Old Grouch has claimed to post in the past just to call me names and for sport. Hard to take him seriously after that. Sort of like any bully, when someone actually pressures him with logic, he collapses like a house of cards.

I am surprised, however, that you seem to approve of dictatorial edicts. Hardly very liberal.

PS I've been "dead to him" multiple times.

You are reminding us of the neocon position, of course.

Well no, "neocon" refers to the chickenhawk war monger wing of the Republican party led by Wolfowitz, Cheney and Rumsfeld. I am describing the anti-tax, anti-government wing of Goldwater, Reagan and GW Bush.

Unfortunately, they have been helped by a fiscal policy that the country was drunk on "free" credit -- only now the bill is due.

Actually "fiscal" policy refers to the spending side, "monetary" policy deals with credit. It's was the monetary policy of the US government over the last decade to encourage the use and abuse of that not so "free" credit, under Greenspan and Bush, to gin up false prosperity.

Economic growth has been part and parcel with cheap energy greasing the entire works. If energy isn't cheap, you won't get the growth. As we are now past peak oil, it's going to be quite a scary ride.

All the more reason to make public investments and encourage private investments in 21st century energy technology. This is decades overdue. We took a huge step backward when Reagan scrapped Carter's energy initiatives and we've been behind ever since.

So, despite the neocons wanted to drown the baby, they were helped by larger forces that they had nothing to do with. Therefore, just because they wanted us to think in a certain direction, it doesn't mean that it's wrong to do so.

Not sure what you mean here. As I see it the American people voted in a bunch of people who hated government. In the first iteration under Reagan they were happy with phase one, gutting federal revenues. Reagan might have had more success gutting federal spending if he hadn't unwisely tried to means test Social Security. He got his butt handed to him in the 1982 midterms because of it. He and Tip O'Neill set up a commission, headed by Greenspan to solve what was then a very real Social Security solvency crisis.
In 1983 Reagan signed into law the doubling of FICA taxes. That solved the SS solvency crisis, by not only providing enough money to pay off current recipients but build up the Trust Fund to cover the baby boomer bulge.

It took the high-tech boon of the Internet buildout that allowed revenues to rise under Clinton, much like electrification in the 1920s. This did a lot of alleviate the debt of the Reagan years. Those types of infrastructure buildout are quite rare. I see nothing on the horizon (including alternate energy) that will provide that type of boost.

That internet boom should have continued along the lines we had in 2000 which was much like the competitive structure in France. It would have under Gore. Bush said the net was "full of dark dungeons, ready to ensnare our children". He didn't much believe in competition and his FCC and the conservative courts turned the internet over to the few big baby bells and cable providers who have slow walked technological innovation preferring to monopolize regional markets so they can maximize their own profits. Letting the marketplace decide with small players on a level playing field with the big boys would have been a much better use of all that money foreigners were willing to throw at us here rather than bursting that bubble and ginning up credit and real estate ones predicated on the ability of the American consumer to shoulder unsustainable amounts of debt. Would have helped CA a lot too if Silicon Valley didn't suffer the worst. A lot of $100,000 engineering and programming jobs (and the income tax revenue) went bye bye in 2001-2003.

This did a lot of alleviate the debt of the Reagan years. The 1990s job boom associated with the tech boom is what drove down the debt. Of course once it became clear you could pay people in Bangalore or Manila much lower wages to work in your back offices using the new communication tech than even North Dakota on Friedman's flat earth it drove American jobs overseas. And there's no way to get any of those jobs back or create new ones unless we lower the cost of doing business in the US. To do that we must cut in half the 17.5% of GDP we spend on healthcare.

Those types of infrastructure buildout are quite rare. I see nothing on the horizon (including alternate energy) that will provide that type of boost.

Pessimist. There were actually some folks in the late 1900s who suggested we close the Patent Office because they thought everything that could be invented already had been. I suggest you look at all the technological innovation that has taken place in the last century. A century from now those achievements will be dwarfed by several magnitudes. Are you satisfied with today's level of alternative energy technology? Transportation? Medicine? Food production? Global warming? You shouldn't be because it's not sustainable. There's millions of people at work on solutions for these problems and the ones who invent and commercialize the breakthrus are gonna get rich saving the vast majority of humankind from ruining our home planet and falling back into the dark ages.

The Energy and Healthcare bills are a start in preparing the USA to lead that revolution.

You really need to read those articles Barefooted. Once again, there never has been a wave of frivolous liability lawsuits, for medical malpractice or any other reason. Even so a whole host of states have already passed "tort reform". It hasn't resulted in lower medical malpractice insurance rates for doctors. The decades long dishonest PR campaign by the insurance cos and the GOP, aided and abetted by the media has largely succeeded. You even seem to believe them.

Doctors claim they order extra tests because of the threat of lawsuits. Well that's one reason but they don't know any better than that either. They also get paid for every test they order and the incentives are all skewed toward ordering the most services they can get Medicare or insurance companies to pay for, not what's best for the patient. There's plenty of studies that show more of this kind of "healthcare" is as likely to kill you as less.

I'd say ask my mother but you can't. She died in 2006, 6 months after being admitted to our local heart surgery mill hospital for a bladder infection and getting scared into having a triple bypass she was in no condition to recover from. Between the hospital and the 17 doctors who got a piece of the action, most of whom I never saw, they made half a million dollars off her "care" from Medicare and Blue Cross. Fee for service has to go. They recognize that in the House bill and have all kinds of demonstration projects set up, there's $2.9 billion in the stimulus bill to institute a robust nat'l electronic record keeping system that in part will be used by a beefed up MEDPAC to data mine for best and worst practices and then pay according to what works.

A medical malpractice public option amendment can be incorporated into any bill, or even pass as stand alone legislation. I think it'd lower med mal insurance rates for most doctors tremendously because most of those premiums are pure profit for insurance companies. I haven't seen it in any bill yet but I'm telling every congress critter's receptionist I talk to about it, be they Repub or Dem. As long as we're changing everything else, we might as well get that on the table too.