The Real Targets: Social Security and Medicare

Flyoverland is the first to admit that it is not a tax expert, but the contention here is that you don’t have to be a tax expert to understand a few basic facts about the tax plan soon to be approved in the congress.

1. Remember just a few short months ago when the undertaking was characterized as a massive overhaul that would greatly simplify the taxpaying process? Well, tax preparers and accountants need no longer hold their breath on this if they ever did. There will be plenty for them to do next April – about as much as there was last April and all the Aprils before. People won’t be filing their returns on a post card.

2. The idea that the tax cuts will “pay for themselves” – i.e. that the economic growth they spawn will generate enough new revenue to offset the revenue losses they create – is, as George H. W. Bush so aptly put it, voodoo economics. No one really believes it, including – in this opinion – the authors of this legislation. What’s really in play here is a ballooning deficit, which Republicans will point to with alarm (even though it’s their creation) and then call for massive spending cuts, with Social Security and Medicare squarely in their crosshairs. Attacking and neutralizing so-called entitlement programs is the GOP Holy Grail and it’s what this entire tax undertaking is really all about.

3. The idea that corporate tax cuts are a growth engine because they’ll encourage companies to expand and hire is nonsense, as any CEO will tell you. Companies expand their facilities and hire more workers when increased demand tells them they need to make more of whatever it is they make. If they perceive that demand, they will do what needs to be done regardless of their tax situation. If they don’t perceive it, they will not expand and hire – again, regardless of the taxes they pay. In either case but especially the latter, any tax savings will go directly into the bank accounts of the shareholders.

4. Donald Trump’s assertion that the tax “reform” bill will hurt him financially is simply a lie.

The Flipping Begins

One of the things we know about Trump’s more ardent supporters, and even a fair number of folks who dislike him or are indifferent to him, is that they see the Russia investigation as either a plot on the part of vindictive, sore-loser Democrats, a media concoction, or as largely incomprehensible background noise without any real significance. They haven’t paid much attention to it, they don’t understand it, and, so, they don’t really believe it. Maybe Russians got into the 2016 election, and maybe not. In any case, what’s the big deal?

So let’s set the record straight on that with the following three easy-to-understand points.

One -- They did it.
That the Russians did interfere with the election, and in a fairly big way, is not in dispute. That ship has sailed. It is attested to by the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security, and a dozen or so other government agencies whose job is to protect the country from just such activities. It is accepted as settled fact by the House and Senate Intelligence committees, by most members of the House and Senate, by the military, and by the Trump-appointed Secretaries of State and Defense. And by Facebook, which we now know ran Russian created and paid for advertising designed to influence the election results. So, Trump supporters, let’s understand: A hostile foreign government carried out a cyber attack on your country, by messing with the single most important component of our democracy – elections. They did that, and you should be appalled and angry, and you should be demanding to know what your government is doing about it.

Two -- Americans helped them do it.
While that was happening -- during the campaign and transition -- at least 12 Trump associates had contacts with Russians. There were at least 19 face-to-face interactions with Russians or Kremlin-linked figures. There were at least 51 communications -- meetings, phone calls, email exchanges, etc. And these Trump associates lied about all of this, issuing blanket denials of any contacts with Russia. On at least nine occasions, Trump and his senior officials denied that there had been any contacts whatsoever with Russians during the campaign or that there were any ties between the campaign and Russians. That these people have something to hide in this matter, which involves multiple interactions with Russians, many with close ties to the Kremlin, is simply beyond dispute.

Three -- Donald Trump is involved

Donald Trump stopped the FBI’s investigation of Russian election interference in its tracks, or tried to, by firing the head investigator, James Comey. Amid all the nonsense cooked up by the Trump team regarding the reason for the firing, Trump admitted in front of millions on national TV that he fired Comey because he wanted the Russia investigation stopped. Instead of expressing righteous anger at the invasion of our sovereignty and launching a no-holds-barred effort, with the full backing of the executive branch, to get to the bottom of it, he did his best to stop to the investigation of it. He did not want the investigation to go forward because he knew this: it would reveal something he did not want people to know. There is no other explanation. The betting here is that it has something to do with ties to Russian oligarchs and/or the Russian Mafia (which in turn have ties to Vladimir Putin), and/or indebtedness to Russian interests.

So…

The Russians invaded our country, they were given aid and comfort by American citizens in that invasion, and the president is determined to keep everyone from knowing anything about it. Easy to understand. Very important. The media didn't do it, the Dems didn't do it. (Note: Defenders of the regime keep saying there is no evidence of collusion with the Russians on the part of Trump people. On the contrary, there is a mountain of evidence. What there isn’t is proof.)

Yet.

There will be. Trumpers are whistling past the graveyard if they think the dots aren’t going to be connected and the whole truth found out (as Gen. Flynn and others tell all to save their own skins.) The guess here as to what we will learn: Various Russian interests, including Putin, are being hit hard by economic sanctions and want them lifted; and they saw in Trump and his people a group that could be talked into, or coerced into, or blackmailed into lifting them. So they went to work to get him elected. The Trump folks were more than happy to accept and facilitate their help.

And now, the Russians want to be paid.

Medicare for All?

(Note: This is a Flyover article from April of this year. It is re-posted here concurrent with Bernie Sanders' recent introduction of Medicare-For-All legislation.)

Chipping In

From an article in the New York Times magazine, we learn of a woman – uninsured, due to a complicated set of circumstances – who suffered a subarachnoid hemorrhage (brain bleed) and spent time in the hospital, and later starting getting bills: $16,000 from the hospital, $50,000 for the air ambulance, $24,000 from a physicians’ group, $54,000 from the same group for additional charges and late fees, and then, another from the hospital for $356,884.42.

The article, which is about “the arcane, sprawling classification system that doctors and hospitals have learned to game” as one big reason for the high cost of health care, is definitely recommended reading. But even if we did nothing about this system or about the other major contributors to the problem – drug prices, too much  testing, high price tags on basic procedures – even if the woman’s bills for hundreds of thousands of dollars were totally legitimate – there is something we could do: Chip in and help her pay the bills. If we did that, it would cost each of us a couple of bucks and save her a fortune – indeed, save her from total financial ruin. And if we chipped in to buy her insurance against those medical bills, as opposed to paying the bills themselves, it would cost not bucks but pennies.

This is something we already do with national defense, roads and bridges, schools, police protection, parks and libraries, sewers and sanitation, water treatment, air traffic control, and on and on -- things too numerous to mention. We chip in. We pay for them collectively. We pool our money to buy things we want and need but which it makes no sense to buy as individuals.

It’s called taxation. 

(Also included in that list, by the way, is keeping old people out of penury by giving them money -- Social Security -- and by helping them pay for health care -- Medicare. The idea that people “pay into” these systems and are therefore merely retrieving the money they contributed and to which they are therefore entitled when they get old is a myth. In fact, people pay taxes to the federal treasury – it doesn’t matter what names those taxes are given – and part of that money is then paid out, from the federal budget, for social security and Medicare benefits, in exactly the same way that money comes out of the budget to pay for an aircraft carrier.)

But, I digress. The point here is this: People may kvetch about paying taxes and about government spending – something everyone is against in the abstract -- but they want the things that tax dollars buy. It’s that simple. The idea that one group of people is more “fiscally conservative” than another is fiction. The argument is never whether tax dollars are going to be collected and spent. The argument is always about how -- which of the things those dollars buy is more important to me as opposed to the ones that are more important to you. 

The obvious question: What’s more important than health care? Needless to say, it is essential to our well-being. But more than that, its high cost is a terrible problem, and the two previous administrations were right in giving it high priority. It puts millions of Americans on the brink of financial catastrophe and/or deprives them of medical care altogether, it exercises undue influence over where and how we live and work and what we do for a living, and it sucks billions of dollars to itself at the expense of all other sectors of the economy. Given the demonstrated inability of the health industry or any outside actors to stabilize costs let alone bring them back to earth, the contention here is that including health insurance on the list of things we spend tax dollars on is therefore a not unreasonable idea. Why not “chip in” for health care?

Would that mean a tax increase? Sure, assuming we can’t find offsetting savings in other areas. (The betting here is we can’t, as those “other areas” tend to have powerful constituencies). But it’s important to understand this: We are already paying that “tax.” We may not call it a tax, but whether it’s in the form of health insurance we buy on our own or higher prices charged by employers that buy it for us, it’s money leaving our wallets. Just like the money we pay to the tax collector, it’s money we have no choice but to part with. Either way, we’re gonna pay. But there is considerable likelihood that we would pay less because of the preventive care that such a system would pick up the tab for and because of the elimination of insurance company overhead and hospital billing costs. So from a financial outlay standpoint, it appears it would be, at worst, a wash.

As for reducing medical costs within the existing system to any meaningful extent as a way to get this problem under control, it appears that for the time being at least, we will have to play it as it lays, so to speak – get people insured against costs as they now stand, and then take up the challenge of reducing costs. And a challenge it is, because the business of health care, for a variety of seemingly intractable reasons, has shown itself to be unresponsive to the normal pressures of a free market. Under the current system, in which there is zero price competition, costs are not going to go down and therefore the price of insurance isn’t going to go down, either. (Free market enthusiasts cite the example of Lasik surgery, the cost of which, due to competition, has come down considerably over the years. But Lasik is elective and people can shop around at their leisure for the low-cost provider. With things like cancer care, cardiac surgery, and organ transplants – well, not so much.) 

What’s being suggested here is not socialized medicine or a government takeover of health care, an accusation that critics draw like a gun whenever this subject comes up. The government would own no facilities or employ any medical personnel. It would simply pick up the tab for insurance – as it already does, efficiently and effectively, with Medicare. For people who object to Medicare on principle, the question is this: Would you like to be paying the medical bills of your elderly parents and having them live in your basement because they can’t afford their own housing? Medicare is a system that the overwhelming majority of Americans believe in and view with gratitude and relief. Thank God for Medicare, is what just about everyone says as they approach old age.

We all chip in for insurance for seniors. Why not chip in for insurance for everyone?

(Note: For an in-depth discussion of why the American health care system is unresponsive to normal free market forces, Flyover can recommend the book “An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take it Back” by Elisabeth Rosenthal. Here is a review in the New York Times Book Review.)

If a Tree Falls in the Forest...

A decade or so ago, local television news gave extensive coverage to what they described as a Klan event – a rally, a demonstration, a parade, whatever -- being planned for an Illinois suburb of St. Louis. Local media knew it was in the offing, of course, because a participant told them it was. And they, in effect, did his bidding, by dutifully reporting on the plan and thereby drawing attention to and unavoidably magnifying into something of significant import what would have been a universally ignored non-event involving a tiny squadron of mouth-breathers. Just what the doctor ordered, as far as the KKK boys were concerned.

If memory serves, the thing turned out to be a circular walk on a suburban street by half a dozen comically costumed, sign-waving morons, witnessed by a sparse gathering of mildly curious – but neither pro nor con – onlookers who weren’t exactly sure what was going on. Only they and the television cameras witnessed this little confederacy of dunces doing their posturing and chanting.

If a tree falls in the forest and no one’s around to hear it, does it make a sound? If hate-spewing wing-nuts wave their signs and shout their idiot slogans and no one pays them any attention, do they make a sound? The thinking here is no, not so much.

No question, our instinct -- the other 98% of us who actually have a brain – is to fight back, to shout them down, to throw rotten fruit at them, or maybe kick them in the shins or slap some sense into them. And there is nothing wrong with that instinct. In fact, it can be argued that it’s important to do that – to loudly and proudly protest their stupid but dangerous “ideas” and not let them go unchallenged. But, wow – talk about giving these fools what they crave – attention – and talk about risking portraying their ludicrous pity parties as events of vastly greater magnitude than they actually are and focusing vastly more attention on them than they deserve.

So there is also an argument for not engaging – for not showing up at all, or, if folks just can’t resist, for counter-protesting in a totally passive, turn-the-other-cheek mode – signs, sure, but no taunting or shouting, no sticks and stones; and maybe most important, no treating by the media every escape from the home by these zombies as a news event warranting breathless, wall-to-wall coverage. Here’s the thing: When the cameras are rolling and brickbats are being hurled in every direction, it’s impossible to know, unless the bad guys are all wearing black hats and the good guys white, who’s doing what to whom. And it’s precisely that confusion that gives surface plausibility to the preposterous notion that there were two equally-to-blame “sides” at Charlottesville. When that notion is picked up and spread around by a weak-minded but vastly influential figure like the president of the United States, trouble ensues. So maybe the best way is to make sure it's unmistakeably clear who's doing the acting out.

Of course, the president should have been forceful and unequivocal in his condemnation of the jackasses that caused this problem. But maybe the problem could have been avoided, or at least mitigated, if they’d been allowed to put their stupidity on display in splendid isolation.

(For an alternative method of handling these events, we can look to a small town in Germany.)

What He Might Have Said

He said this: “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides….on many sides.”

Here are just a few things he might have said if he had had an honest heart and had reacted with the spontaneous revulsion most of us felt...

“450,000 American soldiers and sailors died fighting the scourge of Nazism in World War II. People flying Nazi flags and banners and making Nazi salutes on a street in the United States of America is a goddamned outrage. If I could I would round them up myself, throw them in jail, and throw away the key. It makes me so mad I could spit.”

Or…

“What happened in Charlottesville was 100-percent the fault of gibbering morons who took to the streets to put their irrational hatreds on display. None of this would have happened if they had not emerged from the rocks they live under to spew their poison.”

Or...

“These cockroaches who proclaim white supremacy and allegiance to Adolph Hitler, the murderer of six million innocent men, women, and children, need to be horse-whipped, then tarred and feathered and run out of town. There is no place in America for them, and my Justice Department will do everything in its power to shut them the hell up.  What a bunch of weenies.”

Or maybe...

“Members of the KKK are a bunch of semi-conscious mouth-breathers -- pathetic losers who blame everyone but themselves for their chronic failures and take out their total inadequacy on strangers of a different color. We as Americans need to rise up against them and loudly disavow their disgusting poison.”

A few suggestions about what might have been.  Just sayin'.

Mainstream Media Hatred: Time to Get Over It

Donald Trump said to the president of Mexico, in effect: You know you’re not going to pay for the wall and I know you’re not going to pay for the wall, and, really, we both know there was never going to be any wall. But will you please pipe down about it?  This remarkably revealing conversation once again underscored Trump’s total contempt for his most devoted acolytes – the contempt he first unveiled in his remarks about shooting people on a New York street. This time, we learn – if we didn’t already suspect as much – that their most cherished and emblematic political talisman and the thing that most endeared Trump to them, The Great Wall, was always, in his mind, a crock of you know what – nothing more than a way to harvest votes from the politics of resentment.

Bizarrely, so unswerving is the devotion of the cult of personality known as “The Base” to Trump that this revelation probably won’t change anything for them. But for the rest of us, it is, among other things, a reminder of just how critical the free flow of information is to our way of government. We in America operate in a democracy and that has many meanings and ramifications, but one that can’t be emphasized too strongly is this: Every single person who works for the government, elected or appointed, from the town dog-catcher to the president of the United States, is an employee of us, the people. And for that reason, we are entitled to know what every single one of them is up to. Full stop.

There are exceptions having to do with national security – the date, time and troop strength of the D-Day invasion was not something we all needed to know – but the default position with regard to the words and deeds of government “officials” must be total transparency. What our employees in government are doing and saying is what tells us who to vote for. And knowing who to vote for (or against) and then doing so is the very meaning of democracy.

Certain species of politician are forever telling us they’re going to get rid of waste, fraud, and abuse by running the government like a business, but the difference between for-profit businesses and government entities is instructive. The former are mechanisms for turning money into more money – for making a profit on invested dollars. The people charged with making that happen – management -- are accountable only to the people who employ them – the business’s owners, aka the shareholders. How do the shareholders know if their hired-hand managers are doing their jobs properly? Pretty simple: They look at the bottom line to see if their profit expectations are being met.

We who employ dog catchers and senators and presidents, on the other hand, don’t have such a convenient and obvious metric for deciding if those folks are doing what we want them to do. What do we have? This and only this: Information. And where do we get that information? Hold on to your hats, mainstream media haters: We get it from a free press. That’s why press freedom is protected in the constitution – because it was clearly understood by the framers (and by everyone now who doesn’t dislike and/or distrust the press for telling them facts as opposed to what they want to hear), that information regarding what our employees are doing, documented and conveyed to the citizenry in the press, is essential to the operation of a democracy. In a system of checks and balances, it’s the most important check there is.

Which brings us to the subject of leaks, on its way to becoming the least understood and most over-used perjorative in the language. The clandestine release of national-security-sensitive information to the press – the “leaking” of it – is a bad thing. Such leakage shouldn’t be done by the leaker nor accepted and/or used by its recipient, and most major news organizations are much more sensitive to this than their detractors would like to believe. But the overwhelming majority of so-called leaks are nothing more than information about goings-on in government that have nothing whatever to do with national security but that someone doesn’t want the world to know about because it would be politically embarrassing to them. There is nothing illegal about them.  Hence, the tendency to “classify” information – to put under lock and key information the public has a perfect right to by invoking national security and then branding its release – it’s leak – as felonious.

That’s exactly what Attorney General Sessions is up to now. This is, of course, an attempt to persuade the world that the problem isn’t the content of the leaks – the lies, abuses, and general foolishness revealed in them – but the existence of the leaks themselves. Or, to put it another way, the problem isn’t that this government is overrun with stupidity and miscalculation, but that the public is finding out about all of it. Trump understands that perfectly, and that’s why he constantly tries to de-legitimize the media, going so far as to brand it the enemy of the people. Well, “the people” need to get over their childish resentment of the mainstream press and their baseless dismissal of it as hopelessly biased, and understand that in this democracy, it is not their enemy. In a world where politicians will tell you to look at the shiny thing they hold in one hand while they steal your money and your freedom with the other, a free press may be the only friend you have.

Dreaming in Flyoverland

“I know, I know, there are few things more boring than people telling you what they dreamed about last night, but I gotta tell you about this one. It is so completely crazy.”

“Okay. If you must.”

“So, I dreamed that Trump hired a new guy to be his communications director named Scaramucci. Calls himself ‘The Mooch.’ Little guy with a lotta slick hair and a sharp suit, and the first thing out of the box, he does an interview where he channels Joe Pesci in “Goodfellas” – talks tough, cusses like a sailor, threatens people, comes across like a Mafioso wannabe. Out loud, in front of the world.”

“Cusses?”

“OMG! He calls Priebus a fucking paranoid schizophrenic! He says he wants to fucking kill all the leakers! He says the swamp is trying to defeat him but they’re going to have to go fuck themselves! He says Bannon sucks his own dick and is trying to build his own brand off the fucking strength of the president!”

“That’s disgusting.”

“Hey, it’s not me saying this stuff. It’s my dream. Anyway, then he says he’s calling the FBI about the leak of his financial disclosure form, which he says is a felony, only he doesn’t know that it isn’t a leak at all because the form is a public document, available to any and all. Then, after he says all this stuff to a reporter, he blames the reporter. He says he made a mistake in trusting a reporter.”

“So, Trump fires him, right?

“No! In fact, he doesn’t say a word. In fact, what he does is fire Priebus, so not only does he not fire The Mooch, but everyone thinks he’s gonna make him his next chief of staff.”

“Does he?”

“No. He gives that to John Kelly, the head of Homeland Security. Everybody says Kelly’s a no-nonsense kinda guy. So a commentator on one of the talk shows says he believes Kelly’s the right medicine – that he’ll bring order to the White House and get Trump to behave. Everyone laughs. Meanwhile, Trump’s Interior Secretary, Zinke, calls up Senator Murkowski and does a Mafia don thing on her about her health care no vote. He says Alaska is such a pretty state – me and the Donald would hate to see anything ugly happen to it. Or words to that effect.”

“Then what happened?”

“That’s when I woke up.”

"Boy, that was some crazy dream. The Mooch! Where do you come up with this stuff?"

Adoption = Sanctions

For Trump supporters who discount his Russia problems, or blow them off as being too complicated to understand, or see them as a plot by Democrats and the media, a discussion of adoptions might be enlightening. When Trump folks talked about this subject, adoption, at the infamous Donald, Jr. meeting, and when Trump himself kicked it around with Putin at G-20, it’s important to understand that they were talking about one thing and one thing only: sanctions.

The narrative is straightforward enough and easy to follow. In 2012, the U.S. Congress, in an overwhelming bi-partisan vote (365-43 in the House, 92-4 in the Senate), passed the Magnitsky Act -- a law, just so we're clear – that imposed sanctions on Russia for human rights violations; specifically, the murder in a Russian prison of whistle blower Sergei Magnitsky. Putin was plenty mad about these sanctions and to retaliate he took it out on innocent children, decreeing that adoptions of Russian children by Americans would no longer be permitted. That’s the “adoptions” connection. Putin’s heartless action of course did nothing to alter these sanctions or others that are equally rankling to him – the ones that were imposed for his country’s bloody invasion of its sovereign neighbor Ukraine and ruthless takeover of Crimea and those that were imposed by President Obama for Russia’s cyber-attack on the United States.

And then came the Trump administration. Putin unquestionably sees this administration as fertile territory for getting these sanctions lifted. Why? Almost certainly because Trump has major business interests (i.e., entanglements) involving Russia that give Russia leverage over him. It is those business entanglements, and what they might mean to Trump’s ability and willingness to do his solemn and sworn duty to protect the interests of his country (as opposed to those of himself and his family), that are being investigated by two congressional committees and the office of the Special Counsel. It is now beyond obvious that Trump is hiding something and working very hard to keep whatever it is hidden, and it is increasingly clear that the sanctions, because of whatever hold the Russians have on Trump, are in play. He has thrown every conceivable roadblock in front of these investigations, undercutting or firing every government official involved, attempting to de-legitimize the work of the Special Counsel, throwing his own intelligence people, including the FBI and the CIA, under the bus, and, now, feeling out the idea of pardons.

As for those who maintain that the Russia thing is a non-issue, a distraction, they should understand this: By siding with Russia, the Trump people are protecting a country whose leadership, to maintain their hold on power, works assiduously and ceaselessly to discredit Western democracy, lest their own people get ideas. That work has included an attack on the United States by way of a disruption of our electoral processes – a strike at the heart of what makes America America. People who continue to claim that Trump’s Russia problems are small potatoes are either whistling past the graveyard or don’t understand the problem. Or their unwholesome, see-no-evil hero worship has rendered them completely delusional. In any case, Trump’s stance on all of this is unsustainable. The dots are being connected. It’s all going to come out. The fat lady is about to sing.

Trumpcare Makes its Exit

The problem from the beginning with the GOP’s train wreck of a health care bill – a bill that got worse with each iteration, if that was possible – was that Donald Trump and Republican senators and congressmen never really knew or cared if the ACA was a good thing, a bad thing, or a thing in between. Their antipathy for Obamacare was never really about Obamacare. It was about their antipathy for Obama. And for anything of value for which Democrats could take credit.

So, for political survival, they were left with cobbling together something that purportedly did what people wanted but which they could plausibly say was not Obamacare. The result: a thing that was architecturally the same as Obamacare – and, for that matter, the same as “Romneycare,” the GOP-inspired program on which Obamacare was modeled -- but with provisions whose consequences, intended and unintended, helped no one and would have returned millions to the pre-Obamacare tender mercies of the insurance companies.

What Republicans should do (but clearly lack the stomach for) is stick to their religion and advocate for not only the repeal of Obamacare but for a complete and total absence of government involvement in health care. Get medical insurance from your employer, buy it on the open market, don’t get it all, but keep the government out of it. That is GOP orthodoxy and Republicans should advocate openly for it and accept the electoral consequences. But they won’t do that because they know what those consequences would look like. It’s not what the American people want. What they want is help – help from the government, which is to say help from each other -- in dealing with the outrageously burdensome cost of health care in this country.

Therefore, what Democrats should step up to is getting fully behind Medicare for all, and be willing to put that to the electoral test. That way, people who want zero government involvement in health care and people who want full government involvement will have a clear choice to make, and won’t have to settle for well-intentioned half-measures like Obamacare or malicious-intentioned ones like Trumpcare. As for those in the former group who worry about the taxes that will be needed to pay for Medicare for all, they should understand this: We are already paying that “tax.” We may not call it a tax, but whether it’s in the form of health insurance we buy on our own or higher prices charged by employers that buy it for us, it’s money leaving our wallets. Just like the money we pay to the tax collector, it’s money we have no choice but to part with. Either way, we’re gonna pay.

Meanwhile, the outlandish cost of health care continues to put millions of Americans on the brink of financial catastrophe and/or deprive them of medical care altogether, to exercise undue influence over where and how we live and work and what we do for a living, and to suck billions of dollars to itself at the expense of all other sectors of the economy. Given the demonstrated inability of the health industry or any outside actors to stabilize costs let alone bring them back to earth, the contention here is that including health insurance on the list of things we spend tax dollars on is therefore a not unreasonable idea. Why not “chip in” for health care? (And, no, it’s not “socialized medicine” or a government takeover of health care. The government would own no facilities nor employ any medical personnel. It would simply pick up the tab for insurance – as it already does, efficiently and effectively, with Medicare.)

No doubt, the underlying problem – the thing that drives all of these discussions and that makes insurance so pricey – is the cost of healthcare products and services themselves: practitioners, facilities, medicines, and all the rest. This is a mind-bogglingly complex problem with many moving parts, and it will not be solved by a magical stroke of legislation or an executive order from King Trump. The system is riddled with inefficiencies, unexplainable cost inconsistencies, duplication, non-standardization, fraud, and so on, and is remarkably resistant to the normal market forces that shape cost/price matters in other industries. A way to address all of this in a systematic way is elusive, but that’s what has to be done if the system is going to be tamed and prevented from having the excessive influence over the way we live our lives that it now has.

Selling Out the USA

“…have the Trumpites not been telling us for six months that no collusion ever happened? And now they say: Sure it happened. So what? Everyone does it. What’s left of your credibility when you make such a casual about-face?” Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post

Not only are Trump backers saying spying, as exemplified by Russia’s interference in a U.S. election, is routine, going both ways and, for that matter, every which way, but they are also saying that concerns about Russia, whom they see as largely benign, are overblown or even groundless and that Vladimir Putin is a figure to be admired. Clearly, they understand nothing about Russia and its leader and have no interest in any such understanding. Nevertheless, we offer up some noteworthy information about the object of their admiration, Mr. Putin, and the country he rules...

The KGB, in which Putin was a high-level player, was a Soviet secret police organization whose specialty was the suppression of internal dissent, in the service of which it imprisoned and/or exiled and/or murdered thousands and thousands of people within Russia itself and in the many “satellite” countries Russia had taken over by force after World War II. Internal dissent was defined by, among many other things, the practice of religion, which was forbidden in the Soviet Union and brutally suppressed, and by any criticism of communism or the government. The organization was the embodiment of Orwell’s “Big Brother,” with operatives and informants everywhere, in a closed-off, paranoid society in which the only “news” was government propaganda and in which it was necessary to be extremely careful about whom you were talking to and who might overhear, lest you be grabbed up in the night, held incommunicado, and sent to the Gulag for the rest of your life. The KGB was a merciless and brutal force, not unlike the reviled Gestapo and SS of Nazi Germany.

Under Putin, the Russian economy as measured by GDP is about 1/12th the size of America’s. America’s is the largest in the world; Russia’s is 13th. It has a robust and predatory mafia, endemic and rampant corruption at every level of government, and an oligarchy/kleptocracy that puts vast wealth in the hands of a miniscule minority, the connected, and precious little in the hands of everybody else. It produces little else but oil, military hardware, government bureaucrats, and spies. Putin’s leadership consists of persuading his countrymen that life would be good if they could only return to their chest-thumping ways of old when they strutted on the world stage and enslaved most of Eastern Europe. It also consists of silencing anyone who questions the aims and values of the regime. U.S. allies in Europe, countries we have solemnly promised to defend and who have promised to defend us as members of NATO, are deathly afraid of Russia. And Russia gave a vivid and bloody demonstration of just how justified that fear is by its ruthless theft of Crimea from Ukraine, one of the former Soviet satellites ruled over by the Kremlin with an iron fist.

Russia and its cyber attacks are a very big deal. Those who kiss them off as a minor distraction are flirting with the end of democracy in the United States. Or worse. If Russia, or anyone else, should hack its way into our power grid and/or our financial system? Well, good night and good luck. And let’s be clear: This is not theoretical. It happened. Russia hacked its way into the computer network of the Democratic National Committee. So it has the intention and it has the means. If any Americans worked with them to make that happen, and it certainly appears that some did, that would be the biggest deal of all.

“Republicans’ willingness to accept even national betrayal — that’s what Trump Jr. was willing to undertake, after all — will disgrace the party and its leaders for years, if not permanently. It is a party no longer capable of defending our national interests and Constitution from foreign enemies.” Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post

Homage in Metal and Stone to an Ignoble Cause

Imagine if half a dozen states out west decided they ought to be allowed to imprison homosexuals and deny women the right to vote, and said they wanted to secede from the United States and form their own country so they could do that. And then imagine that when their right to secede was challenged by the United States, they raised an army and attacked, say, Ft. Riley, Ks., thereby igniting a war that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of their people and hundreds of thousands more on the “union” side – a devastating, years-long conflagration that left unimaginable death and destruction in its wake.

I think it is safe to say that after it was all over, we wouldn’t be erecting any statues honoring the leaders of this movement.

With regard to the subject of statues and memorials in Forest Park, it helps to take a look back at the Gettysburg Address, a dominant theme of which was the deaths that resulted from the Civil War – 10,000 at Gettysburg alone.

“We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives…”

“The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here…”

“…that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion…”

“…that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.”

The message that Lincoln’s words conveyed so elegantly and eloquently, and, above all, sorrowfully, was that so many people died in this awful conflagration, and for what? What cause was worth such upheaval and carnage? What principle was the confederacy defending that justified the unutterable misery, destruction, and death the Civil War brought? What was it all for?

Answer: It was for the defense and preservation by southerners of a system by which they enriched themselves through the use of free labor to produce their goods and services – free labor they availed themselves of by enslaving millions of their fellow human beings; a system that treated blacks as a sub-human species, to be bought and sold as if they were cattle or furniture, to be kept in chains, to be capriciously and forever separated from their kith and kin, to be understood as possessions, not people, to be whipped, shot, beaten, maimed, and slaughtered; to be not cared for and loved but owned; to be literally worked to death.

And we should have statues and monuments honoring this movement and its leaders?

As for the argument that most of the soldiers in the Confederacy had no real understanding of what they were fighting for and should be honored not for their commitment to a cause but for their sacrifice -- for having fought and died in battle: Well, there are no monuments in Forest Park or anywhere else in America honoring soldiers who died attacking and fighting against the United States in other wars. And let there be no doubt that the Confederate army attacked and fought against the United States.

Nor is this about preserving history. The history of the Civil War will be preserved quite nicely without these items which are not themselves Civil War artifacts deserving of preservation, but ex-post-facto metal and stone objects that point to, but are not part of, the history of the war. Their disappearance will not make us forget the war and doesn’t constitute a denial of its existence or meaning. It is simply an acknowledgement that there’s no good reason to be paying homage to an ignoble cause by maintaining statuary that is a sickening affront to the descendants of the millions who suffered so terribly under the institution of slavery.

Lies and Audiotape

James Comey, testifying under oath and under penalty of perjury, is lying, and Trump is telling the truth? Can that possibly be Team Trump’s defense? Apparently. They are denying that Trump said anything to Comey about loyalty or about dropping the Flynn investigation, and by way of that denial they are accusing Comey of committing perjury. True, we can’t know with absolute certainty what was said without audio recordings, the existence of which Trump darkly hinted at. But the idea that Comey simply made all this up – wrote a piece of fiction replete with invented dialogue – is possible to believe only if one is absolutely determined to do so and is immune to facts and reality. Which Trump’s core supporters have proven over and over again is exactly what they are. Team Trump’s characterization of the Comey testimony as “vindication” shows the fantasy world into which they have retreated.

But there is one huge Trump lie that was highlighted via Comey’s testimony that doesn’t need audiotape verification – one that he admitted to in front of Lester Holt and the world -- when he said Comey’s firing was over the Russia investigation. By acknowledging that, he admitted in front of tens of millions of witnesses that the other reasons he cited for the firing – that the FBI was in disarray under Comey and that Comey had mishandled the Clinton matter – were lies. When he and his team said those things, they lied. Comey did not lie about why he was fired. Trump did.

Speaking of the Russia investigation, the thing that underpins all of this, Trump has repeatedly tried to muddy the waters and has resisted that investigation at every turn, even as he and his people have belittled it and characterized it as a distraction cooked up by sour-grapes Democrats. (We’re talking here about Russian interference in the 2016 election, leaving aside for the moment whether that interference was abetted by any Americans.) Here is what Comey had to say about it:

“The Russians interfered in our election during the 2016 cycle. They did it with purpose. They did it with sophistication. They did it with overwhelming technical efforts. And it was an active-measures campaign driven from the top of that government. We’re talking about a foreign government that, using technical intrusion, lots of other methods, tried to shape the way we think, we vote, we act. That is a big deal. And people need to recognize it. It’s not about Republicans or Democrats. They’re coming after America, which I hope we all love equally. It is a high-confidence judgment of the entire intelligence community, and – and the members of this committee have – have seen the intelligence. It’s not a close call. That happened. That’s about as un-fake as you can possibly get, and is very, very serious.”

Committee Chairman Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., asked Comey whether he had “any doubt that Russia attempted to interfere in the 2016 elections?”

“None,” Comey responded.

Neither did anyone else on the committee, Democrat or Republican. Nor does anyone else in government, Democrat or Republican, with the apparent exception of Trump and at least some of the people who surround him.  Yet to be determined is whether any Americans were involved.  The betting here is that they were and that it will all come out soon.

The other line of defense being mounted by the Trump folks is attempting to focus everyone’s attention on leaks, something they’ve been at for a while but are now apparently redoubling their efforts on. They say Comey is a leaker, and they spit that word out in a way that suggests it’s the same as, say, slimeball. What this focus on leaks really says is, in effect, we’re not nearly as concerned about lies and wrongdoing as we are about the American people knowing about the lies and wrongdoing. But, hey, maybe if we distract everyone with feigned concern about leaks as being somehow treasonous, they won’t pay close attention to the horrors that are being revealed by way of the leaks. In any event, Comey’s handing over to the press an account of his thoughts about and reactions to his meetings with the president is not a “leak” at all, and something he is perfectly entitled to do. There is no privileged communication here and certainly nothing that is “classified.”

And, finally, there’s the laughable discussion about the meaning of “hope.” Trump’s expressing the hope that Comey would back off the Flynn investigation, his apologists contend, was nothing more than a supplication – to the gods, I guess – that what he wanted to happen, would happen, if fortune were to smile on him. An idle musing. The fact that this wish was expressed in the presence of the person who could make it come true should not be interpreted, Trump people say, in the way Comey did, in fact, interpret it –as a directive-or-else. Wags around the globe lampooned this view in various ways:

“I hope you hand over your wallet,” said the gun-brandishing robber to his victim.

“That’s a nice pair of legs ya got there,” said the Mafia torpedo to the beautiful dame. “I hope nothing happens to mess them up.”

“I hope you can get me that report by the end of the week,” said the boss to the underling.

Anyone who watched James Comey’s testimony in the Senate hearings and still thinks highly of Donald Trump is clearly beyond redemption. When he said he could shoot somebody on 5th Ave. and not lose any voters, it is them he was referring to. A more blatant expression of the contempt he has for these folks, and for the American people in general, you couldn’t find.

The Gold Standard of Witch Hunts

The whiner-in-chief, having presided over an operation with the Russian government to undermine the U.S. electoral process – no, this hasn’t been proven, but it will be – says he is an innocent victim of “the media” and is being treated in a historically unfair way. He is, he contends, the object of a “witch hunt.” Well, why don't we take a look at an actual witch hunt, by which we mean a phony search for a non-existent villain upon whom to blame one’s problems for political gain. In witch-hunt world, this one is the gold standard.

On September 11, 2012, when Hillary Clinton was secretary of State, the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, was attacked and burned.  Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed. At first, it was thought the attack was the spontaneous reaction of an angry mob to a video mocking Islam and the Prophet Mohammed. Later, it was determined to have been a “terrorist” attack, meaning a planned action by unidentified Islamic radicals. The government changed its assessment regarding who was responsible after additional facts came to light – a change which Clinton opponents characterized as somehow sinister. “What difference does it make?” Clinton rightly asked when Republicans went into a tizzy over whether it was angry mob or a planned attack by militants – a question those opponents have never answered.

Investigations of the matter over the succeeding months and years were conducted by the following: U.S. State Department Accountability Review Board. the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the House Judiciary Committee, the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the House Armed Services Committee, the House Select Committee on Intelligence, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, and the House Select Committee on Benghazi.

That last one, the investigation by the House Select Committee on Benghazi, headed by Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC), lasted longer than the 9/11 Commission, and congressional investigations into the attack on Pearl Harbor, the assassination of President Kennedy, Watergate, the Iran-contra scandal, the 1983 bombing that killed 241 American service members in Beirut, and the response to Hurricane Katrina. The committee hauled in more than 100 witnesses, subjected Clinton to an 11-hour grilling, and spent some $7 million on the undertaking. This inquiry was after all the ones listed above – none of which uncovered any evidence of wrongdoing by Clinton or issued any conclusions to that effect. Same result for the House Committee. Its astounding conclusion after the expenditure of all that time and treasure: Security at the mission was not as good as it might have been.

But, of course, it was never about getting to the bottom of what happened that night and who, if anyone, in the U.S. government was at fault. It was always about creating a cloud of suspicion over candidate Clinton among folks who the Republicans knew would not pay very close attention to the actual goings-on in the committee or to its conclusions. Where there was smoke, they knew many voters would believe, there was fire. This investigation was 100-percent smoke. Two years and $7 million worth of smoke.

And it worked, exactly the way they believed it would. “Benghazi” became, among the anti-Hillary people, a buzz word which they would invoke as though its meaning were self-evident; no need to explain how, or even if, the events of that night reflected negatively on Clinton. It was enough to simply speak the word and heads would nod in agreement.

In September of 2015, in a moment of candor that many believe cost him a shot at the House speakership, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA, later referred to by Donald Trump is “my Kevin”) owned up to his party’s cynical motive for the committee’s “investigation.” He said this:

“Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened, had we not fought.”

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) characterized McCarthy’s words as a “stunning concession" which, he said, “reveals the truth that Republicans never dared admit in public. The core Republican goal in establishing the Benghazi committee was always to damage Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and never to conduct an evenhanded search for the facts.”

Now that's a witch hunt. Despite what Trump people would prefer to believe, the investigations now under way by a special counsel and two congressional committees are not the result of non-evidence manufactured by political opponents or the media. They are the result of things he himself has said and done, and for which he is going to have to answer. 

That’s not a witch hunt. 

The Russians did it. The only question now is whether Americans did, too.

To be clear -- because Donald Trump continues to do what he can to muddy these waters: The Russian government, using computer technology, interfered with and tried to manipulate the outcome of the 2016 U.S. election. And we know that the purpose of that interference was to impede Hillary Clinton’s chance of winning. These things are not in dispute, having been uncovered and attested to by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, and more than a dozen other agencies of the government of the United States whose job it is to know about such matters and combat them. It has been fully acknowledged by members of both parties in congress and by the Trump-appointed Secretary of Defense. And by Trump himself, notwithstanding his ongoing efforts to obfuscate the issue and blame it all on Democrat sour grapes. The debate with regard to whether this happened is over. That train has left the station.

So: Since we know with certainty what happened, the only remaining question is what role, if any, did people around Donald Trump, and/or Trump himself, play in it. Did these people, these Americans, help the Russians do what we know with certainty that they did – attack the United States? That’s what’s on the table now – not what happened, but whether Trump and company had a hand in what happened. And that’s what’s being investigated by the FBI and by committees in the House and Senate.  That's what James Comey was investigating when he was fired.

Donald Trump, instead of being outraged by all if this and vowing to get to the bottom of any sins the Russians may have committed, has done everything he can to thwart the inquiry. That Trump has something to hide that involves Russia is a conclusion that has become all but impossible to avoid.

That makes it a good time to review what is known about Trump and Russia. The New York Times recently provided this recap:

THE TRUMP FAMILY BUSINESS There may be no Trump Tower in Moscow or St. Petersburg, but it is not for lack of trying. Mr. Trump and his family have sought to do business in Russia since at least the 1980s. They have also developed extensive commercial and personal relationships with politically connected Russian businessmen. In 2008, Donald Trump Jr. told a real estate conference, “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets; say in Dubai, and certainly with our project in SoHo and anywhere in New York,” according to eTurboNews, a travel industry news site. The author James Dodson said that another son, Eric Trump, told him in 2013 that Russians have bankrolled Trump golf courses: “Well, we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.” Eric Trump denies saying that.

In addition, Donald Trump worked with the Agalarov family, a prominent Russian business group, to host the 2013 edition of his Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. Mr. Trump met more than a dozen of the country’s most prominent oligarchs while he was there, Bloomberg News reported. Jared Kushner, who is married to Ivanka Trump and is a senior adviser to the president, has also been caught up in the Russia story. During the transition, Mr. Kushner met with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, as well as with the top executive of a Russian government-owned bank.

MICHAEL FLYNN Mr. Flynn, the former national security adviser, had several conversations with Mr. Kislyak during the transition in which they discussed American sanctions against Russia. Mr. Trump fired Mr. Flynn after public disclosure that he had lied to Vice President Mike Pence about the nature of those talks. In addition, RT, a Russian government-backed news outlet, paid Mr. Flynn $45,000 for giving a speech in December 2015 in Moscow. On the same trip, he sat next to President Vladimir Putin at an RT gala. The Pentagon is investigating whether Mr. Flynn, a retired military intelligence officer, failed to disclose and obtain approval from the State and Defense Departments before taking money from a foreign government.

JEFF SESSIONS Mr. Sessions, the attorney general, said during his Senate confirmation hearing that he did not have any contacts with Russian officials while he was actively campaigning for Mr. Trump. In fact, he met with Mr. Kislyak twice, once in his Senate office and once at the Republican National Convention.

PAUL MANAFORT Mr. Manafort, a former chairman of the Trump campaign, worked as a consultant for a pro-Russia political party in Ukraine and for Ukraine’s former president, Viktor Yanukovych, who was backed by the Kremlin. Mr. Manafort has been accused of receiving secret payments from the pro-Russia party. About a decade earlier, Mr. Manafort also worked for Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch with close ties to Mr. Putin. The Associated Press obtained a memo he wrote to Mr. Deripaska offering a plan that he said would “greatly benefit the Putin Government.”

CARTER PAGE American officials believe that Mr. Page, a foreign policy adviser, had contacts with Russian intelligence officials during the campaign. He also gave a pro-Russia speech in Moscow in July 2016. Mr. Page was once employed by Merrill Lynch’s Moscow office, where he worked with Gazprom, a government-owned energy giant.

ROGER STONE Mr. Stone, an informal but close Trump adviser, exchanged messages last summer with Guccifer 2.0, a Twitter account widely believed to be a front for Russian intelligence operatives who were involved in the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign. During the campaign, Mr. Stone seemed to know in advance that WikiLeaks would release emails from the account of John Podesta, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman.

So what?

Many Republicans and other Trump worshippers, once the fact of Russian interference in the election became unavoidable, shifted to questioning its importance. What’s the big deal if the Russians got involved in some election mischief here. Who cares if Trump and his people have financial ties to the Russian government? Is Russia so bad? Isn't this just a distraction from all the important things Trump is trying to do?

Well, again, to be clear: This event was an attack on the sovereignty of the United States of America, just as surely as if it had been done with bombs and bullets. It took aim at the very heartbeat of America, the thing that makes it what it is and the thing we have depended on for 200-plus years to provide us with the kind of life we want: the free election of the people who represent us in government. It was an attack on our country by a foreign and hostile country. If American citizens helped them do that, it’s a very big problem. (Trump enthusiasts who shrug their shoulders at all of this need to ask themselves a simple question: What if all of the above were true of Barrack Obama or Hillary Clinton?)

For an interesting take on what Russia is all about -- the Russia that Trump’s hard core would have us believe is essentially harmless – check out Joe Scarborough on the subject.

How to Fire an FBI Chief

As luck would have it, Flyoverland was in the room when it all went down...

Trump: I want that sonofabitch fired. I’ve had it with his Russia thing. If he gets any closer on Russia, which it looks like he’s about to do, it’s really gonna hit the fan. You can stick a fork in us. Plus the insubordinate bastard refuses to back me up on the Obama wire-tapping.

Aide: Well, sir, there’s really no way he could back you up on the wiretapping. After all, we all know what a crock it actually is.

Trump: Who is this man?

Other aide: Jenkins, sir.

Trump: Take him out and shoot him.

Other aide: Yes, sir.

Trump: Now, Sessions, I need you to cook up a reason for the firing. We don’t want people thinking it has anything to do with Russia.

Sessions: Absolutely, sir. And here’s what I think is a great idea. Just delicious, really. What we do is, we say it was because of what he did to Hillary. I mean, think about it. The irony. It’s perfect. The Dems won’t be able to say a word.

Trump: Ooh. Sa-weet! You little devil you!

Aide: I don’t think anybody’s going to believe that. Even our hard-core people aren’t that dumb.

Trump: Oh, they’re that dumb. Believe me. Remember when I said I could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and not lose any votes? No, I think it’s genius. Absolutely beautiful. Not only will our base believe it, everyone will believe it. After all, it’s perfectly plausible.

Other Aide: Damn right, Mr. President.

Trump: Beautiful. Now, here’s what we’ll do. We’ll have the new guy, Frankentein or whatever his name is, say it was his idea, and that I’m just following his recommendation. Everyone will believe that, right?

Another Aide: Damn right, Mr. President. After all, they are incredibly dumb and believe all the ridiculous things you say. But, still, maybe we should have a fallback position on that one.

Trump: Okay, if they question that, I’ll say I started thinking about firing him back when I was elected. By the greatest margin in history, by the way. Because of his handling of the Clinton thing.

Another Aide: But, sir, you praised him to the skies for that.

Trump: Who cares? (sarcastically) Remember? 5th Avenue? Shooting people? Folks have forgotten all about that praising Comey thing. After all, it was months ago. I’ll just say I never said any of that. I do it all the time. And people always believe me. Believe me.

Sessions: Alrighty, then. We’re agreed. So, let’s give it a whirl. We did this because of Comey’s outrageous mistreatment of Clinton. It was Rosenstein’s idea. It had absolutely nothing to do with Russia. And, for good measure, we can throw in that the FBI rank-and-file is completely on board – in fact, had been calling for Comey’s head. All one-hundred percent believable.

Trump: I love it. There’s no way anyone would have any reason to doubt any of that. In fact, everyone will think it’s a beautiful explanation. They will say that I courageously did the right thing, and they’ll thank me! After all, the people are incredibly stupid and believe the things that I say.

Another aide: Sir, while I know you have unbounded faith in the stupidity of the American people, and I admire you for it, you can’t really think anyone’s going to believe this one. I mean, it’s too much. It’s such an obvious whopper!

Trump: Who is this man?

Yet Another Aide: Jones, sir.

Trump: Take him out and shoot him.

Chipping In

From an article in the New York Times magazine, we learn of a woman – uninsured, due to a complicated set of circumstances – who suffered a subarachnoid hemorrhage (brain bleed) and spent time in the hospital, and later starting getting bills: $16,000 from the hospital, $50,000 for the air ambulance, $24,000 from a physicians’ group, $54,000 from the same group for additional charges and late fees, and then, another from the hospital for $356,884.42.

The article, which is about “the arcane, sprawling classification system that doctors and hospitals have learned to game” as one big reason for the high cost of health care, is definitely recommended reading. But even if we did nothing about this system or about the other major contributors to the problem – drug prices, too much  testing, high price tags on basic procedures – even if the woman’s bills for hundreds of thousands of dollars were totally legitimate – there is something we could do: Chip in and help her pay the bills. If we did that, it would cost each of us a couple of bucks and save her a fortune – indeed, save her from total financial ruin. And if we chipped in to buy her insurance against those medical bills, as opposed to paying the bills themselves, it would cost not bucks but pennies.

This is something we already do with national defense, roads and bridges, schools, police protection, parks and libraries, sewers and sanitation, water treatment, air traffic control, and on and on -- things too numerous to mention. We chip in. We pay for them collectively. We pool our money to buy things we want and need but which it makes no sense to buy as individuals.

It’s called taxation.

(Also included in that list, by the way, is keeping old people out of penury by giving them money -- Social Security -- and by helping them pay for health care -- Medicare. The idea that people “pay into” these systems and are therefore merely retrieving the money they contributed and to which they are therefore entitled when they get old is a myth. In fact, people pay taxes to the federal treasury – it doesn’t matter what names those taxes are given – and part of that money is then paid out, from the federal budget, for social security and Medicare benefits, in exactly the same way that money comes out of the budget to pay for an aircraft carrier.)

But, I digress. The point here is this: People may kvetch about paying taxes and about government spending – something everyone is against in the abstract -- but they want the things that tax dollars buy. It’s that simple. The idea that one group of people is more “fiscally conservative” than another is fiction. The argument is never whether tax dollars are going to be collected and spent. The argument is always about how -- which of the things those dollars buy is more important to me as opposed to the ones that are more important to you.

The obvious question: What’s more important than health care? Needless to say, it is essential to our well-being. But more than that, its high cost is a terrible problem, and the two previous administrations were right in giving it high priority. It puts millions of Americans on the brink of financial catastrophe and/or deprives them of medical care altogether, it exercises undue influence over where and how we live and work and what we do for a living, and it sucks billions of dollars to itself at the expense of all other sectors of the economy. Given the demonstrated inability of the health industry or any outside actors to stabilize costs let alone bring them back to earth, the contention here is that including health insurance on the list of things we spend tax dollars on is therefore a not unreasonable idea. Why not “chip in” for health care?

Would that mean a tax increase? Sure, assuming we can’t find offsetting savings in other areas. (The betting here is we can’t, as those “other areas” tend to have powerful constituencies). But it’s important to understand this: We are already paying that “tax.” We may not call it a tax, but whether it’s in the form of health insurance we buy on our own or higher prices charged by employers that buy it for us, it’s money leaving our wallets. Just like the money we pay to the tax collector, it’s money we have no choice but to part with. Either way, we’re gonna pay. But there is considerable likelihood that we would pay less because of the preventive care that such a system would pick up the tab for and because of the elimination of insurance company overhead and hospital billing costs. So from a financial outlay standpoint, it appears it would be, at worst, a wash.

As for reducing medical costs within the existing system to any meaningful extent as a way to get this problem under control, it appears that for the time being at least, we will have to play it as it lays, so to speak – get people insured against costs as they now stand, and then take up the challenge of reducing costs. And a challenge it is, because the business of health care, for a variety of seemingly intractable reasons, has shown itself to be unresponsive to the normal pressures of a free market. Under the current system, in which there is zero price competition, costs are not going to go down and therefore the price of insurance isn’t going to go down, either. (Free market enthusiasts cite the example of Lasik surgery, the cost of which, due to competition, has come down considerably over the years. But Lasik is elective and people can shop around at their leisure for the low-cost provider. With things like cancer care, cardiac surgery, and organ transplants – well, not so much.)

What’s being suggested here is not socialized medicine or a government takeover of health care, an accusation that critics draw like a gun whenever this subject comes up. The government would own no facilities or employ any medical personnel. It would simply pick up the tab for insurance – as it already does, efficiently and effectively, with Medicare. For people who object to Medicare on principle, the question is this: Would you like to be paying the medical bills of your elderly parents and having them live in your basement because they can’t afford their own housing? Medicare is a system that the overwhelming majority of Americans believe in and view with gratitude and relief. Thank God for Medicare, is what just about everyone says as they approach old age.

We all chip in for insurance for seniors. Why not chip in for insurance for everyone?

(Note: For an in-depth discussion of why the American health care system is unresponsive to normal free market forces, Flyover can recommend the book “An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take it Back” by Elisabeth Rosenthal. Here is a review in the New York Times Book Review.)

Kristallnacht

Anti-Semitism rears its ugly head with depressing regularity in this country and elsewhere, and we’re seeing a still relatively small but nevertheless ominous resurgence in 2017. Here’s a bit of history that shows how relatively isolated incidents can coalesce and lead to calamity in an atmosphere of tacit acceptance.

On November 9 and 10, 1938 a wave of violence aimed at Jewish people, institutions, and businesses took place in Germany, Austria, and parts of Czechoslovakia. The events of those days and nights became known as Kristallnacht, a German word loosely translated as the night of broken glass because of the shards of glass in the streets from the broken windows of homes, hospitals, schools, Jewish-owned businesses, and synagogues destroyed by paramilitary forces and German civilians as German authorities looked on without intervening. Estimates vary, but it’s believed that hundreds of people were murdered and thousands arrested and sent to Nazi concentration camps. Over 1,000 synagogues and 7,000 businesses were destroyed or damaged.

Kristallnacht is widely understood to be the event that signaled the beginning of overt anti-Semitism in pre-WWII Germany which evolved to the “final solution” and ended in the murder of 6-million people in what became known as the Holocaust. Full accounts of Kristallnacht and the events leading up to it and flowing out if it are here and here.

The Southern Poverty Law Center counts 917 hate groups currently operating in the United States. It defines them as groups having beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics. Not all of them are specifically anti-Semitic but all have that potential. Of the 917, ten are specifically holocaust deniers, 99 are neo-Nazi, 79 are racist skinheads, and 100 are white nationalists. The SPLC, the Anti-Defamation League, and others report hundreds of anti-semitic incidents in the past few months and thousands in the past year or so, including vandalism in Jewish cemeteries, spray-painted swastikas in public spaces, slurs on social media, and so on. The AMCHA Initiative, an organization that tracks anti-Semitic incidents at American colleges and universities, reports 185 such incidents so far in 2017 and 430 in 2016. Are these incidents a collection of small Kristallnachts – precursors of a larger uprising of people and groups who are encouraged and emboldened by the current political climate?

We know this much: History tells us that anti-Semitism is always bubbling just below the surface and has been for centuries, and that it erupts and becomes virulent and toxic particularly when demagoguery and despotism give people license to blame a hated “other” for their own problems, failings, and disappointments or for a lack of general prosperity. We see a lot of that now, including the resurrection of ageless tropes having to do with Jews controlling the banks or the international financial system or the media.

During the debates, Donald Trump said this: “[Hillary Clinton] meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty, in order to enrich these global financial powers…” In addition to being another entry in the lengthy and ever-growing catalog of ludicrous Trumpian pronouncements, this statement, while not overtly anti-Semitic, has been very much a part of the anti-Semitism vocabulary over the decades.

Everyone knows about the Holocaust. But Kristallnacht, the event that foretold it, is not as well known. It seems important now, as anti-Semitic activity seems to be ramping up once again, that younger generations be made aware of it and of the ominous warning it carried. 

If only people had listened.

Chest Deep in the Big Muddy

There was a time when America was only hip deep in lies and misinformation about Obamacare and what it does and does not do. Now, because of the surreal Republican comedy act that masquerades as a search for something to replace it (or amend it or whatever) we’re chest deep and sinking fast. What Republicans should do, of course, is stick to their religion and advocate for not only the repeal of Obamacare but for a complete and total absence of government involvement in health care. That is GOP orthodoxy: Get medical insurance from your employer, buy it on the open market, get it from the man in the moon, don’t get it all; just keep the government out of it. You’re on your own.

Republicans should step up to that, own it, advocate openly and vigorously for it, and accept the electoral consequences. But they won’t because they know what those consequences would look like. That is most emphatically not what the American people want. What they want is help – help from the government, which is to say help from each other -- in dealing with the incredibly burdensome cost of health care in this country. (The U.S. health care sector is larger than all but five national economies in the world). So, for political survival, the GOP is left with cobbling together something that does what people want but which they can plausibly say is not Obamacare. But, of course, it will be Obamacare. Here is columnist George Will’s concise explanation of why that is:

“If you begin by accepting, as the country does, the Barack Obama premise that the chief metric of health care reform is universal access, and then if you add to that you’re going to have a system in which pre-existing health problems will not preclude you from purchasing insurance, and then you add to that you’re going to build this around a system in which 147-million Americans get their health insurance from their employer with special tax preferences for that…if you start like that you are bound to create a system of regulations and subsidies that’s very complicated; different regulations than Mr. Obama had and different subsidies, but the same basic kind of architecture.”

Noticeably absent from Republican deliberations on this matter, as they go about the business of assembling a program with the “same basic architecture” as Obamacare, are characterizations of it as “socialized medicine” and a government take-over of health care, both of which were flung around extravagantly during the original ACA debate. That debate, by the way, demonstrated that health care reform is not some pet cause of Democrats and lefties. Republicans and other conservatives were fully on board with the need for major changes in the way we provide and pay for health care. They – in the person of John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney and many, many others -- said so repeatedly during the legislative debate over the ACA and have said so many times since. Although those people enthusiastically endorsed the idea that something needed to be done, what they thought that might look like they didn’t say. They only said Obamacare wasn’t it. For eight years.

No matter how many hairs Obamacare opponents try to split, Mitt Romney’s program in Massachusetts was, and is, essentially the same thing. So, they were for Obamacare before they were against it. The individual mandate was part of the Massachusetts program and was an idea that was strongly backed by conservatives whose position was that people who didn’t buy in would essentially be freeloaders. People who think the mandate can be cherry-picked out because it’s the one provision of Obamacare that everyone hates, don’t understand how insurance works. Paul Waldman of the Wasgibngton Post explains it this way:

“The ACA’s individual mandate wasn’t popular, but it was necessary to solve a key problem, which is that if you want to guarantee coverage for those with preexisting conditions, you need to spread costs as widely as possible. Get everyone into the risk pool, and you can do it. So the law required people to carry insurance, fining them if they don’t. The GOP plan says that if you maintain ‘continuous coverage’ then you’ll still be insured despite your preexisting condition. If you go without insurance for two months, then you’ll have to pay a penalty once you start getting coverage again. But you’ll pay it to the insurance company, not to the federal treasury.

“Here’s the thing, though. If you’re healthy, and especially if you’re young and healthy, this system actually incentivizes you to wait until you get sick before getting insurance. You can say, why bother with insurance now? Sure, I’ll have to pay a 30 percent penalty on my premiums when I buy coverage again, but only for the first year. If I can get away with 10 years of having no insurance, and only get it when I’m faced with high expenses, I’ll still come out ahead. If young people make that calculation en masse, the risk pool winds up confined to people who are older and sicker, premiums skyrocket, insurers flee and the whole thing collapses.”

The high cost of health care is a terrible problem, and the Obama administration, and before that the Clinton administration, were right in giving it high priority. It puts millions of Americans on the brink of financial catastrophe and/or deprives them of medical care altogether, it exercises undo influence over where and how we live and work and what we do for a living, and it sucks billions of dollars to itself at the expense of all other sectors of the economy. The ACA doesn’t directly address all of that, but can be seen as a start. Whatever else happens, the creation, passage, and implementation of it guaranteed continued and intensifying focus on this huge national problem. Obsessing over Obamacare, and distorting what it is and isn’t, is politically driven and does nothing to solve a problem many millions of Americans share.

Whatever the Republicans cook up, it will be Obamacare -- just a less effective version of it – one that many believe will lead to large numbers of people losing their health coverage and to increases in premiums and out-of-pocket costs. (There is speculation that House Republican are afraid the Congressional Budget Office will “score” it exactly that way, which is why they’re hustling the bill along so quickly, hoping for passage before the CBO can give them and the American people the bad news, and why they’re making remarks aimed at de-legitimizing the CBO and its work.)

Trump supporters: This will be the “something terrific” with which your man said he would replace Obamacare. He said, you’ll recall: “I am going to take care of everybody. I don’t care if it costs me votes or not. Everybody’s going to be taken care of much better than they’re taken care of now.”

Hmm.

 


 

Another Shooting on 5th Avenue?

Donald Trump’s assertion of a year or so ago that he could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and not lose voters was an eloquent articulation of the total contempt he has for the intelligence of his followers. So slavish are they in their adoration of him, he believes, that nothing he says or does, no matter how ludicrous or contemptible, will turn them away. And that has proven to be the case.

Another phenomenon at work here is that even the more reasonable people among the Trump coterie don’t know about those ludicrous and contemptible things because, in their paranoid distrust of the press, they don’t read about them. They hold their hands over their ears and hum loudly when Trump is spoken of critically, lest their comfort bubble be penetrated. Or, inexplicably, they are so convinced of the blessings he will cast upon the land that they’re willing to ignore daily displays of his wrong-headedness. What great changes they think he will bring to their lives -- changes worth embracing such a fool as their leader -- is anybody’s guess.

But there is a more ominous explanation – other than his contempt for his followers’ brainpower -- for two recent assertions by Trump: That Obama wiretapped Trump Tower and that long-ago public photo-ops of Schumer and Pelosi warrant investigations of ties they may have to Russia. That explanation: That he is becoming untethered from reality. 

These ideas are, to use the vernacular, crazy. And the fear is that he’s saying these things not because he thinks his followers will buy them, but because he actually believes them. This is dangerous territory -- ominous because of what it could mean should he have similar paranoid fantasies about, say, N. Korea or China.

For the record, let’s take a look at the idea that pictures of Schumer and Pelosi in the company of Russian officials could mean they have any ties to Russia, let alone ties that are comparable to Trump’s. In Trump’s view, if an investigation of him is warranted, and investigation of them is warranted. The evidence against them: public widely circulated and utterly inconsequential one-off publicity photographs. The evidence against him: For that, we turn to a recent column by Dana Milbank of the Washington Post…

Having trouble following the fast-moving developments about the Trump team’s ties to Russia? Here’s a primer to get you up to speed:

President Trump got to know Russian President Vladimir Putin "very well,"  but he doesn’t “know Putin.” Putin sent Trump “a present” and they spoke, but Trump has “no relationship with him.”

Trump has “nothing to do with Russia,” but his son has said “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets” and “we see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

Russia definitely hacked the Democratic National Committee, unless it was a 400-pound man in his bedroom or a guy in a van down by the river.

U.S. intelligence agencies allege that Putin meddled in the election to try to get Trump elected, but this was all a “ruse”and a “fake news fabricated deal to try and make up for the loss of the Democrats.”

There was “no communication” between Trump’s team and Russia during the campaign and transition, except for communication with Russia by Trump’s future national security adviser, his future attorney general and his son-in-law and two others.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions “did not have communications with the Russians,” except for the two meetings with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak he neglected to mention under oath. Sessions then said he never discussed the campaign with Russians, which is not what was alleged. Sessions had “no idea what this allegation is about” regarding his Russian contacts but had enough of an idea what it was about to declare “it is false.”

Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation, but this decision is unrelated to the discovery that he spoke twice with the Russian ambassador despite his claims that he had no such meetings. Sessions cannot confirm the investigation he recused himself from exists or will exist in the future.

Sessions believes that perjury is one of the constitutional “high crimes and misdemeanors” and “goes to the heart of the judicial system,” except his false testimony under oath to Congress was not a false statement but a case of speaking too quickly.

Sessions met with the Russian ambassador during the time Sessions was serving as a surrogate for the Trump campaign, but not in his capacity as a surrogate for the Trump campaign.

Sessions remembers nothing of his meetings with the Russian ambassador, except that he remembers clarly talking about terrorism and religion and Ukraine and he’s sure they didn’t talk about the campaign. It was a total coincidence that around the same time Sessions was meeting with the Russian ambassador, Trump gave an interview that ended up on Russian state-owned TV saying he didn’t believe reports of Russian influence in the U.S. election.

Trump, Trump’s press secretary and a broad swath of Republican members of Congress said there is no reason for Sessions to recuse himself from the investigation from which Sessions recused himself.

The incendiary and salacious “dossier” by a former British intelligence official on Trump’s involvement with Russia was completely unverified, but U.S. authorities were prepared to pay the man who wrote it.

Carter Page, who has extensive ties to Moscow, had “no role” in the Trump campaign, except that Trump, meeting with The Post’s editorial board, listed Page as an adviser.

Reports of the Trump team’s ties to Russia are “fake news,” yet those who leaked the information for those articles need to be found and punished.

Trump ousted Michael Flynn, his national security adviser, who Trump says did nothing wrong. Flynn, who spoke several times with Kislyak on the day President Barack Obama announced sanctions against Russia, told Vice President Pence and the FBI that the discussion that intelligence officials heard them having about sanctions was not a discussion about sanctions. The sanctions that Flynn reportedly discussed with Kislyak, in the conversation he can’t entirely remember, were not really sanctions.

Former Trump campaign manager Paul manafort had “absolutely nothing to do and never has with Russia,” except for his extensive work for Russian oligarchs and pro-Russia forces in Ukraine. Manafort declared in the fall that “there’s no investigation going on by the FBI that I’m aware of” into his contacts with Russia, months after that investigation began.

Sessions previously asserted that “no one is above the law” and that failure to punish people for being untruthful under oath “will weaken the legal system,” and he proclaimed that “I’m very careful about how I conduct myself in these matters.” Except when he isn’t.

Manafort is a close Trump associate whose background is of particular interest when it comes to discussions of Trump and Russia, as explained in this article in Slate Magazine.