Put Up or Shut Up Time for the Republicans

It was a pretty depressing election for Democrats. From their viewpoint, the only consolation that evening was that Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell lost. But the Republicans as expected took control of the House of Representatives. Can you say Speaker John Boehner? I knew you couldn’t.

For the Republicans, it was good news and bad news. The good news was that they won enough seats to recapture the House. The bad news is that they now have to help govern instead of just criticizing and obstructing the Democrats from the sidelines.

Anybody can be a critic. But it takes a lot more to be a doer.

Not that there’s anything wrong with criticism. It’s an indispensable part of a free election system. The other guys stink. We can do things better. Vote for us.

But what made things so maddening for the incumbent Democrats during the election was the claim that if the Republicans were elected, they would do things better — but without ever giving any real specifics on how they would do it.

For example, we are now running a budget deficit of about $1.3 trillion which to Republicans is unacceptable. Their plan to balance the budget is to extend the tax cuts to all including the wealthiest 2% along with mostly unspecified “spending cuts”. We don’t know exactly what they have in mind but the most consistent story is that defense, Social Security, and Medicare cuts are not on the table which is the lion’s share of the budget. With precious little else to cut, how do they propose to balance the budget while not only refusing to raise taxes but also swelling the deficit with more tax cuts for the wealthy? The math just doesn’t add up! But then again, they now have a chance to propose their own budget in the House to answer these questions.

And then there is the pledge to repeal “ObamaCare” and replace it with something better. But no matter how one feels about health care reform, there were a number of significant breakthroughs that were a result of the passing of this bill. For example, children can no longer be rejected for insurance based on preexisting conditions. (For adults, this kicks in by 2014.) Children graduating from college who cannot find a job with insurance benefits can stay on their parents’ policy until age 26. And now those with health insurance cannot be dropped by their insurer simply because they got sick. Lifetime individual dollar limits for coverage have also been dropped.

So for those who wish to repeal “ObamaCare”, which of these benefits do they want to see taken away? Or maybe they intend to keep the good parts while getting rid of those parts that they (or more likely the health insurance companies that financially support them) don't like. Admittedly, the stuff about repealing health care reform is little more than blowing smoke. Even if it somehow got past the Senate, the president would be ready with his veto pen. But it would sure be interesting to see how they would do their own healthcare reform bill. And because of the Republicans regaining control of the House, we will finally get to see what substance they are offering behind all of the rhetoric.

But past history has not been encouraging. For example back in 1994, the Republicans defeated "HillaryCare" and in the following years after gaining control of both Congress and the White House, the number of people without health insurance skyrocketed with no real attempts at reform during that period. Now that the Democrats have finally passed a health reform bill into law, the Republican game plan is to again defeat it but this time by repealing it.

Call it political spin, but I now believe that the Republican regaining of the House may well be a blessing in disguise for the Democrats — and maybe the country in general.

We know the Republicans are good at winning elections. But can they govern once they win? Or are they like the dog that chases after cars and then doesn’t know what to do when it catches one?

New Jersey Republican Governor Chris Christie in this recent Meet the Press appearance sums it all up with his usual brutal honesty:

MR. GREGORY:
When you talk about the response from the voters on Election Day, something's very curious. We know some of the feelings about the Democrats, about President Obama 's policies, but look at this from the exit polls in terms of the opinion of political parties . Republicans didn't fare too well either; 52 percent unfavorable rating. What does that say about the Republican Party today?

GOV. CHRISTIE:
You know, I think what it says is what I was saying all over the country, that's it's put up or shut up time for our party. You know, we lost our way last decade, David. We did, and people expect us to do better. And if the Republican Party wants to come back, they're going to have to do what they said they were going to do. I mean, because if they don't, we're going to be sent to the wilderness for a long time, and we're going to deserve it!

Stonewalling the Media

As the Democrats await their fate in the upcoming election, there is one Senate race that even among all of the crazy races has perhaps captured the most attention. And that is the Nevada US Senate race between Democrat and Majority Leader Harry Reid and Republican and Tea Party favorite Sharron Angle.

Sure there are many other races where Tea Party candidates have adopted positions that are well out of the political mainstream (even for many Republicans!), but Sharron Angle is in a league of her own.

Brian Greenspun, the publisher and editor of the Las Vegas Sun in his editorial Nevadans can show how smart we are (Or, by electing Sharron Angle, we can prove the reverse is true) sums up just a few of Angle’s provocative positions.

Angle would dismantle Social Security and Medicare, calling them biblical sins; do away with Veterans Affairs; not require insurance companies to pay for mammograms, and screenings for prostate and other cancers that we know can save lives with early detection; or refuse to require background checks for sex offenders. These are all norms of American daily living that people take for granted and expect that those who we elect won’t take them away. Angle would.

Even worse, she has stated publicly how she really feels about Nevadans crushed by this meltdown. She believes people who need unemployment benefits to keep their homes and food on their tables, until there are jobs to be had, are just spoiled!

The list goes on and on. There is her position that even women who are impregnated by rape or incest should not have access to abortion. And then there are her proposed Second Amendment “remedies” in response to actions by Congress she disapproves of. A little armed insurrection anybody?

But this is not about criticizing her ideas as strange as they may be to many of us. Elections are about competing ideas and candidates should air their different views to allow the voters to make their own informed choices.

But what angers me (and should anger you too) is the strategy of Angle (and many other Tea Partiers) of stonewalling the media when they try to do their job of asking follow-up questions of the candidates to defend their positions. Or as the Sun editorial puts it:

People’s right of access to information about their government is paramount. People who wish to seek and hold public office have no right to withhold themselves and their views from voters. Angle, obviously, disagrees with the First Amendment to the Constitution, the Founding Fathers who wrote it and the vast majority of Americans who live and die each day defending it.

Angle has been seen many times walking away from media questioners, but the latest is the straw that breaks the camel’s back for me. Check out the video of the latest attempted interview of her in this link.

Reporters from the CBS and NBC affiliates surprised the tea party favorite at McCarran International Airport, where they asked her questions about national security and unemployment. Angle responded, "I will answer those questions when I am the senator."

Pressed further, she added, "The two wars that we are in right now are exactly what we are in."

How profound. This is more than just an isolated incident; it represents an attitude on her part. Appearing on conservative-friendly Fox News, she came out with a whopper that even left the Fox interviewer flabbergasted.

"We wanted [the press] to ask the questions we want to answer, so that they report the news the way we want it reported."

The strategy these candidates use is to put out some right-wing talking points (some say it's demagoguery) to fire up the base, but at the same time avoid answering questions by the media (except for friendly questioning on Fox) to explain or defend their positions.

For example, Kentucky Republican Senate candidate Rand Paul cancelled a scheduled appearance on Meet the Press rather than explain his controversial remarks on the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Sarah Palin never appeared on any of the Sunday political talk shows during her VP run in 2008. It was only when ABC’s Charles Gibson asking her about the Bush Doctrine and CBS’s Katie Couric asked her about which newspapers she read that her lack of knowledge on the issues became painfully apparent. And then there was the recent infamous incident in Alaska where Republican Alaska Senate candidate Joe Miller’s private security guards handcuffed a reporter for approaching the candidate with questions after a public town hall meeting.

One would think that when a candidate refuses to answer questions, the voters would respond by not voting for that person! But Angle, Paul, and Miller all lead in the polls this weekend before the election so this basically dishonest strategy is apparently working. (But fortunately not for California GOP gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman.)

We shouldn’t let them get away with it! It should stand to reason that if certain candidates are going through all of this trouble to avoid defending their positions, isn’t it reasonable to ask what they are hiding? Isn’t it possible that some of their extreme positions would be indefensible in the face of media scrutiny? And that they know it!

Freedom to Hate

I can’t help but wonder if the framers of the US Constitution’s First Amendment would have placed at least some restrictions on hate speech if they had seen some of the most infamous examples in history such as from the Nazis, the KKK, and most recently the Westboro Baptist Church, a virulent anti-gay hate group in Topeka, Kansas headed by Fred Phelps which has gotten national attention for their picketing of military funerals.

It is their worldview (not mine) that since God hates homosexuality and the US Government and its military tolerates homosexuality, the tragedies that America has suffered like 9/11 along with the military deaths from the wars are a retribution from God.

For those seeking to understand more about the WBC, a fascinating one hour BBC documentary (which you can watch online in the following link) The Most Hated Family in America is written and presented by Louis Theroux who not only reports on the family’s strange (to say the least) views, but also probes some of the church members on their beliefs and even tries to reason with them (without success). It is scary to hear how all of these people think exactly alike in what amount to a cult environment.

The US Supreme Court has recently heard arguments from the family of Marine Lance Corporal Matthew A. Snyder who initially won a lawsuit against the WBC for “defamation, invasion of privacy, and intentional infliction of emotional distress” as a result of their picketing Corporal Snyder’s funeral only to have a higher court throw out the award based on First Amendment protections.

Ruling on this case is not so easy since hate speech unlike in most countries in the world is protected by the First Amendment. But there are also the rights of citizens not to be harassed by hate from others.

However, even the First Amendment does not provide absolute protection of free speech. There are Exceptions to the First Amendment such as for obscenity, child pornography, libel and slander. But the most applicable exception here is known as Time, Place and Manner Restrictions.

Even speech that enjoys the most extensive First Amendment protection may be subject to “regulations of the time, place, and manner of expression which are content-neutral, are narrowly tailored to serve a significant government interest, and leave open ample alternative channels of communication.” In the case in which this language appears, the Supreme Court allowed a city ordinance that banned picketing “before or about” any residence to be enforced to prevent picketing outside the residence of a doctor who performed abortions, even though the picketing occurred on a public street. The Court noted that “[t]he First Amendment permits the government to prohibit offensive speech as intrusive when the ‘captive’ audience cannot avoid the objectionable speech.”

This has led to the use of so-called Free speech zones.

Free speech zones have been used at a variety of political gatherings. The stated purpose of free speech zones is to protect the safety of those attending the political gathering, or for the safety of the protesters themselves. Critics, however, suggest that such zones are "Orwellian", and that authorities use them in a heavy-handed manner to censor protesters by putting them literally out of sight of the mass media, hence the public, as well as visiting dignitaries.

There is a misconception that the Westboro picketers are always in the immediate vicinity of the funerals. But there have been a number of laws passed to restrict how close the picketers can get to funeral services. In the case of the Snyder funeral, the picketers were said to be about 1000 feet away and their presence was apparently not even known to the Snyder family until they saw the protesters afterwards on the local newscasts.

The ACLU whose position protecting the right of the WBC to picket is in this blog posting (by a gay person no less). Instead of trying to outright prohibit the hate speech of the WBC which would almost certainly be struck down by the First Amendment, separating the picketers and the object of their wrath by enough of a distance appears to be a workable compromise. The only question left would then be to determine how much separation is enough to prevent needless intrusion without being overly restrictive on free speech. In cases like this, it always comes down to the same question: Where do we draw the line?

Make the Rich Pay Their Fair Share!

Today, the Republicans unveiled their "Pledge to America".

House Republicans offered their “Pledge to America,” a combination campaign platform and legislative agenda, on Thursday morning, saying that jobs will return if spending slows and tax rates are kept from rising.

The Republican leaders called on the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, to immediately begin a debate on the items on their list, including making lower tax rates for all taxpayers permanent, holding back federal spending, repealing the health-care overhaul enacted this year and reducing the federal deficit.

Most of the Democrats are in favor of keeping the Bush tax cuts set to expire at the end of the year for all except the 2% who make over $250,000 per year. But the Republicans desperately want to keep those tax cuts for the very wealthiest Americans.

So this leaves us with two questions: Is it morally right to increase the tax rate on the richest from about 35% as it is now to about 39% as it was during the Clinton administration? and…Will keeping the tax cuts for the upper 2% permanent truly reduce the federal deficit?

The moral question is a bit trickier than it seems at first. Just saying that because these people are rich we have a right to take more of their money is not a satisfactory argument by itself. After all, it is their money. But while many of us over the last decade have struggled financially, the very richest have gotten even richer because of preferential tax treatment.

The top 400, all of whom are worth at least $1 billion, saw their combined wealth increase 8 percent this year, to the dizzying total of $1.37 trillion, according to analysis from CNN.

This means the 400 richest people in America account for about 2.6 percent of the nation's private wealth.

The idea of giving tax cuts to the very rich was that if they prospered, the rest of us would also prosper. But that has proven to be a false as income inequality is at an all-time high.

Income inequality in the United States is at an all-time high, surpassing even levels seen during the Great Depression, according to a recently updated paper by University of California, Berkeley Professor Emmanuel Saez. The paper, which covers data through 2007, points to a staggering, unprecedented disparity in American incomes. On his blog, Nobel prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman called the numbers "truly amazing."

...while the bottom 99 percent of incomes grew at a solid pace of 2.7 percent per year from 1993-2000, these incomes grew only 1.3 percent per year from 2002-2007. As a result, in the economic expansion of 2002-2007, the top 1 percent captured two thirds of income growth.

But income inequality in itself is not as much of an issue as long as everybody is doing reasonably well. But when the middle and lower classes are getting hammered while at the same time the rich are getting richer, it is no wonder that there is talk of class warfare. Even conservative economist Ben Stein was moved to write a 2006 op-ed, In Class Warfare, Guess Which Side is Winning?

It turned out that [multibillionaire Warren] Buffett, with immense income from dividends and capital gains, paid far, far less as a fraction of his income than the secretaries or the clerks or anyone else in his office. Further, in conversation it came up that Mr. Buffett doesn’t use any tax planning at all. He just pays as the Internal Revenue Code requires. “How can this be fair?” he asked of how little he pays relative to his employees. “How can this be right?”

Even though I agreed with him, I warned that whenever someone tried to raise the issue, he or she was accused of fomenting class warfare.

“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

Morals aside, another part of the article brings us to the second question about how we can reduce the deficit which just about all conservatives claim to be important to them.

Put simply, the rich pay a lot of taxes as a total percentage of taxes collected, but they don’t pay a lot of taxes as a percentage of what they can afford to pay, or as a percentage of what the government needs to close the deficit gap.

Our recent experience has shown that there are only two realistic ways to try and close a deficit gap — cutting spending and/or raising taxes. Even conservative economic gurus such as former Fed chief Alan Greenspan (along now with Florida GOP Senate candidate Marco Rubio) have now admitted that tax cuts don't pay for themselves.

The solution given by those on the political right is never to raise taxes but instead to cut spending to balance the budget. But as Ben Stein observes:

The imperatives for [increased] spending are built into the system, and now, with entitlements expanding rapidly, increased spending is locked in. Medicare, Social Security, interest on the debt — all are growing like mad, and how they ill ever be stopped or slowed is beyond imagining. Gross interest on Treasury debt is approaching $350 billion a year. And none of this counts major deferred maintenance for the military.

It is telling that although the Republicans’ Pledge to America aims to hold back federal spending and reduce the federal deficit, it offers no specifics on how they would actually cut the budget. And let’s face it, if the Republicans are not in favor of cutting defense spending and the Democrats are not in favor of cutting entitlement spending e.g. Medicare and Social Security, what else is there to cut?

So despite those on the right who say that we are all taxed enough, the only way out of this mess is to bring in more tax revenue to pay for what we want and need our government to do. But especially with the lower and middle classes hurting so badly, we can’t ask more of them. But we can certainly ask the wealthy who have prospered so well in recent years from preferential government tax treatment to carry more of the load.

The concept behind what is called progressive taxation is that the wealthy who can most afford it, are required to pay higher tax rates than others who are less able to afford taxation. In addition, raising marginal tax rates on the wealthy has been an important safety valve for when our government has had to make unexpected large expenditures, such as for wars and during the Great Depression (see chart). At times our top marginal rate for the wealthy has been over 90% during wars. What is unprecedented is George W. Bush conducting the Iraq and Afghanistan wars while at the same time, offering a tax cut to the wealthy. No wonder we turned the budget surplus under Bill Clinton into a huge deficit in such short order!

Even most liberals do not favor us returning to the days of 90% tax rates for the wealthy. That is unfair to them! But when The Angry Rich are fighting so bitterly to keep their tax rates from reverting from 35% now to 39.6% when Bill Clinton balanced the budget, that is unfair to the rest of us! When those (especially the wealthy) who make their money from dividends and capital gains get to pay a much lower rate than those of us who work for a living, that is unfair! When hedge fund managers whose annual incomes are sometimes over a billion dollars can through a tax loophole pay at only a 15% rate, that is unfair! When instead of raising the Social Security taxable income above $106,800, we get the absurd idea of raising the retirement age to 70, that is unfair!

So if we are really about fairness, there is one thing that we can do. We must make the rich pay their fair share!

The Koch Brothers - The Most Powerful People You've Never Heard Of

Frank Rich’s column from August 29, The Billionaires Banking the Tea Party was in my opinion, one of his most significant columns in recent memory. But his column was inspired by an equally significant one by investigative reporter Jane Mayer in The New Yorker, Covert Operations - The billionaire Koch brothers war against Obama which chronicles in detail, not only the extensive money spent but also the building of an entire infrastructure in the form of think tanks and foundations created to promote their libertarian views along with defeating those of progressives.

As Rich writes:

Another weekend, another grass-roots demonstration starring Real Americans who are mad as hell and want to take back their country from you-know-who.

There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising: the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it, and have been doing so since well before the “death panel” warm-up acts of last summer. Three heavy hitters rule. You’ve heard of one of them, Rupert Murdoch. The other two, the brothers David and Charles Koch, are even richer, with a combined wealth exceeded only by that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett among Americans. But even those carrying the Kochs’ banner may not know who these brothers are.

And here are excerpts from the Mayer article:

The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests.  

In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a “kingpin of climate science denial.” The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups. Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies—from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program—that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus.  

Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan watchdog group, said, “The Kochs are on a whole different level. There’s no one else who has spent this much money. The sheer dimension of it is what sets them apart. They have a pattern of lawbreaking, political manipulation, and obfuscation. I’ve been in Washington since Watergate, and I’ve never seen anything like it. They are the Standard Oil of our times.”

The anti-government fervor infusing the 2010 elections represents a political triumph for the Kochs. By giving money to “educate,” fund, and organize Tea Party protesters, they have helped turn their private agenda into a mass movement.

The article in The New Yorker is a lengthy one that goes into considerable detail about the Koch’s behind the scenes manipulation of the US political process. It is hoped that the above excerpts will encourage the reader to check out this interesting article in its entirety.

So what’s the big deal about the Koch brothers’ participation in the political process? After all, it’s a free country and people should be able to support whom they wish to.

The problem is not whom or what they support. It is an issue of transparency. There is a world of difference between those who support a position simply because they believe in it and others who do it because they are on someone's payroll. For example, if a scientist promotes views that question climate change, much of his credibility would depend on whether or not he was being paid by somebody who has a financial stake in denying climate change. To not be given this information amounts to deception.

Adding to the deception, money can be funneled into non-profit foundations with benign names such as Americans for Prosperity which appears to be a grassroots organization but unknown to most people was established by the Kochs to promote their political agenda. And because organizations like these are non-profits, they are not required to disclose their financial backers.

With this background in mind, I will conclude with my comment to Frank Rich’s article.

I am reminded of when Mickey Mantle made appearances on talk shows touting the benefits of Voltaren, an anti-arthritis drug. But then later it was revealed that he was a paid spokesperson for the drug without disclosing this to the viewers. [link to story] Today, ads that have endorsers, especially celebrities are required to disclose that they are compensated. To do otherwise is considered to be deceptive advertising.

Today, many of the political protests are little more than deceptive advertising in that they are often organized and paid for by commercial interests whose identities are not disclosed.

Regular viewers of the Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC know that she has regularly taken on organizations such as Americans for Prosperity [link to video] for promoting the viewpoints of its financial contributors who are largely undisclosed. While it is good that MSNBC (and the NYT) are doing this, do we see the same thing being done at NBC or ABC or CBS whose news shows attract a much wider audience? It appears that they are afraid to take on these organizations for fear of being labeled as “too liberal”. But this is not a liberal or conservative issue. It is about transparency and as long as the mainstream broadcast networks continue to look the other way, this deception of our citizens will continue.

Our Jobs Crisis

It’s easy to get really depressed over the massive amount of unemployment that is everywhere — especially for those of us without a job. But when it looks like all is lost and hopeless, there is NYT columnist Bob Herbert to remind us that perhaps we may be looking at things a bit too optimistically!

In his August 9th op-ed column The Horror Show, he leads off with this.

The employment situation in the United States is much worse than even the dismal numbers from last week’s jobless report would indicate. The nation is facing a full-blown employment crisis and policy makers are not responding with anything like the sense of urgency that is needed.

We’ve got more and more people in our working-age population and fewer and fewer jobs to go around…there are now 3.4 million fewer private-sector jobs in the U.S. than there were a decade ago. In the last 10 years, we’ve seen the worst job creation record since 1928 to 1938.

We need to take into account that there are roughly 150,000 new workers entering the US job market each month due to normal population growth. So if about 130,000 jobs were lost in July according to the government report, this means that about another 280,000 were added to the unemployed. Those who gave up looking for work or forced to take part time work aren’t counted as unemployed or the figures would be even worse! This means that the longer a period of severe unemployment goes on, the deeper we get into a hole.

According to the NYT article Jobless and Staying That Way, the light at the end of the tunnel is a dim one indeed.

[T]he Obama administration predicts that unemployment will drop to 8.7 percent by the end of next year, and eventually sink to 6.8 percent by the end of 2013.

To reach that level, the economy would have to add nearly 300,000 workers a month over the next three years, according to Peter Morici, a business professor at the University of Maryland. Even in the first half of the year, when the economy grew at a healthy 3 percent, it added fewer than 100,000 jobs a month.

This has led many to question whether what we are experiencing is just a temporary bump in the road or a long patch of bad road ahead with no end in sight. It has been said that this is the worst economy we have had since the Great Depression. And while the numbers during that time were worse, there are a number of reasons why what we are going through is different (and arguably worse) than in previous downturns.

Previous recessions have always been treated as cyclical events. Sure things were slow and people lost jobs, but once the economy picked up, the jobs came back. But what we have experienced in the US especially in the last decade has been the permanent loss of many jobs. So while we are technically no longer in a recession, those who are unemployed are feeling no relief because we have not been able to deal with the fact that many of these jobs will never come back. Global competition has been taking its toll on the manufacturing sector for some time now. But we at least had the comfort in believing that only the low-tech jobs would be sent overseas and that we could rely on a growing white collar economy to offset that. But the growth of the Internet in the last decade along with its ability to effortlessly transfer information from around the globe has totally changed all of that.

What were once jobs we thought were safe such as in engineering and science can now be readily outsourced to India and elsewhere to save on labor costs. There seems to be no safe harbor from all of this. Even legal work is now being outsourced to India. And occupations that can’t be readily outsourced such as teaching are falling on their own hard times due to government budgetary struggles. Surely, the health insurance industry which has been prospering during all of these hard times doesn’t have to resort to outsourcing. But they do.

So how to we place all of these people in new jobs to replace the ones that have been permanently lost? Retraining is a logical place to start and has been suggested by many. But retrain for what? I remember being told several years ago when I first lost my job that Information Technology (IT) was the job of the future and all I would have to do to save my career is go to school to retrain. But as many have found out, IT is the job of the future — but not in this country. If there is indeed a chronic deficit of jobs for jobseekers, we can’t solve this by retraining people for jobs that simply don’t exist in adequate numbers!

This also creates difficult decisions for those who are considering attending college. At one time, a college degree usually provided a reliable ticket to prosperity. But many of the college educated such as Alexandra Jarrin whose heart-wrenching story is told in 99 Weeks Later have been living a nightmare.

Ms. Jarrin had scrabbled for her foothold in the middle class. She graduated from college late in life, in 2003, attending classes while working full time. She used to believe that education would be her ticket to prosperity, but is now bitter about what it has gotten her.

“I owe $92,000 for an education which is basically worthless,” she said.

What makes her situation even worse is that student loans cannot usually be discharged through bankruptcy.

The first step in trying to solve a problem as large as this is for our leaders to truly acknowledge how really serious this problem is. It is inflicting permanent harm on many workers and their families who are in dire straits. Something urgently needs to be done — soon. If the private sector cannot or will not provide adequate jobs, the government must step in to create them. This is what was done during the Great Depression. We have a great deal of urgent work that needs to be done such as rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and converting us to using more renewable energy and fewer fossil fuels. Anti-government naysayers will complain that it wasn’t the government created jobs that ended the Great Depression but was instead World War II. But the effect of World War II was indeed, a massive creation of government jobs.

But government created jobs can only be used as a bridge to when the private sector can finally create enough jobs on its own. It is generally agreed that most of the new job creation is generated by small businesses. If so, we have to concentrate on helping that part of the economy instead of just the big players which is what we do now. Money has to be freed up for loans that will help existing small businesses flourish along with helping those who wish to start their own businesses. Unlike the large behemoths, small businesses tend to do their manufacturing locally and in addition, tend to value more experienced workers — a boon to the older displaced workers who have especially suffered through all of this.

Not surprisingly, we are on the wrong path. A jobs bill intended to help small businesses was recently filibustered by the Republicans. Apparently the true Republican priority is to help big business — the same ones who in many cases are hoarding cash and refusing to hire anybody!

Bob Herbert certainly has it right to label this a crisis. But unfortunately, too many in Washington from both parties are content to make excuses rather than making the tough choices needed to tackle this crisis head-on. We need and deserve better from them!

Just Count Votes

Once in a while, it’s nice to be able to share some thoughts with a wider audience than those who normally read my postings here. So I sent a Letter to the Editor to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in response to executive editor David Shribman’s August 8, 2010 column, Rethinking Elections.

Some people who didn't like the way the 2000 election turned out are trying to overturn the Electoral College with a power sweep around the Constitution.

[A]s the country contemplates fiddling with the Constitution while Rome burns, six states have enacted the National Popular Vote plan to pack the Electoral College (with the measure having passed both houses of the legislature in an additional four states). This accounts for 73 electoral votes, more than a quarter of those required to activate the plan, which would go into effect when enough states adopt the measure to account for the 270 electoral votes needed to elect a president.

One of the arguments for the measure is that it would make the votes of all Americans, not just those in states with big electoral-vote totals, more meaningful.

A copy of my response printed in the Sunday, August 15, 2010 edition of the Post-Gazette appears below. An additional point I wanted to make but couldn’t due to space limitations was that nowadays with our present Electoral College system, the only ‘meaningful’ voters in our presidential elections (the ones who get almost all of the attention from the candidates and media) are those who happen to live in the so-called swing states with competitive races.

Just count votes

In response to David Shribman's Aug. 8 column, "Rethinking Elections," I am a person who deeply distrusts simplistic thinking. But nonetheless, here is my simplistic view of the electoral process -- including presidential elections.

Whoever gets the most votes should win. Any electoral process that undermines this is fatally flawed and should be replaced!

Admittedly, the end-around that some states are using to try and nullify the Electoral College is a bit underhanded. The chances of doing this by passing a constitutional amendment would be non-existent since the Republicans are happy with the system the way it is.

I suspect that in 2000, Bush supporters didn't feel too bad about their candidate winning despite losing the popular vote to Al Gore. But had John Kerry not lost Ohio by a razor-thin margin in 2004, he would have won despite President Bush winning the popular vote. And then it would have been the Republicans who would have joined the chorus to get rid of the Electoral College.

All this can happen because a candidate winning a state by, say, one vote gets the same result as winning that same state by a million votes, which makes the additional margin of victory effectively meaningless to the national result. Why should some votes count more than others?

I believe that dumping the Electoral College in favor of a national popular vote would indeed be positive reform that would have far fewer unintended (and negative) consequences than the system we have now.

TONY POLOMBO

Delmont