To Tim Carney, the soul of the Republican Party in 2015 and beyond boils down to (mere) materialism

Here, without the mere:

"More broadly, the rising tide against Ex-Im exemplified a nascent Republican move away from corporate welfare. Marco Rubio led the fight to block an insurer bailout through Obamacare. Ted Cruz is leading in Iowa polls while unambiguously pledging to kill the ethanol mandate. Jeb Bush, Carly Fiorina and most of the rest of the field also feel compelled to inveigh against corporate welfare, even if they don't oppose it in every specific instance. There's a long way for the party to go, but they're at least marching in the right direction, because they're no longer always marching to K Street's tune. ... Dole, Lott, subsidized exporters and ethanol executives will have all the material blessings they need at Christmas. But conservatives will have a much stronger hold on the soul of the Republican Party than they did just 10 years ago, and that's something they can be happy about."

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"Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people 'I offer you a good time,' Hitler has said to them 'I offer you struggle, danger and death,' and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet." -- George Orwell, 1940

Commentary Magazine's Jonathan Tobin doesn't even read what he cites, making a hash of Obamacare story

Jonathan Tobin here:

"This is something of a misnomer because, as the Heritage Institute pointed out in a paper published last month, almost all of these people were simply added to the rolls of those receiving Medicare. If you only count those who are actually receiving insurance outside of Medicare, the net increase of those with coverage (the number of those buying these policies is offset by an almost equal reduction in the number of customers who have employer-based plans) is only 260,000 people."

Ah, no.

First of all the paper was from the "Heritage Foundation", not the "Heritage Institute". Perhaps he's heard of it? It's only been a Washington fixture since like the Reagan Administration. He does remember Reagan, right? Well, he is a neoconservative.

And it was the rolls of Medicaid which were expanded, not Medicare. What kind of a dummy gets that wrong? Medicare is for older Americans. Medicare is supposed to be paid for through payroll taxes, and it's blowing up as we speak, but that's another story. Medicaid used to be health coverage for the poor and the indigent, provided by the States. Leave it to Obama to expand it from DC and call it insurance.

The middle class of this country will end up poor and indigent and on Medicaid, too, if someone doesn't put a stop to this train wreck called Obamacare and soon.

Middle class people have just had their taxes raised dramatically to provide coverage and subsidies to pay for that coverage to about 9 million people who didn't have it before or didn't have what they're getting now. Middle class taxes went up in the form of health insurance premium increases, raised deductibles and skyrocketing pharmaceutical price increases. Middle class people buying the cheapest of plans now can expect to shell out over $13,000 in premiums and deductibles before their plans pay out one red cent of a big healthcare bill. The incentive for them is to avoid care even when they need it in order to save money.  

All Tobin had to do to get the article moving in the right direction was to actually read the title of the Heritage paper and the accompanying abstract, but apparently he didn't do even that. One wonders if he even wrote the story himself. He is Commentary's "editor" after all.

What a putz. 

Backgrounder #3062 on Health Care

October 15, 2015

2014 Health Insurance Enrollment: Increase Due Almost Entirely to Medicaid Expansion

By Edmund F. Haislmaier and Drew Gonshorowski

Abstract

Health insurance enrollment data for 2014 shows that the number of Americans with health insurance increased by 9.25 million during the year. However, the vast majority of the increase was the result of 8.99 million individuals being added to the Medicaid rolls. While enrollment in private individual-market plans increased by almost 4.79 million, most of that gain was offset by a reduction of 4.53 million in the number of people with employment-based group coverage. Thus, the net increase in private health insurance in 2014 was just 260,000 people.

Obamacare's been fabulous . . . for investors in healthcare company stocks

Story here:

"Since the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act took effect two years ago in the rockiest of rollouts, American health-care companies outperformed every industry in the U.S. Taken together, they are the best collection of stocks among worldwide peers."

Profiteering off of human misery is standard operating procedure in the United States of Crony Capitalism.

Washington Examiner has the rare proper assessment of Speaker John Boehner, faced with the unique challenge of a president disloyal to the constitution

Here:

"[R]ight wingers give him an undeservedly bad rap. As a Republican speaker with a Democratic president, he never had a chance to do several of the things they clamored for him to do. Sometimes his most critical Republican colleagues' demands that he get rid of Obamacare or, more recently, defund Planned Parenthood, have suggested a fundamental failure to grasp the mechanics of the system of government in which they work.

"Boehner was not in a position to enact a sweeping, positive agenda. It could not have progressed through the narrowly divided Senate, let alone [have] overridden President Obama's inevitable veto.

"The best accomplishments Boehner could hope for were mostly defensive and negative. The beginning of the his speakership marked the end of Obama's legislative agenda, although sadly the president took this as a cue to exceed his proper powers and bypass Congress, governing by fiat. ...

"Boehner did his job well, and with the sort of patience that conservatives may not appreciate until he is gone."

Charles Cook embraces the impotence of contemporary conservatism faced with Donald Trump

Where else but in National Review here, the locus of conservatism as ineffectual cult and ideology, which finds it impossible to revolt against anything except for the rebels:

"As it happens, Trump’s critics do grasp the appeal [of revolt]. What they do not do, however, is act upon it in this manner. The temptation to deliver a bloody nose to one’s ideological enemies is a human and comprehensible one, by no means limited in its allure to the disgruntled part of the Republican primary electorate. But temptation and reasonable conduct are two separate things entirely, and they should always be treated as such. Can one understand the instinct that is on display? Sure. Can one look beneath the surface and do anything other than despair? I’m afraid not. Such as they are, the explanations provided by Trump’s discordant choir are entirely risible and easily dismantled. Great, you’re annoyed! But then what?"

He's obviously proud of it. In 1776 he'd be called a royalist.

Was taking up arms against England "reasonable conduct"? Only a Catholic sensibility could fail to grasp the point. "But then what?" Well, a long war of several years, full of privations and without guaranty of success, followed by another long period of several years preparing for and culminating in a constitutional convention, during which local and colonial institutions were strong enough to support the absence of a centralized framework. The same is still true today, if only the locals more frequently told the federal courts to go to hell, as the Kentucky county clerk recently did.

By definition, an ideology ought to have some ideas in it which form a system, and should be, when all is said and done, unrealistic. That pretty much describes American conservatism since forever: unable to roll back anything, including the income tax, direct election of Senators, universal suffrage, the Federal Reserve Act, the Reapportionment Act of 1929, Social Security, Medicare, the minimum wage, Obamacare, and the enormous regulatory code, and unable to permanently refound the country on any constitutional principles, say, of limited government or separation of powers. Conservatism has a massive record of zero achievement while liberalism's untruths keep marching on like tanks in Tiananmen Square.

Trump's camp, meanwhile, thinks three modest things: the way to make America great again is to restore law and order by starting with enforcing its borders and putting an end to illegal immigration, to bring jobs back to Americans by reforming the tax code, developing energy independence, cutting wasteful spending and punishing unpatriotic corporations who profit from exporting jobs, and to rebuild the military to protect freedom at home and for our friends and allies abroad.

It takes near religious nuttery to call the proponent of these measures "a self-interested narcissist and serial heretic whose entirely inchoate political platform bends cynically to the demands of the moment."

To understand Trump, it takes a village . . . of Protestants.

Erick Erickson's cheap grace on display: Red State endorsed Alaska Democrats in 2008 and then changed the headline saying so

Here.

And here's the original url showing that's the case:

http://www.redstate.com/diary/The_Directors/2008/10/27/redstate-endorses-mark-begich-democrat-for-s/

It's an old story but just reinforces how Erickson and Red State think that issuing an apology for calling Judge Souter a goat-fucking child molester or changing a headline offensive to pro-lifers is sufficient to show "repentance" or in turn makes one "acceptable" again. More to the point, we could have used the tarnished Stevens' vote against Obamacare in the US Senate in 2010, but Red State would rather punish the country with horrible Democrat legislation than rely on a pro-abortion Republican to stop it. 

Straight out of the cheap grace library of evangelicalism, and the loony bin of fanatical politics.

Maybe Erick Erickson can spend some time studying up on the former now that he's in seminary, but for the latter there is no cure.

Republicans ruined the Republican brand long before Donald Trump came along

Read my lips, no new taxes

Compromise is not a bad word

I have abandoned free market principles

We have nothing to fear from a President Obama

ObamaCare's not worth getting angry about

President signs Trade Promotion Authority (Fast Track) knocked off the news by Supreme Court decisions

The Senate passed TPA last Wednesday, on the 24th, 60-38, but the next day ObamaCare was upheld by the Supremes and the following day Same Sex Marriage, both of which sensational developments obliterated the trade story from the news cycle. The trade vote story from last Wednesday is here. The roll call vote is here. Once again just five Republicans in the Senate voted against the job-destroying measure: Collins, Cruz, Paul, Sessions and Shelby. The same five who voted against bringing the measure to the floor.

The signing story from today is here.

They do what they want to do. We have no say in the matter. But if we vote for any of the principals, we are complicit in the deed.

The country is shell-shocked by it all, walking about in a daze, the part of it that cares anyway.

Obama has had a huge week, winning everything consequential, with Republican help in the Congress and the Court, meaning Speaker Boehner, Majority Leader McConnell and Reagan appointee Justice Kennedy.

The only thing Obama lost and the people won was the Supremes' rebuke of the EPA on coal. Your electric bill will go up later rather than sooner.

The last days of this administration are dark indeed.

ObamaCare is a problem created by Congress: Congress should have fixed it, not the Supremes

Deb Saunders, here:

'As a conservative, I think it serves the country best if elected officials, not judges, repair what's wrong in Obamacare. Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a 2016 GOP presidential hopeful, hit the right note when he said he did not agree with the ruling. "It was never up to the Supreme Court to save us from Obamacare," he said in a statement issued Thursday.

'Because the Democratic Congress wrote a heavy-handed provision that the Obama White House determined it was best to ignore, the Supreme Court got handed a live grenade. With all the Democratic justices on board, Roberts jumped on the grenade -- leading with a bogus argument.'

Trump pulls the trigger, runs for president as a Republican

[H]e said he'll be "the greatest jobs-president that God ever created" . . ..

He said he will: "repeal and replace the Big Lie, Obamacare";

"build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will have Mexico pay for that wall" ("nobody builds walls better than me");

and "find the General Patton or … General MacArthur" in the U.S. military to fight the Islamic State.

More here.

Doug Short makes our point: Part-time surged because of the recession, not because of ObamaCare

Here:

"With regard to Obamacare and part-time employment, the surge in part-time employment was triggered by the recession, not by the Affordable Care Act, as the next chart clearly illustrates."

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After studying the issue since 2010 we first began to express doubts about the meme that ObamaCare part-timed the country in July of 2013, here.

In August 2013 here we realized a part-timing trend, to be real, would have to show up in the hours data and wasn't.

By September 2013 here we were calling the meme a myth, and here we identified the part-time statistics as incapable of capturing such a trend due to the high bar set by the government definition of part-time as less than 35 hours worked.

In October 2013 here we blamed the part-time explosion on the recession.

In February 2014 we noted here that The Atlantic had finally caught on.

Mish started to catch on in September 2014, here.

Now Doug Short joins the party.

Hooray.

I still want my Pulitzer.

Newspeak from the Orwellian president: Ending ObamaCare would punish millions with higher costs of care

Oldspeak from the true born sons of liberty: ObamaCare has already punished millions with higher costs of care, when they can find it.

Here.

Democrats broke nearly every promise about ObamaCare

Jack Kelly here:

Nearly every promise Democrats made has been broken. The average family pays more (some much more) for insurance, not $2,500 less. About 9 million Americans (so far) have learned they couldn’t keep the health plans they had if they wanted. Or some of their doctors.

Federal spending for health didn’t go down. It’s zoomed upward. So have emergency room visits. Overhead costs are exploding.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that Obamacare will lower full-time employment by 2.3 million in 2021, compared with what might have been without reform.

The ACA has hurt millions more than it’s helped. The worst is yet to come. President Barack Obama delayed or altered (mostly illegally) unpopular provisions at least 50 times. If they’re implemented fully, up to 100 million who get insurance from their employers could have their policies canceled, the American Enterprise Institute has estimated.

Why did Senator No Pants Paul vote against subpoenaing a fraudulent congressional application to DC's health exchange?

Maybe there's less to Rand Paul than meets the eye.

The story is unpacked here.

ObamaCare's unequal treatment of Americans under the tax law illustrated

Some people who didn't deserve a tax credit are going to get to keep it anyway because of the government's own incompetence administering the credits. I'm sure this makes people who didn't get a credit feel all warm and fuzzy about ObamaCare.

Seen here:

"The White House has said the error could result in some people receiving a tax credit meant to subsidize health insurance coverage by mistake. 

"On Friday, it said people who received the tax credit and had already filed their taxes based on the incorrect forms would not have to refile and could keep the extra tax credit."

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So too bad for you if you haven't already filed your taxes. The corrected form is in the mail and you are obligated to incorporate it in your return.

Conservatives are prisoners of the '3 million Republicans stayed home in 2012' meme

The meme began with Jeffrey Lord at The American Spectator, here, whose real motive was to beat up the party for nominating another moderate:

"On Tuesday night, it comes clear, as this is written using the latest Fox News figures, Mitt Romney lost to President Obama by 2,819,339 votes. And the news ekes out that Moderate Nominee Number 10 Romney received some 3 million Republican votes less than Moderate Nominee Number 9 -- John McCain in 2008."

Blurted out as it was on November 8, 2012, no one could possibly have known that to be true at the time or trust it, but it has been accepted and remains endlessly repeated as the truth, mostly by the likes of Rush Limbaugh who uses it to browbeat his audience whenever someone spills some lemonade on the still open wound of the Romney defeat. The Republican base was at fault for not showing up, we are told, and Rush is never going to let you forget it. He's as angry at the right as John McCain is, but the meme just reverberates down through the conservative food chain through every microphone until you just want to scream out loud because it simply isn't true.

This is demoralizing for everyone and needed to stop long ago. But why it hasn't stopped has more to do with conservatives' penchant for self-flagellation for their failure to find a new Reagan than with anything else. What they should be doing is trying to learn something from the episode so that they do win next time, but you get the feeling that they don't do that because they really don't believe that they can win next time. Republicans want a Saviour to do the job for them, instead of doing it themselves.

I know why this is, and so do you.

Conservatives have become prisoners of a utopian dream. They keep thinking that if the right guy or gal comes along in the mold of the Gipper, we'll finally, finally, be able to take over the government and show everybody how it's supposed to be done once again, and all will be right with the world.

This is crazy.

The fact is there were just eight states lost by Romney to Obama in 2012 where McCain did better. Here they are, showing how many more votes McCain got than Romney:

Ohio: 16,383

New Mexico: 11,044

California: 171,823

New Jersey: 134,458

New York: 262,275

Maine: 2,997

Vermont: 6,276

Rhode Island: 8,187

Total votes by which McCain did better than Romney, but still lost: 613,443 . . . nowhere near 3 million.

Keep in mind that Romney garnered a net 984,084 more votes nationwide than McCain did in 2008, despite that under-performance in eight states detailed above, and despite what Jeffrey Lord told you in the wake of the election and people like Rush Limbaugh have endlessly repeated ever since. On top of that net better performance, Romney also won North Carolina and Indiana, both of which McCain had lost in bitterly narrow outcomes in 2008. Romney ended up winning 24 states vs. only 22 for McCain. You don't do that with 3 million Republicans staying home in 2012 who didn't in 2008.

To think so now at this late date is a form of mental illness.

Romney's better performance than McCain overall was despite two important factors working against Romney: a lower turnout nationwide in 2012 by 1.6% overall compared to 2008 (2.2 million); and a suppressed voter turnout in New Jersey and New York because of Hurricane Sandy right before the election, which makes McCain's better performance than Romney in those two liberal states in 2008 look questionable, quite apart from being inconsequential.

In New Jersey and New York in 2012 5.9% and 7.3% fewer votes respectively were cast than in 2008, alone totaling a whopping 789,000 votes. Based on Romney's performance in those two states in 2012, as many as 288,000 of those votes could have been his but were not, due to weather related impacts on the election. But they hardly mattered except to show that McCain's so-called out-performance was nothing of the kind.

The only state of the above eight which really mattered for Romney in the 2012 calculus to win was Ohio, where Romney lost by 2.98 points, or 166,272 votes.

Turnout in Ohio was also down in 2012, by 2.3% or 131,000, a rate of no-showing almost 44% higher than in the country as a whole (Just where was Gov. John Kasich when we needed him, hm?). With third party voting in Ohio turning out the same percentage in 2012 as it had in 2008, you have to reckon with the fact that Ohio's 101,788 third party votes in 2012 had a greater impact on the outcome in the lower turnout environment of 2012, and they did.

49,493 of those third party votes in Ohio went to the self-described Republican spoiler from the Libertarian Party, the Republican Governor Gary Johnson of New Mexico, who was just coming off being snubbed by the Republican Party in the presidential debates of late 2011. Another 33,722 votes in Ohio went to assorted libertarian and right of center fruits, nuts and flakes. Then add in the known 16,383 who voted for McCain in 2008 but not for Romney in 2012 and you're up to 99,598 of the 166,272 Romney lost by in Ohio in 2012. That leaves 66,674 additional votes Romney lost to account for, which as luck would have it is about 51% of the total reduced turnout, closely enough mirroring the 47.6% by which Romney ended up losing in Ohio to satisfy the equation's solution. The point is there was nothing terribly unusual about this outcome which couldn't have been remedied by a better boots on the ground operation than Romney fielded, outnumbered as it was by Obama by 10 to 1. Romney's failure in Ohio was remediable.

One gets the feeling from that that Romney too was looking for a Saviour when he should have been working harder. Only after the election was it confirmed by his family that he really didn't have the fire in the belly. We should have known. "ObamaCare's not worth getting angry about". "I'm not going to light my hair on fire".

Ohio, plus New Hampshire, Virginia and Florida in the east together would have given Romney the 270 electoral votes he needed instead of the 206 he actually received. Romney lost those four states, and the presidency, by just 429,522 votes.

Not.3.million.

Stephen Moore tells some whoppers: Income was FALLING long before the 2013 increase in the capital gains tax rate

From Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation, here:

"When Mr. Obama entered office the capital gains and dividend tax was 15 percent. Then he raised it to 20 percent and then he added a 3.8 percent investment surtax, bringing the rate to 23.8 percent. The tax rose by more than 50 percent. ...

"Wages have stagnated under Mr. Obama as taxes have risen on capital."

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Nice try at hiding the chronology, Moore, but no cigar.

Real median household income and real gross private domestic investment crashed in tandem and in concert with the 2007 recession. The investment side rebounded quickly, but real household income did not, and still hasn't. What's more, the whole phenomenon preceded any increase in the capital gains tax rate, which didn't pass until January 2013, with Republican support by the way. 

And it won't do to talk about wages stagnating, either. Real incomes have actually fallen, and fallen big. Employers figured out that the 2008 crisis gave them the cover they needed, their golden opportunity, to shed millions of expensive workers and rehire younger, cheaper ones. It's the biggest scandal in recent history, much bigger than the lies about ObamaCare, but no one is going to talk about it, least of all libertarians who are happy that the business inputs cost less.

The incredible rebound in investment is on the backs of all this labor shed in the crisis, helped along by rock bottom interest rates for those who are first in line for the money: bankers and businesses.

So-called conservatism never looked so bad.  

Kevin Drum admits ObamaCare is a cost to the middle class, not a benefit

Here in Mother Jones last November:

[N]early all [ObamaCare's] benefits flow to the poor. ... winners are those with household incomes below $25,000 or so, and losers are those with incomes above $25,000. ... If you think of Obamacare as something that benefits the working and middle classes, you're probably wrong. It may benefit a few of them, but overall it's a cost to them ... the bottom line is simple: like most of the social welfare programs championed by Democrats, Obamacare is primarily aimed at the poor. Once again, the working and middle classes are left on the outside looking in.

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First Obama did nothing about housing, the sine qua non of the middle class: Over five million completed foreclosures eliminated millions from the middle class without firing a shot.

Then he did nothing about jobs, without which no one buys a house: 18 million have been added to the potential workforce but haven't actually joined it.

Then he rammed through healthcare reform, which was designed to raise costs on the middle class.

And people wonder how Obama could even think of taxing their 529 plans?

The middle class is the enemy of the revolution, the object of the transformation, the source for the redistribution.

Rush Limbaugh is back for 2015 and he's dumber than ever, just like Zero Hedge

Here:

And the second thing I saw was the economy is growing at this 5% rate.  By the way, do you know how that happened, folks?  Do you know what the bulk of the economic growth -- I mean, what is the economy?  The economy is consumer spending, essentially, consumer spending and consumption, commerce.  You know what the majority of spending was in the fourth quarter was people spending money on Obamacare, mandated by law.  The vast majority of our economic growth -- this was made public by Tyler Durden at -- I forget the website.  It's off the top of my head.  Well-known business website.  Over half of the spending in this country in the fourth quarter was you and me and everybody else spending money on health care. ... Well, some economic growth, when over half of it is essentially required by the government? 

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Aside from the fact that the quarter in question is stated in error as the fourth, the idea that "the majority of spending . . . was people spending money on Obamacare" is ludicrous.

Line 17 in the snapshot above from the GDP report shows that 3Q2014 healthcare spending was $2.0089 trillion. Line 2 shows the total of all personal spending at $12.002 trillion. Healthcare spending thus represented just 16.7% of that in 3Q. And that percentage is identical to the percentage spent also on healthcare in 2013. Healthcare spending is not anywhere near "over half of the spending in this country in the fourth [sic] quarter".

ObamaCare hasn't suddenly driven up healthcare spending in 2014 at all. Maybe after the fourth quarter is over and we get the final number for that in March 2015 we will be able to say that Obamacare has driven up healthcare spending overall, but so far we cannot say that. So far such increases have been born by too small a percentage of the adult population to show up in the data.

What we can say is that so far healthcare spending is growing at a pace slightly behind the pace of the overall economy, which grew at 4.96% annualized in 3Q. Healthcare spending grew at a slightly less robust 4.6% rate.

It is likewise incorrect to say as Rush Limbaugh says that healthcare spending accounts for "the bulk of the economic growth" in 3Q. Healthcare spending grew $88.6 billion in 3Q2014 from 2013, which represents just 10.65% of the $831.7 billion overall increase in GDP over 2013 in the latest report. Over 89% of the increased growth thus came from other categories.

Conservatism is not about fighting lies with more lies.