"This is not a budget; this is a cause."

Gary Gutting sorts through the facts versus the convictions about Medicare.

Putting it this way, it became clear to me that everyone agreed that either plan, if implemented, would significantly reduce government spending on medical care. The debate was about each plan’s further consequences. Roughly, critics of Ryan’s plan claim that it will require seniors to pay far too much for their medical care, while critics of Obama’s plan claim that it will keep seniors from receiving needed medical care.

At this point, it seemed that the debate was over empirical questions: What would be the effects of each of the policies? In principle, such questions should be answerable by objective economic analysis. So I began reading Congressional Budget Office reports, articles in The Economist, and opinions by columnists from Ross Douthat to Ezra Klein. My expectation was that I would find a stalemate, with strong arguments on both sides off-setting one another. But as it turned out, my judgment was that the empirical probabilities supported Obama over Ryan. Of course others as or more qualified than I have concluded otherwise.

More importantly, I realized that the relevant economic facts were soft (relatively malleable). Even if they pointed in Obama’s direction, they did not decisively refute Ryan. Economists with strong (relatively inflexible) convictions about the privileged role of markets and the dangers of government regulation could develop alternative interpretations of the facts that supported Ryan’s position. Such strong convictions would be irrelevant if they were ungrounded prejudices. But there is clearly a higher level of economic discussion on which the free-market economists as well as their opponents have developed what they see as a powerful historical and even philosophical case for their convictions. Paul Ryan was, perhaps, gesturing to this level of conviction when he said, “This is not a budget; this is a cause.”

The moral of my story is that understanding and effectively taking part in a debate requires awareness of the level at which we and our opponents are operating at any given point. When we are arguing from the facts, there is a reasonable possibility of convincing one another. When we find ourselves arguing about convictions, the ordinary point-counterpoint of political debate becomes ineffective. We can and should argue about convictions, but this can seldom be done fruitfully in the context of specific policy disputes. Once we’ve pushed the debate on Medicare or any other policy matter to the point where convictions become the sole basis of disagreement, it is time to vote.

Indeed, it is.