“Go Ahead, Make That Statement”: Why Obama Would Love To Run Against Paul Ryan
Sorry, conservatives: Having the Wisconsonite on the ticket would make it easier for the president to portray Romney as a heartless plutocrat.
As Beltway anticipation builds for Mitt Romney’s vice presidential announcement, conservative pundits have re-upped their calls for a “bold” and adventurous choice. This morning, the Wall Street Journal editorial page took the lead with a plea to add House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan to the ticket.
The Journal acknowledges the appeal of VP frontrunners Tim Pawlenty and Rob Portman—working-class roots and high-level experience, respectively—but says that Ryan is the only politician with the gravitas and vision to campaign on a presidential level. Here’s the op-ed:
Too risky, goes the Beltway chorus. His selection would make Medicare and the House budget the issue, not the economy. The 42-year-old is too young, too wonky, too, you know, serious. Beneath it all you can hear the murmurs of the ultimate Washington insult—that Mr. Ryan is too dangerous because he thinks politics is about things that matter. That dude really believes in something, and we certainly can’t have that. […]
The case for Mr. Ryan is that he best exemplifies the nature and stakes of this election. More than any other politician, the House Budget Chairman has defined those stakes well as a generational choice about the role of government and whether America will once again become a growth economy or sink into interest-group dominated decline.
The Journal’s broader argument is that Romney can’t win if this election is fought over “small issues,” like Bain Capital or his taxes. The only way he can prevail, they argue, is if he turns this into a fight over big ideas. Placing Ryan on the ticket would go a long way to making that a reality—he is the architect of the Republican Party’s policy platform.
It’s hard to escape the impression that conservatives view Ryan as a consolation prize for the fact that their best chance for rolling back the welfare state resides in the former Massachusetts governor who gave Democrats the bluebrint for Obamacare. But Ryan would be a terrible choice, and if you aren’t ensconsed in the conservative movement, it’s easy to see why: Ryan’s plan—low taxes on the rich and higher defense spending, funded by sharp cuts to Medicaid, Medicare and most social programs—is wildly unpopular with the public.
Last year, the Washington Post and ABC News surveyed Americans on key elements of the Ryan plan. Would you support reforming Medicare such that beneficiaries “receive a check or voucher from the government each year for a fixed amount they can use to shop for their own private health insurance policy?” Sixty-five percent of respondents said they would oppose such a plan. If told that the cost of private insurance would eventually outpace the value of the voucher—projected under Ryan’s proposal—opposition rises to 80 percent.
The same goes for new tax cuts. By two-to-one (44 percent to 22 percent), according to the Pew Research Center, Americans say that cutting taxes for the rich would harm the economy. The same percentage says that raising taxes on the rich would make the tax system more fair than it currently is.
Both realities have already caused problems for Romney. He does as much as possible to obscure his support for the Ryan plan from the public, but most Americans identify him as someone who would help the rich over ordinary people. Putting Ryan on the ticket would exacerbate that problem, and give Obama a huge boost as he begins the second phase of his attacks on Romney.
Remember, the focus on Bain Capital—and Romney’s tax returns—are a means to a end: showing Romney as a heartless plutocrat who will use the presidency to enrich the wealthy at the expense of everyone else. That image will allow Obama to pin the Ryan plan on Romney, and to (accurately) present him as the avatar for selfish reactionaries.
Without Ryan on the ticket, this is a little difficult: The Ryan/Romney plan is an astoundingly right-wing proposal for the future of the country, so much so that voters refuse to believe that any politican would endorse it, much less make it the centerpiece of his presidential campaign. This was somewhat alleivated by the Tax Policy Center analysis—which shows the degree to which Romney would have to raise taxes on middle-class Americans to pay for his upper-income tax cuts—but would be simple to accomplish if Paul Ryan himself were the vice presidential nominee.
Already, with ads like the recent one from Priorities USA, Democrats are painting a picture of America under the Ryan/Romney plan: less mobility for most Americans, less security for middle-class families, and an explosion of income inequality. A Romney/Ryan campaign would allow Democrats to turn those attacks to eleven, and hammer the extent to which Republicans intend to transform government’s role in shaping our society.
Putting Paul Ryan on the ticket is the election-year equivalent of the Republican strategy on health care reform—high stakes, high reward. If the health-care strategy had worked, categorical opposition to reform would have blocked the law and destroyed Obama’s presidency. But it didn’t, and Democrats passed a health care bill that was more compehensive—and more liberal—than it would have been with Republican support.
A Romney/Ryan ticket could conceivably win, of course, and Republicans could then claim an ideological mandate for sweeping changes to the social contract. In all likelihood, though, Ryan’s vulnerabilities would weigh down the ticket and keep Romney from winning a critical number of undecided voters. By satisfying conservative cries for “substance,” Romney would all but condemn the GOP to four more years of an Obama presidency, allowing Democrats to entrench the major changes of the last three-and-a-half years (namely the Affordable Care Act) and gain a long-term upper hand.
Yes, it’s unsatisfying for ideologues, but for this election Republicans might want to stick to the small stuff, rather than risk it on a “statement.”
By: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, August, 9, 2012
“Romney’s Incredible Extremes”: Mitt Romney’s Tax And Spending Plans Are Irresponsible And Cruel
Mitt Romney’s tax and spending plans are so irresponsible, so cruel, so extreme that they are literally incredible. Voters may find it hard to believe anyone would support such things, so they are likely to discount even factual descriptions as partisan distortion.
The pro-Obama New Priorities PAC stumbled across this phenomena early in 2012 in its focus group testing. When they informed a focus group that Romney supported the budget plan by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), and thus championed ending Medicare as we know it while also championing tax cuts for the wealthy, focus group participants simply didn’t believe it. No politician could be so clueless.
Incredulity may complement what New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd dubbed Romney’s strategy of “hiding in plain sight.” Romney refuses to release his tax returns, scrubbed the records and e-mails of his time as governor and as head of the Olympics, keeps secret details of his Bain dealings and covers up the names of his bundlers. And then, he’s able to announce extremely cruel policy positions with impunity, because the voters just can’t believe that’s what he is for.
This is what comes to mind with the publication of a study on the effects of the Romney tax policy by the non-partisan Tax Policy Center and the Brookings Institution.
The study took its assumptions from Romney’s tax agenda on his Web page — where he promises to cut tax rates by 20 percent, sustain all the Bush tax breaks, keep the reduced rate for capital gains, eliminate the Alternative Minimum Tax, eliminate capital gains taxes on married families earning less than $200,000 (or as Gingrich noted, on those that don’t have any capital gains) and eliminate the estate tax (a small boon to his strapping sons).
Romney then promises to make these cuts without losing revenue by eliminating tax loopholes. Only he refuses to identify which tax breaks or loopholes he would eliminate.
Under the best (and most improbable) of circumstances — that the Congress decided to completely eliminate tax expenditures for those making over $200,000 before reducing any of the benefits to those making under that amount — the study found that Romney’s tax plan would transfer a staggering $86 billion in tax burden from those making over $200,000 to those making under that amount. Millionaires would pocket an average tax cut of $87,000 while everyone else would suffer a tax hike of $500 a year.
That’s because to make up for the lost income, Congress would have to cut the mortgage deduction, the deduction for gifts to charity, the deduction for employer based health care, the Earned Income Tax Credit and child tax credit that goes to middle- and lower-income earners. But simply eliminating these and other tax breaks for the rich doesn’t generate enough revenue. So the people who really take it in the teeth are middle-income earners — small business people, middle management and professionals. It is, the study concluded, “not mathematically possible” to lower tax rates as Romney proposes without giving the rich a tax break and working and middle-income people a tax hike.
But will people believe that Romney really is for that — more tax breaks for the rich paid for by tax hikes on working families? Most of course will never learn about the Romney tax plan. But even those that do, could they ever accept the incredible truth?
Last month, the Democracy Corps, led by Stan Greenberg and James Carville, released a survey arguing that Obama and Democrats benefit greatly when the election is framed as a choice on the Republicans’ Ryan plan, the extreme budget passed by the House of Representatives, that exacts deep cuts in education, programs for poor children and turns Medicare into a voucher that pushes more and more costs on seniors.
In their survey, Obama’s margin over Romney “more than doubles” when the election is framed on the two candidates’ position on the Ryan budget. That of course, assumes that the election can be so framed, and that the voters will accept the assumption. But as the Priorities crowd discovered, voters have a hard time believing any politician could be supporting 20 percent cuts in education, an elimination of the refundable tax credit for children or dramatically changing Medicare. That is simply too extreme to be believed.
Ironically, of course, if Romney is elected and Republicans keep the House, the tea party right will claim a mandate. As Grover Norquist says, the House will drive the agenda and Romney will sign anything that emerges from the Senate. And sadly, given that the millionaires on the Democratic side of the Senate aisle aren’t nearly as united as those on the Republican side — and many are dependent on funding from some of the same special interests that now dominate Washington — we’re likely to see less Senate obstruction and more “bipartisan cooperation” on an agenda that Americans consider literally incredible.
The only hope is that voters take another look before they decide to vote for a change. In the case of Romney, the Republican really does support a budget plan that would scrap Medicare and give tax breaks to millionaires. He really is planning to eliminate Wall Street safeguards and take away health-care benefits from millions. He really believes the country will be better off if more teachers and police officers are laid off and foreclosures continue unabated.He really does want to deregulate Wall Street again, and gut the protections the EPA provides for clean air and clean water, to say nothing of global warming, the existence of which he now denies.
This isn’t a liberal caricature based on election-year demagoguery; this is Mitt Romney’s policy agenda. That is truly incredible — incredibly true.
By: Katrina vanden Heuvel, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 7, 2012
“Benjamin Franklin Would Gag Today”: If Congress Can’t Fix The Postal Service, It Can’t Fix Anything
Most Americans know that the U.S. Postal Service is a mess. What they also ought to know is that Congress is largely responsible for this once-competent institution’s bad rap.
This is the same Congress that is going to have to bring Medicare back from the brink of insolvency, find a way to fund Social Security as it becomes top-heavy with retired baby boomers, and pay down trillions in federal debt without short-circuiting the whole economy. Compared with all that, fixing the Postal Service is easy. Yet Congress dithers, cultivates decline and allows festering problems to become worse.
The Postal Service has been making headlines again because it just defaulted on a $5.5 billion payment due to the U.S. Treasury to fund healthcare costs for future retirees. Another such default is likely at the end of September. The details are technical and boring, and for now, the mail will still show up in the mailbox. So the members of Congress perpetrating the default—mostly House Republicans—act like it’s no big deal.
But it is a big deal because the recalcitrance of political leaders shows an alarming willingness to dismantle the basic machinery of the economy. The Postal Service isn’t some dispensable outpost doing research on cow pies or freshmen mating habits. It’s an elemental part of the government that has been around since before the Constitution. Benjamin Franklin, the seminal American, was the first Postmaster General. He’d gag at today’s handling of the Postal Service.
Here’s the basic background: In 1971, Congress reorganized the USPS as an independent agency that’s supposed to pay for its operations through stamp sales and other forms of revenue, like a normal company. But the catch is that Congress still holds sway over strategic decisions, and most Postal Service employees are treated as members of the federal workforce. So at best, the Postal Service is a hybrid organization that’s as vulnerable as ever to political meddling.
That’s what is holding up reform plans now. The Postal Service itself has detailed a plan to eliminate Saturday delivery, consolidate processing centers, close underperforming post offices and make other cuts to adapt to a technology-driven economy that is obviously less dependent on physical mail delivery than in the past. Hundreds of regular companies have changed their business models and made similar adjustments to survive. Those that didn’t—Eastman Kodak, Borders, Lehman Brothers—paid a brutal price.
The Senate has even passed a bill that would fix some of the Postal Service’s problems and buy time to sort out others. That brings us to the House, where sensible legislation goes to die. There is a House bill meant to fix the Postal Service, but House leaders won’t bring it up for a vote. Nor will they vote on the Senate bill. House leaders like Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor won’t say why, exactly.
Most likely, there’s not enough support in the House to pass any bill, so holding a vote would be an embarrassing setback for the GOP leadership. Opposition to reform seems to come from some usual suspects, such as rural lawmakers who don’t want postal facilities in their districts closed. Others (including Republicans) object to provisions that would allow the Postal Service more freedom to lay off unionized postal workers. Then there are Tea Party types who would prefer to privatize the agency, or who seemingly want to starve it of cash, so that … well, it’s not clear what purpose that would serve. What makes this standoff infuriating is that there are plenty of proposed solutions, including studies by at least three well-known consulting firms that execute corporate turnarounds for a living. There’s no need for further analysis, there’s only a need to make a decision and do something.
But the problem can be put off for a little longer, even if that makes the ultimate solution more expensive and encourages big mailers like Amazon and other retailers to look for other delivery choices. So Congress does less than the bare minimum and the Postal Service drifts toward ruination. Maybe the House will get to it in the fall, after their customary six-week August vacation. Maybe next spring. Maybe never, in order to show those impudent postal employees and their arrogant customers who’s really in charge around here.
Meanwhile, at the end of this year, Congress needs to come up with a deft way to forestall billions in tax hikes and spending cuts that will induce another recession if allowed to fully go into effect. By early next year, it will have to come up with a way to extend the government’s borrowing limit while also weaning Washington off its desperate borrowing habit. Then come some huge decisions about how to reform Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and the long-term defense budget. If the handling of the Postal Service is any indication, we all ought to be terrified.
By: Rick Newman, U. S. News and World Report, August 1, 2012
“Romney’s Cliff Notes Version Of The Ryan Plan”: Your Guide To “Ending Medicare As We Know It”
It’ll be the next argument in the campaign, so it’s a good time to brush up.
Yesterday, President Obama went to Florida and told seniors that Mitt Romney wants to end Medicare as we know it, and it appears that this argument (and some related ones) will be a central feature of the Obama campaign’s message in the coming days. It’s entirely possible, as Jonathan Chait has suggested, that all the Obama campaign’s attacks on Romney’s finances and record at Bain Capital are the first stage of a two-stage strategy that culminates with an attack on the Ryan budget. Since we’ll be talking about this a lot soon, I thought it might be worthwhile to refresh our memories on what this is all about, particularly with regard to Medicare, and how it relates to the current campaign.
First: Is it fair to tar Mitt Romney with the Ryan plan? No question. While Romney’s own policy proposals are quite a bit more vague than the Ryan plan is, they follow the same contours, and when Romney is asked about the Ryan plan he never hesitates to praise it. When asked about it last month, Romney’s chief strategist Eric Fehrstrom said of his boss, “He’s for the Ryan plan.” Or in Romney’s own words, “I’m very supportive of the Ryan budget plan. It’s a bold and exciting effort on his part and on the part of the Republicans and it’s very much consistent with what I put out earlier.” Enough said.
Next: Does the Ryan plan actually “end Medicare as we know it”? This is the phrase that Democrats have used in the past to describe it, and that Obama will continue to use. Republicans claim the phrase is unfair and demagogic. But while it would be inaccurate to simply say the Ryan plan “ends Medicare,” because if the plan were enacted there would still be a program going by the name of “Medicare,” it is fair to say that Medicare would be a drastically different program, and some of the critical things that make it so successful would no longer exist.
Today’s Medicare is an insurance program. If you’re a senior, you go to your doctor, and your doctor gets paid by Medicare. It is a single-payer program that covers every senior, and though it doesn’t pay for every conceivable procedure, because of Medicare’s universality there are essentially no uninsured seniors in America, no seniors who are subject to the tender mercies of the notoriously unmerciful insurance companies, no seniors who need to worry about their pre-existing conditions or their lifetime limits or any of the other ways those companies find to screw their customers, and almost no seniors who find it impossible to pay their insurance premiums (seniors do contribute premiums to Medicare, but they are quite modest).
The Ryan plan in its initial incarnation eliminated Medicare as an insurance program, and replaced it with “premium support.” There’s an argument about whether premium support can be described accurately as a “voucher,” but that’s nothing more than a silly disagreement about semantics; premium support in practice is no different from any voucher. Under this plan, seniors would have to get their insurance from private companies, and the government would pay part of the cost. If those private premiums go up, then seniors will have to pay more out of their own pockets; indeed, this is a feature, not a bug, of the Ryan plan. The whole point is to limit government spending on Medicare by limiting how much seniors get in their vouchers/premium support.
And those limits could be vicious. The Ryan plan caps the growth of Medicare at GDP growth plus 0.5 percent. If health costs rise faster than that, seniors will have to pick up more and more of the tab. That means that if the Ryan plan were enacted, there would likely be many seniors who couldn’t afford private premiums and would have no health coverage. This feature of the plan eliminates one of the fundamental pillars of Medicare: that it is an entitlement, meaning that if you qualify, you’re entitled to the benefit. If this year’s costs are higher than we’d like, we can make changes to the program for next year, but nobody goes without coverage. Under the Ryan plan, that would no longer be true.
But here’s an important thing to keep in mind: After Ryan released the first version of his plan in 2011 and caught a whole bunch of flak for basically destroying Medicare, he came back with a revised plan earlier this year that has one critical difference: it allows seniors, if they so choose, to stay on traditional Medicare. Mitt Romney’s Medicare plan does the same thing (Romney’s plan, such as it is, is basically a Cliff Notes version of the Ryan plan). In other words, under political pressure they embraced a public option. But since the plan still caps overall spending at GDP+.05, seniors would likely have to pay more and more out of their own pockets, likely thousands of dollars.
At this point, it’s good to remind ourselves that Medicare does a far better job of controlling costs than private insurance does, partly because of the negotiating power it has and partly because it spends just a fraction of what private companies do on overhead (around 98 percent of Medicare’s costs go to paying for care, while private companies often spend 20 percent or more of their costs on administration, marketing, underwriting, and so on). Yet Republican philosophy tells us that no matter what the facts say, this is just impossible. A government program can’t possibly be cheaper and more efficient (and deliver service that its customers love, by the way) than a private sector alternative. So if we introduce private competition, then costs will of course come down.
But there isn’t much reason to believe they will, which means seniors will be left holding the bag, and most importantly, lose the security they have now. Anyhow, to return to the question we started with: Is it fair for the Obama campaign to charge that Mitt Romney wants to end Medicare as we know it? If you define “Medicare as we know it” as an insurance program that provides affordable, efficient, and most importantly secure health coverage for every American senior, then the answer is clearly yes.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 20, 2012
“A Deal Too Good To Pass”: Why It’s Still In States’ Interests To Expand Medicaid
For supporters of the Affordable Care Act, it was hard to hear—over the cheering—anything besides the fact that the Supreme Court today kept the law almost entirely intact. But the Court did make a slight change to a crucial part of the ACA: Medicaid expansion. Under the law, by 2014, states are supposed to extend their Medicaid programs to cover people under 65 with incomes up to 133 percent of the federal poverty line. An analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows that means 17 million more people would have access to health care over the next 10 years. Before today, it looked like states didn’t have much choice in the matter. If they didn’t make the necessary expansion, they would lose all federal Medicaid dollars. In their brief, states argued that wasn’t much of a choice—federal Medicaid grants simply constitute too much money to lose. Back in February, Timothy Jost had a very helpful explanation of the states’ argument on this point in Health Affairs. As he wrote:
A state that refuses to expand its Medicaid program will under the ACA lose all Medicaid funding. Medicaid is the single largest source of federal funding to the states, accounting for 40 percent of all federal money dispersed to the states. States do not really have a choice to walk away from federal Medicaid funding, they argue. The states do not, therefore, really have a choice to refuse to participate in the Medicaid expansions. This coercion, the states contend, is unconstitutional.
According to SCOTUS Blog, the Supreme Court basically agreed: The feds can’t cut all Medicaid funding for states that refuse to expand. Now, states that choose not to extend benefits will forgo the money they would have received for doing so—but they won’t lose the money they’re already getting for current Medicaid services. But while states can now avoid the extension more easily, there’s still no practical reason to go down that path. “It’s still an incredibly good deal for the states,” says Edwin Park, vice president for health policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Already the federal government pays, on average, 57 percent of Medicaid costs. But the ACA gives states much higher levels of funding when it comes to extending benefits. As a CBPP report in March noted, the feds will pay a whopping 93 percent of the costs of expansion over the next nine years:
Specifically, the federal government will assume 100 percent of the Medicaid costs of covering newly eligible individuals for the first three years that the expansion is in effect (2014-2016). Federal support will then phase down slightly over the following several years, and by 2020 (and for all subsequent years), the federal government will pay 90 percent of the costs of covering these individuals. According to CBO, between 2014 and 2022, the federal government will pay $931 billion of the cost of the Medicaid expansion, while states will pay roughly $73 billion, or 7 percent.
That means, all in all, states will only see a 2.8 percent increase in what they would have spent on Medicaid if there was no health-care bill. The expansion is also in the interests of health-care providers. The ACA was meant to vastly decrease the amount of health care hospitals have to provide with little or no compensation. It was for that reason, Park says, that providers agreed to reductions in Medicaid and Medicare rates. But without the Medicaid expansion, working adults who are too poor to afford health care but not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid could still be left without coverage in some states. “Now there’s going to be a donut hole in the middle if the state doesn’t proceed,” says Park. That’s bad business for hospitals. There’s another factor that states will have to consider: the savings they will realize as populations begin to get healthier. According to the CBPP report, there will be 33 million fewer uninsured people by 2022. Uninsured people are expensive; they often rely on expensive emergency-room care, rather than getting preventative and early treatment which is ultimately cheaper and more effective. The Urban Institute reports that in 2008, $10.6 billion in state and local dollars went toward hospital care for the uninsured—20 percent of the total costs. The percentage is even higher when it comes to mental-health services. With the expansion, those costs will likely go down dramatically. States may have the option now to forgo the Medicaid expansion. But the results won’t be pretty.
By: Abby Rapoport, The American Prospect, June 28, 2012
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