In our system, it’s not just the number of votes that matter, but – thanks to Roger Sherman – how they are distributed across the several states. Obama’s urban support base was sufficient for political success in the House, which passed a very liberal health care bill last November. But rural places have greater sway in the Senate – and Obama’s weakness in rural America made for a half-dozen skittish Democrats who represent strong McCain states. The evolving thinking on the left – “Obama should have used his campaign-trail magic to change the political dynamic” – is thus totally misguided. The “remarkable capacities he displayed during the 2008 campaign” never persuaded the constituents of the red state Democrats he had to win over. Why should they suddenly start doing so now?
Obama simply lacked the broad appeal to guide the House’s liberal proposal through the Senate. So, the result of “going big” was an initially liberal House product that then had to be watered down to win over red state Senators like Landrieu, Lincoln, Nelson, and Pryor. The end result was a compromise bill that, frankly, nobody really liked. Liberals were disappointed, tantalized as they were by the initial House product. Conservatives were wholly turned off, recognizing as they did that the guts of the bill were still liberal. And Independents and soft partisans were disgusted by congressional sausage-making and wary of the bill’s provisions.
In this words of Jim Pethokoukis, this piece by Matt Miller is a “perfect crystallization of liberal Wash thinking on taxes, spending”. Amazingly, some people think it’s a “brilliant taken-down” and Ezra Klein says that “Matt Miller is about as credentialed a deficit hawk as has ever walked the earth, so when he delivers this hard a blow to the fiscal commission, it’s worth paying attention.”
These plaudits surprised me, since Miller isn’t necessarily mathematically literate. He writes:
I don’t want to overreact. I’d hate to prematurely diss President Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, which held its fourth public meeting Wednesday. But the commission’s Democratic co-chair, Erskine Bowles, may have already blown it.
In little-noticed remarks a few weeks ago, Bowles suggested that the long-term goal the commission should adopt for federal spending should be 21 percent of gross domestic product. This sounds like a bookkeeping matter. But Bowles’ goal would end progressive ambition, ratify America’s declining competitiveness and bury the American dream.
Why? For starters, federal spending under Ronald Reagan averaged 22 percent of GDP. Under Bowles’s view, therefore, the outer limits of the Democratic Party’s 21st-century aspirations would be to run government at a size smaller than did a 20th-century conservative icon.
What’s more, Reagan ran government at this size at a time when 76 million baby boomers weren’t about to hit their rocking chairs. In 1988, 32 million retirees received Social Security and 33 million were on Medicare, our two biggest domestic programs. By 2020, about 48 million elderly Americans will receive Social Security, and 62 million Americans will be on Medicare (then the numbers really soar).
As a matter of math, if you run the government at a smaller level than did Ronald Reagan while accommodating this massive increase in the number of seniors on our health and pension programs, you have to decimate the rest of the budget.
Sorry Matt, but as a “matter of math”, you are wrong for at least two reasons. First, the absolute numbers don’t matter. What matters is the proportion of retirees to workers. But you don’t include this crucial statistic. I don’t know the size of the workforce today compared to 1988, but the U.S. population has increased about 20% since 1988.
Second, you are comparing government spending to GDP and only looking at the growth in people on Social Security or Medicare without looking at the growth in GDP. “As a matter of math” you GDP could grow to match the increased numbers on these programs. For example, since 1988, GDP has increased about 27% according to my calculations.
While Miller’s point about math isn’t necessarily correct, he is correct that it will be hard to restrain government spending and pay for Social Security and Medicare.
Why this Miller’s piece of “brilliant” is beyond me, but then again, I’m not a progressive.
Besides Miller’s lack of math skills, my favorite part of this argument is his lead argument against limiting federal spending at 22 percent of GDP—because that’s what Ronald Reagan did and we all know that he was the anti-Christ and the U.S. in 1988 was hell on Earth.
It is too bad that romanticism about trains makes people loopy when they advocate for increased public funding of passenger rail. Passenger rail doesn’t work in America, and it’s about time we quit trying, instead of the Administration flushing billions down the toilet. Personally, I wish that we could just buy rail advocates Railworks Train Simulator and they can enjoy the romance of trains for their homes and not burden taxpayers with the outsized cost of their schemes.
Here’s a great quote from a guy who is getting back into professional baseball at 41, “In my day, when I was a young phenom, I was too young,” said Banks. “Now I’m too damn old. When does it stop? You know what I’m saying? That’s just the story of my life.”
…but this article which argues that free markets is an ideology of death is close to the dumbest. Here’s just one example of the author’s inability to think. He argues that a laissez-faire free market ideology led to the Deepwater Horizon tragedy. That’s pretty ironic because BP, or Beyond Petroleum as they wanted to be called, tried for years to court progressives and liberals—hardly something a laissez-faire company would do. But that’s just the beginning. Read the whole thing if you want to laugh or cry.
