They Told You So - New York Times
December 8, 2006
They Told You So
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Shortly after U.S. forces marched into Baghdad in 2003, The Weekly Standard
published a jeering article titled, ''The Cassandra Chronicles: The stupidity of
the antiwar doomsayers.'' Among those the article mocked was a ''war novelist''
named James Webb, who is now the senator-elect from Virginia.
The article's title was more revealing than its authors knew. People forget the
nature of Cassandra's curse: although nobody would believe her, all her
prophecies came true.
And so it was with those who warned against invading Iraq. At best, they were
ignored. A recent article in The Washington Post ruefully conceded that the
paper's account of the debate in the House of Representatives over the
resolution authorizing the Iraq war -- a resolution opposed by a majority of the
Democrats -- gave no coverage at all to those antiwar arguments that now seem
prescient.
At worst, those who were skeptical about the case for war had their patriotism
and/or their sanity questioned. The New Republic now says that it ''deeply
regrets its early support for this war.'' Does it also deeply regret accusing
those who opposed rushing into war of ''abject pacifism?''
Now, only a few neocon dead-enders still believe that this war was anything but
a vast exercise in folly. And those who braved political pressure and ridicule
to oppose what Al Gore has rightly called ''the worst strategic mistake in the
history of the United States'' deserve some credit.
Unlike The Weekly Standard, which singled out those it thought had been proved
wrong, I'd like to offer some praise to those who got it right. Here's a partial
honor roll:
Former President George H. W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft, explaining in 1998 why
they didn't go on to Baghdad in 1991: ''Had we gone the invasion route, the
United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly
hostile land.''
Representative Ike Skelton, September 2002: ''I have no doubt that our military
would decisively defeat Iraq's forces and remove Saddam. But like the proverbial
dog chasing the car down the road, we must consider what we would do after we
caught it.''
Al Gore, September 2002: ''I am deeply concerned that the course of action that
we are presently embarking upon with respect to Iraq has the potential to
seriously damage our ability to win the war against terrorism and to weaken our
ability to lead the world in this new century.''
Barack Obama, now a United States senator, September 2002: ''I don't oppose all
wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war.
What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz
and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own
ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost
and in hardships borne.''
Representative John Spratt, October 2002: ''The outcome after the conflict is
actually going to be the hardest part, and it is far less certain.''
Representative Nancy Pelosi, now the House speaker-elect, October 2002: ''When
we go in, the occupation, which is now being called the liberation, could be
interminable and the amount of money it costs could be unlimited.''
Senator Russ Feingold, October 2002: ''I am increasingly troubled by the
seemingly shifting justifications for an invasion at this time. When the
administration moves back and forth from one argument to another, I think it
undercuts the credibility of the case and the belief in its urgency. I believe
that this practice of shifting justifications has much to do with the troubling
phenomenon of many Americans questioning the administration's motives.''
Howard Dean, then a candidate for president and now the chairman of the
Democratic National Committee, February 2003: ''I firmly believe that the
president is focusing our diplomats, our military, our intelligence agencies,
and even our people on the wrong war, at the wrong time. Iraq is a divided
country, with Sunni, Shia and Kurdish factions that share both bitter rivalries
and access to large quantities of arms.''
We should honor these people for their wisdom and courage. We should also ask
why anyone who didn't raise questions about the war -- or, at any rate, anyone
who acted as a cheerleader for this march of folly -- should be taken seriously
when he or she talks about matters of national security.
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Outsourcer In Chief - New York Times
December 11, 2006
Outsourcer In Chief
By PAUL KRUGMAN
According to U.S. News & World Report, President Bush has told aides that he
won't respond in detail to the Iraq Study Group's report because he doesn't want
to ''outsource'' the role of commander in chief.
That's pretty ironic. You see, outsourcing of the government's responsibilities
-- not to panels of supposed wise men, but to private companies with the right
connections -- has been one of the hallmarks of his administration. And
privatization through outsourcing is one reason the administration has failed on
so many fronts.
For example, an article in Saturday's New York Times describes how the Coast
Guard has run a $17 billion modernization program: ''Instead of managing the
project itself, the Coast Guard hired Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, two
of the nation's largest military contractors, to plan, supervise and deliver the
new vessels and helicopters.''
The result? Expensive ships that aren't seaworthy. The Coast Guard ignored
''repeated warnings from its own engineers that the boats and ships were poorly
designed and perhaps unsafe,'' while ''the contractors failed to fulfill their
obligation to make sure the government got the best price, frequently steering
work to their subsidiaries or business partners instead of competitors.''
In Afghanistan, the job of training a new police force was outsourced to DynCorp
International, a private contractor, under very loose supervision: when
conducting a recent review, auditors couldn't even find a copy of DynCorp's
contract to see what it called for. And $1.1 billion later, Afghanistan still
doesn't have an effective police training program.
In July 2004, Government Executive magazine published an article titled
''Outsourcing Iraq,'' documenting how the U.S. occupation authorities had
transferred responsibility for reconstruction to private contractors, with
hardly any oversight. ''The only plan,'' it said, ''appears to have been to let
the private sector manage nation-building, mostly on their own.'' We all know
how that turned out.
On the home front, the Bush administration outsourced many responsibilities of
the Federal Emergency Management Agency. For example, the job of evacuating
people from disaster areas was given to a trucking logistics firm, Landstar
Express America. When Hurricane Katrina struck, Landstar didn't even know where
to get buses. According to Carey Limousine, which was eventually hired, Landstar
''found us on the Web site.''
It's now clear that there's a fundamental error in the antigovernment ideology
embraced by today's conservative movement. Conservatives look at the virtues of
market competition and leap to the conclusion that private ownership, in itself,
is some kind of magic elixir. But there's no reason to assume that a private
company hired to perform a public service will do better than people employed
directly by the government.
In fact, the private company will almost surely do a worse job if its political
connections insulate it from accountability -- which has, of course,
consistently been the case under Mr. Bush. The inspectors' report on
Afghanistan's police conspicuously avoided assessing DynCorp's performance; even
as government auditors found fault with Landstar, the company received a plaque
from the Department of Transportation honoring its hurricane relief efforts.
Underlying this lack of accountability are the real motives for turning
government functions over to private companies, which have little to do with
efficiency. To say the obvious: when you see a story about failed outsourcing,
you can be sure that the company in question is a major contributor to the
Republican Party, is run by people with strong G.O.P. connections, or both.
So what happens now? The failure of privatization under the Bush administration
offers a target-rich environment to newly empowered Congressional Democrats -and I say, let the subpoenas fly. Bear in mind that we're not talking just about
wasted money: contracting failures in Iraq helped us lose one war, similar
failures in Afghanistan may help us lose another, and FEMA's failures helped us
lose a great American city.
And maybe, just maybe, the abject failure of this administration's efforts to
outsource essential functions to the private sector will diminish the
antigovernment prejudice created by decades of right-wing propaganda.
That's important, because the presumption that the private sector can do no
wrong and the government can do nothing right prevents us from coming to grips
with some of America's biggest problems -- in particular, our wildly
dysfunctional health care system. More on that in future columns.
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Democrats And The Deficit - New York Times
December 22, 2006
Democrats And The Deficit
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Now that the Democrats have regained some power, they have to decide what to do.
One of the biggest questions is whether the party should return to Rubinomics -the doctrine, associated with former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, that
placed a very high priority on reducing the budget deficit.
The answer, I believe, is no. Mr. Rubin was one of the ablest Treasury
secretaries in American history. But it's now clear that while Rubinomics made
sense in terms of pure economics, it failed to take account of the ugly
realities of contemporary American politics.
And the lesson of the last six years is that the Democrats shouldn't spend
political capital trying to bring the deficit down. They should refrain from
actions that make the deficit worse. But given a choice between cutting the
deficit and spending more on good things like health care reform, they should
choose the spending.
In a saner political environment, the economic logic behind Rubinomics would
have been compelling. Basic fiscal principles tell us that the government should
run budget deficits only when it faces unusually high expenses, mainly during
wartime. In other periods it should try to run a surplus, paying down its debt.
Since the 1990s were an era of peace, prosperity and favorable demographics (the
baby boomers were still in the work force, not collecting Social Security and
Medicare), it should have been a good time to put the federal budget in the
black. And under Mr. Rubin, the huge deficits of the Reagan-Bush years were
transformed into an impressive surplus.
But the realities of American politics ensured that it was all for naught. The
second President Bush quickly squandered the surplus on tax cuts that heavily
favored the wealthy, then plunged the budget deep into deficit by cutting taxes
on dividends and capital gains even as he took the country into a disastrous
war. And you can even argue that Mr. Rubin's surplus was a bad thing, because it
greased the rails for Mr. Bush's irresponsibility.
As Brad DeLong, a Berkeley economist who served in the Clinton administration,
recently wrote on his influential blog: ''Rubin and us spearcarriers moved
heaven and earth to restore fiscal balance to the American government in order
to raise the rate of economic growth. But what we turned out to have done, in
the end, was to enable George W. Bush's right-wing class war: his push for
greater after-tax income inequality.''
My only quibble with Mr. DeLong's characterization is that this wasn't just one
man's class war: the whole conservative movement shared Mr. Bush's squanderlust,
his urge to run off with the money so carefully saved under Mr. Rubin's
leadership.
With the benefit of hindsight, it's clear that conservatives who claimed to care
about deficits when Democrats were in power never meant it. Let's not forget how
Alan Greenspan, who posed as the high priest of fiscal rectitude as long as Bill
Clinton was in the White House, became an apologist for tax cuts -- even in the
face of budget deficits -- once a Republican took up residence.
Now the Democrats are back in control of Congress. They've pledged not to be as
irresponsible as their predecessors: Nancy Pelosi, the incoming House speaker,
has promised to restore the ''pay-as-you-go'' rule that the Republicans tossed
aside in the Bush years. This rule would basically prevent Congress from passing
budgets that increase the deficit.
I'm for pay-as-you-go. The question, however, is whether to go further. Suppose
the Democrats can free up some money by fixing the Medicare drug program, by
ending the Iraq war and/or clamping down on war profiteering, or by rolling back
some of the Bush tax cuts. Should they use the reclaimed revenue to reduce the
deficit, or spend it on other things?
The answer, I now think, is to spend the money -- while taking great care to
ensure that it is spent well, not squandered -- and let the deficit be. By
spending money well, Democrats can both improve Americans' lives and, more
broadly, offer a demonstration of the benefits of good government. Deficit
reduction, on the other hand, might just end up playing into the hands of the
next irresponsible president.
In the long run, something will have to be done about the deficit. But given the
state of our politics, now is not the time.
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Helping the Poor, the British Way - New York Times
December 25, 2006
Helping the Poor, the British Way
By PAUL KRUGMAN
It's the season for charitable giving. And far too many Americans, particularly
children, need that charity.
Scenes of a devastated New Orleans reminded us that many of our fellow citizens
remain poor, four decades after L.B.J. declared war on poverty. But I'm not sure
whether people understand how little progress we've made. In 1969, fewer than
one in every seven American children lived below the poverty line. Last year,
although the country was far wealthier, more than one in every six American
children were poor.
And there's no excuse for our lack of progress. Just look at what the British
government has accomplished over the last decade.
Although Tony Blair has been President Bush's obedient manservant when it comes
to Iraq, Mr. Blair's domestic policies are nothing like Mr. Bush's. Where Mr.
Bush has sought to privatize the social safety net, Mr. Blair's Labor government
has defended and strengthened it. Where Mr. Bush and his allies accuse anyone
who mentions income distribution of ''class warfare,'' the Blair government has
made a major effort to reverse the surge in inequality and poverty that took
place during the Thatcher years.
And Britain's poverty rate, if measured American-style -- that is, in terms of a
fixed poverty line, not a moving target that rises as the nation grows richer -has been cut in half since Labor came to power in 1997.
Britain's war on poverty has been led by Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the
exchequer and Mr. Blair's heir apparent. There's nothing exotic about his
policies, many of which are inspired by American models. But in Britain, these
policies are carried out with much more determination.
For example, Britain didn't have a minimum wage until 1999 -- but at current
exchange rates Britain's minimum wage rate is now about twice as high as ours.
Britain's child benefit is more generous than America's child tax credit, and
it's available to everyone, even those too poor to pay income taxes. Britain's
tax credit for low-wage workers is similar to the U.S. earned-income tax credit,
but substantially larger.
And don't forget that Britain's universal health care system ensures that no one
has to fear going without medical care or being bankrupted by doctors' bills.
The Blair government hasn't achieved all its domestic goals. Income inequality
has been stabilized but not substantially reduced: as in America, the richest 1
percent have pulled away from everyone else, though not to the same extent. The
decline in child poverty, though impressive, has fallen short of the
government's ambitious goals. And the government's policies don't seem to have
helped a persistent underclass of the very poor.
But there's no denying that the Blair government has done a lot for Britain's
have-nots. Modern Britain isn't paradise on earth, but the Blair government has
ensured that substantially fewer people are living in economic hell. Providing a
strong social safety net requires a higher overall rate of taxation than
Americans are accustomed to, but Britain's tax burden hasn't undermined the
economy's growth.
What are the lessons to be learned from across the pond?
First, government truly can be a force for good. Decades of propaganda have
conditioned many Americans to assume that government is always incompetent -and the current administration has done its best to turn that into a
self-fulfilling prophecy. But the Blair years have shown that a government that
seriously tries to reduce poverty can achieve a lot.
Second, it really helps to have politicians who are serious about governing,
rather than devoting themselves entirely to amassing power and rewarding
cronies.
While researching this article, I was startled by the sheer rationality of
British policy discussion, as compared with the cynical posturing that passes
for policy discourse in George Bush's America. Instead of making grandiose
promises that are quickly forgotten -- like Mr. Bush's promise of ''bold
action'' to confront poverty after Hurricane Katrina -- British Labor
politicians propose specific policies with well-defined goals. And when actual
results fall short of those goals, they face the facts rather than trying to
suppress them and sliming the critics.
The moral of my Christmas story is that fighting poverty isn't easy, but it can
be done. Giving in to cynicism and accepting the persistence of widespread
poverty even as the rich get ever richer is a choice that our politicians have
made. And we should be ashamed of that choice.
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A Failed Revolution - New York Times
December 29, 2006
A Failed Revolution
By PAUL KRUGMAN
After first attempting to deny the scale of last month's defeat, the apologists
have settled on a story line that sounds just like Marxist explanations for the
failure of the Soviet Union. What happened, you see, was that the noble ideals
of the Republican revolution of 1994 were undermined by Washington's corrupting
ways. And the recent defeat was a good thing, because it will force a return to
the true conservative path.
But the truth is that the movement that took power in 1994 -- a movement that
had little to do with true conservatism -- was always based on a lie.
The lie is right there in ''The Freedom Revolution,'' the book that Dick Armey,
who had just become the House majority leader, published in 1995. He declares
that most government programs don't do anything ''to help American families with
the needs of everyday life,'' and that ''very few American families would notice
their disappearance.'' He goes on to assert that ''there is no reason we cannot,
by the time our children come of age, reduce the federal government by half as a
percentage of gross domestic product.''
Right. Somehow, I think more than a few families would notice the disappearance
of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid -- and those three programs alone
account for a majority of nondefense, noninterest spending. The truth is that
the government delivers services and security that people want. Yes, there's
some waste -- just as there is in any large organization. But there are no big
programs that are easy to cut.
As long as people like Mr. Armey, Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay were out of power,
they could run on promises to eliminate vast government waste that existed only
in the public's imagination -- all those welfare queens driving Cadillacs. But
once in power, they couldn't deliver.
That's why government by the radical right has been an utter failure even on its
own terms: the government hasn't shrunk. Federal outlays other than interest
payments and defense spending are a higher percentage of G.D.P. today than they
were when Mr. Armey wrote his book: 14.8 percent in fiscal 2006, compared with
13.8 percent in fiscal 1995.
Unable to make good on its promises, the G.O.P., like other failed revolutionary
movements, tried to maintain its grip by exploiting its position of power.
Friends were rewarded with patronage: Jack Abramoff began building his web of
corruption almost as soon as Republicans took control. Adversaries were harassed
with smear campaigns and witch hunts: Congress spent six years and many millions
of dollars investigating a failed land deal, and Bill Clinton was impeached over
a consensual affair.
But it wasn't enough. Without 9/11, the Republican revolution would probably
have petered out quietly, with the loss of Congress in 2002 and the White House
in 2004. Instead, the atrocity created a window of opportunity: four extra years
gained by drowning out unfavorable news with terror alerts, starting a
gratuitous war, and accusing Democrats of being weak on national security.
Yet the Bush administration failed to convert this electoral success into
progress on a right-wing domestic agenda. The collapse of the push to privatize
Social Security recapitulated the failure of the Republican revolution as a
whole. Once the administration was forced to get specific about the details, it
became obvious that private accounts couldn't produce something for nothing, and
the public's support vanished.
In the end, Republicans didn't shrink the government. But they did degrade it.
Baghdad and New Orleans are the arrival destinations of a movement based on deep
contempt for governance.
Is that the end for the radical right? Probably not. As a long-suffering civil
servant once told me, bad policy ideas are like cockroaches: you can flush them
down the toilet, but they keep coming back. Many of the ideas that failed in the
Bush years had previously failed in the Reagan years. So there's no reason to
assume they're gone for good.
Indeed, it appears that loss of power and the ensuing lack of accountability is
liberating right-wingers to lie yet again: since last month's election, I've
noticed a number of Social Security privatizers propounding the same free-lunch
falsehoods that the Bush administration had to abandon in the face of demands
that it present an actual plan.
Still, the Republican revolution of 1994 is over. And not a moment too soon.
Thomas L. Friedman is on vacation.
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A Healthy New Year - New York Times
January 1, 2007
A Healthy New Year
By PAUL KRUGMAN
The U.S. health care system is a scandal and a disgrace. But maybe, just maybe,
2007 will be the year we start the move toward universal coverage.
In 2005, almost 47 million Americans -- including more than 8 million children
-- were uninsured, and many more had inadequate insurance.
Apologists for our system try to minimize the significance of these numbers.
Many of the uninsured, asserted the 2004 Economic Report of the President,
''remain uninsured as a matter of choice.''
And then you wake up. A scathing article in yesterday's Los Angeles Times
described how insurers refuse to cover anyone with even the slightest hint of a
pre-existing condition. People have been denied insurance for reasons that range
from childhood asthma to a ''past bout of jock itch.''
Some say that we can't afford universal health care, even though every year lack
of insurance plunges millions of Americans into severe financial distress and
sends thousands to an early grave. But every other advanced country somehow
manages to provide all its citizens with essential care. The only reason
universal coverage seems hard to achieve here is the spectacular inefficiency of
the U.S. health care system.
Americans spend more on health care per person than anyone else -- almost twice
as much as the French, whose medical care is among the best in the world. Yet we
have the highest infant mortality and close to the lowest life expectancy of any
wealthy nation. How do we do it?
Part of the answer is that our fragmented system has much higher administrative
costs than the straightforward government insurance systems prevalent in the
rest of the advanced world. As Anna Bernasek pointed out in yesterday's New York
Times, besides the overhead of private insurance companies, ''there's an
enormous amount of paperwork required of American doctors and hospitals that
simply doesn't exist in countries like Canada or Britain.''
In addition, insurers often refuse to pay for preventive care, even though such
care saves a lot of money in the long run, because those long-run savings won't
necessarily redound to their benefit. And the fragmentation of the American
system explains why we lag far behind other nations in the use of electronic
medical records, which both reduce costs and save lives by preventing many
medical errors.
The truth is that we can afford to cover the uninsured. What we can't afford is
to keep going without a universal health care system.
If it were up to me, we'd have a Medicare-like system for everyone, paid for by
a dedicated tax that for most people would be less than they or their employers
currently pay in insurance premiums. This would, at a stroke, cover the
uninsured, greatly reduce administrative costs and make it much easier to work
on preventive care.
Such a system would leave people with the right to choose their own doctors, and
with other choices as well: Medicare currently lets people apply their benefits
to H.M.O.'s run by private insurance companies, and there's no reason why
similar options shouldn't be available in a system of Medicare for all. But
everyone would be in the system, one way or another.
Can we get there from here? Health care reform is in the air. Democrats in
Congress are talking about providing health insurance to all children. John
Edwards began his presidential campaign with a call for universal health care.
And there's real action at the state level. Inspired by the Massachusetts plan
to cover all its uninsured residents, politicians in other states are talking
about adopting similar plans. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon has introduced a
Massachusetts-type plan for the nation as a whole.
But now is the time to warn against plans that try to cover the uninsured
without taking on the fundamental sources of our health system's inefficiency.
What's wrong with both the Massachusetts plan and Senator Wyden's plan is that
they don't operate like Medicare; instead, they funnel the money through private
insurance companies.
Everyone knows why: would-be reformers are trying to avoid too strong a backlash
from the insurance industry and other players who profit from our current
system's irrationality.
But look at what happened to Bill Clinton. He rejected a single-payer approach,
even though he understood its merits, in favor of a complex plan that was
supposed to co-opt private insurance companies by giving them a largely
gratuitous role. And the reward for this ''pragmatism'' was that insurance
companies went all-out against his plan anyway, with the notorious ''Harry and
Louise'' ads that, yes, mocked the plan's complexity.
Now we have another chance for fundamental health care reform. Let's not blow
that chance with a pre-emptive surrender to the special interests.
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First, Do Less Harm - New York Times
January 5, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
First, Do Less Harm
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Universal health care, much as we need it, won’t happen until there’s a change
of management in the White House. In the meantime, however, Congress can take an
important step toward making our health care system less wasteful, by fixing the
Medicare Middleman Multiplication Act of 2003.
Officially, of course, it was the Medicare Modernization Act. But as we learned
during the debate over Social Security, in Bushspeak “modernize” is a synonym
for “privatize.” And one of the main features of the legislation was an effort
to bring private-sector fragmentation and inefficiency to one of America’s most
important public programs.
The process actually started in the 1990s, when Medicare began allowing
recipients to replace traditional Medicare — in which the government pays
doctors and hospitals — with private managed-care plans, in which the government
pays a fee to an H.M.O. The magic of the marketplace was supposed to cut
Medicare’s costs.
The plan backfired. H.M.O.’s received fees reflecting the medical costs of the
average Medicare recipient, but to maximize profits they selectively enrolled
only healthier seniors, leaving sicker, more expensive people in traditional
Medicare. Once Medicare became aware of this cream-skimming and started
adjusting payments to reflect beneficiaries’ health, the H.M.O.’s began dropping
out: their extra layer of bureaucracy meant that they had higher costs than
traditional Medicare and couldn’t compete on a financially fair basis.
That should have been the end of the story. But for the Bush administration and
its Congressional allies, privatization isn’t a way to deliver better government
services — it’s an end in itself. So the 2003 legislation increased payments to
Medicare-supported H.M.O.’s, which were renamed Medicare Advantage plans. These
plans are now heavily subsidized.
According to the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, an independent federal
body that advises Congress on Medicare issues, Medicare Advantage now costs 11
percent more per beneficiary than traditional Medicare. According to the
Commonwealth Fund, which has a similar estimate of the excess cost, the subsidy
to private H.M.O.’s cost Medicare $5.4 billion in 2005.
The inability of private middlemen to win a fair competition against traditional
Medicare was embarrassing to those who sing the praises of privatization. Maybe
that’s why the Bush administration made sure that there is no competition at all
in Part D, the drug program. There’s no traditional Medicare version of Part D,
in which the government pays drug costs directly. Instead, the elderly must get
coverage from a private insurance company, which then receives a government
subsidy.
As a result, Part D is highly confusing. It’s also needlessly expensive, for two
reasons: the insurance companies add an extra layer of bureaucracy, and they
have limited ability to bargain with drug companies for lower prices (and
Medicare is prohibited from bargaining on their behalf). One indicator of how
much Medicare is overspending is the sharp rise in prices paid by millions of
low-income seniors whose drug coverage has been switched from Medicaid, which
doesn’t rely on middlemen and does bargain over prices, to the new Medicare
program.
The costs imposed on Medicare by gratuitous privatization are almost certainly
higher than the cost of providing health insurance to the eight million children
in the United States who lack coverage. But recent news analyses have suggested
that Democrats may not be able to guarantee coverage to all children because
this would conflict with their pledge to be fiscally responsible. Isn’t it
strange how fiscal responsibility is a big concern when Congress is trying to
help children, but a nonissue when Congress is subsidizing drug and insurance
companies?
What should Congress do? The new Democratic majority is poised to reduce drug
prices by allowing — and, probably, requiring — Medicare to negotiate prices on
behalf of the private drug plans. But it should go further, and force Medicare
to offer direct drug coverage that competes on a financially fair basis with the
private plans. And it should end the subsidy to Medicare Advantage, forcing
H.M.O.’s to engage in fair competition with traditional Medicare.
Conservatives will fight fiercely against these moves. They say they believe in
competition — but they’re against competition that might show the public sector
doing a better job than the private sector. Progressives should support these
moves for the same reason. Ending the subsidies to middlemen, in addition to
saving a lot of money, would point the way to broader health care reform.
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Quagmire of the Vanities - New York Times
January 8, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
Quagmire of the Vanities
By PAUL KRUGMAN
The only real question about the planned “surge” in Iraq — which is better
described as a Vietnam-style escalation — is whether its proponents are cynical
or delusional.
Senator Joseph Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, thinks
they’re cynical. He recently told The Washington Post that administration
officials are simply running out the clock, so that the next president will be
“the guy landing helicopters inside the Green Zone, taking people off the roof.”
Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science for his
research on irrationality in decision-making, thinks they’re delusional. Mr.
Kahneman and Jonathan Renshon recently argued in Foreign Policy magazine that
the administration’s unwillingness to face reality in Iraq reflects a basic
human aversion to cutting one’s losses — the same instinct that makes gamblers
stay at the table, hoping to break even.
Of course, such gambling is easier when the lives at stake are those of other
people’s children.
Well, we don’t have to settle the question. Either way, what’s clear is the
enormous price our nation is paying for President Bush’s character flaws.
I began writing about the Bush administration’s infallibility complex, the
president’s Captain Queeg-like inability to own up to mistakes, almost a year
before the invasion of Iraq. When you put a man like that in a position of power
— the kind of position where he can punish people who tell him what he doesn’t
want to hear, and base policy decisions on the advice of people who play to his
vanity — it’s a recipe for disaster.
Consider, on one side, the case of the C.I.A.’s Baghdad station chief during
2004, who provided accurate assessments of the deteriorating situation in Iraq.
“What is he, some kind of defeatist?” asked the president — and according to The
Washington Post, at the end of his tour, the station chief “was punished with a
poor assignment.”
On the other side, consider the men Mr. Bush has turned to since the midterm
election. They constitute a remarkable coalition of the unwilling — men who have
been wrong about Iraq every step of the way, but aren’t willing to admit it.
The principal proponents of the “surge” are William Kristol of The Weekly
Standard and Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute. Now, even if
the Joint Chiefs of Staff hadn’t given the surge a thumbs down, Mr. Kristol’s
track record should have been reason enough to ignore his advice. For example,
early in the war, Mr. Kristol dismissed as “pop sociology” warnings that there
would be conflict between Sunnis and Shiites and that the Shiites might try to
create an Islamic fundamentalist state. He assured National Public Radio
listeners that “Iraq’s always been very secular.”
But Mr. Kristol and Mr. Kagan appealed to Mr. Bush’s ego, suggesting that he
might yet be able to rescue his signature war. And am I the only person to
notice that after all the Oedipal innuendo surrounding the Iraq Study Group —
Daddy’s men coming in to fix Junior’s mess, etc. — Mr. Bush turned for advice to
two other sons of famous and more successful fathers?
Not that Mr. Bush rejects all advice from elder statesmen. We now know that he
has been talking to Henry Kissinger. But Mr. Kissinger is a kindred spirit. In
remarks published after his death, Gerald Ford said of his secretary of state,
“Henry in his mind never made a mistake, so whatever policies there were that he
implemented, in retrospect he would defend.”
Oh, and Senator John McCain, the first major political figure to advocate a
surge, is another man who can’t admit mistakes. Mr. McCain now says that he
always knew that the conflict was “probably going to be long and hard and tough”
— but back in 2002, before the Senate voted on the resolution authorizing the
use of force, he declared that a war with Iraq would be “fairly easy.”
Mr. Bush is expected to announce his plan for escalation in the next few days.
According to the BBC, the theme of his speech will be “sacrifice.” But sacrifice
for what? Not for the national interest, which would be best served by
withdrawing before the strain of the war breaks our ground forces. No, Iraq has
become a quagmire of the vanities — a place where America is spending blood and
treasure to protect the egos of men who won’t admit that they were wrong.
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