Budget Hopes, Further From Reach
There was probably never much chance that a self-appointed gang of six senators could produce a comprehensive solution for the nation’s long-term deficit, given the ruthless political environment. The best hoped was that it could give bipartisan traction to a few useful ideas before they were attacked and destroyed by ideologues.
That’s why the decision on Tuesday by Senator Tom Coburn, a Republican of Oklahoma, to leave the “Gang of Six” deficit talks before that could happen was so unfortunate. It’s not that we regularly agreed with Mr. Coburn’s very conservative outlook — far from it. But he recently showed courage by acknowledging that the budget cannot be put in long-term balance without new money. Few other Republicans are willing to admit that truth out loud.
Mr. Coburn adopted a nuanced position that allowed him to say he was against an increase in tax rates. But he was not against eliminating certain breaks and broadening the tax base, which could result in rich people paying more. By current Republican standards, that constitutes a breakthrough, one that negotiators of both parties could combine with measures to reduce the growth of spending — and get closer to a balanced budget.
Naturally, he was pilloried for it. The no-tax-no-how core denounced him, as did right-wing blogs. The Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, dismissed the gang’s importance, and Oklahoma voters made their unhappiness known. When Mr. Coburn returned from the recent Congressional vacation, negotiators say, he began making new and impossible demands, including cutting $130 billion from Medicare beyond the $400 billion cut envisioned by President Obama’s deficit reduction commission.
When Democrats predictably balked, Mr. Coburn walked out. A wounded gang continues to meet, but its prospects are dimmed. The other two Republicans, Saxby Chambliss of Georgia and Michael Crapo of Idaho, are also risking right-wing wrath by staying on, but they don’t seem to have the political clout to sell a compromise.
The only other serious talks in Washington are the ones forced by House Republicans, who are using the expiration of the debt ceiling to extort new spending cuts. But those talks, led by Vice President Joseph Biden Jr., are focused more on a shorter-term way to hold down spending. The atmosphere in the capital is apparently too toxic to go beyond that, as the gang’s implosion shows.
The Senate could, of course, do something almost old-fashioned: pass its own budget to counter the one assembled by Representative Paul Ryan for the House. But that would require Democrats to agree among themselves about the need to balance revenue increases with long-term cuts. The president’s 2012 budget recommended a 3-to-1 ratio of spending cuts to revenue increases, which cuts government programs far too much in a slow recovery. Last week, Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota, the budget committee chairman, circulated a much better proposal with about an even mix of cuts and increases, including a 3 percent surtax on millionaires.
But some Democrats, like Mark Begich of Alaska and Bill Nelson of Florida, are pushing back on the tax increases, reflecting Republican irresponsibility. Until the president and his party can make a stronger case for increased revenues, it is probably too much to expect Republicans like Tom Coburn to do it for them.
A Victory for Veterans
The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ordered an overhaul of mental health care for veterans, who are killing themselves by the thousands each year because of what the court called the “unchecked incompetence” of the Department of Veterans Affairs.
In a scathing 2-to-1 ruling on May 10, the judges said delays in treating post-traumatic stress disorder and other combat-related mental injuries violated veterans’ constitutional rights. The delays are getting worse as more troops return from Afghanistan and Iraq, the judges said. About 18 veterans commit suicide on an average day.
The government’s obligations are clear. Veterans are entitled by law to be treated for injuries and illnesses. Benefits claims are supposed to be dealt with in days or weeks, but it takes an average of more than four years to fully adjudicate a mental health claim. When a veteran appeals a disability rating, the process bogs down drastically. The problem is an overwhelmed bureaucracy and a chronic inadequacy of resources and planning.
The judges said the system for screening suicidal patients was ineffective, and cited a 2007 inspector general’s conclusion that suicide-prevention measures were mostly absent. The same report found that the veterans department’s regional medical centers have suicide-prevention experts, but its 800 community-based outpatient clinics — which veterans most often use — do not. This crisis plagues active-duty soldiers, too, and the Pentagon has lagged in responding effectively. The government has long known what it was up against with P.T.S.D. and brain injuries — the signature afflictions of current wars.
This new ruling came two years after the appeal was filed, during which lawyers for the government and the nonprofit advocacy organizations that sued, Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans United for Truth, were trying to negotiate a plan for fixing the system. Those negotiations did not succeed, so the judges have remanded the case to the district court to order one.
The government can keep appealing, but it should work with the advocates and enact a plan to fulfill the promise of the veterans affairs secretary, Eric Shinseki, to do better. For 25 million veterans, including 1.6 million who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, the choice is clear.
About That Checking Account
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, created by Congress last year as part of financial reform, has broad authority to ban unfair or abusive practices in financial products and services. Protecting checking account holders from unreasonable fees and other costly traps should be one of the agency’s first priorities when it opens for business in July.
At a minimum, it should apply the same sensible protections won by long-abused credit card users in the Credit Card Act of 2009.
A new report by the Pew Charitable Trust’s Safe Checking in the Electronic Age Project analyzed the policies of the nation’s 10 largest banks. It shows why checking account holders — in other words most adult Americans — are in desperate need of better protections.
Required disclosure documents run an average of 111 pages and often hide penalty and fee information in several places so that customers cannot easily find it. Checking overdraft fees are not “reasonable and proportional,” as late fees must now be for credit cards. According to the study, the average overdraft charge of $35 on an average overdraft of $36 amounts to an annualized interest rate of more than 5,000 percent. The banks deserve to make money on these transactions. But certainly not that much.
Most of the banks studied reserve the right to reorder transactions in ways that maximize overdraft fees. They can post withdrawals before deposits. They can also clear checks out of the order in which they are presented — processing the largest item first — so that the account is emptied quickly and they can levy multiple overdraft charges.
The study estimates that the banking industry will reap $38 billion in overdraft fees this year — a record high — much of that because of tricky disclosure, processing and fee schemes. That is outrageous.
The Vatican Comes Up Short
The Vatican’s long overdue guidelines for fighting sexual abuse of children are, unfortunately, just that — flimsy guidelines for a global problem that requires an unequivocal mandate for church officials to work with secular authorities in prosecuting rogue priests.
Instead, the Vatican has issued nonbinding guidance that punts the scandal back to the authority of local bishops, who still will not face firm oversight or punishment for cover-ups that recycled hundreds of abusive priests.
The directive came two days before a new study of the abuse problem that cites the sexual and social turmoil of the 1960s as a possible factor in priests’ crimes. This is a rather bizarre stab at sociological rationalization and, in any case, beside the point that church officials went into denial and protected abusers.
The Vatican directive is also seriously defective for playing down the role of civilian boards in investigating abuses. The lay boards helped force the American bishops to proclaim a zero-tolerance policy that was finally more concerned about raped children than the image of the Roman Catholic Church.
The Vatican guidelines note that abusing children is a matter for secular law and call for dioceses to create “clear and coordinated” policies by next year. But the continuing stress on church priority in what essentially are criminal offenses is disheartening.
Vatican officials say Rome should not interfere with the traditional supremacy of local bishops. That was not the case earlier this month, when Pope Benedict XVI removed Bishop William Morris of Australia from office. The bishop, concerned with the shortage of priests, asked five years ago whether the Vatican “may well” have to reconsider the bar to ordaining women or married men.
No dramatic dismissal was ordered for bishops well documented to have overseen hush payments to victims and relocation of abusive priests. Splendid Vatican sanctuary was extended to Cardinal Bernard Law after he had to resign amid reports he covered up the scandal in Boston.
Most recently, ranking churchmen in Philadelphia rejected a grand jury finding that as many as 37 priests suspected of abuse should not still be serving. The diocese later suspended 26 amid public alarm. This should have been a red flag to the Vatican that diocesan prelates need a no-nonsense fiat in repairing the damage to children and the church from decades of shielding abusive priests.
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