Drew Sheneman for February 21, 2013

That Boehner tan rubbed off.

“Catastrophic”……….Lol.

Another victim of the left-wing propaganda campaign. House passed at least 10 budget plans for the past 2 years, but Dems in Senate refuse to vote on it. Stop shilling for the dems.

The man on the right is a victim of both parties. He can’t afford to give the 2k maximum donation and he doesn’t own a corporation that can give unlimited funds to a superpac so he has no voice. Rs & Ds can’t hear anything unless the sound of twenty dollar bills being fanned under their noses accompanies the words spoken. I have also seen promises, by both parties, to protect the environment, children who are already born, and jobs placed to the side the moment the elections are over.I am very sympathetic Mr. Sheneman’s cartoon, I place a little more blame on the super conservatives that run the GOP, but I have watched this party over country attitude grow over the last 4 decades and would cheerfully support legislation for term limits, barring politicians from working for companies who benefited from legislation, as well as cutting all gov’t perks once they are no longer in office.Both parties have fulfilled Geo. Washington’s warning that parties would divide and weaken the nation. Respectfully,C.

Drew might want to brush up on his math skills. The actual spending reduction that will occur is a tiny fraction of the overall budget; a fraction of 1%.

You are right . Why do the democraps think that thier people in congress will tax themselves If they cared they would lower thier pay because most of them do not need it they are rich already

how come we pay taxes on our already taxed income, yet we don’t have universal health care like nations who are at least honest about their taxation?

Universal healthcare would actually be the cheaper option. Health insurance companies never lower their rates, only increase them as they can, and most of their profit still goes towards executive salary and bonus payouts, not towards the customer side. I pay about $600 per month for insurance when I’m working a contract, but I’m not covered between contracts. You already pay for everyone else’s healthcare. If you have insurance, your premiums are based on the average of all healthcare payouts, so if more covered people have catastrophic illnesses, premiums go up across the board. For people without insurance, your taxes cover them already. Anyone who goes through a catastrophic health issue finds most of their expenses are still not covered by the insurance companies (like I did), and have to declare bankruptcy, which means YOU now paid for their healthcare costs, as well as any other debt they may have had at the time. For example, when my wife had leukemia, I had to take 6 months off of work, with no pay, to be a full time caregiver. That means living off public assistance, and maxing out credit cards to buy food and pay for extras like ambulance rides and rent. YOU paid for all of that when I declared bankruptcy, and YOU pay for the same for thousands of others every year to do the same.Universal healthcare can work by increasing taxes by about $150-200 a month per taxpayer. That is less than insurance companies charge, and you can eliminate what you pay them, so you come out ahead in your budget. Hospitals and doctors can still charge a copay, but you take away the “surprise – that wasn’t covered” charges. If you want a lower tax increase, cut out some of the defense budget (toilets don’t need to cost $12,500, and I can buy bolts for less than $73 a piece) and it offsets. The advantage – no more medical bankruptcies (the number one reason for bankruptcy in this country), which means now YOU don’t have to pay off anyone else’s debt, like you do now.

The GOP charging hard into irrelevancy…

There is no “pension plus health care”. Congressmen pay into fhe FERS retirement system and Social Security just like other Federal employees – and pay more into FERS than other employees. If they want health insurance, they also pay into the FEHBP plan of their choice, just like other Federal employees and retirees.

If Sheneman is going to pick on Congressional pay and benefits, he should at least spend the time to and effort to find out how it really works.

Mind you, I have a very low opinion of Congress myself, but essentially lying about them isn’t the way to get an effective message across.

Sorry, Ansonia, every time someone brings up any type of govt. assistance, the word “freeloaders” echoes forth from a multitude of conservative mouths. It’s fairly obvious that many conservatives consider anyone receiving assistance to be a freeloader.

pols are biggest freeloaders rep&dem over paid under worked termlimits.com has the right idea dont allways agree with them but this i do

Good explanation, Fourcrows, but don’t expect the crew here to listen to reason.

Hello Ansonia,The congresses of the last few decades have shown that nearly NO program run by this gov’t can be anything but a boondoggle. Bills are being written by the lobbyists representing the people who benefit from them and loopholes are provided to allow waste and fraud to suck up tax payer dollars like a shallow lake on a 110 degree day. You make good points when you’re not angry.Respectfully,C.

To be completely honest, neither your statement that government run healthcare can’t work in this country and my assertion that it can are able to be proven because it hasn’t been tried. However, my experiences here and from living abroad have shown me that the US system is vastly inferior to that of Europe. So much so that, having already been through the financial fallout once, I have already told my wife that if we are living in the US and I am diagnosed with cancer or some other illness, I will not fight it, but will chose to die with dignity rather than put her and my family through another bankruptcy. Saying that it will be a “boondoggle” is accepting as fact that Americans, as a people, are corrupt and selfish. This may be true, and may doom the idea of universal healthcare to remaining only an idea. But think about where your trust should lie – in your elected officials, or a faceless board of directors whose purpose is to make a profit, not “…provide for the general welfare of the people.” I do not trust corporations more than the government. Corporate leaders are not elected by the people. They attain their positions thru money, and retain them by holding on to as much of that money as possible. Their responsibility is only to those who are shareholders, not to the people in general. All of the scare tactics used to discredit universal healthcare are false – they warn of things that exist in the private healthcare system. Death panels? They are core to private healthcare, which won’t cover those they deem will cost more than they pay in. Long waits? Caused by private healthcare, which can limit what doctors you may see. Sub-par care? Required to protect profits. I pay taxes that go to things that I morally oppose, such as needless wars and a bloated military industrial complex. Why not use them to benefit the people for once?

Years ago I read something, but I can’t remember it. Anyway, it was about a game, or something, and there were pieces, or maybe dice, and either they rolled the dice and added up all the numbers or else they subtracted them, and if you got more then either you got more or you got less. And at the end everybody was very mad at everyone else because they all lost something. And what I learned from that is that all liberals are stupid.

I have 2 college degrees and work 2 part—time jobs making under $25,000/yr. Still looking for a better paying full-time job in a country with a poor record of job training.Thanks for the shout-out Drew.!

Speaking from the left, I think everyone who can work should work. I think work is good for the soul (whatever that is), and I think most people want to work, given decent work to do, and given decent remuneration for that work. One of the things I don’t like about unregulated capitalism is that it seems to require periodic economic crises, during which many people who would like to work can’t find work. I have been convinced that certain kinds of government intervention can (a) help to relieve the distress of those caught up in such crises, and (b) help to pull the economy out of downturn.+As a leftist, I believe that society is more than a collection of individuals — just as a baseball team, for instance, is not just a random group of people who happen to arrive at the stadium at the same time and accidentally behave in a way that coordinates their actions. Some problems are individual problems, and these should be solved individually. But some problems are social, and these should be solved socially. In large communities, the disposal of waste is not simply an individual problem, and social solutions, such as public garbage collection, are appropriate. There are various mechanisms for the solving of social problems, and government is sometimes but not always the appropriate mechanism. Enough for now.

You’re welcome. I, too, agree that Obamacare is not the right thing, because it does not solve the problem. It leaves too much in the hands of the people who caused the problem. Private insurance can work as well as the European healthcare model, but there MUST be much stricter oversight. More than 80% of the money taken in by the insurance companies goes directly towards executive salaries and shareholder payouts. The same is true for hospitals. I have no problem with 6 or 7 figure executive salaries, but 8 and 9 figure salaries are obscene when the goal of the business should be healthcare. Placing a cap on how much can be payed out to individuals in the company (including bonuses) frees up billions of dollars, meaning that money is currently wasted. If the government is able to put that amount of oversight on to the healthcare industry, then our system would be preferable to the European or Canadian systems. Here is what really happens:A patient with a serious illness with insurance finds that the insurance money caps out at 80% of the costs, with a yearly cap of $100k. That can still leave several hundred thousand dollars left that the patient is responsible for, meaning the only option is bankruptcy. In the case that the person or their spouse goes back to work, you now find that you can no longer get a loan, a car loan is at 24% interest, you cannot buy a house, and worst of all you are no longer employable because companies will not higher anyone with a bankruptcy on their credit report. This is why I had to work in Europe – T-Mobile was no longer allowed to employ me, but their parent company, Deutsche Telcomm, could, if I worked in Europe. THAT is what really needs to change. Either make healthcare affordable by eliminating the corruption in the privatized system, or stop allowing credit reports to have power over anything but home and auto loans. Until then, everyone with a serious illness can look forward to being treated as worse than a convicted felon, who cannot be denied employment because of their conviction after time served.

Very sorry to hear about your families experience with the devastating financial effects of cancer. Best wishes for your sister in law. Ironic, however, that if Obamacare, however flawed, had been in place, the costs likely would have been covered. Better still would have been Medicare for all.