It’s entitled, ‘How to Ween Yourself of Libs & Inflame Clowns.’ Really, I enjoy seeing all of you get your knickers in a wad. Keep up the hysteria my little libby bibbies.
Hey Joe! Remember writing this, just a few minutes ago? Forgot already huh?
Is it alzheimers that makes you so mean?
“Subject: Dear Idiot Tremblor
Posted On: March 29, 2010, 6:43 pm CDT
Posted By: Joe
Comment:
Hey, Clown, I’ve paid into SS way more than I’ll ever receive back from SS. Same with Medicare. Of course, you’re too stupid to know that people who work and pay taxes pay for their SS and Medicare, plus a lot more to fund SS & Medicare for the losers who can’t work or can’t save for whatever is(are) their phony excuse(s).”
Hey, dummy, who has alzheimer’s? I was responding to his reply of 6:50, which reply was in response to my comment of 6:43 pm.
Having trouble keeping up with the thread? Sure looks like you can’t deal with much of anything too complicated or more than a few sentences in length.
Sheesh, I haven’t heard that joke since yesterday and I first heard it from my great grandfather. You libs are so lacking in originality, creativity, and imagination. No wonder arts are junk and laws are bunk.
Does the AP really think we’ll believe something they say simply because they say it? They compare Mitt Romney’s behavior as a governor at the state level to Obama’s behavior on the federal level, and call it the same??? Really??? This entire article is written on false premise for nothing more than political gain. No wonder Fox News, Rush, and Boortz have more listeners/viewers than all the traditional media combined.
GOP needs to stop viewing Democrats as “domestic enemies.”
A new poll of registered republicans showed that huge %’s believe Obama is a Muslim, is not US-born, that his goal is to destroy America and that he is a “domestic enemy,”
This kind of Us VS Them mentality which is furthered by the media is extremely dangerous. It may be good for ratings, but it’s bad for America.
This article is a fine example of why — an idea once embraced by the GOP was then demonized by the same people as an unconstitutional government takeover which will lead to fascism and communism. Why? Because “the enemy” is always wrong.
I am so tired of the GOP playing politics when the health welfare and safety of men women and children throughout this country is at stake. I hope all the bums are voted out come November, starting with that phoney Cantor.
So the Dems NEVER do the same thing to Repubs? Never call them names, say they are going to run this country into the ground, call them heartless, greedy monsters?
Pot, here is kettle, and you both are black. And that is why I don’t consider myself either. I completely understand why Washington thought that having political parties would divide and destory the government they fought so hard to create.
I agree, especially of late there are certain Democratic factions which seem like they’re emulating the GOP’s “they are the enemy and we must crush them” mentality. Places like the Huffington Post and even worse DailyKos exemplify this.
I still think the vitriol on the right is more hateful and potentially more violent, but the left is now doing it too. It’s a dangerous trend that is nothing but bad news for our country. Having two political factions which are both tossing gasoline onto partisan flames will have no productive end for America & Americans.
We can and should disagree and have poignant debates. But we should not consider those who hold different viewpoints to be our enemies and thus engage them with militant, spiteful and hateful vitriol.
Agreed, why the press fermenting this is what I want to know. What does the AP care if some of these ideas were previously Republican? Everyone knows that politicians are constantly changing with the political winds, but to point it out in this fashion only continues to fan the flames of anger within the two parties. The fact of the amtter is that the individual mandate, and the idea of government involvement in healthcare to any degree, is antithetical to the American idea. We are a free country, made up of free individuals whose rights (and freedoms) are guaranteed by God and nature, not by the government. America is the greatest country ever to exist only as a result of this idea, that our rights and freedoms are given to us by our Creator. The minute we sign over our rights and responsibilities to the government, we resign ourselves to slavery.
This is an interesting individual vs. community debate because the insurance industry generally supports and profits from this and other insurance mandates.
Auto insurance, for example.
Should all homeowners in high flood zones be required to buy flood insurance? Many in the industry believe so.
Lenders require homeowners to have insurance– the effect is the same as government requiring it.
Doctors and hospitals? Should they be required to have coverage?
Insurers also support requiring motorcyclists to buy and wear helmets? Use seat belts and buy and use kid seats in cars. They also want to ban texting while driving.
What about mandatory continuing education?
I assume we all support speed limits on roads; the insurance industry does.
Where do your rights as an individual collide with the best interests of society? I think we all give up some freedom for society. Where to draw the line?
Facing the spectre of forced govt health care was bad enough. That it was being designed by the liberals was even worse. So as a COUNTER-MEASURE, conservatives came up with an alternative. This headline intentionally misleads one to believe conservatives once desired forced health care, which they did not. What a crock.
Hmm, so requiring me to wear a helmet when i ride my motorcycle in NJ or else I get a ticket isn’t forcing me to go buy one and use it? Then I guess requiring me to get healthcare and pay for it or else I get penalized isnt forcing me to get it either.. thanx for clearing that one up for me! moron
STEYN: A healthy dose of catastrophe
May I be boring? Or, if you’re a regular reader, more boring than usual? Bear with me. There are some eye-glazing numbers and whatnot.
In 2003, Washington blessed a grateful citizenry with the Medicare prescription drug benefit, it being generally agreed by all the experts that it was unfair to force seniors to choose between their monthly trip to Rite-Aid and Tony Danza in dinner theater. However, in order to discourage American businesses from immediately dumping all their drug plans for retirees, Congress gave them a modest tax break equivalent to 28 percent of the cost of the plan.
Fast-forward to the dawn of the Obamacare utopia. In one of a bazillion little clauses in a 2,000-page bill your legislators didn’t bother reading (because, as Rep. John Conyers explained, he wouldn’t understand it even if he did), Congress voted to subject the 28 percent tax benefit to the regular good ol’ American-as-apple-pie corporate tax rate of 35 percent. For the purposes of comparison, Sweden’s corporate tax rate is 26.3 percent, and Ireland’s is 12.5 percent. But just because America already has the highest corporate tax in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development is no reason why we can’t keep going until it’s double Sweden’s and quadruple Ireland’s. I refer you to the decision last year by the donut chain Tim Hortons, a Delaware corporation, to reorganize itself as a Canadian corporation “in order to take advantage of Canadian tax rates.” Hold that thought: “in order to take advantage of Canadian tax rates” – a phrase hitherto unknown to American English outside the most fantastical futuristic science fiction.
Ask yourself this: If you impose a sudden 35 percent tax on something, are you likely to get as much of it? Go on, take a wild guess. On the day President Obama signed Obamacare into law, Verizon sent an e-mail to all its employees warning that the company’s costs “will increase in the short term.” And in the medium term? Well, U.S. corporations that are able to do so will get out of their prescription drug plans and toss their retirees onto the Medicare pile. So far, just three companies – John Deere & Co., Caterpillar and Valero Energy Corp. – have calculated that the loss of the deduction will add a combined $265 million to their costs. An additional 3,500 businesses presently claim the break. The cost to taxpayers of that 28 percent benefit is about $665 per person. The cost to taxpayers of equivalent Medicare coverage is about $1,200 per person. So we’re roughly doubling the cost of covering an estimated 5 million retirees.
This single component of “health” “care” “reform” neatly encompasses all the broader trends about where we’re headed – not just in terms of increased costs and worse care, but also in the remorseless governmentalization of American life and the disincentivization of the private sector. As we see, even the very modest attempts made by Congress to constrain the 2003 prescription drug plan prove unable to prevent its expansion and metastasization. The one thing that can be said for certain is that, whatever claims are made for Obamacare, it will lead to more people depending on government for their health arrangements. Those 5 million retirees are only the advance guard. And, if you’re one of those optimistic souls whose confidence in the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is unbounded, let’s meet up in three years’ time and see who was correct – the bureaucrats passing out the federal happy juice or the real businesses already making real business decisions about Obamacare.
Can we afford this? No. Even on the official numbers, we’re projected to add to the existing $8 trillion in debt another $12 trillion over the next decade. What could we do? Tax those big, bad corporations a bit more? Medtronic has just announced that the new Obamacare taxes on its products could force it to lay off 1,000 workers. What do those guys do? Well, they develop products such as the recently approved pacemaker that’s safe for MRI scans and the InterStim bladder-control device. So that’s 1,000 fewer people who’ll be working on new stuff. Well, so what? The public won’t miss what it never knew it had. So again, the effect is one of disincentivization – in this case, of innovation.
If existing tax structures can’t cover the costs, what can we do? Start a new tax. The VATman cometh. VAT is Euro-speak for “value-added tax.” Americans often carelessly assume it’s merely a sales tax, but in fact, it’s far more cumbersome than that, being levied at each stage at which “value” is added to a product or service. The consumer can’t claim back the VAT, but intermediate businesses in the production chain can. So self-employed individuals with relatively modest income wind up both charging VAT to their clients (25 percent in Scandinavia) and then claiming back the VAT they spent on the stamp and stationary they used to mail out the invoice. This is yet another imposition on businesses, taking time away from wealth creation and reallocating it to government paperwork. If the Democrats hold Congress this fall, I would figure on VAT sooner rather than later.
All of the above is pretty much a safe bet. What about the imponderables? Even Obama hasn’t yet asked the CBO to cost out, say, what happens to the price of oil when the Straits of Hormuz are under a de facto Iranian nuclear umbrella – as they will be soon because the former global hyperpower, which gets mad over a few hundred housing units in Jerusalem, is blase and insouciant about the wilder shores of the mullahs’ dreams. Or suppose, as seems to be happening, the Sino-Iranian alliance results in a re- orientation of global oil relationships, or the Russo-Iranian friendship blooms to such a degree that, between Moscow’s control of Europe’s gas supply and Tehran’s new role as Middle Eastern superpower, the economy of the entire developed world becomes dependent on an alliance profoundly hostile to it.
Which is to say that right now, the future lies somewhere between the certainty of decline and the probability of catastrophe. What can stop it? Not a lot. But now that your “pro-life” Democratic congressman has sold out, you might want to quit calling Washington and try your state capital. If the Commerce Clause can legitimize the “individual mandate,” there is no republic – not in any meaningful sense. If you don’t like the sound of that, maybe it’s time for a constitutional convention.
You failed to see Hey Rita’s point. The helmet is optional because it is optional to ride a motorcycle. If you do not ride a motorcycle, you do not have to wear a helmet. But with health care, the only way to not have to buy health insurance is if you are dead.
Conveniently left out of ther article were 2 key points:
-who’s to say that if enacted then, a mandate, regardless of who proposed it, wouldn’t have been challenged in court by, say, Ross Perot’s supporters, who swayed the 1992 election?
-there’s a big difference between a state (Mass.) deciding to adopt a universal coverage program and the federal government imposing it, one-size-fits-all, on every state.
Hey, Rita, don’t call Nixon a conservative; he was a crony-capitalist, big gov’t freak. His theory of gov’t is what has always been practiced by the Dems. The Dems are the largest recipients of hedge funds and banks campaign contribution.
Here educate yourself some more with this article from R. Samuelson:
Planting the Seeds of Disaster by Robert Samuelson.
WASHINGTON — When historians recount the momentous events of recent weeks, they will note a curious coincidence. On March 15, Moody’s Investors Service — the bond rating agency — published a paper warning that the exploding U.S. government debt could cause a downgrade of Treasury bonds. Just six days later, the House of Representatives passed President Obama’s health care legislation costing $900 billion or so over a decade and worsening an already-bleak budget outlook.
Should the United States someday suffer a budget crisis, it will be hard not to conclude that Obama and his allies sowed the seeds, because they ignored conspicuous warnings. A further irony will not escape historians. For two years, Obama and members of Congress have angrily blamed the shortsightedness and selfishness of bankers and rating agencies for causing the recent financial crisis. The president and his supporters, the historians will note, were equally shortsighted and self-centered — though their quest was for political glory, not financial gain.
Bottom of Form
Let’s be clear. A “budget crisis” is not some minor accounting exercise. It’s a wrenching political, social and economic upheaval. Large deficits and rising debt — the accumulation of past deficits — spook investors, leading to higher interest rates on government loans. The higher rates expand the budget deficit and further unnerve investors. To reverse this calamitous cycle, the government has to cut spending deeply or raise taxes sharply. Lower spending and higher taxes in turn depress the economy and lead to higher unemployment. Not pretty.
Greece is now experiencing such a crisis. Until recently, conventional wisdom held that only developing countries — managed ineptly — were candidates for true budget crises. No more. Most wealthy societies with aging populations, including the United States, face big gaps between their spending promises and their tax bases. No one in Congress could be unaware of this.
Two weeks before the House vote, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its estimate of Obama’s budget, including its health care program. From 2011 to 2020, the cumulative deficit is almost $10 trillion. Adding 2009 and 2010, the total rises to $12.7 trillion. In 2020, the projected annual deficit is $1.25 trillion, equal to 5.6 percent of the economy (gross domestic product). That assumes economic recovery, with unemployment at 5 percent. Spending is almost 30 percent higher than taxes. Total debt held by the public rises from 40 percent of GDP in 2008 to 90 percent in 2020, close to its post-World War II peak.
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.
But the CBO estimate is misleading, because it must embody the law’s many unrealistic assumptions and gimmicks. Benefits are phased in “so that the first 10 years of (higher) revenue would be used to pay for only six years of spending (increases),” ex-CBO director Douglas Holtz-Eakin wrote in The New York Times. Holtz-Eakin also noted the $70 billion of premiums for a new program of long-term care that reduce present deficits but will be paid out in benefits later. Then there’s the “doc fix” — higher Medicare reimbursements under separate legislation that would cost about $200 billion over a decade.
Proposals to control health spending face restrictions that virtually ensure failure. Consider the “Independent Payment Advisory Board” aimed at Medicare. “The Board is prohibited from submitting proposals that would ration care, increase revenues or change benefits, eligibility or Medicare beneficiary cost sharing,” says a summary by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. What’s left? Similarly, findings from “comparative effectiveness research” — intended to identify ineffective care — “may not be construed as mandates, guidelines or recommendations for payment, coverage or treatment.” What’s the point then?
So Obama is flirting with a future budget crisis. Moody’s emphasizes two warning signs: rising debt and loss of confidence that government will deal with it. Obama fulfills both. The parallels with the recent financial crisis are striking. Bankers and rating agencies engaged in wishful thinking to rationalize self-interest. Obama does the same. No one can tell when or whether a crisis will come. There is no magic tipping point. But Obama is raising the chances.
I find it interesting the GOP has such a difficult time finding health care for all is not important, yet they will say they are the party for the right to life. Apparently once out of the womb the GOP feels you are on your own and right to life becomes a matter of dollars and cents.
Steve, that’s correct; plus the MA plan is going broke. Let the states decide and almost all of them won’t enact such laws. NJ, NY, MA, and several other lib states that already have problems with health care years ago mandated many of the Fed Health Care provisions of Obutt’s bill.
Today these states have capacity problems and the highest premiums.
Oh, BTW, Japan’s fantastic National Health Care is broker. Just one more; same for UK, Germany.
Tick,Tick, Tick – What’s that sound you’re hearing?
It’s the sound of the tax time bombs that were put in place in the dead of night on Sunday when Democratic leadership in the House of Representatives rammed through so called health care “reform.”
I say “rammed through” because it certainly wasn’t bipartisan. Not a single Republican voted for it. It wasn’t even truly partisan, since even a number of Democrats voted against it. A plurality within the majority forced it to happen.
It wasn’t bicameral, either. The bill the House voted on was one the Senate approved in December — again, without a single Republican vote. But that same bill wouldn’t get through the Senate now, since Democrats no longer control a filibuster-proof super-majority. So in an important sense it is true that this bill was not truly approved by both houses of Congress. And yet the president signed it on Tuesday. I doubt it will do much for health care in this country. But that’s something reasonable people could debate. What there can be
debate about is the part of this that affects the economy and the stock market — the taxes. As taxation expert Howard Gleckman of
the non-partisaTn ax Policy Center1 wrote on Monday, “I have never quite seen a law so full of powerful tax bombs attached to
delayed fuses.”
Before I start telling you about all the new taxes you’re going to be paying — directly and indirectly — let’s start by noting that, all else equal, higher taxes are not good for the economy. Taxes are disincentives to work and to invest. So when taxes go up, people will to some extent work less, and invest less. That simply has to be bad for the economy. There’s really no disagreement about that
among reasonable people.
What taxes are we talking about here, exactly? The nonpartisan Tax Foundation has a nice list of all of them — if you have an especially strong stomach, clickh ere2 to see them all.
Starting on July 1, there will be a 10% tax on all indoor tanning services. Why pick on that particular tiny slice of the U.S.
economy? I have no idea. For some reason, it was chosen — or rather, its customers were chosen — to be the victims this time.
Is this such a terrible catastrophe for the economy? I suppose not, but if government can impose an arbitrary tax on this particular
category of small business, then maybe your small business will be next. The uncertainty of it will keep some unknown number of
people from starting small businesses.
Who cares? You should. Historically, small businesses have created more than half the new jobs in this country year in and year
out. And in case you hadn’t noticed — as apparently Congress had not — the unemployment rate is already 9.7%.
Next year the pharmaceutical industry gets hit with $2.5 billion in new taxes, with the amount rising to $4.1 billion by 2018, and the
falling back to $2.8 billion after that. Huh? Why these particular numbers? Who knows. Some genius in the Senate just pulled them
out of his hat (or elsewhere). The point is that the companies these taxes are being levied upon are the ones who are supposed to
deliver the miracle drugs that save lives — maybe yours. Or maybe not.
In 2013 there will be a 2.3% tax imposed on makers of medical devices. Yeah, the miracle devices that save lives. The devices we
need more of. Have you ever heard of anything — anything! — that you can get more of by taxing it?
Me neither. Try telling Congress and see if they listen. They won’t.
The real killer is another one that goes into effect in 2013. Medicare taxes on wages go up by 0.9% for single-filers earning more
than $200,000 and joint filers earning more than $250,000. That’s just taxing the “rich” you say?
Maybe — and spoken like someone who never plans to be “rich.”
Those same “rich” will be hit in 2013 with a 3.8% tax on investment income such as dividends and capital gains. The dividend tax
rate is already going to go up from 15% to 39.6% next year if you’re in the top tax bracket, so this new levy will make it 44.4%.
Capital gains taxes will go from 15% to 20% next year anyway, and this will take them to 23.8%.
That won’t just hit the rich. When dividends and capital gains are taxed more, stocks simply have to lose value. It’s a law of nature.
When the after-tax return on something goes down, the price of that something has to go down too.
And when a stock price goes down, it goes down for everyone, rich and poor. It goes down for Bill Gates and it goes down for the
poor toiler who has a couple hundred shares of Google in his 401(k) account.
Don’t comfort yourself by assuming that this won’t matter until it takes effect in 2013. It matters right now. That’s because the new
higher taxes will be payable on any investments you make right now, assuming you hold them until 2013 or later. Is there some
little small-cap stock you have your eye on, you think you might want to pick up a couple thousand shares for the long run? \
Think – Published March 26, 2010
Nice strawman. When did the GOP say that Health care is not important? Never. I think they might agree with my thought of “Health insurance should be up the to indivual to carry or not carry”.
1. It was his hero, Shrub, who ran the gov’t so far into debt. His last budget, the one Obama has to work under for his first year in office (ironic, the new President always has to work under the previous President’s budget for the first year) produced the largest single deficit (after adjusting for inflation) in US history! And that’s including FDR’s budgets during the depression and WW II!
In his 8 years in office, Shrub never once gave a thought of the deficit’s he was running up.
And it was on his watch that the final seeds of the recession were planted (yes, to be honest, they were planted earlier on by previous administrations, but Shrub had 8 years to do something about it.
And, it was the Shrub administration that sponsored the bailout, NOT Obama’s. In true wingnut fashion, they try to then blame it on Obama.
What Obama did was to mandate that instead of “promises to repay” as required by the Republicans, he wanted equity – with interest. Thus what the wingnuts now call “goverment takeover of business” was simply collateral for the billions they were given. All the large banks have re-paid their loans (not gifts), AIG is repaying theirs as fast as they can sell off assets. Only Chrysler and GM, of the big recipients, haven’t repaid theirs, and it’s doubtful they ever will.
And under Obama the loans carried interest. The government has profited handsomely from the interest. We the people will make over $11 billion on the Citibank alone.
call me crazy, but i think it has to do more with “how the heck are we going to pay for this right now when unemployment is at record levels, we’re fighting 2 wars, the deficit is out of control, and even the states are going bankrupt.” Couldn’t we have focused more effort on fixing those problems and THEN tackle healthcare?
So what else can we expect from the Party of No? They are all so ignorant & out of touch with the American people & their needs that they are on the way to extinction. To bad-we used to have a choice in voting but the steamroller tactics they are so afraid of began with them. Think of what is best for America & Americans-
although i understand your thoughts here… I doubt my neighbor with a 7 yr old boy who can’t get ins coverage because he now has hiv due to a transfusion would like to wait until america is financially sound…
Bush is the one who initiated the gov’t bailout. What you don’t hear is that absent the gov’t bailout, many small investors who bought gov’t bonds would’ve had power over large corps.
You need a lesson in crony capitalism, which isn’t a free-market form of economics. Start by googling the Ludwig von Mises website and begin your sorely needed education.
look, there are many sad stories, but why stop with just that one. What of people who can’t afford cars to get them to work? Buy’em cars.
You apparently have never heard of some common sense things such as, ‘There’s no free lunch.’ Or this one, ‘Not everyone can have everything that they need or want.’
Where does gov’t stop? It’s not the job of gov’t to take care of people.
This has got to be the most assinine comment I have ever seen. The Constitution lines out exactly the powers of the federal government. At no place in the Constitution does it gove the federal government the right to require every citizen to purchase anything. Period.
The Constitution is silent on states, at least when it comes to healthcare, which means this should and could be taken up at the state level.
Please tell me where in the Constitution is states the role of the federal government is to “take care of the people”. You cannot, because the federal government does not have that right.
It is amazing to watch people with so little understanding of our Constitution offer opinions, which make them look like absolute, uneducated fools. What’s even more amazing is the state of education which is feeding these fools this drivel. PLEASE READ THE CONSTITUTION AND THE FEDERALIST PAPERS!
So, destroying the economy, destroying this country’s healthcare system, setting up a scam of a “Madoff-care” system to be used merely as a leftist slush fund, paying the insurance industry $billions$ of our dollars through mandates, taxing grandma and grandpa’s medical devices and prescription drugs, saddling our children and grandchildren with mountains of debt, and consigning the entire electorate to DMV-style healthcare service is best for America and Americans?
But their life will be at stake if they can not get to work to make a paycheck! Thats sarcasm BTW. Now, I have to disagree a little bit with you To Joe. The government IS there to serve the people. “Of the people, by the people, for the people”. Now its a matter of where do you draw the line between “taking care of the people” and just plain supporting them. I belive that the FEDERAL government is there for national defense, currency, infastructer, and to uphold just a few laws (make sure slavery is still gone, ect ect). The states should be in control of if and how they want to regulate health care, business, torts, and so on. Now, I do not think that either Federal or State government should be used for a crutch (how many people are on welfare that have no business being on it?). The problem is that people disagree with how much the government should be in our lives.
Wish I had time to read all these. Some seem to have a lot of time on your hands. Currently we are driven by competition and I hope all of you are my competition. If so, my internal motivation and capitalist spirit are winning.
I’m gloating while I can, as I know this is short lived. Obama will have us all feeding off the govt before I’m old enough to retire….
I relize the difficulty in responding to such a fool, but here goes:
1. Bush did run up deficits in 8 years. Of course, the national social democrat party quadrupled that debt in ONE SINGLE YEAR. Sorry, not going to let your lie stand without correcting the record. So, once again, the laftists quadrupled Bush’s deficits in ONE YEAR.
2. You are lying about the “stimulus”. There were two bills. The first one Bush enacted. The second one, which cost far more, and served merely as a slush fund for the national social democrat party, was passed, lock, stock, and barrel by the leftists. And it was a worthless waste of money that merely went to graft and buying votes.
And, let us not forget, it is those same people that ran Citigroup and Goldman Sachs into the ground that are serving in cabinet posts for the national social democrat in office right now. In other words, the national social democrats are scamming us all again.
Please take the time to read this and forward it out as you see fit.
Thanks
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.
To begin with, much of what has been said about the law and its
implications is in fact true, despite what the Democrats and the media are
saying. The law does provide for rationing of health care, particularly
where senior citizens and other classes of citizens are involved, free
health care for illegal immigrants, free abortion services, and probably
forced participation in abortions by members of the medical profession.
The Bill will also eventually force private insurance companies out of
business, and put everyone into a government run system. All decisions
about personal health care will ultimately be made by federal bureaucrats,
and most of them will not be health care professionals. Hospital
admissions, payments to physicians, and allocations of necessary medical
devices will be strictly controlled by the government.
However, as scary as all of that is, it just scratches the surface. In
fact, I have concluded that this legislation really has no intention of
providing affordable health care choices. Instead it is a convenient
cover for the most massive transfer of power to the Executive Branch of
government that has ever occurred, or even been contemplated If this law
or a similar one is adopted, major portions of the Constitution of the
United States will effectively have been destroyed.
The first thing to go will be the masterfully crafted balance of power
between the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches of the U.S.
Government. The Congress will be transferring to the Obama Administration
authority in a number of different areas over the lives of the American
people, and the businesses they own.
The irony is that the Congress doesn’t have any authority to legislate in most of those areas to begin with! I defy anyone to read the text of the
U.S. Constitution and find any authority granted to the members of
Congress to regulate health care.
This legislation also provides for access, by the appointees of the Obama administration, of all of your personal healthcare direct violation of the specific provisions of the 4th Amendment to the Constitution information, your personal financial information, and the information of your employer, physician, and hospital. All of this is a protecting against unreasonable
searches and seizures. You can also forget about the right to privacy.
That will have been legislated into oblivion regardless of what the 3rd
and 4th Amendments may provide…
If you decide not to have healthcare insurance, or if you have private
insurance that is not deemed acceptable to the Health Choices
Administrator appointed by Obama, there will be a tax imposed on you. It
is called a tax instead of a fine because of the intent to avoid
application of the due process clause of the 5th Amendment. However, that doesn’t work because since there is nothing in the law that allows you to
contest or appeal the imposition of the tax, it is definitely depriving
someone of property without the due process of law.
So, there are three of those pesky amendments that the far left hate so
much, out the original ten in the Bill of Rights, that are effectively
nullified by this law It doesn’t stop there though.
The 9th Amendment that provides: The enumeration in the Constitution, of
certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others
retained by the people;
The 10th Amendment states: The powers not delegated to the United States
by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are preserved to
the States respectively, or to the people. Under the provisions of this
piece of Congressional handiwork neither the people nor the states are
going to have any rights or powers at all in many areas that once were
theirs to control.
I could write many more pages about this legislation, but I think you get
the idea. This is not about health care; it is about seizing power and
limiting rights… Article 6 of the Constitution requires the members of both houses of Congress to “be bound by oath or affirmation to support the
Constitution.” If I was a member of Congress I would not be able to vote
for this legislation or anything like it, without feeling I was violating
that sacred oath or affirmation. If I voted for it anyway, I would hope
the American people would hold me accountable.
For those who might doubt the nature of this threat, I suggest they
consult the source, the US Constitution, and Bill of Rights. There you can
see exactly what we are about to have taken from us.
Michael Connelly
Retired attorney,
Constitutional Law Instructor
Carrollton , Texas
MikeN, stop listening to Fox News. Your information is also very wrong. Misleading numbers only reported so that these news agencies gain more watchers by preying on their fears.
i understand the constitution doesnt specifically say “take care of people” nor that it gives the fed the right to charge… nor does it specifically say that President Obama’s blackberry messages are not for the people if they arent about national security… time changes alot of things and if you would like a constitutional reference, Mentioned in the United States’ Preamble to the Constitution, “Welfare” means health, happiness, prosperity or well-being. The country has an interest in promoting or maintaining the well-being and liberty of its people. It means that Congress may provide legislation that acts in a general best interest of a nation…. keeping americans alive has GOT to be at least 1% of what our forefathers were talking about, no?
I was always under the apparently mistaken impression that we are supposed to be guaranteed equal opportunity. Now I realize that we are apparently now guaranteed equal results. Ain’t no rich, ain’t no poor, ain’t no reason to work no more.
No, it’s not even 1% of what was meant by the constitution. You need to read the document as a whole and not pick out selected parts. Yes, the welfare of the people, but subject to the limits imposed upon Congressional power.
Look, every society has and will have poor people. There’s nothing that will change this. But there’s no obligation to support the poor. There’s an obligation to make sure that gov’t doesn’t interfere with their rights to care for themselves, but there’s no obligation of the gov’t to care for them.
Any society that exalts the least productive over and at the expense of the most productive will be a society that fails. This has happened throughout history. It’s not as though our modern time is the first time that a society has debated these issues.
These issues go back 1000’s of years. The trend is that as a society becomes wealthy, it tends towards statism. This keep the rich rich and the poor poor, but the poor get enought crumbs to keep them alive. What happens in all of these societies is that the middle/merchant classes pay the piper.
This destroys the middle//merchant classes. This always has lead to the disintegration of the society.
Start with the Sumerians (who preceded the Egyptians) and work forward.
You’re a fool and sucker. Keep listening to that pied piper – I’ll see you going over the cliff.
The fed plan goes further than the Mass plan, and the Mass plan is a mess, so the mere fact that Romney once backed this and now Replublicans do not back you you deem a ‘similar’ plan merely reflects that Conservatives learn from mistakes, while liberals merely attempt to create larger mistakes…more of an indictment on libs, not conservatives, or even republicans for that matter.
While the taxes associated with the healthcare bill is another redistribution of wealth and punishes the successful, having the tax penalty if someone doesn’t have health insurance is sound law, in my opinion. Thep problem is, there are too many free loaders of all income groups who will get free healthcare on everyone else’s dime. The tax penalty is actually much bigger after you take into consider that health insurance is a tax deduction for the most part.
Read my other posts; they were justed posted today and answer your question about the middle class. Of course, you’re a typical phony lib. You don’t read anything; you merely emotionally react to everything.
Also, look at all of your hidden taxes. Look at your phone/cable/electic/water/insurance premium bills. Yes, the middle class is taxed up the a** and this is what’s destroying the middle class and America.
ObuttBoy is a phony, crony-capitalist, statist. You’re a sucker to put any of your trust in the DemonRatic Party, or any party for that matter. Once in power, they want just the power, money, and perks.
How are the rich, who pay for insurance freeloaders? Why do we have any obligation to provide for those who can’t or won’t care for themselves? Why can’t they skip movies, restaurants, cable TV, iPods, DVD players, cell phones, & etc. and use the money to buy insurance? Do you know that most ‘welfare’ users of emergency room services own or use the above products and services?
No, they can’t have their cake and eat it, too. Life involves choices. Why should I pay for the foolish choices of others? So, they won’t get sick or die? That’s the same as a child who holds his/her breath until the parent give in.
Yeah, you’re a conservative as much as I’m the CEO of ACORN.
actually i read them all, still dont see your point and i dont like politicians or politics, this country was not built on any party therefore we should have never created ones, but ignorant people like yourself make me thankful we have a few educated individuals that can pass laws without your vote
To quote a great American, Joe Wilson, “You lie.” You write that you don’t like politics, but you rant about politics all of the time. You’re a typical wacko, lefist, phony lib.
to quote the great american Sarah Palin, “i can see russia from my house” see I can quote idiots too!! If you want to quote a real great american, try this one,”A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy” Theodore Roosevelt
Please read my previous posts, I am a rock solid conservative. I did not say I was for paying for someone else’s health insurance, actually I do not like most of Obamacare, I think a lot of it is socialism and will hinder success. But I am for penalizing those who don’t get health insruance becasue the tax payers end up footting the bill for many of those people. As for the rich, we should allow them to put a minimim of 2 million in an HSA account and have this would qualify as coverage.
Why do you write that you’re a conservative, but you always post big-government solutions to problems. Why limit the rich? What’s rich? $200K per year? That’s barely middle class in NY, Boston, Atlanta, LA, SF, Dallas, & etc.
Get off of the government-solutions kick and then you may label yourself a conservative.
There’s no obligation to care for those who spend money on other unnecessary things (TVs., cable, iPods, & etc.), but can’t come up with the money to pay for their health insurance.
Let them eat cake, then, we’ve no obligation to fund their health care.
Joe, your solution of having the government take care of all people is an outrage. People will go out to dinner before the buy health insurance, what do you want to subsidize such people. You left wing ways are on track to destroy America.
If I read no other posts (doubtful) matt’s is the most important one. This is getting rediculous. The Health Care Bill, while far from perfect, got to it’s current form greatly due to Republican and Conservative Dem wishes. Remember, Single Payer? Universal Coverage? The Repubs still could not find a way to vote for this even though it conformed to their wishes. This country is so good to the rest of the world (Haiti, Chille, the list goes on) but we are absolutely toxic to ourselves. Hating the opposition is new pastime.
I did read your post, I am giving you a dose of your own medicine. Don’t be a left winger and listen to everything you hear, have your own independent views on this. You seem like you are taking your talking points straight from Rush Limbaugh. I like Rush, don’t agree with him 100%, but agree with a lot of what he says. Nevertheless, I am an independent thinker, Obama is a awful President, but I refuse to be like the left and shoot down everything he does (like they did to Bush). I pointed out one good thing about the plan, but I flush those taxes down the toilet because they are plane wrong.
You’re most welcomed; yes, the truth is refreshing and will set free you.
The uninsured should go without health care if they can’t pay for it. Most of the uninsured make choices other than to use their money to buy health ins or save for anything, let alone health care. So, the then gov’t mandates that everyone must have health ins. meeting standards of such and such. This is ridiculous. It hasn’t worked with auto ins & it won’t work with health ins.
Let them eat cake; people must learn to live with the choices that they make in life. I’ve no obligation to pay for John or Jane Doe’s health care (or their kids, for that matter) so that he/she/they might have a bigger apt or car, or the latest electronic gadget or eat at better restaurants & etc.
Do you realize that 3.5 million of the uninsured are drug users, alcoholics, and gang bangers? Yes, let them go w/o health care if they choose not purchase health ins or save money to pay for health care. Their foolishness shouldn’t require that the gov’t interfere with my life.
And I disagree that mandating ins is good or conservative. And, BTW, I don’t listen to Rush, Beck, & etc. I’m too busy and when I’m not working, I’m working out.
Your anger at Fox outs you as a lib. I don’t see that you’re really a conservative or even a country-club Republican.
Nothing annoys certain of my fellow conservative intellectuals more than when I remind them, as on occasion I mischievously do, that the derogatory things they say about Sarah Palin are uncannily similar to what many of their forebears once said about Ronald Reagan.
It’s hard to imagine now, but 31 years ago, when I first announced that I was supporting Reagan in his bid for the 1980 Republican presidential nomination, I was routinely asked by friends on the right how I could possibly associate myself with this “airhead,” this B movie star, who was not only stupid but incompetent. They readily acknowledged that his political views were on the whole close to ours, but the embarrassing primitivism with which he expressed them only served, they said, to undermine their credibility. In any case, his base was so narrow that he had no chance of rescuing us from the disastrous administration of Jimmy Carter.
Now I knew Ronald Reagan, and Sarah Palin is no Ronald Reagan. Then again, the first time I met Reagan all he talked about was the money he had saved the taxpayers as governor of California by changing the size of the folders used for storing the state’s files. So nonplussed was I by the delight he showed at this great achievement that I came close to thinking that my friends were right and that I had made a mistake in supporting him. Ultimately, of course, we all wound up regarding him as a great man, but in 1979 none of us would have dreamed that this would be how we would feel only a few years later.
What I am trying to say is not that Sarah Palin would necessarily make a great president but that the criteria by which she is being judged by her conservative critics—never mind the deranged hatred she inspires on the left—tell us next to nothing about the kind of president she would make.
Take, for example, foreign policy. True, she seems to know very little about international affairs, but expertise in this area is no guarantee of wise leadership. After all, her rival for the vice presidency, who in some sense knows a great deal, was wrong on almost every major issue that arose in the 30 years he spent in the Senate.
What she does know—and in this respect, she does resemble Reagan—is that the United States has been a force for good in the world, which is more than Barack Obama, whose IQ is no doubt higher than hers, has yet to learn. Jimmy Carter also has a high IQ, which did not prevent him from becoming one of the worst presidents in American history, and so does Bill Clinton, which did not prevent him from befouling the presidential nest.
Unlike her enemies on the left, the conservative opponents of Mrs. Palin are a little puzzling. After all, except for its greater intensity, the response to her on the left is of a piece with the liberal hatred of Richard Nixon, Reagan and George W. Bush. It was a hatred that had less to do with differences over policy than with the conviction that these men were usurpers who, by mobilizing all the most retrograde elements of American society, had stolen the country from its rightful (liberal) rulers. But to a much greater extent than Nixon, Reagan and George W. Bush, Sarah Palin is in her very being the embodiment of those retrograde forces and therefore potentially even more dangerous.
I think that this is what, conversely, also accounts for the tremendous enthusiasm she has aroused among ordinary conservatives. They rightly see her as one of them, only better able and better positioned to stand up against the contempt and condescension of the liberal elites that were so perfectly exemplified by Mr. Obama’s notorious remark in 2008 about people like them: “And it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
But how do we explain the hostility to Mrs. Palin felt by so many conservative intellectuals? It cannot be differences over policy. For as has been pointed out by Bill Kristol—one of the few conservative intellectuals who has been willing to say a good word about Mrs. Palin—her views are much closer to those of her conservative opponents than they are to the isolationists and protectionists on the “paleoconservative” right or to the unrealistic “realism” of the “moderate” Republicans who inhabit the establishment center.
Much as I would like to believe that the answer lies in some elevated consideration, I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that the same species of class bias that Mrs. Palin provokes in her enemies and her admirers is at work among the conservative intellectuals who are so embarrassed by her. When William F. Buckley Jr., then the editor of National Review, famously quipped that he would rather be ruled by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the combined faculties of Harvard and MIT, most conservative intellectuals responded with a gleeful amen. But put to the test by the advent of Sarah Palin, along with the populist upsurge represented by the Tea Party movement, they have demonstrated that they never really meant it.
Whether Buckley himself really meant it may be open to question, but it is certain that his son Christopher (who endorsed Mr. Obama) does not now and probably never did. Listen to the great satirist who blogs under the name of Iowahawk, writing in the fictional persona of T. Coddington Van Voorhees VII, son of the founder of The National Topsider, which he describe as a “once respected conservative magazine” now controlled by a bunch of “state college neanderthals.”
“For more than a year,” Van Voorhees tells us, “I have warned that . . . the conservative movement risked abandonment by its few remaining serious intellectuals”—”luminaries” like “the vivacious [Washington Post columnist] Kathleen Parker, Dame Peggy Noonan, and those two mighty Davids of conservative letters, Frum and Brooks”—and “being overrun by the unsightly hordes of Wal-Mart untermenschen typified by the loathesome ‘Tea Party’ rabble” with their “base enthusiasms and simian grunts. As is now obvious, events have proven me right.”
I fear that the attitude satirically exaggerated here by Iowahawk is what underlies the rejection of Sarah Palin by so many conservative intellectuals. When push came to shove, they could not resist what Van Voorhees calls Mr. Obama’s “prodigious oratorical and intellectuals gifts” and they could not resist attributing Sarah Palin’s emergence as a formidable political force to “the base enthusiasms and simian grunts” of “the loathesome Tea Party rabble.”
As for me, after more than a year of seeing how those “prodigious oratorical and intellectual gifts” have worked themselves out in action, I remain more convinced than ever of the soundness of Buckley’s quip, in the spirit of which I hereby declare that I would rather be ruled by the Tea Party than by the Democratic Party, and I would rather have Sarah Palin sitting in the Oval Office than Barack Obama.
Mr. Podhoretz was the editor of Commentary from 1960 to 1995. His most recent book is “Why Are Jews Liberals?” (Doubleday, 2009)
Yet he responding to these posts at lightening speed! Here is his reply to me saying he is “too busy.”
I have a little prediction…
Joe will respond to this post, but he may wait a while because he doesn’t want to look like he is “too busy!”
I listen to Rush, he takes it straight from Rush’s talking points. I like Rush, but I unlike Joe, I have my own independent though. Should we subsidize anyone’s insurance? Well to be honest, we should have charities do it. But if not, I will work an extra hour a day to support the disabled and mentally ill (I would rather do it through charity).
Silly, boy. Rush is on in the afternoon, so I’m at work. Beck comes on when I’m working out. I once in awhile catch a re-run of Beck at night, but it’s not as though I have to watch the two; as you might be able to tell from my postings, I read a ton and that’s the source of my info.
These posts by me of others’ writings also shows that either you’ve a reading comprehension problem or are just a phony, b/c those authors agree & disagree with much of what’s said by Beck and Rush. So, obviously, I get my info from many sources. In fact, I’ve never posted anything written by Beck or Rush.
Not that I disagree with much of what Rush & Beck say and Beck does keep many Republicans on the straight and narrow. It’s just that I don’t feel I have to hear their every word and I’ve haven’t bought anything that they’ve published.
You lie. That fact absolutely is wrong. In fact, patients who are willing to pay cash, pay less.
But, of course, you completely missed my point, the poor can afford health ins if they’re willing to give up those unnecessary things in life, such as cable TV, satellite TV, iPods. As I wrote earlier today, all of the uninsured own some of these things.
You don’t **** about the AP. They are a right leaning organization. And actually they are correct. Just look at history. Its all there in black and white.
Have you looked at your insurance statement recently? What do you think that negotiated discount means?
And while many of the uninsured do in fact own some of those things, many others do not. They walk to work at a place like WalMart and can barely put food on the table. And premiums are so reasonable if they ever had any problems in the past.
But hey, it’s all their fault, right. Equal opportunity doesn’t mean equal outcome, right? WHERE ON EARTH DID YOU GET THE IDEA WE HAVE ANYTHING RESEMBLING EQUAL OPPORTUNITY IN THIS COUNTRY? DO YOU HAVE YOUR HEAD UP YOUR *** OR WHAT?
Keep telling yourself that your success arose only from your efforts and nothing else was involved. Sure it was.
By the way, you might want to work on your anger issues. Quite literally, wanting me to die because I disagree with you on some issues seems to be a bit extreme. You’ll live longer, healthier and more free.
Yes, good point, gt. And UK residents come to the US or go to SE or India for better health care. Oh, BTW, Japan’s National Health Care is broke. Many Japanese also go to SE or India for health care.
What do the poor do in these countries? Mostly, they die waiting for gov’t health care. So much for national health care helping the poor. It’ll just mean less health care; that is, substandard health care for all instead of those too foolish to know how to prioritize things.
Joe, you continue to insult people, that is not the conservative way. As conservatives, we are not afraid of debate, we don’t say stuff like “go get a brain.” People are entitled to their viewpoints. When you insult, it cheapen’s your argument and it shows you are not passionate about whaat you beleive in. The left is good at calling names and insults, you would be in perfect company with them.
Well, if a lib were to give an intelligent and a constructive answer, I’d respond in kind; however, I’ve no respect for idiocy. And just what did the conservatives accomplish by showing respect to the phony, wacko, lib leftists? Nothing, but a foot in the butt.
It’s just the Marine in me that doesn’t allow me to countenance or suffer fools.
Regarding your dissertation, here are a few observations:
‘The bill will force private insurance companies out of business’——–With their record it should.
‘The Gov’t Beurocrats will not be health care professionals’————–you mean unlike the Insurance Industry professionals?
And so on!
Understand the final argument is: The Government is non-profit, Big Insurance, et al, is for-profit and could care less about your health except for making a profit for salaried employees, shareholders, and of course, their CEOs.
Period.
Name one gov’t program that works? If private health ins is so bad, then why are 85% of American satisfied with their health ins & health care?
Just because a few million losers can’t make it and don’t know how to budget doesn’t mean that I’ve any moral or other duty or obligation to support them.
You seem, as most neocons, myopic.
When you see a failed direction, you change it.
The losers are those egotists that think they’re more smart than the rest until, of course, they run into someone that makes them look like and idiot.
Those are true losers.
How about telling us where in the Constitution or the Federalist Papers is written any of the drivel you just drooled? You can’t.
And have you noticed that no one but the wingnuts think there is even a snowball’s chance that their suits to have healthcare overthrown will succeed?
If the government isn’t charged with taking on certain tasks for the common good then please don’t accept your Social Security check when you’re eligible. Send it back marked it should be allocated to help pay for the healthcare costs. Oh, and don’t drive on our roads (subsidized) or our interstate highways. Don’t fly on any of our airlines (air traffic control system, you know). Don’t buy any gasoline – the alcohol added is heavily subsidized.
Oh, and you may as well go ahead and convert to a Muslim, since you can’t use our armed forces to protect you.
I know you still won’t get the idea, and I doubt very seriously you have read the documents you reference, or you wouldn’t be making such statements.
First, Miss Smarty Kacee, it’s ‘smarter’, not “…more smart…”. Second, it’s ‘these are…’, not “those are,” because you’re referring to something in your article. Or, more appropriately, instead of article, a better description might be your attempt at composing something that’s almost semi-literate and akin to English.
Listen, sweetie, I suggest that you take a course of ‘English As A Second Language,’ b/c it clearly ain’t your native tongue.
Hey, Clown, I’ve paid into SS way more than I’ll ever receive back from SS. Same with Medicare. Of course, you’re too stupid to know that people who work and pay taxes pay for their SS and Medicare, plus a lot more to fund SS & Medicare for the losers who can’t work or can’t save for whatever is(are) their phony excuse(s).
Same goes for roads and airlines and many, many other things. I pay for them so that losers who drive w/o DLs & etc. can freeload. In fact, you silly clown, I pay for every gov’t service that I use, plus extra for the loser, freeloaders.
Besides, police, fire, national defense, roads and bridges are just about all that should be handled by gov’t. Even with these items, private industry does much better. Drive some of the private roads in America and you’ll discover this yourself. Even mercenaries are much more cost effective than gov’t soldiers, based upon a cost-per-kill basis.
Yep, when they run out of anything intelligent to say they fall back on name calling.
I guess you never passed third grade arithmetic – if you had, and could add, you would find that your payments into Medicare and Social Security don’t begin to cover your benefits, even if you use compound interest on what you paid in.
A Greek philosopher, you ain’t, but you’re likely a materialist, as are most libs. Not to mention that they’re all thin-skinned and, at heart, violent. I see that one of your comrades shot a Rep. Cantor’s home yesterday.
Gosh, you must be a low paid person who doesn’t work year round. You are so stupid. You make your statement w/o knowing my income or how long I’ve been in the work force.
Typically lib, you don’t have an intelligent or fact-based response to you make up lies.
Joe Wilson, a great American, knows this. Hence, you lie, lib. Justice Alito knows this, hence, not true.
We’ve got your number, libs and we’re sick of the lies and BS.
That’s all you are capable of for a comeback, Kacee? Sheesh, you’re an intellectual midget.
I won’t respond to you anymore, b/c I didn’t realize that you’re mentally handicapped. Please forgive me for mistaking you as someone with an ounce of intelligence; I obviously over-estimated you.
I am hesitant to jump into this fray, but I feel compelled to simply point out one thing to Joe. The point you seem to be missing is that we, or our health insurance carriers, are all already paying for the uninsured. So regardless of whether they choose to buy an ipod or health insurance, we are already paying for it. I am shocked that you would not be in favor of penalizing them for their choice.
Hey, repeal the fed law that requires emergency rooms & hospitals to treat all comers, regardless of comers’ abilities to pay for medical services. Do it thusly: Announce that the law will sunset in two years. This gives the clowns and losers 2 years to get insurance or save money. Watch, suddenly, they’ll buy insurance w/o a gov’t health act or save and not buy iPods, cable TV, & etc.
The HCA is typical of gov’t. The gov’t creates a problem (requires emergency rooms and hospitals to treat all comers regardless of ability to pay) and then proposes another stupid gov’t program that won’t solve a problem that was created by another gov’t program in the first place.
Also, you clowns, read the law. The new HC Act doesn’t cover legal or illegal aliens, so they’ll still be able to access emergency rooms & hospitals. So, this still will be a cost of doing business (i.e., bad debt) that will be passed onto the gov’t/insurers/those who pay. Right now, these two groups account for a large percentage of the uninsured who access emergency rooms for medical treatment. As I wrote above, typical, inefficacious gov’t response to anything.
You’re both typical, dumb a*s libs; all blather and no facts or knowledge. Are you so arrogant and naive as to believe that a bunch of politicians, most of whom have never drawn a non-gov’t paycheck in their pathetic leaching lives, can actually run 17% of the economy? What hubris, you fools.
Name one gov’t program that works, you bozos.
(P.S.: you libs get the name calling that you deserve; people are tired of phony, know-it-all libs who are the sociology, feminist and minority studies, psychology, and other phony, worthless degree holders of world, acting as thought they’ve any knowledge of commerce, finance, math, or any hard sciences. You libs are phony, dumb a*s clowns with worthless degrees in the theory of sh*t.)
Get back in your cubicles and make money for me, you pissants.
I think you are right and sensible. It is established public policy that government can tax citizens. That’s what the healthcare law turns on– not the so-called mandate. If you don’t want to pay the tax, you can buy health insurance. The government is requiring you to pay a tax, it is not requiring you to buy health insurance, so it is all legal and constitutional.
Yeah, right, you’re a conservative and I’m King Arthur. Bow to me, you pup.
The fed has no constitutional power to require that one buy something from another private party. Already, 14 States’ AGs have filed suit, so I’d venture that they know more about the constitutionality of the HCA than do you.
Also, look at the history of the SCOTUS’s rulings on the commerce clause. This should frighten you, if you’re really a conservative.
Excellent Joe. Your solution will place the US at the top of the list of with nations that have a huge disparity in the delivery of their healthcare such as China(who is currently fourth on the list), where a child was left to die in the hospital after ingesting pesticides because his family couldn’t come up with the equivalent of $100 to pay for his treatment.
By the way, thankfully, I don’t have to work for a blowhard bully like you. You are incapable of responding in a mature manner to anyone who dares to disagree with you. Some people bully others because they desperately want something they cannot achieve or obtain. A majority of people bully due to their mental state. They either have some problem in their way of thinking or mindset, or have some social insecurity. I would say you are all of the above.
The back and forth insults and jabs are entertaining. But, the funniest part is those commenting with insults and then saying bad things about others who insult. It’s no wonder our country is in the state it is in and we have the people in “leadership” that we do.
Look, clown, treating you with disdain and disrespect isn’t bullying you. Forcing me to pay for the health care of others, who choose to foolishly spend their money on other than the necessities in life, is bullying me by forcing me (and millions of others) to do something. So, save your phony, pop psychology for your wine and cheese parties.
As I pointed out in one of my other posts, remove the fed requirement that hospitals treat of all comers, regardless of ability to pay, and, presto, people will save and behave more responsibly with regard to their own needs. Want proof? This is exactly what happened with welfare reform. All of the libs predicted dead bodies in the streets. Instead, there were live bodies in the workforce.
And, please don’t compare the US & China. The US economy still is $10T (yes, trillion) larger than China’s economy. In the China, the average urban wage is $7 per day and in rural areas it’s $2 per day. This is because the gov’t still meddles way too much in China’s economy (which leads to much corruption) and its monetary policy hinders the development of internal consumption.
Remember, the more corrupt a gov’t, the more that it legislates.
Exactly! We can’t expect those in power to act civil if we aren’t going to. There are many points on both sides but calling one side a name or insulting someone because they don’t agree doesn’t get anyone anywhere. I understand the frustration and anger (heck- I don’t want this health insurance reform bill either) but someone insulting me isn’t going to change my mind. In fact, it will just cause me to dig my heels in deeper. How does that help or change anything?
The sad truth is that neither side has all the answers- otherwise we’d never be in a negative situation. So, to think that one side is the end all, be all is not going to work. We’ve tried BOTH sides’ approach over the years (not just the last 8) and things are where they are now. Had either side’s ideas/bills/laws/etc been perfect, they would have never lost office. Hence, things are not going to improve with one side or the other going hog wild with all their own beliefs/dreams and discounting the other side.
I don’t think your approach is working either, Joe. Sadly, I agree with many of your political thoughts.
Typing out snappy comebacks isn’t going to do much for anyone. Maybe it will make one feel better, but it doesn’t change a thing. It isn’t constructive, it isn’t helpful and it certainly doesn’t boost any points that are raised/given (and there have been a lot of good points against this bill).
Also, I wasn’t just talking about you in my previous post. There are many on this board/website who are more worried about insulting than improving things. If those “for” this healthcare sham are truly worried about and care so much for others, I don’t understand how they can insult someone who just doesn’t agree with the bill.
Joan, the Republicans tried to reason with the DemonRats and were disdainfully kicked aside by the D’Rats. Rep. Ryan’s good, common-sense proposals didn’t even get an airing on the floor of either House of Congress.
Even Sen. McCain, the original kiss-a*s RINO, has turned over on the issue of cooperating with the commissars of the DemonRatic Party. The Dems are a threat to freedom-loving people.
It’s time to take no prisoners and jettison these dangerous DemonRatic demogogues on Nov. 2, 2010. I have no respect for people that believe they’ve the right to reach into my pocket for whatever is their latest theory of phony, do-good, to grab power.
I hear you, I’m not happy with this thing either. But, going back and forth with people on here won’t do anything. Anyone for this thing is not going to listen to anything we have to say- especially those who just want to throw jabs and insults. I’d much prefer to have a conversation with someone who wants to use facts rather than insults, you know?
Yes, what you say is true,…..but, what fun would be that? I mean, I only blog on here a few times a year, so I’ve gotta milk it for as much fun as possible.
There so much enjoyment watching libs squirm when their knickers get into a wad. Priceless, really.
You can’t even come close to professing this is a “news” article. At least have the decency is to call it what it is – a partisan political op-ed piece. Totally ridiculous!!! I didn’t subscribe to this journal to read this kind of nonsense trash.
“Wouldn’t it be nice if the wingnuts actually learned what fascism and socialism actually meant before they started spraying them around?”
Fascism and socialism are pretty much the same thing: state control of the means of production. Obama’s way down that road. Interesting that the IJ is more concerned about the GOP changing its mind correctly than the Democrats CastroCare that just got rammed thru despite overwhelming public disfavor.
One famous fascist of yore is Benito Mussolini. A famous socialist was Adolph Hitler, head of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. He was an ally of Mussolini as you may recall, genius.
Obama is an advocate of famous Communist rabble rouser Saul Alinski. Obama started his political career at a fundraiser in Bill Ayers’s house, Ayers being a leader in the Weather Underground terror clique, responsible for 100 bombings during the 60’s-70’s.
Van Jones, Obama’s “Green Czar,” was an avowed Communist. Obama appointee Anita Dunn claimed that Mao was one of her favorite “philosophers.”
I went to my first “tea party” last week. I’ve never been that lonely in a crowd before. Seeing only one other African-American among 100 or so people, I have to admit I felt like … well … like a black guy at a tea party.
The turnout left me wondering why the movement seems to attract so few African-Americans. Once you get past one obvious answer — TV footage of crazies and disputed reports of black congressmen dodging spittle — there’s still an undeniable fact: Blacks complain about government, taxes and lousy services just like everybody else.
But even if everyone loves a party, blacks are skipping this one. A Quinnipiac University poll had 7 percent of both blacks and Hispanics saying they are tea partyers. Yet you’d strain your eyes trying to find them at last week’s meeting or among the 250 at a rally last weekend.
See my comment to Kacee, you mental midget. Sheesh, your reply is the equivalent of ‘Teacher, teacher, he called me a name.’
You’re officially anointed a full-fledged clown. Happy bozo to you.
It’s entitled, ‘How to Ween Yourself of Libs & Inflame Clowns.’ Really, I enjoy seeing all of you get your knickers in a wad. Keep up the hysteria my little libby bibbies.
Hey Joe! Remember writing this, just a few minutes ago? Forgot already huh?
Is it alzheimers that makes you so mean?
“Subject: Dear Idiot Tremblor
Posted On: March 29, 2010, 6:43 pm CDT
Posted By: Joe
Comment:
Hey, Clown, I’ve paid into SS way more than I’ll ever receive back from SS. Same with Medicare. Of course, you’re too stupid to know that people who work and pay taxes pay for their SS and Medicare, plus a lot more to fund SS & Medicare for the losers who can’t work or can’t save for whatever is(are) their phony excuse(s).”
And he can’t spell either. It’s “wean” Joe, not “ween”.
I guess we’ll just call him the lean mean ween machine.
Hey, dummy, who has alzheimer’s? I was responding to his reply of 6:50, which reply was in response to my comment of 6:43 pm.
Having trouble keeping up with the thread? Sure looks like you can’t deal with much of anything too complicated or more than a few sentences in length.
Hey, look, there’s help for you. Go to this site: http://www.AlzResource Center.com.
Sweet dreams, my little ‘Greek’ (if you know what I mean) philosopher.
Hey, I know why he’s so mean. Yesterday I hear he got his meds mixed up – specifically his Poli-Dent and his Preparation H.
Do you know about puns? Sheesh, you’re one dumb one. Got an anal retentive problem? Your moniker sure suggests it.
Sheesh, I haven’t heard that joke since yesterday and I first heard it from my great grandfather. You libs are so lacking in originality, creativity, and imagination. No wonder arts are junk and laws are bunk.
Does the AP really think we’ll believe something they say simply because they say it? They compare Mitt Romney’s behavior as a governor at the state level to Obama’s behavior on the federal level, and call it the same??? Really??? This entire article is written on false premise for nothing more than political gain. No wonder Fox News, Rush, and Boortz have more listeners/viewers than all the traditional media combined.
GOP needs to stop viewing Democrats as “domestic enemies.”
A new poll of registered republicans showed that huge %’s believe Obama is a Muslim, is not US-born, that his goal is to destroy America and that he is a “domestic enemy,”
This kind of Us VS Them mentality which is furthered by the media is extremely dangerous. It may be good for ratings, but it’s bad for America.
This article is a fine example of why — an idea once embraced by the GOP was then demonized by the same people as an unconstitutional government takeover which will lead to fascism and communism. Why? Because “the enemy” is always wrong.
I am so tired of the GOP playing politics when the health welfare and safety of men women and children throughout this country is at stake. I hope all the bums are voted out come November, starting with that phoney Cantor.
So the Dems NEVER do the same thing to Repubs? Never call them names, say they are going to run this country into the ground, call them heartless, greedy monsters?
Pot, here is kettle, and you both are black. And that is why I don’t consider myself either. I completely understand why Washington thought that having political parties would divide and destory the government they fought so hard to create.
I agree, especially of late there are certain Democratic factions which seem like they’re emulating the GOP’s “they are the enemy and we must crush them” mentality. Places like the Huffington Post and even worse DailyKos exemplify this.
I still think the vitriol on the right is more hateful and potentially more violent, but the left is now doing it too. It’s a dangerous trend that is nothing but bad news for our country. Having two political factions which are both tossing gasoline onto partisan flames will have no productive end for America & Americans.
We can and should disagree and have poignant debates. But we should not consider those who hold different viewpoints to be our enemies and thus engage them with militant, spiteful and hateful vitriol.
We need to stop yelling and start talking.
Agreed, why the press fermenting this is what I want to know. What does the AP care if some of these ideas were previously Republican? Everyone knows that politicians are constantly changing with the political winds, but to point it out in this fashion only continues to fan the flames of anger within the two parties. The fact of the amtter is that the individual mandate, and the idea of government involvement in healthcare to any degree, is antithetical to the American idea. We are a free country, made up of free individuals whose rights (and freedoms) are guaranteed by God and nature, not by the government. America is the greatest country ever to exist only as a result of this idea, that our rights and freedoms are given to us by our Creator. The minute we sign over our rights and responsibilities to the government, we resign ourselves to slavery.
This is an interesting individual vs. community debate because the insurance industry generally supports and profits from this and other insurance mandates.
Auto insurance, for example.
Should all homeowners in high flood zones be required to buy flood insurance? Many in the industry believe so.
Lenders require homeowners to have insurance– the effect is the same as government requiring it.
Doctors and hospitals? Should they be required to have coverage?
Insurers also support requiring motorcyclists to buy and wear helmets? Use seat belts and buy and use kid seats in cars. They also want to ban texting while driving.
What about mandatory continuing education?
I assume we all support speed limits on roads; the insurance industry does.
Where do your rights as an individual collide with the best interests of society? I think we all give up some freedom for society. Where to draw the line?
As usual you talk about a new poll, but don’t identify it. Who took it, Harry Reid?
Everything you mentioned is optional. The Gov’t does not FORCE you under penalty of law to participate in anything you cite as an example.
If you want to, then there may be State or Fed impositions.
It is absolutely wrong to be forced into anything.
Facing the spectre of forced govt health care was bad enough. That it was being designed by the liberals was even worse. So as a COUNTER-MEASURE, conservatives came up with an alternative. This headline intentionally misleads one to believe conservatives once desired forced health care, which they did not. What a crock.
Dear “Cut the Crap” (an appropriate nickname perhaps?)
As usual the wingnuts try to re-write history with no facts to back them up.
Documentation of your assertions? I’m guessing you don’t have any?
Glen Beck took the poll, ably assisted by Rush Limbaugh.
When and why did you become partisan? Don’t you think that destroys your credibility? Can you really afford that?
Hmm, so requiring me to wear a helmet when i ride my motorcycle in NJ or else I get a ticket isn’t forcing me to go buy one and use it? Then I guess requiring me to get healthcare and pay for it or else I get penalized isnt forcing me to get it either.. thanx for clearing that one up for me! moron
Read this:
STEYN: A healthy dose of catastrophe
May I be boring? Or, if you’re a regular reader, more boring than usual? Bear with me. There are some eye-glazing numbers and whatnot.
In 2003, Washington blessed a grateful citizenry with the Medicare prescription drug benefit, it being generally agreed by all the experts that it was unfair to force seniors to choose between their monthly trip to Rite-Aid and Tony Danza in dinner theater. However, in order to discourage American businesses from immediately dumping all their drug plans for retirees, Congress gave them a modest tax break equivalent to 28 percent of the cost of the plan.
Fast-forward to the dawn of the Obamacare utopia. In one of a bazillion little clauses in a 2,000-page bill your legislators didn’t bother reading (because, as Rep. John Conyers explained, he wouldn’t understand it even if he did), Congress voted to subject the 28 percent tax benefit to the regular good ol’ American-as-apple-pie corporate tax rate of 35 percent. For the purposes of comparison, Sweden’s corporate tax rate is 26.3 percent, and Ireland’s is 12.5 percent. But just because America already has the highest corporate tax in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development is no reason why we can’t keep going until it’s double Sweden’s and quadruple Ireland’s. I refer you to the decision last year by the donut chain Tim Hortons, a Delaware corporation, to reorganize itself as a Canadian corporation “in order to take advantage of Canadian tax rates.” Hold that thought: “in order to take advantage of Canadian tax rates” – a phrase hitherto unknown to American English outside the most fantastical futuristic science fiction.
Ask yourself this: If you impose a sudden 35 percent tax on something, are you likely to get as much of it? Go on, take a wild guess. On the day President Obama signed Obamacare into law, Verizon sent an e-mail to all its employees warning that the company’s costs “will increase in the short term.” And in the medium term? Well, U.S. corporations that are able to do so will get out of their prescription drug plans and toss their retirees onto the Medicare pile. So far, just three companies – John Deere & Co., Caterpillar and Valero Energy Corp. – have calculated that the loss of the deduction will add a combined $265 million to their costs. An additional 3,500 businesses presently claim the break. The cost to taxpayers of that 28 percent benefit is about $665 per person. The cost to taxpayers of equivalent Medicare coverage is about $1,200 per person. So we’re roughly doubling the cost of covering an estimated 5 million retirees.
This single component of “health” “care” “reform” neatly encompasses all the broader trends about where we’re headed – not just in terms of increased costs and worse care, but also in the remorseless governmentalization of American life and the disincentivization of the private sector. As we see, even the very modest attempts made by Congress to constrain the 2003 prescription drug plan prove unable to prevent its expansion and metastasization. The one thing that can be said for certain is that, whatever claims are made for Obamacare, it will lead to more people depending on government for their health arrangements. Those 5 million retirees are only the advance guard. And, if you’re one of those optimistic souls whose confidence in the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is unbounded, let’s meet up in three years’ time and see who was correct – the bureaucrats passing out the federal happy juice or the real businesses already making real business decisions about Obamacare.
Can we afford this? No. Even on the official numbers, we’re projected to add to the existing $8 trillion in debt another $12 trillion over the next decade. What could we do? Tax those big, bad corporations a bit more? Medtronic has just announced that the new Obamacare taxes on its products could force it to lay off 1,000 workers. What do those guys do? Well, they develop products such as the recently approved pacemaker that’s safe for MRI scans and the InterStim bladder-control device. So that’s 1,000 fewer people who’ll be working on new stuff. Well, so what? The public won’t miss what it never knew it had. So again, the effect is one of disincentivization – in this case, of innovation.
If existing tax structures can’t cover the costs, what can we do? Start a new tax. The VATman cometh. VAT is Euro-speak for “value-added tax.” Americans often carelessly assume it’s merely a sales tax, but in fact, it’s far more cumbersome than that, being levied at each stage at which “value” is added to a product or service. The consumer can’t claim back the VAT, but intermediate businesses in the production chain can. So self-employed individuals with relatively modest income wind up both charging VAT to their clients (25 percent in Scandinavia) and then claiming back the VAT they spent on the stamp and stationary they used to mail out the invoice. This is yet another imposition on businesses, taking time away from wealth creation and reallocating it to government paperwork. If the Democrats hold Congress this fall, I would figure on VAT sooner rather than later.
All of the above is pretty much a safe bet. What about the imponderables? Even Obama hasn’t yet asked the CBO to cost out, say, what happens to the price of oil when the Straits of Hormuz are under a de facto Iranian nuclear umbrella – as they will be soon because the former global hyperpower, which gets mad over a few hundred housing units in Jerusalem, is blase and insouciant about the wilder shores of the mullahs’ dreams. Or suppose, as seems to be happening, the Sino-Iranian alliance results in a re- orientation of global oil relationships, or the Russo-Iranian friendship blooms to such a degree that, between Moscow’s control of Europe’s gas supply and Tehran’s new role as Middle Eastern superpower, the economy of the entire developed world becomes dependent on an alliance profoundly hostile to it.
Which is to say that right now, the future lies somewhere between the certainty of decline and the probability of catastrophe. What can stop it? Not a lot. But now that your “pro-life” Democratic congressman has sold out, you might want to quit calling Washington and try your state capital. If the Commerce Clause can legitimize the “individual mandate,” there is no republic – not in any meaningful sense. If you don’t like the sound of that, maybe it’s time for a constitutional convention.
Hey, Jay. Where is your documentation of your ridiculous assertion?
Why is it the wingnuts don’t feel any need to document any of their ridiculous assertions?
Because they can’t, that’s why.
You failed to see Hey Rita’s point. The helmet is optional because it is optional to ride a motorcycle. If you do not ride a motorcycle, you do not have to wear a helmet. But with health care, the only way to not have to buy health insurance is if you are dead.
Conveniently left out of ther article were 2 key points:
-who’s to say that if enacted then, a mandate, regardless of who proposed it, wouldn’t have been challenged in court by, say, Ross Perot’s supporters, who swayed the 1992 election?
-there’s a big difference between a state (Mass.) deciding to adopt a universal coverage program and the federal government imposing it, one-size-fits-all, on every state.
Hey, Rita, don’t call Nixon a conservative; he was a crony-capitalist, big gov’t freak. His theory of gov’t is what has always been practiced by the Dems. The Dems are the largest recipients of hedge funds and banks campaign contribution.
Here educate yourself some more with this article from R. Samuelson:
Planting the Seeds of Disaster by Robert Samuelson.
WASHINGTON — When historians recount the momentous events of recent weeks, they will note a curious coincidence. On March 15, Moody’s Investors Service — the bond rating agency — published a paper warning that the exploding U.S. government debt could cause a downgrade of Treasury bonds. Just six days later, the House of Representatives passed President Obama’s health care legislation costing $900 billion or so over a decade and worsening an already-bleak budget outlook.
Should the United States someday suffer a budget crisis, it will be hard not to conclude that Obama and his allies sowed the seeds, because they ignored conspicuous warnings. A further irony will not escape historians. For two years, Obama and members of Congress have angrily blamed the shortsightedness and selfishness of bankers and rating agencies for causing the recent financial crisis. The president and his supporters, the historians will note, were equally shortsighted and self-centered — though their quest was for political glory, not financial gain.
Bottom of Form
Let’s be clear. A “budget crisis” is not some minor accounting exercise. It’s a wrenching political, social and economic upheaval. Large deficits and rising debt — the accumulation of past deficits — spook investors, leading to higher interest rates on government loans. The higher rates expand the budget deficit and further unnerve investors. To reverse this calamitous cycle, the government has to cut spending deeply or raise taxes sharply. Lower spending and higher taxes in turn depress the economy and lead to higher unemployment. Not pretty.
Greece is now experiencing such a crisis. Until recently, conventional wisdom held that only developing countries — managed ineptly — were candidates for true budget crises. No more. Most wealthy societies with aging populations, including the United States, face big gaps between their spending promises and their tax bases. No one in Congress could be unaware of this.
Two weeks before the House vote, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its estimate of Obama’s budget, including its health care program. From 2011 to 2020, the cumulative deficit is almost $10 trillion. Adding 2009 and 2010, the total rises to $12.7 trillion. In 2020, the projected annual deficit is $1.25 trillion, equal to 5.6 percent of the economy (gross domestic product). That assumes economic recovery, with unemployment at 5 percent. Spending is almost 30 percent higher than taxes. Total debt held by the public rises from 40 percent of GDP in 2008 to 90 percent in 2020, close to its post-World War II peak.
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.
But the CBO estimate is misleading, because it must embody the law’s many unrealistic assumptions and gimmicks. Benefits are phased in “so that the first 10 years of (higher) revenue would be used to pay for only six years of spending (increases),” ex-CBO director Douglas Holtz-Eakin wrote in The New York Times. Holtz-Eakin also noted the $70 billion of premiums for a new program of long-term care that reduce present deficits but will be paid out in benefits later. Then there’s the “doc fix” — higher Medicare reimbursements under separate legislation that would cost about $200 billion over a decade.
Proposals to control health spending face restrictions that virtually ensure failure. Consider the “Independent Payment Advisory Board” aimed at Medicare. “The Board is prohibited from submitting proposals that would ration care, increase revenues or change benefits, eligibility or Medicare beneficiary cost sharing,” says a summary by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. What’s left? Similarly, findings from “comparative effectiveness research” — intended to identify ineffective care — “may not be construed as mandates, guidelines or recommendations for payment, coverage or treatment.” What’s the point then?
So Obama is flirting with a future budget crisis. Moody’s emphasizes two warning signs: rising debt and loss of confidence that government will deal with it. Obama fulfills both. The parallels with the recent financial crisis are striking. Bankers and rating agencies engaged in wishful thinking to rationalize self-interest. Obama does the same. No one can tell when or whether a crisis will come. There is no magic tipping point. But Obama is raising the chances.
“He who govens least, governs best.” Ben Franklin.
“The more corrupt a gov’t., the more that is legislates.” Tacitus.
Ha! Good Ol’ Rosie! I’m amazed nobody’s jumped on you for your satiric comment yet. Keep it up!
I find it interesting the GOP has such a difficult time finding health care for all is not important, yet they will say they are the party for the right to life. Apparently once out of the womb the GOP feels you are on your own and right to life becomes a matter of dollars and cents.
Steve, that’s correct; plus the MA plan is going broke. Let the states decide and almost all of them won’t enact such laws. NJ, NY, MA, and several other lib states that already have problems with health care years ago mandated many of the Fed Health Care provisions of Obutt’s bill.
Today these states have capacity problems and the highest premiums.
Oh, BTW, Japan’s fantastic National Health Care is broker. Just one more; same for UK, Germany.
not necessarily, if they don’t file taxes they don’t need to pay. There’s the optional part…
Read this, clown:
David Luskin
Tick,Tick, Tick – What’s that sound you’re hearing?
It’s the sound of the tax time bombs that were put in place in the dead of night on Sunday when Democratic leadership in the House of Representatives rammed through so called health care “reform.”
I say “rammed through” because it certainly wasn’t bipartisan. Not a single Republican voted for it. It wasn’t even truly partisan, since even a number of Democrats voted against it. A plurality within the majority forced it to happen.
It wasn’t bicameral, either. The bill the House voted on was one the Senate approved in December — again, without a single Republican vote. But that same bill wouldn’t get through the Senate now, since Democrats no longer control a filibuster-proof super-majority. So in an important sense it is true that this bill was not truly approved by both houses of Congress. And yet the president signed it on Tuesday. I doubt it will do much for health care in this country. But that’s something reasonable people could debate. What there can be
debate about is the part of this that affects the economy and the stock market — the taxes. As taxation expert Howard Gleckman of
the non-partisaTn ax Policy Center1 wrote on Monday, “I have never quite seen a law so full of powerful tax bombs attached to
delayed fuses.”
Before I start telling you about all the new taxes you’re going to be paying — directly and indirectly — let’s start by noting that, all else equal, higher taxes are not good for the economy. Taxes are disincentives to work and to invest. So when taxes go up, people will to some extent work less, and invest less. That simply has to be bad for the economy. There’s really no disagreement about that
among reasonable people.
What taxes are we talking about here, exactly? The nonpartisan Tax Foundation has a nice list of all of them — if you have an especially strong stomach, clickh ere2 to see them all.
Starting on July 1, there will be a 10% tax on all indoor tanning services. Why pick on that particular tiny slice of the U.S.
economy? I have no idea. For some reason, it was chosen — or rather, its customers were chosen — to be the victims this time.
Is this such a terrible catastrophe for the economy? I suppose not, but if government can impose an arbitrary tax on this particular
category of small business, then maybe your small business will be next. The uncertainty of it will keep some unknown number of
people from starting small businesses.
Who cares? You should. Historically, small businesses have created more than half the new jobs in this country year in and year
out. And in case you hadn’t noticed — as apparently Congress had not — the unemployment rate is already 9.7%.
Next year the pharmaceutical industry gets hit with $2.5 billion in new taxes, with the amount rising to $4.1 billion by 2018, and the
falling back to $2.8 billion after that. Huh? Why these particular numbers? Who knows. Some genius in the Senate just pulled them
out of his hat (or elsewhere). The point is that the companies these taxes are being levied upon are the ones who are supposed to
deliver the miracle drugs that save lives — maybe yours. Or maybe not.
In 2013 there will be a 2.3% tax imposed on makers of medical devices. Yeah, the miracle devices that save lives. The devices we
need more of. Have you ever heard of anything — anything! — that you can get more of by taxing it?
Me neither. Try telling Congress and see if they listen. They won’t.
The real killer is another one that goes into effect in 2013. Medicare taxes on wages go up by 0.9% for single-filers earning more
than $200,000 and joint filers earning more than $250,000. That’s just taxing the “rich” you say?
Maybe — and spoken like someone who never plans to be “rich.”
Those same “rich” will be hit in 2013 with a 3.8% tax on investment income such as dividends and capital gains. The dividend tax
rate is already going to go up from 15% to 39.6% next year if you’re in the top tax bracket, so this new levy will make it 44.4%.
Capital gains taxes will go from 15% to 20% next year anyway, and this will take them to 23.8%.
That won’t just hit the rich. When dividends and capital gains are taxed more, stocks simply have to lose value. It’s a law of nature.
When the after-tax return on something goes down, the price of that something has to go down too.
And when a stock price goes down, it goes down for everyone, rich and poor. It goes down for Bill Gates and it goes down for the
poor toiler who has a couple hundred shares of Google in his 401(k) account.
Don’t comfort yourself by assuming that this won’t matter until it takes effect in 2013. It matters right now. That’s because the new
higher taxes will be payable on any investments you make right now, assuming you hold them until 2013 or later. Is there some
little small-cap stock you have your eye on, you think you might want to pick up a couple thousand shares for the long run? \
Think – Published March 26, 2010
Nice strawman. When did the GOP say that Health care is not important? Never. I think they might agree with my thought of “Health insurance should be up the to indivual to carry or not carry”.
As usual “Joe” forgets a few pertinent points:
1. It was his hero, Shrub, who ran the gov’t so far into debt. His last budget, the one Obama has to work under for his first year in office (ironic, the new President always has to work under the previous President’s budget for the first year) produced the largest single deficit (after adjusting for inflation) in US history! And that’s including FDR’s budgets during the depression and WW II!
In his 8 years in office, Shrub never once gave a thought of the deficit’s he was running up.
And it was on his watch that the final seeds of the recession were planted (yes, to be honest, they were planted earlier on by previous administrations, but Shrub had 8 years to do something about it.
And, it was the Shrub administration that sponsored the bailout, NOT Obama’s. In true wingnut fashion, they try to then blame it on Obama.
What Obama did was to mandate that instead of “promises to repay” as required by the Republicans, he wanted equity – with interest. Thus what the wingnuts now call “goverment takeover of business” was simply collateral for the billions they were given. All the large banks have re-paid their loans (not gifts), AIG is repaying theirs as fast as they can sell off assets. Only Chrysler and GM, of the big recipients, haven’t repaid theirs, and it’s doubtful they ever will.
And under Obama the loans carried interest. The government has profited handsomely from the interest. We the people will make over $11 billion on the Citibank alone.
Exactly! Blame Bush for everything! that’ll last at least another 6 years!
call me crazy, but i think it has to do more with “how the heck are we going to pay for this right now when unemployment is at record levels, we’re fighting 2 wars, the deficit is out of control, and even the states are going bankrupt.” Couldn’t we have focused more effort on fixing those problems and THEN tackle healthcare?
So what else can we expect from the Party of No? They are all so ignorant & out of touch with the American people & their needs that they are on the way to extinction. To bad-we used to have a choice in voting but the steamroller tactics they are so afraid of began with them. Think of what is best for America & Americans-
although i understand your thoughts here… I doubt my neighbor with a 7 yr old boy who can’t get ins coverage because he now has hiv due to a transfusion would like to wait until america is financially sound…
Bush is the one who initiated the gov’t bailout. What you don’t hear is that absent the gov’t bailout, many small investors who bought gov’t bonds would’ve had power over large corps.
You need a lesson in crony capitalism, which isn’t a free-market form of economics. Start by googling the Ludwig von Mises website and begin your sorely needed education.
Now that we have fixed the US Health Care where are all the Canadians going to go?
look, there are many sad stories, but why stop with just that one. What of people who can’t afford cars to get them to work? Buy’em cars.
You apparently have never heard of some common sense things such as, ‘There’s no free lunch.’ Or this one, ‘Not everyone can have everything that they need or want.’
Where does gov’t stop? It’s not the job of gov’t to take care of people.
dammit…now I have to google Ludwig von Mises to find out who he is.
So then why tax us anything, isnt that the gov’ts job to do so so they can take care of the people?
Common sense should address where lives are at stake, not to buy them a car.. don’t make asinine comparisons when your whole argument is contradicted.
This has got to be the most assinine comment I have ever seen. The Constitution lines out exactly the powers of the federal government. At no place in the Constitution does it gove the federal government the right to require every citizen to purchase anything. Period.
The Constitution is silent on states, at least when it comes to healthcare, which means this should and could be taken up at the state level.
Please tell me where in the Constitution is states the role of the federal government is to “take care of the people”. You cannot, because the federal government does not have that right.
It is amazing to watch people with so little understanding of our Constitution offer opinions, which make them look like absolute, uneducated fools. What’s even more amazing is the state of education which is feeding these fools this drivel. PLEASE READ THE CONSTITUTION AND THE FEDERALIST PAPERS!
So, destroying the economy, destroying this country’s healthcare system, setting up a scam of a “Madoff-care” system to be used merely as a leftist slush fund, paying the insurance industry $billions$ of our dollars through mandates, taxing grandma and grandpa’s medical devices and prescription drugs, saddling our children and grandchildren with mountains of debt, and consigning the entire electorate to DMV-style healthcare service is best for America and Americans?
Only a true fool could believe that.
But their life will be at stake if they can not get to work to make a paycheck! Thats sarcasm BTW. Now, I have to disagree a little bit with you To Joe. The government IS there to serve the people. “Of the people, by the people, for the people”. Now its a matter of where do you draw the line between “taking care of the people” and just plain supporting them. I belive that the FEDERAL government is there for national defense, currency, infastructer, and to uphold just a few laws (make sure slavery is still gone, ect ect). The states should be in control of if and how they want to regulate health care, business, torts, and so on. Now, I do not think that either Federal or State government should be used for a crutch (how many people are on welfare that have no business being on it?). The problem is that people disagree with how much the government should be in our lives.
Wish I had time to read all these. Some seem to have a lot of time on your hands. Currently we are driven by competition and I hope all of you are my competition. If so, my internal motivation and capitalist spirit are winning.
I’m gloating while I can, as I know this is short lived. Obama will have us all feeding off the govt before I’m old enough to retire….
See you in the food line.
I relize the difficulty in responding to such a fool, but here goes:
1. Bush did run up deficits in 8 years. Of course, the national social democrat party quadrupled that debt in ONE SINGLE YEAR. Sorry, not going to let your lie stand without correcting the record. So, once again, the laftists quadrupled Bush’s deficits in ONE YEAR.
2. You are lying about the “stimulus”. There were two bills. The first one Bush enacted. The second one, which cost far more, and served merely as a slush fund for the national social democrat party, was passed, lock, stock, and barrel by the leftists. And it was a worthless waste of money that merely went to graft and buying votes.
And, let us not forget, it is those same people that ran Citigroup and Goldman Sachs into the ground that are serving in cabinet posts for the national social democrat in office right now. In other words, the national social democrats are scamming us all again.
Please take the time to read this and forward it out as you see fit.
Thanks
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.
To begin with, much of what has been said about the law and its
implications is in fact true, despite what the Democrats and the media are
saying. The law does provide for rationing of health care, particularly
where senior citizens and other classes of citizens are involved, free
health care for illegal immigrants, free abortion services, and probably
forced participation in abortions by members of the medical profession.
The Bill will also eventually force private insurance companies out of
business, and put everyone into a government run system. All decisions
about personal health care will ultimately be made by federal bureaucrats,
and most of them will not be health care professionals. Hospital
admissions, payments to physicians, and allocations of necessary medical
devices will be strictly controlled by the government.
However, as scary as all of that is, it just scratches the surface. In
fact, I have concluded that this legislation really has no intention of
providing affordable health care choices. Instead it is a convenient
cover for the most massive transfer of power to the Executive Branch of
government that has ever occurred, or even been contemplated If this law
or a similar one is adopted, major portions of the Constitution of the
United States will effectively have been destroyed.
The first thing to go will be the masterfully crafted balance of power
between the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches of the U.S.
Government. The Congress will be transferring to the Obama Administration
authority in a number of different areas over the lives of the American
people, and the businesses they own.
The irony is that the Congress doesn’t have any authority to legislate in most of those areas to begin with! I defy anyone to read the text of the
U.S. Constitution and find any authority granted to the members of
Congress to regulate health care.
This legislation also provides for access, by the appointees of the Obama administration, of all of your personal healthcare direct violation of the specific provisions of the 4th Amendment to the Constitution information, your personal financial information, and the information of your employer, physician, and hospital. All of this is a protecting against unreasonable
searches and seizures. You can also forget about the right to privacy.
That will have been legislated into oblivion regardless of what the 3rd
and 4th Amendments may provide…
If you decide not to have healthcare insurance, or if you have private
insurance that is not deemed acceptable to the Health Choices
Administrator appointed by Obama, there will be a tax imposed on you. It
is called a tax instead of a fine because of the intent to avoid
application of the due process clause of the 5th Amendment. However, that doesn’t work because since there is nothing in the law that allows you to
contest or appeal the imposition of the tax, it is definitely depriving
someone of property without the due process of law.
So, there are three of those pesky amendments that the far left hate so
much, out the original ten in the Bill of Rights, that are effectively
nullified by this law It doesn’t stop there though.
The 9th Amendment that provides: The enumeration in the Constitution, of
certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others
retained by the people;
The 10th Amendment states: The powers not delegated to the United States
by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are preserved to
the States respectively, or to the people. Under the provisions of this
piece of Congressional handiwork neither the people nor the states are
going to have any rights or powers at all in many areas that once were
theirs to control.
I could write many more pages about this legislation, but I think you get
the idea. This is not about health care; it is about seizing power and
limiting rights… Article 6 of the Constitution requires the members of both houses of Congress to “be bound by oath or affirmation to support the
Constitution.” If I was a member of Congress I would not be able to vote
for this legislation or anything like it, without feeling I was violating
that sacred oath or affirmation. If I voted for it anyway, I would hope
the American people would hold me accountable.
For those who might doubt the nature of this threat, I suggest they
consult the source, the US Constitution, and Bill of Rights. There you can
see exactly what we are about to have taken from us.
Michael Connelly
Retired attorney,
Constitutional Law Instructor
Carrollton , Texas
MikeN, stop listening to Fox News. Your information is also very wrong. Misleading numbers only reported so that these news agencies gain more watchers by preying on their fears.
You’ve fallen victim… Victim to the news.
This is such a progressive socialist slant. Can not believe that IJ wrote this.
I’ve got one word for that rant: Obfuscation.
You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
amen. you’ve answered many of the lemming bloggers on this site.
Just to tick you off. ;)
They accomplished what they were after as well as making half of their readers look elsewhere for info.
Narg,
You’re an idiot and likely, an illiterate one at that. Your post makes no sense. Start with this and work your way up:
‘Look, Dick, see Jane run.’
“Yes, Sally, see Jane run.’
‘Run, Jane, run.’
Spend a few weeks studying the above three primary reader sentences. Once you understand them, come back to me for your second reading lesson.
BTW, you’re a friggin freaky, leftist, wacko, lib idiot.
i understand the constitution doesnt specifically say “take care of people” nor that it gives the fed the right to charge… nor does it specifically say that President Obama’s blackberry messages are not for the people if they arent about national security… time changes alot of things and if you would like a constitutional reference, Mentioned in the United States’ Preamble to the Constitution, “Welfare” means health, happiness, prosperity or well-being. The country has an interest in promoting or maintaining the well-being and liberty of its people. It means that Congress may provide legislation that acts in a general best interest of a nation…. keeping americans alive has GOT to be at least 1% of what our forefathers were talking about, no?
I was always under the apparently mistaken impression that we are supposed to be guaranteed equal opportunity. Now I realize that we are apparently now guaranteed equal results. Ain’t no rich, ain’t no poor, ain’t no reason to work no more.
No, it’s not even 1% of what was meant by the constitution. You need to read the document as a whole and not pick out selected parts. Yes, the welfare of the people, but subject to the limits imposed upon Congressional power.
Look, every society has and will have poor people. There’s nothing that will change this. But there’s no obligation to support the poor. There’s an obligation to make sure that gov’t doesn’t interfere with their rights to care for themselves, but there’s no obligation of the gov’t to care for them.
Any society that exalts the least productive over and at the expense of the most productive will be a society that fails. This has happened throughout history. It’s not as though our modern time is the first time that a society has debated these issues.
These issues go back 1000’s of years. The trend is that as a society becomes wealthy, it tends towards statism. This keep the rich rich and the poor poor, but the poor get enought crumbs to keep them alive. What happens in all of these societies is that the middle/merchant classes pay the piper.
This destroys the middle//merchant classes. This always has lead to the disintegration of the society.
Start with the Sumerians (who preceded the Egyptians) and work forward.
You’re a fool and sucker. Keep listening to that pied piper – I’ll see you going over the cliff.
amen.
thx for the history lesson… please explain how I (middle class) will be paying the piper from all of this
The fed plan goes further than the Mass plan, and the Mass plan is a mess, so the mere fact that Romney once backed this and now Replublicans do not back you you deem a ‘similar’ plan merely reflects that Conservatives learn from mistakes, while liberals merely attempt to create larger mistakes…more of an indictment on libs, not conservatives, or even republicans for that matter.
While the taxes associated with the healthcare bill is another redistribution of wealth and punishes the successful, having the tax penalty if someone doesn’t have health insurance is sound law, in my opinion. Thep problem is, there are too many free loaders of all income groups who will get free healthcare on everyone else’s dime. The tax penalty is actually much bigger after you take into consider that health insurance is a tax deduction for the most part.
Read my other posts; they were justed posted today and answer your question about the middle class. Of course, you’re a typical phony lib. You don’t read anything; you merely emotionally react to everything.
Also, look at all of your hidden taxes. Look at your phone/cable/electic/water/insurance premium bills. Yes, the middle class is taxed up the a** and this is what’s destroying the middle class and America.
ObuttBoy is a phony, crony-capitalist, statist. You’re a sucker to put any of your trust in the DemonRatic Party, or any party for that matter. Once in power, they want just the power, money, and perks.
Term limits.
How are the rich, who pay for insurance freeloaders? Why do we have any obligation to provide for those who can’t or won’t care for themselves? Why can’t they skip movies, restaurants, cable TV, iPods, DVD players, cell phones, & etc. and use the money to buy insurance? Do you know that most ‘welfare’ users of emergency room services own or use the above products and services?
No, they can’t have their cake and eat it, too. Life involves choices. Why should I pay for the foolish choices of others? So, they won’t get sick or die? That’s the same as a child who holds his/her breath until the parent give in.
Yeah, you’re a conservative as much as I’m the CEO of ACORN.
Sheesh.
actually i read them all, still dont see your point and i dont like politicians or politics, this country was not built on any party therefore we should have never created ones, but ignorant people like yourself make me thankful we have a few educated individuals that can pass laws without your vote
To quote a great American, Joe Wilson, “You lie.” You write that you don’t like politics, but you rant about politics all of the time. You’re a typical wacko, lefist, phony lib.
to quote the great american Sarah Palin, “i can see russia from my house” see I can quote idiots too!! If you want to quote a real great american, try this one,”A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy” Theodore Roosevelt
Please read my previous posts, I am a rock solid conservative. I did not say I was for paying for someone else’s health insurance, actually I do not like most of Obamacare, I think a lot of it is socialism and will hinder success. But I am for penalizing those who don’t get health insruance becasue the tax payers end up footting the bill for many of those people. As for the rich, we should allow them to put a minimim of 2 million in an HSA account and have this would qualify as coverage.
Why do you write that you’re a conservative, but you always post big-government solutions to problems. Why limit the rich? What’s rich? $200K per year? That’s barely middle class in NY, Boston, Atlanta, LA, SF, Dallas, & etc.
Get off of the government-solutions kick and then you may label yourself a conservative.
There’s no obligation to care for those who spend money on other unnecessary things (TVs., cable, iPods, & etc.), but can’t come up with the money to pay for their health insurance.
Let them eat cake, then, we’ve no obligation to fund their health care.
To quote T. Jefferson, “A gov’t that has the power to give to you anything, also has the power to take from you everything.
By the way, Sarah Palin didn’t say that. Tina Fey as Sarah Palin said that. Typical liberal, don’t like facts, don’t study history.
Joe, your solution of having the government take care of all people is an outrage. People will go out to dinner before the buy health insurance, what do you want to subsidize such people. You left wing ways are on track to destroy America.
If I read no other posts (doubtful) matt’s is the most important one. This is getting rediculous. The Health Care Bill, while far from perfect, got to it’s current form greatly due to Republican and Conservative Dem wishes. Remember, Single Payer? Universal Coverage? The Repubs still could not find a way to vote for this even though it conformed to their wishes. This country is so good to the rest of the world (Haiti, Chille, the list goes on) but we are absolutely toxic to ourselves. Hating the opposition is new pastime.
Joe, last week, I asked a question on what to do when someone without health insurance gets sick. There are only 3 options.
It is clear your choice is “Let Them Die”
Your honesty is refreshing.
Ah, EGoyle, did you read my posts? What you wrote is what I wrote. Are you having a senior moment?
You were missing the first letter.
I did read your post, I am giving you a dose of your own medicine. Don’t be a left winger and listen to everything you hear, have your own independent views on this. You seem like you are taking your talking points straight from Rush Limbaugh. I like Rush, don’t agree with him 100%, but agree with a lot of what he says. Nevertheless, I am an independent thinker, Obama is a awful President, but I refuse to be like the left and shoot down everything he does (like they did to Bush). I pointed out one good thing about the plan, but I flush those taxes down the toilet because they are plane wrong.
You’re most welcomed; yes, the truth is refreshing and will set free you.
The uninsured should go without health care if they can’t pay for it. Most of the uninsured make choices other than to use their money to buy health ins or save for anything, let alone health care. So, the then gov’t mandates that everyone must have health ins. meeting standards of such and such. This is ridiculous. It hasn’t worked with auto ins & it won’t work with health ins.
Let them eat cake; people must learn to live with the choices that they make in life. I’ve no obligation to pay for John or Jane Doe’s health care (or their kids, for that matter) so that he/she/they might have a bigger apt or car, or the latest electronic gadget or eat at better restaurants & etc.
Do you realize that 3.5 million of the uninsured are drug users, alcoholics, and gang bangers? Yes, let them go w/o health care if they choose not purchase health ins or save money to pay for health care. Their foolishness shouldn’t require that the gov’t interfere with my life.
And I disagree that mandating ins is good or conservative. And, BTW, I don’t listen to Rush, Beck, & etc. I’m too busy and when I’m not working, I’m working out.
Your anger at Fox outs you as a lib. I don’t see that you’re really a conservative or even a country-club Republican.
Hey, libs, read this article by John Podhoretz:
Nothing annoys certain of my fellow conservative intellectuals more than when I remind them, as on occasion I mischievously do, that the derogatory things they say about Sarah Palin are uncannily similar to what many of their forebears once said about Ronald Reagan.
It’s hard to imagine now, but 31 years ago, when I first announced that I was supporting Reagan in his bid for the 1980 Republican presidential nomination, I was routinely asked by friends on the right how I could possibly associate myself with this “airhead,” this B movie star, who was not only stupid but incompetent. They readily acknowledged that his political views were on the whole close to ours, but the embarrassing primitivism with which he expressed them only served, they said, to undermine their credibility. In any case, his base was so narrow that he had no chance of rescuing us from the disastrous administration of Jimmy Carter.
Now I knew Ronald Reagan, and Sarah Palin is no Ronald Reagan. Then again, the first time I met Reagan all he talked about was the money he had saved the taxpayers as governor of California by changing the size of the folders used for storing the state’s files. So nonplussed was I by the delight he showed at this great achievement that I came close to thinking that my friends were right and that I had made a mistake in supporting him. Ultimately, of course, we all wound up regarding him as a great man, but in 1979 none of us would have dreamed that this would be how we would feel only a few years later.
What I am trying to say is not that Sarah Palin would necessarily make a great president but that the criteria by which she is being judged by her conservative critics—never mind the deranged hatred she inspires on the left—tell us next to nothing about the kind of president she would make.
Take, for example, foreign policy. True, she seems to know very little about international affairs, but expertise in this area is no guarantee of wise leadership. After all, her rival for the vice presidency, who in some sense knows a great deal, was wrong on almost every major issue that arose in the 30 years he spent in the Senate.
What she does know—and in this respect, she does resemble Reagan—is that the United States has been a force for good in the world, which is more than Barack Obama, whose IQ is no doubt higher than hers, has yet to learn. Jimmy Carter also has a high IQ, which did not prevent him from becoming one of the worst presidents in American history, and so does Bill Clinton, which did not prevent him from befouling the presidential nest.
Unlike her enemies on the left, the conservative opponents of Mrs. Palin are a little puzzling. After all, except for its greater intensity, the response to her on the left is of a piece with the liberal hatred of Richard Nixon, Reagan and George W. Bush. It was a hatred that had less to do with differences over policy than with the conviction that these men were usurpers who, by mobilizing all the most retrograde elements of American society, had stolen the country from its rightful (liberal) rulers. But to a much greater extent than Nixon, Reagan and George W. Bush, Sarah Palin is in her very being the embodiment of those retrograde forces and therefore potentially even more dangerous.
I think that this is what, conversely, also accounts for the tremendous enthusiasm she has aroused among ordinary conservatives. They rightly see her as one of them, only better able and better positioned to stand up against the contempt and condescension of the liberal elites that were so perfectly exemplified by Mr. Obama’s notorious remark in 2008 about people like them: “And it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
But how do we explain the hostility to Mrs. Palin felt by so many conservative intellectuals? It cannot be differences over policy. For as has been pointed out by Bill Kristol—one of the few conservative intellectuals who has been willing to say a good word about Mrs. Palin—her views are much closer to those of her conservative opponents than they are to the isolationists and protectionists on the “paleoconservative” right or to the unrealistic “realism” of the “moderate” Republicans who inhabit the establishment center.
Much as I would like to believe that the answer lies in some elevated consideration, I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that the same species of class bias that Mrs. Palin provokes in her enemies and her admirers is at work among the conservative intellectuals who are so embarrassed by her. When William F. Buckley Jr., then the editor of National Review, famously quipped that he would rather be ruled by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the combined faculties of Harvard and MIT, most conservative intellectuals responded with a gleeful amen. But put to the test by the advent of Sarah Palin, along with the populist upsurge represented by the Tea Party movement, they have demonstrated that they never really meant it.
Whether Buckley himself really meant it may be open to question, but it is certain that his son Christopher (who endorsed Mr. Obama) does not now and probably never did. Listen to the great satirist who blogs under the name of Iowahawk, writing in the fictional persona of T. Coddington Van Voorhees VII, son of the founder of The National Topsider, which he describe as a “once respected conservative magazine” now controlled by a bunch of “state college neanderthals.”
“For more than a year,” Van Voorhees tells us, “I have warned that . . . the conservative movement risked abandonment by its few remaining serious intellectuals”—”luminaries” like “the vivacious [Washington Post columnist] Kathleen Parker, Dame Peggy Noonan, and those two mighty Davids of conservative letters, Frum and Brooks”—and “being overrun by the unsightly hordes of Wal-Mart untermenschen typified by the loathesome ‘Tea Party’ rabble” with their “base enthusiasms and simian grunts. As is now obvious, events have proven me right.”
I fear that the attitude satirically exaggerated here by Iowahawk is what underlies the rejection of Sarah Palin by so many conservative intellectuals. When push came to shove, they could not resist what Van Voorhees calls Mr. Obama’s “prodigious oratorical and intellectuals gifts” and they could not resist attributing Sarah Palin’s emergence as a formidable political force to “the base enthusiasms and simian grunts” of “the loathesome Tea Party rabble.”
As for me, after more than a year of seeing how those “prodigious oratorical and intellectual gifts” have worked themselves out in action, I remain more convinced than ever of the soundness of Buckley’s quip, in the spirit of which I hereby declare that I would rather be ruled by the Tea Party than by the Democratic Party, and I would rather have Sarah Palin sitting in the Oval Office than Barack Obama.
Mr. Podhoretz was the editor of Commentary from 1960 to 1995. His most recent book is “Why Are Jews Liberals?” (Doubleday, 2009)
Yet he responding to these posts at lightening speed! Here is his reply to me saying he is “too busy.”
I have a little prediction…
Joe will respond to this post, but he may wait a while because he doesn’t want to look like he is “too busy!”
I listen to Rush, he takes it straight from Rush’s talking points. I like Rush, but I unlike Joe, I have my own independent though. Should we subsidize anyone’s insurance? Well to be honest, we should have charities do it. But if not, I will work an extra hour a day to support the disabled and mentally ill (I would rather do it through charity).
Thank you Joe. As I said, your honesty is refreshing
How do you feel about someone who gets a 70% or greater discount on their medical costs under preferred provider discounts?
And why should an uninsured person be asked to pay 2 – 4 times the insured person for the exact same procedure?
Or are you OK with that because it’s the poor subsidizing the rich?
Silly, boy. Rush is on in the afternoon, so I’m at work. Beck comes on when I’m working out. I once in awhile catch a re-run of Beck at night, but it’s not as though I have to watch the two; as you might be able to tell from my postings, I read a ton and that’s the source of my info.
These posts by me of others’ writings also shows that either you’ve a reading comprehension problem or are just a phony, b/c those authors agree & disagree with much of what’s said by Beck and Rush. So, obviously, I get my info from many sources. In fact, I’ve never posted anything written by Beck or Rush.
Not that I disagree with much of what Rush & Beck say and Beck does keep many Republicans on the straight and narrow. It’s just that I don’t feel I have to hear their every word and I’ve haven’t bought anything that they’ve published.
You lie. That fact absolutely is wrong. In fact, patients who are willing to pay cash, pay less.
But, of course, you completely missed my point, the poor can afford health ins if they’re willing to give up those unnecessary things in life, such as cable TV, satellite TV, iPods. As I wrote earlier today, all of the uninsured own some of these things.
Let them eat cake.
Live free or die, quite literally, my friend.
You don’t **** about the AP. They are a right leaning organization. And actually they are correct. Just look at history. Its all there in black and white.
Have you looked at your insurance statement recently? What do you think that negotiated discount means?
And while many of the uninsured do in fact own some of those things, many others do not. They walk to work at a place like WalMart and can barely put food on the table. And premiums are so reasonable if they ever had any problems in the past.
But hey, it’s all their fault, right. Equal opportunity doesn’t mean equal outcome, right? WHERE ON EARTH DID YOU GET THE IDEA WE HAVE ANYTHING RESEMBLING EQUAL OPPORTUNITY IN THIS COUNTRY? DO YOU HAVE YOUR HEAD UP YOUR *** OR WHAT?
Keep telling yourself that your success arose only from your efforts and nothing else was involved. Sure it was.
By the way, you might want to work on your anger issues. Quite literally, wanting me to die because I disagree with you on some issues seems to be a bit extreme. You’ll live longer, healthier and more free.
Yes, good point, gt. And UK residents come to the US or go to SE or India for better health care. Oh, BTW, Japan’s National Health Care is broke. Many Japanese also go to SE or India for health care.
What do the poor do in these countries? Mostly, they die waiting for gov’t health care. So much for national health care helping the poor. It’ll just mean less health care; that is, substandard health care for all instead of those too foolish to know how to prioritize things.
YOu’re an illiterate; not wanting to pay for your health care isn’t wishing that you’d die.
But, being a lib fool, I know that you’re too ignorant to discern this.
Hey, good luck with finding a brain. Have you considered asking the gov’t to give to you a functioning brain? I didn’t think so.
The Republican opposition is purely political.
They oppose the other party and the public be damned.
Joe, you continue to insult people, that is not the conservative way. As conservatives, we are not afraid of debate, we don’t say stuff like “go get a brain.” People are entitled to their viewpoints. When you insult, it cheapen’s your argument and it shows you are not passionate about whaat you beleive in. The left is good at calling names and insults, you would be in perfect company with them.
Hey, where’s the sunshine band?
Well, if a lib were to give an intelligent and a constructive answer, I’d respond in kind; however, I’ve no respect for idiocy. And just what did the conservatives accomplish by showing respect to the phony, wacko, lib leftists? Nothing, but a foot in the butt.
It’s just the Marine in me that doesn’t allow me to countenance or suffer fools.
Regarding your dissertation, here are a few observations:
‘The bill will force private insurance companies out of business’——–With their record it should.
‘The Gov’t Beurocrats will not be health care professionals’————–you mean unlike the Insurance Industry professionals?
And so on!
Understand the final argument is: The Government is non-profit, Big Insurance, et al, is for-profit and could care less about your health except for making a profit for salaried employees, shareholders, and of course, their CEOs.
Period.
Name one gov’t program that works? If private health ins is so bad, then why are 85% of American satisfied with their health ins & health care?
Just because a few million losers can’t make it and don’t know how to budget doesn’t mean that I’ve any moral or other duty or obligation to support them.
Let them eat cake.
Live free or die.
You seem, as most neocons, myopic.
When you see a failed direction, you change it.
The losers are those egotists that think they’re more smart than the rest until, of course, they run into someone that makes them look like and idiot.
Those are true losers.
How about telling us where in the Constitution or the Federalist Papers is written any of the drivel you just drooled? You can’t.
And have you noticed that no one but the wingnuts think there is even a snowball’s chance that their suits to have healthcare overthrown will succeed?
If the government isn’t charged with taking on certain tasks for the common good then please don’t accept your Social Security check when you’re eligible. Send it back marked it should be allocated to help pay for the healthcare costs. Oh, and don’t drive on our roads (subsidized) or our interstate highways. Don’t fly on any of our airlines (air traffic control system, you know). Don’t buy any gasoline – the alcohol added is heavily subsidized.
Oh, and you may as well go ahead and convert to a Muslim, since you can’t use our armed forces to protect you.
I know you still won’t get the idea, and I doubt very seriously you have read the documents you reference, or you wouldn’t be making such statements.
Probably the most posted topic in months…wonder why?????
First, Miss Smarty Kacee, it’s ‘smarter’, not “…more smart…”. Second, it’s ‘these are…’, not “those are,” because you’re referring to something in your article. Or, more appropriately, instead of article, a better description might be your attempt at composing something that’s almost semi-literate and akin to English.
Listen, sweetie, I suggest that you take a course of ‘English As A Second Language,’ b/c it clearly ain’t your native tongue.
Ciao, my lovely.
Boy you wingnuts really like to throw the big words around – just like the bull you throw.
Guaranteed equal results? By giving everyone equal access to medical care?
Boy that came out of (far) right field.
Hey, Clown, I’ve paid into SS way more than I’ll ever receive back from SS. Same with Medicare. Of course, you’re too stupid to know that people who work and pay taxes pay for their SS and Medicare, plus a lot more to fund SS & Medicare for the losers who can’t work or can’t save for whatever is(are) their phony excuse(s).
Same goes for roads and airlines and many, many other things. I pay for them so that losers who drive w/o DLs & etc. can freeload. In fact, you silly clown, I pay for every gov’t service that I use, plus extra for the loser, freeloaders.
Besides, police, fire, national defense, roads and bridges are just about all that should be handled by gov’t. Even with these items, private industry does much better. Drive some of the private roads in America and you’ll discover this yourself. Even mercenaries are much more cost effective than gov’t soldiers, based upon a cost-per-kill basis.
Get a brain, fool.
Yep, you can always tell the true humanitarians – and you’re also no doubt a good Christian – better than most everybody else.
That is really pitiful.
When you come up with something you think is meaningful, forget it.
Yep, when they run out of anything intelligent to say they fall back on name calling.
I guess you never passed third grade arithmetic – if you had, and could add, you would find that your payments into Medicare and Social Security don’t begin to cover your benefits, even if you use compound interest on what you paid in.
A Greek philosopher, you ain’t, but you’re likely a materialist, as are most libs. Not to mention that they’re all thin-skinned and, at heart, violent. I see that one of your comrades shot a Rep. Cantor’s home yesterday.
Gosh, you must be a low paid person who doesn’t work year round. You are so stupid. You make your statement w/o knowing my income or how long I’ve been in the work force.
Typically lib, you don’t have an intelligent or fact-based response to you make up lies.
Joe Wilson, a great American, knows this. Hence, you lie, lib. Justice Alito knows this, hence, not true.
We’ve got your number, libs and we’re sick of the lies and BS.
There he goes name calling again. Clearly doesn’t have anything intelligent to say. Those poor wingnuts, they just don’t know when to quit.
That’s all you are capable of for a comeback, Kacee? Sheesh, you’re an intellectual midget.
I won’t respond to you anymore, b/c I didn’t realize that you’re mentally handicapped. Please forgive me for mistaking you as someone with an ounce of intelligence; I obviously over-estimated you.
Ciao, my little lovely.
I am hesitant to jump into this fray, but I feel compelled to simply point out one thing to Joe. The point you seem to be missing is that we, or our health insurance carriers, are all already paying for the uninsured. So regardless of whether they choose to buy an ipod or health insurance, we are already paying for it. I am shocked that you would not be in favor of penalizing them for their choice.
He’s a moron, what else would you expect?
Hey, repeal the fed law that requires emergency rooms & hospitals to treat all comers, regardless of comers’ abilities to pay for medical services. Do it thusly: Announce that the law will sunset in two years. This gives the clowns and losers 2 years to get insurance or save money. Watch, suddenly, they’ll buy insurance w/o a gov’t health act or save and not buy iPods, cable TV, & etc.
The HCA is typical of gov’t. The gov’t creates a problem (requires emergency rooms and hospitals to treat all comers regardless of ability to pay) and then proposes another stupid gov’t program that won’t solve a problem that was created by another gov’t program in the first place.
Also, you clowns, read the law. The new HC Act doesn’t cover legal or illegal aliens, so they’ll still be able to access emergency rooms & hospitals. So, this still will be a cost of doing business (i.e., bad debt) that will be passed onto the gov’t/insurers/those who pay. Right now, these two groups account for a large percentage of the uninsured who access emergency rooms for medical treatment. As I wrote above, typical, inefficacious gov’t response to anything.
You’re both typical, dumb a*s libs; all blather and no facts or knowledge. Are you so arrogant and naive as to believe that a bunch of politicians, most of whom have never drawn a non-gov’t paycheck in their pathetic leaching lives, can actually run 17% of the economy? What hubris, you fools.
Name one gov’t program that works, you bozos.
(P.S.: you libs get the name calling that you deserve; people are tired of phony, know-it-all libs who are the sociology, feminist and minority studies, psychology, and other phony, worthless degree holders of world, acting as thought they’ve any knowledge of commerce, finance, math, or any hard sciences. You libs are phony, dumb a*s clowns with worthless degrees in the theory of sh*t.)
Get back in your cubicles and make money for me, you pissants.
That’s right, anaxagorus, tango, not tangle, you illiterate, pun-deficient sap.
I think you are right and sensible. It is established public policy that government can tax citizens. That’s what the healthcare law turns on– not the so-called mandate. If you don’t want to pay the tax, you can buy health insurance. The government is requiring you to pay a tax, it is not requiring you to buy health insurance, so it is all legal and constitutional.
Yeah, right, you’re a conservative and I’m King Arthur. Bow to me, you pup.
The fed has no constitutional power to require that one buy something from another private party. Already, 14 States’ AGs have filed suit, so I’d venture that they know more about the constitutionality of the HCA than do you.
Also, look at the history of the SCOTUS’s rulings on the commerce clause. This should frighten you, if you’re really a conservative.
Excellent Joe. Your solution will place the US at the top of the list of with nations that have a huge disparity in the delivery of their healthcare such as China(who is currently fourth on the list), where a child was left to die in the hospital after ingesting pesticides because his family couldn’t come up with the equivalent of $100 to pay for his treatment.
By the way, thankfully, I don’t have to work for a blowhard bully like you. You are incapable of responding in a mature manner to anyone who dares to disagree with you. Some people bully others because they desperately want something they cannot achieve or obtain. A majority of people bully due to their mental state. They either have some problem in their way of thinking or mindset, or have some social insecurity. I would say you are all of the above.
The back and forth insults and jabs are entertaining. But, the funniest part is those commenting with insults and then saying bad things about others who insult. It’s no wonder our country is in the state it is in and we have the people in “leadership” that we do.
Look, clown, treating you with disdain and disrespect isn’t bullying you. Forcing me to pay for the health care of others, who choose to foolishly spend their money on other than the necessities in life, is bullying me by forcing me (and millions of others) to do something. So, save your phony, pop psychology for your wine and cheese parties.
As I pointed out in one of my other posts, remove the fed requirement that hospitals treat of all comers, regardless of ability to pay, and, presto, people will save and behave more responsibly with regard to their own needs. Want proof? This is exactly what happened with welfare reform. All of the libs predicted dead bodies in the streets. Instead, there were live bodies in the workforce.
And, please don’t compare the US & China. The US economy still is $10T (yes, trillion) larger than China’s economy. In the China, the average urban wage is $7 per day and in rural areas it’s $2 per day. This is because the gov’t still meddles way too much in China’s economy (which leads to much corruption) and its monetary policy hinders the development of internal consumption.
Remember, the more corrupt a gov’t, the more that it legislates.
I agree-I bet this is what it sounds like when the republicans and the democrats try to pass a bill!
Exactly! We can’t expect those in power to act civil if we aren’t going to. There are many points on both sides but calling one side a name or insulting someone because they don’t agree doesn’t get anyone anywhere. I understand the frustration and anger (heck- I don’t want this health insurance reform bill either) but someone insulting me isn’t going to change my mind. In fact, it will just cause me to dig my heels in deeper. How does that help or change anything?
The sad truth is that neither side has all the answers- otherwise we’d never be in a negative situation. So, to think that one side is the end all, be all is not going to work. We’ve tried BOTH sides’ approach over the years (not just the last 8) and things are where they are now. Had either side’s ideas/bills/laws/etc been perfect, they would have never lost office. Hence, things are not going to improve with one side or the other going hog wild with all their own beliefs/dreams and discounting the other side.
Why is the insurance journal carrying water for the democrats? This should be a non-partisan, non-political journal!
Yea, great. Why don’t we all join hands and sing Kumbaya, b/c doing so really is constructive and will solve so many problems.
Hey, politics is about differences; it ain’t a come-to-Jesus doodah.
I don’t think your approach is working either, Joe. Sadly, I agree with many of your political thoughts.
Typing out snappy comebacks isn’t going to do much for anyone. Maybe it will make one feel better, but it doesn’t change a thing. It isn’t constructive, it isn’t helpful and it certainly doesn’t boost any points that are raised/given (and there have been a lot of good points against this bill).
Also, I wasn’t just talking about you in my previous post. There are many on this board/website who are more worried about insulting than improving things. If those “for” this healthcare sham are truly worried about and care so much for others, I don’t understand how they can insult someone who just doesn’t agree with the bill.
Joan, the Republicans tried to reason with the DemonRats and were disdainfully kicked aside by the D’Rats. Rep. Ryan’s good, common-sense proposals didn’t even get an airing on the floor of either House of Congress.
Even Sen. McCain, the original kiss-a*s RINO, has turned over on the issue of cooperating with the commissars of the DemonRatic Party. The Dems are a threat to freedom-loving people.
It’s time to take no prisoners and jettison these dangerous DemonRatic demogogues on Nov. 2, 2010. I have no respect for people that believe they’ve the right to reach into my pocket for whatever is their latest theory of phony, do-good, to grab power.
Out with the totalitarian DemonRats.
We need to call this monstrosity exactly what it is…”Madoff-Care”.
We need to call this monstrosity exactly what it is…”Madoff-Care”.
I hear you, I’m not happy with this thing either. But, going back and forth with people on here won’t do anything. Anyone for this thing is not going to listen to anything we have to say- especially those who just want to throw jabs and insults. I’d much prefer to have a conversation with someone who wants to use facts rather than insults, you know?
I’ve changed my moniker to reflect my essence.
Yes, what you say is true,…..but, what fun would be that? I mean, I only blog on here a few times a year, so I’ve gotta milk it for as much fun as possible.
There so much enjoyment watching libs squirm when their knickers get into a wad. Priceless, really.
This one takes the cake… Go back to journalism school dude..
Oh my God, he’s still at it!
Joan, you’re absolutely right, but you’ll never even get a wingnut like him to consider what you’re saying, much less agree.
You can’t even come close to professing this is a “news” article. At least have the decency is to call it what it is – a partisan political op-ed piece. Totally ridiculous!!! I didn’t subscribe to this journal to read this kind of nonsense trash.
“…health plans will be required to accept all applicants…”
A health plan required to take all applicants is not insurance, it’s an fascist entitlement.
Those among you with any sense, who aren’t atheists, pray that this mess be overturned, defunded, gutted, etc by the Republicans.
God save us from Democrats!
“Why is the insurance journal carrying water for the democrats? This should be a non-partisan, non-political journal!”
Since the global warming farce was exposed as a fascist takeover of the economy by govt, IJ had to find another democrat powergrab to assist.
Wouldn’t it be nice if the wingnuts actually learned what fascism and socialism actually meant before they started spraying them around?
“Wouldn’t it be nice if the wingnuts actually learned what fascism and socialism actually meant before they started spraying them around?”
Fascism and socialism are pretty much the same thing: state control of the means of production. Obama’s way down that road. Interesting that the IJ is more concerned about the GOP changing its mind correctly than the Democrats CastroCare that just got rammed thru despite overwhelming public disfavor.
One famous fascist of yore is Benito Mussolini. A famous socialist was Adolph Hitler, head of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. He was an ally of Mussolini as you may recall, genius.
Obama is an advocate of famous Communist rabble rouser Saul Alinski. Obama started his political career at a fundraiser in Bill Ayers’s house, Ayers being a leader in the Weather Underground terror clique, responsible for 100 bombings during the 60’s-70’s.
Van Jones, Obama’s “Green Czar,” was an avowed Communist. Obama appointee Anita Dunn claimed that Mao was one of her favorite “philosophers.”
Shall I go on?
You can go on all you want, if communism or fascism or socialism gives more people health care, then I like it!
My life is great in the USA – I love Obama. I hope he ends the war soon too!
Sorry but love my country, and Obama is doing fine by me – I hate Bush
Do you like how he bows to foreign heads of state, showing that he is clueless about what it means to be a head of state?
You are in a distinct minority: only 44% approve of the job he’s doing, while 48% approve of and agree with Tea Party participants.
http://hotair.com/archives/2010/04/05/rasmussen-obama-44/
Al, I think its nice when he bows to people. Its very polite, and has no effect on my life what so ever.
Its cool hes standing up to Israel now too – They shouldn’t kill all those poor Palestinian people.
Also, Im not in the minority, Im in the majority – Because I voted him into office!
Why NO BLACKS in the tea party??
I went to my first “tea party” last week. I’ve never been that lonely in a crowd before. Seeing only one other African-American among 100 or so people, I have to admit I felt like … well … like a black guy at a tea party.
The turnout left me wondering why the movement seems to attract so few African-Americans. Once you get past one obvious answer — TV footage of crazies and disputed reports of black congressmen dodging spittle — there’s still an undeniable fact: Blacks complain about government, taxes and lousy services just like everybody else.
But even if everyone loves a party, blacks are skipping this one. A Quinnipiac University poll had 7 percent of both blacks and Hispanics saying they are tea partyers. Yet you’d strain your eyes trying to find them at last week’s meeting or among the 250 at a rally last weekend.
Tea Partiers are 6% black.
http://hotair.com/archives/2010/04/05/who-are-the-tea-partiers/
Why NO whites in the Congressional Black Caucus?