The Republicans were pretty sure they'd win. "I'd rather have an American president," is what the bumper stickers say here in Republican-land. The stickers still look brash and hopeful and, as yet, unwashed by any rain in Texas a month after the right got what was coming to them.
Meanwhile, in Washington, they'd like to think they really, really did win... mostly. Boehner seems to be betting on it.
Boehner opens his latest letter by reminding the president that 2012 was “a status quo election in which both you and the Republican majority in the House were re-elected.” That’s technically true and in every other way incorrect. The fact is that 2012 was a Democratic rout, in which Democrats got more votes than Republicans at the presidential, Senate and House levels. Boehner remains speaker because redistricting saved his majority. Nothing more.
That means Republicans are in a far weaker position than they were in 2011. And Boehner knows it. His newest offer is proof. In 2011, it was Obama chasing after Boehner with compromise proposals. In 2012, it’s the reverse. ...Ezra Klein, WaPo
It's going to be interesting to watch Boehner (I can't stand to even look at McConnell) as the crazy, fake deficit crisis is "resolved" and Republicans dribble into a state of jeez-Louise-wha'-happened?
Meanwhile, they continue to allow floods of money to be lost via our Kapitalistikisch health care system. Paul Krugman reminds us:
The point is that if you want to control Medicare costs, you can’t do it by kicking a small number of relatively young seniors off the program; to control costs, you have to, you know, control costs.And the truth is that we know a lot about how to do that — after all, every other advanced country has much lower health costs than we do, and even within the US, the VHA and even Medicaid are much better at controlling costs than Medicare, and even more so relative to private insurance.
The key is having a health insurance system that can say no — no, we won’t pay premium prices for drugs that are little if any better, we won’t pay for medical procedures that yield little or no benefit
But even as Republicans demand “entitlement reform”, they are dead set against anything like that. Bargaining over drug prices? Horrors! The Independent Payment Advisory Board? Death panels! They refuse to contemplate using approaches that have worked around the world; the only solution they will countenance is the solution that has never worked anywhere, namely, converting Medicare into an underfunded voucher system.
So pay no attention when they talk about how much they hate deficits. ...Krugman, Economics and Politics
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