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Let’s be honest. Without counting the sarcastic there are two kinds of people calling Cash for Clunkers a success. The first kind is the person saying the Cash for Clunkers stimulus program is successful. These people are stupid. They don’t understand the most basic economic principles and mechanisms a stimulus program is trying to affect.
I was just listening to BBC. It’s a good thing to do every other day or so. You get a clean outside perspective. They were describing the Cash for Clunkers program. LOL Just the way they dryly described it made it sound so totally stupid. The British accent “Cash for Clunkers,” then talking about the $4500 subsidy for buying a new car, how the dealers didn’t get the money up front so are crippled cash flow wise, how the program is so backed up, how it was so popular the whole 2 billion – or whatever – was used up in the first 48 hours, and how it effectively is causing people to “reschedule” their purchases. And the best part was summarizing the story by calling the Cash for Clunkers an indicator of how effective Obama’s philosophy of buying one’s self into prosperity will be.
Health care reform is an easy thing to talk about on the campaign trail. But I think when all these congressmen start really looking at the complexities and size of things – they’ll start to get cold feet, especially with the political weather that has kicked up. In the case of broad sweeping naïve Change® I’m sort of glad. We need some reform in the way we pay for health care though, that’s for sure. The insurance model doesn’t fit, people get screwed, and so on.
In a single payer option there would be no competition. That’s why it’s called single payer. That’s what Canada and Australia have. It only concerns the payment side, like Medicare. Obama did believe in this until just recently. I mean, that was one of the reasons many people voted for him. But now he no longer supports it.
Palin is talking about two things I think. One might be the clause that provides DNR consultations. But the valid thing she’s talking about is the eventual (or immediate) need in any universal provider of anything for free (or paid for through taxes not in proportion to that service) is the need to — ration. And you don’t ration life-saving care away from
productive tax revenue sources. It would only be a matter of time, a new downturn or war, before priorities would have to shift to the healthy intelligent young people and the old and deficient would all be screwed – because there aren’t any other options for someone who wants to care for a retarded child or old senile parent.
Noisy Dove recently sat down with our medical consultant, Dr. Dove. Noisy Dove discussed the health care reform at length with Dr. Dove. Here are the highlights of Dr. Dove’s perspective as one actually in the trenches.
Noisy Dove:
So Dr. Dove, what do you think of the 1000 plus page health care reform bill?
Having some rational stances and being able to argue them… That’s one big weakness I see in the average politician. Clinton was good. He could really rationalize in a seemingly logical way. But most, especially this past week, are terrible arguers.
How will keeping everything in English make immigrants learn more than a few words?
You already have to put icons on important signs – and some are only icons (crossings and so on). And if an advertisement in an area would be more effective in Spanish – who the hell is the government to say it has to be in English?
The housing market crashed and caused real problems, which have essentially been fixed, except for the numerous bad mortgages floating around. This scared people. People are getting less scared. That’s about it.
The stimulus couldn’t have done anything real. It made some people get scared and some get hopeful – so it probably didn’t help emotionally either.
In order for the Taliban to ‘win’ all they have to do is not lose. It’s like that for about any
rebel/guerilla group – but the Taliban has even more going for it. It’s part of a world wide movement, a pan-Islamic movement that wants to put the entire world under Taliban-Afghanistan-like rule. For this irrational and impossible goal, the simple fact that there are foreign troops fighting in Afghanistan is a victory for them.
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