Age Gap: The GOP’s Generational Weapon In The Medicare Fight
To senior citizens at town hall meetings angry or worried about their plan to convert Medicare to a private insurance scheme, Republicans have a simple answer: It’s not about you. You’ll be fine. This is for “the next generation.”
The next generation is everyone 55 or under, since the plan would not start for ten years and would affect only newly eligible seniors. The stated logic of the ten-year delay is that it takes time to put the system in place and that people need time to plan. But if “premium support” (a euphemism right up there with “enhanced interrogation”) were ever going to work, it could be implemented as quickly as the Affordable Care Act (four years) or Medicare’s prescription drug coverage (two years). Presumably, the delay is mostly a political kludge, intended to avoid a backlash from those now or soon to be dependent on Medicare by affecting only those young enough to be giving little thought to retirement health coverage.
But the line they chose is more than a gimmick: The 55-and-over cutoff marks a sharp and significant generational divide. Those over 55 will continue to benefit from one of the triumphs of social insurance in the Great Society, while the rest of us will be on our own, with a coupon for private health insurance. If you consider what it means to be 55 years old in 2011, you’ll see the significance of the line.
Today’s 55-year-old was born in 1956. That’s not generally considered a major break in the generations. It’s smack in the middle of the Baby Boom (the peak of the boom, in fact), with almost a decade to go before the first Gen-Xers were born, dreaming of Winona Ryder. But the difference between early and later Boomers, especially in their experience of the economy, is dramatic.
A baby born in 1956 would have graduated from high school in about 1974, from college in 1978 or so. Look at almost any historical chart of the American economy, and you see two sharp breaks in the 1970s. First, in 1974, household incomes, which had been rising since World War II, flattened. Real wages started to stagnate. The poverty rate stopped falling. Health insurance coverage stopped rising. Those trends have continued ever since.
Second, a little later in the decade, around the time today’s 55-year-olds graduated from college (if they did—fewer than 30 percent have a four-year degree), inequality began its sharp rise, and the share of national income going to the bottom 40 percent began to fall. Productivity and wages, which had tended to keep pace, began to diverge, meaning that workers began seeing little of the benefits of their own productivity gains. The number of jobs in manufacturing peaked and began to drop sharply. Defined benefit pensions, which provide a secure base of income in retirement, began to give way to 401(k)s and similar schemes that depend on the worker to save and the stock market to perform. While the benefits of higher education rose, college tuitions started to rise even faster. Those trends, too, have continued.
If there was ever going to be a generational war in this country, that high school class of ’74 would be its Mason-Dixon line. It’s the moment when Bill Clinton’s promise—“if you work hard and play by the rules you’ll get ahead”—began to lose its value. Today’s seniors and near-seniors spent much of their working lives in that postwar world, with their incomes rising, investments gaining, their health increasingly secure, and their retirements predictable. Everyone 55 and younger spent his or her entire working life in an economy where all those trends had stalled or reversed. To borrow former White House economist Jared Bernstein’s phrase, it was the “You’re On Your Own” economy. Finally, those 55-year-olds are spending several of what should be their peak earning years, years when they should be salting away money in their 401(k)s and IRAs, in a period of deep recession and very slow recovery.
The Ryan plan, in other words, delivers to the older generation exactly what they’ve had all their lives—secure and predictable benefits—and to the next generation, more of what they’ve known—insecurity and risk. It’s hardly the first generational fight the GOP has started. The previous one was just last fall, when they campaigned for Medicare, and against the $500 billion in cuts (mostly by getting rid of the overgenerous subsidies to private insurers in an experimental program) passed as part of the Affordable Care Act. With an off-year electorate that was overwhelmingly older, they could put all their bets on the older side, knowing that seniors would see little benefit from the Affordable Care Act and were naturally worried about any change to the health system they enjoyed.
Heading into the 2012 election, however, the electorate is likely to shift back to one in which younger and middle-aged voters vote in proportion to their share of the population, so a “Mediscare” campaign won’t work. This time, the GOP hopes to play both sides of the generational war, gambling that while seniors want security, younger voters never expected the certainty of Medicare, just as they don’t expect reliable pensions or Social Security benefits, and thus will embrace a plan that sounds innovative, flexible, and market-based. Contending that the only alternative to premium support is the end of Medicare entirely, they are offering a generation that is accustomed to getting less than their parents a little bit, rather than nothing.
This strategy is a variation on the generational conflict the Bush Administration tried to launch in 2005 over Social Security privatization. Although it never reached the level of specificity that Ryan achieved, the calculus was the same: Younger voters would welcome the opportunity to take advantage of the stock market for their retirement, rather than the stodgy and predictable system their parents and grandparents liked.
That wager didn’t work, however: It turned out that older voters were terrified of Social Security privatization and younger voters unenthusiastic. Within five months, the radical move that every pundit thought was a near-certainty when George W. Bush declared “I’ve got political capital and I intend to use it,” had disappeared, never even introduced as legislation. And despite this week’s relaunch of the Ryan plan, it’s likely to end in the same result. If Social Security is any precedent, younger voters will be indifferent, while older voters won’t believe they’re exempt. The Republicans will again walk away from the conflict, hoping to get credit for being “serious” without bearing a political price for the error.
For Democrats, the defeat of the Ryan plan, like the failed Social Security privatization before it, will be regarded as a great victory, and an opportunity to get a fresh start with worried older voters. But they should not ignore the generational divide revealed by Ryan’s cutoff. If progressive politics has nothing to offer the late Boomers and the generations that follow except the same old programs, and nothing that responds to their distinctive experience of the economy, then eventually they’ll fall for one of these gimmicks from the right.
By: Mark Schmitt, The New Republic; Senior Fellow, Roosevelt Institute, May 20, 2011
GOP Jobs Plan: Old Ideas, Fancy New Clip Art
Academic books pack about 600 words to a page. Normal books clock in around
400. Large-print books, you know, the ones for kids or the visually impaired — fit about 250. The House GOP’s jobs plan, however, gets about 200 words to a page. The typeface is fit for giants, and the document’s 10 pages are mostly taken up by pictures. It looks like the staffer in charge forgot the assignment was due on Thursday rather than Friday and cranked up the font to 24 points and began dumping clip art to pad out the plan.
Which is odd, because there’s nothing in this plan that hasn’t been in a thousand other plans. When I asked David Autor, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a specialist on labor markets, to take a look at the substance, he pronounced it a classic case of “what Larry Summers would call ‘now-more-than-everisms.”
“Here’s how it works,” Autor wrote in an e-mail. “1. You have a set of policies that you favor at all times and under all circumstances, e.g., cut taxes, remove regulations, drill-baby-drill, etc. 2. You see a problem that needs fixing (e.g., the economy stinks). 3. You say, ‘We need to enact my favored policies now more than ever.’ I believe that every item in the GOP list that you sent derives from this three-step procedure.
“That’s not to say that there are no reasonable ideas on this list. But there is certainly no original thinking here directed at addressing the employment problem. Or, to put it differently, is there any set of economic circumstances under which the GOP would not actually want to enact every item on this agenda? If the answer is no, then this is clearly now-more-than-everism.”
If you read Autor’s answer and then guessed at what’s included in the plan, you’d probably get it about right. The GOP wants a separate congressional vote on every significant regulation. It wants to cut taxes for corporations and small businesses led by individuals. It wants a tax break on profit that corporations earn overseas. It wants to pass pending trade agreements, increase domestic production of oil and enact spending cuts. The only two proposals you couldn’t have guessed sight unseen are patent reform and visas for the highly skilled.
But even if you think every item on that agenda is a grand idea, this isn’t exactly fast-acting medicine. “At best, an agenda like this is meant to improve long-term growth by a couple of tenths of a percentage point,” says Larry Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute. “It takes a really long time to move the dial. It’s not a response to a cyclical downturn.”
That’s okay, because the document doesn’t believe in cyclical downturns. It only believes in deviations from the Republican agenda. The first page sets out the GOP’s narrative of the unemployment crisis. See if you recognize what’s missing here: “For the past four years, Democrats in Washington have enacted policies that undermine these basic concepts which have historically placed America at the forefront of the global marketplace. As a result, most Americans know someone who has recently lost a job, and small businesses and entrepreneurs lack the confidence needed to invest in our economy. Not since the Great Depression has our nation’s unemployment rate been this high this long.”
Four years ago, of course, George W. Bush was president. And he was, as you might remember, a Republican, not a Democrat. As for Wall Street, well, Wall Street who?
But it’s not just that you could read this jobs plan without knowing the financial crisis ever happened. You could read it without knowing the past decade ever happened. As Mishel says, “If lower taxes and less regulation was such good policy, then George W. Bush’s economy would have been a lot better. But under Bush, Republicans cut taxes on business and on investors and high-income people, and they didn’t add many regulations, and that business cycle was the first one in the postwar period where the income for a typical working-class family was lower at the end than at the beginning.”
That, however, is the agenda the House GOP thinks we need. And now more than
ever.
By: Ezra Klein, Columnist, The Washington Post, May 26, 2011
What Happens When A Criminal Becomes Governor?
Florida’s wildly-unpopular far-right governor, Rick Scott (R), traveled to a retirement community in Central Florida yesterday known for being the most Republican retirement community in the state. Scott was there to sign his new state budget, which helps demonstrate his priorities and commitment to looking out for his most vulnerable constituents.
In his speech Thursday, Scott omitted many of the serious-sounding programs he cut: homeless veterans, meals for poor seniors, a council for deafness, a children’s hospital, cancer research, public radio, whooping-cough vaccines for poor mothers, or aid for the paralyzed.
These are cuts, by the way, he made from an already-austere budget approved by a Florida legislature dominated by larger Republican majorities. Scott thought they were too generous, so he made sweeping changes though line-item vetoes, which is legal in the state.
All told, Scott’s budget throws 4,500 Floridians out of work as a way to help lower unemployment. No, I don’t understand it, either.
The ridiculous governor might have heard from some of his less-supportive constituents had he not banned Democrats from the bill-signing ceremony.
Members of The Villages Democratic Club were barred from the budget signing by Scott staffers who said the outdoor event in The Villages town square was “private.” Other staffers and Republican operatives scoured the crowd and had Sumter County sheriff’s deputies remove those with anti-Scott signs or liberal-looking pins and buttons. They escorted more than a dozen people off the property.
As Tanya Somanader put it, “Many in the community would likely not be pleased with Scott’s cuts, but those voices remained unheard — mainly because they were banned.”
Atrios added the other day, “I normally resist the temptation to blame “stupid voters” for their leaders, but man, Floridians, what were you thinking….”
By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly-Political Animal, May 27, 2011
Joplin And Natural Disasters: They’re Called “Emergencies” For A Reason
I’ve been writing a lot this week about congressional Republicans’ new approach to disaster relief funds in large part because I find it rather amazing, even for a contemporary GOP that no longer seems capable of surprising.
For all of our differences over party, ideology, and creed, we know that when disaster strikes and our neighbors face a genuine emergency, America responds. We don’t ask what’s in it for us; we don’t weigh the political considerations; we don’t pause to ponder the larger ideological implications.
We act. It’s who we are; it’s what we do.
The problem isn’t that conservative Republicans necessarily disagree with this principle. Rather, the problem is, they place other principles above this one when prioritizing how and whether to act.
While much of Joplin, Mo., is still under rubble from a devastating tornado, conservatives in Congress are starting to argue for a tougher approach to disaster aid, demanding that any funding be offset by cutting federal money elsewhere.
Disasters will no longer be considered “emergencies” if conservatives win this battle to redefine the way Congress funds aid packages for states and cities stricken by natural and man-made catastrophes. […]
Traditionally, the government has responded to disasters — hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and acts of terrorism — by using its power of the purse to aid the affected areas with “emergency” dollars that add to the debt because they don’t count against annual spending caps.
When hurricanes Katrina and Rita slammed into Louisiana and Mississippi in 2005, a vocal minority in the House called for offsetting tens of billions of dollars of spending with cuts to other programs. At the time, House Republican leaders shut them down. But now, as much of the Southern and Midwestern parts of the country have been hit by a series of catastrophic acts of nature, that vocal minority has become a controlling majority — at least in the House.
It was House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) who presented the new way of looking at disaster relief. He was willing to approve a $1 billion emergency package for Southwest Missouri, but on a condition — he wanted to cut money from a clean-energy program to pay for it. His party agreed.
The callousness becomes even clearer in the larger context. If the oil industry wants taxpayer subsidies, conservative Republicans don’t blink, and certainly don’t wonder how we’ll pay for the incentives. When Wall Street needed a bailout, the entire Republican leadership was on board with writing a very large check, without much thought to fiscal responsibility.
But when working-class communities get slammed by a natural disaster, through no fault of their own, suddenly the GOP grows miserly. Republicans’ first thought isn’t, “How can we help these struggling Americans get back on their feet?” Instead, it’s, “How will we block disaster relief aid unless we get corresponding spending cuts?”
By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly-Political Animal, May 27, 2011
The Fake James Madison: Conservatives Selective Reading Of The Founding Fathers Threatens Social Security And Medicare
The House Republican plan to phase out Medicare is crashing and burning. Rep.-elect Kathy Hochul (D-NY) just won an impossible election victory by campaigning to keep Medicare alive. The Senate just soundly rejected the House GOP’s plan. Even former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who once shut down the government in a failed attempt to force President Bill Clinton to support draconian Medicare cuts, blasted this Medicare-killing plan as “radical right-wing social engineering.”
Yet even as this concerted assault on Medicare hemorrhages support from elected officials, conservatives have a backdoor plan to get the courts to kill Medicare for them. Numerous lawmakers embrace a discredited theory of the Constitution that would not only end Medicare outright but also cause countless other cherished programs to be declared unconstitutional. Under this theory, Pell Grants, federal student loans, food stamps, federal disaster relief, Medicaid, income assistance for the poor, and even Social Security must all be eliminated as offensive to the Constitution.
In essence, supporters of this constitutional theory would so completely rewrite America’s social contract that they make Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), the author of the House GOP plan, look like Martin Luther King Jr. This issue brief explores the legal and historical gymnastics required to accept the conservative position that programs like Medicare and Social Security violate the Constitution.
The general welfare
Although Congress’s authority is limited to an itemized list of powers contained in the text of the Constitution itself, these powers are quite sweeping. They include the authority to regulate the national economy, build a national postal system, create comprehensive immigration and intellectual property regulation, maintain a military, and raise and spend money.
This last power, the authority to raise and spend money, is among Congress’s broadest powers. Under the Constitution, national leaders are free to spend money in any way they choose so long as they do so to “provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States.” For this reason, laws such as Medicare and Social Security are obviously constitutional because they both raise and spend money to the benefit of all Americans upon their retirement.
Many members of Congress, however, do not believe the Constitution’s words mean what they say they mean. Consider the words of Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who recently explained the origin of the increasingly common belief that Congress’s constitutional spending power is so small that it can be drowned in a bathtub:
If you read [James] Madison, Madison will tell you what he thought of the Welfare Clause. He said, “Yeah, there is a General Welfare Clause, but if we meant that you can do anything, why would we have listed the enumerated powers?” Really, the Welfare Clause is bound by the enumerated powers that we gave the federal government.
In essence, Paul and many of his fellow conservatives believe Congress’s power to collect taxes and “provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States” really only enables Congress to build post offices or fund wars or take other actions expressly authorized by some other part of the Constitution. According to this view, the spending power is not—as it is almost universally understood —itself an independent enumerated power authorizing Congress to spend money.
Paul’s understanding of the Spending Clause is not simply the idiosyncratic view of an outlier senator. Indeed, there is strong reason to believe his view is shared by the majority of his caucus. In the lead-up to the 2010 midterm elections, congressional Republicans released a “Pledge to America,” which broadly outlined their plans for governing if they were to prevail that November. In it, the lawmakers claimed that “lack of respect for the clear constitutional limits and authorities has allowed Congress to create ineffective and costly programs that add to the massive deficit year after year.”
This language suggests that many conservatives agree with Sen. Paul that Congress is somehow exceeding its constitutional authority to spend money. But there is no support for this view in constitutional text or in Supreme Court precedent.
In its very first decision to consider the issue—its 1936 decision in United States v. Butler—the Supreme Court unanimously affirmed that “the power of Congress to authorize expenditure of public moneys for public purposes is not limited by the direct grants of legislative power found in the Constitution,” as Sen. Paul would claim. Similarly, while the text of the Constitution establishes that “the exercise of the spending power must be in pursuit of ‘the general welfare,’” neither Sen. Paul nor the Pledge cites examples of laws that fail to meet this criterion.
Selectively reading Madison
While conservatives’ narrow understanding of the spending power finds no support in the text of the Constitution or in the Supreme Court’s decisions, Sen. Paul is correct that it does have one very famous supporter. In an 1831 missive, former President James Madison claimed that the best way to read the Spending Clause is to ignore its literal meaning and impose an extra-textual limit on Congressional power:
With respect to the words “general welfare,” I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators.
Sen. Paul suggests that Madison’s extra-textual limit is both authoritative and binding—even if it means that programs ranging from Social Security to Medicare to Pell Grants must all cease to exist. But it is a mistake to assume that Madison’s preferred construction of the Spending Clause must restrict modern-day congressional action.
First of all, even the most prominent supporters of “originalism”—the belief that the Constitution must be read exactly as it was understood at the time it was written—reject the view that an individual framer’s intentions can change constitutional meaning. As the nation’s leading originalist, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, explains, “I don’t care if the framers of the Constitution had some secret meaning in mind when they adopted its words. I take the words as they were promulgated to the people of the United States, and what is the fairly understood meaning of those words.”
Indeed, Madison himself would have been dismayed by the claim that an established understanding of the Constitution must bend to his own singular views. Like Scalia, Madison rejected the notion that the framers’ personal desires can defeat the words they actually committed to text. As he explained to future President Martin Van Buren, “I am aware that the document must speak for itself, and that that intention cannot be substituted for [the intention derived through] the established rules of interpretation.”
Secondly, Madison embraced a way of interpreting the Constitution reminiscent of the evolving theories of constitutional interpretation that are so widely decried by modern conservatives. Although Rep. Madison opposed on constitutional grounds the creation of the First Bank of the United States in 1791, President Madison signed into law an act creating the Second Bank in 1816. He “recognized that Congress, the President, the Supreme Court, and (most important, by failing to use their amending power) the American people had for two decades accepted” the First Bank, and he viewed this acceptance as “a construction put on the Constitution by the nation, which, having made it, had the supreme right to declare its meaning.”
The Constitution is not a scavenger hunt
Even if we must, as Sen. Paul suggests, be bound by the Founding Fathers’ subjective intentions, Madison’s understanding of the Constitution hardly reflects the consensus view among those who created it. The truth is that Madison’s voice was merely one of many competing voices among the founding generation—and his vision of the Constitution was eventually rejected by no less a figure than George Washington himself.
Madison’s chief antagonist in early debates about constitutional meaning was Alexander Hamilton. As the nation’s first secretary of the treasury, Hamilton offered an interpretation of the Spending Clause that closely resembles the modern understanding:
These three qualifications excepted, the power to raise money is plenary, and indefinite; and the objects to which it may be appropriated are no less comprehensive, than the payment of the public debts and the providing for the common defence and “general Welfare.” The terms “general Welfare” were doubtless intended to signify more than was expressed or imported in those which Preceded; otherwise numerous exigencies incident to the affairs of a Nation would have been left without a provision. The phrase is as comprehensive as any that could have been used; because it was not fit that the constitutional authority of the Union, to appropriate its revenues shou’d have been restricted within narrower limits than the “General Welfare” and because this necessarily embraces a vast variety of particulars, which are susceptible neither of specification nor of definition.
Hamilton’s understanding of the spending power was one part of a broader, more expansive vision of congressional power that also included a robust interpretation of Congress’s power under the Constitution’s Necessary and Proper Clause. This broader understanding of Congress’s role prevailed over Madison’s very limited one during the earliest days of the Republic. Hamilton was the chief advocate who convinced President George Washington to sign the First Bank bill over Madison’s objections.
The point here is not that constitutional interpretations should be played like the card game “War,” where conservatives play the Madison card and everyone else plays the Washington card, and whoever plays the higher card wins. Rather, the point is simply that conservatives are wrong to treat the Founding Fathers’ statements as if they were a menu that lawmakers can search through and order the kind of Constitution they want. The Constitution is not a scavenger hunt.
Moreover, it is hardly necessary to dismiss Madison’s tremendous contributions to the Constitution itself in order to recognize why America should not relitigate a 230-year-old argument about America’s power to spend money on programs like Medicare. Hamilton was undoubtedly correct that his own reading of the Spending Clause is more consistent with the Constitution’s text than the reading offered by Madison—Madison himself concedes as much—but Madison was also correct to warn that the nation rejects a longstanding and widely accepted constitutional interpretation at its peril.
Millions of Americans depend upon programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and federal student loans, and America has grown into the wealthiest and most prosperous nation ever to exist in the years since these programs were enacted. Throughout this golden age, not one Supreme Court justice has questioned what Justice Scalia recently told a gathering of members of Congress: “It’s up to Congress how you want to appropriate, basically.”
Conclusion
Few things are certain in American politics, but after this week one thing is crystal clear—the American people cherish Medicare and they want no truck with an agenda that would destroy it. Sadly, far too many conservative lawmakers refuse to listen to their constituents on this basic and obvious point—to the extent of inventing a theory of constitutional interpretation that would achieve their goal of ending Medicare far sooner than the House Republicans’ ill-considered budget.
Conservatives will tell you that killing Medicare is the only way to read the Constitution consistently with the framers’ intent. Don’t believe them. The truth is that the only way to reach this conclusion is to hunt through the framers’ statements, cherry pick statements that conservatives like, and ignore the very text of the Constitution itself in the process.
By: Ian Millhiser, Center for American Progress, May 27, 2011
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