NYT:
Cue James Carville, the veteran Democratic strategist, who told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer yesterday that overturning the mandate “will be the best thing that ever happened to the Democratic party because health care costs are gonna escalate unbelievably.”
He added: “You know what the Democrats are going to say – and it is completely justified: ‘We tried, we did something, go see a 5-4 Supreme Court majority’… the Republican Party will own the health care system for the foreseeable future.”
That’s spin—even though Mr. Carville said twice that it wasn’t. It’s a purely political and cynical way of understanding policy; if health care costs “escalate unbelievably” that’s not good for anyone. (It’s comparable to Republicans thinking a stalled economic recovery is good for their party because it’s bad for the president’s chances at re-election.)
I agree that Republicans thinking that a bad economy is good for them is comparable to Democrats thinking that high health care costs are good for them. However, the Republicans are actively trying to destroy the economy for their own benefit. The Democrats aren’t trying to make health care more expensive; they just think that if it does, then it strengthens their hand.
Anyone who says that America is recovering is lying to you.
WSJ:
A person familiar with the matter said Mr. Smith’s role is actually vice president, a relatively junior position held by thousands of Goldman employees around the world.
Seriously, do words even mean anything anymore?
“The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away.” ~Tom Waits
If anything like the Blunt amendment ever gets passed, then what’s to stop every employer from becoming a Christian Scientist and refusing to pay for any health care whatsoever?
Greece should tell the EU to go fuck itself.
Daniel Foster:
In the NROHQ kitchen just now, Charlie Cooke wondered aloud, and here I paraphrase: “Does anyone on the Left even ask the basic question of whether a private charitable organization has the right to dispose of its money as it sees fit?” But in fact, that anyone thinks there is a question here is a sign we’ve already lost.
Of course a private charity has the right to spend its money however it wants. However, when it makes a decision that its donors don’t approve of, they have the right not to donate any more money.
David Gregory:
Why doesn’t that appear to be a more poll-tested position, which is if you really want shared sacrifice, then the middle class should pay taxes, too. I mean, roll back the Bush tax cuts for everybody rather than looking at the, you know, just having the rich pay more, which you look at polling and see that you have some political for. If it’s shared sacrifice, why not say to everybody, everybody’s going to have to do with less in terms of a social safety net, in terms of taxes and all the rest.
For decades, while everyone else has been suffering, the rich haven’t had to sacrifice a damn thing. On the contrary, their incomes have been rising to a downright criminal degree — sometimes literally. Any sacrifice that fails to hit the rich as hard as the rest of us already have been hit cannot be credibly referred to as “shared,” and anyone that does so deserves to be ridden out of town on a rail.
In the game ActRaiser, your people can learn how to build better structures, but they won’t replace the old ones until you destroy them, which is usually done by causing an earthquake.
It was a message from God, telling us to upgrade our infrastructure.
"It’s not “shared sacrifice” to ask wealthy people to give up money they will not even miss in exchange for asking 65 year olds to wait an additional two years before qualifying for Medicare."
— Digby
"The bad thing about cutting the federal deficit is that unemployment is very high and interest rates are very low. Given that, taxing productive activity to pay down debt is really obviously the wrong thing to do, and borrowing money to employ currently unemployed resources is really obviously the right thing to do."
— Daniel Davies
