Good point from Mark Schmitt:
Back when the Medicare bill was on the floor and I was just starting this blog, I argued that the Democrats, rather than proposing a $1 trillion prescription drug benefit, should have proposed something that cost less and did much more, such as the Clinton bill of 2000, which at the time cost $253 billion and even three years later would certainly not have cost more than the $400 billion claimed cost of the Bush bill, while doing much more. Such an alternative would have put the handful of real conservatives, who were being told by their leaders that if they didn’t vote for the Republican bill, the Democrats would sweep in with something even bigger, in a very awkward position. But now that the real cost of the Bush bill is $1.2 trillion, I realize that I was wrong: the Democrats were perfectly responsible, and did propose a bill that cost less and did more than the Bush bill. And because it contained some real cost controls, its cost was not likely to escalate much beyond that.
(Background on the $253 billion bill here.) And I haven’t excerpted any of the David Brooks-bashing! Come on, you’ve got to click over for that!
{ 3 comments }
Thomas 02.22.05 at 11:04 pm
Better yet, the Democrats should have ofered free drugs to seniors, and simply confiscated the drugs from the evil drug companies.
Conservatives would have to be in favor of that, wouldn’t they?
Andrew McManama-Smith 02.22.05 at 11:29 pm
I just wish they wouldn’t buy the Medicare recipients Viagra, my upstairs neighbours make enough noise as it is~
And David Brooks bashing is sooooo January, I’m glad you refrained from it, it’s practically March you know.
Cleve Blakemore 02.23.05 at 2:31 am
Funny how the left keeps telling us the current inhabitants of the White House are conservatives, when in fact the entire lot of them surrounding Bush are Trotsky style hardcore marxists, devotees of Leo Strauss, a classic homosexual radical communist-fascist nutjob.
Conservatives don’t believe governments solve people’s problems. The fact is, we have Leninists in opposition and Trotskyists in the house. Conservatives, who number some 80% of the nation, have no political representation of any kind.
Socialists argue where we should move the deck chairs around to on the Titanic. Conservatives take issue with the entire gestalt of the radically divergent monster called the “American government,” currently strayed so far beyond the principles of the Constitution it has no context outside being an extension of international Bolshevism. The Founding Fathers could only stand open jawed in horror to listen to the chief chimp in charge talk about how the American empire will rule the globe for the good of all. Jefferson and Franklin would be on full automatic right now and knee deep in spent shell casings.
200 million Americans have no political representation. That’s reality. Conservatives have been relegated to absolute powerlessness before a coalition of insane Zionists and fundamentalist Christian whackos. I’m not sure which side of this match made in hell is crazier, the side that believes they are the living embodiment of God’s will or the fundamentalists who desire to engineer their demise so they can ride the magic Jesus rapture express. Hellbound, each and every one of them say I.
Comments on this entry are closed.