Several years ago, I shared some analysis suggesting that voting for Obamacare resulted in about 25 Democrats losing their congressional seats in 2010. And since more Democrats presumably lost seats in 2012 and 2014 because of that costly and misguided scheme, it surely seems that expanding government’s role in health care was a net negative for the Democratic Party.
Being a contrarian, however, I then suggested in my analysis that Obamacare nonetheless might be a net plus for Democrats, at least in the long run. Simply stated, as more and more people get ensnared in the quicksand of government dependency, that creates an ever-growing bloc of voters who may think that it is in their interest to support politicians who advocate for bigger government.
Let’s expand on that issue today.
Some of my Republican friends (I’m willing to associate with all sorts of disreputable people) have been making the point that President Obama has crippled the Democratic Party.
And they have a compelling case. If you compare the number of Democrats in the House and Senate when Obama took office with the amount that there are today, it’s clear that the President has been very bad news his party.
I suppose a defender of the President somehow might argue that the losses for congressional Democrats would have been more severe without Obama, but that would be a huge intellectual challenge.
Perhaps even more important, there’s been a giant loss of Democratic state legislators during Obama’s tenure, with more than 900 seats going from Democrat control to Republican control.
That’s resulted in a huge shift in the partisan control of state legislatures. Which, by the way, has very important implications for Congress because of the redistricting that takes place every 10 years.
So it seems like Republicans are in a good situation. They control Congress and they control most of the states.
And if GOPers pick up the White House in 2016, it surely seems like that would be the icing on the cake for those who say Obama was bad news for the Democrats.
But now let me give some encouraging news for my Democrat friends (like I said, I consort with shady people).
First, Republican control doesn’t necessarily mean a shift away from big government. Indeed, we saw just the opposite during the Bush years.
Second, even if small government-oriented Republicans controlled Washington after the 2016 election, that might not change the nation’s long-run trend toward more dependency.
These are some of the issues I explore in this CBN interview.
The most relevant point in the interview, in my humble opinion, was the discussion about one-third of the way through the interview. I talked about the “ratchet effect,” which occurs when the statists expand the size and scope of government a lot and good policy makers then get control and reduce it by only a small amount.
Stay in that pattern long enough and you eventually become Greece (which is why I emphasized in the interview the need to reverse this trend with big systemic changes such as genuine entitlement reform).
One final point. Pat gave me an opportunity to brag about the Cato Institute at the end of the interview. It is nice to work at a think tank that cares solely about policy and not about partisan labels. So we criticize big-government Republicans just as much as we criticize big-government Democrats.
No wonder we’ve been identified as America’s most effective think tank.
[…] me to explain. When Obamacare was enacted, I worried that it might be a long-term political victory for the left even though it was very painful for Democrats in the short run. Simply stated, voters in the future […]
[…] Has Obama Been Good News or Bad News for Big Government and the Democratic Party? […]
When Democrats are in power, the size, reach, and cost of government grows rapidly. When Republicans are in power, the size, reach, and cost of government grows slowly. But it always grows.
It’s unlikely that America will become Greece, simply because there is no entity big enough to bail her out.
But it will become France, or a generic European welfare state growing along a 1% trendline.
But the end result is the same: decline. In a world that grows along a four percent trendline whether you are zero growth Greece or one percent growth France makes little difference in the final outcome of decline. As a zero growth Greece, America joins the middle income country group by 2045. As one percent growth France, America joins the middle income country group by 2055.
Of course it’s not going to be a happy slow growth journey while decline completes. Americans are already feeling the malaise of way below par growth. The journey to losing top prosperity status is well underway and compounding with every passing month and year; as we speak.
Many frogs have self cocked this way. “It’s warm and cozier when we all huddle together in the pot of socialism”. I see nothing indicating that Americans will be the ones to escape.
The voter frogs have jumped in the lukewarm pot of coercive collectivism and the flame is on. There’s a bit of worry and apprehension, but overall it feels warm and comfy.
The trajectory to becoming a middle income country in a couple of generations has been taken. It is still beyond comprehension to Americans who have grown up on top of the world’s prosperity ladder, and that is why they are in denial. They are unlikely to snap out of it. But the compounding arithmetic of exponential growth (or lack thereof) is unequivocal.
Those of you born Americans who want a future for yourselves and your children, better start working on shedding irrational emotional attachment to the America you once knew. Otherwise you will most likely cook together with the other frogs, unless you become part of the government elite. But even that is a difficult journey. As American share of world GDP keeps shrinking, even the government intellectual elites will have less and less loot to share amongst each other as they dispense hope to the masses. Eventually even the soviet commissar has a worse standard of living than the capitalist middle class.