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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Obama should have declared globalization dead, accused China of killing it by not playing by the rules, and started fighting the trade war that Trump and Biden have been fighting. If he had done that in 2014 or earlier Trump never would have gotten elected.

    He definitely should not have spent his entire second term fighting for the TPP harder than he ever fought for anything prior to Obamacare, rebranding it several times and then finally and laughably insisting that it was his answer to Chinese aggression. “My solution is to globalize even harder.” – Barack Obama


  • Prices were going up before ACA, under the penalties regime, and after it. There was no inflection point when the penalties got removed.

    People are still locked out of getting insurance on the exchange except during enrollment periods which means people can not “time” getting insurance. They can not wait to get sick and then get insurance only when they know they need it.

    The biggest problem with the exchanges is the insurance offered is pretty shitty (but better than pre-ACA individual coverage), and many exchanges have no real competition or even no competition offered. This is due to flaws in the design of the exchanges (making them per state) and not providing a public option that would always participate in every exchange and set a ceiling on prices.


  • China repeatedly and flagrantly violated WTO rules, imposed restrictions on US companies, pushed US companies out of the Chinese market, forced technology transfers, forced joint-ventures, nationalized foreign-owned companies, aggressively manipulated currency markets to keep Chinese goods cheap, engaged in dumping to put foreign competition out of business (ex: rare earth metal mining, solar panels).

    Obama refused to address any of this. Even obvious things like the postal union rules causing the USPS to lose money subsidizing the import of Chinese products making it cheaper to ship from China than inside the US.

    Then there was the whole Fentanyl thing which is very obviously China waging a new opium war against the US.

    All this lead directly to the collapse of the Democrats in the midwest and the rise of Trump.





  • Obamacare wasn’t bad before it got mostly dismantled

    Getting rid of the tax penalties was the only good thing the supreme court did. And also that was the worst and stupidest part of the whole bill, inserted by the insurance company lobbyists. It’s the thing that initially made ACA hugely unpopular (despite it just being so complicated and stupid). It pretty much caused the entire midterm disaster. It was one of the biggest and dumbest unforced errors the Democrats ever made.