May 30, 2011 -- It’s a good time to take a moment for a Q and A. Lots of big questions, lots of answers to every question. Let’s pose some questions, offer some answers. Allow ourselves to choose as we see it.
Q. Is the country headed toward bankruptcy as some suggest?
As progressive economist Paul Krugman explains the conservative theory, “deficits mean higher debt, which means higher interest payments, which can mean a spiral into bankruptcy.” Conservative NYT columnist David Brooks gloomily forecasts a stalemate in Congress over the debt limit and says: “Federal agencies will send out letters advising parents that because of the deadlock in Congress, student loans will be suspended. Other letters will advise seniors to make arrangements with banks for credit lines until their Social Security checks can resume. National panic will ensue.” At that point “bankruptcy loomed.”
Wait up, says Krugman. While the deficit must be dealt with “the arithmetic of debt is much less scary than you might think.” That spiral is extremely slow, allowing time for judicious cuts, rather than immediate draconian slashes that only choke the economy while causing enormous pain and suffering to the public at large, with time for the economic growth that will pull us out of the hole. He says “the added interest burden is less than one-tenth of one percent of GDP.” He uses a lot more arithmetic to prove the point which you can find if you Google Paul Krugman and the Arithmetic of Debt.”
It is difficult to tell how sincerely Republican conservatives believe in their own scare tactics, and how much of it is to accomplish “social engineering.” Even the usually pragmatic Mr. Brooks had a sentence tucked away in his column about “a values agenda to shore up marriage and family cohesion.” Now I ask you, David, how do you legislate that? Like abstainers only sex education, you put up posters saying “thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife” which, considering the steady stream of sex scandals among the political hierarchy these days would at least be good for a lot of laughs. It still looks like “Starve the Beast,” killing government by not providing any revenue to it. As for me, if the Brooks prediction should come to pass I would tuck my life savings in my coin purse and head for Costa Rica, a wonderful place to live, except I would have to take seven doctors with me.
Q. How far should the government go in protecting Americans from the excesses of capitalism?
President Obama thought a Consumer Protection Bureau would be a good thing and appointed accomplished, high-profile Elizabeth Warren to create one, but the financial services industry, which spends $1.4 million a day on lobbying according to Jonathan Alter of Bloomberg, and their friends in Congress do not agree. So far Republicans have refused to confirm her appointment, subjecting her to some rough treatment in committee hearings. Rep. Patrick T. McHenry (NC-R), chairman of a subcommittee of the House oversight committee, even accusing her twice of lying. Now that was not very courtly.
Alter writes: “Most Republican lawmakers don’t seem to believe the government has a role to play in protecting the middle class against what Warren calls the ‘tricks and traps’ used for years by big banks and credit-card companies to hornswoggle consumers.” Conservatives “believe Warren is overreaching in requiring that the terms of mortgages, credit cards and bank accounts be written in plain English instead of buried in fine print that even experts cannot decipher.” In floor debates earlier this month the claim was made that banks would not be able to make as much profit if such rules were in force. I think of that as a remarkable admission. They can’t make enough money unless they are allowed to use ruses to cheat the consumer? Is that the free market at work at its best? These are the same breed of people who objected to mandate of putting content labels on food. Perhaps Ms. Warren could follow the F.D.A. example and develop a standard simple label, like the one on food products, to stick on every financial instrument.
There was a time there when interest rates were higher than they are now when my credit card company kept sending me blank checks telling me I could fill out and cash them for $15,000 and pay them back at only 4 percent interest. I just destroyed them as they came in but one day in an idle moment I asked myself how they could do this? I could take the 15 grand at four percent and invest it for 5 percent, so I read the document. Way down in the bottom in the middle of a paragraph in about 8 point type there was the kicker. The minute you cashed the check you owed them a “transaction fee” on which you also paid interest thereafter. Even someone as clueless as am I at financial documents could see that in actuality that 4 percent was really about 11 percent once you found the caveat. A small example. So, should it be buyer beware, catch me if you can? Or should I be able to count on my duly elected government to help look after my interests?
Q. Do we want to privatize Medicare as called for in the Paul Ryan Budget proposal?
Under the Ryan plan Medicare becomes a sort of do-it-yourself voucher program, and indications are that this is a widely unpopular idea. Democrats point to the election held this week in a very conservative New York district where Democratic Kathy Hochul won the Congressional seat over her Republican opponent by pounding away at the Ryan plan for Medicare.
But Ryan says: “Medicare will be bankrupt in nine years and the status quo is unsustainable.” That is the party line and even though many Republicans are concerned about voter reaction they are stuck with it, an albatross around their necks. Of course Dick Cheney says “I worship the ground that Paul Ryan walks on,” the same Dick Cheney that said when his administration was in power and they were piling them up that deficits didn‘t matter.
Yes the growing cost of Medicare is a problem, especially when we give huge tax cuts for corporations and the rich, with no increase in revenue, just a decrease? The Ryan plan shifts the cost burden from the government to seniors themselves, a rejection to the principles of social insurance. The vouchers, or “coupons” if you will issued by the government for seniors to buy private insurance are estimated to cover only about a third of health care costs to seniors. This senior says O.K. by me if you can cut my health care problems by two thirds.
A couple of other things about the Ryan budget: it takes discretionary spending, including defense, down to Calvin Coolidge levels along with huge tax cuts for corporations and the rich, with no loss in revenue. A neat trick. Cal was so cool.
So there you have it. Should we give up on Medicare, or take the position of NYT columnist Charles Blow: “We don’t have to gut it to save it. People don’t quantify the quality of their lives by the money they save or the money the government saved on them, but by the moments they savor.”
Q. Do we want Health Care Reform to survive in its present state?
Personal opinion: Mitt Romney is making a big mistake for trying to trash the health care program he instituted in Massachusetts, a framework for what is now called “Obamacare,” which he is doing to pander to Tea Party voters. He should be bragging about it instead. Rick Ungar in Forbes Magazine, not exactly a liberal rag, reports on how well Obamacare is working so far. Thousands of new people have enrolled in the insurance system (The Health & Human Services Department had estimated that the changes in the law would result in about 1.2 million new enrollees in 2011 and it looks like number will be larger), health insurance companies are reporting record profits, here should be fewer trips to the emergency room by uninsured people who can’t pay the bill which tax payers then have to absorb and the CBO says the program will work to help reduce the federal deficit rather than increase it.
How can this be? The law now allows young adults under 26, the biggest group of the uninsured, to stay on their parents insurance which helped in several ways. At least 600,000 new members enrolled in the first quarter of this year. Because so many are young and healthy, fewer claims will be filed picking up the tab for older generations. And as noted, if some young person breaks a leg and goes to the emergency room there will be insurance to pay for it rather than tax dollars. So Mr. Romney, do yourself and your county a favor. Face down those new Tea Party members of the House who say they were elected to destroy “Obamacare.” You are already too linked to the program to disown it and you are just looking craven by objecting to it. If I were you I would try to take the credit away from Obama, or at least re-label it “MBcare,” for Mitt-Barack. What have you got to lose now?
Romney’s fellow Republicans continue the assault. Texas Senator John Cornyn introduced the Health Care Bureaucrats Elimination Act, a bill to kill off a law that is aimed at reforming extremely expensive, deeply-flawed fee-for-service health care system. Cornyn would save us from all of those nasty old bureaucrats who do public service. Rob Woodall, a Georgia Republican, gave this answer to a question at a town hall meeting “You want the government to take care of you because your employer decided not to take care of you. My question is: When do I decide I’m going to take care of me?” Then asked why he allowed the Congressional health care program to take care of him, Woodall answered “because it’s free.” So the best way to take care of yourself is to vote yourself a free benefit because you can, but screw everyone else.
And your opinion: reform or stay the course?
Q. Is the U.S.-U.K. bond “special?”
That question came up as President Obama set off on his excellent adventure to Ireland, England, France, Poland, and the G8 meeting in Deauville. In Ireland Obama must have felt he was back in Chicago the night he won the presidency as thousands cheered, waved placards, bought souvenirs. He got to visit Moneygall, a farming town 86 miles southwest of Dublin, a block-long village (population 298) once the home of his great- grandfather, his tie to the Irish (and 40 million Irish Americans) and an opportunity to talk about the loss of the O apostrophe. In England his tie to the British was his grandfather, a Kenyan who served as a cook in the British Army as he noted in an address to Parliament. The Queen had the American “Royal Couple” drop by for a bite to eat, and at one point the President was greeted by a 41-gun salute.
About that salute. I fantasize about Michele Bachmann, the Tea Party Dragon lady who once advised her Minnesota constituents to keep their guns “cocked and ready” when hearing about this would repeat the Jack Nicolson line as the Joker character in Batman, “where do they get those wonderful toys.” We will continue to be hearing a lot more from her if she does decide to run for the presidency. “Our phones have been ringing off the hook,” Rep. Bachmann told Fox News, announcing plans to accelerate her announcement of a presidential run. “People are saying, ‘Michele jump in, we want you to run.’” It could be worse. We could suffer a biblical plague of locusts.
The President, then, was able to affirm our “special relationship” with the UK. As NYT columnist Roger Cohen reports from London, as far as our relationship with the U.K. is, it’s hard to know where New York ends and London begins.” But he says “U.S-E.U. relations are as far from special as Greece from solvency or Luxembourg from excitement.” As Cohen remarked, the Atlantic is not as wide as the English Channel.
Q. Would you cast your vote for this person to be our President?
We have NYT columnist Gail Collins to thank for reading Texas Governor Rick Perry’s latest book and shares some of its wit and wisdom with us. Such as: “We are tired of being told how much salt we can put on our food, what windows we can buy for our house, what kind of cars we can drive, what kind of guns we can own. I hate it when the salt police come into your house and interrogate your French fries.”
As Collins points out “The federal government actually doesn’t tell us any of these things. Although it is true that federal regulations have driven the price of machine guns way up.”
Perry, she says, hates Social Security (“A crumbling monument to the failure of the New Deal.”) and income tax (“The great milestone on the road to serfdom.”) This all comes up because Perry is being hailed as a possible Republican candidate for President. As a friend of mine remarked, he has good hair but nothing underneath it. Yet Texans have voted for him seven times. It might be worth it to get him out of the state.
In all fairness I suppose we have to recognize the kind of people he represents. Like Daniel Miller, the president of the Texas Nationalist Movement. Here is part of his agenda, as reported by the Houston Press blog.
1. Return the United States to its pre-1845 border with Texas.
2. Recognize Texas as an independent and sovereign nation.
3. Take no actions of retribution and support our success wholeheartedly.
It does make Perry by contrast almost normal. No. That’s going too far.
Q. Do you want the food you eat to be a surprise?
It’s been over 150 years since Mendel played with those thousands of pea plants and gave birth to genetics. A series of scientists followed him down through the path through the years learning more about the inheriting molecule, the template that establishes what each living thing will become. It turns out that I am older than the term DNA (for that matter I learned that I am older than sliced bread by watching Jay Leno the other evening), which came into the language in the early 50s along with its double helix. DNA sounds like it ought to stand for some obscure government agency, Department of Nonessential Activities, say. Now more and more often it is being used to determine the origin or history of everything from wine grapes to grains to humans. The use of it is now arriving at our dinner table.
This week a new report came out called “Bait and Switch: How Seafood Fraud Hurts Our Oceans, Our Wallets and Our Health.” 20 to 25 percent of the seafood products they check are fraudulently identified, fish geneticists say. “Yellowtail stands in for mahi-mahi. Nile perch is labeled as shark, and tilapia may be the Meryl Streep of seafood, capable of playing almost any role.”
“If you’re ordering steak, you would never be served horse meat,” said Dr. Hirshfield of Oceana, a nonprofit group. “But you can easily be ordering snapper and get tilapia or Vietnamese catfish.”
Help is on the way. The FDA has purchased DNA scanning equipment for all of its regional offices and unless they are cut down as Paul Ryan and his slashing scorched earth deficit Cossacks lay waste to their funding as planned, we may be able to actually know that Gulf shrimp really came from the Gulf instead of a fish farm in Vietnam.
Meat lovers take note: DNA-traceable beef may change your whole concept of fine dining. It can now be determined where each piece of meat comes from, organic or Angus, in fact as much information about the meat as you can get on wine from a wine label. It is being used now to trace to the source tinted meat, and when you consider ordinary ground beef in a ten pound box may come from 1,000 animals, you want to be able to track it down.
Picture this. You are seated at your restaurant table and call for the meat steward. He comes with his menu and describes each choice.
- This is our premier cut of steak. from an old established herd of Angus cattle pastured on a steep hillside in Utah that gives them protection for severe weather in winter but cold enough to promote vigor. When harvested it is dry-aged the optimum 21 days at 34F degrees with an ambient humidity level of 65 percent which allows the protein structure to break down for maximum tenderness. The resulting shrinkage of 5 percent concentrates the beefy flavor for a hardy richness on the tongue and an earthy finish.
- Or perhaps you would prefer a King Ranch appellation, the Santa Gertrudis, the only breed of cattle developed in the United States, pride of the famous Texas King Ranch. You’ll savor overtones of cactus these huge free-range cattle browse among and the hint of salt water spray that wafts over the ranchland coming off the Gulf.
- Our steak tartare tonight is a spunky blend of 70 percent Charolais, the breed from France and a staple of French fine cuisine with 30 percent a sturdy Hereford from the American mid-west which adds a mellowness to temper the lively notes of pastries present in its old-world bovine companion.
McDonald’s could, like Starbucks and its coffee, have its own special blend of hamburger, and restaurants could have a house brand, an expansion of what some do now with Angus. With new technology, there is no reason we can’t be as tediously pedantic as we can be about wine. I will lift a lamb chop in a toast to that.
Millions and millions of Americans have served our country since a day was set aside in 1868 to honor that service, over two million in Iraq and Afghanistan alone.
Monday is Memorial Day, and no matter how we spend it it's a day to keep in mind the debt we owe and just why we designate this day as very special.
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