Welfare Capitalism

Employees are not paid in just wages. The days of earning an honest day’s wage for an honest day’s work are long gone. Can any of us answer the simple question, how much do you earn per hour? Salaried employees might start digging out a calculator and dividing their annual salary by 52 and then again by 40, but before you get too far into the math, let me reveal that I’m an hourly employee, and even I can’t say with any precision how much I earn per hour. Why? Because of welfare capitalism. In America over the course of the 20th century, we have switched from a system where employees are paid a wage to a system where employees are paid a mixture of wages and benefits in exchange for their efforts. I don’t earn x dollars per hour. I earn x dollars plus the value of my employer’s contributions to my health insurance, dental and vision plan, 401k retirement plan, and the value of my vacation package. How much does my employer pay for all of that? I have no idea. I am a little chagrined to say I don’t even have a very solid grasp of how much my contributions to my health and dental plans are.

Slate had an interesting article on welfare capitalism today that goes into the history in more detail and foretells the decline. The Slate article recounts the recent spate of companies in bankruptcy that have decided to stop paying pensions and to drop retirement insurance plans for currently retired people. The article posits that as companies either decide or are forced to abandon their welfare capitalist policies because of market pressure, the government will have to step in to fill the gaps. Note the use of the phrase “have to.” That’s Slate’s usage, not mine. I doubt the current Republican administration or majority Republican Congress would agree that the government “has to” provide social programs. I can imagine Dick Cheney and Dennis Hastert bristling at the idea of being told the government will have to fill in where private enterprise has failed.

Now, as you may have guessed, I’m a liberal and a social progressive. Being liberal simply means I am open to new ideas. Being socially progressive means I favor improving our society through universal access to necessary social institutions such as education, healthcare, utilities, and childcare. That does not mean I necessarily think the government is the best answer to providing these things. As a liberal, it means I favor considering all the options to figure out which are the best ones for making sure we provide life’s necessities to everyone who needs them.

California has a proposition on the ballot that we will be voting on in November that would require pretty much every employer, no matter how small, to provide health coverage to every employee. As a social progressive, I like the idea of making sure everyone has health coverage. But as a liberal, I have to be open to other ideas and consider the alternatives. As a liberal, I can’t accept at face value the idea that forcing employers to bear the burden of healthcare is the best idea. We have to consider just how much weight business can bear. How many of our social needs can we pile onto the backs of businesses? Making employers pay for the solutions to our problems might sound easy, but it really isn’t fair. Sure, in some cases it might be fair – when there is a large corporation with deep assets sufficient to provide a decent return on investment to shareholders, it is fair to redistribute some of that wealth to the employees in the form of health insurance coverage. We know it is fair because that is the system the free market has worked out for itself to everyone’s mutual benefit. Large employers pretty much universally provide health care. But there are plenty of small employers where the difference in wealth between the employees and the owners is so small that it hardly seems fair to ask them to redistribute that scant wealth.

So I get back to my initial question: how much do you earn per hour? What we are learning is that even if you were to find out exactly how much your employer pays for all your benefits and did all the math, you still might not know because some of what you are being “paid” now for your work is deferred compensation that may never materialize. That pension your employer is paying into as part of your compensation package might not be around when you retire. You might be working now in exchange for the promise that your employer will provide health care coverage when you retire, only to discover that when you retire your employer has changed its mind or gone belly up. We don’t know how much we earn because we don’t know that our “pay” is going to be there when it’s due.

Maybe it’s time that we started thinking about getting back to a system of asking employers to just pay its employees their wages - and that's all. Maybe we should stop asking our employers to provide for all our social needs. Maybe its time to start looking for other institutions to provide some of our necessities. As individuals, do we really care whether our insurance is provided by our employer? After all, we don't look to our employers to provide us with car or homeowner's insurance. I think most of us just want to know that if we get hit by a car, we don’t have to worry that going to the hospital is going to ruin us and jeopardize everything else in our lives. A European model of state-sponsored health care is one model we can look to. But I’m open to other ideas. I have to be. I'm a liberal.

Where Kerry Stands on Iraq

I feel like I'm getting lazy, but I'm going to do it again. I'm devoting most of this blog entry to other people's writing. First, John Kerry came out with his best speech yet. The full text of that speech is available here: http://www.johnkerry.com/pressroom/speeches/spc_2004_0920.html.
I'm a big proponent of listening to what the candidates have to say in their own words. I believe, as Kerry says in the opening of his speech, that elections are about choices. And one of the easiest ways to learn about what our choices are is to listen to what the candidates have to say about themselves and each other. (I have also long held that the worst ways of informing ourselves about our choices are following polls and coverage of election strategy. Those are nothing but examples of lazy journalism and a waste of time. Never respond to election polls.) So read Kerry's speech. It hits on most of the big points Kerry's been skipping up to now. Bush as pathological liar. Bush as inept war president. How Kerry is different.

Now, we know we can't trust politicians to tell us the truth about themselves or each other. Not the whole truth anyway. That is where the media comes in. We need the media to call the candidates on their statements. That is the beauty of freedom of speech. Crackpots like Zell Miller can rant away about how Kerry voted against pretty much every weapons system our military uses, but we can count on the media to expose those misrepresentations for the garbage they are. So after reading Kerry's speech on Iraq, we are correct to question whether Kerry has told us the whole truth. Is that really what he means? Well, William Saletan, Slate's chief political correspondent, has written an excellent piece parsing Kerry's speech. Click on the title of this entry to read the Slate story. Saleltan does a great job distilling Kerry's long-winded and obtuse style into simple statements, and does an equally great job pointing out where Kerry hasn't been specific enough.

I just love it when election coverage rises to the occasion.

Couldn't have said it better

I disagree with Bush's handling of the problem of global terrorism. I am convinced he has made our world more dangerous rather than safer. While I give him full credit for his successes, such as the destruction of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, his failures far outpace any successes. I wanted to talk about why I think Bush has failed in his war on "terra," but Stephen Holmes, a law professor at New York University, wrote an article that appeared in Salon.com today that more eloquently and more completely made the case than anything I could have written. So instead of rehashing everything he said, I am just going to post the link. Just click on the title of this post, and it will take you to the his article, "Why Republicans Can't Fight Terror."

The issue of how we are going to fight terrorism is an important one in this election. It is perhaps the most important issue. So if you are considering voting for Bush, take the time to read this article. Maybe you'll disagree and still vote for Bush. But for an issue as important as this, it is worth it to take the time to get informed.

How would we react part 2

It looks like we found out that our reaction to terrorists is pretty much the same as the Russian reaction.

Here's the pattern in outline form:
1. Horrible, indescribable terrorist attack happens.
2. National and international feeling of unity around the tragedy builds.
3. National leader in country where the attack occurred uses national sense of unity to push a policy that that has nothing to do with terrorism by saying the policy is necessary to fight terrorism.

Valdmir Putin has announced his plan for making Russia safer from the Chechen terrorists and for preventing another school hostage taking. He has proposed changing how local governors and parliamentary representatives are selected. Now, local governors are elected by the local populace. Putin wants to change that system - he will appoint local governors who will then be approved by local councils. In other words, no one could be a regional governor in Russia unless Putin selected him or her. He would also change the parliamentary election system. Now, half the seats in the lower house of parliament in Russia are directly elected in local elections - like our House of Representatives. Putin would change that to eliminate all local elections of parliamentary members. Local people could only vote for a party, not a person. Then the party would select who the representatives would be.

Now you might be reading this and wondering what these changes would do to stop terrorists from taking a school hostage. You are probably thinking, "I see how they will make Putin more powerful by eliminating any regional opposition to his political party. But how does that make Russia safer?" And of course, it doesn't. Putin claims it will strengthen the country by consolidating control. Does that make sense to you? Do you think the Chechen separatist extremists will now throw down their arms and forsake violence because the local governor in the town where they intended to kill schoolkids was selected by Putin directly instead of being locally elected?

Where did he get such a crazy plan, and what makes him think it will work? Well, it worked in the U.S. of A. for good ole Dubya. In the aftermath of 9/11, Bush pushed through his plan of invading Iraq. Iraq, one of the few countries in the middle east where none of the hijackers were from, and which had no ties to any terrorist organizations. Now, I'm not trying to argue Saddam Hussein is a great guy, but his government was a target of al Quaida because it was secular. There is no connection between Iraq and terrorism. (As a sidenote, I heard administration officials make the claim that there is a terrorist connection because there was an al Quiada cell in one of the cities in Iraq before the war that is giving us so much trouble now. There were also al Quaida terrorists cells operating in San Diego before 9/11. Does that make the U.S. a partner in terror? Or just California?) But Bush claimed then and still claims his war in Iraq is part of the global war or terrorism. Just like Putin claims his power grab is part of his country's war on terrorism.

How would we react?

The Chechen rebels in Beslan attacked a school and took more than 1000 people, many of them children, hostage using guns and simple explosives. Apparently, when some of the explosives accidentally went off in the gymansium where the hostages were being held, a melee ensued resulting in 326 dead hostages, 9 dead bystanders and police, and 30 dead terrorists. I saw reports of over 700 injured. Do the math. 700 injured and 326 dead hostages is more than a thousand dead or injured of approximately 1300 total hostage. That's about 76% dead or injured.

What was the Russian plan for dealing with terrorists in such a situation? And more importantly, what is our plan? There is a presidential campaign waging right now. Isn't that the kind of question we should be asking our candidates? Of George Bush, we have the right to ask what the current administration's response to such an attack would be. What is our current plan for dealing with terrorists taking a school hostage? Of John Kerry, we should be asking what his plan would be. I want to know.

I don't know whether these deaths could have been prevented. I think it would be impossible to prevent all such attacks. We can't turn all of our public spaces into fortresses. So given the possibility of terrorists mounting such an attack in the U.S., how would we respond? Do we leave negotiations up to local law enforcement? Does the Pentagon already have a strategy? Do we take a hard-nosed no-negotiations approach?

And I think just as importantly, why hasn't our media asked these questions already? I thought of them as soon as I heard of the hostage taking. The first thing I thought when I heard that Putin has a strict no-negotiation policy is, "What is our policy?"

What is our policy?

Issue Oriented Campaigning

I am amazed at how effectively the Republicans have painted John Kerry as a flip flopper. That's a serious accusation and it matters in a presidential election. If a candidate regularly changes his or her stance on an issue, it reflects poorly on leadership skills. Some changes are necessary and to be expected - we want our leaders to learn and grow. But too many changes, or changes that are not justified or explained by anything other than polling show a lack of vision and principles.

So it is troubling to me when John Kerry is painted as a flip flopper. I try to give people the benefit of the doubt, and I know that in an election we can usually count on the opponent to provide us with information about a candidate's bad side. So when Republicans say Kerry waivers and falters and changes his mind all the time, I try to look into those accusations. The frustrating thing is, the accusations aren't justified. I won't spend too much time refuting the allegations of flip-flopping because there are so many great resources on the web for doing that. (Check out Salon.com for a partisan approach, or Slate.com for a more neutral approach to dissecting campaign charges.)

But there is one charge of flip-flopping from Bush's acceptance speech last night that is just too egregious to let pass - because it accuses Kerry of flip-flopping while at the same time suggesting he doesn't support providing our troops in Iraq with sufficient gear. Bush used an actual Kerry quote: "I actually did vote for the 87 billion before I voted against it." Now, that 87 billion refers to the additional money Bush asked Congress for to fight the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. So what did that comment mean in context? Well, Kerry voted for the 87 billion in an amendment he proposed that would have also temporarily suspended the Bush tax cuts on those who make more than $400,000 per year. He then voted against the measure that passed, which made no provisions for paying for that additional 87 billion in spending. Some could argue that after his own amendment failed he should have gotten on board and voted for the money anyway - but no additional funds were needed for at least four more months. There was no reason to hurry through an inrresponsible bill. There was still plenty of time to find a way to support our troops while not sending us deeper into debt. So Kerry took one position on the issue: support the troops, but do so in a fiscally responsible manner. For taking one position that was smart, well-reasoned, and responsible, he was labeled as a flip-flopper who doesn't want our troops to have body armor.

There is a substantive difference between Bush and Kerry on the 87 billion dollar issue. Bush favored deficit spending (borrowing from our kids) to cover the cost while Kerry favored paying for the additional spending with additional revenue (reinstating taxes on the wealthiest.) There are sound policy reasons for taking either approach. Those two approaches reflect real differences between the candidates. Why not campaign on this actual issue instead of on demonstrably false name-calling? If Bush should be re-elected, shouldn't it be for his policy positions and not for his superior ability to lie and disparage? Of course, if Bush campaigned on his positions, he couldn't be re-elected.

Introduction

I have always thought I should keep a journal, but I have never been able to get motivated to start. This blog is going to be my attempt to keep track of some thoughts.