Here are my thoughts re “Uncertainty looms ominously over recovery”
ENDING THE RECESSION
This has to be the government’s greatest priority at this moment. It cannot be done without substantially increasing the deficit, at least over the next two years. This would not be a problem as a percentage of GDP were it not for the mountain of debt already accumulated mostly by Reagan and George W. Bush on which it is hard to pile so much more. I agree with you that the next stimulus bill must concentrate on rebuilding infrastructure and creating jobs, something FDR, Eisenhower, and Clinton (22 million new jobs) set good examples for. Accomplishing a worthwhile stimulus bill requires cooperation by the out party, currently busy trying to destroy Obama rather than rebuilding the nation.
REDUCING THE DEFICIT
Once the recession is over, the gigantic deficit can fairly easily and substantially be reduced by
1. Increasing the age of eligibility for Social Security, beginning two years from now. To 66 in 2012,to 67 in 2014, to 68 in 2016, to 69 in 2018, maybe even to 70 in 2020. Most Americans live into their early eighties now. The government cannot afford to support them for that many years. This is not 1965. I worked until age 72. It was not such a difficult thing to do.
2. Seniors with assured retirement incomes (pensions, annuities, dividends) of more than $90,000 per year or so should lose eligibility for Social Security altogether. They should receive a lump sum payment of half of the money they paid into the system and be taken off the rolls. There are several million of them, a big savings. They should also be required to make a larger contribution to Medicare than low earners.
3. Compared with the services the federal government is required or expected to render, taxes are much too low. The myth that you can stimulate the economy by reducing already too low taxes further has been soundly disproven by the facts. Once the recession is over, income taxes could be increased by 5% across the board with only a minor setback for the economy. If Germans, Frenchmen, the Swiss, the Scandinavians can have the same quality of life and larger savings than we, while paying 5 to 12 % higher taxes, why can’t we?
The above three remedies are known to the leading politicians in both parties, but nobody has the guts to say to the voters that this is the only certain way out of our deficit black hole before it swallows our children or grandchildren.
HEALTH CARE REFORM
We cannot pretend to be a civilized nation of mostly religious citizens and have more than 40 million people without health insurance. The costs of medical care and of drugs are too high to be coped with without insurance. Thousands of Americans die every month that would have stayed alive in other civilized nations.
The health insurance industry has become an enemy of our society. In the last 50 years, it has turned into a big-profits-first, healthy patients last, immoral money machine, not too much different in their business morale from the big banks that visited this recession on us. Very few other industries have so much lobbying power in Washington. The politicians are afraid of them. The current health system, adding Medicare fraud, the absence of remedial tort legislation, etc. is dragging the rest of our economy down, including the physicians that also must dance to their tune.
Obama understands this well, but his big mistake was to take this issue on this year, with a terrible recession and two wars underway. Too many other items are burdening our deficit this year. He should have waited until our troops are out of Iraq and the awakening economy brings in more taxes again. He has made it easy for the out party to undermine this very necessary enterprise by pointing to the initial cost burden for the federal deficit. Is it not ironic that the party that created more than 80 % of the federal deficit is now suddenly opposed to the idea of deficit financing?
The uncertainty that looms over our recovery is due to the unwillingness of our politicians to tell the truth, and to tackle the issues that really matter. Most of them put self-serving politics ahead of the nation’s urgent needs, and they refuse to govern in a modicum of bipartisan cooperation. For heaven’s sake, the out party is always the next in party and vice a versa, not a mortal enemy to be vanquished at all costs. Our problems are not too big to be solved, but they cannot be solved with politics as usual.
