Barack Obama is a politician who likes to follow through on long-term strategies and avoid making course corrections. He believes that’s how he won in 2008, and since then he has shown that he’s not much into details.
He was happy to let congressional appropriators fill in the blanks in the 2009 stimulus package, and he let congressional leaders know he would be happy whether there was or wasn’t a public option in the 2010 health-insurance legislation. Whatever. In the long run, the big things would work out his way.
Except right now they aren’t. And his partisan and petulant speech last Wednesday is unlikely to move things in the direction he wants.
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Even as he was speaking, Congress was moving toward passing the appropriations bill for fiscal year 2011 agreed to by congressional negotiators with only occasional input from the White House. The deal will reduce spending substantially below levels that Obama and leading congressional Democrats used to call unacceptable.
Speaker John Boehner was criticized by some on the right for not pressing for deeper and more permanent cuts in spending than the $38 billion he claimed. But the deal nonetheless passed both houses by wide margins, and it contains some details that threaten to undermine the policies of the Obama Democrats in the future.
Most important, it requires the Government Accountability Office to conduct an audit of the waivers from the Democrats’ health-care bill that are being issued in large numbers by the secretary of health and human services.
This will raise an uncomfortable question. If Obamacare is so great, why are so many companies and organizations trying to get out from under it? And, more specifically, why are so many Democratic groups trying to get out from under it?
The fact is that HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has granted more than 1,000 waivers from Obamacare. Many have been granted to labor unions. Some have been granted to giant corporations like McDonald’s. One was granted to the entire state of Maine.
By what criteria is this relief being granted? That’s unclear, and the GAO audit should produce some answers. But what it looks like to an outsider is that waivers are being granted to constituencies that have coughed up money (or, in the case of Maine, four electoral votes) to the Democrats.
If so, what we’re looking at is another example of gangster government from this administration. The law in its majesty applies to everyone except those who get special favors.
The GAO has also been ordered to produce audits on the effect Obamacare will have on health-insurance premiums. This is likely to reveal that the president did not keep his promise that you could keep your current health insurance if you wanted to.
And there will be an audit of the “comparative effectiveness” that the bureaucracy established in the 2009 stimulus package. Comparative effectiveness is supposedly an objective study of which medical techniques are most effective. But anyone who looks closely finds that the experts are constantly changing their minds, which suggests that this is more alchemy than science — and maybe political favoritism, as well.
All of which tends to undercut the thrust of Obama’s obviously-aimed-at-the-2012-campaign message: We can continue to fund Medicare and Medicaid indefinitely if we just tax rich people a little more.
Serious budget experts of all stripes know this is fantasy. Obama’s fiscal commission, which issued its report last December, recognized this clearly, and recommended a package of spending cuts, program changes, and tax increases to address the long-term fiscal dilemma.
House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, in his budget resolution that passed the House Friday, put forward a package of changes that included giving the states block grants for Medicaid and replacing the current Medicare fee-for-service with the kind of premium support recommended by the bipartisan Medicare commission more than a decade ago — all without tax increases.
The voters, in current polls as well as in the elections last November, sent the policymakers down these paths. Obama on the one hand allows congressional Democrats to negotiate packages like the 2011 budget deal that go in that direction — and on the other hand says, incoherently and without detail, that we don’t need to go there at all.
In all this he is acting on the assumptions that Americans will accept a permanently enlarged and more expensive government and that the details don’t much matter.
The 2010 elections refuted the first assumption. Now we’ll see about the second.
Mr. Barone is right, but it's difficult to accept this one-sided criticism of Obama when cronyism and government aggrandizement was the order of the day under Bush, just as it is now. This is the ultimate effect of so much money flowing through Washington, combined with a centralized regulatory state.
It attracts rent-seekers, be they companies with ties and access to Republicans, or unions with ties and access to Democrats. I don't recall that Bush showed anything more than the same indifference when it came to the details of cronyism, or anything but the same passion towards expansion of centralized authority during his two terms.
SomeRandomJerk - You are right, but I would go further: By what right does the Administration legislate through regulation which is why there are rent-seeksers. And Sibellius has the chutzpah to ask Congress to basically give here legislaive and budgeting authority to do what Congress was meant to do. The regulatory state, which has transferred legislative power from the legislature to the executive (which is unconstitutional) must be terminated, or our freedoms will be terminated.
I generally agree with you. What amazes me is that Obama's apologists (I am not putting you into that category, by the way) have been reduced to "Well, Bush did it". When his supporters can only muster a relatively neutral comparison to the President they consider to be "the worst President ever", it shows how far Obama has fallen in the eyes of the American people.
So, those audits will inarguably demonstrate our suspicions and change all the related perceptions. Ahhh. I see. I'll start holding my breath now. Like I am for the $38 billion spending reduction that will most definitely occur in 2011.
It does appear, though, that the Adjunct Professor now Adjunct President does tend to concentrate on the long-term strategic vision at the expense of the details left to Congress or his Cabinet and czars.
Perhaps because he has always thought in terms of the socialist talking points that have surrounded him since childhood. That and the fact that he doesn't really want the current versions of healthcare and any other aspect of the economy to work anyway when the really big crises to come can be used to establish centralized government in a much bigger and irreversible way.
You would think the administration would be for any measure which increases government tax revenue. Lowering taxes has proven to do this.
You think the administration would desire to promote behavior that increases tax revenue as they regularly promote for/against [s]exual, eating, smoking, gun, etc behaviors. Yet they adhere to ‘static-trend’ model which a[ss]umes if you double tax rate you double revenues. We know this is false because people modify behavior to pay less tax.
Seems they care not a whit about revenue but fundamentally altering the nation into a central authority socialist state.
PS - Is anyone having difficult viewing the NRO's video feeds?
Jack in Silver Spring: Take it one step further.
The problem is that congress love to pass vague laws that sound good in theory.
Who wouldn't want to protect the environment or endangered species.
Congress then leaves the hard and unpleasant work of filling in the details to the beaurocracy which proceeds to generate 100's of thousands of pages of regulations to enforce the vague laws that congress passed.
That way, if you are upset with a regulation, you can either yell at the beaurocract, or you can pony up a nice campaign donation to a politician so that he can put pressure on the regulator to make a "fix" on your behalf.
@Bruce the Obama apologists shouldn't get away with saying "Bush did it too" But we also shouldn't let conservatives get away with ignoring what the Bush/Cheney regime did.
TARP was their baby. NCLB was their baby. The Medicate Prescription Drugs benefit was their baby. Sweetheart deals for companies like Halliburton was on their watch. Deficit spending grew under Bush. The tax code got more and more complicated under Bush.
If we forget that history, we're doomed to repeat it, even if the GOP manages a miracle to win versus Obama in 2012.
MarkW - My own feeling here is that the Administraion cannot implement new rules or regulations, and it cannot change existing rules and regulations (down to changing the comma) with a bill going before Congress, with the bill passed and signed by the President. We cannot allow Congress to abdicate its legislative responsibility and we cannot allow the Administration to grab legislative powers. We have to put a stop to the obscenity of things like the EPA threatening Congress about Cap 'n Trade, by telling Congress, it (EPA) will do by rule and regulation what Congress will not do by legislation.
IMHO, all bills Congress passes that require the Administration to write rules and regulations are prima fascie unconstitutional (unless Congress votes on the rules and regs after they've been written). My reason is that the Constitution requires all non-defense legislation increaser the general welfare. How can Congress know ahead of time if the unwritten rules and regulations will do that? It cannot (no matter what it pretends). Hence, the bill cannot have the force of law until such time as the rules and regs have been written and the Congress re-passes the bill with those rules and regs.
The conservative/liberal divide is always the same issue whether the subject is the budget, the national debt, or entitlement programs; the fundamental issue is about how much power to allow the federal government to take in our lives. And the feds get their power through our Byzantine tax code, which creates a labyrinth of special favors for the feds to secure their continuing and expanding roles in the lives of citizens. When Steve Forbes was running for the Republican nomination twenty years ago, I recall him saying that the tax code was the mother of all corruption in Washington. The Obama administration makes his observation even more relevant twenty years later. The application of taxes allows the government not only to tax, but more importantly to not tax; not tax, that is, those associations, unions, industries and corporations, that feed and support this hunghry leviathan we call Washington.
And it is this very part of the Ryan plan that most interests me. Streamlining the tax code - reduce rates and eliminate loopholes. Then, by default Wash will have no reason to interfere to the level they do. Jerk, I don't disagree with you on Bush's spending - in particular the first term. NCLB was a bipartisan program meant to demonstrate how nice everyone was going to be to one another - it should be repealed along with the entire Education department.
But the Medicare drug benefit was done to forestall a bigger push for a more expansive benefit based upon the current Medicare model that the democrats wanted. Bush was no penny pincher - his detractors were worse.
This goes to the bigger issue of GOP wannebe spenders. The democrats do it much better. Don't think you can be democrat light, because W took that path and what did it result in? It laid the foundation for the current president and congress to bankrupt us. If you believe that the govt is too big and tries to do too much and does it poorly to boot - you must sell a competing version that says massive govt is bad for you. That is why from nothing more than a sympolic perspective an executive cabinet needs to be eliminated - completely.
