Tiresome arguments, necessary arguments
I was starting to write a post about this Ed Koch endorsement of Obama. My plan was to point out what the piece said about Romney’s positions vs. his actual stated positions, highlighting the sometimes subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle distortions of what Romney has proposed.
But I decided not to go into the laborious details, and it’s not just because Ed Koch isn’t that much of a political player any more. Entitlement programs are remarkably complex, and so are any proposed fixes. And of course the law of unintended consequences almost always comes into play. The real point is that there’s almost no way to talk about these matters—particularly things like reforming Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, which are the substance of much of Koch’s article—without simplifying and therefore misrepresenting, either deliberately or accidentally or some combination of both.
Many decades ago I took a semester-long course on the welfare system. We had to do a lot of reading about the laws that were current at the time—their flaws, and possible remedies. Then we had to make some recommendations ourselves.
Well, it was a very very sobering few months. The system was deeply troubled, but each fix seemed to introduce other problems. Were the cures worse than the disease? All too often, it appeared so. I developed a healthy respect for anyone who would make a serious attempt to wade into that morass and try to improve it in the real world rather than just the classroom.
That’s what came to mind when I read Koch’s piece. For example, take just this one example Koch cites for his support of Obama:
The Democrats believe Medicaid ”“ health care for the poor ”“ should remain an entitlement, no matter the number of poor qualifying, while Republicans believe Medicaid should instead become a block grant to the states, eliminating the federal responsibility to care for the poor, giving the 50 states the power to decide the benefits to be provided and the funding.
Koch conveniently omits the fact that one of the biggest problems with Medicaid and the federal government is that its regulations now threaten to bankrupt the states, because entitlements that are given “no matter the number of poor qualifying” require a little thing called funding. He also ignores the fact that it’s only the health care law passed in 2010 that’s become known as Obamacare that would cause the states to lose so much of their power over Medicaid in the first place. In fact, he ignores almost everything about the program in order to make it seem to fit the narrative of “Democrats care about poor people getting health care and mean old Republicans don’t.”
Here’s some history:
Until the 2010 enactment of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare), Medicaid preserved state sovereignty and was consistent with the constitutional framework of federalism, despite numerous stringent federal mandates, because the states retained substantial discretion to decide Medicaid eligibility, determine the scope and duration of coverage, and they were free to discontinue participation in Medicaid if not satisfied with the terms and conditions imposed by the program.
At the core of ObamaCare is the individual mandate requiring every citizen to obtain health-insurance coverage with the benefits and provisions specified by the federal government. The way ObamaCare provides for lower-income individuals and families to obtain that required coverage is by forcing the states to offer expanded coverage under Medicaid as a condition of continuing to participate in the rest of the program.
Under ObamaCare, the federal government now imposes Medicaid on the states as a federal mandate to meet the federal requirements of the individual mandate for the entire below-age-65 population with incomes under 138 percent of the poverty line. That includes mandatory coverage for the first time of all non-elderly, childless adults within the income limits. The states, consequently, no longer retain substantial discretion to determine eligibility or scope and duration of coverage for the program within their respective jurisdictions, which makes the program unacceptably coercive.
The result of this coercion will be to increase Medicaid enrollment by 24 million additional beneficiaries by 2015, covering nearly 100 million Americans by 2021 according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The chief actuary of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services estimated that ObamaCare will impose at least another $20 billion to $42 billion in additional costs on the states by the end of the decade, even counting all the federal financing for Medicaid, not to mention other open-ended mandatory costs that are inestimable.
Now, we shouldn’t really expect Ed Koch to go into all that. It would make his task of endorsing Obama so much harder. Nor do Republicans generally present the arguments against their point of view when they’re talking about why they’re supporting other Republicans, either.
But that means voters have to to do their own homework, because they certainly can’t depend on the MSM to do it. And in the case of Medicare and Medicaid reform and so many other things, the issues are remarkably complex, it’s difficult to find trustworthy and unbiased information, and analysis is demanding of skills in math and logic. How many people have the time and the inclination to tackle such a project? And yet without it, we’re at the mercy of the polemicists.
The difficulty with “fixing” any government give-away program is illusory, in the nature of a Gordian Knot, q.v. The solution to the apparent difficulty is to eliminate the give-away program and let people deal with their problems as my grandparents did: get a job, work hard, save your money and quit complaining.
Ike: of course, that would create other problems. Dickens could explain.
Many, many, many more words than Ed Koch is worth. In fact it this posting were only as long as “this Ed Koch endorsement of Obama” it would be too long by seven words.
vanderleun: but this post is not about Ed Koch.
Any post in which the words “Ed Koch” appear are about Ed Koch.
It’s even a bit worse, because lack of bias is not enough to remove the intrinsic uncertainty of such large scale endeavors. Such is the quagmire of having a state that “designs” policies for 350 million people.
In fact (climbs onto soapbox), it was these sorts of considerations, born after the disaster of the French Revolution, that gave rise to conservatism as we know and love it today. Reading Burke, Maine, and Stephen in England, Taine, Guizot, and Tocqueville in France, Humboldt, Jacobi, and Burckhardt in Germany and (of course) the American Founders over here, the emphasis on “Whoa doggie, slow down on that crazy horse,” clearly dominated everything else.
I have a theory about this, which is that the original conservatives were defending regimes yet to be irrevocably Jacobinized, so it paid to emphasize incrementalism (buying time so that cooler heads might prevail). But in the late 20th Century, the progressivization of the state had reached a tipping point, whereupon conservatism began to de-emphasize incrementalism and adopt a more “radical” stance.
Looked at from 10,000 feet, any country with an Anglo-Saxon tradition of ordered liberty where conservatism has been relegated to opposition-status is, let’s just say, in a bad way. (The qualification “Anglo-Saxon ordered liberty” is in there to be sure we don’t confuse so-called “conservatives” in places like Saudi Arabia being relegated to opposition status with a bad thing).
Flash to 2008 and Sam Tannenhaus pens his ludicrous little screed on “The Death of Conservatism,” bemoaning the right’s rejection of Burkean incrementalism (which in a progressive state means slower acquiescence to socialism). This is the line as it stands today in the media and among the pointy heads.
I don’t even disagree with them on the point that conservatism – meaning the bulk of we conservatives out here in the world – has become more intransigent. But if we look back on the originators of the philosophy, they too had moments of intransigence which are revealing. Notably, they were all intransigently hostile to Jacobinism. For those on the left who think conservatism has only recently gone rhetorically ferocious, reading Taine’s History of the French Revolution will disabuse them of that notion right quick. The Tea Party’s rhetoric can’t hold a candle to that 1,000 page conduit of unfiltered fury. The Founders were no slouches either in that regard.
(Short footnote. Taine had a great remark that some here may like to add to their arsenal: “To try to create a new system of habits by decree is like trying to build an old house”).
Anyway, our situation is tricky. William Voegeli wrote a typically brilliant article at National Review a few days ago on the problem. A promissory state with its goodies long taken as part of the fabric of life does not lend itself to the needed cut backs without serious repercussions. We wind up both knowing, as conservatives, that incrementalism is the default preference, and that incrementalism in the circumstances may be like guillotining someone slowly. It’s close to a Catch-22, and Voegeli’s point is that this was the Founders’ point: a promissory state means an eventual confusion about natural rights, as people come to see what they’ve been promised as being the heart of the regime’s legitimacy. “Give me goodies, or give me death!”
And we’re not even talking about ENDING entitlements. We’re just talking about restructuring them so that they are merely insolvent instead of world-historically insolvent. That’s the amount of rhetorical space we’ve been granted; how much policy space will we get?
Suffice it to say that Ed Koch can sleep easy.
The impetus behind most every intractable government problem is an entrenched bureaucracy bent on self-perpetuating itself by erecting Rube Goldberg contraptions funded by a ruling class securing for itself a permanent constituency and thereby a lifetime’s worth of incumbency – the quiddity of political entities, i.e., reciprocation.
Don’t try to fix that. Have the states develop their own programs, tight eligibility, simple forms, highly computerized, easily administered and regionally relevant. The Federal programs would continue to exist only until the last baby boomer is freed from this mortal coil.
DAMN. Maybe Mayor Ed is getting a tad senile. Cannot believe that the same Ed Koch who enthusiastically supported President Bush now supports The Boy King. Cannot grasp that the same Ed Koch who is a huge, enthusiastic champion of Israel is supporting Mr.Lead From Behind-Despiser of Bibi.
God, I’m sorry to read this news. Had NO idea.
Fixing Social Security and Medicare may be complex, but the truth is simple. If they are not restructured to make them actuarilly sound, they will cease to exist. How do I know this? That is what happened to my pension.
The road to ruin was very similar to what we see in in our “entitlements” today. Several close calls, where the fund was not actuarilly sound, but was, over a period of time, brought back up to snuff. What finally killed it was a big increase in the promises in the union contract coupled with a sudden drop in the company’s business. (They began losing lots of money.) The union would not accept that the promises could not be fulfilled and refused to renegotiate smaller pension payouts. The entire mess was put before a bankruptcy court. The court ruled that the promises could not be kept and the remaining money was sent to the PBGC to be divided up amongst stakeholders. Dimes on the dollar for many – less for everyone. In the case of SS and Medicare, we know there are no dollars in a fund, so they just end. Nothing for anyone.
Now, we are not Greece. Their economy is not able to grow because it depends on two things – olives and tourism. They will have a very hard time trying to keep going. We, on the other hand, have huge resources (farms, mines, coal, oil, natural gas, timber, manufacturing know how [Boeing, Deere, Caterpillar] etc.), a working infrastructure, people who know how to run businesses, and much more. All the ingredients to grow the size of the economic pie. Obama and his minions don’t believe in growing the pie. They want to change the distribution of the pie and to grow the government. So, Obama and those like him, (Yes, Mayor Koch, we’re looking at you!) are the problem.
Attacking our entitlement problems and our national debt require two things to happen simultaneously. The first is that we have to quit increasing government spending and instead put it on a downward glideslope. That means restructuring SS and Medicare to make them actuarilly sound and gradually reducing the size and scope of government. The second thing is allowing businesses to grow so that our national income grows. Grow the economy and decrease the growth of government. It won’t be a painless procedure, but it beats the hell out of drifting along as we are now and finding out what happens (as the Greeks are about to) when no one will lend us money any longer.
Doesn’t it all come down to ‘who do you trust’? Ideology plays a huge part. I know that decisions will have to be made, and that categories of people will suffer. But in the end, I trust Paul Ryan over Obama and his ilk any day. I suppose it’s all up to the independents to determine who’s rhetoric matches up at any given moment to their own leanings.
As a devout Tea Party Catholic, I read with much interest this piece on Congressman Paul: http://blog.adw.org/2012/04/congressman-ryan-on-being-guided-by-catholic-social-teaching .
A liberal in my diocesan Scripture class was spitting nails over the Congressman’s claim that his budget was based on Catholic principles….
vanderleun: I fear you are succumbing to the famous Ed Koch Fallacy.
NeoConScum: actually, Koch supported in Obama in 2008, as well.
Ed Koch:
Well, he IS a Democrat Party member.
N-Neocon…Did not know that 2008 fact either. Thanks, my assumption was waaaaay off.
Ira –
Yeah…Koch’s problem is that he thinks there IS an “entitlement contract between government and the individual American.” And yet he supported GWB.
I didn’t remember that he supported Obama in ’08, though I guess he can be forgiven for that…a lot of people had the wool pulled over their eyes.
George Pal –
Ooh! Stealth secession! I like it.
It’s been said that if the unfunded liabilities represented by retirement plans were properly represented on balance sheets, every large corporation would be hopelessly bankrupt.
It’s easy to make promises for the future–expect both sides of the negotiation know it–when the funding isn’t going to have to be ponied up for decades.
Each side grins at the other, then they go tell the chumps what a hell of a thing’s been done for them.
If, however, the funding requirements for defined benefit plans were kept up by public institutions and large corps as is required for small businesses, we’d at least be closer to solvency.
Like to know how the bastards got away with it.
If one accepts Neo’s concluding paragraph, it is clear that we must rely on philosopher-kings, never mind their polemics. The People, deficient in their math skills and knowledge of issue details, are simply not to be depended upon.
Don Carlos: that’s a complete misreading of my position on your part.
What I am saying is that people must rely on themselves, both to inform themselves and to puzzle it out. However, with complex situations, most people aren’t going to take the time and trouble to inform themselves, or to wade through the very strong bias of so many supposedly “objective” reporters.
In terms of just getting the facts (forget about evaluations of the facts), it’s hard to find a source to trust, as well. The MSM is so biased that it helps to read sources on both sides, left and right, and try to figure out the truth. It’s very challenging, but necessary, and it is just a fact that most people won’t take the trouble, but use the shorthand approach of just reading one favored source, usually one slanted towards their own already-existent point of view. However, the solution is certainly not to defer to the opinions of what you call philosopher-kings. That is exactly the opposite of what I’m saying.
Fixing Social Security and Medicare may be complex
Actually, in principle, fixing them may not be so complex, just politically difficult. Merely fixing payments to each at their present levels and letting inflation gradually nibbling that down to nothing would, over time, do the trick of weaning people off of them without the wrenching dislocation entailed in simply cutting them off.
The problem is that today’s Congress cannot obligate tomorrow’s to any given course of action over the decades-long period required.
Dickens could explain.
I’m not sure that Dickensian conditions are all that worse than what we’re going to experience in the alternative scenario.
Bear in mind that Europe has so far avoided a crash because of us coughing up cash and buying up European exports. If we crash, not only will no one bail us out, but no one CAN bail us out. Dickensian conditions then are probably a best case scenario, and Mad Max is a not impossible outcome.
“Attacking our entitlement problems and our national debt require two things to happen simultaneously. The first is that we have to quit increasing government spending and instead put it on a downward glideslope. That means restructuring SS and Medicare to make them actuarilly sound and gradually reducing the size and scope of government.”
IMO, the crisis is far beyond ‘restructuring’ simply because restructuring is not politically viable. Look at Greece to see what our future holds.
“Like to know how the bastards got away with it.”
All you need to do is read the covers of the magazines in the rack at the check out line.
Parker said, “Look at Greece to see what our future holds.”
Did you not read what I said about why we aren’t Greece? It makes a huge difference as to the resources, infrastructure, and human capabilities that a country can call on.
In addition to having meager resources and a crumbling infrastructure, the Greeks are accustomed to bribery, kickbacks, tax avoidance, and easy work days as a way of life. It has become accepted as their due and will be very difficult to change. We are so far from being in their condition that it is night and day.
That said, there is no doubt in my mind that we will, if we keep on our present course, eventually reach the point (a few years away?) where there is no hope of recovery. But by that time the entire world will be in such bad shape, that most will be starting anew.
Socialism is always a mess, but in any case it requires long-term planning. Without this, it is hopeless. The best general rule is to make decision making as decentralized as possible and make the process democratically controlled on state and local level. States, counties and municipalities must be capable to make their own plans and have funds do do so. Even better would be to allow to do the bulk of help to poor to parishes, as Reagan proposed.