Search: tyrone

Tyrone, my evil twin brother, was in town visiting the other day, after a long absence.  He was upset that I gave so little space to the recent machinations in Washington, and that I assigned the events so little importance, so he asked if he could offer his own coverage in a guest post.  Since Tyrone is occasionally a lunch guest of ours, against my better judgment I said yes, so here is my dictation of his midnight sermon:

Tyrone:  I read what a strategic disaster the fracas has been for the Republican Party and for the Tea Party movement in particular, but I don’t see it.  Where I grew up, this counts as a successful stare-down.  Most of the time, the pit bull does not in fact lunge for your throat, but it is hardly a mistake for him to snarl, even if that raises his borrowing rates.

Look where we stand.  In real terms government spending has been falling.  Sequestration appears to be permanent, or it will be negotiated away by Republicans in return for preferred changes in tax and spending policy.  Leading Democratic intellectuals are talking about future fiscal bargains with no new taxes.  The American public polls as increasingly conservative.

With this sequence of events, combined with 2011, the Republicans convinced some of their opponents that they are crazy and irresponsible, without actually being crazy (though they were irresponsible, but that is the whole point).  I peaked once into Tyler’s Twitter feed, and I found several accomplished Democratic economists — yes brilliant economists, as all economists are — suggesting that any day now markets are going to notice the truly crazy character of the Republican House and price that into interest rates and stocks.  Oh what a tale!  (A more accurate reading of the more radical Republicans would in fact be more cynical and ordinary than most of the pablum served up by their critics.)  Imagine that you control only the House and can manage to convince your opponents that you are stronger and more dedicated to your cause than in fact you are.  Only the truly strong and dedicated can pull such a caper off!

Someday, if the Democrats wanted to raise the exemption level for the payroll tax, and pull in a lot of new revenue, what kind of opposition could they expect?  Probably they will shy away from that battle altogether, for fear of another Ted Cruz filibuster.

Yes, Virginia (literally), protecting the brand does sometimes mean going down with the ship.

In the longer run the Republicans will have changed the Doug Overton window on most of these issues.  (Tyler interjects: My apologies loyal MR readers, Tyrone has no Ph.d., not even a Masters, and thus he misuses terminology as would a mere child.)  Even if most Americans do not agree, it is now considered common to believe and to argue publicly that Obamacare represents the end of freedom in our time.  If Obamacare turns out to fail in the eyes of the public, that condemnatory view is being held in the back of people’s minds, whether they admit it or not, whether they agree or not.  They will start to agree more and more, the less generous their Medicare benefits look as time passes.  The future counterrevolution in redistribution is going to have to come from somewhere and it is a major victory to cement the word “Obamacare” as a hypostatized “thingie” in people’s minds, for future reference.

The Republican tactics understand the importance of skewed pay-offs.  In an age of political gridlock, the goal is not to maximize the expected value of your image, any more than you would do the same on a date.  Rather the goal is to maximize the chances of moving your agenda forward, conditional on the existence of world-states where that might be possible.  The harder it is to pull off change, the stupider your strategy will look in most world-states, but hey that is the price of admission to this game.  Capital is to be periodically run down, and if in politics, as in management more generally, if you always look good you are doing something badly wrong.

Another fallacy is that no DC crisis would have focused more attention on the failings of the Obamacare exchanges in a useful manner.  People, that is small potatoes.  No one is going to repeal or even modify ACA because of a few weeks’ bad publicity at the opening.  (Recall the Medicare prescription drug bill, which took weeks to get off the ground but now is beloved and is part of the permanent furniture of the universe, like Supersymmetry or quantum gravity.)  If Obamacare is really going to do poorly, it is better if we build up high or least modest expectations for it.  Imagine the Christmas present of learning you don’t really have insurance coverage after all.  Or the New Year’s resolution that after you have been billed three times for the same policy, you vow to pay for only one of them and live with the bad credit rating until it gets straightened out.  How about extreme adverse selection into the exchanges, resulting in 50-100% premium hikes in the first year of operations?  (The lower premia are now, the better!  Bread, peace, land!  Ach du grüne Neune!)  That’s what will get further traction for the Tea Party on Obamacare, not a bunch of bad reviews on opening day, as if the policy were no more than a mid-tier Jennifer Aniston movie (I can no longer refer to Sandra Bullock in this context), to be swatted down by mild tut-tuts of disapproval and inconvenience.

The very best victories are often described as ignominious retreats.

Tyler again: Readers, I am sorry to subject you to such rants.  But Tyrone insisted.  In fact he threatened that, if I did not comply with his request, he would write a lengthy review of Average is Over, for which outlet I am not sure, perhaps an average outlet.  He threatened to shutter our common household.  He prophesied that cats would lie down with dogs.  He even threatened to default on our joint credit card bill, ruining my credit rating forever.  And people, you now all know just how powerful such threats can be.

147 comments