Obama: George, you — you can’t just make up that language and decide that that’s called a tax increase…. What if I say that right now your premiums are going to be going up by 5 or 8 or 10 percent next year and you say well, that’s not a tax increase; but, on the other hand, if I say that I don’t want to have to pay for you not carrying coverage even after I give you tax credits that make it affordable, then…
Stephanopoulos: I — I don’t think I’m making it up. Merriam Webster’s Dictionary: Tax — “a charge, usually of money, imposed by authority on persons or property for public purposes.”
Obama: George, the fact that you looked up Merriam’s Dictionary, the definition of tax increase, indicates to me that you’re stretching a little bit right now. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have gone to the dictionary to check on the definition.
Stephanopoulos: I wanted to check for myself. But your critics say it is a tax increase.
Obama: My critics say everything is a tax increase. My critics say that I’m taking over every sector of the economy. You know that.
Tag: obama
GOPLand in Bad Decline
An excellent Boston Globe op-ed describes the current, historically bad state of the Grand Old Party, held hostage as it is by the most extreme elements of its fringe membership. I’ve even put it in graph form:
Pretty easy to gather that, compared to everybody else, Democrat and “Independent” alike, self-described Republicans hold very different views on the issues of the day. And it’s not as though, were these folks asked about immigration or abortion, they’d suddenly step back into some region of the non-lunatic spectrum. GOP identifiers largely believe (to the tune of 58%) that the President of the United States is a secret Muslim born in Kenya, after all. And that he’s furthermore planning to usher in a Socialist Empire of some sort. People are certainly entitled to their insane views; the problem is, as the article notes:
In America, we don’t really have splinter parties. When one of our parties goes crazy, it doesn’t slide to the margins.
Yep. It’s not as though this is some tiny, ad-hoc group’s take on some arcane local zoning issue we’re talking about here. This is a national party competing for the Presidency. We either need more choices, or need the GOP to sort itself out, and fast.
But, far from dusting itself off and letting some cooler heads prevail, the modern GOP just pushes the crazy meter even further along. Here’s the man that delivered the response to Obama’s joint-session address on the subject of the President’s citizenship:
STARK: What do you personally believe, I mean – do you think there’s a question [surrounding Obama’s citizenship] here?
BOUSTANY: I think there are questions, we’ll have to see.
Alright, they must have chosen Boustany because of some sort of unique ability or achievement in the healthcare and its administration in LA. Or not:
…ranked Louisiana dead last in 2008 among the 50 states for the overall health of its people, hugely because of its high percentages of people without health insurance, preventable hospitalization, infant mortality, cancer deaths, cardiovascular deaths, and overall premature deaths. The Trust for America’s Health had similar findings in its 2008 rankings. The infant mortality rate in Louisiana, according to the United Health Foundation report, is more than triple that of Slovenia and the Czech Republic.
And yet, apparently, this is the best the GOP had sitting on the bench, waiting to make an important speech to an audience who’d just watched Obama make his case.
Worth noting the ending of the afore-linked op-ed:
Maybe Democrats should be happy that Republicans have been reduced to a lunatic fringe. But the lunatics still have their seat at the table, and someday they may be sitting at its head again. What then?
GOP: Officially Defunct
There is no serious dialogue between the Democrats and the GOP. How can you possibly form any governing coalition between groups when one half of those groups refuses to accept empirical reality?
This is a post about Joe Wilson, but not about him specifically. But let’s start there. He’s the one who lied when he called out “You Lie!” in reference to coverage of illegal aliens. Facts are troublesome things to the modern GOP; one need not read any further than the name of the appropriate subsection to see what’s what, but Politifact goes one further:
…health reform leaves in place the status quo on illegal immigration, and certainly does not provide any new benefits particularly for illegal immigrants
If this outburst were limited only to the sad fucktard that is Joe Wilson, that’d be one thing. But Dana Milbank lays out the entire sad situation:
Wilson was only the most flagrant. There was booing from House Republicans when the president caricatured a conservative argument by saying they would “leave individuals to buy health insurance on their own.” They hissed when he protested their “scare tactics.” They grumbled as they do in Britain’s House of Commons when Obama spoke of the “blizzard of charges and countercharges.”
When he asserted that “nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have,” there was scoffing and outright laughter on the GOP side. Rep. Jeb Hensarling (Tex.) shook his head in disbelief. Several Republicans shouted “What plan?” and Rep. Louis Gohmert (Tex.) waved at Obama a handwritten poster he made on a letter-size piece of paper: “WHAT PLAN?” Gohmert then took that down and replaced it with another handmade poster that said “WHAT BILL?”
The essential outcome of all this is something the media seems to forget on a daily basis: There is no GOP anymore as a functional political party interested in governance. Full stop. All policy debate, healthcare or otherwise is being conducted by Democrats: liberal and conservative. They then have to pass said policy through a perfectly mysterious 60-vote supra-majority in the Senate that the media can never see fit to explain either. Just why is it that the Senate cannot move on 51-vote majorities? Why is that anti-democratic policy in place and ruling our worlds? Easier to repeat whatever it is Drudge is peddling, I suppose. But consulting the MSM, you will never, ever find out what’s behind those mysterious 60-vote requirements. But, rest assured, there is no dialogue, because there is no (functional) GOP. It seems more and more likely that the ultimate outcome of the current situation is a new third party that, over time, first relegates the GOP into a regional, state-level party, and then into Whig-town.
And but Obama is exactly right, though probably a few decades late, in issuing this warning:
[When] we can no longer even engage in a civil conversation with each other over the things that truly matter, we don’t merely lose our capacity to solve big challenges. We lose something essential about ourselves.
One might add that we also lose the ability to govern the country at all.
You’d hope that the powers-that-be in the GOP (or the public at large) will see this sequence as a tipping point, and Joe Wilson will become the Joe McCarthy of his era (though, in his case, managing to be his own Joe Welch). Based on the various FOXnews reactions last night, I seriously doubt it. Things will only get much, much worse as Joe Wilson is held out as some sort of conquering hero and sets about creating a whole crew cast in the vapid image of Sarah Palin.
Tuesdays with Ronnie
Reagan or Obama?: As a wise Frenchman one wrote: “Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue.”
Obama or Reagan?: I’ve talked a lot about responsibility. I’ve talked about your teachers’ responsibility for inspiring you, and pushing you to learn. I’ve talked about your parents’ responsibility for making sure you stay on track, and get your homework done, and don’t spend every waking hour in front of the TV
Reagan or Obama?: [O]ur revolution had already occurred “in the hearts and minds of the people.”
Obama or Reagan?: […] we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents, and the best schools in the world – and none of it will matter unless all of you fulfill your responsibilities. Unless you show up to those schools; pay attention to those teachers; listen to your parents, grandparents and other adults; and put in the hard work it takes to succeed.
Reagan or Obama?: America is not yet complete, and it’s up to each one of us to help complete it. And each one of you can place yourself in that painting. You can become one of the those immortal figures by helping to build and renew America.
Obama or Reagan?: These people succeeded because they understand that you can’t let your failures define you – you have to let them teach you. You have to let them show you what to do differently next time. If you get in trouble, that doesn’t mean you’re a troublemaker, it means you need to try harder to behave. If you get a bad grade, that doesn’t mean you’re stupid, it just means you need to spend more time studying.
Yep
“My fellow Americans, we say that healthcare is a right of all citizens. The other party says that it is a privilege for those who can afford it. If you agree with them that healthcare is a privilege, not a right, then vote for them. We would like to persuade you to join us, but if we can’t, then we are going to defeat you.
"Decades ago our opponents tried to block Social Security and Medicare, using the same bogus arguments that they are using today against healthcare reform. They said Social Security and Medicare would bankrupt the country. They were wrong. Once we fix the cost inflation of our broken medical sector, with some minor tweaks Social Security and Medicare can be made solvent forever.
"Decades ago, our opponents said that Social Security and Medicare would turn the United States into a fascist or communist police state. They were wrong then and they are wrong now. And not only are they wrong, they are hypocritical. Many of our opponents who claim absurdly that universal healthcare will bring tyranny to the U.S. have defended some of the greatest assaults on civil liberties and the rule of law in American history during the previous administration.
"They can draw a Hitler mustache on me. They can draw a mustache on the Mona Lisa, for all I care. They are wrong and we are going to defeat them.
"We won the elections and we are the majority. We would like to build the biggest consensus possible, but progress is more important than consensus. Our job is to help the American people, not split the difference between right and wrong by giving a veto to the party that the American people have rejected.
"In this fight, as in earlier struggles, powerful interests are opposed to the needs of the people. In the 19th century, we the people defeated the Southern slave owners, freed the slaves and saved the nation. In the 20th century, while fighting alongside many other nations to save the world from militarism and totalitarianism, we the people here at home tamed the corporations for a generation and fought segregation based on race, gender and, more recently, sexual orientation.
"Today the campaign for affordable healthcare as a right, not a privilege, is opposed by powerful interests in the medical and insurance industries. They seek to deceive and confuse you. And they seek to bribe or intimidate your elected representatives into serving their will rather than the needs of the public.
"They may win this battle. They may win the next. But we will never stop fighting for the needs of the many against the greed of the few. For more than 200 years, from the time we threw off the tyranny of the British empire and established our republic, we have worked to realize the spirit of ‘76 on this continent and in the world beyond. The enemies of progress have money on their side. We have history on ours.”
El Dorado
As the Obama administration merrily dispatches with that part of healthcare that the public broadly (and, the WH would add: inexplicably) favors, the Public Option, they still stand pat on the part that will really get the folks screaming: the individual mandate. Marc Ambinder chanels the latest (and inevetiably a self-loathing Clinton administration alum) “anonymous source” from inside the Obama administration who chooses to leak this sort of self-damning pablum:
The president continues to operate under the belief that liberals will warm to the bill when presented with a goodybag that includes includes an individual mandate, community rating, guaranteed issue, and a minimum required package. There’s no chance, really, that a bill WON’T feature these reforms. Quietly, to secure and keep Democrats on board, the White House is going to bargain, providing inducements, like more money for favored projects, etc., in order to secure individual votes.
Let’s get Rahm in order on something right now: Without a robust public option there can be no individual mandate. Without strict cost controls and the much-longed-after downward bend to the cost curve, all you’re left with is today’s overpriced, low-choice coverage which, under new laws anybody can get…and they’d have to. That’s sort of why the insurance lobbies favor a plan with no public option and/but an individual mandate; especially if their buddy Max Baucus manages to use the legislation to increase their profit margins to 35%. Oh, and we’d be ditching the employer mandate as well. So there’d be impetus for employers to ditch the matching coverage schemes of today to cut their costs in favor of kicking you out on your own…where you’d be required by law to pay ever more since you’d have no access to the sort of pooled coverage groups and bargaining power that might actually, you know, contain costs. This is really sounding like a wonderful plan they’ve got going.
You can ditch the public option, but with it has, HAS to go: the individual mandate. You then rely on slow growth of acceptance (the campaigning Obama said as much: people will buy healthcare if they can afford it. They want to buy in, but often can’t in the current setup that’s too heavily weighted towards certain “good” jobs with plans attached or the occasional large coverage pools.) It would be a bad outcome, and would extend the period of suffering for all of us; but it’s not nearly as bad as losing the public option and the employer mandate and yet inexplicably keeping the individual mandate along with none of the potential consumer choice and provider competition-oriented benefits. Now you’re forced to buy insurance that too few folks can afford anyway.
Instead, we’re being told to quit being smelly hippies and get on board with the wonderful program of force-fed shit sandwiches, and could we please all agree it’s the best of all possible worlds? Uh, no. We can’t. Lead, follow, or get the fuck out of the way.
Way Down in the Hole
Chuck Grassley, when directly offered the hypothetical “Chuck, go write whatever you want into the bill” counter-factual responded thusly:
Chuck Todd asked Grassley whether he’d vote for the bill if it was a good piece of policy that he’d crafted but that couldn’t attract more than a handful of Republican votes. “Certainly not,” replied Grassley.
[…]
“I am negotiating for Republicans,” he said. “If I can’t negotiate something that gets more than four Republicans, I’m not a good negotiator.”
Implicit in this statement are two facts: a) Republicans are not going (and never planned ) to vote for health care reform, even if they write the bill, and b) Republicans are negotiating in bad faith because of (a), this meaning either they hope to kill the bill by negotiating it to death, or they just like talking to salesmen.
And yet, which party keeps on coming back up to the table, hoping this time they’ll manage to “negotiate” a bipartisan solution? Each time offering up a few more sacrificial lambs in the hope that, this time, the GOP will finally love them and offer true forgiveness? Exactly when does the GOP give up something? Exactly when do the Democrats stop giving in? (Answers visible only in the Teacher’s Edition: Never and Never.)
“Bipartisan” in the current situation means: that to which the Blue Dogs will acquiesce. Full Stop. You get those votes, you have achieved a bipartisan outcome. Period, the end. There is no bill sufficiently milquetoast to achieve a 75-80 vote margin that Grassley seems to implicitly claim is what’s required to “earn” his precious vote. To assume any health-care bill is going to achieve that kind of margin is utter lunacy. But this is the baseline at which “negotiations” are happening. Tells you a lot about the current fecklessness of the Democratic Party in the Senate.
True progress will only come when Harry Reid (and, for that matter, Rahm Emaneul) realizes this and begins to enforce fealty at cloture votes accordingly. You vote out of line on the cloture issue of a key policy initiative like this one, you lose all seniority, all committee assignments, and suddenly find yourself out working the boats with McNulty. You also find that you’re facing a well-funded primary challenge in the next round. Simple as that.
The Next Generation
Obama gets close to something in this closing paragraph he used recently:
Nearly fifty years ago, in the midst of the noisy early battles to create what would become Medicare, President Kennedy said, “I refuse to see us live on the accomplishments of another generation. I refuse to see this country, and all of us, shrink from these struggles which are our responsibility in our time.” Now it falls to us to meet the challenges of our time. And if we can come together, and listen to one another; I believe, as I always have, that we will rise to this moment, we will build something better for our children, and we will secure America’s future in this new century.
You take that, and combine the sense of it with this:
Think about this. You do the responsible thing. You pay your premiums each month so that you are covered in case of a crisis. And then that crisis comes. You have a heart attack. Or your husband finds out he has cancer. Or your son or daughter is rushed to the hospital. And at your most vulnerable – at your most frightened – you get a phone call from your insurance company. Your coverage is revoked. It turns out, once you got sick, they scoured your records looking for a reason to cancel your policy, and they found a minor mistake on an insurance form you submitted years ago.
The final product begins with paragraphs like those and ends up more like this:
I refuse to see us crush what will be the accomplishments of the next generation, to hang a stone around the necks of our own children, through the intransigence and short-sightedness of a small group vigorously defending the discredited ideas and failed programs of the last generation. We won’t saddle our children, my children, with the crushing debt and continual uncertainty of the current mishmash of a tangled, outmoded, and all-too-frequently unresponsive insurance system that was underpowered to address even the simpler medical system of yesteryear. Those days are over. We’re better than that. The time to fight for our future is now. The time to fight for our children’s future is now.
All Hands On the Bad One
And so we hear that the so-called Public Option is probably heavily weighted towards “option” and rather more lightly so toward “public.” We’ll end up with the Co-Ops, a watered down version of the already rather watery Public Option of so much debate. It’s too bad that thousands of grannies have already gone to their deaths at the behest of the various death panels that had yet to hear of these operative changes.
But I think Yglesias has it right:
Given that adding a robust public option into the mix would reduce costs, if you set up a system without a public option wouldn’t you be able to add the public option in later years as an uncontroversial application of the reconciliation process? It seems to me that doing so would count as a 100 percent legitimate deficit reduction play. The public option concept also polls substantially better than does health reform as a whole. Under the circumstances, the odds for securing 50 senate votes for adding one strike me as pretty good.
Yep. Follow the MA model more or less exactly. Get most of everyone insured, giving up cost-controls to the GOP as you go. Then you find: hey, without those cost controls, costs aren’t, uh, controlled. And you revisit cost controls because, what do you know, the program itself is damned popular. Even assuming the 60-vote majority has by then evaporated or diminished, you can ram it through on a Reconciliation basis because it’s absolutely 100% budget related and finally brings the costs under control.
Sunset
Free advice to the Obama administration: the various health care bills wending their way through the House and Senate will ultimately see the floor, and just getting that done is a lot of work. But, like Steve Jobs, you need that “oh, one more thing.”
We need one other bill passed immediately. Just a little one. It can be about one sentence long: should [healthcare reform] remain unsigned into law by the President of these United States on December 31, 2009, all healthcare funding and provisioning for the members of the House and Senate are null and void. Members of said organizations are furthermore ineligible for Medicare for as long as they may serve in the government.
Seems like we might see some more, uh, focused and credible debate with that particular Sword of Damocles hanging. Just saying.
Lemkin 