Well, damn. I wrote a giant long message and then the board ate my post, Senor Beef. Maybe if I have another hour I’ll do it again, and maybe not. I don’t generally care much about the opinions of people who claim to respect me and mine while cursing me out and claiming I cannot possibly have anything of use to say because I’m automatically just that stupid.
Yes, you are. My source for the numbers was cited in my message. You seem to think that the ability to add up numbers in a column is some sort of rare ability. That’s just sad. To paraphrase Dean Wormer: “Fat, drunk and innumerate is no way to go through life, son.”
To be specific - I never read any of this on any blog, left or right. In fact, what drove me to the source material was a post on Media Matters criticizing a right-wing blog somewhere. Media Matters was right in their specific criticism, but I didn’t think they were being completely fair, so I went and followed the link they posted to the source document and did my own analysis. It really wasn’t that hard. You should try it sometime.
You have my personal guarantee that anything I post here from another source will be in quote tags, with a proper link cited. You also have my guarantee that this has always been the case, despite the wingnuts on this board who stand ready to shout, “Liar! Plagiarist! Mouthpiece of the right-wing establishment!” every time they run into an argument they can’t deal with.
What’s your definition of success? My argument here is not that it won’t expand coverage or have other positive affects for some people, but that it will NOT reduce the cost of health care, which was the problem it was purported to address. In fact, it will increase the cost of health care substantially.
This bill does the following things, all of which will make health care more expensive in the United States:
- Restrict supply of medical services through new taxes on health care delivery and pay cuts to doctors.
- Increase demand for health care by adding 33 million people to the insurance roles
- Add new layers of bureaucracy to health care decision-making
- Increase the role of 3rd party payers in health care.
If you want to ‘bend the cost curve’, all of these things are counter-productive. If you want to sell the health care plan in terms of social justice, I won’t say a word. That’s a value judgment. But if you’re trying to sell it as a mechanism for correcting the fundamental problems of health care delivery and the cost explosion of health care, I’ll throw these numbers in your face every time, because it’s a lie.
I’ve offered many constructive ideas. The primary one is to offer government catastrophic coverage only to fix the worst cases of people being bankrupted by health care bills, while allowing them to fund the routine medical costs themselves or through gap insurance they can get from their employer or on the open market. Eliminate the tax subsidy for employer-provided health insurance and use the savings to fund a catastrophic insurance plan.
Uh huh. In elucidator-land, it’s all class warfare, all the time. I guess you haven’t noticed that the real big lobbyists and big money are congregating on the Democrat’s side, huh? Rent-seeking is much easier when the government is run by gullible activists.
Let me rephrase: “We couldn’t get this through if we actually told the truth about it, so we lied.”
It seems to me that most people actually agree with me, not you. Th health care bill has had the support of a minority of Americans for a long time, and opposition to the bill keeps growing. You can put as much populist lipstick on that pig as you want, but the American people can still hear the oinking.
Not in Canada they don’t. 
Once again the opposition includes people like me that mildly opposed it because it was not properly made. But then again, even The Economist recognized that this bill was just a first step in a long way to proper reform, the bit about controlling costs will have to be dealt with sooner or later. What I see is that the real American way in cases like this is to wait for disaster to then make changes.
I don’t think the republicans will help on the coming bubble burst, they will just work to make matters worse.
Just this, for now. Get around to the rest of it, but this is special, this is primo Sam, the genuine article, ninety-nine percent pure. By which gentle inference, I mean it is utter horseshit.
Substantiate that. “Fling the numbers in my face”, if you can. Double dog dare you. Bring it.
I know we’re in the Pit, but I would LOVE to see evidence of this. Absolutely love.
Evidence shmevidence. It’s whatever you can make people believe by saying it often enough and/or loud enough.
No, that was not “the” problem, or even the primary one. Since you do know that, the subject having been discussed a time or two, that assertion can only be categorized as more of your typical ideologically-driven dishonestly.
A predictable result of more people getting it, to the extent that your handwaving is even true. But you do need to consider that:
- Catastrophic care is provided already at emergency rooms
- Fewer problems will get to that point if preventive and early-stage care is available to more people. It’s not odd that you don’t get into that, since it contradicts your brand of dishonest ideologuism. It’s also not odd that you don’t discuss the substantial savings from disintermediation of corporate parasitism from Medicare Advantage.
Another case of the value of preventive and early-stage care being inconvenient to your ideologuism.
You actually said that is if you had some understanding of reality. Remarkable.
And thereby reduce its availablity. Great idea, Ayn.
You con’t really want to pretend your own entire philosophy of life is not based on that.
Cite it or explain why you thought anybody would believe that. Or is the cite for that in the area around Baghdad and Tikrit, and the area south, north, west and east somewhat? :rolleyes:
Since you’ve had that explained to you as well, numerous times, to continue to assert it is a simple lie. But in character, nonetheless.
Credibility is earned. Yours has been earned very well, I’m afraid.
That’s about half of it. The other half is having enough money to say it loud, often, and nationwide.
This survey refers to “likely primary voters,” not to GOP voters as a whole.
There’s no doubt that ANY percentage in the double digits is embarrassing, but I think it represents a quality that may be found on either side of the political spectrum: being highly skeptical of claims that run counter to your fond wishes and not nearly so skeptical of claims that support them.
So for this thread I’ll simply say that:
a) Birther claims are NOT a majority, but they are an uncomfortably large minority in conservative circles
b) This kind of phenomenon is not unique to conservatives
They’re one of the right’s many groups of useful idiots. They’re reliable for giving out sensationalist rant, which is useful for diverting public and media attention from more substantive issues.
Is it supposed to be reassuring that the crazier ones are more likely to vote? :dubious:
How about a favorite example or three, then? Whaddaya got for us?
As a moderate, I’d simply like to say that my side is right and both sides are wrong headed sheeple fringe elements that are out of touch with reality.
Other than that, your post was great.
Why do you think porn is a waste of time?
Well, your porn is!
I think you’re wrong on both counts. The polls don’t back you up on that “minority” thing, and the left has absolutely nothing like this - at least not with the kind of mainstream currency that the Birthers have, and the Republican leadership shows no inclination to to squelch it either.
Bricker might be correct on this, I don’t know. It does seem, for example, like there is a loud leftist minority of 9/11 Truthers.
But it really seems to me that the core ideas of Birtherism have found acceptance among a disturbingly large percentage of very mainstream conservative Americans, to a degree that no left-wing bullshit has ever found among mainstream liberals. While the leftist nutjob Truthers (like Charlie Sheen, Janine Garofalo [sp?], etc) are rather few and far between and largely ineffective in generating broad support for their ideas, the right-wing Birthers have co-opted a large part of the unofficial Republican ideology.
That was one of the more particular points of my OP: An AWFUL LOT of normal, intelligent, educated, rank-and-file conservatives are flirting with Birtherism these days.
I dunno, Sturgeon indicated that only 90% of everything was crud. I’m not sure why you would rachet that up to 99%.
Availability. Almost everything then was in print form only, raising the “publication” threshold quite a bit too. And there were only 3 TV channels to be cruddy.
Well, let’s start with the Heavy Hitters list at OpenSecrets.org.
You may note that of the top 20 biggest contributors to federal political campaigns, only ONE gives substantially more to Republicans than to Democrats. Four more are relatively neutral, and fifteen of them give much larger sums to Democrats than to Republicans.
I would also point you to have a look at the revolving door between the high level executives at some of the biggest beneficiaries of government largesse and the Democratic party. You can start with the executive boards of Goldman Sachs, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
You might also note the big money transfers to General Electric, whose CEO now sits as an adviser to the Obama administration.
Also from OpenSecrets, a list of the Top Industry Donors. Of the top 20 industries donating to federal politics, only TWO gave more to Republicans than to Democrats.
In this list, which compiles the donations to Democrats and Republicans from American billionaires since 1978, the contributions between the two parties are almost identical, suggesting that Republicans have no particular support from the richest Americans.
However, if you look at the column called “Special Interests”, you’ll see that a large percentage of billionaire money went into political projects rather than directly to candidates, and that money skews liberal. George Soros for example has put 82% of his contributions into special interests, all of which are heavily Democratic. T Boone Pickens has done the same.
This gloating article in Slate describes how the Republicans lost the ‘wealthy’ in the 2908 election. From the article:
That Slate article was of course from 2008. But it was different on the last mid-term.
The challenge was related to Lobbies too and I would have trouble to see the Chamber of Commerce to lobby for democratic plans.
Well I guess I stand refuted then! Good work.
This isn’t a reasonable paraphrase of my points.
For one, you’re assuming that I consider you one of the intellectual conservatives on this board. But even if that were the case, then it would make no sense for me to say that you “cannot possibly have anything of use to say because [you’re] just that stupid”.
Nothing that can be summarized that way even appears in my post.