by Brian Klepper and David C. Kibbe
Six months ago, who could have imagined that a large percentage of rank-and-file Americans would support the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) against special interests’ rigging of the American dream? So why not go to the next step? Why not pointedly ask political candidates, “Will you take money from lobbyists?” and “If elected, what will you do to stop special interest influence?”
Most Americans are deeply disturbed by this issue. In a recent Time Magazine poll of people familiar with the OWS protests, 86 percent thought that “Wall Street and its lobbyists have too much influence in Washington.” Gallup found that 68 percent of Americans think corporations should have less political influence.
These trends didn’t just happen. They resulted from special interests’ vigilant attention to legislative possibility, lubricated by the exchange of money for votes. Influence peddling is now so accepted in American politics that the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) has established a lobbying data base, Open Secrets. But making lobbying contributions transparent hasn’t slowed the torrent of money that re-shapes law and wealth distribution.
Since 1952, the percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) represented by corporate taxes has plummeted from 6.1 to 1.0 percent, while the percentage represented by employment taxes has skyrocketed from 1.8 to 6.3 percent. Meanwhile, a just released Congressional Budget Office study confirmed that the top 1 percent of earners more than doubled their share of the nation’s after tax income over the last 30 years.
CRP’s numbers show that 13,000 lobbyists contributed $3.5 billion in Congress in 2010. Considering that Congress influences the flow and distribution of a $15 trillion national economy, these investments promote unfair advantages extremely cost-effectively. Politicians from both parties fund their campaigns with the money, shrug off the system’s financial conflicts, and apparently avoid thinking too hard about the consequences.
The intensifying ability of the powerful to buy America’s lawmakers’ votes is the greatest threat to the America that most of us grew up believing in. It is why the rich have gotten much richer, why large, profitable corporations pay no taxes, why health care costs have continued to explode, and why Americans’ social mobility is at an historic low. America has many difficult problems, but lobbying and the way we finance elections are among the deepest, facilitating many others.
Voters can facilitate rapid change by holding their representatives accountable. Asking our political candidates who they think they’re working for would be a simple but powerful way to bring America back into balance.
Brian Klepper, PhD is a health care analyst and the Chief Development Officer for WeCare TLC Onsite Clinic. David C. Kibbe, MD, MBA is Senior Advisor to the American Academy of Family Physicians and an industry advisor on health information technologies.
1 comments:
Your premise that it is the Federal Government’s fault that “the rich get richer and the poor get poor” may be popular with the People, but it is as far from reality as one can get. Worse, it panders to the notion that it is someone else’s fault that I have not achieved the “American Dream” and in doing so stymies the various things you wish to change. Some one once said the American government was a reflection of those they govern; we don’t like the view, but the mirror doesn’t lie. The only way to decrease what is going on in Washington and for that matter in the various state capitals is to make them less relevant. That means people are going to have to take more responsibility for the problems that exist in their own communities. This is something people refuse to do and why should they, they are consumers and consumers have no responsibility. Why would millionaires and billionaires want to give more money to the most inefficient organization in America? I know of no community in America so deficient in problems, its people so equal in every aspect that those in the top 1% have to look no further than their municipal or county borders as a place to send their “extra funds”. If we are going to be rewriting the “Social Contract in America” then let it be at the local level and grow from there not by edict from Washington DC or some state capital. Subsidiarity before Solidarity.
But this is the “Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review”. I find it ironic that federal, state, county and municipal governments, school districts and various local authorities are able to take taxpayer funds and set up work site clinics (both on and off site) to lessen the health care premiums and out-of pocket expenses for their employees, yet in most states those same taxpayers are not able, through statute or rule, to do the same collectively for themselves. Given the fact that neither the federal government nor states are able or will be able to control the health costs for their citizens and that we will hear repeatedly over the next 11 months how much intelligence and common sense the People have, I propose a different Litmus test to show where the politicians hearts and minds are.
“Do you believe that the citizens in local communities should have the right to tax themselves, unencumbered by the state, for the purpose of decreasing the communities’ health care costs”? “If not, why not and if yes, what will you do to help this occur”?
Do you Brian? Do you David?
James P. Davison DO.
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