Rob Schofield’s lamentations notwithstanding, if the rumors were right, the budget would’ve turned out better than we thought. Read Schofield’s whole post. Most of these rumored proposals strike this eye as pretty positive – particularly the pilot program designed to marketize Medicaid (I imagine similar to the one in Florida). That would have been a good idea.
Why "progressives" are so enamored of the undynamic, sclerotic, expensive, bureaucratic government systems that keep poor people dependent and distort the healthcare market is beyond me. They’ve bought fully the statist party line about "market failure", I guess. But leaving the Medicaid status quo is positively Soviet (and certainly not progressive in any lexical sense). I’d really like to see Adam Searing and Rob Schofield get full scholarships to graduate degrees programs in economics. They’d likely turn out like a couple of Paul Krugmans, but at least they would be able to grasp that a) Medicaid is fiscally unsustainable and gobbling up more and more of state budgets (we do need roads ya know), b) that Medicaid contributes to the very poverty traps you’d think progressives would like for poor people to escape, and c) that it distorts the market in such a way that sends more and more people into it. Then again, c) is their goal — single payer. But hopefully that economics degree would disabuse them of those notions, too. Alas, alas. Such is the redistributionist, zero-sum thinking of the left.
(Update: We could find nothing in the budget to justify Schofield’s fears. Leftism lives another day.)
Max–I think one good semester of principles of economics, preferably micro, would do the trick. You know–some basic supply and demand, opportunity costs, floors and ceilings, shortages and surpluses; the kinds of things that most 19 year-olds learn way before they attempt to do any real policy analysis.