Fixing Our Democracy, Now

by Errington C. Thompson, MD –

I’m sorry, our Government, our nation simply isn’t moving in the direction that I would like.

I am a progressive Democrat. This means that I support policies that lift up and support the middle class. The middle class isn’t someone who is making $5 million a year. The average American does not take vacations in southern France. The average American doesn’t have a second house in Colorado and a third house somewhere in Hawaii.

The average, middle-class American works more than 40 hours a week. Usually, a second member of the household is working either part-time or full-time. The median income for the average American family is somewhere around $53,000 a year. The average American family in 2016 cannot do the same things that the average American family could do back in the 1950s, ’60s and early ’70s. This is the problem. The question is, how can we fix this problem? (hint: it is not tax cuts.)

The average American family does not need to work harder. That is not the answer to the problem. We’ve seen American productivity increase throughout the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s and even up until today. We have seen corporate profits increase (no, that’s not right), soar (nope that’s not the right word either), skyrocket (that’s it!) throughout the same time period. The stuff that the average American family needs to live, the average American life, continues to increase at a rate that outstrips the average American salary.

In 1960, the average American family took home $5,300. The average new car cost $2,600. The average new home cost $12,700—about 2.5 times the average take-home pay. Today? The median cost of a new home today is around $313,500. This is roughly 6X what Americans take home. Six times!! There is the problem. The problem isn’t that we are spending too much (sure there was the go-go ’80s, but let’s not count that). The problem is that we are making too little.

We need multifaceted solutions of this complex problem. We must understand that the American worker has been undervalued for decades. At the same time the American executive has been overvalued for decades. The guy who fixes my car, the server who brings me my food in a restaurant, the person who sweeps the floor at the hospital or corporate building, these Americans are all undervalued. We need to raise the minimum wage, again. We need to keep raising the minimum wage until Americans can afford to live in a good house and buy a decent car that is not going to break down every two weeks.

For years, politicians and intellectuals have been lying to all of us. I remember reading Thomas Friedman’s huge bestseller, The World Is Flat. In this conservative treatise, “Professor” Friedman argues that because we have a global economy, low-wage jobs will go to China, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Mexico. We will not be able to compete for those jobs; therefore, we all needed to increase our level of education.

Basically, Friedman was arguing that Americans who have lost their manufacturing jobs need to go back to school and learn how to be computer programmers. Although the argument sounds ludicrous today, it was just a decade ago that both Republicans and Democrats were pushing this idea. “We need more education and that will fix the problem.” NOT! If everyone got their PhD in mechanical engineering, mechanical engineers would be undervalued. Corporate America has been suppressing wages for decades.

The problem in America is that the rich have taken your money and mine. Any safeguards that we had to protect our incomes and negotiate reasonable salaries have been under attack for over 40 years.

The state and federal government used to subsidize our college and graduate education. I went to a top-rated medical school for $300 per year in 1983. Now, in-state tuition for Georgetown Medical is over $53,000. Wrap your mind around this. If you aren’t rich, if you get a higher education, you enter the world of perpetual debt.

Imagine graduating from college with $100,000 of debt. Then graduate from law school with another $200,000 of debt. Now, buy your way into a practice. You are a half a million dollars in debt before you make a dime. (The problem is the same for respiratory therapists, nurses or accountants.) This is our problem. We don’t need low-interest loans, we need schools to be affordable for the average American. We need federal and state governments to invest in us, again.

Many Americans were freaking out over the recently announced increases in ObamaCare. All I can do is laugh. Congress had the power to make ObamaCare affordable for everyone for the next 5 – 10 years. Congress could have added some sort of mechanism to hold premiums in place. Congress could have added an additional funding source that would pay for any increases, like a tax on fatty foods or on soft drinks, but Congress decided not to do any of these things. They did nothing. So, the increase in premiums is not a surprise: it was expected!

In the hospital, we are using more and more technology to help get patients in and out quicker and safer. We now scan a patient’s wrist band to make sure that we have the right patient getting the right drug at the right time. We now use CT scanners to help with the diagnosis of appendicitis. We are taking the appendix out with the laparoscope, which means that patients have far less post-operative pain; patients go home sooner and get back to work sooner. We need affordable health insurance for everyone. We need affordable prescription drugs for everyone.

So who is talking about investing in us, the average Joe or average Nancy? Who is talking about building and repairing our schools? Who is talking about repairing our roads and bridges? Who is talking about building a smart electrical grid? How do we begin to fix our democracy?

We lift up the American worker. That is how we begin to make our democracy work for everyone.