Comments for A Heaping Helping of Ridicule for Ruth Marcus at http://www.cepr.net , comment 1 to 15 out of 15 comments http://www.cepr.net Tue, 21 May 2013 12:09:30 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.3 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/a-heaping-helping-of-ridicule-for-ruth-marcus#comment-19230 "... the $8 trillion housing bubble... gave us trillion dollar annual deficits" is promptly followed with the objection that "they were screaming about budget deficits even when the deficit was less than 2.0 percent of GDP." Either percentage of GDP is the appropriate metric or it isn't, I would think. Apparently it was appropriate prior to 2008. But wasn't that unrepresentative because GDP was getting an unsustainable boost from unsustainable increases in home prices? - Brian Dell Mon, 01 Oct 2012 07:54:30 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/a-heaping-helping-of-ridicule-for-ruth-marcus#comment-19196 Yeah, sorry RL, I realized it didn't work after I posted it - had a space in it that shouldn't have been there. Try: [url]http://www.levy.org/pubs/ppb72.pdf[/url] No, I'm not being facetious at all. Dean's observation about surpluses implies our broken, inefficient healthcare system is supporting the economy in a kind of medical Keynesianism. As Galbraith observes, decades past, only military Keynesianism existed; but the success of the USA relative to Europe is because it has had government-led socialistic Keynesian devolution! During the Keynesian era, people understood that when there is unemployment, efficiency & frugality are destructive and inefficient for the economy as a whole. Just throws people out of work. While waste & profligacy are beneficial & efficient. Y'know, Keynes on burying banknotes, building pyramids etc. Not the best thing to do, but (a) gets [i]something[/i] done & (b) the multiplier effect of the spending gets all the good capitalistic free market stuff working right. I'd thought & written about this about healthcare meself. Was happy to recently dig up some old papers & see it confirmed by Galbraith (& Parguez, perhaps others). - Calgacus Sat, 29 Sep 2012 07:53:54 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/a-heaping-helping-of-ridicule-for-ruth-marcus#comment-19195 Why can't we cope with the huge overspending on health care? A big reason, in my opinion, is a lobbying group, the Physicians for a National Health Plan. They don't want doctors to be any less rich (neither to Obama's advisors). They want to form medical oligopolies, so as to be able to war with insurance companies. So they make great efforts topersuade the unsophisticated (like the Occupy folks) that there's only one reason our health care system costs too much: administrative costs. And there's only one way to solve this problem: a single payer, whom they, with their political clout, can manipulate. In fact, there are many reasons our health care is too expensive, and many ways we could try to bring costs down. And in particular, Single Payer is not the only way to lower administrative costs. It's just the only one that PNHP wants to talk about. - Rachel Sat, 29 Sep 2012 06:05:03 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/a-heaping-helping-of-ridicule-for-ruth-marcus#comment-19194 Calgacus, your link doesn't work. I love everything I've ehard from James Galbraith, so I'm interested in reading that Also, I'm not at all certain, but you are being facetious in that post, correct? It's becoming harder and harder these days to tell when people are joking and when they're serious. - RL Sat, 29 Sep 2012 04:08:14 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/a-heaping-helping-of-ridicule-for-ruth-marcus#comment-19193 I think you typed too fast in one sentence: "The purpose of this fabrication is to advance their agenda for their preferred plan for spending cuts and tax increases. As Marcus tells us in the next paragraph:..." I think you meant to say "...their preferred plan for tax cuts..." As I understand it the Post (and Marcus) do not want to see tax increases, although they give lip service to the recommendations from dotard former senator Alan Simpson and Morgan Stanley director Erskine Bowles. The "chairmen's write-up" which they published and most of the MSM refers to as the Catfood Commission's recommendations did call for some tax increases but mostly for spending cuts, many of which were not specified. The policy of both spending cuts and tax increases is from President Obama and the Democrats, although I realize the President is obsessed with cutting Social Security in hopes of a Grand Bargain with Satan. - Procopius Fri, 28 Sep 2012 22:46:20 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/a-heaping-helping-of-ridicule-for-ruth-marcus#comment-19192 [i]If we paid the same amount as any other wealthy country we would be looking at huge budget surpluses, not deficits.[/i] One has to be careful with this. As Dean says, Our healthcare system aside, we would have a these huge budget surpluses. But which are a huge problem, a catastrophic danger, not a Good Thing, as Joe says. So one good way to read this, especially now, in high unemployment depressionland is: Aside from our "broken healthcare system", the US government grossly overtaxes & underspends. It is running an insane austerity program. So the "broken healthcare system" is keeping the economy & a lot of people in it from drowning, very quickly. Replacing it with a superior, efficient Eurosystem [i]but not replacing the spending (& even its soaking-of-the-rich)[/i] would ceteris paribus create a Great Depression II fiscal cliff. See James Galbraith's 2003 WHAT IS THE AMERICAN MODEL REALLY ABOUT?: Soft Budgets and the Keynesian Devolution [url]http://www. levy.org/pubs/ppb72.pdf[/url] . Also some work of the always exceedingly perceptive Alain Parguez. - Calgacus Fri, 28 Sep 2012 19:06:55 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/a-heaping-helping-of-ridicule-for-ruth-marcus#comment-19190 "Behind the scenes, serious people in the administration..." Ah, yes, the Very Serious People so often mocked and derided by Paul Krugman, but still venerated by Ms. Marcus and her colleagues at Fox on 15th. - John Q Fri, 28 Sep 2012 16:12:20 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/a-heaping-helping-of-ridicule-for-ruth-marcus#comment-19189 Maybe I'm confused, but why is it a "cliff" if government spending falls and taxes rise? Yes, Congress chose to play the Sheriff of Rock Ridge by holding a gun to their own heads - but they can always choose to holster the gun. Here, Congress could take action - especially if all voters choose only Democrats. As many Democrats are Rockefeller Republicans, this would give us a "bipartisan" set of negotiators. - RepubAnon Fri, 28 Sep 2012 15:10:32 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/a-heaping-helping-of-ridicule-for-ruth-marcus#comment-19186 Interesting, Joe. But the point about surpluses its just to provide a counterfactual to the debt/deficit hawks who would leave the broken healthcare system intact -- one point being that those claiming worry about the debt aren't in the slightest worried about the debt. The actual point is that the health care system is broken and abused. - David Fri, 28 Sep 2012 11:30:57 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/a-heaping-helping-of-ridicule-for-ruth-marcus#comment-19182 There Dean goes again mentioning surpluses, which of course has a positive connotation in everyone's mind. Does anyone here realize the federal govt CANNOT run a perpetual surplus in US dollars? For the federal govt to run a surplus(in dollars) then the non-govt sector(domestic private and foreign sector) MUST run a deficit. The private sector obviously can't run deficits for very long, but the federal govt obviously can, it creates the money, and it obviously should (on average). The deficit adds net financial assets to the private sector. It has ran deficits for 200-and-some years of it's 230-and-some years of existence. Historically the private sector has take a net-surplus position, so the govt must match it with deficits to enable the accumulation of net financial assets. I've seen absolutely no indication that dean really understand this. He's still responds to talk of debts and deficits by referring to interest rates, and he brings up wild-eyed dreams of surpluses if we reformed health care, as if the surpluses would be a good thing. It's playing right into the neo-liberal fantasy that at some point we must 'get the deficit under control' and 'pay back the debt', which is utter nonsense. There is no more 'loser liberalism' than that, as it completely ignores the nature of money and the real economy. - joe Fri, 28 Sep 2012 09:58:17 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/a-heaping-helping-of-ridicule-for-ruth-marcus#comment-19173 I stopped reading Ruth Marcus when Democrat Kathy Hochul won the 2010 election for New York's 26th congressional district. Hochul won by pointing out that Ryan's plan would end Medicare, replacing it with a voucher program. Hochul was successful, according to Marcus, because "mediscare works." No, Ruth. It shows that sometimes telling the truth works. - George Lantos Fri, 28 Sep 2012 05:32:42 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/a-heaping-helping-of-ridicule-for-ruth-marcus#comment-19168 "The actual impact on spending in January is likely to be minimal, unless President Obama wants to slow spending to make a point. (The president has enormous control over the timing of spending.)" Can you explain this a bit? Are you saying, for example, the cuts could be backloaded all the way to the end of FY2013 or even, say, FY2022 with the idea that a deal would be reached by then? - Mike Fri, 28 Sep 2012 02:53:07 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/a-heaping-helping-of-ridicule-for-ruth-marcus#comment-19167 It isn't just Marcus, The Hill purports to be a place where you can find out what's really going on in Congress but the obsession with debt has short circuited their rationality. Just consider this headline: "Report: Carbon tax could halve the deficit." Sounds too good to be true doesn't it? That's because it's based on: "The report finds that imposing an escalating fee that starts at $20 per metric ton could reduce the projected 10-year budget deficit by more than 50 percent, from $2.3 trillion to $1.1 trillion.That estimate relies on the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) “baseline” deficit projection. But the report notes that the same carbon tax would have a much smaller impact on the deficit — cutting it about 12 percent — under CBO’s “alternative” scenario that forecasts a much bigger shortfall." BTP readers along with The Hill writers and editors should know that the chances of the CBO's baseline deficit projection holding for 10 years has as much chance of becoming reality as winning the lottery. A little thinking would lead a rational person to realize that if the baseline scenario did hold, we wouldn't have a deficit problem so why would we use the revenues to lower the debt when they could go to helping lower income Americans compensate for higher fuel prices and for investing in cleaner energy sources? http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/e2-wire/258773-report-carbon-tax-could-halve-the-deficit- - Robert Salzberg Fri, 28 Sep 2012 02:50:10 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/a-heaping-helping-of-ridicule-for-ruth-marcus#comment-19166 Ruth Marcus creates a false equivalency between Republicans who will never raise taxes and Democrats who only want to increase taxes as a way to mend our economy. I sent a correction request to WaPo for Marcus to either produce a single elected Democrat who has stated that the debt can be dealt with just by raising taxes on the rich or retract her statement: "for Democrats, that tax increases on the wealthy will suffice " I expect the chance of a correction for Marcus's piece to be about the same as Marcus finding an elected Democrat who says we can fix the deficit by just raising taxes on the rich. - Robert Salzberg Fri, 28 Sep 2012 02:30:30 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/a-heaping-helping-of-ridicule-for-ruth-marcus#comment-19164 Marcus: "But there can be no pathway to success unless enough partisans on both sides give up on their foundational myths:... for Democrats, that tax increases on the wealthy will suffice." She needs to name some of her serious Democratic friends who believe that. - Bart Fri, 28 Sep 2012 01:11:13 +0100