Candidates Shy Away from Important Issues

Nov 4, 2010. Did you vote for a candidate that was
* Afraid to address the real issues
* Distorted the facts or
* Used canned phases that have little meaning, i.e., “Government is broken,” “We need to take back our country,” “Big government has run amuck” and “Our leaders have led the nation adrift: we need change now” ?????

There was one day of rolling in the election tsunami for tea partiers and Republicans. Now it’s payback time to the corporations that so lavishly funded those winners. It’s time to own up to the deceptive advertising that hoodwinked the electorate by saying the budget could be balanced by reducing taxes. It’s time to finally put something out there that replaces Obama Care and the financial reform law rather than just trying to repeal them. It’s time to get a comprehensive energy bill under the new Chairman of the House Energy Committee, Rep Joe Barton (R-Texas) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Barton, and immigration reform under the leadership of the new Chairman of the House Immigration Committee, Rep Steve King (R- Iowa) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_King. Obama will most assuredly be able to work with these two, along with the rest of the Republican House of Representatives - right? Here’s a clip that shows just how closely the two sides might work together -
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/ns/msnbc_tv-rachel_maddow_show/#39998808

And for those of you out there fed a pack of lies by the folks you trusted in and voted for, here then are the hard core facts. Read it a weep.

The Shrinking Big Government. There have been no new federal programs started since 2009, nothing like the huge government expansion between 2000 and 2008 when non-military domestic expenditures set new records in growth. Welfare state spending increased 32%; public assistance increased 17%; housing assistance increased 12%; federal student loans increased 129%.; food and nutrition assistance increased 43%; social security increased 19%; and medical care increased 54% as result of the unfunded Medicare Prescription Drug Act of 2003. Currently there are no giant infrastructure projects under way and no huge new benefits for low-income workers or the poor. Spending on safety-net programs, mainly unemployment insurance and Medicaid, have risen because there has been a surge in the number of Americans without jobs and badly in need of help, and there have been substantial outlays to rescue troubled financial institutions - although it appears that the government will get most of its money back. The total number of government workers in America has been falling in the last two years with government payrolls falling by more than 350,000 since January 2009. The small increase in federal employment (mainly defense and security) was swamped by sharp declines at the state and local level. Obama Care has yet to kick in but when it does, we will still have a private health care system. Since 2009, we may have finally capped big government expansion. So how did the public become so convinced government was growing rather than shrinking? Does the disinformation coming from Fox News influence the entire American population?
http://www.aier.org/research/briefs/750-big-government-under-the-bush-administration

TARP and the Stimulus - Irresponsible Government or Savior? The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) that bailed out banks under President George W. Bush in Oct 2008 was originally expected to cost the U.S. Government $356 billion, but wound up costing only $30 billion, significantly less than the taxpayers' cost of the S&L crisis costing U.S. tax payers $125 billion under W’s father in the late 1980s. Originally under TARP it was once feared the government would be holding companies like GM, AIG and Citigroup for several years, but those companies bought back most of the Treasury's stake and emerge from TARP within a year. And for the Recovery Act of 2009 and 2010 (the Stimulus Bill) under President Barak Obama; well it wasn’t actually all that big compared with the size of the economy and was not mainly focused on increasing government spending. Of the roughly $600 billion cost of the Stimulus Bill more than 40% came from tax cuts, while another large chunk consisted of aid to state and local governments, with another chuck going to pay for unemployment insurance. Only the remainder involved direct federal spending. Luckily government spending did not surge, and in hind sight the Democratic Congress enacted a much smaller than needed stimulus package, but a stimulus that was better than none at all. Small as it was, the Obama stimulus and the Bush TARP actually save the U.S. from a similar 1929 crash. But because the size of the Federal Government was not increased (as FDR did during the Great Depression of ‘29) unemployment remained high. So why did people think these two programs were giveaways wilding increasing the federal debt when in fact the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq explain virtually the entire deficit for the foreseeable future? http://1bob7.blogspot.com/2008/12/stimulus-package.html http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3036

The Bipartisan Debt Commission. The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform was created in 2010 by President Barack Obama to come up with a plan to reduce our $13 trillion debt. Their solution - two thirds (2/3) will have to be covered with spending cuts and the other third (1/3) by increasing tax revenue. Democrats on the commission appear ready to accept a cap on discretionary spending -- similar to those that worked in the 1990s, a major across-the-board cut in all agencies. The discretionary budget (non-defense @ 24% and defense @ 16%) accounts for 40% of the federal budget with mandatory programs (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.) being the other 60%. Republican commissioners, in turn, seem to be warming to the idea of eliminating tax loopholes, including mortgage and charitable deductions as a trade off for lower income tax rates.
* Democrats will have to swallow spending cuts to their beloved "discretionary" programs, i.e., alternative energy sources, agriculture, training, science, housing, transportation, education, and urban development.
* Republicans will have to accept modest increase in tax revenues coupled with much larger spending cuts. Yet ultra conservative Republicans and blue dog Democrats are rejecting anything that might be labeled a tax increase, even eliminating tax giveaways and loopholes. Paradoxically, they are going to be the obstacle blocking the way toward a shrunken government and a reduced debt.
* Both sides will have to accept cuts in defense spending. This may be the hardest area to tackle, but it is the one most out of control. Some candidates are actually pushing for more military spending with no one on the side of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates who appears to be the lone ranger in trying to bring down military costs now in its 13th straight year of uninterrupted growth.

So why did candidates not talk about the findings and recommendations of the Bipartisan Debt Commission? Their hard work is virtually unknown to the electorate. Instead we heard candidates calling for tax reduction in order to deduce the debt. Why didn’t the electorate see through this shell game?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/01/AR2010100106221.html

Taxes.
* The Freeloaders. The number of Americans who pay no taxes continues to increase. We are close to the point at which half of the population will not pay taxes for government benefits they receive. The recent growth in the number of non federal income tax payers started during the 1990s followed by the Bush tax cuts in 2001 and 2003. First the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993 expanded the earned income tax credit. The second change was the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 which created a $500 per-child tax credit for families earning less than $110,000. In 1990, there were 23.8 million non-payers, but as a result of these legislative changes, 2000 arrived with 32.5 million non-payers. That was a percentage increase of 36. Entering the 2000s with one in four tax filers owing nothing, the non-payers pool was supercharged by the Bush tax cuts in 2001 and 2003—especially by the doubling of the child credit to $1,000. By 2004, when the credit expansion was fully phased in, the number of non-payers increased by 10.5 million, a 32-percent jump in the space of four years. In tax year 2008, the major tax change that created a record number of non- payers was the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008, which included a tax rebate of $300 per person, $600 per couple. A family of four was eligible for a rebate of $1,200. These tax rebates boosted the number of non-payers to nearly 52 million, 19 million more than the number of non-payers in 2000 when President Bill Clinton left office. This represents a 58.6 percent increase in the number of non-payers in less than a decade. Federal taxes in 2009/10 were down for 98% of the people and the Bush tax cuts saw to it that 47 percent of US tax payers paid nothing at all. http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Nearly-half-of-US-households-apf-1105567323.html?x=0
So why didn’t the candidates focused on these freeloaders but rather on breaks needed for the wealthy. This was a political missed opportunity for many candidates.
http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/25962.html
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2010/10/the-2010-index-of-dependence-on-government
* Tax Cuts and Debt Go Hand-in-hand. After imposition of the Bush Tax Cuts in 2001 and 2003, the national debt doubled in the succeeding Bush years. His was the worst eight-year economic record of any modern president. Worse still, by 2007 the U.S. reached levels of income inequality not since 1929. And despite claims by President W. Bush that these tax cuts "meant people had more money in their pocket," our incomes dropped ominously after those tax cuts. So why did Americans buy into voodoo economics and believe in candidates who promised debt reduction and economic good times if only all of the Bush tax cuts could be extended? After all, what happened (and continues to happen) to the debt since enactment of the Bush Tax Cuts is not all that far in the past. http://www.perrspectives.com/blog/archives/001985.htm
* Compared to the Rest of the Industrialized World, We’re actually Under-taxed.
The U.S. tax burden for all taxes a percentage of the GDP is 28.2%, and with the exception of Japan (which is one notch lower at 27%), the US is taxed less than the rest of the industrialized world, i.e., 49-50% - Denmark and Sweden; 43-47% - Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Italy, and Norway; 39-42% - Germany, Iceland, the Netherlands, and UK; 36-38% - Czech Republic, New Zealand, Portugal, and Spain; 33-35% - Barbados, Canada, Ireland, and Poland; and 30-31% - Australia and Switzerland. This is a real bargain considering our spending habits:
- Our defense spending accounts for 54% of the total National Budget. In comparison, the country that spends the second highest percent of their budget on defense is China at 6.3% (2009 budget).
- In no league with military spending but greatly more expensive than any other country is our cost to incarceration our citizens with more people in jail today (as a percentage of the population) than any other country. For example, incarceration rates in the United Kingdom are one fifth of those in the U.S, one ninth in Germany, and one twelfth in Japan. The cost of our prison system is $75 billion per year. Congress must bear responsibility for this cost after passing drug laws that have swelled prison populations by treating it as a crime rather than an addiction as most countries have done.

So why did some candidates scream that we are being taxed to death while keeping quiet on how to pay for our two unfunded wars, stationing of troops in friendly countries (70,000 in Germany for over six decades since World War II and 40,000 in South Korea for five decades since the Korean War); and a prison system loaded with drug offenders who could be in treatment programs rather than costing tax payers $20,000 a year per inmate?
http://geekpolitics.com/what-do-azerbaijan-djibouti-and-suriname-have-in-common
http://www.justicepolicy.org/content-hmID=1811&smID=1581&ssmID=104.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_revenue_as_percentage_of_GDP
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/snitch/primer

Defense. We account for just under half of the world’s total military spending (46.5%) with China in second place at a distant 6.6%. The US has quit literally taken up the mantle of world protector while letting its economy slips into more and more trouble. Our military deploys well over half a million soldiers, spies, technicians, teachers, dependents, and civilian contractors in a vast network of American bases on every continent except Antarctica. The 2010 Military Budget, at $965 billion is 36% of the total $2.65 trillion National Budget and, considering veterans’ benefits and interest on the national debt created by military spending, it’s 54% of the total National Budget – over half. It has risen 76% between FY 2002 and 2010, and we are now in our 13th straight year of uninterrupted growth in the defense budget, an unprecedented rise in spending that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has rightly termed a “gusher.” But the Pentagon has carefully scatters bases and defense dollars in every Congressional district, making it difficult for legislators to curtail spending on their home turf. For example, when Gates proposed that DoD save money by closing the Joint Forces Command, a bureaucracy overloaded with government pencil pushers and private contractors charging exurbanite rates for war plans usually put away on dusty shelves, well the suggestion drew howls of protest from Virginia’s entire Congressional delegation, people who for the most part want to reduce our debt. So didn’t some candidates step up to the plate in strong support of Secretary Gates?
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0115-08.htm
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2010/06/less_is_more.html
http://www.warresisters.org/pages/piechart.htm
http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Issues/Budget-Impact/2010/10/08/Neocons-Talk-Deficit-but-Wont-Budge-on-Defense-Cuts.aspx

Security. As part of the defense budget, the explosive expansion of the intelligence community since 9/11 has been a huge success for that little ole man sitting somewhere in a mountain cave. Bin Laden most assuredly has been gloating over his victory by causing America to go paranoid with billions of dollars spent on building up a gargantuan and cumbersome security community that is being sucked under by its own bureaucratic quagmire. The costs to taxpayers are enormous. A Washington Post's two-year investigative report identified 118 federal contracts worth $745.5 billion (77% of the entire defense budget) that had significant waste, fraud, abuse, or mismanagement. Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States, with 854,000 people holding top-secret security clearances. Having started with 13 employees in January 2002, the TSA now employs 60,000, and has a budget of $6 billion. As for its parent, the Department of Homeland Security, its 2010 budget came in at $55 billion. From the very beginning, security experts and even their own inspectors have been pointing to the absurdity of TSA's and DHS's spending patterns. Congress has fought back against the critics, repeatedly allocating money to unnecessary projects. So why didn’t some candidates stand up to this waste?
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/a-hidden-world-growing-beyond-control

Campaign Finance Reform. This midterm election campaigns have set new records in campaign contributions with no requirement to disclose donors based on a recent Supreme Court decision. Recipients will most assuredly be on the hook to pay back corporate donors with favorable legislation. Congress has talked about this for years doing little. So why didn’t candidates pledge to correct this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_finance_reform_in_the_United_States

Line Item Veto. Another cost saving issue that congress has talked about for years is the line item veto power given to the president, allowing the president to strike the “pork” from large appropriations bills. Yet congress keeps kicking the bucket down the road. So why didn’t candidates pledge to correct this?
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0510/37711.html

Government is Creating Debt without a Clue to a Cost / Benefits Analysis. Government provides services to the public, some of which are cost effective, but when the services become overly expensive for the same services that could be provided at a fraction of the cost, well where are the politicians to blow the whistle? Case in point is the Norfolk light rail expansion through Virginia Beach. By building a prohibitively expensive light rail system that cannot manage low fares and maintain an efficient service, local government shows its worst side by digging us deep into debt. Thirty municipalities (including Richmond) took a look at their light rail options and chose Bus Rapid Transit (BRT)(light rail on tires) which came in at least 1/5 the cost of light rail with money left over to provide customer friendly benefits such as more frequent intervals between buses than light rail. Virginia Beach has funded a $6.6 million Virginia Beach Transit Extension Study (VBTES) with an Alternatives Analysis (AA) for BRT. Most folks don’t know about the study as politicians feel hell bent to sweep the study’s eventual recommendations under the rug while pushing the virtues of light rail, and even prematurely purchasing land for light rail construction ahead of what the study may deem best. Fiscally conservative candidates favor light rail for a system that will cost $20 per ride with the rider paying $2 and the tax payer making up the difference. The same may be said for the seventeen mile extension of the D.C. metro system (the Silver Line) to Dulles Airport now estimated to cost $6.6 billion. And to think, a 2000 study proposed BRT instead of rail using the already in-place dedicated Dulles Access Road for $287,300,000 or less than 5% of the cost of the current rail system now under construction. So why are fiscally conservative politicians so strongly in favor of this waste?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/15/AR2010091504927.html http://1bob1.blogspot.com/2008/05/brt.html

Reducing Health Care Insurance.

After passage of the new Affordable Health Care Reform Act, the price of premiums kept rising. The basic problem with Obama Care is that it added new levels of regulations and forced insurance companies to cover people they would not have covered in the past. While getting more people into the insurance pool was a good thing, it did not change the basic problem. Consumers do not know the prices of the services that they receive and sometimes pass on to insurers unnecessary procedures. The best way to get costs to go down is to make people aware of the prices that they pay for medical care. Another way is though wellness visits which is promoted through Obama Care. http://www.healthcare.gov

Nevertheless, the American Health Care Insurance industry has practically removed competition with a few giants sewing up most of the business. A public plan would rekindle completion and bring down costs. And contrary to criticism that a public option would force private insurers out of business, public and private plans have different competitive advantages and each plan would drive down costs for all.
http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/10/what-happened-to-a-public-health-plan

Even minus a government option (which Obama Care doesn’t have), the current federal health care law provides incentives for State Insurance Commissioner to negotiate more aggressively with providers to hold down health-care prices, and in 2014 states will be empowers to reject “unreasonable” rate increase requests by health insurers. In North Carolina, for example, the State Insurance Commissioner has already used the Obama Care law to roll back premium increases by 23 percent.
http://politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/oct/28/barack-obama/obama-said-states-have-new-power-review-insurance-/
http://lincmad.blogspot.com/2010/10/full-transcript-of-obama-on-daily-show.html

We continue to look away from the rest of the world for a better health care model. The World Health Organization puts us at number 37. Would it not be prudent for our elected officials to look at some of these countries paying less and getting more? http://www.photius.com/rankings/healthranks.html

Repealing Obama Care will be extremely difficult and defeat of the bill in the courts is a long shot. Therefore, politicians can either waste time in the next two years trying to repeal the law or try to make what’s already out there more affordable and better. So why did we hear only hostile attacks on Obama Care and no positive suggestions for a better system? The Republican solution is to provide a tax credit that can be applied towards the purchase of health insurance while keeping many of the new benefits that Americans like, but the GOP stance clearly does not create a solution. Simply leaving more money in the pocket of those who could actually use the tax credit will not put anywhere near enough healthy people back into the insurance pool. While this makes for a good election pitch that most Americans can understand, the idea will do little to nothing to insulate the American health care system from collapse if it is not made mandatory, which Obama Care does in 2014.
http://hotair.com/archives/2010/03/22/can-obamacare-be-repealed
http://blogs.forbes.com/rickungar/2010/09/01/the-ugly-truth-behind-america%E2%80%99s-objection-to-health-care-reform

The Food We Eat is Killing Us. The giants of the food industry continue to be largely unregulated with the high amounts of fructose corn syrup (a major player in the obesity epidemic), salt (a major player in heart attacks), and antibiotics in our meats and pesticides covering our fruits and vegetables (other killers). Americans are obsessed with nutrition yet our dietary health is poor. We’re the world champs in terms of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and the cancers linked to diet. We put warnings on cigarette packs but the food at McDonalds is more hazardous to our health. We need to change our priorities. So were the candidates silent on this vital health issue?
http://pagingdrgupta.blogs.cnn.com/2010/06/15/report-reduce-salt-fat-in-u-s-dietary-guidelines
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34614380/ns/health-infectious_diseases
http://food.change.org/blog/view/chemicals_are_killing_us

Energy. We imports 64% of our crude oil (much of it coming from terrorist sponsored nations) pushing our deficit to new heights and contributing to the selling of our country to the Chinese. At one twentieth of the world’s population, the US is using 20 million barrels of oil a day, 25% of the world's produced oil. That’s 60 times more oil usage per U.S. citizen than non-U.S. citizen. This could all be turned around by passage of two pieces of legislation now lingering in Congress. Since we are literally swimming in recent natural gas discoveries we could use natural gas for all of our energy needs becoming 100% energy independent. On April 05, 2009 Dan Boren (D-OK) introduced H.R. 1835, “the New Alternative Transportation to Give Americans Solutions Act” (or “NAT GAS” Act), legislation that would provide incentives, mostly as tax credits, for gas-fueled vehicle production and overnight installation of natural gas filling stations. A year and a half later Congress still has not passed this legislation. Another fuel we produce right here in America is biofuel, non-eatable grasses and trees. To encourage biodiesel production, the federal government six years ago provided a biofuel tax incentive, but those incentives ran out at the end of 2009 because Congress failed to extent the credit, causing the fledgling U.S. biodiesel industry to suffer dearly. On Sep 16, 2010, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) attempted to add the renewal of the credit to a small business bill currently under consideration in the Senate, but his motion did not receive the necessary 67 votes. The chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Montana Democrat Max Baucus, called Grassley’s motion another GOP proposal stunts meant to score political points. Thus big oil continues to hold Congress addicted to offshore oil. Why didn’t candidates pick up on this win-win issue? Perhaps the amount of money big oil threw into campaign coffers gives just a small hint of an answer. http://1bob6.blogspot.com/2008/07/transportation-ignorant.html

Social Security and Medicare. As a result of the Obama Care Law, despite lower near-term revenues resulting from the economic recession, the Hospital Insurance Trust Fund for Social Security and Medicare is now expected to remain solvent until 2029, twelve years longer than was projected in 2009. So why didn’t supporters of Obama Care boast about how it saved Medicare for another twelve years? Simple - candidates ran away from any of the benefits of Obama Care because they perceived it to be a campaign loser.
http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/TRSUM/index.html