David Cay Johnston

By David Cay Johnston
The opinions expressed are his own.

The Obama administration’s support for killing off the U.S. Statistical Abstract underscores what’s wrong with Washington’s approach to cutting the budget. This nearly thousand-page compendium of official data is in its 130th and evidently last edition since 1878. It is published online and in print.

Taxpayers will save the $2.9 million it costs in a year to compile the data from a multitude of government, academic, nonprofit and industry websites.

But how much time will be wasted hunting for data without this ready reference? How much will state and local taxpayers pay for the extra time reference desk librarians need to answer questions? How many questions will go unanswered? And what of the Statistical Abstract’s value in quickly and efficiently pointing to other sources for a deeper look that spares researchers having to hunt through the vast array of government and private websites?

Corporations, entrepreneurs, researchers and state and local taxpayers will pay much more than what the federal government saves.

It’s a perfect example of what’s wrong with Washington’s approach. The conventional wisdom, a dogma for some, is that federal spending must be cut because government costs more than we can afford.

Yet as the impending demise of the Statistical Abstract exemplifies, proposals for cutting government spending put forth by Democrats and Republicans alike will make the federal government less costly while making America worse off economically.

FISCAL SAND

The mindless rush to embrace spending cuts will throw fiscal sand in the gears of the economy instead of applying the right amount of grease.

The sum the federal government would spend to produce the Statistical Abstract amounts to less than Washington will spend in the first 25 seconds of fiscal 2012, which begins in a month on Oct. 1. Come up with 379,737 more cuts of this size and the projected budget deficit vanishes, at least in the minds of politicians who have conveniently forgotten the concept of cost-benefit analysis.

Last year the online site was accessed 5.6 million times. If the absence of a Statistical Abstract increases search time by even two minutes, then the cost, based on the all-in average pay of reference librarians, will be about five times the federal savings. Were Congress to order up a cost-benefit study, the figure would be a loser, costing society at least $5 for every dollar of tax money saved.

I would not be surprised if the cost to entrepreneurs, businesses and nonprofits was $100 for each federal dollar saved given the pay researchers get and how long it can take to locate data.

The Obama administration is far from unique in failing to think through the implications of spending cuts. Consider Representative Paul Ryan, the Wisconsin Republican who is treated by the press corps as a serious and informed budget expert.

PENNY WISE…

Ryan has twice put forth plans that he accurately says would save the government over the next 75 years the equivalent of more than $5 trillion immediately.

What Ryan did not say is that using the same official data he relied on, the Ryan plan would raise private spending on healthcare by $39 trillion, as liberal economist Dean Baker showed using pure spreadsheet mechanics and the same data source as Ryan. Spending nearly $8 to save $1 is, like killing the Statistical Abstract, just plain foolish.

Of course if the Ryan plan were to become law, that $39 trillion would not be spent because people would not be able to afford it. Many of them would just die sooner, and more painfully, because affordable healthcare would become beyond their reach.

Our Washington politicians are thinking the same way as a girlfriend from long ago whose shiny almost-new Camaro ran like a clunker. She thought not changing the oil saved money. Penny wise and pound foolish.

The truth almost no one in Washington dares speak is that raising taxes can actually put more money in your pocket. My neighbors and I learned this a few years ago when we voted to raise our taxes. For every dollar of added tax my wife and I paid this year we enjoy $1.86 more in our pockets.

How can raising taxes put more money in your pocket? By increasing efficiency.

This year we paid $210 in higher property taxes to finance trash collection and sidewalk snowplowing. Purchased retail, those services would cost about $600. So we spent $210 to save $390. That translates into a savings of $1.86 for every dollar of increased tax. As an added bonus we have just one garbage truck a week down our street, not a different company’s truck everyday, and garbage cans on the street only on Thursday mornings.

What matters in public finance is not how much government spends, so much as what it buys with our tax dollars. But don’t count on the new “Super Congress 12″ committee to undertake serious cost-benefit analysis because cutting spending has become dogma and reality-based policies would be economic heresy.

By David Cay Johnston
The author is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

Washington politicians say high corporate tax rates are driving U.S. companies to invest offshore where tax rates are lower. But that is not General Electric’s experience.

GE’s disclosures show that over the last decade it paid much lower tax rates in America than offshore, just the opposite of the Washington political mantra. Even more puzzling, the U.S. corporate giant chooses to take more of its profits in other lands despite the higher tax rates there.

Given that GE has a roughly 1,000-person tax department dedicated to paying as little as possible in taxes, what the disclosures show is that something other than tax policy is driving GE’s business decisions.

The law gives companies a great deal of latitude in deciding how to arrange where they report profits from multinational transactions. GE won’t elaborate on why it takes so much of its profit in higher tax jurisdictions offshore.

HIGHER RATES ABROAD

From 2001 through 2010, GE’s total American corporate tax burden averaged 9.4 percent of its profits in American corporate income taxes compared to its 17.9 percent foreign tax rate.

GE’s accounting for taxes, both current and deferred, shows that its American tax rate is just a bit more than half its foreign rate and only about a quarter of the statutory 35 percent rate set by Congress.

Gary Sheffer, GE’s top spokesman, insists that the average 9.4 percent rate over 10 years is misleading because GE suffered big losses in its finance unit that lowered its 2010 American taxes.

“GE’s tax rate was lower than normal in 2010,” Sheffer advised me, because “we lost billions of dollars in GE Capital, our financial arm, during the global financial crisis. Our tax rate will be higher in 2011 as GE Capital recovers.”

But that anomalous year pales compared to the long-term trends.

Break the first decade of this century in two and you can see the trend clearly.

From 2001 through 2005, GE paid almost identical tax rates on its profits, 19.3 percent in the U.S. and 19.7 percent offshore. During those five years GE reported 56.1 percent of its profits in the United States.

But for 2006 through 2010 a number of significant changes show up in the fine print of GE’s 10-K disclosures.

FALL OF 28.3 PCT

First, the share of profits taken in the U.S. fell by half to 28.3 percent. On the surface that fits the Washington political debate that high taxes are driving capital and profits offshore.

But during those same years GE’s offshore tax burden was 28 percentage points higher than its American rate. GE reported tax rates of 16.7 percent on offshore profits, compared to minus 11.5 percent on U.S. profits.

During those five years GE reported $26.6 billion in U.S. profits, but its accounting shows a negative $3 billion tax expense. Offshore the company made $67.3 billion and its taxes by the same measure came to $11.3 billion.

Of that $3 billion negative tax burden over five years, GE relied heavily on business tax credits that Sheffer described as “widely available” and included “the credit for manufacturing energy-efficient appliances in the U.S., the credit for research performed in the U.S., and the credit for energy produced from renewable sources.”

Those business credits, first disclosed in 2006, saved GE almost $2.3 billion. Even without them GE would have reported a tax burden for those five years of minus $794 million or minus 3 percent in the United States. Despite this, GE keeps taking more of its profits offshore where it pays higher taxes, suggesting tax rates are not as crucial an issue as U.S. leaders assert.

Here is another way to look at the disclosures: In 2001 GE’s American tax rate was a third higher than its foreign rate. Its American corporate income tax rate was 28.6 percent, compared to 21.1 percent on foreign profits.

STUDY IN CONTRASTS

In every year since then, GE’s domestic tax rate has been much smaller than in 2001. It reported negative tax liabilities in four of the next nine years.

Offshore, however, GE reported a positive tax rate every year, always in double digits.

Significantly, in 2010 — the year of Sheffer’s focus in response to my questions about the longer period — GE’s offshore tax rate was 22.9 percent, a higher rate than in 2001 and the second highest rate since 2001.

During the past decade GE’s state tax rate also slipped, but not by much. The rate was 3.3 percent in the first half of the decade, but just 2.7 percent in the second half.

Yet another way to look at taxes is the company’s worldwide accounting for taxes, which blends American, offshore and state burdens. Back in 2001 it was 28.3 percent of global profits. Every year since then it has been under 20 percent.  The rate was negative in 2009 and in single digits in 2008 and 2010, thanks to negative tax rates in the United States for those three years.

All these numbers show the same basic trend line — despite higher taxes offshore and much lower domestic taxes, GE keeps taking more profits offshore. That cuts against the simplistic theme of the growing bipartisan consensus in Washington that corporate tax rates must come down.

These facts all raise the question of whether our elected leaders in both parties will stop memorizing talking points and get to studying data points so we get reality-based tax policy. That means paying attention to nuance, including those business tax credits GE relies on so heavily, as well as posted tax rates.

Congress may be blind to such facts, though, because of the money GE spends to influence Washington. Last year GE spent $39.3 million lobbying Congress, roughly $73,000 for every senator and representative. That’s four times what it spent back when its American tax rates, and its share of profits taken in America, were both much higher.

By David Cay Johnston
The author is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

The Lisboa, the oldest casino in this thriving gambling city, features a polished black marble floor flecked with what looks like glittering gold. While all gamblers eventually find only fool’s gold, like the glittering pyrite in the marble floor, government is mining real gold from the casinos here.

Macau, a special administrative region of China, is raking in 8 billion patacas (US$1 billion) a month this year in casino taxes.

That is up by almost half from last year and likely to grow much more in the next few years as Chinese with wads of renminbi search for excitement, glamour, commercial sex and a brief escape from the rigors of life back home, not to mention the hope of striking it rich at the tables.

The casinos generate so much tax revenue that the Macau special administrative region cannot spend it all, anomalous proof that government is not an unlimited user of money.

Last year the Macau government took in more than twice what it spent. The budget for 2011 anticipates the government spending more than three-quarters of its revenue as the 22,600 civil servants — every 25th resident of this city of more than half a million — get their first across-the-board pay increase since 2008.

These huge tax surpluses free Beijing from having to spend any money in Macau, the only place under Chinese rule where casinos are legal.

The casino taxes can be seen also as an indirect way for Beijing to capture some of the vast untaxed income in China, where only 3 percent of workers pay income tax and it is universally believed that many fortunes made in business escape the nascent Chinese tax enforcement system.

CASH FLOWS IN
Of course it has not gone unnoticed by Beijing, or for that matter Washington, that so much money flows into Macau across the bustling border crossings at the mainland, on the jetfoils and ferries from Hong Kong and in the jumbo jets landing at the airport. Spies are said to lurk everywhere in Macau, as ubiquitous as the working girls who gather legally at the casino bars.

The Chinese spies are looking for both high-rolling government officials, a sure sign of corruption given Chinese civil service salaries, and for people who might let state secrets slip. The Americans scan for people who might hold valuable military and other secrets and who, having put themselves in vulnerable positions, can be coaxed into selling what they know.

Everywhere around the edges are criminal gangs that lend money to gamblers, encouraged by laws that make casino markers, as credit slips are known, collectable in Macau and Hong Kong, but not the Chinese mainland.

The big markers are held by associates of junket organizers who, workers and customers at the casinos say, are willing now and then to have a customer just disappear because it helps to encourage repayment by the rest of the borrowers.

For those unwilling to leave China with renminbi stuffed into men’s packs (or murses, as they are known in America) there are jewelry shops that take Chinese plastic and hand over not diamonds or watches, but cash with which to gamble, a subtle form of money laundering.

For those who wish more discretion, the Las Vegas Sands — operator of the Venetian, Sands and Four Seasons casinos — operates seven private jets, some of which fly back and forth to the company’s Marina Bay casino in Singapore. Going to Singapore means gambling where Macau, and thus Chinese, officials lack access to casino videotapes.

PROFITABLE DESPITE HIGH TAXES
The six casino companies pay in taxes almost 40 percent of what their players lose, compared to 5 to 15 percent in Singapore, 7.75 percent in Las Vegas and 9 percent in Atlantic City. The American casinos also pay corporate income tax.

Despite Macau’s high taxes, its casinos are immensely profitable.

Partly that is because gamblers pay high prices in the form of the vigorish charged at the baccarat tables. Baccarat accounts for close to 90 percent of the money that Macau players lose.

In Atlantic City the vig, as it’s called, is under 2 percent. In Macau it is almost 3 percent. So Macau players pay about 50 percent more vig because of the higher casino tax.

Almost half the world’s people live within a five-hour flight to Macau, ensuring a steady torrent of players and tax revenues even when the long economic boom in China slows, as it must someday.

Steve Wynn’s Wynn Resorts runs casinos in Macau and Las Vegas. Last year Macau generated 69 percent of company profits and 77 percent of cash flow, a measure of how China prospers while America struggles.

Cash flow from the Las Vegas Sands’ Macau casinos last year was four times what its Las Vegas business generated. Its Macau cash flow, as measured by the company, grew 47.5 percent from $842 million in 2009 to $1,242 million last year. And its new Sands Marina in Singapore, although open only eight months, brought another $642 million of cash flow.

The Macau Venetian has more than 550,000 square feet (50,000 square meters) of gambling floor, making it 3.5 times larger than the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City and infinitely more profitable.
Across the street from the Venetian, new hotel towers are rising for Conrad, Sheraton, Holiday Inn and perhaps other hotels as the number of Chinese with money to play with grows along with the tax revenues generated by the money they lose.

There are many lessons here for America. One is that higher taxes do not necessarily mean less business.  (Editing by Howard Goller)

By David Cay Johnston
The author is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

The equatorial island nations of Mauritius and Singapore are competing for the role of preferred gateway for foreign investments into India and other Asian countries.

Think of it as a triangle, not of love, but of lucre.

Companies and rich investors use gateway countries so they can earn profits in such places as India, China and Indonesia.  Favorable tax treaties let them send dividends and other payments to such places as Mauritius and Singapore while paying little or no tax. The United States can even provide such benefits under some of its tax treaties.

These treaties are sold to the public as vital to avoiding double taxation of the same money and thus encouraging cross-border investments. Countries with tax treaties that enable lightly taxed or tax-free profits can benefit if their rules require local work by accountants, bankers, executives, investment bankers and lawyers, who earn high pay and require little in government services.

But just as tax laws can be drafted to fashion loopholes, so too can tax treaties.

One of the biggest loopholes involves what is commonly known as “black money” and a circular movement of capital known as “round tripping.”

Black money refers to capital that is being hidden, sometimes from the tax authorities and sometimes from partners, litigants, estranged spouses or even criminals such as loan sharks or drug dealers.

ROUND TRIPPING

Round tripping involves getting the money out of one country, say India, sending it to a place like Mauritius and then, dressed up to look like foreign capital, sending it back home to earn tax-favored profits.

The problem for the home country is that native profits escape taxation this way. And instead of foreign capital flowing into the country, local capital just gets a free ride.

While the principles are simple, the mechanics of getting black money to a favored tax treaty partner can be the financial equivalent of a Rube Goldberg machine, only this is no complex contraption that ultimately turns on a toaster or opens a door. Instead, cash moves out of the country in seemingly nonsensical ways designed to throw off auditors or anyone else trying to follow the money. Once the cash is safely out of the mother country, it’s easy to place it in a jurisdiction with a favorable tax treaty and to use a shell company to send the money back home so profits become tax-free or taxed at very low rates.

Under a tax treaty signed 28 years ago, Mauritius has been the gateway country of choice for foreign investment in India. Companies like Caterpillar, the maker of earth-moving equipment, as well as Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo invest in India via subsidiaries in Mauritius.

As the Indian economy has begun to take off — thanks to a mixture of high tech, manufacturing and call centers — seemingly foreign money has been pouring into India. Since the turn of the millennium about US$55 billion has come via shell companies set up in Mauritius. This is more than 40 percent of the direct foreign investment in India.

Tax authorities in New Delhi believe a lot of that investment was black money from India making a roundtrip to Mauritius. Overall the Indian Finance Ministry estimates faux foreign direct investments from Mauritius are costing it $600 million in taxes annually.

SUSPICIONS

India is not alone in its suspicions. Indonesia terminated its tax treaty with Mauritius in 2005, convinced that its government treasury, or fisc, was under assault from round tripping of Indonesian black money.

In India, a series of scandals, tax audits and investigations by the Central Bureau of Investigation, India’s anti-corruption agency, have strained the once intimate financial relationship with Mauritius.

And just as the two partners were sparring, along came Singapore, eager to show it can be a more faithful partner by acting as a tax-favored conduit for real foreign investment in India and not round tripping.

Singapore boasts that it does not allow shell companies, but rather wants a real economic presence. It puts the standard for that at S$200,000 a year spent running a Singapore office. That is a mere drop in a bucket of money, but as with perfume and love triangles, a drop may be all it takes to turn an already disaffected partner’s head.

While India has a reputation for letting legal issues drag on for years, it started talking publicly about a tax treaty with
Singapore last year and the two signed an agreement in June. Whether the treaty will actually deter round tripping remains to be seen, but on paper it looks better for India than the Mauritius treaty.

Mauritius has for several years dallied on negotiating a new tax treaty with India. But the speed with which India moved to embrace Singapore clearly motivated Mauritius to pay more attention to its longtime partner.

This past week officials in Port Louis and Delhi spoke of a new agreement being almost at hand. But then that is often how it goes in triangles, when one party is unsure of whether to stick it out with the old partner or move on to a new one.

In this recent video, David Cay Johnston examines the notion, often heard from U.S. politicians, that Singapore is a model of low taxation:

By David Cay Johnston
All opinions expressed are his own.

Here is how much economic progress America has made in the 21^st Century: the average taxpayer’s 2009 income was at the same level as 1997.

Average 2009 income was $54,283, just $18 more than in 1997 when you adjust for inflation, not that anyone would notice a difference of $1.50 a month in their pocket.

And compared to 2007, the last peak year of the economy, average income fell a painful $8,588 or 13.7 percent in real terms. Having $716 less each month is something most people would notice.

These figures come from the newest tax return data issued by the Internal Revenue Service. You won’t find the numbers above at the IRS website, just raw numbers that I use to calculate changes in incomes, taxes paid and related information.

You also won’t find this data analyzed in most of the mainstream press because our major newspapers and broadcast outlets are too focused on what politicians stay instead of what they do and what the official measures of economic performance tell us.

When you hear politicians saying the cure for what ails our economy is to cut taxes, and that high-income Americans are the job creators who will stop creating jobs if their taxes are not cut more, think about what the data show.

While talking points are political statements, data from tax returns are solid numbers, verified by employers and others and submitted on statements signed under penalty of perjury. The data is not perfect – no set of large numbers is – but the IRS Statistics of Income data gives a reliable picture of incomes that can be compared year-to-year.

So here is what the latest data show, starting with the big picture:

The total income reported by all Americans in 2009 was 4 percent less than in 2000. Since the country’s population grew by more than 25 million people during those years that means not just a smaller pie, but thinner slices all around.

Nearly everyone is feeling the pain, including people at the top. Among taxpayers who make $1 million or more, average income in 2009 was slightly more than $3 million, compared to more than $4.2 million in 2000 and $3.9 million way back in 1997.

Average wages fell, too. Because a taxpayer can be one person or a married couple, the average wage per taxpayer is nearly a third higher than the average wage per worker. The new IRS data does not have details needed to calculate the median wage (half earn more, half less).

In 2009 the average wage per taxpayer was $48,917, lower by $273 in 1999. Indeed only once, in 2004, were average wages per taxpayer higher, and then by a mere $26.

Some other key facts I extracted from the new data, which like all figures in this analysis are  in 2009 dollars:

• Every 33^rd household that had earned wages in 2007 went all of 2009 without earning a dollar for their labors.
• Because a third of taxpayers are married couples this implies that more than 5 million people, and perhaps closer to 6 million, who had work in 2007 went all of 2009 without earning a buck.
• The number of taxpayers collecting unemployment benefits soared from 7.6 million in 2007 to 11.3 million in 2009.
• The average unemployment benefit was under $7,400, belying the claim that jobless benefits encourage people to lie about and not get a job.
• Among taxpayers who earned $1 million or more, 1,450 taxpayers paid no income tax in 2009, up from 959 such taxpayers in 2007.

The reason our economy sits stuck in the doldrums is not taxes, which are much lower now than in 2007, especially for the highest income Americans.  Indeed, as a share of the economy the income tax is at its lowest level since Eisenhower was in his first term.

Individual income taxes in 2010, other data show, were one-third less per capita than in 2001, a recession year when the tax cuts sponsored by President Gorge W. Bush took effect. Total income taxes have never reached the amount collected in 2001 despite a growing population, a situation that contributes mightily to our federal debt and our failure to thrive economically in the 21^st Century.

Changes in economic conditions and in policies set by our elected leaders in Washington and the state capitals are pushing down wages for most people and encouraging elimination of jobs, especially public sector jobs on which the economy relies to provide healthy, educated workers and otherwise grease the wheels of commerce.

Employers have plenty of money to invest. American corporations have roughly $2 trillion in cash, nearly $7,000 per American. They have so much idle cash that they cannot even invest at a high enough interest rate to keep pace with inflation.

Putting that money to work would mean more jobs, more income, more taxes and smaller deficits that could quickly turn into surpluses if our political leaders thought more about numbers than scoring political points.

Here’s a video version making these points:

By David Cay Johnston

The author is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

The Washington debate over whether to voluntarily default on the U.S. government’s obligations revealed a serious political ailment in Congress: mass economic amnesia.

Just 11 years ago, Republicans insisted budget surpluses were bad for the economy, while Democrats told us surpluses would make the economy flourish. Al Gore said pay off the federal debt; George W. Bush said cut taxes so people would have more money.

During the Bush years Democrats decried the red-ink budgets, while Republicans assured us that no real harm would come from a $5 trillion borrow-and-spend spree.

Yet last weekend it was the other way around. The Democrats described a few more years of deficit spending as vital to making up for massive loss of jobs, while Republicans warned that any more red ink would destroy America as we know it. Feeling confused? You should be. And maybe, like the Beijing government, you see the checks-and-balances the framers of the U.S. Constitution put in place to provide sound government replaced by farce.

There is a cure for bad political posture. Just dose yourself with the best elixir ever for manufactured crisis: facts. The posturing in Congress having stretched any sense of reality beyond recognition, here are 10 facts that would have informed the debate on Capitol Hill and can certainly inform your understanding of the federal fiscal follies:

COUNT TO 10
1. No sovereign government with monopoly control of its currency can go broke in its own currency. Since the Constitution gives Congress a currency monopoly it is axiomatic that talk of our government going broke is nonsense unless we have a revolution, in which case federal bonds won’t be worth the electrons used to keep digital track of them.

2. Gross federal debt today is up 250 percent from when President Bill Clinton left office, and up 35 percent from when President George W. Bush left office, but the government’s blended average interest rate has fallen 54 percent since Clinton and 22 percent since Bush, suggesting that the bond rating agencies’ warnings about the chances that federal debt will be serviced as promised are as reliable as their estimates of the likelihood that all those mortgage bonds would be Triple A investments.

3. Had America stuck by the tax-and-restrained-spending policies of President Clinton, and his budget projections proved reliable, the government today would have no debt. Instead it would have a surplus of $2.1 trillion, or nearly $7,000 per American.

4. President Obama’s first budget, for fiscal 2010, that began on Oct. 1, 2009, had a smaller deficit than President Bush’s last budget, which promised a $407 billion shortfall, missing the mark by only a trillion dollars.

5. Those Wall Streeters President Bush bailed out in his final days continue with their risky bets because, being too big to fail, they sense Washington is ready to bail them out by swapping their red ink for government black ink, a belief reinforced with campaign contributions to make sure the government spends little on banking regulators.

BOTH POLITICAL PARTIES
6. President Obama’s original budget ended a host of Bush-era devices that understated budget deficits, while at the same time laying out a plan to cut the deficit he inherited by half, partly by raising taxes on the top two percent of earners, but the Republicans most worried about red ink worried even more about taxing billionaires too much.

7. Federal budget deficits as far as the eye can see would be significantly smaller but for Obama acquiescing to Republican demands to extend the temporary Bush tax cuts for all and Democrats, who also rely on rich donors, meekly going along with it.

8. Federal individual income tax revenues in 2010 were smaller than in 2001, the recession year when the Bush tax cuts began. Revenue was down by $330 billion or 27 percent. Because America’s population keeps growing, income taxes per capita fell 32 percent from $4,310 per American to $2,910, making it harder still to balance the budget.

9. Healthcare costs rose just 3.9 percent in 2010, the smallest annual increase in modern times, according to the federal Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services actuary, while by 2020 the Affordable Care Act (what critics call Obamacare) will add just a tenth of one percentage point to healthcare costs while adding 30 million more Americans to health insurance rolls.

10. The deal to avoid voluntary default calls for squeezing Medicare and Medicaid spending even more while making sure the richest among us enjoy lower tax rates than the middle class do. A result will be more luxuries at the top, while pushing 40 percent of hospitals toward bankruptcy, though not until 2050 when about 40 percent of Americans living now will be beyond any benefit from hospital care.

Both political parties contributed to our federal debt. Manufactured crises like the debt ceiling vote mask the real issue, which is our desperate need for prudent policies that create broad prosperity by taxing, spending and managing debt for the good of country, not party.  (Editing by Howard Goller)