Day: October 14, 2009

A Pale Reflection Of Intent

The vote is in!  The Baucus bill will get to the Senate floor for more debate….one Repub came along for the ride…..

I thought the intent of any health bill was to get the uninsured health care, to hold down consumers cost and to make the industry more responsive to the consumers needs….apparently I was mistaken because I see very little of that in the bills….

46 million Americans are uninsured!  Remember that war chant from the Left?  Alright, we can argue the actual number, but let us say that tens of millions of Americans are uninsured.  But with that said, how are we doing on correcting that situation?  We STINK!

If you have read the bills from the Congress then we will noticed that not one of them addresses ALL the uninsured.  Whatever comes out of the conferences and meeting and negotiation…nothing will cover ALL uninsured Americans.  That is right!  No matter what is done or what is agreed upon there will still be million, if not tens of million Americans that will still suffer from being uninsured.

Also all the bills now will just help keep high insurance costs and drug pay outs…..in other words, these so-called plans will be a godsend to them as far as their profits go.  Why?  We will be adding many more to the rolls of the insured and without thumb screws the health industry will continue the practices that are making them the most profitable industry.

The newest piece of….thinking……crap is the “opt out” proposal.  It is an attempt to find a comprise that will sound like a public option while protecting insurance companies and increasing their profit base……it is a worthless compromise to gain that elusive super majority of 60 votes…..it does little for those uninsured people that all say they want to help…….so far very few have actually done anything to help ALL Americans.

Unfortunately, universal health care was dead before it was born…..that would have solved almost all problems….but it was NEVER given a birth date.  The president will be happy, at this point, to have any bill that he can sign….the public option is a good beginning, but too many Americans will die without a universal coverage.

It will be fascinating to see just what abortion the Congress will give to the president and also to see how he reacts and then signs.

Too Big To Fail

Now there is a quaint little saying that burst on the scene with the banks goiung south because of their disastrous practices  It has been thrown around the media circuit like a cheap hooker on crack….but what does that really mean?

First of all, wiki defines it as this:

a phrase referring to the idea that in economic regulation, the largest and most interconnected businesses are so large that a government cannot allow them to fail because said failure would have a disastrous effect on the economy.This means that it might encourage recklessness since the government would intervene (e.g. by bailing out the company) in the event it was about to go out of business.[1] The phrase has also been more broadly applied to refer to a government’s policy to bail out any corporation. It raises the issue of moral hazard in business operations.

You know the names AIG, Goldman-Sachs, Wells Fargo, and the list goes on….but if they are that big, what can be done to stop this situation?

The newest Nobel winner for economics has said in Bloomberg:

There’s no easy way to deal with the question of institutions whose failure might pose a threat to the financial system, said Oliver Williamson, co-winner of this year’s Nobel Economics Prize.“There is no silver bullet,” Williamson, 77, said at a news conference yesterday at the University of California at Berkeley, where he is professor emeritus. “There is no instant answer that I or any of my students or any of my colleagues would be prepared to advance on that.”

Williamson is a founder of organizational economics — the study of how institutions are created and developed and how they affect growth. In research that may have applications to the financial crisis, he suggested that it is better to regulate large companies than to try to break them up or limit their size.

Before I go on, let me say about that statement— all the right wing pundits are all over Obama for not accomplishing anything to deserve the Nobel…..and now I ask….I would think the a Nobel economists would have a better answer than that….but what do I know?

If one believes in capitalism, and if one believes in the “free markets” then too big to fail is just absurd….if they make disastrous decision and commit disastrous acts, then they should succeed or fail on their own merits….government interevention or bailout only allows these companies to continue to make bad decisions and practices which in turn will allow all this misery to come again and again…..

Where Have The Moderates Gone?

As I wrote the title I could hear the 60’s folk song playing in my head……I digress…..there has been a lot of talk about moderate Repubs and their ultra right brethren….but who are the moderates in the GOP?  (I will give you a time for thought)…..

Sorry…I can wait much longer…..Sen. Collins and Snowe…that is the story, but I doubt that they are that moderate….more like independent thinkers within the GOP….the Senate lost a great liberal Repub when Hagel bowed out….in the House about the only one I can think of right now is Mary Bono of California….there maybe some others but I am not aware of them…..

Okay, I know you are wondering why I am bringing up RINOs at this time?…..and a damn fine question it is……you do realize that taxes are the revenue of the government, right?  We cannot keep cutting taxes and think that revenue for programs will go up……

Since the days of yore and Reagan the term taxes has been a major no-no…for the GOP lives and dies on tax cuts, but even conservatives, not the extremists in conservative clothing,  see the need for the need of taxes at some point when handling the economy.  Unfortunately, it was the moderates or liberal repubs that actually saw the need at times.  But their voice of reason is usually drowned out by the clap trap from the far right, which is now the GOP.

Take health care …..please….in a piece written by Matt Miller for Fortune magazine:

suppose I told you there was a way to square this circle, courtesy of a $500 billion health-related tax hike that could save the economy? And suppose I added that conservative economists would actually be okay with the idea? Too good to be true, you say? Well, welcome to what I call the “opening of the capitalist mind.”

Start with the fact that business now spends a stunning $500 billion a year, or 4 percent of GDP, on health-care benefits. Let’s say we shifted that cost to government – that’s right, relieved business of it entirely – and, to make matters simple, combined it with other public funds to give citizens a voucher with which they could buy a private health plan.

To pay for this without boosting the deficit, we’d raise taxes by an identical amount – not on business, of course, but on taxpayers broadly, via various gas or carbon taxes that would have the salutary side effect of helping cure our energy and environmental woes.

And to seal the deal for skeptical capitalists, conservative economists declare that this brand of tax hike should have no impact on growth. “In one scenario we call health expenditures government, and in another we don’t. What does it matter?” says Kevin Hassett, head of economics at the American Enterprise Institute and an advisor to John McCain. “It’s hard to imagine that would have the negative growth effects” normally ascribed to tax increases in the economics literature.

If conservative economists do have objections to this health shift, Hassett explains, they will be based on ideological notions of what government should be doing, not on whether swapping a giant current business expense for a tax devoted to the same purpose has any economic consequence. When the dust cleared, though, taxes and spending as a share of GDP would officially rise in the U.S. by four or five percentage points.

The moral of the story? We have reached a moment in the history of American capitalism where business’s traditional Me-Tarzan-you- Jane-taxes-bad mindset is one of the biggest obstacles to pragmatically rethinking our health-care and pension systems.

And make no mistake: If business doesn’t help Washington fix these essentials before long, rising worker anxiety will produce a protectionist backlash that could wreck everything capitalists believe in. Instead of reflexively resisting the idea of government and taxes, therefore, business leaders must now do some constructive, nonideological thinking if they want to serve corporate America’s self-interest – and the country’s. As I said, welcome to the opening of the capitalist mind.

All in all, the article has a few good points and I think they are worth a look…

Now back to the original question…..where have the moderates gone?  The moderates in the GOP had good ideas and were a necessity to the two party system…but they were replaced with name calling, lying and ruthless individuals that wanted not what was best for the country, but rather what was best for them and their addiction to power.

The good thing about the way Repubs are acting now is that the moderates of the party will wake up and take back the Grand Old Party from the worthless ilk that now control it.  Well, I can only hope…….