The Barack W. Backlash Begins

[PassedOut]

If he wants to whip someone into shape, it should be the members of his own party.

Agreed.

[kenberg]

Sounds like the Lyndon Johnson approach to the presidency. But LBJ, besides having a natural talent for head banging, spent many years in the Senate perfecting the style. I doubt BHO is up to it. More than a few senators like to sing in a key of their own choosing.

[Winstonm]

Personally, I think there could be a chance of adopting the Dutch model here in the U.S. - but it cannot work as a bastardization of that model. Only a uniform plan presented by the Party's spokesman (the President) has a chance to galvanize the populace behind the change. The schoolboy attempt to hammer out a bipartisan plan that suits all has to be discarded. To get something done, a cogent plan must be presented - then the small details can be debated, but the plan itself, no.

 

Without broad public support, no plan can overcome the power of the health insurance lobbies. The Dutch plan, with insurance companies that are heavily regulated may be the idea that can be sold here - not to idiots like Phil Gram - but to the 99.5% who really can think for themselves without watching Hannity.

[Winstonm]

Sounds like the Lyndon Johnson approach to the presidency. But LBJ, besides having a natural talent for head banging, spent many years in the Senate perfecting the style. I doubt BHO is up to it. More than a few senators like to sing in a key of their own choosing.

Ken,

 

I agree. Funny, but I used to dispise LBJ, but over the years as I grew older I realized that without LBJ there would still be black and white bathrooms in Alabama.

 

You have to admire a southerner taking on sourtherners to pass the civil rights act.

[Al_U_Card]

If he wants to whip someone into shape, it should be the members of his own party.

Agreed.

Indeed. Sounds like the plan of a man with a scam.

 

Maybe his ploy is to not move forward at all?

[Al_U_Card]

Sounds like the Lyndon Johnson approach to the presidency. But LBJ, besides having a natural talent for head banging, spent many years in the Senate perfecting the style. I doubt BHO is up to it. More than a few senators like to sing in a key of their own choosing.

Ken,

 

I agree. Funny, but I used to dispise LBJ, but over the years as I grew older I realized that without LBJ there would still be black and white bathrooms in Alabama.

 

You have to admire a southerner taking on sourtherners to pass the civil rights act.

Interestingly, there is some speculation that his "denigration" by the Kennedys led him to want to surpass their "agenda" in his very populist leanings.

 

OTOH is was his starting of huge expenditures in Vietnam and those social programs that got the ball rolling for the monetization of that debt and the crushing interest rates of the mid-seventies.

 

Certainly an American "character" of reknown and note.

[Rodney26]

I hope that the real truth is that the American people are going to start demanding fiscal accountability from all levels of government and aren't going to let social issues wedge how we vote in elections.

 

If you are so impassioned about fiscal responsibility then you must surely be in favor of reducing the outrageious amount spent on defense spending when there is no U.S.S.R. to defend against.

I think that the US federal government needs to be responsible for the defense of the country. That is not something that can be handled by another model (unless you have any ideas), although the days of the thousand dollar toilet seat are a cautionary tale of how perverse expenditures tend to get when the buyer is spending other people's money and has a reverse incentive to budget properly. The US federal government does not have to be a lender, a car producer, a retirement asset manager, a health insurer, a farmer etc. That's especially true given its current track record of being 50 trillion in debt when SS and Medicare are included in the calculations of just how behind the eight ball we are.

 

That said, I do agree that we should be playing more defense and less offense when it comes to our military. We as a people need to be more vigilant in our voting patterns. I'm hopeful that we're getting there, but seeing results like that poll are not encouraging.

[Winstonm]

The US federal government does not have to be a lender, a car producer, a retirement asset manager, a health insurer, a farmer etc.

 

That's especially true given its current track record of being 50 trillion in debt when SS and Medicare are included in the calculations of just how behind the eight ball we are.

 

I broke up your statement to address each individually. On the first, the amount of money spent on all these programs is so miniscule compared to the big three: defense, medicare, and social security that it is laughable to even worry about them. It makes for good talking points and sound bytes but in reality they don't matter much to the total U.S. bill.

 

What's really funny is that we have continually raided the social security trust to finance tax cuts for the wealthy and then cry out that benefits need to be reduced to the ones getting no tax benefit relief.

 

When Al Greenspan was bemoaning the fate of SS, that program was fully funded. What was not funded was the general budget, which is what brought about the concept of borrowing from SS to fill the gap in the general budget that was brought about by the tax cuts of the Reagan administration and their huge defense spending increases to fight an unnecessary economic escalation war with a counry that was already beginning to collapse from the inside, the U.S.S.R.

 

SS is still funded by IOUs from the general budget - guess which side is going to have to pay that bill, retirees or the Department of Defense.

 

Name a country that has any chance whatsoever of invading and taking over the U.S. Protecting against that event is about 95% of how a defense budget should be used, probably no more than 10% of the current defense budget. The rest of our monumental military industrial complex spending is based on the DoD and MIC contractors raiding the treasury in order to enforce our foreign policies around the globe.

 

We need to do more pillaging, plundering, and robbing. What good is invading Iraq if we don't get their oil?

[Rodney26]

Another question, now that I understand that graph.

 

 

 

I think that some of the worry with the current bill is that it may lock in a number of entitlements, again without adequate regard for the costs. We know how this goes. If I get a prescription filled, it's really very cheap. I don't know why. Medicare? My supplementary insurance? The Bush program? I dunno. But now I expect it. Someone wants to modify it so that I have to pay more? What, they hate old people? Call AARP.

The main reason why the American health care system is so financially perverse is that third party payers pay the vast majority of expenses for most Americans. After we make our $25 copay, we don't care how much the actual bill is because there's no difference between 200 and 500 and 1000. I think you're right when you say you don't seem to have a lot of skin in the game.

 

Last time I had a physical (45 minutes) the actual bill was $650. You can pay the doctor, the nurse, the technician, and the receptionist a nice chunk of change in terms of yearly salary, and that still seems like it is twice as high as it should be. I like my doctor, but if I was paying the $650 out of pocket, there is no way I wouldn't look for something more reasonable. Since my copay never changes, I have no incentive to try to bring costs down.

 

The tax deduction for companies on health insurance is a big problem, since it drives things like annual physicals, dental visits and optometry under the veil of "insurance," when they are really things that shouldn't be insured. Medical insurance should be like auto insurance, where accidents and other unusual occurances are covered. Imagine what the price of gas would be if auto insurance were like medical insurance and you just had to come up with a $10 copay every time you filled up.