Yes, their ideas still stink. (Larry Downing/REUTERS)
Two Ezra Kleins showed up to work today. The first Ezra
makes a lot of sense.
The conventional wisdom is that Obama is being given a great gift this week by Ryan, whose budget proposes to privatize Medicare and slash Medicaid. But the conventional wisdom might be wrong: Ryan is beginning the debate far to the right. He won’t get everything he wants, but if he gets 50 percent of what he wants, or even 35 percent, it’ll be the most dramatic victory that conservatives have scored against the social safety net in a generation—larger, at least in dollar terms, than anything done to welfare in 1996.
And it ignores that Ryan was also given a great gift: the opportunity to set the budget conversation virtually on his own. The Obama administration whiffed on both its budget and the State of the Union that preceded it....
I don’t blame Obama for being unable to change Washington. I don’t blame him for being unable to pass cap-and-trade. But I blame him for ceasing to try. And for sometimes letting what can be done distract from what needs to be done. [emphasis mine]
Then we get the second Ezra. After warning that "if [Ryan] gets 50 percent of what he wants, or even 35 percent, it’ll be the most dramatic victory that conservatives have scored against the social safety net in a generation," and excoriating Obama for not setting the budget conversation in a more progressive path, we get this:
That Ryan’s shown political courage by proposing difficult and even dangerous policy ideas can’t be denied. But political courage in service of bad ideas is no virtue. His budget concentrates its sacrifices among the poor and vulnerable and largely exempts defense spending and high-income taxpayers....
The Fiscal Commission’s approach is less objectionable. Ryan caps his Medicare vouchers at GDP+1%. The Fiscal Commission directs Congress to “contain growth in total federal health spending to GDP+1% after 2020 by establishing a process to regularly evaluate cost growth, and take additional steps as needed if projected savings do not materialize.” The savings are similar to Ryan’s budget, but the proposal offers more flexibility in how they should be achieved, and it doesn’t insist on privatization — which would raise costs — as a precondition to cost control....
Is the Fiscal Commission’s plan perfect? Not even close. But it’s a lot more reasonable, and a lot less ideological, than Ryan’s budget. And I think Ryan’s budget is going to persuade a lot of Democrats to give it a second look. [emphasis mine]
That'd be the Simpson-Bowles plan that isn't an official plan because the commission failed, by the way. A fact that far too many seem to want to ignore or forget. (Here's Ezra's very lukewarm review of that failed catfood commission "report": "In defense of Simpson-Bowles, the report did include a couple of ideas, though they were few, and the recommended items wouldn't have delivered on the promised savings. But it's a bit circular for lawmakers to just gesture at Simpson-Bowles, given that Simpson-Bowles was largely just gesturing at lawmakers.")
So is Ezra doing today what Ezra criticized Obama for doing earlier today, settling? If the catfood commission's ideas were too incomplete and too full of "magical asterisks" to be taken seriously by lawmakers before the Ryan plan was released, they're not any better now. The existence of the really deplorable Ryan plan might make the catfood commission proposal not look quite as bad, but that doesn't make it the best game in town, particularly for Democrats. It was bad four months ago. It's not any less bad now.
Democrats need to do what early-today Ezra blasted Obama for not doing: Take back the budget conversation on realistic, adult, progressive terms. That starts in the White House and works all the way down.