The embarrassing display from the Pom Pom Brigade (the Village blogs) continues. Here is Matt Yglesias disingenuously citing PUBLIC OPINION to support his drive to drop the public option:

[A]n interesting item from the NYT points out that this popularity masks something of an underlying indifference: ["]Two weeks ago, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press asked respondents the main reason they either supported or opposed the health care bills. Among supporters, only 2 percent cited the public option. Among opponents, only 3 percent did so. [...]

[. . .] I think this is a pretty rare instance of the broad public actually being closer to the mark than political activists. [. . .] At this point, the most important question determining the quality of the health insurance options that will be available to Americans in the future probably has to do with the design and implementation of insurance exchanges.

More. . .

Briefly putting away the pom poms, after restarting the six month campaign against the public option, Josh Marshall publishes a reader e-mail against the excise tax:

The big issue, it seems to me, is whether or not the Senate's revenue mechanism -- including health care benefits worth greater than $8000 per year as taxable compensation for individual and household filings -- or the House's, which is a surtax on incomes above $500K: much more progressive and much more consistent with the basic Keynesian economic (as opposed to moral) justification for social benefits, that they encourage more efficient distribution of income by creating a broader base of consumption. (Ie, more people with adequate disposable income and fewer people with excess wealth that is not spent).

[MORE . . .]

Matt Yglesias writes:

The House bill, financed overwhelmingly by income taxes on high earners, will represent a large aggregate shift of national resources from the wealthy to the poor and near-poor. It will also represent a large shift of resources from things that are not health care services to things that are health care services. The Senate bill is not like that at all. It is much more mildly redistributive, but its redistribution is overwhelmingly contained within the health care system via taxes on “cadillac” health plans, medical devices, plastic surgery, etc.

Hmm. Define "mildly redistributive." The main financing device provided by the Senate bill is the increase in the Medicare tax on persons earning more than $200,000 per year. This is is a redistributive tax, though not as redistributive as the House tax proposal. Yglesias' description of the excise tax also does not square with the selling of it by other Village wonks - to wit, that it will move money out of health costs to increased wages. Now that claim strikes me as ludicrous, but it is interesting that Yglesias forgets it. Maybe he realizes it is not true. And that in fact, the excise tax is designed to be quite regressive.

Speaking for me only

I guess he really is running:

Mr. Dobbs, who left the network last week, has said in recent days that he is considering a third-party run for a New Jersey Senate seat in 2012 [. . .] First, though, Mr. Dobbs is working to repair what a spokesman conceded is a glaring flaw: His reputation for antipathy toward Latino immigrants. In a little-noticed interview Friday, Mr. Dobbs told Spanish-language network Telemundo he now supports a plan to legalize millions of undocumented workers, a stance he long lambasted as an unfair "amnesty." [. . .] Mr. Dobbs twice mentioned a possible legalization plan for the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the U.S., saying at one point that "we need the ability to legalize illegal immigrants under certain conditions."

Taking his brownnosing Beltway Dems to new heights, Ezra Klein writes:

To make a bit of a heretical point, most of those cases prove that Bush's domestic agenda was a capitulation to liberalism, not that Democrats were spineless wimps. NCLB and the Medicare prescription drug bill were both longtime Democratic ideas. The problem with NCLB was implementation, and while the problem with Medicare Part D was that its design was a giveaway to drug companies, it was also hundreds and hundreds of billions funneled towards the largest expansions of Medicare since the program's creation. [. . .] The war stuff is, well, the war stuff. [. . .] The tax cuts were free money, and the bankruptcy bill was indefensible. But on the whole, Bush's domestic record is more a tale of co-opting liberal ideas and adding money for corporations than it is a tale of achieving longtime conservative ends.

Wow! Just wow! Klein call his take heretical. I call it an embarrassment.

Speaking for me only

Noam Scheiber:

Geithner's decision not to nationalize some subset of banks looks like the right move in retrospect. Citigroup and BofA are still struggling, of course, and it's hard to know when they'll recover (though much of that seems tied to the unemployment rate). But the rest of the country's biggest banks are chugging along reasonably well. The stress tests restored confidence and allowed them to raise capital privately rather than rely on the government.

Say what? So the fact that the government owns 42% of Citibank, has been the only source of equity capital for Citibank, that Citibank is struggling and "it is hard to know when they'll recover" is the evidence that not putting Citibank into receivership was the "right move?" Hell, I would love to see Scheiber's case for ever nationalizing Citibank. We can argue about a lot of things, but arguing that Geithner's handling of Citibank is evidence of what he's doing right is shocking to me. The federal government dumped hundreds of BILLIONS of dollars into Citibank and has got nothing to show for it (Citibank's new loan originations are anemic.) The only people who have benefitted from Geithner's actions on Citibank are Citi CEO Vikram Pandit and his band of merry Citi bankers. Hell, Geithner would have been better off throwing money onto the street as economic stimulus. As a defense for Geithner, Scheiber has convinced me that Geithenr should go.

Speaking for me only

I saw this Time article on reconciliation and the Byrd rule linked in a blog. It is riddled with errors. The most important seemed to me to be a fundamental misunderstanding of the Byrd Rule. The Time article states:

Republicans would invoke the Byrd rule – which would require a 60-vote majority to overcome – every five minutes, forcing Dems to pare down the bill and pass something much, much less ambitious. It took weeks to get a cloture vote to start the debate -- imagine how long it'd take to get the 2,074-page bill through God knows how many Byrd rule objections -- even if everyone proves to be germane.

The error is glaring and rather amazing. If in fact, every Byrd Rule point of order was subject to a cloture vote, there would be no point to reconciliation at all. And of course, Time gets it utterly wrong. In the very link Time provides, this is demonstrated to be so:

Back in the Summer, Paul Krugman wrote:

To grasp the problem, you need to understand the outline of the proposed reform (all of the Democratic plans on the table agree on the essentials.) Reform, if it happens, will rest on four main pillars: regulation, mandates, subsidies and competition. [. . .] [K]nock away any of the four main pillars of reform, and the whole thing will collapse — and probably take the Obama presidency down with it.

As potential reform, the HCR proposals provide "regulation" (I am not a believer in regulation as an engine for reform of the health insurance industry), mandates (but not employer mandates) and subsidies (inadequate). Absent a public option, they do not provide potential for competition. This is not reform. In July, Jacob Hacker wrote:

As Jeralyn notes, Beltway Dems, eager to declare "victory" on the health care issue are preparing to deal away the public option. What will be interesting to me is what will they come for next from this "reform" proposal? It seems clear that the Beltway Dems are prepared to give away any and all parts of the proposal in order to get 60 votes + Olympia Snowe. Reconciliation will only be considered if progressive Democrats say no to the giveaway.

The Village Wonks and their allies have never cared about the public option (a perfectly reasonable position) and are willing, no, eager, to jettison the public option. That is their right. But for Democrats who believe that the public option is the only worthwhile reform in the proposal, this is an unacceptable capitulation. It is time to consider forgetting the "reform" part of this and just focus on passing the "assistance" part of the proposal. More . . .

Bernie Sanders shrewdly gets in the act:

I voted to proceed on health care reform because our current health care system is disintegrating and must be reformed. [. . .] While I voted to proceed to the health care legislation tonight, I have made it clear to the administration and Democratic leadership that my vote for the final bill is by no means guaranteed.

I wonder what David Kurtz thinks about that?

Speaking for me only

TPM's David Kurtz provides a great example of how NOT to bargain on HCR:

Schumer is [. . .] a pragmatist, and surely he's known for several days what's becoming obvious to all of us today: they don't have the votes. [. . .] [A]t this point you're just denying reality if you think all that the Dems need to do to get the waverers to come around is stand together in a show of unity. [. . .] This isn't one where you get to just pick up the ball and take it home with you. You still have to play, even if the outcome is guaranteed to disappoint.

This is not only ill informed (reconciliation seems to be a procedure Kurtz is utterly unfamiliar with), it also is contrary to a proposal Schumer has already made (split the bill in 2). More importantly, it is precisely what a weak bargainer would say. A good bargainer, aware of reconciliation and aware of Schumer's proposal, would be saying that there are not enough votes for HCR without a public option and that the Schumer Plan is the only way to go. This is not picking up the ball -- this is playing the game to the end. As a good bargainer must. Kurtz does us a favor though - demonstrating how a bad bargainer thinks about these things. (Of course, this assumes Kurtz gives a fig about the public option, which is probably a faulty assumption.)

Speaking for me only

Does Harry Reid have the votes for a health care bill that does not have a public option? Does Nancy Pelosi have 218 votes for a health care bill that does not have a public option? I think the answer is no.

Today's Senate vote on bringing the Reid HCR bill to the floor for debate strikes me as a waste of time. Lieberman, Landrieu and Lincoln (Ben Nelson would likely join them) have said they will not permit an up or down vote on the Reid HCR bill. They have been instructed by their health insurance industry overlords to not permit it. I do not think 50 Democratic Senators will vote for a bill without it. Can Snowe and Collins get them to 50? Or 60 for that matter (What if Sanders and a few Senate Dems vote against cloture of a bill that does not contain a public option?) And even if they do, does Pelosi have 218 votes for that bill? (Remember the Stupak problem as well.)

I do not know if a health care reform bill can be passed through reconciliation. I feel certain it can not be passed through regular order. This is all kabuki today in the Senate. A waste of time.

Speaking for me only