I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career.
I've lost almost 300 games.
26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed.
I've failed over and over and over again in my life.
And that is why I succeed.
Michael Jordan
Entitlements, Federal Reform Efforts and
Democratic Saboteurs: Some Comments
When Obama hypocritically spurned his own bipartisan debt reduction commission (i.e., his Senate vote against increasing the debt ceiling and his vows to halve the deficit), it wasn't the first time a Democratic President disregarded a bipartisan effort. President Clinton was committed to a commission by the Balanced Budget Act of 1997. Clinton was able to name 4 of the members to the 17-member commission, which needed 11 to win consensus status (not unlike Bowles-Simpson, which also fell short of gaining consensus despite a majority on the panel): Democratic Senators Breaux and Kerrey joined with the 8 GOP members in a reform which would allow an alternative government subsidized program arrangement. Unsurprisingly, Clinton sabotaged the bipartisan reform (all his nominees dissented along with the remaining (progressive) Democratic legislators, putting up his own competing universal plan with expanded benefits (in particular, prescription drugs), which, of course, was dead on arrival in the GOP-controlled Congress. (The idea that one should expand an already unsustainable entitlement was a state of denial from someone whom never quite got over the demise of HillaryCare.)
There are no longer any moderate or conservative Democratic Senators of the likes of Breaux and Kerrey. The closest, retiring Senator Ben Nelson (NE), scores the best American Conservative Union rating of 45 lifetime, less than the most liberal GOP senators (from Maine): the next closest is Florida's Nelson, up for reelection, at 33, and other "moderate" Landrieu (LA) and Manchin (WV) score in the 20's. The conservative Breitbart website (cited above) correctly points out that a government-subsidized program similar to what Ryan has proposed is hardly "radical": a similar program had the support of 10 bipartisan members of the Medicare commission.
At this point, let me provide a classic example why some of the "independent" fact checkers aren't cited more often in this blog (their analyses are small-minded and argumentative and do not meet the more rigorous, "big picture" standards of this blog):
Rep. Paul Ryan revises history when he says his Medicare plan is "in keeping with the Bill Clinton bipartisan committee" proposal in 1999. Contrary to the impression left by Ryan, the commission's final report failed largely along partisan lines. Clinton opposed it, and all four of his appointees voted against it.
It's true, though, that both proposals recommended providing a government subsidy for seniors to buy insurance. But any attempt to cast the 1999 report as bipartisan or suggest it was Clinton's commission is misleading.This is pathetic. Okay, let's review: there are some nuanced differences between the two commissions. For example, Obama's deficit reduction committee was created via executive order while Clinton's was the result of passed law (which Clinton signed); Obama named more members to his commission (including two Republicans). But FactCheck is making much ado about nothing: Ryan calls it a "bipartisan committee", not the "Clinton committee", Ryan never said or implied the final proposal was Clinton's, and his point has more to do with establishing the fact that his proposal for government subsidies in Medicare reform is hardly "radical" or "extreme" but has a precedent in a majority-supported proposal. FactCheck is also deliberately engaged in distortion far worse than exaggerating Ryan's casual, not substantive description of the committee: the commission's report had majority support (10 votes of 17). The recommendation failed to win an arbitrary consensus target vote of 11--and more than half the dissenting votes came from Clinton's nominees.
Let's look at the bipartisan commission set up for Medicare. There were 17 votes: 4 chosen by Clinton-D (Altman, Tyson, Vladeck, Watson), 2 by Daschle-D (Rockefeller, Kerrey), 4 by Gingrich-R (Thomas, Conway-Welch, Bilirakis, Howard), 4 by Lott-R (Frist, Gramm, Gordon, Steelman), and 2 by Gephardt-D (McDermott, Dingle), and the jointly appointed chair (including Clinton): John Breaux (D-LA). So there were really 9 Democratic votes on the commission and 8 Republican--and Clinton had a role in picking the tie-breaking vote and commission chairman: John Breaux. So, yes, it's perfectly acceptable to call it Clinton's bipartisan committee in the sense he was vested in the selection of the commission and its tie-breaking vote.
Second, commission chairman Senator Breaux's proposal is the one that passed with majority votes, including votes from each party--it was not the minority GOP's proposal. FactCheck notes that two centrist Democrats voted for the plan, but apparently they are using some unspecified, subjective "true bipartisan" heuristic instead of noting, in relevant context, that just over half of the votes against the Breaux proposal come from Clinton's own nominees, and Clinton was floating an alternative proposal EXPANDING Medicare--a material fact that FactCheck deliberately ignores.
Keep in mind that the whole purpose of the commission was to address solvency concerns about the program (where was FactCheck on this point?), and Clinton was proposing adding gasoline to the fire. And we're not even discussing the palpable hypocrisy of the progressive Democrats whom were howling for the "public option" during ObamaCare deliberations, but yet when it came from competition from the private sector for Medicare, ruled it out from the start.
Another talking point I want to address is these same media "fact checkers" whom have a knee-jerk response to the GOP's charge of Mediscare (re: the Democrat offensive Paul Ryan "throw-Grandma-off-the-cliff" ads). Let's go back to the polemical FactCheck discussion:
[Ryan has] engaged in, well, a bit of Mediscare himself. Ryan repeated a false claim that the Independent Payment Advisory Board created by the new federal health care law will "ration" Medicare to cut costs. As we have written before, the health care law specifically states that the advisory board “shall not include any recommendation to ration health care.” And the voting board members are doctors, economists and other outside experts, not Washington bureaucrats.First, it's laughable that they assert that some bureaucrats are more equal than others. If they are involved in promulgating rules and regulations of a federal program, they are de facto part of the bureaucracy; nobody seriously argues that bureaucrats can't be representative of different professions. Second, their argument that Ryan "falsely" argues that IPAB will "ration" health care to curb costs because the law specifically says that they can't do that basically begs the question. This is like the birth control kerfuffle from earlier this year where Obama said that religious organizations wouldn't be charged for birth control expenses for employees of their affiliated institutions (e.g., schools, hospitals, etc.); of course the organizations are going to pay; some are self-insuring and others will simply find the cost shifted (e.g., in general premium increases).
The salient point is that government resources are by nature limited and must be allocated; we have already seen how this has played out in states with various health initiatives, e.g., in Oregon or Massachusetts: certain treatments are denied approval or deferred; eligibility criteria are tightened. (In one notorious Oregon case, a cancer patient was denied chemotherapy but told assisted suicide costs would be covered.)
Any familiar reader knows by now that I don't think Republican reformers are going far enough; it's clear why, given the ad hominem attacks on Paul Ryan for modest reforms affecting future beneficiaries, with near future beneficiaries grandfathered. Serious reforms can affect one's future in politics.
The big picture here is that Republicans are trying to do with entitlements what businesses started doing 30 years ago in transitioning from defined benefits (i.e., pension) programs to defined contributions. They understood with the huge Baby Boomer generation retiring (followed by smaller wave generations) their pension outlays would be unsustainable. Defined contribution systems made for more sustainable costs. The GOP reforms similarly recognize that government transfer payment programs are unsustainable. What they want to do is to cap and/or means-test distributions.
A government subsidy program accommodates this; the GOP wants to focus on a private-sector solution because of the efficiency and innovation approach to the production of goods and services in the private sector. The Democrats and bureaucrats are promoting/assuming the fallacy of central planning; let me also simply point out that government obtains its resources by coercion, government managers have different incentives, decisions are subject to extraneous (political) factors, and regulations are antithetical to innovation and an inadequate surrogate for competition.
Let me finish this discussion by contrasting the approach of George W. Bush's failed social security reform. Now any free marketer like me thinks that social security should never have passed from the get-go. (Among other reasons, there are private sector financial service alternatives, and a government-run system is intrinsically morally hazardous, i.e., why should I save for retirement when I have government-guaranteed income?) But let's go beyond that: there's the fact that the social security trust fund is invested in US Treasury securities, i.e., past government expenditures--the only income is currently anemic bond interest payments. Putting beside the point that bonds have not had the returns of stocks over time--which means you have to collect more taxes to make up the difference--this has the perverse incentive of encouraging the federal government to spend beyond its means!
Here is the framing of George W. Bush for context. From May 2000: "Bush has voiced support for allowing workers to invest some of their Social Security tax money in financial markets a move Gore has called stock market roulette." Let me just vent here: since when are, say, blue-chip stocks offering both steadily growing dividends and price appreciation more of a gamble versus a federal government which has failed to balance its own budget nearly 90% of the time over the past few decades? We have over $40T in unfunded senior entitlements; the Democrats have made Bernie Madoff look like an amateur. We had a reform nearly 30 years ago between President Reagan and the Democrats which was supposed to fix social security, and we are already paying out more than we are taking in in this pay-as-you-go scheme? Let me ask any reasonable person: how can you trust a government to pay for senior benefits when it can't even do a decent job maintaining its own infrastructure, it's paying off billions in bad mortgage notes it guaranteed, and it's fighting unfunded wars? I mean, if you were a banker on Main Street, and Uncle Sam came in off the street asking you for a loan so he could make payroll next week, would you give it to him? After all, he is already $15T in debt with over $40T off balance sheet. Every time I hear Gore, Obama or any other economically illiterate Democrat comparing investing in good American companies to gambling...
So here is a description of Bush's social security reform committee and mandate:
Former Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) and Richard Parsons, chief operating officer of AOL/Time Warner, became the panel’s co-chairmen. The recently elected president told the group to follow six guiding principles: “(1) modernization must not change Social Security benefits for retirees or near-retirees; (2) the entire Social Security surplus must be dedicated only to Social Security; (3) Social Security payroll taxes must not be increased; (4) the government must not invest Social Security funds in the stock market; (5) modernization must preserve Social Security’s disability and survivors insurance programs; and (6) modernization must include individually controlled, voluntary personal retirement accounts, which will augment Social Security.”Many Democrats described that this approach constituted "partial privatization" (I wish; you would think that even economically challenged Democrats would understand the difference between private-sector investment vehicles and privatization.) Privatization means administration in the private sector. Bush was advocating that individual employees have the OPTION to choose PART of the 6.1% they contribute (ignoring employer matches) be invested NOT in captive Treasury notes, but diversified private sector alternatives administered through the government. Before going on, let me say that Bush's restrictions really didn't provide the commission a lot of flexibility--particularly in not allowing social security to diversify its reserve.
The commission issued a final report on March 19, 2002, that largely endorsed the Bush approach. “Social Security,” the report read, “will be strengthened if modernized to include a system of voluntary personal accounts. Personal accounts improve retirement security by facilitating wealth creation and providing participants with assets that they own and that can be inherited, rather than providing only claims to benefits that remain subject to political negotiation.”More specifically, the commission offered multiple alternatives, instead of a single one:
Instead of a single recommendation, the commission offered three alternatives. One would let workers shift 2% of annual pay, or about a third of what they contribute to the payroll tax, to private retirement accounts. A second would allow contributions of 4%. And the third option would allow contributions of up to 3.5%. To help hold down the program's cost, the second and third would also reduce the promised basic Social Security benefit. But the panel failed to say where the extra $2 trillion to $3 trillion would come from. There are only three possibilities: The government can raise taxes, it can borrow the funds, or it can use general revenues, which means dipping into any government surplus.The big problem is with the status quo pay-as-you-go scheme. The privately-controlled accounts had to be funded in advance. A loan could be advanced, which would be paid off in time through reduced future payments. And those hypocritical Democrats--yes, the same ones who haven't batted an eye in doubling publicly-held national debt during the Obama Presidency (and counting)--cried foul about the Bush reform pushing up costs requiring a loan (paid off because of lower distributions down the line to beneficiaries) because the government simply redistributes payroll tax revenues as fast as it gets it, versus investing the revenue in a lockbox.
The fact is that Bush did present the first choice from the commission (without the more difficult alternatives which called for politically radioactive benefit reductions.) But before the plan went down in flames, Bush could and did make the observation that his plan was based on the feedback from a bipartisan committee.
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
Hodgson/Supertramp, "Dreamer". It wasn't until now I decided to research what happened to Supertramp; the reason I did so was a puzzling enigma of finding few videos of the relevant original hit songs (for many of my past selections, I'll find probably at least a handful of alternatives for each original song). I suspected a rift between the band and original vocalist Roger Hodgson, because I found a number of copies of his performances of the classic hit tunes.
According to Wikipedia, Roger Hodgson and Rick Davies, the Lennon-McCartney like songwriting nucleus behind the group's emerging late 1970's commercial success, began to drift apart, while continuing to share songwriting credit. Hodgson decided to take a break to focus on his personal life in the mid-1980's. Hodgson said that there was an understanding when he left that Davies agreed that the new Supertramp would not cover Hodgson's material. Hodgson has believed that Davies had broken his promise in order to help boost concert attendance. (Supertramp without Hodgson is like Chicago without Cetera or Journey without Steve Perry: I'm not buying it.) There probably is too much bad blood for a reunion; Davies reportedly spurned an overture from Hodgson to join a 40th anniversary band tour. Apparently Davies doesn't understand the meaning of "it's not personal; it's business" I would go to a Hodgson concert or a Supertramp concert with Hodgson; Supertramp without Hodgson? I'll take a pass.
