MSNBC Panel Trolls Sanders With 'Scurrilous, Illogical' Assault on Medicare for All

Pundits are slamming the Vermont senator for helping GOP's Obamacare repeal efforts, when he is actually doing the opposite

by Jake Johnson, staff writer

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/09/22/msnbc-panel-trolls-sanders-scurrilous-illogical-assault-medicare-all

When Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) introduced his Medicare for All legislation last week, he anticipated a massive right-wing reaction—on cue, he got it. But it is ostensibly liberal networks, like MSNBC, that have in recent days launched some of the most aggressive—and in the eyes of critics, absurd—attacks on both Sanders' bill and his decision to debate Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.) on their "brutal and deadly" Obamacare repeal legislation next week.

These attacks reached an apex during two Friday morning segments of MSNBC's "Morning Joe," when several pundits—including hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough—and journalists took turns dumping on Medicare for All and Sanders himself, accusing the Vermont senator of "driv[ing] a lot of people towards Lindsey Graham's bill" by agreeing to debate the Graham on a national stage.

"Morning Joe" hosts and panelists charged that Sanders is "stealing the spotlight" and giving Republicans "an absolute gift" by pitting Medicare for All against the Graham-Cassidy repeal bill, which has been described by analysts as the most extreme iteration of Trumpcare yet.

Ultimately, the panel came to the unanimous conclusion that the debate is "politically stupid," that Medicare for All discussions should come "later," and that Democrats should focus solely on pitting the GOP repeal bill against Obamacare—not more ambitious alternatives.

Watch part of the segment:

In an email on Friday, Chuck Idelson, communications director for National Nurses United (NNU), told Common Dreams that "Morning Joe's" rebuke of Sanders could not be more misguided.

Far from acting selfishly and "stealing the spotlight," Sanders "has for months held rallies from coast to coast, including in a number of red states," to denounce and campaign against "the savage, mean-spirited, and elitist GOP bills," Idelson noted.

"This scurrilous attack sabotages the campaign against Graham-Cassidy and perpetuates a losing mentality and losing election cycle for the corporate Democrats making it," Idelson added. "It's both an illogical attack—there was a series of similar GOP bills before this one, long before the Medicare for All bill was introduced—and transparent in its effort both to vilify the most popular politician in the U.S. and to try to sideline the effort to actually fix our healthcare system, not decimate it, with Medicare for All."

As for the notion that Sanders is playing into the GOP's hands by debating Republicans on their legislation and countering their deadly bill with Medicare for All, the opposite is true, Idelson said.

"Part of the campaign against the draconian GOP bills should be to actually offer a real alternative to real flaws in the bill," Idelson concluded. "That is Medicare for All."

A Politico/Morning Consult released on Wednesday found that 49 percent of Americans—and 67 percent of Democrats—support single payer, indicating that the public is increasingly in Sanders' corner.

In an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times Thursday, Adam Johnson, a media analyst for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, pointed out that the attacks launched by the "Morning Joe" panel and others are hardly original.

Johnson labels such critics "concern trolls," defined as people who claim to support a given objective but cannot act on this support due to vaguely expressed "concerns."

"Give it more time. We need more details. Who will pay for it? All meaningful changes to society have been met with these types of objections," Johnson notes. "But the game of politics isn't won by waiting for the ideal. Its most successful actors establish a moral goal and fight for it until reality catches up to them."

As "Morning Joe" chided Sanders for only "looking out for himself," the Vermont senator continued his aggressive push to ensure the failure of the Graham-Cassidy bill—which will be brought to the Senate floor for a vote by the end of next week—by releasing a video featuring two of his healthcare advisors, who explained the devastating impact the legislation would have on public health.

Watch the video:

Insanely Concentrated Wealth Is Strangling Our Prosperity

Today’s mountains of wealth throttle the very engine of wealth creation itself.

https://evonomics.com/insanely-concentrated-wealth-strangling-prosperity/

By Steve Roth

Remember Smaug the dragon, in The Hobbit? He hoarded up a vast pile of wealth, and then he just hung out in his cave, sitting on it (with occasional forays to further pillage and immolate the local populace).

That’s what you should think of when you consider the mind-boggling hoards of wealth that the very rich have amassed in America over the last forty years. The picture at right only shows the very tippy-top of the scale. In 1976 the richest people had $35 million each (in 2014 dollars). In 2014 they had $420 million each — a twelvefold increase. You can be sure it’s gotten even more extreme since then.

Bottom (visible) pink line is the top 10%.

These people could spend $20 million every year and they’d still just keep getting richer, forever, even if they did absolutely nothing except choose some index funds, watch their balances grow, and shop for a new yacht for their eight-year-old.

If you’re thinking that they “deserve” all that wealth, and all that income just for owning stuff, because they’re “makers,” think again: between 50% and 70% of U.S. household wealth is “earned” the old-fashioned way (cue John Houseman voice): it’s inherited.

The bottom 90% of Americans aren’t even visible on this chart — and it’s a very tall chart. The scale of wealth inequality in America today makes our crazy levels of income inequality (which have also expanded vastly) look like a Marxist utopia.

American households’ total wealth is about $95 trillion. That’s more than three-quarters of a million dollars for every American household. But roughly 50% of households have zero or negative wealth.

Now of course you don’t expect 20-year-olds to have much or any wealth; there will always be households with none. But still, the environment for young households trying to build a comfortable and secure nest egg — the American dream? — has gotten wildly competitive and hostile over recent decades. (If we had a sovereign wealth fund, everyone would have a wealth share from birth.)

But here’s what’s even more egregious: that concentrated wealth is strangling our economy, our economic growth, our national prosperity. Wealth concentration drives a vicious, downward cycle, throttling the very engine of wealth creation itself.

Because: people with lots of money don’t spend it. They just sit on it, like Smaug in his cave. The more money you have, the less of it you spend every year. If you have $10,000, you might spend it this year. If you have $10 million, you’re not gonna. If you have $1,000, you’re at least somewhat likely to spend it this month.

Here’s one picture of what that looks like (data sources):

 

These broad quintile averages obviously don’t put across the realities of the very poor and the very rich; each quintile spans 25 million households. But the picture is clear. The bottom quintiles turn over 40% or 50% of their wealth every year. The richest quintile turns over 5%. For a given amount of wealth, wider wealth dispersion means more spending. It’s arithmetic.

Now go back to those top-.01% households. They have about $5 trillion between them. Imagine that they had half that much instead (the suffering), and the rest was spread out among all American households — about $20,000 each.

Assume that all those lower-quintile households spend about 40% of their wealth every year. They each get to spend an extra $8,000, and enjoy the results. Sounds nice. And it’s spending that simply won’t happen with concentrated wealth. The money will just sit there.

Now obviously just transferring $2.5 trillion dollars, one time, is not going to achieve this imagined nirvana. Nor is it bloody well likely to happen. That example is just to illustrate the arithmetic. Absent some serious changes in our wildly skewed income distribution (plus capital gains, the overwhelmingly dominant mechanism of wealth accumulation, which don’t count as “income”), that wealth would just get sucked back up to the very rich, like it has, increasingly, for the past forty years — and really, the past several thousand years.

If wealth is consistently more widely dispersed — like it was after WW II — the extra spending that results causes more production. (Why, exactly, do you think producers produce things?) And production produces a surplus — value in, more value out. It’s the ultimate engine of wealth creation. In this little example, we’re talking a trillion dollars a year in additional spending and production. GDP would be 5.5% higher.

If you want to claim that the extra spending would just raise prices, consider the last 20 years. Or the last three decades, in Japan. And if you think concentrated wealth causes better investment and greater wealth accumulation, ask yourself: what economic theory says that $95 trillion in concentrated wealth will result in more or better investment than $95 trillion in broadly dispersed wealth? Our financial system is supposed to intermediate all that, right?

Or ask yourself: would Apple be as successful as it is if its business model was based on selling eight-million-dollar diamond-encrusted iPhones? Broad prosperity is what made Apple, Apple. Concentrated wealth distorts producers’ incentives, so they produce, for instance, a million-dollar Maserati instead of forty (40) $25,000 Toyotas — because that’s what the people with the money are buying. Which delivers more prosperity and well-being?

This little envelope calc is describing a far more prosperous, comfortable, and secure society — far richer and one hopes far more peaceful than the one we’re facing under wildly concentrated wealth. With the possible exception of a few very rich multi-generational dynasties, everyone’s grandchildren will be far better off 50 years from now if wealth is more widely dispersed. And over that half century, hundreds of millions, even billions of people will live far richer, better lives.

Why wouldn’t we want that? Why wouldn’t we do that? (We know the answer: rich people hate the idea — even those who aren’t all that rich but foolishly buy into the whole trickle-down fantasy. And the rich people…have the power.)

By contrast to that possibility, here’s what things look like over the last seven decades:

Here are the results — growth in inflation-adjusted GDP per capita:

The last time economic growth broke 5% was in 1984. And the decline continues.

So how do we get there, given that we’ve mostly failed to do so for millennia? Start with a tax system that actually is progressive, like we had, briefly, during the postwar heyday of rampant and widespread American growth and prosperity. And greatly expand the social platform and springboard that gives tens of millions more Americans a place to stand, where they can move the world.

All of this dweebish arithmetic, of course, doesn’t put across the real crux of the thing: power. Money is power. So it is, so it has been, and so it shall be in our lifetimes and our children’s lifetimes (world without end, amen). This is especially true for minorities, who have been so thoroughly screwed by our recent Great Whatever. Money is the power to walk away from a shitty job. To hire fancy lawyers and lobbyists, maybe even buy yourself a politician or two. If we want minorities to have power, they need to have money.

Add to that dignity, and respect, which is deserved by every child born: sadly but truly, they are delivered to those who have money. You can bemoan that reality, but in the meantime, let’s concentrate on the money.

If you want to create a workers’ utopia, a better world for all, seize the wealth and income.

2017 September 18

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