“Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from> around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
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Paul Krugman: Politicians, Promises, and Getting Real
On Wednesday Donald Trump demanded that Congress move quickly to enact his tax reform plan. But so far he has not, in fact, offered any such plan. Not only is there no detailed legislative proposal, his administration hasn’t even settled on the basic outlines of what it wants.
Meanwhile, 17 Senate Democrats — more than a third of the caucus — have signed on to Bernie Sanders’s call for expanding Medicare to cover the whole population. So far, however, Sanders hasn’t produced either an estimate of how much that would cost or a specific proposal about how to pay for it.
I don’t mean to suggest that these cases are comparable: The distinctive Trumpian mix of ignorance and fraudulence has no counterpart among Democrats. Still, both stories raise the question of how much, if at all, policy clarity matters for politicians’ ability to win elections and, maybe more important, to govern.
Eugene Robinson: The biggest thing single-payer has going for it
The smartest, savviest people in Washington will tell you Bernie Sanders’s “Medicare for all” idea is dead on arrival, a waste of time and energy. But since those same smart, savvy people told you Donald Trump didn’t have a prayer of becoming president, I’d advise keeping an open mind.
What the Vermont senator’s bill has going for it is simple: It’s the right thing to do.
The issue is not whether we should have socialized medicine in this country. We already do — Medicare for everyone over 65; Medicaid for the indigent, the working poor and the disabled; the Children’s Health Insurance Program for minors in modest-income families. That’s a total of around 133 million Americans who already enjoy most of the benefits of a single-payer health-care system similar to those in other wealthy countries.
The philosophical debate about whether government should play a major role in medical care is over, as evidenced by the GOP’s “repeal and replace” fiasco. In trying vainly to get rid of the Affordable Care Act, Republicans argued about how to subsidize health insurance, not whether to do so. The most conservative approach — working through the existing free-market, fee-for-service health-care system mediated by private insurance companies — had already been tried. It is called Obamacare.
Catherine Rampell: Sanderscare is all cheap politics and magic math
For years Democrats have (rightfully) hammered Republicans for spouting empty slogans and magic math.
Tax cuts will pay for themselves? Uh-huh, if you say so. Maybe have a chat with Kansas.
Build a wall, and Mexico will pay for it? Hmm, that’s not what Mexico says.
Repeal and replace Obamacare? Right-o, show us a replacement plan, any replacement plan, that won’t raise rates and cause millions of Americans to lose their insurance.
These were hollow promises, with no serious plan backing any of them.
Thanks to the Grand Old Party’s demagoguery, Democrats have for a little while enjoyed a virtual monopoly on facts, evidence and experts. Dems — or some of them, anyway — embraced serious, solutions-based, often technical policymaking and the hard choices that went along with it.
But the lesson the Democrats seem to have taken from the 2016 electoral trouncing is that they need to become more like Republicans. Meaning: Abandon thoughtful, detail-oriented bean-counting and attempts to come up with workable solutions grounded in (occasionally unpopular) reality, and instead chant virtue-signaling catchphrases.
Such as “single-payer.”
Scott Calvin: Why Climate “Alarmists” Should Not Be Ignored
In a December 2011 article, Noam Chomsky noted that in addition to those preaching skepticism of climate change, there exists another group of climate commentators whose input is ignored by the mainstream media: those who insist that the dangers of climate change go far beyond what we are told is the scientific consensus.
This latter group has grown increasingly vocal, especially outside the US, but it is still not being paid enough heed.
Hypothetical situations such as considered here are easy to dismiss as doomsday prophesying. But uncertainty is a crucial part of the conversation, albeit one that is overlooked. In another recent piece, Josh Floyd goes into significant detail on how poorly we are actually able to model climate change, advocating for what he calls “knowledge humility” on the topic.
Simply put, while we know a large amount about human interference with the climate, we are missing much minute detail with which to refine that understanding and produce similarly nuanced predictions. What is a “safe” amount of warming? What will slow our seemingly inevitable parade to that limit? What human intervention will happen, and what will its effects be? Each, for now, remain unknown and unknowable.
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