Just POlitics

Putting it to Putin

"We agreed that Iran should not have a nuclear weapon. I appreciate Vladimir's understanding on that," President Bush said. "We agreed that North Korea should not have a nuclear weapon."

"We agreed to accelerate our work to protect nuclear weapons and materials both in our two nations and around the world," Bush said.

Bush said the two discussed their differences, but stressed that countries in the 21st century will only be secure and prosperous if they have strong democracy and freedom.

"We may not always agree with each other, and we haven't over the last four years that's for sure," Bush said, saying the items of agreement outnumber the disagreements.

Social Security battles

ABC’s The Note offers an interesting look at USA Next’s plan of taking apart the AARP’s position by introducing the fact that the organization in Ohio supported Civil Unions:

The problem for supporters of personal retirement accounts is that Democrats will quickly try to portray USA Next's tactics as emblematic (or symptomatic) of the entire reform movement. It's hard to make a serious argument in favor of reform when the first question you'll be asked is whether you think the AARP is evil. But if USA Next succeeds in softening the AARP's reputation, and if it truly matches them point-by-point on ads in this battle, the reverse might be true, too.

The NY Times has an article of how the left is planning to personally attack Rep. Jim McCrery:

The advocacy group, Campaign for America's Future, accused the subcommittee chairman, Representative Jim McCrery of Louisiana, of conflict of interest, saying he had accepted nearly $200,000 in contributions over four years from securities firms and commercial banks that could benefit from Mr. Bush's plan to let workers invest in retirement accounts.

On Thursday, the group will begin running newspaper advertisements against Mr. McCrery under the headline "Who Does This Man Work For?" in his hometown, Shreveport. In addition, it is using the Internet to raise money for television advertisements.

Mr. McCrery responded by accusing the group, which is backed by labor unions and left-leaning philanthropists, including George Soros, of "extreme liberal bias."

"McCrery ... is compromised as chairman," said CAF deputy director Ellen Miller. "He can't make those decisions fairly with Wall Street's money in his pocket."

The Washington Post takes a look at Social Security beyond the math problem:

At its heart, Social Security's future financial shortfall is a basic math problem: The benefits owed over the next 75 years are $3.7 trillion greater than what it will have collected to make those payments. But how economists propose to solve that problem has had more to do with their vision of the nation's largest social insurance system than mathematics.

A straightforward solution could be to raise the current payroll tax by less than 2 percentage points or cut benefits by 13 percent. Either would solve the problem through 2080. Similarly, if the limit on wages taxed for Social Security, currently $90,000, were lifted altogether, the system would be kept fully solvent until 2077, according to the Social Security Administration's chief actuary.

…Conservatives, meanwhile, want to fundamentally change the system from the current model, in which taxes come in and benefits go out according to set formulas, toward a "forward-funded" system, in which benefits increasingly would be a product of savings and investment returns.

Economic advisor named

President Bush on Wednesday named Harvey S. Rosen, an economist on leave from Princeton University, to be chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

Rosen is John L. Weinberg Professor of Economics and Business Policy at Princeton University.

His research and publications focus on such topics as federal taxation, state and local governmental finance, housing policy, and labor study. He is currently Chairman of the Department of Economics, and Director of the Center for Economic Policy Studies at Princeton University. He also is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and a Research Associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research. >From 1989 to 1991, he served at the Treasury Department as the Deputy Assistant Secretary (Tax Analysis). He has written two undergraduate textbooks Microeconomics (with Michael Katz), and Public Finance. Ph.D. Harvard University.

The BIG problem

Social Security is the small problem when it comes to federal budget problems. The big problem is the welfare system of Medicare and Medicaid. The NY Times offers the following:

The Bush administration predicted Wednesday that government would account for nearly half of all the nation's health care spending by 2014.

Further, it said, total health spending will double in a decade, to $3.6 trillion in 2014 from $1.8 trillion last year, while gross domestic product, the total output of goods and services, grows more slowly. As a result, health spending will constitute 18.7 percent of the economy by 2014, up from an estimated 15.4 percent last year, the administration said.

The public share of health spending has been climbing gradually for decades. When Medicare and Medicaid were created in 1965, public programs accounted for 25 percent of all health spending in the United States. By 2014, they will account for more than 49 percent of the total - "a record share that could have important implications for the budget as a whole," said Stephen K. Heffler, director of the national health statistics group at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Last year, public programs accounted for 46 percent of all health spending.

So what does it mean? :

Mr. Heffler said government economists and actuaries believed that the number of people with private health insurance coverage would grow in coming years, but not as fast as the population. And the proportion of people without any coverage at all may increase, he said.

People who have no drug insurance and sign up for the Medicare drug benefit will see a decline in their out-of-pocket spending on prescription medicines, Mr. Heffler said. But, he added, some employers may drop coverage they now provide to retirees, and such retirees "are likely to see their out-of-pocket costs increase" even if they sign up for Medicare's drug benefit.

ABC’s The Note offers this additional input on the issue:

The NGA, chaired by Democratic Gov. Mark Warner of Virginia, wants to examine ways to raise high school graduation rates this year (see LINK ), although it is overhauling Medicaid that's on the minds of many. The President's FY06 budget proposes to cut tens of billions from Medicaid with the carrot of allowing states to more flexibly put to use the money they get.

The Governors want the White House to give them as much latitude as possible to structure Medicaid in their states, but the budget cracks down on what the Administration (and the Wall Street Journal's Sarah Leuck today) call loopholes: the often ingenious techniques used by state Medicaid administrators to increase the amount of federal matching money that flows to their programs.

The new head of HHS is, of course, former Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt, whose Medicaid program is seen by many as a model of how a state can legitimately cut costs while still keeping part of the safety net intact for the most vulnerable citizens. Everyone can go to the emergency room for care, provided they pay a nominal fee, but not everyone gets access to expensive procedures. (Leavitt's critics disagree about all this, and you can read more about it in The New York Times today: LINK )

No child left educated

Rep. John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Education Committee, said critics "want the funding No Child Left Behind is providing, but they don't want to meet the high standards that come with it."

The liberal National Council of State Legislators offered its reform proposal of the No Child Left Behind Act. Under their proposal children would not be required to meet stands of excellence:

Granting states flexibility to meet the goals of the No Child Left Behind Act will result in stronger democracy and strengthen the nation's economic future, according to a bipartisan review of the law.

A special task force of the National Conference of State Legislatures today released the results of a 10-month study that identified specific areas of the act that need to be changed if states are to guarantee that young people will learn at their full potential.

"Our bipartisan review shows that in order to reach the No Child Left Behind Act's lofty expectations, changes need to be made in the law's foundation," said NCSL President John Hurson, a member of the Maryland House of Delegates. "We extend our hand to the White House and Congress and believe they will find this exhaustive, bipartisan, earnest and impartial review of the No Child Left Behind Act an opportunity to close the achievement gap in America's schools and improve education opportunities for all students."

The report lists 43 specific recommendations on ways the law can be revised to improve the quality of education for all students and close the gaps in achievement that exist in schools today.

Key recommendations of the report include:

·        Remove obstacles that stifle state innovations and undermine state programs that were proving to work before passage of the act. Federal waivers should be granted and publicized for innovative programs;

·        Fully fund the act and provide states the financial flexibility to meet its goals. The federal government funds less than 8 percent of the nation's education program, but the No Child Left Behind Act affects nearly all classroom activity. In addition, states ask for a Government Accountability Office review to determine the act's costs and whether it violates the Unfunded Mandate Reform Act;

·        Remove the one-size-fits-all method that measures student performance and encourage more sophisticated and accurate systems that gauge the growth of individual students and not just groups of students. States believe the 100-percent proficiency goal is not statistically achievable and that struggling schools need the opportunity to address problems before losing parts of their student populations;

·        Recognize that some schools face special challenges, including adequately teaching students with disabilities and English language learners. The law also needs to recognize the differences among rural, suburban and urban schools.

Task force co-chair Steve Saland, a New York state senator, noted that the idea for No Child Left Behind originated in the states, but that its restrictions stifle state innovations. "We believe the federal government's role has become excessively intrusive in the day-to-day operations of public education," he said. "States that were once pioneers are now captives of a one-size-fits-all educational accountability system."

Co-chair Minnesota State Senator Steve Kelley said using only one yardstick to judge every school's effectiveness is not practical. "To say that only one measurement can be used to judge every school's effectiveness is not practical," he said. "Our recommendations continue to hold schools accountable, but provide for a more realistic measurement method to ensure that they do."

Utah State Representative Kory Holdaway, a member of the committee and a special education teacher, said the No Child Left Behind Act conflicts with a previous law designed to help students with disabilities, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. "Ignoring the contradictions between IDEA and No Child Left Behind is one of the act's worst weakness," he said. "Because the special education population is not uniformly dispersed across the states and school districts, these decisions should be made in the states, not in Washington, D.C."

Staff Chair Robin Johnson, Principle Legislative Analyst of the North Carolina Assembly, noted that the federal government only needs to look at the sport of basketball for reasons why state flexibility is a good idea. Different sized basketballs are made for various age groups in order to promote skills at each level, she said.

"We ask Congress and the administration to play ball with us and recognize that being partners with states and providing greater flexibility makes this country and our education system stronger," she said.

Paranoid Politics

James Taranto’s The Best of the Web offers important advice to those who want to be serious players in today’s blog wars:

In his classic 1964 essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," historian Richard Hofstadter described this mentality:

As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. . . .

The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman--sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced.

Hofstadter wrote at a time of liberal ascendancy, and as he noted, "in recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers," especially Sen. Joe McCarthy and the John Birch Society. But as he noted, "the paranoid style is an old and recurrent phenomenon in our public life."

Explaining Howard Dean

According to Matt Bai, New York Times Magazine:

"Dean perfectly embodies the modern Democratic Party, whose ideology feels so muddled and incohesive that labels of 'left' and 'center,' at least in terms of governing philosophy, are almost irrelevant. So-called centrists, with precious few exceptions, have lined up with their party's base against the idea of partly privatizing Social Security, even though those same Democrats used to argue that the program was gravely ill; so-called leftists, meanwhile, have embraced the gospel of budget restraint. The only real arguments among Democrats now are entirely tactical in nature. Should Democrats make an impassioned, populist argument against Bush's war and his tax cuts? Or should they try to sound more reasoned and Clintonian, arguing that some wars are good (but not this one) and that some tax cuts are fine (but not these)? Should they talk more about God, or increase their turnout among black voters? What was once the purview of pollsters and admen has become the central dialogue of the Democratic Party itself."