September 2012

Saw this yesterday, from Gallup. The continuing polarization in American politics renders big picture public opinion polling like this suspect at times. Democrats will instinctually disparage the Republican convention, and vice versa. Plus, if you look to the other chart provided by Gallup, you’ll see that, historically, RNCs get more thumbs down reviews than their Democratic counterparts. It’s not a hard-and-fast rule so much as a tendency; and just as recently as 2004, it proved to be immaterial to the eventual outcome.

But just in case you’re waiting for a big post-convention Romney bounce to send us into the Democratic convention with the President’s back against the wall — don’t. (Sorry, political media!)

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A Google search for Labor Day images returns precious few depictions of actual workers. This is one of them.

Hope you had a happy Labor Day. I opted to spend my day off doing all manner of things, none of which could be described as labor. Entire history of the struggle for worker’s rights and equality, my cat and I thank you.

Since as I write it is not yet September 4, I think I’ll try to squeeze a good read through this small window of temporal fortuitousness.

From MSNBC’s Lean Forward, Ned Resnikoff’s got a nice, short op-ed on why, for a progressive, unions are worth fighting for — and why they’re not. Professing annoyance with the Center for American Progress’s Neera Tanden, who on “Up with Chris” this weekend argued that a strong union movement in a capitalist economy ensures higher wages, which in turn ultimately benefits a consumer economy by keeping cash in the customer’s pocket. Ned rightly notes that if the point of unions is subsidizing demand, there are far more direct, efficient ways for government to achieve this end; tax-credits, a higher minimum-wage, “loose money” from the Fed, etc.

He continues:

[U]nions should do more than just put money in their members’ pockets. Wages and benefits matter, but they are not what make the labor movement unique. First and foremost, unionization is important because it promotes freedom, democracy and dignity in the workplace.

Freedom, democracy and dignity: those three concepts have suffered a fair amount of abuse from political talking heads, especially around election season. But they still mean something, even when the meaning has been obscured. Freedom means being able to say that no one can arbitrarily interfere in your affairs. Democracy means being able to come together as equal members of a shared community, to deliberate on the key decisions affecting you all. And dignity simply means being regarded as a full and equal member of society, entitled and empowered to take charge of your own life.

Margaret Thatcher infamously said there was no such thing as society, that what we called “society” was merely a loose and tenuous collection of individuals and families. Philosophically, I believe she was wrong. But, to Resnikoff’s point, the ultimate death of a relevant union movement in America may render her judgment to be, empirically, simply premature.

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Here’s something I’ve been meaning to write about for some time now — why turning Medicare into vouchercare, or, if you’d prefer, “premium support,” is a bad idea.

Matt Yglesias, in his way, uses the recent, unprecedentedly bizarre and silly Clint Eastwood speech at the RNC as an excuse to point out that the elderly are often not operating at their previous peak-mental-capacity. Roger Ebert has written a thoughtful and sympathetic response to Eastwood’s address, one that would contest Yglesias’s tongue-in-cheek and implicit assertion that Eastwood’s performance was a consequence of senility. But even if you reject citing The Man With No Name as an exemplar of old age’s indignities, it’s both a truism and true that old age dulls our intellectual edges. It sometimes wears them down to the bone, in fact.

And yet this is the group that Republicans believe should be the guinea pigs on which American public policy tests the effectiveness of voucherized health care coverage:

We all know that some cognitive impairment tends to be a part of the aging process, just as nobody expects 7-year-olds to be incredibly wise decision-makers. That’s why elder fraud is a recognized problem. A great study by David Labison finds that about half of 80-somethings have “significant cognitive impairment, effectively rendering them incapable of making important financial choices.” […]

[Romney-Ryan's plan for Medicare] is essentially the same idea as what ObamaCare will do for the non-elderly, but in the opposite direction. In the case of the Affordable Care Act, it’s not clear to me that there are sound non-political reasons for doing it this way rather than constructing a single public program. But in the case of a program targeted at the elderly, the case for consumer sovereignty is clearly weaker. Insurance forms are confusing, and calculating the real actuarial value of different offers is difficult. This is not an ideal task to assign to a 92-year-old. It’s impossible to make it work with adequate regulation, but you really are counting on building a very effective regulatory agency to manage the program. So why not just build an effective agency and manage Medicare?

Why not, indeed.

Earlier this year, Henry Aaron, one of the intellectual fathers of premium support — at least among the center-left — abandoned the cause, noting the political atmosphere as well as recent studies of elder cognition had convinced him that the idea was not only politically unwise, but programmatically problematic:

I find it to be something of a relief to hear a policy maven like Aaron recognize the profound role politics should play in any leader’s estimation of a given policy’s wisdom. While Aaron cites some in-the-weeds-type issues with implementing premium support for Medicare today — most obviously the fact that insurance companies, despite technocratic attempts of policymakers to ensure otherwise, still rely on “risk management” strategies to avoid covering those seniors most likely to cost insurance provider’s money — the heart of his disavowal of premium support for Medicare is the fact that those very same people who so vehemently advocate it as the silver bullet to solve Medicare’s longterm cost crunch are those who would oppose the regulatory measures needed to ensure premium support didn’t result in a less generous and efficient program for seniors.

Aaron claims that these “regulatory interventions,” which he calls “pretty aggressive,” would be anathema in today’s health care policy “environment.” A less euphemistic way to say the same thing? The zealous anti-government ideology of the contemporary GOP would make it impossible to pass premium support with the regulations it would need to protect seniors. And as he further acknowledges, even if premium support passed with the necessary regulatory safeguards, the population that uses Medicare — the old, often infirm, and extremely vulnerable — is hardly the idea group to task with making the highly consequential cost-benefit analyses premium support requires of its participant-consumers.

Ironically, the most obvious testing-ground for premium support can be found in the health insurance “exchanges” that comprise much of Obamacare. Using a vastly preferable pool of consumers — not nearly as old and thus on the whole better equipped to choose wisely — the exchanges hope to use competition and government subsidies to lower health care costs through free-market means. Yes, the very same policy that folks like Mitt Romney (as of late) and Paul Ryan have characterized as little less than a full-scale assault on America’s capitalist system — it’s the ultimate test of the premium support model.

It’s a testament to the contemporary Republican Party’s intellectual bankruptcy, and its breezy disregard for the actual consequences of governing: The best possible test for premium support is being castigated while the worst possible test is unapologetically championed.

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Today’s episode of “Up with Chris” was great stuff for anyone who, like me, finds the history and future of labor unions in America to be at once both fascinating and deeply depressing. Check it out.

The picture-link above (trouble embedding for some reason) is a great exemplar of the cognitive dissonance that exists today within the Democratic Party. As a consequence of the economic story of the past generation — the decline of US labor and the rise of Wall Street — the always fractious Democrats must now determine how to live in a Citizens United era of untrammeled access for the wealthy into politics. Alongside three other members of a panel so leftwing, Neera Tanden of the Center for American Progress was the ideologically rightmost among them, sat one possible answer. Robert Wolf, a former UBS higher-up and a longtime adviser, fundraiser, and friend to Barack Obama, joined the show for about two segments and made the classic, “Third Way” pro-business Democrat pitch.

It’s fascinating to watch where this works and where it doesn’t — and there are clear, obvious, nagging inconsistencies between fealty to the post-New Deal Democratic Party’s version of social democracy, and the Clinton-Obama model of left-neoliberalism. One thing Wolf’s presence helps clarify is the general preference of left-neoliberalism to talk politics as if it were reams and reams of data. As Van Jones’ various comments throughout the show made clear, this is not a uniform trait of self-identified Democrats.

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