The Bank Bailout and Social Security/Medicare
When you have one pot of money and it is finite, it can be hard to split it up in a way that makes everyone happy. Let's take what the government is going through with the budget right now. It would be great if they had unlimited amounts of money, if the automakers and banks weren't in big trouble and if Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security were at least stable.
But the picture isn't that pretty, and the fact that we are in the middle of a recession doesn't help either. Add to that bad mortgages, foreclosures all over the place and handing over money to the banks without an accounting of where it has gone and the picture gets worse.
As to the banks supposedly showing profits recently from the bailouts, take a look at Dr. Martin Weiss’ article, Big bank profits are bogus! Massive public deception! He writes, “Was the bad-debt disease magically cured? Did the economy miraculously turn around? Not quite. In fact, we have overwhelming evidence that the condition of the nation’s banks has deteriorated massively since then.
“How can our trusted authorities be so blatantly deceptive and still keep their jobs? Perhaps you should ask Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. Not long ago, for example, he declared that the total losses from the debt crisis would not exceed $100 billion, while conveying the hope that most of those losses could be soon written off. Also around that time, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimated the losses would be $1 trillion, with only a small percentage written off. The IMF’s latest estimate: $4 trillion in losses, with only one-third of those written off so far. Bernanke’s error factor: He was 4,000 percent off the mark, in a world where 50 percent errors can be lethal.”
And the critics talk of Medicare’s $1 trillion in costs last year to cover 42.5 million seniors. This cost was inflated by the privatized HMOs, PPOs inserted into Medicare along with the rule that Medicare could not bargain with Big Pharma on drug pricing as does Medicaid. These are a few of the negative impacts inflicted on Medicare by the Bush administration and others. In fact, Medicare began in 1964 under Lyndon Johnson as a classic single-payer health insurer. Listen closely, President Obama. It was only later that the privateers were ushered in to gobble up 12.6 percent of its premium revenue for “administration.” What if Medicare got some of that bank bailout money?
Yet the Times reports, “as a result, the administration said, the Medicare fund that pays hospital bills for older Americans is expected to run out of money in 2017, two years sooner than projected last year. The Social Security trust fund will be exhausted in 2037, four years earlier than predicted, it said.” The question is to whom will that money run out to?
Though there are many priorities here, this is a country that touts taking care of the neediest among us first. "Give me your poor...your huddled masses..." The country was founded on these ideas. All of the rest of this stuff we are dealing with now came later and some of it did not have to come at all.
The new president has said that this is our time, this is the time for change. It seems that he and lawmakers are trying to figure out what to change first and how to do it so that everyone comes out at least somewhat stable. I wouldn't want to be in their position - the president and lawmakers were left with quite a mess to clean up and figure out and it hit them all at once. It doesn't matter who is or was to blame. The blame game can go back decades and waste time that we don't have. It is time to fix things once and for all, and it is time for everyone to stop whining and get the job done.
