A response to Conn Carroll

In his second paragraph, Carroll accuses me of “changing the definition of entitlement program [sic]” by counting increases in Medicaid spending as spending related to the economic downturn.  But the fact is, Medicaid is different from Social Security and Medicare.  It is a means-tested entitlement, which means it is available to lower-income people of pre-retirement age.  If you are, say, 32 years old, you could become eligible for Medicaid if you are hit by financial catastrophe and your income drops below a certain level. That doesn’t happen with Social Security or Medicare. Medicaid spending tends to go up in an economic downturn, and it’s entirely reasonable to attribute the increase to the economic downturn. So throw out Carroll’s second paragraph.

In his third paragraph, Carroll accuses me of overstating the amount of the deficit that is attributable to the economic downturn.  Carroll makes his point by saying that “if we take out the loss in tax revenue, which isn’t spending, and the Medicaid spending, which is entitlement spending,” then the amount of the deficit attributable to the downturn is much smaller than I said.  But I wrote that “nearly half of the current deficit can be clearly attributed to the downturn” [emphasis added]. By “deficit,” I meant “deficit” — not “spending.”  And the loss of tax revenue due to the economic downturn unquestionably, incontestably contributed to the deficit.  So throw out Carroll’s third paragraph.

Carroll’s fourth paragraph is an extended quote from my article.  I’m not sure why he included it; what I wrote is absolutely accurate, and the part that Carroll boldfaced, apparently to emphasize its wrongheadedness, is absolutely accurate.

In his fifth paragraph, Carroll suggests that entitlement spending has to — just has to — account for much of the deficit today because it will account for the majority of federal spending between now and 2021.  But that’s the future, not now.  In the article, I asked, “What is causing massive deficits now? Is it the same entitlements that threaten the future?”  The piece was about how we got where we are today — not about 2021.  So throw out Carroll’s fifth paragraph.

I know this is getting a little tiresome, but it’s almost over.  In his sixth paragraph, Carroll argues that since Medicare and Social Security are running deficits now, they must account for a lot of the current overall federal deficit.  “Entitlements are causing our deficit today,” he writes.  But parts of Medicare have run deficits in the past, at times when the overall federal deficit was not the urgent issue it is today.  Something is different now that is making the deficit so huge — and it is the astonishing increase in discretionary spending under Democratic control of Congress and the White House, coupled with the revenue loss and associated costs of the economic downturn.  So throw out Carroll’s sixth paragraph.

In a brief seventh paragraph, Carroll suggests that Tim Pawlenty’s candidacy failed because he believed the kind of stuff that is in my article.  “A political case can be made that Republicans should just pretend we don’t have an entitlement problem,” Carroll writes.  “Former Gov. Tim Pawlenty certainly believed that. How did that work out for him?” I’ve covered Pawlenty off-and-on since 2008 and have never gotten the impression that if he had just pushed entitlement reform, then his candidacy would have taken off like a rocket.  And one could just as logically argue that Pawlenty advocated a muscular foreign policy and his candidacy failed, so therefore it’s foolish to advocate a muscular foreign policy.

Some conservatives want to base a 2012 Republican presidential run on entitlement reform.  Maybe that will happen, and maybe it won’t.  But it won’t do them any good if they refuse to recognize that the cause of the current deficit problem — the one for which Barack Obama bears much direct responsibility — is different than the cause of deficits projected for the future.  Why not run a campaign in which you can truthfully accuse your opponent of screwing things up now, as opposed to 2021?