Columns

Guest Commentary

Two Guest commentary by Kent Carlson and Douglas Burns

Middle class should not subsidize the wealthy

By Kent Carlson

Rx for failure

The national debt is nearly $12 trillion, triple the record debt of a year ago. For perspective sake, it will take 31,688 years for one trillion seconds to pass. Because of our record spending, the Chinese are dumping their U.S. bonds in favor of gold and liquidating their dollars. In the process, they are trying to eliminate the dollar as the currency of choice. And thanks to Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, 47 percent of Americans will pay no federal income tax. Between 1950 and 1990 that number averaged 21 percent.

Obviously, the most important issue to the economy of the United States is the health of the dollar. But in 2009, Washington politicians seem to be looking at this country through fun-house mirrors. Though they deny it in mixed company, Obama and his fellow travelers are rallying to control another 17 percent of the U.S. economy by taking over healthcare. Barack Obama, Barney Frank, Katherine Sebelius and a host of others have stated their desire for single-payer healthcare in front of cameras and tape recorders, so their intent is no mystery. Still, there are those who are either intellectually challenged or intellectually dishonest and choose to deny the obvious path liberals are attempting to take the country. All hope for intelligent discourse is lost on this group.

The latest Gallup poll indicates only 22 percent of Americans believe healthcare costs will drop if the pending bill is passed. But we don’t need to guess what will happen. History provides the answers. In 1966, Medicare cost $3 billion, but was projected to cost $12 billion by 1990. It ended up costing $107 billion. In 2008 the cost rose to $462 billion. Now Medicare fraud alone costs taxpayers $60 billion a year. The government has never met budget on any large federal program, and states haven’t fared any better. Tennessee, Oregon, Hawaii, Massachusetts and Maine have all tried versions of universal healthcare, and none have been successful.

So what about Canada? They’ve been at this game for years. The average wait in an emergency room is 23 hours, if you’re admitted at all. They have lotteries to pick who gets to see a doctor. In Canada it takes a month to get a CT scan, unless you’re a dog. Veterinary medicine is still privately controlled, so Fido has a fighting chance. Hundreds of gravely ill Canadians have been carted across the border to the United States because they could not obtain intensive-care beds. And Canada feeds off of American research and development that is stagnant in their socialized system.

As stated earlier, it’s estimated that $60 billion of the $462 billion in 2008 spent on Medicare was lost to fraud – about 12 percent. In contrast, the credit card industry loses only .047 percent to fraud even though it is an $11 trillion industry. That’s because Medicare pays first and investigates later, while the credit card industry has real time data review.

Given the track record of government run programs, it’s amazing anyone would look to government to solve healthcare costs. The much ballyhooed Cash for Clunkers program was supposed to jump-start an ailing automotive industry by providing buyers $4,500 in incentives toward the purchase of a new car if they traded in a less fuel-efficient vehicle. Research by Edmunds.com, a provider of automotive data to the industry, indicates each car sold ended up costing taxpayers $24,000. It also had the effect of driving up the cost of used cars to consumers.

When it comes to government controlled healthcare, Iowans have more to lose than most states. Insurance revenue amounts to 5.6 percent of Iowa’s gross state product. There are 480 insurance related firms in Polk County alone. Insurance carriers account for 160 of the businesses, and 77 percent of the insurance jobs. Of course not all are healthcare, but the ripple effect of single payer insurance would have serious consequences. Des Moines is the third largest insurance center in the world. Think white-collar Detroit and you can start to visualize the impact a crippled insurance industry would have on the economy of Des Moines, Polk County and all of Iowa. Insurance companies are directly or indirectly linked to more than 88,000 jobs in Iowa. When the federal government moves toward controlling 17 percent of the economy, the health insurance industry will evaporate, jobs will disappear and tax revenues will plummet. The State of Iowa will be in a state of shock, and we will all discover the real cost of “free” healthcare. CV

Kent Carlson is a native Iowa artist interested in the preserving Iowa’s architectural heritage and the common sense of its leaders. And he writes a few columns for Cityview, too.

PoliticalMercury

By Douglas Burns

Memo to GOP: Treasure your Bible, read the Census

A good Republican today should read not only his Bible but the U.S. census, too.

He can mine the former for words and wisdom that save the soul. The GOP will need a better understanding of the latter to save its party.

In the short-term, it is interesting fare to speculate on which wing of the GOP is feathering its way to more tilt, the social conservatives who are willing to go down on the Good Ship Principle or more moderate Republicans who can stomach some pro-choice tablemates on the chicken-dinner circuit.

We’re expecting to see this play out in Iowa with Terry Branstad in the role of the buttoned-down friend of the businessman and low taxes and Bob Vander Plaats as the cultural warrior from northwest Iowa, where voters prefer their politicians to have an evangelizing quality.

At the end of the day, though, the future of the Republican Party, whether it is a collection of marginalized malcontents or a robust political machine capable of presenting a viable alternative to Battlestar Barack, will come down to immigration.

The GOP has one, maybe two election cycles to get this right or it will face a demographic Mount St. Helens.

U.S. census data, freshened for 2009 consumption, reveal that half of all children in the United States under age 5 are minorities. And 25 percent of all children under that threshold are Hispanic.

In total, Hispanics will account for 30 percent of the American population by 2050.

Some states, including California and Texas, are already majority-minority.

By 2042 the United States will be such a nation, meaning whites of European ancestry will represent less than half of the population.

Now, to be clear, the Hispanic community is hardly a monolith. One company found this out the hard way when it ran ads with Mexican actors in Cuban-rich Florida. Cubans and Mexicans don’t always see eye to eye — in much the same way the Germans and Irish didn’t in the early settled days of parts of rural Iowa.

That said, the GOP’s language on illegal immigration is so freighted with hostility that it is alienating Hispanics. It’s as if the party has a “Bridge Over the River Kwai” rhetorical strategy aimed at exploding any connections with Latinos.

One Republican who clearly sees this as a problem is not some left-leaning Northeasterner from Maine but Haley Barbour, the governor of Mississippi, a supreme pal of Bushes and no friend of abortion.

In response to a line of questioning from me in Des Moines earlier this year, Barbour, who helped craft strategies that built GOP majorities in the 1990s, avoided the hot-blooded, racially heated language of others in his party when talking about immigration.

He wouldn’t come out and use words verboten in his party like “path to citizenship” for millions of immigrants who have been here without papers functioning as shadow Americans.

But when I asked him if all illegal immigrants should be rounded up and bused to the border, he replied: “We’re not going to put all these people in jail and shouldn’t.” Barbour was downright rhapsodic when explaining how the Hispanic community has helped rebuild the Katrina-ravaged Gulf Coast.

If Republicans would delouse their party of hardline positioning on immigration (which is a defining issue for millions of Latinos, including most in Iowa), they would find kindred political spirits.

Hispanics in Iowa don’t send their aging parents to nursing homes or abort their babies. With a strong presence as small-business people (walk the streets of Denison and Storm Lake and you’ll see my point), they want limited government that stays out of their endeavors. There is a marked discomfort with gays (see recent referendum in California) in the Hispanic community, and church attendance is exceptional. The Latinos I know in Iowa are either traditional Catholics or evangelicals.

Quite simply, the Hispanic community is peopled with instinctive “family values” Republicans. They could help resurrect the party instead of cheering along the executioner’s march for the Grand Old Party. CV