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Following is a dennis speech, i'm presuming that the copyright is not an issue given the kucinich lion heart: (read more at www.kucinich.us)
THE STATE OF THE NATION
Jobs, Trade, Health Care, Housing, Retirement Security
Dennis J. Kucinich
Tuesday, January 20, 2004
Bedford, New Hampshire
Our nation is in a perilous condition due to fear, war, tax cuts to wealthy Americans, and trade policies leading to widespread unemployment in manufacturing and high tech industries. The rising costs of health care threaten the financial stability of all Americans. The retirement security of tens of millions of Americans is in doubt. Social Security is under attack with another privatization scheme.
National economic trends are discouraging. The official unemployment rate for all of 2003 was 6%, but this figure masks the number of people who have not been able to find work and who have given up looking for work and are no longer recorded in the totals. Tax cuts produced only a fraction of the jobs promised. The economy would have to create 375,000 new jobs per month in order to keep the Administration from having the worst job creation of any administration since the beginning of the Great Depression. There are 2.4 million more people unemployed now than when the Administration took office.
In less than three years, a projected ten year surplus of $5.6 trillion has turned into a projected deficit of $3.6 trillion.
The official poverty rate is up, from 11.7% in 2001 to 12.1% in 2002. Nearly 34.6 million Americans live in poverty. About 1.7 million more than in 2001.
In New Hampshire, 11,255 workers have become unemployed since this Administration took office and 22,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost.
It is urgent that we immediately institute a job creation program patterned after the WPA of the Administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. America has hundreds of billions of dollars of infrastructure needs. We must rebuild our roads, our bridges, water systems, sewer systems, roads, libraries; build new schools and colleges and new sustainable energy systems. It will be a $500 billion program funded. The Federal Reserve holds a large amount of treasury securities, a certain portion would be transferred to a newly created Federal Bank of Infrastructure Modernization. The money would be loaned to the states at zero interest. The states would pay the principal back which would replenish funds in the bank. The zero interest loan would cut the cost of projects in half for states, by eliminating interest expense.
Every state and local government would have access to $185 per capita per year for ten years for infrastructure improvements. We can put millions of people back to work with this program.
It is clear that the tax cuts to those in the top bracket have not improved the economy. They must be cancelled because they have created a system that favors the wealthy over the middle class. The tax cuts have complicated the tax code with loopholes and caused massive deficits.
We must stop the shift in wealth occurring in our tax code and we must stop the loss of jobs occurring through our trade policies.
Since July of the year 2000, America has lost three million manufacturing jobs in textile, steel, automotive, aerospace, and shipping industries. A$550 billion trade deficit is looming as a long-term threat to our national economic security.
The tax code is not the only area where the Administration is helping the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. It has spent $155 billion for an unnecessary war driven by fear. It spends half of the nation’s resources for military purposes.
The urgent needs of the American people are for health care, education, housing, job creation, retirement security and veterans benefits.
A new direction and strong measures are needed to repair the hopes of Americans for physical and economic security.
Health Security
Forty three million Americans do not have health insurance, including 125,000 residents of New Hampshire. Seventy percent of the uninsured live in a family with at least one full time worker. Health insurance premiums have increased about 50% in the past three years. Over the past three years, senior citizens total spending on prescription drugs has increased by almost 50%. American seniors will spend $1.8 trillion dollars on prescription drugs over the next ten years. Everyone knows Americans pay more for prescription drugs than people in other countries, including Canada. The Administration’s Medicare plan will increase profits of the drug companies and undermine Medicare through eliminating cost containment measures. And not everyone receives the meager benefits. In New Hampshire, for example, 18,300 seniors are worse off under this new plan.
It is time for a universal, single payer, not-for-profit system, extended Medicare for All. Such an approach is contemplated in HR 676, a bill I have cosponsored in the House of Representatives, which will phase in a full coverage plan over a ten year period.
This approach to health care emphasizes patient choice and puts doctors and patients in control of the system, not insurance companies.
The fact is that the American people are already paying for a universal standard of care, but are not getting it. Over $1.6 trillion, fully 15% of our gross domestic product, is spent for health care. This amount would be sufficient today to provide full health care coverage for all medically necessary procedures, plus care for vision, dental, mental health, long term care and a prescription drug benefit. It could all be covered if all the health care dollars went for health care. Unfortunately, hundreds of billions of that $1.6 trillion goes for the benefit and activities of a private, for profit health care system. Consider what you actually pay for when you pay your health insurance premium: Corporate profits, stock options, executive salaries, advertising, marketing, lobbying, the cost of private sector administration 15% - 30%. Executives of health insurance corporations routinely make millions a year while their agents routinely refuse doctors requests for tests and procedures for patients. Premiums, deductibles and co pays are soaring while a few profit at the expense of the many and while health insurance companies are busy with expensive acquisitions which allow them to achieve increasing market dominance.
In New Hampshire, Anthem raised premiums substantially after it acquired Blue Cross and Blue Shield. Executive of pharmaceutical companies also make millions while charging American consumers three times what people in other countries pay for the same prescription.
I am offering the American people a plan which will remove private insurance companies and all their tricks from the system, along with their profits, excessive executive salaries, their waste and their paperwork and redirect resources to actual treatment.
Insurance companies make money not providing health care. They do not treat or heal anyone; physicians and health practitioners do. A study by researchers of Harvard Medical School and Public Citizen found that health care bureaucracies last year cost the United States almost $400 billion and that a single payer system would save at least $286 billion annually, enough to cover all the uninsured and to provide a fully funded prescription drug benefit.
A not-for-profit, national health care system will actually decrease the total health care spending while providing more treatment and services.
Funding for a not-for-profit system will come primarily from existing government health care spending (more than $1 trillion) and a phased-in tax on employers of 7.7%, which would yield about one trillion. Employers who provide coverage are already paying 8.5% on average.
The cost effectiveness of a not-for-profit, universal system of health care has been affirmed by several studies, including those by the General Accounting Office and the Congressional Budget Office. The GAO has said, “If the US were to shift to a system of universal coverage and a single payer, as in Canada, the savings in administrative costs would be more than enough to offset the expense of universal coverage.
Housing Security
Twelve million households pay half of their incomes for housing. There is an urgent need for subsidized housing. Programs for the preservation of public housing, project based Section 8 and tenant based subsidized housing programs must be fully funded and expanded. This will lower the amount of family income that goes to housing, so that millions of American families can meet other basic needs for food, shelter, utilities and transportation.
The Department of Justice must investigate, prosecute and eliminate predatory lending practices of high interest rates, balloon payments and inflated lender fees which lead to people losing their homes. These sharp practices are often aimed at low income and minority communities which often lack legal recourse.
Social Security
Social Security is essentially sound. The Social Security Trust Fund, according to an analysis by the fund’s trustees, is solvent through the year 2042, without any congressional action being necessary. Social Security is projected to pay all of its promised benefits for the next four decades without any changes whatsoever. A shortfall projected to occur in 2042 is not a crisis.
There is a political crisis looming for Social Security, however.
The same Administration which looked the other way while millions of investors were defrauded by chicanery in mutual funds and unscrupulous Wall Street operators such as those at Enron, Global Crossing and WorldCom now wants to take your Social Security funds and invest them in the stock market in a plan called "private savings accounts."
Most people understand that investment in the stock market is risky. What goes up must come down. For every winner there is a loser. Social Security is the only guaranteed income for old age and for disability. It is what protects many Americans from poverty. Proponents of this scheme to invest Social Security funds in the stock market assume that the stocks will earn a 7% annual rate of return over the next 75 years. Social Security trustees are predicting the growth of the economy will slow to 1.45% per year over that period, meaning that it will be impossible to get a 7% rate of return on stocks in a slow growth economy.
Additionally, we must insist on a critical inspection of the actuarial assumptions for privatization.
There is no sound reason to privatize Social Security. Simply put, the money belongs to main street, not Wall Street. People work a lifetime to gain a small measure of economic security through Social Security and no one's future ought to be jeopardized just because of the greed of a few who want to fuel the growth of the market.
Social Security is solid. But the same is not true for the private pension plans of tens of millions of Americans which are in jeopardy. More and more corporations are failing to fully fund their defined benefit pension plans and using bankruptcy to cheat hardworking American out of their full retirement benefits while dumping pension obligations onto the taxpayer backed Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation.
The PBGC assumed liabilities of 152 plans in the last year. A $7.73 billion dollar surplus in the year 2001 has turned into a deficit of over $11 billion. The takeover of several giant plans, together with its own faltering stock portfolio has led the PBGS to incur a $7.6 billion loss in 2003, the largest in its history.
What’s more, the under funding of pension plans is so severe that it is anticipated that $85.5 billion in pension claims are under funded.
According to the LA Times, nearly 90% of the 343 companies in the S&P 500 that offered traditional, defined-benefit pension plans in 2002 were under funded, despite the fact that in 1999 these corporations had a total pension surplus of $251 billion. By the end of 2002 that surplus became a shortfall of over $350 billion.
The average under funding of pensions is at least $10,000 per covered employee. The under funding of pensions is a breach of trust. Corporate executives and board members ought to be accountable in under both civil and criminal law for under funding pensions. Pension funds must have equal standing in bankruptcy court with banks in order to protect assets. Pension fund obligations should be attached to successor companies.
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