The bankrupting of our country under Bush is incomprehensible. Taxes for the ultra-rich were cut at the expense of the poor and elderly, as their programs were slashed in order to make up for the account deficits. Senator McCain and other GOP candidates intend to continue his economic policies.
On that note, Ezra Klein delves in to the policy differences between Barack and Hillary. He finds that:
In his book The Audacity of Hope, he admits to appreciating the Gipper's understanding of government's failings. "Reagan's central insight," he wrote, "that the liberal welfare state had grown complacent and overly bureaucratic … contained a good deal of truth." This insight was hardly peculiar to Reagan; it was shared by a generation of community organizers, Obama among them, who fought with public bureaucracies every day. This insight has led Obama to the belief that individuals should experience a government as gentle and unfussy as possible. In my talks with his advisers, the term "iPod government" repeatedly came up, a reference to Obama's desire for a sleeker, easier-to-use state. This guiding principle helps explain how he came up with a health-care plan without an individual mandate. Obama's fears that care would prove unaffordable and individuals would be left begging for exemptions from some unconcerned bureaucrat outweighed concerns that the healthy would opt-out of the system and that the insurers wouldn't cover everyone at a fair price if "everyone" meant only the sick. It's that thread that reconciles his philosophical preference for single-payer with his programmatic eschewing of universal care. Single-payer is simple. Mandates are more complicated, and Obama fears that a mismatch between affordability measures and care costs will leave individuals fighting with the state for coverage. Better the policy be meeker and the experience smoother than risk a strong policy's potential to force the unsuspecting into unwanted dealings with an unfamiliar bureaucracy.Harold Pollack responds to Krugman about Barack and mandates. His points about the study summarized:
Similarly, Obama's stimulus plan is essentially a quick, across-the-board tax cut. Clinton's is a series of tax credits and targeted subsidies. The difference between the plans, again, is between the ease-of-implementation of Obama's and the specificity of Clinton's. Her targeted credits help worthwhile programs and do more to target the worst-off, but in so doing, they create an essentially means-tested stimulus package that would require beneficiaries to prove their distress. Obama, by contrast, offers a large payroll tax rebate that would require little in the way of administration.
In this, as in much else, Obama betrays a universalist streak. Government is simplest when it is unspecific—it's when it starts trying to subdivide the population and impact only targeted groups that it becomes hard to administer (think of how little trouble seniors have accessing a universal program like Social Security versus how much trouble the poor have trying to determine eligibility for a means-tested program like Medicaid). If Kennedy wanted a rising tide to lift all boats, Obama wants us all in one boat to better navigate the waves. But before he can rehabilitate the universalist approach to government, the experience of interacting with government must be bettered. In a world where a trip to the DMV is such a Kafkaesque odyssey that you can actually hire individuals to undergo the torment for you, unifying the public square first means beautifying it. So Obama's detailed plans for more government accountability and transparency precede and even take priority over his plans for what the newly accountable and transparent government should do. Till that day when government is reformed and citizens' trust is ensured, that new government must be used with care, and its capabilities should not be overestimated.
So we're back where we started: two plans, both with guaranteed availability of insurance regardless of health status, both with subsidies. One has a mandate with (as yet undefined) enforcement mechanisms. The other has no mandate but (as yet undefined) financial disincentives for free-riding. Until the two plans are better specified, there is no basis on which to estimate how many people will wind up not buying insurance under either plan, and therefore no basis for any firm estimate of costs to the taxpayer.David Brooks follows up on the same issue (Clinton's mandates and dealings with health care):
This is hardly justification for the holy war the Clinton campaign is waging on Obama on the mandate issue.
Moreover, the debate Clinton is having with Barack Obama echoes the debate she had with Cooper 15 years ago. The issue, once again, is over whether to use government to coerce people into getting coverage. The Clintonites argue that without coercion, there will be free-riders on the system.Kevin Drum makes his case for Obama.
They’ve got a point. But there are serious health care economists on both sides of the issue. And in the heat of battle, Clinton has turned the debate between universal coverage and universal access into a sort of philosophical holy grail, with a party of righteousness and a party of error. She’s imposed Manichaean categories on a technical issue, just as she did a decade and half ago. And she’s done it even though she hasn’t answered legitimate questions about how she would enforce her universal coverage mandate.
Cooper, who, not surprisingly, supports Barack Obama, believes that Clinton hasn’t changed. “Hillary’s approach is so absolutist, draconian and intolerant, it means a replay of 1993.”
The evolution of Hillary's views on Iraq by Spencer Ackerman show a complete lack of clarity and track with polling figures, this is the sort of thing that will hurt her badly in the general election:
...Clinton set herself up to run for president as both a pro-war and an anti-war candidate—depending on the contingencies of the war and the politics of the moment.This will come back to haunt her.
Clinton’s statements during October 2002 have received much attention. But what she’s said in the intervening years demonstrates a vertigo-inducing lack of clarity. Her position tracked the political zeitgeist elegantly: cautiously in favor of the war before it started; enthusiastically in favor of it during its first year; overtaken with doubt during 2004; nervously against withdrawal in 2005; cautiously in favor of withdrawal ever since—and all without so much as an acknowledgment of her myriad repositioning. At no point did she challenge the prevailing assumptions behind the war.
