It is often suggested that the struggling economy is a giant millstone around the neck of the Democratic donkey, which can’t do much about it because widespread fears of rising federal budget deficits have taken most remedial options off the table.
But a new survey from Hart Research Associates, asking some well-framed questions, paints a different picture of public opinion on the economy. Americans are still more worried about unemployment than budget deficits, still blame George W. Bush more than Barack Obama for current conditions, and are open to further action by the federal government.
Even self-identified Republicans rate unemplomyent as a bigger concern than deficits by a margin of 51%-42%, and overall, only 27% of Americans consider deficits as among the one or two most important economic problems facing the country. Even so, Americans blame the Bush administration as opposed to the Obama administration for current budget deficits by a 52%-27% margin (45%-27% among self-identified independents).
Meanwhile, 83% of Americans consider unemployment to be either a “very big problem” or a “fairly big problem.” A remarkable 68% of people in rural areas rate unemployment as a “very big problem,” which is a reminder that some parts of the country have been struggling economically for a long while, and don’t necessarily view the recession as having suddenly emerged last year.
Moreover, the recession is a very personal thing to vast numbers of Americans, with 44% claimiing that someone in their own household has either been laid off or has had hours or pay cut in the last year. This number rises to 54% among Hispanics.
Perceptions of this year’s stimulus package are more positive than you might expect, though not very strong; 53% said it had helped the economy a little, and 12% a lot, while only 16% bought the conservative argument that it had hurt the economy. Unsurprisingly, voters oppose the now-common Republican idea of freezing further stimulus spending by a 55%-39% margin. And in a parallel finding, Americans favor the economy strategy of “creating jobs and investing” over one of “shrinking government spending” by a 61%-36% margin.
At a time when sweeping generalizations about public opinion on the economy are far too prevelant, this new research from Hart is well worth reading and pondering.

TDS Co-Editor William Galston earns a quote of the day designation for a quote included in an Eliza Carney piece for National Journal on the possible use of budget reconcilation procedures for health care reform:

Resorting to reconciliation would amount to “bridge burning, not bridge building,” acknowledged William A. Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who was a policy adviser to President Clinton. “On the other hand, as I look at Congress right now, I don’t see a lot of bridges that haven’t been bombed out already. It’s sort of like Europe in 1944.”

It sometimes seems like the Senate Finance Committee has been deliberating on health care reform legislation for a decade or so. Now that all 500-plus proposed amendments have been disposed of, the Committee appeared to be ready for a vote tomorrow, but the latest buzz is that it’s waiting for a final “score” of the cost of the modified Baucus bill from the Congressional Budget Office, and probably won’t vote until later in the week.
Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic has a thorough analysis of the five shaky votes (four Democrats and one Republican) on final passage, but in the end agrees with this positive assessment from Ezra Klein:

[T]he people I talk to don’t believe there is a single Democrat on the committee who would actually imperil the legislation’s chances. Anyone whose vote is needed will vote for the bill. But if the bill is going to pass comfortably, you might see Snowe withhold her vote to strengthen her negotiating position on the floor of the Senate, or Lincoln hold back because she’s worried about her political standing in Arkansas, or Wyden hold back because he’s genuinely unimpressed with the legislation and infuriated at how he’s been treated. But the bill will pass, and easily. That means health-care reform will have passed all five relevant committees, and is moving toward the floor of the House and the Senate, and after that, the president’s desk.

So even at this late date, there’s a lot of maneuvering on the Finance Committee to position the bill, and senators, for the more important moment when the Finance and HELP versions of heatlh care reform are combined under the direction of Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, and the White House and the combined congressional Democratic leadership decides on a strategy for floor action in both Houses. The real endgame remains several steps ahead, but action in Finance keeps the ball rolling.

Washington veterans were probably shocked yesterday when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced he was cancelling the chamber’s traditional Columbus Day Recess in order to make time for action on health care reform.
Pretty much everywhere other than in DC, Columbus Day is a minor holiday mainly beloved of Italian-Americans. But in Washington, it’s generally the occasion for a weeklong congressional recess, and often, in even years, the official excuse for the pre-election break.
To be clear, the Senate will take off two of the five days in the week of October 12, so Columbus’ legacy will not be completely profaned.

One vote in the Senate Finance Committee’s markup of health reform legislation should be of positive interest to progressives: the committee defeated an amendment proposed by Orrin Hatch that would have prohibited use of federal subsidies to purchase private health plans offering abortion coverage. The vote was 10-13, with Democrat Kent Conrad supporting Hatch, offset by Republican Olympia Snowe’s opposition.
While Hatch’s amendment was advertised as maintaining “government neutrality” on abortion, it would have actually rolled back existing abortion coverage in private plans. Moreover, as Jonathan Cohn has pointed out, the tax writeoff for employer-sponsored health plans already provides significant taxpayer subsidies for optional abortion coverage, so allowing subsidies to be used (particularly since the Baucus bill already requires segregation of public and private money for such purposes) for the same coverage doesn’t really change anything.
Hatch will undoubtedly offer his amendment again on the Senate floor. And there remains the separate issue of whether any public option would offer abortion services (which didn’t come up in the Finance Committee since the Baucus Bill has no public option). But the fears of some progressives that the White House or Senate Democrats would surrender on an anti-choice amendment don’t seem to have been borne out so far.

This item by Mike Lux is cross-posted from The Huffington Post.
A fascinating article was in the WaPo yesterday morning about Democrats having more trouble raising money than they expected. I haven’t had the chance to really look closely at the numbers to compare how flat the big dollar fundraising was as opposed to the small grassroots donations but, according to the article, “The vast majority of those declines were accounted for by the absence of large donors who, strategists say, have shut their checkbooks in part because Democrats have heightened their attacks on the conduct of major financial firms and set their sights on rewriting the laws that regulate their behavior.” It also said that:

Other Democrats and their aides, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal party strategy, said that rhetoric toward big business has grown so antagonistic that it has become increasingly difficult to raise money on Wall Street, particularly after the controversy about bonuses and executive compensation.

I am going to write today not from my populist blogger perspective, but from my intensely pragmatic Democratic strategist perspective. This is a complicated and important issue that Democrats, individual candidates, and we as a party, will have to wrestle with in the coming years.
Until we pass a public-financing bill for elections (a topic I will come back to), it is a very tough thing for a congressional candidate to not get the money they have raised in the past from big business. Wall Street is the wealthiest and most generous industry in cultivating politicians, so their withholding of dollars is a particularly hard hit, but other business special interests are going to be withdrawing or threatening to withdraw their campaign cash as well. If a public option is passed, insurance execs will be pissed, so a lot of their money goes away. If a serious climate change bill were passed, a lot of energy industry money goes bye-bye. It’s a serious problem for Democrats, and it’s what makes real change in Washington so damn hard.
I have raised a ton of money for Democratic candidates over the years, and I have worked on a ton of campaigns desperate for cash, so I would never minimize how hard it is to walk away from all this money. But tough as it is, the alternative in my very pragmatic view is quite a bit worse for Democratic prospects. The alternative is to downplay our rhetoric about change, and downplay our efforts to make real change — because let’s face it, it’s not mostly the rhetoric these business interests are worried about, it’s the policy.
That path leads us to mushy rhetoric that doesn’t address the real anger voters have at Wall Street and insurance companies. And it leads to policy choices that avoid dealing with the really deep and fundamentally important problems in our society. If we fail to take on the power and profits of Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase, the smartest economists who most accurately diagnosed the problems that created the financial collapse last year say we are in for another major financial collapse in the not too distant future. If we fail to deal with these big banks after the bailouts they were given, the anger about those bailouts will boil over with voters in a hundred different ways.
Or take health care. The poll I referenced in my last post is absolutely stunning, and should strike terror in the hearts of any Democrat who is thinking of voting for an individual mandate without a public option: voters oppose a mandate on its own 64-34, but support a mandate with a chance of a public option or private insurance 60-37. And I think those numbers understate the sentiment. If you pass a mandate to buy insurance without creating real competition for private insurers, you know they will raise their rates and continue to screw people, and voters are going to be very angry.
The problem with the big money in politics is that politicians will start doing things that voters don’t like in order to get those checks. It leads to weak messaging and twisted policymaking, doing things that make no sense to average voters.
The ultimate answer is public financing of campaigns, ending this terrible dependence on special interest big money. It would make it so much easier for Democrats to do the smart thing politically and the right thing in terms of policy, to really make the transformative changes this country has to make. In the meantime, I am convinced that if we have to choose between losing that money from the bankers and the insurance execs, and doing the most sensible thing politically and policy-wise in every other way, the hard, cold, pragmatic path is the latter. We can find other ways to raise the money we need and win elections.

As J.P. Green noted earlier, Senators Rockefeller and Schumer are gearing up for a big push on the public option in the Senate Finance Committee markup of health care reform. But it ain’t happening today. Tim Noah, liveblogging the session at Slate, reports that the Committee started out late today, ended early for the weekend (as is traditional), and won’t reconvene until next Tuesday, in observance of Yom Kippur.
There was, however, time for some additional dumb Republican amendments to be offered and discussed, none dumber that Sen. Jon Ensign’s amendment, entitled, no kidding, the Transparency In Czars Amendment. Here’s Noah:

[I]t could also be called the Who Does Nancy-Ann DeParle Think She Is? amendment. DeParle is the White House health reform director. Under the amendment, she couldn’t keep her job unless the Senate confirmed her. There ensues an unedifying argument between Democrats and Republicans about whether DeParle really is a czar. (Don’t they mean czarina?) The amendment fails on a party line vote. Once again, swing-voting Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, votes for an idiotic partisan Republican amendment.

Ensign, you may recall, is in a bit of hot water for some of his recent extracurricular activities, and is trying to head off a 2012 primary challenge by using the spotlight on the Senate Finance Committee to identify himself with hard-right conservative activism. Hard to say what Snowe is up to; she may be sucking up to her Republican colleagues as a prelude to parting company with them on the ultimate vote, or she may just be acting like a partisan Republican generally.

Most accounts of what’s going on in the Senate Finance Committee on health care reform view the various amendments being offered as a buffet of Republican efforts to derail the legislation, and Democratic efforts to make the Baucus bill more like the versions already approved by the House committees and the Senate HELP Committee. And that’s generally the case.
But as TDS Co-Editor William Galston points out at The New Republic, there’s one big exception: Sen. Ron Wyden’s “Free Choice” amendment.
Under the previously approved reform blueprints, and in the Baucus bill, participation in the new “exchanges” that would establish a competitive system of health insurance plans offering federally-established minimum benefits is very limited: basically, they are for the uninsured who do not qualify for public programs, the self-employed, and small businesses. People already covered by employer-sponsored plans are barred from participating. That approach is designed to reassure those who fear the new system will discomfit people happy with their current insurance (other than, perhaps, rising premiums), and to avoid abandonment of employer-based insurance by younger and healthier folk who make coverage affordable for older and sicker employees.
But as Galston argues, the same logic greatly limits the ability of reform to hold down future costs, or for that matter, to satisfy consumer. Wyden’s amendment would require employers who do not offer a choice of affordable plans to offer employees vouchers that could be used on the exchange, and even converted to cash if low-cost alternatives were chosen. And that would have a powerful effect:

Wyden’s plan would offer more choice for both workers and employers, and it would encourage cost containment by encouraging consumers to select lower-cost options. CBO scores the plan as roughly deficit-neutral; the Lewin Group believes that it would actually lower the deficit by reducing the amount of revenue the federal government foregoes because of the tax exclusion for employer-provided health benefits.

So Wyden offers another way to reduce the revenues lost to the vast tax subsidy for employer-sponsored health coverage, while expanding individual choice. But at a time when Democrats are largely committed to a different approach, and Republicans are largely committed to the goal of killing reform altogether, it’s hard to see where Wyden will get any votes.
Perhaps a reformed system could move towards the Wyden approach in the near future, once the exchanges are set up and fears about costs gradually overcome fears about the disruptive effect of changing the employer-based system. But as Galston notes, the issues raised by Wyden can not be avoided perpetually.

If you are really, really into health care reform, you should definitely check out the remarkably exhaustive summary done by Igor Volsky at ThinkProgress’ Wonk Room about the vast number of amendments to the Baucus bill being offered in the Senate Finance Committee. Volsky organizes them by subject-area, and as “helpful,” “dubious” or “political.”
Overall, Democratic amendments, as you might imagine, are aimed at pushing the Baucus proposal in the direction of what we’ve seen from the House and from the Senate HELP committee. Republican amendments generally represent efforts to unravel the Baucus proposal by eliminating essential elements such as the individual mandate and Medicaid expansion, or to promote longstanding conservative hobbyhorses like medical malpractice “reform” or preemption of state insurance regulations. There’s also a lot of extraneous crap about ACORN and “rationing” and so forth that is pure posturing.
Only a few of these amendments from either side are likely to have a big impact on what the Finance Committee actually produces. A couple of Democratic amendments aim at paring back the excise tax that Baucus uses as his main financing vehicle in order to reduce middle-class exposure, which is a big deal politically. And Sen. Snowe tossed in her “triggered public option,” which could wind up being the linchpin for ultimate congressional approval of health care reform, though perhaps at a later date.
But what you are mainly seeing here, particularly from Republicans, is a preview of what we will be hearing on the Senate floor. It’s a reminder of how long this process is likely to take, and why either cloture or reconciliation will be necessary to get to a final vote. Since Republicans are also prepared to offer long lists of points of order against proceeding on health reform via reconciliation before the debate time limits kick in, even that route won’t necessarily produce anything like a brisk floor debate. We’re going to be talking about health care reform well into this year’s pared-back Xmas shopping season.

There’s a great piece up at TNR today from Jonathan Cohn succinctly describing the state of play among Senate Democrats on the subject of how to finance health care reform. It focuses on the proposal in the Baucus bill, originally suggested by John Kerry, to raise a very large chunk of cash through an “excise tax” on high-end private health insurance policies.
An immediate problem, as those following the debate may recall, is that some major unions have negotiated very generous health care benefits for not-necessarily well-compensated workers that could be exposed to the tax. Such union members also tend to be older, and/or work in risky occupations, both of which boost the price tag for insurance. Moreover, people in states with unusually high health-care costs could run afoul of it as well. As Cohn points out, the Senate Finance Committee, which must approve some plan for health care reform financing, has a large number of Democrats who represent one or the other of these sensitive constituencies. But there’s a potential solution:

There’s a way out of this dilemma. Since the Kerry proposal taxes insurers rather than individuals, it would be relatively straightforward to dictate that groups facing high costs because of age, unusually large regional variations, or physical risk don’t see their prices go up by that much (or at all). And while carving out some exceptions to the insurance tax change would mean reducing the revenue from the tax, that money could be made up by making the tax itself larger–or adding some other revenue source, whether it’s a smaller version of the House income tax or maybe even a small tax on sugary sodas.

This won’t be easy, but resolution of the financing issue is at least as important as all the high-profile arguments over the public option.