Meanwhile, back at Lake Tahoe ...

Here, from Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander, is the latest marker of rising, squalid disingenuity in the GOP's congressional cesspool: 

You know, they're sitting around down at the White House like it was a Harvard Law Review meeting, just to show who's the smartest person in the room. We don't need the smartest person in the room. We need someone to get up and say, "OK, America, we need to deal with revenues; that's the bad news; and we also need to deal with the Medicare fiscal cliff, or you're not going to get your medical bills paid."

Catch that? Suddenly it's the Medicare fiscal cliff, a slight precipice which ObamaCare in fact forestalled by a few more years--an effort vigorously opposed, of course, by Republicans.

I don't know how they do it, but they really do manage to always find ways to new lows, or, as the intro has it, to new high-squalidness markers.

One cannot negotiate with such animals. One mustn't even try. One simply rehearses Corleone's line: "Senator? You can have my answer now, if you like. My final offer is this: nothing."

Comments

[japa21]

Actually, we do need the smartest person in the room. The Republican party's disdain of intelligence is remarkable. Unfortunately, it also has an appeal to a lot of people.

[McJeff]

I've been in the conservative end of the software/mechanical engineering world, around a lot of software developers and engineers. It is remarkable also, too, that for all their education and mathematical abilities, they cannot think their way out of a paper bag in any other way.
Many of them mostly read the Bible, watch Fox, are terrified of a UN takeover, and write code.
The contrast between the logic they use to write some pretty sophisticated software, and the rest of their worldview is astounding and saddening.

[mdblanche]

Perhaps Mr. Alexander is referring to the doc fix, or lack thereof. That could very well hurt the wallets of some people he actually cares about: his campaign contributors.

[McJeff]

I might add that lately, most of these guys (who think they are libertarian but vote Republican), now also mistrust the wealthy and the corporations and Wall Street, right along with that 'blah' man who is in the White House, and all the liberal Soros-sponsored UN shock troops, or whatever. They loathed Romney. I'm not sure they have anything, or anyone, they can truly support anymore. This makes me uneasy, more than anything else.

[Janicket]

Do they have guns, McJeff? Or do they write code that could do widespread damage if seeded with malware?

[Robert Lipscomb]

I am pretty sure Medicare is paid with FICA ("paroll") taxes, not personal income taxes.I agree that the currrent rate of increase in Medicare expenditures is not sustainable in the long run. My preferred remedey to that is bringing US medical expenditures on per capita and % GDP bases in line with the rest of modern eocnomies.

Regardless and back to my original point, how is Medicare tied to income tax rates?