Category Archives: Debt and deficits

Pryor’s prior positions on Social Security, Medicare

Debt and deficits, Elections, Politics, U.S. Congress

By Steve Brawner

In one of Sen. Mark Pryor’s latest campaign ads, a Little Rock woman named Linda looks into the camera from her kitchen table and calls his opponent, Rep. Tom Cotton, “a real threat to your retirement” because he has voted to turn Medicare into a voucher system and has voted to raise the eligibility age for Social Security and Medicare to 70.

She’s right about at least the voucher part. Forcing seniors to buy private insurance with help from a government check is a bad idea.

But the part about raising the retirement age for Social Security? At least one other elected official has mentioned it as a potential solution – Sen. Mark Pryor.

In an interview in 2011 with the KTTS television station in southwest Arkansas, Pryor was asked what should be done about Social Security. He responded that the program is “very, very fixable. And again if people would get serious about this in Washington, we could fix Social Security next week if we wanted to.”

One possible fix? “Probably the biggest change would be is you would take my kids’ generation, teenagers today,” he said, “and life expectancy’s longer, etc., and probably say that they couldn’t get Social Security until they turn 68 or 69. If you just did that one change, you’d fix about 80 percent of it right there.”

You can see it on YouTube.

That was not the only time Pryor discussed making changes to popular entitlement programs. In 2010, he offered an amendment that would have established a limit on federal spending and created a presidential debt commission. His amendment would not have excluded Social Security and Medicare. “We need to put 100 percent of everything on the table,” the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported him saying.

Pryor was being honest about the problems the country faces, and honesty is the crucial first step to finding solutions.

And he wasn’t done. On Jan. 5, 2011, he told the Little Rock Rotary Club that he supported many of the recommendations of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform – known for its sometimes politically unpopular prescriptions.

“We have to take a hard look at entitlement programs, including the sacred cows of Medicare and Social Security, and admit that we cannot bring our spending into balance without changes in these programs,” he said, according to the Arkansas News Bureau. He also said, “The solution will be painful. There is no easy way out. Everything must be on the table.”

Three-and-a-half months later, Pryor told the Political Animals Club in Little Rock that he wanted his legacy to be addressing the national debt. That required making difficult decisions about programs such as Medicare and Social Security.

“My view on the debt is that it is beyond politics,” he said, according to the Democrat-Gazette. “This isn’t about the next general election; it’s about the next generation.”

That was three years ago. Pryor’s campaign isn’t talking much about painful solutions or the next generation now. Instead, he’s being positioned as the defender of the status quo.

That’s smart politics, but it’s not good for the national discourse. Campaigns are a conversation about the direction of the country, not just a time to pick winners and losers. They set the tone for how Congress governs afterwards. If campaigns lead voters to believe that Medicare and Social Security are perfectly fine, it makes it harder for members of Congress to make politically tough choices during the rare occasions when they actually govern after the election.

This isn’t to say that Pryor is a hypocrite. Campaigns rarely ennoble anyone. We voters have set the ground rules, and one of the rules is simple: Don’t give us the bad news.

But despite what his campaign ads are implying, even Pryor knows there really are problems with Social Security and Medicare. He said so repeatedly in 2010 and 2011. Those problems are fixable, but only if we acknowledge they exist.

 

“Medicare!” vs. “Obamacare!”

Debt and deficits, Elections, Health care, Politics, U.S. Congress

Medicare vs. Obamacare. That’s what this year’s Senate race between Sen. Mark Pryor and Rep. Tom Cotton is about.

Cotton’s campaign points to Pryor being the necessary vote to pass Obamacare, and Pryor’s points to Cotton’s Medicare votes that would raise the eligibility age for future beneficiaries and create a voucher-like system where seniors would buy insurance using government subsidies.

Last week, Pryor received the endorsement of the National Committee to Protect Social Security and Medicare. He stood before seniors who held hand-lettered signs, talked about how he voted to increase benefits, and said that House members who had voted to change Medicare were irresponsible.

Vouchers are a bad idea, but Medicare really does face serious, long-term challenges. It’s 14 percent of the federal budget, and Social Security is 24 percent. The costs of those two programs are part of the reason the Congressional Budget Office projects we’ll add another $541 billion this year to our $17.6 trillion national debt. The challenges will increase as the baby boomers age and as Americans live longer.

Call it a “cut” if you want, but somehow Medicare will have to spend less than it’s projected to spend – for its sake and for the rest of the budget’s. When I asked Sen. Pryor at his press conference what changes he would support, he said reform is needed and listed a few ideas such as allowing the program to negotiate drug prices and emphasizing preventive care. When I followed up by asserting those wouldn’t be enough, he didn’t disagree, saying, “The only way we’re going to get Medicare fixed is to do this in a bipartisan way.”

That’s true. But campaigns create the environment in which officials govern after the election. When candidates win by assuring voters that actual problems aren’t really problems, it weakens the ability of Congress to create those difficult bipartisan fixes later.

Republicans have used Obamacare – and President Obama himself – to gain a 5-1 majority in the Arkansas congressional delegation and majorities in the state Legislature. The message has been simple: Obamacare is bad.

But that message ignores the health care system’s serious problems. It hasn’t insured millions of people. Before Obamacare, it cold-heartedly denied insurance to those with pre-existing conditions and stopped covering them if they cost too much money. It’s 18 percent of our gross domestic product, far more than the rest of the industrialized world. A big reason Medicare has challenges is because it’s paying to treat seniors within this system.

Republicans, including Cotton, have focused far too much on what’s wrong with Obamacare and not enough on their own ideas. “Obamcare is bad” is not a health care policy.

Cotton’s Medicare votes are becoming a bigger political problem than Pryor’s support of Obamacare, as reflected by recent polls showing Pryor in the lead. By now, everyone who’s paying attention knows that Pryor voted for Obamacare, but they’re just now learning about Cotton and Medicare.

We’ve also reached the point where the news about Obamacare is not all bad. Yes, the employer mandates have been delayed, the website rollout was a disaster, and Obama never should have said that people who liked their plans could keep them. But the latest news, that eight million people have enrolled in insurance plans, gives Democrats the ammunition they’ve needed to return fire on the issue.

In an ideal democracy, the candidates would engage in an honest debate about Medicare’s long-term sustainability and about how to fix a health care system that was broken before Obamacare and still is. That debate, mirrored across the country, would continue in a statesmanlike fashion in Congress after the election, resulting in better policies.

Instead, the candidates will shout past each other – one saying “Medicare!” and the other “Obamacare!” – until November. It’s not an ideal democracy, but it’s the one we have.

Crawford: Blueprints without constitutional amendment won’t pass budget

Debt and deficits, Politics, U.S. Congress

Rick Crawford

On April 10, the House of Representatives narrowly voted for a budget plan by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., that, on paper, would have balanced the budget in 10 years.

Rep. Rick Crawford, who represents eastern Arkansas’ 1st District, doesn’t trust paper. Or Congress.

Crawford voted no to that budget blueprint and also to another one by the Republican Study Committee. That one, which failed by a wide margin, would have balanced the budget by 2017 – again, only on paper. Both plans would have reduced taxes and spending, including by repealing Obamacare and by replacing the current Medicare system with subsidies to seniors to purchase insurance. Democrats countered with a plan that left spending on Obamacare and Medicare alone, raised taxes, and didn’t balance the budget – on paper or otherwise. None of these plans had a chance of passage.

The state’s other House members – Rep. Tim Griffin in central Arkansas’ 2nd District; Rep. Steve Womack in Northwest Arkansas’ Third District; and Rep. Tom Cotton who represents everything else in the Fourth District – voted yes to the Ryan plan. Cotton was the only Arkansas congressman who voted yes to the Republican Study Committee plan as well.

Crawford believes all these budget blueprints fail to tackle the underlying structural issues that are increasing the national debt, and that making long-range plans is pointless because Congress changes every two years. What’s needed, he says, is a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget or one that would limit spending to a certain percentage of the nation’s gross domestic product.

Crawford pointed to the 1990s, when President Bill Clinton and Congress managed to briefly balance the budget. It wasn’t long before the red ink started flowing again because there was nothing structurally to stop it.

“I’m not an obstructionist,” he said in an interview. “I’m not part of the ‘h—, no caucus.’ I’m trying to be a constructive legislator, but the reality is we’ve seen this over and over and over again, and Congress keeps doing the same thing and expecting a different result.”

The mechanisms Crawford proposes both are problematic. A balanced budget amendment must include a provision allowing Congress to vote by super-majority to deficit-spend – in the event of war or a national emergency, for example. That clause would be abused. Moreover, deficit spending can be helpful during a recession, assuming the government would pay the money back in good times, which, unfortunately, it never does. A spending limit amendment, meanwhile, might force Congress to take a meat cleaver versus a scalpel approach to cutting programs. Like the balanced budget amendment, Congress would try to circumvent it.

At this point, however, it’s getting harder to see what alternatives are available. The national debt is $17.6 trillion and climbing. The Founding Fathers unfortunately did not include anything in the Constitution that would keep Congress from spending money it does not have. The U.S. government has never, not since 1790, finished a year debt-free. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me 224 times, shame on me.

Only 12 Republicans voted against the Ryan plan, and they did it for different reasons. Crawford says many congressmen agree some kind of structural reform is needed. But he says he may be the only one insisting on a constitutional amendment in order to move forward.

“You have these conversation in private,” he said. “You know, you sit next to somebody on the House floor and, ‘You’re voting no on the budget?’ ‘Yep.’ ‘And how come?’ I tell them why. They go, ‘Yeah, that makes a heck of a lot of sense. It sure does. You’re right.’ And then they turn around and vote yes.”

There are 535 members of Congress, all with differing agendas and ideas. So, in the immediate future, expect to see lots of blueprints, but no balanced budgets.

What SS and Medicare reforms WOULD Sen Pryor support?

Debt and deficits, Elections, Politics, U.S. Congress, Uncategorized

I asked Sen. Mark Pryor Tuesday what reforms to Social Security and Medicare he WOULD support during a press conference where he received the endorsement of the National Committee to Protect Social Security and Medicare.

He said he supported cutting waste, fraud and abuse in Medicare; allowing it to bargain for prescription drugs; and emphasizing preventive care. When pressed, he criticized his opponent’s votes and then called for bipartisan solutions.

We cannot balance the budget without reforming Social Security and Medicare. Mandatory spending, of which those two programs are the major part, composes 64 percent of the federal budget, and that number will rise as the baby boomers age.

Pryor knows this, but he’s not going to say so during an election year.

At least he acknowledged there’s a problem.