Republicans propose change to ObamaCare that will drop insurance for 1.5 million employees, saving Business money, and expand Deficit $74 billion over 10 years. That's "Fiscal Conservatism."

You heard the whining. Republicans complained that many Americans lost their old insurance plans to ObamaCare.

And yet those same Republicans want to take health care away from 1.5 million hard working people. By changing the Affordable Care Act for the worse, they would allow businesses to drop their employee insurance. More on that below. And the public isn't outraged or clamoring to stop them?

Am I pissed? You bet, and here's why: If the Affordable Care Act was the disaster the GOP claimed it was, then why are they rewriting it to intentionally making it worse, angering the public even more? From MotherJones:

Republicans plan to vote on a bill that would gut Obamacare—and could deprive up to 1.5 million Americans of their employer-sponsored health insurance. The law defines employees who work 30 or more hours per week as full time. The legislation ... would change the definition of full time to 40 hours per week for purposes of the law. Companies that don't want to provide health insurance for their employees can avoid doing so by cutting workers' hours.

"I call this the 'send people home a half hour early on Friday and deny them health insurance' bill," says Tim Jost, a health care law scholar at the Washington and Lee University School of Law who has consulted with the Obama administration on implementation of the Affordable Care Act.

Cutting time at work by a half hour, even 15 minutes, is no joke. But can Republicans still blame ObamaCare if something they changed in the law takes health care away from 1 and half million people? Of course, because Obama would have signed it into law as part of an important budget bill.

"Raising the threshold to 40 hours would place more than five times as many workers at risk of having their hours reduced," Paul van de Water, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, wrote in 2013.

And the cost of this Republicans ObamaCare add-on?

"...increasing the federal deficit by $73.7 billion over 10 years, according to the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation."

Incredibly, Democrats continue to waffle on the basic fundamental human right to health care, and Republicans are loving it. For that reason, the GOP can make the case health care is a consumer product that people can "shop" for. Cancer? Shop, shop, shop.

Insurers, hospitals, doctors, drug and device makers will all share in the profits of the "health care" buying public. Can't afford it? Ask your neighbor to donate a few hundred dollars for a little help. Maybe that church down the street. Schools are now requiring their students to provide some kind of social service...maybe a car wash or bake sale.

Ask Paul Ryan why our Debt has Skyrocketed during the Bush Years, and why he Doesn't want to pay anything Back.

While Scott Walker would like to blame Obama for doubling the national debt, it's important to understand why really doubled, and the long term effects of Bush economic policies.

Short Memories and a devious plan: Paul Ryan is big on reforming the tax code, and cutting taxes. But he shouldn't do either until we as a country payback much of the money we've borrowed. From all indications, Ryan wants to change the rules so he won' have to pay back our loans.

Yet Ryan's votes got us into our current hole.

Disaster Capitalism: Using that debt now to cut spending on our social safety nets, like Social Security and Medicare, may have been the plan all along. Using the crisis created by his own votes to spend, he can now demand cuts to programs used by those Ryan calls the "takers:" Retired Americans swinging carefree in the "hammocks," veterans, the disabled and children. Brutal yes, and an effective strategy.

Here are the charts you can point to, that dug us deep into a hole, now being blamed on Obama?

CBPP: The deficit for fiscal year 2009 — which began almost four months before President Obama took office — was $1.4 trillion and, at 10 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), marked the largest deficit relative to the economy since the end of World War II.

That era’s tax cuts, most of which policymakers extended in this year’s American Taxpayer Relief Act, with President Obama’s support, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will account for almost half of the debt that we will owe, under current policies, by 2019. By contrast, the economic recovery measures and financial rescues will account for just over 10 percent of the debt at that time.

Sykes belittles the little man, Rep. Robin Vos!

Everyone's talking about how State Rep. Robin Vos collapsed under the interviewing pressure of TMJ's Charlie Sykes. Sykes' questions got Vos to admit he was lying earlier in the interview.

Deficits don't matter, again? While Rep. Paul Ryan ran on the presidential ticket pushing a balanced budget, Vos is happy with huge deficits. Republicans love having it both ways. Hear that teabillies?

Republicans don't really care about deficits. Vos is acting no different than his fellow DC Republicans during the Bush administration, where tax cut deficits were were all the rage. How'd that turn out? In fact, Vos brags he wouldn't mind having a billion dollar deficit. Just amazing.

Here's a shortened audio version of Vos' spanking. How pathetic is it to know that Sykes is in total control of our state assembly.



Root River Siren has a nice piece on this.

Sequester slows America's Future. Welcome to our Minority Controlled America.

Sequester Austerity hits Wisconsin:

jsonline: The Medical College of Wisconsin estimates that it will lose $5 million to $9 million in federal funding for research due to automatic budget cuts that took effect last week. The school also will lose an estimated $1.5 million in revenue a year from a 2% reduction in what Medicare pays physicians. And Froedtert Hospital, its academic medical center, projects that it will lose about $7.5 million. These are just a few examples of the reductions in federal spending on health care from sequestration, and they could be a preview of what's ahead.

It didn't have to be like this.

Disaster Capitalism: The Republicans set us up for austerity, by spending like “drunken sailors” and creating an economic/deficit crisis during the Bush years. Sure Clinton left them with projected budget surpluses, but do you think Democrats will bring that up…ever?

Republicans now control the dialog about a supposed “spending problem,” when it’s really a revenue problem made worse by the Great Recession. And they control the dialog thanks to the Democratic Party’s reluctance to advance their own agenda and force conservatives to fight against populist ideas.

The sequester cuts spending, sure, but it also slows progress by taking away from what made the U.S. great in the first place, research and development.  We won’t be so quick to create new industries and/or save money by improving current inefficient technologies.

With no push back or promise of restoring societal advances, Democrats are helping to usher in the new austere America. And there is still no clear Democratic alternative.

People will settle into, and adjust to, life made a little harder, even though it really doesn't have to be like this. With all the difficult life changing curve balls reality tosses at us, do we need to start spinning our wheels needlessly to fulfill some minority groups fringe concept of what it means to be truly free?  

Sadly the answer is yes. 

Obama's Spending compared to Fiscal Conservative Republicans under George W. Bush!!

Is Obama’s spending out of control? Republican Candidates for U.S. Senate say so, defying truth again.

This is just a short blurb that describes the Republican position on pushing their austere agenda.

jsonline: Mark Neumann said that, after the federal government spent money on the economic stimulus and the TARP program for troubled banks, spending continued to increase. Obama's proposed budget continues that deficit trend, he said.

But as you an see by the chart, due to the Great Recession, Obama tightened spending like never before: