Letting healthcare fail.
No democratic nation has every taken away a social benefits program after extending it. It's simply too difficult.
The Republicans have just done that in health care.
They know this is going to be popular, so they've very clearly received their marching orders. It's all Joe Biden's fault, like everything else. The truth is much more complicated.
The United States is the only first would nation on EArth that doesn't have national healthcare. It's part of what depresses the American standard of living and why, in spite of what we seem to think, we aren't exactly admired lifestyle and standard of living wise by any other advanced nation. Frankly, most of the rest of the developed world thinks we're a bunch of ignorant rednecks, a view that has a lot behind it, frankly. Donald Trump, in one of his demented rages, wondered the other day why Norwegians don't come here as opposed to Somalians.
Why on Earth would they?
Anyhow, the dirty little secret of the ACHA, termed Obamacare, which was Romneycare before that, is that it was probably supposed to be transitional in the first place. It was the best the Democrats could do under the circumstances, and the thought is that it would probably phase away, I suspect, into bonafide national health care. The Republicans took their typical approach to the advancement of social programs, which was to complain and do nothing. We've now had the ACHA for fifteen years.
The ACHA system really came under strain during COVID, and that in turn lead to the premium subsidies, a big advance towards a national health care system. Those are now coming off, which will cause a huge spike in premiums, followed by a massive loss of coverage, much of which will fall right on the backs of diehard Trump loyalist. By next year quite a few of those people will be thinking that Bernie Sanders is the greatest politician of all time.
The destruction of the ACHA is a goal of NatCons, who really don't like a government role in such things at all. Cassie Cravens did an op ed which edged up on really voicing their view recently, and while I really don't like Cravens' articles, I'll give her some credit for that one. It's really undeniable that welfare programs create a dependence that is existentially problematic.
That really dealt with welfare more than healthcare, however, and here a real distinction can be made. We'll look at that a bit below, but what we'd first note is that all the GOP howling about "it's Joe Biden's fault" can't cover up the fact that they did utterly nothing for fifteen years. They don't have any real plan at all.
Indeed, the real concept is that removing the subsidies will cause the ACHA to fail, reverting the situation to the status quo ante. That's what they want. Yes, that'll mean that a lot of people will be uninsured, but they really don't care. Somehow, the magic of the marketplace is supposed to work all this out.
It won't.
The law of unintended consequences works pretty strongly in areas like this, and the net result is likely to be large-scale populist outrage and a shifting towards the left. Trump's already screwed farmers in the country with his tariffs, and more than a few of them will go into the polling stations in November 2026 wearing MAGA hats and then vote for Democrats. People who start watching family members die due to no healthcare coverage, and that will happen, will react more strongly. When the Democrats come back into power, which will start in 2026, and complete in 2028, they'll likely create a national healthcare system based on Medicare.
In the interim three years the GOP is going to do nothing.
Doing something, frankly, is warranted and would not be all that difficult. A single payer system could be created but which would bid the system out decadally to carriers. The system wouldn't cover everything, just necessary medical. Yes, it'd be paid for with taxes, but taxes graduated so they wealthy would bear more of them, which they should in general now.
Every other advanced nation in the world does this.
A few thoughts, or reminders, on war.
The Trump administration is beating the war drum and in fact pretending that enforcing American laws on drug smuggling is the same thing as a war.
It isn't, in fact that's criminal in and of itself, but because this is the direction the administration is clearly going, there's some things that should be kept in mind.
The first thing is that if you treat something like a war, it might become one. That raises this:
Yeoman's Fifth Law of History. When a war ends is when the defending party decides that it is over.
Americans have long had the view that, because we're Americans, we're the toughest on the block and we'll win. The wars we've fought since World War Two have shown that isn't the case. Indeed, they've shown we're perfectly capable of being beaten, and moreover, our greatest weakness is that we get tired of war pretty easily.
Right now we're picking on Venezuela, which is not an admirable nation, but what if we go in? Are we going to occupy the country until it becomes a democratic state? What do the Venezuelans think of that. Some of them probably don't like the idea much, and they'll resist it. Are we prepared to be in the country for a decade, two decades, three?
Note also that in our last several major wars, and this would be a major war, the US has been very careful to pretend they aren't wars.
Yeoman's Fourth Law of History. War changes everything
It'd behoove us to remember that our association with wars of choice is not a happy one. For that matter, our association with wars in general isn't all that happy.
World War Two, nearly fondly looked back upon now, created so much social destruction that we've never really recovered from it. While I've done a pretty poor job of defining it, nearly every single social ill Americans face today was amplified, if not created, due to the Second World War. People like to imagine that the war gave us a generation of stalwart self sacrificing men, and there's a lot of truth to that. It also, however, gave us a generation of men who crawled into the bottle and never came back out, and who were never able to really recover from having had their youth destroyed and every single value of a decent society made a mockery of.
We don't think much about the Korean War anymore, but the Korean War acclimated us to the concept of getting into big wars without a declaration of war, something we'd never done before. That lead to Vietnam, which destroyed the American military and which helped create the drug problem we're dealing with now. The Vietnam War was directly linked to the widespread use of all sorts of narcotics in the US which we've never been able to get a handle on.
What the impacts are of simply killing drug smugglers on the seas are isn't known yet, but we're already suffering from the impacts of exposing too many people to militarized violence. It'd serve us well to remember that two of the most infamous killings of the 1960s were committed by Marine Corps veterans. The Oklahoma City bombing was committed by an Army veteran. People trained to kill, can kill more easily, particularly if they've already killed.
There are also real dangers to teaching an entire society that killing is the answer to problems. Sen. Tom Cotton is running around doing that right now, in regard to boat murders, but where does it end? If it's okay to kill suspected drug smugglers on the sea, why isn't it on the block?
That, unfortunately, feeds right into the paranoia that some on the very far right have been backing for years. In the US crime is at an all time low, and it's been declining for decades. Blowing up boats and getting young men, and women, used to extrajudicial killing isn't going help that trend to continue.
Every single human vice finds massively amplified expression during wartime, not just killing. Soldiers at war will invariably, to some degree, engage in rape, theft and drug and alcohol use. There are no exceptions to this whatsoever. The U.S. military already has internal problems with drugs and rape, the former being a problem that every military has had always, and the latter a feature of the increased number of women in the service. War will make every single vice worse, and then that gets taken home.
Yeoman's Fifth Law of History. When a war ends is when the defending party decides that it is over.
Every war the US has entered following the Korean War, which was a genuine emergency which we entered not knowing how it would come out, has been done with the concept that we were so dominant that nobody could defeat us. Our track record is pretty poor that way. In Korea, we were fought to a stalemate by the Red Chinese who had just come out of over two decades of civil war and which should not have been a match for a first world military. In Vietnam, we did even worse and while our battlefield performance was good up until 1968, after that the service started to crumble. We proved to have no staying power in Afghanistan and Trump surrendered to the Taliban.
The thing is here that we're dealing with criminal organizations, not real foreign armies, so far. We've beaten organized crime before, but through dedicated law enforcement. The thing we've never beaten, however, is the existence of organized crime that seeks to fuel illicit desires. That is, the mafia is a shadow of its former self, but drugs and prostitution, two of its main sources of income, are as prevalent as ever.
The Trump interregnum seems to think that if you kill the middleman, the smugglers, this problem goes away. It won't. It just shifts to new trafficking routes. It might think that going right after the source will do it. There's a little support for that view, as that's basically what Mussolini did to the mafia during his fascist rule of Italy, but we really don't know that. If you start hitting drug manufacturing in Venezuela, you pretty much have to do it in Columbia and Mexico as well. That's a pretty big task, particularly given our long border with Mexico.
And you have to accept that at some point, those you are trying to kill fight back.
We haven't really experienced that for a very long time, perhaps since the Punitive Expedition of 1916, but we're living in a much more fluid world than we did even a decade ago. The North Vietnamese were not going to hit back, even if they could. But we have already seen an upset Afghani hit back. And the conditions for doing just that are presently ideal.
The Trump Administration likes to pretend its ended nine wars. What it has done iis made a lot of enemies, and a lot of those enemies are pretty smart. Why wouldn't Iran make use of the current situation in the US? Why wouldn't Venezuela, or the drug cartels. Massive domestic reaction would occur, but that would practically be part of the point. Conditions are ideal for Iran to engage in a false flag operation in the US.
Conditions are also ideal for Russia to do that. Russia has a proven track record of manipulating US information and elections. It's just approved of the Trump admin's strategic plan, which would give us pause. Getting us bogged down in a South American war would really serve their interests, and would be frighteningly easy to do. The same is true for China, or North Korea.
Chickenhawks.
One of the most pronounced trends in my life has been watching men in high office commit the country to war when they never served themselves.
This isn't completely true, if I consider every President who has been in my office during my lifetime. Kennedy, for example, had certainly seen war. But after Jimmy Carter things really changed.
People have come to admire Ronald Reagan as some sort of superhero. He was quite hawkish and deserves a lot of genuine credit for bringing the Cold War to a successful conclusion. He was a cavalry officer in the Army Reserve prior to the Second World War, but served as an actor for the Army during the war.
Not exactly John Ford.
Be that as it may, his role was his role, but one thing I wish he'd never done was to introduce the snappy salute into the Oval Office. The President is a civilian, not a soldier, and that lousy habit has been around every since.
Anyhow, George Bush I had been in the Navy in the Second World War, and his son had been a Texas National Guard pilot. George Bush II, however, really brought Dick Cheney into prominence, and Cheney had been in divinity school during the Vietnam War.
Hmmm. . .
Barack Obama had, of course, never been in the service, but I wouldn't have expected him to be. He's too young to have lived during a time of conscription.
Neither Biden or Trump are, however. No service there. Trump had shin splints, we're told.
Trump seems to have a love hate relationship with war. On some occasions he appears to genuinely abhor it, but at the same time he's having people murdered on the seas. Some of that may have to do with an oddly narrow worldview. We know that he likes money and women. That seems to be about it.
He does seem to abhor drugs. That may mean the one thing he's okay killing over is that topic, although his recent pardon of a major drug runner raises a question about that.
Epstein
View those files yet?
No, you haven't, as they still haven't been released.
The Democrats have released some materials, however, from the Epstein materials, including a photo of Trump with some young women. Their faces are blocked out, so you can't really tell how young they are, or for that matter, who they are. Other materials are just weird, including photos of sex toys, and then this:
Demonizing people
We've really entered a period of full blown racist name calling like I've never seen in my entire lifetime. It's now openly the case that Trump and some of his cronies say things that are blatantly racist.
Nobody seems to be willing to put a stop to it by calling it out.
Bear Care.
One of the interesting things going on in MAGA land is that in Wyoming, where the MAGAs now control the legislature (we're always behind the curve) there's starting to be some real pushback. As the MAGAs pushback on the pushback, people's real views start to come out.
The Wyoming Department of Health, seeing that the Republican controlled Congress is going to let a huge number of Wyomingites lose their health insurance coverage, came up with an emergency coverage plan. It'd cover things like car wrecks and bear attacks. Because it covers bear attacks, they dubbed it Bear Care.
The Wyoming Freedom Caucus, which might as well be called the Leopards Won't Eat My Face Party, is opposed to it.
Well of course they are. . . leopards won't eat my face, right?
One of the big wheels in the WFC is John Bear, ironically, who was interviewed on his views, which demonstrate he doesn't really see a separation between church and state being what most would. That puts him, and therefore perhaps the WFC, squarely in the New Apostolic Reformation camp, something very much outside of the traditional Protestant mainstream, and even more outside of the Wyoming mainstream.
Anyhow, I think Bear Care is a good idea.
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Labels: 2020s, 2025, 2025 White House Vandalization, Chuck Gray, Donald Trump, Eric Barlow, Kristi Noem, law, Mark Gordon, Pete Hegseth, Venezuela, White House, Zeitgeist
