The over-65s were a huge share of the turnout, and they broke heavily for the Republicans.
Author: Mark Kleiman
Professor of Public Policy at the NYU Marron Institute for Urban Management and editor of the Journal of Drug Policy Analysis. Teaches about the methods of policy analysis about drug abuse control and crime control policy, working out the implications of two principles: that swift and certain sanctions don't have to be severe to be effective, and that well-designed threats usually don't have to be carried out. Books: Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know (with Jonathan Caulkins and Angela Hawken) When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment (Princeton, 2009; named one of the "books of the year" by The Economist Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results (Basic, 1993) Marijuana: Costs of Abuse, Costs of Control (Greenwood, 1989) UCLA Homepage Curriculum Vitae Contact: Markarkleiman-at-gmail.com View all posts by Mark Kleiman
That's good news,since according to Rubio et. al., they're first on the list.
All this reckless spending is out of hand. We need to make massive cuts in social security and medicare right now. Right?
Yes exactly, let's cut Medicare Advantage especially, let's also get rid of Medicare Part D, and make the coverage gap even larger.
We've got to control these crazy entitlement programs.
Why the @#$% didn't the Democrats drum up some Social Security demagoguery? Something like "The 2010 Social Security Will Never Be Privatized Act" and dare Republicans to vote against it. That's not even unfair. Republicans are for privatizing it after all. A whole lot of wedge issues went unwedged: right to birth control, middle class tax cuts, etc. They didn't make any hay out of Lilly Ledbetter either.
Oh well, someday there will be a fighting Democratic party.
Bruin Alum,
I can't tell which parts you're joking about – but surely you should be aware that Medicare Advantage is little more than a government handout to Big Insurance. It was created by Newt et al, who asserted that private companies are always better than government, and more efficient, and so HMOs should be able to subcontract Medicare, do it better, and make a profit. Didn't work out, of course: even though the private companies were paid the per-patient average of Medicare even as they provided care to a disproportionately younger, healthier subset of the eligible seniors,, they were soon crying poverty and cancelling coverage – often whole programs, because case-by-case rescission wasn't permitted. But the Medicare Advantage plans were popular, in part because they covered some things not covered by normal Medicare (most famously including health club membership, one way to recruit a fitter subset of eligible Medicare enrollees). So rather than admit that Newt's idea had been of the sane low grade as his other ones, we started subsidizing private insurers to do Medicare Advantage, a constantly growing expense; if I recall, they get about 30% more per enrollee than normal Medicare. This is one reason the ACA wraps up the program – it can think of better uses for that money.
Dems probably should have figured out a way to make a Social Security COLA happen this year with a one-time temporary "fix". I know, that would have been evil and bad policy and all that. Still, they should have figured out a way to make that happen.