Bulletin Board Archive

Topic: The Nitty Gritty on your two choices

1. Feb 8, 2008 07:03pm by AceFadal - [b:353f9d151d]k[/b:353f9d151d]inestheti[b:353f9d151d]C[/b:353f9d151d]~means To learn by doing www.dipity.com/acefadal WE ARE, Kansas City is [b:353f9d151d]k[/b:353f9d151d]inestheti[b:353f9d151d]C[/b:353f9d151d]! http://crushproofstudio.bandcamp.com/ Location: Downtown, Kansas City, Mo.
   http://www.democracynow.org/2008/2/8/examining_clinton_obamas_stances_on_the [color=yellow:7d4bfd5016]Warning this might change the way you view O or Hill[/color:7d4bfd5016] Im a little peeved myself. anyway what can you do, vote for mcain? [quote:7d4bfd5016] JUAN GONZALEZ: We turn now to the Democratic race, where Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are in a virtual dead-heat that could last right up until the convention. The contest is so tight that Democratic Party chair Howard Dean has raised the possibility of a compromise if no clear nominee emerges by April. As the Democratic race intensifies, we spend the rest of the hour looking at the candidates on some of the key domestic issues of the 2008 campaign. Both candidates have come under new scrutiny in the past few weeks. The New York Times revealed last week that Barack Obama backed down on a bill that would have required nuclear plants to disclose radioactive releases. Critics say Obama watered down the measure after heavy lobbying by the nuclear industry, including an Illinois company named Exelon that was among his largest donors. Days earlier, ABC News reported Hillary Clinton did not once speak out against Wal-Mart’s intensive campaign against unionization during her six years on the company’s board of directors. Clinton’s campaign biography makes no mention of her time at Wal-Mart. AMY GOODMAN: Today, we’ll look at several domestic issues: the economy, housing crisis, Social Security, healthcare and nuclear power. Max Fraser is a journalist with The Nation magazine. His latest article is called “Subprime Obama.” He joins us in our firehouse studio here in New York. In Washington, D.C., we’re joined by Robert Kuttner, veteran economics and financial journalist, founder and co-editor of American Prospect magazine, former investigator for the Senate Banking Committee, an author of seven books, his latest, The Squandering of America: How the Failure of Our Politics Undermines Our Prosperity. We want to begin on the housing crisis. This is a clip of Hillary Clinton outlining her plan at the Democratic debate last month in South Carolina. SEN. HILLARY CLINTON: I would have a moratorium on home foreclosures for ninety days to try to help families work it out so that they don’t lose their homes. We’re in danger of seeing millions of Americans become basically, you know, homeless and losing the American dream. I want to have an interest-rate freeze for five years, because these adjustable rate mortgages, if they keep going up, the problem will just get compounded. And we need more transparency in the market. AMY GOODMAN: Robert Kuttner, let’s begin with you. Let’s talk about the healthcare plans of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. ROBERT KUTTNER: Well, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have proposed healthcare plans that are really variations on a plan designed by Jacob Hacker of Yale University, which is an attempt to get to universal coverage without having national health insurance, and it’s not bad, if you can’t have the first best, which is national health insurance. The idea is that if you have employer-provided coverage, and you like it, and it’s decent, you get to keep it. If you don’t have affordable coverage, the government will subsidize you to get coverage that’s as good as the coverage that members of Congress get. Clinton has what’s known as a mandate. She requires people to get coverage. Obama doesn’t. Clinton and some liberal commentators, like Paul Krugman, have whacked Obama for not having a mandate. I think a mandate is a very bad idea. I think the difference between universal social insurance and a mandate is that universal social insurance, like Medicare, says that, as an American or a permanent resident of the country, you get health insurance, the same way you get Social Security. A mandate takes a social problem and makes it the individual’s problem. And in the Massachusetts version of this, on the website it says “new penalties for 2008.” You get penalized if you don’t buy health insurance, even if the health insurance that’s available is not high quality and is not affordable. Now, Hillary Clinton says that her version of this is better than Massachusetts, because they will have a substantial amount of regulation to make sure that you can’t discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions, and you can’t have excessive deductibles and co-pays. So the approach is not bad, but it’s definitely a second best. The first best would be national health insurance. The other problem with this whole approach is that you don’t get the cost efficiencies that you get from universal health insurance, because you still have all this paperwork, you still have all the profit by private insurance companies, you still have doctors being given incentives to go for the reimbursable procedures. And as a result, the cost-containment pressures hit patients. They come in the form of less care, rather than in the form of less waste. JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, I’d like to ask you, in terms of the mandates issue, because obviously both Krugman, in his various articles, and Clinton have claimed, on the one hand, that Obama does have mandates—he has mandates for coverage of all children—so that the mandates issue is not a principled issue, it’s a tactical issue as to what you think could be approved. Your sense of that? ROBERT KUTTNER: My point is that a mandate, in a situation where the whole system is sick, makes that sickness the problem of the individual. Instead of putting a gun to people’s heads, typically people who can’t afford good quality insurance, and saying to them, “You must, under penalty of law, or pay a tax or pay a fine, go out and find decent insurance,” it’s so much better policy to just have insurance for everybody. Then there’s no question of a mandate. I think it’s a very bad position for progressives to back into, because it signals that government is being coercive, rather than government being helpful. Now, we can split hairs and argue whether Obama is being principled or tactical, but I think his discomfort with the idea of a mandate is something that I applaud. I wish that both he and Clinton had gone all the way and said, let’s just to do this right and have national health insurance. I think they could have used this as a teachable moment. They could have bought public opinion around. Medicare is phenomenally popular. Medicare is national health insurance for seniors. Let’s have national health insurance for everybody. AMY GOODMAN: Let’s hear how Clinton and Obama discussed their plans at last week’s debate in Los Angeles. SEN. HILLARY CLINTON: We cannot get to universal healthcare, which I believe is both a core Democratic value and an imperative for our country, if we don’t do one of three things. Either you can have a single-payer system, or—which I know a lot of people favor, but for many reasons is difficult to achieve—or you can mandate employers—well, that’s also very controversial—or you can do what I am proposing, which is to have shared responsibility. Now, in Barack’s plan, he very clearly says he will mandate that parents get health insurance for their children. So it’s not that he is against mandatory provisions; it’s that he doesn’t think it would be politically acceptable to require that for everyone. I just disagree with that. I think we, as Democrats, have to be willing to fight for universal healthcare. SEN. BARACK OBAMA: What they’re struggling with is they can’t afford the healthcare. And so, I emphasize reducing costs. My belief is—is that if we make it affordable, if we provide subsidies to those who can’t afford it, they will buy it. Senator Clinton has a different approach. She believes that we have to force people who don’t have health insurance to buy it, otherwise there will be a lot of people who don’t get it. I don’t see those folks. And I think that it is important for us to recognize that if, in fact, you’re going to mandate the purchase of insurance and it’s not affordable, then there’s going to have to be some enforcement mechanism that the government uses. And they may charge people who already don’t have healthcare fines or have to take it out of their paychecks. And that, I don’t think, is helping those without health insurance. That is a genuine difference. AMY GOODMAN: It’s interesting to note something Hillary Clinton says in that clip. When she mentions a single-payer system, the audience applauds and cheers, even though it’s an option rarely seriously discussed by politicians or the corporate media. And Hillary Clinton acknowledges the applause by saying, “I know a lot of people favor [it], but for many reasons [it’s] difficult to achieve.” She doesn’t explain why she thinks it’s difficult to achieve. And polls repeatedly show a majority of Americans favor it. An A.P. poll in December found nearly two-thirds of voters want universal healthcare, in which everyone’s covered in a Medicare-type program, while more than half of voters explicitly said they support single payer. But it’s the insurance companies that are against it. Robert Kuttner, can you talk about that? ROBERT KUTTNER: Well, one of the reasons that it’s difficult to achieve is the lack of leadership on the part of leaders like Hillary Clinton and, for that matter, Barack Obama. I mean, if you had Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama say, “You know, this is an intramural debate that we should not be having, this debate about mandates; we should do this right: we should have national health insurance,” public opinion would turn around on a dime. And instead of it being this fringe idea, all of a sudden, just because the two of them had blessed it, it would become a mainstream idea, and we would be having a debate that we should have been having all along. JUAN GONZALEZ: I’d like to turn also now to Max Fraser, who joins us. He’s with The Nation magazine. He’s written an article recently called “Subprime Obama,” where he looks at the housing crisis, and initially the article dealt with—John Edwards was still in the race—with the positions of Edwards, Clinton and Barack Obama on the housing crisis sweeping the nation. Welcome to Democracy Now! MAX FRASER: Thanks for having me. JUAN GONZALEZ: Could you outline the differences between—the major differences between the candidates? And it would be instructive also to talk about John Edwards’s policies, as well. MAX FRASER: Sure. Well, when he was in the race, Edwards’s plan was by far the most comprehensive and aggressive, insofar as it really committed the government to intervening on behalf of homeowners and resolving the crisis in such a way that it would keep people from losing their homes. Edwards called for a mandatory moratorium on foreclosures, a freeze on rising interest rates, a real kind of redoubled efforts to not only regulate the mortgage markets, but financial markets generally. Clinton and Obama fall short of that, and Obama falls short most significantly. He is the only one of the three who hasn’t called for a moratorium on foreclosures or a freeze on interest rates, which really are the most effective short-term measures that can be taken to keep homeowners in their homes. And beyond that, his plan calls for the least aggressive government intervention, the most limited spending to bail out homeowners and to especially borrowers who are at risk of defaulting on their mortgages and to help them restructure their loans in such a way that they’re affordable moving forward. And his plan actually really most relies on a pretty insignificant tax credit, which comes out to about $500 on average for homeowners, which might make a difference for those who are just barely falling behind, but not for those who are falling further and further behind. AMY GOODMAN: Max, in your piece, “Subprime Obama,” you talk about his three main economic advisers. MAX FRASER: Right. AMY GOODMAN: Tell us who they are. MAX FRASER: Well, there are these three young economists: David Cutler, Jeffrey Liebman and Austan Goolsbee. Cutler and Liebman are Harvard economists who hail from the Clinton administration. Goolsbee, who does the lion’s share of the work on this issue, comes from the University of Chicago. They’re all centrist market economists, I mean, what you would call them Clintonian in their politics, and that’s really where they’re coming from. They are oriented towards, you know, market-based solutions to social welfare issues. Cutler writes about incentivizing the healthcare industry as a way to improving care. Liebman has endorsed the partial privatization of Social Security. And Goolsbee also is one of the kind of market faithful. JUAN GONZALEZ: Yeah, I’d like to ask you about Liebman in particular, because I think that, from what I understand, he is proposing a—has proposed for a 20 percent increase in the Social Security payroll tax to, in essence, create private accounts for all Americans. It would be like the equivalent of dues check-off for Wall Street. MAX FRASER: Yeah. JUAN GONZALEZ: It would be an enormous windfall for the Wall Street firms to be able to get that kind of a operation. MAX FRASER: Right. JUAN GONZALEZ: But it’s not clear—Obama has never said anything about this in the campaign trail, but his key adviser is known as the main proponent of this, right? MAX FRASER: Well, one of the—a proponent of it, that’s right, entirely true. And, you know, Obama, I think what he says on the campaign trail on various issues of domestic policy are, you know, not wholly in line with where these policy advisers are, but they clearly are animating where he stands on these issues, like Social Security and the housing crisis, most notably, I think. AMY GOODMAN: Robert Kuttner, can you weigh in here with these three economists that Max writes about in The Nation magazine, their significance, and especially on this issue of privatization of Social Security? ROBERT KUTTNER: Well, it’s very distressing. I mean, I think it was National Journal, recently came out with a rating that showed that Obama has the most left-of-center record, voting record, in the Senate. And yet, the advisers that he relies upon are—I would call them center-right. They’re basically free-market guys who want to use markets to somehow solve social problems, which is like squaring a circle. And I was just at a board meeting of the Economic Policy Institute, which is, you know, the most effective left-of-center think tank in Washington. Except at the staff level, he is not reaching out to progressive economists. It’s a fairly narrow circle. Same, of course, with Hillary. If anything, Hillary’s advisers are a shade more open to reaching out a little further left. And you worry that as attractive as Obama is, as inspirational as he obviously is, he might be very centrist as president, and you wonder whether this is him trying to be the Democratic version of John McCain, trying to tone it way down in order to reach out to independents, or whether this is what the man really believes, or whether he’s still a work in progress. May I comment briefly on the housing situation? AMY GOODMAN: Yes. ROBERT KUTTNER: I think the right way to do this is to reinvent something that was done during the 1930s, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, where the federal government, through a new agency, would buy back these bonds that are packages of subprime mortgages, buy them back at a discount, so that the banks and the bond holders take a big loss, and then use that savings to turn them back into affordable mortgages. You can’t do it just on the basis of a moratorium or on the basis of a freeze, because there’s no practical way to renegotiate the terms of a mortgage if the mortgage has been packaged with other mortgages into a bond. And interestingly enough, Chris Dodd, on the Senate side, who is no great progressive, is the guy who has been promoting this solution. Home Owners’ Loan Corporation in the ’30s saved about a million families from foreclosure. It ended up refinancing about 20 percent of all the homes in the United States. And they simply used the government’s own borrowing rate to make cheap mortgages available to homeowners who were going to lose their houses. Now, it’s more difficult today. You can’t just refinance something. First of all, you have to turn it back from a bond into a mortgage. But I think the level at which Hillary has talked about it and Obama has talked about it is superficial and doesn’t really get at the structural problems. Now, again, the Social Security privatization issue, I don’t think it’s necessarily a terrible idea to have supplemental accounts on top of basic Social Security. The problem is that when the people who promote this take a close look at it, you realize you can’t afford to do both, so it ends up coming out of Social Security. And you really do worry about the company that Obama keeps, in terms of where he’s getting his economic advice. [/quote:7d4bfd5016]
2. Feb 8, 2008 07:09pm by Blam Location: Kansas City, MO
   two choices? nah son, there are alot more peeps running for prez in 08 other than dems and repubs. thats just picking the lesser of 2 evils, i prefer to pick the righteous.