View 612 March 1 - 7, 2010 (original) (raw)
Thursday, March 4, 2010
On the Health Care Crisis
We are headed for what may well be a constitutional crisis, so of course the news distribution system has broken down. The essence of the conflict was given in public remarks by Representative Paul Ryan during the health care summit at Blair House. Those remarks have been published on the Op-Ed page of the Wall Street Journal this morning, which then did an editorial about them.
http://online.wsj.com/article/
SB10001424052748704548604
575097602436388116.html?mod
=rss_opinion_main
The problem is that while the editorial is available on line, and references the Ryan article (a summary of what he said at Blair House), the link in the on-line editorial leads to a small extract plus an offer to sell you the rest of the article. I presume that's good for the economics of the Wall Street Journal, but it makes it harder for those of us trying to follow the arguments.
Much of Ryan's speech can be found in a Washington Post article http://www.washingtonpost.com/
wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/
25/AR2010022504074.html published back in February, and there are various postings of the speech itself, so I suppose those will have to do; but it says a lot about the state of debate in the US that it's vary hard to find -- at least it has been hard for me to find -- a simple transcript of what Ryan said at the time and his summary that was done in the Journal this morning.
The substance of Ryan's remarks -- questions, really -- go to the financial manipulations used to justify the ObamaCare bill, The President pretends that he answered those questions, but in fact he did not, and he is now falsely claiming that much of this was settled at the summit, when in fact it was not. This is one of those cases where the gory details are important.
Ryan said at the summit:
[Mr. President,] Now, you're right to frame the debate on cost and health inflation. And in September, when you spoke to us in the well of the House, you basically said -- and I totally agree with this -- I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits either now or in the future.
Since the Congressional Budget Office can't score your bill, because it doesn't have sufficient detail, but it tracks very similar to the Senate bill, I want to unpack the Senate score a little bit.
He then proceeds to do that.
Well, first off, the bill has 10 years of tax increases, about half a trillion dollars, with 10 years of Medicare cuts, about half a trillion dollars, to pay for six years of spending.
Now, what's the true 10-year cost of this bill in 10 years? That's $2.3 trillion.
It does couple of other things. It takes $52 billion in higher Social Security tax revenues and counts them as offsets. But that's really reserved for Social Security. So either we're double-counting them or we don't intend on paying those Social Security benefits.
It takes $72 billion and claims money from the CLASS Act. That's the long-term care insurance program. It takes the money from premiums that are designed for that benefit and instead counts them as offsets.
The Senate Budget Committee chairman said that this is a Ponzi scheme that would make Bernie Madoff proud.
There is considerably more, none of it answered by the President. As Ryan says, he is not demeaning the Congressional Budget Office for its evaluations of the bill; he is pointing out that the information they were given is incomplete because the evaluation was restricted to the bill itself. The true cost of ObamaCare is much higher than the official estimates have said they are; and it will add a very great deal more than a dime to the deficit.
We have a system that's not working very well because it does not control costs, and we are about to substitute for it a system that has even less cost control and hands out even larger entitlements to even more people. We are building a Ponzi scheme, and it will be decided by Party whips, not by any consultation with the American people. That will create a real constitutional crisis within the next decade, and possibly sooner. It's not too late: Pelosi says she has the votes to ram this through Congress using 'reconciliation' procedures, but there's some doubt about that.
It's possible that some Democrats will come to their senses. That's pretty well the conclusion of the Wall Street Journal editorial (hardly surprising), which has many other insightful conclusions. I don't usually echo such matters, but this one is important because it will generate a real constitutional crisis. This nation won't recover from these crises until there are two parties able to govern without attempting to force fundamental changes on the nation absent any overwhelming mandate to do so. The Democrats thought they got such a mandate in November 2008; at least some of the entrenched Democrat leadership were able to maintain that they had, and given the President's popularity and his platform of 'change we can believe in' there was some evidence of this.
That's no longer true; the elections of November 2009 showed that in November 2008 a great part of the nation was weary of the Republican leadership -- the Creeps -- and rejected them, and now they were rejecting the Democrat leadership -- the Nuts. There is a desperate need for sane center-right government in these United States. This health care crisis is but the first of the series of constitutional crises coming up. Using Chicago politics to ram through ObamaCare is only the first stage.
We will have more and worse crises until we have Republicans vs. Democrats rather than the Creeps and the Nuts. Defeating this Chicago Politics 'reconciliation' is an important step toward that. The Democrats may not have the votes to begin this crisis: it's vitally important that the Independents in this nation make it clear to their representatives that whatever the solution to our health problems, fundamental changes to American society ought not be made by devious manipulation of Congressional rules.
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We are told that Green Jobs are the wave of the future, and the basis of our new economy. We can hope that works out better than the Electric Zamboni worked at the Olympics:
http://jalopnik.com/5472523/
winter-olympics-electric-zamboni-fail
http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/
energy/stories/electric-ice-resurfacers
-sputter-at-olympics
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On access to WSJ articles:
Free access to WSJ articles
I've had good luck accessing full content of WSJ articles by copying the article title into Google News search, doing the search and clicking the article link from there. YMMV.
-Jim
I do the same, particularly when someone who subscribes to WSJ sends me a link. It's made a bit more complex because I am a subscriber and sometimes it recognizes me. I am not really complaining about the WSJ practices. They continue to survive and to keep a reasonable editorial staff, although of course most of their reporters are on financial beats (as they should be). Information may want to be free, but the gathering and confirmation of information and preparing for its publication costs money. In my case we operate on the public radio model (thanks to all those who recentlysubscribed or renewed during our last pledge drive), but that model doesn't scale well.
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I met Tom Bethell a long time ago on a trip to Moscow sponsored by the World Journalism Association. I've told the story before: we were in the hotel bar, and discovered we both had Atari Portfolio computers. Tom was a two-finger typist and used his to knock out a column while we talked. Alas, as a touch typist, I couldn't keep up; the little keyboard was too small. I was learning the two-thumb method until I got an iPhone.
Anyway. Tom's monthly column in the American Spectator on "Why Are We in Afghanistan?" which is in fact a good question. He is more eager simply to get out of there than I am, as his series of questions shows. His argument is similar to mine: winning a favorable outcome requires us to make promises we cannot keep, and a sustained will we do not have.
As evidence of our failing will:
"Consider the Islamic traitor at Fort Hood, who shot and killed 12 soldiers in November. The response? Chaplains moved promptly to 'comfort' the ;larger army community' which was itself 'struggling to make sense of what happened.' It made perfect sense, however, to those engaged in Islamic jihad -- and to those who understand that that is their intention. It made no sense only to those who think that the world consists of liberals-at-heart some of whom suffer from too much 'stress'. A lieutenant colonel on the base said that the Fort Hood 'community' responded like this: They were holding 'critical-incident stress-management sessions.'
"That's it. They have martyrs, we have critical-incident stress-management sessions."
The United States Army, at least under present control, considers the threat to diversity more important than the jihadist war.
Now had we never gone into the Middle East in force in the first place, we would not be targets for jihadist martyr candidates, and we would not need an Army that understands and can fight against jihadist enemies; but we did not choose that route. We won't get those crosshairs off our back simply by getting out of the Middle East now. Nor will we get across the notion that it's not a good idea to attack the United States by holding critical-incident stress-management sessions.
To make things worse, apparently the Army is being converted into a counter-insurgency nation building force, to the detriment of its ability to fight real wars. I do not think that insurgency is the real threat to the existence of the United States. Wealthy Republics have ever had this dilemma, particularly when they go to play imperialist. Yes, one needs troops whose main job is controlling puppet states and colonized territories. One also needs Legions who can win wars.
Converting the Legions into limitanei is not a particularly good solution to the problem posed by Bethell's question: "Why are we in Afghanistan?"
And how many victories will an Army that needs critical-incident stress-management sessions be able to win?
And see this. Fortunately we have not come to this. Yet.