ASSUME.

As a follow-up to the post below, I want to hold this claim of Doug Holtz-Eakin's up for a bit of scrutiny:

Mr. Holtz-Eakin said the plan is accurately described as budget neutral because it assumes enough savings in Medicare and Medicaid spending to make up the difference. He said the savings would come from eliminating Medicare fraud and by reforming payment policies to lower the overall cost of care.

Italics mine. There's an old joke about the nasty tendency of economists to float off into realms totally divorced from the constraints of the real world. The joke has a lot of versions, but it goes something like this:

A physicist, a chemist and an economist are stranded on an island, with nothing to eat. A can of soup washes ashore. The physicist says, "Lets smash the can open with a rock." The chemist says, "Lets build a fire and heat the can first." The economist says, "Lets assume that we have a can-opener..."

Holtz-Eakin is assuming more than a can opener. He is assuming a different political system, 75 Republican votes in the US Senate, 300 in the House, and an electorate with entirely different demographics and political opinions than the one we have. Indeed, the McCain campaign knows this full well, because their hope for victory is reliant on an electorate where seniors are wildly overrepresented and uniquely well-organized. If their vision of the electorate is sound, Medicare is untouchable. If it's not sound, McCain loses by 15 points. If it's not quite sound enough, McCain loses by four points and Medicare is still untouchable (which is probably what we'll see). I'd like to say Doug Holtz-Eakin, an economist who used to have a very good reputation, is being good-natured and silly about the oddities of his profession here, but actually he's probably just lying about what McCain plans to do because he's scared of being called out on the huge tax hikes that are built into the proposal.Image used under a CC license from Papalars..