Deep in Debt, But Planning a New Federal Wing
As promised in comments, I read up on President Obama’s health care meeting, ready to pounce on any dissembling. Rather than pen an inferior context graph of my own, I’ll quote the estimable Ms. McArdle:
Obama’s health care plans are very, very expensive, and they mean higher taxes for everyone, not just that elusive klatch of greedy fools who are not in the 95% of working families now allegedly slated for stable or lower taxes. Otherwise, how could Obama hope to pay for it?I think we found out today: magic!
Were there a function on Babelfish that translated the lively prose of Ms. McArdle into the staid style found in a New York Times news analysis, it would read just like Robert Pear’s article:
Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said Mr. Obama had told the health care executives, “You’ve made a commitment; we expect you to keep it.”
If history is a guide, their commitments may not produce the promised savings. Their proposals are vague — promising, for example, to reduce both “overuse and underuse of health care.” None of the proposals are enforceable, and none of the savings are guaranteed. Without such a guarantee, budget rules would normally prevent Congress from using the savings to pay for new initiatives to cover the uninsured. At this point, cost control is little more than a shared aspiration.
My aspiration is to one day vote for a president who gets the nation to go along with his trillion+ dollar policy proposal by persuading us the trade off is worth it, rather than pretending that there is no trade off. But it seems instead I’ll be forced to choose between Republicans who act as though military spending isn’t real, Democrats who act as though social services spending isn’t real, and George W. Bush, who managed on this issue to be a uniter, not a divider, by pretending that all spending wasn’t real.
Michael Kinsley wrote a book a long while back called “Big Babies” in which he alleged that the American public was to blame for politicians telling us we can have our cake and eat it too. I don’t know if it’s more the fault of politicians or the constituents they pander to, but one way or the other, you’re right. Our process just doesn’t allow us to be real about the nature of sacrifice, and the tradeoffs that are necessary.
— Freddie · May 12, 03:02 PM · #
The government prints money, you know. As much as conservatives hate deficit spending, they never seem to explain what’s so bad about it except as a moral issue, or that it devalues dollars already in circulation, causing inflation.
Well, inflation happens anyway, and for a society as heavily in debt as we all are, inflation is a good thing.
Anyway, I’d like to see you defend the current system by your argument of trade-offs. “So, we’ll move to a system where you’ll pay 50% more for the same care, and even better, if you can’t afford to pay out of pocket, you’ll die, unless you’re one of an elect and declining few whose care is paid for by their employer. In that case, hope you never move, leave your job, or get fired; even then getting your care covered will basically be a crapshoot since there’s a market incentive to deny care. But, the upshot is, you can make all your own medical decisions without any sort of medical training whatsoever!”
— Chet · May 12, 04:30 PM · #
I love this.
@Chet: you’ve heard of portability, have you not?
— Blar · May 12, 05:03 PM · #
I’ve heard of it, yes. Have you heard of “single-payer national health insurance”?
— Chet · May 12, 05:10 PM · #
Well, inflation doesn’t happen “anyway” if the monetary unit is tied to a physical reserve, like gold or silver or oil barrels, but generally speaking, when you tie the money to such things you end up with spiraling deflation, because the resource is finite and pretty scarce, even if population isn’t, and the resource is never something that actually acts as a brake on population. (A monetary system based on calories might actually have a future in it, but I digress.)
Inflation is a good thing for debt insofar as you yourself are not a net creditor, and, uh some of us with savings accounts don’t like the way you’re talking :). And, past a certain point, the US’s creditors are going price in all the debasement we’re doing, or are going to decide that the value of a future dollar is effectively zero, and aren’t going to want their debts in silly green paper. This will be a very, very bad day.
(These are some pretty flaky arguments, but I assume the audience at TAS is pretty sympathetic to even a badly-made monetarist argument and will improve it, so I’ll leave it here.)
— j · May 12, 06:14 PM · #
@Chet: You don’t imagine that single-payer and portability can possibly be divorced?
Your first post suggested that the failure to spend gobs of federal money on insurance consigns jobless people to a life without health insurance. My point was that your framing was a false choice.
— Blar · May 12, 08:14 PM · #
Your choice isn’t just R vs D – vote Libertarian – abolish the 2-party system!
— Dave · May 13, 03:13 AM · #
I don’t see the false choice. Elaborate?
— Chet · May 13, 04:50 AM · #
I like the way Chet thinks! Why should the government go through the bother of, like, trying to collect taxes at all when they could just print the money? Think of all that money wasted on the IRS budget when it could go towards making healthcare affordable.
— Billy! · May 13, 02:47 PM · #
Here’s a silly idea: Before the “Great Society” started injecting tax-dollars into the healthcare sector of the market and deforming it, people used to pay for care when they received it. And doctors who didn’t want to starve found ways to make their services affordable.
In the forty-odd years of my lifetime, healthcare costs have grown at roughly twice the rate of general inflation. Higher education costs have grown roughly twice as fast as healthcare. These are the two segments of the marketplace which have been flooded with tax-dollars since the inception of the Great Society. Those tax-dollars have perverted the operation of the marketplace, removing all downward pressures on price which honest supply-demand market performance would otherwise have exerted.
The solution isn’t MORE governemnt. The solution is to undo the unconstitutional meddling that’s already been done.
— Bubblehead · May 14, 10:41 PM · #