The Real Scandal

Posted on 07/04/2009 at 1:48 pm by admin

by Lee Stranahan

A short film about the real implications of the Washington Post ‘pay to play’ scandal, with a July 4th twist….

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  • kansasdem

    That was excellent!Damn, I wish we could afford to air that 24/7 on the tee-vee machine for about two weeks!

  • Stranahan

    TV time can be amazingly affordable – I really just need to get a handle on the fundraising list…Like access to a fundraising list…maybe I should start asking…

  • R & T

    Paul Krugman just said on July 2;”…we’re about 8 ½ million jobs in the hole.And the deeper the hole gets, the harder it will be to dig ourselves out. The job figures weren’t the only bad news in Thursday’s report, which also showed wages stalling and possibly on the verge of outright decline. That’s a recipe for a descent into Japanese-style deflation, which is very difficult to reverse. Lost decade, anyone?Wait — there’s more bad news: the fiscal crisis of the states. Unlike the federal government, states are required to run balanced budgets. And faced with a sharp drop in revenue, most states are preparing savage budget cuts, many of them at the expense of the most vulnerable. Aside from directly creating a great deal of misery, these cuts will depress the economy even further.”"Do you remember the administration’s plan to sharply reduce the rate of foreclosures, or its plan to get the banks lending again by taking toxic assets off their balance sheets? Neither do I.”"What I don’t know is whether the administration has faced up to the inadequacy of what it has done so far.”“So here’s my message to the president: You need to get both your economic team and your political people working on additional stimulus, now. Because if you don’t, you’ll soon be facing your own personal 1937.”The CBO said that “Under current law, the federal budget is on an unsustainable path”The bottom line is that there is not going to be any money to do a proper health care plan. The almost trillion dollars for the stimulus plan could have been the money for health care, but the administration had other priorities. All the money for bailouts; where did all that go?To me the real scandal is that we had the money, but spent it elsewhere.

  • http://broadwaycarl.blogspot.com Broadway Carl™

    Happy 4th R&T. Since we’re quoting, here are some numbers.Joe Conason:

    …America’s current health care system wastes considerably more than a trillion dollars every year. We know that because countries such as France, Germany, Japan and Finland, with standards of living comparable to ours, spend roughly half what the United States spends annually on health care per citizen, while they cover everyone and achieve better results. So if the total cost of American health care over the coming decade reaches $40 trillion, as economists expect, then we will be “wasting” approximately $20 trillion, or $2 trillion a year.

    Compared with figures such as those, the CBO scoring estimate of $1.6 trillion over 10 years to reform the U.S. health care system is so small as to be almost negligible. Constantly hearing numbers that sound so large makes perspective even more important. When Princeton health economist Uwe Reinhardt actually did the simple calculations, he found that the price of reform amounted to only 4 percent of the country’s cumulative health care budget between next year and 2020. He noted that this amount is much less than the annual increase in health care spending over the past 10 years. And he also pointed out that on the broader economic horizon, $1.6 trillion represents only about 1 percent of the $170 trillion in gross domestic product that Americans will produce over the same period.

    Investing a trillion dollars or so in modernizing and improving our health care system is a good bargain – especially when contrasted with the maddening way that we have thrown away tax dollars over the past several years…

    …a trillion dollars is a significant amount of money, even on a scale as large as the American economy. Had we avoided the stupid waste of $2 trillion or $3 trillion on the war, we could have paid for a long list of social goods that would have improved the lives of the American people, enhanced their productivity and secured their future. To name only a few of many better choices, we could have moved rapidly toward alternative energy sources and reduced our dependence on foreign sources of oil for about $500 billion, achieved universal literacy in the United States for about $5 billion, rebuilt the Gulf Coast damaged by Hurricane Katrina for about $200 billion, ended hunger and all the diseases caused by poverty for another $200 billion – and still have a substantial sum remaining to build new schools, roads, bridges, railways and other badly needed infrastructure.

    The senators who now claim that we cannot afford to spend a trillion dollars to make long overdue changes in health care know exactly what that amount can buy. They know because they have spent it, year after year, on military misadventures and subsidies to big banks and corporations, without stinting or whining. Why can we always afford those trillion-dollar boondoggles, but never decent health care for all Americans?

    You’re right, we did have the money. But I would argue it was spent on a $1.3 trillion tax cut in 2001. We’ve never recovered from that. That combined with a money pit of a war put us in a horrible hole even before all the bailout business began last year.

  • kansasdem

    “TV time can be amazingly affordable – I really just need to get a handle on the fundraising list…Like access to a fundraising list…maybe I should start asking…”I’d have no idea. I’d hoped this was a go:http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/968679247/conversative-nanny-state-movieI'm in for $10.00.But almost all of your video productions are excellent!I really think you can connect in that “real live person” kind of way!

  • http://arkytek.blogspot.com/ SillyGit

    Thank you for your diligent work Lee. This is the most important issue we have right now. You and Bob’s work on this is greatly appreciated.

  • R & T

    Broadway Carl-We are not in disagreement, except on one point. You said that we never recovered by a 1.3 trillion dollar tax cut in 2001.I disagree on that point. Here are the GDP figures.2009 -2.50 -2.502008 2.50 2.10 0.70 -0.80 1.132007 1.30 1.80 2.80 2.30 2.052006 3.10 3.20 2.40 2.40 2.782005 3.20 2.90 3.00 2.70 2.952004 4.10 4.10 3.20 3.10 3.632003 1.50 1.80 3.10 3.70 2.532002 1.00 1.30 2.20 1.90 1.602001 1.90 0.60 0.40 0.20 0.78You can see that GDP went from .78 to 1.68 in 2002, then to 2.53 in 2003 and then to 3.63 in 2004, stayed at 2.95 in 2005, and in 2006 was still at 2.75 and even in 2007 was still at 2.05, all up from .78 in 2001, the year of the tax decrease.What about IRS total tax colletions during that period? Still strong.2001 2,128,831,1822002 2,016,627,2692003 1,952,929,0452004 2,018,502,1032005 2,268,895,1222006 2,518,680,2302007 2,691,537,557By the way, you want to talk about tax cuts and their effect on the economy and tax revenues? Look at the figures on the total tax take to the IRS under President Reagan under his tax cuts.1981 606,799,1031982 632,240,5061983 627,246,7931984 680,475,2291985 742,871,5411986 782,251,8121987 886,290,5901988 935,106,5941989 1,013,322,133We need a business solution to the economic situation, not a political one. Tax cuts help families, help business, help grow GDP and help grow tax revenues. You can see from the figures above from the IRS that this is true. Healthy tax revenues allow for social programs to be funded and paid for.http://www.irs.gov/taxstats/article/0,,id=172265,00.html