The Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama [85]
The same principles are at work when it comes to the Administration’s efforts to encourage a shift from employer- or government-based health-care plans to individual Health Savings Accounts. The idea might make sense if the lump sum each individual received were enough to buy a decent health-care plan through his employer, and if that lump sum kept pace with inflation of health-care costs. But what if you work for an employer who doesn’t offer a health-care plan? Or what if the Administration’s theory on health-care inflation turns out to be wrong—if it turns out that health-care costs aren’t due to people’s cavalier attitude toward their health or an irrational desire to purchase more than they need? Then “freedom to choose” will mean that employees bear the brunt of future increases in health care, and the amount of money in their Health Savings Accounts will buy less and less coverage each year.
In other words, the Ownership Society doesn’t even try to spread the risks and rewards of the new economy among all Americans. Instead, it simply magnifies the uneven risks and rewards of today’s winner-take-all economy. If you are healthy or wealthy or just plain lucky, then you will become more so. If you are poor or sick or catch a bad break, you will have nobody to look to for help. That’s not a recipe for sustained economic growth or the maintenance of a strong American middle class. It’s certainly not a recipe for social cohesion. It runs counter to those values that say we have a stake in each other’s success.
It’s not who we are as a people.
FORTUNATELY, THERE’S AN alternative approach, one that recasts FDR’s social compact to meet the needs of a new century. In each area where workers are vulnerable—wages, job loss, retirement, and health care—there are good ideas, some old and some new, that would go a long way toward making Americans more secure.
Let’s start with wages. Americans believe in work—not just as a means of supporting themselves but as a means of giving their lives purpose and direction, order and dignity. The old welfare program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, too often failed to honor this core value, which helps explain not only its unpopularity with the public but also why it often isolated the very people it was supposed to help.
On the other hand, Americans also believe that if we work full-time, we should be able to support ourselves and our kids. For many people on the bottom rungs of the economy—mainly low-skilled workers in the rapidly growing service sector—this basic promise isn’t being fulfilled.
Government policies can help these workers, with little impact on market efficiency. For starters, we can raise the minimum wage. It may be true—as some economists argue—that any big jumps in the minimum wage discourage employers from hiring more workers. But when the minimum wage hasn’t been changed in nine years and has less purchasing power in real dollars than it did in 1955, so that someone working full-time today in a minimum-wage job doesn’t earn enough to rise out of poverty, such arguments carry less force. The Earned Income Tax Credit, a program championed by Ronald Reagan that provides low-wage workers with supplemental income through the tax code, should also be expanded and streamlined so more families can take advantage of it.
To help all workers adapt to a rapidly changing economy, it’s also time to update the existing system of unemployment insurance and trade adjustment assistance. In fact, there are a slew of good ideas out there