The Democratic Party should work to further the interests of its base, the people who volunteer, donate money and vote for it. I dare you to make a persuasive argument against that.
News flash: in the 2010 elections for the House of Representatives, the Democrats' worst age group, by far, was 65+. Social security recipients voted for Republicans by a 59-38 margin while the youngest voters favored Democrats 55-42, even in this harsh year for the good guys.
And yet, we have Dean Baker arguing this:
(S)upporters of Social Security and Medicare have to restructure the options. They have to push President Obama to announce in advance that he will never sign a debt ceiling bill that includes cuts to Social Security and Medicare, the countr(y's) two most important social programs.
He's not the only one, of course. We have scores of progressives yelling that Social Security and Medicare should be sancrosanct. But, why? If the elderly are going to vote Republican, why not let the Republicans protect the interests of their own base?
The scandal of Social Security and Medicare is the funding mechanism, the payroll tax which caps out at about $110K per year. That is, if you make a kajillion dollars this year, you only have to pay Social Security and Medicare taxes on the first $110K. If you inherit money or make it in the stock market, you pay nothing from that into this fund. Since the 80's, Social Security has, by and large, been taxing middle-class families and redistributing it to older middle-class Americans. Granted, there's some redistribution of money downward, but it's not to the degree that most assume.
The Democrats should insist on applying the payroll tax to the wealthy. If Republicans won't agree to that, cuts in Social Security and Medicare should be made first on the Republicans' base-- currently retired people who are relatively well off. And Democrats should, of course, protect the elderly who vote for them, those whose income is marginal.
As the late Molly Ivins would say, "You Got to Dance with Them what Brung You."
(Photo by Ansgar Walk, who has zero connection with the other content of this post.)
Happy Martin Luther King Day! If you furthered progressive causes the last couple years, even if all you did was vote for Democratic candidates, you should congratulate yourself for contributing to the best year for progressive legislation since the death of Rev. King.
The new SCHIP law covers 4 million additional children. I could make the case that these SCHIP improvements mean this Congress has passed the most important progressive health legislation since 1968. But why bother? A health reform bill will be passed this month or next and that will dwarf even the SCHIP expansion. Under the Senate bill, 31 million people will gain access to health insurance, a staggering achievement. The health reform bill will be the most important progressive legislation passed since Rev. King's death, in any category, bar none.
The House has already passed what would arguably be the most important environmental legislation ever, a bill to combat global warming. And there's still a pretty good chance the Senate will pass similar legislation. But even without those bills, we could celebrate higher fuel efficiency standards for cars and a new attitude toward transportation funding that makes it easier for localities to spend money on transit, walking and biking. Much money was set aside for clean energy projects, including $11 billion to improve our electrical grid.
And then there was the trillion-dollar stimulus bill which saved or created at least one million jobs (.pdf). Not since the New Deal has the federal government intervened so generously to keep us earning a paycheck. And if you're out of work, your unemployment benefits may last for as long as 99 weeks, an unprecedented extension of the usual 26-week term.
In foreign policy, President Obama has significantly improved America's standing in the world by building alliances. His Nobel Prize attests to that.
Sure, the stimulus was too small. The health reform bill should have included a Medicare buy-in. And, yeah, the global warming legislation is only a first step toward solving this problem. We still have huge military commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq, too.
But this Congress and this president are delivering on the progressive agenda better than any team since 1968, when Rev. King was taken away from us. Sadly, progressives in Congress are almost all in one political party. What ails the progressive movement and the Democratic Party can best be ameliorated by simply electing more progressive Democrats and, where that's difficult, just more Democrats.
This was a great year in Washington for the causes Martin Luther King championed. Disappointing and unsatisfactory at times? Sure. Is there much still to be done? Oh, yes, so much more. But since MLK's last birthday, the United States has sworn in our first African-American president, surely a testament to the civil rights leader's work. And to ours. And to our progressive leaders in Congress. Let's keep supporting that progressive team as they try-- sometimes just falling short of our hopes & dreams and sometimes trying in vain-- to govern in a manner Rev. King would be proud of.
My initial worry after the President's speech on Wednesday was that he'd damned the public option with his faint praise of it. The speech, I guessed, would tend to solidify the Democratic base behind whatever emerges as the final "Obama Plan". Politicians from Progressive districts would then be put in the unenviable position of holding out for a truly progressive plan only by opposing a President who's very popular in their own districts. But there are signs that the Congressional Progressive Caucus in the House is going to see if they have the votes to make a stand and it's uncertain what organized labor will do.
Richard Trumka, the man expected to replace John Sweeney as president of the AFL-CIO, vowed a couple weeks ago to hold Democrats accountable on the public option:
"We need to be a labor movement that stands by our friends, punishes its enemies and challenges those who, well, can't seem to decide which side they're on," said Richard Trumka, currently the AFL-CIO's secretary-treasurer.
In remarks to the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, Trumka singled out lawmakers "who say they are all for health care reform, but refuse to stand up for a public system that puts people before profits."
How Trumka follows thru on this is very important.
Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chairs Raul Grijalva and Lynn Woolsey have stated they'll be counting up how many firm votes they have-- the number of Representatives willing to vote against a final bill that lacks a public option. Then they'll use that number to advance their cause during negotiations.
As this process goes forward, it's important to keep two concepts in mind.
The first is that the public option holds down costs. In fact, the public option in the current House bill is designed to cost taxpayers nothing. The federal government would contribute $2 billion over each of the next five years to get the public option up and running, but participants in the plan would finance costs with premiums AND eventually reimburse the federal government for those set-up costs. The more robust the public option is, the more likely it is to hold down the cost of premiums for private insurance plans through the power of competition. Because the federal government subsidizes employer-provided health insurance through tax laws and allows its own employees to choose from private plans, reductions in the cost of private plans help to reduce the deficit. This is very important: Progressives advancing a robust public option are on the side of deficit reduction while moderates who want to eviscerate it are increasing the federal deficit.
The second important concept is that the potential for the public option to hold down costs is proportional to its number of participants, the size of its pool. The current House bill would limit public option participation to the self-employed and those working for small companies not already offering health insurance. Paul Krugman believes that even this small pool would have a significant effect, but Ezra Klein argues that it's really a small piece of the reform package, while Paul Starr and Robert Kuttner believe the House public option might even set back the cause.
Progressives need to advance the deficit-reduction arguments while looking for ways to maximize the pool of those eligible to choose the public option. The most politically-savvy way to do the latter, in my opinion, is to send this back to the states. The federal government should enable states to set their own public option participation parameters and make it easy for states to band together to form large pools of participants. If the red states don't want to participate in socialized health insurance*, they don't have to, but there's no reason we should let them force their views on the rest of us.
*Any more than they already participate in socialized health insurance, that is. Medicare is Canadian-style single-payer and the Veterans Administration runs a British-style health care system where the government owns the hospitals and pays doctors directly.
I'll give the President credit for saying as much as he did about the benefits of the public option. Of course, as he pointed out, the public option left in this bill is paltry, offered only to the self-employed and those working for very small companies. He estimates that only 5% of the population would use it. But defense of that stub of a public option doesn't make up for the deficiencies in the speech, his unrealistic belief that bipartisanship can prevail and, even worse, his offensive relativism when comparing the proposals coming from Conservatives and Progressives.
"I still believe we can replace acrimony with civility," President Obama stated. This comes after rightwing nutcases have thrown every conceivable (and inconceivable) accusation at him and the milquetoast reform plan before us. After Republican accusations of death panels and government takeovers and of him being Hitler, he still believes there are numerous politicians of good faith on the Republican side of the aisle. Well, where are they?
Insurance company executives don't mistreat us because they're "bad people", he argued. "They do it because it's profitable." Well, the same can be said of drug dealers or frauds like Bernie Madoff.
He mentioned that Conservatives have called for replacing employer-based health insurance with vouchers and that Progressives favor single payer. These approaches are too radical, he told us, despite his own extensive litany of complaints about the existing system. What we have is horrible, he says, but we don't want to change it too much. And equating vouchers with single payer is an offensive example of relativism. What's so radical about moving to the insurance system used by Canada, the nation most similar to us culturally? What's so radical about adopting a proven idea?
The President signed onto the individual mandate tonight, a federal imposition demanding that each and every one of us send money to private insurance companies. He compared this to auto insurance mandates. But those are state mandates and a federal mandate is stretching the constitution. That's a radical change! But more importantly, driving is a lifestyle choice. No one has to own or drive a car. The President promises more options except the option to decline to participate in private health insurance chicanery. This time, he promises, this industry that's done so much harm will be sufficiently regulated. I suppose he thinks I should disregard all we know about the industry's behavior or Congress's ineptitude in regulating it for my entire adult life.
Democrats at the federal level have been an abject failure on health insurance reform. My preference would be for Congress to enable the states to opt into an interstate, no holds barred public option that's available to all (including large organizations) and do as much as possible to prohibit private insurers from cherry picking. The rest of this plan simply transfers money from taxpayers to private insurance companies, a mixed blessing at best.
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