It’s one of the more comical aspects of the deadly serious game of chicken that House Republicans are playing on the debt limit, but it’s worth pointing out, as I did at New York:
As the United States lurches toward a possible debt default thanks to House Republican hostage-taking on legislation needed to extend or suspend the debt limit, it’s increasingly evident that (as my colleague Jonathan Chait observed) the hostage-taker is strangely reluctant to name a ransom. Indeed, the initial Democratic strategy in this complicated chess game was simply to force House Republicans to say exactly what kind of spending cuts they propose to make in exchange for allowing a debt-limit measure to wobble its way to Joe Biden’s desk.
It’s easy to mock GOP lawmakers for the brainlessness, or maybe cowardice, of their effort to make Democrats identify the spending cuts their opponents want. The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell tans the elephant’s hide with considerable panache:
“Republicans have Very Serious budget demands. Unfortunately, they can’t identify what any of those demands are.
“They say they want to reduce deficits — but meanwhile have ruled out virtually every path for doing so (cuts to defense, cuts to entitlements, wiping out nondefense discretionary spending, or raising taxes). …
“Republicans say they want lower deficits — in fact, they have pledged to balance the budget (that is, no deficit at all) within seven or 10 years. But they have not laid out any plausible mathematical path for arriving at that destination. They promise to cut ‘wasteful spending’ … but can’t agree on what counts as ‘waste.’”
In so quickly reaching this predictable dead end in answering the world’s easiest math problem, Republicans have one plausible line of defense: It’s how much of the public feels about fiscal matters as well. They really don’t like deficits and (especially) debt. But they really don’t like the kind of spending cuts that Republicans are talking about either (tax increases, of course, are categorically off the table for the GOP and have been since the George H.W. Bush “Read my lips: No new taxes” debacle).
A September 2022 poll from the deficit scolds of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation found that Americans are up in arms about all the borrowing:
“A 31-month high of 83% of voters are urging the president and Congress to spend more time addressing the national debt, with the biggest jump among those under age 35 (8 points to 85%).
“More than eight-in-ten voters (81%) also said that their concern about the national debt has increased. Nearly three-in-four voters (74%) feel the national debt should be a top-three priority for the president and Congress, including 65% of Democrats, 74% of independents, and 86% of Republicans.”
From 40,000 feet, all that red ink looks pretty alarming, it seems. More recently, this very week, the Heritage Foundation’s Daily Signal found a majority of Americans stamping their feet about it:
“Most Americans oppose raising the federal debt ceiling without accompanying cuts to federal spending, a new RMG Research poll finds.
“Sixty-one percent of 1,000 registered voters in the survey said Congress should either raise the debt ceiling with spending cuts (45%) or refuse to raise the ceiling at all (16%). Only about a quarter (24%) said Congress should raise the ceiling without accompanying spending cuts.”
To House Republicans, the great symbol of runaway spending is the “monstrous” $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill passed by Congress in December. Many of them claimed during the fight over Kevin McCarthy’s Speakership bid that “the American people” were outraged by the measure despite the fact that it cleared the Senate, House, and White House. Perhaps they were thinking of a Twitter poll conducted by Elon Musk that showed that 75 percent of respondents opposed the omnibus bill.
The sad truth is, however, that the more specific you are in identifying items in one of those “monstrous” bills, the more support they command from the public. In 2021, Gallup published a summary of public-opinion research on what was then a $3.5 trillion Build Back Better Democratic budget-reconciliation proposal (soon whittled way down to $2.2 trillion and then to a net-negative figure in the ultimately enacted Inflation Reduction Act) and found that its provisions were very popular despite the debt they required:
“[S]everal recent polls … ask about the bill in a broad, umbrella fashion, and all find majority support. A Quinnipiac poll conducted July 27-Aug. 2 asked, ‘Do you support or oppose a $3.5 trillion spending bill on social programs such as child care, education, family tax breaks and expanding Medicare for seniors?’ and found 62% support, 32% opposition. A Monmouth University poll conducted July 21-26 asked about both the initial infrastructure bill and the new $3.5 trillion bill, describing the latter this way: ‘A plan to expand access to healthcare and child care, and provide paid leave and college tuition support.’ The results were similar to the Quinnipiac poll, with 63% in favor and 35% opposed …
“A progressive think tank, Data for Progress, conducted an online poll among likely voters July 30-Aug. 2, with a much more detailed 130-word description of the bill, including in the question wording a bulleted list of six specific proposals in the plan, the $3.5 trillion price tag and even a description of the ‘reconciliation’ procedure necessary to pass it. All of this (and the online mode, and the sample of likely voters as opposed to national adults) also didn’t seem to make much difference; 66% of likely voters in their sample supported the plan as described, while 26% opposed it — similar to the Quinnipiac and Monmouth results.”
So the minute you get into the particulars of Democratic-proposed spending bills, public concerns about debts and deficits tend to fade. And oh — there’s another problem for Republicans on the fiscal front: voters like the idea of higher taxes on the wealthy and on corporations to pay for popular spending measures.
The lesson for Republicans is clear: Their crusade for fiscal discipline is popular, so long as it is very general and you exclude higher taxes on the rich as a possible solution. No wonder politicians like McCarthy want Democrats to be the ones who name the GOP’s price for letting the U.S. economy get through the year without calamity.
No doubt the American health insurance industry will oppose rigorous regulation even more fiercely than the public option. It seems almost a silly exercise to even consider the prospect. However, I do wonder whether insurance regulation such as that imposed on auto insurance by California Prop 103 might work. As a counterbalance to mandatory auto insurance, the State exerts control over premiums. When the proposition passed in 1988, the auto insurance industry forecast doom, warning that companies would abandon the California market in droves. 20 years later, there are plenty of choices of auto insurance to choose from and most Californias are pleased with the results. California premium rates have dropped from the second highest in the US to 21st (http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/insurance/articles/?storyId=18988). Note that voters, not legislators, imposed regulation in California. Can you imagine Conrad, Baucus, and Lincoln standing up for stiff regulation? I sure can’t. I’m hanging in there for a public option and wondering whether I could ever support mandated health insurance without either a public option or regulation. I think not.
We can’t even bring ourselves to regulate Wall Street immediately after the biggest meltdown in living memory. They’ve taken the bailout money, thank you very much, and jumped right back into derivatives trading. And you’re pinning your hopes on regulating the insurance and pharmaceutical industries?
aggressive government regulation of private health insurers can accomplish a lot of the same things as competition from a public option
Even mild regulation won’t last a decade, if that long; it will be bound and smothered and neglected in a thousand ways, from under-the-radar ‘relief’ for businesses to race-to-the-bottom ‘federalism’ to outright refusal to enforce said regulations,all accelerating as Republicans gain more power. And because most of the ill effects of this non-regulation will be borne by those under the radar for many years (until we reach another tipping point), people won’t care.
A public option’s big advantage is that it’s, well, public— we can see it and will know others who use it and will all have at least some interest in it not being overly corrupt. And one most likely would grow instead of decaying the way regulations inevitably will. Bottom line: American regulation is a joke, because our political system is not designed to protect the common good, no matter what the founding documents say.
Democrats know perfectly well that whenever they build anything benefiting citizens by GOP blueprints, the foundation will eventually fail, and that’s a feature, not a bug. The right can tinker with cosmetics without doing too much damage, but I will never buy anything they helped design (or even influenced) from the ground up.
My understanding of the Swiss system is not that the insurance companies cannot make any profit on policies, but that they cannot make any profit on BASIC policies. Supplemental insurances, boutique policies, the kind (I surmise) where you get a private room and a private duty nurse, etc., or access to the pricier long-term care facilities, can be sold for a profit. It might not change the willingness of the insurance lobby to fight reform, but it’s a point that perhaps should be made.
The chance of passing real insurance reform, like that in the Netherlands, or Germany or Switzerland, all of which have systems based on private insurance, is probably less than that of a public option.
In most of these countries the insurers are regulated like public utilities, and are generally by law required to be not for profit. What is the chance of current insurers going or that? Right, and slim has left town. If you think they are putting up a fight now, wait for a bill that strictly regulates their coverages, premiums and corporate policies and makes them essentially non-profits. Can you say, “Republicans (and all too many Democrats) screaming Government takeover?” I thought you could.
In this political climate the public option is our only option.