Social Contract

privatised care failures: a service crying out for change (10/7/2024)

"Modern societies cannot function without a welfare state" (3/11/2024)

Congress must listen to working families and overhaul healthcare, minimum wage and education (1/9/2023) Bernie Sanders in The Guardian

The relentless Republican effort to see you die (10/3/2017)

"The refusal to provide very minimal living standards to people who are caught in this monstrosity — that's just pure savagery." –Noam Chomsky

Links

Just about everywhere in the West except the United States, where there is no mandatory paid time off, workers not only get vacations but also short work weeks, government health care, large pensions, high minimum wages, subsidized childcare, and so forth. Why is the United States the exception?" Claude S Fischer, Boston Review
"Like 1933 — which would be 2021 — we can see that it is now time to discuss universal child care, universal sick leave and a guaranteed income for everyone in our society.” Ed Markey
We’re a rich country — and citizens of other rich countries don’t worry about being bankrupted by medical expenses. It wouldn’t take much to protect Americans against being scammed by mortgage lenders or losing their life savings to fluctuations in the wholesale price of electricity. So the next time some politician tries to sell a new policy — typically deregulation — by claiming that it will increase choice, be skeptical. Having more options isn’t automatically good, and in America we probably have more choices than we should. Paul Krugman, Too Much Choice Is Hurting America (3/1/2021)
The economic history of the last thirty-five years is the story of class war in the United States: how the 1 percent have erased or weakened key public benefits won by the 99 percent. Occupy the Economy, Challenging Capitalism: Richard Wolff pg 131
“I want to end the international embarrassment of the United States being the only country in the industrialized world that does not guarantee health care as a right and not a privilege.” Bernie Sanders
It is not by happenstance that America today looks more like a Third World country than an advanced industrial state in international comparisons of social health such as longevity, infant mortality, income distribution, social mobility, labor protection, average number of vacation days, and many other metrics. Our tax policies have ensured that the rich got richer and the rest of us got stuck with the bill. Congressional obedience to corporatized medicine ensured that Americans pay an average of 50 percent more for their health care that citizens in Western Europe. Union busting, leveraged buyouts, and the offshoring of jobs guaranteed lower wages and fewer labor protections. The Party is Over, Mike Lofgren
The United States does not guarantee the availability of affordable housing to its citizens, as do most developed nations. It does not guarantee reliable access to health care, as does virtually every other developed nation. The cost of a college education in the United States is among the highest in the developed world. And beyond the threadbare nature of the American safety net, the government has pulled back from investment in infrastructure, education and basic scientific research, the building blocks of future prosperity. It is not surprising many Americans have lost confidence in the government as a vehicle for achieving the things that we cannot achieve alone. New York Times Editorial.
Many proposals to expand the welfare state now find strong support across the political spectrum. A clear majority of Americans favor higher taxes on the rich, a more generous minimum wage, th introduction of universal pre-K, and a public option for health insurance. Yascha Mounk in his book The Great Experiment, Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How they can Endure
"If you wonder why the United States is the only country in the industrialized world not to have a national health care program, if you're asking why we pay the highest price in the world for prescription drugs, or why we spend more money on the military than the rest of the world combined, you are talking about campaign finance. You are talking about the unbelievable power that big-money interests have over every legislative decision." Senator Bernie Sanders (Vt)
I have some bad news for you: You have the worst quality of life in the developed world – by a wide margin. Lance Freeman

U.S. Fails to Meet International Human Right to Housing Standards (10/5/2023)

Welcome to Republican America, where a poor woman is forced to carry an unplanned pregnancy to term, in some red States even if there are life threatening complications. Every medical society opposed the overthrow of Roe, but Catholic Justices on the Supreme Court decided they know better.

Denmark has good government

Caring for a child is work and should be rewarded. It is a 24/7 job, especially in the first few months. By making a job a requirement for financial assistance, the law is depriving children of parental care. If a family has no income, there is no child tax credit. The Congress believes a new mother should have a job, not be on leave.

According to a 2019 report by UNICEF, which analysed which of the world’s richest countries are most family friendly, Estonia leads the field for new mothers with over 80 weeks of leave at full pay. At the bottom was the United States – which, with a grand total of zero weeks, was the only country in the analysis that offered absolutely no national paid leave.

The US does not have a federal paid maternity and family leave act... Five states currently offer paid family leave: California, Massachusetts, Georgia, New Jersey, and Rhode Island. In New Jersey, women who took paid leave in the year after giving birth were 40% less likely to receive public aid or food stamps.[75] According to a California-based study, 87% of employers reported that the paid leave requirement did not increase costs; 9% note that it saved money due to decreased turnover and other costs.[76]

'Pro-life' Republicans can not bring themselves to accept health care as a right. Further, it appears they are willing to remove millions of people from health insurance to pay for huge tax cuts for the wealthy. If that is not moral hypocrisy, what is ?

“… median charges for childbirth hospital stays in the United States include $13,524 for delivery and care for the mother and $3,660 for newborn care. That adds up to $16,884.” (2018). US Maternal death rates are much higher than in other developed countries. First year costs of a new baby are about $15,000

It’s mostly women (65%) who earn minimum wage. “The fact that the federal minimum wage has stagnated at $7.25/hour since 2009 is atrocious. But in reality, it's actually far worse than that. The federal minimum wage is worth 28% less today than it was worth in 2009. It’s worth 41% less than in 1968. An absolute disgrace.…, but any government assistance requires that recipients have a job. Childcare is unaffordable on minimum wage, but working parents must find it.

Privatization makes social programs expensive, if not unaffordable.

It was never a good idea to make corporations responsible for social supports such as healthcare or retirement, and corporations have resisted and minimized these functions as much as possible. Retirement programs have all but disappeared in favor of 401Ks. Elder care facilities are being devoured by private equity.

US Healthcare has become the most expensive in the world, has mediocre outcomes, and may be given back to the tender mercies of insurance companies that are trying to bring back pre-existing conditions by killing the ACA.

M4A can cover everyone.

Pharma charges prices that are many times what the rest of the world pays. The US is 1 of only 2 countries to allow direct consumer advertising.

If you vote GOP, you are not voting in your own self-interest. When you see the US has the most expensive healthcare in the world bankrupting the sick, hordes of homeless, students in lifetime debt burden, unaffordable child care, substandard eldercare, that’s what you got for those Republican tax cuts. That’s the GOP idea of small government.

According to a UN report from 2014 surveying 185 countries and territories, only two did not guarantee any paid maternity leave; Papua New Guinea and the United States.

FDR had it right. He fought Fascism, and provided a social safety net with the New Deal. The Second Bill of Rights he advocated was implemented in Germany and Japan, but not in the U.S. Corporate leaders plotted to overthrow him in a failed coup. Over the decades, Republicans have appeared to bring on Fascism in the U.S. and are working hard to sunset Social Security and Medicare and otherwise shred the social safety net.

Republicans don't like government which is why they are very bad at it. They especially never liked the New Deal, attempted an overthrow of FDR, failing at that, weaponized religion to oppose it, ultimately they elected Trump who brought on a close brush with Fascism.

A strong social safety net, unions, and a wealth tax are powerful antidotes to extreme income inequality. You can see that in Scandinavian countries, such as Finland.

The lesson we should learn is social programs: healthcare, childcare, education, eldercare belong in the public sector. They are human rights. Profiteers, who have become predators, do not belong furnishing these programs. Keeping them in the public sector damps down wealth inequality. It is one of the reasons Nordic countries are more successful.

Probably the worst thing Republicans have done is all but removed progressive taxes. After WWII the highest marginal rate was over 90%, CEOs worked for $1 a year, we had a thriving middle class, world class education, and good government.

Progressive taxes reduce inequality and could pay for child care, education, health care, old-age pensions and protection against severe deprivation. See A BRIEF HISTORY OF EQUALITY By Thomas Piketty

Republicans, are not only racists, but, being the party of oligarchs, for decades have been aggressively cutting the social safety net. They have consistently opposed the New Deal. As Hannah Arendt pointed out racism is the seed of Fascism, and it appears we are rapidly headed toward a Fascist dystopia. We may have lost WWII.

The social contract should guarantee some economic fairness, but the US, with money-driven politics, has been steadily losing it. Republicans, the party of the wealthy, can take credit for the deterioration: the results include a less healthy, less productive (because of poorer education and chronic under employment), higher levels of income inequality, toxic politics, crumbling infrastructure, and a deteriorating economy that cannot support both the world's largest military and the well-being of the people.

The US budget funds the world's largest military, the highest rate of incarceration, a bloated security bureacracy, an empire that extends to hundreds of countries, but poor and declining services for its own people. When polled, people do not agree with these budget priorities, but the unfortunate fact is that US democracy is weak and under attack. Oligarchs control policy and their major objective is dodging taxes and self enrichment. Media does not report this because it is overwhelmingly corporate.

The most advanced countries strengthen their social contracts, but the US Government, Corporations assisted by Republicans and their billionaire-funded, tea-party supporters are increasingly shifting risk to the 99%. A favorite: ripping off pension funds. As savings rates are inadequate, pensions disappearing, 401ks not enough, It appears certain that there will be a retirement crisis. Many people approaching retirement have little savings.

Growing extreme income inequality has brought us growing poverty, social pathology, a middle class sinking into debt servitude, devastating financial volatility, and corrupt institutions. Extreme inequality is a hallmark of bad government.

Republicans, always ready to dodge taxes, have advocated policies of individual responsibility. You are on your own. R's oppose raising the minimum wage, favor cutting social security, fight healthcare reforms, and bust unions.  401k's, Medical Savings Accounts, and a push to privatize Social Security: all efforts to help corporations unload their social burdens. Result is there is much more insecurity for US families. Welfare programs are niggardly. There was little opposition because Republican policy has been hostile to unions that might have objected, and besides virtually all media is corporate, so the real story doesn't air.

The Supreme Court , in what amounts to a coup, ruled that corporations are people with all of the rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, whose only goal is profit, and they can participate in elections by spending as much money as they like without disclosure. This underscores what we already know: Our government is controlled by corporations, not by people. By definition, governments controlled by corporations are fascist. The well-being of the people is not a priority. Our government is not broke, it is bought.

Against this background, Republicans want everyone to be armed with advanced weapons. See Charles Derber's book: The Wilding of America.

Corporations, by law, seek maximum profit and, in to do that pay the lowest possible wages. They migrate to countries that allow prison labor, child labor, subsistence wages, environmental laxness, dangerous working conditions. They have deindustrialized the US to export jobs to them. We have high unemployment. Not only are American workers competing with third world subsistence wages, surplus US workers are driving wages down still more.

We have had many decades of privatized, for-profit health care that has proven outlandishly expensive, complicated. intrusive, ineffective, and neglects the needs of a large fraction of the population. Careful examination of other countries experience should prove that single-payer, public health is the simplest, most efficient, fairest, and most effective. Republicans think having a bake sale for catastrophic illness is fine. Pay up or die.

Corporations traditionally have provided health benefits, pensions, and other insurance to their employees. It never covered everyone, but for many people it worked. No more. Now, it turns out, corporations no longer willing or able to pay for such guarantees, and with the help of Republicans, they have shifted these responsibilities on to families. With falling wages, less job security, it is no wonder that many people have fallen behind. Raiding pension funds has become a major profit center for the privatizers. Productivity and corporate profits soar, while the middle class is sinking into debt servitude. Student debt is at unprecedented high levels and, since it cannot be shed in bankruptcy, will continue to keep demand weak. Students can look forward to debt servitude in the face of an anemic job market.

The US made a profound mistake in making corporations responsible for social supports. That's one of the reasons Scandinavian countries do so much better.

In the US a job is necessary for subsistence, but for many reasons, a large fraction of people are not needed in the private sector. As machines become smarter, paid jobs become scarcer. For example, self-driving vehicles could replace taxi-drivers and truck drivers. Low wage, off-shore workers can replace many formerly well paying jobs. Even academic credentials no longer guarantee a job.

That is why we need to create a strong social safety net that supports everyone from cradle to grave. The government could be employer of last resort, because, as we all know, there is always plenty of work to do. Scandinavian countries have been leaders in providing serviceable institutions. (See Finland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, )

We can afford it, particularly if we abandon our effort to build a world-dominating empire, and a world destroying nuclear arsenal.

Rick Scott of Florida

See this Elizabeth Warren video (about an hour, though well spent): http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/642.html

How could the United States devote so much money to health care and yet rank so poorly relative to other industrialized countries in key indicators of the nation’s health? Per capita, the United States spends nearly double what some of its peers spend, but Americans lag behind in terms of life expectancy, infant mortality, low birth weight, injuries and homicides, adolescent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, HIV/AIDS, drug-related deaths, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, chronic lung disease, and disability rates. (1) Some have argued that Americans’ comparatively poor health is due to the larger proportion of people living in poverty in the United States than in the more generous welfare states of Scandinavia and Western Europe, but this thinking fails to explain why this poorer health ranking holds for Americans who are white, educated, employed, and high-income. (2) We have suggested that previous calculations have omitted an aspect of spending that is critically important for national health outcomes. This is spending on social services, an area in which the United States spends far less relative to its GDP than its peer countries. The new math unravelled the paradox. If we add together what countries spend on health care and what they spend on social services, the United States’ place in the ranking of industrialized countries shifts considerably. This sum of spending is what might be called the national investment in health. In looking at the sum, no longer does the United States appear to be a massively big spender. Americans’ spending on social services is far less per capita than that of counterpart countries. Taking both health care and social service spending into account, the United States spends a fairly average sum compared with its peer countries and, we argue, has fairly average health outcomes as a result. The American Health Care Paradox: Why Spending More Is Getting Us Less, Elizabeth H. Bradley and Lauren A. Taylor

Who’s unhoused in California? Largest study in decades upends myths (6/20/2023)

How to Fight the New GOP Scheme To Kill Social Security & Medicare (8/4/2022)

Private Equity Giant KKR Bought Hundreds Of Homes For People With Disabilities. Some Vulnerable Residents Suffered Abuse And Neglect. (4/25/2022)

The Ugly Truth: Republicans Want More Poverty and Crime (5/29/2021)

Ending the End of Welfare as We Knew It (3/11/2021)

‘We’re No. 28! And Dropping!’ (9/9/2020)

A ‘Safety Net’ That’s a Kafkaesque Mess (7/25/2020)

Not much of a Safety Net: Millions of Americans lost their Health Care and Apartments when COVID-19 Took their Jobs (5/25/2020)

An Epidemic of Hardship and Hunger (5/7/2020)

The Great American Divide (4/20/2020)

it’s becoming increasingly clear that Americans suffering from the economic consequences of Covid-19 will get far less help than they should. Having already condemned tens of thousands to unnecessary death, Trump and his allies are in the process of condemning tens of millions to unnecessary hardship. Paul Krugman (NYT 5/7/2020)

Lemony Snicket Explains Occupy Wall Street

How One GOP Plutocrat Helped Make 20,000 Kids Homeless (11/29/2012)

The World Happiness Report for 2018 found Finland the most cheerful country on earth, followed by Norway, Denmark, and Iceland. America came in eighteenth. "substantially below most comparably wealthy nations." Bill McKibben in his book Falter, Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?.

Trump and the Republicans are focusing on the tattered remnants of the social welfare system: Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security. The remains of FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society--- are on the chopping block. James Petras

‘Homelessness is lethal’: US deaths among those without housing are surging (2/7/2022) Guardian

The Myth of Meritocracy (4/9/2019)

Trump said he wouldn’t cut Medicaid, Social Security, and Medicare. His 2020 budget cuts all 3. (4/12/2019)

President of Iceland Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson on the Importance of Social Welfare for a Healthy Economy

Welfare Reform Is About Systematically Impoverishing People (11/29/2018)

The US has the highest level of inequality among developed countries. That means that many people do without basic necessities. There are too many homeless, food insecure, indebted, without medical coverage.

The US was great when FDR was in office. He had solutions to many of our problems expressed in his Second Bill of Rights, which was written into law in post WWII countries but not here. To fight Fascism we not only mobilized for war, the top marginal tax rate exceeded 90%, which is why income inequality was not so extreme. It is difficult to tax the rich because they game the system, but that’s where the money is.

It is morally right to have a strong social safety net so that everyone has the basics for a dignified life. A high marginal wealth tax would pay for universal health care (including vision, hearing, childcare, and long-term care), free public higher education, supplemented income for displaced workers, and well-maintained infrastructure.

That would damp down inequality and make the US a much better place. Electing Bernie would have been a good start.

Republicans oppose all of this, even now opposing the fight against Fascism. We may have lost WWII.

Mitch McConnell says it out loud: Republicans are gunning for Social Security, Medicare and Obamacare next (10/19/2018)

Sanders Introduces the Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies (or BEZOS) Act (9/7/2018)

Come the Recession, Don’t Count on That Safety Net (2/20/2018)

Statement on Visit to the USA, by Professor Philip Alston, United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights* (12/15/2017)

Rise and Decline of the Welfare State: Class Struggle and Imperial Wars as the Motor Force of US History (12/11/2017)

The coming Republican assault on the safety net (12/8/2017)

Paul Krugman, Republicans Are Coming for Your Benefits (12/4/2017)

FDR’s Dream, Europe and Japan’s Reality

“All the advantages I gave up when I left Finland and moved to America – universal public health care, universal affordable day care, real maternity benefits, high quality free education, taxpayer funded residences for the elderly, even the separate taxation of spouses – were no gifts from the government to make me a servile dependent on the state’s largess. Rather the Nordic system is intentionally designed to take into account the specific challenges of modern life and give citizens as much logistical and financial independence as possible. This is actually the opposite of a community-centered system, or socialism, or whatever you want to call it.” the Nordic Theory of Everything, In Search of a Better Life: Anu Partanen

American politics and policy is badly tilted against working families. We have limited liability for corporations, but increasingly we have full liability for American families. This must change, and the change should begin with health care, the epicenter of economic insecurity for millions of hardworking Americans. Health reform doesn’t have to be complicated, just effective. Let every employer and worker have a choice: Buy insurance through the private sector, or buy it through Medicare. Americans should also have access to an all-purpose catastrophic insurance policy to protect themselves and their families against huge drops in income or budget-breaking expenses. These and other innovative reforms outlined in The Great Risk Shift are designed to catch people when they plummet from the ladder of economic advancement. But they’re not just about security, but also about opportunity. By providing workers and their families with the financial security they need to look with hope and optimism toward the future, they will help millions of now-anxious Americans reach for and achieve the American Dream. From The Great Risk Shift (web page): Jacob S. Hacker

Racial discord plays a critical role in determining beliefs about the poor. Since racial minorities are highly overrepresented among the poorest Americans, any income-based redistribution measures will redistribute disproportionately to these minorities. Opponents of redistribution in the United States have regularly used race-based rhetoric to resist left-wing policies. Across countries, racial fragmentation is a powerful predictor of redistribution. Within the United States, race is the single most important predictor of support for welfare. America’s troubled race relations are clearly a major reason for the absence of an American welfare state. Why Doesn't the United States Have A European Style Welfare State: Edward Glaeser and Bruce Sacerdote (pdf download.)

Communities of any size, from the local to the national level, can start initiatives that dramatically enhance their own economic well-being. Perhaps the most dramatic example in the past century was the revival of the nations of Western Europe after World War II, taking them from destitution to the highest living standards in the world through the principles of social democracy - combining self-interest with civic values. Working though their trade unions, cooperatives, and multiparty systems, the citizens of Western Europe responded to the rebound fo their economies by raising their expectations. During the decade after 1945, these countries embraced their citizens' demands for universal health care, decent pensions, cheap and accessible public transit, tuition-free university education, at least one month of annual paid vacation, free child care, paid family sick leave, and maternity leave - to name only a few of the amenities fostered by this collaboration between local and national.

Sixty seven years after 1945, however, the United States - the victor in World War II and long touted as the richest nation in the world - offers none of these civilized services for all of its people. Not one. We do not have a multiparty system in which smaller parties with pioneering agendas can be part of governing coalitions. Instead, we have a winner-take-all two-party dictatorship, its voting blocs broken into gerrymandered districts largely dominated by one party or the other. We have the weakest, most obstructionist labor laws among industrialized nations, which have led to the lowest percentage of labor union members in the Western world. A much smaller segmeent of our economy is devoted to consumer cooperatives. In short, the institutional flaws of our government have allowed powerful corporate interests to drive the American standard of living downward for the past thirty-nine years." Ralph Nader: the Seventeen Solutions

Government Spends More on Corporate Welfare Subsidies than Social Welfare Programs

It’s time we saw support for child care and paid leave as central to both economic growth and family well-being. (10/24/2016)

Bernie Sanders Wants to Take Back "Family Values" From the GOP (6/13/2015)


GOP Budget Slashes Tax Rates for the 1 Percent, Safety Net for Everyone Else (3/17/2015)

America's Family Leave Disgrace (1/22/2015)

Strengthening the Social Safety Net (10/4/2014)

Congress Cuts $8.7 Billion in Food Stamps, But Finds $22 Billion to Fight ISIS (10/1/2014)

Wall Street's Secret Pension Swindle (4/27/2014)

Republican Lifeguard (3/17/2014)

Take Action: Defend Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid (10/26/2013)

Profiting from the Poor: Outsourcing Social Services Puts Most Vulnerable at Risk (10/8/2013)

How America’s 401(k) Revolution Rewarded the Rich and Turned the Rest of Us Into Big Losers (9/23/2013)

House Agriculture Committee Farm Bill Would Cut Nearly 2 Million People off SNAP (5/16/2013)

The Politics of Race (12/18/2012)

Paid Parental Leave Lacking In the US (2/22/2011)

Bibliography

DEATHS OF DESPAIR AND THE FUTURE OF CAPITALISM By Anne Case and Angus Deaton

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite: Daniel Markovits

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism by Anne Case and Angus Deaton

Development as Freedom: Amartya Sen (Nobel Prize in Economics)

The Second Bill Of Rights: FDR's Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More Than Ever: Cass R. Sunstein

Why Doesn't the United States Have A European Style Welfare State: Edward Glaeser and Bruce Sacerdote (pdf download.)

The Nordic Theory of Everything, In Search or a Better Life: Anu Partanen

Social Justice in the OECD: How do the Member States Compare (2011). Download the pdf.

Occupy the Economy, Challenging Capitalism: Richard Wolff

The Great Risk Shift: Jacob S. Hacker

Why the White Working Class Still Matters: Ruy Teixeira and Joel Rogers.

Retirement Heist: How Companies Plunder and Profit From the Nest Eggs of American Workers: Ellen Schultz

From Poor Law To Welfare State: Walter Trattner

The Wilding of America: Charles Derber

Our Kids, The American Dream in Crisis: Robert Putnam

Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash Over the New Deal, Eric Rauchway

The Social Contract, 1762, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712-1778