A response to Robert J. Samuelson’s WaPo op-ed column today

Robert J. Samuelson has written a piece today for the Washington Post entitled “With health bill, Obama has sown the seeds of a budget crisis”.

Now first of all, let me say that Robert J. Samuelson has an impressive mustache, and this is an important qualification for an economist or an accountant, as anyone who is familiar with the Woody Allen character’s dictum on that issue should know. Especially since I myself have no mustache of any kind -- not even an unimpressive one (dinos have only pin feathers, you see) – I must, in order to maintain any credibility in this area -- agree with Mr. Samuelson in at least one area. It is an important one: notwithstanding certain Republicans’ smugness about the debt not mattering in political terms, I believe Mr. Samuelson is correct in his fiscal-conservative claim that the huge gap between our spending obligations and our tax revenues will at some point become ruinous if we can't close it -- even for a colossus like America, borrowing for a huge percentage of expenditures is dangerous, and hoping that we will always be able to grow our way out of staggering debt is not a viable long-term strategy. I would add that the only reason this borrowing hasn’t been cast as a massive Ponzi-Madoffian scheme – by which I mean in general any scheme that’s viable only so long as everybody goes along with the illusion that fuels and underwrites it – stems from our tremendous economic significance and, of course, from the indisputable fact of our military supremacy. In plain English, America is still a country you don’t want to mess with: in the economic sphere, if we get taken down, a lot of others are going with us. Only certain religious fanatics want to see America burn; everybody else realizes that we are still vital to the global economy even though other countries (China above all) are growing in importance at an astonishing clip.

But Mr. Samuelson’s impressive whiskers only ingratiate him so far with this commenter. I disagree with him about the allegedly reckless quality of the current president’s decision to move forward with health-insurance reform even during an economic downturn. I don’t consider it unfair to point out that the previous administration’s irresponsible fiscal policies and rampant militarism contributed a great deal towards our present difficulties. Their most reckless spending had little to do with social programs. I would even argue (this is not directed at the writer or any particular individual) that the political right’s long-term goal is simultaneously to reduce the tax base and expand military spending to the point where it will no longer be possible to do any meaningful social promising or promise-keeping. So in a sense, running up huge deficits actually furthers the oligarchical right’s interests: it ensures that in the long run, tax revenues can and will only go to economic endeavors that further enrich them but bring no relief to ordinary people just trying to survive.

But on a more congenial note, I suggest that President Obama’s health-insurance changes amount to an advisable realignment of priorities: access to good health care is among the handful of “big things” in which government really should take an interest on behalf of the people, so I don't see why we should call it reckless to put health-care access high on the country’s To Do list. The president has recognized the importance of health to the nation’s well-being, and he has acted accordingly.

If we want to get our national outgo and income into alignment, I suggest, we will need to take a look at revitalizing the tax base (I don't mean this as code for "soak the rich") as well as examining just how many areas of life we think the government really needs to be involved in. But in my view, access to health care is not one of the areas in which the government’s involvement can fairly be labeled unwarranted or merely intrusive.* Whatever one thinks of the insurance reform bill’s particulars, its orientation towards the common citizen who actually pays most of the tax money that will be used for services seems to me entirely appropriate, and I don’t believe its arrival at a difficult socio-economic moment should count against it or lead to charges of fiscal irresponsibility.

*Not that this was necessarily Mr. Samuelson’s point, I should make clear.