GOP economic nostrums.

Supply-side “voodoo” economics got its shot in the Reagan and Bush administrations and it has proven to be quackery that hollowed out the American economy and ballooned the national debt. If Republicans really were concerned with restoring the economy and eliminating the deficit, they would:

• Join progressive Dems in rolling back the top tax rates to the pre-Reagan levels and do away with the low rates for capital gains, which would give capitalists an incentive to reinvest their profits in their businesses, but make room for tax breaks for the middle class, which actually would stimulate the economy;

• Resume enforcement of the Sherman Antitrust Act, which prevents cartels and large corporations from dominating the markets;

• Reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act, which kept investment banks from speculating with federally insured deposits;

• Replace free trade with fair trade laws that protect US jobs;

• Reverse economic policies that encourage corporate executives to maximize shareholder value at the expense of what is best for their employees and the communities in which they do business (as Thom Hartmann frequently argues on his radio show).

Instead, Republicans are demanding that they get something in return for letting the government open back up and pay the bills that Congress already has appropriated. One GOP proposal is that Democrats agree to “entitlement cuts” to Social Security and Medicare as a “compromise” from their previous demand that the Affordable Care Act be defunded. Some bad ideas just won’t go away. Whether Republican House leaders are saboteurs or simply morons, Democrats should stand firm against their hostage taking and leave Social Security and health care alone. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, November 1, 2013
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Selections from the November 1, 2013 issue













Karl Rove chides House Republicans for not having an endgame. He should know

By Marc Jampole

Congratulations to Karl Rove for joining the “reality based community,” which comprises you and me and other lesser mortals who look to empirical reality when analyzing and acting in the world. 

Remember it was Rove who, when referring to the war in Iraq, supposedly said that some people were “in what we call the reality based community” and “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality…That's not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out.”

It was Rove, too, who exploded in rage when Fox News declared Obama the winner in Ohio and therefore of the 2012 presidential election. An Obama win went so much against the alternative reality that Rove and other Republicans had constructed that he went into a hissy fit of denial.

Now Rove writes in the Wall Street Journal that it was probably unwise of Congressional Republicans to start this current fight over the debt ceiling and federal budget. In the Great Karl’s words, “In general, it's not wise to engage in a battle without having an endgame.”

Entering a battle without an endgame is something about which Karl Rove should know quite a lot. Rove was part of the neo-con faith-based if-wishing-made-it-so brain trust that planned and implemented the Iraq War without considering what would happen after the invasion. They went to war without an end game. We all know how that worked out.

I’m sure all my readers’ hearts are as warmed as mine to learn that Rove has dropped his objection to reality and has decided that maybe it is better to think first and shoot later.

Rove does remain part of the conservative propaganda machine that is trying to sell us on the nonsense that the country blames the President and Democrats as much as they do the Republicans for the government shutdown and imminent default. The latest polls of course contradict that colored view, with 22% more of Americans blaming Republicans than blaming Obama and the Democrats.

The Republican media apparatchiks, including Rove, are also trying to convince us that the Democrats are more to blame for the mess, because they have refused to enter serious discussions about deficit reductions.  Also not a part of reality: As President Obama recently pointed out, House Republicans turned down 19 requests to enter into joint discussions with the Senate. I am not the first to speculate that the House Republicans were probably too busy to meet on the budget because they were taking more than 40 votes to turn back the Affordable Care Act.

What the Tea-Party Republicans really object to is that President Obama, Democrats, many of their fellow Republicans and most of the country see the world as it is and not the world that these right wingers want to bring into existence by denying reality, the Democratic process, and, most tragically, the needs of millions of innocent middle class and poor people across the country.

Wednesday, October 9, 2013

Republicans who say defaulting is okay are lying; reflect a “good old boy underbelly” business culture

By Marc Jampole

If the topic is the potential impact of not raising the debt ceiling, how do you know whether Senators Richard Burr and Rand Paul and Representatives Justin Amash and Paul Broun are lying? Their lips are moving.

All four of these distinguished legislators are saying that the impact of not raising the debt ceiling will be minimal. And all are engaged in straight-faced lying.

Representative Broun, Georgia Republican, says that Obamacare is the greatest threat to our economy, despite the many studies that show that the new healthcare law will save money because millions of newly insured people will go to doctors with symptoms instead of emergency rooms when very ill.  Obamacare thus adds money to the economy, something that is supposed to be good. By comparison, not paying all our bills will lead to hundreds of thousands of people losing their jobs, interest rates going up and foreign investors losing confidence in the dollar as the central financial pillar of the global economy. That’s all bad.   

Both Representative Amash, Michigan Republican, and Senator Burr, North Carolina Republican, point out that with tax revenues still coming in, we will still be able to pay the interest on all the various instruments by which the federal government borrows money. But what they don’t say is that other bills won’t get paid—and no one likes that. When you’ve lent a buddy money and he’s paying you back, but you hear he isn’t paying back his sister, don’t you get a little uneasy?  

Their claims are so outrageous that even the U. S. Chamber of  Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, as free-market and anti-government as organizations can get, are telling Congress to raise the debt ceiling.

Broun, Burr, Amash, Paul and other Republicans suggesting that default ain’t so bad all reflect a “good old boy underbelly” business culture that no one likes to talk about in the big slick business publications like Wall Street Journal, Fortune and Forbes. It’s the culture of living right at the edge of financial ruin, one step ahead of your creditors, but still in the game. Multiple bankruptcies, dragging out payments, trying to keep afloat with another loan, selling suspect goods, using slightly suspicious selling practices, maybe puffing up inventory a little or pledging the same equipment on two personal loans—these actions characterize this entrepreneurial culture, and it’s surprising how large it is.  The good old boy underbelly business culture serves as the real underlying cause of the real estate bubble that wrecked our economy: liar loans, sub-primes, bundling bad loans with good—all qualify as underbelly business behavior.

In popular entertainment—“Cadillac Man,” “The Goods,” “Fargo,” “Glengarry Glen Ross,” “Tin Men”—this business culture is associated with selling automobiles, real estate and siding, but in fact it’s not the business but the way the owner runs it that defines the good old boy underbelly culture.
Again, I ask you to personalize: Do you like doing business with these sharks? Why should banks, large multinational corporations and foreign companies be any different? They aren’t. They’ll do what any reasonable business person does when the risk of nonpayment is great—charge more.

Let’s also not forget about the millions of people whose lives will suddenly become much more challenging because they have been laid off or aren’t getting paid. It’s not just a matter of financial consequences. There are painful human consequences to refusing to raise the debt ceiling. 

In detailing the good old boy underbelly business culture I forgot to mention one thing: These business owners are all liars who lie frequently. Which brings us full circle to the Republicans who claim that defaulting on our bills won’t be so bad.

Monday, October 7, 2013

Economist Stephen D. King shows lack of imagination in telling economic horror story

By Marc Jampole

Stephen D. King, chief economist at HSBC and author of the recent When the Money Runs Out: The End of Western Affluence, painted a horror story as gruesome as any of his namesake in his New York Times Op/Ed article titled “When Wealth Disappears.”

King reviews the no-growth economy that Europe and Japan already have and is about to reign in the United States. King takes it as a fact that no-growth has to lead to a decline in the economy—that an economy that is not growing is weak and bad. He takes it for granted that because growth will no longer bring extra wealth each year, college costs will keep going up and we will continue to fray our safety net.

Common sense should tell you that this idea is nonsense. If we have already achieved great wealth, why should no more increases prevent us from performing the functions of an economy—to provide a reasonable living standard for everyone? We have so much wealth right now that we could feed, educate and care for everyone in our country—if we only redistributed it.  All a growing economy does is enable people to live a higher standard of living without having to seriously consider wealth redistribution.

The standard of living in the mature industrialized countries is already quite high.  Who says it ever has to get any higher?  Certainly we have to improve the lives of our poorest and most disadvantaged residents, plus there are billions of people living at or below subsistence in the developing world. But in general the middle and upper classes of the industrialized nations are living on easy street.

Of course if there is no economic growth, the improved position of the poor has to be funded from existing pots of money—and that means redistribution of the wealth. And that’s just not part of the agenda for the people who created the field of economics, most practicing economists, those who fund economic research and those who look to economic theory to guide their business operations—otherwise known as rich folk.  

The idea that a healthy economy requires growth is nothing more than a first premise, similar to the premise that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, upon which all of traditional geometry is based. The difference is that the shortest distance between two points really is a straight line (except to a few brilliant scientists and mathematicians), whereas an economy can thrive without growth. No ruling elite ever wants to try it though, because it takes planning and a commitment to the community that our wealthiest citizens don’t seem to have.

King’s own plan, outlined in broad brushes after his plea that we be honest about the end of abundance, will certainly benefit his employer without inconveniencing much, if at all.  Here it is:

“That means a higher retirement age, more immigration to increase the working-age population, less borrowing from abroad, less reliance on monetary policy that creates unsustainable financial bubbles, a new social compact that doesn’t cannibalize the young to feed the boomers, a tougher stance toward banks, a further opening of world trade and, over the medium term, a commitment to sustained deficit reduction.”

A higher retirement age and more immigration will keep the number of workers high and thereby lower wage rates, which is good for any employer. The “new social compact” assumes that taxes on corporate profits and wealthy shareholders will not go up; unspoken here is the obvious—that we could keep the current social compact if we taxed the wealthy at the rates we taxed them in 1950, or even 1980.  King does mention a tougher stance towards banks and less government manipulation of money, but what does he really mean? He has very concrete ideas when it comes to increasing the pain of working stiffs, but only vague strategic thoughts about modifying banking.    

It’s not just what King says, but what he doesn’t say. Immigration is a great way to funnel people from poor countries to rich countries with shrinking populations, but only if we have immigration across the board, not just for the wealthy and educated. There is nothing wrong with further opening world trade, but only if trading partners meet the high environmental, wage and work safety standards of the West. Otherwise free trade exploits both the poorly paid workers in developing countries and the middle class workers in wealthy countries who lose their jobs.

King’s horror story also doesn’t tell us how we got into this mess: by straining the world’s resources. We can’t grow anymore, because we don’t have the raw materials of growth.  Instead of bemoaning the shrinking population, King should embrace it and advocate efforts to bring down the population even faster.

And make no mistake about it. If we as a species don’t voluntarily bring down our population and learn to live well while using less energy and resources than Americans currently do, then we will see a true horror story—one in which the world descends into a hell of major wars, famines, epidemics and human-induced weather and chemical disasters.

Instead of fearing the end of growth, King should understand that it is a good thing and then set his mind of an economist to making sure that the end of growth does not also mean the end of wealth.

Of course, that’s not King’s job. His job is to help his company make more money.

Friday, October 4, 2013

Tea Party’s government shutdown has many parallels with Germany in late 1920s-early 1930s

By Marc Jampole

A group of rich industrialists are not happy with the direction in which the country is going, so they give money to support and develop a radical party to push their agenda for smaller government and lower taxes and regulation. But the fringe party they support gets into a position to subvert the democratic process and the economy. At the end, even the industrialists who funded them are worried about the actions taken by the suddenly powerful if still small party.

Sounds familiar?

What am I describing? Is it the United States in 2010-2013? Or could it be Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s?

The structural parallels between what has happened in the United States and what happened almost a century ago in Germany are uncanny. Now I’m not comparing the current state of our country to Nazi Germany, nor am I predicting that we are moving in Germany’s genocidal direction. Nor am I comparing the Tea Party Congressional representatives and Senators to Hitler, although there are many similarities between the philosophies behind the two movements:
  • Stress on traditional values.
  • Hate of the current government.
  • Nativism and distrust of foreigners.
  • An underlying racism, which the Tea Party denies, but which can be detected in code language, occasional slip-ups and irrational abhorrence of our mixed-race President.
  • Willingness to subvert democratic processes.
The big difference, of course, is that the Tea Party wants to shrink government to almost nothing, whereas Hitler wanted to increase government and have government aggressively direct the economy.

Make no mistake about it. The Tea Party would be a minor force in American politics if not for two things: 1) the money that big business threw into their campaigns in the wake of the Supreme Court’s weird but unfortunate Citizens United decision; and 2) the main news media—owned by large corporations—which lavished Tea Party candidates with coverage while ignoring the many progressive and liberal candidates across the country.

But the Tea Partiers could not by themselves have been able to close down much of the government and put us on the precipice of a debt crisis that could plunge the world into economic free-fall. It has taken the craven and self-serving actions of Speaker of the House John Boehner, who has refused to release Republicans to vote their consciences on the budget and debt issues.  Does that sound like a decrepit and ineffectual Paul von Hindenberg turning over the German government to a former house painter named Adolf?

When I learned that the Republicans want to cut some $40 billion from food stamps I was befuddled and sickened at how little empathy this relatively small group of mostly privileged people had for the challenges facing the poor and near poor. I had the same feeling when I learned that 26 Republican-led states decided not to extend Medicaid coverage to millions of people who are without health insurance. Don’t they understand how much sicker people get when they don’t go to the doctor because they can’t afford it or take half their dosage of medicine to make it last longer?

And I have the same feeling now. Why don’t these people feel the pain of the many federal workers who have already been ordered to stay home or the businesses that serve them? Why don’t they feel the fear of the many federal workers whose jobs have been declared essential, which means they’ll have to keep working even when the government won’t be able to pay them, starting in about two weeks? What about the people waiting for Social Security disability forms to be processed? Or people who work for government vendors and will be laid off? Don’t the Republicans care one little bit about the collective pain and economic loss already inflicted on American individuals and families?

The sheer lack of empathy for their fellow women and men, their willingness to plunge so many into suffering—their hard hearts—frightens me as much as the Tea Partiers attack on democracy and our democratic system.

Wednesday, October 2, 2013

Graphic by Kevin Kreneck

Monday, September 30, 2013

Graphic by Kevin Kreneck

House Republicans want to destroy the town to save it

By Marc Jampole

The logic of House Republicans should ring familiar to those old-timers who lived through the Viet Nam War. What they want to do is “Destroy the town to save it.”

The original quote was attributed to an unnamed U.S. officer by reporter Peter Arnett about the U.S. bombing of the city of Ben Tre: “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”

The Republicans are using this logic in refusing to fund the federal government unless Congress votes to postpone the implementation of the Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare.  The Republicans believe the new law is a disaster for the country, so they are willing to shut down the government in their continued efforts to dismantle it.

But a government shutdown will be more of a disaster than letting go into effect a law passed by Congress, signed by the President and endorsed by the American people in the last presidential election.  Most of the government will grind to a halt. About 800,000 federal workers will lose their jobs for the duration. About 1.4 million active-duty military personnel must remain on duty unpaid. We’ll see delays in processing passport and visa applications, issuing gun permits, continuing U.S. bankruptcy court. All national parks and federal wildlife refuges would be closed for the duration of the shutdown. Think of the loss of status we will suffer in world markets and in other countries.

That sure sounds like destroying the town to save it to me.

Except for one thing: Just as U.S. carpet bombing was unable to stop the rise of the Viet Cong nationalists, defunding our federal government won’t affect the timetable for starting exchanges or other major elements of the new healthcare law. The Internal Revenue Service will still collect the new taxes mandated by the Affordable Care Act.

The “destroy the town to save it” logic is merely stupid. But the other piece of Republican House strategy reeks of venality and cynicism.  I’m referring to the idea—supported by recent polls—that the American people will blame both Democrats and Republicans equally for a government shutdown.  In other words, instead of treating the funding of the government and the lifting of the debt ceiling as a matter of public interest, the Republicans (and perhaps Democrats, too) see it as a political football to be tossed around. 

This strategy is likely to backfire. No matter what the polls show, history suggests that once the government is shut down, the American people will blame Republicans.  It’s similar to war situations. After we declare or invade a country, the American public always rallies around the President, no matter how many people opposed the war ahead of time. 

I think government shutdowns are similar. Moreover, based on the views expressed on the opinion pages so far, it’s likely that virtually the entire mainstream media and significant parts of the right-wing media will blame Republicans.  Of course, Americans might blame President Obama if the current House bill passes and the President vetoes it, but rest assured, Senate Democrats won’t let that happen.  

If we want to blame one person for this mess, it’s John Boehner, who is all too willing to resort to the most irresponsible of actions to placate radical Tea-partiers and keep his job as Speaker of the House. All Boehner has to do to serve his country is release Congressional Republicans to vote their conscious (or the will of their constituents) and thereby let enough Republicans in blue states vote with Democrats to keep the government running.

Mr. Boehner, sir, it’s time to stand up and show a profile in courage.

Thursday, September 26, 2013

Editorial: Death Panel’s Last Stand?


In his professed crusade to derail Obamacare, Sen. Ted Cruz, the Canadian-American charlatan who is seeking to broaden his base from Texas to the nationwide Tea Party, played to the rubes Sept. 24-25 with his fake filibuster that, ironically, was supposed to block Senate consideration of the House bill that would defund Obamacare.

Cruz stayed on the Senate floor for more than 21 hours, delivering a rambling spiel that at one point included a reading from Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham. He apparently was oblivious to the irony that the children’s story is about someone who says he does not like a food he has never tried, until he tries it and finds that he likes it. In the end, after declaring that “a vote for cloture is a vote to fund Obamacare,” Cruz ended up voting with the rest of the Senate, 100-0 for cloture.

Cruz and other Republicans went through this charade in a last-ditch attempt to prevent the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, which was signed into law in May 2010 over unanimous GOP opposition and, among other things, required insurance companies to actually make good on their promised coverage while helping lower- and middle-income Americans get affordable health coverage when their skinflint employers refuse to provide it.

Of course, some of us were unhappy in 2010 that the Democrats didn’t go ahead and expand Medicare to cover everybody, or at least provide a public option for Americans who don’t want to be forced to buy private insurance. But Vice President Joe Biden congratulated President Obama at the May 23, 2010, signing ceremony, telling him in what he thought was a private aside that the health care reform “is a big f***ing deal.” The ferocity of Republican opposition to the law, and the lies they have told about the reforms over the past three years in order to scare the working people the law was designed to help ought to validate Obamacare for progressives.

The reforms already have required insurance companies to provide free preventive care and annual health exams, allowed parents to include their children in their insurance plans until the kids are 26 and required insurance companies to provide rebates when their administrative costs and profits amount to more than 20% of premiums. Insurers also no longer can cancel policies if you get sick or made an honest mistake on your application; consumers can appeal insurance company decisions to an independent reviewer; and insurance companies no longer can limit an individual’s medical benefits. In 2014, insurers also no longer will be able to deny coverage to applicants with pre-existing conditions.

When Republicans were unable to come up with a Senate majority to repeal the reforms, they resorted to sabotage and now hostage-taking. As Tara Culp-Ressler noted at ThinkProgress, Republican governors at the state level have refused to extend health coverage to the working poor by rejecting the law’s optional Medicaid expansion, which is supposed to cover people below the poverty level (including those working at minimum wage), with the federal government paying more than 90% of the costs.

Republicans have undermined national public outreach efforts to teach Americans about their options under the law, and they have slashed the state-level budgets dedicated to marketing the new insurance plans. They’ve attempted to slow down enrollment by placing unnecessary restrictions on the people who are supposed to help Americans sign up for new Obamacare coverage. For example, in Texas, where 25% of workers are uninsured — the highest uninsured rate in the country — and health insurance is practically unregulated by the state, Gov. Rick Perry has chosen to impose draconian regulations on the health marketplace “navigators.”

Republicans have disseminated misinformation about the law and confused people about what it actually does. Some states have even simply refused to implement Obamacare’s provisions altogether. And as the state health insurance exchanges prepare for their debut on Oct. 1, Republicans are even advising young people to break the law by refusing to get insurance.

If you already have insurance through your employer, are enrolled in a government program like Medicare or if you purchase insurance on your own, the “individual mandate” won’t affect you — though if you buy your own insurance you might find a better deal on the exchange. If your employer cuts your insurance benefits or increases your share of the cost, it probably is because your company is run by a skinflint using Obamacare as an excuse to cut costs, but mom-and-pop businesses with 25 or fewer employees qualify for tax credits to help them offer health insurance to their employees. Small businesses with up to 100 employees can shop for health plans in the exchange. And if health care costs continue to rise, as some Obamacare critics predict, well, they were rising for a decade before the health reform was enacted, but at least the rate of increase has been reduced.

Democrats should work with labor unions to allow tax credits for union-sponsored multi-employer plans, also known as Taft-Hartley plans, that are bargained by unions and jointly administered with employers, usually for low-income, part-time and seasonal workers who might work for several employers during a year.

The mandate will affect 48 million Americans who are uninsured — 15.4% of the general population, according to the Census Bureau, but 25% of people in households with an annual income of less than $25,000. Many of those households will now qualify for Medicaid coverage — unless their Republican state officials have left them adrift by refusing Medicaid expansion. Families living in poverty won’t be required to pay for insurance, but they won’t get health care either, because of the Republican obstinance. Families above the poverty level are required to be insured but they will qualify for subsidies to help them buy insurance if they make less than $94,200 for a family of four (or $45,960 for a single person).

You can find out the truth about the Affordable Care Act and how to find your state’s health insurance marketplace online at healthcare.gov or by calling toll-free 1-800-318-2596, where help is available 24/7. Signup starts Oct. 1 for coverage starting Jan. 1.

And if the program is implemented without the disruptions that Republicans are predicting, Ted Cruz likely will claim the credit.

Republicans might not get Obama and the Senate Democrats to agree with dismantling the Affordable Care Act, but Senate Democrats did agree to keep the job-killing austerity budget going into the new fiscal year with previously scheduled sequesters. The Congressional Budget Office in July reported that keeping sequester cuts in place through 2014 would cost the economy as many as 1.6 million jobs.

In case the “deficit hawks” try to take another run at “entitlement reforms” — that is, cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits so the richest 1% of Americans don’t have to pay the taxes they deferred during the Bush II administration — Dems need to remind their representatives in Congress that they paid for Social Security and Medicare and they are entitled to those promised benefits.

Richard Eskow noted at OurFuture.org that leaders of “Fix the Debt,” a group of corporate executives who are trying to push the costs of budget cuts onto the working class, recently met to discuss the possibility of ramping up their campaign for a Grand Bargain to cut entitlements.

If expansion of the tax base is required to stabilize Social Security, that can be accomplished by lifting the cap on taxable income for the payroll tax from the current $113,700. Imposing a relatively small tax of 3 cents per $100 traded on Wall Street would be unnoticed by most investors but would curb market speculators and raise an estimated $352 billion over the next decade.

Anybody who professes concern about the federal deficit, then turns the discussion to “fixing” Social Security and/or Medicare without the option of lifting the cap on the payroll tax and/or the financial transaction tax is a fraud. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, October 15, 2013

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Selections from the October 15, 2013 issue














Turning healthy vegetables into unhealthy chips symbolic of cultural homogenization

By Marc Jampole
 
What could be healthier than starting dinner with a seaweed salad, then moving on to brown rice and black beans with a side of kale? What a rich balance of delicious tastes and colorful foods, and how healthy. Lots of cancer fighters, cholesterol reducers, plus no salt, sugar or chemical additives. Perfect for a vegan, and even good for a meat-eater who might add a small piece of chicken, fish, beef or lamb and still have a healthy meal.

But what a lot of work. It might take as much as a half hour to dress the seaweed, boil the rice, heat the chickpeas, sauté the kale and broil the meat.

How much easier to open a few bags and munch brown rice crackers, dried kale leaves, black bean chips and roasted seaweed snacks.  All meat-eaters have to do is add some beef jerky.

Yes, there are now chip versions of all these foods and others, too—cabbage, chickpeas, peas. In fact, American food processors have created snack chip versions of virtually every hot “super food” fad of the last few decades. For example, manufacturers have introduced 16 new versions of seaweed chips this year alone.

As readers may have already suspected, all of these chips are loaded with salt and many have sugar and chemical additives. All involve processing the life out of the original fruit or vegetable. An ounce of all these snacks delivers many more calories than an adult serving of the unprocessed food.

While 71% of all U.S. snack foods now make health claims, according to a recent Wall Street Journal article, no one really believes that eating this stuff is healthy. It certainly is not as healthy as eating a serving of brown rice or kale.

People prefer the chips because of convenience and flexibility. It’s much easier to carry a bag of spiced dried chickpeas around than a plastic tub of chickpeas. And many people prefer the taste of salt and sugar to the bitterness of kale or the tang of cabbage. (Yes, there are also cabbage chips!).  They’re used to process food.

There is no doubt that chips bear a major part of the responsibility for the epidemic of obesity and obesity-related disease we face. But beyond health, the proliferation of faux-healthy chips represents another example of the homogenization of reality that we see everywhere. Instead of authentic Italian or Mexican food, Americans go to themed versions that use a few stylistic elements from the authentic cuisine to dress up American fare. These ethnic-themed restaurants tend to load down healthy traditional recipes with unnecessary frying and extra sauces laden with so much sugar and salt that they taste more like some standard muck than like Italian or Mexican. Check out how many chain restaurants serve the very same menu: hamburgers, fajitas, chicken strips, blackened meat.  And doesn’t it seem as if pizza dough and bagels now share the same consistency and overly sweet taste in most chain restaurants and packaged versions?

And it’s not just food. National chains for auto supplies, clothing, movie theatres, fabrics, toys, sporting goods, furniture, jewelry, hair stylists, urgent care facilities, drug stores, convenience stores, fitness clubs, massage studios and consumer electronic stores make every mall in every suburb and most smaller cities look virtually the same. Many of us prefer taking a phony riverboat at a Disney resort to a real one in New Orleans or viewing the faux Eiffel Tower and Statue of Liberty in a Las Vegas casino to the real deals in Paris and New York.  One theme—a landmark—associated with New York or Paris is placed in a homogenized environment, like a vegetable dehydrated and encased in salt, chemical additives and binders.

On another level, the concentration of media has led to homogenization of the information we receive, too, as more media run the same stories with the same point of view.

One could make the case that this homogenization is a good thing, because it turns the disparate cultures and nationalities of the United States into a unified whole—the melting pot that produces the cookie-cutter suburbs.  I prefer a vision of the United States as a rainbow of beliefs, practices, customs and cuisines, each retaining its own authenticity while also contributing its own richness to a glorious American mosaic. 

Monday, September 23, 2013

Let’s not be lulled by a lull in global warming

By Marc Jampole
 
A few news stories don’t make a trend, but it seems as if the mass media are misreading some short term trends to present a more optimistic view of our future on earth than we really face.

Much of the news media has covered the news that the average global temperature has failed to rise over the past 15 years, despite the soaring levels of greenhouse gases we have been pumping into the atmosphere.  While no reporter has quoted Desi Arnaz yet, the tone of the articles could clearly be captured by his stock phrase, “Lucy, you have some 'splaining to do.”

The argument that treading water for 15 years disproves or calls into question the theory of human-induced climate change is absurd for several reasons. First of all, the earth is still much hotter than it was 150 years ago, much of the icecaps have already melted and we still have dangerously high levels of carbon dioxide in our oceans.  And while the average temperature on earth may have remained the same over the past 15 years, some parts of the earth have grown warmer, including the United States and most of Europe and China. 

Secondly, those who only look at the last 15 years make the mistake of trend localization: They are judging changes that take centuries on the basis of a few years. The earth goes through natural cycles of warming and cooling. Most phenomena act that way—the stock market doesn’t go up every day even during a raging bull market and children don’t grow the same amount every month or even every year, but grow by spurts. The important question is whether the average temperature on earth would be lower during the current cycle without the impact of all that additional carbon we are generating. I’m betting the answer is yes.

There is also the issue of the complexity of life on earth—our ecosystem comprises a number of cycles and smaller interlocking ecosystems. It’s possible that the earth has made a partial adjustment, but if we keep burning fossil fuels at the current rate, sooner or later, the earth will become less flexible. The increase in drought areas, the thriving of jellyfish in the oceans, the extinction or threatened extinction of so many species—so much is happening that tells us we have to change our ways or risk destroying our planet. By all means, scientists should continue to study the models that predict global warming. But we shouldn’t use a misinterpretation of short-term facts as an excuse for keeping our heads in the sand about climate change.

One environmental challenge—and I see it as the main one—is the sheer number of human beings walking the planet, about seven billion right now. It’s very convenient to ignore population control. The religious issues aside, most economists and politicians love an increasing population because it’s an easy way to grow the economy and they are addicted to growth. Any campaign to stabilize or reduce the population requires a plan to address how an economy may thrive without growth—in a solid state or even shrinking. My idea of thriving clearly doesn’t mean “growing bigger” but rather producing a high quality of life and economic opportunities for all its members.

Like the end of easy oil, reaching a population level that is unsustainable is the unspoken fear. It’s the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about.  Many people, then, must have breathed a sigh of relief to learn the news that the standard forecast for population growth may be too high.

But like the report of a stable temperature over 15 years, “not as bad as” still doesn’t mean “good.” Instead of predicting that the world’s population will reach 10.9 billion by 2100, the latest statistical model says our population will peak at 8.7 billion by around 2055 and then decline to 8 billion by the turn of the next century. The models are based on the theory that as nations develop their citizens have fewer children. It’s a corollary of the idea that animals follow one of two reproductive strategies—have a lot of offspring and pay them no attention, or have a few and put a lot of energy into helping them to survive. In human terms, when people get wealthier, they tend to have fewer children.  The experience of Europe, the United States (except our immigrants) and Japan seems to support this idea.

The only problem is that even our current population of seven billion is too high. Half that amount is too high. The earth cannot carry so many humans on a long-term basis. We use too many of the earth’s non-renewable resources and leave too many messes in our wake. And imagine if most of the world raised its standard of living to the levels of Japan or Western Europe—they might produce fewer offspring but each person would be using a lot more resources!

I doubt that we will be able to formulate an adequate response to global warming and resource shortages without lowering the population on earth substantially.

Historically there have been three ways that human populations have decreased: war, famine or epidemics.  Let’s hope that instead of riding these three horses of the Apocalypse, most countries will instead decide to pursue aggressive policies to reduce our population in a more peaceful way: birth control. More people must make the decision to have one child in their lifetime, be it by following a new social norm or a draconian law.

So don’t believe that there’s good news about global warming and populations trends. These recent optimistic news reports are the equivalent of learning that you won’t die in six weeks, but in eight weeks—if the trends stay lucky.

 

Thursday, September 19, 2013

Moving in retirement to avoid school taxes is the epitome of the politics of selfishness

By Marc Jampole

Last time we cited Tom Sightings, self-proclaimed retirement expert, he was conjuring images of the various dream retirements to which he assumed the American public might aspire.  His catalogue of utopias reflected the pro-suburban ideology that dominates the mass media: golf communities, small university towns, beach fronts and suburban houses. Not one of Sighting’s dream retirements involved living in a city with great mass transit, an abundance of public spaces, cultural activities and entertainment, top-rated healthcare systems, the exciting buzz of cultural diversity and tremendous resources for seniors. In Sightings’ world, cities just don’t exist.

The latest view from Sightings highlights an ideological principle that has dominated U.S. public discourse since the election of Ronald Regan in 1980: the politics of selfishness, the idea that everyone should pursue his or her own private agenda, no matter how harmful it might be to others or to the community at large. Symbolic of the politics of selfishness is Reagan’s favorite joke about not having to outrun a bear, just one’s companion (who will then get ripped to shreds by the bear).  

Sightings doesn’t come out and explicitly say, “Care only about yourself” in his recent U.S. News & World Report article.  What he proposes, in a soft-shoe, gently prodding kind of way, is that retired people move out of their communities to avoid paying high school taxes.

After all, their kids have long graduated from high school, so who cares about the next generation!

Sightings employs the increasingly irritating rhetorical device of building the story around himself (the writer) and his situation. The article begins when he receives the school tax bill which has increased by four percent. He grumbles that his income has not increased by that much.  Continuing the article as a first person narration, Sightings tells us of a dinner his wife and he shared a few days later with a couple who had just moved to a new town to avoid high school taxes.  Sightings quotes the husband: “Who needs to pay those high school taxes, he ventured, when your kids are grown up and gone away?” Sightings continues: “Left unsaid was the other question: Who can afford those school taxes when you're no longer pulling in a paycheck, and instead living on a fixed income?”

After some wishy-washy discussion of the pros and cons of moving to avoid school taxes and a spackling of information about states that reduce property taxes for seniors, Sightings ends the column fully on the side of moving: “But then I see that school tax bill sitting over there on the corner of my desk. It's due by the end of September. And our youngest child graduated from the local school system four years ago. Maybe it's time to start looking for our place in the sun, after all.”

What Sightings doesn’t see, or doesn’t want to see, is that when he sent his children to school, large numbers of his fellow townspeople were paying property taxes to fund public schools who had already sent their children through schools and many more who hadn’t had children yet or never were going to have any. Even parents who sent their children to private schools contributed to educating Sightings’ children. Now it’s his turn and he wants selfishly to shrug his responsibility.  After all, he got his.

There are many great reasons to move in retirement: to be near grown children or to live one’s dream, be it on a quiet shore or in a high rise co-op overlooking the hustle and bustle of Manhattan. “Chacun sa chimère,” as Baudelaire once said (which translates into “To each, his or her illusion.”) It’s also true that some people move to smaller homes in retirement or are forced to move to cut expenses.

But to move just to avoid taxes is as anti-social as robbing a convenience store or embezzling from a nonprofit organization.

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Latest mass shooting shows need for stiffer gun purchase laws and better national database

By Marc Jampole

The Washington Naval Yard mass murder has produced a macabre good news/bad news story:

The good news is that a week before the shooting a Virginia gun dealer didn’t sell an AR-14 assault rifle to the shooter, Aaron Alexis, because Alexis wasn’t a resident of the state, a requirement under Virginia state law.

The bad news is that the dealer did sell Alexis the pump-action shot gun he used to kill 12 innocent people. 

What if Virginia had tougher laws and only permitted sales of all kinds of guns to residents? Or what if gun purchase standards were higher everywhere and we had a robust database of gun offenders and persons with documented behavior that should preclude gun ownership, behavior like hearing “voices speaking to him through the wall,” as Alexis heard?

It should be tragically clear to everyone that stiffened gun control laws would have prevented Alexis from just walking into a store and buying a lethal weapon.  Those who argue that a criminal will find a way to get a gun forget that Alexis, Lanza and most of our mass murderers are not criminals. Something else they all have in common: all manifested behavioral problems that should have precluded legal gun ownership or use.

We now seem to have these national days of mourning and hand-wringing about every six months. The public discourse following these tragedies almost always follows a classic formula: Gun control advocates point out the obvious lesson that we need to tighten gun control, while gun industry toadies and factotums create tortuous arguments to show that the mass murder really proves we need more guns in the street and less gun control.  Major political figures say they will renew efforts to pass gun control laws, but “momentum” peters out in days or weeks.  There’s a spike in both gun sales (out of fear of gun control) and articles in the mass media analyzing the impossibility of getting any gun control legislation passed. Nothing happens.

That’s sad, but what’s even sadder is that these occasional mass murders collectively represent a drop in the bucket of all the U.S. deaths and injuries annually from guns—from accidents, disputes among family and friends, suicides and murder.  If we use a base figure of 32,000 deaths by guns a year, that works out to almost 88 a day. We typically have national days of mourning when a crazed killer takes the lives of 12 or 24 people.  Perhaps we should declare every day a day of mourning.  

The gun lobby has tried to sell us the bill of goods that more people packing will make the streets safer, because the bad guys will be frightened of retaliation. A study released today shows that argument is completely bogus: The study, published Wednesday in the American Journal of Medicine (AJM), compares the rate of firearms-related deaths in countries where many people own guns with the gun death rate in countries where gun ownership is rare. The US, with the most guns per head in the world, has the highest rate of deaths from firearms, while Japan, which has the lowest rate of gun ownership, has the least. The study concludes that guns make a nation less safe. AJM published the study early because of the shootings at the Washington Naval Yard.

Nothing proves the collective self-serving venality of our state and federal legislators like the gun issue. All too many lawmakers have been bought and sold by the gun (and the weapons) industry or are too frightened of the gun lobby’s money to speak up on the issue of gun control. And so the needless death of innocents continues.

Monday, September 16, 2013

Editorial: Breakthrough for Cooler Heads


Can President Obama declare victory and bring the cruise missiles home? After a week and a half of saber rattling by the only President we’ve got, the Russian sponsors of Syria’s dictatorship responded to the ultimatum by Secretary of State John Kerry that Syria could avoid an attack by the United States by handing its chemical weapons over to international authorities. And Syria welcomed the initiative, defusing the crisis.

As much as it frustrates conservative talking pointers, President Obama did not make a mistake in calling Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to account for his military allegedly using chemical weapons in that nation’s civil war, nor did Obama show weakness in deferring to Congress on authorizing a punitive strike against the Syrian government. Obama followed the Constitution, which gives Congress the authority to declare war. If Syria reneges on its commitment to put its chemical weapons under international control but Congress still declines to authorize a strike against Syria, it probably will be for the wrong reason — Republicans in the House and Senate simply won’t go along with anything the President proposes — but in calling for Congress to delay the vote to see if the Russian peace initiative succeeds, President Obama wisely put on hold the proposed American attack on Syria, which could have caused more damage than it would solve.

Corporate news media, who were looking forward to a quick air war to fill in the dead space around the Labor Day holiday, were noticeably disappointed when President Obama announced on Aug. 30 that he would consult Congress before launching the attack. For the next week, the corporate pundits were practically taunting Obama to get on with it, charging that if he failed to follow through with the attack it would be seen as a sign of weakness.

As for the predictions that a failure to attack Syria would result in a loss of respect for the United States, enemies of the world’s Last Remaining Superpower must realize that the President still has plenty of cruise missiles, satellite-guided bombs and radar-deflecting stealth bombers which he can order into the air in a New York minute if a belligerent nation actually posed a threat to the US or one of its allies (and all it would take is a call from Ankara to give Obama the cover to launch missiles and bombers at Syria in defense of our NATO ally Turkey).

Neither does a failure to follow through with the attack result in a loss of credibility for President Obama. Some wags called Obama “Bush Lite” when he threatened the action against Syria. They ignored the fact that Obama was proposing a limited air strike on Syria in response to an actual chemical attack, not the threat that was imagined by then-President George W. Bush and his war-mongering advisers, which was only proved false after they invaded and occupied Iraq. Also, Obama held off on the attack, which allowed diplomats to get to work. It was particularly galling to watch former defense secretary Don Rumsfeld, the architect of the preemptive invasion of Iraq, criticizing President Obama’s “lack of leadership” as the “so-called commander in chief.” At least George W. Bush has the sense and/or decency to keep his mouth shut.

Nor would a congressional rejection of Obama’s request for an authorization to attack be a turning point in his relations with Congress. Many Democrats balked at the war vote because they thought it was a bad idea, which their constituents were overwhelmingly opposed to, but they’ll be back with Obama when it comes to his domestic priorities. As Kevin Drum noted at MotherJones.com Sept. 9, “Presidents suffer defeats all the time. Obama lost on cap-and-trade. He’s lost on plenty of judicial and executive branch nominations. He couldn’t get agreement for a grand bargain. He lost on gun control. What’s more, Republicans have been opposing him on virtually everything from the day he took office. In what concrete way would a defeat on Syria change this dynamic in even the slightest way?”

If anything, the failure of the world at large to react to the Syrian gas attack questioned the credibility of the United Nations Security Council, which so far has been unable to even debate the issue. But the diplomatic initiative that has gone on while Obama was making his case for intervention bore fruit as Russians called for the Syrian government to turn over its chemical weapons to the control of international authorities. Syria’s Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem quickly welcomed the Russian proposal, acknowledged for the first time that Syria possesses chemical weapons and said Syria was willing to cooperate fully with the UN and sign the Chemical Weapons Convention.

That could be the best result of this complicated situation. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is a dictator, but he runs a secular regime that among other things is protecting Christian minorities who comprise as much as 14% of the population in Syria (3 million out of 22 million), as well as refugees from Iraq, many of whom are Christians and moderate Muslims who were driven out of Iraq by fundamentalist Sunnis and Shi’ites after the downfall of Saddam Hussein.

Assad also cooperated with the Bush administration after 9/11. As part of its “extraordinary rendition” program, the Bushies sent Arabs who were suspected of al-Qaeda ties to Syria to be tortured by Assad’s secret police. (At least one, Maher Arar, a Canadian Arab who was arrested at JFK Airport in New York in September 2002 when he was in transit back to Canada, was instead sent to Syria and tortured for 10 months before he was found to be innocent.)

Assad’s opponents include al-Qaeda-affiliated jihadists who are fighting Assad in part because his brand of Islam is too moderate for their tastes. They already have been engaging in reprisals against moderate rebel groups, and some rebel groups have been engaging in war crimes of their own, such as summarily executing captured Syrian soldiers. We have no guarantee that the moderate Muslims who Sen. John McCain and other hawks want us to support in the Syrian civil war would win the power struggle after Assad is toppled; we could end up clearing the way for a fundamentalist, al-Qaeda-affiliated government in Damascus, with access to the chemical weapons that Assad has stockpiled. That’s the reason that President Obama, while he will go ahead with arming some of the moderate rebels, is in no hurry to press for regime change. That’s also why he only proposed a limited air attack.

President Obama has agreed to take the proposal to secure Syria’s chemical weapons to the UN Security Council, though Russia is objecting to a French proposal to back up the proposal with the threat of force if Syria fails to comply. Obama and Congress are wise to give the diplomats time to secure those chemical weapons. If Russia is serious about securing the weapons — and Russian President Vladimir Putin also is concerned about Islamic terrorists getting their hands on poison gas — they may be able to get the job done. Good for them. Good for all.

In the meantime, Republicans in Congress are still threatening to take the US government hostage if Obama does not agree to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, which will start enrolling customers on the new healthcare exchanges Oct. 1. Maybe Obama should invite the Russians to try to mediate a deal with the GOP jihadists. Unfortunately, we trust Bashir al-Assad to turn over his chemical weapons more than we trust Republican leaders to negotiate in good faith to resolve the federal budget and debt obligations for the coming year.

Assuming that President Obama does not negotiate with the hostage takers to do away with the Affordable Care Act, people who do not get insurance coverage through their job but who live in one of the states where Republican governors aremaking it difficult to find out about the new insurance marketplaces can get the information on the plans and subsidies that are available at healthcare.gov. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, October 1, 2013

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Selections from the October 1, 2013 issue




LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 










New book shows that poverty affects brain and makes it harder to think, work, learn

By Marc Jampole

Thanks to Cass Sunstein for reviewing Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much in the latest New York Review of Books. In Scarcity, Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir collect and analyze an impressive amount of research to demonstrate that those who suffer a scarcity of a resource—say food or money—dedicate more of their brain to addressing that scarcity, thereby degrading their ability to attend to their daily tasks, in school or on the job.

According to Mullainathan and Shafir, scarcity “puts people in a kind of cognitive tunnel, limiting what they are able to see. It depletes their self-control. It makes them more impulsive and sometimes a bit dumb. What we often consider a part of people’s basic character—an inability to learn, a propensity to anger or impatience—may well be a product of their feeling of scarcity,” to quote Sunstein. The book cites a ton of empirical research that shows that the effects of scarcity cut across all possible types of scarcity. 

The most striking study mentioned in the review tested Indian sugar cane workers before the harvest when they were broke and after the harvest when they had lots of money. The difference in scores amounted to 9 or 10 points on an I.Q. test, which measures certain intellectual capabilities correlated with success in school and in professional employment.  On an I.Q. test, ten points means a lot: for example, about 28% of the population scores between 106-115, while only 9% of the population scores between 116-125.

In other words, not only do rich and upper middle class children have the advantages of classes and lessons, summer camps, trips abroad, private tutors, SAT prep courses and the doors that money and business contacts can offer. The wealthy also have an inherent advantage in that their brains are not drained by scarcity concerns as the brains of poor children are.  The easiest way to improve our educational system would be to end poverty, which would enable formerly poor children to focus their brain on learning and not on the anxiety of not knowing when the next meal will be.

A few years back, the mainstream media and politicians were completely enamored by an article titled “Growth in a Time of Debt” by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, which concluded that countries with public debt greater than 90 percent of GDP suffered measurably slower economic growth. In This Time Is Different, the two right-wing economists ostensibly fleshed out the theory with examples across the centuries.  Mainstream politicians and journalists throughout the world embraced this “new discovery,” using it to bolster assertions that we had to deal with the debt instead of pumping money into the economy.

The problem was that Reinhart and Rogoff miscalculated in a number of places and even made typographical errors. When their bad math was corrected, it was found that there was no correlation between levels of debt and economic growth.

Many people wanted to believe Reinhart and Rogoff were right because they wanted to cut the budget, regardless of the pain and the economic havoc it caused. Of course it didn’t work out—Europe’s austerity program backfired and the U.S. limited “rescue” of its economy produced uneven and weak results. Through it all, inequality continued to grow, especially in the United States. The distribution of wealth in this country is now less equitable than it has been in more than in a century.

As of this writing, a Google key word search yields about 3,000 mentions of Scarcity, which is not even a drop in the ocean of web pages floating around cyberspace.  It’s still too early to tell, but I’m betting the mainstream news media is going to ignore Scarcity for the most part and few politicians outside maybe Bill de Blasio will reference it. 

But imagine if Scarcity captured the imagination of politicians and pundits the way that Reinhart & Rogoff’s bogus research did, or the way Michael Harrington’s poignant expose of poverty, The Other America, did in the early 1960s?

What if our various governments started to create public policies and new laws to address the implications of Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much? If Scarcity is true (and the Sunstein’s extensive review makes we want to read it as soon as I can), that puts a whole new light on Republican efforts to decrease funding for food stamps and unemployment benefits. The very nature of poverty distorts and weakens the thinking process, so that once people fall into poverty it is very hard to escape.  It makes sense then to be as generous as possible with these benefits in times of economic distress, to keep as many people out of poverty as possible.

Widespread knowledge of the findings by Mullainathan and Shafir would lean the debate over minimum wage and health care decidedly to the left, as think tank pundits and government policy makers quoted the book to assert the need to protect Americans from the negative effect of scarcity in general, and of medical care in particular.

Scarcity also serves as an epiphany for the great challenge facing the United States in the area of education. Rich people are spending more to educate their children while their state and federal representatives continue to cut budgets for public schools.  Meanwhile, a college education has become a major drain on the finances of most families.  Equal opportunity movements focused on voting and jobs in the 20th century. In the 21st century, the real battle ground for equal opportunity may be over education. 

For the past 30 years, we have passed laws and followed policies that increase the number of people facing scarcities of money, food, health care and now education. We have in effect degraded our intellectual stock by putting more panic into more people.  Creating a more unequal society has weakened our collective ability to learn and to work. If our leaders believed the message of Scarcity they would pursue an entirely different set of policies that would resemble the policies our nation pursued in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s. You know, when we had general prosperity, a lower rate of poverty, a more equal distribution of the wealth, strong unions, mostly great public schools—and, not coincidentally, much higher taxes on the wealthy.
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