The Fallacy of Health Care “Uncertainty”

I was talking to a friend of mine for the first time in a couple of years yesterday. We used to work together and engage in lively discussions on the topics of the day.

My friend now finds himself involved in a small business. We talked of the differences between our old existence at a major corporation and how we thought about employee benefits versus his current thinking as a buyer of those services (and not simply as a consumer of whatever the HR department already purchased) and someone charged with watching every corporate penny.

The subject turned to health care.

My friend talked of an “almost universal hatred of Obama and the health care law” within the small business community that he knows. “The cost to hire new employees has gone through the roof and on top of that is all the uncertainty associated with health care.”

“Uncertainty?” I asked. “There’s no uncertainty.  The health care law has been enacted and is in effect. The only ‘uncertainty’ about the law is from Republicans talking about undoing it and repealing it,” I told him.

“Oh,” he said.  “I guess you’re right. I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

Well maybe you should from now on and stop complaining about problems that don’t exist, I did not add.

“It was good talking to you,” I said.  “I’ve missed our little chats.” And my chance to set you straight on what’s really happening.

 

Federal Tax Redistribution And Voting Patterns – A Study in Hypocrisy?

I saw the picture below yesterday. (I apologize that I can’t find the link to the article, but I saw it on The Economist.  If I find it, I’ll link to it.) It shows the differential between federal taxes paid and federal spending within each state. The green shades represent more paid in federal taxes than the state received in federal spending. Shades of red represent states that received more in federal spending than their residents paid in federal taxes.  That by itself makes it an interesting graphic. I have enhanced the chart by overlaying it with the 2008 election results.  States shown with a “O” went for Obama; those without designation went for McCain.

The Givers in Green, the Takers in Red

What you notice is that most of the states shaded in green (the “Givers”) went for Obama.  Voters in states that pay more into the federal government than they receive voted for a guy that some caricature (then and now) as a “socialist” and “redistributionist”–their words not mine. Said another way, those people who already have wealth redistributed away from them and toward those in other states voted against a guy that professed to want to reduce the size of the federal government and cut their tax bills.  Of the 22 green states, only four (Texas, Nebraska, Arkansas, and Georgia) voted for McCain, the professed tax-cutter and government-shrinker.

On the other side of the ledger are those states that are the Takers; those that get more from the federal government than they send in. These guys are already not paying their own way and benefit from the largess of the federal government.  There are 28 states than get more than they give. Of those, 18 of them voted for the Republican nominee.

Is this not biting the hand that feeds? If those states want the government to be smaller, I can think of 18 places to reduce the federal budget. But until you start paying your own way, don’t you owe it to those that are paying the bills to at least shut up?  This is like having your teenager tell you that the family wastes too much money dining out but then asks for money to go out for pizza with his friends.

As with many things, ’twas ever thus.

Policy Changes Under Two Presidents

Republicans get defensive when comparisons are made between President Obama and President Bush.  That is understandable.  The chart below appeared in yesterday’s New York Times, accompanied by an article entitled “How the Deficit Got This Big” by Teresa Trich.  Ezra Klein today points out today that much of what appears on President Obama’s side of the ledger represent temporary expenditures (g., e.the $711 billion of “stimulus spending” and the $425 billion of “stimulus tax cuts”) where as the largest items on President Bush’s side of the ledger (and what at least 2o sitting GOP senators and 100 GOP House members voted for) represent recurring expenditures (e.g., the wars, the Bush tax cuts, the Medicare Part D drug benefit which will go on in perpetuity).

Klein notes, “To relate this specifically to the debt-ceiling debate, we’re not raising the debt ceiling because of the new policies passed in the past two years. We’re raising the debt ceiling because of the accumulated effect of policies passed in recent decades, many of them under Republicans. It’s convenient for whichever side isn’t in power, or wasn’t recently in power, to blame the debt ceiling on the other party. But it isn’t true.”

Sad, especially given the behavior of the GOP during the debt ceiling crisis, but true.