Lost Decades looks at why the explosion of debt happened through the traditional lens of supply-and-demand. It examines the motivations and situations of people on both side of this debt. Why did demand for debt increase in the United States? The first reason Chinn and Frieden identify is the huge deficits run during the George W. Bush years. These are the trillions spent on the Bush tax cuts, the expansion of Medicare part D and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that weren’t paid for.

The GOP is demonstrating their seriousness about the federal debt by holding the debt ceiling hostage, screaming “We’ve got to reform Medicare TODAY!” as a means for cutting government spending. But that’s talk — loud talk, to be sure, but talk nonetheless. How serious is the GOP really when it comes to trading cuts in Medicare spending for an increase in the debt ceiling?

One way to find out is simple: push for Medicare to be able to negotiate drug prices in the same way that the VA already does.

PhRMA might not like it, but we’ve all got to share in the sacrifices, right?

The deficit reduction plan President Obama vaguely outlined yesterday lacks basic credibility. The problem isn’t that the math doesn’t add up–it is at least a dramatic improvement over Republican Paul Ryan’s plan, which literally defies logic and basic math. This issue is that many of the reductions President Obama promised yesterday come from actions that he has been promising for years, yet when the opportunity came up to fulfill them, he actively violated his word.

Sadly, the actions of politicians in Washington are often more about ripping off the public to benefit a handful of well-connected and extremely wealthy donors while having little to do with any form of actual ideology or governing philosophy. In fact, nearly identical schemes to enrich large corporations at the expense of the public are used by both parties. The parties then take turns pretending this policy design is an outrage against conservatism or liberalism.

It doesn’t matter what prominent Democrats were telling the base when they were trying to sell the vote. Just because a basically Republican health care law was passed by Democrats doesn’t make it some great progressive policy victory.

Democrats face a tough election and might lose control of one or both houses of Congress, and, not surprisingly, the drug makers have abandoned them. Dems are now left with a deeply unpopular health care law that does too little and fails to excite the base, while the corporate mercenaries have abandoned what looks like a losing battle.

The NYT Business page reports that AT&T, Caterpillar, Deere & Company and many other large corporations are complaining that the new health reform law will strip them of a large tax subsidy. But the provision is a corporate scam for looting taxpayers and raising drug prices.

A while back Jake McIntyre wrote an interesting post (for which he was widely pilloried) noting that the same people who supported this bill were those who supported the Iraq war. Not a coincidence. The health care bill is a neoliberal victory, just as the Iraq war represented a neoliberal triumph. As willyloman said in a Seminal diary yesterday, neoliberalism is now being rebranded as populism, with the President acting as chief salesman. But in emails like this, and Nancy Pelosi’s trumpeting of the bill’s Heritage Foundation roots, it’s clear that the Democrats know what they’ve done. They have no intention of reversing themselves now. And they are consciously punching the progressive hippies whose messaging and ideals brought them their majorities in the first place.

The announcement that PhRMA plans to drop $6 million in a final round of pro-reform ads is a good indication that they received strong assurances that their secret deals with the Obama administration will be protected.

Marion Berry (D-AR) is unlikely vote for the Senate health care bill in the House, but he has recently submitted is own, less comprehensive health care bill. Primarily, what it does is fix the problems with the Medicare Part D program created by former Republican Rep. Billy Tauzin, which Democrats have been promising to fix for years. That is until President Obama promised now PhRMA lobbyist Billy Tauzin to not fix Medicare Part D as part of health care reform.