Madder as the Day Went On!

Last night, I fell asleep looking at a news story about the bombshell budget proposal whose poster boy is Rep. Ryan, R-Wisconsin.  Then I woke up this morning thinking about it, so I finished reading the article.  Then, as the day went on, I kept reading and kept getting more upset.

As has been the case with the Party of NO for the past few years, Social Security, Medicare, and the social safety net have been held up as bankrupting the country.  There is no doubt that the cost of health care is at the heart of what is destroying the people of the US and the economy.  But Medicare and Medicaid are not the cause.  Medicare and Medicaid are expensive because the health care industry is operating with out-of-control greed, and the health care industry lobbyists are running the government.

Pres. Obama and his advisers offered ideas about reform, but before reform could get started the pharmaceutical industry, the insurance industry, the hospital industry, and on and on had derailed real reform.  What we got was, I think, a step in the right direction.  But it did not do what was needed to slow the growth of health care costs.  Its opponents also have no interest in slowing the growth of health care costs.  They only want to make American safe for health care profits.  So if health care is going to cost more and more, they want to make sure that taxpayers are not paying for the poor and elderly to get some.  That might require the wealthy to pay their fare share of taxes, and the sinister dementia of current right-wing politics is that the wealthy deserve all that they have gotten, and the rest of us deserve to do without.

As you can tell, I have been getting madder as the day has gone on.  I have tormented my facebook friends with post after post, which of course they have been free to ignore.  So I decided I would collect them all into one blog post for those who want to think through this with me.

around 11 am

Thank you, government of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations. Don't forget, corporations are people, too. In fact, they are special people who get a better deal than the rest of us lowly human people. Mr. Obama, Mr. Ryan, stop posturing and FIX THIS!

10 of the Biggest Corporate Tax Cheats in America

f you or I were running a small business and we kept one set of books showing how much money we were making and a second set for the IRS that painted a picture of an enterprise on the brink of bankruptcy, we'd end up behind bars.

But that's standard operating procedure for corporate America.

around 3 pm

Let's see: spinach, hamburger meat, peanut butter, chicken, tomatoes, and besides food there's lead paint on toys, radioactive compounds in toys. All in all, doesn't Ryan's budget make sense when it fires all the inspectors? Mr. Obama and Mr. Ryan--tell the truth, serve the people, do what is right, FIX THIS.

Congress: Support funding for FDA food safety

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports, urged Congress to support funding for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)s food safety functions in advance of a House hearing on the FDA budget.

around 3:30 pm

I gave some effort but should have tried harder at my kids' high schools. Let's hear it for this Atlanta group's recruitment for non-violence.

American Friends Service Committee/Atlanta: SCAP Brings Non-Military Options to Stephenson High

Stephenson High school invited Student Career Alternatives Program to their first spring career fair, which took place today. This marked our second visit to the Stone Mountain high school. One striking thing that we again noticed today that the student body is over 99% African American, which seems to further confirm the fact that Atlanta Metro school have become resegregated over the past 20 years.

We were all impressed with the counseling staffs dedication to the students and their post high school careers. So many high school counselors cave into parents request to hold career fairs after school instead of during school. The fairs that take place during school hours are so much more accessible to students.

We had hundreds of students come talk to us through the course of the fair. Students explored ways to serve their country, travel the world, find adventure, get money for college, develop artistic skills, and other job skills training without out having to join the military.

around 3:30 pm

Recruiting for nonviolence

Before You Enlist! (2011 revision)

Straight talk from soldiers, veterans and their family members tells what is missing from the sales pitches presented by recruiters and the military's marketing efforts. Produced by Telequest, Inc with support from AFSC. See http://youth4peace.org/ for more info.

around 4 pm

Here is the Congressional Budget Office's analysis of the Bill to Massively Increase Senior Adult Medical Bankruptcy presented by Rep. Ryan.

Representative Ryan Proposes Medicare Plan Under Which Seniors Would Pay Most of Their Income for Health Care

That is what headlines would look like if the United States had an independent press. After all, this is one of the main take aways of the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) analysis of the plan proposed by Representative Paul Ryan, the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee.

still around 4 pm

The budget debate is between those who would reign in the mountains of money going to pharmaceutical corporations, physicians, for-profit and "non-profit" hospitals, and private insurance companies, and those who would keep letting them rob the rest of us to pay bonuses to their top executives.  Mr. Ryan and Mr. Obama, tell the truth, stop the "giant sucking sound" of money going from the people to the corporations.

The New York Times Thinks That Congress is Full of Philosophers | Beat the Press

The New York Times apparently missed the elections last fall. This is the only possible explanation for its assertion that the budget debate in Congress "is likely to spur an ideological showdown over the size of government and the role of entitlement programs like Medicaid and Medicare."

The people serving in Congress got their jobs because they are effective politicians. This means that they have the ability to appeal to powerful interest groups; there is no requirement that they have any background in, or adherence to, any political philosophy.

The debates over competing plans for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are most obviously about the distribution of income between the wealthy and the less wealthy.

a little later, around 4 pm 

Look at the third graphic line from the bottom: this is the projected percentage of health care cost turned back upon the retiree on fixed income in Ryan's plan.  Of course, if most of the seniors go bankrupt, then we can put them on Medicaid instead--oops, that will be gone, too.  Sorry, Mom and Dad, but we're better off if you die.  Ryan says this will save the taxpayers $400 billion over 10 years, which may or may not be accurate.  Ten years of war in Afghanistan has cost $400 billion, and eight years in Iraq has cost $800 million.  This year $119 billion is budgeted for Afghanistan alone.  Ron Paul, where are you when we need you?  Cut the cost of these wars and bring the troops home.  That way we can keep medical care available for seniors.  Cutting the cost of medical care is essential, but this is not the way to do it.

around 7:20 pm

Calculating the costs of killing--Cadillac Death Machines and Yugo Safety Nets

MLK, Jr., speaking about the war in Vietnam in 1967:  "You may not know it my friend, but it is estimated that we spend $500,000 dollars to kill each enemy soldier, while we spend only $53.00 dollars for each person classified as poor.  And, most of that $53.00 dollars goes to salaries for people who are not poor."

Available data on enemies killed per year in the past three years is sketchy, ranging from under 2000 (Army data in mid 2009) in a year to about 4000 (Wikileaks) to 5225 (Afghan government).  At a cost of over $100 billion a year that would mean somewhere between $20 million and $50 million dollars to kill each enemy soldier.  Grisly.  Sickening.  Expensive.

Who is benefiting from such an outsized cost for the blood and guts of war?  Not the taxpayers.  Not the soldiers.  Not the seniors on Medicare or the malaria sufferers of Africa.

So there you have it.  Mad.  Sick and tired.  The world is not the church.   Too often, the church is not the church.  The phrase "hell in a handbasket" comes to mind.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.  Where there is despair, let me sow hope.  Where there is darkness, let me sow light.  Where there is sadness, let me sow joy.

Reverse Flow: Flip-Flopping the U.S. Economy

One feature of economic systems, as in ecosystems, is the flow of resources from one region to another.   For instance in an ecosystem, nutrients flow up the food chain.  If pollutants get into the system, they flow that direction too and concentrate in the top predators.  Rivers flow downhill, winding wherever the ridges and ravines of the landscape guide them, carving out their paths as they go.  In economic systems, money and wealth also flow through winding, complex paths.  Economic systems are human constructions, although the more complex they become the less direct control people have over them, for good or for ill.  People and organizations regularly intervene in the flow of resources in an attempt to redirect their flow.  Sometimes they do this with an eye toward the common good, but other times with an eye to personal gain.

There is an interesting history of redirecting the flow of rivers.  One of the more famous cases is the Chicago River, which used to flow into Lake Michigan.  As the city and its industry grew, the river became more and more polluted, and its toxic flow into Lake Michigan put poisons into the water supply of Chicago.  Eventually, a plan to reverse its flow through industrial canals so that it eventually flowed into the Mississippi Basin helped preserve the waters of Lake Michigan.  Of course, it means the sewage and pollution flowed somewhere else.

The Soviet Union, known for its massive statist vision of industrial progress, long debated and planned for reversing a portion of the flow of Siberian rivers whose waters were "wasted" by emptying into the Arctic Ocean.  Regions with growing industry, agriculture, and population could use the water better for the benefit of the Union.  The internal debates dealt not only with the methods and costs of water transfers, but also on the affect on the climate, especially in the northern regions.  Many argued that the reversal of waters would lead to a shorter growing season and colder winters.  Eventually the plans were dropped, although the mayor of Moscow has revived the idea to reverse a portion of the flow of the Ob river to serve other regions.

China has planned numerous water redirection proposals in order to deal with its growing industrialization and population needs.  Russia fears dams and canals in China will bring desertification to some of its important industrial and agricultural regions.  India and Bangladesh face even greater fear of ecological and economic damage from a plan to divert water from the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra River to the Yellow River.  Some of the most densely populated regions of the world are watered by the Brahmaputra, which flows east along the northern side of the Himalayas in China before turning south, then west through Nagaland and Bangladesh.  China's plan would send much of this water north and east, eventually thousands of miles away into Bohai Bay off the Yellow Sea, not far from Beijing and in the direction of Korea.

The point of talking about river reversals is that in each of these cases, some who had the capacity to redirect the flow of water did so, although not necessarily to the benefit of all who could be affected.  As China and India compete for industrial growth, and as each deals with a history of population growth, water becomes an ever more precious commodity.  The capacity to control the flow of this resource can become a path to survival and prosperity for some, and for impoverishment and death for others.  Even the powerful central administration of the Soviet Union could not amass the social and political power within the nation-state to reverse the flow of water resources according to its vision of a new society.  The Chicago River's transport of sewage benefits many people, but pollutes the Mississippi River basin and potentially many urban and rural water supplies as it crosses Illinois.

Various parties, even those who claim to believe in free markets, are constantly evaluating the flow of resources in the economy and trying to think of ways to redirect the flow.  It is fairly accurate to conclude that those who insist on doctrines of the free market conveniently interpret freedom to be their own freedom while limiting the freedom of others.  They organize, spend, lobby, and manipulate to bend the laws governing economics in their favor and against the interests of those they consider their opponents or adversaries.  Many seek monopolistic structures whereby they can become the de facto market regulators in place of government regulation, or with the assistance of government regulation. 

An examination of the economic policy changes and their results in the forty years since 1980 ends up looking much like reversing the flow of rivers.  Paul Krugman's column, "The Old Enemies," of a week ago spurred me to see this comparison.  Here is an excerpt.

If you really want to know what’s going on, watch the corporations.

How can you do that? Follow the money — donations by corporate political action committees.

Look, for example, at the campaign contributions of commercial banks — traditionally Republican-leaning, but only mildly so. So far this year, according to The Washington Post, 63 percent of spending by banks’ corporate PACs has gone to Republicans, up from 53 percent last year. Securities and investment firms, traditionally Democratic-leaning, are now giving more money to Republicans. And oil and gas companies, always Republican-leaning, have gone all out, bestowing 76 percent of their largess on the G.O.P.

These are extraordinary numbers given the normal tendency of corporate money to flow to the party in power. Corporate America, however, really, truly hates the current administration. Wall Street, for example, is in “a state of bitter, seething, hysterical fury” toward the president, writes John Heilemann of New York magazine. What’s going on?

One answer is taxes — not so much on corporations themselves as on the people who run them. The Obama administration plans to raise tax rates on upper brackets back to Clinton-era levels. Furthermore, health reform will in part be paid for with surtaxes on high-income individuals. All this will amount to a significant financial hit to C.E.O.’s, investment bankers and other masters of the universe.

Now, don’t cry for these people: they’ll still be doing extremely well, and by and large they’ll be paying little more as a percentage of their income than they did in the 1990s. Yet the fact that the tax increases they’re facing are reasonable doesn’t stop them from being very, very angry.

Nor are taxes the whole story.

Many Obama supporters have been disappointed by what they see as the administration’s mildness on regulatory issues — its embrace of limited financial reform that doesn’t break up the biggest banks, its support for offshore drilling, and so on. Yet corporate interests are balking at even modest changes from the permissiveness of the Bush era.

From the outside, this rage against regulation seems bizarre. I mean, what did they expect? The financial industry, in particular, ran wild under deregulation, eventually bringing on a crisis that has left 15 million Americans unemployed, and required large-scale taxpayer-financed bailouts to avoid an even worse outcome. Did Wall Street expect to emerge from all that without facing some new restrictions? Apparently it did.

His comments made me look back again to refresh my memory of the tax rates of the federal income tax.  In preparation for war and in time of war, during the late 1930s through the 1950s, marginal tax rates for those earning high incomes stayed around 90%.  Those earning and amassing great wealth were expected to pay most of it back into the system to support military families, war efforts, road building, crime prevention, agricultural infrastructure, small business support, unemployment, assistance to the poor--including children, widows, and others.  It was only fair that a system which prospered because of the hard work of the masses would structure a downward flow of resources from those who were benefiting most from the economy toward those on whose backs those benefits had grown, and to those who were most vulnerable to the harsh effects of economic processes.

It would be remiss not to remind readers that the lower tiers of everyone's income are taxed the same.  As a person's income rises, the higher tiers of that income become taxed at higher rates.  For most of the twentieth century, the federal tax rates had many tiers.  As one's income rose, one paid a lower tax rate on the lower amounts, then progressively higher rates on the additional amounts.  It made for complicated math, but it made good sense for trying to strengthen the entire economy.  There are still several "tax brackets," but the percentage differences are much smaller than they used to be.

In the prosperous 1960s, the top marginal tax rate declined to the 70% range, where it remained until 1981.  Having moved beyond World War II and the Korean War, having repurposed industry away from the build-up of conventional war materiel, the U.S. revised the taxation system to allow those at the top of the economy to retain three times as much as they previously had of their marginally high incomes.

Starting in the 1980s, the top tax rates dropped drastically.  The reasoning was that so many tax loopholes and exemptions existed, the people in the highest brackets were mostly avoiding paying those rates.  If loopholes and exemptions could be eliminated, then maybe they would end up paying their fair share with lower tax rates.  Ever since that time, people whose income is higher than 80% of the nation have paid a significantly lower portion of their income in taxes.  Yet they have grown to pay a larger share of the total federal tax bill because their incomes have increased four times faster than the lower income portion of the population.

Thus the last part of the twentieth century witnessed changes in the flow of resources within the U.S. economy.  Ross Perot's famous "giant sucking sound" was redirecting the flow of wage income away from U.S. workers and toward overseas workers, not merely in the Americas, but also in China and other Pacific economies, and even a few African economies.  On the taxation front, the wealthiest U.S. taxpayers now had to pay only half of the percentage of their marginally higher incomes than had previously been the case.  A major policy for redistribution of wealth was fully underway, with the help of government policies on trade, taxation, and labor.  But these were not the only massive wealth transfers happening.  Another regulatory change also redirected the flow of resources.

Usury caps had for centuries helped to prevent overconcentration of wealth among a few.  Keeping interest rates at relatively low levels slows the transfer of wealth from the lower-income groups toward the wealthy lords of finance.  As interest rates rise, debtors find it harder to get out of debt.  The history of sharecropping, company towns with company stores, tenant farming, and other such systems illustrates again and again that the power of lenders has to be held in check for the benefits of the economy to accrue in a fair and just manner.  Usury laws imposing interest rate caps are one of the best methods to do this.  But around 1980, a series of changes in law eliminated the regulation on interest charged by banks, credit card financiers, and other financial institutions.  The massive growth of consumer credit, the housing bubble, and many more destructive trends have led to huge transfers of wealth from average workers toward a financial elite through bonuses, short-term gains, and eventually through bailouts of the banking, finance, and insurance industries.

On one side, changes in tax policies reduced the flow of resources toward shared benefits and the common good.  In the middle, the flow of resources to U.S. workers stopped growing or declined, as wages flowed overseas.  On the other side, the income of low- and middle-income people began to flow into profits for the financial industry through a system designed to keep people perpetually in debt through high interest rates, exorbitant fees, and deceptive policies.  Like reversing the flow of a river, the resources stop going where they used to.  Instead, they go elsewhere to benefit a few and harm others.  This is not an argument for never meddling.  It is an argument for making decisions with the good of all people in mind.  That is what the biblical teachings on economic life tell us:  put in place economic structures that will prevent permanent indebtedness, harsh economic class divisions, and rewards for manipulating money markets.

We take our highway bridges for granted. I know I do. When I got word that pastor Doug Donley and his congregation in Minneapolis are safe from the terrifying bridge collapse there yesterday, I thought again about how quickly so much can be lost. I was able to talk with pastors from New Orleans who a brief two years ago found out that we can't take for granted that our congregations will even be in the same city the next day if a big enough storm and a big enough failure of infrastructure occurs.

As one article I read pointed out, thousands of miles apart along the Mississippi we can see the results of cutting corners and playing the odds with human lives. The levee failures in New Orleans and the bridge failure in Minneapolis had become more and more likely to happen. The game of how much risk can we take for how long seems to be leading to deadly consequences.

I've listened for three decades to the attacks on the public services the national government owes to its people. The attacks get coded by race. Anecdotes of extreme cases get publicized. People of all sorts get demonized as wasters of the taxpayers' hard-earned money. But as the time goes on, the legislators and executives run out of things to cut. But because the momentum of cutting taxes gets them elected, they keep on cutting essential services.

A certain segment of the population feels good about the tax cuts when they don't feel the pinch. If a few people across town have dilapidated housing, no health benefits, and can't afford an education, that seems to be the price of building the economy. But nobody is safe from a levee break. Nobody who needs to cross the Mississippi River can avoid using a bridge. The odds would tell us that if we risk too much too long, we will eventually have to face some losses. But the euphoria of beating down the tax and spend liberals blinds people to the reality of the kind of society they are helping to create.

We must hope and work so that bridge and levee maintenance can be completed in time to avoid more disastrous events such as those in Minneapolis and New Orleans.

May God be with the families who suffer in Minneapolis this week.