Your Life And $1.33 Will Get You A Cup O’ Joe

Megan McArdle has been in a mathematical uproar since HCR passed, honking on about how she’s 95 percent certain that three-fourths of half of a third of Ezra Klein’s predictions about a baker’s dozen of 17-sixteenths of the cosine of future mortality rates are eleventy percent likely to be a sham. We can’t quibble, but then this:

But the biggest problem is how much we’d then be spending per year to get this added benefit. I think it’s entirely plausible that we’ll be saving 3,000 people a year. But 3,000 people a year, at a cost of $200 billion, is almost $70 million per life saved.

Well, $200 billion is indeed a big number in simoleons, material even, but we feel obliged to point out that McMegan is freaked out about a per capita yearly expenditure of $666 on the part of the American personage to achieve this, which … well, you have to wonder if she jiggered the numbers a bit to get so Satan-y with it.

At any rate, the cost and/or savings that we’ll eventually associate with health care reform is important stuff. We passed this bill (and continue to hope for much more by way of HCR) because we think it’ll lead to better overall health outcomes for the country’s citizenry.

But that’s not all that this is about. It’s also about a much-needed bit of equity in an increasingly stratified society, where wealth disparity has been accelerating like a runaway freight train in recent decades.

In short, the belief that we’re offered a fair shake despite the accidents of our assorted births is not something that anybody’s figured out a way to put a price tag on. But we do know that America has had a pretty good run of it in the past 100 to 200 years, and a big factor in that streak has been an idea amongst the people that — contra other, shittier places — any one of us can hit it big via grit and keeping our nose clean and a bit of hard work. And that even if hitting it big didn’t happen, we’d still have a solid, middle-class peg upon which to hang our hat.

It’s not clear if that communal faith in America’s willingness to give everybody a fair shake was the biggest factor in our success as a nation, or if it was trumped in its beneficence by various historical accidents — geography, resources, the convenient self-destruction of Europe just as industrialization and its fruits were on the cusp of peaking in the 20th century — but most of us Americans agree that at the very least, it’s made us who we are, that it is the very stuff of our national mythology. And we continued to believe in that story for a long, long time.

But then something happened to crush that healthy attitude — or rather, fermented over time until one day we woke up and realized that everything had gone to shit. More and more of us were fucked in a merciless system that shat buckets on you if you slipped up just a couple times, or were born with a hole in your heart or with asthma or as a woman with working ovaries and a natural desire to fuck, or otherwise didn’t hit that increasingly improbable succession of lucky streaks at the crap table of life that gave a vanishing few the run of the place. Our great middle class kept getting smaller, until it wasn’t as much of a bulwark against the general hopelessness and cynicism that’s always knocking at the door, even in the best of times.

But, as any study of probability would predict, a few people continued to hit the lucky streaks against all odds, collected those overflowing buckets of extra chits that signaled they were winners and that the rest of us chumps milling about and coughing into our sleeves were losers, and this kept getting worse and more pronounced until this great and mythological haven of opportunity, America, was in fact home to a greater gulf between the very richest and the working poor than even the most outrageous and cruel satrapies existing in exotic tales could ever purport to match.

And yet the McMegans of the world, not quite big winners in the new arrangement but rather apologists for them, still insist — perhaps out of stubbornness or pique — that the old social glue that held us together still ought to do, despite it having long been eroded. That ethics long since abandoned by those who hold all the cards should be upheld by those who are being demonstrably gamed in every possible way. That what we need isn’t a radical reappraisal of our ancient national mythology befitting our new, cruel circumstances, but a reaffirmation of its most base and exploitable tenets.

It’s true — we can’t know for sure if the health care bill just passed will eventually yield the returns its advocates hope for, in the strictest statistical measures. Probably not. It wasn’t even our first or second choice for dealing with the problem. But one thing it is, at long last, is a visible rebellion against the cruel jungle law of three-plus decades that relentlessly sought greater spoils for the few at the expense of the many.

You can’t put a price on a return to sanity. You can’t assign an exact dollar figure to a strong and encouraged middle class. You can’t measure the economic value of a citizenry’s restored faith in a livable baseline for their prosperity when emerging from an era where no floor for that basic security seemed to exist at all.

Megan can’t see that, but it’s hardly surprising. She’s fucking thick.

 

Comments: 52

 
 
 

McMeathead deserves nothing more than the fruits violent revolution that her desired policies would lead to. Unfortunately, the rest of us don’t, so much. And even I, in my nastiest blackest moods, don’t have the stomach for the amount of gore it would take to cleanse the landscape of her & her ilk.

But then, that’s why Jeebus gave us alcohol and dope, to transform that sticky mess into sunshiny unicorns and jellybean trees!

 
 

Whoops, almost forgot: FYWP

 
St. Trotsky, Pope-in-Avignon
 

And while I understand the point that compassion, morality, social justice and charity has since been scourged out of the fabric of American souls like McArdle, I can look at her hyperventilating crunching of the numbers and go “fantastic!”

Saving someone who would’ve otherwise died is fucking worth the amount of money she’s caterwauling about. And it’s hardly as if we’re just going to be saving the same 3,000 people each year! Every year, another 3,000 people who could’ve otherwise died will live, and this loopy nut thinks this is some kind of fucking failing?

Cripes, why are there so many fucking people out there that thinks Scrooge was just talking sense when he suggests the poor die to reduce the surplus population?

 
 

Re surplus population: You just figured that out? It appears everytime one of them says that “A right to health care is not in the Constitution.” What they mean is that they’re shamelessly comfortable with the idea that some people will die of a treatable disease in agony in the gutter.

 
St. Trotsky, Pope-in-Avignon
 

I’m not just figuring it out, it’s just…. why? He’s the villain of the story! Nobody should like Scrooge at the beginning of the story! His views are repellent, he’s absolutely alone, and yet … they keep doing this thing where they emulate him perfectly at the beginning of the story, and don’t seem to notice anything wrong with it.

If Dickens wasn’t already dead, seeing people like McArdle would kill him.

 
 

St. Trotsky: But the point of the Scrooge character was that in Dickens time, there were a heck of a lot of people—probably as many or more than now—who really did think that way. Consider Sir Trevelyan, for example, of Irish Famine fame. What to you and I is a moral outrage is merely an act of God to them, to be accepted as part of the moral order, which again to them is a subset of natural law.

Dickens was illustrating something readily observed in his time, and then fantasizing that some kind of moral epiphany about their inner cruelty would come to them, and the world could be fixed.

I actually think that Dickens might have felt at home on places like Sadly No.

What is to us a moral axiom—that most human being cast a moral shadow on the world that entitles them to our consideration against their suffering—is merely a form of religion to them, and one with which they disagree.

 
 

Crap. These fuckers just cannot get it. At all. I’m just out of the hospital this week and I don’t even want to think about the details. Ack. For 2008 my old insurance co. mailed out a statement that told us the scant amount they’d paid and then what we had paid. And we had paid a whopping $36,000 over insurance!

I kept saying “never again” regarding that, but hell if I knew that that patch of road I hit was covered in “black ice”. Egads, sorry if I don’t make much sense, I have the worst fever and chills. At least that doesn’t seem to be something that docs can screw me over again on. Sheeesh.

 
Spengler Dampniche
 

The whole argument is specious anyway. This fucking trout cavern thinks we shouldn’t spend stacks of loot saving lives, but she has no goddamn problem with spending our treasury dry to kill a bunch of dune coons.

How much is a life worth? All the money in the world. How much is all the money in the world worth? Not one life. But that’s just typical of my faggortzest dirty fucking hippie Buddha lovin’ socialest alternative lifestyle. Real, meat-eating Merkin Patriots only care about the delicate balance between maintaining a wealthy ruling class here, and mountains of smoking corpses there.

 
 

Re surplus population: You just figured that out? It appears everytime one of them says that “A right to health care is not in the Constitution.” What they mean is that they’re shamelessly comfortable with the idea that some people will die of a treatable disease in agony in the gutter.

and thats why, in any just society, they would be hunted down like dogs….

 
Spengler Dampniche
 

First they came for the mangoes, and because there was no way I was getting out of the boat, I said nothing.

 
 

I’m just out of the hospital this week
Was just thinking, “Where’s Lex been lately?”

we can’t know for sure if the health care bill just passed will eventually yield the returns its advocates hope for, in the strictest statistical measures. Probably not. It wasn’t even our first or second choice for dealing with the problem.

When the US health system is ranked so low in terms of the ratio between “general health” and “money spent per person”, one can’t help thinking that any change is going to make it more efficient and save more lives per dollar. How could it become any worse?

 
 

Heya Clyde! Damn, it’s good to be online again. I’m going to send my bills to McArdle. Why the heck not?

 
 

Trout Cavern!!1???!?

Crap. I just squirted chocolate milk through my nose.

And I wasn’t even drinking any.

 
 

I still have no idea why anyone is having to ‘debate’ the information-free rambling of spoiled little McAddled.

In any case, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities takes down these bullshit arguments about how the deficit savings are ‘double counted’ and all the rest of the horse shit.

 
 

Yo McMeggerz, for reals, you plus me plus my fam’s beach house out in Malibu and E$ will wonk your socks right off. Trust me Meggerz, this’ll all work out fine for people like you and me, just like everything else does. The world is still ours, baby, and my main man in the big White House will keep making sure of it.

Oh Matt Y wants to come too but don’t worry, even my family’s summer house has a guest house so he can just crash out there while you and me get wonked out, bAY-BEE.

 
The Tragically Flip
 

It’s true — we can’t know for sure if the health care bill just passed will eventually yield the returns its advocates hope for, in the strictest statistical measures. Probably not. It wasn’t even our first or second choice for dealing with the problem

This needs more elaboration, considering we arrived at our 3rd rate, 3rd place solution in no small part thanks to the efforts of people like McMcMc who defended the existence of socially useless rent-drawing parasitical insurance companies in the equation and worked to make any solution without them, or even meaningful competition to them, politically impossible.

Fuck, these hypocrites even fought against ending a program that paid rent-skimmers extra money to provide identical services to Medicare with no measurable improvement in quality.

 
The Tragically Flip
 

Also, I don’t get the random Ezra bashing. Ezra needs a rhetorical slap every now and again, but when the revolution comes, he’s not even among the first year’s worth of people to put up against the wall.

 
St. Trotsky, Pope-in-Avignon
 

I don’t even understand what the deal is with the “Ezra” character portrayed. Has Ezra talked like that at some point? It feels somewhat similar to the way they beat “Rahm Emmanual swears!” into the fucking ground, and then continued beating it more until the limp, flaccid shame of it all just became more and more valueless.

(unsubtle veiled PENIS reference, by the way)

 
 

Well said. The levees that protect the middle class are giving way and witless fools like mcmegan think the millionaire class will have room in the lifeboats for them.

 
 

You can’t measure the economic value of a citizenry’s restored faith in a livable baseline for their prosperity when emerging from an era where no floor for that basic security seemed to exist at all.

ME-gan, like most libertarians, can and it’s a negative value. <long rambling run-on sentence alert.>They’ll claim that it’s because government is involved but their narrow zero-sum market-driven view of the universe is not merely indifferent to the suffering of others (teh FYIGM axiom), it actually believes that it is morally right for the vast majority of the population to get shafted (since they’re unproductive moochers). Basic security? You have to earn that. Insert that Benjamin Franklin quote about security and liberty for bonus head-splodey jerk-wad-ish-ness.

 
 

ME-gan’s “analysis” is of that ultra-facile kind – like the spherical cow, only less relevant to reality.

Apparently the only measurable financial benefit to this bill is reduction in medically caused bankruptcies. From a fucking glibertarian. Well Megs, let’s just use your own fucking stupid ass standard on tax cuts. Shitwad. Your basic philosophy, your world-view, your entire raison d’être is based on the notion that taxes are ebil and should be cut like crazy because of some magically pony-riffic totes awesome productivity gains that’ll trickle down and va-va-voom!!! i.e. based on your own “logic” – totally fucking un-measurable.

SO, the entire thing comes down to the fact that you feel that for healthcare reform “there will be few measurable benefits of this bill, and certainly not any large enough to justify the gross cost of the coverage provisions” but tax cuts almost always are the other way around in that they’ll naturally pay for themselves or some such Laffer curve-atastic bullshit.

Thanx Megs, it’s not like we couldn’t have guessed how you felt about it.

 
 

but we feel obliged to point out that McMegan[…]if she jiggered the numbers a bit to get so Satan-y with it

If you ever, EVER, put the name Megan McArdle in the same sentence…in the same paragraph…in the same DOCUMENT…as “jiggy” again, I’m going to march up to your office and punch you in the nose, DA.

And now, the brain bleach, please…

 
 

This is one of the aspects I hated about the “health care debate”. All the conversation was centered entirely on cost, money, effect on the economy. And yeah, the facts are on the side of right on that debate as well but it’s sort of besides the point. Health care is one of those fundamental rights of any decent first world nation, a key cornerstone of the safety net that says that no matter how bad things get for you, you can’t die like a dog in the streets.

The fact that people’s lives are treated like meaningless lines in a ledger book, less valuable than the property values of the buildings that surround them is one of the greatest problems with how Americans approach all problems and libertarians have been key in making that so.

A human life is not to be measured in value directly related to the amount of money in their bank accounts. A human life has real genuine value, because money will come and go but once someone is gone they are never coming back.

 
 

Megan can’t see that, but it’s hardly surprising. She’s fucking thick.

I know her hips are a little bigger than I generally like, but I don’t see what her weight has to do with anything.

 
 

She’s fucking thick.

I dig em big boned. Like a dinosaur.

 
 

She’s fucking thick.

And your wise men don’t know how she fe-ee-ee-eels…

 
 

I’m not allowed to post over at McAddled’s, either because the Atlantic can’t figure out how to make a comments registry work OR because of too many taunts about how McMegan should just “pick up a 2 x 4” and whack all the people who point out how dumb she is upside the head, so I’ll post my response to her bullshit “I doubt that all that many people have been stopped from starting their own business by health care coverage concerns” here:

I would think someone who stands so nobly in defense of an ideology of individual freedom wouldn’t need to resort to making calculations to show that yeah, some people are prohibited from pursuing their dreams by a private industry that has nothing to do with actually providing health care to anyone, but it’s not all that many so no big deal. I’d think all you would need to do is consider the following:

For all the bleating about freedom, how free is anyone when a private entity can determine their destiny, career-wise, from the time they enter the work force until they retire? The child born with diabetes or other chronic health condition, under the old system, was pre-destined to either a) work for someone who provides group health coverage his entire life, b) marry someone who has group health coverage, or c) forget about ever building up any personal wealth, since all of it would be subject to forfeit in the case of any health problem. For someone who prates on about how raising taxes a few percent will stop multi-billionaires from ever again “creating jobs”, you seem awfully flip about the disincentive that losing one’s entire life’s savings serves up to those who have any minor medical problems coupled with a desire to start their own business.

You’d scream bloody murder if those types of restraints were being put upon the citizenry by government, but when it’s a private interest doing it – elected by none and accountable only to shareholders – you seem to think it’s not so much of a problem.

That’s a very odd way to look at things. I suppose you could retreat into a claim that it’s ok for people’s destinies to be dictated by private interests because it’s just an example of the “free market”, but that wouldn’t change the fact that you are willing to accept a set of circumstances you would consider intolerable if imposed by government, simply because they’re instead being imposed by private interests.

It’s this cart-before-the-horse-putting that causes so many of us to ridicule so much of what you say. I think it must arise from confusion in the understanding of “principle” vs. “ideology”. Principle is what says, “it’s intolerable to allow someone to be boxed in to one path because he can’t get health coverage otherwise.” Ideology is what says, “things that would be intolerable if government did them have to just be accepted if they are delivered up by a ‘free market’.” Unless you’re willing to step forward to advance the principles of freedom, regardless of how the chips fall vis-a-vis any pet ideology, it’s not really what your concern is about. And anytime you put ideology before principles, you end up looking not noble, but stupid.

 
 

You’d scream bloody murder if those types of restraints were being put upon the citizenry by government, but when it’s a private interest doing it – elected by none and accountable only to shareholders – you seem to think it’s not so much of a problem.

Excellent, Jennifer.

 
 

The difference between Megan and me is that she wants millions of Americans to be without health insurance and I just want her to.

 
 

PS ‘she’s fucking thick’ is a coded reference to when Ezra dresses up as Alan Thicke at the Malibu beach house. See, Megan and Ezra are into really really boring cosplay.

 
 

DA, and the difference between you and I is I just want Megan — for a good hate-fu….I’m at work but you get the picture.

 
Fleas correct the era
 

You’d scream bloody murder if those types of restraints were being put upon the citizenry by government, but when it’s a private interest doing it – elected by none and accountable only to shareholders – you seem to think it’s not so much of a problem.

As long as it happens to “those other people”. Megan’s a big, big believer in the principles of I’m All Right, Jack, So Fuck You.

 
 

The difference between Megan and me is that she wants millions of Americans to be without health insurance and I just want her to.

…be without health.

Finished yer thought for you, DA!

 
The Goddamn Batman Thinks That It's Entirely Plausible That Megan Is Not Mammalian And/Or Not Vertebrate And/Or Not Carbon-Based And/Or Not Of This Earth/Galaxy/Dimension/Continuum
 

FOOLISH HOO-MONS WHY DO YOU FRET OVER THE LOSS OF A HANDFUL OF MEATSACKS THERE ARE BILLIONS YES I SAID BILLIONS OF YOU WAITING TO BE USED AS RECEPTACLES FOR MY OVIPOSITOR NOW SHUT UP AND LINE UP FACE DOWN BUTT UP FOR YOUR SHORT AND AGONIZING FUTURE AS A NEST AND FOOD SUPPLY FOR MY SPAWN SKREEEEE SKREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE WHERE IS MY SALT TO TRIGGER MY SPAWNING CYCLE?!?!?!?!?

 
 

Jennifer:

Excellent, although I might quibble with the very last word. “Stupid”? I’d say, “either stupid, or only self-interested, and therefore despicable.”

But that’s me.

DA: First rate.

 
 

haha! She’d be better off under the national socialist NHS, where the threshold for including a treatment is 33000 pounds per life year saved.

suck it, megan!

 
 

This is one of the aspects I hated about the “health care debate”. All the conversation was centered entirely on cost, money, effect on the economy. And yeah, the facts are on the side of right on that debate as well but it’s sort of besides the point. Health care is one of those fundamental rights of any decent first world nation, a key cornerstone of the safety net that says that no matter how bad things get for you, you can’t die like a dog in the streets.

This is so true, and large swathes of the people making the argument against based purely on costs are the same people who argue against abortion based on imputed humanity and morality. How strange they are.

On Megan in particular: she is the moocher parasite scion of moocher parasites. She has no skill other than ingratiating herself as a fawning lackey, no knowledge, no work ethic, no empathy, nothing to make her worthwhile as a citizen or human being, and yet she sees her place as an arbiter of what is right and who are useful.

 
 

great comment Jennifer!

 
 

I would also point out that lots of people are helped beyond “lives saved”.

 
 

I think it’s entirely plausible that we’ll be saving 3,000 people a year. But 3,000 people a year, at a cost of $200 billion, is almost $70 million per life saved.

By the use of asshat-algebra, I can calculate that:

50,000-plus cases of rigor mortis onset per annum all occurring due to completely preventable causes, minus the input of extending basic coverage out to 80% or so (*****spitballing alert*****) of those who happen to be most prone to said premature cases of “Severe Go Into Teh Light Syndrome,” plus one national preventative-care initiative equals one EPIC SMELL-TEST FAIL for McArdle … unless she wants to fantasize suggest that in the deranged universe of ObamaCare, many tens of thousands of Yankees every year will now think themselves invincible & thus commence massive sprees of overpass-swandives, shotgun-mouthwash & hand-grenade Hot Potato.

The inherent defect of her BS is that (as any wide-awake six-year-old could discern) not every simoleon of the healthcare-reform funds she references will go solely to save lives – much of it will simply make them less hellish – so she also gets a IRIDESCENT FLAMING PURPLE POLKADOT BASIC ADULT APTITUDE-TEST FAIL at no extra cost.

 
 

Great rant, Jim…great post, Jennifer.

Someone should ask McHiccup how she feels spending 1 trillion dollars to save Bin Laden’s ass. Got your money’s worth yet, Meg?

 
 

3,000 people’s lives saved per year. Add to that the number of people who maybe wouldn’t have died, but as a result of HCR enjoy improved health. That’s got to have an effect on overall productivity, which ought to offset some of those costs.

If we’re following Megan’s lead and making numbers up, let’s say that’s, oh, $eleventy-jillion going back into the economy, which way more than offsets the $200 billion it costs.

 
 

Oh yeah, and Jennifer, I hope your answer gets to Megan. I’d like to see her squirm as she tries to respond.

 
address my envelope, lips!
 

Nice one, D. Aristophanes – it does the upper classes no good to whine that we’re not being the good little peons we should be when they’ve removed all incentives for worker loyalty.

Pensions? Fuck, no – the shareholders need the money!
Health care benefits? You’re paying for them out of your paycheck, and that’s only if we decide to employ you full-time – which we won’t.
Raises? Screw that – we make more profits if we fire you as soon as you get some experience, and hire someone who doesn’t know a thing for minimum wage!
Perks? What do you think you are – a shareholder?
Office supplies? we pride ourselves on only buying the shittiest, cheapest crap we can get away with!
Training? All the $49 hotel “management” courses you can stomach – as long as they’re local!
Retirement bennies? Get your own IRA – and if we’re forced by law to put one in for you, we’re getting the cheapest crappiest kind, and forget about matching funds!
Extended sick leave? You’ll take unpaid leave, and gamble on whether you have a job or not when you come back!*

And McArglebargle is so consumed by the possibility of being one of Them, it’s pathetic. Maybe she thinks one of the Rich White Men will take her under his rich, fluffy, protective wing if she persuades the hoi polloi to shut up and get their noses back to the grindstone.

*This is totes illegal, but it doesn’t stop businesses from doing it all the fucking time.

My home computer has more gig than my work computer, and I work for a pretty decent place with retirement matching, and everything. *sigh*

 
 

McArdle is just now coming around to the mindset that Ford abandoned back in the 70s in the wake of the Pinto scandal. It’s not enough that citizens in a free society should be able to go about their lives without the fear of being bankrupted and/or crippled by the inability to pay medical bills (or blown to bits behind the wheel of a Pinto). Showing her economic chops, McArdle measures out the value of such a program by whether or not it keeps one from dying.

I’d suggest there are a lot of things we’d never do if our benchmark of success was – hey, you didn’t die.

 
address my envelope, lips!
 

Cerberus said:
This is one of the aspects I hated about the “health care debate”. All the conversation was centered entirely on cost, money, effect on the economy. And yeah, the facts are on the side of right on that debate as well but it’s sort of besides the point. Health care is one of those fundamental rights of any decent first world nation, a key cornerstone of the safety net that says that no matter how bad things get for you, you can’t die like a dog in the streets.

The fact that people’s lives are treated like meaningless lines in a ledger book, less valuable than the property values of the buildings that surround them is one of the greatest problems with how Americans approach all problems and libertarians have been key in making that so.

A human life is not to be measured in value directly related to the amount of money in their bank accounts. A human life has real genuine value, because money will come and go but once someone is gone they are never coming back.

I’m so going to print that out and paste it into all the Texas Board of Education History books. That is a quote for the ages, my friend.

 
 

What irketh the shit out of me about the health care debate:

a) very few Americans actually DO want those who can’t pay to die in the gutter, untreated. I’d guess, half of the 28% That Hold American Hostage. So, 14? 7% points rrrracist MFers (you know who they are adamant is undeserving and should die in the gutter) and 7% points hard core libertarians?

b) but so effin’ many of those who do not, at least consciously, subscribe to the “kick ’em the curb” mentality, don’t understand the already DO pay for these folks through our own hospital bills

c) and I heard so little about how much time and energy and MONEY is wasted on insurance companies, doctors, and hospitals chasing each other around with accounting ledgers

I don’t see how it wouldn’t be better or our economy to not spend such vast sums on paying people to quibble with each other over payments and reimbursements, and to not deter people from becoming entrepeneurs.

For all of their dick-fondling about the bold frontiersman entrepeneurs, Glibertines don’t seem to grasp that this system greatly deters it.

Oh, and don’t forget, in Fantasy Libertarian World with Sparkle the Unicorn, once those horrible state regulatory fetters come off, health insurance will become cheaper and cheaper and quality will soar, just like McDonald’s has done with food.

(Or maybe just profits will rise. They never mention that possibility.)

 
monkey knife fight
 

It’s true — we can’t know for sure if the health care bill just passed will eventually yield the returns its advocates hope for, in the strictest statistical measures. Probably not. It wasn’t even our first or second choice for dealing with the problem. But one thing it is, at long last, is a visible rebellion against the cruel jungle law of three-plus decades that relentlessly sought greater spoils for the few at the expense of the many.

This.

 
 

In short, the belief that we’re offered a fair shake despite the accidents of our assorted births is not something that anybody’s figured out a way to put a price tag on. But we do know that America has had a pretty good run of it in the past 100 to 200 years, and a big factor in that streak has been an idea amongst the people that — contra other, shittier places — any one of us can hit it big via grit and keeping our nose clean and a bit of hard work. And that even if hitting it big didn’t happen, we’d still have a solid, middle-class peg upon which to hang our hat.

This is completely untrue. There was no Golden Age where anyone could strike it rich with enough talent and ingenuity. Do you really think the mine workers and sweatshop labourers, let alone the slaves, of the 19th century had a fair shot? That their low positions were just due to them not keeping their nose clean or working hard? The American Dream was always just a dream.

But I guess if you’re willing to rally around a bill that chiefly funnels even more money to the insurance industry, maybe your standards are low enough to defend 19th-century America too.

 
 

“Look, there’s massaging the data, then there’s giving it a happy ending. In the end, both methods have their advocates, but only one should leave all involved feeling awkward and slightly guilty” -Me doing Bill Maher impression

So,

The general assessment is “glibertarian mouth-piece uses lazy bullshit arithmetic to attempt to assign a seemingly unreasonable “cost-benefit analysis” to the HCR package” (What? Message delivery is all about summary these days Yo. Unpacking the bullshit is what we do once we get the cattle’s attention 😉

How is this not a tempest in a teapot? If Mcgirdle hadn’t called out one of your homeboys (Ezra, I like you but we are not yet “message board buddies” though I hope to earn your respect) would you have simply rolled your eyes and kept the make-shit-better train rolling along? Then again, I suppose the point of Sadly No is calling bullshit on those who try to confuse, conflate, or simply lie to convince us they have better ideas.

The ultimate tragedy for me in all of this “massaging the data” Kabuki is that the casual observer(most of our country) no longer trusts or even listens to empirical data. For every budget estimate using accepted methodology that shows “X” there are five stink tanks saying “Y.” Eventually, the public completely ignores anything that doesn’t already agree with their preconceptions simply out of fatigue and time-management. I mean, forget about the Crazy 28. Seriously, fuck those rascist Randian asshats (like a two-on-one Coulter-Bachmann grudge-bang hasn’t crossed your minds, whatevs) and look at the middle ground folks. Mcgriddle isn’t going to change her mind simply because we break out the slide-rule of “fact” and paddle her with it. Further, the idea that she will “struggle to respond” to a well written and well thought-out argument (Jennifer, looking at you here, very nice letter) implies that she will react like us. That isn’t how glibertarians function. They make unprovoked bullshit statements,let the cross-linking circle-jerk nature of the web give said statement some prominence and move on to the next thing. They know full hell well that they don’t have to held accountable for spreading intellectually dishonest arguments. They just have to say something “sciencey-sounding” that supports the conclusions of their base. That MSM got snookered into believing that the webs echo-chamber actually represents anything like informed public opinion is probably the greatest triumph of the lunatic fringe.

 
 

C’mon Rob – I didn’t say WHEN the American Dream was an actual reality. In fact, I am referring to the couple of years following the Civil Rights Act and before the election of Richard Nixon.

 
 

On the other hand, some 3000 or so people died on 9/11 and we spent trillions invading the wrong country so that Dick Cheney could one day rub one out to a Wikileaks video.

Can Megan do a cost/benefit analysis of that jerk-off?

 
 

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