FRIDAY, MAY 28, 2010
MICHAEL GERSON
A lollipop Americans don’t want
n closing the deal on health-care reform, Democratic leaders as- sured wavering legislators that the plan would grow more popular with time as its benefits became clear. “We have to pass the bill,” argued House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, so that the pub- lic “can find out what is in it.” Presi- dential adviser David Axelrod pre- dicted that Republicans would pay a political price for their opposition. “Let’s have that fight,” he said. “Make my day.” Consistent with this belief, the administration recently has been rolling out attractive elements of the law, including coverage for depend- ents up to age 26. But after a brief bump, support for Democratic health reform has de- clined. A Kaiser Family Foundation health tracking poll shows erosion in the intensity of support. Last month, 23 percent of Americans held “very fa- vorable” views of the law. This month, that figure is 14 percent, with most of the falloff coming among Democrats (Republicans and independents al- ready being skeptical). Other polling reinforces these views. On the theory that the distribution of lollipops usually doesn’t provoke riots of resentment, opposition to the health entitlement requires explana- tion.
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One cause is simply economic. At a time when Americans are focused on recovery and job creation — and how deficits and debt may eventually un- dermine both — the economic case for Democratic health reform has been weak, contrived, even deceptive. Re- cent events in Congress make the point. Two months after passing a law that supporters claimed would reduce federal deficits, largely through Medi- care cuts, the House is moving toward a temporary “doctor fix” that would add tens of billions in Medicare costs. Even more expensive fixes are likely in the future. Congressional leaders knew this spending would be neces- sary when they passed health reform in March. Yet they didn’t include this liability in the law, in order to hide the overall cost of the entitlement. In a failing corporation, this would be a scandal, investigated by Congress. In Congress, this is known as legislative strategy. The economic arguments for re- form — that it would reduce the deficit and health inflation — were question- able from the beginning. Now they have been revealed as absurd. There is a social justice case for expanding health coverage. But Americans have not found it credible that the creation of a massive new entitlement will somehow help the economy. There is, however, a deeper explana- tion for public skepticism about health reform. Since the New Deal, Democrats have viewed times of eco- nomic crisis as opportunities for gov- ernment expansion. In the current case, government itself was implicated in the crisis. According to a poll by the Pew Research Center, public satisfac- tion with government plunged just as the financial collapse took place. Only 22 percent of Americans report that they trust government all or most of the time — among the lowest levels in 50 years. One and a half years after a financial meltdown that some sup- posed would be a crisis for capitalism itself, 58 percent of Americans agree that “the government has gone too far in regulating business and interfering with the free enterprise system.” Fa- vorable opinion of the Democratic Party — now firmly associated with the stimulus package, assorted bail- outs and health reform — has fallen 21 points in one year. In this ideological environment, the administration’s emphasis on publi- cizing the desirable details of the health law is beside the point. Amer- icans are troubled with health reform, not because they lack knowledge of its provisions but because they are un- comfortable with social democracy. When entitlements began in Amer-
ica, they were mainly focused on the elderly (through Social Security and Medicare) and the poor and disabled (through Aid to Families With De- pendent Children and Medicaid). Ben- efits for the middle class were largely given through tax deductions for mortgage interest and the purchase of health coverage by businesses. America eventually retreated from some entitlement commitments to the poor because they involved a moral hazard — discouraging work and re- sponsibility. Entitlements for the el- derly have remained a strong, national consensus.
But the idea of a middle-class enti- tlement to health care, achieved through an individual mandate, sub- sidies and aggressive insurance reg- ulation, seems to change the nature of American society. Entitlements in the Obama era are no longer a decent pro- vision for the vulnerable; they are in- tended for citizens at every stage of life.
Americans resist taking this lollipop precisely because America is not Eu- rope — which even Europe, it seems, can no longer afford to be.
mgerson@globalengage.org
EUGENE ROBINSON
Our Deepwater wake-up call
fire. Time magazine described the Cuya- hoga this way: “Chocolate-brown, oily, bubbling with subsurface gases, it oozes rather than flows.” The spectacle of a river in flames helped galvanize the environmental movement, and the following year, with Richard Nixon as president, the Environ- mental Protection Agency was estab- lished. In 1972, Congress passed the landmark Clean Water Act. Today, the Cuyahoga is clean enough to support more than 40 species of fish. We still don’t know the full extent of
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the environmental disaster unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico — the impact on avian and aquatic life, on fisheries, on tourism, on the delicate ecology of coastal marsh- es and barrier islands. We do know, though, that it is the worst oil spill in our nation’s history, far surpassing the Ex- xon Valdez incident. And maybe the shocking images from the gulf of dead fish, oiled pelicans and shores lapped by viscous “brown mousse” will refocus at- tention on the need to preserve the envi- ronment, not just exploit it. “Drill, baby, drill” isn’t just the bizarre- ly inappropriate chant that we remem- ber from the Republican National Con- vention two years ago. It’s a pretty good indication of where the national ethos has drifted. Environmental regulation is seen as a bureaucratic imposition — not as an insurance policy against potential catastrophe, and certainly not as a moral imperative. Yes, many Americans feel good about
going through the motions of environ- mentalism. We’ve made a religion of re- cycling, which is an important change. We turn off the lights when we leave the room — and we’re even beginning to use fluorescent bulbs. Some of us, though not enough, understand the long-term threat posed by climate change; a subset of those who see the danger are even willing to make lifestyle changes to try to avert a worst-case outcome.
But where the rubber hits the road — in public policy — we’ve reverted to our pre-enlightenment ways. When there’s a perceived conflict between environmen- tal stewardship and economic growth, the bottom line wins.
n June 1969, the stretch of the Cuya- hoga River that runs through Cleve- land was so polluted that it caught
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CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER
A disaster with many fathers
GERALD HERBERT/ASSOCIATED PRESS
An oil-soaked bird struggles against the side of a ship near the oil-spill site.
Barack Obama is, in many admirable
ways, our most progressive president in decades. But as an environmentalist, let’s face it, he’s no Richard Nixon. Before the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded — al- lowing, by some estimates, as many as a million gallons of crude oil to gush into the Gulf of Mexico each day for more than a month — Obama had announced plans to permit new offshore drilling. “I don’t agree with the notion that we shouldn’t do anything,” Obama said at the time. “It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills. They are technologically very advanced.” Obama has wisely backed away from
that decision. The technology involved in deep-sea oil drilling turned out to be far more advanced than the technology needed to halt a spill if something goes wrong — essentially, like engineering a car to double its top speed without thinking to upgrade the brakes. This oversight apparently wasn’t noticed by anyone who had the power to correct it. Calls for Obama to somehow “take over” the emergency response ring hol- low. Take it over with what? Hands-on intervention has never been govern- ment’s role in this kind of situation. BP
and the other oil companies had the un- dersea robots and the deep-water experi- ence. Other private companies owned and operated the skimmers that remove the oil from the surface. There is no huge government reserve of the booms that are needed to protect Louisiana’s beach- es and marshlands; those are made by private firms and are being deployed by unemployed fishermen. Obama has rethought his enthusiasm
for offshore drilling. Now he, and the rest of us, should rethink the larger issue —the trade-off between economic devel- opment and environmental protection. In the long run, our natural resources are all we’ve got. Defending them must be a higher priority than our recent presidents, including Obama, have made it.
Energy policy is one of Obama’s priori-
ties. He talks about “clean coal,” which I believe to be an oxymoron, and favors technologies — such as carbon capture and sequestration — that are new and untested. The environmental risks must be a central and paramount concern, not a mere afterthought. Let’s preclude the next Deepwater Horizon right now.
eugenerobinson@washpost.com
he emergency spending bill before the House would address the education crisis facing communities across America — and the jobs of hundreds of thousands of teachers are at stake. Because of continued high unemployment, state and local budgets are stressed to the break- ing point. Many states and localities are drastically cutting education spending. This year school districts in Hawaii went to only four days of instruction a week. In many other districts, officials are ending the school year early to save money. Most worrisome, hundreds of thousands of public school teachers are likely to be laid off over the next few months. As many as one out of every 15 teachers could re- ceive a pink slip this summer, the White House Council of Economic Advisers esti- mates. These layoffs would be spread throughout the country — in urban, rural and suburban districts. Such layoffs are terrible for teachers, for communities and, most important, for stu- dents. For the families directly affected, layoffs mean not only lost wages but often lost homes and postponed dreams. Be- cause unemployed teachers have to cut back on spending, local businesses and overall economic activity suffer. And the costs of decreased learning time and sup- port for students will be felt not just in the next year or two but will reduce our pro-
Keeping teachers in the classroom
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by Christina D. Romer
ductivity for decades to come. Additional federal aid targeted at pre- venting these layoffs can play a critical role in combating the crisis. Such aid would be very cost-effective. There are no hiring or setup costs. The teachers are there, eager to stay in their classrooms. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 in- cluded some of this aid for 2009 and 2010. The recipient reports filled out by states and school districts show that, last quarter, Recovery Act funds supported more than 400,000 education positions. Furthermore, by preventing layoffs, we would save on unemployment insurance payments, food stamps and COBRA sub- sidies for health insurance, and we would maintain tax revenue. Accounting for these savings, the actual cost of the pro- gram is likely to be 20 to 40 percent below the sticker price — perhaps even lower when one considers the spillover effects of maintaining employment. And the country will recoup much of the cost in coming years, as a better-educated workforce leads to higher tax revenue and less reliance on the social safety net. The American economy has made tre- mendous progress over the past year. We have gone from job losses of three-quarters of a million per month, in the first months of 2009, to now adding jobs — nearly 300,000 in April. But we still have a very long way to go. Overall employment is down almost 8 million from its December 2007 peak. And for the millions of Amer-
Many reasons, but this one goes un- mentioned: Environmental chic has driven us out there. As production from the shallower Gulf of Mexico wells de- clines, we go deep (1,000 feet and more) and ultra deep (5,000 feet and more), in part because environmentalists have succeeded in rendering the Pacific and nearly all the Atlantic coast off-limits to oil production. (President Obama’s ten- tative, selective opening of some Atlan- tic and offshore Alaska sites is now dead.) And of course, in the safest of all places, on land, we’ve had a 30-year ban on drilling in the Arctic National Wild- life Refuge. So we go deep, ultra deep — to such a technological frontier that no precedent exists for the April 20 blowout in the Gulf of Mexico. There will always be catastrophic oil
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spills. You make them as rare as human- ly possible, but where would you rather have one: in the Gulf of Mexico, upon which thousands depend for their liveli- hood, or in the Arctic, where there are practically no people? All spills seri- ously damage wildlife. That’s a given. But why have we pushed the drilling from the barren to the populated, from the remote wilderness to a center of fishing, shipping, tourism and recrea- tion? Not that the environmentalists are the only ones to blame. Not by far. But it is odd that they’ve escaped any mention at all. The other culprits are pretty obvious.
It starts with BP, which seems not only to have had an amazing string of perfect-storm engineering lapses but no contingencies to deal with a catastroph- ic system failure. However, the railing against BP for its
performance since the accident is hard- er to understand. I attribute no virtue to BP, just self-interest. What possible in- terest can it have to do anything but cap the well as quickly as possible? Every day that oil is spilled means millions more in losses, cleanup and restitution. Federal officials who rage against BP would like to deflect attention from their own role in this disaster. Interior
icans who are struggling to make ends meet without a paycheck, this is still an economic crisis. Further targeted actions to speed the re-
covery and reduce unemployment, such as the teacher layoff prevention fund that is included in the emergency spending bill, are good for the economy and good for families. With teacher layoffs imminent, the time to act is now, before schools send out more layoff notices and make their staffing decisions for the fall. Yes, we all understand that our budget
deficit is too large. Profligate policies of the past and rising entitlement spending have created a mess that simply must be dealt with as we return to full employment. But it would be penny-wise and pound-foolish to deal with that issue by failing to allot es- sential spending on teachers at a time when the unemployment rate is still near 10 percent. The right way to deal with a budget problem that was years in the making is by formulating a credible plan to reduce the deficit over time and as the economy is able to withstand the necessary fiscal belt- tightening. That is what President Obama is doing. Let’s also do what we need to do now —
keep hundreds of thousands of teachers in the classroom and prepare our students for the challenges of the future.
The writer is chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers.
POST PARTISAN
Excerpts from The Post’s opinion blog, updated daily at
washingtonpost.com/postpartisan
RUTH MARCUS
Palin doesn’t need this ‘neighbor’
I’m with Sarah Palin on this one. Her new neighbor, it turns out, is author
Joe McGinniss. Coincidence? I think not. McGinniss wrote an unflattering profile of Palin for Portfolio magazine last year, and he’s now writing a book about the former Alaska governor. So he’s moved in next door.
Apparently, this is really next door. As
Palin posted on her Facebook page along- side a picture of McGinniss, “Here he is — about 15 feet away on the neighbor’s rented deck overlooking my children’s play area and my kitchen window. . . . Wonder what kind of material he’ll gather while over- looking Piper’s bedroom, my little garden, and the family’s swimming hole?” Palin’s intimations of pedophiliac voy- eurism are characteristically aggrieved — said “swimming hole” is a public lake, after all — but I’d feel pretty aggrieved in these circumstances as well. McGinniss’s choice of venue is outra-
geously, unnecessarily intrusive. There is — there used to be and should be, anyway — a difference between reporting and stalking, serious journalists and paparazzi. Not that
I’d want to make my living chasing celebri- ties, but the paparazzi, at least, have an ex- cuse: They have to stick their cameras in people’s faces to do their jobs. McGinniss and Marcus don’t. People, politicians in- cluded, deserve a zone of privacy, literal as well as metaphysical. Slate’s Jack Shafer says he has “no prob-
lems, ethically or morally, with [McGin- niss] getting as close to his subject as pos- sible,” and puts McGinniss’s behavior with- in a “long journalistic tradition of wearing sources and subjects down until they sur- render.” His examples include “knocking on the door of a grieving family to ask them, ‘How do you feel?’ ” and “frequenting a subject’s favorite bar, place of worship, and subway stop until he cracks.” I’ve had to do that knocking — not easy
— but I was taught not to besiege grieving families. If that’s changed, too bad on us, but there are remedies against such harass- ment. Going to a public place in pursuit of a source is different from essentially spying on the source in her private domain. This was, it turns out, something of a
grudge rental. McGinniss’s son wrote in an e-mail obtained by Politico’s Ben Smith that the owner “sought out the author because the Palins had crossed her [owed her mon- ey for renovations she had done at their re- quest and never paid her for].” As McGinniss Jr. explained, “If you were writing a biography of Tiger Woods and
had the chance to move in with him, or his pool house, or rent next door or down the street from him — it would be journalistic malpractice not to.” Yes, if Tiger invited you to move in, or rent the pool house, you’d be crazy not to. But positioning yourself so you can watch his every move, day in and day out, for five months? “People who write about politics, cam- paigns, they travel with the candidates, stay in the same motels, ride the bus, eat break- fast, hang out any and everywhere they can to get access,” the e-mail added. “We want to read the work of someone who is as close to their subject as possible. That’s called re- porting.” But there is a private sphere even on a political campaign. Reporters don’t camp out in the hotel room next to the can- didate and put their ears to the wall. In a statement, McGinniss’s publisher promised that the author “will be highly re- spectful of his subject’s privacy as he inves- tigates her public activities.” Really? So re- spectful of her privacy that he invaded it? Plow through all the papers, interview all the sources you want. But seizing the op- portunity to live next door is creepy. The Yiddish word “mensch” refers to a decent person. I’ve always believed that it is possible to practice good, hard-hitting jour- nalism and behave like a mensch. I’ll wait for the book to judge McGinniss’ journal- ism. It’s not too early, though, to conclude that he is no mensch.
The deepwater-drilling culprits are pretty obvious: BP, federal officials, environmentalists.
Secretary Ken Salazar, whose depart- ment’s laxity in environmental permit- ting and safety oversight renders it among the many bearing responsibility, expresses outrage at BP’s inability to stop the leak, and even threatens to “push them out of the way.” “To replace them with what?” asked the estimable, admirably candid Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the national in- cident commander. No one has the as- sets and expertise of BP. The federal government can fight wars, conduct a census and hand out billions in ear- marks, but it has not a clue how to cap a one-mile-deep out-of-control oil well. Obama didn’t help much with his fin-
ger-pointing Rose Garden speech in which he denounced finger-pointing, then proceeded to blame everyone but himself. Even the grace note of ad- mitting some federal responsibility turned sour when he reflexively added that these problems have been going on “for a decade or more” — translation: Bush did it — while, in contrast, his own interior secretary had worked diligently to solve the problem “from the day he took office.” Really? Why hadn’t we heard a thing about this? What about the September 2009 letter from Obama’s National Oce- anic and Atmospheric Administration accusing Interior’s Minerals Manage- ment Service of understating the “risk and impacts” of a major oil spill? When you get a blowout 15 months into your administration, and your own Interior Department had given BP a “categori- cal” environmental exemption in April 2009, the buck stops. In the end, speeches will make no dif- ference. If BP can cap the well in time to prevent an absolute calamity in the gulf, the president will escape politically. If it doesn’t — if the gusher isn’t stopped be- fore the relief wells are completed in August — it will become Obama’s Katrina. That will be unfair, because Obama is no more responsible for the damage caused by this than Bush was for the damage caused by Katrina. But that’s the nature of American politics and its presidential cult of personality: We ex- pect our presidents to play Superman. Helplessness, however undeniable, is no defense. Moreover, Obama has never been overly modest about his own powers. Two years ago next week, he declared that history will mark his ascent to the presidency as the moment when “our planet began to heal” and “the rise of the oceans began to slow.” Well, when you anoint yourself King Canute, you mustn’t be surprised when your subjects expect you to command the tides.
letters@charleskrauthammer.com
ere’s my question: Why were we drilling in 5,000 feet of water in the first place?
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