Obama Attempts Simultaneous “Open Heart Surgery and Particle Physics”

Scherer
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Can you explain what a “liberal New Deal defender” is and how they relate to entitlement reform since only SS, which is the most financially sound of all the entitlement programs, came out of the New Deal? Can you also explain why you didn’t attach the word “conservative” to the phrase “anti-tax idealogues”? Should Drudge get a byline in all of your stories from now on?

I thought the after-stimulus article was way too reasonable and sober to be written by Calabresi. Until I got here:
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Will he actually identify popular programs he’s willing to cut, or will he antagonize his party’s patrons–such as drugmakers or trial lawyers–in the pursuit of real savings?
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sigh….
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Once a partisan hack, always a partisan hack I guess…..

As i wrote in the previous thread
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just fyi, Scherer has written a completely atrocious article about “entitlement reform” — lying about Social Security in the usual conventional stupidity way.
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The FACTS on social security are simple. The Social Security Trust runs a surplus through at least 2026. And even if the trust is depleted in 2042 and the law requiring cuts in Social Security benefits is enforced, benefits will still provide a higher standard of living than today’s retirees receive.
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Moreover, subsidies to Social Security from general revenue to provide full benefits would not be a problem, because Social Security benefits peak at 6.5% of GDP in 2032 (currently its 4.5%), and remain stable after that. In other words, the US economy would have 10 years to adjust to paying 6.5% of GDP for Social Security benefits.
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The real problems are Medicare and Medicaid, neither of which are sustainable. And while an “aging population” is part of the Medicare problem, its not biggest part — rather, its the costs of providing health care in general that is the problem. And the solution is both obvious and easy — a single payer system for health care that eliminates the massive waste associated with the private insurance system (only 68 cents of every dollar in revenue in the private system is spent on actually providing health care; the rest is “overhead”; Medicare spends only 3% of its revenue on overhead).

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In fact, “entitlement reform” doesn’t belong as part of any kind of “fiscal responsibility summit”, because the issues relevant to programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, AFDC, etc are merely tangential to fiscal responsibility. While achieving cost savings within these programs is always a good idea, the real questions regarding fiscal responsibility are based on the imbalance between taxes and overall spending.
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Singling out social safety net programs, while ignoring the costs of the bloated military/defense establishment (not to mention various other wasteful programs like subsidies to giant agricultural conglomerates, the Wall Street bailout that is little more than welfare for the 20% of Americans who own 90% of financial assets) when talking about “fiscal responsibility” is adopting right-wing framing of fiscal issues — and unfortunately Obama seems to have accepted that framing.

For an alternate view here is Kuttner’s article in today’s WaPo
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/22/AR2009022202003.html

Very early in the primary campaign I complained about Obama talking about entitlement reform with the right-wing frame. I was disappointed that he did not seem to see the clear difference. I hope that in this summit he puts a focus on the real costs – the health care industry and the out of control military expenditures.

If median wages rose with productivity growth, as they did during the first three decades after World War II, Social Security would enjoy a big surplus. Even without a raise for working America, Social Security needs only minor adjustments.
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indeed, one way to cut the projected long-term imbalance in social security is to raise the minimum wage. Social Security benefits are based on your best 30 years of income, and thus an increase in the minimum wage will have a near negligible impact on future benefit levels while increasing the amount of money collected through payroll taxes.
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One other point — anyone who talks about an “unfunded liability” for Social Security is lying. Under the law pursuant to Social Security, it cannot run a deficit — once the trust is completely depleted, the law requires that benefits be cut to equal income received — there can be no “unfunded liability” because benefit cuts are automatic under the law.

ivb3016: The Man has been in office just over a month. Do people like MS not understand our priorities? I notice that the CBO is all the rage ( pace Moring Joe). Where were they during the Bush Years, and why is that we seem to have new stuff put out so frequently just now? Or, as I suspect, did MS ignore the CBO because did not provide material that can be used for the purposes of dissing the Dems? As PD says: journalism has given way to hackery.

Another easy fix for Social Security is to raise the wages on which it is collected. That seems like a no brainer to me in spite of all the right-wing “tax-increase, tax-increase” screaming that will be heard.

sgwhite, that New Deal phrase is a reference to Social Security. There is a significant group of mostly liberal members in Congress who took as the lesson of the 2005 Social Security fight with Bush not that private accounts were a bad idea (no one defends them anymore, really) but that Social Security should not be touched in the short term. (Senior advisers in the White House, by the way, disagree, but they are nervous about getting into a fight with Pelosi, et al.) That’s what I mean. And I don’t think using “liberal” there is pejorative, or at least not any more pejorative than using “ideologues” to describe the Norquist crew.

ivb
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Its actually good for President Obama to talk about entitlement reform because its gives him solid footing to call for universal healthcare which is what Orszag basically did today on Morning Joe. If you can convince people that Medicare and Medicaid are the real problem and that in the long run we will save money with universal healthcare then it takes away RW talking points about it increasing our deficit. As for SS reform I don’t know whether he is going to touch it or not, I doubt that he will. But if he does I would look for something pretty mild that he can point to and say “look at what I have done” instead of something that could be considered an “overhaul”. Also while SS is on solid footing that doesn’t inherently mean it can’t be improved.

Another easy fix for Social Security is to raise the wages on which it is collected. That seems like a no brainer to me in spite of all the right-wing “tax-increase, tax-increase” screaming that will be heard.
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the other problem with raising the income limit is that it is likely to have a significant impact on benefit levels, because of the way that benefits are calculated — eliminating the cap entirely might work, but absent an adjustment in how benefits are calculated, simply raising the cap could have little or no impact on long-term projections (and could have a negative impact on projections, insofar as the people most likely to be affected by a raise in the cap are those closest to retirement age…)

Scherer
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The word liberal nowadays IS a pejorative. Thats something even Hillary Clinton admitted to in a debate. And the anti-tax idealogues should have an appropriate label attached to them as well, or is it your contention that it isn’t conservative members of Congress who are the anti tax idealogues? BTW Scherer, did it ever occur to you that maybe those members of Congress came to the conclusion of not touching SS in the short term, not because of any fight with Bush, but on the actual data which supports their claim? I tell you what, ask the people on SS conservative liberal or otherwise if they think they should have their benefits cut and you had better duck quickly.
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CW is a hell uva drug

When everythings falling apart, you have to do something.
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In the past everyones put off tough decisions because it hasn’t been painful enough to make them, well it’s painful enough now. America is like your grandfather who’s been suffering for heart pains for years and hasn’t gone to the doctor until he finally passed out on the porch a week ago and his family made him.
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Things might have been easier if we did them when we were living high on the hog, but now that things are in the doldrums, it’s become something we don’t have a choice about anymore.

MS– “(No word yet on whether the Senators will be using Magic Marker, or those easels with the oversized notepads.) ”
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While I believe that this was just a feeble attempt at humor to make your article more interesting, it is exactly what we constantly rail against — the trivializing effect of the msm. What is so hard for you people to get? Are you so enamored of your insider positions that you can no longer look outside and see Rome burning? Our country is at the fork in the road where the decision we make now will determine the future for generations to come and I think it warrants more serious consideration than you and your brethren have chosen to give it.

MS– “One industry front group, called the Partnership to Improve Patient Care, mobilized last month to water down a House plan for more than $1 billion in the stimulus bill to study the relative effectiveness of certain medical treatments, a widely recognized first step in controlling costs. The provision passed, but not before its language was changed to decouple the effort from evaluating the costs of competing treatments.”
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Here we go again. So tell me MS, why isn’t this the focus of your humorous reporting about how the Shelby/Cantor (dumb as dirt) wing of the Republican party, who believe that dinosaurs roamed the earth 6,000 years ago and want to teach creationism as science is actually trying to convince the American public that making evidenced based medical decisions is a bad thing?

Ideologue hardly comes close to describing Norquist. Mentally incompetent rabid raccoon might be halfway there.

Its actually good for President Obama to talk about entitlement reform because its gives him solid footing to call for universal healthcare which is what Orszag basically did today on Morning Joe. If you can convince people that Medicare and Medicaid are the real problem and that in the long run we will save money with universal healthcare then it takes away RW talking points about it increasing our deficit.
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the problem is that Obama is not interested in universal health care, rather his approach to health care is based on universal health insurance primarily through employers contracting with the private insurance industry.
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and while Medicare is relatively safe from demagoguery (at least in the sense that the Dems will demagogue the issue of care for the elderly just as much as the GOP will demagogue the cost issue), Medicaid — which is administered and paid for (in part) by the states and is targetted at low/no income people — is not.

OT
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Check out Scar unintentionally PWNING the House Republicans for lying about the “field mouse” in the stimulus bill.
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http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2009_02/017005.php
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The pitfalls of having a fact checker come in lol

@Pluk — Your take on the vulnerability of medicaid is not entirely accurate. While Medicaid suffers from the image of the black welfare queen provided so adeptly by the exalted Ronald Reagan, the truth of the matter is that the major costs of Medicaid is not health care for the poor.
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The major costs to Medicaid is long term nursing home care for the elderly. While the GOP loves to kick the poor, mess with medicaid and see how fast Republican thug Peter King (NY) has a fit. If all of those suburban/exurban, even rural white folks with parents in nursing homes have to now foot those bills they will take what’s left of the Republican party and rip it to shreds.
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It seems to me the problem here is that because so many in Washington, and outside Washington for that matter, are limited in their vision, they see Obama as tasking on more than he can chew. Obviously, these people believe that Obama supporters were in it because for the megawatt smile. Give me a break. we supported Obama because he had a vision, and the last thing we need is a bunch of myopic imbeciles standing in the way blocking his view. If their piece meal strategy was what was called for they would have run and won the presidential campaign. What America needed was a visionary who could conceive of and implement a holistic strategy — Thank God or the law of averages if you want, but the bottom line is that the American people hit this one out of the park.

Michael Scherer:
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…the sitting President of the United States promises to save our fiscal future by reforming entitlement spending…
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What evidence is there beyond politicians’ rhetoric that “entitlement reform” is necessary to “save our fiscal future”?
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Have you looked into it? I mean, have you really examined this plank of apparent Beltway orthodoxy, and truly found that the country’s fiscal future is in jeopardy unless we enact “entitlement reform”? Is that the only way out of the looming crisis our nation faces that you’ve implied exists?
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“At bottom, entitlement reform means one of two things: Less spending on things voters like, such as medical treatment or retirement checks, or unpopular higher taxes to pay for those things, and quite possibly both.”
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Really?
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Is that true –I mean, are those the only two options available?
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What if we started by looking to cut spending from other areas, such as, say, slowing the growth of our nuclear submarine fleet (just a random example)?
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(from Defense Tech)
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Cost Cutting the Super Sub
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The Navy’s submarine force is in trouble. A shrinking number of boats is struggling to meet steady demand from regional commanders. Meanwhile, the cost of the only U.S. submarine currently in production, the super-high-tech Virginia-class attack boat, has risen to $2.3 billion apiece. At that price, the Navy can afford to buy only one per year. Do the math: since attack boats last only 30 years, building one boat per year means your fleet is eventually going to shrink to 30 boats from the current 55. Long-range plans call for 48 attack subs, so how is the Navy going to get there?

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So, at the current spending rate on one item, in ten years we will have spent over 23 billion dollars adding additional nuclear subs to our fleet.
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It makes me wonder just exactly what these “Long-range plans” the DefenseTech.com guys so blithely toss out are…what plan calls for 48 more “attack subs”?
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Would average Americans really prefer to reduce their net from Social Security (either in the way of tax increases or benefit cuts), in order to keep in line with our Navy’s “Long-range plans“?
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Do you think that these folks even know that, while we’re discussing whether or not people will continue to have access to the medical treatments they…umm… “like” so much, we’re expecting to reconstitute a global fleet of nuclear-powered subs with no questions asked?
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I don’t get it, Michael Scherer. How can you tell your readers that “At bottom, entitlement reform means one of two things“, as if there are literally no other areas of spending that can be questioned or examined?
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Why are these the only options on the table? Who told you that “At bottom,” there are these two remedial scenarios, both of which constitute a net loss for most Americans? I’m serious, Michael Scherer…where did you get this idea that there are only two ways to “fix” the entitlement situation?
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Is it perhaps because, when you use the phrase “At bottom“, you really mean “According to current Beltway Conventional Wisdom“?
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Are you truly being accurate in your presentation of the matter, Michael Scherer? Do people really need a larger fleet of long-range nuclear subs, or do they need their housing paid for in their elderly years? What if they knew that they had a choice, Michael Scherer…what solution to the problem of our “fiscal future” do you think they would favor?
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Why do you portray the situation facing our country as if it is “pills vs. cash from your pockets”, instead of “pills vs. subs”? Are you certain that, “At bottom,” there’s no other way, Michael Scherer?

Dee–
good point about medicaid’s role in providing nursing home care. But while 60% of medicaid goes to “the elderly, blind, or disabled” only 35% of medicaid goes toward providing long term care.
( http://www.ahrq.gov/research/mednote.htm )
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(moreover, in order to qualify for nursing home payments under medicaid, recipients must first pretty much “impoverish” themselves.)
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But the point I was making wasn’t about the reality of Medicaid, but its political vulnerability as a national issue. It doesn’t matter that states will be forced to make eligibility requirements for the elderly even more stringent, what matters is that GOP congresscritters is more likely to sucessfully demagogue “Medicaid” and target it for cuts when it comes to federal budget priorities.

MS, Bob Somerby has something to say about your entitlement reform.
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http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh022109.shtml

Have you looked into it? I mean, have you really examined this plank of apparent Beltway orthodoxy, and truly found that the country’s fiscal future is in jeopardy unless we enact “entitlement reform”? Is that the only way out of the looming crisis our nation faces that you’ve implied exists?
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is really is two different issues — and the doomsayers like to point out projections that paying for Medicare and Medicaid will consume 20% of GDP by 2050 based on the last 30 years rate of inflation in medical care costs.
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But if you consider the fact that interest due on the federal debt will rise from 1.5% of GDP to over 10% by 2050 based on current projections, one very big element of the “looming” fiscal crisis in 40 years is to stop that debt load from increasing now. That of course, means increasing taxes on the wealthy (and not cutting them for the middle class), cutting way back on defense spending, etc. now.
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But the Villagers like their tax cuts — and since the vast majority of them of them are in the top quintile (if not decile) of earners, and don’t have the same concerns as the rest of us — Scherer feels free to ignore how the Bush tax cuts are the very definition of fiscal irresponsibility.

Pluk — which is precisely why every time they go after Medicaid they try to offset it with some sort of catastrophic coverage that nobody buys.
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The only way to solve this problem long term is health care reform.
Now I’m thinking, and I could be wrong, but your absolute loyalty to Hillary prevents you from seeing Obama’s plan as universal, and I know that focusing on what’s possible instead of what’s perfect generally engenders harsh rebuke, but if Obama can get some version of health care this year that allows me to buy into a plan without forking over a kidney and subsidizes it so that the less affluent have a shot then I’m okay with it.
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Call me selfish, but I’d rather have something that’s not quite perfect than nothing at all which is pretty much where we are at now.

Now I’m thinking, and I could be wrong, but your absolute loyalty to Hillary prevents you from seeing Obama’s plan as universal
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well, Obama’s “campaign” plan was no more “universal” than what we have today. Its biggest flaw was, of course, that healthy people could opt out of the system entirely (and then sign up when they get sick). You’re ability to obtain reasonably priced health insurance is based on “community rating”, i.e. rates are based on total cost of providing care for everyone. And by allowing the “healthy” segment of the community to opt out, “community rating” doesn’t work.
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I have no idea what Obama will finally propose — if he actually comes up with a proposal (his failure to come up with his own economic recovery bill as the basis for Congression action was not an encouraging precedent.) Moreover, Obama shows no signs of interest in taking on private health care and insurance industries, which lie at the heart of the problem. Instead, he seems bent on trying to find some kind of “compromise” — and there is a huge gap between effective reform and what can be accomplished while accomodating both the GOP and the health care conglomerates.

Hillary Clinton once punched a hole in a cow just to see what was comin’ up the road. I hear Hillary Clinton is 10 feet tall with arms like tree trunks.
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“Today, I learned that CBS News named Jeff Ballabon, a New York Republican activist, to serve as the Senior Vice President of Communications.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ira-forman/cbs-news-pick-claimed-dem_b_168688.html

Great questions Stu: “How can you tell your readers that ‘At bottom, entitlement reform means one of two things,’ as if there are literally no other areas of spending that can be questioned or examined? … Is it perhaps because, when you use the phrase ‘At bottom,’ you really mean ‘According to current Beltway Conventional Wisdom’?”
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I believe when one leaves the likes of Mother Jones, entering the machine, one is strip-searched, and any nonsense like alternatives to our Beltway polarizations is confiscated like so much weaponry. Sadly, as far as defense spending goes there’s little in the way of debate. And, as P-luk said, once you become a courtier, you have to protect your interests.
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Sadly, of course, other than the rare Barney Frank riff, who among our esteemed democratic leadership is not spewing CW? How can we expect the MS to be intrepid when Obama, Pelosi et al seem equally inclined to protect the same sacred cows. It always boils down to the same conclusion for me: you can’t join the MSM-Congress-White House axis of obfuscation if you hold such views.