Political Irony

Tuesday, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a report on Obamacare and conservatives immediately jumped on it, saying that it proves that the ACA will damage the economy by destroying jobs.

Even the “liberal” Washington Post fell for it, running an article with a headline that incorrectly stated that the CBO estimated that the health care reform law will result in 2 million fewer jobs.

There is just one small problem — the CBO said nothing of the kind. They said, as they have said before, that because employees will no longer feel the need to remain in a job in order to have affordable health insurance, people will find it easier to leave jobs they don’t need or want. You know, like people who want to retire but stay in a job because they don’t qualify for Medicare for a few years, or people who work a low paying job not for the money, but because their spouse’s profession doesn’t include health insurance.

Which to me means that they will open up jobs for people who are currently unemployed. A huge win-win.

I work with entrepreneurs, and I know that this also means that people who have always wanted to start a new company can now do so, because they are not stuck working a job that includes health insurance. Prior to Obamacare, it was difficult for entrepreneurs to get health insurance, even at any price. And as everyone knows, small businesses are the real job creators, and drive innovation.

But what I find ironic is that you would think that social conservatives would also welcome this news. After all, they are the ones who claim to honor stay-at-home mothers. The law will make it easier for women to stay home and take care of their children, rather than take a job that will provide health insurance for them.

So in effect, conservatives are attacking the real job creators and mothers. Well, that’s a promising line of attack. At least the WaPo realized their mistake and corrected their headline. And hardly anyone has mentioned that the CBO also says that the new law will save the government more money than they originally estimated, lowering the deficit.

And in related old news, after trying to repeal Obamacare 47 times, Republicans have finally come out with their proposed alternative to Obamacare. I wouldn’t blame you if you thought this was a purely political move, since they have had years since the ACA passed to propose an alternative, but all they tried to do was kill it. Until now, after Obamacare has fully gone into effect.

I wouldn’t even care if their alternative had a chance of solving our previous health care problems, because we have already gone to all the trouble and expense of implementing Obamacare. But of course, their (currently rather vague) “new” proposal is just a rehash of already debunked faux solutions to our health care crisis. Things like health savings accounts, medical liability reform, high risk pools for those with pre-existing conditions, and insurance portability across state lines. Yawn.

The Republican alternative has no health care exchanges. No expansion of Medicaid but instead uses tax credits, which seem to be so skimpy compared to Obamacare that they probably won’t pay for much health insurance at all. The rest of their “new” proposal keeps the provisions of Obamacare that have become too popular to get rid of: watered down versions of the rules that prevent insurers from rejecting people with pre-existing conditions and which continue dependent coverage to age 26.

Can we afford to go through another change in health care now? Hardly. Other than problems with the website that have now been fixed, Obamacare is working and people are signing up for it. And it is saving money and reducing the deficit. I personally have new health insurance that is better than what I had before, and I’m paying less for it. And I got to keep my current doctor and dentist. I like it. A lot.

So I see this as a last ditch attempt to (once again) sabotage Obamacare, before it gets too popular, and a feeble attempt to let Republicans try to claim that they are not the party of no.

UPDATE: I just noticed a good article in the LA Times that makes a strong case that the new Republican alternative to Obamacare is actually designed to fail. “The proposal incorporates some provisions that are bound to doom it even among Republicans, as well as others that are already known to be ineffective.” It includes a cap on tax deductions for employer-sponsored insurance. Republican orthodoxy says that this would be tantamount to a tax increase, and they are pledged to vote against that.

UPDATE 2: Another article in the LA Times points out the “stupid bias” of American media. The report comes out and has lots of good news:

• The ACA is cheaper than it expected.
• It will “markedly increase” the number of Americans with health insurance.
• The risk-adjustment provisions, which Congressional Republicans want to overturn as a “bailout” of the insurance industry, will actually turn a profit to the U.S. Treasury.

Given all this good news, the immediate headlines about the CBO report scream that it is a job killer. Like this, and this. Which is not what the CBO report says at all. I guess if the economy bleeds, it leads (even if they have to make it up).

UPDATE 3: More hypocrisy. TPM points out that Republicans have long proposed delinking health insurance from employment to increase “labor mobility” — making it easier for employees “to take a better job, change careers, or leave the workforce to raise a family or to retire early”. In fact, it was the major point of McCain’s health care reform proposal. But of course, they hate it once it became part of Obamacare.

And the most recent Republican proposal mentioned above? They propose capping the tax exemption for employer-provided insurance, which would likely provide even greater encouragement for people to leave jobs they don’t want or need.

Think we don’t need any government? Oops!

What I find hilarious is that while we all heard on the news how terrible things were in Atlanta — people stranded all night in their snowed-in cars, students forced to sleep on the gym floor at their schools or on school buses because they could not get picked up, babies being born on the side of the highway because pregnant mothers couldn’t get to a hospital, mass chaos on the order of an apocalypse — the reality is that Atlanta got a freaking two inches of snow. That’s right, two inches. Now that’s a state of emergency! Kudos to those rugged individualists who don’t need a nanny state.

Maybe next time they won’t ignore those pesky governmental weather forecasters and will actually prepare for bad weather.

Meanwhile, remember the Texas school board? The people who approved teaching students that the words “separation of church and state” do not exist in our constitution? And who eliminated any mention of climate change from science classes (you know, the thing that is causing all this freakish bad weather)? Well, good news. The board has approved new rules that will help reduce the influence of politics and religion on our public schools. I for one applaud this move to stop trying to make our young people stupid.

The prevailing discourse about energy is particularly interesting to me as an example of the politics of scarcity. The conventional wisdom (based on rampant misinformation) is that we are running out of energy, which is why we need to fight expensive and terrible wars for oil, pollute our air and water, build costly pipelines to bring tar sands and shale oil to market, drill offshore, ramp up the use of coal, etc.

This is so obviously insane. We are actually bathing in energy, including wind energy, solar energy, hydro energy, tidal energy, and many others. Our oldest form of fuel is burning wood, which means that energy literally grows on trees!

We spend far more money propping up our arcane petroleum industry than researching more sustainable alternatives to it.

Which is why it is nice to see reports coming out of non-oil companies taking matters into their own hands and coming up with promising solutions. For example, here’s a report about research funded by Boeing and an airline. Why are Boeing and airlines funding fuel research? Because as the cost of aircraft fuel goes up and up and the quality of the fuel goes down, that’s a big problem for them.

So here is the good part. They researched using common plants called halophytes to produce biofuels, and made some amazing discoveries. The reason they picked halophytes is because they are plants that have adapted to grow in deserts using salt water, so they don’t use up valuable agricultural land or scarce fresh water (unlike corn ethanol). But the spectacular thing they discovered is that halophytes are actually far easier to turn into biofuels than other plants, so they will be dramatically easier and cheaper to process. This is because halophytes are lower in lignin — the part that makes plants stiff, and which must be separated out before the plant sugars can be turned into fuels (the same thing that keeps us from eating wood for food). And even better, the resulting fuels are actually higher quality than fuels made from crude oil.

They are building a two-hectare pilot production facility in Abu Dhabi right now. And even cooler, they will be using the waste outflow from aquaculture (the farming of fish, crustaceans, mollusks, and aquatic plants). The problem with aquaculture activities is that they produce sea water containing large amounts of fertilizers, which causes algal blooms and other serious problems. Instead, they will be using this waste water to grow halophytes, which significantly reduces the fertilizer levels, reducing pollution. Wow, energy production from waste pollution!

Win, win, win, win. As the researchers put it, this has the potential to be “the big gamechanger for biofuels”. And not just for aviation, but for all fuels. And remember that biofuels are carbon neutral, since plants remove carbon from the air.

But there is an added ironic part. Go read the comments on the article, where you will see a bunch of trolls desperately trying to cast doubt on this development.

My favorite comment is:

Snag is mass conversion of large deserts to greenery will almost affect climate and could well cause some sort of devastation somewhere else.

Ignoring this person’s weak grasp of language, right now we are creating new deserts like crazy. Converting some of those deserts back into green areas is a good idea, and will not “almost affect climate”.

© Tom Tomorrow

I think Osama bin Laden made a (literally) fatal mistake. I mean, he was rich. He should have bought up a bunch of American corporations (including of course some media companies). After all, look at what big corporations have done to our country (and we are only looking at recent events): yes, they negligently poisoned the water supply of hundreds of thousands of Americans, but what about investment bankers nearly destroying our country’s economy, killing millions of jobs and wiping out seniors’ retirement accounts, not to mention costing us billions of dollars to bail them out?

Corporations also spent an estimated billion dollars on a propaganda campaign to deny climate science and convince us to keep using fossil fuels — estimated because 75% of the funds are untraceable. Who knows, maybe some of that money came from terrorists.

Or bin Laden could have taken over the automobile industry and brought it to its knees, requiring another bailout. Or how about causing a housing bubble, creating widespread homelessness? Oh wait, he didn’t need to do those things, we did them for him!