Republican Budget Cuts Will Come Back to Bite Them
Something about the Republican dance with populism these days reminds me of one of those classic Twilight Zone episodes: Aliens come down to earth. They want to help us! (They even have a book called To Serve Man!) Wait a minute … they want to eat us! (It’s a cookbook.) From there things take a decidedly downward turn.
One suspects that Republicans may be in for a similarly demoralizing experience. Here’s why:
When NPR asked Sen. Jim DeMint this week why Republicans were pressing to reduce Social Security benefits (a subject that had long been considered off limits for politicians interested in re-election), he answered, “It is politically dangerous, but I think the mood of the country is different than it has been [at] any time in my lifetime.” The “mood” he’s talking about is the so-called “new populism,” the voter anger expressed everywhere from Tea Party rallies to voting booths in 2010.
When you think of traditional populism, it evokes images of regular people rising up against a remote, usually corporate, elite that’s run roughshod over their rights. Farmers and working people taking on runaway industrialists and robber barons. Traditionally, Democrats have been most receptive to these kinds of appeals. In response, they’ve pushed government to enact programs aimed at protecting those most vulnerable to the predations of more powerful interests.
For the new populists, government is the remote elite. Instead of unsafe working conditions or unfair lending practices, they’re protesting the ills of government spending and overreach, the wasting of taxpayer dollars. And if their efforts undo the kinds of programs that a more traditional brand of populism might embrace—those aimed at helping the less advantaged make their way—so be it. It’s populism Republican style. And Republicans look like they’re going to ride it for all its worth.
But what happens when you start cutting programs that are in and of themselves something of a check on potential populist anger? That’s one way to look at government programs: There’s a need that’s not being addressed, and rather than let it ferment, government, however clumsily, tries to fill the gap. Sometimes the proposed gap filler is ridiculous (Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s “Department of Peace” springs to mind). Other times, it becomes part of the very fabric of our country.
Take public schooling. Public schools reflect a societal judgment that children should have a chance to succeed without regards to wealth or socioeconomic background. To help get them there, we don’t give every kid a million dollars and say “have at it,” we offer them a tuition-free classroom with a curriculum designed to put them on an equal footing with everyone else when they enter the workforce. What they do from there is up to them.
It doesn’t always work out, of course. Some schools are better than others. So are some teachers. But wherever our various debates about education reform end up, public schools reflect a deeply held American value: that there are some public goods (like an educated workforce) that we, as a society, believe are worth individual (taxpayer) costs. That seems to have become lost in the current debate.
Take another look at what’s underway in Wisconsin. A centerpiece of Gov. Scott Walker’s budget is a $1 billion cut in education funding. That’s a big number that may sound appealing to people worked up about government spending today, but in September when they send their kids to schools with classroom sizes twice as big as a year before, they may begin to remember why they thought it was a good idea to fund education in the first place. Presto! New populists transformed into traditional populists. Only now their target has shifted from Democrats to Republicans. And you can imagine the same phenomenon playing out across a whole host of issues, from Social Security to shared revenue.
Republicans may have momentum on their side at the moment, but there’s a long way to go in the various budget battles playing out across the country. To be sure, Democrats can overplay their hand, too, by opposing any kind of spending restraint.
But one way or the other, populism is sure to play a role in determining how it all turns out. Which strain of populism wins? For Republicans, the answer is kind of like the difference between To Serve Man (they’re helping us!) and To Serve Man (oh wait, they’re eating us). And they had better hope they’ve got it right.
By: Anson Kaye, U.S. News and World Report, March 17, 2011
The GOP’s Health Policy Cynics
The health care community is discovering to its shock and dismay that it’s not simply traditional Republican conservatives who have taken control of the House of Representatives, it’s a new group of cynics.
Conservatives, like liberals, have a more-or-less coherent set of ideas. They use political power to push preferred policies, whether related to health care, housing or a hundred other possible issues. William F. Buckley Jr., one of the fathers of modern American conservatism, “had a way of … making conservatism a holistic view of life not narrowed to the playing fields of ideology alone,” as one admirer put it.
Although cynics may claim conservative credentials, their view of government is really nothing more than a quarrel about its cost. It brings to mind Oscar Wilde’s immortal phrase, “The cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
The contrast between the two viewpoints was on stark display at two recent marquée meetings, AcademyHealth’s yearly policy conference and the sprawling Health Information and Management Systems Society — HIMSS – Health IT Conference and Exhibition.
AcademyHealth’s “Running of the Wonks” (my term, not theirs) is a magnet for researchers and policy mavens who are inured by long experience to most political rhetoric. Yet at the general session featuring a bipartisan dialogue among congressional staffers, the harsh rhetoric from the GOP participants stunned the crowd. The new federal health law, it seemed, was evil incarnate, and the rhetoric of “repeal and replace” was wielded with a fundamentalist zeal.
“The bureaucracies that administer ObamaCare” must be cut, declared one aide to a powerful congressional leader, setting the tone. And in case anyone didn’t get the point, the word “ObamaCare” was deliberately repeated every few syllables in a tone of disdain combined with wonder at how such a monstrosity had ever come to be. (AcademyHealth meeting rules said the staffers could not be quoted by name.)
The audience of wonks quailed, then quietly queued up for the question-and-answer period. They knew, after all, that the health law’s fine print incorporates a generous helping of initiatives championed by both conservatives, and those on the left. Besides, these were staffers speaking, not politicians playing to the press. Surely, gentle reason would triumph. Alas, it was not to be.
The Prevention and Public Health Fund? “You mean, the prevention health slush fund, as we like to refer to it?” replied a GOP staffer.
The Innovation Center at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services? “An innovation center at CMS is an oxymoron,” responded a Republican aide, before adding a personal barb aimed at the attendees: “Though it’s great for PhDs who come to Washington on the government tab.”
There was also no reason the government should pay for “so-called comparative effectiveness research,” another said.
“Everything’s on the chopping block,” said yet another.
Everything? At HIMSS, where GOP staffers also spoke, attendees were chagrined to learn that “everything” applied to them, too. The subsidies for health information technology that were part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act were targeted in legislation introduced in late January by Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, chairman of the Republican Study Group. His bill would repeal this funding and eliminate all remaining stimulus spending, including about $45 billion in unspent health IT funds.
Those focused on the substance of health policy might be forgiven for feeling blindsided. After all, the McCain-Palin health policy platform in the 2008 presidential election called for coordinated care, greater use of health information technology and a focus on Medicare payment for value, not volume. Once-and-future Republican presidential candidates such as former governors Mike Huckabee (Ark.), Mitt Romney (Mass.) and Tim Pawlenty (Minn.), as well as ex-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, have long promoted disease prevention, a more innovative federal government and increased use of information technology. Indeed, federal health IT “meaningful use” requirements can even be seen as a direct consequence of Gingrich’s popularization of the phrase, “Paper kills.”
Ah, but that was back before the Republican cynics swept into power. It was back before traditional GOP conservatives — worried that any suggestions outside a single-minded focus on slashing spending would be seen as disloyal — eschewed ideas in favor of ideological declarations.
This column was filed just days after a two-week compromise was signed into law to avoid a federal government shutdown. It allowed funding for health reform to continue, but instituted other budget cuts. Obviously, the cynics yielded a bit, at least for the moment, to the conservatives, and the liberals and centrists have given ground to both.
Still, one wonders what the urbane Buckley would think of a movement that seems intent on ignoring the real-world context of its actions. Buckley launched his lifetime crusade against liberalism with God and Man at Yale, a book that took aim at the academics who’d taught him as an Ivy League undergraduate. Alas, the GOP cynics are cocooned instead in an underground bunker of their own design, as impervious to realities they’d prefer to ignore as the ivory tower academics they’ve come to scorn.
By: Michael Millenson, The Health Care Blog, March 9, 2011. Post Originally appeared in Kaiser Health News.
The Games People Play: How Boehner Is Playing The Democrats
Richard Nixon espoused what he called “the madman theory.” It’s a negotiating approach that induces the other side to believe you are capable of dangerously irrational actions and leads it to back down to avoid the wreckage your rage might let loose.
House Republicans are pursuing their own madman theory in budget negotiations, with a clever twist: Speaker John Boehner is casting himself as the reasonable man fully prepared to reach a deal to avoid a government shutdown. But he also has to satisfy a band of “wild-eyed bomb-throwing freshmen,” as he characterized new House members in a Wall Street Journal interview last week by way of comparing them fondly to his younger self.
Thus are negotiators for President Obama and Senate Democrats forced to deal not only with Republican leaders in the room but also with a menacing specter outside its confines. As “responsible” public officials, Democrats are asked to make additional concessions just to keep the bomb-throwers at bay.
This is the perverse genius of what the House Republicans are up to: Nobody really thinks that anything like their $57 billion in remaining proposed budget cuts can pass. It’s unlikely that all of their own members are confident about all of the cuts they have voted for. But by taking such a large collection of programs hostage, the GOP can be quite certain to win many more fights than it would if each reduction were considered separately.
Begin with the outrageous $1.1 billion, 15 percent cut from Head Start, a program that offers preschool education to roughly 965,000 poor children. According to the Center for Law and Social Policy, this would knock 218,000 kids out of Head Start and force 16,000 classrooms to close.
That is an excellent way to lose the future, as Obama ought to be saying. What could be a better use of public money than helping our poorest children early in life so they might achieve more in school, and later?
And for those who say that Head Start is not as good as it should be, the administration announced plans in September to require lower-performing Head Start programs to compete against other entities for continued funding. Isn’t this the sort of competition conservatives say they’re for?
Given what science has shown about the importance of a child’s first years, we need better and broader early childhood programs. Slashing them can only cause harm – to parents, to children and to the country.
Then there are the cuts at the other end of the education continuum. The House budget would reduce the maximum Pell Grant, which helps needy kids go to college, by $845, from $5,550 available now. According to Mark Kantrowitz, who publishes the FinAid Web site that gives financial-aid advice, 1.7 million low-income students would lose eligibility for Pell Grants, almost a fifth of current recipients. Is that what Americans voted for last November?
But here is where the Republicans’ strategy works so brilliantly. Let’s assume that neither the administration nor Senate Democrats – even the most timid among them – can allow the Head Start or Pell Grant cuts to go through. That still leaves a lot of other truly worthy programs to be defended. By heaping cut upon cut, Republicans get advocates of each particular cause fighting among themselves.
And with so many reductions on the table, voters who would actually oppose most of them if they knew the details don’t get to hear much about any individual item because the media concentrate almost entirely on the partisan drama of the shutdown fight, not the particulars.
You can also imagine the argument from those Democrats petrified of their own shadows. “Well,” say the scaredy-cats, “we have to save Pell Grants and Head Start, so why don’t we give House Republicans what they want on the National Endowment for the Arts – or their cuts in foreign aid, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, medical research, the Women Infants and Children program, meals-on-wheels or mine safety inspections? I mean, we have to give them something, or those crazies will shut down the government, and we might get blamed.”
Boehner can just sit back and smile benignly as Democrats battle over which concessions they should give him. When the negotiating gets tough, he can sadly warn that his freshmen need more because he can’t guarantee what they’ll do. The perpetually tanned one is a shrewd dude. Democrats who underestimate him will be playing into his hands.
By: E. J. Dionne, Op-Ed Columnist, The Washington Post, March 7, 2011
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