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I also wanted to thank all of you who came this evening, and I'll beg your indulgence if this talk turns out to be a little short. I'm used to writing newspaper columns, which are about 800 words long. Like most people, I speak at about 200 words per minute. So in just four minutes, I use up a day's work.
When I told a friend that I was speaking to the
Frémont County Democrats, he asked Which phone
booth will you meet in?
And in a certain historical sense, that's a fair question, since the county is named for John Charles Frémont, who in 1856 was the first Republican candidate for president. But on further examination in Colorado, county namesakes do not indicate county political preferences. Jackson, Jefferson, Douglas, Custer -- all counties named for Democrats -- and they're all Republican strongholds.
Indeed, when Custer County's Democrats gathered a couple
of years ago, the Westcliffe newspaper put this headline on
its story: The few, the proud, the brave.
And for
those of you concerned about the Biased Liberal
Media
-- namely, those of you who wonder What
liberal media?
-- I will point out that, so far as I
know, the weekly Wet Mountain Tribune in Westcliffe is the
largest newspaper in the world owned by a registered
Democrat.
From what I've been able to gather, most county
Democratic parties hold an annual Jefferson-Jackson
Day
dinner. That honors Thomas Jefferson, who founded
the oldest political party in the world, our Democratic
party, all the while insisting that he was not a
politician. It also commemorates Andrew Jackson, who won
the Battle of New Orleans, served two terms as president,
and left public life with only two regrets: That I have
not horse-whipped Henry Clay nor hanged John C.
Calhoun.
But up here, we do things a little differently. In
Chaffee County -- which was named for a Republican
insider-trader known during his Colorado career as Boss
Chaffee,
we used to hold an annual Give 'em Hell,
Harry
Dinner.
As you've likely guessed, it honored the last major-party presidential candidate to campaign in our part of the world. During one of his famous whistle-stop tours in 1948, President Truman's train left Denver one September afternoon. It halted for him to give brief speeches in Colorado Springs, Pueblo, Cañon City, Salida, Glenwood Springs, and Grand Junction.
A few years ago, I found a Salida old-timer who had been
at the 1948 speech. I don't remember a lot of what
President Truman said,
he told me, but I do remember
I was standing next to two wire-service reporters. They had
their notebooks out as the President began. Then one of
them snapped his notebook shut and said 'This is the same
damn speech he gave in Cañon City. I'm going back
inside.
'
If Harry Truman were campaigning in America today, he
might be saying the same damn things he said in 1948, like
Something always happens to Republican leaders when they
get control of the government.
They become deaf to
the voice of the people,
but quite able to catch the
slightest whisper from big business.
He said I'm
trying to look after the man who has to work for a living.
You won't find that in any member of the GOP.
I haven't had time to find out how Cañon City received President Truman in 1948, but I know that Salida presented the President with a watch on that trip.
Keep that in mind as I relate what happened a few years
ago at a Give 'Em Hell Harry dinner in Salida. Among our
speakers was Dan Slater of Cañon City, who
impersonated President Truman. He went on a while longer
than anticipated, which inspired someone at my table to
mutter What did he do with that watch we gave him last
time he was in town?
From what I was told, this is not a Truman Dinner. It's a Franklin Delano Roosevelt Dinner. FDR came through here on his 1940 campaign. I didn't have time to delve through old newspapers to find out what he said. I have talked to a Salida woman who remembers being told to wear her Sunday best to school one fall morning, because they were going to walk down to the railroad depot and hear the President. She remembers the band playing and the general excitement, but not a word the President said -- which was probably the same damn thing he said in Cañon City.
And what was FDR saying?
· No business which depends for existence on
paying less than living wages to its workers has any right
to continue in this country.
· Remember that all of us are descended from
immigrants and revolutionists.
· In a veto message, It is not a tax bill but
a tax relief bill providing relief, not for the needy, but
for the greedy.
· The test of our progress is not whether we
add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is
whether we provide enough for those who have too
little.
· Big business and finance are unanimous in
their hatred for me -- and I welcome their hatred.
· And, We have earned the hatred of entrenched
greed.
Oh, how I would love to hear a president say such things now. Say what you will about FDR, he picked his enemies well. But nearly sixty years have passed since he died on April 12, 1945. We have some of the same old enemies, like entrenched greed, but we also face new challenges at every level of government.
In rural Colorado, the Democratic party seems split between two factions, which I'll call Labor Democrats and Green Democrats. While I think environmental issues are quite important, I do thing we sometimes forget the party's historical commitments to the little guy when we pay too much attention to the Green side.
For instance, our water rates keep going up. Now, water
is a necessity of life, and you'd think that Democrats
should be at the forefront of keeping it affordable so that
the little guy
might have a little extra money for
something else.
But the Green Democrats tell us that we have to reduce water consumption, and that high rates are the best way to do that. Well, the more water we consume, the less there is for new low-wage Wal-Marts, franchise strip malls, and other blights on the landscape that harm our local enterprises. And besides, just about everything we consume in Salida ends up flowing down the river to you guys -- it's not like we're removing it from circulation.
Surely we can find a better way to deal with water than
by making life harder for those of us who are economically
challenged. That's my politically correct term for
poor,
just as I use the politically correct term
People of Money
instead of Rich bastards.
Speaking of water hereabouts, the first summer I worked at the Mountain Mail in Salida, 1978, something went wrong at Salida's treatment plant and raw sewage was being released into the river. I called Bob Wood, now the publisher of the Florence Citizen but then the managing editor of the Daily Record, and advised him that he might find a story there.
I checked the Record for the next several days, and
found no mention of raw sewage in Cañon's water
supply. This amazed me, so I asked about it the next time I
talked to a friend who had grown up here, Bruce Plasket.
When you've got all that uranium,
he explained,
who's going to worry about some coliform
bacteria?
But I'm glad to see that people here have been working
on ways to cope with all that uranium.
And I'm glad
I can't be here to complain about our Republican
legislature, although I do wish that we'd managed to make
Emily Tracy a part of that General Assembly.
What should we want from our legislature?
They're addressing the state's fiscal crisis. There are more two things I'd like to see:
1) Pay at the pump auto insurance. (expand on)
2) Electing water conservancy districts (expand on)
There are things that bother other Democrats that don't bother me. I figure that someday all Democrats will figure out that there are more parents of schoolchildren than there are teachers in the teachers' union, and craft policies accordingly. And I don't think this would hurt our public schools.
For instance, there's an almost visceral opposition to vouchers. Now for about ten years, a friend and I used to go to every school board meeting in Salida. Our wives thought it was because it gave us an excuse to go down to the Victoria Tavern afterwards to discuss the meeting, and there is probably some truth in that, but we did notice that often, parents came to complain that the school was teaching evolution in its science classes, or promoting the occult because an English class was assigned Shakespeare's play MacBeth, that sort of thing.
Under our current system, the school board has to
accommodate those complaints. With vouchers, you could say
I'm sorry you have a problem with us trying to provide a
good education to your children. Here's your money. Take it
down the road to a school that suits you, and leave us
alone.
We could have excellent public schools, untroubled by the would-be ayatollahs of America, with a voucher system. And I hope more Democrats will start to see it that way.
Not all will, I fear. We Democrats disagree on a lot of
things. As Will Rogers put it, I don't belong to any
organized political party. I'm a Democrat.
But a recent
article in the Washington Monthly did point out that the
thing Democrats most agree on is the need for national
health insurance. And I think we can make that case on
strict economic grounds -- indeed, as a way to solve some
the problems the Republicans say we have.
For instance, the Republicans profess to be concerned about all those lawsuits about matters like product liability and medical malpractice. But I suspect that if you look into the reason most of those suits are filed, it's because people have medical bills as a result of bad products or bad medical practice, and suing is the only way to get the medical care they need. If we had universal health coverage, they'd know they could get medical care, and they wouldn't have to sue.
They're always telling us to be more productive. Well, how many people do you know who stay in jobs they hate, places where they're not productive, just to keep their health insurance? If it went wherever they worked, wouldn't the economy benefit from an enthusiastic workforce?
But instead, we let them scare us, as with those
Harry and Louise
commercials a dozen years ago. I
don't want the government in my medical cabinet,
one
said. I don't, either -- so why aren't those people working
to repeal our moronic drug laws?
Last fall, there were other scary commercials about
universal coverage. If Democratic Sen. John Kerry were
elected president, Washington bureaucrats
would be
in control [of] a government-run health-care plan [with
a] $1.5 trillion price tag.
The sentence fragments
continue: Big government in charge. Not you. Not your
doctor.
In other words, Team Bush will protect us from the awful menace of socialized medicine.
But is it really such a menace? The 2002 edition of one of my favorite reference books, The Statistical Abstract of the United States, has a chapter of international statistics, and the health statistics do not make one proud to be an American.
One chart lists 29 nations, and the percentage of Gross Domestic Product that each spends on health care. The United States is a leader there. We spend 12.9 percent of our GDP on health care -- that's the highest percentage in the world, at least for an industrial democracy.
What do we get for the money? The two major measures of public health are life expectancy (77.3 years in the U.S.) and infant mortality rate, 6.8 deaths per 1,000 live births in the first year of American life.
Some nations spend considerably less, and it shows. Turkey spends only 4.8 percent. Life expectancy is a decent 71.2, but infant mortality is an appalling 47.3. Mexico, with health spending at 5.3 percent, is similar: 71.8 life expectancy, and 25.4 infant mortality.
However, they're exceptions. Great Britain spends only 6.9 percent of its GDP on health care, considerably less than our 12.9 percent. Yet British citizens enjoy a longer slightly longer lifespan, 77.8 as compared to our 77.3, and a lower infant mortality rate, 5.5 rather than our 6.8.
In other words, they spend less and get more. That's also true of many other countries. Icelanders spend 8.7 percent of their GDP on health; they live 2.6 years longer, and only half as many of their babies die before their first birthday.
The Japanese enjoy the world's longest life expectancy, 80.8 years, and their infant mortality rate is only 60 percent of ours. They spend only 7.5 percent of their GDP on health care. Canada spends 9.2 percent of its GDP on health, and Canadians live two years longer we do spending 12.9 percent of our GDP.
Greece is a relatively poor country; its per-capita GDP is only $10,733 as compared to our $35,619. But it has a longer life expectancy and a lower infant mortality rate than we do, and it spends only 8.4 percent of its GDP on health care.
This list could continue for long enough to put you to sleep, but I'll spare you. The point should be clear: We spend more on health care, and get less for our money, than most industrial democracies, from Australia to Switzerland. And the ones who deliver the best value have socialized medicine.
Further, if the current American health care system is
the envy of the world,
why is it that no politician
in Iceland, or Canada, or Britain, or anywhere else has
ever campaigned on the plank of giving his country an
American-style? Don't you think that if it were the envy of
the world, somebody else would want it?
Now, I don't like big government
any more than
the next guy. But if it's a choice between paying $200 a
month more in taxes to big government
for national
health care or $400 a month for big insurance from big
business,
then the answer seems fairly simple.
Since big government
can deliver better health
care at a lower cost in other countries, perhaps we should
try improving our health care while saving money.
Suppose we could do as well as Spain, which spends only 7 percent of its GDP on health while getting better results. In that case, Americans would enjoy an extra $588 billion each year that now gets sucked up by health care. That's about $2,100 apiece -- talk about a way to keep more of our hard-earned money in our own pockets.
And if government health care
is so terrible, why
do those who often denounce it, like our president and many
senators and representatives, use their government
health-care plans? They seem to think big government
does a fine job of providing health care to them and their
families. But for some reason, they must toil day and night
to save us from that dreadful fate.
Anyway, a national health care program could easily cost $1.5 trillion. But if we use the international averages, then the same amount of private health care delivered the current American way would cost $2.4 trillion. Isn't it time we got serious about saving money?
Why aren't we forcing the Republicans to try to justify this current expensive and inefficient system?
Instead, we're now being put on the defensive, trying to preserve FDR's most enduring accomplishment: Social Security. Our current president, George Walker Bush, has proposed to allow people to invest portions of what now goes to the Social Security Trust Fund into the private sector.
Now, I'm not an economist. I'm just a journalist, but I think I know why our Republican president thinks so highly of investing in the private sector. It treated him quite well.
George Bush, that enemy of the elites,
was able
to pay for Yale and Harvard, those well-known institutions
that serve common folk, because he had a family trust fund.
Of course, we all know how important family values
are for success in life -- especially a family trust
fund.
After his graduation from Harvard Business School in 1975, he stopped to see some old friends in his old hometown of Midland, Texas. Some of them were in the oil business, and since he was at loose ends, he got into the oil business, too.
He organized his first oil-exploration firm, Arbusto Energy. It attracted investors -- his father's rich friends. It found some oil, but by the end of 1984, the company had brought in only $1.54 million, while investors had put in $4.66 million.
In other words, it lost $3 million. And what was Bush's
reward for losing $350,000 a year? He was paid $678,000
over those years. I'm sure we would all like the free
market
a lot better if we could arrange to get paid
well for losing money.
This doesn't end here. While Bush's father was vice-president, he made a deal to merge Arbusto with a company called Spectrum 7 -- part of the deal was that he'd get $75,000 a year as CEO. Spectrum 7 lost even more money and in 1986 it was merged with Harken Energy.
He managed to sell his Harken stock for $4 a share in 1990, just before the price plunged because the company announced that it lost $6.7 million in that quarter. With the $835,307 he made from that, he could pay off the $500,000 he borrowed for a piece of the Texas Rangers baseball team. While he was the managing partner of the Rangers, he helped arrange for the city of Arlington, Texas, to build a new stadium, almost all at public expense, for the Rangers. That raised the value of the team, so that Bush was able to sell out for $15 million -- which is a fair-sized retirement account, and I sure wish he'd retired on it.
But there's little wonder, then, that he sees the
private sector
as a wonderful security system that
we should all feel good about relying on. It does appear to
work pretty well if:
· You have a trust fund to put you through world-class private universities.
· Your father, who is an important politician, has a lot of rich friends who will put money into your money-losing enterprises.
· And you can persuade taxpayers to build something that makes your business a lot more valuable before you sell out.
The problem is, most of us don't have all that going for
us. We aren't likely to benefit that way from the
private sector.
And that's why we need a healthy and
trustworthy public sector
-- one that we, as
Americans and as Democrats, ought to keep fighting for.
Thank you, and good night.
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