What else have they [the Obama administration] plowed ahead even though they knew it wouldn't work?
Let's remember this particular delusion: that a machine already in motion isUsing that context as a premise, watch this short video of Marc Faber, publisher of The Gloom, Boom & Doom Report, telling CNBC on Monday, that investors are asking the wrong question about when the Federal Reserve will taper its massive bond-buying program. They should be asking when the central bank will be increasing it. The program is also known by the less onerous name "the Fed Pump".either[easier] to fix than one that you keepon thegrounded until you know it works (or at least until you don't know that it doesn't work!).
Every government program that is introduced under urgency and as a temporary measure is always permanent.
The question is not tapering, the question is at what point will they increase the assets purchase to say 150, 200 billion... a trillion dollars a month.The ObamaCare "glitches" aren't glitches at all. ObamaCare was conceived, designed and executed to fail, so as to make it as big as it would not otherwise have been.
Everything is proceeding according to plan.
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Hey, at least the space program gave us non-stick cookware.
Last night I watched the scifi horror movie "Apollo 18", and it made me think about how much capability and competence we have lost as a nation. By the early 70's - 40 freaking years ago - we actually got bored with sending men with their cars to the moon regularly.
Today, we can't build a website with 3 years and half a billion dollars spent. We are all impressed with twitter, which is essentially a digital bulletin board - oooooohhhhh! We don't even have a robot that get you beer out of the fridge yet. Have you seen the Hoover dam, the Empire State building, and the interstate highway system? These things were done without computers before we were even born.
40 years ago, we were driving around on the moon just a few years after the fist space flights. We've had websites for decades now, and we can make one work with all the power of government behind it.
Today our most fantastic predictions aren't even exciting compared to what we used to actually do routinely. We are a sissified nation of risk averse and easily panicked chumps clinging to bobbles.
No, that's giving too much credit.
This is one of those instances where the simple explanation - they really are that incompetent (remember, these people are professional politicians) - is probably the right one.
Radical Leftist Marxism is all about plowing and bulldozing over things and always moving forward and destroying anything that gets in it's way.
Okay, so if we default on the debt ceiling thing, whatever that is, does it really matter? Isn't China so entwined with us that it would really boil down to everyone getting a haircut?
-Loosey Goosey
I forget who first said it, but I've always found it to be a good rule of thumb: don't assume malicious intent to something best explained by simple incompetence.
I think malicious incompetence is quite possible. The rhetoric from the top sure sounds like it's no accident.
It's kind of like if you show up to a party with a gun to kill your boyfriend, and then shoot 6 other innocent people in the process because you can't shoot straight - malicious incompetence.
I agree with Rev. I think people are OVERestimating this administration. They just don't know how to do anything but campaign and agitate.
Insty posted an article by Megan McArdle that I found fairly persuasive. Though maybe the 1%ers (and by that I mean hard core leftists) want single payer, they'll never be able to convince all of America.
Birches said...
Though maybe the 1%ers (and by that I mean hard core leftists) want single payer, they'll never be able to convince all of America.
Americans were never convinced to support Obamacare either.
Birches-
I also read the article by McArdle, and was unimpressed, as the path to single payer does not seem all that difficult, regardless of what most people want.
We already had single-payer for seniors ( Medicare ) and the poor ( Medicaid ). The ACA expanded Medicaid to more people. If the ACA causes the collapse of the individual insurance market then the government will have to step in to fix this market failure, either in the form of expanded Medicare/Medicaid or an new program. Between heavy subsidies for insurance purchased through the government and greater requirements/regulations/taxes on plans offered through employers, employers will have to discontinue their plans in order to compete.
And all the while, they will promise that if you like your current plan, you can keep it. And the same people will believe it.
@ Ignorance
The reason Medicare and Medicaid were persuasive is that it doesn't really affect you. Grandma's dying in the street! Will someone think of the children?!?!
The whole if you like your plan you can keep it has been revealed as a big fat lie. Most regular folks are starting to become aware. I don't forsee the Republicans losing the House anytime soon, so single payer can't be forced through like Obamacare. It would take ENORMOUS political will to go to single payer. The electorate is pissed right now. I don't see the will to go there.
Of course single payer can't be forced through. That's the point. That's why it wasn't forced through in the first place.
But don't you think that if the ACA causes the individual insurance market to collapse, that there will be a strong push for the government to step in and offer a public option for those people who were purchasing on the now-destroyed individual market? It will of course just be an option. More competition to fix the market failure. You like markets and competition, don't you?
If such a program passes, and is open to all who don't have other insurance, then it's game over. There are more than enough regulatory power in the ACA to slowly, quietly discourage employers from continuing their plans. No new legislation is needed for that.
Note, I'm not actually arguing that this was Obama's plan all along. I'm just saying that McArdle is failing to see a pretty clear path to single-payer that is advanced by the collapse of the individual market, and never requires the public to support single payer.
Birches said...
I don't forsee the Republicans losing the House anytime soon, so single payer can't be forced through like Obamacare.
This is overly optimistic. Democrats have controlled the Presidency, House, and Senate with a filibuster proof majority for two years since Jimmy Carter was President, and in that two years they passed Obamacare over the objections of their constituents.
If they happen to get it again, and the last time was a surprise, they can push it through. Members at risk will be promised a soft landing with administration jobs or academia sinecures to go along with their lobbyist efforts.
I see your point Ignorance and think it might be possible. I don't forsee the insurance market folding though. Somebody somewhere is going to figure out how to game the system and still be profitable, or use their immense lobbying power to change the law in their favor. Whether that will actually make the health care mess better than it is right now, I highly doubt. But it won't be single payer.
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