BBO Discussion Forums: The Affordable Care Act Greek Chorus Line - BBO Discussion Forums

The bubbles with numbers greater than one mean the United States is losing more life to a particular condition than the average member country in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. A bubble with a number less than one means Americans are losing fewer years of life, although you don't see many of those, because, in every category measured in 2008, the United States did worse than than average.


Americans lose three times as many years of life to infectious diseases as the average OECD country and lose twice as many years to metabolic diseases. There are some categories in which America used to lose fewer years of life than other countries back a few decades ago. But, ever since the 1980s, that hasn't happened.

Why do the start of America's woes and its decline continually point back to the Ronald Reagan era?

The number of corporations with public affairs offices in Washington grew from 100 in 1968 to over 500 in 1978. In 1971, only 175 firms had registered lobbyists in Washington, but by 1982, 2,500 did. The number of corporate [political action committees] increased from under 300 in 1976 to over 1,200 by the middle of 1980. […] The Chamber [of Commerce] doubled in membership between 1974 and 1980. Its budget tripled. The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) doubled its membership between 1970 and 1979.

Why do the start of America's woes and its decline continually point back to the Ronald Reagan era?

Source


Concerning the great American healthcare ruse, we find this:(emphasis added)

One could argue that the decline of this country goes back to Washington's use of military force to deal with certain Pennsylvania farmers' refusal to comply with what they considered an unreasonable and unconstitutional tax. Or with Andrew Jackson's statement that "Mr. Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it." Or with Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus. Or FDR's incarceration in concentration camps of American citizens because we happened to be at war with the country their ancestors came from. Or his incarceration of people in a psychiatric hospital without due process. Or any of a thousand transgressions that occurred long before Reagan became President.

Cullen Murphy: If you had to locate a fork-in-the-road moment when we started down the path toward widening inequality, when would that moment be? And what were the precipitating events?

Joseph Stiglitz: It’s hard to pinpoint a single critical moment, but clearly the election of President Ronald Reagan represented a turning point. In the decades immediately after World War II, we had economic growth in which most people shared, with those at the bottom doing proportionately better than those at the top. (It was also the period that saw the country’s most rapid economic growth.) Among the precipitating events leading to greater inequality were the beginning of the deregulation of the financial sector and the reduction in the progressivity of the tax system. Deregulation led to the excessive financialization of the economy—to the point that, before the crisis, 40 percent of all corporate profits went to the financial sector. And the financial sector has been marked by extremes in compensation at the top, and has made its profits partly by exploiting those at the bottom and middle, with, for instance, predatory lending and abusive credit-card practices. Reagan’s successors, unfortunately, continued down the path of deregulation. They also extended the policy of lowering taxes at the top, to the point where today, the richest 1 percent of Americans pay only around 15 percent of their income in taxes, far lower than those with more moderate incomes.

Reagan’s breaking of the air-traffic controllers’ strike is often cited as a critical juncture in the weakening of unions, one of the factors explaining why workers have done so badly in recent decades. But there are other factors as well. Reagan promoted trade liberalization, and some of the growth in inequality is due to globalization and the replacement of semi-skilled jobs with new technologies and outsourced labor. Some of the increase in inequality common to both Europe and America can be ascribed to that. But what’s different about America is the remarkable growth in incomes of the very top—especially the top 0.1 percent. This is orders of magnitude greater than in most of Europe and comes partly out of Reagan’s deregulatory fervor, particularly in finance, partly out of inadequate enforcement of competition laws, partly out of America’s greater willingness to take advantage of inadequate corporate governance laws.

Throughout its history, America has struggled with inequality. But with the tax policies and regulations that existed in the postwar period, we were on the right track toward ameliorating some of that. The tax cuts and deregulation that began in the Reagan years reversed the trend. Income disparities before tax and transfers (help that is given to the poor through, for instance, food stamps) is now larger, and because government is doing less for the poor and favoring the rich, inequalities in income, after taxes and transfers, are even larger.

Cullen Murphy: In your new book, The Price of Inequality, you range very widely both historically and geographically. Looking at American history, what period strikes you as most similar to our own in terms of lack of concern for widening inequality?

Joseph Stiglitz: Two periods come to mind: the Gilded Age of the late 19th century and the boom times of the 1920s. Both were marked by high levels of inequality and corruption, including in the political process (such as the notorious Teapot Dome Scandal that marked the beginning of the 1920s). In fact, until the middle part of the last decade, income inequality had never reached the levels of the 20s. Of course, some of those who made their fortunes in both periods made great contributions to our society—the Robber Barons in building the railroads that transformed the country, or James B. Duke, who was instrumental in bringing electricity to parts of America. But both periods were also marked by speculation, instability, and excess.

Since September, Americans for Prosperity, a group financed in part by the billionaire Koch brothers, has spent an estimated $20 million on television advertising that calls out House and Senate Democrats by name for their support of the Affordable Care Act.

The unusually aggressive early run of television ads, which has been supplemented by other conservative initiatives, has gone largely unanswered, and strategists in both parties agree it is taking a toll on its targets.

Building on the success, the deep-pocketed organization disclosed on Tuesday that it was expanding its Senate efforts with $1.8 million in airtime to attack Democratic House members running for the Senate in Iowa and Michigan, where Democrats are viewed as holding an early advantage. The group was also moving into Montana, a state where Democrats may struggle to defend a seat, on behalf of a Republican House member running for the Senate.

Now we are engaged in a great tug-of-war over a few points in the top tax rate in Washington. But even if the White House pulls hardest, it won't amount to much of a victory for the long-suffering middle class. The sources of their income stagnation are too deep, too varied, and too long-term for Clinton-era tax rates to cure them.

"There is a huge amount of focus on progressive taxes in our policy world but progressive taxes are not much of a solution to this," said Lawrence Mishel, president of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. "We need to get unemployment down rapidly. We need to greatly change our labor standards. We need to raise the minimum wage."

He's right: The middle class crisis -- and its resulting income inequality -- is the most important economic story of our time.

IMO, the Kock brothers, et al, really do not care about Obamacara, climate change, acid raid, or the myriad other things they seemingly oppose - bottom line is they want to protect their power by limiting the influence of government on business - public interests, in their views, always take a back seat to the interests of business.

Just because corporations are people too doesn't mean they have a moral obligation to give a f*** about anyone's interests but their own.

No -- by law, in fact, they're not allowed to.

That's the problem. We praise a system in which corporations and those connected with power and money are given even more protection and privileges, while everyone else is left to fend for themselves. The problem is that system. The problem is that our government, which controls what is allowable and what is not, has cultivated a corporate system that works increasingly well for a select few, and all others be damned.

The government has the power to allow whatever system it wants, and for 30+ years, this is exactly what it has allowed. So this is what we get.

And we voted for the people responsible for it, so we get what we deserve. A country that is decaying from the middle outward, while the fortunate watch their bank accounts and power grow.

In a sense, we all chose this.

Reagan, however, is the one who made it look appealing. And for THAT, I find him despicable.

Don't blame Reagan. Blame the people who set up our "noble experiment" to fail - although it's taken quite a while to get to this point.

"Whatever system it wants". Right. Certainly Mr. Obama seems to believe that. Yet there's this pesky thing called the Constitution. How do we get around that? I know! We'll just ignore it! That'll work!

It shouldn't, but it certainly seems to.

There is nothing in the US constitution that would prohibit a move to Australian levels of inequality.

Don't blame Reagan. Blame the people who set up our "noble experiment" to fail - although it's taken quite a while to get to this point.

"Whatever system it wants". Right. Certainly Mr. Obama seems to believe that. Yet there's this pesky thing called the Constitution. How do we get around that? I know! We'll just ignore it! That'll work!

It shouldn't, but it certainly seems to.

There certainly is in the original Constitution.

Growing up in the middle of the last century I saw unions as a great equalizer. A working guy, my father for example, could make a decent living. The role of government was to make unions legal and then get out of the way. For whatever the reason, and I think there are several, this is now history. I don't think that we have fully coped with how to replace this social force.

That is why the labor share of earnings has been declining since Reagan was elected.

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our (movie) stars but in ourselves.

Some might adhere to the view that the fault is not in the stars, but in the (pin) stripes.