Winning Progressive

(By Joanne Boyer, cross-posted at Wisdom Voices)

This past week would have been the 87th birthday of one of my true heroes, Bobby Kennedy, who was born on November 20, 1925.  Although far from perfect – like all of us – his genuine compassion for people and his belief that government could make a positive difference is people’s lives has never been duplicated since his tragic death on June 6, 1968.

Bobby Kennedy offered hope to a divided country in 1968 that the progressive spirit would once again resurrect in full force.  For those of us who lived through the assassination of John F. Kennedy – that anniversary just a few days ago – it was Bobby’s run for president during a time of war that made the prospect for peace and justice a possibility.  During a time of division, he suggested a way for healing.

His fervor for Civil Rights, and his commitment to racial equality,was rooted in a firm sense of social justice.  As Senator, Kennedy visited apartheid-ruled South Africa and at the University of Cape Town he delivered the Annual Day of Affirmation speech. A quote from this address appears on his memorial at Arlington National Cemetery.

“Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope.”

He spoke forcefully in favor of what he called the “disaffected, the impoverished, and the excluded.”  Where were those topics in this past presidential election?

For those of us old enough to remember the 1960s, November can be a tough month – with the birthdate of Robert Kennedy and the anniversary of the date that was a defining moment for a generation/era (November 22, 1963).  For all their imperfections, the Kennedys reminded us that we could think outside of our self-interests and that traveling the road of possibilities for good was the far better road to be on.  Both are featured in our book Wisdom of Progressive Voices.

In honor of Bobby’s birthday, here are a few of his great quotes.

“As our nation—and its problems – have grown, we seem to have grown apart from one another.  We seem, through no fault of our own, to look only the short distance; to turn away from the far horizon; to work, each of us, on building a piece of our country.  And the pieces do not match…We became separated from one another, treating those of different races, or religions, or calling, as adversaries instead of allies…the first step in this task is to remember what our government should be…a reflection of common effort, a means of aspiring greater individual opportunity to our citizens.”

–Scottsbluff, Nebraska, April 20, 1968

“I have seen the people of the black ghetto, listening to ever-greater promises of equality and justice, as they sit in the same decaying schools and huddle in the same filthy rooms, without heat, warding off the cold and warding off the rats.  If we believe that we, as Americans, are bound together by a common concern for each other, then an urgent national priority is upon us.  We must begin to end the disgrace of the other America.”

– University of Kansas, March 18, 1968

“What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.”

– Indianapolis, Indiana, April 4, 1968

For this weekend’s reading list, we have reports on conservative plans to bully voters on Election Day, the facts on who doesn’t pay federal income taxes and why, how state tax codes can be used to reduce poverty, the Obama Administration’s regulations aimed at greatly reducing sexual assaults in prisons, and increasing segregation in our schools.

Bullies at the Ballot Box - a report on the plans of True the Vote and other right-wing organization to hinder voting by people of color and other Democratic-leaning groups through overly aggressive and unfounded Election Day challenges to the eligibility of voters in Democratic precincts. For more on this voter suppression effort, see this New York Times article.  And to help defend the right to vote, sign up for the Democratic Party’s election protection efforts.

Misconceptions and Realities About Who Pays Taxes - in the aftermath of the revelation of Mitt Romney’s offensive comments about people who owe no federal income taxes, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has released a report explaining which groups of people don’t pay federal income taxes and how much in other types of taxes most of those folks do pay.

State Tax Codes as Poverty Fighting Tools - a report documenting how state tax policies, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit and child care tax credits, can be used to help reduce poverty.

Prison Rape: Obama’s Program to Stop It – A review of how we can greatly reduce the 209,000 sexual assaults that occur in US prisons every year, and how the Obama Administration’s recently finalized standards for reducing sexual assaults in prison are expected to be successful.

E Pluribus . . . Segregation: Deepening Double Segregation for More Students – a report on how schools in the US are becoming more racially segregated and how government could take action to reduce such segregation.

Over the past few days, the 2012 Presidential election has turned into a battle over Medicare.  On one side, President Obama and Democrats have vowed to defend Medicare as a program of universal coverage for seniors and have worked to strengthen Medicare by protecting benefits while cutting back on waste, fraud, and subsidies to insurance companies.  On the other side is GOP Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan’s proposal to abolish Medicare and replace it with inadequate vouchers for seniors to try to purchase coverage from private insurance companies. Ryan’s plan has been endorsed by Mitt Romney, and virtually every Republican member of the House and Senate has voted in favor of abolishing Medicare and replacing it with inadequate vouchers.

With the battle lines drawn, it is important to remind ourselves what it is we are fighting over.  Medicare is a wildly successful program that provides quality health care coverage at a lower cost than private insurance.  Abolishing Medicare would represent the ultimate triumph of ideology over pragmatism, and would increase costs and impose significant new economic burdens on seniors and their families.  As such, Medicare should be preserved and strengthened, not abolished.

Medicare’s benefits fall into five primary categories:

1. Medicare greatly expands health coverage

In 1964, the year before Medicare was established, almost 50% of seniors were uninsured.  Today, 97% of seniors have health insurance.

2. Medicare is more efficient than private health insurance

Medicare has significantly lower overhead costs than do private insurance.  While there are some debates over exactly how to measure administrative costs, the estimates for Medicare range between 3.6% and 8%, while for private insurance the costs ranges from 12.5% in the large group market to as high as 30% in the individual market.

Medicare has also done a far better job of controlling costs than has the private insurance system.  From 1970 to 2009, annual per enrollee costs went up 8.3% for Medicare and 9.3% for private insurance.   For the years 2002 to 2009, the annual increase in Medicare costs was 4.6% while for private insurance it was 6.7%.  And over the next 10 years – 2012 through 2021, Medicare is projected to have annual cost increases of 3.1%, while private insurance costs are expected to grow by 5% per year.

3. Medicare improves health outcomes

Between 1960 and 2000, the average life expectancy for a 65-year-old increased approximately 20%.  Medicare is almost certainly one of a number of factors that have gone into that increase, especially in the first decade of the program when Medicare led to a substantial change in seniors’ access to health care.  For example, a recent review of the impact of Medicare over its first decade on mortality rates among seniors found that “the program at its inception was an almost unqualified success in improving population health at a very reasonable cost.”

Much of the benefit of Medicare was seen in the early years of the program because, at that time, a higher proportion of people who were in their late 50s or early 60s were in poverty and lacked health insurance. As such, there was a significant impact from Medicare because people suddenly had access to quality insurance and health care they had not previously had.  Those impacts of Medicare are no longer as noticeable because other government programs, employer-based health insurance, etc. mean that far fewer people in their late 50s or early 60s lack insurance today than they did in the early 1960s.  However, if people over the age of 65 suddenly started lacking the access to quality health insurance provided by Medicare, negative health impacts would almost certainly return, especially given that more and more people are losing the guarantee of health insurance that had been provided by employers and pensions.

4. Medicare provides financial security

Health care costs for people who are uninsured or under-insured represent a huge financial burden that can lead to bankruptcy or significant cutbacks in the quality of one’s life.  Medicare provides financial security to seniors, who no longer have to worry about large unpaid medical bills.  In 1964, seniors paid an average of 53% of their health care costs out of pocket.  By 1997, that figure was down to 18%.  And given that the children of seniors often help support their parents and other relatives, the financial security provided by Medicare accrues not only to seniors, but also to people in their 30s, 40s, and 50s who are taking care of their elders.

The financial security provided by Medicare is perhaps best seen in the dramatic reduction in poverty rates among seniors.  In 1935, approximately 50% of people over the age of 65 were living in poverty.  That number has dropped to below 10% thanks in large part to two government programs.  First, Social Security led to a dramatic decline in poverty among seniors from 50% in 1935 to about 33% in the early 1960s.  Then, after Medicare was established, poverty rates for seniors dropped again, to around 15% by 1974 and to around 10% in 1999.

5. Medicare provides significant intangible benefits

The fact that Medicare is universal in its coverage of seniors provides benefits that may not show up on a spreadsheet but are significant nonetheless.  The simple reality is that as we get older our health and mental faculties typically decline. And as that happens, our ability to engage in activities like trying to find a good health insurance policy from a private insurer, making sure the insurer is paying your claims and not improperly denying you coverage, etc. also falls significantly.

Imagine an 89 year old with dementia having to negotiate the world of the private insurance market.  Thanks to Medicare, they do not have to do so.  And while many seniors have family members who take care of them as they get older, Medicare also means that those family members do not have to take time away from caring for their elders in order to deal with the health insurance industry.  I spent the past four years caring for my Dad as he went through the stages of dementia, and it was a huge relief knowing that I could count on Medicare to cover most of his health care bills, rather than having to figure out insurance on top of everything else such care giving entails. But if Republicans end Medicare and replace it with inadequate vouchers, the intangible benefits of Medicare’s universality go out the window.

In summary, Medicare has cost-effectively made health insurance coverage for seniors essentially universal, which has improved health outcomes, increased financial security, and relieved seniors and their caregiving families from the worries of dealing with the private insurance industry.  The Romney/Ryan ticket is working to take those benefits away by abolishing Medicare and replacing it with an inadequate voucher that seniors would have to try to use to obtain insurance in the marketplace.  By contrast, President Obama and the Democrats have worked to preserve Medicare as a universal program and to strengthen the program by reducing waste, fraud, and unnecessary subsidies to insurance companies.

If you agree that we should preserve and strengthen Medicare, rather than voucherizing it, please write a letter to your local newspaper editor and get involved in helping to re-elect President Obama.

(By NCrissie B)

This week I’ve been considering the curious conservative belief that the solution to many problems is more of the same problem. First, I looked at their view on mass shootings. Yesterday I examined the Wall Street crisis and financial regulation. Today I conclude with deficits and tax cuts.

Yelling about the debt …

If you watched the London Olympics Opening Ceremony last night, you may have learned a few things: Mary Poppins can chase Voldemort out of childrens’ dreams, Rowan Atkinson may get bored if asked to play music, and Queen Elizabeth II has enough spunk and good humor to join Daniel Craig in a James Bond-themed royal entry.

If you watched the ads, you also learned that the ‘New Majority Agenda’ are concerned about our national debt….

“Why isn’t the economy stronger? In the seconds it takes to watch this, our national debt will increase $1.4 million,” the narrator ominously intones. “He’s adding $4 billion in debt every day.”

Note: I’m not certain this is the same ad that ran last night, but it’s by the same group, looks the same, and is the most recent such ad about which I could find information.

Who are the ‘New Majority Agenda?’ That’s at the end of the ad, in the small print: Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS Super-PAC. Who are they? Apart from the usual “grassroots” claims, Karl Rove won’t say. He says the group should be exempt from FEC rules that require disclosure of political donations, claiming the Super-PAC is a “social welfare organization” that talks about issues rather than candidates. That claim is as laughable as the argument in the ad itself, which Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler gave two Pinocchios last month:

As with a previous Crossroad GPS ad, this ad exaggerates Obama’s impact on the rise of the debt, as it was not just spending, but a decline in revenue that is responsible for the sharp rise in federal budget deficits. Obama has proposed policies to help reduce the deficit – which Crossroads opposes. That’s their right, but it seems strange to suggest he has done nothing about it.

… and whispering about race.

Why claim President Obama has done nothing to reduce the deficit, when he offered a comprehensive deficit-reduction package that Republicans rejected last summer? Perhaps because the truth wouldn’t fit the emerging Republican narrative of President Obama working to undermine the U.S. as claimed in Dinesh D’Souza’s new ‘documentary’ film:

The film argues that this explains all of the actions of the current administration, from the frosty relations with Israel and outreach to Muslim world, to the refusal to intervene in Syria, to the resistance to offshore drilling and the running up of the national debt. Obama wants to knock America down a peg or two to put it in parity with the Third World. Indeed, the film concludes by arguing that Obama is running up the national debt in a deliberate effort to bankrupt the nation in the name of anti-colonialism.

As D’Souza told ABC News: “Obama wants to shrink America’s footprint in the world because he thinks we’ve been stepping on the world. And that is directly related to the ideology espoused by his father.”

Linking race and the federal budget is hardly new, as Sanford Schram, Joe Soss, and Richard Fording explained in their book Race and the Politics of Welfare Reform. Ronald Reagan’s mythical ‘welfare queen’ reinforced rather than created a conservative meme that we could easily balance our federal budget if we stopped giving money to Those People. D’Souza takes it to the next level, claiming that President Obama is intentionally running up the debt to weaken the United States … because his father was a black man from Kenya who hated the West.

More tax cuts … for some

President Obama’s ‘Grand Bargain’ proposal collapsed on the issue of tax increases for the wealthiest Americans, and D’Souza’s distorted racial lens helps clarify the two very different tax cut proposals considered by the Senate this week. Senate Democrats pushed and ultimately passed their plan to extend the 2001 tax cuts for incomes up to $250,000, as well as 2009 tax cuts that targeted working families. Senate Republicans had proposed a plan to extend all of the 2001 tax cuts – including tax cuts for incomes over $250,000 – but to eliminate most of the 2009 tax cuts for working families.

As polls show most Americans support tax increases for the wealthy, how did Republicans hope to sell their plan of more tax cuts for the rich and while raising taxes for working families? It helps if, like House Majority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA), you argue that it’s unfair for half of Americans to pay no income taxes. Never mind the fact that the working poor pay state sales taxes and other taxes and fees, or that the federal tax code is set up to exclude the working poor with programs like the Earned Income Tax Credit … a program that was created in the 1970s to subsidize low-income jobs.

It’s still unfair for those “lucky duckies” to skate by without paying taxes. Republicans are trying to paint the working poor as the new welfare queens … driving up the debt by soaking up entitlement programs while paying no taxes, protected by a president who wants to undermine America because his father was Kenyan. You don’t need canine hearing to translate that Republicans hope to sell tax increases for the working poor by telling white working class voters those tax increases will stop Those People from busting the budget … and sell tax cuts for the rich by talking about “job creators.”

When it comes to tax cuts, Republicans always want more, more, more … but only for some.

(Crossposted from Blogistan Polytechnic Institute (BPICampus.com))

For this weekend’s reading list we have the story behind the “Black Power” salute at the 1968 Olympics, a review of the history of America’s obsession with guns, a look at poverty in the 50 years after the publication of Michael Harrington’s The Other America, an investigation of how the religious right is spreading homophobia in African nations, and a report on the impact of GOP obstructionism on the federal court system.

Fists of Freedom: An Olympic Story Not Taught In School – the story behind Tommie Smith and John Carlos’ human rights salute at the 1968 Olympics, in which those two American athletes, along with Australian Peter Norman, risked ostracism and rejection by standing up for human rights and racial equality.

Battleground America – an in-depth review of the history of gun laws, gun ownership, and the rise of the NRA in the United States, which is the country with the highest rate of civilian gun ownership in the world (Yemen is second).

Poverty in America 50 Years After Michael Harrington’s The Other America – a look back at Michael Harrington’s seminal book on poverty in America, which was published 50 years ago, and an evaluation of how issues surrounding poverty have and have not changed since then.

Colonizing African Values - a report on how the U.S. Religious Right is promoting the spread of homophobia and anti-LGBT legislation in numerous African nations, and a discussion of how we can fight back and promote human rights instead.

The State of the Judiciary – a report on how unprecedented GOP obstructionism of President Obama’s judicial appointees has left us with a judicial system that is understaffed, and has delayed or even prevented the appointment of eminently qualified jurists.

For this weekend’s reading list we have articles on experts agreeing that we should not attack Iran, the Obama Administration’s corporate tax reform proposal, debunking myths about poverty and the safety net, and climate scientists fighting back against climate deniers.

If you have any feedback on any of these articles, or would like to recommend an article for next weekend’s reading list, please let us know in the comments section below, or at the Winning Progressive Facebook page.

Experts Say Iran Attack is Irrational, Yet Hawks Are Winning the Debate – Why is the media promoting the war hawks’ efforts to start a war with Iran, even as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the head of Mossad warn it would be a horrible idea.

Administration’s Corporate Tax Reform Framework a Promising Start but Falls Short on Raising Revenue - a good overview of the highlights of President Obama’s corporate tax reform proposal, along with its major downside of being revenue neutral. See also this list of Six Tests for Corporate Tax Reform.

Debunking Poverty Myths and Racial Stereotypes – a good debunking of 10 conservative myths about safety net programs and their recipients.

The Inside Story of Climate Scientists Under Siege – Climate scientist Michael Mann, the climate denying Heartland Institute, and the conservative attack on the science of climate change.