What if Mitt Romney was actually elected President, how might America be transformed?

Based on the statements he has made and his pandering allegiance to the right wing extremists in his party, one can reasonably extrapolate out what policies and laws Romney would support and approve.

To begin, it is conceivable that the GOP could retain the House and win over the Senate. It’s also conceivable that having seen how effective their use of the filibuster was against Obama, Senate Republicans could pass rules limiting the use of it by Democrats.

In such an admittedly hypothetical scenario, the damage to the American society and democracy we have come to know could be severe and long term, with numerous permanent aspects.

The End of Medicare as an Entitlement

The Ryan Plan, which Romney heartily supports, transforms Medicare from being an entitlement into a partial subsidy for buying health insurance. Thus, Americans would no longer be entitled to health insurance when they grew older. This would have a profound and devastating impact on tens of millions of seniors and society in general.

The amount a senior would received from Medicare, as a Ryan-type subsidy program, would be insufficient to fully pay for corporate insurance premiums. At current rates, seniors would have to pay an additional $6,000 a year to have basic medical insurance that would give them less coverage than they receive now between Medicare and Part B. As time goes by, that gap and the percentage of their premium they will have to pay will grow, requiring them to pay $10,000 annually, then $20,000 and on and on until more and more are priced out of being able to afford health insurance. The CBO estimates that by 2030, under the Ryan plan, 65 year olds would be required to pay 68% of the total cost of their coverage, which includes premiums, deductibles, and other out-of-pocket costs.  That compares with the 25 percent they would pay under current law.

And if seniors can’t afford to pay that growing amount of their premium that their subsidy doesn’t cover? They don’t get partial insurance, they get none. No health insurance. End of story. There are around 40 million senior citizens, many of whom live on a very limited budget with Social Security as their primary income (more on this below) and simply can’t afford this additional expense. The numbers of  uninsured senior citizens will grow and one result will be that millions of Americans will die younger as part of this Romney/GOP plan to make the wealthy wealthier.

Ryan and the GOP have cynically played the selfish card on seniors to win their support, assuring them that their changes to Medicare wouldn’t affect them, just their children and grandchildren. In other words, we assume you’re greedy and selfish like us so as long as you get yours, screw the rest of your family. Fortunately, the push back by seniors after Ryan’s first proposed budget reflected that even elderly parents care about the welfare of their children and grandchildren. However, with Romney in the White House and Republican control of Congress, there may be no stopping such a drastic change.

So in addition to the shocking precedent of shrinking lifespans in a modern, industrialized nation, how else might our society be affected by having tens of millions of seniors unable to afford health insurance?

Emergency rooms would likely become increasingly congested with the millions of elderly who don’t have insurance. Since they would not have been treated regularly, many will have more severe conditions, requiring more time and resources at emergency rooms. This will severely tax the already burdened emergency room system, financially and staff-wise, eventually past the point of their capabilities. In such an environment, what kind of care, resources and attention will those without insurance, who only have the emergency room for treatment, receive? And what about people who are brought to an emergency room due to a car accident or severe illness? How quickly will they be able to receive care when many other patients are ahead of them with just as urgent life-threatening conditions?

What happens when the ranks of the uninsured swell towards one third of the nation’s population? When emergency rooms and hospitals have waiting times that double and triple? Or after hospitals close from being bankrupted by their unpaid emergency room costs that multiply? When the resulting domino effect is created that overloads and bankrupts other emergency rooms?

And add to that the cost to society of the potential for mass outbreaks of illnesses and diseases that result from so many Americans not having regular medical care.

This viable scenario would devastate our society.

The End of Social Security as an Entitlement

There was a time in our past when people who worked their whole lives would get too old and/or ill to keep a job and live out the remainder of their lives as desperate and indigent. Some might bring a financial burden on their children, others might be reduced to a horrible life of squalor. To most Americans, that would seem like a tragedy of the past but for Mitt Romney and the GOP, they welcome our returning to those times.

The reason for their wanting to privatize Social Security is obvious. They want to take the over $2.6 trillion in the Social Security trust fund out of government hands and pour it into Wall Street coffers where it can be sucked away by them in part or in whole.

We all know what can happen to the majority’s money when Wall Street has their hands on it. As bad as it has been, imagine what would have happened in the midst of the 2008 economic crash if the 40 million senior citizens who rely primarily on Social Security to pay their monthly expenses and Medicare Part B insurance, had that money in the stock market instead of Social Security. What kind of hell would America be with the majority of seniors unable to pay for a roof over their head, food, health insurance and medicine (add the privatizing of Medicare into the mix and you multiply the disaster)?

This massive economic crash would have been made exponentially worse if seniors had all of their Social Security money in the market and in a crisis, they had to sell their stocks for whatever they could get. Add to that, the steep loss of seniors’ spending that would result and further deepen an economic disaster (which of course didn’t occur and helped the economy in this recent case, thanks to Social Security being as it is).

The depth of such a depression that would result from seniors losing everything because their Social Security was in the stock market could dwarf the original Depression and fully climbing out under such a rigged system might not even be possible.

How can we choose to have 99% of our elderly vulnerable to losing their home, food and health insurance when the market has its next crash?

That is of no concern to Mitt Romney and the GOP. Though many of them inherited their wealth and advantage in society as Romney did, they will give lip service to “the dignity of self determination” while actually working to take away the security and independence of the elderly because it interferes with the wealthy achieving greater wealth.

The Destruction of Democracy, the Middle Class and an Inclusive Economy

It is a cornerstone of the modern GOP to continue down the path of cutting taxes for the wealthy and gutting services for the poor and the rest of the 99% of Americans who aren’t wealthy. The overall scheme includes keeping downward pressure on salaries, limiting economic mobility and gaming the system to maximize the accumulation of wealth for the top 1% by taking it from the bottom 99%. Along with this is the perversion of our democracy into a plutocracy, where those with money control elections and use their advertising and marketing expertise to sell the public on voting for “products” that will, in the end, serve only the wealthy.

The ideal America for Romney and his Republican colleagues is one where the wealthy freely buy the White House and Congress that best serves them, reroute the tax revenues from social programs into their pockets, remove all regulations that prevent them from polluting, economic fraud and harming the public if preventing it interferes with greater profits.

Their America has only two classes, the wealthy and workers. The middle class is already shrinking and hastening this is part of the scheme. Attacking unions (which created the Middle Class), job protections, rights and through off shoring, depressing the salary value of American workers.

In 2000, corporate America was already off shoring jobs at a fast clip, sharply reducing the number of jobs it had in the US. When the economic crash of 2008 hit, it just accelerated the off shoring.

These are jobs that are lost forever and are never coming back…unless American wages drop down to being more competitive with third world wages. The whole Free Trade scam was presented as something that would bring up wages around the world and add more jobs in the US due to exports. In fact, it was designed to do just the opposite, to slash labor costs for corporations and put severe downward pressure on workers’ wages in the US. And it has worked well.

The Romney/GOP agenda is to seal the deal on America as a plutocracy, a country of the wealthy, for the wealthy and by the wealthy. They have drilled Orwellian terms into the minds of Americans, deeming the greedy as benevolent “Job Creators” even though all evidence proves that they are willfully not creating high paid jobs in America (the job growth in the public sector has been coming primarily from small businesses).

Romney is running on being wealthy, that is his central platform, “I made a lot of money so that means I’m a good businessman and would make a good President.” Donald Trump flirted with running for President for the same reason, because they define wealth as success. So the reverse would be true, those like Romney view those who aren’t wealthy as failures and lesser people. Thus, it is not so bewildering to see how Romney stumbles around regular Americans like a king trying to pander to those he sees more like odd human-like animals than people like him.

So the concept of the majority’s purpose being that of serving Romney and his ilk is a mentality they already possess. For them, empathy for most Americans just doesn’t compute. With such a President, the depth of exploitation and oppression of the majority would have no limit, there would not be a conscience to say, “That policy would hurt too many people’s lives,” so even if he does it merely to benefit his fellow elitists and isn’t motivated by harming others, he could be capable of subjecting the American people to damaging things and being as oblivious of its impact as he is of how his constant gaffes are perceived.

A President Romney would be in a position to appoint perhaps two or more Supreme Court justices which could cement a right wing SCOTUS for generations. The lasting damage from the last dozen years of Gore v. Bush, Citizens United, etc. is already profound but another thirty to forty years of such pro-corporate, anti-democratic decisions could permanently cast the nation in the image of the wealthy and the majority of Americans as powerless, second class citizens.

War and Conflict That Destroys Our Future

America is pretty war weary. We’re getting out of Iraq, we’re slowly getting out of Afghanistan but trillions of dollars and precious lives have already been lost and continue to be. Americans want it to be over.

To that, Mitt Romney says, “My party’s core says, ‘Screw that! War rocks!’ so I do too!”

Romney has absolutely no foreign affairs experience or education so he merely adopts the stances of those in the Republican right wing he panders to and has hired as consultants. And they profit from the military industry. So, war with Iran sounds good to them. Hostility towards China and calling Russia our enemy, that’s good for business.

If not influenced by others, Romney doesn’t seem like the war mongering type but being greedy and self-serving, Romney would take any position if it benefited him. And threatening war with one country after another yields a gold mine of campaign donations.

What would happen if the US started a war with Iran? Even if it was just air strikes, it could create a hostile backlash against the US around the world while miring us in a very complicated war we could never win, using an already overused and depleted military that could deteriorate as a whole.

What would happen to gas prices and oil prices in this fragile economy, if the Straight of Hormuz became a war zone? How would it affect inflation and jobs in this country if the price of gas went up towards $10 per gallon?

Yes, Romney and the GOP exude hypocrisy when attacking Obama on gas prices while whipping up support for war with Iran but it would be naive to think they wouldn’t be just fine with energy costs skyrocketing…along with revenues for oil companies…who are the top GOP sponsors anyway.

Our remarkable volunteer army has been stretched thin in two simultaneous wars over the last ten years and another war could require more soldiers than we have able to serve. By creating a growing lower class of unemployed and economically excluded people, they have created a great ongoing supply of cannon fodder for their eternal wars-for-profit, draining our nation of blood and treasure.

The Ryan budget and Romney’s budget greatly increase military spending while insisting on reducing the deficit and balancing budgets so there is no alternative but for ongoing war to be financed by degrading America’s social and physical infrastructure even more than it has been and it is already past the point of sustainability.

At the same time, their insistence on cutting taxes paid by the wealthy will transfer that loss of revenue from social programs to the wealthy, adding a greater hacking away at social programs on top of what would already be occurring.

Conclusion

A Romney Presidency, especially when coupled with a Republican Congress could be a profound and devastating blow to the future of this nation. This is not because Romney is a worse person than other GOP candidates (GW Bush can’t be argued to be better) but because America is at a tipping point in so many ways that each Presidential term during this period is make or break.

Had President Obama made disastrous decisions after taking office, never passing a stimulus bill, agreeing to drastic slashing of Medicare and Social Security with no revenue increases, we could have tumbled down into an economic depression beyond what we could have imagined.

If Romney is enabled to tear apart Medicare and Social Security, lock in a pro-corporate SCOTUS for 30 years, cement plutocracy and economic injustice into place and be the vehicle for legally oppressing minorities and women in America, it would be hard to imagine ever fully reversing the damage to the nation.

These are the concrete kind of considerations that should be discussed on the MSM instead of  “scandals” like President Obama not literally saying that he supports gay marriage or puff pieces on how Ann Romney helps “humanize” Romney.

There are serious and powerful issues at stake right now, we can’t afford to be distracted by the trivia of the horse race and gotcha games in the media.

We need to have the public discussing what really matters and what country America is going to be in reality, not just in mindless nationalistic blather.

There might not be a more important election in our lifetimes than the one we will have in November. The value of keeping that in mind and impressing that on others can’t be understated.

By now it has become crystal clear that to Republicans, no news is good news. It doesn’t matter whether Osama Bin Laden is killed, the economy is recovering from the worst recession in recent history or diet donuts have been invented that actually reduce your cholesterol and make you lose weight, the GOP is bent (in many ways) on spinning every bit of good news that comes into something terrible.

As the Party of Nope and Deranged, the GOP has come to realize that there is no way enough people will vote for their party based upon their policies that only address the desires and needs of the top 1% and religious fanatics. So, their only path to power is by piling as much manure on top of President Obama and Democrats as possible and counting on people being so offended by the stench that they stumble away and blindly tumble into the sewer known as the modern GOP.

In order for this cynical plan to work, the GOP must respond to any and all positive news like they were cantankerous old people (which many Republicans naturally are anyway) but instead of replying to, “Hey Grandpa, I pitched for my Little League team for the first time!” with “Keep it up and you’ll suffer the rest of your life in excruciating pain from your rotator cuff!”, the GOP comes up with various ways to describe great things as Roves in the punchbowl.

So, since we are always seeking ways to offer olive branches to the other side in hopes of bringing everyone together, we have worked up a list of issues and responses that Republicans can use at a moment’s notice if a particular piece of good news rears its pleasant head in the future.

LIST OF REPUBLICAN RESPONSES TO GOOD NEWS

1. If unemployment continues dropping and GDP and other economic indicators rise:

GOP: “Now the elitists in the Democratic Party including President Obama are trying to use numbers and math to convince Americans that things are getting better in this country. Math may be their God but we believe in the one true God and we object to this continuing attack on religion! We don’t need math or numbers to know what’s happening in our economy! We have our guts to tell us and Rush Limbaugh! The more these numbers rise, the more Big Arithmetic is taking away our freedoms!”

2. If President Obama achieves a foreign policy success in North Korea, Iran, Israel, etc.

GOP: “Reducing political tensions is playing into the hands of Al Qaeda and all of those who want to harm us. The less threats and wars we have, the less we’ll spend on protecting ourselves. Military equipment manufacturers will be paid less and less and eventually  shrivel and die, leaving America helpless and vulnerable thanks to “peace”. Then you know who’ll be free to invade and take over America? Al Qaeda, communists, socialists, Russians, Taliban, Gypsies, Cubans, Slytherins, Morlocks, yodelers, mimes and many others who hate America!”

3. If a cure for cancer, Alzheimer’s or another devastating disease is discovered thanks to federal funding of science and medicine:

GOP: At a time when unemployment is so high in this nation, thanks to our government, the need for doctors and nurses will now drop and hundreds of thousands if not millions of them will lose their jobs. Those having their Alzheimer’s cured are forgetting about the salaries of many job creators and little people in the pharmaceutical and medical industry that their conditions have been paying for! Our President wants us to be selfish and only care about ourselves and our health instead of the health of our economy. Sick is good! Good for business and good for America! Health care is thumbing our nose at God’s great plan for the uninsured. If He wanted everyone in America to be healthy, why are there so many Arby’s around?”

4. If President Obama makes a powerful and inspiring speech about the rights of minorities, women or some other issue addressing fairness in our society:

GOP: “Once again, President Obama is trying to divide Americans and turn us against each other. Under the guise of “fairness” Obama wants to sow dissent in the majority of Americans who happily celebrate millionaires and billionaires getting richer because they know that one day, the 99% will become the 1% . It’s simple math and you can’t argue with math…forget what we said about it before, we changed our minds because now it helps us make our point! Obama insists Latinos should be treated as equals even though they’re happiest when they’re treated as servants…if they weren’t, why do they smile so much when you speak English to them? And there is no War on Women. If there was, they’re so inferior to men, they wouldn’t stand a chance of winning and the war would be over before it started. Women are as loved by Republican men as their family dogs and are given a long leash to explore around within reason. Women see a leash as a bond between them and the men they serve, why Obama would have anything against bondage is beyond us.”

5. If the Affordable Care Act is confirmed to save taxpayers a great deal of money and insure tens of millions of Americans who were uninsured:

GOP: It’s no surprise that Democrats are celebrating Obamacare starving insurance companies from the kind of profits they used to make. Obama hates American business, he hates job creators and those who used hard work and the free enterprise to inherit their fortunes and positions of power. Health insurance is not a right, it’s a hot dog dangling on a string that should be able to be yanked out of reach when people are selfish enough to try and grab it and greedily harm insurance company profits. We believe in the free market and in the free market, nothing is free. Except corporate bailouts. Anyway, if the uninsured wanted to be insured, all they’d have to do is get insured in the past when they were healthy and in their 20′s. If they’re too lazy to go back and do that one simple thing, why should insurance companies be forced to help them? As Ayn Rand once said, “I made how much on royalties? Sweet! Everyone else can kiss my Objectivist ass from now on!” Now that is the character of free enterprise and America that this country was founded on and that we believe in.

There will no doubt be many more alarming incidents of “good news”, thoughtlessly intruding on the Republican campaign this year, we can only hope that our modest offerings herein help the GOP to find political black mold in the pot of gold at the end of every rainbow.

IN SUMMARY…
Romney supports the Wall Street Bailout but he will not honestly address why the economy crashed or give any credit to the Obama Administration.

Romney condemned the Auto Bailout and still says it was a mistake despite its having saved a hallmark U.S. industry and a million plus jobs.

Romney’s solution for the Housing Crisis is to let market forces prevail wiping out the single largest investment most Americans have and when values bottom out he recommends converting many foreclosed properties into rentals.

All of this makes sense in light of his experience in founding a company which depended on those market forces to turn fast profits by destroying weak companies and rebuilding moderately strong ones to maximize investor profit.

The proof that he is extraordinarily unsuited to hold office is how badly he did as governor in dealing with the loss of manufacturing, jobs and state revenue.

__________________________________________________________
A closer look at Romney’s Positions on Three of the Most Significant Economic Decisions since 2008.

1) Romney supports the Wall Street Bailout BUT gives no credit to Obama for supporting and carrying it out. For him the credit all goes to Bush and his Treasury Secretary Paulson. AND they get none of the blame for the meltdown. Romney ignores how Paulson, as head of Goldman Sachs, lobbied to raise leverage limits that fueled Wall Street’s unchecked risk-taking machine. The Bush administration sponsored low-income housing and deregulatory policies that promoted the illusory idea of a self-stabilizing Wall Street, gutted the financial regulatory system and set the stage for the disaster.

2) Romney condemned the Auto Bailout when it was first proposed and continues to condemn it today. His loyalty to free market principles seems absolute. Indeed Romney implies that Obama was eager to see the auto industry collapse, so he could do “all these things that liberals have wanted to do for years.”

That is false. The collapse of the auto industry began before Obama took office, and it was President George W. Bush who began the bailout of Chrysler and General Motors. But it was only after the Feds delivered $80 billion in bailout funds, as part of a managed bankruptcy demanded by the Obama administration that Chrysler and General Motors turned things around. Romney would have let the industry collapse and with it one million jobs.

3) Romney criticized the Obama administration’s “hands off” approach for not fixing the housing crisis and in the next breath declared that the most effective way for the market to correct itself was to allow the foreclosure process “…run its course and “hit the bottom.”

For a man who owns a lake home in New Hampshire, as well as some choice beachfront real estate in La Jolla, CA (which Romney will remodel after the election) and Boston, Romney has a slim and inconsistent set of views on U.S. housing policy.

In his 59-point plan to fix the U.S. Romney does not single out housing as vital. Romney has only offered a cursory “analysis” of why the housing market tanked citing the Democrat’s desire for cheap housing as the principal cause. He offers no plan to stabilize home values and remedy the foreclosure hemorrhaging suggesting that underwater homes become rental properties managed by the mortgage holders.

__________________________________________________________
How could a salvager of businesses, and a job creator hold positions like this? Easy. His business experience was not about saving companies or creating jobs. It was about maximizing capital growth often at the expense of company solvency and the loss of jobs.

Romney’s experience at Bain Capital makes sense of his positions and more importantly predicts how he will approach the management of the U.S. economy in the global environment. Begin with the fact that Romney set up Bain Capital with guarantees made by the partners from the parent consulting firm Bain & Company that ensured that he would risk nothing and be paid very handsomely no matter how the new company did.

His business model at Bain Capital was one of picking the meat off the bones of struggling companies to maximize profit for wealthy investors. He did this by picking away at jobs, decent wages and benefits plant by plant AND by attaching massive new debt to those that were moderately healthy. There were cases where companies were rebuilt and emerged stronger but fewer than 30 percent of Bain’s acquisitions could make that claim.

His specialty was flipping companies — or what he often called “creative destruction.” The new must constantly attack the old to bring efficiency to the economy, even if some are destroyed along the way. Wolves, cull the herd of the weak and infirm.

His formula was simple: Bain would purchase a firm with little money down, then begin extracting huge management fees and paying Romney and his investors enormous dividends.

The result was that previously profitable companies were now burdened with debt. It didn’t matter if a company manufactured bicycles or contact lenses. The formula worked for them all.

Bain would slash costs, jettison workers, reposition product lines, and merge its new companies with other firms. With luck, they’d be able to dump a firm in a few years for millions more than they’d paid for it. If not, the company died but Bain still made a lot on fees, property sell-offs, and asset transfers.

The beauty of Romney’s thesis (from the point of view of the investor) was that it really didn’t matter whether the company succeeded. Since he was yanking out cash early and often, he would profit even if his targets collapsed.

THAT IS HIS VAUNTED BUSINESS EXPERIENCE.
DOES THIS RECOMMEND HIM TO OVERSEE THE U.S. ECONOMY?
WHO WILL HE FAVOR?
WHO WILL HE REGARD AS EXPENDABLE?

__________________________________________________________
But how did he do in his one position of public service, as Governor of Massachusetts? Surely that record recommends him?

As governor, Romney’s crucial test is like Obama’s. It lay in applying his vaunted business background to a slow-growing economy — and the data shows that the results were unremarkable, Some would say they were poor.

Romney ran for governor vowing to attract new jobs to the state, but there were limits to what he could do. Massachusetts by law had to balance its budget every year, and revenue had taken a dive after the first Bush recession, hindering the state’s ability to use public money to stimulate the economy.

In November 2003, Romney signed a modest stimulus, that included a one-day sales tax holiday and a tax rebate for companies that created manufacturing jobs in the tech sector. The package, costing about $131 million, was tiny compared with the state’s total budget then of more than $20 billion. Today, few involved in Massachusetts’s economic policy even remember it. Romney was unable to craft any better plan than this.

At the end of 2002, just before he entered office, there were 338,000 manufacturing jobs in the state. By the time he left, there were 298,000, a drop of 12 percent, according to federal data. The service sector also suffered largely as a result of the drop in manufacturing. With a further decline in state revenue cuts in public positions followed.

Thus job growth only increased at a 1.3 percent rate during Romney’s term, a period of generally robust growth throughout the country, ranking Massachusetts 47 out of 50 states in that statistic during that time, in absolute terms.

Unemployment did go from 5.6 percent to 4.7 percent but that was only because people were leaving the workforce in droves during Romney’s term. Just one state had a bigger drop in its labor force during the same period, according to the Labor Department — that was Louisiana, which was hit by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Massachusetts has been losing manufacturing jobs for more than a decade. And Romney was unable to stem the tide. At the end of 2002, just before he entered office, there were 338,000 manufacturing jobs in the state. By the time he left, there were 298,000, a drop of 12 percent, according to federal data.

BUT he did get two significant measures passed. First, he raised taxes on businesses. The most pressing issue for Romney was finding money to fill a yawning budget gap of about $3 billion. He avoided raising income or sales taxes, by targeting corporate tax “loopholes.” To pro-business groups, this was the equivalent of raising taxes on businesses just when these firms were needed to help grow the state’s economy. By the end of his first term Romney was in trouble with many in the business community.

His most successful initiative? Yep….Romneycare and its noteworthy and trendsetting mandate.

THAT IS HIS VAUNTED GOVERNMENT LEADERSHIP EXPERIENCE.

Conclusion:-

Romney is completely unsuited to lead the nation in the one category where he claims to have the greatest credibility and where polling shows he has strength. If he becomes President most of us will drown in his and his friends’ pools of cold, hard cash.

Facts not Slogans

THE PRESIDENT:  Thank you very much.  (Applause.)  Please have a seat.  Well, good afternoon, and thank you to Dean Singleton and the board of the Associated Press for inviting me here today.  It is a pleasure to speak to all of you — and to have a microphone that I can see.  (Laughter.)  Feel free to transmit any of this to Vladimir if you see him.  (Laughter.)

Clearly, we’re already in the beginning months of another long, lively election year.  There will be gaffes and minor controversies, be hot mics and Etch-a-Sketch moments.  You will cover every word that we say, and we will complain vociferously about the unflattering words that you write — unless, of course, you’re writing about the other guy — in which case, good job.  (Laughter.)

But there are also big, fundamental issues at stake right now — issues that deserve serious debate among every candidate, and serious coverage among every reporter.  Whoever he may be, the next President will inherit an economy that is recovering, but not yet recovered, from the worst economic calamity since the Great Depression.  Too many Americans will still be looking for a job that pays enough to cover their bills or their mortgage.  Too many citizens will still lack the sort of financial security that started slipping away years before this recession hit.  A debt that has grown over the last decade, primarily as a result of two wars, two massive tax cuts, and an unprecedented financial crisis, will have to be paid down.

In the face of all these challenges, we’re going to have to answer a central question as a nation:  What, if anything, can we do to restore a sense of security for people who are willing to work hard and act responsibly in this country?  Can we succeed as a country where a shrinking number of people do exceedingly well, while a growing number struggle to get by?  Or are we better off when everyone gets a fair shot, and everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same rules?

This is not just another run-of-the-mill political debate.  I’ve said it’s the defining issue of our time, and I believe it. It’s why I ran in 2008.  It’s what my presidency has been about. It’s why I’m running again.  I believe this is a make-or-break moment for the middle class, and I can’t remember a time when the choice between competing visions of our future has been so unambiguously clear.

Keep in mind, I have never been somebody who believes that government can or should try to solve every problem.  Some of you know my first job in Chicago was working with a group of Catholic churches that often did more good for the people in their communities than any government program could.  In those same communities I saw that no education policy, however well crafted, can take the place of a parent’s love and attention.

As President, I’ve eliminated dozens of programs that weren’t working, and announced over 500 regulatory reforms that will save businesses and taxpayers billions, and put annual domestic spending on a path to become the smallest share of the economy since Dwight Eisenhower held this office — since before I was born.  I know that the true engine of job creation in this country is the private sector, not Washington, which is why I’ve cut taxes for small business owners 17 times over the last three years.

So I believe deeply that the free market is the greatest force for economic progress in human history.  My mother and the grandparents who raised me instilled the values of self-reliance and personal responsibility that remain the cornerstone of the American idea.  But I also share the belief of our first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln — a belief that, through government, we should do together what we cannot do as well for ourselves.

That belief is the reason this country has been able to build a strong military to keep us safe, and public schools to educate our children.  That belief is why we’ve been able to lay down railroads and highways to facilitate travel and commerce.  That belief is why we’ve been able to support the work of scientists and researchers whose discoveries have saved lives, and unleashed repeated technological revolutions, and led to countless new jobs and entire industries.

That belief is also why we’ve sought to ensure that every citizen can count on some basic measure of security.  We do this because we recognize that no matter how responsibly we live our lives, any one of us, at any moment, might face hard times, might face bad luck, might face a crippling illness or a layoff.  And so we contribute to programs like Medicare and Social Security, which guarantee health care and a source of income after a lifetime of hard work.  We provide unemployment insurance, which protects us against unexpected job loss and facilitates the labor mobility that makes our economy so dynamic.  We provide for Medicaid, which makes sure that millions of seniors in nursing homes and children with disabilities are getting the care that they need.

For generations, nearly all of these investments — from transportation to education to retirement programs — have been supported by people in both parties.  As much as we might associate the G.I. Bill with Franklin Roosevelt, or Medicare with Lyndon Johnson, it was a Republican, Lincoln, who launched the Transcontinental Railroad, the National Academy of Sciences, land grant colleges.  It was Eisenhower who launched the Interstate Highway System and new investment in scientific research.  It was Richard Nixon who created the Environmental Protection Agency, Ronald Reagan who worked with Democrats to save Social Security. It was George W. Bush who added prescription drug coverage to Medicare.

What leaders in both parties have traditionally understood is that these investments aren’t part of some scheme to redistribute wealth from one group to another.  They are expressions of the fact that we are one nation.  These investments benefit us all.  They contribute to genuine, durable economic growth.

Show me a business leader who wouldn’t profit if more Americans could afford to get the skills and education that today’s jobs require.  Ask any company where they’d rather locate and hire workers –- a country with crumbling roads and bridges, or one that’s committed to high-speed Internet and high-speed railroads and high-tech research and development?

It doesn’t make us weaker when we guarantee basic security for the elderly or the sick or those who are actively looking for work.  What makes us weaker is when fewer and fewer people can afford to buy the goods and services our businesses sell, or when entrepreneurs don’t have the financial security to take a chance and start a new business.  What drags down our entire economy is when there’s an ever-widening chasm between the ultra-rich and everybody else.

In this country, broad-based prosperity has never trickled down from the success of a wealthy few.  It has always come from the success of a strong and growing middle class.  That’s how a generation who went to college on the G.I. Bill, including my grandfather, helped build the most prosperous economy the world has ever known.  That’s why a CEO like Henry Ford made it his mission to pay his workers enough so they could buy the cars that they made.  That’s why research has shown that countries with less inequality tend to have stronger and steadier economic growth over the long run.

And yet, for much of the last century, we have been having the same argument with folks who keep peddling some version of trickle-down economics.  They keep telling us that if we’d convert more of our investments in education and research and health care into tax cuts — especially for the wealthy — our economy will grow stronger.  They keep telling us that if we’d just strip away more regulations, and let businesses pollute more and treat workers and consumers with impunity, that somehow we’d all be better off.  We’re told that when the wealthy become even wealthier, and corporations are allowed to maximize their profits by whatever means necessary, it’s good for America, and that their success will automatically translate into more jobs and prosperity for everybody else.  That’s the theory.

Now, the problem for advocates of this theory is that we’ve tried their approach — on a massive scale.  The results of their experiment are there for all to see.  At the beginning of the last decade, the wealthiest Americans received a huge tax cut in 2001 and another huge tax cut in 2003.  We were promised that these tax cuts would lead to faster job growth.  They did not.  The wealthy got wealthier — we would expect that.  The income of the top 1 percent has grown by more than 275 percent over the last few decades, to an average of $1.3 million a year.  But prosperity sure didn’t trickle down.

Instead, during the last decade, we had the slowest job growth in half a century.  And the typical American family actually saw their incomes fall by about 6 percent, even as the economy was growing.

It was a period when insurance companies and mortgage lenders and financial institutions didn’t have to abide by strong enough regulations, or they found their ways around them.  And what was the result?  Profits for many of these companies soared. But so did people’s health insurance premiums.  Patients were routinely denied care, often when they needed it most.  Families were enticed, and sometimes just plain tricked, into buying homes they couldn’t afford.  Huge, reckless bets were made with other people’s money on the line.  And our entire financial system was nearly destroyed.

So we tried this theory out.  And you would think that after the results of this experiment in trickle-down economics, after the results were made painfully clear, that the proponents of this theory might show some humility, might moderate their views a bit.  You’d think they’d say, you know what, maybe some rules and regulations are necessary to protect the economy and prevent people from being taken advantage of by insurance companies or credit card companies or mortgage lenders.  Maybe, just maybe, at a time of growing debt and widening inequality, we should hold off on giving the wealthiest Americans another round of big tax cuts.  Maybe when we know that most of today’s middle-class jobs require more than a high school degree, we shouldn’t gut education, or lay off thousands of teachers, or raise interest rates on college loans, or take away people’s financial aid.

But that’s exactly the opposite of what they’ve done.  Instead of moderating their views even slightly, the Republicans running Congress right now have doubled down, and proposed a budget so far to the right it makes the Contract with America look like the New Deal.  (Laughter.)  In fact, that renowned liberal, Newt Gingrich, first called the original version of the budget “radical” and said it would contribute to “right-wing social engineering.”  This is coming from Newt Gingrich.

And yet, this isn’t a budget supported by some small rump group in the Republican Party.  This is now the party’s governing platform.  This is what they’re running on.  One of my potential opponents, Governor Romney, has said that he hoped a similar version of this plan from last year would be introduced as a bill on day one of his presidency.  He said that he’s “very supportive” of this new budget, and he even called it “marvelous” — which is a word you don’t often hear when it comes to describing a budget.  (Laughter.)  It’s a word you don’t often hear generally.  (Laughter.)

So here’s what this “marvelous” budget does.  Back in the summer, I came to an agreement with Republicans in Congress to cut roughly $1 trillion in annual spending.  Some of these cuts were about getting rid of waste; others were about programs that we support but just can’t afford given our deficits and our debt.  And part of the agreement was a guarantee of another trillion in savings, for a total of about $2 trillion in deficit reduction.

This new House Republican budget, however, breaks our bipartisan agreement and proposes massive new cuts in annual domestic spending –- exactly the area where we’ve already cut the most.  And I want to actually go through what it would mean for our country if these cuts were to be spread out evenly.  So bear with me.  I want to go through this — because I don’t think people fully appreciate the nature of this budget.

The year after next, nearly 10 million college students would see their financial aid cut by an average of more than $1,000 each.  There would be 1,600 fewer medical grants, research grants for things like Alzheimer’s and cancer and AIDS.  There would be 4,000 fewer scientific research grants, eliminating support for 48,000 researchers, students, and teachers.  Investments in clean energy technologies that are helping us reduce our dependence on foreign oil would be cut by nearly a fifth.

If this budget becomes law and the cuts were applied evenly, starting in 2014, over 200,000 children would lose their chance to get an early education in the Head Start program.  Two million mothers and young children would be cut from a program that gives them access to healthy food.  There would be 4,500 fewer federal grants at the Department of Justice and the FBI to combat violent crime, financial crime, and help secure our borders.  Hundreds of national parks would be forced to close for part or all of the year.  We wouldn’t have the capacity to enforce the laws that protect the air we breathe, the water we drink, or the food that we eat.

Cuts to the FAA would likely result in more flight cancellations, delays, and the complete elimination of air traffic control services in parts of the country.  Over time, our weather forecasts would become less accurate because we wouldn’t be able to afford to launch new satellites.  And that means governors and mayors would have to wait longer to order evacuations in the event of a hurricane.

That’s just a partial sampling of the consequences of this budget.  Now, you can anticipate Republicans may say, well, we’ll avoid some of these cuts — since they don’t specify exactly the cuts that they would make.  But they can only avoid some of these cuts if they cut even deeper in other areas.  This is math.  If they want to make smaller cuts to medical research that means they’ve got to cut even deeper in funding for things like teaching and law enforcement.  The converse is true as well.  If they want to protect early childhood education, it will mean further reducing things like financial aid for young people trying to afford college.

Perhaps they will never tell us where the knife will fall — but you can be sure that with cuts this deep, there is no secret plan or formula that will be able to protect the investments we need to help our economy grow.

This is not conjecture.  I am not exaggerating.  These are facts.  And these are just the cuts that would happen the year after next.

If this budget became law, by the middle of the century, funding for the kinds of things I just mentioned would have to be cut by about 95 percent.  Let me repeat that.  Those categories I just mentioned we would have to cut by 95 percent.  As a practical matter, the federal budget would basically amount to whatever is left in entitlements, defense spending, and interest on the national debt — period.  Money for these investments that have traditionally been supported on a bipartisan basis would be practically eliminated.

And the same is true for other priorities like transportation, and homeland security, and veterans programs for the men and women who have risked their lives for this country.  This is not an exaggeration.  Check it out yourself.

And this is to say nothing about what the budget does to health care.  We’re told that Medicaid would simply be handed over to the states — that’s the pitch:  Let’s get it out of the central bureaucracy.  The states can experiment.  They’ll be able to run the programs a lot better.  But here’s the deal the states would be getting.  They would have to be running these programs in the face of the largest cut to Medicaid that has ever been proposed — a cut that, according to one nonpartisan group, would take away health care for about 19 million Americans — 19 million.

Who are these Americans?  Many are someone’s grandparents who, without Medicaid, won’t be able to afford nursing home care without Medicaid.  Many are poor children.  Some are middle-class families who have children with autism or Down’s Syndrome.  Some are kids with disabilities so severe that they require 24-hour care.  These are the people who count on Medicaid.

Then there’s Medicare.  Because health care costs keep rising and the Baby Boom generation is retiring, Medicare, we all know, is one of the biggest drivers of our long-term deficit.  That’s a challenge we have to meet by bringing down the cost of health care overall so that seniors and taxpayers can share in the savings.

But here’s the solution proposed by the Republicans in Washington, and embraced by most of their candidates for president:  Instead of being enrolled in Medicare when they turn 65, seniors who retire a decade from now would get a voucher that equals the cost of the second cheapest health care plan in their area.  If Medicare is more expensive than that private plan, they’ll have to pay more if they want to enroll in traditional Medicare.  If health care costs rise faster than the amount of the voucher — as, by the way, they’ve been doing for decades — that’s too bad.  Seniors bear the risk.  If the voucher isn’t enough to buy a private plan with the specific doctors and care that you need, that’s too bad.

So most experts will tell you the way this voucher plan encourages savings is not through better care at cheaper cost.  The way these private insurance companies save money is by designing and marketing plans to attract the youngest and healthiest seniors — cherry-picking — leaving the older and sicker seniors in traditional Medicare, where they have access to a wide range of doctors and guaranteed care.  But that, of course, makes the traditional Medicare program even more expensive, and raise premiums even further.

The net result is that our country will end up spending more on health care, and the only reason the government will save any money — it won’t be on our books — is because we’ve shifted it to seniors.  They’ll bear more of the costs themselves.  It’s a bad idea, and it will ultimately end Medicare as we know it.

Now, the proponents of this budget will tell us we have to make all these draconian cuts because our deficit is so large; this is an existential crisis, we have to think about future generations, so on and so on.  And that argument might have a shred of credibility were it not for their proposal to also spend $4.6 trillion over the next decade on lower tax rates.

We’re told that these tax cuts will supposedly be paid for by closing loopholes and eliminating wasteful deductions.  But the Republicans in Congress refuse to list a single tax loophole they are willing to close.  Not one.  And by the way, there is no way to get even close to $4.6 trillion in savings without dramatically reducing all kinds of tax breaks that go to middle-class families — tax breaks for health care, tax breaks for retirement, tax breaks for homeownership.

Meanwhile, these proposed tax breaks would come on top of more than a trillion dollars in tax giveaways for people making more than $250,000 a year.  That’s an average of at least $150,000 for every millionaire in this country — $150,000.

Let’s just step back for a second and look at what $150,000 pays for:  A year’s worth of prescription drug coverage for a senior citizen.  Plus a new school computer lab.  Plus a year of medical care for a returning veteran.  Plus a medical research grant for a chronic disease.  Plus a year’s salary for a firefighter or police officer.  Plus a tax credit to make a year of college more affordable.  Plus a year’s worth of financial aid.  One hundred fifty thousand dollars could pay for all of these things combined — investments in education and research that are essential to economic growth that benefits all of us.  For $150,000, that would be going to each millionaire and billionaire in this country.  This budget says we’d be better off as a country if that’s how we spend it.

This is supposed to be about paying down our deficit?  It’s laughable.

The bipartisan Simpson-Bowles commission that I created — which the Republicans originally were for until I was for it — that was about paying down the deficit.  And I didn’t agree with all the details.  I proposed about $600 billion more in revenue and $600 billion — I’m sorry — it proposed about $600 billion more in revenue and about $600 billion more in defense cuts than I proposed in my own budget.  But Bowles-Simpson was a serious, honest, balanced effort between Democrats and Republicans to bring down the deficit.  That’s why, although it differs in some ways, my budget takes a similarly balanced approach:  Cuts in discretionary spending, cuts in mandatory spending, increased revenue.

This congressional Republican budget is something different altogether.  It is a Trojan Horse.  Disguised as deficit reduction plans, it is really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country.  It is thinly veiled social Darwinism.  It is antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility for everybody who’s willing to work for it; a place where prosperity doesn’t trickle down from the top, but grows outward from the heart of the middle class.  And by gutting the very things we need to grow an economy that’s built to last  — education and training, research and development, our infrastructure — it is a prescription for decline.

And everybody here should understand that because there’s very few people here who haven’t benefitted at some point from those investments that were made in the ’50s and the ’60s and the ’70s and the ’80s.  That’s part of how we got ahead.  And now, we’re going to be pulling up those ladders up for the next generation?

So in the months ahead, I will be fighting as hard as I know how for this truer vision of what the United States of America is all about.  Absolutely, we have to get serious about the deficit. And that will require tough choices and sacrifice.  And I’ve already shown myself willing to make these tough choices when I signed into law the biggest spending cut of any President in recent memory.  In fact, if you adjust for the economy, the Congressional Budget Office says the overall spending next year will be lower than any year under Ronald Reagan.

And I’m willing to make more of those difficult spending decisions in the months ahead.  But I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — there has to be some balance.  All of us have to do our fair share.

I’ve also put forward a detailed plan that would reform and strengthen Medicare and Medicaid.  By the beginning of the next decade, it achieves the same amount of annual health savings as the plan proposed by Simpson-Bowles — the Simpson-Bowles commission, and it does so by making changes that people in my party haven’t always been comfortable with.  But instead of saving money by shifting costs to seniors, like the congressional Republican plan proposes, our approach would lower the cost of health care throughout the entire system.  It goes after excessive subsidies to prescription drug companies.  It gets more efficiency out of Medicaid without gutting the program.  It asks the very wealthiest seniors to pay a little bit more.  It changes the way we pay for health care — not by procedure or the number of days spent in a hospital, but with new incentives for doctors and hospitals to improve their results.

And it slows the growth of Medicare costs by strengthening an independent commission — a commission not made up of bureaucrats from government or insurance companies, but doctors and nurses and medical experts and consumers, who will look at all the evidence and recommend the best way to reduce unnecessary health care spending while protecting access to the care that the seniors need.

We also have a much different approach when it comes to taxes — an approach that says if we’re serious about paying down our debt, we can’t afford to spend trillions more on tax cuts for folks like me, for wealthy Americans who don’t need them and weren’t even asking for them, and that the country cannot afford. At a time when the share of national income flowing to the top 1 percent of people in this country has climbed to levels last seen in the 1920s, those same folks are paying taxes at one of the lowest rates in 50 years.  As both I and Warren Buffett have pointed out many times now, he’s paying a lower tax rate than his secretary.  That is not fair.  It is not right.

And the choice is really very simple.  If you want to keep these tax rates and deductions in place — or give even more tax breaks to the wealthy, as the Republicans in Congress propose — then one of two things happen:  Either it means higher deficits, or it means more sacrifice from the middle class.  Seniors will have to pay more for Medicare.  College students will lose some of their financial aid.  Working families who are scraping by will have to do more because the richest Americans are doing less.  I repeat what I’ve said before:  That is not class warfare, that is not class envy, that is math.

If that’s the choice that members of Congress want to make, then we’re going to make sure every American knows about it.  In a few weeks, there will be a vote on what we’ve called the Buffett Rule.  Simple concept:  If you make more than a million dollars a year — not that you have a million dollars — if you make more than a million dollars annually, then you should pay at least the same percentage of your income in taxes as middle-class families do.  On the other hand, if you make under $250,000 a year — like 98 percent of American families do — then your taxes shouldn’t go up.  That’s the proposal.

Now, you’ll hear some people point out that the Buffett Rule alone won’t raise enough revenue to solve our deficit problems.  Maybe not, but it’s definitely a step in the right direction.  And I intend to keep fighting for this kind of balance and fairness until the other side starts listening, because I believe this is what the American people want.  I believe this is the best way to pay for the investments we need to grow our economy and strengthen the middle class.  And by the way, I believe it’s the right thing to do.

This larger debate that we will be having and that you will be covering in the coming year about the size and role of government, this debate has been with us since our founding days. And during moments of great challenge and change, like the ones that we’re living through now, the debate gets sharper; it gets more vigorous.  That’s a good thing.  As a country that prizes both our individual freedom and our obligations to one another, this is one of the most important debates that we can have.

But no matter what we argue or where we stand, we have always held certain beliefs as Americans.  We believe that in order to preserve our own freedoms and pursue our own happiness, we can’t just think about ourselves.  We have to think about the country that made those liberties possible.  We have to think about our fellow citizens with whom we share a community.  We have to think about what’s required to preserve the American Dream for future generations.

And this sense of responsibility — to each other and our country — this isn’t a partisan feeling.  This isn’t a Democratic or Republican idea.  It’s patriotism.  And if we keep that in mind, and uphold our obligations to one another and to this larger enterprise that is America, then I have no doubt that we will continue our long and prosperous journey as the greatest nation on Earth.

Thank you.  God bless you.  God bless the United States of America.  (Applause.)  Thank you.

MR. SINGLETON:  Thank you, Mr. President.  We appreciate so much you being with us today.  I have some questions from the audience, which I will ask — and I’ll be more careful than I was last time I did this.

Republicans have been sharply critical of your budget ideas as well.  What can you say to the Americans who just want both sides to stop fighting and get some work done on their behalf?

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, I completely understand the American people’s frustrations, because the truth is that these are eminently solvable problems.  I know that Christine Lagarde is here from the IMF, and she’s looking at the books of a lot of other countries around the world.  The kinds of challenges they face fiscally are so much more severe than anything that we confront — if we make some sensible decisions.

So the American people’s impulses are absolutely right.  These are solvable problems if people of good faith came together and were willing to compromise.  The challenge we have right now is that we have on one side, a party that will brook no compromise.  And this is not just my assertion.  We had presidential candidates who stood on a stage and were asked, “Would you accept a budget package, a deficit reduction plan, that involved $10 of cuts for every dollar in revenue increases?” Ten-to-one ratio of spending cuts to revenue.  Not one of them raised their hand.

Think about that.  Ronald Reagan, who, as I recall, is not accused of being a tax-and-spend socialist, understood repeatedly that when the deficit started to get out of control, that for him to make a deal he would have to propose both spending cuts and tax increases.  Did it multiple times.  He could not get through a Republican primary today.

So let’s look at Bowles-Simpson.  Essentially, my differences with Bowles-Simpson were I actually proposed less revenue and slightly lower defense spending cuts.  The Republicans want to increase defense spending and take in no revenue, which makes it impossible to balance the deficit under the terms that Bowles-Simpson laid out — unless you essentially eliminate discretionary spending.  You don’t just cut discretionary spending.  Everything we think of as being pretty important — from education to basic science and research to transportation spending to national parks to environmental protection — we’d essentially have to eliminate.

I guess another way of thinking about this is — and this bears on your reporting.  I think that there is oftentimes the impulse to suggest that if the two parties are disagreeing, then they’re equally at fault and the truth lies somewhere in the middle, and an equivalence is presented — which reinforces I think people’s cynicism about Washington generally.  This is not one of those situations where there’s an equivalence.  I’ve got some of the most liberal Democrats in Congress who were prepared to make significant changes to entitlements that go against their political interests, and who said they were willing to do it.  And we couldn’t get a Republican to stand up and say, we’ll raise some revenue, or even to suggest that we won’t give more tax cuts to people who don’t need them.

And so I think it’s important to put the current debate in some historical context.  It’s not just true, by the way, of the budget.  It’s true of a lot of the debates that we’re having out here.

Cap and trade was originally proposed by conservatives and Republicans as a market-based solution to solving environmental problems.  The first President to talk about cap and trade was George H.W. Bush.  Now you’ve got the other party essentially saying we shouldn’t even be thinking about environmental protection; let’s gut the EPA.

Health care, which is in the news right now — there’s a reason why there’s a little bit of confusion in the Republican primary about health care and the individual mandate since it originated as a conservative idea to preserve the private marketplace in health care while still assuring that everybody got covered, in contrast to a single-payer plan.  Now, suddenly, this is some socialist overreach.

So as all of you are doing your reporting, I think it’s important to remember that the positions I’m taking now on the budget and a host of other issues, if we had been having this discussion 20 years ago, or even 15 years ago, would have been considered squarely centrist positions.  What’s changed is the center of the Republican Party.  And that’s certainly true with the budget.

MR. SINGLETON:  Mr. President, the managing director of the (inaudible) for continuation of United States leadership (inaudible) economic issues, and underscored the need for a lower deficit and lower debt.  How can you respond to that claim?

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, look, she’s absolutely right.  It’s interesting, when I travel around the world at these international fora — and I’ve said this before — the degree to which America is still the one indispensable nation, the degree to which, even as other countries are rising and their economies are expanding, we are still looked to for leadership, for agenda setting — not just because of our size, not just because of our military power, but because there is a sense that unlike most superpowers in the past, we try to set out a set of universal rules, a set of principles by which everybody can benefit.

And that’s true on the economic front as well.  We continue to be the world’s largest market, an important engine for economic growth.  We can’t return to a time when by simply borrowing and consuming, we end up driving global economic growth.

I said this a few months after I was elected at the first G20 summit.  I said the days when Americans using their credit cards and home equity loans finance the rest of the world’s growth by taking in imports from every place else — those days are over.  On the other hand, we continue to be a extraordinarily important market and foundation for global economic growth.

We do have to take care of our deficits.  I think Christine has spoken before, and I think most economists would argue as well, that the challenge when it comes to our deficits is not short-term discretionary spending, which is manageable.  As I said before and I want to repeat, as a percentage of our GDP, our discretionary spending — all the things that the Republicans are proposing cutting — is actually lower than it’s been since Dwight Eisenhower.  There has not been some massive expansion of social programs, programs that help the poor, environmental programs, education programs.  That’s not our problem.

Our problem is that our revenue has dropped down to between 15 and 16 percent — far lower than it has been historically, certainly far lower than it was under Ronald Reagan — at the same time as our health care costs have surged, and our demographics mean that there is more and more pressure being placed on financing our Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security programs.

So at a time when the recovery is still gaining steam, and unemployment is still very high, the solution should be pretty apparent.  And that is even as we continue to make investments in growth today — for example, putting some of our construction workers back to work rebuilding schools and roads and bridges, or helping states to rehire teachers at a time when schools are having a huge difficulty retaining quality teachers in the classroom — all of which would benefit our economy, we focus on a long-term plan to stabilize our revenues at a responsible level and to deal with our health care programs in a responsible way.  And that’s exactly what I’m proposing.

And what we’ve proposed is let’s go back, for folks who are making more than $250,000 a year, to levels that were in place during the Clinton era, when wealthy people were doing just fine, and the economy was growing a lot stronger than it did after they were cut.  And let’s take on Medicare and Medicaid in a serious way — which is not just a matter of taking those costs off the books, off the federal books, and pushing them onto individual seniors, but let’s actually reduce health care costs.  Because we spend more on health care with not as good outcomes as any other advanced, developed nation on Earth.

And that would seem to be a sensible proposal.  The problem right now is not the technical means to solve it.  The problem is our politics.  And that’s part of what this election and what this debate will need to be about, is, are we, as a country, willing to get back to common-sense, balanced, fair solutions that encourage our long-term economic growth and stabilize our budget.  And it can be done.

One last point I want to make, Dean, that I think is important, because it goes to the growth issue.  If state and local government hiring were basically on par to what our current recovery — on par to past recoveries, the unemployment rate would probably be about a point lower than it is right now.  If the construction industry were going through what we normally go through, that would be another point lower.  The challenge we have right now — part of the challenge we have in terms of growth has to do with the very specific issues of huge cuts in state and local government, and the housing market still recovering from this massive bubble.  And that — those two things are huge headwinds in terms of growth.

I say this because if we, for example, put some of those construction workers back to work, or we put some of those teachers back in the classroom, that could actually help create the kind of virtuous cycle that would bring in more revenues just because of economic growth, would benefit the private sector in significant ways.  And that could help contribute to deficit reduction in the short term, even as we still have to do these important changes to our health care programs over the long term.

MR. SINGLETON:  Mr. President, you said yesterday that it would be unprecedented for a Supreme Court to overturn laws passed by an elected Congress.  But that is exactly what the Court has done during its entire existence.  If the Court were to overturn individual mandate, what would you do, or propose to do, for the 30 million people who wouldn’t have health care after that ruling?

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, first of all, let me be very specific. We have not seen a Court overturn a law that was passed by Congress on a economic issue, like health care, that I think most people would clearly consider commerce — a law like that has not been overturned at least since Lochner.  Right?  So we’re going back to the ’30s, pre New Deal.

And the point I was making is that the Supreme Court is the final say on our Constitution and our laws, and all of us have to respect it, but it’s precisely because of that extraordinary power that the Court has traditionally exercised significant restraint and deference to our duly elected legislature, our Congress.  And so the burden is on those who would overturn a law like this.

Now, as I said, I expect the Supreme Court actually to recognize that and to abide by well-established precedence out there.  I have enormous confidence that in looking at this law, not only is it constitutional, but that the Court is going to exercise its jurisprudence carefully because of the profound power that our Supreme Court has.  As a consequence, we’re not spending a whole bunch of time planning for contingencies.

What I did emphasize yesterday is there is a human element to this that everybody has to remember.  This is not an abstract exercise.  I get letters every day from people who are affected by the health care law right now, even though it’s not fully implemented.  Young people who are 24, 25, who say, you know what, I just got diagnosed with a tumor.  First of all, I would not have gone to get a check-up if I hadn’t had health insurance. Second of all, I wouldn’t have been able to afford to get it treated had I not been on my parent’s plan.  Thank you and thank Congress for getting this done.

I get letters from folks who have just lost their job, their COBRA is running out.  They’re in the middle of treatment for colon cancer or breast cancer, and they’re worried when their COBRA runs out, if they’re still sick, what are they going to be able to do because they’re not going to be able to get health insurance.

And the point I think that was made very ably before the Supreme Court, but I think most health care economists who have looked at this have acknowledged, is there are basically two ways to cover people with preexisting conditions or assure that people can always get coverage even when they had bad illnesses.  One way is the single-payer plan — everybody is under a single system, like Medicare.  The other way is to set up a system in which you don’t have people who are healthy but don’t bother to get health insurance, and then we all have to pay for them in the emergency room.

That doesn’t work, and so, as a consequence, we’ve got to make sure that those folks are taking their responsibility seriously, which is what the individual mandate does.

So I don’t anticipate the Court striking this down.  I think they take their responsibilities very seriously.  But I think what’s more important is for all of us, Democrats and Republicans, to recognize that in a country like ours — the wealthiest, most powerful country on Earth — we shouldn’t have a system in which millions of people are at risk of bankruptcy because they get sick, or end up waiting until they do get sick and then go to the emergency room, which involves all of us paying for it.

MR. SINGLETON:  Mr. President, you’ve been very, very generous with your time, and we appreciate very much you being here.

THE PRESIDENT:  Thank you so much, everybody.  (Applause.)  Thank you.—

Related articles

• “Laughable” (duanegraham.wordpress.com)
• Three Charts Illustrating Two Different Visions for Our Nation (whitehouse.gov)
• Obama denounces ‘radical’ Republican budget plan (newsday.com)

My all-in-one printer needed new ink cartridges. It’s served me fine over a number of years but had also developed a minor problem of creating a thin scratch of a line on the scans it produced. So, out of curiosity, before taking out a loan to pay the substantial cost for new ink cartridges (I have tried paying for refills but more than once have ended up with unusable cartridges), I looked to see how much a new all-in-one ink jet printer would cost instead.

I found one on sale at an office supply store, from a major manufacturer that was at a very low price. A very, very low price. It hardly made sense not to buy it when it cost less than three sets of ink cartridges…and came with a set ink cartridges as well…so make that, it cost less than two sets of ink cartridges.

There was however a sense of guilt that came with doing this, the idea that a piece of technology that was so sophisticated could be so easily tossed away and replaced (I’m actually donating that printer to my daughter’s public school…guilt level reduced by 10%).

Consider cell phones and smart phones. Just ten years ago, the technology in the devices we use today would have been seen as incredible. Today, we can upgrade to a new high tech phone (with a 2 year commitment and assignment of our eternal soul) for little or even for free and flick the technological genius in our last phone into the garbage.

We have become sociologically conditioned to expect that electronics should be cheap despite their complexity and this, combined with the much more expensive cost of repairs, often makes it common sense economically for one to just buy a new item instead of repairing the old one.

This sensibility isn’t confined to electronics though, at the supermarket and stores like Walmart, Target, Kmart, etc, we expect to be able to buy clothes, food and all nature of things at remarkably low prices despite what we may think deep inside is much less than they should be.

Paying little for what should be more expensive products has become a self-sustaining machine where most people only look at what the machine provides without considering what it consumes to do so. And the sneaky truth is, what it consumes is the wealth, employment and standard of living of most people in America and in many places throughout the world.

Why is something cheap to buy? Of course, the simple answer is that it’s cheap to make…but the next step is often overlooked. It’s cheap to make because the people who are paid to make it are paid cheaply. So when you buy that cheap pair of pants or bargain smartphone, you are giving the corporation that is selling it, a profit and economic support for paying so little for the labor of the workers it employs. So in effect, those people who shopped at Walmart to buy inexpensive Chinese-manufactured products and later lost their jobs, were unknowingly incentivizing the corporation they worked for to take away their jobs.

It can be interesting to sometimes step back, zoom out and look at the big picture, how things are interconnected and the unintended consequences of one’s actions. Where one shops and what one buys is indeed directly and necessarily interconnected with what jobs are available and how much they pay. For example, if 10% of current Walmart shoppers chose to buy only from American based companies that provided good wages, there would be billions in revenues for such companies to create more and more well paying jobs. It’s simple economics and math.

Corporations may have designed this mousetrap but as long as consumers keep going for the cheese they set out, they continue to be the victim of this trap.

The vicious circle is well known, people are unemployed, underemployed or underpaid and so they need to be able to buy things cheaply to get by. However, by buying things cheaply, they are affirmatively financing the outsourcing of their own and millions of other jobs to China and elsewhere, the only places where products can be made so cheaply because of brutally low wages and conditions. By supporting outsourcing in this way, Americans in fact create a greater supply of unemployed and available workers in America who are willing to work for whatever wage they are offered. This dynamic of supply and demand in a flooded workforce allows companies to depress wages and increase “productivity” (that means doing more work for the same money) because as they often say, “If you won’t do it, there are plenty of people out there standing outside who would be happy to work more for even less than you!”

Publicly, corporations exclaim, “People want things at super low prices so we’re just giving people what they want. That’s why we outsource our jobs to other countries! I mean, paying people in America a living wage or God forbid, union wages, would mean we’d have to charge a higher, more sensible price for things and then Americans wouldn’t be able to ‘have it all’…and that would be an unthinkable hardship on all Americans.”

As for actual hardships, especially when you factor in inflation as well, the wages of most Americans continue on a slow decline.

It is the Henry Ford model of business in reverse. Though a famous pro-Nazi/anti-Semite, Ford did have a good idea about paying workers enough so they could buy the very cars they built. Today’s corporate thinking is just the opposite, it is to find ways of making things cheaper so that the people who used to make them but are unemployed or have low or declining wages now, can still afford to buy those products.  It’s a race to the bottom where the only winners are the corporations sponsoring the race. They reduce the wages they pay Americans and their solution to their reducing their employees’ buying power is to make products cheaper.

Just as with the economic crash of 2008, this is a path to eventual destruction. It can’t be sustained indefinitely. If people’s income keeps declining in real terms, it will eventually reach a point where it will be literally impossible to cheapen the price of products sufficiently for them to be able to afford buying as much as they’ve been buying and consuming will also be on a steady decline. Then, as we saw on what would be a smaller scale in comparison, with the crash of 2008, there is a domino effect on businesses closing and jobs and pay declining even more and rapidly when consuming declines.

70% of economic activity in America comes from consumers. The American economy and in turn, the world’s economy would collapse and have no conceivable path to recovery if Americans reach a point where they can afford to buy less and less. No matter how cheaply a corporation can pay for plastic, steel, foodstuffs, chemicals, etc., there is a bottom line cost to everything that can’t ultimately be reduced. So there is a cliff out there somewhere in the distance that our economy will eventually drive off of if wages of consumers keep declining (again, even stagnant wages decline each year due to the standard of inflation).

Of course, corporations live only for the next quarter’s profits so they naturally love this circular dynamic that they’ve trapped our society in since it is currently stuffing their pockets with incredible amounts of money. They are certainly not seeking to change it and in fact are seeking to make it worse by outsourcing more, destroying unions and promoting “right to work” in more states and even loosening restrictions on the hiring of teens so they can increase the competition for jobs and drive down wages even farther.  Add to that their avoiding paying taxes and campaigning to cut what taxes they can’t escape, which slashes public sector jobs, funding for social programs, maintaining our infrastructure, etc.

So…if the corporations will never change this destructive cycle on their own, it is their customers that have to seek change. It’s time we recognize that things being disposable because they are so cheap is a two way street,  as our value as employees simultaneously becomes cheaper and cheaper, we too become as disposable as what we buy.

So, I’m throwing out a simple concept and name for this proposition.

Pay More.

That is, pay more for American made goods from companies that pay more to Americans for their work.

It would entail some financial sacrifices in the near term, paying more for things but the more it finances companies where Americans have good paying jobs, the more tax revenues there would be to pay more for many good-job-creating situations such as rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure…which could pay more for building materials from American businesses and create more jobs from them that pay more, as well as pay more to construction workers who are underemployed or unemployed…which would provide more tax revenues to states and the nation that could be invested in schools…which could pay more salaries for more teachers and shrink class sizes which would better educate our children to get better jobs…which could mean companies that hire them when they graduate could pay more to them for being well educated…and on and on.

The cycle of economic decline has to be broken in a deliberate and organized way.

One way that could be accomplished might be by combining President Obama’s tax credits and incentives for manufacturing and small businesses that start up, grow and hire in this country, with an organized, active and growing community of Americans who are committed to supporting American jobs, good wages and businesses that provide them.

If there was for example, a group and website consumers could join (like Groupon for example) which presented an array or e-mall of products and services only from American companies that were certified to pay good wages and benefits to their employees,  Americans could express their support for good wages and their opposition against the corporate depression of wages whenever they need to buy something or use a service. Such a growing coalition of consumers pooling buying power to benefit a growing coalition of businesses that pay workers well could become a very powerful dynamic.

Also, as Choicelady and KQuark have championed along the way, it would create a great environment for employee-owned businesses which is another great path to reversing the economic plundering by the wealthy and giant corporations. It could also put economic pressure on corporations to either compete with businesses manufacturing and operating in the US or lose a growing segment of consumers.

Admittedly, it’s unrealistic and impractical to suggest to people across the country who are already dealing with severe financial pressures to pay more for everything right now. This is not a transition that could or should be made overnight, it would need to be gradual and incrementally by each American, as they can find ways here and there to buy things that support good paying American jobs, building up to buying more and more from good-citizen American businesses as their wages hopefully improve. The key is that people realize that paying more for something to a company that pays good wages, can help make the society they live in better and could help them indirectly, if not directly by eventually providing more opportunities for good paying jobs.

I am far from a nationalist or conservative, in fact, I burn flags on a daily basis (I get them by the gross cheaply at Walmart who buys them from an American flag manufacturer in China). I am also not vowing to stop buying products made in China and other countries, there are many things that simply don’t have American-made counterparts or even if they do, may not be of comparable quality or the company may not pay their employees decently. What I am saying is that in the meantime, until or unless there is a broader movement, it can be a great start simply to keep in mind shopping local and at small businesses, eating at local non-chain restaurants, etc. Purism is not required, doing it at least some of the time, when you can afford to, can make a difference.

And this is not at all intended to express anything negative towards the countries that have been the recipients of outsourced American jobs (they’re being exploited and oppressed by these same corporations), it’s only meant to present an affirmative proposition on improving the standard of living in our society which, if it spread around to other nations like Occupy Wall Street, could help improve their standards of living too.

It would take the pulling together of a lot of threads to make this happen on a big scale but at this point in time, a difference could still be made by each person who has a choice to pay more for something American-made that will help pay more to fellow Americans for their work…and by deciding to do so, that person is so simply and easily supporting the idea that we will pay more if employers pay more.