Category Archives: Politics

The Left’s Post-Election Self-Examination?

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Brad DeLong writes,

Massachusetts has been walking down this exchange-and-public-program-expansion road for six years now, since Mitt Romney signed RomneyCare. Massachusetts has been vacuuming up doctors and nurses from Costa Rica and elsewhere and still has been finding that the cost of treating your state population is higher when 97% are insured than it was when 88% were insured. And there aren’t enough loose doctors and nurses in the rest of the world for the ACA to vacuum up enough of them to meet the needs of not 1 state but 50 states.

…What is your guess as to what will happen if the ACA works for access, works for quality, works for coverage–but the extra health-care workforce needed isn’t there, and the lines start to get longer?

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

Until the election, this sort of question had only been asked by conservative economists.

Perhaps this is an early example of the pattern of self-examination that I thought might take place after the election. When it comes to their policy portfolios, the Republicans will be second-guessing themselves in terms of political positioning. Meanwhile, the Democrats may be second-guessing themselves in terms of feasibility.

The Right’s Post-Election Self-examination

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Tyler Cowen points to a David Brooks column that praises a number of right-of-center commentators who are more prominent in the blogsphere than elsewhere. Some thoughts of mine:

I doubt that Mitt Romney ever considered drafting any of the people mentioned by Brooks to serve on his policy team. Instead, he just rounded up the usual suspects. I thought that President Obama could have put up a list of Romney’s economic advisers along with their positions in the Bush Administration and asked, rhetorically, “What do you think will turn out differently this time?”

I expect that most of the advice to Republicans will be of the form, “Move closer to my position.” So, for example, I would advise the Republicans to focus on the fact that the government has made financial promises that it cannot keep. In other words, we are broke. I would like to see Republicans insist on an adult conversation about the budget, while soft-pedaling other issues.

Left-wing Democrats will tell Republicans that they need to move closer to the “center,” by which they mean the positions held by left-wing Democrats. Social conservatives will say that Republicans need to jettison their unpopular economic conservatism and instead emphasize traditional marriage in order to appeal to ethnic minorities. Immigration restrictionists will say that Republicans need to hang tough rather than surrender. Libertarians will dream of a Republican Party that moves to the far left on every issue other than economic policy.

Which brings me back to David Brooks. He wants Republicans to elevate the importance of young pundits who combine the background, tastes, and style of the liberal elite with some conservative political views. Bobos in Paradise meets Hayek, or something like that. I assign a low probability to the Republican Party adopting that identity.