ADDENDUM::Zombies Against Medicare - The New York Times

Paul Krugman takes a look at Bush's "zombie idea" that Medicare is not working and that raising the age of eligibility is a good idea.

[W]hile raising the Medicare age has long been a favorite idea of Washington’s Very Serious People, a couple of years ago the Congressional Budget Office did a careful study and discovered that it would hardly save any money. That is, at this point raising the Medicare age is a zombie idea, which should have been killed by analysis and evidence, but is still out there eating some people’s brains.
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The real reason conservatives want to do away with Medicare has always been political: It’s the very idea of the government providing a universal safety net that they hate, and they hate it even more when such programs are successful. But when they make their case to the public they usually shy away from making their real case, and have even, incredibly, sometimes posed as the program’s defenders against liberals and their death panels.

What Medicare’s would-be killers usually argue, instead, is that the program as we know it is unaffordable — that we must destroy the system in order to save it, that, as Mr. Bush put it, we must “move to a new system that allows [seniors] to have something — because they’re not going to have anything.” And the new system they usually advocate is, as I said, vouchers that can be applied to the purchase of private insurance.

The underlying premise here is that Medicare as we know it is incapable of controlling costs, that only the only way to keep health care affordable going forward is to rely on the magic of privatization.

Now, this was always a dubious claim. It’s true that for most of Medicare’s history its spending has grown faster than the economy as a whole — but this is true of health spending in general. In fact, Medicare costs per beneficiary have consistently grown more slowly than private insurance premiums, suggesting that Medicare is, if anything, better than private insurers at cost control. Furthermore, other wealthy countries with government-provided health insurance spend much less than we do, again suggesting that Medicare-type programs can indeed control costs.

Zombies Against Medicare - The New York Times

Wall Street crushes records yet again - The Washington Post

For the last 5 years or so, I have been sitting on this Op-ed, "Obama's Radicalism Is Killing the Dow." It was penned by Michael J. Boskin over at the Wall Street Journal in response to the free-fall of the financial markets. A catastrophe he placed at the feet of President Obama, contrary to the reality of the situation.

It's hard not to see the continued sell-off on Wall Street and the growing fear on Main Street as a product, at least in part, of the realization that our new president's policies are designed to radically re-engineer the market-based U.S. economy, not just mitigate the recession and financial crisis.

The illusion that Barack Obama will lead from the economic center has quickly come to an end. Instead of combining the best policies of past Democratic presidents -- John Kennedy on taxes, Bill Clinton on welfare reform and a balanced budget, for instance -- President Obama is returning to Jimmy Carter's higher taxes and Mr. Clinton's draconian defense drawdown.

So nothing give me more pleasure than to highlight this bit of news,,,

In a year full of market milestones, Wall Street crushed a couple more Tuesday, lifting the Dow Jones industrial average past the 18,000-point mark for the first time and delivering the Standard & Poor’s 500 index its second record-high close in two days.

Investors welcomed the latest encouraging news on the economy as the government said the United States grew at a 5 percent annual rate, the fastest pace in more than a decade in the third quarter.

The rally gave the Dow and the S&P 500 their fifth straight gain. It also marked the 51st all-time high for the S&P 500 and the 36th for the Dow this year, according to S&P Dow Jones Indices.

What is bizarre, we will still have many within the ranks of the Reich who will continue to claim that President Obama is in fact a socialist. If that were true, the financial gains of the last six years would have gone to the middle class and low wage earners, not to the pockets of the already wealthy one percent. A point that EJ Dionne makes:

This habit seems especially pronounced in the way President Obama’s adversaries treat him. It’s odd that so many continue to see Obama as a radical and a socialist even as the Dow hits record levels and the wealthy continue to do very nicely. If he is a socialist, he is surely the most incompetent practitioner in the history of Marxism.

As well as Paul Krugman:

You know the spiel: that the U.S. economy is ailing because Obamacare is a job-killer and the president is a redistributionist, that Mr. Obama’s anti-business speeches (he hasn’t actually made any, but never mind) have hurt entrepreneurs’ feelings, inducing them to take their marbles and go home.

This story line never made much sense. The truth is that the private sector has done surprisingly well under Mr. Obama,,,

So to those that call President Obama a socialist, I will borrow from the great Florence Jean Castleberry, "Kiss my grits!!"

Wall Street crushes records yet again - The Washington Post

Paul Krugman: We live in the most unequal society ever, and it’s only getting worse

Paul Krugman: We live in the most unequal society ever, and it’s only getting worse (via Raw Story )

Americans may be living in the most unequal society that has ever existed, said economist Paul Krugman. The New York Times columnist and Princeton University professor said Thursday there is zero evidence to suggest extreme inequality is good for economic…

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