Blog

Since government workers refuse to live up to the greedy goon stereotype, the Tea Party must do it for them. Stephen Colbert shows how they accomplish this.

Robert Creamer

By Robert Creamer
Political organizer, strategist and author

For over forty years, the right wing has mounted an irrepressible campaign to discredit the very concept of government in the United States.

It continued its campaign to demonize government even as we watched first responders –government employees — run into the collapsing twin towers to rescue their fellow citizens on September 11, 2001. They continued to defame the concept of government in the face of daily reports of the bravery and sacrifice of our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan — all representing the Government of the United States of America.

The Right even continued this drum beat in the face of the most spectacular recent failure of its anti-public sector philosophy — the 2008 financial collapse. They simply ignored what was obvious to the entire world: that today’s economic crisis was caused by the fact that Republicans had essentially ended effective public sector oversight of the big Wall Street Banks whose greed and recklessness caused the worst economic crisis in 60 years and cost eight million Americans their jobs.

In the Republican moral universe, the private sector is good, and the public sector is evil — it’s as simple as that.

This week, the new House Republican Majority rode into Washington, DC to promote an anti-public sector agenda that is overtly aimed at shrinking the “evil” Federal government.

Progressives can no longer allow the radical right to define the concept of Government in the United States. It’s time to proudly and forcefully stand up for the public sector. (more…)

Subsidies to business willing to train and/or retrain would also be a big help in stimulating the economy. Check out this New York Times story.  Subsidy (stimulus) to manufacturing and infrastructure has about 1.4 times economic multiplier whereas tax cuts have only about 0.9 (because people save a portion of them) and Defense expenditures have even less. Defense jobs are as good as any other jobs but the product the industry makes doesn’t circulate in the domestic economy so we don’t get the same bang for the buck (pardon the pun). The biggest opposition to spending these days is from so-called “deficit hawks,” many of whom don’t know the first thing about how the economy really works.

There is an irrational fear of debt for debt’s (or fear’s) sake. Remember, about a third of the debt is inter-governmental, held by the various trust funds, the Fed, etc. And all the debt is held as an asset on someone’s balance sheet, somewhere in the world. I for one am not too concerned that we have too much (yet). Government, when it works properly, should be spending when the regular economy can’t (or won’t). The time to cut or refinance debt is when things are good again (like Treasury did in the years of the Clinton surpluses).

Rather than cutting spending, we should be looking for new revenue sources. Economists know that taxing things makes them less attractive and subsidizing them makes them more attractive. So, after repealing the Bush tax cuts, the most logical things to tax are the things that add the most to our problems. What are our problems? One problem is our trade deficit, most of which is attributable to three categories of imports: oil (about $60 billion per quarter, about a quarter of which is consumed by the Defense Department; rice (it’s in or on almost everything we eat and costs us about $40 billion a quarter to import beyond what we grow here), and coffee(which Americans drink at the rate of $20 billion a quarter, and we can’t grow here). Relatively small consumption taxes on these three items could generate significant revenue that could be used as a source of subsidy for things we want, like jobs (training) and infrastructure repair.

John Barringer
Lakewood, Colo.

***

To submit a blog to Free Speech Zone, e-mail it to bstack@usw.org. Keep it to 250 words or fewer. You MUST include your full name, hometown, and state. You may attach a photograph of yourself. Please include a phone number. This WILL NOT be published. Posting any given blog is within the discretion of the USW.  No blog using foul language (this is a family site), false information (we don’t want to get sued), or unnecessary personal attacks (again, we don’t want to get sued) will be used. Wait a reasonable period of time, then blog again! This is a Free Speech Zone. 

Amy Traub

By Amy Traub
Research Director Drum Major Institute for Public Policy

It’s a truism on the right these days: firefighters, librarians, sanitation workers, and other public employees are lazy and overpaid. They’ve “turned themselves into a coddled class that lives better than its private sector counterpart,” according to Reason Magazine. They are crushing beleaguered taxpayers with their fancy salaries and lavish benefits.

It would be an alarming story if it were true. But a new study by the Center for State and Local Government Excellence and the National Institute on Retirement Security takes a sober look at the data behind the politicized hype and uncovers a very different picture. When workforce factors such as education and work experience are taken into account, state and local employees make less than their private sector counterparts. Looking at pay alone, those supposedly “coddled” state employees earn 11 percent less than comparable private sector workers. Employees of city and county governments earn 12 percent less than their private sector counterparts.

What about those generous public sector benefits? Analyzing data from the National Compensation Survey, the researchers find that benefits such as pensions and health coverage do make up a slightly greater share of public employees’ overall compensation than for private employees. Yet when the cost of benefits is factored in, state and local employees still wind up with less total compensation. People working for local government earn 7.4 percent less than employees with comparable skills could get in the private sector. State employees are compensated 6.8 percent less. So much for the lavish lifestyle.

The new research offers no clarion call for public employee raises and benefit hikes to catch up with the private sector. Indeed, the study documents how public compensation has lagged private sector for twenty years. But it does throw the resurgent right-wing campaign to demonize public employees and their unions sharply into question. In this recession, public employees have been laid off, furloughed, and seen their wages frozen. At a time when public budgets are strained by falling tax revenue, these are among the difficult choices cities and states have made. But that’s no reason to imagine that “greedy” city workers somehow caused the crisis or deserve to lose their jobs or to see their pay cut any more than private sector employees. Those looking for a “coddled class” should look to the Wall Street bonus pool, not the Parks Department.

***
Follow Amy Traub on Twitter: www.twitter.com/AmyTraubDMI
***
Amy Traub is the author of the book, From Disaster to Diversity: What’s Next for New York City’s Economy. She also wrote a chapter for the book, Thinking Big: Progressive Ideas for a New Era (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2009). She has authored several influential DMI reports, including “Principles for an Immigration Policy to Strengthen and Expand the American Middle Class.” In 2008, the Jewish Funds for Justice gave her its Cornerstone Award.

When you hear a politician running for office proclaim that “government can do no good,”  think of him or  her as someone applying for a job, because that’s exactly what he or she is doing, and think of yourself as a prospective employer interviewing the candidate for a job in your company, because that’s precisely who you are.

In the course of a job interview:

Would a doctor get hired by a hospital if he said “medicine can do no good?”  Would a lawyer get hired by a company or a law firm if he said, “the law can do no good?”  Would a teacher be hired if he said “education can do no good?”

Leo Toribio
Pittsburgh, Pa.

Leo Toribio

***

To submit a blog to Free Speech Zone, e-mail it to bstack@usw.org. Keep it to 250 words or fewer. You MUST include your full name, hometown, and state. You may attach a photograph of yourself. Please include a phone number. This WILL NOT be published. Posting any given blog is within the discretion of the USW. No blog using foul language (this is a family site), false information (we don’t want to get sued), or unnecessary personal attacks (again, we don’t want to get sued) will be used. Wait a reasonable period of time, then blog again! This is a Free Speech Zone.

Dave Johnson

By Dave Johnson
Fellow with Campaign for America’s Future

The blogs and airwaves are full of explanations for the MA Senate special election’s outcome, mostly involving people being upset at particulars of the health care bill. But I don’t really think that the people who voted were all that well-informed about differences between the House and Senate versions of the bill, the “public option,” or other intricacies of ongoing legislation.

Instead, I think we should take the winning candidate’s word for it. On his website he says his win was for the following reasons, and I agree:

At his September 12 announcement of candidacy for the U.S. Senate, Senator Brown articulated a core set of beliefs that guide his thinking:
• Government is too big and that the federal stimulus bill made government bigger instead of creating jobs
• Taxes are too high and are going higher if Congress continues with its out-of-control spending
• The historic amount of debt we are passing on to our children and grandchildren is immoral
• Power concentrated in the hands of one political party, as it is here in Massachusetts, leads to bad government and poor decisions
• A strong military and vigorous homeland defense will protect our interests and security around the world and at home
• All Americans deserve health care, but we shouldn’t have to create a new government insurance program to provide it
I think the voters agreed with these basic conservative talking points. But here’s the thing: most of the assumptions underlying these statements are simply wrong – factually incorrect. They have been pounded out by a corporate/conservative misinformation machine that just makes stuff out and puts it out there on TV, the radio, email forwarding and every other channel they can find. There is no one out there responding with truth and facts, and making the case for government and democracy.

When the public only hears from one side, and hears from them over and over, day after day, after a while many people are going to believe what they are hearing. When no one seems willing to make the case for the other side of the issue, it starts to look like maybe there is no case.

The Right has a message machine that has been repeating misinformation and getting away with it, because:
1) The leadership of the other side has let them get away with it.
2) There is no comparable megaphone with which to refute the misinformation.

So is there a case to be made for government and democracy? Will our elected leaders start going before the public and making that case? Will the big funders and foundations start providing the means for progressive organizations to reach the general public and counter corporate-owned media and FOX News and Rush Limbaugh and the rest of talk radio and a million email forwards, and make the case for government and democracy? If not, then we shouldn’t expect our government and democracy to continue. But if we just take the easy way out and let the tea party crowd take over things could get scary. The alternative to “big government” is government by big corporations.

 ***

 This post originally appeared at the Campaign for America’s Future (CAF).

Johnson also is a fellow at the Commonweal Institute and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for the Renewal of the California Dream.

***

Follow Dave Johnson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/dcjohnson

Sen. Bernie Sanders

By Sen. Bernie Sanders
Independent U.S. Senator from Vermont

Let’s be clear. Our health care system is disintegrating. Today, 46 million people have no health insurance and even more are underinsured with high deductibles and co-payments. At a time when 60 million people, including many with insurance, do not have access to a medical home, more than 18,000 Americans die every year from preventable illnesses because they do not get to the doctor when they should. This is six times the number who died at the tragedy of 9/11 – but this occurs every year.

In the midst of this horrendous lack of coverage, the U.S. spends far more per capita on health care than any other nation – and health care costs continue to soar. At $2.4 trillion dollars, and 18 percent of our GDP, the skyrocketing cost of health care in this country is unsustainable both from a personal and macro-economic perspective.

At the individual level, the average American spends about $7,900 per year on health care. Despite that huge outlay, a recent study found that medical problems contributed to 62 percent of all bankruptcies in 2007. From a business perspective, General Motors spends more on health care per automobile than on steel while small business owners are forced to divert hard-earned profits into health coverage for their employees – rather than new business investments. And, because of rising costs, many businesses are cutting back drastically on their level of health care coverage or are doing away with it entirely.

Further, despite the fact that we spend almost twice as much per person on health care as any other country, our health care outcomes lag behind many other nations. We get poor value for what we spend. According to the World Health Organization the United States ranks 37th in terms of health system performance and we are far behind many other countries in terms of such important indices as infant mortality, life expectancy and preventable deaths.

As the health care debate heats up in Washington, we as a nation have to answer two very fundamental questions. First, should all Americans be entitled to health care as a right and not a privilege – which is the way every other major country treats health care and the way we respond to such other basic needs as education, police and fire protection? Second, if we are to provide quality health care to all, how do we accomplish that in the most cost-effective way possible?

I think the answer to the first question is pretty clear, and one of the reasons that Barack Obama was elected president. Most Americans do believe that all of us should have health care coverage, and that nobody should be left out of the system. The real debate is how we accomplish that goal in an affordable and sustainable way. In that regard, I think the evidence is overwhelming that we must end the private insurance company domination of health care in our country and move toward a publicly-funded, single-payer Medicare for All approach.

Our current private health insurance system is the most costly, wasteful, complicated and bureaucratic in the world. Its function is not to provide quality health care for all, but to make huge profits for those who own the companies. With thousands of different health benefit programs designed to maximize profits, private health insurance companies spend an incredible (30 percent) of each health care dollar on administration and billing, exorbitant CEO compensation packages, advertising, lobbying and campaign contributions. Public programs like Medicare, Medicaid and the VA are administered for far less.

In recent years, while we have experienced an acute shortage of primary health care doctors as well as nurses and dentists, we are paying for a huge increase in health care bureaucrats and bill collectors. Over the last three decades, the number of administrative personnel has grown by 25 times the numbers of physicians. Not surprisingly, while health care costs are soaring, so are the profits of private health insurance companies. From 2003 to 2007, the combined profits of the nation’s major health insurance companies increased by 170 percent. And, while more and more Americans are losing their jobs and health insurance, the top executives in the industry are receiving lavish compensation packages. It’s not just William McGuire, the former head of United Health, who several years ago accumulated stock options worth an estimated $1.6 billion or Cigna CEO Edward Hanway who made more than $120 million in the last five years. The reality is that CEO compensation for the top seven health insurance companies now averages $14.2 million.

Moving toward a national health insurance program which provides cost-effective universal, comprehensive and quality health care for all will not be easy. The powerful special interests – the insurance companies, drug companies and medical equipment suppliers – will wage an all-out fight to make sure that we maintain the current system which enables them to make billions of dollars. In recent years they have spent hundreds of millions on lobbying, campaign contributions and advertising and, with unlimited resources, they will continue spending as much as they need.

But, at the end of the day, as difficult as it may be, the fight for a national health care program will prevail. Like the civil rights movement, the struggle for women’s rights and other grass-roots efforts, justice in this country is often delayed – but it will not be denied. We shall overcome!

******

To keep up to date on the health care debate in the Senate, sign up for the Bernie Buzz newsletter here.