Friday, January 23, 2009

Snopes on what Democrats were saying about Iraqi WMD's

I got into a discussion with a Steve Sailor reader at one of the blog comment forums. Basically he was offering 20/20 hindsight, arm chair quarterbacking insights on W's Iraq invasion. Ignoring WMD's the invasion was morally justifiable based solely the numbers of Iraqi civilians were killing during the 1991-2003 sanctions period. Wikipedia has a good article on this. With W's invasion the sanctions are gone and the killing for the most part has stopped. The blog commenter went on to say that we should have just lifted the sanctions altogether ignoring Saddam Hussein's behavior. How possible was that? Check out the comments made by prominent Democrats, pre-invasion at Snopes.

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Samuelson on socialized medicine and the coming Medicare/Social Security Crisis

Robert Samuelson has two columns that do a good job of the insanity of Obama's and the voter's choices.

Obama's Unhealthy Choices:

"What really drives health spending, the study finds, is that Americans
receive more costly medical services than other peoples do, and pay more for
them. On a population-adjusted basis, the number of CT scans in 2005 was 72
percent higher in the United States than in Germany; U.S. reimbursement rates
were four times higher. Knee replacements were 90 percent more frequent than in
the average wealthy country and are growing rapidly. In 2005, there were 750,000 knee and hip replacements, up 70 percent in five years, reports the journal Health Affairs."


In an October 22, 2008 WaPo column he has this:
Young Voters Get Mad

"You're being played for chumps. Barack Obama and John McCain want your votes, but they're ignoring your interests. You face a heavily mortgaged future. You'll pay Social Security and Medicare for aging baby boomers. The needed federal tax increase might total 50 percent over the next 25 years. Pension and health costs for state and local workers have doubtlessly been underestimated. There's the expense of decaying infrastructure -- roads, bridges, water pipes. All this will squeeze other crucial government services: education, defense, police. "

"Obama's your favorite candidate (by 64 percent to 33 percent among 18- to
29-year-olds, according to the latest
Post-ABC News poll)."

"Click on the
Obama video. You'll see some world-class pandering. There are
three basic ways of reducing the costs of Social Security and Medicare: increase
eligibility ages; trim benefits; and require recipients to pay more for their
Medicare benefits (higher premiums, co-payments or deductibles). In his talk,
Obama effectively rejected all three. "


Why would young voters go against their own interests? Perhaps it's form of generational altruism, knowing in the end they'll take the lumps (huge). I think the answer is simpler than that - they're woefully ignorant of finances and purpose of state-hood. They believe they're voting for security (theirs) when actually they're voting for the financial equivalent of a perpetual motion machine. We'll see in the future that the purpose of state-hood is to provide for an orderly society and not guaranteed financial security.