April 15, 2011
That would be at the White House of course. Brooks is upset that:
“It is sad, although not strange, that in today’s Washington they have never had a serious private conversation. The president has never invited Ryan over even for lunch.”
Brooks goes on to tell us five things that Ryan “believes” that Obama does not.
“First, he believes that aging populations, expensive new health care technologies and the extravagant political promises have made the current welfare state model unsustainable. Fundamental reform is necessary or the whole thing will collapse, here and in Europe.
Second, he believes that seniors and the middle class cannot be excused from the benefit cuts that will have to be imposed to rebalance these systems. Third, he believes that health care costs will not be brought under control until consumers take responsibility for their decisions and providers have market-based incentives to reduce prices.
Fourth, he believes that tax increases should not be part of these reforms because the economic costs outweigh the gains. Fifth, he does not believe government can nurture growth and reduce wage stagnation with targeted investments.”
Let’s look at some of these points more closely.
Number one is certainly a very peculiar belief given the fact that Japan and most countries in Europe in have much older populations than the U.S. and are still showing comparable rates of productivity growth. It would be interesting to know what sort of timeline he envisions for this scenario since it would take many decades for the age composition of the United States population to catch up to its older neighbors, all of whom continue to see growing economies.
The second belief only makes sense if the first one is true, which the evidence in the world does not support in any obvious way.
The third belief is contradicted by the experience of the dozens of countries who have comparable quality health care systems to the United States and pay less than half as much per person. Most, if not all, of them rely less on co-payments and other patient contributions than the United States. It is also worth noting that if the United States had the same per person health care costs as any other wealthy country, it would be looking at huge budget surpluses rather than deficits.
The fourth belief assumes that there are no areas where the government can possibly do things better than the market. Ryan and Brooks may not understand this point, so I will explain.
If the government can provide a service like health care insurance or retirement pensions more efficiently than the private sector, as a vast body of evidence suggests, then it means that we would either want higher taxes or a less efficient economy. It does appear that Ryan would prefer the latter. His Medicare proposal would add more than $30 trillion to the country’s health care costs over Medicare’s 75-year planning period. This amount, which reflects the pure increase in costs, not the shift from the government to beneficiaries, is almost 6 times the projected shortfall in the Social Security program.
The fifth point seems to imply that Ryan thinks that in 2011 we have somehow stumbled on the optimal level of government support for infrastructure, education, and research and development. I suppose God may have spoken to Representative Ryan, but the rest of us might view the optimal degree of government support as a matter to be determined by evidence at each point in time. This means the level could be very different in 1961, 2011, and 2041 depending on the possibilities available.
As Brooks has described Representative Ryan’s positions, it seems that the Congressman holds many views that are contradicted by a vast body of evidence. Representative Ryan may be a very nice guy (I met him once in his district where we debated Social Security privatization. He seemed nice enough.), but do we really think it’s important for President Obama to spend his time and the taxpayers’ money having lunch with someone who is so out of touch with reality?
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