What’s Broke and How to Fix it?
The pandemic has exposed many of the flaws and fractures in our nation. Our social safety net is badly tattered. Our democratic institutions are severely threatened. Our economy has been seriously weakened. Racism persists and has been given new life by Donald Trump. Education is poorly performing and is highly inequitable. Our faith in our nation and each other has been broken in two.
On the flip side, we have a new President, three effective vaccines developed in record time, a sharp slowdown in the spread of Covid 19 and a recovering economy. On top of that an economic relief package appears to be imminent. The lies, misinformation and threats of Trump are in the rearview mirror, and seem to be receding; we can all at least hope it stays that way.
Safety Nets
UI (Unemployment Insurance) is for employed individuals out of work for a short time when the economy slows down, a company closes or a person loses a job. It does not pay much – a third or a quarter of your prior wages. We went from 3% unemployed to 20% unemployed in about a month. Not surprisingly the systems broke and couldn’t get out the checks; there was a lot of fraud. There was no system in place for UI for gig workers; one had to be created from scratch, which delayed their benefits for months. We still have 10% unemployed; many of them are now long term unemployed. The economic stimulus measure continues enhanced benefits at $400 per week, coverage for gig workers, and coverage for the longer term unemployed but only through the end of August.
We will need to do four things: 1) develop coverage and financing for the gig workforce, 2) update the benefit levels to provide better support for the unemployed, 3) provide better training programs to return the long term unemployed to new jobs because too many of their employers were destroyed by the pandemic and 4) fix the bureaucratic and computer messes that plague the program.
Public health is for every resident; it operates locally, statewide and nationally. We all thought CDC was the premier public health agency in the world. Yet our public health system was unable to do basic things -- timely Covid testing, contact tracing, and safely quarantining those infected in the early stages of the disease, thus allowing it to spread widely and unchecked. It experienced these difficulties for three reasons: 1) it has long been grossly underfunded and understaffed for the tasks it faced, so it was overwhelmed; 2) this was a brand new virus, and it had been over 100 years since the US faced a pandemic of similar severity; we were badly unprepared and overestimated our system’s capacity, and 3) the President was consistently providing significant misinformation, and he was misleading and poorly informing the American people about what to do to reduce the spread of the disease. Public health in many of our states is now facing grave difficulties vaccinating all Americans quickly and equitably, leaving too many of those at highest risk in avoidable peril. The Covid relief bill beefs up federal funding for tracing, testing, vaccine development and distribution through the end of the fiscal year, but does not try to effectuate the long term repairs needed for public health.
Welfare refers to an uncoordinated, extremely complicated combination of federal, state and local programs designed to make sure poor citizens have adequate nutrition and safe housing – a meal and a roof. These programs were overwhelmed, underfunded and unable to meet the needs of the many Americans who suddenly had no money to pay for the basics of survival. Eligibility is endlessly complex and bureaucratic; the programs are as full of holes as a slice of swiss cheese and highly variable from state to state. We resorted to emergency food banks with extraordinarily long lines and bans on evictions or utility shut offs to keep our American citizens from starving and becoming homeless during the pandemic. We bypassed and augmented these programs with direct Treasury checks to all individuals below certain income thresholds that temporarily helped both those in direst need and those who did not need help at all. The stimulus measure provides stop gap funding for food programs, for rental, utility and mortgage assistance, for $1400 stimulus checks and for $3000 child tax credits. These are vital short term palliatives. They do not begin to address the long term problems of hunger, homelessness and poverty in our nation, and the vast inequities between different states' programs. A $15 minimum wage and making the child tax credits permanent would make a start.
The undocumented are 11 million workers without the requisite green cards to be eligible for UI, welfare, food stamps and federal health care programs like Medicare and Medicaid. Many are essential workers in agriculture and food preparation; they pay local, state and federal taxes, but cannot vote or qualify to receive most public program benefits, including the recent Covid relief checks. Their jobs and living conditions often expose them to Covid, and they have little choice to stay home when sick because they are ineligible for most forms of public safety net assistance needed to feed their families, and because their jobs have few if any benefits attached to employment. The Biden immigration reform plan would afford them an eight-year path to citizenship.
Universal, well managed health coverage is essential to treat patients in a widespread pandemic like Covid. Covid hit the hardest at some of the lowest income populations of essential workers and their extended families, at those employed in the small restaurants and local shops. Many of them were uninsured or inadequately insured with higher copays and deductibles than they can afford to access covered services. If those who become ill are not promptly diagnosed, treated and quarantined safely, Covid infections spread quickly and widely throughout the community among the uninsured and insured alike.
The US health system, with its high copays and deductibles, with its 30 million uninsured, and its lack of organized, integrated and quickly responsive systems of health care, was poorly designed to manage an epidemic like Covid. While hospitals, doctors, nurses and emergency responders were heroic and overwhelmed in many parts of our nation, other parts of the health system were idled due to the fears of further spreading the pandemic. Patients suffered from untreated mental illness and addiction associated with their enforced isolation due to Covid and had no or limited access to the care they needed. Seriously ill patients were terrified to seek care in person due to high costs and the potential for Covid infections. In the future, we need to develop universal coverage, but we also need to develop well managed and accountable systems of care that reach every American. We will need well-integrated linkages with a much stronger and better prepared public health system. The new proposed Covid relief package helps those enrolling in the Exchanges get better, more affordable coverage and offers additional financial incentives to the states, primarily Southern, still refusing the Medicaid Expansion for the poor. Neither the Bernie/Warren plan nor the Biden plans create the well organized systems of integrated care and universal coverage we need to develop.
Democratic institutions
We experienced and survived an insurrection, a takeover of the US and Michigan Capitols, an attempt by the President and his supporters to overthrow an overwhelming election defeat, efforts to pack the nation’s courts and to suppress Americans’ votes, rampant bold faced lies and misinformation, two Congressional impeachments of one President, widespread protests against the unjustifiable killings of African-Americans, and an effort to insert and deploy a politicized military and law enforcement into the nation’s political disputes.
The nation’s voters turned out in record numbers to oust an incumbent President deploying and exceeding all of his Presidential powers in his efforts to secure his re-election. The nation’s courts rejected a multitude of baseless lawsuits by the President and his pals to overthrow his defeat. Republican elected officials in Georgia and Arizona were steadfast in upholding the decisions of their states’ voters. Some Republicans in Congress stood firm in rejecting the President’s efforts to overthrow the government, and a courageous handful were willing to impeach him for the most egregious Presidential misconduct since the nation’s founding.
In some states, Republican legislators are renewing and expanding their efforts to suppress votes and gerrymander districts to preserve and expand their control of government. In some states, the Trump wing of the party is seeking to discipline and oust the Republicans who stood fast for the rule of law, the peaceful transition of power and the US Constitution. The future path of the Republican Party and its recent allegiance of convenience with extreme right, anti-democratic, white supremacist forces are as yet unclear.
US Attorneys in the Department of Justice may be able to bring some of would-be insurrectionists to account. District Attorneys in New York, DC and Georgia might be able to hold Trump to some measure of account, but we still need to know far more about the full scope of his conduct to assess the extent of his legal culpability. We need to build and rebuild our democratic institutions to bulwark our nation against a repeat of the near miss of this past year aimed at overthrowing free and fair elections in order to preserve the rule of wanna-be God-King Trump. The House has passed and is further crafting efforts to preserve and assure American’s rights to vote in free and fair elections. The Senate outcomes are uncertain.
The economy
Our nation’s economy has become a tale of two cities. Those in the lower income rungs have been experiencing ever lower standards of living for the last 40 years, and they suffered the most during the Covid recession from disease and death, lost jobs and incomes. Those already in higher income tiers were able to work from home, maintain their incomes and further increase their wealth during the pandemic.
Prior to Covid, we in the US were losing manufacturing jobs and standards of living for those associated with the traditional industries and the manufacturing sector. At the same time, our knowledge-based industries in technology were exploding and creating vast new wealth, particularly concentrated for a few at the top, in those companies leading and riding the waves of economic change. Income inequality grew at a phenomenal pace. Economic growth was widely disparate between states in different regions of the nation. Trump was able to channel and offer a message of discontent for those losing status, jobs and incomes and for those living in the poorer states with more troubled economic prospects; however he offered no policy or programmatic solutions to the economic fracturing of the nation, only rhetorical grievance and racial scapegoating, and nativist nostrums to a global economy.
Our national challenge is to build a high growth, entrepreneurial, dynamic, competitive and more equitable society. We cannot prop up the yesterday jobs and industries, but must build for the future. GM, for example, has just gone all in phasing towards a future of electric cars. Our energy sector has to do the same and embrace the potential opportunities offered by wind and solar and electric storage batteries and a reliable nation wide power grid. Our medical system has to adopt and embrace payment and delivery system reforms, it has so long resisted.
Our educational system
We have the highest performing higher educational systems in the world and one of the poorer performing, public, elementary and secondary school systems. Our higher education systems are increasingly expensive and out of the financial reach for many Americans without substantial government assistance. Our public school systems are fraught with vast inequities between the educational opportunities offered in suburban vs. inner city schools, and between rural and city schools. Our public schools do a very good job educating white and Asian school children living in the suburbs and a very poor job educating African-American and Latino children living in inner cities. Some of the reasons for this disparate performance involve fiscal disparities between suburban schools with stronger financial bases than the inner city public schools. Some of the reasons are preferential assignments of the most experienced educators to suburban schools. Some of the reasons are the high expectations for achievement and college admissions for students in suburban schools as opposed to those in inner city schools. During the Covid pandemic and school shut downs, the poorer kids had less access to and mastery of the technology needed to succeed in remote learning settings; those in the lower grades suffered significant learning loss. We have so much to fix and severe institutional obstacles and inertia and resistance to doing so. The Covid rescue plans offer funding, but they are not attached to any programmatic improvements in our school systems.
Racism
Our country has been plagued by racism since the 17th Century – towards Native Americans, African Americans, Latinos, Asians, Middle Easterners and immigrants from Eastern, Central and Southern Europe. It has been plagued by religious discrimination against Catholics, Jews and Muslims. Yet it is founded on freedom of religion and on a religious tolerance for others not practiced in Europe at the time, and we had to fight a long and bloody civil war to end slavery and enshrine equal rights in our Constitution.
With the exception of Native Americans, we are all immigrants to this nation; we are a melting pot from many different backgrounds. And our nation has aspired, no matter how frequently imperfect the execution and backsliding, to include all Americans in its democracy and in its civic institutions.
Trump did not suddenly invent racism or nativism in our society; he simply encouraged and rewarded it with his rhetoric and conduct in office. He came on the heels of President Obama and set an image starkly at odds with all of his recent predecessors, an image that has inspired an inconceivable, cult-like devotion from his followers. The question facing all of us is how to extinguish the flames of racism and nativism he fanned so ardently and how to build a better society affording equal opportunity for all.
While we may think that racism might be at its most overt or virulent in the rural evangelical South, it is pervasive, and we cannot dispel it either by denial of its existence or by suppression of his most violent adherents. It will require effective and sustained civic education to build the nation of freedom and opportunity for all that is enshrined in our Constitution.
A broken nation
It is not surprising that certain states typically vote Democratic or Republican and others are swing states; however the degree of political rancor is at an all-time high not seen since the 60’s when civil rights and the Vietnam War divided the nation. Killings and assassinations of political and civil rights leaders were far too common then. There were nevertheless unifying media figures such as Walter Cronkite or Huntley and Brinkley, and the memories of the nation’s common sacrifice during the Second World War and the Great Depression created strong bonds.
The news is now filtered through polarizing figures. The far right wing has captured all but a small segment of the Republican Party. Truth is a casualty on the fields of partisan combat. It is hard to conceive, but many Republicans still believe Trump’s big lies that he won the last election. Extremists on the very far right want to accelerate the nation’s divisions towards a new Civil War in order to establish a white and Christian supremacy. The meanness and vitriol of political discourse has reached new levels. Certain members of Congress seek to carry their guns onto the House floor, and other members are uncertain whether they are the intended victims.
Last spring, our two parties achieved remarkable agreements in moving the first two Covid packages at warp speed to address the political and health crises. That temporary partisan ceasefire broke down soon after and continued over the rest of the spring and summer. The fall election season fractured the potential for bi-partisan deal making.
Can President Biden, who by temperament and inclination is a mild-mannered moderate trying to work across party lines, become the nation’s healer? Is there any leader emerging from the Republican Party post-Trump who can serve as Biden’s counterpart in helping to rebuild our troubled nation? Romney or Sasse? Hogan, Cheney or Kinzinger? Must a new party be built to replace the faltering and disgraced Grand Old Party?
Prepared by: Lucien Wulsin
Dated: 3/2/21