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Hullabaloo

Monday, May 23, 2011

 

Sacrificial Ham

by digby

Former Vice Presidential economic adviser Jared Bernstein's new blog is very entertaining and informative. I urge you all to check it out daily.

Today he responds to a piece in the Washington Post by Robert Samuelson and adds this, which seems to me to be extremely important and something that Democrats would need to start pounding into people's minds before the next election:

[H]e doesn’t stress enough the caveat that growth, while reliably positive, is still too slow. To generate the number of jobs needed to bring the unemployment rate down more quickly, we need some GDP quarters well above the recent average of about 3%.

But most importantly, anyone thinking about the nature of this recovery needs to be very clear about this: the economic well-being of the broad middle class is not simply a function of macroeconomic growth. Such growth is, of course, necessary and welcomed. It is not sufficient.

The question is whether the growth is reaching the middle class and lower-income families. The data on where growth is ending up arrive with a lag so we can’t fully answer this question yet, but some indicators are clearly worrisome. For example, corporate profits have been doing a lot better than average wages (the former has made up most of the ground lost over the downturn; the latter are recently declining in real terms).

Now, profits often lead more broadly shared gains—that certainly was the story of the 1990s expansion, which ultimately did reach the middle class and the poor, at least for a New York minute in the latter half of the decade.

But it was demonstrably not the case in the 2000s, the first recovery on record where the typical household’s real income went nowhere despite years of GDP and productivity growth. In stark contrast to the 1990s, poverty was actually higher at the end of the 2000s expansion than at the beginning.

And as long as we’re worrying about the distribution of growth, as opposed to just its creation, let’s not make things worse by extending budget-bashing tax cuts that enrich those who already appear to have climbed out of the hole and are outpacing the rest. If one goal of the nascent economic expansion is to achieve more broadly shared prosperity than the last one, to renew the high-end Bush tax cuts, as in the Republican budget plan, is to start the race with an anvil around our necks.

There's more at the link. People need to understand that they have a personal stake in the fair distribution of taxes beyond an abstract notion of fairness. They need to know that the great growth in wealth of the super-rich is literally coming at their expense. I don't think they know that.

Certainly Rush Limbaugh's audience doesn't know it. Get a load of this exchange from a couple of months ago when I happened to come across this morning:

CALLER: I keep hearing on TV and you, "We just can't afford it, and the sacrifice is gonna have to be shared." And I've got a decent memory. I remember just a couple months ago when we couldn't have increased taxes on the most wealthy, the people that have made more money over the last decade, over the last 40 years, really --

RUSH: Yeah, yeah.

CALLER: -- than anyone else in America.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: Well, wages have, you know, kinda remained flat. What I want to know is when Andrea Mitchell, Mrs. Alan Greenspan, and when Rush Limbaugh say we need to share the sacrifice, what kind of sacrifices are you guys making? I mean, really?

RUSH: What do you mean by you guys?

CALLER: Well, like I said, you, Andrea Mitchell, all the rest of the rich folk in the media that love to get up on TV and radio and talk about how the sacrifice must be --

RUSH: I'm not avoiding your question. I'll answer it here in just a second. I am not a proponent of shared sacrifice. I don't believe in sacrifice, period. I think that's an absolutely defensive, stupid, self-defeating way to go about life. This whole sacrifice business is a Democrat trick. It's nothing more than a political spin game: We must have joint sacrifice. That means we must accept, we must universally accept bad times, must just accept them, and then all share equally in them. Sorry, I don't participate in recessions. I am not gonna sacrifice to make somebody else feel good. I'm gonna keep doing what I do, and I hope to prosper at every moment of my life. I mean that's what this country's all about. Now, what do you think, what kind of sacrifice should I be doing?

CALLER: Well, I just want to know who's gonna pay for the oil subsidies, and who's gonna pay for these wonderful wars you love so much? I mean if we're going to have these things that you want, Rush, somebody has to pay for it, and I'm sick and tired of --

RUSH: Wrong.

CALLER: -- the people paying for it are the people making $50,000 a year. You're making $25 million a year.

RUSH: I don't look at life the way you do. There's a reason somebody makes $25 million and there's a reason somebody makes $25,000, and it's not the guy who makes $25 million's fault. There's a reason and it's not your job to come along and say that somebody is at fault, and it's none of your business to come along and say it isn't right and that somebody has got to make it fair by giving something up.

You are destined to fail in your own life if that's your attitude about success. That somebody's success is owing to somebody's misery, therefore the misery must be honored. Wrongo, pal. Somebody in misery's gotta be shown how to get out of it, not have it shared equally. It's what I've never understood about people on the left. Okay, so you have misery out there, but not everybody's feeling misery. Unfair. Solution? Make everybody miserable. Ergo, give us liberalism, it works. But sorry, I don't participate in it.

...Whether you know it or not, we're all sacrificing what otherwise could be a great life because of liberalism running this country right now. And of all things that you could call here to talk to me about and learn from, you're sidetracked on $25 million versus $25,000 and somehow it's unfair to spend money defending the country against people who want to kill you...

So I checked the e-mail during the break after this last caller and all this joint sacrifice business, and people are suggesting, "Rush, you do sacrifice. Why didn't you tell that guy how much you pay in taxes?" That would not be classy, folks. That's not the way to deal with this.

I mean to tell him that I pay more in taxes in one year that he's gonna earn in his worthless life is not the classy way to do this, because that's not what this clown actually means by sacrifice. You gotta understand this.

Joint sacrifice to liberals means more government. Even now with massive spending, high unemployment, foreclosures, to this liberal that called here and all the rest of them, the problem is not enough government; it's not enough bureaucrats; not enough government benefits; not enough government. That's what the left means.

The question is, when is it time for Washington to sacrifice? When is it time for unions to sacrifice? When is it time for government to sacrifice? When is it time for bureaucrats to sacrifice? When do they ever sacrifice? When does the government sacrifice? The government never sacrifices. Zilch, zero, nada.

I'm beginning to think that the best way to handle this is to have the government declared a "person" just as corporations are "persons." Limbaugh already seems to think it is one --- a sociopathic criminal, but a "person" nonetheless. The whole concept of democracy is obviously lost on him.

But just read the utter BS and understand that people listen to that and believe it. I have written before about the guy I once heard call in to thank Rush and tell him that he was happy to pay more in taxes if it meant his boss didn't have to --- it meant he was more likely to get a raise.

Let's just say that if you listen to that disembodied voice droning on and on like that every single day you're likely to get a little bit confused. At some point someone is going to have to challenge this brainwashing.


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digby 5/23/2011 12:17:00 PM


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It depends who you are talking to what will be achieved by Privatizing Ryan's Roadmap to Ruin budget plan should it be enacted. Most people either come down on the side of "it ends Medicare" or "it ends Medicare as we know it," while the Randians like Ryan insist on pretending that it "saves Medicare (okay, something we will call Medicare) for future generations."

Those in the last group are engaging in that age-old-and-time-tested political tactic that we call "lying" when they make that claim. They may call whatever private-insurance apostasy that they want to foist on those of us under 55 "Medicare" but it will look as much like the Medicare our parents know and love as a McNugget looks like a chicken.

Medicare has been wildly popular and extremely effective at delivering healthcare to America's elderly and disabled people for nearly fifty years, and as a result of that, it has been in the crosshairs of republicans and other assorted miscreants and privatizers for it's entire existence.

It was Rahm Emanuel who said "never let a crisis go to waste" and immediately he got hammered by republicans and their mouthpieces, but they were only protesting because they wanted to deflect attention from their own pioneering work in that same field of endeavor. It was just short of brilliant the way they ran up the deficit and depleted the nation's coffers when they were in power, making it possible for them now to scream, wail, gnash their teeth and rend the cloth from their breast as they decry the deficit and insist that "we're broke!" and all the safety net programs have to be gutted, if not outright shut down, otherwise the republic is doomed.

Credit where credit is due: When they get rolling, they can be far more melodramatic than any 8th-grade girl's-school production of Romeo and Juliette, and just hope that no one fact-checks them.

For a plan that they insist is necessary because the current system is headed for bankruptcy, it sure doesn't save any money. In fact, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, privatization would actually cost 11 percent more for the exact same services than leaving the current system in place -- and that cost disparity would widen over time, not shrink. The CBO, the non-partisan research arm of Congress, estimates that by 2022, the year the Ryan plan would start screwing retirees, it would cost a whopping 34% more than simply maintaining the current system.

The hard, cold truth is that those of us under 55 would pay more for less than our friends, siblings and spouses who are a little bit older. Our out-of-pocket expenses would skyrocket, amounting to about $6400 per year more than those born a year or two earlier.

Pity the person in their late forties who finds him- or herself struggling in this economy, underemployed, and likely to stay that way. Those poor folks get screwed seven ways from Sunday if Ryan gets his way. They will get no respite at age 65. The formerly middle class middle manager who is stocking shelves at Wal-Mart and depleting their 401K to pay the mortgage on a house that has lost a third of it's value is suddenly paying in a lot less in payroll taxes and this will affect the amount of benefit they are eligible for at retirement. Where they were on track to draw the maximum, they now stand to see their monthly benefit reduced by two or three hundred dollars, and they are depleting their savings now to save their house, so there may be nothing to supplement it. To add insult to injury, that thing they, in the spirit of George Orwell, want to call Medicare takes five hundred and change off the top of what they will get, eating up about half of their future Social Security checks, transfering that money directly to insurance companies and removing it from the economy of the areas where the seniors reside and spend their Social Security checks on living expenses.

The CBO also found that the greater cost-sensitivity could result less frequent use of newer and more expensive -- but frequently beneficial -- technologies and procedures than occur now under current law. In other words, the Ryan plan would kill that innovation that the republicans are forever insisting that free-market forces will certainly bring to bear if we just unfetter the market and let it work it's magic on our healthcare system.

There is one thing that republicans always say when healthcare is the topic that I can't believe they get away with. They always, without fail, say that they don't want a government bureaucrat between you and your doctor.

This has to register a full five cow-pies on the BS-o-Meter.

Let me provide a little anecdotal evidence and tell you about my experience with reimbursements and the filing thereof, since I did some of that in both of my two most recent jobs.

I was the second shift supervisor of a hospital phlebotomy crew...this meant that we had a waiting room full of patients up until 4:30 or so, and then we saw any stragglers that came in. I did the paperwork and filed for payment for the stragglers. When I went to another hospital and worked third shift, part of that job was processing specimens that came in to the hospital lab from doctor's offices and smaller hospitals either for in-house testing or as send-outs to Mayo, ARUP or Quest/Nichols. After I processed the specimens, I processed the "paperwork" for payment and filed the claims electronically.

I can count on one hand the times I had a Medicare claim bounce back requiring more information or a call to their offices during business hours that I had to leave in the day shift's inbox -- and it was almost always a coding error that was quickly resolved. Private insurance was just the opposite. The technologists on day shift in that facility finally revolted at the revolving insurance-resolution job that no one wanted to do, and the lab director had to go to the budget committee and add a full-time employee to her staff, an associates-level technician who did nothing but resolve insurance claims five days a week, eight hours a day.

The dirty little secret is this: There already is a bureaucrat standing between you and your doctor. But he or she doesn't work for the government. They are bean counters for an insurance company, and their bonus depends on them denying you the care your doctor deems you need.

If Ryan's plan were to see the light of day, every claim for every procedure would get that sort of unreasonable scrutiny by a Utilization Management Panel. You are familiar with these -- Sarah Palin called them "death panels" and they are the stock and trade of the private insurance / managed care / profit driven healthcare system she was desperately trying to preserve.

I realize that Ryan tends toward Randianism, and Randians are, by definition, emotionally stunted, amoral and selfish. Indeed, selfishness is not merely a virtue, it is the highest, if not only, virtue to the true Randian.

So I have to wonder, what's in it for Ryan to put in place a policy that would transfer massive amounts of formerly middle-class wealth to private insurance companies? If he is really a Randian, he has an angle he is working. And if he doesn't, he isn't a Randian, he's just a garden-variety sociopath.

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