"Let's Get On With It Mr. President"

This why I LOVE Bill Moyers. The man tells it like it is with no BS.



Nice plug for Josh Marshall over at TPM at the end too.

And That's The Bottom LIne....

...Because Josh at TPM said so!

Ok cheesy ode to Stone Cold Steve Austin out of the way, Josh Marshall of the aforementioned TPM fame, has a post up that really boils it all the way down when it comes to the question of whether health care reforme gets passed this year with a public option in tact...

And that's this: the opposition to a so-called 'public option' comes almost entirely from insurance companies who have developed monopolies or near monopolies in particular geographic areas. And they don't want competition.

Note, I'm not saying more competition. I'm saying any competition at all. As Zack Roth explains in this new piece 94% of the health care insurance market is now under monopoly or near-monopoly conditions -- the official term of art is 'highly concentrated'. In other words, there's no mystery why insurance costs keep going up even as the suck quotient rises precipitously. Because in most areas there's little or no actual competition.

It's something everyone can understand that if you have only one widget maker, widgets will get really expensive, and probably decline in quality. And the widget makers will pour lots of money into Congress or whatever the law-making power is, to keep their monopoly in place because their monopoly ensures locked in profits. It's market theory 101 (or perhaps, rent-seeking 102, depending on your perspective.)

Put even shorter, if there is no public option in the health care reform bill then the monopolistic insurance companies will have won, if it does have a public option then everybody else in the country wins.

Its really that simple.

Smoke And Mirrors

I have been talking about Congressman Paul Ryan today and his promotion of the House GOP "alternative budget". Well what I didn't mention was that he also had an op ed in the WingNut Journal this morning also advocating for his plan. In the op ed he included this chart. Look it over and then see if you can find anything curious about it.









I knew something looked wrong about this picture but I didn't take it seriously anyway. Then I went over to TPM and Josh Marshall points out that the chart goes out 70 years. Now keep in mind that the President's budget only went out 10 years and if you look carefully the numbers during that time of their estimates of the percentage of GDP that their budget would take up isn't far off at all from President Obama's budget projections. Now if you are skeptical like me you have to believe that they fudged even those numbers on their own projections. You don't see an actual big divergence until 20 years from now, at best 12 years AFTER President Obama will be out of office, which nobody has actually game planned out.

This is just another reason why you can NEVER take Republicans seriously these days.