CBS/NYT poll:
Nearly two-thirds of Americans choose higher payroll taxes for Medicare and Social Security over reduced benefits in either program. And asked to choose among cuts to Medicare, Social Security and the nation’s third largest spending program — the military — a majority by a large margin said cut the Pentagon instead.
David Leonhardt:
We have come to believe a story about the deficit that is largely not true.
It’s a comforting story, to be sure. It holds the promise of a painless solution, because it suggests that the country’s huge looming deficits are not really our fault. Instead, they seem to stem from weak-willed politicians, wasteful government programs that do not benefit us and tax avoidance by people we have never met.
In truth, the coming deficits are a result, above all, of the fact that most Americans are scheduled to receive far more in Medicare benefits than they have paid in Medicare taxes. Conservative and liberal economists agree on this point. After Medicare on the list of big, growing budget items come Social Security and the military.
The three programs are roughly as popular as tax increases are unpopular – which is precisely why solving the deficit problem will be so difficult.
CBS:
More Americans want to keep the sweeping health care reform legislation passed last year than want to repeal it, according to a new CBS News/New York Times survey. Forty-eight percent of Americans say they want to keep the law in place, while 40 percent want to see it repealed.
Jena McGregor:
But it's hard to vote against something if you don't know what might replace it. Republicans could have turned first to the "replace" part of their strategy, developing an alternative piece of legislation that would similarly insure 30 million people at a lower cost, but do it in a different way than the current law proposes. Once that was drafted, they could have then tried to repeal the old law, with potentially more support for an actual substitute solution.
Instead, they tried to act quickly to undo rather than explaining exactly how they plan to move forward. They complained about a problem, but offered no tangible solutions for fixing it. Whatever you may think of the health care reform law--and even many supporters lament that it is flawed--it's a start to a deeply problematic systemic issue our country must face one way or another.
Bellingham (WA) Herald:
Consumer Confidential: GOP's childish opposition to health reform
Get over your bad selves.
That's basically what former Senate Republican leader Bill Frist told his GOP compadres this week as they set about trying to dismantle the national health care reform law.
"It is not the bill that I would have drafted," he said during an appearance at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington. "But it is the law of the land and it is the platform, the fundamental platform, upon which all future efforts to make that system better, for that patient, for that family, will be based."
Greg Sargent:
Today's Gallup poll, I think, reveals anew why this insight of McConnell's was so crucial. What McConnell was really saying here is that if any Republicans signed on to Obama's proposals, it risked suggesting to the American people that Obama's governing approach was moderate or even somewhat centrist -- something that could command some agreement. By contrast, when no Republicans signed on to Obama's proposals it made it far easier for them to paint Obama's agenda as ideologically off the rails to the left, which is exactly what they did.
Paul Krugman:
Could all of this really turn into a full-fledged crisis? If I didn’t know my economic history, I’d find the idea implausible. After all, the solution to China’s monetary muddle is both simple and obvious: just let the currency rise, already.
But I do know my economic history, which means that I know how often governments refuse, sometimes for many years, to do the obviously right thing — and especially when currency values are concerned. Usually they try to keep their currencies artificially strong rather than artificially weak; but it can be a big mess either way.
So our newest economic superpower may indeed be on its way to some kind of economic crisis, with collateral damage to the world as a whole. Did we need this?