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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (881013)	8/19/2015 2:35:39 PM
From: bentway	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1576172

Pension-cutters and Privatizers, Oh My AUGUST 19, 2015 10:56 AM I wrote Monday about the strange phenomenon of Republicans lining up to propose cuts to Social Security, a deeply unpopular policy that is, however, also a really bad idea. How unpopular? Lee Drutman has the data: only 6 percent of American voters support Social Security cuts, while a majority want it increased. I argued that this apparent act of political self-destructiveness probably reflected an attempt to curry favor with wealthy donors, who are very much at odds with the general public on this issue: Photo Credit Now we have another example: Marco Rubio has announced his health care plan, and it involves (a) greatly shrinking the tax deductibility of employer health benefits and (b) turning Medicare into a voucher system. Part (a) is favored by many economists, although I would argue wrongly, but would be deeply unpopular; part (b) is really terrible policy — proposed precisely at the moment when Medicare is showing that it can control costs better than private insurers! — and also deeply unpopular. The strategy here, surely, is to propose things that voters would hate if they understood what was on the table, but hope that Fox News plus “views on shape of planet differ” reporting elsewhere will keep them confused, while at the same time pleasing mega-donors. It might even work, especially if Trump can be pushed out of the picture and the Hillary-hatred of reporters overcomes professional scruples. But it’s still amazing to watch.

To: i-node who wrote (881013)	8/19/2015 2:39:44 PM
From: bentway	Respond to of 1576172

Trump and Entitlement Reform Political Animal by Ed Kilgore I've often called it the "dirty little secret of Republican politics:" the "entitlement reform" schemes embraced by most Republican politicians and supported with near-religious intensity by bipartisan business elites are not at all popular among rank-and-file Republican voters. Indeed, as Republican constituencies have grown older, they cling to "their" Social Security and Medicare benefits with considerable self-righteousness, viewing them as benefits they've already paid for and otherwise "earned." It's no mistake that the most successful Republican "message" on entitlements in recent years has been the attack on Obamacare for "raiding" Medicare money. And even though most of the media attention paid to Donald Trump has dwelled on his extremist positioning on immigration as the main source of his appeal, it's worth noting that he's repeatedly rejected "entitlement reform" as a policy goal and scorned other GOP politicians for supporting it. Now comes Lee Drutman at Vox with today's must-read, combing National Election Studies data to identify a very large and Republican constituency for Trump's characteristic combination of support for immigration restrictions and opposition to any trimming of Social Security benefits. And indeed, he shows that the two groups who have largely dictated GOP positions on these two issues in the past--ideological conservatives and "Business Republicans"--are a very small part of the GOP in all dimensions other than money, dwarfed by the "Populists" who more or less share Trump's views. I've made a similar argument on a more intuitive level by suggesting that the GOP has absorbed and even made its "base" a large number of white non-college educated voters who don't like government or cultural liberalism but have never shared elite Republican economic thinking, especially about entitlements and immigration. As Drutman says: [I[f these two issues turn out to be salient for the months to come, the establishment Republicans — and the business Republican donors who support them — are in a very weak position. Now much as I tend to share Lee's analysis, I do wonder how many Trump supporters actually know about his position on entitlements, given the overwhelming media attention given to the proposition that Trump doesn't stand for much of anything other than nativism and undifferentiated anger. But on the other hand, if they don't know Trump is defending their Social Security benefits against the schemes of Christie and Bush and most of the rest of the GOP (other than Mike Huckabee, whose own "populist" pitch has been eclipsed by Trump's), and they subsequently find out, maybe the real Trump "peak" which so many people hope to glimpse in the rear-view mirror is still on the horizon. Scary, eh?