Wait. What?

It has come to my attention today that, despite my frequent politically charged posts and the proliferation of garbage that passes for news on the 24-hour news networks, many of my friends out there have absolutely no idea what just happened or why our government just shut down. That's okay. No judgment. Here's the breakdown.

Every year Congress adopts a budget. Simple enough. They decide how much money is going to be spent on different government programs for the next 12 months. That funding runs from October 1st through September 30th. If the Congress can't agree (I know, you'd think that never happens, huh? But, yeah, it totally does) on how much money they want to spend on certain government functions by October 1st, they usually agree to just keep funding those programs at the same level as the previous year. Kind of like saying, well, I know our phone budget for last year was $150 a month and we are really hoping to save some money on telephone bills this year, but until we figure out how to do that, we'd better keep planning on spending $150 a month. This is called a "Continuing Resolution." It simply lets the government continue to function until lawmakers can do what we pay them do, which is to compromise on solutions that benefit the greatest number of us, in theory.

For the last several years, a far right faction of the Republican Party has discovered that they can hold the rest of the Congress hostage by refusing to support the bills put forth by their own party or the opposing party unless their very specific demands are met exactly. This happened last year with the continuing resolution, and again with the debt ceiling increase last fall and again in December. Last year the Tea Party members of the GOP were demanding continuing tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans and refusing to allow even a small increase in tax rates for corporations or high income citizens. This year, they want to "defund" Obamacare.

Now, let me be clear. I am not a fan of the Affordable Care Act. I would have preferred a single payer system. In my opinion, requiring health insurance coverage is about 180 degrees from insuring that every American has access to affordable health care. The mere presence of health insurance companies dramatically increases the cost of care by requiring even small doctor's offices to employ a virtual army of claims processors. Insurance companies are very skilled at bleeding money out of the general population, out of Medicaid and out of Medicare. I mean, once your Medicaid claim is processed and paid, do you ever go back and examine the bill and see what the government actually paid ? Of course not. It's not your money. It got paid, and that's all that matters. Every health insurance claim I have had processed in the last 3 years required at least once call to the company to correct an error and insure that I was paying the appropriate bill, or that the doctor's office was paid the correct amount. A ridiculous chunk of my precious time was spent arguing with insurance companies over the last year to convince them that they should, in fact, pay for my health care, which is their job.

I will go on to say that, just because someone has health insurance, doesn't mean they can afford to use it. A $2,500 deductible for someone making $18,000 a year may as well be $100,000. Its more money than they will ever have available to pay for medical care. And before you say it, no, a person making $18,000 a year does NOT automatically qualify for Medicaid just because they are poor by your standard. That is technically above the poverty line and in most scenarios in North Carolina, would not qualify for Medicaid.

However, even with its inherent failures, the ACA also did several really great things, like end the lifetime caps on coverage, do away with denials of coverage based on pre-existing conditions, and make preventative care 100% free to anyone with a policy. For that reason alone, I purchased a policy. Free physical, free pap smear, free mammogram, free birth control? Bring it on, Obama! The law is flawed, terribly flawed, but it was a grand compromise designed to get the most benefit for the greatest number of people while still managing to pass both houses of Congress, which seems to take a friggin act of Congress lately!

So, the GOP says they hate the ACA and they ain't havin' it! The House is held by a GOP majority who says that the only way a continuing resolution is getting through their chamber is if we fully strip the funding provisions for the ACA. Even if this could get through the Democratic held Senate (which they know it can't), it would never be signed into law by President Obama, so really, it's just a great big game of grandstanding. Which is great. Politicians grandstand all the time. They grandstand until they come close to the brink, and then they do what we pay them do. They think and discuss and compromise and come up with a solution. But not these guys.

When their first proposal was turned down, they countered today with a provision that would have allowed your employer to claim a "conscientious" objection to your being provided with birth control. I'm sorry. Wait. What? You want my employer to be able to decide whether or not my health insurance policy will pay for my birth control? Seriously? Is this 1913? Quick, all the 20-50 year old women in the room who think birth control should be restricted, raise your hand! Anybody? Nobody? No? Didn't think so.

The GOP is going to have to get this rogue bunch of Tea Partiers under control before they sink the entire nation. And they certainly better have a quick Come-To-Jesus session with them to explain that their overarching strategy this election cycle is to overcome the appearance that they are waging a war on women. Sure looks like a war on women to me. You better keep your grubby paws off my birth control GOP, cause Lord knows I can't afford to have more children right now, and you sure as hell don't want to pay for them if I do. Sweet Baby Jesus! I cannot wait to go register voters.

From the tiniest voice, "Help! Help!"

I don't consider myself to be a radical. I don't think that my values, while more liberal than some of my friends, are so far to the left that people think, "Wow, look at that wacko. There she goes spouting off her crazy talk again." In fact, I'd like to think that I'm pretty middle of the road.

I think we need welfare reform. The current system does allow some abuses to happen, although they are not nearly as prevalent as the right-wing media would have you believe. Why is it that we still have more than 20 different kinds of "welfare" (think food stamps, cash assistance, social security, disability, Section 8 housing, Medicaid, WIC, daycare vouchers, tax credits, etc.) administered by a bakers dozen of government agencies, all with different income requirements? Why do we require every needy family to meet with administrators from each of these separate agencies to apply and then recertify for benefits every year, or multiple times a year in many cases? Why can't we simplify this process? It wouldn't be hard to create a singular federal form to apply for government benefits, similar to the way the FAFSA allows you to apply for both Federal and State education assistance, to apply for all available government assistance programs. One application should link you with all of the programs for which you qualify. And then, shudder to think, we could assign actual social workers who could help actually lift families out of poverty!

I think we need tax reform. If my congressman can't fill out his taxes without the assistance of a paid professional, the code needs to be simplified. One of the most interesting things I learned on my recent trip abroad is that filing taxes in France takes all of about 90 seconds. The income data is electronically submitted by employers. Taxpayers log on to an online system, answer a few questions, confirm the information submitted by their employer and then, press send. That's it. Done. I want that.

I want women to make their own health care decisions. Whether you agree with their decision or not, it is theirs to make. Whether or not you choose to use birth control, it is their decision to make, not yours. You certainly shouldn't have to resort to back-room political side-stepping to restrict women's access to abortions. In case you haven't ever read anything, ever, it is damn near impossible to force a women who is opposed to giving birth, to give birth, even if that resistance means that she dies in the process of seeking out a dirty, back-room abortion. Conversely, if you give women unfettered access to birth control and education, the number of abortions decrease substantially, go figure.

I think we should legalize marijuana and end the costly and unjust war on drugs. I don't smoke pot, but the people I know who do, aren't criminals and I prefer that my tax dollars not be spent housing and feeding them, when they are perfectly capable of doing that themselves.

I think we should scale way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way back on the amount of money we spend on the NSA, CIA, FBI, Army, Navy, Airforce, Marines, Homeland Security, etc, etc, etc. The truth is, we are pretty much the safest and most over-prepared country on the face of the earth. Most of the money we force down the throat of this plethora of government agencies serves only to line the pockets of shareholders in major companies supporting the war machine. If you believe in small government, lets start the shrinking process here.

I think we need to reform the way we provide subsidies to big Pharma, big Agro, and big Oil. If you gross more than $1 Billion a year, you don't need a government subsidy...for anything. Can I get a' Amen!?

I think we need to increase mandatory paid maternity leave, require paid paternity leave, and pay for pre-k for working single moms and families with two working parents. At some point, we need to recognize that there is value in providing care. Just because it's "women's work" doesn't mean we should continue to devalue it. If we valued child-rearing the same way we valued "stock-rearing," this nation would be a far, far better place to live.

I think we can find the funding to pay elementary school teachers at least as much as I pay my plumber. Lord knows they put up with just as much shit. And, if our economy has evolved so that nearly every job in the workforce requires an advanced degree, we should pay for 2-4 year college educations for everyone and ensure that our entire workforce doesn't start working with $50,000 in debt before they ever purchase a house or a car or have a baby or a major medical procedure.

While we're at it, we ought to provide universal health care. Doing so will create thousands of new jobs, and stop the hemorrhaging of money from the working class into the pockets of the health insurance industry. Obamacare is crap. The private health insurance industry has done absolutely nothing to control costs and the entire system is designed to funnel even more money from the working, middle-class in this country into the pockets of the rich and further widen the expanse that exists between the classes.

I think we should provide an exemption so that teenagers can be paid a lower minimum wage than working adults. If you, as an adult, work full-time at McDonald's or Wal-Mart to support your family, you should gross more than $1,055 a month and my tax dollars shouldn't have to pay for your food. You should be paid an actual living wage for laboring 40 hours a week. But, if you are a 16 year old teenager living at home with your parents, I'm sorry, but I think you can scrape by on $5.00 an hour instead of $7.00. Seriously, it's not gonna kill you.

While we're talking about wages, how about if we stop subsidizing billion dollar profits for companies who pay their workforce next to nothing. If 20% of your workforce qualifies for "entitlement" programs because you keep their wages so low, your company should pay a hefty tax penalty to cover the cost of those programs.

I think we should expand the earned income credit (the exact opposite of what was done in North Carolina this year when the state legislature abolished the earned income tax credit) and pay it to workers weekly instead of paying it out at the end of the year in one lump sum. Give people money to live on, money to support their families, to buy groceries and pay their electric bill instead of vacation money or tattoo money or flat-screen-tv-money.

Am I spouting off crazy talk? Have I spewed gross inaccuracies that are begging for correction? If so, please enlighten me with your comments so that I can reconssider my positions. Whether you agree with every point I make or not, surely you can agree that I do not spout off from some uninformed, entrenched, ideological viewpoint. These are well-reasoned arguments that, according to the current political paradigm, should not be allowed to all occupy the same brain. Most people I know do not easily fit into a solidly "conservative" or "liberal" box, which is itself a major national problem that we must someday address. Not that we need to all fit more nicely into the two available boxes, but that we should have far more boxes to choose from.

There are many, many topics I have not covered here, like the abolition of the estate tax in North Carolina, the inability of the US Congress to reach an agreement about imigration reform, civil rights of the LGBT community, the wholesale seizure of public water assets for the sole purpose of later privatizing the system, large scale environmental cover-ups to support fracking, etc. There seem to be so many directions to which I can shift my focus that I cannot narrow it down and write about just one thing. There are so many public misinformation campaigns going at once. There are so many problems to solve. There is so much injustice, and I am, after all, just one person. One person, with a very tiny voice, and a family and a job and very little time for protesting, or calling representatives, or writing nasty letters. I sure hope someone hears this tiny little voice, yelling out, like the Mayor to Horton, and hoping that someone hears us, down here in a tiny small town in a rural southern state, yelling, "Help, Help!"

Institutional Failures

The world's major religions share many important teachings, the most important of which is that we should give to the poor. Jesus, Buddha. Zoroastra and Ghandi all advocated living a simple life with few physical possessions and giving all that one did not need for survival to others. None of them required that we first evaluate the merit or virtue of the recipient. None of the scriptures say that we should give to the poor, but only if they are able to first demonstrate that they are really working hard to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.

In the US, we responded to these commandments by establishing a social safety net in the form of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP (Food Stamps), Public Housing & Section 8 rental assistance, unemployment and TANF (welfare). We created these programs to support the needy because we consider ourselves to be a moral society that does not want to see our brethren suffer and die in a land of plenty and excess. 

The problem is that these systems, as currently designed, disincentivize work and increased wages. This only feeds the public perception that the poor are lazy and undeserving of our assistance. In truth, there are very few people who desire to subsist only on handouts from the government. This is not a pleasant way to live. But, the programs are designed by people who have never had to use them, by bureaucrats who fail to see how one program interacts with another.  

The poor, especially the working poor, must always work to keep their earnings below the levels set by the various programs they collect so that their benefits will continue, so that they do not work themselves further into poverty. If a person is physically disabled and in desperate need of Medicaid coverage, he must apply for Social Security Disability and, once receiving that benefit, must keep his earnings less than about $500 a month. Failure to do so could mean a complete loss of lifesaving medical care. But, what if this person wants to work, at a desk, using a brain that is not so disabled? Our system doesn't allow for that, and that is a travesty. 

A working single mother offered a $.50 raise by her employer must be cognizant of the fact that her raise is going to increase her bring-home pay by less than $75.00 per month, but could result in a combined reduction of more than $100 a month in her non-cash benefits. So, she is likely to refuse a raise and remain on government programs so that she doesn't have to figure out how to make dinner with $25.00 less in groceries. This is not her fault. This is an institutional failure, a failure of the programs' designers to see how the programs are utilized in the real world.

The Earned Income Tax Credit is one of the most targeted and beneficial of our safety net programs. It is so unfortunate that NC's state legislature decided to do away with this program this year instead of finding a way for it to function in a more useful manner. It is unfortunate that our national leaders decided years ago to do away with the Advanced Earned Income Credit which allowed a wage-earner to choose to receive the tax refund incrementally over the course of the year. This again represents a failure on the part of our leadership to recognize what makes a difference for people in the real world or the way one program affects another. Currently, families can receive as much as $7,000 in EITC tax refund. This money, when added to an annual salary of $20,000 could mean a substantial increase in the family's quality of life, except that it is given in one lump sum instead of distributed over the course of the year. Not only does this fail to account for the gigantic exercise in self control you are asking of a person who has struggled for a year to make ends meet, choosing to buy bread and milk instead of paying an electric bill, who now has 4-5 months worth of take-home pay sitting in a bank account, but it also fails to account for the fact that having such a large sum of money in the bank is likely going to mean that he is suddenly disqualified from receiving any other public benefits until the money is spent. He is forced to spend this money on large purchases in a short time which does not overall increase his family's quality of life for the coming year. Again, this is not his fault, it is a failure of the system.

It doesn't have to be this way. The system could be fixed. We could take a moment and put some real thought into the design of our safety net. We could have a conversation about what we expect our safety net to provide for people. What is its purpose? What are we trying to accomplish? We could find a way to incentivize work and stop penalizing people for earning a higher wage. We could find a way to wean people off of the safety net programs without decreasing their quality of life in the process. We could streamline the administration of programs so that there is less paperwork and more person-to-person social work. We could pay a social worker to give a family the resources that will lift them out of poverty. We could help them to find those elusive bootstraps. 

"If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth." I John 3:17-18 (Christianity)

"There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore I command you to be openhanded toward your brothers and toward the poor and needy in your land." Deuteronomy 15:11 (Judaism)

"Do you know who really rejects the faith? That is the one who mistreats the orphans. And does not advocate the feeding of the poor." Quran 107:1-7 (Islam)

"One may amass wealth with hundreds of hands but one should also distribute it with thousands of hands. If someone keeps all that he accumulates for himself and does not give it to others the hoarded wealth will eventually prove to be the cause of ruin." Atharva Veda 3: 24-25 (Hinduism)

"Possessions are ephemeral and essenceless
Know this and give them generously to monks,
To brahmins, to the poor, and to your friends:
Beyond there is no greater friend than gift." Bhikshuni Thubten Chodron, from 'How to Free Your Mind: Tara the Liberator' (Buddhismn)