Snagged this one from BoingBoing, and it tells a pretty hilarious tale. Head over there to see each charge in larger glory, but all in all it boils down to this: for as much as the US healthcare industry and Republicans in congress want you to believe that everything is just fine the way it is and we shouldn’t change anything, and that all of these pharmaceutical companies and health care industry groups have our best interests at heart and well…they must, right, considering everything is just so much more expensive here than it is in every other first-world nation on the planet.

Or as noted by BoingBoing:

s Jay Livingston of the Montclair SocioBlog says, “Our Lipitor must be four to ten times a good as the Lipitor that Canadians take.”

[ Charts Showing How Much US Residents Pay for Health Care Compared to People in Other Countries ]
Source: The International Federation of Health Plans (courtesy of BoingBoing)

Let’s start this off with the facts: first reported by the AP and quickly denounced by conservatives and conservative media as somehow being lapdogs of the White House, but then independantly verified and picked up by dozens of other news entities (thus as usual, leaving conservatives out in the cold whining again when the truth doesn’t match up with their world view), we got the following good news last week:

Some 640,000 jobs exist nationwide as a direct result of the government’s record economic stimulus program, the Obama administration reported Friday.

The White House released a detailed tally, allowing Americans to see how many jobs have been saved or created in their own state or ZIP code. California and North Carolina were among the states reaping the most jobs so far, on a per capita basis. Both those states have higher-than-average unemployment rates, and the administration highlighted this pattern.

“The Recovery Act is creating jobs where they are needed the most,” White House economist Jared Bernstein said in a report accompanying the data, which are viewable at http://www.recovery.gov/Pages/home.aspx.

According to the Christian Science Monitor’s initial review of the data, the White House report found that $159 billion in stimulus spending is providing nearly 2100 jobs for every million people in the country. That number, again, reflects direct impacts reported by states and businesses receiving the money.

California and North Carolina have each reaped more than 3,000 jobs per million people.

Now that’s the good news. The better news is that because the stimulus money has been coming out at a slow but steady pace – exactly the bane of conservative politicians who have been whining that it hasn’t done enough or moved fast enough – these jobs are jobs that will have funding for a while, and there are even more jobs that will be saved or created because there’s more money in the tap – a lot more.

But the picture isn’t completely rosy, and a number of areas around the country, including some where the local legislatures and politicians have resisted spending stimulus cash, lag behind in job creation even though the money is there to use:

Although the White House appears to be correct that many hard-hit states have reaped above-average job gains, some states with higher-than-average unemployment lag behind. Florida shows about 1,600 jobs per million residents, and Ohio 1,500. Michigan and Nevada, hit hard by an automotive recession and housing slump, respectively, report job gains that are barely above average.

Friday’s White House report covers much of the spending that has occurred under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act this year, but not all. It includes federal contracts and grants to states.

The report does not track the impact of expanded safety net programs (like unemployment insurance), tax cuts, or small business lending. Those programs are also having an impact on US consumer spending and hence on jobs.

Western states fared well.

The states with the biggest job gains, on a per capita basis, are Montana and Washington State (both with more than 5,000 per million residents). Alaska came in third. The states showing the fewest jobs were Texas and Pennsylvania, with about 800 and 600 jobs per million residents, respectively.

Teaching and construction jobs made up a large share of all jobs saved or created under the stimulus, thanks largely to aid flowing to state and local governments.

In a conference call with reporters, administration officials said the jobs also flowed in some cases to areas with lots of federal facilities (including the District of Columbia) or nuclear-waste cleanups under way.

Stay tuned to this story, there’s more to come, and while it’ll all be good news because jobs will be saved or created, the trick is going to be WHERE those jobs are saved and created, and whether it’ll actually come out that some of these districts that need the most help but are represented by conservatives that would rather leave the cash on the table than help the people they claim to represent could have fared better if they had made use of the available funds.

[ Economic Stimulus: Which States have Gained the Most Jobs ]
Source: The Christian Science Monitor

This piece was particularly timely, as everyone, especially libertarians who would rather not see their government spend money on anything, especially the well being of its citizens, if it means they can have more money to stuff their mattresses with, debate the costs of some of the critical measures that the President and Congress have in front of them right now.

Everything from action on climate change to health care have a price tag associated with them, and industry groups usually trot out the same scare tactics to try and frighten politicians into backing away from their initiatives: “It’ll cost money, and probably jobs!”

Protip for the politically uninitiated: you can usually tell who’s on the wrong side of the argument if they say that doing nothing, or worse, going backwards, is the best option because the alternative will cost money, cost jobs, or make things harder for “Joe Six-Pack.” The same held true for the bailouts, the same holds true for environmental legislation and for health care. But why do they ring so clearly?

Simple: because depending on which side of the political spectrum the economists you drag out line up with, they can come up with worst-case scenarios where our grandchildren are faced with massive deficits, higher taxes, and a huge debt to some amorphous foreign interest (the Chinese are this decade’s favorite target – in the 80s it was the Japanese) they’ll have to essentially go into indentured servitude to pay back. You can already hear it in the voices of some economists on the radio: they happily cash their checks from The Enterprise Institute and The Cato Institute and claim that someday down the road our children’s children’s children will pay massive taxes in order to keep these social programs – you know, like access to the care and services that our neighbors in Europe already have – alive.

The funny thing is that while every country has its social and political problems, health care is one of the more managable for some of our European counterparts. As with education and other social services, those people have an understanding that the common good is worth a little more out of the individual paycheck – especially if it means that they money they give to the government to pay for services will result in not getting ever escalating bills from the so-called free market. Add to this that the doom-and-gloomers almost never do a benefit analysis to compare the recovered costs on the back end to escalated costs on the front end – as in, how do I save money over time – and there you have it.

It’s a scare tactic, pure and simple, and it always has been. Ever since progressive politicians were labeled “tax and spenders,” and ever since taxation got a bad name, it’s been this way. The conservative right and the free-marketeers all over the political map have used the threats of debt to scare people into doing nothing to improve their personal situations, and politicians to do nothing to improve our local, state, and national situations. It has to stop. Robert Borosage, writing for the Campaign for America’s Future, says:

We’ve got a new red scare. Forget Glenn Beck; the fear isn’t that America is going red, it’s that it is in the red. Conservatives in both parties are raising alarms about deficits and government spending. Well, get over it. If we are going to generate growth and shared prosperity out of the mess we are in, expanded public investment must be a centerpiece of the new economy.

In today’s Washington, this verges on heresy. The chattering classes are raising a clamor about Obama’s deficits. The growing fixation, fanned by conservatives in both parties, may well cripple any short-term recovery. Worse, the wrong-headed debate could well undermine the reforms vital to the new economy we need to build out of the ruins of the old.

Both parties still pay tribute to false idols that should have been discarded in the recent economic collapse. Republicans rail against everything Obama, chanting, “Where are the jobs?” while calling for rolling back the stimulus, abandoning health care reform, cutting spending and, no surprise, more tax cuts. They seem to have learned nothing from the crisis. Sure, they claim that they have put aside their fiscally wastrel ways, blaming it all on Bush, and have become born-again fiscal conservatives.

But this leaves them in the bizarre posture of arguing that “deficits don’t matter” when the economy is growing, but are unacceptable when the economy is sinking. Step on the gas when the economy is already racing and on the brake when it is sputtering. The perpetually tanned leader of House Republicans, John Boehner, clearly believes that Americans have neither memory nor common sense. The continued high disregard that most Americans have for Republican legislators suggests otherwise.

But conservative Democrats of various ilk—the corporate New Dems, the old-boy Blue Dogs—echo the Republican fears, using the recession-driven deficits to revive their efforts to force cuts in “entitlements” (read: Social Security and Medicare). This is both bad policy and bad politics.

In reality, the world has changed.

That it has, Borosage, that it has. It’s time we threw away this old world-view that somehow we’re a nation without communities, and without responsibilities to each other.

[ The New Red-Ink Scare ]
Source: Campaign for America’s Future

As much as the far-right and the anti-everything camp would like you to believe that the inclusion of a public option in health care reform is somehow the will of the Congress being bent to the will of the progressive movement, this isn’t about the progressive movement at all – this is about the will of the American people, who overwhelmingly support a public health insurance program that can cover all Americans, give them the choice to opt out if they don’t want to be a part, challenge corporate health insurers to stop abusing their customers, and in the end cut costs of coverage and access to health care and save the American people money.

But you won’t hear that in the shouting, nonsensical talking points from the right, and you won’t hear it from the so-called independent thinkers among the Libertarians and free marketeers – the same folks who would rather let a boardroom decide whether they live or die, eat or starve, or breathe air or toxins, all in the name of the free market, each with their own series of talking points they like to parrot.

The truth is that the American people simply got fed up with the nonsense they saw: people comparing the President to Hitler, shotuing racist epithets at the President of the United States, threatening to kill him, and so on – all from people who claim to be their countrymen and have their own communal best interests at heart. It was clear to the American people that these fringe few were both completely ignorant of the situation, ignorant of their own condition, and ignorant of the facts. And thus the tide turned, and people came out to support universal access and availability to health care for every American man, woman, and child – the American people decided that the costs of such were nothing compared to both the dollars and cents and the human costs of doing nothing.

And the American people spoke:

Today, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced he would submit a health care reform bill with a national public option that states could choose not to join.

This is how democracy is supposed to work. The highest ranking member of Senate was able to hear the will of America’s progressive majority over the din of the insurance lobby and the right-wing noise machine, and was responsive to the majority.

But that’s mere idealism. From a practical standpoint, this is how the modern progressive movement is
supposed to work.

In 1993, there was no significant progressive movement putting positive pressure on the Clinton Administration. Many naively assumed having a Democratic president and Congress was enough, the hard work was done, and we could kick back with a Crystal Pepsi and let democracy work its magic.
We learned the conservative minority had many tricks up its sleeve, and was able to smear and fear to death any attempt at major progressive reform.

The election of a uniquely compelling figure in President Barack Obama threatened to bring back some of that complacency. A false notion persists in some corners that the President should be able “ram through” any legislation he likes.

But Obama himself has always stressed that real change is too hard to be accomplished by one person, even the President. Without a progressive movement pushing good ideas, debunking conservative information and countering special interest pressure, any attempt at reform will suffer the right-wing meat grinder, spooking even the biggest congressional majority from acting.

Over the last several years, the infrastructure of a modern progressive movement has been falling into place. There may be plenty of kinks to work out, but the movement has been making its mark.

Bill Scher, writing for the Campaign for America’s Future pins the credit on the American progressive movement, but I’d take that a step further – it has less to do with the American progressive movement and more to do with the will of the American people who – after all – are and always have been some of the most progressive on the planet, despite what conservatives would have you believe.

[ Public Option: This Is How It's Supposed To Work ]
Source: Campaign for America’s Future