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