Social Costs & American Healthcare

Social Costs & American Healthcare

 

By J.M. Hamilton (6-27-2020)

 

Social costs are the expense bore by society, at large, for the production of certain goods and services; and yet, these costs, or future liabilities, generally, are not factored into the retail price of the good or service.  As ninety-nine percent of American society is disenfranchised by the political duopoly (i.e. Establishment Dems and GOP), social costs are a topic that is, conveniently, rarely discussed. 

And yet, these costs, or liabilities, are both real and can be astronomical. 

JMH has written about social costs before... perhaps not directly, but certainly touched upon the subject in write ups on Big Oil and Gun manufacturing.  Read here and here. 

 

Take U.S. Big Oil, for instance… the modern-day Death Star of our times.  Here, the social costs for producing gas & oil not only includes planetary destruction, disease & fatalities from pollution, but for American citizens, endless Middle East war (and the resulting austerity and lack of social services that are cut off, as a result of the cost for these wars).

 

The social costs associated with the Big Oil industry run in the tens of trillions, minimum… merely, by assigning $50,000, per head, to the lives of the planet’s 7.8 billion human occupants.  

 

In the past, JMH has recommending imposing strict liability and criminal sanctions on Boardrooms and C-suites, as a means by which to address social costs.  But if we really want to call attention to social costs, we should assign expense, liability, & numbers.  Moreover, we should allocate social costs – not only to the businesses, themselves (say Exxon Mobil’s financial statements) - but to a US government that is, ultimately, responsible & captured by this industry.

 

Since multinationals, in this example, can’t bear the social costs of its business model, those costs will ultimately fall upon the US taxpayer for cleanup and remediation.  Social cost, unaccounted for in the retail price of a product or service, is just one more means by which the wealthy privatize profits, while socializing losses; one more means by which toxic liabilities are transferred from private ledgers to public balance sheets.

 

Taken to its logical conclusion, if unfunded liabilities – resulting from social costs – were to suddenly appear on America’s Federal balance sheet, the US government would be bankrupt.  No amount of money printing (aka debt monetization by the FED) could cover these liabilities and future fiscal outlays, w/out serious ramifications for the dollar as a storehouse of value and as the global fiat currency.  And given the acceleration of climate change, arguably, this is a bill that is rapidly coming due. 

 

There are many, many industries generating astronomical social costs.  Start accounting for social costs, and the path to real economic reform, and structural change, may begin in earnest. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If we take nothing else from today’s piece, please remember this: Social costs, picked up by taxpayers, are just more welfare for big biz & Wall St.  As we let the concept of social costs sink in, and the assignment of liability … think about all those billionaires and multinationals who are pushing to reopen the economy – in the middle of a pandemic – and America’s failing for-profit healthcare system.

 

Think about the tragic surge in coronavirus cases w/in the GOP states of Arizona, Florida, and Texas.   

 

Why would these businesses, and billionaires, want to risk harm to the American consumer and the labor pool, by reopening the economy prematurely?

 

To answer that question, we have to ask: Who pays for American healthcare?  We know the taxpayer pays for publicly provided healthcare (see Medicare and Medicaid); and we know billionaires and multinationals do everything in their power to dodge taxation and increasingly, pay less and less US taxes.

 

We know that US employers have increasingly shifted the cost of private healthcare insurance onto the backs of America’s - disenfranchised - labor pool. 

 

The bottom line: billionaires, multinationals - pushing to reopen the US economy – increasingly, are NOT responsible for medical costs (except to profit by them).  As with taxation, the oligarchy has become extremely adept at dodging US medical expense, as well as, the social contract.  

 

That is to say, the social costs of opening up the economy prematurely – w/out adequate medical care for the resulting viral catastrophe – are borne on the backs, and lives, of the American consumer and taxpayer (who cannot dodge taxation or medical expense).  

 

This callousness, greed, & myopia is setting America, the US economy, and labor up for a great, great fall.  All so that some highly, non-essential, C-suites and billionaires can make their quarterly targets. 

 

Does America’s, owned, political duopoly – Establishment Dems & GOP – care about any of this?  Absolutely not. They’re too worried about their stock portfolios.

 

So how do we make this right?  

 

Assign medical costs - in this instance, the social costs for a premature restart - to the donor class, billionaires and multinationals, for a grossly incompetent and negligent economic reopening.  And suddenly, we may see an oligarchy that actually cares about something more than their bonuses, capital gains, and financial engineering. 

 

Who knows?  The oligarchy might actually insist upon a highly efficient, single-payer, healthcare system.

 

Such is the, potential, power of placing a number on social costs, and making sure these liabilities are borne by protected industries & plutocrats (or allocated to the Federal balance sheet, already very much encumbered by long term debts accrued bailing out the financial aristocracy & Wall St.).

 

Copyright JM Hamilton Publishing 2020

American Apartheid & Denazification …

American Apartheid & Denazification … 

 

Establishment Dems & GOP have screwed the American people out of: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.

 

Let the nation’s collective guilt not be a temporary phenomenon, but rather a daily lesson:

 

That equality, freedom, and justice are not abstract ideas to be entrusted in the hands of corrupt politicians; but ideas, and values, that must be fought for w/ each and every American breath.

 

-    

By J.M. Hamilton (6-14-2020)

 

The events of the last several weeks show a virus and resulting economic crisis can reveal a great many truths about a nation and its society.  A nasty pandemic, raging – economic & political - inequality, Great Depression level unemployment, and the systemic racism & murder of black Americans… have all collided together in an economic & political supernova.   

 

The catalyst: A Minneapolis police officer spent between eight-and-nine minutes kneeling on the throat of a handcuffed & prone black American, George Floyd.

 

Mr. Floyd was made a martyr by a white officer of the law for, allegedly, passing a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill.  The scene was caught on cell phone and it galvanized & revealed four hundred years of inequality, racism, slavery, and thuggery… the exact opposite of what the United States proclaims it stands for: equality, life, liberty & the pursuit of happiness.  

 

But deeper analysis reveals an entire economic system that profits from what JMH has termed, the US Apartheid Economy. 

 

What was Apartheid?  I’ll defer to History.com to sum it up:

 

From 1948 through the 1990s, a single word dominated life in South Africa.  Apartheid – Afrikaans for “apartness” – kept the country’s majority black population under the thumb of a small white minority. The segregation began in 1948 after the National Party came to power.  The party instituted policies of white supremacy, which empowered white South Africans, descendant’s from Dutch and British settlers, while further disenfranchising black Africans.  Racist attitudes about “natives” colored white society.  Many white women in South African learned how to use firearms … 

 

Gee whiz, sound familiar?  Systemic racism, a privileged white population, a divide & conquer political strategy… pitting white against black, white supremacy, nationalism (an ideology that preys upon white fear), economically & politically disenfranchised blacks & minorites, and – not covered in the previous paragraph – an overwhelming police state presence designed to protect the assets of a privileged few and strike fear & intimidation into all nonwhites (as well as, anybody who falls outside proscribed societal norms)… 

 

… Damn, it’s as if Apartheid was made in America.

 

As a college student in the eighties, w/ a deep interest in politics… the most embedded memory from that era, on this topic, was the searing image of white Apartheid police officers siccing German Shepherds on the black population and those same officers deploying bullwhips against black South Africans. 

 

Substitute firehoses for bullwhips… and the images could have been taken from American Civil Rights protests throughout the Deep South, during the 1960s.  All of which makes me wonder, if Hitler picked up some of his ideas from a fascist United States – and he did – did the United States provide the playbook for Apartheid and white colonial domination?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We know why political leadership often deploys a divide & conquer economic & political strategy (aka nationalism), pitting races against one another.  Divide and conquer, based upon race, taps right into the fight-or-flight response, driven by fear.  A privileged minority, or majority, is so afraid of economic or political loss – and/or loss of societal favor – that this fear turns to hate, and this hate turns to outrages – crimes & murder -  that is completely at odds with humanity and what Lincoln termed: “the better angels of our nature.”

 

Divide & conquer also provides a convenient distraction, while a predatory elite loot the economy and the government. 

 

There’s a reason why US multinationals and billionaires have marketed & pandered, heavily, to #BlackLivesMatter protests, while their German Shepherd – The US Chamber of Commerce – continues to lobby for a failed, racist, status quo, and larger & more frequent corporate bailouts; there’s a reason why boardrooms and C-suites remain lily-white.  

 

And there’s a reason why two very old, tired, white men - emissaries for the US Apartheid economy – neolib/neocon - top the two centrist party tickets for 2020. 

 

JMH does not believe bigotry, hatred and racism is an, entirely, learned response.  Somewhere in our psyche, in our DNA, in our history, buried deep in the subconscious, perhaps, as mentioned above, w/in the fight-or-flight reflex itself, are the seeds of hatred and racism.  There is little doubt that, among some humans, it takes very little from the environment, or societal nudge, to spark racism.  Deprive a person of education, suspend intellect, logic, thought, run w/ simian instinct - add a heavy dose of deprivation & economic hardship - and presto … a racist very well may appear. 

 

Either way, perhaps the best responses to racism are via education (teach members of society that racism is wrong) and by addressing economic inequality (eliminating a key source of fear & hatred).

 

Which brings us to denazification.  America needs to overhaul its history books.  We need, mandatory, classes dedicated to teaching our children – all children, in all fifty states – about the dark underbelly of the United States: genocide of Native-Americans, slavery, and systemic racism.  Like post-WW2 Germany, we may need to run U.S. citizens through the death camps in the American South (i.e. plantations, slave quarters, and/or through today’s private prison industrial complex).  This might even give repugnant private prison contractors a revenue stream, after the nation outlaws prison privatization.  Germany kept its death camps open, post-WW2, as museums.  The U.S. should keep its death camps open and we should parade generation after generation of Americans right through them.

 

Our kids, like Germany’s children, need to be educated on how entirely unexceptional & exploitive the United State is and remains to this very day.

 

Will education, alone, eliminate hatred and racism… in the short term, probably not.  In the longer term, it can be a tremendous source for good. 

 

Of course, education, platitudes, and words are all meaningless if the US doesn’t address the source of the fear itself.  The very economic realities spawning racism and the elite’s divide & conquer strategy - which is poverty and a neoliberal economy that no longer serves the American people.  Rising growth, or GDP, or greater trickledown policies - or any other fairytales that the Chicago School of Economics dreams up – won’t address the levels of economic deprivation and the resulting systemic racism.  Since Reagan came to power, wealth has been transferred at an exponential pace – within the private and public sectors – from all Americans to a few billionaires and an ever-shrinking pool of monopolies, multinationals & utilities. 

 

It’s time to reverse that flow.  It’s time for the American people, who have been destroyed by the economic royalists, to have their day; it’s time to remove the real economic roadblocks that triggers fear, hatred, and racism.  Starting w/ - as proscribed by FDR – an economic bill of rights; a UBI; a healthcare system that works for all & is fully portable, via Medicare for All.  And to pay for it, and mitigate the unseemly power of a financial aristocracy that has failed – not only the American people, but themselves – we need: wealth taxes directed at billionaires and multinationals; we need a very simplified – progressive - tax code; the tax deductibility of interest on debt – removed; and most importantly, the American people need a Federal Reserve bank that will serve the American people, not Wall Street shysters. 

 

Finally, the nation needs to rid itself of the current cadre of corrupt gangsters w/in the Congress – from the two establishment political parties - who have placed profiting from the US Apartheid economy before the interests of the American people. 

 

So, in summary, what do the American people need: nothing short of real economic, educational, fiscal & monetary, healthcare and political reform.  Basically, a rejection of the status quo, offered by Messrs. Biden & Trump.  We need a restoration of the first principles that the nation was founded upon, w/ the economic reforms necessary to make it happen … call it an American Renaissance … a renewed commitment to greater equality.  Greater economic & political equality will drive home true American exceptionalism, and a reinvigorated US economy: a real commitment to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all Americans.

 

And if a few billionaires are unhappy as a result… I hear there are bunkers in New Zealand.  

 

Besides, what do billionaires & monopolists have to lose, the pitchforks have arrived. 

 

Copyright JM Hamilton Publishing 2020