Here is one thing I’ve picked up on. Republicans didn’t like talking about policy alternatives to Obamacare.
–Pete Spiliakos

I picked up on that since, oh, the 1980s when Kennedy was stumping for some version or other of the UK’s National Health to be transplanted to America. Here’s something else I’d picked up on, there are no nice policy alternatives to nationalized medicine. Someone is going to get less doctoring than wished for because there’s no infinite pot of money and no vast corps of monk-like doctors and nurses who’ll work for free. Yet strangely, most people vote as though the State has an infinite pot of money (or would if only taxes on other people were covetous enough).

Frankly, talking to people who wish for such things as single-payer health care, nationalized medicine, Hillarycare, Obamacare or socialized medicine by any name is as useless as trying to logically reason someone out of an infatuation. Can’t be done. Since the 1980s I’ve figured that some form of socialized medicine would inevitably come to America because the temptation and illusion of the thing is just too strong for most people to resist.

JP’s advice “to raise the surrender flag” is, alas, probably the best pragmatic political advice. Sure, the parts of Obamacare that are simply ideological Culture Of Death bludgeons against the Church, morality and innocent life can and should be fought. Those battles can be won because they have nothing fundamentally to do with the “making health care affordable” illusion that’s the basis of this tempting of America. Until the whole paradigm of health care we have today is made obsolete by some sufficiently advanced techonology that gives people easy and preferable alternatives to today’s practice of medicine, some socialized medicine scheme will remain politically unstoppable.

2) Leaving aside that no one is going to fully be capable of unwinding the precise impact of every policy change vis a vis taxes under Reagan…One thing that a very simple american undergraduate economist(yours trully) might be able to understand or predict is that we were in a drastically different IS-LM position at that point, not to mention a different place on a Laffer curve(I accept the theory, the idea goes all the way back to David Hume and J.S. Mill.) While there are potentially an infinite number of battles to be fought over details in between, Volker was signalling to us that Inflation was very important as a matter of public policy! Currently Bernanke is not signalling to us that Inflation is very important as a matter of public policy. Or actually in my reading Bernanke is signalling to us that Inflation is very important as a matter of public policy…but quite in the opposite direction as Volker suggested. This QE1-3 is unprecedented, as is the general begging of congress to deficit spend.

That is my rhetorical response for Carter in modern times to a Reagan in modern times: Deficit spending is inflationary (with IS-LM caveats) but essentially we should let people spend money the way they want while letting government spend money the way it wants.

Given the fact that the fed has pumped around 29 trillion into the banks, ( http://www.levyinstitute.org/publications/?docid=1462 ) it is easy to see why some groups like the Peterson group are all about fighting the deficit, i.e. engaging in a war against fiscal policy in favor of monetary policy. To give Bernanke a bit of an out, I think he knows the game that is going on, but his legal duties force him to abeit this quasi-fraud. So long as Bernanke makes a bit of noise and reminds folks that he was all for fiscal policy, when folks really catch on he can just turn and blame congress. (It will happen). On the other hand all this 29 trillion gets paid back…but it is still a pretty valuable interest to be able to borrow at super low rates and lend at much higher ones. (or to be able to cherry pick and dump off the bad loans.)

This in my view is the fault of folks not being principled Keynesians.

This brings us to another truthful Romney gaffe, which is probably a Marxist axiomatic truth about Capitalism: “The rich will do fine no matter who wins in Nov.” In fact you should consider Marxism to be a long run prediction about distribution effects of Capitalism on the fiscal side, while Malthusianism is a long run prediction about Capitalism on the material resources side. On either a Marxist or Malthusian basis going over the fiscal cliff is largely a moot point. On the Marxist side Mitt Romney nailed it! (corporations are people, or at least corporations are run by people) (not that Citizens United was rightly decided)…but basically those big banks are run by rich people, and it is almost certain that with less fiscal policy, these rich people will receive more monetary policy largess.)

On the Malthusian side anything that slows consumption in one sense buys time for the fossil fuels corn bubble to be extended, albeit by slowing patent development pushed by Gov. it also slows the future trickle down of science and hurts the capacity of the bulls to outrun the Malthusian bear.

So the two quasi-discredited bears are playing a very very long run game. As spoiled americans it is perhaps easy to mock the Malthusian +Marxist bear by engaging in a debate over the relative greatness/trademark value of McDonalds and Waffle House. I have so much food my big mac commodity fetishism is better than yours! Indeed, my milk shake brings all the bulls to the yard!

I for one am hopeing that I win over people who considered themselves proud Obama democrats, or rather I am hopping that Krugman will do so.

Do you realize how much Krugman is moving in the direction of simple arguments I made? i.e. patent as the only long run trickle down economics. (for which you have the Hicks model). The path of the bull and growth against the Marxist and Malthusian bears? A need for Keynesian Macro-economics to move into the long run while embracing its true destiny and original intent as Anglo-American exceptionalism! (Keynes historically respected Malthus)

see Krugman: “It’s taken me a while to get around to Bob Gordon’s stimulating essay suggesting that the great days of economic growth are behind us. It’s not that different from things he’s been saying before, and I have in the past had a lot of sympathy for that view. I now believe, however, that his technological pessimism is wrong — or if you prefer, it’s the wrong kind of pessimism. But this is definitely a discussion worth having.” (AGREED)

In other words a large macro view of Krugman is to see him peeling away from the perma-bears altogether (away from malthus)…but realize that some part of Reagan was also peeling away from the perma-bears (away from Carter+ the deficit hawks).

In the end of the day you aren’t selling either Reagan or Keynes if you believe that america’s best days are behind her. American exceptionalism has to believe that we can see technology trickle down that is not Hicks Neutral, yet still absorb the unemployment this creates by pushing fiscal policy for full employment. If the rich get richer, that is ok but it isn’t the primary goal, and in point of fact once we understand this, we no long need to have some sort of “cold war” dynamic to push technological innovation.

Among the republicans the most Reaganesque (or at least Bullish) was probably Newt Gingrich, and I actually think this isn’t far from the direction he wanted in terms of satisfying his dreams for a moon colony.

Krugman says: “So we could be looking at a society that grows ever richer, but in which all the gains in wealth accrue to whoever owns the robots.”

(This is the Marxist bear)

The answer is in understanding (and improving) the Hicks model and melding this with a theory of intellectual property/USPTO.

“Anyway, interesting stuff to speculate about — and not irrelevant to policy, either, since so much of the debate over entitlements is about what is supposed to happen decades from now.”

Keep preaching Krugman!

I never said the Marxist and Malthusian bears weren’t going to get us, just maybe we can kick that can down the road. GO BULLS!

Therefore, it is best for the GOP to raise the surrender flag. ObamaCare, Medicaire, and Medicaid are unsustainable financial disasters that cannot even come close to being reformed. And niether our political class nor our Cognitive Class (the so-called) experts even contemplate alternatives. Conservaitves should just bide their time and develope alternatives plans that are 180 degrees opposite of current ones (Believe it or not, many European nations do have viable private health care solutions. The only problem is, they are available only to the well-to-do and wealthy). Creative destruction is in order.

“If the theory is that the Republican Party can jettison the plutocrats, jettison the racists, jettison the tax jihadists, jettison the creationists”

If you really think this way, the GOP probably really isn’t for you – and that’s okay (the not being for the GOP – not the cartoonish view of the opposition.)

That’s an excellent insight, Pete.

What this would look like, maybe, would be finding some successful, affluent, well-educated white male family men from conservative Catholic backgrounds who nevertheless support Obama, and then listening to and understanding what motivates their collection of self-righteous, self-validating bigotries toward the Republican Party.

Because if you can’t understand how to find common ground with people like that, it’s going to be a long, long way to understanding working-class Hispanics.