Liberal Bullshit

[Freewill]

Jonathan Gruber, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist, is making himself a household name, and not in a good way. A series of videos have emerged in recent days showing Mr. Gruber—an architect of the Affordable Care Act—telling college audiences that major parts of the law were designed purposely to mask its true cost to individual Americans.

As Mr. Gruber put it, speaking last year at a conference at the University of Pennsylvania: “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, you know, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass.”

One example cited by Mr. Gruber is the so-called Cadillac tax, as the ObamaCare excise tax on high-value employer health plans is known. The tax, which he helped devise and will take effect in 2018, imposes a 40% levy on individual health plans worth more than $10,200, and on family plans worth more than $27,500. As Mr. Gruber’s remarks were unearthed last week, economist Mark Wilson and I released a study of the excise tax that shows he is right about its deceptive design. The tax is likely to hit many people who don’t have high-end coverage.

Mr. Gruber says in one video that his real aim was to reduce the tax break available to those who get employer-sponsored insurance, about 170 million Americans. He lamented that it would be hard to persuade Congress to reduce people’s tax breaks: “You just can’t get through. It’s politically impossible.” True enough—the excise tax does the job instead. It is a stealthy way to reduce the tax preference for health care without taking it away from employers.

Mr. Gruber also noted that the real impact of the tax would fall on individual Americans: “We just tax the insurance companies, they pass on higher prices that offsets the tax break we get, it ends up being the same thing. It’s a very clever, you know, basic exploitation of the lack of economic understanding of the American voter.” In another video that surfaced on Friday, he explained that the only way to get rid of the tax preference for employer-sponsored insurance was “by mislabeling it, calling it a tax on insurance plans rather than a tax on people, when we all know it’s a tax on people who hold those insurance plans.”

Our study bears this out. While the tax is designed to be paid by companies, employees or consumers will see significant increases in costs. These cost increases will be passed on in several ways. Large employers who are subject to the excise tax in 2018 will pay an average of more than $2,700 per employee a year from 2018 to 2024. As Mr. Gruber admits, and basic economics confirms, this cost will be passed on to consumers or to employees in higher prices and lower compensation.

Employers, being rational actors, will not want to pay these taxes and will reduce their health-care benefits to limit their potential exposure to the tax. Doing this will cause employees to be hit by the excise tax in at least two other ways. If employers increase taxable wages to compensate for reducing the value of their plans, then employees will be paying more in taxes for the same compensation levels, and more after-tax out-of-pocket expenses for their health care.

From 2018 to 2024, the excise tax could cost 12.1 million employees an average $1,050 in higher payroll and income taxes a year, if employers increase their taxable wages as they reduce the cost of health-care benefits. Alternatively, if employers only reduce the value of their offerings without increasing wages and salaries, these employees could see up to a $6,150 reduction in their health-care benefits and little or no increase in pay.

Mr. Gruber also implicitly acknowledged that calling the excise tax a “Cadillac” tax is misleading, as the tax’s reach will expand. “Over time it’s gonna apply to more and more health-insurance plans,” he said, elaborating in a separate speech that the “tax that starts out hitting only 8% of the insurance plans essentially amounts over the next 20 years [to] essentially getting rid of the exclusion for employer-sponsored plans.”

http://online.wsj.com/articles/tevi-troy-another-obamacare-deception-1416179540

GRUBER!!!!!!!

did you not read the article dumbass? Get your head out of your ass. Most people's rates will only go up.

Rates go up every year. They are going up at a slower rate now than before the ACA was passed. Try again.

Correct rates have always increased and increased at a rate much higher then the inflation rate, at least the reported inflation rate. What did Obamacare do to curb any of the costs that drive the increase? Simple, force more people in so the amount of money going into the system is the same as if it did increase as much.

I heard on the news there was something like 77 new insurance companies (number might be wrong). Does anyone believe they started because of the goodness of their heart? No, they started because Obamacare made it very profitable for them to do so.

My thoughts are that for this one year when there are lots of new enrollees the rates will stablize. But once everyone is hooked in then they will go back to increasing as they always did, there is no cost containment.

There is no cost containment? Hmmmmmmm. It would be interesting to see the supporting evidence for that claim. Premiums cannot exceed 9.5% of AGI, I believe.

With so many more insurance companies entering the market...wouldn't competition help to supress rate hikes?

You believe, 9.5 %? Isn't that a lot more then inflation rate? Is that really cost containment? Think about it. The business that hospitals and health care offices do is pretty damn predictable. It is not like a drought is going to increase business. Maybe a flu epidemic might increase cost but that is rare. So rates still increase at levels no where near the reported inflation rate. Why? And I am not even arguing against Obamacare but facts be the facts. Also what is the cost containment of drugs????

 

[Stephanie]

Jonathan Gruber, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist, is making himself a household name, and not in a good way. A series of videos have emerged in recent days showing Mr. Gruber—an architect of the Affordable Care Act—telling college audiences that major parts of the law were designed purposely to mask its true cost to individual Americans.

As Mr. Gruber put it, speaking last year at a conference at the University of Pennsylvania: “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, you know, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass.”

One example cited by Mr. Gruber is the so-called Cadillac tax, as the ObamaCare excise tax on high-value employer health plans is known. The tax, which he helped devise and will take effect in 2018, imposes a 40% levy on individual health plans worth more than $10,200, and on family plans worth more than $27,500. As Mr. Gruber’s remarks were unearthed last week, economist Mark Wilson and I released a study of the excise tax that shows he is right about its deceptive design. The tax is likely to hit many people who don’t have high-end coverage.

Mr. Gruber says in one video that his real aim was to reduce the tax break available to those who get employer-sponsored insurance, about 170 million Americans. He lamented that it would be hard to persuade Congress to reduce people’s tax breaks: “You just can’t get through. It’s politically impossible.” True enough—the excise tax does the job instead. It is a stealthy way to reduce the tax preference for health care without taking it away from employers.

Mr. Gruber also noted that the real impact of the tax would fall on individual Americans: “We just tax the insurance companies, they pass on higher prices that offsets the tax break we get, it ends up being the same thing. It’s a very clever, you know, basic exploitation of the lack of economic understanding of the American voter.” In another video that surfaced on Friday, he explained that the only way to get rid of the tax preference for employer-sponsored insurance was “by mislabeling it, calling it a tax on insurance plans rather than a tax on people, when we all know it’s a tax on people who hold those insurance plans.”

Our study bears this out. While the tax is designed to be paid by companies, employees or consumers will see significant increases in costs. These cost increases will be passed on in several ways. Large employers who are subject to the excise tax in 2018 will pay an average of more than $2,700 per employee a year from 2018 to 2024. As Mr. Gruber admits, and basic economics confirms, this cost will be passed on to consumers or to employees in higher prices and lower compensation.

Employers, being rational actors, will not want to pay these taxes and will reduce their health-care benefits to limit their potential exposure to the tax. Doing this will cause employees to be hit by the excise tax in at least two other ways. If employers increase taxable wages to compensate for reducing the value of their plans, then employees will be paying more in taxes for the same compensation levels, and more after-tax out-of-pocket expenses for their health care.

From 2018 to 2024, the excise tax could cost 12.1 million employees an average $1,050 in higher payroll and income taxes a year, if employers increase their taxable wages as they reduce the cost of health-care benefits. Alternatively, if employers only reduce the value of their offerings without increasing wages and salaries, these employees could see up to a $6,150 reduction in their health-care benefits and little or no increase in pay.

Mr. Gruber also implicitly acknowledged that calling the excise tax a “Cadillac” tax is misleading, as the tax’s reach will expand. “Over time it’s gonna apply to more and more health-insurance plans,” he said, elaborating in a separate speech that the “tax that starts out hitting only 8% of the insurance plans essentially amounts over the next 20 years [to] essentially getting rid of the exclusion for employer-sponsored plans.”

http://online.wsj.com/articles/tevi-troy-another-obamacare-deception-1416179540

GRUBER!!!!!!!

did you not read the article dumbass? Get your head out of your ass. Most people's rates will only go up.

Rates go up every year. They are going up at a slower rate now than before the ACA was passed. Try again.

Correct rates have always increased and increased at a rate much higher then the inflation rate, at least the reported inflation rate. What did Obamacare do to curb any of the costs that drive the increase? Simple, force more people in so the amount of money going into the system is the same as if it did increase as much.

I heard on the news there was something like 77 new insurance companies (number might be wrong). Does anyone believe they started because of the goodness of their heart? No, they started because Obamacare made it very profitable for them to do so.

My thoughts are that for this one year when there are lots of new enrollees the rates will stablize. But once everyone is hooked in then they will go back to increasing as they always did, there is no cost containment.

So how do conservatives feel about Dr Ben Carson's approach to healthcare insurance companies and free markets.

==========================================================
Regulate insurance companies as non-profit services
Today, insurance companies call the shots on what they want to pay, to whom, and when. Consequently, even busy doctors operate with a very slim profit of margin.
This is an ideal place for the intervention of government regulators who, with the help of medical professionals, could establish fair and consistent remuneration. To accomplish this, essentially all of the insurance companies would have to become non-profit service organizations with standardized, regulated profit margins.
This is not the paradigm that I see for all businesses, [but] is uniquely appropriate for the health-insurance industry, which deals with people's lives and quality of existence. That may sound radical, but is it as radical as allowing a company to increase its profits by denying care to sick individuals? In the long run this would also be good for the insurance companies, who could then concentrate on providing good service, rather than focusing on undercutting their competitors and increasing their profit margin.
Ben Carson on Health Care

This thread is about being lied to and kept in the dark by this administration to pass this Monster law on us called ObamaCare and now he's onto immigration reform. As if we need him reforming anything after, OScamCare

 

[guno]

Only 100,000 people signed up over the weekend. It's never going to work.

Its all bullshit. What a pity. At first I thought it could be great.

says a knuck who gets free heath care

Yes, the freeloaders come out from under their rocks when anyone threatens their subsidies and entitlements.

Yes steh wants here government cheese now that her meal ticket is unemployed

 

[kiwiman127]

GRUBER!!!!!!!

did you not read the article dumbass? Get your head out of your ass. Most people's rates will only go up.

Rates go up every year. They are going up at a slower rate now than before the ACA was passed. Try again.

Correct rates have always increased and increased at a rate much higher then the inflation rate, at least the reported inflation rate. What did Obamacare do to curb any of the costs that drive the increase? Simple, force more people in so the amount of money going into the system is the same as if it did increase as much.

I heard on the news there was something like 77 new insurance companies (number might be wrong). Does anyone believe they started because of the goodness of their heart? No, they started because Obamacare made it very profitable for them to do so.

My thoughts are that for this one year when there are lots of new enrollees the rates will stablize. But once everyone is hooked in then they will go back to increasing as they always did, there is no cost containment.

So how do conservatives feel about Dr Ben Carson's approach to healthcare insurance companies and free markets.

==========================================================
Regulate insurance companies as non-profit services
Today, insurance companies call the shots on what they want to pay, to whom, and when. Consequently, even busy doctors operate with a very slim profit of margin.
This is an ideal place for the intervention of government regulators who, with the help of medical professionals, could establish fair and consistent remuneration. To accomplish this, essentially all of the insurance companies would have to become non-profit service organizations with standardized, regulated profit margins.
This is not the paradigm that I see for all businesses, [but] is uniquely appropriate for the health-insurance industry, which deals with people's lives and quality of existence. That may sound radical, but is it as radical as allowing a company to increase its profits by denying care to sick individuals? In the long run this would also be good for the insurance companies, who could then concentrate on providing good service, rather than focusing on undercutting their competitors and increasing their profit margin.
Ben Carson on Health Care

This thread is about being lied to and kept in the dark by this administration to pass this Monster law on us called ObamaCare and now he's onto immigration reform. As if we need him reforming anything after, OScamCare

So it's wrong to bring up past deceptions that cost taxpayers a trillion more than they (and Congress) were told (Medicare Part D). And it's wrong to bring up a solution (which I like) by Dr Ben Carson to controlling healthcare costs?

 

[guno]

Fr

Only 100,000 people signed up over the weekend. It's never going to work.

Its all bullshit. What a pity. At first I thought it could be great.

says a knuck who gets free heath care

Free?

Try 15 percent on every thing I buy for starters. I pay 15% just because I want an item.

Free? Kiss my ass.

 

[orogenicman]

"Liberal Bullshit"

Typical of most conservatives, pointlessly complain about something while at the same time lacking the courage to offer a solution of their own.

You'll be ok. Remember it's was because of Your parties BS that they just got kicked out of power. tsk tsk

Translation: "I don't have any solutions other than to continue to support the bankrupting of American families so I will instead divert attention away from the fact that I have no solutions and offer more obfuscations."

 

[guno]

"Liberal Bullshit"

Typical of most conservatives, pointlessly complain about something while at the same time lacking the courage to offer a solution of their own.

You'll be ok. Remember it's was because of Your parties BS that they just got kicked out of power. tsk tsk

 

[Stephanie]

Something interesting. article is a couple days old. But we need to stop Obama on his SUPER Amnesty.

Snip:
Super-Amnesty Will Turn Every City into Detroit
Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog 28 Comments
After another bloody weekend in Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel branded the shootings unacceptable and the city’s top cop demanded more gun control laws. Chicago’s murder rate has actually dropped since concealed carry became legal. Emanuel’s lawsuits over his illegal gun control laws have left the already struggling city deep in the hole and forced to cover the NRA’s million dollars in legal bills.

Concealed carry paid off over that bloody weekend when a vet carrying a gun returned fire stopping a massacre before it happened. The original shooter ended up in the hospital, but nobody ended up in the morgue, which kept the death toll for the weekend down to fourteen.

Fourteen isn’t pretty, but it’s better than twenty or thirty.

ALL of it here:
Sultan Knish

 

[guno]

Something interesting. article is a couple days old. But we need to stop Obama on his SUPER Amnesty.

Snip:
Super-Amnesty Will Turn Every City into Detroit
Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog 28 Comments
After another bloody weekend in Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel branded the shootings unacceptable and the city’s top cop demanded more gun control laws. Chicago’s murder rate has actually dropped since concealed carry became legal. Emanuel’s lawsuits over his illegal gun control laws have left the already struggling city deep in the hole and forced to cover the NRA’s million dollars in legal bills.

Concealed carry paid off over that bloody weekend when a vet carrying a gun returned fire stopping a massacre before it happened. The original shooter ended up in the hospital, but nobody ended up in the morgue, which kept the death toll for the weekend down to fourteen.

Fourteen isn’t pretty, but it’s better than twenty or thirty.

ALL of it here:
Sultan Knish

They will be resettled in your trailer park

 

[Stephanie]

did you not read the article dumbass? Get your head out of your ass. Most people's rates will only go up.

Rates go up every year. They are going up at a slower rate now than before the ACA was passed. Try again.

Correct rates have always increased and increased at a rate much higher then the inflation rate, at least the reported inflation rate. What did Obamacare do to curb any of the costs that drive the increase? Simple, force more people in so the amount of money going into the system is the same as if it did increase as much.

I heard on the news there was something like 77 new insurance companies (number might be wrong). Does anyone believe they started because of the goodness of their heart? No, they started because Obamacare made it very profitable for them to do so.

My thoughts are that for this one year when there are lots of new enrollees the rates will stablize. But once everyone is hooked in then they will go back to increasing as they always did, there is no cost containment.

So how do conservatives feel about Dr Ben Carson's approach to healthcare insurance companies and free markets.

==========================================================
Regulate insurance companies as non-profit services
Today, insurance companies call the shots on what they want to pay, to whom, and when. Consequently, even busy doctors operate with a very slim profit of margin.
This is an ideal place for the intervention of government regulators who, with the help of medical professionals, could establish fair and consistent remuneration. To accomplish this, essentially all of the insurance companies would have to become non-profit service organizations with standardized, regulated profit margins.
This is not the paradigm that I see for all businesses, [but] is uniquely appropriate for the health-insurance industry, which deals with people's lives and quality of existence. That may sound radical, but is it as radical as allowing a company to increase its profits by denying care to sick individuals? In the long run this would also be good for the insurance companies, who could then concentrate on providing good service, rather than focusing on undercutting their competitors and increasing their profit margin.
Ben Carson on Health Care

This thread is about being lied to and kept in the dark by this administration to pass this Monster law on us called ObamaCare and now he's onto immigration reform. As if we need him reforming anything after, OScamCare

So it's wrong to bring up past deceptions that cost taxpayers a trillion more than they (and Congress) were told (Medicare Part D). And it's wrong to bring up a solution (which I like) by Dr Ben Carson to controlling healthcare costs?

Mr. Carson isn't a elected official ruling over us NOW

 

[guno]

Rates go up every year. They are going up at a slower rate now than before the ACA was passed. Try again.

Correct rates have always increased and increased at a rate much higher then the inflation rate, at least the reported inflation rate. What did Obamacare do to curb any of the costs that drive the increase? Simple, force more people in so the amount of money going into the system is the same as if it did increase as much.

I heard on the news there was something like 77 new insurance companies (number might be wrong). Does anyone believe they started because of the goodness of their heart? No, they started because Obamacare made it very profitable for them to do so.

My thoughts are that for this one year when there are lots of new enrollees the rates will stablize. But once everyone is hooked in then they will go back to increasing as they always did, there is no cost containment.

So how do conservatives feel about Dr Ben Carson's approach to healthcare insurance companies and free markets.

==========================================================
Regulate insurance companies as non-profit services
Today, insurance companies call the shots on what they want to pay, to whom, and when. Consequently, even busy doctors operate with a very slim profit of margin.
This is an ideal place for the intervention of government regulators who, with the help of medical professionals, could establish fair and consistent remuneration. To accomplish this, essentially all of the insurance companies would have to become non-profit service organizations with standardized, regulated profit margins.
This is not the paradigm that I see for all businesses, [but] is uniquely appropriate for the health-insurance industry, which deals with people's lives and quality of existence. That may sound radical, but is it as radical as allowing a company to increase its profits by denying care to sick individuals? In the long run this would also be good for the insurance companies, who could then concentrate on providing good service, rather than focusing on undercutting their competitors and increasing their profit margin.
Ben Carson on Health Care

This thread is about being lied to and kept in the dark by this administration to pass this Monster law on us called ObamaCare and now he's onto immigration reform. As if we need him reforming anything after, OScamCare

So it's wrong to bring up past deceptions that cost taxpayers a trillion more than they (and Congress) were told (Medicare Part D). And it's wrong to bring up a solution (which I like) by Dr Ben Carson to controlling healthcare costs?

Mr. Carson isn't a elected official ruling over us NOW

So you live in the trailer park on 8 mile priceless!!!

 

[Freewill]

"Liberal Bullshit"

Typical of most conservatives, pointlessly complain about something while at the same time lacking the courage to offer a solution of their own.

You'll be ok. Remember it's was because of Your parties BS that they just got kicked out of power. tsk tsk

Funny you would post such a video, that I didn't watch. It is the liberals that always equate being poor to being black. That the alleged disenfranchisement of poor voters only happens to blacks. The left makes every damn thing political.

 

[NYcarbineer]

Quite a fitting word for them and these Progressives you are getting a taste of in this administration. Never put them in Power over us again

SNIP:
For progressives, the success of government programs takes a backseat to their own moral grandstanding.
By William Voegeli

• 
  
  

The "Bully Pulpit" in action. (Win McNamee/Getty)


Comments
589
‘Bullshit” is American English’s assertion, maximally succinct and vigorous, that a contention is factually preposterous or logically absurd. According to philosophy professor Harry Frankfurt, however, the “essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it is phony.” His slender volume devoted to the subject, On Bullshit, invites us to think of a Fourth of July orator “who goes on bombastically about ‘our great and blessed country, whose Founding Fathers under divine guidance created a new beginning for mankind.’” The speaker’s point is not “to deceive anyone concerning American history.” Rather,

what he cares about is what people think of him. He wants them to think of him as a patriot, as someone who has deep thoughts and feelings about the origins and the mission of our country, who appreciates the importance of religion, who is sensitive to our history, whose pride in that history is combined with humility before God, and so on.

It’s difficult to banish the glum suspicion that life in the 21st century, for all its economic and technological benefits, necessitates putting up with much more bullshit than our ancestors had to.
. . .
Frankfurt limits his discussion of bullshit to descriptive statements, analyzing and regretting our departure from the standard of truth. He does not take up the question of prescriptive statements, the mainstay of politics. Criticizing Republican proposals to cut spending on Head Start and other educational programs, for example, President Obama said, “We know that three- and four-year-olds who go to high-quality preschools, including our best Head Start programs, are less likely to repeat a grade, they’re less likely to need special education, they’re more likely to graduate from high school than the peers who did not get these services.”

The first part of Obama’s statement is not bullshit, because it does nothing worse than employ the politician’s constant companion, the selectively revealed half-truth.
Children who attend the best Head Start programs show positive results but, as we have seen, Head Start attendees overall are no better off than peers not enrolled in the program.

Obama invokes the sunny side of the law of averages without acknowledging its grim side: If children who attend the best Head Start programs do better than their peers, children who attend the worst programs must, necessarily, have developmental problems even more severe than those afflicting children in a control group who never enrolled in the program at all.


The more interesting part of Obama’s statement, for our purposes, is the generic political prescription, the assertion that government program X will solve problem Y. Prescription lends itself to bullshitting if, following Frankfurt, the prescriber has a lack of connection to a concern with efficacy.

Both kinds of bullshitters, de-scribers and prescribers, are more concerned with conveying their ideals, of which idealized understandings of their true selves are a central component, than with making statements that correspond scrupulously to empirical or causal reality. A bullshit description may be, at least in part, factually accurate, but any such accuracy is inadvertent. The accurate data were incorporated into the spiel not for the sake of correctness but because it helped express the speaker’s “values” or “vision.”

ALL of it here:
Liberal Bullshit National Review Online

The funniest government haters are the ones like Stephanie,

who works for the government.

 

[NYcarbineer]

Jonathan Gruber, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist, is making himself a household name, and not in a good way. A series of videos have emerged in recent days showing Mr. Gruber—an architect of the Affordable Care Act—telling college audiences that major parts of the law were designed purposely to mask its true cost to individual Americans.

As Mr. Gruber put it, speaking last year at a conference at the University of Pennsylvania: “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, you know, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass.”

One example cited by Mr. Gruber is the so-called Cadillac tax, as the ObamaCare excise tax on high-value employer health plans is known. The tax, which he helped devise and will take effect in 2018, imposes a 40% levy on individual health plans worth more than $10,200, and on family plans worth more than $27,500. As Mr. Gruber’s remarks were unearthed last week, economist Mark Wilson and I released a study of the excise tax that shows he is right about its deceptive design. The tax is likely to hit many people who don’t have high-end coverage.

Mr. Gruber says in one video that his real aim was to reduce the tax break available to those who get employer-sponsored insurance, about 170 million Americans. He lamented that it would be hard to persuade Congress to reduce people’s tax breaks: “You just can’t get through. It’s politically impossible.” True enough—the excise tax does the job instead. It is a stealthy way to reduce the tax preference for health care without taking it away from employers.

Mr. Gruber also noted that the real impact of the tax would fall on individual Americans: “We just tax the insurance companies, they pass on higher prices that offsets the tax break we get, it ends up being the same thing. It’s a very clever, you know, basic exploitation of the lack of economic understanding of the American voter.” In another video that surfaced on Friday, he explained that the only way to get rid of the tax preference for employer-sponsored insurance was “by mislabeling it, calling it a tax on insurance plans rather than a tax on people, when we all know it’s a tax on people who hold those insurance plans.”

Our study bears this out. While the tax is designed to be paid by companies, employees or consumers will see significant increases in costs. These cost increases will be passed on in several ways. Large employers who are subject to the excise tax in 2018 will pay an average of more than $2,700 per employee a year from 2018 to 2024. As Mr. Gruber admits, and basic economics confirms, this cost will be passed on to consumers or to employees in higher prices and lower compensation.

Employers, being rational actors, will not want to pay these taxes and will reduce their health-care benefits to limit their potential exposure to the tax. Doing this will cause employees to be hit by the excise tax in at least two other ways. If employers increase taxable wages to compensate for reducing the value of their plans, then employees will be paying more in taxes for the same compensation levels, and more after-tax out-of-pocket expenses for their health care.

From 2018 to 2024, the excise tax could cost 12.1 million employees an average $1,050 in higher payroll and income taxes a year, if employers increase their taxable wages as they reduce the cost of health-care benefits. Alternatively, if employers only reduce the value of their offerings without increasing wages and salaries, these employees could see up to a $6,150 reduction in their health-care benefits and little or no increase in pay.

Mr. Gruber also implicitly acknowledged that calling the excise tax a “Cadillac” tax is misleading, as the tax’s reach will expand. “Over time it’s gonna apply to more and more health-insurance plans,” he said, elaborating in a separate speech that the “tax that starts out hitting only 8% of the insurance plans essentially amounts over the next 20 years [to] essentially getting rid of the exclusion for employer-sponsored plans.”

http://online.wsj.com/articles/tevi-troy-another-obamacare-deception-1416179540

GRUBER!!!!!!!

Have they tied him to Benghazi yet?

 

[Stephanie]

Quite a fitting word for them and these Progressives you are getting a taste of in this administration. Never put them in Power over us again

SNIP:
For progressives, the success of government programs takes a backseat to their own moral grandstanding.
By William Voegeli

• 
  
  

The "Bully Pulpit" in action. (Win McNamee/Getty)


Comments
589
‘Bullshit” is American English’s assertion, maximally succinct and vigorous, that a contention is factually preposterous or logically absurd. According to philosophy professor Harry Frankfurt, however, the “essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it is phony.” His slender volume devoted to the subject, On Bullshit, invites us to think of a Fourth of July orator “who goes on bombastically about ‘our great and blessed country, whose Founding Fathers under divine guidance created a new beginning for mankind.’” The speaker’s point is not “to deceive anyone concerning American history.” Rather,

what he cares about is what people think of him. He wants them to think of him as a patriot, as someone who has deep thoughts and feelings about the origins and the mission of our country, who appreciates the importance of religion, who is sensitive to our history, whose pride in that history is combined with humility before God, and so on.

It’s difficult to banish the glum suspicion that life in the 21st century, for all its economic and technological benefits, necessitates putting up with much more bullshit than our ancestors had to.
. . .
Frankfurt limits his discussion of bullshit to descriptive statements, analyzing and regretting our departure from the standard of truth. He does not take up the question of prescriptive statements, the mainstay of politics. Criticizing Republican proposals to cut spending on Head Start and other educational programs, for example, President Obama said, “We know that three- and four-year-olds who go to high-quality preschools, including our best Head Start programs, are less likely to repeat a grade, they’re less likely to need special education, they’re more likely to graduate from high school than the peers who did not get these services.”

The first part of Obama’s statement is not bullshit, because it does nothing worse than employ the politician’s constant companion, the selectively revealed half-truth.
Children who attend the best Head Start programs show positive results but, as we have seen, Head Start attendees overall are no better off than peers not enrolled in the program.

Obama invokes the sunny side of the law of averages without acknowledging its grim side: If children who attend the best Head Start programs do better than their peers, children who attend the worst programs must, necessarily, have developmental problems even more severe than those afflicting children in a control group who never enrolled in the program at all.


The more interesting part of Obama’s statement, for our purposes, is the generic political prescription, the assertion that government program X will solve problem Y. Prescription lends itself to bullshitting if, following Frankfurt, the prescriber has a lack of connection to a concern with efficacy.

Both kinds of bullshitters, de-scribers and prescribers, are more concerned with conveying their ideals, of which idealized understandings of their true selves are a central component, than with making statements that correspond scrupulously to empirical or causal reality. A bullshit description may be, at least in part, factually accurate, but any such accuracy is inadvertent. The accurate data were incorporated into the spiel not for the sake of correctness but because it helped express the speaker’s “values” or “vision.”

ALL of it here:
Liberal Bullshit National Review Online

The funniest government haters are the ones like Stephanie,

who works for the government.

I Don't work for the government goof. When I worked in the school, I worked for the state. I quite the school because the Feds got involved with Michelle's Obama's lunch menus. I didn't sign up to be her food Nazi. And what does that have to with Obama's administration LYING to us in order to pass some MONSTER new government entitlement on our back that we have to PAY FOR?

 

[NYcarbineer]

Quite a fitting word for them and these Progressives you are getting a taste of in this administration. Never put them in Power over us again

SNIP:
For progressives, the success of government programs takes a backseat to their own moral grandstanding.
By William Voegeli

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The "Bully Pulpit" in action. (Win McNamee/Getty)


Comments
589
‘Bullshit” is American English’s assertion, maximally succinct and vigorous, that a contention is factually preposterous or logically absurd. According to philosophy professor Harry Frankfurt, however, the “essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it is phony.” His slender volume devoted to the subject, On Bullshit, invites us to think of a Fourth of July orator “who goes on bombastically about ‘our great and blessed country, whose Founding Fathers under divine guidance created a new beginning for mankind.’” The speaker’s point is not “to deceive anyone concerning American history.” Rather,

what he cares about is what people think of him. He wants them to think of him as a patriot, as someone who has deep thoughts and feelings about the origins and the mission of our country, who appreciates the importance of religion, who is sensitive to our history, whose pride in that history is combined with humility before God, and so on.

It’s difficult to banish the glum suspicion that life in the 21st century, for all its economic and technological benefits, necessitates putting up with much more bullshit than our ancestors had to.
. . .
Frankfurt limits his discussion of bullshit to descriptive statements, analyzing and regretting our departure from the standard of truth. He does not take up the question of prescriptive statements, the mainstay of politics. Criticizing Republican proposals to cut spending on Head Start and other educational programs, for example, President Obama said, “We know that three- and four-year-olds who go to high-quality preschools, including our best Head Start programs, are less likely to repeat a grade, they’re less likely to need special education, they’re more likely to graduate from high school than the peers who did not get these services.”

The first part of Obama’s statement is not bullshit, because it does nothing worse than employ the politician’s constant companion, the selectively revealed half-truth.
Children who attend the best Head Start programs show positive results but, as we have seen, Head Start attendees overall are no better off than peers not enrolled in the program.

Obama invokes the sunny side of the law of averages without acknowledging its grim side: If children who attend the best Head Start programs do better than their peers, children who attend the worst programs must, necessarily, have developmental problems even more severe than those afflicting children in a control group who never enrolled in the program at all.


The more interesting part of Obama’s statement, for our purposes, is the generic political prescription, the assertion that government program X will solve problem Y. Prescription lends itself to bullshitting if, following Frankfurt, the prescriber has a lack of connection to a concern with efficacy.

Both kinds of bullshitters, de-scribers and prescribers, are more concerned with conveying their ideals, of which idealized understandings of their true selves are a central component, than with making statements that correspond scrupulously to empirical or causal reality. A bullshit description may be, at least in part, factually accurate, but any such accuracy is inadvertent. The accurate data were incorporated into the spiel not for the sake of correctness but because it helped express the speaker’s “values” or “vision.”

ALL of it here:
Liberal Bullshit National Review Online

The funniest government haters are the ones like Stephanie,

who works for the government.

I Don't work for the government goof. When I worked in the school, I worked for the state. I quite the school because the Feds got involved with Michelle's Obama's lunch menus. I didn't sign up to be her food Nazi. And what does that have to with Obama's administration LYING to us in order to pass some MONSTER new government entitlement on our back that we have to PAY FOR?

...I didn't work for the government, I worked for the state...

oh my. priceless

 

[zeke]

Also what is the cost containment of drugs????

Did you know that the Federal government can not negotiate drug prices with the manufactures? And that a Republican Congress is who made it that way.

You good with that? You think the spiraling cost of drugs could be contained? All over the world, American drug companies sell their product more cheaply than in the USA.. ALL because of a republican congress.

 

[zeke]

...I didn't work for the government, I worked for the state...

oh my. priceless

It is hard to beat Staph for stupidity.

 

[Freewill]

Also what is the cost containment of drugs????

Did you know that the Federal government can not negotiate drug prices with the manufactures? And that a Republican Congress is who made it that way.

You good with that? You think the spiraling cost of drugs could be contained? All over the world, American drug companies sell their product more cheaply than in the USA.. ALL because of a republican congress.

Again, what did Obamacare to stop that? They had control they could have done anything, but didn't.

 

[Stephanie]

...I didn't work for the government, I worked for the state...

oh my. priceless

It is hard to beat Staph for stupidity.

Are You proud to be seen as a stupid troll. You and Carbin have nothing to add but insults