Will Mary Landrieu Sell Her Vote for $100M?

Great Debates
61

I’m not talking about conservative vs liberal issues. I’m talking about the technical aspects of governing and whether you can expect that ANY bill, on the right or left, wll be coherent, well-designed, and effective at a national level.

It’s all about perverse incentives. The interests of the people running the government do not align with the national interests of the country. So you can have hundreds of millions being spent on bridges to nowhere, while the levees in New Orleans crumble. It makes no sense whatsoever, unless you analyze it from the perspective of individual lawmakers fighting for their own special interests and not necessarily the good of the country as a whole.

Take the stimulus bill. The academic argument is that you take money and give it to people who have none, and they’ll spend it and not only keep themselves afloat, but put money into the hands of the people they buy from, and the economy will improve. But the bill as signed by the President was little more than a giant grab-bag of goodies and payoffs for special interests. So NY transit workers, who are not unemployed, get stimulus money to pay for an 11% pay hike, while Detroit collapses. It’s incoherent.

Or take the latest shenanigans with the health care bill. One of the justifications for it was to reign in ‘gold plated’ health insurance, which has been driving up cost and consuming a disproportionate share of health care resources. So the plan included funding the expansion of coverage for the poor by taxing the gold-plated benefits of others. This would make more doctors available for the newly covered and help pay for them. But then in a last-minute horse trade, the tax on luxury plans is gone, and instead transferred to a general surtax on the rich. But decoupling the tax from actual use of the health care system removes one of the biggest benefits of the tax.

Of course, most ‘gold-plated’ health care recipients are union members, so you can understand why the Democrats had to bail on that. What’s harder to understand is now that makes the plan better or how it helps America as a whole.

This is the problem with debates over these grand schemes - the debate is carried out against the perfect ideal of what an optimum plan would look like, but the plan that’s actually implemented bears little resemblance to the plan debated.

62

:dubious: Yes.

Quid pro quo != bribe.

63

:dubious: Because there is more than one “right thing.” Even leaving aside her own self-interest in securiing re-election, advancing her political career, getting more clout on the right Senate committees, etc., a senator has several duties: To her political ideology and principles; to her party; to the interests of the nation as a whole; and to the interests of the people of her state. (And, arguably, to do the will of the people of her state as reflected in opinion polls; but most political theorists would say an elected official’s duty is not to do their will, but to do what is best for them by her own lights.) These duties are sometimes convergent but sometimes in conflict with each other. When they conflict, she has to take them all into account and weigh them against each other (and, inevitably, against her career self-interest) in making her political calculations – which is the job she is elected to do, and nobody else can do it for her.

64

“Washington”? What, you think there’s no vote trading in state capitals, county commissions, city councils, etc?

65

Of course there is. But then the damage is localized. And other forces tend to keep the craziness in check. Localities that behave poorly see their best citizens, and their tax base, leave.

It’s like the difference between small business and giant international conglomerates. Small businesses make lots of bad mistakes and do stupid things. But because they are small, the damage is minimized and there is much more ‘churn’ and replacements spring up fast. But when an international conglomerate fails, it causes widespread damage and a lot of collateral damage. Thus the ‘too big to fail’ moniker.

The ultimate in ‘too big to fail’ is the federal government. Yet another reason why you don’t want to cede too much control of your country to it.

66

And yet, it is big businesses that dominate the industrial economy, and have since the late 19th Century; their “economies of scale” make them more competitive than small ones making the same goods.

As for government, yes, you’ll get pettiness and interest-seeking and inefficiency at any level – but, according to Michael Lind, the lower/more local you go, the worse it gets.

67

Yes, government tends to suck. That’s why some of us like to keep it as small as possible while maintaining a civil society, and don’t support handing over vast gobs of power to it every time there’s a social ill we think needs addressing.

But still, community malfeasance is limited in scope, and civic governments are constrained by the relatively easy mobility of the population. California and New York are losing millions of people because of their poor governments. At some point, either those states will have to reform, or they will eventually melt down as their tax base leaves.

When it’s the federal government screwing up, the people have no place to go. That means they can push a lot farther down the wrong path before the day of reckoning comes, and the damage will be much greater. That’s one of the rationales the founding fathers of the U.S. used to justify strong limits on the power of the federal government.

68

Wrong. Her duty is to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. Anything else is superfluous.

69

But healthcare reform is more than just fixing a social ill. It’s an economic necessity. the system is set to go bankrupt if we do nothing. That’s a pretty good argument to let Congress try and reform it. Reform won’t be perfect, but it will be better than bankruptcy, right?

70

How is anything that Landrieu did against the Constitution?

71

I guess we’ll find out. Although I don’t expect the Reid bill to pass, there would be Constituional challenges, if it did. Kinda like FDR’s nonsense that got nixed.

72

:rolleyes: Wrong. Not one political scientist or constitutional lawyer in America would defend that proposition.

73

But Social Security was not nixed. Nor was Medicare, nor Medicaid. No sane person has seriously questioned the constitutionality of any of them in living memory. Constitutionally, health-care reform is not essentially different from any of them.

74

Not one political scientist or constitutional lawyer would defend the proposition that she uphold her oath of office? REALLY? How about a cite, pal.

75

There are plenty of ways to reform health care that don’t involve the government being as intrusive as it is. I’ve described free-market plans before on this board, but the debate goes nowhere because most of the supporters of the Democrat’s plan don’t really want to discuss alternatives.

In fact, the alternatives to this plan aren’t even crazy right-wing alternatives - they are similar to what John Kerry advocated, and what Ted Kennedy had advocated in the past. They also have support of many left-wing economists.

Just to give you a quick rundown of what these ideas might look like, they include:

[ul]
[li]Tort Reform[/li][li]Government guaranteed catastrophic health insurance, with the private market supplying the rest.[/li][li]Drug regulation reform to bring down the price of drugs[/li][li]More tax preferences for Health Savings Accounts[/li][li]Allowing people to buy health insurance across state lines to increase competition.[/li][li]Medical certification reform, to help create a bigger supply of doctors, and to allow more nurses and other health practitioners to do things that doctors do today but who probably don’t need to.[/li][li]encouraging low-cost health clinics through outlets like Wal-Mart (it’s worked great for optical so far)[/li][li]Eliminating the tax preference for employer-based health care[/li][li]Immigration reform/incentives to encourage foreign doctors to emigrate to the U.S.[/li][li]Immigration reform to reduce the burden of illegal aliens on the health care system.[/li][li]Cas Sunnstein’s ‘nudge’ ideas to reset defaults in terms of employer deductions for HSAs, encouraging healthier living, and other ways to encourage people to act responsibly with respect to their own health care.[/li][li]Tax breaks for adult relatives for helping with the health care bills of family members, or allowing families to set up their own risk pools and income-shift into each other’s HSAs.[/li][li]Eliminate Medicare, and roll seniors into the same health plan, but with addition aid to poor seniors. Stop giving rich people unlimited free health care.[/li][/ul]

And there’s lots more. I don’t agree with all of them, but these ideas are out there and some, like HSAs and catastrophic-only government health insurance have widespread support. Means-testing Medicare would save the government a bundle of money.

It’s annoying, because Democrats keep pushing the line that either you had to agree with their plan, or you were a do-nothing who was out of ideas. In the meantime, Republicans keep introducing health care bills with these features, and the Democrats summarily dismiss them. They’d rather campaign against a straw man than debate their own bill against another on the merits.

You tell me whether shutting down that debate is good for the American people.

Here’s the Republican health care bill. (PDF) Why do Democrats insist on saying that there are no other ideas than their own?

76

No, that “Anything else is superfluous.” Most of Congress’ work has nothing whatsoever to do with “upholding the Constitution.” Nor with undermining the Constitution. The Constitution does not settle all political questions for all time. The Constitution merely provides a framework for working out governmental and political problems, which are different for every generation, and I’m sure the Framers had no illusions to the contrary.

77

I agree that the democrats are creating a false dichotomy - either you support this particular health care plan, or you aren’t support any sort of reform. However, from what I understand the Republicans did not have any sort of concrete plans and no coherent policy, let alone specific bill proposals, until very recently and very late in the process. Given that their tactics have been simply to obstruct, obstruct, obstruct, I’m not sure that their recent developments in terms of proposing an alternative plan is done in good faith - if they were serious about discussing reform, they probably would’ve done so earlier in the process. Only after it looks like it’s going to get pushed through do they suddenly show interest in alternative plans (rather than flat out obstructionism), and it seems pretty late in the game now.

78

Still not seeing your cite. Perhaps you don’t have one, eh?

79

Did I call it, or did I call it?

http://thinkprogress.org/2009/11/23/guns-health-care/

**Gun Lobby Mobilizes Against Health Reform By Claiming Obama Administration Will Issue ‘No Guns’ Decree **

Excuse me, I must go preen for a while… Damn, but I’m good!

80

I don’t have time to read the whole thread - has Carol pasted in her angry letter to McConnell about the $300 million he threw away?

-Joe