{"id":3876,"date":"2011-01-17T10:12:25","date_gmt":"2011-01-17T18:12:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=3876"},"modified":"2011-01-17T10:12:25","modified_gmt":"2011-01-17T18:12:25","slug":"krugman-the-republican-war-on-logic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2011\/01\/17\/krugman-the-republican-war-on-logic\/","title":{"rendered":"Krugman: The Republican War on Logic"},"content":{"rendered":"

Many on the left and many all on the right are unhappy with the health care reform as it now stands.  Does that mean we are allies?  Think again.  The things in HCR that Republicans oppose are the only thing that we support.  We need to hang on to the good things the bill contains and build from there.  The Republican justifications for repeal require a degree of rational distortion that could not be accomplishes by anyone but a highly educated professional: a Doctor of Bullshitology.  This fine Krugman editorial demonstrates the extent of the deception.<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\"RepubliCare\"My wife and I were thinking of going out for an inexpensive dinner tonight. But John Boehner, the speaker of the House, says that no matter how cheap the meal may seem, it will cost thousands of dollars once you take our monthly mortgage payments into account. <\/p>\n

Wait a minute, you may say. How can our mortgage payments be a cost of going out to eat, when we\u2019ll have to make the same payments even if we stay home? But Mr. Boehner is adamant: our mortgage is part of the cost of our meal, and to say otherwise is just a budget gimmick. <\/p>\n

O.K., the speaker hasn\u2019t actually weighed in on our plans for the evening. But he and his G.O.P. colleagues have lately been making exactly the nonsensical argument I\u2019ve just described \u2014 not about tonight\u2019s dinner, but about health care reform. And the nonsense wasn\u2019t a slip of the tongue; it\u2019s the official party position, laid out in charts and figures<\/strong>. <\/p>\n

We are, I believe, witnessing something new in American politics. Last year, looking at claims that we can cut taxes, avoid cuts to any popular program and still balance the budget, I observed that Republicans seemed to have lost interest in the war on terror and shifted focus to the war on arithmetic. But now the G.O.P. has moved on to an even bigger project: the war on logic<\/strong>. <\/p>\n

So, about that nonsense: this week the House is expected to pass H.R. 2, the Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act<\/a> \u2014 its actual name. But Republicans have a small problem: they claim to care about budget deficits, yet the Congressional Budget Office says that repealing last year\u2019s health reform would increase the deficit. So what, other than dismissing the nonpartisan budget office\u2019s verdict as \u201ctheir opinion\u201d \u2014 as Mr. Boehner has \u2014 can the G.O.P. do? <\/p>\n

The answer is contained in an analysis [Agent Orange delinked] \u2014 or maybe that should be \u201canalysis\u201d \u2014 released by the speaker\u2019s office, which purports to show that health care reform actually increases the deficit. Why? That\u2019s where the war on logic comes in. <\/p>\n

First of all, says the analysis, the true cost of reform includes the cost of the \u201cdoc fix.\u201d<\/strong> What\u2019s that? <\/p>\n

Well, in 1997 Congress enacted a formula to determine Medicare payments to physicians. The formula was, however, flawed; it would lead to payments so low that doctors would stop accepting Medicare patients. Instead of changing the formula, however, Congress has consistently enacted one-year fixes. And Republicans claim that the estimated cost of future fixes, $208 billion over the next 10 years, should be considered a cost of health care reform<\/strong>. <\/p>\n

But the same spending would still be necessary if we were to undo reform<\/strong>. So the G.O.P. argument here is exactly like claiming that my mortgage payments, which I\u2019ll have to make no matter what we do tonight, are a cost of going out for dinner. <\/p>\n

There\u2019s more like that: the G.O.P. also claims that $115 billion of other health care spending should be charged to health reform, even though the budget office has tried to explain that most of this spending would have taken place even without reform. <\/p>\n

To be sure, the Republican analysis doesn\u2019t rely entirely on spurious attributions of cost \u2014 it also relies on using three-card monte tricks to make money disappear. Health reform, says the budget office, will increase Social Security revenues and reduce Medicare costs. But the G.O.P. analysis says that these sums don\u2019t count, because some people have said that these savings would also extend the life of these programs\u2019 trust funds, so counting these savings as deficit reduction would be \u201cdouble-counting,\u201d because \u2014 well, actually it doesn\u2019t make any sense, but it sounds impressive<\/strong>. <\/p>\n

So, is the Republican leadership unable to see through childish logical fallacies? No. <\/p>\n

The key to understanding the G.O.P. analysis of health reform is that the party\u2019s leaders are not, in fact, opposed to reform because they believe it will increase the deficit. Nor are they opposed because they seriously believe that it will be \u201cjob-killing\u201d (which it won\u2019t be). They\u2019re against reform because it would cover the uninsured \u2014 and that\u2019s something they just don\u2019t want to do<\/font><\/strong>\u2026 [emphasis added<\/em>]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Inserted from <NY Times<\/a>><\/p>\n

If the Republicans get their way, comprehensive health care will be available to the rich only.  The rest of us will get RepubliCare: the right to pay premiums until we need the coverage, and then be dropped.  Sure we need single payer, Medicare for all, but the ray to get this is not to repeal the current bill.  It is to remove Republicans, and a handful of DINOS, from office.<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Many on the left and many all on the right are unhappy with the health care reform as it now stands.  Does that mean we are allies?  Think again.  The things in HCR that Republicans oppose are the only thing that we support.  We need to hang on to the good things the bill contains […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3876","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3876","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3876"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3876\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}