The Fiscal Cliff

[byu71]

Why do I watch MSNBC, because although Cali does a great job of giving us the left's talking points, with all due respect to Cali MSNBC is more deceptive.

In the last couple of years ole Chuckie Tood has really become partisan. Probably always was, but he doesn't seem to bother to try and even play like he isn't.

This morning in order to inform his viewership, he showed them what a country defaulting on it's debt looked like and what could happen to us if we defaulted. He then reviewed the default and subsequent consequences of Argentina. Yep Argentina. He is comparing the USA to Argentina.

He made the mistake of bringing an economist in from the left leaning Economist magazine who I am sure he thought would back him up. Although the guy said really bad things would happen, he basically had the good sense to shoot down Chuckie's comparing Argentina to the USA.

[il Padrino Ute]

I guess Harry Reid isn't as important as he thinks he is.

http://hotair.com/archives/2013/10/1...-negotiations/

[byu71]

I guess Harry Reid isn't as important as he thinks he is.

http://hotair.com/archives/2013/10/1...-negotiations/

LOL It was pretty obvious watching things yesterday that for some reason the President decided things weren't going his way as much as he thought. It was also noticeable the absence of sir Harry except to hear him say something like even if the President agree's that doesn't mean he will.

So all I hear on CNN and MSNBC and I assume it would be the same on NBC, CBS and ABC, is that the horrible poll that came out showing the republicans at an all time low has the republicans on the run. Have I ever mentioned I hate the press acting as an arm of the democratic party. Even the "terrible" poll showed the democrats are disliked too. Who cares if it is an "but I hate you more thing".

I really believe the Congress would function much better if we didn't have the "press" looking out for the people and making sure we get the "truth" from our government.

I have a new whatever you call just using letters. FTP

[BigFatMeanie]

LOL It was pretty obvious watching things yesterday that for some reason the President decided things weren't going his way as much as he thought. It was also noticeable the absence of sir Harry except to hear him say something like even if the President agree's that doesn't mean he will.

So all I hear on CNN and MSNBC and I assume it would be the same on NBC, CBS and ABC, is that the horrible poll that came out showing the republicans at an all time low has the republicans on the run. Have I ever mentioned I hate the press acting as an arm of the democratic party. Even the "terrible" poll showed the democrats are disliked too. Who cares if it is an "but I hate you more thing".

I really believe the Congress would function much better if we didn't have the "press" looking out for the people and making sure we get the "truth" from our government.

I have a new whatever you call just using letters. FTP

I believe the word you're looking for is "acronym". Still, you could always get by with "whatever you call just using letters" or "WYCJUL" for short - that works for me.

[TripletDaddy]

byu71, "FTP" is already taken, it isnt new. It stands for File Transfer Protocol. sorry.

[Color Me Badd Fan]

I guess Harry Reid isn't as important as he thinks he is.

http://hotair.com/archives/2013/10/1...-negotiations/

That speaks well of Obama. Reid is horrible.

[il Padrino Ute]

That speaks well of Obama. Reid is horrible.

It pains me to say, but I agree.

[woot]

I believe the word you're looking for is "acronym". Still, you could always get by with "whatever you call just using letters" or "WYCJUL" for short - that works for me.

"Initialism" would be more accurate. An acronym is an initialism that forms a pronounceable word, e.g., SCUBA or RADAR.

[Pelado]

Nate Silver weighs in on the shutdown:

1. The media is probably overstating the magnitude of the shutdown's political impact.
2. The impact of the 1995-96 shutdowns is overrated in Washington's mythology.
3. Democrats face extremely unfavorable conditions in trying to regain the House.
4. The polling data on the shutdown is not yet all that useful, and we lack data on most important measures of voter preferences.
5. President Obama's change in tactics may be less about a change of heart and more about a change in incentives.
6. The increasing extent of GOP partisanship is without strong recent precedent, and contributes to the systemic uncertainty about political outcomes.

http://www.grantland.com/fivethirtye...nment-shutdown

[Pelado]

Nate Silver weighs in on the shutdown:



http://www.grantland.com/fivethirtye...nment-shutdown

Linked in Silver's article:

Tetlock got a statistical handle on his task by putting most of the forecasting questions into a “three possible futures” form. The respondents were asked to rate the probability of three alternative outcomes: the persistence of the status quo, more of something (political freedom, economic growth), or less of something (repression, recession). And he measured his experts on two dimensions: how good they were at guessing probabilities (did all the things they said had an x per cent chance of happening happen x per cent of the time?), and how accurate they were at predicting specific outcomes. The results were unimpressive. On the first scale, the experts performed worse than they would have if they had simply assigned an equal probability to all three outcomes—if they had given each possible future a thirty-three-per-cent chance of occurring. Human beings who spend their lives studying the state of the world, in other words, are poorer forecasters than dart-throwing monkeys, who would have distributed their picks evenly over the three choices.

Tetlock also found that specialists are not significantly more reliable than non-specialists in guessing what is going to happen in the region they study. Knowing a little might make someone a more reliable forecaster, but Tetlock found that knowing a lot can actually make a person less reliable. “We reach the point of diminishing marginal predictive returns for knowledge disconcertingly quickly,” he reports. “In this age of academic hyperspecialization, there is no reason for supposing that contributors to top journals—distinguished political scientists, area study specialists, economists, and so on—are any better than journalists or attentive readers of the New York Times in ‘reading’ emerging situations.” And the more famous the forecaster the more overblown the forecasts. “Experts in demand,” Tetlock says, “were more overconfident than their colleagues who eked out existences far from the limelight.”

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/200...205crbo_books1

[Jeff Lebowski]

John McCain blames the Republican party for the shutdown. Calls the effort to defund ObamaCare "a fool's errand". The Fox anchor seemed more than a little shocked.



http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewir...-s-fault-video

[Uncle Ted]

John McCain blames the Republican party for the shutdown. Calls the effort to defund ObamaCare "a fool's errand". The Fox anchor seemed more than a little shocked.



http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewir...-s-fault-video

Yes, trying to defund Obamacare is a fool's errand. It seems, as Daniel Henninger said, Obamacare is heading for a collapse on its own:

Daniel Henninger: Let ObamaCare Collapse

September 25, 2013

Congress can't kill the entitlement state. Only the American people can.
[...]
The public's dislike of ObamaCare isn't growing with every new poll for reasons of philosophical attachment to notions of liberty and choice. Fear of ObamaCare is growing because a cascade of news suggests that ObamaCare is an impending catastrophe.

Big labor unions and smaller franchise restaurant owners want out. UPS dropped coverage for employed spouses. Corporations such as Walgreens and IBM are transferring employees or retirees into private insurance exchanges. Because of ObamaCare, the Cleveland Clinic has announced early retirements for staff and possible layoffs. The federal government this week made public its estimate of premium costs for the federal health-care exchanges. It is a morass, revealing the law's underappreciated operational complexity.

But ObamaCare's Achilles' heel is technology. The software glitches are going to drive people insane.

Creating really large software for institutions is hard. Creating big software that can communicate across unrelated institutions is unimaginably hard. ObamaCare's software has to communicate—accurately—across a mind-boggling array of institutions: HHS, the IRS, Medicare, the state-run exchanges, and a whole galaxy of private insurers' and employers' software systems.

Recalling Rep. Thomas's 1999 remark about Medicare setting prices for 3,000 counties, there is already mispricing of ObamaCare's insurance policies inside the exchanges set up in the states.

The odds of ObamaCare's eventual self-collapse look stronger every day. After that happens, then what? Try truly universal health insurance? Not bloody likely if the aghast U.S. public has any say.

Enacted with zero Republican votes, ObamaCare is the solely owned creation of the Democrats' belief in their own limitless powers to fashion goodness out of legislated entitlements. Sometimes social experiments go wrong. In the end, the only one who supported Frankenstein was Dr. Frankenstein. The Democrats in 2014 should by all means be asked relentlessly to defend their monster.

Republicans and conservatives, instead of tilting at the defunding windmill, should be working now to present the American people with the policy ideas that will emerge inevitably when ObamaCare's declines. The system of private insurance exchanges being adopted by the likes of Walgreens suggests a parallel alternative to ObamaCare may be happening already.

If Republicans feel they must "do something" now, they could get behind Sen. David Vitter's measure to force Congress to enter the burning ObamaCare castle along with the rest of the American people. Come 2017, they can repeal the ruins.


The discrediting of the entitlement state begins next Tuesday. Let it happen.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...230322758.html

ED-AR299_wl0926_G_20130925185613.jpg
The Four Horsemen of the Democratic Apocalypse.

[Jacob]

Was finally able to see rates on Obamacare exchange. My family's rate would go up $300 from the plan I'm on with my employer, and would almost double what I could have bought on the open market last year. Sweet deal!

[Uncle Ted]

Was finally able to see rates on Obamacare exchange. My family's rate would go up $300 from the plan I'm on with my employer, and would almost double what I could have bought on the open market last year. Sweet deal!

Is that $300 difference from your share of your employer's plan or the total cost?

[woot]

Linked in Silver's article:



http://www.newyorker.com/archive/200...205crbo_books1

Silver's book talks a lot about this phenomenon. Political "experts" are generally considered such because they are partisan, and their expertise tends to reside in all the facts that support their opinions, and none that don't. We don't punish these types when their predictions are consistently worse than random chance, so they continue to be given opportunities to "predict" according to their partisan biases. In this way, a complete ignoramus would be more accurate, since their picks would likely line up with chance.