My BFF (AEAEAEAE) Barrett Kaiser is leaving his post as State Director for Max Baucus after a long time with the senior Senator. He's leaving to take a position with a campaign consulting firm as their Western director.
John Lewis is moving up from Deputy State Director to State Director. I'm not sure yet if other shuffling will occur.
Barrett and I have butted heads a few times over the years, but he's a sharp operator. It really is a loss for that office. Kaiser, for example, posted and engaged in conversation here (publicly, under his own name, not the most common thing) for quite some time before concluding that suffering the slings and arrows wasn't really helping him do his job.
Hilltop Strategies, the firm he's joining, is gaining a hell of a team member.
Someone -- I can't be sure whom -- has unsubscribed me 6 times in the past week from Congressman Rehberg's official constituent email list. I contacted his office and got a (fairly jokey) email in response indicating that they were not responsible for this. It started happening after I wrote a piece critical of the Congressman's constituent emails on reducing the deficit by cutting taxes and increasing spending (I think I had a fair point).
Like I said, I'm not sure who's doing this and I can't really point the finger at the Congressman's office. It would take an amount of work I'm not interested in undertaking to get to the bottom of this, especially since it is easy enough to maintain a subscription through other means.
Regardless, this sort of crap -- the inclination to stop debate by cutting off critical voices -- bothers me in most forums (which is one reason why I've allowed comments here to become so absurd at times), but it is especially reprehensible in communication media paid for with taxpayer dollars.
Number one suggestion..stop spending money on failed stimulus. Tax relief!!
A full third of the ARRA was tax relief. That's why payroll withholding dropped last year. It is why there's a $400 or $800 Make Work Pay tax credit on people's returns this year.
Beyond that, the spending in the stimulus didn't fail, unless our Congressman is advocating for cutting short COBRA subsidies or unemployment insurance. Hilariously, Congressman Rehberg tweeted this yesterday, around the same time he was touring the stimulus-funded Northern Hotel renovations:
When the two reached Nelson's basement office, Rehberg's work began. The congressman inquired about what the government could do for the Northern, promising to have a staffer look for grant options and Department of Energy assistance.
A year ago, by cooperating with the city of Billings, the Northern was able to sell $20 million in tax-free "stimulus bonds" to pay for the hotel's remodeling. Investors like the government-backed, tax-free bonds, which were made possible through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
Rehberg is looking into government grant options and DoE assistance for private projects? Sounds like government spending to me.
Even worse, our Congressman is apparently aware that he's full of it:
In an interview with The Billings Gazette editorial board Tuesday, Rehberg, who opposed the ARRA and is advocating a shift toward tax cuts, said the construction projects funded by the ARRA had merit....
If Denny Rehberg thinks COBRA benefits, food stamps, unemployment, and local business projects like Northern renovation are failures, he should say so explicitly. He's trying, as always, to have it both ways.
And keep in mind when Rehberg rails about government spending that his office repeatedly calls for higher spending on numerous programs. This guy is absolutely all over the map.
Fresh in the inbox, a Congressional newsletter from Montana's junior Congressman Dennis Rehberg:
Congressman Denny Rehberg
HAS A SOLUTION TO OUR DEBT PROBLEM:
STOP SPENDING AND BALANCE THE BUDGET!
Already, Cappy McShout, let's see your solution:
Congress can decrease the deficit and decrease the debt by:
* Freezing non-defense discretionary spending
* Reforming "entitlement" spending
* Increasing tax incentives for small businesses
* Lowering taxes for hard-working Americans
Low-hanging fruit first: Items 3 and 4 will increase the deficit, not reduce it. Cutting taxes means slashing revenue. Budget deficits by definition amount to expenditures minus revenues. If revenues get smaller, deficits go up.
Obviously, some practitioners of voodoo economics will argue that resulting improvements in economic growth will make up for any loss of revenue, but the math here is quite fuzzy and, at the tax rates currently levied in the United States, almost certainly inaccurate. There are policy arguments for cutting taxes and accepting the deficits, but we're almost certainly on the wrong stretch of the Laffer curve to have tax cuts actually increase revenue.
But let's look at the other two proposals, starting with the discretionary non-defense spending freeze. First, this is an Obama proposal. Second, in terms of the budget, it's virtually meaningless. Check out this interactive budget graphic from The New York Times. Look at the overall budget, then click on the "Hide Mandatory Spending" button. Now, pretend that the National Security and Veterans Benefits (I'm presuming Rehberg isn't advocating freezing spending on Veterans). Look at what a small share of the budget is left. Now remember that we're not slashing this, we're freezing its growth.
So, not really a big deal.
What's the last proposal? Entitlement reform.
Where to begin with this one? Entitlement reform is GOPese for "cutting Medicare and Social Security," often through privatization. Depending on the particular privatization scheme with Social Security, there's a good chance that Rehberg's proposal would actually increase costs.
But let's just keep in mind that any savings on the Social Security front are likely to be minimal. The real driver of costs within the long-term budget is Medicare (which is one of the big reasons I favor health care reform). Rep. Paul Ryan, the House Republicans' point person on the budget, solves this problem by voucherizing Medicare and freezing its spending, a proposal that has the virtue of balancing the budget solely through spending cuts. Of course, Rehberg has also played politics by pretending to oppose any reduction in Medicare services. Instead, he'll just destroy the program in wholesale fashion.
One last point, despite Paul Ryan's ability to balance the budget solely with spending cuts, it is worth knowing that he had to instruct the CBO to assume no revenue reductions, which means no tax cuts.
In short, Montana's Congressman is pushing fiscal snakeoil. No surprise there. As Tyler Gernant put it a few weeks ago:
While Rehberg claims that fiscal responsibility is at the core of his being, Gernant said he voted for "a massive tax cut for the wealthy that completely eliminates our budget surplus and returns us to deficits."
Gernant said Rehberg voted to put two wars on the country's credit cards and voted for a pharmaceutical drug plan that lets the big drug companies charge the U.S. government whatever they want.
Rehberg doesn't give a shit about the deficit. He's either an idiot or a liar on this stuff. What he really wants is to destroy government, except when he can have a press conference to take credit for it.
Sadly, politicians rarely explain the federal budget to constituents. Neither, really, does anyone else. That means we're left with misleading crap like this being peddled instead.
Read Jon Tester's note on Facebook about the lying ads up on Montana TV about a "bank bailout" bill. All you really need to know is that the people running the ads are fighting furiously to maintain their anonymity. If there's a group of people in this country willing to use a government bailout check to run ads calling a piece of legislation that would institute needed protections for consumers in their industry a bailout in order to kill it...and do it anonymously...it would be the assholes on Wall Street.
Good news on the health reform front, where the President announced on Super Bowl Sunday that he plans an open meeting at the White House with Congressional leaders from both parties and cameras from C-SPAN for a conversation about improving and passing the health care bill.
If they want to take a pass on being able to provide input, let them pass. Hold the summit, ask for their ideas, let the President outmatch them once again, and pass the Senate bill and a corrective bill through both chambers, on party lines if need be.
Hot damn. I missed Tyler Gernant's announcement because I was traveling but just picked up the coverage from yesterday's papers. The contender is swinging and he lands a few punches:
Gernant said he wouldn't be running if the country was in the same shape it was in 2000, with a $200 billion budget surplus and a booming economy with increasing numbers of jobs.
[...]
While Rehberg claims that fiscal responsibility is at the core of his being, Gernant said he voted for "a massive tax cut for the wealthy that completely eliminates our budget surplus and returns us to deficits." Gernant said Rehberg voted to put two wars on the country's credit cards and voted for a pharmaceutical drug plan that lets the big pharmaceutical drug companies charge the U.S. government whatever they want.
Good for Tyler -- on point, honest, and educational about just what policies our Congressman pursues.
Fresh in my inbox is a statement from Jon Tester following his vote in favor of creating a deficit reduction commission:
"For a decade, both parties have swept America's debt problem under the carpet. And like most Montanans, I'm fed up with the mess.
"The only way to get our fiscal house in order is to put politics aside and work together to create good-paying jobs, making Wall Street work for Main Street."
"That's why I crossed party lines to vote against the bailouts of Wall Street and the U.S. auto industry. And that's why I voted today to create a bipartisan panel to recommend spending cuts."
I know Jon well enough to know that this stuff is heartfelt from him. He really isn't a fan of the massive deficit we've racked up. And I don't even really have a problem with this commission, except that I don't really see how it works.
The basic idea is that most of the real solutions for dealing with the deficit -- bending the health care curve, raising taxes, or seriously rethinking the defense budget -- are politically difficult votes. That's why a health care bill that does two of those three is currently stuck in Congress with some small chance left to pass. On the third issue -- the defense budget -- it means actually building some sort of willingness to stand up to military contractors, their significant lobbies, and the "weak on security" storylines that they and their Congressional lackeys will spin if you seriously evaluate their spending.
How does any of this get easier with a bipartisan commission whose recommendations require a super-duper-pooper majority? It doesn't.
Reality is that fixing America's fiscal outlook isn't at this point a policy problem. We have a bill in Congress that will seriously reduce the long-term deficit. We can write additional bills tomorrow to do the same. The problem is that Judd Gregg, for all his hemming and hawing about budget deficits won't do anything about it. The problem is that Evan Bayh and Blanche Lincoln crow about deficits but continue to vote for massive tax cuts that will worsen the long-term deficit picture (Jon has cast some of these votes, as well).
Governing is occasionally about making hard choices. Those hard choices are compounded by a press corps whose understanding of the federal budget often seems downright abysmal. But there's no reason to believe that a blue ribbon panel will convince a single GOP member of Congress to vote for a tax cut or meaningful health care cost controls or the kinds of defense cuts that don't really threaten national security.
For now, anyone seriously interested in long-term deficit reduction should be acting to get the health care bill moving again. If that means reaching across the rotunda and pledging to work with House members on sidecar provisions to move through budget reconciliation or publicly or privately stepping up pressure to get something passed, that's what it will take to get this deficit reduced.
Virtually everything else is basically a game of kick the can.
Markos, grappling with last night's Massachusetts returns, cites Montana Democrats (and alludes to, I believe, our flat-topped Senator) as another example of hard-to-believe victories achieved, by part, by sheer hard work:
In 2006, while researching Democratic gains in Red Montana, I asked a couple of state legislators how they won their tough races. I was looking for the magic message, but instead got a mundane answer: they knocked on doors. Lots of them. And they put tens of thousands of miles on their pickup trucks.
That's the strategy we saw in reverse in indigo-Blue Massachusetts -- a Republican who downplayed his GOP badge while putting in thousands of miles on his pickup truck. 200,000 of them.
Teddy never took his voters for granted, no matter how big an icon he was in the state. Brown didn't take them for granted either. He was aggressive, engaged, effective, and ... lucky as all shit. It's not every day you get to go up against a candidate who takes everything for granted, neglects to negatively define you, and heads out for vacation while the race is still on.
Yesterday, a few hours before the race in Massachusetts was called, I was at the campaign announcement of Bryce Bennett. Bryce is a long-time friend and (full disclosure) currently a co-worker at Forward Montana. He's also among the hardest working people I know in politics. He's been out knocking doors in January in a strongly Democratic district (almost as Democratic as Massachusetts) despite a lack of filed opponents.
Why? Because that's what voters deserve. A lot of Scott Brown's voters probably disagreed with him on a bunch of policy issues. He will, soon, be among the most unpopular members of the U.S. Senate or a deep disappointment to the Tea Party crowd that elected him. But for at least a while, he was the only candidate in the game who appeared to give a damn what voters thought.
Separately, I have absolutely no patience for the Democrats in Washington, DC, who are now ready to throw in the towel on health care reform in the name of the Massachusetts results. This is a serious mistake for a number of reasons, both policy-wise and politically. Policy-wise because even the Senate bill is a significant improvement over the status quo. Politically because the last thing Democrats need to indicate to the country is that they, once again, have no substantive principles for which they'll risk their careers.
If the Democrats turn from this setback, weeping and scared, and crawl in a cave and become the part of 2003 again, there's a whole lot of us who will be more than ready to abandon ship. And for me it won't be because I didn't get single-payer or whatever else, my-way-or-the-highway bullshit, it will be because America needs a party capable of governing. The Republicans have proven they can't be trusted. The Democrats have one more year to make their case.
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, among the most respected budgetary think tanks in the country, has a new report out on how to merely stabilize the federal debt. I think there's too little in the way of hard understanding of the federal budget.
CBPP is run by smart economists, so they open the report with a giant disclaimer that near-term deficits really aren't a big problem:
Reducing deficits in the short term, however, would undercut the fragile economic recovery. Policymakers should tolerate large deficits over the next several years in order to maintain strong aggregate demand until the economy is back on its feet. Moreover, they can take comfort in the fact that temporary measures intended to aid recovery add very little to the long-term deficit problem. The increase in deficits for several years pales in comparison to the size of the economy over the long run.
But from there, things get interesting. Current projections have the federal deficit comprising 20% of GDP by 2050 and CBPP's analysis, well, I'll let them speak:
The "fiscal gap" - defined here as the average amount of program reductions or revenue increases that would be needed every year over the next four decades to stabilize the debt at its 2010 level as a share of the economy - equals 4.9 percent of projected GDP. That is a very large amount. To eliminate that gap would require a 28 percent increase in tax revenues or a 22 percent reduction in program (non-interest) expenditures over the entire 40-year period from now to 2050 (or, more realistically, a combination of tax increases and spending cuts).
Got that? Those measures would simply allow for us to maintain a public debt at the current rate.
The big problem here is not current spending areas. It is specific inflations and population growth among certain populations.
Basically, the problem is health care inflation:
Rising health care costs are the single largest cause of rapidly rising expenditures, and ongoing reform of the health care system is absolutely fundamental to any solution. The two main sources of rising federal expenditures over the long run are rising per-person costs throughout the U.S. health care system (both public and private) and the aging of the population. Together, these factors will drive up spending for the "big three" domestic programs: Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Growth in those programs accounts for all of the increase in federal spending as a share of GDP over the next 40 years (and beyond).
This is why the bullshit out there about opposing the health care bill out of fear of government spending is absolutely mind blowing. Without health reform, this country goes bankrupt. The stronger the health reform, the better the fiscal state of our nation.
The current health care bill is the single biggest deficit reduction act in the history of the nation. A whole bunch of conservatives paying lip service to deficit concerns are about to vote against its final passage.
Interesting to read this interview with Tim Geithner along side this story on energy legislation. Geithner's basic message is "I'm here to get a job done and to get the economy moving again. Whatever people think of my actions, we need to find the policies that work because success is more important than popularity." There's an easy way for that message to turn into arrogance, but failing to even try to walk that line results in the worst form of political cowardice.
Cue the dregs of the Senate Democratic Caucus:
Bruised by the health care debate and worried about what 2010 will bring, moderate Senate Democrats are urging the White House to give up now on any effort to pass a cap-and-trade bill next year.
"I am communicating that in every way I know how," said Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), one of at least a half-dozen Democrats who've told the White House or their own leaders that it's time to jettison the centerpiece of their party's plan to curb global warming.
Senator Landrieu is either smart enough or too stupid to stake her opposition to taking action on global warming on a scientific argument that action is unnecessary. Instead, her opposition is basically that she thinks it is too hard to tackle to many big ideas too quickly.
Look, I'm all in favor of putting more economic development legislation on the docket prior to getting back to energy reform. But the question just can't be one or the other. We need to rethink the carbon we're producing. We need to get our economy going. These are real issues that we as a country need to address.
Sadly, Lieberman is actually one of our better champions on energy legislation. He remains committed to a carbon cap as part of energy reform in 2010.
Side-note -- if you want to read some truly mind-bogglingly stupid defenses of legislative action, check out these Republicans defending their votes in favor of Medicare Part D while explaining their opposition to the current healthcare legislation. It is worth keeping in mind that current CBO projections have the current health care bill landing as the single largest deficit reduction act in the history of the country. Given that CBO tends to score conversatively, odds are good that the deficit reduction will be more pronounced than predicted. In plain English, the Republican opposition predicated on deficit concerns is full of shit.
I've been swamped with polling closures and some administrative/fundraising work, but a friend emailed asking me to post something on health care and the rather unfortunate news of the past few days. I still don't have a ton of time to go into details about why I still support the bill, but for whatever it is worth, I do.
You should read Nate Silver's and John Podesta's and Ezra Klein's and Jon Cohn's and others on why this bill is still a good idea. Paul Starr, in particular, deserves a close read. He's a smart dude.
But to a large extent, none of these folks are in the thick of it. Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio is almost certainly the most reliable economic liberal who has been in the thick of Senate negotiations. And while he's disappointed, he isn't backing off his support for the bill.
Sherrod Brown's actions are worth monitoring as this debate continues. Bernie Sanders as well, although he's less in the thick of the conversation as far as I can tell.
Bottom-line, it will actually be easier for a bunch of reasons to make progress off of this bill as a platform than off the status quo. With subsidies, insurance regulations, and exchanges in place, other policies like stronger cost containment and a meaningful public option will be able to pass through reconciliation.
Blowing up the process on the other hand gives us two options: pursuing a reconciliation strategy that would force us to omit insurance market reforms or trying from the beginning with the same set of players. Realistically, starting over would mean giving up and seeing a Congress where Ben Nelson and Olympia Snowe are no longer the key votes. Instead, Judd Gregg or someone similar would be.
Social security was strengthened over the years. Civil rights law was strengthened over the years. Victory rarely (never?) comes down to a single bill in a single year. Even slavery's ending was a mish-mash of legislative compromises over decades compounded by open warfare between the states.
Changing the fundamental polity of a nation of 300 million is hard. It probably should be.
But this bill is progress. And it lays the groundwork for more progress. That's a win. And I still support it.
There's a few different comments. Someone calls me an idiot or a sellout or something. Actually, a few people do that. But someone else points out that if this bill dies, private insurance is still the only route to coverage for most Americans, but without subsidies, without regulations, and without an understandable marketplace. That's a damn good point.
Laying people off is hard work. Fortunately, it is also lucrative. Despite entering bankruptcy, Smurfit-Stone paid out $47 million in bonuses to executives and other employees in 2009.
I suppose this is the new trickle down from Wall Street's largesse. Infuriating.
In another reminder that the economic turmoils (either the painful short-term recession or the long-term remaking of the Western economy), Smurfit-Stone is shutting its Frenchtown plant. This is a huge blow to the area economically, where the mill provided damn good pay by our standards:
In specific terms, the plant closure means the loss of 417 high-paying jobs, with an average annual salary of $70,000.
"Those jobs represent about 4 percent of the Missoula's economy," Barkey said. "In terms of what it represents for the economy - that's about a $45 million loss annually.
Through ripple effects, one economist thinks we may see as many as another 1,000 jobs lost in the region.
The only bright spot in the dark day was the fact that employees will receive benefits under the Trade Assistance Act - but only because those federal benefits were approved within the past year during the plant's last round of layoffs.
As the day wore on, as Houseman went from one management meeting to the next, taking short breaks to explain the news and its repercussions to his fellow union members and coworkers, his exhaustion and heavy heart could be heard in his voice.
Weary, he talked about upcoming meetings with Smurfit representatives to discuss severance packages and about the many union meetings to come.
His voiced cracked, and Houseman paused for a moment to say quietly: "This is not a very good day."
I've been on the road for what feels like forever, but I checked in to find Montana editorials absolutely up in arms about the Baucus-Hanes story. So let me say a few things:
I think it is messed up that a Senator's significant other, whether boyfriend, girlfriend, spouse, partner, whatever, could be appointed a U.S. Attorney without violating ethics rules.
I think it is messed up that a Senator's former state director could be appointed...say...U.S. Marshall, as happened with Conrad Burns earlier this decade.
I think workplace relationships are generally terrible ideas.
All that said, the problem here is as much about the rules of the game as they are about judgment in these situations. Would it be better to nominate your former state director to the senior-most law enforcement position in the state, the person who oversees corruption cases, because you're not seeing them romantically?
If anything, I'd be more worried about the potential of a future scorned lover in the US Attorney's position than I would be about the fiercest political nemesis...
But there's a place here where the Missoulian crosses the line, attacking Max's staff for going to bat for their boss. Anyone who has worked in politics knows that going to bat for your boss is what you do. Staff aren't extensions of their "principal," they're an army dedicated to protecting that person.
I don't know who in Max's operation knew what when. I'm guessing the Missoulian also lacks omniscience. I do know that has probably been a damn long week for a bunch of people who didn't make ethical lapses.
I heard a story years ago about a local Democratic elected official who got asked what he thought about Bill Clinton's affairs. He said he was pissed. When he got told that he was being prude, he responded that he didn't really care that Bill Clinton had sex. He cared that Bill Clinton's actions had to become the focus of so many young staffers and other people all over the country who couldn't get laid for the next two years because of the long hours they had to put in protecting the President's agenda.
Anyways, as someone who works in the bidness, it is worth keeping in mind that as usual, the staff here aren't culpable. They're just responsible for taking care of the mess. Being jerks to them personally is unnecessary.
Update -- Matthew Koehler suggests in comments that I disclose that I'm friends with members of Max Baucus's staff. That's true. I've both butted heads with them and gone to their birthday parties.
For the record, I'm friends with lots of people, as evidenced by my Facebook page. But, yes, my friends include multiple people on Max Baucus's staff...and I care about my friends and the difficult time they're in.
That either means that politicians have failed in a major way to explain its benefits to the people of Montana (I mean beyond the readers of this blog) or that people are seriously upset about some of the worst provisions in the bill.
What's could be getting Montanans so riled up? Could it be the excise tax on good health care plans? The kind of plans that we were told we could keep if we like are now subject to a 40% excise tax on the value of health plans- plans with a value of $8,500 for individuals and $23,000 for a family.
When you look beyond the talking points, however, you find that this is also going to tax plenty of Buicks: plans for teachers, nurses, firefighters, miners, for example.
It gets even worse for those in high risk blue-collar professions like miners and firefighters. Unfortunately the retiree and high risk occupation threshold amounts were reduced by $500 and $2,000 for individuals and families, respectively, thereby worsening their financial hit under the excise tax. We're talking about workers who have already in many cases sacrificed wages to get better benefits.
The bill does have the advantage, according to the Congressional Budget Office, of being deficit-neutral. In fact, the CBO claims it will reduce the deficit over 20 years. But just because we can afford a vehicle like these at LoserCars.com doesn't mean it's a good idea to buy it.
This provision of the bill will actually harm millions of middle class Americans who already have health insurance.
There may be a piece of paper somewhere on which this bill looks good (please, somebody show it to Montanans). But it's not looking like this bill is going solve the problem.
I continue to see people screaming bloody murder over the health care legislation moving through Congress. I don't have the numbers handy, but a poll (CNN, I think) recently found a narrow plurality opposing the House legislation, with a notable portion of those opposing it for being too conservative (worth noting, of course, most opposition was actually from the right or was self-described non-ideological).
The Senate bill, by most accounts, is a more conservative bill. It is financed primarily not by an explicitly progressive tax, but by an excise tax on health plans that will hit Goldman Sachs executives for sure, but will also hit a lot of working class union members who have negotiated health benefits for years.
The subsidies for purchasing coverage in the Senate bill are lower than I would like, meaning near-term affordability isn't what I would hope (of course, it also means less of a public transfer to private insurance companies, which I suppose is OK).
With all that in mind, people have been asking me a lot lately why I'm still supportive of the bill. For me, it really cuts to a few things:
The underlying structure of the bill -- subsidies, insurance exchanges, insurance market regulations, etc. -- are the right underlying reforms to make a public/private system work. They also may take us a bit closer to single-payer and certainly do not move us further away (e.g. single-payer supporters may not get what they want in this bill, but it does not foreclose victory down the road, which is important).
There are some very smart political incentives built in. For example, members of Congress get thrown into the exchanges with a lot of the rest of us, helping guarantee that the incentive down the line is for them to maintain high quality and affordability (relatively speaking on the affordability, a lot of members of Congress happen to be very rich and all are higher income than the majority of Americans).
The biggest point of all is that the Senate bill is extremely serious about costs over the long-term. What should worry just about everyone in the healthcare debate is how completely unsustainable the current system is. It isn't just that it is expensive or that administrative costs run too high. Those administrative costs don't even begin to explain the wild inflation that occurs in America's healthcare sector. You simply cannot have costs in 17% of your economy rise at rates 5-10% faster than the economy as a whole in perpetuity.
My friend Jay Stevens wrote a while ago that his problem with the excise tax was that it penalized spending on healthcare and that we should be happy to encourage people to spend more on healthcare. If healthcare actually improved health, I'd be inclined to agree that it is worth subsidizing. But the correlations are relatively weak (and the odds that hospitalization can hurt or kill you are unfortunately high). Under these circumstances, reducing healthcare spending and allowing ourselves to spend more money on other things (perhaps sporting equipment or healthy local food, both of which can be expensive but would do more in general to improve health than more heart surgeons) would be a good thing.
Does the Senate bill do this? We don't know. But it does everything it can to "bend the curve." Is that good for progressives? Depends on what you mean by progressive, but anyone concerned that health insurance is too expensive for low-income people and tthe middle class should hope that the low- and middle-income people of 20 years in the future have better choices. That requires bending the curve. And by all accounts, the Senate bill works harder to bend the curve than the House bill.
The Senate bill isn't just deficit neutral. Over the next twenty years, by CBO's (rough) estimates, it will reduce the deficit by three-quarters of a trillion dollars. That, as they say, is real money. It does that by long-term holding federal spending on healthcare steady even as massively expanding federal assistance to help low-income and middle-class Americans purchase insurance.
Even better news: CBO has at times been known for being woefully pessimistic. They overestimated the cost and underestimated the impact of tradeable permits for reducing SO2 pollution (which helped clean the air in my (and Dennis Rehberg's) hometown of Billings -- maybe "cap and trade" ain't such a bad idea, Mr. Rehberg). They overestimated the cost of Medicare's prescription drug benefit. And they routinely admit that they can't "score" the cost of key provisions of health care bills that may further reduce spending because these are experiments and folks like CBO approach experiments conservatively.
A couple months ago, a "meme" flew around Facebook as millions of social networkers changed their status to read "No one should die because they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick." Both the Senate and the House legislation accomplish these goals. If we want to establish additional corollaries, such as "No insurance executive should make money" or "No brain surgeon should make more than $250,000 per year," we could have done that. But those goals aren't really as important, either policy-wise or politically.
Soon, we'll pass a bill that should effectively end medical bankruptcy in America and guarantee baseline health care access for all citizens (too low a bar, I agree, for a variety of reasons). Over the long-term, this bill will likely ensure that we need not ever turn back on that promise and that we may even expand on it, just as we did over time with the promises of the civil rights acts and Social Security.
Mike Dennison has a good and informative story out this past weekend with the short version of what health reform will do for most Montanans in difficult situations: make their lives better even if it is hard to know precisely what will improve until 2013.
For some folks, this is another major black eye for an already deeply flawed bill. For many of us, though, this is simply another foreseen frustration inevitable with major system changes in a huge sector of the economy.
The health care bill will have a handful of immediate changes. Although the structure of the national high-risk pool is currently unclear, it should provide some near-term help for the currently uninsurable. In the slightly longer term, the exchanges and the subsidies and insurance regulations should make coverage affordable for basically everybody and near-universal coverage will be the standard in the U.S. And we'll also put some key systems in place to actually bend the cost curve on health care -- which eventually will mean fewer procedures, devices, and drugs that aren't improving our health.
What marked me most about the Dennison piece wasn't the sadness of the young woman at the end when she hears that no help is coming for three or four years, it is that based on these five (representative?) stories, help is actually on the way. It's been a long time since anyone could say that on the health care front.
Attention LiTW readers: this post was actually written by the always stellarJamee Greer, but for some reason, there was a bug in the piece that prevented him from posting it. I found the error, and put it up for him...
There's plenty of discussion among LGBT circles right now about whether or not the Obama Administration is doing a good job of moving civil rights policy forward, or if they're willfully stalling or even dismissing the community. It appears that many in the LGBT blogosphere are joining in on a boycott organized by the founders of AmericaBlog in an attempt to push resolution on a list of about thirty grievances directed at the Administration.
Joe and I are launching today a donor boycott of the DNC. The boycott is cosponsored by Daily Kos, Jane Hamsher of FireDogLake, Dan Savage, Michelangelo Signorile, David Mixner, Andy Towle and Michael Goff of Towle Road, Paul Sousa (Founder of Equal Rep in Boston), Pam Spaulding, Robin Tyler (ED of the Equality Campaign, Inc.), Bil Browning for the Bilerico Project, and soon others.
It's really more of a "pause," than a boycott. Boycotts sounds so final, and angry. Whereas this campaign is temporary, and is only meant to help some friends - President Obama and the Democratic party - who have lost their way. We are hopeful that via this campaign, our friends will keep their promises.
This is ill-informed to the point of recklessness, and all equality advocates should be offended that John Aravosis would use his influence, such as it is, to attack the most pro-equality environment we've ever seen in this country.
Was the DNC right in failing to provide much-needed financial support for the No on 1 campaign in Maine? No. Should people sit down and find out what happened and why and publicly demand accountability? Yes. Is President Obama right in maintaining his campaign position opposing marriage equality? No. Should the LGBT community continue to push the president to fulfill his campaign promises that would advance LGBT equality? Of course.
Equality is black and white. We are either treated with the same respect and opportunity to uphold the same level of dignity as every other citizen, or we are not. The path to equality isn't as clear, but I don't accept that equal rights can be produced by the grey middle. I fight the middle, I resist it out of instinct because it can so often be two steps forward and another back.
In just the last month we saw fully inclusive federal hate crimes legislation signed by the president, the repeal of housing discrimination against gay and lesbians utilizing HUD services, the repeal of the HIV travel ban, the announcement that gays and lesbians will be counted in the 2010 Census, the first Senate hearing on a fully inclusive ENDA and the strong promise by DOJ officials that they'll make ENDA one of their top legislative priorities. There were extraordinary provisions included in the House health care reform bill that impacted the LGBT community and people living with HIV/AIDS. I'm forgetting some others, I'm sure of it.
I agree, mistakes have been made by the Administration, by the Democratic National Committee, and Organizing for America on LGBT issues. But that list of what's been done right, and the growing national momentum on equality, means so much to someone living in a state where a gay man can be denied the right to visit his partner if they are dying in the hospital, a trans community facing the daily threat of being fired for blurring the lines of gender, and a lesbian who spent years and thousands of dollars in the courts for something as simple as joint custody of a child she helped raise since birth. And I, for one, and possibly others, am extraordinarily grateful for what is happening in America today.
At this time I just can't see why I should support this boycott.
There's plenty of discussion among LGBT circles right now about whether or not the Obama Administration is doing a good job of moving civil rights policy forward, or if they're willfully stalling or even dismissing the community. It appears that many in the LGBT blogosphere are joining in on a boycott organized by the founders of AmericaBlog in an attempt to push resolution on a list of about thirty grievances directed at the Administration.
Joe and I are launching today a donor boycott of the DNC. The boycott is cosponsored by Daily Kos, Jane Hamsher of FireDogLake, Dan Savage, Michelangelo Signorile, David Mixner, Andy Towle and Michael Goff of Towle Road, Paul Sousa (Founder of Equal Rep in Boston), Pam Spaulding, Robin Tyler (ED of the Equality Campaign, Inc.), Bil Browning for the Bilerico Project, and soon others
