Tag Archives: Social Security

Political Rants

Making The case for Postal banking.

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The end of the eviction moratorium this past week and the response by the Squad says a lot about the limitations of the administrative state. Mass evictions should not be a problem. The large COVID relief package passed last year included something like $40 billion in rental assistance, distributed to the states. As of now, only about $3 billion has been allocated to the people who need the help. That’s maybe 8%.

What the fuck? Why is it that when we go through the ridiculously baroque process of applying federal funds to a problem like this, the money often doesn’t get spent? David Dayen talked about this a bit on the Majority Report on Monday. Put simply, after decades of neoliberal attack on the administrative state, the means of getting government aid to people are sclerotic and dysfunctional.

Loudest voice in the room

There’s a reason why we have such an atomized, ineffective system for helping poor and working people. Ordinary people don’t have armies of lobbyists at their disposal. The eviction moratorium is a good illustration of this. The 7 to 11 million people who were at risk of homelessness as a result of the moratorium’s end are underrepresented. Their landlords, by and large, are anything but.

The difference this time around was that a formerly un-housed person became a member of the House of Representatives. Cory Bush, along with some of her allies, became, in effect, lobbyists for renters. And, amazingly, they were successful. Though I know the thought of it is intensely painful to many armchair leftists on Twitter, we should celebrate this small victory, because it is significant. In so doing, however, we must bear in mind that money still talks very, very loudly.

Why we need postal banking

What do we do about a system that easily transfers billions to corporate bankers but can’t seem to manage rent relief for people in trouble? Well, we need some method for delivering direct payments to Americans in a reliable, low-friction way. In my humble opinion, that method is setting up postal banking.

As many of you may know, postal banking is not a new idea. In fact, the Postal Service offered banking services back when I was a little shaver. The idea I prefer is one that is a bit broader than the old version. My preferred version is this: Every American – and I mean every one – gets a postal banking account. Just like getting a Social Security number, they open an account for you when you are born and you have it all your life. It would be a free, interest bearing account that allows for savings, electronic transfers, etc.

My personal preference would be that the Federal Government deposit some amount, say fifty bucks, as a little birthday gift for every newborn. But whether or not that comes to pass, your postal bank account would serve as the deposit account for any federal benefit payments. Now, if you prefer to use a private bank account, you can always transfer your funds to that bank, even set up auto transfers. But no matter what, that account would be there for you.

Put some bank in the reconciliation bill

I think this is an idea whose time has come. It would make the transfer of that $40 billion in rental assistance dead simple. It would give poor and working people access to banking services. It would, in short, make an enormous difference, and help float our beloved Postal Service as well.

Let’s put it in the reconciliation package, people! Call your reps!

luv u,

jp

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Political Rants

Winning and losing.

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I’ll start this post with some overly simplistic observations about human nature – here goes. My first thought is that, in general, modern-day Americans are encouraged to think that the sky’s the limit, but that that sky is about three inches over their heads. It’s a freakish hybrid of the power of positive thinking and terminal pessimism. This comes to mind as I consider what we as Americans are capable of vs. what we’re likely to even try to accomplish over the next few years. We have done enormous things before, no question. While the problems facing us are of an almost unprecedented scale, they are ultimately solvable if we have the political will to act. And yet, because we have been admonished for decades to “think small” when it comes to what we can ask of our government, it feels like we’re frozen in place, like a deer in the headlights. That, it seems to me, is problem number one.

Bernie and the also-rans.

My second observation is about Democrats – more specifically, people inclined to vote for Democrats. They (or I should say, we) are shell-shocked and obsessed with the project finding a presidential candidate that can win against Trump. We listen to talking heads and prognosticators who tell us the relative merits and risks associated with this candidate, that candidate, etc. But the risk of any Democratic presidential candidate, it seems clear, is that Democratic voters won’t show up for them in November. So this ends up being a kind of Dorothy/ruby slipper problem. We waste all of this time and effort on scarecrows, tin men, and cowardly lions, bowing to bogus wizards in hope of salvation when in fact we have had the power to save ourselves from the very beginning. Just pick the goddamn candidate you agree with, then whoever gets the nomination, fucking vote for that person in the general. If we all do that, we will prevail.

With the Nevada caucuses now underway, we need to focus on policy, not competitive politics. Let’s not obsess over which Democrat the never-Trumpers prefer as our nominee. And even more importantly, let’s not be swayed by the notion that we can’t get hard things done. We are faced with a series of hard problems – not in the sense that the solutions are obscure or unknowable, but rather that they require a heavy political lift that we as a nation are wholly unused to. That doesn’t mean we can’t do it. We lifted ourselves out of the Great Depression. We created Social Security and kept it running, despite the many attacks, for all these years. We achieved formal political rights for black people, women, even if those efforts remain works in progress. In short, we need a real sense of possibility if we’re going to accomplish any of these vital task before us.

I think Reverend William Barber said it best when he observed that Martin King wouldn’t have gotten anywhere if, say, at Selma he just said, “Oh, well …. we can’t win.” We can win, if we are willing to work toward it. In fact, that’s the only way.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Step one.

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There’s a lot to say about the Republican’s craven plan to push through a massive tax plan in a matter of days. I needn’t point out that the final bill is likely to be a cobbled together mess, one that we’ll be struggling with for many years to come if it ever finds its way to Trump’s signing hand. Nor do I need to repeat the obvious fact that this is a tremendous giveaway to the richest Americans, to corporations, and to the GOP’s donor base, one that demonstrates the degree to which the Republicans’ supposed concern over budget deficits is just another ploy.

Rich folks get THIS much.What I find most infuriating about this legislation is that it is being proffered at a time when its chief beneficiaries – the richest of the rich – are doing just fine, thank you very much, and corporate America is sailing from strength to strength. The last thing they need is more money in their pockets. This is also a time when our armed forces are deployed in conflicts all around the world. Trump just signed into law a $700 billion defense bill, subject to repeal of the sequester agreement. When we’re spending this kind of money and putting people in harm’s way, why the hell are we cutting taxes? What effing justification is there for that? It is beyond shameful, frankly.

Even worse, this is just part one of a two-step routine the Republicans have been rehearsing for a generation now. Step one: cut the hell out of rich people’s taxes, and blow a huge hole in the federal budget. Step two: almost immediately afterward, feign panic over a ballooning deficit and use that as a rationale to cut core social programs, like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other extremely popular programs. They have tried this numerous times before, with only limited success. This time might be different, as they are more craven than in previous decades and control every lever of power. They really don’t need any Democratic votes to push these cuts through.

The GOP has always hated Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid, largely because they are defined benefit, pay as you go institutions. To the current crop of crazies running Congress, insurance is now tantamount to Soviet-style top-down socialism. Don’t think they won’t try this: Paul Ryan has been working on setting this up for many years. We have to be ready to fight back, or you can kiss these vital public institutions goodbye.

That fight begins with killing this tax bill. Best get started.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

No to reconciliation.

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Want a good reason to vote next month? Here’s one: Paul Ryan’s “Better Way” agenda, which he will drive home like lightning if his party is successful on election day. With a Republican congress and a Trump presidency, Ryan can pass the most regressive political program ever contemplated on the national level. At the core of this agenda will be another raft of massive tax cuts for the rich, including a 20% cut for corporate taxes, which will drain trillions of dollars from the Federal budget and (no surprise) prompt austerity action on social programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

Why is this man smiling?On top of that, the “Better Way” will use reconciliation votes to repeal sections of the Affordable Care Act, including Medicaid expansion. Ryan tested his caucus’s ability to use this tactic on non-fiscal legislation this past term when he brought an ACA repeal vote via reconciliation. This will be repeated next year, but with a Republican president, their vile legislation will get a signature. Ryan will be able to move forward with converting Medicare to a voucher. You can already hear right-wing pundits floating the concept of expanded Health Savings Accounts as part of their “repeal and replace” strategy – that and the seemingly evergreen notion of allowing insurance to be sold across state lines. This should be great comfort to the hundreds of thousands thrown off of Medicaid by their so called “better way.”

Whatever your misgivings about Hillary Clinton (and I have plenty), voting for her is the best way to shut Ryan down. I strongly suggest you also consider voting down-ballot for Democrats. There’s an outside chance that Dems could take the House and a stronger opportunity to retake the Senate. That’s our best opportunity to ensure that we’re not massively losing ground over the next four years, even if we’re not leaping forward in great strides. I feel strongly enough about this that I have been volunteering for our local Democratic candidate for Congress (Kim Myers), mostly because her principal opponent is an anti-choice zealot who once referred to the head of the Oneida Nation as “spray-tan Ray” in a Trump-like drunk tweet. Classy.

There’s plenty we need to do to build a more progressive, equitable, and sustainable political reality. Voting is a very small but important part of that. It’s the best way at this point to say “no” to Paul Ryan’s agenda. Let’s stop that mother cold.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Chain gang.

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The thing that keeps popping into my mind as more details of the president’s budget emerge is the notion of how small-bore our political leaders are about everything. We face enormous problems – climate changes, massive unemployment, deindustrialization, economic inequality, rampant militarism, an out-of-control justice and penal system, rampant gun violence, and so on – and yet our politicians behave like the wizened, stingy little men they are and fail again and again to recognize the scale of what’s confronting us. Obama is no exception, his desire to reach a “Grand Bargain” with the Republicans so overriding that he appears to have forgotten who stood out in the sun, rain, whatever, for hours and voted for him last November.

Think bigger.
Think bigger.

Honestly, it’s hard to imagine that a Democratic president, serving in the wake of two decades of steady decline for the poor and working class, would opt for a plan that would cut the meager supplemental retirement checks of elderly people in order to preserve preferential treatment for the nation’s wealthy, who have been doing just fine since the Reagan years, thank you very much. He talks about balanced approaches and shared sacrifice, but what he seems to forget is that the vast majority of us have already carried more than our share of sacrifice. Many have paid with their jobs/careers, others with their homes, their retirement funds. And they are supposed to give up more on top of that? Ludicrous.

This is not a new formula, nor is it a surprise. Obama has been signalling this decision for a few years. He is just following the example of previous Democratic party presidents, particularly that of Bill Clinton, who was a master triangulator and who ruled in a way that assumed the poor, the workers, people on the left, and people of color had no where else to go politically. The only remedy for this cynicism is push back. Politicians respond to public pressure – it there is any “law of gravity” in politics, that is it. Look at how quickly the Occupy Wall Street movement changed the conversation over a year ago. It has since drifted back to austerity and small-mindedness, but that can be overcome. Look at the gun debate, at immigration, at gay rights. There is movement because politicians are looking at the masses of people moving these issues forward.

So… if anyone is going to save the poor, the disabled, the elderly, from a greater level of penury (imposed to service the interests of the rich), it will be us. Make a ruckus…. or they’ll fuck us. That is all.

luv u,

jp

 

Political Rants

Samesville.

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Back again, right? Every couple of months or so we are faced with a manufactured fiscal crisis. Again, this is by design, not by necessity. The Republican party – particularly the hard core of yargle-bargle types known as the “tea party” – has long pursued the practice of enormous deficit spending while they hold the White House and austerity when they are in the opposition. This time around, it’s austerity with a vengeance. Sure, the president signed on to this sequester deal, but it was in response to another manufactured fiscal crisis, brought on by the newly-installed G.O.P. Congress in 2011. In other words, if it wasn’t the sequester, it would be the debt ceiling, or the budget, or some key appropriations bill – anything to jam up the works.

Patron saint of the whiners. There is nothing surprising about this. Grover Norquist, patron saint of the cheapskates (and clearly someone who did not like eating his peas when he was 4), articulated it quite clearly when he said, in effect, when Democrats are in power, force them to rule like Republicans. Parse out the irony (as mentioned earlier, Republicans are much more generous with presidents of their own party) and you can see the sense in what they’re doing. Of course, it goes beyond that. I think most Republicans are smart enough to know that the kinds of cuts they’re advocating will result in a second recession. That works to their political benefit. Winning is paramount to them, even (and perhaps especially) when they lose. If they can discredit a Democratic president, so much the better.

The Democrats are enablers of this continuing train wreck. They were handed the reins in 2009, and instead of meeting the financial crisis with a response of an appropriate magnitude, they allowed conservatives to talk them down to a small-bore strategy that simply was not sufficient to pull us out. The stimulus worked to the extent that it was designed to work; when the money ran out, so did the steam. Now we are in what Krugman rightly calls a depression – an economy that is not shrinking, but not really gaining ground either – and all Washington can talk about is cutting the freaking deficit. The problem is unemployment, not short-term debt. Fix one, and the other will take care of itself. Want to solve long-term debt? Stop maintaining health insurance as the province of private profit-making industry; expand Medicare and you will make it solvent.

How do you get these people to do the right thing? To borrow a phrase from V.S. Naipaul, a million mutinies now. Tell your representative and your senators that you want them to invest in the economy, not starve it.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Cash poor.

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Americans are hurting. Well… not all of us. Some of us – those who can claim the mantle of corporate “personhood” by virtue of a bizarrely generous judicial interpretation of the 14th Amendment –  are doing quite well, thank you very much. Profits are up, executive pay is up, personal wealth among the top 1% is up – in fact, virtually all of the gains realized through economic growth over the past ten years have been enjoyed by the very wealthy. This while the economic position of people in the lower strata of society – particularly communities of color – have seen what wealth they may have held (principally in their homes) wiped out. Blacks and Latinos have seen the gains of the past 30 years wiped away in less than 3.

With millions of people out of work, you would think Congress’s top priority would be job creation. That was what they ran on in 2010, not so much on debt reduction. The best the G.O.P. can manage is to twist the issue around to becoming a tortured argument for doing what the party always does – cut taxes on rich people. They want to allow rich folk to keep more of their money so that they will, in turn, hire some of the legions of unemployed. They cling to this belief, rhetorically at least, even when it’s clear that a) businesses already have multiple trillions in savings they are sitting on right now, and b) they have no intention of spending any of it on new hires so long as they can press their current employees to do the work of three, four, perhaps more. Ask anybody who’s got a job, and they’ll tell you – increased productivity is just the modern term of art for speeding up the assembly line.

Meanwhile, our national infrastructure is falling apart. Bridges in my upstate community are aged and crumbling, the water system is falling apart, roads are pitted and broken. With all this, the word that we get from Albany and Washington is austerity. It’s as if we have as a society decided that roads and bridges no longer need maintenance and repair, and that our highest calling is to keep taxes on companies and well-off people at historic lows. The vaunted debt ceiling compromise takes this tack – we don’t need to invest in ourselves, we’re told; we need to divest ourselves of all the trappings of modern society, from freedom of choice and to the freedom of driving downtown without having the highway crumble beneath you. That’s the essential philosophy of the tea party loomers in Congress.

This is what happens when 16% of American voters bother to go to the polls, as happened last Fall. Next time, folks, don’t sit on your hands.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Barry’s hand.

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The ongoing debate over raising the debt ceiling has dominated another week’s worth of news coverage. Now Moody’s has put the U.S. government “on notice” – something I thought only Stephen Colbert could do – that our debt rating may be downgraded if the current impasse continues. As I mentioned in my last rant, this is a manufactured crisis. It’s a standoff not over debt yet to be incurred, but debt already booked by Congress by virtue of budget items already agreed to. There is no reason for this threatened default other than to make political points… and yet it continues, even though the downside risks are substantial.

How substantial? Default – or even near-default – could cause a global financial disruption on a scale that would dwarf that of late 2008. At the very least, a downgrade of the investment rating of U.S. Treasury bonds would be not only unprecedented but extremely costly, making service on our existing debt far more costly, blowing an even bigger hole in the federal budget. If that alone were to happen it would be bad enough. But these facts just don’t seem to register on Capitol Hill.

It’s often been said that, in a Democracy, we get the government we truly deserve. Last fall, the American people – by voting or by abstaining to do so – sent to the House of Representatives a class of Republicans that amount to the American version of the Taliban. The core of this class are fanatical believers in their own delusions; they see reality as a nefarious socialist plot. Fueled by tea party faux-populism, the new G.O.P. goes beyond their party’s traditional obsession about cutting taxes. Anything – anything – that brings more revenue to the Federal government is to them an unacceptable burden on the American taxpayer. (i.e. rich people. They apparently don’t consider burdensome the enormous costs displaced to workers, pensioners, etc. as a result of the massive cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and other programs they demand.) That much is a given. The only wild card is in the president’s hand – what will he sacrifice to appease them?

This is what we voted for, whether we realize it or not. More likely not, since the Republicans did not advertise this part of their program. (It was going to be jobs, jobs, jobs, remember?) While it’s far from the only thing we need to do as citizens, it’s obvious that voting is essential… just as it’s clear that we need to hold our leaders – namely Obama – accountable when they give away the store.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Fighting ground.

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Okay, let’s get one thing out of the way at the start: very few people enjoy paying taxes. To that I can only add my own personal observation that the people who seem to complain the loudest about taxes are the ones who can most afford to pay them. They have an excellent means of making their complaints heard, too – it’s called the Republican Party. In fact, in service to those who would pay not a single dime more than the historic low rates they’re paying today, the G.O.P. is creating a default crisis out of whole cloth by linking the authorization of additional borrowing to the conclusion of a draconian budget agreement that will gut the essential social programs they have always sought to defund, privatize, etc.

The two things, of course, have nothing to do with one another in the real world. Raising the debt ceiling is merely addressing financial commitments that have already been agreed upon. It is something the Republicans have gladly passed many times before under their own presidents, as well as under Democrats. They have seized upon it because it offers an opportunity to, in effect, put the entire nation up against a wall until we give up on the idea of not spending our elderly years in penury. (That’s sooooo 1960’s of us.) The Republicans see an opportunity here to realize what they could never accomplish during George W. Bush’s tenure – privatization of Medicare, pirating Social Security, and locking in massive tax cuts from now until perdition. And they sense, perhaps correctly, that the Democrats don’t have enough fight in them to stop it.

I will gladly crib Bernie Sanders, Keith Ellison, and Dean Baker on this – Social Security is not – repeat, not – part of any budgetary problem. It is fully self-funding for the next 25 years with no changes whatsoever. How many programs can make that claim? The G.O.P. and spineless Democrats merely want to pirate the fund to pay for extending Bush tax cuts for the richest people in the country. Regarding Medicare and Medicaid, they are single-payer systems dedicated to the elderly, poor, disabled, and stricken amongst us. The rest of us – those who are relatively young, fit, and almost never need a doctor – are reserved for the profit of private insurers. Single payers systems only pay for themselves when everyone – sick and well, old and young, rich and poor – participates in them. If we want to solve the funding problem, we need to decide whether we can continue to afford contriving a profitable market for companies like BlueCross.

In short, the deficit hawks in the Republican caucuses are blackmailing us into funding tax breaks for wealthy people – including the fuckers who caused the financial crisis – by crippling our already inadequate social safety net.  I say, call their bluff. This is ground worth fighting for.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

What now.

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Gingrich has thrown his hat into the presidential ring. That should go well. Not so long ago, he was the most hated man in America. I have to think he has moved up from there – perhaps that fact alone has encouraged him to try. Or maybe he’s pulling a Buchanan and using it as a fundraising, image-building exercise. (Great way to sell books.) Either way, I can hardly imagine a less likely or desirable prospect, and I don’t think I’m alone in this. It’s no accident – the policies he has been most closely associated with over the years are wildly unpopular. The current crop of GOP congresspeople represent an odious distillation of his most extremist positions. What’s not to hate?

Back when the Newt was Speaker, I wrote a song about his crusade against welfare – one cheerfully joined by Bill Clinton and various other Democrats, eager to throw the poor over the side for a few cheap political points. Written like a bloodthirsty hymn sung aboard a pirate ship, the lyric went, in part, like this:

Please, Newt Gingrich, save us from welfare dependent mothers
whose hungry infants threaten our fortunes with default
Please, o Speaker, drive them away from this captain’s table
Please drive them from below the salt!

Bring to us the biscuit, that humble little biscuit
Please add it to our bounty, we savor every crumb
Take it from the infant, that greedy mother’s infant
Please pluck it from his toothless gums!

Mr. Speaker – we beseech thee, for the gods of war and industry
Mr. Speaker – we beseech thee, please… Bless This Feast!

Imagine the singing pirates being all of those industrialists, corporate CEOs, and generals/admirals who benefit from budgetary largess, year after year, to the tune of billions of dollars (at the expense of all of the rest of us, including many in dire need) and you’ll get the idea.

I suppose it makes sense that Newt would think this is a good time for him, since the ethos of greed and further targeting of the poor/working class has descended upon us once again. Given today’s sensational announcement that the Social Security trust fund will be expended in 2036 (instead of 2037), after which the fund would only cover 75% of its costs (assuming we never come out of deep recession and never again experience economic growth above 1% a year), he may be right.

But I doubt it.

luv u,

jp