Introduction: Changing Beliefs and Assumptions

Originally written in February 2010, some of the particulars have changed -- particularly prior to the Affordable Care Act became law -- the issues remain central for understanding and changing the control of our government, media and economy by the 1%. It is also important for understanding why the strongly progressive income tax is so important for implementing fundamental change. Some manor changes have been made for current clarity.
Richard S. Galloway

Many people tend to dismiss out of hand ideas that venture very far from what we have come to “believe” or accept as “normal” or the “way the real world works.” Most of our beliefs have been accepted without question from early childhood. Most of them are taught as fact in our public schools, our churches and other organizations we participate in and through our media. While this also applies to many of our religious beliefs, we are talking here about our beliefs about our country, big government, taxes, the free market economy.  Originally, these concepts were strictly secular -- or non-religious -- ideas. Over time, American "nationalism" [in its extreme form called pure chauvinism]on the one hand and “religious” beliefs have become intertwined and confused.

Such beliefs have been used since the dawn of human civilization as the simplest and most effective way of controlling people. Beliefs are very “cost effective” means of control. Beliefs imply basic agreement and living in accord with those beliefs without further inducements or the use of threats or force.

Changing beliefs is absolutely fundamental to changing how things are done. In order to understand the progressive income tax and its fairness, we have to change a lot of beliefs currently held by many Americans. Understanding how this works – the facts, the arguments and the false beliefs – is critical if we are to be effective agents of change.

We can be blinded by our beliefs. For example, many Americans believe it is better pay for their own health insurance directly to a diminishing number of mostly "non-profit" health insurance corporations through premiums. We put "non-profit" in quotes because clearly huge profits are being made which are rewarding those at the top in huge ways.  This health insurance system clearly drives our costs up and limit the care we actually receive.

The very rich who control most of what's going on tell us that we can trust them, but not our government to provide the best care and many people continue to believe it. We have been lead to believe that R & D are the reason for high medical costs. Do you know that the drug industry spend more on wooing doctors to their new drugs and advertising to create a popular demand for them than they spend on research and development? What does this expense add to our health care? Such advertising is against the law in virtually every other country and for good reason. It’s a way of creating an artificial need in the mind of the public.

In the private sector the first third of our premiums are spent on overhead. More is spent on profit, advertising, lobbying Congress to allow them monopolistic practices that drive our costs up… Supposedly removing high risk people and pre-existing conditions from coverage has been eliminated by the Affordable Care Act. Hopefully that is true. They still spend more of our own premium money figuring out ways to limit coverage, deny claims, add co-pays and lifetime limits... And many believe this is the best way of providing insurance. They believe that a single payer national insurance is somehow worse -- big government socialism -- and must be feared.

The fact of the matter is that the overhead cost of the VA and Social Security is only 7% as compared to 30% in the private sector system we now have. How can this be possible? Because most or all of the above practices used to bolster profits have been eliminated so that the rest of the cost is directly paying for the intended medical service.That’s an immediate savings of at least 23% of our health costs due to a single payer system of health insurance. That savings is enough to cover the cost of including the currently uninsured. Got that? We pay the same amount as we did before, but include everyone in coverage -- that's millions of people who cannot afford healthcare.

Not only is universal health care cheaper in Europe, but the World Health Organization – using objective measurements – has determined their quality of care is better than ours. [We are ranked #37 behind virtually every European nation in quality of care.] This is again exactly the opposite of what the health care industry wants us to believe. They are very successful in using the fear that governmental control over the health care industry will limit both quality and the availability of health care. It’s a lie. While you will hear anecdotal stories about how badly European health care works, it is not only objectively better, cheaper as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product, and...everyone is covered for all the basic, accepted needs no questions asked. That's the truth of the matter. It's a lot better than what we have on virtually every count.

Let's bring this back to the issue of taxes: Since trickle down economics became our economic model over thirty years ago, we have been have been taught to believe that decreasing individual and corporate income tax, capital gains, and inheritance taxes, new good paying jobs will be created and all boats will float up with the tide. If you are not in the very top income earners, how's that working for you?

Suppose we take a new look: What difference does it make if we pay our health insurance premiums directly to for profit companies or we pay the same amount through our taxes? Not only that, but with this same money included everyone's health care coverage at no additional cost. Can you explain to me what's wrong with that? If you fall back to the "big government is the problem" point of view, review the well established comparison of the experience in other countries regarding cost, universal coverage, and quality and effectiveness of service as statistically determined by the World Health Organization.

Are we beginning to make progress on changing beliefs? Are we warming to the idea that together we can provide for the common good through our democratic system? Are we maybe even beginning to question that the "free market" and capitalism are  God's plan? [Note: We are not saying they are  bad per se.  But we are saying that when it is not a free market, but in fact corrupted, controlled and manipulated from the top by the 1% it needs to be put in its place.] Do we agree that taxes have always been necessary to pay for the common good? We'll get back to that.

Or do we consider that despite the fact that polls indicate over and over that the vast majority of the American public favors a single payer program, the option is not even on the table. Why? Because the medical industry alone has eight highly paid lobbyists per member of Congress injecting millions of dollars into each of their campaign slush funds to keep universal health care off the table. Are we to trust these people to do what is in our best interest? I think not. But more importantly isn't this a direct subversion of our democratic system?

But people fear that our taxes will go up if we have universal national health insurance. True. But not all taxes are bad. If we can get better and universal health care for less than it costs us now as a nation, isn't a benefit  to pay more in taxes, when the net result is savings for us all? More in taxes, yes, but don't forget none of us are paying huge premiums, co-pays nor are our employers paying a substantial part of the bill. It really makes no difference in the long run whether we pay through premiums or though taxes. It’s the same money. In fact, today Europeans pay more in taxes, but far less as a percentage of their gross domestic product for quality universal care which is the only real measure of value received. That’s a fact, but the health industry in this country is doing everything possible to convince us otherwise and/or to buy the votes necessary in Congress to block all reform. That’s also a fact.

Many people believe that only the “free market” and “profit” can guide and effectively control the economy for the good of all people and that any other criterion is a “communist” idea and evil. This belief creates a mental wall that precludes us from seeing that sometimes human need for subsistence, schools, health care, a genuinely equal opportunity to strive to improve ourselves and the world we live in…are more important than profit. The number of examples we could include are infinite.

Beliefs are critical. Beliefs are central. Change requires changing beliefs. Fundamental change requires changing fundamental beliefs in fundamental ways. It’s as simple as that.

Where we are today is the direct result of a fundamental change in our beliefs begun over 30 years ago by the right wing as the way they would regain control over our nation as they had before the reforms of the previous century. They have been immensely successful in convincing the public that big government is bad…taxes are bad…regulation is bad. That everything that limits their ability to amass untold money and power is bad. [They, of course, don’t say it that way.] Today, a huge portion of the people of our country has totally bought into their worldview hook, line and sinker.

There is a major shift here moving into a whole new area which is likely to raise objections and cloud the issues.

Before this philosophical reversal in favor of the very rich again, we believed that government was there to provide for the common needs of all citizens and to insure fairness in the process... overall it was working to a relatively large degree. The Big Change began early in the post WW II era when so-called liberal views and policies prevailed. Again in a nutshell: it took the Great Depression and FDR for the situation to get so bad that as a nation we started a 50 year period of systematically taking away the extremely abusive power of the ultra-wealthy. Then Reagan supported by right wing think tanks began a slow but steady propaganda campaign to begin to reverse the reforms of the past 50 years. Slowly but surely, they began an indoctrination programs [such as endowing professors of economics at our most prestigious universities]aimed in the end to convince the majority of American citizens that those at the very top of the economy know and will do what is best for our country,...that God is on their side,... that they will lead us "as no one else can" as Trump recently promised..

What set up this belief system to begin to reverse the critical democratic reforms of the past half century? As a nation, we were working our way through the period of being the only major power who could oppose the Soviet Union after WW II. This was a very self-conscious first step by the very wealthy to begin to regain their hold on power. Fear, always fear. Make us afraid of something, and they can get us to do anything to oppose that something. That something was Communism. Now, make no mistake, the way that Soviet Communism was manifesting at that time, Communism was nothing to seriously support, despite the belief of quite a few Americans at that time. We were told that anything which served to balance the injustice between the rich and the poor was socialism or worse communism. This false moral claim of the conservatives was in direct contradiction to all Biblical injunctions about loving your enemy and helping the poor and those who cannot take care of themselves no fault of their own. However imperfect, we had worked towards such goals and had made significant progress on most fronts.

So what happened to change our minds? After WW II, America was the only world power able to stand up to the Soviet Union.We were seen as the savior of the world by many nations. What changed this central role we were playing?

The keys event was the first and second oil crises in 1974 and 1979. America at that time consumed something like 75% of the world resources while being only 5% of the population.  The two oil crises said to us, "your days are numbered...it's not going to work that way much longer. Just how long do you think such an imbalance can go on? Starting before WW II, the Third World began to wake up and say, "Sorry America. You don't get to take that much of the world's resources off the top.  We won't stand for such exploitation any longer, and they were right. Yes, we are a great nation and we have done many great things. But we can no longer ignore that a significant portion of our material wealth today is the result to taking land and resources from native Americans, building our infrastructure largely through slave labor, controlling economic conditions around the world by owning banana and rubber plantations, oil and other resource extraction...

The beliefs we bought into effectively removed any obstacle to their power.

They changed our beliefs fundamentally. We need to change beliefs back fundamentally. They succeeded and so can we. They accomplished their changes through the power of their money to control not only our economy and government, but also the information we receive through our schools and media. To fix it, we need to prove that we can change it back, not through spending tons of money. They have far more than we can afford. We need to prove that we can change it back without a huge input of money, but by the merit of our beliefs over theirs.

We have a plan to do exactly this.

Many of the beliefs popularly held in this country simply cannot stand in the face of hard facts or logic. For instance: If you are among those who believe in “political realism” – that the way the world works can’t be changed in the fundamental ways, as the Bible says it, “So be unto you according to your faith.” If you don’t believe we can do it, you won’t even try. Belief in failure produces failure. They win. We loose. So for starters, we who believe change is necessary,…who know change is necessary, we must first believe that fundamental changes can be made.

We invite you to put such limitations created by what we believe aside for a brief while and to try to imagine a picture of kinder, gentler world as if it were fully possible and realistic. Stilling your mind of objections is like preparing the soil to receive new seed to give them room to grow strong. If you let your mind continues to “argue with you” as you read the following material, you will not understand or believe it in the end. Remember, there is nothing in what we are proposing that does not have a history of success. It’s all been done before.

All change comes in stages. The new idea [belief] always comes first to challenge the old. At first all new ideas except those which serve their interests are ardently opposed by those with vested power in the status quo. It has been this way throughout history. Then comes the struggle to implement the change – and it has always been a struggle – often literally war. Only then can a new reality replace the old. This is the way of all progress in history.

Success in changing fundamental beliefs is just as possible as it was for the Copernican revolution, the Protestant Reformation or the abolition of slavery. The Copernican Revolution took many centuries for the church to accept the scientific fact that the Earth is not the center of all creation; the Reformation took a little over one century to remove the monopoly of the Roman Catholic Church over all matters religious and secular; the abolition of slavery only took about 50 years from the advent of the Abolitionist Movement until the Civil War put an end to slavery in our country – an institution that has existed for over 5,000 years. The tradition continues with civil rights, civil liberties, gender issues… Who could have imagined the progress we’ve made in the last 50 years?

In America today, in our democracy the voters can change almost any aspect of our common life in one single election if people decided they’ve had enough of the way it is and have a clear vision of what is needed to bring that change. Yes, that too is a fact! All these historic transitions succeeded despite immense and brutal opposition and almost total disbelief that they could change. So we ask that you give the following thoughts and dreams an opportunity to play out in your mind before you dismiss them. Before anything can change, we must first believe it. That too is a fact.