OT: I've just become Joerg-asmed ;-)

Barack is the main reason people need foodstamps.

Letting people work and keep the money they earn at it is their road to salvation, but Democrats' success depends on poor people not being able to do that. Having succeeded at that, now they're hoping to make it impossible for ordinary people to afford health care, without a welfare check to your insurance company. Then they own you.

Here's some homework for you Bill, back up Joerg:

Tavis Smiley - black people have lost on every front under Obama

Poor families work half as many hours as non-poor families

What Is Poverty In America? - Describes the living conveniences and standard they enjoy

The Myth of the Disappearing Middle Class - Brookings

Cheers, James Arthur

It doesn't matter if your friend or anyone else with cancer lives or dies. Bill doesn't care. But, he's more than satisfied and entitled to decide what your care should look like, even as you pay and he contributes nothing. If Bill's skeptical, you die, that's reason enough.

Or Obama, or any number of bureaucrats now, for that matter, which is why I wrote the above. Not to disparage Bill, but to underscore that when someone else makes decisions, they don't have your best interest in mind. That's why, in a free society, we should make these decisions ourselves.

Collective Bill's decided Chelsea Manning's sex-change is vital, and your cancer surgery is not. Sorry, you die.

As for privacy, under Obamacare that won't be a problem any more -- it no longer exists. Doctors are compelled to share medical records with an infinite array of federal agencies, including HHS, the IRS, CMS, and an alphabet-stew of others.

Under Obamacare one of my best friends would be dead. He twice got life-saving experimental care that would not have met Obamacare's "evidence-based" criteria. (By definition, there can't be evidence for something that has never been tried.)

But, the experiment worked like a charm, and is now available to and saving countless others as a new standard therapy.

Of course all of that costs money, so Bill would point to this break-through life-saving treatment as proof that we're spending too much of our own money.

And then, he'd point to his own country, who copies this and benefits without incurring our cost, as proof that they're more efficient.

I posted some links above to the effect that poor people work about half the hours as non-poor. And, more links on how they got there.

Here's a succinct version from the great Walter Williams: How Not to Be Poor - Walter Williams

Cheers, James Arthur

That's the leftist's way. The collective feelings are important. The individual simply doesn't matter.

At least KY admits that there is no expectation of privacy with Obamacare. The data is assumed to be available to any politician or bureaucrat. HIPAA is for losers.

Why not. They've been leaning on us for defense for seven decades.

A popular right-wing delusion, unsupported by any evidence beyond the gut-f eeling of every right-wing nitwit.

state where they can look for work, if there's any around.

Not true. The global financial crisis - aka the sub-prime mortgage crisis - is the actual reason. James Arthur thinsk that his much beloved banker's c riminal antics were forced on them by the evil Democrats, so he choses to t hink otherwise (if his mental processes can be dignified by the title "thou ght" - knee-jerk reflex is proabably a better description).

tate where they don't mind that the Tea Party has destroyed any chance that there might be work around for them to find.

It's a road to salvation, but - as John Maynard Keynes pointed out - recess ion can be self-feeding if the governemnt is silly enough to let it.

I wonder why he thinks he can make such an absurd claim? The Democrats aren 't implementing his silly ideas - they didn't work for Hoover, so why James Arthur want's to repeat the mistake isn't entirely obvious - but what the Demoncrats have done has generated progressively more jobs (though not the right kind of jobs to keep James Arthur happy).

Like the goverments of Britain, Germany, France and the Netherlands own the ir citizens? The US could do worse - and in fact is doing worse.

Nothing intersting there - this is just the trend that started when Regan c ame to power and the top 1% of the income disributuion (where black poeple are under-represented for fairly obvious historical reasons) started raking in essentially all the expansion of the US economy.

ins

ont_work.html

If the poor had work, they wouldn't be poor.

In so far as these arguments aren't a restatement of the obvious, what's go ing on is a fairly obvious consequence of off-shoring unskilled labour and cheap-skating on the education of the chidren of the poor. A little more en lightened self-interest in the top 1% of the income distribution could have given them more skilled workers, if they'd had the imagination to see how they could exploit them.

h-haskins

Joseph E. Stiglitz in "The Price of Inequality" tells a rather different st ory, but he's not paid by the right-wing Brookings Institute.

Stiglitz is more interested in the way the middle class's relative decline has blocked - or at least made less accessible - the usual routes of upward social mobility, leaving the US with less inter-generational movement betw een social classes than countries with less polarised income distrbutions - the Scandinavian countries and Germany come to mind.

You may complain that excessive socialism is damaging the economies of thes e countries, but since Germany now earns more from its exports than does th e US (even through the US has about four times the population) you'd look a little silly if you did, not that this has ever worried you.

Whereas in the America so highly valued by James Arthur and krw, you die if you haven't got the medical insurance that will pay for the operation, no matter how cost effective it might be.

There's usually a fig-leaf of some legitimate reason to access the data. Wi th US reporters as avid for personal details as they are, getting upset abo ut bureaucrats and politicians does seem a trifle beside the point.

And using Australia as a forward base for just as long. My father's job in the Tasmanian paper industry was vital to the war effort (much to his disgu st) because the paper mill where he worked was churning out the paper on wh ich McArthur and his staff were writing their bum-fodder.

James Arthur's idea that the US is the only place that does medical researc h is a parochial delusion. When I was doing my Ph.D. the place where I live d was crawling with American (and ocassional European) visitors to the Walt er and Eliza Hall Institute

When I moved to Cambridge, the MRC Institute of Molecular Biology was just down the road.

Both featured their own home-grow Nobel Prize winners. Pharmaceutical compa nies have battened onto both to feed their cash flows, and onto a host of o thers in places where I haven't bothered to settle down.