(permalink): David Brooks recently spoke to Bill Gates, Brooks notes at the start of this morning’s column.
Normally, such news puts the analysts on high alert. But Brooks has produced a fairly standard column, in which he sketches the need to address the future cost of three federal programs. We can’t vouch for every detail in the projections from which he is working. But as a general matter, almost everyone seems to agree with the general thrust of this excerpt:
BROOKS (2/11/11): Over the past decades, spending in nearly every section of the federal budget has exploded to unsustainable levels. Each year, your family’s share of the national debt increases by about $12,000. By 2015, according to Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the former director of the Congressional Budget Office, Moody’s will downgrade U.S. debt.
The greatest pressure comes from entitlements. Spending on Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and interest on the debt has now risen to 47 percent of the budget. In nine years, entitlements are estimated to consume 64 percent of the budget, according to the invaluable folks at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. By 2030, they are projected consume 70 percent of the budget.
We can’t vouch for every aspect of those budget projections. But almost everyone seems to agree that, as matters now stand, Medicare and Medicaid may place serious burdens on future federal budgets. “The implication is this,” Brooks declares. People who care about domestic federal programs must “band together and fight their common enemy, the inexorable growth of entitlement spending.”
Absent that fight, there will be little money for anything else, Brooks declares.
We had two reactions to this familiar formulation.
First reaction: Where’s the three legs?
Brooks, like others, focuses almost exclusively on future cost-cutting. But there are three basic legs to the budget stool, and cost-cutting is only one of them. Brooks is right; if we reduce spending on these federal programs, that will help address projected federal deficits. But higher tax rates would do that too, as would some successful attempt to increase economic growth. Again: We can cut spending; we can raise taxes; we can find ways to produce stronger growth. But Brooks, like so many people today, addresses only one leg of that stool. Here is his formulation:
BROOKS: If people who care about this or that domestic program fight alone, hoping that their own program will be spared, then they will all perish alone. If they have any chance of continuing their work, they will have to band together and fight their common enemy, the inexorable growth of entitlement spending.
The foreign aid people, the scientific research people, the education people, the antipoverty people and many others have to form a humane alliance. They have to go on offense. They have to embrace plans to slow the growth of Medicare, to reform Social Security and to reform the tax code to foster growth and produce more revenue.
That last third of that highlighted sentence is the only place where Brooks goes beyond the single-minded focus on spending. He never contemplates what higher tax rates might do—for one purely hypothetical example, a return to the Clinton tax rates, under whose yoke the nation was suffering as recently as 2001.
Liberals should challenge formulations which focus on one leg only.
Second reaction: Please go to Finland!
Almost everyone seems to agree that health care spending is the biggest problem facing future federal budgets. (By “almost everyone,” we mean “Paul Krugman.”) Despite this general agreement, a familiar black-out remains in effect; intellectual leaders never explain why the per-person cost of health care is so crazily high in this country. In the future, federal budgets will groan beneath the yoke of Medicare spending, Medicaid spending and spending in other federal health programs. This always makes us wonder:
What would those budget projections look like if the cost of health care in this country resembled that in the rest of the world? In the miracle nation of Finland, for instance. Do you recall these statistics?
Total spending on health care, per person, 2007:
United States: $7285
Finland: $2900
Our projected federal budgets are burdened by the astonishing cost of health care in this country. As of 2007, Finland was spending about 40 percent as much per person. Question: What would our future budgets look like if Finland’s level of health spending was miraculously substituted for ours? Just a guess: The troubling numbers in Brooks’ projections would suddenly look very different.
This is a purely academic exercise, of course. Our level of health care spending will never resemble that in Finland. As we all saw in 2009, there is an ironclad agreement among our elites: On pain of death, no one will ever attempt to explain why we spend so much more on health care than all other comparable nations. Here’s the irony: Our intellectual elites constantly fly to Helsinki, where they tug their whiskers and pretend to explain that nation’s high test scores. (In recent weeks, the New Republic explained the whole thing—in Finland, kids get longer recess!) But in accord with Implacable High Pundit Law, no one ever tries to explain how the Finns maintain a universal health system while spending so much less, per person, than we rubes do over here.
We pretend to study the Finns when it comes to public schools, but not when it comes to health clinics.
Please go to Finland, the analysts cried, begging Brooks to fly away and explain how the Finns get by with that level of spending. But Brooks will never do any such thing—and neither will “liberal” journalists. No one will tell you why our health spending is so crazily high—although the problem we gnash our teeth about comes straight from that contrast in spending.
We must restrain health spending, elites all cry. When did you ever see them explain why our costs are so high in the first place? Under such rules, your discourse strains.
Egyptians rail against their censors. We’re meeker than that over here.
Normally, such news puts the analysts on high alert. But Brooks has produced a fairly standard column, in which he sketches the need to address the future cost of three federal programs. We can’t vouch for every detail in the projections from which he is working. But as a general matter, almost everyone seems to agree with the general thrust of this excerpt:
BROOKS (2/11/11): Over the past decades, spending in nearly every section of the federal budget has exploded to unsustainable levels. Each year, your family’s share of the national debt increases by about $12,000. By 2015, according to Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the former director of the Congressional Budget Office, Moody’s will downgrade U.S. debt.
The greatest pressure comes from entitlements. Spending on Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and interest on the debt has now risen to 47 percent of the budget. In nine years, entitlements are estimated to consume 64 percent of the budget, according to the invaluable folks at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. By 2030, they are projected consume 70 percent of the budget.
We can’t vouch for every aspect of those budget projections. But almost everyone seems to agree that, as matters now stand, Medicare and Medicaid may place serious burdens on future federal budgets. “The implication is this,” Brooks declares. People who care about domestic federal programs must “band together and fight their common enemy, the inexorable growth of entitlement spending.”
Absent that fight, there will be little money for anything else, Brooks declares.
We had two reactions to this familiar formulation.
First reaction: Where’s the three legs?
Brooks, like others, focuses almost exclusively on future cost-cutting. But there are three basic legs to the budget stool, and cost-cutting is only one of them. Brooks is right; if we reduce spending on these federal programs, that will help address projected federal deficits. But higher tax rates would do that too, as would some successful attempt to increase economic growth. Again: We can cut spending; we can raise taxes; we can find ways to produce stronger growth. But Brooks, like so many people today, addresses only one leg of that stool. Here is his formulation:
BROOKS: If people who care about this or that domestic program fight alone, hoping that their own program will be spared, then they will all perish alone. If they have any chance of continuing their work, they will have to band together and fight their common enemy, the inexorable growth of entitlement spending.
The foreign aid people, the scientific research people, the education people, the antipoverty people and many others have to form a humane alliance. They have to go on offense. They have to embrace plans to slow the growth of Medicare, to reform Social Security and to reform the tax code to foster growth and produce more revenue.
That last third of that highlighted sentence is the only place where Brooks goes beyond the single-minded focus on spending. He never contemplates what higher tax rates might do—for one purely hypothetical example, a return to the Clinton tax rates, under whose yoke the nation was suffering as recently as 2001.
Liberals should challenge formulations which focus on one leg only.
Second reaction: Please go to Finland!
Almost everyone seems to agree that health care spending is the biggest problem facing future federal budgets. (By “almost everyone,” we mean “Paul Krugman.”) Despite this general agreement, a familiar black-out remains in effect; intellectual leaders never explain why the per-person cost of health care is so crazily high in this country. In the future, federal budgets will groan beneath the yoke of Medicare spending, Medicaid spending and spending in other federal health programs. This always makes us wonder:
What would those budget projections look like if the cost of health care in this country resembled that in the rest of the world? In the miracle nation of Finland, for instance. Do you recall these statistics?
Total spending on health care, per person, 2007:
United States: $7285
Finland: $2900
Our projected federal budgets are burdened by the astonishing cost of health care in this country. As of 2007, Finland was spending about 40 percent as much per person. Question: What would our future budgets look like if Finland’s level of health spending was miraculously substituted for ours? Just a guess: The troubling numbers in Brooks’ projections would suddenly look very different.
This is a purely academic exercise, of course. Our level of health care spending will never resemble that in Finland. As we all saw in 2009, there is an ironclad agreement among our elites: On pain of death, no one will ever attempt to explain why we spend so much more on health care than all other comparable nations. Here’s the irony: Our intellectual elites constantly fly to Helsinki, where they tug their whiskers and pretend to explain that nation’s high test scores. (In recent weeks, the New Republic explained the whole thing—in Finland, kids get longer recess!) But in accord with Implacable High Pundit Law, no one ever tries to explain how the Finns maintain a universal health system while spending so much less, per person, than we rubes do over here.
We pretend to study the Finns when it comes to public schools, but not when it comes to health clinics.
Please go to Finland, the analysts cried, begging Brooks to fly away and explain how the Finns get by with that level of spending. But Brooks will never do any such thing—and neither will “liberal” journalists. No one will tell you why our health spending is so crazily high—although the problem we gnash our teeth about comes straight from that contrast in spending.
We must restrain health spending, elites all cry. When did you ever see them explain why our costs are so high in the first place? Under such rules, your discourse strains.
Egyptians rail against their censors. We’re meeker than that over here.
