Who could be surprised by the following Haaretz report?
The Israel Air Force on Tuesday evening bombed a target in the Gaza Strip used earlier in the day [by] Palestinian militants to fire eight mortar shells at Israel.
Militants on Tuesday also opened fire at Israel Defense Forces soldiers in Gaza in two separate incidents, in the first violation of a shaky cease-fire in the coastal strip that ended Israel’s 3-week offensive against Hamas.
Even though the coverage leads with Israel’s bombs, the cease-fire was broken by Palestinian rockets and guns. This doesn’t scream out “sustainable and durable.” Up until this point, the story on the cease-fire was that Hamas leadership in Syria had rejected it while Palestinian fighters on the ground were on-board. Now, with leadership and ground forces both exposing the foolishness of Israel’s premature retreat, what is to follow? Israel managed to curry an impressive amount of international goodwill throughout the Gaza operation, and perhaps Ehud Olmert determined that an internationally overseen cease-fire could help secure that goodwill – to be capitalized on another day. But when you let global opinion influence operational decisions so directly you end up constrained by the reality that’s been imposed on you from third parties. If Israel continues to simply fight back, they may very well fall from the temporary good graces of the governments that had shown support. In short, Israel may have opened itself up to national security blackmail. That’s not a state of affairs one can easily imagine Israel tolerating very long.
Anti-Iraq War folks, take note: This is what happens when you actually do what Barack Obama has been saying he wants to do and simply “end” a war without worrying about the winning part.
The 70′s – we’ll be lucky to hit the 70′s the way things are going.
Maybe its Obama’s strategy to bring the country down to the level of 1931 so he can get credit for getting us back to 1938.
God help us if we are confronted with the same types of enemies that confronted FDR. At least FDR recognized evil and knew it had to be defeated.
I thought there would be no way anyone could touch Obama in 2012 and that any halfway decent candidate would hold back until 2016. Instead Obama is kicking the door wide open.
If the economy continues to tank it actually lets Romney back in the picture.
But I think that we will be confronted shortly by a foreign policy crisis – Pakistan? And that would open the door for Petraeus.
bush was the 2000′s answer to nixon. obama wants to bring back clinton not carter duh
Romney, Patraeus, Palin; it really doesn’t matter now does it? All 3 of those mentioned have a grounded center and believe in the reality of the moment. Barry believes in hyperbole, demonizing anyone careless or thoughtless enough to doubt his good intentions; and the fact that he has been informed of his infallibility since he was in Columbia. This is what affirmative action has accomplished. A media cowed into reporting what it knows to be lies. An electorate that wrongly answers the basic question “who you going to believe; me, or your lying eyes?”
What has happened is we now have a government we truly deserve. I just hope that the price isn’t too high in 2 years and we can correct the problem.
Here is the problem that will keep the Republicans down until they have an answer for it. There hasn’t been relative prosperity for the majority of Americans. Before the economic crises the average 30 year old was making less than the average 30 year old 30 years ago. Wages at the lower in of the spectrum have been stagnant for nearly a generation. Upward mobility in th e United states has fallen below many European nations..
For these people talk of the good old days won’t appeal. Unless Republicans come up with a plan for rising wages for those who have a high school diploma or a little junior college, they will be in the minority forever. You may not think that Obama’s plan will work, but it is at least different than what hasn’t been working for these people for a generation.
Actually, although Robert Lee Hotchkiss, Jr has a point about the economy for the last 30 years, it is entirely untrue that Obama’s plan is different from what hasn’t been working. Obama’s plan is, rather, MORE of precisely what has not been working: regulation, mandates, and taxes.
It is inaccurate to say (or imply) that US government policies, at the federal or state level, have had a free market trend in the last 30 years. Reagan’s policies, the scope of which was hampered by his never having a majority in the House, were an 8-year interruption of a 100-year trend toward increasing regulation, mandates, and taxes. Life costs more today for everyone, in spite of technological advances that have improved many economic efficiencies, because we regulate everything much, much more heavily than we did 100 years ago.
ALL regulation imposes costs on us. Every single last sentence and clause of regulation costs us money, whether we are requiring businesses to pay environmental fees, requiring them to comply with environmental mandates, requiring them to make employee benefit contributions, comply with OSHA or FDA regulations, or pay business surcharges or property taxes. It costs us money to require our cars to meet emission, safety, and fuel efficiency mandates. Cars would be cheaper if we didn’t levy those requirements on their manufacturers. Motor fuel would be cheaper if we didn’t have layers of fuel content and emissions regulations — in some parts of the country, a regulatory pile-on by the federal government, the state, the county, AND the municipality. Fuel and electricity would be cheaper if we didn’t prohibit drilling, and the building and retooling of new refineries and power generation plant, with lawsuits and state legislative decisions.
Medical care would be much cheaper if it were not so heavily regulated. Many of us remember when it WAS much cheaper — back in the 1960s and early ’70s, when I was a kid, before the urge to regulate it began to gather steam at the federal and state level. The cost-shifting nature of our current system is effectively obscured by the collectivization effect of an insurance-based industry. Most Americans don’t realize that they are paying for the health care of others by paying their private insurance premiums — and even fewer realize that they are doing so through the cash compensation they forego, if they are covered by employer-maintained plans. Back when routine care — check-ups, sore throats — was provided almost entirely on a cash basis, physicians were able to balance paying and non-paying patients with no real overhead cost, by making their own decisions about standard fees. Today, no doctor who accepts insurance of any kind has that option. A whole state bureaucracy, employing thousands of people — as well as the doctor’s own extra clerical help, which has to be paid — is dedicated to making the doctor charge everyone the same, mandating insurance compensation and co-pay levels, and enforcing the sharing of health costs at tremendous expense in overhead. The expense of this dynamic metastasizes exponentially when hospital stays and surgical procedures are at issue.
We do not have free market medical care, in the sense of supply and demand being mediated through a price mechanism. Neither the service provider nor the user has any voluntary say in the price of the service — except among the very rich, and the doctors who cater exclusively to them. For everyone else, the only free decision we have is to NOT buy insurance or NOT seek medical care, even when we think we might need it. This burden is mitigated to some extent by the urgent-care clinics that have become increasingly popular, by offering limited routine-care services on a cash or insurance basis. National health care will eliminate the safety valve function these small clinics have been performing.
In my lifetime, America has been far, far less regulated than we are today. The early 1970s saw the advent of the urban planning movement that has caused housing prices in major urban areas to skyrocket, due to restrictions on land use. Restricting the supply of land will always make housing prices increase. Between environmental regulation, health care regulation, worker benefits regulation (including the minimum wage), product safety regulation, insurance regulation (which mandates what insurance must coverage), and the lengthening lists of local regulations in every hamlet in America, everything we buy and do has become more expensive over the last 30 years.
The regulation is always for a good cause. But it is THE main factor in making life more expensive for 30-year-olds in 2009 than it was in 1979 or 1969. If not for technological advances that have improved economic efficiency, the impact would be even worse than it is. Regulation and mandates are how we make consumers pay for the visions of political advocacy groups. Regulation COSTS. It cannot — CANNOT — be done for free. It is a cost that 50-year-olds can typically pay more easily than 30-year-olds — and there is much, much, much more of it today than there was 30, 40, 60, or 100 years ago.
And of course, this is separate and apart from the impact of increased sales and property taxes across the country over the last 40 years. When I was a kid, it was very unusual for sales taxes to run more than 4-5%. That maximum has nearly doubled in many parts of the country. The activist state costs a LOT of money. Younger workers feel the impact of paying for it more than older ones, who are usually better off. Democrats are always the politicians who are FOR higher taxes and more costly regulation — but too many Republicans have simply gone along with the proposals, over the years. From a regulatory standpoint, the America of 1994, when the Gingrich Revolution hit Congress (and then fizzled rather quickly), would have been unrecognizable to the citizen of 1909.
Mr. or Ms. Dyer.
I do find some areas of agreement with you. Certainly housing prices have risen as result of many communities effectively outlawing multifamily dwellings. Even a tenement is better than living on the street. I’ve shared a bathroom, in London, with 8 other people. It isn’t great, but you can live with it. If Americans are ever going to compete in the world economy housing costs are going to have to plummet. I live in low income housing, and I pay 1000 dollars a month for a studio. It is ridiculous. How can an American compete with a Chinese or Indian person who pays a tenth or even a hundredth as much for housing.
However, there are some things that you said that are factual. Property taxes don’t raise the cost of housing, especially for lower income residents. The cost of housing for a renter is largely determined the market value of real estate + property taxes. If property taxes rise the value of the real estate falls by approximately the same amount. What is lost is equity, wealth, for the property owner. This does have a bering on the economy but not rental prices.
The major reason for medical cost increases is the vast increase in the use of technology and pharmaceuticals, much of which provide negligible benefit to the patient. The problem is that the patient is incompetent to determine which treatments are cost effective and which are not. I have been without health insurance before. I got no help from the doctors and found myself completely unable to bargain for reasonable care at a reasonable price.
Here is the big catch 22. The medical profession wants to effectively end suits for medical malpractice. The problem with this is that patients aren’t just going to take mysterious deaths. Without an outlet resolve these issues they will assume the worse and demand changes. Some cultures tied the bodies of dead patients to their doctor and let the doctor die faced with his failure. The much more likely response will be endless senseless regulation.
Malpractice suits aren’t just, or even reasonable, but believe me doctors will miss them when they are gone.
But the biggest problem with these thoughts is that they aren’t going to spring fourth from a democracy. People don’t want to go back to 1910 . And many of the regulations are actually written at the behest of business. For example there is a regulation here that power washers have to capture all their water used to clean parking lots. This isn’t the work of wild eyed environmentalist, but the big cleaning companies who don’t want to compete with free lancers.
Mr Hotchkiss, Jr. — I’m not sure what you are saying about property taxes, but they do, of course, affect the cost of housing, whether you rent or are buying. Renters cover the cost of the landlord’s property taxes with the rents they pay. Public housing is a separate issue, however. What happens with public housing is not a guide to how it works for private residential renters.
You are simply wrong about technology and pharmaceuticals being “the” reason why medicine costs so much today. Technology does increase the baseline costs of treatment by some amount, although we are also getting better treatment for that increased cost. Drugs, however, are a separate cost. Insurance premiums are not as high as they are because of the cost of drugs, nor are hospital charges or co-pays.
Hospitals don’t charge $8 for an 800-mg ibuprofen because it cost them that much, but because in the aggregate bills they present, they have to recover their operating costs for everything they do, which includes covering the costs of treating non-paying patients, and paying for the extra admin required to do that in accordance with state regulations. The hospitals may, depending on the state, not be compensated by the insurance companies for the total bills they present, but for a percentage of them. This increases the incentive to overstate itemized costs.
No drug company is making out like a bandit on the drugs dispensed in hospitals. Ibuprofen costs hospitals less than it costs you at WalMart, per pill. (This is also true of controlled drugs.) The hospitals aren’t pocketing the $8 they charge for the ibuprofen dose either. If they are compensated $6 for an $8 charge, they are using $5.97 of that $6 to pay their overall operating costs, from utility bills to medical and administrative staff. If everyone who came through the door paid the same for the same treatment, the ibuprofen charge might be, say, 10 cents for an 800-mg dose, because all you’d be paying for was, literally, the pill. But everyone isn’t charged what his care actually costs — no Medicare or Medicaid patients are — and hospitals have far less discretion today over how they deal with that than they did 40 years ago.
The inflated prices of hospital incidentals — pillows, meals — are cost-recouping measures. In large part, the prices of new drugs are cost-recouping measures too, since the drugs are very expensive to develop. We have chosen to make it more expensive by adding the layers of government regulation we have on the process. The fact that most people agree they WANT this regulation doesn’t mean we don’t have to pay for it. It makes developing drugs substantially more expensive. That we may want the regulation is no argument against the factual proposition that having it makes our drugs cost more. The answer to “We want the regulation” is still, “Fine. It costs money.”
You also overstate, quite drastically, what opponents of unlimited liability judgments seek. No one proposes to eliminate malpractice lawsuits. The only proposals that are on the table are to set limits on the amounts of tort judgments — i.e., what judges and juries can award to plaintiffs, in malpractice as well as other kinds of cases. Ironically, meanwhile, if health care is fully nationalized, malpractice litigation will no longer be an effective tool against incompetent physicians. Government employees are very hard to fire, the government is very hard to sue, and any judgments that ARE obtained against it will not produce big monetary payoffs for plaintiffs. If a government doctor cuts your leg off accidentally, you won’t be awarded $200 million, you’ll just receive government disability payments, in amounts no more generous than they are today. The doctor may or may not be fired. With nationalized health care, and its inherent imbalance of supply with demand, it will be more important to keep as many doctors practicing as possible.
I do appreciate your time spent sharing a bathroom with 8 people in London. I spent much of the 20 years from 1983 to 2004 sharing a bathroom with even more than 8 people on Navy ships. During my junior officer years, sharing very small living quarters (much smaller than your studio) with 7 other people was common. I was grateful to have a bed to sleep in, a toilet that mostly flushed, a place to brush my teeth, and about 70 seconds of shower water every day.
I also lived in a tenement apartment for a while, when I was a kid. We were very poor until I was about 14. People live in all different ways, at different times in their lives, and the idea that we can prescribe for everyone what will be good enough for them, on some universal basis, is wrong. I survived living in 8-man berthing on a ship, but that doesn’t mean I think we should use the force of government to make that the only feasible option for most people.