Thursday, October 27, 2011

From Hertzberg's Blog

Answer Me These Heresies Three

Posted by Hendrik Hertzberg

Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail

ONE

Believe it or not, studies have been done that show that in Western Europe, people at the lower parts of the income scale actually have a better mobility going up the ladder now than in America.
Rick Santorum, CNN Republican debate, October 18

TWO


No, it [i.e., the abortion issue] comes down to it’s not the government’s role or anybody else’s role to make that decision. Secondly, if you look at the statistical incidents, you’re not talking about that big a number. So what I’m saying is it ultimately gets down to a choice that that family or that mother has to make—not me as President, not some politician, not a bureaucrat. It gets down to that family. And whatever they decide, they decide. I shouldn't have to tell them what decision to make for such a sensitive issue… I can have an opinion on an issue without it being a directive on the nation. The government shouldn’t be trying to tell people everything to do, especially when it comes to social decisions that they need to make.
Herman Cain, CNN’s Piers Morgan Tonight, October 19


THREE

I’m sorry, Rick, that you find so much to dislike in my plan, but I’ll tell you, the people in Massachusetts like it by about a 3-1 margin. And we dealt with a challenge that we had, a lot of people that were expecting government to pay their way. And we said, you know what? If people have the capacity to care for themselves and pay their own way, they should.... What we do is rely on private insurers, and people—93 percent of our people who are already insured, nothing changed. For the people who didn’t have insurance, they get private insurance, not government insurance.
Mitt Romney, CNN Republican debate, October 18



Supplementary notes:

ONE: Santorum was apparently referring to a 2008 Brookings Institution (!) study showing that, as the authors put it, “rising on one’s own bootstraps is harder in the United States than it is in several Northern European countries,” to wit, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Sweden. The study shows that the people of Canada, Germany, France, Spain, and Australia, too, are living the American dream better then Americans are.

All these countries have high taxes, government-guaranteed universal health care, ample social services, and non-crumbling infrastructure. But you already knew that.

TWO: No amplification needed. Transcript here. To the stake!

THREE: A little murkier, but Romney’s admonition that people who have the capacity to pay their own way should do so is actually a reference to the requirement that people get health insurance, with a government subsidy if necessary, or else pay a penalty—an idea promoted by conservatives like Newt Gingrich and the right-wing wonks of the Heritage Foundation, as Romney correctly noted. This is the notorious "individual mandate," a feature of both "Romneycare" and "Obamacare," as is the provision of care via "private insurance, not government insurance." But you already knew that, too.

2 comments:

James R said...

Wow, this the the biggest story yet, and there have been some big ones. I guess its so the queen can read it without her spectacles.

Big Myk said...

OK, I reduced the font size to more appropriately match the significance of the piece, which mostly I stuck in the blog because it refers to Monty Python and is otherwise mildly entertaining.

Also, Hertzberg had a follow up blog enttry citing more heresy from Eric Cantor:


Heresies, Cont’d: Four Shalt Thou Not Count

Posted by Hendrik Hertzberg

A week ago, Eric Cantor, who reminds some people of why they were glad to leave high school behind, went on Fox News Sunday and said the Fox News/Republican Party unsayable:


"We agree that there’s too much income disparity in this country."

Expanding on this remarkable admission, the House Majority Leader added that “we”, i.e., Republicans and Democrats alike,


"know in this country right now that there is a complaint about folks at the top end of the income scale, if they make too much, and too many don’t make enough. Well, we need to both go encourage those at the top of the income scale to actually put their money to work to create more jobs so that we can see a closing of the gap. You know, we are about income mobility and that’s what we should be focussed on to take care of the income disparity in this country."

Adepts at code-breaking will understand that “encouraging those at the top of the income scale to actually put their money to work” is Cantorspeak for cutting rich people’s income taxes, gutting environmental and financial regulations, and, probably, abolishing corporate taxes, capital gains taxes, and inheritance taxes altogether. Still, good for Cantor for recognizing that the “complaint” is valid. (And good for Occupy Wall Street for doing the complaining.)

Not only that, but Cantor was all set to give a lecture Friday afternoon on that very formerly taboo subject, income inequality (or “disparity,” as he prefers to call it), at Wharton, the University of Pennsylvania’s business school. Around lunchtime, he suddenly bailed out, so to speak, after learning that the speaker series of which his lecture was to be a part is open to the general public, riled-up Occupy fans and business-school students alike.

Cantor, therefore, is not really a fully qualified heretic, just a run-of-the-mill martyr.

Update: Tim Noah reads the prepared text of the speech Cantor was going to give, and suggests that its cancellation was an act of euthanasia.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/hendrikhertzberg/2011/10/heresies-contd-four-shalt-thou-not-count.html#ixzz1c5ExqfkB