Buried inside the Affordable Care Act was something called the CLASS Act, which dealt separately with long-term care issues. I didn’t follow the CLASS debate closely, but one claim the critics made was that it was a basically unworkable program that was being stashed into the ACA to make the 10-year deficit score look better but that would actually undermine the fiscal position of the United States over the long run. Late last week, the Obama administration decided that the critics were correct, the program is unworkable, and decided to scrap it. That seems like a good idea to me. Making the short-term deficit smaller has no value, and making the long-term deficit bigger is a bad idea. So good for President Obama and good for Secretary Sebelius.

But Fred Upton has another view:

“Make no mistake,” Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) said in announcing the hearing, “the CLASS program was tucked into the health care law to provide $86 billion in false savings, and this budget gimmick is a prime example of why Americans are losing faith in Washington. We plan to hold this hearing to get answers about why this sham was carried on for as long as it was, and what cancellation of the program means for the law’s growing price tag.”

When it looked like CLASS was going to happen, Upton wanted to say it’s a costly boondoggle. But when Obama cancels CLASS, avoiding a costly boondoggle, Upton wants hearings into “what cancellation of the program means for the law’s growing price tag.” It means the price tag is going down! That was the entire point the critics were making all along.

This is, at any rate, an example of the perversity of Washington that reminds me of the Solyndra “scandal.” Taking steps to stem costs on an initiative that’s not working out, sets off the frenzy.

This interview with Glenn Greenwald popped up on my radar because I’m mentioned in it but I think it’s pretty insightful:

But I think that the idea that bloggers are this oppositional force to the media has eroded, in part because some of the more successful bloggers have been absorbed into these media institutions, and at the same time, a lot of these media institutions—which kind of ignored blogging for a long time, and then paid attention to it only to mock it—have decided that they now need to be bloggers. Another notable shift is that the liberal blogosphere really was an outside, marginalized force at first, and took pride in that. When it largely devoted itself to Barack Obama’s election, though, it became more an organ of the Democratic Party than it did any kind of insurgent or outsider force. That’s a little oversimplified; there certainly are a lot of bloggers who are still in that outsider role. There are some, like Matt Yglesias, who have one foot in one camp and one in the other. But I do think the dichotomy has blurred a lot over the last several years.

That seems pretty right to me. When I started out, a “blogger” was by definition not a real journalist. He might have been a college student like me or a professor or an anonymous scribbler working a day job. Today, the New York Times publishes lots of blogs and most of us early bloggers who met with success have gotten hired by someone or other. By and large, that’s a good thing and represents good sense on the part of established media institutions. Still, there is a cost and in my sentimental moments I miss the gold old days. I don’t accept the view that the alternative to being an “insurgent or outsider force” is to be “an organ of the Democratic Party” but the political arena is shot through with tensions around the desire to be a player in the struggles between the powers that be and a desire to be a critic of the entire system.

There’s a certain strand of thought that never finds a new idea persuasive unless someone can offer a detailed explanation of how it is that the rich and powerful benefit from not adopting the idea. The underlying thought is that problems all exist because of corruption and malign influence rather than from bad ideas or poorly designed institutions. This, I think, is one reason why I’m frequently greeted with emails asking me to lay out how it is that nefarious major banking interests benefit from Federal Reserve lassitude and would lose out if we had an aggressive policy of reflation.

Yet, as Brad DeLong observes owners of bank stocks have done terribly throughout the Lesser Depression. In some ways a bank is necessarily going to be one of the main victims of a failure to reflate. The whole idea of sophisticated management of a loan portfolio, after all, is that by aggregating risks you can avoid pinning your fortunes to the vicissitudes of one guy’s life and possible bad luck or poor judgment. Instead, you’re pinned to the mast of overall economic aggregates. But when policy makers fail to park the broad aggregates where you were expecting, everything goes awry.

It’s true that if reflation were a zero-sum enterprise it would be a transfer from creditors to debtors. But it’s not a zero-sum enterprise, so it’s not really a “transfer” from anyone to anyone. The interest group politics are relevant, but not really decisive. Like Keynes said, ideas actually matter. As do hazy ideological associations. One thing I’ve heard, for example, is that the government shouldn’t reflate the economy with helicopter drops because then voters and politicians may get the idea that you can always boost growth by printing money. To me that’s like saying you shouldn’t step on the gas when the traffic light turns green because you might forget to slow down seven blocks later when the light turns red. But people have what they think of as tried-and-true non-context-dependent ideas for economic betterment and they’re much more comfortable pushing those eternal verities.

I don’t have a really strong view on whether or not it’s advisable to dispatch a small number of US combat troops to help fight the Lord’s Resistance Army. My instinct is to be skeptical. I want to see less military intervention, not more. But Rush Limbaugh’s instinct is to embrace brutal murderers:

Now, up until today, most Americans have never heard of the combat Lord’s Resistance Army. And here we are at war with them. Have you ever heard of Lord’s Resistance Army, Dawn? How about you, Brian? Snerdley, have you? You never heard of Lord’s Resistance Army? Well, proves my contention, most Americans have never heard of it, and here we are at war with them. Lord’s Resistance Army are Christians. It means God. I was only kidding. Lord’s Resistance Army are Christians. They are fighting the Muslims in Sudan. And Obama has sent troops, United States troops to remove them from the battlefield, which means kill them. That’s what the lingo means, “to help regional forces remove from the battlefield,” meaning capture or kill. [...]

Lord’s Resistance Army objectives. I have them here. “To remove dictatorship and stop the oppression of our people.” Now, again Lord’s Resistance Army is who Obama sent troops to help nations wipe out. The objectives of the Lord’s Resistance Army, what they’re trying to accomplish with their military action in these countries is the following: “To remove dictatorship and stop the oppression of our people; to fight for the immediate restoration of the competitive multiparty democracy in Uganda; to see an end to gross violation of human rights and dignity of Ugandans; to ensure the restoration of peace and security in Uganda, to ensure unity, sovereignty, and economic prosperity beneficial to all Ugandans, and to bring to an end the repressive policy of deliberate marginalization of groups of people who may not agree with the LRA ideology.” Those are the objectives of the group that we are fighting, or who are being fought and we are joining in the effort to remove them from the battlefield.

This post is illustrated with a photo of a man who survived a Lord’s Resistance Army machete attack and has the gashes on his head to prove it. You can read more about it courtesy of Human Rights Watch:

LRA forces attacked at least 10 villages, capturing, killing, and abducting hundreds of civilians, including women and children. The vast majority of those killed were adult men, whom LRA combatants first tied up and then hacked to death with machetes or crushed their skulls with axes and heavy wooden sticks. The dead include at least 13 women and 23 children, the youngest a 3-year-old girl who was burned to death. LRA combatants tied some of the victims to trees before crushing their skulls with axes.

The LRA also killed those they abducted who walked too slowly or tried to escape. Family members and local authorities later found bodies all along the LRA’s 105-kilometer journey through the Makombo area and the small town of Tapili. Witnesses interviewed by Human Rights Watch said that for days and weeks after the attack, this vast area was filled with the “stench of death.”

I think reasonable people can disagree as to whether or not chasing a relatively small band of depraved mass murderers around central africa is a reasonable thing for American military personel to be doing. But let’s make no mistake—these are depraved mass murderers. And yet Rush Limbaugh is pleased to welcome them as fellow Christian allies.