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Is it just the "private" part that you don't like? Would it be OK if we had a single payer system that the government ran? The reason I ask is this: If the mandate violates the 13th Amendment, then so does Social Security. The only difference is one is making you buy a product from a private party, and the other is making you buy a product from the government.

At least with the mandate, you can select a bare bones plan that won't cost you a ton (or you can pay the $450 annual fine). With SS, you are being forced to buy a product (retirement insurance for all practical purposes), you get no choice as to how much you pay for it (6.7% of your income), it's completely compulsory as it is deducted directly from your paycheck, and if you die before you hit 65, you get no return on your investment.

At least with health care insurance you get something out of it - everyone gets sick or has some health problem that requires them to see a doctor on occassion.

 

Aldeth - Your wife will get your benefits at a certain point. And if she is raising the kids, she will get a portion of your SS for them as well.

 

True - but you don't. And if you're not married and have no kids, then no one else receives any benefit either.

 

True. That is why even with the market volatility I wish we could privately invest some if not all of our social security money. My mother died when she was 48 (she was a smoker) and since my sister and myself were over 18 the system got to keep her 30 years of contributions.

 

Yes - In that sense it's insurance. You pay into something you may never use....

 

Right - that's why I even went so far as to call SS retirement insurance. While it does give me some comfort to know that if something happens to me, my wife and child would receive some benefit (not that I don't already have life insurance), it only does so because I'm still alive. It wouldn't give me any comfort once I'm dead, because, I would be, well... dead.

 

Did anyone not see this coming? Maybe those "Tea Party" people aren't just racists and they just have an understanding of how government and economics works. Linky

Spoiler

The director of the Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday that the health care reform legislation would cost, over the next ten years, $115 billion more than previously thought, bringing the total cost to more than $1 trillion.

The revised figure is due to estimated costs to federal agencies to implement the new health care reform bill – such as administrative expenses for the Internal Revenue Services and the Department of Health and Human Services -- and the costs for a "variety of grant and other program spending for which specified funding levels for one or more years are provided in the act."

CBO had originally estimated that the health care reform bill would result in a net reduction in federal deficits of $143 billion from 2010-2019; this revised number would eliminate most of that savings.

In a statement, House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, said that the new CBO analysis "provides ample cause for alarm. This comes just weeks after the Obama administration itself released an analysis confirming that the new law actually increases Americans’ health care costs. The American people wanted one thing above all from health care reform: lower costs, which Washington Democrats promised, but they did not deliver. These revelations widen the serious credibility gap President Obama is facing."

Office of Management and Budget spokesman Kenneth Baer said in response that the health care law "will reduce the deficit by more than $100 billion in the first decade, and that will not change unless Congress acts to change it. If these authorizations are funded, they must be offset somewhere else in the discretionary budget. The President has called for a non-security discretionary spending freeze, and he will enforce that with his veto pen."

Baer also pointed a reporter to comments made by OMB director Peter Orszag on his blog in March in which the budget director says that Congress has the power to pay for the $115 billion costs with cuts elsewhere, or not act on those budget authorizations in the bill at all

What concerns me is that this is all just estimates. If you had to bet the lives of your children on if these estimates are low or high which way would you bet?

 

There certainly is an element of racism in the Tea Potters. I still think it's fairly small despite the large amount of racist signs and comments seen and heard at their protests.

And they should know something about government because one of the main organizers is Dick Armey, who spent some years in Congress and is now a major corporatist and government lobbyist. They know how to get money out of the government for their corporate agendas. Notice they were nowhere to be seen regarding bank and Wall Street regulation. What a surprise that was.

As far as I'm concerned about the extra 110 billion, so what? If some general wanted an extra 100 billion for contractors in Iraq the Tea Potters would be peeing all over themselves to spend it with no problem. These guys are really for less government? Right.

http://www.freedomworks.org/

Snook - You would have been better served to have left the Teas Potters out of your post and spoke directly to the specific issue in your post:

 

I'm sorry, I just have to stop for a second and ask: where on earth did 'Tea Potters' come from? I know 'Tea Party', as it was the original name. I know 'Tea Baggers', as that's what the critics decided to insult them with. Where on earth did 'Tea Potters' come from, though? And why?

 

I think it comes from their work to usurp the deeds of he-who-shall-not-be-named.

 

How "on earth" can you have a Tea Party without the pot?

 

Yeah, but you don't call the people at the party the 'potters'. They're the 'partiers', or maybe 'party-goers'. Calling someone a 'tea-potter' is just, well, confusing. Unless you're making some bizarre allusion to pot (the drug) and/or the potty, but I don't think you were. Tea-baggers was invented for that, and it works better.

 

I thought they came up with the term tea potter because of the obvious insulting and implicit sexual reference to "tea baggers". I thought tea potters was supposed to be less graphic in nature.

EDIT: Regarding the video - we just got my son Alice in Wonderland. He watched it last night in fact.

 

For the record - it was the Tea Partiers themselves who first started calling themselves "Tea Baggers," and with pride, I might add; evidently oblivious to the reference. It wasn't until almost a year into the movement that word finally made its way up the chain of command what "teabagging" really was. That's why many of us were content to sit back and laugh. "Why yes, angry 'patriot' holding a sign depicting your president as a Nazi, you ARE a Tea Bagger indeed."

You may now return to your regularly-scheduled bickering.

 

You mean the tea baggers aren't the women????

 

Good.

So your idea of a party is a bunch of middle-aged, anrgy white boys shouting "Liberty?" Not much of a "party" in my opinion. But whatever turns you on, I guess....

 

Actually, yes, but that is because I can't stand the smell of Patchouli

 

Because it covers up the scent of the tea "potters?"

 

Weren't the original Revolutionaries fairly angry? I mean, they were angry enough to go to war. And many were middle aged. And white. And they used the word Liberty a lot. I fail to see why today some use the whole "angry white men" epithet to denigrate a portion of society when the country was started by that same demographic.

 

You're kidding, right?