"Majorities in the poll believe the plans would give health insurance coverage to illegal immigrants; would lead to a government takeover of the health system; and would use taxpayer dollars to pay for women to have abortions — all claims that nonpartisan fact-checkers say are untrue about the legislation that has emerged so far from Congress. [...] Forty-five percent think the reform proposals would allow the government to make decisions about when to stop providing medical care for the elderly. That also is untrue: The provision in the House legislation that critics have seized on — raising the specter of 'death panels' or euthanasia — would simply allow Medicare to pay doctors for end-of-life counseling, if the patient wishes.Crucially:
while just 36 percent believe Obama’s efforts to reform the health system are a good idea, that number increases to 53 percent when respondents were read a paragraph describing Obama’s plans."So the popular rejection Blue Dogs cite as their reason for opposing a public plan is mostly based on lies and slippery comparisons to British-style socialized medicine, which no one is advocating. And that's not even counting the very real effect insurance industry lobbying is having on the proceedings, which Nate Silver pegs at nine lost votes in the Senate alone.
Dear conservatives: remember when giving women the vote was gonna destroy the fabric of the nation? Remember when the Clean Air Act was gonna cripple industry? Remember when the Americans with Disabilities Act was gonna create enormous financial burdens on small businesses?Ann Coulter: "I think [women] should be armed but should not [be allowed to] vote. No, they all have to give up their vote, not just, you know, the lady clapping and me. The problem with women voting — and your Communists will back me up on this — is that, you know, women have no capacity to understand how money is earned."
Remember how none of that ever even came close to happening?
Don't forget those pesky child labor laws"Repeal Child Labor Laws", by the editorial vice president of the Mises Institute, linking to his article "The Trouble with Child Labor Laws":
QUESTION: I’m sorry. What did you just mean by it’s bouncing around K Street ?Sounds like even the Obama white house is saying the baucus plan is too to tilted towards the insurance companies? Seems strange, it could mean nothing
GIBBS: I was told that — that K Street had a copy of the Baucus plan, meaning, not surprisingly, the special interests have gotten a copy of the plan that I understand was given to committee members today.
It's a situation that one would have thought would be sobering enough to snap Congress into real action for once. Instead, they did the exact opposite, doubling down on the same-old, same-old and laboring day and night in the halls of the Capitol to deliver us a tour de force of old thinking and legislative trickery, as if that's what we really wanted. Almost every single one of the main players — from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Blue Dog turncoat Max Baucus — found some unforeseeable, unique-to-them way to fuck this thing up. Even Ted Kennedy, for whom successful health care reform was to be the great vindicating achievement of his career, and Barack Obama, whose entire presidency will likely be judged by this bill, managed to come up small when the lights came on.posted by Kirth Gerson at 4:15 AM on September 9, 2009
"The most recent data available (for 2007) showed that the top 14,988 households (0.01% of the population) received 6.04% of income, the highest figure for any year since the data became available. The top 1% of households received 23.5% of income (the second highest on record, after 1928), while the top 10% received 49.7% of income (the highest on record).When talking about "the rich" let's just be clear what exactly we mean.
The fortunate 14,988 had an average income in 2007 of $35,042,705. They had an average federal tax burden, according to Piketty and Saez, of 34.7%, leaving them after tax income of $22.9 million. If you assume a 50% savings rate among this group, you get total savings of $171.5 billion. This is nearly ONE HALF of the total savings for the entire country implied by a savings rate of 4.2% ($365 bn) reported in this month’s Bureau of Economic Analysis data."
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posted by l33tpolicywonk at 7:18 PM on September 8, 2009 [8 favorites]