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Thom's blog
Cash For Geezers and The French
In our "Need to Know" news today, President Nicolas Sarkozy may be facing the biggest challenge of his presidency as the month-old protest against so-called pension reform intensifies. An astounding 3 million demonstrators – one in 20 of all French people – marched yesterday against the President's plans to hike up the retirement age from 60 to 62. Tens of thousands of students joined the marches for the first time and Rail and air services were severely disrupted yesterday. Many schools and government offices, and even the Eiffel Tower were closed. Eleven out of the nation's 12 oil refineries were wholly or partially closed and local union branches are threatening an indefinite stoppage, "to topple the pension reform".
The state railway company, the SNCF, warned last night that it expected more widespread cancellations today. Close to 3.5 million people were estimated by unions to have joined the protest marches in more than 300 French towns and cities yesterday. Tens of thousands of university students have joined the marches for the first time, concerned that raising the retirement age will mean fewer jobs for them. There's a simple math here, that Europeans - who are nearly all unionionized, and who study in high school how labor supply and demand affects wages - understand and that Americans generally are clueless about. It's that the more workers there are, the lower wages will go, and the fewer workers there are, the higher wages will go. It's simple supply and demand.
That's why American unions fought for restrictions on child labor and immigrant labor - to drive up their own wages by making labor scarce so employers had to compete for workers by paying more. And the French know that if everybody in the country has to work two extra years, there will be an increase in people competing for jobs thus driving wages down.
Here in the US we could use this simple math to get us out of our unemployment crisis and raise the standard of living of all working people. I call it "Cash For Geezers," and it's a chapter in my book "Rebooting the American Dream." Simply lower the optional US retirement age - the age at which a person can opt to stop working and begin drawing medicare and social security - from 67 to 55. Probably about half the people in that group would opt to retire, freeing up as many as ten million jobs for young people entering the labor force. And because it would causes wages to go up, it would pay for itself because increased wages means increased taxes that pay for the Medicare and Social Security.
-Thom
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The Daily Stack 
Quote: "In every religion, there are those who would drape themselves in the mantle of belief and faith only to distort it’s most sacred teachings -- preaching intolerance and resorting to violence." -- Hillary Clinton.
Hour One: The French are protesting, why is the American press missing the "cash for geezers" angle?
Hour Two: What do radical right wing tea partiers and radical Islam have in common? Thom has a rumble with Dan Gainor, Vice President and T. Boone Pickens Free Market Fellow at the Business and Media Institute.
What causes Religious Extremism? Thom asks Professor Ian McGregor, Associate Professor York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Watch Thom's new show on the RT channel called the Big Picture, or stream it live from 9 to 10pm, and it repeats at 11. You can catch the shows you have missed on Youtube.
Talk Radio News Segment: Geoff Holtzman, Assignment Editor/Congressional Correspondent.
Hour Three: You now must learn Chinese if you want to do business in America...?!
"Everything You Know is Wrong...about Facebook?!" With Greg Stebben, Editor - Men's Health magazine.
The good: Chilean President Sebastian Pinera for inviting expert help from around the world to help free the miners.
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Coming up Thursday on The Thom Hartmann Program
Hour Two: Geeky Science Rocks...what do can we learn about curing illnesses from...butterflies?!
Hour Three: Why are conservatives determined to keep the prohibition on marijuana intact? California has a chance to change this...should the rest of the country too? Thom has a rumble with Charles Stimson of the Heritage Foundation.
And, the best of the rest of the news and your calls right here on...
The Thom Hartmann Program... your media support group for we the people.
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Save the profits wasted on health insurers
When premiums skyrocket, the usual response from the insurance companies is that they are simply passing along the increase in health care costs to the consumers. And the corporate media never ask whether the profits of these insurance companies are also suffering. In reality, they are making out like bandits, as a 2009 report from Health Care for America Now shows:
"Profits at 10 of the country’s largest publicly traded health insurance companies in 2007 rose 428 percent from 2000 to 2007, from $2.4 billion to $12.9 billion, according to U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings. In 2007 alone the chief executive officers at these companies collected combined total compensation of $118.6 million—an average of $11.9 million each. That is 468 times more than average American worker made that year".
The excess is money that could be spend on providing health care that enables people to stay productively in work and on providing a safety net so that more people can afford the risk of becoming entrepreneurs.
Learn more about how to save the profits wasted on health insurers in chapter five, "Medicare “Part E” – For Everybody". Get " Rebooting the American Dream" now (on Kindle too) |
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Watch & Listen to Thom
Peter Beinart - The New McCarthyism - are we in the midst of a national psychosis?
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