Category Archives: U.S. Congress

We won the lottery, but who bought the ticket?

Debt and deficits, Legislature, Politics, State government, U.S. Congress

By Steve Brawner
© 2017 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Should welfare recipients be required to pay back the state if they win the lottery? Maybe the better question is, should all of us?

Those questions came to mind after hearing a presentation by Rep. John Payton, R-Wilburn, of his House Bill 1825 before the House Rules Committee at the State Capitol Wednesday.

The bill would require lottery winners to reimburse the state for their last 10 years of Department of Human Services benefits, such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly the food stamp program.

Payton said the lottery is a bad deal for poor people, who gamble their sparse dollars with the odds stacked mightily against them. This arrangement would make them think twice about doing that and remind them that their benefits come from the taxpayers.

In addition to Payton, the bill has 26 co-sponsors in the House, but it’s likely not going far. One committee member requested a fiscal impact statement, which will delay the bill’s progress. Legislators are hoping to go home at the end of March, which is fast approaching.

Still, if part of the idea is to make welfare recipients consider the source of their government benefits, then let’s consider the bigger picture: As a nation, we are all receiving government freebies.

In 2017, the Congressional Budget Office projects the United States government will spend $4 trillion but collect only $3.4 trillion, producing a deficit of $559 billion. That means the government is spending about $1,700 more than it collects per American, or almost $7,000 for a family of four.

Think you don’t benefit from that? Of that $4 trillion, almost a fourth went to Social Security in 2016, which benefits all of us – recipients directly, future recipients because it offers a guaranteed retirement plan, and families because they expend fewer resources taking care of their elderly relatives. (Yes, there’s a trust fund – but not really. In effect, the tax dollars go into one pot.) Another $588 billion goes to Medicare, which offers the same benefits. About that same amount pays for the United States to maintain by far the largest military in the world, which we’re all generally glad we have even if some of us would be OK with it being a little smaller.

Need more examples? The interstates on which we drive are no longer funded entirely by the gas taxes we pay at the pump. They are now funded partly out of the indebted general fund. The public schools we attend at a cost of $9,400 per Arkansas student annually also are funded partly by federal dollars and therefore by federal debt. And contrary to popular belief, only 1 percent of the budget goes to foreign aid, which often directly benefits Americans (for example, by buying food produced in America).

Finally, and this is really important, deficit spending does more than just allow these popular programs to continue. It infuses the economy with extra cash borrowed from future generations without their permission – stolen, in other words. We all live better because the government is writing $559 billion in hot checks this year, and putting it into the economy. Modern American life is being propped up by our grandchildren’s labor.

The frustration that many Americans feel toward welfare recipients is based on their belief that they are receiving unearned benefits that trap them in a cycle of poverty. And yet as a nation we are all receiving unearned benefits that trap us in a cycle of debt. These habits enable us to buy prosperity and security we have not fully earned. We’re all welfare queens, which is why the national debt – the accumulation of all these annual deficits – has reached $19.9 trillion, or more than $61,000 for every American. Most of that has accumulated in the last 16 years, meaning we were the ones who benefitted most.

There will come a point when the nation either chooses a different path, or is forced to do so. At some point in the future, the bill will come due. It always does.

If you and I are not around, then congratulations to us. We lived in a rich country during a rich era, and we received a lot of government benefits we never had to pay for.

In other words, we already won the lottery.

How can an unhealthy nation fix health care?

Health care, Politics, U.S. Congress

By Steve Brawner
© 2017 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

You may have noticed that a while back, a Democratic president and a Democratic-led Congress tried to fix health care, and while more people do have health insurance, health care costs are still rising. You also may have noticed that a Republican president and a Republican-led Congress now promise to fix the fix. It won’t work either.

The truth is that no health care reform can create an affordable system in an unhealthy nation.

Modern American life, in fact, is profoundly unhealthy. Americans eat too much and eat the wrong things: too much sugar, fast “food” and processed conglomerations with unpronounceable ingredients; too few fruits, vegetables and healthy protein sources. We stay up too late bombarding our brains with flashing electronic lights rather than getting the sleep we need. We drive everywhere, take elevators up one flight of stairs, and spend most of our days sitting, which research has shown is very bad for us. We are addicted to all kinds of drugs – caffeine, opiates, alcohol. Then we try to fix all of this, quickly, with short bursts of exercise that often injure us, and with diets we cannot maintain, and with pills that have harmful side effects.

But it’s more than just about what we put into and take out of our bodies. We are disconnected from nature and from the natural rhythms of life. We are replacing healthy personal interactions with shallow distant relationships and unproductive disagreements on social media. We are fueled by a sense of outrage triggered by 24-hour media sources that might as well be plugged into our brains. We seek “more” rather than “enough,” filling our lives with stress and worry, flitting like gnats from responsibility to responsibility, and climbing ladders that are leaning against the wrong buildings.

And then after all of that, we think our members of Congress and a president are going to create an affordable, workable health care system, just because they happen to be members of a certain party?

The costs of our lifestyle were illustrated in a recent report by the Arkansas Center for Health Improvement. As reported by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, state and school employees and spouses were given the opportunity to save $75 on their insurance premiums if they completed a survey. More than 69,000 did.

It found that health insurance plans spent $4,302 in 2015 on employees and their spouses who were obese – 43 percent of the respondents – compared to $3,270 on employees who were not. The costs of obesity, in fact, were significantly higher than for those who smoked tobacco, who averaged $3,703. The plans spent an average of $6,043 for employees who exercised fewer than 20 minutes per week, compared to $3,776 for employees who said they exercised moderately at least 20 minutes just once a week. Those who exercised moderately three times a week or vigorously once a week cost their health plans $3,345.

No study tells the whole story, of course. Some people don’t exercise because they already have health problems, perhaps through no fault of their own.

Still, these are large differences in a sample size of more than 69,000 people. The difference in costs between those who exercise very little and those who exercise not that much was almost $2,700 a year. That one habit almost cut health care costs in half.

The United States has by far the most expensive health care system among the industrialized nations. According to the World Bank, the country spent $9,403 in 2014 per person on health care. Health care costs accounted for more than 17 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, compared to an average of 12.3 percent among all high-income nations – a number that we skew upwards.

As the study of 69,000 Arkansans makes clear, healthier lifestyle choices would make us a lot healthier as individuals and significantly reduce the nation’s health care costs, which is the key to increasing access to everyone. Think of what could be done with that extra money now spent on taxes, insurance, and the costs of preventable health problems.

You can’t overcome the actions of 300 million people with a legislative act. Regardless of what elected officials do, if we’re going to reform health care, we’re going to have to reform ourselves.

Could Democrats become states’ rights party?

Elections, Politics, State government, U.S. Congress

By Steve Brawner
© 2017 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

People tend to think about how things work in relation to how well they’re working for them. That’s why some Democrats, who’ve won the popular vote but lost the electoral vote in two of the last five elections, want to get rid of the Electoral College, while many Republicans say it’s a pillar of democracy. If the results had been reversed, so would have been the arguments.

Which leads us to the 10th Amendment, sometimes known as federalism or states’ rights.

The 10th Amendment states, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.” As the national government has grown in recent years, it has been the most ignored amendment outside of the 18th, the one that prohibited the sale of alcohol, which was repealed by the 21st.

Some conservatives have called for bringing back the 10th Amendment, particularly during the last eight years when they didn’t like what the federal government was doing. They say states have different cultures, economies and histories and should be able to enact policies that fit themselves. Moreover, states should have the freedom to be laboratories of democracy, where ideas are subject to experimentation and then can be copied, modified or rejected by other states and the federal government.

Democrats have looked skeptically at returning power to the states, largely because the idea of “states’ rights” has been used to justify racial and other types of discrimination, including in Arkansas. Moreover, moving power to the states would make it harder to enact sweeping programs at the federal level, such as Obamacare.

But now here’s what Democrats, particularly in blue states, are facing. President Trump occupies the White House and leads the executive branch, and he has already nominated a Supreme Court justice who will give conservatives a 5-4 majority. Among the four “liberal” justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 83 and Stephen Breyer is 78, while the sometimes swing voter, Anthony Kennedy, is 80. By the time Trump leaves office, the Court could have a conservative tilt for decades to come.

Republicans also control the House and the Senate. True, Democrats could take back the Senate in 2018, but they would have to overcome two challenges. First, Republicans tend to do better in midterm elections because their older, more conservative voters vote more often. And second, Democrats have more to lose next year. Of the 33 Senate seats up for grabs, eight are held by Republicans and 23 are held by Democrats, while the other two seats are held by independents who vote with Democrats. Ten Democratic senators are running for re-election in states carried by Trump in 2016.

Democrats also face another problem with the national map: where they live. Democrats tend to cluster in big cities while Republicans are spread across the country, which is why Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 3 million people but lost the election, and why there are more red states than blue ones. Demographic changes – an increasingly more diverse population in many parts of the country – have been expected to counteract this, but they obviously didn’t in 2016.

The result of all this is that some blue states, particularly California, are really getting the short end of the stick, and will continue to do so. With more than 39 million people, California’s population is almost as large as the 22 smallest states combined, including Arkansas. The people of those states have 44 U.S. senators between them, while Californians have two. It’s no wonder California is a donor state, meaning it sends more money to Washington, D.C., then it gets back. And it’s no wonder that there’s a growing movement among Californians to try to secede from the union. In fact, blue states tend to be donor states across the board, while red states tend to be receivers.

So could Democrats, particularly in big blue states like California, embrace returning some power to the states? If states had more power, President Trump would be less important, his secretary of education couldn’t tell people how to run their schools, and blue staters could keep more of their tax dollars.

So we’ll close with two questions. First, will Democrats give the 10th Amendment a try, now that they aren’t in charge of any part of the federal government?

And second, will Republicans turn their backs on the 10th Amendment, now that they are in charge of all of it?

Cotton the populist

Politics, U.S. Congress

Sen. Tom Cotton
By Steve Brawner
© 2017 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Sen. Tom Cotton made a name for himself because of his combat service, support for the military, opposition to the Iran deal, and fierce criticism of President Obama. These days, he’s talking a lot about a top issue in the 2016 presidential campaign – immigration, and not just the illegal kind.

Cotton has expressed support for the president’s border wall with Mexico and for his refugee policies, while also raising the ante by introducing the Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment Act.

Cotton’s RAISE Act would reduce the number of legal immigrants admitted into the country from more than 1 million in 2015 to a little more than 500,000 by the act’s 10th year. It would do so by eliminating preferences for some adult family members, eliminating a lottery system that is supposed to increase the diversity of immigrants but which Cotton says really doesn’t, and limiting the number of refugees to 50,000 per year.

Cotton’s argument is that immigrants are creating surplus labor, driving down wages in low-skilled jobs and making it harder for certain Americans (including the immigrants who are already here) to get ahead. As long as a new immigrant is willing to work a job for subsistence wages, then that’s what the job will pay. It’s a pretty good deal for corporations that profit off cheap labor, Cotton says, but not for blue-collar Americans.

These are not brand-new stances for Cotton, but they and other bread-and-butter issues are getting more emphasis since you-know-who was elected president. On Feb. 16, Cotton criticized the high cost of a prescription drug on the Senate floor by saying, “We should be channeling people’s ambition and entrepreneurial spirit into finding cures, not finding new and clever ways to make a profit.” It wasn’t long ago that few Republicans would ever use the word “profit” negatively in any circumstance.

For decades, the Republican Party has been composed of an increasingly awkward alliance between big business interests and culturally conservative Americans. Those two groups’ interests are not always aligned economically, particularly for Americans without a college degree, who have not recovered much in this economic recovery while the rich have gotten a lot richer.

In election after election, Republican candidates have bridged that gap by mixing pro-big business politics with culturally conservative stances on social issues, all seasoned with promises of tax cuts that everyone likes. The formula has worked particularly well among whites without a college degree. According to the Pew Research Center, John McCain won that group of voters 58-40 percent in 2008, while Mitt Romney, the ultimate big business elite candidate, won by an even bigger margin, 61-36.

In 2016, Trump ran a different kind of Republican campaign by appealing to those culturally conservative voters on both social issues and economic issues, helping him pick up just enough new voters to win key states. Trump ran as a populist, his message being that the common man is being hurt by the kind of “unfair trade deals” that big business Republicans (and big business Democrats) have often supported. As a result, according to the Pew Research Center, Trump won the votes of 67 percent of whites without a college degree versus only 28 percent who supported Hillary Clinton, a bigger spread than in 2012 or 2008. That gap is one reason he won 107,000 more votes than she did in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, just enough to make him president.

It’s a potent formula in certain parts of the country, including Arkansas. At the moment, Republican elected officials in those parts oppose Trump at their own peril. So we’re watching one of two things happen: either a historical anomaly that will correct itself in four years, or the transformation of a party as it better aligns itself with its own voters and potential voters. Democrats, who lost in 2016 after nominating a candidate who didn’t match their own voters’ mood, probably will undergo their own transformation in 2020.

The country’s already cynical enough, and I try not to add to that cynicism. Cotton’s recent emphasis does not equate to insincerity. I’m not saying his principles have changed, but it’s fair to say he has made an adjustment in his politics in the age of Trump.

So have a lot of other Republicans, and if they haven’t, they’d probably better.