- Conservatives have "no credibility" on budget deficits because George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan ran big deficits You are missing a Republican president in the middle: George H. W. Bush, who bravely enacted a whopping tax hike in order to close the deficit, helping to ensure that he would not be re-elected in 1992; by most metrics, Bush I deserves about as much credit for closing the deficit as Clinton does. But even if this weren't a highly selective misreading of history, so what? Are we going to drive our government over a fiscal cliff because George Bush and the Republicans who enabled them were grossly irresponsible, and some of the commentators were hypocrites? That'll show 'em!!!
- You can't talk about deficits in regard to health care spending because the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were really expensive. Item: wars, and stimulus spending, are the kind of thing that are traditionally done on deficit spending, all the way back to the American revolution. That's because they're temporary, and it often makes sense to amortize the cost over a number of years. Item #2: Lumping in Afghanistan, when almost everyone in the country supported that, is pretty silly. Item #3: Entitlements are not supposed to be funded on deficit spending, because they're not temporary. It's the same reason that it's okay to take out some student loans to pay for medical school, and not okay to take out a home equity loan to pay your mortgage. You can say that we should never have gone into Iraq, and I'll agree; it's entirely possible that we should stop spending money there, and in Afghanistan, ASAP. But the problem with our entitlements is not their ten year cost; it's that their costs keep growing and growing.
- The deficit can't be that big, because Iraq and Afghanistan are costing $600 billion and counting Umm . . . what? You're comparing a ten year cost to a one year deficit of $700+ billion.
- Every other industrialized country has a national health care system Which will fix our structural budget deficit how, exactly?
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Posting about our coming entitlement problem generates some non-sequiturs masquerading as incisive political commentary.
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I used to think that Reagan and W ran big deficits, but now I have learned that they were mere pikers. But seriously, we'll give W partial credit for the FY 2009 deficit blowout, at least for everything before Jan 20 (I seem to recall the Dems retaking Congress in 2006, and I think that budgets actually originate in Congress, no?), but the Porkulus is all on Obama - sure he outsourced it to Nancy and Harry, but that was his decision. The problem isn't 2009 or even 2010 - we really did experience a huge fiscal and financial crisis that resulted in unexpected expenses and a huge drop in revenues - the problem is that the picture does not look to get any better in the future. And instead of addressing that, Obama, Reid and Pelosi are determined to ram through a program that will permanently explode the already staggering deficit. It would by hilarious if it weren't so frightening.
Holdfast: we really did experience a huge fiscal
and financial crisis that resulted in unexpected
expenses and a huge drop in revenues.
"Unexpected" ? As predictable as sunrise.
Obama, et. al. are to be blamed not for the crisis,
but for their response to it; TPTB refuse to admit
that it is Game Day, and Obama...Best Guess:
"L'Etat, c'est moi, et apres moi, le Deluge."
Well no, but it does mean we're going to be mighty skeptical of the claim that health care reform is indeed going to "drive our government over a fiscal cliff" when said claim is made by people who have no credibility whatsoever on the subject of government debt.
Every political party represented in D.C. "has no credibility whatsoever on the subject of government debt". And collectively, they're aiming for the cliff.
Well, Jasper, we can turn that around and ask why we should be any less skeptical of the proponents claims that it will only cost about $850 billion over 10 years. That value assumes, somehow, we can continue collecting 10 years of taxes while paying 6 years of benefits. How would that work, again?
It also assumes Congress will suddenly stop "fixing" the cuts to physicians' incomes. Why would we ever expect that?
Rick
The underpants gnomes really exist and they are Democrats. Those non-existent jobs and congressional districts are actually their's!
It all makes sense now.
The folks complaining about W's spending because it wasn't enough have even less credibility.
Democrats complaining about deficits or spending are hypocrites. Plain and simple and undeniable.
Upshot of Jasper's argument:
"Fiscal conservatives are telling me that it is crazy to mortgage my house to buy some oceanfront property in Nevada. But they have no fiscal credibility, so I'm not listening to them. Beach, here I come!"
Every other industrialized country has a national health care system ... that has better health outcomes and costs far less than the U.S. system. If we simply copy any one of a dozen national health care models currently followed by other developed countries, we can not only improve our health outcomes, but also reduce our structural budget deficit.
you can't be serious about the "better outcomes" tripe. no one who has spent any time looking into health care believes that. why do people fly to the US for treatment?
Unless you've controlled for diet, lifestyle, crime rate, the statement is meaningless. The services offered in the US are more up to date. We should allow drug reimportation, but Europe has lower drug costs because they're free riders on the American market. I'd like to 'even things out' with reimportation, both because we're in competition with other nations and so people stop making bogus comparisons. But it's not like Europe has discovered some magic trick. They leach off America and call it the benefits of socialism. Also, America has higher legal costs because of our litigious culture, which the current 'reforms' aren't even working to address.
And furthermore, Europe (and Japan and Canada, for that matter) also freeloads off of America by allowing us to provide for their defense. It's much easier to pay for a freewheeling cradle-to-grave nanny state when you've outsourced your primary national responsibility to someone else.
I voted against Bush 41 and 43 and have always been opposed to the Iraq war. And I am opposed to the progressive agenda for fiscal reasons. The ad hominem arguments don't work on my views.
Megan,
#1 Good point, Megan, I guess we shouldn't worry about the long term costs of Stimulus. Oh wait! Megan From January 2009 seems to disagree:
#2 If this really was going to be the last war for 20 years, what you are saying might make sense, but history indicates that this isn't likely. Moreover Iraq and Afganistan's costs continue to mount, and it doesn't appear they will subside particularly soon.
#3 The 10 year cost for correct comparison would be $6 Trillion.
#4 The fact that people thought the war was justified is a non-sequitur to a non-sequitur. Popularity doesn't have any bearing on the logic of the way the war is funded. "Medicare is popular, I guess we can put it on the deficit!"
#5 You only read the first half of the sentence. Every other industrialized nation has a more nationalized healthcare system than our own and those healthcare systems are much,much cheaper.
#6 The correct phrasing would be "Conservatives have no credibility."
So if we have another war in the next 20 years, that will be the fault of one George W. Bush? As for the rest, I was reluctantly in favor of the stimulus, but I wanted a radically different structure that emphasized transfer payments over "investment".
The fact that their health care systems are cheaper is irrelevant. Our government spends as large a percentage of GDP insuring the poor and elderly as other nations spend on their whole population. Unless you have a blueprint from here to there, this is not useful.
That wasn't the stimulus package. If you supported the package, then you supported the package that was passed.
You can no more state you were for the stimulus, but you wanted helicopter payments, than you can say "I supported the war, but I really wanted us to go into Syria." Neither was ever on the table.
I opposed this stimulus with every fiber of my being. Would I have supported a true intrastructure package, or transfer payments? If properly structured, I might have. I, in fact, recommended several of them here.
But the package that was proposed and passed? I loathed and loath it. The health care fiasco, as currently glommed together? A vile piece of dung, that I hope haunts Mary Landrieu for the rest of her life. The illegal confiscation of GM bonds, transferred to the UAW? I look forward to hearing St. Peter comment on that one, to any number of thieves who made it happen.
Hey hey hey Miss Mcardle. How many times am I going to have to point out your "ham fisted" conflation of the normative and positive?
#1 I was just making the positive statement that de facto war/defense costs contribute to the budget costs more or less continuously rather than with instantaneous amortizable costs. I wasn't saying anything about GWB.
#2 You have a very weird view of how accounting works. If we spent less per-capita, our costs for the poor and elderly would be smaller as a percentage of GDP. Other nations have much lower per-capita costs. The per-capita cost of our government health care is lower that the per-capita cost of our private health care.
#3 Your statement about the percentage spent on poor and elderly versus other industrialized country totals is, in general, completely wrong. For someone who is constantly touting how they are just making positive statements, you sure do a get a lot of them wrong.
Great comment on GHW Bush, Megan. It's true, even though people hate hearing it.
Americans, as a whole, are a lot like Californians (as the law of numbers would predict, eh?): they love their tax cuts, and they love their spending increases, but they hate when either of these are reversed.
Cutting Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, etc. is political suicide, as is raising taxes.
Welcome to American Exceptionalism: selling our children into fiscal bondage just to fund our own gluttony, all while blaming "the other guy."
As we sow, so shall we reap. I'm sorry, Megan, that you are younger than I. I'm sorrier, still, that my children are younger than you. I did my best, and voted against this crap whenever I could...
Ditto.
Health care reform will shrink America's deficit by $50 billion or more over 10 years, says the CBO. But Megan McArdle says it's a problem because...it will increase the deficit! What a non sequitur.
The problem here, of course, is that the other parts of your argument which make it sensible have been omitted: the argument that the reform is sucking up the new taxes and spending cuts needed to erase the deficit in other ways.
It's not a non sequitur to say "we need to raise taxes and shrink defense expenditures (including getting out of Afghanistan) to pay for universal health care."
Most Democrats have a fairly positive view of George HW Bush.
The fact that every other industrialized country has universal health care shows that you can 1. pay enough taxes and 2. institute the necessary cost control measures to provide health insurance for everyone and still have a prosperous free-market economy.
Matt,
The CBO numbers are only valid if Congress allows some hardcore cuts in payments to doctors and other service and equipment providers. They were supposed to do the same thing with Medicare payments, but they keep overriding the spending cuts.
I believe the CBO actually states this in their report as a gigantic caveat.
As does CMS--and they have been since long before health care reform; it's in the trustee reports. I think this bill has a substantial risk of increasing the deficit, as well as making it harder to reduce the rest of the deficit, even if everything transpires just as the CBO says.
This is non-responsive to what I wrote. Who are accusing of "non sequiturs"? We should impose cuts on Medicare, raise taxes, end the war in Afghanistan, and pass the universal health insurance bill. Please explain where you see a non sequitur.
Oh, I am with Matt. The tooth fairy will take care of all that. We will spend less on medical care than we take in with these new taxes. doctors will be delighted to work for substantially less. Hospitals don't need all that money to provide quality care. It will all work out. The tooth fairy says so.
Rick
Don't have much time right now. There's something wrong with every one of these points. The most obvious ones:
WTF?
The deficit didn't close under brave Bush I. It continued to climb. Nobody is selectively leaving Bush I out of nothing. If you want to find a Republican President exception, you have to go back to Ike.
http://zfacts.com/p/318.html
Actually, it's a 4 year cost for Iraq and a 6 year cost for Afghanistan. Those were 2007 values that are surpassed by now. And who compared the wars cost up to 2007 to the current total deficit anyway?
Sam, you are confusing national debt with deficit. The deficit is annual. The national debt is cumulative. You ought to hold onto your WTF until you figure out the difference.
Second, you are still quibbling. You cannot, and will not, address the idea that both Afghanistan and Iraq will end. A new entitlement will never end.
Rick
One thing that GW Bush accomplished in my opinion was to make GHW Bush look like a lot better President than I thought he was at the time. Better Iraq War plan and outcome, better idea of financial responsibility, better concept of compassionate conservative, more sincere in bringing the country together and respecting the other party.
Kudos to the liberals for dismantling Megan's arguments. These huge struyctural deficits began under Saint Ronald with his voodoo economic planof huge tax cuts and huge defense spending increases.
The Magical Laffer curve pony was supposed to make it work, but it didn't happen. Deficits continued to climb under Bush the elder. A DEMOCRATIC president then balanced the budget and handed a small surplus to GWB, who promptly blew it with more tax cuts for rich, and an unnecessary war, which the magical tax cut pony was again going to pay for. Obama inherited a huge deficit PLUS the worst recession in 25 years. Most reputable economists called for a stimulus package and deficit spending, including such socialists as Herbert Stein( Reagan's chief economist) and David Bartlett. The liberal economists called for a really big stimulus, but the conservaDems and Obama settled for one that most economists now admit was too small.The wingnuts of course wanted to channel Herbert Hoover-tax cuts, deficit cuts, tariffs. Thank God the electorate chose the the Roosevelt successor over the Hoover successor, or we would really be in the soup
As for UHC, MEgan, if you can't understand that a better, cheaper health care system can shrink deficits, then there really is not much hope for you. And forget the wars, what about garden variety defense spending? Where is the long series of articles decrying massive defense spending overruns, which dwarf any proposed health care spending? Doesn't that add to the deficit too? Or do you subscribe to the conservative dogma that defense spending isn't really government spending?
A DEMOCRATIC president drastically divided government then balanced the budget and handed a small surplus to GWB (thanks to fiscal Conservatives in both houses of Congress coupled with Clinton's less than dogmatic pursuit of outright redistributionism, being far more moderate than large segments of his party)
/FTFY
grr... that was supposed to be a strikethrough through "a DEMOCRATIC president"
Stonetools, this just doesn't work. Before the financial crisis, the Bush deficit was 1%--not even a level that worried Saint Bob Rubin, when he was presiding over the deficit. Screaming the Democratic myth-narrative doesn't make it any more true. It would have been nice if Bush had balanced the budget, for all sorts of reasons. But he's responsible for only a minority of the deficits under Obama.
The Bush deficit was 1% in the last, best year of his economic recovery. Clinton ran a 2% surplus in the last, best year of his economic recovery. In the prior 2 years of recovery, Bush ran deficits of 1.8% and 2%. Clinton's prior 2 years of recovery ran surpluses of 0.5% and 1%. It's true, as Krugman says, that Bush is responsible for "only a minority" of Obama's deficit; the financial crisis is responsible for most of it.
But ultimately it's meaningless to talk about how much Bush is responsible for. We're going to have to pay it anyway. What you're missing here is the political point this responds to. The point is that Bush robbed the rainy-day fund and gave it to the rich, leaving Democrats to clean up after him. Reagan did the same thing. It's a way of stymieing Democratic efforts to pass social programs by stealing the money for them in advance. Democrats get pretty frustrated at this pattern.
The statement "Every other industrialized country has a national health care system" is also false.
If the US would do the following:
- Get rid of Medicare and Medicaid.
- Make buying health insurance compulsory.
... then it would end up with a system pretty much like the Netherlands or Switzerland have right now.
You mean, a national health care system?
This forum is like reading the transcripts for the lunatic caller sessions of C-Span.
1. Presidents don't run deficits
Why?
1A. Presidents cannot spend money.
2. Congress has the power to approve and vote on presidential ventures, such as war - to fund or defund is the entirely and without expection, the choice of the legislative branch, not the executive.
Until you start thinking realistically about how deficits actually come into being, you can't argue them with credibility.