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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RetiredNow who wrote (247392)	3/14/2014 9:21:05 AM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541731

You do not belong here. All this stuff: " They get Obama phones, 5 years of unemployment, food stamps, and a whole host of welfare. The rich most definitely. I'm in the 1% and have most of my wealth in stocks, real estate, and other investments. The last 5 years has been beautifully bountiful to 1%. Our portfolios have expanded nicely with all this Quantitative Easing. Low rates have been nice too, where the 1% has snapped up nice real estate properties at low prices from their cronies, the Big Banks, for renting out at high rents to all those middle class people who lost their homes in 2008-9. I saw that happen in a home right across the street from me. Our upper middle class friends lost their home, a company came in 3 years later and bought it for half the price, and now rents it to a nice family for a healthy rent." Your first item: factcheck.org I do not expect you to snopes yourself and I have neither the time nor the inclination to post corrections to the kind if tripe your post contains. It's sad I have to do even the first one. But I don't want to see you here again- not because you're a bad person, but because this is NOT the thread for you. Why you didn't read the thread header and figure this out, I will never understand. This is a place for people of the center and the left- and you are neither- this has become very clear. I've no idea why you even want to be here, but sadly, you don't fit- and I'll give you the chance to leave without a ban. If you look up any of the stuff you believe, you're going to find out things are different than you think they are. I have anecdotes that beat your anecdotes- but who cares? Nothing lies like an anecdote- some of the biggest political chicanery started with anecdote. The glittering generalities you post sans facts, sans logic, obviously appeal to you- but you need to post them elsewhere. Goodbye and good luck.

To: RetiredNow who wrote (247392)	3/14/2014 9:25:02 AM
From: Sam	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 541731

Wow, there is so much confusion in that post! I can tell you that MANY of my friends are contractors. Many used to be employed with big firms. Most are contractors now because they got laid off in the past few years and have come back to some of the same firms as contractors. Their former employers laid them off, because they don't want to pay the increased healthcare costs and SS and Medicare taxes, but they are fine picking them back up as contractors. The kicker for my contractor friends is that the pay isn't bad, but their health care costs have skyrocketed. First of all, employers aren't paying increased SS and Medicare taxes--if they say that, they are lying. Second, people in construction were laid off back in '08-09 because the real estate/credit bubble burst. Business was great before then in good part due to the bubble. And as for healthcare costs--guess what, they were increasing before Obama, and in fact healthcare cost increases have been slowing since Obama came into office. Not insurance prices though. Yes, I realize that insurance companies claim that their increases are due to Obamacare, but this is mostly BS. See for example, But analyst Doug Whiteman said this may be a case of companies passing along more of the health insurance costs to employees and using Obamacare as an excuse. "Since prices for everything rise all the time, I suspect that the reason workers are telling us their health insurance is costing more is because there are noticeable increases -- for example, their $25 copay at the doctor’s office just went up to $35," said Whiteman, an insurance analyst for Bankrate. "Businesses are passing along more of the insurance costs to their covered employees, though this is a trend that has been going on for years, since before Obamacare." One example of the apparent disconnect: Some companies are blaming the ACA's 40 percent tax on higher-cost "Cadillac" health insurance as reason to raise plan costs or curtail coverage. But that aspect of the law doesn't take effect until 2018, Whiteman notes. "It would appear companies are acting very preemptively," he said. cbsnews.com There has been an incredible amount of FUD spread about Obamacare, much of it deliberate. I am not saying that these people aren't paying higher insurance premiums, but blaming Obamacare for those premiums and for medical costs in general just isn't right. And if Obamacare were repealed tomorrow, I will bet that insurance prices won't go down (except by reducing coverage). But this is a complicated issue, and really, I don't think we can resolve it on an SI thread--it is far more likely that we would just fling simplistic talking points at each other. All of these folks are solidly upper middle class, I'd say, with families, kids in school or college, and a heap of weekly bills to pay. Most don't have much savings in the bank nor investments in stocks and most have mortgages to pay. If they don't have "much savings in the bank," then I wouldn't say that they are 'solidly upper middle class." Certainly not "solid." Well then, who has benefitted most from Obama's policies? The poor most definitely. They get Obama phones, 5 years of unemployment, food stamps, and a whole host of welfare. I can't believe you bring up "Obama phones"--I thought that by now everyone knew that that program began under Bush. And surely you know that no one lives very well on welfare, food stamps or unemployment insurance. But maybe you actually believe these things? That people pant for these things, would rather be on welfare than have a job, lol? Maybe you don't know that welfare itself is limited in time? You just fall for the "welfare queen" nonsense? All of this makes me sick and feeling guilty. I'm doing fine, but I see the misery all around me and I know and see and feel viscerally what these Obama and Fed policies are doing. They are enriching the rich and giving welfare to the poor, and DESTROYING the middle class. I don't doubt that the rich have done better under Obama than the middle class. But that has been true since the 70s, and especially since the Reagan administration dramatically flattened the tax curve. And the "Greed is good" slogan became firmly embedded in popular culture.