Tag Archives: medicare

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There’s nothing courageous about it


For days, I’ve been reading in the press about the “courage” of a Republican budget proposal that abolishes Medicare to pay for more tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires and slashes investments in energy, education, and infrastructure.

On Wednesday, I heard President Obama say exactly what I’ve been thinking: There’s nothing courageous about it.

The Republicans are pledging to cut investments to clean energy by 70 percent, education by 25 percent, and transportation by 30 percent. Their plan would see as many as 50 million people lose their health insurance in order to reduce the deficit. Instead of creating jobs, they want to create $1 trillion in new tax breaks for the wealthy.

That’s not a brave vision for the future. It’s a rejection of the idea that there are brighter days ahead.

Today, the House of Representatives will meet to vote on the GOP budget proposal, and if they insist on pushing this plan forward — if they can’t come together with the President to find common ground — we’ll make sure their constituents know about it. If they choose to try to privatize Medicare, we will put ads on the air and organizers on the ground, and we’ll talk about this vote over and over again. We’ll make this stick.

But we need your help to do it.

www.democrats.com

This week, President Obama offered a path forward that I believe in: $4 trillion in deficit reduction; responsible investments to improve our schools, fix crumbling roads, and develop clean energy; and a total rejection of the notion that spending cuts must come on the backs of seniors and poor children.

He laid out a vision where we all make sacrifices, but none of us is left to bear the burden alone. And he offered a forceful, unapologetic response to those who don’t believe in the responsibility we all share to move our country forward together.

This isn’t just about this week’s vote or the latest shiny object to capture the attention of Washington for a news cycle or two. This is about the very future of this country and the direction we take.

We know that because the Republican plan hasn’t just been adopted by a few ideologues in Congress — it’s been embraced by the candidates who want to take President Obama’s job.

If we want to win this fight about the direction our country takes, then we must start now — as Congress considers the GOP proposal.

Can you chip in?

http://my.democrats.org/Medicare

Thanks,

Patrick

Patrick Gaspard

Executive Director

Democratic National Committee

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Budget:A Better Path To Prosperity


As the nation edges closer to hitting the debt ceiling, President Obama delivered at George Washington University yesterday a new plan to reduce the deficit by $4.4 trillion over the next 12 years — a rebuttal to the GOP’s “Path to Prosperity” plan sponsored by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI). Matching targeted spending cuts with less drastic entitlement reform and a more realistic tax policy, Obama’s plan, as Center for American Progress notes, “puts us on a much more sustainable path, and most importantly, would do so without putting further burdens on seniors and an already-struggling middle class.” While a big step away from his 2012 budget, Obama’s plan stands in stark contrast to Ryan’s “draconian” vision that gouges out the budget at their expense. Trading cuts and reforms that overly burden vulnerable populations for tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, Ryan’s budget earned rebuke even from conservative economists. Former President Ronald Reagan’s budget director called it “a measure of how far off the deep end Republicans have gone.” Obama did not mince words when drawing the contrast between the GOP vision and his “compassionate” alternative. In response, House Republicans elected to decry what they saw as the president’s political, unfriendly treatment rather than offer the merits of their policy. Hearkening back to the 1995 government shutdown, Republicans are now hinting that Obama’s strong words might be enough to derail budget negotiations — no matter how valid the proposal.

OBAMA’S VISION: Rather than relying exclusively on deep spending cuts, President Obama’s deficit plan offers a framework to more responsibly reduce the deficit over the next 12 years through a multi-pronged approach. To achieve the $4 trillion in deficit reductions, Obama called for $2 trillion in spending cuts while maintaining “investments” in “schools, highways, bridges and research” that help maintain global competitiveness. However, aware of the ballooning defense budget, Obama also called to cut $400 billion from national security over 10 years — a move the GOP has specifically avoided. On entitlement programs, Obama asked both parties to “work together now to strengthen Social Security” and proposed saving $340 billion on Medicare and Medicaid by 2021 through increasing efficiency. “We will reduce wasteful subsidies and erroneous payments” and “cut spending on prescription drugs by using Medicare’s purchasing power to drive greater efficiency,” he said. In stark contrast to Ryan’s Medicare voucher plan, Obama’s Medicare plan builds on the cost containment reforms in the health care reform law by expanding IPAB, a 15-person commission tasked with advising Congress on how to reduce excess growth in Medicare if costs exceed GDP per capita plus one percent but will do so without rationing care or raising premiums or cost sharing. Obama’s clearest policy declaration, however, centered on his rebuke of the Bush-era tax cuts. “We cannot afford one trillion dollars in tax cuts for every millionaire and billionaire in our society. We can’t afford it. And I refuse to renew then again,” he said. Opting to move towards his fiscal commission’s policies, Obama plans to allow those tax cuts to expire at the end of 2012 and would raise an additional $1 trillion by overhauling the tax code to lower rates and eliminate tax breaks. And should all these deficit reduction efforts miss their targets, Obama called for a fail-safe “trigger mechanism ” that would force “across-the-board spending reductions if the ratio of debt-to-GDP is not stabilized by 2014 and projected to decline for the rest of the decade.” While Obama’s plan does propose significant cuts and misses opportunities to add additional revenues and find secure additional savings in the Pentagon budget, it provides a more “balanced” deficit plan than offered by the GOP. In response, U.S. bonds and the dollar rose based on hopes that Obama’s plan would “shore up the United States’ credit-worthiness and the dollar’s reserve status.” Oil recovered by 1.5 percent.

RYAN’S ‘PESSIMISTIC’ PLAN: A driving factor behind Obama’s plan was to provide a “compassionate” alternative to slash-and-burn Republican proposal offered last week. “This debate over budgets and deficits is about more than just numbers on a page,” Obama said. “It’s about the kind of future we want.” Dubbing Ryan’s plan as a “pessimistic” vision that “is less about reducing the deficit than it is about changing the basic social compact in America,” Obama blasted Republicans for implementing cuts that allow our infrastructure to “crumble” and “collapse” and, by slashing billions from Pell Grants, for telling “bright young Americans” that “we can’t afford” to support their education. He then lambasted Ryan’s Medicare voucher program for “end[ing] Medicare as we know it.” “Instead of guaranteed health care, you will get a voucher. And if that voucher isn’t worth enough to buy insurance, tough luck — you’re on your own,” he said. Indeed, according to the non-partisan CBO, seniors will end up paying significantly more for their health benefits if House Republicans have their way. He viewed the GOP’s plan to rob Medicaid of $771 billion over the next decade by turning it into a block grant program as a vision that tells 50 million Americans, including “poor children,” “middle-class families” with disabled children, and low-income seniors “to fend for themselves.” But “worst of all,” he said, was the Republican vision increase the burden on the vulnerable just so a corporate tax rate can be ten points lower and so we can “afford more than $1 trillion in new tax breaks for the wealthy.” Criticizing the tax break he’d receive while asking seniors to pay “$6,400” more in health costs, Obama said “that’s not right, and it’s not going to happen as long as I’m President.”

POLITICS OF WHINING: Invited to the address, House Republicans bristled under Obama’s rebuke and quickly rejected his plan as a “political broadside from the campaigner-in-chief.” Almost completely ignoring his policies, House Republicans took their turn at the podium to lambast the president for engaging in “partisan rhetoric .” House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) insisted that Obama’s plan was “light on the specifics” but “didn’t lack shameless political attacks and scare tactics.” Ryan claimed Obama’s “demagoguery” was “exploiting people’s emotions of fear, envy, and anxiety.” Indeed, Ryan gave a detailed account of his hurt feelings, tracing them from “excited” to “naively optimistic” to “disappointed” then to “sad,” and hinted that Obama’s rebuke “sure doesn’t help” Republicans forge a budget consensus. Now “sincerely disappointed” at Obama’s “partisan broadsides against us,” Ryan is also suggesting that his hurt feelings will make it “that much harder for the two parties to come together with mutual respect of one another to get things done.” House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), however, did offer House Republicans’ sole policy response: “We, as a conference, won’t raise taxes” on the wealthy.

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The view from outside Washington


The President’s speech today began a new conversation in Washington about how to reduce the deficit while protecting crucial investments in our country’s future.

But as we seek to build an organization based outside of Washington, President Obama’s speech also provides an unusually stark contrast — one all of us can use to start conversations with our friends and neighbors about what’s at stake in this election.

He spoke about things you don’t generally hear in Washington conversations too often dominated by special interests: He’ll cut waste and excess at the Pentagon — particularly spending that is requested not by our military, but by politicians and corporate interests.

He’ll eliminate tax cuts for Americans in the highest tax brackets who don’t need them, including himself — and he will reform the individual tax code so that it’s fair and simple and so that the amount of taxes you pay isn’t determined by what kind of accountant you can afford.

Some cuts he proposed are tough. But they’re also smart and surgical — helping us balance our books while still doing the right things to win the future. President Obama’s plan would protect the middle class, invest in our kids’ education, and make sure we don’t protect the wealthiest Americans from the costs of reform at the expense of the most vulnerable.

The other side has presented a very clear alternative: End Medicare as we know it, privatizing the program that millions of seniors rely on for health care. Make deep cuts to education. Slash investments in clean energy and infrastructure. All to pay for tax cuts for people making over $250,000 a year, and all while actually raising our national debt.

In short, their plan will please a special interest donor base and those who put ideology before results rather than reduce deficits over the long term. And let’s be clear: They think they can get away with it because, fundamentally, they don’t think you’ll do anything about it.

That’s where I know we can prove them wrong. Because we can respond right now by building an organization that will stop them — not just in this deficit battle, but in the next election so they never have the chance to enact these proposals.

Here’s the first step. Join our fight for a deficit reduction plan that will actually reduce the deficit — with a goal of shared prosperity through shared responsibility. Add your name to support President Obama’s plan — and then help bring more people into the conversation:

www.barackobama.com

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The Progressive Path To Deficit Reduction

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Today, President Obama will deliver a wide-ranging speech laying out a strategy to deal with the U.S. budget deficit. Although the exact policies that he will endorse are unknown, he is expected to lay out a vision that will alter the country’s entitlement programs and call for high-income earners to pay more taxes. In addressing the U.S. debt, Obama is entering an increasingly heated debate about how to address our long-term deficits in a way that does not shoulder Main Street Americans with undue burdens or hinder job growth. On one side, conservatives are proposing cruel plans that would sacrifice the services and investments in America’s great middle class while asking nothing more from the wealthiest among us. On the other side, a growing number of progressives are demanding fair sacrifice that protects our crucial needs while demanding fair sacrific e from those who are richer than ever. The path that we choose will determine the very kind of country we will have in the future: one where only the wealthiest among us have opportunities or one that enshrines the American Dream — the idea that anyone, no matter what their background, can work hard and succeed.

EXPLAINING THE DEBT: To understand the most responsible way to tackle our long-term deficit problem, it’s important to first understand exactly what the challenge of the debt is and what caused it. Interest rates and inflation are currently low, and addressing unemployment is a far more pressing immediate problem. A March 2010 CBS News poll found that 51 percent of Americans said that jobs/economy is the most important problem facing the country, and only seven percent said the deficit was. Still, we should address the $14.2 trillion debt and the $1.3 trillion budget deficit over time, as doing so is crucial to our long-term economic health. In the short-term, there are a handful of major factors driving our debt. This includes the cost of two wars, a runaway defense budget, the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, taxes on the richest Americans being the lowest in a generation, and a recession caused by the lack of regulation of Wall Street. The greatest long-term driver of our debt is health care costs, with our “possibly most inefficient” system in the world having us spend more than any other country in the world on health care with worse results. Thus, long-term deficit reduction plans that do not seriously deal with these causes of the current debt are avoiding the key issue.

EMACIATING MAIN STREET, ENRICHING THE RICH: Conservatives in Congress and the right-wing intelligentsia have unleashed a flurry of deficit reduction plans in recent months, which both continue to enrich the wealthy with massive tax cuts and which take aim at programs and investments for Main Street — solutions that were tried under the previous president and failed. In House Republicans’ much-touted budget resolution, H.R. 1, some of which made it into the recent budget deal to keep the government open, they dramatically cut Pell Grants, Head Start, foreign aid to children suffering from malaria, and other programs that benefit ordinary p eople, but are in no way the cause of our modern deficits. House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) upped the ante when he released his FY2012 budget, which continues to call for massive and crippling cuts to the Pell Grant program, slash the Food Stamp program by $127 billion over ten years, effectively privatize Medicare, and likely increase taxes on the middle cl ass while dramatically cutting them for the rich and corporations, actually making taxes on the rich lower than at any other time since Herbert Hoover’s presidency. At the end of the day, Ryan’s budget would leave the safety net in tatters, investments in Main Street severely under-funded, and would have seniors paying the majority of their income for health care, destroying the promise of Medicare — a system that Americans actually want expanded, not crippled. And while these conservatives are quick to ask Main Street to pay for debt that it did not primarily cause, they have no problem exempting some of the nation’s biggest dirty energy corporations from fair sacrifice. Last month, House Republicans effectively said “so be it,” as they voted in lockstep to protect billions of dollars in corporate welfare for Big Oil.

THE PROGRESSIVE PATH: While conservatives seem intent on blaming the poor, the sick, the elderly, and the middle class for deficits that they did not primarily cause, progressives are promoting plans that tackle the deficit by promoting fair sacrifice and responsibility. The CAP report “The First Step: A Progressive Plan for Meaningful Deficit Reduction” lays out a number of progressive deficit reduction steps that rely equally on raising revenues and cutting spending. It calls for implementing a graduated surtax on adjusted gross income for households making more than $1,000,000 a year, imposing a $5 per barrel fee on imported oil, and other measures that, when combined with spending cuts like wasteful tax expenditures, subsidies for Big Oil, a downsized defense budget more appropriate to our needs, and other measures, would yield single-year deficit reduction of $255 billion. This plan would stabilize the debt situation by 2015. This plan would stabilize the budget situation by 2015. Meanwhile, the Congressional Progressive Cauc us (CPC) has put out its own budget proposal, called “The People’s Budget,” which if enacted would reach primary balance in 2014 and result in a budget surplus by 2021. The major proposals within the budget include, but are not limited to, enacting a millionaire’s tax, initiating a progressive estate tax, ending corporate welfare for the dirty fuels industry, reining in the defense budget, and enacting a public option in the health care system as well as authorizing Medicare to negotiate with drug companies for lower drug prices. Economist and Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University Jeffrey Sachs notes that the CPC budget is a “truly centrist initiative,” if judged by American public opinion. Progressive economist Dean Baker has proposed allowing Medicare beneficiaries to seek care overseas, taking advantage of cheaper health care systems. Baker estimates that if fifty percent of Medicare beneficiaries opted for this globalized option, then taxpayers would save more than $40 billion a year by 2020. Additionally, there are numerous proposals for a financial transactions tax — which would ask that some of the very same banks that caused the global financial crisis would be responsible for helping us pay for it. A Dean Baker analysis of these plans finds that a “0.25 percent tax on trades of stocks, bonds, derivatives, and other Wall Street financial instruments…would easily raise between $50 billion and $150 billion annually,” while doing little to actually harm economic productivity. While there is healthy debate among progressives about these ideas, they make one thing clear: there is a way to reduce long-term de ficits that does not have to unduly harm Main Street America and that asks for fair sacrifice that includes the richest among us.

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We need a budget that works for all of us …


You may have seen in the news recently how GE¹—like many other multinational corporations—is getting away with paying zero taxes, even though it raked in $26 billion in record profits.

Unbelievable, right? Well it’s only going to get worse—if we don’t stop it.

http://afl.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=yHzrr33xgU1Ywr6ssSyVENJtMUMH5SJ%2B&url=http%3A%2F%2Faction.afscme.org%2Fc%2F51%2Fp%2Fdia%2Faction%2Fpublic%2F%3Faction_KEY%3D1882%26amp%3Btag%3DAdvE_201104_BackToFuture_blast-32792%26amp%3Btrack%3DAdvE_201104_BackToFuture_blast-32792%26amp%3Butm_source%3Dblast-32792%26amp%3Butm_medium%3Demail%26amp%3Butm_campaign%3D BackToFuture

This week, House leadership released a budget that is an extreme version of old policies to hand more tax breaks to millionaires and corporations—while putting all the sacrifice on the backs of working people. This back to the future budget would radically undermine the economic security of America’s middle class.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, “House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s fiscal year 2012 budget resolution would undermine the modern social safety net, reversing the gains America has made in health and economic opportunity. This resolution would deny millions of middle-and low-income households access to the American Dream.”

Please click here to tell your representative NO to going back to the future. It’s time to move forward with a budget that works for everyone.

http://afl.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=yHzrr33xgU1Ywr6ssSyVENJtMUMH5SJ%2B&url=http%3A%2F%2Faction.afscme.org%2Fc%2F51%2Fp%2Fdia%2Faction%2Fpublic%2F%3Faction_KEY%3D1882%26amp%3Btag%3DAdvE_201104_BackToFuture_blast-32792%26amp%3Btrack%3DAdvE_201104_BackToFuture_blast-32792%26amp%3Butm_source%3Dblast-32792%26amp%3Butm_medium%3Demail%26amp%3Butm_campaign%3D BackToFuture

Many vital public services and programs are targeted for near destruction by Ryan:

The budget would end the guaranteed benefits of Medicare that seniors and the disabled depend on. Medicare would be replaced with a voucher that would be paid to insurance companies. The plan is designed to shift more costs onto seniors while giving insurance companies more control.

The budget would slash support for seniors and the disabled in nursing homes by cutting Medicaid by nearly $800 billion over ten years.

This budget even lays out a plan for making future cuts to Social Security.

These leaders in Congress are so committed to protecting tax breaks for their corporate donors, that they are about to shut down the federal government rather than compromise. Instead, they are demanding a budget that would destroy public services, jobs, K-12 schools, public safety and more.

Enough. Please take a moment to send a message to your member of Congress now. Click here. http://afl.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=zFp8q5VhdL9DKRZe1iPYHtJtMUMH5SJ%2B&url=http%3A%2F%2Faction.afscme.org%2Fc%2F51%2Fp%2Fdia%2Faction%2Fpublic%2F%3Faction_KEY%3D1882%26amp%3Btag%3DAdvE_201104_BackToFuture_blast-32792%26amp%3Btrack%3DAdvE_201104_BackToFuture_blast-32792%26amp%3Butm_source%3Dblast-32792%26amp%3Butm_medium%3Demail%26amp%3Butm_campaign%3D BackToFuture

Thanks for all you do, 

Chuck Loveless

Legislative Director

AFSCME