Health Care Reform and Welcome Back!- Søren Hough, UHS

Welcome back to Teens on Politics, a blog where high school students weigh in with their opinions on current politician issues. Do you think the current administration is making grave mistakes for our future, or that we are getting the change we were promised in the 2008 election? Send any opinion pieces on any political topic of your choice to uhmspodcast@gmail.com and we'll throw it up on the official blog. Alternatively, you can always comment on the post with your ideas and strike up a conversation. This blog is 100% open to every party's ideas and political ideas (including Socialism) as submitted material is appropriate and non-derogatory. Any high school student from any school may submit, and anyone in the world can comment.

Other than that, have fun!

On to health care. In the past few months, Obama's proposed health care reform has been the major topic of debate. There has been an incredible resistance to this reform- the Far Right has been absolutely adamant in their refusal to cooperate on the matter. Widespread rumors and fallacies have been spread throughout the republican party and their support has grown tremendously. The real problem is, half of the people who are so against the reform actually have no idea what the changes are or what their party finds so negative about the issue. Once again, political mudslinging has gotten in the way of change. Read the article on the supposed "Socialist" ideas from Obama.

In truth, governmental control of the health care system would not significantly impact anyone for good or for worse. Actually, the change would go largely unnoticed in the general public. However, the current health insurance system cannot sustain itself. In the not-so-distant future, there will be serious consequences to keeping our current system, not the least of which being financial issues (not helpful in our current economic state). People cannot afford health care- and that isn't right. See a brief article here on whether reform is necessary or needless.

Either way, without some sort of reform, the country will suffer in the coming years, economically and medically. The only real change here would be that the new system would not imminently fail.

Obama has been very quiet on the whole matter, oddly. Only recently has he come out himself to defend against the attacks from the opposition. Some say that this is too little too late from the President. See here for Obama's original statement on the reform, and his new weekly address video (see below) where he confronts the misinformation from the Right.



What republicans in the Senate don't seem to understand is that democrats don't actually need their votes to get the reform passed. If they cannot get it done through current methods, the administration and the whole party will simply regroup and pass enough regulations to ensure that the reform goes through.

Or maybe they DO understand?

Resistance at this point, then, would simply be an attempt to put Obama in the same light as Bush was for democrats so that republicans could rally the country together before the next elections in 2010. Former governor Sarah Palin, 2008 vice presidential nominee, has gone on record stating that the proposed health care reform will result in "death" committees allowing widespread euthanasia of elderly patients. This, of course, is entirely untrue. The issue at hand really is what the governmental health care will cover. Obama's plan will in fact provide insurance coverage for many procedures, but to suggest that all of a sudden there will be a genocide of elderly people is absolutely ridiculous. Instead of patients and their families (or their insurance) paying to be taken off life support, the governmental insurance will cover it instead. Literally, it affects nothing.

It reminds me of the elections, when people were claiming that there would be some sort of widespread abortion trend if Obama was elected. In reality, nothing changed- the previous abortion laws remained in place and the country moved on.

Palin was not totally off-base, though- what she said brings in ethical cases, including life support and other controversial medicine. This is a legitimate concern- if tax dollars are going to health care, should the public have a say in what that money covers? I believe they do.

Now does anyone really care what the washed-up governor has to say at this point? Probably not- but this represents the public standpoint of many other conservatives. My problem with these [republican] politicians is that they are attacking Obama's plan with McCarthyism instead of straight politics. If they raised legitimate concerns, like where people's tax money is actually going and what the health care was covering, then I think they would stand a better chance. But as it stands, this fear-mongering has got to go.

Republican Economic Policies are a Failure- Paul B., UHS

The recent economic turmoil that has shaken up world markets and caused billions of dollars in losses, huge government bailouts, forced sales and bankruptcy can be summed up by one word: idiocy. Yes, idiocy is the word of the fiscal year. Or at least it should be, because the blatant stupidity of the Republican economic policies is a major cause for this fiasco. This is relevant, because in a few days we will decide whose economic policies we will follow for the next four years by voting for the next President. Either we vote for the Democrat, and find change in Washington and Wall Street, or we vote for the Republican and get more of the same leadership that led to this economic calamity. Now, critics may say that the economy is too complex an issue to find a root cause, therefore my assertion is fundamentally flawed. While it is true that the American economy, a thirteen trillion dollar a year juggernaut, is an intricate beast, a careful analysis of the events leading up to this moment should provide a clear answer to such critics. I will attempt to construct for you a quick rundown of the major events of the stock market and economic collapse. It can be said that this fiscal cataclysm began with the U.S. real estate bubble. The country was feeling good because housing prices had been on a fantastic rise for years, with the lucky people enjoying the benefits of increased equity and new-found wealth. Many major housing markets across the country saw an explosion of home construction, and everybody thought that they could get in on the ground floor. Large mortgage companies start offering no money down deals and subprime mortgages to move these houses out to the consumers.
Subprime mortgage loans are loans to people who cannot afford more stringent loan schedules and have weakened credit scores because of an inability to pay debt. Subprime loans have many unsavory options including interest-only payments and variable rates. What this ends up doing is creating a market full of people who think they can purchase houses they have no ability to pay for. The interest only payments mean that a consumer can pay a low monthly fee, but may never ever pay off the principle loan, meaning they will be in debt indefinitely, while never owning a house. For a time, people with these subprime mortgages bought houses willy-nilly, assured by the giant corporations that housing prices would only rise, and equity and resale values would make attempting to buy a house a smart investment. This new influx of homeowners made Wall Street investors greedy, because banks and financial services now had a massive increase in capital (without real money behind it), to play around with. Investing with mortgage money is a risky business, because you’re working under the assumption that you will get paid by the people who owe the mortgage. What made things even more crazy were the ways the investment banks and financial institutions made up to make even more money. Complexity became the norm for these companies, which began organizing strange high yield contraptions called CDO's or Collateralized Debt Obligations. These funny inventions are securities (a poor, almost ironic name) based on clumps of mortgages from all over the place. Investors at the top were convinced that these CDO’s, which were really little more than thought experiments, were safe, and investment began in earnest. Then financial firms, like Lehman Brothers, decided to purchase enormous quantities of these investments. Lehman ended up having 30 times its wealth put into these outrageously over-hyped and insecure CDO's. AIG, an insurance company, came up with insurance called Credit Default Swaps, which had the goal of adding even more “security” to CDO’s by making AIG responsible if the CDO’s went bad. Unfortunately, the one event that would ruin Wall Street’s fun should have been the most predictable. Everyone knows that the good times can’t last forever. Apparently Bear Stearns and every other Wall Street company never got that memo. The housing bubble burst. Those subprime mortgages loans that people were given by mortgage companies became too much for the populace to bear. The subprime borrowers could no longer afford their mortgages and defaulted on their loans. All of a sudden, the housing market went into freefall. Prices dropped, equity dropped, and there was no longer any money for the financial institutions to play around with. The loans that should never have been made became the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Organizations like Washington Mutual and Countrywide Financial take the loss on the chin, hemorrhaging money. With the huge amount of defaulted loans, the complex CDO's lose value rapidly. Banks are all but forced to try to sell these CDO's so they can raise real money, real capital. It’s astounding to the banks that no one wants to buy up bad loans and take control of the debt. The banks and other financial institutions have to take the debt upon themselves. It is a monumental undertaking to say the least. More than five trillion dollars of debt must be taken into account, it is estimated, since the CDO's were so complex and far reaching, no one really knows how much they were really worth.
Bear Stearns is sold to JP Morgan Chase at a fraction of the price it was worth only months before. Lehman Brothers collapses under the weight of its debt. Stocks plunge precipitously. AIG, the world’s largest insurance company couldn’t ever pay for this fiasco. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are taken over by the US government to prevent a worldwide crisis of Great Depression proportions. AIG is bailed out of 85 billion dollars of debt, and just announced, the American taxpayer will also be required to pay 700 billion for the government to buy up the bad loans that started this calamity.
Alright, now we can explore what caused the worst economic disaster in 79 years, since we understand what actually happened. To explore the present, we look to the past. In the years when the world was in the throes of the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt and his crack team of financial experts formulated some congressional acts that became the foundation of Democratic financial and economic policy for generations. At the forefront of this legislation was the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. This act set up the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, as well as split up banking into distinct categories, such as investment banking and commercial banking. It also set up regulations to curb market speculation. Don’t we wish that this act was still intact today, when market speculation drove oil prices up to a hundred forty seven a barrel early this year.
Unfortunately, the Glass-Steagall Act was deemed unnecessary by the Republican reformists of the 80’s and 90’s. They felt that 1933 wasn’t relevant anymore; the act was just a dinosaur of an age long past. The first chip in the Great Depression era armor occurred in 1980, when the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act allowed banks to merge, allow checkable deposit, and prevented the Federal Reserve Board of Governors to set interest rates for savings accounts. Later, in 1982, the Garns-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act, while admittedly bipartisan, was spearheaded by a Republican and passed into law under Ronald Reagan. This law deregulated the savings and loan industry, and allowed variable rate mortgages; the same beast that would rear its ugly head as part of the subprime mess. It would turn out that this act was a major cause of the Savings and Loan Crisis of 1987. The fact that this is still an act that is on the books after that financial crisis astounds me. The last nail in the coffin of the Glass-Steagall act thus far is the 1999 legislation called the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. The Gramm mentioned in this title refers to the Republican former official economic strategist for John McCain, Philip Gramm. Under this Act, securities, investment, insurance, and banking companies can merge, compete directly and offer all the services under one roof, completely ignoring why there was a separation in the first place. Despite any conflicts of interest and other issues that might arise, the law passed by a veto proof majority in a Republican Congress, and was signed by a reluctant Bill Clinton. It took nine years for the consequences of these actions to reveal themselves. So as you can see, deregulation of the financial sector led to greedy corporations taking advantage of the little guys in addition to taking advantage of the government. John McCain has stated openly that he is a staunch deregulation supporter. Republicans as a whole are also deregulation devotees. This is a reality that makes me cringe. If deregulation has harmed us this badly already, I can only imagine the kind of horrors that would arise from further cutbacks in oversight.
There are two holy tenets of Republican economic policy; the first being the "trickledown" theory, and the second being the cause for today’s issues, a move toward a free market complete with a laissez-faire attitude.
Trickledown theory is one that hypothesizes that if you give money to the rich, the rich will spread the wealth to those less fortunate, or less able to generate it on their own. By giving more to those that have more already, it is hoped that it will lead to giving to others on a truly epic scale. "Trickle-down" is supposedly able to work through other methods besides giving money, such as corporate benefits, and lower prices of goods because of rich people’s investment into equity markets. A perfectly free market society is also big for Republicans. It is claimed that without government intervention, businesses will rectify their own issues through the easy rules of competition. A laissez-faire adherent’s battle cry is “get your government out of my business”. The invisible hand of Adam Smith’s lore will magically sweep in and remove unhealthy business, and replace it with decent business that will be profitable and part of the self correcting marketplace.
Both of these ideologies are based on the erroneous belief that companies are always good to their fellow man. While I don’t doubt that a vast majority of Americans are upstanding, hardworking, generous and good citizens, the few that aren’t, when put into power, can make things pretty bad. On top of that, you don’t have to be bad to make things worse. This is exemplified by our current president. He’s not a bad person, just an idiot. This deregulation binge that Washington is on must be stopped at all costs. A free market is an idealist’s dream, and it will remain a dream forever. A regulated market worked amazingly for over forty years. As soon as you give command to a Republican, and let them work their pro business magic, there will be years of prosperity, but ultimately a crash, like Icarus having the hubris to fly too close to the sun. Regulation prevents the calamities that bring the world economies to their knees.
The other point I am trying to make here is that since the Republican deregulation caused this market crash, the government wants the taxpayer to be the one to foot the bill, which is terribly unfair. The multinational conglomerates have been having a wild party for years, but as soon as things head south, the average citizens, just concerned about living their lives, are called upon by Uncle Sam to clean up the huge mess the rowdy businessmen left behind. Something here isn’t right. The billions of dollars in bad mortgages that began this crisis were not the fault of the consumers. They were offered these subprime loans by huge businesses that told them it was a good idea. The businesses should be smart enough to know who is able to pay the monthly fees. They have people to do that sort of thing. But, once again, idiocy shows its hand. Instead of giving loans that meet people’s financial capacities, they go overboard and make deals that should never have been made in the first place. Then the companies make insanely complex deals among themselves to spread the wealth, and they ultimately don’t have a clue what they’re worth. What makes me upset is the way that the Republicans treat the majority of Americans. The GOP basically says “give your money to the rich, and we’ll deal with your money. You won’t see it again, and when we screw up, you’ll have to foot the bill essentially for a second time. We’ll make the millions and enjoy much lower taxes proportionally to our worth. The rich deserve your money more than you do, and we’ll find tax loopholes like capital gains to turn your investments and savings into our plaything.” That is the most distorted and criminal economic policy I’ve ever heard. And now that the government will be buying up billions in bad debt, how does the GOP plan to pay for the trillion dollar budget deficit this year? By lowering taxes for the rich, that’s how!
I think that these idiotic businessmen should pay for their misdeeds. Don’t lower their taxes when their greed was the cause of this economic nightmare. Vote for a President who will hold them accountable and raise their taxes to make them pay. They’re already million and billionaires from usurping your hard earned cash. They can stand to be taxed proportionately. The rich can take a hit and still come out not too much worse for the wear. It is you, the average Joe worker who has suffered here. You have lost your jobs, your savings, your investments, and even your home. Your kids may not be able to afford to go to college and you might not be able to retire, because you no longer have the money. The rich still do. The top one percent of this country controls fifty percent of all America’s assets.
Barack Obama’s change platform will surely help right this fundamental wrong that has existed for over twenty years. The Democratic economic policies are designed to keep businesses in check and to redistribute wealth to the largest portion of earners in this great nation of ours. The Republicans led by McCain can only secure their self interests. They don’t care about you, and it’s obvious by the way they make you pay for their own self inflicted idiocy.

Matt Damon has a political agenda?- Søren Hough, UHS

Matt Damon has a political agenda?

I never pegged him as a guy with that much common sense. He may be a liberal, although I wasn't sure from looking around on the internet, but his argument in this video could easily have been from a disgruntled GOP supporter's point of view.

This video was released on September 10th, 2008, by the Associated Press on youtube.com and has been viewed at the point of this post over one million times. I think that Damon has very clearly and concisely reported exactly what I have been feeling. Governor Palin has much less experience than the other people in the race, and has nothing over the other vice presidential nominee, Joe Biden. In fact, Biden has more political experience than everyone else running put together.

Sarah Palin has many issues, not the least of which being the reason she was nominated. She was the perfect choice for the republicans who are bent on defeating Obama by any means necessary because she is a gun-toting, pro-life woman who will bring in women voters and the religious right. It boggles the mind that a person such as this could be the GOP vice presidential candidate of choice.

Fox news has many problems, most of which I won't get into right now. However, specifically pertaining to Sarah Palin and the election, they had a long campaign against Senator Obama for his inexperience. Now what are they going to say as a VP nominee comes in now with even less experience? As Damon pointed out, we don't really know much about her and probably won't learn a whole lot more by the election.

I am really glad I'm not in a party in which the mere fact that a politician is so anti-abortion that she will allow her 17-year-old to have a kid and then take care of it is more important than her crazy foreign policy beliefs.

Better than that, my favorite part of the interview was Damon quoting the actuary estimates on whether McCain would survive his presidency. He's old. I don't mean that offensively, but the man is 72 years old. He also has some history of skin cancer. That is absolutely a possibility- and Palin is next in line if he does indeed pass away.

In a recent interview with Charlie Gibson, Palin handled herself quite well. What scared me was when she stated that if necessary, we would go to war with Russia.

Russia.

This country has no ability to be going to war with any country right now. If we went to war with Russia right now, we would be very quickly overrun. In fact, it's my belief that the only thing that we have that is stopping them is our nuclear arsenal. Then again, they have bombs, as well. Putin made that statement about the US starting a war with Russia by supporting Georgia- with two leaders that eager to jump into conflict together, I fear for the future of this country.

This is an extreme example, of course, but as a country, we should be looking towards evading conflict if at all possible over the next few years. The Iraq War has gone on long enough and wasted enough of our resources. Palin diagrees, it seems.

Palin scares me, too, Mr. Damon. Thanks for that- we needed some logic in this election.