The View from Right Field

New Musical About Life in the State Legislature

Did you hear there is a new TV show about life in a Midwestern state legislature?  It's called - Flee!

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Update (3/2/2011 8:00 am):  A variation of this post was printed in today's Chicago Tribune, Voice of the People.  See here.

Senators Durbin and Coburn Are Talking Deficits. Where Is President Obama?

Last Friday I noted a report in The Wall Street Journal that a group of six senators, including Dick Durbin of Illinois and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, was “considering legislation that would trigger new taxes and budget cuts if Congress fails to meet a set of mandatory spending targets and other fiscal goals aimed at reducing federal deficits.”  That sounded hopeful.

But then, Saturday’s Wall Street Journal* had a follow-up report:

“Top Senate Democrats tried to scotch efforts by Majority Whip Richard Durbin to include Social Security in comprehensive deficit-reduction negotiations, illustrating the challenge facing the bipartisan talks.

The discussion occurred during a closed-door White House meeting this week among negotiators including Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, a key lieutenant.”

The article explains the problem with the Reid/Schumer position:

“If Democratic negotiators are forced to take Social Security out of the discussions, Republicans could counter by refusing to discuss tax changes that raise revenue. With only Medicare and Medicaid left, talks would likely collapse, said Erskine Bowles, a former Clinton White House chief of staff who co-led Mr. Obama's deficit commission last year. Limiting the scope of negotiations ‘is the exact wrong thing to do,’ Mr. Bowles said.

Sen. Tom Coburn (R., Okla.), one of those involved in the bipartisan talks said ‘purists on both sides’ need to abandon their entrenched positions. For Republicans, that would mean ending or limiting hundreds of tax deductions and exemptions. For Democrats, the issue is Social Security. ‘For a deal to happen, Social Security needs to get fixed,’ Mr. Coburn said."

This would seem to fit exactly with what President Obama has been talking about.  The discussion between Senators Durbin and Coburn started when both were on the President’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility.  Both of them even voted for the panel’s recommendations, a surprise, perhaps, to supporters – and opponents – of both men.  In his State of the Union speech, the President called for Democrats and Republicans to work together, as they did during the lame-duck session at the end of 2010.  And when reporters questioned him about the failure of his budget to tackle the deficit, the President said he wanted to “have an adult conversation where everybody says here’s what's important and here’s how we’re going to pay for it.”  Which seems to be exactly what Senators Durbin and Coburn are trying to do.

Except.  Except that it is unclear how many people are really want to have that conversation.  The Wall Street Journal article continued:

“Sens. Reid and Schumer want any talk of changes to Social Security to be dealt with separately from the broader deficit-reduction talks. Mr. Schumer wants to protect the sizable number of incumbent Democrats facing elections in 2012 from having to make tough votes on the program.”

In other words, Senator Schumer’s idea of an adult conversation omits “tough votes” for Democratic senators up for reelection.  Unfortunately, if Senator Schumer has his way, his politics-first way, the problem isn’t going to get solved – and the “adult conversation” that President Obama says he wants to have isn’t going to take place.

The real question, then, is where President Obama will come down:  Trying to solve the problem with Senators Durbin and Coburn.  Or playing politics with Senator Schumer.

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* Jonathan Weisman, “Talks to Cut Deficit Stumble,” The Wall Street Journal, Saturday, February 19, 2011.

Our Deficit Will Come Down. It’s Just How and Who Decides.

The events in Egypt were just one more in the long list of things that took everybody, or at least almost everybody, by surprise.  The financial system breakdown, and its near collapse, in the United States is another example.

Looking back at both of these events, after they happened, we can see how they happened and why it should have been obvious they were going to happen.  Except, of course, it wasn’t obvious.  Because it if had been obvious, people would have done something different.  Hosni Mubarak certainly would have.  I assume that people in the United States would have, too.  But we kept doing what we were doing because it wasn’t obvious.

Things continue as they are until, all of a sudden, they change.  What had been occurring, what seemed like it was going to keep on occurring, no longer occurs.  Even though continuing for a few more months or a couple more years really wouldn’t make things significantly worse, all of a sudden, what had been happening can no longer continue.

It happened to Greece last year.  They had been borrowing and borrowing.  And then, all of a sudden, people wouldn’t lend to them.  It wasn’t a matter of having to pay a little more interest – or even a lot more interest.  Lenders just wouldn’t lend.  And without loans, the government couldn’t pay its bills, its workers, its retirees.

I mention this because I wonder (fear-?) that the United States could be approaching such a time.  Our budget deficit is out of control.  Things can’t continue as they are.  And they won’t.  They will stop.  The question is how and with what effect. 

If we do it ourselves, we will be able to choose how it happens and what the impacts will be.  If we don’t it ourselves, if we keep spending and borrowing until lenders refuse to lend any more, then we will not be able to pick and choose.  It will be forced on us at a moment of crisis. 

The problem is that we did not know when that moment of crisis will come.  All we know is that the longer we wait, the longer we put off solving our problems for ourselves, the more likely it is that the crisis will come and we will have much less choice as to what we must do.  The other thing we know is that when the crisis comes, it will be a surprise, except that after the fact, it will be obvious.

Obama Won’t Lead In Washington But He Will Tell Wisconsin What To Do

According to Thursday’s Wall Street Journal, a group of six senators, three Democrats and three Republicans, “is considering legislation that would trigger new taxes and budget cuts if Congress fails to meet a set of mandatory spending targets and other fiscal goals aimed at reducing federal deficits.”*  The group includes Dick Durbin of Illinois and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma.

My goodness.  People as far apart as Dick Durbin and Tom Coburn are trying to solve our nation’s fiscal problems, and all the President can do is to present a budget which Erskine Bowles, the Democratic co-chair of the President’s own National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility, said goes “nowhere near where they will have to go to resolve our fiscal nightmare.” 

Alice Rivlin, another member of the Commission, and budget director under President Clinton, said this of the President’s budget: “I would have preferred to see the administration get out front on addressing the entitlements and the tax reform that we need to reduce long-run deficits."

But while he won’t lead in Washington, the President is willing to advise the new Republican governor of Wisconsin on how he should handle Wisconsin’s budget problems:

“President Obama thrust himself and his political operation this week into Wisconsin's broiling budget battle, mobilizing opposition Thursday to a Republican bill that would curb public-worker benefits while planning similar action in other state capitals.

Obama accused Scott Walker, the state's new Republican governor, of unleashing an ‘assault’ on unions in pushing emergency legislation that would nullify collective-bargaining agreements that affect most public employees, including teachers. …

‘Some of what I've heard coming out of Wisconsin, where they're just making it harder for public employees to collectively bargain generally, seems like more of an assault on unions,’ Obama told a Milwaukee television reporter, taking the unusual step of inviting a local station into the White House for a sit-down interview.”

So, while Dick Durbin and Tom Coburn are actually trying to do something to solve our country’s problems in Washington, President Obama has decided to focus his attention on Madison, Wisconsin.  That’s audacity, all right, but I am not sure I would call it “the audacity of hope”.

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* Jonathan Weisman, “Deficit Plan Details Emerge,” The Wall Street Journal, February 17, 2011.

Obama Administration Budgeting. As Honest As the City He Comes From.

Lots can be said about the budget that President Obama submitted on Monday.  But let me just mention two little points that say a lot about this budget. 

At AOL News, Jacob J. Law, Director of Office of Management and Budget, wrote this about how President Obama’s budget is, in Mr. Law’s words, “address[ing] our long-term fiscal challenges”:

“For example, this budget shows how we can pay for solutions to two problems that we have been too willing to kick down the road by putting on the national credit card: preventing a nearly 30 percent cut in reimbursements to doctors in Medicare to keep doctors in the system treating patients; and preventing an increase in taxes on middle-class families through the Alternative Minimum Tax or AMT.

In December, there was a bipartisan agreement to pay for a one-year extension of the so-called 'doc fix' -- which was not required by budget rules but was the right thing to do. Building on that, our budget identifies $62 billion of specific health savings to pay for the next two years of this fix -- establishing a clear pattern that, consistent with our budget, this needs to be paid for in the future.

With regard to the AMT, we pay for three years of a patch by limiting the amount those in the highest tax bracket can receive for their itemized tax deductions. By bringing the rate back to where it was in the Reagan administration, this is the biggest reduction in revenue-side spending in 25 years.”

But Director Law doesn’t tell the entire story.  First, with respect to the AMT patch, he doesn’t mention that the way the Administration wants to “pay” for three years of the patch is by limiting the amount of itemized tax deductions that people at higher tax brackets can take.  And he also didn’t mention that the Obama administration made this same proposal in the last Congress, and it didn’t pass.  Why they think it is going to pass now is beyond me.

The story is the same with respect to the “doc fix”; i.e., putting off the cut in payments to doctors for seeing Medicare patients.  The Administration is going to pay for this by “cuts to payments for other [medical] providers, including proposals to cut the exclusivity period for biologic drugs from 12 years to 7 and restrict pharma’s ability to head off patent challenges from generic manufacturers with side payments.”  (See Megan McArdle.)  Once again, Director Law did not mention that these ideas have been proposed before and did not pass.

But most of all, Director Law did not mention that the Administration is using ten years of savings from limiting tax deductions to pay for three years of the AMT patch and that the Administration is using ten years of savings from those proposals I mentioned above to pay for just two years of the “doc fix". (See here.) 

This is phony budgeting.  This is not a real effort to “address our long-tem fiscal challenges.”  All this does is to push these issues off so they won’t come up again until after the next election.  Which may be the point. 

John Kerry and Afghanistan

While everybody’s focus was on Egypt last week, a fascinating little dance was going on between Senator John Kerry and the Administration regarding Afghanistan. 

First, Senator Kerry called up Boston University professor Andrew Bacevich, a noted opponent of both the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan and asked him to have lunch.  At some point after the lunch, somebody, Senator Kerry, perhaps, called the Boston Globe to tell them about the lunch and to say that Senator Kerry, in the words of the Globe, “has concluded that the US strategy in Afghanistan has to be revised” and that he “is calling for a more limited focus and fewer troops than the 155,000 that are in place now.”

The article in the Globe continues:

“‘What I don’t want is to be party to a policy that continues simply because it is there and in place,’ Kerry said in an interview about his evolving views of the war in Afghanistan. ‘That would be like Vietnam. And that is what I am determined to try to prevent.’”

Given that Senator Kerry is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, this is big news – and not good news for President Obama.  Except that, by the time I saw the article, it included this “clarification” at the very beginning of the story:

“A headline on an earlier version of this story may have left the false impression that Senator John F. Kerry has called for a significant reduction in US military forces in Afghanistan. He has not. While the senator told the Globe that troop levels should be reduced by an unspecified amount, with greater emphasis on counterterrorism, he characterized that as a ‘tweak’ of current strategy. The story failed to mention Kerry's description of his position as a ‘tweak.’ A Kerry spokesman also disputed the story's portrayal of his meeting with Boston University professor Andrew J. Bacevich, a war opponent, as evidence of the senator's growing doubts about the war. The spokesman said Kerry regularly speaks with people of varying views on the war and that the Bacevich meeting had no larger meaning.”

Two comments.  First, it appears that the Administration was not happy with the article and that, even with everything else that was happening around the world, somebody found the time to both read the article and let Senator Kerry know about their feelings. Certainly, after reading the “clarification,” there wasn’t much of the article left, at least insofar as it related to Senator Kerry.

Second, in reading the article, you get the feeling the Senator Kerry really wants to oppose the war in Afghanistan.  He first achieved fame (notoriety-?) by opposing the war in Vietnam.  You get the feeling he would love to oppose this war, too.  Then every time he spoke against the war in Afghanistan, the (mainstream) media would recall how he spoke against the Vietnam War.  It would be great.

But Barack Obama won in 2008, not John McCain, so John Kerry is stuck supporting, grudgingly, a war that it seems like he would really be happier opposing.

The Source of the Famous Clinton Surpluses

For the last several years, whenever Republicans have complained about the deficit or Democratic spending, Democrats have responded in two ways.  First, they point to the spending record of George W. Bush and all of the spending approved by the Republican Congresses from 2003 through 2006 (and the Republican House in 2001 and 2002).  They certainly have a point there.  Congressional Republicans spent way too much money, though I do wonder whether the Democrats would have spent any less.  While Democrats now point at President Bush’s drug plan for seniors as the kind of big spending program he favored, I don’t remember too many of Democrats at the time complaining about how expensive the plan was.  If anything, many of them wanted a more generous plan that would have cost even more.

Their second response is to say that the last budget surplus we had was under Bill Clinton.  What they forget to mention are the sources of that surplus.  Let me mention a couple of the main ones.  One, the Republican Congresses in the 1990s were less profligate than those under George W. Bush.  It was a Democrat asking for money then, and they didn’t approve as much.

Two, and just as important, there was a big reduction in defense spending.  Take a look at this chart which was in this week’s Economist:*

The Economist used the chart to show how much defense spending has gone up since 2001.  But the chart is just as useful to show how much defense spending went down during President Clinton’s administration.  The drop in actual spending was significant.  The drop in spending as a percentage of GDP was even more dramatic – and the source of much of the famed Clinton surpluses.

So, the next time Democrats tell you that a Democratic president is better able to get our deficit under control, say yes, as long as they have a Republican Congress and as long as they get a peace dividend because their predecessor won a war.

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* “Threatening a sacred cow,” The Economist, February 12, 2011, p. 33.

President Obama: Recapturing the Magic

According to E. J. Dionne, Barack Obama “is trying to recapture the magic of 2008 when he was more a preacher of hope and inspiration than the representative of a particular ideology.”  Of course, 2008 was when he was just a candidate for President, instead of actually being President, and it was a lot easier then because all he had to do was to make speeches instead of actually making decisions.

Mr. Dionne continues: “Judging by reactions to Obama's [U.S.] Chamber [of Commerce] speech on Monday, there is a Rorschach quality to his rhetoric these days. People are hearing either what they want to hear or what they were inclined to hear before he even opened his mouth.”  Which is the kind of speech that works for a candidate who is trying to be all things to all people – or at least most things to most people. 

This kind of speech is a bit of a problem for a president, though I suppose it might work if your main goal is to get reelected, as opposed to actually running the country for the next almost two years.  Certainly, then-Senator Obama didn’t’ do much in the Senate during the two years he was running for President.  Based on these comments from Mr. Dionne, you wonder how much President Obama will be doing as President over the next two years while he running for re-election.

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Update (2/15/11 12:55 am): Corrected an editing error by inserting "how" before "much" in the last sentence. 

The Constitutionality of the Obama Health Care Plan – A Follow-Up

Last April I wrote about whether the Obama health care plan, and especially the requirement that people must buy health insurance, i.e., the individual mandate, is constitutional.  I am not going to repeat what I said then.  I will say, however, that the question of whether the plan, and especially the individual mandate, is constitutional is getting a lot more serious attention than I expected.  A year ago, not many people thought about it, and the supporters of President Obama’s plan thought that even asking the question was absurd.  But with two U.S. federal district courts having found that parts of law are unconstitutional, out of the four that have looked at the issue, the question does not seem so absurd anymore.

But the interesting question is something that I mentioned in passing last April:  Instead of all of the arguments about the constitutionality of the individual mandate, what if the government had just raised taxes and started providing health care to everybody, like it does with Medicare for those over 65?  Would there be a constitutional argument about that?  Probably not.  After all, what is the difference between taxing people to provide Social Security or Medicare for older Americans and taxing people to provide medical care for everybody?  There would be lots of debate on whether doing this would be a good move, but I doubt there would be any serious constitutional argument.

So why didn’t the Administration do that?  There are probably several reasons.  First, as I said above, I don’t think the Democrats ever thought the constitutional argument about Obamacare was serious – or any kind of a real concern.  Their general view seems to be that the federal government can do whatever it wants in terms of economic rules and regulations, and that the only constitutional limits on the federal government are certain Bill of Rights protections for people charged with crimes.*  After all, liberals don’t even think that the First Amendment should prevent the federal government from imposing limits on political speech during election campaigns, as long as what the federal government is doing will make the process fairer and more equal, so why should Obamacare be a problem?

Second, I wonder if such a bill, i.e., extending Medicare to everybody, would have passed.  One of the key arguments, especially early on, for Obamacare, was that it would provide coverage for people who didn’t have it, but it would not affect people who already had health coverage and wanted to keep what they had.  Remember President Obama saying that, under his plan, if you liked the health insurance you had, you would be able to keep it.  Obviously, nobody, including the President, is saying that anymore, because it has become fairly clear that it is not true, but it was part of the effort to sell Obamacare back before people knew how the plan was really going to work.  If the Administration had admitted, from the beginning, all of the changes that the plan was going to make to people’s existing health insurance, the public uproar would have been greater and sooner, and it might not have passed.

Third, the ultimate goal was to pass something, anything.  The idea was that, once it was passed, it would be impossible to repeal it.  Problems could be fixed later.  The point was to get it passed and then worry about the details.  This became especially true once Scott Brown was elected in Massachusetts.  It didn’t matter how the plan worked, or if it would work.  The goal was to pass something and then fix it over the next three and one-half years.

What President Obama and his supporters did not count on was that the financial bailouts, the huge stimulus package, and the health care legislation itself – including the process by the bill was passed – wound up creating a backlash that generated renewed interest in how limits could be put on the federal government.  Which led people to the Constitution. 

This was unexpected by liberals and Democrats because the idea of limiting what the federal government can do (except in those areas I mentioned above) is alien to them.  In the view of most liberals and Democrats, if the goal is good, if the motive is good, then why should anyone object to what the federal government wants to do?  Not everybody agrees with such a view, and that disagreement lies at the heart of the debate over the constitutionality of certain parts of Obamacare as it was passed. 

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* And limits on what the federal government can do in terms of national security, of course.

Ronald Reagan and the Liberals Who Now Claim to Like Him

Tomorrow is Ronald Reagan’s 100th birthday, and the amazing thing for those of us who lived through his presidency is all the nice things that liberals and Democrats are saying about him.  Even President Obama, the epitome of the intellectual/liberal/post-American greatness wing of the Democratic Party, wrote an Op-Ed for USA Today praising Ronald Reagan.

I wonder how many politicians there are in Washington today who are more different than Ronald Reagan than President Obama.  Consider this excerpt from an article by Anthony Dolan:

“In office only two weeks Ronald Reagan had his 70th birthday party in the Roosevelt Room of the West Wing just across from the oval office. He walked in with Nancy Reagan, saw the cake and began as his staff knew he would.

‘Say, listen, I know some really funny stories about 70-year-old men’- and here he peered down at his wife who was vigorously shaking her head and then added – ‘but I don't think I'm going to get the chance’ -- and the staff began to laugh and Mrs. Reagan nodded emphatically – ‘to tell you any of them.’

Among the disadvantages of not having Ronald Reagan around for his own centennial is missing the jokes he would have made about it.

‘There are three ages of man,’ Reagan liked to say: ‘Youth, middle-age, and ‘You-look-terrific.’”

Can anybody envision Barack Obama making jokes about himself like that – and having fun doing it?

But beyond that, to properly remember Ronald Reagan, you have to remember the things that drove the liberals crazy, because those things were so much of the real Ronald Reagan.  Paul Kengor reminds us of what Ronald Reagan said about the Soviet Union and what media thought about it:

“On Jan. 29, 1981, barely a week into Ronald Reagan's presidency, the world got a no-nonsense education on how Reagan's America would differ from that of his predecessor. During the first press conference, ABC's Sam Donaldson asked the new president about Moscow's aims and intentions. Throwing diplomatic double-speak to the wind, Reagan calmly explained that the Soviet leadership had ‘openly and publicly declared that the only morality they recognize is what will further their cause, meaning they reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat.’

Reagan continued, explaining that the Soviets considered their relativistic behavior “moral, not immoral.’  This was something that the United States needed to ‘keep … in mind’ when doing ‘business’ with Moscow.  The assembled Washington press corps responded with what National Security Adviser Richard V. Allen described as ‘an audible gasp.’”*

But most of all, remember what President Reagan said in Berlin, at the Brandenburg Gate, on June 12, 1987:

“And now -- now the Soviets themselves may, in a limited way, be coming to understand the importance of freedom. We hear much from Moscow about a new policy of reform and openness. …

Are these the beginnings of profound changes in the Soviet state? Or are they token gestures intended to raise false hopes in the West, or to strengthen the Soviet system without changing it? We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty -- the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace.

There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace.

General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate.

Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate.

Mr. Gorbachev -- Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

How many of those liberals, how many of those Democrats, praising Ronald Reagan today praised him for saying that in 1987?  To ask the question is to answer it.  They thought it was foolish and unnecessarily provocative.  Or at least they would have if they had realized he really meant it.

Let’s face it.  Democrats and liberals did not like Ronald Reagan when he was President, and they are saying good things about him today because history proved him right.

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* Paul Kengor, “When Reagan Spoke Truth to Soviet Power,” The Wall Street Journal, January 31, 2011.