An Example Of How Civil Political Discourse Threatens Modern Conservatism

An Example Of How Civil Political Discourse Threatens Modern Conservatism

"The AmericaSpeaks background materials actually did acknowledge that the rising budgetary costs of Medicare and Medicaid are driven by the fact that our whole health care system is broken -- and costing both the private sector and government programs much more per person than in countries that have much better health outcomes. They even acknowledged that thoroughgoing reform -- like single-payer health care system -- is the only way to control those rising costs.

However, when it came to options the participants were allowed to vote on, they were all variations on how much people wanted to cut Medicare and Medicaid benefits. At this point in the proceedings, the AmericaSpeaks founder and President, Carolyn Lukensmeyer had to acknowledge a rebellion in the ranks. People were demanding to have the option of voting for "single-payer" reform instead of cutting Medicare and Medicaid, and when she announced a complicated process of writing in that alternative, a roar of approval went up from the crowd in several locations."

We've just lived through the Bush tax cuts experiment and now we're in a major mess because "less taxation" did zilch to create prosperity, and "less regulation" on Wall Street has created a class of boring malfeasers and criminals that have ruined the housing market - probably the worst scenario in the bunch: a dead housing market means no construction, no new refrigerators, no refinancing for re-modeling - no way to do anything except crawl slowly out of the recession and hope that America's still there.