NEITHER SIDE IS PREPARED FOR THE REFORMS THAT ARE NEEDED:

The President’s Speech (Yuval Levin, 4/13/11, National Review)

President Obama’s speech really brought home how confused and disoriented liberalism is today, and how very difficult it will be for the Left to accept that the social-democratic welfare state is collapsing and something else must take its place. Yet the very fact that he felt compelled to make such a speech does offer some hope.

As recently as February, in his budget, Obama essentially denied that we had a fiscal crisis. Today, he admitted it and described it, or at least parts of it. It is certainly unorthodox for a president to renounce his own budget two months after proposing it, but that is just what the president did—implicitly dismissing even the goals set out by his budget in its own terms (let alone its potential to achieve them, as measured by the Congressional Budget Office) as totally inadequate. In that sense, the only immediate practical implication of the speech is that it throws the 2012 budget process into disarray. Are the cabinet agencies supposed to be defending the president’s now-repudiated formal budget request before congressional committees in the coming months, or does the administration now expect Congress to ignore its budget? If so, will the administration be offering some particular alternative requests, with details that (unlike this speech) can be scored by CBO?

The other implications are less direct, because the president mostly laid out ends without means. He accepted much of Paul Ryan’s definition of the problem we face, but insisted that it could be solved by trimming our welfare state at the edges, rather than reforming and restructuring it. He held up past examples of such trimming as his model—arguing, preposterously, that the budget agreements of the 1990s, which offered slight adjustments without reforming the institutions of our welfare state, were successful and that we only face a crisis today because George W. Bush cut taxes. In fact, those budget agreements bought a little time while ignoring the basic problem—especially the entitlement problem. That’s why we are where we are, and Obama now proposes to just put the blindfolds back on and make the same mistake again.

Christians in a Post-Welfare State World (Samuel Gregg, 4.13.11, American Spectator)

he welfare state's impending demise is going to force Christians to seriously rethink how they help the least among us.

Why? Because for the past 80 years, many Christians have simply assumed they should support large welfare states. In Europe, Christian Democrats played a significant role in designing the social security systems that have helped bankrupt countries like Portugal and Greece. Some Christians have also proved remarkably unwilling to acknowledge welfarism's well-documented social and economic dysfunctionalities.

As America's welfare programs are slowly wound back, those Christian charities who have been heavily reliant upon government contracts will need to look more to the generosity of churchgoers -- many of whom are disturbed by the very secular character assumed by many religious charities so as to enhance their chances of landing government contracts.

Another group requiring attitude-adjustment will be those liberal Christians for whom the essence of the Gospel has steadily collapsed over the past 40 years into schemes for state-driven wealth redistributions and promoting politically-correct causes.

The welfare state's gradual collapse presents them with somewhat of an existential dilemma. The entire activity of lobbying for yet another welfare program will increasingly become a superfluous exercise -- but this has been central to their way of promoting the poor's needs for years.

More-pragmatic liberal Christians will no doubt adjust. Others, however, will simply deny fiscal reality and frantically lobby for on-going redistributions of an ever-shrinking pool of funds.

Initiatives to Promote Savings From Childhood Catching On (Amy Goldstein, 8/20/05, Washington Post)

In today's economy, a savings account "is as fundamental as land was back in the 18th and 19th century," said Ray Boshara, of the New America Foundation, a centrist think tank that is a main advocate of children's accounts.

Involving several hundred children in a dozen communities around the country, SEED (Saving for Education, Entrepreneurship, and Downpayment) -- a four-year experiment being conducted by local social service agencies, studied by researchers and paid for by several nonprofit foundations -- is a modest version of the ultimate goal.

Legislation has been introduced in Congress that calls for the government to open a KIDS Account of at least $500 for every baby born in the United States. And President Bush's first Treasury secretary, Paul H. O'Neill, has been giving speeches around the country, promoting an even bolder plan he has devised for children's accounts that he says would guarantee every American at least $1 million by age 65, eventually eliminating the need for Social Security.

Fostering savings from childhood is, in a sense, a spillover from the debate over whether to establish private investment accounts in Social Security, the nation's fragile retirement system. But unlike the partisan rancor that runs through the Social Security debate, children's accounts are gaining proponents across the ideological spectrum. Conservative Republicans construe them as a form of the market-oriented "ownership society" that Bush touts. Liberal Democrats view them as an extension of the Great Society of the 1960s that created government programs to lift people from poverty.

"It's a simple kind of merging of the stereotypes of the parties," said Rep. Harold E. Ford Jr. (D-Tenn.), sponsor of a bill that would create KIDS Accounts. "You give to people; you put some responsibility on people to save, as well."

Despite bipartisan cheerleading, such accounts have skeptics on the right, who are disdainful of a new government handout, and on the left, who fear the expense would drain money from other social needs.

The Right can't stand that reform is going to be universal and expensive up front and the Left can't stand that it means ceding control from government to individuals and the markets.

Posted by oj at April 14, 2011 6:10 AM
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