Again, in the spirit of Eugene Robinson's assertion that Democrats should stop treating the Affordable Care Act as a weakness, I offer, as promised, another advertising message: "Obamacare didn't cut Medicare benefits; Obamacare cut Medicare costs. Thanks to Obamacare, Medicare no longer has to spend tens of billions of dollars annually propping up private health care plans. But the same Republicans who whine about Obamacare want to turn Medicare into a coupon program that won't save our government money and that will cause seniors to pay more -- a lot more -- for health care. So which party is destroying Medicare again?" Again, you're welcome, Democrats.
Citizens for Tax Justice reviews the Congressional Progressive Caucus's Better Off Budget. Their findings: the Better Off Budget would create almost 9 million jobs and cut the deficit by $4 trillion over 10 years, mainly by hiking taxes on millionaire income to 45% and above, by taxing investment income at the same rate as everyone else's income (since it is, you know, income), and ending offshore "deferral" of corporate profits. I think if this budget proposal got a lot of "liberal" media coverage, most Americans would like it. But I think I've also just explained why it hasn't received much "liberal" media coverage.
David Dayen does his usual thorough job explaining how payday lenders thwart federal regulations. And Wall Street benefits from subsiding payday lenders, by helping them operate in impoverished areas the banksters wouldn't normally be caught dead in. But don't be discouraged: as with internet security, the whole point is to either stay one step ahead of creative rule-breakers or no more than one step behind them plugging the holes they've made as quickly as possible. And n.b. Mr. Dayen does his explaining this time at the Guardian; David Dayen is one of the greatest journalists of the last decade, and I'm thrilled he's getting work from fairly prestigious news organs.
Ho hum, another day, another billionaire asshole comparing all our quite-justified anger at the sins of his ilk with the Nazis murdering over 11 million Jews, Gypsies, and Poles in gas chambers. And the "liberal" media enables him, of course -- Politico uses the mere existence of super-rich whining to say "the effectiveness of the populist approach comes into question," rather than assert that, say, super-rich whining shows that "the populist approach" has hit a nerve with them and resonates with the rest of us, which would be (at the risk of understatement) a far more reasonable conclusion.
Also from the "ho hum" file: Mother Jones slams the Republican "alternative" to the Affordable Care Act by noting that the mostly Republican Florida Supreme Court struck down that state's malpractice lawsuit caps last week, suggesting that the "problem" malpractice caps supposedly address is a fiction and that malpractice caps only serve to enrich health care corporations. Somehow the tragic death of Michelle McCall, which instigated the lawsuit that ultimately brought down the Florida malpractice caps, didn't excite the "liberal" media very much. How could that be?
Finally, an Oxford psychologist ranks the 10 most and least psychopathic jobs. Even given the more clinical/neutral definition of "psychopath" given in paragraph four, the rankings by and large won't surprise you -- CEO ranks number one in the plus-psychopath column, big shock. Your experience may vary, of course -- I suspect only those who deal with surgeons and chefs all the time aren't surprised by their inclusion in the plus column.
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