WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Dick Durbin, a senior Senate Democrat and close ally of President Barack Obama, urged fellow liberals on Tuesday to consider reforming Medicare and Medicaid, the U.S. healthcare programs they have long fought to shield from spending cuts.
The timing of his message - just as Democrats and Republicans struggling to avoid the "fiscal cliff," looming early next year - and its prominence may signal that Democratic leaders and the White House will discuss social programs at the fiscal policy negotiating table.
"Progressives should be willing to talk about ways to ensure the long-term viability of Medicare and Medicaid," which help pay for the care of the elderly and needy, Durbin said in remarks to the liberal Center for American Progress.
Most Democrats have avoided talking about making changes to Medicare and Medicaid, despite the rising costs of the two programs, which are adding mightily to U.S. budget deficits.
Durbin has recently made other high-profile remarks about reducing Medicare and Medicaid costs. Appearing on ABC's "This Week" program on Sunday, he raised the possibility of Democrats accepting Medicare reforms that would make higher-income seniors pay more for their care.
Durbin said on Tuesday, however, that the debate over Medicare and Medicaid should not be part of the solving the immediate fiscal problem - the convergence of sharp tax increases and deep federal spending cuts set for January. Economists warn that going over this fiscal cliff could put the U.S. into a recession.
Durbin has suggested a two-step process: avert the cliff now and agree to a framework to find savings from Medicare and Medicaid with the details to be worked out next year.
Obama and congressional Democrats want to raise income taxes only on the wealthy and Durbin said liberals need to offer concrete ways to rein in spending, as well.
"We can't be so naive to believe that just taxing the rich will solve our (fiscal) problems," Durbin said.
Durbin repeated the Democrats' position that most tax cuts enacted in 2001 should be extended, but tax cuts given to those with income above $250,000 should expire. If Congress fails to act, tax rates for all income groups will rise.
Republicans could block any bill that does not extend all tax cuts, but this risks playing into Democrats' hands. After January 1, with all tax cuts expired, Democrats could draft a bill that cuts taxes only for those earning below $250,000, cranking up pressure on Republicans to go along.
One controversial proposal to shore up Medicare finances the to raise the age at which seniors start receiving benefits. Durbin said he was concerned that those with health problems in the years before Medicare kicks in may struggle to get coverage.
Democrats say manual laborers and people with health problems before eligibility age are at risk. Durbin cited his brother, who had a heart attack before qualifying for Medicare at age 65.
"My very conservative Republican brother, who had no use for social programs, started counting the days until he was eligible for Medicare," Durbin said.
"If anybody wants to talk about a later eligibility age for Medicare, what I want to hear is the assurance and guarantee that people like my brother will have access to affordable health care and insurance," before they reach the age, he said.
Echoing the stance of Obama and other Democrats, Durbin said changes to Social Security are needed but since the retirement benefits program did not contribute to the deficit problem, it should be tackled separately.
He proposed a new bipartisan commission to recommend a plan to keep Social Security solvent for the next 75 years. Congress should be required to vote on the changes, he said. Such a panel shored up the pension program in the mid-1980s.
(Reporting by Thomas Ferraro, Kim Dixon and David Morgan; Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh and Jackie Frank)
As rival lawmakers struggle to avoid the dreaded fiscal cliff in Washington, research shows that Americans will get a huge cut in their take-home pay if Congress can?t reach a deal on tax hikes and spending cuts.
In basic terms, the fiscal cliff is a set of dramatic tax increases and government program spending cuts that would decrease the annual deficit run up by the federal government.
It was put into a debt-negotiation process by lawmakers as a ?poison pill,? an alternative so politically toxic that it would force Democrats and Republicans to agree, or face an angry mob of voters.
But an agreement was never reached in 2011, and now, the stark tax increases and spending cuts become law on January 1, 2013, unless a bipartisan agreement can be reached or the problem is pushed back into the hands of a new Congress.
The math behind the fiscal cliff can be quite complicated, but to see why politicians are scrambling to find a solution now, you only need to look at how the cliff would suck money out of voters? paychecks, if the fiscal cliff goes unchecked.
As a rule, Americans don?t like taxes, and they don?t like dramatic tax actions. Look back at the original Tea Party in Boston as an example.
A study from the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution, shows that tax hikes triggered by the cliff will ?dock the pay? of 90 percent of Americans.
?Taxes would rise by more than $500 billion in 2013?an average of almost $3,500 per household?as almost every tax cut enacted since 2001 would expire. Middle-income households would see an average increase of almost $2,000,? the group said in an October 2012 report.
The telling factor in the Center?s report is that after-tax income will fall in every tax bracket, at an average of 6.2 percent.
In other words, instead of getting a 6 percent raise in 2013, you?d have your take-home pay docked 6 percent, before your employer even had a chance to give you a raise.
About 40 million Americans in the lowest fifth of the economy would see take-home income fall 3.7 percent. Taxpayers in the top fifth of the economy would see a 7.7 percent drop. Middle income tax payers would see take-home income fall by 4.4 percent.
Fiscal Cliff Changes in Take-Home Pay
Percent
Dollars
Lowest quintile
-3.7%
$??????? 412
Second quintile
-4.5%
$??? 1,231
Middle quintile
-4.4%
$??? 1,984
Fourth quintile
-5.1%
$??? 3,540
Top quintile
-7.7%
$? 14,173
Average
-6.2%
$??? 3,446
The tax changes hit Americans from all angles. The biggest hit is from the expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts, but there are also Obama-era tax cuts and credits that expire.
There will be tax penalties for married couples and for families with children. And the dreaded Alternative Minimum Tax is in the mix, which would increase taxes for 22 million people.
So income taxes would go up, payroll taxes would go up, and estate taxes and dividend taxes would go up.
And there is a new tax to pay for the Affordable Care Act.
If there is a silver lining, the federal government would bring in an extra $536 billion in 2013 to use for deficit reduction. About 54 percent of that money would come from ending the Bush-era tax cuts and from new payroll taxes.
The health-care tax would take up about 5 percent of the overall tax hikes.
To get a different look at how the tax changes would affect your family, the Tax Foundation has an online calculator that lets you put in your income and deductions and see your actual tax hike under different scenarios.
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The Foundation has its critics, which say it is a conservative-leaning group.
But when we added data from the calculator on a married couple, with two children, making $60,000 annually, the tax-home pay number was similar to the information from the Tax Policy Center.
In most middle-income scenarios, the Foundation calculator shows take-home income falling by about 5 percent.
Its calculator also lets you pick different scenarios for dependents and dropping the Alternative Minimum Tax.
For now, President Obama and House leader John Boehner aren?t speaking, and the Democrats and Republicans are presenting the tax and spending plans to Americans, in advance of a big congressional showdown in December.
Obama is committed to extending tax cuts for the middle class and hiking taxes on wealthier citizens. The GOP is committed to deep spending cuts in ?entitlement? programs as part of any fiscal cliff bargain, which would include sparse tax hikes.
The most anxious watchers are Wall Street and its partners in the global economy, which are very much aware of Congressional Budget Office projections of a 2013 recession if the fiscal cliff goes into effect.
Oil prices fell Tuesday as traders remained unsure whether positive U.S. economic news signals an increase in fuel demand.
Traders weighed news that might have been expected to push oil prices higher. U.S. holiday spending and consumer confidence both rose. And negotiations over the next installment on Greece's bailout proved successful.
However, some analysts warned that it's still not clear that demand for oil is picking up.
Oil prices could get a short-term lift from the Greece deal, said Edward Bell, a commodities analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit. Indeed, oil rose in overnight trading after the Greek deal was announced, before prices turned negative in morning trading in the U.S. Crude oil was down 31 cents to $87.43 in afternoon trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
"The eurozone has not yet escaped its economic woes and there are no clear signs of a recovery in demand, meaning we expect there will be a drag on oil prices going into 2013," Bell said.
At the pump, the national average for a gallon of regular fell a fraction of a penny from Monday's price to $3.419, according to AAA.
Brent crude, which is used to set prices for many international varieties of oil, fell 60 cents to $110.32 a barrel on London's ICE Futures exchange.
In other energy futures trading on the Nymex:
? Wholesale gasoline for December delivery rose 2 cents to $2.75 a gallon.
? Natural gas rose 3 cents to $3.76 per 1,000 cubic feet.
Sunday November 25, 2012, 9:27 am ( Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com/djgis)
You can call them ?unaffiliated,? as in a recent Pew poll, or ?nones? -- or even just ?not very religious.? A new poll by the Public Religion Research Institute divides this group further (and somewhat counterintuitively) into ?unattached,? ?atheists/agnostics,? and ?seculars.? But whatever you call them, this ever-growing cohort of unchurched Americans makes up, at 23 percent, the single largest segment of Barack Obama?s ?religious coalition? (compared to the 37 percent of white evangelicals who support Mitt Romney).
While we have yet to see a ?Seculars for Obama? bumper sticker, the unaffliated are clearly having a moment. Media analysis, however, has not gone very deep -- there is a story here that goes beyond names and numbers.
Recent sociological work from Courtney Bender, Christian Smith, and others does help us understand who the current crop of unaffiliated are and what they do and believe. Yet we have precious little historical understanding of this critical and growing demographic. What are their roots? What religious, cultural, economic, demographic, and political processes shaped their sensibilities, habits, and makeup?
In order to understand these still-believing ?nones,? we need to understand that much of the religious dynamism in the United States happens outside the church walls, and has for some time now. The ?rise of the nones? is but the latest phase in the long transformation of religion into what we now commonly call ?spirituality.? In my class on ?Spirituality in America? at the University of Virginia, we use Leigh Schmidt?s pathbreaking Restless Souls to trace this phenomenon over two centuries, from Ralph Waldo Emerson?s break with New England Unitarianism in the 1830s to the multibillion dollar spirituality industry of today.
Spirituality can mean many things, of course, and the language of spirituality is used by traditional religious adherents as well as the religiously unaffiliated. But only the ?nones? have made it into a clich?: ?spiritual but not religious.?
The history of American spirituality reveals that our commonplace understanding of spirituality?as the individual, experiential dimension of human encounter with the sacred?arose from the clash of American Protestantism with the forces of modern life in the nineteenth century. While religious conservatives fought to stem the tide, giving rise to fundamentalism, religious liberals adapted their faith to modernity, often by discarding orthodoxies in favor of Darwinism, psychology, and comparative religions.
The majority of today?s religious ?nones? -- those who claim no religion but still embrace spirituality -- are engaged in the same task of renovating their faith for a new historical moment. And typically, they draw from this same liberal religious toolkit. Today?s unaffiliated, like the liberals of previous generations, typically shun dogma and creed in favor of a faith that is practical, psychologically attuned, ecumenical -- even cosmopolitan -- and ethically oriented.
This liberal spirituality, as it has evolved over time, has been deeply entwined with media-oriented consumerism. Of course Americans of all religious varieties have been deeply influenced by consumerism, but media and markets have particularly shaped the religious lives of those without formal institutional or community ties. The religiously unaffiliated might not attend services, but they ?do? their religion in many other ways: they watch religion on TV and listen to it on the radio; find inspiration on the web; attend retreats, seminars, workshops, and classes; buy candles and statues, bumper stickers and yoga pants; take spiritually motivated trips; and, perhaps most significantly, buy and read books.
Since the 1920s, when the major New York trade presses first started offering nonsectarian religious books in significant numbers, books have been the most important conduit for spreading the ?spiritual but not religious? gospel.
This dependency on the consumer marketplace, and especially books, has had significant consequences for the religious lives of all Americans, especially the unaffiliated. First, it has enhanced the tendencies within American religion toward a therapeutic understanding of the spiritual life. The profit-oriented commercial presses that came to dominate religious publishing naturally pursued the largest market possible for their goods, and seized on the non-creedal, nonsectarian, and psychologically modern forms of faith advanced by religious liberals as a common American religious vernacular. These trends have only accelerated from the 1920s to the present, such that now the line between religion and self-help disappears in the spirituality section of Barnes & Noble.
Second, spiritual consumerism has fostered a robust cosmopolitanism. Books allow readers entry into previously unimaginable religious worlds. Since trade presses entered the religion game with vigor, the lines of denomination and tradition have mattered less and less. The political and moral imperatives of World War II provided the greatest stimulus to such interfaith reading, and before long even the Protestant-Catholic-Jew formulation of the era could not contain American readers. What matters to the unaffiliated is not imprimatur but inspiration.
The Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith has observed, ?Liberal Protestantism?s organizational decline has been accompanied by and is in part arguably the consequence of the fact that liberal Protestantism has won a decisive, larger cultural victory.? The ?cultural victory? Smith and others write about happened not because more Americans joined liberal churches, in other words, but because liberal religious values and sensibilities became more and more culturally normative. And no single cultural force has been more significant to this profound religious shift than the unabashed consumerism of the religious book business in the twentieth century.
Even as religious affiliations decline, religious books sales continue to rise, as they have steadily for more than a half century. In this ultimate spiritual marketplace, American religion displays its full shape-shifting vitality.
****
by: Matthew S. Hedstrom is assistant professor of religious studies and American studies at the University of Virginia | alternet |
**The article is reprinted with permission from Religion Dispatches.
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