Krugman: The Real Referendum
Last edited Mon Oct 1, 2012, 12:59 AM - Edit history (1)
By PAUL KRUGMAN
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Yet there is a sense in which the election is indeed a referendum, but of a different kind. Voters are, in effect, being asked to deliver a verdict on the legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society, on Social Security, Medicare and, yes, Obamacare, which represents an extension of that legacy. Will they vote for politicians who want to replace Medicare with Vouchercare, who denounce Social Security as “collectivist” (as Paul Ryan once did), who dismiss those who turn to social insurance programs as people unwilling to take responsibility for their lives?
If the polls are any indication, the result of that referendum will be a clear reassertion of support for the safety net, and a clear rejection of politicians who want to return us to the Gilded Age. But here’s the question: Will that election result be honored?
I ask that question because we already know what Mr. Obama will face if re-elected: a clamor from Beltway insiders demanding that he immediately return to his failed political strategy of 2011, in which he made a Grand Bargain over the budget deficit his overriding priority. Now is the time, he’ll be told, to fix America’s entitlement problem once and for all. There will be calls — as there were at the time of the Democratic National Convention — for him to officially endorse Simpson-Bowles, the budget proposal issued by the co-chairmen of his deficit commission (although never accepted by the commission as a whole).
And Mr. Obama should just say no, for three reasons.
First, despite years of dire warnings from people like, well, Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, we are not facing any kind of fiscal crisis...Second, contrary to Beltway conventional wisdom, America does not have an “entitlements problem.” Mainly, it has a health cost problem, private as well as public, which must be addressed (and which the Affordable Care Act at least starts to address)...Finally, despite the bizarre reverence it inspires in Beltway insiders — the same people, by the way, who assured us that Paul Ryan was a brave truth-teller — the fact is that Simpson-Bowles is a really bad plan, one that would undermine some key pieces of our safety net. And if a re-elected president were to endorse it, he would be betraying the trust of the voters who returned him to office.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/01/opinion/krugman-the-real-referendum.html
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formulate it into such an elegant and coherent verbally-economic whole.
Paul Krugman!
only how bad the alternative is. I get it now. 
It's not too much to ask, that a Democratic President promise not to attack the social safety net.
Not even promise to *improve* already meager SS benefits, but promise not to *attack* them.
It's really and truly not.
supposed to be about us? So driving people away from one another for ideologies and relatively uninformed (at least as to significant particulars that is) PREDICTIONS works AGAINST that empowerment.
I don't get why you don't get that individuals MUST pick their battles and prioritize objectives themselves, unless your priorities differ from mine with a high probability difference between you and me being that what could be done in the next 4 years = 0 to you and that WHATEVER time and human suffering and losses, which very likely can result from a Democratic loss, DON'T MATTER, or you're assuming that ALL of it was going to be lost anyway. I don't get how you expect INDIVIDUAL persons to stand up and empower themselves, when you appear to assume that whatever burden they must stand up under is a Just burden as long as it is in the name of whatever it is that you agree with, so if it crushes them or turns them, likely irrevocably, to the dark that's as it should be. I don't understand how individuals are supposed to empower themselves when you are constantly telling them how it has to be, instead of letting them make the deals for themselves that all of us must make anyway, no matter who is "in charge", so the questions are about the process by means of which the options increase, not decrease, for everyone. I think we may agree in significant principles, but disagree on timing, because we disagree on the wheres, how many, and the qualities of the oppressors.
Not that I think all of that is set in stone, just that, because "we" are going to need critical mass for authentic change and I don't believe "we" have anything even slightly near that yet, I want "us" to stick together better than "we" appear to be doing and have a little more caution about those who ARE amongst us who have a powerfully vested interest in seeing that fail.
The new Medicare Trustees Report is out. Comparing Table IIIA-2 in this year’s report and last year’s report, we get this:
Medicare Trustees
In other words, the Medicare actuaries believe that the cost-saving provisions in the Obama health reform will make a huge difference to the long-run budget outlook. Yes, it’s just a projection, and debatable like all projections. And it’s still not enough. But anyone who both claims to be worried about the long-run deficit and was opposed to health reform has some explaining to do. All the facts we have suggest that health reform was the biggest move toward fiscal responsibility in a long, long time.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/05/bending-the-curve/
