A great deal was spoken during the presidential campaign concerning the middle class and very little about the poor and impoverished. And yet, it was that group that delivered the presidency back to Barack Obama. In exit polls following the last Tuesday’s election of the three economic groups — those who made less than $50,000 a year, between $50,000 and $99,999 and more than $100,000 annually — those who made less than $50,000 a year made up approximately 41 percent of those who voted.
That 41 percent represents approximately 50 million voters, and Obama won this group by about 22 percent (60 percent vs. 38 percent) — the president won no other economic group.
The manufactured crisis called the fiscal cliff
The fiscal cliff so dramatically spoken of by the media was the result of another bargain that was struck between Republicans and Democrats during the debt ceiling debacle when House Republicans held the nation’s credit worthiness hostage. So in order to raise the debt ceiling in the summer of 2011 the agreement was that sequestration, a series of drastic budget cuts, totaling $1.2 trillion that are scheduled to go into effect on Jan. 1, 2013. These cuts are evenly split between defense and domestic discretionary spending (with some exemptions, such as Social Security, Medicare and veterans’ benefits).
And so with the talk of a grand bargain, a deal between Democrats and Republicans that raises taxes and cuts spending, one would think it would massively reduce the deficit, right? No … wrong. The Simpson-Bowles commission’s suggested plan is continually touted as a bipartisan approach to our economic woes when nothing could be further from the truth.
The right-wing Republican Alan Simpson and the conservative Southern Democrat Erskine Bowles may be from different parties, but they are cut from the same ideological cloth. Their plan makes concessions on higher taxes on the rich for Democratic support as they gut Social Security, Medicare and other social-safety net programs.
Now the president, who must be one terrible poker player, has announced that his starting point is $3 in spending cuts to $1 in tax increases. So, what’s the calculation? According to the president’s own plan, that would be $3 trillion in spending cuts, which is significantly higher than the current plan of $1.2 trillion in spending cuts to reach the 4 trillion over 10 years figure that he’s targeting.
The Obama populism two-step
Additionally, in a memo obtained by noted investigative journalist Bob Woodward, during the debt ceiling fight in 2011, President Obama appeared to be willing to make much larger concessions than previously believed. This is how Woodward described on a recent Meet The Press:
“This is a confidential document, last offer the president—the White House made last year to Speaker Boehner to try to reach this $4 trillion grand bargain. And it’s long and it’s tedious and it’s got budget jargon in it. But what it shows is a willingness to cut all kinds of things, like TRICARE, which is the sacred health insurance program for the military, for military retirees; to cut Social Security; to cut Medicare. And there are some lines in there about, “We want to get tax rates down, not only for individuals but for businesses. So Obama and the White House were willing to go quite far.“
So the man who ran on not balancing the budget on the backs of the poor; the candidate/president who painted Romney as a heartless 1-percenter who threatened the fortunes of the middle class, seemed all too willing to go along with the same sort of draconian cuts that he constantly accused the Republican ticket of wanting to make.
We shouldn’t expect to hear much about this, however, because the private sex lives of former and current four-star generals seems to be far more worthy of our attention. This manufactured fiscal cliff nonsense betrays the real jobs cliff and living-wage cliff that this nation leaped off of a long time ago and those in Washington don’t seem to be terribly interested in finding a real solution for.
What voters really voted for
The exit polling from last week’s presidential election showed that although a majority of voters were concerned about the economy (59 percent), only 15 percent of the electorate was concerned about the deficit. Health care beat out the deficit for second place as the most important issue to voters at about 18 percent.
What the majority of voters based their decision on who to vote for showed a pretty accurate assessment of how and why we are where we are, economically, in this country. Fifty-three percent of voters still blame George W. Bush for our financial woes (only 38 percent blamed Obama). So what does this mean exactly?
Well, it points to a couple of things. One, it acknowledges that the biggest drivers of our current debt is the result of George W. Bush’s tax cuts, which predominantly benefited the wealthiest Americans, and George W. Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which were funded entirely by borrowing rather than taxes.
The rest of the debt increase is the result of lost revenue from the Great Recession, with a small amount being from government emergency and corrective responses to the Great Recession, such as the bailouts of the banks, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the stimulus and the federal contribution to unemployment insurance.
Secondly, the voters rightly discerned that the swelling of the public debt was not caused in any way, shape or form by any outburst of spending on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid or other middle-class expenditures or social safety-net programs for the poor. And yet, here we are talking about those programs being part of the “grand bargain.”
The Medicaid deception
The proposed cuts to Medicaid appear to be the most troubling, because they are based largely on groundless assumptions and ugly stereotypes regarding the poor and people of color. Medicare and Social Security still have a great of deal of support from voting blocs that politicians desire to garner favor from.
Medicaid, however, has long been targeted by conservative legislators and has been the first program that Democrats consistently surrender to the chopping block as well — and it usually comes down to the same reason.
Conservatives paint Medicare as the preferred medical insurance of the much-maligned (and mythological) black welfare queen. In an effort not to alienate white working and middle class voters who, basically, believe the myth, Democrats, largely, acquiesced to conservative demands.
What is left out of the conversation, however, is that although women with children (vast majority of them white, by the way) represent the greatest number of enrollees in the program, one-third of the program’s entire budget – almost $120 billion last year – was spent on long-term care services for the elderly and younger people with disabilities. And two-thirds of the program’s budget was spent on all services including health care for this population.
Further, Medicaid spends almost five times as much per person for the elderly as it does for young adults or kids. And it spends more than five times as much for people with disabilities. Clearly, there is more to this program than meets the eye and with the exception of Bill Clinton, no one appears to be talking about it because it is viewed as the health insurance program of the unwashed and unmotivated masses. This means, that Democrats and Republicans are united in their lack of regard for it.
What will our society look like if programs that are designed to help those most in need are cut before we even address joblessness — public enemy number one?
Conclusion
The answers appear to be quite clear: If self-proclaimed deficit hawks are so concerned about health care costs, don’t cut programs that help those who desperately need medical care, but rather, reduce the excessive prices charged by greedy U.S. medical providers and pharmaceutical companies.
If fiscal conservatives, and those who have accepted their talking points as gospel, are so alarmed about a slow recovery or another recession, then let’s avoid the austerity trap. If the deficit is reduced too rapidly and drastically (which, by the way would increase the deficit), then the fear of a recession will become a self-fulfilling reality.
The Congressional Budget Office and most independent economists say it will draw so much demand out of the economy that it will push us back into an economic downturn. Those who decry European-styled socialism seem all too willing to plunge us into a European-styled austerity of low growth, high unemployment and falling government revenues.
The talk of shared sacrifice is an insult to those who have suffered the most during this financial chasm of the last four years or so, because it ignores how much they have already sacrificed. It is time to alleviate their suffering and to focus on those who have sacrificed very little to the cause of economic recovery — our nation’s most wealthy.
Earlier in this piece it was pointed out that those who made less than $50,000 a year represented 41 percent of those who voted and in raw numbers that’s about 50 million people — approximately 30 million of that 50 million voted for Barack Obama.
Studies also showed that those who made less, more often than not, waited in longer lines to vote.
Now let’s put this all together: If a grand bargain is struck where the president agrees to significant cuts to programs that did not add to the current economic mess we are now in, then those who voted in greater volumes than anyone else and waited longer than anyone else, to cast that vote, their thanks will be that they are harder hit by the consequences of said bargain.
The teachers, firefighters, police officers, social workers, the mentally and physically challenged and working poor did not vote for this and the president and the Democratic and Republican parties have to be held accountable to give them something a whole lot better.