The Obama Presidency

[YellerDog]

Your strawman's a little skinny there.

[Anthony]

Yes, but how many individuals do you know who want to start a business with the sole goal of paying the bills?

I am all for it being socialized, so I'm not sure if we are debating the same things here.

[Space Pirate Roberts]

It's not about doctors being paid less, it's about cutting the Gordon Geckos out of the equation.

[Yoshi]

Yes, cut the people with the seed money to actually open hospitals and invest in R&D out. Good call.

[Yoshi]

I have the frame of mind to be able to say I do, in a sense - food banks, homeless shelters, cancer research, and I recently added elderly care: some of it is monetary, some of it is volunteer work. But I suspect you're also probably right that most people talk the game but don't play it. It's a terrible feeling, thinking that the majority of people with the means to help the hungry, the sick, the poor, or anyone else in need don't do so. I hope that's not true.

Also - and I don't know if you were present in the last thread I brought this up in - there's a staggering number of corrupt charities and it's very difficult to make sure you're giving to a place that is going to make a difference. (CNN did the research with a supposed bipartisan group so I guess belief of that depends on whether you think the series about it was biased or not.)

I do recall, and I'll give the same response now I did then. There fraction of crooked charities absolutely can't exceed the fraction of crooked politicians in Washington.

[Diff-chan]

Except crooked politicians aren't the ones actually implementing and running these programs.

Charity is great. Nobody is talking bad about charities. But if your goal is, for example, to get hungry people some food, SNAP is a very efficient program that does its job pretty well. You can't replace it with handing out bags of food at local churches and expect to feed nearly the same amount of people for the same price. You only do that if you have some ulterior ideological motive.

[Yoshi]

Except crooked politicians aren't the ones actually implementing and running these programs.

No, those are crooked IRS agents.

[Diff-chan]

You mean the IRS agents that followed the law and inspected a bunch of obviously political tax dodges to see if they were political.

[Yoshi]

Which is, of course, why their bosses were taking the 5th, taking leaves of absence, and then retiring instead of answering questions about all of this completely benign and legitimate activity.

Also, the first Syrian weapons inspection date was missed today. What a shocker.

[Diff-chan]

Obama admin has a long and sorry history of folding like a cheap suit at some obviously ridiculous and phony "scandal" that emerges from the far right swamp. Shirly Sherrod and ACORN are two other examples.