Anti-tax pols should look to the Greeks

Any U.S. Republican or Democrat who believes we can cut the deficit and balance the budget without a tax increase should listen closely to Greek protesters who ask "Why me?" when their government insists on austerity measures.

The Greek poor have a good argument if they haven't benefited from the huge debt their society built up before going bust over the last decade.

On the other hand, the hypocrisy of anti-tax politicians in Washington resounds all the louder because they ignored and allowed the speculative practices of Wall Street bankers and traders who got America into the mess we all find ourselves in today.

President Barack Obama took to the White House press-conference podium yesterday to scold Congress when he said, "These are bills that Congress ran up. ... Now they are saying, 'Maybe we don't have to pay.'"

Instead, the congressmen and women who oppose raising taxes -- mostly Republicans but including some Democrats -- want to cut government spending to the bone, which means they want the burden of curing the deficit placed squarely on the backs of the middle class and the poor.

Not only did the poor draw no benefit at all from the wealth generated on Wall Street before 2008, but companies all across America whittled away at the middle class by eliminating jobs; cutting salaries; pushing people into part-time, no-benefits positions; increasing health-insurance co-pays and deductibles; and forcing employees out of defined-benefit pensions into 401ks where their retirements were put at risk by the same Wall Street traders who caused the 2008 crash.

But the "cut-spending-only-crowd" has yet another motive. Opposing increased revenues for government today essentially means the rich will escape paying the government back for Bush tax cuts that made them even more wealthy over the past 10 years. Anti-tax pols have but one constituency it seems: the people who fund their re-election campaigns year after year.

Because George W. Bush promoted a lack of dissent as the only true expression of patriotism in America while all that was happening, neither the poor nor the dwindling middle class took to the streets to protest their lot.

But the Greek rock-throwers offer a glimpse of what could happen in America as more of the poor get poorer; more of what's left of the middle class gets pushed into poverty; and the rich inexorably keep getting richer, as seems the goal of the current Republican majority in the House.

Revolutions get started in the back streets of any nation; and the middle class in the U.S. elected Obama to change things for the better, not worse. If anti-tax Republicans and Democrats believe the population of their country will remain somnolent forever they should look to Greece and the Arab Spring, then remember the anti-Vietnam-war demonstrations of the 1960s.

The people here are not afraid to peacefully stand up against their government. They just have to be pushed hard enough.

End the wars, cure cancer, create jobs

Is the nation war weary? Would the $700 billion this nation is spending on wars be better spent creating jobs for Americans at home?

There is a double-edged sword in the conundrum offered by those two questions.

I've had an epiphany! The Republicans are right! We don't need more public-sector spending to create jobs. We need the private sector to invest money in more businesses to create jobs.

Public-sector jobs are real jobs and help the economy because money in the pockets of public employees is spent just like the money in the pockets of private-sector employees.There's no discriminating between dollars spent in a free market. We are all consumers, and the American consumer has always led the nation's economy toward growth and confidence.

U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, on Charlie Rose last night, mentioned he would like to see the $700 billion we're spending on warfare nowadays returned to the domestic economy in order to keep from "savaging" government programs here at home.

That's fine. But Republicans are essentially right when they say government spending does not create jobs. Private businesses create jobs that public-sector jobs are intended to serve. The need to hire hundreds of lawyers to staff the Security and Exchange Commission arises from the thousands of jobs created in the financial sector by private businesses taking financial risks to boost the nation's prosperity.

Teachers are hired to serve the children of parents working in both the public and private sectors who want to provide a better life for their kids.

Health-insurance companies create jobs to serve private employers who want to provide affordable health insurance to workers whose health or illness creates jobs in the private health industry: nurses, doctors, lab technicians, record keepers and computer techs to create data bases to hold paper medical histories converted to digits. And the health-care industry needs public-sector regulators hired to oversee it.

But no one gets to create jobs if private investors don't have enough confidence in the American economy to invest in it. No one gets to return modernized, outsourced jobs to American shores unless private American money is pumped with confidence into successful, well-managed American firms.

War weary is right. We are all weary of the wars that keep claiming the lives of men and women who could contribute to a peace-time economy at home.

Contribute, for example, to the war against cancer that also keeps claiming life after life after life in this country and around the world. A drug war that seems eminently more winnable than any of the foreign wars we're waging because it actually has produced recent advances that have saved lives.

That's where the $700 billion could be put to better use for all Americans. End the wars, cure cancer and create jobs, too.

Bill Ritter for governor in 2010

Right here, right now, I'm endorsing Bill Ritter for re-election as governor.

The Republicans made me do it.

The news today, according to the banner headline across the front page of the Denver Post, is "United GOP targets Ritter."

And right below that headline the Post encapsulates the Colorado Republican Party's 2010 "Contract for Colorado," which leads off with the promise (I would call it a threat) to "Limit taxes and state spending."

As if the perennially Republican-defended Taxpayers Bill of Rights didn't already prohibitively limit Colorado's business growth and progress.

As if the perennial Republican criticism of Amendment 23, the only bulwark against legislative raids on public-school funding for the state, were not promise enough from their party that the children of Colorado can be ignored in order to uphold the wealth of the establishment.

No, none of that has been enough for Republicans in Colorado.

Now, they want to re-impose a "limited-government, no-government" regime on the state, apparently not satisfied with the deep hole the former Owens administration dug for Colorado through its frivolus spending on inefficient computers, its promotion of an Internet network that failed to deliver on its promises, its complete abrogation of public health programs and higher-education funding, and its total disregard for racial discrimination in state contracting.

That was once Colorado's contract with Republicans.

I, for one, would rather see Democrats in charge of making government mistakes.

At least they err on the side of ordinary people.

Watch Democrats 'just do it'

Over the weekend, Democrats gathered around a bunch of spades to dig the first shovels-full of dirt marking the rise of a new $300 million Veterans hospital in Aurora.

It took ten years to get there, eight of them during the Republican George W. Bush administration, but only eight months since the election of Barack Obama.

According to the Denver Post, actual construction on the project won't start until June, which may be a better time to celebrate the decision of the federal government to build the hospital, given the history of the project.

Before I left ColoradoBiz (in 2007), I had a writer do a profile of then Veteran's Administration head Jim Nicholson who was one of the several VA secretaries to go round and round on the project, but Nicholson did his job for local vets by getting it back on track.

Unfortunately, Nicholson's successor put it off track again, and Saturday's groundbreaking was the closest point yet veterans from the region have come to being assured the new hospital will be there for them if they live long enough to be served in it.

The federal commitment is an example of how Democrats just do it, rather than yak, yak, yak about it, like Republicans want to do on health-care reform, in order to keep the federal government from spending money.

Building a state-of-the-art hospital for vets from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, as well as vets from the first Iraq war, the Korean War, Vietnam, and many of the conflicts in between, helps fulfill one of Obama's campaign promises: To get Iraq and Afghanistan wounded proper and on-going treatment. But you won't hear many bipartisans making that point.

Still, it is what Democrats do, besides tax and spend, as they are constantly accused of doing. They tax, yes. But they also spend tax money on government service to its people. Even when they have to borrow billions of dollars to do it.

Democrats believe the people they serve are worth government support. It's time Republican elected officials begin to do the same.

Don't be idiots, America

Schwab on health-care reform: Don't be idiots, America. This is why you elected Barack Obama.

Don't let insurance companies, the special interests in health care, Republicans, who always defend the establishment because they always serve the monied interests of the nation, or whackos on the Internet (me excluded, of course) convince you that health-care reform is not in your best (self) interests.

I listened to Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, last night on public television. He sounded like one of the nuts. He said a public-option health insurance plan was just a first step in the government plot to take over the entire health-care system in America. The first step toward a single-payer system.

That conclusion is not logical.

It is the Republican Party's national spin for senators and representatives to take back to the heartland to try to talk the U.S. population out of insisting that Congress change health care for the betterment of most people in America.

How can starting a cheaper-than-current-costs, government-run health-insurance plan, to compete against more expensive private insurers, be a step into the hospitals and doctors offices that deliver health care now -- unless you think the private health-care insurers are already there, dictating what health care to give at prices high enough to make the insurers, doctors and hospitals a profit?

Grassley and others say we already have a health-care system that works just fine. How crazy is that?

Even if you think the movie "Sicko" was all wrong, anybody with any common sense, from doctors and nurses, to hospital administrators and even insurance executives, have known and have said publicly for years that our health-care system is on its own way toward bankruptcy if something isn't changed soon. And perhaps the nation with it.

Yet Republicans are now telling the country: It works just fine.

How crazy is that?

Don't be fooled.

If you attend public meetings of Colorado senators and representatives this month you'll no doubt hear the shouts of anti-reform activists who will describe any shouts you hear from pro-reform activists as the shouts of the looney fringe.

Right now, a guy named Jeff Crank, who is described in today's Denver Post as the head of the Colorado chapter of Americans for Prosperity (meaning the rich), is launching a 13-day bus tour around the state to repeat what he told the Post:

"We're headed right now to this thing being a fringe group of people demanding that there be some kind of 'public option' versus real America that is saying we're not going to throw out a health care system that delivers fine care but is expensive and maybe has to be refined."

Don't be fooled, real America. Those last nine words are Crank's attempt to sound not crazy. And in the earlier part of his quote, you see how he's trying to define other people who support reform as "a fringe group."

But who drives a bus around the state to harangue people about crazies in government besides a crazy, himself (although you wonder what's he's getting paid to make the pitch in this otherwise era of joblessness).

Don't be fooled, Colorado. Don't be fooled America. Health-care reform is one reason why a large majority of people in this country voted for the nation's first African-American president. We voted for change, and we could feel in our bones that Obama was the political athlete who could score for us.

Don't listen to shouts on either side of the argument.

Just quietly tell your congressmen and congresswomen to "stay the course," as George W. Bush's father used to say. But make sure they realize you mean the course toward reform.

Get health care reformed in this country by the end of the year, and let it start having its beneficial effect in 2010 and beyond, if we all live that long. Too many have passed without the benefit of the best care our country can offer its citizens.

You won't hear an anti-reformer shouting out about that outrage.

You can bet on that.