Pollution Costs

Common Ssnse

"More Pollution Won't Solve Our Jobs Problem" - Paul Krugman.

CONGRESS and President Obama were wrong to say we can not afford pollution regulation now. The regulation is based on the fact that pollution costs money and lives. Upgrading plants creates jobs and provides savings to the public. Electricity from old coal fired plants always has hidden costs that "tax" us with pollution that kills crops, poisons land, rivers, and fish with mercury. Not fixing pollution saves money and eliminates jobs, while the public continues to pay the costs associated with pollution.

Reducing the costs of pollution can save us $1 trillion in ten years. In explaining the deal, President Obama was silent about the costs being imposed daily by pollution, Silence can be a lie. Cleaning up the environment creates savings that exceed t the costs to make the upgrades. You won't see any of this if the facts are hidden from you. Reducing pollution from coal is not free and makes non-polluting sources attractive. That is what the coal-fired industry objects to.

INDUSTRY is responsible to investors and no one else. Rather than protect voters, Congress has failed to ensure that the long recognized costs imposed on the public be accurately quantified, apparently feeling that the exposure of the real costs will inevitably lead to the voters insisting on proper regulation.
OUR best guide for public policy is a study that has been done of costs of pollution: "Environmental Accounting for Pollution in the United States Economy" [1] by Nicholas Z. Muller, Robert Mendelsohn, and William Nordhaus. We need to know the costs, to design appropriate regulation or taxes. We want every industry to be on a level playing field, denying any benefit those industries that burden us and our children with pollution.
Table 1 from [1] showing gross external damages (GED) in billions of dollars and GED value added (VA) ratio (multiply by 100 for percent):

Sector	GED (B)	GED/VA
Agriculture and forestry	32.0	0.38
Utilities	62.6	0.34
Transportation	23.2	0.10
Admin, waste mngnt,remediation svcs	10.7	0.08
Construction	14.7	0.03
Art, entertainment, and recreation	2.2	0.03
Accommodation and food services	4.2	0.02
Mining	3.3	0.02
Manufacturing	26.4	0.01

NOTE the top two sectors show a recurring cost to the public of $94 billion each year, while the costs the industry claims are one-time costs, and industry has a very poor record of predicting the costs of regulation, habitually estimating the costs at two or three times the worst case. From economist Paul Krugman, "it turns out that there are a number of industries inflicting environmental damage that's worth more than the sum of the wages they pay and the profits they earn - which means, in effect, that they destroy value rather than create it. High on the list, by the way, is coal-fired electricity generation" [2]).

. TODAY (16 Nov. 20011) it was reported that Obama has "decided against ratcheting up the ozone rule because of the cost and the uncertainty it would impose on industry and local governments."[3] "This was the worst thing a Democratic president had ever done on our issues," said Gene Karpinski, president of the League of Conservation Voters. "Period." [3]The worst things that Obama has done are actually more than one, but they each have one common element; consideration of the costs to business or that taxes might need to be raised on the wealthy, but no consideration of the continuing cost to the public. Look at the unrecognized costs of utilities above, 34% of the cost they charge for their products, is waste dumped on the public. If they had to pay for trash disposal, they would never fail to include that in their costs, but Obama and congress have failed to. Business must compete on all costs, including health, not just the ones they can't dump onto the public.

Harrison Picot

Independent candidate for Congress in Virginia's 10th district

[1] http://www.aeaweb.org/atypon.php?return_to=/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/aer.101.5.1649

[2]Paul Krugman, "TheParty of Pollution" 

[3] Re-election Strategy Is Tied to a Shift on Smog

They Lost Their Way

Common Sense

"On the road from Glass-Steagall to Gramm-Leach-Billey, they lost their way, turning their backs on civilization, family values, and ethics; all those things they tell us are their core values."

"The Greatest Generation" is a term coined by journalist Tom Brockaw describing the generation who grew up in the United States during WW I, suffered in the Great Depresion, and and many of whom fought in WW II, while others supported the effort by working in factories, and paying taxes. Once the war was over, they supported the construction of highways, bridges, airports and port material handling systems that helped this nation sell goods to rebuild much of the world. At the same time, they paid taxes that enlarged universities that educated returning veterans and many others who contributed to the prosperity of all of us.

Not only did the greatest generation contribute to society, but many of their children have also, Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, and also many of our politicians.As Eisenhower had got us to invest in concrete highways, Al Gore took the initiative in creating the Internet and took the lead in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have been important to our country's economic growth. Neither Portland cement highways, or electronic highways would exist without millions of taxpayers sharing the burden, and surely those same people and their children are entitled to share in the benefits of their sacrifice, they are entitled to share in the profits they made possible.

After the Great Depression banking officials realized that much of the damage of the depression was caused by banks gambling on stocks (creating a bubble) and the Glass-Steagall bill was enacted to protect depositors from bank failure by the creation of the FDIC, and limit the number of failures by forbidding commercial banks, that you and I need for our accounts, from acting as investment banks, buying securities based on toxic sub-prime loans with money we deposited. The law meant that the bnks we did not count on, the investment banks were not insured by us, and could fail. Banks saw this as a tax; you can make some money gambling with your own money, but you can make much more if you gamble with the public's money.

In 1999, the last of that protection was removed by the Gramm-Leach-Billey, introduced by Barney Frank (D) and Jim Leach (R), and signed into law by Bill Clinton. The "tax" had been removed, banks could gamble with money borrowed at low rates, but the risk to the public had been increased without any corresponding promise to share the profits. Economists like Kenneth Arrow offered to explain the risks and dangers of this "moral hazard" but there is less profit for the few in considering the risk to the public, so no one in politics was listening.

The Greatest Generation created an economy that doubled the median wage in less than one generation. The "Silent Generation" that followed them, quietly, without any public discussion of the risks to taxpayers, removed the protections and voices that the public depended on. Rather than crate wealth, they accumulated wealth by "taxing" all Americans with greater risk, higher banking fees (28% credit card interest rates) and finally, with the Great Recession when their greatest gamble, the sub-prime loan, burst. All of those profits were the product of investments by millions of Americans in good government, a condition denied them by the 1% who bent the rules to take all the profits from a doubling of productivity from 1970 to 2000. In return, they gave us credit cards with hig rates, and ATM machines.

Bad government is not a condition of size, it is a condition of leadership. No business would retain the services of employees who let departments fail to respond to the real needs of the customers who pay all the bills and we can no longer afford to "hire" representatives who will not "own" the agencies they manage. Tell us why we should be proud of your work, or go home.

This article is one of a series, "Common Sense" by

Harrison Picot

Independent candidate for congress in Virginia's 10th district

Here and at http://standupvirginia.org/

Who Pays for Taking Risks?

Common Sense

THE twelve members of the Congressional Debt Super Committee have basically one question to answer: who will pay for the excessive risk taking that only profited a few? Those who benefited from the risk taking, and dismantling of regulation that almost crushed our economy, the one percent with high priced lobbyists who are even now writing large checks to determine the outcome of the committee,? Or the vast majority of Americans who got no benefit from sub-prime loans or unregulated derivatives,?

INCOME rose for all Americans between 1947 and 1979. A generation in which the middle fifth (quintile) of Americans saw their real family income (adjusted for inflation) more than double, growing by 114%. The income of the top quintile saw their income grow by 99 percent (the top 5 percent "only" saw their income grow by 80 percent.) The income of the lowest quintile grew by 116 percent, removing millions of people from poverty, cutting the costs of welfare, and proving the value of education, even at the bottom.[1]

BETWEEN 1979 and 2005 elections moved from in-person speeches to high priced campaigns of slogans and tv ads. When Sen. John Stennis (D-MS) ran for election in 1976, he raised no more than $5,000 in campaign funds. In 1982 Republicans saw a chance to replace him with Haley Barbor, someone who could likely raise $2 million for a campaign that would wash Stennis away. Stennis was forced to raise $2 million to compete, and he raised much of that from giant corporations that received millions in Department of Defense contracts. Stennis won, but as Bob Dole told the Wall Street Journal that summer, corporations that donate large sums "expect something in return other than good government. Elections are now being paid for by the top 1 percent, and they don't expect to see the middle class to be getting the benefits.

REAL family income between 1979 and 2005 saw the lowest quintile lose 1 percent in income, the middle quintile gain 15 percent but all of that from more wives going to work (only rich women would now be able to stay at home and instill "family values in their children). The real income of the top 5 percent of Americans, those with family incomes of more than $180,000, had been increased by 81 percent.[1]

THE top one percent of Americans take home half the total increases in income each year, and yet their taxes have been cut by more than 75% since Ronald Reagan took office. The answer to who will pay for the lack of regulation that allowed so much gambling with the future of this country should be easy, but the majority of American citizens do not have lobbyists on Capital Hill, so the issue is in doubt.T

TheHill.COM: The Joint Committee on Deficit Reduction, meets today for the first time. Americans are rightly concerned that business-as-usual will dominate, including the outsized and damaging influence of special interests and wealthy campaign contributors. Committee members Reps. Dave Camp (R-Mich.) and Xavier Becerra (D-Calif.) both held fund-raisers yesterday. At least nine of the 12 members have fund-raisers scheduled over the coming months. Lobbyists have called the super committee a "lobbying bonanza".One even said his plan to prepare for the committee was to "write 12 really large checks." [2]

STAND UP to "business-as-usual", join with others in supporting real solutions to obvious problems, like ending the bribery of congress. Ask yourself, why your representative has not been as upset as you or most Americans and why he or she has not proposed a solution hat costs you less than bailing out the banks (a process that never ends). John Kennedy once said that if average Americans will not support representatives who share their values, the few rich who are concerned about the middle class will not be enough. Fair elections would cost you 7¢, a day. Ending the bribery of Congress costs much less than bailing out banks.

Harrison Picot

Independent candidate for Congress in Virginia's 10th district
http://standupvirginia.org/ and http://virginia10th.blogspot.com/2011/7-solution.html

[1] [http://standupvirginia.org/
2] http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/campaign/180335-supercommittee-members-must-give-up-fundraising

The Commonest Criminal

Common Sense

Every president after WW II, including Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Carter, cut the deficit as a percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Reagan, as shown in the graph on the left, more than doubled the deficit, adding almost $2 trillion back when a trillion was real money. Between 1980 and 1988, Reagan was busy cutting taxes as the deficit shot up (as you would expect), and it looked like he was doing nothing to pay for his tax cuts but that is not true. Just as is is being proposed today, Reagan was asking working families, the vast majority of Americans to pay the bills for his cutting the taxes of the top 1%. One key element in his program to cut costs was to remove people from the disability lists of social security, taking away benefits awarded by an Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) to claimants who had appeared, usually represented by an attorney, before an ALJ, presented evidence of their disability and, based on the law and testimony, been awarded benefits. The decision was made to revue disability cases and cut of benefits to those that didn't seem qualified in light of the government now running a huge deficit.

The problem was the law. Many of those who had had hearings, and been awarded benefits, felt that the decision, made after a hearing, could not be reversed because the government did not now want to pay, so they took their case to the Federal courts, and those courts agreed, in fact, one judge wrote in his judgment, "I would remand this case to you for your reconsideration if you were a real judge, but a real judge would know that the same testimony and evidence can not support two contrary decisions; you can not award benefits after a full hearing where the plaintiff is represented by an attorney who hears all the arguments,and then remove them in the middle of night without the plaintiff being represented. The commonest criminal in this country would better treated than a man who works honestly for 35 years, becomes disabled, and asks for the benefits that are his due, as you agreed. Therefore I am not remanding this for your reconsideration, the law is plain, I am ordering you to resume payments within 30 days." After this ruling, one of the first of what was to become many (and no claimant ever lost) because the Reagan administration decided not to correct their error, but to allow the constraints of the docket of the Federal courts put a brake on how many people could get their right to due process; the Reagan administration not only refused to accept as precedent that you can not use the same evidence to reverse a decision in the middle of the night, but they announced that ALJs would rated on how many decisions they made in favor of the claimant and those who decided in favor the worker too often would be removed. One ALJ told a co-worker that his decisions would now be based on how the decision affected him.

That is pretty much where we are today. There is a feeding frenzy of lobbyists trying to find a way to protect their clients, mostly by buying time with politicians, after writing big checks, and, like the common working man, there are few voices for the middle class and none for the poor. If you want to be heard in Washington, you must work with others to make sure your voice is heard and that congress respects your opinion, and the best way to do that is to make them stop taking campaign funds from lobbyists. You can do it; check out the 7 cent solution. See if it is not the best value and ask why your representative did not offer it to you 30 years ago. The commonest criminal still gets his day in court, represented by an attorney, but the honest middle class worker has no lobbyist demanding that congress look out for his or her rights. The majority of Americans deserve at least the consideration given every criminal facing such penalties, but congress does not provide or assure such consideration. Tell congress you want at least that much, you want to end the system of bribes that fund elections and take congress away from doing the work you pay them to do.

As a footnote you may want to consider the quality of political appointments that the current system provides us after every election. Since this article is about the Reagan years and social security, let's start there; Reagan appointed a woman to be head of the Social Security Administration (SSA) who felt she was above at least some the rules. When going on a trip, she insisted that an SSA employee drive her car and take her to National Airport. When they got there, she insisted that he (a black man) carry her bags to the airline check in, ignoring the porters waiting at the curb (you have to pay them). Even in the 80s, you could not leave an unattended vehicle at the drop off point to check in, so when the man came back to his bosses car, he was met by the police who asked; if it was his car? (no), did he have the registration? (no), whose car was it? (his boss's the head of SSA), how long had she lived in the area? (several years), why does she have expired Alabama (or some other "foreign" state; not local) tags on her car? (no idea). So the police said they could not allow him to move the car and they impounded it. Contempt for workers and contempt for any rules and the law, seem to go hand in hand, and if you remember how the political appointees at the Department of the Interior Minerals Management Service acted, you can see that nothing has changed.
washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/10/AR2008091001829.html

Obama: A Cost without Benfits

Common Sense

"President Obama abandoned a contentious new air pollution rule on Friday, buoying business interests that had lobbied heavily against it, angering environmentalists who called the move a betrayal and unnerving his own top environmental regulators...The E.P.A., following the recommendation of its scientific advisers, had proposed lowering the so-called ozone standard of 75 parts per billion, set at the end of the Bush administration, to a stricter standard of 60 to 70 parts per billion." NY Times 3 Sept 2011

Just as in the deficit negotiations, Obama points out the costs projected by business (always billions and lost jobs, ignoring the fact that if they are forced to spend billions, it is impossible to see how that can be done without creating jobs).

The cost completely ignored by business and its graceless sycophants is that we have a $2 trillion health care industry whose costs are passed on to consumers,and when those consumers get sick or die, there are real losses that are painful, and can drive even individuals with insurance into bankruptcy.

If Obama's house was on fire, he would not say, "We can not afford to put it out now; let's wait." and when pollution continues there are real costs that are tragic for the people affected. Those people have no lobbyists, so their voices do not seem to reach the White House, but the only reason for canceling a program is if the costs exceed the value of the benefits, and that is the argument that Obama did not make. He made the political judgment that big industries make large contributions, and voters rarely do.

This is hardly the first time that Obama has ignored working families. He accepted the parameter for the deficit talks that there would be $3 in spending cuts every $1 in tax increases. The spending cuts a necessary because he allowed the Bush tax cuts to continue. The spending cuts mean job losses; in August 2011, the private industry added 17,000 jobs and federal, state, and local governments laid off 17,000 workers. Nobody rushed to put help wanted ads in the paper. Layoffs are tax, particularly when they come when there are six people looking for every job being offered. A huge tax, but since Obama does not see the burden on working families as something he can work to political advantage, he does not address it. $3 in spending cuts is $3 of taxes to someone. Too bad Obama does not talk to those people.

How Reagan and Bush Blanced the Budget

Common Sense

Just joking, we know that Reagan and Bush did not balance the budget, unlike every president since WW II until Reagan, every other president, Democrat and Republican, reduced the deficit as a percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).So, why did the deficit go down under Carter,explode under Reagan and Bush, fall under Clinton, and explode under George W. Bush?

The answer is simple; every time you cut taxes for someone, you increase the deficit or you increase the burden on someone else, higher taxes or cut their benefits. Working families have not got raise in salary, except for a promotion or cost of living increase since 1975. While they failed to get a real raise (keeping up with the effect of inflation on the cost of living is not a raise), they did get benefits, like grants so they could send their children to college, and a variety of services we called the safety net. So long as Reagan, and then Bush, and after that, Bush again, were cutting taxes, nobody complained, and even Alan Greenspan said that paying off the deficit might not be a good idea. So the deficit kept climbing, nobody suggested taking benefits away, the middle class did not get a raise, but women stopped staying home raising the children so family income went up, and everyone was pretty happy with the ballooning deficit. It was not a problem.

And taxes keep coming down for the super rich, cut from 70% for income over (today's) $1.2 million in the Eisenhower years, down to under 20% by Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and then Bush again. The story told by Reagan and never doubted by Bush or Clinton, was the cutting taxes on the rich created jobs, and everyone got richer.

The problem was that the Reagan economic policy was what George H. W. Bush called, "Voodoo" economics. It did not work. Wages were not going up, and during the George W. Bush years, 2001 to 2009, the stock market went from 10,000 up to 10,000. That is not a typo, it did go up from time to time and then it went down, when Bush left office, it was where it was when he came in. Unless you were a banker, almost a decade wasted. Middle class wages went down and to keep up, people had to use their homes as an ATM. While the population was growing at a rate of 1.2 million new workers a year, the workforce grew, on average, under Bush by an average of less than half the growth of the workforce.

Nothing about the Reagan and Bush years was good for the middle class and working families. Time and again Reagan and Bush cut taxes without cutting spending, each time creating more of a burden to paid off later, after the reasons for the burden, tax cuts,were forgotten. Even Clinton got into the act, protecting the IT industry that would reward him so so handsomely after he left office, in what has long been seen as message to future presidents, by cutting the capital gains tax rates, the taxes on the sales of stock options that fuels so many IT CEO incomes:

"Even more interesting results arise from comparing the effects of the Bush tax cuts with the changes for investors that President Clinton signed into law in 1997. During Clinton's two terms, the effective tax rate for the top 400 (U.S. incomes) fell from almost 30 percent to 22.2 percent. Applying the Bush tax cuts yields a rate of 17.2 percent for income taxes only. That means that Clinton gave the richest of the superrich a much bigger tax cut than Bush." - David Cay Johnson, "Free Lunch".

Like Reagan, and like "W" Bush would do later, Clinton did not cut spending, he did not reduce benefits to the middle class, paid for by those taxes, he decided to just add to the deficit and let the debt be paid long after the reason it was incurred had been forgotten. After all, a grateful nation will not pay $50,000 a night in speaker fees after you leave office; grateful CEOs not only will, they will fly your wife around the country so she can campaign.

And then the banks made the bet that even though there were many more homes being built each month than there were qualified buyers to move into, the price of homes would never go down or even level off, so loans to people with no income and no assets would always be made good by the always rising home prices. The problem was, that was the dream, the reality is, since the first mortgage was ever made, that home prices go up sometimes, and then they go down. When they went down, all bets that lenders made that prices could not go down, were lost, and the bankers turned to people who always have bailed them out, the public.

The problem now, is that with no real raise in 40 years, no raise while the cost of health care and education climbed faster than inflation, there just enough money to bail out the banks and no more.So now there were only three things that could be done; increase taxes back to where they were when everyone was doing well, give the middle and working classes the raise they wer cheated out of, or cut the benefits working families got in lieu of raises that kept up with the increases in productivity of U.S. workers, and the long hours they put in. It is going to be a feeding frenzy for lobbyists. The deficit is going to be taken care, and the burden is going to be up one someone who does not have a lobbyist writing checks to congress. You can "man up" and pay off your (and the bank's) share of this disaster or pay just seven cents a day to get a congressional representative that works for you , not the lobbyists. Think if this way: letting the banks gamble on the housing market has added $25,000 to your share of the debt, and the recession will end up costing you another $25,000 in lost or lower future wages. Figure the two now cost you %150 a a month, and if interest rates on U.S. debt go up, it can cost more. $25 a year for publicly funded elections, or $2,000 in waste and abuse? Seven cents a day to pay for a better system that ends bribes, or $5 a day keep the system that abuses you? Which sounds better?

The 7¢ Solution

Common Sense

On 12 September 2011, the Wall Street Journal reported that Procter & Gamble are giving up on the middle class and will now create products for two classes; the poor and the rich. The Journal sees our economy as an "hour glass", a heavy upper class that takes in more than half of all the increases in income each year (and thus can buy a lot), and the poor who buy based on costs. Two days later, the Census Bureau released a report that the median wage in the USA continues to decline, as jobs being created are almost always lower pay than ones people are losing, and this at time when corporate profits have been soaring.The middle class are not getting raises, they are getting laid off, and their kids are moving back in.

President Obama talks about spending cuts as though he is unaware that those cuts are layoffs and the loss of services valuable to the middle class. They are taxes no matter how you slice them. The president also talks about entitlements as though one works for 40 or 45 years, pays Social Security and Medicare taxes to provide services for the previous generation and an additional $2.5 trillion that congress spent on tax cuts for hedge fund managers, and when they retire, they somehow wrong to imagine they are owed the same services they provided, as though "entitled" is an inherited gift rather than a social contract. He realizes taxes on incomes ovedr $1.3 million, taxes that were normal when middle class doubled their standard of living in one generation would annoy billionaires, but does not see that cutting $500 billion in health care payments will "tax" millions of people, some beyond what they can stand.

Just 12% of Americans currently approve of Congress, so why aren't the president and congress busy finding solutions to the problems of the vast majority of Americans? Because that is not how they got their jobs.They need to raise $10,000 a day for their campaign and they do that by listening to lobbyists. Why aren't your arguments and the facts enough to convince them? As Upton Sinclair said, "You can't get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding." It is like going to court and finding that the judge only listens to the guy that takes him to lunch.

It is not like we haven't been warned, economists have been writing for years that working families have not got real increase in income since 1970, unless their wife wife went to work or they got a promotion or new job. While the productivity of the average worker more than doubled, middle class wages have been stagnant. In fact, all the middle class got were some rather inefficient services ("safety net") that reflected the lack of concern that the congress had about how those programs were managed. Now congress is planning on putting all the burden of banking industry failures and the resulting recession, on the backs of those who got thing from an economy that has produced hundreds of billionaires. Here are a few of the warnings we all ignored:

IN 1982, former senator Bob Dole, in an article in the Wall Street Journal said, "When these political action committees give money, they expect something in return other than good government. It is making it more difficult to legislate. We may reach a point where if everybody is buying something with PAC money, we can't get anything done. Poor people don't make campaign contributions. You might get a different result if there were a `Poor PAC'." (1)

IN Spring 2000, a major supporter of pending legislation which would increase the H-1B quota, Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.), had the gall to say, "This is not a popular bill with the public. It's popular with the CEOs...This is a very important issue for the high-tech executives who give the money." (National Journal, May 5, 2000 and New York Daily News, May 3, 2000.) Rep. Davis was chair of the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee. (2)

IN 2011, when (compared to 1982) the number of lobbyists had quadrupled, Nobel laureate in economics Joseph Stiglitz, in an article in in Vanity Fair, said "It should not make jaws drop that a tax bill cannot emerge from Congress unless big tax cuts are put in place for the wealthy. Given the power of the top 1 percent, this is the way you would expect the system to work." (3)


THE losses for the typical taxpayer are certainly more than $25,000 (the average home owner has lost 50% of their equity in their home, and millions have lost good paying jobs). We can keep up with the current systems of congress running on bribes, and keep forking over a trillion dollars every few years to bail out the banks again, or we can send congress the message that they have to stop taking bribes or leave town. We have had enough.

YOU can put an end to this mess for just 7¢ a day. This is all it will cost you to fully support publicly funded elections for congress and the white house for candidates who agree to forgo all private funding and coordination of campaign spending with any group or PAC. Does 7¢ a day ($25 a year) sound like too much? We had a law,Glass Steagall, that kept the type of bank we actually need separate from the ones that bet on securities and derivatives. That law was put in place after the same thing happened and caused the great depression. Then banks said we could trust them to the law was removed, letting banks that we must have grow too big to fail, and able to gamble with our economy without regulation. They made contributions to campaigns and then said that regulation was holding them back. We would have said being a millionaire was enough, but we are not looking for campaign contributions; congress always is.

Finally, why has your congressman not offered you an honest hearing of your needs? Why has he not been disgusted by campaign financing? Why has he not offered you a safer and lower cost way to have a better democracy? Why does he run government and say it does not provide you a good value, so we need to let unregulated private industry do the jobs? Why doesn't he admit that the economy can not come back to where it was until you have more money to spend? The latest New York Times/CBS News poll found that nearly three-quarters of Republicans said they thought Social Security and Medicare were worth their costs.Congress are saying "Cut them"; the time to push back is right now.

This article is one of a series, "Common Sense" by

Harrison Picot

Independent candidate for congress in Virginia's 10th district

and at http://standupvirginia.org/

1) "So Damn Much Money" Robert G. Kaiser p. 148
2)"Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage" 2.3.1 Dr. Norman Matloff UC Davis
3) http://www.vanityfair.com/society/features/2011/05/top-one-percent-201105