Saturday, March 07, 2009
Monday, February 09, 2009
GRIT TV
Monday, January 12, 2009
People don’t eat in the long run. They eat every day
Editorial Observer - Republicans’ Latest Talking Point - The New Deal Failed - NYTimes.com:
"Congressional Republicans say Mr. Obama’s stimulus will cost too much, and that over time the economy will cure itself. When critics raised the same objections to F.D.R.’s programs, his relief administrator, Harry Hopkins, had a ready answer: “People don’t eat in the long run. They eat every day.”"
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/12/opinion/12mon4.html?ref=opinionWednesday, December 31, 2008
The Yale Book of Quotations - Shapiro, Fred R.; Epstein, Joseph - Yale University Press - Sent Using Google Toolbar
The Yale Book of Quotations - Shapiro, Fred R.; Epstein, Joseph - Yale University Press
Author Fred R. Shapiro's
Most Notable Quotations of 2008
1. "I can see Russia from my house!" — Sarah Palin on her foreign-policy credentials, as satirized by Tina Fey, NBC "Saturday Night Live" broadcast, Sept. 13, 2008
2. "All of them, any of them that have been in front of me over all these years." — Sarah Palin responding to Katie Couric's asking her to specifically name newspapers or magazines she reads, CBS News interview, Oct. 1, 2008
3. "We have sort of become a nation of whiners." — Phil Gramm on Americans concerned about the economy, quoted in Washington Times, July 10, 2008
4. "It's not based on any particular data point, we just wanted to choose a really large number." — Treasury spokeswoman explaining how the $700 billion number was chosen for the initial bailout, quoted on Forbes.com, Sept. 23, 2008
5. "The fundamentals of America's economy are strong." — John McCain, interview with Peter Cook on Bloomberg TV, Apr. 17, 2008
6. "Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency." — Department of the Treasury's proposed Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, Sept. 2008
7. "Maybe 100." — John McCain on how many years U.S. troops could remain in Iraq, response at town hall meeting, Derry, N.H., Jan. 3, 2008
8. "I'll see you at the debates, bitches." — Paris Hilton, video responding to John McCain ad attacking Barack Obama as a celebrity, Aug. 2008
9. "At a time of great crisis with mortgage foreclosures and autos, he [Barack Obama] says we only have one president at a time. I'm afraid that overstates the number of presidents we have." — Barney Frank, remark to consumer advocates, Dec. 4, 2008
10. (tie) "Cash for trash." — Paul Krugman on the financial bailout, New York Times, Sept. 22, 2008
10. (tie) "There are no atheists in foxholes and there are no libertarians in financial crises." — Paul Krugman, interview by Bill Maher on HBO's "Real Time" broadcast, Sept. 19, 2008
Friday, November 07, 2008
The Health Care Challenge: Sailing Into a Perfect Storm - Economix Blog - NYTimes.com
The Health Care Challenge: Sailing Into a Perfect Storm - Economix Blog - NYTimes.com
Either Americans in the higher income strata must step up to the cashier's window to help subsidize, with higher income taxes, the health care of the most hard-working members of the lower income classes, or the United States will have to evolve toward a noticeable two-tiered or multi-tiered health care system, with bare-bones, low-tech health care for families in the bottom half of the income distribution and increasingly superior, high-tech health care for families in the upper-income strata.
Consider a family headed by two income earners each with a gross wage base of $30,000. One might be a taxi driver, and the other a sales clerk in a department store or at, say, Home Depot.
It follows from this definition of gross wage base that it must support all of the health expenditures made by or on behalf of the family in a given year — that is, the employer's contribution to premiums for the employee's health insurance, the employee's own contribution and the employee's out-of-pocket health spending.By "gross wage base" is meant here the sum of all of the debits that an employer makes to the account "Payroll Expense" for an employee. It includes the employee's cash take-home pay, all the income taxes and Social Security taxes and other deductions – for example, the employee's contributions toward health insurance and pensions — withheld from the employee's paycheck, as well as the employer's share of Social Security taxes and the employer's contributions toward the employee's health insurance, pension, vacation pay, sick days and so on. It is a sum that supports all taxes paid by or on behalf of the employee and all fringe benefits earned by the employee, whether formally paid by the employer or taken out of the employee's paycheck.
According to the Milliman Medical Index, this total health spending figure for a typical non-elderly American family of four had reached an average of $15,600 by 2008. It had grown at an average compound growth rate of about 8.6 percent from $11,192 in 2004.
To return to our family with an assumed gross wage base of $60,000: If that gross wage base grew by, say, 3 percent per year over the next decade, to $80,600 by 2017, while total family health spending grew by, say, 8 percent per year over the same time frame, to $33,700 by 2017, then about 41 percent of the family's gross wage base would be taken up by health care alone, before any deductions for taxes or fringe benefits. If the wage base grew by 4 percent, health spending still would absorb about a third of the family gross wage base.
These numbers, which are realistic, suggest that before long the gross wage base earned by American households will become too small a donkey to carry the load of the family's spending on health care. It will put before Americans an uncomfortable choice.
It is one of the several unpleasant trade-offs facing President-elect Barack Obama.
Uwe E. Reinhardt is an economist at Princeton.
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/07/the-health-care-challenge-sailing-into-a-perfect-storm/
Saturday, September 27, 2008
New Videos From BarackObama Via YouTube
New Videos from BarackObamadotcom
- Presidential Debate: The Right Judgment in Iraq
- Blueprint for Change: Foreign Policy
- Joe Biden speaks with Firefighters in Cudahy, WI
- Drive for Change Virginia
- Joe Biden gives a community gathering in Greensburg, PA.
- Faith Forum with Don Miller
- Barack Obama: Washington, DC Press Avail
- Barack on Clean Coal in Virginia
- Next Generation Veterans for Obama
- FightTheSmears.com: Fight Back with the Truth!
- A Message from Maya
- Joe Biden discusses the McCain/Palin Healthcare Tax
- "A Stronger Economy"
- VoteForChange.com: Alicia Keys
- Gov. Kathleen Sebelius in Virginia
- Virginia Veterans for Obama
- Obama: Debate is 'More Important Than Ever'
- Joe Biden speaks on the Economic Crisis in Jeffersonville, IN
- Volunteers in Florida
- Barack Obama: Press Avail in Clearwater, Florida
Friday, September 12, 2008
John McCain Can't Count to Seven, A Senior Moment? Or Just Lipstick on a Higgs Boson
Obama Counts McCain's Houses - The Caucus Blog - NYTimes.com
The Republican nominees consider truth to be insidious personal attacks, but insit their insidious lying personal attacks are the truth. So here's another look at the first squeal of outrage. Without any lipstick involved at all.
August 21, 2008, 12:10 pm
Obama Counts McCain's Houses
By Katharine Q. Seelye AND Kitty BennettUpdated CHESTER, Va. — If John McCain had tried to play into Barack Obama's strategy of sounding out of touch with ordinary people, he could not have done better than to say in an interview that he didn't know how many houses he had.
"This puzzled me. I was confused as to what he meant. Then there was another interview, where somebody asked John McCain, 'How many houses do you have?' He said, 'I'm not sure I'll have to check with my staff.' True quote! 'I'm not sure, I'll have to check with my staff.' So they asked his staff and he said, 'at least four.' 'At least four.'Now think about that. I guess if you think that being rich means you've got to make $5 million, and if you don't know how many houses you have, then it's not surprising that you might think the economy was fundamentally strong. But if you're like me, and you got one house, or you were like the millions of people who are struggling right now to keep up with their mortgage so they don't lose their home, you might have a different perspective.
By the way, the answer is, John McCain has seven homes. There's just a fundamental gap of understanding between John McCain's world and what people are going through every single day here in America. You don't have to be a Nobel Prize-laureate economist, you just have to have a little bit of a sense of what ordinary people are going through to understand that we can't afford eight more years or four more years or one more year of the failed economic policies that George Bush has put in place."
Mr. Obama returned to the subject later in an answer to a woman who asked him what he would do for poor people. He said that among other things he would expand the mortgage deduction beyond people who itemize their taxes.
"John McCain, with those homes, they get a mortgage deduction, up to $1 million," he said. (The Obama plan would give a 10 percent tax credit on up to $8,000 of mortgage interest payments to households who take the standard deduction. The campaign estimates that 10 million homeowners would benefit from this proposal.)
Brian Rogers, a spokesman, issued this statement: "Does a guy who made more than $4 million last year, just got back from vacation on a private beach in Hawaii and bought his own million-dollar mansion with the help of a convicted felon really want to get into a debate about houses? Does a guy who worries about the price of arugula and thinks regular people "cling" to guns and religion in the face of economic hardship really want to have a debate about who's in touch with regular Americans?The McCain campaign quickly fired back at Mr. Obama's remarks, calling them a "personal attack."
"The reality is that Barack Obama's plans to raise taxes and opposition to producing more energy here at home as gas prices skyrocket show he's completely out of touch with the concerns of average Americans."
"I understand that Senator McCain was asked yesterday this question, 'How many houses do you own?,' and he couldn't answer that question," Mr. Kaine said. "He couldn't count high enough, apparently, to even know how many houses he owns."
And, in another sign of how the Obama campaign has seized on Mr. McCain's not remembering how many homes he owns, campaign workers have fanned out in various battleground states to ask voters if they remember how many homes they own. Among the states are Pennsylvania and Florida.
Now, two major labor organizations and Brave New Films teamed up earlier this week to produce a Web film that intersperses shots of some of those properties with the tale of a woman who lost her home in a mortgage foreclosure.
Mr. McCain's Senate financial disclosures do not list these properties among his assets, because, according to public records, the homes and condominiums are in the name of a corporation trust listing his wife Cindy, the heiress to a beer distributorship whose worth is estimated to be anywhere from $35 million to $100 million.
Among those properties:
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