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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (554596)	4/14/2014 8:16:18 AM
From: Bearcatbob	6 Recommendations Recommended By bejay Glenn Petersen J.B.C. lightshipsailor Nadine Carroll and 1 more member Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793772

This is one of the key issues in saving the future of our nation. We cannot continue to grow a permanent growing underclass (one no longer defined by race). To break the current trend we need to do two main things. 1. We need to make education available to kids who want it. That means getting the good inner city kids into positive learning environments. Ways to do this include vouchers and Charter schools. The D party faced with a choice in the matter will always be the slaves of the monied teacher unions and sell out the kids (but they will loudly purport - and I emphasize purport - to care). These good kids from good parents - many single - deserve to be in an environment where being smart is just that and not "acting white". This will leave a residue of seriously non functional students - but since they do not learn anyway - they will no longer be damaging those who want to. Special actions will be needed to address this problem - and I do not pretend to know what they are until the culture of rap and such is shamed by the public. 2. The second thing we need to do is create a growth economy. It does little good to educate kids if there are no jobs. Here again the nation is cursed with a regulation crazed Democrat party. They seem to recognize that their policies will not grow the pie as they always want to spend spend spend and spend to stimulate the overburdened private sector. So - as I see it the needs are clear and the biggest barriers to achieving the needs is liberal/socialist idiocy. And then there is illegal immigration. We need to deal with the people here and shut down the influx. How in the world are we going to get people started up the economic ladder when we turn millions and millions loose on the ladder? Bob

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (554596)	4/14/2014 11:33:45 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793772

before the War on Poverty black families used to be intact. I started to respond to this and realized I would be in trouble if I did. Even here, I can't be honest with my thinking without laying myself open to being called a "racist." There is a lot of data about the makeup of various ethnic families in academic files that will never see the light because of this problem. Charles Murray exposed some of it in his book, "The Bell Curve" and almost got run out of academia for doing so. That was about the intelligence levels, but there is more on the socializing of people. A lot of it you can't discuss because it would not accomplish anything and would only hurt people on an emotional level. But the problem with this approach is that discussions get skewed because some facts have to be ignored. Questions can't be asked or answered.

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (554596)	4/14/2014 8:52:24 PM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793772

Vermont Is Waking Up from Its Single-Payer Dream to a Taxpayer Nightmare By Tyler Hartsfield & Grace-Marie Turner The citizens of Vermont apparently believe that Obamacare doesn’t go far enough toward government-controlled health care, so the Green Mountain State decided in 2011 to create its own single-payer health-care system. Vermont’s Act 48 requires the new system to be in place by 2017. Halfway to the deadline, state officials do not have a plan to pay for the utopian dream. The state’s single-payer system, dubbed Green Mountain Care, is expected to cost $2 billion a year. Vermont collected $2.7 billion of taxes in fiscal year 2013, so paying for the new health-care system could require a near doubling of taxes. Yet Act 48 also requires that the system not do economic harm to Vermont’s economy. Good luck with that! Before it can proceed, Vermont needs waivers from the federal government allowing it to divert Medicaid and other health-care funding into the single-payer system, and then it needs to find some way to pay the rest of the tab. Democratic state representative Jim Condon told Vermont Watchdog it’s time for Governor Peter Shumlin to shelve the ambitious plan immediately. “The deadlines for proposing financing have been missed two years in a row now, so to me that’s very disappointing. It’s becoming clearer and clearer that there is no financing plan,” Condon said. Governor Shumlin won election in 2010 promising he would come up with a plan that equates to promising each of the 620,000 Vermont citizens a gift of $3,225 every single year to pay for “free” health care. Three years later, neither he nor the legislature can explain how they will do that. Supporters of a single-payer system argue that the government is better suited to negotiate health prices than health-insurance companies. The government could negotiate lower prices and achieve better coverage than the private insurance market, they say, pointing to Canada and Britain as examples. Most Americans are rightly skeptical of such utopian promises after Obamacare, which was supposed to achieve near-universal health coverage, reduce premiums for every family by $2,500 a year, and reduce the federal budget deficit. Single-payer advocates argue that if we could get private insurance companies out of the way, government could save all of the money spent on administrative costs and also force doctors and hospitals to accept lower payment rates. To be sure, the lack of price transparency in our health sector is preventing a true free market for health care services. But the government cannot simply tell a doctor’s office how much a procedure will cost. Different offices and hospitals have different costs, and they offer different products and services. A procedure at a big hospital in Montpelier simply doesn’t cost the same as a similar procedure at a small doctor’s office in rural Vermont. Government officials would have to navigate the political and pricing shoals their mega-regulatory plan would create. In the rest of the country, the argument for government control over our health sector is losing support — in November 2013, a record high 56 percent of U.S. adults believed that health care is not the government’s responsibility. Maybe this exercise will help the left-leaning voters in Vermont and across the country realize that government services — even for something as worthy as health care — aren’t free.

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (554596)	4/21/2014 8:26:31 PM
From: carranza2	6 Recommendations Recommended By Geoff Altman lightshipsailor MichaelSkyy Nadine Carroll Reilly Diefenbach and 1 more member Respond to of 793772

I've been listening to recordings of Lyndon Johnson's telephone conversations with Sargent Shriver concerning the War on Poverty. There was never any doubt that it was a good thing. Not a contrarian thought expressed. Liberal optimism unbridled. Sad. One of the biggest fu****s in American history, ever. Set the stage for our entitlement paradigm. A mistake made by the same guy who gave us Vietnam. And one of the most talented pols ever. What a story. I guess that's the explanation: he was a pol, not a thinker.