Missing the Point

Bernie Sanders may have enjoyed Cervantes’ Don Quixote (Don Quijote de la Mancha) a little too much in his youth. Then perhaps he read or saw it more recently.  Either way, the Romantic view that he fashions himself as the leader of a “revolution” speaks more of windmills than of reality. 

That doesn’t discount the value of his opinions.  Bernie has garnered substantial support because he has addressed, with authenticity, systemic problems that our current divided government is incapable of addressing.

Nevertheless like most politicians, he presents these problems with little substance.  He’s heavy on the what and rather light on the how. A case in point is healthcare, which he doesn’t even address as an “issue” on his website.

I find that disappointing since Sanders is the only candidate with the courage enough to advocate a single payer system.  It’s disappointing because in the real world healthcare has no equal for stressful issues that impact our daily lives…our actual lives. 

People can stress over terrorist attacks, gun use, runaway germs, environmental deterioration, bad parents, puppy farms, you name it, but none of these actually impact the daily lives of the vast majority of Americans.  This is not to say that we should ignore issues that don’t affect us directly.  Were that the case, slavery might have lasted into the 20^th century.  But we should not ignore the obvious.

In the recent December Democratic debate Bernie was asked how he planned to pay for a single payer healthcare system. He was actually asked how much specifically in taxes would have to be raised to pay for it.  This was a how much more this month do you expect to be beating your wife kind of question.

He awkwardly (and timidly, in my opinion) attempted to point out that, essentially, every American is already paying a huge healthcare tax in the form of premiums and co-pays (my words), and the elimination of that would offset any tax increase.  He didn’t succeed.

Moreover, he failed to give even the slightest idea on how we get from here to there.  Democrats, in their desire to defend Obamacare, have added nothing significant to the debate on this issue.  The Republicans simply want to eliminate the law (which they invented) and let the chips fall where they may.  Not surprisingly, those chips would be like poker chips going to very few winners.

Saunders and other politicians often ask this question but don’t have the cohunes to give an answer: why do Americans pay multiples more (per capita) in healthcare costs than any other developed nation yet receive outcomes no better or inferior for the society as a whole? The American capitalist approach to healthcare, unique in the world, makes the difference and the reason it doesn’t work has to do with healthcare itself.

General healthcare is not a marketable commodity as Republicans would like you to think.  It is a service which is essentially inelastic, meaning that regardless how much the price goes up the demand for the service does not drop.  It is no more marketable than Police protection, Fire Departments, the Military, food safety, road repair or any one of many public services.

There is no free enterprise pressure to lower cost and no practical way to shop for services based on price. Controlling cost is the real issue and Obamacare doesn’t take us one step closer…but it could have.

Insurance based Universal Healthcare, as they have in Japan, is probably the type of system we could gravitate toward, given the passage of Obamacare.  However, Japan’s system has both central control of pricing and outlaws for-profit hospitals.  These are critical ingredients to controlling healthcare costs and a near impossible goal given the flora and fauna of American politics. Or is it?

In enacting the Affordable Health Care Act Obama caved on the most important aspect of the law, the public option.  He was willing to risk long term failure for short term success. It was a bad deal. It was like negotiating your right to bake bread by giving up the yeast.

The most cost-effective healthcare in the Country today is Medicare.  The public option would have essentially created a “Medicare” for American’s under 65.  It is likely it would have attracted a lot of support and combined with over-65 Medicare could have given the US Government the kind of leverage that is needed to control costs.

Given enough support we might be able to back door into a Japanese type of Universal Health Care, which ironically America created for the Japanese after WWII.

For those brain-dead Conservative Republicans who robotically respond that the Government is incapable of handling such power, I suggest they give a portrait of Lyndon Johnson the finger and turn down their Medicare benefits when they turn 65.

Bernie, Hillary and common sense Americans who know that Obamacare isn’t going away anytime soon need to start to address how to improve it and deal with its overriding fault…cost. It is by reinstating the “public option”. That is what Saunders should have responded with and should have done it with gusto.  Does he even get it?

Take a Deep Breath

Take a deep breath America, relax…it’s only Donald. 

What we’re seeing in the Republican Party this political season relates more closely to Reality TV than reality.  The massive attention “The Donald” has received from both news media and bias media (Right and Left) is no less bizarre than the affection he gleans from his supporters.

He has been called or accused of being a fascist, a tower of strength, a demigod, a racist, a patriot, a loser, a winner, a womanizer, a fighter, or a megalomaniac, among other things.  Take your choice. 

None of them are true.  I liked Martin O’Malley’s label of “carnival barker”. After all, what kind of colorful, fast talking trickster stands before a crowd trying to entice them into the Fun House.  Sounds like Trump to me.

In truth, what he says is meaningless, beyond the generation of endless rhetoric.  It’s what he does that defines who he is, and as of yet he has done nothing other than talk.  Moreover, there is nothing he can do and, likely, nothing he will do.

I’m not suggesting that rhetoric has no value, far from it, but a weather report is not the weather. When someone is forecasting a July snowstorm in Miami, it’s time to stick your head out the window.

Trump is not alone. All politicians, but the Republicans especially, campaign with the use of outrageous fantasies.  How many times have I heard Republican presidential candidates advocate the elimination of the Internal Revenue Service?  An $18 trillion Federal budget with no agency assigned to collect the money??  We’re going to run the Country on goodwill and the honor system??  Perhaps we could employ the Salvation Army bell ringers during their off season.

Deporting millions of people, building impenetrable walls, stopping immigration (even visitation), or tagging Americans by their personal beliefs are just as cockeyed and brain dead as any other political fantasy.

So can this carnival barker actually become President of the United States? After all, we did have Warren G. Harding, Chester A. Arthur, and (gulp) George W. Bush. Of course Trump won’t become President.  No prior President ever gestated in the world we know as Reality Television, and it’s not going to happen, all other things being equal.

It should be no mystery, however, why Donald attracts the starboard side of the good ship GOP.

Republican politicians primarily trade in the use of fear to harvest support.  They’re good at it and they readily get mass media to help. It doesn’t matter if it’s because of immigrants, minority crime, “leftists”, or even simply the “Government” (which they are trying so desperately to be part of) their followers are, by their opinion, deep in doo-doo…and it works.

When a Republican candidate expresses his dire concern about the cunning insertion of Shiria Law into our Judicial System, as most of them have, it should evoke universal belly clutching laughter…but it doesn’t. Hell, we can’t even get good law passed, let alone Shiria Law.

Instead of gun control laws let’s pass laws that take away the driver’s licenses from all women.  Yeah…that’ll be easy.  Regrettably, it doesn’t cause laughter even in those who know better. What it does, when said over and over, is to create uncertainty, the mother of fear.

So who are these “legions” that support Donald, Ted, Rubio, Ben, Jeb and the like? 

This week Bernie Sanders was asked that question.  He said emphatically that they were those individuals angry from the injustice and inequality of our (non-pluralistic) economy in which the power barons in Washington fight to maintain.  According to Bernie, Republicans like Trump give them a scapegoat by blaming the Muslims or Latinos, just as Hitler used the Jews to gain power in a very sick Germany.  Sounds good but, sorry Bernie, you couldn’t be more wrong, except for one thing…they are angry.

The diehard Trump supporter is white, Christian, and with reasonable income and assets by national standards. He or she is usually rural, older, suspicious of education generally, and adverse to change. What makes them angry?  Quite simple really: bias talk radio and television. 

Most all the things that make them angry and engender irrational fear are not really happening in their lives.  Without Rush Limbaugh, Carl Levin, Fox News and the like they probably could deal with, for example, a black President.  Does that make them stupid?  Not really. Still, when fear walks in one door, generally intelligence walks out the other.

The good part is that there are just not that many of them.  One well thought out estimate I read recently argued that if The Donald could hold onto every one of his current supporters in a general election he would garner less than 5% of the vote.  Breathe easy.

The United States is not the German Weimar Republic of 1934…not even remotely close. However, the similarities on the kinds of things that can cause fear in both cultures are notable. Add to that our 21^st Century ability for instant mass communication and you can see how relatively small events or incendiary rhetoric can have widespread impact. 

Donald Trump knows this and uses it to his advantage…but not to be President. 

The Donald is a business man, as he claims.  It is what he actually does.  He is currently merchandizing the “Trump” brand with hundreds of millions in free advertizing.  I believe he’s not interested in being President, probably not even the Republican nominee.  He might leave the Party as an excuse to exit the race, but he won’t run a third party campaign because he wouldn’t spend a dime of his money on a sure loss. He is not a man of principal…obviously.

Trump is a smart, rich narcissist and we’ll be seeing him in the news long after we start saying “Marco…ah, what’s his name?”  So sit back, relax and enjoy the show.  Reality starts again next fall.