Parties need incentives to discipline their absurd fringes, and if you wave off their excesses because they're "never going to happen" in favour of discussing less absurd ideas, you're only coddling the whackjobs

ON CNBC early Friday, the topic was the Republican decision to set up a party committee to explore a return to the gold standard. The clips I've found of this discussion on the CNBC website (here and here) feature commentators appropriately noting that the idea is "ludicrous" (amusingly, the website's caption team has spelled it "ludacris"; someone younger than myself please insert an appropriate hip-hop-themed joke). But in the sequence I was watching on TV that didn't get picked up by the website, one of the channel's regulars (I didn't catch the name) said the attention was misplaced. The gold standard is "never going to happen", he said; it's "incredibly deflationary", the American government is never going to try to return to it, and the whole exploratory committee is just political tomfoolery we should all ignore in order to focus on real issues. A short while later I found myself reading Dylan Matthews' exploration of the actual differences between the Romney-Ryan campaign's Medicare plans, and those of the Obama administration under the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. Obamacare, he notes, cuts Medicare's payments to hospitals and other health-care providers by $716 billion. It then uses some of the money saved to expand coverage for non-retirees. At the same time, it eliminates the "doughnut hole" that currently leaves seniors liable for about $3,500 per year in prescription drug costs, waives Part B premiums for some preventive services, and institutes "a host of reforms to help Medicare learn how to pay for quality rather than for volume." Then he moves on to the Romney-Ryan campaign's plans.

So what about the Ryan plan? Well, it preserves the cuts in the Affordable Care Act, so it shores up the trust fund by an equivalent amount. But the Romney-Ryan campaign is now promising to reverse the ACA’s cuts, which would render the HI trust fund insolvent in 2016 rather than 2024. For the sake of argument, though, suppose the ticket changed their mind on those cuts and implemented Ryan’s plan, as laid out in his proposed budget for 2013.

Well, maybe, for the sake of argument. But for the sake of evaluating the actual Republican ticket this year, how about we don't suppose that? How about we pay attention to what the campaign actually says it will do, rather than substituting other options which would be more reasonable? Mr Romney and Mr Ryan say they want to eliminate Obamacare's cuts in payments to health-care providers, and instead have the government pay those providers more money. Not only would that render the Medicare trust fund insolvent in 2016, it would raise premiums and co-payments for Medicare beneficiaries. As the New York Times' Jackie Calmes explained earlier this week, beneficiaries "share the cost of Medicare with the government. If Medicare’s costs increase—for instance, by raising payments to health care providers—so, too, do beneficiaries’ contributions."

For those reasons, Henry J. Aaron, an economist and a longtime health policy analyst at the Brookings Institution and the Institute of Medicine, called Mr. Romney’s vow to repeal the savings “both puzzling and bogus at the same time.” Marilyn Moon, vice president and director of the health program at the American Institutes for Research, calculated that restoring the $716 billion in Medicare savings would increase premiums and co-payments for beneficiaries by $342 a year on average over the next decade; in 2022, the average increase would be $577.

I understand the dilemma faced by both Mr Matthews and that fellow on CNBC. The problem is that the things Republicans are advocating these days are often so off-the-wall that discussing them is simply not interesting. Paul Ryan's Medicare plan is terrible for all sorts of other reasons that are worth discussing, but the idea of rolling back Obamacare's cuts to Medicare reimbursements is one that doesn't even make sense; it gives away $716 billion in taxpayer money to health-care organisations who've said they're willing to give it up, speeds up the insolvency of the Medicare trust fund by eight years, and makes beneficiaries pay more. Austrian-style growth-through-austerity policies are a poor idea that has failed throughout Europe and Britain, but going a step further and bringing back the gold standard is just ridiculous, antediluvian, superstitious nonsense. Illegalising abortion is a bad idea, but criminalising abortion for rape victims and outlawing IVF by granting full legal rights to just-conceived embryos is such a terrible notion that it's scarcely interesting to debate it. And yet these are the actually existing proposals that are being pushed by actually existing Republicans in the actual presidential campaign we're involved in this year.