I have it recorded and haven't gotten that far yet. Knowing there is something to look forward to, I won't give up like I often do and delete the show before I finish it.

haven't watched MoJo in quite awhile Did you see Steny Hoyer? The discussion of the Regan deficit v the Obama deficit? Just once I'd like to see Dems exercising their brains....The retort to Joe's insistance that Obama is a bigger spender should have been, "During Reagan's first year in office the top tax rate was 69.125%, from 1982 through 1986 it was 50% then dropped to 38.5% in 1987. Are you saying we should raise taxes, Joe? Even with those tax rates, Reagan turned the US from being lender to the world, to being the world's greatest debtor" I am so tired of hearing the BS about the recession Obama inherited....the problem is so much greater than that and goes back so much further in time.

DO believe he was there primarily to stress that Obama's "huge deficit" looks very different once you are reminded of what Reagan did). Mika looked silly when she asked if Steny meant that "deficits and debt" don't matter, which was total reductio ad absurdum.

I think the Dems are pushing back by re-tooling the phrase "deficit reduction" in the way it SHOULD be re-tooled and it's not by cutting people's benefits.

the truth...taxes are too low, probably for everyone. Wages are too low, which is why we have so many people working and not paying income tax...There is so much more to the deficit than just spending....

I wouldn't want to bet the ranch on benefits not being cut. The rich still run the country...

primarily benefit the rich. Thus, you avoid "raising taxes" by getting more revenue from closing loopholes. It's still revenue. Just don't call it that. "Closing loopholes" is a very popular theme with the general public, who are beginning to understand that the rich get a LOT more tax breaks than the ordinary citizen.

This is a smart way for Democrats to talk about essentially increasing revenue...

But I'm not sure it will be enough revenue. Only time will tell.

a fortune. I think there's a LOT of money there, otherwise the rich wouldn't have come up with them, would they?

and prosperous middle class paid the bulk of federal income tax. That is no longer true. Closing loopholes is a great sound bite...but little more. Sure, it will raise revenue, but nowhere near enough to do what needs to be done. It's why I have little confidence that benefits won't be cut. It's just arithmetic CTYankee.

Greed is a disease as pernicious as alcoholism, as malignant as a cancer. The rich never have enough, money is what drives them and any loss of that money drives them to extremes of antisocial behavior.

with repubs in charge of the house, we'll have to get it through closing a lot of loopholes and some subsidies need to go too. Then we may have a shot at regaining the House. Then we can have a better chance at revising taxes upward on the wealthy.

Programs like this one today give me hope that the public is awakening to the outrageous giveaways to the rich that they end up paying for. Nothing like a little good old-fashioned OUTRAGE! It's an interesting process that I see unfolding...

But again, I don't think our problems can be solved simply by increasing the taxes on the wealthy. I haven't heard a single Democratic politician challenge executive pay, outsourcing, offshoring of profits etc. in any constructive manner, have you?

We learned the other day that Facebook not only paid no income taxes but got a $429 million tax credit refund. That's right, Facebook "paid" a negative income tax. Apple got over $700 million from the same loophole. What is this popular loophole, you ask.

Corporate bonuses in the form of stock options. The tax credit is for the difference between the stock option price and the price the stock is selling for on the day the option was granted. Say the CEO is granted an option for 30,000 shares at $40 a share and the stock closes that day at $100. That means that the company gets a $1.8 million tax credit based on the $60 difference times 30,000 shares. Do that with enough people and it becomes $429 million. That's right, the tax payers foot the bill for a big chunk of executive pay.

Back in the day that I practiced small-time corporate law, there was no corporate tax "bonus" for writing stock options under the price of the stock on that day.

Back in the day, stock options were issued at the price of the stock on the issue day or a few days prior.

And they generally were not exercisable for at least two years down the pike, which forced execs to look at at least the medium term prospects of the company and not just the next quarter's results.

Disgusting.

This is the corporate version of 'carried interest'

instead of paying a living wage. A good example of "socializing" a cost of doing business...

But whose fault is that? I had never thought about it before, but if we were to phase out the EITC, companies like WalMart would be forced to pay better wages. They are moaning right now about the fact that traffic is down in all of their stores because of the expiration of the 2% Payroll Tax holiday. I will have to give that some thought.

You're absolutely correct, it is socializing the cost of doing business. We need to end it.

In her new book, Joan Walsh talks about how Bill Clinton got around the whole "raising taxes on the rich" thing by manipulating what he could thru the tax code. Of course, he did raise taxes on the rich, too, but some of his administration's redistributive measures weren't raising rates.

I missed part of his show last Saturday...slept much later than usual for me. I have to remember to record it this weekend. Everyone's taxes were higher under Clinton. So what did he do?

tax credit which eventually got bigger than the GI Bill. The economic boom of course had a lot to do with it. But the down side was he played down the role of government in people's lives and that gave more strength to the republican argument, unfortunately. So much of this book made me sad because we suffered so much loss when Bush was selected prez by SCOTUS. I'm now in the last part of the book where she talks about the Obama-Hillary dispute in 2008 and how nasty that got.

read it

more productive. He actually said "Let people buy in to Medicare and it saves money"!!!

Dawn breaks over marble head...at last...

OK, Medicare for everyone. I would support that.

But the 1st Amendment allows hospitals and doctors to lobby. They don't fight fair. There will be a ceaseless parade of the ill and lame up to Capital Hill demanding increases in reimbursement rates. We see that already in the medical appliance trade. Some woman slathered in pink ribbons will be screaming for increases in breast cancer reimbursements. If a congressthing votes against breast cancer reimbursements then some baldheaded woman will be featured in a campaign ad the next election stating that the congressthing killed her.

I wish we would grow up as a nation.

now, so your rationale isn't really what the issue is. This is just a version of what European countries have been doing all along: delivering BETTER health care to people at a LOWER cost and with MORE EFFICIENCY.

As for the "ill and lame" as you put it, what is health care for anyway?

against socialized medicine. OMG socialism!

He'll return to orthodoxy the moment Stangel leaves the room.

Plus, in demonstrating how Medicare SAVES money, the argument for extending it to younger people makes a lot of sense. The name Medicare takes the sting out of "government health care" because lots of people are too uneducated to know better. Joe can get only so far in asserting something that is being proved not true on his own program!

I was amazed to see that he had Stangel on with this. Even Mika looked a little stunned...I think Joe had her brainwashed too...

Another McKinsey report found that health care providers in the U.S. conduct far more CT tests per capita than those in any other country — 71% more than in Germany, for example, where the government-run health care system offers none of those incentives for overtesting. We also pay a lot more for each test, even when it’s Medicare doing the paying. Medicare reimburses hospitals and clinics an average of four times as much as Germany does for CT scans, according to the data gathered by McKinsey.



Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2013/02/20/bitter-pill-why-medical-bills-are-killing-us/#ixzz2LYWmrWau