Originally posted by kaath9 at Healthcare Myths #3 & 4: Bloated Bureaucracies & Cruel Necessities

I’m a gun owning machete wielding landowner (Haven't found a better cure for devil's club on a steep slope than a big knife).  I live on a ridge line in the Chugach Mountains of Alaska.  I believe that the TSA should be constrained, the patriot act should be eliminated or critically rewritten by people who value their rights more than their safety, or even my safety.  I think that every hospital and medical clinic in the US should be able to fearlessly take in every American patient that comes through the doors without worrying about who is going to pay, because they know that the bill will be paid.  Medical care costs have grown beyond the resources of the middle class, and yet the country only exists as a country because of the efforts of that middle class.  We build the chips and datasets, cars and trucks, and the economic environment that allows the rich to become rich.  We do have the right to expect healthy lives, considering how much we participate in empowering this land, for how little of the pool of money, and there is more than enough money in the medical care system to ensure that all of us can. Just the money wasted on insurance overhead and caregiver financial administration would more than care for a sturdy health care system for the currently uninsured.

You might say that I'm an independent voter.  I believe that the banks, not President Bush, took down wall-street
and created the mortgage crisis for a clean and continuing profit (take over a mortgage, foreclose when the owner is one or three payments behind, take the mortgage insurance, sell the house for it's full market value, never repay the insurance payout.  What's not to love about that?).  The national debt was created to fund a war half-way around the world that we won, but whose outcome was never going to create any greater good in the U.S.  Why, weapons of mass destruction?  Not bloody likely. 

Saddam Hussein and his minions were never a legitimate threat to the U.S.  I'd like to know what the real reason was, but I'm betting I'd disapprove.  Western cultures have been trying to remake the middle east for more than two thousand years and it always ends poorly.  Maybe the U.S. really shouldn't go 11,000 miles away and exercise American dominance games.  I'm not sure who it's helping.  I know it isn't me, and I know it isn't my country's economy. 

I know a surprisingly large group of people who've put their lives into public service, but never took the time to make themselves millionaires.  I have no problem with somebody who has made themselves a millionaire, but much rather vote for a public servant who considers supporting the nation to be more important than making millions of dollars. 

One of my state's recent senators made himself a multimillionaire during his first term in the Senate, many years ago.  I don't consider that laudable in any way.

I've watched, in the least interested way, this story evolve.  US seeks record sentence for hedge fund boss in NY( Read more...Collapse )
It's very likely that the billionaires the Republican Party protects from higher taxes with one voice are simply not as emotionally invested in the tax argument as the bought and paid for politicians are in protecting their investors.  Ah, I mean their staunch Republican Party contributors.  The billionaires' club can call this growing likelihood of a voters' rebellion off by dropping some money on the Republicans to back off of this filibuster thing.  Yes, the billionaires (and the millionaire auxiliary) bought and paid for their politicians, and their politicians have stayed bought (even the tea-partiers).  It's already become so obvious that the Republican hardline attitude is caused by loyalties that lie beyond voters and in the hands of the contributors who have bought and paid for that blind loyalty that every filibuster threatens to destabilize the voting blocks that keep the red state politicos useful. 

Bald Eagle at Fort
Snelling, MN

I'm proud to announce that seeing this picture brought tears to my eyes.  I was so touched that I went back online to see if I could track down the story.  Apparently, it's true.

The gentleman whose grave is so righteously decorated was a part of the Greatest Generation.  That generation brought in and supported social security, national welfare programs, and the first federal intervention through business subsidies to ameliorate the catastrophic economic collapse that was in progress during the 1930s. 

Right now, there is a big political fracas brewing about cutting welfare, social security, and any other obvious government programs.  Those programs were used to set our nation back on its feet after an entirely laissez faire economic meltdown led to mass starvation in this country. 

A lot of people want to deny that Americans were dying of malnutrition during the great depression. When I went to high school in the 1970s, I had teachers that remembered classmates in their U.S. elementary schools who had quit coming to class because they STARVED TO DEATH.  Yes, Americans starved to death in the 1930s because their local charities and local governments and local social organizations fell down – because the local folks were all poor.  It’s just that some of them were a little poorer than others.  We want to deny that today, but my teachers in the 1970s still remembered their dead friends.  American friends.  If we follow down this line of “reducing government” far enough, and if this stupid economic meltdown continues to stretch the difference between the richest and the poorest of us, we’ll start to see starvation deaths again.

I'm agin it.

There are seven billion people on Earth this year or next, and although the demographers think that that growth rate will slow in upcoming years, they're banking on an ahistorical trend when they make such predictions. Whether the rate of population increase slows or not, barring a die back that makes the Black Death look like a summer cold, Earth will double in population over the next century.
Lots of folks are using the internet to complain that the US Government has never done anything good for the country, and that everything good that has happened in America is purely the result of individual initiative.

The internet they complain about the Gubmint on was developed using both private and public funding. The auto industry is a good example of private development that then turned to the gubmint to protect themselves from brash interlopers taking control of their industries.

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The citizens of this country, whom I consider the only important part of the country, are ceding stakeholder status in the running of the nation when we call for deregulation and ignore the elephant in the room. The corporations grow more powerful and less responsible for their actions with every deregulation. They don’t give a fig about illegal immigration, which is profitable to them, or our opinions, which are absolutely insignificant to Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon, BP, Microsoft, or AT&T, even if several million like-minded people give up their phones or cars and boycott. They do care when we, as a people, force them, through our government, to play fair by our standards, rather than their own.

Congress does not have a policy permitting retirement at full pay after one term.  Congress critters are on FERS, which is the same federal retirement program as the rest of the Federal government.  In 1984, congressemen were on another program, CSRS, and did not pay into Social Security.  They also were not eligible for social security, so that is a wash.  You can google congretional retirement plans any time you like.  It's publically available information available here.

Congress critters do not exempt themselves from the health care reform legislation - check here.  They have a valid health care plan, and that is all that is required.  I'm on the same health care plan I was on when the legislation went into affect.  The only impact it has had on me is actually on my children, since they will be covered by my plan for five additional years, thanks to that legislation.  I'm not exempt from health care reform, I was already involved in a health care plan, so the new legislation had little impact on my life.

Hey! most of the federal deficit was paid to American Corporations.  The money is still in the U.S, or at least held my U.S. citizens - most of it went to the U.S. military industrial complex.  The bombs and bullets went away, but the cash is either here or in off-shore accounts.  When are those trillions going to trickle down to us, the hoi polloi?  Methinks they won't.  Never.  Trickle down doesn't work when the corporations are handing out record-breaking bonuses during years when their companies claim losses.  I'm guessing that a lot of that money is going into off-shore accounts.

I'm not in the life-boat yet, so I'm kind of pissed that they're pulling in the ropes.

Bill