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Another way in which Liberals don't get Conservatives

In response to a recent post of mine entitled We Must Change Course, Eric commented, "I suppose if you think that the recipients of health care benefits are useless bums, then any cost is unjustifiable."

Now, there was no reference in my post nor in the attached piece by Robert Samuelson to recipients of expanded healthcare as bums or as anything else. It seems to me that Liberals, generally speaking, think Conservatives are mean.

Not so.

Speaking for myself, I think we need to take care of those who cannot take care of themselves. But simply offering free rides is a mistake, and I'll echo Ganem in saying that allowing consumers to pay 10 cents on the dollar for healthcare is bad business and bad for the country and that it is close enough to "free" so as to encourage bad behavior.

In the 90s, welfare reform was necessary because welfare had become a lifestyle for too many. Similarly, the healthcare system that has existed and the new system now being created has in the past and will in the future waste enormous amounts of money and drive bad consumer behavior in the populace. Reform was in scant evidence in the new legislation, although there may have been more reform than there was honesty as relates to the full future cost.

Personally, I hardly blame Obama and Pelosi. Their goals were clear to me during the election, and the American public got what they deserved because it was their votes that brought the bastards in. Obamacare isn't what people voted for, but Obama is, so the People own it.

I think the real root of the problem was the horrendous job Bush and Republicans did when they had there chance. Conservative principles were abandoned.

Conservatives must reassert themselves, and I believe they will, big-time, in the fall. But, we need to explain that our goal is not to be mean, it is not to turn our backs on those that need help; but it is our goal to use free market principles to grow the economic pie so as to be able to fulfill our obligations to one and other and to enthusiastically pursue happiness.

Hags

Seems like deciding on Death by Knife or Gun, still dead either way.

Difference between liberalism, progressivism


David Sirota
As a progressive, I'm often asked if there is a real difference between progressivism and liberalism. It's a fair question, considering that Democratic politicians regularly substitute "progressive" for "liberal" in news releases and speeches. Predictably, Republicans call their opponents' linguistic shift a craven branding maneuver, and frankly, they're right: Most Democrats make no distinction between the two words.

But that doesn't mean the ideologies are synonymous. Some background: Economic liberalism has typically focused on using the government's Treasury as a means to ends, whether those ends are better health care (Medicare/Medicaid), stronger job growth (tax credits) or more robust export businesses (corporate subsidies). The idea is that taxpayer dollars can help individuals afford bare necessities and entice institutions to support the common good.

Economic progressivism, by contrast, has historically trumpeted the government fiat as the best instrument of social change - think food safety, minimum wage and labor laws, and also post-Depression financial rules and enforcement agencies. Progressivism's central theory is that government, as the nation's supreme authority, can set parameters channeling capitalism's profit motive into societal priorities - and preventing that profit motive from spinning out of control.


Looked at this way, liberalism and progressivism once operated in tandem. But regardless of which you particularly favor (if either), three of the recent epoch's most far-reaching initiatives make clear the former now dominates both parties.


It started in 2003 with Republicans' Medicare drug benefit. Rather than go the progressive route - imposing price controls, permitting government to negotiate lower bulk prices or letting wholesalers buy drugs at cheaper foreign prices - the bill hinged on taxpayer money. Essentially, the government gave $1.2 trillion to the pharmaceutical industry in exchange for the industry providing medicines to seniors.

This became the bank bailout's model. Instead of first responding to the Wall Street crisis with progressive, New Deal-style regulations, presidents Bush and Obama opted for liberal bribe theory: Specifically, they bet that giving banks trillions in loans, subsidies and guarantees would convince financial institutions to halt their riskiest behavior and start lending to small businesses again.

Now, it's health care.  The Democratic bill began as a hybrid. On the liberal side, it proposed growing Medicaid and trading subsidies to insurance companies for expanded coverage. On the progressive side, the original legislation included measures like premium regulation and a government-run insurer to compete with private firms. But save for a few fairly weak consumer protections, the final bill was stripped of most major progressive provisions. Ultimately, the celebrated "reform" is based primarily on a liberal wager that Medicaid plus subsidies will equal universal health care.


The trouble, though, is what the Washington Post reports: "The (subsidies') buying power could erode over time in an era of rapid medical inflation."


Liberalism sans progressivism - i.e., public money sans regulation - turns the Treasury into an unlimited gift card for whichever private interests are being sponsored.


In this era of corporate-tethered lawmakers, such public-to-private transfers often face less congressional opposition than progressivism's inherent confrontations. But the inevitable result is taxpayers being bilked, as subsidized industries freely raise prices and continue engaging in destructive behavior, knowing government and/or captive consumers will keep financing the binge.


So to answer the question - is there a difference between liberalism and progressivism? Yes - and without both, we end up paying a steep price.

How little these/you fools value your freedom.  If only we just had a little more regulation and taxes.

We Must Reverse Our Course

Robert Samuelson has been writing for Newsweek (a noted liberal rag) for years. He is a fairly independent sort, and has given Republicans a hard time during their years in power. This is the first time I recall him shooting so directly at Obama. I quote:

"To criticisms, Obama supporters make two arguments. First, the CBO says the plan reduces the deficit by $138 billion over a decade. Second, the legislation contains measures (an expert panel to curb Medicare spending, emphasis on "comparative effectiveness research") to control health spending. These rejoinders are self-serving and unconvincing.

Suppose the CBO estimate is correct. So? The $138 billion saving is about 1 percent of the projected $12.7 trillion deficit from 2009 to 2020. If the administration has $1 trillion or so of spending cuts and tax increases over a decade, all these monies should first cover existing deficits -- not finance new spending. Obama's behavior resembles a highly indebted family's taking an expensive round-the-world trip because it claims to have found ways to pay for it. It's self-indulgent and reckless."

To read the full article go to:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/03/29/planting_the_seeds_of_disaster_104952.html

I made my first political contribution in years yesterday. I'll be making more. We must act, or we will sink. Complaining will do nothing. Only conservative action will save us.

Hags

For your reading enjoyment

The Vat Cometh
Charles Krauthammer
Friday, March 26, 2010

WASHINGTON -- As the night follows the day, the VAT cometh.
With the passage of Obamacare, creating a vast new middle-class entitlement, a national sales tax of the kind near-universal in Europe is inevitable.
We are now $8 trillion in debt. The Congressional Budget Office projects that another $12 trillion will be added over the next decade. Obamacare, when stripped of its budgetary gimmicks -- the unfunded $200 billion-plus doctor fix, the double counting of Medicare cuts, the 10-6 sleight-of-hand (counting 10 years of revenue and only 6 years of outflows) -- is at minimum a $2 trillion new entitlement.
It will vastly increase the debt. But even if it were revenue-neutral, Obamacare pre-empts and appropriates for itself the best and easiest means of reducing the existing deficit. Obamacare's $500 billion of cuts in Medicare and $600 billion in tax hikes are no longer available for deficit reduction. They are siphoned off for the new entitlement of insuring the uninsured.
This is fiscally disastrous because, as President Obama himself explained last year in unveiling his grand transformational policies, our unsustainable fiscal path requires control of entitlement spending, the most ruinous of which is out-of-control health care costs.
Obamacare was sold on the premise that, as Nancy Pelosi put it, "health care reform is entitlement reform. Our budget cannot take this upward spiral of cost." But the bill enacted on Tuesday accelerates the spiral: It radically expands Medicaid (adding 15 million new recipients/dependents) and shamelessly raids Medicare by spending on a new entitlement the $500 billion in cuts and the yield from the Medicare tax hikes.
Obama knows that the debt bomb is looming, that Moody's is warning that the Treasury's AAA rating is in jeopardy, that we are headed for a run on the dollar and/or hyperinflation if nothing is done.
Hence his deficit reduction commission. It will report (surprise!) after the November elections.
What will it recommend? What can it recommend? Sure, Social Security can be trimmed by raising the retirement age, introducing means testing and changing the indexing formula from wage growth to price inflation.
But this won't be nearly enough. As Obama has repeatedly insisted, the real money is in health care costs -- which are now locked in place by the new Obamacare mandates.
That's where the value-added tax comes in. For the politician, it has the virtue of expediency: People are used to sales taxes, and this one produces a river of revenue. Every 1 percent of VAT would yield up to $1 trillion a decade (depending on what you exclude -- if you exempt food, for example, the yield would be more like $900 billion).
It's the ultimate cash cow. Obama will need it. By introducing universal health care, he has pulled off the largest expansion of the welfare state in four decades. And the most expensive. Which is why all of the European Union has the VAT. Huge VATs. Germany: 19 percent. France and Italy: 20 percent. Most of Scandinavia: 25 percent.
American liberals have long complained that ours is the only advanced industrial country without universal health care. Well, now we shall have it. And as we approach European levels of entitlements, we will need European levels of taxation.
Obama set out to be a consequential president, on the order of Ronald Reagan. With the VAT, Obama's triumph will be complete. He will have succeeded in reversing Reaganism. Liberals have long complained that Reagan's strategy was to starve the (governmental) beast in order to shrink it: First, cut taxes -- then ultimately you have to reduce government spending.
Obama's strategy is exactly the opposite: Expand the beast, and then feed it. Spend first -- which then forces taxation. Now that, with the institution of universal health care, we are becoming the full entitlement state, the beast will have to be fed.
And the VAT is the only trough in creation large enough.
As a substitute for the income tax, the VAT would be a splendid idea. Taxing consumption makes infinitely more sense than taxing work. But to feed the liberal social-democratic project, the VAT must be added on top of the income tax.
Ultimately, even that won't be enough. As the population ages and health care becomes increasingly expensive, the only way to avoid fiscal ruin (as Britain, for example, has discovered) is health care rationing.
It will take a while to break the American populace to that idea. In the meantime, get ready for the VAT. Or start fighting it.

The Real Phil Gramm please stand up !

Phil Gramm is a pompous and self-righteous man. The Wall Street Journal gave him some 2000 words on Friday, and he used 1000 of them to defend the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 from the fault that has been assigned to it for knocking down the regulatory defenses against Wall Street. And who does he summon to protect him history? His good friend Bill Clinton, as if he were a credible witness to have anything to do with honesty about the past. I looked at the ID line at the end of Gramm's op ed to find what he was doing now? Who was paying his keep? It turns out that he is now vice chairman of Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) Investment Bank. I wonder how much he gets in salary and bonus because this is what he writes about restrictions on executive compensation: "...they are good fun for politicians but they are just one step removed from telling banks who to lend to and for what." Since the feds are funding these rogue and decrepit institutions it's only reasonable that they should have some say. No? In any case, Gramm is not really a banker. He is a lobbyist, and if I were in charge of UBS I'd fire old Phil. He has no influence with anybody important in Washington these days, not Tim Geithner and not Larry Summers, not Mary Schapirio and not Paul Volcker. Anyway, the bank will need whatever cash it has. It is in deep shit. Not only because, like any other big counting houses, it had bad banking habits. UBS has already been bailed out by the Swiss government once. But because the United States government wants to see 52,000 accounts from American depositors whom the Justice Departments suspects of tax evasion, courtesy of UBS. This matter is very well described in the FT of Friday. Actually, the country's president has admitted that up to 300 American customers are guilty of tax fraud, which is a crime under Swiss law. Tax evasion, however, is not a crime. But even Swiss patriots cannot tell you the difference. Ah, great patriot Phil Gramm, vice president of a bank that has sequestered nearly $15 billion of American assets. The Swiss, of course, are experts at hiding money. They hid assets from family members who were survivors of Jews who had deposited cash, securities, gold in their banks. They hid assets from surviving depositers themselves. It took more than half a century for these banks (including UBS) to come, not clean exactly, but acknowledge their culpability and part with some cash. And not much cash. P.S.: Mrs. Gramm was a director of Enron. Rancid money is a family business.

By PHIL GRAMM

For every dollar's worth of health care that Americans received last year, they paid a dime and somebody else paid 90 cents. If you bought food the way you buy health care—where 90% of everything you put in your basket was paid for by your grocery insurance policy—you would eat differently and so would your dog. We have the best health-care system in the world, but as rich as America is we can't afford it.
Any real debate about health-care reform has to be centered on solving the problem of cost. Ultimately, there are only two ways of doing it. The first approach is to have government control costs through some form of rationing. The alternative is to empower families to make their own health-care decisions in a system where costs matter. The fundamental question is about who is going to do the controlling: the family or the government.

President Obama and his congressional allies systematically excluded every major proposal to empower consumers to control costs. From beginning to end, they insisted on a government-run system. That's why compromise was never possible.
The plan signed into law by the president on Tuesday is simply a hodgepodge of schemes to expand insurance coverage and government power with no coherent program to control cost. By contrast, the old Clinton health-care bill was a plan to control costs through health-care purchasing cooperatives, standards of medical practice, and penalties for providers who violated those standards. When Americans came to understand the loss of freedom resulting from the Clinton plan, they rejected it. The Democrats learned from that experience. This time around they simply left their cost control component to be added later.
Even though the Obama bill became far more unpopular than the Clinton bill ever was, the daunting size and rigid commitment of the Democratic majority to a government-run system was such that they could override public opinion. Now the Democrats are out to make Americans like their plan—or at least get them to acquiesce to it. But as Gandhi once explained, 40,000 British troops cannot force 300 million Indians to do what they will not do.
Republicans have a job to do. They must make it clear to the American people that this is only the beginning of the debate. There will be two congressional elections and a presidential election before the government takeover is implemented in 2014.
I believe that Republicans should take the unequivocal position that if they are given a majority in Congress in November, they will stop the implementation of the government takeover. And if a Republican is elected president in 2012, they will do with Mr. Obama's health-care bill what the American voters will have done to the Democrats: throw it out. If the voters demand change in November, even the Democrats who remain in Congress will help give it to them.
If Republicans don't want America to follow Britain and Canada down the road to socialized medicine, they must change the system so that families have more power to control their own health-care costs. This will entail real changes like tax deductions for health insurance, not for prepaid medicine; refundable tax credits for families to buy their own insurance; freedom to negotiate with insurance companies; rewarding healthy lifestyles; tort reform; and reforming Medicare and Medicaid so every consumer has deductibles and copayments based on their income. This system will require Americans to make choices in health care—just as they do in every other area of their lives.

There is one more overwhelming reason freedom is so critical in health care. In the end, even the greatest health-care system in the world fails. At 92, my mother decided to stop going to the hospital, stop going to the doctor, stop taking her medicine, and to die in her own bed. It was a free choice, and she made it. For her family, it was a painful choice, but she died as she lived—proud and free. Government bureaucrats did not make that decision; she did. And that made all the difference.

Who Said these TEA PARTY people are mainstream

On Sunday, Democratic Rep. Russ Carnahan of Missouri had a coffin placed on his lawn, said his spokeswoman, Sarah Howard. She said Tea Party protesters at his office in St. Louis had a coffin with them and later brought it to his house. The coffin was later removed, she said.

The Latest Gallup Poll Shows America Approves Obamacare

The Republicans of late have been very poll centric, arguing that Americans opposed the Healthcare bill (they haven't talked as much about polls showing that 1/3 of Republicans want to secede from the Unites States or that 1/4 of Republicans think Obama might be the Antichrist). Of course, they failed to mention that many of those opposed to the bill felt it was not liberal enough. In fact, Jon Kyl used a 59/39 opposed poll to make his point to Wolf Blitzer yesterday and Wolf called him on it. The same poll showed 52% supported the bill or felt it wasn't liberal enough.

The latest poll - conducted after passage by the Republican leaning Gallup Organization - shows that America supports passage of the landmark legislation by a wide margin. The financial markets seem to agree as well, having steadily moved up on Monday and Tuesday.

Waterloo by David Frum

Conservatives and Republicans today suffered their most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s.

It’s hard to exaggerate the magnitude of the disaster. Conservatives may cheer themselves that they’ll compensate for today’s expected vote with a big win in the November 2010 elections. But:

(1) It’s a good bet that conservatives are over-optimistic about November – by then the economy will have improved and the immediate goodies in the healthcare bill will be reaching key voting blocs.

(2) So what? Legislative majorities come and go. This healthcare bill is forever. A win in November is very poor compensation for this debacle now.

So far, I think a lot of conservatives will agree with me. Now comes the hard lesson:

A huge part of the blame for today’s disaster attaches to conservatives and Republicans ourselves.

At the beginning of this process we made a strategic decision: unlike, say, Democrats in 2001 when President Bush proposed his first tax cut, we would make no deal with the administration. No negotiations, no compromise, nothing. We were going for all the marbles. This would be Obama’s Waterloo – just as healthcare was Clinton’s in 1994.

Only, the hardliners overlooked a few key facts: Obama was elected with 53% of the vote, not Clinton’s 42%. The liberal block within the Democratic congressional caucus is bigger and stronger than it was in 1993-94. And of course the Democrats also remember their history, and also remember the consequences of their 1994 failure.

This time, when we went for all the marbles, we ended with none.

Could a deal have been reached? Who knows? But we do know that the gap between this plan and traditional Republican ideas is not very big. The Obama plan has a broad family resemblance to Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts plan. It builds on ideas developed at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s that formed the basis for Republican counter-proposals to Clintoncare in 1993-1994.

Barack Obama badly wanted Republican votes for his plan. Could we have leveraged his desire to align the plan more closely with conservative views? To finance it without redistributive taxes on productive enterprise – without weighing so heavily on small business – without expanding Medicaid? Too late now. They are all the law.

No illusions please: This bill will not be repealed. Even if Republicans scored a 1994 style landslide in November, how many votes could we muster to re-open the “doughnut hole” and charge seniors more for prescription drugs? How many votes to re-allow insurers to rescind policies when they discover a pre-existing condition? How many votes to banish 25 year olds from their parents’ insurance coverage? And even if the votes were there – would President Obama sign such a repeal?

We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.

There were leaders who knew better, who would have liked to deal. But they were trapped. Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making was rendered impossible. How do you negotiate with somebody who wants to murder your grandmother? Or – more exactly – with somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their grandmother?

I’ve been on a soapbox for months now about the harm that our overheated talk is doing to us. Yes it mobilizes supporters – but by mobilizing them with hysterical accusations and pseudo-information, overheated talk has made it impossible for representatives to represent and elected leaders to lead. The real leaders are on TV and radio, and they have very different imperatives from people in government. Talk radio thrives on confrontation and recrimination. When Rush Limbaugh said that he wanted President Obama to fail, he was intelligently explaining his own interests. What he omitted to say – but what is equally true – is that he also wants Republicans to fail. If Republicans succeed – if they govern successfully in office and negotiate attractive compromises out of office – Rush’s listeners get less angry. And if they are less angry, they listen to the radio less, and hear fewer ads for Sleepnumber beds.

So today’s defeat for free-market economics and Republican values is a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry. Their listeners and viewers will now be even more enraged, even more frustrated, even more disappointed in everybody except the responsibility-free talkers on television and radio. For them, it’s mission accomplished. For the cause they purport to represent, it’s Waterloo all right: ours.

If they had said

If they had said, "we need to reform entitlements because we are spending too much money" and the population had protested, that would have been courage.

If they had said, "we need to limit pain and suffering awards and you will need to pay a portion of your health care to reduce costs", that would have been courage.

But what they did is mandate (order under the force of law) everyone to buy insurance, mandate new, impossible levels of coverage and mandate acceptance regardless of condition with a lower level of patient participation while just flat lying that this absurdity will lower the cost of care, over the objection of the population. 

No, we will not "move on"

Will

On Sunday, as will happen every day for two decades, another 10,000 baby boomers became eligible for Social Security and Medicare. And Congress piled a huge new middle-class entitlement onto the rickety structure of America's Ponzi welfare state. Congress has a one-word response to the demographic deluge and the scores of trillions of dollars of unfunded liabilities: "More."
There will be subsidized health insurance for families of four earning up to $88,200 a year, a ceiling certain to be raised, repeatedly. The accounting legerdemain spun to make this seem affordable -- e.g., cuts (to Medicare) and taxes (on high-value insurance plans) that will never happen-- is Enronesque.
As America's teetering tower of unkeepable promises grows, so does the weight of government, in taxes and mandates that limit investments and discourage job creation. America's dynamism, and hence upward social mobility, will slow, as the economy becomes what the party of government wants it to be -- increasingly dependent on government-created demand.
Promoting dependency is the Democratic Party's vocation. It knows that almost all entitlements are forever, and those that are not -- e.g., the lifetime eligibility for welfare, repealed in 1996 -- are not for the middle class. Democrats believe, plausibly, that middle-class entitlements are instantly addictive and, because there is no known detoxification, that class, when facing future choices between trimming entitlements or increasing taxes, will choose the latter. The taxes will disproportionately burden high earners, thereby tightening the noose of society's dependency on government for investments and job-creation.
The public will now think the health care system is what Democrats want it to be. Dissatisfaction with it will intensify because increasingly complex systems are increasingly annoying. And because Democrats promised the implausible -- prompt and noticeable improvements in the system.
Forbidding insurance companies to deny coverage to persons because of pre-existing conditions, thereby making the risk pool more risky, will increase the cost of premiums. Public complaints will be smothered by more subsidies. So dependency will grow.

When does Socialism start?

Socialism is a creeping crud which is never requested. While it obviously saps the strength of a citizenship, some seem to take comfort in its false safety, yet deny its existence.
So now we have the government in control of health care (setting the rules and creating competing plans) as well as government control of college and student loans.
We have the government in control of the banking, financial, auto, energy, construction, defense industries with a quarter of the economic output of our economy feeding its appetite.
We are spending money we will never have.
So, when are you willing to declare Socialism my liberal/progressive (better known as Socialist) friends?
Do you value your freedom, including the freedom to fail, so lightly? You take comfort in their control?

The Truth

• "We have incorporated the best ideas from Democrats and from Republicans." Far from it. Some of the biggest omissions include tort reform, health savings accounts, portable insurance, expanding consumer access to plans across state lines and posting provider prices for services so patients can shop around.
Republicans were almost completely shut out from the process and at the early stages last summer, were not even permitted to read the bill. In an atmosphere like this, it's little wonder the bill isn't drawing a single vote of support from Republicans of either house. It's fully a creature of the Democratic Party.
• ("This is not a) government takeover of health care." How is it that government can dictate to private insurance companies what they can offer, to whom, under what circumstances and at what prices, and yet still not own it? Every basic business decision a private company can make has effectively been expropriated.
Even as Obama denied his health care plan was a government takeover, his vice president, Joe Biden, laid out the real deal: "You know we're going to control the insurance companies." We'll take him at his word.
• "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor." That's if your doctor chooses to remain in the profession. Unfortunately, our own IBD/TIPP Poll found that up to 45% would consider quitting if they're going to be dictated to by unaccountable bureaucrats who couldn't get into medical school.
Price controls will slash doctor salaries and raise workloads, mandating that doctors make up for losses with volume. Bureaucrats will crack the whip on costs by lowering payments and penalizing doctors who refer patients to specialists. All this, and zero tort reform relief, will drive many doctors out of the profession just as 32 million new patients enter the market.
• "Our proposal is paid for ... our cost-cutting measures would reduce most people's premiums and bring down our deficit by more than $1 trillion over the next two decades." Government programs always cost more than projected. Medicare, which has $86 trillion in unfunded liabilities, was supposed to cost $10 billion within 25 years of its implementation. It actually cost $107 billion.

The real cost of the Democrats' reform plan, according to the Cato Institute, which isn't handcuffed in its estimates like the Congressional Budget Office, is $2.5 trillion over the first decade.
• "If this vote fails, then insurance companies will continue to run amok." They're not exactly wildcatting as it is. Health plan providers boast a profit margin of 3.4% — placing them 88th of 215 industries in Morningstar rankings. More than 2,000 state mandates dictate what coverages they provide.
• "By the time the vote has taken place ... you'll know what's in it because it's going to be posted and everybody's going to be able to evaluate it on the merits." The final bill wouldn't available to the public until Saturday morning, the day before the vote, congressional sources told us Friday. So in fact, nobody would have time to digest the 2,500-page leviathan.
• "We're not transforming one-sixth of the economy in one fell swoop." Yes, Obama wants to take over the health care sector, but in pieces. In 2007, he said that "economically it is better for us to start getting a system in place, a universal health care system, signed into law by the end of my first term as president." Canada, he noted, "did not start off immediately with a single-payer system, they had a similar transition step." He's been on record since at least 2003 as a "proponent of single-payer, universal health care."
• "(This will be) the largest middle-class tax cut in the history of the country." Tax cut? New taxes on prescription drug sales, medical devices, tanning services and an annual tax on health insurers for being health insurers will all end up on middle-class shoulders.
Then for families earning $250,000 there are taxes of 0.9% for hospital insurance, 2.9% on "unearned income," plus a tax on high-premium policies. The "middle-class tax cut," in the president's misleading words, amounts to "tax credits to help you afford" the more expensive insurance of the new (also misleadingly named) "competitive marketplace."

OK. What Next?

There is no time for gloating or a victory lap. Unemployment is high, the economy and financial system remain fragile and the debt and deficit have reached levels unseen since WWII. Our fiscal circumstances are unsustainable. So, what will we see in 2010? Ranked in order of probability:

Gitmo/Terrorist Protocol – a bargain will soon be reached that closes Gitmo and moves the bad guys stateside. Military tribunals, rather than civilian courts, will be used almost exclusively for foreign defendants accused of anything related to terrorism. Substantively, this will be a win for the GOP.

Financial Reform – We will see this passed this summer. It will essentially be a Democratic bill and many Republicans will support it, as they cannot go into the next election having opposed financial reform. I see 70 – 75 aye votes in the Senate.

Carbon Tax Implementation/Payroll Tax Cut – I have supported this concept since John Anderson (R) suggested it in 1980. Prominent Republicans Arthur Laffer and Jeff Flake, among others, have signed onto the idea. In fact, it can be described as the free market approach to our energy and climate problems. Though highly unlikely, why might we see it this year? It would kill Cap/Trade in its crib and provide substantial payroll tax relief for employers and workers. I’d suggest eliminating Medicare from the payroll tax and cutting the FICA tax in half to 3.1% (for employer and employee sides), with a corresponding increase in carbon taxes. Said taxes would automatically go to Medicare/Social Security, in the manner of the payroll tax. This will reduce the cost of an employee by 4.55%, which makes it a jobs bill. It will add billions to consumer’s paychecks. The price mechanism will cause thrift and innovation to find new ways to efficiently produce clean energy and reduce consumption of fossil fuels. Iran, Venezuela and Al Qaeda patrons (among other bad actors) will suffer body blows that will completely change the game in favor of the good guys. We will have to find something else to argue about rather than climate change. We will have rewarded the noble concepts of employment and labor at the expense of finite and deleterious resources that have left us economically and geopolitically vulnerable for nearly 40 years.

Raise the Eligibility Age for SS & Medicare – this “third rail” approach will absolutely come, but when? The sooner, the better. Our debt and deficits are such that this simply cannot wait. This will not happen without support from the leadership of both parties – the political costs are simply too high. Let’s gradually raise the age to 72, adding four months per year for the next twenty-one years. As part of the package, the Social Security surplus needs to be invested in financial assets rather than simply offsetting operating deficits and being recorded as self-owed IOUs. Enable Americans 50 years and up to “buy in” to Medicare on an actual cost, non-subsidized basis. Myriad issues will have been addressed without raising a single tax. The fiscal implications will be positive in the extreme, with profound benefits being found in the strength of the dollar and world financial markets. The talk of a waning America will recede and it will have been accomplished on a bipartisan basis.

Wow. Will all of the above solve all of our problems? Obviously not, but it will go a long way in that direction. Unfortunately, we will still suffer from massive deficits. Much will remain to be done in reconciling our federal receipts and spending. Nonetheless, 2010 can be a year of great achievement rather than one of ever more partisan rancor.

Try again

http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/03/18/the-woodhouse-civil-war-over-health-brothers-trade-barbs-in-hig/

Great Article on Simpson ~ Bygone Era of Rational & Reasonable GOP

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/18/us/politics/18simpson.html?scp=1&sq=alan%20simpson&st=cse

This is it.

The majority of this article will soon be moved to the comment section.

By JAMES TARANTO


Democrats trying to force through ObamaCare over the will of the voters are transforming the House of Representatives into a procedural funhouse hall of mirrors. "House Republicans announced a plan Tuesday that would force Democrats to vote on whether they should have a vote," the Washington Post reports.
Let's try to explain. Late last year, the House and Senate each passed its own version of ObamaCare. Normally, these bills would go to a "conference committee," at which selected congressmen from both chambers would iron out the differences between them, producing a "conference report"--a single bill that would become law after both chambers approve it and the president signs it.

Remind you of anyone?

The Woodhouse Civil War Over Health: Brothers Trade Barbs in High-Stakes Showdown -- Politics Daily

And yes, the Conservative would kick ass in a fight, despite a "girth" difference.

This guy is a Dumb Ass

Biden mistakenly blesses Irish leader's mother -- who is still alive!

And you were worried about Sarah! When do the gaffes end? Can you imagine if he were a conservative? What a joke! Yikes!

I can't believe they are trying this stunt.

Even those who are in denial that the majority is against this bill cannot claim there is sufficient support for such a sweeping piece of legislation.
Terry, you have no idea what is in this legislation, no one does.  More importantly, you have no idea what this legislation will become!
And yes, people may ultimately like another entitlement, but...we cannot afford it! We cannot afford Medicare, Social Security, Welfare, providing government jobs to a significant portion of the population, a college education, propping up failed companies and supporting Wall Street!
Rich, you really think a return to the Cinton era tax rates are going to pay for all these entitlements?

Bless the protestors. I cannot believe the Democrats Reps. are willing to lose their seats for "health care", of course they will retain their government supplied benefits after they return to the real world.

Article 1, Section 7 of the Constitution couldn't be clearer: "The votes of both Houses shall be determined by yeas and nays, and the names of the persons voting for and against the bill shall be entered on the Journal of each House respectively."

JUST THE FACTS SIR

Well, if having the government regulate and subsidize health insurance is a “takeover,” that takeover happened long ago. Medicare, Medicaid, and other government programs already pay for almost half of American health care, while private insurance pays for barely more than a third (the rest is mostly out-of-pocket expenses). And the great bulk of that private insurance is provided via employee plans, which are both subsidized with tax exemptions and tightly regulated.

The only part of health care in which there isn’t already a lot of federal intervention is the market in which individuals who can’t get employment-based coverage buy their own insurance. And that market, in case you hadn’t noticed, is a disaster — no coverage for people with pre-existing medical conditions, coverage dropped when you get sick, and huge premium increases in the middle of an economic crisis. It’s this sector, plus the plight of Americans with no insurance at all, that health care reform aims to fix. What’s wrong with that?

In the last several days, the debate has taken a detour about what some have called a "shameful attack" on the "noble attorneys" who have chosen to defend "unpopular people." A national security organization, Keep America Safe (of which Ms. Burlingame is a board member), used the phrase "Al Qaeda 7" in an Internet ad to describe seven unnamed Department of Justice political appointees who previously represented or advocated on behalf of terrorists.


The purpose of the ad was to prod Attorney General Eric Holder to disclose to the public which detainee attorneys he has hired to work on behalf of the American people, and whether they are involved in the policy-making decisions that will affect the nation's safety and security while we are at war. He was asked for this information by several members of the U.S. Senate, and he was stonewalling.

The attorney general has the right to select whomever he chooses to work in his department, and to set policy as he sees fit. He does not, however, have the right to do it in the dark. The policies he advances must face the scrutiny of the American people, his No. 1 client.

The public has a right to know, for instance, that one of Mr. Holder's early political hires in the department's national security division was Jennifer Daskal, a former attorney for Human Rights Watch. Her work there centered on efforts to close Guantanamo Bay, shut down military commissions—which she calls "kangaroo courts"—and set detainees who cannot be tried in civilian courts free. She has written that freeing dangerous terrorists is an "assumption of risk" that we must take in order to cleanse the nation of Guantanamo's moral stain. This suggests that Ms. Daskal, who serves on the Justice Department's Detainee Policy Task Force, is entirely in sync with Mr. Holder and a White House whose chief counterterrorism official (John Brennan) considers a 20% detainee recidivism rate "not that bad."

It is entirely legitimate to ask who else among Mr. Holder's hires from the Gitmo bar is shaping or influencing national security policy decisions. Meanwhile, the public can decide whether the lawyers at Paul, Weiss who are volunteering at Guantanamo are an example of the legal profession's noblest traditions.

An FYI from Ol' sara: Showtime!!

An interesting read. If you go to snopes.com you will find that they have checked this out and Mr. Connelly did write this. There are also other opinions about the health bill  A retired Constitutional lawyer has read the entire proposed healthcare bill. Read his conclusions. This is stunning! The Truth About the Health Care Bills - Michael Connelly, Ret. Constitutional Attorney Well, I have done it! I have read the entire text of proposed House Bill 3200: The Affordable Health Care Choices Act of 2009. I studied it with particular emphasis from my area of expertise, constitutional law. I was frankly concerned that parts of the proposed law that were being discussed might be unconstitutional. What I found was far worse than what I had heard or expected.

Terry, it is not the "lying" Republicans who are preventing the health care bill from being passed.

House Democratic leaders don’t have the votes to pass healthcare reform. At least not yet.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has expressed confidence that when push comes to shove, healthcare reform will pass Congress. But there will be plenty of pushing in the days ahead.


Pelosi is clearly down in the vote count. Thirty-four House Democrats are either firm no votes or leaning no, according to The Hill’s whip list. Dozens more are undecided.

Terry, it is the Democratic House members who have no desire to commit political suicide, passing the bill against the will of their voters.

And Terry....perhaps, just perhaps, the voters are right.

John Stossel, I like this guy. He presents both sides on his show and covers interesting topics.

Fiscal Responsibility is No FunAs the Democrats scramble to pass health care legislation, talk still returns to the idea that at least the health care bill is "deficit neutral". That is, while it spends more than a trillion on a new entitlement, it pays for itself mostly by cuts in Medicare. Of course, the doc fix -- scheduled Medicare cuts to doctors which Congress has no intention of making -- will dwarf those savings and add $89 billion to the deficit.
But leave that aside. Medicare already faces a $30 Trillion deficit. The bigger issue is that Democrats are poised to make cuts in Medicare -- something that is incredibly difficult to do -- but instead of applying those cuts towards Medicare, they are applying it towards a lavish new entitlement program.

Harvard economist Greg Mankiw sums up the absurdity of this attitude perfectly on his blog. He shows off his professorial side by writing this dialogue between a friend who consistently spends more money than he earns, racking up credit card debt--and you:

Friend: I am going to take off a few days from work and fly down to Bermuda for a quick vacation.

You: But isn't that expensive? Won't that just add to your growing debts?

Friend: Yes, it is expensive. But my plan is deficit-neutral. I have decided to give up that half-caf, extra-shot caramel macchiato I order at Starbucks twice every day. I really don't need that expensive drink. And if I give it up for the next three years, it will pay for my Bermuda trip.

You: Well, then, how are you going to solve the problem of your growing debts?

Friend: I am going to figure that out as soon as I return from Bermuda.

You: But in light of your budget problem, maybe you should give up Starbucks and skip the Bermuda vacation. Giving up Starbucks could be the easiest way to start balancing your budget.

Friend: You really aren't any fun, are you?

Government in action!

http://www.sacbee.com/2010/03/13/2604016/irs-suits-pay-visit-to-car-wash.html

What could possibly go wrong with government run Health Care!

Who dat? 2006 til 2010? RIP Democrats

WASHINGTON—Even as government receipts posted a rare increase in February, soaring outlays pushed the country's year-to-date deficit up to a record $651.60 billion.

The government's fiscal 2010 year-to-date deficit is up 10.5% from fiscal year 2009.
The government in February alone ran its largest ever monthly deficit—$221 billion, the U.S. Treasury said in releasing its monthly budget statement Wednesday.

And they will also need a car, house and clean socks.

PELOSI: Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or, a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance, or that people could start a business and be entrepreneurial and take risk but not [be] job-locked because a child has asthma or someone in the family is bipolar. You name it. Any condition is job-blocking.

Nancy...who is going to pay for hippie care?

Lucky they were not in the shower.

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. (March 9) -- U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts said Tuesday the scene at President Barack Obama's first State of the Union address was "very troubling" and that the annual speech to Congress has "degenerated into a political pep rally."
Obama chided the court for its campaign finance decision during the January address, with six of the court's nine justices seated before him in their black robes.  "To the extent the State of the Union has degenerated into a political pep rally, I'm not sure why we're there," said Roberts, a Republican nominee who joined the court in 2005.
 The image of having the members of one branch of government standing up, literally surrounding the Supreme Court, cheering and hollering while the court - according the requirements of protocol - has to sit there expressionless, I think is very troubling."

Breaking from tradition, Obama used the speech to criticize the court's decision that allows corporations and unions to freely spend money to run political ads for or against specific candidates.
"With all due deference to the separation of powers, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests - including foreign corporations - to spend without limit in our elections," Obama said.

Greatest Deliberative Body in the World

It would be great if the Republicans in the Senate (and the House for that matter) were really willing to work on issues. I am a believer in the idea of better governance through compromise, but when one side will not compromise at all, when it has to be all their way all the time, then that is not something that is available. When you are governing a nation of 300 million, you can only wait for reasonableness and patriotism ahead of political gain for so long before you have to act on the reality in front of you. That time has come.

The Republicans in the Senate are not acting in a collegial manner. They are willing to outright lie and distort on some issues of Health Care Reform. They are not exhibiting wise judgment or sage consideration. They are acting out of craven political interest and frankly against the interest of people who need insurance reform. In the last two months alone, they have filibustered or threatened to do so 40 times. That is far more than most two year Congresses have seen in our history, and it is clear that this is just the start not the end of this practice.

It is time for the Democratic Senators to give up their lies about where they work. Senators, you do not work in the Greatest Deliberative Body in the World. If you ever did those days are long gone. The Republicans do not view you as colleagues; they view you as the enemy. They will not act in good faith. They have made a political calculation that the good of the Republican party and its electoral future outweighs the good of the American people.

This is a hard truth. It always is hard when some one points out that you are fatter than you think or that you are just a cog in a big machine and if you were replaced today almost no one would notice.
It is a hard thing to understand that the Senate of the United States is not some magisterial club, but the playground of uninformed and ideological hard cases. However, you still have a job to do, and it is an important one. Letting the lies that make your life easier prevent you from doing that job would be the saddest part of this sorted mess. Pass the reform, don't let no win.

Sent to me by a Conservative friend

Initially, this seemed to be a quick delete type of E-mail, but then one realizes....it is true.

He destroyed the Clinton Political Machine:
     Driving a stake thru the heart of Hillary's presidential aspirations.  Something no Republican was ever able to do.
He killed the Kennedy Dynasty.
He is destroying the Democratic Party before our eyes.
Dennis Moore had never lost a race - Quit
Evan Bayh had never lost a race - Quit
Byron Dorgan had never lost a race - Quit
Harry Reid, in all probability - Gone (apparently a Democratic Senate Majority Leader is an endangered species).
By the end of 2010 dozens more will be gone.
In December 2008 Democrats were on the rise.

In the past two election cycles they had picked up 14 senate seats and 52 house seats. The press was touting the death of the Conservative Movement and the Republican Party.
In one year Obama put a stop to all of this and will probably give the House and the Senate back to the Republicans.
He has completely exposed liberals and progressives - extremists, for what they are.
Liberals tax, borrow and spend - Check
Liberals won't protect America - Check
Liberals want to take over economy - Check
Liberals think they know what is best for everyone - Check
Liberals aren't happy till they are running your life - Check
Every generation seems to need to relearn the lesson why they should never put liberals in charge.
He has brought more Americans back to Conservatism than anyone since Reagan.  In one year he rejuvenated the Conservative movement.

Thank You Barack Obama.

True... this is not about the deficit, it is about control.

Mort Zuckerman on Obama Failure

He’s misjudged the character of the country in his whole approach. There’s the saying, “It’s the economy, stupid.” He didn’t get it. He was determined somehow or other to adopt a whole new agenda. He didn’t address the main issue.
This health-care plan is going to be a fiscal disaster for the country. Most of the country wanted to deal with costs, not expansion of coverage. This is going to raise costs dramatically.

In the campaign, he said he would change politics as usual. He did change them. It’s now worse than it was. I’ve now seen the kind of buying off of politicians that I’ve never seen before. It’s politically corrupt and it’s starting at the top. It’s revolting.

Crazy Rich likes:

 Zakaria: How to Solve America's Debt Problem - Fareed Zakaria - Newsweek.com

OK, but entitlement reform first.

This is a paragraph from the following article which is to the point:

Being unwilling to rein in spending, Obama will soon be proposing further tax increases of a size that will dwarf the few tax breaks he is offering to small businesses that take on new workers. Nobody doubts that the commission the president is appointing to find a way out of the fiscal mess will recommend tax increases now, and spending cuts, if any, much later. Or that Congress might well decide to do neither, and Micawber-like, simply hope that something turns up.

Local Flavor

Local "tea party" activists apparently aren't totally sold on Hayworth as a conservative alternative to the more moderate McCain. Organizers of four tea-party groups in Phoenix, Tucson, Flagstaff and Mohave County issued a joint statement Monday saying they are declining to endorse in the GOP Senate primary.


"The Tea Party is a non-partisan, grass-roots movement that stands for limited government, free markets, and fiscal responsibility," Tucson Tea Party co-founder Robert Mayer said in a written statement. "Both McCain and Hayworth's records during their many years in Washington leave much to be desired on these issues."

I guess I am a member of the Tea Party

And by the way

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Friday that based on the Obama administration's budget proposal, deficits over the next decade would be $1.2 trillion higher than the White House estimated.

A preliminary analysis of the president's budget by the CBO forecasts a $1.43 trillion deficit for fiscal year 2011, $75 billion higher than the White House projection. The CBO also estimated deficits from 2011-2020 would be more than $9.7 trillion, compared with $8.5 trillion projected by the administration.

Ol' Sara suspects we're all getting to "tight": So PLAY BINGO

RULES for Bullshit Bingo…at least it may keep you awake

60.8 million Americans are dependent on the government for their daily housing, food, and health care. The number of taxpayers is shrinking--and the country may be rapidly approaching the point where more than one-third of Americans do not pay taxes for benefits they receive. In February 2009, the Democrat-controlled Congress and the new Obama Administration may have driven the final stake into the heart of any semblance of fiscal responsibility when they enacted the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act--essentially overturning the fiscal foundation of welfare reform.

Starting in 2016, Social Security will not collect enough in taxes to pay all of the promised benefits-- which is a problem for all workers, but especially for the roughly half of the American workforce that has no other retirement program.

So, How's That Pivot to Jobs Going? or Gosh, Isn't this what Jim has been saying all along?

Last week President Barack Obama hosted a seven-and-a-half-hour televised health care summit. This week the President launched his "final" campaign for passage of his health care plan. Next week, President Obama will travel to Missouri and Pennsylvania to continue this "final" effort to jam his unpopular plan through Congress. With this all-health-care-all-the-time White House agenda it seems like eons ago that the Obama administration announced, following the complete rejection of its health care plan in the Massachusetts Senate special election, that President Obama's first State of the Union would mark a "pivot" from health care and to a "razor sharp focus on jobs". So how is that pivot to jobs going? Well, the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics released its monthly jobs report this morning and it showed the U.S. economy shed another 36,000 net jobs last month. Our nation's unemployment rate is still at 9.7%.

So why is our economy having such a tough time pulling out of recession? Here are the facts: the most recent data available show that the U.S. economy actually lost fewer jobs during this recession than were lost during the 2001 recession. Specifically, 50.8 million jobs were lost through the first six months of the '01 recession while 48.2 million jobs were lost through the first six months of this recession.


But if out economy is losing fewer jobs this time, then why is our unemployment rate so much higher under President Obama's stewardship of the economy? The answer: job creation. Or actually the lack thereof. Back to the BLS data: through the first six quarters of the 2001 recession 47.6 million jobs were created, while only 40.3 million jobs have been created through the second quarter of 2009. That's a 7.9 million jobs gap. The reason our unemployment rate is so much higher now is low job creation, not high job loss. So why aren't businesses creating jobs? Here is what entrepreneurs have been trying to tell the Obama administration:
At one of President Obama's many jobs summits, Fred Lampropoulos told The New York Times that businesses were uncertain about investment because “there’s such an aggressive legislative agenda that businesspeople don’t really know what they ought to do.” That uncertainty, he added, “is really what’s holding back the jobs.”


Dan DiMicco, CEO of steelmaker Nucor Corp, told the Wall Street Journal: “Companies large and small are saying, ‘I am not going to do anything until these things — health care, climate legislation — go away or are resolved.’”

Porta-King CEO Steve Schulte told USA Today his company is not investing because “proposals in Congress to tackle climate change and overhaul health care would raise costs.”

The New York Post's Charles Gasparino reported on the 600 companies stock analyst Peter Sidoti covers: "'There hasn't been one bankruptcy,' he tells me. How did they survive the recession? By cutting costs and hoarding cash, not expanding their business and hiring more people, even as the economy now is starting to recover. During other recoveries, Sidoti says, firms like these would be hiring workers in droves as demand picks up for goods and services. This time around, they're not -- because 'they don't know what their costs are going to be.'"

National Federation of Independent Business chief economist Bill Dunkelberg writes: "The horizon is filled with cost unknowns, from healthcare to cap and trade to yawning deficits and the need to come to grips with them, from paid family and medical leave to card check, from expiration of the Bush tax cuts to state decisions about their finances. Washington cannot expect small business owners, facing difficult economic circumstances anyway, to commit themselves to investing in new employees or equipment and vehicles without acknowledging and revealing the policy-inspired costs that will be imposed on them. It is all about uncertainty and confidence."

The problem with animal right activists explained

A French Deer Hunting Story

Ted Nugent, rock star and avid bow hunter orginally from Michigan, was being interviewed by a French journalist, who is also an animal rights activist, when the discussion came around to deer hunting. The journalist asked, 'What do you think is the last thought in the head of a deer before you shoot him? Is it, 'Are you my friend?' or is it 'Are you the one who killed my brother?

Nugent replied, 'Deer aren't capable of that kind of thinking. All they care about is, what am I going to eat next, who am I going to screw next, and can I run fast enough to get away. They are very much like the French.' The interview abruptly ended.

You have to love Ted! He explained it is such a simple way for this French idiot to actually understand that imputing Human thought processes on to animals is idiotic.

Anyone from the midwest readily understands why there needs to be a culling of the herd every year. They even eliminate buffalo every year in South Dakota's Custer State Park http://www.reidsguides.com/destinations/northamerica/sd/roundup.html

Only idiots are incapable of realizing that it is more humane for an animal to be shot and killed than to die of starvation in the winter because there is not enough food.

The biggest hypocrite to ever sit in the oval office

Remember when the Democrats were turning blue about the possibility that the Republican majority Senate was going to go to the "nuclear option" because of all the Democratic obstructionism over President Bush's appointments to positions and judgeships? You have to remember the gang of 14? Well now we have a President who wants to ram a humongous entitlement program through with no bi-partisan support whatsoever. This is so opposite everything Obamamessiah had to say before about his healthcare proposal that is hypocratic in the extreme.

During a CBS-TV election night interview on Nov. 2, 2004, for example, Barry said, "My understanding of the Senate is, is that you need 60 votes to get something significant to happen, which means that Democrats and Republicans have to ask the question: Do we have the will to move an American agenda forward, not a Democratic or Republican agenda forward?"

At the Change to Win convention on Sept. 25, 2007, he declared, "The bottom line is that our health-care plans are similar. The question, once again, is: Who can get it done? Who can build a movement for change? This is an area where we're going to have to have a 60 percent majority in the Senate and the House in order to actually get a bill to my desk. We're going to have to have a majority, to get the bill to my desk, that is not just a 50-plus-1 majority."

He didn't stop there. On Oct. 9, 2007, in an interview with the Concord (NH) Monitor, Barry pontificated, "You've got to break out of what I call the sort of 50-plus-1 pattern of presidential politics. Maybe you eke out a victory of 50 plus 1, but you can't govern. You know, you get Air Force One -- I mean, there are a lot of nice perks, but you can't deliver on health care. We're not going to pass universal health care with a 50-plus-1 strategy."

At the Center for American Progress on July 12, 2006, he confided, "You know, one of the arguments that sometimes I get with my fellow progressives -- and some of these have flashed up in the blog communities on occasion -- is this notion that we should function sort of like Karl Rove, where we identify our core base, we throw them red meat, we get a 50-plus-1 victory. But see, Karl Rove doesn't need a broad consensus, because he doesn't believe in government. If we want to transform the country, though, that requires a sizable majority."

This is by far the most arrogant, stubborn and elitist President the nation has ever had. He makes Teddy Roosevelt look like a shy man. How can someone be so arrogant that they will stop at nothing, like buying votes again, to ram something through Congress that a sizable majority of Americans are against?

Thus far it appears that everything Jim and I were predicting would happen has since Barry won. If the Obamamessiah rams this home my prediction is that you will see a Dunkirk like defeat for the Democrats this November except that there won't be an armada of boats to keep them from going under.

Radio Show

Jim/Bax:

You two are definitely more interesting than the bunkum and balderdash on television. Why not do dueling commentary in the newspaper. Or better yet, get some local radio time and have people call in. I would love to hear you guys take some dimwit phone calls. You can use pseudonyms, of course.

It can be done.

I once spent the better part of a year traveling to a town of 20,000 (Palestine, Texas), that had more or less been politically taken over by a loose cannon on the local public radio. His show was proudly hillbilly. The county judge sued him for $8,000,000 in an entirely appropriate slander suit. (In Texas they don't pay off on that kind of settlement; it's a little like your photo speeding tickets in Arizona.)

He was still on the air, last I heard.

Pay Go a Go Go

So Eric is worried about the banks and the insurance industry. Says our country is heading in the wrong direction.


Rich bitches a lot about the deficit, says it is the Republicans fault. Says tax cuts are to blame, but we also need entitlement reform. Don't worry, Rich says, the adults are in charge.

Now little me, I keep saying we are going broke, we have promised too much and the government is involved in too much of our lives. I keep saying that.

I use lots of news articles to make my points, most of them are from conservative publication because they...agree with me.

So...Jim B, the evil one, won't let poor folks get their unemployment benefits. I know this because I watched MSNBC last night and they said so. That is right, the Senator from KY is now being portrayed as having a mental disorder because...he wants to enforce Pay-Go, the very program Rich cites when crowing about the 90's surplus.

I have said, many times, that the Republicans tried, tried, to bring some fiscal discipline and sanity to government spending but their efforts were demagogue by the Democrats. I have even posted examples, mostly ignored.

Like I tell my patients, to quite smoking you have to quit smoking, you can't just talk about it. (advice I would give our President).  To quit spending, we need to quit spending.  Duh

But, because of the Democrats and their...lying...we can't get a damn thing don't.

Our only alternative is to tax more to spend more. Rich, you keep saying we need to spend more now to stimulate the economy then reign it in later. Bull----, YOUR PARTY WILL NOT EVEN LET AN ISSUE PASS WITHOUT MANIPULATING IT AGAIN FOR POLITICAL GAIN, WHICH ENFORCES A RULE JUST PASSED, WHICH WOULD HAVE NO REAL EFFECT ON THE UNEMPLOYED.

Come on!

Dude smokes, has high cholesterol and needs to moderate his alcohol intake. 

He is a set up for a MI unless renal failure from his NSAID use gets him first.

Apparently, he also does not keep his promises to his wife.

Take the quiz, what's your score?

Today's kids have no chance at this test. Same thing for anyone in college - no chance. Victims of our Unionized teaching force. Actually most immigrants trying to become citizens have a much better chance.

Enjoy:

www.americancivicliteracy.org/resources/quiz.aspx?batch=16

Scenario 1:


A fragile economy on the brink is met with a huge stimulus, absent funds to pay for the stimulus the deficit soars. The stimulus creates, at best, make work jobs. New industries are absent and the only growth is in commercials for bankruptcy attorneys.  Despite the hoped for effect of the stimulus, unemployment rises and tax receipts fall, creating an even larger deficit. Employers, reluctant to hire with proposed income and health care excise tax increases hanging over their heads, do not engender the usual post recession expansion. The economy remains at standstill, unemployment remains high, the deficit expanding and consumer confidence is at historic low levels.

Scenario 2:

A fragile economy on the brink is met with a broad series of marginal and business tax cuts. Absent funds to pay for the tax cuts, the deficit initially rises but due to the increased economic activity brought on by citizens holding onto the $700 billion in tax cuts, tax receipts have now exploded and unemployment dramatically reduced. Several "new" business are ready to start their next generation and IPO's have exploded. Despite the Presidents cultural issues with the Conservatives, they are grudgingly expressing admiration for the President and his willingness to work with them on economic issues.

Just to be clear, the point of these posts is to emphasize that Conservative=Fiscal

And

and

Pay Go...A good thing unless...it matters.

And you act like this never happens (as it does time and time again).  I'm sure he just wants to help his rich Republican friends. 

Bunning  would not bend on his objection to extending benefits without a way to offset the $10 billion expenditure elsewhere in the budget.


US Senator Jim Bunning, a Republican from Kentucky, foiled Democrats attempts to enact a short-term extension of unemployment benefits and COBRA subsidies for a million Americans.

"In my 24 years of service, I have never seen the congress of the United States perform as badly as we are performing presently," said Bunning.