Yeah, I was laughing pretty hard too:
Monday, April 11, 2011
Saturday, April 9, 2011
"What's mine is mine and what's yours is negotiable."
Great column in The Week. Some important questions it raises:
• Do you really want to replace Medicare with vouchers for private insurance?
• Do you really want to lose guaranteed coverage – and pay more and more for less and less?
• Do you really want to exchange Medicare for a market that puts profits ahead of people?
• Do you really want to slash Medicaid so the sick are left without help in order to lavish tax cuts on the wealthy?
• Do you really want to let Republicans get their budget-cutting hands on your Social Security – because that’s the next target?
• Do you really want to let insurance companies cancel the coverage you paid for across the years once a loved one gets cancer or some other serious illness – and the bills mount up?
Unless you answered 'Yes' to all of these questions, you'll never fully understand what it is the House Republicans are fighting for.
• Do you really want to replace Medicare with vouchers for private insurance?
• Do you really want to lose guaranteed coverage – and pay more and more for less and less?
• Do you really want to exchange Medicare for a market that puts profits ahead of people?
• Do you really want to slash Medicaid so the sick are left without help in order to lavish tax cuts on the wealthy?
• Do you really want to let Republicans get their budget-cutting hands on your Social Security – because that’s the next target?
• Do you really want to let insurance companies cancel the coverage you paid for across the years once a loved one gets cancer or some other serious illness – and the bills mount up?
Unless you answered 'Yes' to all of these questions, you'll never fully understand what it is the House Republicans are fighting for.
Friday, April 8, 2011
Death Panels and Tax Cuts: Not quite the same as Death and Taxes
Following up on the theme from yesterday's post on Matt Miller's column, Charles R. Morris authors an op-ed piece in Politico about how the US tax burden is really a red herring and the real issue isn't the quantity of taxes collected but the quality of the government spending them. He also calls out the people that think everything can be saved by cutting spending without raising a penny in taxes:
"But even a casual look at the country’s needs suggests that increased revenues have to be part of the solution. Cutting-edge U.S. research, mostly funded by the government, created the Internet and much of the scientific matrix supporting the semiconductor and biotech industries. But now research funds are under severe budget pressures. Roads, bridges and airports are in disgraceful condition after decades of scrimping on maintenance.
If we magically eliminated all waste in health care, the expanding technologies of “standard care” would still have far outrun middle-class paychecks. We have a terrible record in perinatal care, thereby incurring immense longer-term social and medical costs. Only in America do middle-class kids finish college with mountains of debt. And sad to say, it seems that economic mobility in America is now lower than in most European countries."
Thursday, April 7, 2011
The duplicitous choice between "Bad" and "Ugly"
This Matt Miller column in today's Washington Post is a must-read regardless of your political ideologies. Regular readers of my blog (all two of you!) know how big a fan I am of Matt Miller's pragmatic thinking or, as he puts it in his weekly radio show, 'Radical Centrism'. In today's column, he spells out the reasons why neither the Obama budget nor the Ryan budget is intellectually honest about the deficit and is really pandering to its own political agenda. A great point from the column:
"Paul Ryan proposes that the federal government spend $40 trillion over the next 10 years, as opposed to Barack Obama’s $46 trillion. The first thing to note is that there is thus about a 15 percent difference in the size of government envisioned by our two major parties. This difference matters greatly, of course, but shouting aside, this is a fight taking place between the 40-yard lines on either side."
My personal thought on this is although the president's budget is much closer to Ryan's budget, his preference would likely be what was proposed in the Simpson-Bowles Commission Report. That's just my hunch; I'm not basing it on any information confirming or denying it. Unfortunately, the President won't get it today from a Republican Party set on the emotional victory of making him a one-term president. The problem this would raise isn't that Republicans don't have the nation's best interests in mind. The real issue with the sport of politics being what it is, a Republican President in 2012 would only work between the 40-yard lines for four more years in hopes of securing a re-election, pushing off further necessary pain until 2016 at the earliest, which may be too late.
"Paul Ryan proposes that the federal government spend $40 trillion over the next 10 years, as opposed to Barack Obama’s $46 trillion. The first thing to note is that there is thus about a 15 percent difference in the size of government envisioned by our two major parties. This difference matters greatly, of course, but shouting aside, this is a fight taking place between the 40-yard lines on either side."
My personal thought on this is although the president's budget is much closer to Ryan's budget, his preference would likely be what was proposed in the Simpson-Bowles Commission Report. That's just my hunch; I'm not basing it on any information confirming or denying it. Unfortunately, the President won't get it today from a Republican Party set on the emotional victory of making him a one-term president. The problem this would raise isn't that Republicans don't have the nation's best interests in mind. The real issue with the sport of politics being what it is, a Republican President in 2012 would only work between the 40-yard lines for four more years in hopes of securing a re-election, pushing off further necessary pain until 2016 at the earliest, which may be too late.
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Monday, April 4, 2011
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