Author: lemkin

Never. Is never good enough for you?

Nancy Pelosi on when the Democratic plan to destroy Social Security would be introduced. This is the sort of Democrat we need a whole lot more of.
And, as Atrios notes, the Bush administration hadn’t yet even offered their plan and wouldn’t, really, until after the whole thing was effectively dead. They were, in fact, counting on that Defeatocratic impulse to get out there and co-own a truly terrible idea just because the Serious People wanted them to. For once, they didn’t do it. That’s true leadership.

It’s Courageous To Go Die in the Streets

David Brooks:

Today, Paul Ryan, the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, is scheduled to release the most comprehensive and most courageous budget reform proposal any of us have seen in our lifetimes….His proposal will set the standard of seriousness for anybody who wants to play in this discussion….This budget tackles just about every politically risky issue with brio and guts….Paul Ryan has grasped reality with both hands. He’s forcing everybody else to do the same.

Kevin Drum responds:

Courageous. Serious. Gutsy. I imagine that within a few days this will be the consensus view of the entire Beltway punditocracy. A plan dedicated almost entirely to slashing social spending in a country that’s already the stingiest spender in the developed world, while simultaneously cutting taxes on the rich in a country with the lowest tax rates in the developed world — well, what could be more serious than that?

I think I’m going to be sick.

He’s right, but it didn’t take a few days and it’s not just Our Punditocracy; here’s the generic Democrat legislator last night on Hardball (sorry, no transcript yet):

[it was] “courageous” [for Paul Ryan to put up a plan to abolish Medicare and other federal social programs]

This is deadly serious. It’s easy to say we drugged bloggers out here are simply another example of the smelly hippies flying off the handle on something. Rest assured: We are not. You are going to be fighting 100% of the GOP caucus, some non-zero percent of the Democratic caucus (exactly 100% of the Democrat caucus), the entire Beltway elite media, and the do-nothing defensive crouch of the President and his administration heading into 2012. Keep in mind where that “sensible compromise” is going to land when the Overton Window has been set far, far to the right. Every possible outcome other than status quo within the current frame of the debate is going to be a major GOP win, far beyond anything that’s happened in recent political history. And that’s with a Democratic Senate and a Democratic President faced with a politically daunting 87% public approval of either continuing or increasing Medicare coverage relative to today’s levels. This is why they fail.

It’s going to be just like the Social Security fight, only worse: once again, Very Serious People will pretend not to notice that the Republican plan is a giant game of bait-and-switch, dismantling a key piece of the social safety net in favor of a privatized system, claiming that this is necessary to save money, but never acknowledging that privatization in itself actually costs money. And we’ll have endless obfuscation, both-sides-have-a-point reporting that misses the key point, which is that the putative savings come entirely from benefit cuts somewhere in the distant future that would, in all likelihood, never actually materialize. (What do you think will happen when retirees in 2025 discover that their Medicare vouchers aren’t enough to buy insurance?)

Paul Krugman, on the coming Medicare privatization fight. Add to that an administration that has shown zero interest in coming out of a defensive crouch on such issues, even when 87% of Americans favor keeping Medicare as is or increasing funding.
And, just to get a sense of where the MSM and its serious people are going to come down on the issue, you might review how that overwhelming majority of Americans favoring the continuation and expansion of Medicare is played. tl;dr: second to last paragraph, after about 17,000 words on how Americans “flunk” the budget test. Newsflash, CNN: your own poll shows they know that Medicare is relatively costly; however, they see the value of not putting folks over 65 out there on a competitive market with a fixed amount of 2010 dollars with which to try and find care. But, by all means, journalistic integrity means playing up that folks overestimate our outlays in foreign aid as a cudgel against their views on (and apparently clear understanding of) Medicare funding. Might those sad rubes out there in the many diners of flyover country be conflating military spending with “foreign aid?” We shall never know.
It aint going to be pretty.

Welcome the Responsibility

E.J. Dionne posits that the coming “Ryancare” enforced destruction of Medicare will either be Obama’s defining moment or the final end of progressive government in America:

Americans are about to learn how much is at stake in our larger budget fight, how radical the new conservatives in Washington are, and the extent to which some politicians would transfer even more resources from the have-nots and have-a-littles to the have-a-lots.

And you wonder: Will President Obama welcome the responsibility of engaging the country in this big argument, or will he shrink from it? Will his political advisers remain robotically obsessed with poll results about the 2012 election, or will they embrace Obama’s historic obligation — and opportunity — to win the most important struggle over the role of government since the New Deal?

And that’s exactly what this is. If you “privatize” Medicare, you are in effect creating a real live death panel for those individuals who cannot afford to pay the difference between the arbitrarily low payments (pegged to the dollar circa 2010) that will be made in the name of “cost containment.” Scare quotes there because such a move is categorically not cost containment; it is payment containment, or total government outlay containment, if you will. Costs will still rise, whether that rise is at the rate of inflation or at some other rate doesn’t really matter: the payments are locked, now and forever, to roughly today’s value. It is therefore only that fraction of individuals that are capable of paying the difference between real cost and subsidized value that will be “contained.” This number of individuals will, of course, be diminished day by day, year after year after year, as the subsidy represents lower and lower actual healthcare buying power. This is how Ryancare “works.” Hope you’ve been rather aggressive and uniformly successful with your by then privatized “Social Security” 401(k). Because you’re going to need it. Cat food doesn’t buy itself, after all. Otherwise, kindly go die in the streets.

In a decade or two, yes, even the very wealthy will begin to feel that pinch and there might be some movement to address the issue. But, by then, assuming all goes to Ryan’s master plan, tax revenue will have ratcheted to such historic lows (the other part of this “plan” is to limit next year’s spending to a fractional percent of the previous year’s, regardless of inflation and actual vs. projected economic output or overall economic conditions) that the federal government will have drowned itself in a teacup and will be laughably incapable and plainly impotent relative to doing anything about it. Problem solved! Think of how free we’ll all feel on that wonderful day!

And but so: do I think Obama will rise to this particular challenge? No I do not. Nothing coming out of the administration leads me to believe he or his advisers have any interest whatever in fighting for the future of Medicare, much less Social Security (which, having its own funding source, is utterly secure for decades to come: so Serious People all know that we must act now to destroy it because otherwise it won’t be there! This makes sense to our Beltway Punditocracy.). The administration and, by and large, The Body Democrat will remain in their defensive crouch, trying not to “screw up” 2012 with a lot of progressive mumbo-jumbo, because, as any Serious Person can tell you, those dozens of Tea Partiers that showed up in DC the other day are the ones that run the country, now and forever, without any regard to election results, polling data, or the stated wishes of the American People at large. Those 100k that showed up in the tundra of Wisconsin? Just out of town Union thugs. No reason to pay attention to them at all. They’ll only win in 2012 if ACORN steals the election for them.

Welcome the Responsibility

Years ago I remember a lot of moderate liberals talking about how the Bush era radicalized them. For me, it was the economic collapse of 2008 that did it. The financial industry almost literally came within a hair’s breadth of destroying the world, but even so it took only a few short months for them to close ranks with Republicans and the rich to prevent anything serious being done to rein them in. Profits are back up, new regulations are barely more than window dressing, nothing was done to help underwater homeowners, bonuses are as obscene as ever, unemployment remains sky high, and the public has somehow been convinced that this was all their own fault — or perhaps the fault of big government, or big deficits, or something. But the finance industry has escaped almost entirely unscathed. It’s mind boggling. If this doesn’t change your view of who really runs the world, I don’t know what would.

Kevin Drum
Source: Mother Jones

On the budget, by contrast, it’s hard to know what the president’s bottom line is, what deals he would regard as reasonable or when he will even join the fray.

The White House is so determined to keep the president antiseptically distant from the untidy wrangling on the budget that it will not even allow its allies in Congress to cite the administration’s own analyses of how harmful some of the Republican cuts would be. They can use the facts but not let on that the administration put them together. What’s up with this?

E.J. Dionne, remaining blissfully unaware of The Third Thing.
Seriously, I’d enjoy living in the dimension inhabited by Our Beltway Punditocracy. Must be really nice in there.
Newsflash, E.J., if Obama came out to the Rose Garden this PM in favor of cutting the non-military discretionary budget to $0, the GOP would immediately balk and say it’s not enough. Just how is he supposed to get involved in a “debate” on those terms? Furthermore, such a step would still not solve the budgetary issues the GOP claims to be so very concerned about. For that, we’d need the thing of which nobody speaks: revenue.
That the GOP systematically and categorically ignores revenue proves that they are not serious about deficits. Never have been. Never will be. You’d think a serious person would start to pick up on this at some point.
But, far be it from me to talk. I’m shrill and out here on drugs with the rest of the pajama wearing naysayers who know nothing of your dimension and its needs.
Source: Washington Post

There Is No Third Thing

Ezra Klein, on the tepid reaction to the President’s energy policy:

This brings up one of the toughest questions in punditry: What is the right thing for the president to do on an issue that’s 1) morally urgent and 2) absolutely dead on arrival in Congress?

He forgets one thing:

3) and which his political opposition will be allowed to argue both sides of?

Libya is only the latest example, but there are many, many others. As soon as the President is for it, the GOP is categorically and irrevocably against it regardless of where they stood in the millisecond before Obama made a decision. This is how Obama went from “dangerously disengaged” or “timid” on Libya and missing his big chance to remake the region to dangerously over-aggressive and missing his big chance for peace in our time in the course of approximately 36 hours.

This is precisely why Obama needs to start inveighing against the perils of windpower, the tyranny of train-based transportation, and making demands that every US citizen above the age of 14 be required to carry at least one gun with its safety off at all times.
I’m only half-joking here. Any rational policy decision will have to be couched in, at best, seeming disinterest on the part of Obama. And this is why many issues are currently hung with the “why isn’t Obama saying anything about…” rubric. Once he takes up a position, even if it is the GOP position, you’re going to face instant and intransigent opposition to whatever Obama says. Even if they were the ones promoting it yesterday. On really sticky issues like Libya, you’ll have the Serious Person dream situation: categorical GOP opposition coupled with strong attacks “from the President’s left.” And just how it’s possible to be “to the left” of a radical socialist community organizer is left as an exercise for the student, as these are questions that the MSM simply will not ask. Shrill.
Progressives angry that their pet issue isn’t receiving enough facetime from Obama should frankly count their lucky stars. Once he weighs in, your issue is over. It is only in the face of Presidential disinterest that even incremental policy progress can actually be made in this environment.

Until such time as the GOP gets significant push-back on this form of rampant and entirely political flip-floppery, it will remain the only game in town. Since such push-back would require research and preparation on the part of the MSM, I wouldn’t hold my breath. That this cycle happens to be a game that is measurably and inexorably killing the country is yet another of those facts that do not matter.

The lyrics, a first-person narrative, appear to relate the story of a man pleading with a woman to let him in her house; the speaker calls himself “Papa McTell” in the first stanza (“Have you got the nerve to drive Papa McTell from your door?”). Throughout the song, the woman, addressed as “mama,” is alternately pleaded with (to go with the speaker “up the country”) and threatened (“When I leave this time, pretty mama, I’m going away to stay”). Throughout the non-linear narrative, the “Statesboro blues” are invoked—an unexplained condition from which the speaker and his entire family seem to be suffering.

Wikipedia explains Statesboro Blues.
Perhaps a little Coricidin would help with that?