Aren't you glad you voted against Gore...

Remember the budget surplus. Somehow we can't afford the same government services today. I think we all know why. More from Kevin Drum's blog below:


Just the Simple Truth:
by

"Have I mentioned my favorite part of Obama's speech yesterday? Here it is:


America’s finances were in great shape by the year 2000. We went from deficit to surplus. America was actually on track to becoming completely debt free, and we were prepared for the retirement of the Baby Boomers.


But after Democrats and Republicans committed to fiscal discipline during the 1990s, we lost our way in the decade that followed. We increased spending dramatically for two wars and an expensive prescription drug program — but we didn’t pay for any of this new spending. Instead, we made the problem worse with trillions of dollars in unpaid-for tax cuts — tax cuts that went to every millionaire and billionaire in the country; tax cuts that will force us to borrow an average of $500 billion every year over the next decade.

To give you an idea of how much damage this caused to our nation’s checkbook, consider this: In the last decade, if we had simply found a way to pay for the tax cuts and the prescription drug benefit, our deficit would currently be at low historical levels in the coming years.

But that’s not what happened. And so, by the time I took office, we once again found ourselves deeply in debt and unprepared for a Baby Boom retirement that is now starting to take place. When I took office, our projected deficit, annually, was more than $1 trillion. On top of that, we faced a terrible financial crisis and a recession that, like most recessions, led us to temporarily borrow even more.


Translation: Fuck you, Republicans.

And I'd say it's a well deserved flip of the bird. Republicans, as you can imagine, are less enthusiastic, and this bit of the speech undoubtedly accounts for most of the bile being tossed around on Fox and elsewhere today. But hey — sometimes the truth hurts. And all Obama did was speak the simple truth. In the past decade, Republicans slashed taxes, started two wars, approved a big unfunded entitlement, and presided over an economic collapse that cratered tax revenues and required massive government spending to counteract. That's pretty much 100% of our existing deficit problem right there. All we're doing now is trying to clean up the mess the GOP has left us."

Why we need health care (for the citizenry of our shared nation)

I've been reading a few blog posts arguing that if we just gave senior citizens cash, then they could decide if they wanted to buy health care or not. And that would put downward pressure on health care's inflation rate. It's interesting, but I think Ezra make the relevant point below:


Why can’t we just give seniors cash?:

"As a society, we are not willing to let people die painfully in the street, even if they have previously made decisions that would lead to that outcome. In reality, what terrifies all of us is what happens after someone takes the cash and then gets sick.

Let’s run through the cash-grant world: At age 65, grandma decides to purchase no health-care plan, as she figures she’ll just get one when she gets sick, or maybe just get one next year, or perhaps she just doesn’t want to spend money extending decrepitude. But then she has a stroke and gets rushed to the hospital. Someone is paying for that emergency care. It might be the hospital. It might be the taxpayers. But it’s someone: The paramedics aren’t going to refuse to lift her onto the gurney. And then she needs rehabilitation. Someone is going to end up paying for that, too. Or perhaps she gets leukemia and, in a display of consistency, doesn’t want heroic efforts made to fight it. But are we really prepared to deny her pain meds? Or hospice?

Perhaps you just build in a requirement that grandma has to at least purchase a catastrophic care plan. The problem with catastrophic care plans, of course, is that they often don’t cover the care you need. That’s why they’re cheaper. So the question is what happens when grandma needs more than the catastrophic care plan will provide — and when you’re dealing with seniors, that’s a “when,” not an “if.” The secondary question is whether grandma stops paying for the preventive care that she can put off, and that leads to higher emergency costs down the road. We’ve certainly seen that before, too.

This is why Medicare is universal and the health-care law has an individual mandate. If we were willing to let people simply live with the consequences of their decisions, we could have a very different health-care system than we do. But we’re not — and, as a compassionate, rich society, I don’t think that’s such a bad thing. This is why we, like every other developed nation, are moving toward insurance solutions that assume an eventual need for health care. If we can’t say no credibly, then we need to say yes responsibly, and in advance."