Paul Kleyman
Special to RedwoodAge.com
"There you go again" was the refrain of Ronald Reagan in another campaign season. But it applies today to another charming conservative, antisocial insurance propagandist Peter G. Peterson, who's releasing a film and companion book funded and promoted by his billion-dollar Peterson Foundation.
IOUSA carries a misleading, if compelling, argument: Profligate spending is jeopardizing the American future, and unless things change soon, the national debt will sink to $53 trillion by 2040. That would leave little left to pay for anything but the interest on the national debt.
There's no doubt that the United States is in serious long-term trouble. Heck, there's no doubt that we're in serious immediate trouble. But advance clips from IOUSA which is being screened for one day in movie theaters nationwide focused on its claim that $41 trillion of the ginned-up total of national debt will be because of Social Security ($7 trillion) and Medicare ($34 trillion).
Defense spending is down to only 20 percent of current federal spending, they say, so the real culprits are the "promises" to all those aging boomers that will bankrupt our children's generation.
No kidding. If you believe that, I have a couple of bridges to nowhere to sell you.
We wonder whether the Peterson media package will mention the effect of
subprimes on the US economy. You know, the Wall Street bailout, the devastation
to retirement savings, the - well, you know. Why bring up, say, the debilitating
role of petroleum dependency or massive tax loopholes for the rich.
Yes, the United States government has dug itself deeply into debt. Who are
creditors that will reap the interest on those trillions? China and other
foreign entities that the US government has tapped in recent years and that have
financed the US economy, wars, tax cuts and all.
Spending Critic
The octogenarian Peterson, who served as Commerce Secretary to Richard Nixon,
certainly has been critical of the cost of the wars in the Middle East and Bush
tax slashes. Also, the former US Comptroller General David Walker, whom the
grandfatherly financier hired this year to run his new foundation, is an
impressive figure widely noted for his forthrightness and integrity.
But honorable advocates can have their slant, too. In this case the tilt is at a
billion-dollar angle that aims to buy lots of media opinion. Will IOUSA's
so-called bipartisan media blitz include a balanced examination of US
priorities, of all squandered resources, of both the burdens and benefits of the
longevity revolution? Don't hold your markers on that bet.
While we haven't seen the full film yet, clips and related material posted on
YouTube and other sites suggest that both Peterson, author of Gray Dawn and other screeds against social insurance programs for elders, and
Walker, a hard-nosed conservative bean counter, won't depart much from what
they've been saying for years.
In one clip, Walker declares that the nation's single greatest budgetary threat
is the runaway cost of healthcare. That's an assertion anyone familier with
aging should be glad to hear from a respected figure in the American financial
class. In his next breath, though, Walker switches the subject from healthcare
to Medicare.
He's repeatedly insisted that the United States cannot treat Medicare costs
in isolation from its broader healthcare mess. But then he quickly dips into a
critique of Medicare, the healthcare program credited by the Census Bureau for
reducing poverty among those 65-plus from about 35 percent in 1965 when the
program was enacted to today's 11 percent. Congress, Walker says, was even more
irresponsible by passing the Medicare prescription drug benefit.
Drug Benefits
Perhaps in the full film, Walker addresses the deep fiscal flaws in the
structure of Part D's corporate giveaway, but all one can hear from him in
current online segments is a lament about the unaffordable $8 trillion drug
benefit by 2040, not recognition that the United States of America finally
supplied its most vulnerable citizens with medication - something no other
advanced economy denies its elders and people with disabilities.
In breaking down his estimate of the estimated $53 trillion US debt
looming darkly over the 78 million aging boomers, Walker somehow can't find the
$3 trillion attributed to the long-term costs of the war by Nobel Prize-winning
economist Joseph Stiglitz.
Will Walker and others in the film and book surprise us by putting every bean in the pot? Will IOUSA examine, say:
- Cost controls for insurance, healthcare providers and drug companies;
- A plan for ending the devastation meted out to 47 million uninsured people in the US;
- A proposal to integrate our top-heavy acute care system with preventive and long-term care;
- How a healthier, better-educated older population could actually reduce the future American debt burden by working and contributing longer than any other generation of elders in history?
Interviews for the book that are listed on
the IOUSA website include such "bipartisan" luminaries
as former Treasury secretaries Robert Rubin and Paul O'Neill; former Fed
chairmen Alan Greenspan and Paul Volker; "trickle-down" economist
Arthur Laffer; and billionaire Steve "Flat Tax" Forbes. Brookings
Institution economis Alice Rivilin, a Democrat and former head of the
Office of Management and Budget, will likely caution against stewing beans
faster than future supplies are apt to fill the pantry. (We hope the book
and film package give more the token footage to her admonitions the United
States also needs to give fair treatment to those in more fragile straights,
such as older women.)
Aging Experts Absent
Where, however, are the sociologists,
historians, gerontologists and health or social service experts? None seem
to be listed in the advance publicity for IOUSA. And will any
progressive economists or health policy analysts have their say for the sake
of presenting diverse views?
What's another view? Just one example
of the informative and authoritative views of the American future will run
this fall in the American Society on Aging's publication, Aging Today. In an essay,
Gene Cohen, a medical doctor and
former deputy director of the National Institute on Aging, questions what
he calls "half-asked questions."
Cohen, who now heads the Center for Aging, Health and Humanities at George Washington University, analyzed Census projections showing clearly what many demographers and health experts have been saying for some time: Although the US population ages 65-plus will grow dramatically - presumably placing an increasing burden on younger taxpayers - the percentage of people ages 65 or older will level off, and the proportion of those 65-84 will decline sharply after the year 2030.
Cohen, historian Theodore Roszak, economists Alicia Munnell or Dean Baker, political scientists Robert Binstock or Nancy Altman, or health policy expert Bruce Vladeck, former head of Medicare and Medicaid, are only a few of those who might balance the flavors in Pete Peterson's billion-dollar bean pot.
"There is a history of doomsayers capturing public attention by
depicting the doom and gloom related to the growing number and longevity of
older Americans," writes Cohen. "The risk is that such depictions discourage
motivation for creative strategies, problem solving and efforts to devise
innovative solutions. Such thinking reflects what historian Daniel Boorstin poignantly pointed out: 'The greatest obstacle to discovery is not
ignorance - it's the illusion of knowledge.'"
Inconvenient Half-truths?
The Peterson Foundation juggernaut is
promoting IOUSA as American's budgetary Inconvenient Truth. Yet, the
on-air interviews with Peterson, the promotional clips and publicity summaries
suggest a stacked argument closer to Unfit for Command, the
Swift Boat film that helped sink John Kerry's candidacy with half truths and
full lies four years ago.
But let's give optimism an even chance.
Perhaps Peterson and Walker will fill the void with a well-balanced and
nuanced exposition of America's fiscal future. Maybe they will fill the void
with a well-deserved Academy Award, if not a valedictory journey to
Stockholm.
Meanwhile, keep in mind
Peterson's claimed ambition that he hopes, with his foundation and the
convenient timing of the IOUSA release, to influence the
presidential election, in which he is backing John McCain. Hopefully,
viewers will watch IOUSA questioningly, with a keen eye toward its breadth and balance.
Paul Kleyman is Editor of the American Society on Aging. This analysis was
adapted, with permission, from his comments in Aging Online.
