social contract Archives

July 29, 2011

Older Americans do not intend to ruin America,
but as a group, that’s what they’re about.
Robert J. Samuelson,
Why are we in this debt fix? It’s the elderly, stupid.
Washington Post, July 28, 2011

Answer: The Bucket. Mr. Samuelson, a right-wing economist, in yesterday’s Washington Post POSTOPINIONS column didn’t bury the lede: Why are we in this debt fix? It’s the elderly, stupid. This (unfortunately) memorable title tells you where this is going, and Samuelson does not disappoint, except one does walk away from his screed a bit more disappointed than usual in how right-wingers think. They relish attacking those who live one crisis away from poverty. Samuelson gives those weakened geriatric gray hairs a good beatdown, like Seinfeld‘s Kramer when he thrashed those prepubescent youngsters in the karate dojo, “I’m dominating the dojo. I’m class champion!” Or the man who plotted to throw his mother off a train, but in that case, decided against it. Samuelson did not.

Jihad Grandpas & Grammas

You may not have known that your seemingly sweet Granny and Gramps were on a jihad bent on burying you and their other children and grandkids under mountains of nationalized debt. I would’ve never suspected my own grandparents, they were always good for a hug and a cookie. (There are exceptions, however. My Aunt Ruth, for example, for my ninth birthday, gave me the 670 page 1955 edition of Emily Post’s Etiquette: The Blue Book of Social Usage. Obviously, by that act alone, she proved that she’d do anything to anyone. Thus, she, now at 89 years, remains suspect of burying us all under mountains of public debt.)

Samuelson’s point is obvious, a lot of those rampaging elders are gaming the system, many do not need the benefits they receive, especially from Social Security and Medicare. He ignores the fact that a national social welfare program ought to embrace all the elderly; after all, well-off elders may, during their retirement, lose everything. (And don’t be fooled, Samuelson believes that poor Americans in any age group don’t deserve their benefits either.) Statistics show that the majority of elders need social security to live any kind of decent life at all. Medicare to live a healthy life at all.

Of course, Obama and the Democrats are Samuelson’s villains de jour, but he includes his own companions:

“the shunning [of even discussing entitlement cuts] is bipartisan. Tea Party advocates broadly deplore government spending without acknowledging that most of it goes for popular Social Security and Medicare.”

Thus he proves that he is worse than Tea Partiers. He forgets that the vast majority of retirement aged Tea Partiers collect Social Security and Medicare, (rightfully) believe they earned it, are therefore “entitled” to it, and would smack you with their canes should you try to even discuss cutting benefits. Of course, they also believe that other groups of elderly persons do not deserve what they have; funny how that works, eh? Samuelson doesn’t understand politics very well, doe he?

The social contract which we have includes income and health security, and yet does not eviscerate free enterprise. It’s benefits are for all citizens. Samuelson is no friend of our social contract:

“By now, it’s obvious that we need to rewrite the social contract that, over the past half-century, has transformed the federal government’s main task into transferring income from workers to retirees.”

To him, and the GOP/TP when it suits them, the federal government ought to have few mandates, i.e., foreign relations, border protection, building a national armed forces, and, most of all, cutting taxes paid by those who, by and large, are already doing quite well. For people like Samuelson, doing well is always the best revenge on those whose paths through life are rocky and dangerous. Tea Partiers, in particular, detest those they consider lazy welfare queens and kings, despite the fact that many Tea Partiers collect what the call “welfare,” within which they have been known to include Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. When this wrongheaded enmity is pressed against the elderly, especially those who rely upon those programs, on those who have lived long enough to achieve old age, it’s akin to saying to them, “Thanks for your hard work, and drop dead.”

Robert Samuelson’s Why are we in this debt fix? It’s the elderly, stupid proves he’s comfortable warring on the nation’s elderly. Period. Paragraph. Throw him off a train . . .

January 12, 2011

“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the taxes.”
A (mild) paraphrase of Shakespeare’s “let’s kill all the lawyers”
Henry The Sixth, Part 2 Act 4, scene 2, 71–78

Ken Silverstein’s July 2010 Harper’s Magazine article, Tea party in the Sonora: For the future of G.O.P. governance, look to Arizona, surveys the political landscape of that Tea Party dominion. It’s relevant today as the GOP has seized control of the House and maintains its unofficial “filibuster majority” in the Senate.

Below are some excerpts:

Since the days of Barry Goldwater, an axiom of Arizona politics, particularly among Republicans, has been that tax cuts generate economic growth in all circumstances. Hence total state taxation has declined during fifteen of the past seventeen years; the individual income tax has taken the biggest hit, but sales, property, and corporate-income taxes have also come down substantially. The legislature has created tax exemptions for everything from country-club memberships to pedicures to food purchases by airlines (the latter at the behest of local airline lobbyists). None of this has produced the hoped-for effect. Although tax cuts “have lowered government revenues,” they “have not had any perceptible effect on the state’s economic growth,” concluded an Arizona State University business-school study, published last November, that examined the past three decades of fiscal policy.

Instead, to raise cash, the legislature has pursued a series of wild sell-offs and budget cuts. It privatized the capitol building and leased it back from its new owner, an arrangement that brought in substantial revenue but over time will cost Arizona far more. The legislature has sold off numerous other state properties at bargain prices, and has put up future lottery revenues as collateral on a $450 million loan. Meanwhile, Arizona removed more than 300,000 adults from state health coverage and terminated one health-care program for 47,000 poor children. Funding was slashed at the agency that deals with reports of child abuse and neglect, and also at Children’s Rehabilitative Services, so that parents of children with cystic fibrosis, cerebral palsy, and a number of other conditions are now required to pay 100 percent of treatment costs. 

The anti-government attitude in Arizona is now reflexive, especially because of its entanglement with the issue of immigration. As one local resident, who didn’t want to be identified because she has a government job, told me: “People who have swimming pools don’t need state parks. If you buy your books at Borders you don’t need libraries. If your kids are in private school, you don’t need K-12. The people here, or at least those who vote, don’t see the need for government. Since a lot of the population are not citizens, the message is that government exists to help the undeserving, so we shouldn’t have it at all. People think it’s OK to cut spending, because ESL is about people who refuse to assimilate, and health care pays for illegals.”

There’s a lot to think about. And not just in Arizona . . .

Jihad Grandpas & Grammas

It’s the Social Contract