1. Stan Collender rejoices at how much easier life is now that the president's budget is released electronically. He's actually one of the wonks that spends time sifting through it, in which case the difference must be unimaginable. I never had to do that work, but I can sympathize as well. I always used to have to go over to the Old Executive Office Building (which Mark Twain once called the ugliest building in America) to pick up Bob Reischauer (president of the Urban Institute's) reserved copy of the five (thick) volume books. Now he can just download it :)
2. Matt Yglesias points out how surreal the media's reaction to Congressional math is. In 2009-2010, Democratic bills in the House that couldn't get past a Republican filibuster weren't considered important news. Democratic relevance was measured by the stark reality of the Republican minority in the Senate. Today, however, House Republicans are lauded as a force to be reckoned with and a new reality in Washington. Is there position any stronger or more mandate-backed than the Democrats in 2009-2010? No. In fact, they're in a weaker, and less popularly backed position with a much smaller chance of doing much of anything. But the media lionizes them. I try not to be too plugged into the political world in this city, but sometimes if you didn't live here I think you'd start to mix up who is in power and who has what mandate, the way the media reports it.
3. Finally, whenever anyone in this town breathes a word about the budget, really the only discussion at hand is a discussion about Medicare and Social Security. That's what "the budget" means in Washington. Politicians may not want to do anything about it, but that's what the policy people talk about when they talk about the budget. I think in a lot of the country "federal entitlements" sound like welfare-queen doles. But in Washington "entitlement" has a very specific meaning - it's the collection of guaranteed social insurance programs but essentially "entitlement" means Medicare and Social Security. Matt Yglesias reports, however, that 44.1% of Social Security recipients and 39.8% of Medicare recipients say they haven't received any government social programs!!!! Unbelievable! If you keep the share of recipients who've received nothing but Social Security and Medicare (i.e. - take out the people that have received food stamps and Social Security and are only thinking of their food stamps when they respond that they've participated in a government program), I wouldn't be surprised if that constitutes a majority. This thing that is the centerpiece of worries in Washington isn't even directly associated with government social policy by many recipients!
Monday, February 14, 2011
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But why just Social Security and Medicare?
ReplyDeleteLook, there was once a dotcom bust in the 1990s. Take together all the losses in that bust. Huge losses, yes. And they are just an "error margin", if you consider the kind of waste that happens in Pentagon - which can not account for $2.3 trillion of funds. Quoting a certain unmentionable columnist:
[On January 29, 2002, CBS Evening News reported that the Pentagon had lost track of $2.3 trillion, yes, $2,300 billion. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld admitted, “According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions.” “We know it is gone,” said Jim Minnery of the Defense Finance and Accounting Service, “but we don’t know what they spent it on.”]
And then you have $56.34 billion spent on TSA scanners alone - enough money to bribe all the banks into forgiving defaulting debtors during foreclosures. Don't look at that as a percentage of GDP or total spending, but in absolute figures. It's outrageous.
Why talk about "entitlements"? Why not real waste? In the UK, David Cameron just cut defense spending, and all non-medical care spending by 25%. He didn't even touch entitlements.
The best defense against anyone shocked by government waste is to accuse him of wanting to only cut entitlements. As Labour attempted against Cameron. But that failed in the UK, where people are generally intelligent. Will that fail in the US?
Defense doesn't have the growth issues that Social Security and Medicare do. Defense spending is up because of wars that many of us considered ill-advised, and there's an easy way to cut spending - pull out of those wars. There's lots of low-hanging, unnecessary fruit to cut in the defense budget as well.
ReplyDeleteSS and Medicare pose somewhat different problems, I think. Health costs have been growing a twice the rate of inflation, which means that Medicare is growing at that pace as well. We're entering a demographic transition with the retirement of the baby boomers that will affect both programs. The entitlements are a freight train that's hard to imagine how we'll divert in a way that the Pentagon simply isn't. Decades from now, there's no reason to think that the Pentagon will of necessity be an unsustainable budget-gobbler. With the entitlements, alternatively, it's hard to have the math come out in any other way. There's simply no avoiding this freight train, which is why policy people in Washington are almost exclusively thinking in terms of the entitlements when they talk about the long-term budget at least (other things may come in in the short and medium term).
Off topic...but people outside DC don't think about security clearances...when questioned at an event in SF, the vague response that tells a DC-ite: "Don't go any further" is met with: "What does that mean? Who do you work for?"
ReplyDeleteThat is a very good one. My wife was pulling her hair out over that one for a while, until she got a clearance through her job. It's a catch-22 situation too. There are whole fields and industries where you can't easily get a job without a clearance, but the best way to get a clearance is through a job!
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