Saturday, December 15, 2012

Let Uncle Sam Do Health Care Exchanges


When Congress approved the Affordable Care Act, it allowed states to set up insurance exchanges to help their uninsured residents shop for health insurance. Ironically, 18 states, largely run by Republicans, have opted to leave the exchanges up to the federal government. The punting governors probably are doing their insurance consumers a favor.

An estimated 25 million people who don’t get insurance through their job are expected to get insurance coverage through the exchanges, once the system is set up in October 2013 to start signing up people for new insurance plans that will take effect in January 2014. The exchanges also will help people find out if they qualify for insurance tax credits, which are available to uninsured people who earn up to $44,680, or four times the federal poverty level, which is $11,170 this year.

As of Dec. 9, 17 states and D.C. have decided to establish their own state-based exchanges; five states will partner with the federal government to set up their exchanges; and 18 states have indicated they will leave the exchange up to the federal government, Melissa Harris-Perry noted on her MSNBC show.

Jay Engoff, a former official with the federal Health and Human Services Department, told Harris-Perry that a federal exchange is more likely than state exchanges to provide individuals with the sort of bargaining power against insurance companies that they would have if they worked for a large business. The exchanges will offer “apples to apples” comparisons that will make it easier to find the best deal, Engoff said. Insurance companies and hospitals actually would prefer that states run the exchanges because they “will not standardize benefits packages, will not really enable people to make apples to apples comparisons,” whereas federally created exchanges will do so, Engoff said, according to RawStory.com (Dec. 9).

“So the insurance companies, ironically, they want the governors and the states to elect to do the state exchange, whereas the other part of the Republican’s constituency, the Tea Party people, they just want the state to do nothing, and to allow the federal government to do it,” he said.
Rep. Donna Edwards (D-Md.) said that some in Congress originally wanted more “universality” in the system and the option for state control was a compromise. But now, she said, a large state like Texas, where Gov. Rick Perry has publicly dismissed the exchanges, “becomes a major major marketplace for experimentation.”

Texas has a miserable record on health insurance regulation, which consists largely of clerks filing rate increase announcements from the insurance companies. Anybody who shops for individual insurance coverage in the past few years, as this editor has, has wondered over a bewildering array of choices with little recourse. We ended up with a policy with a large deductible, a few exceptions for pre-existing conditions and a bunch of riders that leave us wondering what, if any, coverage we actually would get if we got sick. We have more confidence in Obama’s administration than we do with Perry’s administration to drive hard bargains with the insurance companies and to hold those companies accountable.

The Affordable Care Act also offers states the option to expand Medicaid to cover the working poor who earn up to 133% of the poverty level. That is $14,484 for a single person and $29,726 for a family of four and the expansion would cover many of those unfortunates who work, usually part-time, for skinflint organizations such as Papa John’s, the Olive Garden, the Red Lobster and Walmart, which have suggested that they would reduce the hours of part-timers to avoid being required to provide insurance for them. If all states implemented the expansion, Medicaid would cover an additional 21.3 million people by 2022, including one million uninsured low-income adult Texans who don’t qualify under the current program. The expansion costs the states nothing for the first three years. After that, the states would pay 5% of the Medicaid cost in 2017, and up to 10% in 2021. But that’s too much for nine Republican governors, including Perry of Texas, which has the highest rate of uninsured at 24%; Florida’s Rick Scott, Georgia’s Nathan Deal Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal and South Carolina’s Nikki Haley, whose states are tied for fourth on the list of uninsured with 20% each; Alabama’s Robert Bentley (14% uninsured); Maine’s Paul LePage (10%); Mississippi’s Phil Bryant (19%); South Dakota’s Dennis Daugaard (13%); and Oklahoma’s Mary Fallin (17%). They are rejecting the Medicaid expansion because it would increase their states’ costs in future years. In fact, they just don’t care about the working poor. The cost of caring for the uninsured will fall on hospitals who must treat those who show up at their emergency rooms.

According to the Advisory Board Co., which keeps a daily tally at advisory.com of how each state stands on ACA’s Medicaid expansion, six states are leaning against participating in the Medicaid expansion: Iowa, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, Virginia and Wyoming. States that will participate in the Medicaid expansion include Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Delaware, D.C., Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington. Four states leaning toward participating are Kentucky, New Hampshire, New York and Oregon; and 18 others are undecided.

Ironically, the states that reject the Medicaid expansion might end up spending more for health care and pass more uncompensated costs on to hospitals and local governments. The Kaiser Family Foundation notes that the individual mandate likely will encourage half a million Texans who qualify for Medicaid but haven’t enrolled to finally sign up, but at a cost of around $7,000 a head, or $3.9 billion over 10 years under the restrictive old plan, where the state pays about 39% of the cost. Or the state could take the extra federal money, expand its eligibility rules and cover 2.4 million low-income residents for $3,300 a head over the decade.

“In short, the state can pay the retail price for its new Medicaid enrollees, or it can pay the bulk rate,” Jordan Weissmann wrote at TheAtlantic.com (Nov. 26).

Weissman also noted that under the expanded program Medicaid would pay an additional $24 billion to Texas hospitals over the decade. “That, in turn, could bring down the overall cost of care, since patients with health coverage won’t need to subsidize those without,” he wrote. “All that, and it would get to reap the benefits of a healthier, presumably more productive workforce, paid for overwhelmingly with tax dollars they’ll be sending to Washington no matter what.

“Maybe governors like Perry don’t believe in higher spending or a bigger social safety net. But surely they believe on getting a good deal on insuring a large number of their residents, rather than a bad deal on insuring just a few of them. Failing that, they have to believe in retrieving as much of their citizens’ tax dollars as they can. Really, that’s just fiscal conservatism.”

But just as Republicans who oppose the implementation of the Affordable Care Act cannot be trusted to run health insurance exchanges and they are resisting expansion of Medicaid which could show that the government insurance program can efficiently provide health coverage to the working poor, President Obama should not agree to Republican demands that the fiscal austerity negotiations in Washington, D.C., result in cuts to Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid. Republicans have floated the idea of raising the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67 as one way to reduce senior health care spending, and some Democrats appear to be open to the idea of making some cuts, but raising the eligibility age is a terrible idea. If anything, the Medicare age should be lowered.

The proposal to raise the Medicare eligibility age might just be a trial balloon raised by the White House to draw out the Republicans, but progressives should shoot down this trial balloon. Contact your senators and your Congress member, and/or any senators or members of Congress to whom you may have supported, and tell them that regardless of what President Obama might agree to, if they vote for a “Grand Bargain” that cuts benefits to Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid they will get a primary opponent and you will donate to that challenger. This is no time to give up hard-fought ground to those who would repeal Medicare, privatize Social Security and deny Medicaid to the working poor. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, January 1-15, 2013

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Selections from the January 1-15, 2012 issue
















Friday, December 14, 2012

George Will plays the intellectual but tells the “big lie”

By Marc Jampole

George Will told “The Big Lie” in his column this week, which I read in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review as “Off the cliff of credibility.”

Long-time followers of the pseudo intellectual Will know he is capable of telling a whopper.  His Wikipedia biography details a fib he told in a 2009 article about global warming, which he was trying to prove isn’t happening by citing a learned source for a false statistic.  When the learned source called Will on it, Will persisted—much like Romney persisted in his falsehood that Jeep was moving jobs from Ohio to China. Will kept repeating his fib and kept citing the source who had publicly repudiated him.

Will, who conceals his bankrupt rightwing economic hokum behind the demeanor of a coldly objective and slightly pedantic university scholar, was at his old lying tricks again this week. Either that or he really is pretty stupid.

Here’s the lie: When Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) said, “Social Security has not added one penny to the deficit” Charles P. Blahous III, a member of the Social Security board of trustees, wrote to the Post to say that in 2012 this program will add $165 billion to the deficit because benefit expenditures exceed Social Security tax revenue by that amount and “this gap is filled entirely by revenue that the federal government borrows’.” The fact that the second-ranking Senate Democrat is off by 16,500,000,000,000 pennies reveals the sort of precise thinking that got the country into its current condition and that supposedly will produce a cure. It is enough to make you want to hop in your Fisker and drive off a fiscal cliff.

Durbin is right and Will is a liar, because he knows Durbin is right. Will knows that the payroll taxes that the federal government collects go to a special trust fund for Social Security. That trust fund has a massive surplus. It is true that in 2012, the trust fund spent $165 billion more than it took in, which is maybe the third time that has ever happened. That’s why we collect surpluses for Social Security in many years—so the money is there in the lean years.

What’s also true is that the federal government has borrowed money from the Social Security Trust Fund, and if it didn’t have to pay it back, it would be $165 billion less in the hole this year, but that’s funny math: sooner or later the federal government has to pay back what it borrowed from the Social Security trust fund to finance Bush II’s meaningless and bloody wars and to meet all of the government’s commitments during the time it was starved of funds because of the Bush II tax cuts. But that’s not Social Security creating a deficit. That’s the federal government having to pony up to pay off its debts, including what it owes to Social Security recipients.
 
Our big Social Security problem is that the baby boom is going through retirement and the generations behind it chronologically are significantly smaller, leaving a smaller number of people to pay into the system for those currently receiving benefits. But that problem will work itself out over time, especially when the smaller workforce increases the value of labor. All the system needs is a quick fix, and the easiest one would be to remove the cap on income that is taxed for Social Security purposes.
 
George Will knows all this basic information, that is, assuming that he is the student of history and of civics that he purports to be.  But he would rather see the government get out of the retirement pension business, unless it is to collect the tax and give it directly to the private sector to invest on a non-guaranteed basis.
 
While there have always been a lot of lies and myths floating around the political blathersphere, the big lie is that the Social Security system is bankrupt or on its last legs.
 
For the casual follower of Will, it may seem like a shock that he tells a big fat whopper about the major source of income for most retired Americans. But to those who have followed him carefully for the last few decades, it’s par for the course. Will cloaks his inaccuracies in a fairly erudite vocabulary, but it’s the same set of lies you can hear delivered much more explicitly by Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.

Thursday, December 13, 2012

The right wing persists in using failed slogans and attitudes

By Marc Jampole

It’s amazing that the right-wing ideologues in the news media continue to use failed slogans and continue to take repudiated positions. It’s as if there has been a message retrenchment to the basics of Romneyism among media stalwarts.

I didn’t realize that the right-wing media was channeling Romney’s worst until earlier this week when channel surfing while driving home from the office: I heard Rush Limbaugh take off on the 47% of the country who are takers; the 47% first promulgated as the “other” whom Mitt Romney would never help as president. Just what the wealthy racist donors wanted to hear. But not what the voters wanted to hear.

I can never bring up the 47% canard without pointing out that these moochers include senior citizens who paid payroll taxes and are now receiving Social Security and Medicare, veterans who fought for our country and children who find themselves in poor families for no fault of their own. There’s most of Romney and Rush’s 47%.

So why did Rush persist in conveying the thought that half the country are moochers and do it in the same ill-fated words? Doesn’t he realize that a good part of his audience are part of that 47% and know it?

I thought Rush was losing it to attack the 47% after the election results, but he’s not the only media maven (or is that craven) to channel the Mittman this week. The wicked witch of the North, East, West and South, Ann Coulter, penned a column today in which she lashed out at Hispanics and immigrants and told a lot of whoppers. As the analysis in the Huffington News pointed out, Coulter accuses Hispanics of looking for handouts when statistics show that Latinos use less than their share of government benefits compared to the rest of the population. Coulter says that immigrants from Latin America have too many babies out of wedlock. Again, Huffington cites facts that prove her wrong.

When Romney’s strong anti-immigration stand turned off Hispanic voters, it guaranteed that he would lose some key swing states and the election. Many Republicans were beginning to express the view that there was no reason not to take a more favorable view of reforming immigration laws in a way that pleased Hispanic voters.  You would think that as a Republican shill, Coulter would fall in line. Instead she has thrown more red meat to the ultra-right nativists who favor mass deportations and building a 30-foot high wall along our borders. 

I know that both Rush and Coulter always have to ratchet up the audacity to keep the attention of the masses and pump up their ratings. But in both cases, they used tired, old, failed, lie-ridden rhetoric that the political party they support had repudiated.

Why resurrect these false and failed ideas? I’m guessing that keeping these lies out there will make sure that some part of the population will continue to believe them and therefore continue to vote Republican even if the GOP economic stands work against their best interests. It’s a short term strategy, since this Republican core is losing population.

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Universities should increase merit scholarships, but end athletic ones, plus stop giving breaks to legacies

One of the minor threads in the vast patchwork quilt called anti-intellectualism in the mass media is the assault on merit scholarships for college students.  For example, the New York Times used today’s report on the effort of the University of Oklahoma to attract National Merit Scholarship winners to treat the practice of giving these high academic achievers as controversial. To quote the article, penned by Richard Peréz-Peña, “Oklahoma’s program touches on a long-running argument within higher education, about the role of ‘merit aid’ — scholarships that schools give on the basis of credentials like grades, test scores or musical skills — versus the aid that nearly all schools give on the basis of a student’s financial need.”

Interestingly enough, the writer cites school officials at Michigan State and Texas A&M as opponents to academic scholarships. These two schools are well known for funding the minor league training of a number of professional football and basketball players. But then again, Oklahoma also gives a lot of money to star athletes.

Inputting “against merit scholarships” into the Google machine will yield hundreds of other articles arguing against giving scholarships to students who are high achievers but don’t need the money.

I can speak with some personal experience on this issue, as seven years ago Northeastern University awarded my son Ezra a full merit scholarship covering room, board and tuition for four years.  Although his mother and I both make incomes that disqualified us from receiving any need-based assistance, I never felt bad about my son taking Northeastern’s money. Ezra maintained a high grade point average in the most advanced academic courses that his urban high school offered, scored highly in his SATs and was involved in a slew of extra-curricular activities. (FYI, he won a number of university and national scholarships for his academic performance at Northeastern and is now getting his PhD in structural engineering at Stanford, funded by a National Science Foundation fellowship.)

By the way, just at his high school alone I knew of at least 10 other students with credentials similar to Ezra’s—different skills and different activities, but all showing a clear demonstration of talent, drive and creativity.  Whatever one wants to say about the overall decline of secondary school education in the U.S., no one can dispute the fact that the best students today are far more educated and skilled than the top dogs of any previous generation.  And that there are more of them now.

To attract top-flight students, Northeastern offers merit scholarships, just as a large number of universities offer room, board and tuition to attract athletes who will help their teams ascend the football and basketball rankings. If you take the scholarship from my son, then take away the athletic scholarship from the suburban kid who went to sleep-away football camp every summer.  At least the academic scholarship has something to do with the mission of higher education. 

The scandal is not that a well-off kid got a scholarship. 

The scandal is that there are too few merit scholarships for the number of deserving students.   Instead of ending merit aid, as many colleges are threatening to do, merit and need scholarships should be expanded and athletic scholarships should be completely eliminated.   

Another scandal is that too many talented high school students in poor school districts do not get the same opportunities to learn and excel that the kids in richer school districts and independent private schools get.  Universities would do more for fairness if they used their enormous resources to make access to educational opportunity available to all children.

And yet another scandal is the fact that too many high school students end up going to college when instead they should be in vocational or career training.  While 70% of all high school graduates go to college, a far lower percentage of all jobs require a four-year college education.  That great disconnect leads to college graduation rates of about 50% and a whole lot of young people with a lot of debt and nothing to show for it.

And how about the large number of places reserved for legacies and athletes? A study a few years ago showed that both these groups get bigger breaks on their SAT scores than minorities do. There’s something scandalous when my son’s truly brilliant chess buddy complains that legacies hold back the class and impede his education at one of America’s very most prestigious universities.

Yes, there’s a lot to fix in higher education, and not just in the process by which high school seniors are selected.  I don’t think that ending merit scholarships to deserving kids belongs on higher education’s agenda for change, and it befuddles me why media outlets like the Times want to keep it there. 

In youth chess, my son learned that there is nothing wrong about giving a trophy to the winner, but that it is unfair if a deserving kid doesn’t have a chance to compete. That’s the real problem for higher education, and one that not just colleges, but school districts and all levels of government should seek to solve.

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Why is all the talk about cutting payments to the poor and elderly? How about cutting defense?

By Marc Jampole
 
So far, the mainstream news media and the Conservative propaganda machine both agree that the payments to the poor and elderly should be the focus of public discussions of a deal to cut government spending to go along with the almost certain increase in taxes on the ultra-wealthy and wealthy.
 
That may be changing now that 22 House members from both sides of the aisle announced that military spending should be part of the deal to avoid the fiscal cliff.
 
The dirty little not-so-secret story of the deficit we face is that military spending and historic tax cuts for the wealthy are what fueled its tremendous increase during the Bush and early Obama years.
 
Here are some facts I picked up from the Friends Committee on National Legislation, the national lobbying group for the Quakers:
  •  Military spending has doubled in the last 10 years, primarily to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
  • U.S. per capita spending on its military budget has increased by 72 percent since 1998.
  • Military spending accounts for half of all the funds that Congress appropriates every year.
  • The U.S. military budget accounted for nearly 48 percent of global military spending, as of 2010. U.S. presence in the world includes hundreds of military bases in Europe.
After all other wars since World War II, the nation has cut back on military spending and tended to other needs at home. The cut in military spending after the Cold War ended was called the Peace Dividend.  It is most associated with the Clinton years of economic growth and federal deficit reduction. The other thing that Clinton (and before him, Bush I) did was to raise taxes, especially on the more well-off. 
 
That increasing government revenues and spending on people instead of guns grows the economy makes sense for all except the navel-gazers brainwashed by the myth that the market is always right. The tax part is simple: rich folk save their money, whereas the government spends its money and that creates jobs. 
 
Military spending doesn’t re-circulate into the economy creating echoes of additional wealth as much as spending on people does. There is a value in investing in military technology and a lot of technological advances began in the military, but if we put the same research dollars to use on peaceful uses immediately it would make our research much more efficient. Let’s put it this way: Would you rather have our scientists and research engineers working on new bombing systems or a barrier system that keeps the shores protected from the next Sandy or Katrina without harming the environment? That’s an easy call except to the hoard of elected officials and lobbyists who feed at the trough of military contractors.
 
One thing to keep in mind is that neither party is all that serious about the deficit. It’s just a side show to make sure that we don’t go too far into downward income redistribution. The so-called fiscal cliff leads to a great reduction of the deficit, as government spending is cut and taxes are raised. Even Republicans, however, admit that if we suck too much money out of the economy to pay to the rich folk and foreign banks and governments that own our debt we’ll sink into another depression. So everyone’s a Keynesian, but no one wants to admit it.
 
The deficit was caused by low taxes on the wealthy and military spending. Those are the places to look for the money to pump into the economy while stabilizing the debt level.

Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Falling birth rate is not a problem if we embrace immigration and income redistribution

By Marc Jampole

The recent study by the Pew Research Center that found the U.S. birthrate is falling has transformed a lot of economists and economic writers into Chicken Littles, running around the barnyard waving their wings furiously and shouting that “the sky is falling.” Most of the news coverage, e.g., in U.S. News and World Report and Bloomberg Businessweek concluded that a falling birth rate is a negative, or made unstated and unsubstantiated assumptions that it is negative.

Having fewer people in the world will mean we use fewer resources and push less CO2 into the environment.  What could be bad about that?

What the economists and pundits fear is that the economy will shrink with fewer people to feed, educate, keep well, herd from place to place and entertain. Fewer children mean a need for fewer pediatricians and toy makers and elementary school teachers. The children become teens and there is suddenly less demand for cars, video games, cosmetics and fashion clothes. And as the new generation ages, more and eventually all industries contract.

Continual increases in productivity and energy efficiency make the problem worse, because when productivity and energy efficiency improve, fewer jobs are required to produce the same amount of products and services.  More people don’t have jobs, which leads to an even smaller economy and enormous social problems.

In other words, the common view is that without population growth the economy and society will decline.

This old time thinking may have worked before we realized we were both polluting the Earth and depleting its resources.  But no more.

To address global warming, we have to reduce our output. Fewer people is a far better way to do it than famine, war or pestilence. True enough, we must slowly move to renewable sources of energy and materials, but even as we do, reducing our population remains one of the best ways to address global warming.

But what to do about the economy that will shrink if the population decreases?

The answer is two-fold: immigration from poorer, less developed nations and income redistribution.  If we accept immigrants from poorer, less developed countries they will fill the gap between our current population and the smaller population that would result from no immigration. The population of the world will get smaller, even as ours will stabilize. And while the immigrants will use more energy and resources in the United States than they would have back home, there will still be a net decrease in energy/resource use in the world.

Income redistribution comes into play as we address the growing number of unemployed that results when productivity increases but the population doesn’t. There are several ways to address the social problems inherent in fewer hours of work needed to produce the same amount of goods and services:  working fewer hours to afford the same or a slightly lower standard of living; raising the education level needed for jobs (extending adolescence); reducing the retirement age; free services and goods to the unemployed.  All of these actions take money from those who own the means of production in the form of higher wages and benefits or more use of tax policy to distribute income down the ladder.  The only way for a humane and decent society to address a falling population is to distribute wealth in a more equitable fashion.

Two of the most fundamental principles of the study of economics are 1) that an economy must always be growing to be healthy and 2) a greater population is the most effective way to achieve that growth.  Economists accept these principles as absolute truth, but they are only starting premises—foundation stones upon which the whole of economic theory is currently constructed.

But just as Einsteinian physics replaced the Newtonian version, so must an economic theory that does not depend upon growth develop.  As long as economists and mass media journalists continue to believe and promulgate that growth is always good we will not come close to learning how to create a world in which our energy and materials footprint is small enough to sustain the human race.

Monday, December 3, 2012

The case against smartphones: To get one benefit you make a lot of trade-offs

By Marc Jampole

Virtually everyone I know has or is getting a smartphone. I keep resisting the Siren call, however, because as far as I can discern, the smartphone provides only one benefit and in return, the user has to give up a lot that I prefer to keep.
 
The benefit is to have it all here and now, and by all, I mean the Internet, email, games, text-messaging, movies, music, directions and documentation such as airline or event tickets. In short, everything that the user is accustomed to getting on her/his computer, DVD player, landline telephone, stereo system, Gameboy, paper newspaper and MP3 player.
 
The only additional benefit that the smartphone provides over any of these devices is to be able to have it here and now, at this instant, immediately, right now. No matter what the app, you can find an equivalent on at least one and sometimes several other pieces of equipment that do the same thing. The only additional benefit you get from the smartphone is the instantaneous nowness.
 
And here is what you give up to get the smartphone’s immediacy:

·        Civility: Smartphone use spoils interactions with other people, which tends to fill the time people are not at home and in the vicinity of other devices. Checking a batting average, playing a smartphone game in the restaurant or text-messaging while you’re talking all offend the commonly held conventions of etiquette. The scene of a table full of young people, each on his or her own cell phone, replays daily and nightly in every city across America.
·        Size of screen: The smartphone screen is too small to be of any real use, if you ask me. The miniaturization of the smartphone experience offsets the value of immediacy—I would rather see a larger screen for a movie or TV show, to play a game or even to surf the web.  Scrolling, and especially horizontal scrolling, slows down the search for information. The eyes can quickly review a lot of detail at one time, but there is only so much detail that can fit on a small screen.  Whatever you’re doing thus takes longer on the smartphone than when using a computer or reading a book or Kindle. It’s funny, though, whenever I raise the size issue with smartphone owners, they brag about how much bigger their screen is than those of other smartphone brands.
·        Sound quality: The sound on a smartphone is terrible—and it’s always breaking up. I understand that with headphones, you get a pretty good sound from the MP3s and movies you play, but the sound is only as good as the headphone, and the best headphone never compares to the warmth that the room environment provides to sound that comes from speakers.  Call me an effete audiophile, and why not: there’s nothing I like more than putting my e-width feet up and listening to some Beethoven or Kate Bush from a beautiful sound system.

At this point, I imagine that smartphone defenders are eager to point out that there is another benefit of the smartphone—having everything in one place. And by everything,  I don’t mean all the experiences that devices with larger screens or better sound systems give us better, but stuff for which size (and sound) doesn’t matter, like tickets and other documentation  I travel a lot by Megabus and last time amazed me: half the passengers showed their smartphones to the ticket-taker. I see more and more people presenting the smartphone at concerts, plays, airports, restaurants and sporting events.
 
But having all your documents in one small place has its drawbacks: What if you lose your phone? Or if some super freaky hacker steals it or buys it hot? For anyone using the smartphone to manage all documents, when you lose it, you lose everything.
 
Paper tickets are also so easy to deal with: You show it and then you throw it in a shoebox or file or wherever you keep your receipts for reconciliation, tax or expense account purposes.  When you’re done, you throw it out. If you need to have an electronic copy, you just scan it.
 
Occasionally when I’m with a smartphoner, it’s helpful that she/he can punch out the directions to someplace we’re headed (obviously none of my friends and family are “Applers”).  Other information, e.g., where is the closest Chinese restaurant, can also be useful. 
 
But these small conveniences aren’t worth the cost.  Smartphones are expensive to buy and expensive to operate, especially if you go app-shit crazy. There’s no such thing as unlimited use on smartphones, which is why Internet service providers love them so much. The more you use the smartphone instead of a computer, the more money the corporate leviathans make.
 
Many tech writers and social critics believe that we have entered the age of the portable device, and that pretty soon all of us will be managing our lives on that little square of plastic and wires in pocket or purse.  If that’s so, I’ll be the last person that still prints his ticket on the computer or waits for them to come in the mail. I’ll be the last one to present the paper to the ticket-taker. And I’ll be the last one to ask complete strangers coming out of the subway at Union Square where Irving Place is instead of accidentally ramming into a wheelchaired individual because I was looking it up on my smartphone while hurtling up the subway steps.

Saturday, December 1, 2012

Editorial: Stop the Grand Con


The deficit scolds, as Paul Krugman rightly calls them, have been dominating fiscal policy discussions for the past three years, calling upon the federal government to cut services to the poor and elderly to free up more money to pay for more tax breaks for the rich and corporations.

They are frauds. When Bill Clinton in 2001 turned over to George W. Bush a federal budget that was in the black and on track to wipe out the national debt in a decade, these same “conservatives” proclaimed that deficits didn’t matter. Bush enacted two tax cuts and pursued two wars without bothering to pay for them, which increased the national debt upwards of $5 trillion.

Conservatives who supported Bush’s $700 billion Wall Street bailout in 2008 didn’t “come to their senses” until after Barack Obama took office in 2009 and started trying to save the American auto industry and stimulate the economy, which, in addition to the health reform and other discretionary spending, cost about $1.44 trillion. Republicans resisted him at every step. Now that the economy has stabilized and corporations are banking profits, the unemployment rate is still hanging around 8% and there is still plenty of work to be done rebuilding our roads and bridges and other critically needed infrastructure to 21st century standards. But “conservatives” say we can’t put those people back to work because it would increase the deficit — even though the Treasury is able to borrow at near-record low interest rates.

Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein and Honeywell’s David Cote get extra gall points for making the case to cut the deficit by severely scaling back social safety-net programs, such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Goldman Sachs got $10 billion in federal bailout cash. Now that it is back in the black, Goldman Sachs is looking for a tax break on offshore profits that could save it $3.3 billion when it brings the profits home. Honeywell had $2.3 billion in federal contracts in 2011 alone and it is not interested in giving discounts for government work.

Blankfein called for cuts in Social Security and other “entitlements” in an interview with CBS News Nov. 19. He said Social Security “wasn’t devised to be a system that supported you for a 30-year retirement after a 25-year career.” That surprised many of us who figure to work more than 40 years before getting to retire. But the key to cutting Social Security, Blankfein said, was simply a matter of teaching people to expect less.

“You’re going to have to do something, undoubtedly, to lower people’s expectations of what they’re going to get,” Blankfein told CBS, “the entitlements, and what people think they’re going to get, because you’re not going to get it.” Blankfein made $16.1 million in 2011 and, like all millionaires, gets dinged by the Social Security payroll tax only on the first $110,100. Seniors might not need to expect less if we just lifted the cap on taxable income and multimillionaires like Blankfein paid their fair share.

Cote, whose compensation in 2011 was more than $55 million, suggested in a CBS interview Nov. 20 that the government raise revenue by ending individual tax credits and deductions, including mortgage and charitable deductions that the middle class uses. Cote added, “The big nut is going to have to be [cuts to] Medicare/Medicaid … especially with the baby boomer generation retiring. It’s going to literally crush the system.” (Particularly if we let multimillionaires bank their dividends at bargain tax rates.)

But what Cote really wants is a corporate tax rate of zero. In May he said in an interview in May, the only reason his desired rate won’t happen is because “from a fairness perspective, nobody would be able to stand it.”

Cote’s belief that a low corporate tax rate will spur job creation stands at odds with the country’s current experience, Pat Garofalo noted at ThinkProgress.org. After all, US corporate taxes that were actually paid (the effective rate) fell to a 40-year-low in fiscal year 2011, despite corporate profits rebounding to their pre-Great Recession heights. However, job creation has been stubbornly slow.

In a New York Times op-ed column (Nov. 25), billionaire investor Warren Buffett noted that higher tax rates are not likely to deter investors. During the early 1950s, when the capital gains rate was 25% and marginal rates on dividends were as high as 91%, he did well as a securities broker. “In the years from 1956 to 1969, the top marginal rate fell modestly, but was still a lofty 70% — and the tax rate on capital gains inched up to 27.5%. I was managing funds for investors then. Never did anyone mention taxes as a reason to forgo an investment opportunity that I offered.”

In 1992, the tax paid by the 400 highest incomes in the US averaged 26.4% of adjusted gross income. In 2009, the most recent year reported, that rate was 19.9%, he noted. “It’s nice to have friends in high places,” he added.

That top 400’s average income in 2009 was $202 million, he noted. Yet more than a quarter of these ultrawealthy paid less than 15% of their tax in combined federal income and payroll taxes. A few actually paid nothing.

Buffett supports President Obama’s proposal to eliminate the Bush tax cuts for high-income taxpayers, although he prefers a cutoff at $500,000 instead of $250,000. But he also suggests a minimum tax on high incomes of 30% on taxable income between $1 million and $10 million and 35% on amounts above that. “A plain and simple rule like that will block the efforts of lobbyists, lawyers and contribution-hungry legislators to keep the ultrarich paying rates well below those incurred by people with income just a tiny fraction of ours,” Buffett wrote. “Only a minimum tax on very high incomes will prevent the stated tax rate from being eviscerated by these warriors for the wealthy.”

Democrats don’t need a deal at any cost in the lame duck session. Wall Street bet on Romney and the Republicans in the election and now the Democrats don’t owe them anything but “good government” and Elizabeth Warren on the Senate Banking Committee. They shouldn’t go along with any “Grand Bargain” that cuts Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid benefits.

America’s plutocrats have tried to scare the middle class with the specter of China threatening to foreclose on our burgeoning national debt. In fact, China owns about $1.15 trillion in US Treasury notes, or 7% of the US national debt, according to the Treasury Department — and that is good for us. Instead of cutting domestic spending to marginally reduce the federal deficit, as the Republicans are calling for, we should be proud to sell China more Treasury bills to help us pay the $2.2 trillion the American Society of Civil Engineers estimates it would take to rebuild our infrastructure and put 12 million jobless Americans back to work.

China is buying our debt not because they’re good guys, but because they need to invest their profits somewhere, and the US Treasury is the safest investment in the world (at least until Republicans start threatening the faith and credit of the Treasury). As of Nov. 26, the 30-year Treasury bond rate was 2.8%. Investing in the US also helps keep down the value of the Chinese currency, the yuan. That keeps Chinese exports less expensive and more attractive to western consumers. Chinese leaders need American workers to be prosperous enough to buy the consumer goods that are made in Chinese sweatshops.

Consequently, the Chinese economy would suffer as much, if not more than the US if China stopped buying our debt. And, contrary to popular opinion, China can’t demand that we give them San Francisco in return for their T-bills. Instead, they can dump that paper on the world market. That might cause Treasury prices to fall, but that not only would reduce the value of China’s remaining Treasury holdings; it also might slow down the US economy, so we might not be able to buy as many Chinese goods as we used to. And with 1.3 billion Chinese consumers having greater expectations of a higher living standard, driven by trade with a healthy United States, the Chinese leadership is not likely to start a war with their best customer. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, December 15, 2012

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Selections from the December 15, 2012 issue











Thursday, November 29, 2012

Behind surveys with ideological subtext lies an attempt to subtly shape the views of the audience.

By Marc Jampole

The number of surveys that news media are placing on their websites for their online followers seems to multiply daily. Most of the surveys reflect only the views of the respondents. Since the respondents self-select to take the survey, the validity of these surveys for the nation as a whole or even for the universe comprising the audience for the media outlet is virtually always suspect. 
 
Take for example the Yahoo! survey of which presidential candidate would receive their vote featured on its web page the day before the election: 53% of the respondents said they would vote for Romney and only 47% for President Obama. Of course the actual results were flipped, with Obama winning 51% of the vote and Romney a mere 47%. Clearly either Yahoo! users or those who answer Yahoo! surveys are more Republican than the voters.
 
These quick-and-dirty surveys usually ask one or at the most a few questions.  But even with one question, they often seem to be making a point as opposed to gathering information. These media surveys often reduce to attempts to convince the public of something rather than to gather information.  The persuasion comes in how the question and the answers are phrased.
 
Here are a few recent examples of advocating an ideology in the one-question Yahoo! survey, which changes every day or two on its home page:
 
Survey Question: Are you planning to shop on Cyber Monday?

            Yes, I don’t like crowds

            No, I prefer to shop in person

The assumption is made that, no matter what, you’re going to shop for Christmas/Hanukkah/Holiday presents. But what if you’re not shopping on Cyber Monday because you don’t celebrate holidays, don’t celebrate by exchanging gifts, are boycotting the holiday, make your own presents or have already shopped online for the holidays? By giving one and only one reason only for not shopping on Cyber Monday, the question assumes that the only possible reason not to shop on the Monday after Thanksgiving is that you are participating in another way in the great American potlatch of materialism  called the Holiday Shopping Season. The subtext of the question supports the basic American ideology of consumerism.
 
The next example, also from Yahoo!, is even more manipulative:

Survey Question: Do you support a tax hike for the wealthiest Americans?

            Yes, it’s needed to fix the deficit

            No, it will hinder economic growth  

We see in the characterization of the “no” answer one of the great hoaxes that conservative economic writers and pundits have been perpetrating on the American public for decades: that raising taxes on the wealthy will hurt economic growth. It’s just not so. The further up the economic scale you go, the more money you take out of the economy. The wealthy invest most of their money without investing in new jobs or the economy—for example, by buying stocks and bonds on the secondary market (where the money doesn’t go to a company that’s hiring, but to another investor). Every bit of the money that the government takes in is spent (except what’s used to pay down the debt, which is owned primarily by rich folk and foreign governments). World economic history has shown that higher taxes on the wealthy almost always lead to economic growth and virtually never hinder growth.

The “yes” answer also serves as an ideological shill. There are a great many progressives, including myself, who think the deficit is not such as critical problem, but propose raising taxes on the wealthy to improve our infrastructure of roads, bridges, mass transit, public spaces and education; support the development of new technologies; or help the people hurt by the last six years of deep recession followed by slow growth.  The survey question leaves out these option, just as most mainstream and rightwing media and right-wing politicians do: they want to take the ideas of taxing to grow the economy or create a more equitable society off the table because they go against their own mostly false economic notions.

Yahoo! is not the only one that’s trying to freeze the debate about taxes in right-wing terms. Here is a recent Washington Post online survey:

Survey Question: Would you be willing to pay more in taxes to help shore up the deficit?

            Yes

            No

In this case, the only reason given to raise taxes is to pay down the deficit (which is what I think the imprecise “shore up” means). And again, there are many people who would be delighted to see their taxes raised to kick-start the economy or help people in need, but would not want to pay more in taxes to pay down the deficit at this time. It’s something that the Washington Post  doesn’t even want us to bring up, let alone consider.

The accumulation of little nuggets of propaganda—in these silly surveys, in the details and assumptions of news stories, in the experts quoted in articles—allows many false notions to parade around in the marketplace of ideas as truth. The news media accepts these false notions and wants us to do the same.

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Some gifts you can give our society and economy on Black Friday.

By Marc Jampole

With the great American holiday of Black Friday in two short days, I wanted to suggest some gifts that my cherished readers can get for American society to celebrate the holiday season. Note that I wrote “get,” and not “buy,” since these gifts do not involve commercial transactions.

Gift Idea #1: Boycott Wal-Mart until it stops its anti-union activity, and email the company to tell it that you’re not shopping at Wal-Mart until its store and warehouse employees are covered by certified unions. If enough people boycott Wal-Mart, it will be forced to unionize, just as grape farmers were forced to accept a union for farm workers after the successful boycott of grapes led by Cesar Chavez in the 1970’s.

You may be wondering how unionizing Wal-Mart will help our society. It’s simple: The more unionized workers there are, the higher the wages of everyone else. Wal-Mart is the largest private employer in the country, one known for giving very low salaries to their employees (except the executives!).  If Wal-Mart were unionized, wages would increase across the board across the country.

If history can serve as a guide, with higher wages will come some increase is prices, but employers will have to swallow a good part of their increased costs. Those that don’t adjust will lose market share to the entrepreneurs and innovators who are willing to take a lower profit margin.

The net effect of unionizing Wal-Mart will therefore be to rebalance the distribution of wealth, with less income and wealth in the hands of those on top and more in the hands of the middle class and the poor. One of the lessons of economic history is that nations with a relatively equitable distribution of wealth thrive; examples include the United States in the 50’s and 60’s and Europe in the 14th century after the Black Plague drove up the cost of labor. And yes, nations in which the distribution of wealth becomes increasingly less equitable suffer precipitous economic declines; examples include the Roman Empire after about 200 CE, Spain in the 16th century, several of the Chinese dynasties and the contemporary United States.

Right now the U.S. government provides billions of dollars of subsidies to Wal-Mart because so many of its employees qualify for food stamps. Another effect of unionizing Wal-Mart will be to make a big dent in the costs of the food stamp program, thus lowering government costs.

Those who want to give the precious gift of a just society and a growing economy to the United States can email Wal-Mart about your boycott at https://corporate.walmart.com/contact-us/store-corporate-feedback, check the “Financial Information” box, click “Next” and then leave your message on the page that appears. And instead of buying at Wal-Mart, go to your local merchants and to national companies that treat their workers with the dignity of a fair wage.

Gift Idea #2: Write your Republican Senators and Congressmen and tell them that you will not vote for them if they take the Norquist Pledge not to raise taxes or do not recant the pledge if they have taken it in the past.  The pledge, first proposed years ago by right-wing political operative Grover Norquist, has become part of contemporary Republican ideology. Before the most recent election, 238 of 242 Republican Congressional representatives and 41 out of 47 Republican Senators had signed Norquist’s pledge, promising to “oppose any and all efforts to increase the marginal income tax rate for individuals and business; and to oppose any net reduction or elimination of deductions and credits, unless matched dollar for dollar by further reducing tax rates.”

The problem is that the federal government has been starved for revenues since the Bush II temporary tax cuts went into effect about 10 years ago, during which time we have fought two purposeless wars that have drained the federal treasury. We have to pay our debts, but just as importantly, we have to have the funds to keep investing in the economy by rebuilding our infrastructure. And we need money to respond to natural disasters like Sandy and man-made ones like the bursting of the real estate bubble that sent the country into an economic nosedive in 2007 and 2008.

But since they control the House of Representatives, the Republicans stand in the way of raising taxes. (In my heart, I believe that they would be delighted to raise taxes on anyone making less than $1.0 million or so a year. I base this belief on the Republican tax policies of the last 30 some-odd years, which have shifted the burden of paying for everything the government does from the wealthy to the middle class.)

Right now the Republicans are particularly vulnerable to reason, as they see that they have lost the election and surveys show that most Americans want to raise taxes on the wealthy. Telling Republican Representatives and Senators that getting your vote depends on their voting “Yea” on tax increases could prove to be particularly effective at the current moment, when President Obama is negotiating with Congress about new taxes.

So give some gifts that can keep on giving for years. Tell Wal-Mart and the Republicans that we won’t put up with their policies that are creating a nation of rich and poor.

Possible Twinkies demise gives journalists another chance to equate bad food with good times.


By Marc Jampole

When I look back in fond nostalgia to childhood foods, I often remember the Syrian and Eastern European delicacies that my mother made for us at holidays. I can often almost taste the sweet fresh corn on the cob in the summer and the tangy mussels that would come in a bucket. I sometimes conjure steaming images of oversized potato knishes and hot pastrami sandwiches we used to get at the neighborhood deli. Perhaps my most sentimental memories are reserved for the turkey, stuffing and sweet potatoes we had at Thanksgiving.
My food nostalgia never includes packaged baked goods like Twinkies, Ho Hos, Ding Dongs and Wonder Bread: They never were very good, and certainly not as good as the corn rye we got at the bakery or the various cakes and cookies my mother would make, sometimes without a package mix, or we would occasionally buy in the bakery. I stopped eating Hostess-type packaged junk sometime in my teens and never returned to them.
When I’m reminiscing about childhood foods with friends and family, no one ever mentions these Hostess products either, even though, regardless of their age, almost everyone I know ate them at one time or another.
Nevertheless, it didn’t surprise me that the news that Hostess may close down and that these baked concoctions of white flower, sugar or corn syrup, food coloring and lots of preservatives instigated collective moaning and hand-wringing by the mass media. Reporter after reporter have mourned the loss of these products (and they are more product than food) as if we had suddenly lost a part of our collective cultural heritage, akin to all the monuments in Washington crumbling or misplacing all the episodes of “The Andy Griffin Show” and “You Bet Your Life.”
Writer after writer has come forward with his or her own defense of Twinkies and dirge for their possible demise. Here are some examples:
“Except that Twinkies aren’t merely a snack cake, nor just junk food. They are iconic in ways that transcend how Americans typically fetishize food. But ultimately, they fell victim to the very fervor that created them.” (Associated Press)
“When news broke Monday that beloved treat-maker Hostess would not be forced to shut down after all, Americans breathed a joint sigh of relief .” (Business Insider)
“If my insides are particularly well-preserved, it’s not because of the steamed broccoli crowding my dinner plate. No, it was the Twinkies. My longtime habit of consuming the famously imperishable cakes — with a preservative no doubt passed down from King Tut’s mummifiers — surely must have infused me with their elixir….Perhaps, it’s for the best that I wouldn’t have one last bite. They couldn’t live up to my gauzy memories of them. And maybe the Twinkie hoarders will pass them down like heirlooms to their children.” (Chicago Tribune)
“I don’t want to live in a world without Twinkies… The Austrians have their Strudel, the Italians their tiramisu, the French created crepes. But the Twinkie is an American original.” (Fox News)
“A world without Twinkies! How can it be?! I haven’t eaten a Twinkie since the third grade. But, when the demise of Hostess was announced last Friday, I, along with most of America, got swept up in Twinkiestalgia. Watching the six o’clock news, it dawned on me that my kids had never had and might never have a Twinkie in their young lives. What kind of life is that? What kind of mother would I be if one of those infinite-shelf-life treats never passed their lips?!” (The “Today Show” website)
“The Twinkie is an institution and a distinctly American one at that. It was the dessert that Edith packed in Archie’s lunchbox. It became part of legal nomenclature (the “Twinkies defense”). And its supposedly eternal shelf life only added to its stature as a pop-culture icon…No one, it seemed, had eaten a Twinkie (or Sno Ball) in years. Their affection for the brand was largely an exercise in nostalgia. The Twinkie took them back to their childhood – and knowing it was still there (and could be had at any time) meant there was always a comfortable (and cheap) portal to a time when life was safer, simpler and more innocent. It’s the Twinkie as, yes, Proust’s madeleine.” (The Wall Street Journal)
“Consider the Zen of the moment when you take a bite, that taste of something so simple yet decadent, Godiva for the everyman, and, for many, the savory hint of childhood and innocence. Can that small pleasure be had any longer without fear of diet-busting self-loathing?” (Baltimore Sun)
The common themes running through the commentaries are 1) nostalgia for what are imagined were simpler, better times and 2) defiance of what the reporters postulate are the food police who want to take away our every culinary pleasure and replace them with good food.
The nostalgia aspect is just weird: there are so many good things we can remember about the 40’s, 50’s, 60’s and every other decade of the last century that it seems absurd for pundits to give bad-tasting food that was also bad for you a second thought. We all have individual memories and we also share in collective memories, both happy and sad. For example, people my age can reminisce about where we were when the first men landed on the moon (I am proud to write that I watched the first moon walk sitting next to my uncle, who led the team that engineered the fuel that propelled the rockets) or about the first time we heard the Beatles. But Twinkies?
When the mass media tries to create a collective memory for all of us, there is usually some ideological or business reason behind it, and that brings us to the second common theme in the encomiums to Twinkies: the assertion that there is a dichotomy between food that tastes good and food that’s good for you. The mass media often asserts this dichotomy: when discussing fast food, balanced diets, foods you can buy at state fairs, what to make at holidays or for Superbowl parties and what to feed your children. It’s a false dichotomy, but every time a writer makes it or assumes it, it helps to sell more of the crap. It also undercuts efforts to address our growing epidemic of unhealthy lifestyles.
I can see why someone might grab a package of Twinkies from the food vending machine for a late afternoon snack, even though I wouldn’t do it. And I can understand why parents might find it easy to slip a package of Ding Dongs into their kids’ lunch bag, although I never did. And certainly there are a number of people around who can’t distinguish between a Twinkie and a piece of fruit, some home-made cookies or even cinnamon and sugar sprinkled on a piece of buttered whole wheat toast.
But these instances do not make a case for elevating Twinkies, Ho Ho’s and the other edible dreck from Hostess into the pantheon of American culture. The very fact that these brands are threatened by poor sales suggests that they brands do not hold any special place in our collective hearts, at least not until the mass media starts to brainwash us with phrases about “pop-culture icons” and “savory hints of childhood innocence and innocence.”
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