Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.

Timing is everything when it comes to the deficit

Truth Dig, in its Ear to the Ground feature, remarks on some recent polls that show Americans concerned about the deficit and questioning whether Barack Obama has it in him to control spending. The danger is that polls like this could create a sort of backward momentum at a time when government intervention in the economy — specifically, government money priming hte pump — is needed and reform of health care and programs to address climate change need to move forward.

With mounting pressure at home and abroad to cut the budget, Obama’s ambitious health care plans could be headed for the rocks. Too bad we already blew a few trillion on wars and banks. We could have used that money for something useful, as it turns out.

Which brings me to an important point: Deficits are not necessarily bad, so long as the deficits and debt are used for productive purposes (schools, health care, mass transit improvements) and not for wars and tax cuts to people who do not need tax cuts. What I’m getting at is that the obsession with deficits that has cropped up now is misplaced and raises a question: Where was this obsession during the Bush years, when the Republican warmonger racked up record deficits?

Reining in Wall Street (well, maybe not)

The business community seems OK with the Obama administration’s proposed revamping of the financial regulatory structure — which should give anyone looking to rein in the so-called “Masters of the Universe” pause.

As Steve Pearlstein writes in The Washington Post,

the current system of financial regulation has been thoroughly captured by the companies it was meant to restrain — and that the only way to put things right is to bring in new rules, a new structure and tough new regulators. Anything short of that, and you can almost guarantee that the inmates will be back in charge of the asylum by the time the next bubble starts to develop.

Judged by that standard, the proposals the Obama administration put forward this week to reform the regulatory apparatus were a bit of a disappointment.

He blames the shortcomings on efforts by the president to move quickly and appease too many people. Reform, he says,

should have been grounded, first and foremost, in a thorough and independent analysis of how the crisis was allowed to develop and what regulators did and didn’t do to prevent it, drawn from interviews under oath and internal records and made available to the public. That should have been followed by a detailed set of recommendations from a panel of seasoned regulators and independent experts on how the regulatory system should be reformed to prevent similar crises in the future.

If Congress decided to deviate from those recommendations, of course, nobody would be surprised. But at least it would have given the public a marker for reform that was free of industry influence. It would have also provided political cover for the president and members of Congress, a politically acceptable default position that they could have used to turn aside the entreaties of local bankers and campaign contributors when they came knocking.

Instead, the Obama team, hoping to ride the wave of public outrage before
it crested, determined to fashion a reform proposal even before a thorough
analysis could be completed. And by deciding to contort and trim their proposal
to accommodate the objections from powerful interest groups and key members of
Congress, members of the Obama team have now made it politically acceptable for
everyone to treat this as just another special-interest free-for-all of the sort
that helped cause the crisis in the first place.

Pearlstein’s right. We need a full-blown investigation of what happened so that we can craft tough rules and rebuild our regulatory system to prevent future meltdowns. The economy is not supposed to be a casino that spits out winnings. It’s about producing goods and services that people need — and believe me, I’ve never met anyone who needed a collateralized debt obligation.

If two became one

When things become bad enough, towns will consolidate. That, I think, is the lesson that we should be taking from the recent police and courts merger down in Gloucester County.

As the Packet Group paper, the Windsor-Hights Herald, reports, the borough of Swedesboro has disbanded its Police Department and signed a shared-services agreement with Woolwich to take over patrols and court services. The agreement is expected to save Swedesboro taxpayers about $400 annually and Woolwich taxpayers $68 a year.

The consolidation of law-enforcement functions likely wouldn’t have happened, however, were it not for the squeeze put on smaller towns by the Corzine administration, which wants to see local governments streamline, eliminate duplicated services and share services whenever possible,

Consider:

”There had been talk (about sharing a police department with Woolwich) in Swedesboro for as long as I have been mayor, which is about six years,” Swedesboro Mayor Thomas Fromm said Tuesday.

”But when Gov. Corzine announced his municipal aid cuts at budget time last year, that’s when we realized what we had to do. We knew we needed to do something real, and something bold, for our taxpayers, and we began in earnest at that time,” he said.

In 2008, about one-third of Swedesboro’s $2.2 million municipal budget was used for police- related expenditures, according to Mayor Fromm.

Hightstown and East Windsor have been talking for nearly a year, while the two Princetons have gone back and forth for years, slowly merging many smaller services but failing to share police services or go all the way to full consolidation.

As for Jamesburg and Monroe, officials in the two towns treat consolidation like a particularly nasty strain of swine flu.

Consolidation — whether full-bore or incremental — makes fiscal sense for Hightstown and Jamesburg, at least on the surface. Both towns have faced difficult fiscal choices in recent years, with stagnant ratable bases and increasing costs forcing the towns to cut services and increase taxes. Jamesburg even considered closing its public library to give it some budgetary room last year.

East Windsor and Monroe, however, have not felt the same level of pain — but the state’s own fiscal emergency may change that. It is going to get more and more difficult for the state to justify giving cash to towns like Monroe and East Windsor that completely surround their poorer neighbors when it doesn’t have enough money to pay its debts and provide basic services.

Who’ll watch the White House now?

This is bad news and typical of the way the journalism business works these days. I really have little to add and just want to wish Dan Froomkin well — he will end up on his feet somewhere.

I’ll just add this comment from Glenn Greenwald, which sums up my feeling:

All of this underscores a critical and oft-overlooked point: what one finds virtually nowhere in the establishment press are those who criticize Obama not in order to advance their tawdry right-wing agenda but because the principles that led them to criticize Bush compel similar criticism of Obama. Rachel Maddow is one of the few prominent media figures who will interview and criticize Democratic politicians “from the Left” (and it’s hardly a coincidence that it was MSNBC’s decision to give Maddow her own show — rather than the endless array of right-wing talk show hosts plaguing television for years — which prompted a tidal wave of “concern” over whether cable news was becoming “too partisan”). In general, however, those who opine from the Maddow/Froomkin perspective are a very endangered species, and it just became more endangered as the Post fires one if its most popular, talented, principled and substantive columnists.

An unhealthy compromise

It is time for President Barack Obama to make a stand.

His speech earlier this week clearly outlined the need for a public plan as part of healthcare reform, but if he doesn’t step up and play hardball with Congress his words will come back to haunt him.

The latest on healthcare reform is that the man originally tapped to lead the president’s reform effort, former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, wants the public plan scrapped in an effort to move legislation forward:

Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle said on Wednesday that the Obama White House would likely have to scrap a public option for health insurance coverage
if it wanted to get the votes needed to pass systematic change.

“We’ve come too far and gained too much momentum for our efforts to fail over disagreement on one single issue,” the Senator and one-time HHS Secretary nominee said, according to ABC News.

The remarks came after Dashcle, along with former Senate Majority Leaders Bob Dole and Howard Baker introduced his own proposal for health care reform that. That plan actually included a pseudo-version of a government-run option. The Daschle proposal calls for (among other things) public insurance pools to be administered by state government, not the feds.

In coming out against a public plan, Daschle adds kindling to an already roaring debate on health care reform. On Thursday morning, former Vermont Governor Howard Dean repeated the mantra that you cannot have effective legislation if it does not include a public option. At the White House on Wednesday, several state legislators who had met with current HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius argued the same point.

Certainly, the public seems to be weighed in Dean’s favor. An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll conducted on Wednesday night showed that 76 percent of respondents wanted a choice between a public option for insurance coverage and private providers.

The public, of course, understands this issue far better than the politicians, most of whom are beholden to the quartet of special interests who control this debate — the insurance industry, drug companies, doctors and hospitals. While I’d like to believe that at least some of them — doctors and hospitals, in particular — have patients’ and consumer’s best interests at heart, the reality is that a public plan could cut deeply into their profits. And that’s what this is all about.

The reality is that a single-payer plan would be the most efficient and effective way to fix health care in the United States, but a host of myths and political considerations stand in the way. In the meantime, Ezra Klein offers some interesting thoughts on the next steps toward reform and some stronger alternatives than the perpetually cautious men on Capitol Hill seem ready to embrace.

Those options, for the most part, have been excluded from the debate, as he notes. The public plan, however, remains on the table, though it is under seige. People like Gov. Dean, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich and Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) are making it clear that, without it, any reform legislation would be a sham.

Time to step up Mr. President and spend some of that political capital you’ve been storing.