Oh Dear Lord: Obama's New Time-Wasting, Decision-Dodging, Leadership-Defaulting Deficit Commission Just Like The Old One, Except Now It's Headed Up By... Chatanooga Choo-Choo Biden

Can't wait for their recommendations. $53 trillion on high-speed monorails and another special $40 million for Biden's own real-size toy train set.

Definitely. That's what we needed all along. Grandpa Snoozykins.

This is embarrassing, truly. He just had a commission of approximately the same size and make up (sans Sheriff Joe) and he utterly ignored their findings, choosing instead to demagogue and delay.

And now he's just doing the exact same thing again.

Hey, Jerkoff, every commission is going to say the same thing: We are spending too much money and you have three options:

1) Jack up taxes to unprecedented rates, especially on the middle class, which is going to be surprised at being taxed at a 40% rate (and that's just the feds' take)

2) Begin preparing for the process of default and hyperinflation. We Go Greek, in other words.

3) Reduce spending on entitlements.

That's it. That's your choices. You can convene as many of these Special Commissions as you like, and they're going to keep on saying this, because the math does not change week-by-week. The math has been what it was since the problem was first discovered in the seventies. It has not changed since then, except to grow worse.

I cannot believe he's doing this. Another commission!

At the time, Sperling was discussing the form and mission of a new bipartisan congressional working group the president wants to charge with establishing a deficit-reduction plan. In the president’s view, it would consist of 16 members, plus the vice president as chairman, and finish up by the end of June.

Didn't this guy run on the platform that he already had the guts to tackle this, and a fount of brave, wise thinking on the matter?

Three years later and now he needs someone to explain to him the rule of greater than and less than?

The crocodile wants to eat the bigger food, Mr. President.

The crocodile wants to eat the bigger food.

Read it, learn it, live it.

Krugman Loves Obama's Medicare Plan:

As I understand it, it would force the board to come up with ways to put Medicare on what amounts to a budget — growing no faster than GDP + 0.5 — and would force Congress to specifically overrule those proposed savings. That’s what cost-control looks like! You have people who actually know about health care and health costs setting priorities for spending, within a budget; in effect, you have an institutional setup which forces Medicare to find ways to say no.

And when people start screaming about death panels again, remember: you can always buy whatever health care you want; the question is what taxpayers should pay for. And compare this with a voucher system, in which you have insurance company executives, rather than health-care professionals, deciding which care won’t be paid for.

Wait-- so if the government tells someone they can't have an operation, it's cool, since they can just use their own money to pay for it.

But -- this is the big criticism of Ryan's plan -- if someone has a $15,000 voucher (per year) from the government with which to buy insurance, and that cruel insurer says no... that's "cruel"?

Krugman specifically uses the word "cruelty" to describe Ryan's plan.

It seems that Krugman doesn't mind that seniors might have to pay their own money for health care -- so long as the government is the one doing the deciding, so long as the government is still at the center.

If the exact same thing happens in a private insurance decision (and it would happen less often, as the system would work to impose cost discipline), then all of a sudden it's "cruelty"?

This is their big answer to the Medicare problem -- they insist that the government remain in the center of it, as bloated and wasteful and inefficient and riven by fraud as ever, and to make up for all that lost money -- death panels and rationing!

And liberals are eager to embrace death panels and rationing, as long as it comes from the government!

Gee, that's certainly less cruel than offering someone a policy with a high deductible whereby they pay for all routine costs up to some fixed level (like $5000 per year) and the insurer pays every dime after that, and doesn't ration.

The only thing they care about is keeping the government in this. Cutting care, stealing a half-trillion from Medicare, death panels, rationing -- all of these are acceptable (required, really, in their plan), and it's all defensible so long as government is kept in the center of everything.

posted by Ace at 04:51 PM

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