Romney’s presidential pick

By George F. Will, Published: August 12

When, in his speech accepting the 1964 Republican presidential nomination, Barry Goldwater said “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” and “moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue,” a media wit at the convention supposedly exclaimed, “Good God, Goldwater is going to run as Goldwater.” When Mitt Romney decided to run with Paul Ryan, many conservatives may have thought, “Thank God, Romney is not going to run as Romney.”
Not, that is, as the Romney who 12 months ago, warily eyeing Iowa, refused to say a discouraging word about the ethanol debacle. Rather, he is going to run as the Romney who, less than two weeks before announcing Ryan, told the states — Iowa prominent among them — that he opposes extending the wind energy production tax credit, which expires soon.
This may seem a minor matter, as well as an obvious and easy decision for a conservative. The wind tax credit is, after all, industrial policy, the government picking winners and losers in defiance of market signals — industrial policy always is a refusal to heed the market’s rejection of that which the government singles out for favoritism. But ethanol subsidies also are industrial policy. And just a few days after Romney got the wind subsidy right, more than half of the 11 Republican senators on the Finance Committee got it wrong, voting to extend it. So even before choosing Ryan, Romney was siding with what might, with a nod to Howard Dean, be called the Republican wing of the Republican Party. For Romney, conservatism is a second language, but he speaks it with increasing frequency and fluency.
Romney embraced Ryan after the sociopathic — indifferent to the truth — ad for Barack Obama that is meretricious about every important particular of the death from cancer of the wife of steelworker Joe Soptic. Obama’s desperate flailing about to justify four more years has sunk into such unhinged smarminess that Romney may have concluded: There is nothing Obama won’t say about me, because he has nothing to say for himself, so I will chose a running mate whose seriousness about large problems and ideas underscores what the president has become — silly and small.
He on whose behalf the Soptic ad was made used to dispense bromides deploring “the smallness of our politics” and “our preference for scoring cheap political points.” Obama’s campaign of avoidance — say anything to avoid the subject of the country’s condition — must now reckon with Ryan’s mastery of Obama’s enormous addition to decades of governmental malpractice.
Obama is, by now, nothing if not predictable, so prepare for pieties deploring Ryan’s brand of “extremism” that has supplanted responsible conservatism. Goldwater, quoted above, infuriated the sort of people who, regardless of what flavor of conservatism is in fashion, invariably purse their lips and sorrowfully say: “We think conservatism is a valuable thread in our national fabric, etc., but not this kind of conservatism.” Goldwater’s despisers did not recognize his echo of words by Martin Luther King Jr. 15 months earlier.
In his “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” King wrote, “You speak of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. . . . But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love. . . . Was not Amos an extremist for justice. . . . Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel. . . . Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.”
Remember this episode when you hear, ad nauseam, that Ryan is directly, and Romney now is derivatively, an extremist for believing (a) that “ending Medicare as we know it” will be done by arithmetic if it is not done by creative reforms of the sort Ryan proposes, and (b) that the entitlement state’s crisis cannot be cured, as Obama suggests, by adding 4.6 points to the tax rate paid by less than 3 percent of Americans.
When Ryan said in Norfolk, “We won’t replace our Founding principles, we will reapply them,” he effectively challenged Obama to say what Obama believes, which is: Madison was an extremist in enunciating the principles of limited government — the enumeration and separation of powers. And Jefferson was an extremist in asserting that government exists not to grant rights but to “secure” natural rights that pre-exist government.
Romney’s selection of a running mate was, in method and outcome, presidential. It underscores how little in the last four years merits that adjective.

georgewill@washpost.com

The Medicare Distortion

By Yuval Levin
http://www.nationalreview.com
August 13, 2012

It is simply a fact that the United States government is now on track for an unprecedented fiscal disaster — with debt quickly surpassing the size of our GDP and reaching twice that size in the coming decades, crushing any chance for robust growth. It is also a fact that the rising cost of Medicare is at the very heart of that disaster. The program has been growing far faster than the rest of the federal budget for decades, and the trend is only set to accelerate.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, Medicare spending as a share of the economy is five times what it was in 1970, while all other federal spending combined (excluding interest) is 1.1 times what it was. By 2035, CBO expects Medicare costs to be nearly twice what they are today as a share of the economy, while all other federal spending combined will actually decline somewhat as a share of the economy. The debt problem is a Medicare problem. There is no way to avert fiscal disaster without significantly reining in the growth of that program. Even President Obama has acknowledged that no other solution, and certainly not his symbolic class-warfare tax proposals, could be sufficient, saying last July that “if you look at the numbers, then Medicare in particular will run out of money and we will not be able to sustain that program no matter how much taxes go up.”
And yet, even though he acknowledges this fact, the president has chosen to do nothing, and indeed to stand firmly in the way of doing anything meaningful to solve the problem. Obamacare’s Medicare cuts and its board of price controllers aren’t a solution — the CBO debt and Medicare growth numbers cited above already include them, and the agency (along with Medicare’s actuary, who works for the president) has said they are very unlikely to work. What is needed is a structural reform of the program, to enable it to deliver coverage to seniors far more efficiently by driving more efficient delivery of care. But seniors who are now in the program don’t want to hear that it’s going bankrupt, and don’t want to think about changes to it, so the politics of Medicare argue strongly against any kind of solution. The president and his party have chosen to make the most of that political reality, quietly raiding Medicare to fund Obamacare but otherwise leaving the program to its sorry fate. They have denied the need for reform. It would take real political courage to do otherwise.
To their enormous credit, congressional Republicans over the past few years have decided that they cannot leave Medicare to collapse and take the government’s finances (and the nation’s economic future) with it, and so they must address the problem despite the standing threat from the left to demonize anyone who tries. Thanks to the creativity, tenacity, and flexibility of Paul Ryan in particular, they have worked through several different versions of a market-based reform of the system, and earlier this year they arrived at one that effectively addresses the key concerns of past critics of such “premium support” reforms — an idea that could dramatically improve the efficiency of Medicare (and so reduce its cost) without increasing risks or out-of-pocket costs for beneficiaries.
Because Mitt Romney (to his own enormous credit) has endorsed that reform, and because Paul Ryan (its architect) is now Romney’s running mate, this idea will come under blistering attacks in the coming weeks and months. Medicare will not be the central issue of this fall’s campaign — economic growth and jobs are far more important to voters. But President Obama and his supporters seem intent on distracting voters from the failed economic policies of the past four years by scaring them about the Romney-Ryan Medicare reform. And it is already perfectly clear that their criticisms of that reform are based on either a misapprehension or an intentional misrepresentation of the actual proposal, and of the very significant ways in which it differs from past Medicare-reform ideas (including those proposed by Ryan in the past). So it is worth taking a moment to understand the proposal — generally known as the Ryan-Wyden reform after its originators, Paul Ryan and Democratic senator Ron Wyden of Oregon — and to see what its critics are missing or misrepresenting.
At first, the idea seems rather similar to past “premium support” reforms, which have basically proposed to transform today’s “defined benefit” Medicare system (in which the government decides on a set of insurance benefits and then pays health-care providers a price the government defines for providing each of those covered services) into a “defined contribution” system (in which the government decides on an amount of money to provide to beneficiaries and then lets them use that money to choose from an approved set of competing private insurance plans that each offers all those benefits at whatever cost it is able or willing to offer). Such a system would use the power of intense competition among insurers seeking Medicare dollars to increase the efficiency of health-care provision and drive down costs. But the foremost criticism of this sort of defined-contribution reform is that if the amount provided to seniors to buy coverage were too low, or if its annual growth did not keep up with the growth of health-care costs, seniors would be left to make up the difference out of their own pockets, and those who didn’t have the money wouldn’t be able to afford insurance.
The Ryan-Wyden idea solves that problem through a clever combination of defined-contribution and defined-benefit insurance. The federal government would still define a package of required benefits that would constitute comprehensive insurance coverage — the same benefits that Medicare covers today. But each year, private insurers as well as a federal fee-for-service insurance provider (akin to today’s Medicare program) would submit bids to the government to provide that comprehensive coverage at the lowest cost they could manage. The government would then provide seniors in each region of the country with a premium-support payment equal to the second-lowest bid in that region or to the bid of the federal fee-for-service option, whichever was lower. That way, every senior would be guaranteed to have at least one comprehensive coverage option that cost no more than the premium-support payment he received (and thus involved no more out-of-pocket costs than Medicare does today), and would also have other options that cost more (whether because the offering companies could not manage to be as efficient in working with their provider networks or because they offered more benefits than the required minimum and thus charged a higher premium).
The market itself, rather than Medicare’s administrators, would set the level of each year’s premium-support payment, which would ensure that the payment was sufficient to pay for comprehensive coverage. A senior who chose a plan that cost less than the premium-support payment would get to keep the difference (deposited into a tax-free health savings account to use for future out-of-pocket health costs), and a senior who chose a plan that cost more than the premium-support payment would pay the difference out of his pocket. Poorer, older, and sicker seniors would get somewhat higher premium-support amounts than the rest.
Such a system would include the key advantages of defined-benefit insurance without its key drawbacks (since there would be a guaranteed comprehensive insurance benefit just as in today’s Medicare, but without the open-ended spending to provide it), and the key advantages of defined-contribution insurance without its key drawbacks (since the federal payment would be set, and so would drive intense competition for consumer dollars among insurers and providers, but, because the set payment would be determined by an annual bidding process, no gap would open up between the cost of coverage and the amount available to seniors to pay for it). It is based on the premise that intense competition in a genuine market could dramatically reduce the cost of Medicare without cutting the actual insurance benefit provided to seniors. And it puts the burden of proving that premise on the government, not the beneficiary: If costs in fact go down, then the cost of Medicare will decline and the government’s fiscal crisis would ease; if they do not go down, then the cost of Medicare will not decline and the fiscal crisis will remain, leaving reformers to find other solutions. Either way, Medicare beneficiaries will have the same comprehensive, guaranteed insurance coverage they have now.
There are some very good reasons for believing competition would indeed dramatically reduce costs. The way markets work in the rest of the economy offers one powerful kind of evidence, of course. But recent research into the Medicare system itself offers another. For instance, on August 1, three Harvard researchers published a study in theJournal of the American Medical Association (you can find it here, but it requires a subscription) that used data from the Medicare Advantage program (a much more limited experiment in insurer competition in Medicare) to consider how the Wyden-Ryan reform would have worked if it had been in effect in 2009. They found that, “nationally, in 2009, the benchmark plan under the Ryan-Wyden framework (i.e., the second-lowest plan) bid an average of 9% below traditional Medicare costs (traditional Medicare was equivalent to approximately the tenth-lowest bid).”
In other words, even under the very constrained competition of Medicare Advantage, in which prices are set by Medicare’s bureaucracy, the Ryan-Wyden approach would have reduced per-beneficiary spending by 9 percent in a single year while still providing seniors with the same comprehensive insurance coverage. With real competition through a bidding system, the reductions in the rate of the program’s growth over time could be enormous. And if those savings don’t in fact materialize, we would just end up where we are today — which is where Democrats seem to want to end up anyway.
In order to be scoreable by CBO, the Wyden-Ryan reform also has a kind of backup: a requirement that Medicare’s growth not be faster than 0.5 percent more than GDP growth per year. That is, not by coincidence, the same maximum rate of growth set in President Obama’s budget. Neither maximum rate is really all that meaningful — it’s a scoring convention, not a reform; if it were exceeded, Congress would almost certainly just suspend it, as it has when past maximum growth rates (like the one in place since 1997) have been exceeded. So in this respect, too, if Ryan-Wyden’s competitive system didn’t keep costs down, we would just be in the same place the Democrats want to end up. It is not the maximum growth rate but the mechanism for remaining below it — the bidding process that allows for the transformation of Medicare into a new kind of intensely competitive insurance system with both a defined benefit and a defined contribution at once — that is the real key to the Ryan-Wyden reform.
The proposal would also have this reform begin only ten years from now, and affect only new entrants into Medicare, so that all current seniors and everyone now over 55 would be left entirely untouched for the rest of their lives, unless they chose to enter the new system. Thus, today’s seniors have no reason to complain about the proposal, since it would not affect them, and tomorrow’s seniors have essentially nothing to lose by it, since they would still be guaranteed a comprehensive benefit at only today’s out-of-pocket costs.
Essentially all of the criticisms of the Ryan-Wyden(-Romney) proposal ignore its innovative combination of defined-contribution and defined-benefit insurance — directing themselves instead to older versions of the premium-support idea — and ignore the fact that it would leave all current seniors and near-retirees untouched. Thus just minutes after Paul Ryan was announced as Mitt Romney’s running mate, Obama campaign manager Jim Messina said in a statement that Ryan’s Medicare plan would “end Medicare as we know it by turning it into a voucher system, shifting thousands of dollars in health care costs to seniors.” Some Democrats even put a particular dollar figure on that supposed cost shift — $6,400. That figure comes from a (rather rough) CBO calculation regarding a prior version of the premium-support idea, not the Ryan-Wyden proposal that Romney has endorsed. CBO would certainly not claim that the figure applies to what is now the Romney-Ryan plan, or indeed that any such shift would occur under that plan.
The Democrats continuing to make such charges either do not know about the difference between Ryan-Wyden and past premium-support ideas or are knowingly lying. And those who argue that “Medicare as we know it” is the alternative to the Ryan-Wyden proposal are also either ignoring or denying reality. The fact is that Obamacare cuts Medicare by $700 billion over its first ten years to fund other programs and imposes a board of price controllers — the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) — over Medicare to cut costs in ways that (particularly by driving providers out of the business of serving Medicare patients through inadequate payment rates) would reduce the access of both current and future seniors to care. And without further reforms, the Medicare program will soon run out of funds in ways that would either require dramatic benefit cuts or would drive the government bankrupt.
Medicare as we know it is thus not an option. The choice is between, on the one hand, a reform that leaves current seniors untouched for life and offers future seniors a guaranteed comprehensive benefit and more choices about how to get it or, on the other hand, cuts that affect both current and future beneficiaries and yet are still likely to fail to avert the program’s fiscal collapse. Mitt Romney offers the first — a plan for saving Medicare without increasing the risk to seniors. Barack Obama offers the second — a plan for raiding Medicare and watching it crumble.
The only way for Democrats to avoid the political consequences of this painful fact is to deny it, and to insist that the opposite is the case: that Romney and Ryan seek to arbitrarily cut Medicare and increase costs for seniors. In the wake of Paul Ryan’s selection as Mitt Romney’s running mate, some of them have seemed downright giddy at the prospect of unleashing that lie, and perhaps even building their entire fall campaign around it. Many of them surely don’t even know it’s a lie. But it is, and a strategy based on a lie can work only if it is left unchallenged. Romney, Ryan, and their supporters must not leave it so.

Romney's Gutsy Choice

By Roger Scruton
PJ Media
August 10, 2012

Mitt Romney did something that a lot of supposed wise men said he wouldn’t — pick a vice presidential candidate who is more charismatic than he. In choosing Paul Ryan, Romney took the risk he would be outshone, but he did America a favor. He selected the brightest young politician we have.

He also underscored his best line of the campaign so far, “It’s the economy – and we’re not stupid!” No one in Congress has thought more creatively or acted with more determination to solve the great economic problems we face than Ryan. He has virtually stood alone among higher elected officials in the battle for serious entitlement reform, being criticized by none other than Newt Gingrich for recommending remedies that were, if anything, too mild for the monumental fiscal crisis confronting us. But at least Ryan has tried to do something about it. Few others have had the courage to attempt it.

Through nominating Ryan, Romney has signaled that his campaign is going to be about the economy, the economy, and, yes, you guessed it, the economy (with healthcare thrown in as an aspect of the economy). It is not going to be about immigration, marriage, the legalization of marijuana, whether candidates cause cancer, who has a dog on his car, or even who was born where. It’s going to be about the one thing America is obsessed with, the one thing that if we don’t correct nothing else is possible…. Okay, I won’t say it again, but you certainly know.

In choosing Ryan too, he has certainly gone for a candidate with personality, unlike some I could mention. (Why do it now? That’s over.) He also, I suspect, has chosen a man who can dish it out and in an articulate manner. Many of us can recall Ryan testifying in front of Obama regarding the dubious budget for the president’s healthcare legislation and making Obama highly uncomfortable. It looked as if O. had met his match and knew it.

Ryan v. Biden will probably be the hottest ticket among the coming debates. Definitely worth watching.

Of course none of that means that Romney/Ryan will win anymore than it would Romney/Whoever. We are in a high-stakes game now in which democracy and ideas go out the window in favor of vicious attacks orchestrated by David Axelrod, et al. The Chicago crew will do anything possible to push the discussion away from the economy with as many distractions as possible. The compliant media can be trusted to be their more-than-willing executioners in this endeavor.

It will take a great deal of skill and hard work for Romney to keep the election focused on the issues. So far he has not been completely successful. But in this regard, putting Ryan by his side seems a particularly smart move. This guy usually has something to say and, for a politician, something remarkably substantive. The fight has been joined.

Democrats should let sleeping dogs lie

Obama's childhood appetite for dogs isn't as critical as his adult appetite for spending and statism. But it was part of his cool, which Mitt Romney doesn't have, according to the left.

By Mark Steyn
The Orange County Register
http://www.ocregister.com/
April 27, 2012

A couple of days ago, Obama campaign top dog David Axelrod threw in the towel on the dog war. "I thought it was a little absurd to talk about what the President had done as a 10-year-old boy," he sniffed to MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell, which is as near as the suddenly sheepish attack dog will ever get to conceding that Barack Obama is the first dog-eating president in the history of the Republic.

For those coming late to the feud, the Democrats started it, assiduously promoting accounts of a 1983 Romney vacation to Canada in which the family pooch Seamus rode on the roof of the car. Axelrod and the boys thought they could have some sport with this, and their poodles in the media eagerly played along. The New York columnist Gail Collins alone has referred to it dozens of times.

And then Jim Treacher, the sharp-eyed wag of The Daily Caller, uncovered this passage from Chapter Two of Obama's bestselling but apparently largely unread memoir "Dreams From My Father," in which the author recalls childhood meals with his stepfather, Lolo Soetoro:
"I was introduced to dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher), and roasted grasshopper (crunchy). Like many Indonesians, Lolo followed a brand of Islam that could make room for the remnants of more ancient animist and Hindu faiths. He explained that a man took on the powers of whatever he ate: One day soon, he promised, he would bring home a piece of tiger meat for us to share."

There followed an Internet storm of "I Ate A Dog (And I Liked It)" gags. Axelrod, an early tweeter of Romney doggie digs, has now figured out that the subject is no longer profitable for his boss. The dogs he let slip aren't quite that savvy. Jeremy Funk, communications director of "Americans United For Change," is still bulk-emailing links to the dogsagainstromney.com video "Should We Have A President Who Isn't Even Qualified To Adopt A Pet?" Confronted by the revelation that his preferred candidate only swings by the Humane Society for the all-you-can-eat buffet, he huffs that this is "false equivalence." "A 6-year-old with no choice in the matter" is not the same as a grown man choosing to place his dog on the roof of his vehicle. My Canadian compatriot Kate McMillan, a dog breeder, advised Mr. Funk to "try this experiment – sit a normal, American 6-year-old down at a plate and tell him it's dog meat. Watch what happens."

For their next exploding cigar, the Democrats chose polygamy. Brian Schweitzer, the Democrat governor of Montana, remarked that Romney was unlikely to appeal to women because his father was "born on a polygamy commune." Eighty-six percent of women, noted Gov. Schweitzer with a keenly forensic demographic eye, are "not great fans of polygamy." You can understand the 86 percent's ickiness at the whole freaky-weirdy idea of a president descended from someone who had multiple wives. Eww.

Just for the record, Romney's father was not a polygamist; Romney's grandfather was not a polygamist; his great-grandfather was a polygamist. Miles Park Romney died in 1904, so one can see why this would weigh heavy on 86 percent of female voters 108 years later.

Meanwhile, back in the female-friendly party, Obama's father was a polygamist; his grandfather was a polygamist; and his great-grandfather was a polygamist who had one more wife (five in total) than Romney's great-grandfather. It seems President Obama is the first male in his line not to be a polygamist. So, given the "gender gap," maybe those 86 percent of American women are way cooler with polygamy than Gov. Schweitzer thinks. Maybe these liberal chicks really dig it.

The exploding cigars are revealing not merely of Democrat hypocrisy but of a key difference in worldview between liberals and conservatives. Jeremy Funk and Gov. Schweitzer reflexively believe that their dog-eating polygamy-scion is different from the other guy's dog-transporting polygamy-scion. This is nothing to do with young Barack being 6 or 10 years old and meekly eating whatever was put in front of him. He was 34 years old when he wrote the passage quoted above and 10 years older when he recorded the audio edition. And, as both versions make plain, he thinks it's kinda cool, and he knows that to the average upscale white liberal it has the electric frisson of the exotic other.

Obama is correct that certain cultures believe a man takes on the powers of whatever he eats. In Liberia, where presidential contests are somewhat more primal than in this effete republic, Samuel Doe was captured by some of his eventual successor's, ah, campaign staff, who cut off President Doe's ears and then fed them to him. They then removed His Excellency's genitals and wound up in a fight over who should get them, believing that the still-not-quite-yet-late president's powers would be transferred to whoever got to chow down on the crown jewels. I'm not suggesting that President Obama has eaten a human penis, because, if he had, he'd almost certainly have boasted about it to the impressionable NPR ninnies who gobbled up his memoirs. But I am suggesting that Mitt Romney might like to consider it for next year's Inauguration Day.

I jest – just in case the Secret Service are taking a break from their Colombian hookers and are minded to investigate me for a threat against what Joe Biden would call the "big stick." My point is that self-loathing cultural relativism is so deeply ingrained on the left that any revulsion to dog-eating is trumped by revulsion to criticizing any of the rich, vibrant, cultural diversity out there in Indonesia or anywhere else. Most polygamy in the developed world is nothing to do with Mormons: It's widely practiced by western Muslims, whose plural marriages are recognized de facto by French and Ontario welfare departments and de jure by Britain's pensions department. But "edgy" "transgressive" leftie comics on sad, pandering standup shows will reserve their polygamy jokes for Mormons until the last stern-faced elder in Utah keels over at the age of 112. In the United Kingdom, 57 percent of Pakistani Britons are married to their first cousins, with attendant increases in their children's congenital birth defects. But the comics save their inbreeding jokes for stump-toothed West Virginians enjoying a jigger of moonshine and a bunk-up with their sisters. The editor of Washington's leading gay newspaper was gay-bashed in Amsterdam, "the most tolerant city in Europe," but by Muslims rather than the pasty rednecks who killed Matthew Shepard, so liberals don't have a dog in this fight.

Likewise, the epidemic of black-on-black murder versus the once-in-a-blue-moon Trayvon Martin: to the liberal mindset, certain dogs won't hunt. In one of his many bestsellers, Ayatollah Khomeini produced a hierarchy of "the uncleans": Dogs are at Number Six, Infidels are at Number Eight, and Number 11 is "the sweat of an unlawful ejaculation." In the liberal hierarchy, conservative infidels are at Number One, dogs are somewhere between 8 and 11, and the sweat of an unlawful ejaculation isn't on the list at all.

Axelrod is right. Obama's appetite for dogs isn't as critical as his appetite for spending and statism. But it was part of his cool. "Mitt Romney isn't cool," declared Brian Montopoli of CBS News this week in a story headlined "Can Mitt Romney Make Boring Sexy"? For economically beleaguered Americans, the more pertinent question is: "Can Barack Obama Make Cool Affordable"? It's not just that Obama ate the dog, but that he's screwing the pooch.

©MARK STEYN