Barack Obama, elegant and professorially articulate, was an invitation to sophistication that America simply could not bring itself to turn down. If "hope and change" was an empty political slogan, it was also beautiful clothing that people could passionately describe without ever having seen.

Mr. Obama won the presidency by achieving a symbiotic bond with the American people: He would labor not to show himself, and Americans would labor not to see him. As providence would have it, this was a very effective symbiosis politically. And yet, without self-disclosure on the one hand or cross-examination on the other, Mr. Obama became arguably the least known man ever to step into the American presidency.

Our new race problem—the sophistication of seeing what isn't there rather than what is—has surprised us with a president who hides his lack of economic understanding behind a drama of scale. Hundreds of billions moving into trillions. Dramatic, history-making numbers. But where is the economic logic behind a stimulus package that doesn't fully click in for a number of years? How is every stimulus dollar spent actually going to stimulate? Why bailouts to institutions that only hoard the money? How is vast government spending simultaneously a kind of prudence that will not "add to the deficit?" How can such spending not trigger smothering levels of taxation?

Mr. Obama's economic thinking (or lack thereof) adds up to a kind of rudderless cowboyism combined with wishful thinking. You would think that in the two solid years of daily campaigning leading up to his election this nakedness would have been seen.

...I think that Mr. Obama is not just inexperienced; he is also hampered by a distinct inner emptiness—not an emptiness that comes from stupidity or a lack of ability but an emptiness that has been actually nurtured and developed as an adaptation to the political world.

The nature of this emptiness becomes clear in the contrast between him and Ronald Reagan. Reagan reached the White House through a great deal of what is called "individuating"—that is he took principled positions throughout his long career that jeopardized his popularity, and in so doing he came to know who he was as a man and what he truly believed.

He became Ronald Reagan through dissent, not conformity. And when he was finally elected president, it was because America at last wanted the vision that he had evolved over a lifetime of challenging conventional wisdom. By the time Reagan became president, he had fought his way to a remarkable certainty about who he was, what he believed, and where he wanted to lead the nation.

Mr. Obama's ascendancy to the presidency could not have been more different. There seems to have been very little individuation, no real argument with conventional wisdom, and no willingness to jeopardize popularity for principle. To the contrary, he has come forward in American politics by emptying himself of strong convictions, by rejecting principled stands as "ideological," and by promising to deliver us from the "tired" culture-war debates of the past. He aspires to be "post-ideological," "post-racial" and "post-partisan," which is to say that he defines himself by a series of "nots"—thus implying that being nothing is better than being something. He tries to make a politics out of emptiness itself.

Paul Krugman, one of the few liberal columnists writing for The New York Times, claims that...

Apparently, the Social Security Administration (SSA) believes that a “shovel ready” project means digging up the dead to hand them a stimulus check.

In fact, the SSA reported that more than 10,000 stimulus checks were sent to the dead. The new law provided a one-time payment of $250 for retirees, disabled individuals, and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) recipients. One would assume that the term “retirees” was meant to describe people retired from the workforce, not people retired from life.

These are not just the recently deceased of the past few weeks, months, or even a year. The government sent checks to one individual who had been dead for 42 years. That’s exactly what 83 year-old James Hagner of Orchard Beach, Maryland learned in May. He received a check from the U.S. Treasury made out to his mother, Rose, who died in 1967.

Working on research for a blog entry on Medicare regarding the socialist argument that Medicare is the model for socialized medicine in the USA and socialists pointing to Medicare being a "popular" government program.

Anyway, as I'm doing my research, guess who pops up on the topic? Paul Krugman (is there anything he doesn't comment upon?). What a load!

Here is Krugman's article. Within his article he references statistics which appear in a pie chart (be sure to scroll to the second page as two pie charts exist and one might very well not know a second page exists).

Then Krugman references himself within the article/ Please read Krugman excerpt below:

One of the truly amazing and depressing things about the health reform debate is the persistence of fear-mongering over “socialized medicine” even though we already have a system in which the government pays substantially more medical bills (47% of the total) than the private insurance industry (35%).

Debate is the subject of the sentence. The sentence is written as: Debate is all government vs. private insurance percentage payment of medical bills. There is a serious flaw with this comparison. A correct comparison would be government insurance vs. private insurance. Krugman's argument is based on an apples and oranges comparison which is: all government vs. private insurance. It has to be government vs. private or government insurance vs. private insurance. But it can't be all government vs. private insurance unless you are attempting to misrepresent the statistics.

Please take a second and take a very close look at the referenced pie chart. There are two pie charts. Krugman was using the second chart which likely no one scrolled down to, as when you open link, you only know a second page exists if you look about. The second pie chart, not the first pie chart, is where Krugman derives his percentages. Krugman writes about 47%/35% statistics.

Krugman's Math Quest:

(1) first of all you must correct the misrepresented comparison so we are comparing apples with apples,

(1a) we correct the comparison to government vs. private payment of medical bills,

(2) a pie chart is 360 degrees. That is, the pie chart needs 100% filled-in. We must fill in the pie 100% or else it is not a pie chart,

(3) if one points to 47% and 35% of a pie chart, then 18% of the pie chart is missing,

(3a) if 18% is missing, then who paid the 18%? Public, private, or other?

Who paid that 18%? Hmmmm. First of all 2/3 of the missing 18% was paid by "out-of-pocket". Out-of-pocket is related to the large company self-insured plans, the self-insured deductible and co-payments of major medical plans, HSA payments, and those individuals that self-insure. Regardless, it was paid by "private". Hence add "out-of-pocket", which is 12%, to 35% and we have 47% private.

It gets much better.

Now the pie chart mentions "other private". Oops! That's another 7%. Now we have 35% + 12% + 7% = 54%.

We now have to examine a questionable assumption within the pie chart. "Other public" is defined as including workers compensation as mentioned in footnote (1). Workers compensation in most states is a private system, paid with private dollars, based on workers compensation law. It is not, in most states, a public delivery system. Hence some portion of the 12% labeled "other public" is really private. Lets us err on the conservative side and say private workers compensation makes up 10% of the 12% or 1%. Now we have 35% + 12% +7% +1% equals 55% private.

One can only guess why Krugman represented private as 35% rather than 55%. One can only guess why Krugman created an invalid comparison of all government vs. private insurance.

Note: Think about this for a moment. Government does not exist without transfer payments from the private sector (via taxation). When the government pays a medical bill, the ability to pay the medical bill exists due to transfer payments from the private sector. In the final analysis all medical payments are paid by the private sector as government is only a transfer mechanisms.

The second reference within the article is merely another Krugman article. Here is an excerpt:

There are, however, no examples of successful health care based on the principles of the free market, for one simple reason: in health care, the free market just doesn’t work.

Hence according to Krugman's statement, from the discovery of the New World, through the founding of the USA, until the present, health care never worked, as it was based on the free market. All those advancements in cancer, heart disease, transplant surgery, etc., etc. are examples of free market failure.

I can't I am writing this, but the junior high school teacher in me trumps a lot (not all, thank God). I was amused by William Heasley's spanking of Paul Krugman, but there was one glaring error. In this sentence: "One of the truly amazing and depressing things about the health reform debate is the persistence of fear-mongering over “socialized medicine” even though we already have a system in which the government pays substantially more medical bills (47% of the total) than the private insurance industry (35%)." "Debate" is not the subject, it is part of prepositional phrase. The subject is "One".

Aarrrrgh, I can't beleive I am being so pedantic, but, next to inserting the occasional lesson on rational economics in to 8th grade history, standing athwart the decline of the Elnglish language and yelling "STOP!" is my passion.

My Republican friends often seem to miss the point in this debate: The so-called “public option” is not Page 3,079, Section (f), Clause VII. The entire bill is a public option — because that’s where it leads, remorselessly. The so-called “death panel” is not Page 2,721, Paragraph 19, Sub-section (d), but again the entire bill — because it inserts the power of the state between you and your doctor, and in effect assumes jurisdiction over your body. As the savvier Dems have always known, once you’ve crossed the Rubicon, you can endlessly re-reform your health reform until the end of time, and all the stuff you didn’t get this go-round will fall into place, and very quickly.

As I’ve been saying for over a year now, “health care” is the fast-track to a permanent left-of-center political culture. The unlovely Democrats on public display in the week before Christmas may seem like just a bunch of jelly-spined opportunists, grubby wardheelers and rapacious kleptocrats, but the smarter ones are showing great strategic clarity. Alas for the rest of us, Euro-style government on a Harry Reid/Chris Dodd/Ben Nelson scale will lead to ruin.