Over at Bloomberg, Christopher Flavelle asks the excellent question “Why Are Corporate Titans So Clueless at Politics?” Chris covered a recent Business Roundtable shindig, and here’s what he has to say:
The Business Roundtable, an association of chief executive officers of the largest U.S. companies, held a lunch for reporters this week on what’s wrong with the economy. A better question might be what’s wrong with the country’s chief executives.
In the face of persistently high unemployment and slow economic growth, the two executives hosting the lunch (the Roundtable insisted they not be identified) didn’t talk about this year’s government spending cuts, the best course for monetary policy or even reducing regulations. Instead, they talked about their plan to cut Social Security and Medicare, which they called a drag on economic growth.
Chris points out that the argument that SS&M are causing our current economic woes is “tenuous at best.” Furthermore, the Roundtable’s “plan” for reforming Medicare, which includes boosting the retirement age to 70, is a political non-starter that would gag a horse. According to Chris,
If business leaders really wanted to shore up Medicare, they could throw their weight behind cost-cutting mechanisms that are already in law but face enormous political opposition, such as the board of experts charged with limiting the rise in Medicare spending to just 1 percent more than gross domestic product growth. If they really wanted to ensure Social Security’s solvency, they could support eliminating the cap on income subject to the Social Security tax, which now stands at $113,700.
I’d go a lot further than that. If business leaders were serious about their incessant claims about impending financial disaster (which they totally aren’t), they could do the following:
—Support a dramatic reduction in the grossly swollen defense budget. Cutting defense spending by 25 percent would make the U.S. safer and stronger. Cutting it by 50 percent would be even better.
—Renounce all subsidies, not in vague terms, but specifically. Work aggressively for the elimination of farm subsidies, energy subsidies, every subsidy that every Democrat and every Republican ever came up with.
—Recognize with both President Obama and “thoughtful” conservatives like Ramesh Ponnuru that we don’t have a “Medicare” crisis; we have a health care spending crisis. Increases in health insurance costs are absorbing almost all of the income increases that are trickling down to the trickle-down class, so that most Americans have no more spending power than they did a decade ago or even more. CEOs who supposedly believe in “markets” might notice that the major players in health care—doctors, hospitals, insurance companies, and drug companies—all hate free competition and have worked aggressively for the past half century and more to eliminate it from health care.
Of course, the Business Roundtable types keep their mouths shut about these issues, because they don’t want to step on anyone’s toes. That is to say, they don’t want to step on the toes of anyone important. If you’re a nobody, they’ll stomp you like a son of a bitch.
Afterwords
The “ultimate villain”—or at least one of them—in America’s ongoing health care crisis is, alas, the “average” American. Most Americans want what most Americans have—an extravagant health care system that they don’t have to pay for. That is to say, tax-free health insurance through their employer, or Medicare, which is health care for old retired folks subsidized by young working folks. Among the young, the fact that that insurance is sucking up money that could go into their pocket as income doesn’t really sink in. And, of course, trying to make people bear the real costs of their health insurance by removing the subsidy would be really unpopular. Because for 90 percent of the population, health care “reform” means “my health costs go down.” I don’t expect even the Business Roundtable to come up with a quick and easy solution to that one.
