Campaign Reform

Don't miss the Project Vote-Smart tour to

Milwaukee on January 8th - Tuesday - Milwaukee, WI. Milwaukee County War Memorial. 750 N. Lincoln Memorial Dr. Milwaukee, WI 53202. 10:00am - 4:00pm

Appleton on Jan 8th - Thursday - Appleton, WI. Harmony Cafe , 124 N. Oneida Street, Appleton, Wisconsin 54911 11:00am - 4:00pm

Check out this investment opportunity:

While you may be familiar with stocks and bonds, currency speculation, IPOs and all the rest, there's a new investment arena you should be aware of: LEGISLATION.

If a mutual fund returns 20% a year, that's considered quite good, but in the low-risk, high-return world of legislation, a 20% return is positively lousy. There's no reason why your investment dollar can't return 100,000% or more.

Too good to be true? Don't worry, it's completely legal. With the help of a professional legislation broker (called a lobbyist), you place your investment (called a Campaign Contribution) with a carefully selected list of legislation manufacturers (called Members of Congress). These manufacturers then go to work, crafting industry-specific subsidies, inserting tax breaks into the code, extending patents or giving away public property for free.

Just check out these results.

• The Timber Industry spent $8 million in campaign contributions to preserve the logging road subsidy, worth $458 million the return on their investment was 5,725%.

• Glaxo Wellcome invested $1.2 million in campaign contributions to get a 19-month patent extension on Zantac worth $1 billion - their net return: 83,333%.

• The Tobacco Industry spent $30 million in contributions for a tax break worth $50 billion - the return on their investment: 167,000%.

• For a paltry $5 million in campaign contributions, the Broadcasting Industry was able to secure free digital TV licenses, a give-away of public property worth $70 billion - that's an incredible 1,400,000% return on their investment.

Just thought you might like to know. Come to our next meeting and see the rest of the story.         

Best regards,

Dwayne Block
Waukesha County Democrats

Crisis may make 1929 look a 'walk in the park'

As the credit paralysis stretches through its fifth month, a chorus of economists has begun to warn that the world's central banks are fighting the wrong war, and perhaps risk a policy error of epochal proportions.

See the complete article HERE

To those who supported the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, I'd ask: How do you like it now? It took a $300 billion budget surplus to a $600 billion deficit and it's been downhill ever since. All thanks to our corrupt political system.

Thanks to LD Rockwell, Burlington, for help on the links below.

www.OpenSecrets.org*                              www.Congress.org Profiles PAC Dollars

1^st        Paul Ryan (R)                                  Info Page       PAC Money  $192,750

2^nd       Tammy Baldwin (D)                         Info Page       PAC Money  $82,456

3^rd        Ron Kind (D)                                    Info Page       PAC Money  $165,200

4^th        Gwen Moore (D)                              Info Page       PAC Money  $117,024

5^th        F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R)   Info Page       PAC Money   $ 44,170

6^th        Tom Petri (R)                                   Info Page       PAC Money  $138,550

7^th        David R. Obey (D)                          Info Page       PAC Money  $267,025

8^th        Steven Kagen (D)                           Info Page       PAC Money  $249,049

* At each of the OpenSecrets pages you can click on “Personal Finances” (you will have to enter an anti-spam code)

* See all Congress.org WI Repos HERE

Asclepios

Your Weekly Medicare Consumer Advocacy Update

Wait Till Next Year  --  December 20, 2007, Volume 7, Issue 49

The score card on health care for this session of Congress is pretty grim.       

Both the House of Representatives and the Senate passed legislation using $35 billion in additional cigarette taxes to extend health coverage to four million uninsured children. President Bush repeatedly vetoed the bill, however, and there were not enough votes in the House to override the veto.

Big Tobacco: $35 billion (2008-2012)

Uninsured Children: 0

The House passed legislation authorizing Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices under the Part D prescription drug program. The Senate rejected the bill.

Drug Manufacturers: $30 billion (2008)

People with Medicare: 0       

The House passed a bill eliminating the excess subsidies Medicare pays to insurance middlemen, using the money to shore up Medicare's finances, help more low-income people with Medicare with their drug and medical expenses, and improve Medicare's coverage of preventive and mental health services. Backed by the threat of a presidential veto, the Senate stripped the bill of any subsidy reductions to Medicare private health plans and rejected any expansion of low-income assistance programs or coverage for mental health or preventive services.

Insurance Companies: $50 billion (2009-2012)

People with Medicare: 0

Of course, this is not the first year that Congress and the president have handed victories to special interests at the expense of the health care of the American people. It took 20 years, from President Truman's 1945 introduction of a plan to provide universal health care coverage to President Johnson signing the Medicare bill in 1965, for older adults to receive guaranteed health coverage under Medicare. It took another seven years, until 1972, for Medicare to cover people with disabilities (and they still have to wait two years for their coverage to begin).

Still, the American people placed a lot of hope that the slate of lawmakers elected in 2006 would help stem the ever rising cost of health care and the ever expanding ranks of the uninsured. It's clear that the team has a few holes in it. We need more legislators in both chambers of Congress (including 60 senators) and a president who are all committed to addressing the health care crisis in this country and willing to stand up to the insurance industry, the pharmaceutical manufacturers and any other lobby that puts its self-interest above the health care of Americans.

With a team like that, we can protect and improve Medicare and extend it so that every person in this county, young or old, can receive the health care he or she needs. Next year, we get to elect the players to that team and get rid of the bums that let us down this year. We need to make sure all the candidates know we are taking our responsibility seriously.

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Medical Record

"The combined savings to the government and beneficiaries from having Medicare offer the drug benefit as an add-on to the traditional program, and to negotiate directly with the pharmaceutical industry, would be close to $30 billion in 2008. Even this figure is somewhat conservative since more beneficiaries would enroll in the program if it offered drugs at lower prices" (Celebrating Pork: The Dubious Success of the Medicare Drug Benefit (HERE), Center for Economic and Policy Research, March 2007).

"[Medicare Advantage] overpayments significantly weaken Medicare's finances. The overpayments will total $54 billion over the next five years and $149 billion over ten years, according to CBO. That puts an added strain on Medicare, moving up by two years (from 2021 to 2019) the date when its trust fund will become insolvent, according to the chief actuary at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services" ("Curbing Medicare Advantage Overpayments Would Strengthen Medicare (HERE)," Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, December 5, 2007).

"When Medicare and Medicaid were signed into law on July 30, 1965, former President Harry Truman received the first Medicare card. He would be shocked that 40 years later, more than 45 million Americans have no health coverage, half of all personal bankruptcies are health-related, and lack of universal insurance is increasingly hurting our economy as well as our health" ("Time for Health Care for All on Medicare's 40th Anniversary (HERE)," Holly Sklar, August 1, 2005).

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Medicare Part D Appeals Help for Advocates Is Here!

MRC's new Medicare Part D Appeals: An advocate's manual to navigating the Medicare private drug plan appeals process offers an easy-to-understand, comprehensive overview of the entire appeals process, including real-life case examples, a glossary of important appeals terms, a sample protocol for advocates, and links to important resources.

Register for a FREE copy (HERE) of this great resource.

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Medicare Private Health Plan Monitoring Project

The Medicare Rights Center (MRC) would like to hear about your experience, or that of someone you know, enrolled in a private health plan. With information about what the issues are with Medicare Advantage plans, we will be able to demand that those problems be fixed.

Submit your story at www.medicarerights.org/maplanstories.html      (HERE).

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The Louder Our Voice, the Stronger Our Message

Asclepios—named for the Greek and Roman god of medicine who, acclaimed for his healing abilities, was at one point the most worshipped god in Greece—is a weekly e-newsletter designed to keep you up-to-date with Medicare program and policy issues, and advance advocacy strategies to address them. Please help build awareness of key Medicare consumer issues by forwarding this action alert to your friends and encouraging them to subscribe today (HERE).

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The Medicare Rights Center (MRC) is the largest independent source of Medicare information and assistance in the United States. Founded in 1989, MRC helps older adults and people with disabilities get good, affordable health care.

Visit our online subscription form to sign up for Asclepios at http://www.medicarerights.org/subscribeframeset.html    (HERE).

TCS on Farm Bill

www.taxpayer.net Complete article HERE

REFORMERS REBUFFED IN FARM BILL DEBATE
Volume XII No. 39 - December 20, 2007

The farm bill drifted to its anti-climatic finale last week in the seemingly rudderless Senate. We will have to wait for the New Year to see what Congress actually sends to the President. Essentially the Senate took the pile of manure it got from the House, added a couple billion dollars and topped it with a new permanent disaster slush fund that will be spent in just five or six states, and called it a finished bill.

We say rudderless because it took a couple of eye-popping agreements among Senate “leaders” to even get the bill done. First, after two weeks of back and forth (longer if you include the weeklong Thanksgiving vacation), Democrats and Republicans agreed to limit amendments to twenty per side. Then, after Rumpelstiltskin-esque foot-stamping by one Southern Democrat, Senate leaders agreed that some amendments would require sixty votes for passage, instead of a simple majority.

This wasn’t because the afore-mentioned Southern Democrat, Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), actually took to the floor to filibuster. Instead, she merely threatened to filibuster and Congressional leadership couldn’t be bothered to call her bluff. As a result, a bipartisan amendment to limit total subsidies received by a single farm to $250,000, received majority approval (56-43) but failed anyway.

Sen. Lincoln had plenty of support from Democrats and Republicans alike, especially those from the South with their big rice, cotton, and peanut farmers back home. Senators Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) and John Cornyn (R-TX) made frequent appearances on the Senate floor during the farm bill debate to make the pitch for their particular commodity favorites.

A handful of other amendments that defenders of the status quo feared might pass were also held to the same sixty-vote bar, including one from Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) that would have denied subsidies to farmers with an adjusted gross income (AGI) of more than $750,000. For the rest of us who rely on an accountant or Turbotax to do your taxes, “AGI” is your income after deducting certain expenses. In the case of farm income, the IRS generously allows thirty such deductions.

One bright spot was acceptance of amendment from Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) which restricts farm subsidy payments from going to deceased farmers. Now that’s aggressive reform!

In the midst of record crop prices and farm incomes, sensible reforms didn’t get a fair shake. As it all unfolded, dozens of newspapers across the country editorialized in favor of many of the proposed changes. Even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) seemed to regret supporting the weak farm bill that she arm-twisted through the House, commenting that she hoped the Senate would pass stronger reforms in its version.

Adding fuel to the reform flame, the President threatened to veto the farm bill if passed unchanged; former President and peanut farmer Jimmy Carter wrote an op-ed urging caps on farm subsidies; and former Secretary of Agriculture and Republican National Committee Chair Clayton Yeutter sent a letter to Congress urging support of reform amendments on the Senate floor.

But in the end, there was little in this bill in the way of reform. Farm bill reformers won majority votes on critical amendments that would save taxpayers money by preventing millionaires from receiving subsidies. But like a home-town referee, Senate leadership changed the rules mid-debate to get a bad bill passed and everyone lost except for those throwing tantrums on behalf of corporate farming.

Going on at Taxpayer.net This Week

Check out TCS's Complete Coverage of FY08 Spending Bills

Sen. Coburn Calls for Full Coconut Road Investigation

Omnibus Spending Bill Stuffed With Earmarks

TCS in the News

Tidbits