Well, the "negotiations" are going on over dealing with
"Fiscal Cliff" (which is more like a fiscal slope). Given the
Republican intransigence and acting as if they, not the Democrats, had won the
election, President Obama is starting to sound as if he is negotiating with
himself. (Not surprising. After all, this is precisely what the DLC-led
Democrats did over the Bush tax cuts when they were first introduced back in
2001, which adoption began the downward fiscal and monetary slope to the
present situation. And on most of the major issues, especially on war and
foreign policy, the President is still acting very DLC-like.) But there is
another approach that could be taken, which is what the column below is about.
If one started from the position taken here, which is essentially
the few-have-ever-heard-of-it-because-it-has-received-virtually-no-exposure
"People's Budget" of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, plus a few
other features, there would actually be some stuff that one could bargain away
and still come up with a progressive solution to the problem. But since the President
has already started from the middle (to be generous about it), it is likely
that we are going to end up with a bad bargain, e.g., raising the Medicare
eligibility age to 67 (which would actually increase overall health care
costs [1] and is the first step on the road to the destruction of Medicare).
This is especially true since the Federal debt ceiling "crisis" is
once again just around the corner. (Of course, it is only a crisis because the
GOP insists on making one out of it --- never seemed to be a problem when the
debt limit had to be raised continually to pay for Bush's wars.) At any rate,
here is a proposed progressive guide, with much credit due to the Progressive
Congressional Caucus and Sen. Sanders, for how to effectively deal with the GOP
and the "Fiscal Cliff" without giving away the whole store in
advance.
The United States does have a serious Federal
debt/deficit problem, and it is important for progressives to recognize that
fact. There is no danger of the United States, with its enormous productive
power and its enormous borrowing power, "becoming Greece" at any time in the
foreseeable future. But the two problems are important, and must be dealt, not
for the reasons the "small government" GOPers give, but for two very real ones:
interest payments are taking up an ever-increasing portion of total Federal
expenditures, and thus less and less money is available for national domestic
spending, whether it be for infrastructure, education, research, or, let's say,
the National Weather Service and the Federal Aviation Administration. (Just
wait for some Republican to propose that the FAA be given just enough funds to
put only every other flight under Air Traffic Control and for the NWS get along
with being able to track only every other hurricane. After all, Romney proposed
a major defunding of FEMA.) That the current problem is largely the result of George
W. Bush's unpaid-for wars and Medicare expansion, and his tax cuts for his "you
are my base" rich folks, needs to receive even more mention.
The GOP actually just loves "big government" when it
comes to, for example, the criminal enforcement of religious determinism in the
outcome of pregnancy and loves big spending on the military, the
prison-industrial complex, and etc. But they do want to use this manufactured
crisis to pursue Grover Norquist's true agenda (2): "shrinking the Federal
government [that is the parts they don't like] to the size of a bathtub and
then drowning it in the bathtub." Their immediate targets are, of course, those
announced by Romney/Ryan: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
Social Security happens to be funded completely
outside of the Federal annual budget and can be fixed easily by, for example,
raising the upper income limit on payments-in. Medicare and Medicaid do pose
threats to Federal spending capabilities, but only because a) health care is so
expensive in the United States and b) precisely because of the existence of
Medicare, spending is so heavily tilted towards the elderly when the same
services if provided to people at a younger age could serve to, among other
things, reduce the costs of care when they get older. This situation, however,
cannot be rectified without a major overhaul of the US health care delivery
system (as in single-payer), but that is not going to happen anytime soon. So
where do we go from here, in a way that makes sense for the whole of the American
people?
We hear a lot about "Simpson-Bowles," actually a
failure, which happened to focus heavily on major reductions in the
paid-for-benefits programs (mis-named "entitlements"), Social Security and
Medicare, and Medicaid. (The latter is actually as much a subsidy for the
health care system as it is a health care benefit for the poor, because without
it hospital emergency services would be even more overburdened with the
un-insured than they are now.) Interestingly enough, Erskine Bowles is an old
right-wing, DLC, Democrat, a former banker who was once Mr. DLC-er himself,
Bill Clinton's, Chief of Staff. The chief claim to fame of Alan Simpson, a
former far-right wing GOP Senator from Wyoming, is that he was the mentor of
Dick Cheney. And boy do they get publicity, as the pressure builds and builds
to use the "fiscal cliff" to indeed start taking aim at the paid-for-benefit
programs, even, apparently, reaching to the White House. But there is another
way, and it is what progressives should be rallying around.
What has received virtually no publicity (although it
has received from very nice endorsements, including one from the aforementioned
Bill Clinton, see the document on the web) is the "Peoples' Budget," first
released in 2011 (3). It was produced by the Congressional Progressive Caucus
under the leadership of Cong. Raul Grijalva of Arizona and supported by other
Congressional figures like Sen. Bernie Sanders and presumably the newly
re-elected Cong. Alan Grayson. The US is fortunate as compared with many other
advanced capitalist countries that came a cropper during the 2007-2009 blow-up
of finance capitalism in that it has some very deep pockets from which all
kinds of money can be drawn (given the political will). And many of those
pockets would be dug into with some form of the following measures (many of
which appear in the People's Budget, but some of which have been drawn from
other sources over the years).
1. Raise personal income
taxes on the rich and raise the collected taxes on the large corporations,
embracing "tax and spend" under the slogan "Tax the rich; spend
for the Nation." (On paper, US corporate tax rates rank fairly high;
however as collected [the corporations employing many accountants] they rank
rather low.)
2. Close
all the tax loopholes for the same parties. (We are not talking about the
charitable deductions and mortgage interest payments here, of course. But such
measures would put lots of accountants out of work.)
3. Restrict the export of
capital so that employment and the tax base here could expand.
4. Tax overseas profits.
5. Create a separate
national capital expenditure budget like the state and localities have, funded
by specific bonding authority. This would take all infrastructure spending off
the Federal budget, and allow the nation to really deal with its rapidly
deteriorating roads, railroads, mass transit, water supply, electrical grid,
and internet systems.
6. End the so-called "drug
war" which commits billions of dollars annually to law enforcement and
imprisonment of non-violent "drug offenders," which would significantly reduce
the size of the US prison-industrial complex (highest number of incarcerated
people in the world, by proportion overwhelmingly non-white) and tax the sale
of the formerly "illicit" drugs (a potential biggie).
7. Create a
Medicare-for-all/single-payer health care financing system that would save
several hundred billion dollars per year in administrative costs.
8. End the subsidies for the
agribusiness and the extractive industries.
9. Make massive cuts in
military spending (while providing jobs in a re-industrialized United States
for the 100s of thousands of displaced workers), beginning with the ending of
the current US foreign wars and going on to a drawdown of the massive overseas
military base system.
10.
Institute a transaction tax on securities trades (4), as France has just done
for certain types of transactions. (This one alone, at say 1%, could bring in
huge amounts of revenue.)
It is essential in the present fight over how to deal with
the "fiscal cliff or slope" that progressives come up with more than "tax the
rich" and "don't touch Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid." Some form of
this aggressive approach is what progressives need to be undertaking, loudly
and clearly. And it is time for people like our friends at MSNBC to begin to
provide a forum for the Congressional Progressive Caucus to be heard.
References :
1. Campaign for
America's Future, Smart Talk, Number 9 | December 13, 2012, "Preserving
Medicare Benefits by Controlling Health Care Costs" ( http://www.ourfuture.org/fact-sheets-briefs/2012125012/prevent-cuts-medicare-benefits-controlling-health-care-costs
2. Jonas,
S., " Grover Norquist's Wet Dream," Published on BuzzFlash@Truthout ( http://blog.buzzflash.com/node/12601 ), April 15,
2011. Revised, April 20, 2011, for http://www.opednews.com/articles/Grover-Norquist-s-Wet-Drea-by-Steven-Jonas-110707-971.html , f urther
revision, Dec. 10, 2012
3. The People's Budget of the Congressional Progressive
Caucus ( http://cpc.grijalva.house.gov/index.cfm?sectionid=70 -iontree=5,70 ).
4. "The Financial
Transaction Tax," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_transaction_tax.
