why are folks working so hard for people not to have health insurance? well, if possession is 9/10 of the law, and i certainly think it is, millions of americans aren t going to give up their new insurance any time soon. joan walsh is editor at large for the solon and michael steele. joan, it looked like a victory lap, fair enough. that s what it was. the numbers, when you beat the spread, you cheer. that s what happened today, they beat the spread. you cheer and you say we ve got more work to do. certainly people want to get more people signed up. but really, when you look at what the republican party has done in the last six months, chris, imagine if they hadn t been rooting against it? imagine if they hadn t been hyping every scare story. imagine if they hadn t been saying don t sign up for this mess, it s a disaster and we re going to repeal it. imagine if all 50 states had their own state-run exchange? instead we only had 17 of those. imagine if all governors had expanded medi
let me go back to joan here. politically, i go back to what we all cooked up here, which is that old phrase, possession is 9/10 of the law. once you have it in hand, it s like golda meir once said. new fax. new fax. it isn t about the theory of health care, it s about the reality. and i would think that s a stronger hand for the dems. michael, your thoughts. and i really appreciate michael saying we have to let people who have preexisting conditions keep their health insurance. but the three of us know and most of the american people know that to do that you require the individual mandate. and when you have the individual mandate, you re going to need some subsidies because some people frankly can t afford it. president obama and the democrats did this through the private insurance system. they did not do single payer. they did not have a public option. they worked with the quirks of the free enterprise system to make it work. and the subsidies are important. so you re never going
i do believe cbo is wrong here because most economists disagree. when you raise minimum wage it does not cut jobs. that is a fact. if you are worth more than the minimum wage to your employer you will make it. if you are not worth more you will lose your job or have hours cut. it is a mix bag. of course, it is going to help some people. if it is $9.10 an hour and you are worth $9.11 to your employer you got a raise. if you are worth $8.10 you will lose your job. it is basic economics. it is basic economics. 600 economists say they are wrong because they are using an outdated model. much more importantly you can t mean the people in your state, in maryland, who are actually working for places like
talk on a daily basis. do these right wingers really think there s going to be some revolution to overthrow the tyrant barack obama? do these particular right wingers believe that? yeah, i think they might to be perfectly honest. we talked about the invading canadian army. he talked previously about how president obama was on the verge of detonating nuclear explosives to kill 9/10 of the country. it s politics by mad lib. it s not closely tied to reality. what s scary is that we see these things on the very far right. the extreme that can be written off. but it doesn t stay there. that kind of rhetoric moves closer and closer into our mainstream politics. and then we start seeing people we think of as more responsible with the rhetoric and even sometimes using some of the same tactics when talking about riling people up. a lot of people think why is
coffee shop down the street, that s not competition for me. believe it or not, if someone can t find something here, i tell them to go to the jewelry store down the block. i want it to stay in town. why shouldn t they be able to find it in another shop in town? 2013 was a tumultuous year for many small business owners. they had to deal with government uncertainty confusion over the new health care law. as we look forward, there does seem to be hope. the national federation of independent business optimism index was up in november 9/10 of a point. they provided a seasonal adjusted increase in november. could this be a trend for 2014? we have the founder and ceo of the advocacy group, the small business majority. daniel pink was an aide to rice and a proclaimed business thinker and best selling author. his latest is to sell is human.