Originally Posted by marypoza

-- what do you mean by "delay single payor"? Bernie wants to lower the Medicare age to 0 asap.

Yes he does, but Congress does not, and they write the laws. So when Bernie calls for a bill to replace the ACA with Medicare, call it the Health Care for All bill of 2017, they will send him it to sign, except the Medicare provisions will be stripped out. He will have to veto his own bill, and the ACA will remain. Sanders's supporters will be frustrated and stay home in 2018 like they always do.

The problem is simple. Medicare is shitty insurance, worse that what employees at big companies get. So you will have like two-thirds of the electorate opposed to Sanderscare, and the whole issue will become so sour that nobody will want to try to do anything with it for decades.

On the other hand the simple change of allowing Medicare to bid in the exchanges will change nothing for people who have employer-provided insurance. And nobody who likes their insurance will have to change to Medicare. But some people will and depended on how the prices work out I would predict more and more people will. Pretty soon most of the people signed up on the ACA will be getting Medicare, and you are well on your way to single payor. It's insidious and why Republicans have been fighting ACA tooth and nail--they know its an elephant trap.

For me its simple. My grandson has insurance now (he didn't before) because of Obamacare. A colleague at work, his child who was uninsurable because she had a transplant, can have insurance and now will be able to live without bankrupting her family. The guy at Subway now has insurance for his family because of Obamacare. All these people are going to be lifelong Democrats because their lives have been materially affected in a positive way. As for me and folks I know like me, none of us are affected because we have insurance from our company and so nothing has changed. So for me its all good and no bad. That's just one of the many reasons I am a toaster Democrat--I will vote for a toaster or other small appliance before I will a Republican--although with Rubio is hard to tell the difference

Originally Posted by Mikebert

The problem is simple. Medicare is shitty insurance, worse that what employees at big companies get. So you will have like two-thirds of the electorate opposed to Sanderscare, and the whole issue will become so sour that nobody will want to try to do anything with it for decades.

-- dunno about that, it pd for my Mom's dialysis. I saw those bills, dialysis for 1 month was more than I grossed in a yr. But thrn maybe I'm used to shitty ins, which is why I want decent health care for all

On the other hand the simple change of allowing Medicare to bid in the exchanges will change nothing for people who have employer-provided insurance. And nobody who likes their insurance will have to change to Medicare. But some people will and depended on how the prices work out I would predict more and more people will. Pretty soon most of the people signed up on the ACA will be getting Medicare, and you are well on your way to single payor. It's insidious and why Republicans have been fighting ACA tooth and nail--they know its an elephant trap.

--Then that may be the way to do it. Bernie can't issue an exec order lowering the age, or at least not penalize ppl who can't afford obummercrap? Maybe your grandson can, but lots of ppl can't, esp if they work @ Subway

For me its simple. My grandson has insurance now (he didn't before) because of Obamacare. A colleague at work, his child who was uninsurable because she had a transplant, can have insurance and now will be able to live without bankrupting her family. The guy at Subway now has insurance for his family because of Obamacare. All these people are going to be lifelong Democrats because their lives have been materially affected in a positive way. As for me and folks I know like me, none of us are affected because we have insurance from our company and so nothing has changed. So for me its all good and no bad. That's just one of the many reasons I am a toaster Democrat--I will vote for a toaster or other small appliance before I will a Republican--although with Rubio is hard to tell the difference

-- Rubio's a douche

It may be freezing up in NH, but yesterday they were definitely feeling the Bern up there. Boo-yeah!! Now on to Vegas! Bern baby Bern!

Originally Posted by playwrite

News flash!

Hate makes one stupid, Odin.

Odin is absolutely correct. Whether Sanders or Clinton end up with the nomination, either one will need the others' supporters in order to win in November.

Originally Posted by Marx & Lennon

Reagan ran it the other way by being his congenial self, and not much more. It's hard to know what tips the balance, but it happens. Why not this time? The justification is certainly there.

Maybe the days of apathy are now behind us, and that many who still admire Reagan will switch sides. This would be interesting because in many ways Sanders is like Reagan except with the opposite philosophy. Both are senior citizens appealing to the younger generation of voters.

Originally Posted by The Wonkette

Odin is absolutely correct. Whether Sanders or Clinton end up with the nomination, either one will need the others' supporters in order to win in November.

Ah, that was my point to Odin.

I don't think there is a Sanders Hate Derangement Syndrome; even Karl Rove's PAC is spending considerable funds to support him at the present.

There certainly one for Clinton, however, and Odin has a particularly virulent form of it. He's obviously an otherwise pretty smart fellow so it is a pretty good example of what hate can do to someone.

Originally Posted by Brian Beecher

Maybe the days of apathy are now behind us, and that many who still admire Reagan will switch sides. This would be interesting because in many ways Sanders is like Reagan except with the opposite philosophy. Both are senior citizens appealing to the younger generation of voters.

Reagan didn't appeal to the younger generation of voters, as was pointed out. He did best with older voters. But Generation X grew up with him as president, Reagan got support from them in 1984 (those 5 or 6 cohorts who could vote), and Gen X absorbed his (false) philosophy. Later, some of them switched sides, maybe going back and forth.

Originally Posted by Mikebert

No they aren't. Panics occurred in 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1884, 1893, 1907 and 1932-33, about 16 years apart on average. Then Congress shut them down in the 1930's. Congress re-authorized them in 1997 and we got the first 9 years later. So what is the recurrence rate? If we get one this recession then I would guess once per Juglar cycle. If not then I would suspect it will be every other cycle like before.

Another way to look at it is the four peaks in stock market valuation: 2000, 1929, 2015, 1906. Two gave panics two (so far) have not. If we go with the big crashes there were big crashes in 1987, 1929, 1946, 2008, again a 50:50 shot. So flip a coin.

Playwrite called it right, in the sense that 2008 was not a recession-- it was THE GREAT Recession. It was a 1929-type event. It precipitated a 4T mood in the USA and Europe, which is reflected in the Trump/Sanders surge. If not for some timely actions to bail out the big banks and stimulate the economy (lessons learned from 1929), we would have gone over a cliff to total ruin. 2008 was a BIG F*CKIN' DEAL!

Playwrite in his own way confirms my own astrology-based prediction that the 2008 crash is the worst economic recession we will have in the 21st century, at least until the 2090s.

Yes, there are recessionary cycles, although I don't think 1884 qualifies, and recessions certainly continued after 1933: 1937, 1946, 1959, 1973, 1979, 1992, 2001, 2008.

So a recession is due in 2018-19, but it won't be another crash. I'm pretty sure about that. But the economy is weaker than in 2013-14 for the next several years. An energy boom has been keeping a recession from happening, and if the Democrats win, a green energy boom is due starting in 2018 that will offset the recession, although the Supreme Court is now trying to shut it down. We can expect a relative boom in the 2020s.

Politicians have survive recessions before and will likely do it again. The lost of aggregate demand is a slow grind that will shift the peaks and valleys lower but not in a catastrophic way. There's a lot of automatic stabilizers that will come into play that a GOP House will not be able to do anything about. All bets, however, are obviously off if we put a non-Trump GOPer in the WH - they'll strangle the economy in response to even a mild recession.

Yes I agree.

Originally Posted by marypoza

Maybe your grandson can, but lots of ppl can't, esp if they work @ Subway

My grandson works at Subway, his insurance is Medicaid, so its costs him nothing. Part of the ACA was the Medicaid insurance expansion, which allowed him to qualify (before he had no insurance).

Medicare is not very good compared to a good employer-provided plan, like you get at a big company (I work for Pfizer). Medicare for retired folks is like Obamacare for poor folks, its subsidized, by the payroll taxes working people pay. If working folks were covered by Medicare you would have to bump up the payroll taxes--a lot.

Originally Posted by Eric the Green

Reagan didn't appeal to the younger generation of voters, as was pointed out. He did best with older voters. But Generation X grew up with him as president, Reagan got support from them in 1984 (those 5 or 6 cohorts who could vote), and Gen X absorbed his (false) philosophy. Later, some of them switched sides, maybe going back and forth.

Why do you think Reagan chose De Anza College for a speech during his '84 re-election campaign? He understood that he needed a % of the youth vote. I was there. At the time, I was probably one click less radical than the people banging the drums with all the "Fascist Gun in the West" signs, etc. But the heck if his speech did not soften me up. He really was "The Great Communicator!"

Originally Posted by Eric the Green

2008 was a BIG F*CKIN' DEAL!

Yes it was. Panics are big deals. That is why they got rid of them in the 1930's. But then they brought them back. They ain't going to go away until Congress sends them away. After working tirelessly to bring them back, Republicans are not going to do this, and unless you see huge Democratic majorities filled with Sanders-style liberals nobody else will either.

Yes, there are recessionary cycles, although I don't think 1884 qualifies,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1884

and recessions certainly continued after 1933: 1937, 1946, 1959, 1973, 1979, 1992, 2001...

Recessions, but not deflationary recessions (depressions).

...2008.

This one had the potential to be a depression, and if we get another panic any chance at depression.

Originally Posted by XYMOX_4AD_84

A few years ago I started to do intensive auditing of not only the insurance AOBs but also the providers' claims and coding. At this point I am 100% convinced of two things:
1) The quality levels at both ends suck eggs.
2) And in cases where there are not booboos going on, there is a serious cat and mouse game going on. A sad percentage of care providers I thought were OK are actually thieves on an ongoing basis - e.g. upcode / submit fraudulent claims for work never done, etc, as SOP.

Some simple auditing and enforcement could hit a lot of low hanging fruit.

After decades in various parts of the medical field, my wife is a pro at getting the insurance companies and providers to code correctly. In some cases it's simple laziness, but it may be a form of fraud too. I understand the reluctance of the insurance company to pay, but the providers seem to gain from bad coding too. In any case, corrections often take hours of phone calls, meaning most people won't bother.

And no one is watching except the insured, and the insured is not qualified for or patient enough to do the job.

Originally Posted by Odin

Meanwhile in the real world people are getting angry because they are being mandated to buy insurance that borders on useless because the co-pays and deductibles are so high.

I'm moving to Medicare on April 1st. Medicare Part A is free, and I'll be paying $121 a month for Medicare Part B. My Medigap policy is roughly $145 and my Medicare part D is about $40. So my out of pocket insurance expense is roughly $300 a month, but my total out of pocket medical exposure is $167 a year. My drug expenses should be roughly $100, unless I need something new I'm not taking now.

This is what people want from their ACA plan.

Originally Posted by XYMOX_4AD_84

Why do you think Reagan chose De Anza College for a speech during his '84 re-election campaign? He understood that he needed a % of the youth vote. I was there. At the time, I was probably one click less radical than the people banging the drums with all the "Fascist Gun in the West" signs, etc. But the heck if his speech did not soften me up. He really was "The Great Communicator!"

Well, he was the charming and rugged-looking Hollywood star and TV narrator, no doubt. With a 14-4 horoscope score. About the same as another TV star running today. I just hope we don't hear Trump take the oath and then say to Barack Obama, "you're fired!"

Ronnie Raygun got more support from young Xers, and from Jones Boomers, than from core Boomers, which was his weakest group. This bears no relation to Sanders' support among millennials.

Originally Posted by playwrite

All true, but it also requires some brains.

Have you read any rationale for Sanders support that comes from the head rather than heart. It's like being at a Eugene McCarthy convention - almost by rote, it makes me want to throw-up.

We went there, but you didn't, apparently. Others did en masse, and the author had to add this:

UPDATE:This post is getting a lot of attention, which is terrific and I thank all of you who are sharing it and helping more people see it. The downside is that there are a lot of comments, and it’s overwhelmed my ability to thoughtfully reply to each one. To allow myself to get other work done, I’ve had to go cold turkey and I will no longer be writing any more comment replies for this post. In the comments I’ve seen so far, I’ve noticed some people expressing concerns about electability, and I will write a post about why non-neoliberal candidates are fundamentally more viable now than they used to be soon (this includes not only Bernie, but also Trump–Trump is a right nationalist, not a neoliberal, which is why the republican establishment hates him). If you want to be sure not to miss that post, I invite you to scroll down to the bottom of the webpage, where I have all sorts of means by which you can follow my blog (via Facebook, Twitter, or E-Mail). My thanks again to all of you who are helping to make this post so popular by sharing it on social media.

I'm anxious to read the post about electability.

Originally Posted by playwrite

If you think Reagan's Democratic House is just the polar opposite of Paul Ryan's House, you are suffering from one of the worse cases of false equivalency meme that I have ever encountered.

Politicians, even rabidly dogmatic ones, bend to threats on their tenure. That was the club Reagan used, and a powerful one it was then and can be again today.

Originally Posted by playwrite

Just as long as you don't care about, you know, actual results that actually move us down the Progressive agenda.

Maybe we could get Disney to add a ProgressiveLand to their theme park, to the left of course. And have Libertarian land on the right hand side. Or, just mix them both in Fantasyland, but I guess that would lead to too many arguments at the shooting gallery.

I've seen a steady stream of retrenchment for 40 years. What progress do you envision that a neoliberal tool might bring to the table?

Originally Posted by Mikebert

No they aren't. Panics occurred in 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1884, 1893, 1907 and 1932-33, about 16 years apart on average. Then Congress shut them down in the 1930's. Congress re-authorized them in 1997 and we got the first 9 years later. So what is the recurrence rate? If we get one this recession then I would guess once per Juglar cycle. If not then I would suspect it will be every other cycle like before.

Another way to look at it is the four peaks in stock market valuation: 2000, 1929, 2015, 1906. Two gave panics two (so far) have not. If we go with the big crashes there were big crashes in 1987, 1929, 1946, 2008, again a 50:50 shot. So flip a coin.

A Juglar cycle at its low point meeting the 3T-4T cusp? That's likely to happen some time between 75 and 80 years.

1929 + 78 = 2007, corresponding peaks of doomed bubble economies at or the end or near the end of 3Ts. The latter part of a 3T tends to bring out the worst in mass behavior, and the bad behavior leads to a 4T. We can also go back to the Panic of 1857:

1857 + 82 = 1929.

Expect another possible big, bad economic downturn around 2023 if America has not resolved its 4T problems by then.

Originally Posted by playwrite

Ah, that was my point to Odin.

I don't think there is a Sanders Hate Derangement Syndrome; even Karl Rove's PAC is spending considerable funds to support him at the present.

There certainly one for Clinton, however, and Odin has a particularly virulent form of it. He's obviously an otherwise pretty smart fellow so it is a pretty good example of what hate can do to someone.

The reason so few Millies can tolerate Hillary at all has as much to do with her sense of entitlement as it does with her politics. How much of this can the young absorb? They are told to focus on all the identity politics they reject out of hand, and accept that things they care about will take time to work out, even though they are watching their lives and careers crater in front of their eyes. Yet Hillary is due. It's her turn. In return for supporting her, she promises to support some half-ass program they care not a whit about, even though the one they do care about has to be off the table as too expensive or too hard or too <insert the excuse of choice>.

But far and away, her worst problem is her total tone deafness on, well everything. Did she really think a few old feminist women could tell today's young women who to support? Really? It's just the most recent case of her not getting it ... but they do, and they're pissed. She won't get their support. If she gets the nomination, the GOP wins in November... period.

Originally Posted by Eric the Green

Reagan didn't appeal to the younger generation of voters, as was pointed out. He did best with older voters. But Generation X grew up with him as president, Reagan got support from them in 1984 (those 5 or 6 cohorts who could vote), and Gen X absorbed his (false) philosophy. Later, some of them switched sides, maybe going back and forth.

Reagan changed the baseline assumptions of American politics. Does it matter how? Personally, I thought he was a joke, but the joke was on me. I wasn't the audience he wanted to reach. I didn't matter, nor did others like me. We were swept aside. You can argue that it was really Carter who abandoned the working class or the times just called for change. It doesn't really matter why it happened. It did. The question now: can it happen again in reverse? If the answer is yes, then we should pursue it. If the answer is no, then pursuing it makes no difference one way of the other. We're screwed.

The answer seems pretty straight forward on those terms. We have very little to lose, but a lot to gain.

Originally Posted by playwrite

Ah, that was my point to Odin.

I don't think there is a Sanders Hate Derangement Syndrome; even Karl Rove's PAC is spending considerable funds to support him at the present.

There certainly one for Clinton, however, and Odin has a particularly virulent form of it. He's obviously an otherwise pretty smart fellow so it is a pretty good example of what hate can do to someone.

Hatting corrupt establishment politicians is bad now? Is this the hill (heheheh) you want to die on?

It's looking like Sanders' strongest support is coming from blue collar whites, the opposite of Obama's campaign in 2008, which had trouble with that exact demographic. Sanders is bring working class whites back home to the Democratic Party.

Originally Posted by Marx & Lennon

We went there, but you didn't, apparently. Others did en masse, and the author had to add this:

UPDATE:This post is getting a lot of attention, which is terrific and I thank all of you who are sharing it and helping more people see it. The downside is that there are a lot of comments, and it’s overwhelmed my ability to thoughtfully reply to each one. To allow myself to get other work done, I’ve had to go cold turkey and I will no longer be writing any more comment replies for this post. In the comments I’ve seen so far, I’ve noticed some people expressing concerns about electability, and I will write a post about why non-neoliberal candidates are fundamentally more viable now than they used to be soon (this includes not only Bernie, but also Trump–Trump is a right nationalist, not a neoliberal, which is why the republican establishment hates him). If you want to be sure not to miss that post, I invite you to scroll down to the bottom of the webpage, where I have all sorts of means by which you can follow my blog (via Facebook, Twitter, or E-Mail). My thanks again to all of you who are helping to make this post so popular by sharing it on social media.

I'm anxious to read the post about electability.

I read that post too. He touches on the problem, but missed the most important part. He talks about how inequality was high in the 1920's just like today, but was low in between. But he doesn't talks about how that happened. He says things like this:

So what did the left do? As you can see in the chart, between the 1930’s and the 1970’s, the United States drastically reduced economic inequality. It redistributed wealth from the top to the middle and the bottom, resulting in consistent wage increases and consequently consistent consumption increases.

He shows an outcome and then just states that a political side caused this to happen like magic. He doesn't go into more detail because he probably doesn't know HOW it happened. Well if you don't know how something happens how is the hell are you supposed to bring it about?

Sanders talks about raising the top tax rate by 94%. Has a left ever accomplished this in American history? No.

During the New Deal FDR raises top tax rates by 25%, about the same as the 1993 28% increase under Clinton. Republicans raised the top tax rate by 140% just before the New Deal, and supported further increasing the top rate by 21% for the war.

So you see Sanders top pro-equality tool is something "the Left" has never been able to achieve in peacetime. The big increases that were an important contributor to the inequality reduction described in the cited article were mostly done by Republicans. Ask yourself, why did they do it? Can one arrange things so that they are willing to do it again?

He calls for a national minimum wage of $15. This is good. How about calling for a rally in Washington for a 70K minimum salary for exemption from overtime rules. This is something the president can do unilaterally. Maybe a call for a tariff. How about prosecution of those who hire the undocumented, combined with a path to citizenship for those those they employ who show a willingness to become Americans. Maybe steal a bit of Trumps thunder. What I am suggesting is open up a wide range of policy issues, all of which are unified in that they were possibly involved in the great compression. The vast reduction in inequality from 1929-1946 occurred in a world in which immigration has been sharply reduced in 1924, tax raises sharply in 1930, 1935 and 1941, a massive tariff passed in 1930, labor actions legalized in 1935, prohibition ended in 1933, economy flooded with money in 1933 and after, welfare programs established mid 1930's, massive stimulus in 1941-46, price and wage controls with an explicit income leveled objective built in, etc. Lots of moving parts. No one know for sure how big of a role any one of these played. Maybe the results came from most or all of these acting in concert. The more policies along these lines that can be thrown into the debate, the better. And the primary is the time to do it.

Originally Posted by Marx & Lennon

The reason so few Millies can tolerate Hillary at all has as much to do with her sense of entitlement as it does with her politics. How much of this can the young absorb? They are told to focus on all the identity politics they reject out of hand, and accept that things they care about will take time to work out, even though they are watching their lives and careers crater in front of their eyes. Yet Hillary is due. It's her turn. In return for supporting her, she promises to support some half-ass program they care not a whit about, even though the one they do care about has to be off the table as too expensive or too hard or too <insert the excuse of choice>.

They may have to choose between half-assed improvement and dire destruction.

But far and away, her worst problem is her total tone deafness on, well everything. Did she really think a few old feminist women could tell today's young women who to support? Really? It's just the most recent case of her not getting it ... but they do, and they're pissed. She won't get their support. If she gets the nomination, the GOP wins in November... period.

I don't know how much she can be blamed for that particular error. But, no doubt, she is campaigning on her identity as a woman. Barack didn't campaign on his identity, but people voted for it. Hillary could learn something from the man who beat her.

Originally Posted by Eric the Green

They may have to choose between half-assed improvement and dire destruction.

Methinks that a Hillery win would unto itself = dire destruction.

Originally Posted by Kunstler

The remaining Americans sound-of-mind must view the primary election spectacle with mounting sensations of wonder, nausea, and panic. It’s one thing for the financial system to crack up, and another thing for social norms to disintegrate, and still another for the political system to become a locked ward of obvious psychopathology. Even the neurosurgeon on duty went narcoleptic the other night when his name was called to take the stage.
Last week’s candidate “debates” (or boasting contests) only underscored the human frailty on display. Marco Rubio was unmasked as an android with a broken flash drive. For a few moments I thought I was seeing an clip from the old movie Alien. In fact, the Republican melodrama more and more echoes the tone and plot of that story: a hapless, bumbling crew lost in space. One of these nights, something unspeakable is going to shoot out of Donald Trump’s mouth and there will be blood all over the podiums.
The Democratic boasting contest was not more reassuring. Bernie blew his biggest chance yet to harpoon the white whale known as Hillary when he cast some glancing aspersions on Mz It’s-My-Turn’s special side-job as errand girl of the Too-Big-To-Fail banks. Together, Bill and Hillary racked up $7.7 million on 39 speaking gigs to that gang, with Hillary clocking $1.8 million of the total for eight blabs. When Bernie alluded to this raft of grift, MzIMT retorted, “If you’ve got something to say, say it directly.”

There was a lot Bernie could have said, but didn’t. Such as: what did you tell them that was worth over $200,000 a pop? Whatever it was, it must have made them feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Did it occur to you that this might look bad sometime in the near future? Is there any way that this might not be construed as bribery? And how is some formerly middle-class out-of-work average voter supposed to feel about you getting paid more for 45 minutes of flapping your gums than he or she has earned in the past five years?

Bernie could have found a gentlemanly way to say that directly, but perhaps he experienced a sickening precognitive vision of his jibes being used against the party establishment’s candidate in the fall general election. Of course, if it looked like Hillary was going to get elected, the remaining sound-of-mind in this country might be falling over each other to applyfor citizenship in Uruguay. Beyond all the political histrionics, is there not some broad recognition that whoever occupies the White House in 2017 will preside over a financial debacle like unto nothing in scale that the world has ever seen before? With all the reverberating side effects imaginable among the traumatized nations? Something wicked has been creeping through the stock markets since the year began. The velocity and damage are amping up. Credit default swap spreads are yawning like fault lines in a ‘quake. Bankers are watching their share prices collapse. It’s a wonder that panic has not already broken out. This is not just about Wall Street and its counterparts in London, Shanghai, Tokyo, and Frankfurt. This is the financial world (and underworld) catching up with the Economy of Actual Stuff. In the USA, that economy has bled out like a hapless bystander with a sucking chest wound for the last eight years. Despite all the patriotic sanctimony on view at the Superbowl, the nation appears to be visibly cracking up, along with the fantasy of a permanent global economy. None of the desperate work-arounds since 2008 have worked around the predicaments of our time. Politics will not abide a rational journey out of our fatal hyper-complexity to something simpler and more consistent with the realities at hand. Expect more and greater craziness as the year lurches on.

Heh, I just love this. Hey, Mr$ It'$ my turn, yeah you, ju$t exactly why $hould you get all that $ when I can't?

I don't know how much she can be blamed for that particular error. But, no doubt, she is campaigning on her identity as a woman. Barack didn't campaign on his identity, but people voted for it. Hillary could learn something from the man who beat her.

1. Campaigning on her identity as a woman = identity politics as a woman. Hey, identity politics is just so 60's.
2. Stick a fork in it, that's a long gone cause.