Nate Silver: Why Progressives Are Batshit Crazy to Oppose the Senate Bill [View All]

[jefferson_dem]

Why Progressives Are Batshit Crazy to Oppose the Senate Bill

Pick your subheadline:

a) It's time to stop being polite and start getting real.
b) Here's hoping a picture is worth 1,000 words.



<SNIP>

I understand that most of the liberal skepticism over the Senate bill is well intentioned. But it has become way, way off the mark. Where do you think the $800 billion goes? It goes to low-income families just like these. Where do you think it comes from? We won't know for sure until the Senate and House produce their conference bill, but it comes substantially from corporations and high-income earners, plus some efficiency gains.

Because this is primarily a political analysis blog, I think people tend to assume that I'm lost in the political forest and not seeing the policy trees. In fact, the opposite is true. For any "progressive" who is concerned about the inequality of wealth, income and opportunity in America, this bill would be an absolutely monumental achievement. The more compelling critique, rather, is that the bill would fail to significantly "bend the cost curve". I don't dismiss that criticism at all, and certainly the insertion of a public option would have helped at the margins. But fundamentally, that is a critique that would traditionally be associated with the conservative side of the debate, as it ultimately goes to mounting deficits in the wake of expanded government entitlements.

<SNIP>

Also, frankly, the individual mandate penalty is not very harsh, especially for lower-income people, so there's some potential for gaming the system in a way that isn't economically optimal but would give this particular family a better deal than suggested above.

Secondly, the critiques over the level of subsidies are rather tangential to where the locus of progressive energy has been -- on the public option. The presence of a watered-down public option would make very little difference in terms of this family's cost structure -- and yet, this same bill with a public option is one that most liberals would be head-over-heels for.

I happen to agree that the cost subsidies need to be improved somewhat for this type of family and indeed I wish that this is where more of the left's energy had been directed. Fortunately, I think this is something that really can (still) be improved in conference committee or on the floor. For instance, if you adopted the House bill's subsidies for families at under 250% of poverty, and the Senate's (which actually become more generous) for people at greater than 250% of poverty -- perhaps in exchange for a harsher (not weaker!) individual mandate penalty -- you'd have a pretty reasonable compromise.

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/12/why-progressives-are-batshit-crazy-to.html