Are they overdoing it? Jimmy Pethokoukis thinks so. The best way to get out of debt is to grow our way out, with less regulation and lower tax rates, but entitlements have to be reformed, and soon.
[Update a while later]
Bad link. Fixed now, sorry.
Category Archives: Business
How Dare You?!
Daniel Hannan has a good piece on the NHS:
The elision of the “hardworking doctors and nurses” with the state monopoly that employs them is what allows opponents of reform to shout down any criticism. People who complain are treated, not as wronged consumers, but as pests. People who argue that there might be a better way of organising the system are treated, not as proponents of a different view, but as enemies.
Any organisation that is spared criticism becomes, over time, inefficient, insensitive, intolerant. It has happened to the United Nations. It has happened to the mega-charities. It happened, for a long time, to the European Union (though not over the past five years). The more lofty the ideal, the more reluctant people are to look at the grubby reality.
We can’t let that happen here. I’m sure that many of the people behind this legislative atrocity would love to jail its critics, if they could.
Pajama Boy Nation
Some thoughts on pajamas and duck calls from VDH:
How bizarre that the Duck Dynasty characters and Pajama Boy reverberated the same week. I have never watched Duck Dynasty, and have only glanced at the expanding genre of white working class reality dramas, from tree cutters and gold miners to ice truckers and boat captains: Cussin’ good ol’ boys, who lose their temper when failing to start the generator, have big arms and bigger guts, and are to remind us (within limits) that once upon a time we all used to be more like them than Ezra Klein and Jay Carney.
Who watches these shows? Perhaps the majority of viewers are those who still admire muscular strength and the earthy ability to make a living from nature (and not work for the Bureau of Labor Statistics or the local Department of Motor Vehicles), and a smaller percentage who find these aborigines odd, but also oddly compelling in their reminder that the people like themselves who run our country could not sharpen a chain saw, change the oil in their car, or unplug their own sewer line. This latter group is curious about the uncouth people who can do these things.
The A&E controversy grew even stranger in that pet white aborigines from the rural south are supposed to shock us by their blunt talk and religious hocus pocus, but only if they stay inside the bars of their zoo cage and thus only ham it up within the parameters of politically correct hillbilly-ese. The Pajama Boy mob at A&E must know that the Ducks, should they speak like those in Silicon Valley or act in accordance with Upper West Side protocols, would have zero audience. Is the logic of Duck Dynasty that the few left in America of the 1940s can spout off in a neat way to us — but only without putting their paws and snouts too far through the bars of their cage?
Apparently.
It’s Panic Time
Thoughts on the current health-care mess from Walter Russell Mead.
Creativity
Most people, and particularly teachers, don’t like it much.
I hadn’t thought about it before, but I think that this is one of the reasons that people can’t let go of the Apollo cargo cult. They see doing it in any other way as too risky, even though it has been thoroughly demonstrated that the big-rocket approach is unaffordable.
Obama’s Average Year
Worse than last year, better than next.
Fountain Of Youth
Wow. Looks like they’re going to start human trials of that mouse-rejuvenation treatment next year.
The societal impacts of this would be enormous.
The Swamp Folks
The ObamaCare Chaos Strategy
We know they always wanted to get to single payer. They’ll do whatever they have to in order to push toward that goal. The question is whether or not the Republicans and voters let them get away with it. Of course, a few lawsuits would help as well.
Discussing ObamaCare
A conversation between Instapundit and Mickey Kaus. Don’t miss Glenn’s rant channeling Mark Levin.