Kevin Drum

I'll be in San Francisco for the next three days at a MoJo staff meeting, so blogging will be light. Maybe even nonexistent. It all depends on my mood, my schedule, and the vagaries of WiFi availability. Catblogging, however, will appear normally, though it will be reduced by 50%. I'll be back this weekend, and normal blogging will resume on Monday. 

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It's a slow news days, so everyone is highlighting the latest Kaiser report on healthcare costs. Guess what? They're up!

I don't have a ton to say on the fact that healthcare costs are increasing, but it's worth pointing out what this means for household incomes. In the last year, for example, the Census Bureau reports that median household incomes dropped from $49,777 to $49,445. That's a decrease of 0.7%.

But households also got compensation in the form of healthcare insurance. According to the Kaiser report, the employer share of healthcare premiums increased from $9,773 to $10,994. So let's add this up:

• 2010: $49,777 + $9,773 = $59,550
• 2011: $49,445 + $10,994 = $60,439

Suddenly, instead of a decrease, we have an increase of 1.5%. Adjusted for inflation, this is still a net loss, but it's a smaller one: about -1.2% instead of -3.4%. (All numbers are a bit rough since the sampling periods aren't identical. But they're probably accurate within a tenth of a point or two.)

Obviously the Great Recession is still taking its toll on household incomes. But so is healthcare. Household cash incomes have dropped considerably over the past decade, and that's a sign of something seriously wrong with the economy. But it's also a sign that instead of cash, we're increasingly taking our compensation in the form of ever more healthcare. That's probably a bad deal for most of us.

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The constant drumbeat of attention being paid to New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is really starting to grate. The guy says he's not going to run. Why not take him at his word and just let him govern New Jersey until 2016?

Answer: because Republicans are in a panic. They don't trust Romney, they're increasingly worried that Perry is unelectable, they think Bachmann is a nutcase, and the rest of their field are just fill-ins. So Christie is their once and future saviour. He yells at constituents! He killed a tunnel that liberals loved! He yells at teachers! He cut budgets! He yells at Democratic legislators! What's not to like?

Lots, it turns out, and Dan Amira finally tallies up Christie's weak points with the Republican base in a convincing fashion. Christie does like to yell at people, but unfortunately, he likes to yell at crazy conservatives too. In particular, he's taken very loud, very public positions on illegal immigration, gun control, climate change, education, and Sharia law that are precisely the opposite of the tea party positions. Any one of them would probably be enough to doom his chances, but five? Fuhgeddaboutit. He'd crash and burn before he even had his first chance to yell at a debate moderator for asking him a stupid question.

Note to Republicans: your field is set. Your choice is between an apparently inept Rick Perry and a transparently insincere Mitt Romney. Them's the breaks. Make the best of it.

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It's probably not a wise use of time to obsess too much about David Brooks, but.....I just don't get the guy. Today he argues that the global economy is on the verge of a train wreck and neither Democrats nor Republicans are thinking big enough:

We need an approach that is both grander and more modest. When you are confronted by a complex, emergent problem, don’t try to pick out the one lever that is the key to the whole thing. There is no one lever. You wouldn’t be smart enough to find it even if there was.

Instead, try to reform whole institutions and hope that by getting the long-term fundamentals right you’ll set off a positive cascade to reverse the negative ones.

Simplify the tax code. End corporate taxes and create a consumption tax. Reshape the European Union to make it either more unified or less, but not halfway as it is now. Reduce the barriers to business formation. Reform Medicare so it is fiscally sustainable. Break up the banks and increase capital requirements. Lighten debt burdens even if it means hitting the institutional creditors.

Wow. Eliminate corporate taxation! Completely reform the EU! Fix Medicare! Break up the banks! Declare a debt holiday! And do it all now now now. This is coming from a guy who likes to think of himself as a Burkean conservative?

At a grand policy level, it's not even that I disagree that much. I've written in favor of all these things except for simplifying the personal tax code (sort of trivial on the scale Brooks is writing about) and reducing the barriers to business formation (the World Bank ranks us pretty satisfactorily on this already). But whether or not these are good ideas, this is a pretty mind-boggling list of things to just casually toss off with one sentence apiece. I mean, what's the pitch to the Europeans? You've probably never thought about this before, but you need to either dissolve the eurozone or create a United States of Europe. Tick tock, time's a wasting. What's it going to be? [Cue Jeopardy theme music.]

It's probably not a good idea to dash off a column right after you've jerked awake in a cold sweat in the middle of the night. Especially one week after writing a column castigating President Obama for cynically proposing ideas that "couldn’t get passed even when Democrats controlled Congress." But implementing a VAT, getting healthcare costs under control, reforming the tax code, and breaking up the banks could? In which universe?

In the universe we actually do live in, Democrats are willing to talk about the kinds of things on Brooks's list. Maybe not as bravely or as fully as Brooks would like, but at least they'll entertain his ideas. But Republicans? They're dead set against any tax reform that isn't effectively regressive; they're dead set against a VAT; they're dead set against any new revenues for Medicare, which is plainly required as part of any serious reform; they're dead set against breaking up banks; and they're dead set against any kind of debt relief. Until conservatives like Brooks manage to get their more rabid compatriots to abandon this antediluvian approach to just about everything, there's not even a faint hope of getting anything on his wish list done. That's Job 1. In the meantime, there's hardly any point in writing about anything else.

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