These days the word "reform" seems to be on every conservative's lips. Not since philandering Bill opened the door to means for further repressing the working class and called it welfare reform have conservatives been so passionate about the kind of change they like to call reform.
Let's look at some of these so-called reforms and see if we can't find better ways to solve the problems being trotted out as an excuse for these regressive policy changes. Most of these are related to money. It brings to mind a quote from Douglas Adams.
This planet [earth] has--or rather had--a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time.Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
(Douglas Adams, So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, 1984)
Astute observation, one it might enhance the civility of public discourse to remember frequently. You fix people problems by fixing people, not by fixing the rules by which money changes hands....
This is something nearly every politician wants to do, and something that has so far failed. Because the real problem with taxes isn't that we pay too much; we pay less than in most industrialized countries. While the sleazeball who previously occupied the Oval Office managed to run a couple of small budget surpluses, King George the second has corrected that egregious error.
Rather, the mind-boggling complexity of the tax code causes most of the tax-related problems. Anyone who has run a small business and thought to save money by preparing their tax returns on their own can tell you that it's almost impossible NOT to make an error on your return of the sort the IRS likes to correct in the criminal justice system.
Everybody wants to pay less in taxes, but they do understand that you have to match tax cuts with spending cuts. It's just that everyone wants the spending that benefits the other guy cut. The only way for a representatively governed nation to properly cut spending is for the governed to call for an end to programs that benefit themselves. You want to pay less in taxes? Accept fewer of the benefits offered you by government.
One of the major proposals on the agenda is the VAT. That stands for "value-added tax." The thinking is that a sales tax often hits every citizen the same without regard to ability to pay. There have been "luxury" taxes, taxes that kick in when someone buys something clearly beyond the ordinary necessities of life -- say an SUV or a third home. The value-added tax draws money from the places where it is genuinely generated, where true value is added to a product or service.
There's only one glaring problem with the idea. It taxes those who are productive, and does not tax those who are not productive. Now that wouldn't be a problem if we had a society that demanded productivity of everyone. But the wealthiest members of our society are generally the least productive. Correcting that injustice might require that we rely for a time on a NON-value-added tax.
Here's how it would work. Anyone who makes money on the delivery of a product or service to the public would have to calculate a value-added-to-money-earned ratio. The tax paid would be inversely proportional to that ratio. The less value you add, or the more you make on the value you add, the more you pay in taxes. The person whose income is based entirely on investments and therefore adds no value to the products and services of the companies owned, would pay the highest tax rates, rates approaching 100%.
Workers, who generally add the most value to a product and receive the least remuneration for it, would have a high value-added-to-money-earned ratio and would thus pay a very low tax rate. But don't expect a law-making body comprised primarily of low value-added workers to ever agree to such a sensible tax structure.
This is the president's answer to the health cost crisis. The only reason this has reached the public agenda is that companies have long been expected to provide health cost benefits as part of their employment packages. The costs of those benefits have risen sharply over the past five to ten years, and the nation's well to do are beginning to feel the pinch. Had we been paying attention to the needs of the working classes we'd have fixed this problem long before slick Willie tried unsuccessfully to push a special-interest-weakened solution through Congress.
The fact that cowboy George would reach to this solution first shows that he believes government's duty is to protect the strong of the nation from the weak. Had he learned, somewhere in his privileged past, that the ideals of this country call for its government to protect the weak from the strong, he might start with a different proposal.
Part of this is a conflict between the different wings of the legal profession. The high-priced firms that make plenty of money tending to the interests of the well-to-do and large groups of people (such as corporations and unions) don't like those of their profession who oppose them. One of the great means for harassing such high-end lawyers is to offer your services to someone unable to pay for them on the stipulation that you get a percentage of any judgement won.
This system brings a lot of people into the civil courts who might otherwise not get a day in court. And since the high-end lawyers tend to think the courts are there for the benefit of their clients and not for the population in general, they have heaped scorn on these lawyers for the common man, calling them "ambulance chasers."
Someone eventually figured out that if they could limit the size of the awards juries handed out they could also limit the income potential of these despised lawyers for the disenfranchised. That's what they're trying to do here. The argument is that when the jury awards drop, malpractice costs will drop, and doctors will pass those savings on to their customers.
Sounds good, though it may not hold true given the current dynamics of the health cost system. Doctors are feeling that they're under a lot of "price" pressure from HMOs and insurers. Any cuts in malpractice insurance costs would probably go to give them a little breathing room and have no impact whatsoever on costs.
The real problem is two-fold: utilization and profits. When costs are skyrocketing in a sector which consistently earns the highest profits it doesn't take a rocket scientist (pun intended) to see part of the problem. But this is directly related to the utilization issue.
Americans grossly overutilize health services. We eat at fast food drive-throughs, greasy spoons, and other such institutions, spending more of our income than necessary on more food than necessary, and then we want the doctor to fix the mess we've made. A consumer-oriented health business community sees the opportunity to make money and obliges us.
The first and most obvious reform, then, would be to encourage healthful living. While it may not be the government's role, this society could stand some major health-education efforts. And the interests who make money by catering to our unhealthy appetites would have to be told to go home and shut up (i. e. take their commercials off our televisions, etc.).
The second reform would be to force all health-related corporations to take losses equivalent to the excesses in profits they've earned over the last fifty years. That would be calculated by comparing their profit margins to the performance of the broadest Wall Street index. For example, if in 1955 a company earned a 12 percent return while the broader market only mustered a nine-percent return the company would be forced to take a three-percent loss in 2005. (Yes, I know this is a pipe dream, but it would be justice of a unique sort.)
I could say much about the arrogance of the average physician, but that's a separate issue to be dealt with outside the realm of politics.
We've long known that without some change social security would eventually run out of money. It would have made sense to be proactive as soon as the problem presented itself, making minor modifications in the retirement age, employer and employee contributions, and reimbursement rates so that the system would have remained solvent with the least impact on its constituents.
That approach would probably still work. Politicians would just have to have the backbone to tell the folks at AARP that since everyone has to make some sacrifices for this to work there's no reason the older generation shouldn't also contribute some small amount to the effort. But there’s this one little hitch that throws the entire debate into the realms of astronomical unreality. It's called the national debt.
Don't get confused here. I'm not talking about the year-to-year deficit we've run almost non-stop for the last seven decades. I'm talking about the huge, hungry, public-mind-numbing debt the nation owes to investors worldwide. Eliminating the interest on the debt alone could possibly turn George's deficit budget into a surplus budget.
The trick is that one of the major investors in this national boondoggle is the social security system. Politicians aren't so worried about the system running out of money in 2041; they've never been so far-sighted on any other issue. They are worried about what will happen when the system's reserves start running low over the next few years. How will the nation finance its unconscionable debt then?
For years Republicans had the reputation of being deficit hawks. During the Reagan administration they toyed with a "balanced budget" amendment. Let's force ourselves to spend responsibly, they said. What they really wanted was a way to cut popular entitlement programs without having to face the political music. When that didn't work they changed tactics.
This change actually began with the Reagan administration. Reagan, like King George, ran up huge budget deficits. Cut taxes and pay lip service to cutting spending. When the federal government goes broke, the entitlement programs will have to go. With leaders like Ron and George bullying their way through foreign policy it would be unthinkable to cut military spending.
But them some hick from Arkansas wormed his way into DC and demonstrated that it was possible to begin paying off that debt without cutting programs. This appalled the Republicans. They heaped on huge sums of taxpayer money trying to destroy the hick politically. When that didn't work, they took him on in the one arena where he had a weakness, sexual purity.
Ultimately that didn't work either, but they did manage to smear enough sleaze around that some of it stuck to the hick from Tennessee. That was supposed to allow George to march into the Oval Office with a "mandate." when that almost failed, they had to bring in the Supreme Court to fix the obvious errors in a voting system that allowed thinking people to have a voice in government.
The approach since then has been to cut back on government income, inflate government spending by inventing "wars" to consume the money, and if that fails to bring the federal government to its financial knees, pull out the prop that holds it all up, the social security trust fund. By diverting taxes from this fund to private investment accounts, you advance the arrival of the debt crisis and the day when you can finally rid the government of those accursed entitlement programs.
When seen in this way, the seemingly brain-dead approach the administration has taken to its projects begins to make sense. Why start a war and then refuse to draft more soldiers into the military to carry it out? Because pulling more workers out of the labor pool would increase labor costs and benefit the weak at the expense of the strong.
And understand this, when the president talks about spreading liberty throughout the world, he doesn't mean the liberty to oppose your government or the liberty to choose your work schedule, or the liberty to practice the religion of your choice (including none at all) without harassment by others. He means the liberty of the strong and wealthy to get even more wealthy. The more people you can put in the pool of potential laborers, the more likely that the laws of supply and demand will drive labor costs down (at the expense of workers, of course). These are the liberties the working-class grunts of the military are dying to protect.
We need to find a way to express our disgust at this approach to foreign policy that doesn't put the onus on working class members of the military. We failed at this in our opposition to the Vietnam War. Many of the returning soldiers took our opposition personally, and believed we were mad at them for the establishment's poor choices that made them sacrifice so much. That's why the "veterans for truth" were so willing to ignore the truth in their vendetta against anti-war activist Kerry. They thought he had attacked them personally when he pointed out the atrocities taking place in Vietnam.
We need to be clear that we DON'T place a high degree of blame on the individual soldiers who participated in the abuses at U. S. detainment facilities. Yes, they should have had a little human kindness and refused to go along with the pressure. But the largest part of the blame needs to go to those who applied that pressure. It needs to be directed toward the man who approved this insane war. It needs to be directed toward the leadership team around him who refused to jeopardize their own positions by speaking the truth. It needs to be directed against the man who would surround himself with such morally spineless individuals. It needs to be directed against the man who claimed U. S. sovereignty as an excuse for withdrawing our soldiers from a world court of accountability.
"W" has a great need to be seen as a legendary leader. Those of us with moral sensibilities need to be sure that his legacy be seen for what it is, a giveaway to the least deserving and an abdication of the government's responsibilities to the least powerful among us. If America is to remain great, then the future must see George as an anomaly that fueled a true reform movement in American politics. The real reform will be to return government to the days when it protected the small and the weak from the large, wealthy, and powerful.