In effect, he would allow rising outlays on mandatory programmes such as Medicaid and Social Security and debt servicing to crowd out public investments that are vital for America’s long-term economic future…
Mr Obama probably hoped that when the moment of truth arrived, when the spending cuts started to bite, the American people would support higher taxes rather than the spending cuts long called for in his own budget proposals. And perhaps they will still do so. Yet he has never presented an alternative with more robust tax revenues in order to fund a higher sustained level of public investments and services.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen.
I know that the conventional wisdom is that Republicans and conservatives are hopelessly irrational and self-contradictory on fiscal policy. Let us stipulate that such is the case. That does not mean that the Democrats and progressives are rational and coherent. If someone on the left can point me to a budget that does what you want, does not lead to explosive deficits, and does not depend on spending an imaginary dividend of “lower health care costs, through magic,” I would like to see it.
To put it this another way, I think that even if the entire conservative side of the political spectrum were to collapse tommorrow, the left still could not govern.
Since what is uncontrollable is health care costs, no solution is possible without some sort of imaginary dividend, that with the current slowdown may prove not so imaginary. The left at least knows that, while the right plays shell games.
What Lord said, except hat I see no reason medical spending cannot be limited. It “just” requires that we get used to the idea that any federal medical spending is going to sometimes have to say no.
The Democrats have roasted themselves, but nobody is bothering to call them on it. They have to cut medical to balance the budget, but, their most consistent platform plank for several years has been increase medical spending. These two goals are strongly antithetical.
An extreme path is one in which no matter what fiscal or monetary policies are in place, the medical care (or other goods and services) accessible to the retired, will be seriously curtailed.
In such a circumstance, no party will “govern” in any normal sense.
The “find a way to muddle through” skills of real societies make this path fairly unlikely, but by no means impossible.
Whether it amounts to “governing” or not is a matter of debate. But it seems to me that the left knows full well that it’ll have to do dramatic cuts eventually, and I think the idea is to hide the ball in this regard as a marketing strategy until the institutional changes have become entrenched and irreversible.
After the ACA breaks down as designed and is replaced by single-payer Socialized Medicine, the US-NHS eventually becomes the new bipartisan axiomatic baseline assumption. The political dynamics on this issue evolve to be similar to those in Canada or the UK.