In the middle of heated policy debates, projections of cost to industry and government fly thick and fast. If costs to citizens are mentioned, it's usually in their capacity as taxpayers, as though they weren't otherwise part of the economy. A couple examples from the global warming policy arena put this into sharp relief in a way that emphasizes the urgency of providing affordable health coverage to every American.
First, there's David Roberts' explanation (... with puppies!) of how the Congressional Budget Office undercounts the benefits of lower energy costs from efficiency. Their method counts the promotion of energy efficiency as a cost to the taxpayer, but not a savings to the ratepayer, as though you can make an absolute separation between people who pay taxes and people who pay utility bills.
That may make sense from the CBO's perspective, but not from the perspective of electricity-using members of the public trying to figure out whether new energy legislation benefits them.
David's diary Cato Echoes Kristol's Point on Health Care is a stark reminder that conservative politics is intimately related to spreading human suffering, and yes, even death. It's not just that conservatives are warmongers, moreso than liberals. And it's not just that they care about money, and don't care who dies so they can get more of it. Both those are quite true, of course, but they are only secondary manifestations. One can turn from one form of conservatism to another, over and over again, and repeatedly come up against this is one form or another: Conservative policies hurt people. Conservative policies kill people. And conservative policies tend to look worse to people as their lives become better.
The basic reason for this is quite simple, as George Lakoff, for one, has pointed out: empathy is a core liberal value, and because of it liberals don't believe in hurting people. While this is true of many individual conservatives as well, it is true of them in spite of their conservative beliefs, not because of them. Now that Bush is on the verge of leaving the national stage, it's worth recalling that he climbed up onto it under the banner of "compassionate conservatism," a tacit--if unintended--admission that conservatism normally is mean-spirited, if not downright cruel. Only thing was, the same turned out to be true of "compassionate conservatism" as well.
