More bank handouts by Obama

One of the things I disagree with is Obama's continued baby'ing of the banks. His abrupt U-turn on providing mortgage assistance to people who are underwater is not good. Barry Ritholtz explains why in an interview on NPR.

Older people and the Tea Party movement

I can understand the frustration with our government. I agree that our government does some dumb things. Our biggest fiscal bomb is the rising Medicare/Medicaid, but from what I can tell with these Tea Party folks, they cheer when a politician says that Medicare is untouchable. How does that compute? Especially when a lot of the Tea Party leaders are baby boomers near retirement. They want those benefits that they claim are ruining the country and destroying liberty and all this. That doesn't make sense at all. To me, those folks just reinforce the idea of Baby boomers wanting it all for themselves. I understand the anger more when it comes from baby boomer children, because the children are currently paying for the benefits being paid out right now. What kind of answer is it to someone who gets sick or gets into a car accident and can't work for weeks at a time, like this example here. I don't hear any answers to this scenarios, accept a shrugging of shoulders and an 'oh well, too bad.' I reject that on moral grounds. That is my biggest frustration. Come to me with a plausible solution so that I can do a comparison between the two ideas. Don't just say that the liberal ideas suck and leave it at that. That doesn't SOLVE anything. We have problems. Conservatives: Provide choices with viable solutions. Anything other than that is lazy and is just playing politics.

Historical mandate watch: The Militia Act of 1792 mandated that all able-bodied men between the ages of 18 and 45 equip themselves with a musket and rifle.

I agree with post at Slate. If Republicans actually offered good ideas and compromise, they would have my vote:

...I am in favor of universal access to health care and also horrified by what President Barack Obama's bill is going to cost. So who should I be voting for? If congressional Republicans are determined to fix this bill by, say, reforming the medical malpractice laws that drive up costs and put doctors out of business, they've got my vote. If, instead, they are going to scream "Communist" and "fascist" at our democratically elected president—thereby achieving nothing at all—then I want nothing to do with them.

I'm also getting a lot of enjoyment out of Conservatives crying out about Americans being against the health care bill. For one, its simply not true. Second, public opinion polls never stopped Republicans from doing things, like pulling out of Iraq when nearly 2/3 of Americans were against that war. Third, Democrats won the election in 2008, with large majorities in both Houses. They said they would change health care, and we voted them in. That's American Democracy. If it sucks for the opposition, then they can overturn the law when they get control if that is what the People vote for.

Finally, Bruce Bartlett (fellow Conservative castout like David Frum) has a thoughtful article talking about who the Democrats should thank for getting health care through Congress and then he talks about how similar the law is to Republican proposals from the past 20 years.

Obamacare mandate isn't unconstitutional

Ok, maybe it is on principle if you think that buying insurance from a company in another state does not constitute interstate commerce. But it is unlikely that the courts will rule in favor of it being unconstitutional.

That being said, if you agree that an insurance company can't drop you when you get sick, or can't accept you if you are sick (two things that are in the the health law) then what do you do? The point of insurance is to have a wide pool of policy holders paying into a system. So now you have this big pool of money that you can spend on those policy holders that are sick and need care. Not everyone in the pool is sick. The healthy ones payments cover the costs of the sick ones. If everyone is sick then you are screwed, because health costs are so high. You can try to figure out how to tackle costs (that is called rationing) or you can insist that people who could need care at some point (everyone) must pay into the system. The mandate is needed simply because you are making insurers take people that will cost a lot of money. This is happening right now in hospitals that receive Medicare payments. Federal law states that hospitals that receive Medicare payments must treat people who come into the ER. So people that don't have health care coverage wait until they are really sick and at death's door before they go into the hospital. So now the hospital has spent all this money on people that can't pay and don't have insurance. So the hospital has to increase the rates it charges for its services. This causes premiums to go up for all of us who pay for insurance. So you must have a mandate if you are going to force insurers to carry everyone. Otherwise you abolish the insurers and just cover everyone under Medicare. Or you do something that I haven't thought of.

David Frum is getting a lot of flak over his Waterloo comments, but I have to agree with him. He then states his current political outlook with all the new FrumForum viewers who came to the site to bash Frum over his Waterloo piece. It's well worth a read. The best part is the last line:

I don’t think of myself as having gone squishy. I think of myself as having grown sober. And my conservative critics? On them, I think the most apt verdict was delivered by Niccolo Machiavelli, 500 years ago: “This is the tragedy of man. Circumstances change, and he does not.”

I recently had a Facebook discussion with one of the kids from my neighborhood in Idaho where I grew up. He is a staunch conservative who is convinced that the country is going down the tubes. He is a great guy and has a wonderful family and if I ever move back to Idaho I'll probably hire him to be my realtor. But I just can't agree with his politics. The Machiavelli quote above seems to suit him aptly.

I'm not sure if I've posted this before, but the state of Maryland sets prices for what hospitals can charge for care. But they do it in a very smart way. They don't set prices to be the same for all hospitals. They set prices based on what each hospital is paying its workers and who the hospital provides care to. Guess what? It's working!

Here is a lengthy but thoughtful essay on health care in National Affairs magazine.

And this whole "We don't work past 2pm" Senate rule being used by Republicans? Dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb.

Healthcare 'reform' passes! A step in the right direction

It sure was entertaining to watch on CSPAN last night. The House passed the Senate bill 219-212, then went on to pass the Reconciliation fixes. This bill will be sent to the Senate, which should get passed by simple majority. Hopefully, Obama can sign this by this weekend and we can move on to focusing exclusively on the economy, the deficit, carbon, and the mid term elections.

What are my thoughts on this bill? It's far from perfect. It gives too much away to Big Pharma, it doesn't tax all employer-based health care plans, it paints insurers as the only bad actors in the health care sector. My preferred system is a single-payer, "Medicare for all" type of program that cuts out insurers completely and leverages all 300+ million American's needs with doctors, hospitals, drug companies, and medical equipment providers. This is what the rest of the industrialized world has done. This is the only way that I can see to effectively manage costs. Tort reform and buying insurance across state lines, Republican's 'silver bullet' remedies to healthcare costs, don't amount to much savings. This bill looks very similar to what Republicans proposed as a counter reform to Clinton's 1994 healthcare propoal. It's also very similar to what Mitt Romney and Massachusetts enacted a couple of years ago. So Republicans are left with just being the party of 'No, no, hell no".

I agree with Dennis Kucinich and other Progressives who want even more reform, but I am hopeful that these incremental reforms will prove that even more reform is needed. But attempts to kill the bill because it doesn't do enough is foolish in today's political climate.

This is going to be a good week for the President.

Oh, and lets not forget that tucked into the reform bill is another reform, one that eliminates the middle man from student loans. See, right now a lot of student loans use government money, but the money is given out through third-party bankers. These banker made a tidy sum giving out the money, but if the student defaults on the loan Uncle Sam guarantees the loan will be repaid to the third party. So does it make any sense at all to have the third party at all? No. So this little reform eliminates the third party, saves something like $60 billion over 10 years. Part of this savings will be used to give out more Pell Grants, the other part will go towards reducing the deficit.

Andrew Samwick shows how the Republicans complaints of the process used by Democrats to get the bill passed are bunk.

David Frum thinks that passage of the health care bill is Republican's Waterloo.

For a rundown on what parts of the bill will try to control costs, Ezra Klein has that right here.

People are against the health care bill, but then are for it once they learn what's in the bill. This should worry Republicans who think that November will give them the House. William Saletan agrees that Republicans are risking much by opposing this bill.

Only comedy can bring light to the truth

If you've ever wondered how the subprime crisis happened, and how Wall Street works, John Bird and John Fortune are DEAD ON. You HAVE to ignore what CEOs and Public Officials are explaining. It is not in their interest to explain the truth. It's sad to know that it takes a couple of comedians to distill all the fluff and bogus complexity into this.


And here's another bit, except this is just entirely too funny and not connected to anything.



And now back to how things work. This time it is explained how CDOs and CDSes are put together:




People in the audience are laughing, but they should be crying. This is their money these people are playing with. Their pension funds, their 401(k)s, their investments. The end of the second part is telling, with the 50's speaker guy saying how awesome capitalism is and how it is incorrect to think that capitalism leads to concentrations of wealth if the fundamentals of capitalism are maintained. We have gotten to where we are today BECAUSE the fundamentals of capitalism have not been maintained. The fundamentals have been distorted and changed to precisely enhance the wealth of the well-off. American today is not practicing capitalism for all. We have socialism for the wealthy and capitalism for everybody else.

On a completely different not, why DOESN'T the IRS do my taxes for me? There should be a law that makes them. Oh, wait there IS a proposal to do just that!

Whenever I hear that we can't cut defense spending because we are at war, but we should be cutting spending in other areas, I just can't agree. If this is what some of our defense dollars are being spent on, let's just not spend the money.

Where the money goes

See Here.

WTF?!?!

It's been a crazy couple of days. Lots to catch up on so lets get started.

The Democrats lost the senate seat held by Ted Kennedy to a Republican. Of course, this is being touted as a referendum on health care reform. But the Democrats are running around whining that now all is lost! No, sorry Democrats. All was lost about 6 months ago when you squandered all the political capital on the bank bailouts and the tea parties for healthcare and everything else. Democrats suck. I'm not saying that they go all GOP and start passing things in reconciliation, but to continue to give in to Republican demands in the hope that Republicans will join in voting is proving to be useless. Yet Democrats keep trying.

The Supreme Court just ruled that its ok for companies to directly spend money in politics. This stikes me as a disaster for our democracy. Treating a company as an individual who has free speech rights yet not treating a company as an individual when criminality or wrongdoing has a occured doesn't make any sense. Plus, what good does someone like me have in supporting a candidate who doesn't have the backing of large corporations for donations? Our democracy is no longer 'of the people, for the people, by the people'. It's more like 'of the people, for the companies, by the companies'. This fall, TV is going to be unwatchable because the ads will be unreal. This decision makes our democracy a joke. Even the Supreme Court thinks so, if Twitter can be believed. Republican Senator Olympia Snowe thinks the ruling is bad.

Obama is proposing a raft of bank reforms ala Paul Volker. Geez, what took so long? What started all this populist anger out of Obama lately? Its nice, but a little too late. Did they see the writing on the wall in Massachusetts and realize that they should move the focus to financial reform to save face, now that health care reform is in doubt?

Obama's presidency turned on yesterday. Ezra Klein has a great summary of what his first year means to us progressives. Not very pretty.

But that's meant letting the government work. And that turns out to be an ugly thing, full of deals with pharmaceutical companies and concessions to Nebraska and delays and press releases and controversy and anger and process stories and confusion. Americans don't like Washington, and they like it less when they see it more. Obama's strategy has meant they see it constantly, and there's no one really guiding them through its thickets. The country is trapped in a sausage factory, and they want out.

This is what Obama has given us, but it is not what he was voted into office to do. We wanted someone to change how things got done. Obama has been a real pushover. I mean this isn't even the high road he is taking. He's got a ton of appointments being held up in Congress, he had a supermajority in the Senate and a 40 seat majority in the house, and yet all he has to show for that is a too small stimulus. Take the gloves off, man. Explain how stupid Congress is being. Why isn't he doing this? He keeps giving chances to Republicans. Why? Why why why? Things better change, or Obama will be a one term president with nothing to show for it.