“Who’s Paying The Premiums?”: Health Insurance Is Not A Favor Your Boss Does For You
The debate over the Hobby Lobby case has been plagued by many problematic presumptions, but there’s one that even many people who disliked the decision seem to sign on to without thinking about it. It’s the idea that the health insurance you get through your employer is something that they do for you—not just administratively, but in a complete sense. But this is utterly wrong. You work, and in exchange for that labor you are given a compensation package that includes salary and certain benefits like a retirement account and health coverage. Like the other forms of compensation, the details of that insurance are subject to negotiation between you and your employer, and the government’s involvement is to set some minimums—just as it mandates a minimum wage, it mandates certain components health insurance must include.
Those who support Hobby Lobby are now talking as though mandating that insurance include preventive care is tantamount to them forcing you to make a contribution to your local food bank when you’d rather give to the pet shelter. You can see it, for instance, in this piece by Megan McArdle in which she tries to look at the clash of rights involved in this dispute, but running through the whole piece is the idea that an employee’s health insurance isn’t compensation for her labor but a piece of charity her boss has bestowed upon her for no reason other than the goodness of his heart. Referring to the question of whether the religious beliefs of Hobby Lobby’s owners are being imposed on its employees, she writes: “How is not buying you something equivalent to ‘imposing’ on you?” Then later she refers to “a positive right to have birth control purchased for me.”
But when your insurance coverage includes birth control, your employer isn’t “buying you” anything. Your employer is basically acting as an administrative middleman between you and the insurance company. Your employer isn’t the one whose money is paying the premiums, you are. It’s compensation for the work you’ve done, just as much as your salary is.
This goes all the way back to to the roots of our employer-based insurance system. During World War II, the government imposed wage and price controls, meaning employers couldn’t give raises. So they began to offer health insurance as an alternate form of compensation, and when the IRS decided in 1943 that insurance could be paid with pre-tax dollars, it made it all the more attractive as a form of compensation. And keep in mind that the preferential tax treatment of health insurance (which the self-employed don’t get) is a tax benefit to the employee, not the employer. If you eliminated it, employers’ balance sheets would stay the same (it would still be counted as an expense), but employees would have to pay taxes on the benefit.
You might or might not think that remembering the true nature of the insurance benefit should change the calculation in the Hobby Lobby case. I’m guessing that for the plaintiffs, it wouldn’t; they’d probably argue that even having to think about what sinful harlots their employees are imposes a “substantial burden” on their religious freedom. And as I’ve argued before, we should get rid of the employer-based insurance system entirely. That may happen eventually, but in the meantime, it’s good to remember just whose health insurance it is. It’s not your boss’. It’s yours.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 9, 2014
“Why Obama Makes The GOP Panic”: The Party Of Lincoln Has Metamorphosed Into A Confederate-Accented Political Cult
If you pay too much attention to opinion polls, as most people do, doubtless you’ve heard that a plurality of voters has judged Barack Obama the worst president since World War II. Thirty-three percent, to be precise, which as it conflates almost exactly with the number of hardcore Republicans, merely tells you something you already knew: GOP partisans dislike Obama with irrational zeal.
In short, the Quinnipiac University survey reveals more about them than about Obama. But hold that thought.
A presidential poll whose results might be worth heeding would measure the opinions only of people who could actually name the 12 U.S. presidents since 1945. I’m guessing that’d be maybe 10 percent of the electorate, tops.
Anyway, to put the bad news about Obama in perspective, back in 2006 when George W. Bush was in his sixth year in office — typically the nadir of a two-term president’s popularity – the same Quinnipiac poll found that 34 percent of Americans judged him the worst since 1945.
Even the sainted Ronald Reagan’s job approval numbers took a sharp drop during his sixth year due to the Iran-Contra scandal — selling missiles to Iran to finance right-wing terrorists in Nicaragua.
This year, however, a reported 35 percent in the Quinnipiac survey judged Reagan the best president since World War II. Apparently all is forgiven, forgotten, or — equally likely — never known.
Bill Clinton came in second at 18 percent; JFK third with 15 percent. Democrats, see, split their “best president” choices pretty evenly among Clinton, JFK and Obama. Meanwhile, 66 percent Republicans chose Reagan, a sharp rebuke to ex-presidents named Bush.
Indeed, some 28 percent in the 2014 survey still think that Dubya established a new low in presidential ineptitude. More significant, exactly 1 percent called Bush the best. One percent!
Even Nixon, who resigned the presidency ahead of impeachment, got one percent. Gerald Ford, who pardoned him, got one percent.
Historians agree about Dubya. A recent Siena College survey of 238 “presidential scholars” called Bush the fifth worst in U.S. history, and the only chief executive since 1945 to make the bungler’s Hall of Fame.
(Only one post-WWII president made the historians’ Top 10: Dwight D. Eisenhower, a judgment I wouldn’t dispute.)
Politically, the make-believe rancher turned portrait painter has become The Man Who Wasn’t There. Because Bush’s record is pretty much indefensible — asleep on 9/11, imprudent tax cuts, an unfinished war in Afghanistan, weak job creation, a financial meltdown that damn near destroyed the world economy, trillion-dollar budget deficits, an unjust, failed war and unfolding geopolitical catastrophe in Iraq — Republicans not named Dick Cheney make no serious effort to defend it.
Instead, they insist that the world began anew with the inauguration of Barack Obama. All references to the astonishing mess his predecessor left behind are forbidden lest one be accused of playing the “blame game.”
Rhyming slogans often prove irresistible to simpletons.
OK, so Obama asked for it. Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum gets that part exactly right:
For years, I really didn’t believe the conservative snark about how Obama supporters all thought he would descend on Washington like a god-king and miraculously turn us into a post-racial, post-partisan, post-political country. Kumbaya! The reason I didn’t believe it was that it never struck me as even remotely plausible.
Of course Obama promised to transform America. “That’s what presidential candidates do,” Drum adds. “I believed then, and still believe now, that Obama is basically a mainstream Democrat who’s cautious, pragmatic, technocratic, and incremental…[But] by now, the evidence is clear that millions of Obama voters really believed all that boilerplate rhetoric.”
Hence bitter disappointment on the sentimental left. Oh, you wanted single-payer health care? So tell me where Obama was supposed to get the votes.
However, the real believers in Barack the magic enchanter have been Republicans. His presidency has driven a substantial proportion of the GOP electorate completely around the bend. To a remarkable degree, the party of Lincoln has metamorphosed into a Confederate-accented political cult on apocalyptic themes suggested by fundamentalist theology.
“The unhinged versions of this sensibility,” notes Jonathan Chait “held that Obama had launched a sinister ideological assault on the Constitution and American freedom, perhaps in the name of Islamism, or socialism, or, somehow, both.”
Mentioning Obama’s race as one cause of GOP panic is even more forbidden than bringing up George W. Bush. You want to argue about it? Check the comment lines to any online article about Obama, and then get back to me.
It’s in the Bible: “The guilty flee, where no man pursueth.”
Along with existential panic goes an inability to keep things in proportion. Benghazi equals invading Iraq. The IRS “scandal” equals Watergate. Forty-five consecutive months of job growth and shrinking budget deficits get airbrushed out of the picture.
Over time, fear will abate. Then we’ll see what we see.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, July 9, 2014
“Benghazi, The Cost Of An Obsession”: A Farcical Waste Of Time And Money
The furious, year-and-a-half-old effort to turn the deadly Benghazi attack into a Watergate-level scandal has so far failed. Naturally that hasn’t stopped Republicans from howling at hearings and turning over seat cushions in search of evidence. “Naturally,” because the Republican base has so far embraced these tactics.
But the Democrats, who for the most part have responded to the hysteria with loud sighs, are increasing their efforts to change the politics of the endless investigation by showing that it’s a farcical waste of time and money.
So it was that on Monday Nancy Pelosi provided journalists with a document revealing this year’s anticipated operating costs for the 12-member select committee on the Benghazi attacks. House Republicans have apparently requested $3.3 million for the panel, which will be composed of seven Republican lawmakers, five Democrats and an expected staff of 30.
USA Today put that figure in perspective:
Since the Benghazi committee was created in May, its full-year equivalent budget would be more than $5 million. This is more than the House Intelligence Committee, which has a $4.4 million budget this year and spent $4.1 million last year. The largest House committees — Energy and Commerce; Oversight and Government Reform; Transportation and Infrastructure — have budgets between $8 million and $9.5 million for the year.
A special committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming created by Democrats in 2007 spent about $2 million a year until it was shut down by the new Republican majority in January 2011.
The $3.3 million doesn’t count as a new expenditure since it will come from legislative branch funds that have already been appropriated. But this kind of profligacy won’t help the Republicans sell themselves as fiscal conservatives.
By: Juliet Lapados, Taking Note, Editor’s Blog, The New York Times, July 8, 2014
“Such Short Memories”: The Worst President Since World War II? Uh, Guess Again
When George W. Bush was inaugurated president of the United States on January 20, 2001, the unemployment rate stood at 2.4 percent. By the time Dubya completed his second term in office on January 19, 2009, the unemployment rate at risen to 7 percent. When Dubya took office in 2001, he was left with a budget surplus of $127.3 billion. When he completed his second term, he left a budget deficit of $1.4 trillion. The US national debt was $5.7 trillion on January 19, 2001. After eight years of Dubya, the debt was $10.6 trillion.
The US was at peace on January 20, 2001. After eight years of Dubya, the US was involved in two overseas wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that had cost US taxpayers nearly $1 trillion. The bigger of the two — Iraq — was launched based on mistaken, manipulated, or concocted information (or some combination of the three), and had resulted in the deaths of approximately 4,200 US military personnel and somewhere between 100,000 to 500,000 Iraqi civilians.
America’s image abroad took a serious plunge under Dubya, primarily because of Iraq. International surveys of tens of thousands of people taken by the Pew Research Center’s Pew Global Attitudes Project during those years consistently found extremely low opinions of Dubya and the US due to the war in Iraq, particularly among Muslims. The revelations of atrocities committed by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison and abuses by contracted security firms like Blackwater certainly didn’t help. Oh, and the little matter of holding prisoners at Guantanamo and… more torture.
Both wars were carried out in retaliation for the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The attacks, which took place during Dubya’s first year, resulted in the deaths of nearly 3,000 people and at least $10 billion in material damage.
A muscular foreign policy? Well, yeah… if you consider taking on third-rate powers like Iraq and Afghanistan “muscular.” Dubya couldn’t do much against Russia when it invaded Georgia in 2008, nor against Iran’s nuclear program. Also impotent to prevent the military rise of China. Some things just can’t be helped — not even if you’re a superpower.
The stock market? When Dubya took office in 2001, the Dow Jones stood at $10,587.59, the S&P 500 at $1,342.54, the NASDAQ at $2,770.38. Eight years later, the Dow was at $7,949.09, the S&P at $805.22, and the NASDAQ at $1,440.86. Those represented drops of 25 percent, 40 percent, and 48 percent, respectively.
The Great Recession in the US, which occurred during Dubya’s seventh and eighth years (2007-2008) in office, triggered a worldwide financial crisis — the worst since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and resulted in the collapse of numerous large financial firms in the US and around the world. It threatened the very viability of the international financial system.
During Dubya’s seventh and eighth years, Americans lost a total of $16.4 trillion in household wealth. In 2008 alone — Dubya’s last year — more than 1 million Americans lost their homes, and the foreclosure process had begun on another 2 million Americans.
Health care costs? Under the Dubya years, health insurance premiums doubled. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the average cost of employer-sponsored premiums for a family of four was $6,000 per year in January 2001. Eight years later, the average cost had risen to $12,680. It’s no wonder that the number of Americans with healthcare insurance dropped by 7.9 million under Dubya. Some 13.7 percent of Americans were uninsured in January 2001. Eight years later, the figure had risen to 15.4 percent.
Oh, Americans have such short memories — made only worse by how pathetically poor many choose to be informed. This is perhaps best reflected in the immensely entertaining poll recently taken by Quinnipiac University on June 24-30. The poll surveyed 1,446 people and asked them to rate US presidents since World War II. The result? Barack Obama was found to be the worst president since WWII. Right.
It brings to mind a gag quote I found online a couple of years ago. It was accompanied by a photo of Dubya. Went like this: “I screwed you all. But thanks for blaming it on the black guy.”
Bill Clinton perhaps put it best when he described the Republican Party’s position toward Obama: “We left him a total mess. He hasn’t cleaned it up fast enough, so fire him and put us back in.”
By: Marco Caceres, The Huffington Post Blog, July 8, 2014
“Fundamentalism, The Political Kiss Of Death”: Experienced Veterans Of Culture Wars, Just Not On The Winning Side
Jonathan Rauch writes that Christian conservatives, in response to their defeat in the “culture wars,” are likely to isolate themselves from the wider society.
I think that is precisely what they will do. It’s what they’ve done before. After the failure of Prohibition and their Pyrrhic victory in the Scopes trial, they headed for the backwoods, hiding out in their tent revivals and two-bit tabernacles.
The iconoclastic libertarian, H.L. Mencken, skewered and roasted them with all the glee of the Calvinistic deity in newspapers across the country. They earned every column inch.
Even into the 1960s, they continued their retreat, establishing thousands of “Christian” schools in protest of 1) the ruling on prayer in government schools, 2) sex education, and 3) desegregation of government schools. They wanted the right to pray, repress and hate–three constant traits of the American fundamentalist.
Oddly, it was the victory of Jimmy Carter, a born-again Christian, who gave them a lust for power–in spite of Carter holding none of the hateful values inspiring his fellow fundamentalists. Once they saw the glimmer of political power, however, nothing could restrain them. The greatest lust is not sex, it’s power.
It is said in Luke that Satan took Jesus to a mountaintop and showed him “all the kingdoms of the world” and said to him, “All this power I will give thee, and the glory of them; for that is delivered unto me; and to whomsoever will I give it. If thou therefore wilt worship me, all shall be thine.”
Jesus resisted, it is said, but for American Christians this temptation was too great. With Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson playing the role of Satan, they were promised political domination of this country, and by implication, the world. The temptation was too great.
In the end, they tied their wagons to the anemic presidency of the village idiot, George W. Bush, discrediting themselves and their message in the process.
America turned against the demands of the Christian Right. The campaign to bring back censorship failed. The campaign to ban abortion fizzled with public opinion now as split as when the battle started. They will never have the nation-wide ban on abortion they seek.
Their crusade against gay people backfired spectacularly–not only did they fail to make it a felony to be gay, but gay couples are legally marrying in state after state.
During the “war” Americans, became more secular and less Christian. More Americans today say they are non-believers than when the Moral Majority set out to make this a “Christian nation.”
They lost because they fought tooth and nail against the oldest American value–individual rights and liberty. Americans have long held those as core values. I won’t say Americans have always lived up to those values–they haven’t, but I will say they always clung to them.
As much as the Religious Right pretends they are patriots, in terms of American core values, they are traitors to the Enlightenment tradition of the Founders, instead they preached an authoritarian religion which, when all was said and done, had no appeal for the American people.
Time and time again, we have been able to judge the final victory of a cultural war by determining the side of the American fundamentalist. The staunchest advocates of slavery were fundamentalists, so much so that the largest fundamentalist denomination in the country originated in a defense of slavery: the Southern Baptist Convention. Fundamentalists supported Prohibition. They tended to oppose equality of rights for women.
During the war against Jim Crow, racist fundamentalists put out pamphlets on the evils of “miscegenation.” Figures such as Jerry Falwell claimed “civil rights” was communistic. Some outposts, such as Bob Jones University, refused to admit black students even into the 1970s. Fundamentalists are experienced veterans of culture wars, just not on the winning side. If anything, their support for a cause is the kiss of death.
By: James Peron, President, Moorfield Storey Institute; The Huffington Post Blog, July 8, 2014
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