Thank you for standing up against unnecessary war,
advocating for Epstein’s victims, and for defending the spiritual side of
Christianity against Trump’s recent blasphemy. Our mutual friend Congressman Ro Khanna (who you worked
with on the Epstein legislation) reached out to you a few months ago about
dropping by on my radio/TV program to have a friendly conversation; I haven’t
heard back but figured I’d reach out this way to suggest some things we could
discuss.
You’re one of the few high-profile Republicans who’s
not only disagreed with Trump on policy but has also clearly seen through his
con-man façade of competence and, frankly, sanity. Well, done! But let’s go a
bit farther and talk policy, including a few areas where we may even agree…
Healthcare
America spends about twice as much as any other developed
country in the world on healthcare, yet we have a lower lifespan and poorer
outcomes than any other similar nation.
We spend about $14,885 per person per
year, while the average among other developed countries is about $5,967 (according to the OECD). Even Mexico, President
Sheinbaum announced this week, will have comprehensive free national
healthcare (including drugs) within 2 years.
Some of your Republican colleagues will say our poor
outcomes are because we have “too many Black people” (referencing Prudential’s
Frederick Hoffman’s old “genetically inferior Blacks” story that dominated
healthcare and insurance policy in the 1910-1965 era covered in detail in my book on the Hidden History of American Healthcare). I’ve had
several conservatives reference that old canard when they’ve come on my show.
But that’s just a racist myth, and the proof is that these numbers hold for
poor whites, too; just look at the numbers in overwhelmingly white West
Virginia, for example.
As a conservative, I’d guess you’d be outraged by the
billions of our healthcare dollars that are being shoveled into the money bins
of the insurance and hospital giants.
Your colleague Senator Rick Scott, for
example, ran a hospital chain convicted of the largest Medicare fraud in American
history at the time and walked away from it with hundreds of millions in his
money bin; it financed his run for governor and senator from Florida. “Dollar
Bill” McGuire, the first CEO of United Healthcare, left with over $1.5 billion from his gig (although he had to
return a few hundred million to avoid going to jail for fraud).
The Medicare Advantage scam is costing Americans billions
a year, and that profit all goes directly to the stockholders and executives of
massive insurance companies.
And now Trump is inserting for-profit insurance
companies into real Medicare in 6 states as an “experiment” and Dr. Oz is talking about replacing real Medicare with Advantage plans as the
default when people turn 65. Millions of dollars are going into the pockets of
politicians of both parties (but mostly Republicans) who support this fleecing
of the American people.
If America just did what every other developed country in
the world has done, we’d preserve a fortune and save an estimated 68,000 lives and a half-trillion-dollars a year. And,
as any EU citizen can tell you, the service will be better! That seems like
something a conservative could get behind.
Education
America is the only country in the developed world where
a person goes deeply into debt to get an education.
An advanced degree can
create a debt that takes decades to pay off, and is preventing young people
from getting married, buying a home, starting a family, and discouraging
would-be entrepreneurs like yourself from starting a small business.
When we gave returning GIs from WWII free college, almost 8 million young men and women not only got free
tuition from the 1944 GI Bill but also received a stipend to pay for room,
board, and books like about half of Europe’s countries do today. And the
result — the return on our government’s investment in those 8 million
educations — was substantial.
The best book on that time and subject is Edward
Humes’ Over Here: How the GI Bill Transformed the American Dream, summarized by Mary Paulsell for the Columbia Daily
Tribune: “[That] groundbreaking legislation gave our nation 14
Nobel Prize winners, three Supreme Court justices, three presidents, 12
senators, 24 Pulitzer Prize winners, 238,000 teachers, 91,000 scientists,
67,000 doctors, 450,000 engineers, 240,000 accountants, 17,000 journalists,
22,000 dentists and millions of lawyers, nurses, artists, actors, writers,
pilots and entrepreneurs.”
When people have an education, they not only raise the
competence and vitality of a nation; they also earn more money, which
stimulates the economy. Because they earn more, they pay more in taxes, which
helps pay back the government for the cost of that education.
In 1952 dollars, the GI Bill’s educational benefit cost
the nation $7 billion. The increased economic output over the next 40 years
that could be traced directly to that educational cost was $35.6 billion, and
the extra taxes received from those higher-wage-earners was $12.8 billion.
In other words, the US government invested $7 billion and got a $48.4 billion return on
that investment, about a $7 return for every $1 invested.
In addition, that educated workforce made it possible for
America to lead the world in innovation, R&D, and new business development
for three generations. We invented the transistor, the integrated circuit, the
internet, new generations of miracle drugs, sent men to the moon and reshaped
science. Wouldn’t any rational conservative agree with former
Republican President Eisenhower and his Vice President Richard Nixon that
that’s a good deal for America?
I realize the big banks who make billions in
profits from all that student debt regularly pour millions into the coffers of
your Republican colleagues, but shouldn’t America’s interest and that of
hard-working Americans come first?
Taxes
When Ronald Reagan came into office in 1981, two-thirds
of Americans were in the middle class and could get and stay there with a
single paycheck. Today it’s only 43 percent of us who qualify for
that, and, to add insult to injury, it takes two paychecks to get there. In
large part that’s because of Republican “trickle down” economics.
When Reagan came into office, the top tax rate on the
morbidly rich was 74% and corporations 50%. That encouraged wealthy people to
make tax-deductible donations to charity and stop taking money out of their
companies after the first three million or so a year (in today’s dollars)
when the top rates began to kick in. Billionaires weren’t even a thing, mostly,
at the time; now we have a guy who’s about to become a trillionaire.
CEOs and senior managers often lived in the same
neighborhoods as their workers, although their homes were a bit spiffier. Just
look at old sitcoms from the ‘50s and ‘60s and you’ll see what I mean. It also
encouraged companies to invest their surplus money into R&D, new products
and expansion, and better wages and benefits for their workers (all
tax-deductions that helped them avoid paying corporate income taxes). Today,
instead, since Reagan legalized stock buybacks (it used to be a
felony called “stock price manipulation”), CEOs recycle their companies’ money
into buybacks to artificially inflate the value of the stock and thus their
bonuses.
When Reagan came into office in 1981, the total
national debt was about $800 billion — less than one trillion dollars — and had
been going down every year since the end of WWII. If you add up the total value
of Reagan tax cuts, the GW Bush tax cuts, and both sets of Trump tax cuts — all
heavily weighted toward the obscenely rich — you’ll discover that the number is
well north of the current $38 trillion of our national debt.
In other words, under those three Republican presidents
America borrowed — in your name, my name, and our kids’ and grandkids’ names —
$38 trillion and handed it all to the Musks and Zuckerbergs and Bezos of our
country so these “Masters of the Universe” could compete to see who could build
the largest mega-yacht, shoot themselves highest into outer space on
penis-shaped rockets, or build the most elaborately outfitted doomsday bunker.
If we went back to the tax rates we had when Reagan
came into office, working class people would see a major tax break, the
morbidly rich would have to again pay their fair share, and corporations would
once again be incentivized to innovate their products and pay their employees
enough to revive the middle class.
Wouldn’t a reasonable conservative think that’s a good
deal for America? Eisenhower and Nixon certainly did; even Republican President
Jerry Ford agreed and kept the top tax rate at 90%.
There are multiple other issues we could discuss and
probably agree on. They include the benefits of:
— Building out public transportation like China, Japan,
South Korea, and most of Europe have done.
— Cleaning up our air and water to save lives and slow down these
increasingly deadly weather disasters (you do believe in science, right?).
— Protecting our public lands from greedy fossil fuel billionaires.
— Passing Republican James Langford’s immigration legislation to get
undocumented people out of the country without brutality while
cleaning up our immigration mess going forward.
— Getting off our addiction to fossil fuels and the Middle East.
— And even the “small government” idea of letting queer people and
non-Christians simply live their lives in peace and quiet.
We can discuss these things or any issue you’d like; you
can also talk directly to my listeners and viewers all across the country.
Every week members of Congress come on my show for a full hour to take calls
from listeners; you’re welcome to do the same, too, if you’d like. Bernie
Sanders did that every week for 11 years. Ro Khanna is one of my regulars and
has been for years; he can tell you all about it.
Hoping to hear from you,
—Thom Hartmann
