Mountain Views News          Saturday, April 16, 2011

12

LEFT TURN/RIGHT TURN

 Mountain Views News Saturday, April 16, 2011 

HOWARD Hays As I See It


GREG Welborn

ARE WE SERIOUS?

 The L.A. Times ran another 
story of factory off-shoring, 
where a hugely profitable 
company becomes even 
more so by setting up shop 
overseas to take advantage 
of low wages and lack of the 
worker protections expected 
at home. Workers have 
endured forced overtime, elimination of raises, 
and management’s suppression of organizing 
efforts - struggles unheard of in the home 
country.

 

 There have been expressions of dismay at 
home about how a company with an otherwise 
sterling reputation for decent wages, benefits 
and union protections could so easily exploit 
a desperate workforce overseas. A company 
spokeswoman explains that it’s simply “related 
to the standard of living and general conditions 
in the different countries.”

 

 The company is IKEA, based in Sweden, 
and the place with cheap, exploitable labor 
is Danville, VA. While IKEA’s profits, $2.2 
billion in 2009, have risen, hourly wages at 
the Danville plant have dropped from $9.75 
to $8.00 an hour (compared to $19.00 an hour 
in Sweden). Bill Street, a union organizer 
whose efforts were squelched by management 
despite a majority of workers having expressed 
interest, observed it’s “ironic that IKEA looks 
on the U.S. and Danville the way that most 
people in the U.S. look at Mexico.”

 

 Barely a decade ago, we were looked 
upon as a nation of consumers, with cheap-
labor factories overseas. Today, we’ve been 
supplanted as the world’s largest economy by 
the European Union, China is becoming that 
nation of consumers, and we’re the land of an 
$8 an hour workforce. We also have a typically 
third-world distribution of wealth, with the top 
1% controlling almost half of it.

 

 Barely two years ago, we heard Republicans 
proclaim their “top three priorities” were “jobs, 
jobs, and jobs”. When it became clear what 
they had in mind was the $8 an hour variety, 
the focus then became the deficit.

 

 Any pretense of concern over the deficit 
disappeared when the wealthiest were 
exempted from any responsibility to help 
alleviate it. Those of us in the bottom 99% were 
asked to sacrifice - not for the deficit - but to 
shift more wealth to the top.

 

 A new focus of budget battles in Washington is 
the Democrats’ insisting on a “clean” bill, while 
Republicans are holding out for an extensive 
list of “riders”. A look at that list of riders 
shows the main concern of Republicans is not 
jobs, nor the deficit, but an agenda for which 
they are willing to shut down the government 
in order to see it enacted, an agenda which:

 

 Targets Wall Street reform by defunding the 
new Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection 
as well as the “consumer products complaints 
database”.

 

 Bans funding for Dept of Education 
regulations concerning for-profit colleges; those 
which provide students with insurmountable 
debt rather than an education.

 

 Bans already-approved funding for watershed 
and wetlands preservation, flood control, and 
various environmental projects in California. 
Stops the Environmental Protection Agency 
from regulating greenhouse gases and water 
quality. Prohibits funding for enforcement of 
the Secretary of the Interior’s order protecting 
public natural spaces.

 

 Defunds EPA efforts to regulate coal mining, 
surface mining, air quality, offshore oil drilling 
and support for ethanol as an alternative to 
foreign oil. Stops enforcement under the 
Clean Water Act of efforts to protect rivers and 
streams from mining operations.

 

 Prohibits funding for the United Nations 
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

 

 Prohibits funding for implementation of any 
and all parts of the healthcare reform law, with 
specific mention of blocking the state-regulated 
Health Insurance Exchanges, the Center 
for Consumer Information and Insurance 
Oversight, and requirements that insurance 
companies spend a certain percentage of 
premiums on actual healthcare.

 

 Bans any funding for Planned Parenthood, 
ensuring that women’s healthcare needs, 
especially in under-served communities, will be 
all the harder to obtain. Rather than a woman 
having a “right to choose”, the government will 
make that choice for her.

 

 Prohibits the transferring of detainees from 
Guantanamo Bay.

 

 Prohibits funding for any additional TSA 
employees at our airports.

 

 Stops the ATF Bureau from collecting 
information on multiple firearm sales to a 
single individual, so as not to inconvenience 
those arming Mexican drug cartels.

 

 Prohibits funding for HUD Housing for the 
Elderly projects.

 

 Prohibits contributions to the UN Population 
Fund or any other organization that uses 
their own funds, or anybody else’s, to provide 
abortion services.

 

 Blocks funding for the FCC to institute Net 
Neutrality rules; thus preserving the freedom 
of internet providers to develop the means to 
decide for us which websites are appropriate 
for us to have access to.

 

 The list goes on; from cutting funds to the Job 
Corps, school lunch programs, and bringing 
broadband connections to rural communities.

 

 Not long ago, Republicans insisted that 
before budget talks could even begin, the Bush 
tax cuts had to be extended. According to a 
2008 Urban Institute study, from 2009 through 
2018, $834 billion in tax cuts will go to those 
with incomes of over $1 million a year. More 
than the total federal budget for K-12 and 
vocational education, more than the total 
amount spent on hospital and medical care 
for our veterans, is going to further enrich the 
wealthiest 0.3% of our population.

 

 And now, Republicans threaten to shut 
us down over a woman having access to a 
mammogram or a school kid getting a decent 
lunch.

 

 You don’t need to be able to follow a sheet 
of IKEA instructions to see what this agenda is 
all about. 

 They’re trumpeting a budget deal that saves 
$38.5 billion over the next six months, while 
the tax cuts extended four months ago will cost 
$150 billion over the same period.

 

 There’s another, obvious way to close the 
budget gap. According to the GAO, $330 
billion in unpaid tax revenue lies out there 
uncollected, mostly owed by those “with 
substantial personal assets”. It’s been estimated 
that every $1 spent on enforcement results in 
$10 of recovered taxes.

 

 Oh, never mind: Republicans also want to 
ban funding for additional IRS agents.


Punctuating history, there are often events 
or crises which define a generation. As 
House Budget Committee Chairman, 
Paul Ryan, stated so succinctly this week, 
our fiscal situation today is one of those 
defining moments, and how we respond 
will ultimately demonstrate to our children, 
grandchildren, and future heirs whether we 
should be recorded in the ledgers of history 
as being serious about our stewardship of this 
great country. The key question is who we 
are going to trust to lead us in this defining 
moment. To me, and a growing number of 
Americans, it is not the current resident of 
the White House or any other leader in the 
Democratic Party. 

This week, we heard two responses to the 
fiscal crisis in this country. The President 
and his party ask us to trust Washington 
politicians with more power and money to 
build a dominating public sector which will 
lead us forward. The Conservatives put their 
trust in the people themselves operating in a 
vibrant private sector with limitations on the 
size and scope of the government to take our 
money and regulate our lives.

Consider first the severity of the situation. 
We have $14 trillion in debt. According 
to the White House, we spend $7 for every 
$4 in tax revenue. Furthermore, the White 
House has also projected that the mandatory 
spending items are themselves greater than 
all tax revenues raised. In other words, we 
could totally eliminate all discretionary 
spending by the government, and the budget 
still wouldn’t be balanced. The cumulative 
affect of social security, Medicare, Medicaid 
and all other “non-discretionary” spending 
items are larger than the tax revenues the 
government collects, and this is before the 
affect of full implementation of Obamacare. 
This is not a sustainable system, and it will 
eventually cripple us as a nation.

Into this disaster, this defining moment, 
President Obama gave an election speech, 
not a serious policy speech. He proposed a 
budget that would increase deficit spending 
by $1.2 trillion next year and by $9.5 trillion 
over the next 10 years. He would raise 
our national debt to $28 trillion (it was 
$9.8 trillion when he took office). More 
importantly, his budget offers zero reform 
of the entitlement spending items – the ones 
that are really causing our problem. This 
is not a serious approach to a very real and 
potentially devastating problem. It is not 
leadership.

The conservative approach, as articulated 
by Representative Paul Ryan, tackles the 
core financial issues and the very important 
underlying philosophical issues of who we 
are as a nation. On the financial side, the 
conservative plan seeks to bring spending 
back in line with revenues for both the near 
and long term. To put this into perspective, 
historically, government spending has run 
about 20% of GDP. Tax 
revenues have also run at 
about 19% to 20%, so while 
there have been deficits in 
previous years, there have 
also been surpluses, and 
generally we have run at a 
somewhat sustainable level.

The Obama budget 
would take spending to 24% of GDP. That 
seemingly small 4% difference (spending 
over receipts) is hugely significant when you 
consider the size of our GDP. Our country’s 
economy (GDP) is about $14 trillion. This 
little 4% difference, if allowed to stand, will 
define who we are as a people and what we 
become as a country.

But the fate of our nation is more than just 
the budget deficit. The size of this deficit is 
determinate of whether the public sector or 
the private sector is dominant. The basic 
assumption of the Obama/Democratic 
budget is that the American people can’t be 
trusted to make basic decisions about their 
own well-being. It implicitly argues that 
only a department of centralized bureaucrats 
can make appropriate choices for the 
people. The conservatives’ budget proposal 
argues that the people themselves can, and 
should, be trusted to make decisions for 
themselves. The conservatives’ budget takes 
spending back to 2008 levels, improves the 
incentives for people who receive Medicare 
and Medicaid to take responsibility for 
their medical decisions, allows the states 
to experiment with cost savings solutions, 
and ultimately spurs the economy through 
a system of fair tax rates and vastly limited 
loopholes.

The time to solve this problem is now. We are 
only in the beginning stages of what could 
become a devastating financial catastrophe. 
How bad it becomes depends entirely on 
how seriously we address the issues, the 
imbalances and the roles of the public and 
private sectors of our economy. If we don’t 
meet the challenge, realize that this is our 
defining moment and demonstrate a serious 
resolve, we will ultimately find that those 
“non-discretionary” spending items are 
actually pretty discretionary. The Supreme 
Court has already ruled that Congress can 
change the Social Security and Medicare 
formulas. There is nothing guaranteed in 
the promise of Social Security. The bottom 
line is that there may be some pain now, but 
there is ultimately going to be severe pain in 
the very near future if we don’t tackle our 
present crisis with a seriousness of resolve 
and commitment to honesty.

About the author: Gregory J. Welborn is a 
freelance writer and has spoken to several 
civic and religious organizations on cultural 
and moral issues. He lives in the Los Angeles 
area with his wife and 3 children and is active 
in the community. He can be reached at 
gregwelborn@earthlink.net.

SUSAN Henderson 

NOW YOU THINK ABOUT THAT!


When I was in 8th 
grade, (just a few 
years ago in case 
you were wondering), 
my favorite 
teacher, Mrs. Naomi 
Hamilton, had an 
expression that used 
to drive some of my 
classmates crazy. 
because it required 
us to review, analyze and justify our statements 
before delivering them as fact.

 Mrs. Hamilton had the challenge of teaching 
what would be called today an advanced 
placement class, and as such, she was subjected 
to the high minded interpretations 
of her class on everything. When she had 
enough of our pseudo intellectualizing, she 
would deliver to us what were the obvious 
facts and say, “Now You Think About That!”, 
indicating that there was no thought whatsoever 
in the positions we had brought forth. 
I never have forgotten that expression and 
how she used it to compel us to look beyond 
knee jerk responses to situations. This week 
when I ran across an article written about 
our current income tax situation, she came 
to mind again, for what I found definitely 
warrants contemplation.

 Even my 8 year old granddaughter Maila 
knows that April 15th (this year 18th) is 
the US tax filing deadline. She knows this 
because she listens to the adults in her life 
stressing over it. And while we really don’t 
want to pay taxes, responsible citizens know 
that we have to. I’m pretty certain that she 
doesn’t know, however, is that at the rate 
we are going, by the time she grows up, she 
won’t be paying any taxes. 

 Why would I say that? Well, this week I ran 
across a very interesting article that reviewed 
what we currently pay for income taxes compared 
to what was paid at various times in 
the last 60 or so years. And, believe it or not, 
we pay less and receive more services.

 Compare the income tax burdens* then and 
now for a married couple filing jointly with 
a combined income of $200,000: (the taxes 
have been converted to today’s dollars):

2011 Tax: $44,070

1990 Tax: $52,423

1970 Tax: $57,139

and for a couple that earned a million dollars 
it is even more startling:

2011 Tax: $319,873

1990 Tax: $280,001

1970 Tax: $538,273

*from the interactive tax rate historical calculator 
found at http://www.remappingdebate.
org/map-data-tool/new-interactive-tool-
puts-tax-rates-historical-context

 That seems incredible to me, especially 
since our obligations to the citizenry have 
increased and every day we want more. We 
ask for lower taxes, we threaten elected officials 
that if they don’t meet our demands we 
will throw them out. And, we’ve have been 
successful in lowering taxes, (arguably not 
low enough or at least not distributed equitably), 
but, the question must be asked, at 
what overall cost? Is our position on lower 
taxes similar to changing your Christmas 
Club contributions for $50 a month to $5 
dollars a month and being surprised when 
there isn’t enough money to do what you 
want come December? 

 Now, the tool is not perfect but as Craig 
Gurian from Remapping The Debate says, 
“At a time when both the President and his 
GOP adversaries are looking to lower income 
tax rates, it is helpful to get some historical 
perspective — a process that quickly 
reveals that federal income tax burdens are 
near post- World War II lows.”

 “There are a number of obvious limitations 
in using the tool. For example, the additions 
and subtractions to gross income (that yield 
adjusted gross income) change over time. 
The deductions that are available to yield 
taxable income from adjusted gross income 
also vary over time. The tool, however, only 
addresses taxable income, and thus doesn’t 
account for those changes. Likewise, the difference 
between ordinary income and income 
from capital gains (the latter currently 
gets preferential treatment) is not accounted 
for. The tool only deals with income tax, not 
payroll tax (payroll tax as currently structured 
exacts a disproportionate burden on 
lower- and middle-income taxpayers).”

 But even with all the variables that keep 
it from being a perfect instrument, the tool 
should definitely make you take another 
look at our current tax situation. Use the 
link above and try it for yourself.

 Perhaps we need to consider the consequences 
in our demands for lower taxes, and 
the way the tax burden is allocated. What 
are we doing to ourselves? Yes, this is definitely 
something we need to think about!