“I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health care program”
— Illinois state Sen. Barack Obama, June 2003
“I have not said that I was a single-payer supporter”
— President Obama, August 2009
“Leadership means that the buck stops here…. I therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America’s debt limit”
— Sen. Barack Obama, March 2006
“It is not acceptable for us not to raise the debt ceiling and to allow the U.S. government to default”
— President Obama, July 2011
“I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages”
— Obama questionnaire response, 1996, while running for Illinois state Senate
“I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of gay marriage”
— Sen. Obama, November 2008, while running for president
“It is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married”
— President Obama, May 2012
I initially posted this at maclectic/Forums/politics on Jan 29, 2010. Barack Obama had just completed his first year, and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid set the stage in Congress:
Yesterday the Senate approved raising the debt ceiling another 1.9 Trillion across a party-line vote. Had it not passed, the fall-back plan was to approve the 635 Billion already approved by the House. Naturally, raising the ceiling again wouldn’t look good next fall right before the mid-term elections, so our fearless Senate simply doubled down on the ceiling.
Following WWI, two major and opposing “schools” of economics appeared.
The first was known at the time as “classic liberalism” today we know it as the Austrian School. Ludwig Von Mises and F.A Hayek were major proponents. The prime tenets of this economic theory was that individuals, and their contributions can create wealth and add value to society more efficiently with the least amount of government interference and control. The Chicago School which Milton Freidman spear-headed is an off-shoot in a sense of the Austrian School of thought. Today in the US at least, most folks who align with this theory are generally regarded as conservatives in an economic sense. In parts of Europe and academia they are still known as “classic liberals” which should not be confused with the progressive movement.
Second, at about the same time, John Maynard Keynes was developing his progressive economic theories in London. He believed that money or wealth would always be in a constant fixed supply, and that governments could control markets by controlling the money supply. This theory punished producers with excessive taxes, a policy which created a self-fulfilling prophecy, and producers found ways to reduce their output, since punitive taxes also reduced individual incentive to create and produce goods and services.
Keynesian Economics also held that governments could artificially stimulate an economy by pumping up the money supply, also known as printing money. Governments also used such gimmicks to deflate the value of their currency in order to pay international debts at lower than agreed to rates. This is known as monetizing debt. The US, England and Germany all used the Keynesian theory to print money to prop up their respective economies after the Great Depression (in Germany’s case beforehand). The Weimar Republic printed so much currency in order to pay off punitive WWI war-debts that the government finally collapsed which led to the rise of the Third Reich.
Sadly, the Keynesian School was known as gospel in most governments in the West for much of the 20th century with a few exceptions. It is making a strong come-back today. We are monetizing our debt, something that the Chinese and Arabs are not looking fondly upon, since they now hold such a large part of it.
Today, our government is creating the most forceful shift to failed Keynesian theories since the days of FDR and his progressive vision which we are all still paying for today. Governments can not create wealth, they can only confiscate it regardless of the amount of currency they are printing.
It still takes individuals and producers willing to risk, to create and innovate to create wealth, it is not a static target. We should go back to creating an environment which rewards instead of demonizing the risk-takers, and the producers of the world. We will all be richer for it in the long run.
I’m not a big fan of hip-hop, or rap as we used to call it. This is a very entertaining rap production of an imagined meeting of Keynes and Hayek during current times. It is very well produced, and brings into contrast the two major economic schools of thought in a creative way. I hope you enjoy it.
In Fear the Boom and Bust, John Maynard Keynes and F. A. Hayek, two of the great economists of the 20th century, come back to life to attend an economics conference on the economic crisis. Before the conference begins, and at the insistence of Lord Keynes, they go out for a night on the town and sing about why there’s a “boom and bust” cycle in modern economies and good reason to fear it.
About 6:30 running time with an additional 60 seconds of credits.
Hit the read more for lyrics, and additional links.
The Obama administration, along with their PelosiReidian enablers
in the United States Congress, gave a great deal of thought to the timing of various events in the Obamacare process.
They passed it through the House when the American public was distracted by the massacre at Fort Hood… they passed it through the Senate when the nation was distracted by Christmas Eve celebrations… they designed it so that the taxes would begin to be collected immediately, but the benefits wouldn’t start for four years, so they could pretend to stretch ten years of taxes to fund six years of benefits. Of course this accounting sham would collapse in its second decade, but that didn’t matter to them; once it was fully effective, they were sure it would never be repealed, no matter how incredibly destructive it turned out to be. And they may be right; that window of opportunity for a second chance at redemption is rapidly closing.
With all their concentration on timing, however, they neglected to consider one key, unchangeable moment, now locked into the American corporate world: healthcare open enrollment sessions are almost always in October, as employees can choose their plans for the following year. And that all happens now, within weeks or even days of casting our ballots.
The Annual Presentation:
Most companies now offer a presentation to their employees – the larger the company, the more presentations – at which Human Resources professionals explain the options for next year, the changes from the prior year’s program, what it’s going to cost, what the employees need to do by the end of the open enrollment period.
There will be changes this year, many changes.
If you like using the Flexible Spending Account option
– the program of paying your medical, dental and vision bills with pretax dollars, you’ll see a big change, as the old $5000/year maximum shrinks to $2500 for 2013. This doesn’t matter to most of us… most people just use a few hundred dollars per year in this use-it-or-lose-it account to cover doctor visit copays and prescription copays. But to those with a couple of kids who need braces, or those with expensive vision work, or other surgeries planned, the loss of that $2500 means an increase in the price of those services… an increase that goes directly into the government’s coffers. The hundred dollars you pay the orthodontist or other surgeon won’t change; he’s still getting the same hundred dollars. But now that it’s paid with post-tax money, you’ll be paying another ten, twenty, or thirty percent of it to the government. It’s a windfall for Washington.
