For those of you who urged Sarah Palin to bone up on the issues and become a more serious policy person, here is Exhibit A that she is listening: a major piece in today’s Wall Street Journal. In it, Palin endorses Rep. Paul Ryan’s Roadmap for America’s Future over the recommendations of the Simpson-Bowles commission. The gist of the op-ed is summed up in the subhead: “Let’s not settle for the big-government status-quo, which is what the president’s deficit commission offers.”
She makes a number of good points in favor of the Roadmap:
On health care, it would replace ObamaCare with a new system in which people are given greater control over their own health-care spending. It achieves this partly through creating medical savings accounts and a new health-care tax credit-the only tax credit that would be left in a radically simplified new income tax system that people can opt into if they wish.
The Roadmap would also replace our high and anticompetitive corporate income tax with a business consumption tax of just 8.5%. The overall tax burden would be limited to 19% of GDP (compared to 21% under the deficit commission’s proposals). Beyond that, Rep. Ryan proposes fundamental reform of Medicare for those under 55 by turning the current benefit into a voucher with which people can purchase their own care.
While describing the Simpson-Bowles plan, Palin can’t resist this:
It also implicitly endorses the use of “death panel”-like rationing by way of the new Independent Payments Advisory Board-making bureaucrats, not medical professionals, the ultimate arbiters of what types of treatment will (and especially will not) be reimbursed under Medicare.
This is a terrific piece, and I urge you to read it in its entirety. As somebody who likes Palin, but definitely does not regard a Palin nomination as one of the best ideas going, I have to admit that this is an impressive indication of where she would go. The drawbacks are that she is such a lightning rod figure, that the press has succeeded in damaging her in the eyes of many Americans, especially independents, and that the odds of her winning and putting into effect her ideas are very slim.