GOP Senate takeover is best for all

By Steve Brawner
© 2014 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

This is not an endorsement of Rep. Tom Cotton, but it’s best for everyone – in some ways, even President Obama – if Republicans take over the Senate. They are almost certain to maintain control of the House, so a GOP-controlled Senate is the only way our government might be able to function during the next two years.

We’ve seen what happens when one party controls the House and the other controls the Senate in the current political climate – a complete train wreck. Nobody has to take responsibility because everybody can just blame the other side. As a result, Americans have witnessed a series of avoidable fiscal crises and a government shutdown. It’s also why we’ve seen hundreds of show votes that have little purpose but to score political points, such as the Republican House’s dozens of votes to repeal or cripple Obamacare. Those bills died in the Senate, which the House members knew would happen all along.

Just as a split Congress is bad for the country, so too is one-party control. Under the Constitution, the White House and Congress are supposed to check and balance each other. But the way the system has evolved, when the president and the congressional majority are of the same party, they see themselves as members of the same team.

In contrast, the government functioned reasonably well at times from 1994-2000, when Democrats controlled the White House under President Clinton and Republicans controlled Congress. The melting pot of ideas and priorities brought both branches of government to the center. Together they reformed welfare and passed polices that enabled the government to balance the budget, sort of. On the other hand, Monica Lewinsky happened.

If Republicans win control of the Senate (and keep the House), they will have a responsibility to govern, not just oppose Obama. They will need to show the country they can accomplish something constructive so they can win again in 2016.

So there will not be dozens of votes to repeal Obamacare because if Republicans actually did that, they’d have the responsibility to replace it with something else, and they don’t know what that would be.

Instead, GOP members will pass one bill to repeal Obamacare in the House and try to pass one in the Senate to satisfy their base voters. If it somehow survived a Democratic filibuster attempt in the Senate, Obama of course would use his veto. If that were to happen, everyone on both sides would rant and rave, and then hopefully Congress would get down to business and start amending the law – for example, by passing tort reform to limit the excesses of medical malpractice lawsuits. Obama might even sign such a bill because a Republican takeover of the Senate would force (and on some issues allow) him and some congressional Democrats to move to the center.

Mike Ross, who spent 12 years in the U.S. House of Representatives, has made a similar argument in his race for governor. Republicans already are assured of a minimum of 20 of the 35 seats in the Arkansas Senate. They’ll almost certainly control the House as well.

Ross has said his election will keep one party from controlling everything. That’s true, although the Arkansas governor’s veto is far less powerful than the president’s. While a presidential veto requires a two-thirds vote to override, the state Legislature merely needs a simple majority, which is the same percentage that passed the bill in the first place. Still, the governor is the state’s chief executive – the one able to get everybody’s attention, and the one who remains in Little Rock administering state government after legislators have gone home.

So Ross is right. Voting for him will result in divided government in Little Rock, and voting for his opponent, Asa Hutchinson, will result in one-party control.

That’s not an endorsement of Ross any more than this column is endorsing Cotton. There are many other reasons to choose one candidate over the other. Besides, Little Rock is not Washington – not now, and hopefully not ever.

Remembering history on the eve of war

By Steve Brawner
© 2014 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” the philosopher and poet George Santayana wrote. They also forget the good stuff, too.

Prior to Dec. 7, 1941, Americans were divided on how to respond to the escalating global conflict. That division ended with the attack on Pearl Harbor. Congress declared war on Japan with one dissenting vote. Germany and Italy declared war on America. America declared war on Germany and Italy.

In the months that followed, Americans volunteered for service or registered for the draft. During the war years, civilians across the country participated in scrap metal drives, bought war bonds, and accepted the rationing of certain foods and household items. They could hardly buy a tire because the rubber was needed by the boys overseas. Taxes, which already were high, rose even higher to a top rate of 94 percent. No one, and I mean no one, could go about their lives pretending a war wasn’t happening.

On Wednesday night, President Obama announced that the United States is expanding its efforts against its newest enemy. As with Japan in World War II, the Islamic State, or ISIS, has been committing atrocities for a while now in Syria and Iraq, but American opinion was not galvanized until Americans were killed, visibly. In 1941, it was the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Now, it’s the beheading of two journalists.

Obama announced that the United States will, among other actions, lead a broad coalition against ISIS, conduct airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, and will deploy 475 additional military advisors in Iraq. He asked Congress for “additional authority and resources” to train and arm Syrian rebels. “America, our endless blessings bestow an enduring burden” of leadership, he said.

This effort will be a fraction of the federal budget, but it will not be free. There is no question the resources will be provided. The question is, from whom? Like much of what the United States has done since 1980 – including a bunch of military actions, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan – the money likely will be borrowed. Because our blessings are not actually endless, we’ve made a habit of asking for our children and grandchildren to pay for our current needs.

Whether it involves foreign policies like the wars in Iraq, or domestic crises such as relief after Hurricane Sandy, America’s response has been consistent for decades: There’s a need, often a legitimate one, and so we meet it. Unfortunately, we tend not to count the costs, and if we do, we tend to pass them on.

I am not opposed to what the president is proposing – and unlike many, I expect he’ll do a decent enough job of carrying out his plans. But the costs of this exercise should be budgeted, and they should be offset by spending cuts elsewhere or by revenue increases. No more wars that we ask our kids to pay for.

There’s a tendency to glorify World War II. That’s a mistake, because we need to learn from actual history, not an idealized one. They had a draft back then because they couldn’t get enough volunteers. They raised taxes because they couldn’t just pass the offering plate and collect enough to pay for the war. At the end of the war, the national debt had increased to 109 percent of the gross domestic product – higher than it is now.

But Americans back then at least tried to pay their own way. They did this at a time when the entire world was in flames, when much of the available workforce was overseas, when many were grieving lost loved ones, and when the Great Depression was still a fresh memory. Everyone sacrificed – not just those who wore a uniform.

Now, like so many times in recent years, the United States is about to kill some bad people in a far-off land. Let’s hope it makes the world a safer, freer place.

If it does, it would be our world that benefits – the one we’re living in now. That means we should be the ones to pay for it, not our children and grandchildren. They already will be looking back through history at us, and, hopefully, learning from our mistakes so they don’t repeat them.

A drugstore quits cigarettes

By Steve Brawner
© 2014 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

CVS Pharmacy, a national drugstore chain, stopped selling cigarettes last week. This was big news because it was so unusual. And if anyone is wondering why the United States is spending far too much money paying for health care that isn’t making Americans healthier – those first two sentences should help explain it.

The chain is rebranding itself as “CVS Health” as it empties its shelves of the tobacco products that contribute to one in five American deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The company did not have a sudden epiphany that tobacco is bad for us. It’s trying to find a market niche as a health care provider. Like other pharmaceutical retailers, it also is offering basic medical services such as flu vaccines and blood pressure tests.

This is a welcome change because drugstores – which supposedly sell us products to make us well – are among the unhealthiest retailers in the country. The national chain in my area – I won’t use the name, but it’s new slogan contains the word “healthy” – sells cigarettes, candy and colas behind or near the cashier, who is located only feet from the doorway. Rows upon rows of candy, in fact, are sold in that store, along with chips and other salty snacks. It does sell cereal, and there’s a small refrigerated section that contains juice and milk, along with frozen pizza and ice cream. The gas station that changes my oil sells bananas, oranges and apples. Not so this drugstore, where virtually every grocery item is a processed food. The drugstore does sell bottled water, which, though a waste of money, is at least good for you.

You can’t really blame the drugstores for this. I guess they have every right to sell us what we have every right to buy, and Americans in general and Arkansans in particular buy a lot of tobacco, candy and processed foods. According to the CDC, an estimated 41.1 million Americans, or 18.1 percent of us, smoke cigarettes. In Arkansas, it’s 27 percent, ranking the state 49th, and not in a good way. More than one-third of Americans are obese.

The United States spends about 18 percent of its gross domestic product on health care – far more than other industrial countries. Some say it has the “best health care system in the world,” and if you judge it by one metric – the ability to treat certain serous diseases, that’s true. But it’s burdening us and future generations with unsustainable debt, and was doing so long before Obamacare was created.

The health care system itself is partly to blame. Among its biggest problems is that it rewards all the wrong behaviors. It pays medical providers far more money for treating diseases than it does for curing them and pays them almost nothing for prevention. A pharmacy selling us cigarettes and then selling us drugs (and charging the government for them) to treat the effects of those cigarettes? That’s the American way.

But just as it’s very hard for schools to educate students without parental support, it’s difficult for the health care system to treat patients when we don’t treat ourselves. Americans see “health care” largely as the act of taking a pill, right now, to make us feel better, right now. It’s no wonder drugstores sell cigarettes and candy. They’re drugs. One produces a nicotine high, and one produces a sugar rush.

So while we’re talking about state and national policies, we also have to talk about personal responsibility. In fact, the conversation must start there, even if it’s a little uncomfortable, just as writing this column has been. (Most are.) As Arkansas Surgeon General Dr. Joe Thompson said recently as we discussed various forms of health care reform, “If we don’t get control over our obesity and of our hypertension and our tobacco use, it doesn’t matter how much money we’re spending. We’re going to sink the boat.”

Will a drugstore clearing its shelves of America’s most harmful drug keep that boat afloat? No, but it certainly can’t hurt. It made its choice based on free market principles. Let’s hope the market rewards it, and that others freely follow its lead.

The minimum wage: Make it about work, not fairness

By Steve Brawner
© 2014 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Arkansans in November will vote on whether or not to raise the minimum wage incrementally from its current $6.25 an hour to $8.50 by the beginning of 2017. There is no organized opposition, the State Commerce of Commerce doesn’t have an opinion, and polls have shown it is likely to pass.

For perspective on this Arkansas-based issue, let’s check with a self-described “zillionaire” from Seattle.

Nick Hanauer earned his billions starting and helping start more than 30 companies and was an early investor in Amazon.com. He’s written a widely shared piece for Politico magazine, “The Pitchforks Are Coming … For Us Plutocrats.” A plutocrat is a powerful, wealthy person.

Hanauer says the shrinking middle class is bad for everyone. The top 1 percent earn about 20 percent of the nation’s income while the bottom half earn just 12 percent – a gap that is widening. He points out that capitalist societies don’t survive long without a healthy middle class – the economy’s real job creator. As the middle class shrinks, consumers have less money to spend at businesses owned by rich people. Eventually, he writes, the common people get restless, and then you have problems – historically, either a revolution or a police state. As Hanauer jokingly told radio host Tavis Smiley, the super-rich have the most to gain or lose “because we’re the ones that go to the guillotine.”

Hanauer’s only specific prescription in his piece is raising the minimum wage. In Seattle, the economy has boomed even as the minimum wage has increased to $15 an hour – which would be too high for Arkansas.

Arkansas is one of only four states whose minimum wage falls below the federal level of $7.25 per hour. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2012 there were 50,000 employees here above the age of 16 earning at or below the federal minimum wage. That’s about 6.9 percent of all workers here who, if they work 40 hours a week and never take a vacation, earn $13,000 a year before taxes.

You might say that’s not fair. If you do, Hanauer would say you’re using the wrong language. He says supporters of raising the minimum wage should stop talking about fairness and instead focus on the economic benefits that occur when work pays. People who earn a livable wage have money to spend at local businesses and don’t require government assistance, as do many fast-food and other low-wage workers now. “The fundamental law of capitalism is, when workers have more money, businesses have more customers,” Hanauer told Smiley.

The same argument is being made – and should be made more aggressively – by supporters of the private option. That’s the state program that uses Medicaid dollars to buy private insurance for low-income Arkansans. It had enrolled 163,480 people as of July 31.

One of the arguments opponents make is that it’s an expansion of government, and they are right, in one way. But remember that the private option is a benefit for “low-income Arkansans,” not “no-income Arkansans.” Recipients are engaged in some form of employment that had made them ineligible for free government health care through Medicaid. They’ve made choices to try to be self-sufficient. If the private option is repealed, the practical result will be that they will get free health care anyway because they won’t be able to afford it on their own. Moreover, the message sent to recipients will be that they are better off not working and instead should depend on the government like some of the people they know.

The wealth gap must be addressed. Without a strong middle class, both democracy and capitalism are corrupted. There’s a reason why the Wall Streeters who nearly wrecked the economy were bailed out: They make the rules. And without a strong middle class, the economy enters a death spiral where not enough people spend not enough money to support not enough businesses, which then hire not enough people.

But how we talk about the wealth gap is as important as what is done about it. Please, no more political movements encouraging us to see ourselves as victims. Hanauer is right: As society debates issues like raising the minimum wage, the focus should be on self-sufficiency, not fairness. There are many things about which Americans can’t agree, including what’s “fair,” but most of us believe this: It’s better for people to earn a real paycheck than to accept a government handout.

Here’s Hanauer’s Politico article.

Here’s Hanauer’s interview with Tavis Smiley.

Kansas independent could shake up Senate

By Steve Brawner
© 2014 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Note to subscribers: This is an updated version of this column that had been released earlier today.

The race between Sen. Mark Pryor and Rep. Tom Cotton is one of the two or three most important in the country because both political parties believe it will help determine control of the Senate. But another race could be even more important – the one in Kansas, where businessman Greg Orman, a member of no party, has a real chance to win.

Orman, an independent, had polled third in a four-man race in a recent Public Policy Polling survey, but with 23 percent support, he was not far behind Sen. Pat Roberts, the unpopular incumbent Republican. Roberts was leading with only 32 percent and had an approval rating lower than President Obama’s. That same poll revealed that, were this only a two-man race between Orman and Sen. Roberts, Orman would be leading, 43-33.

The four-man race is now a three-man race. The Democrat, Chad Taylor, who was second with 25 percent, dropped out Wednesday. The other candidate is Libertarian Randy Batson.

Taylor had little chance of winning in a state that hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate since the Great Depression. In fact, the best he could have done was split the anti-incumbent vote and elect the Republican, which would have been a huge irony. Typically the argument against voting for independents is that it’s a “wasted vote” – you know, you must vote for the major party candidate you dislike the least, or you’ll otherwise help the other major party’s candidate win. In this case, the Democrat would have been the spoiler. His party’s leadership obviously encouraged him to drop out.

Orman says he simply does not fit into either party. He was a College Republican in 1988, became a fan of independent Ross Perot in 1992, leaned Republican for a while, and then flirted with running against Roberts as a Democrat in the 2008 race. He says he voted for President Obama in 2008 and then Mitt Romney in 2012. In 2010, he founded the Common Sense Coalition, whose purpose has been to elect centrist candidates. “Historically, I’ve tried the Republican Party, I’ve tried the Democratic Party, and I’ve just finally decided that if we’re going to change things in Washington, we’ve got to attack the two-party system and stop supporting it,” he told MSNBC.

He describes himself as “fiscally conservative and socially tolerant,” which might not play well in Arkansas right now but apparently has some appeal in Kansas. The nationwide tension between the GOP’s various factions is boiling over in that state. On Wednesday, more than 70 moderate former Republican legislators announced they were supporting Orman, not their own party’s candidate.

Why am I writing about a Kansas race? Because of what might happen if Orman wins. There are already two independents in the Senate who align themselves with the Democrats. Orman says he will caucus with whichever party will adopt more of a solutions-oriented approach. If control of the Senate in this close election comes down to which party he chooses to align with, he then becomes a powerful swing vote. He could make demands. And that could get interesting.

Then what? There would be three independents out of 100 in the Senate. Maybe Orman’s model could create a template that other independent candidates could follow. Maybe a rich businessman in a state like Arkansas might decide to run as an independent, too. Maybe if there were six or seven independents in the Senate, they could form a “coalition of the uncorrupted” who side with either party or neither depending on the issue, forcing both to behave.

Of course I’m heading toward wishful thinking territory here. Eventually, that coalition would be corrupted, too. Also, two-party domination is almost inevitable the way our system is designed. The most likely good scenario is a shakeup that makes the system work a little better for a while. That’s what happened after 1992, when Perot won 19 percent of the vote basing his campaign on balancing the budget, and then congressional Republicans and President Clinton sort of balanced the budget.

Maybe it starts this time in Kansas.

Here is one of Orman’s ads.