re: #536 sattv4u2

Name me one, just ONE of the suggestions of his own bipartisan commisian that the President will embrace

[Link: www.fiscalcommission.gov…]
(pdf)

Let me give you a personal example of why I don’t take current Republican policies seriously (and this includes the Republican side of the suggestions made in the document you link to). I work in higher education. It is a fact (you can go and look it up) that the various state higher ed systems provide college education more efficiently than their private competitors. This is for the same reason that single-payer healthcare works: you can achieve economies of scale, and you can also impose meaningful cost restrictions when you are operating what is effectively a natural monopoly.

But the Republicans want to cut the size of government. So they cut taxes, and defund state higher ed systems (California is the most famous current example, but it’s happening all over the country).

As a result, tuition will go up. This has two effects. One is that poor people find it harder to go to college. You may not care about this, fair enough.

The second effect, though, is that higher education ends up consuming a greater share of GDP. So the state is smaller, but we are, overall, worse off (except for professors, and incidentally people like me, who get paid more as a result).

If you look through that document, you will see that the Republican-proposed measures are basically cuts to spending, but there isn’t much about what costs those cuts will incur. If you cut early childhood education funding, for example, this is even more damaging than cutting higher ed, since this is an age at which you have a good chance of preventing the damaging behaviors that cost a lot to remedy down the road.

And all this is unconnected from the simple reality that government workers get paid less (in total compensation) than private sector workers, over the long term.

So again, come back to me with a Republican proposal that reduces the deficit over the long term. I can wait a long time and sadly I expect I’ll have to.