George Will, in his “for god’s sake, let’s just eliminate all taxes” sort of way, has made what passes for an argument against the newly passed health care reform bill. Here, we attempt to demolish his arguments as they occur in his Washington Post article of March 23, “A battle won, but a victory?” Basically, it’s the same old whine about taxes, with a lot of fluff and smoke screens thrown in.

“And everybody praised the Duke,

Who this great fight did win.”

“But what good came of it at last?”

Quoth little Peterkin.

“Why that I cannot tell,” said he,

“But ’twas a famous victory”

– Robert Southey,

“The Battle of Blenheim”

Oh, sure, start it out with a rather well known defeatist poem about a futile battle. If you buy into that intro, Will has half the battle won, right? Sorry, Will, no dice.

Barack Obama hopes his famous health-care victory will mark him as a transformative president. History, however, may judge it to have been his missed opportunity to be one.

A bald assertion, nothing more.

Health care will not be seriously revisited for at least a generation, so the system’s costliest defect — untaxed employer-provided insurance, which entangles a high-inflation commodity, health care, with the wage system — remains. Obama could not challenge this without adopting measures — e.g., tax credits for individuals, enabling them to shop for their own insurance — that empower individuals and therefore conflict with his party’s agenda of spreading dependency.

Now, here Will makes his major claim, but it’s almost as fatuous as is Will. In the first place, if politics had any justice, IF, if… if we got lucky, health care WOULD be revisited – with a public option or single payer, at some point before a generation from now. However, IF health care reform accomplished it’s purpose, then it would not NEED to be revisited. Moreover, the fact of health care being a high-inflation commodity with a wage system problem is true, regardless of how good the health care bill is, right? So the claim has nothing to do with the bill at all, it’s just an attempt to tie a structural health care problem into the new bill and then CLAIM (without any evidence to tie it in) that the new bill makes this worse. However, if COST is such a problem then Will would be touting the savings in Medicare, and the fact that the reform bill saves $130 billion the first decade and $1.2 trillion during its second decade. Fair is fair. Seems by that measure the bill goes a long way towards FIXING the structural problem of health care being a high-inflation commodity. And according to the Congressional Budget Office, the health care reform bill delays by over nine years the time when Medicare would become insolvent. That’s a bad thing, Will?

On Sunday, as will happen every day for two decades, another 10,000 baby boomers became eligible for Social Security and Medicare. And Congress moved closer to piling a huge new middle-class entitlement onto the rickety structure of America’s Ponzi welfare state. Congress has a one-word response to the demographic deluge and the scores of trillions of dollars of unfunded liabilities: “More.”

O.K., there are lots of us boomers, that’s neither here nor there in evaluating the bill, is it? Now, is the bill an “unfunded liability” or does it save some $1.32 trillion over the next twenty years over what health care would be saving the tax payers without reform. Jeez, Will, I’m real sorry to bring up the facts.

There will be subsidized health insurance for families of four earning up to $88,200 a year, a ceiling certain to be raised, repeatedly. The accounting legerdemain spun to make this seem affordable — e.g., cuts (to Medicare) and taxes (on high-value insurance plans) that will never happen — is Enronesque.

Now, maybe in WILL’S universe there will never be those taxes…. I’d sure as hell like to see them. Between World War II and about 1974, the eminently fair tax code in our fair land taxed the richest bracket at some 90 percent. What we saw during those years was an unshakeable GNP growth of about four percent annually, regular as clockwork. That was before Ronnie and W. had their way with the tax code and the obscenity that are derivatives had been created for the plunder of America. And arch-republican Will has some kind of nerve bring up Enron.

As America’s teetering tower of unkeepable promises grows, so does the weight of government, in taxes and mandates that limit investments and discourage job creation. America’s dynamism, and hence upward social mobility, will slow, as the economy becomes what the party of government wants it to be — increasingly dependent on government-created demand.

Same old tired hack about raising taxes and stunting growth. Same old Republican crap. Hey Will, did you hear anything in your extensive reading of the press about this health care bill being paid for in advance??? Anything at all??? By the way, do you have any kids, Will, any young twenty somethings you might like to keep on your rich man’s health insurance? As in up to age 26, according to the new law? And just how healthy are you Will??? Any pre-existing conditions? Like terminal wealthy snot-nose?

Promoting dependency is the Democratic Party’s vocation. The party knows that almost all entitlements are forever, and those that are not — e.g., the lifetime eligibility for welfare, repealed in 1996 — are not for the middle class. Democrats believe, plausibly, that middle-class entitlements are instantly addictive and, because there is no known detoxification, that class, when facing future choices between trimming entitlements or increasing taxes, will choose the latter. The taxes will disproportionately burden high earners, thereby tightening the noose of society’s dependency on government for investments and job creation.

Taxes, taxes taxes. Will seems to have a one track mind, really, when you strip the other arguments out of his argumentation. It’s always taxes with these guys. Well, a certain Galilean once said “feed my sheep”, Will. Did you ever hear the old saw about a Christian society being our brothers’ keeper? Guess not.

Politics in a democracy is transactional: Politicians seek votes by promising to do things for voters, who seek promises in exchange for their votes. Because logrolling is how legislative coalitions are cobbled together in a continental nation, the auction by which reluctant House Democrats were purchased has been disillusioning only to sentimentalists with illusions about society’s stock of disinterestedness.

Besides, some of the transactions were almost gorgeous: Government policy having helped make water scarce in California’s Central Valley, the party of expanding government secured two votes by increasing rations of the scarcity. Thus did one dependency lubricate legislation that establishes others.

This is the intellectual whore prig complaining about buying votes. So far as I can see, the entire Republican Party is a wholly owned subsidiary of the banks and multinational corporations, and here goes one of the chief apologists complaining about buying votes. It’s called horse trading, Will. L.B.J. was rather well known for it. Too bad.

The bill is a museum of hoary artifacts from liberalism’s attic. The identity politics of quasi-quotas? The secretary of health and human services “in awarding grants and contracts under this section . . . shall give preferences to entities that have a demonstrated record of . . . training individuals who are from underrepresented minority groups or disadvantaged backgrounds.” And the bill creates an Advisory Council on Green, High-Performing Public School Facilities and grants for “retrofitting necessary to increase the energy efficiency and water efficiency of public school facilities.”

The public will think the health-care system is what Democrats want it to be. Dissatisfaction with it will intensify because increasingly complex systems are increasingly annoying. And because Democrats promised the implausible — prompt and noticeable improvements in the system. Forbidding insurance companies to deny coverage to persons because of preexisting conditions, thereby making the risk pool more risky, will increase the cost of premiums. Public complaints will be smothered by more subsidies. So dependency will grow.

Seeking a silver lining? Now, perhaps, comes Thermidor.

Oh, crap, revolution again. Comes the bloody revolution. The only real revolution the G.O.P. really wants is to eliminate the entire Federal income tax. I’d bet they’d LOVE that revolution. Or maybe, not. The Republican Party is using coded and not so coded talk about “revolution” way too much for me to be comfortable about it. George Will? Revolution? No, Will, that’s not part of the political process in America.

That was the name of the month in the French Revolutionary calendar in which Robespierre fell. To historians, Thermidor denotes any era of waning political ardor. Congressional Democrats will not soon be herded into other self-wounding votes — e.g., for a cap-and-trade carbon-rationing scheme as baroque as the health legislation. During the Democrats’ health-care monomania, the nation benefited from the benign neglect of the rest of their agenda. Now the nation may benefit from the exhaustion of their appetite for more political risk.

Oh, yeah, Will, we LOVE the political kick in the ass we’re probably going to get for doing the right thing and passing health care reform. We Democrats love to be on the short side of opinion, don’t you know, that’s just what politicians love, doing unpopular legislation. You see, we LIKE to lose seats in Congress. No chance at all we’re doing it because it’s the right thing to do.

And all this fatuous argument coming from a man who doesn’t believe in global warming…. Why??? Certainly not because fixing global warming would cost the rich folks a little money, nah, couldn’t be you’re that predictable, Will.

See, Post Uses Xenophobia to Advance Its Budget Agenda, The American Prospect, March 29, 2010, by Dean Baker:

The Post once again used xenophobia to push its budget agenda as editorial page editor Fred Hiatt darkly warned readers that as a result of projected future budget deficits: “the United States would be increasingly at the mercy of China, Saudi Arabia and other lenders.”

Of course, as every econ 101 student knows, budget deficits do not determine the indebtedness of the U.S. to foreigners, the trade deficit does. The trade deficit in turn is the result of an over-valued dollar. The Post has actually been a supporter of the “strong dollar” policy that has given the U.S. high trade deficits. So, when it comes to the policy that actually puts us “at the mercy of China, Saudi Arabia and other lenders,” the Post has been on the wrong side.

It is also worth noting that the protectionist policies that the Post supports are a big factor in the deficit. If the U.S. allowed freer trade in health care services, especially the provision of Medicare, it could lead to enormous savings for the government and huge income gains to beneficiaries.

See, Why the President’s Next Big Thing Should Be Jobs, RobertReich.org, March 25, 2010, by Robert Reich.

See, Jeffrey Feldman’s comments on Twitter: “IF: Steele spends RNC $ at bondage club, Palin dons black leather at rally; THEN: dominatrix is the new family values??” — Not so lol.

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