Ryan Streeter
A notable, but little-noticed, development on entitlement reform:
Bob Corker – one of the policy activists included in our list last Tuesday – and Claire McCaskill have introduced the CAP Act, which would bring federal spending as a percentage of GDP down from its current 24.7% to 20.6%. This idea used to generate a lot of sneers, and it still does, but now that our fiscal house is burning, it stands as good a chance of becoming law as ever.
But the Corker-McCaskill bill goes farther. It would ensure that Social Security and Medicare are fully accounted for in this total spending scenario. In other words, they would stop being pure entitlements and would have to compete for their share of the 20.6%-of-GDP pie.
Who knows where this bill will go, but it’s a promising sign that we’re beginning to get more creative in how we think about entitlement reform, and that the debate is becoming something we can respectably do in open air without frightening the horses too much.
And we need to give Claire McCaskill her due respect for co-sponsoring the bill. Perhaps she’s doing this as a way to show Missouri voters that her Obamacare vote doesn’t mean she’s lost her way.
Karl Rove writes in his column today:
We're at an unprecedented moment. The huge historic advantage Democrats have enjoyed on the health-care issue has evaporated...My hunch is voters are more inclined than ever to reward the political party that addresses entitlement reform—and more inclined than ever to punish the one that fiddles while America's fiscal house burns.
Let’s hope Rove is right. It certainly seems evident that voters will punish the fiddlers, but it remains to be seen how readily they will reward the reformers.
The Corker-McCaskill bill provides a good platform for a debate that would help inform voters more about how big entitlements really are, and what they portend. Fox News, for starters, should think about running a spot on it.
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