{"id":7925,"date":"2010-12-04T00:52:12","date_gmt":"2010-12-04T05:52:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/?p=7925"},"modified":"2010-12-04T00:52:39","modified_gmt":"2010-12-04T05:52:39","slug":"obama-debt-commission-teeing-up-reform-of-great-society","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/7925\/obama-debt-commission-teeing-up-reform-of-great-society\/","title":{"rendered":"Obama Debt Commission Teeing Up Reform of Great Society?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yuval Levin notices an interesting trend in the various plans coming out of the Obama Debt Commission.\u00a0 When the proposals are added together there seems to be <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationalreview.com\/corner\/254476\/emerging-consensus-yuval-levin\" target=\"_blank\">a consensus building towards overhauling federal healthcare entitlement spending<\/a>.\u00a0 If done correctly, it could be a moment for conservatives to inject market principles like choice and opportunity into the system.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>There is growing agreement in American politics that <em>the <\/em>challenge of our time is cleaning up the horrible mess created by the Great Society\u2014the mess that is our approach to domestic discretionary spending but above all the mess that is our health-care entitlement system. That is the essence of our debt and deficit problems.<\/p>\n<p>The question is whether we can deal with that mess by keeping the basic structure of the Great Society entitlements while trimming significantly elsewhere and massively raising taxes, or whether we must deal with it by fundamentally reforming those Great Society entitlements while trimming significantly elsewhere and spreading the tax burden more widely but less heavily to encourage growth and innovation.\u00a0The latter is fairly obviously the answer to that question\u2014given demographic and economic realities, and given the kind of country the American public wants to live in\u2014but it will take a little time before that really sinks in. It is a very good thing, though, that the question is now being asked.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Reforming (or rather, transforming) the Great Society into a fiscally sustainable, free market-guided, consumer-driven system would be the kind of bipartisan project worthy of the era President Barack Obama and his congressional counterparts find themselves.\u00a0 Solving that puzzle would establish the president\u2019s sought for legacy while enacting the kind of policy changes the Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and other conservative intellectuals champion.<\/p>\n<p>H\/T: National Review Online<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yuval Levin notices an interesting trend in the various plans coming out of the Obama Debt Commission.\u00a0 When the proposals are added together there seems to be a consensus building towards overhauling federal healthcare entitlement spending.\u00a0 If done correctly, it could be a moment for conservatives to inject market principles like choice and opportunity into [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[143,905,2136,2047,12,802,61,2137],"class_list":["post-7925","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-barack-obama","tag-debt-commission","tag-entitlement","tag-great-society","tag-health-care","tag-paul-ryan","tag-spending","tag-yuval-levin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7925","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7925"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7925\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7929,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7925\/revisions\/7929"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7925"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7925"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7925"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}