From the Comments: Please Pay Attention to No One Behind the Curtain
Down in the comments to our first entry back (and boy, am I glad we still have comments after the long layoff), reader Ian says:
The administration’s optimistic projections call for a debt/GDP ratio of around 80% by the end of the decade. President Obama is trying to tell us that by adding a new entitlement that guarantees health insurance for 30 million Americans, that debt burden will be reduced. This is the left’s version of the Laffer curve. This fabrication alone makes this administration beneath contempt, and I wish you recognized that.
And also:
I’m all in favor of deficit commissions, even if they’ve never worked before. But that hardly compensates for Obama’s strenuous efforts to further saddle me and my ever growing brood with enormous new debt. It is debt that felled all the great powers throughout history, and we are almost certainly going to join them all.
This is where you would expect me to take issue with Ian, but I’m going to agree with him, although we get to the end result via different paths. For me, the issue isn’t the current deficit spending, which is something that we can come back from, having done it before, as after World War II, as after Ronald Reagan. I believe that spending is necessary to get the economy back on track. The problem, and here is where Ian and I agree, is that ultimately the deficit will have to be dealt with.
Normally, that would mean raising taxes in better times, when/as/if they come. Now, we no longer have governments, we just have infestations by politicians who never quite achieve the butterfly/caterpillar transition into statesmen. When the time comes to raise taxes, which party is going to do it? Which is going to be willing to tell us the hard truths? Which is going to have the will to do what needs to be done?
If you chose “C,” none of the above, you answered correctly. Neither political party is going to do it, either out of fear, intellectual bankruptcy, cockeyed philosophy, or all three. And at that moment, this republic becomes a banana republic, just another country that can’t get it together to pay off its debts.
That’s my issue. The deficit doesn’t frighten me. It’s just a thing to be dealt with, however difficult. It’s the people who are going to be asked to deal with it that scare the hell out of me.
February 24th, 2010 at 2:27 am
In the post below, you criticize Obama for not putting a jobs bill ahead of health insurance reform. In this post, you criticize our political leadership (including, implicitly, Obama) for being politicians rather than statesman, and therefore unable to deal with our growing deficit.
The reason Obama put health care reform first is that he believes that it is necessary to bring down the deficit. He also saw that health care reform had the best chance of passage while his ratings were high, and while the Democrats had large majorities in both houses of Congress.
In other words, he acted like a statesman — tackling the problem that was politically more difficult and, at least in his view, more important in the long term — and not what you’ve described as a politician.
In fact, I agree with you that Obama should have tackled jobs first. It would certainly have been more popular.
But then, I’m not the one making distinctions between politicians and statesmen.
February 24th, 2010 at 8:50 am
“He also saw that health care reform had the best chance of passage while his ratings were high,”
Which they no longer are . . . If Obama thought this, then I have to ask you: why didn’t he put more pressure on the Senate (and specifically, Baucus and his “Gang of Six”) to actually get him the bill by August, as was his original timetable? The data regarding the Presidential honeymoon period are quite clear, and as the calendar ticked on, his ratings kept falling, exactly as expected.
It seems to me that his calculation was that having a “bi-partisan bill” would make passage of the bill easier, and make the bill more popular . . . so he let the Senate fritter away interminably for months. But that calculation was certainly a political calculation. If he had “acted like a statesman — tackling the problem that was politically more difficult and, at least in his view, more important in the long term” then I would have expected to see him actually tackle something in June, July, August, September, October . . .
To me, its only now, after his political calculation failed miserably, that he’s actually tackling anything, through this health care summit. We’ll see how it goes.
February 24th, 2010 at 9:54 am
Steve: You hit the nail on the head.
We “know” how to deal with the deficit - the outlines are clear: (1) limits on entitlements which transfer money (a) from hard working young families to retirees and (b) from all taxpayers to the pet industries of each congressional district; (2) tax increases on people who can afford them (which means more than Obama would prefer, let alone the GOP or tea drinkers), and (3) limiting wasteful military spending (on systems the military doesn’t even want).
In the longer term, we have to control medical costs, and the outlines of that are also pretty clear: increase competition among insurers (across state lines), ending state regulation of insurance, and allowing people to join medicare at any age (with age-appropriate premiums). I’ve never understood the opposition to “puiblic option” - is the private sector afraid they can’t compete with the public sector?
Remember when Eisenhower warned against the “military/industrial complex?” Well, an even greater danger now seems to be the “medical/insurance company/pharmaceutical complex”!
I admire doctors. They’ve saved my life once, and others in my family. I’ve spoken to some who tell me they would gladly trade in their private practices to work at a relatively high wage (say, $200,000, depending on area) if they could get out from under the burden of paperwork and insurance scare tactics by becoming (hold your breath) federal employees!
So if the outlines are clear (and these are not necessarily the only ones), what’s missing? Political will.
Our system has been in gridlock for 40 years. (OK, I admit that partisanship has been the rule, not the exception throughout American history). But we seem to be in a place where government doesn’t work at all, where opposition is un-American, and THAT’s the scary part.
February 24th, 2010 at 1:00 pm
Thanks, Steve.
I think people miss the point when they say we have had high deficits before. Yes, we had pretty serious deficits during and immediately after the defeat of Hitler. And again, though not nearly as seriously, in the 1980s during the denouement of our confrontation with the Soviets. And yes, today’s extraordinary circumstances call for priming the pump.
The real trouble sets in when there is no crisis driving the explosion in debt, but rather when that debt becomes endemic, which is to say driven not by temporary exigencies, but by the permanent ordering of our budgetary priorities. Even if we do nothing, debt is more than likely going to climb to late 1940s levels by the end of this decade. And after that, rather than go down, it will go up.
This, with all due respect to those that lack health insurance, is THE crisis of our age. None compares. When I hear “conservatives” at CPAC talk about cutting taxes, I have to wonder what planet they inhabit. When I hear liberals (including our President) talk about insuring 30 million Americans, I have to wonder what planet they inhabit. Liberals in my view are far more dangerous, however. Tax cuts, however irresponsible, can at least be undone. Obama will do it by allowing the 2001 Bush tax cuts on the wealthy to expire. Clinton raised taxes in 1993. I have yet to meet the large government entitlement that has been rolled back, the opposite is much more likely. Entitlements have more endurance than Jason Voorhees, and are harder to kill.
Support for the President on health care is driven in part from the feeling that the lack of health insurance is a terrible lacuna in the social safety net, I get that. But it is also driven by a visceral distaste for conservatives and their shop-worn slogans regarding tax cuts and “small government” (which they have never succeeded at bringing about). Fair enough. But if you care about your kids, you have to get over both of these motivations and reject this health plan. Not because of death panels or “socialized medicine,” but because it makes the already horrifying debt picture immeasurably worse.
February 24th, 2010 at 2:30 pm
Ian, you wrote:
“When I hear liberals (including our President) talk about insuring 30 million Americans, I have to wonder what planet they inhabit. . . . because it makes the already horrifying debt picture immeasurably worse.”
Why? The health care bill is deficit neutral; indeed my understanding is that it will actually add about $25 billion to the federal coffers over the next ten years (I know Ezra Klein has reported that, among others, though I can’t find a good link right now). Not only that, but with the Democrats running the show, PAYGO is again the rule - anything that is passed by Congress has to be paid for. No deficit spending. The health care bill is subject to the same requirements.
Now if you want to say that the bill doesn’t do anything to reduce health care costs, I agree completely. But, in my home “commonwealth” of Massachusetts (the native New Yorker says through gritted teeth), with everyone now having health care coverage, they are talking very seriously about how to reduce costs, and believe me, the public is very much on board with it (even if the medical industry isn’t). I think its reasonable that “extend health care to everyone” comes first, and then “cut the costs” comes second.
How those costs would ever be cut if the GOP gets control of Congress in 2012 is beyond me, so I hope that doesn’t happen.