Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Reich: Beware the "Middle Ground", The Nation: The People's Budget

From: Anthony Saidy <saidychess@sbcglobal.net>
To: letters <letters@latimes.com>
Sent: Mon, April 25, 2011 4:31:01 PM
Subject: The Times' Endorsement in 36th District Race

To the Editor of the L.A. Times:

    The Times imagines "charisma" where's it isn't, and opposes the one candidate who is "stridently anti-war."

     Since I was old enough to vote, I myself have been "stridently anti-war." As a physician in the V.A. system, I treated the casualties of our rulers' arrogance.  I have been "stridently" against the needless US wars in Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iraq again. I plan to stay "strident" until the policy of permanent war is torn down, and our country's resources are turned to human needs.

     Which is why I support the real anti-war candidate in the 36th district, Marcy Winograd. She is not strident, but rational, principled and humane. The benighted Congress, which has voted trillions for wars, fairly cries out for a voice like hers.

           Sincerely,

            Anthony Saidy

             Los Angeles

* * *

 

http://robertreich.org/post/4810720801

 

Beware the "Middle Ground" of the Great Budget Debate

 

Robert Reich

Thursday, April 21, 2011

 

How debates are framed is critical because the "center" or "middle ground" is supposedly halfway between the two extremes.

 

We continue to hear that the Great Budget Debate has two sides: The President and the Democrats want to cut the budget deficit mainly by increasing taxes on the rich and reducing military spending, but not by privatizing Medicare. On the other side are Paul Ryan, Republicans, and the right, who want cut the deficit by privatizing Medicare and slicing programs that benefit poorer Americans, while lowering taxes on the rich.

 

By this logic, the center lies just between.

 

Baloney.

 

According to the most recent Washington Post-ABC poll, 78 percent of Americans oppose cutting spending on Medicare as a way to reduce the debt, and 72 percent support raising taxes on the rich – including 68 percent of Independents and 54 percent of Republicans.

 

In other words, the center of America isn't near halfway between the two sides. It's overwhelmingly on the side of the President and the Democrats.

 

I'd wager if Americans also knew two-thirds of Ryan's budget cuts come from programs serving lower and moderate-income Americans and over 70 percent of the savings fund tax cuts for the rich – meaning it's really just a giant transfer from the less advantaged to the super advantaged without much deficit reduction at all – far more would be against it.

 

And if people knew that the Ryan plan would channel hundreds of billions of their Medicare dollars into the pockets of private for-profit heath insurers, almost everyone would be against it.

 

The Republican plan shouldn't be considered one side of a great debate. It shouldn't be considered at all. Americans don't want it.

 

Which is why I get worried when I hear about so-called "bipartisan" groups on Capitol Hill seeking a grand compromise, such as the Senate's so-called "Gang of Six."

 

Senator Dick Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, a member of that Gang, says they're near agreement on a plan that will chart a "middle ground" between the House Republican budget and the plan outlined last week by the President.

 

Watch your wallets.

 

In my view, even the President doesn't go nearly far enough in the direction most Americans would approve. All he wants to do, essentially, is end the Bush tax windfalls for the wealthy – which were designed to be ended in 2010 in any event – and close a few loopholes.

 

But why shouldn't we go back to the tax rates we had thirty years ago, which required the rich to pay much higher shares of their incomes? One of the great scandals of our age is how concentrated income and wealth have become. The top 1 percent now gets twice the share of national income it took home thirty years ago.

 

If the super rich paid taxes at the same rates they did three decades ago, they'd contribute $350 billion more per year than they are now – amounting to trillions more over the next decade. That's enough to ensure every young American is healthy and well-educated and that the nation's infrastructure is up to world-class standards.

 

Nor does the President's proposal go nearly far enough in cutting military spending, which is not only out of control but completely unrelated to our nation's defense needs – fancy weapons systems designed for an age of conventional warfare; hundreds of billions of dollars for the Navy and Air Force, when most of the action is with the Army, Marines, and Special Forces; and billions more for programs no one can justify and few can understand.

 

If Americans understood how much they're paying for defense and how little they're getting, they'd demand a defense budget at least 25 percent smaller than it is today.

 

Finally, the President's proposed budget doesn't deal with the scandal of the nation's schools in poor and middle-class communities – schools whose teachers are paid under $50,000 a year, whose classrooms are crammed, that can't afford textbooks or science labs, that have abandoned after-school programs and courses like history and art. Most school budgets depend manly on local property taxes that continue to drop in lower-income communities. The federal government should come to their rescue.

 

To think of the "center" as roughly halfway between the President's and Paul Ryan's proposals is to ignore what Americans need and want. For our political representatives to find a "middle ground" between the two would be a travesty.

 

 

http://www.thenation.com/article/160097/peoples-budget

 

The People's Budget

The Editors : May 9, 2011 edition of The Nation

 

In poll after poll, Americans consistently list the economy and joblessness as the most important problems facing this country, far ahead of the deficit. Solid majorities of Americans also oppose cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, Social Security, Planned Parenthood, the EPA, healthcare and education. Indeed, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll, the only aspect of President Obama's deficit reduction plan that enjoys strong support is his proposal to raise taxes on the rich. And yet the debate in Washington seems to be taking place in an alternate universe—one defined by Representative Paul Ryan's radical and mean scheme to eviscerate the government on one end, and by President Obama's plan to shrink it by one of the largest annual spending cuts in history on the other. Neither is a progressive—or popular—option, but too few inside the Beltway seem to be listening to the people they were elected to represent.

 

Fortunately, the eighty-three members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) are. On April 14, they introduced a "People's Budget" as an alternative to President Obama's center-right and Representative Ryan's far-right proposals. The People's Budget is exactly what a robust populist agenda should look like. It protects the social safety net, promotes a progressive tax policy, reintroduces a public option for healthcare and makes significant cuts to the Pentagon by bringing our troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan. It makes millionaires, billionaires and corporations pay their fair share while protecting the poor and middle class. Plus, it actually generates a budget surplus by 2021, according to CPC co-chair Representative Raúl Grijalva.

 

But even though the CPC is the largest Democratic caucus in Congress, its People's Budget was ignored by establishment Democrats and the mainstream media. And it was snidely dismissed by pundits like the Washington Post's Dana Milbank, who didn't say much about its policies but seemed to have a beef with the word "people" because it reminds him of China.

 

That is a shame, because the People's Budget is exactly the kind of common-sense economic agenda our president should be advocating. Instead, he's taking to the road to sell his deficit reduction plan to voters in Nevada and California. Those states also happen to be the epicenter of our jobs crisis; more than one in five residents there don't have enough work, the highest rates in the nation. In Nevada, one in every thirty-five homes is in foreclosure, also the highest rate in the nation. California is facing a record budget shortfall of at least 
$25 billion, forcing schools, parks, libraries and even police and fire departments to shut down. Nothing coming out of official Washington—not Obama's austerity-lite deficit plan and certainly not Ryan's slashonomics—does a thing to alleviate these catastrophes.

 

But the solutions are out there, and they are creative and serious. They can be found in the CPC's People's Budget; in the inspiring work of US Uncut, the direct-action group, seeded in the pages of The Nation, that targets corporate tax dodgers and thus shifts the debate away from its narrow-minded focus on spending cuts toward finding new sources of revenue; in the astute writings of Keynesian economists who can't seem to get a job at the White House; and in the streets of Wisconsin and Ohio, where workers have risen up to protect their right to organize and to demand a better deal. If only Washington would put its ear to the ground and listen.

 

The Editors

April 21, 2011 - (In the May 9, 2011 edition of The Nation.)

 

 

 

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