Democrats and your money

So the Democrats have won control of both the House and the Senate, now that the winners of Montana and Virginia have been settled (though not conceded by the losers). Is this good news or bad for our queer dollars and cents?

My sense is that it will be good, and here’s why:

(1) We need to wind down our adventure in Iraq. So far the war has cost us $340 billion according to the estimate of the Congressional Research Service. And it’s money we didn’t have. We can debate whether our actions were right or wrong. But we have funded the war using IOU’s with massive interest charges, that you and I (and our children, if any) will have to pay off some day with”you guessed it”tax hikes. Getting out of Iraq includes dramatically slowing down our spending there, and trying desperately to regain control of the U.S. budget. (Wasn’t it the Republicans who used to be for fiscal discipline and small government?) We can’t continue to cripple ourselves with debt.

(2) We have millions of people in this country who work full time (often far more) and are still in poverty. Raising the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour is certainly a hit on business (and small businesses in particular), which is why it will be phased in. But the minimum wage hasn’t been raised in a decade, and the minimum wage today ($5.15) buys less in “real dollars” (accounting for inflation) than the minimum wage in 1951. Nancy Pelosi intends to bring this to a vote within the first 24 hours of the new Congressional term. Raising the minimum wage is not only the right thing to do for the working poor, but it also stimulates the U.S. economy: more money to spend = more demand for goods and services.

(3) Fixing Medicare, and specifically dealing with the outrageously uncompetitive drug prices in this country. Why is it illegal to buy in Canada the exact same drug from the exact same manufacturer for a lot less money? Simply because a few companies in the U.S. wrote the legislation. Congressional Democrats also intend to deal with this issue within the first few days in office.

(4) Cutting the interest rate on student loans in half. This is also top of the Democrats’ agenda. I don’t know if you or anyone you know is in school or intends to go to school, but my partner took out an educational loan earlier this year for 9.75%, and that’s with a sterling credit rating!

This is not a partisan blog, and I’m not a partisan Democrat. There’s no guarantee that Democrats will walk the straight and narrow (for instance, ending lobbyist corruption of Congress), and there’s no guarantee that President Bush will sign off on any legislation that Democrats propose.

But I do expect we will begin to see more of a dialogue of the right wing and left wing in this country, which will hopefully start to address our crippling budget deficit ($8.5 trillion) and our international trade imbalance ($68 billion a month and growing). As it stands we are way out of control, and if you or I tried to run our personal finances like this, we would have a credit rating of 350 and filed for bankruptcy several times over. It’s time to turn this around.