Kevin Drum

In a response to Jonah Goldberg, Charles Cooke admits that sharks aren't actually all that dangerous:

Still, it’s best to presume that every single shark you meet is going to eat you. My view is that, because a shark can eat you, and has eaten people in the past, you should have, as per the definition that you provided, ”suspicion and mistrust of people or their actions without evidence or justification” — or, rather, of sharks and their actions

....The bottom line is that we should treat government as we should sharks: As George Washington is supposed to have said, “Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.” Even he couldn’t have imagined how dangerous and fearful governments could become.

My problem is that I’m not sure that the alternative to paranoia is reason. Is the way in which most people trust “reasonable”? No, not in the slightest. If people are going to be unreasonable — and they certainly are – it’s better that they’re unreasonably scared....There are no black helicopters and there may never be any black helicopters. But isn’t it positive that people are worried about them?

Well, I agree with Cooke about sharks. But there's a pretty important missing point here: for most of us, there's zero upside to palling around with sharks and zero downside to being unreasonably scared of them. So sure: you should avoid sharks at all costs. Why wouldn't you?

Needless to say, the same is not true of government, no matter how much conservatives like to think otherwise. It provides many useful services! I like the fact that police keep me safe, paved roads let me go places, pensions and healthcare are available to me when I get old, and government agencies keep my air, water, and food tolerably clean and safe. There are genuine tradeoffs to be made here, which means that reason really is the only non-insane way to evaluate what kind of government we want. Even coming from National Review, I'm a little surprised that apparently someone needs to make this rather obvious point.

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The growth rate of healthcare spending, which once seemed to be putting us on a path to national bankruptcy, seems to be abating pretty seriously lately. Jon Chait comments:

The general conservative response to date has involved ignoring the trend, or perhaps dismissing it as a temporary, recession-induced dip likely to reverse itself. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal editorial page offered up what may be the new conservative fallback position: Okay, health-care costs are slowing down, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the huge new health-care reform law. “It increasingly looks as if ObamaCare passed amid a national correction in the health markets,” the Journal now asserts, “that no one in Congress or the White House understood.” It’s another one of those huge, crazy coincidences!

My take is a little different: I think the Journal is wrong to suggest that we're merely in the middle of a temporary correction, and Chait is wrong to imply that Obamacare has played a role in the slowdown of healthcare spending. Take a look at the chart below, which is a home-brewed version of one that's cropped up in a lot of places recently. I took the CMS figures for per-capita national healthcare consumption expenditures and compared its year-over-year growth rate with the inflation rate. A high number means healthcare spending is growing faster than inflation. The chart is noisy, but the pattern is pretty clear: the growth rate of healthcare spending has been on a pretty steady downward trend for three decades. If it keeps following the current trendline, per-capita healthcare spending will be growing at the same rate as general inflation by around 2020 or so:

For a more rigorous look at this over just the past decade, check out "When the Cost Curve Bent," described here by Sarah Kliff. Standard caveats apply: the trendline might not keep going down; more people will still mean higher healthcare spending; and recent data might be artificially depressed by the recession and the sluggish recovery.

Bottom line: I think the moderation of healthcare spending growth has been going on for quite a while. And while Obamacare may very well accelerate this trend, it's too early to say it's had any effect yet. At the same time, Chait's more general mockery of the Journal's about-face on this subject is fully merited:

Of course, it’s not just that the Journal didn’t predict the health-care cost slowdown. The Journal insisted it couldn’t possibly happen. Indeed, it insisted that Obamacare would destroy — was already destroying — any possible hope for a health-care cost correction, and would instead necessarily lead to a massive increase in health-care inflation.

That's been the party line on the right all along. Along with hyperinflation and spiraling interest rates, I think we can put this squarely in the basket of stuff they just don't get.

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The CBO has released its latest budget projections, and guess what? The medium-term national debt has stabilized. Hooray!

You might still not be happy about this. Maybe you won't be happy until debt drops back down to Carter-era levels. That's fine. It's a free country, after all. But for the next decade, at least, the trendlines are no longer shooting upward, and if the economy continues to improve the trendlines will look even better. So no more screaming about how the country is going bankrupt, OK?

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The more we find out about the editing of the Benghazi talking points, the more the evidence points in one direction: this was a CIA fiasco from the start. As we all know by now, the Benghazi mission was primarily a CIA operation, and they were the ones responsible for security there. But when it came time to write up talking points for public consumption after the September 11 attacks, they immediately started trying to shift blame. Here is David Brooks writing about the role of State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland:

On Friday evening of Sept. 14, the updated talking points were e-mailed to the relevant officials in various departments, including Nuland....[She] noted that the talking points left the impression that the C.I.A. had issued all sorts of warnings before the attack.

Remember, this was at a moment when the State Department was taking heat for what was mostly a C.I.A. operation, while doing verbal gymnastics to hide the C.I.A.’s role. Intentionally or not, the C.I.A. seemed to be repaying the favor by trying to shift blame to the State Department for ignoring intelligence.

Marcy Wheeler had a more pungent assessment a few days ago:

In other words, the story CIA — which had fucked up in big ways — wanted to tell was that it had warned State and State had done nothing in response....The truthful story would have been (in part) that CIA had botched the militia scene in Benghazi, and that had gotten the Ambassador killed.

Today Jake Tapper tells us that previous reports about the role of Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes have also been mistaken. Rhodes didn't say anything to suggest that the White House was concerned with protecting the State Department's reputation. All he said was this: "We need to resolve this in a way that respects all of the relevant equities, particularly the investigation." The next day, when everyone got together to vet the talking points, they were stripped down to their final mushy state.

Greg Sargent has more here. This was, pretty clearly, a turf war, and the evidence increasingly suggests it was a war started by the CIA. The State Department has already largely owned up to its own failures in the ARB report released last year. So far, though, the CIA hasn't.

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