The New Budget Economics in the US

The crazy right is up in arms about deficits and debts. They want a slash-and-burn austerity to get deficits under control. But strangely, they ignore big ticket items that for most people should be first to be chopped, hacked, and reduced.

During December 2010 Republicans were adamant that a trillion dollar giveaway to the billionaires and millionaires was absolutely essential for the "health" of the US economy. But now they want to chop every government program that delivers any benefits to ordinary people. It is "unaffordable".

Here's the equivalent story from New York. This is from Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing:

As New York's health care system slashes spending by charging more to be unwell and providing fewer services to disabled people, one area of costs is off-limits: multimillion-dollar compensation for hospital executives. The best-paid hospital CEOs are paid nearly 10 million dollar a year (and compensation packages for CEOs are on the rise). When an advocacy group mooted the possibility of caps on executive pay, they were outmaneuvered by lobbyists who ensured that the salaries for top administrators would not be considered in efforts to balance the budgets.

A Health Department spokesperson says that the state can't set compensation levels (or even advise on them) for private businesses, even when those businesses are financed at public expense, which means that no matter how much of a hospital's budget comes from Medicaid and Medicare, CEOs' salaries can't be touched by regulators. The NYT cites the example of Greenwich Village's St. Vincent's Hospital Manhattan, which received large public contributions but went bankrupt anyway, due to mismanagement from administrators -- the top ten of whom took home $6 million in pay in the hospital's last year.

This is the two-tier economy so beloved by right wing politicos. Slash and burn anything of any benefit to the bottom 90% of the population while make sacred and untouchable the egregiously outrageous big bucks thrown at incompetents at the top of the heap.