Another Elite Media Lie About Gingrich

Ramesh Ponnuru examines Newt Gringrich's bold new ideas and finds them illogical, impractical, and expensive. His wacky no-risk privatization of Social Security, for instance, could break the Treasury:

His plan guarantees that if people’s investments fail, they will still get all the benefits that current law promises them. How can the government save money while giving everyone their promised benefits and making up unlucky or incompetent investors’ shortfalls? It can’t. And won’t those shortfalls be larger if people know they can’t lose? Plenty of Social Security plans involve the government saving money in the long term by taking a hit in the present. Gingrich has managed to devise a plan that actually increases the program’s long-term cost. The price tag for Gingrich’s originality, based on estimates of similar proposals in years past, would be several trillion dollars.

I Paid For Some Of It At The Office

Writing about a new study of moderate Republicans, Timothy Noah says the tea party is actually a big-spending social welfare movement dedicated expressly to its own social welfare:

[T]he Tea Partiers’ anti-­government ideology is tempered by quiet support for Social Security and Medicare. That’s because the activists themselves tend to be middle-aged or older. Tea Partiers aren’t opposed to government benefits per se, according to [Theda] Skocpol and [Vanessa] Williamson; rather, they’re opposed to “unearned” government benefits, which in practice ends up meaning any benefits extended to African-­Americans, Latinos, immigrants (especially undocumented ones) and the young. A poll of South Dakota Tea Party supporters found that 83 percent opposed any Social Security cuts, 78 percent opposed any cuts to Medicare prescription-drug coverage, and 79 percent opposed cuts in Medicare reimbursements to physicians and hospitals. “So much for the notion that Tea Partiers are all little Dick Armeys,” Skocpol and Williamson write. The small government Tea Partiers favor is one where I get mine and most others don’t get much at all.

Ryan's Hope

Jacob Weisberg on the competing GOP and Democratic economic plans:

If Obama wants to offer a convincing vision of the federal government's role, he will need to recognize the growing imbalance between generosity for the old and investment in future generations. Preserving our biggest entitlement programs in their current form because they have a powerful constituency is hardly a progressive stance. It's the definition of reactionary liberalism.

Woodstock On The Block

The most fateful debate in a generation about the role of the federal government is officially underway, writes Richard W. Stevenson -- and it's all about the expectations of those of us of a certain age:

The aging of the baby boom generation and the costs of maintaining Medicare and Social Security have put the two pillars of the social welfare system on the table for re-examination. The growing weight of the national debt has given urgency to the question of whether the government has become too big and expensive.

The tepid nature of the current economic recovery, following big stimulus packages, has provided an opening to challenge the effectiveness of Keynesianism as the default policy option for government. And the revived energy of grass-roots conservatives has given electoral clout to the movement’s intellectual and constitutional arguments.

Budget Balancing By Other Means

While Matthew Yglesias's scrappy comment-writers differ about the reliability of the information he presents, it does appear that, since there aren't that many rich people, means testing for Social Security and even Medicare wouldn't save much money.