Matt Yglesias likens transparency in Congressional negotiations with transparency in family negotiations:

Think about a family negotiation over whose house you spend the holidays at, or who goes to watch Billy’s soccer game on Saturday. At the end of the day, wouldn’t everyone be worse off if the whole extended clan had the right to watch the negotiation on C-SPAN? More to the point, wouldn’t knowledge that the proceedings were going to be seen by others bias the negotiation. If your husband says “you don’t even like your cousin John” then you more or less have to protest and insist that you do too like him and any proposal predicated on the idea that you don’t like him needs to be rejected.

And that’s how it would go in negotiations. I think people think that if there were more transparency, the dread special interests would have less hold over the process. But I suspect the real result would be the reverse. What happens when you reach a compromise is both sides agree to sell some folks out in pursuit of some bigger objective they care more about. But in a transparent process, nobody would be willing to even hypothetically entertain the idea of selling anybody out.

Ezra Klein adds:

Of course, if the whole clan was watching, the husband would never mention your antipathy to your cousin John. And that’s the bigger problem: Hard issues never get discussed at all. You’d have some private talk and then some fake public negotiations where you followed a predetermined conversational route to the ending you settled on behind closed doors.

Now, this is true to an extent.  One significant difference between family negotiations and government negotiations is the set of incentives.  There are no lobbyists when a husband and wife decide where to spend Christmas (unless you count the kids or the competing relatives).  Nor is there typically a great deal of money at stake. And while family negotiations are typically quite personal, government negotiations are not.  Obviously hashing out disagreements about our family members is not something we want to do in public because, at the end of the day, we’d like to maintain some ties with even those family members who we may be complaining about.  These same deep bonds simply don’t exist in the public policy arena.  So it is not merely a difference of scope but a difference of kind which causes this analogy to fall apart.

Would lobbyists and government officials simply negotiate behind closed doors prior to negotiating in public as Ezra suggests?  Probably.  However, there are other ways to make the process more transparent.  Even if negotiations remain behind closed doors, certainly the results of these transactions could be made more visible.  Certainly there could be a better way to publicly advertise who is being lobbied by whom.

This is the information age after all.  The trick isn’t a lack of information – the trick is distributing that information and making it as easy to understand for as many people as possible. 

A simple solution would be to treat our congressmen (and women) like NASCAR drivers.  Simply stick a bunch of sponsor logos and industry stickers all over them so that we can see that when Congressman A votes for more farm subsidies, it’s because Big Agriculture is paying him to.  Or when Senator Y votes against defense cuts, it’s because [insert weapons manufacturer here] has donated to his re-election fund.  Have their staffers do the same.  Have each bill enacted in Congress prefaced with a "This bill is brought to you by…." credits section.

And so on and so forth.  There are plenty more ways (and even some not-tongue-in-cheek ways) to make the connections between our representatives and the special interests they represent more obvious and accessible.  Not all special interest influence is necessarily bad either – but it’s good to know who is at least ostensibly pulling the strings – and how hard.

“If Obama’s efforts to create a viable regulatory framework in which individuals can buy private health insurance (a) pass congress, and (b) turn out to work well and be popular, then you can imagine a version of Ryan’s plan being put into place. But in the absence of that kind of reform, I just don’t see how you can do this, which is presumably why the implementation is delayed all the way to 2021 which helps Ryan avoid needing to think about implementation details.” ~ Matt Yglesias, writing about Rep. Paul Ryan’s alternative budget

I think Yglesias actually makes a pretty strong point here.  While I’m overall fairly sympathetic to Ryan’s budget – he does, after all, balance it (at least according to the CBO report [pdf]), something virtually no other politician is willing to even propose – I think there is a fundamental flaw with implementing a healthcare voucher program without first fixing the broken, dysfunctional health insurance market.  The exchanges created in Obamacare would be one way to do this. 

What Yglesias does not point out, however, is that Ryan’s budget proposal also puts an end to the tax exemption for employee benefits.  Simply coupling this tax reform with the ability to purchase insurance across state lines creates an entirely new health insurance market.  Suddenly people on the individual market are given the same tax preference as people who receive their insurance from an employer.  Health insurance drifts away from employers and becomes personal and portable.  People wouldn’t lose coverage when they left their jobs.  Meanwhile, insurers would lose their long-held local and state monopolies and be forced to compete nationally, driving down costs both through added competitive pressures and by the better bargaining powers that these large, national firms would have, with their much larger, national cost-sharing pools.

Of course, the hard questions in healthcare will center around two inextricably linked concepts – pre-existing conditions clauses, and individual mandates.  Almost all modern democracies have some form of universal coverage, and the only way that it has been achieved with any semblance of a free market has been by doing away with pre-existing conditions clauses and implementing some sort of individual mandate.  If the former is done without the latter, nobody would buy insurance until they were sick – defeating the purpose (and the viability) of insurance to begin with.

Other alternatives exist, of course.  My personal preference is a model along the lines of Singapore’s healthcare system, which mandates health savings accounts and then picks up the tab on any costs above a certain flat percentage of income.  This puts healthcare directly in the hands of the consumer (cutting out insurance companies altogether) and provides them with catastrophic coverage if something should go wrong.  Furthermore, by placing costs and transactions directly in the consumers hands, it keeps costs from skyrocketing.  The mandated savings would be flat, but the catastrophic coverage functions progressively, covering less and less as income rises.

Either way, before any privatization of Medicare and Medicaid can occur, the private insurance market must be transformed.  Paul Ryan has shown true grit in crafting a budget that is actually balanced, but the possibility of backlash to cuts in entitlements is very real if the systemic problems in our healthcare system aren’t taken care of first.  Both Yglesias and Ezra Klein see this budget as a sort of draconian rationing of benefits for seniors and poorer Americans. If the insurance market could actually be fixed, however, then the system of vouchers which Ryan proposes would be adequate and possibly even better alternatives to the status quo.

Well, that’s the headline they gave my post saying about the same thing over at David Frum’s digs in any case.

While I do think that the success or failure of healthcare reform rests squarely on the shoulders of the Democrats in Congress and with the president, I still wish that Republicans would come aboard with some reasonable compromises. At this point, though, the Democrats have several options on the table and while I think there is reasonable room for compromise they could always….

….pass a healthcare reform bill via reconciliation. Yes, the Byrd rule makes this tricky. Serious holes could be shot through the bill. But it can be done. Democrats should seriously consider this approach given the continued strength of their majorities in both the House and the Senate. Whatever is cut out during the process can be added back in later. Rather than worrying so much about public opinion should they pass the bill in the wrong way, Democrats should worry about public opinion if the bill fails altogether. That’s a lot more memorable then some abstract legislative process with as benign sounding a title as “reconciliation.” But…

…if reconciliation is too daunting, Democrats could take a Republican bill and remake it into a bipartisan bill – rather than the other way around. Market and tort reforms could be coupled with subsidies (or vouchers) and some broadly popular reforms like an end to pre-existing condition clauses and some sort of optional national exchange. All the reforms I mention below could be packaged together as one bigger bill. Or…

….the Democrats could do this incrementally, with smaller moves and compromises made one at a time – in three or four separate bills over the course of a year or two or three.

First: expand Medicaid to 200% of poverty while at the same time deregulating the insurance market so that insurers could sell insurance across state lines. Shift the regulatory burden from the states to the federal government to avoid the same problems we’ve seen in the credit card industry. Finally, have the federal government pick up the tab for the Medicaid expansion.

In the next bill, introduce an excise tax on “Cadillac plans” while at the same time tackling tort reform. Toss in some vouchers (subsidies) for low-income families to purchase private health insurance. The Cadillac tax will eventually hit enough people to start a shift away from employee-based health benefits. In the future, the vouchers can be adjusted as more and more people leave the current system to purchase personal, portable insurance.

Third, lower the age of Medicare recipients to 50 while at the same time introducing significant means-testing. Change the fee-for-service model to one which relies on results rather than services rendered. In other words, have a Medicare bill that adds more healthy, younger people to the pool, while reducing benefits and/or raising premiums for wealthier elderly while at the same time changing the biggest and most fundamental flaw with how service providers are paid.

Somewhere in here pass a VAT. Put a bunch of money into community health centers, and nursing programs. Deregulate the medical cartels allowing more barefoot doctors, nurse practitioners, and midwives to provide more of our health services. Let low-cost, easy access, for-profit medical centers set up in shopping malls and other easy access places. Make sure Medicaid is accepted at these new walk-in clinics. Let Wal*Mart run them from its stores, all across the country. Let people start tax-deductible HSA’s regardless of the their health insurance.

And so on and so forth. Plenty can be done – even incrementally – to enact change in the status quo. Things can get better for people without enacting sweeping change that scares voters and kills the process in its tracks.

I have a confession to make.

I did not watch the President’s speech last night. 

No, after putting our daughter down to bed I did not turn on the computer.  I did not watch or listen to our Commander in Chief and his stirring oratorical skills.  I missed the Alito scandal altogether. I didn’t even check Memeorandum.

I turned, instead, to that most archaic of inventions: the novel.  I am currently midway through the third of Steven Erikson’s oh-so-epic Malazan books, Memories of Ice, and I admit that learning more about the mysterious Pannion Domin and the Crippled God sounded far more interesting to me than another of the President’s rhetorical masterpieces. Perhaps this is because I have had my fill of Obama’s grand speeches (since about the 4th of November, 2008).  Not that he’s a bad speaker – far from it – but because they become somewhat predictable after a while, no matter which president it is.

Or perhaps it’s just that I’m the sort of person who becomes lost easily in a good story.  (I used to bring a book with me to college basket-ball games as a kid and read through the entire game.  And I played basketball. So….)  Either way, last night the book won out over the speech.  I know, I know…  Shame on the blogger who would skip the SOTU address to read a book – and not just any book, not some literary triumph, but a fantasy novel.  It doesn’t get much lower than that.  Of course, I almost never watch anything in the first place – especially not on politics – so this is really nothing new.

And it is a very good book/series.  Any fantasy reader who’s still hung up on George R. R. Martin not finishing his Song of Fire and Ice books (or at least not very quickly) should check it out.

ADDENDUM: Consider this an open thread.

One problem with conservatism today is that conservatives are living in a past in which tax cuts were a panacea.  Thattimes have changed does not seem to register, and so new ideas are few and far between.  At some point, more and more conservatives will start thinking like Bruce Bartlett – not necessarily in favor of higher corporate or income taxes (hopefully) but in favor of something like a VAT – because there is simply no way we can cut spending enough to fix the budget.  The political will simply doesn’t exist.  We need a multi-pronged approach, tackling debt, spending, and revenue all at once, and we need serious politicians on the left and the right to do that.  (The tax-the-rich crowd on the left is just as bad as the cut-taxes crowd on the right, ignoring the (un)employment implications that such punitive taxes inevitably entail especially with unemployment in the double-digits.  Certainly raising taxes in the midst of a recession is a very bad idea.)

Another problem with conservatism in its current form is that defense has become so sacrosanct that true, limited government will never be realized.  Entitlements are out of control, but the growth and imperviousness of our defense budget is worse.  This is where I come down (among many other things) on the libertarian side of the aisle.

Meanwhile liberalism, while often the most egalitarian of these ideologies (to grossly generalize, of course) and certainly appealing to people who want to help the poor and to fix the manifold problems with society, too often relies upon the beneficence of the state, of experts and their expertise, and on central planning to achieve its grand (and expensive) designs.

And I guess I don’t trust the experts, even when I find their arguments compelling and even convincing.  And I don’t trust the planners even when the plan sounds pretty good – at least not any more than I trust the nation builders and their militaristic optimism, no matter how much better their nation-to-be sounds than the nation-that-is.  At the end of the day I think the best plan is always the one which allows for the least amount of planning, the one which can unfold organically, the one that allows competition and choice to flourish, and which relies upon local communities and private enterprise rather than Peter Orszag and the Planning Committee.  Ditto that for our foreign policy.

That doesn’t mean we don’t need a government or an army or that any and every action of the state is bad. It just means that we need to find ways to do it through limited government rather than putting so much faith in that institution time and again always with the same disappointing results.

We should be moving toward competitive federalism, not toward further centralization in Washington D.C.  Such centralizing of power is unsustainable at best.  But conservatives should also be distancing themselves from too much market-speak (a curse and a blessing for libertarians and conservatives), from too much of the dispassionate conservatism that defines so much of the movement today, and embrace the spirit that comes along with decentralization and its dismissal of big power in whatever form it takes. (Free trade certainly does end oligopolies and concentration of entrenched powers-that-be, but somehow talking about it too much makes people think quite the opposite.)

Such a spirit, I would argue, is rather more bohemian in nature.  And perhaps there is a streak of this bohemian self-reliance animating the tea parties, or perhaps there could be.  A conservatism that means what it says when it touts family values by understanding the family in terms of its relation to the larger community; and which understands that the power of the self-reliant individual rests as much on those things which support and surround him as upon his own natural talents.

Blogger and Jeopardy contestant.

I’ve been a little too hard on conservatives lately – largely due, I think, to my overall frustrations over healthcare reform, but also because of the antics on the right which I find distasteful and discouraging.  Part of what draws me to conservatism is its respect for tradition, restraint and of course the conservative disposition (which I realize is awfully vague and fairly apolitical).  This includes not saying wildly outlandish things or using scare tactics to make your case.  Somewhere along the way, all this has been tossed aside, along with many conservative principles such as limited government (i.e. not “save Medicare from the Democrats”).  Loudmouths like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck dominate the conservative airwaves, and the GOP itself is headed by the inept Michael Steele.  Several weeks ago, after watching that horrible Colbert segment with Andy Schlafly, I let myself sink into despair.

The conservative movement – nay, conservatism itself – was dead (to me, or so I thought).  Or, if not dead, it was damn near.  Andy Schlafly and Sean Hannity were dancing on its grave sputtering nonsense about Jesus and the free market, giving anti-capitalist progressives all the ammunition they’d ever need to spout their own brand of crazy-passionate-yet-uninformed.  What little remained of conservatism’s once robust intellectual movement seemed cordoned off, populated by a few economists, a handful of paleocons and dissidents, and some libertarians.  The neocon’s secret mission to destroy the movement from the inside out was working – had worked.  Game over.

Then came the special election in Massachusetts.  The Scott Brown victory, if nothing else, has restored my faith in the possibility of Big Tent conservatism.  Whatever Brown’s flaws or inconsistencies – and like every politician, they are many – he nevertheless represents a shift away from vapid purity tests and toward a more regionally representative Republican party.  The lesson of the Brown victory is not that moderate/liberal Republicans should be the model for conservative candidates country-wide, but that there should be no status quo at all – no precise model for what works, no one-size-fits-all-conservatism. What works in Tennessee will likely not work in New Yrok (nor should one politician attempt to change their political views entirely to appeal to each of these states consecutively).

Furthermore, Republicans should run more broadly appealing candidates rather than hyper-partisan ones, even if the hyper-partisan candidates are the best at rousing the base.  Republicans can still run very conservative candidates so long as those candidates can speak to a wide swath of voters. – Bob McDonnell in Virginia, for instance, is just this sort of candidate.

Moreover, the liberal reaction to Citizens United (Glenn Greenwald notwithstanding) has made me realize that my recent lack of faith in conservatives/conservatism is more a reflection of my overall lack of faith in humanity/politics. People on both sides of the aisle enforce that lack of faith on a daily basis.  Liberals and progressives can be just as over the top, emotional, and absurd as their conservative and libertarian counterparts.

On the other hand, all these groups can be well-intentioned and simply disagree fundamentally on very core principles and ideas. That disagreement exists does not make one side more wicked than the other. Obstructing the majority’s agenda is not in and of itself wrong. For instance, Republicans actually did compromise on healthcare reform.  Quite a few of them backed the Wyden/Bennett bill which was a much better bill than the one the Senate eventually produced. Big Labor was the lurking opposition to that bill’s passage, and guess who happens to be situated deep in the pockets of Big Labor?

Hint: it’s not the Republicans.

“Reformers should be focusing on lifting limits on the flow of money from parties to candidates and restoring the role of the parties as the funders of campaigns. Instead of Candidate Smith asking Donor Gonzalez for money – and Donor Gonzalez asking for a favor in return – party chairman Robinson will ask thousands of donors for money on behalf of a slate of candidates, who will never know precisely whose gift was directed to them. That step will diminish corruption and the appearance of corruption.” ~ David Frum

I asked our own Mark Thompson what he thought of this idea, and Mark replied:

From a corruption standpoint, Frum’s proposal is a recipe for creating machine politics on a national scale.  Strengthening parties is a guaranteed way of ensuring that everything will be a party-line vote, which may or may not be a bad thing, depending on your perspective.  But because it strengthens parties so much, it just shifts the appearance of corruption from individual politicians with only one vote or one voice who are at least nominally accountable to the electorate to national party chairmen with near-absolute control of every vote in their party and of every agenda item in their party who are not even nominally accountable to the electorate.  It amounts to the Boss Tweed-ization of national politics.  My feeling is that corruption would be better addressed by weakening parties through various ballot reforms.  That’s also one of the benefits of this recent decision – it weakens political parties quite a bit.

This is the danger of campaign finance reform – the unintended consequences of ideas which on their face seem pretty good.  Similarly, while I really enjoyed Glenn Greenwald’s piece on Citizens United, I think that his idea for reform is both vague and probably a recipe for unintended consequences as well:

There are few features that are still extremely healthy and vibrant in the American political system; the First Amendment is one of them, and the last thing we should want is Congress trying to limit it through amendments or otherwise circumvent it in the name of elevating our elections.  Meaningful public financing of campaigns would far more effectively achieve the ostensible objectives of campaign finance restrictions without any of the dangers or constitutional infirmities.  If yesterday’s decision provides the impetus for that to be done, then it will have, on balance, achieved a very positive outcome, even though that was plainly not its intent.

I’m right with Greenwald on pretty much everything up to that last bit.  What does meaningful public financing of campaigns mean?  And even if we could find a way to actually publicly finance everybody without creating a huge barrier to entry in politics, would this really even begin to address the problem of corporate influence in Washington? If it would, then I’d fully support it, but I can’t help but think that the corporations and special interests would simply find other ways to lobby and peddle influence.  Transparency is the only thing I can think of that can really even begin to break the stranglehold corporate interests have over Washington.  All the rules and regulations we can dream up, they can get around.  And neither Frum or Greenwald seem to provide the answer to that.

Ought health care legislation be stopped dead in its tracks after the Brown win? That is a clear promise he made in the campaign (though procedurally he can’t necessarily stop it himself). But many Democrats are saying that the result shouldn’t be ignored and that HCR should be halted. You supported Brown. You supported this (not just any) health care reform. Where do you stand? ~ Michael Drew, in the comments

I went back and forth a bit on the hypothetical – if I were a Massachusetts voter would I vote for Brown (and thus against HCR) or for Coakley (and thus against my better judgment).  I honestly can’t say what I would have done, because I like Scott Brown but I also want reform of our terrible no good healthcare system.  I’ve had some pushback at my other blog (where I have been writing a great deal about Brown) from Daniel Larison and Andrew Sullivan over whether my enthusiasm for Brown was ill-placed.

I may be wrong about Brown – he may not be the reformer many of us dissidents would like, but he’s such a change in tone and style it’s been a relief seeing him actually succeed, defying not only all the odds, but also the current Republican strategy.  Whether he is a mindless Bush Republican as Sullivan has labeled him, or whether he is actually going to change things for the better in the GOP is hard to say – but the stylistic shift he represents is substantial and may be in and of itself a significant step forward for conservatives.   [Read more →]

There are many things wrong with what James is trying to say in this post.  I will try to tackle a few of them.  The meat of the post, which is also the part most riddled with odd suppositions and strangely drawn conclusions, is as follows:

The tea partiers, in insisting that economic policy derives from and reflects political principles, and not the other way around, help make this clear. Take taxes. When taxes are too many and too high, the economy suffers. But, as this decade has brutally taught us, taxes do not necessarily enrich the state, but they always aggrandize it. The evil of taxes is not primarily economic but political. When a government learns how to use taxes to coerce, control, and manage the behavior of its citizens, a country is placed on a perilous road — not to serfdom, necessarily, but to tyranny, a tyranny that lords over even the rich and famous, even when they happen to profit from its favor. The GOP is supposed to keep this kind of tyranny at bay, and when it comes near, the GOP is supposed to ward it off.

It’s in this regard that, over the past ten years, the GOP has failed. The trouble with RINOs is that, in their liberalism, they are often either blind to the threat of tyranny or they do not really see it as a problem. This is not because they ‘fail to understand the nature’ of tyranny. Tyrannical regimes can rule over dynamic, exciting societies, over huge numbers of people full of promise and purpose. They can focus resources on big challenges and execute amazing feats of efficiency and publicity. Just ask the growing number of American commentators suffering from China envy.

Three things are mistaken here.

First, that “taxes do not necessarily enrich the state, but they always aggrandize it” strikes me as a very odd thing to assert n the context of the past decade.  While taxes may indeed aggrandize the state, how James can reach this conclusion after a period in which tax rates have been at historical lows is beyond me.  If anything, the past decade has revealed the state’s capacity to endlessly borrow in order to pay for the spending that Republicans and Democrats alike cannot seem to cut back.

And while taxes can indeed be corrosive to liberty and used to coerce citizens and distort the natural economy and a whole host of other abuses, they can also be used for legitimate purposes – though no two people can agree on what those purposes may be.  I assume James approves of our tax dollars going to our national defense, for instance, but perhaps not toward national healthcare.  Calling this tyranny without explaining why it is tyranny is mostly unsatisfying, especially coming from someone who can certainly think past such trite assertions. [Read more →]

“No one will ever put “worked for the Martha coakley campaign” on their resume. Unless they’re a republican.” ~ Ezra Klein