Change and entrenched interests

By Dave Anderson:

Changing policy to benefit entrenched, well-connected and well-funded interests is easy.  That is the basic story behind Bush's tax-cuts. He wanted to give money to the well-connected and the elite.  They were willing to take the money and to use their access and power to convince people that everyone would be better off if the best connected looters of value could concentrate income and wealth even more despite the evidence of the past thirty years as the majority of Americans have seen their wages flatline in real terms despite massively increased productivity and insecurity that basic economic theory would predict would be compensated for by higher wages. 

Doug J at Balloon-Juice notes that war has the same set of incentives:

Did Bush ram his war resolution through the Senate? Sure, but our whole
system is set up to make war seem appealing. We have �news� networks
that get better ratings during wars, foreign policy think tanks that are funded by defense contractors,

But after the tax cuts and the Iraq War, what were the other big Bush policy projects?  No Child Left Behind was "for the children" and happened during Bush's honeymoon as Democrats were willing to cooperate on an experiment to see if things could be better?  I'll give you that, the only entrenched interest that was hurt was some teacher unions, but unions are not the force that they used to be.  Everyone else was bought off to buy-in.  Medicare Part-D was not a reform.  It was a big piling of cash just waiting to be handed out to the biggest voting bloc, seniors, and a major institutional donor bloc. 

Social Security privatization and immigration reform failed because these were attempts to take things away from highly entrenched and powerful interest groups.  Social Security privatization takes away old age security from the highest propensity voters around, old people.  It had the counter-vailing interest group of Wall-Street salivating at the last big pot of money that they could rob from the rubes, but that was insufficient in the face of Democrats actually being organized and acting in their own self-policy and political- interest.  Immigration reform took away cheap labor or at least the threat of cheap labor that a significant portion of the Republican donor base counts while also infuriating the nativists of the voting base. 

Healthcare reform, pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan in a reasonable time frame, CO2 regulation through cap and trade, financial re-regulation and basically everything else on either Obama's agenda or the broader Democratic agenda involve taking significant things away from significant interest groups.  Structure matters, so even when the process produces net long run benefits, the policy losers are more concentrated and more motivated to throw wrenches into the works to minimize losses.