Voucher Denial

So, I was airborne during the VP debate, which means no theater criticism. But I do have the transcript. And I thought it was interesting that Ryan was the first to use the word “voucher”, as a preemptive strike to try to stop Biden from using it to characterize his plan.

Indeed, the official line seems to be that you’re a liar if you call a plan under which people receive a fixed sum to spend on insurance, as opposed to simply getting insurance, a voucher scheme.

Among the lying liars, then, is the guy who, back in 2009, described the Ryan plan as “converting Medicare into defined contribution sort of voucher system”. Oh, wait: that was Paul Ryan.

We’ve seen this movie before. For decades the right pushed for Social Security privatization — their own term for it. The Cato Institute even had a Project on Social Security Privatization. Then they found that the term polled badly, and tried to pretend that only evil liberals accused them of favoring such a terrible thing (Cato even tried, incompetently, to purge its web site of all references to the program’s previous name).

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http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/12/voucher-denial/