Talking Point

There are seven basic principles that should be a part of any health care proposal. We need to find a system that will:

• Provide health care to all Americans regardless of income;
• Allow individuals to keep their insurance when they change jobs;
• Ensure that no one could be denied coverage for preexisting health conditions;
• Allow individuals to see the doctor of their choice;
• Result in lower drug costs;
• Promote prevention and early intervention; and
• Help control soaring health care costs.

We need to make it possible for all Americans to retire with dignity at the end of a lifetime of work. That means protecting Social Security and mandating corporations treat their employees the same as their executives when it comes to health and retirement benefits.

Prominent Republicans have come out publicly in past weeks stating that, given the chance in 2007, they will push Social Security privatization again. This includes...

• President Bush and his Chief of Staff Josh Bolten

• Treasurer Secretary Henry Paulson

• House Majority Leader John Boehner

• And other key Republicans

The Republicans apparently haven't learned their lesson from the 2005 defeat of privatization: the American public, armed with the facts, will overwhelmingly reject privatization for the bad deal that it is.

A right-wing group called The Tax Foundation declared April 23 "Tax Freedom Day," representing the time it takes "Americans" to earn enough money to pay their federal, state and local taxes. A YouTube video dramatizes the organization's contention that average Americans are overtaxed, with a song that says, "I think it's too late in the year for Tax Freedom Day." But their annual proclamation is bogus.

Their calculation averages the tax burdens of the wealthy and the non-wealthy. And because the income increases experienced by the wealthiest 20 percent of taxpayers during the Bush administration far outstrip the income stagnation of the bottom 80 percent, the increase in tax receipts from that higher income bears no relationship to the tax burden of average families, which has actually gone down.

It's also misleading to say that families are paying more of their income in taxes than they are spending on food, clothing and other necessities. That is definitely untrue for low-income families, who may pay little or nothing in federal taxes, and is likely to be untrue for a number of middle-income families, depending on the tax deductions available to them.

Conservatives, and some in the media, say that a cut in capital gains taxes will stimulate economic growth enough to actually increase government revenue. But, as the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities notes, both the Congressional Budget Office and the Treasury Department have estimated that the government would lose money in the long run if the capital gains tax cuts enacted in 2003 were made permanent—$100 billion, according to the CBO. As for the economic growth effects, consider this: A study by Federal Reserve economists found that European stocks, which did not benefit from the U.S. capital gains tax cut, performed as well as stocks in the U.S. market in the period following the tax cut. Rather than pursuing the myth that tax cuts provide a free lunch, we need sensible tax policies that will allow us to pay for urgent notional priorities.

Like many conservatives, Arizona Sen. John McCain wants to eliminate the one item in the tax code designed to keep the wealthy from escaping taxes altogether: the alternative minimum tax. The intent of the AMT is to limit the ability of wealthy individuals to escape paying taxes by piling on exemption after exemption. It is true that the tax is increasingly affecting middle-income people it was never intended to ensnare, and Democrats in Congress have struggled to come up with a fair solution, which would cost about $50 billion a year. But McCain is a leading proponent of eliminating it altogether, which some congressional analysts say would mean $1 trillion less revenue to the government over 10 years. This is not even "trickle-down economics"; this is allowing the wealthy to game the tax code and leave the government unable to pay for the kinds of programs that serve the common good.

The Washington Post has reported that technical problems with the “virtual fence” being erected along a portion of the U.S.-Mexican border will mean a three-year delay in the project. And the 700 miles of physical barriers authorized by Congress is also poised to fall behind schedule – at an undetermined cost.

It’s becoming clear that depending on our ability to seal the U.S.-Mexican border without having a comprehensive immigration strategy is folly—and the American people know it. According to the National Immigration Forum, three-quarters of the public would support a policy that combines smart border enforcement, effective immigration and labor enforcement directed at bad-actor employers, earned legalization/eventual citizenship for the estimated 12 million undocumented residents already in the country, assistance for vulnerable American workers and impact aid to local communities and states. Those steps, plus trade policies that help both Mexican and American workers, will do more to stem the problems caused by illegal immigration than any fence.

The effects of disastrous federal economic policies continue to roll downhill.

At least 25 states face budget shortfalls in fiscal year 2009, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. For 21 of those states, the combined deficits are expected to total at least $36 billion; the remaining four have yet to come up with an estimate. These states will most likely drastically cut services to meet the requirement that they balance their budgets—an action that will worsen an economic slowdown by laying off employees, cutting purchases and shifting costs to already overburdened residents.

This is where the federal government should step in—as it did belatedly in 2003—by giving direct aid to states so they will not be forced to take actions that will deepen a recession.

President Bush signed bipartisan legislation in December reauthorizing the Head Start program. But even as they praised the program, Congress funded the program at $480 million below its authorized level. Then President Bush in early February proposed a budget that would reduce funding even further below what the Congress authorized. It would mean the number of children who would be served in Head Start would fall to 895,000 in 2009, with deeper cuts in the future. That is at a time when the number of children eligible for Head Start grew by 13 percent between 2002 and 2006. Head Start will have no choice but to turn away children who need this support the most.

The President’s 2009 budget proposes to fund Head Start at $7 billion, just a hair under what is needed to maintain 2008 funding levels adjusted for inflation, and about 12 percent below the 2002 funding level adjusted for inflation.

The reality is that for every $1 that Head Start received in 2002, it will receive just 89 cents in 2008. President Bush is not supporting the Head Start program. He is starving it, and leaving children behind in the process.

At the 2008 Conservative Political Action Committee conference in Washington, President Bush said that the tax cuts for the wealthy he pushed through a conservative Congress “contributed to a record 52 months of job creation. They helped produce strong economic growth — and the increased revenues from that growth have put us on track to a balance our budget by 2012. Here is the bottom line: tax relief works.”

What he did not say is that during that period, job growth, such as it was, has been anemic by historic standards, and has been on a downward path since early 2006, according to the federal government’s own data. In fact, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in January 2008 the number of people with jobs was just 6.2 percent higher than it was in January 2001, while the country’s population growth was 7 percent during that period. Not surprisingly, the number of people unemployed in January 2008, 7.57 million, was 25 percent higher than the number unemployed in 2001.

That statistic doesn’t even speak to the quality of jobs created versus the quality of jobs lost under Bush’s watch, once of the reasons the nation is experiencing record income inequality. The bottom line is that if President Bush is looking at the job market, tax relief has not worked to bring about broad-based prosperity.