Get ready, Uncle Obama is about to make life wonderful while at the same time he bankrupts America.
“CHICAGO — President-elect Barack Obama and Congressional Democrats are considering major expansions of government-assisted health care insurance and unemployment compensation as they begin intensive work this week on a two-year economic recovery package.
One proposal, as described by Democratic advisers, would extend unemployment compensation to part-time workers, an idea that Congressional Republicans have blocked in the past.
Other policy changes would subsidize employers’ expenses for temporarily continuing health insurance coverage to laid-off and retired workers and their dependents, as mandated under a 22-year-old federal law known as Cobra, and allow workers who lose jobs that did not come with insurance benefits to be eligible, for the first time, to apply for Medicaid coverage.
The proposals indicate the sorts of potentially long-range changes that Mr. Obama intends to push in his promised American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan, as he named it in his weekly Saturday address on the radio and YouTube. They will be combined with one-time measures that are more typical of federal stimulus packages to jump-start a weak economy, like spending for roads and other job-creating public works projects.
As the economy worsened in the weeks after Mr. Obama’s election, advisers and Congressional leaders suggested that a stimulus plan would be ready by the new year for House votes this week. But the House is not expected to vote until next week at the earliest, which will most likely push final action into February, Democratic aides said.
The aides said delays were probably inevitable given the holiday interruptions, the big ambitions of the undertaking and internal tensions over the plan’s components and their costs.
Obama advisers have said the package will carry a total cost of at least $775 billion.
Still, Democrats are wary of slowing down the economic stimulus by provoking the opposition of Republicans, who have warned in recent days that the package must be neither excessive nor rushed. They are also fielding concerns from fiscally conservative Democrats.
In his address on Saturday, Mr. Obama, just off a two-week vacation, also announced that, as expected, he would begin meeting in Washington on Monday with Congressional leaders of both parties in a bid for bipartisan cooperation.
“Economists from across the political spectrum agree that if we don’t act swiftly and boldly,” Mr. Obama said, “we could see a much deeper economic downturn that could lead to double digit unemployment and the American dream slipping further and further out of reach.”
Right. So the answer is to open the coffers and throw more money into an already corrupt abyss? You see this is where Obama’s inexperience and quite frankly “quasi-genius” is going to get us all in trouble. Trusting in a group of “advisors” and “economic experts”, many of which couldn’t see this coming if it had hit them in the ass, because he has nothing – nothing at all – in the way of experience or knowledge to draw from.
2 Responses
James
January 4th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
1How much more will health insurance cost when another nine million children lose theirs? It behooves all of us to make certain that everyone has access to health care: you cannot just demonize fat smokers and improve the most inequitable system in the Western world.
If you want to throw money into a corrupt abyss, keep funding the health insurance lobby.
Olga
January 4th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
2I think we know who bankrupted America in more ways the one. Obama’s task will be to fix it and that will take money. I don’t see any other genius proposals out there. Just a lot of people whining about spending money. At least this times, the money spent will be worth it.
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