Semi-Daily Journal

I, for one, simply cannot imagine a better place to be a potted plant than in the West Wing.

Be agreeable and contented, and the trip from the West Wing to a juicy industry or academic post will be especially pleasing. What is the point of whining, there will be no policy change and you will lose friends in all the right places.

Never ever expect a Glen Hubbardy sort to act on principal. There is no profit in it.

anne - I don't think that Brad expects a Hubbardy sort to act on principle - but I do think that he hopes for it. As do I.

JFK wrote "Profiles in Courage" because, now and then in American history, someone acted solely on the basis of personal integrity. It was a bestseller because such actions are truly extraordinary.

Agreed!

"Partisan" must be referring to AARP -

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/21/opinion/21KRUG.html

AARP Gone Astray
By PAUL KRUGMAN

This is a good bill that will help every Medicare beneficiary," wrote Tom Scully, the Medicare administrator, in a letter to The New York Times defending the prescription drug bill. That's flatly untrue. (Are you surprised?) As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out, the bill will force millions of beneficiaries to pay more for drugs, thanks to a provision that cuts off supplemental aid from Medicaid. Poorer recipients may find previously affordable drugs moving out of reach.

That's only one of a number of anti-retiree measures tucked away in the bill. It contains several Trojan horse provisions that are clearly intended to undermine Medicare over time — it will allow private insurers to cherry-pick healthy clients in selected cities, and it will heavily subsidize private plans competing with traditional Medicare. Meanwhile, the bill prohibits Medicare from using its bargaining power to cut drug prices; drug company stocks have soared since the bill's details became public.

Yet the bill has a good chance of passing, thanks to an endorsement from AARP, the retiree advocacy organization, which has already begun an expensive advertising campaign on the bill's behalf. What's going on? ...

"Partisan" must be referring to breaking the promise of Medicare -

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/14/opinion/14KRUG.html?8bl

The Trojan Horse
By PAUL KRUGMAN

What are we going to do about Medicare? That should be the subject of an open national debate. But right now Congressional leaders are trying to settle the question by stealth, with legislation that purports to be doing something else.

An aging population and rising medical costs will eventually require the nation to provide Medicare with more money or to cut benefits, or both. Meanwhile, there are demands for a new benefit: a gradual shift away from hospital treatment and toward the use of drugs has turned the program's failure to cover prescription drugs into a gaping hole.

A Congressional conference is now trying to agree on prescription drug legislation. But beware of politicians bearing gifts — the bill will contain measures that have nothing to do with prescription drugs, and a lot to do with hostility to Medicare as we know it. Indeed, it may turn out to be a Trojan horse that finally allows conservative ideologues, who have unsuccessfully laid siege to Medicare since the days of Barry Goldwater, to breach its political defenses....

I'm confused as to _why_ Evans would cut the NEC out of the loop. If it functions like the Clinton NEC, it's more of a spin/political ("coordination" is the politically correct term) operation than an analysis shop, so they wouldn't have much substantive input anyway. You would certainly want to have the NEC on board to help sell the policy.

Now if you have told me that they cut CEA and/or Treasury out of the loop, that would make more sense. Maybe _that_ was why Evans cut out the NEC, so it wouldn't go through that normal review process...

Would this mean Friedman would have refused to rubber stamp bad policy? Maybe he should stay and the rest of this crowd should leave. Only if that could be the case!

Everyone who supports free trade has to deal with the plain fact that this administration is willing to screw the workers of America. There are no programs to retrain displaced workers, there is no extended unemployment insurance that will help; there is no safety net, and most of the displaced workers live in places where there are no jobs, and no possibility of jobs. And right now, I cannot think of a job that any of the displaced workers could get, even after retraining. We are exporting all low-level jobs.

All of the losses fall on the newly and probably permanently unemployed, or at least underemployed. Not to mention the stress on their families, the impoverishment of their communities, and the consequent deterioration of their lives.

So, free traders must hold the straight utilitarian view that the benefits that the rest of us get justify the immiseration of those losers. Economic efficiency is apparently the only value we can seek out in our lordly position as homo economicus. Other values, like those espoused by John Rawls, and what once was the Democratic Party, are outdated.

People willing to follow ideological views to their ultimate logical conclusions are always worrisome. There is much more to forming a just society than economic efficiency, regardless of what logic dictates.

" JFK wrote 'Profiles in Courage' "

Only if JFK is the pen name of Ted Sorenson.

Correct. JFK wrote "Profiles in Courage" the same way that Barry Goldwater wrote "The Conscience of a Conservative" So for bonus points who can tell me the name of Goldwater's ghost writer?

Gee, Patrick and Kosh, if you're going to malign a man, a man who can't now defend himself because he was killed in the line of duty, don't you think you should give some citation supporting your assertion that he didn't really write the book for which he received the Pulitzer?

>>So for bonus points who can tell me the name of Goldwater's ghost writer?<<

Was it Harry Jaffa?

"Was it Harry Jaffa?"

Nope. L. Brent Bozell.

>>Nope. L. Brent Bozell.<<

Oh. Makes me lose a lot of respect for Goldwater...

Yes, great writers and thinkers select their ghostwriters more carefully than that.

I'll bet Stephen Friedman is going to make damn sure he is definitely in the loop when the boxer shorts import quotas are discussed.

The exclusion of the National Economic Council on the bra decisions may have been a one time deal, not indicative of any general exclusionary policy directed towards them.

It may have, in fact, been an exclusionary policy of Mrs. Friedman, who perhaps did not want her husband's eyes to be gazing at bra catalogs.

So now Don Evans, Andrew Card, and George W. Bush bear the full responsibility for the bra selection at Victoria's Secret.

Name all of the economists who resigned in 1993-1994 because they were not consulted on the Clinton health care plan.

See this article about the authorship of JFK's book. It's not exactly primary source material, but I've been reading Cecil Adams for years and trust his research and conclusions far more than what I read in the newspaper.

MM

"So now Don Evans, Andrew Card, and George W. Bush bear the full responsibility for the bra selection at Victoria's Secret."

You'll note the quotas are on cotton bras. Find me a cotton bra in a Victorias Secret catalog.