Alec MacGillis has a nice piece in the New Republic about one of the most fatuous of the grand confabs that float about the French cuffs and poached salmon universe, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation’s “Fiscal Summit,” at which a variety of rich people moan about the fact that the gutless politicians in Washington won’t take away trillions of dollars from poor people.
As Alec notes, none of the “sky is falling” predictions about a deficit tsunami consuming the American economy have come true, but that don’t stop the squawkin’ from the likes of Columbia economics professor Glenn Hubbard, or General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt, or Ohio Sen. Rob Portman, not to mention former Pres Bill Clinton, all of whom manage to tear themselves away from the PGP-provided Chateaubriands and lobster Newburg long enough to denounce the idea that poor folks deserve to have a roof over their heads in the coming decades. What’s causing the squawkin’, dudes, the future or the food?
Over at Slate, Dave Weigel weighs in with a post labeled Tim Geithner, Good Soldier, praising/accusing Tim of working overtime to make his boss look good in the “Who sank the Grand Bargain” debate. In fact, the Grand Bargain was sunk by the bases, both Democratic and Republican. It’s only the party elites who want a Grand Bargain, because they want to please Wall Street. The Democratic base wants no cuts to government spending at all. And the Tea Party, though it pretends to lust to cut, holds both Social Security and Medicare as sacred as do the Democrats. Tim Ryan’s “ruthless” plans would have held Medicare harmless for a decade and Social Security for, well, for forever. Easily the Tea Party’s greatest card against Obama was that he did cut Medicare. How likely is it that a political movement that rose to power opposing any spending cuts to Medicare (and, implicitly, Social Security) would turn around and cut both?
As for the PGP crowd, well, they can go fuck themselves. If they believed in “markets” the way they say they do, they would attack health-care spending (which actually is a crisis) through markets. They would work to increase the supply of doctors; they would work to increase competition among health insurance companies; they would work to increase the competition among hospitals; and they would work to increase the competition within the pharmaceutical industry. They would do all these things because the American health care system as it now exists is a morass of “managed” (i.e., non-existent) competition. But this would put them in conflict with the interests of rich people rather than the poor and the middle-class. And, well, you don’t want to pick a fight with a fellow that you might meet at the club.
Afterwords
I blame PGP et al. for trying to cut Social Security and Medicare, but I don’t blame them too much for not trying to lower health costs. We have “runaway” health costs because, by and large, the American people want gold-plated, no-expense-spared health care without having to pay for it, which, via untaxed, employer-provided health insurance and Medicare, is exactly what they get. It’s hard to control runaway costs when the public doesn’t want to control runaway costs.
