--- The real lesson from Kansas is the enduring power of bad ideas, as long as those ideas serve the interests of the right people. ---
Now most of you know by now I am not a fan of writing long diaries and I just love this sentence, since it describes perfectly why I get so bloody mad at times.
His conclusion isn't that bad either
--- But the effect won’t last long, because faith in tax-cut magic isn’t about evidence; it’s about finding reasons to give powerful interests what they want. ---
The number of times "piss on economics" has failed miserably to such an extent that those least able to pay for the elites excessive asset stripping end up paying for the debacle makes me seriously wonder about our collective intelligence.
A steady diet of propaganda about how wonderful this "Limited American Dream" sold by some of the wealthiest people on earth via their media and political organs seems to have cudgeled people into voting against their own interests.
Oh those nasty evil Unions was another phrase taken hook line and sinker, I wonder what SCOTUS will come up with today to add to the citizens united madness.
Oh those evil estate taxes hurting the average American! Oh bloody hell.
Oh those nasty evil taxes, the rich should pay as little as possible and once you are rich enough the ride should be free, job creators!
Yes I can get with:
--- The enduring power of bad ideas, as long as those ideas serve the interests of the right people. ---
Brought to you by Goebbels...I mean the rich and their propaganda arms Congress and the MSM.
The last three decades have seen a monumental decline in virtually every qualitative measurement in America. This can be directly linked to the conservative political paradigm that was ushered into dominance starting with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Stagnant wages, rising costs, decreasing benefits, ballooning national debt, and a loss of freedoms have been the keynote of the Reagan Era.
The Drug War, Social Repression, and Incarceration
Where to begin? Let’s start with the colossal failure known as the drug war. Many states had decriminalized marijuana by the 1970s. When the Reagan conservatives came to power, one of their central plans was to force cuts in recreational drug usage (including alcohol). Thus began the Just Say No program and the drug war. Costs quickly spiraled.
All this money being spent to massively expand the government has to be justified somehow, so the authorities began to ‘fight back against crime’. The number of arrests for marijuana offenses alone is approaching 1,000,000 people per year. With an estimated 44% of Americans have tried or currently use it (compared to 22% in Holland), we have become a nation of criminals. What better way to justify these bloated governmental budgets?
The spike in the number of incarcerated Americans reflects an increasing social repression. Gilbert Mercier writes .. http://newsjunkiepost.com/2009/12/11/united-states-the-worlds-leading-jailer/ .. that the US is the worlds leading jailer, “According to the BJS, in 2008 over 7.3 million people were either on probation, in jail, in prison or on parole. This amounts to an astonishing 3.2 percent of all US adult residents or 1 in every 31 adults.” The following chart represents incarceration rates for a few countries:
Liam Fox expands .. http://newsjunkiepost.com/2011/01/16/incarceration-up-education-down-americas-cannibalistic-profiteering/ .. on this, “America incarcerates more of it’s citizens than any other country in the world. With only 5% of the world population, America has more than 25% of the world’s prisoners. The steep incline in the number of Americans incarcerated began in 1980. Since that time the number of Americans incarcerated has jumped from under 500,000 people to close to 2,500,000. The advent of private prisons during that time has created a powerful lobby, on behalf of its Wall Street investors, to lengthen sentences. Longer sentences means more prisoners. More prisoners means more prisons. More prisoners, and more prisons, means more profit. As a result, Americans now spend almost $70 billion a year on a corrections system (including prison, probation and parole) being run largely for profit.”
The conservative tax policy that unleashed the class war that ended the period known as the Great Compression (which followed the Great Depression), and was the terminus of an era where single income families enjoyed plenty of jobs, economic opportunity, and a larger degree of social mobility.
Additional charts for the share of wealth controlled by the top 10% and top 0.01%. Ronald Reagan and the conservatives ushered in an era of unbridled greed. An increasing amount of the share of the pie of wealth that is created by labor was gobbled up by those most well off to begin with.
The rich have reaped .. http://newsjunkiepost.com/2010/12/06/obama-may-have-just-lost-the-2012-election/ .. the vast majority of every economic expansion over the last 30 years, including the top 1% gaining two thirds of it in recent years. The top 0.1% have seen a 94% income growth since 2002. The richest of them all (the top 400) have seen an astounding 476% increase since 1992. The richest 74 people made as much as the 19 million lowest-paid people in America.
Currently, one third of all the pay in the United States is raked in by corporate executives .. http://thinkprogress.org/2009/07/21/executive-pay-wsj/ . In 1970, the average CEO made 28 times what an average worker at his company made. By 2005, this had swelled to 465 .. http://www.portfolio.com/interactive-features/2007/06/salary_comparison .. times what an average worker made. This is phenomena exclusive to the US, and is not shared by other developed Western nations like Japan where an average CEO makes less than 20x what an average worker does.
Deficits and the National Debt
This is perhaps the most ironic part of the Reagan Legacy. He railed against the national debt, even though it was decreasing with every president from FDR to Carter. As soon as Reagan and the fiscal conservatives took control over economic policy, the very thing they talked about the most started to grow.
The national debt nearly tripled under Reagan. We see a sudden change in the trendline for the national debt as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product as soon as Reagan became president as well:
In fact, Reagan and the Bushes are responsible for over 93% .. http://reaganbushdebt.org/ .. of the national debt:
Since the election of Reagan and the conservatives in 1980, America has been on a downward spiral. The charts above are just the tip .. http://thinkprogress.org/2011/02/05/reagan-centennial/ .. of the iceberg, but demonstrate in no uncertain terms that we are on the wrong track in America. From turning the United States into a police state with the highest incarceration rate in the world, to waging class warfare on the poor so the rich can get richer, to massively ballooning the national debt, the Reagan Legacy is disastrous.
When he was elected in 2010, Kansas Governor Sam Brownback began to slash core government services and privatize the rest. His austerity politics resulted in the state being downgraded by S&P in August 2014, and his privatization initiatives have also drawn criticism, causing one leading Republican to state, "I had hoped that it wouldn't be as extreme as it's been... what we didn't know was that Sam would use this state as crash test dummies for his own fiscal experiments."
Kids receiving child support payments from absent parents would be among Brownback's first "crash test dummies."
While Kansas partially outsourced the enforcement of child support to private corporations and law firms in 1997, the private players were only awarded around 20 percent of the contracts; the rest went to public state agencies. In March 2013, however, the Kansas Department of Children and Families (DCF) announced that all child support services would be outsourced, and a request for proposal was issued. Not limited to enforcement, the contracts would include services connected to court petitioning, locating parents, and establishing paternity, which had never been in private hands before.
"Collection is a function that can be carried out more efficiently and more cost-effectively by private companies," DCF secretary Phyllis Gilmore said at a press conference. Similar blanket statements, seldom backed by empirical evidence, are often echoed by privatization proponents, regardless of which public services they want to outsource. In this particular case, there is little evidence to support Gilmore's sound bite. A 2013 report on the privatization of child support services commissioned by the Mississippi Legislature, for example, concluded that "the significant additional cost of privatization would outweigh the potential additional benefits."
Child support is indispensable for hundreds of thousands of vulnerable Kansans, mostly single women and children. Nationally child support "represents 40 percent of family income for poor families who receive it, and reduces the poverty rate for children in these families by nearly 25 percent," say experts [ http://www.urban.org/uploadedpdf/412272-child-support-plays-important-role.pdf ].
The outsourcing of social services involving vulnerable population is backed by influencial groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) [ http://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/ALEC_Exposed ], which has developed a raft of model bills to privatize state services [ http://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/ALEC_%26_Privatization ] and has had model bills to privatize child support services and foster care services since the late 1990s.
According to research group In the Public Interest [ http://www.inthepublicinterest.org/ ], a comprehensive resource center on privatization and responsible contracting, "many children and adults rely on government-provided health and human services. The ability of these programs to deliver services efficiently and appropriately can be a matter of life and death. Numerous state and local governmental entities are finding that turning over these programs to private contractors not only fails to achieve projected cost savings but also decreases access to these important services, hurting many vulnerable families. In many cases, the service quality declines dramatically and many sick or at-risk people are left with substandard care."
In June 2013, DCF announced that four firms had been awarded contracts. The winner among the winners was YoungWilliams -- a nationwide company based in Mississippi -- that received two-thirds of the caseloads or 85,000 child support cases, worth some $50 million. While YoungWilliams boasted that it landed the contract because of its "innovative service delivery structure," there might be more to it than that.
A few weeks later, the Brownback administration appointed Trisha Thomas from YoungWilliams as director of child support enforcement after firing her predecessor. It didn't take long for the new director to conclude that "privatization was the quickest way to improve Kansas' child support enforcement performance numbers."
It is too early yet to say what YoungWilliams will do with Kansas child support enforcement, but if history is any guide, outsourcing vital public services for vulnerable populations to companies that must turn a profit frequently leads to higher costs and worse services. Between 1995 and 2000, privatization behemoth Maximus [ http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/MAXIMUS,_Inc. ] was in charge of child support enforcement in two Tennessee counties. A report concluded that the company "spent more but collected less money for overdue child support payments in [these] counties, on average, than DHS did in the rest of the state." Sen. Hob Bryan (D-MS) characterized a similar situation simply as "a disaster" for Mississippi families and their kids.
But it is not clear if fact matter to the administration officials pursuing the privatization agenda. Shar Habibi from In the Public Interest notes: "The evidence suggests that expanding the outsourcing of a public service that many Kansas children dearly rely on, was influenced by campaign donations and expensive corporate lobbyists, instead of an objective analysis of what was in the public's best interest."
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