Fish in Space

Very recently Obama's administration released a four trillion dollar budget proposal for 2016 that for the most part is not going to happen. Don't let the numbers fool you; just because it's a big number doesn't mean it's either irresponsible or unfeasible. Total economic output from the United States in 2014 was close to seventeen trillion dollars with a surprisingly strong fourth quarter growth of five percent , up from prior estimates. What Obama has proposed spends less than a quarter of the nation's wealth on national priorities. Maybe that still seems excessively high to you but there are a lot of things that still need to be addressed with no one but the federal government even considering addressing them. Four of the five of Obama's proposal are things that liberals like me have been waiting impatiently for since he first took office in 2009. So why do I call this a betrayal? Doyle McManus of the LA Times had this to say about the President...

It would be funny if it weren't so insidious. Having spent three years doing everything they can do to either repeal or undermine "Obamacare," we now have some initial indications of success and slower rises in health insurance premiums than at any time under Republican governance. Nevertheless, House Republicans have voted at least 47 times to repeal the Affordable Care Act UPDATE: 50 times to repeal the Affordable Care Act when they're not voting to delay it . At this point there's no stopping the implementation of Obamacare. The White House has delayed specific provisions to the derision of conservatives, but the overall provisions are not going to be stopped. Every year conservatives claim that it's going to make premiums skyrocket and every year it doesn't happen. Now we have an election year coming up, a mid-term election where Republicans typically have more success and they've pinned their election strategy on selling the idea that Obama...

It seems that the popular conservative apologetic today is to claim that conservatives never introduced or supported mandatory health insurance. Even a casual browse through the public record reveals that claim to be false, but the claim continues to get repeated apparently in hopes of replicating the Big Lie . So for the record (mostly for my own benefit) here's what's on the public record with regard to the GOP's health insurance mandate. First there's the 1993 GOP counter-proposal to "Hillarycare" taken from the proposal written by the Heritage Foundation . The idea was to force people to join the insurance pool to lower the overall risk just like they do with mandatory auto insurance. Then there's Romneycare , the Massachusetts health care reform law that the Heritage Foundation claimed credit for helping build based off their original health insurance mandate. Romney and other conservatives continued to hail the Massachusetts law as a model for ...