Elliot Spitzer (4/6/11): Congressman, thank you so much for joining us tonight….Look, I want to begin with the question that goes to a simple notion of fairness. And here’s how I want to frame it for you. The top one percent of income earners in our nation get 25 percent of the income and control 40 percent of the wealth. Those numbers have gone through the roof over the last decade or two. And yet Paul Ryan’s budget plan imposes two-thirds of its burdens on the poor. Two-thirds! Right after we gave a big tax cut to the rich. Does that violate your sense of fairness in a very basic sense?
Todd Akin, R MO: Well, no.
Author: lemkin
Health care is another matter. That has to be taken very methodically because people’s lives are affected. Nobody’s life is affected by NPR. Nobody’s life is affected by Planned Parenthood. These are options.
Bill O’Reilly, apparently believing the notion that Planned Parenthood is merely the place one goes for on-demand partial birth abortions and the like.
Pop quiz: Number of federal dollars used by Planned Parenthood to fund abortion?
That would be ZERO. The Hyde amendment way back in 1976 made that illegal.
The right wing that increasingly makes up and already makes all important policy decisions for the GOP is after contraception. Always has been, always will be. In their world women are chattel who cannot and should not be allowed to make decisions about their own fertility, especially since all sex should be reproductive and within a “traditional” marriage. Anything else is a threat to the GOP approved sanctity of marriage and inevitably results in men marrying box turtles and the like.
Pop quiz: Number of federal dollars used by Planned Parenthood to fund abortion?
That would be ZERO. The Hyde amendment way back in 1976 made that illegal.
The right wing that increasingly makes up and already makes all important policy decisions for the GOP is after contraception. Always has been, always will be. In their world women are chattel who cannot and should not be allowed to make decisions about their own fertility, especially since all sex should be reproductive and within a “traditional” marriage. Anything else is a threat to the GOP approved sanctity of marriage and inevitably results in men marrying box turtles and the like.
Shutdown Number One
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Thursday morning that he and House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, have agreed on a deal to cut about $38 billion from current spending levels, but added that Republican insistence on including a policy rider blocking federal funding for Planned Parenthood, is the only stumbling block.
“We agreed on a number last night,” Reid told reporters in the Senate Press Gallery. He said he is “really upset that this government is going to shut down” because of GOP efforts to limit access to abortion.
A spokesman for Boehner has challenged Reid’s account, saying that continuing differences over spending cuts, not the abortion rider, remains the problem.
On the wager: Planned Parenthood will be the Newt Gingrich bad seat on Air Force One of this shutdown. Simple and easy to understand, and it pushes most of sensible America’s “that’s just rank insanity” button.
Ryan’s Motivations (or: Pie-O-My)
Kevin Drum wonders what drives Ryan to produce such a uniquely partisan budget document…
There is this strange notion that Ryan should not have proposed the plan he actually wanted, but that he was supposed to compromise before the Democrats even come to the table. This is insane. You don’t go to the car dealer and figure, “Well, I’d like to pay $22,000 for the Prius, but he’d probably like me to pay more, so I’ll start at $23,000.” Ryan proposed the plan he wanted; the Democrats are now free to counter with any plan of their choosing, and maybe the sides will meet somewhere in the middle.
So what’s the problem here? The problem is that Democrats don’t want to address the debt problem because it means they will either have to sacrifice programs they like or greatly increase taxes on the middle class. There’s nothing fun about that choice, but Paul Ryan didn’t put us into the position where that choice has to be made.
Perhaps I wasn’t sufficiently clear: of course Ryan should swing for the fences. My frustration lies with the traditional Democratic impulse to start from the position of compromise in response to said fence-swinging proposal. They’ve know he was developing this plan, and the outlines of it, for weeks. In response, they’ve been working on marking up the deficit commission’s plan. My contention is that this is bad strategy unless you want a rightward shift in funding priorities.
But, I don’t consider returning to Clintonian tax rates “greatly increasing” taxes on anybody. Let the Bush tax cuts expire. Period. In a stroke, you’ve corrected at least half of the deficit issue. You can legitimately plan to make reasonable cuts and adjustments and but also just grow your way out of the rest of it, as the economy should be in much better shape by the time of that expiry.
Ryan’s Motivations (or: Pie-O-My)
Kevin Drum wonders what drives Ryan to produce such a uniquely partisan budget document:
I don’t know what motivates Ryan, but it’s certainly not a genuine search for plausible grounds for negotiation. Instead, he’s produced a document carefully crafted to produce a universally negative reaction from Democrats, presumably because he thinks that will make Democrats look intransigent while the Beltway press is praising Ryan for his courage.
Sorry, but that’s just wrong. Ryan crafted his document to produce a Beltway press that praises him for his courage and demand that The Democrat must now compromise based on that starting point. This is why the Democratic party needs to come out with its own pie-in-the-sky progressive budget. Then you could compromise in a way that would represent a legitimate compromise of opposing ideas and not just yet another rightward lurch at the hands of the ever-triangulating Democrats.
Instead, what seems likely to happen is the Democrats will counter with the deficit commission document and then compromise to the right of that. Which is precisely the outcome Ryan likely considers “worst but acceptable.” The sad reality, of course, will be that in the absence of a GOP President, a GOP Senate, and with only a fractionally lunatic GOP House they will have delivered the biggest far-right reshaping of American budgetary priorities (and politics) ever achieved in anyone living’s lifetime. And the Democrats will have only themselves to blame.
Ryan’s Unicorns
Krugman on Ryan:
Ryan is claiming that unemployment will plunge right away; that by 2015 it will be down to the levels at the peak of the 1990s boom (and far below anything achieved under the sainted Ronald Reagan); and that by 2021 it will be below 3 percent, a level we haven’t seen in more than half a century.
[…]
According to the CBO analysis, a typical senior would end up spending more than twice as much of his or her own income on health care as under current law. As Dean Baker points out, this means that seniors would end up paying most of their income for health care. Again, right.
[…]
Ryan is assuming that everything aside from health and SS can be squeezed from 12 percent of GDP now to 3 ½ percent of GDP. That’s bigger than the assumed cut in health care spending relative to baseline; it accounts for all of the projected deficit reduction, since the alleged health savings are all used to finance tax cuts. And how is this supposed to be accomplished? Not explained.
Now that’s what I call a truly serious and courageous budget proposal. Obviously it won’t pass, but it’s not meant to. It is meant to move the debate rightward. And it already has. Dread Liberal Mouthpiece the Boston Globe has already run a “Where’s the Democrat Version of Destroy Medicare?” editorial. The implicit expectation is, again, that Serious People know the sensible outcome is, by definition, in-between Ryan’s plan and status quo: thus the GOP moves policy ever rightward while The Democrat simply stays in defensive crouch, hoping to scratch out minor concessions along the way. Forever.
How’s that been working out for you?
Tax Increases and Giveaways to Big Banks
Ryan’s view of an ideal America on the Path to Prosperity really is a winning combination; aside from the top line items of eliminating Medicare, Medicaid, and (ultimately) Social Security, the GOP Vision of an America they want to live in includes:
…lurking in the plan is a giant giveaway to Wall Street […]. Specifically, Ryan wants to repeal two key provisions of the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill that allow regulators to identify systemically important financial institutions and unwind them if they go bankrupt. This means that in a future financial crisis, regulators will face a Hobson’s choice between letting the financial system collapse and replaying the ad hoc and unjust bailouts of 2008.
[…]
[Ryan’s plan also] promises to raise the same quantity of tax revenue as the government got during the George W Bush years, but he wants to push marginal tax rates on the rich even lower than they were at that time. He doesn’t spell out how, exactly, he plans to make up the lost revenue and that’s because he wants to obscure the fact that it’ll have to come from the middle class.
Who can possibly argue with that entirely sensible approach? Why, unemployment will be almost certainly be at negative eleventy percent by 2014 under policies like those.
Serious journalism is about having lunch with powerful people so you can write about what they have on their iPod and, later, spoon feed you self-serving leaks.
Matt Yglesias on the rigors of Serious Person journalism.
…the concept of “seriousness” in Washington punditry is closely tied to the sacrifices rich people expect everyone else to make on their behalf in order to rescue America not merely from fiscal ruin but from moral decline as well.
Adam Serwer, exactly right on serious people.
Medicare and the Overton Window
This Pelosi post got me thinking about just what a Democratic response to a Ryan-style plan on Medicare should even be. After all, if you work from Ryan’s far right starting point and counter with “well, let’s just privatize x% of Medicare for this set of individuals” or some other “sensible middle” type compromise, then you’ve already lost. You’ve advanced the GOP’s idea of the program (which is a bad one) significantly and at the expense of the better solution: Medicare as it stands or Medicare plus substantial improvements.
It is a fact that the real driver of deficits in this country are healthcare expenses. Don’t take it from me, here’s the CBO’s report (PDF link):
Medicare and Medicaid are responsible for 80 percent of the growth in spending on the three largest entitlements over the next 25 years and for 90 percent of that growth by 2080.
But if we could achieve the per patient healthcare cost of most of the other developed nations in the world, we’d be facing yawning surpluses in this country, not deficits, and we’d very likely have better individual health outcomes to boot.
Therefore: the Democratic response to Ryan’s “privatize Medicare” should in fact be: Medicare For All. Period. We don’t want to reduce this program. Like 87% of all Americans, we think it should at the bare minimum stay just as it is. Preferably, we’d like to massively expand it. This has the dual benefit of covering medical expenses for everyone in the country and relieving the number one deficit driver in the economy: everyone’s medical expenses. Plus this means we eliminate the dread ACA and its totalitarian horrors. Everyone wins!
Now, of course, I don’t really think Medicare For All has any particular chance of becoming law; what using this sort of proposal does do is set the limits of the debate more appropriately and in ways that tend to favor outcomes preferable to the Democrats.
On the right: Eliminate Medicare and let the wealthy fend for themselves.
On the left: not only keep Medicare, but make it the healthcare provider for all, with tremendous humanitarian benefit but also knock-on budget benefits.
Then you’d be down to arguing about whose plan actually saves more money long term and how that impacts health outcomes in America. Which is precisely where the debate needs to be.
Lemkin 