Pandering To The Extremists: Mitt Romney In A Time Warp
There was something almost quaint about Mitt Romney’s speech on health careThursday, as if we were watching early sound footage of Theodore Roosevelt.
Republicans no longer talk about the virtues of government social programs, especially if they intend to run for president in a party that now considers Medicare the first cousin of socialism. Yet there was Mr. Romney defending a mandate to buy health insurance as passionately as in any similar speech by President Obama.
When he was governor of Massachusetts, of course, Mr. Romney created a health care system very similar to the one championed by the president. He could have walked away from it, as he did in the 2008 presidential race, or fecklessly repudiated it, as Tim Pawlenty, the former governor of Minnesota, did in the Republican debate last week regarding his earlier support for a cap-and-trade system to reduce greenhouse gases.
This time, to his credit, Mr. Romney is standing by his record, perhaps hoping there might still be a few primary voters who appreciate candor — assuming he doesn’t pivot again in the heat of the right-dominated primaries.
Tearing it down might help him politically, he said, but “it wouldn’t be honest.” He said he did what he “thought would be right for the people of my state.” A mandate to buy insurance, he said, makes sense to prevent people from becoming free riders, getting emergency care at enormous cost to everyone else.
Where he went off the rails, however, was in not acknowledging that that same logic applies to the nation. Mr. Romney tried desperately to pivot from praising his handiwork in Massachusetts to trashing the very same idea as adapted by Mr. Obama. His was an efficient and effective state policy; Mr. Obama’s was “a power grab by the federal government.”
He tried to justify this with a history lesson on federalism and state experimentation, but, in fact, said nothing about what makes Massachusetts different from its neighbors or any other state. And why would he immediately repeal the Obama mandate if elected president? Because Mr. Obama wants a “government takeover of health care,” while all he wanted was to insure the uninsured.
That distinction makes no sense, and the disconnect undermines the foundation of Mr. Romney’s candidacy. At heart, he is still the kind of old-fashioned northeastern Republican who believes in government’s role while trying to conceal it under a thin, inauthentic coating of conservative outrage. But in its blind abhorrence of President Obama, the party has also left behind former centrists like Mr. Romney, and it is unlikely that any amount of frantic pandering about the free market will change that. He is trapped not only between the poles of his party but between eras, a candidate caught in an electoral time warp.
By: The New York Times, Editorial, May 12, 2011
Insuring The Elderly, Insuring The Poor
Democrats, Republicans and Independents all believe the government is responsible for providing health care to the elderly. Democrats and independents, but not Republicans, believe the government should also provide health care to the poor:
All groups are more likely to favor guaranteed health care for the elderly than for the poor. But the dropoff between the two policies is very different. Democrats by a plus 77% margin favor covering the elderly, but only favor covering the poor by a 52% margin. That’s a 25 percentage point gap between covering the elderly and covering the poor. For independents, the falloff is a very similar 28 percentage points. For Republicans, the falloff is 61 percentage points, from a +15 point margin for covering the elderly to a -46 point margin for covering the poor.
The best way to understand this is by grasping the link between ethnocentrism and support for universal entitlements and both opposition to means-tested entitlements. Ethnocentric attitudes among whites, controlling for all other beliefs, correlate with support for universal programs and with opposition to programs for the poor. White racial conservatives favor programs that benefit people like them — and hey, everybody gets old — and oppose programs for people unlike them — the poor being disproportionately non-white, and even more proportionately so in the white imagination.
The Selfish Budget Or The Selfless Budget
It was refreshing to hear all those unambiguous declarations from President Obama on Wednesday. “I will not” let Medicare become a voucher program or deprive families with disabled children of needed benefits. “We will” reform government health-care programs without disavowing the social compact. “I refuse” to sign another renewal of the Bush tax cuts for millionaires. Republicans “want to give people like me a $200,000 tax cut that’s paid for by asking 33 seniors each to pay $6,000 more in health costs. . . . And it’s not going to happen as long as I’m president.”
Okay, there weren’t any lines with the simple heat of “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” or the terse power of “Make my day.” But Obama’s budget manifesto represented a significant warming of his usually cool rhetoric. He said he wanted to find common ground but instead devoted much of the speech to drawing lines in the sand.
And thank goodness. If ever there were a time when lines desperately needed to be drawn, it’s now.
Before we get carried away with praise, let’s remember that even as he gets in touch with his Old Testament side, Obama is playing defense. Republicans have already forced him to accept budget cuts that he abhors, and it’s a given that more slashing and burning will follow. Obama noted the questionableness of choking off government spending at a time when the economy is struggling for altitude. Yet he proposes doing just that — which means his GOP opponents are setting the agenda.
Let’s also remember that those tax cuts for the rich were as unjust, outrageous and totally unacceptable last fall as they are today. Which many commentators noted (ahem). Before someone caved to Republican demands and signed legislation extending the millionaires’ tax break for two more years. That someone being Obama.
The president glossed over this inconvenient history. What he managed to do admirably, however, was distinguish between his vision of America and the one sketched by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) on behalf of House Republicans. It was, as Obama’s critics charge, a political speech — and rightly so. The questions at the heart of the battle over spending and entitlements are, after all, fundamentally political.
It’s not just a matter of drawing a graph in which the line called “expenditures” meets the line called “revenue.” The question is how this intersection is made to occur. Ryan’s plan and Obama’s plan both reduce the deficit by about $4 trillion over the next decade, but they do so in starkly different ways.
Perhaps the clearest example of the difference is how the two plans would handle Medicare and Medicaid, the chief drivers of the deficit. Obama wants to maintain both programs as entitlements. He believes, as I do, that we have a collective interest in ensuring that the elderly and the poor receive the health care they need and deserve. He sees this as a matter not just of compassion but of common sense: We’ve already fallen behind other industrialized democracies in major health indicators, including life expectancy, and we certainly won’t “win the future” by becoming an unhealthier nation.
Republicans apparently believe it’s enough to ensure that state-of-the-art medical care is available to those who can afford to pay for it. Under Ryan’s plan, Medicare and Medicaid could no longer be described as true federal entitlements. This is no exaggeration, because under neither program would adequate health care be guaranteed. Seniors and the poor would, increasingly, have to fend for themselves.
The Republican plan would turn Medicare into a voucher program that subsidizes the purchase of private health insurance. So what if an individual’s insurance premiums are not covered by the voucher? So what if health costs, and premiums, continue to skyrocket? The free market will surely take care of all that, somehow or other.
On Medicaid, Republicans want to shift the burden to the states, giving them block grants and essentially telling them to take care of the indigent however they choose. Some states would be diligent in providing adequate medical care. Some would not.
Is this the kind of America we want? How selfish are we, really? How selfless? To what extent does this churchgoing nation take the biblical instruction to “love thy neighbor” seriously?
These are the kinds of basic choices we face. There are two plans on the table now. Only one of them — Obama’s — appeals to the better angels of our nature.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, April 14, 2011
Pragmatic Policy vs Ideological Philosophy
For some time now, Democrats and Republicans alike have been yearning for a great philosophical clash between the two parties. No more of this five percent of 12 percent of the federal budget stuff. We wanted entitlements, the role of government, the obligations that the old have to the young, that the rich have to the poor, that the powerful have to the powerless.
Paul Ryan’s budget offer exactly that sort of reconstruction of the social compact. America is a very different place before his budget than it would be after his budget. But though Obama’s speech was closer to that sort of clash of visions than anything he’s offered before — he used the word “vision” 15 times, for instance — what he offered was not philosophy. It was policy. But you have to read it closely — and know where it came from — to see that.
This is difficult advice when it comes to deficit reduction, but don’t look at the number. This plan cuts $4 trillion, that plan cuts $2 trillion, that one cuts $10 trillion. Those numbers reflect little but the internal hopes and dreams of the plan. If I say that my plan means Medicare will never spend another penny and economic growth will shoot to 8 percent — and that’s only a shade less optimistic than the assumptions and models included in the Ryan budget (pdf) — I can save an almost unlimited amount of money. My number can be anything I want it to be. The problem is I actually can’t save that much money because my math is based on fantasy. So my number is meaningless.
President Obama says his plan cuts $4 trillion over 12 years. Rep. Paul Ryan says his plan cuts $4 trillion over 10 years. If you look at the numbers, the two plans appear quite similar. But if you look at how they’d get to the number, they couldn’t be more different. And it’s how you get to the number that matters, because that’s what decides whether you’ll get to the number. It’s also, incidentally, what decides the shape of our government going forward.
Ryan’s number is the product of holding the growth of Medicare and Medicaid to the rate of inflation, which is far lower than has ever been shown to be possible. How he gets there is, on Medicaid, he tells the states to figure it out, and on Medicare, he tells seniors to figure it out. Both strategies have been tried: Various states have gotten waivers to radically remake their Medicaid program, and the consumer-driven model that Ryan is proposing for Medicare has been attempted in the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program and Medicare Advantage. None of these programs have worked, which is why we’re in our current predicament.
Obama’s number is the product of holding Medicare growth to GDP+0.5 percent — which is, in practice, a few percentage points beyond inflation, and a few percentage points behind the health-care system’s normal rate of growth. He mostly gets there through the cost controls passed as part of the Affordable Care Act, which hope to hold Medicare to GDP+1 percent. He then proposes to shave a further half-percentage point off the growth rate by introducing value-based insurance — where we pay more for treatments that are proven to work than for treatments that are not proven to work — into Medicare and giving generic drugs quicker entry into the marketplace. These programs have worked at smaller scales and in more limited pilots. We don’t know if they’ll work across the entire Medicare system, but we have reason to think they will.
Then there are taxes. Ryan’s plan pledges to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, at a cost of at least $4 trillion over 10 years, and more after that. He’d then clean out the tax code, but he’d pump the money he made from closing expenditures back into tax cuts. Obama proposes to return to the Clinton-era tax rates on income over $250,000 and then raise a further trillion through closing tax expenditures. Altogether, that’s about $2 trillion less than letting all the Bush tax cuts expire, but at least $2 trillion more than Ryan’s plan. Notably, Obama hasn’t said which expenditures he’d close to get to $1 trillion. The difference between the two tax plans — particularly when added to Obama’s decision to cut $400 billion from security-related spending, while Ryan largely exempts that category — explains why Obama doesn’t have to make such deep cuts in programs for seniors and low-income Americans.
So are we finally getting the grand philosophical debate we wanted? Not quite. Obama spoke extensively of vision — the GOP’s, which “claims to reduce the deficit by spending a trillion dollars on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires … {while} asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it and don’t have any clout on Capitol Hill,” and his, “where we live within our means while still investing in our future; where everyone makes sacrifices but no one bears all the burden; where we provide a basic measure of security for our citizens and rising opportunity for our children,” but he’s overselling it.
Obama’s budget is not philosophy. It is very similar to the Simpson-Bowles report, which attracted the votes of Republicans as far to the right as Tom Coburn. Few Democrats would say their vision of balancing the budget is one in which there was only one dollar of new taxes for every three dollars of spending cuts, but that’s what Obama’s proposal envisions. Obama’s budget, somewhat curiously, is what you’d expect at the end of a negotiation process, not the beginning. In fact, as it’s modeled off of Simpson-Bowles, it is the product of a negotiation process, as opposed to an opening bid. It is, in other words, policy. You could argue that this is a philosophy, and that philosophy is pragmatism, but I think that’s getting too cute. This is the sort of policy that might pass and might work.
Ryan’s budget is purer, but it is also more fantastical. It posits the government it wishes were possible, and the policies it wishes would work. It is an opening bid so ideological that it leaves little room for a process of negotiation. Every dollar it purports to raise comes from cutting spending. Not one comes from taxes. It privatizes Medicare and unwinds the federal government’s role in Medicaid. For all the philosophy in his budget — and his budget does have a very different philosophy about the proper role of government than we see in federal pllicy today — there’s neither policy that could pass nor policy that could work. And, curiously for a conservative who distrusts both government and congress, it has no answer to the question of “what if this fails?”
The policy that clarifies this difference is the “trigger.” Obama’s budget, aware that it might not pass and, if it does pass, it might not work, proposes to make automatic cuts to discretionary spending and tax expenditures if the promised savings don’t materialize. If Ryan’s budget falls shorts, there’s no comparable failsafe. That is to say, Obama’s budget has two plausible ways to get to its number, while Ryan’s budget has none. You don’t need a PhD in philosophy to understand why that’s a problem.
By: Ezra Klein, The Washington Post, April 13, 2011
No More Fence Straddling: Even Moderates Should Condemn Paul Ryan’s Budget
Political moderates and on-the-fencers have had it easy up to now on budget issues. They could condemn “both sides” and insist on the need for “courage” in tackling the deficit.
Thanks to Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget and the Republicans’ maximalist stance in negotiations to avert a government shutdown, the days of straddling are over.
Ryan’s truly outrageous proposal, built on heaping sacrifice onto the poor, slashing scholarship aid to college students and bestowing benefits on the rich, ought to force middle-of-the-roaders to take sides. No one who is even remotely moderate can possibly support what Ryan has in mind.
And please, let’s dispense with the idea that Ryan is courageous in offering his design. There is nothing courageous about asking for give-backs from the least advantaged and least powerful in our society. It takes no guts to demand a lot from groups that have little to give and tend to vote against your party anyway.
And there is nothing daring about a conservative Republican delivering yet more benefits to the wealthiest people in our society, the sort who privately finance the big ad campaigns to elect conservatives to Congress.
Ryan gives the game away by including the repeal of financial reform in his “budget” plan. What does this have to do with fiscal balance? Welcome to the Wall Street Protection Act of 2011.
Oh, yes, and this budget has nothing to do with deficit reduction. Ryan would hack away at expenditures for the poor. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates he gets about two-thirds of his $4.3 trillion in actual cuts from programs for low- income Americans. Note that this $4.3 trillion almost exactly matches the $4.2 trillion he proposes in tax cuts over a decade. Welcome to the Bah Humbug Act of 2011.
But you’d expect a progressive to feel this way. What’s striking is that Ryan is pushing moderates to stand up for a government that will have enough money to perform the functions now seen as basic in the 21st century. These notably include helping those who can’t afford health insurance to get decent medical care, a goal Ryan would have the government abandon, slowly but surely.
Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, the co-chairs of the deficit commission and the heroes of the budget-cutting center, put out a statement saying some nice things about the idea of the Ryan budget. They called it “serious, honest, straightforward,” even though there is much about its accounting that is none of those.
But then they got to the real point, declaring themselves “concerned that it falls short of the balanced, comprehensive approach” needed for bipartisan accord because it “largely exempts defense spending from reductions and would not apply any of the savings from eliminating or reducing tax expenditures as part of tax reform to deficit reduction.”
Ryan, they argued, “relies on much larger reductions in domestic discretionary spending than does the commission proposal, while also calling for savings in some safety-net programs — cuts which would place a disproportionately adverse effect on certain disadvantaged populations.”
This is much like what I said, with an added layer of diplomacy. When even deficit hawks begin choking, however politely, on a proposal whose main motivation is ideological, you know there is an opening for a coalition between moderates and progressives on behalf of sane, decent government.
The Republican approach to shutdown talks should reinforce this possibility. Democrats have nearly given away the store to avoid a crackup, yet Republican leaders, under pressure from their right wing, have continued to ask for more and more and more. My word, even President Obama has finally gotten impatient.
However the shutdown saga ends, the negotiating styles of the two sides ought to tell moderates that they can no longer pretend that the two ends of our politics are equally “extreme.” No, conservatives are the ones who’ve been radicalized. The Ryan budget is definitive evidence of this.
It is conservatives who would transform our government from a very modestly compassionate instrument into a machine dedicated to expanding existing privileges while doing as little as possible for the marginalized and the aspiring — those who, with a little help from government, might find it a bit easier to reach for better lives.
Moderation involves a balance between government and the private sector, between risk and security, between our respect for incentives and our desire for greater fairness. The war against moderation has begun. Will moderates join the battle?
By: E. J. Dionne, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, April 6, 2011
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