Maybe the vast majority of American voters really do want to repeal — not fix or adjust — the new health care law, and maybe they want to privatize Social Security or scuttle it altogether — I find that hard to believe, but maybe. Certainly the Republicans, with the help of the Tea Party, feel they have the political capital to do just that.
I don’t know if the health care law is helping me or not but I do know that something needed to be done and the whole system is not sustainable as it is, that is unless we are willing to let vast numbers of people go without adequate health care.
Like a stuck record I keep saying that President Obama should have concentrated on making sure that those without any health care coverage had coverage made available to them and left it at that, but I think he saw what he thought was a one-time opportunity to enact something that has been talked about nearly a century or more, with a, believe it or not, Republican president, Theodore Roosevelt, bringing it up in the first place.
I think Obama misjudged, and I think he realizes it now. Vast numbers of people are without work and just as many or more are scared they will be in the unemployment lines and others who had investments in bonds and notes have seen interest rates drop to near zero, due to the Great Recession/Depression — there goes that.
While I think the Republican/Tea Party bunch exaggerate when they claim the Obama administration is trying to turn the USA into some kind of socialist/communist state, there is something there. Many Democrats are into a kind of socialist ideology whether they like to think so or not. I think there is a place for social programs, but one can get carried away.
Maybe the best way to sell social programs is to gut what we have and let people see what it is like to go naked, so to speak.
To at least paraphrase a song I know: I never missed it until I had it and I lost it, and now I can’t live without it anymore.
Tony Walther's Weblog 