Now, it’s very likely that with Jeff “Too racist for the 1980’s” Session as AG, it’s going to be gone, maybe literally soon enough.
The guy's history (reportedly) includes desegregating schools, having the head of the state Klan given the death penalty, and supporting the nomination of Eric Holder.
‘No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.’
Any bets on whether Congress will "consent" to the President keeping his empire? Maybe give him a general waver? IMHO they'd be crazy not to, his empire is a big reason why people voted for him.
You stand and say, often, that we should give the accused the benefit of the doubt. Yet here you wish to talk about Clinton’s corruption, as if it is a given and solid thing...
What part of this are we pretending we don't understand? That they're not given big bags of money (fact 1)? Or that they don't do "favours" for the people who do this (fact 2)?
As Marc Rich's pardon demonstrates, the Clintons' behaviour doesn't rise to the level of "criminality" because we can't legally prove an defined agreement between the first fact and the second. However we do know both those facts exist.
Bill and HRC are both lawyers, they know where the lines are drawn. They apparently don't step over lines which end in their arrest. However the line they stay inside is "provably criminal" rather than "ethical" or "appearance of impropriety".
As long as they deliberately mix their personal and public business (for example raising money for her own private "charity" from the people she's doing favours for as the Sec of State) and getting big bags of money transferred to their control; "openly corrupt" (as opposed to "criminal") seems like a good way to describe them.
Feel free to suggest a description other than "openly corrupt", but whatever we say needs to describe how they use their public office to rake in 9 or 10 digits of money.
Trump is in this situation because for months no one serious thought he'd win. Having said that, I have serious doubts that either Obama or Bush before him had good transitions. There were a lot of "not ready yet" mistakes, possibly leading to 911 in Bush's case.
...when faced with the least godly candidate to ever grace the stage...
From their point of view, why is this true?
When Trump does his fowl-mouthed-old-man thing, does he take the Lord's name in vain? Call down God's wrath on someone? Has Trump worshipped other gods (money doesn't count)? Discouraged the worship of God? Sued a church or something?
In other parts of the world, there are Christians being put to death for the crime of having their god. Obama seems determined, because of political correctness, to not call the situation for what it is, even if the followers of that ideology/religion some times show up here and shoot up an army base or gay night club. Hillary would follow Obama's policy.
After that we have... what? Sex? Compare what Trump has said to what Hillary+Bill have actually done.
Trump brings a total lack of dignity to the office, which we might compare to Congress investigating Hillary for various crimes even before she takes office.
Trump's real "sins" (compared to HRC), are an absolutely total lack of piety (i.e. Pride) and a disconnect from what I'll call "the Christian Culture"... although weirdly his family seems really functional (and non-Trump-ish), so I'm not sure how much "family values" would weigh against him.
And then we have the Supreme Court, where Trump has already released "his" list (copied from Heritage or someone)... and this is probably the most important point. Trump offered a simple deal, the Religious Right backs him and he'll use Heritage(?) to pick his Supreme(s). The Court is currently 4-4.
I’m sure most conservatives would rather not vote for a man known to assault women, but those voters – unlike liberals I suppose – did not view Trump’s behavior as fundamentally disqualifying.
To be fair, liberals consider this sort of behaviour "disqualifying" only when it's a member of the GOP. They were just fine with Bill's behaviour and defended him against impeachment... even though the Presidency wasn't at stake with VP Gore also a Dem.
Trump got +5% of Dems to vote for him (i.e. 5% more than Romney), but +4% of the GOP switched to Hillary. So a significant number of people were turned off by either/both sides.
I don't think anyone really condones Trump's behaviour, they ignore or tolerate it because they like the message. For example the Evangelicals went heavy for Trump, not because they approve of his divorces or believe he's actually pro-life, but because he put in writing who he'd put on the Supreme Court.
That fact that he might be just a cynical egomaniac instead of someone with a sincere hatred of various minorities doesn’t make it better, because his followers still hear it and start defending the notion that only white judges can give fair rulings in cases even vaguely adjacent to issues of race.
I mostly agree with you, but I'm not sure how useful it is to take literally clear trash talk.
Let's look at speech from a much smoother politician.
“If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.”
If it were a White judge (one assumes ruling the same way which is likely), Trump would find a different way to be an ass. Witness going after John McCain's war record.
Where, other than Mass, was this attempted, much less implemented?
Exchanges, mandates, the lack of pre-existing conditions, and tax subsidies were the right’s *only ideas*.
Lack of Transparency prevents consumers from knowing how much something costs. Force the publication of all costs.
Lack of Transparency also prevents consumers from knowing how safe a doctor or hospital is, and it's a real challenge to figure out who is good at what. How many surgeries of type X does Doctor Y do a year? What is his success rate?
3rd party pays prevents consumers from having any skin in the game, figure out a way that they do, the HSA isn't a terrible way to do it but there are others.
In the news recently are drugs off patent (epi-pens for example) which increase in price to crazy levels. Why do we have one pen while Europe has 9 or so? Regulatory capture? Standards set too high?
And yes, I shouldn't lose my insurance just because I have to move across state lines, so letting insurance be sold across state lines would be good.
And yes, defensive medicine is a bad thing, so tort reform would be good.
Medical mistakes are a problem. There are better ways to address this than lawyers, where the doctors are incentivized to hide their mistakes so other doctors can make the same mistakes. Something like what we do for vaccinations would probably work, and/or what the Air Force(? I think) does for mistakes. Reviewed them, examine them, don't blame the guy who did it, blame the system and fix it.
Of course, I am *not* making entirely random movements.
You say that like doing this is the equiv of walking across the room. It's more like winning a gold medal at the Olympics, actually a lot harder because *someone* is going to win even if everyone screws up. If you claim to have put on ice-skates for the first time and you got a gold metal at the Olympics (one of the other comparisons used by experts to describe how unlikely all this was), then we should be concerned.
The next question we should ask is if there's a simpler explanation.
Neither was Clinton. She was being advised by someone who knew the market well.
Even ignoring that the guy who "knew the market well" wasn't profitable himself, how many people who "know the market well" get these sorts of results? When her defenders talk about other people making this level of money in the market, they're talking about raw money (from people trading far bigger accounts), not percentage gains.
Moreover, while you’re citing *this paper* as evidence of all the claims, I will point out there’s no raw data of claims like ‘She often sold at the highest price a day and sold at the lowest one’, which would be pretty damning…but isn’t *here*.
I'm not willing to pay the $40 to down load it, those damning claims come from reporters' summaries and others evaluations. Worse, many of the records either don't exist or never did. This link here details what we know about her highs and lows. http://www.nationalreview.com/article/436066/hillary-clinton-cattle-futures-windfall
So, throwing *that* away, what exactly was this office bribing her for?
So if I can't detail exactly who was paying the wife of the governor and exactly who benefited and how, the math should just get a handwave? My lack of ability to detail exactly what transaction took place doesn't change the underlying math, nor the shear insanity of someone like HRC risking her family's net worth in a field where the expected result is large losses.
It's possible we're looking at another "Marc Rich" situation where the transaction is deliberately kept vague enough so one can't get arrested, and if we could put a back-in-time movie camera on this we'd see handshakes rather than written agreements, and winks rather than handshakes.
I'm focused on the math of all this. And the math would be damning even without the whole "and the office was convicted of routinely did this for VIPs at that time" aspect of it.
The latest start date I’m finding for the Tea Party movement was in January 2009… within days of Obama taking office. Add the Tea Party to Isis on the list of things he miraculously founded.
Hmm... looks like I got the President right but the incident wrong.
The movement began following Barack Obama's first presidential inauguration (in January 2009) when his administration announced plans to give financial aid to bankrupt homeowners. Following a February 19, 2009 rant by CNBC reporter Rick Santelli on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange for a "tea party,"[11][12] over fifty conservative activists agreed by conference call to coalesce against Obama's agenda and scheduled series of protests, including the 2009 Taxpayer March on Washington.[13][14] Supporters of the movement subsequently have had a major impact on the internal politics of the Republican Party.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Party_movement
Although granted, they were pretty irritated over lots of things Bush did.
The key word there is "Massachusetts", not "Romney". The rest of the Country is no where near as liberal as the state which kept Ted Kennedy in power for 47 years.
That some Dems wanted something more to the left is irrelevant, they put together a plan as far to the left as it was possible to pass. The reported price for GOP input to the plan was supporting "the public option". And shock, what was middle of the road in Massachusetts was far left in much of the rest of the country.
Most politicians follow, as opposed to create, public opinion. The President is one of the few with a good sized budget and the ability to connect to the media, and that wasn't close to being enough.
Absolutely the GOP did what they could to fan the flames, but the core of the ACA is to expand coverage to a minority of people at the expense of the majority who were happy with what they had. If I ask "what is in it for me?" and your only answer is "higher prices so we can cover someone else", that's not going to be popular.
Second, you seem to think they made paid speeches while in power.
HRC was in office the moment Bill stepped down (being the NY Senator certainly counts, especially if she or Bill was giving speeches to NY banks). Then she became Secretary of State. And for the bulk of that time it was assumed she'd be President.
Trump has explicitly said he traded in government favors. He just did it from the other side.
A real estate guy in New York? And internationally? From the 1970's on? No way he could function without paying off the unions/politicians/organized crime. That doesn't change that he doesn't (yet) have a multi-year network to accept bribes. Granted very much that he's starting with a lot of the underlying pieces in place.
Congress has the right to impeach for whatever reason they want, regardless of whether or not something is a crime.
Impeaching Trump on the basis of why the voters elected him sounds more like an excuse than a reason. I think we wait for it to be a problem (and to be clear, it probably will be), and then act on it.
What is “medical reform”? I’ve never heard that term before. All I’ve heard from conservatives at this point (apart from dismantling Medicare) is a) HSAs and b) open up competition across state lines and c) “torts!”.
Conservatives? The liberals wrote the ACA, aren't there any liberal ideas for reducing cost short of single payer and price controls? Having said that, let's make a partial list on why the market doesn't work and go through it.
Lack of Transparency prevents consumers from knowing how much something costs. Force the publication of all costs.
Lack of Transparency also prevents consumers from knowing how safe a doctor or hospital is, and it's a real challenge to figure out who is good at what. How many surgeries of type X does Doctor Y do a year? What is his success rate?
3rd party pays prevents consumers from having any skin in the game, figure out a way that they do, the HSA isn't a terrible way to do it but there are others.
In the news recently are drugs off patent (epi-pens for example) which increase in price to crazy levels. Why do we have one pen while Europe has 9 or so? Regulatory capture? Standards set too high?
And yes, I shouldn't lose my insurance just because I have to move across state lines.
And yes, defensive medicine is a bad thing (how bad is unclear).
And so are medical mistakes. There are better ways to address this than what we've been doing.
I'm sure I'm missing things but this is the conversation which we should have had, and it would have been impossible for the GOP to not get involved because reducing medical costs is something everyone wants.
Do you want to know how to explain the ’30 trillion to one chance’? It’s easy: The person who said that said it about the *Clintons*, in the *90s* There. That’s almost it entirely. It’s crying wolf.
That number comes from a peer reviewed study published in the Journal of Economics and Finance. A google search on each of the authors doesn't go to anywhere either left wing or right wing. The authors and study are here: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF02920493
They stripped out HRC's name for the study to at least try and keep it from being a partisan mess. They appear to be exactly what they claim. BTW that 30 Trillion is after making lots of happy assumptions in favor of the trader, a more conservative estimate is 10^16. Her activities involved exposure to losses that potentially could have been greater than her family's net worth.
And there was a lot of innumerate nonsense in the allegations...
The New York Times is hardly anti-Clinton. Neither of those journals are right wing rags.
Let's review what you're claiming actually happened. HRC went into an office known for doing exactly what I'm claiming at exactly the time HRC was there. The office suffered from systemic corruption and shortly afterwards set records for the level of fines imposed. The office gave her extreme VIP treatment and ignored all sorts of rules about her account. However, although she was the (pregnant?) wife of the governor, they didn't dare cross *that* line for her, although they did for others. She then took insane risks which could have broken her family, and beat really long odds to make eye-popping returns based on the advise of a man who was loosing money.
Even ignoring the math, why is this a more likely interpretation? HRC is hardly known for taking wild risks.
We have had literally had *hundreds* of crimes asserted to have been committed by them, most of them investigated to the point we know they were nothing.
Many/most of those crimes were indeed made up, and others were simply not provable criminal, but that's a far cry from "nothing". The pardoning of Marc Rich ignored normal processing, vetting, standards, and advise, but since we can't prove it was linked to the large money Denise Rich gave to Bill's library, or HRC's campaign, it's not provably criminal.
However these ethical adventures have always followed the Clintons around, and "not provably criminal" is a very different standard than "ethical", much less "appearance of impropriety". To their (dis?)credit, the Clintons are good at staying on this side of "not provably criminal", so imho there's a good chance that the Cattle Futures thing would have worked out the same way.
But that doesn't change that the math and situation strongly say she was given those trades, she wasn't at risk for destroying her family, and so forth. "Not provably criminal" is so far from "appearance of impropriety" that I can't tell the difference between that and "openly corrupt"... probably because there is none.
Republicans certainly gained seats in the the midterm, but lost the presidency and seats in both the Senate and house in 2012.
The cost of the ACA goes way beyond a few seats.
The Dems went from a super majority because the GOP was (rightfully) despised to losing control of the House (at the next election) and then the Senate as soon as enough Senators who'd voted for the ACA faced election.
If the ACA had been popular, or if the dems had just backed off and done nothing, they would have kept their super majority MUCH longer because there's no way Ted's seat would have gone to the GOP.
If the Dems had enacted popular legislation they would have kept the House, they might or might not have lost their Super Majority but they'd still be in the majority in the Senate and thus would now have tilted the Supreme Court Left. The Elderly Leftist Supremes might have been convinced to retire and be replaced by Obama.
The GOP taking power in 2010 across multiple states was huge because of the Census and gerrymandering, the Dems would have been the group doing that if they could have stayed the party of fiscal responsibility for two years.
Imagine the Tea Party never existing because Obama governed like a fiscal conservative (or at least moderate) and the GOP was still burdened with the reputation of being the party of incompetent war, big, irresponsible spending and irresponsible tax cuts.
I don’t think the political expense actually has been that extreme.
We've been through about three election cycles where it's been a serious issue, and has caused Dems to either retire or lose elections. Incumbents losing elections is seriously rare.
...people who don’t need insurance must pay into the system for the entire model to work...
This is the wrong discussion, and was the wrong discussion back when the Dems did the ACA.
What the country needed was medical reform (i.e. cost), not medical insurance reform (coverage).
The Dems turned the system upside down, promised all sorts of things, including that costs would go down, and delivered increasing costs, a government mandate on my person, and a broken website.
Further, IMHO the dems' leadership was counting on entitlements being almost impossible to remove after enacted to safeguard the ACA. Of course I also think they believed the ACA would work better than it has at reducing expenses and so forth, and that the political expense wouldn't be this extreme.
Maybe... but we're running the risk of thinking that anyone other than HRC could have beaten Trump.
Time after time after time I proclaimed Trump couldn't go any further, and I was always wrong. At every step I underestimated him, at some point I have to wonder if it's something other than luck, especially with people like Scott Adams dissecting his moves.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Obama Is Warning America About Trump’s Presidency. Are You Listening? | New Republic”
The guy's history (reportedly) includes desegregating schools, having the head of the state Klan given the death penalty, and supporting the nomination of Eric Holder.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/in-alabama-jeff-sessions-desegregated-schools-and-got-the-death-penalty-for-kkk-head/article/2005461
On “The Scorecard”
‘No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.’
Any bets on whether Congress will "consent" to the President keeping his empire? Maybe give him a general waver? IMHO they'd be crazy not to, his empire is a big reason why people voted for him.
On “Obama Is Warning America About Trump’s Presidency. Are You Listening? | New Republic”
Odds are the Left is proclaiming the Right are Nazis again. The Right mostly doesn't see itself as racist.
"
What part of this are we pretending we don't understand? That they're not given big bags of money (fact 1)? Or that they don't do "favours" for the people who do this (fact 2)?
As Marc Rich's pardon demonstrates, the Clintons' behaviour doesn't rise to the level of "criminality" because we can't legally prove an defined agreement between the first fact and the second. However we do know both those facts exist.
Bill and HRC are both lawyers, they know where the lines are drawn. They apparently don't step over lines which end in their arrest. However the line they stay inside is "provably criminal" rather than "ethical" or "appearance of impropriety".
As long as they deliberately mix their personal and public business (for example raising money for her own private "charity" from the people she's doing favours for as the Sec of State) and getting big bags of money transferred to their control; "openly corrupt" (as opposed to "criminal") seems like a good way to describe them.
Feel free to suggest a description other than "openly corrupt", but whatever we say needs to describe how they use their public office to rake in 9 or 10 digits of money.
"
test
"
Trump is in this situation because for months no one serious thought he'd win. Having said that, I have serious doubts that either Obama or Bush before him had good transitions. There were a lot of "not ready yet" mistakes, possibly leading to 911 in Bush's case.
On “On Reversing the Tide”
From their point of view, why is this true?
When Trump does his fowl-mouthed-old-man thing, does he take the Lord's name in vain? Call down God's wrath on someone? Has Trump worshipped other gods (money doesn't count)? Discouraged the worship of God? Sued a church or something?
In other parts of the world, there are Christians being put to death for the crime of having their god. Obama seems determined, because of political correctness, to not call the situation for what it is, even if the followers of that ideology/religion some times show up here and shoot up an army base or gay night club. Hillary would follow Obama's policy.
After that we have... what? Sex? Compare what Trump has said to what Hillary+Bill have actually done.
Trump brings a total lack of dignity to the office, which we might compare to Congress investigating Hillary for various crimes even before she takes office.
Trump's real "sins" (compared to HRC), are an absolutely total lack of piety (i.e. Pride) and a disconnect from what I'll call "the Christian Culture"... although weirdly his family seems really functional (and non-Trump-ish), so I'm not sure how much "family values" would weigh against him.
And then we have the Supreme Court, where Trump has already released "his" list (copied from Heritage or someone)... and this is probably the most important point. Trump offered a simple deal, the Religious Right backs him and he'll use Heritage(?) to pick his Supreme(s). The Court is currently 4-4.
"
:Amusement:
"
To be fair, liberals consider this sort of behaviour "disqualifying" only when it's a member of the GOP. They were just fine with Bill's behaviour and defended him against impeachment... even though the Presidency wasn't at stake with VP Gore also a Dem.
Trump got +5% of Dems to vote for him (i.e. 5% more than Romney), but +4% of the GOP switched to Hillary. So a significant number of people were turned off by either/both sides.
I don't think anyone really condones Trump's behaviour, they ignore or tolerate it because they like the message. For example the Evangelicals went heavy for Trump, not because they approve of his divorces or believe he's actually pro-life, but because he put in writing who he'd put on the Supreme Court.
"
Trump did significantly better than Romney with Blacks, Hispanics, Asians... but not Whites.
Reading the stats... one of the big things which stands out is Trump did a lot better with the poor (under $30k) than Romney.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/08/us/politics/election-exit-polls.html
"
I mostly agree with you, but I'm not sure how useful it is to take literally clear trash talk.
Let's look at speech from a much smoother politician.
“If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.”
-Obama, talking about the Republicans
"
If it were a White judge (one assumes ruling the same way which is likely), Trump would find a different way to be an ass. Witness going after John McCain's war record.
On “A One Party Nation”
Where, other than Mass, was this attempted, much less implemented?
Lack of Transparency prevents consumers from knowing how much something costs. Force the publication of all costs.
Lack of Transparency also prevents consumers from knowing how safe a doctor or hospital is, and it's a real challenge to figure out who is good at what. How many surgeries of type X does Doctor Y do a year? What is his success rate?
3rd party pays prevents consumers from having any skin in the game, figure out a way that they do, the HSA isn't a terrible way to do it but there are others.
In the news recently are drugs off patent (epi-pens for example) which increase in price to crazy levels. Why do we have one pen while Europe has 9 or so? Regulatory capture? Standards set too high?
And yes, I shouldn't lose my insurance just because I have to move across state lines, so letting insurance be sold across state lines would be good.
And yes, defensive medicine is a bad thing, so tort reform would be good.
Medical mistakes are a problem. There are better ways to address this than lawyers, where the doctors are incentivized to hide their mistakes so other doctors can make the same mistakes. Something like what we do for vaccinations would probably work, and/or what the Air Force(? I think) does for mistakes. Reviewed them, examine them, don't blame the guy who did it, blame the system and fix it.
On “The Scorecard”
You say that like doing this is the equiv of walking across the room. It's more like winning a gold medal at the Olympics, actually a lot harder because *someone* is going to win even if everyone screws up. If you claim to have put on ice-skates for the first time and you got a gold metal at the Olympics (one of the other comparisons used by experts to describe how unlikely all this was), then we should be concerned.
The next question we should ask is if there's a simpler explanation.
Even ignoring that the guy who "knew the market well" wasn't profitable himself, how many people who "know the market well" get these sorts of results? When her defenders talk about other people making this level of money in the market, they're talking about raw money (from people trading far bigger accounts), not percentage gains.
I'm not willing to pay the $40 to down load it, those damning claims come from reporters' summaries and others evaluations. Worse, many of the records either don't exist or never did. This link here details what we know about her highs and lows. http://www.nationalreview.com/article/436066/hillary-clinton-cattle-futures-windfall
So if I can't detail exactly who was paying the wife of the governor and exactly who benefited and how, the math should just get a handwave? My lack of ability to detail exactly what transaction took place doesn't change the underlying math, nor the shear insanity of someone like HRC risking her family's net worth in a field where the expected result is large losses.
It's possible we're looking at another "Marc Rich" situation where the transaction is deliberately kept vague enough so one can't get arrested, and if we could put a back-in-time movie camera on this we'd see handshakes rather than written agreements, and winks rather than handshakes.
I'm focused on the math of all this. And the math would be damning even without the whole "and the office was convicted of routinely did this for VIPs at that time" aspect of it.
On “A One Party Nation”
If anyone cares: This link deconstructs Trump's history with racism...
http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wolf/
"
Hmm... looks like I got the President right but the incident wrong.
The movement began following Barack Obama's first presidential inauguration (in January 2009) when his administration announced plans to give financial aid to bankrupt homeowners. Following a February 19, 2009 rant by CNBC reporter Rick Santelli on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange for a "tea party,"[11][12] over fifty conservative activists agreed by conference call to coalesce against Obama's agenda and scheduled series of protests, including the 2009 Taxpayer March on Washington.[13][14] Supporters of the movement subsequently have had a major impact on the internal politics of the Republican Party.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Party_movement
Although granted, they were pretty irritated over lots of things Bush did.
"
The key word there is "Massachusetts", not "Romney". The rest of the Country is no where near as liberal as the state which kept Ted Kennedy in power for 47 years.
That some Dems wanted something more to the left is irrelevant, they put together a plan as far to the left as it was possible to pass. The reported price for GOP input to the plan was supporting "the public option". And shock, what was middle of the road in Massachusetts was far left in much of the rest of the country.
Most politicians follow, as opposed to create, public opinion. The President is one of the few with a good sized budget and the ability to connect to the media, and that wasn't close to being enough.
Absolutely the GOP did what they could to fan the flames, but the core of the ACA is to expand coverage to a minority of people at the expense of the majority who were happy with what they had. If I ask "what is in it for me?" and your only answer is "higher prices so we can cover someone else", that's not going to be popular.
On “The Scorecard”
HRC was in office the moment Bill stepped down (being the NY Senator certainly counts, especially if she or Bill was giving speeches to NY banks). Then she became Secretary of State. And for the bulk of that time it was assumed she'd be President.
A real estate guy in New York? And internationally? From the 1970's on? No way he could function without paying off the unions/politicians/organized crime. That doesn't change that he doesn't (yet) have a multi-year network to accept bribes. Granted very much that he's starting with a lot of the underlying pieces in place.
Impeaching Trump on the basis of why the voters elected him sounds more like an excuse than a reason. I think we wait for it to be a problem (and to be clear, it probably will be), and then act on it.
On “A One Party Nation”
Conservatives? The liberals wrote the ACA, aren't there any liberal ideas for reducing cost short of single payer and price controls? Having said that, let's make a partial list on why the market doesn't work and go through it.
Lack of Transparency prevents consumers from knowing how much something costs. Force the publication of all costs.
Lack of Transparency also prevents consumers from knowing how safe a doctor or hospital is, and it's a real challenge to figure out who is good at what. How many surgeries of type X does Doctor Y do a year? What is his success rate?
3rd party pays prevents consumers from having any skin in the game, figure out a way that they do, the HSA isn't a terrible way to do it but there are others.
In the news recently are drugs off patent (epi-pens for example) which increase in price to crazy levels. Why do we have one pen while Europe has 9 or so? Regulatory capture? Standards set too high?
And yes, I shouldn't lose my insurance just because I have to move across state lines.
And yes, defensive medicine is a bad thing (how bad is unclear).
And so are medical mistakes. There are better ways to address this than what we've been doing.
I'm sure I'm missing things but this is the conversation which we should have had, and it would have been impossible for the GOP to not get involved because reducing medical costs is something everyone wants.
On “The Scorecard”
That number comes from a peer reviewed study published in the Journal of Economics and Finance. A google search on each of the authors doesn't go to anywhere either left wing or right wing. The authors and study are here: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF02920493
They stripped out HRC's name for the study to at least try and keep it from being a partisan mess. They appear to be exactly what they claim. BTW that 30 Trillion is after making lots of happy assumptions in favor of the trader, a more conservative estimate is 10^16. Her activities involved exposure to losses that potentially could have been greater than her family's net worth.
The New York Times is hardly anti-Clinton. Neither of those journals are right wing rags.
Let's review what you're claiming actually happened. HRC went into an office known for doing exactly what I'm claiming at exactly the time HRC was there. The office suffered from systemic corruption and shortly afterwards set records for the level of fines imposed. The office gave her extreme VIP treatment and ignored all sorts of rules about her account. However, although she was the (pregnant?) wife of the governor, they didn't dare cross *that* line for her, although they did for others. She then took insane risks which could have broken her family, and beat really long odds to make eye-popping returns based on the advise of a man who was loosing money.
Even ignoring the math, why is this a more likely interpretation? HRC is hardly known for taking wild risks.
Many/most of those crimes were indeed made up, and others were simply not provable criminal, but that's a far cry from "nothing". The pardoning of Marc Rich ignored normal processing, vetting, standards, and advise, but since we can't prove it was linked to the large money Denise Rich gave to Bill's library, or HRC's campaign, it's not provably criminal.
However these ethical adventures have always followed the Clintons around, and "not provably criminal" is a very different standard than "ethical", much less "appearance of impropriety". To their (dis?)credit, the Clintons are good at staying on this side of "not provably criminal", so imho there's a good chance that the Cattle Futures thing would have worked out the same way.
But that doesn't change that the math and situation strongly say she was given those trades, she wasn't at risk for destroying her family, and so forth. "Not provably criminal" is so far from "appearance of impropriety" that I can't tell the difference between that and "openly corrupt"... probably because there is none.
On “A One Party Nation”
Excellent post. Very insightful.
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The cost of the ACA goes way beyond a few seats.
The Dems went from a super majority because the GOP was (rightfully) despised to losing control of the House (at the next election) and then the Senate as soon as enough Senators who'd voted for the ACA faced election.
If the ACA had been popular, or if the dems had just backed off and done nothing, they would have kept their super majority MUCH longer because there's no way Ted's seat would have gone to the GOP.
If the Dems had enacted popular legislation they would have kept the House, they might or might not have lost their Super Majority but they'd still be in the majority in the Senate and thus would now have tilted the Supreme Court Left. The Elderly Leftist Supremes might have been convinced to retire and be replaced by Obama.
The GOP taking power in 2010 across multiple states was huge because of the Census and gerrymandering, the Dems would have been the group doing that if they could have stayed the party of fiscal responsibility for two years.
Imagine the Tea Party never existing because Obama governed like a fiscal conservative (or at least moderate) and the GOP was still burdened with the reputation of being the party of incompetent war, big, irresponsible spending and irresponsible tax cuts.
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We've been through about three election cycles where it's been a serious issue, and has caused Dems to either retire or lose elections. Incumbents losing elections is seriously rare.
This is the wrong discussion, and was the wrong discussion back when the Dems did the ACA.
What the country needed was medical reform (i.e. cost), not medical insurance reform (coverage).
The Dems turned the system upside down, promised all sorts of things, including that costs would go down, and delivered increasing costs, a government mandate on my person, and a broken website.
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@davidtc
I'll second what Koz said.
Further, IMHO the dems' leadership was counting on entitlements being almost impossible to remove after enacted to safeguard the ACA. Of course I also think they believed the ACA would work better than it has at reducing expenses and so forth, and that the political expense wouldn't be this extreme.
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Maybe... but we're running the risk of thinking that anyone other than HRC could have beaten Trump.
Time after time after time I proclaimed Trump couldn't go any further, and I was always wrong. At every step I underestimated him, at some point I have to wonder if it's something other than luck, especially with people like Scott Adams dissecting his moves.
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