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David Sirota

 By David Sirota
Political journalist, best-selling author and syndicated newspaper columnist

Mitch “Tuesdays with Morrie” Albom has made millions of dollars writing books about sick people and death. His writing tends to be a bit sappy and cliche for my taste, but I’ve always assumed that because his writing comes into contact with the most gut-wrenching parts of health care system, and because he portrays himself as a shining beacon of compassion and selflessness, that he is, in fact, a somewhat compassionate human being. Unfortunately, his new column in the Detroit Free Press (yes, in the newspaper of quite literally the most economically devastated city in the United States) proves me wrong — and proves that Albom is a run-of-the-mill royalist and right-wing psychopath.

In this, arguably the most important week for health care reform in decades, Albom could have written about the need to expand health care coverage to as many people in his economically destroyed city as possible. He could have written about the human tragedy of a health care system that currently allows 22,000 of his fellow countrymen to die every yearfor lack of coverage. Instead, he opts to devote his entire column to bewailing the plight of the top 1 percent and attacking the tax proposal that would finance universal health care with a tiny levy on millionaires. I shit you not:

Those high income earners currently shell out around 35% in income taxes, the highest rate, plus state income taxes, local income taxes, property and other taxes that likely chew up between 45% and 50% of their money. If Obama’s tax-related plans all go through, it could, for some, approach 60%…
Look. It would be one thing if we had a flat tax in the United States or if you could shelter your income or hide it offshore. But most wealth experts will tell you tax shelters for individuals are long gone, and offshore is a rapidly disappearing corporate trick.

For the most part, if you earn a lot of money in America today, you have to pay your taxes on it. Capital gains are taxed at a lower rate, but in most cases, before you have money to buy and sit on stocks, you have to earn it and therefore pay taxes on it.

So let’s see — The richest one percent earn the largest share of America’s income since 1929 and pay the lowest taxes they’ve paid in 20 years. Meanwhile, two-thirds of corporations pay no taxes at all; the IRS says most of the more than $300 billion in unpaid taxes (ie. the “tax gap”) is from individual tax evaders; there’s a huge and well-known problem with offshore tax havens; and IRS audits of millionaires have plummeted so precipitously that President Bush repeatedly admitted in public that it’s almost impossible to collect taxes from the super-wealthy because they can evade taxes. On top of this, tax, regulatory and corporate welfare policies are literally handing away trillions of taxpayer dollars to the richest 1 percent at a time that 22,000 Americans are dying every year because of a lack of health care.

And yet, Albom — the guy who has made his pile by trumpeting his alleged compassion for the plight of the sick and dying — is spending the most crucial week in the health care debate insisting that the superwealthy pay too much in taxes and never avoid paying what they owe. And more importantly, Albom spends this week insisting the major problem facing America is a “class warfare” that would ask a Goldman Sachs executive making $1 million a year to devote just 9-tenths of one percent more of his taxpayer-subsidized income to a universal health care program. And he’s doing all this in the flagship paper of the city that has been most devastated by the economy.

Promoting oneself as a compassionate chronicler of end-of-life issues, and then penning right-wing diatribes defending the richest 1 one percent…these are the tell-tale signs of a truly disgusting human being.

UPDATE: Albom is not just a disgusting human, he’s also a fool. You’ll note he asserts that under the surtax proposal, “a family earning a million dollars a year” would” now have to “cough up $54,000 of that — in addition to all the other taxes it pays — to cover health care for people who may not pay a penny of new tax themselves.” That’s factually inaccurate as atwo-second Google search shows. Because the 5.4% surtax applies only to income above $1 million (and not on the $1 million in total), someone making $1 million a year would pay just $9,000 a year more in taxes, not $54,000. Here’s FAIR’s dispatch nailing Albom for his idiocy.

By Leo W. Gerard

International President

Sarah  ”Joe-Sixpack” Palin pulled her labor union roots out of the frozen Alaskan soil and started shaking them at normally union-allergic Republican crowds from the day John McCain announced her as his running mate.

Recently, she redoubled her efforts to cast herself not as a governor and member of an elite American family earning more than $165,000 a year, but as Joe Sixpack and someone whose membership in a union enabled her to secure health insurance for her family. Her confounding statements reveal John McCain as a hypocrite on the issue of unionization.

McCain, who has condemned unions as “serious excesses” and said government workers are “crippled by the fine print of the latest union contract,” introduced Palin by bragging about her union background — as if he approved. “The person I am about to introduce to you,” he said, “was a union member and is married to a union member.”

After that, Palin repeatedly put her husband, Todd, on display, telling crowds that he is “a proud member of the United Steelworkers Union.” Then, last week, Palin went on talk radio and said that her family was without health insurance or had to figure out how to buy it themselves, until, “Todd and I both landed a couple of good union jobs.”

That makes perfect sense since unionized workers are 28 percent more likely to be covered by employer-provided health insurance than nonunion workers, according to a study by the Economic Policy Institute. And employers with unionized workforces pay a greater share of the cost, lowering deductibles and co-payments for union families, the EPI study found.

What doesn’t make sense is for the anti-union McCain campaign to be boasting about the benefits of union membership. Like many Republicans, McCain has made it clear that he feels about unions the way an Alaskan aerial hunter does about wolves – best when dead.

John McCain denigrates labor leaders as “big union bosses” as if such a thing exists in a country where union membership has steadily declined for decades, a weakening caused by Republican policies implemented against the interests of organized labor and the middle class. McCain helped block the Employee Free Choice Act, which would help even the playing field between workers trying to organize their own workplaces to improve conditions and corporations that hire union-busters to prevent it. He voted to block a bill that would have protected American strikers against companies hiring permanent replacements – a safeguard for workers that is commonplace in other industrialized nations.

But, suddenly, when he needs the middle class vote, John S. McCain is trying to convert himself into John L. Lewis. It’s like his position on regulation. He was Mr. Deregulation until Wall Street collapsed. Now, he’s all for it. And his position on tax breaks for the nation’s wealthiest citizens. He voted against it twice. But now he has promised as part of his campaign platform to make that Bush tax break for the rich permanent. He was either for it before he was against it, or he was against it before he was for it. But in the case of unions, his lip service doesn’t automatically translate into a flip flop.

It’s one thing for Palin to acknowledge that her family was without health insurance until she and Todd joined unions. The McCain health insurance plan is another thing entirely. It won’t be good for the middle class, union members or not. It’s a flop. And McCain’s not flipping on that.

The pain in the McCain health plan is the tax. He plans to create a brand new tax on health care benefits. The value of employer-provided health benefits – the kind Palin got when she joined a union – would be added to workers’ incomes, then taxed. For a worker with a median income and health plan, the extra cost would be about $1,300 a year. But for union members, who earn more and whose insurance plans are better, the added taxes may be more than $3,000 a year.

McCain says he would offset that additional cost with tax credits — $2,500 for individuals and $5,000 for families. It won’t work though. The money is not a rebate for taxpayers but a credit for insurance companies. They money goes directly from government coffers into the pockets of insurers. And there’s nothing to prevent them from hiking up their prices by that amount – something that wouldn’t be out of the question considering the startling rate at which insurers have increased their fees.

Similarly, there’s nothing to stop employers from simply reducing the amount they pay toward insurance coverage by the amount of the “credit.” Maybe unions could stop their employers from cutting payments because of protections in contracts, but the “credits” would become another bargaining issue.

Numerous professional organizations that have analyzed McCain’s plan have projected that it would result in millions of young and healthy people leaving their newly income-taxed employer-provided plans and buying untaxed insurance with their tax credits. That would leave the older, less healthy workers in the employer-provided plan, making it increasingly expensive, and very quickly consuming at any portion of that $5,000 credit that might be left.

It is also projected that many employers will terminate coverage as costs rise, forcing workers to try to buy insurance on their own. And that raises another problem with the McCain plan – he will not require companies to insure people with pre-existing conditions, like allergies, asthma and diabetes. That would greatly increase the pool of 47 million uninsured in this country, including many a Joe Sixpack and his family.

All of this makes it particularly disconcerting for McCain’s emissary to publically celebrate the fact that her union card provided her family with health insurance. Palin needs to announce whether she disagrees with McCain — as she does on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge — or whether she espouses the McPain plan to tax health care. Joe Sixpack wants to know.