Rachel Maddow had a segment last night taking note of the remarkably rapid increase in the pace with which actual al-Qaeda leaders have been killed by US forces since President Obama’s inauguration. It reminded me that there’s a tendency, which I think is somewhat misguided, to take all of Obama’s “hawkish” actions and fold them into a narrative about continuity with Bush administration policies since Bush was also “hawkish.” There are some real continuities, but I think this business is actually an example of discontinuity.

The difference—and I think it’s a big difference—is that the Bush administration took a very ideological view of “the war on terror.” They viewed the United States as broadly in conflict with a vast-yet-hazily-defined array of Muslim Bad Guys such that Saddam Hussein and the government of Iran were somehow part of the same problem as Osama bin Laden. The conceptual alternative to this that Obama offered (and I think you see it in early coverage of Obama’s national security thinking from Spencer Ackerman and yours truly) was to think of al-Qaeda as a specific, narrow thing that ought to be obsessively targeted and destroyed. His team viewed the Iraq War as a catastrophic distraction from that task, and also repeatedly clashed with John McCain over the need to more forcefully disregard Pakistani government views about hitting targets in Pakistan. You see in the rising body count that this all wasn’t just talk. There’s been some kind of meaningful reallocation of national resources away from Bush’s geopolitical vision in favor of a much more literal global effort to identify, locate, and kill members of al-Qaeda. This whole suite of undertakings is in significant tension with the administration’s desire to pursue a rules-based global order and if Obama asked me I’d tell him he’s tilted too far against his own big picture ideas. Still, world affairs doesn’t exist on a two-dimensional hawk/dove axis and this militaristic aspect of Obamaism should be seen as a departure from Bush’s view of the terrorism problem.

Damn fine speech if you excise the city-bashing and some of the stuff about Andrew Jackson:

Mr. Carlisle said in 1878 that this was a struggle between “the idle holders of idle capital” and “the struggling masses, who produce the wealth and pay the taxes of the country,” and, my friends, the question we are to decide is: Upon which side will the Democratic party fight: upon the side of the “idle holders of idle capital” or upon the side of “the struggling masses”? That is the question which the party must answer first, and then it must be answered by each individual hereafter. The sympathies of the Democratic party, as shown by the platform, are on the side of the struggling masses who have ever been the foundation of the Democratic party. There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to- do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them.

The point is that while there is a conflict of interests between debtors and creditors, it’s not a zero-sum game. One path secures the interests of creditors at the price of reducing overall output.

Scott Sumner is one of many to point the finger at the federal tax subsidy for employer-provided health insurance as a driver of high costs. I’m against this subsidy, I think it’s excellent that the Affordable Care Act rolls it back, and it’s clear that providing a large subsidy does contribute to high prices. Still, I think that too often people’s pet concerns about health care costs point to things that increase the level of health care spending rather than the high growth rate of health care spending.

Think about the market for cars. Cars are pretty expensive. They’re sold at a wide variety of price points. And quality-adjusted prices for cars don’t show any noteworthy crazy trends. Now suppose the government made cars tax deductible, what would happen? Well I assume that at the margin people would start buying more expensive cars. So for a few years, car spending as a share of GDP would accelerate. But pretty soon the American automobile fleet would have turned over and the acceleration would stop. The subsidy, in other words, provides a one-off boost to automobile spending but it doesn’t do anything to change the underlying cost structure of the system.

Health care, I think, is like that. But what’s really distressing people about health care isn’t the absolute level of spending, it’s the very rapid pace at which prices are rising.