Trump Couldn’t Buy Coverage Like This

Not only Trump but the entire Republican Party is in a political bind over healthcare. On the one hand, they can’t endanger the core of their voters, mainly older Americans. On the other, any plan that doesn’t simply obliterate government’s presence in healthcare fails to appease another, ideologically blinkered part of the GOP base.

The solution? Lower the Medicare eligibility age to 55 and then screw everyone else with tiny vouchers for overpriced private insurance. This imperfectly but largely satisfies both Republican factions. And, since most people don’t use much healthcare until their 50s, it might actually serve a large portion of the populace better than they’re being served now. This could be further enhanced — as both Trump and GOP Rep. Darrell Issa have suggested — by giving Medicare full negotiating powers with the drug companies.

Of course, any adjustment in Medicare eligibility opens the door to further adjustments, with the obvious solution being Medicare for all. So that could be a big ideological hangup. Still, it may be less of an obstacle than simply hanging all those medically needy 50- and 60-somethings out to twist slowly in the wind.

My guess is Trump and the GOP Congress will manage to get some kind of upper income tax cut, a bit more defense spending, and the usual deregulation and non-enforcement of labor and environmental laws etc.

In other words, standard fare for a Republican administration, just meaner, dumber, and even more dysfunctional than usual given their lack of governmental experience and general incompetence. I imagine these policies will work about as well as they have in the past in terms of making people’s lives better.

The real question is whether it all matters in 2020. Both Republican and Democratic voters have been voting for politicians who hurt them for decades. He talked a good game during the campaign but Trump doesn’t seem to be a break from this pattern. (Kind of like Obama in that regard.)

I suspect for most of his voters the fact that he’s throwing brown people out of the country is more important than whether or not he takes away their Medicaid or creates jobs in their communities. They may still vote for him again even if his policies make them poorer if they get a big enough psychological boost from being able to kick down on brown people and liberals and feel like “Real America” (i.e. them) is “winning” again by reasserting their social dominance.

I guess we’ll see how it all plays out.

So I’m not quite sure why you doubt. My track record on economic prediction is pretty good, not perfect, but I rarely get the trends wrong, just the timing.

I don’t doubt the economics, just the politics. I’m as yet unconvinced that Trump failing to deliver economically will change his electoral fate in 2020. That doesn’t mean I think he will win or lose in 2020, merely that whether he wins or loses in 2020 won’t have much to do with the sorts of issues in this post. We’ll see, four years left for him to propose single payer or something…

Yes, you think it was all identity politics.

Not quite. I think it was a combination of a change in local economic conditions for the worse in many areas and identity politics. The economic conditions create the desire for a political shake-up, the identity politics creates the form of the political shake-up. In this case, the affected sectors of the white American public used Trumpian identity politics to express their economic discontent.

The question here is to whom they will attribute the failure if Trump does not deliver the goods. The history so far (see Wisconsin, Kansas, etc) is that they will for a long time adopt a ego-defensive posture towards the object of identification, ie, Trump. His failures will be combined with his social unacceptability to the “liberal establishment” into a narrative that features the establishment, the Cossacks/Kossacks, doing something that the Czar doesn’t like, but the Czar is surrounded by traitors. Sure, it has a lot of similarity to Obama. The difference is, the identity politics here is more poisonous.

The military plus-up will create jobs – high tech jobs.

We have not run Navy ships on coal since WWI so the zombie profession of digging coal is unlikely to be re-animated. As usual, much of the $54B, should it actually be appropriated, will likely disappear into the economic black hole we call cost-overruns.

BTW, it takes years; not months, to build a Navy ship. A mere destroyer, like the USS Zumwalt will run about $4Billion – each (wild estimate). A laughable aspect of the “New Navy” is that the Zumie’s guns cost $800K/round to fire. That is more expensive than most of its combat targets.

Trump got elected on the promise that he would make the lives of those in the middle and working classes better. You have only to look at his Cabinet and agency picks to see this isn’t true. Now with his first big policy initiative, replacing Obamacare, the CBO has just finished shredding it. You need to know that the Congressional Budget Office is very Establishment and that its current head was named to that position by Congressional Republicans in 2015. So it says a lot that a Republican appointee basically incinerated a Republican healthcare plan. Even under the best of conditions for a positive review, they were told the numbers do not add up and that not only will it not be Better than Obamacare. It will be far worse. Trump and company tried to pre-empt what they knew was going to be a negative CBO scoring, but even they did not know it would be as bad as it has turned out to be. So the politics on this are going to be really bad. But more importantly with those swing voters who got Trump and a lot of other Republicans elected, this is going to make their lives materially worse, a lot worse. And this is just the start. Trump hasn’t even been in office two months and this isn’t even his first clusterf*ck, just the biggest, and it is far from over.

We are also seeing the pattern of his Presidency forming. February had a good jobs report, but this had to do with the weather and virtually nothing to do with Trump. This did not stop him from taking credit for it. At the same time, he discounts the CBO report which is negative and which has a lot to do with him. Now all Presidents do this to some extent, but Trump has taken it to a completely different level.

And then there are all the self-inflicted wounds. So we have Spicer trying to sell the line that when Trump tweets about Obama wiretapping him, he is not talking about wiretapping. And we have Kellyanne Conway trying to deflect the issue by saying bizarrely and completely irrelevantly that people’s microwaves are talking to them. Except for the jokes, a lot of these gaffes are not going to have any impact on Trump voters. They’re still looking for what are going to be those illusory positive benefits Trump promised them. A lot of this they simply won’t pay attention to, for now. But unless something drastic changes with Trump, and Trump’s White House, neither at all likely, this is going to start trickling down to them and with the lack of tangible results is going to kill Trump’s Presidency and endanger Republican majorities in the Congress, with worthless, shiftless Democrats their and Trump’s only hope.

The democrats are counting on getting elected back into power based purely on republics screwing up. They will offer no substantive reforms. It worked for them under Bush. But my feeling is that voters are done with the dog and pony show.

Some Guy, yes, Trump is fortunate in his enemies.

People on the right are hoping this healthcare plan is just a chess game to get Ryan to fall on his own sword, since this is basically his health care plan, and to remove Ryan from leadership.

Sometimes it’s fun & invigorating & inspiring to get nostalgic, and considering the ever-quickening news cycle, nearly two years prior is now considered nostalgic whereas ten years prior is downright ancient — you may as well be referring to the Egyptian pharaohs and the pyramids.

Here’s some nostalgia that should make you laugh and maybe even cry depending on your perspective. Everyone was fooled, even Trump. Or were they? Putin wasn’t. In CNN’s special last night, they have him on tape saying he expected Trump to win. Hmmmm, maybe Putin should spend more time in Vegas, or, come to think of it, why should he bother since he already owns the House and the House always wins.

Some days, and today is one of those days, I truly think Black Magic was at play and in play. Typical, conventional political analysis doesn’t explain Trump as POTUS despite political commentators trying to fit Trump’s circle into their square.

I found the following while pondering Trump as a Foil — something I’ve been pondering for several moons now. It made me laugh out loud. Look how far we’ve come!! Anything, and I mean ANYTHING, is now possible. All you have to do is think of it and share it and it will come. Donald Trump as POTUS proves this now cemented maxim.

Donald Trump: Plant? Foil? Something’s not right!

@shargash

Bah! Mistyped the blockquote closing tag. Sorry about that. The first paragraph only should be the blockquote.

Interesting comments.

In note that you kept out the building of the wall, the crackdown on illegal immigration and the restrictions of travelling from high risk mainly Muslim countries.

You may not agree with these policies but many Trump voters voted for Trump because of these issues and there is no doubt that an end to illegal migration will help legal low skilled Americans. Not mentioning these issues was a mistake, as these are hot topics for Trump’s electoral base, and gives a much more balanced view on his performance to date.

Agree regarding free trade and Obamacare, but it is early days, as you say and there is a battle going on within the White House between populist nationalists and establishment Republicans over key areas of policy and it isn’t clear yet who will win. Should the populists, led by Bannon win, expect to see stronger action on free trade later on this year.

As for healthcare, there are deep divisions within the Republican party and I suspect that this plan will not be the end of the story.

There was a very valuable lesson to be learned the other night per CNN’s special about Putin and him being the most powerful man in the world. Just as was the case with Hitler, there were multiple opportunities prior to Putin consolidating power to prevent him from ever ascending. Take, for example, the scene where the KGB headquarters in East Germany was surrounded by a mob intent on delivering revenge from all the years of pent up rage. Putin and his scumbag murderous torturing colleagues, pretend Communists as they have now shown and never a friend of the Little People, was busy burning documents in the furnace in the basement and then when things got really dire he went outside to confront the roiling mob.

He miraculously talked them down and they turned around and went home. Let that be a lesson to one and all. Turning around and going home is allowing a murderous potentate to rise and consolidate power. The CNN special informed that this one event more than any other significantly shaped who Putin is today.

I’d love to interview some of the people who were there that night and surrounded the KGB headquarters and ask them if they have regrets about turning around and going home. In five years the planet may be a cinder and it could well be because they turned around and went home because some cornered pipsqueak pretending to be a Communist convinced them they would all perish in a gun battle. When you catch a piggy by the toe, never, ever let him go.

I get the sense America is already occupied and has been for awhile now. Watch the following Netflix series, Okkupert. Remember, your leaders, every single one of them, are traitors to the Little People. They have been selling you out for years regardless of the jersey they wear. It’s plausible America’s elite are capitulating to Putin’s Russia as we speak and a soft coup in D.C. has been underway for awhile now. All this theater is their dysfunctional way of selling it.

If I was elected POTUS, my first order of business would be to deport every Russian back to their homeland where they belong and that they love so much, and I’d start with the wealthy oligarch pricks who have bought up Southeast Florida — Donald Trump’s neighbors. Then, I’d draw a line in the sand with Vlad and if he crossed it, we all go boom. You have to be prepared to die if you truly want to live free. It’s the only thing this pipsqueak diminutive bully understands. So long as there is an opportunity to make money and become even more fabulously wealthy, The Rich are not prepared to die. They will, and perhaps already have, fork over the pesky business of governance to foreign interests so long as they are guaranteed to be ridiculously wealthy & powerful oligarchs in the new regime in return.

This is why we must Deport The Rich immediately if it isn’t already too late. Send them gift-wrapped to Putin and let’s see if they’re the good friends they pretend to be, afterall.

Okkupert

Situation Normal: All F-ck Up. Next time vote in the primaries.

“There was a very valuable lesson to be learned the other night per CNN’s special about Putin and him being the most powerful man in the world. Just as was the case with Hitler, there were multiple opportunities prior to Putin consolidating power to prevent him from ever ascending”

Exactly. If you look up a chart of Russian life expectancy over time, you can see that it was in freefall during the 90’s when everything was going according to plan. But then, the opportunities to keep Putin from power were missed and he took power and, sure enough, Russian life expectancy bottomed out and then rose sharply. Millions of Russians could and should be dead but are alive today thanks to our failure to prevent Putin from taking power.

But not to worry, the Stephen Miller Band is on the case making sure we don’t make a mistake like that again.

The only people reading Mr. Offtopik aka “The Stephen Miller Band” are the clueless, perhaps here for the first time, the guy chases them away, which, pathetically, is probably his job description. I ignore Mr. Offtopik’s posts, but if you can’t do so entirely, just remember, Mr. Offtopik patrols one of the smallest blogs…and cruel as it may sound, you should take a moment out of your busy day to laugh at his self-inflicted humiliation.

It is disheartening, but then it is perhaps meant to be, that if Ian writes a post about climate change, he attracts climate change deniers, and if he writes a post on Trump, both the diehard Trump and Clinton supporters show up. It doesn’t seem to matter that voting for either Trump or Clinton, just as with voting for any Democrat or Republican, was a sucker’s choice. All you ended up doing was validating a corrupt political system bent on screwing you over. The rest is noise. Meanwhile progressives, or whatever they want to call themselves, remain in disarray and I can’t help thinking that is where they really want to be: refusing to organize, or stay on message, or even come up with a coherent message.

“The only people reading Mr. Offtopik aka “The Stephen Miller Band” are the clueless, perhaps here for the first time, the guy chases them away, which, pathetically, is probably his job description. I ignore Mr. Offtopik’s posts, but if you can’t do so entirely, just remember, Mr. Offtopik patrols one of the smallest blogs…and cruel as it may sound, you should take a moment out of your busy day to laugh at his self-inflicted humiliation.”

You make a fair point, but it does still feel like a bit of a slight to our host that his blog was assigned such a low ranking, incompetent committee member.

@ Hugh

Console yourself, amigo. The Democratic Party must be completely destroyed so that it can be replaced with something that actually represents the regular people.

As long as it continues to exist, it will continue to siphon away the political will and support that rightly belongs only to a party that is actually, in fact and practice, going to represent the interests of the People.

Allowing the Dem Party to break itself against the rock that is Trump, as it seems to be actively doing, is probably the only way we can get there.

and if he writes a post on Trump, both the diehard Trump and Clinton supporters show up.

Who are the diehard Clinton supporters who have shown up? I don’t see any. If you think I’m one, you’re nuts. If you want an example of diehard Clinton supporters, I suggest you review the following blog. Talk about singing to the choir. It’s enough to make you want to puke. It’s as grotesque as former McCarthyite Conservatives cozying up to Putin and licking his asshole.

http://nomadicpolitics.blogspot.com

Speaking of humiliation, as Colonel Kurtz famously said, “the irony…..the irony.” Donald Trump is a complete and irrevocable humiliation. He not only humiliates himself every second on the minute and minute on the hour, but he also humiliates America on the world stage.

The Clintons and Obama are liars and cheaters, crooks really, just like Trump, but they have the sophistication to not drop their pants and shit all over themselves and everyone else on an hourly and daily basis.

Trump is an embarrassment. A humiliating embarrassment. Truth be known but seldom is, serendipitously this is the only good thing about Trump. He is undeniable proof that the Emperor that is America has no clothes. The Clintons & Obama obscured America’s nakedness with fig leaves. Trump said, “fuck that, I’m going ALL NUDE.”

realitychecker is right, Trump can be useful in that he can unwittingly help smash the Binary Political Bind, the two sides of the same coin, that usurps and strangles progress and prevents us from evolving (not revolving). However, this won’t happen in a vacuum and will in fact create a power vacuum — one Putin’s Russia & China will be all too happy to quickly fill. In the process of encouraging and facilitating evolutionary change in America, we must be hyper-vigilant to ensure we don’t inadvertently carry Putin’s, and Dugin’s, water for them.

I am critical of all tyrants and all tyranny in all its manifest forms. That’s one of many principles I happily & proudly live by, therefore, I’m being consistent when I excoriate and oppose not only The Clintons and Obama, but also Putin and Donald Trump. They’re all cut from the same tyrannical cloth and hence all of them equally deserve our opprobrium, resistance and opposition. If you feel otherwise, I would submit you are a deceit and you’re really not interested in progress.

I have to laugh at the MSM blathering on and on about Trump’s “wiretapping” tweets and Trump’s equally ridiculous responses to the distracting spectacle. The Dems and The Clintons are to blame. They set the precedent. It all started with Bill’s “it’s depends on what the definition of ‘is’ is.” That has effectively been the Trump WH’s response to the tweets. It depends on the definition of “wiretapping.”

@ Peter

“If I remember correctly Trump’s tweets addressed illegal spying on his campaign and tower. It was only after the Clintonite media started deflecting the story that supposedly legal wiretapping was introduced and used to draw attention away from the real High Crimes.”

Yes, Peter, I was wondering when somebody else was going to pick up on that lol.

The power of the gambit is that, once accepted, it means we only have to ask about “warrants issued,” and if there were none, then no “wiretapping” could have occurred.

Nobody in the intelligence community that is on Obama/Hillary’s side would ever dream of engaging in any ILLEGAL surveillance, even with all those nifty tools available, amirite?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Tell me another.

@ Steve

Still, one can appreciate the irony of watching the media attack him because “all” he has to base his wiretap claims on is media reporting. So he must be crazy or lying lol.