Yesterday, as I was riding in a taxicab through one of New York's Indian/Pakistani neighborhoods, next to its dreadful airports that are inferior to everything in China, the cab driver said something amazing to me.  "Every dog has his day," he said.  I thought about this.  I realize that it had something to do with dog racing.  And maybe even Thomas Friedman who, has a writer, generally makes a pretty good Greyhound.  Though, seriously, you should see the busses in Calcutta.  They don't just have Wi-Fi, they run on Wi-Fi, floating effortlessly above the pavement.

This morning, Friedman writes about all of Obama's accomplishments that you don't know about because he hasn't told you.  I thought his take on healthcare was particularly spot on:

"'Obamacare is socialized medicine,' says the Republican Party. No, no — excuse me — socialized medicine is what we have now! People without insurance can go to an emergency ward or throw themselves on the mercy of a doctor, and the cost of all this uncompensated care is shared by all those who have insurance, raising your rates and mine. That is socialized medicine and that is what Obamacare ends. Yet Obama — the champion of private insurance for all — has allowed himself to be painted as a health care socialist."

This is, of course, what a lot of us hate about Obama's health care reform.  And, yes, Friedman is wrong to say that the system we have now is anything akin to socialized medicine.  But he's right to point out what any honest insurance company executive will tell you, which is that the Affordable Care Act, by design, preserves the role of private companies in health care and enhances their business by giving them a profitable way to expand coverage, partly through the use of smart government subsidies.  This is why health care executives like the idea a lot more than Republicans do.

Friedman also points out that, as part of the auto bailout, Obama got the industry to concede to new efficiency standards.  This is not just the Chevy Volt.  It's for everything and it could do a lot to help us with foreign oil dependency and, of course, our environmental issues that Republicans refuse to face.

Unfortunately, Friedman ends his column by calling Obama to, once again, embrace the Simpson-Bowles deficit plan, combined with some short-term infrastructure stimulus.  Dog days are not as long as human days, so one shouldn't expect Friedman to make it through a whole column without veering into bad advice.

Simpson-Bowles cuts Social Security and Medicare.  The deal that Friedman is pushing (echoed by Matt Miller at The Washington Post) is that, if you're under 50, you get stimulus spending now, but you pay for it when you retire.

This is pretty funny because, if you ask Alan Simpson, the reason the government borrowed from the Social Security trust fund in the first place was to build bridges and highways.  That we have a need for this new deal suggests that there's something wrong with that story.

Friedman doesn't seem to have much to say about what will happen when Generation X and the Millenials, who are unlikely to have pensions and have had a hard time saving adequately through 401(k) programs, try to retire.  I suspect that the answer, which very few people want to say bluntly, is that these generations will not retire and will instead depend on some technology or other to keep working pretty much to the end, very often in low pay and low prestige roles.  Social Security is not enough to fund people's retirements as currently envisioned.  Cutting the rate of growth of benefits  (and then claiming it's not a cut, even as the value of those benefits fail to keep up with inflation) will make things much, much worse.

But, Friedman's arguing politics here, not economics and he's not interested in what happens to Millenials when they push 70.  He thinks it's good politics for Obama to hand Romney the cudgel that Obama is going to cut Social Security.  Then, what will Obama say?  That's he's just cutting the rate of growth and, you know, just for the young people who make up his most enthusiastic supporters?  Sounds like a winner, Tom.