Health Care Reform is Critically Important, But Getting Americans Back to Work is More So

[Crewleader]

Robert Reich's Blog

Nov. 1,2009

Health Care Reform is Critically Important, But Getting Americans Back to Work is More So

Presidents tend to overcompensate for the errors of their predecessors in the same party and in so doing sow seeds of their own mistakes. Bill Clinton wanted above all to avoid Jimmy Carter's fate -- losing re-election because the economy was heading south on Election Day. So Clinton made a deal with Alan Greenspan to slash the budget deficit and thereby jettison much of his ambitious campaign agenda (that was Greenspan's precondition for lowering interest rates and causing an economic boom in time for the re-election) and then Clinton took direction from Dick Morris, who told him to move to the right. The result: Clinton avoided Carter's failure and won re-election handily. But the Clinton years produced few if any major social reforms. Clinton spent so much of his initial political capital, as well as his time and energy, on deficit reduction that he didn't have enough left to enact health care in 1994.

Barack Obama came to the White House intent on not repeating Clinton's failure to enact universal health care. Did he overlearn the Clinton lesson? Obama seems to have made all the right moves to enact something he can credibly label health-care reform: Rather than spend his political capital elsewhere, he reserved most of it for health care.

I sincerely hope America gets genuine health reform and I hope it's stronger than what's emerging in the Senate. (Whoever voted for Joe Lieberman last time around ought to pray for continued good health.) I worry, though, that Obama's strategy may turn out to be a mistake comparable to Clinton's overemphasis on deficit reduction. Obama's focus on health care rather than jobs, when the economy is still so fragile and unemployment moving toward double digits, could make it appear that the administration has its priorities confused. While affordable health care is critically important to Americans, making a living is more urgent. Yet the administration's efforts to date on this more basic concern have been neither particularly visible nor coherent.

http://robertreich.blogspot.com/

[eridani]

1. Single payer would create 2.6 million jobs n/t

[Jeep789]

2. I agree, both are critically needed and we should be able

to do both.

[FrenchieCat]

3. Will Obama pull jobs out of his ass if he stops concentrating on Health Care?

I Don't think so.

Reich must need us to go to his blog or something. :shrug:

[pokercat999]

4. Although his heart is in the right place I think his ideas are

wrong about half the time. Of course when you look at the yahoo's in this administration on the economic side Reich looks like a freaking genius.

[AdHocSolver]

5. It was mostly Clinton's policies that sped up the decline of the U.S. economy.

Clinton pushed NAFTA resulting in loss of jobs.

Clinton signed off on Most Favored Nation Trading status with China resulting in a flood of lost jobs.

Lowering the interest rates by Greenspan below "market" values was the catalyst that enabled and promoted the stock market Ponzi schemes, and the real estate "bubble".

Clinton signed off on the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act which legalized the incestuous relationship between Wall Street and the banking system, which allowed us to re-experience the plundering of America by the banksters that occurred in the 1920's, and which led to the Great Depression.

The only policies that will save the U.S. economy from total collapse, and end the coming depression, will be to undo those policies that Clinton signed off on, so as to bring jobs back to America.

People working allows them to buy things, and allows governments to collect taxes to maintain infrastructure, support education, pay for necessary services. Clinton looked good on the economy because a lot of Americans were working. However, his policies weren't the cause of the good times, they set the stage for the economic failure we are experiencing today.

There is NO such thing as "free trade", and we are NOT completing in a "global market". NAFTA, the WTO, the IMF, the World Bank, and MFN trading status for slave-wage economies such as China are corporate cartel agreements to allow the corporations to pillage countries like the U.S. They must be rescinded. The U.S. economy will only recover when most of what we buy is produced in the U.S. by Americans, and the money we spend stays in the U.S. If it takes import quotas and tariffs being imposed on goods and services from slave-wage states such as China, then so be it.

I find it interesting that so many people, including a majority on DU, are unable to comprehend the lessons of the Great Depression and the role played by FDR's New Deal policies in saving the U.S. economy from total collapse.

The stock market does NOT drive the economy. It is the cornerstone of Supply Side Economics and the Trickle Down Theory. The Wall Street operators say buy shares in our company and we will provide jobs. Yet, the main method used to boost apparent profits and the stock prices is to merge companies and fire large numbers of people to eliminate jobs and "increase productivity". It is all utter nonsense.

Even Democrats and progressives will talk about saving the stock market to protect their investments, mutual funds, and IRA funds. Wake up folks. How much more evidence do you need to understand that the stock market and its ilk are not designed to make you rich, but to steal your money. Most Americans apparently prefer to keep their fantasies rather than learn the lessons of Enron.

[C_Lawyer09]

9. Reinvention must take place

A large part of the problem is finite resources. We'll never be able to provide the mass of cheap labor that economic success now demands. We must master the art of the new, that which others cannot produce.

[h9socialist]

6. Jobs vs. Healthcare Reform is a false choice

Frankly, I would much rather have something like the National Health Service in Great Britain. Single payer is only half the battle. If you're a worker and getting open enrollment on your health insurance about now, you should understand really well that healthcare and the economy are linked together. The choice between jobs and health reform is a false choice.

[amandabeech]

7. I think that Obama would be having an easier time with health care and would have

an easier time with cap and trade if people weren't worried about their jobs.

I think that Reich is right here.

[Warpy]

8. Robert, it's not a zero sum game

and the truth is that both are equally pressing needs. Putting a sick workforce back to work is not going to work any more than telling the unemployed to buy health insurance.

There are times that you have to do both and both are national security issues, as is rebuilding strategic industries that people don't think about as necessary to surviving war: cloth making, shoemaking, and other subsistence industries.

The party is over, Robert, and the financiers are the last ones to realize the wine cellar is empty and they're drinking warm, flat champagne and that's all there is until they make more damn wine, themselves, because they've stolen the vineyards from the winemakers.

[h9socialist]

10. Mr. Secretary . . .

You should know well that US Presidents tend to accomplish the most in their first two years, and that one of Clinton's mistakes was pushing healthcare in an election year, when the "blue-dogs" and moderate Republicans had less room to maneuver. Moreover, the Democrat majority was only 56-44, not 60-40. Our big obstacle now is that bloody Lieberman! If he'd hold with the President who saved his rear-end, we might have a better chance at overcoming a filibuster.