* In any event, I find it surprising that no one seems to want to acknowledge the cost of war. Wars are very important to people, but even these excellent adventures seem not to be important enough to justify raising taxes. When it was recently proposed that we establish a 1% surtax on everybody's federal tax liability to help pay for the wars, the proposal did not even make it to the House floor for vote. As Yglesias says, "Nobody seems to really think there are national interests at stake that are critical enough to be worth paying slightly higher taxes for. But if a war’s not worth paying for, how can it be worth fighting? And if we don’t pay for the war in the FY 2010 budget, we still need to pay back the loans."
* On the health care reform front, it looks like the public option, a government administered health plan that would compete with private insurance state monopolies, is a goner. I can't say I care that much. The recent public option compromise of compromise of compromise has probably gutted the program of its potential effectiveness, anyway. The Democrats should now use their giving up the public option as a bargaining chip to improve other aspects of the bill.
* The complete CBO analysis of the Senate health care bill have now been released. As I said before, the health care bill is projected to reduce the deficit by $127 billion over 10 years. Not a huge number in the grand scheme of things, but a little saving is better than nothing. The CBO also released a report about what the bill would do to insurance premiums. Premiums would remain steady for people with group coverage, while decreasing for those in the small-group or individual markets (see chart below). Costs would rise for some people, but that is mostly because the government subsidies will allow them to be able to afford more coverage. This is all good news.
* Led by John McCain, the Republicans are presenting themselves as gallant defenders of Medicare. The Democrat's reform bill does indeed include cuts to Medicare Advantage, which is almost universally seen as a program fraught with waste and inefficiency. This is something that Republicans have said they have wanted. So, are they happy now? Nope, they have decided it will help them politically to rile up opposition to these spending cuts. Kevin Drum points out the irony: "Here's a party that opposed Medicare viciously in the first place, routinely spoke out against it in the years that followed, was dedicated to gutting it in the 1990s, voted for major cuts in 1997, and has been using it as a cudgel ever since to get its base riled up over the future bankruptcy of America. McCain himself proposed over a trillion dollars in Medicare cuts just 12 months ago. But now? Well, now it's 2003 all over again and there are elections to think of. So now they're righteously opposed to cutting so much of a nickel out of Medicare spending, even if the cuts are aimed at waste, fraud, inefficient programs, and bad incentives. It's just jaw droppingly mendacious." Amen.* Some good reporting coming out on Obama's stimulus package. The Wall Street Journal reports on the CBO estimates showing that the stimulus saved up to 1.6 million jobs and added up to 3.2% to GDP. The New York Times surveys private sector economic forecasters (i.e., people who get paid big bucks to give accurate information to companies) who agree that the stimulus is working as predicted and that is was structured properly. While the economy is still struggling, the economists agree, it is doing much better than it would have done without the stimulus: "In interviews, a broad range of economists said the White House and Congress were right to structure the package as a mix of tax cuts and spending, rather than just tax cuts as Republicans prefer or just spending as many Democrats do." See handy charts below.
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