Spendalot: Economic small 'hope' and spare 'change' for the new inflation to come

There is a new term that I wish to share,   my new name for the Obama Administration. It has little to do with efforts of "saving the economy", bailing out banks or GM. It has to do with the budget, and the holly-jolly engagement with inflation that the liberal White House and Congress seems to be sending our country to, with all this spending and the taxation and further expansion of government to come.

Often people invoke comparisons of the Obamas to images of John Kennedy and wife, for their youth, presumably. We called JFK's administration Camelot, which was a favorite musical of JFK, and somehow it was a fitting definition of his generation-changing entry into the White House, thought it was very corny if you really think about it.

What comes to mind nowadays when I think of Obama is the late Robert Goulet, in his portrayal of Sir Lancelot in the musical Camelot. Except, he's instead an ironic cameo character, in a comic bit. The bit's name? Spendalot!

That is my nickname for Obama's White House: Spendalot.

Contrary to the JFK-Camelot budgetary outlook, and far more moderate political perspective, I say to hell with Spendalot's brand of so-called "progress". If -- big IF! -- it bears the fruit of bona-fide economic invigoration, I'll be among the first to admit I was shortsighted. I don't weant to make excuses for why a success was actaully a failure. That's not what I want. Some successes are on the backs of those who benefit nothing from it, though. That's what I will be responding against. Inflation, weakened state of U.S. to favor other states. I think the only way a nation can reasonably help others is in a position of strength. How else?

There's only so many ways one can play on the theme of economics, short of hitting stop and reinventing the thing, before it all becomes essentially fatal to millions of people who must use money to buy things to live. Spendalot seems terribly burdensome, and terribly anti-business, to me.

We lack economic growth, and that means we are weakened. So we are going to print more money, thus weakening it -- in the short term, or will it create severe inflation? Spendalot is creating a very steep budgetary deficit. So are we going to eventually redefine the country's money -- or the world's as the Chinese have already floated. Money's funny this way: more money you print, the less it is worth. Economics is a human-invented thing, but that does not mean it is not a sort of entity on its own, that reacts to the environment. Inflation is survivable, but when you're something that the whole world hinges its economic activity to, which is what the U.S. surely is, then you need to be a bit careful, lest you spin the planet into a world at war. Tough times inspired WW I and WW II, easily. Nazis took charge in a time fo great strife in Germany, after the loss of WW I.

Spendalot seems to play to both sides, to our detriment: apologizing for American arrogance (since GW, intentionally or not, made us out to be arrogant, or like a bull in a china shop) and inventing words like "mad-made disaster" (a stupid PC phrase for "terrorism") on one end, pushing other nations to share troops and spend their money with us on the other (c'mon, let's all risk severe inflation so it won't feel so uncommon to Americans).

Either other nations can expect us to be merely the lead dog on many fronts, or we simply give up and pretend we are not the lead dog anymore, thus making it so. We are not -- NOT -- yet an insignificant nor a dead economy, not by far. In fact we are still a massive piece of the world's wealth, no matter how people "feel" about it. Reality pleads that we stop acting like it's all over for the U.S., or it will be all over. The less rationally we think it through, the closer we are to being a has-been, and not a preeminent up-and-comer. Perception can be reality, so it's a shame if the overall economic graphs are more rational -- relatively -- than our perception of the economy, isn't it?

A bad economy hits some very personally, with job lesses, income loss, retirement loss -- we have every right to be ticked off, too. But our personal feelings are not the world reality. Don't just imagine that the U.S. is a mere part of the whole world economy. We're a huge chunk of it. That's not arrogance, that's realism. We consume more, we provide more, we are busy busy busy. Meanwhile, millions live in dirt houses in China.

Ask yourself how many a nation came up with 1000% inflation in the past, from many South American nations, to Israel, to ... well, likely there's a long list of African nations, and several European states, too. How did that happen? Do better than asking yourself, look it up.

This massive, overarching Spendalot "budget" --more like a massive government-expanding bill -- and the inflation to come will not be the hope and change wished for by anyone but those who adore power and the status quo over everything else.

I am sure, come 2012, that Spendalot will still be blaming GW Bush for everything. Spendalot will be held up as the answer to everything, simply if the economy turns around at all. He will be aiming for the lowest common denominator for avowed voters, misleading them with bogus words of aimless positiveness as he did in 2008. This was less about hope than race, and white guilt; it was less about change than it was about anger against the GW Bush White House -- even over things that they were only one hand of many, like the economy, the Iraq invasion and governmental upheaval, the mortgage meltdown, etc.

Whether or not Spendalot's tactics work as well next time as they did in 2008, there's plenty of room to wonder but there's little reason to jump to conclusions. But there is no time to wait, no time for the GOP to wonder -- they need to get off their duffs and make progress or they will lose again in 2010, and possibly 2012, too.

Conservatives cannot win by being the ignorant opposite of ignorant liberalism. They cannot win out over mindless openness and utopian wishing unless they DO SOMETHING. Ronald Reagan's plainspoken, clever, and well-informed, reasoned tactics up against the USSR, Newt Gingrich's intelligence and ability to debate -- these are some of what the GOP, and Blue Dog Dems, and small government moderates, need to tap. There's no more USSR, but there are people who resent us everywhere. Even Spendalot's apologies do little to improve the world's view of America. Iran is going nuclear, Korea is launching missiles, and America is being looked at as just another player in the international game. I think we're fools is we simply accept that kind of thinking. Not because I want America to be the biggest kid on the block, having to jump into the fight, but because if not us, then what country? WHO?

If conservatives and moderates simply complain, refuse to compromise, react with invocations of mere punditry, or simply keep tossing out the socialism bomb towards the liberal desires for government-controlled education, health care, and markets, then they will not win anything in the few years that lie ahead. We aren't trying to convince those who believe in small government of its merits, but those who think government is their friend that it is, in fact, the burden to the people, not the solution to our ills.

What will win is realism that is supercharged by evidence of governmental failures and decent plans for how to fix them. It cannot be won through Christian conservative rhetoric (much as I follow Christian ethics, these are a complement to, and no replacement for, down to earth facts in order to make policy, and write bills). They need to start soon. Now would be better than next month.


- jRuse, aka AirFarceOne (on Twitter)

Birther on Board

There needs to be a triangle sign, like the Baby on Board signs, for cars as such:  Birther on Board

 

- AF1

Bill Clinton: deluded sore loser?

Bill Clinton commented in an interview around April 16, 2010, that the
Bush vs Gore decision in 2000 was one of the five worst by the SCOTUS.
Ever. Ever!

This comes without regard for decisions that were pro-slavery, awfully
reactionary and activist, flatly political, or otherwise? Yes, it
does. That's Clinton's estimation nearly ten years later. It is driven
bu personal bitterness, it seems, unless there are many more than five
rulings that are worse than that one. So are there? What would you
guess? From 1800 to 2000 there probably were plenty of Supreme
decisions one could include in a 'five worst' list. I don't have a
list handy. Some later changed or overcome by law created, not for
sour grapes, but for good reason. The SCOTUS were dragged into the
Florida fiasco of 2000 thanks to Al Gore choosing to bring it to court
rather than doing something less ... self-serving.

One ought to recall that Gore was the one who brought the Florida
voting problems to the state's courts, not the Bush people. Then, the
Supreme Court of US was virtually forced into the matter by the
interjection into the matter of what was understood to be a vastly
liberal-leaning Fla. Supreme.

In any case, the realities of the time - a Republican US Congress,
namely - would have meant that had Gore not brought it to court, had
Congress decided a stalemate, if there were one, he would not have
ever been made president, anyways. Majority rule, all that. And at
best, since he was sitting as president of Senate, Gore could have
seen to it that Lieberman became VP.

The Gore torchbearers, possibly including Mr. Internet Inventor
himself, and Bill Clinton, seem to be the bitterest of losers, even
9.5 years later. Or very willing to skew reality to make a decision
not in their favor seem legitimately wrong when another result would
have not made a difference in the Gore election, save a curious twist
of a Bush-Lieberman administration.

But to suggest that it was not just a decision he disliked, but it was
a "worst ever" decision by SCOTUS, seems to be ignoring facts, holding
a grudge, and dealing in much more petty things than questioning its
legitimacy.

All I ever go back to is that the former Senator Al Gore lost in his
home state of Tennessee. Who loses in their home state?! (McGovern did
vs. Nixon, but aside from that.)

(For an interesting look at other possible outcomes of 2000, see the
book 'Men in Black,' by conservative Mark Levin.)

Yes He Did: Familiar Figure in Latest Arizona Uproar

Some people! Educating kids, one charged up activist move after another... 

Familiar Figure in Latest Arizona Uproar - via Fox News

The same school official who kept a girls' ball team from going to Arizona sports meet also earlier had students agree to stay quiet about a 'gay experiences' seminar by gay (or simply adventurous or curious?) high school upper classmen about their experiences. He apparently wanted them to be quiet to their parents, even. 

He stopped the team's plans over the immigration law, claiming, as it was reported, for their protection. I guess school basketball is not just about tall, athletic girls scoring baskets: illegal alien girls are sneaking into the States to play grade school ball!  

A Citizen Feeling Ripped Off, and Milton Friedman's 'A Way Out of Soviet-Style Health Care'

DEPERSONALIZING CARE

Medicare/aid is giving medical providers artificially short 'reimbursements', in an accounting maneuver that would shame sensible accountants. That financial reality brings up the stated rates for procedures so that the paid percentage coming from those lowball entitlements is higher. So those who do pay (cash or through corp. insurance market coverages) wind up paying a greater amount, to counterbalance the shorting of government payments. So, thanks to the lowballing by govt cheating hospitals and doctors, medical providers are artificially 'subsidized' by those outside a govt system. Unentitled citizens pay more for medical costs since govt refuses to balance the books and shrink their size, preferring to cheat both providers and patients, in effect. 

So long as citizens accept the artificial ripoffs by govt, anyone receiving health care outside of Medicare and Medicaid, and other gov't 'reimbursement' programs will continue to pay higher rates to offset the losses taken for the government-failed medical programs. Government 'reimbursements': a sorry euphemism for govt's shorted, inequitable, unsustainable payouts. 

The concerns over more government involvement are along those lines, not about forgetting the needy. It is more about distrusting the greedy -- bureaucrats in this case, no matter their ideas of who's to blame. See, in the end, it is their fault that government is failing, but they seek to solve it with even more governmental control. That is not wise nor is it a positive change. It is, by definition, leading along a path to the uneconomically healthy model of, yes, socialism. We have already too much waste in the hands of bureaucrats. Medicare and Medicaid fail because they were mishandled. By whom? The folks who now claim to be improving America with more massive spending plans that will NOT reduce government one tiny bit. Mistake. 

A great mind of anti-socialist thinking was referenced by another anti-socialist in a piece for the Walk St. Journal. What follows is a bit of that.    

A Solzhenitsyn character comments against a governmental, centralized health care system: "Treatment isn't free, it's just depersonalized." 

More from that quote, which is via a piece that Milton Friedman wrote to plead against Govt health control: 

"What do you mean by 'free'? The doctors don't work without pay. It's just that the patient doesn't pay them, they're paid out of the public budget. The public budget comes from these same patients. Treatment isn't free, it's just depersonalized. If the cost of it were left with the patient, he'd turn the ten rubles over and over in his hands. But when he really needed help he'd come to the doctor five times over. . . ."

---

...Friedman relates the changes in health care since the 1930's, including: A major change added was "Medicare and Medicaid in 1965....[adding a] large slice of the population to those for whom medical care, though not completely "free," ... was mostly paid by a third party [all taxable income earners], providing little incentive to economize [- to function frugally -] on medical care."

---

And this, a MF comment on what option would let actual costs be less costly, which is no doubt unpopular with politicians since it takes government benefit - by taxation - out of the equation:

 "...The best alternative available is to extend the [employer's health plan costs] tax exemption to all expenditures on medical care, whether made by the patient directly or by employers, to establish a level playing field...."

 ---

On that last bit, WHERE is THAT option? Not in the 'HCR' we got. We can either pay via deductions, or pay via health coverage, being taxed and indebted any way it goes.  Or, we can be fined. 

Those outside the government system will continue to pay higher rates to offset the losses taken for the government-failed medical programs. How is that fair of reasonable? And where will medicine be if even more govt lowballing rules the industry? 

(link , and more clipped from the opinion piece is below that)

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704784904575111273624979544.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

In a chapter in his novel "The Cancer Ward" titled "The Old Doctor," Alexander Solzhenitsyn compares "private medical practice" with "universal, free, public health service" through the words of an elderly physician whose practice predated 1918. . .

Mr. Solzhenitsyn himself had no personal experience on which to base his account and yet, in what I have long regarded as a striking example of creative imagination, his character presents an accurate and moving vision. The essence of that vision is the consensual relation between the patient and the physician. The patient was free to choose his physician, and the physician free to accept or reject the patient.

In Mr. Solzhenitsyn's words, "among all these persecutions [of the old doctor] the most persistent and stringent had been directed against the fact that Doctor Oreschenkov clung stubbornly to his right to conduct a private medical practice, although this was forbidden."

In the words of Dr. Oreschenkov in conversation with Lyudmila Afanasyevna, a longtime patient and herself a physician in the cancer ward: "In general, the family doctor is the most comforting figure in our lives. But he has been cut down and foreshortened. . . . Sometimes it's easier to find a wife than to find a doctor nowadays who is prepared to give you as much time as you need and understands you completely, all of you."

Lyudmila Afanasyevna: "All right, but how many of these family doctors would be needed? They just can't be fitted into our system of universal, free, public health services."

Dr. Oreschenkov: "Universal and public—yes, they could. Free, no."

Lyudmila Afanasyevna: "But the fact that it is free is our greatest achievement."

Dr. Oreschenkov: "Is it such a great achievement? What do you mean by 'free'? The doctors don't work without pay. It's just that the patient doesn't pay them, they're paid out of the public budget. The public budget comes from these same patients. Treatment isn't free, it's just depersonalized. If the cost of it were left with the patient, he'd turn the ten rubles over and over in his hands. But when he really needed help he'd come to the doctor five times over. . . .

"Is it better the way it is now? You'd pay anything for careful and sympathetic attention from the doctor, but everywhere there's a schedule, a quota the doctors have to meet; next! . . . And what do patients come for? For a certificate to be absent from work, for sick leave, for certification for invalids' pensions: and the doctor's job is to catch the frauds. Doctor and patient as enemies—is that medicine?"

"Depersonalized," "doctor and patient as enemies"—those are the key phrases in the growing body of complaints about health maintenance organizations and other forms of managed care. In many managed care situations, the patient no longer regards the physician who serves him as "his" or "her" physician responsible primarily to the patient; and the physician no longer regards himself as primarily responsible to the patient. His first responsibility is to the managed care entity that hires him. He is not engaged in the kind of private medical practice that Dr. Oreschenkov valued so highly.

For the first 30 years of my life, until World War II, that kind of practice was the norm. Individuals were responsible for their own medical care. They could pay for it out-of-pocket or they could buy insurance. "Sliding scale" fees plus professional ethics assured that the poor got care. On entry to a hospital, the first question was "What's wrong?" not "What is your insurance?" It may be that some firms provided health care as a benefit to their workers, but if so it was the exception not the rule.

The first major change in those arrangements was a byproduct of wage and price controls during World War II. Employers, pressed to find more workers under wartime boom conditions but forbidden to offer higher money wages, started adding benefits in kind to the money wage. Employer-provided medical care proved particularly popular. As something new, it was not covered by existing tax regulations, so employers treated it as exempt from withholding tax.

It took a few years before the Internal Revenue Service got around to issuing regulations requiring the cost of employer-provided medical care to be included in taxable wages. That aroused a howl of protest from employees who had come to take tax exemption for granted, and Congress responded by exempting employer- provided medical care from both the personal and the corporate income tax.

Because private expenditures on health care are not exempt from income tax, almost all employees now receive health care coverage from their employers, leading to problems of portability, third party payment and rising costs that have become increasingly serious. Of course, the cost of medical care comes out of wages, but out of before-tax rather than after-tax wages, so that the employee receives what he or she regards as a higher real wage for the same cost to the employer.

A second major change was the enactment of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. These added another large slice of the population to those for whom medical care, though not completely "free," thanks to deductibles and co-payments, was mostly paid by a third party, providing little incentive to economize on medical care. The resulting dramatic rise in expenditures on medical care led to the imposition of controls on both patients and suppliers of medical care in a futile attempt to hold down costs, further undermining the kind of private practice that Dr. Oreschenkov "cherished most in his work."

The best way to restore freedom of choice to both patient and physician and to control costs would be to eliminate the tax exemption of employer-provided medical care. However, that is clearly not feasible politically. The best alternative available is to extend the tax exemption to all expenditures on medical care, whether made by the patient directly or by employers, to establish a level playing field, in terms of the currently popular cliche.

Many individuals would then find it attractive to negotiate with their employer for a higher cash wage in place of employer-financed medical care. With part or all of the higher cash wage, they could purchase an insurance policy with a very high deductible, i.e., a policy for medical catastrophes, which would be decidedly cheaper than the low-deductible policy their employer had been providing to them, and deposit all or part of the difference in a special "medical savings account" that could be drawn on only for medical purposes. Any amounts unused in a particular year could be allowed to accumulate without being subject to tax, or could be withdrawn with a tax penalty or for special purposes, as with current Individual Retirement Accounts—in effect, a medical IRA. Many employers would find it attractive to offer such an arrangement to their employees as an option. . . .

SEE STORY LINK FOR FULL PIECE

- J Ruse, aka AirFarceOne (on Twitter)