Mike's Election Guide (10 page)

Systems like the one I’m describing here cost nearly 50 percent
less
per capita than the one we now have—and yet they provide
better
care than we do. In each of these Western industrialized countries that have universal healthcare, their people live longer than we do here in the USA. If the promise was one of a longer life for less money, who wouldn’t jump at the chance of that?

Barack Obama and John McCain, that’s who. Neither believes in true universal healthcare that covers everyone—and most importantly, one that cuts private, profit-making, greedy health insurance companies out of the picture. The thing is, I know why
McCain
wants to protect corporate profiteering. For some reason, Obama does, too. “Why?” would be a good question to ask him if you see him.

There is a bill in Congress that does for America the very thing that is done for every other citizen in the Western world. It’s called HR 676, the United States National Health Insurance Act, sponsored by Rep. John Conyers. Ninety members of Congress have signed up as co-sponsors. It is the law that needs to be passed. Americans will still be able to pick their own doctor and go to whatever hospital they want. No one can be turned away.

The corporate army of public relations spinmeisters will fight this legislation with everything they’ve got. They will tell you that it’s “socialized medicine.” You tell them that you like your “socialized fire department.” They will tell you that you will have a longer wait to get help. You tell them, “Oh, you mean longer than the six hours I spent in the waiting room of the ER last week with my kid, or the six-month waitlist I’m on to see a dermatologist?” They will say that pharmaceutical companies won’t have the money to research and discover new life-saving drugs if they can’t charge $300 for a prescription. You say, “You mean the life-saving drug that was developed with my tax dollars at the University in Ann Arbor (only 17 percent of the research for our drugs is done by the drug companies)?”

We would not allow the police to ask us for a credit card before they start looking for the crook who broke into our home, and we would not allow the fire department to demand a fire insurance card before they start putting out the fire. We should make it illegal for anyone to say to a sick person, “Will that be cash or charge?”

3. Ban High Fructose Corn Syrup.

One way to help us live a bit longer would be to ban the most evil substance known to man: high fructose corn syrup.

Read the label of anything you’re eating and you’ll probably see the words “high fructose corn syrup” somewhere. It’s in everything and you can’t get away from it. Just because the word “corn” is in it, please don’t think for a second that you’re getting one of your five recommended vegetable servings of the day. High fructose corn syrup has as much to do with corn as I have to do with the Boston Marathon.

High fructose corn syrup is a super sweet and very cheap “sugar” extracted from corn without any of that silly corn fiber, taste, or nutrients. Real sugar is not cheap. Back before the 1970s, that’s what food manufacturers used in their products. And they tried to use as little as possible because the more they used, the more it cut into their profit margin.

Then along came Richard Nixon.

In the early 1970s, Nixon, who was already under immense political pressure because of the Vietnam war, was beginning to see waning support from a traditionally strong Republican base: farmers and big agribusiness. They were upset because a series of short-term economic problems were putting a serious squeeze on their income.

In the midst of this crisis Nixon brought in former Purdue University dean of agriculture Earl “Rusty” Butz to serve as America’s eighteenth Secretary of Agriculture. Butz, who had a penchant for telling tasteless jokes and bemoaning welfare spending, turned his attention to eliminating anything that got in the way of farmers planting “from fencerow to fencerow.” But what would they do with all this corn? Sell it and make it into high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). Because real sugar was expensive. HFCS, derived from cheap and widely available corn, was a bargain.

As a result of Nixon’s and Butz’s corn policies, the average American has gone from consuming zero pounds of HFCS per year in the late 1960s, to 63 pounds per year in this decade.

Thanks to $19 billion a year in subsidies to agribusiness giants making food products that harm Americans, we are a sicker—and poorer—nation as a result. Because of all these subsidies, every dollar of profit ADM makes on corn sweetener costs consumers and taxpayers $10.

Thanks to all this cheap and easy high fructose corn syrup, soft drink and fast food companies have turned 8- or 12-ounce drinks into 16- or 20-ounce super-sized drinks or 32-ounce Big Gulps. While turning cheap corn into HFCS has resulted in cheap soda, cheap corn can also be used in making burgers and other fast-food or processed junk foods. Cheap, subsidized corn, in the form of HFCS, is the backbone of our ever growing national waistline.

If you look at the charts, you can see when the obesity boom began in the U.S. It began with the introduction of high fructose corn syrup into our diet. If you are overweight you are in the majority—two-thirds of us are now overweight, and a third of us are actually obese.

This weight gain has increased the risk of heart disease, turned millions into diabetics, and generally reduced the quality of most people’s lives. It has probably also killed more people than Nixon did in Vietnam. It is our domestic napalm.

So who better to issue the ban on high fructose corn syrup than the skinniest man ever to win the presidency! You
know
his mother never fed him any of this crap. Remember the Friday night during the primaries when John McCain finally released his medical records—over 1,100 pages explaining everything that’s gone wrong inside his body.

The following week, Obama released his medical records. Total number of pages? One.
ONE!
One friggin’ page. All it was was a letter from his doctor saying he’d quit smoking and there was absolutely nothing wrong with him, never has been anything wrong with him, and—my favorite—a sentence stating that he has “no excess body fat.”

What better leader to get us all healthy and fit again? That should be reason alone to elect this guy. And when he issues his decree banning the corn syrup, he should do it with his shirt off. And then tell everyone at home watching to “drop and give me ten.”

It will definitely be a new day in America.

4. The American People Will No Longer Pay More Taxes Than the French Do.

What if the new president proclaimed on Inauguration Day, “Beginning this year, you will pay
less
taxes than the French.”

At first, people would go, “Hey, we already pay less than the French!” One thing we all know is that not only the French, but most Europeans, pay more taxes than we do. They have to because they must pay for their socialized welfare state, and we—well, we just get up in the morning, pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, every man for himself—enjoy one of the lowest tax rates in the world!

Sadly, this is one of the biggest lies we are told. The truth is, a typical American family pays much more than a typical French family. The reason we have gotten away by claiming the opposite is that we just change the words so that we don’t call certain things a “tax.”

A French couple with two children pays an average income tax of 22 percent; in the USA the average American couple with two kids pays 19 percent—less than the French.

But here’s the rub. What French taxes cover and what ours cover are two very different things.

Here’s what a French family’s income tax gets them:

• FREE healthcare

• FREE (or virtually free) child care

• FREE tuition at every university, from community colleges to the Sorbonne

• Four months minimum of maternity leave with FULL PAY

• Mandatory 30 days vacation each year at FULL PAY

• Unlimited sick days at FULL PAY for all citizens

All of that—for paying just a bit more to the government. How can they afford that?

Here’s how. They don’t invade countries. They stopped being a colonial power. They don’t let the corporations entirely run their country. They have strong unions. And the citizens will shut down the country if the government misbehaves.

Because we don’t provide the above benefits the French get—and instead make our citizens pay for them out of their pockets—we don’t refer to these fees as “taxes.”
But that’s exactly what they are.
Taxes. We Americans each pay our
regular
taxes, and then on top of that we pay
much, much more.

If you are paying for your own family’s health insurance, you pay an average of $12,000 a year in “premiums” (taxes), plus hundreds of dollars more in co-pays and deductibles (taxes). (If your employer pays it, that’s money you could otherwise be negotiating to be paid in WAGES; plus, even with employer-funded health insurance, you still end up getting socked with the numerous co-pays and deductibles.)

When, as an American, you pay for your own college education, you’re paying a tax that we call “tuition, room, and board.” And if you’re still paying off your student loans, you’re paying hundreds of dollars each month in student loan payments (again, a tax that we don’t call a tax)—often well into your thirties or forties.

And how much are you paying each year in child-care costs? That’s day care, baby sitters, pre-school, and other caregivers. Some pay $200 a month, some pay $400 a week. We don’t call that a tax, but that’s what it is. And I’m not even talking about what you are paying at your kid’s PUBLIC school for band, art, sports, driver’s ed—all the stuff that used to be free. You still pay the property and income taxes for the public schools—and these days, thanks to so many corporate tax breaks where billion-dollar companies are paying either half or none of what they should be paying, you now pay a larger personal share—but you don’t get the same free services you used to get.

And that, I believe, is what’s at the core of our American tax dissatisfaction. We hate, and I mean HATE, paying taxes in the U.S. It’s not that the French
love
paying taxes, but there is nowhere near the level of grumbling in France as there is here. And no wonder.
They actually get something in return for all the taxes they pay! Never have to worry about getting sick. Never have to worry about who will look after the kids. Never have to worry about sending their sons and daughters off to college (or off to war).

They pay for all this peace of mind with their income taxes—and they get it back in spades.

We, on the other hand, pay all these taxes and can’t even get a pothole fixed. We can’t even be certain when we drop a letter in the mail it will ever reach its destination. I’m looking out the window at an empty lot across the street that hasn’t been mowed all summer. Wanna catch a city bus in Detroit? Don’t forget to bring
War and Peace
to read while you’re waiting at the bus stop.

Instead of services to benefit us and our families, our taxes go to waging two wars, lining the pockets of military contractors, handing out welfare to oil companies that turn around and rob us at the pump, and other rip-offs.

No wonder we’re mad. Meanwhile, the French are having sex.

5. Ban All Commericals in Movie Theaters.

Mr. President, does this one really need any explanation? When you go to the movie theater, you’re there to see a movie, not a screeching ad for Chevrolet. You have left the house because you don’t want to watch TV. You have paid for a baby sitter, the gas in the car, the $10 movie ticket, and the $7 popcorn. You have done so in order to escape into the magic of the cinema. But before you can watch the latest Coen Bros. masterpiece, you must first be reminded that you’d be having a lot more fun if you were sitting at home playing the latest version of Grand Theft Auto.

Because the theater chains think the public is stupid (and why shouldn’t they when they see people line up at their door eager to pay ten bucks for
Saw IV
), they think we won’t mind sitting there through 20 minutes of TV commercials. Remember when it was just one ad? Nobody objected, so they just kept adding more. Now whole companies are devoted to creating 20-minute packages of 30-second ads to blast at you once the lights dim and you think you’re about to see a couple of previews and then the feature.

In 2007, movie theaters raked in $417 million in ad revenue from these pre-movie screenings, up 15 percent from the previous year, making this one of the fastest-growing types of advertising.

But why stop at just showing ads before
movies
? How about Pepsi commercials each day as Congress is called to order? Viagra ads on the curtain before a Broadway play? Victoria’s Secret spots shown to the faithful before Mass?

The new president needs to ban all ads other than the “Coming Attractions” in our nation’s cinemas. If you want to help him with a head start, let your local theater know that you did not come here to watch TV. And let the advertisers know, too. Go to
www.captiveaudience.org
to join the protest movement.

After enacting this ban, the new president should ensure that no bag of popcorn costs more than three bucks, that people talking on cellphones and texting on BlackBerries will be waterboarded in the theater lobby, and that the kid popping the corn won’t be the one running the $100,000 projector.

6. Defeat Al Qaeda and the Next Generation of America-Haters by Building Wells.

Let’s begin by admitting there is no way to stop some crazy lunatics from blowing things up. They have always done that, and they always will do that. No amount of taking my shampoo from me at the airport X-ray machine is going to stop them.

By the way, Homeland Security, if you happen to be reading this because the publisher slipped you an advance copy in return for some unmentionable “favor,” here’s a little tip: The next terrorist attack is
not
going to be on an airplane. These terrorists may be nuts, but they do not have Tourette’s. One thing I know about them, they’re really big into “Been There, Done That.” They don’t like to repeat themselves. Check out their pattern: