Op-ed: The Democrats Rejoice
Print
Email
Check out David Brooks op-ed from today on the Democrats' health care victory. It's the final piece in the social welfare puzzle, he writes. The Democrats brought forth the New Deal to protect the unemployed, Social Security and Medicare to help the old, and now health care. But at what cost?
"Today, America’s vigor is challenged on two fronts. First, the country is becoming geriatric. Other nations spend 10 percent or so of their G.D.P. on health care. We spend 17 percent and are predicted to soon spend 20 percent and then 25 percent. This legislation was supposed to end that asphyxiating growth, which will crowd out investments in innovation, education and everything else. It will not. ...
"The Democratic Party, as it revealed of itself over the past year, does not seem to be up to that coming challenge (neither is the Republican Party). This country is in the position of a free-spending family careening toward bankruptcy that at the last moment announced that it was giving a gigantic new gift to charity. You admire the act of generosity, but you wish they had sold a few of the Mercedes to pay for it. "
Comments
David Brooks Has Lost HIs Way
David Brooks, a thoughtful person known to embrace complex ideas and sometimes postmodern philosophical frames, has become a surprisingly vacuous commentator. One reads with sadness his latest attempt to craft an interesting or compelling narrative about recent events. Like his superficial people-hate-Washington mantra, his editorial linking the passing of historic healthcare reform to a childhood chimera recalling some poster of Hubert Humphrey in his bedroom (Was this, David, a campaign poster for the somewhat kind but ineffectual HH, or when he stood behind LBJ during the signing of The Civil Rights Act of 1964?) is a pathetic attempt to cast current events as more-of-the-same; Democrats as a regressive party who spend too much on social programs because they’re nice but who don’t get it. Republicans, for Brooks, on the other hand, are the Roman Gladiators he came to respect with age and puberty: they “embody the cause of personal freedom and economic dynamism.” Putting aside for the moment the disastrous “economic dynamism” of the George W. Bush years—including that Administration’s costly yet hollow, self-indulgent, and misguided foreign policies—casting the Democratic victory on health care as another “grand liberal project” is a rather empty idea that misses—pro or con—the enormity of recent cultural shifts.
Brooks has been one of the more creative, engaging, and thoughtful commentators on the right, a mantle that David Frum now holds. But he has succumbed, like the Republican party at large, to an incoherent, superficial, emotional, trite, shriveled balloon kind of rhetoric. Indeed, the man is looking a bit neurotic these days in his talk show appearances.
I want good ideas from David Brooks, and he can do better. Stop whining, David. Frame current events in ways that move the debate forward, not backwards or, worse, nowhere. Pull up your underwear, get out of your childhood bedroom, and start thinking man!
First, the country is
First, the country is becoming geriatric. Other nations spend 10 percent or so of their G.D.P. on health care. We spend 17 percent and predicted to soon spend 20 percent and then 25 percent."
The U.S. is not more geriatric than the European countries and Japan that provide excellent health care, better than ours, for their whole populations and for the price of, as Brooks says, about 10% of GDP rather than 17% and going up sharply. These countries also, on the whole, have better public education systems, good public transportation, and don't have crumbling infrastructures. Nor do they have a distorted income distribution with a large percentage of poor people and a layer of hugely rich people at the top.
So the "vibrancy" that Brooks admires is fading, and not because of the federal debt. Rather the federal debt is a result of our wanting to have our cake without paying for it. A country that believes that taxes are a kind of theft rather than the price civilized people pay for the privilege and responsibility of taking care of themselves and their fellow citizens is on a downward slope. Look at what has happened in California since 1978 when Proposition 13 was brought to the Golden State by tax-hating Republicans. There was a budget surplus at the time but 30 years later the state is on the verge of bankruptcy.
Maybe Brooks will write in his next column about prudent Republicans whose sense of responsibility includes their fellow citizens, who believe in a common national enterprise. Yesterday there was ugly shouting inside the House chamber to say nothing of racial and homophobic slurs by protesters inside and outside the Capitol building.
Are these people to whom Brooks feels "spiritually attached?"
I'll take the Democrats any day
Stephanie Mcnealy
Excuse me?
European countries provide "excellent healthcare"?
Have you ever experienced the indignity of a healthcare waiting list? Or how about seeing a loved one waiting almost a year for second rate cancer treatment?