Bipartisanship and Deficit Plans

Lots of interesting but boring-to-99%-of-the-population stuff about the deficit today.  I don't want to recap everything...oh FINE I will.

Paul Ryan/Republican Plan: "cuts" $4.3 trillion in 10 years. scare quotes used bc a) his numbers don't add up b) no one can actually predict what our deficit will be in 10 years with any kind of certainty. that's like me asking you what your credit card debt will be in 10 years, so fundamentally this whole debate is about hypotheticals and the numbers are pretty screwy.  Anyway - Ryan gets the cuts by turning Medicare into a block grant program (which means instead of covering your insurance when you're an oldtimer, you'll get a certain amount of money to buy your own insurance), raising the retirement age, cutting taxes on rich and raising them for the middle class/poor, fully repealing ObamaCare and Financial Reform Act. i think that's basically it.

Obama Plan: "cuts" $4 trillion in 12 years.  Raise taxes on people making over $250,000, fully implement ObamaCare to cut health care costs, continue to invest in research & development, slash defense spending. This would be about $2-3 dollars in spending cut for every $1 dollar in new taxes. Oh and reform the tax code, which would save a lot of money.

Surprise! Republicans like Ryan's plan, Democrats like Obama's plan, and Moderates want to split the difference. You've got moderate folks like David Brooks and Max Shifrin endorsing what they call a hybrid approach comprising of the following:

1. Aging populations, expensive new health care technologies and the extravagant political promises have made the current welfare state model unsustainable. Fundamental reform is necessary or the whole thing will collapse, here and in Europe.
2. Seniors and the middle class cannot be excused from the benefit cuts that will have to be imposed to rebalance these systems.
3. Health care costs will not be brought under control until consumers take responsibility for their decisions and providers have market-based incentives to reduce prices.
4. Tax increases on the rich have to be part of a fiscal package.
5. Government investments in research and infrastructure nurture broad-based prosperity.

That's the hybrid. There's kind of a big problem in that though, in the sense that it's...um...like...actually not a hybrid at all.  Let's work in reverse order:

5. Obama's plan has investment in research/infrastructure, and (I think) Ryan's does not.
4. Obama calls for new taxes on the rich. Ryan has 100% said that is completely unacceptable.
3. This just isn't true. Medicare - government-run health care - does a better job of controlling costs than the private insurance market. Health care costs in countries with government-run health care see their health care costs increase at a slower rate than those with more private markets. Why? Because health care is different - unlike most things, where people make a rational, market-based choice, people rarely do that when their loved ones lives are at stake. The free market is not the best way to deal with health care costs.
2. None of Ryan's cuts come from people younger than 55 years old. Obama's cuts do.
1. Ryan's plan doesn't really have fundamental reform...it just shifts the rising cost of health care from the government to individuals. It repeals ObamaCare, which is actually forecasted to slow the rate of health care cost growth.

So long story short, the moderate, consensus view is basically Obama's plan. Oops.

I am so delinquent at blogging but still this is insane

I haven't had time to blog recently.

This is how that makes me feel:

I realize I don't read enough news

So I added some new blogs/news sources to my google reader. Things are already looking up! Here's an excerpt from The Monkey Cage (blog written by legit political scientists - they're generally better at analysis than journalists) on Obama's presidency - it's pretty astute, methinks.

Two years in to Obama's presidency it has turned into a Rohrschach test. Indeed, while Obama's approval ratings are higher than those for Reagan or Clinton at comparable points in their terms, support for Obama is as polarized as it has ever been for any recent president. Democrats and Republicans seem to be observing different presidencies. Left-leaning ideologues hoping Obama would be the liberal lion have been disappointed since Obama advocated a surge in Afghanistan, failed to close Guantanamo Bay, dropped the public option on health care, and extended the Bush tax cuts. Moderate supporters hoping for a post-partisan pragmatist watched as the president pushed through policies such as health care and the stimulus that were supported by less than half of the public on partisan lines.

Why the different opinions about Obama? Perhaps it is because Obama has learned the leadership lessons of the modern presidency better than any other president. Many factors have shaped Obama's actions, including the context of his presidency and the Republican resurgence but he is working from a playbook written by the late Harvard presidency scholar Richard Neustadt. Following the advice of Neustadt frustrates ideologues, confuses pragmatists, and can energize the opposition.

As Neustadt advised, Obama started with a clear agenda but sequenced his legislative initiatives effectively so as not to overload Congress. As Lyndon Johnson explained, Congress is like a whiskey drinker. If you try and force too much down their throat at once, they'll throw it up but if you get to drink sip by sip you can get them drunk. Careful sequencing of legislative initiatives means that some people are going to be disappointed, usually those supporters who have been led to believe the president will make everything (or at least the issue most important to them) better right away.

President Obama also began his presidency with vivid demonstrations of his tenacity and deal making ability. These demonstrations are necessary, in Neustadt's reckoning, to prove to the Washington community that the president is not someone to be trifled with. There are costs to opposing the president and benefits to siding with the president and what the president says he will accomplish, he will accomplish. The reputational benefits of such early demonstrations pay off later in the president's tenure. This helps explain the president's dogged persistence early in his term on some big ticket items that were not particularly popular and passed largely on party-line votes. Where is the compromising pragmatist?

Fundamentally, Neustadt advised that presidents make decisions today with an eye toward tomorrow. President Obama has protected the power of the presidency, most noticeably by continuing to use signing statements. The president has also issued notable executive orders on topics such as gay rights and abortion and centralized power in the White House via czars. In public appearances Obama has sought to generate support for the president and his brand as much as for his programs. Where Obama is criticized for vagueness and a refusal to engage, one explanation may be that people misunderstand the purpose of his public activities. The president wants to generate support but prefers to be less specific in order to protect his bargaining flexibility down the road.

The modern president who is a good student of the office may be a Rohrschach president.

Security vs. Insecurity

I've got this buddy Max who is also the proud owner of a nerdblog. I'm not sure how I'd characterize his politics - inherently skeptical, but more sympathetic to tax cuts than government spending. His whole blog is worth reading. He grapples with things.

Anyway, he characterizes liberalism as follows:
"This dichotomy, which still persists to the present day, is the fundamental advantage possessed by big government liberals.  They are seen as political Robin Hoods, fighting for the poor and disadvantaged against the corporate elites with the small government politicians in their pockets.  No matter what lies beneath this superficial classification, they always seem to harp back on the theory that small-government conservatives want to take from the poor and give to the rich."

I take issue with that. Sure, liberals talk about the poor a lot, but that's not really what liberalism/big government is about. "Big government," in the pejorative sense that politicians love to harp on, is about one thing: security.

Watchoo talkin' bout, Gart? Hm. This is what I mean -- the fundamental planks of a liberal's dream state (spoiler alert - we're pretty close to having one!) is a country in which everyone - be they rich, poor, or, most crucially, middle class - has some measure of security in their life. Specifically, if you make less than the top 50% of the country, that means you'll make about $35,000 a year. Most likely, that isn't going to leave you much savings to fall back on when you retire, or when you face some kind of catastrophic illness (which almost everyone will face at some point), or whatnot. Big government is about providing a safety net so that you have a little less fear when those things happen, and a little more security through your life.

Crucially, this ISN'T about the poor - it's about everyone. Just because you're rich doesn't mean you don't get your Social Security check or Medicare. This is a real thing! What if you invested in one of Madoff's Ponzi schemes completely unwittingly and with no fault of your own. You did your due diligence. You studied up - no one knew he was a crook! Or Enron, or WorldCom, or real estate. You could go from being literally in the top 10% in terms of income, only to have all your savings wiped out. Social Security provides you a safety net so you're not living in poverty in your old age.

This is real. It's time for charts I think. Ok so Medicaid is the program we think of as providing health care to the poor, right? Well, not exactly:

Half the people in it are kids, another 25% are either old folk or disabled. So literally 75% are either kids, elderly, or disabled - and I'm not sure anyone can make a kind of morally compelling argument that kids and the disabled shouldn't get health care. Even if you're a purely free market person, you've gotta realize that penalizing people who can't provide for themselves is just not good business for a country. This is 2011 folks.


I have to work. More later.

Two thirds of cuts in Republican Budget come from the poor

At a time when the rich are making more and paying less taxes than at any time in modern American history, does this seem in any way fair?

Deficit Reduction

Time to get back to the boring stuff. Paul Ryan, a Republican robot, released a deficit reduction plan today. It's bold, in that it makes hard cuts in areas we need to, and also really stupid, in that it makes a lot of cuts in programs that help support poor children, the elderly, and the disabled - while cutting taxes for the rich (again!). It's funny how we can be the richest country on the planet yet still be the stingiest when it comes to helping the sick, poor and old. Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses indeed!

Anyway. One of my favorite things about politics is that people repeatedly base decisions on ideology instead of experience. "Government is wasteful! Let's cut it!" says every Republican ever. When really government waste is minimal, and Medicare and Medicaid have less waste than private health insurance. Interesting and factual! But it won't convince any Republicans to preserve those systems because...um...I don't know why.

You know what's interesting? We recently had a budget surplus! Oh yeah! Didn't Clinton do that? How interesting! Maybe instead of just y'know listening to Republicans (who presided over the ballooning of the budget in the first place under Bush), we should look to how we balanced the budget back then. Let's see...

1) Let the Bush tax cuts expire for the love of Jesus! They cost like $150 billion. THAT IS A LOT. We were incredibly prosperous during the Clinton years and did so just fine with slightly higher taxes. This is obvious.

2) Stop going to war. They cost a lot of money. This includes Libya, probably.

3) Stop enacting programs without paying for them, like Bush's Medicare prescription drugs program. Example of a good new program: ObamaCare, which is 100% paid for. Example of good exception to rule: Stimulus, because the only time you should really have deficit spending is during a recession, to stimulate demand. If any conservatives read this blog they will not like this.

4) Stop having recessions. That's kind of pedantic, but that means we should probably stop doing things that lead to the loss of jobs - like cutting spending programs when we still have 18million+ people unemployed. And we should have strong regulations of the banking industry that stops those jerks from doing idiotic things like plunging the world into Great Depression II.

That's where you should start. Because, y'know, it has a proven track record of success. Evidence, you jerks.