First an apology. My post yesterday on my decision to vote for Warren (which I did at about 9:45 AM) and to contribute to her campaign ($100 online) was my first posting here in more than a month. Some may remember that in mid-November I suffered a stroke, later had surgery to relieve the stenosis in my carotid artery that caused the stent, followed by a brief TIA. I am still not fully back to energy, and have had less to spend online and writing, because I am still teaching full-time (and grateful that my school has been so generous and supportive of me through my medical travails).
I am not yet committing to the level of regular blogging that was so much a part of my life a few years ago, but after the positive response of yesterday, and the number of people who told me they value what I have to offer, I decided to offer this piece.
Let me be clear. There are things very important to me that will NOT be a part of this — our now almost 19 year old rescued cat is one example. Other things, like the health issues my wife and I have addressed over the past 7+ years are a part because they undergird the thinking that has led to this piece, which given where I am posting it is of course political in nature.
Political in nature — I say that in a very broad sense. That is, this is an explanation of how I shape my own thinking when it comes to political matters: what issues I consider, what aspects of those issues, the moral decisions with which they confront me.
I do not fit into easy categories. As an early Baby Boomer (born May 1946) I lived through and participated in and knew well some of the activists of the political activities of the 1960s and later, but my own politics can be considered very eclectic. After all, the political campaigns in which I have been active have included people fairly conservative on some issues of importance to Democrats, like Webb and Hollings, and others who were considered too far “left” by many, including McGovern.
These will be the musings of one man now approaching 74, who still thinks very much about the future because he spends his working hours teaching teenagers.
Make of it what you will, if you are interested enough to keep reading.
Health care was, in 2018, perhaps the most important issue motivating turnout, and it is still an important issue in 2020. My approach is shaped not only by the recent medical travails of my wife and myself, but also by what is now more than a decade of volunteering at free dental events in Southwest Virginia through the Virginia Dental Foundation’s Mission of Mercy.
$41,133.92.
That was the total amount billed to my insurance company for my stroke treatment in November. That does not include the ambulance bill, also largely paid by my insurance. Nor does it include separate charges by some of the doctor’s who consulted on my case.
Insurance covered the vast majority of the bills, either by payment or by negotiating the charges downward.
But just take that one figure. It is more than 2/3 of the average family income in the US. Ofter $26,000 was for one injection that was critical, that was given quickly enough to limit and reverse the effects of the stroke, and without which I almost certainly would not have been able to return to work in less than a week.
So let’s talk about healthcare. It should be a basic human right. IT should include vision, dental, hearing, and psychological services. It should cover all necessary prescriptions, devices, and treatments, I have no problem with people able to make money from providing services, but profits shoulod be controlled like the costs of public utilities (usually natural monopolies) are controlled, and large profits to passive investors at the expense of public health is an obscenity.
I am not committed to the notion of Medicare for All, for a number of reasons, not all of which I will explore here. We as a country have yet to make what Medicare (and Medicaid) we have cover all necessary expenses, the reimbursement rates are regularly too low and need to be supplemented by Congressional action that is usually insufficient, and in offering that approach we often do not address the number of jobs that might be lost in the private sector — there are after all many people serving the health care sector through private entities whose employment is NOT accounted for in the costs proposed for Medicare for All. There are the further issues of access to health care in rural areas — remember that many have limited numbers of all kinds of physicians, are seeing hospitals close, and the costs of ambulance services (which increase more quickly than the distance traveled) can be astronomical.
I do believe in a commitment to universal health care, but believe that there are models (Germany for example) where public/private partnerships udner government regulation/supervision might move us more quickly to complete coverage. Thus I want access to robust public options as well as government regulation. For health reasons, I want even the undocumented aliens to have access to more that just stabilizing emergency care (which in itself is very expensive). I would like to see development of public urgent care facilities (less expensive than full emercency care). The Government funds the development of many pharmaceuticals, and should therefore be able to control the pricing — which BTW perhaps should have restrictions on advertising to the public, which costs far too much — think how many different ads we see for similar type drugs that treat conditions that few of us have. Yes, I fully understand the First Amendment, but it was not aimed primarily at protecting COMMERCIAL speech, and there are precedents that allow its limitations.
Criminal Justice Reform. Let’s get real about it. First and foremost, there should not be for profit private prisons/jails. We have seen far too much of what that represents. Second, we should not be building prisons in communities remote from the source of their inmates, because that cuts the connections with family and community, which makes it harder to reintegrate former prisoners productively back into society. I will address racial/economic aspects of this anon, but one further point: if the prisoners are going to be counted as part of the population for census purposes where they are incarcerated, they should also be given full voting rights in those communities. Their presence already contributes to the tax base. Yes, the 13th Amendment allows involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime, but give where many of our prisons our counting prisoners in those communities represents a transfer of both economic and political power away from their home communities in a way that seems alien to the original intent of the Amendment.
Voting Rights. We cannot claim we are a liberal democracy (using those words with the political science meaning thereof) when we place barriers against political participation, making it hard to register, to vote, and in some cases to run for office. Those who use false rationalizations for actions/laws/etc intended to keep SOME people from full political participation are cowards: they are afraid of submitting themselves and their policies to the will of the people they want to govern. Rather than barriers to registering/voting, we should be moving to make both universal or at least far easier. By the way, we should consider requiring at least all federal elections (including primaries for those offices) to have provisions for voting for a period of AT LEAST one week, including at least one weekend, to make voting more accessible. Restricted days/hours, especially when combined with insufficient stations/equipment, is clearly intended to discourage/suppress the votes of certain groups.
Combined with this should be a move to eliminate partisan gerrymandering, the kinds of action that can lead a state to have one party get 60% of the vote but only 40% of the seats in a legislative body (or that state’s Congressional Delegation). Partisan gerrymjandering is also antithetical to liberal democracy.
It would be nice if Federal Judges, including the Justices on SCOTUS, would stop distorting the clear intent of the Bill of Rights. This is especially true for those who deliberately misread the First Amendment to allow for religion to be used to discriminate in commercial activity. It also should apply to the 2nd Amendment, which after all begins with a clause discussing the need for well-regulated militias, something ignored in the Heller decision (even as Scalia still acknowledged the right of government to restrict and even ban certain weapons).
Race and Economic Class. We are as a nation going backwards, becoming willfully less inclusive and allowing access and opportunity to be stifled. We see this in moving funds from public schools open to all to entities that are for profit, not well regulated, that can deny services (eg: special ed and English Language Learners). We see it in impositions on instruction/curriculum/testing that do NOT meet the educational needs of many, particularly in less well-off communities (which often overlap extensively with communities of color). This continues on with the defunding of higher education — the notion of tuition free public college just about totally disappeared. Combine with this the for-profit educational loan industry, and we are eliminating education as a pathway to improvement. The notion of for-profit higher education, often institutions that provide substandard instruction at the public trough (eg GI Bill) and the intent of education as something that should open doors rather than create a class that is permanently indebted loses any meaning.
Issues of race and economics applies on many levels — the ability to build wealth, red-lining, food deserts, etc. All of these need to be addressed.
So does our tax policy. There is NO JUSTIFIABLE REASON for the highest incremental tax rate to be less than 50%. We thrived as a country and build an expanding middle class when it was in the 90s. I think we need more tax brackets, perhaps a top rate of 60 or 70. The cap on income subject to FICA should be lifted. Deductible limits need to be raised for the middle class, and cut for the wealthy. There should be an EFFECTIVE corporate tax rate of 25%, with the equivalent of an Alternative Minimum Tax so that entities like Amazon and Apple and GE are paying for the services they get from governments. This should include taxes on income held outside the US and not subject to taxes in the nations where it is held.
I will not address military policy in this post. Nor will I explore the issues of the distortion of the rule of law. Each of these requires a great number of words.
There is one topic I must at least address. That is the existential threat posed by Climate Change. IF we do not address that IMMEDIATELY, nothing else will matter. We will see pandemics that will dwarf anything in human memory. We will live through fires that will dwarf Australia’s recent horrors. Species will go extinct as their habitat is destroyed. We will see mass starvation as food supplies are disrupted. This country may see flooding we cannot imagine, that will make the failure of the levees during Katrina seem trivial: remember how much of our population and infrastructure is in coastal cities, many with little elevation. Loss of massive amount of ice in Greenland and Antarctica will have devastating effects here, and will cause some island nations to largely disappear.
We need to do much more than rejoin the Paris agreement. We need to move to elimination of vehicles powered solely by petroleum fueled internal combustion engines. We need to conserve power of all kinds and move to retrofit buildings, and prohibit the building and expanding of structures that are not energy efficient. As a model I note that the Americans With Disabilities Act required retrofitting of existing buildings being modified to provide access to the disabled.
My own political participation will be shaped by these and other issues I have not addressed. I will have to make choices among these priorities given the candidates before me. I am not going to run for office myself.
I am also responsible for my own individual actions and choices, that they are as much as I can make them in conformity with what I believe is important.
For if I do not model what I believe, how can I teach or challenge others on these — and other — issues?
Peace?