ABC's Jon Karl pretends that Kamala Harris wasn't for ending private health insurance and that she's changed her position despite zero evidence of that

 

Four things she ran on which Kamala Harris says she no longer supports for some reason: Medicare for All, A Fracking Ban, Border Funding Reductions, Mandatory Firearm Buybacks

What could the reason be lol?

 

 

This Biden word salad last night ended with the death of Medicare

 "We’d be able to help make sure all those things we need to do, childcare, elder care, make every single person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the, with the COVID. Excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do with. Look. We finally beat Medicare."

 

 

Trump has learned nothing, floats wacko bird pie-in-the-sky elimination of income tax

The federal government now needs about $6 trillion in revenue annually for the budget, social security, and medicare.

Imports of goods and services last year were valued at $3.83 trillion. You'd have to tariff all that at 160% or so to come up with $6 trillion. When pigs fly.

Trump promised big cuts to spending and to the size of the government workforce in 2016. Never happened.

This won't either.

 

The orchestrated lawfare against Donald Trump is designed to make you forget Biden's five tyrannical anti-democratic COVID-19 vaccination orders

Not to mention to make you forget all Biden's other failures, starting with the fall of Kabul in August 2021.

This is the same political strategy used by Hillary and the Democrats after Trump's election, with their phony baloney plastic banana Trump-Russia hoax to hamstring Trump's tenure in office.

 

The five mandates were discussed here in April 2022:

Federal contractor mandate September 9, 2021 on all employees with no opt-out for testing or masking

Federal employee mandate September 9, 2021 on all employees with no opt-out for testing or masking

OSHA mandate November 4, 2021 on all employers of 100 or more COUNTRYWIDE to be vaccinated or tested weekly

Medicare/Medicaid provider mandate November 4, 2021 on all provider employees with no opt-out for testing or masking

Head Start mandate November 30, 2021 requiring vaccination of 300,000 employees at child care facilities AND masking of the children.

And let's not forget the vaccination mandates shoved down the throats of the US military and National Guard in August and November 2021. More than 8,000 service members who refused the jabs were forced out.

This is the real Joe Biden.

As much as I sympathize with this guy's tale of Obamacare woe, his timeline is pure fantasy

 The story is here:

My insurance was $185/month with a $1,000 deductible. That was for a family of 5. So I voted for Obama-Biden in 2008 based on Obamacare. ...  the cheapest insurance I could find to replace that one was $1,200 a month with a $6,000 deductible.

The guy had a great plan before Obama!

But Obamacare as he now thinks he knows it didn't even exist in 2008 for him to base his vote on it.

Obama was for something else, the public option, a government-funded health insurance plan designed to compete with private health insurance. That was also Nancy Pelosi's preference, and the preference of the US House Democrat left at the time.

The great fear was the public option would crowd out private insurance and defeat it because it would be more attractive to women and the chronically ill.

The House public option plan put forward in 2009 competed with the Senate plan, and the two proposals were at an impasse by the end of 2009. Eventually the Senate version prevailed in March of 2010.

The Senate plan was actually worse, what we now call Obamacare.

It dictated the much more expensive nature and new shape of all existing private insurance plans instead of providing a separate public option to compete with those already existing private insurance plans. It cost more to provide because it eliminated pre-existing condition exclusions, and treated men and women equally even though women's care is more costly.

It was fascism pure and simple, government dictating to the private sector what will be, and what will not be.

That's how you lost your old plan, your old doctor, and your money: Because Obama bowed to the Senate plan, instead of fighting for what he said he believed in.

If you were too poor, though, to qualify for Obamacare, you just got stuck with Medicaid, health insurance for the poor, and, failing that, with nothing at all.

The once heralded public option for everyone defaulted to Medicaid. Nearly 86 million are now stuck with that, and most are unaware of its clawback provisions.

Today only 21 million can afford Obamacare, and about 25 million non-elderly adults have bupkis, like the poor fella in the story had for ten years.

Meanwhile, 158 million have employer-provided health insurance, the cost of which climbs relentlessly. The average worker had to pay $549 a month in premiums for it in 2023.

Medicare provides coverage to about 66 million aged 65+, and costs nearly $175 a month in 2024.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

 

 

 

Compromise spending bill passes US House 286-134 bringing fiscal year 2024 federal discretionary spending to $1.659 trillion through September

 WASHINGTON — The House voted 286-134 on Friday to pass a sweeping $1.2 trillion government funding bill, sending it to the Senate just hours before the deadline to prevent a shutdown. ...

The bill, released early Thursday, funds the departments of Homeland Security, State, Labor, Defense, Health and Human Services and various other agencies. Together with the $459 billion bill passed earlier this month, it fully funds the federal government to the tune of $1.659 trillion through September, after months of stopgap bills and negotiations.

More here.

The Roll Call Vote is here, if you want to check how your representative voted. 

The argument is perennially NOT about deficit spending, but deficit spending on WHAT. 

The projected tax shortfall for all programs for fiscal 2024 is $1.582 trillion, more than half of which will be net interest expense of $0.870 trillion on the exploding national debt. Interest payments on what we have already borrowed now exceed defense outlays of $0.822 trillion.

CBO in early February estimated fiscal 2024 discretionary spending at $1.739 trillion, so today's bill "saves" a mere $80 billion off that.

Mandatory spending on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc. is estimated at $3.908 trillion for fiscal 2024.

It's obvious that spending should be cut and taxes raised, but no one has the courage for either.

They should just agree to do both and let the chips fall where they may. Everyone out here will be pissed, vote accordingly, and it would be a wash politically.

Current national debt is $34.5612 trillion and rising.

Democrats who rammed Obamacare down our throats 13-years ago say it's totally broken

 

Sen. Bernie Sanders renews push for Medicare for All to end ‘totally broken’ health-care system

Democrats in Michigan incessantly advertise on YouTube against Republican John Gibbs in MI-3, featuring scarry pictures of a big, very black man with troglodyte views on women, abortion, and Medicare

Your Democrat choice in the race is a very white female, a progressive extremist who served in the Obama Injustice Department and who was defeated last time around by Peter Meijer.

My extremely stupid progressive neighbor had a sign out for the Democrat early in September until he figured out a couple of weeks later that our street had been re-districted out of MI-3. 

The Democrat's campaign clothes her extremism in the glow of her Christian faith to make her more acceptable to the white, right of center, evangelical population around Grand Rapids.

On YouTube Gibbs seems to run one ad for every twenty the Democrats run.

 

Spiking interest payments on the national debt through 2Q2022 threaten to crowd out other current spending on Social Security, Medicare, and National Defense

 Wait until the second half is done. 

This is going to be ugly.

LOL Bill Clinton, you mean like DCCC ads flooding YouTube claiming Republicans will take away your Social Security and Medicare?

 

Clinton: Republicans "Always Find Some New Way To Scare The Living Daylights Out Of Swing Voters About Something"

Meanwhile The Grauniad can't decide whether record STDs constitute a crisis which is serious or waning

While neglected, the STI crisis presents a serious public health problem. ...

But Harvey warns that a coordinated effort by national health agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is needed to combat the waning STI crisis.

Here.

You can always count on THE GRAUNIAD to be clear as mud.

The horror: Share paying no income taxes spikes from 44% in 2019 to 61% in 2020

 Stereotypical story here.

No one ever talks about how little Americans make.

In 2019, you'll be happy to know, 61% of individual wage earners in the US made less than $45,000. 

44% made less than $30k.

I'd like to see our legislators live on $30k, since so many of the people they claim to represent must. Maybe they'd be less inclined to rob us blind year in and year out with their trillion$ in spending.

Congressional salaries, incidentally, put the 435 members of the US House in the top 3.5% of individual wage earners.

IT'S WHY THEY RUN.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There's something horribly wrong with a Rube Goldberg tax code which allows:

the rich to avoid taking "ordinary income" and pay little or zero tax on their fabulous capital returns;

more than the bottom half also to pay little to nothing (don't forget that they do pay Social Security and Medicare taxes);

and the people in-between to get squeezed to death.

Given that deficits no longer matter, why do taxes continue to matter? Just end them. We borrow the money anyway.

smdh

"two-year suspension of the debt ceiling expired at the end of July"

Pure gobbledygook.

The limit, a facet of American politics for over a century, prevents the Treasury from issuing new bonds to fund government activities once a certain debt level is reached. That level reached $22 trillion in August 2019 and was suspended until Saturday. 

The new debt limit will include Washington’s additional borrowing since summer 2019. The Congressional Budget Office estimated in July that the new cap will likely come in just north of $28.5 trillion.

More gobbledygook.

The government's bookkeeping shenanigans here are always amazing, but especially now given the orgy of spending during the pandemic, and the reporting is nearly as bad.

The debt ceiling was "set" at $22 trillion in August 2019, but it wasn't "reached" until April 2021.

Add in the ever present "intragovernmental" borrowings and the total debt is now $28.46 trillion at the end of July. Intragovernmental holdings is code for raiding the Medicare and Social Security Trust Funds. It's one of the weird things about how bureaucrats think that the extent to which they must raid those funds plus the "normal" public debt becomes the sum they'll use to set the new "public" portion, the debt ceiling, when Congress gets around to it.

They all should be in jail. Instead we are.

Spending in 2020 on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid to hit $2.19 trillion

[S]pending on the “big three”—Social Security ($1.1 trillion), Medicare ($679 billion) and Medicaid ($418 billon)—will be approximately $2.19 trillion in 2020, nearly three times more than defense spending ($738 billion).

Story.

Slate's Jordan Weissmann is scared of Joe Biden's propensity to flirt with cutting entitlements like Social Security and Medicare

[O]ur ex-VP has talked extensively about his desire to return to an era of bipartisan cooperation. And whether we’re talking about Social Security or another major program, the budget is one area in which those instincts are truly scary.

Read the whole thing here.

World's best kept secret: Democrat Joe Biden would consider CUTS to Social Security and Medicare, Trump notably won't

Biden in the cat bird seat: Just as Bernie tanked after promising criminals will get to vote, Warren has tanked after hedging on Medicare for all

Ezra Klein, here:

One lesson of the past few weeks is that the Medicare-for-all debate has become a minefield for Democrats — and it’s not clear that any candidate has a safe path through it.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren has dropped 14 points since October 8, when she briefly led the Democratic field in the RealClearPolitics polling average. Most attribute her decline to her handling of Medicare-for-all — the financing plan she released made her the target of attacks from the moderates, and then the transition plan she released, which envisions a robust public option in the first year of her presidency and only moving to Medicare-for-all in year three, left single-payer advocates unnerved about her commitment to the cause.

The Democrat left has been its own worst enemy.

In addition to alienating working people by going soft on crime, the people who bear the brunt of it,  Bernie has notably lost ground with the working class by flipping on immigration restriction. Every new immigrant drives down their wages when immigrants are not taking their jobs outright.

For her part, on top of hedging on Medicare for all, Warren has rolled out a veritable cornucopia of crazy in this campaign, including a ban on all fracking in the US and ending the Electoral College. Combined with the recent lying about the little details of her life, voters justifiably doubt her sincerity on these larger issues and suspect that she cares about little except getting the power into her hands.

Hence the default candidate still on top, Joe Biden.

America's political institutions are still so structured that even when radicals like Obama do win, those institutions frustrate their aims. The upside of this is that harmful radicalism is usually stopped in its tracks. The downside is that mediocrities and grotesques are produced.

Just as Obama was content to let his Clinton retreads handle the Great Financial Crisis resulting in the still poor full time employment, moribund GDP, unaffordable housing and low interest rates catastrophic to income portfolios of the present time, Obama provided zero leadership on healthcare reform. This resulted in the competing Democrat House and Senate versions which consumed his first year in office, and eventually produced the Affordable Care Act camel, a horse designed by a committee. He sure did enjoy watching basketball in the private residence, though, and went on to make the Bush tax cuts permanent after winning re-election in 2012. Some radical, huh?

The same thing has happened with Trump. Although promising us the moon about immigration, healthcare reform and foreign wars, he instead delivered tax reform mostly for the corporations and huge spending increases for the military industrial complex, which is the basic consensus of the Republican caucus in Congress, foolishly hoping that they would give him a little somethin' somethin' in return.

Nothing doing. Even trade realignment will disappear when Trump does.

Trump's problem is that he never had a political faction holding any seats in Congress to drive his agenda. He just assumed the existing members would adopt his positions, which is pretty damn naive considering how he attacked and alienated them all throughout 2015-2016. Instead, Trump has steadily moved away from his own positions and adopted theirs, for his own political survival.

Trump's porous bollard fencing instead of the real wall he promised is simply the most public symbol of this, going back as it does to the George W. Bush administration.

The only radical realignment we have seen is the realignment of the radicals with their respective parties, and Election 2020 will be the same old, same old fight between them.

Those who won't realign get discarded.

This is the tyranny of the legislative. And the only way to remedy this is to repeal the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution, the great mistake of 1951. Only the threat of a Trump or an Obama perpetually in the White House will restore the balance of power between the three branches of government and advance the interests of the people who vote for the president.

As things stand, the best we can hope for is a president desperately stacking the courts to increase his power in a tyranny of the judiciary, which is hardly the remedy intended by the founders and is unacceptable to Americans loyal to the constitution and the nation as founded. The three stooges of the law schools on display at the impeachment hearing yesterday are proof enough of that. 

Democrats rammed Obamacare down our throats on a party line vote, and now ABC News has the effrontery to report it's crushing the middle class

Democrat solution? Crush everyone, with Medicare for All.

Rush Limbaugh gets more out of touch with every passing day: "People like their health care from their employer"

Talk about delusional.

In my household we haven't had employer provided health insurance since 2008, but recently a new employer offered us some. My jaw hit the floor when I saw the price: $2,033 per month for family coverage.

Currently I pay $532 a month for family coverage, because I have a plan grandfathered in from pre-2010, which I get to keep as long as I don't make any changes to it. The new employer's plan is almost FOUR TIMES more expensive than what I'm paying now.

Compared to what I'm being offered by an employer right now my current plan looks mahvelous, right?

Well guess what it cost just eight years ago?

$227 a month.

That's right. Despite the fact I'm not hostage to Obamacare or employer provided insurance, my premiums have still risen 134% in eight years. And it would be even worse had I not raised the deductible. Needless to say, my coverage is nearly useless for office visits and routine tests; that's all 100% out of pocket, too.

But look at the scale of what's happened. The coverage I had in 2011 now costs me about two and half times as much as it did then, but this new employer plan costs NINE TIMES as much as privately purchased coverage cost me eight years ago.

That is insane.

OBAMACARE IS A CURSE AND A BLIGHT ON THE NATION, WHETHER YOU HAVE IT OR NOT, and Rush Limbaugh is as out of his mind as the Democrat hucksters trying to sell us Medicare for All or some other bottle of government elixir when he says people like their health care from their employer. They do not. The LA Times in May:

Health insurance deductibles soar, leaving Americans with unaffordable bills:

The 2010 healthcare law — often called Obamacare — provided landmark protections to Americans once shut out of health coverage. But as Democrats and Republicans fought over the law, Altman said, neither focused on the rapid run-up in costs for people covered through work. ... Over the same time, insurance premiums also increased, rising at more than double the rate of inflation and outpacing wage gains.