Matt did a good job this morning of giving the business to Robert Samuelson. Economist/blogger Mark Thoma weighs in as well for good measure. Thoma makes the critical point: Samuelson seems to have completely missed the connection between health care reform and his pet column peeve, hence his claim that the problem is being ignored in the political debate when that isn't the case. In addition, Samuelson's continual focus on the budget deficit obscures the real problem. It doesn't matter whether health care is in the public domain or the private domain, the costs will be daunting either way if they continue on their present trajectory, so finding ways to hold down health care costs is where the focus needs to be. Exactly. Samuelson is miffed that a gang of six think tanks have been derelict in their duty to ride his personal hobby horse. He complains that three left-leaning and three right-leaning think tanks have not yet gotten together to write a single book, with each contributing 35 pages, about the horrors of the retirement of the Baby Boom generation. It would illuminate the connections between defense spending, retirement benefits, health care, economic growth and much more. Writing for a general audience, it would favor plain English, not the usual technobabble. His beef is that think tanks writ large have yet to address his fears. I submit that perhaps there's a good reason for this: Think tanks have in fact thought about this and concluded that long term fiscal challenges cannot be met by simply cutting Socialsecurityandmedicare benefits. It's entirely possible that think tanks have figured out that these are multidimensional, complicated issued that require multiple policy solutions that cannot be addressed in 35 pages and require big words and numbers to describe them.