Parsing our traditional media reporter

I saw this WaPo piece courtesy of Dean Baker's Beat the Press blog and the illogic was so extreme I couldn't even get past the first few paragraphs of the fictional exchange between “Barack” and “Paul” (Gee, I wonder who those two names could be representing? /snark)

 

Paul: Okay, you guys won the first round. Congratulations on that New York House seat. But “Medicare as we know it” can’t continue.

 

Okay, “Paul” admits that, yes indeed, the New York District 26 election was all about Ryan's plan to do away with Medicare. Can Medicare “as we know it” continue? Well, health care as we know it certainly can't continue. President Obama made that quite clear In the speech that kicked off the push to get the Affordable Care Act passed.

 

But the problem that plagues the health care system is not just a problem for the uninsured. Those who do have insurance have never had less security and stability than they do today. More and more Americans worry that if you move, lose your job, or change your job, you'll lose your health insurance too. More and more Americans pay their premiums, only to discover that their insurance company has dropped their coverage when they get sick, or won't pay the full cost of care. It happens every day.

 

[snip]

 

Then there's the problem of rising cost. We spend one and a half times more per person on health care than any other country, but we aren't any healthier for it. This is one of the reasons that insurance premiums have gone up three times faster than wages. It's why so many employers -- especially small businesses -- are forcing their employees to pay more for insurance, or are dropping their coverage entirely.

 

So, it's not like anybody back in mid-2009 disputed that American health care was (and still is) quite a mess.

 

Seniors now have little incentive to control costs, and providers, paid by the procedure, have every reason to ramp them up.

 

Uh, wait a sec, how does “We spend one and a half times more per person on health care than any other country” square with the idea that private, for-profit health care insurance companies are just throwing money at the problem of health care, seemingly without a care in the world? I thought conservatives, Republicans and right-wingers have been claiming for decades that it's government that spends wildly and freely and doesn't really care about costs. Let's look at another paragraph from Obama's speech:

 

One man from Illinois lost his coverage in the middle of chemotherapy because his insurer found that he hadn't reported gallstones that he didn't even know about. They delayed his treatment, and he died because of it. Another woman from Texas was about to get a double mastectomy when her insurance company canceled her policy because she forgot to declare a case of acne. By the time she had her insurance reinstated, her breast cancer had more than doubled in size. That is heart-breaking, it is wrong, and no one should be treated that way in the United States of America.

 

Notice that Obama is citing cases from private, for-profit health care insurance companies. He's not talking about government agencies. Where on Earth does “Paul” get the odd notion that American seniors are driving up costs via unreasonable demands when other countries with government (i.e., not for-profit) health care have done a much better job of restraining costs? That doesn't sound like any private capitalist institution I've ever heard of. The important point to remember here is that Medicare administrative costs are about a fifth of private health insurance costs (The study by the Council for Affordable Health Insurance calculates administrative costs for Medicare as being 3.3% of total expenses, private health care costs are at 16.7%). Medicare is not the problem when we're discussing the state of our health care system.

 

Medicare costs were 8.5 percent of the federal budget in 1990 — they’ll be 17.4 percent by 2020.

 

I have no reason to doubt this, but the problem is far bigger than just Medicare.

 

Barack: The current system can’t go on. I wouldn’t say this publicly, but my party’s wrong to pretend it can.

 

Umm, see the above. No one on either side of the aisle disagreed with Obama's position that health care was a mess and had to be reformed. I haven't the vaguest clue as to where the WaPo reporter is getting this from. Now, if this was a piece from a random blogger, the problem here would apply to just that one person. But this is a traditional media piece and these people pride themselves on having editors and research assistants and fact-checkers. An oversight like this isn't just the fault of one person, it's the fault of a whole group of people. This merits extra condemnation on our part.

 

Still, your approach goes way too far. Seniors would get help to buy private insurance but would pay a lot more than they do now.

And over time, because the vouchers rise only with inflation, not with medical costs, beneficiaries would have to pay even more. They’re not going to be able to afford it, not with median incomes of less than $21,000. And why should they? You’re forced to make deep cuts in Medicare because you won’t agree to raise taxes and that’s the only other way to get to balance.

This sounds entirely accurate to me.

Paul: Look, I could maybe support higher taxes as part of an overall deal.

That's a nice idea in theory, but there's no evidence that Republicans are willing to raise taxes for any reason. Remember, the whole idea popularized by President Reagan and today pushed very strongly by Grover Norquist is “Starve the beast.” “The beast” being the parts of the government budget that serve the people of the middle and working classes, the government programs that do not directly support the military-industrial complex. So does “Paul” really mean to say “I just can’t admit that” or is he not “admitting” it because he has no intention of ever doing so? Sorry, I can't go along with the WaPo reporter's mind-reading here and refuse to credit “Paul” with the realism necessary to agree to raise taxes.

On costs, my plan gives extra subsidies to the poorest, sickest and oldest seniors. If those aren’t big enough, we could talk.

No. Again, this is a combination of wishful thinking and mind-reading. Ryan simply put out a plan wherein costs would keep up with inflation, not with medical costs and medical costs are increasing a good deal faster than inflation. As Baker points out:

And the comparison of the cost of the Ryan plan to the existing Medicare plan is not a hypothetical. The additional $34 trillion cost that CBO projected for buying Medicare equivalent policies is based on the actual history with Medicare Plus Choice and Medicare Advantage. How many times must this experiment be repeated before its results are accepted?

Ryan has not withdrawn any elements of his plan upon being informed that the cost would be an additional $34 trillion. This idea that he would be flexible and reasonable and would negotiate parts of his plan is sheer wishful thinking.

One statement “Barack” makes strikes me as very true.

Otherwise, costs just get shifted elsewhere.

Precisely! The whole idea of the Ryan plan is to simply shift costs from those most able to pay them (The government, large insurance companies) to seniors, people who are just getting by on Social Security and savings and pensions and who really don't have the spare cash to just toss into “the game.” Having “skin the game” is a rilly kewl-sounding phrase, but seniors spent their lives contributing to a system that they then expected would be there for them when they got to the point of really needing it. I saw a survey many years ago that said our maximum earning years are between 45 and 52. After that, memory and energy take a hit and our capacity for work begins to decline. It is cruel beyond any human decency to expect any typical baby boomer (Somebody born in 1947 would be 64 now) to suddenly have to deal with radical changes to their health care system. As I pointed out above, a person of that age will be living from hand to mouth with very little cushion to deal with radical changes. Such people simply don't have the resources to go out onto the market and negotiate whole new deals for themselves.

Rich Lowry asks: “Where are the jobs?”

Rich Lowry is the fellow who wrote the piece for National Review entitled "We're Winning [in Iraq]," but he wrote it back in 2005 when the US was most certainly not winning.  Lowry writes a basically decent piece today that takes the Republican Party to task for forgetting about jobs. Lowry gives far too much credit to the Republican Party for being sincere in their desire to fix Medicare's long-range difficulties ("If political life were fair, they’d be rewarded for their farsightedness") but is absolutely correct is saying that:

If you are worried about the security of your job, if your personal income is stagnant, if the value of your home is still declining, and if you are paying more for food and fuel, the perilous state of a government program circa 2024 that you know, one way or the other, will never be permitted to go bankrupt is not a subject of proverbial kitchen-table conversation.

Unfortunately for the Republicans, Lowry is also correct when he says:

Retreat on Medicare isn’t an option now. Like Cortes in Mexico, Republicans have disabled their ships behind them.

I strongly endorse Lowry's prescription here:

Deficit reduction should only be an element of a program for renewing the economy, which directly impacts people’s lives and also makes controlling the debt marginally easier. By a rough back-of-the-envelope calculation, every 1 percent of economic growth above the assumptions of the Congressional Budget Office knocks $2 trillion from the debt over the next 10 years.

My only revision to Lowry's suggestion is that deficit reduction should be placed entirely on the back burner and that the government should concentrate entirely on economic growth. Any serious attempts to cut the budget should wait until the country is prosperous and citizens have plenty of jobs and our infrastructure is well on the way to getting fixed and America is well on the way to replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy. In other words, deficit reduction is not an "element" of economic recovery. Deficit reduction is a luxury we can't afford for the next half-decade, at least.

The real problem I have with Lowry's piece is in the next-to-last paragraph:

House Republicans just released a growth plan. Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio has been evangelizing for a growth agenda since his election last year. The elements are familiar — cutting taxes and reforming the tax code, reining in regulation, increasing energy production, passing free-trade agreements. It doesn’t have much chance of getting signed into law, but neither does Ryan’s Medicare plan.

This plan has the slight problem of having absolutely nothing to do with economic growth. G.W. Bush cut taxes back in 2001 and 2003 and growth has been anemic ever since. Not sure what "reforming the tax code" means, but it sounds like allowing the rich to keep even more of what they already have and preventing the government from making use of the money that's sitting around in money market accounts and not going to much use. "[I]ncreasing energy production" sounds good, but I suspect it's just code for "drill, baby, drill," i.e., let's use up our energy resources even faster without attempting to find  any replacement sources. Free-trade agreements simply allow corporations to outsource jobs to other countries and thus are in direct opposition to getting the economy at home moving. It means more pay for those who are already wealthy, but it's far from clear that the non-rich will benefit in any way. Please note that with the passage of NAFTA (Activated back in 1994), the share of income from the five quintiles was

Year	Share of aggregate income
	Lowest fifth	Second fifth	Third fifth	Fourth fifth	Highest fifth	Top 5 percent

1994 (24)

4.2

10.0

15.7

23.3

46.9

20.1

2001

4.2

9.7

15.4

22.9

47.7

21.0

2009 (36)

3.9

9.4

15.3

23.2

48.2

20.7

This is not simply the result of NAFTA, but of a whole series of political decisions to move money to the higher tax brackets and away from those who are making less to begin with.  No, Senator Portman doesn't want economic growth, he just wants to continue the movemen of money upwards and to use up natural resources to the long-range detriment of the entire planet.

Lowry's piece is essentially a good one, but his proposed plan for growth is a complete FAIL!

Ryan plan rebuked in special election

Kathleen Courtney Hochul, the Erie County clerk and longtime Democratic figure who defied political experts who had given her little chance of success, ground out a stunning and surprisingly comfortable victory Tuesday in the special election for the House seat in the predominantly Republican 26th Congressional District.

Hochul defeated Republican Jane L. Corwin, a Clarence assemblywoman, 47 percent to 43 percent, with 97 percent of election districts reporting, while the Tea Party’s Jack Davis mustered only 9 percent in his fourth try for the seat. Ian L. Murphy of the Green Party recorded 1 percent, while overall turnout was about 25 percent.

The results marked a stunning defeat for the GOP in a contest that garnered intense national attention as the first competitive race following the Republican takeover of the House in last November’s elections. And as a jubilant Hochul took the stage at her headquarters at the UAW Hall in Amherst at about 10:30 p.m., she reminded supporters about the core of her campaign — controversial proposals by the GOP to revamp Medicare.

This tells us two things. First, Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) plan to toss granny onto the tender mercies of the marketplace with nothing more than a voucher that she can purchase insurance with, a voucher that will decrease in value over time, was a really lousy idea that should never have been proposed. Second, for the zillionoth and 23^rd time, Howard Dean’s 50-State Strategy is confirmed. It always was the better way to go and it proved itself once again. Even though Hochel didn’t have any reasonable chance to win her contest just a few short months ago, the Republican overreach gave her an opening and, because she already had an organization on the ground and ready to go, she was ready to take advantage of the opportunity.

Democrats should work hard to exploit this victory. They should drop all talk of a “Grand Bargain” between themselves and Republicans (I’ve very strongly urged the progressive Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) to simply drop his membership in the “Gang of Six” and to just toss all of those plans into the recycling bin) and should adopt Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s plan to simply stand behind Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and to just plain support all three of them unconditionally. There’s absolutely no call for reducing the federal budget to where Republicans would like to take it.

Update: Rather jarring to see a word here that really doesn’t belong in President Obama’s message of congratulations: “Kathy and I both believe that we need to create jobs, grow our economy, and reduce the deficit in order to outcompete other nations and win the future.” (Emphasis added).

What in the heck does reducing the deficit have to do with anything?!?!?!? The deficit is a purely technical problem that nobody would ever notice or be aware of were it not for deficit scolds nagging the country about it all the time. Jobs and growing the economy are serious and meaningful issues that have a direct impact on people’s lives. Those first two goals are often in conflict with the goal of reducing the deficit.

There’s not the slightest question as to where Democrats should stand when it comes to a conflict between the two goals Democrats should stand firmly and forthrightly in favor of jobs and growth. The deficit should be handled, it’s not a good thing to have a big deficit, but that’s a very distant second priority.

Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi rips Republican budget

Ooh! That's gotta hurt! Pelosi points out, quite correctly, how the Republican budget both hurts seniors and benefits wealthy supporters.

Update: Derek Thompson from the Atlantic defends the media's overlooking job-creation as a deficit-reduction strategy by saying "Nobody's talking about it." well, perhaps Republicans aren't talking about it, but the blanket term "no one" obviously doesn't include Democrats, who have been talking about job creation quite a bit.

The effects of state taxes

At the same time that NPR concludes that “Y'know, raising state taxes on the rich does not cause them to flee to lower-tax states,” Texas decides, in the middle of a fiscal crisis, to do without $1.4 million annually by giving a tax break to people buying yachts!

Now, I can kind of understand Texas' decision on the grounds of economic stimulus, but this decision only applies to the ultra-wealthy. It means nothing to Joe or Jane regular-person. There are no stimulus measures that apply to non-millionaires. And yes, the NPR study appears to me to be entirely sensible. It concludes that wealthy people tend to have strong ties to the community as they tend to have established businesses with long-time customers and employees and tend to be involved in other community activities (The e-e-evil Koch brothers also give money to an impressive list of decent and worthwhile recipients), so no, wealthy people are not likely to up and leave because the state takes a bit more of their money than they did the year before.

Do state taxes affect whether or not they move into a state to begin with? Not really, as rich people move to where the customers are. If people are moving to California to take part in the Gold Rush, hey, someone's got to sell them the pans, picks and shovels they'll need to do their gold retrieval!

And what is the cause of Texas' fiscal crisis? As we're seeing with lots of other states (Specifically, California and the 1978 Proposition 13), the real problem is under-taxation. The wealthy aren't paying nearly enough to cover the state bills.

A not-unexpected reaction

Unfortunately, there's nothing surprising about the fact that Republicans have now convinced the nation that the deficit, and not the lack of jobs, which is in turn due to lack of consumer demand, which is in turn due to the collapse of the housing bubble, is the real problem and that it must be fixed NOW!!!

 

The suggested solution, of course, is to cut government spending. Never mind that the government spends money because it is trying to meet real and serious needs. The battle cry is “We must cut spending!” The British elected a new Parliament recently, which set about “hammer and tongs” to cut Britain's budget. How did that work out for them? Not well at all. Britain's GDP showed a 0.5% contraction as opposed to any sort of growth.

 

 

“The Chancellor needs to get his head out of the sand. He doesn't seem to understand that without jobs and growth you can't get the deficit down. The slower growth, higher unemployment and higher inflation we now see under George Osborne means he is now set to borrow £46 billion more than he was planning to. That's a vicious circle and makes no economic sense at all.

 

“Families know that cutting too far and too fast is hurting, but now we know it’s not working either. George Osborne can't keep making excuses – it's not the wrong kind of snow that's to blame, it's the wrong kind of policies. He needs to think again before it's too late.”

Is it a good idea to reduce the deficit in any event? Actually, it isn't. The US is seriously behind in getting our infrastructure fixed and up-to-date. Missouri just had to evacuate 1000 people from threatened areas because the levees in the town of Poplar Bluffs failed in four separate places. Nothing surprising about this failure. The levees were rated as “unacceptable” back in 2008 by the US Army Corps of Engineers. Why did this particular levee fail? The community simply couldn't afford to keep it up. The US as a whole needs to spend about $50 billion in order to get all the levees back into shape (The US has 881 counties or 28% of the total number of all counties, that have flood control systems). Of course, people have been moving into areas that are protected by levees, so the longer levees go unmaintained, the more US citizens that are put at risk. In all, the US needs to spend about $2.2 trillion in order to meet all of our infrastructure needs. Curing the deficit by getting spending down is a very bad idea as our infrastructure will then be permitted to deteriorate still further.

Can the Democrats make the case for more federal spending? Well yes, but President Obama's support for the “Cat Food Commission” (i.e., the Deficit Commission) directly contradicts the idea that the deficit is meaningless compared to getting Americans back to work. Essentially, Democrats would have to contradict pretty much everything that the party has been saying about the deficit for the past two years in order to convince Americans that jobs should be our number one priority.

Update: From Daily Kos Pundit Round-up

"Note in the [Stafford Act chart] that it's the Governor, who asks FEMA, who asks the President to declare a Federal disaster or emergency so as to free up funds and relief that through the National Response Framework can be delivered to the states. ..."

The federal response is intiiated by the state, and complexity and speed are inversely related. The wider the area affected, the slower the response will be (because supplies and infrastructure needs to come from farther away.) So let's talk about cutting the budget, shall we? Especially for FEMA. (see GOP's Continuing Resolution Cuts Funding for National Weather Service, FEMA.)  Brilliant idea.

A review of “Path to Prosperity”

Representative Paul Ryan's (R-WI) economic agenda

 

 

Only recently, millions of American families saw their dreams destroyed in a

financial disaster caused by misguided policies, perverse incentives, and irresponsible leadership. This crisis squandered the nation’s savings and crippled its economy.

 

Path to Prosperity PDF p. 10

 

 

Ryan makes it clear in the next paragraph that he blames “the last Congress ” for America's economic problems. Nevertheless, he's right. America's economic problems have everything to do with “misguided” government policies. The government under President George W. Bush was informed by liberal economists as early as 2002 that there was a housing bubble and that the collapse of that bubble would have bad effects on the economy. Both of the Chairmen of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, were looked up to as economic authorities and both of them miserably failed to even take notice of the housing bubble until after it had burst in late 2007, costing the economy several trillion dollars in lost consumer demand.

 

 

At a time when the free-market foundations of the American economy were in desperate need of

restoration and repair, the last Congress took actions that further undermined them. The President and his party’s leaders embarked on a stimulus spending spree that added hundreds of billions of dollars to the debt, yet failed to deliver on its promises to create jobs.

 

 

Hmm, well, first off, the “free market foundations” of America's economy were and are in perfectly good shape. It was consumer demand that had fallen off a cliff due to there being so many people losing value in their homes (For most of them, that was their main investment that they were going to sell off in order to retire in comfort), in addition, millions of Americans were thrown out of work. The “stimulus spending spree” was an absolutely critical necessity in order to get consumer demand back up. It only fell short on that goal because President Obama wanted to get his stimulus bill through without annoying and aggravating Congresspeople and Senators too much and therefore, he didn't force a good bill through. One of his economic advisers wanted a $1.2 trillion stimulus, but by “negotiating with himself,” Obama finally settled for only $787 billion and far too much of that was in the form of tax breaks as opposed to straight-out spending.

 

 

Acute economic hardship was exploited to enact unprecedented expansions of government power.

 

This did not sit well with the American people. Citizens stood up and demanded that their leaders reacquaint themselves with America’s founding ideals of liberty, limited government, and equality under the rule of law.

 

 

Government influence on the economy certainly expanded greatly, but it's far from clear that President Obama “exploited” economic hardship in order to expand the government. No one has shown that Obama took any power that wasn't needed in order to get the economy back on track. The “Tea Party” that citizens were allegedly spontaneously joining in order to protest the actions that the allegedly greedy, grasping government was taking, was and is an astroturf organization bankrolled by billionaires (Notably, the Koch brothers) in order to protect the economic interests of the top 1% of income-earners.

 

 

In recent years, both political parties have squandered the public’s trust.

 

 

I certainly agree that the Republican Party has done so. Not sure how Democrats have done so except by giving in too often and by surrendering the initiative in the war of ideas to the other side. We've seen a spontaneous uprising in Wisconsin due to the overreach of the Governor there, but the Obama Administration, although they've quietly helped Wisconsin citizens, has generally kept a low profile and has not vigorously exploited the situation there at all.

 

 

The American people ended a unified Republican majority in 2006, just as they ended a unified Democratic majority last fall. Americans reject leaders who focus on the pursuit of power at the expense of principle.

 

 

Not sure I agree as to why either Republicans lost power or as to why Democrats did. Seems to me in both cases that voters were punishing parties that failed to fulfill their mandates. Republicans led America into two grinding, inconclusive wars and chalked up a disastrous economic performance, Democrats failed to either end those wars or to get America's economy back on track. I don't see much evidence that voters were reacting to a failure to follow “principles.”

 

 

But a government that loses its sovereignty to its bondholders cannot long guarantee its people’s prosperity – or secure their freedom.

 

 

Ah yes, Paul Krugman refers to this theory as the “bond vigilantes,” suggesting dark figures waiting in the alley with switchblades and baseball bats, ready to pounce on Presidents who fail to follow sound economic principles. As the US trades with the world in its own currency and does not carry on trade in Rubles or Euros or the Yuan, there is absolutely zero danger that bondholders will someday take over the government or force it to take any action the government does not wish to take. The US is not Greece and is not subject to the pressures that the Greeks are subject to.

 

 

A government that buries the next generation under an avalanche of debt cannot claim the moral high ground in the world.

 

 

Having lots of debt is certainly not a good thing and America was certainly on the right path when President Clinton left office, as the national debt was lower and diminishing. Has that national debt become unreasonable or unsustainable? If it were, one would think that bondholders would be insisting on high interest rates or they wouldn't buy our bonds. They aren't, interest rates are low by historical standards, so it's not at all clear what the problem is. Does debt have anything to do with the “moral high ground”? With the national debt being entirely sustainable, it's hard to see much of a connection between debt and morality.

 

 

This Path to Prosperity draws upon solutions from across the political spectrum and builds upon the important work of the President’s bipartisan Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform.

 

 

%$#@&!!! The damned “Cat Food Commission” is what Ryan's referring to. The Commission that failed to fulfill its mandate and issued a report anyway, despite not having the appropriate number of votes in favor of its recommendations. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) disgraced himself by voting in favor of its recommendations, even though he knew full well that the proposed plan was an awful one. He piteously mewled that he needed to maintain some credibility in order to be “part of the conversation.” Representative Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) distinguished herself by refusing to vote for its recommendations because she recognized what an awful mess those recommendations were. Interestingly, Ryan was also part of the Cat Food Commission (It was called that because the Commission would obviously like to see grandma and grandpa living in a four-story walk-up with broken windows and no heat, eating cat food for their dinner) and refused to vote for its recommendations because the Commission wanted to raise taxes as part of its approach to “fixing” the economy.

 

 

While American families have been tightening their belts, these agencies have been the beneficiaries of a major spending spree over the last two years. Since January of 2009, there has been a 24 percent increase in this slice of the pie – a number that jumps to 84 percent when stimulus funds are included.

 

 

Here's a familiar conservative/Republican/right-wing complaint. Why can't government be run like a family and stay within its budget? Well, one reason is that modern families don't stay within their budgets, either. When a family wished to have a carriage for their horses to pull, that was a sufficiently cheap investment that the family could afford to wait until they had the full cost in hand and then go to the carriage-maker to custom-manufacture a carriage just for them. When the automobile arrived on the scene, they quickly became too expensive to pay for outright and so, consumer credit was born. When homes were hand-built using local materials, there was no need for consumer credit. When small city houses and especially when suburbs, were born and families didn't have the money to purchase them outright, again, consumer credit was developed to meet that need. Governments run debt/deficits for precisely the same reason. If the US wants to fight a war overseas, say in Afghanistan or Iraq or wants to establish, say, Medicare Part D or wants to give tax breaks to millionaires and billionaires and corporations, it sells bonds and covers the cost that way. Yes, it would be nice to cover everything via taxes and during several years under President Clinton, everything was. But when the country has a severe economic problem, such as with the collapse of the housing bubble, it's entirely sensible for the government to run an even bigger deficit to cover all of the things (Schools, hospitals, transportation infrastructure, etc) that would otherwise have to stop working.

 

 

As illustrated in Figure 1, autopilot spending accounted for around 60 percent of all federal spending in 2010. Congress does not regularly debate, annually appropriate or properly scrutinize this category of spending. If an individual meets legal eligibility requirements for these government programs, he or she automatically receives – or “is legally entitled” – to the benefit. This category includes food stamps, unemployment benefits, and farm subsidies – programs that are frequently referred to as “entitlement programs.”

 

 

It's not at all clear why, if a recipient of an entitlement program is legally entitled (I don't put that phrase in scare quotes because it's not clear why Ryan uses quote marks in the first place) to a government benefit, that the program under which the benefit is distributed is not also “properly scrutinized.” Why would a benefit that a citizen was legally entitled to not be considered properly awarded to the citizen? If Congress has written the eligibility requirements so that citizens have too easy a time getting benefits, then that's a problem to be tackled in the legislative process. That's a fight over details, not over principles.

 

 

But Americans will not be able to rely on these programs for much longer unless Congress repairs and reforms them. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid all face structural problems that are driving them – and the country – into bankruptcy.

 

 

Well, Medicare and Medicaid face great problems because of four of what the Kaiser Family Foundation calls “cost drivers.” They include Technology and Prescription drugs, Chronic disease (Longer life spans means more diseases in total), Aging of the population and the Administrative costs that come along with the extensive use of private industry in health matters. All of these drivers are outside of the design of the programs. There are no problems that are traceable solely to the way in which these programs are designed. As Ryan's own chart on p. 16 shows, Social Security is not a problem at all and should not be included on this list.

 

 

Ryan's chart on page 14 is correct. There are far fewer workers today supporting far many more retirees than when the Social Security program was enacted. But what has also increased is worker productivity. The average worker of today produces far more value than the worker of yesterday did. There is no “massive shift of earnings away from younger families ” that Ryan asserts there is.

 

 

Ryan considers it a major problem that the Affordable Care Act puts “even more of the health sector under government control. ” This isn't a problem at all because the private, capitalist sector does a very poor job of managing health care in the first place. That's because buying a car is essentially different from buying an operation to fix a heart valve. Say a woman decides to get her breasts enlarged. That's a straight, capitalist, comparison-shopping experience. She looks at the different models, decides what it is she can afford and arranges for the operation. Now, say that her enlarged breasts start leaking into her chest and putting her health at risk. It wasn't her choice to have to deal with that kind of problem, so she doesn't necessarily have the money to pay to fix the problem. She can't engage in any comparison-shopping because she needs the problem fixed right away. It's wildly unrealistic to expect her to focus on details like the expertise of the different doctors when her health is deteriorating. In the first instance, our hypothetical person is a customer. She had plenty of time to research the various issues connected to her purchase and collected all the money needed before she contacted the doctor who would do the operation. In the second, she's a patient who's dealing with a problem she had no reason to expect and that she hasn't prepared for in any way. It's simply not valid to compare fixing health problems to any sort of shopping experience as the two experiences are not at all alike. Regardless of how much money Medicare/Medicaid may or may not waste, forcing citizens to use a comparison-shopping model is not an answer and never will be.

 

 

This next sentence is from p. 24, where Ryan discusses his Reform Agenda.

 

 

Government spending on domestic departments and agencies has grown too much, too fast over the past decade, with much of the money going to programs and projects the nation can do without.

 

 

This is a problem that goes all the way back (At least as far as I can remember, I was In college when Ronald Reagan won the Presidency) to Reagan's 1980 campaign. He put out the general proposition that government spending should be cut. Okay, fine. He got general agreement on that score. Then came the hard question. What, exactly, to cut? On that, he managed to find lots of small cuts during his first year in office, then he had picked all the “low-hanging fruit” and then had to start really looking. For the past 30 years, conservatives have been looking and they've found very little that 1. Americans can agree on and that 2. Would make a serious difference. It's like saying “Let's establish a toxic waste dump.” Okay, fine, people can easily agree on the need to do that. Where do y'all wanna put it? Ah, there's where decision-making gets difficult and complicated. If any program were one that “ the nation [could] do without,” then it's difficult to see how that program was established in the first place. Obviously, any program that's been running for awhile and that disburses money or things of monetary value to constituents is going to be considered vital and irreplaceable, if only to the constituents that directly benefit from it. Those constituents are likely to be generously distributing campaign money to politicians, which makes their desires very important for those politicians to keep in mind.

 

 

Ending corporate welfare:

 

 

Y'know what? I'll believe it when I see it. Don't get me wrong, I think ending corporate welfare is a great idea, but when a Republican actually does any such thing, I'll be happy to stand up and cheer. I just don't foresee ever having to do any such thing.

 

 

Boosting American energy resources:

 

 

The Continental United States reached “Peak Oil” back during the 1970s. That means we already extracted half of all the oil that we'll ever extract around 40 years ago. When does the world as a whole hit Peak Oil? Many sources say we're already there. No, if the US is going to become self-sufficient in energy, it'll have to be through the development of alternative, renewable energy. “Drill, baby, drill” was a cute campaign slogan, but it's not a realistic answer for America's energy needs.

 

 

Sorry, but the highly respected economist Paul Krugman weighed in on Ryan's proposals and has found them severely wanting. Also, as Media Matters points out here, Ryan is not exactly some sort of guru or expert that we should expect anything amazing out of. He went along with every budget-busting, unworkable, worthless economic program that President G.W. Bush proposed. There's absolutely no reason to think that anything he produces is going to be worth examining, let alone enacting.