“Voucher” is one of those cool words, like “quantum” and “mobile”, that just makes everything better:
David Brooks columns are often difficult to grasp hold of, but I want to flag this accurate-but-misleading account of how Paul Ryan’s “budget roadmap” achieves large reductions in entitlement spending: “On the welfare-state side, he’d sweep away most subsidies to the middle and upper classes, like the tax exemption on employee health plans. He’d essentially voucherize federal benefits, like health care and Social Security, and increase federal subsidies for people down the income scale.”
Since Social Security is just checks mailed out by the government I don’t even know what voucherizing it would mean.
I think vouchers are fine, as long they are implemented in a Burkean way so as not to disrupt the complex adaptive system of the marketplace of ideas.
MikeBoyScout
Vouchers would enable the free-enterprise synergy of freedom and rectal exams.
Cacti
My understanding of Ryan’s voucher scheme is that they are not tied to inflation, and would consistently lose purchasing power as the years went by.
BethanyAnne
heh, indeedy
demo woman
You could go to any doctor you wanted and buy any insurance plan you wanted, as long as that insurance company wanted you.
What a bunch of bull. Right now the government is subsidizing insurance companies for medicare recipients. It costs a lot more and Ryan thinks this will help. Help line his pocket maybe.
The big Picture had an article about Ryan’s plan to have the feds raise the rate.
This is the best the repubs have.
brent
@Cacti:
Ryan has talked about vouchers with regard to medicare and his plan is indeed constructed so that those vouchers would cover less and less as time went on. He seems to believe that the magic of the marketplace would fix this because individual purchasing power would somehow bring prices down over time but then, that is what makes him a Republican. He is able to believe absurd things about economies all evidence to the contrary.
Desert Rat
Rules for when Republicans talk about social programs.
1. When a Republican talks about Social Security, Medicare, education, or any other program designed to benefit society at large, put your left hand on your wallet, and reach for the revolver with your right hand. You’re about to get robbed.
2. When in doubt, see Rule 1.
robertdsc-PowerBook & 27 titles
In vino veritas? lol
Cacti
@brent:
So the magic libertarian fairy dust of the market will take care of everything?
Yep, sounds like a Republican plan.
chrismealy
That made me laugh out loud.
MikeBoyScout
Those who criticize the wholesome goodness of vouchers as a solution shall face the wrath of the underpants gnomes.
Don’t come crying when your drawers drawers are empty!
Corner Stone
What it means is that he wants to use a coupon instead of a check. It would act like company scrip and be worth whatever the government said it was worth at any point in time.
Vouchers would also set up another way for the economic elite to get their mordita, the little bite. Any bank will cash the checks but a voucher will most likely add another layer of overhead as it’s redeemed.
Davis X. Machina
Surely after seven Harry Potter books it would be clear to even the most cloth-eared intellect that the efficacy of a spell has to do with performing it correctly, not with understanding it.
Vouchers!
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
Yglesias: “Since Social Security is just checks mailed out by the government I don’t even know what voucherizing it would mean.”
I don’t know either, but perhaps it means that instead of a check the government sends you a voucher that is redeemable at your local Schwab office.
Cacti
@Corner Stone:
“We will be happy to cash your Social Security voucher Mrs. Johnson. Our modest administrative fee for this service is only…”
Brachiator
Ah, yes. The third leg in the Rigid Republican Economics Stool:
Deregulation. Tax cuts. Vouchers.
birthmarker
I think when vouchers apply to education, parents get a tax credit for their private school tuition. How would you apply this to SS? Wouldn’t you have to have taxable income against which to apply the voucher? I guess if you have no taxable income as a retiree it would be like an earned income tax credit. This seems like a scheme to reduce ss income for the more affuent, even though they paid (more) into it. (The credit might reduce as income rises.)
Or you could just go to a zero cap gains tax…or zero once you reach retirement age. All under the guise of stimulating investment…
MikeBoyScout
Look, you can’t take the policy prescriptions of a man who thinks some of the worst written fiction is Teh Bomb seriously.
burnspbesq
Let me see if I’ve got this straight.
Republicans pilloried Democrats last year about rationing health care for the elderly, when the Democrats plan had nothing remotely resembling rationing in it.
The spiffy new Republican plan reduces the cost to government of health care for the elderly by rationing in the form of vouchers that are insufficient to cover reasonably foreseeable costs, and that’s cool.
Mmmmm … got it. One side lies all the time and is believed to be truthful, and the other side tells the truth and is believed to be lying.
Nice.
Indie Tarheel
@Brachiator:
Somebody should make a pill for that.
__
Also, ewwww!
jrg
@burnspbesq: Don’t worry, Matlock is on it.
Keith G
Who would get the SS vouchers? The retirees most of who need to spend their allotment? We workers who will then need to find a asset to invest in?
Sounds like a jobs bill for future Maddoffs.
Incertus (Brian)
@Brachiator:
Is that an upside-down stool, you know, one that can fit three people on it at a time?
MattF
And if you forget, you have to pay a free market mobile quantum voucher private enterprise late fee.
JGabriel
Everything will work perfectly when all workers are objectivists incentivized to do more with less!
.
Ripley
Show me on the doll where the invisible hand touched you….
Stillwater
“Voucher” is one of those cool words, like “quantum” and “mobile”, that just makes everything better:
And ‘nano’. Don’t forget nano. Personally, if SS wants to provide me with nano-vouchers when I’m
6572, I’m all for it.Doesn’t nano also mean ‘small’? Hmmm….
Stillwater
@Ripley:
Bing!!
Jay in Oregon
@Ripley:
This needs to become a BJ article tag, immediately.
JGabriel
I really don’t get the GOP fetish for vouchers. The only differences between a dollar and a voucher for a dollar are that the government can direct that a voucher only be used for specific purposes, and that a voucher can have an expiration date – each encapsulates the action of the government telling you what to do, which Republicans keep saying they’re against.
Ooooh! I get it now! It’s GOP hypocrisy. Again.
.
Roger Moore
I think that “voucher” is Republican code for being given the finger by the invisible hand of the market. The hope is that because it’s the invisible hand giving the finger, people won’t notice that it was the Republicans who were ultimately to blame.
FlipYrWhig
“Voucher” carries with it a sense of choice. You might think that when all your choices suck, that’s bad, but, shut up, that’s why.
Tonal Crow
You “voucherize” Social Security by
piratizingprivatizing it. Clear now?PeakVT
The main point of vouchers is to funnel public money to a set of private Christian schools in the exurbs where conservatives would be free to indoctrinate their children as they see fit. I don’t think they really care about them in any other policy area.
Tonal Crow
@Desert Rat: Win!
jeffreyw
Another of those words is “sesame oil”: Sesame oil chicken.
BeccaM
Vouchers are just another way to transfer tax dollars to bloated, parasitic corporations while reducing poor people’s freedom of choice even further.
Corner Stone
I love Usain Bolt and I don’t care who knows it.
Maude
@BeccaM:
THIS
Cassidy
@Desert Rat: I’m stealing that.
MikeJ
Vouchers for Social Security is another way of shifting public perception of the program from “I paid in for years and when I retire I should get what has been promised to me” to “Social Security is a charity program for the poor.”
Once it’s charity, it’s toast.
Silver
@Jay in Oregon:
Seconded.
El Cid
Social Security is not ‘a check mailed out from the government,’ but a return on the social insurance you paid in.
2liberal
just watch out for “nano” as a catchworld. If they decided to nano-voucherize the programs, that is a bad thing.
Alwhite
It simple to voucherize social security. Instead of a check you get a $400 voucher for rent, a $200 voucher for cat food, a $5 voucher for transportation. Now, if you WANT to spend more on something better that would be up to you.
It just occurred to me that goatsie is actually a photo of the invisible hand fisting us all
Tsulagi
Vouchers might be a good idea for the politicians themselves. When they put their hands out for campaign money, give ‘em a voucher. If later they meet minimum standards, do a decent job, spend less time screwing their staff, underage pages, hunting for soulmates in Argentina, etc. spending more time keeping campaign pledges, then give them the money.
Look forward to R-cans and R-incums leading the way on that.
John Bird
Burke, Burke, Burke . . . I still can’t understand, after decades of Buckley-style fealty, how people like Brooks can claim Burke as their heritage. And yet the Republican movement of the present day DOES owe a lot to Burke, not because of his work’s (socially responsible) conservatism, but rather its strident stance against democracy and individual rights.
Presumably David Brooks still believes in democracy – and is one of the moderate voices of the right (gag me). But still, Burkean this, Burkean that. It’s like if E.J. Dionne regularly spoke approvingly of Karl Marx.
Tom Paine pointed out, in an attempt at ridicule, that only Burke could (and did) make the claim that people will rise up, violently if necessary, AGAINST their own rights.
And yet, here we have it – the Tea Party.
BC
Actually, there are very few actual checks mailed out; the Social Security office just puts the names, account numbers, routing numbers, and amounts on an electronic tape and voila, the money is in your account in your bank on the 1st of every month. Much better than a check that could be lost or stolen. It’s magic, that’s what it is. Paul Ryan just wants to take away our SS magic (sniff).
Nylund
Simply not paying for all the costs of Medicare is indeed a way to avoid paying all the costs of Medicare. Too bad it doesn’t actually solve the problem of how to pay for medical care for the elderly.
jake the snake
@Brachiator:
Fixed
jake the snake
@Ripley:
Win!
Ed Drone
@BC:
Actually, it’s around the second Tuesday of the month — not the 1st day of the month. I don’t know why.
But I do know that if you die in the middle of the month, they ask for the last payment back (or did for my mother-in-law, anyway).
Ed