A Stitch in Haste

No wonder class warriors such as John Edwards and Barack Obama are so incensed. Just look at the absolute squalor now spreading across America:

Lori and Steven Siravo earn $56,000 a year and say they can't afford health insurance.

They consider themselves lucky to live in New Jersey, where the family's income isn't too high to qualify their 16-year-old daughter, Carlie, for U.S. government-subsidized coverage under the State Children's Health Insurance Program.
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Steven, 49, drives a Chevrolet Caprice Classic that's almost 20 years old, and she drives a 5-year-old Chevy Monte Carlo. The above-ground pool out back is 17 years old, bought when "we had money" before Carlie was born, Lori said.

The one luxury is a full-size pinball machine Steven bought for his wife on her 40th birthday.

The family's monthly bills consume most of their take-home income. Pulling out her checkbook, Lori said there's the mortgage ($1,500), utilities ($743), phones and Internet service ($200), car insurance and gasoline ($205), property taxes ($230), basic cable television ($48), food ($600) and credit-card payments ($325) on an outstanding $11,000 balance. That's $46,212 a year, not including clothes, school books and extra-curricular activities for Carlie.
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There's also $352 a month on a home-equity loan the Siravos took out to send Carlie to a private Catholic high school.

Read that again: Apparently "poverty in America" now means having "only" two cars, "only" basic cable, "only" an above-ground pool and "only" a private education. Oh, and "only" one pinball machine.

If that's your (deprived) lifestyle, then you are, to SCHIP apologists, "poor" and in need of health insurance welfare underwritten by other people's taxes.

This is what Democrats decry as "poverty in America." These are the people to whom President Bush is being "cruel" by threatening a veto of SCHIP expansion. These are the miserable, contemptible, utterly hopeless forty-something whiner-brats who lay claim to other people's income, insisting that — their words — "life is stressful enough without worrying about your health."

Or, apparently, worrying about being middle-class leeches on other taxpayers.

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UPDATE: Just to be clear, this family is not "uninsurable." They have access to typical, ordinary private health insurance. They choose, however, to opt -- immorally if not irrationally -- to enroll in SCHIP for less than one-third the cost of private, middle-class health insurance. Behold "enlightened" socialized medicine schemes -- corrupting otherwise reasonable people into becoming welfare bums.

Madness. Sheer madness.

(Via Cato@Liberty.)

Harold Meyerson sees — well, "invents" would be a better word — a contradiction in the president's veto of expanded SCHIP coverage:

Beyond question, there are parents in Fairfax and Montgomery who could easily afford to send their kids to private schools but who send them nonetheless to the excellent public schools in their neighborhoods They thus increase government spending and withhold revenue from the private-school industry, but I've never heard anyone complain about that. A free public education is a right, or, if you prefer, an entitlement in America, because the nation long ago decided that an educated population is a national good.

You might think that the same logic would apply to providing children with health care, that the gains to the nation from having a healthy population would outweigh those of bolstering private health insurance companies in the name of laissez-faire ideology. According to President Bush and the hard-right wing of the Republican Party, though, you'd be sadly mistaken. Bush fears that expanding health care for children from uninsured families who can't afford to buy insurance on their own (it costs about $11,000 a year for a family of four) would enable some families, as he put it at a news conference last month, collectively to "move millions of American children who now have private health insurance into government-run health care."

Nice try.

There is a fundamental, and in Myerson's case thesis-killing, distinction between public education and socialized medicine: The justification for public education is not that there is a "right to an education." There is of course no such right. The justification for public education is that there are positive externalities — large, objective, measurable positive externalities — to universal elementary and secondary education.

There are no — zero — positive externalities to socialized medicine generally and SCHIP specifically. It's just socialism: warm fuzzy feeling demands by "enlightened" folks like Myerson who wish to express their compassion for children via other people's wallets. How charitable of them.

The discussion could end there of course, but there are other reasons why SCHIP is hardly the economic, or moral, equivalent of public education.

For starters, public education is — well, was — locally funded via property taxes in almost all jurisdictions. The people who benefited from public education paid for it (net of the pesky problem of people without children paying for those who do, but that circles back to the externality argument, which is stronger the more localized the taxation is). SCHIP cannot make that claim: it is a federal entitlement, QED.

Similarly, public education is at least somewhat competitive. When a couple with or contemplating children decides to move, what is often the first question they ask of potential new homes? "What are the schools like?" Offset, naturally, by "What are the taxes like?" Again, SCHIP cannot make that claim: it is a federal entitlement, QED.

Likewise, people can, as my parents recently did, flee a local tax-for-schools regime that they find undesirable for their circumstance. It is much harder, and less reasonable to demand, that people flee the federal income tax, whether over No Child Left Behind or SCHIP.

To summarize: Public education* is a public good; health care — even health care for children — is not. Public education is not welfare; SCHIP is. Public education is not provided because it is a "right;" neither is SCHIP.

Like I said: Nice try.

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There are far less "nice" tries in Myerson's piece: Health care for veterans is a public good (in the same sense that the military itself is a public good), so that's wholly inapposite to the SCHIP debate. And Medicare, qua a compulsory tax-and-participate scheme, is most definitely socialized medicine. It is pompous, insolent sophistry to suggest otherwise. Oh, and it's a fiscal disaster. Yet people like Myerson (and Hillary Clinton) somehow consider Medicare a "counterargument"? Utterly mind-boggling.

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*By which I of course mean public financing of elementary and secondary education, not public provision. And since there are no externalities to higher education, there should consequently be no — zero — taxpayer subsidization of colleges or college students.

Paul Krugman on the SCHIP veto (netting out his typical bait-and-switch, guilt-by association background noise -- e.g., extraneous references to the Rush Limbaugh / Michael J. Fox affair):

Most conservatives ... try to preserve the appearance that they really do care about those less fortunate than themselves. But the truth is that they aren't bothered by the fact that almost nine million children in America lack health insurance. They don't think it's a problem.
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And on the day of the veto, Mr. Bush dismissed the whole issue of uninsured children as a media myth. Referring to Medicaid spending -- which fails to reach many children -- he declared that "when they say, well, poor children aren't being covered in America, if that's what you're hearing on your TV screens, I'm telling you there's $35.5 billion worth of reasons not to believe that."
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Of course, minimizing and mocking the suffering of others is a natural strategy for political figures who advocate lower taxes on the rich and less help for the poor and unlucky.

Two hasty stitches:

--If Medicaid, which is specifically designed to provide health care to the poor, is not adequately reaching poor children, then isn't the answer to fix Medicaid rather than to create (or expand) a whole new entitlement that is clearly capable -- and perhaps surreptitiously intended -- to undergo mission creep into the middle class? How is arguing that programs to help the poor should only help the poor, and not be wastefully duplicated, constitute "they aren't bothered by the fact" or "they don't think it's a problem" or "minimizing and mocking"?

--Do radical tax-and-spend liberals ever acknowledge the ignoble symmetry between being manically, fanatically willing to spend other people's money (which they call "compassion") and being manically, fanatically unwilling to spend your own (which they call "greed")? The difference between the two is not a chasm; it's a hairline fracture. How do they legitimize their sweeping indignation to those who are just tails to their heads? I don't get how they don't get it.

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Eugene Robinson grabs Krugman's baton and runs with it:

To say that George W. Bush spends money like a drunken sailor is to insult every gin-soaked patron of every dockside dive in every dubious port of call.
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So for Bush to get religion on fiscal responsibility at this late date is, well, a joke. And for him to make his stand on a measure that would have provided health insurance to needy children is a punch line that hasn't left many Republicans laughing.

All true (well almost: I strenuously object to Robinson's lumping the unarguably proper war in Afghanistan in with the discredited war in Iraq as a unified example of fiscal profligacy or misplaced priorities -- that's just sloppy thinking at best and disingenuous propagandizing at worst).

But it is at least as true that fiscal recklessness will be at least as bad starting in January 2009 when we have a Democratic president, Democratic House and Democratic Senate (and perhaps -- ministers of grace defend us -- a filibuster-proof Democratic Senate). Heckuva job, Craigy!

The answer to Republican Drunken Sailor Syndrome is not Democratic Drunken Sailor Syndrome. The answer, in the absence of libertarian principles (which are indeed absent in Washington), is gridlock.

And that answer is not forthcoming.

A self-standing comment I left at another blog:

"So I ask: Would Jesus have vetoed the SCHIP bill?"

Is he suggesting that Jesus was a tax collector? Because I can think of a Bible passage or two that would suggest otherwise.

There is no rational basis to invoke any government entitlement program, or any compulsory tax that finances one, as "proper Christian policy."

"Doing good works" is not the moral equivalent of "forcing your neighbor to pay for them." No true Christian has difficulty with this basic concept.

It is mind-boggling to me to think that there are self-professed "Christians" who consider it a "Christian" virtue to force other people to be "Christian." It's offensive when the conservative theocrats do it, and it's no less offensive when liberal theocrats do it.

The conservative theocrats put "God" on the money in our wallets. The liberal theocrats now want to put "God" on the tax bill that pulls the money out of our wallets. While both insolently claim the moral high ground.

Bottom Line: There is no cognizable difference between Shavar Jeffries and James Dobson.

A pox on both their churches.

Blaspheme Discuss.

A New York Times editorial assures us that fears of "mission creep" within an expanded SCHIP program are unfounded:

To hear the Bush administration tell it, expanding the State Children's Health Insurance Program would entice hordes of families to drop their private coverage and put their children on the public dole. As the Health and Human Services secretary, Michael Leavitt, argued in a recent television appearance, states that cover middle-income children as well as the poor are essentially telling people to "cancel your private insurance and we'll have the government pay for it."

The Times then points to a Congressional Budget Office study that concludes that "only" two million children (!) currently covered by or eligible for private insurance would be lured into this new middle class entitlement.

Of course, history shows — over and over and over — that, when evaluating federal programs, mission creep should always be the default assumption. For example:

--The first income tax (after the Sixteenth Amendment took effect) "only" applied to incomes over $500,000 and was capped at a 7% rate. Fewer than 1% of Americans had to pay any federal income tax at first. Now the income tax is paid by roughly half the population and reaches as much as 35% of marginal income.

--The first Alternative Minimum Tax applied "only" to 155 hyper-rich families who would otherwise have paid no federal income tax whatsoever. It will soon apply, if left unchecked, to the entire American middle class.

--Social Security (insanely described by liberals as "the most successful government economic program in history") initially "only" taxed 2% of income and was capped at "only" $3,000. It now confiscates one-eighth of most workers' entire paychecks.

--A "temporary" 3% tax was imposed on long-distance telephone service "only" to fund the Spanish-American War. It was not repealed until last year — 108 years after the five-month war ended.

--Similarly, three generations after the Great Depression, the federal government still sees a need for taxpayer-funded rural electrification programs, farm subsidies, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and countless other leftover New Deal zombie-ocracies. No mission creep in any of that, apparently.

--PBS was established when there were exactly three homogeneous broadcast networks. Now that 300 astoundingly diverse television channels (or more) is the norm, politicians and bureaucrats consider PBS to be — still absolutely vital. Somehow.

--One word: Amtrak.

Add you own examples in the comments.

So to think that SCHIP will somehow be different, that it will forever avoid mission creep and could never expand even further into a "teaser rate" for socialized medicine, is either unforgivably naive or unforgivably disingenuous.

Not that it makes much difference which.

We already have a health care safety net for the poor in this country — Medicaid. To the extent that Medicaid is failing in its mission to cover poor children, it should be fixed. That would be an acceptable form of "mission creep." But Medicaid should not be supplemented by a duplicative, politically loaded, warm-fuzzy-feeling middle-class entitlement that would, intentionally or otherwise, almost certainly lure self-sufficient households to suckle at the teat of socialized medicine.

More thoughts at From On High.