Politics

So as most of you should know, Congress has passed a bill that will affect how health care works in America. It was a pretty thick document, filled with lots of legal-speak. I enjoyed this op-ed in the New York Times about it. I'll post some excerpts for the link-clicking impaired.

[I]f liberals are right, health care reform will save tens of thousands of lives every year. Not some lives, on the margins, in hard-to-measure ways that may or may not justify the bill’s price tag. Tens of thousands every year. . .

Right now, these assumptions are hotly contested between left and right. But if the bill passes, by 2018 we’ll find out who’s right. . .

[P]assing the bill will shed some light on them.

It will shed light, as well, on all other promises that piled up as the health care vote drew near — that the bill, its implicit abortion subsidies notwithstanding, will actually reduce the abortion rate, as T.R. Reid argued last week in the Washington Post; that it will create 400,000 new jobs “almost immediately,” as Pelosi recently claimed; that it will become more popular once implemented, as every Democrat insists; and so on through an array of happy possibilities.

The same goes for all the things that liberals are sure won’t happen. We’ll find out if the bill makes premiums skyrocket. We’ll find out if it creates doctor shortages. We’ll find out if the array of new taxes destroys more jobs than the new spending creates. We’ll find out if the fiscally essential firewall between the new, heavily subsidized exchanges and the old, less-subsidized employer-based system holds up. And in the (only slightly) longer run, we’ll find out if tacking an entitlement to comprehensive health insurance atop a groaning system speeds America’s rendezvous with a bankrupt, Californian future.

But the part I most heartily agreed with was this:

As a conservative, I suspect they’re wrong. But now that the bill has passed, as a citizen of the United States, I dearly hope they’re right. Indeed, I hope that 20 years from now, in an America that’s healthier, richer and more solvent than today, a liberal can brandish this column and say “I told you so.” Because the alternative would mean that we’re all about to be very sorry, and for a very long time to come.

I teach a Sunday School class for twelve and thirteen year olds. This past week's lesson was on leadership and we were supposed to be reviewing it in the context of Harold B. Lee's life. We started by discussing current events and how good leaders help us through wars, famine, natural disasters, etc.

As we were discussing what qualities a good leader possesses, I was surprised to suddenly hear scathing remarks about President Obama. One of the students began to recount how his grandmother hates the President, calls him a monster, and even went so far as to say that his biggest problem is that he's still breathing. Needless to say, I was a little shocked. Continue reading "Let's Get Political"

Some of my facebook friends have been discussing the affects of legislation currently going before Congress, namely the Waxman-Markey Act or cap-and-trade climate bill. Some of their arguments have seemed a little weird to me until I read this article by a Nobel Prize winning economist in the New York Times Opinion section.

He starts his essay by playfully pointing out that the debate over health care reform has not exactly been an intellectual stunner and that we can expect more of the same from this piece of legislation.

I'll go ahead and quote heavily from the article, because I know some of you are link-challenged. If the New York Times comes knocking on my door for plagiarism or copyright infringment, I'll tell them it's your fault.

So the main argument against climate action probably won’t be the claim that global warming is a myth. It will, instead, be the argument that doing anything to limit global warming would destroy the economy. . .

First, the evidence suggests that we’re wasting a lot of energy right now. That is, we’re burning large amounts of coal, oil and gas in ways that don’t actually enhance our standard of living — a phenomenon known in the research literature as the “energy-efficiency gap.” The existence of this gap suggests that policies promoting energy conservation could, up to a point, actually make consumers richer.

Second, the best available economic analyses suggest that even deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions would impose only modest costs on the average family. Earlier this month, the Congressional Budget Office released an analysis of the effects of Waxman-Markey, concluding that in 2020 the bill would cost the average family only $160 a year, or 0.2 percent of income. That’s roughly the cost of a postage stamp a day. . .

[L]ast week Glenn Beck — who seems to be challenging Rush Limbaugh for the role of de facto leader of the G.O.P. — informed his audience of a “buried” Obama administration study showing that Waxman-Markey would actually cost the average family $1,787 per year. Needless to say, no such study exists.

But we shouldn’t be too hard on Mr. Beck. Similar — and similarly false — claims about the cost of Waxman-Markey have been circulated by many supposed experts. . .

So here’s the bottom line: The claim that climate legislation will kill the economy deserves the same disdain as the claim that global warming is a hoax. The truth about the economics of climate change is that it’s relatively easy being green.

So if you start seeing articles claiming that the cap and trade bill is going to destroy our economy, you now have a rebuttal by a world renowned economist. And you can always fall back on my favorite argument, which is that it will eventually cost more just to walk outside if we don't start doing more about pollution. The inversion+smog in Salt Lake is deadly and will only get worse unless we do something about it.

Do you agree with this take on Obama's presidency? What are the chances we pull out of this recession/depression during his first term? Is it necessary to have more goodwill among the world community or are we holding our nation back by looking for the approval of foreigners?

Magic and Realism
By ROGER COHEN of the New York Times

So the next new thing is “smart power.” The phrase was sprinkled through Senator Hillary Clinton’s confirmation hearing in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. It means using all the levers of influence — diplomatic, economic, military, legal, political and cultural — to get what you want.

I’ve nothing against smart power, a blend of soft and hard. It’s better than dumb power, of which we’ve had a dose.

Dumb power estranges friends, privileges force, undermines United States credibility and proclaims war without end.

But what I want from the Obama administration is something more than Harvard-to-the-Beltway smarts. I want magical realism.

Seldom has so much hope confronted so much anxiety as in these five days before Barack Obama becomes the 44th president and the first African-American one. Continue reading "What do *you* think?"