Requesting A Bribe

Political Cartoon is by Rob Rogers in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Tragic Cost Of Medicare Privatization For Seniors (& Others)

During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised to protect Medicare. It now looks like he may be getting ready to break that promise. Speaker Paul Ryan is already writing another of his bills to privatize Medicare -- putting seniors at the mercy of heartless insurance companies. Those companies don't really want to insure seniors, because that is a group generally more in need of medical care than any other -- and you can be sure that the premiums they will charge seniors will be sky-high (meaning many poor and working class seniors will be unable to buy insurance).

Medicare is a government program that has worked exceptionally well (like Social Security) -- and has insured that seniors do not have to do without life-saving medical care (especially preventative care). It would be a tragedy to abolish it, and force seniors to buy private insurance -- a tragedy that would also extend to the families of those seniors and hospitals (who would see the misuse of their emergency rooms skyrocket).

Here is what Josh Marshall, editor and publisher of Talking Points Memo, says about this:

We are hearing more about the Trump/Ryan plan to phase out Medicare and replace it with private insurance and vouchers. But we're still hearing much, much less than about Obamacare or a lot of other issues. Obamacare is super important. Don't get me wrong. But Medicare is a much, much bigger deal. Most DC journalists don't actually understand what's being proposed. You think it's hard getting good insurance when you're 30 or 50? Try getting good private insurance when you're 70 or 80.

Providing health insurance coverage to seniors will unquestionably cost more if run through private insurance. No one who has looked at the comparative data on the cost efficiency of Medicare and private carriers can question this. There's no money savings. Quite the opposite. The only difference is that seniors will pay vastly more out of pocket because the vouchers won't come close to the costs of a policy. The upshot of the Ryan plan is significantly increasing the cost of what society pays for the medical care of seniors and then making seniors pay dramatically more out of pocket. All with none of the bedrock gaurantees Medicare provides.

That's what phasing out Medicare means. Ironically, what Trump and Ryan are proposing is something like Obamacare: you buy your insurance on an exchange and you get some premium support from the government. Obviously, not everyone loves Obamacare. But building an exchange and subsidy adjunct for non-seniors onto an existing and fairly robust private health insurance system is one thing. Creating one from scratch for people who are all pretty much by definition bad risks is close to laughable. Laughable if you're not bankrupted or dying because you couldn't get care. 

Remember the other things Medicare significantly guard against. If parents have insupportable medical bills or have no way to pay for care, they go to children. In the absence of any other options, that's how it should be. But that money comes out of other things: buying homes, putting kids through college. The social insurance model of Medicare has positive effects well beyond direct beneficiaries. 

Ryan and Trump want to pass a bill to phase out Medicare in just six months.

Messages

Political Cartoon is by Nick Anderson in the Houston Chronicle.

Arrogant And Ignorant

War On Christmas ?

An 11 Chart Post Election Analysis Of The 2016 Election

Between November 10th and 14th, the Pew Research Center conducted their quadrennial post-election survey. They questioned 1,254 voters who voted in the 2016 election, and their survey has a margin of error of 3.4 points. These 11 charts are from that survey (and there's much more in their 6 page report of the survey). These are just the charts I personally found to be most interesting.

Note, in the top chart, that Donald Trump received the lowest marks of any winning president-elect since Pew has been conducting this survey. Only 30% gave him an "A" or "B" for the way he conducted his campaign -- 13 points lower than the 43% that gave Clinton an "A" or "B", and a lower score than any losing presidential candidate since 1992 (when George H.W. Bush also scored 30%). That's not good for someone claiming to have a mandate for his policies.

Low grades were also given to both parties, the press, and the pollsters. And 92% said there was more mudslinging in this campaign than in the past (20 points higher than the previous election high for mudslinging -- 2004).

I also found it interesting that 74% of voters had made up their minds about who to vote for by the conventions or shortly after them, and another 15% during or immediately following the debates. Only 7% said they made up their minds in the last week before the election.

Sadly, most people don't expect race relations to improve under a Trump administration, and most don't think relations between the two parties will improve. And both parties seem to be moving toward more partisanship -- with most Republicans wanting their party to be more conservative, and most Democrats wanting their party to be more liberal.

GOP Attitudes

Political Cartoon is by Mike Stanfill at ragingpencils.com.

Are Dems In As Much Trouble As Media Want You To Think ?

The Democratic Party is in a lot of trouble after losing both the presidency and the Congress to the Republicans. That's what the media would like you to believe. They have bad-mouthed the re-election of Nancy Pelosi to be the Minority Leader in the House, called for a new direction for the party (especially concerning the choice of a new DNC head), and lamented the lack of future candidates among the Democrats. They would have you think the Democratic Party is close to death (like in the image above).

That's nonsense. They completely overlook that the Democratic candidate for president got over 2.5 million more votes than the Republican candidate did, that the Democratic candidates for the Senate got more votes combined than the Republican candidates did, that when the votes are all counted it is likely that will also be the case with House Democratic candidates (as it was in 2012 and 2014). They also overlook the fact that the Democrats gained seats in both the House and the Senate.

Did the Democrats lose the White House and both houses of Congress in the 2016 election? Yes. But that does not mean the [arty is an archaic and dying institution -- far from it. What it means is the Democrats, especially on the national level, did not effectively communicate their policies to the voting public, and show them how those policies were better than those put forth by the Republicans. That was an unforgivable mistake by the national party, but it doesn't mean those policies were wrong -- only that they weren't effectively communicated (and the media must take part of the blame by normalizing the horrid Republican beliefs, especially those of Trump).

The biggest mistake made by Democrats was in thinking that Trump could not win, and making the election a referendum on Trump and Clinton -- instead of beating the drums loudly for their policies. Those policies are supported by most of the public -- raising the minimum wage, closing the wealth & income gap, protecting the environment, raising taxes on the wealthy, making corporations pay their fair share of taxes, protecting Social Security and Medicare, amending Obamacare to cover more people and control costs, regulation of Wall Street (to prevent abuse of consumers and another recession), protect the voting rights of all citizens, provide for a background check on all gun buyers, and insure equal rights and more opportunities for everyone.

Those are all Democratic policies, and they are supported by significant majorities of the voting public. They are also policies that are opposed by the Republicans.

And the Republicans are preparing to go against the public's wishes on most of those policies. They are preparing to kill Obamacare, privatize Medicare, cut Social Security benefits and raise the retirement age, cut taxes massively for the rich and the corporations, balloon the deficit and the national debt, remove regulations protecting the environment, remove Wall Street regulation that protect ordinary Americans, kill off efforts to raise the minimum wage, and keep the tax breaks that encourage corporations to continue to offshore good American jobs. If they succeed in doing most (or all) of that, they will be doing serious damage to this country.

That's why I think it's not the Democratic Party that's in trouble -- it's the Republican Party. They just haven't realized it yet -- and neither have too many other Americans. And they can'y change direction. That party has been coopted by racists and teabaggers -- both of which are too stupid to see what they have done to their party. They won't allow any change in the Republican Party because they truly think that taking this country backwards to what it was decades ago is a good thing. They're taking the Republican Party (and the nation) off a cliff (just like similar thinkers did in the 1920's).

Jonathan Chart recently finished an article in New York Magazine by saying:

The party that needs to search its soul about whether it has the capacity to govern competently is not the one out of power. And what should concern Democrats is not whether they’ll get back in power but what will be left of the country when they do.

I agree with him.

(NOTE -- The caricatures of the Democratic and Republican symbols above and below are by the inimitable DonkeyHotey.)

Comparison

Political Cartoon is by Nick Anderson in the Houston Chronicle.

Trump Sides With Big Oil To Support Dakota Access Pipeline

For many weeks now, the Native Americans at Standing Rock (and many of their friends) have been trying to stop the building of the Dakota Access pipeline. That pipeline will disturb the graves of their ancestors, and put their water supply in serious jeopardy (the very reason it was changed from a route that did not go through their territory).

They have been opposed by the forces of Big Oil, who have marshaled at least 76 policing agencies from 10 states to stop the demonstrations. The peaceful demonstrators have been abused by those agencies, and the governor of North Dakota has ordered them to be removed from the private property they are camping on (claiming their living structures are not safe for the winter weather).

Now they have even worse news. The incoming president, Donald Trump, has made it clear that he is siding with the interests of Big Oil, and against the Standing Rock demonstrators. They will get no help from the federal government.

This is one more action showing that Trump is going to be a corporate-friendly and ate-free speech president. And he is going to act to improve his own financial situation, regardless of how that affects ordinary Americans.

While Trump has divested his interests in the company building the pipeline (worth between $500,000 and $1 million), he does have between $100,000 and $250,000 invested in Phillips 66, which will get 25% of the oil from the pipeline when it is finished.

Trump's corrupt policies have begun, and he hasn't even been sworn in yet.

Bribed

Political Cartoon is by John Branch at branchtoon.com.

"The White Working Class Is About To Be Betrayed"

Millions of white working class voters opted for Donald Trump in the recent election, in the belief that the billionaire who thinks wages are too high will actually make things better for them. They are going to be sadly disappointed. Trump's cabinet picks have shown that he is casting his lot with the corporations -- and against American workers.

The following op-ed is from Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman  (pictured) in his New York Times column. Krugman writes:

Donald Trump won the Electoral College (though not the popular vote) on the strength of overwhelming support from working-class whites, who feel left behind by a changing economy and society. And they’re about to get their reward — the same reward that, throughout Mr. Trump’s career, has come to everyone who trusted his good intentions. Think Trump University.

Yes, the white working class is about to be betrayed.

The evidence of that coming betrayal is obvious in the choice of an array of pro-corporate, anti-labor figures for key positions. In particular, the most important story of the week — seriously, people, stop focusing on Trump Twitter — was the selection of Tom Price, an ardent opponent of Obamacare and advocate of Medicare privatization, as secretary of health and human services. This choice probably means that the Affordable Care Act is doomed — and Mr. Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters will be among the biggest losers.

The first thing you need to understand here is that Republican talk of “repeal and replace” has always been a fraud. The G.O.P. has spent six years claiming that it will come up with a replacement for Obamacare any day now; the reason it hasn’t delivered is that it can’t.

Obamacare looks the way it does because it has to: You can’t cover Americans with pre-existing conditions without requiring healthy people to sign up, and you can’t do that without subsidies to make insurance affordable.

Any replacement will either look a lot like Obamacare, or take insurance away from millions who desperately need it.

What the choice of Mr. Price suggests is that the Trump administration is, in fact, ready to see millions lose insurance. And many of those losers will be Trump supporters.

You can see why by looking at Census data from 2013 to 2015, which show the impact of the full implementation of Obamacare. Over that period, the number of uninsured Americans dropped by 13 million; whites without a college degree, who voted Trump by around two to one, accounted for about eight million of that decline. So we’re probably looking at more than five million Trump supporters, many of whom have chronic health problems and recently got health insurance for the first time, who just voted to make their lives nastier, more brutish, and shorter.

Why did they do it? They may not have realized that their coverage was at stake — over the course of the campaign, the news media barely covered policy at all. Or they may have believed Mr. Trump’s assurances that he would replace Obamacare with something great.

Either way, they’re about to receive a rude awakening, which will get even worse once Republicans push ahead with their plans to end Medicare as we know it, which seem to be on even though the president-elect had promised specifically that he would do no such thing.

And just in case you’re wondering, no, Mr. Trump can’t bring back the manufacturing jobs that have been lost over the past few decades. Those jobs were lost mainly to technological change, not imports, and they aren’t coming back.

There will be nothing to offset the harm workers suffer when Republicans rip up the safety net.

Will there be a political backlash, a surge of buyer’s remorse? Maybe. Certainly Democrats will be well advised to hammer Mr. Trump’s betrayal of the working class nonstop. But we do need to consider the tactics that he will use to obscure the scope of his betrayal.

One tactic, which we’ve already seen with this week’s ostentatious announcement of a deal to keep some Carrier jobs in America, will be to distract the nation with bright, shiny, trivial objects. True, this tactic will work only if news coverage is both gullible and innumerate.

No, Mr. Trump didn’t “stand up” to Carrier — he seems to have offered it a bribe. And we’re talking about a thousand jobs in a huge economy; at the rate of one Carrier-size deal a week, it would take Mr. Trump 30 years to save as many jobs as President Obama did with the auto bailout; it would take him a century to make up for the overall loss of manufacturing jobs just since 2000.

But judging from the coverage of the deal so far, assuming that the news media will be gullible and innumerate seems like a good bet.

And if and when the reality that workers are losing ground starts to sink in, I worry that the Trumpists will do what authoritarian governments often do to change the subject away from poor performance: go find an enemy.

Remember what I said about Trump Twitter. Even as he took a big step toward taking health insurance away from millions, Mr. Trump started ranting about taking citizenship away from flag-burners. This was not a coincidence.

The point is to keep your eye on what’s important. Millions of Americans have just been sucker-punched. They just don’t know it yet.

Voted

Political Cartoon is by Clay Bennett in the Chattanooga Times Free Press.

"War On Christmas"