numbskulduggery

Okay: The case for Medicaid expansion is not as strong as I had thought. Now for the caveats: The case for Medicaid expansion is overwhelmingly strong. If a study found that puppies survive steep falls at a higher rate than expected, then you could say the case for throwing puppies out of skyscraper windows has marginally weakened, but would remain extremely strong. Indeed, data notwithstanding, either throwing puppies out of skyscrapers or throwing people off Medicaid are both acts of sadism.

Here is the central dilemma in American politics since 2010: You need to enact laws even to do very basic things like not crash the world economy for no reason. You can’t enact a law without passing it through the House. The House is controlled by Republicans. And many if not most of these Republicans appear to be stark raving mad — which is to say, not merely ideologically extreme but unable to rationally connect means with ends, as evidenced by such things as the Plan B fiasco.

The argument against minting the platinum coin is simply this: It makes it harder to solve the actual problem facing our country. That problem is not the debt ceiling, per se, though it manifests itself most dangerously through the debt ceiling. It’s a Republican Party that has grown extreme enough to persuade itself that stratagems like threatening default are reasonable. It’s that our two-party political system breaks down when one of the two parties comes unmoored. Minting the coin doesn’t so much solve that problem as surrender to it.

Imagine that after careful study a government official — say, the president or one of the party leaders in Congress — reaches a considered judgment that a particular course of action is best for the country. Suddenly, someone bursts into the room with new information: a group of white propertied men who have been dead for two centuries, knew nothing of our present situation, acted illegally under existing law and thought it was fine to own slaves might have disagreed with this course of action. Is it even remotely rational that the official should change his or her mind because of this divination?

The best way to read President Obama’s leaked offer to the GOP last week was: “You want to cut Medicare, you’re going to have to propose it first.” The House GOP has done so, and gone not to the Bowles-Simpson proposal, but to the proposal by the Democratic member of the pair. You see why they included all that opening verbiage about the “status quo” election. The Republicans are offering more than they did in 2011, and they’re wearing the “painful cuts” hairshirts. But they leave aside the issue of top-end Bush tax rates. They try to move the conversation back to generic “revenue,” which might mean something different to them than it meant to Bowles.