Here's a good video on the protests (via Ezra Klein):
This may not be a coherent group with an organized set of demands, but I don't think they should be dismissed. They have a diverse, but real, set of problems. Health care costs (don't get me started on all the speech therapy that our insurance company refuses to pay), student loan debt, unemployment. There are a lot of videos on their Facebook page.
Higher education and student loan debt is a huge part of this protest. Check out this blog post on an unemployed PhD on the We Are the 99 Percent tumblr blog. Dude, I'm totally going to this protest!
Apt. 11d 
Sad story: only a handful of my students even knew this was going on.
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Student loan debt, my husband believes, is the reason that the housing market isn’t turning around. People just can’t afford both.
And they were protesting in San Fran last week while we were there. They are protesting in Raleigh and in Durham. It is going to spread across the country if it is already here.
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Might go check it out tomorrow, if Jonah is well enough to go to school.
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There was some commenting on Saturday about how little news media this was getting. Which helps explain Wendy’s students.
Has Stewart/Colbert covered this much yet? (As someone with no time and no tv–I’m getting updates from twitter mostly.)
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“Student loan debt, my husband believes, is the reason that the housing market isn’t turning around.”
Currently, you need at least three big gobs of money:
1. house
2. college
3. retirement
There can be a fourth, too:
4. medical
And let’s not forget
5. taxes
particularly at the higher income levels or in highly-taxed coastal areas.
Any one or two of these is somewhat feasible on median income, but add in a third or a fourth or a fifth and the numbers suddenly don’t work at all.
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I still don’t understand this. Whose attention is the protest trying to get, and what do the protesters want them to do? At first it sounded like it was about “Wall Street,” but maybe it’s the federal government, or other governments, or the banking industry, or businesses, or the American public in general?
This to me explains the lack of news coverage – it sounds (from out here in the midwest) like a lot of people are upset about being jobless, having student loan debt or high health care costs, not being able to buy a home, etc. That’s true everywhere – but it’s not really news. It’s just a bunch of New Yorkers gathering to vent. If people don’t have a plan, or even a message, it’s impossible for the news media to cover it.
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Yes, but the tea party has a diverse, but real, set of problems, and our hostess and her friends react not with just dismissal, but withering scorn and vituperation. Why is it okay to abuse and vilify one group and not the other?
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I speak only for myself, of course, but I am pretty sure the “tea party” was only really ever the same 24% of people who voted for Pat Buchanan back in the 90s. In other words, I don’t think their problems are real. Well, I think many of their mental health problems are real. Does that count?
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Why is it okay to abuse and vilify one group and not the other?
I don’t know if this counts as vilification or not, but I’m not solely interested in restoring economic growth. Very large numbers of people made a great deal of money and then stuck the public with the bills. I’d pay money to see them face a consequence. I already lost three different ways (lost income, lost wealth, increased taxes). I’ll take another loss if someone could convince me it has a shot at introducing enough stability for me to plan or enough instability to actually replace enough of the nation’s elite to matter.
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Anyway, umpteen years of people bitching about getting a reward for taking risk and then watching the people who took the most risk getting bailed out while people who saved conservatively get .25% and all the pain of a bag economy isn’t going to make me go out of my way to get upset over an extra 5% marginal tax rate or whatever it is. Or at least, I wouldn’t be upset about it if I was sure that the extra money wasn’t wasn’t being used to bail out Bank of America. I’d rather it go to the hippies since at least I don’t need to worry about them working against me in the rat race for positional goods.
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There is going to be one here on Wednesday, we’re pulling the kids out of school to go. I don’t think it will do any damn good, but once in awhile I like to remind them we’ve got a voice.
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A voice. A bag of rocks. A rusty pitchfork. It doesn’t matter. Go with what works for you.
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Wendy, your comments certainly count as evidence of a refusal to engage in civil discussion, combined with deep hatred and contempt for large numbers of your fellow citizens, if that is what you were aiming for.
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Every social-scientific study suggests that the TP movement is overwhelmingly made up of right-wing evangelicals. I don’t have a problem with right-wing evangelicals, but I don’t agree with them on social issues and I don’t understand how anyone can complain about: (1) taxes that are at historic lows, (2) efficiency gains in Medicare that are tiny compared to what the Republican party has sought for decades, and/or (3) deficits that only become “a problem” when deficit spending benefits other classes, demographics, and/or the political fortunes of the other party. How’ that?
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y81, I didn’t see anyone vilifying or even bringing up the Tea Party until you did. Wendy responded to your comment. I honestly don’t think anyone was looking to talk about the Tea Party in this discussion, let alone scorn them.
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Nexon’s point (2) was what really sealed the case against the TP every amounting to anything useful for me. On (1), federal income taxes may be at historic lows, but every other tax is going up and rapidly. And there were many Republicans complaining about Bush’s deficits. I don’t know if they were the TP people, but I don’t know if they weren’t.
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“Anyway, umpteen years of people bitching about getting a reward for taking risk and then watching the people who took the most risk getting bailed out while people who saved conservatively get .25%”
The last I checked (and things may have changed), we’re getting just north of 1% on the money market where we’ve got our downpayment money parked, but .25% was what we were getting on the old account before we pulled the plug on it (it started around 2.5% a few years back). Not that 1% isn’t pretty pathetic, but it is possible to do just a hair better than .25.
CORRECTION: I just checked our current bank, and they’re trumpeting .65% interest on money market accounts. Good thing home prices keep falling, because otherwise that would be aggravating.
“…efficiency gains in Medicare that are tiny compared to what the Republican party has sought for decades…”
The “efficiency gains” remain to materialize. I suspect that the whole health reform bill, if it is allowed to go into effect, will sink like the Vasa, and for similar reasons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa_(ship)
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The “efficiency gains” remain to materialize.
They’ll come from somewhere sooner or later. There isn’t another option. But, my point about the TP is that complaining about the deficit and very small cuts in Medicaid is effectively asking for an increase in the number of resources consumed by the elderly when those are clearly on an unsustainable path.
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“McKinsey, which based its projection on a survey of more than 1,300 employers of various sizes and industries and other proprietary research, found that 30 percent of employers will “definitely” or “probably” stop offering coverage in the years after 2014, when new medical insurance exchanges are supposed to be up and running.”
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43316969/ns/health-health_care/t/many-employers-will-drop-health-benefits-study-finds/
I think it’s not at all unreasonable to look at Obama’s health care program and be really worried about where it’s taking us. I know a lot of people here would love single-payer, but that was not how the thing was sold. Obama said “First of all, if you’ve got health insurance, you like your doctors, you like your plan, you can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan. Nobody is talking about taking that away from you.” Then we come to find out that that’s not how this is going to work.
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2009/07/president-obama-continues-questionable-you-can-keep-your-health-care-promise/
I think it’s entirely reasonable to think that either 1) Obama was being dishonest or 2) he really didn’t understand the implications of the health care bill. If the health care reform bill goes into effect, I’m afraid we are up for a decade of discovering exactly what is in it and what the implications are.
I was at one of our two local non-VA hospitals recently. This one is a new hospital in the suburbs, recently relocated from a poor city neighborhood. They had a sign in a main lobby (not ER) explaining that they do not take Medicaid. If you are on Medicaid and in dire medical need, they say that they will stabilize you and find another hospital to take you. As I said, this is one of only two hospitals in town that serves the general public. It is not a very happy thought to think that we’re all eventually either going to wind up on the equivalent of Medicaid, or we’re all going to need to pay our own way in cash. The old Soviet joke was, they pretend to pay us, we pretend to work. In a freer society like our own, there won’t even be the pretense of cooperation with a system that isn’t paying adequately for services rendered.
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If you are on Medicaid and in dire medical need, they say that they will stabilize you and find another hospital to take you.
If you aren’t on Medicaid, they’ll still take you. The public is already paying for that care, just doing so in a very inefficient way.
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Anyway, part of the reason I like Romney is he might be willing and able to create something workable for health insurance/care.
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1) We don’t need to get into a debate about the aggregate impact of PPACA on medical efficiency (I won’t convince you, you won’t convince me, and the fact is that 99.99% of what we say will simply repeat the arguments of others). My point has nothing to do with that. Rather, the Medicare cuts that so animated TP members were in of themselves efficiency gains: they come out of reduced rent payments to private insurers via the Medicare Advantage program.
2) I sure don’t remember a lot of griping about the deficit from Republicans during the Bush years. I do remember reconciliation rules that allowed passage of deficit-increasing measures by a bare majority in the Senate. But this isn’t a partisan thing. Deficits are like states rights: most politicians and activists only invoke them to block policies they don’t like.
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Oh, screw it.
1) The McKinsey survey is just that, a survey that asked “what do you think you’ll do when the health exchanges come online.” We’ll see what actually happens when employers tally the costs and benefits of dumping people into the exchanges (see, e.g., the employer mandate that conservatives complain about and that was absence from the Romney version);
2) If the exchanges work, they’ll give you significantly more choice than you currently get from your employer — and even offer many of the same plans; and
3) Nobody’s going to get to keep their current plans without the PPACA; you are *much* more likely to retain something like it once the insurance regulations kick in than you would have been if pre-PPACA system continued. My own employer (Amy knows them well) has been through a variety of providers over the last ten years, rates continue to go up, and coverage terms change every year.
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“1) The McKinsey survey is just that, a survey that asked “what do you think you’ll do when the health exchanges come online.” We’ll see what actually happens when employers tally the costs and benefits of dumping people into the exchanges (see, e.g., the employer mandate that conservatives complain about and that was absence from the Romney version)”
My dad (he’s a successful small businessman, and long term uninsured himself) has said that if he is required to insure his employees, he’ll just lay them off. I’m not sure about whether that would hold true if the penalty for non-compliance was the sort of nominal sum that has been discussed in the health care debates or whether it’s even a realistic plan in view of the expansion they’re doing that will require a minimum of one full-time seasonal employee. At minimum, I expect that my dad will be running the old calculator pretty hard to figure out how far to pare back the payroll.
As with the Bank of America’s unexpected $5 debit card fee, for every federal action there’s an equal and opposite reaction.
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