Insurance Pool
by digby
Ezra Klein has an interesting post up today making the case that the government is essentially a gigantic insurance program backed by a standing army. It sounds jarring at first, but when you think about, it makes sense. (There used to be another name for it --- "the welfare state" -- but don't tell anybody.)
Our biggest problem with it at the moment is that it isn't very efficient because we have one of our political parties devoted to screwing it up so they don't have to pay into the pool in which people they don't like might benefit. But a welfare state it is, and from what the polls are telling us, people like what it provides them.
Ezra writes:
[I]t’s time to admit that there’s little in the budget that’s truly unpopular. If it was unpopular, it either wouldn’t be there in the first place, or it would’ve been zeroed out when politicians went hunting for offsets to pay for programs that interested them more. Anything that’s survived Congress’s occasional spasms of fiscal responsibility and constant hunger for easy money has some sort of a constituency behind it.
And though cutting non-defense discretionary spending might buy us some time on the deficit, we’re eventually going to have to do as legendary robber Willie Sutton did when he started hitting banks: We’ll have to go where the money is. That means our social insurance programs, and our military. Of this group, Social Security is in the best shape, and is by far the most efficient. It should be last on our list. Not, as it often seems to be, first.
The military remains largely untouched -- and that is true in the budgets released by both the Republicans and the Democrats. This is one case where politicians are lagging behind the public: In the Pew poll, military spending was the third-least popular category of spending, even though in Washington, it’s frequently considered politically unassailable. But perhaps we’ll see more action on this soon: A bipartisan group of legislators including Reps. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and Ron Paul (R-Tex.) created the Sustainable Defense Task Force to look at ways to reduce our military spending, and the plan they developed could save us a trillion dollars over the next 10 years.
He concludes with the unwelcome but unavoidable truth that the big items eating the budget alive are health care costs, which the health reform law may help curb in some small measures if the experiments within it work, but there are no guarantees. I suspect that this is going to be the most contentious issue of the next couple of decades.
Ezra's formulation is an interesting way of looking at things, I think. If you were to ask people what government is supposed to do, I wonder if they would object to the idea that it's a big insurance program? I think a lot of them would think that makes pretty good sense. Why not?
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