…are on the order of a hundred billion per year, a lot of it from Medicare/Medicaid.
One of the stupider arguments (among many) made by proponents of those programs it that they “have low overhead costs,” relative to private insurers. Well, it’s easy to have low overhead costs if you pay no attention to whether or not a claim is valid. I consider a hundred billion in overpayments in fact a very high overhead cost.
Did it work?
No.
As some wag noted at the time, it was stimulating in the same way a clumsy ugly person doing a pole dance was.
As with many Republicans, I would not miss him. I hope that Mississippi voters dump him.
[Update a couple days later]
Sorry, wrong link. Fixed now.
Also, there’s this:
Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., made a surprising admission to a local Mississippi news outlet during a Monday campaign swing: “The Tea Party is something I don’t really know a lot about,” he told WLOX.
He may be about to learn a lot more than he ever wanted to know.
So a lot of people have been discussing this paper, that shows that Democrats are more likely than Republicans to think that it is, but I question its results because the methodology seems flawed. They should have first asked the question: “Do you understnd the difference between astronomy and astrology?” Because there’s a possibility that some of the respondents were simply confused, and thinking the latter was the former. Which is a form of ignorance, but nowhere near as bad as knowing what astrology is and thinking it scientific.
“I am a Ukrainian.”
I want us to be free, too.
Some extensive thoughts from Steve McIntyre.
Another review of Rick Boozer’s book
Are we being saved from it by the student loan bubble? What an awful, awful government policy. It’s destroying a generation’s financial prospects.
Of course it’s relevant. Democrats who say that the voters won’t be interested in it are just expressing a desperate hope. They got away with that “it’s old news” nonsense in the nineties, but it’s not the nineties any more. Hillary enabled Bill’s sexual predation and corruption and participated in it, including targeting inconvenient women who were his victims. Speaking of which, three cheers for Kathleen Willey for not letting the Clintons’ thugs intimidate her.
Hillary should, finally, be held accountable, even if all that means is that she doesn’t get to rule over us.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Byron York has it right:
Of course Clinton’s recent experiences are relevant to a presidential run. But so are her actions in the 90s, the 80s and even the 70s. It’s not ancient history; it reveals something about who Clinton was and still is. And re-examining her past is entirely consistent with practices in recent campaigns.
In the 2012 presidential race, for example, many in the press were very interested in business deals Mitt Romney made in the 1980s. In the 2004 race, many journalists were even more interested in what George W. Bush did with the Texas Air National Guard in 1968, as well as what John Kerry did in Vietnam that same year. And in 2000, a lot of journalists invested a lot of time trying to find proof that Bush had used cocaine three decades earlier.
So by the standards set in coverage of other candidates, Clinton’s past is not too far past.
That’s especially true because there will be millions of young voters in 2016 who know little about the Clinton White House. Americans who had not even been born when Bill Clinton first took the oath of office in 1993 will be eligible to vote two years from now. They need to know that Hillary Clinton has been more than Secretary of State.
Yes. There is a new generation that needs to learn just what kind of people these people are.
[Another update]
More from Wes Pruden:
The “bimbo eruptions” that Bill and Hillary thought were well behind them are coming back with a vengeance, and it’s only 2014. Bimbos have been a menace to ambitious men since Eve treated Adam to his first apple tart, Delilah gave Samson his first haircut, and Anthony Weiner tweeted his first crotch shot to the bimbos of the cyberworld.
The invention of politics raised the ante. The cultivation of the libido at taxpayer expense, together with the explosion of media, makes official indiscretion unsustainable.
The fact that Bubba’s bimbos were leftovers from an earlier century means that the recollection of them won’t be old news to the millions of voters who grew up after the Clintons left the White House. Fourteen years and two presidents later, a lot has been swallowed by the memory hole.
Bubba’s bimbos and Hillary’s enabling and manipulation of scandal will be new and titillating stuff. Sex sells, even the creepy sex attributed to old fogies over 30. The modern American culture is built on the cultivation of sexual titillation.
Yup.
And Monica was the least of Bill’s predatory conquests, because unlike Juanita Broaddrick, whom he forcibly raped, Paula Jones, whom he had delivered to his hotel room by an armed police officer, and Kathleen Willey, whom he assaulted in the White House after she came seeking a job, she threw herself at him.
The day it died:
Even before President Obama was elected in 2008 I wrote that he was showing Chavez-like tendencies. I have never seen any reason to revise that notion; it has only strengthened. Reading the Globe and Mail article I quoted above, I am struck in particular by this seemingly unimportant quote, “the government releases almost no reliable data.” That’s been especially true of Obamacare and the present administration, as I pointed out last Thursday. Far more than ever before in my memory, domestic statistics released by the government have become almost pure propaganda, and few on right or left trust them.
But bluffing can only get you so far. Sooner or later economic reality comes to call.
As noted, collapses can come suddenly. And of course, the silence of the administration on what’s happening in Chavistaland is deafening.
[Update a few minutes later]
This is an important point:
It is easier to destroy than to build. Much easier. That’s true whether destruction is your goal or not. And if you’re blinded by the need to stick to your ideology and declare it a success no matter what the truth is, you may not even know what’s going on until Humpty Dumpty finally takes that tumble.
That’s what entropy is all about. There are millions of forms of crap, but just a comparative few of worthwhile things. Collectivism is a highly entropic system.
[Update late morning]
Fausta Wertz is live blogging the protests.