Friday News Roundup - Hour 1
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2011-04-22/friday-news-roundup-hour-1
The U. S. receives a warning about its credit rating. President Obama takes his deficit plan on the road. And more bad news for air traffic controllers after a near mishap with the First Lady’s plane. A panel of journalists joins Diane for analysis of the week's top national news stories.
Guests
Clarence Page
syndicated columnist for the Chicago Tribune.
Susan Davis
congressional correspondent, National Journal.
Byron York
chief political correspondent, Washington Examiner.
News Roundup Video
A caller who works as an air traffic controller explains his opinion that President Ronald Reagan's policies contributed to the recent problems with air traffic controllers falling asleep:
Comments
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Election season has begun. Obama's fundraising at every turn and announcing investigations of oil speculation. He's probably kissing babies and making more promises he intends to break.
Gold prices are rising and US debt is headed to junk status. We need some hope and even more change.
Diane, Please do not ignore the costs of our wars (Lives, physical and mental) and total financing. Planned Parenthood should not pay for Bush's aggression.
Hi Diane, Please have a serious discussion of the real issues without letting the crazies on the right define what the issues are.
hainc wrote: "Election season has begun. Obama's fundraising at every turn"
Hey, wasn't this the guy who said he didn't care if he was a one-termer or not?!
Prediction - if unemployment rate is still at 9% (effective rate is at least twice that) and gas at 5.00 a gallon at this time next year, he will be. Those items form the bottom line for most independant voters - the ones that every Presidential candidate needs.
Diane,
President Obama announced that a task force will be investigating the increase in gasoline prices.
They "say" it could be fraud and speculation.
They are wrong.
If they actually care to figure out who the culprits are, they wouldn't even have to leave the Beltway.
It's the value of the dollar and the policies of Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke.
Oil is traded on the world market, just like every other commodity, in US dollars.
When the value of the dollar declines, prices increase.
It's mathematics.
THAT is why commodity prices have risen, including oil. QE1, QE2, backdoor bailouts, etc....increasing the number of dollars (supply) beyond that of demanded, decreases the value of the US dollar.
That is simple economics and common sense.
Please be the voice of reason and call out this blatant misdirection by the administration.
If you like a visual depiction, graph the value of the dollar vs. the price of oil. They are inversely correlated and highly proportional.
Here is a link for your easy access: http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=184722
-David
On the issue of health care, instead of arguing over programs, can Congress and Obama agree to goals for the program, ie, so the left tries to get its goals of a high % of pop covered, limits on growth of health care cost. The right gets what they want - more state control and both sides agree to fund 10 to 12 pilot state programs. Let the states explore block grants, a MA option or whatever but monitor each program for specific benchmarks.
Frankly most Americans are so done with this political fight - they simply want some compromises. Even I a political junkie turned you all off this week.
David said, "It's the value of the dollar "
You are right about the stealth inflation of the falling dollar, no doubt. But speculation is playing a part in oil prices too. I expected that the announcement of the investigation would have put a pin in the inflated price, but it didn't. I think that is because nobody believes anything will come out of "an investigation". The reaction was different when Bush announced increased drilling - that started the ball rolling downhill to the tune of about 400% about 3 years ago. The dollar was stronger then, however.
Please don't forget about the death of Tim Hetherington while trying to document that sideshow/ploy to strengthen the U.S.'s oil empire going on in Libya. Tragic.
I am a senior who agrees that reform is needed in Social Security and Medicare. There should be means testing as well as raising the age for SS. Medicare needs to stay in the public sector with private insurance supplemental. Perhaps if we take 'profit' out of health care, as most of the rest of the world has, we can cover everyone and no one would face bankruptcy due to medical bills. That's my opinion and that of most seniors I know. If only our government would touch this 'rail'. Until this issue is seriously addressed the budget and credit rating of our nation are at risk.
Hi Diane, Please have a discussion without pandering to the crazies on the left. Good luck!
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Re young doctors & their schedules. There was an attempt a while back to set some requirements on their hours. How soon after a 36 hour stint another one can be scheduled, etc. I'm not sure what the final result was. I think you did a program about it.
The same thing with pilots & truckers a while back - how much time they had to be allowed between shifts.
So don't use one wrong to justify another one, and in any event those "wrongs" have already been ameliorated somewhat.
Transportation Secretary's position is absurd and he should be called on it.
Diane: Please don't let Mr. York's assertion go unchallenged. Mr. York stated we could confiscate the income of all individuals earning over $200k, and we would still not close the budget gap. In his article, "How the Wall Street Journal Distorts the Truth About Taxes," economist Jeffrey Sach debunks the myth Mr. York espouses. Mr. Sachs convincingly explains that "f the tax rate were 100% rather than 23% (and assuming in the Journal illustration an unchanged AGI), the extra revenues would be $1,300 billion, or 9 percent of GDP. Even allowing for other taxes already paid by the richest 1%, the incremental federal tax revenues would be at least 6 percent of GDP. Since every baseline scenario by the Congressional Budget Office and the Office of Management and Budget shows a deficit between 2013 and 2021 that is less than 6 percent of GDP, the total income of the top 1% would close the budget deficit entirely."
Also, it does go back to Reagan's firing the air traffic controllers. He basically established that they had no right to bargain on working conditions, which I believe is why they were striking.
Another thing that will be happening and also goes back to Reagan is that a huge number of these controllers were hired at the same time and were probably close in age. Well, they may be retiring in numbers faster than they can be replaced.
Why are politicians so afraid to let the free market system work? I suspect ego and a need to tell people what to do. The great thing about the USA was always that people here could do what they love or are good at free from interference, as long as they didn't interfere with another person's rights and freedoms. Now, the government has their fingers in everything. They need to get back to their core purpose of national defense and making regulations that stop people from taking advantage of their neighbor, as well as these games of Wall Street, the largest casino in the world!
Diane,
I am a corporate pilot. I don't worry much about controllers sleeping, we land at uncontrolled airports all of the time and know how to do it if the controller is incapacitated. I don't understand why they are put on such long shifts over night. A few scheduling changes such as 6 hour night shifts and shift changes at 2 or 3 in the morning would make it much less likely for these folks to fall asleep.
Monday, June 17, 2002
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2002-06-17/medical-residents-hours
Medical Residents' Hours
10 a.m. (ET)
Overworked medical residents will get some relief from new rules restricting how many hours they spend on the job each week. A panel talks about the regulations and how they'll affect medical education and health care.
Came up again in 2005:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4512366
Regrding cuts or changes to Medicare. We keep talking as if this only impacts seniors. Who will pay for the health care of these people without adequate Medicare coverage. The answer in most cases is very simple: their middle class sons and daughters and grandchildren!
Diane, I don't think that any term other than Class Warfare accurately describes what has been happening during the last twenty years. Income for the upper portion of the population has soared, while those for the lower and shrinking middle classes have remained flat.
The cost of health care will never come down until you take away the easy money to have it. Insurance and government programs only make prices go up because the end user fells very little financial pain and they will pay anything to get healthy. The ONLY way to lower costs is to have the user pay out of pocket and set the price by what they are willing to pay. This applies also to college and homes...when there is too much easy credit or the ability to have someone else foot the bill, humans don't say no to the cost. Especially when we think we need it, deserve it or just want it really bad!
CraigS
I agree that we need to go back to national defense- national (military) offense needs cut back.
Problem with allowing “free market work” is that to many this means creating a business climate stripped of oversight or regulations designed to protect individuals from abusive practices of wall St, etc.
Diane requested that we stop using the phrase 'class warfare'. I'll agree to that when panelists and callers stop using the words 'entitlements' (should be 'earnings'). As the division between the 'haves' and 'have nots' widens it is difficult to see it as anything but class warfare.
Your guest Brian York is apparently a talking points person for the right. He needs to be challenged to show evidence for his biased views. The Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute do not count as they are bought and paid for by the right.
What is his plan to give liberty and JUSTICE to all and not just for corporations. The poor and middle class need to pursue happiness. What is the right's answer to giving the least of these the food, health care, housing, and jobs.
Maybe it would be helpful for GE, Bank of America, and other groups to pay a share of their wealth in taxes.
This conversation and call-ins reflects how our population is being brainwashed to think the only answers are to cut social security and medicare.
Our two wars are costing us trillions of dollars to spread democracy in countries they really don't care about democracy or they would have been doing what Egypt and Libya are doing a year after we entered there. And why isn't one person asking why Iraq isn't paying for the cost of US lead democracy. Iraq has the third largest deposits of oil in the world and we are presently spending $58 Billion, or twice what congress wants to cut our deficit by, to reconstruct Iraq. We don't even want them to pay for that. We want to take these costs out of medicare and social security.
Iraq is pumping 3 Million barrells of oil a day and plan to pump 12 million by 2017 and they can't pay us anything. The numbers are very large at $100 a barrell.
The US taxpayers only paid 12% of Desert Storm (freeing Kuwait) Kuwait and Saudia Arabia paid 50% and Japan and others paid all but our 12%.
Didn't George Bush say we would pay for the war in Iraq with Iraq oil. Well lets reduce the deficit with Iraqi oil and forget Medicare. A single payer plan would fix that.
Class warfare is when the government, for no good reason, assaults the earnings of those who work in order to fund income redistribution programs benefiting those who don't. The attack is on income and the weapon is taxes; the justification ideology.
As a 52 year old women I can assure you I am very much going to make a fuss about the proposal to turn Medicare into a private voucher system. Without a guarantee of medical insurance and a reasonable expectation of coverage at an affordable cost, I can never have a secure retirement. I know this all too well from personal experience.
My parents came close to losing their entire life savings due to healthcare bills. My mother, age 61, (and thus not eligible for Medicare) contracted cancer and the medical bills came to within a few thousand dollars of the $100,000 lifetime cap as a spouse under my father's health insurance. She died before exceeding this cap, but had she lived, her medical costs might have well wiped-out my parents modest saving, forcing my father, then 68, to go back to work or face destitution. Obviously as a family member I would have been affected as well by having to help support my father.
Ryan's plan to not impose the cuts on those 55 and older is a clever way to minimize opposition, as he knows that seniors are active politically. But make no mistake his cuts to Medicare and also Medicaid would be felt intergenerationally.
I will not go quietly into the night and let this change go down without a fight, and I speak as someone who has voted in every elction since turning 18.
Two good hours of informative conversation. Diane can do a great job when she keeps her emotions out of it, I suppose that is why I come back day after day. She is the grandmother none of us would mind having. Politically way too nanny state for my tastes but a fine lady.
Delete wrong place
hainc wrote:
"Class warfare is when the government, for no good reason, assaults the earnings of those who work in order to fund income redistribution programs benefiting those who don't. The attack is on income and the weapon is taxes; the justification ideology."
As pithy and succinct a summary of what has happened in this country since the 30's as I have ever seen. I assure you, hainc, I will steal it at some point! Nice going.
Diane:
I was appalled to hear Byron York pontificating on your show without sufficient chaperone. York is soft spoken, yet is still a right-wing extremist.
I only got to hear about 15 or 20 minutes this morning, but in that short time heard York talk about the "savings" generated from our draw-down in Iraq without adequate correction (only a muffled scoff from you).
At best this is Orwellian nonsense, but it is closer to a grotesque distortion. How can anyone be allowed to talk, rationally, about SAVINGS of any kind associated with a war of choice, unprovoked aggression, and oil sold to the American people on a false bill of goods? A war that has been so discredited and has so discredited our nation in the eyes of the world? SAVINGS? Financial, not to mention the human "collateral damage?"
Second, York was allowed to speak in calm tones (without any challenge) about how reasonable Republicans meant no harm to "the Big 3" of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid but were simply trying to deal with a real and present financial crisis. No one on your show pointed out the clear culpability of the crisis by the Bush regime's waging of 2 wars with historic tax bonuses for the wealthy, or the well-documented "starve the beast" strategy of David Stockman, or the fact that conservatives have so loathed and despised Social Security and Medicare that they fought them tooth and nail--and then, tried to kill them in their infancy.
Please Diane, if you are going to have someone like Byron York on the air, please have a forceful proponent of reality (I suppose that is currently termed "liberalism") on the show to effectively counter his nonsense.