[QUOTE=Marco Rubio]
[The Dem debate] was basically a liberal versus liberal debate about who was going to give away the most free stuff: Free college education, free college education for people illegally in this country, free health care, free everything.
[/QUOTE]
It’s gonna be fun, watching Rubio’s time in the spotlight. Or even better yet, if he’s the nominee. Because Hillary will nail his sorry ass to the wall with this one.
Seriously, assuming (and please don’t fight the hypothetical, folks) we as a nation can afford to make education and health care free, why shouldn’t it be free?
The usual argument of ‘free stuff for the poors’ is that it rots their moral fiber, leading them to sit around and live off handouts. How does free college education do that? How does free health care do that? You can’t eat a college course, or pay the rent with an ER visit. How do these things turn the poor into layabouts?
Because if we want the poor to become productive members of society, then free health care and free quality education, if they’re able to take advantage of it, are exactly the free things we should be giving them.
Actually, the problem with Democrats promising free stuff is that they can’t deliver. I’m not talking about Congress either. I’m talking about math. There’s only one way they can deliver even a fraction of their promises: by raising taxes on all of us.
We have a pretty sizeable deficit right now and an entitlement crunch coming up that Democrats don’t want to deal with at all. There is absolutely no more room in the budget under any plausible scenario for new programs. You are mistaken. Rubio will nail them to the wall on this, with an assist from Paul Ryan, who at the appropriate time, probably in fall 2016, will ask the CBO to run the numbers on some of those programs.
I’m a bit fuzzy on that, has Mr. Rubio joined the vast majority of Republicans who express their complete faith in the competence and honesty of the CBO? Seems to me I had heard some talk about how some Republicans are not entirely convinced by CBO numbers that don’t agree with their version of reality.
The numbers are fine. The CBO is fine. But the CBO can be gamed by giving them instructions to count policies that will never be implemented, such as the cadillac tax, Medicare cuts, and the employer mandate.
Er, what? The employer mandate has already been implemented. The IRS is requiring employers to report based on 2015 annual enrollment. And there’s no reason to believe the Cadillac tax won’t be implemented.
Just pointing out how the CBO can be gamed. The revenue for 2014 didn’t come in at all and the revenue for 2015 will only partially came in.
There’s also the revenue from the individual mandate, which because of all the ways out of it won’t come in as projected either.
And the cadillac tax? I don’t think anyone ever expected that one to be implemented. It was pushed out really far(to 2018 I think). It’s not Obama’s problem, it’s his successor’s, and unless Biden runs, there are no plausible successors who support the tax.
There’s no big entitlement crunch. Social Security’s problems can be solved by minor adjustments. Medicare’s looking a lot better, thanks to Obamacare. The Dems would be delighted to tackle fixes to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare if only the GOP would kindly step aside and let them.
And the deficit’s not very big, and yes, we could increase revenue to pay for more programs, because there’s a lot of lightly-taxed money sloshing around at the top. Maybe it used to be that you couldn’t get that much income for programs by taxing just the rich, but as their share of both income and wealth continues to increase, there’s a lot more to tax up there in the economic stratosphere than there was 40 years ago.
Not to mention, for the most part the Dems are pretty good at spelling out how they’re going to pay for programs. If you can give a for-instance of a candidate that’s not doing that on their website for a particular large program, please point it out.
The main thing you seem to be missing here is that Rubio, and every single other plausible Republican nominee, has also proposed deficit busting programs. On their side, it’s tax cuts for the rich. So the debate won’t big-spending Democrats vs. fiscally conservative Republicans. It’ll be tax cuts for the rich against increased spending on education and health care. I think Democrats largely feel comfortable with their position in that debate.
OK, so how big are these gaps? In the case of Ryan, we’re talking about a gap of 6% of GDP, just a little matter of a trillion bucks a year. And it wasn’t “assume that this tax won’t be repealed,” it was “assume a unicorn.”
When it comes to gaming CBO, there’s penny-ante games, and there’s big game. So can we take Ryan and CBO off the table in terms of showing why the Dem plans won’t work? Because like I said, Ryan’s the king of forcing CBO to make assumptions that result in numbers that even CBO acknowledges are bullshit.
If the general comes down to Clinton vs. Rubio, what is her strategy to take him down? It doesn’t look like she’s planning to run away from Obama’s record, so it will be hard for her to say that Rubio’s too “inexperienced” for the job. So, presumably she’ll have to make the case that it’s not so much about experience, but judgment. But Clinton’s judgment on foreign policy hasn’t been stellar, the Iraq war vote being exhibit A. The RNC is already calling her out for that (ironically). So what should her strategy be?
I don’t think the war vote is going to be much of a problem for Hillary if Rubio is the candidate, since he is doing even worse on that front. At the very least, he can’t blame her for voting for it if he won’t blame GWB for calling for it. It will be a tougher issue for her against other candidates who don’t swallow their own feet WRT Iraq.
He’s gone Full Yahoo on immigration and Cuba, too. That’s going to be hard to spin as having good judgment. As a running mate, he could get that ignored, just like GHWB and “voodoo economics” (no matter that he was right), but not at the top of the ticket.
That’s the GOP field’s problem - it does contain a decent VP nominee, but not a decent Presidential one.
