Thanks to Mha Atma. -Ed http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0502-23.htm
Published on Monday, May 2, 2005 by USA Today Social Security Reform is Simply a Diversion by Robert B. Reich The president just ended a 60-day whirlwind tour to try to sell his Social Security plan. But almost everyone inside the Beltway, and a growing number outside, know it's going nowhere. Polls show most Americans don't want to tinker with Social Security. Many Republicans, facing re-election, don't want to touch it. Why still flog it? Because Social Security is a place holder. As long as it remains on the domestic agenda, it blocks consideration of the real domestic crisis President Bush doesn't want to touch: the health care system. Consider the symptoms. Medicare, the government's health care program for the elderly, is heading toward bankruptcy faster than Social Security. Its future unfunded liabilities are seven times larger. Social Security is projected to be in financial trouble in four decades; Medicare, within 10 years. Medicaid, the government's health care program for the poor, is also in trouble. Its costs are rising so fast the White House and congressional Republicans want to whack it by $10 billion over the next five years. But governors don't want Medicaid cut. States pick up half its cost. If the feds bow out, states will have to make up the difference. Symptom No. 3 is the increasing number of Americans without health insurance. Ten years ago, when President Clinton's proposal for universal health care tanked, 38 million lacked health insurance. Now, 44 million are without it at some point during the year. Meanwhile, Americans who get health insurance through their employer are suffering sticker shock. That's because companies are rapidly shifting the escalating costs onto their employees. They're doing it through higher co-payments and larger deductibles and premiums. The last symptom is the huge financial burden on companies that can't shift rising health care costs onto employees because of union contracts. For example, every car General Motors produces costs thousands of extra dollars because of GM's health care tab. Health care is the single most contentious labor-management issue today. But it's possible to control health costs and at the same time give Americans far more health security. One step is to use the government's bargaining clout to cut the prices medical providers and suppliers charge. Through Medicare and Medicaid, the U.S. government is the biggest health purchaser in the world. It has the heft to get pharmaceutical companies to agree to far lower drug prices. The same bargaining power could be used to bring down prices of other health care supplies and services. Another step is to offer every American the chance to buy basic health insurance for the family at say, a few hundred dollars a year. The low cost would be possible because so many Americans would be in the same plan, generating vast economies of scale. In such a uniform system, transacting with a doctor or hospital of your choice would be as easy as using an ATM. As a result, far more Americans would get regular checkups, and health problems could be prevented. Chronic illnesses such as heart disease could be identified before they got out of control. Catastrophic illnesses such as cancer could be treated early. We'd end up with lower costs and better care. It's the perfect time to respond to America's health care crisis. With the middle class squeezed by soaring costs, big companies reeling and governors screaming, the political momentum is there. But the Bush administration doesn't want to tackle it. Doing so would require an active role for government, and they're ideologically opposed. They know the nation can pay attention to only one big domestic crisis at a time. So they're using the fake crisis of Social Security as a diversion. That's a shame. The real crisis of health care demands the nation's real attention. Robert B. Reich, former U.S. secretary of Labor, is professor of social and economic policy at Brandeis. � 2005 USA Today ### http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0502-24.htm Published on Monday, May 2, 2005 by the New York Times A Gut Punch to the Middle by Paul Krugman By now, every journalist should know that you have to carefully check out any scheme coming from the White House. You can't just accept the administration's version of what it's doing. Remember, these are the people who named a big giveaway to logging interests "Healthy Forests." Sure enough, a close look at President Bush's proposal for "progressive price indexing" of Social Security puts the lie to claims that it's a plan to increase benefits for the poor and cut them for the wealthy. In fact, it's a plan to slash middle-class benefits; the wealthy would barely feel a thing. Under current law, low-wage workers receive Social Security benefits equal to 49 percent of their wages before retirement. Under the Bush scheme, that wouldn't change. So benefits for the poor would be maintained, not increased. The administration and its apologists emphasize the fact that under the Bush plan, workers earning higher wages would face cuts, and they talk as if that makes it a plan that takes from the rich and gives to the poor. But the rich wouldn't feel any pain, because people with high incomes don't depend on Social Security benefits. Cut an average worker's benefits, and you're imposing real hardship. Cut or even eliminate Dick Cheney's benefits, and only his accountants will notice. I asked Jason Furman of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities to calculate the benefit cuts under the Bush scheme as a percentage of pre-retirement income. That's a way to see who would really bear the burden of the proposed cuts. It turns out that the middle class would face severe cuts, but the wealthy would not. The average worker - average pay now is $37,000 - retiring in 2075 would face a cut equal to 10 percent of pre-retirement income. Workers earning 60 percent more than average, the equivalent of $58,000 today, would see benefit cuts equal to almost 13 percent of their income before retirement. But above that level, the cuts would become less and less significant. Workers earning three times the average wage would face cuts equal to only 9 percent of their income before retirement. Someone earning the equivalent of $1 million today would see benefit cuts equal to only 1 percent of pre-retirement income. In short, this would be a gut punch to the middle class, but a fleabite for the truly wealthy. Beyond that, it's a good bet that benefits for the poor would eventually be cut, too. It's an adage that programs for the poor always turn into poor programs. That is, once a program is defined as welfare, it becomes a target for budget cuts. You can see this happening right now to Medicaid, the nation's most important means-tested program. Last week Congress agreed on a budget that cuts funds for Medicaid (and food stamps), even while extending tax cuts on dividends and capital gains. States are cutting back, denying health insurance to hundreds of thousands of people with low incomes. Missouri is poised to eliminate Medicaid completely by 2008. If the Bush scheme goes through, the same thing will eventually happen to Social Security. As Mr. Furman points out, the Bush plan wouldn't just cut benefits. Workers would be encouraged to divert a large fraction of their payroll taxes into private accounts - but this would in effect amount to borrowing against their future benefits, which would be reduced accordingly. As a result, Social Security as we know it would be phased out for the middle class. "For millions of workers," Mr. Furman writes, "the amount of the monthly Social Security check would be at or near zero." So only the poor would receive Social Security checks - and regardless of what today's politicians say, future politicians would be tempted to reduce the size of those checks. The important thing to understand is that the attempt to turn Social Security into nothing but a program for the poor isn't driven by concerns about the future budget burden of benefit payments. After all, if Mr. Bush was worried about the budget, he would be reconsidering his tax cuts. No, this is about ideology: Mr. Bush comes to bury Social Security, not to save it. His goal is to turn F.D.R.'s most durable achievement into an unpopular welfare program, so some future president will be able to attack it with tall tales about Social Security queens driving Cadillacs. � 2005 NY Times, Co. *** Washington Post Monday, May 2, 2005; A01 Doubts about mandate for Bush, GOP By John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei The day after he won a second term in November, President Bush offered his view of the new political landscape. "When you win there is a feeling that the people have spoken and embraced your point of view," he said, "and that's what I intend to tell the Congress, that I made it clear what I intend to do as president . . . and the people made it clear what they wanted, now let's work together." Six months ago, this comment was widely viewed as more than just a postgame boast. Among campaign strategists and academics, there was ample speculation that Bush's victory, combined with incremental gains in the Republican congressional majority, signaled something fundamental: a partisan and ideological "realignment" that would reshape politics over the long haul. As the president passed the 100-day mark of his second term over the weekend, the main question facing Bush and his party is whether they misread the November elections. With the president's poll numbers down, and the Republican majority ensnared in ethical controversy, things look much less like a once-a-generation realignment. Instead, some political analysts say it is just as likely that Washington is witnessing a happens-all-the-time phenomenon -- the mistaken assumption by politicians that an election won on narrow grounds is a mandate for something broad. In Bush's case, this includes restructuring Social Security and the tax code and installing a group of judges he was unable to seat in his first term. This was the error that nearly sank Bill Clinton's presidency in his first years in office in 1993 and 1994 when he put forth a broad health care plan, and that caused then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich's Republican "Revolution" to stall in 1995 in a confrontation over cutting spending for popular domestic programs. Even with authentic realignments, "as soon as you've recognized that one has happened, the next one [replacing it] may already be happening," said John J. Pitney Jr., a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College who closely studies Republican politics. He cautions against drawing large conclusions from the evidence of 100 days, and notes that "the indications are all over the map" about how decisively national politics moved toward the GOP after last fall's elections. With comparatively little furor -- and the support of a significant minority of Democrats -- Bush in his first 100 days has enacted far-reaching proposals to restructure the nation's laws on bankruptcy and class-action lawsuits. Judged by conventional standards, such legislative victories would signal a second-term president performing at full throttle. But Bush signaled from the moment of his reelection that he was not contemplating a conventional second term. Instead, on the advice of White House strategists such as Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove and White House director of strategic initiatives Peter Wehner, he settled on a bolder-is-better strategy. The rationale, according to White House aides, is that most second-term presidents tend to lose their policymaking leverage quickly. This dictated moving quickly and decisively -- to ensure that Bush remained the dominant figure setting Washington's agenda and to take full advantage of a narrow window. By this reckoning, White House aides say, Social Security is a natural issue, because it shows Bush taking on a problem that most politicians had timidly avoided, and it could turn retirement security -- political turf owned for decades by Democrats -- into a Republican issue. Even among many influential conservatives, there has been a growing consensus that the Bush governing theory, at least on Social Security, has been proved wrong. The conservative Weekly Standard magazine recently warned in a headline of a "Social Security Quagmire," and argued that Bush should position himself so that a defeat on the issue does not cripple other parts of his agenda or produce big Republican losses in next year's congressional elections. History suggests the possibility of major losses next year is not beyond imagination. The latest Washington Post-ABC News poll showed support for Bush's handling of Social Security at just 31 percent. That is several points lower than support for Clinton's handling of health care in the summer of 1994 -- just before the failure of what was widely perceived as an over-ambitious plan helped fuel the GOP takeover of Congress that fall. A recent analysis by Democracy Corps, which offers polling and strategy to Democrats, concluded, "Voters have not yet turned to the Democrats as an instrument of change, but when they do, there can be electoral changes on a very large scale." If Bush has misjudged the public appetite for an ambitious conservative agenda, he is not the only one. On election night 2004, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) boasted: "The Republican Party is a permanent majority for the future of this country. . . . We are going to be able to lead this country in the direction we've been dreaming of for years." One thing Republicans apparently did not bargain for was that, as their majority grew, so would the difficulties of holding together the different wings of the party. One important split has emerged on Social Security. Bush was forced last week to insert himself into one of the most contentious fights: between those who think large private investment accounts alone can save Social Security and those who argue that benefits must be trimmed in tandem with creating smaller accounts. With his statement that future benefits must be reduced for middle- and upper-income beneficiaries, Bush weighed in against the private-accounts-only purists. This group includes conservative lawmakers such as Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and activists such as Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform. One prominent Republican, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.), applauded Bush's willingness to take a stand in the intraparty argument. The president "dramatically shaped the debate within the Republican world by embracing index changes and rescheduling benefits," Graham said. "He chose a path different from the one many Republicans have embraced." This dynamic has played out to a lesser extent in the debate over whether Republicans should move to end the Senate filibuster for judges, which would make it significantly easier to approve the president's most controversial nominees. Social conservatives are demanding Republicans move to eliminate the filibuster, while corporate conservatives worry the move will derail their pro-business agenda in Congress. If Republicans force a confrontation on Senate rules, and Democrats respond by effectively shutting down the chamber, "then you get to stalling the movement of any and all legislation," said R. Bruce Josten, the top lobbyist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Josten said the business community is sitting out the fight over filibusters because it has no role in internal Senate matters. "We are not social groups, we are business groups," he said. Although politicians may be prone to over-interpreting their election mandates, some skeptics warn that political analysts are prone to over-interpreting short-term controversies. The factors causing problems for Bush, for instance, are less about political strategy than something largely out of his control -- the high price of gasoline. William Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard and a conservative analyst, said that Bush's problems with Social Security will look small in retrospect next to a large achievement: last winter's Iraqi elections. "We are all missing the forest through the trees: January 30, 2005, was the most important thing that happened in the first 100 days," he said. Nicole Devenish, the White House communications director, struck a similar theme. "There have been accomplishments that admittedly no one pays attention to," she said, "because the biggest thing we bit off [Social Security], something that has not been done in 20 years, has dominated the debate." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/01/AR2005050100 948.html?sub=AR ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Help save the life of a child. 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