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.