Single Moms Can't Be Asked to Feed Big Bird?

March 20, 2017

By Joe Rothstein

During a 2012 Republican presidential debate, CNN moderator Wolf Blitzer asked hypothetically whether a 30-year-old working man in a coma should be treated, even if he lacked health insurance.

Ron Paul, candidate, congressman, medical doctor and favorite of Libertarian-leaning Republicans, replied, “What he should do is whatever he wants to do and assume responsibility for himself.”

The studio audience cheered and applauded.

Blitzer followed up with this question: “Congressman, are you saying that society should just let him die?”

Before Paul could answer, many in the audience shouted, “Yes!”

I was reminded of that 2012 campaign highlight reel moment the other day when President Trump’s budget director Mick Mulvaney, unveiled wholesale cuts in longstanding public priorities. Mulvaney justified the cuts for one of those line items, public broadcasting, this way: “Can we really continue to ask a coal miner in West Virginia or a single mom in Detroit to pay for these programs?”

Mulvaney's logic could be applied as well to the elimination of budget items related to combating climate change, diplomacy, famine relief, low-income housing, and scientific research, also on Trump’s budget chopping block.

The question of whether and what to cut out of the federal budget is not a narrow one of money, but rather a larger one of who we are as a people. Do I, as someone who lives far from the coal mines, tell that miner I don’t want to pay for his unemployment check or his black lung treatment? Do I, as someone who already has raised my children, tell that single mom I don’t want to help pay for her child’s education?

Or, going back to that 2012 TV debate, do I shout “yes,” let that young uninsured man die because I don’t chose to save him from his unwise decision to go without health insurance? Is that the kind of society I want to live in?

Hardly. And most likely, neither do you.

Most programs targeted either for elimination or devastating cutbacks have strong popular support. These programs were not born out of some bureaucrat’s capricious whim. They exist because needs for them became so evident Congress and past presidents were compelled to act. They exist only after running a grueling gauntlet of debate and compromise among competing ideas and interests.

Ask anyone who’s ever tried to get ANYTHING through Congress. Our legislative system is a model of how action can be resisted, deferred, delayed. Only the hardiest ideas generally survive conception and are born into actual federal programs. Even then, unless you’re talking military weapons systems, non-military program budgets are meager as part of a multi-trillion dollar spending program.

The point here is not so much the dollars as it is the principal. What kind of a country are we? Are we a nation of citizens, as in “We the people of the United States,” or are we merely customers for those in private business or shareholders whose fortunes are tied to the rise and fall of profits or stock prices?

Is education a private competitive business or a value than underpins the strength and future of the nation? Is health care merely another commodity for a balance sheet, or an integral need to redeem the promise of “promoting the general welfare?”

Before Medicare, a lot for older parents were living in spare rooms at the sufferance of their grown children. Before Medicaid a lot more people were in the emergency rooms or on the streets and crowding church basements. Before Congress enacted clean water and air rules, polluted rivers were garbage dumps, toxic waste was likely to be in our backyards, and air was as poisonous as it is in some parts of China and India today.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau uncovered the egregious Wells Fargo bank scheme of signing up millions of customers for credit cards without their knowledge and then charging them fees for it. That’s exactly the type of work the bureau was created to do. Anti-consumer practice is rampant in much of the business community--and now we're going to eliminate some of the best cops we have on the beat to defend us?

Budget Director Mulvaney’s Kentucky coal miner and single Detroit mom could easily be among Wells Fargo’s victims. Or maybe they have older parents who are are living longer and more independently because of Medicare. Or, to specifically answer Mulvaney’s public broadcasting question, either the miner or the mom, or both, may have children whose lives have been enhanced because of Sesame Street and other non-commercial broadcasting.

And, yes, it’s reasonable to ask that miner and mom, in their presumed tax brackets, to pay at most $1.50 a year to keep public broadcasting as a worthy public service. The British pay nearly $150 a year for a similar service, and few Brits are clamoring to do away with the BBC.

Let’s face it, the issue here isn’t money. The U.S. is by far the richest economy in the world. It’s a huge disservice to Americans to keep insisting we’re too poor to pay for public services that other, smaller economies manage to finance without whining about the costs.

For nearly 30 years worker pay has stagnated while income for top earners has soared. Much of that new wealth has been shielded from taxes in offshore havens or through dodges devised by clever attorneys and accountants. Trillions in corporate profits remain stashed in foreign accounts. The financial sector has become hugely profitable by just pushing money around, with little productive benefit to the overall economy.

Our capitalist system has been distorted by wealth, while workers and communities are starved for resources to buy and build. And Trump is promising a new huge tax break for wealthy corporations and individuals, while cutting money for legal aid and meals on wheels.

Our problem is larger than a budget deficit or an individual program cut. Our problem is too much cash in the wrong places and too little sense of community by those who have the power to get things back in balance.

Tell THAT to the Kentucky coal miner and the single mom in Detroit.

(Joe Rothstein is a regular columnist for USPoliticstoday.com and author of the acclaimed political thriller “The Latina President… and the Conspiracy to Destroy Her.” Mr. Rothstein can be contacted at joe@einnews.com).