"The Anonymous Liberal" - 5 new articles
Time for a Blogging SabbaticalAs you've undoubtedly noticed if you've been coming to this site regularly, my posts have been getting fewer and farther between. Though I can always point to the demands of my real job as an excuse (it is a pretty demanding job, after all), the reality is that I haven't been any busier than normal lately. For whatever reason, though, I've been having more trouble finding the time to write here, and when I do sit down to write a post, much of the time I abandon it halfway through, usually because I'm not convinced it contributes anything useful or original to the discourse.
 Why the GOP has no health care planThe Hill reports that there is currently a debate within the GOP caucus as to whether they should offer an alternative health care reform bill.
Some House Republicans are growing frustrated that their leaders have not yet introduced a health care reform alternative.The problem the GOP faces is a very simple one: it is impossible to translate their "principles" into a functional plan. This is why they never lifted a finger to address the issue of health care reform during the entire time they controlled the White House and Congress. Indeed, the one health care related bill they passed (the Medicare prescription drug bill) was a massive new--and completely unfunded--government entitlement, something that would seemingly violate any possible list of GOP principles in profound ways. In the current debate, if you ask a GOP politician what he/she would do to reform health care, you're likely to hear a lot of buzzwords, things like "portability" and "competition across state lines." This all sounds well and good. Competition is generally a good thing and most of us would prefer it if our health insurance wasn't tied to our employment. But when you try to reduce these ideas to policy, the result is a disaster. There are two fundamental problems we face with our health care system. The first is the fact that tens of millions of people in this country are either uninsured or under-insured. The second is the fact that health care costs are rising rapidly. Any proposal to reform our health care system must address these problems. The one idea that Republicans have offered to address these problems is relatively easy to understand. They want to allow private health insurers to sell policies across state lines. Thus, as long as an insurer complies with the regulations of its home state, it could sell insurance outside of the state. This would increase the amount of competition and thereby reduce premiums. The problem with this idea, of course, is that it would create an instant "race to the bottom." The insurance industry would lobby the states to relax their regulations and then would all set up shop in the state that was most willing to comply with their demands. The result would de facto deregulation of the industry. But, from the GOP perspective, this is a feature, not a bug. Without laws mandating what they have to cover, insurance companies would gravitate toward high-deductible, low-benefit policies that could be offered for reduced premiums. Businesses would start offering these kind of policies to their employees in order to cut costs and many individuals would choose such policies in order to save money on premiums. While this might reduce average premium prices (at least in the short term) and allow some people who currently can't afford insurance on the individual market to purchase it, the result would be a system in which just about everyone is under-insured. But this is exactly what conservatives want. They believe (or at least claim to believe) that the reason health care costs are out of control is because people don't have enough personal stake in health care spending. The believe that if people have to pay a greater percentage of costs out-of-pocket, they will have an incentive not to "purchase" unnecessary care. As anyone who has studied health care policy for more than ten seconds knows, however, treating health care like grocery shopping is a recipe for disaster. First, when it comes to health care, "consumers" simply don't have the expertise to be intelligent "shoppers." We're not doctors. We generally don't know what diagnostic test or procedure we need or when we need it. We don't know which doctor or hospital is the best "deal." We don't know which drug offers the most "bang for our buck." Most of us never will, either. That's why we have doctors. Moreover, when you make people pay for routine and preventative medical care out-of-pocket (as high deductible policies do), the inevitable result is that people don't get enough routine and preventative care. That results not only in worse health outcomes, but it drives up costs. It is much easier and cheaper to treat conditions if they are detected early. On some level, I'm pretty sure that most Republican politicians know all of this. They know that their "principles" don't translate well into actual policies. They know that if they were to produce an actual bill, nearly every health care policy expert in the country would immediately point out its myriad flaws. And on some level they also know that the only way to effectively deal with the problem of the uninsured or to control costs is through greater (not lesser) government involvement in the health care system. Indeed, one of the final quotes in the article is very revealing on this score: One House Republican who spoke on the condition of anonymity said, “The fact is, [GOP leaders] are very concerned with doing anything that the base would interpret as ‘Democrat-lite’ or ‘socialized-lite’ … which is forcing a little of paralysis.”That paralysis is a consequence of the fact that, absent greater government involvement, there really is no way to deal with the uninsured or to reduce systemic costs. If the GOP were to produce a bill and submit it to CBO-like analysis, the results would undoubtedly show that it does almost nothing to address either problem. Indeed, it could very well be shown to make both problems worse. That's why there is no GOP health care plan.  The Politics of the Opt-OutThe rumor at the moment (which may well be disproved shortly) is that the health care bill Harry Reid will send to the Senate floor will include a national public insurance plan that individual states may choose to "opt out" of. I've previously written that I think the "opt-out" is by far the best of the various watered-down public option compromises that have been suggested. In fact, there are scenarios where I think the "opt-out" might actually be better than the full-fledged public option. But I want to expand upon that thinking a little bit, because it requires quite a bit of speculation.
 The Party of One IdeaNow that they are no longer controlling the reins of government, conservatives and Republicans are suddenly very concerned about the size of the federal budget deficit and the national debt. They never miss an opportunity to suggest that President Obama is primarily (if not exclusively) responsible for the size of both the deficit and the debt. And careless members of the mainstream media have shown a remarkable willingness to accept this premise. But as Steve Benen patiently explains (yet again), this is nonsense:
Specifically, 40% of the fiscal deterioration we're seeing -- the single largest contributing factor -- can be attributed to Bush policies. Another 12% comes from Bush's financial rescues, while 20% are the result of the economic crisis. What's President Obama's share? Just 16% of the total, most of which is the result of new spending that was necessary to prevent a depression. Indeed, blaming Obama is backwards: "[P]roperly accounted for, the deficit actually goes down when you compare Obama's budget proposals to current policy, not up."Steve's right about all this, of course, but since most members of the media seem incapable of processing any argument involving numbers, I wonder if there isn't another way to make this same point. Let's try this. Suppose that somehow, magically, the GOP found itself once again in control of Congress and the White House. Republicans could set the agenda and pursue whatever policies they saw fit. What would they do to bring the deficit under control? Well, let's tick through the options. One idea that some Republicans have suggested (safe from their position in the minority) is to cancel the rest of the stimulus bill. The near universal consensus among economists, however, is that stimulus spending in the coming year will be crucial. Moreover, the states, including most red ones, are very much counting on this money. I find it hard to believe that the GOP--even with a larger majority--could garner anywhere near enough votes to cancel the stimulus bill. Moreover, doing so would only improve the deficit numbers for one year (after that, the stimulus spending is done). Even if it didn't harm the economy, it would do nothing whatsoever to improve the long term deficit numbers. So what else? We can be pretty sure that there would be no tax increases. No Republican member of Congress has voted for a tax increase since the 80s and virtually all of them have taken oaths not to do so under any circumstances. So what about spending cuts? Well, the largest source of potential spending cuts is in the defense budget, but the GOP has always been fiercely opposed to any cuts in defense spending, and it's hard to see that changing any time soon. Most of them also want to increase spending in Afghanistan, restart boondoggle missile defense projects, and waste money on fighter planes that don't work. So that leaves us with entitlement spending. Would the GOP make major cuts to Medicare? It's possible, but they are currently opposing efforts to rein in wasteful Medicare spending and promising to protect seniors from any cuts whatsoever. It seems highly unlikely that the GOP would make any real effort to reduce spending on Medicare. So what about Social Security? Well, for starters, Social Security is a much smaller program than Medicare, so even drastic cuts would not make much of a dent in the overall spending picture. Moreover, the last time the GOP tried to "reform" Social Security (by converting it into 401k-style individual accounts), their plan involved massive up front transition costs that were to be paid for by borrowing. In other words, if they passed Bush-style Social Security reform, it would massively inflate both the deficit and the debt, both in the short term and long term. So what does that leave us with? Not much. Honestly, I have no idea what the GOP would do. As near as I can tell, they don't currently have a single idea, realistic or otherwise, for reducing the deficit in the long term. My guess is that if they suddenly found themselves back in power, they'd fumble around for a while and then, having thought of nothing else to do, try to pass some sort of tax cut. It wouldn't make any sense and it would make the budget situation worse, but they just don't have any other policy ideas. They are the Party of One Idea. And it doesn't matter that their one idea is the primary reason we are in such a bad budget situation in the first place. This sounds like parody, but it's not. If journalists actually pressed Republicans to explain how they would reduce the deficit, I bet that the most common answer would be to cut taxes. Let's get them on the record.  Rush Was Not and Cannot Be LibeledThe lengths to which supposedly "serious" conservatives are willing to go to defend Rush Limbaugh are staggering. The National Review this morning has an entire editorial fluffing Limbaugh and attacking his critics. It ends with this gem:
Rush is a rich and powerful man and quite able to take care of himself, but the dishonest attacks on him are the template for equally dishonest attacks on private citizens in less exalted positions, from Tea Party organizers to town-hall critics. If Rush can be ruthlessly libeled by the Democrats and the media, so can they.Actually, the template for such attacks is what Rush has been doing for a living every day for the last few decades, but I'll get back to that. There is so much insanity and projection embedded in this single paragraph that it's worth unpacking it a little bit first. First, as a legal matter, Rush was not libeled, at least by the media. For something to be slander or libel (especially when it involves a public figure), you have to know that what you are saying or writing is false. What happened here was that someone circulated an email that purported to be the "Top Ten Racist Rush Limbaugh Quotes." Contrary to what the National Review and Rush's knee-jerk defenders claim, these quotes are not all fabricated. Most of them, in fact, are well-documented (his quote about Donovan McNabb, etc.). Several of them, however, are unverifiable. They come from secondary sources (books and magazine articles about Rush) and supposedly date back to very early in Limbaugh's career. It's not as if there are transcripts of everything Rush has said on air since the 70s, so who knows whether they're true. Armed with the list of quotes, some people in the media (mainly bloggers) repeated these quotes without verifying them. That's no doubt sloppy reporting and whoever repeated those quotes--at least the ones that cannot be proven to be genuine--should issue a retraction. But it's not libel. No one said anything knowingly false. Indeed, the reason people were so willing to believe that all of these quotes were real was that many of them were, in fact, real. Limbaugh has said a number of very racist things over the years (many which didn't even make the Top Ten). Moreover, as far as I can tell, the most widely repeated quotes from the list (in the particular the McNabb quote) were the real ones, not the ones Rush claims were made up. But let's go one step further. Suppose I were to repeat, right now, one of the quotes Rush claims was fabricated--let's use the slavery quote as an example--and attribute it to him. Would that be libel? The answer is almost certainly no. After all, I don't know that it's false. It comes from a book--101 People Who Are Really Screwing Up America--and I have no particular reason to trust Limbaugh more than the author of that book. And there's no independent way of verifying the truth; there's no comprehensive repository of all of Limbaugh's statements. I, of course, wouldn't do that because I have higher standards, but guess who doesn't. That's right, Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh has made a career out of exactly this sort of character assassination. When he isn't making stuff up himself, he is credulously repeating stuff made up by other people. Any right wing nutjob who writes a book gets invited onto to Limbaugh's show to pollute the airwaves with their outlandish claims, and Rush will then repeat it. Was Vince Foster murdered in an apartment owned by Hillary Clinton? According to Rush he was. Was Michael J. Fox faking his Parkinson's disease symptoms? According to Rush he was. Is Justice Sotomayor a "bigot" and "racist" comparable to David Duke? According to Rush she is. Indeed, just in the past week, Limbaugh repeated several times a false and rather despicable character attack against Obama Department of Education official Kevin Jennings. And these are just examples I came up with in 2 minutes of Googling. There are similar examples to be found in nearly every broadcast Limbaugh has ever done. Limbaugh is a slander-merchant. That's what he does for a living. The notion that someone like him could ever be unfairly treated by the media is inherently ludicrous. To portray Rush as a victim of such tactics--as opposed to the world's biggest practitioner of them--is insulting to everyone's intelligence and a sign of the complete intellectual decay of magazines like the National Review.  More Recent Articles |
