treetop57 Member

You said nothing of the sort, on this thread anyway. I can't read things you don't say.

Or both!

Slightly shocked that limited-government conservative George Will recognizes that DOMA isn't consistent with small-government conservative principles:

I have more respect for Portman than people like this:

What is "film"?

Don't let the door hit ya.

My Fitness Pal (this website). Total Daily Energy Expenditure.

From the Forbes Sally Pipes column: Healthcare insurance costs have been increasing faster than inflation for decades. Even Pipes can't blame that on Obamacare. She is probably right that they will continue to increase, but wrong to blame it all on Obamacare. The question is whether Obamacare will bend the curve. The data…

Yes, Sally Pipes is the very type of person I'm talking about. She's been advocating less government involvement in healthcare for years. I think she will be shocked when her dire predictions don't come true. Or would be shocked if she were honest.

The some who say such nonsense are the very people I'm talking about.

From Azdak's link:

And I think many of its detractors will be disappointed at how little it changes their personal healthcare.

I expect that this wouldn't be an issue if she had gone to a hospital in her insurance network. The insurance company would have a negotiated price that they were willing to pay the hospital and it would be a lot closer to $3,780 than $39,652. Or the insurance company would refuse to pay for the antivenom and the angry…

I'm anal enough with numbers that this was driving me crazy. You are accurately quoting numbers showing that the gross debt when up, even in years when we were running a total surplus, an on-budget surplus, and an off-budget surplus. It's taken me a while but I think I finally understand . . . and it convinces me that the…

Not enough, but not nothing.

Woohoo!

"Nothing" is too strong a word. I'd agree it probably doesn't do enough, but it doesn't do nothing to lower future costs. For example (carriage returns added):

Those must be non-inflation adjusted gross debt numbers. Fair enough. If you include the money the government owes itself and you ignore inflation, the national debt increased every year. I'd argue that public debt is more meaningful than gross debt and it's better to take inflation into account, but numbers is numbers.

We must have cross posted. I already showed that the debt went down. It didn't go up as you claim.

Or to beat this into the ground . . . . The top graph shows two lines: Gross debt and public debt. The difference between those two is mostly the Social Security and Medicare Trust Funds (or as the caption states it debt "held by the federal government itself." Notice that both lines drop a bit in the late 90s. That's…

Or as they state it at the website I linked to above: Words have meanings. Having a surplus by no means implies no debt.

You're confusing two concepts: deficit/surplus and debt. Deficit is the amount the government spends in a given year over the amount it collects in that year. And if the government collects more in a year than it pays out, the difference is called a surplus. Debt is the total amount the government owes. If the government…

I can't let the part about Clinton's "mistouted" "balanced budget" pass without comment.

Below is the best explanation I've seen of the Social Security Trust Fund and what y'all are calling an intragovernmental loan. Notice the year this deal was struck: 1983. Reagan was president, expected income from payroll taxes was increasing more slowly than expected SS payments, so Reagan tasked Alan Greenspan to head a…

A list of numbers is hard to absorb, for me anyway. Here's a graph of those numbers. One of these things is not like the others. One of these things just doesn't fit. We spend a lot more per person for healthcare. And as has been pointed out, we don't get a commensurate increase in healthcare quality.

My mother believed that for years, but we found that was not true in her case. She collects part of my late father's social security benefit in addition to her state teacher retirement benefit. Her social security benefit is reduced from what she would have gotten if she had never worked in a SS exempt job, but it is not…

Courts cost money. Fair trials are a basic human right, protected in the United States by the fifth and sixth amendments. Freedom isn't free.

Some people are so lacking in class, they repeat lies long after they are debunked.

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS_in_the_United_States

Sorry to hear that, Thomas. I would have thought the huge drop in death rate when HAART became available would have convinced the people who denied that AIDS is caused by HIV. I'm glad I don't run across them all the time like I used to 20 years ago.