Tuesday punditry. Housekeeping note: Barb's on her way to LV (and what she does there stays there) so I'll be picking APR up for the week. Since I'll be at NN as well, there might be some odd or early posting times on some days.
Jonathan Cohn:
This isn’t the first time insurers have offered plans with fewer treatment options. It happened most famously in the 1990s, when insurers first introduced the concept of “managed care” on a wide scale. Consumers didn’t like it then, and they might not like it now. But last time, most people blamed the insurance industry. This time, they might blame the government--in no small part because reform critics will use the occasion to say, “I told you so.”
Taking the blame for anything and everything that goes wrong in health care has always been the biggest political danger to reform, at least in the short term. The Obama administration and the Democrats now “own” health care just as surely as they own General Motors. But before Sean Hannity or the Wall Street Journal editorial page get their hands on these stories, let’s be clear about something: Those headlines don't highlight reform’s problems. They actually highlight its virtues.
Chris Cillizza:
That data point suggests that Congressional Republicans have -- whether intentionally or accidentally -- decoupled themselves from the unpopular former president over the past 18 months or so.
The work of the next four months (or so) for Democrats is to remind people of that link -- that the vast majority of Republicans in Congress were in office when Bush was president and played a not-insignificant role in passing his agenda.
The data in the Third Way poll suggest that if Democrats can (re)hang Bush around the neck of Republicans, it could greatly improve their chances of minimizing losses this fall.
Andrew Yurkowski and Albert Otti:
Former U.S. President Bill Clinton and Microsoft founder Bill Gates urged HIV/AIDS organizations Monday to deliver their services more efficiently and stop waste in the wake of the global economic crisis.
At the biennial International AIDS Conference in Vienna, which both men were addressing, advocates have warned that the United States and other countries might lower their funding in the fight against the global virus epidemic.
"Every dollar we waste today puts a life at risk," said Clinton.
Both he and Gates have started foundations that are major players in the fight against HIV/AIDS.
Alastair Smith:
On January 12, 2010, Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, was struck by a 7.0-magnitude earthquake that caused widespread destruction and killed approximately 222,000 people. The next month, Chile was hit by an 8.8-magnitude earthquake -- approximately 500 times stronger than that in Haiti -- but only 500 people died.
Why the disparity? For one, Chile rigorously enforces strict building codes, so there was less immediate damage to the infrastructure near the earthquake’s epicenter. The government of President Michelle Bachelet was also quick to act once the earthquake hit. It immediately began to coordinate international and domestic relief efforts to get supplies and shelter to those in need. In contrast, there is no national building code in Haiti, and the country’s government was barely functional even before the earthquake, let alone after.
Arthur Delaney:
Since the 1950s, to fight recessions Congress has routinely put in place federally-funded benefits to help people who can't find work before exhausting 26 weeks of state benefits. Democrats have said during the current debate that because Congress has never offset the cost of the benefits, doing so now would not only nullify the stimulative effect of giving money to people who immediately spend it, it would also fundamentally undermine unemployment insurance in the future. "If you say that you can't feed people because you don't have the money right now, that is a real new precedent," Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) told HuffPost.
The claim has gone largely unchallenged, but Sen. Jim Bunning, the Kentucky Republican who launched the GOP's deficit crusade back in February, says Democrats are wrong about offsetting benefits. "Historically that is untrue," Bunning told HuffPost. "Just do your homework. Go back and check historically what they've been doing."
HuffPost did its homework, and Bunning's got a point: Congress has, in fact, offset the cost of unemployment benefits -- but Congress has never substantially cut spending elsewhere in the budget to fully pay for them as Republicans now want to do.
Kevin Drum:
Back in the day, one of the key Republican arguments against the estate tax was that it forced hardworking, salt-of-the-earth children of small farmers to sell the family plot in order to pay their taxes after dad died. It was a sad story, but with one problem: no one could find even a single small farmer who had been forced to liquidate in order to satisfy Uncle Sam's voracious maw. Even the American Farm Bureau Federation was eventually forced to admit that it couldn't come up with a single example, and a few years later the Congressional Budget Office estimated that under the now-current exemption level, only a tiny handful of small farms were likely to owe any estate tax to begin with — and of those, only about a dozen lacked the assets to pay their taxes. And even those dozen had 14 years to pay the bill as long as the kids kept running the farm. In other words, the story was a fraud from beginning to end.
Good times. Today, though, we're getting a rerun. The subject at hand is the Bush tax cuts, and the question is who exactly will get hurt if we go ahead and keep the cuts intact for middle income earners but let them expire for the rich. The obvious answer is, "the rich," but it turns out that, just as there are small farmers begging for our sympathy, there are small rich too: namely an alleged army of hardworking, salt-of-the-earth small business owners who would also end up paying higher tax rates.