Welcome to Obama FTW.com

Obama for the win

Welcome to Obama FTW.com; your source for political news regarding our current president. Here you will find facts and trends by obscure entities such as mainstream economists that you'll generally not see from our allegedly liberal media. Oh yeah, click here to see OBAMA'S BIRTH CERTIFICATE. If you're somehow not convinced that the Hawaii state records are being honest, read The Truth about Obama's birth certificate.

Healthcare Passed and the Economy is adding Jobs again


So healthcare passed and the economy is once again adding jobs, and a study shows that Tea Party members are highly misinformed on the the size of the Federal Government and taxes (the very things they keep protesting against). But back to health care; not surprisingly, detractors aren't happy and are crying foul. Since CBO projections (which Republicans accept when it favors one of their bills) show that this bill will reduce medical spending, Republicans are now dismissing the report as flawed. Here is the CBO's response. Another one of the chief complaints is that it will hurt Medicare. This complaint ignores the cost-cutting measures being put in place, as well as the fact that it will raise income taxes on the top earners to help fund the underfunded program. Some people claim this is socialism but a quick look at historical trends (as in, how much these taxes have been lowered over the last 30 years) shows why this is not the case, unless we were socialist during most of our Post WWII years. Note the correlation with the US national debt (which isn't as scary as it looks in the chart, since the chart isn't indexed for inflation, nor does it show that the debt is as a percentage of GDP). Something else that flies in the face of all the Medicare scare tactics; The AARP supports the bill.`



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The Economy is IMPROVING thanks to the stimulus packages

 

So once again, the economy iss adding jobs. While pundits from the right were busy with doom and gloom stories that the stimulus packages were making things worse,the stock market had already recovered, and the economy had already started growing again. Unfortunately, positive job creation is the last (businesses need to be assured that demand will be stable before they begin hiring) is the last thing to happen, and pundits were busy using this sole metric as their smoking gun knowing that most Americans can only see the anecdotal evidence. They see people still out of work. They don't see some obscure nationwide trends that generally only policy wonks have time to understand and follow. And let's face it; we all slept through Econ 101, so how many of us understand recession cycles? So understandably, people were/are losing patience with the Obama administration, and conservative pundits and politicians are capitalizing on this for their own purposes.

Economic stimulus Obama FTW


ARRA Obama FTW
Estimates of the Effects of the ARRA on Employment


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The Doomsday Deficit!

 

Deficits Obama FTWOk, so while our addiction to borrowing and spending is unhealthy and the deficit certainly can't be allowed to increase indefinitely, we are nowhere near uncharted waters. And while Obama is constantly blamed for the increased deficit in 2009, much of that is due to spending under the Bush adinistration prior to Obama stepping into office (see also: Dont Blame Obama for Bushs 2009 Deficit by the Cato Institute (which is no fan of Obama's or Bush's fiscal policy, but explains how these spending bills affect the deficit). I'd also like to add that not everything Bush spent money was a bad idea. In fact, the Republican members of congress knew they were good ideas, which is why they voted along with Bush for these spending (spending isn't always the best word; sometimes "investing" is a better word, since the bill is aimed at raising revenue in the future) bills. Oddly enough, these Republican House and Senate members suddenly became staunch defenders of "fiscal responsibility"once it was Obama trying to pass these bills, and have fought him on virtually everything, then turned around and accused him of ramming bills through Congress without regard to their voice (for example, even as the intended health care bill was stripped down beyond recognition, Republicans still unanimously opposed the bill, threatening to filibuster (since there were enough independents and moderates still not on board with the bill to override a filibuster)). Read more about filibustering here.

Now look at this pretty graph. It shows that our deficit as a percentage of GDP (an econ craponym for "how much our economy produces") has been higher in the past, and apparently, the universe didn't implode. Also remember that not all spending is the same. A bill aimed at increasing education is intended to reduce the deficit in the long run, as it will result in higher paying jobs, and therefore more revenue from taxes to pay down the deficit (and for that matter, less money being paid out in the form of unemployment).

Deficit GDP Obama FTW

US Federal Deficit As Percent Of GDP
Myths and falsehoods about the deficit

Health Care - Why our System Sucks compared to other advanced countries.

 

What do you get when you mix basic arithmetic with advances in technology? You get the reason Health care gets more expensive with time. Prior to the days of MRIs, chemotherapy, complicated surgeries, etc. health insurance didn't have to pay to cover these treatments since they didn't exist. Now that they exist, it costs money to provide them. Furthermore, the people most likely to need them are the most expensive to insure. In order to maintain a viable business model, insurance companies must minimize costs and maximize revenue (which means screening out customers likely to ever need kidney dialysis or chemotherapy, and collecting premiums from people less likely to ever need expensive medical treatment).

Pay Obama FTW

The same basic arithmetic that drives private sector insurance higher also affects Medicare. But unlike the private sector, Medicare doesn't screen out patients for pre-existing conditions. Quite to the contrary, Medicare covers those most expensive to cover; the elderly. In fact, our current fragmented privatized health care insurance industry helps drive up Medicare costs. How? By not having any real incentive to provide proactive treatments for later-in-life illnesses since those people will be on Medicare when these illnesses crop up. So it's Medicare who will have to foot the bill, not the private insurer. In fact, this fragmented health care system places so much of a burden on public plans like Medicare that we already pay more in taxes alone for health care than countries with public plans (don't believe me? Fine, click here.).

Health Care costs Obama FTW

These increased costs get us less coverage for our money. Why you ask? Private health insurance companies spend a lot of money researching prospective customers, checking into their medical history and habits to figure out how much to charge them for premiums or whether or not to cover them at all. It also has other costs, like marketing/advertising, dividend payouts, and overpaid CEOs/execs, lobbying politicians to not pass any health care bill which might threaten their profit margins, scare ads that misinform the public about such a bill, in addition to maintaining profit margins. These costs are passed onto us by way of higher premiums and deductibles. In other words, we pay those costs, and these are costs that would not exist in a public plan. So the net effect; we pay more and get less health care than other industrialized countries (who do have universal health care).

Runaway health care costs were #1! (health care spending as a percentage of GDP)

And according to the National Health Expenditure Report, private health insurance costs have risen at a faster rate than public health insurance (ie. Medicare, Medicaid). Read the entire PDF here. Ok fine, don't read it. I know I know. We Americans tend to have the attention span of a football (thanks a lot Twitter, Tivo, text messaging, etc). At least look at snapshot of the report that shows the increases in both Medicare and private health insurance and note which one has risen more! And remember this when the Glenn Becks of the world complain about "inefficient governmen bureaucracyt," because the private sector, in cases like this, are loaded with their own inefficient bureaucracy.

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Not Passing Health Reform isn't Free

Opponents of Obamas Health Care reform are fond of portraying the proposed bills as too expensive, often with the assumption that not passing them is free. The problem here is that doing nothing would be more expensive than the costs of the proposed bills. Here is an example of how Fox News Chris Wallace took the CBOs projections out of context to give a false impression of the net costs of the bill.

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The GOP's Fake Solutions

Wedged between not wanting to accept anything that involves more government/public infrastructure and not wanting to be seen as the party thats for staying the course on health care, the GOP continually insists on a number of alleged solutions they claim will lower health care costs and extend coverage to currently uninsured or underinsured Americans. Actual studies from non-partisan sources show these solutions are either unrealistic or would bring little/no savings or added coverage in health care.

Some of these solutions sound great in sound bytes, but these arent realistic methods for seriously reducing costs and expanding coverage on their own (at best, they chip away from the edges). They are shoot-from-the-hip suggestions that sound good and appeal to our common sense. But the subject of health care is not intuitive to us. Its not subject to the usual laws of supply and demand. So as good as some of these solutions sound upfront, in practice, they are not very efficient or practical.

See Also: Tort Reform Selling Health Insurance Across State Lines
Health Savings Accounts

Reaganomics Demolished The Middle Class:

It goes like this: Make the middle class think their tax money is going to welfare queens and don't let them know that most social spending goes to the middle class in the form of Medicare and Social Security. This way, in the name of "small government," lower taxes on the most wealthy, bust up unions, and let the country's wealth coagulate to the top as unions have less and less ability to ensure workers are getting a fare share of the pie. As middle class jobs pay less and less for the cost of living, continually trick them into thinking that taxes (not the fact that the rich are soaking up a bigger and bigger slice of the pie) are what's eating up their ability to get by. Also, as less tax revenue is collected, the deficit is racked up because important programs are paid for through borrowing. This way, you can then scare the middle class into thinking that an "entitlement mentality" and "bloated government "are eating up the deficit (for an advanced country, our tax rates are actually quite low).

Note the how much less the rich pay in taxes now when conservative "deficit hawks" pretend that raising taxes on the upper income earners is not an option for paying the deficit down. Remember, the Post WWII/golden era conservatives pretend to long for, was an era of much higher taxation on the rich, and more social distribution. It's the "liberals" who want those days back. Note the irony of the conservative/liberal labels.


Paul Krugman on the Middle Class

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Paul Krugman is the Man!

Watch this video where Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman explains the creation and virtual extinction of the middle class here. If you want more than this cliff notes version, buy his book, The Conscience of a Liberal.

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