The Undeserving

How do you explain the "What's the Matter With Kansas?" phenomenon? This question, the title of the famous and insightful book, asked how it could be so many people vote against their own self interest, vote Republican, when the Republican party, clearly, is dedicated to keeping the rich rich and the poor in their place.

The two most likely explanations are: One, Joe Sixpack, who works hard to make $40,000 a year believes, has to believe, someday he will be rich. He believes he is only temporarily poor.. That is his pipe dream and he gets nasty and hostile when you try to disabuse him of this delusion.

The second explanation is the Republicans simply fool enough of the people enough of the time. They tell you you are not making it because the Democrats are spending your money, and it's not your fault: It's the Democrats robbing you blind.

Of course, the truth is just the opposite: it is the Republicans who are robbing you blind, who always have, who have stacked the tax code to keep the rich rich and the poor poor. It is the Republicans who want to destroy public education because they don't want to pay to educate the poor, especially if the poor might learn to be critical thinkers, in which case the Republican party is really cooked.

If the poor realized the Republican tax code means Warren Buffet pays less income tax than his own secretary, they might get pretty angry at the Republicans. But all the Republicans have to do is say, "No, it's the Democrats who have screwed you with taxes.

It's the old truth that a person often accuses others of the sin of which he himself is most guilty.

The Republicans can propose killing Medicare by turning it into Coupon Care, where you get a fixed amount, say $6,000 a year, to cover your medical expenses and then you find out your coronary by pass surgery will cost $250,000.

Tough luck, sucker.

But the real hard core of Joe Sixpack's resentment against the Democrats is his bitterness about how hard he works and how the Democrats are willing, and have always been willing, to give away money to slackers who simply will not work and who live on welfare, or depend on Medicare or Social Security.

Somehow, the message that Democrats, under President Clinton, and guided by Daniel Patrick Moynahan, changed welfare. There are no more welfare queens, driving Cadillacs, dripping in diamonds, sitting at home collecting welfare checks.

Actually, there never were such queens--the Welfare Queen was the most potent fictional character ever invented by the Republican party.

But there was, once, a very toxic welfare culture, a culture of dependency.

I saw it first hand in a clinic I did in Washington, DC, when a fourteen year old girl came in pregnant and I asked her how she intended to support this baby.

She shrugged her shoulders, looking at the floor and said, "Welfare."

It was a pattern I saw all the time in that clinic: Have the baby, hand it off to grandma, who was herself on welfare, sitting at home at age 40, taking care of her grand daughter's baby and taking care of her daughter's baby, and the daughter was working as a part time clerk and as a part time prostitute. The grand daughter went back to school,l where she got pregnant by three different boys, three more times before she finally left school. And all this depended on the arrival of the welfare checks.

That toxicity poisoned those it supported, but more important, it poisoned a generation of Joe Sixpacks who hated the Democrats for being so soft hearted as to give away the dollars Joe paid in payroll taxes and income taxes and gas taxes to these free loaders.

Democrats have to face this legacy of bitterness head on. We have to say, "We are against taking your money and giving it to people who don't deserve it."

On the other hand, when I asked people, "Suppose you had only two choices: Number One, you get all the healthcare and retirement money you need, but some people who are not working, who refuse to work will also get the same or, Number Two, you do not get any of that healthcare or retirement money, but the people who refuse to work get nothing."

Amazingly, there are people who chose number two.

That is a truth Democrats have to face.

A Revelation

DOUBLE CLICK ON THE GREEN PIE CHART TO ENLARGE

You can always learn something new.

I was so stunned by the pie graphs Paul Solman showed on the PBS News Hour (shown in pretty poor reproduction to the left)

I showed them around the office.

The top pie shows how wealth is distributed in Sweden, and the bottom pie shows the United States, with the yellow slice showing the proportion of all national wealth owned by the top 20% in the nation, the wealthiest 1/5 of the country; the blue slice is what the next most wealthy 20% owns; the magenta slice shows the next 20%'s slice of the pie and so on, down to the lowest 40%, which owns less than 1% of all the wealth in the USA, but in Sweden the poorest 40% owns roughly 25% of all the weath.

So I did what Paul Solman did on the News Hour: I asked people in my office which country they would rather live in, Sweden where the wealth is distributed more evenly or the USA where they wealth is so uneven, where 84% of all the wealth is owned by just 20% of the people.

Of the three coworkers I asked, two said, immediately, they like the Swedish distribution, although not speaking Swedish they would not want to live there.

But one of my coworkers looked at it and said, "Well, to get that distribution, the Swedes had to tax their wealthy. It's a socialist system. I'd rather live here."

When I pressed her she said, she did not make enough money to pay taxes and she had a lot of relatives who don't want to work for a living and she doesn't want to pay taxes to support them.

Floored me.

But it does finally reveal why some people support the Tea Party, and the Republican Party.

There really are people who are offended by the idea of supporting their neighbors, even their relatives. They'd rather have less themselves, just to be sure the undeserving do not get a bigger share. The idea that the richest 1/5 of Americans own over 80% of all the wealth does not disturb these people. Even if the rich do not deserve their wealth, in the sense of not having earned it, that does not disturb my co worker.. What bothered her was not that the rich may not deserve their wealth; what bothered this lady is that someone who does not deserve a hand out may get that support.

One interesting thing about this woman: She is a devout Christian.

Wowser!

Where do you begin with this?

Wealth Re Distribution, Republican Style

This is a pretty dim photograph of a very vivid pie chart from Paul Solman's Public Broadcasting System website, (Google Paul Solman, PBS, Wealth Distribution).

But it's clear enough. The Yellow part of the pie is the wealth owned by the top 20% of Americans. The Blue slice is the wealth owned by the next most wealthy 20% and the Red and Orange slices show the wealth owned by the next three quintiels, i.e. the lower 60% of the country.

Even with the dim graphics, the effects of the Bush Tax Cuts which the Tea Party and the rest of the Republicans are so eager to preserve and defend are starkly visible.

See that tiny little wedge of the pie owned by 60% of our population? Not easy.

This is what the rich get richer plan of Republican voracity has got us.

Is there a more brutally honest way of seeing what these sanctimonious Americans have wrought?

Common Sense

President Barack Obama spoke to the good folks of Cannon Falls, Minnesota about the Republican opposition to raising taxes on billionaires, "Think about that. I mean, that's just not common sense."

Gee whiz, actually, it makes perfect sense.

As usual, President Obama did not name names, so the greedy and the guilty remain faceless, nameless abstractions. They are the guys at Wall Street firms and at banks who played with everyone's money but their own, took no personal risks but reaped huge personal benefits on security back mortgages and things called derivatives and on other financial arcanea and they walked off with millions in their bank accounts, while the rest of the country lost their homes, their jobs and their self respect. Obama said he did not want to go after these guys. He's just too polite to speak ill of anyone. He may be too polite to lead, for that matter.

The Republican party is bought and paid for by billionaires and millionaires and people who are deluded enough to think one day they may become billionaires and they do not want to pay taxes when that happens. These are the poor, deluded souls who in another age would have cried out lustily, "God save the King!" as if the welfare of the king had anything to do with their best interests.

As one great Republican President once said, "You can fool some of the people all of the time."

And the Republicans have taken that to heart.

So they create these phony Reischtag fires and they ride to power on them. You remember the Reischtag fire. Well, maybe not, but the Reischtag was the Capitol building of the German Parliament and the Nazis set it ablaze and blamed the Communists and Hitler, newly elected, used this attack on the parliament as an excuse to pass The Enabling Act which gave him a lock on power. The Nazis created a phony "emergency" to justify seizing power, to "save" the country.

Sound familiar?

And now, the Republicans (Mitch, John, Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor and all those who sail with them) are, as they always do, singing a song in chorus and it goes like this:

Oh, we are the saviors of the Republic,
We are the ones on whom the nation's life does depend.
We will save the country from the Deficit and from Bankruptcy,
From those nasty Democrats who want only to tax and spend!

Millions are unemployed, uninsured, and at their wits' end,
But we will save the billionaires first,
By slipping the knife into Medicare, and making the Democrats bend
And cutting Social Security at the jugular
So we can finally put the New Deal to an end!

And our pitiful President goes to the heart land and says, "It's jut not common sense."
Golly gee, fellas, act nice.

It makes perfectly good sense, to cut taxes for the millionaires, if they are the people who put you in office. We have the best Congress money can buy.

As a great Democratic President once said, "A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who has never learned to walk forward."

The same man observed, "Over ninety percent of all national deficits from 1921 to 1939 were caused by payments for past, present and future wars."

And, if he were alive today, that President would observe that our deficit today was caused by Republicans who got us into Iraq and Afghanistan and by the tax breaks they gave their rich patrons.

And it was this same Democratic President (not President Obama) who said, "Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to the ability to pay. That is the only American principle."

So here's hoping our present day President will man up and give 'em hell, President Obama. It's only common sense.

Just the Simple Truth, Please

What I'm wondering is: Who really knows?

Mitt Romney says he knows, and he is a Presidential candidate.

Paul Krugman says he knows, and he is an economist, a Nobel prize winning economist at that.

Paul Ryan, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Rand and Ron Paul all know, and they sound very sure.

Rush Limbaugh, has always known, and he has been telling us about it ad nauseum for years.

Glenn Beck knows and he has been drawing it on his blackboard, but there really is something loony about his frenetic style, so even if he knows, I'm not sure I can believe him.

So, are we spending too much in Washington?

Are we spending too much in New Hampshire?

I mean, is government spending too much?

Actually, I haven't seen the numbers, and I'm pretty sure if I did see them, they'd be too big and in too many categories and contained in too many graphs for me to actually understand. So I just have to believe other people. But who to believe?

Mitt, Mitch, John, Paul, Rush, Glenn all say we are and they thunder it, like the word of God coming down from the mountain, so they must know.

But little Paul Krugman sits at his computer at Princeton University and looks at numbers and he says, actually, we the government is spending too little, says government spending is actually a smaller part of the overall economy than it has been in decades, says we should have spent way more in that stimulus package and if we had we would've actually pulled out of the recession, rather than just wallowing toward the shore.

Money, economy, deficits, debt payments, really Social Security and Medicare are all about the numbers, aren't they? Until they become about the people affected by the numbers, or the candidates trying to get elected by the numbers.

So we are told to look at numbers and apply them to the complex government numbers they are fighting over down in Washington.

We got more going out than coming in.

Maybe, maybe not. But, for the sake of argument let's say, yes, more going out than coming in.

So what should we do about that?

If I have too little to cover expenses, especially fixed expenses, I typically look for another job, a contract, some more income.

But for the government, that means taxes, fees, "income enhancement."

And for Mitt, Rand, Ron, Rush, Mitch and John, that "Tax" word is a four letter word they dare not speak.

Even closing "tax loop holes" is an anathema for these boys. Loop holes which allow you to deduct a corporate jet (because, as Mitt tells us corporations are people) or allows you to buy a Ford Expedition and deduct it as a business expense if you are a doctor--but you could not deduct your Honda Civic (go figure.)

So the Republicans are like those people who are starving but their religion forbids them to eat sacred cows, so they cannot take action to save themselves or their people. Except for the Republicans, it's sacred cows, chickens, hogs, corn, wheat, soy and fish. You just cannot touch anything to help save yourself if that anything is "Taxes."

Say It Ain't So

If you don't think too good, don't think too much.

--Ted Williams

If you are rich and others are not, whether you find yourself in the 17th century or the 21st, you find yourself faced with an eternal question, a question with which you will inevitably be challenged by your fellow man: Why should you have so much when the rest of us have so little?

In the 17th century, the working argument was, "Obviously, I was born into this wealth, and God selected my parents and meant for me to be rich." So, in a time when God was the answer to every question which confounded people, that worked.

Not so much in the 21st century.

Now, in the 21st century we have a similar problem for the Republican party. One percent of the country owns 70% of the wealth and we have to figure out why that should be a good idea.

If we can do that and kill the two things which have justified Democrats for decades, Social Security and Medicare, well, that would be a master stroke.

So first we create a crisis. This is a great tactic and worked well throughout history: The Nazis burned down the Reishtag, the parliament building, created a sense of impending doom and rode to power as the strong force of law and order. So this works well.

Here's a crisis for you: THE DEFICIT. WE ARE ALL JUST A HOP, SKIP AND JUMP AWAY FROM BANKRUPTCY.

And why? ENTITLEMENT PROGRAMS, namely, you guessed it, Medicare and Social Security.
We Republicans have been telling you for the last 50 years these government tax and spend giveaway programs would bankrupt us all. Now it's happening.

The escape from this impending disaster is of course, PRIVATE ENTERPRISE.

So, here's our fool proof plan:

1/ No more taxes.
2/ This will empower small business to create jobs, once they don't have to worry about paying taxes or taking time to deal with regulators and regulations.
3/ This will put more money in the hands of people who already have a lot of money, so they will now have enough to spare a little for the little guy, and they'll hire more little guys.

Once you unleash the horses of competition and individual incentive, the economy will come roaring back.

Problem is, small businesses and big businesses alike are swimming in cash, but they are not hiring, for the very good reason, there are not a lot of customers out there.

There are not a lot of customers because people who don't have jobs tend to not spend a lot.

So, the Democrats have said, if business is failing to hire and if private enterprise is failing to put people to work, people who will spend, then we, the people of the government will do it. Once people have jobs, businesses will have customers and we'll have tax payers and the economy will come roaring back, just the way it's done throughout history.

The Democrats have said, if the patient is bleeding out on the emergency room table, let's stop the bleeding, start the intravenous lines, infuse some blood and we'll worry about how the patient will pay for it once he's back on his feet.

Dead patients don't pay bills.

But nobody hears the Democrats because the Republicans are always big, loud and angry, so angry and so sure of themselves they can say the most transparently stupid things, like spending is the problem, lack of income is not a problem, and that stupidity gets accepted as conventional wisdom.

The next stage of battle for the Republicans is the Obamacare bill. They will argue in the Supreme Court that the government cannot be allowed to compel a citizen to buy health insurance. This is the end of liberty, if a man has to buy health insurance even though he believes he will never need it, will never get ill or injured and even if that means all the rest of us will have to pay for his heedlessness.

We know that argument in New Hampshire, where you can ride a motorcycle without a helmet and when you are found brain damaged on the roadside and wind up quadraplegic in a hospital for the rest of your life, the taxpayers have to pay for your care--but it was your Constitutional right to live free or die (or linger) and not have to pay for the risk you were taking.

In fact, if you cannot compel a citizen to buy health insurance, then what have we been doing all these years compelling people to buy health insurance in the form of Medicare? And we've been making people by unemployment insurance against their will all these years, and we've been calling it social security.

We've played the role of uber parent, forcing people to put aside money for a future they may never live.

But now, we'll have our day in court, and, you heard it here first: Justices Thomas, Scalia, Alieto and Roberts will all agree, Obamacare and by extension, Social Security and Medicare are unconstitutional intrusion of government into private lives; Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and Jame Madison never said we could have these programs where the government steps in and forces citizens to plan for the future. We have no such text in the original good book we call The Constitution.

Ah, a Republican paradise, a clean sweep.

Charity

Remember that wonderful scene from the Godfather where Michael assigns missions to each of his men and Tom Hagen finds himself standing alone,without an assignment and asks, "Mike, I'm out? Why am I out?"

And Michael smiles and says, "Tom, you have always a great advisor but this is war and I need a war consigliorere."

Almost since his inauguration I've felt President Obama needed a war time adviser, for whatever reason.

Now he has one, in the form of Drew Westen, a professor at Emory, who writes in the Sunday New York Times.

He notes Obama has not realized, as Michael did, that he is locked in combat with people who are not going to be reasonable, who will not negotiate or accommodate, so he has to go to war.

He does not say, "In times like these, the rich should be giving to charity, not getting charity."

Obama fails to identify the villains. He does not say, "This disaster was not a natural disaster but was created by conservative extremists who told us if we just eliminated regulations and rewarded greed and recklessness, it would all work out. And it didn't work out 80 years ago, when the same people sold our grandparents the same bill of goods, with the same disastrous results."

If Westen and Paul Krugman were Obama's advisors, the President would be saying, "You elected me to fix the mess the Republicans and Wall Street have made of the economy. The deficit didn't' exist until George W. Bush and his war Republicans gave 2 trillion dollars in tax breaks to the wealthy and squander $1 trillion in two wars, at least one of which was a total waste."

FDR said he welcomed the hatred of the forces of greed and selfishness and Obama could have said the same, and he could have named names, Fox, Murdoch, Limbaugh.

We needed an FDR, not a Ghandi, in this country in 2008. Ghandi was successful because he was opp posing the British. Had Ghandi been up against Hilter or Stalin, he would have been an unknown dead man, just another statistic. Same for Martin Luther King. To be successful with negotiation and appeals to conscience, you have to place faith in a certain level of integrity and conscience in those you oppose. But Obama is dealing with Mitch McConnell, who has publicly said his only first goal is to prevent Obama's re election That comes ahead fo any national interest, ahead of an improved economy, which would only help Obama.

But Obama compromised, accepted an ineffectual stimulus package and then had to live with the Republicans crowing that stimulus packages don't work. It was like the diabetic who takes a trivial amount of insulin an sees no improvement in his blood sugars and then complains, "This insulin stuff doesn't work!" You need to say, "Insulin always works, if you take enough."

Same with health care reform. Obama accepted a watered down insurance company reform when what was needed was a Medicare for all alternative. That would have made the insurance companies compete.

He never explained why saving the banks was so important, or why no bankers issuing bizarre and reckless loans did not and should not have wound up in jail.

Westen goes on to speculate about why President Obama cannot be the president we "know" is inside. And he is not afraid to list all the possibilities: The first is that he is simply not the guy we hoped he was. He was, after all, inexperienced and we didn't know much about him. "Those of us who were bewitched by his eloquence...chose to ignore some disquieting aspects of his biography: that he had accomplished very little before he ran for president." He just might not be up to the task.

Westen notes Obama's narratives always lack one vital element every charismatic leader needs: The villain. "Who is always left out, described in passive voice, as if the cause of other's misery has no agency and hence no culpability."

So we have a problem. We may have a President who is simply not up to the task.

The sad thing is we just got through 8 years of George W. who was so obviously not up to the task, and we are faced with alternatives from the GOP who are worse than useless.

Where that leaves us, I do not know. But I'm not smiling.