Saint Obama
by Errington C. Thompson, MD
There are times in the last several years where I simply look at President Obama and shake my head. I have no idea how he does it. Where does he find the willpower?
I understand that the frustrations of being president are nearly constant. I also understand that we live in an extremely contentious society. There are some people who try to hold onto the past because they can’t look towards the future; others embrace the future and want to ignore the past. It seems that there are very few people in the middle who understand that we have a glorious—and checkered—past, but that we also have some real challenges facing us.
This brings me to Sunday night, February 2. No, not the Super Bowl game, but before it, when Bill O’Reilly sat down and interviewed President Obama. In one of the more ridiculous exchanges, O’Reilly tried to “prove” that the president has expanded the “welfare state”—at a time when government spending is at a 30-year low.
This is a common accusation made by conservatives. Obama pointed out that the government is actually smaller now than in a generation, and he brought up an extremely successful government program, student loans. Bill O’Reilly pointed out that he never needed student loans. He painted houses.
O’Reilly’s point was to demonstrate how self-reliant he was and is, so let’s think about this for a second. The cost of a year at UNC Chapel Hill is about $18,000 for NC state residents today, including room and board. The cost of a private school like Duke University is above $60,000 a year. Well, I’m sorry, but painting houses is not going to put a dent in $60,000 a year.
Forty years ago, around the time Bill O’Reilly went to college, the Ivy League Columbia University in New York cost about $2,600 per year (1974) for tuition, and another $1,400 for a dorm room and meal plan. That’s right: $4,000 per year for college, when the median income was in the mid-$20,000 to mid-$35,000 range. So for 10% to 20% of a family’s income, they could put a child through college IN THE IVY LEAGUE. Today, middle-class income is $50,000 to $150,000, and a Duke education costs more than a third of that if you’re on the high end—and more than the entire income of most families.
Why? For thirty years college costs have risen at a rate as much as twice as high as inflation, and for those same thirty years middle-class incomes have stagnated compared to inflation rates.
For some reason many conservatives believe that America has gone soft. They believe that nobody really wants to work hard anymore. Instead, they believe that everybody wants “stuff given to them.” While it is true that there are a few people in our society who sit back and enjoy food stamps, welfare, and other government programs, that is not the vast majority of Americans. Americans want to work hard and take home a decent paycheck.
The problem is, while Americans got the “work hard” part down to a science, the “decent paycheck” part of the formula seems to be lacking. If I had a dollar for every person I ran into—a friend or patient—who held down two jobs and was also doing something else on the side in order to make ends meet, I’d be a wealthy man. When a huge, and hugely profitable corporation like Walmart pays its employees so little that it counsels them how to get free food from local food pantries, there’s something terribly wrong with this country.
Since the midterm disaster of 2010, President Obama has been tested at every turn. I have lost count of how many times Republicans have passed meaningless legislation or resolutions calling for the repeal of ObamaCare. For the most part, this has simply been a waste of our tax money. Ironically, those same Republicans claim to believe the government is spending “too much money” and that the size of government is simply “too big.” Therefore, they’ve done everything in their power to cut spending—except for wasting it on their pet projects
Conservatives have told us time and time again that cutting spending will fix our economy and put more Americans back to work. But now the data is in. Over the last two years, our economy has lost approximately 2,000,000 jobs, and our gross domestic product has fallen or been suppressed by over two points, as a direct result of Republicans’ fiscal austerity. In a sluggish economy with relatively high unemployment, we need to be putting Americans back to work, not cutting jobs and our GDP.
Saint Obama continues to battle Republicans. He tries to win the hearts and minds of Americans in spite of 24-hour nonsense from Fox News and other organizations. I’m surprised he doesn’t step up on the stage like a rapper and drop the mic, saying, “I’m out of here.” The one thing the president did propose, and will do despite the obstruction of Congress, is raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour—for federal employees under future government contracts. This is hardly a windfall, though it should help at least some of those who are working at minimum wage. Meanwhile, it seems it’s up to individual states to increase minimum wages for all employees, as about 15 states have done recently.
I believe that the president and his advisors need to be looking for every avenue they can take to try to stimulate the economy and help Americans. It is clear that he is going to still try and work with Republicans, he has the patience of Job—and then some.
