It's possible to make too much of it, but sure, the shutdown matters.
What doesn't matter? Most likely, it's the glitches -- very real -- in the ACA exchange rollout. My strong feeling is what matters is the product, not the interface. We'll see, I guess.
What do you have? What was pushed off the front pages that we should know about? What do you think mattered this week?
Saturday, October 5, 2013
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IMO the shutdown, if brief, doesn't matter much, except as it interferes with the Debt Limit, which matters a lot
ReplyDeleteI agree that the ACA rollout doesn't matter - most people will wait a week or two. But the reality of the plans will matter a lot.
I'm taking BART to the As playoff games, and overhear lots of talk about the shutdown and ACA. As one would expect in coastal California, the shutdown talk is largely anti-Republican, like why do they want to deny healthcare to 20 million people. But, as to the guts and prices on the exchanges, I'm hearing a lot of griping that the options and plans are no better, or even worse than what was available before, and with high deductibles they will be out several thousands a year, etc... Obviously, this is all hearsay, but I hope that the ACA isn't as disappointing as the early scuttlebutt makes it out to be,
I think the really important thing about the shutdown is how it ends. If the Democrats make significant concessions in order to end it, that would really stain the party and pretty much destroy the rest of Obama's term. But if the Republicans give in without anything more than cosmetic changes on the part of the Democrats, it could be the beginning of the end for the Tea Party rump and Ted Cruz as a political power.
ReplyDeleteI disagree that if it ends with only cosmetic concessions it would harm Cruz and the Tea Party. They will say that if only Boehner had waited a little longer, Obama would have been forced to give up, etc. Remember, to Tea Party types, true conservatism cannot fail, it can only be failed...
DeleteIf they fail, will these Tea Party tactics lead to stronger primary challenges from GOP moderates?
ReplyDeleteWill a failure invigorate or debilitate Tea Party supporters/activists?
Hope you can share your perspective.
Jonathan,
ReplyDeleteThis is OT. Like you I am baseball fan. Selig announced he is stepping down. Why don't you do a baseball post on the career of Selig.
Cheers
Do you read anything into the unanimous vote in the House to preemptively pay furloughed government employees? My gut feeling is that they are starting to clean up the loose ends so they can pass a clean CR/debt ceiling bill. Once they accept the position that this is just now a series of paid government holidays, it (might) show that the Tea Party member's heart aren't in the fight anymore.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if they are reaping the whirlwind with respect to the way they are treating their staff on Obamacare. My understanding is that the current Tea Party concept is to force all congressional staffers to buy Gold or Platinum insurance plans, exempt from federal subsidies.
DeleteBear in mind, their people previously had employer-subsidized insurance, like all federal employees, and some are paid perhaps $25,000 a year. Forcing them into paying ~$6000 a year for a talking point boggles the imagination.
I'd never ask one of my people to get me coffee again...
I saw somewhere that the people who ran the Mass. heatlhcare exchanges said it took a year to get it going smoothly, and there's no point in even judging the rollout until six weeks or so from now, when it gets closer to the time the plans will go into effect. People who sign up now won't actually start until Jan. 1.
ReplyDeleteSo I agree basically that the glitches this week won't matter.
What does matter as the week ends is not only the shutdown and the looming mega-crisis of default, but that nobody seems to know how to end this. The speaker was quoted last week as saying he wouldn't let default happen even if he had to take it to the floor without a GOP majority, and later as saying he wouldn't go to the floor with it without support from the GOP majority. Every story I see says he has no idea what to do and is improvising day by day. This is no way to run a railroad, let alone a huge nation, central to the world economy.
Seems to me that the incredible pent-up demand, which is bringing the on-line enrollment through the Federal website, is the big news this week. I've managed to log in once, and gotten no further. I'll wait a bit. But that's what mattered. People want health insurance.
ReplyDeleteMy conservative sister in MO will be able to get nearly $13,000 a year in subsidies for health insurance. In rural regions, the cost of private insurance is so unbelievably high.
DeleteItaly avoided a destabilizing capitulation to Berlusconi, thus possibly reshaping the future of its center-right.
ReplyDeleteJapan, under Abe, decided to raise its sales tax next year, but also to launch a new stimulus program to cushion the economy.
(Both decisions seem to be tentative early signs of political systems that, though riddled with their own pathologies and problems, are gradually choosing to right themselves. Some enterprising American journalist could have gotten a think piece out of the juxtaposition with the US, still stuck in a phase of self-destructive acting-out enabled by craven right-leaning elites.)
With no jobs numbers we now have proof that jobs numbers in and of themselves don't matter (though economic trends certainly do).
ReplyDeleteThe emerging narrative I'm hearing is that the shutdown might go on until we get right up against the debt limit so Boehner only has to "surrender" once, rather than twice. If it does go on for a few weeks it'll probably go from a shutdown that doesn't matter to one that does.
A shutdown that doesn't matter politically maybe. But to the families it is hurting as well as the economy, it matters right now.
DeleteI'm willing to think it may matter more if it last until October 17, but it's not yet clear whether it would redound to the Democrats' benefit or to the GOP. A longer shutdown and prolonged debt-ceiling showdown would likely hurt the economy more in Q4 and possibly for 2014 through to the elections. A weaker economy may yet help the GOP by putting a cap on support for Democrats, who'll never be able to say they truly got the economy on the strong path to recovery. All high information voters will sense the shadiness of this strategy, but who knows yet about low information voters?
DeleteI've tried to suggest back here that ressentiment from recently-downscale, undereducated whites is driving the Tea Party train. In trying to understand where those folks are coming from, I left out where they're going: nowhere good, or nowhere like where they've been.
ReplyDeleteIf those folks are driving this, it raises a pretty disturbing question: what concession would Obama/Reid/Pelosi need to offer to make this *all* go away? Think it through. I bet you land on something like a return to Jim Crow-type apartheid.
I'm not saying that's necessarily correct, and its easy to be alarmist at times like this, but if something similar is true, its pretty damn scary, and obviously extremely important.
Interesting comment, thanks. I'd suggest it's not just "undereducated whites" driving the Tea Party train. There's plenty of evidence that college-educated, middle-class and upper-middle class (not to mention billionaires like the Kochs) play large roles there as well.
DeleteBut I think you're onto something, which I'd sketchily define as the convergence of two broad trends in American society over the past 40 years: 1) rising economic inequality (and its attendant social anxiety) as expressed in flat median incomes when worker productivity has basically doubled; and 2) declining relative social status for straight white men.
I think that your understanding of the causality of the situation puts the cart before the horse. Obama/Reid/Pelosi don't have to offer anything to Boehner. That's why they aren't negotiating.
DeleteAsk yourself this: if they stay away from the table, what happens? Who loses money? Federal workers, sure; defense contractors, sure. When this starts costing wealthy people and the markets real money, who can they call to make things change? Who will get real pressure to bend? The guy who can't get re-elected again? Or the guy who's refusing to execute Congress's Constitutionally mandated functions?
@massappeal - the interesting thing about your comment - if we accept that the two forces you identify are driving the Tea Party train (I think its plausible), then it is probably unlikely that Kochs or others in the rentier class are driving the Tea Party train as well.
DeleteAfter all, entities like Georgia-Pacific or their oil & gas holdings put lots of dollars in Koch pockets as they contribute heavily to the social forces you identify. Those guys aren't driving that train, it seems to me.
They're free riders on it.
CSH, simply gearing policy toward full employment instead of deficit reduction might do your folks a world of good.
DeleteScott, that's an interesting point, and considering that this kindly audience must be gasping at the prospect of yet another "would stimulus work?" debate, let's fiat that it would. Two interesting questions nevertheless follow:
Delete1) First, even if we get back to full employment, would the Tea Partiers get jobs good enough to return to their former glory? Any job is better than no job, but are those jobs good enough to make those Tea Partiers whole (as they perceive it)?
2) Would the Kochs get off the train? Full employment helps the Kochs when more brand name toilet paper is purchased or demand is greater for their oil and gas. Costs go up though with a tighter labor market. My impression is the costs overwhelm the revenues in these cases - if so, and the Koch-types exit, would the Tea Party soldier on?
I wouldn't want to guess about how the Koch's would respond. With just two relevant decision makers, personal idiosyncrasies play a big role. But I think lower unemployment and rising wages would make people in general less uneasy, and that might calm the GOP base.
DeleteThere was a silly article on a punk rock band filming a porn film on the lawn of the Westboro Baptist Church, which likely did not matter, in the long run. But it gave me a funny idea.
ReplyDeleteWhat if a group of homosexual couples did an art project on the lawn of the Westboro Baptist Church, called the "Homosexual Lifestyle Education Project." In this, they would engage in small pleasures of life, from board and card games, to reading specific authors, watching certain sports teams, and eating certain foods. For each activity, they would post signs to educate the congregation on what they were doing, so the good Baptist folk could avoid doing "gay things."
Like playing Monopoly, or barbecuing corn, or rooting for the Padres, or reading Agatha Christie, or playing with your dog, etc, etc.
Just felt like sharing!
They'd be charged with trespassing?
DeleteHere's a tweet from my IT son: Failures of the US Healthcare Exchange are not 'glitches'. They are failures of engineering and eng. management. I weep for my profession.
ReplyDeleteYes, the coding techniques and design flaws are being ripped apart on tech sites. How many times have we seen millions spent on government IT projects (even with reputable "consultants" like IBM) abandoned because they fail? I am worried this could be one of them. Back to the drawing board isn't an option. This gives ammunition to the Republicans--should have postponed it until it was ready. Who knew it wasn't ready and is letting Obama stand there and say it's a capacity issue?
DeleteSupreme Court announced its selected docket for the new judicial year: http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-court-new-term-20131006,0,6362653.story
ReplyDeleteRepublican comments that there is no possibility of default as long as the Treasury Dept can pay interest on the debt suggest really big problems lie ahead after mid October. I can easily imagine Republicans refusing to budge on extending the debt limit, while continuing to pass little budget bills that fund specific agencies (National parks, for instance). If the Senate refuses these bills or Obama vetoes them, the Republicans will be certain to scream that THEY'VE tried to compromise and that the fault for default is all the Democrats -- and half the country will agree with them. It's not clear what an acceptable Democratic counterstrategy would be. Perhaps Republicans could be discredited if a great deal of pain and suffering were inflicted on the public and people decided to punish Republicans at the polls, but elections are a year away and the pain and suffering would probably have to be extraordinary -- something like diving into full scale recession. It would not be surprising if the public blamed such a recession on Obama personally and Democrats in general.
ReplyDeleteI think the happy talk about how default is impossible because everyone will be reasonable is delusional.
There's a six-week clean CR on offer from the Senate, so the Dems are the ones pushing the shutdown. That's clear and simple. The Senate would probably do a short-term debt limit increase too.
DeleteConservative news outlets would probably spin it quite differently, but just imagine a simple side-by-side comparison. That's how you convince the 50+% who aren't firmly in the GOP camp.
@mike, so you think Boehner's talk about not allowing the US to default isn't credible?
MP, did that first line come out as intended?
DeleteI don't think Boehner would permit a default. Destroying the economy to save your job isn't really a reliable way to, well, save your job. Also, it's possible that what looks like loose talk about default not being real or not being all that bad is just a strategy to try to regain some of the bargaining leverage that they lost by admitting that they couldn't afford not to give in in the end.
Quite right, Scott. I forgot the all important "not," but I promise it was in my head. It should read " ...so the Dems are NOT the ones pushing the shutdown."
DeleteI agree that the Boehner noises might be bluff intended to frighten. However, Boehner isn't make clear moves to negotiate a debt limit deal. His demands are still out of line, and he's got a short time to shift his boat of a conference in a different direction. He ran out of time with the shutdown, so I think it could happen again. It'll be much clearer in 7 to 9 days.
ModeratePoll -- What I see is Boehner saying there's no real chance of default as long as Republicans get their pound of flesh. Quite a few Republicans seem to think as long as interest on the debt is paid that default will have been avoided. True, there is more for the government to spend money on than interest, but that's just a matter of priorities..... and the Republicans will help steer Obama with partial spending bills/
ReplyDeleteSee! Here's a bill to authorize 30 billion dollars a month for interest. And here's a bill for the National Park Service! Here's a bill for No Child Left Behind and other educational programs! Here's a bill to pay for the National Science Foundation and NOAA (except for climate change studies)! Here's a bill for the National Labor Relations Board -- a quarter of it, anyhow! Here's a bill to fund Social Security and a brand new commission to recommend ways of cutting Social Security! Here's a Coast Guard bill! And here's....
See? There's not the slightest chance of default. Obama just has to sign these bills and our financial problems are over. Any idiot can see it. And if Obama doesn't oblige after a couple of weeks or a month .... maybe he's gone insane. Banks are failing, after all. Old folks are suffering. The stock market's going down and down and overseas exchanges have crashed, and we can't get this President to listen to us! We probably ought to impeach him. For the good of the country, of course.
You can probably get 50% of the public to buy that by the end of October. The question is, does that rise to 70% by New Years or fall to 45%