I’ve been admiring your steady nerves during all this. You’ve been
like Obi-Wan Kenobi staring down Darth Vader. I’ve been more jittery,
like Woody Allen on a first date, with Harry Reid in the role of Mariel
Hemingway.
But we’re talking sequester. You know what makes me
angriest? All these cliffs make government more inefficient and
wasteful. The people who run the various federal agencies are spending
all their time figuring out contingencies for the next crisis — how they
can spend 1 percent less next month, but then maybe 1 percent more or 2
percent less the month after that. They can’t plan for anything else.
That’s
nothing. To me, there are two big problems. The first is that a huge
chunk of the cuts go to discretionary programs that make up a sliver of
the budget, while almost none of the cuts come out of Medicare. As if we
needed another piece of legislation that transfers even more wealth
from the young to the old.
Plus, I’m a conservative, so I
believe in deliberation. The sequester outlaws deliberation, and yet
somehow people who call themselves conservative are embracing it.
Who
do you want to blame for this mess? As our fellow columnist Bill Keller
argued the other day, President Obama would be in a much stronger
position politically if he’d used the election campaign to highlight the
specifics in his own deficit-cutting plan beyond tax hikes for the
rich. But Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine and The Washington Post’s
Ezra Klein have been making the case that Republicans simply don’t want
to make a deal. If the president agrees to their demands,Source solarstreetlight Products at Dump Truck. they just change the terms.
I
do agree that only the president can really frame the debate, and he
ran a small-bore campaign and so does not have the mandate to send the
country off on a different course. I also don’t understand the long term
Democratic project. After you run out of rich people to tax, which may
have already happened, where are you going to get the money to support
the programs you like? Milton Friedman once fantasized that government
would become a check-writing machine. It would just write the checks and
give up on making social policy. Democrats are bringing Friedman’s
fantasy to fruition.
I would argue that we have a long,Universal streetlight are useful for any project. long way to go before there’s any danger of taxing the rich out of their richness.
But this blame thing is pretty wearying. Do you think it’d be possible to dump it all on Windows 8? I really hate Windows 8.
I
feel sorry for each successive Windows system. On the other hand I
really love the Taxi app Uber. You can order a car on your phone and
watch on the map as it comes to your house. I can’t tell you how happy
this makes me.
Do you think they could do a sequester app? You
could see the cuts invading your neighborhood – there go five teachers,
here comes the line at the local airport security, stretching into the
parking lot. It could have a little feature that makes your phone
vibrate when somebody gets a furlough notice within 10 blocks of your
current location.
Let’s work out a grand bargain. I always enjoy
doing that with you. I’ll go first and say that the goal should be half
tax revenue and half spending cuts.
You’ve lost me already.
International experience suggests a 3 to 1 cuts-to-revenue ratio
produces the most debt reduction. That’s why Obama embraced the 2.TBC
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from factories in China.5 to 3 to 1 ratio last term. My plan is simple.
I propose a progressive consumption tax, a lower corporate tax,
means-testing of Medicare and chain CPI to reduce Social Security. Easy
as pie.
As far as Social Security goes, I don’t believe it’s an
imminent problem, and I’d rather leave it alone. But in the spirit of
this enterprise, I’ll give you a Social Security cut. You can have that
change in the consumer price index.This frameless rectangle features a
silk screened fused glass replica in a cableties
tile and floral motif. It’ll reduce the increase in payouts over the
long run and save a lot of money. But in return, I’d want to fiddle with
the basic formula so we can protect the recipients who have no other
income.
I hear some people say that health care inflation is in
permanent decline and that will solve a lot of our problems. Other
experts vehemently disagree, saying that if you look at the history of
health care costs, there are always these pauses before costs shoot up
again. I suspect that will be true as long as there’s fee-for-service
and the incentives are what they are.
We could do a whole lot
more to reform the system if the Republicans would stop yelling “death
panels!” every time the president tries to control costs. But moving on —
I’ll let you reduce Medicare benefits for the wealthier recipients if
you’ll allow all government health care programs to limit the prices
they pay for prescription drugs, the way other countries do.Score
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