Once again the most progressive Democrat elites, who pushed out Joe Biden, prove that they are not on the side of the people.
Showing posts with label The American Prospect. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The American Prospect. Show all posts
Monday, December 22, 2025
Thursday, October 23, 2025
Obamacare's chickens have come home to roost!
David Dayen should have entitled this The Planned Failure of Obamacare Is Now Upon Us.
The Health Insurance Cost Crisis Is Now Upon Us
... We should be clear that this premium apocalypse is a function of returning Obamacare subsidies to where they were in the original version of the law. That was poorly designed to target the middle class with bearing the bloat in the health care system, and no work was done on basic health plans or other public options at the state level. (A federal public option was stripped from the legislation by the threat of that exemplary moderate, Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, to withhold his support unless it was dropped.) Now, Democrats are effectively warning that a return to their original vision of Obamacare spells doom. (And what we’re really talking about is how much the government should send to private insurance companies, a horribly inefficient way of ensuring health for American citizens.) ... The ACA was seen as a “starter home” that could be built on, and Democrats built on it. It’s Republican neglect that is taking the wrecking ball to it, with all the political fallout on their backs. ...
Yes, Obamacare was the enemy of the middle class, making it "bear the bloat". Communists have always hated the middle class because the middle class stands in the way of the revolution. Obamacare was designed this way on purpose, by Democrats and Obama who were the communists we always said they were. Senator Max Baucus rightly called it what it was, income redistribution.
Premiums have steadily risen along with deductibles, to the point that everyone pays their premium, then pays out of pocket, no one ever reaches their deductible, and the plan never pays anything. Most people never reap any benefit under Obamacare. Now premiums will explode without the subsidies, making dropping it more attractive than ever.
And No, Republicans had no duty to "build" on Obamacare. It was rammed down their throats in the first place. No Republicans ever voted for this goddamn commie boondoggle.
The best thing which could happen right now is for the millions imprisoned in this system to opt out of it and let Obamacare implode. That would force the Congress back into the corner it was in in 2009.
Not one more penny should be spent to prop up this system which benefits only the insurance companies. Can you say Luigi Mangione?
Obamacare should be repealed, and nothing done to replace it. It would be painful, but it is the only way.
In the aftermath, someone will start to sell real insurance again out of the ashes, and the current greedy bastards of the insurance industry will scramble to follow them as they lose business and market share. That, the capitalist option, is the only public option which makes any sense, but currently that is against the law.
Just repeal it.
Tuesday, June 24, 2025
Because the BBB is a GOP Christmas tree of policy-change goodies masquerading as a reconciliation bill
This was taken down pretty early this morning by the suck-ups at Real Clear Politics. I guess the bosses come in a little later than the help.
This is arguably one of the best discussions of what is really going on that you will find.
The estimate of the Senate Finance Committee’s tax provisions reflect
a cost of $441 billion over ten years, according to the Joint Committee
on Taxation’s estimate over the weekend.
How, you might ask, could the Finance Committee have extended all the
Trump tax cuts, expanded some of them, added a bunch of other new tax
cuts, made some temporary business tax cuts permanent, and still only
cost $441 billion? The trims to clean-energy tax credits and other
rollbacks, you would presume, weren’t SO costly that they would nearly
wipe out all of the costs!
The answer, friends, is a big gimmick known as the current policy baseline.
Senate Republicans are claiming that, because the Trump tax cuts are in
place now, as current policy, it costs $0 to extend them. An analogy
would be if Congress passed a bill to institute Medicare for All for one
day, at the cost of $4 to $8 billion,
depending on your estimate, and then the next day they passed a bill
extending M4A permanently, which would cost … nothing. The same
Republicans who would scream bloody murder at that dastardly maneuver
are the ones now employing this absurd maneuver.
The reality is that the Trump tax cuts, under a current law baseline
that compares the policy to the change to current law, really cost
$3.76 trillion over ten years. If you add that to the $441 billion
estimate, you have a tax section that costs over $4.2 trillion. This is
$400 billion higher than the House version that the Freedom Caucus
already found intolerable, and that some self-styled Republican budget
hawks in the Senate are grumbling about. ...
In most cases, the parliamentarian looks at whether provisions have a purely budgetary purpose, rather than policy dressed up as a budget item. (This is known as the Byrd Rule, after the longtime Democratic senator from West Virginia, Robert Byrd; the process by which the parties debate the provisions and by which a ruling is made is known as the “Byrd bath.”) ...
For context, the House version costs $3.3 trillion over a decade, according to the latest estimates. We’re verging on $4 trillion for the Senate bill—unless the Republicans’ wish to have the $3.7 trillion in tax cuts entered as zero passes muster with the parliamentarian. ...
Update Wed Jun 25:
Real Clear Politics put this back up in the rotation this morning, lol.
Wednesday, March 12, 2025
Saturday, June 29, 2024
Wednesday, December 14, 2022
Surprise, surprise, right on schedule progressive Robert Kuttner attacks the 2 percent inflation target in favor of 4 percent
It all sounds very persuasive, as long as you forget how inflation impoverishes the lower classes and keeps them down so that the elites can continue to milk them like slaves year after year. 4% just does it twice as fast as 2%.
The little people are an afterthought to the left.
This is the "inflation is actually good" talk you hear from lefties from time to time.
Story here.
Saturday, May 28, 2022
News flash: He doesn't mean abortion and never mentions it, almost as if killing 1 million unborn every year since the 1970s wasn't the prolegomenon to the violence now everywhere around us
We accept the death of children because we accept a politics that enables it.
Friday, August 24, 2012
It Takes One To Know One: Liberalism Believes In Nothing
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| "Caesar and Christ; they had them both. And the word is spreading only now." |
Oh dear, here, but if the author understood that he also believes only in death:
[B]y now the base knows what Governor Romney believes, too. By now we all know what Governor Romney believes; by now his beliefs are more manifest and less mysterious than that of any candidate who’s ever run. Governor Romney believes nothing. ... What’s happening in and to the Republican Party this past week isn’t an aberration; it’s happening because of what the party has become . . ..
It's like a bad episode of Star Trek, in which The Enterprise visits a planet bent on civilizational suicide but must follow The Non-Interference Directive and let it go all to hell.
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