By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 7, 2012
“The Real Referendum”: The Legacy Of The New Deal, The Great Society And Obamacare
Republicans came into this campaign believing that it would be a referendum on President Obama, and that still-high unemployment would hand them victory on a silver platter. But given the usual caveats — a month can be a long time in politics, it’s not over until the votes are actually counted, and so on — it doesn’t seem to be turning out that way.
Yet there is a sense in which the election is indeed a referendum, but of a different kind. Voters are, in effect, being asked to deliver a verdict on the legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society, on Social Security, Medicare and, yes, Obamacare, which represents an extension of that legacy. Will they vote for politicians who want to replace Medicare with Vouchercare, who denounce Social Security as “collectivist” (as Paul Ryan once did), who dismiss those who turn to social insurance programs as people unwilling to take responsibility for their lives?
If the polls are any indication, the result of that referendum will be a clear reassertion of support for the safety net, and a clear rejection of politicians who want to return us to the Gilded Age. But here’s the question: Will that election result be honored?
I ask that question because we already know what Mr. Obama will face if re-elected: a clamor from Beltway insiders demanding that he immediately return to his failed political strategy of 2011, in which he made a Grand Bargain over the budget deficit his overriding priority. Now is the time, he’ll be told, to fix America’s entitlement problem once and for all. There will be calls — as there were at the time of the Democratic National Convention — for him to officially endorse Simpson-Bowles, the budget proposal issued by the co-chairmen of his deficit commission (although never accepted by the commission as a whole).
And Mr. Obama should just say no, for three reasons.
First, despite years of dire warnings from people like, well, Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, we are not facing any kind of fiscal crisis. Indeed, U.S. borrowing costs are at historic lows, with investors actually willing to pay the government for the privilege of owning inflation-protected bonds. So reducing the budget deficit just isn’t the top priority for America at the moment; creating jobs is. For now, the administration’s political capital should be devoted to passing something like last year’s American Jobs Act and providing effective mortgage debt relief.
Second, contrary to Beltway conventional wisdom, America does not have an “entitlements problem.” Mainly, it has a health cost problem, private as well as public, which must be addressed (and which the Affordable Care Act at least starts to address). It’s true that there’s also, even aside from health care, a gap between the services we’re promising and the taxes we’re collecting — but to call that gap an “entitlements” issue is already to accept the very right-wing frame that voters appear to be in the process of rejecting.
Finally, despite the bizarre reverence it inspires in Beltway insiders — the same people, by the way, who assured us that Paul Ryan was a brave truth-teller — the fact is that Simpson-Bowles is a really bad plan, one that would undermine some key pieces of our safety net. And if a re-elected president were to endorse it, he would be betraying the trust of the voters who returned him to office.
Consider, in particular, the proposal to raise the Social Security retirement age, supposedly to reflect rising life expectancy. This is an idea Washington loves — but it’s also totally at odds with the reality of an America in which rising inequality is reflected not just in the quality of life but in its duration. For while average life expectancy has indeed risen, that increase is confined to the relatively well-off and well-educated — the very people who need Social Security least. Meanwhile, life expectancy is actually falling for a substantial part of the nation.
Now, there’s no mystery about why Simpson-Bowles looks the way it does. It was put together in a political environment in which progressives, and even supporters of the safety net as we know it, were very much on the defensive — an environment in which conservatives were presumed to be in the ascendant, and in which bipartisanship was effectively defined as the effort to broker deals between the center-right and the hard right.
Barring an upset, however, that environment will come to an end on Nov. 6. This election is, as I said, shaping up as a referendum on our social insurance system, and it looks as if Mr. Obama will emerge with a clear mandate for preserving and extending that system. It would be a terrible mistake, both politically and for the nation’s future, for him to let himself be talked into snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, October 1, 2012
“The Red Flags Are Flying”: Senate Candidate Tommie Thompson Wants To “Do Away With Medicare And Medicaid”
Paul Ryan admits that he’s an “end Medicare as we know it” candidate.
But, somehow, we are not supposed to think that he would actually end the popular and successful healthcare program for the elderly, as well as related Medicaid programs for the poor and people with disabilities.
The “as we know it” part provides a sort of cover, at least in the eyes of a media that is more inclined toward stenography than journalism.
Never mind that Ryan, a rabid reader of government-can-do-no-good fanatic Ayn Rand, goes positively wide-eyed when he starts talking about how desperately he wants to downsize government—and shift control of healthcare and retirement programs to the insurance and Wall Street interests that so generously fund his campaigns. We’re not supposed to talk about the long-term crony-capitalist scheme of certain Republicans to do away with government programs that work so that private sector profiteers can come in and create programs that don’t work—except for private sector profiteers.
Never mind that the Republican nominee for vice president has a long history of decrying Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in Randian terms such as “collectivist” and “socialistic.”
Never mind that Ryan has griped that “Social Security right now is a collectivist system. It’s a welfare transfer system.”
Never mind that, as recently as 2010, Ryan dismissed Medicare and Medicaid as part of a “socialist based system” that needs to be replaced.
The red flags are not supposed to go up until someone actually says they want to, you know, “do away with Medicaid and Medicare.”
Never mind that, even now, Ryan complains about how America is being overwhelmed by “takers” (citizens who claim benefits to which they are entitled) and the “welfare state” (Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid).
Only when a candidate starts talking about ending entitlement programs—as in “doing away” with them—can we be serious about the immediate threat those programs actually face.
Meet Tommy Thompson, former Republican governor of Wisconsin, former Bush-Cheney administration secretary of health and human services, former candidate for the Republican nomination for president and mentor to Paul Ryan.
Speaking to a Tea Party group while campaigning for Wisconsin’s open US Senate seat, Thompson recounted how he “reformed” welfare in Wisconsin.
Back in the 1990s, Thompson said he wanted to “end welfare as we know it.” In fact, he replaced the program with a classic combination of high-government spending, lots of patronage appointments and rising poverty.
Now, Thompson has dropped the “end welfare as we know it” pretense. He brags that he finished off “one of the entitlement program.”
And he’s gunning for a couple of other entitlement programs.
Which ones?
You guessed it: Medicaid and Medicare.
Declaring that he wants to “change Medicare and Medicaid like I did welfare,” Thompson asked a May gathering of the Lake Country Area Defenders Of Liberty in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin: “Who better to and who better than me, who’s already finished one of the entitlement programs, to come up with programs to do away with Medicaid and Medicare?”
The video has only now surfaced and its a blockbuster—especially in the aftermath of the release last week of a similar video that saw Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney dismissing 47 percent of Americans as a “dependent” class unworthy of Republican consideration.
Just to repeat: a top Republican Senate candidate has been caught on video talking about how he would “DO AWAY WITH MEDICAID, AND MEDICARE.”
Just to repeat: “DO AWAY WITH MEDICAID, AND MEDICARE.”
It should be understood that Thompson is no fringe-dwelling Todd Akin. As the longtime Republican governor of a swing state, he’s worked with every GOP president since Ronald Reagan, and he oversaw social programs for the Bush-Cheney administration. This year, he’s one of his party’s premier recruits in the fight to retake the Senate. Indeed, the race between Thompson and Democratic Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin could decide which party controls the chamber.
Thompson is, as well, closely aligned with Paul Ryan. The Senate candidate’s ties to Ryan’s politically connected family go back to when the Republican vice presidential nominee was a child. Thompson has been a Ryan booster from the very beginning of the younger Wisconsinite’s career in electoral politics—when Thompson was the powerful governor of the state and Ryan was organizing his first Congressional bid.
When Thompson joined the Bush-Cheney Cabinet, he and Ryan kept regular company in Washington. They look forward to working together when Thompson becomes the point man on entitlement debates in a Republican-controlled Senate and Ryan is the Romney White House’s chief liaison to Capitol Hill.
The voters will have something to say about that, however.
If they want to preserve Medicaid and Medicare, they will remember that, while Ryan may add the “as we know it” spin, Thompson gets to the heart of the matter when he says it is the intention of these “reformers” to “do away with Medicaid and Medicare.”
By: John Nichols, The Nation, September 24, 2012
“Eddie Haskell Maintains His Mask”: Paul Ryan’s Presence On The Romney Ticket Has Become An Actual Irritant
The day Mitt Romney put Paul Ryan on the ticket, my immediate reaction was to speculate that this was a definite effort to get conservative activists off Mitt’s back and liberate him to run whatever kind of campaign he wanted: “Here you go! Now STFU!”
If that was the idea, the memo didn’t seem to get around, because Ryan’s presence on the ticket has become an actual irritant to many of the Wisconsin’s fans who are increasingly agitated that this isn’t the Randian anti-entitlement firebrand they know and love. WaPo’s Felicia Sonmez and David A. Fahrenthold have the low-down:
Conservatives had hoped that Mitt Romney’s choice of House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (Wis.) as his running mate would make Romney act more like Ryan — bold, specific, confident.
Instead, in the six weeks since Ryan became the GOP vice presidential nominee — and particularly in the three weeks since the Republican National Convention in Tampa — there has been mounting concern among Republicans that the pick has made Ryan look more like Romney — vague, cautious and limited to pre-set talking points….
“I was wrong. When Paul Ryan was picked, I really thought this meant that the Romney campaign was shifting gears and was going to have a debate about big issues,” said Michael Tanner, an expert on health care and the budget at the libertarian Cato Institute.
He said that Romney’s campaign had previously cast the race as a referendum on Obama instead of as a choice between two clear visions. That hasn’t changed, Tanner said.
“Why do you pick somebody like Paul Ryan if you’re going to run a referendum, Obama’s-done-a-bad-job campaign?” Tanner asked.
That’s the question being raised by all sorts of people on the Right who weren’t informed or didn’t accept that the gift of the vice-presidential nomination was the last gift the Romney campaign intended to give them before November 6.
So the Eddie Haskell persona Ryan’s put on from the moment he was chosen–reassuring old folks he’s not the Social-Security-and-Medicare hater his record would suggest, and is instead actually their very best friend, determined to protect their benefits from mean old Barack Obama–is upsetting those who are fond of the smart-and-snarky Eddie who emerges when Mrs. Cleaver isn’t around. Indeed, Team Mitt is in serious danger of falling between two stools here, picking a vulnerable running mate whose downside can’t be made to go away even as his upside is obscured.
Before it’s over, Tim Pawlenty may look better than ever in the rear-view mirror.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, September 24, 2012
“Hope And Change 2012”: Building On An Existing Narrative With A Forward Vision
The man who ran on hope and change didn’t walk away from them. He redefined them for the long haul.
And a president who has been accused of being a collectivist and a socialist didn’t abandon a vision of shared burdens and purposes. He replied forcefully with a call for a renewal of citizenship, “the idea that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another, and to future generations.”
“We, the people, recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights,” he declared, “that our destinies are bound together; that a freedom that only asks what’s in it for me, a freedom without commitment to others, a freedom without love or charity or duty or patriotism, is unworthy of our founding ideals, and those who died in their defense.
Rarely has an American election been defined by such a sharp clash of philosophies. When Obama told a fired-up Convention crowd that the contest will involve “the clearest choice of any time in a generation” and “a choice between two fundamentally different visions for the future,” he was not exaggerating. On Wednesday, he took the Republicans’ new radical individualism head on.
Obama’s was a speech aimed less at shaking up the campaign than in building on an existing narrative. The president did not defend his economic record. He left that to Bill Clinton. He did not even promise rapid recovery. On the contrary, he told voters: “I won’t pretend the path I’m offering is quick and easy.”
Indeed, he seemed to reach back to John F. Kennedy’s call on the nation to ask not what the country could do for them, but what they could do for the country. “As citizens,” Obama said, “we understand that America is not about what can be done for us. It’s about what can be done by us, together, through the hard and frustrating work of self-government.”
And thus his redefinition of hope and change. Faced with assertions that he can no longer inspire the elation he called forth four years ago, Obama challenged those who had supported him to stay in the fight for the longer-term and do the work required for saving their original vision.
“If you turn away now — if you buy into the cynicism that the change we fought for isn’t possible…well, change will not happen,” the president said. “If you give up on the idea that your voice can make a difference, then other voices will fill the void: lobbyists and special interests; the people with the $10 million checks who are trying to buy this election and those who are making it harder for you to vote. . . .”
Of course, this is an election, not a philosophical exercise, so Obama was concrete about his differences with Mitt Romney and the Republicans’ vision of a spare government that would ask even less of the already successful. He criticized his foes on Medicare and Social Security, on their refusal to accept any deficit plans that included higher taxes on the wealthy, on education spending and tuition aid.
“Over and over, we have been told by our opponents that bigger tax cuts and fewer regulations are the only way; that since government can’t do everything, it should do almost nothing,” he said. “If you can’t afford health insurance, hope that you don’t get sick. If a company releases toxic pollution into the air your children breathe, well, that’s just the price of progress.”
And he mocked the GOP’s diagnosis of more tax cuts in all economic circumstances: “Feel a cold coming on? Take two tax cuts, roll back some regulations, and call us in the morning!”
In defining his vision for “moving forward,” Obama spoke more of goals than of policies, highlighting an expansion of manufacturing, energy independence, education and job training, and climate change, an issue that has largely been absent from the public discussion since 2010.
Politicians usually run campaigns based on what they will do, or have done, for voters. Obama will certainly do his share of this, and did some of it Thursday.
Yet his heart seems not to lie in transactional politics. He prefers challenges to promises, obligations to privileges, reason to emotion. “The path we offer may be harder,” he said, “but it leads to a better place.” This is not a typical campaign pledge. It implies neither ease nor comfort but burdens worth bearing and responsibilities worth shouldering. It is still a form of hope, but one that requires far more than going to rallies and cheering.
“Ryan’s America”: Here’s How Much It Would Hurt To Be Poor Under Paul Ryan’s Budget
There are many different ways to talk about Paul Ryan’s Roadmap, but maybe the most useful is to imagine how his budget affects your budget.
How much more money would you keep under his broad tax plan? How much more would you have to save to pay for health care?
And for the low-income, whom—as we’ll see—bear the brunt of Ryan’s cuts: How alone would they be in Ryan’s America?
But let’s start with a bit of basic arithmetic.
There are two ways that the government’s budget can affect yours. Clearly, one is taxes. More than 80 percent of government revenues comes from individuals’ wages and income. (The rest comes from corporate taxes and things like excise taxes on gasoline, which also affects our budgets, but less directly.)
Two is spending. Although most of us might think of government as providing public goods like airports and security, $3 out of every $5 Washington spends is basically insurance—a transfer to those who are old, sick, and poor. Social Security writes checks equal to 20% of government outlays. Medicare, Medicaid and CHIP account for another 20%. Safety net programs and benefits for veterans and federal retirees account for another 20%.
So, a full accounting of how Ryan’s budget would affect your budget must consider how much he would cut our taxes and how much he would cut our transfers.
TAXES. Ryan cuts income tax rates and abolishes investment taxes to reduce government revenues by about $450 billion* per year over the next ten years. (That’s after he makes permanent the Bush/Obama tax cuts.)
We don’t know exactly how Ryan’s tax cuts would break down by family income level, but the Tax Policy Center has published an estimate based on the Ryan-inspired budget passed by the House of Representatives this year. The upshot is that the federal income tax code—the one highly-progressive part of our tax system—would become significantly less progressive. Taxes would barely change (or even rise) on the low-income Americans, and the top 1% would see a windfall from the elimination of taxes on most of their investment income.
“Those making $1 million or more would enjoy an average tax cut of $265,000 and see their after-tax income increase by 12.5 percent,” TPC found. “By contrast, half of those making between $20,000 and $30,000 would get no tax cut at all.”**
SPENDING. Ryan is most famous for his Medicare plan, but if his budget became law at midnight tomorrow, the most dramatic changes over the next ten years would be everything but Medicare. That’s because Ryan’s long-term plan to move Medicare from a defined-benefit fee-for-service system (where government is your insurance) to a defined-contribution system (where government writes you a check to help you pay somebody else for insurance) is truly a long-term plan. It wouldn’t begin to take effect until the early 2020s. The typical family might prepare for a more modest Medicare by putting more money away. They might leave more of their salaries in a savings account. They might invest in the stock market, with the understanding that any gains wouldn’t be taxed. They might use their modest income gains to buy a house, with the intention to sell at a tax-free gain later.
Ryan slashes deeply, but he spares defense and Social Security, which, together, account for 40% of the budget. That means his $4 trillion in cuts come mostly out of health care spending, income security spending, and basic government duties. By 2023, Ryan would spend 16 percent less than Obama on income security programs like unemployment benefits and food stamps. He would spend a quarter less on transportation, and 13 percent less per veteran, according to Brad Plumer.
Medicaid spending would be shaved by about a third, and the Urban Institute calculated that a similar proposal would force the states to drop between 14 million and 27 million people from Medicaid by 2021 (note: that’s an extreme prediction). It’s not clear exactly what programs would be cut, or by exactly how much. What is clear is that everything within the bundle of government responsibility—from subsidizing science research to subsidizing education to keeping up national parks and law enforcement—would come under pressure for cuts to make room for the massive and regressive cuts to taxes.
What does that budget mean for your budget? It rather depends where you fall on the income ladder. Romney is relieving the richest Americans from some of their duties to pay for the risk-protection of the poor, and he is asking some of the poorest Americans to accept less help from the government in exchange for … well, the virtue of independence from government. It is stark, but broadly accurate, to say that the less you benefit from Ryan’s tax cuts, the more you would potentially suffer from Ryan spending cuts. It is possible—and, in Ryan’s vision, duly hope for—that devolving responsibilities from the federal government to the states and the private sector will drive efficiencies. But, as the GOP likes to point out about the president, “hope is not a policy,” and it is definitely not an inevitability.
Remember when Romney said he’s “not concerned about the very poor” because there’s a safety net for them? Well, there wouldn’t be the same safety net after Ryan’s plan took root. Romney doesn’t have to embrace every detail of Ryan’s plan, and he won’t. But he has embraced the philosophy of Ryan’s vision: That true freedom means freedom from government dependency, and that the poor are somehow richer, in spirit or in literalness, if they take less money from the government. Ryan believes that his budget could unlock spectacular growth and increase lower-income wages. And it might! But most of what we know about the impact of technology, emerging markets, and off-shoring suggests that gaping income inequality is a side-effect of global capitalism more than an outcome of progressive government.
This budget would have a very predictable outcome: It would make poor families poorer, and more exposed to the risks of medical or financial calamity, all under the banner of “Responsibility And Freedom.” Ryan is free to march under his banner. But don’t ask me to call it responsible.
By: Derek Thompson, The Atlantic, August 14, 2012
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