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Tag: fiscal policy
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis

So, Ron DeSantis Wants To Be President

Beyond the human price of COVID-19 is the financial toll of treating the sick. Back in the day, conservatives touted fiscal responsibility — that is, keeping the cost of government in check.

But now we have the extraordinary example of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, apparently looking to run for president in 2024, backing policies designed to waste the maximum number of taxpayer dollars. From a fiscal point of view, his opposition to vaccine and mask requirements is insanity.

Here are some numbers to consider:

The required two doses of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines cost the U.S. government less than $40. Either vaccine protects most people from contracting the disease, and for those who do, it lessens the severity, keeping them out of the hospital.

Florida hospitals are now clogged with the COVID-19-infected, with over half of their intensive care beds taken by patients with the virus. The median cost for a stay at an ICU or being on a ventilator in Florida is $234,732 for those without insurance, according to FAIR Health. With insurance, it runs at $115,497.

Oh, but DeSantis now has a cheaper alternative to hospitalization. He is pushing for monoclonal antibody treatments for those already sick. These antibody cocktails, such as Regeneron, seem fairly effective at keeping COVID-19 patients out of the hospital. DeSantis has opened at least 18 clinics in his state to deliver them.

The expense of running these treatment centers aside, Regeneron charges about $2,100 per dose to treat a disease that, again, could have been prevented for under $40. And these numbers don't take into account the care provided to survivors who suffer "long" COVID-19 — people who show disabling symptoms long after the disease has run its normal course.

Across America, the cost of COVID-19 hospitalizations among unvaccinated adults came to an estimated $2.3 billion in June and July alone, according to a Peterson-KFF analysis. Some 84 percent of these hospital admissions were preventable.

Where does the money come from?

Government-run Medicare covers necessary hospital care for older Americans. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services expects hospital payments to go up by $3.7 billion in the fiscal year starting Oct. 1, much of the rise due to COVID-19.

However one may feel about hospitalized adults who could have gotten shots but didn't, the fact remains that many will be handed significant bills for treatment. How much depends on their insurance plan, but some survivors are getting hit with bills in the hundreds of thousands.

If the patient dies, the providers may go after family members or the estate for payment. A man whose father died of the virus reportedly received bills of more than $1 million.

Gone are the days early in the pandemic when many insurers waived the copayment for COVID-19 treatment. And who can blame them? Why not ask patients to pay their share at a time when they could have had their free shots and not become patients?

Despite the enormous amounts Medicare pays for treatment, beneficiaries are still expected to cover hospital deductibles and copays.

DeSantis, meanwhile, continues to defend a law that bans private businesses from requiring vaccines for service — a pain especially for cruise companies trying to draw passengers to their crowded ships. Disney Cruise Line has just joined Carnival, Royal Caribbean, and Norwegian in ignoring the law and are now demanding proof of vaccination for passengers 12 and older.

The Florida governor evidently believes the path to a Republican presidential nomination requires appeasing the right-wing nuts who recently booed even Donald Trump when the former president urged people to get their shots.

Taxpayers should know that they are paying for this idiocy and vote accordingly.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com

Scott Walker: Uncle Scrooge’s Lackey In Wisconsin

Scott Walker: Uncle Scrooge’s Lackey In Wisconsin

Economically speaking, all 237 GOP presidential candidates are selling the same magic beans.

Everybody knows the script by now: Tax cuts for wealthy “job creators” bring widespread prosperity; top off Scrooge McDuck’s bullion pool, and the benefits flow outward to everybody else, the economy surges, budget deficits melt away, and the song of the turtle dove will be heard in the land.

Almost needless to say, these “supply side” miracles have never actually happened in the visible world. State budget debacles in Kansas and Louisiana only signify the latest failures of right-wing dogma. Hardly anybody peddling these magic beans actually believes in them anymore. Nevertheless, feigning belief signifies tribal loyalty to the partisan Republicans who will choose the party’s nominee.

However, with everybody in the field playing “let’s pretend,” a candidate needs another way to distinguish himself. I suspect that Scott Walker, the Republican governor of Wisconsin, may have found it.

See, Walker won’t just put money back in “hardworking taxpayers’” pockets. Like a latter-day Richard Nixon, Walker will also stick it to people he doesn’t like: lollygagging schoolteachers, feather-bedding union members, and smug, tenured college professors who think they’re smarter than everybody else. If Walker lacks charisma, there’s an edge of ruthlessness in his otherwise bland demeanor that hits GOP primary voters right where they live.

No less an authority than Uncle Scrooge himself — i.e. David Koch of Koch Industries, who with his brother Charles has pledged to spend $900 million to elect a Republican in 2016 — told the New York Observer after a closed-door gathering at Manhattan’s Empire Club that Walker will win the nomination and crush Hillary Clinton in a general election “by a major margin.” 

Viewed from a distance, the determination of prosperous, well-educated Wisconsin to convert itself into an anti-union right-to-work state like Alabama or Arkansas appears mystifying. To risk the standing of the University of Wisconsin system by abolishing academic tenure, as Walker intends, is damn near incomprehensible.

Attack one of America’s great public research universities for the sake of humiliating (Democratic-leaning) professors over nickel-and-dime budgetary issues? Do Wisconsinites have the first clue how modern economies work?

Maybe not. But Walker’s supporters definitely appear to know who their enemies are, culturally speaking. Incredulity aside, it would be a mistake not to notice the craftiness with which he’s brought off the transformation. Not to mention that Walker’s won three elections since 2010 in a “blue” state that hasn’t supported a Republican presidential nominee since Ronald Reagan.

Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes don’t mean much by themselves, but throw in Michigan and Ohio, Midwestern states also trending similarly, and you’ve definitely got something.

Act 10, the 2011 law that took away collective bargaining rights for many public employees in Wisconsin (except, at first, for police and firefighters), brought crowds of angry teachers (also mostly Democrats) to the state capitol in Madison for weeks of demonstrations. As much as MSNBC was thrilled, many Wisconsinites appear to have been irked.

In the end, the state ended up saving roughly $3 billion by shifting the funding of fringe benefits such as health insurance and pensions from employer to employee, costing the average teacher roughly 16 percent of his or her compensation. Mindful of budget shortfalls, the unions had proposed negotiations, but that wasn’t enough for Gov. Walker.

For the record, Act 10 was an almost verbatim copy of a bill promoted by the Arlington, Virginia-based American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a think-tank largely funded by, you guessed it, the Brothers Koch.

Four years ago, a documentary filmmaker caught Walker on camera telling wealthy supporters that the new law was just the beginning. “The first step is, we’re going to deal with collective bargaining for all public-­employee unions,” he said, “because you use divide-­and-­conquer.”

“If we can do it in Wisconsin, we can do it anywhere — even in our nation’s capital,” Walker wrote in his book, Unintimidated, notes Dan Kaufman in the New York Times Magazine. Elsewhere, Walker has boasted that as president, he could take on foreign policy challenges because, he’s said, “If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the world.”

Ridiculous, of course, but it plays.

Meanwhile, rueful trade unionists who endorsed Walker in 2010 are crying the blues, because they never imagined that having vanquished the women’s union he’d come after the ironworkers and the electricians in their pickup trucks. Divided, they’ve been conquered.

So right-to-work it is: diminished salaries, job security, pensions, health and safety regulations will inevitably follow.

More bullion for Scrooge McDuck’s pool.

So now it’s the professors’ turn. Walker, a Marquette dropout, has described his new law as “Act 10 for the university.” Tenure’s a dead letter in cases of “financial emergency…requiring program discontinuance, curtailment, modification or redirection.” 

So who gets redirected first? Left-wing culture warriors or climate scientists? Hint: Scrooge is a fierce climate-change denier.

Meanwhile, Democrats underestimate Scott Walker at considerable peril.

Photo: Wikicommons

5 Lies Paul Ryan Needs You To Believe About Poverty

5 Lies Paul Ryan Needs You To Believe About Poverty

The only thing more disturbing about hearing Jeb Bush say that George W. Bush is his closest foreign policy advisor is having to endure Paul Ryan pretending to care about about alleviating poverty.

Paul Ryan doesn’t just get the facts about poverty wrong — “Mr. Ryan’s poverty report, like his famous budget plan, is a con job,” The New York Times‘ Paul Krugman wrote — he creates a narrative that purposely stigmatizes the poor.

When he released his first budget plan that would send millions below the poverty line, he often referred to the safety net as a “hammock,” as if poor Americans were lounging around waiting to live off the supple fat of $4 a day in food stamps. Casting doubt on the poor’s willingness to work is a core principle of “dogwhistle” politics meant to divide the deserving poor from the rest of us who benefit just as much from government help, but in ways that are far less obvious. As many have noted, some white folks have been calling black people lazy ever since black people stopped working for free.

Ryan has revised his rhetoric a bit and wisely opened up his thinking to consider some criminal justice reform, as long as it doesn’t touch on the root of the “New Jim Crow” — The Drug War. But his argument is basically the same: Poor people choose to be poor because they don’t know better. Cut their government support and give them life coaches so we can afford huge new tax breaks for the rich, who have never been richer.

The prophet George Carlin said, “Conservatives say if you don’t give the rich more money, they will lose their incentive to invest. As for the poor, they tell us they’ve lost all incentive because we’ve given them too much money.”

We’re crawling out of almost 40 years of that “logic.” After massive tax cuts for the rich, we created about 20,000 jobs a month under George W. Bush, about 65,000 a month if you don’t count his disastrous last year. Under Barack Obama we’ve raised taxes on the rich and passed Obamacare, the biggest and most effective attempt to reduce inequality in at least a generation. And we’ve seen 98,000 new jobs a month… 182,000 if you don’t count his disastrous first year, which was severely hampered by the mess Bush’s disastrous last year left behind.

But facts only get in the way when your agenda is to undo progress. Republicans have to say the policies they oppose have failed because it’s the only way to argue against undeniable conservative failures. Here are five lies that conservatives insist on you accepting so we can redouble our efforts the help the people who truly need our help — the rich.

1. The “War on Poverty” didn’t work.

This lie is so invidious even some conservative writers have started pushing back against the idea that government spending hasn’t made a dent in poverty. But it’s the basic premise of Ryan’s attack on our safety net and it’s been repeated recently by GOP presidential candidates Jeb Bush and Mike Huckabee.

Conservatives compulsively ignore that many measures of poverty are taken before adding government aid into the equation. A new study shows that government programs are even more effective than previously thought at keeping Americans out of poverty. In 2012 alone, we lifted 48 million of our neighbors out of extreme need with the safety net.

The idea that the War on Poverty doesn’t work should be most offensive to seniors.

elderlyspm

 

By any measure, we’ve cut the percentage of elderly Americans living in poverty by more than half since Lyndon Johnson declared the War on Poverty some 50 years ago. And they are the only group that didn’t see a spike into poverty due to the Great Recession.

Ironically, seniors are now the core of the GOP’s political power in America, and the only reason Republicans are able to pursue savage cuts to the stability we’ve created for our grandmothers and grandfathers.

2. The poor are lazy.

This is the true gospel of the right. It’s how they justify opposing every government program including Medicaid expansion, which only helps Americans who earn too much to qualify for regular Medicaid. And it’s built entirely on a misunderstanding of who the poor are.

Demos’ Matt Bruenig looked at census data and found that the vast majority of the poor in America are children, the elderly, the disabled, and students.

Who-Are-the-Poor_0

Sadly, 20 percent or so are working poor who would likely be pushed out of poverty if the minimum wage were raised.

Ah, what about the “Rest”? They sound lazy! They must be the shiftless hammock dwellers whose main goal in life is to suckle at the taxpayer teat. Yeah. Notsomuch.

nonworkingpoor87

 

Bruenig found that the vast majority of them are occupied with “Caring” for children or another loved one. That leaves fewer than 1 out of 10 poor Americans as the sort of jobless moochers conservatives would like you to believe all poor Americans long to be.

3. Government help creates dependency.
Who ends up on welfare in America? About half of us. And of the 1 out of 2 Americans who gets government help, only 5 percent end up taking that help for 10 straight years.

“The idea of welfare dependence is an utter fabrication invented by rich Republicans to gut the social safety net,” Demos’ Sean McElwee wrote. “But this safety net has actually been incredibly effective. Which is why these rich Republicans want to get rid of it.”

Otherwise, we many not be able to afford the help we give to people who don’t need it so badly — like tax breaks for vacation homes, gluttonous business lunches, and private jets. Too bad the poor don’t enjoy such luxuries, or those too might become “hammocks.”

4. A lack of morals is the problem, not a lack of cash.

It’s always a little freaky when conservatives who don’t believe government can fix roads think it can fix “culture.” But this is the exact argument of the right whenever there’s an event like the riots in Baltimore that unearth the horrors of what it’s truly like to be poor in this country.

Crime is way down in America, as is teenage pregnancy and most other “immoral” behaviors that we measure, which makes you think the “morality” the right wants to see is a more theocratic and controlling government with more say in what women do with their bodies, and less of that “helping the poor” crap.

Bruenig points out that America has some of the worst poverty in the industrialized world for one simple reason: We spend less than the countries — like the Nordics — that have nearly eliminated poverty. “If you want serious anti-poverty policy that targets actual poverty,” he wrote, “and not stereotypes of it, then what you want is welfare-state expansions targeted at vulnerable populations.”

5. Cutting help to the poor will help the economy.

It hurts everyone when the poor don’t have the basic essentials to live.

“The societal cost of hunger, for example, is $167.5 billion per year as a result of factors such as lost economic productivity, the increased costs of poor educational outcomes, avoidable health care costs, and the increased costs of charitable assistance,” The Center for American Progress’ Joey Moes wrote in an analysis of Ryan’s 2012 budget.

Republican policies are especially bad for the poor. But they’re also bad for everyone else, except the very, very rich.

Still, Paul Ryan has done a lot to help poor people. For instance, he helped Mitt Romney lose.

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

How Democrats Can Make Their Case For Raising Revenue

(Bloomberg) — Social Security may be known as the “third rail” of American politics, but it is the debate over taxes that has been the “kryptonite” of the Democratic Party in recent decades.

President Barack Obama has put the question of revenue increases on the front burner as part of his fiscal-policy agenda, and the discussion will grow in visibility and intensity as the early December deadline for a report from the congressional supercommittee approaches.

Although almost every expert, economist and open-minded leader in both parties (excluding, of course, the hard-line Republican leadership) agrees that we need more revenue to bring future deficits under control, the political danger for Democrats in the debate remains severe.

Indeed, one Democrat with a proven ear for politics, Bill Clinton, has expressed doubts about the administration’s decision to wade into the revenue controversy, saying, “I personally don’t believe we ought to be raising taxes or cutting spending until we get this economy off the ground.” (More recently, though, Clinton acknowledged that deficit reduction requires “adequate revenues,” scooting a bit closer to the administration’s line.)

How can Democrats tackle the tax question without courting political disaster?

Obama has tried two approaches. Last spring, when he was pressing for revenue increases during the debt-ceiling talks, his emphasis was on a “balanced approach”: If spending was to be cut, then revenue should be increased, too.

Not Balanced

The “balanced” argument was perhaps too effective. When the president reached a debt-limit deal with the Republicans that was all spending cuts and no revenue increases, he was excoriated for accepting a package that didn’t meet his own standards.

In the end, though, the argument for a balanced approach has limitations, because it requires only a mix of spending cuts and tax increases, without specifying how much of each — or both — is needed. That’s a bit like saying, “If you are going to serve liver, you should also serve Brussels sprouts” — perhaps correct, maybe even candid, but hardly compelling.

More recently, Obama has emphasized “fairness,” in particular in pushing for his proposed Buffett rule, which would raise taxes on incomes of $1 million a year or more, and with his plan to require private jets to pay a landing fee. The president has rallied his base with these populist appeals, and polls show that most Americans agree that those in the upmost tax brackets pay too little in taxes.

Fairer Package

In addition, because the bulk of the pain from spending cuts falls disproportionately on those at the bottom, tilting the revenue increases toward higher-end taxpayers would make any overall package fairer.

But the limitation of the fairness argument is that it frames the revenue increases as a penalty that should be imposed on the wealthy for paying too little. It is more of a jab at the rich than an appeal for raising needed revenue.

The argument that billionaire investor Warren Buffett should pay at least the same tax rate as his secretary fails to explain why either is paying what they are paying, or why anyone should be paying more. Even if middle-class voters are stirred by the populist sentiment behind such rhetoric, they may be unnerved by its implicit zeal to raise taxes, and the tone of the debate leaves the administration vulnerable to the usual caricatures of Democrats as overenthusiastic tax hikers.

Making the Argument

So what is a better way to make the case for much needed revenue increases?

First, the administration needs to reiterate, time and again, that tax increases — on anyone — are a last resort. This may seem like a tweak, but it is an important one. Even when voters favor mixed approaches to our ballooning deficit, more of them believe that our fiscal problems are caused by too much government spending, not too little taxation.

To avoid being burned by the tax debate, Democrats need to begin the conversation by reiterating that they support revenue increases — not because there are people who can afford to pay more, but because there is no other way to get our fiscal house in order.

Second, the administration needs to understand that this debate is playing out against a backdrop of unprecedented public doubt about the effectiveness of government spending. For political purposes, it matters little if Americans believe the government actually spent too little trying to reverse the Great Recession — as progressives such as Paul Krugman argue — or if they think government spent too much, as Republicans contend. Either way, the necessity for more revenue is being weighed in an environment that is highly skeptical of government’s ability to use that revenue wisely.

Mythical Muffins

The strong reaction to the report that the Justice Department bought $16 muffins — a story that, as should have been immediately obvious, was wrong — illustrates the depth of the public’s cynicism. The president and the Democrats must engage the tax debate with that skepticism in mind.

One approach that addresses this challenge is tying specific revenue increases to specific uses. For example, revenue from the so-called Buffett rule could be used to endow a trust fund dedicated to education reform and rebuilding our schools, popular investments in our nation’s future that are starved for resources. Revenue generated from new fees on private plane flights could be set aside to fund improvements at airports. This would neutralize arguments about “class warfare,” and remind the public of our vital shared needs.

Bush Cuts

The single largest revenue item — allowing the Bush-era tax cuts for the highest-income taxpayers to expire as scheduled at the end of next year — could be devoted to several purposes. For example, a large portion could be applied directly to paying down the debt. In other words, easing the future burden on our children, not expanded government spending.

Another dedicated use could be funding an infrastructure bank to rebuild roads and bridges, with projects selected by an independent board of governors, not elected officials.

Alternatively, a portion of the funds could be set aside for loans to small businesses to help spur economic growth; in the past, Small Business Administration loans have helped launch or grow some of the most innovative and successful U.S. companies, including Apple Inc., FedEx Corp., Nike Inc. and Under Armour Inc.

Here’s the bottom line: Tying tax increases to dedicated and popular uses insulates proposals for much-need revenue from attacks of “class warfare” or general anti-tax sentiment, and can help rebuild faith that marginal dollars collected by the government will be put to a clear and important public purpose.

Advocates of revenue increases need to develop an effective way of defending their side if they are to prevail in the contentious debate that will soon start in Congress, and in the critical election just 13 months from now.

(Ron Klain, a former chief of staff to Vice President Joe Biden and a senior adviser to President Barack Obama on the Recovery Act, is a Bloomberg View columnist. He is a senior executive with a private investment firm. The opinions expressed are his own.)

Copyright 2011 Bloomberg.