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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: zax who wrote (959761)	8/27/2016 6:36:35 PM
From: Broken_Clock	1 Recommendation Recommended By gamesmistress Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573927

Democrats are drilling holes in their own boat faster than the R's are… +++ How Obamacare Destroyed The Middle Class In One Chart by Tyler Durden Aug 27, 2016 3:00 PM 0 SHARES Ever wonder how politicians and bureaucrats can go out and deliver the same misleading propaganda to various media outlets each day and keep a straight face while doing it? Are these folks so detached from the real world that they go back to the "safe space" of their offices in Washington D.C. and pat themselves on the back thinking they've actually duped the American people into believing some alternate set of facts that have no basis in reality? Or, are they so immersed in the false narratives day in and day out that they actually start to believe their own rhetoric? No matter the reason, one narrative we've found particularly misleading this week comes to us courtesy of Marjorie Connolly, of the Department of Health and Human Services, who has the brutally difficult job of defending the "success" of Obamacare as it literally on the verge of collapse from soaring premiums and declining insurer participation. While we certainly don't envy the position of Connolly, we do find some of her comments to the press "slightly" misinformed. Just to provide an illustrative sample: Reuters (8/2/16) - "Consumers coming back to shop for 2017 will continue to have a robust set of choices." New York Times (8/19/16) - “A number of steps remain before the full picture of marketplace competition and prices are known. Regardless, we remain confident that the majority of marketplace consumers will have multiple choices and will be able to select a plan for less than $75 per month when Open Enrollment begins Nov. 1.” The Tennessean (8/25/16) - “Consumers in Tennessee will continue to have affordable coverage options in 2017. Last year, the average monthly premium for people with Marketplace coverage getting tax credits increased just $2, from $102 to $104 per month, despite headlines suggesting double digit increases.” As you can see, the chosen narrative of Connolly is to focus on the premiums paid by the overwhelming minority of healthcare consumers that actually receive subsidized rates under Obamacare. While this may be the only "convenient" fact that Connolly could find to peddle, it ignores the skyrocketing rates that the other 95% of people, mostly middle-class Americans, have to pay. So, here's the real math. There are roughly 320mm people in the United States. 120mm people are covered under Medicare and Medicaid which leaves 200mm to be covered by "private" health insurance plans. In 2016, roughly 11.1mm people signed up for "private" health insurance through one of the Obamacare federal or state exchanges. Of those people, it is estimated that roughly 85%, or ~9.5mm people, received some level of "need-based" subsidy . News flash Department of Health and Human Services, 9.5mm people is less than 5% of the 200mm people seeking private health insurance. The other 95% is America's middle class and they're getting crushed. As for Connolly's suggestion that consumers will continue to have "robust" choices in 2017...we're not sure that people in the majority of the Southeast and Midwest with only 1 "option" for 2017 would agree. And, as for premiums...we're not sure that a 21% YoY median increase is necessarily "affordable." The fact is, the overwhelming majority of the 95% we mention above is comprised of middle-class consumers who are bearing the brunt of the burden of rising health insurance costs. In fact, a June Brookings Institution study found that middle-income households now devote the largest share of their spending to health care ever, 8.9%, a rise of more than three percentage points from 1984 to 2014. Per the Wall Street Journal, since 2007 middle-class families have been forced to increase the share of their overall spending on healthcare by nearly 25% while cutting back massively on other necessities to cover the difference. So here in one simple chart is why President Obama's Affordable Care Tax is crushing the middle-class more than any other social strata... So, for those wondering why the "recovery" from the "great recession" has been so muted perhaps you need to look no further than the massive healthcare tax imposed on the middle class by Obamacare.

To: zax who wrote (959761)	8/27/2016 7:34:27 PM
From: Wharf Rat	1 Recommendation Recommended By Mongo2116 Respond to of 1573927

The Republicans tried to sink Obama. Instead, the party imploded "</snip> Rest here", so we can hear the squeals of protest.."This one-term president is having an unusually successful end to his second term, and for that he can thank the Republicans who were so determined to destroy him." They needed to deny him a reputation for bipartisanship and mainstream politics, and they succeeded. He wasn’t reasonable; he was an ideologue. His vision of healthcare reform wasn’t a free-market system based on Republican plans; it was a socialist takeover that would destroy the American way of life. He was inviting terrorist attacks on the homeland, not hunting down Osama bin Laden. He was acting in unconstitutional ways because he wasn’t really American at all. The party of Sarah Palin, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann and Roger Ailes had turned him into their own kind of freak. Before he finished his second year in office, Obama was such an object of Republican loathing that the Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell could say – with impunity – that “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” If your political priorities are the total defeat of a single politician – not the advancement of your own policies through debate or legislation – then you are already in pretty desperate shape. You render it impossible to compromise with your opponents, and you fan the flames of extremism that will burn anyone in the center. You also look weak and foolish when you lose, surrendering the stage to someone who can vilify his opponents better than you. So don’t look dazed and confused at Donald Trump when he runs your playbook more convincingly than your own team. It’s too late to fret about endorsing his kooky positions – like deporting millions of undocumented immigrants, treating all Muslims as enemies and blowing up the deficit – when they are only logical extensions of your own. After eight years of conservative caricature, you may be forgiven for thinking that Obama is a Kenyan Muslim socialist with terrorist sympathies and job-destroying policies on healthcare and bank regulation. Of course, if you live inside the echo chamber of Fox News and rightwing talk radio, you have to ignore the pesky fact that unemployment now stands at 4.9%. That’s lower than when Reagan left office in 1988, and it’s lower than when Bill Clinton won re-election in 1996. The rate stood at 8.3% in Obama’s first full month in office, and not much below that when he won re-election. For a president with a job-killing economic plan, that’s not a shabby performance. Sure enough, Obama’s approval ratings (52%) are almost identical to Reagan’s in August 1988 (53%) and a dramatic contrast to those of George W Bush (32%) in 2008. One of these Republican presidents was succeeded by his own vice-president; the other was succeeded by Barack Obama. This should lead to some serious soul-searching inside the Republican party. Not a post-mortem about how to reach out to Latino voters, but a dismantling of the politics of personal destruction, and the creation of a new, hopeful agenda that can appeal to the mainstream. Instead, the only point of unity inside the GOP is its gleeful hatred of Hillary Clinton, and its thinly veiled disdain for a nominee who has yet to find a politician he can’t insult. The Republican party did not entirely fail to destroy Barack Obama. For a few years, aided by the great recession, they almost succeeded. But then they contrived to revive him by nominating a man who would destroy everything Obama stood for, along with much of the free world as we know it. The rise of Trump has led, perversely, to the revival of Obama. Republican candidates are saying they will not vote for their presidential nominee, and the party’s national security officials are lining up to condemn Trump as a reckless danger to the Republic. How could the incumbent not look like a statesman compared to a man who apparently can’t be trusted with the elevator button, never mind a nuclear one? Inside the White House, Obama’s aides talk about a president liberated from previous constraint. On the trail, and at the podium, he seems to love campaigning against his orange nemesis. His party’s candidates can’t get enough of him, and his potential successor – instead of putting distance between them – believes Obama doesn’t get enough credit for his economic achievements. This one-term president is having an unusually successful end to his second term, and for that he can thank the Republicans who were so determined to destroy him.