Category: Economy

Sometimes when you win, you lose. Sometimes when you lose, you win. And sometimes when you win or lose you really tie.

On By Hitting BregmaIn Donald Trump, Economy, Famous quotes, Health and Healthcare, How I see the world, politicsLeave a comment

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TscQVGF2cwg

 

The House of Representatives has voted, once again, to repeal the Affordable Care Act. This is not the first time they have done so, and it likely won’t be the last. They passed several bills and amendments since 2011 that repeal or limit Obamacare, and few of these became law. My guess is that this bill will die like the others have, but this time it will be killed by a more pensive (and smart?) Senate. Senate republicans are already saying that they can’t pass the current bill, and it’s not clear that they even have enough support for a vote. It’s hard to see how the House and President see this as a win, but they do, and they had a party at the White House about it. Vice President Pence rallied the crowd (of middle-aged to old white men) with a line, “Welcome to the beginning of the end of Obamacare.” Silly line. Doesn’t that assume that Obamacare will end? Doesn’t it assume that the previous votes weren’t the beginning of anything? Silliness all around.

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Putting on a show

On By Hitting BregmaIn 2016 Election, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Economy, Hillary Clinton, How I see the world, politics, societyLeave a comment

I don’t know why, but I’m still trying to view the Trump administration through rational eyes. Perhaps there are several versions of rational. There really shouldn’t be, but maybe what I think is rational isn’t actually rational. I am saddened by what I see as missed opportunities (see here and here), but I’m starting to accept the fact that it’s never going to happen. I’m starting to accept the fact that we all have things that motivate us, and I think what motivates Trump has more to do with celebrity than anything else. That’s not inconsistent with doing good things for the country, but I’m not convinced that it’s what drives him. I can imagine that he can convince himself that it’s driving him, but I think deep down the things that he embraces are things that feed his celebrity status. I should be clear that I’m not saying that there’s no concern for others in that. I think he enjoys entertaining people. I think he likes it when they’re excited to see him. I think he thrives on that. There’s a level of admirable selflessness in that. Like the comic who stands on stage making fun of himself to make you laugh. On the other hand, it leads to some pretty strange moments when the President of the United States acts that way.

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Do as I say, not as I do…but actions speak louder than words

On By Hitting BregmaIn Donald Trump, Economy, How I see the world, politics, societyLeave a comment

The scientist in me craves information. I want to know what’s going on and why. It’s undoubtedly what made science so attractive to me. It’s also what makes research with human subjects so unappealing to me. People lie, and can’t be trusted (of course I know that’s not entirely true, but when it comes to research, it’s a real problem and I’m continuously impressed by those who take on those problems). We know people lie because we see it all the time. This isn’t a misanthropic judgement, it’s just a statement about who we are. Most of it is unintentional, and we even lie to ourselves. How many times do we say that we don’t want to eat that last chocolate, but we eat it anyway? We say that we wanted to go to the gym, but we stayed on the couch instead. We become living contradictions. We have the verbal report (even the voice in our head) saying that want something (or don’t want something), but our behavior tells the opposite story. When faced with this contradiction, if we’re trying to figure out which is the real version (the not wanting to eat the chocolate, or the eating the chocolate), I think the behavior tells the real story. We may say or think that we don’t want to, and a piece of us might not want to, but if we eat the chocolate, we clearly wanted to more than we didn’t want to. To make it worse, how can I know if somebody is lying when they say that they don’t want to do something, but they do it anyway? Until we invent a mind-reader, and can be sure that we aren’t lying to ourselves, all I have is the action, and, to be as cliche as possible, actions speak louder than words. What makes me say this today? Sanctuary cities. It’s a stretch, but follow along if you want.

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Do our priorities expose moral flaws?

On By Hitting BregmaIn Economy, Health and Healthcare, How I see the world, politics, society1 Comment

The GOP is busy trying to repeal and replace Obamacare. They’ve proposed the American Health Care Act as a means to that end. To be honest, I can’t seem to find the bill online anywhere, but the CBO has released its estimates of the impact (the CBO says it combines legislation, but it doesn’t say what legislation it combines). As an aside, in my search for the bill on congress.gov turned up H.R.277 (American Health Care Reform Act) that has collected 29 cosponsors), but also turned up H.R.1275, which has a much better name: “World’s Greatest Healthcare Plan.” I’m quite sure it’s not, but it’s still a great name.

I am not going to get into details about the CBO score, but the summary is that the plan will save Americans $337 billion over 10 years, at the cost of increasing the number of uninsured by 24 million. The CBO says that 14 million people will become uninsured by 2018, mostly because they will opt out of coverage after the mandate is repealed. People speaking in support of the plan have said that it will maintain coverage for pre-existing conditions for people who maintain continuous coverage, so it looks like these 14 million will lose that benefit of the ACA. By the end of the ten year estimate, the CBO says a total of 24 million more Americans will be without insurance, bringing the total uninsured to 52 million Americans. The impact of this could be devastating to those Americans, and we will watch them suffer, all to save some money. I think that’s a moral failure.

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Some thoughts on jobs

On By Hitting BregmaIn Bartlet Democrats, Economy, Education, How I see the world, society2 Comments

Once again, I have to start with a disclosure: I am not an economist and these thoughts likely shouldn’t be taken seriously by anybody. Of course a lack of expertise hasn’t stopped me from bloviating about ways to fix the world, and not being an expert certainly hasn’t even stopped Donald Trump from becoming president. With that in mind, I have a dream about a program to help get people to work. It has two main ingredients, and I don’t know if it would work, but it’s fun to imagine anyway.

To think about how to fix the jobs problem in the United States, we have to first think about what the problem is, and who is affected. And then it leads me to the solution that’s been in my dreams lately. It’s a great dream, of a bold initiative, with a practical solution to a pressing problem. Something I could imagine being a crux of the Bartlet Democrat platform.

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What would Bartlet do?

On By Hitting BregmaIn Bartlet Democrats, Economy, How I see the world, politics, Religion, society5 Comments

I have a tendency to think of the world in a two-type model. Of course I know this isn’t true, and I’ve spent plenty of time explaining false dichotomies to people, both in my personal and professional lives, but in a non-literal, knowingly unrealistic way, I like to do it anyway. My wife and I have a long-standing view, for instance, that there are two types of people in the world: people who would lick the plate if it were socially acceptable, and people who wouldn’t. “Lick the plate” is, in many ways, a statement of passion for food, but also for life. The “plate-licker” gestalt reveals a person with a zest not just for food, but for life. Somebody who wants to get every last drop out of the good stuff, and lick the plate. We’ve recognized this (false) dichotomy since early in our life together (we’ve been together for almost a quarter of a century, married for a fifth of a century), although it seems to have become an unspoken thing in the last few years.
I’m certainly not alone in my dichotomization of the world. Others have different splits, cat people and dog people, organized inbox people and those like me with thousands of unread emails, Coke vs Pepsi…we’ve seen these all.
So here’s my false dichotomy of the day: there are people who seek a label, and people who shun them. I’m one who seeks a label, and I think one has finally dawned on me. I’m a “Bartlet Democrat,” and proud of it.

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It’s the economy, stupid!

On By Hitting BregmaIn Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Economy, Famous quotes, Hillary Clinton, How I see the world1 Comment

“The economy, stupid!” The phrase made famous by James Carville, campaign strategist for Bill Clinton. Amazingly effective, and at a time when the US was in a recession. The past election cycle used the sentiment in some ways. The Trump campaign and his inauguration speech painted a very dystopian view of America. There was talk about our crumbling factories and our crime-infested cities. Couple that with prevailing views that our economy is doing poorly (something I touched on before, when I wrote about the disconnect between the way the public perceived us to be in a recession, when were actually weren’t in a recession), and it was almost a “the economy, stupid” election.

This all depended on how we saw the world, and likely which media outlets we viewed (something else I wrote about before).

But let’s look at some numbers, and think about what could come next. To do this, I’m going to steal some text from something I posted on Facebook this morning.

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Capitalism first, a hybrid economic perspective from a woefully amature economist

On By Hitting BregmaIn Economy, How I see the world, society4 Comments

I’m not a scholar of economics, so I probably have no business writing about this at all, but here goes anyway. I’ve spent time, probably too much time, thinking about socialism and capitalism and the ways that we’ve been told that capitalism is good and socialism is bad, and how to reconcile the socialism in our society that we love with the capitalism in our society that we hate. It’s not an easy task, and the most simple and easiest answer to the clear discrepancy is that people are stupid. This seems to be the fallback too often these days. Why did people who benefit most from government vote for smaller government? Because people are stupid. Why did people who have insurance thanks to Obamacare vote for a candidate who ran to repeal Obamacare? Because people are stupid. I’m not saying I disagree with that response entirely, but it’s too easy, and too simplistic. I think there’s more to ponder here, which is what I plan to do with the next few hundred or so words.

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Debating the Obama presidency before it even ended

On By Hitting BregmaIn Economy, How I see the world, ObamaLeave a comment

A friend posted this on FaceBook the other day. It’s a blog post written about a challenge that was made to republicans to “Name any meaningful metric that got worse under President Obama.” The post is very detailed and long, and I’m actually a bit jealous that I didn’t write it first. Either way, this friend, the one who posted it on FaceBook, tagged one of his conservative friends to respond. He did it in a nice way, non-confrontational.

Scott, genuinely interested in your response to this. Not posting this as a provocation – I would really like to hear an informed rebuttal from a smart conservative person who plays fair, which you do.

But please limit your response to 20 or 30,000 words. Don’t want feel like I’ve burdened you with homework on 4th of July weekend.

I like that. Scott responded, and I wanted so badly to respond to his comment, but I don’t know the original poster all that well (the “friend” on FaceBook is really the husband of one of my wife’s high school friends who I’ve known for a while, but she doesn’t fall into the list-of-people-I’d-invite-to-my-birthday-party circle, and neither does her husband. For that reason, and because he specifically said he wasn’t trying to provoke, I resisted the temptation to post…and just relieved myself here. So here’s Scott’s response, and what I so badly wanted to say to him after.

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