Conservative protesters should remember that the recession, which led to so many of the policies they oppose, is almost entirely the result of Bush’s policies. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the recession began in December 2007 - long before Obama was even nominated. And the previous recession ended in November 2001, so the current recession cannot be blamed on cyclical forces that Bush inherited.The entire article is worth reading, filled as it is with all sorts of facts that those who are convinced President Obama is trying to destroy the economy and the country will find terrifically inconvenient:
But the truth was always that the economy performed very, very badly under Bush, and the best efforts of his cheerleaders cannot change that fact because the data don’t lie. Consider these comparisons between Bush and Clinton:Beyond the economy, Mr. Bartlett also notes that it was President Bush who not only set the stage for the health care reform debate currently underway, but left his party bereft of any sort of plan of their own, their only option to simply oppose Democratic initiatives at all costs:
- Between the fourth quarter of 1992 and the fourth quarter of 2000, real GDP grew 34.7 percent. Between the fourth quarter of 2000 and the fourth quarter of 2008, it grew 15.9 percent, less than half as much.
- Between the fourth quarter of 1992 and the fourth quarter of 2000, real gross private domestic investment almost doubled. By the fourth quarter of 2008, real investment was 6.5 percent lower than it was when Bush was elected.
- Between December 1992 and December 2000, payroll employment increased by more than 23 million jobs, an increase of 21.1 percent. Between December 2000 and December 2008, it rose by a little more than 2.5 million, an increase of 1.9 percent. In short, about 10 percent as many jobs were created on Bush’s watch as were created on Clinton’s.
- During the Bush years, conservative economists often dismissed the dismal performance of the economy by pointing to a rising stock market. But the stock market was lackluster during the Bush years, especially compared to the previous eight. Between December 1992 and December 2000, the S&P 500 Index more than doubled. Between December 2000 and December 2008, it fell 34 percent. People would have been better off putting all their investments into cash under a mattress the day Bush took office.
- Finally, conservatives have an absurdly unjustified view that Republicans have a better record on federal finances. It is well-known that Clinton left office with a budget surplus and Bush left with the largest deficit in history. Less well-known is Clinton’s cutting of spending on his watch, reducing federal outlays from 22.1 percent of GDP to 18.4 percent of GDP. Bush, by contrast, increased spending to 20.9 percent of GDP. Clinton abolished a federal entitlement program, Welfare, for the first time in American history, while Bush established a new one for prescription drugs.
But there is yet another dimension to Bush’s failures - the things he didn’t do. In this category I would put a health-care overhaul. Budget experts have known for years that Medicare was on an unsustainable financial path. It is impossible to pay all the benefits that have been promised because spending has been rising faster than GDP.Mr. Bartlett conclusion is one with which I agree completely:
In 2003, the Bush administration repeatedly lied about the cost of the drug benefit to get it passed, and Bush himself heavily pressured reluctant conservatives to vote for the program.
Because reforming Medicare is an important part of getting health costs under control generally, Bush could have used the opportunity to develop a comprehensive health-reform plan. By not doing so, he left his party with nothing to offer as an alternative to the Obama plan. Instead, Republicans have opposed Obama's initiative while proposing nothing themselves.
In my opinion, conservative activists, who seem to believe that the louder they shout the more correct their beliefs must be, are less angry about Obama’s policies than they are about having lost the White House in 2008. They are primarily Republican Party hacks trying to overturn the election results, not representatives of a true grassroots revolt against liberal policies. If that were the case they would have been out demonstrating against the Medicare drug benefit, the Sarbanes-Oxley bill, and all the pork-barrel spending that Bush refused to veto.Go check out the article. It's a worthwhile read from an intellectually honest conservative.
Until conservatives once again hold Republicans to the same standard they hold Democrats, they will have no credibility and deserve no respect. They can start building some by admitting to themselves that Bush caused many of the problems they are protesting.
The United States spends far more per capita on health care than any other industrialized nation. Yet for all of that expenditure, the U.S. is just 37th in the most recent World Health Organization (WHO) rankings of the world's health care systems, slightly ahead of Slovenia and Cuba, but behind such dynamos as Costa Rica, Dominica, Chile, Colombia, Morocco and Greece. Further, the United States ranks 47th in life expectancy at birth; 29th in infant mortality (down from 12th in 1960); and 14th out of 26 developed nations surveyed for deaths from heart disease. Americans also wait as long or longer for care as people in countries with national health insurance.Even some of these facts, however, have been tested in conversations I have had on the topic, with questions about how one can possibly compare health care across national boundaries when the lifestyles and dietary habits of Americans, French and Japanese, for instance, are so clearly different. As it turns out, a methodology for doing just that was devised by U.S. researchers in the 1970's; it's called amenable mortality, and it's been used worldwide for the past thirty-odd years.
This opposition cannot be appeased. Some pundits claim that Mr. Obama has polarized the country by following too liberal an agenda. But the truth is that the attacks on the president have no relationship to anything he is actually doing or proposing.I believe Mr. Krugman is correct, and that the only solution to enacting true health care reform is to abandon the spurious priority of bipartisanship. It is not needed to pass legislation in either the House or the Senate, and Republicans have made it clear that they are more interested in demonizing Democrats and working against the president using any means available than they are in actually solving this problem. A loyal opposition is important to our system of government; unfortunately, at this point in history - as amply demonstrated by the tactics they have employed - on this issue, we simply don't have one.
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And not long ago, some of the most enthusiastic peddlers of the euthanasia smear, including Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, and Mrs. Palin herself, were all for “advance directives” for medical care in the event that you are incapacitated or comatose. That’s exactly what was being proposed — and has now, in the face of all the hysteria, been dropped from the bill.
Yet the smear continues to spread...
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Last week, Mr. Grassley claimed that his colleague Ted Kennedy’s brain tumor wouldn’t have been treated properly in other countries because they prefer to “spend money on people who can contribute more to the economy.” This week, he told an audience that “you have every right to fear,” that we “should not have a government-run plan to decide when to pull the plug on grandma."
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So much, then, for Mr. Obama’s dream of moving beyond divisive politics. The truth is that the factors that made politics so ugly in the Clinton years — the paranoia of a significant minority of Americans and the cynical willingness of leading Republicans to cater to that paranoia — are as strong as ever. In fact, the situation may be even worse than it was in the 1990s because the collapse of the Bush administration has left the GOP with no real leaders other than Rush Limbaugh.
The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.Such a system IS - very definitely - evil. It is also complete fantasy.
The language that follows includes further detail, and it is very clearly about patients making their own end-of-life and living will arrangements so their families don't have to. It's about putting more control in the hands of patients themselves, not placing the lives of the elderly in the hands of faceless government drones.Advance Care Planning Consultation(1) Subject to paragraphs (3) and (4), the 7 term ‘advance care planning consultation’ means a consultation between the individual and a practitioner described in paragraph (2) regarding advance care planning, if, subject to paragraph (3), the individual involved has not had such a consultation within the last 5 years...
Given that Senator Isakson is a conservative member of Governor Palin's own party, I think it is fair to say - if it wasn't already before - that she is either a liar or an idiot. There really are no other choices, and Post columnist Steve Pearlstein certainly seems to agree, as his column from last Friday amply illustrated:KLEIN: How did this become a question of euthanasia?
ISAKSON: I have no idea. I understand - and you have to check this out - I just had a phone call where someone said Sarah Palin's web site had talked about the House bill having death panels on it where people would be euthanized. How someone could take an end of life directive or a living will as that is nuts. You're putting the authority in the individual rather than the government. I don't know how that got so mixed up.
KLEIN: You're saying that this is not a question of government. It's for individuals.
ISAKSON: It empowers you to be able to make decisions at a difficult time rather than having the government making them for you.
KLEIN: The policy here as I understand it is that Medicare would cover a counseling session with your doctor on end-of-life options.
ISAKSON: Correct. And it's a voluntary deal.
As a columnist who regularly dishes out sharp criticism, I try not to question the motives of people with whom I don't agree. Today, I'm going to step over that line.President Obama, speaking at town hall forum in New Hampshire, had this to say:
The recent attacks by Republican leaders and their ideological fellow-travelers on the effort to reform the health-care system have been so misleading, so disingenuous, that they could only spring from a cynical effort to gain partisan political advantage. By poisoning the political well, they've given up any pretense of being the loyal opposition. They've become political terrorists, willing to say or do anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its most serious domestic problems.
This is not about putting the government in charge of your health insurance. I don't believe anyone should be in charge of your health insurance decisions but you and your doctor. I don't think government bureaucrats should be meddling, but I also don't think insurance company bureaucrats should be meddling. That's the health care system I believe in.That sounds about right to me. We've got enough problems to solve without arguing the imaginary.
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And I have to say, this is personal for Lori but it's also personal for me. I talked about this when I was campaigning up here in New Hampshire. I will never forget my own mother, as she fought cancer in her final months, having to worry about whether her insurance would refuse to pay for her treatment. And by the way, this was because the insurance company was arguing that somehow she should have known that she had cancer when she took her new job - even though it hadn't been diagnosed yet. So if it could happen to her, it could happen to any one of us.
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Under the reform we're proposing, insurance companies will be prohibited from denying coverage because of a person's medical history. Period. They will not be able to drop your coverage if you get sick. They will not be able to water down your coverage when you need it. Your health insurance should be there for you when it counts - not just when you're paying premiums, but when you actually get sick. And it will be when we pass this plan.
Now, when we pass health insurance reform, insurance companies will no longer be able to place some arbitrary cap on the amount of coverage you can receive in a given year or a lifetime. And we will place a limit on how much you can be charged for out-of-pocket expenses, because no one in America should go broke because they get sick.
And finally - this is important - we will require insurance companies to cover routine checkups and preventive care, like mammograms and colonoscopies - because there's no reason we shouldn't be catching diseases like breast cancer and prostate cancer on the front end. That makes sense, it saves lives; it also saves money - and we need to save money in this health care system.
So this is what reform is about. For all the chatter and the yelling and the shouting and the noise, what you need to know is this: If you don't have health insurance, you will finally have quality, affordable options once we pass reform. If you do have health insurance, we will make sure that no insurance company or government bureaucrat gets between you and the care that you need. And we will do this without adding to our deficit over the next decade, largely by cutting out the waste and insurance company giveaways in Medicare that aren't making any of our seniors healthier.
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...There's been a long and vigorous debate about this, and that's how it should be. That's what America is about, is we have a vigorous debate. That's why we have a democracy. But I do hope that we will talk with each other and not over each other - because one of the objectives of democracy and debate is, is that we start refining our own views because maybe other people have different perspectives, things we didn't think of.
Where we do disagree, let's disagree over things that are real, not these wild misrepresentations that bear no resemblance to anything that's actually been proposed. Because the way politics works sometimes is that people who want to keep things the way they are will try to scare the heck out of folks and they'll create boogeymen out there that just aren't real.
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