12 thoughts on “Tuesday Open Thread”

1. Yes, indeed, Obamacare is a disaster.

   

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   1. Link?

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      1. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/04/how-america-reduced-health-care-spending-by-2-trillion/390771/

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   2. 

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   3. of course Obamacare has helped tremendously. It was the right thing to do and future Dems should run on it. Though some of them will be too stupid to see the sense of that.

      But, though R’s have lost that argument and several others lately, it’s not going to change their rhetoric on the guvmint, “takers” like you and me, and who should benefit from and how we maintain this capitalist democracy.

      And the fact that Obamacare is “working” is beside the point for our Modern Day Republican Tea Party Cons. Republican “thinkers” now regularly express the idea that almost any government income is a “taking” that is depriving someone of their hard-earned and sacrosanct wealth. (Social Security taxes don’t count, because they all pay them too. But, that’s also another target for elimination by R’s. See below.)

      And almost any government outlay is an illegal redistribution of that ill-gotten income. So, even though it might be “working”, Obamacare, and S-CHIP, and Medicare and Medicaid are also in this group of government programs that should be eliminated. Of course, tax credits that go to large corporations, tax laws that shield their overseas profits, accounting tricks that count millions of dollars in stock options going to CEOs as a business cost are all super-duper OK with these same Republicans.

      Not to mention privatization, giving war contracts to the company you just left, and shifting pension funds into private and friendly hands.

      And the last of the big, bad government programs that redistributes wealth from the hard-working job creators to the lazy takers is Social Security, which Republicans have lied about since before it was enacted up until this very day. (Randi Rhodes used to say this all the time, and if she’s still on she’s still saying it.) Even though this program has saved and prolonged countless lives, brought the elderly out of poverty, and paid for children who would’ve been left destitute, it’s wrong philosophically, it should not be a government function (the churches will handle it, right?), and therefore it should be eliminated. 

      And therefore Republican Tea Party Cons will lie about until the end of time:

      Never lend money to a conservative. That’s one conclusion to be drawn from recent attacks on Social Security by Bloomberg View columnists Megan McArdle and Ramesh Ponnuru. Apparently promises, even legally executed ones, don’t mean much to their crowd.

      McArdle recently expended 1249 words attempting to evade the government’s debt to the Social Security Trust Fund, never really getting much beyond the five-word assertion that “the trust fund isn’t real.” Ponnuru tried to argue that a cut isn’t really a cut.

      It’s an odd spectacle to watch rightwingers, with their avowed hostility toward “big government,” arguing that the federal government should break its commitments and stiff middle-class retirees. Luckily they’re not very good at it.

      What Is “Reality”, Man?

      “The trust fund isn’t real.” This claim is evergreen on the right — and it’s wrong. Social Security’s trust funds, which currently hold more than $2.8 trillion in surplus, are very much real, creatures of both law and public trust. Social Security is required by law to keep its funds separate from the general budget, because all of its benefits must be financed solely by the payroll tax.

      The federal government borrowed from Social Security, using legally-executed instruments (both bonds and certificates of indebtedness). This obligation is as real as any other government debt, including those owed to Goldman Sachs or any other wealthy holder of Treasury bonds.

      But McArdle, like others of her political persuasion, is eager to sever the binds of legal and moral obligation surrounding this debt. Why? One suspects an inmate hostility to government programs of any kind, especially successful ones like Social Security, combined with the desire to take the seniors’ money and run — to the next tax break for the wealthy.

      Exactly. But FDR knew his adversaries, and seemingly could also see into the future:

      The intent behind Social Security’s financial structure was, in fact, to create a binding obligation. Roosevelt said as much at the time, telling an advisor:

      “We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program.”

      Rule of Law. But that’s a concept that Republicans only support when they’re trying to do something else.

      As for Ponnuru, he challenged a statement from Social Security Works1 which said that “If Senator Marco Rubio had his way, Social Security’s very modest benefits, averaging just $1,330 a month for retired workers, would be cut.”

      “That’s not true,” insists Ponnuru.

      Is he right? Rubio talked about two things: raising the Social Security retirement age and lowering the formula for cost-of-living adjustments. The former would reduce the total amount received during a person’s lifetime. The latter would reduce the amount beneficiaries receive in inflation-adjusted dollars, which is how such things are always measured.

      When someone is scheduled to receive X dollars and someone suggests giving them less than X instead, that’s a cut. That wouldn’t be open to debate in an honest discussion. But that’s not what we’re having here.

      Social Security works as intended and marked the beginning of America’s rise to world class leadership and to the rise of the Middle Class as a millennial force of society. Republicans want to eliminate it. 

      Obamacare works. Republicans want to eliminate it.

      S-CHIP works. Republicans want to eliminate it. And on and on. 

      And the worst thing is that when Dems agree with Republicans on these key arguments about the most critical and basic of government functions they make the survival of these important, life-saving, common-sense programs much more difficult than they should be.

      That’s no lie.

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      1. Republican House attempting to execute that very plan based on their current operating principles

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      2. and the “I’ve Got Mine” coalition who helps elected R’s like Boehner and McConell with their stated goal of removing the ACA root and branch:

         According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, whose tracking poll is a touchstone for measuring public sentiment about Obamacare, the law is under water—barely. Forty one percent of respondents hold favorable views of the ACA, while 43 percent hold unfavorable views. But if you break it out by age cohort, you find that that two percent margin is entirely attributable to people who have aged out of the program.

         Among 18- to 64-year-olds—the people who pay for the law, or are eligible for the law’s benefits, or might become eligible for the law’s benefits at some point in the future—Obamacare is breakeven. Forty two percent favorable, versus 42 percent unfavorable.

         Among those whose opinions we should generally ignore on this issue—old people—it’s a bloodbath. Only 36 percent view the law favorably, while 46 percent view it unfavorably.

         As with so much in American politics, “I’ve got mine, Jack” is the dominant ethos of opposition to the ACA. The fact that so much opposition to the ACA comes from people with so little stake in whether the law survives (and what little stake they do have something that only a vanishingly small number of people would be aware of) doesn’t help the politics, but it’s certainly morally important.

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2. Leonhart is stepping down…

   

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   1. Excellent!

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3. The Post is reporting that there’s an arrest warrant out for Mr. TABOR in connection w/ his assaulting that woman while leaving court during his probation revocation hearing earlier this month.

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   1. More good news!

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   2. Wonder if we could get rid of TABOR on the grounds that it’s just too humiliating to have this guy immortalized in our state constitution?

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