What, for good or ill, would a President Ron Paul have accomplished? What, try though he might, would he not be able to do?
I ask this question because it’s a way of asking what a President actually has power to do, even when his agenda is likely to be opposed by much of the political establishment of both parties, and where he can be blocked, even when he’s determined and dedicated to his particular set of political principles.
What, realistically, would you have expected a President Ron Paul to get done?
My good Lynn,
An excellent post, in that it precludes much hot air by raising the point that what must be examined first is what is actually possible in U.S. politics.
For example, if someone says “If Romney gets this kind of margin, I’d expect…voucherizing of Medicare, and privatization of Social Security…” without expressly qualifying that she is unequivocally speaking only of future retirees 54 or younger, it becomes reasonable to question upon what planet she envisions this occurring.
The reason being, obviously, is that we live, not in a Caesarian (or Romneyian) empire, but rather in a representative democratic republic composed of not only a President, but also of 100 Senators and 435 Representatives. On this particular planet as well, in this nation, at this point in history, the largest political cohort just happens to be retirees and retiring and about to retire Baby Boomers, of all political affiliations. That age cohort is also distinguished by voting in greater numbers than any other. To become and remain one of the 100 Senators and 435 Representatives, then, and thus to enact any legislation whatsoever, one must be elected or reelected to office on an ever increasing basis by that aging, imminently retiring cohort.
Were any sort of privatization of anything but far future Social Security and Medicare accounts even conceivably to be legislated by virtue of any sort of Republican supermajority, those legislating it would then be faced with turning to their constituents in the cohort described above (which, unlike any other but gender, is uniformly distributed throughout all districts and states) and chirping, “I just changed your current and near future retirement benefits, with no transition, which will probably cost you more money out of pocket very soon, if not immediately. Instead of electing an immediately available opponent who will repeal my recent legislation and rebate any unfortunate, unexpected costs you may suffer in the meantime, will you reelect me instead? Oh, and may I have 10,000 marbles, please?”
Although our good Steve has previously demagogued and fear-mongered against Paul Ryan’s current Medicare proposal by pointing out that, like the Articles of Confederation, Paul Ryan’s initial Medicare proposal is still available to read and thus, with the same likelihood that a Romney administration might attempt to replace the Constitution with the AoC, it might attempt to apply Ryan’s initial Medicare proposal in privatizing Medicare, all other, sane individuals understand that, politicologically, no current privatization of current retirement benefits can ever occur in the U.S., for the reasons given in the paragraph above this one.
Whether or not various elected officials voting for current privatization of current U.S. retirement benefits may find themselves in receipt of marbles, however, requested or not, at velocity or not, is less certain.
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
“An excellent post, in that it precludes much hot air by raising the point that what must be examined first is what is actually possible in U.S. politics.”
Thanks! I’m glad you like it.
“For example, if someone says “If Romney gets this kind of margin, I’d expect…voucherizing of Medicare, and privatization of Social Security…” without expressly qualifying that she is unequivocally speaking only of future retirees 54 or younger, it becomes reasonable to question upon what planet she envisions this occurring.”
I’m puzzled. You do know that I’m in my early 50s, right? Why would you think I was saying what I expected to happen to your already guaranteed Social Security and Medicare, rather than what I expect to happen to my own Social Security and Medicare under that circumstance? By all means, feel free to modify that sentence to “voucherizing of Medicare, and privatization of Social Security, both of these things to take place as soon as I personally am eligible for retirement.”
“Were any sort of privatization of anything but far future Social Security and Medicare accounts even conceivably to be legislated by virtue of any sort of Republican supermajority”
You do understand that to someone in her early 50s, changes to Social Security and Medicare that happen just in time for her retirement don’t look all that much like “far future Social Security and Medicare accounts”? And that, though I certainly don’t want to jeopardize the retirement security of all of those Baby Boomers who are ahead of me, I’m not all that well prepared to replace those suddenly decreased retirement funds, given that I’ve already spent most of my prime retirement earning years, and that I would still, under this system, wind up paying the taxes to supply full benefits for absolutely everyone who is even a few years older than me? An age cohort that, as you say yourself, is quite large.
And so, as you suggest the people older than me would do were it their retirement benefits on the line, I intend to elect an immediately available opponent. If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
Now, all of that said, I actually do expect that the eventual resolution of the Social Security and Medicare discussion will be considerably more favorable to me than was the original Ryan budget. I even expect it to be better than whatever the latest Romney/Ryan proposal is. But the mechanism by which that happens is that people like me object to a deal like that in the original Ryan budget. If we didn’t do that, that’s the proposal that would still be floated, no?
I also do realize that Social Security and Medicare will need to be adjusted in some way by the time I am old enough to qualify for them. In fact, Social Security has been adjusted already, and I have accepted that adjustment, including the fact that my full retirement age is two years older than that of people older than me. In theory, you could fix Social Security (if perhaps not Medicare) purely by hiking taxes, but I don’t personally actually expect or lobby for that to happen. I’m open to considering proposals like those in Domenici-Rivlin, or Bowles-Simpson, or this interesting one from Reihan Salam: http://www.nationalreview.com/agenda/262924/pozen-graham-and-quest-workable-social-security-reform-reihan-salam
But I do want to make sure that we don’t wind up with a resolution that uniquely disadvantages my age cohort in particular (as the ones just young enough to be hit by the new system and just old enough to have the least time to prepare for it).
I’m puzzled. You do know that I’m in my early 50s, right? Why would you think I was saying what I expected to happen to your already guaranteed Social Security and Medicare, rather than what I expect to happen to my own Social Security and Medicare under that circumstance?
My good Lynn,
Because, without additional qualification, the English construction you chose to deploy – “voucherizing of Medicare, and privatization of Social Security” – means what it says: voucherizing Medicare and privatizing Social Security immediately.
I am less than a decade older than you, perhaps as little as five years. Whose government retirement, yours or mine, and even more so government funded first tier quality medical care, do you fantasize as “guaranteed”, and why?
By all means vote against Ryan’s privatization of ever-inflating medical prices. That will simply mean I will more likely get 100% of my government funded retirement and medical care farther down the road – because I am in line ahead of you – while you will receive precisely that much proportionately less, until the system abruptly collapses in your lap because patients were never forced far earlier, when it might have still been possible to make a difference, on hundreds of millions of individual, one-to-one bases to confront each episode with each of their individual providers at the point of purchase and demand increasingly lower pricing at every turn. As long as someone else pays, though, whatever the price is will continue to be fine – until it no longer is.
Given my life history and recent medical events in the past decade I expect to have about ten to fifteen years more life ahead of me from right now, after which I will not need Medicare at all; Madame Stuart is completely provided for.
You will ensure that I will collect in full, but if something drastic is not done, you yourself will grow old on universal Medicaid, that is, where it is even in fact accepted.
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
“Although our good Steve has previously demagogued and fear-mongered against Paul Ryan’s current Medicare proposal by pointing out that, like the Articles of Confederation, Paul Ryan’s initial Medicare proposal is still available to read and thus”
Etch-a Sketch really works. Only the last thing said counts in conservaworld. I wonder if that should also hold true for politicians from the left?
Steve
My good Steve,
Yes, out here in the world where the consensus of lived human experience is that time flows one way, it is the last thing said or done, nearest to what we call “the present” which counts, for anyone.
There are some exceptions: heinous behavior like rape and murder are almost never excused by subsequent behavior, nor are heinous comments which constitute the equivalent of such behavior. Planning, however, as a general rule of successful human experience is expected to evolve from preliminary, problematic plans to better, less problematic plans, not vice versa, or randomly.
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
My good Lynn,
Let me now address your twice-excellent post directly.
Ron Paul would never get a gold standard; our now more ethereal and abstractly fragile economies are no longer bindable to material commodities in such a fashion. He might, however, achieve a compromise between a metal commodity and Ben Bernanke’s unbounded wet dreams. The financial writer Scott Burns, for example, has previously mentioned pegging modern economies to a civilizational economic value index like the BTU (that is, some type of average of the floating cost of the value of the BTU).
Paul might in fact achieve auditing the Federal Reserve – why not? Merely rendering it transparent would not do away with it, let alone compromise its autonomy.
Curbing American adventurism would, these days, fall on receptive ears; pissing on American exceptionalism, perhaps not so much.
Free market business? He would gain support from business Republicans while finding resistance from populist Democrats. On free market labor (immigration), probably just the opposite.
I am not a Paulite and so I have not followed him in detail; I have become pragmatic enough an independent to realize that, whatever I do, I will be helping to elect either the Democratic candidate or the Republican one.
Because I am old enough and have been in sales long enough to recognize that without exception no beans for trade are magic, I do not worry overly about choosing on the basis of any candidate’s campaign promises. When required, both candidates will lie, cheat, and torture their foreign enemies. While I voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primary as the most experienced White House candidate in the race (she lived there for eight years) – and precisely because of the perspective of your post: that any mischief she might have entertained would necessarily be bounded by 535 others and, so, contained – this year I will likely back Romney because, whatever he says he will do (unbelievable; see above), he has a fairly solid track record of actually producing accomplishments of concrete value compared to his rival who, in my estimation, has proved fairly consistently to have been an illusionist. This latter, though, again off-topic and unsolicited, is my personal political opinion, to my mind supported sufficiently by facts to satisfy me.
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
By the way, speaking of foreign affairs, and illuminated by the richly multiplex Benghazi narrative, we all do understand that President Obama has had U.S. troops in Jordan on the Syrian border, poised to enter Syria, for some time now, right?
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria