Buy a bit of economic justice

Raise the minimum wage

So, I've written the Washington Post, again. And, reliably, it does not appear that they will print my letter.

No matter. I almost prefer the opportunity to elaborate my point in a forum (this one) that I know will always make space for me and, from time to time, will be read by others.

In any case, here's what I wrote:

Editor,

I applaud Charles Lane's effort to broadly consider the merits of an increase in the minimum wage ("Better than minimum wage," Feb. 19). One quibble, though.

Lane reviews four of the possible effects of an increase that may minimize an employer's interest in cutting jobs when an increase in the minimum wage is mandated. But in concluding that an expansion of the earned income tax credit (EITC) is superior to an increase in the minimum wage, Lane appears to discount two of the potential benefits connected to an increase--lower turnover and higher organizational efficiency.

Why not capture those positives, too?. Get better at calibrating and regularizing increases in the minimum wage and spread the benefits of a broader EITC.

Jeff Epton

Brookland

But the truth is that I have more than one nit to pick with Lane's piece, and one happy observation to add, as well. I held back on the quibbles because the Post doesn't seem very receptive to extended critiques and I figured the one point--that Lane was posing an either/or choice when both would work--was substantial enough.

In any case, Lane's column kicks off with his characterization of Paul Krugman as a "liberal firebrand [who] is still economist enough..." to note that quickly raising the minimum wage by a substantial amount would create problems. This description ignores the fact that Krugman is also a Nobel Prize winner in economics and signals to the casual reader that Krugman is a partisan and Lane is not.

This is not good journalism. We are all partisans. Krugman is the one with the Nobel. With his characterization of Krugman the firebrand, Lane is also signaling from the beginning that he is going to come down in favor of some alternative to raising the minimum wage.

Applauding Lane for actually appearing to be carefully considering a minimum wage increase was a bit of sychophancy in the interest of getting the letter published. Say it didn't work, if you will. Say that sychophants will burn in hell, if you like, but I tried.

The issue my letter raises is that despite Lane's apparent willingness to consider all the pros and cons of raising the minimum wage, he actually dismisses two potential benefits pointed out in a study by John Schmitt of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). Workforces that are compensated better at the low end may end up working with more enthusiasm and improved efficiency. In the long run, such improvements allow employers to recover costs. But Lane sees that potential benefit as less certain than the potential downsides, like the possibility of reduced employment overall, and fewer job opportunities for youth.

Indeed, Lane cites studies that show reduced unemployment for "young, low-skilled people" when the minimum wage goes up. That ought to be a genuine concern and should be addressed, even if the problem is not quite the one Lane defines. The fact is that many young people have been pushed out of the job market with increasing frequency as more older people, including those collecting Social Security, take part-time jobs just to make ends meet. Holding down the minimum wage doesn't serve either group.

There is a silver lining in Lane's column. He actually uses CEPR as a substantial source for his column. That's a big deal, and a credit to CEPR and to co-founders Dean Baker and Mark Weisbrot who have been a relentless voice for progressive economic policy. Lane has always been a centrist, at best, and has never seemed very willing to consider progressive policy options. But he does here, even if he ends up rejecting the idea of a minimum wage increase.

As George Lakoff tells us (a bit on Lakoff here), sometimes speech is action. Baker, Weisbrot and CEPR keep researching, writing and talking and have helped move the political discussion to the left.

A better column on the minimum wage by Harold Meyerson ran in the Post on Feb. 20. In "A jump-start for wages," Meyerson points out that the lion's share of the benefits from productivity gains have been going to employers, not workers, since 1973. "The decoupling of wages from the fortunes of big business has been going on for the past 40 years," he writes.

Meyerson cites another study that may not have crossed Lane's desk. "As a January report by Cal-Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez documents, while the income of the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans rose by 11.2 percent during the recovery years of 2009-11, the incomes of the bottom 99 percent declined by 0.4 percent. That's some recovery," he observes. Read the rest of Meyerson's column here.

Cruelty and American exceptionalism

The things we do on purpose

Two days ago, I posted "War makes us stupid--and violent." Its central point was that our violent culture, our "exceptional" America, has been shaped by a root cause that runs considerably deeper than first-person shooter video games, deeper than our highest per capita gun ownership rates. The post focused on our country's unique history of war making, on our history of continuous mobilization and war fighting, more than a century of continuous warfare, to this point (with a couple years off during the Great Depression).

Of course, there has to be more than one root cause, more than one factor that makes the United States easily the most violent among industrialized nations. There is the racism of our past and present, our racism against Native-, African-, Asian- and Latino-Americans, and immigrants of all description. There is the legacy of slavery. There is the history of the violence wreaked on indigenous peoples and cultures; our colonizing ancestors, unlike most invaders who occupied conquered territories, did not assimilate. By and large, we obliterated those who had been here before us. We fought a civil war bloodier than any other in the history of industrialized democracies. There are plenty of other root causes to propose and argue.

For now, I'm going to try and stay focused on the continuous-war thing. But any assertion that the influences which have shaped a uniquely cruel and violent country need to be articulated, understood and addressed requires some sort of further argument that the country in question is in fact so unfortunately exceptional. That argument cannot rest exclusively on the twin facts of highest per capita gun ownership and highest homicide rate.

A column by Harold Meyerson, in yesterday's Washington Post, seems an excellent source for more evidence that the United States is exceptional as much for its cruelty as for its generosity.
In "America flunks its checkup," Meyerson sifts through a recent report on longevity and health care comparing the U.S. to 16 other developed countries. "...the United States placed dead last in life expectancy, even though we lead the planet in the amount we spend on health care," he wrote.

"Americans die young. The death rate for Americans younger than 50...is almost off the comparative charts," he continued. "A range of exceptionally American factors--car usage and lack of exercise, junk food diets, violent death from guns, high numbers of uninsured...the high rate of poverty--all contribute to this grim distinction."

Meyerson makes such points on the way to the further observation that once Americans reach 65, if they are lucky enough to do so, longevity rates suddenly and dramatically improve. That, he wrote, is because at that age Americans enter a national health care system comparable to that which had been available at all ages to citizens in the other 16 countries assessed in the study.

It's a good column and I certainly have no problem with a smart argument in favor of a birth-to-death national health care system in the U.S. But I'm more concerned with how much of Meyerson's discussion of these unique aspects of American life fits into the thesis that the U.S. is unusually cruel in its social policies and that it's worth figuring out why.

Most of the data shared in Meyerson's piece--higher death rates for younger people, high obesity rates, more uninsured people, higher auto usage and more--are the direct outcomes of long established social policy. And the fact that they are the outcomes of long established policy, and that the relationship of those outcomes to those policies has been understood for a generation, if not more, means that those outcomes and those policies are deliberate choices.

In other words, it has been the policy of the United States for many years that health care will be rationed in favor of the wealthy, that jobs and homes will be located at a distance from each other and that they will not be linked by public transportation, and that food deserts that encourage bad nutrition will be characteristic of places where poor people and minorities live. For going on at least 50 years, Americans have been voting for the politicians who approve and support such policies.

There is more, of course, a public education system that was once the best in the world in terms of universality and accessibility has been defunded and allowed to collapse for more than a generation. Wage stagnation has been worse and gone on longest in the U.S., while the lion's share of benefits from productivity increases since the 1970s has gone to the wealthy. All these outcomes are the result of economic policies that have created and maintained private profit opportunities in regard to basic needs, policies that other developed nations provide as direct benefits to their citizens or that those same countries regulate far more carefully than the U.S. does.

So if we know what we're doing, and we know what will happen when we do it, and we know that our  fellow citizens will be injured by the doing, and we still do it, don't we intend the damage that we cause? And haven't we been doing that damage, in some cases, for quite a long time? And if we are going to learn to control ourselves, and stop doing such damage,  don't we need to understand why we have been and are so cruel in the first place?

By all means, let us regulate gun ownership more effectively, and let us continue to reform the health care system in our collective interest. But let's look at how we got to be more warlike than any other developed nation. And let's take a long look at what being that way has cost our country and ourselves.

The Left is still a no-show in American politics

The time for sitting it out is over

Harold Meyerson has a nice piece in the Washington Post today, "A loser of a tax deal" about the declining share of GDP that goes to wages and salaries. "The earned income share of GDP peaked in 1969 at 53.5 percent," Meyerson writes. "In 2012, it was 43.5 percent."

"Where did those 10 percentage points of GDP--currently about $1.5 trillion every year--go instead of to U.S. workers?" he asks. Simply put: corporate profits, a huge transfer of wealth to the owning class.

When those profits are distributed to shareholders, the lion's share goes to the very wealthy, whose income from dividends and capital gains, Meyerson points out, are taxed at a much lower rate than income from wages and salaries. Into the bargain, retained profits are frequently invested by corporations in overseas production rather than domestically. This, of course, reinforces foreign low-wage competition with American workers.

All of this, Meyerson tells us, is redistributionist--a charge frequently lobbed at liberals, but which more accurately describes the right-wing agenda. "Far from mitigating the consequences of this shift [in income from working people to the wealthy], the U.S. tax code reinforces the redistribution from wages to profits," Meyerson writes.

"None of this upsets Republicans, but it would be nice if Democrats realized these tax breaks undermine everything they stand for," he concludes.

Meyerson's column is a helpful, fact-based assessment of the recent fiscal-cliff deal. It is only a minor quibble to observe that Democrats likely do realize that the current tax code, with its favorable treatment of unearned income and overall generosity toward corporations and the wealthy, does undermine what they stand for.

And it's certainly worth pointing out that President Obama might have gotten more in negotiations, if he had been rougher on Republicans. But the deal, unpalatable as it might have been for the Left, nevertheless represented a significant reversal of Bush-era tax cuts in the face of powerful irrational resistance from the Right. The tax on dividend income, for instance, went up 33 percent. That would have been a more meaningful step, if the payroll tax hadn't gone up even more.

In the long run, the fight for economic justice is going to take something more than an aggrieved awareness of how far we are from that happy state. It will take a level of Democratic electoral vigor that isn't possible with a Left that is eternally divided about the wisdom of participating in "bourgeois" politics.

Right now unions and minorities, organizationally and individually, are the only participants in the electoral process who organize and vote based on the interests of working people. A scattering of environmental and feminist organizations and other nonprofits are involved, as well. But there may very well be as many as ten million or more leftists, with organizing, communication and policy experience, who could be running, working and voting in local, state and federal elections; and doing so in a way that would reestablish a liberal agenda as a thing to be reckoned with here in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

We do have a dog in the Michigan fight

The union movement built prosperity and solidarity

Membership in organized labor has been declining for years. The largest industrial unions have gone the way of rustbelt industries, declining and nearly disappearing. The public sector unions that held the line through the last part of the 20th century have suffered significant losses during the Great Recession and its aftermath, and teachers' unions in particular have suffered from right-wing attacks that have accompanied the education reform movement. The passage this week of a right-to-work law in Michigan may be part of the continuing decline, but ought to raise new alarms on the American left.

There are plenty of critiques of unions in the mainstream press, so none of those will be linked here. Readers can hunt them down easily enough. Yes, union leaders are sometimes too cozy with power, especially in states and cities. And, yes, union leaders sometimes get too comfortable with the perks of their own power.

But so do progressives who get elected to public office or settle into tenure track positions at major universities. But they do not stop being politically progressive simply because they compromise or, even, overindulge. Neither do unions. The point is that regardless of what unions and their leaderships sometimes do to deserve criticism, progressives need to recognize that to err in some of these familiar ways is both all too human and ought not be an obstacle to progressive solidarity with labor.

I've written before about the need for the left to completely embrace the union movement; twice when I was working for In These Times ("Labor's Future is Ours" and "When Mainstream Media Tells Labor Stories"), and several posts on this blog (many of which can be found here).

Now, Harold Meyerson, one of the few mainstream media columnists with a true appreciation of the value of organized labor, has written an instructive column in the Washington Post, "The Lansing-Beijing connection," on how right-to-work laws undermine prosperity and increase inequality. "[A]n exhaustive study by economist Lonnie K. Stevens of Hofstra University found states that have enacted such laws reported no increase in business start-ups or rates of employment. Wages and personal income are lower in those states...Stevens concluded, though proprietors' incomes are higher," Meyerson wrote.

Everyone who embraces the goals of reducing income and wealth inequality in the United States and globally ought to be embracing labor organizing, as well. Jobs with Justice, a national organization founded to be a bridge between non-union progressives and the labor movement, is one way to get moving on this. Also, check out labor writer David Moberg's interview with Larry Cohen, organizing director for the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and a founder of Jobs with Justice.

Compromise or Betrayal

The Politics of Gridlock

So, I wrote the Washington Post, again. Something like Letter to the Editor number lebenty-leben, I’m guessing. They didn’t get around to publishing it (quelle surprise!), but here it is:

Editor,

“Obama did not lead a U.S. retreat from the world,” Jackson Diehl writes in “Foreign policy red flags “(Post, Nov. 12). “Instead he sought to pursue the same interests without the same means.”

Obama has withdrawn ground troops from war zones, cut the defense budget, and backed away from nation-building projects and from U.S.-led interventions, Diehl tells us. That sounds to me like a decision to pursue distinctly different interests around the world and, more specifically, to make it clear that the U.S. will no longer police the world to secure all the advantages that once accrued under Pax America.

If my understanding is correct it might mean that U.S. corporations can no longer invest and operate globally backed by the threat of force. If my understanding is correct it might also mean that groups with historic grievances against the U.S. (real or imagined) will unfortunately have more space and freedom to plot anti-American violence. Indeed, that might make Americans a bit more vulnerable, a risk that we will have to figure out how to manage and reduce by other means. But if we can do this through a “lighter footprint” globally, we might become one of the principal architects of a more peaceful world.

Or is Diehl suggesting that a heavier footprint might get better results? Are we talking, say, the Bush footprint, which resulted in upwards of one million Iraqis and Afghanis dead or displaced, thousands of American fatalities, and a military budget that roughly doubled from the first Bush-year to the last? Is that the footprint Diehl is recommending?

Jeff Epton

That’s the letter, but there’s more to say, of course. Obama’s “lighter footprint” still includes drone attacks, Guantanamo and anything but a get-tough-with-Israel element, but at this time in history, and after almost 50 years of disappointment with American foreign policy, I’m more than willing to settle for half a loaf.

And, speaking of compromise, disgruntled leftist though I may be, I’m ready for more of it. If Barack Obama wants to trim a little around the edges of programs I support, including Medicare, in exchange for Republican votes for higher taxes on the wealthy, other revenue increases of various kinds, closing tax code loopholes or ending subsidies that supplement the profits of oil companies and hedge funds and other corporate actors, and continuing reductions in the military budget, I’m ready to sign on.

Some of those cuts likely will harm individuals and communities that need more, not less, government assistance or protection. But without Republican support for revenue increases the country will continue to be pummeled by the effects of political gridlock.

Of course, there are lots of possible compromises that will provide no long-term benefit. Any worthwhile deal with Republicans in Congress must be part of a strategic assessment that suggests that the Republicans who do compromise will be willing to do so more than once.

I don’t know what criteria to apply in reaching such a conclusion, but I’m fairly certain that there are Republican senators and representatives who believe that a deal of some sort would be better for the country than falling off the fiscal cliff and also believe that Republicans who continue on their present reactionary path might well be overwhelmed by an approaching demographic tsunami.

There will be plenty of folks who wish to argue with this approach. People who believe that compromise can easily convert to betrayal. Robert Borosage lays out that perspective in persuasive detail in “A ‘grand bargain’ on the fiscal cliff could be a grand betrayal.”

Borosage’s main argument is that going over the fiscal cliff will not immediately do the kind of damage that so many observers are predicting. Further, he says, the nation does not have a debt or deficit problem, but a jobs problem that needs to be addressed first. And, finally, that there is plenty of time next year, after going over the cliff that is not a cliff, to address the problems created by lapsed tax cuts and automatic budget cuts.

But I’m not persuaded. I agree with the proposition that getting more people back to work is more important than addressing the deficit. But what Borosage and I believe is not going to compel action. The end of the payroll tax cut is going to reduce household income for even the poorest working families by a meaningful amount. That’s not going to get anybody back to work. There are more layoffs coming, as well, as the fiscal cliff approaches.

Sorry I am that compromise is necessary, but January will not create a more flexible Congress or present new opportunities to pass another sorely needed stimulus bill. Stimulus items like spending for infrastructure, extending unemployment benefits, and preserving the payroll tax cut are going to take compromise, now or later. Election victories notwithstanding, coaxing the right number of Republicans to vote with Democrats is going to take giving up something.

Though Jackson Diehl’s Nov. 12 piece left something to be desired, two Post columnists wrote rather more interesting columns that ran on Nov. 14. Dana Milbank’s “The Confederacyof Takers” points out in substantial detail how well most red states do feeding at the public trough. “Red states receive, on average, far more from the federal government in expenditures than they pay in taxes. It is the opposite in blue states,” Milbank wrote.

Also, check out Harold Meyerson’s “The GOP’s gerrymandered advantages,” which points out that in Florida, Virginia, Ohio, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania congressional races, Republicans won 30 more seats in the House of Representatives than Democrats, despite the fact that Obama won the popular vote in those states by margins that should have led to a 30-seat Democratic advantage. That did not happen, Meyerson wrote, because Republican gubernatorial and legislative control of those states after the 2010 census permitted significant gerrymandering of House districts. “…by suppressing competition, and crafting uncompetitive districts, [Republicans] maintained their hold on the House last week.”

 Obviously, it will take a while before the full effects of the coming demographic change will swamp intransigent Republicans. In some cases, it will take Democratic victories in tight elections in state legislative districts over the next six years before redistricting will permit Democrats to once more exercise all the prerogatives of the majority party in Congress. But legislative victories for working people and minorities should come a little easier in the future than they have over the last four years.

In the meantime, we should all keep in mind that working people in the red states are suffering, too. After all, capital and organized commercial interests in the south, like weapons manufacturers, oil companies and agribusiness, are siphoning off a huge share of the federal largess that heads that way.

Ordinary folks in the red states are pretty much getting the same shaft as working people elsewhere. They may even have been getting it longer. The fact that they don’t seem to vote their own interests is a measure of how long they’ve been exploited and of the absence of unions to organize and message an alternative. While we are compromising, and strategizing our way to future victories, we ought to figure out a way to talk plainly and supportively to folks in the red states. They are Americans and they are our sisters and brothers.

Bad Health Care Bill Is Better Than None

The hard road to a more perfect democracy

The health care bill that hopefully will pass in the Senate on Christmas Eve isn't final. The finalized legislation will be negotiated between House and Senate conferees early next year. But it seems safe at this point to make a few observations about what the Health Care Reform struggle 2009-2010 will do or has done.

• It has helped clarify just how dysfunctional Congress is (see Ruth Marcus' "The next decade from hell?" Washington Post, Dec. 23 here or Richard Cohen's "An imperfect ray of hope," Washington Post, Dec. 22 here).

• It exposed some members of the Senate, like Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) or Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) as particularly repellant (see Michael Gerson's "For sale: One senator (D-Neb.). No principles, low price." Washington Post, Dec. 23 here or Eugene Robinson's "Health-care hardball," Washington Post,Dec. 18 here).

• It created opportunity for Republican members of the Senate to raise the bar for hypocrisy. Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority leader and his caucus did everything they could to keep health care reform in any form from passing, including forcing Democrats to get 92 year-old Sen. Byrd (D-W Va.) to haul himself and his wheelchair to the Senate for roll call votes three times in the last week. They relentlessly criticized every compromise Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) brokered in an effort to get something passed. Hearing Sen. Lindsay Graham (D-SC) on NPR denounce the admittedly repugnant deal with Ben Nelson, as though Graham was a disappointed advocate for a better bill, seemed somewhat like we had all fallen down a large rabbit hole. Other Republicans seemed to be wishing for fate in the form of, say, a sudden illness that would prevent Democrats from rounding up 60 votes. It boggles the mind that Republicans have seemingly decided their obstructionist behavior and petty cruelties improve their chances of success in the 2010 mid-term elections.

• It will result in a bill that will dismay virtually every Democratic voter (see Harold Meyerson's "For unions, a messy bargain," Washington Post, Dec. 23, here), but it is a start; that fact will prove to be more important than many disappointed advocates are likely to believe (see Eugene Robinson's "Carpe health reform," Washington Post, Dec. 22, here or Henry J. Aaron's "Health-reform legislation would accomplish more than critics admit," Washington Post, Dec. 18, here).

• It confirmed that there is a senator for the rest of us. Bernie Sanders, the Independent from Vermont worked diligently to make a bad bill as promising as possible (see Katrina Vanden Heuvel's post on The Nation's website, Dec. 22, here).

It seems to be a general perception that if the US electorate were as sophisticated as the Western European demos, we would have a democracy that provided national healthcare, assumed international leadership on global warming and invaded fewer foreign countries, but that's probably not a helpful comparison. We should measure our democracy by the effort we put in to improving it, by the quality of our encounters with political opponents, and by the accumulated progress we make. As Eugene Robinson pointed out in "Carpe health reform," the US may continue for some time to come to use wealth and work as a means to ration health care, but with President Obama's signing of the health care reform bill early next year, we will, for the first time, "enshrine the principle that all Americans deserve access to medical care regardless of their ability to pay." We should celebrate that achievement while we are also working on the peace dividend, affordable housing, quality public education. and clean air and water.

Health Care Reform Lurking

But Not Good Enough?

The Washington Post ran seven articles on health care, one on the front page, in an 18-page first section today. The coverage added up to more than 10 percent of the paper's first section. Hurricane Katrina may have been the last time that coverage of a single issue was so dominant in the Post, though I suppose I should check back issues to see if Michael Jackson's death might have made a similar footprint.

But the Post's focus is right on and the effort demands attention. In "Health Insurance Industry Spins Data in Fight Against Public Plan" writer David Hilzenrath says the industry is "cherry-pick[ing] the facts."

Citing an industry spokesperson who says the vast majority "of Americans are satisfied with their existing health coverage," Hilzenrath makes the editorially sound observation that the same poll shows that respondents also support "the creation of a public [health insurance] plan." Fetching additional data from another source, Hilzenrath observes that the public's apparent affection for their existing health insurance ought to be taken with a grain of salt. He writes:

"Those who described their health as "excellent" -- people who presumably had relatively little experience pursuing medical care or submitting claims -- were almost twice as likely as those in good, fair or poor health to rate their private health insurance as excellent."

In other words, if your health is good, and you're not relying on your insurance to keep you healthy, then you may not know if health care needs reforming (though one day, you will).. The percentage of those expressing approval for their existing insurance plans would also be lower if the 16 percent of Americans who don't have coverage were counted as at least neutral on the matter. Regardless, health insurers are likely the most powerful interest group at work on health care reform these days. And one reform, mandatory coverage, is naturally backed by health insurers.

The Post's front-page story "Like Car Insurance, Health Coverage May Be Mandated," explores the experience of mandated coverage in Massachusetts. In 2007, somewhere near 600,000 state residents, about 16 percent of the population, had no coverage. The state's health care reform required individuals to get coverage or pay a penalty, and required most employers to provide a coverage option or contribute to the overall cost. A year later, only three percent of residents were without coverage. Of that group about half paid the penalty rather than buy coverage, and "71,000 residents were exempted [from penalties] because they did not meet the minimum income levels."

A mandate will certainly benefit health insurers. If four out of every five Americans with no current coverage were to buy even $2,500 worth of health insurance (way below the current average premium), it would mean $80 billion a year in new revenue for the industry.

No rational person who doesn't work for a health insurer wants to create a new revenue stream for companies primarily responsible for the way we ration health care, but a mandate could dramatically reduce a variety of health care costs, including uncompensated emergency and hospital care. The amount of possible savings is unclear, but it's probably on the order of more than $100 billion each year. Several websites provide data that suggest the savings could be much higher. (Here and here are two of those sites.)

Op-ed pieces by Michael Gerson (a former Bush II speechwriter), "Health Care's Sensible Center," and Harold Meyerson (the only mainstream columnist I know of who identifies himself as a socialist), "The Can't-Do Blue Dogs," take apparently opposite positions on how much compromising Democrats ought to be doing on the road to getting health care done. But both writers are clear that the debate is largely between various positions within the Democratic party.

In my view, Gerson makes two big errors in his column. The first is discounting what President Obama might accomplish in the upcoming month. Obama may be too wounded politically by the continuing recession, growing unemployment and "trillions of dollars in stimulus and bailouts" to provide good leadership, Gerson writes. He also quotes William Galston of the Brookings Institution, who told Gerson that Congressional opposition to "boosting taxes on the rich" eliminates that option, but if Obama does enter the political fray with a specific list of reform requirements, taxing households with annual incomes of, say, $350,000 or more, ought to be completely doable. A reform bill promoted by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi envisions raising more than half a trillion dollars from such a tax (see the details here).

On this point, Meyerson is clear. Taxes ought to (and probably would) be paid, if not for "the Blue Dogs' ... deference to wealth." But even though I am anxious to see Obama weigh in on the subject, Steven Pearlstein ("Imperfect Health Reform Still Beats the Status Quo") sees Obama as "boxed in" and "lashed to the mast" of predicted deficits in both health care and federal spending. But so far, Obama's commitment to not raising taxes has been limited to individuals making less than $250,000 per year. To most of us, such an income threshold seems to go way beyond the middle-class, but it still leaves the president free to endorse tax revenues like those advocated by Pelosi.

For me, no analysis of this issue would be complete without checking on what Dean Baker, co-director for the Center on Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), has to say. Accordingly, here's "Taxing Health Insurance Premiums and Subsidizing Health Care Providers," which ran yesterday on truthout. Taxing the health benefits of working people won't do, Dean writes, but changing the drug patent system and relaxing immigration rules limiting entry of qualified medical doctors would cut $200-300 billion in annual health care costs.

The problem with all of this, as Ruth Marcus writes in "The F-22 Model for Medicare," is that current health care arrangements have always worked pretty good for insurers, providers and the shrinking numbers of workers with employer-provided health coverage. This creates both a powerful lobby for the status quo and another group of voters who simply have not supported dramatic reform. To Marcus, this sounds uncomfortably close to the experience with the endlessly funded F-22 fighter jet.
The lineup of powerful members of Congress who fought to maintain production of the F-22 despite the opposition of President Bush, President Obama, Sen. McCain and several secretaries of defense kept the program going. But just yesterday, Congress finally pulled the plug on the F-22.

On the way to a final optimistic note, Marcus advocates another reform not mentioned in the other articles, improvements to MedPAC or the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, advocated in some form by the Obama administration and some members of Congress. Establishing "a MedPAC on steroids" would create huge Medicare savings and, in the process, reduce health care costs overall. "Because Medicare is the 800-pound gorilla of health care, its reimbursement policies also drive payment arrangements between private insurers and providers," she writes.

And, speaking of the F-22 and other good ways to save tens, maybe hundreds, of billions of dollars in military expenditures, lets give Marcus the last word.

"The politics of health care make the F-22 fight look simple. It won't be easy to expand coverage in a way that controls costs.

But maybe, just maybe, the naysayers are premature."