Democracy is on Decline in America

Rural America vs. Sensible Gun Control

Multiple opinion polls have shown that more than 80% of Americans support expanded background checks to make it more difficult for criminals and the mentally ill to obtain guns. Senators Joe Manchin (Democrat from West Virginia) and Pat Toomey (Republican from Pennsylvania) struck a bi-partisan deal to accomplish this objective. The proposal failed 54 to 46. You see passing anything in the Senate requires 60 votes of the 100 in that body.

It is accurate to say that those living in rural areas are more likely to need a weapon for protection. Even those people in rural areas must worry about criminals and the mentally ill. So why would they oppose an expansion of a regulation that already exists to gun shows?

The NRA and other pro-gun groups have won another round for no limits on gun ownership. Democracy has lost. This nation is less safe. This nation is less united.

Social Security is a Promise that will be Hard to Keep

Chained CPI is only the beginning of many other factors that will limit future payout.

Here is an unpleasant fact about Social Security. The system was designed in the 1930s. Life expectancy at birth in 1930 was indeed only 58 for men and 62 for women, and the retirement age was 65. Reported in USA Today, Social Security’s original retirement age of 65 was set in 1935 when life expectancy was 63. Today, life expectancy is 77 — and, for those who live to 65, life expectancy is 83. The system used to benefit financially from people who paid Social Security taxes but died before collecting any benefits.

When Social Security was implemented almost 54% of men could expect to live to age 65 if they survived to age 21, and those who attained age 65 could expect to collect Social Security benefits for almost 13 years (and the numbers are even higher for women). Men attaining 65 in 1990 can expect to live for 15.3 years compared to 12.7 years for men attaining 65 back in 1940. This is data supplied by the Social Security Administration.

Some of the data is murky and can be interpreted to support your particular views.

I entered all of my Social Security contributions for my entire working years. I then calculated their future value in an Excel spreadsheet. The calculation included the employer contributions. I compounded the interest at 5% (Future Value Calculator for Single Payment-the annual contribution). The results were enough money contributed to last 13 years. But that calculation was made the year after I retired. Since then my monthly SS income has increased. As the increases continue my contributions may be consumed in ten years.

With growing numbers of people living into their 80s and 90s where will the money come from to pay their SS checks? My guess is it will come from the general revenue of the United States. That is the reason that chained CPI is inevitable as is a later retirement age.

Equality is something for Everyone!

Some of the people in my family are devoutly religious. None are in my immediate family. I am quite certain that they believe marriage is between a man and a woman. They believe it cannot be any other way. Homosexuality is, in their view, something to be hidden and something to be ashamed of. It must have been VERY difficult for Senator Rob Portman, who had taken a strong stand against gay marriage to learn that his 21 year old son is gay.

I personally find sexual relations between two people of the same sex to be revolting. Especially sex between two men. There was nothing funny about “I Love You Phillip Morris” starring Jim Carrey. To me it was horrifying.

Despite my feelings, I recognize that there are people in this world who are attracted to others of the same sex. They have the right to live their lives as happily as does the rest of society. Homosexual marriages will not impact my marriage in any way. The religious may believe that homosexual marriage will demean the basic principles of marriage. Those that have that belief probably also find all deviations from orthodox religion as unacceptable behavior too.

No one makes you associate with those you find an anathema to your views or beliefs. You are not required to associate with people of another religion, race, political party, etc. that you consider unacceptable.

“Modern Family” really is a profile on the early 21^st century as “The Jeffersons” were in the last part of the 20^th century.

I have no idea how the Supreme Court will rule on California’s Proposition 8 or DOMA. I would recommend the justices re-read the American Declaration of Independence and the preamble to the Constitution.

Equality is something for Everyone! No law should limit that right!

The 1% aren’t like the rest of us

This Op-Ed from the Los Angeles Times is really worth the read. I admit to being part of the 47% that Mitt Romney mocked. The findings of this survey confirm what I always knew.

The ultra-rich share few of the priorities of most Americans, but their access to policymakers is greater, a study finds.

By Benjamin I. Page and Larry M. Bartels

March 22, 2013

Over the last two years, President Obama and Congress have put the country on track to reduce projected federal budget deficits by nearly $4 trillion. Yet when that process began, in early 2011, only about 12% of Americans in Gallup polls cited federal debt as the nation’s most important problem. Two to three times as many cited unemployment and jobs as the biggest challenge facing the country.

So why did policymakers focus so intently on the deficit issue? One reason may be that the small minority that saw the deficit as the nation’s priority had more clout than the majority that didn’t.

We recently conducted a survey of top wealth-holders (with an average net worth of $14 million) in the Chicago area, one of the first studies to systematically examine the political attitudes of wealthy Americans. Our research found that the biggest concern of this top 1% of wealth-holders was curbing budget deficits and government spending. When surveyed, they ranked those things as priorities three times as often as they did unemployment — and far more often than any other issue.

If the concerns of the wealthy carry special weight in government — as an increasing body of social scientific evidence suggests — such extreme differences between their views and those of other Americans could significantly skew policy away from what a majority of the country would prefer. Our Survey of Economically Successful Americans was an attempt to begin to shed light on both the viewpoints and the political reach of the very wealthy.

While we had no way to measure directly the political influence of those surveyed, they did report themselves to be highly active politically.

Two-thirds of the respondents had contributed money (averaging $4,633) in the most recent presidential election, and fully one-fifth of them “bundled” contributions from others. About half recently initiated contact with a U.S. senator or representative, and nearly half (44%) of those contacts concerned matters of relatively narrow economic self-interest rather than broader national concerns. This kind of access to elected officials suggests an outsized influence in Washington.

On policy, it wasn’t just their ranking of budget deficits as the biggest concern that put wealthy respondents out of step with other Americans. They were also much less likely to favor raising taxes on high-income people, instead advocating that entitlement programs like Social Security and healthcare be cut to balance the budget. Large majorities of ordinary Americans oppose any substantial cuts to those programs.

While the wealthy favored more government spending on infrastructure, scientific research and aid to education, they leaned toward cutting nearly everything else. Even with education, they opposed things that most Americans favor, including spending to ensure that all children have access to good-quality public schools, expanding government programs to ensure that everyone who wants to go to college can do so, and investing more in worker retraining and education.

The wealthy opposed — while most Americans favor — instituting a system of national health insurance, raising the minimum wage to above poverty levels, increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit and providing a “decent standard of living” for the unemployed. They were also against the federal government helping with or providing jobs for those who cannot find private employment.

Unlike most Americans, wealthy respondents opposed increased regulation of large corporations and raising the “cap” that exempts income above $113,700 from the FICA payroll tax. And unlike most Americans, they oppose relying heavily on corporate taxes to raise revenue and oppose taxing the rich to redistribute wealth.

Some of the differences between the political views of the wealthy and other Americans may be explained by differences in the two groups’ economic experiences and self-interest. The wealthy are likely to have better information about the costs of government programs (for which they pay a lot of taxes) than about the benefits of those programs. They don’t usually have to rely on Social Security, for example, let alone food stamps or unemployment insurance.

Another possibility is that the wealthy — who tend to be highly educated, well informed and committed to charitable giving — seek the common good as they see it, and in fact know better than average Americans what sorts of policies would benefit us all. On the issue of federal deficits, for example, the public has come to see government debt as an increasingly important problem over the last two years, reducing the gulf between their views and those of the wealthy. Is that because the wealthy were ahead of the curve, or because their concern helped stimulate a steady drumbeat of deficit alarmism in the media and in Washington?

Our pilot study included a relatively small number of wealthy citizens, and they were all from a single metropolitan area. A larger-scale national study is needed to pin down more precisely the views of wealthy Americans about public policy. We need to understand how they formed the preferences they have, and how wealthy people from different regions, industries, and social backgrounds differ in their political views and behavior. We also need to understand more about their political clout.

Our initial results suggest the wealthy have very different ideas than other Americans on a variety of policy issues. If their influence is far greater than that of ordinary people, what does that mean for American democracy?

Benjamin I. Page is a political science professor at Northwestern University and co-author of “Class War? What Americans Really Think About Economic Inequality.” Larry M. Bartels is a political science professor at Vanderbilt University and author of “Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age.”