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On the Sean Hannity radio program this afternoon, Speaker-presumptive John Boehner was interestingly cautious about promising actually to do anything in the new Congress.
But there was one thing Boehner did specifically pledge: Republicans would call a vote on restoring President Obama’s cuts to Medicare.
It’s a clever move!
How can Democrats vote no? But how can they vote yes?
At the same time, it’s also a warning of what is to come. You don’t call a vote like that if you are seriously planning to balance the budget. You do it if your priority is to entrap your opponents into paralyzing political predicaments. This is what gridlock looks like: tactical maneuvers, point scoring – and a continuing intensification of all the problems, including the debt, that the parties claim they wish to fix.
David, as all of us who are opposed to this bizarre GOP comeback have been noting… has ANYONE clamoring to get into office suggested anything at all productive that they’re hoping to get done, once they are elected?
Your commentary on NPR today was very interesting. I sincerely hope you’re correct in your prediction that all these new know-nothing/ do-nothing faces in congress will force Obama to actually act on his own, rather than deferring to congress (though of course you may recall that this is precisely what the President’s role is *supposed to be!).
Oh well… executive decree it is, then.
This article makes a very important point. Republicans aren’t interested in governing but rather interested in political opportunism. Voting to restore Medicare cuts caused by Health Care Reform should fail since Republicans historically are for reducing the size of government and entitlements in particular. However if the Republican leader is saying that he supports this shift in policy, then what the hell do they stand for? nothing apparently.
It’s in line with his party’s other double talk; cut the deficit but extend tax cuts for the wealthy, etc. Nothing but land mines for their own advantage. Maybe the saddest part is that millions of Fox viewers and teabaggers won’t notice or care about the inconsistencies. Nah, they’ll manage to work themselves into another frenzy that anyone tried to balance health care costs at their expense and in the next breath insist the wealthy also need protection to provide the long awaited trickle-down effect.
By trapping their opponents, they are also trapping themselves. They can’t cut Medicare because this would alienate seniors, but they can’t put a significant dent in spending without sacrificing at least one of the three sacred cows of Medicare, Social Security, and Defense.
Republican voters are stupid. The GOP gets 400 million dollars from big business to campaign on and the idiotic cows of teabagger movement all say hell yes. Republicans clamor to elect Harry Mudd to office so he can get back to lying to them.
They want to hear all the soothing bullsh*t so they can go back to basking in their warm anti-science, fag bashing, anti-tax beliefs even as those same big business interests steal from them, choke them with poisons, and kill them with unsafe practices. But hey, let’s get government out of the way and let Exxon make its money.
Suckers.
The simple fact you first call this move “clever” shows you are fore and foremost a political animal mainly concerned with winning elections rather than solving problems.
BTW, what makes you so sure Democrats wouldn’t vote NO to repealing Medicare cuts?
For all the talk about a “sane GOP” you are just like every other partisan politico.
BTW, what makes you so sure Democrats wouldn’t vote NO to repealing Medicare cuts?
Here’s the real question – if a Speaker Boehner proposed this repeal, which would effectively add 1 trillion dollars to the public debt over the next decade … and Democratic Congressmen voted it down … do those Tea Partiers who claim to be motivated by the size of our debt finally start to admit that the Democratic Party has consistently over the last decade been the party more serious about controlling the deficit?
lol – yeah, I thought people might enjoy a good laugh this morning!
This piece should be titled “The Party Of Hypocrisy”
Do you conservatives actually believe in anything.? Are you willing always to throw over your supposed core values in order to score a political point?
Party of fiscal responsibility my ass. Never been true never will be.
I hope Boehner has 100+ Republican no votes on this. This bill will instantly kill any credibility the Republicans have on deficit reduction. I think the Democrats do vote no standing with the President on his healthcare plan. It passes, dies in the Senate and any ability for the 2011 House not to look like a bunch of opportunistic weasels dies with it.
What is the upside for the Republicans?
Considering the Pledge to America’s “common sense” exception to senior citizens from spending cuts and that Mitch McConnell has publicly stated that the GOP’s goal for the next two years is to replace Obama in 2012, I don’t know how anyone can possibly be surprised by this proposal.
The Party of Medicare - MotownSports.com Message Board // Oct 28, 2010 at 10:15 am
[...] Party of Medicare The Party of Medicare | FrumForum From our next Speaker of the House… [...]
Um….2 houses of Congress. The vote might never come up in the Senate hence who the hell cares what the House does. Or does David really imagine Republicans will pick up 10 seats?
Of course Republicans don’t care about the debt. They want to change Paygo (offset every spending increase or tax cut with spending cuts or tax increases) for Cutgo (offset every spending increase with spending cuts, but tax cuts don’t need any spending cuts to offset them)
The Republicans are simply nuts. They honestly must hate America if they institute Cutgo.
Here is something interesting by Noam Schieber:
I’m of the view that it’s a bit futile to worry about Social Security’s long-term actuarial balance before you’ve figured out what to do about Medicare and Medicaid, whose contributions to our deficits over the next several decades are far, far bigger. (Though given that they had to enact some tricky Medicare cuts to help pay for health care-reform, I see why administration officials prefer to brainstorm about Social Security these days.) I’m also skeptical of the politics of Social Security reform, given that conservatives love urging Democrats to make fixes that would strengthen the program’s trust fund, then turn around and deny that such a trust fund exists.
Still, if we’re having a conversation about how to shore up Social Security over the long-term–and Obama’s deficit commisison may thrust that conversation on us–Jed Graham of Investor’s Business Daily has a pretty smart proposal. The basic idea, which he calls “Old-Age Risk-Sharing,” would be a series of cuts that hit young, affluent retirees hardest, then phase out completely over 20 years, so that older retirees receive all the benefits they’d get under the current system. (Graham elaborated on this in a recent book called A Well-Tailored Safety Net.) The beauty of the approach is that low-income workers–typically the people least able to work beyond their early 60s because their jobs are physically grueling–would see little in the way of cuts, while more affluent workers would have an incentive to keep working, something many are capable of. To borrow Graham’s example:
[A] career-average earner ($42,000 in 2009) retiring after 2032 would face an upfront benefit cut of 20%, which would gradually unwind over 20 years to keep the safety net intact. However, thanks to enhanced incentives for delayed retirement, that worker could fully overcome this upfront cut and attain an extra measure of income security in very old age by working two years past the official retirement age.
A lower earner would face a 10% upfront cut that could be overcome with one extra year of work, while a high earner would need to work three extra years to overcome a 30% upfront benefit cut.
In general, Graham shows how this is a much more nimble approach than, say, raising the retirement age or early-retirement age, which hits people in those grueling jobs pretty hard. Though his proposal accomplishes something similar, it distributes the additional work years to people best able (and most willing) to shoulder them, while ensuring that no one will be destitute in very old age.
I might like to see the cuts phase out for low-income workers a little sooner than 20 years (since they’re actuarially less likely to live that long), but it’s a pretty reasonable place to start the discussion–assuming we have to have it.
easton: I checked out some of the information Amazon had about that book. It seems like an intriguing idea. And I fully agree with the view that solving health care inflation is way more important than fixing Social Security. I’ll probably pick up the book sometime in the next few months. Thanks for the suggestion.
Easton –
That’s a good proposal. Making it an incentive would avoid the demagoguery and unfairness charges. The big problem though is medical expenses escalate rapidly. We have got to get rid of employer insurance for these sorts of proposals to work.
CD-Host, I glanced through the Amazon instantly-available contents of that book, and it mentions briefly how to deal with taxation of employer-sponsored health insurance. I suspect the book deals with it further, and based on the quote easton posted, he presumes that the health care issue is way more important and will have to be dealt with well before SS goes defunct.
I agree medicare is the big problem. My point is lets get rid of employer sponsored healthcare. It creates an unnecessary distortion and yet again on the medicare debate being another example of it.
CD-Host:
“I agree medicare is the big problem. My point is lets get rid of employer sponsored healthcare. It creates an unnecessary distortion and yet again on the medicare debate being another example of it.”
From what I’ve seen on the news one of the proposals that the Debt Commission is considering is ending the practice of letting health benefits be tax free and instead counting it as income.
Unless Boehner et. al. put entitlements and defense … yes defense … on the table, then their promises of fiscal restraint cannot be believed and voters who put stock in such promises are beyond naive. You can pretend that 2 plus 2 equals 1 for only so long. The laws of arithmetic are not subject to negotiation, litigation, or repeal.
From what I’ve seen on the news one of the proposals that the Debt Commission is considering is ending the practice of letting health benefits be tax free and instead counting it as income.
That would be a great move forward. I’d like to be a bit more gradual in terms of transition, having worked in insurance I’m thinking about the details of implementation, but that would do it. It would be great. 100% support from me.
CD:
“That would be a great move forward. I’d like to be a bit more gradual in terms of transition, having worked in insurance I’m thinking about the details of implementation, but that would do it. It would be great. 100% support from me.”
I am in total agreement. But I don’t think implementation would be complicated. You would simply have state that by year 2014 all health benefits are considered taxable income. I state 2014 since it would allow unions and other organizations which collectively bargain their contracts to negotiate based on this new change in tax law which would have a significant change on their income.
Out of curiosity, wasn’t the GOP against medicare? Isn’t medicare, by current definition, socialism?
Rabiner –
But I don’t think implementation would be complicated. You would simply have state that by year 2014 all health benefits are considered taxable income.
Which means people want to get off company insurance and take their benefits in cash. Which is good for the companies. But that means:
1) You have to create better individual plans
2) You need to staff open enrollment mass switching
3) GSA’s involving termination (from companies) and workers that don’t switch need to be figured out. I.E. I’m not priced properly if only 5% of your workers stay on plan, and then which 5%.
etc…
This is not for the insurance companies, the employer’s HR which is why I’d like to do it phased. But other that its a great idea.
Out of curiosity, wasn’t the GOP against medicare? Isn’t medicare, by current definition, socialism?
Yep. The party of lying, hypocritical pandering strikes again.
Cd-Host:
“Which means people want to get off company insurance and take their benefits in cash. Which is good for the companies. But that means:
1) You have to create better individual plans
2) You need to staff open enrollment mass switching
3) GSA’s involving termination (from companies) and workers that don’t switch need to be figured out. I.E. I’m not priced properly if only 5% of your workers stay on plan, and then which 5%.
etc…”
This was one of the major components in the original bill for Health Care Reform that was neutered in the end if I recall. They were going to tax health care plans after a certain quality at like 40% which would made them unreasonable and limited those ‘Cadillac plans’. That would in turn cause people to earn more taxable income which would raise more revenues for the Federal Govt.
Also by 2014 shouldn’t the individual markets for insurance be fully functional under HCR? I thought that was one of the things that would of been in place when fully implemented.
The cadillac tax is in there still. That’s different than going after the entire county’s insurance all at once. Like I said I’m in favor of the provision I just want a few year rollout with some intermediate steps. Insurance companies will not be able to handle the surge in workload, there is no reason to do this that quickly.
CD-Host:
Didn’t think about the surge in workload for insurance companies. It just didn’t seem like that complicated a tax change for the IRS to implement but I guess the private sector would have issues handling the change all at once.
Boehner Endorses More Medicare Spending: Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss? (Cato @ Liberty Blog) // Oct 30, 2010 at 2:03 am
[...] But I was amazed that the presumptive future Speaker of the House went on a supposedly conservative talk radio show and said that increasing Medicare spending would be on the agenda of a GOP-controlled Congress. (I wondered if I somehow misinterpreted what was being said, but David Frum heard the same thing) [...]
One More Way A GOP Win Will Destroy The Economy « Alan Colmes' Liberaland // Nov 1, 2010 at 7:51 pm
[...] reason to think it will get worse if they have their way by enacting massive new tax cuts while protecting Medicare from cuts. And as I have previously warned, I am very fearful that it will be impossible to raise the debt [...]
Boehner Endorses More Medicare Spending: Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss? | Cato @ Liberty // Dec 17, 2010 at 2:19 am
[...] But I was amazed that the presumptive future Speaker of the House went on a supposedly conservative talk radio show and said that increasing Medicare spending would be on the agenda of a GOP-controlled Congress. (I wondered if I somehow misinterpreted what was being said, but David Frum heard the same thing) [...]