Latimer on Law

The Ten Million Pound Gorilla At Town Meeting

The Ten Million Pound Gorilla At Town Meeting

  "If we're able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him."
     - Senator Jim DeMint, R. So. Carolina

"All politics is local."  -Rep. Tip O'Neill, D. Mass.

We just held a special town meeting in Falmouth this past week to deal with budgetary shortfalls due to the economic collapse of 2008.   You remember that, don't you?   There are lots of folks, the corporate elite and their errand boys in the GOP, who don't want you to remember how the financial idiocy of Wall Street combined with  the idiotic deregulatory and tax cutting policies of the Bush administration over the prior eight years to create a major collapse of the U.S. economy second only to the crash in 1929.  

            As I sat there listening to the budgetary debate at town meeting, I wondered whether I was the only one who noticed the ten million pound gorilla sitting right there with us in the Lawrence School auditorium.  I'm referring to  the $10,337,104 line item for employee group health insurance entered as a "fringe benefit."

           This is the second largest line item in the budget, second only to the School Department and weighing in at almost double either the police or fire department allocation. It's more than double any other departmental allocation, and takes up over ten percent of the entire $100 million plus annual budget, yet  there was no discussion or questioning of this item as we debated long and hard over really important issues like whether to apply some of the $5,600 taken out of the travel allowance for the administrator's office toward shellfish propagation, to replace $3,000 that had been taken out there. 

          Putting $3,000 back into the line item for shellfish propagation, by the way, would have been a wise investment of public money.  It would directly create an available resources for taxpayers worth about twenty times the layout. Lots of people in town rely on harvesting shellfish in our public waters to supplement their declining incomes or just to put food on the table for their kids.  But, no, we voted to put the whole piddling $5,600 into the stabilization fund instead.  Now, that really put us back in the black, didn't it?

          Meanwhile, in Washington, cadres of insurance industry lobbyists and their Republican stooges in Congress are fighting tooth and claw to prevent meaningful reforms that will make health care both more affordable and more widely available to all Americans, including us taxpayers here in Falmouth and our municipal employees.  As Republican Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina has admitted, it's really all about politics because the GOP is desperate to defeat President Obama on something, to make health reform his "Waterloo," public health and welfare be damned.

          Those of us who have been paying attention over the past three decades or so know that while the insurance industry is concerned only with profits, the right wing GOP base is driven by the ideological nonsense that "free market" capitalism, deregulation, small government and states rights is a constitutional and divine mandate.   They still cling to their imbecilic, knee-jerk ideology despite seeing the economy go into the tank last year, with trillions of dollars in debt, bankruptcies, mortgage foreclosures and ten percent unemployment, after eight years of GOP deregulation and tax cuts.

            As Tip O'Neill said, all politics is local, and our local budgetary problems are a good example given the presence of that obscenely obese gorilla, the one sitting in the auditorium with us Tuesday night, taking over ten million of our local tax dollars and handing them over to the private insurance corporations, enabling them to pursue excessive profits by making reckless investments while devising ever more ingenious, "perfectly legal" ways to deny the health care benefits we pay for.  Then, when they become "too big to fail" of course, we have to use federal tax dollars to pay for their recklessness in the form of bailouts.

           Here in Falmouth, that ten million dollars to provide group health coverage for town employees is paid in addition to the premium dollars we pay as individuals or through employer funded ERISA plans for ourselves.  It's the same in small towns all over America, where major portions of municipal budgets are devoted to providing the same kind of corporate welfare for the insurance industry CEOs and shareholders, where basic health care for municipal employees is considered only a "fringe" benefit.

          After we got through deciding we couldn't afford to put $3,000 back into shellfish propagation, we were presented with an opportunity to increase local revenues by adopting a local option increase in hotel and motel room taxes.  Then we were entertained by the bellowing of all the gored anti-tax oxen, business owners like former Selectman Kevin Murphy, telling scary stories about how a couple of extra tax dollars imposed on hotel or motel rooms was going to frighten tourists away en masse and deprive them of their anticipated profits.  Murphy and others also argued that the additional tax was "unfair" because it didn't apply to other temporary rentals like time-shares -as if they'd ever endorse any new tax on time share rentals.

             The rooms tax increase would have enhanced town revenues by "only" $150,000 or so for the remainder of this fiscal year, based on an anticipated $330,000 annual increase.  Earlier, Fire Chief Paul Brodeur gave us a breakdown of his budget saying he was able to hold the line for now, but by 2011 he would probably have to start cutting personnel in addition to the $200,000 or so in cuts he took this year, including over $169,000 for salary and wages. 

             Of course, we can't collect a few hundred thousand extra tax dollars to be paid by visitors instead of town property owners, because that'd cut into the profits of local businessmen like Murphy and it'd be "unfair."  So let's just take away the livelihoods of two or three firemen, a couple of policemen, a half-dozen teachers or several DPW workers instead.  Now, that's really fair, isn't it?

           About $120,000 in salaries and wages had to be cut from the Police budget, too, but nobody stopped to think that the extra $330,000 from the rooms tax increase just might go a long way to keep Falmouth a lot safer by maintaining existing levels of police and fire protection by offsetting those wage and salary cuts.  Alternatively, it would easily pay for several teachers whose jobs will be threatened if we don't begin to increase revenues in addition to looking for ways to limit expenditures.

          Naturally, when the Fire Department jobs disappear in a year or so, we'll be able to reduce some of that health care "fringe benefit" line item proportionally -make that gorilla slim down to about nine million pounds or so maybe.  You'll  have to learn to be patient then, however, because when you call for an ambulance you'll have to wait longer the way you have to wait, according to all the right-wing media blowhards, for medical treatment in all those "socialist" European countries with publicly financed health care.   But that's o.k. because, after all, what's a few extra minutes waiting for the ambulance when you have a stroke against a couple of dollars maybe taken off of Mr. Murphy's bottom line?

          Those European countries with "socialized" medicine recognize health care as a basic right rather than merely a "fringe benefit," and keep health care costs a lot lower than here in America, because they don't see how "fair" it is  to enhance business profitability by making basic health care unaffordable to millions of people.    In England they do this even though they don't even have a written constitution that specifies one of the basic purposes of government, and of the power of taxation, is to provide for the general welfare of the people, as expressly stated in Article I, Sect. 8, of our Constitution. 

          No, in England, France and other European democracies they have practical and effective political parties that are concerned for the well-being of all the people, with or without a constitutional mandate.  Here, however, we have the ideologically addled GOP marching in lockstep with the very rich to create a political paralysis serving only to maintain the economic ascendancy of the corporate elite,  and the constitutional mandate to promote the general welfare be damned.