Maybe you will remember that next time, and take the better deal when it is offered, instead of sticking out your chin and saying, “No tax increases, ever!”. Republicans doubled down on their principles from a position of weakness, and lost. Tough titty.
I’m not going to defend the Republicans plan since it does not align with my own, but the following is directly from their 2012 platform. Any plain reading of it will show that their primary focus is on entitlement reform.
[QUOTE=GOP Platform]
Reining in Out-of-Control Spending, Balancing the Budget, and Ensuring Sound Monetary Policy
The massive federal government is structurally and financially broken. For decades it has been pushed beyond its core functions, increasing spending to unsustainable levels. Elected officials have overpromised and overspent, and now the bills are due. Unless we take dramatic action now, young Americans and their children will inherit an unprecedented legacy of enormous and unsustainable debt, with the interest alone consuming an ever-increasing portion of the country’s wealth. The specter of national bankruptcy that now hangs over much of Europe is a warning to us as well. Over the last three and a half years, while cutting the defense budget, the current Administration has added an additional $5.3 trillion to the national debt-now approximately $16 trillion, the largest amount in U.S. history. In fiscal year 2011, spending reached $3.6 trillion, nearly a quarter of our gross domestic product. Adjusted for inflation, that’s more than three times its peak level in World War II, and almost half of every dollar spent was borrowed money. Three programs-Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security- account for over 40 percent of total spending. While these levels of spending and debt are already harming job creation and growth, projections of future spending growth are nothing short of catastrophic, both economically and socially. And those dire projections do not include the fiscal nightmare of Obamacare, with over $1 trillion in new taxes, multiple mandates, and a crushing price tag.
We can preempt the debt explosion. Backed by a Republican Senate and House, our next President will propose immediate reductions in federal spending, as a down payment on the much larger task of long-range fiscal control. We suggest a tripartite test for every federal activity. First, is it within the constitutional scope of the federal government? Second, is it effective and absolutely necessary? And third, is it sufficiently important to justify borrowing, especially foreign borrowing, to fund it? Against those standards we will measure programs from international population control to California’s federally subsidized high-speed train to nowhere, and terminate programs that don’t measure up.
Balancing the Budget
Cutting spending is not enough; it must be accompanied by major structural reforms, increased productivity, use of technology, and long-term government downsizing that both reduce debt and deficits and ignite economic growth. We must restructure the twentieth century entitlement state so the missions of important programs can succeed in the twenty-first century. Medicare, in particular, is the largest driver of future debt. Our reform of healthcare will empower millions of seniors to control their personal healthcare decisions, unlike Obamacare that empowered a handful of bureaucrats to cut Medicare in ways that will deny care for the elderly. We must also change the budget process itself. From its beginning, its design has enabled, rather than restrained, reckless spending by giving procedural cover to Members of Congress. The budget process gave us the insidious term “tax expenditure,” which means that any earnings the government allows a taxpayer to keep through a deduction, exemption, or credit are equivalent to spending the same amount on some program. It also lumped a broad range of diverse programs under the heading of “entitlement,” as if veterans’ benefits and welfare checks belong in the same category. Far worse, the process assumes every spending program will be permanent and every tax cut will be temporary. It refuses to recognize the beneficial budgetary impact of lower tax rates, and it calls a spending increase a cut if it is less than the rate of inflation. Republican Members of Congress have repeatedly tried to reform the budget process to make it more transparent and accountable, in particular by voting for a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution, following the lead of 33 States which have put that restraint into their own constitutions. We call for a Constitutional amendment requiring a super-majority for any tax increase, with exceptions for only war and national emergencies, and imposing a cap limiting spending to the historical average percentage of GDP so that future Congresses cannot balance the budget by raising taxes.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t see anything contradictory in them. You seem to think I am saying that annual spending should go up an down based upon some formula tied around that particular year’s GDP. I am saying that spending should fit our long-term forecasts of our ability to finance that spending either through revenues or debt financing. If we can’t reasonably cover our future spending with our forecasts of revenue and we can’t finance it with debt then we need to adjust. The bulk of this spending is not short term stuff like recession driven increases in food stamps or unemployment benefits, it is medicare and social security. It is also interest expense on the debt.
Not when our debt load is growing faster than any reasonable forecasts for economic growth.
Congratulations, the Democrats have won this real life version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Their prize is that they get to experience economic collapse at the exact same rate as everyone else.
When you have put yourself in the position of dealing with the lender of last resort you shouldn’t blame him for acting irrationally, you should blame yourself for acting irresponsibly.
Exactly, Obama DID compromise and the Republicans refused to budged even a little when the deck was stacked ENTIRELY against them. So they got shafted because they refused to compromise. There was no way Obama was losing this one, the deal they got is entirely on the Republicans for refusing to budge when they had no leverage whatsoever.
Not for long. Republicans serve at the pleasure of the plutocrats, who have far more to lose than the Democratic base. Sure, it will be painful for a while, but sooner rather than later, Republicans will fold again as Democrats jam more revenue increases down their throats.
Huh. I thought the FC avoidance bill included some cuts, but I guess it doesn’t. Sucks for the GOP.
And this will continue until either (a) the Democrats put entitlement reform on the table, which will obviously only be in exchange for significant revenue, (b) the GOP comes up with an entitlement reform plan of their own that is politically popular, or (c) the GOP wins a national election.
And in case you haven’t been paying attention, (b) will never happen. And (c) can’t happen for almost 4 years.
Which has nothing to do with anything that I’ve said. This whole discussion of debt-to-GDP is a response to Saint Cad’s posts about the debt going perpetually up. The dollar amount of the debt goes up, yes, but as I have pointed out, the burden of the debt on the country has gone up and down over the last 60 years, but mostly down. Correcting Saint Cad’s error doesn’t have much to do with your concern about future entitlements.
Ok, that’s fair. My reading of your previous statements led me to believe you were arguing a slightly different point.
I may have misread you earlier, but you are misreading me. “SHOULD” decrease. But again, as a general principle, the idea that entitlement spending is to blame for everything is masking the real, underlying problem: one of the major reasons Medicare costs are growing is because our health care system is insane, and expensive beyond all reason. What do you think is a better approach to fixing this problem: we can cut Medicare benefits to make our budgets smaller, or we can fix the health care system to make care more affordable for everyone, the government included.
Everyone seems fixated on the first option because it’s the easiest, but I think the latter option is more important.
Except for Mitt Romney, who apparently wanted to spend a lot more money than Obama did on Medicare.
And somehow people continue to forget that the Democrats have already past a plan that at least claims to begin to address this - the Affordable Care Act. Maybe we should give it a few years to kick in and see what type of effect it has on health-care expenditures (both public and private) before we make another whole-sale change to our healthcare system.
This viewpoint that you and others are looking at this from is insane. We’re not dealing with a negotiation in which each side represents opposite competing interests. Both sides (if we have to simplify this down to only two) represent the exact same interests that should be trying to reach a very similar endgame goal: a balancing act of long-term fiscal stability without destroying the short term economy.
Unfortunately, reality is that the Republicans have a bad plan for dealing with the long-term and will sacrifice the short-term in the process while the Democrats have morphed into populists with their blinders on to the future.
It is my go-to response for what is obviously an unproductive conversation. It became apparent to me that you just want to argue for argument sake. I’m bored by that, since I know what the standard GOP talking points are, and the argument was off-topic anyway.
If you’d like to resume, I’m curious to hear why you, Stratocaster, think Romney’s proposal to let future retirees choose between the current version of Medicare and something else counts as reform of Medicare. I genuinely cannot imagine reasons why you’d think that. What I suspect is that you’re conflating Romney’s position with Ryan’s, in part because part of Obama’s strategy was to cause that kind of confusion (it’s much more effective to demonize vouchers than to explain that Romney’s plan wouldn’t actually do anything).
To connect it back to the thread, I’d like to see means-testing for Social Security and higher co-pays for Medicare and Veterans Care. What do you think of those ideas as ways of off-setting the sequester?
Yep, sucks for the GOP … and sucks for Democrats and every other human being in the country.
shrug It’s better than the cliff. They’ll cut spending after the next round of talks. Obama has made no secret of the fact that his goal is a $2.50/$1 cuts/tax hike ratio.
Obama demonized something? Perhaps you forgot Romney’s frequent charges that Obama took $748 billion from Medicare, which every single unbiased observer branded as a lie?
Romney chose a running mate who proposed to scrap Medicare and replace it with a voucher system. Virtually the entire Republican delegation in Congress voted for it. Do you think Romney’s assurance that he didn’t want to do what his running mate invented and the Republican House voted nearly unanimously for is in any way to be taken seriously?
Obviously not, since I mentioned it twice in this thread already.
I don’t think any of it is to be taken seriously. That’s my whole point. The GOP isn’t actually very interested in doing anything about Medicare. They talk a big game in bills they know are dead in the water. But when it comes to actually campaigning on an issue or negotiating serious legislation, they are all vague proposals and non-reforms.
I just didn’t like the way you seemed to be saying that we can just grow our economy as a solution. Further, you seem to be saying that the opposition to this fiscal cliff deal is just reduction in current spending that will destroy the ability to grow the economy. I’m saying that we can’t just grow our way out of the problem, this debt is growing completely unrelated to and at a faster pace than economic growth, that this fiscal cliff deal did nothing to solve that problem, and that most of the opposition is actually focused on longer term spending and not short term austerity.
Of course healthcare cost inflation is a huge part of the medicare problem. However, a huge part is also demographics, which is simply a reality that we are going to have to adjust around. Further, aren’t you basically saying here that what was billed as a major part of the solution to the healthcare cost problem, PPACA, did essentially nothing to actually fix the real problem. What are Obama and the Democrats supposed to do now? Roll out another healthcare bill and just admit that all of their work in 2009 and 2010 didn’t really do anything to fix the underlying problem?
Further, everyone says that social security is a much easier fix than medicare and I totally agree. Now lets see our elected officials actually do something for once and fix it.
Let me ask you a fundamental question: why do you think the deficit is so high right now? It’s pretty obvious what tax revenues are lower, but what spending do you believe has increased to cause these trillion dollar deficits?
There’s a huge gap between solving the problem and doing nothing.
PPACA levies excise taxes on the insurance plans believed to be the biggest driver’s of cost inflation (those with high benefits but very low deductibles and co-payments), as well as medical devices which have less impact on health outcomes than other spending. It then uses that revenue to subsidize people to get health insurance, attacking one of the other main driver of costs which is improperly treated chronic conditions and preventable illness (including, especially, diabetes care).
That’s mostly just chasing the margins, but it’s still pretty important marginal change. The big changes were not pre-ordained–instead the bill sets up the structures that might lead to bigger cost changes. Specifically, PPACA established a first-of-its-kind research center to share information about cost effectiveness, since all the medical literature suggests that we have treatment regimens out there with vastly different costs for treating the same illness but without corresponding differences in outcomes.
And it set up the Independent Payment Advisory Board for Medicare to make recommendations for cost-saving changes to Medicare (though it is prohibited from suggesting benefit limitations). Importantly, Congress must either accept these recommendations or find alternatives that achieve the same savings, potentially meaning that we can get real entitlement changes without these kind of once-in-a-blue-moon moments.
It also set up a bunch of pilot programs for Medicare to test the cost effectiveness of different organizational structures, such as organizing primary-care physicians into teams that coordinate care and anticipate health problems and compare the cost of this structure against traditional care. The Advisory Board can then make determinations for how to organize medical care for Medicare patients.
Those all seem like pretty good ideas to me that may bear fruit. Do you think the GOP should stop blocking their implementation?