It's the Economy, Stupid!

It's totally amazing -- almost everyone on the business channels rails about growth -- we need growth, we're not growing enough, the demographics are tamping down growth, growth is the way out of our fiscal problems, Europe has a growth problem, the global economy is slowing down.  At the same time, the solution being touted from sea to shining sea, from Europe to Alaska, the solution being pushed and pushed and pushed is austerity.  Spend less and somehow we will grow our way out of the problems.  This just doesn't make any sense, unless you are willing to wait years and years for things to equalize.  People need to make money to buy things, people have to buy things for others to make money.  People can't buy things so people quit making things and the economy slows down thereby  reducing growth.  Everyone agrees that long term, we have a financial problem -- health care costs are fast outpacing our ability to pay them.  The single biggest contributor to our long term economic problems are medical costs, both public and private.  Our public system pays out more than it takes in, but it also controls costs better than our private system.  We can cut costs by denying care, by charging people who don't have money more for their care so they can choose between living and medical care, thereby actually raising the costs because the only time they are medically attended to is when there is no choice.  We can continue to ratchet up the cost to employers and employees of employer based health care and we will continue to create a climate where more and more of our wealth goes to the health care system or we can actually try and reduce health care costs, which the new reform act puts a tiny downpayment on.  If you look at the share of the budget, you see where the big ticket items are, but you don't see where the savings can come from.   The ideological war we have gotten into basically cuts domestic discretionary spending every time they cut spending.  The share of government spending that is for something other than medicare, medicaid, defense and the national debt is now down to a miniscule 15% but still we want to cut "government" by which we seem to always mean that 15%.  Government really is getting down to the place where you can drown it in the bathtub just like Grover Norquist wants.  But this is where we invest in America -- this is where the interstate highway system came from, this is where our bridges and water treatment facilities were built, this is where we do basic science research and basic medical research that gives us all those cures and treatments for all those diseases we seek medical care from.