On the subject of a grand left-right bargain | Michael Tomasky

CautiousOptimist wrote on the last thread at 1:07 pm:

MT talks a lot about bipartisanship, but that typically means he wants the Republicans to agree with the Democrats. But I hear very little about the Democrats agreeing with Republicans. And I think there are areas where the Republicans have valuable views.

Naturally, I don't think this is entirely fair to moi. I feel like I said several times during the healthcare debate that I would vastly prefer bipartisan outcomes even if it meant (and in practice it would always mean) that the legislation in question was less quote-unquote liberal. If both Democrats and Republicans participate in crafting legislation, then both Democrats and Republicans down the road will have an interest in preserving it and correcting it. This is an unremarkable position. It's the way the legislative process works...in countries where it works, a list that doesn't include my country, and while the D's are a long way from perfect, the R's are clearly more to blame than the D's.

The funny thing is, and the thing most people forget, that the Democrats have compromised. The default Democratic position on healthcare (most Democrats, if someone died and made them emperor) is a single-payer British or Canadian-style system. But that's socialism. So a compromise was crafted called the public option. But that was socialism, too. So what the Democrats ended up passing was modeled largely on...Republican Mitt Romney's Massachusetts plan, and Republican John Chafee's 1993 alternative to Hillarycare.

But guess what? That's socialism too. Did I say this was a "funny" thing? It's really not so funny.

Same thing with cap-and-trade. The default Democratic position is a carbon tax. Cap-and-trade is a free-market alternative to a tax. But suddenly it too is...guess what? Most of the Democratic platform is compromise.

But okay: here's one issue on which I do fault Democrats, and it's one many of you conservative commentators complain about bitterly - public employee unions, and especially the pension obligations.

David Brooks addressed this yesterday in an interesting column about New Jersey's effort to build a rail tunnel. I thought his premise was a little cockeyed. Capital financing of big infrastructure projects is typically a different pot of money than operating budgets. But point taken. Public pension obligations are onerous.

But, they're not as onerous as Brooks makes them sound, wrote Ezra Klein in a very fact-based riposte yesterday. For starters, Klein notes that New Jersey governor Chris Christie didn't fund his state's $3.1 billion pension obligation this year, so that could hardly be the reason New Jersey can't come up with the tunnel money.

But the real point is this:

Brooks's column doesn't do much to put the pension obligations of the states in context, so we'll do it here. Just today, Alicia H. Munnell, Jean-Pierre Aubry and Laura Quinby released a paper (pdf) tallying up the pension problem. "Public plans are substantially underfunded," they conclude, but "in the aggregate, they currently account for only 3.8 percent of state and local spending." Roll that around for a minute. Pension obligations currently account for 3.8 percent of the average state's spending. That's not where the current crisis is coming from...

..."The problem in this moment," says Betsy Zeidman, director of the Center for Emerging Domestic Markets at the Milken Institute, "is revenue." The word "revenue," incidentally, doesn't appear in Brooks's column.

The revenue problem is a result of the bad economy, of course, but also a function of the fact that we are forbidden to discuss taxes at the national level. I urge to you click through to Ezra's post because he makes two or three other highly salient points on this, all backed up empirically.

All that said: I can understand why some people on the right get frosted at the idea that someone can retire at age 52 or 53, or younger in the case of cops and fire fighters, and get a handsome pension and health plan for possibly 30 years or more and go pursue a new career too. It's a basic fairness issue.

And I will acknowledge quite plainly that Democrats will probably never do anything about this, at the national level. AFSCME is too powerful in Democratic politics. Some Democrats at the state and local level will inevitably make public pension cuts - they'll have to. And they'll probably be lionized by the media for having kicked the unions. That's how it works in this country.

If someday the political atmosphere in this country becomes less toxic, a scene I'd like to see is Democrats and Republicans actually being leaders and announcing a grand bargain whereby reasonable cuts are made to public-employee pension and health plans, and reasonable tax increases (a higher marginal rate for really high-end earners, a carbon tax, a gas tax) are agreed to. But it's an impossibility in this country now and for the foreseeable future. Both sides are to blame, but I say and will always say that the R's are more to blame on all of these questions because one can't even talk about taxes with them.

Budgets are about spending and revenue. We talk all the time about spending. We don't talk about taxes, except to lower them more and more from what are already 80-year lows.

US politicsMichael Tomasky
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