American politics 2016: Lawyers, Guns, and D-Money

or you could go to someone whom you cite often who's not a lib idiot and whose conclusions line up with mine almost as well as drone rockets did on al-Awlaki:

Despite all of that, here in 2016, the Affordable Care Act is still law, as is marriage equality, and so is the right to be gay and a soldier. Wall Street is still regulated better than it was in 2008. The president has moved the country further toward a policy to combat the climate crisis than anyone thought he could. He has moved boldly—and alone—on the issue of this country's insane attachment to its firearms. And he has redefined for all time the concept of a lame-duck president as a president with no more fcks to give. As Michael Grunwald shrewdly points out, if you listen to the Republicans on the campaign trail, they mostly complain about all the stuff that the president has managed to accomplish.

He has had to be more of a wartime president than he wanted to be. The drone war—and its consequences in both the short and the long term—are his alone. Sooner or later, some of the kids he's sending back to Central America are going to end up dead, and that will be on him, too. The surveillance state is still alive and well in the United States and Edward Snowden is still alive and well in Moscow. He can't close the prison at Guantanamo because Congress won't give him the money to do it.

He has been as progressive a president as our stunted, money-drunk politics allows, and that's been enough. Has he disappointed me? Yes, which gives him something in common with every president of my lifetime.

yeah i don't like him in that mode. expect more.

DEMAND more.

except, as you know, it's all fucking over.

He has been as progressive a president as our stunted, money-drunk politics allows

self-fulfilling horseshit

we're kind of perpetually fucked until we somehow manage to reconcile mid-term elections with the presidential elections in order to get movement on the actual process of legislation

it's kind of bullshit we even refer to them as "mid-term" when the makeup of the legislative body is more important than the president, who has executive power but functionally can't introduce policy beyond handing it to the party representatives in congress and making bold speeches

DEMAND more.

except, as you know, it's all fucking over.

― skateboards are the new combover (Dr Morbius),

It's not a binary. It's being an adult. It's possible like many friends who finally have access to health care to campaign for Sanders because HRC is a horror.

Screw that "adult" shit in particular, it's the mantra of the O-bots on JoeMyGod and the like.

any "progressives" who are disappointed in Obama after his 2008 spring/summer antics had their heads in the sand.

I voted for O in the NY '08 primary, and it's the last shameful time i'm going to be pressured into shoveling 'adult' shit.

Man, Karl, going back through some of these old SOTUs really bring back the memories.

http://i.imgur.com/vh9OnZf.jpg

loool

maybe this is the start of a grand new tradition

I didn't vote for him at all in '08: his FISA vote, so soon after the decade's horrors, was too puerile for me to accept. He had done nothing for me to feel disappointed about; he's governed exactly as he says he's going to govern. I voted for him in 2012 because he'd done enough for me to recoil at the idea of Romney taking Miami-Dade.

he's governed exactly as he says he's going to govern

something to be admired about this, imo. his lack of duplicity is pretty unusual for a prez.

Screw that "adult" shit in particular, it's the mantra of the O-bots on JoeMyGod and the like.

Sorry you can't imagine nuances to the word, like David Brooks attaching "reform" to "conservatism."

His foreign policy's been more confused than expected: super exec powers bequeathed by Bush + "smart" "tactical" Clinton-era recoiling from ground combat + chickens coming home to roost in the Middle East = shit's fucked up. But I can't imagine any president of either party creating coherence out of Middle East policy, in part because the idea that we can impose coherence on independent actors is fucking mindless. I do admire the Iran deal -- in broad strokes.

In contrast to 2008 (most of it anyway), I'm thinking about domestic matters only.

I mean: Saudi Arabia's our most trusted ally.

he's governed exactly as he says he's going to govern

also crap, let's start w/ promise to walk a picket line with a union, close Guantanamo, warrantless surveillance is "not who we are"...

even Cheney strongly hinted he'd come around to inheriting a good chunk of the required worldview.

I....don't think he inherited it? After the FISA vote I knew he believed it.

also he "hates stupid wars," several of which he's prosecuted

as usual you are fudging a lot of facts

idk what else he could have done to try and close Gitmo, for example. No way does he want that open.

Writers are so often the worst judges of their own material.

xxpost

I am sure glad his grand bargain with Boehner fell apart. Not sure his pledge of civility and bipartisanship meant that proposed agreement

plz see my recent link on how he could've closed Gitmo by himself, Shakes, cuz i dont gaf anymore

Really?

Also I did not expect him to allow his Justice department to go after whistleblowers more than any prior administration in history. But yeah, some good accomplishments

Morbz I don't see any discussion of Gitmo in that intercept link, or are you referring to something else

yes something a few weeks ago

well it's not on this thread so idk what yr talking about

and you replied to it!

so Dubya wants to shut down Gitmo

oh that

yeah idk how compelling that legal reasoning is, certainly it would be immediately challenged/drag on for years/go to the supreme court

morbs, which presidents do you think have accomplished more than obama (or have a more morally admirable record) in the last 50 years?

kinda like asking me to choose among mafia chieftains, no lie

LBJ was our last liberal prez, so despite that little genocidal oopsie in Vietnam, him. And everyone else except maybe Reagan, Nixon and Clinton.

and that means nothing

you think Dubya was better than Obama = you are insane

i knew GOTCHA was coming

i dont care about ranking these shits; you are all fucking hobbyist fantasists

that's a GOTCHA? It was a bizarre omission on your part!

T/S: ILE film threads vs. ILE politics threads - which one makes you not want to live more

tbh i don't even think LBJ was better than obama, i oppose the drone campaign but i'm not sure how anyone could make the case that anything obama's done is worse than escalating a needless war for no reason and carpet bombing another country for three years straight.

you are all fucking hobbyist fantasists

sez the baseball fan

I thought you liked Poppy Bush.

austan goolsbee on sanders' single payer plan

2) Sanders is right that we shouldn't just think of his single-payer health plan as a $15 trillion tax increase. We should ask whether people would be better or worse off in total. But even by that measure, lots of low and middle income workers would, in fact, be worse off and paying higher taxes.

Sanders' basic argument against the newspaper articles characterizing his health plan as needing a $15 trillion tax increase has been that we shouldn't think about tax rates alone but should ask the broader question of whether people are better or worse as a whole after the program goes into effect. If a single-payer health plan lowers health costs overall then his reasoning says that the taxes we raise for the health plan will be less than what people currently spend on health care and if we concentrate those taxes on the rich, then a typical person could actually be better off after the tax than they were before.

As a theoretical matter, that's not wrong. We should try to make that kind of calculation when we think about government programs. The thing is, though, that argument does rely quite heavily on the economic notion of "pass-though". Oversimplifying here: the Sanders health essentially plan puts all current health costs onto the government but will pay for it with cost savings and with taxes including a payroll and income taxes around 9%. Doing that frees companies from their currently massive health care costs. The Sanders plan counts on the employers then passing all of that savings though to their employees in the form of higher wages (and not keeping part of it as higher profits). If the companies don't pass it on, then, for sure, workers will end up worse off because they will pay the 9% payroll and income taxes but not have higher incomes to compensate (remember that employers pay about 75% of the normal health insurance premium for their workers so their savings on the employee contribution for health care will not normally add up to anything close to the 9% tax hike they're paying. They need the employer to pass on the other 75% to them).

So you need to decide whether companies would pass through the savings to employees. Would they? Many economists trust that markets would pass it through. Ironically, many of the Democrats that, like Sanders himself, have called for a repeal of the "Cadillac Tax" on expensive health insurance plans have implicitly presumed the opposite. They fear that the Cadillac tax will lead companies to reduce or eliminate generous health care plans without raising employee's wages in return.

But even with complete pass through, there are some significant low and middle income groups that would face net tax increases under a Sanders health plan. Generally, people that currently pay less than 9% of their income on health insurance will be worse off under a plan with free health care but a 9% tax to pay for it. That makes me think the plan hasn't been well thought through.

Almost anyone with low or moderate income getting insurance through the Obamacare exchanges, for example, will have health premia capped at rates below the Sanders 9 percent tax. A typical non-smoking family of 4 making with an income of $50,000 per year would have to pay in excess of $1000 a year more in taxes under the Sanders plan than they pay now for health insurance in the exchange You can plug in different characteristics in the Kaiser Family Foundation premium calculator to see for yourself here or you could look at the JAMA stylized examples here http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1738900 (in real life, some of those people would have out-of-pocket expenses and deductibles when they get care, some of them would get help with those costs and we would need to weigh those against whatever co-pays they might have with a single payer plan but you get the idea).

People on Medicaid have caps on their health insurance cost at around 5% of income. So the working poor would face a net tax increase of 4% of their income. Kids with jobs but that can stay on their parents' health care plans up to age 26 under Obamacare would have to pay 9% of their income in taxes with Sanders' plan but without getting any upside from the government paid health care (though their parents would get some part of it back, depending on what they pay for the incremental coverage for the child).
I'm sure there would be other groups, too, if we worked through the numbers. His plan seems likely to hit a lot of people with tax hikes that it probably didn't intend to hit. If the employers don't pass on their savings to raise wages, it will hit all workers.

Isn't that 9% thing a red herring? Workers pay 2.2% in the Sanders plan, the other 6.6% is a payroll tax paid by employers who would no longer have to provide insurance for workers.

Isn't only using the "premiums" number also grossly misleading? Those are high deductible plans, and they have copays and coinsurance too. I don't think you have deductibles and coinsurance under single-payer. But yeah I guess a non-smoking family of four earning $50,000 a year who NEVER EVER ACTUALLY USE ANY HEALTH CARE SERVICES and buy the cheapest plan on the market would be a little worse off.

Just being able to live in a country where everyone was able to get health care based on their need for health care and not have to worry about whether they could afford it should be cause for joyous nationwide celebration. Because everyone needs health care and no one can predict or control how much health care they will need or when they will need it. That, and the fact that a single payer system done properly would not cost society a cent more than the train wreck we have now.

that goolsbee post was written before the sanders plan actually came out

ezra klein on bernie single payer plan

krugman:

My column and Bernie Sanders’ plan crossed in the mail. But the Sanders plan in a way reinforces my point that calls for single-payer in America at this point are basically a distraction. Again, I say this as someone who favors single-payer — but it’s just not going to happen anytime soon.

Put it this way: for all the talk about being honest and upfront, even Sanders ended up delivering mostly smoke and mirrors — or as Ezra Klein says, puppies and rainbows. Despite imposing large middle-class taxes, his “gesture toward a future plan”, as Ezra puts it, relies on the assumption of huge cost savings. If you like, it involves a huge magic asterisk.

Now, it’s true that single-payer systems in other advanced countries are much cheaper than our health care system. And some of that could be replicated via lower administrative costs and the generally lower prices Medicare pays. But to get costs down to, say, Canadian levels, we’d need to do what they do: say no to patients, telling them that they can’t always have the treatment they want.

Saying no has two cost-saving effects: it saves money directly, and it also greatly enhances the government’s bargaining power, because it can say, for example, to drug producers that if they charge too much they won’t be in the formulary.

But it’s not something most Americans want to hear about; foreign single-payer systems are actually more like Medicaid than they are like Medicare.

And Sanders isn’t coming clean on that — he’s promising Medicaid-like costs while also promising no rationing. The reason, of course, is that being realistic either about the costs or about what the system would really be like would make it a political loser. But that’s the point: single-payer just isn’t a political possibility starting from here. It’s just a distraction from the real issues.

But to get costs down to, say, Canadian levels, we’d need to do what they do: say no to patients, telling them that they can’t always have the treatment they want.

It should be noted that foreign single-payer systems are just as good or better than the US 'system' at delivering the outcomes people want.

neither of those are anti-single payer

Can certainly see how some of those details need to be explained, but I'm a little surprised by Klein's level of alarm - insisting the plan is "unrealistic" in the subtitle, the thing about hospitals closing, and the raising of income taxes on the wealthy (which is like 3.4-4% increase if you're making less than ten million dollars a year).

The thing I would say I'm most alarmed about in HRC's plan is nothing specific I can see about how the uninsured in states with right wing governors will ever get to go the doctor. At all.

In terms of the economics, I don't see anything in Clinton's plan to reduce insurance premium costs. Is that where people who are somewhat well off are primarily feeling it? I only see mention of reducing deductible and co-pay costs.

3.4-4% increase if you're making less than ten million dollars a year

And over $250K, of course.