Mitt Romney’s Back and Forth on Obamacare

Unsurprisingly, the Romney campaign has been to this point vehemently against the Affordable Care Act, commonly referred to as Obamacare. It came as a bit of a shock then, when Romney had this exchange with Meet the Press‘s David Gregory:

GREGORY: Well, let me ask you about a couple of specific areas. On healthcare, you say that you would rescind the president’s healthcare plan on day one. Does that mean that you’re prepared to say to Americans, young adults and those with pre-existing conditions, that they would no longer be guaranteed healthcare?

MR. ROMNEY: Well, of course not. I say we’re going to replace Obamacare. And I’m replacing it with my own plan. And, you know, even in Massachusetts where I was governor, our plan there deals with pre-existing conditions and with young people. Everybody…

GREGORY: So you’d keep that part of the federal plan?

MR. ROMNEY: Well, I’m not getting rid of all of healthcare reform. Of course, there are a number of things that I like in healthcare reform that I’m going to put in place. One is to make sure that those with pre-existing conditions can get coverage. Two is to assure that the marketplace allows for individuals to have policies that cover their– their family up to whatever age they might like. I also want individuals to be able to buy insurance, health insurance, on their own as opposed to only being able to get it on a tax advantage basis through their company.

This has some interesting and contradictory implications, and those implications comprise today’s topic.

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Welfare and Wage Slavery

Recently, Barack Obama was accused of “gutting welfare reform” in some of Mitt Romney’s ads of which the following is an example:

This has been widely recognised as a distortion; PolitiFact calls it a “pants on fire” lie. In reality, Obama is allowing state governments to waive certain parts of the welfare reform’s performance measures in favour of alternatives, provided that there is evidence that the state is achieving the principle aim of the reforms–putting people on welfare to work.

That’s all widely known at this point. What I’d like to talk about today is why we really would be better off if Obama had in fact gutted American welfare reform. It’s a bold claim, and not a very politically popular one in the times in which we live, but hear me out. I propose that a welfare system with no demand or encouragement to reenter the workforce is in fact better for the capitalist system.

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Paul Ryan’s Convention Speech Analysed

Paul Ryan’s convention speech went over pretty well on the right in the United States. Jim Geraghty of the National Review had this to say about it:

This speech, and his warmth and sense of connection when delivering it, almost unnerved me. I started worrying that I was seeing what I wanted to see, that I was hyping a pretty good speech delivered pretty well in my own mind. Except my Twitter feed was exploding. The delegates were going nuts. And it just seemed to be getting better and better as it went on. Conversational, direct, funny, detailed . . . this was Reaganesque, guys. I was a kid when Reagan was president, so I got lulled into a false sense of what American presidents were — I thought they were all that good. This felt like that.

You can read his full post here. Perhaps this was indeed the case for Mr. Geraghty. I myself was struck by the sheer number of untrue, openly fallacious claims in it, and today I would like to highlight them.

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Space Age Stimulus

Over the last few months, a few things have happened that have put space exploration on my mind:

Newt Gingrich proposed a lunar colony
NASA sent a new rover to Mars
Neil Armstrong died

As a result, space exploration’s political implications are the topic of today’s post.

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Stimulus vs. Austerity: USA

I keep seeing a certain political sentiment expressed. It goes a little something like this, from James Pethokoukis of the New York Post:

So what’s the problem with the Obama recovery? Why is it the weakest since the Great Depression?

Maybe it’s the Obama policies, like a stunning disregard for the trillion-dollar deficits that are likely already a dead weight on growth. Or maybe it’s the Obama guarantee of more tax hikes and regulation that makes US business too worried to hire and invest.

But it’s not too late to start shrinking unproductive government, cut debt and reduce penalties on work and investment — just like in those recoveries that we used to know.

Then there are the political cartoons, things like this:

Here’s the structure of the idea: