{"id":2765,"date":"2009-12-18T12:56:01","date_gmt":"2009-12-18T17:56:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/?p=2765"},"modified":"2009-12-21T11:57:44","modified_gmt":"2009-12-21T16:57:44","slug":"krugman-grasping-at-straws","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/2765\/krugman-grasping-at-straws\/","title":{"rendered":"Krugman Grasping at Straws"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>What\u2019s Paul Krugman\u2019s advice to liberals like MoveOn and Howard Dean upset over current health care negotiations in the Senate?\u00a0 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2009\/12\/18\/opinion\/18krugman.html?_r=1\" target=\"_blank\"><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Pass the Bill<\/span><\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>It seems that liberals like Krugman want a bill just for the sake of passing a bill. \u00a0 Politics and not principle appear to be his main motivation, which is strange coming from an economist and college professor.<\/p>\n<p>Ideological purists like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-dyn\/content\/article\/2009\/12\/16\/AR2009121601906.html\" target=\"_blank\"><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Howard Dean<\/span><\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/spectator.org\/blog\/2009\/12\/15\/moveon-activists-protest-white\" target=\"_blank\"><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">MoveOn<\/span><\/a> object to Harry Reid&#8217;s version of reform.\u00a0 But why?\u00a0 The current Senate bill supposedly lacks the government-run public option that liberals have been salivating over for the past year.\u00a0 What remains from Senate negotiations is a hodgepodge of mandates, new regulations and higher taxes.<\/p>\n<p>The one issue both sides of the aisle should agree on during the holidays is that the current health care bill is awful; it&#8217;s really really bad.<\/p>\n<p>Conservatives and libertarians should hate the bill because it contains hundreds of billions in new taxes, an unconstitutional mandate for individual health insurance, an expensive employer mandate, costs over $2 trillion and it does nothing to bend the health care cost curve downward, among many other reasons.<\/p>\n<p>Liberals should hate the bill because it (supposedly) contains no government-run public option, politically connected health care companies practically drafted the legislation, PhARMA supports it, socialist <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cbsnews.com\/blogs\/2009\/12\/17\/politics\/politicalhotsheet\/entry5990091.shtml\" target=\"_blank\"><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Senator Bernie Sanders<\/span><\/a> doesn\u2019t, it fails to cover 100% of the uninsured and it doesn\u2019t bend the health care cost curve downward.<\/p>\n<p>Dr. Krugman may attempt to use his perch at the <em>New York Times<\/em> to rally progressives toward a final health care push, but the ugly truth is that health care reform has become the product of Washington, D.C. politics.\u00a0 That\u2019s never a good thing.\u00a0 President Obama rallied against Washington-style politics during his campaign but it appears that his bill and his political strategy have embraced the zero sum ultra-partisan approach that he derided so frequently in the past.<\/p>\n<p>Dr. Krugman\u2019s headline should have been \u201cKill this Bill.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What\u2019s Paul Krugman\u2019s advice to liberals like MoveOn and Howard Dean upset over current health care negotiations in the Senate?\u00a0 Pass the Bill. It seems that liberals like Krugman want a bill just for the sake of passing a bill. \u00a0 Politics and not principle appear to be his main motivation, which is strange coming [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[77,12,659,206,14,38],"class_list":["post-2765","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-harry-reid","tag-health-care","tag-howard-dean","tag-paul-krugman","tag-president-obama","tag-senate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2765","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2765"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2765\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2807,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2765\/revisions\/2807"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2765"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2765"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2765"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}