In all seriousness, lawmakers seem
poised to bring the same devastating budget-cuts and austerity measures that
have crippled Portugal, Spain and Greece here to the United States. Under the
pretense of averting the “fiscal cliff,” Congress is eyeing so-called
“entitlement” programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
And here
you thought these programs would be safe under President Obama. Silly liberals.
Let’s fill in the details for the
uninitiated. The so-called fiscal cliff—for those who have been living under a
rock for the past two months—is the dramatic, sound bite-worthy name given to
the series of spending cuts (including the Bush-era tax-cuts for the very
wealthy) which are set to automatically expire at the end of 2012. Economists
(well, some of them, anyway) fear a failure to determine which spending
programs to maintain will send the U.S. “over the fiscal cliff”—i.e. the shit
will hit the fan, economically speaking. President Obama has signaled for weeks
now that he is willing to work out a “Grand Bargain” to avert economic disaster.
Many fear Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid—the crown-jewels of not just
liberalism, but social democracy--could be part of this bargain.
As I said, not every economist is
convinced the fiscal cliff is really as menacing as the cable news talking
heads make it out to be. As Nobel Prize-winning economist, Paul Krugman points
out in the New York Times (11/09/2012), the fiscal cliff “isn’t really a cliff.”
“It’s not like the debt ceiling
confrontation where terrible things might well have happened right away if the
deadline had been missed,” he writes. “This time nothing very bad
will happen to the economy if agreement isn’t reached until a few weeks or even
a few months into 2013.”
Author, James K. Galbraith takes this
criticism even further. In an article for AlterNet (“Six Reasons the Fiscal
Cliff is a Scam,” 11/22/2012), Galbraith calls the debate “policy-making by
hostage-taking,” and a “contrived crisis.”
He writes, “Stripped to essentials, the
fiscal cliff is a device constructed to force a rollback of Social Security,
Medicare and Medicaid, as the price of avoiding tax increases…”
A trumped-up crisis or not, there are a
few things readers should know.
First off, it is important to understand
these programs are not really “entitlements” as they are routinely referred to
by critics so much as earned income benefits. Social Security and Medicare are
programs Americans pay into, through paycheck deductions, throughout their
working lives.
Furthermore, Social Security does not contribute one dime to the federal deficit. And, contrary to Republican talking
points, there is nothing wrong with Social Security's overall sustainability. The program may need some
minor tweaking down the road, but all reports indicate it is structurally sound
for the foreseeable future. Medicare, likewise, is projected to remain
financially viable until at least 2024, and even then there will still be
enough left in the fund to pay 87 percent of benefits.
Indeed, I suspect much
of the misinformation about how we can “no longer afford” these cherished
programs, which are crucial to helping provide for the elderly, the poor and
citizens with disabilities, is being promoted by free-market-obsessed elites
who never approved of them in the first place. Now they see their opportunity
to obliterate them forever.
Second, there are two main drivers of
this fiscal disaster which the media seem all too willing to overlook: The Bush
tax-cuts for the rich, and our two unfunded wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Raise
taxes on the wealthy and bring our troops home from both countries (yes, there
are still “non-combat” forces in Iraq), and there would be no cliff.
It angers me to no end when the
uber-rich mock and deride the “freeloaders”— “parasites” in their Randian
lexicon—as a financial drain on the system, when most of them are getting
unwarranted and undeserved tax-cuts.
Yet Wall Street robber barons—the very
same people who crashed the global economy—under the guise of a group called
Fix the Debt have no qualms about publicly calling for cuts to Social Security,
Medicare and the like. One such member of the Fix the Debt crusade, Goldman
Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein stated on a recent appearance on CBS Evening News
(11/19/2012):
“The entitlements and what people think
they’re going to get…they’re not going to get it.”
But wait, you ask: Surely Blankfein’s
view was juxtaposed with a critic of cutting benefits, right? You know—in the
interest of “objectivity” and all that?
Well, I must have missed that segment
of the program. In fact, throughout all of last week, CBS’s Scott Pelley only
spoke with corporate CEOs from the Fix the Debt clan. No contrarian voices were
featured. Hmmm… I wonder if this is an example of the media’s “liberal bias” I
constantly read about in the Portland
Press Herald’s letters to the editor section?
Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security
are part of the New Deal promise to society’s most vulnerable that they would
be taken care of. They are not “handouts,” and those who receive them are not “moochers.”
To jeopardize these federal programs while millionaire CEOs continue to rake in
record profits, and many global corporations avoid paying income taxes entirely
is unconscionable.
The ever-growing income disparity in this
country is not only immoral, it is ultimately unsustainable. As John Steinbeck
observed in The Grapes of Wrath, the
poor, exploited masses will not tolerate their oppression forever. “How can you
frighten a man whose hunger is not only in his own cramped stomach but in the
wretched bellies of his children?” he wrote. “You can’t scare him—he has known
a fear beyond every other.”
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