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Streetwise Professor on the administration’s Friday afternoon dump of CLASS (Community Living Assistance Services and Supports)
One element of Obamacare, the CLASS program (a long term care program) has flatlined. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, officially acknowledged what had been known since the get go: the program was not economically feasible. So she pulled the plug.
CLASS was one of the myriad pieces of legislative-financial legerdemain used to make believe that Obamacare would actually reduce future deficits.
The budgetary impacts of Obamacare were made up out of the whole cloth: CLASS was just the most egregious example of that. To create the fiction that Obamacare would save money, Congress and the administration resorted to budgetary and accounting tricks that were so outrageous that even the Greeks would have blanched at the thought of using them when presenting their fiscal numbers in to qualify for the Eurozone.
Yes. That bad.
Obamacare is not only a policy disaster, it is a fiscal time bomb. One would hope that the premature detonation of CLASS will put Congress and the country on warning, and result in the defusing of the rest of the whole dangerous mess. That, unfortunately, will have to wait until January 2013, at the earliest.
Jennifer Rubin on the demise of CLASS.
… To say that this is an embarrassment for the gang in the White House and the Democratic congressional leadership, who we already knew could not shoot straight, would be a gross understatement. The failure of CLASS, predicted by conservatives, sprang from the Democrats’ insistence to pass some “historic” health-care bill, any such bill, and deal with the consequences later. Well, later is now. You can be sure that this — along with the failed stimulus bill, the high unemployment rate and the massive debt — will be frequent features in Republicans’ 2012 ads.
Charles Krauthammer sums up the Obama strategy.
What do you do if you can’t run on your record — on 9 percent unemployment, stagnant growth and ruinous deficits as far as the eye can see? How to run when you are asked whether Americans are better off than they were four years ago and you are compelled to answer no?
Play the outsider. Declare yourself the underdog. Denounce Washington as if the electorate hasn’t noticed that you’ve been in charge of it for nearly three years.
But above all: Find villains.
President Obama first tried finding excuses, blaming America’s dismal condition on Japanese supply-chain interruptions, the Arab Spring, European debt and various acts of God.
Didn’t work. Sounds plaintive, defensive. Lacks fight, which is what Obama’s base lusts for above all.
Hence Obama’s new strategy: Don’t whine, blame. Attack. Indict. Accuse. Who? The rich — and their Republican protectors — for wrecking America.
In Obama’s telling, it’s the refusal of the rich to “pay their fair share” that jeopardizes Medicare. If millionaires don’t pony up, schools will crumble. Oil-drilling tax breaks are costing teachers their jobs. Corporate loopholes will gut medical research. …
This piece by Steve Hayward is a little long, but he needs time to explain why it is today’s liberals heart Ronald Reagan.
Of all the unlikely developments in American politics over the last two decades, the most astonishing is this: liberals suddenly love Ronald Reagan. They have taken to celebrating certain virtues they claim Reagan possessed—virtues they believe are absent from the conservative body politic today—while looking back with nostalgia at the supposed civility of the political struggles of the 1980s.
“There’s something there I miss today,” mused the former Democratic staffer and longtime talk-show host Chris Matthews in January about the relationship between Reagan and House Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, the most powerful Democrat in Washington during Reagan’s first term. Matthews dreamily evoked a time when Reagan and O’Neill had drinks together, swapped Irish stories, slapped backs, and, they say, cut deals with a minimum of personal rancor—as opposed to the ugly relations between the two parties today.
Even more notable is the fact that Reagan has become a model for presidential governance for . . . Barack Obama. Time, having proclaimed Obama to be the second coming of FDR in January 2009, abandoned that image in favor of declaring an Obama “bromance” with Reagan in January 2011. The White House’s press office revealed that Obama had read Lou Cannon’s biography of Reagan over the 2010 Christmas holidays, a choice that might once have seemed as incongruous as John F. Kennedy reading up on Calvin Coolidge. Obama even wrote an homage to Reagan for USA Today in February at the time of Reagan’s centennial birthday. “Reagan recognized the American people’s hunger for accountability and change,” the president said, thereby conferring on Reagan two of his most cherished political slogans.
All in all, say Time’s Michael Duffy and Michael Scherer, “there is no mistaking Obama’s increasing reliance on his predecessor’s career as a helpful template for his own.” After all, Reagan governed during a punishing recession with horrific unemployment, both of which led to a bad midterm election for his party and approval ratings in the 30s—only to win a 49-state landslide reelection. It is only natural for Obama and his political team to look at Reagan’s example to glean lessons about how they might achieve a similar result in 2012. …
Charlie Gasparino says the “flea party” is picketing the wrong people.
Here’s an important irony lost on those zany and sometimes violent Wall Street protesters: On the day that they extended their near riots from the financial district to the swanky uptown neighborhoods where many of the Wall Street millionaires live, we got proof positive that the ranks of the wealthiest Wall Streeters are shrinking.
Which is rotten news for the massive New York City welfare state that the protesters say they want to protect.
The proof comes from a new report by state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli that confirms much that’s been said and reported on these pages: The number of Wall Street fat cats is shrinking fairly dramatically, and will continue to shrink in the years ahead — meaning even less money coming from one of New York’s most important sources of tax revenue.
It also confirms something else reported recently on these pages: Rather than heading uptown to the homes of people like JP Morgan chief executive Jamie Dimon, the protesters should be marching south — way south — to protest the Washington lawmakers who gave us the jobs-killing Dodd-Frank financial reform. …