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From MIT Inventor To Tea Party Leader
An anonymous reader writes "In the midst of Congressional races around the country, one stands out to techies. Thomas Massie, an MIT whiz kid who pioneered touch-based interfaces and founded SensAble Technologies in the 1990s, is the favorite to win the Republican nomination in his Kentucky district next week. SensAble was recently sold on the cheap, but in a new exclusive, Massie explains why he left the haptics firm years ago to lead a simpler life of farming, family, and guns — lots of guns. Along the way he built a solar-powered, off-the-grid house and became a local hero of the Tea Party. Now Massie is leading the charge to get more engineers into politics, and if he wins, he could be a force to be reckoned with in Washington, DC."
You can afford more than $1000/month? I spent time as a consultant and sans an employer that was the quoted figure to cover one 20-something with no medical issues around five years ago. I couldn't afford it and neither could most people in my area. Lots of people think they can because their employer foots 80% or more of their medical insurance bill.
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
>>>no thanks to Fox News and their involvement.
FOX News is involved with the Tea Party? As in giving funds and organizing the events? I'd like to see a citation of that, because it's the first I ever heard it.
Please tell me you're being sarcastic. If not, start here. The Tea Party was created by Republican strategist Dick Armey and promoted relentlessly by Fox News- it was never intended to be grass roots. Amusingly, it's actually grown some legitimate roots since and has proved more difficult to control than the establishment would like.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Which is more crazy? Trying to prevent fiscal crises before they happen?
The Republican party has been trying to create this very crisis since the 1980's. Read what people like Stockman have written, when they (quickly) realized that trickle-down didn't actually work they decided to run up the debt so they could use it as an excuse to dismantle social programs they didn't like.
The debt to GDP ratio is already over 100% if you include publicly held debt.
Glad you brought that up. Debt/GDP is about where it was at the end of WWII. What differs now is the will to respond. That generation tightened their belts and raised taxes as high as in the 90% range for top tax brackets. When enough debt had been retired in the early 60's, Kennedy dropped the top rates and people decided we could still afford to improve the safety net with medicaid/medicare and improved welfare benefits. The debt/GDP ratio declined quite consistently under both Republican and Democrat administrations until Reagan came along. Under Reaganomics, debt/GDP skyrocketed until the Clinton years. Prior presidencies reduced debt/GDP by growing the denominator, Clinton's budgets worked on both numerator and denominator - he actually had surpluses in the budget for the first time since Nixon. If W had not been elected, we were scheduled to retire the debt in its entirety during this decade. W came into office, saw the surplus, and gave nice tax rebates to the wealthiest Americans, putting us back into red ink. He then took us into a very technological (read: expensive) war, and for the first time in American history, refused to raise taxes even to support the war effort. Debt/GDP skyrocketed. Then we hit the banking crisis and triggered a recession, and debt/GDP grew even more. And you know what? The right was strangely silent until Obama took office facing the accumulated debt of his predecessor, the worst economic conditions since the 1930's. Given the Nancy Reagan Chorus in Congress - "Just say 'No!' - he's done remarkably well.
We've had this level of debt/GDP before, and we survived it. I'm not going to claim it's a good thing, but it's not the disaster the right would like to paint it as. We've paid it down before, we can do it again. But as we pay it down, remember that the overwhelming bulk of it was accumulated by three administrations -- Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II.
Who's crazy again?
Given all of the above, I'd have to say you are. You're certainly not dealing in facts.
We've had this level of debt/GDP before, and we survived it. I'm not going to claim it's a good thing, but it's not the disaster the right would like to paint it as. We've paid it down before, we can do it again. But as we pay it down, remember that the overwhelming bulk of it was accumulated by three administrations -- Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II.
The lower graph is the debt/gdp ratio. As parent points out, growth is mostly in the last three Republican administrations. Also note that Obama wasn't sworn in until 2009, and the huge increase at the right began before Obama took office. In other words, it's the recession rather than the stimulus package.
You're missing the point, I think. If you have a "normal" insurance plan, they cover your checkups and medications because they know it saves them money if you deal with your cholesterol before it gives you a $50k heart attack. If you have one of those high-deductible plans (the kind of healthcare you describe), they sign up young folks unlikely to develop chronic medical conditions and just screw them over on the doctor visits, but it doesn't cost them much money if the person skips the doctor visit because a 25 year old guy isn't likely to get a heart attack or a stroke or something in the next 20 years, but they can take his money in the meantime.
I do EMS, so the healthcare debate seems incredibly stupid to me. Let me paint you a scenario - somebody calls from the bad part of town with severe chest pain, difficulty breathing, etc - the paramedics come and see a nasty AMI (heart attack) in progress, he codes in the rig, they work on him, we get him to the hospital where they get a pulse back and he end up OK - at great cost. But he can't pay for it, at all - everybody knows it, but the hospital can't turn him away by law. So he walks out of there, they hound him for a few months and give it up as a lost cause. They figure they'll make it back by tacking a bit onto every visit, procedure, test, etc - which raises costs on the people who have insurance or otherwise can pay. Higher costs to the insurance company become higher costs to the subscriber, so the people on the edge of being able to afford their plan no longer can. Some of them have heart attacks they can't afford... and it goes on.
This isn't a hypothetical. I've had literally dozens of people who follow this exact story. We've already decided on universal healthcare - anyone can walk into an ER and get treated - but we've done it in literally the worst possible way. I'd rather pay for that guy's Lipitor and checkups for 10 years than for his one heart attack.
You can construct the same story for almost anything, from pregnancy (prenatal care substantially reduces complications and hence costs) to asthma (inhalers vs. needing an emergency intubation). Emergent care is the most expensive way to do anything, both because of the complexity of emergency medicine, and the fact that it needs to be much worse to qualify as an emergency. But it's the only way we let the disadvantaged get "treatment"
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.