Or: Health care, health care, health care, revenue.
Or Or: as Dr. Sean Maguire might say “The ACA is deficit reduction. The ACA is deficit reduction. The ACA is deficit reduction. The ACA is deficit reduction. The ACA is deficit reduction. […]”
Month: February 2011
Ezra Explains Wisconsin
The best way to understand Walker’s proposal is as a multi-part attack on the state’s labor unions. In part one, their ability to bargain benefits for their members is reduced. In part two, their ability to collect dues, and thus spend money organizing members or lobbying the legislature, is undercut. And in part three, workers have to vote the union back into existence every single year. Put it all together and it looks like this: Wisconsin’s unions can’t deliver value to their members, they’re deprived of the resources to change the rules so they can start delivering value to their members again, and because of that, their members eventually give in to employer pressure and shut the union down in one of the annual certification elections.
What is it with this glut of cogent explanations in the media today? More, please. After all, something has to offset the emerging right-wing and MSM meme that this is primarily about budget cuts and that’s why Democrats have gone missing…
There are three things you need to know about the current budget debate. First, it’s essentially fraudulent. Second, most people posing as deficit hawks are faking it. Third, while President Obama hasn’t fully avoided the fraudulence, he’s less bad than his opponents — and he deserves much more credit for fiscal responsibility than he’s getting.
Paul Krugman, reminding us how to start a column. Later, he offers a solution in seven words: “health care, health care, health care, revenue.”
Yep.
Yep.
Social Security
The size of that fix [required to keep Social Security fully funded] is significant, but not astonishing. Over the next 75 years, the shortfall will be equal to about 0.7 percent of gross domestic product. How much is 0.7 percent of GDP? To put that in perspective, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities calculates that it’s about as much as George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the rich will cost over the same period. Saying we can afford those cuts – which is the consensus Republican position – but not Social Security’s outlay is nonsensical. Coming up with 0.7 percent of GDP isn’t a crisis. It’s a question of priorities.
And this is precisely how it should be talked about every single time a microphone is turned on. Clear, simple terms that highlight the basic stability of the program, the relative ease of fixing it (as opposed to, say, Medicare), and its critical position as the only thing between catfood and dying in the streets for millions of elderly individuals who have by and large paid into it, fair and square. Oh, but now your deal has to change and you have to keep working at your labors until you’re 70. Just makes perfect sense.
The parallels to Wisconsin are striking: A group and the government enter into a deal. Now the government wants to change the deal ex post facto, and uses a bludgeon of “dread Unions” to paper over the fact that they the government are the one dealing in underhanded fashion. And, of course, the media blissfully reports it from the government perspective. This is why we fail.
But, if a few million folks show up on the doorstep of said government, well, things can change.
Watson has lots in common with a top-ranked human Jeopardy! player: It’s very smart, very fast, speaks in an uneven monotone, and has never known the touch of a woman.
Ken Jennings, reporting on his failed battle against our new robotic overlords.
Four Memes that Need to DIE
1: Just like any family sitting at their kitchen table does…
2: Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill workin’ nights an’ evenin’s together to find the best…
3: Tighten our belts…
4: Social Security will be “broke” in…
Social Security isn’t even hard to understand. Taxes go in, benefits go out. Unlike healthcare, which involves extremely difficult questions of technological advancement and the specter of rationing, Social Security is just arithmetic.
[…]
Right now, Social Security costs about 4.5% of GDP. That’s going to increase as the baby boomer generation retires, and then in 2030 it steadies out forever at around 6% of GDP.
That’s it. That’s the story. Our choices are equally simple. If, about ten years from now, we slowly increase payroll taxes by 1.5% of GDP, Social Security will be able to pay out its current promised benefits for the rest of the century. Conversely, if we keep payroll taxes where they are today, benefits will have to be cut to 75% of their promised level by around 2040 or so. And if we do something in the middle, then taxes will go up, say, 1% of GDP and benefits will drop to about 92% of their promised level. But one way or another, at some level between 75% and 100% of what we’ve promised, Social Security benefits will always be there.
This is not a Ponzi scheme. It’s not unsustainable. The percentage of old people in America isn’t projected to grow forever. Lifespans will not increase to infinity. Taxes go in, benefits go out. It’s simple.
Kevin Drum: big yep. And almost a usable political slogan as well: Taxes go in, benefits come out. Got to work on something for the T-word, though.
It is, however, remarkable how the serious people in the MSM have obligingly turned Social Security into some sort of indecipherable rocket science which everyone knows will be defunct sometime later this week, all without ever pausing to consider that Social Security is A): self funded outside the annual budget (and therefore deficit neutral for many, many years to come), and B): the easiest fix currently in the entire governmental clusterfuck that the GOP both caused and loves to natter on about. You want to talk about something important? Let’s talk Medicare or defense spending if you want to get at the real dollars, Gwen. Let’s talk about the Bush tax cuts. Your Liberal Media.
It is, however, remarkable how the serious people in the MSM have obligingly turned Social Security into some sort of indecipherable rocket science which everyone knows will be defunct sometime later this week, all without ever pausing to consider that Social Security is A): self funded outside the annual budget (and therefore deficit neutral for many, many years to come), and B): the easiest fix currently in the entire governmental clusterfuck that the GOP both caused and loves to natter on about. You want to talk about something important? Let’s talk Medicare or defense spending if you want to get at the real dollars, Gwen. Let’s talk about the Bush tax cuts. Your Liberal Media.
If the deficit was actually something anybody cared about, they’d be interested in raising revenue. You don’t have to raise tax rates to raise revenue, you just have to increase the number of goddamn jobs.
Duncan Black aka Eschaton, on jobs, revenue, and the deficit.
As Gwen Ifill was being all serious person last night talking to and asking the tough questions of Jack Lew on why he won’t just admit that Social Security must be eliminated, preferably today if we as a nation are to survive, I found myself jumping up and down screaming “revenue, revenue, revenue.” It was a special Valentine’s Day moment for the wife. But: revenue. It’s a word that never, ever comes up in the MSM. Instead, they have laserlike focus on the elimination of Social Security, the one entitlement that is perfectly fine for 40+ years, and then only moderately not fine after that. But they aren’t likely to depend on it, so it has to go. Medicare? Well, not so much. They see a real benefit for themselves in that one.
This is why Our Republic is coming apart at the seams.
As Gwen Ifill was being all serious person last night talking to and asking the tough questions of Jack Lew on why he won’t just admit that Social Security must be eliminated, preferably today if we as a nation are to survive, I found myself jumping up and down screaming “revenue, revenue, revenue.” It was a special Valentine’s Day moment for the wife. But: revenue. It’s a word that never, ever comes up in the MSM. Instead, they have laserlike focus on the elimination of Social Security, the one entitlement that is perfectly fine for 40+ years, and then only moderately not fine after that. But they aren’t likely to depend on it, so it has to go. Medicare? Well, not so much. They see a real benefit for themselves in that one.
This is why Our Republic is coming apart at the seams.
PREDICTION: House GOP will almost certainly lose some seats in 2012 then dump Boehner for being not conservative enough.
Matt Yglesias rends the fabric of time and space via Twitter. I think he’s almost certainly right.
Radical as this seems to Americans, the rest of the world has figured this out and gotten it right. We keep getting it wrong, and we’re paying for it.
Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin, talking to Ezra Klein about his plans to make Vermont the first all single payer healthcare state in the Union.
I eagerly await the “why this instance isn’t actually states’ rights” argument from the GOP.
I eagerly await the “why this instance isn’t actually states’ rights” argument from the GOP.
Lemkin 