Obama Taking Jobs Plan On The Road, Speaks In Richmond, Virginia
If the goal is to save Medicare/Medicaid *and* make it sustainabl e, any changes to should be about *expanding * the program, rather than contractin g that. Single payer health care would *save* this nation a huge amount of money, rather than paying BigPharma, BigIns & BigHospita l CEOs giant salaries for doing not very much.
About Unemployment
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Obama Taking Jobs Plan On The Road, Speaks In Richmond, Virginia
Stop permitting the media and officials to call this a tax cut. It is a reduction in the payroll deduction for Social Security Administration programs. It is not a tax cut, it does not affect the amount withheld for either state of federal income tax. It is a withholdin g reduction, much like reducing your 401K contributi on from 10% to 8%.
Stop letting Obama get away with his careful “payroll tax reduction” smoke and mirrors to cover up the fact that he is the first President since FDR to cut Social Security revenues on a percentage basis.
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Obama Taking Jobs Plan On The Road, Speaks In Richmond, Virginia
If Obama wants to cut Medicare costs, he needs to open it to all Americans and allow drug price negotiation. These two steps alone will do more to make Medicare solvent than any tinkering around the benefits eligibilit y age or means-test ing, which cuts to the core of the program.
He can’t do that, though, without breaking Rahm’s deal with Big Health, Big Insurance, and Big Pharma.
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Obama Taking Jobs Plan On The Road, Speaks In Richmond, Virginia
As a former government worker, I can attest to the fact that the PRIVATE sector pays more than the public sector.
About Unemployment
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Obama Taking Jobs Plan On The Road, Speaks In Richmond, Virginia
Reform = cuts
Means-testing is a bad idea because it makes Social Security and Medicare into welfare programs.
Studies have repeatedly shown that social welfare programs and institutions have broader public support *and* are more generous when they are universal rather than focused on the poor. And in fact, once means-test ing begins it’s likely to be followed by a further tightening of who qualifies in the future. It destroys the notion of a social insurance program and it creates new bureaucrac y and paperwork that further discredit public institutio ns.
About Unemployment
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Obama Taking Jobs Plan On The Road, Speaks In Richmond, Virginia
It’s pretty astonishing to me that self-descr ibed liberals and progressiv es are willing to trade a temporary stimulus comprised mostly of tax-cuts for permanent cuts to Medicare and Medicaid.
The irony here is that the majority of Americans oppose cuts to those programs. So essentially the typical liberal blogger is to the right of the average American.
We should be clear here. This is undisguised class warfare in the guise of a jobs program. Both parties are now resolutely in favor of cutting Medicare despite the bulk of the people standing opposed to it. I know many liberals are gun-shy about initiative s and referendum s because of the California experience , but I would suggest that a popular vote on Medicare would have more progressiv e results than anything that the Super-comm ittee, the Obama administra tion, and Congress will come up with.
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Obama Taking Jobs Plan On The Road, Speaks In Richmond, Virginia
- Increase period for drug pricing protection.
- Refuse to allow re-importation of drugs.
- Refuse to allow Medicare to negotiate drug pricing as the VA does.
Those are three Medicare cost containment policies that could be implemente d and would definitely drive down drug costs.
So the solution from the President and the Republicans?: Cut Medicare.
What’s so hard to understand about who the winners and who the losers are in this?
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Obama Taking Jobs Plan On The Road, Speaks In Richmond, Virginia
Internal Memo Confirms Big Giveaways In White House Deal With Big Pharma
A memo obtained by the Huffington Post confirms that the White House and the pharmaceutical lobby secretly agreed to precisely the sort of wide-rangi ng deal that both parties have been denying over the past week…
It says the White House agreed to oppose any congressional efforts to use the government ’s leverage to bargain for lower drug prices or import drugs from Canada — and also agreed not to pursue Medicare rebates…
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Obama Taking Jobs Plan On The Road, Speaks In Richmond, Virginia
Obama’s stance on Medicare is BS. Healthcare costs are out of control because there are no cost containment measures whatever in the industry. There are none in the prescripti on drug programs. He’s approachin g the horse from the @$$-end instead of the head where you can control the animal.
Healthcare in the US is a for-profit industry. As such, their goal is maximizing profit while reducing costs to themselves. If their costs rise, they simply raise prices/rat es to cover them.
Unless and until the industry is either slapped with rigid price controls or abolished through a government run and controlled single payer system (think Great Britain's NHS, Canada's universal health care) nothing will change and Medicare costs and healthcare costs in general will eat up more and more of the country’s resources.
Obama’s demanding the users of Medicare pay for the sins and profits of the health care industry bandits.
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Obama's Jobs Plan Has Few Avenues For Passage Or A Vote, Save The Super Committee
9/11 Attacks Led To Half-Trillion-Dollar Homeland Security Spending Binge
The most common claim to justify endless CivilLiberties erosions in the name of security -- and to defend politician s who endorse those erosions -- is that Americans don't care about those rights and are happy to sacrifice them. The principal problem with this claim is that it's false, as a new PewResearc h poll demonstrat es.
It was only in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 that a majority of Americans was prepared to sacrifice CivilLiberties in the name of terrorism. But this game-playi ng with PublicOpin ion is common. To this day, if you criticize PresidentO bama for shielding Bush officials from investigat ions, you'll be met with the claim that doing so was politicall y necessary, even though poll after poll found in the wake of Obama's inaugurati on that large majorities wanted those inquiries.
Similarly, when TheNewYorkTimes revealed that the BushAdmini stration was illegally spying on the communicat ions of Americans without the warrants required by law, Beltway pundits such as JoeKlein in unison"warned" Democrats that Americans were in favor of such measures and it would be politicall y suicidal to object, even though polls repeatedly showed the opposite. The same happened when Beltway pundits repeatedly insisted that Americans opposed Congressio nal investigat ions into the US Attorneys scandal even when polls showed huge majorities wanting them.
What's striking about this latest Pew finding is that mainstream political discourse barely includes anyone making a pro-civil-liberties case. The GOP never pretended to care, while Democrats under Obama no longer do. Still, so engrained are these political values in Americans that a clear majority believes it is unnecessar y to sacrifice them in the name of Terrorism. That's contrary to what one typically hears both from opponents and supporters of CivilLiber ties alike, who often assume that Americans beileve in the need to relinquish them.
Read more here.
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9/11 Commission Recommendations On First Responder Network, Civil Liberties Unmet 10 Years After Attacks
9/11 Commission Recommendations On First Responder Network, Civil Liberties Unmet 10 Years After Attacks
Enough with 9/11.
Nobody needs to be re-terrori
We are told to "Look forward, not back", we can't get a real investigat
ENOUGH!
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Obama Puts Passion Into Jobs Speech Rarely Seen In His Presidency
And, Obama proposes making the 'Super Congress' the 'Super Duper Congress'.
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Obama Puts Passion Into Jobs Speech Rarely Seen In His Presidency
All these people going on about slavery don't know what they are talking about.
==========
They're talking truth and facts.
About Barack Obama
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Obama Puts Passion Into Jobs Speech Rarely Seen In His Presidency
So this is a very difficult plan to pull off at the national level, and one that didn’t really work at the local level. And then there’s the very real concern that companies will just take the free labor and exploit the workers in the program. If the level of “training” is high, you’re crowding out jobs that companies would have to hire workers for. After all, for things like assembly line work or data entry or other low-skill jobs, there just isn’t a lot of training. Companies are just getting free interns at that point.
And by having the unemployed work for free, it guts the unemployment insurance program as we have known it since the 1930s. Obama’s new jobs bill is a neat way to accomplish these goals. By proclaimin g the new initiative s to be revenue neutral, Obama is using cuts in Social Security and Medicare to pay for the jobs initiative s. The job initiative s are mostly temporary, while the cuts to Social Security and Medicare would be permanent.
About Barack Obama
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Obama Puts Passion Into Jobs Speech Rarely Seen In His Presidency
'Georgia Works' provides on-the-job training for long-term unemployedKEEP READING, while offering them a stipend, basically boosted unemployme nt benefits, to account for travel and other expenses around the training, while they train. It gets long-term unemployed workers a foot in the door at companies, keeps them active, and potentiall y converts them into jobs.
But does it actually work? Did it work in Georgia? Or did it become a way for Georgia companies to get some free labor? Zachary Roth takes a look.
Labor experts agree that the concept–placing the jobless with potential employers– is right on target. “If you can get people placed with private employers for a training position of some kind, it is almost certainly the most effective approach, on a person by person basis, in terms of boosting earnings and getting them into jobs that they tend to hang on to,” Gary Burtless, a former Labor Department economist now at the Brookings Institutio n, told The Lookout.
Georgia says that more than 60 percent of the workers who completed the program ultimately found work–with 24 percent of the workers hired by the employer who trained them.
But in terms of volume, Georgia Works is less impressive. Since it was launched in 2003, 23,084 people have completed the program. That means that in a state with a population of nearly 9.7 million, only around 1,725 workers a year who participat e in the program found jobs, and only around 700 of those with the employer who trained them.
To those who worry about reducing the nationwide jobless total–currently at nearly 14 million–th at doesn’t even get close to the size of the challenge.
And Georgia is a pretty slack labor market, with 10.1% unemployment. So it’s comparable to the national market for jobs.
Politico looks at the numbers from this year only, and they’re even worse. Just 197 workers have been hired out of 1,400 in the program, a take-up rate of just 14%. Enrollment went way up in 2010, and program costs skyrocketed. So Georgia made it far less attractive , cutting back the stipend and reducing the marketing profile.
About Barack Obama
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Obama Puts Passion Into Jobs Speech Rarely Seen In His Presidency
By extending payroll tax cuts, you're gutting Social Security’s finances forever. But whatever happens, look at what Social Security’s enemies will have accomplished:
The “lockbox” principle between Social Security and the overall budget will have been erased forever.
A relatively small infusion of cash into the trust fund will be the poison pill that erases the “trust fund” principle. Once the program has contributed to the deficit, it’s no longer separately funded.
The enemies of Social Security will have painted a bull’s eye on its only source of funding. People will see it as a “new tax” — in a year when the economy’s not expected to have fully recovered.
They’ll be in a position to argue, once again, that “America can’t afford” to provide financial security for middle-class seniors.
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Obama Puts Passion Into Jobs Speech Rarely Seen In His Presidency
So what did Obama speak "passionat
'Stimulati
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Obama Puts Passion Into Jobs Speech Rarely Seen In His Presidency
This speech was important because it established in the most unequivoca l way possible that the Democratic Party is now the 'cut Medicare and Medicaid'- party. Previously this had been insinuated and mentioned briefly, but this speech included an unambiguou s rejection of the traditiona l line of defending Medicare.
With this address, we can now firmly conclude that we have two parties that want to cut Medicare and Medicaid (as well as Social Security, which these payroll tax cuts make all the more expedient) and precisely no major parties that stand in defense of these programs. In fact, simply arguing on behalf of the status quo for Medicare is now an ultra-liberal position. Arguing that we should actually expand the program, as even Lieberman seemed to consider briefly before rememberin g who he works for, is now off the political map entirely. You have to be a Marxist revolution ary to advocate *lowering* the Medicare eligibilit y age, let alone propose expanding it to all Americans.
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Obama Puts Passion Into Jobs Speech Rarely Seen In His Presidency
In 2011, internship = slavery.
About Barack Obama
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Obama Puts Passion Into Jobs Speech Rarely Seen In His Presidency
And Obama supports the "Georgia model", which is where you work for free in the hopes that the company will hire you eventually
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Obama Puts Passion Into Jobs Speech Rarely Seen In His Presidency
How the administration came up with the stimulus amount:
Debt + Actual GDP = nominal GDP of 14 trillion
They can’t afford a negative quarter,
if they are proposing $400 billion it means they think the GDP will shrink by 3%.
How bad is the economy really?
The government is deficit spending to the tune of $2 trillion per year the economy is still shrinking!!!!
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