Rhetoric By Molotov


“One false step and our enemies would be upon us surely comrades you don’t want Jones to come back?”

-George Orwell, Animal Farm (p. 22), 1945



Before the President found his inner progressive on Tuesday evening, he dialed up his usual rhetoric about the deficit.   He stated

Yes, the biggest driver of our long-term debt is the rising cost of health care for an aging population. And those of us who care deeply about programs like Medicare must embrace the need for modest reforms. Otherwise, our retirement programs will crowd out the investments we need for our children and jeopardize the promise of a secure retirement for future generations. But we can't ask senior citizens and working families to shoulder the entire burden of deficit reduction while asking nothing more from the wealthiest and the most powerful.
(APPLAUSE)

We won't grow the middle class simply by shifting the cost of health care or college onto families that are already struggling or by forcing communities to lay off more teachers and more cops and more firefighters. Most Americans -- Democrats, Republicans and independents -- understand that we can't just cut our way to prosperity. They know that broad-based economic growth requires a balanced approach to deficit reduction, with spending cuts and revenue, and with everybody doing their fair share. And that's the approach I offer tonight.

President Obama won't ask elderly people and the working class to shoulder the entire burden of deficit reduction- only a large portion of it.  Similarly,  he won't 'grow' the middle class simply by shifting the cost of health care or college onto struggling families or by forcing communities to lay off more teachers, police officers, and firefighters.  That is part of the plan, not its entirety.

But that's not all.  Obama noted "the biggest driver of our long-term debt is the rising cost of health care."  But then he cleverly added "for an aging population," thereby suggesting that the cost of health care is due to the elderly people receiving it- and the Medicare program paying for it.    Dean Baker, however, recently debunked the argument that baby boomers entering retirement are dumping the costs of Social Security and Medicare onto the younger generation.  He explained

The imbalance on the Medicare side stems from the fact that we pay twice as much per person for our health care as the average for people in other wealthy countries. This is not the result of us getting better care; we don’t generally have better outcomes than people in other countries. It is the result of the fact that we pay more for our care. This means that our doctors get paid much higher salaries (our autoworkers and retail clerks don’t), we pay far more for our drugs, our medical equipment and everything else in our health care system.

This is a story of class war: rich people getting richer from the inefficiency and corruption in the health care system. 

"The problem," Baker had observed on another occasion, "is not the American people getting what they want" but "the health care industry using its political power to extort incredible sums from the rest of us."

Intent on deception, Obama pledged "on Medicare, I'm prepared to enact reforms that will achieve the same amount of health care savings by the beginning of the next decade as the reforms proposed by the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles commission."

There was no reform proposed by the Simpson-Bowles commission; there was nothing proposed by the commission because there was no report issued by the commission.   Today, Baker noted

Just as little kids like to believe in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, Washington insiders like to believe that the Bowles Simpson commission issued a report. Of course the commission did not issue a report.

The commission's by-laws state that a report would need the support of 14 of the 18 members of the commission. There was no report that met threshold and in fact no formal vote was ever taken on any report. The document in question should properly be referred to as the report of the co-chairs, former Senator Alan Simpson and Morgan Stanley director Erskine Bowles.

It might be painful to accept the truth, but there is no Santa Claus, Tooth Fairy or Bowles-Simpson Commission report.

If there was an intent to deceive on Medicare and Simpson-Bowles, Social Security could not be far behind.  And it wasn't.  The President contended  

To hit the rest of our deficit reduction target, we should do what leaders in both parties have already suggested and save hundreds of billions of dollars by getting rid of tax loopholes and deductions for the well-off and the well-connected. After all, why would we choose to make deeper cuts to education and Medicare just to protect special interest tax breaks? How is that fair? Why is it that deficit reduction is a big emergency, justifying making cuts in Social Security benefits, but not closing some loopholes? How does that promote growth?

In George Orwell's classic Animal Farm, Squealer (representing Vyacheslav Molotov) stated "surely, comrades, you don't want Jones back?"  Asked in that fashion, it was obvious no one should want Farmer Jones to return.  Similarly, President Obama asks, rhetorically, "Why is it that deficit reduction is a big emergency, justifying making cuts in Social Security benefits but not closing some loopholes?"  That leaves the mistaken and injurious impression that deficit reduction requires both.  By saying that deficit reduction requires not only "cuts in Social Security benefits (but also) closing some loopholes," he conflates the deficit and Social Security.

Before going on to the liberal, reality-based portions of his address, President Obama first tried to establish his credentials on the economy by appealing to the crowd that worships bipartisanship.  If he had to enhance fallacies about entitlements and the deficit reduction panel he created, it was all, he might suppose, in a good cause.


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Kick 'Em To The Curb



Oh, he's good... very, very good.  In his address on Tuesday emphasizing his opposition to implementation of the budget sequester, President Obama remarked

I just want to repeat; the deals that I put forward, the balanced approach of spending cuts and entitlement reform and tax reform that I put forward are still on the table.
I’ve offered sensible reforms to Medicare and other entitlements and my healthcare proposals achieved the same amount of savings by the beginning of the next decade as the reforms that have been proposed by the bipartisan Bowles-Simpson fiscal commission.

These reforms would reduce our government spending bill. [mechanical noise interruption] What’s up cameramen? [laughter] Come on, guys. They’re breaking my flow all the time.
These reforms would reduce our governments bills by reducing the cost of healthcare, not shifting all those costs onto middle class seniors or the working poor or children with disability but nevertheless achieving the kind of savings that we’re looking for.

But in order to achieve the full 4-trillion dollars in deficit reductions, that is the stated goal of economists and our elected leaders, these modest reforms in our social insurance programs have to go hand in hand with a process of tax reform so that the wealthiest individual and corporations can’t take advantage of loopholes and deductions that aren’t available to most Americans.

While recommending "modest reforms in our social insurance programs," the President emphasized his offer of "sensible reforms to Medicare and other entitlements."

It's hard to be opposed to "modesty" and "sensible" anything.  It's especially difficult when the President promises it "would reduce our government's bills by reducing the cost of healthcare, not shifting all those costs onto middle class seniors or the working poor or children with disability."

Use of effective buzzwords is critical to winning a political (or perhaps any) argument.  (Frank Luntz has built a very lucrative career around it.) Modest, sensible, and reform gets Obama halfway there.  But these "reforms" are cuts, notwithstanding the clever framing: "reducing the cost of healthcare, not shifting all those costs..."

Unfortunately, President Obama is not aiming to reduce the cost of healthcare overall but, as a careful reading of his message indicates, is aiming to reduce the cost of the government bill for healthcare.  This sleight-of-hand is effectuated when Obama says his plan "would reduce our government's bills by reducing the cost of healthcare."

This is no mere technicality.  It would be sheer folly for a President to state "I'm going to reduce benefits to the elderly, the poor, and the sick by cutting the most popular and effective government programs enacted since World War II."  Instead, he implies- but does not say, for it would be untrue- that slicing Medicare (a health care vehicle demonstrably more cost-effective than private insurance) would lower the cost to the American public of healthcare, but merely the government's bill.   Then he assures us that he is "not shifting all those costs onto middle class seniors or the working poor or children with disability."   For he is not shifting all those costs; only some.

A recent poll of sentiment toward Social Security found most respondents opposed to raising the retirement age or means testing benefits, but in favor of eliminating the payroll tax cap, increasing the tax rate, and applying a more generous inflation index to determine benefits.Yet, to President Obama this means his "balanced mix of spending cuts and tax reform is the best way to finish the job of deficit reduction. The overwhelming majority of the American people Democrats, Republicans and Independents have the same view."  Reality, it seems, is sometimes ignored even by Democrats. Or in this case, President Obama.

"The greediest generation" former Senator Alan Simpson calls them, while the more subtle critics of earned benefits, including the Peter G. Peterson Foundation and the Washington Post editorial page, pose as supporters of the younger generation against the pampered, old cranks. But as The New York Times recently reported

In the current listless economy, every generation has a claim to having been most injured. But the Labor Department’s latest jobs snapshot and other recent data reports present a strong case for crowning baby boomers as the greatest victims of the recession and its grim aftermath.

These Americans in their 50s and early 60s — those near retirement age who do not yet have access to Medicare and Social Security— have lost the most earnings power of any age group, with their household incomes 10 percent below what they made when the recovery began three years ago, according to Sentier Research, a data analysis company.

Their retirement savings and home values fell sharply at the worst possible time: just before they needed to cash out. They are supporting both aged parents and unemployed young-adult children, earning them the inauspicious nickname “Generation Squeeze.”

New research suggests that they may die sooner, because their health, income security and mental well-being were battered by recession at a crucial time in their lives. A recent study by economists at Wellesley College found that people who lost their jobs in the few years before becoming eligible for Social Security lost up to three years from their life expectancy, largely because they no longer had access to affordable health care.

Other than promoting the use of chained CPI to underestimate the true cost of inflation and thus reduce Social Security benefits, the proposals to cut Social Security would exclude individuals above a certain age.  Opposition by the oldest cohort to weakening the program, then, reflects a concern for the younger generation, as well as an understanding of the value to the country of a program which enhances inter-generational equity and national cohesion.

In case anyone was uncertain that the President wants most of the sacrifice to be borne by recipients of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, Obama maintained "deep and indiscriminate cuts to things like education and training, energy and national security, will cost us jobs and it will slow down our recovery."   Viewing his approach and the GOP's sudden willingness to consider letting the sequester occur, Digby comments

The Republicans have been winning at every step along the way and they just keep demanding more, more, more.   And they will again, even if they agree to the President's proposals. And that's because the President's proposals at every step of the way have also been Republican proposals.



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Garbage In, Garbage Out



I do not come to bury Ruth Marcus.  I come to praise her.

Somewhat.  A few of the questions the Washington Post syndicated columnist recommends be posed to the two major presidential candidates tomorrow night are well-informed, probing, and worthy of answers for the American people.   Two others, however, reflect disturbing ignorance.

She critically prefaces one of her questions by stating

President Obama, you have been criticized for not supporting the recommendations of your own fiscal commission. Why didn't you? Do you regret that choice?

You have offered what you describe as $4 trillion in debt reduction over 10 years. Yet your $4 trillion is $2.3 trillion short of what the Simpson-Bowles commission said was essential.

It's not entirely, or even primarily, her fault, of course.   Dean Baker noticed that even the august, paper-of-record New York Times has referred to "the proposal by President Obama’s fiscal commission led by Erskine B. Bowles, the Clinton White House chief of staff, and former Senator Alan K. Simpson of Wyoming, a Republican."   It is common throughout the media to refer to the "Simpson-Bowles report" or, in shortened form, "Simpson-Bowles," as if the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform actually had issued a report.   The Commission by-laws, as Baker notes, read

The Commission shall vote on the approval of a final report containing a set of recommendations to achieve the objectives set forth in the Charter no later than December 1, 2010. The issuance of a final report of the Commission shall require the approval of not less than 14 of the 18 members of the Commission.

Baker notes, however, "there was no vote on anything by December 1, 2010 and there was never a report that received the approval of 14 of the 18 commission members. Therefore, there was no report of the commission. That's pretty simple, isn't it?"

Marcus unknowingly propagates another faulty premise when she asks

you promised in Charlotte to take “responsible steps” to strengthen Social Security. Yet in your acceptance speech four years ago you said that “now is the time ... to protect Social Security for future generations,” and then did nothing on Social Security during your first term. What do you plan to do if re-elected? Would you support Gov. Romney’s proposal to raise the retirement age to reflect increases in longevity? To lower the rate at which benefits grow for higher-income seniors?

Paul Krugman, recognizing that the increase in longevity cited by Marcus and so many others is well overstated, explains

Consider, in particular, the proposal to raise the Social Security retirement age, supposedly to reflect rising life expectancy. This is an idea Washington loves — but it’s also totally at odds with the reality of an America in which rising inequality is reflected not just in the quality of life but in its duration. For while average life expectancy has indeed risen, that increase is confined to the relatively well-off and well-educated — the very people who need Social Security least. Meanwhile, life expectancy is actually falling for a substantial part of the nation.

These less well-off and lesser-educated individuals are not likely to capture the imagination of most of the news media, generally relatively well-off and more highly educated.  There has been little attention paid, in fact, to the news reported on September 21 by The New York Times:

For generations of Americans, it was a given that children would live longer than their parents. But there is now mounting evidence that this enduring trend has reversed itself for the country’s least-educated whites, an increasingly troubled group whose life expectancy has fallen by four years since 1990.

Researchers have long documented that the most educated Americans were making the biggest gains in life expectancy, but now they say mortality data show that life spans for some of the least educated Americans are actually contracting. Four studies in recent years identified modest declines, but a new one that looks separately at Americans lacking a high school diploma found disturbingly sharp drops in life expectancy for whites in this group. Experts not involved in the new research said its findings were persuasive.

The reasons for the decline remain unclear, but researchers offered possible explanations, including a spike in prescription drug overdoses among young whites, higher rates of smoking among less educated white women, rising obesity, and a steady increase in the number of the least educated Americans who lack health insurance.

The steepest declines were for white women without a high school diploma, who lost five years of life between 1990 and 2008, said S. Jay Olshansky, a public health professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the lead investigator on the study, published last month in Health Affairs. By 2008, life expectancy for black women without a high school diploma had surpassed that of white women of the same education level, the study found.

Perhaps there would be consideration of this large, though declining, group of Americans if one of those awful cliches stereotyping voters would emerge.  We have had "soccer moms," "NASCAR dads," and "Walmart moms."
 
But unless "diner women" or some other hideous term trivializing this segment of the populace is popularized, it's hardly likely that many journalists will pay attention.   The elites might even find some solace in the statistics, for the racial disparity between relatively uneducated white women and black women has declined or apparently, reversed.  But the drop in life expectancy for white women without a high school diploma reflects yet another instance in which the American economy has left a lot of people behind, even if it's inconvenient to notice.





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Cut And Lose


Sometimes the truth and wise political strategy intersect.   Amid numerous flights from reality exhibited in his acceptance speech, Paul Ryan claimed

He created a bipartisan debt commission. They came back with an urgent report. He thanked them, sent them on their way, and then did exactly nothing.

Republicans stepped up with good-faith reforms and solutions equal to the problems. How did the president respond? By doing nothing— nothing except to dodge and demagogue the issue.

Here is how the stridently partisan, evil President chose "to dodge and demagogue the issue" in a recent interview with Time's Michael Scherer:

I will continue to reach out to them and work with them wherever I can. And I think it’s important to note that even in the two years that Republicans have controlled the House, we’ve gotten a lot of stuff done. We have passed a payroll tax cut that affected almost every American. We’ve helped veterans get hired as they come home. We’ve gotten two major trade deals that open up markets and are contributing to us doubling exports.

So even in a pretty sour political circumstance, we’ve been able to get some things accomplished. And I believe that in a second term, where Mitch McConnell’s imperative of making me a one-term President is no longer relevant, they recognize that what the American people are looking for is for us to get things done.

And I will continue to insist to my Democratic colleagues that not all good ideas just come from Democrats and that if we’re going to reduce our deficit in a serious way, we are going to have to cut some spending even on some programs that I like. If we’re going to be serious about energy independence, then we can’t just have a knee-jerk opposition to the incredible resources that we have in our country. We’ve got to have an all-of-the-above strategy that develops oil and gas and clean coal along with wind and solar.


I will continue to reach out to them and work with them wherever I can.... even in a pretty sour political circumstance, we've been able to get some things accomplished... And I will continue to insist to my Democratic colleagues that they must do what Republicans want them to do.   Holy Batman!  The man is a terror, vicious and vengeful.  He must be stopped.

Lyin' Ryan, of course, never noted what those "good-faith reforms and solutions equal to the problems" were which were proposed by the Gas and Oil Party, presumably because there has been none.     But that might not stop Obama, with Democrats dutifully following his lead, from stopping themselves.   The President went on to tell Scherer

My message to Democrats is the same message I’ve got to Republicans and independents, and that is, I want a balanced approach to deficit reduction that combines additional revenue, particularly from folks like me who can afford it, with prudent cuts on both the discretionary side and the mandatory side but that still allows us to make investments in the things we need to grow.

And that means I’m prepared to look at reforms in Medicaid. I’m prepared to look at smart reforms on Medicare. But there are things I won’t do, and this is part of the debate we’re having in this election. I do not think it is a good idea to set up Medicare as a voucher system in which seniors are spending up to $6,000 more out of pocket. That was the original proposal Congressman Ryan put forward. And there is still a strong impulse I think among some Republicans for that kind of approach.

I’m not going to slash Medicaid to the point where disabled kids or seniors who are in nursing homes are basically uncared for. We’re not going to violate the basic bargain that Social Security represents.

Now, the good news is, if you’re willing to raise taxes on millionaires and billionaires, then you can make modest reforms on entitlements, reduce some additional discretionary spending, achieve deficit reduction and still preserve Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid in ways that people can count on. The only reason that you would have to go further than that is if there’s no revenue whatsoever. And that’s a major argument that we’re having with the Republicans.

Digby responds

Well hell. I'm sure glad he isn't willing to cut Medicaid to where the disabled aren't "basically" cared for. And, you know, it's good that he's not going to violate the "basic bargain" that social security "represents." Big relief.

Vote Obama/Biden 2012 -- We won't cut your benefits quite as much as the other guys. 

It would be both good policy and good politics for top Democrats to modify their approach to one by which the Party traditionally appealed to voters.   Surely, many Democrats at their national convention this week will point out that Representative Ryan, a member of the Simpson-Bowles commission to which he was alluding on Wednesday night, voted against the commission's draft plan.

But it goes beyond that.    Ryan stated "he created a bipartisan debt commission. They came back with an urgent report. "  But "they"- the bipartisan debt commission- did not "(come) back with an urgent report."    They (really, "it," but why argue with the Genius that is Paul Ryan?) did not come back with any report at all.   Dean Baker highlighted the pervasive misunderstanding when he wrote in February

The New York Times badly misled readers by repeatedly referring to a report of the deficit reduction commission led by former Senator Alan Simpson and Morgan Stanley Director  Erskine Bowles. There was no report from this commission.

The report discussed in this article was exclusively the report of the co-chairs. It did not receive the necessary support of 14 members of the commission that would have made it an official commission report, a point noted only in passing toward the end of the piece.

The Administration, however, has chosen not to challenge the inaccurate perception that the commission agreed upon a plan and submitted a report.   Instead, the President emphasizes "we're going to reduce our deficit in a serious way."  

Walter Mondale can tell us how well that works.   Upon accepting the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984, the Minnesota Senator argued (video below) "we are living on borrowed money and borrowed time.... Mr. Reagan will raise taxes and so will I.  He won't tell you.  I just did."  Courageous and wise words, met with considerable applause and the loss of 49 states in the election.

David Dayen recognizes

The fact that you can draw a line in inverse proportion between what party embraces austerity and what party has the dominant position in the politics of the age should tell you what you need to know about its importance. By and large, we saw a liberal era in the 1950s and 1960s (regardless of what party actually ruled) followed by a conservative era in the 1980s that stretches to this day. And the factor of austerity politics plays a big role in that.

Noting that John Maynard Keynes 75 years ago found "the boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity," Paul Krugman explained "even if you have a long-run deficit problem- and who doesn't ?- slashing spending while the economy is deeply depressed is a self-defeating strategy because it just deepens the depression."  And becoming the tax collectors for the austerity state is not only a bad policy, but bad politics, one which Democrats would be wise to eschew in Charlotte.







                                               HAPPY LABOR DAY







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