The Price of Civilization_ Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity - Jeffrey D. Sachs [125]
5. Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, “Voter Turnout by Country.”
6. Spending in presidential election years (2000, 2004, 2008) averages around $1.5 billion more than in nonpresidential election years, with presidential and off-year elections on the same common upward trend.
7. Robert Kaiser, So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), pp. 343–44.
8. Gallup Poll, “Automobile, Banking Industry Images Slide Further,” August 17, 2009.
9. Andrew J. Bacevich, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War (New York: Henry Holt, 2010).
10. Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Farewell Address,” January 17, 1961.
11. Peter Orszag, “One Nation, Two Deficits,” New York Times, September 6, 2010. He writes: “It would be tough, then, to squeeze more than a half percent of G.D.P. from spending by 2015. Additional revenue—in the range of 0.5 to 1.5 percent of the economy—will therefore be necessary to reduce the deficit to sustainable levels.”
12. Christina D. Romer, “What Obama Should Say About the Deficit,” New York Times, January 15, 2011.
13. ABC News “Summary: 2009 Polling on a ‘Public Option.’ ”
14. Congressional Budget Office, “Estimate of Direct Spending and Revenue Effects of H.R. 2,” February 18, 2011.
15. Consider the following passage written by political scientist Thomas Ferguson in 1995 on the Clinton-era debate on health care, and note how well it applies to the Obama case, almost without needing to change a single word. In both 1994 and 2009, the health care industry was in the driver’s seat of the legislative process:
As this essay goes to press [in 1994], the administration is finally unveiling its long-awaited (and several times postponed) blueprint for overhauling the nation’s health-care delivery system. Already, however, some of the costs of this strategy—to strike deals with as much of the existing health-care industry as possible, instead of pushing for a simple and economical “single payer” (“Canadian style”) system—are plain. While the package of benefits and universal coverage the plan promises is carefully thought out and at least modestly appealing, the plan is fantastically complicated and not easy for ordinary voters to evaluate. The full costs of the network of oligopolies that the plan will create are being hidden, and savings are being claimed that are almost certainly not there. The basic design is heavily weighted in the direction of the large insurers and several other parts of the health-care industry, including teaching hospitals. A few years down the pike the financing system proposed may well create strong pressures to curtail benefits or skimp on care. (Thomas Ferguson, Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995], p. 327.)
Neither President Clinton nor President Obama dared to propose deep reforms to America’s astoundingly overpriced private health care system. The influence of the powerful health care lobby to prevent change is the real subtext of the past thirty years of U.S. health care policy.
16. Campaign Finance Institute, “New Figures Show That Obama Raised About One-Third of His General Funds from Donors Who Gave $200 or Less,” January 8, 2010.
17. Center for Responsive Politics, “Banking on Connections,” June 3, 2010, p. 1.
18. Ibid, p. 3.
19. The following is based on Jesse Drucker, “Google 2.4% Rate Shows How $60 Billion Lost to Tax Loopholes,” Bloomberg News, October 21, 2010.
20. See Chapter 1 of Title 26 of the Internal Revenue Code.
21. U.S. Government Accountability Office, “International Taxation: Large