As the economy contracts the tax base and puts pressure on social services, suggestions that Medicare is on a track to run out of money in eight years and that Social Security will not be able to handle the load after 2037 (2020 for disabled Americans), spending more money than it takes in by 2016, seem to produce two completely different responses. For Republicans in Congress, the Medicare failure simply points out that the government cannot administer a healthcare plan that works. Democrats respond that this is a problem that will be subsumed under the eventual imposition of universal healthcare, a government-administered healthcare plan that is essential.
As healthcare providers at all levels pledge voluntarily to reduce medical costs by over $2 trillion over the next few years, that promise… or the hope that medical costs will voluntarily reduce at all after decades of cost increases that have uniformly exceed general annual cost-of-living statistics… is generally met with skepticism on both sides of the aisle. According to the May 13th Washington Post: “Administration officials said that if Congress were to act immediately, the impending gap could be filled three ways: by raising workers’ Social Security payroll taxes by 2 percentage points, from 12.4 percent to 14.4 percent; by reducing benefits by 13 percent; or a combination of the two approaches. The officials briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity on the technical aspects of the trustees’ findings.”
Government funding is a pretty sensitive topic these days, coupled with exchanges over the failure of regulation. Funds spent under the Bush-era TARP program have created mixed results (I’m being kind) under any analysis, and the harsh reality is that under Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the big stimulus package), despite a pledge to roll out $500 million of the total expenditure level in the first two years and the very obvious struggle of states and cities to tackle budget deficits with lots of cutbacks, to date, albeit between 80-90 days of the bill’s passage, only 6% of that sum has actually been released.
For Republicans not currently holding office, including former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, there is a greater willingness to accept the mistakes of the past. The May 13th thDeal.com says this about some of Mr. Gingrich’s opinions expressed at recent business conference in Las Vegas: “[E]liminating Glass-Steagall, the Depression-era law that sundered [separated] investment and commercial banking, may have been a mistake… Asked what he thought of legislation sponsored in 2000 by [Republican] Sen. Phil Gramm to bar regulation of derivatives, Gingrich said simply, ‘I don’t.’”
For Republicans holding office, seemingly bereft of a clear identity of what they stand for, the current practice of opposing any major economic policies (and many foreign policies) proposed by the Obama administration has become a boring mantra, more an example of former Republican Vice President (under Nixon) Spiro Agnew’s “nattering nabobs of negativism” than anything else. Without a genuine voice to create constructive criticism from a position of being the “loyal opposition,” the GOP seems to be hell-bent on marginalizing itself as the party of the extreme and the privileged few.
The disharmony between expectations and reality, what is possible and what is actually done, the prognostications of our near term “bottoming out” versus the slow reset we are witnessing, the hope of government “fixes” versus the battles over every single suggestion, the need to change versus the desire to retain old practices, proposals for solutions consistently greeted by Republican knee-jerk rejection without implementable alternatives and the efficiency of common sense versus the reality of bureaucratic implementation have all combined to drag out a seemingly interminable process toward find economic stability.
The true test of leadership, from all of our elected officials, is whether they can, notwithstanding those barriers, generate a truth path that will “get us outta here” sooner rather than later. We Americans are less enthralled with the flash of peacock feathers than we are with the way we are going to survive and thrive in our new and scary future.
I’m Peter Dekom, and I approve this message.
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