In my prior related post, I acknowledged agreement with certain points made by Republican friends and party leaders, citing one example for each.
Echoing a Republican friend, I noted the errancy of a White House proposal to “require employers who do not offer a retirement plan to enroll their employees in a direct-deposit individual retirement account unless the employee opts out.” While I still believe that proposal is flawed, I think criticism of it should be fairly balanced with positive recognition of the business-friendly proposals the President has made, including, from his SOTU address: a small-business tax credit for hiring new workers or raising wages; eliminating all capital gains taxes on small-business investments; and providing tax incentives for large and small businesses, alike, to invest in new plants and equipment.
Reminded of those proposals, the Republican friend in question acknowledged the merits of my argument but was not entirely persuaded because he believes there are “three times that many initiatives supported by the current administration and Congress that go the other way,” i.e., that are unnecessarily burdensome to business and hence discouraging of economic/job growth. As examples, he cited the Employee Free Choice Act or EFCA; cap and trade; “expansion” of the Family and Medical Leave Act or FMLA; and “obtrusive and time consuming reporting by businesses related to Medicare and Medicaid eligibility for worker’s comp recipients.”
I agree with him about the Employee Free Choice Act or EFCA. I think cap-and-trade should be shelved for a straight-up carbon tax, which I understand even the coal industry would support. Regarding the other two examples on his list, I don’t know enough about them to debate them intelligently, but I’m guessing the FMLA expansion (while burdensome) is a matter of common decency, while the reporting requirements related to workers compensation are part of an attempt to cut waste or prevent fraud, although I’d support a re-examination of those requirements to help make sure businesses are not inequitably saddled with the burden of proof.
All that being said — and obviously a lot more could be said about each of those issues — I’m not sure this particular debate is winnable: Those who believe President Obama has and regularly acts on a bias for stifling regulation will not be persuaded by those of us who believe he might have such a bias but he frequently checks or balances it, or has it checked and balanced for him by a divided, not-as-leftist-as-some-believe Congress. (Case in point: It was the hesitancy of certain Senate Democrats re: EFCA that ultimately killed that effort.)
Moreover, if the aforementioned debate is un-winnable, perhaps it’s the wrong debate all together, the wrong use of our energies. Maybe it’s time to make fewer broad judgments about Obama’s capitalistic versus socialistic tendencies and instead spend more time on specific, negotiable points of compromise.
That brings me to the ideas promoted by GOP party leaders. In my prior post, I cited the example of a constitutional amendment “requiring the federal government to keep a balanced budget.” In acknowledging that idea, I also acknowledged the need for caveats, that there are times, like the present, when deficit spending will be necessary. But readers were not convinced. As one argued, such an amendment would result in “more and more items being moved ‘off-budget’ in a shadow game of bogus accounting.”
Fair enough.
A perhaps better, more defensible example of an idea pushed by Congressional Republicans that I increasingly believe has merit is tort reform, limiting the scope of damages in medical malpractice suits.
I’ve read the arguments against tort reform, and yes, I think some of those arguments have merit. For instance, the claim that damage awards represent but a fraction of the overall cost of health care. That claim appears to be true, but it ignores the potential, sizable costs driven by the health care professionals who routinely practice defensive medicine out of fear of being sued, ordering more tests and more procedures than are necessary.
Thankfully, the President has expressed a willingness to consider tort reform in the context of overall health care reform. He has also made it clear that he and fellow Democrats can’t be expected to do all the compromising, that there has to be “some give and take” on both sides. In that spirit, Matt Steinglass (h/t Andrew Sullivan) offers the following …
I’m instinctively sympathetic to this idea [of tort reform] in part because I come from a family of doctors and have heard complaints about crazy malpractice suits since I was 12, and in part because I’ve lived in Europe, where people think American tort law is insane. But part of the reason why Europeans accept restrictions on their ability to sue doctors for malpractice is that they have guaranteed health insurance. It’s part of the social contract: doctors accept limited salaries in exchange for limited liability; patients accept that they cannot sue doctors for millions of dollars in exchange for a guarantee of access to decent health care.
And there you have it. I’m still listening to certain Republican arguments, but what I won’t do (what I can’t do) is buy into the series of sweeping pronouncements that too often accompany those arguments — pronouncements like “Obama supports three times as many initiatives that are job-killing as those that are job-creating” and “scrap the current health bill or we walk.”
Granted, I’m one person. But I don’t think I’m alone. I think there are a fair number of largely independent voters who recognize the sanity in various Republican talking points — who fear the potential over-reach of progressive Democrats — but who are also not going to sit back and tolerate grand rhetoric sans meaningful dialogue, principled compromise, and substantive action.
In short, Republicans can do what they want. They can continue burying good ideas under truckloads of posturing. But they’re sadly mistaken if they think that’s a viable long-term strategy for winning independents and thus winning elections.