The Aurora shooting has sparked debates over gun control, but health care reform is just as important for the uninsured victims.

Just 11 days ago, a shooter opened fire in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, killing 12 and injuring 58 others who had gathered for the midnight premiere of The Dark Knight Rises. In the wake of these tragic events, a debate has erupted over gun control. (This happens every now and then when we’re reminded that the authors of the Second Amendment might not have meant for someone to be able to buy 6,000 bullets online with no questions asked.) But as we mourn those who were lost and extend our sympathies to their grieving families, we shouldn’t forget that the suffering continues for many who survived the shooting. As Dashiell Bennett of The Atlantic Wire notes, “Most of the wounded are expected to have medical costs in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars and many appear to have inadequate or non-existent coverage.” This burden could add more tragedy to the lives of those who have already experienced too much. But while we may wonder if more sensible gun laws or better mental health care could have prevented the shooter’s rampage, we know for sure that a stronger social safety net could have prevented the financial catastrophe that has followed in its wake.

As hospital bills pile up, uninsured and under-insured survivors of the shooting are being forced to rely on the kindness of strangers. The Associated Press reports that three of the five hospitals treating the Aurora victims are capping their fees or offering them free care. But that still leaves many to bear a heavy financial burden, including Caleb Medley, an uninsured man who was shot in the eye and placed in a medically induced coma. His family is raising private donations to cover what already amounts to over $2 million in medical bills.

The charity of those who have donated is certainly commendable, but while we wish Medley and his family all the best, we have to ask ourselves whether this is any way to run a country. If there’s a crime spree, we don’t pass the hat around to hire a private security firm to defend us. We have the police for that. If our homes catch on fire, we don’t just cross our fingers and hope one of neighbors will be nice enough to lend us their garden hose. We know firefighters will be there to help. So when it comes to medical emergencies, including random events like this one and also the kind that all of us will face at some point in our lives, why should the 50 million uninsured Americans be reduced to begging for help? If the Affordable Care Act is allowed to fully take effect, providing guaranteed coverage, expanded Medicaid coverage, and insurance subsidies for those who need them, that may no longer be the case. But that’s a big “if.”

There’s a story conservatives like to tell about our health care system, and as with so many of their stories, it involves their peculiar definition of personal responsibility. The story goes that if you’re a responsible person, as physically and mentally healthy as you are morally upright, you can obtain health insurance by working hard so that you can either be covered by your employer’s plan or purchase an individual plan. If you don’t have insurance, there are two likely explanations. The first is that you’re an irresponsible bum who wants everyone else to pick up the tab for your medical care. The other is that you’re a Galtian Übermensch who has planned ahead and saved up for your own private medical staff and organ-cloning lab in case of emergency. If you can’t obtain insurance because you’ve been denied due to a preexisting condition or because your employer doesn’t offer it and doesn’t pay you enough to buy it yourself, you don’t fit into this narrative, so please politely excuse yourself and go complain about it in a quiet room.

I last wrote about this argument and the problems with it when I discussed my own brush with death. That experience didn’t just deepen my appreciation for health insurance and my belief that everyone should be guaranteed coverage. It also made me aware of just how flimsy the GOP’s argument is. If I hadn’t had health insurance at the time of my accident, would I have been “responsible” for a driver blowing a red light and running me over as I was crossing the street? Should the firefighters and paramedics who saved me have instead patted me on the (broken) shoulder and said “Good luck with all that”? Are the uninsured victims of the Aurora shooting at fault because they didn’t set aside some rainy day money on the off-chance that a psychopath in SWAT gear would try to murder them while they were enjoying a night out at the movies?

Claims like these clash with common sense and basic human empathy, which is why they’re rarely made explicit. But it may take events like the Aurora shooting to highlight the extent to which they undergird the Republican approach to health care. To be fair, many conservatives would argue that they agree with the principle that everyone should have access to affordable health care but believe the best way to accomplish that is through the free market rather than government mandates. And many on the left would rightly point out that the Affordable Care Act is only a half-measure, a compromise with private insurers that won’t truly guarantee equal access to health care for all. But none of those criticisms are reflected in the policy agenda of the Republican Party, which has now repealed the Affordable Care Act 33 times and offered an alternative proposal zero times. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has explicitly said that covering the uninsured is “not the issue,” while Senator Orrin Hatch admits that the number of uninsured is disgraceful but maintains that “we cannot succumb to the pressure to argue on the left’s terms.” Indeed, why should the debate about health insurance focus on people who need health insurance? We should talk about something more fun, like our favorite vacation destinations or Mitt Romney’s dancing horse.

The Aurora victims may have been gathered to watch a movie about a benevolent billionaire who dedicates his life and fortune to righting society’s wrongs, but there’s a reason such stories are best left to fiction, and it’s not just that Warren Buffett wouldn’t look good in a bat costume. In the real world, we understand that there are vast and complex problems that we can’t solve through private charity alone, and for those problems we require strong public institutions and a reliable social safety net. People shouldn’t have to fear that they’ll be shot dead when they walk into a movie theater, but neither should they have to fear that they won’t be able to afford the cost of survival.

Tim Price is Deputy Editor of Next New Deal. Follow him on Twitter at @txprice.

Cutting back on meat is healthier for us and for the environment, but Republicans are more concerned about the health of corporate profits.

Not content to keep Congress from doing anything about climate change, the GOP showed last week that it will also go out of its way to keep anyone else from taking action. The USDA sent a tip to employees to take the Meatless Monday challenge, a one-day-a-week commitment to forgo meat. They explained that cutting back on meat is more healthy (true) and more environmentally friendly (also true) than the large quantities of meat Americans regularly eat. In no time at all, this newsletter was picked up by the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, which stated that the claims about cutting back on meat are false. And from there, the Republican spin machine kicked into high gear.

The NCBA release made it to Senator Jim Moran of Kansas and into a speech by Senator John Barasso of Wyoming. It even found its way into one of Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley’s more comprehensible tweets, in which he pledges to eat more meat to make up for “stupid USDA recommendation abt (sic) a meatless Monday.” They all claim it’s an attack on the rancher’s way of life, and disappointingly, the USDA backpedaled. To their credit, they kept it simple and only said that “USDA does not endorse Meatless Monday.”

This is an absurd controvery over such a small issue, but it highlights a larger problem: Republicans are once again burying their heads in the sand on science and health. So let’s start with the facts.

 Fact #1: Meat production emits an outsize amount of greenhouse gases compared with crop production. In short, meat and dairy are, as a whole, a larger climate problem than other foods. Red meat in particular has a significant impact, followed by dairy. Switching a little bit of meat for a bit more grains, fruits, and vegetables will reduce the climate impact of anyone who participates.

(Graph from “Food-Miles and the Relative Climate Impacts of Food Choices in the United States” – Weber and Matthews, 2008.)

Fact #2: Meat in moderation is far more healthy than the amount of meat typically associated with the American diet. Research continually confirms this. Cutting back on meat provides numerous health benefits, including a longer lifespan and reduced risk of illnesses like cancer, heart disease, and diabetes.

Fact #3: Skipping meat is not an attack on rural America as Cattlemen’s Beef Association is claiming. People don’t just stop eating entirely if they skip meat. Is my home garden an attack on ranchers? No. If we’re going to talk about rural America, then let’s note that, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, crop production generates more economic output than livestock production. And while we’re at it, we might also note that crop production creates more jobs than livestock production. It’s not that one is better than the other, but by skipping meat, people are only switching from one very significant economic sector to another.

This attack on the USDA and Meatless Monday is ridiculous on every level. The recommendation appeared in a relatively small, internal newsletter for employees – they weren’t exactly screaming it to the world through a megaphone. What’s especially disappointing is that Meatless Monday is an apolitical organization. They aren’t advocating policy or suggesting that any of their recommendations be legislated. They make sensible recommendations for people’s health. They are not extreme in the least bit; they’re the very definition of moderation and are now being attacked by groups with extreme agendas.

One last thing – the cherry on top of this little manufactured controversy. Four United States presidents, including Franklin Roosevelt and others from both parties, observed meatless Mondays and encouraged the rest of the country to do so as well. It was seen as a sign of patriotism for all Americans to do their part. So when and how did we lose our pride and unity in the name of excess and industry profit?

Nick Santos is a Roosevelt Institute | Pipeline Fellow working on climate change education. He runs Environmental Consumer, a nonprofit, and works with the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences.

Conservatives want to have their cake and eat it too: decry the rise in nonmarital births but make life even harder for women facing single motherhood.

Ever wonder what the “war on women” is really about? An article in the New York Times, “Two Classes, Divided by ‘I Do’: For Richer Marriage, for Poorer, Single Motherhood,” provides some clues. The article documents the growing class divide in family form. College graduates like Chris and Kevin Faulkner, who were profiled in the article, postpone starting families, produce marriages with lower divorce rates than a generation ago, and reap the rewards in terms of greater time and resources to invest in children. In the meantime, women like Jessica Schairer who do not graduate from college, also profiled in the article, are increasingly raising children on their own. These women often give up on the men in their lives and struggle to balance the demands of low-paying jobs with the attention their children need.

The article presents a compelling portrait of the causes and the effects, but not of the partisan divide over the potential solutions. That divide can be summed up by a struggle over a simple question: are women like the single mother, Jessica Schairer, the victims of our economy or the problem? Those who see them as the problem are setting forth proposals to make their lives (and their children’s lives) worse. Those of us who see Jessica Schairer as a victim of increasing economic inequality recognize that supporting her ability to care for her children is critical to the strength of the country’s next generation. The political war for the future of Jessica Schairer is under way.

The change in family structure is a consequence of growing economic inequality that further increases inequality in the next generation of children. The most startling change is the increase in non-marital births. In 1990, just 10 percent of white women with some college education had a birth outside of marriage; today the figure is 30 percent, compared to 8 percent of whites with a college degree and 40 percent for the country as a whole. Meanwhile, 86 percent of black high school dropouts have children outside of marriage. The likelihood that a child will be raised in a two-parent family has become a marker of class.

The Times article documents the consequences of this change, as it describes the limited ability of single parents to pay for sports participation, attend school events, stay on top of homework, and provide adequate role models. Harvard’s Robert Putnam adds that the growing class gap in childrearing affects everything from the time parents spend playing patty-cake with their pre-schoolers to the likelihood that a high school senior will be the captain of a sports team.

In considering the causes of class divergence, the Times articles documents a negative spiral. It observes that economic woes speed marital decline “as women see fewer marriageable men.” Women do not commit to men without steady employment, and a shortage of “good men” encourages the employed to play the field. A long list of academic studies demonstrates that when marriageable women outnumber the men, everyone’s norms change and marriage rates decline. For single mom Jessica Schairer, as for many other women today, there was no point to marrying the father of her three children. Instead, for her the issue is “why she stayed so long with a man who she said earned so little, berated her often and did no parenting.” On the other hand, marriage also encourages men to shape up. Kevin Faulkner, the married father in the story, explained that he returned to college because he wanted to get married. Other studies show that not only has the premium for college graduates increased over the last generation, but the job stability of less educated men has fallen more than for other parts of the population and male layoffs often break up relationships and discourage marriage.

While the documentation of these differences is now well established, the solutions are not. Yet there are two obvious ones, rarely discussed in explicit terms. The first recreates the links between stable jobs and stable families. This requires greater economic equality, more opportunities for blue-collar men, more family-friendly workplaces, greater support for higher education and job training, and better access to contraception and other supports for delaying family formation. A growing literature suggests that greater equality itself creates virtuous cycles that deter teen births and encourage longer lasting family relationships.

The alternative? Bring back patriarchy. Conservatives like Charles Murray blame changing values, charging that the men have gotten lazy because women no longer depend on them or fail to sleep with them until they shape up. The secret to bringing back female dependence and male virtue? Make the women desperate. Murray has made a career of blaming government programs such as welfare for the destruction of the American family because such programs cushion the impact of single parenthood. For conservatives who see single mothers like Jessica Schairer as the problem and who refuse to see inequality itself as the explanation, the result is a war on women.

Virtually every conservative Republican, from Paul Ryan’s budget to Mitt Romney’s platform, would cut the benefits on which single mothers like Jessica Schairer currently depend. Indeed, shortly after Romney’s NAACP speech, he commented, “Remind them of this: If they want more free stuff from government, tell them to go vote for the other guy.” What could Romney have meant by “free stuff?”

First, start with food stamps. They are an important part of Jessica Schairer’s ability to feed three children on an income of $25,000 a year. Romney’s proposals would either force 13 million people off of food stamps entirely or cut benefits by $2000 per year per family.

Second, Romney’s budget would produce massive cuts in Medicaid programs that serve as the most important source of health care for working mothers without adequate benefits. 

Third, Romney’s tax proposals would raise Jessica Schairer’s taxes while providing for massive cuts for those with high incomes. 

Whether or not Romney specifically intends to make the lives of single mothers more perilous, his policies would do exactly that.

Social conservatives, in the meantime, have taken aim at the reproductive rights that make it possible for women to avoid inopportune births. The class divide in access to contraception and abortion is wide and growing. The Guttmacher Institute reports that between 1994 and 2006, the unintended pregnancy rate grew by 50 percent for women below the poverty line. During the same period, it fell by 29 percent for higher income women. Yet those who share Charles Murray’s sentiments about single mothers have done their best to make it worse.

For many of us, this is the most perplexing part of the war on Jessica Schairer, and it rests on conservatives’ analysis that the key to reforming the family is to deny men sex rather than prevent births. Indeed, Republican candidate Rick Santorum linked the increase in non-marital births to the “dangers of contraception,” which he categorized as "a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be."

We noted in Red Families v. Blue Families that most conservatives do not oppose contraception per se, but they remain resolutely against the implied approval of non-marital sex that would accompany explicit support and the government subsidies necessary to make access more universal. In the name of religious liberty, they accordingly raised a furor over President Obama’s recent proposal to mandate employer coverage of contraception as preventive health care. With less publicity, they blocked inclusion of proposals to increase contraceptive access in the stimulus bill. And they defeated efforts to include contraception in any form as part of the health care package. Yet poor women’s lack of health care coverage is a major factor in the unplanned pregnancy rate.

If contraceptive access is controversial, abortion is off the table. Ms. Schairer considered one in response to the unplanned pregnancy that derailed her college education, but the father of her children opposed it. The Guttmacher Institute notes that the women most likely to end an unintended pregnancy by abortion are those who, like Ms. Schairer, are in college at the time of the pregnancy. Had Ms. Schairer not given birth when she did, she would have been much more likely to graduate, to avoid a non-marital birth, and to be able to secure a better job. But at the same time conservatives work to make life more difficult for mothers like Jessica Schairer, they argue that having the child is the only acceptable moral option.

For a generation now, Murray, the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, and many other conservatives have denied that inequality has anything to do with the changing family. Romney has joined the chorus, dismissing any discussion of inequality as “envy” and “class warfare.” It is time to recognize the truth. The policies they have championed are responsible for the class-based division in family form. The war on Jessica Schairer is claiming an increasing number of victims. 

June Carbone is the Edward A. Smith/Missouri Chair of Law, the Constitution and Society at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Naomi Cahn is the John Theodore Fey Research Professor of Law at George Washington University Law School. She is the author of numerous books and law review articles on gender and family law.

Cahn and Carbone are the co-authors of Red Families v. Blue Families.

Conservatives are in a rage after Obama suggested we add value to the economy together. In their version, only the rich do.

"If you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own... If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive... If you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build that... The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together."

- President Barack Obama, Roanoke Fire Station #1, Roanoke, Virginia, July 13th, 2012

"The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contribute nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all their brains.”

- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, required reading for Representative Paul Ryan's (R-WI) staff.

"The Zambrellis scoffed at attempts by the Democrats...to wage class warfare... 'It's not helping the economy to pit the people who are the engine of the economy against the people who rely on that engine.'"

- Michael Zambrelli, Mitt Romney fundraiser, East Hampton, New York, July 8th, 2012, Quoted in the LA Times

What's the opposite of President Obama's view that the rich have become rich thanks to the American system that we've created together? President Obama's speech has sent the right into a furor, with Rush Limbaugh telling his audience, "I think it can now be said, without equivocation—without equivocation—that this man hates this country." But if expressing the opinion that the value of the economy is something that is created together is enough to hate America, what would it mean to have a vision of wealth creation that loves America?

Some political commentators have treated this comment and its reaction either as part of the presidential noise machine or as the dreamscape projections of the conservative id. Will Wilkinson at Democracy in America has written a post, "Taxes and the rich," addressing this. There are some problematic issues with the post [1] [2], but he describes Rush Limbaugh's reaction as being bound up in an absurd myth. He says, "Mr Obama's in-it-together point is mildly offensive in context because it is used to imply that top-earners who resist paying an even larger portion of America's tab do so only because they are in the grip of an absurd myth of self-reliance."

I'd argue that instead of self-reliance, the real idea the right is appealing to here is the idea of the "job creator." It goes beyond the person who gets by on his own without any help from the government or the public at large. It's the idea that the rich create all the value of the economy. They are, as John Paul Rollert put it in a great post wondering what Adam Smith would think of "job creators," the visible hand of the economy. The rich are, as people at the Mitt Romney fundraiser put it, "the engine of the economy" who all the other people "rely" on for their survival. (I'm assuming. I would have meant it the other way around, but I wasn't at that fundraiser.) The economy isn't something we create together. It is something the rich create for everyone else.

And, crucially, rather than being a myth or a fairy tale conservatives tell themselves, this idea of the "job creator" is the basis for current policy-making on the right. As Texas Governor Rick Perry put it during the primary, “America is not going to move forward until we remove restrictions of over-taxation, over-regulation and over-litigation on the job creators and free them so the jobs can be created.” Charles Krauthammer argues on TV that we have a capital strike that's holding back the economy. John Boehner gives speeches where he argues "private-sector job creators in particular — are rattled by what they’ve seen out of this town over the last few years. My worry is that for American job creators, all the uncertainty is turning to fear that this toxic environment for job creation is a permanent state. Job creators in America are essentially on strike."

Speeches like these diagnose the problem, and then it turns into policy. Presidential candidate Mitt Romney's policy plans for job creation operate under the assumption that those at the top of the economic pyramid are being held in check. His Day One proposals include “the elimination of Obama-era regulations that unduly burden the economy or job creation," “revers[ing] the executive orders issued by President Obama that tilt the playing field in favor of organized labor," cutting corporate taxes, eliminating the estate tax, and a variety of other policy designed to give the "job creators" a firmer hand in controlling the economy. His education policy includes putting private actors in charge of everything, especially putting commercial banks back into the sweet spot of collecting government-insured money and expanding how easy it is for for-profit colleges to qualify for federal money. Presumably he does this because the private is always superior to the public, regardless of how much the business model appears to be a vacuum for subsidies. His tax and social safety net policy focus on boosting the earnings of those at the top of the pyramid on the backs of those at the bottom.

These policies include no hint that the economy is stuck due to inadequate demand or the weak purchasing power of the middle and working classes and the delinking of wages and productivity. There's no mention of the need to expand education and infrastructure to create the economy of the 21st century. There's absolutely no sense that the economy encourages the most innovative or entrepreneurial when there is full employment and a portable social safety net that provides economic security. And it is light-years away from the observation that society is a system of cooperation in which the value in the economy is created together.

[1] Wilkinson doesn't say it outright, but it seems that he is in favor of a flat, proportional tax on fairness grounds: "the facts about the portion of tax revenue contributed by the rich plausibly suggest that they pay more than their fair share for the infrastructure of capitalism..the class of people Mr Obama wants to 'give back' has already paid most of the tab, and continues to pay most of the tab, for the tax-financed public goods upon which they, and the rest of us, so crucially depend."

Why do we assume that a flat tax is fair? Given that Wilkinson's theory is about how public goods benefit society, presumably he thinks taxes should be the shadow price of purchasing those goods if they were available in a market. A flat tax would be the philosophically coherent answer for how to raise funds to pay for these benefits if and only if benefits consumed rise proportionately to income. If someone is 10^4 times as rich as I am, they need 10^4 times more garbage collected, breathe 10^4 times more clean air, require 10^4 more police protection and functioning courts, etc. That strikes me as dubious.

The best Milton Friedman could do was "proportional flat-rate-tax would involve higher absolute payments by persons with higher incomes for governmental services, which is not clearly inappropriate on grounds of benefit conferred." Not clearly inappropriate indeed. Taxes should be highly regressive in Wilkinsons' view, converging to a head tax, unless we are talking about utility gained from society, or unless we believe tax policy is a function of making the basic structures of society serve goals like benefitting the worse off, under which the progressive taxation case makes much more sense. See Barbara Fried's fantastic "The Puzzling Case for Proportionate Taxation" for more.

[2] Wilkinson: "[I]n 2008...[t]he top 5 percent earned 31.7 percent of the nation's adjusted gross income, but paid approximately 58.7 percent of federal individual income taxes. If that's not giving something back, what is?" These numbers are juked in part due to the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which is kind of like a negative tax with a work requirement. Given that all the rage in Bleeding Heart Libertarian circles is a universal basic income (UBI) delivered through a negative tax, wouldn't that number be significantly higher under such a system? This is why some people think that libertarians wouldn't really pull the trigger on a UBI...

Mike Konczal is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.