Apparently, stealthcare will come to a "final" vote tomorrow night. Thousands of tea partiers have converged on Washington, DC. The left says the right is racist, and are chanting racist taunts on the lawns before the White House.
One side tries to demonize the other.
Obama is getting prizes out from underneath his desk to tempt recalcitrant congressmen into his web.
Perhaps as many as 30 million more people, including illegal aliens, possibly even aliens from places beyond our solar system, will receive health insurance. The uninsurable will be part of this newly enfranchised group.
Companies threaten to close and move their tentacles elsewhere, releasing giant new numbers of people on the other end from the ranks of the employed to the ranks of the unemployed and homeless.
Where is ACORN? Out doing Census work?
What nefarious underminings of law will they now be set to perform?
Meanwhile, the ants have invaded my kitchen now that the thaw has come. I just poured a bowl of Raisin Bran for my four-year-old and the bowl overflowed with ants. She sat fascinated and laughed and laughed. "Dad, the raisins have come alive."
150 years ago (more or less) was the Civil War. All those people are now dead.
The war between red state and blue state is a lot more civil these days. Inside of every blue stater is a worried red stater, and inside of every red stater, is one that longs to party down with the dissolution of the Republic as voting itself is replaced by deeming, and so many bills are stuffed inside of bills that it resembles a Russian doll. Even if a senator did know one bill they were voting for, they wouldn't know what else they were voting for. "We'll see what we've voted for once the voting is done!" Mad Nancy giggles.
Prestidigitation and poetry combined, as the Battle Hymn of the Republic appears to be a song for the soldiers, but turns out to actually be about mothers who have born these sons, and borne such songs as to bring a Republic to the boiling point, ants pouring out of bowls, boiling, roiling, spilling, pooling, thrilling, trilling, drooling, milling, pilings of words inside of words, as the Host goes marching on.
9 comments:
Dear people:
Barring unforeseen circumstances, any talk of deeming is now officially a straw man, since it never happened and won't happen.
love,
reality
What about, "redeeming"?
Nearly all of those people in the Civil War were dead 80 years ago. By the time Obama leaves office it will be four score and seven years ago. A soldier who was twenty in 1865 was 85 years old in 1930 if he lived that long. A fair number of them did live that long and one of the reasons is that they received government pensions. I don't think it's an accident that the New Deal happened just as the last of the Civil War pensioners were dying off.
A soldier who was 20 in 1945 is 85 years old now if he's still alive. I'm sure they'll come up with a name for whatever Obama cooks up to bolster the middle class now that the WWII generation is expired. Whatever it's called, it's likely to be something on the scale of the New Deal, something seen in our lifetimes only through the eyes of our parents.
I've got no problem with it. I think he's the right guy in the right place at the right time. Pensions going to Civil War or to WWII veterans were merit based and given to people who had made sacrifices to earn their benefits.
The thirty dollars a month my great great grandmother's sister-in-law was getting from the government when she died in 1928 was roughly equivalent to a 5% annual return on a $10,000 dollar investment. Where I come from that's known as capitalism.
Redeem that.
Problem is he's giving it to anybody who lives in the country no matter how they got here, or even if they are willing to fight against the country rather than for it. Did Confederate soldiers also get a pension? Even terrorists can have Obamacare, so they can fly planes into skyscrapers and then have death benefits given to their families in Yemen. anybody who's here for ANY reason can buy in.
I think the only hope is that the two sides on the abortion issue won't come together, and this will make the deal fall apart.
There's still hope. Keep your fingers crossed.
Otherwise, I think the last remaining good jobs in the country have just been given to China.
Confederate soldiers received pensions from the state in which they served. Union soldiers were paid by the federal government. Up until 1890 pensions were restricted to those with war-related disability, those who were indigent, and, of course, the widows and orphans of soldiers who were killed in the war. Eighty or ninety percent of the soldiers enlisted were between the ages of 18 and 25, so they generally were not married and did not have dependent children when they died in the war.
By 1890 soldiers who had been 20 in 1865, the youngest veterans, were 45. The oldest veterans were 65, so old age was added to disability and indigence as a criterion for eligibility. Medical care was part of the package. Most of the veterans died between 1890 and 1920.
My great great grandmother, whose husband died in the war, had four dependent children. She was denied benefits until she re-married. Her second husband received benefits for each of the dependent children until the youngest of them turned 15 in 1878 and was apparently considered no longer dependent. Her second marriage took place in a church that is now Missouri Synod and a national landmark since 1987. Most of the stones in that church had been gathered at the time of her marriage, but they weren't assembled until four years later.
The fourth dependent child was the son of the second husband by his first wife who I suspect died giving birth during the war. The older three children married in 1877, 1879 and 1880 and the marriages appear to have been, at least partially, arranged by their stepfather.
Between 1890 and 1920 both the federal and the state governments, especially those in the south, were radically altered by the need to provide pensions and related services for Civil War veterans. Both the Spanish-American war and participation in WWI could be interpreted as efforts on the part of the military to generate new beneficiaries to perpetuate its bureaucracy.
Financial collapse in 1929 provided a whole new set of needs and priorities that could be met by adapting an existing bureaucracy that had outlived those it was designed to serve. On the whole, I think it's a good thing. We wouldn't want those veterans to have survived the Civil War in vain.
I'm sad for my country today.
We're going down a road that promises to be fraught with problems.
I predict that the new entitlement will bust the Federal Budget within 10 years. The people who start these programs always promise that in the long run, it will save money, but it always ends up costing 10 times more than they predicted.
We spent our "surpluses" on wars of choice over the last decade. And then there was the drug benefit--a gift to the drug companies.
Now society will shoulder the burden of providing complete health care to those who cost the most. I expect this to drag down the benefits and raise the cost for the other 2/3's of the population.
The real solution to the problem would have been to tweak the regulations regarding insurance coverage, to prevent abuses and obscene profits. But that would have required some complicated, and thankless, legislative work--something neither party seems interested in. Better to drop this bombshell on the problems, they surmise, and hope for the best.
As much as I believe in health coverage for all, it isn't a right. And we can't afford to give Cadillac treatment to everyone. There's going to have to be sacrifices.
When those sacrifices start to occur, people are going to get very angry. You ain't seen nothin yet!
Well Curtis, you can predict that it will bust the federal budget in 10 years, but the nonpartisan CBO says otherwise, and strongly so.
We already spend a crapton of money on healthcare, a lot of it because of the inefficiencies inherent in having millions and millions and millions of people without health insurance whom we nevertheless end up treating.
We already do give Cadillac treatment to everyone when they're in serious trouble...a lot of times, we give cadillac treatment to people when they just need an old sedan, using up emergency room resources when they should be using the less expensive resources at a clinic or primary caregiver - now everyone will have access to better preventative care and be bought into the system, expanding the pool and thereby lowering costs.
It won't be perfect and flowers and roses, but it's an improvement over our backwardarse system that we have now.
W.B., why are you sad? How old are you? Were you sad in the early 90s, when the individual mandate was a plank of the Republican healthcare platform?
I have a hard time understanding how the individual mandate and the health exchanges - two Republican ideas that use the free market to manage health care costs and expand coverage - are now the kiss of death from the right's perspective.
Brett,
I was a liberal in when health care was last on the table. I even voted for Paul Wellstone. But I didn't follow the health care reform very closely. I was more interested in being a libertine.
Why am I sad? There are a lot of reasons. I perceive this "reform" to be bad for people and bad for my country. I'm sad that, looking forward, there is all kinds of scorched earth, as far as the eye can see. I'm sad that I perceive my government to be at war with my ideals. In short, at least for the time being, I think my country is becoming a worse place. I don't hate it and I'm not going to leave it. I'm not trying to make a hysterical point. I'm just sad for my country.
Post a Comment