The Price of Civilization_ Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity - Jeffrey D. Sachs [50]
Table 7.2: Attitudes About Ending the Bush Tax Cuts
Source: Richard Auxier, Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “Taxed Enough Already?,” September 20, 2010, and Pew Research Center, “Mixed Views on Tax Cuts, Support for START and Allowing Gays to Serve Openly,” December 7, 2010.
The proof of this pandering is the behavior of key advisers after they leave office. No sooner had Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Peter Orszag left the White House than he wrote about the need for higher tax revenues as a share of GDP, a position he never took publicly while OMB director.11 The head of the Council of Economic Advisers, Christina Romer, also called for tax increases—once she had left office:
Finally, the President has to be frank about the need for more tax revenues. Even with bold spending cuts, there will still be a large deficit. The only realistic way to close the gap is by raising revenue.12
It’s a funny thing about being frank. We spend billions of dollars every two years to elect politicians who in turn bring top academic experts to Washington. Is that merely so that the experts can then hide the truth from the American people until those experts leave office and begin to write the truth once again?
Case 2: The Health Care Reform Debacle
The health care reform effort also exemplified the power of special interests. Obama worked very hard to make some progress in this area, and he achieved some progress, but at huge costs to public morale and huge sacrifices to corporate power. When the administration began its legislative efforts in early 2009, it decided not to put forward a plan, on the grounds that the last attempt to prepare a health plan, in Clinton’s first year of office, had gone down to defeat. A plan, it was argued, would leave too many hostages to the lobbyists’ whims.
Obama was determined to avoid a confrontation with two key corporate sectors, the health insurers and the pharmaceutical industry. If he put forward a plan that would really control costs, for example, or that introduced government competition into the insurance market (through the so-called public option), the private insurance industry would bolt. Therefore, from the start, Obama winked at the industry and assured its lobbyists that there would be no heroics on the critical cost and competition issues. He did not say as much to his constituents and the general public, who were told repeatedly that cost control was central and that a public option was very much on the table. Similarly, Obama negotiated an early truce with the big pharmaceutical companies, assuring the industry that the United States would not explore new methods of drug pricing. This too was never clearly articulated to the public.
The entire health care debate then took on a surreal air for the next fifteen months. Obama could not table a plan because the outlines of the implicit agreement with industry ran counter to the views of much of his own party, and indeed a majority of the public at large. During 2009, the public repeatedly indicated in opinion surveys that it backed the option of a government-run plan to compete with private plans. According to CBS/New York Times polls, the margin was 66 percent to 27 percent in favor of the public option in June–July 2009; in a Pew survey, it was 52 percent to 37 percent.13 Obama aimed to keep supporters of the public option satisfied by assuring them that such a policy was still on the table, while not explaining clearly to the public the outlines of the actual White House understandings with private industry.
The situation was even murkier because the costly part of the proposal—subsidies to expand health care coverage—meant additional annual outlays of around