A couple of days ago, my wife's cousin forwarded me an article from Human Events that tried its darndest to make a mountain out of Joe Biden's molehill comments about Obama being tested during the first year of his presidency (I won't link to the article, but if you want it, you can find it out there on the tubes). I shot a reply back explaining how the article was editing what Biden said to make it seem as negative as possible and how, if you read all of his remarks, there was nothing really all that remarkable about it.
But mostly, I just wanted to express my shock at the fact that he was forwarding this steaming pile along to me and my hope that he wasn't voting for John McCain.
His reply: he's one of those mythical "undecideds" that we all hear so much about, and he wanted to hear why I was so convinced that Obama was the right choice.
I couldn't believe my luck. Needless to say, I jumped at the chance to help him make up his mind.
In his email telling me that he was still having trouble with the choice this election, these are the reasons (in his words, slightly edited for space) for his indecision:
Fair enough, [identity redacted to protect the undecided]. I'll give you my reasons why I voted for Obama today (I voted absentee since my wife and I will be in New Hampshire on election day working on the Obama Voter Protection Program) by responding to some of what you wrote, then I'll add a couple of other reasons. Just remember: you asked.
A. I actually like the "socialist" ideas (they're not socialist, or even close, but whatever) that Obama is running on. Let's take healthcare. There are some things that the so-called "free" market can do well (I don't believe that there is such a thing as a really "free" market, but that's a story for another email), but healthcare just isn't one of them. Right now, the United States pays more for healthcare per person than any other major industrialized nation on the planet, roughly $7600 for every man, woman and child. This adds up to over 16% of our GDP. That's horrendous. And the costs just keeps going up. The average rate of increase for healthcare costs over the last decade has been somewhere between 6 and 7 percent a year, which is about double the rate of inflation (inflation has been running somewhere between 3.2 and 3.4 percent a year), and that's in the good years. In the bad years, the increase has been even higher, around 9 to 10 percent per year.
Given how much we spend, we must get the best healthcare outcomes in the world, right? Wrong. Our healthcare system underperforms most other major industrialized countries (who universally have government run health care systems without while maintaining very capitalist economies,I might add) by almost any objective measure you'd like to use. We rank something like 30th in the world in life expectancy (behind countries like Jordan and South Korea) and 34th in infant mortality. And those are just two measures.
Why do we have such bad outcomes? First, we have somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 million people in the country who don't have health insurance at all. Studies have shown that people without insurance don't get the preventive care, screenings, immunizations, etc. that they need to keep from getting sick in the first place and often let less serious illnesses go until they become deathly ill and have to seek medical care in emergency rooms, where they can't be turned away for not having insurance. That's a horribly inefficient way of delivering care. So while people who have good insurance may get some of the most advanced care in the world, too many people either have none or have bad coverage that only protects them in case of a catastrophic illness (and not getting regular medical care is more likely to lead to such catastrophic illnesses, by the way). Second, while we spend a lot, way too much of that money goes to paying the administrative costs associated with private health insurance companies and not to actually caring for patients. Right now, somewhere between 15-20% of the money we pay for insurance is used for administrative costs. By comparison, in the traditional Medicare program (that's supposedly so horribly inefficient) only 2 percent of the costs are administrative. Why the discrepancy? It's mainly due to the fact that health insurance companies spend a lot of money trying to figure out how not to cover people because they're under pressure to forever increase profits so that their parents companies' stock prices don't go down, and fighting with people about their bills is actually cheaper than paying claims.
The "free" market system for delivering health care in this country has failed. It just doesn't work, and it's not going to work by simply giving people a $5000 tax break so that we can go buy into a system that's inherently flawed (McCain's answer, a "solution" that would lead to a whole host of other problems and probably end employer-based coverage completely). In order to drive down the cost of health care, you need to: 1. cut administrative costs (and Medicare has shown that we can run a health care system with low administrative costs); 2. create larger pools of insureds so that the risk can be spread between healthy people who are cheap to insure and the very sick who are more costly to insure; and 3. drive down the costs of actually providing care by modernizing health care records, by ensuring that there's better preventive care that will prevent more expensive health care problems from happening, and by using the bargaining power that comes with having a large pool of insureds to put the brakes on the escalating costs of drugs and medical equipment. What we really need in this country is a single payer system like every other major industrialized nation in the world has. Unfortunately, we're not prepared for that as a country. But barring that, Obama's plan is pretty good since it gives people and businesses the option of buying into the federal employees' health care plan, while also implementing some changes that will address the goals that I just described. If that's socialism, you can sign me up for it (and if you're interested in Obama's health care plan, you can read about it more on his website).
B. Obama's tax plan is far better than McCain's. And no, [deleted], it's not socialist to have a system that taxes people with higher incomes more than people with lower incomes. It's called a progressive tax system, and it's what we had in this country for the better part of the 20th century, when we weren't, as far as I can remember and from everything I've read, a socialist country. A progressive tax system is the norm in every capitalist country in the world and actually better for the economy (more on that in a bit). All this campaign rhetoric about "income redistribution" and "socialism" is just ridiculous (and for the record, McCain was for "redistribution" before he was against it: http://www.youtube.com/...
As Colin Powell (not exactly a Marxist) said this past Sunday, any tax system is going to involve "redistribution." That's what happens when you pay taxes: the government takes in money as revenue and then redistributes it through spending programs. This idea that we're taking money directly from rich person A and giving it to working class person B is just silly. What we're doing is taking a little more from rich person A, a little less from working class person B, and then using those revenues to pay for things like the military, schools, roads, energy initiatives, etc. I don't have a problem with the idea that rich people pay larger tax percentages to fund government programs. In fact, I think they should because chances are, they've leveraged the government infrastructure provided to help themselves accumulate wealth, and now that they are wealthy, they should have a responsibility to pay a larger share of their income. I actually like the fact that I pay lower taxes than Warren Buffet or Pete Coors or whomever. I'm not delusional enough to think that I'm ever going to be rich enough to pay taxes at the highest rates, and if I were, I would think it was my obligation to pay more than all the Joe the Plumbers out there in the world. My point is that I think that it's good that we ask the wealthy to pay more in taxes. It's not like they would be sharing it with the rest of us if they didn't have to.
That's right, I don't believe in the idea that if we just let rich people keep more of their money, they'll see fit to give more of it to us. The idea that rich people, compelled only by their sense of compassion and general benevolence, are going to let their wealth trickle down to the rest of us just doesn't have any basis in reality. The rich are rich because they're good at capturing and maintaining huge piles of cash. But you don't have to accept my word or share my distrust of rich people's munificence. Let's just look at some numbers:
**Since 2000, wages for the top 5 percent of wage earners have been on a steady rise. During that same time, as you know, tax rates for these higher income brackets have been cut dramatically. For instance, for a family of four with income of $1 million a year, the Bush tax cuts saved them between $85,000 and $86,000 a year off their tax bills. Meanwhile, between 2000 and 2006, corporate profits grew at an average rate of more than 10 percent a year—more than five times the average rate of growth in corporate profits during the previous 50 years. That's a lot of money that could be invested in higher wages or in growing businesses through increased investment. If trickle down economics worked, in other words, you would expect wages to be up for the lower and middle class, increased investment, and a dramatic rise in GDP.
**However, median household income, adjusted for inflation, was lower in 2007 than it was in 2000. If the top 20% are seeing wage increases, but the median household income is actually coming down overall, then that tells us that middle and lower class families are actually seeing their wage levels go down, when you adjust for inflation. Despite this decline in real wages, production is actually up about 20% since 2000, so it's not like workers have suddenly become lazy and are not producing enough to justify wage hikes.
**During the period after the first Bush tax breaks, real investment growth was comparatively low, a mere 2.7 percent per year. By comparison, in the years after 1993 (the year in which the Clinton administration passed a tax hike for the wealthiest Americans), the investment growth rate was 10.2 percent (just so you know, you also saw slower rates of investment growth after the first trickle down economic policies were put in place by Ronald Reagan in 1981 - about 2.8 percent growth per year).
**Economic growth as measured by real U.S. GDP was also comparatively weak following the big tax breaks passed by the Bush administration. GDP increased by about 2.5 percent per year between 2001 and 2008. Again, by comparison, GDP grew at a 3.9 percent clip per year after the tax hike of 1993 until 2000 (and only grew at a 3.5 percent rate per year between 1981 and 1988).
So what do we see? The rich got a huge tax break thanks to George Bush, but it didn't translate to higher wages, increased investment, or large gains in GDP in the wider economy, despite what trickle down theories tell us. So where is all the wealth going? Well, it's staying in the pockets of the very rich. Over the last years, the gap between the wealthiest Americans and the rest of us has grown to levels not seen since before the Great Depression. From 1947 to 1949, the top 10 percent of wage earners made about 20 times what the bottom 90 percent made. However, by 2006, the wealthiest Americans were making 77 times more than the other 90 percent of the country. So it's not just that we're paying more attention to CEO salaries; it's that they've grown increasingly out of line with what the rest of us are struggling to get by on.
All of this tells me that I should vote for the candidate who proposes rolling back the tax cuts that Bush gave to the wealthy. The country is going to need the additional revenue to do things like develop alternative energy resources, provide better health care for more people, repair the country's crumbling infrastructure, and help more people go to college. Given the numbers above, it's clear that letting the wealthy accumulate larger and larger shares of the wealth just doesn't benefit the country as a whole, and I'm voting for Barack Obama because he understands this and will pass a tax plan that actually acknowledges these economic realities.
C. Social security is not really that big of a problem. Even by the most conservative estimate (those that come from the Social Security Administration itself, which uses very cautious actuarial numbers), it's going to be solvent for decades to come, and we could continue to ensure its solvency by simply, as Obama suggests, asking those who make more than $250,000 to pay a bit more (between 2 and 4 percent more, including both employer and employee contributions).
D. Obama's committed to ending the war in Iraq. He had the good judgment to oppose the war from the beginning, and I think he will use that same good judgment to bring the troops home in a safe and orderly way. John McCain is fine with an open-ended commitment to keeping our military in Iraq, and this country simply can't afford that right now. We're paying $10 billion a month to keep our troops there, and we could be putting that money to much better use here at home. But more fundamentally, it's time for a change in our foreign policy outlook. Obama doesn't see the world in terms of an epic struggle of good vs. evil, and he's surrounded himself with a group of advisors who share his worldview and will actually work with those countries around the world who share our interests. John McCain's primary foreign policy advisors make George Bush's team seem moderate and reasonable by comparison. McCain has wholeheartedly embraced neoconservative thinking, and if he's elected, the people helping him make decisions will do nothing but inflame his natural tendency towards bellicosity, further isolating the U.S. from our allies and leading to the possibility of conflicts that the U.S. simply cannot afford to fight right now.
E. Finally, Obama is just the right leader for this moment in American history. We need a president who is willing to speak to and work with everyone in the country to bring about the kinds of change we need after the disaster of the last eight years. Obama doesn't divide the country into "real" America and fake America; he doesn't see some parts as pro-American and other parts as anti-American; and he doesn't call into question the patriotism or motives of those who disagree with his policies. Rather, he sees one America, united despite our different cultures, religions, races, and political beliefs (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9OhVMHIuO4). While Obama has never shied away from drawing sharp contrasts between his policies and those of John McCain, and while Barack has never failed to answer attacks on his campaign or his character, he has also never questioned John McCain's patriotism or honor. The last few weeks of the campaign have showed us, however, that McCain is willing to run a campaign built around exploiting people's prejudices, fears, and resentments. The way in which they've both been running their campaigns reveals a lot about how they intend to govern. Right now we need someone who is willing to make appeals to this country's highest ideals and aspirations, not their basest instincts. Barack Obama is that kind of candidate.
Sorry for writing so much, but you did ask.
A couple hours later, he wrote me back to say that he appreciated my thoughtful response and that he forwarded it along to his co-workers to read as well. While I can't say for sure that he's moved out of the undecided category, I hope that's one more vote we can count on on November 4th.