Musings with 5 weeks to go

The irrationality of current GOP views is becoming clear, but also we are starting to get some perspective on where Conservative hatred of President Obama comes from.  Skip to the bottom if you want to read only that.

Obamacare would be a conservative's dream solution for health care, if only it had been implemented by a GOP President rather than Obama.  Obamacare was developed by the Heritage Foundation as a way to control costs by getting the uninsured into the system.  It uses the principles of Transparency, Mobility and Choice.  It does so by preserving the private health insurance sector and empowering individual choice once you are past the requirement that every individual be in the health insurance system.  In fact, Representative Ryan's plans for Medicare are built on the principles of Obamacare.  Some form of Obamacare is the base path to controlling healthcare expense which is a necessity for a stable fiscal picture.

The Conservative ire toward Obamacare is built on enmity toward anything the Obama Administration does and the base desire of the Conservative elite to oppose anything that provides use of public funding for women's reproductive health or even empowers a woman to have control over her reproductive health.

Source article for the above

On foreign policy, you would think Conservatives would have some balance in their thought as two wars without any revenue increases has certainly not been conservative from a fiscal policy standpoint. Yet, the GOP cannot change their policies to reflect the new world order.  We cannot order a country to do things in a manner that fits our liking exactly.  A democratic Egypt (or a democratic any other Arab country) cannot ignore its people when it comes to Israel's failure to allow the Palestinian's a state of their own.  Reacting in a neocon manner to the killing of the American Ambassador to Libya would have provoked outrage and more violence against Americans instead of the Libyan people's peaceful disarming of the militias that provoked the violence that provided the cover for the Al-Qaeda attack.  And how would we have known who to bomb in such a reaction that neocons would have approved of?   The world is a complicated place and it takes thought, analysis and time to find a solution that meets the approval of the world.

Thomas Friedman today

So why are conservative's so angry with President Obama?  For that, we read a book review of I AM THE CHANGE by Charles Kesler.  The book review was written by Mark Lilla and here is the link.

Link

"Once upon a time there was a radical president who tried to remake American society through government action. In his first term he created a vast network of federal grants to state and local governments for social programs that cost billions. He set up an imposing agency to regulate air and water emissions, and another to regulate workers’ health and safety. Had Congress not stood in his way he would have gone much further. He tried to establish a guaranteed minimum income for all working families and, to top it off, proposed a national health plan that would have provided government insurance for low-income families, required employers to cover all their workers and set standards for private insurance. Thankfully for the country, his second term was cut short and his collectivist dreams were never realized.  His name was Richard Nixon."

Nothing President Obama has proposed is quite as radical as what Nixon opposed.  What conservatives are really angry about has nothing to do with President Obama exactly.  They want to turn the country back into a society where the individual acknowledges and acts upon a personal responsibility to take care of themselves and the government provides no individual safety net.  They see what is now a 90 year trend toward statism (having started under Woodrow Wilson) and they want to reverse it.  They are angry that Republican Presidents like Reagan, Bush I and Bush II did not do more to reverse the trend.  They are angry that their strategy of starving the beast by not raising taxes has only resulted in an inadequately funded government that now has a debt burden that they find scary and they worry that they are about to lose an election that will reverse that starving of the beast.  They are angry about virtually anything that incubates the demise of the role for white males.

Now to go back to their philosophy of personal responsibility, I have no disagreement with it.  People are responsible for taking care of their economics and health.  But if that worked so well, why did the country have to develop social security and medicare, unemployment benefits, Medicaid and welfare?  The answer is a modern industrial economy is a complicated place and complete self reliance didn't work.

In a capitalist society, companies do what is best for the shareholders.  Workers are the respected until they are not needed and then they are cast off into society.  Their value and self respect take a beating in such a process.  They need a safety net to provide them the means to look for that next job in a proper frame of mind.  Not every person is as tough as nails in their mental makeup.

As for why retirement entitlements are necessary, the answer is that no person can control the timing of their retirement to match when the markets will be doing well.  Many less educated people are not good at saving or managing investments.  They need a societal safety net that forces them to contribute from their earnings to that safety net.  Those contributions fund a properly constructed retirement that smooths out the investment risk and allows individuals to benefit from the law of large numbers.

You would think after 90 years of losing, conservatives would adapt, but I guess there is always a philosophical battle to wage and things to modify around the margin, like the design of healthcare financing where conservatives won, but they cannot acknowledge that because then they would not have a shot at winning the election since even conservative white males don't want their health care changed and health care is all that they are angry about.  They do not want to separate health care from employment and that is a necessity that is not in Obamacare.

This is really funny at the 2:45 mark

It was getting tedious even for a passionate political person like myself, but then it had me in stitches.

The disaster that awaits us if Mitt wins

How Ironic

The Wall Street Journal reported into today's paper that the 1st authenticated perpetrator of voter fraud was found in Florida and hired by the Republican National Committee in a total of 5 states. Maybe instead of eliminating voters who have difficulty getting ID's, the state government's fixated on this should focus on old fashioned and illegal ballot stuffing.

More WSJ Musings.

France's new tax rate is too high.  75% does inhibit innovation.  I think the dividing line should be 39% because with state taxes that gets close to 50% beyond which I think the tax rate is counterproductive.

Police and other's are using technology to photograph the license plates of every car passing by them.  While I know this is legal, it does give me pause about the role technology plays in reducing our privacy. Yet, at then end of my thought process, I cannot oppose this as long as it is only used to find criminals and foster commerce.  Privacy rules are one reason health care costs are so high because Dr's cannot share records with each other forcing them to repeat tests to find out results that are in another Dr's files.

Also, why on earth did a Border Patrol agent shoot across the border and kill a father having a picnic with his family?  Of course, why would a family picnic near the border, but since it was in the WSJ which is not known to make up facts (except on the editorial page), I will accept this a a true story.

A cost of living musing

Today I spent the day of atonement atoning for my year of poor golf shots and ending up shooting my best round of the year.  97 on a Par 71 with only a few readjustments of the ball to compensate for my inconsistent game.

What got me writing was two of my golf partners were in their 80's and both lived in Pelham, where I do.  Both of these gentlemen were blue collar workers in their prime.  One was a driver of 18 wheelers (tractor trailers for any readers outside the U.S.) and the other repaired TV's and computers.  Yet, both earned income sufficient for them to save and live in a village with high taxes and a great school system.  Today, the house that they have lived in for decades are worth between $600,000 and $750,000 and no one in their old profession could ever save enough to live in such a house.

I think I could explain how this came to pass but somehow it doesn't seem right that it did come to pass,  nor do I have any idea how to get wages for such workers high enough to change it and I certainly don't want the price of housing to go much lower.  That is a sad commentary on our economy.

Richard Cohen Nails Today's GOP

"In 1980 Ronald Reagan won the Republican nomination. He beat a future president, George H.W. Bush; two future Senate majority leaders, Howard Baker and Bob Dole; and two lesser-known congressmen. This year Mitt Romney won the GOP nomination. He beat aradio host, a disgraced former House speaker, a defeated Senate candidate, a former appointee of the Obama administration, a tongue-tied Texas governor, a prevaricatingreligious zealot who happens to serve in the House of Representatives and a cranky libertarian doctor. Where did all the talent go?"

This is the way to convince thinking voters that the GOP is balanced?


Here is the whole article if you are interested.

The Whole Article

David Brooks Explains Why I am no longer a Republican

Link to David Brooks

Romney Doesn't Understand The Tax Code

Last night on 60 Minutes Romney said his tax rate was fair because the income was taxed at the corporate level.  While he was correct that any dividend income had been taxed at the corporate level, he was incorrect when he stated that capital gains had been taxed at the corporate level.

I detest double taxation.  Therefore, I believe that dividends should be tax free as the income used to pay them is after tax income from the corporation.  Interest payments are tax deductible so it is appropriate for the receiver of interest to pay tax on it.  And any capital gain or losses at the corporate level would be taxed and paid to investors as dividends.  But capital gains for investors are made by buying a security at one price and selling it for another price.  There is no taxation on those values because they occur from market valuation of corporate activity.  Romney is obfuscating the truth when he advocates that capital gains have already been taxed at the corporate level.  They have not!

Corporations pay no taxes on the capital gains and losses generated by their securities.