Youth in Revolt Against Obama! 54% of Millennials Now Disapprove of Him!
According to the latest Quinnipiac Poll, 54 percent of folks ages 18 to 29 disapprove of the job Barack Obama is doing. In March 2009, fully 60 percent approved of the guy.
I've got a new piece up at The Daily Beast that argues Obama has lost the kiddos not in spite of his policies but because of them. Here's a snippet:
Back in 2008, Barack Obama seemed like the coolest cat to hit the national scene in a long time, almost scientifically engineered to appeal to idealistic young Americans. He was the perfect combination of a dream dad and an older brother who could run you ragged up and down the basketball court, wink and nod about smoking dope, and hip you to some older but still cool music, you know? In 2008, the Pravda of youth culture,Rolling Stone, slathered the future president with praise for being so with it that he even knew how to use…an iPod. We were all pretty sure that his eventual Republican challenger, John McCain, had stopped listening to music when Rudy Vallee went electric or Stephen Foster released his Chris Gaines record or something, but there Obama was, listening to Bob Dylan, Yo-Yo Ma, Sheryl Crow, and even Jay-Z. "I have pretty eclectic tastes," Obama told Rolling Stone. He even went on to invoke "Maggie's Farm," Dylan's classic song of generational defiance and opting out. "It speaks to me as I listen to some of the political rhetoric," explained.
Yeah, well, it's all over now baby blue. Like Bush before him – and in many wars, even worse than Bush before him - Obama has personified the failure of leaders to speak plainly, honestly and directly and to enact simple, effective, financially responsible policies that speak to Americans' hopes and dreams. The great political continuity in the 21st century is one of transpartisan failure and the continuing flight from party affiliation by more and more Americans.
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wink and nod shuck and jive about smoking dope
FTFY
This is the missing link. http://www.thedailybeast.com/a.....acare.html
Too late, hot plate.
He means well, though.
Like Bush before him ? and in many wars, even worse than Bush before him
Nice Freudian slip there, Nick.
Shrike bait.
RC'z Law extends its benevolent hand even over H & R posts.
We might go so far as to call it an "Invisible Hand".
Someone at my work has a Rolling Stone subscription, and old issues are left in the cafeteria.
Every issue has an article either fellating Obama or excoriating the Republicans/Tea Party.
It's all rather sad really; I get the sense that the magazine is written entirely for aging boomers.
Not even that. Not all boomers are progs or live in the past. If the is a more stale mag, hard to think of it
Has anyone under 30 read an issue of Rolling Stone in 20 years? I got a subscription as a gift when I was a teenager in the mid-80s at the politics and opinions seemed horribly retrograde and Boomer to me even then.
Rolling Stone is an embarrassment.
So, you're saying they're gathering a lot of moss? 😉
It was already growingfat in the early 70s.
If you like classic rock, read MOJO or an actual music magazine. What market are they going for?
The penance-to-your-younger-self market always has money in it.
My younger self was an idiot. Seriously, if I ever time travel to my past, I'm going to have some stern words with that moron. Jesus, what are you thinking?
Other than a few choices here and there, I'm pretty at peace with my younger self. I definitely would have warned him off of redheads, though.
I'm okay with where I've stumbled and wouldn't change anything in the past that would mean today vanishes, but I was pretty stupid.
Isn't that good advice for everyone?
I dunno, but if I time travel to your past, I'll give you some generic advice, too.
'Here's a few lists for you, kid. These are the bitches to avoid, this is the one you should have taken seriously, this one was fug, but you'll kick yourself for turning her down after a five month drought, this list is of things you'll regret saying, these are things you shouldn't do, wait, cross the naked chased by the cops incident of the beach, it was awesome and you got away, and this one is of the assholes whose asses you left un-kicked. Memorize it for both of us. Understood?'
I looked at it periodically in the late '70s/early '80s. Not bad, some good articles, but you could see it looking for shark to jump by the mid-'80s, anyway.
I'm
Wow the squirrels really did eat my comment.
I'm under 30 and I've never touched it, and neither have any of my friends.
You recieved RS and _not_ NME?
Christmas present from relatives.
^this. The high school library had a subscription, so it was passed around the study hall because it was marginally less boring than the other magazines, not out of love.
It's all rather sad really; I get the sense that the magazine is written entirely for aging boomers.
it is.
Don't even get me started on Rolling Stone. A sad excuse of a magazine written by sad, pathetic former hippie boomers grasping with both palsied, wrinkled hands on to their "Age of Aquaris" with all their senile might. Its like they excuse everything Nobama does, I bet that if Nobama in plain daylight on a city street was filmed shooting someone point blank, Rolling Stone would find some way to excuse it. Its funny how they will trash the right side of things but totally ignore it when the left side does the some thing they accuse the right of doing. A co worker told me he's been subscribed to the magazine forever (he's a boomer) but is now so sick of the Nobama butt kissing he is cancelling his subscription. As one commenter posted, if you want music there is way better sites and periodicals out there. When I pick up a MUSIC MAGAZINE I expect to read about, I don't know, MUSIC, not sad, senile, scribblings from some ex hippie who still thinks he/she is in their teens or twenties. Boomers for the most part just can't age gracefully, they've got to age embarrassingly.
On the one hand, what difference, at this point, does it make? The young demographic may help in the midterms, or the next national election, but we still have 3 more years of cocksuckery with this administration.
....but we still have 3 more years of cocksuckery with this administration.
It's going to suck...bad! But it will also be fabulously entertaining!
Nice of them to do that after they helped elect and reelect him. It would be nice if the rest of the country didn't have to suffer zo generation retard could get an education in reality
At least the Millenials seem to be learning from their mistakes. What exactly is the baby boomers excuse?
I believe that when they don't jump on the Lizzy Warren bandwagon. And the boomers only elected carter and Clinton. Obama is much worse. Hell I would take McGovern over Obama.
Hell I would take McGovern over Obama.
in a heartbeat.
My first vote was against Nixon, so it was for McGovern. He was an old-fashioned, good intentions liberal. Though he had an addled understanding of economics and the nature of regulation, he had good, pacifist instincts when it came to foreign policy.
It's unclear to me whether Obama has a Marxian understanding of economics, or just a misunderstanding that happens to be about 179 degrees opposite of reality. Same with the nature of regulation. Obama's model for foreign policy is different from neo-cons, not in a non-interventionalist Ron Paulian way, but in an interventionalist anti-American way. And his instincts in foreign policy are awful.
No contest: McGovern.
It's unclear to me whether Obama has a Marxian understanding of economics, or just a misunderstanding that happens to be about 179 degrees opposite of reality.
Obama is a true believer in Central Planning by Top Men? . Not exactly Marxist but definitely in the same vein.
The boomers in 1968 would have voted for Ho Chi Mihn or Pol Pot if either had secured the democrat nomination. The sanity of democrat candidates in that era was a function of the WWII generation dominance, not the boomers wisdom.
Not true. A lot of boomers went to vietnam and got lives and had nothing to do with leftism. For every dude there were two or three Walters
I don't know about two or three, but it was certainly one to one.
Obamacare is certainly like the VietNam draft in that regard. There will be enough supporters to finally see the light on leftism, though there are so many who get exceptions that they won't feel the pain and go right on believing the bullshit until they die.
"What exactly is the baby boomers excuse?"
Ronald Reagan.
They're still mad at Ronald Reagan.
Except for the half of them or so that voted for Reagan.
I'm a boomer and voted for him twice and am not at all mad. He's my favorite President after Coolidge.
Reagan undid all the good of his first term by going full Keynesian in his second.
Young people trend left - everyone knows that. The only reason it seems like Boomers still do is because there's so damn many of them, and they like the sound of their own voices.
Young people trend stupid. Their only saving grace is that most of them continue to trend stupid when they get older.
I was extremely rebellious as a teenager. I thought all my authority figures were stupid and that I should be free to make my own decisions.
Now that I've grown up, I realize I was wrong.
...about nothing.
Story of my life.
Plus thier Hero JFK had his brains blown out and it traumatized them or something.
Young people have just lived for 20 years in a situation where one or possibly two people work and 5 people live off it. Where everybody gets things supplied to them for free. It looks good at 20, and they want it to continue for as long as possible.
And the Millenials are going to have to pay for their mistakes.
Or their kids will.
Boomers are at least 3 generations removed from the pain.
I've said it before and you acknowledged it: because of low turnout only about a third of millennial voted for Obama in the last election.
I know. But the ones who didn't buy Obama need to be shamed into mercilessly mocking and shaming those who did. Old peopleover 40 like me cant do it. So until you shame the hopey changy crowd your generation owns it
I'm 25, and I definitely point out the failures of the Obama presidency to my lefty friends. It's especially fun to point out the things that are failures even by their own standards. And indeed, a diminishing number is willing to defend Obama. Some of them are even leaving the left-wing plantation. And this is in Manhattan.
I find that my lefty friends are strangely quiet about politics. If nothing else they seem embaressed these days.
The reticence of my liberal friends in the past six weeks has been interesting. Before that they were freely ragging on Ted Cruz, saying "Rand Paul is a moron", and excoriating the Tea Party for government shutdown, etc. They were also confident that Tea Party types were afraid of ObamaCare's soon-to-be eminent popularity and success.
Curiously, they don't want to hear my Healthcare.gov stories. The first few days they were arguing that the website's failure was evidence of the overwhelming popularity of ObamaCare. Since then, silence.
Obama made them into fools in front of their friends and family. Suddenly being a prog isn't such a great wayto show his smart and tolerent you are.
It must be so rewarding to have a politics that consists solely of shitting on everything, sitting back, and pointing out every failure of the guys actually doing things and saying "told you so!"
Yeah it's not useful, helpful, or morally laudable, but it certainly has worked politically for conservatives. They still exist as a political force despite not having made a single solitary positive accomplishment in three decades.
Are you having a breakdown, the way that joe idiot did when it had to face its failures and resisted doing so?
"It must be so rewarding to have a politics that consists solely of shitting on everything, sitting back, and pointing out every failure of the guys actually doing things and saying "told you so!"
I was wondering what your talking point would be after your relative silence lately.
There is no defense of Obama or Obamacare, so you have to resort to this kind of shaming technique.
I almost feel sorry for you.
He was the perfect combination of a dream dad and an older brother who could run you ragged up and down the basketball court, wink and nod about smoking dope, and hip you to some older but still cool music, you know? In 2008, the Pravda of youth a fabulous magical mirror into which one could gaze and see all one's own best qualities shimmering brightly in those beady little ratlike eyes.
Guess what. That mirror has a crack in it.
Damn, Obama's way cooler than I am. When I hear "Maggie's Farm," I think it's a reference to season 2 of The Walking Dead.
Anyway, I wonder if the yoots will decide the problem with Obama is that he's not left-wing enough, and that what this country really needs is Elizabeth Warren in 2016.
Yeah, that was my first thought too.
Anyway, I wonder if the yoots will decide the problem with Obama is that he's not left-wing enough, and that what this country really needs is Elizabeth Warren in 2016.
Rome's slide into tyranny was essentially enabled by a succession of populist demagogues--some of their criticisms of the optimates had merit, but ultimately their real goal was grasping and then consolidating as much power as possible.
I suspect our own Republic will head down a similar path, given the dysfunctions and neuroses of our current mass society, but since we've already gone through the land-expansion phase of our history, I doubt there will be an Augustan renaissance of any kind.
I hope the liberals of the classic sense will get things under control. I expect that everything will get fucked up and there will be nothing to do except take advantage of the situation.
Dream dad or older brother? What kind of a loser wants the mulatto Steve Urkel for their dad or older brother?
"If I had a father, he would look like Barack Obama."
Steh-FAN Ur-KEL was a pretty cool guy.
He was, and sharp as a tack.
iI wonder if the yoots will decide the problem with Obama is that he's not left-wing enough, and that what this country really needs is Elizabeth Warren in 2016.
I fear there is much truth in this assessment.
I know "grownups" who want the Earth Mother's earthly manifestation, Elizabeth Warren, to wrap them in her warm protective embrace and smite the evil profiteering White Man.
The Late P Brooks|11.20.13 @ 10:12AM|#
"iI wonder if the yoots will decide the problem with Obama is that he's not left-wing enough, and that what this country really needs is Elizabeth Warren in 2016."
Ditto.
'That Obo promised all sorts of free shit and he didn't deliver. Let's get someone in there who knows how to tax (other) people to death.'
I was against him before it was cool!
and they dislike Obama so much that they will vote for his party's nominee in 2016.
This.
Hoopefully they will feel cheated and bitter and just not vote.
I was against him before it was cool!
I know a couple of hard core personality cultists who still believe anybody who doesn't like Him is a racist. I mean, there's nothing in His record as President which could possibly justify any dissatisfaction with the job He has done thus far.
Hater.
Well, I grew up in the country and like to hunt. So of course I'm racist and don't like Obama for that reason.
I know a couple of hard core personality cultists who still believe anybody who doesn't like Him is a racist."
Oh, you mean like Oprah? *barf*
"54% of Millennials Now Disapprove of Him!"
It think that's extraordinary just becasue the Facebook generation is such a consensus driven bunch. It's all about who likes what.
A lot of them are just now realizing the worm has turned.
Gillespie is so cool that he won't even link you to his The Daily Beast article.
Yes. that's a mistake. I always follow the link to show support.
He was the perfect combination of a dream dad and an older brother who could run you ragged up and down the basketball court.
Of all the lies and myths that have been spun about the man, the idea that he's a great basketball player is one of the most laughable. He plays quite a bit, but the reality is that he sucks.
That goof Arne Duncan on the other hand is a real player and can still bring it.
He's skinny nerd with no perceptible athletic ability.
NTTAWWT. Really.
Have you seen his jumpshot? It's like...uh... even better than the Obamacare website!
Unfortunately, Nick, the experience of late is that Americans' hopes and dreams are incompatible with truly effective and financially responsible economic policies told plainly and honestly. Instead, many Americans are fond of effortless gratification based on their mere existence, more succinctly called "entitlement mentality."
This is sadly true, Old Mexican.
And the really, really bad thing is that the entitlement mentality is no longer confined to certain subcultures, but has become nearly universal.
And, geezers are the worst with their arguments that social security and Medicare are not welfare programs.
You are requiered to be on medicare by law. Millions of people saw their private health plans turned into supplemental plans and thrown on medicare. Are they welfare queens?
And ss stole 13% of people's. Income for decades. Maybe they wanted that money then and are not happy with just getting it back now. Social security is welfare fir some. But fir most is it compensation for theft.
Re: John,
Yes, they are, John: They've been voting to keep those mandates in place election year after election year. Any politician honest enough to talk about reforming Medicare gets booted very quickly.
Although I agree with Old Mexican on principle, I think John actually has it right.
Wait until 401K's get seized (in part). OM will say he's entitled to his 401K money and someone younger will call him a welfare queen.
"Blame Bush" isn't a "meme," pissypants. He actually was a disaster, and we Millennials had our politics set probably for the rest of our lives by his many disasters. However much you, libertarian freethinker, might want us to, we are not going to reevaluate things and decide what we really want is another "faith-based" warmongering plutocratic moron.
So instead you want... a faith-based* warmongering plutocratic moron?
*You can have faith in things besides God, for instance government or your own superior abilities
It's such mindless nonsense. If you hate Bush for principled reasons--foreign policy, abuse of power, whatever--then you have to hate Obama even more, because he's worse in almost every way and in totally new ways.
Emoting is a poor substitute for thinking, and giving "your guy" a pass on the bad things he does simply tells him and others to come that you'll tolerate anything.
Absolute poppycock. A coward's way of defending Bush.
Nobody here hated Bush more than me.
Including you. I demonstrably hated Bush more than you, more than MNG, more than Joe from Lowell.
Obama is worse than Bush.
Absolute poppycock. A coward's way of defending Bush.
Wow....It's like shreeky went completely gay!
And there are also plenty of Christian (and otherwise religious) socialists out there. We hear so much about the religious right in the US that it is easy to forget that there is a considerable religious left as well, even in the conventional church and God sense.
Other than the issue of abortion, Catholic activists tend to run hard to the left.
Try not to use "we" so much. I'm a Millennial too, and while I certainly don't want another Bush, I also don't want an Obama or Warren.
"Tony" isn't a Millennial, not even close. Every word coming out of his mouth regarding his fake sockpuppet persona is just that: fake.
He actually was a disaster
On domestic policy, what did W do that is even in the same ballpark as the OCare catastrophe?
On foreign policy, are we in a better position or a worse one now than we were under W? I find it very hard to say we are more influential now than we were then. As far as ME wars go, Bush laid the groundwork for getting out of Iraq that Obama just carried out. And we're still in Afghanistan, apparently indefinitely.
And let's not mention the galactic clusterfuck of the Arab Spring/Libya/Egypt/Syrian/Iran.
"On domestic policy, what did W do that is even in the same ballpark as the OCare catastrophe?"
I'd mention TARP and follow up with the prescription drug benefit for starters.
You're right in that what Obama did--on those same issues--was worse than Bush, but Bush did them, too.
I mean, millions of Americans didn't lose their insurance because of the prescription drug benefit--like they did with ObamaCare.
And Bush didn't use the taxpayer funds in TARP to nationalize GM and give its stock to the UAW.
But what Obama did--which was much, much worse than what Bush did--he did in the same way that Bush did it.
Even the NSA stuff. That's domestic, and that crap was happening under Bush's watch, too.
Bush was a fuck-up on domestic policy, but mainly because he was a "compassionate conservative", would compromise with the Left on the "kinder, gentler" stuff, and never used his fucking veto pen. Probably the worst thing: he listened to Karl Rove.
The problem with the TARP and Part D examples is that they had bipartisan support; they were compromises with the Left. Ditto NCLB. Ditto the promotion of grotesque GSE lending practices that led to the 2008 meltdown.
Also, TARP and Part D were a couple of orders of magnitude less catastrophic than ObamaCare.
"Also, TARP and Part D were a couple of orders of magnitude less catastrophic than ObamaCare."
Yeah, I'd rather take a bullet to the stomach than a bullet to the head, but I'm not willing to pretend getting shot in the stomach is okay--just because he didn't shoot me in the head.
And shouldn't we give Bush some of the "credit" for what Obama did with TARP? Would anything Obama did with TARP have been possible if Bush hadn't pushed so hard for TARP in the first place?
Same thing with the NSA. Obama is using the arguments to violate our constitutional rights that the Bush Administration pioneered.
You are too delusional to respond to.
Calling RC Dean delusional makes Tony look even more ridiculous than usual.
No tony it just appearsthat way because you are delussional. The fact that you helped ekect someone who has done everything you claim to be against is so embarassing to you you just pretend it is not true. You and every obama suppoerters' legacy to liberalism is making it the ideology of drone strikes, NSA spying, millions losing their health insurance and doctors and corporate ripoffs. Own it honey. It is all yours.
Millions are not losing health insurance. Millions are gaining health insurance. You've gotta start figuring things out for yourself instead of having FOX News bobbleheads tell you what slogans to think.
You don't understand me. I don't support everything Obama does. My main motivation is the desire never to see Republicans in power ever again, and Obama or Generic Democrat will have to be pretty fucking bad to get me to switch. Which is what you guys seem to want here on this utopian idealistic libertarian freethinking haven.
No, Tony.
Millions of people have had their policies cancelled because of Obamacare.
Those millions of people, along with the millions of current uninsured, are being OFFERED insurance...that's overpriced and that they can't afford.
As punishment for not being able to afford that overpriced insurance, they will be subjected to a penaltax.
Regardless of what you think the intent of Obamacare was, its actual impact will be to deprive millions of people of insurance and then fine those people for lacking insurance. That's what's going to happen.
Oh, and a Medicaid expansion.
Congrats.
There is a small percentage of people who are "losers" under the new plan, meaning they have to pay more than they previously would. A much larger portion will be "winners"--getting access to insurance they didn't have before or getting it for cheaper. If you want to fault the president for not explaining this in careful detail, fine, but it's perfectly sensible and to be expected considering the mission is to get everyone covered. There will be a few who pay more because they are being required to get adequate insurance instead of their shit plans they had before and they make too much money to get subsidies to cover the difference. Yes.
But your tears are of the crocodile sort and I dare you to deny it. There's nothing odd about this kind if churn. It's just that now there's a mandate whose only goals are to cover everyone and thus bring down costs for everyone. If you expect that nobody would have to pay more, anywhere, under any circumstances, then you put way more faith in government than you've ever demonstrated before.
This is all politics. All bullshit, all around. You don't care about people getting raw deals. You are jumping with glee at Obama's poll numbers going down. That's all this is to you. You couldn't give the slightest shit about healthcare policy. You're libertarians--it's not even on your radar until you get old and start suckling at the Medicare teat like everyone else.
"There is a small percentage of people who are "losers" under the new plan, meaning they have to pay more than they previously would. A much larger portion will be "winners"--getting access to insurance they didn't have before or getting it for cheaper."
I know what you're thinking: How could somebody be so dumb?
Still, I don't think he's getting paid to write this drivel.
It's like when the Jim Jones people in Guyana drank all that kool-aid. Tony's like that. It's just that he's a progressive instead of being in the People's Temple.
If the Moonies had gotten a hold of Tony first, instead of trolling the boards at Hit & Run, he'd be hassling people in an airport parking lot somewhere asking for donations.
If the Moonies had gotten a hold of Tony first, instead of trolling the boards at Hit & Run, he'd be hassling people in an airport parking lot somewhere asking for donations.
Frankly that would be a greater benefit to society and would give him the opportunity to acquire some valuable begging...err...job skills!
Somewhere out there has to be a political/philosophical approach that puts human well-being at the forefront and that requires all approaches to policy to be empirically grounded. The only one that comes close is what is usually called liberalism or progressivism. And there's nothing inconsistent about taking that approach while also appreciating the value of individual liberty.
Your problem is you are a la carte socialists just like everyone else, while denying you are socialists at all. Taking your "first principles" to their logical conclusion would mean anarchism. Otherwise you simply endorse a few collective endeavors and reject others--just like liberals. We're just willing to admit it and thus are not hypocrites.
"Somewhere out there has to be a political/philosophical approach that puts human well-being at the forefront and that requires all approaches to policy to be empirically grounded."
Yeah, and ours has nothing to do with respect for individual rights--and isn't grounded in anything like economics.
How do you explain your enthusiasm for the argument that Jews didn't have a right to their lives during the Holocaust--because the government didn't recognize their rights?
How do you explain your insistence that Rosa Parks didn't have the right to sit in the front of a public bus--because the government said she didn't have that right.
You throw the Jews into the ovens, you throw Rosa Parks in jail--saying that their rights didn't really exist--and then you come here and lecture us about not putting human-well being at the forefront?
You're a propaganda victim. You're sick in the head. You're so sick, you're willing to victimize anybody so long as someone propagandizes you into thinking it's for the common good. Your conscience is dead to the suffering you cause.
...and on top of that? You'd rather take a position that's virtually indistinguishable from that of the Nazis and/or the segregationists--rather than admit that people have rights regardless of whether the government recognizes them. It's worse than pathetic. I already told you why everyone laughs at you; now you know why no one empathizes with you, too.
After all this time you don't get it--It doesn't fucking matter whether we consider rights as prior to enforcement or not. What matters is whether people actually get to enjoy the rights. What good did it do the Jews or Rosa Parks to have rights "out there" in the cosmos waiting for them? Not a damn bit of good, that's what. This is not a point of disagreement, it's a philosophical jerkoff session.
You would accuse me, when you think you're actually helping people by making a distinction between pre- and post-enforcement rights from your armchair? What a crock of hysterical shit.
Well cleary it did Rosa Parks a lot of good. She new she had the right so she went ahead and exercised it.
"Well cleary it did Rosa Parks a lot of good. She new she had the right so she went ahead and exercised it."
If Abraham Lincoln had never described slavery as a "crime against humanity" and abolished it, if (because what the Nazis did to the Jews wasn't against the law at the time) the Nazis had never been charged with crimes against humanity at Nuremberg--the rights of slaves and the rights of Jews during the holocaust would have always existed and been violated anyway.
I'd say that Tony's real problem is that he can't tell the difference between someone's rights being violated by the government and someone not really having any rights--but it's much worse than that.
Tony sees that admitting that people have rights regardless of whether the government recognizes them would make it harder for Obama and the progressives to violate our rights when they push through whatever legislation they want. And Tony would rather argue (like a Nazi) that the Jews rights to their lives during the holocaust weren't real and (like a Klansman) that Rosa Parks' rights weren't real either.
Tony would rather be just like a Klansman or a Nazi than admit that we all have rights--and let that get in the way of whatever progressive agenda.
And that's disgusting.
It shows up in the flippant way he dismisses all the millions of Americans who have lost their insurance because of ObamaCare. Tony doesn't give a shit about those people. If Tony could, he'd march all of us libertarians up against the wall.
And he comes here and lectures us about not being compassionate towards other people.
That is a good point Ken and it makes a lot of sense. If they admit to a basic set of human freedoms that are inviolable then it constrians their efforts to ram everyone into their dystopian future.
Somewhere out there has to be a political/philosophical approach that puts human well-being at the forefront and that requires all approaches to policy to be empirically grounded.
I put justice at the forefront.
We talk about liberty a lot, so let's talk about justice for a moment.
It's simply not just to charge people more than their true actuarial cost to insure because you've decided to charge other people less than their true actuarial cost to insure.
It's simply not just to force people to buy insurance that covers services they're biologically unable to require, or vanishingly unlikely to require, because you want to use those premium dollars to cover other people.
Taking your "first principles" to their logical conclusion would mean anarchism.
No, it wouldn't. I believe in a delegatory theory of government power, so anything it is moral for one person to enforce against another directly can rightly be made a subject of law. And any system that allows for the legitimate use of force in defense of law is not anarchistic.
You don't care about people getting raw deals.
That statement is complete crap, utterly contradicted by the other assertions about us that you routinely make.
In any other context, you would assert that we are biased in favor of the "fortunate". But that would mean that when we say we're pissed that the ACA is screwing over the healthy, the young, the abled, and the affluent, we mean that and actually are pissed.
It's no less just than any other collective effort. Some people get more than they paid for, some people get less. It's the same with police protection, roads, social security--anything, anywhere, that people pay for and receive the benefits of collectively. And it's the model upon which private insurance is based.
Which includes and excludes what?
Oh, I'll say in any context that your political philosophy is nothing but a set of ad hoc "principles" meant to justify using government force to ensure that the wealthy get to keep as much of their wealth as possible, while throwing everyone else and their needs to the private market (which of course is the selfsame project).
Note: add insurance to the list of things Tony doesn't actually understand.
And it's the model upon which private insurance is based.
Note: add insurance to the list of things Tony doesn't actually understand.
There has been a deliberate campaign to attempt to convince people that private insurance is nothing more than a "risk pool". The purpose of that campaign has been to support the argument Tony makes here.
It's complete rubbish, of course, as anyone with any familiarity with the actual history of what we call "insurance" would know.
Which includes and excludes what?
That, naturally, becomes a topic for extensive discussion...since it's the entire rest of political philosophy.
But, as just an example, if a private person is entitled to seize the product of another person's labor by force, just because they think they need it, then government would possess that same power. If a private person is not entitled to do that, then a government also is not.
Political morality is a subset of ethics, and not something separate from it. How could it be separate from it?
The other thing that's comical is that you claim we don't care about people getting raw deals...
...after you admit up front that YOU don't care that people are getting raw deals.
"Fuck those people getting raw deals!" yells Tony. "Fucking them lets me help other people - people I prefer. So fuck 'em, let 'em suffer!"
This is what is presented to us as a model of empathy. You know, something to aspire to.
Nobody is dying because of the ACA. Lots of people's circumstances will improve to the tune of not going bankrupt over healthcare costs. On balance it's good for people and not really bad for anyone, at least compared to the prior status quo. As I've made clear, I'd prefer a simple Medicare-for-all system.
The actual funny thing is a bunch of libertarians whining about people not getting the free lunch they were accustomed to. Let Republicans do that--it's their thing. But you guys doing it is proof positive that you're getting your thoughts from the Bubble.
The actual funny thing is a bunch of libertarians whining about people not getting the free lunch they were accustomed to.
So people paying for insurance were getting a free lunch?
Wow.
The actual funny thing is a bunch of libertarians whining about people not getting the free lunch they were accustomed to.
You mean all the people moving on to Medicaid that will contribute little to nothing for their services?
Holy shit. You really are unbeleivably re-fucking-tarded.
No, there isn't. The radical progressive ideologies fascism and communism proved that. The problem is that 'human well-being' is an empty, meaningless term and therefore can be construed to mean anything anhyone wants to beleive in.
Yes, there is. In order to re-order society to a radical progressive ideology a one-size fits all apprach is required. Unfortunately, human beings are not one size and Proggies conveniently ignore that FACT. So, in order to advance their agenda political and when necessary violent force is necessary to pound the square peg in the round hole. This was proven several times over the past 100 years where whole societies were denied individual liberty, up to an including their individual right to live.
Your problem here is that you think that a community that freely and voluntarily gets together to work for the benefit of the whole is "socialist". No, it is not. Socialism is a political agenda that eliminates the option to not participate. It is not voluntary and there is nothing free about it. Socialism, even the less benign than fascism/communism variety, still requires the State to usurp individual liberty in order to force its collectivist agenda.
.
No it doesn't. Not even close. I cannot speak for all here but just because we advocate for the smallest, least intrusive government possible; with elected officials wholly accountable for their actions and liable to suffer the same penalties as private citizens for transgressions; that people should be free to contract with others; that free individuals should be able to work without intrusion, engage in discourse without intrusion, acquire property without intrusion; and defend themselves and their property without intrusion does not make us anarchists. I will grant you that it may be a messy and at times chaotic society but that isn't what anarchy is.
You are equating all collective endeavors. They are not all equal. State imposed collectivism is socialist tyranny. A voluntary collective endeavor is not. It's not a subte difference.
This just reveals you as hopelessly naive. Do you really want everyone here to start articulating how hypocritical the proggies really are? We'll be here for decades. But, part of that comes down to your lack of real world experience and misunderstanding of human nature. There are inconsistencies and hypocrisy in every political system. It is inevitable.
A much larger portion will be "winners"--getting access to insurance they didn't have before or getting it for cheaper
And you know what you still don't get?
I keep pointing this out, but you still don't get it.
People without insurance prior to the passage of the ACA fall into two categories:
1. People with disposable income left over after all their bills
2. People with no disposable income left over after all their bills
The people in group #1 won't get subsidies. So the ACA is now forcing them to buy insurance they didn't want, at a high and unsubsidized price, that will probably wipe out their disposable income.
But those people have decent incomes, so Tony doesn't care about those people. So let's talk about the second group.
The second group can't afford insurance - even subsidized insurance.
"Look, folks! For the low, low price of $100 a month after subsidies, you can afford health insurance in our Bronze plan! So you pay us $100 a month, and we give you a plan with a $6000 deductible!"
Guess what? Those people can't pay $100 a month. And they can't pay the $6000 deductible. So your plan is offering them nothing.
All that will happen is that those people will realize they can't pay the premium, and you will penaltax them for this. So the ACA is nothing to those people but an anvil.
And if they do pay the premium, they won't be able to pay their deductible, and we'll still have a uncompensated care problem.
Congrats.
I don't think your figures are right but I don't really want to be dragged into defending this law too much. I'm a liberal Democrat, so I don't really like this conservative Republican healthcare plan and definitely don't expect it to be a panacea. I would in fact welcome its failure if it meant as a country we take the obvious pragmatic next step and go to a single-payer plan. But my fear is that we'd do what we usually do--take the stupid and cowardly route whereupon politicians would be afraid to touch healthcare for yet another half century.
This is so laughable. How on earth can you remotely believe this? Not one Republican went along with this disaster. So how is it a conservative Republican health plan? This is a liberal Democrat health plan. You own it big boy, and you own all the repercussions.
Heritage came up with a loose framework for it (and stopped advocating it shortly thereafter) some 20 years before it was implemented. So, even though the only people to ever advocate it were a certain squishy technocrat Republican governor (who had a notably liberal Democrat economist put together the details) and Democrats from all over the spectrum, it's totally a conservative Republican plan. SCIENCE.
The Tonys of this world are clearly in their own separate reality. I think it's a total waste of time arguing with them as nothing your or others here may say has the least chance of penetrating.
I consider modern liberalism a type of mental dysfunction seriously. Think about what makes for mental dysfunction and compare that to the mindset of liberals. You won't find much difference. And no, they won't ever see it; from their separate reality from the rest of us they can not.
"I don't really like this conservative Republican healthcare plan and definitely don't expect it to be a panacea. I would in fact welcome its failure"
...
Then what was with your whole "You people are all crazy right wing haters who wants the poor to die" just above here?
Do you really think you can defend the POS ACA in one breath, then disown it in the other?
..even more funny - while you're doing this complete policy flip-flop to protect your ideological sacred cows, you accuse others of having 'no real policy ideas'.
Whereas the grand policy idea the liberal democrats created* and implemented patently SUCKS, and to date liberal democrats have no viable alternatives to 'fix' it other than to lash out at critics or head for the hills pretending they had nothing to do with it. Bravo. You're like the fucking Black Knight in the Holy Grail = missing two legs and an arm, and taunting your opponent that they should be begging for mercy.
*(please stop with the bullshit claim that this was a "republican" idea. As though RINO Masshole Romneycare was being cheerleaded by the rest of the nation. ZERO REPUBLICAN VOTES means you own it, bitch)
Tony...What will you say in six months if it is obvious Obamacare is a disaster? Will you then accept he screwed up, or will you still blame Bush/TeaThugs/whatever?
Is there anything he can do that will make you shake your head and say 'can't we impeach this idiot?' Or, have you completely totally turned off your brain?
Hahahahahahahahaahahahahahahah.....whew....deep cleasing breath....Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
Oh.....Tony....I am in your debt sir! That was wonderful!
You're right, Tony. The worst thing about Obama is that he's just like Bush--only more so.
So you must love him.
Because it has to be a one-or-the-other proposition?
You are retarded.
Tony only sees things in black and white red and blue.
Yeah, since this site was started in 2003, I spent almost every day on this website for the last five years of Bush's presidency denouncing Bush as an idiot and a traitor to the Constitution.
I denounced his Iraq War, and his staff as war criminals for what happened at Abu Ghraib. I denounced him as an incompetent for his behavior in Katrina; I denounced him for enlarging the Great Society by way of his prescription drug benefit; I denounced him for his warrantless wiretapping, etc., etc.
But I should love Obama for being just like Bush--in every way that matters.
You're so fucking dumb, Tony. You're so dumb, you can't even conceive of someone hating Obama and Bush for the same exact reasons. That's why everyone laughs at you.
When did Obama start a decade-long war based on lies and get tens or hundreds of thousands of people killed for no reason?
Did you miss the part where I said I was against the Iraq War?
You have been here way too fucking long to actually be a millennial.
You're a late X, AT BEST.
I'm an early millennial according to any of the various ranges out there.
I'm curious to what the ranges are.
Yeah, it's probably definitional.
I don't consider anyone born before 1988 to be a millennial.
Use a different date, and you get a different set of people.
The first time I saw the word "millennial" used it was to describe people who came of age around the turn of the century/millennium. Under that definition its probably anyone from 1980-1995?
I remember being told in high school I was "generation Y". Which means about as much to me as generation apricot.
Generation Y just meant you were after and not a part of Generation X.
I've been here longer than Tony (or just didn't notice him over the sound of joe), and I am fairly certain I fall into the millennial category (as dumb as a I think generations are).
Re: Tony,
It's more of a tired and old excuse like those told by the old communists to explain the fall of the Soviet Union.
He actually was a disaster, and we Millennials had our politics set probably for the rest of our lives by his many disasters.
No, that would have been Reagan.
we are not going to reevaluate things and decide what we really want is another "faith-based" warmongering plutocratic moron.
By going for a non faith-based warmongering plutocratic moron?
Biden 2016!
I was born under Reagan, didn't become politically aware until Clinton (when I was a Republican because my mom was), and didn't become politically active until Bush the Lesser, at which point both I and my mother became socialists.
Right, which means you're too young to remember when everything was Reagan's fault.
I've come to appreciate that acutely.
You're a socialist? You believe in socialism? Why?
He actually was a disaster,
Which is why Booosh 2.0 has faithfully kept all of his policies in effect.
You are too delusional to respond to.
Stick with this one. I like it.
The only bumper sticker you will ever need, good for all time, simply reads
WORST.PRESIDENT.EVER
It was true for Bush the first, it was true for Bush Jr., and it's true for Obama. There are zero reasons to suppose it will not be true for the next one up.
I like it.
If you hate Bush for principled reasons--foreign policy, abuse of power, whatever--then you have to hate Obama even more, because he's worse in almost every way and in totally new ways.
But Booosh did that stuff for the wrong reasons!
Obama is a DEMOCRAT, which means his heart is pure.
JFK is the earliest president that I remember (actually, I really only remember the day he was shot).
I grew up under LBJ and Nixon. Raised a family under Carter, Reagan, Bush I, and the early parts of Clinton. Watched my kids raise families under Bush II and Obama.
There isn't a single shred of doubt that Obama is the worst president of my lifetime.
Agreed, though, overall, I'd say this is the worst government in our history. It's in large part the accumulation of its shitty predecessors.
This. It's bigger than Obama. Obama is bad. But Obama is more of a symptom.
People here might hate me for saying that, but Obama is what you end up with when you basically throw limited government and the Bill of Rights to the four winds.
LBJ has a bigger kill record, and we're still living with the cyclical poverty that the Great Society gave us, but in terms of executive competence, Obama is worse than any in my life time. Possibly the worst in American history.
Listen to what he had to say just in the last twenty four hours.
http://cnsnews.com/news/articl.....e-care-act
"So, look, I am confident that the model that we built, which works off of the existing private insurance system, is one that will succeed," Obama told the Wall Street Journal's CEO Council Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.
"We are going to have to, (a) fix the website so everybody feels confident about that. We're going to have to, obviously, re-market and re-brand, and that will be challenging in this political environment."
That is a bubble the likes of which we have never seen in the White House. Most men who get that far in politics have good survival instincts to at least know what the time of day is. He has been sheltered his entire political career and never needed reality based instincts.
That statement reveals the insipid Thomas Frank "What's the Matter with Kansas"/George Lakoff mindset at work, along with his managerialism.
No where does he state, "We're going to get to the bottom of where we went wrong and re-examine our assumptions in light of recent events." His entire focus is on superficial image bullshit.
He's still convinced that somehow he can bend reality to fit into the dysfunctional "model" he and his mates constructed, when the private sector already had developed marketplace websites that actually worked, didn't force anyone to have medical insurance for the simple act of breathing, and weren't an identity thief's dream.
Tony vociferously defends this guy because, like most progs, they share the same socipathic broken zero-sum thinking. Bring up actual free-market solutions that would lower costs, like selling insurance across state lines or transparent service pricing, and their eyes glaze over. They literally are intellectually incapable of understanding how these types of measures work, so they assume that they simply have no merit. Anything that doesn't involve some government mandarin codifying increasingly and exponentially strict regulations they simply cannot conceive as successful.
This is the result of a political philosophy of demanding that someone else wipe your ass your entire life and pay you for the privilege.
You're skipping over Ford. And despite his awful mistakes, he was clearly better than any of the others in your list simply because nobody remembers how shitty he was.
Ford - the least awful president in my lifetime. Which pretty much tells you all you need to know about the pointlessness of elections as the most competent of the last 8 POTUS actually had a record of semi-competence in the office and voters rejected him in favor of bad platitudes.
An Elizabeth Warren nomination in 2016 would be an early Christmas present for the GOP. Imagine her and Rand in a debate. Red Teamers should be doing whatever they can to push Warren and undermine Clinton.
She would wipe the floor with the bloody pulp that used to be his face. It would be epic and I would love to see such a thing.
She would wipe the floor with the bloody pulp that used to be his face. It would be epic and I would love to see such a thing.
Easy there rough trade.....
Re: Tony,
She certainly has the mind (and the face) of a mop. I'll grant you that.
Why do rightwingers expect women politicians who are old enough to be grandmothers to be fuckable before they are taken seriously? It's kind of sick really.
You know the reason FOX News has so many blond bimbos on staff and the GOP offers up its share of pretty women politicians... you don't have to be intelligent to regurgitate their idiotic nonsense.
Re: Tony,
I don't know, ask one. I am stating two facts: She's an obtuse ideologue, and she lacks charisma.
Because they're in business to make money? Just a wild guess.
I'd say she's better than anyone on the scene including Barack Obama at articulating liberal values. She's one to watch from both sides. Just get her on a stage with Rand Paul and watch what happens.
Re: Tony,
Such a statement generates a fightening question in my mind: better at what?
Articulating liberal values.
Re: Tony,
Maybe you have the privilege of hearing something different in your mind when she speaks, because so far the only "values" that I've been able to discern from her verbiage is "government knows wat is best for you" and "you didn't build that" (which Obama took from her.)
You don't need to convince me you've never listened to her speak.
Re: Tony,
Oh, I've heard her speak. Just not whole speeches as I prefer to keep my sanity intact but I've heard her speak.
What I am trying to tell you is that there's nothing impressive about this college professor who lied about her heritage to get a discounted price of entry. To me, she's still an obtuse ideologue and an economically-ignorant loon, two features betrayed by two things she articulated in the past: "government knows better than you" and "you didn't build that."
Articulating is the easy part. Convincing is the hard part. Good luck with that after this administration is done.
Good comments there.
The smart thing to do would be to throw Obama under the bus and try to save progressivism. But they cant do that. That would be racist. So they are going to go down with him.
They also can't do it because if they throw him under the bus it is an explicit repudiation of their core values.
John, you keep thinking people are going to reject progressivism rather than double-down on it.
I just don't understand why you can be so sure.
CBS: Bastion of conservative spin.
Conservative Bastion of Spin
Most people do not pay much attention to politics. Millions of people consider themselves liberals and vote dem because they think being so means they care about the less fortuneate and civil rights. Obama by telling people who have loss their insurance to go fuck themselves by defending NSA spying and a lot of other things is pissing that whole brand away.
A couple of years ago Abercrombie and Fitch offered to pay one of the people on Jersey Shore to stop wearing their clothes. His association with them was killing their brand. Obama and his brain dead enablers in the media are doing the same thing to liberalism right now. But since he is black and they played the race card so much against his critics, they can't throw him overboard.
"A couple of years ago Abercrombie and Fitch offered to pay one of the people on Jersey Shore to stop wearing their clothes. His association with them was killing their brand. Obama and his brain dead enablers in the media are doing the same thing to liberalism right now."
Tony is almost too good to be true. If we wanted to pay someone to go around on the internet and make Obama supporters look like a bunch of morons to average people? No libertarian--not even if we paid him--could do that as well as Tony does for free!
That's why I've always doubted that Tony is a paid sock puppet! Because if some pro-Obama group somewhere is paying him to make libertarians look bad and progressives look good? Then he's completely ripping them off!
How could you pay Tony to do that, read what he writes here at Hit & Run, and then keep paying for MOAR? He's single-highhandedly done more to sink the Obama cause with people who read comments on this site than anyone else possibly could.
Tony is real. And the hard core progs think just lime him. He is actually one if the smarter ones.
"Tony" is not about making progressives look good, but rather disrupting and derailing discussion. I imagine his main mission is to keep an eye on us and commenting is just a side line.
shrike is a talking points memo spammer.
Or they both come here to do their shuck and jive for free, which makes them run of the mill morons.
Either way, it's best to ignore them.
Maybe my mission is to get you guys to refine your arguments in preparation for a world in which there are a lot more of me than there are of you. You guys are stagnant. You think in slogans. And worst of all--something you don't even seem to realize--you mostly all appear to be acquiring your thoughts from the Republican media bubble. It's the only explanation for why you're so confident in yourselves despite being wrong about so many things. You have to be getting reinforcement from somewhere.
LOL
Yeah, Tony, you got me. I think in slogans.
You're utterly unable to make an argument based in first principles and then follow it through to all implied conclusions. That's why most of what you say collapses utterly when subjected to the least little reductio ad absurdum.
Even if I'm wrong about everything, in terms of our relative methods I'm fucking Aquinas compared to you.
Why do we need to talk about first principles? We share all the same first principles by the time we get to talking about economic and social policy. What you're referring to is a set of claims about those economic and social policy that derive from slogans (not first principles).
"What you're referring to is a set of claims about those economic and social policy that derive from slogans (not first principles)."
Tony admits his thinking is dominated by slogans, and that's progress.
We share all the same first principles by the time we get to talking about economic and social policy.
No, we don't.
My daughter could kick your ass.
Maybe my mission is to get you guys to refine your arguments in preparation for a world in which there are a lot more of me than there are of you.
Yeah a world fully staffed with the....needy, whiny, and useless!
Re: Tony,
The polls suggest that there actually many less of YOU than you think. I would start becoming even more paranoid if I were you, just to be in phase with reality.
Blah blah blah....
You're here, you're queer, still not voting democrat.
Is that slogan-y enough for you?
Sheesh you people are so annoying. Gay this gay that.
Slate (of all places) had a really good article a couple of months ago that explained that the Democratic party was made of two primary wings (with lots of little splinter groups too). There is the "social justice" wing that cares about race and poverty and civil rights and so on. Then there is the "solidarity" wing that cares almost exclusively about blue-collar labor. These two wings frequently work in opposition to each other, and the early Obama years where focused almost exclusively on the solidarity wing.
The interesting part now is both wings of the party are seeing the devastation that Obamacare brings to its own interests. This is going to be an amazing disaster for Obama.
Also at Newsweak, Niall Ferguson pwns the true believers.
Ah, I just noticed how old that is. Still a good read.
Has Nick always been this salty in his writing? Last week it was sharting, this week it's clusterfucking.
Second look? Nick Gillespie?
He had an article probably somewhere in 2010 about the disconnect in the establishment's thinking on the debt hike that poured the salt on them like the deserving slugs they are.
Re: Tony,
Talk about a "meme". You are impervious to irony.
There is really no way to know that considering the tool that purports to serve as the implementation doesn't work, so your argument is based on wishful thinking. The fact is that 5 million policies have been cancelled - POLICIES, not people. And we haven't even seen the effect that the employer mandate will have on the rest of the plans, which according to estimates from the IRS to those of the CBO, could mean that the number of "winners" will quickly become a tiny minority and not the majority that you're touting so highly.
You're right in at least one aspect: Pretending to care that people are getting "raw deals" is playing politics. Makes no economic or logical sense, but it makes for good politics.
Don't you think it's a bit rich to be bitching about the problems of this plan when your plan is to subject all people's healthcare to market forces alone (i.e., if you're poor, you are free to die in the street)?
Re: Tony,
Nobody is subjected to market forces, Tony. We're all the market. Everyone of us. Your statement is as obtuse as saying that we're all being subjected to gravity. Stop making a fool of yourself.
You're too thick to realize that mandates and grandiose plans cannot escape market forces. The true cost of things manifest themselves one way or another. You state that you abhor price rationing yet what you prescribe is worse: queue rationing.
What's a "true cost"?
Re: Tony,
The market-clearing price, the point where there are no more willing sellers and no more buyers. If through mandates or regulations or other impediments to supply the market does not reach the clearing point, the price will manifest itself in non-monetary form like for instance time. You will see queues which represent unproductive time or empty shelves which will mean lead time.
Consider the following two people:
1. Person X is a drunken bum who doesn't work and has no income. He gets sick, and can't pay for a doctor. So he dies in the street.
2. Person Y works for a living, but doesn't have a high IQ and can't get that good a job, although they try hard. That person used to have health insurance, but now they can't afford it because their existing policy was terminated due to the requirements of the ACA. That person now has a lot of stress in their lives, worrying about what to do about this problem.
You know what? I care about person Y's problem, but person X can go fuck themselves.
And I reach this position of relative caring based on both liberty AND justice AND empathy.
I guess that's where we differ. I simply do not care about the personal lives or habits of people when formulating social policy. But I'm not an insufferable busybody nanny like libertarians.
Given the wealth of this country, we can easily afford to provide good healthcare availability to every single person. If we don't do it, then we fail morally. I don't believe there is a moral case to be made to deny people healthcare for any reason, considering serial killers in prison get it on the public dime. So whether someone is a no-good layabout is hardly my concern. But again, I'm not a nanny-stater like you.
Re: Tony,
Your statement implies arrogance, not charity.
Whoa! Projecting much, Tony? What is it about the meaning of the word "libertarian" you don't get?
Ah, I see. So anybody that resists such lofty goals is ipso facto a "busybody nanny." At least in your mind.
Up is down and slavery is freedom. I am finally beginning to understand you, Tony.
Yes, there is a moral case: Doctors are not slaves.
You don't really get irony do you?
"we can easily afford..."
Who's "We", again, fuckstick?
And what's with this 'availability' shit? Health-CARE *is* widely 'available'. Its money that's a bit more unevenly-dispersed.
A problem easily rectified.
"If the state doesn't pay for everyone's health care, that constitutes nanny statism." = today's Tony non sequitur
So whether someone is a no-good layabout is hardly my concern.
When you're attempting to make me feel guilty about someone's state of being, everything about them becomes my concern.
Saying that it's not your concern is morally obtuse.
If I told you that person A spent the last 25 years of his life in prison, and asked you how you felt about that morally, you would have to be a moral monster to believe you could answer that question without knowing if that person was guilty of a crime.
"Well, you know, I'm not a nanny stater. When putting people into prison, I don't trouble myself with silly questions like whether they committed the crime for which they were imprisoned. That's hardly my concern." - signed, Tony
Yeah because whether they committed a crime is relevant! Whether someone is an entrepreneurial go-getter or a basement-dwelling cheeto addict is not relevant to whether they deserve healthcare in an advanced industrialized country.
Suppose I agree with you. Why would you be a defender of Obamacare? Do you think it was even intended to do this? You should be hating Obamacare, as it has set back the ideal of a rational health care system 40 years.
But, you speak just like a socialist. Socialists are famous for making policy that goes terribly awry, and hurts millions. But, the pain it causes is not relevant, because policy uber alles.
One gets the impression Tony is just on the edge of running out of the room crying.
I think he already did that and has only just come back becasue it misses us.
He just cannot quit you. 😉
They must have heard he wasn't a socialist.
Re: Tony,
The problem is that it is too late to have a single-payer program. Those were easy to implement in Europe during the 40s and 50s because people were living under autoritarian regimes and through war economies. People were already accustomed to top-down impositions from government. Not so in the post-war United States.
Also, the current single-payer healthcare entitlements (Medicare and Medicaid) are already grossly underfunded and increasingly undersuppling the market as many less doctors become unwilling to sell their wares at the discounted prices that the government is paying, exactly like I argued previously. That means the current systems are completely bankrupt - there's no money to fund them, it has to be borrowed from abroad. To be more succinct, your dream of a single-payer system is a pipe dream, economically-speaking.
The bigger argument against single payer is the state of Illinois.
When you sell services to the state of Illinois, Illinois is the single payer.
But the single payer isn't paying all it's bills.
The proper term for Tony's fantasy is "single-delayer". I'd say single-denier but that implies government decision-making responsibility to deny something when they can more easily delay payment until the person owed gets fed up and stops asking for the payment. Same outcome, but the delay gives them plausible deniability.
The delays will come in the form of asking for ever-increasing documentation and red-tape. Somewhat akin to the federal takeover of education with their "core" fetish.
From the above thread, we can conclude that Elizabeth Warren will be their new Avatar.
Out: Obama
In: Elizabeth Warren
Tony has kept me entertained for over an hour. Much better than television.
Besides the Obamacare fiasco, I think most young people are growing up and are witnessing time marching on while they march in place. They want to move on to material things that make life "nice". The war cries of youth are not so loud anymore!
I get lots of people in my office looking for jobs. And I have deduced that the idealism of "doing it your way" has crashed. Most are desperate for a job because they want a car, a partner, and a future. They see the ads on TV for cars they can't qualify for and they are shopping for clothes at Walmart rather than Macy's.
For lack of a better term, they are sobering up and facing the facts of life we all face at one time or another. "I gotta do better".
Those who first voted in 2008 at 18 yrs of age, are now 24 and are reaching that point at which youth recedes in the rear view mirror of life, and maturity begins. They are beginning to reflect on where they are in life, and they are not hopeful as the witness what our leaders are doing for them.