Constantly looking for new experiences, I tried calling the White House comment line (202-456-1111) to register my outrage over the Democrats fumbling the family planning part of the stimulus package. I’m pretty sure that their internal response is “Yeah, whatever”. But I want them to get used to the idea that there are liberals out here in the wilds of California, and those liberals vote, and sometimes they even call on the phone. (Of course, I’ve been known to show up on Capitol Hill and ask questions, too.) From my POV, these people work for me and I’m a close supervisor.
(More, with added bonus comments on Donny Deutsch and Rachel Maddow, below the fold.)
The immediate stimulus for this was an e-mail message from Cecile Richards at Planned Parenthood Action Fund, on talk in the media that family planning will be stripped from the economic stimulus bill. Where are their heads?
So, I rang up the White House yesterday and asked where Obama was on this. Of course, as a comment line, they don’t tell you anything. It was a rhetorical question, anyway. I asked they convey the message that I would like Obama to use all his influence to make sure that family planning funding makes it all the way through the process.
The House apparently then stripped it out.
So, I called back today and asked that Obama intervene again, putting it back in when it gets to the Senate. I said that I know that this isn’t a sexy part of the bill, but that it’s an important economic part of the package. (They didn’t even laugh at this. I’m not sure why.) Anyway, here’s my argument to Obama:
Family planning funding is the only part of the stimulus package that I’ve seen that has any long-term positive effect on the economy. Almost everything else is short-term, pumping money into the economy so that people will have more to spend. Infrastructure spending (a very small percentage of the package) has some residual effect. A bridge you fix will be around providing service for decades. Tax cuts for the poor are a palliative because they aren’t coming with tax increases for the rich, although they will pump money into the spending part of the economy. Without reversing the Bush tax cuts (and the Reagan ones, for that matter), they will have little effect other than to run up deficits, hurting us in the long term.
But the thing in the bill that would have had the most positive effect in the long term was the family planning funding, because any pregnancies prevented now will continue to have payback for years. Poor people are in an extremely poor position to support additional family members. Helping them with family planning alleviates suffering from the group that is destined to suffer the most from the downturn. Family planning takes a huge expense out of their budgets, allowing them to spend their money on food, clothing, shelter and other essential items. At the same time, it reduces government spending because our system supports poor babies through various welfare programs. A baby not born means less Welfare spending, less food stamps, less emergency room care, and so on, saving governments at all levels untold billions of dollars in the aggregate.
So, axing spending for family planning is probably the most serious damage that the Republicans have been able to do to our economy in their fight against the current legislation.
My message to Obama was simple—the stimulus package needs to make long-term changes as well as short-term ones. Family planning does this. (I also mentioned that it needs to address the international trade agreements, which are one of the fundamentals of why our economy is in such bad shape. I pointed out that the U.S. has lost 25% of its manufacturing capacity since it peaked in 1978. We need wealth-creating jobs here in the U.S. This is totally missing from the bill, and it is absolutely necessary to the health of the economy. Until they do something on this, I’m not going to have confidence in the U.S. economy, and neither should you. I’m going to save as much as possible, preferably in gold or in instruments denominated in something other than dollars. But, I didn’t go into all the reasons. I just noted that the bill needs to have long-term aspects, one of which is fixing these trade agreements. The notetaker summarized this as “you’re in favor of American jobs”. That’s not far off the mark.)
And, while I had them on the phone, I put in a plug for prosecutions of the Bush Administration. I told them that I was sensing some ambiguity from Obama on this issue. But, how, I asked, are we going to maintain our moral standing in the world if we let this go?
Now, I know, as you do, that Obama probably ordered the family planning stripped out of the bill in an attempt to placate Republicans. In this he failed to get any Republican votes in the House, but that was never the point. The point was appealing to rank-and-file Republicans so that they would put up with more Democratic legislation going forward, and possibly weaken their politicians in subsequent elections. We’ll see if this works, but in the short term it was less than a success. The bill would have passed anyway, even if he hadn’t tinkered with it. So, we lost a clear economic benefit in the near term for a possible political gain in the long term. I wouldn’t have made that tradeoff.
I didn’t want to create hostility in my call, so I didn’t mention that I know Obama ordered the family planning funds removed. I just want them to think about the economic implications. I want them to know how much they are losing, in dollars and cents, over this kind of blind strategic blunder. Did they get any political gain for dumping family planning spending? Probably not. Did it cost them? Yes. It costs them politically with liberals (probably more than any gain from wooing conservatives) and it costs the country an enduring economic gain.
What is this battle over family planning really about? It isn’t a battle over morality. That’s the smokescreen. It’s a battle over money. It’s a question of profits. Why would you want to prevent abortions, stop contraceptives, keep people in the dark about the science of pregnancy, make them think that having babies is something inevitable? You would want to do that because it increases the working population. When you do that, you increase consumption and decrease wages. In other words, it’s good for profits.
When you strip away the rhetoric and the fake morality, this is just about money, and it’s just about class warfare. It’s just about making the rich richer and the workers more docile so that you can extract more from them. Family planning helps the working poor, reducing profits (and, incidentally, putting less pressure on the environment). It’s good for workers. That’s why Democrats push it and Republicans, the political arm of the rich, oppose it. In short, it’s good for us and bad for them. This is why failing to get it through Congress as part of this bill is a clear strategic failure, why it’s a clear sign of either stupidity on strategy or a failure of nerve. Or, more charitably, a lack of clarity on what it means at a core level.
We need to be very clear on our intentions. If our intention is to build a better country and a better world, then we need to build a more equitable society and one that does less damage to the environment. Providing family planning is one of the most effective ways of achieving those goals. That’s exactly why it should be a part of the stimulus package. It helps us build a better world.
I never bothered to call the Bush White House because I could tell my appeals would fall on deaf ears. Do you think Obama is listening?
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BTW, Donny Deutsch on CNBC, pointing out that the $18 billion in bonuses came out of the TARP money:
“Where is it written that a Wall Street guy is supposed to make $5 or $10 million a year?”
“Ordinary people, dumb people, make $500,000 on Wall Street. I don’t mind the captains of the industry that change the world and do what and build things—you would be astounded that thousands and thousands of people you wouldn’t hire making $5 and $10 million on Wall Street.”
“Why is money going out the back door to retain people who failed?”
Dweeb: “Because you have to retain people.”
This is hooey. Let these people take a job in Detroit. They don’t have to work on Wall Street. Give them a wrench and put them on the assembly line.
Whine, whine, whine. One of these firms paid a half-million dollars in compensation per employee last year. That’s over $225/hour. Wall Street workers have a better “union” than the UAW! Let’s try to get their average compensation down to something reasonable, like $70/hour.
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BTW, did you see Rachel Maddow last night take on a Republican Congressman? He made the mistake of saying that they had taken things like fixing the national mall and funding for contraceptives out of the bill, implying that these weren’t stimulus for the economy. Maddow pressed him on this point. Doesn’t this create jobs? No, not bureaucratic jobs, real ones, like groundskeepers, going out there and planting grass.
Unfortunately, this argument never resolved itself, but it was refreshing to see someone press the Republicans on their lie that these are not going to stimulate the economy. If the government borrows money and spends it on someone’s salary then it creates a job that would otherwise not be there. That creates a stimulus. It doesn’t matter whether a bureaucrat fills that job or anyone else; it’s still a job creation.
And, in calculating the effects of this no one seems to take into account the multiplier effect. If you create a job with government borrowing, then you are paying that person, so that’s one job. But that person also buys food, clothing, housing, transportation, and a myriad other things. When they spend the money, then that supports another job. In the aggregate, their money effectively creates a second job when they spend it, and those people spend it in turn. Of course, a certain amount of that money is taken out as profit at every turn, so that the effect diminishes over time. But paying a $60,000-a-year salary may create the equivalent of four or five $60,000-a-year jobs. Just like a bank making a loan, where the money is then loaned again, creating a multiplier effect (remember, this is the basis of how the reserve rate works), when the government borrows money and pays an additional salary, that salary is multiplied over and over again, creating multiple jobs. When you figure the cost per job created, you can’t just divide the size of the stimulus package by the size of the average job it pays for directly. That isn’t a good measure of how many jobs it creates, so it isn’t a good measure of the cost per job created. You have to factor in the multiplier effect. That means that the cost per job created is not, maybe, $60K, but rather more like $12K.
Of course, there would be a much larger job multiplier if the tax rates for the rich were higher. That’s why we should also raise the tax rates for the rich. The percentage of money taken out at every step in profits determines how much of a multiplier you get for each dollar spent. A very slight increase in the top rates would have an enormous effect on the job multiplier. It could increase it from, say, four to five, or from five to six. This is why delaying the tax increases for the rich is foolish policy. They should be part of the package. Taking them out was another strategic blunder by the White House.
Call the White House and tell them!