The Reemergence of Ron Wyden in the Repeal of Obamacare

 

Five years ago this December, Sen. Ron Wyden and Rep. Paul Ryan authored an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, "A Bipartisan Way Forward on Medicare," outlining reform measures that they wished to make to Obamacare. In the bill were provisions that the Obama administration found odious.

 

Wyden and Ryan wrote, "Our plan would also expand health care options for working Americans by giving smaller businesses the opportunity to empower their employees to make their own health care choices. Under this 'free choice' option, employees take the amount that their employer was contributing toward their employer-provided health coverage and use it to purchase their own health insurance instead."

 

For the designers of Obamacare, who hoped one day, perhaps after the 2016 election, to convert their monstrosity into a single payer American health care system, Wyden's work with Ryan in late 2011 was political apostasy. The White House came down hard on the senior senator from Oregon and Senate Finance Committee member. After all, 2012 was an election year and was somewhat of a referendum on Obamacare. But the White House caught a break when Republicans nominated Mitt Romney, who had designed a similar proposal for his own state of Massachusetts a few years prior. The issue was effectively off the table.

 

The competitive marketplace ideas for health care reform proposed by Wyden and Ryan were quickly shelved.

 

A lot has happened since 2011. Paul Ryan, after a term as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, is now speaker of the house. Ron Wyden is the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, which has jurisdiction over Obamacare in that chamber. And Donald J. Trump will, on January 20, be inaugurated the 45th president of the United States. The political world has turned over.

 

So, Obamacare is sure to be repealed in the next Congress. Right? Yes. But to make it stick and avoid a filibuster in the Senate, Republicans will need two things: 1) a free market replacement plan that promises universal coverage, and 2) 60 votes in the Senate. Currently, Republicans hold 51 Senate seats. Enter Ron Wyden.

 

The Washington Post's Ezra Klein, writing in 2011 about the working relationship of Ryan and Wyden, foreshadows the tensions Wyden may face this spring as he tries to convert a handful of Democrats to market-based health care reform: "Back when Wyden was pushing the Healthy Americans Act ? a bill that had an individual mandate and manny Republican co-sponsors ? he used to say that the fundamental comppromise in health care was that Democrats wanted universal coverage and Republicans wanted choice. Wyden is going to find Democrats are not very happy with this compromise because he let Ryan wiggle out of his side of the deal: Wyden is a Democrat signing onto a major choice based reform, but Ryan, as a Republican, is still calling for the full repeal of the Affordable Care Act."

 

Ryan had this to say in 2011 about his working relationship with Wyden and the Oregon senator's Healthy Americans Act: "If I were a Democrat, it's the bill I'd be on. He's got more mandates than I'd like. But if Ron Wyden and I were in a room, we could hammer out a deal by tomorrow."

 

Getting people in a room and hammering out a deal to repeal Obamacare will be the number one policy priority of the new Trump administration this next spring. Sen. Wyden's relationship with U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan, his role as ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, and his policy expertise and prejudice for market-based health care reforms make him the key figure in the U.S. Senate to round up the handful of moderate Democrats necessary to repeal/fix Obamacare.

 

How progressive Oregon voters take to Wyden's critical role in getting this done is another story.

 

Are Third Party Candidates Keeping Democrats in Power?
By Jacob Vandever

 

Looking over the election results in Oregon, it's clear that a number of races could have ended differently had third party candidates not been in the race.

 

In the race for Senate District 5, Republican Dick Anderson challenged Oregon political institution Arnie Roblan. Anderson only lost the race by 334 votes, while another 2,537 votes went to Libertarian Party candidate Dan Souza. Assuming those Libertarian voters would be more likely to vote for the Republican candidate should Souza not have appeared on the ballot, it's not unreasonable to assume that Souza's presence swung the result of the race.

 

In House District 9, which happens to be part of Senate District 5, Republican Teri Grier came within 1,095 votes of unseating incumbent Democrat Caddy McKeown. In that race, Libertarian candidate Guy Rosinbaum received 1,172 votes. Now, it isn't likely that all of Rosinbaum's votes would have gone to Grier had he not been on the ballot, but we can safely say that the race would have been closer.

 

Finally, and most critically, in the state treasurer's race, Republican Jeff Gudman lost to Democrat Tobias Read by 42,184 votes. (Not all the precincts are reported yet, so that number is not final.) Former Republican legislator and Independent candidate Chris Telfer received around nine percent of the vote, currently recorded at 171,438. Assuming that voters for Telfer, who served in the Oregon Legislature as a Republican, would have voted for Republican candidate Jeff Gudman over Democrat Tobias Read in Telfer's absence, Republicans could have had two big statewide wins this election.

 

Independent Party candidates can pull from either major party, depending on whether the individual running leans right or left, as exemplified by former Republican Telfer. But if we work under the assumption that Libertarian and Constitution Party candidates pull votes mostly from Republicans, while Progressive and Green Party candidates pull votes mostly from Democrats, it is clear that Republicans in Oregon are hurt by third parties much more than Democrats are effected.

 

Here's why. Five Libertarians ran for the State Senate this year and another 15 ran for the State House. Compare that to the two Progressive Party candidates and two Pacific Green candidates for the State House and the one Progressive Party candidate for the State Senate. Almost all of the Progressive and Green Party candidates ran in either safe Republican or safe Democrat seats, so they did not have much of an effect on the end result. That's a very different outcome than in the races mentioned above. In those much tighter, competitive races, the third party candidate likely changed the results.

 

Thus the question becomes: Are third parties helping Oregon Democrats keep a grip on power? At least for this election cycle, the presence of third parties on the ballot definitely hurt Republican candidates more than it hurt Democrats. Without third parties on the ballot Republicans could have possibly picked up another seat in the House and the Senate and won the state treasurer's race. A win in the treasurer's race would have given Oregon Republicans control of the State Land Board.

 

Trump Needs a Dose of Reagan Luck
By Philip J. Romero

 

As Portland high school students and other eminent philosophers attempt to relitigate the election, much of the chattering class still has omelet on their faces. Many pundits made the mistake of betting the odds, which heavily favored a Clinton victory. In some cases this was projection -- predicting what the predictor preferred would happen.
 

But as Damon Runyon wrote, the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet. So it is with the economy under a Trump presidency.
 

Both his passionate supporters and his aggrieved opponents regularly equate him with Ronald Reagan. There are undoubtedly superficial similarities: a larger-than-life political outsider with a penchant for simple homilies who broadens his party's appeal to core Democratic voters. Depending on your perspective, Reagan was a revolutionary who broke the cycle of stagflation, or a simple-minded ideologue who spent the nation into penury. Financial markets are playing out a very similar debate about Trump: Treasury bond interest rates a have risen almost a full percentage point since the election as investors anticipate faster growth and a flood of new debt.
 

New administrations usher in new optimism, so Trump's supporters may take his promises literally ?that his policies, such as slaashing corporate and individual tax rates and investing $1 trillion-plus in infrastructure renewal, will cause annual economic growth to rocket to 6 percent from the 2 percent range where it has been stuck since the end of the recession. After all, in Reagan's first three years, GDP transformed from shrinking at double-digit rates to growing at 6.3 percent in 1983, the year before his "morning in America" reelection landslide.
 

Let's compare the economic landscape in 1981 and 2017.
 

Reagan had the mixed fortune of arriving in office just as the country was entering its worst postwar recession (at the time). It was a man-made slump, engineered by the Volcker Fed to finally break the back of inflation (which exceeded 10 percent), after 15 years of half-measures. Reagan quietly but firmly supported the Volcker Fed, even as members received death threats and Republicans paid a price in the 1982 midterms (coincidentally, about the time when the 1981-82 recession ended). Interest rates peaked in 1981 and have been trending down for a generation and a half, providing massive support to bond and stock prices. For much of that time this support was turbo-charged by a now-accommodating Fed under Greenspan, Bernanke and Yellen; although that is likely to begin to reverse in December or soon thereafter.
 

Reagan also had "fiscal space" ? debt capacitty ? to increase defense spending and cut taxes. America's ddebt levels in relation to its GDP were at postwar lows. While the tax cuts were never completely self-financing as supply-siders claimed, they unquestionably expanded investment and small business formation, and made a sharp bounce even higher. But Reagan had very favorable winds from monetary policy once the shoals of recession were behind him.
 

The economy Trump inherits has some similarities to 1981? butt only some. Business startups have collapsed over the past eight years. No statistic is a better predictor of prosperity than the rate of business births, as this column argued in June. At present this birth dearth is due in part to taxation: taxes grew under the outgoing president, who showed zero interest in reform. But the main culprit is regulation, particularly Dodd-Frank for Wall Street and Sarbanes-Oxley, and expanded labor and environmental rules for Main Street. So, there certainly is room for improvement through sensible policies.
 

But the differences between 1981 and 2017 are greater than the similarities. Many are historical facts that no president can affect: We are in the eighth year of (lackluster) expansion and at or near a historic interest rate bottom. And government fiscal space has evaporated: The federal debt-to-GDP ratio now exceeds 100 percent, more than three times the rate Reagan inherited. Finally, in 1981 the Baby Boomers were between 17 and 35, entering their most productive years when they would contribute the most economically. Today, 10,000 are retiring every day, and more have de facto retired by exiting the workforce without acknowledging it, which underestimates our true unemployment rate.
 

Can Trump's policies of slashed corporate and individual tax rates and a massive infusion into infrastructure help? Of course, at least in the short run. But Reagan's tailwinds will be Trump's headwinds.
 

A recession some time in his term seems a virtual certainty. It may be caused by an external shock, such as a European or Asian financial crisis ? keep your eye on their barely solvent banks. It may come if foreeigners flee the dollar due to grand tax-and-spend plans. Or the positive wealth effect from the past nine years of the Fed-engineered stock market bubble may reverse. If any of these happen in the early months of the Trump term, we might have another "morning in America" in 2020. But more likely the euphoria will continue into 2017 ? until it stops,, suddenly and painfully, sometime later in the term, and too late to effect recovery before the reelection campaign.
 

Reagan was vastly underestimated by his critics. Trump's critics, including this writer, may be doing the same. Trump may work a miracle ? that is certainly what his legions of voters hope. But his econoomic success will depend on an outsized dose of Reagan luck.