Rational Arguments

Please move with me.

I will be blogging from now on at The Incidental Economist.

You should also switch your RSS feed over the TIE’s feed.

Thanks!

Aaron

I promised you some news. Here it is.

Anyone who has read my blog for any amount of time knows that Austin Frakt and I have been referencing each other’s stuff for a while. We’ve been talking up and back offline as well. It finally occurred to us that it might make more sense just to team up.

So that’s what we are going to do.

Rational Arguments is closing up shop. I will leave the blog open and up for archival purposes. And the email address will still work, so feel free to use it. But I will be blogging from now on at The Incidental Economist. I humbly ask that you all start heading over there. We’d also appreciate it if you would switch your RSS feeds over the TIE’s feed. That way you will miss nothing.

If you head over there now, you will see lots of ways to keep in touch with me. I’m not leaving. I’m just moving. It’s just a click away.

On a personal note, I want to sincerely thank every one of you who has been coming here. It’s been almost a year since I started the blog, and it’s only recently I’ve felt like I was hitting my stride. Please keep on visiting!

Aaron

Rep. Ryan is disappointing me.  He has a defense of his “Roadmap” up.  Specifically, he wants to talk about how his plan will affect Medicare.  In his own words:

We do not have a choice as to whether Medicare will change from its current structure. It is being driven to insolvency. An honest debate requires a serious discussion of how Medicare will avert its collapse and be made sustainable. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, the Democrats’ political machine has attacked my contribution to this debate, making the false claim that the only solution put forward to save Medicare would “end Medicare as we know it.”

The CBO has said that my reform plan, “A Roadmap for America’s Future,” would put Medicare on a sustainable path. The plan protects and preserves Medicare for those enrolled now and for those who will become eligible in the next 10 years, while reforming the program to ensure it will be there for younger generations. Future seniors would have access to the same coverage I enjoy as a congressman.

OK.  First of all, no one is arguing against the fact that Medicare has to change from its current path to be sustainable.  But part of the reason that path was made worse was because of the huge unpaid for addition of Medicare Part D, which was not passed by the Democratic machine.  ARGH.  Look, he’s made me make a partisan argument.  Unforgivable.  Deep breath.

Rep. Ryan, your plan for Medicare is not crazy.  It’s not corrupt.  It’s not morally wrong.  But I’m sorry, it absolutely would end Medicare as we know it.

Medicare right now is a defined benefit plan.  Everyone knows exactly what they are going to get from the government and that’s what happens.  Every year, the government (CMS) figures out how much it will cost to give those defined benefits, and it pays the bills.  There are pros and cons to such a plan, but that’s Medicare as we know it.

You would like to change Medicare to a defined contribution plan.  In that plan, everyone knows how much money (in a voucher) they are going to get every year, and then they go out and buy insurance.  Every year, the government sets how much it is willing to pay, and gives out the vouchers.

A defined contribution plan is NOTHING like a defined benefit plan.  Going to a voucher system, is a total change from Medicare.  It’s the “end of Medicare as we know it”.

Medicare right now is the equivalent of Canada’s single payer health care system.  You want to end that; you want to privatize it.  It’s a radical change.  Own it.  Deal with it.

Your proposal would be a much greater disruption of Medicare than anything in passed in health care reform recently.  Yet many of your colleagues have said that any cuts to Medicare would be horrible.  Did you share this view with them earlier this year?  I ask, because I’ve always felt that the demagoguery about cuts to Medicare was foolish.  I’m not sure you’ve always been consistent.  A wonk would clarify that.

The irony is that you keep talking about the CBO as if they were the gold standard of knowledge in terms of how reform will affect the budget in the future.  Did you share this feeling with your colleagues when they were debating health care reform earlier this year?  I ask, because I’ve always felt the CBO was credible.  I’m not sure you’ve always been consistent.  A wonk would clarify that.

Another irony is that what you are proposing, giving the elderly money or vouchers to buy private insurance, sounds much like the exchanges recently passed in the PPACA.  Right?  How is it different?  Did you share your feelings on the value of this type of setup with your colleagues when they were debating health care reform earlier this year?  I ask, because I’ve always felt the exchanges seemed like something conservatives would always support.  I’m not sure you’ve always been consistent.

A wonk would clarify that.

I apologize for the light blogging the last day or two.  I promise the time hasn’t been wasted.

I should have some exciting news in the next few days about the future of the blog.  Well, at least I think it’s exciting.

Hold tight and watch this space!

I’ve been following Bruce Bartlett for the last year or so with increasing interest.  I am too young to remember him from his work in the Reagan and Bush I administrations, but I have to tell you, the man makes as much sense as anyone I’ve been reading with respect to the economy and the budget.  Maybe he speaks to my conservative side.

A few weeks ago, he wrote about a poll that I’ve been meaning to get back to.  I’m late, but it’s still relevant:

Today, Harris released an extraordinarily interesting poll on attitudes toward taxes, spending and deficits in several European countries and the US…The principal lesson of the US responses appears to be that support for spending cuts and government downsizing is broad and deep. But at the same time, there is strong support for soaking the rich through the tax system. Also, Americans continue to have unrealistic expectations about how easy it will be to balance the budget without cuts in programs that affect them. This suggests that if forced to choose between spending cuts that affect them and higher taxes that don’t affect them, the latter could quickly become the dominant position…

Question 5: “Which of the following policy areas do you think should bear the biggest part of the spending cuts burden?”

I have gotten a lot of emails from you concerning the state fair, especially in light of my earlier posts on obesity.  So let me state the obvious – no, I don’t eat like that every day.  Nor does my wife.  Nor do my children.  In fact, I would wager that the way we are eating now is the healthiest we have ever eaten.

But we made a conscious decision, long ago, not to make food an issue in our house.  And, although I have no scientific data, my anecdotal case series of three children has produced two of the best eaters (in terms of variety) that I have ever encountered.  Noah is the outlier.  If it was socially acceptable, he would eat chicken nuggets and fries, three meals a day, seven days a week.  In fact, he is a proponent of the “beige” diet, in which all foods are brown.

We’re working on him.

But not making a big deal out of food means that we relax the rules periodically.  And so, on State Fair day, all bets are off.  Noah got his elephant ear.  Sydney got a big bag of cotton candy.  Jacob would have eaten a whole steak if he’d had room.  If they had fought for the deep fried butter, I might have even let them try it.

They have more sense than that, though.  Even children draw the line somewhere.

My parents live in Nevada.  Sharron Angle is running for the Senate there.  This makes me sad:

“I think we get confused a little bit. Our healthcare system is the best in the world. There’s nothing wrong with our healthcare system. Our doctors are the best,” says Angle.

“But how many people get access to the best healthcare in the world,” asks Action News reporter Marco Villarreal.

“The access is not what is being denied. It is the cost that has become prohibitive and that’s what we need to address,” she answers.

The fact that I even need to type any of this – at this stage of the game – is maddening.  Ms. Angle? First, the prohibitive cost is what is denying access.  Also, the subsidies?  The exchanges?  The other stuff in PPACA?  That is what they were addressing.

Second, no one, and I mean no one, is saying we need to fix the healthcare system because our doctors aren’t good enough. Can you please point out one person who made that claim?

Third, do you really believe there is nothing wrong with our healthcare system?  Really?  Really?

I am OK with people who think the PPACA is the wrong way to address the problems that exist in health care.  There are other solutions.  But I’m getting a little tired of politicians who have no idea what they are talking about.

So in the last few weeks, I’ve written two posts that are not like my usual posts.  And the traffic for those two posts are is more than almost everything else I’ve written combined.  So, welcome, to all of you who came for the state fair food.  I hope you will consider staying for the health policy.

Or, maybe I just need to write more posts off topic.

I was born and raised on the East Coast.  I went to college on the East Coast, and then medical school on the East Coast.  Then, my wife (then fiance) and I picked up and moved all the way out to the West Coast for 5 years.  It wasn’t until 2003 that I spent any real time in the Midwest.

It wasn’t until 2003 that I ever went to a state fair.

For people who don’t live in places like this, there is simply no way to explain the Indiana State Fair.  There is a whole thing with animals and showing them.  I don’t understand any of it.  Truly, I can’t tell the difference between the pig that wins first place and the one who goes home empty handed.  There are rides, but I don’t trust any of them.  There are shows, but I don’t really care for anyone performing there.  So why do we go?

The food.  It’s completely insane.

You can turn on Top Chef or any show on the Food Network and hear about chefs on the “cutting edge”.  They may be deconstructing old favorites, or using molecular gastronomy, or fusing two cuisines.  They have NOTHING on the artists at the state fair.

State fair food people do things that no one in the real world would dare.  They push the limits, to the point that I no longer know where this will end.

I warn you.  The rest of this post is not for the faint of heart.

My wife grew up in Milwaukee.  She will occasionally talk of food that she loved at their state fair when she was a child.  Because of this, we always manage to nab one of these (her favorites):

That is a chocolate cream puff. We once got one that I swear weighed 6 pounds.  My crack team of eaters – 5 of us – put this down in less than a minute.  We’re veterans of the state fair.  Cream puffs are for, well, cream puffs.  This is a warm up.

After all that sweet, you gotta have some salty.  Luckily, this was right across the way:

Get this.  The geniuses at the state fair have invented this gizmo where they can take a whole spud, and just by spinning it, they can turn it into one long mobius-strip of potato.  Then they drop it in a deep fat fryer until it’s absolutely deadly. It’s like a potato chip, only not as good for you.  They serve it with a cheese-like sauce and all the ketchup you can carry.  It’s too big for the plate.  This might have taken us 2 minutes to polish off.

Just so you know, I took a Pepcid before we left.

Some of you are thinking I’ve overplayed my hand right now.  After all, these aren’t really that bad.  Sure, they’re unhealthy, but not really interesting.  I laugh at your naivete.  Because here is where the fun begins.  Here is where the Indiana State Fair blows your mind.

Back in 2003, before I left for the fair, everyone would ask one question.  Are you going to eat this:

Of course I was.  Back in ’03, the cutting edge of state fair food was the deep-fried Twinkie.  Why, you ask?  Because a regular Twinkie is for health nuts.  They take a Twinkie, dip it in batter, and then drop it in the deep fryer.  When you eat it, it’s like a funnel cake wrapped around regular cake wrapped around sugar.  See the sign above “Bread Man”?  That sign is letting you know that you can take home a bag.

Although my oldest son and I tried this back at that first fair, we passed on it in subsequent years.  Not because it was terrible, although it sorta was, but because every year for the next 5 years, they found something else to deep fry:

Behold the wonder of the deep fried candy station.  This beauty appeared at the second state fair I attended in 2004.  That year, I partook of a deep fried Oreo.  Sure, Oreos are good and all.  But…  it’s deep fried!  Dipped in batter, dropped in the fryer, and then covered in powdered sugar.  Much better than the Twinkie.  But they weren’t done there.  In 2005, they added the deep fried Snickers.  Push a stick into the Snickers, drench it in batter, fry it, and powder it with sugar.  The master stroke of this one is that the Snickers melts inside the batter, so when you bite it, you get to scald your mouth with molten Snickers. Mmmmmmmm.

Over the next few years, they added deep fried Reeses Peanut Butter Cups, deep fried cookie dough, deep fried Milky Ways, and deep fried Pepsi.  From what I hear, they inject some dough with Pepsi and give it the usual routine.

If you look at the yellow sign, they have the “Special Candy Combo”.  That’s what true gourmets like us get.  One deep fried Snickers, one deep fried Reeses, and two deep fried Oreos.  We take this basket of goodness behind the cart, outside the Cattle barn, and (ignoring the manure smell) my children gather around like baby birds awaiting a worm.  After sampling each of these, my wife and I lower the sticks in each of the treats into our childrens’ mouths so they can take a bite.  We go around in circles until the “food” is all gone.  I have no fear of spreading germs.  No germs could live on this stuff.

We satisfied ourselves on deep fried candy and such until 2009.  But the state fair people were obviously anything but satisfied.  In 2009, they rolled out this baby:

That’s not a Photoshopped fake.  It’s chocolate covered bacon.  My wife, who is usually a sport, tapped out here.  Not my kids, though.  Nothing could stop them.  We stepped up and placed an order.  When the chef collected our bacon from the vat of chocolate, she asked if we wanted powdered sugar on it.  I was temporarily frozen.  After all, I had no idea how true connoisseurs ate their “Pigs in the Mud”.  We opted for the sugar.

The bacon was soggy.  It was disappointing.  Not terrible tasting, but better in concept than in execution.

That brings us to 2010.  A few weeks ago, the whispering began.  How could they top chocolate covered bacon?  I read a few posts from people attending other state fairs which confirmed for me that Indiana was ahead of its time.  Our maestros could not let us down.  They would have to once again prove their mettle.

And, boy, did they:

The “Doughnut Burger”.  Words failed me.  What insane mastermind looked at a burger and thought, “You know what this is missing? Glazed Krispy Kremes.”  And that’s what they did.  You may not be able to see it, but you can get your doughnut burger with cheese and/or bacon.  Don’t believe me?  Here’s a close-up:

Where do I start?  The doughnuts are on the grill.  They take one of the grilled doughnuts, and put a burger right on top of it.  Everyone seemed to be adding cheese and bacon.  And then they top it off with another doughnut.  It’s like someone thought the Double Down was too healthy.

I’m a pretty adventurous eater.  If I’m in a restaurant, and there’s something funky or odd on the menu, I will order it.  But this…  this was too much.  I couldn’t do it.  Even my kids didn’t fight my decision.

You would be shocked how many of these I saw sold, though.

Where will it end?  I am almost afraid for 2011.  At some point, they will go too far.  I fear that Hoosiers won’t be able to turn back before it’s too late.  Partly, that’s because right next to the doughnut burgers, they were selling this:

Deep.  Fried.  Butter.  Did you hear me?  Deep fried butter!!!  I couldn’t even look.

Isn’t that one of the signs of the apocalypse?

I’ve been following with interest the ongoing fight debate between Paul Krugman and, well, no one yet.  I hold all of you to a high standard, so I’m not going to recap the whole thing.  I’ll give you the broad strokes.

Rep. Paul Ryan put together a “Roadmap” for the budgetary future.  It’s won a lot of acclaim from some for at last being an actual policy document that attempts to outline a conservative vision of deficit reduction.  I will admit, I was initially impressed with its existence.  I can’t say I agree with it’s methodology.  For instance, I think the replacing of Medicare with vouchers that will slowly become inadequate to purchase insurance will only result in the same problems I cite here when countering Avik Roy’s similar proposal for Medicaid.  Rep. Ryan was also going to freeze all discretionary spending at 2009 levels until 2019.  That’s simply stunning.

But at least it put something down on the table.  That way we can start to debate.

Rep. Ryan even had the plan scored by the CBO.  And it brought the deficit down impressively.  Massively, in fact.

Yes, some noted problems with the plan.  For instance, Jonathan Chait said:

Begin with his proposed tax changes. Ryan would not only retain the Bush tax cuts for the highest earners, he would further lower the top tax rate to 25%. On top of that, he would repeal all taxes on corporate income, inherited estates, capital gains, and dividends. In other words, he would completely eliminate the most progressive elements of the tax code, and slash the next most progressive element. In their place he would impose a value-added tax, which would not bring in nearly enough revenue to replace the revenue lost from his tax cuts, but would fall much more heavily on the poor and middle class.

I remember thinking that if he could really balance the budget and massively cut taxes, then he must be some sort of genius.  But then, a number of other groups said you couldn’t lower taxes so much and still balance the budget.  The cuts (even those massive ones) weren’t enough.  Rep. Ryan responded:

The tax reforms proposed and the rates specified were designed to maintain approximately our historic levels of revenue as a share of GDP, based on consultation with the Treasury Department and tax experts. If needed, adjustments can be easily made to the specified rates to hit the revenue targets and maximize economic growth. While minor tweaks can be made, it is clear that we simply cannot chase our unsustainable growth in spending with ever-higher levels of taxes. The purpose of the Roadmap is to get spending in line with revenue – not the other way around.

In other words, “we’ve got it covered.”  The exact quote was, “tax reforms would raise slightly less revenue than claimed“.

That was in March.  It’s been a busy year.

But this week, Rep. Ryan has been all over the news.  There was this mavericky profile in the Washington Post on Monday.  Ezra Klein had a long interview with him that made him look super-wonky.

But today.. hoo-boy.

Paul Krugman opened up a whole case of whoop ass on Rep. Ryan.  Remember the tax cuts that would result in “slightly less revenue than claimed”?  Turned out to be $4 trillion over a decade.  For those keeping score that’s four, count ‘em, four PPACA’s.  That’s… insane.  If you factor that in, it turns out that deficit in 2020 under the “roadmap” is not what the CBO claimed. It’s pretty much exactly where President Obama’s budget will get us.

Except that we will have those massive Medicare cuts.  Same to Medicaid.  And 2009 discretionary spending in 2019.  I was willing to at least listen to those kind of spending cuts when I thought it would help with the deficit.  But why would we consider them just to get the same deficit we would have without them?  How big are Rep. Ryan’s tax cuts to completely eat away the deficit savings?

The Tax Policy Center finds that the Ryan plan would cut taxes on the richest 1 percent of the population in half, giving them 117 percent of the plan’s total tax cuts. That’s not a misprint. Even as it slashed taxes at the top, the plan would raise taxes for 95 percent of the population.

I’m speechless.

It turns out that Rep. Ryan asked the CBO to score his plan as if revenue would be about the same as without the tax cuts.  He asked them to ignore the tax cuts.  He asked them to pretend the $4 trillion in lost revenue didn’t exist.

That’s not OK.  That’s cooking the books.

Paul Krugman gets sort of nasty.  So do a few others.  I try, really hard, not to do that here.  I will not question Rep. Ryan’s motives.  Nor will I pre-assume anything about his argument or answers to these issues. I hate when people do that.

But Rep. Ryan is a politican, and a pretty powerful one at that.  He has full access to the press and microphones. It’s time for him to step up.

You want to be a wonk?  Then you defend your plan.  Explain how you will account for the $4 trillion difference.  You don’t get to play with the big boys if you hem and haw and pretend that magically we will make up that money somewhere else.  That’s what politicians do.  And if he wants to be a politician, that’s fine, but then no special treatment from the press or people who know better.  You go back and play with the other politicians who have no idea what they are talking about.

I’m going to break my name calling rules just once here, because this is policy, and I take that seriously.  When you write a paper, or a blog, or a “roadmap”, you’re putting yourself out there.  I respect that.  But you have to be ready to defend your work.  If it gets attacked, that doesn’t mean it’s wrong.  Not everything is black and white, and some things are open to interpretation. But if someone makes a valid criticism of your work, you have only two honorable options.  You defend it, publicly for everyone to see, or you own up to your mistake.  Either one will do.  What you can’t do is run and hide, or pretend that you didn’t hear, or ignore the criticism and attack the criticizer.  If you do, then you’re not a serious player.

You’re a hack.