The Big Obama Administration Thread

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I'm not sure if that was the result of de-regulation or not. I got the impression that it was a policy decision made by the lending institutions themselves. I would be curious to see if there was a specfic law that required lenders to have certain lending standards when evaluating their customer's ability to pay back a loan.

 

Get a load of these guys - The very same people who drove the subprime mortgage mess have discovered how to make money off the damage they've done. Amazing.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32007521/ns/business-the_new_york_times/

 

Wow. Just wow. Apparently whatever pond this scum came out of must have been used as a toxic dump site as well.

Edit: And to nobody's great surprise, Mr. Steele (the RNC chairman, that is) is again using the good old spectre of socialism to scare people away from the healthcare reform plans. I have to admit, though, using the word "cabal" does introduce a tinge of the exotic.

""Many Democrats outside of the Obama-Pelosi-Reid-Waxman cabal know that voters won't stand for these kinds of foolish prescriptions for our health care. We do too. That's why Republicans will stop at nothing to remind voters about the risky experimentation going on in Washington," the party chairman said. ."

Wow, so providing the bloated insurance giants with competition is a "risky experimentation". Great. So now they are the bipartisan side in the conflict?

""Obama-Pelosi want to start building a colossal, closed health care system where Washington decides. Republicans want and support an open health care system where patients and doctors make the decisions,""

Yeah, patients, doctors, lawyers, MBAs, and who knows what else. I guess it does not roll of the tongue so easily, right?

By now, I should be inured to this, but it's still annoying me. Has there been any mention of a plan that Obama has supported that would do more than offer a public option that currently insured people can choose or include people that are not currently enrolled in any of the other plans - thus most likely poor or with pre-existing (thus expensive) conditions? To me it just does not look like the public plan could take the bread off its private competitors, unless they are too big, cumbersome and ineffective to take proper care of their clients - or too greedy to cut down their profit share.

And if that is the case, they deserve what they get. Live by the dollar, die by the dollar.

 

Unfortunately this is why the Republican party is so screwed right now. Their loudest voices and leadership throw around charges of "socialism," and "fascism," and "racism" when that obviously isn't what the Democrats propose or represent. The only reason I can think of for their behavior is they honestly don't have a better solution, to any of these policies, so their answer is to scare people away from the current administration's agenda, rather than steer people towards them with a more effective agenda of their own.

Reasonable people can disagree about which overall philosophical approach of either party is more effective. But in a disagreement about whether or not Obama is a socialist/fascist/muslim/whatever, the disagreement is between a reasonable person and an utter buffoon. It's simply ridiculous. They'd be a lot more effective if they opposed Obama for who he actually is. I hope the Republicans start getting serious again, and stop encouraging this kind of nonsense. It isn't helping anyone (least of all the Republicans themselves).

 

Seven or eight months ago I was at a job fair where a real estate type told me in so many words that they made money helping people buy houses they couldn't afford and now they are making money helping those people sell the houses they couldn't afford.

I thought that was greatest thing I'd ever heard, so I made sure to get a job with that company.

 

Where's the Beef?

For the first time ever, I have been very disappointed with an Obama speech. What I was looking for last night was a detailed plan of what he wanted to see with health care reform, and exactly how he wanted to pay for it.

Instead his speech can be summed up as: "Our current system sucks, it's going to cost boat loads to fix, we have a plan that pays for about 2/3 of it, it's more expensive in the long run to do nothing, and I want to get it done this year."

Great, Mr. Prez, but anyone who has been following this issue already knew all of that. What did you accomplish by giving that speech? People who supported reform still do, people who didn't support reform still don't, and people who were on the fence because they wanted to know the details are still waiting to hear them.

Very disappointing, and unless all he wanted to do was re-iterate his talking points to a national audience, I have to assume he failed in the message he was attempting to send. The delivery was smooth, and he was well-spoken as always, but that speech was very light on the details.

 

I have to agree. This is a very complicated issue, and his aim should be on breaking everything down into the most simple and digestible terms as possible. And that may be his aim - he just hasn't been doing a very good job of that in recent weeks. Wonks probably understood, but wonks don't vote.

 

Actually, from all I've seen so far, his plan seems to be to get his plan passed. He's exherting a lot of pressure to get something passed soon, and there doesn't seem to be too much concern with educating the people about what it is.

 

That's not true. Educating people is what's going to get it passed. In a choice between the scary new program you don't quite understand and the status quo, voters (and by extension the congressmen who represent them) will choose the status quo every time. He's certainly making an effort to educate - that's the reason for last night's press conference and for the much-maligned (though well-received and highly rated) ABC special. He just isn't hitting the notes as well as he could be.

 

Guys, I think one of the reasons that Obama isn't going into lots of specifics is that he isn't the one writing the bill. Obama has spelled out what he wants, but he doesn't get to decide all the specifics. The specifics are congress' job. I thought Obama spoke well, given what he had to work with.

 

But that's the thing, DR - if his goal was to educate then he fell well short. The only way you learned anything new about health care reform last night was if you have been living under a rock for the past couple months.

The only reason I will not bash the speech completely is that Obama has shown to carefully plan everything he does, and thus there may be a method behind this. Specifically, he may have played everything close to the vest last night because he does not yet know exactly what either the House or Senate plan will contain, and thus he obviously doesn't know the difference yet between the two plans. He doesn't want to come out and say I want to reform to contain X, Y, and Z - and then find out that the House Plan has X and Y, but also A, B, and C - while the Senate Plan has Y and Z, and also B. If both bills have some of what you want, but neither bill has all of what you want, then you'd be force to back pedal. Still, I would have liked to see him add some meat to the bones.

EDIT: Drew posted while I was typing.

EDIT2: And Howard Fineman - an unabashed liberal columnist, thinks the speech lacked substance as well.

 

I thought that was my point...

I agree with you and Drew, he is very limited in the specifics he can give, and much is till to be determined. Slack, I cuts it.

 

Drew is right - It's not HIS plan. He left the details of reform up to Congress. I had a hard time getting a handle on this for the longest time as well. If I'm now gauging this correctly, he did not want to repeat the same mistakes that the Clintons made in the 1990s. Hillary Clinton and her Commision on Health Care drafted a detailed plan on reform and handed it to Congress and basically said to them, "Pass this." We all know how well that went over.

It's wrong to claim that Obama lacks details when the plan is not even complete yet. Also, since the plan is not finished, how does anyone know how much it will cost? Seems to me that before you know the true cost of something, you have to know what you are paying for.

 

CtR, Drew, DR -

I hear you - and I agree that the specifics of the plan -and the ultimate cost- are for Congress to decide. However, we didn't even get to hear what he had to say about general issues that both halves of Congress are considering. He was non-committal of his support for a public option. He was non-committal of his support for a personal mandate. He was non-committal of his support for additional very high income tax brackets to help pay of this. He was even non-committal of his support for not raising taxes on the middle-class. He said that he would not support placing the "ENTIRE" burden on the middle-class, which suggests he might support the middle class paying some of it.

These are big picture items that he could have talked about and didn't.

EDIT: I LIKE Obama. The problem here is every time in the past where he has had to come up with a big speech or a bold initiative (Rev Wright is probably the best example) he has done it - but not this time. Public support for this initiative is slipping, and I don't think he did anything to turn that sentiment around.

 

In the past, though, he was speaking about issues which he could control. He was able, for example, to distance himself from Reverend Wright when his speeches were first made public -- and was ultimately able to fully sever his ties with his church and Reverend Wright when it became necessary. While he didn't control Reverend Wright and his church, he was able to control his connection to them. In this case, though, Obama neither controls the agenda of Congress nor is he able to separate himself from the bill. Congress is writing it, he has little to no control of what they write, and no matter what gets passed, it will be seen as his bill. Obama can't distance himself from Congress, he can't distance himself from the Bill, and he has no real control over its content. That's the fundamental difference between this and other challenges past.

 

Ok, let me redirect this. My problem is with Obama not giving (and probably not having) details on a plan that he is heavily pushing. Sure, it's fine to say we need something, but saying "Support this" when you don't even know (or aren't willing to say, it doesn't really matter which) what "this" is is dangerous.

 

NOG - Well, there are some broad principles involved:

1. Losing insurance on employment
2. Being turned down for "pre-existing conditions."
3. An employer refusing to offer insurance or cancelling it after one is employed.
4. The uncompetitive burden on small business against foreign companies that don't have the cost of providing medical insurance.
5. The "skyrocketing" cost of medical insurance for individuals, families and business.

There is nothing dangerous about wanting to fix what's already broken; that's what Obama is asking Congress to fix by reforming the current system. He is asking for reform based upon those principles.

 

Ah, that may be true, but he has no idea what he'll get (which may easily make the situation worse) and from comments I've heard from Senators and Representatives, many of them don't know either. Which, of course, raises the question of who exactly is writing this bill.

Anyway, my point is, Congress has a long history of taking things that seem like they should be straightforward and simple and making them convoluted, complex, and unworkable. What makes you think they'll do any better on this issue?

 

The bill is being worked on in the two houses of Congress. The House is finishing its version of the bill; the Senate has not finished its version yet. After the two have finished their respective versions, the bill will be in conference, where the two different houses of Congress will work out their differences and issue a joint bill, hopefully by Octobor. The president then has the option of signing the bill into law or he can veto it.

 

Yes, but we both know that the Senate and House, as complete wholes, don't actually write the bills. Usually, one or two senators and/or representatives write and the rest of a sub-committee adds and comments, then it's voted on by the whole, with most usually having only taken a cursory glance at it, especially for bills that are hundreds to thousands of pages long.