Bricker, you don’t have any political aspirations, do you?
I will be one of the 30 million additional people getting health insurance who didn’t have it before. I deeply admire those Congressmen who were willing to lose their seats in order to do the right thing. The light of history will shine favorably upon them.
I will be soundly screwed, and see my healthcare and insurance costs going up by at least $400 per month. I voted straight Pub for the first time in my life, and that’s why. I am nowhere near “rich”
It all depends on where you’re coming from.
Not really. At one time I thought I might try for a local seat on my city’s council, but I think I’m cured.
I would be nice if that were so, but it’s not true that economists assume the economy will be roaring back.
Some of us have been saying from the beginning that this not a typical business-cycle recession, and that a Keynesian pump wouldn’t work this time, because the Keynesian solution assumes that a stimulus just has to prevent destruction of productive resources until the business cycle reasserts itself. But in this case, the recession was caused by a fiscal collapse due to an asset bubble popping, which exposed the fact that people had been over-consuming for years and were now burdened with debt that was not balanced by assets.
Recessions like this are hard to predict because there haven’t been many of them. The prime example is Japan, which flew high in the 80’s due to a massive real-estate bubble, then went into economic shock when the bubble popped. It’s been more than a decade and a half since that happened, and the Japanese economy has been struggling ever since. This leads a lot of economists to predict a long period of low growth, and permanently high unemployment.
If that’s the case, then 2012 will be another interesting election, and will be mostly about who manages to deflect the blame for the next two years of a crappy U.S. economy.
Sorry, dude. I wish they passed single payer so we could reduce health care costs from 17% of GDP to something more like 10%, but single payer wasn’t even on the table. From my perspective, I don’t want to be one of the 45,000 people a year who die because they don’t have access to affordable health care. Hope you understand.
Good, because you’d last a fast five minutes being all reasonable like that.
You are speaking, in the main, of largely the same group of economists who totally failed to foresee the recession in the first place, so fuck 'em.
It doesn’t have to be “roaring back” for Obama to claim that it’s a lot better than it was 4 years ago - and all due to his leadership :).
Not an economist, but I tend to agree with what seems like the common sense notion that the US has been living beyond its means for years, as evidenced by the budget & trade deficits, and we are doomed to a lower standard of living going forward.
But that doesn’t necessarily hurt Obama. “Low” and “high” are relative terms, and if your scenario plays out, then what you call “low growth, and permanently high unemployment” will eventually come to be seen as the new normal, and politicians will be punished or rewarded based on how the economy performs relative to those baselines.
This is either delusional or intellectually dishonest.
Obama entered into office with possibly the most conciliatory and open attitude of any president before him. It was quite a difference from Bush, who entered office claiming a mandate to do whatever he wanted when his opponent had actually gotten more votes.
The mistake that Obama and the Democrats made was to concede so much ground to the Republicans from the start. Every single piece of legislation was moderated. The health care bill was a Republican bill from a prior Congress.
It didn’t matter at all what the Democrats were willing to concede, because no matter what, the Republicans would have kept moving the ball. This has been their basic strategy for years. No matter what the Democrats do, the Republicans will label it as radical and excessively liberal and berate them for failing to moderate their positions. But “moderate” is a moving target that the Republicans will never let the Democrats hit, no matter how far to the right they move.
The debate went on for-freaking-ever. See, this is a perfect example. No matter what Pelosi did, you would have said exactly the same thing. The mistake was letting the debate go on for as long as it did – all that happened was that whatever bill in question – whether stimulus, health care, or financial services reform – got watered down further, and Republicans got more time to play the refs.
When you’re faced with an opposition who deals with absolutely no good faith, what your advice essentially amounts to is “Just give up and let us run things the way we want them, even when you have a majority of the votes.”
I once saw a great line from Dave Barry, in an article about men & women. He had a bunch about how men and women have all these complaints about each other, and he, the peacemaker, wanted both sides to rise above it. And he ended off with something like “so I’d like to have both sides, men and women, come together and agree, on just how irrational, obstinate and difficult women are”.
“Let’s all get together and do things my way” is not bipartisan in any meaningful sense.
If that’s what you’re suggesting Obama did, then you’re dreaming. Obama’s mistake was to give any ground at all, thus setting up the Republicans with multiple opportunities to throw bombs. He should have looked to the Bush model – Fuck you, I have the votes, we’re doing what I want.
Yes, that’s what I’m suggesting.
He did that. He only gave ground when he didn’t have the votes.
The main negotiations over HCR were ultimately internal Democratic negotations among themselves, and as it was they barely got enough support from their own party to get it passed.
Because not one Republican in the senate was honest enough to break cloture. Not one. Every single Republican sitting in the senate during the health care debate marched in blank, unthinking lockstep against a bill that was literally modeled after Republican ideas.
It was hard to get all the Democrats to agree on HCR. It was easy to get all Republicans to agree, they wanted to damage Obama more than they wanted to do the work of the people.
The Republicans were not going to vote for the bill no matter what the outcome. When one side has no interest in coming to the table, how do you negotiate with them?
This is untrue. Actually several Republicans spent a lot of time negotiating with Baucus on a version of the bill that they could support. But Reid eventually decided to jettison the results of these negotations, and froze them out of future discussions.
This is strange. I have no idea what this is about.
Actually the problem was the opposite. The whole notion of huge government programs is something that is at the core of what conservatives in this country are opposed to. Even the suggestion that they should support it is already not bipartisan.
It’s like if the Republicans started up a bill to shut down Medicaid and food stamps and invited the Democrats to come together, in the most bipartisan way, to work out the details. And then whined about it if they failed to support it.
The Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act was modeled on the Health Equity and Access Reform Today Act of 1993, the Republican alternative to the Clinton HCR plan, and the Act Providing Access to Affordable, Quality, Accountable Health Care, the Massachussetts individual mandate plan- a bipartisan effort championed by Mitt Romney.
If you really didn’t know this you probably aren’t qualified to comment on the topic. I’m sure, however, that you did know and are being obtuse, for whatever reason.
Your analogy is false.
It’s as if the Republicans started up a bill to shut down Medicaid and food stamps, and invited the Democrats to come together, in the most bipartisan way, to work out the details. The Democrats made it clear they would not support the bill, the Republicans passed it anyway, and then the Democrats whined that the Republicans refused to negotiate or allow sufficient time for debate.
If the disagreement is a policy disagreement, then be honest about it. “We hate the health reform bill that you passed” is a perfectly honest criticism.
Trying to dress it up as a failure to negotiate or a procedural irregularity is dishonest. “You didn’t give us enough opportunity to kill a bill for which you had the majority of votes” is not an honest criticism.
It’s highly unusual for Congressmen to vote their conscience even if it means they’ll lose. But Profiles in Courage still exist.
Whatevs. I’m a yellow dog Democrat, and I woke up this morning with the same set of expectations for my life, liberty and pursuit of happiness as I did on that Wednesday in 2008. There’s a boatload of things I’m not happy about, but that’s par for the course.
I should say: It would be an honest criticism if it were true.
When it is clear that any bill put forth by the Democrats is going to be labeled as radical, socialistic, and too far to the left, even if it is essentially the same bill that the Republicans supported in the past, then it isn’t an honest criticism.