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This is a Make-or-Break Moment for the Middle Class
Remarks by the
President at the Associated Press Luncheon
Marriott Wardman Park
Washington, D.C.
3 April 2012
Thank you very much. Please have a seat. Well, good
afternoon, and thank you to Dean Singleton and the board
of the Associated Press for inviting me here today. It
is a pleasure to speak to all of you—and to have a
microphone that I can see. Feel free to transmit any of
this to Vladimir if you see him.
Clearly, we’re
already in the beginning months of another long, lively
election year. There will be gaffes and minor
controversies, be hot mics and Etch-a-Sketch moments.
You will cover every word that we say, and we will
complain vociferously about the unflattering words that
you write—unless, of course, you're writing about the
other guy—in which case, good job.
But there are also
big, fundamental issues at stake right now—issues that
deserve serious debate among every candidate, and
serious coverage among every reporter. Whoever he may
be, the next President will inherit an economy that is
recovering, but not yet recovered, from the worst
economic calamity since the Great Depression. Too many
Americans will still be looking for a job that pays
enough to cover their bills or their mortgage. Too many
citizens will still lack the sort of financial security
that started slipping away years before this recession
hit. A debt that has grown over the last decade,
primarily as a result of two wars, two massive tax cuts,
and an unprecedented financial crisis, will have to be
paid down.
In the face of all
these challenges, we're going to have to answer a
central question as a nation: What, if anything, can we
do to restore a sense of security for people who are
willing to work hard and act responsibly in this
country? Can we succeed as a country where a shrinking
number of people do exceedingly well, while a growing
number struggle to get by? Or are we better off when
everyone gets a fair shot, and everyone does their fair
share, and everyone plays by the same rules?
This is not just
another run-of-the-mill political debate. I’ve said
it’s the defining issue of our time, and I believe it.
It’s why I ran in 2008. It’s what my presidency has
been about. It’s why I’m running again. I believe
this is a make-or-break moment for the middle class, and
I can’t remember a time when the choice between
competing visions of our future has been so
unambiguously clear.
Keep in mind, I
have never been somebody who believes that government
can or should try to solve every problem. Some of you
know my first job in Chicago was working with a group of
Catholic churches that often did more good for the
people in their communities than any government program
could. In those same communities I saw that no
education policy, however well crafted, can take the
place of a parent’s love and attention.
As President, I’ve
eliminated dozens of programs that weren’t working, and
announced over
500 regulatory reforms that will
save businesses and taxpayers billions, and put
annual domestic spending on a path to become the
smallest share of the economy since Dwight Eisenhower
held this office—since before I was born. I know that
the true engine of job creation in this country is the
private sector, not Washington, which is why
I’ve cut
taxes for small business owners 17 times over the
last three years.
So I believe deeply
that the free market is the greatest force for economic
progress in human history. My mother and the
grandparents who raised me instilled the values of
self-reliance and personal responsibility that remain
the cornerstone of the American idea. But I also share
the belief of our first Republican President,
Abraham
Lincoln—a belief that, through government, we should
do together what we cannot do as well for ourselves.
That belief is the
reason this country has been able to build a strong
military to keep us safe, and public schools to educate
our children. That belief is why we’ve been able to lay
down railroads and highways to facilitate travel and
commerce. That belief is why we’ve been able to support
the work of scientists and researchers whose discoveries
have saved lives, and unleashed repeated technological
revolutions, and led to countless new jobs and entire
industries.
That belief is also
why we’ve sought to ensure that every citizen can count
on some basic measure of security. We do this because
we recognize that no matter how responsibly we live our
lives, any one of us, at any moment, might face hard
times, might face bad luck, might face a crippling
illness or a layoff. And so we contribute to programs
like
Medicare and
Social Security, which
guarantee health care and a source of income after a
lifetime of hard work. We provide
unemployment
insurance, which protects us against unexpected job
loss and facilitates the labor mobility that makes our
economy so dynamic. We provide for
Medicaid,
which makes sure that millions of seniors in nursing
homes and children with disabilities are getting the
care that they need.
For generations,
nearly all of these investments—from transportation to
education to retirement programs—have been supported by
people in both parties. As much as we might associate
the G.I. Bill with
Franklin Roosevelt,
or
Medicare
with
Lyndon Johnson, it was a
Republican, Lincoln, who launched the Transcontinental
Railroad, the National Academy of Sciences, land grant
colleges. It was
Eisenhower who launched the
Interstate Highway System and
new investment in
scientific research. It was
Richard Nixon who
created the
Environmental Protection Agency,
Ronald
Reagan who worked with Democrats to save
Social Security. It was
George W. Bush
who added
prescription drug coverage to Medicare.
What leaders in both parties have traditionally
understood is that these investments aren’t part of some
scheme to
redistribute wealth from one group to
another. They are expressions of the fact that we are
one nation. These investments benefit us all.
They contribute to genuine, durable economic growth.
Show me a business
leader who wouldn’t profit if more Americans could
afford to get the skills and education that today’s jobs
require. Ask any company where they’d rather locate and
hire workers—a country with crumbling roads and bridges,
or one that’s committed to high-speed Internet and
high-speed railroads and high-tech research and
development?
It doesn’t make us
weaker when we guarantee basic security for the
elderly or the sick or those who are actively looking
for work. What makes us weaker is when fewer and fewer
people can afford to buy the goods and services our
businesses sell, or when entrepreneurs don’t have the
financial security to take a chance and start a new
business. What drags down our entire economy is when
there’s an
ever-widening chasm between the ultra-rich
and everybody else.
In this country,
broad-based prosperity has never trickled down from the
success of a wealthy few. It has always come from the
success of a strong and growing middle class. That’s
how a generation who went to college on the
G.I. Bill,
including my grandfather, helped build the most
prosperous economy the world has ever known. That’s why
a CEO like
Henry Ford made it his mission to pay
his workers enough so they could buy the cars that they
made. That’s why research has shown that
countries with less inequality tend to have stronger and
steadier economic growth over the long run.
And yet, for much
of the last century, we have been having the same
argument with folks who keep peddling some version of
trickle-down economics. They keep telling us that
if we’d convert more of our
investments in education and
research and health care into tax cuts—especially
for the wealthy—our economy will grow stronger. They
keep telling us that if we’d just
strip away more
regulations, and let businesses pollute more and
treat workers and consumers with impunity, that somehow
we’d all be better off. We’re told that when the
wealthy become even wealthier, and corporations are
allowed to maximize their profits by whatever means
necessary, it’s good for America, and that their success
will automatically translate into more jobs and
prosperity for everybody else. That’s the theory.
Now, the problem
for advocates of this theory is that we’ve tried their
approach—on a massive scale. The results of their
experiment are there for all to see. At the
beginning of the last decade, the wealthiest Americans
received a huge tax cut in 2001 and another huge tax cut
in 2003. We were promised that these tax cuts would
lead to faster job growth. They did not. The wealthy
got wealthier—we would expect that. The income of the
top 1 percent has grown by more than 275 percent
over the last few decades, to an average of $1.3 million
a year.
But prosperity sure didn't trickle down.
Instead, during the
last decade, we had the slowest job growth in half a
century. And the typical American family actually saw
their incomes
fall by about 6 percent,
even as the economy was growing.
It was a period
when
insurance companies and mortgage lenders and
financial institutions didn’t have to abide by
strong enough regulations, or they found their ways
around them. And what was the result? Profits for
many of these companies soared. But so did people’s
health insurance premiums. Patients were routinely
denied care, often when they needed it most. Families
were enticed, and sometimes just plain tricked, into
buying homes they couldn’t afford. Huge, reckless bets
were made with other people’s money on the line. And
our entire financial system was nearly destroyed.
So we tried this
theory out. And you would think that after the
results of this experiment in
trickle-down economics,
after the results were made painfully clear, that the
proponents of this theory might show some humility,
might moderate their views a bit. You'd think they’d
say, you know what, maybe some
rules and regulations
are necessary to protect the economy and prevent people
from being taken advantage of by insurance companies or
credit card companies or mortgage lenders. Maybe, just
maybe, at a time of
growing debt and widening
inequality, we should hold off on giving the
wealthiest Americans another round of big tax cuts.
Maybe when we know that most of today’s middle-class
jobs require more than a high school degree, we
shouldn’t gut education, or lay off thousands of
teachers, or raise interest rates on college loans, or
take away people’s financial aid.
But that’s exactly
the opposite of what they’ve done. Instead of
moderating their views even slightly, the Republicans
running Congress right now have doubled down, and
proposed a budget so far to the right it makes the
Contract with America look like the New Deal. In fact,
that renowned liberal,
Newt Gingrich, first called the
original version of the budget "radical" and said it
would contribute to "right-wing social engineering."
This is coming from
Newt Gingrich.
And yet, this isn’t a budget supported by some small
rump group in the Republican Party. This is now the
party’s
governing platform. This is what they’re
running on. One of my potential opponents,
Governor
Romney, has said that he hoped a similar version of
this plan from last year would be introduced as a bill
on day one of his presidency.
He said that he’s
“very supportive” of this new budget, and he even called
it "marvelous"—which is a word you don’t often hear when
it comes to describing a budget. It’s a word you don’t
often hear generally.
So here’s what this
"marvelous" budget does. Back in the summer, I came to
an agreement with Republicans in Congress to cut
roughly $1 trillion in annual spending. Some of
these cuts were about getting rid of waste; others were
about programs that we support but just can’t afford
given our deficits and our debt. And part of the
agreement was a guarantee of another trillion in
savings, for a total of about $2 trillion in deficit
reduction.
This new House
Republican budget, however, breaks our bipartisan
agreement and proposes massive new cuts in annual
domestic spending—exactly the area where we’ve already
cut the most. And I want to actually go through what it
would mean for our country if these cuts were to be
spread out evenly. So bear with me. I want to go
through this—because I don’t think people fully
appreciate the nature of this budget.
The year after
next, nearly 10 million college students would
see their financial aid cut by an average of more than
$1,000 each. There would be 1,600 fewer medical
grants, research grants for things like Alzheimer’s
and cancer and AIDS. There would be 4,000 fewer
scientific research grants, eliminating support for
48,000 researchers, students, and teachers. Investments
in clean energy technologies that are helping us reduce
our dependence on foreign oil would be cut by nearly
a fifth.
If this budget
becomes law and the cuts were applied evenly, starting
in 2014, over 200,000 children would lose their
chance to get an early education in the Head Start
program. Two million mothers and young children
would be cut from a program that gives them access to
healthy food. There would be 4,500 fewer federal
grants at the Department of Justice and the FBI to
combat violent crime, financial crime, and help secure
our borders. Hundreds of national parks
would be forced to close for part or all of the year.
We wouldn’t have the capacity to enforce the laws that protect the air we breathe, the water we drink,
or the food that we eat.
Cuts to the FAA
would likely result in more flight cancellations,
delays, and the complete elimination of air traffic
control services in parts of the country. Over time,
our weather forecasts would become less accurate
because we wouldn’t be able to afford to launch new
satellites. And that means governors and mayors
would have to wait longer to order evacuations in the
event of a hurricane.
That’s just a
partial sampling of the consequences of this budget.
Now, you can anticipate Republicans may say, well, we’ll
avoid some of these cuts—since they don’t specify
exactly the cuts that they would make. But they can
only avoid some of these cuts if they cut even deeper in
other areas. This is math. If they want to make
smaller cuts to medical research that means they’ve got
to cut even deeper in funding for things like teaching
and law enforcement. The converse is true as well. If
they want to protect early childhood education, it will
mean further reducing things like financial aid for
young people trying to afford college.
Perhaps they will
never tell us where the knife will fall—but you can be
sure that with cuts this deep, there is no secret
plan or formula that will be able to protect the
investments we need to help our economy grow.
This is not
conjecture. I am not exaggerating. These are facts.
And these are just the cuts that would happen the year
after next.
If this budget
became law, by the middle of the century, funding for
the kinds of things I just mentioned would have to be
cut by about 95 percent. Let me repeat that. Those
categories I just mentioned we would have to cut by 95
percent. As a practical matter, the federal budget
would basically amount to whatever is left in
entitlements, defense spending, and interest on the
national debt—period. Money for these investments that
have traditionally been supported on a bipartisan basis
would be practically eliminated.
And the same is
true for other priorities like transportation,
and homeland security, and veterans programs
for the men and women who have risked their lives for
this country. This is not an exaggeration. Check it
out yourself.
And this is to say
nothing about what the budget does to health care.
We’re told that Medicaid would simply be handed over to
the states—that's the pitch: Let's get it out of the
central bureaucracy. The states can experiment.
They'll be able to run the programs a lot better. But
here's the deal the states would be getting. They would
have to be running these programs in the face of the
largest cut to Medicaid that has ever been proposed—a
cut that, according to one nonpartisan group, would take
away health care for about 19 million Americans—19
million.
Who are these
Americans? Many are someone’s grandparents who, without
Medicaid, won't be able to afford nursing home care
without Medicaid. Many are poor children. Some are
middle-class families who have children with autism
or Down’s Syndrome. Some are kids with disabilities
so severe that they require 24-hour care. These are the
people who count on Medicaid.
Then there’s
Medicare. Because health care costs keep rising and
the Baby Boom generation is retiring, Medicare, we all
know, is one of the biggest drivers of our long-term
deficit. That’s a challenge we have to meet by bringing
down the cost of health care overall so that seniors and
taxpayers can share in the savings.
But here’s the
solution proposed by the Republicans in Washington, and
embraced by most of their candidates for president:
Instead of being enrolled in Medicare when they turn 65,
seniors who retire a decade from now would get a
voucher that equals the cost of the second cheapest
health care plan in their area. If Medicare is more
expensive than that private plan, they’ll have to pay
more if they want to enroll in
traditional Medicare.
If health care costs rise faster than the amount of the
voucher—as, by the way, they’ve been doing for
decades—that’s too bad. Seniors bear the risk. If the
voucher isn’t enough to buy a private plan with the
specific doctors and care that you need, that's too bad.
So most experts
will tell you the way this
voucher plan
encourages savings is not through better care at cheaper
cost. The way these private insurance companies save
money is by designing and marketing plans to attract the
youngest and healthiest seniors—cherry-picking—leaving
the older and sicker seniors in traditional Medicare,
where they have access to a wide range of doctors and
guaranteed care. But that, of course, makes the
traditional Medicare program even more expensive, and
raise premiums even further.
The net result is
that our country will end up spending more on health
care, and the only reason the government will save any
money—it won’t be on our books—is because we’ve shifted
it to seniors. They’ll bear more of the costs
themselves. It’s a bad idea, and it will
ultimately
end Medicare as we know it.
Now, the proponents
of this budget will tell us we have to make all these
draconian cuts because our deficit is so large; this
is an existential crisis, we have to think about future
generations, so on and so on. And that argument might
have a shred of credibility were it not for their
proposal to also spend $4.6 trillion over the next
decade on lower tax rates.
We’re told that
these tax cuts will supposedly be paid for by closing
loopholes and eliminating wasteful deductions. But the
Republicans in Congress refuse to list a single tax
loophole they are willing to close. Not one. And
by the way, there is no way to get even close to $4.6
trillion in savings without dramatically reducing all
kinds of tax breaks that go to middle-class families—tax
breaks for health care, tax breaks for retirement, tax
breaks for homeownership.
Meanwhile, these
proposed tax breaks would come on top of more than a
trillion dollars in tax giveaways for people making more
than $250,000 a year. That’s an average of at least
$150,000 for every millionaire in this
country—$150,000.
Let’s just step
back for a second and look at what $150,000 pays for: A
year’s worth of prescription drug coverage for a senior
citizen. Plus a new school computer lab. Plus a year
of medical care for a returning veteran. Plus a medical
research grant for a chronic disease. Plus a year’s
salary for a firefighter or police officer. Plus a tax
credit to make a year of college more affordable. Plus
a year’s worth of financial aid. One hundred fifty
thousand dollars could pay for all of these things
combined—investments in education and research that are
essential to economic growth that benefits all of us.
For $150,000, that would be going to each millionaire
and billionaire in this country. This budget says we’d
be better off as a country if that’s how we spend it.
This is supposed to
be about paying down our deficit? It’s laughable.
The bipartisan
Simpson-Bowles commission that I created—which the
Republicans originally were for until I was for it—that
was about paying down the deficit. And I didn’t agree
with all the details. I proposed about $600 billion
more in revenue and $600 billion—I'm sorry—it proposed
about $600 billion more in revenue and about $600
billion more in defense cuts than I proposed in my own
budget. But
Bowles-Simpson
was a serious,
honest, balanced effort between Democrats and
Republicans to bring down the deficit. That’s why,
although it differs in some ways, my budget takes a
similarly balanced approach: Cuts in discretionary
spending, cuts in mandatory spending, increased
revenue.
This
congressional Republican budget is something different
altogether. It is a Trojan Horse. Disguised as deficit
reduction plans, it is really an attempt to impose a
radical vision on our country. It is thinly veiled
social Darwinism. It is antithetical to our entire
history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility for
everybody who’s willing to work for it; a place where
prosperity doesn’t trickle down from the top, but grows
outward from the heart of the middle class. And by
gutting the very things we need to grow an economy
that’s built to last—education and training, research
and development, our infrastructure—it is a
prescription for decline.
And everybody here
should understand that because there's very few people
here who haven't benefitted at some point from those
investments that were made in the '50s and the '60s and
the '70s and the '80s. That’s part of how we got
ahead. And now, we're going to be pulling up those
ladders up for the next generation?
So in the months
ahead, I will be fighting as hard as I know how for this
truer vision of what the United States of America is
all about. Absolutely, we have to get serious about
the deficit. And that will require tough choices and
sacrifice. And I’ve already shown myself willing to
make these tough choices when I signed into law the
biggest spending cut of any President in recent memory.
In fact, if you adjust for the economy, the
Congressional Budget Office says the overall spending
next year will be lower than any year under Ronald
Reagan.
And I’m willing to
make more of those difficult spending decisions in the
months ahead. But I’ve said it before and I’ll say it
again—there has to be some balance. All of us have to
do our fair share.
I’ve also put
forward a detailed plan that would reform and
strengthen Medicare and Medicaid. By the beginning of
the next decade, it achieves the same amount of annual
health savings as the plan proposed by
Simpson-Bowles—the
Simpson-Bowles commission, and
it does so by making changes that people in my party
haven’t always been comfortable with. But instead of
saving money by shifting costs to seniors, like
the congressional Republican plan proposes, our approach
would lower the cost of health care throughout the
entire system. It goes after excessive subsidies to
prescription drug companies. It gets more efficiency
out of Medicaid without gutting the program. It asks
the very wealthiest seniors to pay a little bit more.
It changes the way we pay for health care—not by
procedure or the number of days spent in a hospital, but
with new incentives for doctors and hospitals to improve
their results.
And it slows the
growth of Medicare costs by strengthening an independent
commission—a commission not made up of bureaucrats from
government or insurance companies, but doctors and
nurses and medical experts and consumers, who will look
at all the evidence and recommend the best way to reduce
unnecessary health care spending while protecting access
to the care that the seniors need.
We also have a much
different approach when it comes to taxes—an approach
that says if we’re serious about paying down our debt,
we can’t afford to spend trillions more on tax cuts for
folks like me, for wealthy Americans who don’t need them
and weren’t even asking for them, and that the country
cannot afford. At a time when the share of national
income flowing to the
top 1 percent of people in
this country has climbed to levels last seen in the
1920s, those same folks are paying taxes at one of
the lowest rates in 50 years. As both I and Warren
Buffett have pointed out many times now, he’s paying a
lower tax rate than his secretary. That is not fair.
It is not right.
And the choice is
really very simple. If you want to keep these tax rates
and deductions in place—or give even more tax breaks to
the wealthy, as the Republicans in Congress propose—then
one of two things happen: Either it means higher
deficits, or it means more sacrifice from the middle
class. Seniors will have to pay more for Medicare.
College students will lose some of their financial aid.
Working families who are scraping by will have to do
more because the richest Americans are doing less.
I repeat what I’ve said before: That is not
class
warfare, that is not
class envy, that is math.
If that’s the
choice that members of Congress want to make, then we’re
going to make sure every American knows about it. In a
few weeks, there will be a vote on what we’ve called the
Buffett Rule. Simple concept: If you make more
than a million dollars a year -- not that you have a
million dollars—if you make more than a million dollars
annually, then you should pay at least the same
percentage of your income in taxes as middle-class
families do. On the other hand, if you make under
$250,000 a year—like 98 percent of American
families do—then your taxes shouldn’t go up. That’s the
proposal.
Now, you’ll hear
some people point out that the
Buffett Rule alone
won’t raise enough revenue to solve our deficit
problems. Maybe not, but it’s definitely a step in the
right direction. And I intend to keep fighting for this
kind of balance and fairness until the other side starts
listening, because I believe this is what the American
people want. I believe this is the best way to pay for
the investments we need to grow our economy and
strengthen the middle class. And by the way, I believe
it’s the right thing to do.
This larger
debate that we will be having and that you will be
covering in the coming year about the size and role
of government, this debate has been with us since
our founding days. And during moments of great challenge
and change, like the ones that we’re living through now,
the debate gets sharper; it gets more vigorous. That’s
a good thing. As a country that prizes both our
individual freedom and our obligations to one
another, this is one of the most important debates that
we can have.
But no matter what
we argue or where we stand, we have always held
certain beliefs as Americans. We believe that in
order to preserve our own freedoms and pursue our own
happiness, we can’t just think about ourselves.
We have to think about the country that made those
liberties possible. We have to think about our fellow
citizens with whom we share a community. We have
to think about what’s required to preserve the
American Dream
for future generations.
And this sense of
responsibility—to each other and our country—this isn’t
a partisan feeling. This isn’t a Democratic or
Republican idea. It’s patriotism. And if we
keep that in mind, and uphold our obligations to one
another and to this larger enterprise that is America,
then I have no doubt that we will continue our long and
prosperous journey as the greatest nation on Earth.
Thank you. God
bless you. God bless the United States of America.
Thank you.
* *
* * *
Mr. Singleton:
Thank you, Mr. President. We appreciate so much you
being with us today. I have some questions from the
audience, which I will ask—and I'll be more careful than
I was last time I did this. Republicans have been
sharply critical of your budget ideas as well. What can
you say to the Americans who just want both sides to
stop fighting and get some work done on their behalf?
The President:
Well, I completely understand the American people’s
frustrations, because the truth is that these are
eminently solvable problems. I know that
Christine Lagarde is here from the
IMF, and she’s looking at the
books of a lot of other countries around the world. The
kinds of challenges they face fiscally are so much more
severe than anything that we confront—if we make some
sensible decisions.
So the American
people’s impulses are absolutely right. These are
solvable problems if people of good faith came together
and were willing to compromise. The challenge we have
right now is that we have on one side, a party that will
brook no compromise. And this is not just my
assertion. We had presidential candidates who stood on
a stage and were asked, “Would you accept a budget
package, a deficit reduction plan, that involved $10 of
cuts for every dollar in revenue increases?” Ten-to-one
ratio of spending cuts to revenue. Not one of them
raised their hand.
Think about that.
Ronald
Reagan, who, as I recall, is not accused
of being a tax-and-spend socialist, understood
repeatedly that when the deficit started to get out of
control, that for him to make a deal he would have to
propose both spending cuts and tax increases. Did it
multiple times. He could not get through a Republican
primary today.
So let's look at
Bowles-Simpson. Essentially, my differences with
Bowles-Simpson were I actually proposed less revenue and
slightly lower defense spending cuts. The Republicans
want to increase defense spending and take in no
revenue, which makes it impossible to balance the
deficit under the terms that Bowles-Simpson laid
out—unless you essentially eliminate discretionary
spending. You don't just cut discretionary spending.
Everything we think of as being pretty important—from
education to basic science and research to
transportation spending to national parks to
environmental protection—we'd essentially have to
eliminate.
I guess another way
of thinking about this is—and this bears on your
reporting. I think that there is oftentimes the impulse
to suggest that if the two parties are disagreeing, then
they're equally at fault and the truth lies somewhere in
the middle, and an equivalence is presented—which
reinforces I think people's cynicism about Washington
generally. This is not one of those situations where
there's an equivalence. I've got some of the most
liberal Democrats in Congress who were prepared to make
significant changes to entitlements that go against
their political interests, and who said they were
willing to do it. And we couldn't get a Republican
to stand up and say, we'll raise some revenue, or even
to suggest that we won't give more tax cuts to people
who don't need them.
And so I think it's
important to put the current debate in some
historical context. It's not just true, by the way,
of the budget. It's true of a lot of the debates that
we're having out here.
Cap and trade
was originally proposed by conservatives and Republicans
as a market-based solution to solving environmental
problems. The first President to talk about cap and
trade was
George H.W. Bush. Now you've got the
other party essentially saying we shouldn’t even be
thinking about environmental protection; let's gut the
EPA.
Health care, which
is in the news right now—there's a reason why there's a
little bit of confusion in the Republican primary about
health care and the
individual mandate since it
originated as a conservative idea to preserve the
private marketplace in health care while still
assuring that everybody got covered, in contrast to a
single-payer plan. Now, suddenly, this is some
socialist overreach.
So as all of you
are doing your reporting, I think it's important to
remember that the positions I'm taking now on the budget
and a host of other issues, if we had been having this
discussion 20 years ago, or even 15 years ago, would
have been considered squarely centrist positions.
What's changed is the center of the Republican Party.
And that’s certainly true with the budget.
Mr. Singleton:
Mr. President, the managing director of the IMF
(inaudible) for continuation of United States leadership
(inaudible) economic issues, and underscored the need
for a lower deficit and lower debt. How can you respond
to that claim?
The President:
Well, look, she's absolutely right. It's interesting,
when I travel around the world at these international
forums—and I've said this before—the degree to which
America is still the one indispensable nation, the
degree to which, even as other countries are rising and
their economies are expanding, we are still looked to
for leadership, for agenda setting—not just because of
our size, not just because of our military power, but
because there is a sense that unlike most superpowers in
the past, we try to set out a set of universal rules, a
set of principles by which everybody can benefit.
And that’s true on
the economic front as well. We continue to be the
world’s largest market, an important engine for economic
growth. We can’t return to a time when by simply
borrowing and consuming, we end up driving global
economic growth.
I said this a few
months after I was elected at the first G20 summit. I
said the days when Americans using their credit cards
and home equity loans finance the rest of the world’s
growth by taking in imports from every place else—those
days are over. On the other hand, we continue to be an
extraordinarily important market and foundation for
global economic growth.
We do have to take
care of our deficits. I think
Christine has
spoken before, and I think most economists would argue
as well, that the challenge when it comes to our
deficits is not short-term discretionary spending, which
is manageable. As I said before and I want to repeat,
as a percentage of our GDP, our discretionary
spending—all the things that the Republicans are
proposing cutting—is actually lower than it's been since
Dwight Eisenhower. There has not been some
massive expansion of social programs, programs that help
the poor, environmental programs, education programs.
That’s not our problem.
Our problem is that
our revenue has dropped down to between 15 and 16
percent—far lower than it has been historically,
certainly far lower than it was under
Ronald Reagan—at the same time as
our health care costs have surged, and our demographics
mean that there is more and more pressure being placed
on financing our Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security
programs.
So at a time when
the recovery is still gaining steam, and unemployment is
still very high, the solution should be pretty
apparent. And that is even as we continue to make
investments in growth today—for example, putting some of
our construction workers back to work rebuilding schools
and roads and bridges, or helping states to rehire
teachers at a time when schools are having a huge
difficulty retaining quality teachers in the
classroom—all of which would benefit our economy, we
focus on a long-term plan to stabilize our revenues at a
responsible level and to deal with our health care
programs in a responsible way. And that's exactly what
I'm proposing.
And what we've
proposed is let's go back, for folks who are making more
than $250,000 a year, to levels that were in place
during the Clinton era, when wealthy people were doing
just fine, and the economy was growing a lot stronger
than it did after they were cut. And let's take on
Medicare and Medicaid in a serious way—which is not just
a matter of taking those costs off the books, off the
federal books, and pushing them onto individual seniors,
but let's actually reduce health care costs. Because we spend more on health care with not as good outcomes
as any other advanced, developed nation on Earth.
And that would seem
to be a sensible proposal. The problem right now is not
the technical means to solve it. The problem is our
politics. And that's part of what this election and
what this debate will need to be about, is, are we, as a
country, willing to get back to common-sense,
balanced, fair solutions that encourage our
long-term economic growth and stabilize our budget. And
it can be done.
One last point I
want to make, Dean, that I think is important, because
it goes to the growth issue. If
state and local
government hiring were basically on par to what our
current recovery—on par to past recoveries, the
unemployment rate would probably be about a point lower
than it is right now. If the
construction industry
were going through what we normally go through, that
would be another point lower. The challenge we have
right now—part of the challenge we have in terms of
growth has to do with the very specific issues of huge
cuts in state and local government, and the housing
market still recovering from this massive bubble. And
that—those two things are huge headwinds in terms of
growth.
I say this because
if we, for example, put some of those construction
workers back to work, or we put some of those teachers
back in the classroom, that could actually help create
the kind of virtuous cycle that would bring in more
revenues just because of economic growth, would benefit
the private sector in significant ways. And that could
help contribute to deficit reduction in the short term,
even as we still have to do these important changes to
our health care programs over the long term.
Mr. Singleton:
Mr. President, you said yesterday that it would be
unprecedented for a Supreme Court to overturn laws
passed by an elected Congress. But that is exactly what
the Court has done during its entire existence. If the
Court were to overturn individual mandate, what would
you do, or propose to do, for the 30 million people who
wouldn’t have health care after that ruling?
The President:
Well, first of all, let me be very specific. We have not
seen a Court overturn a law that was passed by Congress
on a economic issue, like health care, that I think most
people would clearly consider commerce—a law like that
has not been overturned at least since
Lochner.
Right? So we’re going back to the ’30s, pre New Deal.
And the point I was
making is that the Supreme Court is the final say on our
Constitution and our laws, and all of us have to respect
it, but it’s precisely because of that extraordinary
power that the Court has traditionally exercised
significant restraint and deference to our duly elected
legislature, our Congress. And so the burden is on
those who would overturn a law like this.
Now, as I said, I
expect the Supreme Court actually to recognize that and
to abide by well-established precedence out there. I
have enormous confidence that in looking at this law,
not only is it constitutional, but that the Court is
going to exercise its jurisprudence carefully
because of the profound power that our Supreme Court
has. As a consequence, we’re not spending a whole bunch
of time planning for contingencies.
What I did
emphasize yesterday is there is a human element to this
that everybody has to remember. This is not an
abstract exercise. I get letters every day from
people who are affected by the health care law right
now, even though it’s not fully implemented. Young
people who are 24, 25, who say, you know what, I just
got diagnosed with a tumor. First of all, I would not
have gone to get a check-up if I hadn’t had health
insurance. Second of all, I wouldn’t have been able to
afford to get it treated had I not been on my parent’s
plan. Thank you and thank Congress for getting this
done.
I get letters from
folks who have just lost their job, their
COBRA
is running out. They’re in the middle of treatment for
colon cancer or breast cancer, and they’re worried when
their COBRA runs out, if they’re still sick, what are
they going to be able to do because they’re not going to
be able to get health insurance.
And the point I
think that was made very ably before the Supreme Court,
but I think most health care economists who have
looked at this have acknowledged, is there are basically
two ways to cover people with preexisting conditions or
assure that people can always get coverage even when
they had bad illnesses. One way is the single-payer
plan—everybody is under a single system, like Medicare.
The other way is to set up a system in which you don’t
have people who are healthy but don’t bother to get
health insurance, and then we all have to pay for them
in the emergency room.
That doesn’t work,
and so, as a consequence, we've got to make sure that
those folks are taking their responsibility seriously,
which is what the individual mandate does.
So I don’t
anticipate the Court striking this down. I think they
take their responsibilities very seriously. But I think
what's more important is for all of us, Democrats and
Republicans, to recognize that in a country like
ours—the wealthiest, most powerful country on Earth—we
shouldn’t have a system in which millions of people are
at risk of bankruptcy because they get sick, or end up
waiting until they do get sick and then go to the
emergency room, which involves all of us paying for it.
Source:
WhiteHouse
President Obama Speaks at the Associated Press Luncheon
/
The Ed Show—Comparing the Ryan and Obama budget plan
Recession Officially Over, U.S. Incomes Kept Falling
/
The Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer
Protection Act
Mitt Romney Distinguished by Lying
(Rachel Maddow)
/
Romney takes a page from the Karl Rove
(Rachel Maddow)
Romney Speaks at
News Editors
Annual
Conference
(video)
Donald Ritchie—Foundations of the U. Senate /
Bain Is just
Chapter One in the Book of Romney
* * *
* *
ameriKKKa is nonreligious (Orisha Kammefa) / We Will Always Love You Whitney (Poem by
Marvin X)
The Return of Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala (Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye)
* * *
* *
Why
Obamacare is good for America—More Coloradans will
have access to health care, and small businesses
will benefit. It's the right prescription.—19
February 2012—Obamacare is starting to hold
insurance companies accountable, controlling the
runaway costs that prevent Coloradans from access to
health care. For example, insurers must now justify
premium rate hikes. Just last month, the Department
of Health and Human Services found that a
Pennsylvania insurance company's proposed rate
increase of 12 percent was unjustified in relation
to the benefits provided, and urged the insurer to
rescind the rate, issue refunds or publicly explain
their refusal to do so. While some states, including
Colorado, were already regulating rate increases,
before Obamacare there were no national limits on
what insurers could charge as administrative costs.
Now at least 80 cents of every dollar must be spent
on actual medical care.
Families are
getting direct relief from Obamacare as well.
Essential preventive care is now considered a basic
benefit for those with insurance and is available
without co-pays or other cost-sharing because it
keeps people healthier. Everyone qualifies for
annual checkups. Children may receive immunizations;
women can access mammograms, contraception and
domestic violence screening; and men benefit from
prostate screenings and colonoscopies.
The
heartbreaking practice of excluding children from
coverage based on even the most minor pre-existing
condition is already over because of Obamacare. In
2014, adults will enjoy this protection as well.
Young adults just starting in the work world often
do not receive health insurance in entry-level jobs
and make up 28 percent of the uninsured in Colorado.
Now they can stay on their parents' health care plan
until age 26.
Another 675,000
Coloradans are underinsured. Many have learned the
hard way that their coverage is completely
inadequate when diagnosed with a serious chronic
illness like lupus or multiple sclerosis. With
Obamacare, there is solace for those who find they
are underinsured, too. Individuals who are denied
needed treatment by their insurance companies will
now have a guaranteed appeals process. Insurers will
no longer be allowed to place lifetime or annual
limits on how much they will pay out to cover claims
on policies' covered benefits. Likewise, insurance
companies no longer can cancel individual coverage
for those who have been diagnosed with serious and
expensive illnesses, a practice known as "recission."
A major
cost-containment initiative of Obamacare is the
exchange. In 2014, Coloradans will be able to
purchase affordable insurance in the Colorado Health
Benefits Exchange, a statewide nonprofit
organization. Intended to be a competitive, online
marketplace similar to Travelocity, Coloradans will
be able to easily compare insurance plans. Subsidies
to purchase a product will be available on a sliding
scale based on income (an estimated 590,000
individuals in Colorado will be eligible), meaning
many currently uninsured will be able to afford
coverage.— DenverPost
* * *
* *
Obama
declares support for same-sex marriage—Michael
A. Memoli and Kathleen Hennessey—9 May
2012—President Obama, marking the end of a prolonged
"evolution" on the issue, now favors allowing
homosexual couples to marry, he said in a television
interview Wednesday.
The announcement comes days after Vice President
Joe Biden’s
comments that he was "absolutely comfortable" with
gay marriage put new pressure on Obama to clarify
his position on the issue.
Obama told
ABC's
Robin Roberts
Wednesday: "Over the course of several years as I
have talked to friends and family and neighbors,
when I think about members of my own staff who are
in incredibly committed monogamous relationships,
same-sex relationships, who are raising kids
together, when I think about those soldiers or
airmen or Marines or sailors who are out there
fighting on my behalf and yet feel constrained, even
now that 'don't ask, don't tell' is gone, because
they are not able to commit themselves in a
marriage, at a certain point I’ve just concluded
that for me personally, it is important for me to go
ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples
should be able to get married."—ChicagoTribune
"That's
what we try to impart to our kids and that's
what motivates me as president and I figure the
most consistent I can be in being true to those
precepts, the better I'll be as a as a dad and a
husband and hopefully the better I'll be as
president," Obama said.— Syracuse
* * *
* *
We haven't heard
the end of Bain—and we won't until the end of the
campaign—despite the inexplicable comments of Newark's
"Democratic" Mayor
Cory Booker, who must be spending too much time
cozying up to Republican Gov. (and potential running
mate) Chris Christie. On Meet the Press, Booker equated
the race-baiting, anti-Obama ads about the Rev. Jeremiah
Wright that were recently proposed to
billionaire clown Joe Ricketts with Obama's Bain attack:
"It's nauseating."
Well, Ricketts and
his now-renounced smear job certainly was nauseating.
But with Romney, what's nauseating is what happened at
his hands to ordinary hardworking Americans thrown out
of work so he could rake in the bucks. And what's
worrying is Romney's austerity agenda that would drive
the U.S. into a double-dip recession, which is what such
policies have already done to Great Britain.
Within hours,
Booker
retracted his comments and conceded the point: It is
Romney who has made his business experience the
centerpiece of his campaign. Bain is the spine that
holds the whole Book of Romney together. As one of the
workers in that Obama commercial put it, "If he's going
to run the country like the way he ran our business, I
wouldn't want him there. He would be so out of touch…
How could [he] care?"
theweek
* * *
* *
Don't Be
Fooled. Cory Booker, Barack Obama & the Whole Black
Political Class Love Bain Capital—Bruce A.
Dixon—22 May 2012—Barack Obama, Cory Booker and the
entire black political class have a problem. They
must deliver the votes of their people to the
campaign contributors who make their careers
possible. Their voters oppose unjust wars,
privatizations of public assets and services, and
corporate bailouts. Once safely in office, these are
exactly the measures Obama, Booker and their
colleagues enact. But right now Barack Obama and
other Democrats need to be re-elected, and to be
re-elected they must pose at least as half-hearted
opponents of the bloodsucking model of parasitic
venture capital practiced by Bain Capital, J.P.
Morgan and other players.
 |
It's not an easy act to sell, and
sometimes Obama and his surrogates are
caught in their own tangled webs.
Romney's Bain Capital, like other
vampire capital firms like it don't just
have relations with Democrats as well as
Republicans. They have deep
institutional and personal ties with
leading members of the nation's black
political class.
Bain's business models, along with reams
of their business advice in the forms of
pro bono “transition” and “turnaround”
reports recommending the mass firings of
public workers, especially teachers, and
the wholesale privatization of local
water, government payrolls, parking
meters, garbage pickup, parks and
recreation departments, and everything
that can or cannot be nailed down have
been common staples on the desks of
incoming black mayors in Newark,
Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Columbia SC,
Atlanta and other cities.
|
When former
Atlanta mayor Shirley Franklin swept into office in
2005 her pro-bono transition report was “the Bain
Report” put together by Mitt Romney's colleagues
intent on turning government services into lucrative
business opportunities and pocketing the money saved
by firing workers, reducing their benefits and
eliminating their pensions while jacking user fees
for the public to the maximum sustainable levels.
Fortunately for Atlanta, the water privatization
deal already done by her predecessor unraveled in
spectacular fashion just as Franklin was entering
office, creating a less favorable atmosphere for
other immediate privatizations. Out of office,
Franklin is a lobbyist and consultant to firms
specializing in the privatization of education and
government services of all kinds.—blackagendareport
* * *
* *
* * * * *
|
Black Americans in Congress, 1870-2007
By Matthew Wasniewski
Black Americans in Congress, 1870–2007—
beautifully prepared volume—is a
comprehensive history of the more than
120 African Americans who have served in
the United States Congress. Written for
a general audience, this book contains a
profile of each African-American Member,
including notables such as Hiram Revels,
Joseph Rainey, Oscar De Priest, Adam
Clayton Powell, Shirley Chisholm, Gus
Hawkins, and Barbara Jordan. Individual
profiles are introduced by contextual
essays that explain major events in
congressional and U.S. history.
Part I provides four chronologically
organized chapters under the heading
"Former Black Members of Congress." Each
chapter provides a lengthy biographical
sketch of the members who served during
the period addressed, along with a
narrative historical account of the era
and tables of information about the
Congress during that time. Part II
provides similar information about
current African-American members. There
are 10 appendixes providing tabular
information of a variety of sorts about
the service of Black members, including
such things as a summary list, service
on committees and in party leadership
posts, familial connections, and so
forth. |
 |
The entire volume is 803 large folio
pages in length and there are many illustrations. The book
should be part of every library and research collection, and
congressional scholars may well wish to obtain it for their
personal libraries.—Pictures—including
rarely seen historical images—of each
African American who has served in
Congress—Bibliographies and references
to manuscript collections for each
Member—Statistical graphs and charts
* * * * *
 |
Faces At The Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism
By Derrick Bell
In nine grim metaphorical sketches, Bell, the black former Harvard law professor who made headlines recently for his one-man protest against the school's hiring policies, hammers home his controversial theme that white racism is a permanent, indestructible component of our society. Bell's fantasies are often dire and apocalyptic: a new Atlantis rises from the ocean depths, sparking a mass emigration of blacks; white resistance to affirmative action softens following an explosion that kills Harvard's president and all of the school's black professors; intergalactic space invaders promise the U.S. President that they will clean up the environment and deliver tons of gold, but in exchange, the bartering aliens take all African Americans back to their planet. Other pieces deal with black-white romance, a taxi ride through Harlem and job discrimination. Civil rights lawyer Geneva Crenshaw, the heroine of Bell's And We Are Not Saved (1987), is back in some of these ominous allegories, which speak from the depths of anger and despair. Bell now teaches at New York University Law School.—Publishers Weekly |
Derrick Bell Law Rights Advocate Dies at 80
* * * * *
|
The Looting of America: How Wall Street's Game of Fantasy Finance
Destroyed Our Jobs, Pensions, and Prosperity—and What We Can Do About It
By Les Leopold
How could the best and brightest (and most highly paid) in finance crash the global economy and then get us to bail them out as well? What caused this mess in the first place? Housing? Greed? Dumb politicians? What can Main Street do about it? In The Looting of America, Leopold debunks the prevailing media myths that blame low-income home buyers who got in over their heads, people who ran up too much credit-card debt, and government interference with free markets. Instead, readers will discover how Wall Street undermined itself and the rest of the economy by playing and losing at a highly lucrative and dangerous game of fantasy finance. He also asks some tough questions: Why did Americans let the gap between workers' wages and executive compensation grow so large? Why did we fail to realize that the excess money in those executives' pockets was fueling casino-style investment schemes? Why did we buy the notion that too-good-to-be-true financial products that no one could even understand would somehow form the backbone of America's new, postindustrial economy? |
 |
How
do we make sure we never give our wages away to gamblers again?
And what can we do to get our money back? In this page-turning
narrative (no background in finance required) Leopold tells the
story of how we fell victim to Wall Street's exotic financial
products. Readers learn how even school districts were taken in
by "innovative" products like collateralized debt obligations,
better known as CDOs, and how they sucked trillions of dollars from the global economy when they failed. They'll also learn what average Americans can do to ensure that fantasy finance never rules our economy again.
The Economy
* * * * *
The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
* *
* * *
Ancient African Nations
* * * * *
If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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* * * * *
The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
* *
* * *
The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
* * * * *
* * * *
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ChickenBones Store
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posted 4 April 2012
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