America's Failing Commitment to the Common Good

[FayeforCure]

Fire department fees: An abdication of government

Editorial


It's absurd to charge motorists when the fire department shows up at the scene of an accident.


July 26, 2010


Democrats and Republicans validly debate the size and reach of government. But certain services have always been considered fundamental. During California's pioneer days, rudimentary municipal services sprang up when communities of settlers agreed to chip in to provide common law enforcement, fire protection and, usually, basic public education.

In the latest efforts to close the gaps in public budgets, though, an increasing number of California cities are ripping holes in the fabric of local government. More than two dozen municipalities, including Stockton and Roseville, now charge motorists who are involved in auto accidents that require the fire department to respond to the scene. That might be for emergency rescue or putting out a fire with foam. Some charge anyone involved in a crash; many levy a fee only on nonresidents who have the bad luck to be in an accident in such inhospitable locales.


Several municipalities bill only insured motorists, on the assumption that insurance companies will cover the cost. That's particularly wrongheaded because it rewards people who illegally fail to insure their vehicles.

On July 1, the Placer County Fire Department began charging nonresidents; and now Sacramento, the seat of state government, is considering doing the same. The fees are being pushed by collection agencies that take on the task of billing motorists or their insurance companies for a percentage of the take. The insurance industry, of course, objects.

This time, the insurers have it right. Some companies don't cover these bills, and as the number of localities imposing them grows, more insurers will probably either exclude the fees or raise premiums. In the end, all drivers pay, including those who never visit those places and who never experience an accident.

Cities that impose such fees are abandoning the commitment to the common good that inspired people to form fire departments in the first place: the idea that we should all share the cost of putting out fires, of rescuing the injured and trapped. What's more, they give fire departments a financial incentive to show up whether or not they're needed; every accident represents a potential source of revenue. And what's the accident victim supposed to say? Go away, I can't afford the jaws of life?

These new fees subvert the tradition of mutual aid, in which law enforcement and fire agencies assist each other in providing services; each municipality guards the safety of the public within its borders, even if the individuals involved live and pay property taxes elsewhere. If fees like these are justified, the logical next step is to charge tourists $300 for the arrest of the mugger who just robbed them of $40.

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jul/26/opinion/la-ed-fire-20100726

[FayeforCure]

Meryl Streep's eery reincarnation of Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady brings to mind Thatcher's most famous quip, "there is no such thing as 'society.'"

None of the dwindling herd of Republican candidates has quoted her yet but they might as well considering their unremitting bashing of everything public.

What defines a society is a set of mutual benefits and duties embodied most visibly in public institutions -- public schools, public libraries, public transportation, public hospitals, public parks, public museums, public recreation, public universities, and so on.

America no longer values public goods as we did before.

The great expansion of public institutions in America began in the early years of 20th century when progressive reformers championed the idea that we all benefit from public goods. Excellent schools, roads, parks, playgrounds, and transit systems would knit the new industrial society together, create better citizens, and generate widespread prosperity. Education, for example, was less a personal investment than a public good -- improving the entire community and ultimately the nation.

In subsequent decades -- through the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War -- this logic was expanded upon. Strong public institutions were seen as bulwarks against, in turn, mass poverty, fascism, and then communism. The public good was palpable: We were very much a society bound together by mutual needs and common threats. (It was no coincidence that the greatest extensions of higher education after World War II were the GI Bill and the National Defense Education Act, and the largest public works project in history called the National Defense Interstate Highway Act.)

But in a post-Cold War America distended by global capital, distorted by concentrated income and wealth, undermined by unlimited campaign donations, and rocked by a wave of new immigrants easily cast by demagogues as "them," the notion of the public good has faded. Not even Democrats any longer use the phrase "the public good." Public goods are now, at best, "public investments." Public institutions have morphed into "public-private partnerships;" or, for Republicans, simply "vouchers."

Mitt Romney's speaks derisively of what he terms the Democrats' "entitlement" society in contrast to his "opportunity" society. At least he still envisions a society. But he hasn't explained how ordinary Americans will be able to take advantage of good opportunities without good public schools, affordable higher education, good roads, and adequate health care.

His "entitlements" are mostly a mirage anyway.

Medicare is the only entitlement growing faster than the GDP but that's because the costs of health care are growing faster than the economy, and any attempt to turn Medicare into a voucher -- without either raising the voucher in tandem with those costs or somehow taming them -- will just reduce the elderly's access to health care. Social Security, for its part, hasn't contributed to the budget deficit; it's had surpluses for years.

Other safety nets are in tatters. Unemployment insurance reaches just 40 percent of the jobless these days (largely because eligibility requires having had a steady full-time job for a number of years rather than, as with most people, a string of jobs or part-time work).

What could Mitt be talking about? Outside of defense, domestic discretionary spending is down sharply as a percent of the economy. Add in declines in state and local spending, and total public spending on education, infrastructure, and basic research has dropped from 12 percent of GDP in the 1970s to less than 3 percent by 2011.

Only in one respect is Romney right. America has created a whopping entitlement for the biggest Wall Street banks and their top executives -- who, unlike most of the rest of us, are no longer allowed to fail. They can also borrow from the Fed at almost no cost, then lend the money out at 3 to 6 percent.

All told, Wall Street's entitlement is the biggest offered by the federal government, even though it doesn't show up in the budget. And it's not even a public good. It's just private gain.

We're losing public goods available to all, supported by the tax payments of all and especially the better off. In its place we have private goods available to the very rich, supported by the rest of us.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-reich/the-decline-of-public-goo_b_1186252.html

[FayeforCure]

Implications of dropping the Common Good (like fire rescue services) that may be overlooked:

Letter to The Honorable Douglas Duncan
BCCRS opposes the “ambulance user fee”
March 27, 2003

The Honorable Douglas Duncan
County Executive
101 Monroe Street
Rockville, Maryland 20854

Dear Mr. Duncan:

I am writing on behalf of the Bethesda-Chevy Chase Rescue Squad, Inc. (BCCRS) to express our strenuous opposition to the "ambulance user fee" as proposed in the County Executive's FY2004 budget. Our opposition to the proposed ambulance user fee can be summarized as follows:

The ambulance user fee would jeopardize the health and safety of Montgomery County citizens by discouraging them from calling for an ambulance or paramedic at the earliest possible sign of a heart attack or other life-threatening medical emergency.

The ambulance user fee would fall most heavily on the elderly and others least able to afford it.

The revenue estimates supporting the ambulance user fee appear to be extremely inflated. Indeed, when the administrative costs of collecting the fee are added to the cost associated with the loss of donations to the local fire and rescue departments, the ambulance user fee is likely to generate little or no revenue for the County's fire and rescue system.

As explained in more detail below, we urge the County Council to quickly and decisively reject the imposition of an ambulance user fee.

User Fee Will Jeopardize Public Health and Safety

Imposing a user fee on ambulance and paramedic service will deter people from calling 9-1-1 at the earliest sign of a heart attack or other life-threatening medical emergency. Study after study indicates that early activation of the EMS system is essential in the successful pre-hospital treatment of heart attacks, strokes, respiratory distress, traumatic injuries, and other serious medical emergencies. The County has invested tremendous resources in educating the public about the need to call 9-1-1 quickly for medical emergencies. Imposing an ambulance user fee will undercut these efforts and deter

people from calling 9-1-1 in times of serious need. This will undoubtedly jeopardize citizen health and safety.

Disproportionate Impact on the Poor and Elderly

The burden of the ambulance user fee will fall most heavily on the elderly and those least able to afford it. A high percentage of the citizens using the EMS system are elderly and low-income individuals, many of whom live on fixed incomes. The proposed ambulance user fee may force such individuals to choose between calling for an ambulance for a medical emergency or having enough money to pay for food, housing, and other essentials.

Even if a scheme is devised to focus on reimbursement from individuals with health insurance, many health plans impose a "co-payment" charge on individuals. Medicare, for example, charges a 20% co-payment. For advanced life support (paramedic) services, this could result in a co-payment of almost $100 for users of the EMS system (based on Medicare's current ambulance fee schedule). Statements by Fire Administrator Gordon Aoyagi that uninsured patients will not be "forced to pay"[1] offer little comfort to elderly and other patients who will receive collection notices and calls from insurance companies and their collection agents. Ultimately, the insured will shoulder the cost of the uninsured.

Revenues Are Exaggerated, Costs Are Hidden

The County Executive's proposal estimates the ambulance user fee will generate $4,000,000 in FY2004, while costing $1.6 million to administer. The Fire Administrator has stated that the fees will be set at $350 for ambulance service and $650 for paramedic service, Medicare reimbursement (which tends to be equal to or greater than Federal or private insurance reimbursement) for these services is approximately 60% of the Fire Administrator's proposed charge. While neither the County Executive nor the Fire Administrator has provided figures to support its revenue estimates, it appears clear these projections supporting the ambulance user fee are extremely exaggerated if users are not going to be expected to pay the difference between the County charge and insurance payments.

We are also concerned about the unintended consequences of the ambulance user fee. The Local Fire and Rescue Departments, through which much of the EMS service is delivered in the County, derive a significant portion of their operating funds through voluntary donations from citizens and businesses. Many donors will stop giving voluntarily if they will be charged for calling for an ambulance or paramedic unit. The ambulance user fee proposal neither addresses the loss of these revenues nor the impact on the LFRDs.

In addition, the imposition of an ambulance user fee may subject the County's EMS system to the new Federal HIPAA privacy regulation (which applies to certain health care providers that charge for their services). Under the HIPAA privacy rule, providers are required to establish elaborate safeguards to protect the confidentiality of personal health information. The costs of complying with HIPAA, alone, could exceed the projected revenue from the ambulance user fee.

Hasty Process Leaves Many Unanswered Questions

Finally, we are extremely troubled by the hasty process under which the ambulance user fee proposal was developed. None of the stakeholders in the County's Fire and Rescue System - including the LFRDs, community groups, or individual citizens - were consulted about the proposal. The proposal is accompanied by no supporting analysis or projections. As a result, countless important questions have not been addressed, including:

How will the ambulance user fee be imposed and collected?
What impact will it have on elderly and low-income individuals?
How will these vulnerable individuals be protected against collection efforts from insurance companies seeking to recoup all or a portion of the fees?
What impact will the new user fee have on voluntary donations to the LFRDs? How, if at all, will the County make-up for these lost revenues?
Is the ambulance user fee a temporary proposal - or will this be a permanent new fee imposed on users of the EMS system?

These are, of course, only a handful of the unanswered questions surrounding the proposed ambulance user fee. We urge the County Council to consider these issues carefully, and to seek the input of the various stakeholders in the County's EMS system, before any consideration of a new ambulance user fee that could jeopardize the health and safety of County residents, particularly the elderly and other low-income individuals.

* * * * *

In conclusion, we urge the County Council to reject the ill-considered ambulance user fee proposal in the County Executive's FY04 budget proposal. We would be happy to meet with you or your staff to discuss our concerns.

Sincerely,


David T. Chaconas
President 

Edward G. Sherburne, NREMT-P
Fire/Rescue Chief

http://www.bccrs.org/news/archive/ambfeeduncan032703.htm#_ftnref1

[BridgeTroll]

[finehoe]

Have the Super-Rich Seceded from the United States?

by MIKE LOFGREN

It was in 1993, during congressional deliberation over the North American Free Trade Agreement. I was having lunch with a staffer for one of the rare Republican members of Congress who opposed the policy of so-called free trade. I distinctly remember something my colleague said: “The rich elites of this country have far more in common with their counterparts in London, Paris, and Tokyo than with their own fellow American citizens.”

That was just the beginning of the period when the realities of outsourced manufacturing, financialization of the economy, and growing income disparity started to seep into the public consciousness, so at the time it seemed like a striking and novel statement.

At the end of the cold war many writers predicted the decline of the traditional nation state. Some looked at the demise of the Soviet Union and foresaw the territorial state breaking up into statelets of different ethnic, religious, or economic compositions. This happened in the Balkans, former Czechoslovakia, and Sudan. Others, like Chuck Spinney, predicted a weakening of the state due to the rise of Fourth Generation Warfare, and the inability of national armies to adapt to it. The quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan lend credence to that theory. There have been hundreds of books about globalization and how it would break down borders. But I am unaware of a well-developed theory from that time about how the super-rich and the corporations they run would secede from the nation state.

I do not mean secession in terms of physical withdrawal from the territory of the state, although that happens occasionally. It means a withdrawal into enclaves, a sort of internal immigration, whereby the rich disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation and from any concern about its well-being except as a place to extract loot. Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it. If one can afford private security, public safety is of no concern; if one owns a Gulfstream jet, crumbling bridges cause less apprehension â€" and viable public transportation doesn’t even show up on the radar screen. With private doctors on call, who cares about Medicare?

To some degree the rich have always secluded themselves from the gaze of the common herd; for example, their habit for centuries has been to send their offspring to private schools. But now this habit is exacerbated by the plutocracy’s palpable animosity towards public education and public educators, as Michael Bloomberg has demonstrated. To the extent public education “reform” is popular among billionaires and their tax-exempt foundations, one suspects it is as a lever to divert the more than one-half trillion dollars in federal, state, and local education dollars into private hands, meaning themselves and their friends. A century ago, at least we got some attractive public libraries out of Andrew Carnegie. Noblesse oblige like Carnegie’s is presently lacking among our seceding plutocracy.

In both world wars, even a Harvard man or a New York socialite might know the weight of an army pack. Now the military is for suckers from the laboring classes whose subprime mortgages you just sliced into CDOs and sold to gullible investors in order to buy your second Bentley or rustle up the cash to employ Rod Stewart to perform at your birthday party. Courtesy of Matt Taibbi, we learn that the sentiment among the super-rich towards the rest of America is often one of contempt rather than noblesse; Bernard Marcus, co-founder of Home Depot, says about the views of the 99 percent: “Who gives a crap about some imbecile?”

Steven Schwarzman, the hedge fund billionaire CEO of the Blackstone Group who hired Rod Stewart for his $5-million birthday party, believes it is the rabble who are socially irresponsible. Speaking about low-income citizens who pay no income tax, he says: “You have to have skin in the game. I’m not saying how much people should do. But we should all be part of the system.” But millions of Americans who do not pay federal income taxes pay federal payroll taxes. These taxes are regressive, and the dirty little secret is that over the last several decades they have made up a greater and greater share of federal revenues. In 1950, payroll and other federal retirement contributions constituted 10.9 percent of all federal revenues; by 2007, the last “normal” economic year before federal revenues began falling, they made up 33.9 percent. By contrast, corporate income taxes were 26.4 percent of federal revenues in 1950; by 2007 they had fallen to 14.4 percent. Who has skin in the game now?

As is well known by now, Schwarzman benefits from the “Buffett Rule:” financial sharks typically take their compensation in the form of capital gains rather than salaries, thus knocking down their income tax rate from 35 percent to 15 percent. But that’s not the only way Mr. Skin-in-the-Game benefits: the 6.2-percent Social Security tax and the 1.45-percent Medicare tax apply only to wages and salaries, not capital gains distributions. Accordingly, Schwarzman is stiffing the system in two ways: not only is his income tax rate less than half the top marginal rate, he is shorting the Social Security system that others of his billionaire colleagues like Pete Peterson say is unsustainable and needs to be cut.

This lack of skin in the game may explain why Willard Mitt Romney is so coy about releasing his income tax returns. It would also make sense for someone with $264 million in net worth to joke that he is “unemployed,” as if he were some jobless sheet metal worker in Youngstown, when he is really saying in code that his income stream is not a salary subject to payroll deduction. The chances are good that his effective rate for both federal income and payroll taxes is lower than that of many a wage slave.

The real joke is on the rest of us. After the biggest financial meltdown in 80 years â€" a meltdown caused by the type of rogue financial manipulation that Romney embodies â€" and a consequent long, steep drop in the American standard of living, who is the putative front-runner for one of the only two parties allowed to be competitive in American politics? None other than Mitt Romney, the man who says corporations are people. Opposing him, or someone like him, will be the incumbent president, Barack Obama, who will raise up to a billion dollars to compete in the campaign. Much of that loot will come from the same corporations, hedge fund managers, merger and acquisition specialists, and leveraged buyout artists the president will denounce in pro forma fashion during the campaign.

The super-rich have seceded from America even as their grip on its control mechanisms has tightened.

MIKE LOFGREN retired in June 2011 after 28 years as a Congressional staffer. He served 16 years as a professional staff member on the Republican staff of the House and Senate Budget Committees.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/01/05/have-the-super-rich-seceded-from-the-united-states/