• We are given the flexibility to decide which insurers are permitted to offer their products.
• All the law's expensive benefit mandates are waived, so that our citizens aren't forced to buy benefits they don't need and have a range of choice that includes more affordable plans.
• The law's provisions discriminating against consumer-driven plans, such as health savings accounts, are waived.
• We are given the freedom to move Medicaid beneficiaries into the exchange, or to utilize new approaches to the traditional program, instead of herding hundreds of thousands more people into today's broken Medicaid system.
• Our state is reimbursed the true, full cost of the administrative burden to be imposed upon us, based on the estimate of an auditor independent of HHS.
• A trustworthy projection is commissioned, by a research organization independent of the department, of how many people are likely to wind up in the exchange, given the large incentives for employers to save money by off-loading their workers.
Obviously, this is a very different system than the one the legislation intends....
That's a GOP proposal on how to tweak health care reform, which is what Obama and others have said they need. With the prospect of 21 states dropping out of the enforcement regime, there should be real pressure to work with them and try to draw them back in.
On the other hand, you really are in favor of a fully nationalized health-care system, then you might celebrate the states failure to go along with the attempt to include them. And if what happens is, as Daniels predicts, "first-rate operational catastrophe," then that sets up the collapse into the only workable fix a fully nationalized health-care system.
"Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, John Thune, Tim Pawlenty, Mitch Daniels, Mike Pence, Rick Santorum, Haley Barbour, Mike Huckabee, Bobby Jindal, Paul Ryan, David Petraeus, Ron Paul, Jeb Bush, John Bolton, Bob McDonnell, Jim DeMint, Chris Christie, Herman Cain, Gary Johnson, Judd Gregg, Marco Rubio, and Rick Perry."
Romney, Palin, Gingrich, Pawlenty, and Daniels. Romney is the organizational front-runner; Daniels is the first pick of wonks and D. C. eggheads; Palin probably has the most devoted following among actual voters; Gingrich will dominate the debates; and Pawlenty (vying with Daniels) is the least disliked.
If you look at the numbers alone, the tax cut deal looks to have robbed Republicans blind. The GOP got around $95 billion in tax cuts for wealthy Americans and $30 billion in estate tax cuts. Democrats got $120 billion in payroll-tax cuts, $40 billion in refundable tax credits (Earned Income Tax Credit, Child Tax Credit and education tax credits), $56 billion in unemployment insurance, and, depending on how you count it, about $180 billion (two-year cost) or $30 billion (10-year cost) in new tax incentives for businesses to invest....
.... Much of what the Obama administration wanted was not that noxious to conservatives. They were tax cuts, many of them for businesses. Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels had previously proposed both a payroll tax cut for 2011 and the tax breaks for business investment. Republicans have frequently said that they don't even oppose unemployment insurance.
I elided 4 paragraphs for humorous effect. The "numbers alone" skew heavily toward the Democrats only because Klein limited the Republican side to "tax cuts for the rich." He also says:
Conservatives saw the extension of the tax cuts as an important pivot point in American politics -- full stop. As my colleague Jennifer Rubin puts it, Republicans "won the philosophical point (tax hikes impede economic growth)..." The Obama administration didn't see the tax cuts as a philosophical point....
... Obama's strategy going forward will be to position himself as Washington's lone resident adult in a town full of squabbling children on right and left, and at his presser just now, Obama offered a surprisingly stern, and even angry, rebuke to his liberal critics....
This is a good stance to take for 2012. At that point, we'll see how well the tax cuts worked. If the economy improves, Obama can take credit and warn us against giving too much power to Republicans because they will overdo tax cutting for the rich instead of taking the intelligently balanced approach he brokered. If things go badly, he can say the Republicans got some power in 2010 and forced a compromise that demonstrated that their ideology is wrong.
Meanwhile, both Jim DeMint and Mary Landrieu are lambasting the deal. Landrieu says she's "going to argue forcefully for the nonsensicalness and the almost, you know, moral corruptness of" tax cuts for the rich. DeMint says:
"I’m glad the President recognizes that tax increases hurt the economy.... [b]ut ... most of us who ran this election said we were not going to vote for anything that increased the deficit.... I don’t want to second-guess my leadership, but frankly, I think we need to come away with a lot better than this. We cannot increase the deficit, or keep increasing deficit spending.."
And I'll just end this patchwork post with Rush Limbaugh....
My take is, taken by itself in its own universe, yeah, okay, pretty good. I like the fact the left hates Obama. I like the fact they're mad at him right now. I like the fact that nobody's taxes are going up. But placed in the context of the shellacking and of this huge election victory, it's not nearly what we coulda gotten....
ADDED: My post title is "It's funny the way people are trying to spin the tax deal, now, before the vote." Once the legislation is passed, I assume people will say different things. Extreme claims of victory can't be made now if what you want is to get the legislation passed. And, too, different things will be said about this when 2012 rolls around.
I find Mitch Daniels very appealing. A successful, accomplished state governor. I have a presumption against Senators at this point. But I haven't seen him in action enough to have an opinion about how strong of candidate he'd be, standing next to President Obama in a debate and so forth.
You can almost see the green eyeshade as he speaks. It's been noted that Daniels is short, balding (with a combover), that he speaks with just a bit of a Southern country twang (he moved to Indiana from Tennessee and Georgia at age 10): hardly a glamorous candidate.
The way I read this poll, the correct answer is: Mitch Daniels!
Think about it.
IN THE COMMENTS: People start right in with the news that Daniels is short. I say: Smaller government — and if that means a smaller President, so be it.
I'm not sure what Mitch had in mind there but there's a whole coalition of people and interests and issues that comprise the conservative movement and the conservative perspective. I'm a fiscal conservative as well as a social conservative, so I don't think it's an either/or. I think it's both. And right now the economy is a pressing issue for the nation, and we're all primarily focused on that and jobs and the like, but that's not to say there isn't space to discuss other issues.
That's a lot of words. I feel like I'm still Trapped Under Wreckage. But if I take off my high-heeled shoe and I tap on something hard to attract attention, I think an answer emerges from the debris. It's faint, but my hearing is really sharp. The answer is yes.
Well, I remember seein’ some ad So I turned on my Conelrad But I didn’t pay my Con Ed bill So the radio didn’t work so well Turned on my record player— It was Rock-a-day Johnny singin’, “Tell Your Ma, Tell Your Pa Our Love’s A-gonna Grow Ooh-wah, Ooh-wah”
Why did Bob Dylan's record player work when the radio didn't? You'd be more likely to have a battery-operated radio than a battery-operated record player. But you probably don't even have a record player anymore, do you? And I don't think your radio has the Conelrad symbol on it. Do you even remember what the symbol looks like? I don't. Some triangle? That's what I wanted to see when I got distracted by that poor trapped woman, who was not so unfortunate that she didn't have a stiletto shoe to use to tap out her distress.
What took me back to the old Dylan song? I wasn't worrying about World War III. (I have a book in the house — it was given to me — called "World War IV" and one of my sons, puzzled, said "When did we have World War III?") I wasn't worrying about that, I was selecting the ideal pronunciation of the word "paw" (or "pa") to explain how to pronounce the name "Pawlenty" so it didn't confuse me by sounding like "polenta." Now, Tim Pawlenty, like Bob Dylan, is a Minnesotan. We were talking about him, because he's in a bit of a dispute with Mitch Daniels — who, unlike Bob Dylan, is a Hoosier (like my interlocutor in this conversation I'm alluding too). I need to do a separate post on the Pawlenty/Daniels dust-up, though, because in this post, I'm trapped under wreckage.
