Let Lew Holtz be your guide: https://www.facebook.com/
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Apparently China has agreed to allow its Central Bank to restrict dollar cash flow transctions into N Korea. Time will tell whether they will match their words with action but it is a significant accomplishment on Trump's part.
He must have told the Chinese, we do not want war but will do what is necessary should we be pushed to the wall by N Korea's "Fat Boy." Chinese leaders must have concluded Trump meant what he said. They too do not want war on their border but neither have they wanted to bring N Korea to its knees because a powerful N Korea serves their goal of restraining and creating problems for America in Asia.
The next chapter in the N Korea saga should become evident fairly soon. The Trump Administration understands sanctions will not bring N Korea to the table but it may well slow their nuclear progress down because of lack of funding. Should N Korea come to the negotiating table I believe that is when the real problems and pressures on America and Trump will begin because N Korea will, as they have in the past, agree to do some of the things we want, this will not include ending their nuclear program,the world will then press us to accept their offer and N Korea will break their word and move forward towards their goal of nuclearization.
It will also be interesting to see whether Trump renounces Obama's Iran Deal.
If the Republican Congress passes some legislation regarding Obamacare and then does something about the budget and tax simplification etc. Trump's popularity and poll ratings should begin to rise and the Democrats will be left appearing as obstructionists as the 2018 mid term election moves into high gear.
Now that Mc Cain has said he will not vote for the Graham-Cassidy Bill, Trump will either turn to the Democrats helping pull their chestnuts out of the fire making Republican 2018 prospects bleaker.
It might also dawn on the Republican Establishment, Trump will be a bigger force to contend with as his presidency stabilizes and voters turns away from his adopted party.
The political scene could become quite fluid in the coming months.
Stay tuned.
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Quite long but hits the nail on the head. Liberals have a story/narrative, false as it may be, but they stick to it. Conservatives do not and therein lies their problem.
Consequently, liberals are able to put conservatives on the defensive because they are always defending against the fact that liberals have usurped all the playing field suggesting they care and conservatives do not. Yes, liberals, care but they do not dare look at the results of their caring.
With liberal caring who needs enemies? (See 1 below.)
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Could we learn a few things from the Japanese culture? (See 2 below.)
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This from a friend and fellow memo reader: "Thanks again! Your past presidential observations couldn't have been closer to this 85 year old's thoughts! Trump is a "doer" and not a talker so I think he's going to make some real accomplishments.
And,,,,,,,,,,,,, a comment made by Newt Gingrich back in 10-31-09:
"As an American, I am not so shocked that Obama was given the Nobel Peace Prize without any accomplishments to his name but that America gave him the White House based on the same credentials."
Have a good day dude! C----"
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McCain decided he cannot vote for his closest friend's bill and my friend, Kim, turns her editorial guns on Sen. Murkowski.
I have two questions which either display my ignorance or are on the mark.
First, it seems to me the The Graham-Cassidy Bill misses two basic points.
First, it continues allowing the government to re-launder money back to the states. Why not shut down most of the agency that intrudes the Federal government into our health care and allow states to determine their own health programs and the money extracted by the federal government could be raised by states from their own citizens.
Second, the Graham Cassidy Bill may not be perfect but it is a step in the direction of ending Obama Care, which is a flop, and Republicans can revisit the Graham-Cassidy Bill and make additional changes after they see what problems are created by its passage.
Laundering money is against the law and the federal government is the biggest money launderer in the nation. Taxpayers send money to The Swamp, Swamp Alligators take a huge cut, build enormous buildings to house thousands upon thousands of bureaucrats.
Trump recently, and rightfully, accused the U.N of growing like a weed and accomplishing very little. The U.N probably modeled themselves after Congress.(See 3 and 3a below.)
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1)
What's the Story?
Liberals have one; conservatives need one
f I were a Republican strategist, which I’m pleased to say I’m not, I would pay especial attention to Shelby Steele’s op-ed “Why the Left Can’t Let Go of Racism” in the August 27 issue of the Wall Street Journal. Toward the close of his article, Steele writes that “the great problem for conservatives is that they lack the moral glibness to compete with liberalism’s ‘innocence’ ”—innocence, in this case, from the evil of racism and social injustice generally. Steele then goes on briefly to suggest that “reality” should be the “informing vision” of conservatism.” By “reality” I take him to mean more than arguments countering the unreality of the empty utopianism of much liberalism.
What Shelby Steele holds in his op-ed is that liberals have a story and conservatives do not. The liberal story is an old one, in many ways a false one, but it works for them, and, as he points out, they are adamantly sticking to it. Their story—nowadays the approved word is “narrative”—is one of impressive simplicity: They hate social injustice in any form, despise capitalism for its selfishness and blame it for the despoiling of the environment and the planet generally, and cannot find an ethnic or sexual minority they don’t wish to help. Through this program, they have, or at least feel they have, cornered the market on virtue. To put the liberal story in two words: They care. This has left conservatives in the unattractive position of not caring.
Like most simple stories about the motorforce of human behavior—the class struggle, the Oedipus complex—the side-effects of the liberal story, which go unmentioned, are sometimes as pernicious as the disease. Liberals, in recent years, have a lot for which to apologize. Thus, owing to the successful attempts at implementing an essentially liberal program of diversity and giving way to every possible strain of multiculturalism, the contemporary university controlled by liberal ideas has been so badly watered down in its humanities and social sciences divisions as to dilute the quality of higher education itself, with political correctness, trigger-warnings, and microaggressions putting on the finishing touches. Thus, in their relentlessly reassuring African Americans of their continuing victim status—ignoring the more deadly tragedy of black-on-black gang murders in the inner city—the liberal program on race has ensured bad feeling all round and brought on the worst in black leadership. As Shelby Steele himself remarked some years ago, if racial progress in the country is ever admitted, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton would be out of business.
A liberal in good standing through my late 20s, the liberal story lost credence for me when I began to teach at a Middle Western university. There I discovered young professors, good liberals all, sleeping with their students, older professors backing down before radicals who openly proclaimed they had no use for free speech—never have I witnessed such cowardliness when there was so little to fear—and behavior so grasping (and for such very low stakes) that it made the Robber Barons look like an order of Dominicans. Liberals, as is well known, are much better at proclaiming than living up to their ideals.
If liberals frequently turn out disappointing, conservatives are uninspiring. Conservatives don’t have a story, or at least an impressive one. They are left only with their insistence on the unreality of contemporary liberalism, which when proclaimed is usually turned against them by charges of racism, blindness to the beauty of idealism and the larger project of the good of eminently improvable humankind, and insensitivity generally. Conservatives need a story of their own. But what might it be?
Economics has long been at the heart of the conservative story. Friedrich Hayek correctly held that the loss of economic liberty soon results in the loss of other, more essential liberties. The prime example here is the Soviet Union, whose leaders, having captured the means of production, for 75 brutal years promptly closed down the means of decent life itself.
Unarguably true though it is, the conservative insistence upon the importance of free markets is not necessarily useful as an arguing point for winning the good opinion of independents. The emphasis on free markets in current-day conservatism is more likely to convince them, and reconfirm liberals in their fixed belief, that conservatives merely wish to preserve the status quo—preserve, in other words, the wealth of the One Percent and all that. The conservative story ought somehow to show that conservatism itself is not identical with, is richer and more complex than, business interests. The business of America, they need to emphasize, contra Calvin Coolidge, is greater than mere business.
My friend Edward Shils once remarked to me apropos of Milton Friedman, George Stigler, Gary Becker, and their colleagues in the University of Chicago economics department that they were decent men, honorable and obviously highly intelligent, but “insufficiently impressed by the mysteries of life.” Those mysteries need to be part of the conservative story. While endorsing free markets as the most efficient arrangement known under successful capitalism, the conservative story must not allow a belief in the importance of economics to block out the more significant elements in life. In defense of his own Communist politics, Bertolt Brecht said, “first grub, then ethics.” Through an undue emphasis on economics, conservatives convey essentially the same skewed message.
As Chesterton is supposed to have said, “when a man chooses not to believe in God, he does not choose to believe in nothing, he believes in anything.” In the realm of economics, confirmation of Chesterton’s aphorism is available at Exhibit A: the invisible hand of the market.
On the subject of God, liberals and conservatives are divided. Those liberals who profess religious belief feel that their belief impels them to join the fight for social justice. Among religious institutions given over to politics, the Episcopal church, once the citadel of the East Coast social establishment, appears to have been captured by liberalism. Unitarianism has for decades seemed an appendage of liberalism. Reform Judaism, it has been said, is little more than the Democratic party platform, with holidays added. True, evangelical Christians have supported the Republican party in recent years, but they have done so chiefly because they felt their faith under attack by the social arrangements promoted by secular liberalism.
In this melee of religious passion, conservatives do well to present themselves as defenders not of the Faith, but of faith itself. (I have, in this connection, a conservative friend who calls himself a “pious agnostic.”) By this I mean conservatives ought, insofar as possible, to defend all respectable religious worship while stressing that religion is above mere politics and as such does best wherever possible to steer clear of direct involvement in political activism.
The attack on Big Government has long been another part of the conservative story. However high its truth factor, this, too, has a commensurately low persuasion quotient. The closer it gets to impinging on personal life—in the realms of health, setting and reinforcing social norms, and the rest—the more inept, not to say interfering, Big Government does indeed seem. Yet to be against all Big Government is to chew much more than one should bite off. The need for FEMA, the FDA, ICE, and the other of the lettered federal agencies that comprise the alphabet soup of Big Government has if anything grown greater in recent years. The conservative argument ought not to be against Big Government per se, but on the underlying assumption that government is the greatest force available for bringing about human welfare and happiness.
The insistence on free markets and the attack on Big Government and the retreat into tradition that takes the form of disparagement of advanced-guard social behavior (gay marriage, abortion, and the rest) come to little more than a melancholy and defeatist creed, when what is missing and much needed in the conservative story is an affirmative philosophy.
At the heart of the liberal-conservative argument is a dispute about human nature. Liberals find human nature infinitely malleable—“A path out of poverty and poor health” runs the happy headline to a story about a recent study conducted by psychologists and developmental scientists—conservatives view it as hardily resistant to change. Liberals see humanity as on a relentless march of progress, conservatives see civilization itself as inherently fragile, a beautiful but thin construct always in danger of tearing.
In his one strongly political novel, The Princess Casamassima, Henry James has a character, Madame Grandoni, the companion of the radically chic princess, remark in a manner to which most conservatives would, I think, readily subscribe: “I take no interest in the people; I don’t understand them and I know nothing about them. An honorable nature of any class, I always respect it, but I will not pretend to a passion for the ignorant masses.” Conservatives are not, like liberals, under any obligation to take up the cause of supposed victim groups en masse, but only that of individuals of honorable character. Hyacinth Robinson, James’s hero in the novel, a boy born poor, orphaned, and raised in the London slums, undergoes an inner revolution and gives up the outer revolution to which he had been committed, abandoning his political resentment and anger and falling in love with “the beauty of the world.” Later in the novel James remarks about the limits of politics, a limit conservatives need to make part of their story: “The figures on the chessboard were still the passions and jealousies and superstitions and stupidities of man, and their position with regard to each other, at any given moment, could be of interest only to the grim, invisible fates who played the game—who sat, through the ages, bow-backed over the table.” Such thoughts do not make for simple political messaging, but, conservative at their core, they can supply the philosophy behind a persuasive conservative story.
The conservative English novelist Evelyn Waugh once jokingly remarked that he was never again going to vote for the Tories as they had been in power for eight years and hadn’t turned the clock back one minute. Neither should American conservatives expect their political representatives to have any better luck with turning back the clock. Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. held a cyclical view of American history, with liberal changes sweeping the board for a time, at which point, having exhausted itself, liberalism is replaced by conservatism. Thus do Democrats and Republicans shuffle in and out of power, though with the changes made during the liberal years generally accepted and becoming part of the status quo.
But the most recent liberal changes seem unacceptable, and not to conservatives alone. The identity politics that, along with an inept campaign, cost Hillary Clinton the presidency have also gone a long way to destroying the universities, made race relations more jagged than ever, and left American foreign policy in a great muddle of indecision. So demoralized had the nation become by liberalism that in Donald J. Trump it elected a man richly unprepared for the job whose only attraction was his promise that he could put a stop to the business-as-usual of liberal identity politics and foreign policy dithering and, you should pardon the expression, Make America Great Again.
With a good conservative story in place, the Trump presidency, with all its unnerving volatility, might have been avoided. But none of the candidates who opposed Donald Trump in the Republican primaries was in possession of that story or any other moderately convincing story, leaving them all seeming little more than men and one woman in business for themselves.
I myself do not have that much-needed conservative story, but I do have a strong sense of what its general lineaments ought to be. The conservative story ought to be respectful of business but not dominated by its values. It ought to be sympathetic to those who have fallen or are otherwise unfit to compete in a competitive society and relieve their misery wherever possible. It ought to recognize the centrality of immigration in our history and do all in its power to turn recent immigrants into true Americans, not merely people who have come here seeking work and the enjoyment of superior consumer goods. Connected with this it needs to recognize that the United States is no longer a dominantly white country, which statistically it isn’t, and to give up any false notions of our having an aristocratic class (“Ah,” said the Italian to the Englishman who was bragging about his lineage, “when your people were still painting their behinds purple and baying at the moon, in my family already we had homosexuals”). Finally, in a hard world, conservatives ought to be good-humored. As for that world, permit me to allow Henry James, in a passage from an essay on Turgenev, to have the last word:
“Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of a night; we wake up to it again for ever and ever; we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.”
Nothing cheerful about that, to be sure, but it seems impressively realistic in the way that Shelby Steele called for “reality” to be “the informing vision” of conservatism and to help furnish conservatives with a powerfully persuasive story of their own.
Joseph Epstein, a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, is the author, most recently, of Wind Sprints: Essays.
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2)Japan - some interesting facts
2)Japan - some interesting facts
* Hiroshima has returned to what it was economically before the atomic bomb was dropped.
* Japan prevents the use of mobile phones in trains, restaurants and indoors.
* For first to sixth primary year Japanese students must learn ethics in dealing with people.
* Even though one of the richest people in the world, the Japanese do not have servants. The parents are responsible for the house and children.
* There is no examination from the first to the third primary level because the goal of education is to instill concepts and character building.
* If you go to a buffet restaurant in Japan you will notice people only eat as much as they need without any waste because food must not be wasted.
* The rate of delayed trains in Japan is about 7 seconds per year!! The Japanese appreciate the value of time and are very punctual to minutes and seconds.
* Children in schools brush their teeth (sterile) and clean their teeth after a meal at school, teaching them to maintain their health from an early age.
* Japanese students take half an hour to finish their meals to ensure proper digestion because these students are the future of Japan.
The Japanese focus on maintaining their culture.
Therefore,
* No political leader or a prime minister from an Islamic nation has visited Japan not the Ayatollah of Iran, the King of Saudi Arabia or even a Saudi Prince!
* Japan is a country keeping Islam at bay by putting strict restrictions on Islam and ALL Muslims.
1) Japan is the only nation that does not give citizenship to Muslims.
2) In Japan permanent residency is not given to Muslims.
3) There is a strong ban on the propagation of Islam in Japan.
4) In the University of Japan, Arabic or any Islamic language is not taught.
5) One cannot import a 'Koran' published in the Arabic language.
6) According to data published by the Japanese government, it has given temporary residency to only 2 lakhs, Muslims, who must follow the Japanese Law of the Land. These Muslims should speak Japanese and carry out their religious rituals in their homes.
7) Japan is the only country in the world that has a negligible number of embassies in Islamic countries.
8) Muslims residing in Japan are the employees of foreign companies.
9) Even today, visas are not granted to Muslim doctors, engineers or managers sent by foreign companies.
10) In the majority of companies it is stated in their regulations that no Muslims should apply for a job.
11) The Japanese government is of the opinion that Muslims are fundamentalist and even in the era of globalization they are not willing to change their Muslim laws.
12) Muslims cannot even rent a house in Japan.
13) If anyone comes to know that his neighbor is a Muslim then the whole neighborhood stays alert.
14) No one can start an Islamic cell or Arabic 'Madrasa' in Japan .
15) There is no Sharia law in Japan
16) If a Japanese woman marries a Muslim, she is considered an outcast forever.
17) According to Mr. Kumiko Yagi, Professor of Arab/Islamic Studies at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies,
" There is a mind frame in Japan that Islam is a very narrow minded religion and one should stay away from it."
The Japanese might have lost the war, but they are in charge of their own country. There are no bombs going off in crowded business centers, "Honor Killings", nor killing of innocent children or anyone else.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++3) Lisa Murkowski’s Calculator
The GOP health-care bill is in her hands. And her state, Alaska, needs a ‘yes’ vote.
By Kimberley Strassel
It’s accurate to say that the fate of the GOP’s new health-care bill, Graham-Cassidy, is in the hands of Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski. The question is whether Ms. Murkowski, when she considers her vote, will use the right calculator.
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is agonizingly close to having the votes to pass the plan sponsored by South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham and Louisiana’s Bill Cassidy. It would replace ObamaCare by repealing its worst mandates and sending money to the states as block grants.
Two GOP senators are likely “no” votes: Kentucky’s Rand Paul, who never votes for anything that might actually pass, and Maine’s Susan Collins, who is always “disappointed” by Republican bills. But Arizona’s John McCain, who spoiled this summer’s attempt at ObamaCare repeal, seems unlikely to repeat his performance and sandbag his BFF, Mr. Graham.
That means the 50th vote will come down to Ms. Murkowski, who says she’s still trying to decide how the bill will affect her state. The media and liberal analysts are therefore pumping out predictions of disaster for Alaska, from vicious Medicaid cuts to dying Eskimos. These predictions are not only wrong, they intentionally miss the point. If Ms. Murkowski is honest with her constituents—and about her numbers—Alaska needs a “yes” vote.
What would Ms. Murkowski get by killing Graham-Cassidy? For a fleeting moment, the adoration of Anchorage’s liberal elite and media. But come next election, that crew will be as arrayed against her as always.
She would get the ObamaCare status quo, which has hit Alaska harder than any other state. Health-insurance premiums have soared more than 200% and are now the highest in the country. All but one insurer has fled the state’s individual market. People are dropping policies. Doctors are refusing to take the flood of new Medicaid patients.
Ms. Murkowski is dreaming if she thinks an alternative bill, some grand “bipartisan” deal, will rescue Alaska. Democrats have no interest in giving a sweet deal to a state that went for Donald Trump by 15 points. House conservatives will never pass any bill that further entrenches ObamaCare. A “no” vote on Graham-Cassidy would condemn Alaska to a downward health-care spiral.
And there’s this: She would get the fury of a White House and a GOP Congress with far more power over Alaska than just its health care. As Ms. Murkowski knows better than anyone, Alaska lives or dies on federal largess. It routinely tops the list of federal funding per capita. It receives billions in annual federal grants and billions more in defense spending. Federal money supports an estimated one-third of all the jobs and household income in the state.
Some of these funds come from mandatory entitlement programs, but the money that really matters is discretionary. It’s the Denali Commission. It’s the Essential Air Service, which subsidizes flights in rural Alaska. It’s grants for weatherization, and village water projects, and salmon recovery. It’s wildlife refuge payments and bridges to nowhere. It’s upgrades for military bases.
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke called Ms. Murkowski after her July health-care defection to let her know President Trump would be turning off the tap, and ending Alaska’s enormous opportunity to cash in on energy deregulation. The liberal press howled over this supposed “threat.” But why should the nation continue to send outsize taxpayer funds to a state that is single-handedly condemning Americans to ObamaCare? Somewhere on Ms. Murkowski’s calculator is a button that reads “Trump Grudge”—and it adds a lot of zeros.
By contrast, what would Ms. Murkowski get with a “yes” vote? She would earn the support of conservative groups, which will matter most in any re-election bids. She would get to keep open the Alaska money tap and even gain leverage for new projects. She would get the backing of a Trump administration that could turbocharge Alaska’s natural-resources markets.
Mostly, she would get a bill allowing Alaska the flexibility to tackle its unique health-care needs. The state has just 740,000 people spread across 660,000 square miles. Gov. Bill Walker, an independent, knows the power of state innovation, having spent recent months bragging about a waiver the Trump administration gave Alaska to support a reinsurance fund for high-cost patients, which is helping with premiums. Mr. Walker’s decision to oppose Graham-Cassidy is as churlish as it is political.
The Congressional Budget Office releases its preliminary score of the bill next week, and it will contain the usual wild predictions about costs. But that score won’t factor in the out-of-the-box thinking that Mr. Walker credits for saving Alaska health-care dollars. It won’t factor in the formula twiddles Senate Republicans are considering to ensure rural states aren’t harmed by Medicaid block grants. And it won’t factor in the dollars Ms. Murkowski would lose for her state more broadly by obstructing the GOP’s health-care plan. Those are the numbers Ms. Murkowski needs in her calculator. And they add up to an easy “yes.”
3a) Dick:
A recent poll should worry all Americans who care about the quality and availability of health care in America.
According to POLITICO/Morning Consult, 49 percent of American voters say they would support a single-payer health care system, wherein the only provider of health insurance in the United States would be the federal government.
Think about that: The same federal government that runs Medicaid and Medicare – both of which lose an estimated $70 billion to $110 billion in tax dollars annually to fraud – would be the sole option for your family’s health insurance.
Not surprisingly, 67 percent of Democrats said they are in favor of having the government completely take over our health insurance system – a figure that is up from 54 percent in April. This shows the growing influence that Bernie Sanders, who recently introduced a “Medicare For All” bill, continues to exert over the Democratic Party. What’s truly alarming though is that even 33 percent of Republicans polled said they support a single-payer health care system.
These results suggest that in the midst of arguing over Obamacare and the merits of the various “repeal and replace” bills, some basic truths have been forgotten.
It is time to go back to basics.
The most important principle to understand in the debate over health care is that government-dominated systems lead to scarcity and rationing. It is why we see the same food lines and starvation in Venezuela today that we saw last century in Soviet-run countries.
In single-payer health care systems, scarcity and rationing often take the form of long wait times. The Red Cross recently declared that Great Britain, which has a single-payer system, faced a “humanitarian crisis” of hospital bed and doctor shortages. Two people recently died at a British hospital after waiting more than 30 hours in a hospital hallway for treatment.
If this situation sounds familiar, it is because the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Health Administration, another government-run health care system, faces a similar crisis of long wait times due to years of bureaucratic inefficiency. (Fortunately, under the leadership of President Trump and VA Secretary Shulkin, this problem is being fixed, in part by offering veterans more non-government health care provider options.)
Other times, scarcity and rationing take the form of government refusing to pay for treatments that you and your doctor think are best for your health.
In Britain’s case, the government – not the patient or doctor – has the final say on what treatments are covered. According to National Health Service Constitution for England:
“You have the right to drugs and treatments that have been recommended by NICE for use in the NHS, if your doctor says they are clinically appropriate for you. You have the right to expect local decisions on funding of other drugs and treatments to be made rationally following a proper consideration of the evidence. If the local NHS decides not to fund a drug or treatment you and your doctor feel would be right for you, they will explain that decision to you.” [emphasis added]
The British government justifies its decisions through “comparative effectiveness” studies. But in modern medicine, which is becoming increasingly personalized, this is extraordinarily dangerous. If studies show Drug A is 70 percent effective at treating a disease, while Drug B is only 50 percent effective, the government may decide to cover Drug A over Drug B, regardless of what your doctor recommends. Medicine is rarely one-size-fits-all, and if you are a person for whom Drug A does not work, then you may be paying big for Drug B.
Ultimately, single-payer health care suffers from the same problem that Margaret Thatcher identified as the issue with all of socialism: “Eventually you run out of other people’s money.”
In 2014, the State of Vermont tried to pass a single-payer system. The state that gave us Senator Sanders was meant to be the liberal-torchbearer that would show the nation how great a government-run system could be.
Then, reality set in.
Democratic Governor Peter Shumlin realized he would have to raise the state’s payroll tax to 11.5 percent and set premiums at nearly 10 percent of people’s income.
According to The Washington Post, Shumlin determined the plan would be bad for Vermonters, saying “the potential economic disruption and risks would be too great to small businesses, working families, and the state’s economy.”
Three years after Vermont’s single-payer effort fell apart, California’s State Senate passed a single-payer health care bill in June of this year.
Even upon passage, the Democrats in the state acknowledged it was an incomplete, wildly expensive piece of legislation that had no hope of going anywhere. The plan would cost $400 billion a year. Lawmakers would have to raise the state’s payroll tax to 15 percent in order to raise the additional $200 billion in annual revenue required to afford the plan.
Republicans must remember these examples – and once again get into the habit of regularly communicating conservative principles and policies. If we don’t focus on winning the basic arguments about the merits of free markets over socialism, the Left will continue to try to convince every new generation of American voters that destructive policies, like single-payer health insurance, are reasonable.
If we let the Left win, America will be fundamentally changed in a matter of decades. That new America would be less healthy, less prosperous, and less free.
Newt
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