Friday, July 17, 2009 - Posts
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Via Jennifer Rubin: "Card check"--allowing unions to avoid secret ballots--is now semi-officially out of the "card check" compromise bill. But the other sweeping structural change in the economy--allowing government "arbitrators" to set wages in the first union contract-is still in. The goal for unions is now to hide this "mandatory arbitration" provision and pretend that the fight was almost all about the defunct anti-secret ballot provision. The NYT's Steven Greenhouse, as usual, gives the unions what they want.
Opponents may need to come up with a new name for the bill (though "card check" is working pretty well for them). How about "federal pay determination"? Keep in mind that not only does the apparent "compromise" propose abandoning the hoary idea that wages should be set in the marketplace, it also abandons the New Deal's substitute idea that wages should be set in labor contest where unions threaten to use their strike power and management threatens to survive a strike. Unions seem to have given up strikes. Instead they want to authorize an official--maybe even an actual federal bureaucrat--to simply swoop down and impose what would undoubtedly be a wage increase. That's more akin to FDR's notorious, failed National Recovery Act--except the NRA at least let industries set their own rigid wage scales. ...
Note also that the arbitration provisions give now-unorganized workers a new, powerful incentive to unionize: Vote for the union, wait a few months, and an arbitrator will fly in and give you a raise. No strike. No fuss. No muss. ...
P.S.: Opponents also need to go on offense. ... 5:53 P.M.
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Bob Lutz, old/new General Motors product czar and now public face of exciting New GM, has announced that GM is killing its one shot at building an affordable rear-drive sedan on the discontinued Pontiac G8 chassis--a possibility Lutz himself floated a few days ago-- because there is no "marketing" case for it ... at which point hundreds of thousands of U.S. car fans, who have residual fondness for GM because they remember its classic rear-drive cars, think to themselves, "F--k it. Let GM die. What's it good for? Building boring family vehicles that are aren't quite as good at Toyota's boring family vehicles?" ...[via The Truth About Cars] 4:23 P.M.
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WaPo's Ezra Klein decrees "rules" for those who would use the CBO's damning analysis "against the existing health-care reform proposals"--they "must," he says, endorse some combination of cost-cutting proposals from a list he provides. Huh? Even as mock hubris (and it's hard to tell) this makes no sense. Who said opponents have to be for more cost-cutting? Why can't Republicans say to Dems a) You said your plans would bend the cost curve down. Instead they increase costs. The status quo would be better than your plans. Vote no. b) You said your plans would bend the cost curve down. Instead they increase costs. Why should we believe anything else you say? ... That isn't what I would say, but it's not an illogical or inappropriate response. ...
P.S.: Klein goes on, of course, to re-endorse the very treatment-restricting form of cost-cutting that is scaring people away from the Dem plans, specifically
comparative effectiveness review that can judge not only the effectiveness but also the cost-effectiveness of various treatments, and give the federal government authority to use that data when deciding reimbursement rates.
In other words, a medical treatment can be more effective than the alternative but the government will still try to prevent you from getting it if it's expensive. Yikes. Smug self-styled wonks will kill health care yet. ... [What would you do?--ed Guarantee health care security to all citizens--a public plan being one way to do it. People can switch jobs and lose jobs and be poor and near-poor and move and get ill without worrying about being covered. Assume this will raise costs. Assume the cost curve of medical costs will be hard to bend in any case, if that can be done at all. Figure out how to pay those costs--through taxes, if necessary. Take reasonable cost-controlling measures, if desired, once everyone has health care security--but don't expect too much. Stop acting as if cost-cutting and treatment-denying is the point of health care reform.] ... 2:28 A.M.
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