Given the preemptive bashing of the CBO by Republicans and the subsequent release of a pretty damning score on the AHCA bill, I wanted to take a look at how the CBO did at predicting the effects of Obamacare. Is the Trump administration on solid ground when it says that the CBO is wildly inaccurate and partisan?
After that I discuss four very thought provoking questions I received in the voicemail segment!
Sources:
More Critical Look at CBO Predictions
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Good show.
You’re right on with your evaluation of Trump. I read that one reason Bannon had to be allowed to attend Nation Security Council meetings, even though ad hoc presidential advisers had not traditionally been part of those, is that Trump doesn’t have the attention span to get through a meeting like that. He needs one of his trusted “staff” there paying attention or half an hour later he won’t remember what they talked about.
We need to be careful about cutting Republicans slack and giving them a pass on things as a courtesy or a “consensus building” tool. That is the first, greatest and longest lasting mistake that Obama made. With a Democratic Congress and Senate on his side in 2008, he could have completely steamrolled right over the Republicans, and had he done so, we might even have single payer health care by now. But he wanted to be a “consensus builder” like he believed Lincoln had been. He wanted the accomplishments of his administration to be a bipartisan group effort that everyone had input into and could be proud of. Well, you saw what happened. Obama should have steamrolled the Republicans. That’s certainly what they would have done had the tables been turned. There’s no give and take with Republicans, especially not Tea-Party-belonging, Trump-believing Republicans. You give, they take, and every inch of ground you give is one you’ll never get back. You made a very good point in that they think they do what they do for God, but their god is essentially a book out of the Bronze and Iron Ages that can’t grow, change or adapt—they’re going to make some ill-informed decisions.
Everyone on the left needs to read Jonathan Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Some people have complained that he justifies the behavior of right-wing ideologues, misogynists, patriarchists, corporate oligarchs, etc., but even if that was his intention (I don’t think it was), he does an exemplary job of explaining why the right-wing believe as they do and why they find it so much easier to rally their base than the left does. In my gut, I feel that the elections in 2018 and 2020 are already lost to the right-wing juggernaut, but if we changed our minds and decided to take off our rose-colored glasses and pull the ear buds out of our ears for a while and look around and see what’s actually going on, Haidt’s book would give us some real-world tools to construct a narrative that a lot wider swath of the population could buy into.
Great comment, thanks. I don’t share your dismal view of 2018. I think Dems just needed a wake-up call apparently. We’ll see though.