Social Security / Medicare
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MERRI OK
3/18 medicare medicaid 2 disambig
see social safety net
SEE PVTIZATION
bak 919 bak 2020 html fixed
promote primary 919 as proxy for fights, plus aha moderation ~ inequality, commons
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AN 8 26
An extreme position does not become less extreme just because someone can put forward one that’s even more extreme. Massacring 100 children doesn’t become a moderate position just because someone is advocating killing 200 children.
This is how we should view the line being pushed by “moderate” voices that we have to deal with the $40 trillion debt with both spending cuts and tax hikes. The reality is that, apart from the military and Homeland Security, there is little fat in spending to be cut, as even Elon Musk inadvertently acknowledged.
Insofar as we have a deficit problem, the issue is on the tax side, as can be easily shown. The rich have been taking an ever-larger share of national income over the last half-century, and they don’t feel like paying taxes on their winnings.The major media outlets, which are all controlled by rich people, are pretending to be moderate by saying that we need to both raise taxes and cut spending. But there is nothing moderate about saying that we have to cut programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid because Republicans have given big tax breaks to their campaign contributors.
Republicans pushed these tax cuts, knowing they would increase the deficit, but did not make any corresponding cuts in spending because the cuts would be incredibly unpopular. Now they are using their control over the media to insist that these cuts are now absolutely necessary to offset all the lost tax revenue from tax cuts put in place by Reagan, Bush II, and Trump.
The Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post gave us a great example of this fake moderate position in its editorial, “To get the national debt under control, start with the retirement state.” The piece makes its case by taking the example of a two-earner couple, with average earnings of $100,000 a year. It shows that the couple, turning 65 in 2025, can expect lifetime Social Security benefits of $739k compared with tax contributions of just $597k. A couple with the same income retiring in 2045 can expect lifetime benefits of $987k compared to tax contributions of $735k.
After laying out this disparity for Social Security (it has a similar story for Medicare, which I’ll come to), it then makes an argument for reducing Social Security for high-income people. This is three-card Monte level deception.
If the idea is that we should reduce the benefits of high-income workers, honest people would look at the relative taxes and benefits for high-income workers. Social Security is explicitly designed to have a progressive payback structure, which means that relatively moderate-income workers, like the ones highlighted in the WaPo editorial, have higher paybacks relative to their taxes.
If the editors were interested in doing an apples- to-apples comparison, here’s what the picture would look like. (This is taken from the exact same source.)
As can be seen, high-income people pay considerably more in taxes than they get back in benefits. For a high-income woman retiring in 2025, the gap is $263k. For a high-income man, the gap is $336k. (The gap is larger for men than women because their life expectancy is shorter.) For a high-income woman retiring in 2045, the gap is $259k. For a high-income man, the gap is $346k.
If the point is to make an argument for reducing the benefits of high-income retirees, then show the taxes and benefits for high-income retirees. No one disputes that Social Security looks like a pretty good deal for more moderate-income retirees, but these people don’t typically have much income in retirement. I guess Jeff Bezos’ paper would have been too embarrassed to argue that we have to reduce the average monthly Social Security benefit of $2,071.
The Post’s editorial makes the push that while cutting Social Security, we should expect people to be more reliant on private 401(k)s. In addition to increasing risk, this is also enormously inefficient. Private 401(k)s cost more than 40 times as much to administer per dollar of benefits as Social Security. It is understandable that Mr. Bezos would be happy to see more money going to his rich friends in the financial industry, but most of us would rather see the money going to ordinary workers.
Medicare Benefits: Big Bucks to Hospitals and Drug Companies Are Not Benefits to Workers
The Post’s graphs do show a huge imbalance between the taxes paid out for Medicare and the cost of the benefits received. This is also deceptive.
In the United States, we pay almost twice as much per person for healthcare as the average for other wealthy countries. This is not because we get more or better healthcare. Our life expectancy ranks near the bottom for wealthy countries.
The big bucks for healthcare go to the income of drug companies, insurers, hospitals, medical equipment makers, and doctors. In each case, we pay two times as much, or more, than people in other wealthy countries.
A paper that was not answerable to one of the richest people in the world would suggest bringing our payments in line with the rest of the world. But instead, the WaPo wants to beat up on the country’s retirees.
No one should be confused: cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits to reduce the deficit is not a moderate position. It’s one that attacks hundreds of millions of ordinary workers to avoid taxing the rich or reducing waste in our health care system. That is extreme, but the rich media owners pushing this position will do everything they can to convince us they are being fair and balanced.
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CPI? 2015? SEE IHS BAK
For instance, to support assertions made in a recent, 67-page policy paper, Koch-supported American Encore regularly cites and quotes Mercatus Center research and mentions the center nearly a dozen times.
Among the academic work American Encore’s paper highlights: a 2014 Mercatus Center study by Keith Hall, a senior research fellow who had previously served as commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and a 2014 commentary about a federal regulations tracking and measurement tool by Patrick A. McLaughlin, another senior research fellow.
“Yet another study has confirmed what we already knew — states with lower taxes do better,” read an article by the Kochs’ flagship nonprofit, Americans for Prosperity, about a study published July 7 by the Mercatus Center. “Overall, the rankings provide more evidence that economic freedom works, and bigger government means bigger trouble.”
And the 60 Plus Association, a retiree-focused nonprofit that’s benefited from tens of millions of dollars of the Koch brothers’ money over the years, for a time tapped Walter Williams, a George Mason University economics professor, syndicated columnist and Rush Limbaugh Show fill-in host, as a member of its “truth squad.” His mission: to “battle” against Democrats on Social Security and Medicare programs.
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AN 7 25 BESSANT?
Trump official slammed for saying this policy is 'backdoor to privatizing Social Security'
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an 4 25
'Hospitals are going to close': Johnson insisted he won’t 'touch Medicaid — but now pushes deep cuts
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an 4 25
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is blaming what he calls “young men” playing video games instead of working, as he defends Republicans’ plan to gut Medicaid—slashing what Democrats say is $880 billion from the vital health program that provides medical care to one in five Americans.
“No one has talked about cutting one benefit in Medicaid to anyone who’s duly owed — what we’ve talked about is returning work requirements, so, for example, you don’t have able-bodied young men on a program that’s designed for single mothers and the elderly and disabled,” said the Speaker. Johnson’s own Louisiana district has a disproportionately high rate of Americans on the life-saving program: CBS News this week reported Medicaid is a “lifeline” for people in his district.
Johnson blamed what he suggested is a large number of male gamers on Medicaid for “draining resources.”
“So if you clean that up and shore it up, you save a lot of money, and you return the dignity of work to young men who need to be out working instead of playing video games all day,” he again declared.
READ MORE: ‘Giant Grift’: Calls for Trump Insider Trading Probe Surge Over ‘Corruption’ Questions
“We have a lot of fraud, waste, and abuse in Medicaid. Just one tiny example. The estimate is $51 billion a year, in Medicaid is lost to fraud. That’s unconscionable,” the Louisiana GOP lawmaker claimed.
But rather than target professionals who may be bilking the system, or other factors including paperwork errors, Johnson has chosen to repeatedly target what he claims are “29-year-old males sitting on their couches playing video games.”
The nonpartisan health policy organization KFF (formerly the Kaiser Family Foundation) reported in February that “data show most Medicaid adults are working or face barriers to work. Many Medicaid adults who are working low-wage jobs are employed by small firms and in industries that have low employer-sponsored insurance offer rates.”
KFF also reports that the vast majority of adult Medicaid recipients under the age of retirement (65) are already working, with no work requirement.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that adding a work requirement would only serve as a barrier to Medicaid participation, and therefore spending, but would not increase the employment levels for otherwise eligible recipients.
“In Arkansas,” KFF reports, “implementing Medicaid work requirements resulted in more than 18,000 people losing coverage.”
Adding work requirements also increases monitoring and implementation costs at the state level.
Critics blasted Johnson.
READ MORE: ‘Pump and Dump’: Market Manipulation Questions Swirl Over Trump Tariff Pause
“Of course, nothing says ‘dignity’ like ripping healthcare away from poor people based on outdated, classist stereotypes,” wrote Wall Street investment banker Evaristus Odinikaeze. “Young men on Medicaid aren’t ‘playing video games all day,’ they’re often underpaid, overworked, or struggling in a rigged economy. This is just MAGA cruelty dressed up as moral judgment.”
Annie Shoup of the nonprofit Protect Our Care wrote: “We know that people on Medicaid who are able to work already do. This will only hurt people and prevent them from getting the health care they deserve, including caregivers who are staying at home caring for family members.”
The organization Social Security Works added, “Medicaid pays for two-thirds of nursing home care in America. That’s what Mike Johnson wants to rip away from seniors and people with disabilities.”
Watch the video below or at this link.
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an 7 22 pvt all
Since the beginning of his campaign, Blake Masters, the conservative venture capitalist turned U.S. Senate hopeful from Arizona, has been drawn to the kind of rhetorical extremism that now animates the Republican Party, bandying insults and talking points of the kind that require no specialized knowledge or experience but nevertheless leave an indelible impression on Republican voters. As far back as 2015, Masters told The Washington Post, he'd been entranced by the rhetoric of Donald Trump, a loud misogynist, who during one of his presidential debates proudly embraced accusations of sexism rather than deny them.
"You've called women you don't like fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals," then-Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly said to Trump during a 2016 GOP debate. "Your Twitter account ––"
"Only Rosie O'Donnell," Trump interjected, before getting rapturous applause from the crowd.
It was during this now-notorious back-and-forth, Masters explained, that he had his lightbulb moment.
"Somehow he just busted through some wall," Masters recently told the Post of Trump. "He didn't apologize. He kind of just picked on her as this target."
Since then, Masters has largely emulated the former president's brashness on all matters political. Just this May, in the wake of the Supreme Court's rescission of Roe v. Wade, the former tech executive stressed the need for nationwide ban on abortion, a practice that he called "demonic" just last year, according to The Tuscon Weekly. Masters also believes that the Capitol riot was an FBI-led "false flag operation"; that the American education system is pushing "gay sex ideology" onto students; and that Democratic elites are deliberately attempting to loosen borders and win future elections with a more pliant voting bloc from the Third World.
Of course, none of this is particularly unique to the MAGA agenda, which has for the most part set its sights on culture war issues like abortion, race, immigration, sex, and gender. But Masters also espouses a strange flavor of half-baked libertarianism that calls for the complete abolition of long-standing cornerstones for American welfare.
For one, Masters supports a generalized push to privatize the country's water supply, according to audio provided to Salon by American Bridge, a Democratic Super PAC.
"Would you support the transferring of water resources to private ownership?" a voter asked Masters two weeks ago during a campaign event in Sedona, Arizona.
"In general, yes," Masters responded, because "the state can't do it and you don't want the government doing a lot of this stuff."
To be sure, private water companies would be nothing new for the nation. But anecdotal evidence suggests that water is the kind of basic human right that has no business under Corporate America's thumb.
Back in 2017, The Washington Post reported that states that offload their publicly-owned water infrastructure to private corporations tend to see rate hikes for customers, adding to the millions of Americans whose sinks, toilets, and showers are routinely disconnected for unpaid bills, as The Guardian reported.
Janice Beecher, the director of Michigan State University's Institute of Public Utilities, told the Post that state officials "should ask good questions, and they should understand the trade-offs" before selling off their municipal water systems, because "once it's gone, it's gone."
According to a sweeping 2016 analysis from the Food & Water Watch, a consumer rights organization, private water companies charge 58 percent more than their publicly-owned counterparts. In states like New Jersey and Pennsylvania, the premium can be as high as 79 and 84 percent respectively.
And that's just pricing. Public Citizen, another consumer rights group, found that privatization leads to worse water quality, job losses, over-extraction, and corruption. To add insult to injury,$26.5 billion of the EPA's budget goes to for profit-water providers, which presently control 10% of the nation's water supply, suggesting that water companies have trouble sustaining themselves without the largesse of the government.
Meanwhile, cities all across America are now attempting to expropriate water infrastructure they sold off in response to complaints about rate hikes and bad service. However, as the Post reported, exercising eminent domain in this area can be extremely costly, leading to municipal deficits that, ironically, might have been the original impetus for privatization.
Apart from water, Masters also has a grand, albeit ill-defined, vision to privatize Social Security, the federal insurance program that provides benefits to 65 million retired, disabled, and unemployed people.
"We got to cut the knot at some point though because I'll tell you what, I'm not going to receive Social Security," Masters said at a primary debate back in June. "I'm a millennial."
"We need fresh and innovative thinking, maybe we should privatize Social Security," he added at the time. "Private retirement accounts, get the government out of it."
Make no mistake: Social Security security has been a perennial punching bag for the Republican Party for decades.
As early as 2004, then-President Bush campaigned on privatizing the program, arguing that young people should be able to take "ownership" of their future benefits by investing their tax withholdings into a private account that would be subject to the whims of market forces.
"We should make the Social Security system a source of ownership for the American people," Bush said in a January 2004 State of the Union address.
However, the plan ultimately unraveled once it became clear that it was massively unpopular amongst the American public, 96 percent of whom currently support Social Security as is.
Today, both parties agree that Social Security needs to be reformed, in part because the retirement funds are projected to run dry by 2034. But what that reform should look like breaks down across party lines.
Democrats, for their part, have argued that the program should be expanded – along with provisions that would create a minimum benefit and a cost-of-living adjustment – through tax increases. Unsurprisingly,Republicans have repudiated this plan as anti-business, instead proposing plans to raise the minimum age of retirement, establish "rescue committees" that would mull cuts behind closed doors, and even sunset the program every five years.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/trumps-payroll-tax-ploy-ploy-endangers-social-security-and-it-will-have-to-be-paid-back-next-year/
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/the-trump-administrations-monstrous-idea-direct-payments-in-exchange-for-cuts-to-social-security-benefits
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/trumps-latest-judicial-nominee-wants-to-abolish-social-security/
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/trumps-latest-judicial-nominee-wants-to-abolish-social-security/
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Trump’s latest judicial nominee wants to abolish social security
Written by Joan McCarter / Daily Kos February 26, 2020
There’s another deplorable nominee on Mitch McConnell’s conveyor belt: Stephen Schwartz, nominated to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims and pending in the Judiciary Committee. This is impeached president Donald Trump’s second go at having Schwartz appointed to this court, which hears claims against the federal government. Trump wants Schwartz there because he’s argued that Social Security should be abolished because being elderly and disabled “is a natural aspect of the human condition” so those people shouldn’t get any assistance.
Those are recent views from the too-young Schwartz, who wrote them 15 years ago in the student newspaper at Yale. When he was an undergraduate. He also “wrote that the departments of Transportation, Agriculture and Education lack a ‘constitutional basis,’ and that Social Security benefits were intended to prevent ‘outright starvation’ but had become a ‘standard component of most retirement programs.'” Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, you lollygagging 80 year olds.
Of course that’s not all. Schwartz has also been in on legal efforts to disenfranchise African American voters in North Carolina and in Virginia’s public bathroom wars, trying to make transgender students’ bladders explode. As a pet attorney for the Koch network in its Cause of Action institute, he has sued the federal government multiple times. “There are lots of circumstances today in America where agencies of the federal government exercise their discretion in ways that are terrible for personal liberty, for economic freedoms,” he said in an interview during one of those suits.
Because personal liberty and economic freedom mean having to find a job when you’re in your 70s or 80s or 90s so you can eat. “Schwartz is another example of Trump’s ideal nominee for the bench: a conservative ideologue who is determined to undermine civil rights and federal agencies,” Vanita Gupta, who headed the Obama Justice Department’s civil rights division, told The Washington Post.
Schwartz faced stiff opposition in 2017 from a variety of quarters, and his nomination eventually languished as the committee and Mitch McConnell focused on more critical seats. This appointment needs to be squelched again.
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Trump is trying to break a 2016 promise about the social safety net
Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security are among the most popular federal programs out there. A 2019 Pew Research poll showed majorities across all parties and demographics opposing cuts to Social…
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/blatant-lie-seema-verma-claims-trump-not-cutting-medicaid-as-he-pushes-plan-doing-just-that/
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trump looks to take an axe to Medicaid — and people will die as a result
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timing bizzaRE unles smash and grab window?
https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/the-trump-administration-just-declared-war-on-social-security/
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The Trump Administration just declared war on social security
Social Security Commissioner Andrew Saul, Image via Screengrab CSPAN.
Written by Alex Lawson / Independent Media Institute December 18, 2019
American workers contribute to Social Security with every paycheck. When they do, they are earning comprehensive insurance protections. Social Security insures against the loss of wages due to old age, disability, or (for the surviving family of a worker) death. While Social Security is best known as a retirement program, disability and survivor’s benefits are equally essential.
An attack on any part of Social Security is an attack on the entire system and all current and future beneficiaries. The latest proposal from Donald Trump’s administration, which is designed to rip benefits away from hundreds of thousands of Americans with disabilities, amounts to a declaration of war on Social Security.
The Trump administration proposal would require millions of Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) beneficiaries to re-prove their eligibility for benefits as often as every six months—far more frequently than is currently the case.There is no justification for this policy. The United States already has some of the strictest eligibility criteria for disability benefits in the world. More than half of all claims are denied.
We should be making it easier for workers to claim the Social Security benefits they’ve earned with every paycheck, not harder. And ripping benefits away from current beneficiaries, who rely on them to survive, is even worse.
We know what the effects of the Trump proposal would be, because Ronald Reagan implemented a very similar benefit cut back in the 1980s. Reagan’s policy ripped away the benefits of 200,000 Americans with disabilities. The New York Times reported that “people with obvious physical and mental disabilities” lost their benefits “without having been interviewed.”
Ultimately, Reagan was forced to reverse his attack on Social Security after massive public outcry, and bipartisan condemnation from Congress—but not before 21,176 people died, including several who died by suicide, “because their benefits were cut off.”
Donald Trump himself might not be a diligent student of history, but his advisers—men like Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s chief of staff and a longtime enemy of Social Security—know exactly what they are doing. They want to resurrect Reagan’s Social Security cut knowing full well that it killed people.
This could impact any of us, even those of us who are currently healthy. Imagine that you are hit by a car tomorrow, and suffer life-altering injuries that prevent you from working. You’re faced with crushing medical bills, and you’ve lost your income. In such situations, SSDI benefits are a crucial lifeline. Donald Trump wants to rip that lifeline away.
Trump and Mulvaney are targeting people with disabilities first, because they perceive them as politically vulnerable. But if they are allowed to get away with this attack, it will be only the beginning. They want to destroy every part of Social Security, including retirement benefits, and turn it over to their criminal friends on Wall Street.
We must stop Trump’s plan. The Social Security Administration is collecting comments on the proposal until the end of January. You can comment opposing the plan here. Everyone must also call their elected officials. Congressional condemnation played a huge role in forcing Ronald Reagan to reverse his version of the attack, and it can stop Trump in his tracks.
If we let the politicians in Washington, D.C., take away some people’s earned benefits, it means they can take away all of our earned benefits.
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
Alex Lawson is the executive director of Social Security Works, a non-profit advocacy group that supports expanding benefits to address America’s growing retirement security crisis. Lawson has appeared on numerous TV and radio outlets and is a frequent guest host of The Thom Hartmann Program, one of the top progressive radio shows in the country.
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"The Trump administration is attacking another vulnerable population: those who…
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/trump-just-launched-a-stealth-attack-on-medicare/
no lnx many
Trump just launched a stealth attack on Medicare
Written by Diane Archer / Common Dreams October 7, 2019
Watch out, older Americans and people with disabilities! President Trump just announced a plan to give corporate health insurers more control over your health care. His new executive order calls for “market-based” pricing, which would drive up costs for everyone with Medicare, eviscerate traditional Medicare, andsteer more people into for-profit “Medicare Advantage” plans.
Seema Verma, the Trump appointee who heads the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), may not have warned Trump about the slew of government audits revealing that many Medicare Advantage plans pose “an imminent and serious risk to the health of… enrollees.” They also overcharge taxpayers to the tune of $10 billion a year.
In the last few years alone, CMS’ limited audits have highlighted major issues with Medicare Advantage plans. Reports from the Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General (OIG) and Government Accountability Office (GAO) have underscored these issues. They have recommended that CMS increase its oversight of Medicare Advantage plans and its enforcement efforts.
A Medicare Payment Advisory Commission report indicates that the problems with Medicare Advantage may be even more far-reaching than the government audits indicate. The Medicare Advantage plans have failed to turn over reliable and complete claims data, as required by law. Without this data, it’s not possible to know whether they are covering the health care services they are paid to provide or to oversee them to the extent necessary.
Last month, Senators Sherrod Brown, Amy Klobuchar, Chris Murphy, Richard Blumenthal, Bernie Sanders and Debbie Stabenow laid out several serious malfeasances by these corporate Medicare insurers—including UnitedHealth Group, Aetna, Cigna and Humana—in a detailed letter they sent to Verma.
The insurers’ wrongdoings are systematic. They are ongoing. They endanger the health and financial well-being of millions of people. They undermine the financial integrity of the Medicare program and harm the U.S. Treasury. Yet, to date, CMS has failed to develop, let alone execute, a plan to hold these insurers accountable for violating their legal obligations and to ensure their members get the health care to which they are entitled.
Tens of billions in overcharges are one big problem. Medicare Advantage plans have been overcharging the government for their services for many years now, by claiming that their members are in worse health than they actually are in order to increase payments. To make matters worse, they have refused to pay back the tens of billions in overpayments that the federal government has made to them. UnitedHealth successfully fought to keep the government from collecting this money.
Another major concern is that Medicare Advantage plans are failing to cover the care their members need and are entitled to. Government audits show that Medicare Advantage plans are inappropriately delaying and denying care and coverage to hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of their members. This puts patients’ health and safety at risk. Thousands of people end up paying for care that should have been covered—or foregoing care altogether.
CMS has not named or flagged these corporate health plans on its Medicare website or notified people in any other way of plans with serious violations, as it had agreed to do at the recommendation of the Office of the Inspector General. So, people with Medicare are unaware when they enroll in a Medicare Advantage plan that the government has found to be jeopardizing the health and safety of its members. Instead, CMS continues to give four- and five-star ratings to some of these health plans. In the process, it misleads older adults and people with disabilities about their performance.
What’s more, CMS has found that a sizeable number of Medicare Advantage plans have for years issued highly inaccurate provider directories; and, the GAO has noted “concerns about ensuring enrollee access to care.” Many of these health plans have narrowed their provider networks. GAO suggests that it is not at all clear which of these Medicare Advantage plans have an adequate number and mix of health care providers in their networks.
To date, the Trump administration has been steering people into Medicare Advantage plans, without regard to their deficiencies. And, it has failed to provide people with Medicare with meaningful information about their health plan choices as required by law. It is on a reckless path, promoting the business interests of Medicare Advantage plans that violate the law over the health care needs of vulnerable Americans.
The administration and its congressional allies are playing a game of bait and switch with older adults and people with disabilities. They allow Medicare Advantage plans to lure people with benefits that traditional Medicare does not offer, such as dental care and transportation services to the doctor, without exposing their failings. The Trump administration’s goal is to fully privatize Medicare and shift more costs onto older and disabled Americans.
To be clear, Trump’s executive order does nothing to hold the Medicare Advantage plans accountable for their fraudulent overcharges or their inappropriate denials of care and coverage. Rather, it rewards them. It gives them even more discretion regarding the services they cover and the freedom to create new bells and whistles to lure in members. The health and financial well-being of older and disabled Americans hangs in the balance.
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/how-american-inequality-follows-us-to-the-grave/
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How American inequality follows us to the grave
Written by Independent Media Institute September 13, 2019
by Tom Conway
Regular exercise and an apple a day may help to keep the doctor away. But to live a long, healthy life, it helps to be rich.
Income inequality is a pox on America. The rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poorer. CEO pay keeps rising while workers’ paychecks have been all but flat for decades. As a result, income inequality now rivals that of the robber baron days of the early 1900s, when labor unions were virtually outlawed while corporate monopolies thrived.
It gets worse. It turns out that low income is an actual pox, killing people before their time. The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found in a study released on September 9 that poor people live shorter lives than rich people.
This is appalling. And preventable.
Researchers at the GAO discovered that poor people are doomed to an early death. They tracked a group of people who were in their 50s in 1992—and found that that the wealthier members of the group were much more likely than the poorer ones to be alive in 2014.
Money may not be able to buy happiness, but it can buy longevity.
The early death effect of poverty plays out in whole neighborhoods and towns. Take the coal community of McDowell County, West Virginia, where the poverty rate is nearly 32 percent. As of 2016, a man’s life expectancy there was 63.9 years, the lowest among U.S. counties.
By organizing themselves into unions, workers can buy themselves more time on earth. That’s because median weekly earnings of union workers are about 22 percent higher than those of nonunion workers—$1,051 compared to $860, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Organized labor also fights to get workers better health insurance and retirement benefits. Unions work to make workplaces safer and to hold companies responsible for unsafe conditions so workers don’t die on the job.
Unions lift people out of poverty and narrow income inequality. They help to close racial- and gender-based pay gaps. People with decent incomes and benefits are better able to access health care, afford healthy food and enjoy comfortable retirements.
The opposite also is true. The lower rate of unionism in recent years has allowed income inequality to grow, and that has led, as the GAO study shows, to disparities in life expectancy. Even the Grim Reaper favors the rich.
Because unions help build the middle class, government used to support them, especially under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s and 40s. But not now.
Now, organized labor is under attack. President Trump’s National Labor Relations Board has made a series of anti-worker decisions that includes denying unions access to an employer’s public spaces, such as hospital cafeterias; denying SuperShuttle drivers the right to organize; and allowing employers to withdraw recognition of unions before negotiations for a new contract begin.
GOP-controlled legislatures in states ranging from Wisconsin to West Virginia have passed so-called right-to-work laws that allow workers to benefit from union contracts without joining the union and paying dues and without even paying smaller fees charged to non-members to cover the cost of union services such as negotiations and grievance cases.
And last year, the U.S. Supreme Court, packed with Republican appointees, issued the Janus decision that made the entire country right-to-work for public-sector workers. In all 50 states now, public-sector workers who don’t join unions can pay nothing but still enjoy the higher wages and other benefits that dues-paying members get.
As right-wingers legislated away union rights over the past four decades, the power of unions declined, and the middle class became stuck. U.S. Census Bureau data released on September 10 show that middle-class wages are roughly the same now as 20 years ago.
That’s two decades of stagnation. For workers, not CEOs. Since 1978, CEO pay packages have risen nearly 940 percent.
Eight executives at Philadelphia Energy Solutions illustrate how the rich look out for themselves while stiffing everyone else. Together, those executives received almost $4.6 million in retention bonuses on the heels of the June 21 explosion and fire that shut down the refinery, pushed the company into bankruptcy and put about 1,000 employees—many of them members of United Steelworkers Local 10-1—on the street without pay or health insurance.
The employees were the ones who risked their lives the day of the disaster by taking quick action to prevent the release of lethal hydrofluoric acid, saving untold lives inside the plant and across Philadelphia.
The executives who operated the plant—and were ultimately responsible for the fire and explosion—got a big payoff. The workers got pink slips.
This kind of rapacity is so pervasive that it might actually be hurting the economy. Money is being concentrated in the hands of super-rich people who are more likely to invest it than spend it, and that can affect growth.
At the other end of the spectrum are people like those in the GAO study who died younger than they deserved.
Many of them relied on Social Security to scrape by in retirement. The poorest people in the group didn’t own homes or even cars. They had only what social insurance programs provided.
Like labor unions, these programs are under attack.
The Trump administration has so weakened Obamacare that the portion of Americans without health insurance increased last year.
And after Congress gave rich people and corporations that huge tax cut in 2017, Republican leaders talked about cutting Social Security and Medicare to pay for it. They didn’t do it yet, but the fight isn’t over.
Sen. Joni Ernst, a Republican from Iowa, recently suggested that Congress meet behind closed doors to discuss “changes” in Social Security. She said she feared public backlash from having the conversation in public. More specifically, she said she didn’t want to look like she was pushing “granny over a cliff.”
Sen. Ernst’s flippancy speaks volumes. It shows how little she and other Republicans think of the grannies and grandpas, dads and moms, and working men and women who have broken their backs to pay taxes and provide for their families.
Some will struggle all of their working lives, still be unable to save anything for retirement and die early deaths. Sen. Ernst needs to wake up. The Republicans’ pro-wealth, anti-labor and anti-social welfare campaigns are pushing people over a cliff before they live long enough to become grannies.
Tom Conway is the international president of the United Steelworkers Union (USW).
This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/republicans-want-to-cut-social-security-behind-closed-doors/
no lnx
Republicans want to cut Social Security ‘behind closed doors’
Written by Nancy J. Altman / Independent Media Institute September 5, 2019
Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) just said out loud what Republican politicians usually only talk about in secret meetings with their billionaire donors: The GOP wants to cut our earned Social Security benefits—and they want to do it behind closed doors so that they don’t have to pay the political price.
At a recent town hall, Ernst stated that Congress needs to “sit down behind closed doors” to “address Social Security.” She vaguely asserted, “A lot of changes need to be made in this system going forward.” But, she complained, if these changes were proposed in public, she would be accused of pushing “granny over a cliff.” It is not hard to figure out what “changes” she has in mind.
There are many “changes” that should be made to strengthen Social Security and make it even better than it already is. But none of those have to be done secretly.
Congress should address our nation’s looming retirement income crisis by increasing Social Security’s modest benefits. Congress should combat rising income and wealth inequality, by requiring the wealthiest Americans to contribute to Social Security at the same rate as the rest of us.
Congress should enact caregiver credits for those who perform essential but unpaid labor caring for their children, aged parents, and other family members. Those crucial caregivers should receive credit toward future Social Security benefits so they don’t retire into poverty.
In addition, Congress should update the way that Social Security’s benefits are adjusted so that they reflect the high health care and prescription drug costs that beneficiaries experience. The annual cost of living adjustment is intended to keep benefits from eroding, to allow beneficiaries to tread water. But without updating the measure of inflation, those benefits are losing value each year.
Those are just some of the improvements that Congress should make. But those are not the “changes” Ernst has in mind, because none of those changes need to be done behind closed doors. Numerous pieces of legislation proposing those changes have been introduced in Congress—though none by Senator Ernst or her Republican colleagues.
Indeed, 210 House Democrats have co-sponsored the Social Security 2100 Act, which expands Social Security’s modest benefits, while ensuring that all benefits can be paid in full and on time through the year 2100 and beyond.Every Democratic presidential candidate opposes cutting Social Security benefits, and nearly all support expanding them. Meanwhile, neither Donald Trump nor a single Republican member of Congress is sponsoring or cosponsoring any legislation that increases benefits or even ensures that they can be paid in full and on time beyond 2035.
No action is the same as supporting cuts.As Representative John Larson (D-CT), chairman of the House’s Social Security Subcommittee and the author of the Social Security 2100 Act, has explained, “The hard truth of the matter is that Republicans want to cut Social Security, and doing nothing achieves their goal.”
Larson and his Democratic colleagues are calling Republicans’ bluff. Under Democratic control, Congress has held numerous hearings on Social Security and the importance of protecting and expanding it. Larson and his Democratic colleagues are planning to have a recorded, public vote on the Social Security 2100 Act this fall.
The legislation has enough votes to pass the House of Representatives. But don’t expect Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to bring it to a vote in the Senate. And don’t expect Senator Ernst or her other Republican colleagues to urge him to do so.
With respect to Social Security, just as with the issue of legislating background checks and other overwhelmingly popular commonsense legislation to reduce the epidemic of gun violence, Republican politicians will not say what they are for. In the case of gun legislation, they block action. In the case of Social Security, they block action unless Democrats agree to go behind closed doors so the public doesn’t know who pushed the cuts.
We should not let Republican politicians get by with platitudes about “saving” and “fixing” Social Security. And we certainly shouldn’t let them hide behind closed doors and undermine our Social Security.
As polarized as the American people are over many issues, we are not polarized about Social Security. Republicans, Democrats and Independents, of all ages, races and genders, overwhelmingly agree. We understand that Social Security is more important than ever. We overwhelmingly reject any cuts to its modest benefits.
The only group that disagrees is Republican Party donors. As an ideological matter, they hate Social Security because it puts the lie to their assertions that government can’t work. They do not want to pay their fair share. Indeed, they would love to get their hands on the money now flowing to Social Security.
When President George W. Bush proposed destroying Social Security by privatizing it, the American people overwhelmingly rejected his plan. But Republican politicians learned the wrong lesson. As unpopular as Bush’s proposal was, he was at least willing to advocate for it publicly. Rather than recognize the proposal was the problem, Ernst and her fellow Republicans think the problem was being honest with the American people.
Like Bush, they want to enact a Social Security proposal that is deeply unpopular. But unlike Bush, they want to enact it in the dark of night. Fortunately, their Democratic colleagues won’t let them get away with that undemocratic act. Nor should the American people.
All of us who have a stake in Social Security—which is every one of us—should insist that those seeking our vote tell us if they support expanding or cutting Social Security. If they refuse to tell us, if they ramble on about their desire to “save” or “fix” or “strengthen” Social Security in secret, we should draw the obvious inference: They want to cut Social Security. We should use the election to ensure they do not have the power to do that—and certainly not behind closed doors.
Nancy J. Altman is a writing fellow for Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute. She has a 40-year background in the areas of Social Security and private pensions. She is president of Social Security Works and chair of the Strengthen Social Security coalition. Her latest book is The Truth About Social Security. She is also the author of The Battle for Social Security and co-author of Social Security Works!
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/republican-attacks-on-the-social-security-2100-act-are-an-assault-on-public-health/
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/the-trump-administrations-insidious-plan-to-cut-social-security-benefits/
Trump administration, continuing its assaults on the most vulnerable Americans, is now going after disabled people with limited English proficiency. Dependent children of people who become disabled are among those likely to be hurt by the new rule.
The rule, not yet in effect, would deny Social Security disability benefits to people whose language difficulty makes them unemployable in the market, but who Team Trump thinks should be able to find jobs where an inability to speak or understand instructions is only a minor problem, citing among other examples cook and gardener.... The proposed rule contradicts another Trump rule change. Both rules are squarely aimed at immigrants.
The proposed Social Security rule change is the latest example showing that to Team Trump no one is too poor, too powerless or too far down the economic ladder to escape their malicious attention.
People with difficulty speaking in any language could be denied benefits, opponents argue.
"We’re very concerned at how this administration is chipping away” at benefits for people, said Jenna McDavid of the Diverse Elders Coalition.
Hidden Intention
Buried deep in the Federal Register notice is the point of the rule change, which “would revise ‘Illiterate or unable to communicate in English’ to simply ‘Illiterate.’”
We’ve linked to the administration’s pending new rule explanation in the Federal Register, a difficult to comprehend government publication which I review frequently. This explanation stands out as one of the most verbose and obtuse proposed rule changes I’ve ever read because the explanation is designed to obscure the purpose.
The existing 40-year-old rule says “limited education means ability in reasoning, arithmetic, and language skills, but not enough to allow a person with these educational qualifications to do most of the more complex job duties needed in semi-skilled or skilled jobs.”
The rule change comes at a time when, the Trump administration says, the share of American workers with limited English proficiency is growing.
“The working-age population (ages 25–64) with [limited English proficiency] increased from approximately 5.4 to 17.8 million between 1980 and 2016, while more than doubling, from 5.1% to 10.5%, as a percentage of the population,” the notice of the proposed rule change stated. “Within this group, the number of individuals who spoke no English more than quadrupled from approximately 682,000 to 2.8 million” people.”
McDavid noted that the Trump administration has taken diametrically opposed positions on the value of English proficiency.
In a proposed rule to turn away people at the border, Team Trump asserted “an inability to speak and understand English may adversely affect whether an [immigrant] can obtain employment.” But in the proposed Social Security rule, McDavid pointed out, “the Administration claims that ability to speak English is irrelevant for an individual’s ability to find employment.”
No Definition of ‘Illiteracy’
One anonymous commentator noted that the proposed rule fails to define illiteracy. That would matter if the government argued that someone who can read and write in their native tongue is literate even if they cannot communicate in English, creating grounds to deny benefits.
About one in five Americans speak a language other than English at home. And about 25 million Americans, or one in 13, have limited proficiency in English.
Some of the 241 people who filed comments favor denying benefits to disabled people who are not proficient in English.
“There is no reason for them not to be able to communicate in the English language,” Peter Alamillo III wrote. “Children are taught English in school, either public or private. There is no reason for applicants for survivors [sic] benefits, etc. to have an inability to communicate in English.”
He said the proposed new rule “is a very prudent change that will help to save the SSA money for individuals and programs that truly need it instead of wasting it on foolhardy and unnecessary non-essential matters.”
Poor and Sick
Others noted that individuals lacking proficiency in English are more likely to be poor and suffer ill unhealth, among them Karla Guerra, writing on behalf of a community organization in Oakland, Calif. “The implementation of this proposal would result in diminished opportunities for health for disabled LEP individuals and their families,” she wrote.
Emily Voelker complained that the new rule “would mean that over 10,000 disabled and low-English proficient workers per year would no longer qualify for and receive benefits when they are unable to work. It’s discrimination that helps no one – and only hurts people who are already vulnerable to prejudice.
Perhaps the most direct and damning comment was filed by Margo Vanderhill:
“This proposed rule is clearly discriminatory. Many Native Americans cannot speak English (due to living in very isolated regions). They are not immigrants yet [they] would be affected by this rule.
“Other immigrants (documented and legal) may not be able to speak English, but that in no way should bar them from assistance. They may be unable to speak English because of emotional or intellectual disabilities. That does not diminish their qualifications for disability.
The proposed rule change does indicate racial bias and Xenophobic attitudes for those proposing the change.”
Yup. That’s standard operating procedure for this administration, which propagates harm using language that even those highly proficient in English find nearly incomprehensible.
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The remarkable Mothers of Social Security
Nancy J. Altman / Independent Media Institute
This Mother’s Day, let’s celebrate the remarkable Mothers of Social Security. Without them, this essential program may never have been born. It certainly would be much less successful and effective.…
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/a-federal-judge-just-struck-a-blow-to-the-trump-administrations-cruel-plot-to-gut-medicaid/
On Wednesday, a federal judge dealt a massive blow to one of the Trump administration’s pet projects.
Washington, D.C. District Court judge James Boasberg struck down work requirements in Kentucky and Arkansas,ruling that the waivers granted by Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar were not valid because work requirements do not further the Medicaid Act’s mission of improving public health.
The rules differ in some ways, but both broadly require certain Medicaid recipients to complete a minimum number of work or community service hours each month and provide proof to the state.
Kentucky’s work requirement, known as Kentucky HEALTH, was the first to be approved by the Trump administration but was struck down last year by the same judge, and the newly revised rules were scheduled to take effect on April 1. Arkansas has already implemented its work requirement system, known as Arkansas Works, with disastrous consequences — over 18,000 people in the state have lost Medicaid coverage, many of whom actually were working but couldn’t figure out how to meet the state’s confusing reporting requirements, especially those in rural areas who don’t have easy access to the internet.
Boasberg criticized Arkansas for doing virtually nothing to help Medicaid recipients understand and comply with the new work requirement, saying “the State’s outreach efforts may well be falling severely short.” He further criticized Kentucky, which argued that their work requirement does further the mission of expanding health coverage because Gov. Matt Bevin intended to cancel Medicaid expansion entirely if he didn’t get his way: “The Court cannot concur that … states are so armed to refashion the program Congress designed in any way they choose.”
Several other Republican-controlled states are currently seeking approval for similar work requirement programs.
Medicaid is a joint federal-state program — both Congress and the states provide funding, and the states are in charge of administering the program within their borders. The Medicaid Act sets strict guidelines about how the program can be run, but the Department of Health and Human Services can approve what are called “Section 1115” waivers if a state has a custom-designed plan that would promote health and coverage beyond what traditional Medicaid does. The Trump administration is trying to flip this on its head, encouraging states to apply for waivers that will lead to fewer people being covered.
Boasberg’s ruling holds that states cannot use Section 1115 waivers in this manner. “That provision of the Act does not turn the comprehensive Medicaid program into a buffet for states,” he wrote.
Medicaid work requirements are a particular passion of Seema Verma, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services. She has claimed that denying low-income people health coverage is actually good for them, insisting that “it is not compassionate to trap people on government programs or create greater dependency on public assistance.” She has also claimed that work requirements do further the mission of Medicaid, pointing to studies that show people with jobs tend to be healthier (when in reality the correlation is probably the other way around.)
Arkansas and Kentucky were early adopters of the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, which made the program available to people up to 138 percent of the poverty line. The Affordable Care Act originally required states to expand Medicaid, but a Supreme Court ruling allowed states to decide whether they wanted to or not. Republicans in these states are now intent on chipping away at this progress, and work requirements are one way the Trump administration is encouraging them to do it.
For now, that effort has hit a roadblock.
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beat 2018 --> dirty tricks: (anti-democratic authoritarian moves)
eg https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2019/03/04/right-wing-funded-groups-battle-new-state-governors
ctr-attack
If the corporate-funded influence groups on the Right have their way, there will be no honeymoon for newly elected Democratic governors.
Affiliates of the State Policy Network (SPN), a network of right-wing “think tanks” in 49 states bankrolled by the Kochs and other billionaires and big corporations, have already been deployed to oppose legislation introduced by Democratic governors in states that previously had GOP governors.
Last week the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) wrote about the battle over Medicaid in Wisconsin, where the newly elected Democratic governor, Tony Evers, who replaced the GOP’s Scott Walker, has introduced a measure to expand Medicaid in the state.
The article showed how right-wing “think tanks,” in this case the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) and the Center for Research on the Wisconsin Economy (CROWE), and state legislators quickly rolled out a flawed study to exaggerate the costs of Medicaid expansion to the tune of $600 million. The “research” was released without noting that the paper supported the anti-Medicaid expansion position taken by the groups’ major funders: the Bradley Foundation and the Koch brothers.
Minimum Wage Fight in Illinois
In Illinois, Governor J.B. Pritzker, who defeated Republican incumbent Bruce Rauner, introduced an increase in the state’s minimum wage as one of his first acts. The state’s SPN affiliate, the Illinois Policy Institute (IPI), quickly went on the attack, repeating claims that a rise in the minimum wage reduces jobs,because Illinois would have higher minimum wages than surrounding states. The group does not consider the relative cost of living among Midwestern states, and ignores the experience of nearby Minnesota where 92,600 have directly benefited from the January 1 increase, the Economic Policy Institute reports.
Nonetheless, the Illinois legislature voted along party lines to increase the state minimum wage to $15 by 2025, starting with a $1 increase next year to $9.25 an hour. On February 19, the Governor signed the bill into law.
IPI is well-connected to right-wing billionaires. The GOP megadonor Richard Uihlein has provided $11.8 million through his foundation to IPI since 2009, according to a CMD analysis of IRS filings. Robert Mercer has donated $1.1 million through his foundation to IPI over the same period, and the preferred piggy bank of the Koch donor network, DonorsTrust and its sister organization Donors Capital fund, has funneled over $1.5 million to IPI since 2010.
Notably, IPI has received $717,300 from SPN itself between 2012 and 2017, making it one of the largest grant recipients over this period.
Previously IPI was listed as a “partner organization” in the Charles Koch Institute‘s Liberty@Work program, but the current status of that program is unknown.
Consistent with the opinions of its funders, IPI also does not consider the ripple effect of a rise in the incomes of low wage workers.
A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute finds that raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2024 would increase wages for 40 million U.S. workers, which would “stimulate the economy and spur greater business activity and job growth.”
Renewable Energy in New Mexico
In New Mexico, newly elected Democratic Governor Lujan Grisham has made increasing the state’s reliance on renewable energy a hallmark of her first year. “We know that we cannot rely on the federal government right now to lead on climate action,” Lujan Grisham said in her January 15 State of the State address. “It is our responsibility and indeed our moral obligation to ensure our planet and our state are preserved for our children and their children.”
The SPN local affiliate, the Rio Grande Foundation (RGF), came right out to oppose the increase in renewable energy the state relies on, from 20 percent to 50 percent by 2030, and then to 80 percent by 2040, saying it will raise electrical bills.
RGF has received over half a million dollars from DonorsTrust since 2010 and tens of thousands from the Charles Koch Foundation since 2015. In addition, RGF has held joint events with the Charles Koch Institute.
RGF fails to consider the cost of carbon on health and its effects on climate change in its analysis. The industry-backed group also leaves out the fact that renewable energy prices in New Mexico have gone down by 60 percent to 70 percent, according to the newly appointed state energy agency head, Cottrell Propst, and that as new technologies are adopted the costs will come down even more. “We know that this technology and cost will not stay the same for renewables or energy storage,” Propst said. “History shows us it’s good to be ambitious, it’s good to be bold.”
RGF does not share that ambition and is even out of step with the state’s major utilities which, while not now embracing the same targets as the Governor, support increases in the state renewable energy standard to reduce carbon emissions.
Medicaid Work Rules in Michigan
The SPN affiliate in Michigan, Mackinac Center for Public Policy, is already battling newly elected Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s reconsideration of a 2018 law that included a work rule requirement for Medicaid recipients. Mackinac lobbied for the work requirement and testified in support of its passage.
Whitmer wants a reconsideration of the requirement in light of new research showing that people are losing coverage in Arkansas, one of the first states with the work requirement. Thousands of people in the state have lost coverage because of failing to report their activities, whether they are meeting rules or not, and almost 17,000 Medicaid recipients in all lost coverage in 2018.
In December alone, 4,655 Medicaid recipients lost coverage, many for failing to report their activities to the state. “Arkansas takes an especially aggressive approach to terminating coverage due to paperwork and compliance issues, such as not responding to a (state) request for information quickly enough,” the *Arkansas Times* reported.
The Mackinac Center ignores the negative societal effects a work requirement has and instead focuses on cutting Medicaid costs. “Medicaid has ballooned into an unwieldy and massively expensive entitlement program that crowds out access to services and vital resources for that most vulnerable population,” Mackinac reports.
But it provides no such evidence for its claims. Whitmer believes the Arkansas research may show that vulnerable people are losing coverage and that, until it is known who is losing coverage and why, Michigan should go slow on adopting the work rules.
Mackinac Center has received over $1.5 million from the Bradley Foundation since 1993 and $590,000 from the Koch family foundations since 2001, as well as over $3.4 million from the DonorsTrust conduits since 2010.
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AN 12/18
Don’t let the Trump administration corporatize Medicare
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https://www.alternet.org/economy/trumps-budget-director-reveals-plans-attack-social-security-and-medicare
Opponents of Social Security and Medicare are so eager to end these two overwhelmingly important and popular earned benefits that they can’t contain themselves. Mick Mulvaney, the Trump administration’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, is the latest to make crystal clear the longstanding plan to destroy both programs.
Speaking at a conference of state legislators hosted by the anti-government American Legislative Exchange Council (“ALEC”), Mulvaney just revealed that he plans first to go after what he sees as more politically achievable cuts. He explained that the next step, presumably after Trump is in his second term, will be for the administration not just to cut these programs but to end them as we know them.
Mulvaney is apparently so eager to go after our earned benefits that he threw the point into a speech to state legislators, even though both Social Security and Medicare are federal programs.
Mulvaney’s apparent uncontained enthusiasm to take away people’s earned benefits is similar to that of Mitch McConnell, who just weeks before the midterm, called for Social Security and Medicare to be “adjusted” (code for destroying them). McConnell couldn’t resist broadcasting his intentions, even though these programs are extremely popular even with Republican voters.
Why are these opponents so hostile to such important programs? Social Security, now more than eight decades old, and Medicare, now more than five decades old, have stood the test of time. Both of these efficient, virtually universal, overwhelmingly popular programs insure us against risks that all of us face. Rich or poor, anyone can suffer a disabling illness or accident, making work impossible. Rich or poor, any parent can die prematurely leaving dependent children. Rich or poor, all of us hope to live to old age and, if we are so fortunate, require income we cannot outlive and health insurance for the treatments and medication we inevitably will need.
The private sector is incapable of providing the wage and health insurance that Social Security and Medicare provide as efficiently, universally, securely or effectively as the federal government. Insurance works best when the greatest numbers of people are covered. The only entity that can require that everyone is covered and pays premiums as soon as they start working is the federal government. That is one of the reasons both Social Security and Medicare work so well.
And that is why Mulvaney, McConnell, and other opponents of these programs want to end them. These programs put the lie to their ideological zealotry, which insists that the private sector is always better than government.
Decades ago, opponents of these programs were forthright that their objections were ideological. They did not see the creation and administration of universal insurance programs as an appropriate role for the federal government. But the American people overwhelmingly disagreed, so this argument was utterly unsuccessful.
Now most opponents have changed their tactics, and proclaim their love for these programs. President George W. Bush, for example, proclaimed, “Social Security was a great moral success of the 20th century, and we must honor its great purposes in this new century.” His very next sentence argued for radically changing it.
Similarly, Mulvaney, McConnell, and other opponents hide their straightforward ideological opposition. Rather, these opponents subversively seek to undermine confidence in Social Security’s and Medicare’s future by asserting that both programs are unaffordable.
Worse, in their efforts to end Social Security and Medicare, they seek to turn Americans against each other. They tell us that seniors are taking from children, that people with disabilities are taking from seniors.
Moreover, in their efforts to lull us into thinking they are not seeking to hurt our legitimate interests, opponents claim that our vital and earned financial protection in the event of disability isn’t as “core” as our financial protection in the event of old age. In his recent ALEC speech, Mulvaney tried to make just such a claim, asserting, “You can reform and save a ton of money in Medicare and Social Security and not touch the primary pillars for the next several years.” Along those same lines, last April, Mulvaney rhetorically asked, “Do you really think that Social Security disability insurance is part of what people think of when they think of Social Security?”
I am confident that the over 10 million Americans receiving Social Security because of wages lost as the result of serious, work-ending disabilities understand that Social Security disability insurance is Social Security. When American workers pay into Social Security with every paycheck, disability insurance is one of the protections they earn, along with life insurance and retirement annuities.
Social Security disability benefits are inextricably intertwined with Social Security’s retirement and survivor benefits. Social Security benefits are generated from the same formula. When workers with disabilities reach retirement age, their benefit is unchanged in amount but is paid as a retirement benefit, no longer as a disability benefit. Despite those facts, though, Mulvaney’s claim that Social Security disability insurance is not really Social Security is a convenient rhetorical game to claim “core” benefits are not being touched.
For Medicare, Mulvaney revealed another trick before his ALEC audience. He floated the idea of Medicare no longer reimbursing teaching hospitals its fair share of those hospitals’ costs, arguing that the cut wouldn’t hurt beneficiaries. Like his claim that Social Security disability insurance is not “really’ Social Security, beneficiaries would be hurt, though not immediately, and the cause of the hurt would be difficult to trace.
While benefits wouldn’t be directly cut, it certainly would limit the ability of Medicare beneficiaries to get treatment at teaching hospitals if that were their choice and the best setting for their care. To the extent Medicare didn’t pay its fair share and teaching hospitals nevertheless continued to treat seniors and people with disabilities, those costs would be shifted to everyone else.
And, of course, this is just the start, Mulvaney made clear. “In the long term you’ll have to [make more major changes.] The president has asked me to fix the easy stuff first,” Mulvaney explained to his audience.
Fortunately, the Democrats—who support expanding, not cutting, Social Security and Medicare—have control of the House of Representatives, at least for now. But, all of us who want to keep the benefits we have earned must remain vigilant. We must not be fooled or confused into allowing opponents to make what they deem “easy” cuts to our earned benefits.
These opponents will not give up. And neither must we. Expanding, not cutting, our Social Security and Medicare is profoundly wise policy and is overwhelmingly popular. But it will only become a reality if we keep our voices loud, reminding our political leaders that it’s voters, not donors, to whom they must account next election day.
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
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AN
By Jake Johnson, Common Dreams
"Medicare for All promises a system that
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[cf hedges we need to give ppl security/net or they will keep going for fake populism/magical thinking; is this reverse/leverage?]
ballot measures in Idaho, Nebraska, and Utah to expand Medicaid didn't just draw out a lot of voters; it might have created some, and not just for the midterm election. Evidence from the last four years of the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion suggests that people who get Medicaid turn into voters.
An author of one of the studies, Jake Haselswerdt, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Missouri, says, "We can confidently say: When you expand Medicaid eligibility, participation goes up." The theories include the fact that Medicaid has been shown to increase financial stability as well as mental health treatment, and has meant particular improvement for people suffering from depression. Maybe they have more capacity, both in time and in their personal well-being, to participate. It's also possible that enrolling hooked them into the mechanisms of getting registered to vote and then voting.
Maybe it's the greater investment they have in their government by having it work for them. "These are programs that have a major effect on people's lives," said Andrea Campbell, a professor of political science at M.I.T. who is an expert on the politics of Social Security. Seeing government work and having it work for you can raise the stakes and spur greater involvement.
Whatever the reason, a handful of studies have used the example of Medicaid expansion, comparing adjacent counties in states that accepted the expansion with counties in states that did not. Expansion counties have a 3-4 percentage point increase in registrations AND voting.What isn't clear at this point is how durable that increase is, since we only have four years’ worth of data to work with.
But with health care front and center in the political debate this cycle, and almost certainly in the next as well, chances are pretty good the trend is going to stick around a little longer.
https://www.alternet.org/medicaid-expansion-doesnt-just-make-people-healthier-it-makes-democracy-healthier-too
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koch loss
For the past decade, the Koch brothers and their network of political and policy groups have made fighting government health benefits and reforms the centerpiece of their electoral agenda. But the 2018 midterm election results show that the tide of public opinion has turned against them.
Despite the best efforts of the Koch’s astroturf group, Americans for Prosperity (AFP), Medicaid expansion ballot measures passed in Utah, Idaho, and Nebraska, providing coverage to an additional 325,000 low-income people. Republican governors who have been blocking Medicaid expansion were defeated in at least three states, and dozens of new Democratic candidates won seats in Congress by promising to protect the Affordable Care Act.
Together with a poor showing by one of the Kochs’ super PACs, AFP Action, the loss of these three state ballot initiatives to expand Medicaid suggests that AFP is seriously out of step with voters.
All three states had ballot initiatives that passed and were opposed by AFP. A measure proposing a cigarette tax to fund Medicaid expansion lost in Montana, which passed expansion legislation in 2016.
Thirty-four states had already approved expansion, and the passage of the initiatives raises the number to 37. Before this election, Maine had been the only state to pass a Medicaid expansion ballot measure.
In Maine, Governor Paul LePage (R) vetoed legislation to expand Medicaid five times, but voters took the matter to the ballot in 2017 and won by a margin of nearly 2 to 1. Maine’s newly elected governor, Janet Mills (D), has vowed to implement expansion.
AFP had worked hard to oppose Medicaid expansion in Maine, where expansion means coverage for an additional 70,000 or 80,000 people, and its chapters in Utah, Nebraska, and Idaho conducted new opposition campaigns this year involving radio, digital media and mailings.
In Nebraska, Medicaid expansion will cover 86,000 additional people, while in Utah 170,000 people will gain coverage, along with 69,000 more in Idaho.
The Koch-backed State Policy Network (SPN) — a right-wing web of “think tanks” across the country — also provided support to AFP in these states by publishing numerous studies opposing Medicaid expansion.
The Maine Heritage Policy Center published a lengthy report titled, “Reject Medicaid Expansion,” which claimed that expansion is too costly for Maine and would not result in lives saved.
The Idaho Freedom Foundation published a piece on its website arguing that Medicaid expansion would be expensive and an insult to first settlers who never lamented “their lack of health insurance, healthcare, or insisting that the government provide it, or any other services, to them.”
Utah’s Sutherland Institute wrote on its website that expanding Medicaid would raise the sales tax and result in lower quality healthcare, and Nebraska’s Platte Institute for Economic Research argued that Medicaid expansion would result in cuts to K12 funding and higher property taxes.
Public Opinion Shifting
It is clear from the election results that public opinion has shifted against the Kochs’ “free market” approach to health care and steadfast opposition to government health regulations and benefits.
Pre-election polls showed that health care was the most important issue to voters in battleground states, and 55 percent of voters in non-expansion states said they wanted Medicaid expansion.
Not only did voters approve health care access ballot measures, they voted for governors who made expanding Medicaid coverage part of their platform.
In Wisconsin, Democrat Tony Evers defeated incumbent Republican Governor Scott Walker. Evers assured voters that he would accept federal dollars for expanding Medicaid and would protect those with pre-existing conditions.
In Kansas, Democrat Governor-elect Laura Kelly promised on the campaign trail to advocate for and sign a bill approving Medicaid expansion in her first year.
And in Maine, Democrats seized control from the Republicans in the governor’s mansion and the Senate after years of Governor LePage’s obstruction of reform.
In Florida and Georgia, where gubernatorial elections are still undecided, Democrats Stacey Abrams (GA) and Andrew Gillum (FL) made Medicaid expansion a major campaign issue.
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Because the economy is doing well? This shameless president is quick to take credit for what is, according to Forbes magazine, “just a continuation from Obama’s presidency.” Job growth has been steady for the last eight years.
And try selling that booming economy to those who are working two and three and four jobs to scratch out a living, the 41 million Americans in poverty, a third of them kids—or to the more than half a million homeless. As Philip Alston,U.N. special rapporteur on extreme poverty, said in June, “In a rich country like the United States, the persistence of extreme poverty is a political choice made by those in power.”
Why would you vote to keep Trump unchecked? Because he and Republican candidates suddenly are promising that they’d never, cross their hearts, ever disallow people with pre-existing conditions from decent health care? That’s a lie; they’ve spent eight years trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act some seventy times and the Justice Department backs a Texas lawsuit that would overturn Obamacare’s protection of insurance for those with pre-existing conditions.
And lest we forget, should they hold onto their majorities in the House and Senate, the GOP leadership is openly talking about gutting Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, the programs you’ve paid for throughout your working life. These reductions are to compensate for the trillion-dollar deficit they themselves created with their billions in beloved tax cuts for the rich. There’s even talk about cutting or eliminating the Federal minimum wage....
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https://www.alternet.org/right-wing/donald-trump-and-republicans-work-every-day-destroy-social-security-medicare-and-medicaid
during..Trump’s campaign for president, he promised over and over again to protect Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Now, in the lead-up to the midterm elections, Trump is claiming to have kept that promise. Completely in character for a president who doesn’t let a day go by without lying, he recently falsely claimed, “We’re saving Social Security, the Democrats will destroy Social Security. We’re saving Medicare. The Dems, you look at what they’re doing. They want to destroy Medicare.”
It’s time to set the record straight. Far from keeping his word, Trump and his administration have spent every day since taking power working to destroy Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
Here are 10 of the Trump administration’s worst attacks on the American people’s Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid:
1. Trump nominated Congressman Mick Mulvaney to be the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director. Mulvaney has a long history of working to destroy Social Security and Medicare. In 2011, he said, “We have to end Medicare as we know it.”
Every single Republican senator voted to confirm Mulvaney, while every Democrat voted against.
2. Trump nominated Tom Price to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees Medicare.Price has stated that “We will not rest until we make certain that government-run health care [e.g., Medicare] is ended” and decried “the federal government’s intrusion into medicine through Medicare.”
Every single Republican senator voted to confirm Price, while every Democrat present voted against. After less than a year on the job, Price was forced to resign in disgrace, and Trump replaced him with Alex Azar, a former pharmaceutical executive who tripled the price of insulin.
- As soon as Trump took office, the Republican Party’s top priority was to take health care away from tens of millions of Americans. If “Trumpcare” had become law, it would have cut $880 billion from Medicaid, creating a disaster for seniors who rely on Medicaid for long-term care. It would also have created a Medicare time bomb by starving the program of essential funding.
- Trump’s 2018 budget proposal sought cuts of $800 billion to Medicaid and Social Security Disability Insurance over 10 years. When OMB Director Mulvaney was asked if these cuts would lead to fewer people receiving their earned Social Security disability benefits, he replied, “I hope so.”
- Republicans passed a massive tax giveaway to billionaires and corporations, which they are now using as an excuse to demand cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
6. Nearly every House Republican voted for a so-called “Balanced Budget Amendment,” which would make it unconstitutional for Social Security to use its own $2.9 trillion trust fund to pay promised benefits. (Fortunately, the Amendment did not attain the two-thirds majority required for passage.)
- The Trump administration floated a proposal to eliminate the payroll tax, which would have served as a Trojan horse to undermine Social Security.
- Trump issued an executive order opening the door to the politicization of Administrative Law Judges, who are supposed to impartially resolve disputes between Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries and the people in government who run those programs.
- The Trump administration announced plans to get rid of a rule that allowed nursing home residents and their families, in facilities that accept Medicare or Medicaid funding, the right to take those facilities to court for alleged neglect, abuse or sexual assault.
10. The Trump administration began allowing states to impose work requirements on Medicaid beneficiaries.
This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.
==
https://www.alternet.org/economy/pete-petersons-ghost
Peter G. “Pete” Peterson, the billionaire businessman and anti-government crusader, died last week at the age of 91. He leaves behind family and friends who will miss him, and a vast coterie of consultants and politicians who may miss his checks even more. They can take comfort from the words of Percy Bysshe Shelley: “He doth not sleep/he hath awakened from the dream of life …”
Peterson will be mourned by those who loved him. But that’s no reason to forget the harm he has done, especially since his family vows to continue his work. His son, speaking on behalf of the foundation Peterson created, says that “we will carry on his legacy with passion and pride.”
That legacy is marked by Pete Peterson’s long war against Social Security and Medicare, his austerity economics, and the false aura of objectivity Peterson used to promote his ideology.
Behind his carefully stage-managed veneer of bipartisanship (his team once tried to get me suspended from a publication for calling him right-wing), Peterson engaged in a decades-long war on the social contract. Programs like Social Security and Medicare were his immediate targets, but his ultimate goal was even broader: He wanted to extinguish the ideal of public goods, and put an end to the notion that certain social programs should be universal.
Peterson took conservative ideas and gave them an undeserved air of truth and neutrality. Politicians who embraced them were more likely to receive a steady flow of high-dollar contributions and gaining entrée to the right salons and alliances.
Thanks to Peterson, prominent journalists can make outlandish and inaccurate statements about “entitlement” programs, while still laying claim to journalistic objectivity. That’s no mean feat on Peterson’s part – although it becomes easier when you can spend nearly half a billion dollars in four years to promote your agenda, as Peterson did. (Peterson engaged in his crusade for decades; his total spending isn’t known.)
Peterson may be gone, but his ideology still holds sway in the corridors of political and media power.
Doing the Math
“The standard operating procedures of private equity—purchasing businesses, adding debt, minimizing taxes, cutting costs (and facilities and employment), extracting large fees—are just the sort of things to aggravate popular anger about finance.”Peterson was a corporate success at a young age, and then joined Richard Nixon’s Cabinet. But he became a billionaire as co-founder of the Blackstone Group, one of four firms that exemplify what The Economist calls “the barbarian establishment.” As that (hardly left-wing) publication writes:
Peterson promptly put his billions to work on a new mission: Cutting government programs, especially Medicare and Social Security, and reducing government deficits. (The fact that these moves would reduce the political incentive to tax billionaires is never mentioned in Peterson’s work.)
Peterson’s sleight-of-hand trick, and it was a brilliant one, was to present his opinions as neutral and objective truth. As the New York Times reported in 2011:
“If some consider him Cassandra and others Chicken Little, Mr. Peterson considers himself, in self-deprecating (and self-interested) terms, as a data-driven businessman who ‘simply did the math.’”
The Peterson team claims that its proposals would exclude the poor, but cuts are a slippery slope. Social Security benefits are already meager, and any reductions – including cuts to cost-of-living increases and increases in the eligibility age – will lead to added poverty. Here’s some real math: Medicare saves lives, and “greater spending per beneficiary is associated with significantly lower mortality rates.” So does Medicaid. Social Security lifts 22 million Americans out of poverty, including children and non-elderly adults.
And poverty kills.
Sleight of Hand
Deficits were Peterson’s obsession. But when it came to economics, Peterson did the arithmetic, not “the math.” His zero-sum approach to government budgets failed to recognize the wide range of policy choices that are open to governments or the ways that government spending can create economic growth.
In a 2010 Wall Street Journal op-ed, Peterson argued that “spending cuts must play a lead role in any solution to our long-term structural deficits.” That’s an ideological statement that can’t be found anywhere in “the math.” For revenue, Peterson’s go-to solution was a consumption tax that would disproportionately harm the middle class.
No cut is too cruel for the Peterson crowd. A Peterson-backed group praised the draconian spending cuts in Donald Trump’s budget proposal last year, writing, “The President deserves credit for setting a fiscal goal and working to meet it.”
But it chastised the Republican for failing to apply an equally heavy hand to Social Security and Medicare.
Testing Mean
The policy heart of the Peterson agenda is means testing: of Social Security, Medicare, and other vital government programs. The Concord Coalition, which Peterson co-founded, pioneered the idea of means-testing Social Security benefits and reducing them for anyone making $40,000 per year or more. The idea quickly spread to Medicare and other universal programs.
It sounds reasonable, at first. Why should rich people collect taxpayer-funded benefits? One answer – because it’s an insurance program – can be hard to convey, but is nevertheless important.
Voters forget that means-testing is a slippery slope. Once it’s applied to vital programs, it can be ratcheted down until most Americans are excluded from them. Should we means-test public high schools? Elementary schools?
Means-testing works for anti-poverty programs. But under social insurance programs like Social Security, everybody contributes and everyone is eligible for benefits (with limited exceptions).
For 50 years, both political parties favored these kinds of universal programs. Peterson changed that.
When people are debating means-testing, they’re not asking a more obvious question: If we’re so concerned about giving “free rides” to rich people, why don’t we just raise their taxes?
Supporting Cast
Peterson assembled an ensemble cast of characters to push his message. Ex-senator Alan Simpson became a key spokesman, primarily because he shared Peterson’s gift for making a heavily ideological agenda sound like blunt truth-telling. Erskine Bowles, David Walker, and a coterie of economic and policy consultants also filled the ranks.
Peterson recruited media figures, too, through his “Fiscal Summits” and other events. Prominent journalists were offered hosting and guest appearances at Peterson events (and were presumably paid for them) At least one received a board seat on a Peterson organization, while at the same time “objectively” covering Peterson-style initiatives. (I reported on Lesley Stahl’s conflict of interest in 2013.) Journalists were also given talking points to help them sound knowledgeable about fiscal policy.
Politicians of both parties embraced the Peterson agenda for years. Bill Clinton, who received Peterson funding on the road to the White House. turned the Democratic Party in a more Peterson-friendly fiscal direction. Clinton emphasized deficit reduction, privatization, and means-testing as president, while over-praising the skills of the private sector.
Reaching the Summit
...
==
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/us-no-country-older-men-and-women
https://www.alternet.org/deeply-immoral-values-todays-republican-leaders
tax voodoo
==
OMG
http://exiledonline.com/monster-koch-bust-charles-koch-used-social-security-to-lure-friedrich-von-hayek-to-america/
MONSTER KOCH BUST: CHARLES KOCH USED SOCIAL SECURITY TO LURE FRIEDRICH VON HAYEK TO AMERICA
“Ha-ha! Those suckers will believe anything! “
This article appeared in the October 17, 2011 edition of The Nation
There’s right-wing hypocrisy, and then there’s this: Charles Koch, billionaire patron of free-market libertarianism, privately championed the benefits of Social Security to Friedrich Hayek, the leading laissez-faire economist of the twentieth century. Koch even sent Hayek a government pamphlet to help him take advantage of America’s federal retirement insurance and healthcare programs.
This extraordinary correspondence regarding Social Security began in early June 1973, weeks after Koch was appointed president of the Institute for Humane Studies.Along with his brothers, Koch inherited his father’s privately held oil company in 1967, becoming one of the richest men in America. He used this fortune to help turn theIHS, then based in Menlo Park, California, into one of the world’s foremost libertarian think tanks. Soon after taking over as president, Koch invited Hayek to serve as the institute’s “distinguished senior scholar” in preparation for its first conference on Austrian economics, to be held in June 1974.
Hayek initially declined Koch’s offer. In a letter to IHS secretary Kenneth Templeton Jr., dated June 16, 1973, Hayek explains that he underwent gall bladder surgery in Austria earlier that year, which only heightened his fear of “the problems (and costs) of falling ill away from home.” (Thanks to waves of progressive reforms, postwar Austria had near universal healthcare and robust social insurance plans that Hayek would have been eligible for.)
IHS vice president George Pearson (who later became a top Koch Industries executive) responded three weeks later, conceding that it was all but impossible to arrange affordable private medical insurance for Hayek in the United States. However, thanks to research by Yale Brozen, a libertarian economist at the University of Chicago, Pearson happily reported that “social security was passed at the University of Chicago while you [Hayek] were there in 1951. You had an option of being in the program. If you so elected at that time, you may be entitled to coverage now.”
A few weeks later, the institute reported the good news: Professor Hayek had indeed opted into Social Security while he was teaching at Chicago and had paid into the program for ten years. He was eligible for benefits.
On August 10, 1973, Koch wrote a letter appealing to Hayek to accept a shorter stay at the IHS, hard-selling Hayek on Social Security’s retirement benefits, which Koch encouraged Hayek to draw on even outside America. He also assured Hayek that Medicare, which had been created in 1965 by the Social Security amendments as part of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs, would cover his medical needs.
Koch writes: “You may be interested in the information that we uncovered on the insurance and other benefits that would be available to you in this country. Since you have paid into the United States Social Security Program for a full forty quarters, you are entitled to Social Security payments while living anywhere in the Free World. Also, at any time you are in the United States, you are automatically entitled to hospital coverage.”
Then, taking on the unlikely role of Social Security Administration customer service rep, Koch adds, “In order to be eligible for medical coverage you must apply during the registration period which is anytime from January 1 to March 31. For your further information, I am enclosing a pamphlet on Social Security.”
* * *
The private correspondence between two of the most important figures shaping the Republican Party’s economic policies—billionaire libertarian Charles Koch and Nobel Prize–winning economist Friedrich Hayek, godfather of today’s free-market movement—were obtained by Yasha Levine from the Hayek archives at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. This is the first time the content of these letters has been reported on.
The documents offer a rare glimpse into how these two major free-market apostles privately felt about government assistance programs—revealing a shocking degree of cynicism and an unimaginable betrayal of the ideas they sold to the American public and the rest of the world.
Charles Koch and his brother, David, have waged a three-decade campaign to dismantle the American social safety net. At the center of their most recent push is the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity, which has co-sponsored Tea Party events, spearheaded the war against healthcare reform and supported Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s attack on public sector unions. FreedomWorks, another conservative group central to the rise of the Tea Party and the right-wing attempt to dismantle Social Security and Medicare, emerged from an advocacy outfit founded by the Koch brothers called Citizens for a Sound Economy. FreedomWorks now exists as a separate entity that champions the “Austrian school” of economics.
Hayek, a founder of that school of thought, is primarily known for two major works. The first, The Road to Serfdom (1944), grudgingly accepts the possibility that some “free” countries might find it necessary to set up a bare-minimum catastrophic social insurance program limited to the very neediest, so long as the benefits do not incentivize productive members of society to abandon free-market retirement savings or medical insurance.
Hayek’s comparatively liberal attitude toward social insurance hardened considerably by the time he published his 1960 opus, The Constitution of Liberty. Despite privately spending the intervening years paying into Social Security, Hayek devoted an entire chapter—titled “Social Security”—to denouncing the modern welfare state as a gateway to tyranny and moral decay. Ironically, one of Hayek’s main objections to government programs like Social Security was the “fundamental absurdity” of using tax dollars to promote their benefits. In other words, Hayek publicly objected to the kind of brochure that Charles Koch sent him. In their private correspondence, however, we could find no objection to this “fundamental absurdity.”
By the mid-1970s, Hayek had fully distanced himself from the modest benefits he’d originally conceded to in The Road to Serfdom. In his preface to the 1976 edition, he explained his “error”: “I had not wholly freed myself from all the current interventionist superstitions, and in consequence still made various concessions which I now think unwarranted.”
Publicly, in academia and in politics, in the media and in propaganda, these two major figures—one the sponsor, the other the mandarin—have been pushing Americans to do away with Social Security and Medicare for our own good: we will become freer, richer, healthier and better people.
But the exchange between Koch and Hayek exposes the bad-faith nature of their public arguments. In private, Koch expresses confidence in Social Security’s ability to care for a clearly worried Hayek. He and his fellow IHS libertarians repeatedly assure Hayek that his government-funded coverage in the United States would be adequate for his medical needs.None of them—not Koch, Hayek or the other libertarians at the IHS—express anything remotely resembling shame or unease at such a betrayal of their public ideals and writings. Nowhere do they worry that by opting into and taking advantage of Social Security programs they might be hastening a socialist takeover of America. It’s simply a given that Social Security and Medicare work, and therefore should be used.
* * *
Shortly after this exchange, in 1974, Hayek won the Nobel Prize in economics. The next year he went on something of a victory tour of the United States, which ended at the IHS, where he spent the summer as a resident scholar. Hayek returned to Menlo Park again in the summer of 1977. The Nation has filed a Freedom of Information Request with the Social Security Administration to discover if, in fact, Hayek received Social Security payments or used Medicare during his residencies at the institute or at any other time. At press time, these requests have not been answered.
Meanwhile, in 1974, Charles Koch founded the Cato Institute (called the Charles Koch Foundation until 1977). This think tank has done more than any other to push for an end to Social Security. In 1983 the Cato Journalpublished a blueprint of how to destroy Social Security,“Achieving a ‘Leninist Strategy,’” by Stuart Butler and Peter Germanis. The authors acknowledged that a strong coalition of Americans backed Social Security and thus saw the need for “guerrilla warfare against both the current Social Security system and the coalition that supports it.” Victory could be far in the future, “but then, as Lenin well knew, to be a successful revolutionary, one must also be patient and consistently plan for real reform,” they write.
As part of Cato’s campaign, the institute has launched various groups and projects, including the Project on Social Security Choice, whose co-chair is José Piñera, architect of AugustoPinochet’s controversial pension privatization scheme in Chile. Cato Institute members and alumni also dominatedPresident George W. Bush’s commissionon Social Security in his first term and spearheaded Bush’s failed attempt to privatize the program in the early months of his second term.
Thanks in part to Hayek’s writings and to the Koch brothers’ decades-long war on the social safety net, Americans are among the Western world’s few citizens without universal healthcare. Not surprisingly, life expectancy here has fallen to forty-ninth place in the world, while medical costs are double those of other Western nations. By contrast, Hayek’s native Austria, which has a public health plan that covers 99 percent of the population, boasts a healthcare system ranked ninth in the world by the World Health Organization.
* * *
When Texas Governor Rick Perry, a front-runner in the Republican primary for president, derides Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme” or a “monstrous lie,” that rhetoric can be traced back to the work of Hayek and Koch. And yet we now know that in private practice, Hayek was perfectly content to pay into Social Security and that Koch encouraged him to draw upon both Social Security and Medicare. Did they really believe what they wrote? Or were these attacks just scare-talk meant for the rubes, for you and us, “the public”?
Calling this mere hypocrisy downplays the seriousness of their fraud. Koch and Hayek are no more hypocritical than the used-car salesman who knowingly sells a lemon to a gullible buyer, or the financial agency that rates “AAA” instruments it knows are crap. This is a grand swindle played on a trusting, gullible public, a scam whose goal is to con America’s dying middle class into handing over their retirement money to the richest 0.1 percent, convincing them that in doing so, they’re “empowering” themselves and protecting their “individual liberty.”
Another question hangs over all this: Why didn’t Charles Koch offer to put up some of his enormous wealth to pay for Hayek’s temporary medical insurance? One obvious answer: because the state had already offered a better and freer program. But perhaps Koch’s stinginess also reveals the social ethic behind libertarian values: every man for himself; selfishness is a virtue.
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America's very rich keep trying to start a movement among college students to blame senior citizens for the sorry state of the economy that kids will inherit. Specifically, the billionaires keep trying to scapegoat Social Security.
This is part of the public relations effort to create a "grand bargain" to cut America's (fast-declining) budget deficit. The Peter G. Peterson Foundation has spent about a billion dollars of Peterson's own money to create faux movements to get students to take up this unlikely cause.
The latest of the billionaires to try this gambit is Stanley Druckenmiller, net worth estimated at $2.9 billion, former head of the hedge fund Duquesne Capital. Druckenmiller's personal campus crusade has been the subject of two fawning profiles, one by Tom Friedman in Wednesday's Times, the other by James Freeman in Saturday's Wall Street Journal.
Druckenmiller's campus crusade is based on such preposterous economics that I hereby challenge him to a college debate or series of debates. Freeman's puff piece in the *Journal* begins thus:
Stan Druckenmiller makes an unlikely class warrior. He's a member of the 1% -- make that the 0.001% -- one of the most successful money managers of all time, and 60 years old to boot. But lately he has been touring college campuses promoting a message of income redistribution you don't hear out of Washington. It's how federal entitlements like Medicare and Social Security are letting Mr. Druckenmiller's generation rip off all those doting Barack Obama voters in Generation X, Y and Z.
"I have been shocked at the reception. I had planned to only visit Bowdoin, " his alma mater in Maine, he says. But he has since been invited to multiple campuses, and even the kids at Stanford and Berkeley have welcomed his theme of generational theft.
The Tom Friedman column, titled, "Sorry, Kids. We Ate It All.," which I addressed in the American Prospect Thursday, Friedman wrote:
After we baby boomers get done retiring -- at a rate of 7,000 to 11,000 a day -- if current taxes and entitlement promises are not reformed, the cupboard will be largely bare for today's Facebook generation. But what are the chances of them getting out of Facebook and into their parents' faces -- and demanding not only that the wealthy do their part but that the next generation as a whole leaves something for this one? Too bad young people aren't paying attention. Or are they?
Wait! Who is that speaking to crowds of students at Berkeley, Stanford, Brown, U.S.C., Bowdoin, Notre Dame and N.Y.U. -- urging these "future seniors" to start a movement to protect their interests? That's Stan Druckenmiller, the legendary investor...
Where to start? If you itemize all the reasons why recent college graduates face a wretched economy, Social Security doesn't even make the list. What does make the list are unreliable jobs that pay lousy wages, the aftereffects of a financial bubble created on Wall Street, and unaffordable college that leaves graduates starting life with more than a trillion dollars worth of debt.
The next generation, and the one after that, will have a shot at a decent life if we can get growth and a fairer distribution of earnings back on track. That project has nothing whatever to do with Social Security or the federal deficit. On the contrary, if we keep on the austerity kick and further cut social outlays that promote opportunities, growth will be even slower.
The biggest lie in Druckenmiller's crusade is the premise that the income distribution problem is somehow generational and that he, as a billionaire, has anything whatever in common with most college students or most recipients of Social Security. One of his pitches to students is that Social Security is excessive because he, a very wealthy man, receives it but doesn't need it.
But for the vast majority of the elderly, Social Security is a lifeline, and a meager one at that. Some two-thirds of all seniors depend on Social Security for half of their income. Fully 46 percent of elderly widows and other unmarried seniors depend on Social Security for at least 90 percent of their income.
The entire projected 75-year shortfall in the Social Security trust funds that conservatives make such a big deal about is around one percent of GDP per year. We could make it up with modest tax increases on wealthy people like Druckenmiller.
Since Social Security is financed by payroll taxes -- on wage and salary income -- the real Social Security crisis is the crisis of stagnant wages. If average wages had continued to track average productivity growth during the past three decades, as they did in the three decades after World War II, Social Security would be in perpetual surplus.
The real crisis facing the elderly is not that Social Security is excessive but that it's inadequate -- especially with the collapse of traditional pensions in favor of far less reliable 401k plans (another counter-revolution made on Wall Street.)
There is a certain moral blindness and chutzpah of very wealthy people trying to enlist students in a generational movement against the alleged affluence of their grandparents. The real issue here is not generation, but class, specifically Druckenmiller's class.
Contrary to the claim in writer Freeman's opening sentence -- that Druckenmiller makes "an unlikely class warrior," his crusade is precisely class war, of the sort we have been seeing for decades -- of the very wealthy against everyone else.
Happily, most of America's students don't seem to be taking the bait. None of Pete Peterson's front groups has had much resonance on campus -- not his "Fiscal Wake-Up Tour," nor "Fix the Debt," nor more far-fetched groups aimed a college students such as "America's Promise Alliance," nor the foundation's poetry contest aimed at battling deficits in verse.
However, these crusades do have a certain resonance among media elites and even in the Obama White House. As we go into the next phase of a trumped up budget crisis, with Social Security and Medicare as targets A and B, the politics and economics could not be more perverse.
So how about it Mr. Druckenmiller? If you are so sure of the righteousness of your cause, how about defending yourself in a campus debate?
Robert Kuttner's new book is Debtors' Prison: The Politics of Austerity Versus Possibility. He is co-editor of The American Prospect and a senior Fellow at Demos.
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Freshman Colorado Congressman Scott Tipton received an award recently for his work in support of senior citizens from a group called RetireSafe. Tipton was one of 20 Republicans elected to Congress from swing districts to have received the award, according to RollCall, but the award was fake, or at least the group that gave the award was fake. RetireSafe is an industry front group run by Republican and conservative politics figures and founded by Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America to push policies that will boost industry profits.
It’s the kind of revelation that has become commonplace in today’s political news, where industry and government figures exchange revolving seats, yet it still has the power to shock in its details.
“Local news reports and campaign advertisements trumpeted the awards…” RollCall writes, “providing these Republicans with valuable political cover for supporting controversial bills, such as the budget proposed by House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) that would have dramatically revamped Medicare.”
RetireSafe bills itself as a nonpartisan senior citizens advocacy organization, but it is led by former Bush and Reagan administration officials, small-government activists and pharmaceutical industry lobbyists and consultants. It is funded at least in part by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the drug industry’s chief lobbying group, and at times has served as a third-party entity to validate the industry’s agenda….
The award, which sounds a lot like an endorsement that could come from one of dozens of other seniors groups, can then be used as a credential on the campaign trail.
Matt Inzeo, communications director for the Colorado Democratic Party, said the story demonstrated that Republicans like Tipton will have a very hard time this year selling their service-slashing pro-industry priorities to constituents.
“While Scott Tipton stakes his political future on fake awards from front groups, Colorado seniors know he pushed a raw deal on them by trying to turn Medicare into a voucher program,” Inzeo wrote in an email. “Tipton can’t paper over the fact that he would hike seniors’ health care costs by over $6,000 a year, and this charade shows that lame attempts to hide the facts will quickly backfire.”
Tipton has made news in the short months since he took office for accusations of corruption and dirty tricks.
He was investigated by and apologized to a House ethics committee for pushing communication services through his offices for Broadnet, a company where his daughter worked as a lobbyist and where his nephew worked as CEO. More recently he was accused of packing his town meetings with Republicans and mining industry interests by sending out announcements of scheduled meetings to select email lists.
The RetireSafe seniors award shell game seemed to have worked on at least a small scale for Tipton, garnering a brief spot in the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel. The award presentation ceremony drew members of the Alzheimer’s Association and the Colorado Gerontological Society.
The Sentinel piece:
Tipton’s bill wins kudos from group
A Washington, D-C.-based organization that described itself as a watchdog for personal freedom and advocate for seniors on Social Security and Medicare recognized U.S. Rep. Scott Tipton, R-Colo., for sponsoring legislation to repeal a part of the new health care law.
Al Cors Jr., RetireSafe.org vice president, gave Tipton a plaque recognizing him for sponsoring legislation to repeal the Independent Payment Advisory Board, which has the task of reducing the growth of Medicare and is required to implement its first proposals in 2015.
RetireSafe.org, which says it represents more than 400,000 seniors, lists health, financial, national and personal security as a pyramid of goals supporting personal freedom.
Representatives of the Alzheimer’s Association and Colorado Gerontological Society attended the presentation.
According the Democratic Party Congressional Committee, the Alliance for Retired Americans on Friday alerted its members that RetireSafe was not to be trusted; it’s a “front group for the pharmaceutical industry” the group wrote in an email. AARP has issued a similar statement. Tipton could not be reached for comment.
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- The Koch brothers want to destroy the most popular government program of all, Social Security, by funding right-wing think tanks that spread misinformation about Social Security's long-term financial health, claiming it will not survive. They want people to invest their retirement savings on Wall Street, which is riskier and would earn billions in fees for investment firms. They want to raise the retirement age for Social Security to 70, which would especially penalize blue-collar workers who do manual labor, as their bodies wear out more quickly than white-collar workers.
http://www.alternet.org/print/election-2014/11-things-koch-brothers-dont-want-you-know-robert-greenwalds-newly-updated-documentary
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“Don’t retreat, instead reload!”
Much of the right-wing’s resurgence is due to its intense investment in technology and communications. Republicans, as well as right-wing conservatives, realized that their image could be salvaged if repackaged properly. And the most discussed post-2008 election concern was the advantage held by the Left in communication infrastructure. In a December 2008 reflection piece titled the “Roots of Defeat,” Republican consultant Patrick Ruffini wrote in the National Review that progressive news sites, like the Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo, were the constant purveyors of “attack memes” against the conservative movement and its candidates.Talking Points Memo had led the liberal blogosphere’s mobilization against President Bush’s attempt to privatize Social Security in 2005. In addition to its rapid news coverage, the web site posted the phone numbers of Democratic politicians who had indicated support for Bush’s proposal and encouraged readers to call. The groundswell of opposition from bloggers, then the general public, marked the first significant policy defeat for President Bush. As Ruffini noted, the defeat punctured Bush’s “aura of invincibility and presage[d] the death spiral to come.” ThinkProgress, where I began working in 2009, had helped expose much of disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s relationship with the Bush administration, and Talking Points Memo broke the story of the Bush Justice Department’s systematic political firings of U.S. Attorneys around the country. As the 2008 election unfolded, the McCain campaign’s positions and statements were instantly fact checked and scrutinized by leading progressive web sites. Ruffini observed that progressive blogs did actual research and reporting while most conservative bloggers were “generally commentators and not reporters.” He also noted that the Right lacked many of the technological innovations employed by Barack Obama’s campaign, and, more important, lacked a powerful online megaphone for its ideological goals.
As conservative writer Ross Douthat noted in a post-election interview about the future of conservatism, the Internet also served as a vital organizing platform for progressives.DailyKos, Douthat said, was one of the main sources of “left-wing populist anger against the excesses of the Bush Administration.” The DailyKos system allows the public, after registering, to post blog entries, which are either selected by moderators or voted up to the “Recommended” list by other users. Other organizations, from MoveOn to Democracy for America to the message board Democratic Underground, had helped feed the surge in leftist populism through the Internet by providing opportunities for like-minded people to find each other instantly.