April 2011 Archives

Dear America,

Most conservatives have taken to making persistent reference to what they assert to be the central impediment to addressing the national debt and deficit: the unwillingness of middle-class Americans to make sacrifices in the programs from which they benefit while demanding sacrifice from the wealthy. Even David Brooks-- usually, but less and less often lately the voice of moderate conservatism-- infers from the polls that appear on a regular basis now, that the vast middle class is unwilling to make sacrifices through reductions in Medicare benefits or increases in their own taxes but want the rich to have their taxes increased by the repeal of the Bush tax cuts from which they have benefited for a decade or so with no evidence of the "trickle down" effect so heavily relied upon to justify them. But what conservatives mistake, or prefer to characterize, as an unwillingness to sacrifice is actually the desire to order sacrifice so as to impose it on those who have gained the most and can best afford it before, not in lieu of, going to those less fortunate for their contribution. That is the contrivance in the conservative criticism of every plan but their own. However, in reality no one is arguing against that plan's central principle of spending less. Rather, they are angry about the way in which the Republicans would have us go about it...whom it would ultimately affect and how it would do so. It is gasoline for yachts versus gasoline for the commute to work; roofs over our heads versus McMansions; the wealth accrued over a lifetime out of one man's pocket versus what amounts to a pittance out of another's that are the conflicts in values between the Republicans and those whom they claim to be unwilling to sacrifice.

In a letter to the editor in The Times about the tax contribution of the top 1% in terms of income, an irate conservative, presumably a member of the plutocracy himself given his point of view, bemoaned the fact that they pay 38% of the taxes. Of course he never mentioned the fact that they make 23% of the income too. Nor did he reference the two percentage point fall in income for that elite group from 2007 to 2008 because it demonstrates that the preponderance of their income does not come from work, but rather from investments, and in the case of that period of financial industry profligacy, from what now appear quite clearly to have been illicit investments, in some cases even illegal ones. Nor does the disparity in share of wealth-- figures that range from 28% to 42% depending on the source (the Reaganite conservative David Stockman is on the high end) in the possession of the wealthiest 1% versus 7% held by the bottom 80%-- seem to be on the commenter's mind. We are still to feel sorry for the rich because their tax burden is disproportionate even though their share of all that we produce as a nation as well all that we own continues to grow and that of those who produced it continues to shrink. The evidence that the rich are not overburdened is clear to both conservatives like Stockman and liberals like Robert Reich, but to the rest of us as well; I mean, who would you rather be. But the evidence that they take too much is just as clear, if not more so.

Gasoline is now at $4.00 per gallon or more in virtually all places in the United States. But when those in the media attempt to determine why, they cannot. A couple of days ago I saw one of the ubiquitous authorities, as it turned out the owner of a commodities trading hedge fund, telling an MSNBC reporter that the cause of the inflated prices was not speculation because the prices of coffee, sugar, lettuce and various and sundry other essentials was also going up: a bent logic that ignored the fact that future production of all those things is traded on commodities exchanges just like oil is, demonstrating only that commodities exchanges are where most speculation now occurs, not that there isn't any. He never mentioned either what proportion of those futures is owned not by manufacturers of consumer products who will use them, but by investors who will not use them and produce nothing. Nor did the fact that oil futures have risen by 22% and the price of gasoline by 34% just this year despite the fact that there has been no reduction in the amount of crude oil being produced. Even the brief interdiction of supply from Libya, amounting to no more than 2% of the world's supply in the best of times, has been compensated for by increased production from Russia according to CNN. And who is benefiting from all of this? (That's a rhetorical question.)

There is always a danger of lapsing into a diatribe when talking about these things, and I for one seem to be the last to know that my plaints have turned into a rant. But we continue to hear from the Republican conservative complex (Rcc) that we should avoid "class warfare" at all costs, yet they never tell us why, or even how. They seem to be suggesting that we shouldn't complain when the moneyed class prey on us; that we should accept our fate and just be grateful for their purported largess; that we owe them something because they give us jobs (a dubious assertion in light of the fact that there are so few being created despite record business wealth) while they enjoy the lucre that we produce. Actually, that's how I detect insincerity often times. When someone resorts to demagoguery and non-rational moral certitude at my expense, I know that I am being had. The fact is that social injustice and inequity are not the ineluctable way of the world, and the Rcc cannot have it both ways. If we are the righteous Judeo-Christian society that they say we are, it is the duty of the rich not just to say a prayer before the banquet, but to pay what they can afford so that the less fortunate will also be able to eat. And if they want to avoid class warfare, they have to stop waging it, both on Wall Street and at the pump.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I have recently seen a couple of things on television that remind me of how fragile the truth is. The first was a reflection on television news as an institution. CNN has made hay out of the BP oil spill ever since the first day. I recall quite clearly Anderson Cooper of CNN practically taking up residence in Louisiana and reporting every night about the spill, constantly bemoaning the failure of the federal government to stop the under-sea gusher that was polluting an entire sea. Governor Bobby Jindal got coverage from CNN every couple of days when he took the grandstand to promote whatever spurious effort he claimed to be making to abate the damage of the spill, but the daily press conference being given by the Coast Guard admiral who was coordinating the containment and clean-up efforts never seemed to make the news. Cooper stuck his fingers in the sludge wherever he found it and pointed those fingers at the feds and called that the news, meanwhile ignoring information about what was actually being done, and he changed attitudes by doing so, and CNN is still at it.

Last week, there was much coverage on CNN of the condition of the Gulf of Mexico and the Louisiana coast, in particular as a function of seemingly celebrating the one year anniversary of the BP spill. In that connection, CNN sent a reporter to talk to a local shrimper, ostensibly in order to demonstrate that the amount of oil one might consume by eating shrimp and oysters from the Gulf of Mexico was so miniscule that one would have to eat tens of pounds of them every day for years in order to consume an amount of oil that the EPA considers significant for one's health. It was feint praise in a way, as the fact of consuming any oil at all is daunting, but that's what makes it commercially advantageous to report on the subject, I suppose, even though the ostensible point of the piece was to defuse public concern over eating shellfish from The Gulf. So, the reporter began interviewing the fisherman after he dumped sixty three pounds of shrimp out on a table as a demonstration of the volume of shrimp one would have to eat every day for five years in order to get a significant dose of oil toxicity, and the reporter's subject was the decline in the market for Gulf fish. The problem was that when he asked the fisherman how the Gulf spill was affecting the sale of his fish he said that it wasn't. "It's all good," the fisherman said. So the reporter rephrased his question and tried to put in the fisherman's mouth words to the effect that the market was suffering irrationally, but again, "It's all good," came the fisherman's response. The reporter tried one more time with the same result and then gave up, making some lame reference to what he had intended to prove about the market for shellfish in lieu of having proved it. The point: if CNN wants to make a point, it should do a better job of preparing before going on the air, or better still, stop trying to make a point...any point. Just give us the news and let us make the points.

Then there was the coverage on MSNBC of Paul Ryan's "town hall meetings" about his budget. It seems that even among his own constituents there is deep resistance to the idea of effectively eliminating Medicare, though Ryan contests that characterization of his budget's implications, and that resistance is pretty ardent. Among the arguments that the attendees of the meeting made was that the Bush tax cuts for the rich should be repealed before any attempt to balance the budget at the expense of Medicare recipients is enacted. And Ryan reverted to type...Rcc (Republican conservative complex) type, that is. He said that they should all remember that tax increases on that top 2% of earners would diminish job creation because they were the owners of the small businesses that create two thirds of all new jobs...which is partly true. The fact is that two thirds of new jobs are created by small businesses, but only those that are starting up. After five years, half of those businesses will have failed and the jobs that they created will have gone with them, while the other half will stop creating jobs and prosper or struggle on the basis of what they have become by then. But what Ryan and his compatriots leave out is that something on the order of 96% or more of small business owners earn less than $250,000. In other words, those tax cuts for the top 2% are not being received by small business people but rather are being paid for by the vast majority of them, just as they are being paid for by the rest of us; tax cuts for the rich impair job creation by taking money out of small business owners' pockets, they don't induce it. But Ryan's ulterior motive is to preserve the tax cuts of the rich, not to stimulate business as he says, so that argument isn't one that we will ever hear coming out of his mouth. He will continue to tell just enough of the truth that he doesn't seem to be lying, but not enough to convey the whole truth.

My point is that there are constantly people and entities trying to sway us to their points of view by telling us only what they want us to hear in order to serve their own purposes. Some of them are insidious, and others are crass, and still others just don't know what they are talking about because of sloppy thinking. For that reason, I feel compelled to repeat something I have said over and over again: think with your own head, not someone else's. The danger of allowing yourself to be convinced without being informed on your own is that people love to convey myths and drivel at every opportunity because it is fun, and often profitable, to play the authority, but it is hard work to actually become one. There is plenty of misinformation on the internet, but with a little caution, the truth can be found, and that is what I hope that all of us Americans will do: find the truth...and then vote with the truth in mind regardless of what CNN or Paul Ryan tells us.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

As the debate between the liberal budget plan of President Obama and the Democratic Party on the one hand, and the conservative, proposed budget of Paul Ryan and the Republicans on the other, distills to its essence, it becomes ever more apparent that the crux of the argument is the "social safety net" in general, but Medicare in particular. The Ryan proposal for balancing our budget includes many cuts in spending for the least fortunate two thirds of us, but the highest profile reduction proposed by Ryan is in the form of the "voucher system" to which Ryan and the Republican conservative complex (Rcc) refer as a "premium subsidy," which euphemism they employ because of the charge carried by the term voucher. Under the Ryan plan, they would replace the current system, which is predominently funded by payroll deductions, with subsidies that would be used to buy health insurance on the open insurance market. When it is favorable, the Republicans rely on the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to support their positions, but in this case they cannot do so. The CBO has estimated that the Ryan voucher plan would cost the average senior citizen about $6,000 per year, and being on Social Security myself, I can tell you from experience that such a burden is unsustainable for most of us. But Ryan defends himself and his plan by resorting to the canard of the free market as an agent of change, which he claims will mitigate that heavy burden.

Like all Republicans, Ryan believes that the pressures and currents that govern the free market will bring the cost of insurance down. It is not clear exactly how those mechanisms would work, but deregulation of business and markets would surely be part of it all. The problem is that experience belies the notion that deregulation brings about responsible corporate behavior, and we have had plenty of recent experience to demonstrate that fact. For example, in 1996 the federal government ceased to regulate the cable television industry. The proposition on which the decision to do so was based was that deregulation would encourage competition, and that would put downward pressure on prices and upward pressure on service-- another gift from a Republican congress. But here we are going on two decades later and as far as cable television is concerned, there is only one provider available to each of us. The only competition in the industry is from new technologies like satellite transmission and AT&T's Uverse system, generated because the cable companies have fought every attempt by outside competitors to gain access to the infrastructure that we all subsidized through our taxes and promoted with easements across our yards and under and over our streets. So, while we do have options, they entail large reception equipment on our roofs and compromises on the quality of reception, and thus there is no effective competition within the cable industry because of deregulation, not in spite of it.

Then, there was deregulation of the financial industry over the past thirty years, culminating in the repeal of the Glass-Steagle Act which had been passed in the thirties to prevent the recurrence of the kind of catastrophe we had in 1929 and the early thirties...and now again in 2008 thanks to that repeal. Coincidentally, a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, signed the repeal of Glass-Steagle in order to get concessions from a Republican congress on other social issues and budgetary considerations, just as the Republican House of Representatives will no doubt try to compel President Obama to do today by seeking the repeal of the Dodd-Frank statutes-- which were intended to do some of what Glass-Steagle did when it was the law-- in exchange for budget and other concessions. Again, the Republican rationale is that the free market will accomplish the desired result while allowing business to thrive. But it seems that the only way in which business knows how to thrive is by burning down the rest of our lives and redirecting our collective wealth into hedge funds and executive bonuses. And now we are paying $4 a gallon for gas because the derivatives markets, which include the market for petroleum "futures," have not been regulated to cull the speculators from the process of buying and selling petroleum. Even J.P.Morgan recently estimated that such speculation adds 27% to the cost of a barrel of oil, but Rcc resistance to regulation of such markets continues to prevail.

And then of course there is the disaster that just enjoyed its one-year anniversary a couple of days ago: the BP oil spill. The spill was caused by a series of technical misjudgments, failures and false economies, as it turned out largely enabled by the co-opting of the federal agency that was responsible to monitor and regulate such wells by the business interests that controlled the industry. In response, our President imposed a moratorium on deep water drilling until it could be demonstrated to be safe, but the Rcc, the Republicans in congress and the local government, that is Bobby Jindal, the Republican governor of Louisiana, complaining all the while. With oil still in their waters, they wanted to take the risk that deep water drilling might do again what it had just done. And regulation of the petroleum industry is still controversial. It seems that as far as business is concerned, there is no limit to the number of times that they will ask us to stick our fingers in the fan if they can profit from our doing so.

So, the history of our world, our nation and our economy have demonstrated amply, and painfully in the bargain, that the free market is in reality nothing but economic hooliganism legalized. It allows rapacity and predation, and prosperity for the few is the bi-product, not prosperity for us one and all. So, in consequence of the free market profits rise shamelessly while wages stagnate at best, hedge fund managers make billions while working men and women lose their homes, the greedy enrich themselves at the expense of a nation that cannot muster the will to stop them. And if we allow Medicare to be subjected to the free market, we might as well expect that it will suffer the same consequences as the petroleum, cable and financial industries have wreaked upon us so far. But this time, it will be our parents' burden to bear, and eventually ours, and then our children's as well, and we will be as responsible as the plutocrats are if we let it happen.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

On Fridays, the New York Times runs two opposing editorials: one by the conservative, David Brooks, and the other by Paul Krugman, the liberal, economics Nobel Prize winner. As one might imagine, their opinions on issues vary considerably, but I, like many thousands of others, enjoy reading them both. Each man has intelligence and insight, and though Brooks suffers from the same inclination to think that things are more important than people in creating positive change while Krugman carries compassion to the point that it is sometimes incongruous with realism, they are rational voices for their beliefs and thus voices worth listening to. But the past two Fridays' editorials by the two men were remarkably focused on a single area of current politics...one that is just now becoming prominent in the news and that will get only more prominent as the end of the 2011 fiscal year approaches: the budget for 2012. The President unveiled his budget some weeks ago, and the clamor from across the aisle made it clear that it would not be the paradigm that the Republican House of Representatives followed when it created a budget. Then a week or so ago, Congressman Paul Ryan, the Chairman of the House Budget Committee, released the Congress's version of the budget to much Republican conservative complex (Rcc) applause, but the budget was predictably parsimonious when it came to the least fortunate of us and unsurprisingly generous to the richest of us. So, last Wednesday, President Obama gave a speech that was to limn his concept of budget balancing strategy to overlay the budget he had previously submitted to the Congress for scrutiny and to respond to, and critique, the Ryan budget. Needless to say, the emphasis of The President's budget strategy was quite different from that in Congressman Ryan's proposal.

Ryan's budget was released during the week before the April 8 editorials of Brooks and Krugman. In that Friday's editorials, Brooks characterized the liberal Democrats of unrealistically believing that the budget could be balanced just by abrogating the Bush tax cuts on the rich, and he touted Ryan's budget as a step in the right direction, needing only to be re-proportioned so as to make it somewhat more humane. Krugman on the other hand characterized Ryan's plan as ludicrous and cruel "voodoo economics." You may remember that phrase-- voodoo economics-- from the Reagan-Bush campaign of 1980. It's what George Bush the elder used to impugn the budgetary math used by Ronald Reagan, and Bush turned out to be largely correct as Reagan, after a major tax reduction in 1981, wound up increasing taxes in four steps during just his first administration, eleven times total in his two administrations combined according to Senator emeritus Alan Simpson. In addition, Krugman criticized the Ryan approach as mean-spirited in the same way as Brooks had characterized the Democratic liberal response as Pollyanna-esque based on its philosophical bent.

But then came The President's speech on Wednesday and the editorials of the following Friday, April 15-- ironically the date on which taxes are usually paid but not this year because of a special holiday in Washington, D.C. In his editorial, Brooks professed to be on Ryan's side with regard to his belief that fundamental reform of health care benefits for the elderly must be made as they cost more than the elderly pay for them. He also favors Ryan's position that the elderly have to pay their share of the cost of deficit reduction and that market competition can work to bring health care costs down...in other words he supports in principle Ryan's voucher plan, which Ryan incidentally prefers to call by some euphemism like "premium subsidies" (the fact that he doesn't want to call the thing by its right name should tell Brooks something...but it doesn't). As to The President's position, Brooks agrees with him that tax increases on the rich are essential to a balanced budget and that the government has a role in providing the safety net that we have all come to take for granted. Krugman, on the other hand, lambasted Ryan's budget and his criticism of the Obama proposal for deficit reduction by pointing out Ryan's hypocrisy. Setting aside accounting errors in the Ryan budget, he points to the fact that Ryan would preserve Medicare Part D, the prescription drug plan, and would also preserve the prohibition of negotiation by Medicare with pharmaceutical companies over the price of pharmaceuticals for the elderly, while at the same time advocating that voucher program in lieu of Medicare as we know it because market pressures will drive insurance and health care costs down. Apparently Ryan isn't aware that the VA, which can negotiate prices for drugs, pays 40% less for them than do the private Part D plans, and as to market pressure driving health care costs down as a general principle, I can't help but observe that such a strategy hasn't worked so far in the free market that is our current health care system, which begs the question, why should it work for Medicare.

So in the final analysis, Brooks and Krugman have outlined the debate for the rest of us, and now all we have to do is choose sides. But there is something on which we all agree. Something has to be done, and soon. Finally, the spurious arguments about Social Security are disappearing with regard to the deficit debate, and now at last, each side has made a comprehensive stand on the issue of the balance between increased taxes and budget cuts in the deficit/debt reduction calculus. All that's left is for us to vote.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

On Wednesday, The President addressed a gathering that probably included a few student at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. I say that it probably included a few students because the front row was populated by several members of Congress, including five Republicans who consider themselves the voices of the Republican conservative complex (Rcc) as I define it. There were Representatives Dave Camp, the Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Paul Ryan, the Chairman of the House Budget Committee, Eric Cantor, the House Majority Leader, and Jeb Hensarling, a conservative "rising star" for years now by all accounts, which I can believe given his obvious tendency toward self-servingly elliptical remarks. It's hard to be a rising star for so long, and his blatant politicization of his every thought doesn't reflect intelligence, but rather does reflect that he is desperate to stop rising and be risen. He isn't even a joke anymore. He's just an irrelevant punch line. There was also a Republican Congresswoman there, but her remarks in the aftermath of the speech were so lacking in substance and so replete with partisan generalities that I didn't even make note of her name. But as to The President and the other Congressmen, there is really quite a bit to say, though most of it has been said already.

I thought President Obama's speech was excellent, and though the Rcc Congressmen who spoke afterward characterized it as partisan rhetoric, it seemed just the opposite to me. The President made a point of crediting three of his predecessors-- two of them the Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush-- with shepherding bipartisan efforts conjointly with Congresses of the opposite party through the processes of enacting reform of Social Security and passage of contentious budgets that reduced the deficit, in Bill Clinton's case even leading to a budget surplus. Though The President also made oblique reference to the fact that the younger President Bush squandered that surplus and turned it into a deficit with his very first budget, to me it all seemed like credit generously given out of conciliation and solicitude...frankly a much more conciliatory effort than I would have made given the rigidity of party affiliation among Republicans and their demonstrated willingness to put their party's success ahead of principle. And while he criticized the budget propounded by Congressman Ryan as harsh and too broad in its excisions from federal spending while lacking tax increases for those who can afford them, he didn't seem to me to be making his criticism personal, or even vituperative. But the Republican budget is contrary to Democratic principles, and the Republicans would have to have been disingenuous to claim that they expected The President to demur on the subject. So when they spoke, that's exactly what they were: disingenuous. Which leads me to my criticism of The President-- one that I have made previously: he spoke at about 2:00 p.m. on a Wednesday. It was my day off, so I heard the speech, but we all needed to hear it, and once again, all that most of us in America heard was the sound bites that the evening news anchors chose to give us, though there was plenty of "human interest" to go around. As far as the networks are concerned, pap is good; news is superfluous. But I digress. To put it in a nutshell, The President needs to move his bed time back so that he can stay up with the grown ups after dinner some nights.

As to the Rcc Congressmen, I think that all of us Americans needed to see their real stripe as well, but like The President, they were on in the afternoon rather than after dinner when we all could have, and should have, seen them in action. Congressman Camp, the Ways and Means Chairman, seems a reasonable man, and though he took issue with The President, he did it civilly and professionally. But Hensarling is as dogmatically conservative as anyone I have ever heard speak, and he is a champion prevaricator as well as a peremptory buffoon. He yapped like the other Congressmen's irate lap dog about what he characterized as The President's failure to make a specific proposal about Social Security reform, claiming that the Republican budget did so. And while he complained about The President using "scare tactics" and demagoguery in his speech, he himself feigned alarm about The President's statement that Social Security is not causing the debt or the deficit that we are suffering with today, which is the truth, he inadvertently admitted it to be so a few minutes later. At first he claimed that Social Security needed reform now despite Mr. Obama's statement that while it needed reform, it was not an emergency; since the program is solvent until 2037, that seems like a pretty accurate assessment. But within five minutes, he reiterated his claim that something had to be done about Social Security in order to ensure that his children would get their benefits. Hensarling is fifty seven, and I assume that his children are about the same age as mine, which means that in thirty years or so, there will be a problem unless it is addressed...some time within the next twenty five years. Considering the problems we have on our plate right now, I agree with President Obama and his debt commission that the program needs reform, but it can be done gradually and it has nothing to do with reducing the debt or the deficit.

Of course, the hyperbole-prone Eric Cantor had his say to the effect that The President's speech contained no suggestions but tax increases, and that they would harm the recovery, never addressing the facts that the extension of the Bush tax cuts didn't stimulate the creation of any new jobs and that despite the $2 trillion cash pile that business is already sitting on, they still aren't doing the right thing, and won't until there is demand for what they sell. Cantor doesn't seem to have the common sense to realize that demand comes before production, not the other way around, and more cash for the rich doesn't stimulate demand. But Cantor is a Republican shill, so I don't really expect anything more from him. Ryan, on the other hand, seemed like a guy who, though captive to Rcc dogma, is intelligent enough to be reasoned with...at least until he spoke after the speech. In response to a reporter's question as to what specifics his budget included on the subject, he agreed with Hensarling that President Obama had not put forward a specific plan to correct Social Security's cash flow problems, which don't start until 2037, but he did claim that he had. Then he described that proposal: if congress doesn't do something within a set period of time, they will have to sit down in a room together and hash something out because that's his budget's solution to the problem. And, as if that didn't demonstrate his insincerity, he went on to criticize The President for forming his debt commission and then not advocating the changes it, or at least its co-chairmen, recommended. I guess since Ryan did not actually use the term "commission" in his budget, he doesn't think that that is what he proposed.

It comes to this. On Wednesday, President Obama took a good first step toward redirecting the debate on how to address the nation's fiscal woes toward Democratic humanism tempered by fiscal pragmatism and away from Republican materialism and social Darwinism. Despite the puling of the Rcc Congressmen, his speech foreshadowed what will be some rational and productive changes that will be painful, but even handedly so, and the specifics of The President's proposals will hopefully begin coming out for public consumption directly. But I hope that in the future, Mr. Obama will talk to us about them when we are home rather than leaving us a message while we are at work, hoping that the news media will deliver it. Because they almost never do.

Your friend,

Mike

As I have previously noted, I am preoccupied with Social Security and what the Republican conservative complex (Rcc) is trying to do to it. The Social Security Trust Fund contains something on the order of $2.6 trillion--that's trillion with a "t"--but the federal government has borrowed all of it, and the Republicans in congress complain incessantly because now, they have to pay it back as we all might have expected since they played a major role in spending it. The long and short of it is that Social Security is the only federal government program that funds itself and has money on hand for decades of its cost. It is not in any way part of our debt or deficit problem, but the program lent the federal government its money and is now therefore a target because the federal government doesn't want to pay its debt. If we were dealing with a bank, someone would be going to jail for such a scheme, but since we are dealing with Republicans, they seem to have some kind of immunity. Still, we cannot let them get away with this without a fight. So, while I have had to cut back on the frequency with which I write to you by limiting myself to Monday and Friday, I have written to you several times about Social Security, and I feel that comments made about the Republicans and their plans for the program bear repeating. thus, for the foreseeable future, I will reprise those letters on Wednesdays with the thought that someone who missed them might be interested in Social Security too, and in what it means to us as a nation as well. Here is this Wednesday's reprise: my letter of November 17, 2010.

Dear America,

Almost any current affairs program you turn to on television will at some point have a discussion of the economy and which way we should turn next. Monday night Lawrence Kudlow, your basic Wall Street cheer leader, had two economists on his program: one was the progressive former labor secretary, Robert Reich, and the other was someone I have never seen before whose name I neither remember nor care to. Reich's position has been the same all along; the rich have too much money and they are not only killing the rest of us with it, they will eventually kill themselves-- the goose and the golden egg theory. The other party to the debate insisted that what we need is less regulation and lower taxes; where have you heard that before. But regardless of my ingrained tendencies, self-interest is not an alien concept to me. If the conservative mentality on the subject of how to cure our economic woes is the most effective for everyone, I will gladly admit to being wrong in my predilections and climb up into the Republican conservative complex's (Rcc) gravy train as long as there is room for everyone on it. And correspondingly, if the progressive school of thought is materially best for everyone, I will follow as I always have, given that I believe such to be the case. But either way, I have to figure out my own position before the next election as do we all considering that there are legions strenuously urging each of us to go in either direction. Thus, consistent with my creed that we should think with our own heads and not someone else's, I am going to spend the next two years asking questions and deciding for myself whose answers make the most sense. I am starting with the notion that we must reduce benefits and the cost of Social Security in order to balance the budget.

The most recent figures I have heard are that Social Security will go "cash negative" in five years. That means that five years from now, the Social Security "trust fund" will begin paying out more than it takes in, trust fund being the operative phrase. Mind you, there is already enough in the trust fund and being paid into it between now and then that Social Security benefits could continue to be paid at the same rate without any change in the income of the fund-- that is the aggregate amount we citizens pay into it-- until about twenty years from now. I am not advocating that we make no adjustments to prevent the negative cash and income situations from emerging, but here's the question: if Social Security is paid out of a trust fund, that is funds dedicated solely to the purpose of paying Social Security benefits, and there's enough in the fund to pay benefits for awhile thus obviating any federal subsidization, how does reducing those benefits or increasing the fund's revenues reduce the deficit or the national debt? It would be one thing if Social Security benefits were paid out of the general fund, which comprises all of the revenue of the U. S. government-- and I advocate that incidentally-- but it isn't. If you look at your next pay stub, you will see that, while your check is reduced by federal income tax withholding-- that's the general fund money-- it is also reduced by a deduction strictly for Social Security. They are separate and distinct from one another. The Social Security money goes into the trust fund I mentioned above, and it can't be used for anything else, just as funds put in trust by Bill Gates for his kids to live on some day cannot be used for any purposes other than those he dictates in the terms of the trust. The funds in the Social Security trust are our own joint savings account and that money belongs to us even though the U.S. treasury holds it for us. It is not federal revenue of any kind, at least as I understand it. It is true that the U.S. government borrows that money as soon as it comes in, but that does not make it any less ours.

I raise this issue because, on the conservative side of the debate people are clamoring for benefit reductions and an increase in the retirement age. But as I said above, as I see it those things might help prevent the cash negative situation the fund is facing, and they might make it unnecessary to decrease benefits in the future, but I don't see how they reduce the debt or the deficit? So what benefit would devolve from doing those things? As to the liberal side of the argument...well, I frankly haven't heard much, which seems to be par for the course these days. My own opinion is that increasing the retirement age would just reduce the number of jobs available to people coming into the job market. It's just simple arithmetic. If there are ten jobs and ten occupants filling them longer, those needing the jobs have to wait longer to get them, and they stay unemployed longer as a consequence. And on the revenue side of the issue, it seems to me that we could solve the balance of payments problem by getting more in the way of contributions from those working toward retirement in several ways: we could increase the maximum contribution by raising the income ceiling under which you pay into the system, we could increase the percentage of income contributed, maybe we could even find someone to pay a higher interest rate when they borrow the money than the federal government does. And maybe a combination of the income measures and the benefit reduction measures would be appropriate. But what does that have to do with the national debt or the deficit, which translates to the question, why is the President's debt reduction commission even mentioning it?

So, I admit that I don't understand how all of the debt reduction pieces relative to Social Security fit together. And while I have abandoned this idea lately, I am willing to assume once again that the people in charge are smarter than we are. Therefore, I'm asking them, or anyone else for that matter, to explain it to me. America, here's my email address: MichaelWolf@letters2america.com. Please write to me and let me know where I'm wrong, because really, if the Rcc has one, I'd love to get on their gravy train.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Several days ago, a young man-- an EMT by profession and apparently a compassionate soul by nature-- went to a Los Angeles Dodgers' game. At the game, two men beat him so badly that he had to be put into a medically induced coma in the hope that he could overcome his injuries if he lay still enough for long enough. He was beaten because he was wearing a San Francisco Giants' jersey. Of course, we all condemn such brutality, especially when it is committed for such trivial reasons, and presumably, the number of people in our society who would do such a thing is so minimal that it is not even statistically cognizable. But that does not mean that the event is not, in some attenuated way, a reflection of who we have become as a nation. For while the beating was an aberration, was it a social anomaly in the context of the ways in which we as Americans direct our individual lives' activities. We are all products of our culture, and that includes the two cretins who committed the crime, so I find myself thinking that, while it was an aberration, it was not a totally surprising one.

Like the rest of you, I occasionally have the experience of driving along the highway at highway speed on cruise control when someone passes me and gets in lane ahead of me only to slow down. Or I catch up to someone while I am driving at a constant speed, and when I do, they speed up so as to prevent me from passing them and getting into their lane in front of them. Both of those things happened to me several times yesterday during a five hour trip, and while these are trivial complaints, they are also reflective of the ethos that leads to things like the beating at Dodger Stadium, and in fact, that ethos has been institutionalized, even in our political establishment. The first time I actually recognized it was during the administration of the first President Bush.

The vice presidency has long been known to all as a political parking space in which political operatives fill that sinecure for a period while they wait in line to run for president. Dan Quayle was President George H.W. Bush's vice president, and he was particularly suited for such a position given his lack of stellar qualities. So, Quayle was put in charge of a Council of Competitiveness within the White House. I had never heard of such a thing, and I haven't heard of it since, but it was a clear statement of the goals of that particular Republican administration. Just to be clear, competition is not a uniquely Republican fixation; our current president talks about competition all the time, as did Bill Clinton, and of course President Bush the Younger did too. Our congressmen and senators invoke competitiveness as a justification for everything from education reform to tax cuts, and both conservatives and liberals tout it as a goal for our country...competitiveness in the world market place is our national holy grail. Bill Gates talks about it. Warren Buffet talks about it. Coaches, college professors, school teachers, even our mothers and fathers talk about it when they tell each of us that we're "special." We live in a society in which no one is anything unless he is better than the next guy.

There is an old joke about that infinite hierarchy, or perhaps we should coin a new term for it: "lower-archy." A guy goes into a phone booth and calls the FBI in response to a search for the last guy, you know, the guy at the end of the line of all the people who "are worse off than you." He puts his dime in the phone and calls The Bureau where he speaks to an operator. He says, "I hear you're looking for the last guy. That's me." He is put on hold, and before he knows it, a bunch of big black sedans surround the phone booth and he is pulled out and hand cuffed. "What are you doing?" he says. "You're making my miserable life worse by arresting me? I'm already the last guy!" To which the agent responds, "Yeah? You're the last guy? Well, where'd you get the dime?" The problem with the myth that there's always someone worse off is like the problem created by the myth that everyone can be rich if he puts in the time and the effort: it just isn't true. We can't all be rich, for one reason because rich is a relative term, and for another, because someone has to do the dirty work or no one can be rich. Similarly, we can't all be better than everyone else. By definition, there is only one "best," which means that the rest of us have to be something less. What we as Americans have not yet learned to do is to live with that.

Almost everyone is less than the best, and even those few who become the best don't stay the best forever. Just ask Tiger Woods. But still, we should be able to satisfy our needs for satisfaction with life by trying hard to do what is important to us for its own sake rather than to be better at it than someone else, and by taking from the effort what gratification of our needs just the doing of it provides, though that is not the popular view. The popular view is that if you are ahead of me on the highway, I have to vindicate myself because I am no longer ahead of you...no longer better than you. If my son's little league team doesn't beat your son's, I have to belittle your son's team so as to reassert my son's superiority. If you get a better job than I, you must have cheated somehow because I know that I am a better worker than you are. If you drive a more expensive car than I, mine is better because I got more for my money. If you have an addition put on your house, I have to have one too...a bigger one. And now, if the team from your town is better than the team from mine, I have to beat you into oblivion. It used to be called keeping up with the Joneses, but it has gone far beyond that point and gotten way out of hand. Now, if you even like something that I don't, you are a target for a beating. We have gotten to the point in our society at which someone else's success or prosperity, or even just his difference from the rest of us, is not just a threat to our own egos, it is an insult. We can no longer satisfy ourselves without it being at the expense of someone else. We cannot have self-esteem without relativity, that is, without robbing someone else of his. The consequence is that we are in a constant state of struggle-- with others, with society, with ourselves-- and we can never be satisfied because we insist on being on top, but there is always someone above us, all of which is that destructive obsession with superiority and the insufficiency of mere accomplishment...a destructive obsession rather than one that leads to success.

Maybe competitiveness is important, but as for me, I prefer satisfaction to superiority. This is like the issue of our priorities as a nation. We have to decide who we are. I'm in favor of letting each of us define himself and allow those who love and care about him or her to give him value rather than giving that power to those who are ahead of him in the passing lane. It's simple. As a nation we have this one simple issue to resolve, and it comes before Olympic pride, being true to our schools, whether to ban abortion and family planning or deciding which federal programs to cut and which to keep. Either we believe in the golden rule or we don't.

Your friend,

Mike

MichaelWolf@Letters2America.com

Dear America,

I don't know how you feel about it, but I am sick of the finger pointing and whining in Washington about the 2011 budget. The Republicans fulminate that they have tried everything and the Democrats are intransigent. The Democrats complain that they have given much more up than they think they should have, but the Republicans keep upping the ante and refusing to moderate their position. The Tea Party stamps its collective little foot and complains that it hasn't yet gotten its way, and all the while, they all tell the truth as they see it, and none of their truths seem to be consistent with one another, much less reality. It makes me wonder, what's a voter to do. And that is the real problem. It was all crystalized for me in one instant by John Boehner, the Speaker of the House of Representatives. He was meeting with the press after the first meeting between the leadership of the two houses of congress under the aegis of the White House. Boehner was asked for some specific areas of disagreement in a particular area, and his response to the reporter who asked the question was, "I'm not going to negotiate that here." In other words, I am going to continue to accuse the Democrats of everything, and I am not going to explain myself to the American people.

Harry Reid, the Democratic Majority Leader of the Senate has done slightly better, but he too has taken a somewhat inscrutable position. On that same occasion, he addressed the press, and he complained about the shifting demands of the Republicans in The House. He also complained about the Republicans' politicization of the process of keeping the government running temporarily in that they have not been satisfied to slash and burn by $12 billion without touching the defense budget while pushing their social agenda in the form of riders to a "continuing resolution" that would defund Planned Parenthood and the Affordable Health Care Act and strip the Environmental Protection Agency of its power to enforce some environmental regulations among other political goals: a legitimate complaint I would say. National Public Radio's federal funding has also been threatened. But when someone in the press corps asked Reid if the Democrats in The Senate were going to propose their own budget as an alternative to the budget offered by the Republicans, he said that they were thinking about it. So in the final analysis, we have the two political parties standing monolithically against each decrying the other's position, but through it all, we have never been given anything but the barest allegations as to the deficiencies of either party's position. They both have told us what they don't like, but neither has told us what they do for the most part. The Democrats have offered tens of billions of dollars in cuts, and the Republicans have offered a similar amount, but apparently the Democrats' cuts are so different from the Republicans' that they are irreconcilable. I can't help but wonder how that is possible.

What emerged from the political conflagration burning Washington and the country down this past week or two is this. Neither side wants to tell us what it proposes for an austerity budget in specific detail. Each side wants to tell us how bad the other is, but neither wants us to see the whole picture of its own position, and I think that's because both sides know that what they want to do will make us all mad, America. The goal here is not to solve the problem. It is, as the old Russian aphorism says, to get out of the water dry. Both sides know that whatever they propose to do about the mess they have created for us over the past decade or so, there are going to be a lot of voters angry at them for it, so they have refused to admit their plans and instead are trying to get us to look at the other guys' plan before we see theirs. That way, they can have a free hand at vituperating the opposition because they won't have revealed the worst about themselves. It's a public relations game, and a con game in the bargain. I admit that I am a hard and fast Democrat, and I admit as well that I see the Republicans as being more disingenuous in this whole thing. But the bottom line is that the Democrats have mishandled this episode of mutually assured partisan destruction just as badly as they did the Bush tax cuts in the second half of last year. They were so afraid that we, America, would not see things their way that they didn't dare take a stand, and as a result, we-- or at least some of us-- elected the other guys. They made the dire prophesy, and then they fulfilled it themselves. That is what they are doing now. In a recent poll that I saw on the news, 37% of us think that the Democrats are going to be responsible for a government shut down, but 37% think it will be the Republicans' fault. The balance of us think it is both their faults. If there was intelligence in Washington-- and frankly it seems more likely to me that there is intelligence on another planet-- they would all recognize that this game they are playing will have only losers and they would try something else, but that seems ever less likely to happen unless we can somehow prevail upon them to give us what we need: information.

So here is what I propose. Each of us should write to his Congressman and Senator and tell them that we want a list of the twenty biggest budget cuts they propose with the amounts of the cuts. It would be ideal to ask for a copy of each one's budget, but there probably hasn't been that kind of comprehensive thinking to date...that would be too much to ask. Then, we should all begin calling the pollsters rather than waiting for them to call us. We should tell them what the proposed cuts are, and then tell them what we think of them by voting yes or no on each side's proposal. The pollsters will then report that polling data, and the politicians will read it. Then, they will know how what they are doing is going to affect their individual political careers. That's when we will get a resolution of this stalemate: when self-interest intervenes. But until they tell us what they stand for rather than what they don't like about what the other guys stand for, we aren't going to get anywhere. It's all about voting with our own heads, America, and not with theirs...certainly not without knowing who they really are.

Your friend,

Mike

MichaelWolf@Letters2America.com

Yesterday, Paul Ryan, the Republican budget savage who has been put in charge of reorienting our national finances toward supply side economics, announced his budget plan, which included, as you might have anticipated, tax cuts-- that is additional tax cuts-- for the rich along with cuts in the programs known collectively as the "social safety net." Social safety net is a euphemism for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, which is federally funded state run medical care programs for the poor primarily, plus a few much smaller programs and of course the recent health insurance reform law. As I have admitted, I am preoccupied with Social Security and what the Republican conservative complex (Rcc) is trying to do to it, so the Ryan budget proposal is of great interest to me, though I have been awaiting its publication with dread as well anticipation. So you can imagine how elated I was when I read that his budget does not reduce Social Security, though it doesn't reduce defense spending either. You may remember from others of these letters that the Social Security Trust Fund contains something on the order of $2.6 trillion--that's trillion with a "t"--but the federal government has borrowed all of it, and the Republicans in congress complain incessantly because now, they have to pay it back. But the long and short of it is that Social Security is the only federal government program that funds itself and has money on hand for decades of its cost to come. It is not in any way part of our debt or deficit problem, though since the program did lend the federal government its money it is now a target because the federal government doesn't want to pay its debt. So, the fact that Paul Ryan does not intend to cut Social Security in order to balance the budget is in effect an admission from the pinnacle of the Republican Party establishment that calls to do so are spurious at best, dastardly at worst, and disingenuous if you are a fan of moderation. With that in mind, I am reprising my letter of August 6, 2010, now that I have Paul Ryan on my side, but just a note before I do. A federal budget is an enormously complicated document, and even if I had access to Ryan's, I probably wouldn't be able to digest the major part of it. But with the exception of the fact that Ryan believes that the only way to approach fiscal responsibility is to reduce spending rather than increasing taxes as well to cover part of the deficit, his budget may have some good points. As details become more clear, we will all be able to come to conclusions in that regard, but just if Ryan sees the light on that point....just imagine if a Republican actually did something of value for all of us, not just the privileged few. Such a Republican might have a future in politics.

Dear America,

As all of you know, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius announced yesterday that the "Medicare Trust Fund" will be solvent for a few more years-- until 2029 the trustee now says-- because of the new health insurance reform law. And Social Security will also be solvent, until 2037, though the "Social Security Trust Fund" will begin losing money this year: similarly, Medicare in all its forms is approaching that kind of reversal threshold but later on down the road. Still, the talk of the town, Washington, D.C. that is, is that those programs will cause the deficit, that is the shortfall of revenue to cover any one year's budget expenditures, to grow based on one proposition: Social Security and Medicare account for one third of all federal expenditures. What's wrong with that statement?

What's wrong is that Social Security and Medicare benefits are not federal expenditures. They are our expenditures, America. Those benefits are paid out of the trust funds I just mentioned, which we endowed as individuals with our money, dedicated to one purpose only: the funding of our retirement income and elder health care needs. The money is not just earmarked; it is ours. The federal government writes the checks, but they are drawn on our trust fund, just as the retirement needs of our plutocrats are funded by their trust funds, only not only did daddy fund our trusts, we funded them too. So how does our drawing on our trust funds increase someone else's, that is the federal government's, deficit? Here's the answer: it doesn't. True, the federal government borrows every dollar we pay into the trusts until one of us becomes eligible under the terms of the trust and wants to collect his money, but the money itself, the IOU from the feds, belongs to us, not them. So, if the Rcc wants to claim Social Security spending as a problem, the first thing they have to do is to convert Social Security from a program funded by its own trust to a general fund program funded by tax dollars. I am in favor of that by the way, but until it's done, the Republicans and the Rcc have to keep their hands off our money. They can't both claim the right to confiscate some of our benefits and force us to be the only ones to endow a "trust" from which those benefits are paid and which they don't supplement when it runs dry. In other words, they can't both eat our cake and have it too.

My point is that the Republicans and the Republican conservative complex (Rcc) are constantly ranting about reducing federal spending by cutting entitlements. That's code for cutting Social Security and Medicare benefit eligibility, among other things by increasing the retirement age. But they never explain how reducing our rate of expenditure of our money helps to mitigate the national debt and the budget deficit. They are not talking about borrowing that money-- they've already done that. So what do they mean? Well, my guess is that they are just using Rcc speak to say that they don't want to contribute to those programs anymore: they want to keep their money and manage for their own retirements and old age, you know, like they didn't do before The Depression, which necessitated the New Deal and Social Security in the first place. They want to privatize Social Security and Medicare so that we can all be rich in our old age. They want us to invest in big business, like in the stock market for example (can you imagine where we would be if we had all had money in the market instead of in the Social Security Trust Fund). But most of all, they want to blame someone other than themselves for the mess we are in-- it's misdirection, my friends, misdirection, and a red herring in the bargain. Reducing "spending" by reducing Social Security benefits in particular will serve no purpose but to take money out of the stream of commerce-- we have less to spend so less gets spent. They never mention that back half of the proposition, and presumably, if they get their way and benefits are reduced, they will find another source of the common man's weal to take so as to undo the next financial catastrophe born of greed. And there will surely be one because that one third of federal spending about which they complain goes directly into the chain of commerce: for the most part, people on Social Security don't have the resources to bank their monthly stipends. They spend the money, albeit on frivolities like food, clothing and shelter, but they spend it. So, once again, what the Rcc is advocating is the very petard by which we will all be hoist one more time if they get their way: a bullet aimed not just at their collective foot but at ours as well.

It is remarkable that people who have such an interest in money, particularly their own, have no idea where it comes from. In a recent article written for The Nation, an admittedly liberal journal, Robert Reich, the bearded, diminutive economics gnome who was the Labor Secretary under former President Clinton, opines that the problem with our economy is that the rich are too rich. The money they count does not go into the stream of commerce the way that unemployment benefits, average earnings, the fifty bucks grandma gives your kids when they graduate from college, and yes, our Social Security benefits do. That is an observation more than a theory. It's only common sense. No jobs come from a rich man stashing more money in the trust fund for his soon-to-be rich kids.

So, I have but one song to sing to the Rcc, and it's about self-preservation-- their self-preservation as well as ours. It is not the supply side that drives the economy. It is demand, stupid. Please join me in the chorus, America.

Your friend,

Mike

Yesterday, Paul Ryan, the Republican budget savage who has been put in charge of reorienting our national finances toward supply side economics, announced his budget plan, which included, as you might have anticipated, tax cuts-- that is additional tax cuts-- for the rich along with cuts in the programs known collectively as the "social safety net." Social safety net is a euphemism for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, which is federally funded state run medical care programs for the poor primarily, plus a few much smaller programs and of course the recent health insurance reform law. As I have admitted, I am preoccupied with Social Security and what the Republican conservative complex (Rcc) is trying to do to it, so the Ryan budget proposal is of great interest to me, though I have been awaiting its publication with dread as well anticipation. So you can imagine how elated I was when I read that his budget does not reduce Social Security, though it doesn't reduce defense spending either. You may remember from others of these letters that the Social Security Trust Fund contains something on the order of $2.6 trillion--that's trillion with a "t"--but the federal government has borrowed all of it, and the Republicans in congress complain incessantly because now, they have to pay it back. But the long and short of it is that Social Security is the only federal government program that funds itself and has money on hand for decades of its cost to come. It is not in any way part of our debt or deficit problem, though since the program did lend the federal government its money it is now a target because the federal government doesn't want to pay its debt. So, the fact that Paul Ryan does not intend to cut Social Security in order to balance the budget is in effect an admission from the pinnacle of the Republican Party establishment that calls to do so are spurious at best, dastardly at worst, and disingenuous if you are a fan of moderation. With that in mind, I am reprising my letter of August 6, 2010, now that I have Paul Ryan on my side, but just a note before I do. A federal budget is an enormously complicated document, and even if I had access to Ryan's, I probably wouldn't be able to digest the major part of it. But with the exception of the fact that Ryan believes that the only way to approach fiscal responsibility is to reduce spending rather than increasing taxes as well to cover part of the deficit, his budget may have some good points. As details become more clear, we will all be able to come to conclusions in that regard, but just if Ryan sees the light on that point....just imagine if a Republican actually did something of value for all of us, not just the privileged few. Such a Republican might have a future in politics.

Dear America,

As all of you know, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius announced yesterday that the "Medicare Trust Fund" will be solvent for a few more years-- until 2029 the trustee now says-- because of the new health insurance reform law. And Social Security will also be solvent, until 2037, though the "Social Security Trust Fund" will begin losing money this year: similarly, Medicare in all its forms is approaching that kind of reversal threshold but later on down the road. Still, the talk of the town, Washington, D.C. that is, is that those programs will cause the deficit, that is the shortfall of revenue to cover any one year's budget expenditures, to grow based on one proposition: Social Security and Medicare account for one third of all federal expenditures. What's wrong with that statement?

What's wrong is that Social Security and Medicare benefits are not federal expenditures. They are our expenditures, America. Those benefits are paid out of the trust funds I just mentioned, which we endowed as individuals with our money, dedicated to one purpose only: the funding of our retirement income and elder health care needs. The money is not just earmarked; it is ours. The federal government writes the checks, but they are drawn on our trust fund, just as the retirement needs of our plutocrats are funded by their trust funds, only not only did daddy fund our trusts, we funded them too. So how does our drawing on our trust funds increase someone else's, that is the federal government's, deficit? Here's the answer: it doesn't. True, the federal government borrows every dollar we pay into the trusts until one of us becomes eligible under the terms of the trust and wants to collect his money, but the money itself, the IOU from the feds, belongs to us, not them. So, if the Rcc wants to claim Social Security spending as a problem, the first thing they have to do is to convert Social Security from a program funded by its own trust to a general fund program funded by tax dollars. I am in favor of that by the way, but until it's done, the Republicans and the Rcc have to keep their hands off our money. They can't both claim the right to confiscate some of our benefits and force us to be the only ones to endow a "trust" from which those benefits are paid and which they don't supplement when it runs dry. In other words, they can't both eat our cake and have it too.

My point is that the Republicans and the Republican conservative complex (Rcc) are constantly ranting about reducing federal spending by cutting entitlements. That's code for cutting Social Security and Medicare benefit eligibility, among other things by increasing the retirement age. But they never explain how reducing our rate of expenditure of our money helps to mitigate the national debt and the budget deficit. They are not talking about borrowing that money-- they've already done that. So what do they mean? Well, my guess is that they are just using Rcc speak to say that they don't want to contribute to those programs anymore: they want to keep their money and manage for their own retirements and old age, you know, like they didn't do before The Depression, which necessitated the New Deal and Social Security in the first place. They want to privatize Social Security and Medicare so that we can all be rich in our old age. They want us to invest in big business, like in the stock market for example (can you imagine where we would be if we had all had money in the market instead of in the Social Security Trust Fund). But most of all, they want to blame someone other than themselves for the mess we are in-- it's misdirection, my friends, misdirection, and a red herring in the bargain. Reducing "spending" by reducing Social Security benefits in particular will serve no purpose but to take money out of the stream of commerce-- we have less to spend so less gets spent. They never mention that back half of the proposition, and presumably, if they get their way and benefits are reduced, they will find another source of the common man's weal to take so as to undo the next financial catastrophe born of greed. And there will surely be one because that one third of federal spending about which they complain goes directly into the chain of commerce: for the most part, people on Social Security don't have the resources to bank their monthly stipends. They spend the money, albeit on frivolities like food, clothing and shelter, but they spend it. So, once again, what the Rcc is advocating is the very petard by which we will all be hoist one more time if they get their way: a bullet aimed not just at their collective foot but at ours as well.

It is remarkable that people who have such an interest in money, particularly their own, have no idea where it comes from. In a recent article written for The Nation, an admittedly liberal journal, Robert Reich, the bearded, diminutive economics gnome who was the Labor Secretary under former President Clinton, opines that the problem with our economy is that the rich are too rich. The money they count does not go into the stream of commerce the way that unemployment benefits, average earnings, the fifty bucks grandma gives your kids when they graduate from college, and yes, our Social Security benefits do. That is an observation more than a theory. It's only common sense. No jobs come from a rich man stashing more money in the trust fund for his soon-to-be rich kids.

So, I have but one song to sing to the Rcc, and it's about self-preservation-- their self-preservation as well as ours. It is not the supply side that drives the economy. It is demand, stupid. Please join me in the chorus, America.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

The President announced on Friday that our economy had created 213,000 new jobs in the month of March and that the unemployment rate had gone down by .1% to 8.8%, and this in spite of the irrational speculation-inspired increase in the prices of food, barreled oil and gasoline. My belief continues to be that the 2% decrease in our Social Security contributions starting in the month of January is what is causing the new jobs to be created with the cognate decrease in unemployment, but the Republican conservative complex (Rcc) continues to say that the reason things aren't better is the lack of predictability of taxes and regulation causing a concomitant lack of "confidence" in the business community. The theory seems to be that business will not invest to make money today because it is not sure that it will be able to make money tomorrow, but the things that belie such an absurd notion are legion in number, not to mention that American business has never been known to pass up a way to make a buck even if it was questionable.

First, taxes are stable at the rates they have been at since the 2003 Bush tax cuts. Perhaps the business community hasn't heard yet, but the Republicans extorted a continuation of those cuts, even for the richest of us, for another two years. Second, with what amounts to a 2% raise for every working American in the form of the Social Security contribution reduction, demand seems to be improving, and hence, new jobs necessary for business to meet the commensurate 2% increase in demand are being created. Third, as of the end of the last fiscal year, business on the whole was sitting on the biggest capital reserve in history, estimated at more than $2 trillion, which I characterize as the money they're saving for a sunny day. Fourth, as to the debt and the deficit putting a damper on business's enthusiasm, the tax cut for the top earners in our country put $70 billion in their pockets this year, which would be more than enough to reduce the 2011 budget deficit by even the amounts that the Tea Party seems to be set on. So if they were so concerned about the deficit, why did they let their political surrogates demand that they continue to get that unneeded funding for themselves personally when it could have helped fund the nation that they all claim to be concerned about. As to the fear of regulation causing reluctance to invest, the world is choking on noxious substances, so environmental controls are not some liberal cause, they are life and death pursuits. On the issue of financial regulation, well, just look what they did to us without the regulations that they managed to abrogate in consequence of their lobbying and cajoling over the past thirty years. And even at that, they made enormous gains in profitability in 2010 despite having to borrow money in 2009, and while the rest of the nation struggled behind debt that the banks more or less created while pocketing huge windfalls by doing so.

All of this may seem simplistic, but it is no less reasonable for being so, and at the very least, if it were all put to the American people to consider, it would be up to the Rcc to refute it. Instead, however, they seem to have created an irrefutable, or at least un-refuted presumption that their obsession with tax cuts and austerity budgets to the exclusion of tax reform is the right solution. The question is, who should be raising the issues for debate. The President, that's who, but he isn't doing so. On March 15, 2011, The President held his twelfth solo press conference at the White House...at 11:15 a.m. on a Wednesday. Last Friday, he was on one of his field trips to a UPS plant, and he spoke to the workers in the morning about all the new jobs that were created last month. No one saw it except for what the news media deigned to present that night. In fact, the President has held only four solo press conferences in prime time since he took office. It is almost as if he is afraid to face the press in the presence of the vast majority of the American people. It's surprising in light of the fact that he has taken so many pages from the Clinton play book since the disastrous mid-term election. Clinton put the Republicans to the test by making them take a position, but then he summoned the press to hear what amounted to his soliloquy on the subject at a press conference. And he always managed to put the blame where it should lay with an argument so cogent that the conservative majority at the time had no choice but to retreat. He was the master of the "Bully Pulpit." The term comes from Teddy Roosevelt in the form of an off hand remark he made while reading a speech to his confidants in the White House. He recognized in its content that he was moralizing and preaching to the nation, but while he may have been loathe to do so, he couldn't resist because he had "such a bully pulpit," bully in the British sense meaning "jolly good." That's what we hire a president to do. Anyone can go to the office and shut the door. But a president has to come out in public and lead, not just by using his veto pen, but by invocating his moral authority loudly and in public. That is where Barrack Obama has failed his ever less faithful following.

So, I would exhort President Obama to more powerfully assert his intelligence and reasoning power against the forces of...dogma (I'll bet you thought I was going to say evil, didn't you). There is but one man in the world who can get the major television and radio networks to give him time to address us all whenever he wants, and that's the President of the United States. There are specific reasons why the Republican proposed spending cuts are draconian, I'm sure, but no one knows them because the Republicans control the discussion and no one, not them or their adversaries, is calling them on the specifics. Someone has to take the time to tell us all why what they want to do is wrong...specifically. I don't have either the information or the bully pulpit from which to do it, and in fact no one but The President does. That is why his party, and for that matter millions of those of us who voted for him want him to start showing up for work...where we all can see him.

Your friend,

Mike

MichaelWolf@Letters2America.com