Tag Archives: Jonathan Chait

” … by a government that had no pride.”

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Chrissie Hynde and the (mostly new) Pretenders were in good form last night at The State. Chrissie’s voice is still crisp and her two young guitar players have a remarkable feel for her material, while the only other surviving original, drummer Martin Chambers, looked to be having as much fun wailing on the tom-toms as the first time I saw them 40 years ago. It was a good upbeat night for geezer rock after a thoroughly disgusting day.

I didn’t take a poll, but my guess would be that more than a few of the crowd happily exchanging tales of bad rock ‘n roll behavior of yore had seen or by the cocktail hour heard of The Debacle in Helsinki. It was a truly depressing sight. The President of the United States … using phrases like “very strong and powerful” to flatter Vladimir [bleepin’] Putin, while demeaning his own military and intelligence services, the Justice Department and every adult with a high school degree who can spell “Make America Great Again” without eating their Crayons.

By now people like me, you know, characters way … waaaay … over on the fantastical fringe, have been gobsmacked by Donald Trump’s flagrant stupidity and fraudulence so many times that we can’t imagine him ever saying or doing anything that has the same effect on his Goober base.

(And yes, I know how the Tina Smiths of the world wring their hands and urge restraint at such intemperate language — for fear, you know, they might get really upset and do something, you know, bad. But screw it. If Trump’s crowd was merely ignorant, that’d be one thing, and I might give them a pass. But by now there is no question that they are mainly just seething with plain old George Wallace-style racial resentment. So, yeah. [Bleep] it. “Goobers.”)

A word gaining currency in the past couple weeks is “maximalist”. This in the context of imagining how bad this Trump crap really is, and how much worse it is going to get before he feels the weight of justice. Jonathan Chait at New York magazine wrote a long piece last week that got a lot of attention for going where our “responsible” press has generally avoided, to date.

Based largely on what is already on the record, what is known to anyone following the available facts of story and is certainly only the very tippiest of tips of the big, hulking spray-tanned iceberg in the eyes of Robert Mueller, we know Donald Trump’s business “empire” (the true size of which he keeps secret) has floated on Russian oligarch/gangster money for well over 20 years. From there common logic requires you to imagine what Trump will do to protect that empire — the essence of him — and what Vladimir Putin will continue to extract from him in exchange.

And forget “the pee tape”. At this point that would be just another … gobsmacker … that would have no effect on GooberNation. (“Fake video!”). You and I and every late night comic would turn cartwheels of delight. But it wouldn’t change a thing. Just as impeachment won’t change anything as long as more than 33 Republican senators see a poll of their voters showing ferocious approval of Trump holding above 50%.

At the risk of repeating myself, reprehensible as he is, Trump is smart enough to know his legal goose is cooked. His new attorney, Emmett Flood, would be engaging in malpractice if he hasn’t by now examined the situation — the money-laundering, the obstruction of justice vis-a-vis James Comey, etc. — and advised his client of the dire precariousness of the situation. Whether he has already used the phrase, “You are [bleeped], dude”, I can’t say. But it’d be accurate if he has, and explain Trump’s even more naked embrace lately of the only people who can save him.

They would be: Putin and The Goobers.

In their two hour-plus secret/no notes/no recordings meeting I have no problem taking the “maximalist” view that Putin assured Trump that techniques his people used to swing the 2016 election have been refined even further, thanks of course to no coordinated pushback from Trump’s government. And that all the algorithms capable of feeding individual Goobers precisely the bullshit insanity they gobble like soggy corn nuts is teed up and ready to roll on this next election. It will be, the promise goes, enough to keep the House in Republican hands and guarantee Trump a full four-year term.

And what does Putin get? Well, he’s already getting it. Trump’s senile-bull-in-the-china-shop act has Europeans thinking out loud about how to go about their business without the United States. NATO is reeling. The Brits are still trying to figure out what to do with the crowbar Putin’s hackers jammed into their Brexit vote. Mini-trumps are in power in Poland, Hungary at Italy, largely because of the refugee (immigrants!) crisis set off by Putin in Syria and North Africa.

And sure, while our Senate can vote for tougher sanctions on Putin and his mob boss money-laundering buddies, Trump’s crew has myriad ways to prevent anything of the sort from really happening.

So yeah. If I’m Trump, and I know that I’m toast every way you can spin it legally, what I do — the only thing I can do — is keep toggling back and forth between keeping the guy who got me there happy, with whatever he wants, and making sure my message to GooberNation — “Where are Hillary’s servers!” — is in tight synch with what Putin’s hackers and social media bots have greased and ready to go in November.

That’s what you call “maximalist” thinking, kids.

 

So I had a fleeting moment of encouragement last night as Chrissie (the pride of Akron, Ohio) and crew chugged through her classic hit, “My City Was Gone”.

Everyone in the place new the lyrics …

“Well I went back to Ohio
But my family was gone
I stood on the back porch
There was nobody home
I was stunned and amazed
My childhood memories
Slowly swirled past
Like the wind through the trees
A, o, oh way to go Ohio

I went back to Ohio
But my pretty countryside
Had been paved down the middle
By a government that had no pride … “

 

At that line, a roar went up among the faithful.

I can’t say how many Goobers are Pretenders fans. But if any were in The State last night they were probably even more mystified and befuddled than usual.

 

State of the Obamacare Debate

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I’m too uninspired to write anything new, and am about to go on vacation, so I’m just posting the best recent distillation I have seen of the state of that Song That Never Ends, the Obamacare debate.

Take it away, Jonathan Chait from the New York magazine:

Republicans Finally Admit Why They Really Hate Obamacare

By JONATHAN CHAIT

Conservatives spent years predicting Obamacare would collapse in all manner of gloomy scenarios. But those predictions all occurred in the run-up to the law coming on-line, on the basis of sketchy, preliminary data or pure conjecture. But in the months since the law has come into effect, a steady stream of far more solid data has come in, and the doomsaying predictions are being hunted to extinction. The right’s ideological objections to Obamacare remain, but I can’t think of a single practical analytic claim they made that still looks correct.

Just within the last week, numerous predictions of Obamacare skeptics have suffered ignominious deaths. Consider a few:

1. Obamacare is mostly just signing up customers who already had insurance. The basis for this claim was a preliminary survey conducted by McKinsey last year, well before the first enrollment period for Obamacare was complete. It generated massive coverage in the right-wing media. Since then, newer data has shown much higher figures. A Kaiser Family Foundation survey finds that 57 percent of enrollees lacked insurance previously.

2. Obamacare isn’t even significantly reducing the ranks of the uninsured. This claim built on the previous one — it combined the prediction few people would sign up for new coverage with the prediction that those who did were mostly insured. “CBO has projected that 14 million previously uninsured Americans would gain coverage under the law. With about ten weeks left in this year’s enrollment period, we’re looking at a coverage expansion of less than a million,” suggested Republican health-care adviser Avik Roy.

Obamacare_uninsured_decline_chartMeasuring the population lacking insurance is historically complex and imprecise, but we now have a bevy of measures showing that Obamacare has already made a huge dent in the uninsured population. Gallup has showed the uninsured rate dropping by about a quarter. A report finds the uninsured rate in Minnesota has fallen by 40 percent. A study of numerous cities by the Robert Woods Johnson foundation projections projects declines of about 60 percent by 2016 in municipalities whose states expanded Medicaid, and half that in states where Republicans have maintained the party’s boycott of Obamacare.

3. Insurance will be so expensive that few people will want to buy it. We spent weeks and weeks debating “rate shock.” Also, nope. The average plan purchased on exchanges costs customers only $82 a month. A Kaiser Family Foundation survey of people who used to have individual insurance and now have the regulated insurance on the exchanges — finds that the number of customers reporting lower premiums exceeds the number paying higher premiums.

Obamacare_premiums_char

4. But premiums will shoot up next year! As premiums have turned out to be cheap — indeed, cheaper than initially projected — Obamacare skeptics slowly retreated to a new prediction: Rates would rise next year.

Another nope. As state-by-state information trickles in, it appears conservatives won’t get the premium spike next year, either. Insurers are jumping into the market, putting downward pressure on prices. Expected premium increases appear to be on par with, or perhaps a bit lower than, historic levels:

Will all this data produce a grand bipartisan consensus on Obamacare? Of course not. Nor should it. The practical objections to Obamacare are collapsing, but the philosophical ones remain in place. Suppose you strongly objected to the idea that your city should own a bunch of buildings where people can go borrow books for free. (Some people do!) If you couldn’t persuade a majority of fellow citizens of your conceptual objections to libraries, you might try arguing that the library scheme was doomed to collapse in cost overruns, or that nobody would ever use them, or that shelves of heavy books would be routinely toppling over and killing small children. But the fact is that running buildings where people can check out books, and running exchanges where people can purchase basic health insurance packages, are both things that governments can do.

And so conservative objections to Obamacare are finally turning from the practical to the philosophical. In response to reports that Obamacare insurance turns out to be affordable, Roy, who has spent months warning of rate shock, mocks that “other people’s money will pay for it.” Conservative columnist Byron York likewise argues “Obamacare’s ‘good news’ applies only to the poor.”

It is true that Obamacare is far more helpful to people lower down the income scale. The poorest people get Medicaid, which is free. Those higher up the income ladder get tax credits, which phase out at $45,000 a year for an individual, and $94,000 a year for a family of four. (I wouldn’t call people earning under those levels “poor.”) Of course, people who get employer-sponsored insurance also get their coverage paid for with “other peoples’ money.” The difference is that employer-sponsored insurance uses a tax deduction, which gives the largest benefits to those who earn the most money, as opposed to Obamacare’s sliding scale tax credit, which gives the most to those who earn the least.

But at least conservatives are now representing their true bedrock position on Obamacare. It is largely a transfer program benefitting people who either don’t have enough money, or pose too high a health risk, to bear the cost of their own medical care. Conservatives don’t like transfer programs because they require helping the less fortunate with other peoples’ money.

– Loveland, but really Chait