The Broken window

The parable of the Broken Window was first expressed by the great French economist, Frederic Bastiat. Bastiat used the parable of a broken window to point out why destruction doesn’t benefit the economy. The story goes like this:

A young hoodlum, heaves a brick through the window of a baker’s shop. The shopkeeper runs out furiously, looking for the miscreant, but the boy is gone. A crowd gathers, and begins to stare with quiet satisfaction at the gaping hole in the window and the shattered glass over the bread and pies. After a while the crowd feels the need for philosophic reflection. Several of its members are almost certain to remind each other or the baker that, after all, the misfortune has its bright side: It will make business for some glazier. As they begin to think of this they elaborate upon it: How much does a new plate glass window cost? Two hundred dollars? That will be quite a sum. Then, of course, the thing is endless. The glazier will have $200 more to spend with other merchants, and these in turn will have $200 more to spend with still other merchants, and so ad infinitum. The smashed window will go on providing money and employment in ever-widening circles. The logical conclusion from all this would be, if the crowd drew it, that the little hoodlum who threw the brick, far from being a public menace, was a public benefactor. After all, if windows were never broken, then the glaziers would soon be out of business.

The fallacy of the onlookers’ argument is that they considered only the benefits of purchasing a new window, but they ignored the cost to the shopkeeper. As the shopkeeper was forced to spend his money on a new window, he could not spend it on something else. For example, the shopkeeper might have preferred to spend the money on bread and shoes for himself (thus enriching the baker and cobbler), but now cannot because he must fix his window.

Thus, the child did not bring any net benefit to the town. Instead, he made the town poorer by at least the value of one window, if not more. His actions benefited the glazier, but at the expense not only of the shopkeeper, but the baker or the cobbler as well. Moreover, the benefit to the glazier is relatively small, because most of what he charges is to compensate him for his tedious and strenuous labor, as well as the materials he uses.

The same thing happens here when we pas a law mandating that everyone gets free health care, or in the case of ObamaCare, that everyone is forced to purchase health insurance. People rejoice because they are getting “free” somethings, without reflecting that the net cost to society is high.

Suppose it was discovered that the little boy was actually hired by the glazier, and paid a franc for every window he broke. Suddenly the same act would be regarded as theft: the glazier was breaking windows in order to force people to hire his services. Yet the facts observed by the onlookers remain true: the glazier benefits from the business at the expense of the baker, the cobbler, and so on. Bastiat argues that people actually do endorse activities which are morally equivalent to the glazier hiring a boy to break windows for him (specifically the burning of Paris):

Whence we arrive at this unexpected conclusion: “Society loses the value of things which are uselessly destroyed;” and we must assent to a maxim which will make the hair of protectionists stand on end—To break, to spoil, to waste, is not to encourage national labour; or, more briefly, “destruction is not profit.”

You reflect on how much trade would gain by the burning of Paris, from the number of houses it would be necessary to rebuild?

I have spent the last few weeks posting on how certain members of the financial industry profited through the buying off of politicians on both sides of the aisle, getting those politicians to change the rules of the game so those particular members profited immensely, and then getting out of the game before the now gamed system fell apart.

We see a repeat of history as the health care and health insurance industry game the system to their own benefit, and use the government to do it.

Subsidizing health insurance with taxes upon the rich, many will say, is justified because the rich can well afford the extra taxes. They ignore the fact that the rich do not simply roll around on top of large piles of money. What happens is that the things and services that the rich man would have bought will go unpurchased. The employees who produced the things that the rich man used to purchase (before the tax) will be laid off as demand drops.

You cannot make an economy grow by taking money from one sector and giving it to another, just as you cannot stand inside of a bucket and lift yourself off the ground by frantically tugging on the handle.

March jobs

The labor department reported that payrolls increased in March because there were 162,000 jobs added, and they claim that this is the best showing in three years, thus proving that the economy is improving. I believe that is a misleading report. The government hired 48,000 of those people for the census, and those jobs all end at the end of July. Expect unemployment to climb in August.

This article claims that private industry added 123,000 jobs. All of this is propaganda. (BTW 123K plus 48K is NOT 162K. Just sayin). There were actually 114,000 jobs added. What is funny is that Obama takes credit for adding the jobs created by a Census that was mandated in the Constitution, written nearly 200 years before he was born.

Unemployment is remaining steady, mostly because people’s unemployment extensions are running out, and there are still no jobs out there. There are 6.5 million people who have been out of work for 6 months or longer. Even if you take the jobs report for March seriously, it will take us over 5 years at March’s rate for us to hire those 6.5 million people and be back to a “normal” employment rate.

This all reminds me of Bagdad Bob. You guys remember him?

Political and legal roots of the foreclosure mess and the recession

I have recently been on a kick of looking at the mortgage foreclosure crisis that started the whole recession going. Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3, looked at securitization, and Part 4 looked at the strategic default. I also wrote a post here about the greed of originators who loaned money to people that they knew couldn’t pay, knowing that the loan would be sold off to investors long before the first payment was due, thus removing all incentive for originators to make sure people could actually pay the loans back.

This post will look at why the process was so profitable, or to be more accurate, why did this happen so recently, and what changed that made it happen. The Republicans would have you believe that the Democrats are to blame, claiming that banks were required by the Clinton administration to loan to minorities. The truth is far more sinister.

The blame has its roots in the Great Depression, and the banking act of 1933, most commonly called the Glass-Steagall Act. The act separated the Commercial Banking and Investment worlds. At the time, “improper banking activity”, or what was considered overzealous commercial bank involvement in stock market investment, was deemed the main culprit of the financial crash. According to that reasoning, commercial banks took on too much risk with depositors’ money.

Commercial banks were accused of being too speculative in the pre-Depression era, not only because they were investing their assets, but also because they were buying new issues for resale to the public. Thus, banks became greedy, taking on huge risks in the hope of even bigger rewards. Banking itself became sloppy and objectives became blurred. Unsound loans were issued to companies in which the bank had invested, and clients would be encouraged to invest in those same stocks.

The Glass-Steagall Act prevented the banks from making these risky investments, and prevented another crash caused by greed and sloppy lending practices. At least until the Gramm Leach Bliley Act came along in 1999. This law relaxed the regulation and interinvestment restrictions between the Banking, Insurance, and Securities Companies, allowing loans to be converted into securities and sold to investors.

The bill was introduced by Phil Gram (R-Texas),  Jim Leach (R-Iowa), and Thomas Bliley (R-Virginia). The bill passed with Yea votes coming from both parties- 90 to 7 with 2 abstentions in the Senate, and 362 to 57 with 15 abstentions in the House. This was a true bipartisan effort. It was signed into law by President Clinton in November of 1999.

This law allowed mergers of companies like Citi Bank (Banking) and Travellers Group (Insurance) to form Citi Group ( a failed company that needed bailout), with brands like Smith Barney, Travelers, Citibank, and Primerica. 

The year before (1998) sub-prime loans were just 5% of all mortgage lending, but by the time of the mortgage crisis in 2008, the number of sub prime mortgages was near 30%.

According to the Congressional record, top Citigroup officials were allowed to review and approve drafts of the legislation before it was formally introduced. After resigning as Clinton’s Treasury Secretary and while secretly in negotiations to head Citigroup, Robert Rubin helped broker the final deal to pass the bill, and he later became one of three CEOs that headed up CitiCorp, and also served as Citigroup’s chairman until 2007. Robert Rubin received over $17,000,000 in compensation from Citigroup and a further $33,000,000 in stock options as of 2008. Rupin also was a part of the Enron scandal, but wascleared of all charges that he used influence with the Treasury to keep Enron’s status from being downgraded so Citi would not lose money.

So there you have it- both parties sold us down the river.

Race and Political movements

In keeping with the theme for today’s posts, I am going to talk in this post about the allegations that the TEA party is racist because it is predominantly made up of whites. As a disclosure, I am not a TEA party member, I have not attended even ONE TEA party rally or event, and I agree with most, but not all, of what they have had to say. With that out of the way:

The Tea party has been accused lately of being a racist organization, because the majority of those in the TEA party events have been white. Actually, an organization based in the United States that is a true random sampling of the American public SHOULD be mostly white.

According to the Census Bureau, the United States has a population that is 75% white, 15% Hispanic (of any race), 12% Black, 4% Asian, and 9% other. (The preceding numbers are more than 100% because Hispanics can be white or black, or any other race for that matter). Follow the math here: For a population of 304 million, That is a mean of 43 million and a standard deviation of 82 million. To keep it simple, we will assume that there is a TEA party rally of 304 people. We will see if the TEA party is truly independent of race. 

In a normal distribution with a truly random selection, there is a 99% chance that a TEA party rally with 304 attendees would have between 221 and 235 whites in attendance, and would have between 69 and 84 non whites. Now keep in mind that we are not talking about hispanics here, as hispanic is not a race, but an ethnicity. There is a 99% chance that there will be between 23 and 57 hispanics there of all races.

I knew that Statistics class would come in handy one day. My second disclaimer: I only got a B in that class.

So our theoretical TEA party rally, if we took a random picture of it, the people in that picture should be 72.4% to 77.4% white 99% of the time. The same is true of ANY random selection of people in the US. Anything outside of that tells you that there is probably some sort of non-random selection going on. That would either be a non-random process of selecting people to be at the rally, or a non-random process in framing the picture that was taken.

Race and Crime

A nightclub was the site of a shooting involving a fully automatic MAC-10 on April 11th. You would think that this had happened in the United States, after all the rest of the world and Hollywood would have you believe that there are shootings involving machine guns on every corner almost daily.

Instead, the shooting happened in London, which as you all know is located in the country formally known as Great Britain. (perhaps like Prince, they could change the name to an unpronounceable symbol?) Less surprising is that it involved people that are part of the rapper culture, which brings us to the point of this post.

According to the New Century Foundation’s 2005 report, The Color of Crime, blacks are seven times more likely to commit murder, eight times more likely to commit robbery, and when they do commit a crime of violence are three times more likely to use a gun, and twice as likely to use a knife, than any other race. Read on for more statistics:

  • Of the nearly 770,000 violent interracial crimes committed every year involving blacks and whites, blacks commit 85 percent and whites commit 15 percent.
  • Blacks commit more violent crime against whites than against blacks. Forty-five percent of their victims are white, 43 percent are black, and 10 percent are Hispanic. When whites commit violent crime, only three percent of their victims are black.
  • Blacks are an estimated 39 times more likely to commit a violent crime against a white than vice versa, and 136 times more likely to commit robbery.
  • Blacks are 2.25 times more likely to commit officially-designated hate crimes against whites than vice versa.

According to the Black on Black crime coalition, blacks comprise nearly 14% percent of the U.S. population, but are 43% of the murder victims, and 93% of their murderers were other blacks. I would guess, and this is my opinion here, that the majority of killers and victims in those cases were gang members.

The CDC reports that the leading cause of death among black men age 15-24, age 25-34, and age 35 to 44 is homicide. 20% of all black women who die between the age of 15 and 24 are murdered, and 92% of the time, it is another black person who did it. Isn’t it time for use to put a stop to this?

This is not a “pro-white” racial thing, as asians were found to commit crimes at one quarter the rates of any other race. It is a CULTURAL THING. In other words, I don’t think this is because whites are any better than blacks or hispanics, and I don’t think this is because of some genetic superiority. I think the problem here is the culture that I mentioned earlier- the thug rapper culture. Not the songs themselves, mind you, but the whole attitude of the music. Calling women whores, bragging about murder, stealing, drug dealing, and “gang banging.” The music is merely just another symptom of the real problem:

Among men, blacks (28.5%) are about six times more likely than whites (4.4%) to be admitted to prison during their life. Among women, 3.6% of blacks and 0.5% of whites will enter prison at least once. (U.S. Department of Justice) Based on current rates of incarceration, an estimated 7.9% of black males
compared to 0.7% of white males will enter Federal prison by the time they are age 20 and 21.4% of black males versus 1.4% of white males will be incarcerated by age 30. (U.S. Department of Justice)
More black men are in prison in America than are in college. (The Black and White of Justice, Freedom Magazine, Volume 128) 

18.5% of all births nationwide are to unwed teen mothers, and two thirds of those are to black and hispanic women. Of teen births in 1999 to girls aged 10-14, 59% were to black teens, 30% were to Hispanic teens, and 11% were to white teens.

When a black man is successful, they call him “Oreo,” or “Carlton” (after a character of the TV show “Fresh Prince”), or they call him a sellout. I have heard successful hispanics called “Potato”- brown on the outside, white on the inside. This culture that promotes drugs, violence, poverty, and punishes success is the real problem here. Bill Cosby said pretty much what I am saying right now, and was blasted for it. Bill Cosby had this to say:

We, as black folks have to do a better job. Someone working at Wal- Mart with seven kids … you are hurting us.

The black community responded with:

We’ve been letting this fool talk CRAZY now for a couple of years now. But it might be time to stick this FOOLISH OLD BIRD in a home.

How is he gonna try and talk slick about working mothers. It shouldn’t matter if a woman has one kid, seven kids, or WHATEVER … If a woman is going out and working and trying to better herself and her children’s lives, that’s nothing to be embarrassed about.

Ignoring the point Mr Cosby was trying to make- having 7 kids on a Wal-Mart salary guarantees that they will grow up in poverty, and join the failing modern rap culture.

Look, there is nothing that makes a white better than a black. What the problem here is that too many are content to accept handouts. It is acceptable in this culture to get pregnant at an early age, for the father to split, to do drugs, and join gangs. Until we can have an adult conversation about the real problem, and can work on a solution, the problem will continue.

Too many are willing to simply say that the black man is being discriminated against, because it is easier to blame others than it is to fix yourself.

Our situation summed up in one story

I am writing this post because I feel the need to show something to a Blogger friend. This post is for TOTWTYTR, who recently posted a comment to this blog:

Maybe I’m just drinking the conservative Kool Aid, but a close friend of mine who makes money from the financial industry, but not mortgages, explained it all to me. In addition I read up on it.

It started during the Carter Administration, but has gotten worse with each one since. Not only were banks and mortgage companies told that the government would make good on their losses, people like the excrable Barney Frank and Chris Dodd told the lending institutions they’d be labeled as racist if they didn’t lend money to minorities who almost certainly couldn’t pay it back.

As I said, there is plenty of blame to go around, but it’s the politicians, not the banks that deserve the most blame.

Now this post is not a flame, I am just hoping that I can convince those of you who feel the same way that you are being deceived. Here is my proof:

This home right here, a 576 square foot home with 2 bedrooms and one bath, was used as collateral for a $103,000 loan, according to the Wall Street Journal. Less than two years ago, Integrity Funding LLC gave a $103,000 mortgage to the owner, Marvene Halterman, an unemployed woman with a long list of creditors and, by her own account, a long history of drug and alcohol abuse. At one time, Ms. Halterman says, 23 people were living in the tiny house or various ramshackle outbuildings. Ms. Halterman hasn’t had a job for about 13 years, she says. She receives about $3,000 a month from welfare programs, food stamps and disability payments related to a back injury.

Now the Republican talking point states that the banks are not to blame, because they were FORCED to loan to minorities by the Democrats. Here is a picture of Ms. Halterman:

Oops. Not a minority. The motive here was not complying with some rule about minority lending, it was about money. The lending company was owned by Barry Rybicki, 37, a former loan officer who started it in 2003. Of the boom years, he says: “If you had a pulse, you were getting a loan.”

When an Integrity telemarketer called Ms. Halterman in 2006, she was cash-strapped, owing $36,605 on a home-equity loan. The firm helped her get a $75,500 credit line from another lender.
Ms. Halterman used it to pay off her pickup, among other things. But soon she was struggling again.
In early 2007, she asked Integrity for help, Mr. Rybicki’s records show. This time, Integrity itself provided a $103,000, 30-year mortgage. It had an adjustable rate that started at 9.25% and was capped at 15.25%, according to loan documents.
It was one of 197 loans Integrity originated in 2007, totaling almost $47 million.

At closing, on Feb. 26, 2007, Integrity collected $6,153 in underwriting, broker, loan-origination, document, application, processing, funding and flood-certification fees, mortgage documents show. A few days later, Integrity transferred the loan to Wells Fargo, earning $3,090 more, Mr. Rybicki says.

Now picture this, Integrity made a $103,000 loan, and collected $9,243 in fees, and only loaned the money to her for a few days, selling the loan before the first payment was even due. That is exactly what I said was going on, in my series of posts on the lending crisis. The payments on this loan were $881 a month, for a woman who only had an income of $3,000 a month in disability, welfare, and food stamp payments and had not held a job in over 13 years.

The home was valued at $132,000 by the appraiser, even though there is no record of similar homes in the area selling for that price. What makes this case so typical of all this subprime garbage are all the fees that were made by people who had no stake in it: The appraiser made money, then Integrity made money, and Wells Fargo made more when it was sold to HSBC, which also took a cut before dumping it on investors in mortgage backed securities that were inexplicably rated AAA by rating agencies that were somewhere between crooked and incompetent.

Actually, the piece perfectly illustrates the greedy, deceitful practices that has since brought our economy to its knees. It’s a great piece of reporting.

Sure, it is easy to lay all of this at the feet  of the borrower, but you would be dishonest in not pointing a few fingers at the lenders who should have known better, but were instead blinded by greed and profit. Three different lenders loaned her money on the “equity” of this nearly worthless home: The first for $36,000, then one for $75,500 to pay off the first, and then another for $103,000 to pay off the second. Each time, she got money at closing, and the lender passed the loan off on investors.

Read the linked article and realize one thing: Just because the Democrats are your enemy does not make the Republicans your friends, and just because the Democrats are lying does not mean that the Republicans are telling the truth.

Natural Rights

To understand our Constitution, a person must understand the theory of “Natural Rights.”  Natural rights are the rights that all humans possess merely by being born. This theory began with European philosophers in the 17th and 18th centuries, men like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Thomas Paine.

These men believed that denying a person his natural rights would be absurd, like expecting a carnivore to give up meat. In his natural state, according to Hobbes, man’s life consists entirely of liberties and not at all of laws – “It followeth, that in such a condition, every man has the right to every thing; even to one another’s body. And therefore, as long as this natural Right of every man to every thing endureth, there can be no security to any man… of living out the time, which Nature ordinarily allow men to live.”

This would lead inevitably to a situation known as the “war of all against all”, in which human beings kill, steal and enslave others in order to stay alive, due to their natural lust for “Gain”, “Safety” and “Reputation”. Hobbes reasoned that this world of chaos created by unlimited rights was highly undesirable, since it would cause human life to be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. As such, if humans wish to live peacefully they must give up some of their natural rights and create moral obligations in order to establish political and civil society. This is one of the earliest formulations of the theory of government known as the social contract.

Like Hobbes, Locke was a major social contract thinker. He said that man’s natural rights are life, liberty, and property. He greatly influenced the American Revolutionary War with his writings of natural rights.
According to Locke there are three natural rights:

  • Life- everyone is entitled to live once they are created.
  • Liberty- everyone is entitled to do anything they want to so long as it doesn’t conflict with the first right.
  • Estate- everyone is entitled to own all they create or gain through gift or trade so long as it doesn’t conflict with the first two rights.

According to Locke, the social contract is a contract between a being or beings of power and their people or followers. The King makes the laws to protect the 3 natural rights. The people may not agree on the laws, but they have to follow them. The people can be prosecuted and/or killed if they break these laws. If the King does not follow these rules, he can be overthrown.

Thomas Paine (1731–1809) further elaborated on natural rights in his influential work Rights of Man (1791), emphasizing that rights cannot be granted by any charter because this would legally imply they can also be revoked and under such circumstances they would be reduced to privileges:

It is a perversion of terms to say that a charter gives rights. It operates by a contrary effect — that of taking rights away. Rights are inherently in all the inhabitants; but charters, by annulling those rights, in the majority, leave the right, by exclusion, in the hands of a few. … They…consequently are instruments of injustice.

The fact therefore must be that the individuals themselves, each in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a contract with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist.

It is for these reasons that our Constitution was built upon the “Natural Rights” theory.

  • Men are endowed by certain rights by their creator.
  • Men constitute governments in order that they may protect those rights from others.
  • That they grant powers to that government so that it may function.

Governments cannot grant rights, they can only deny rights and liberties from one group, while allowing others to retain them. In a future post, I will examine some of how this works, and why certain things cannot be rights under this theory.

You get what you pay for

Recently, a person came to this blog via a post by TOTWTYTR. The post s from December where 2 EMTs were accused of refusing to help a dying pregnant woman because they were on a break. People are screaming for them to be fired. I would have just placed a comment on the post itself, but it was an old post, and my comments are likely to be a little long.

In the current environment, there is a lot of talk about budget cuts, and much talk about how public sector employees are overpaid, get too many benefits, etc. but in all of this no one seems to notice how public sector employees are held to a higher standard. As an example, the woman who died was an employee of the coffee shop. If the situation had been reversed and the woman would have been off the clock, and the EMTs had wanted a cup of coffee, would people be calling for her to be fired for refusing to do her job while off the clock?

Currently in the State of Florida, and all across the nation, there is talk of cutting benefits. Florida is about to change the rules for the Florida Retirement System to cut retirement benefits in half, and to change the retirement age for high risk jobs from age 50 to age 65. Some departments are discussing cutting hours by not paying responders between the hours of midnight and 6 a.m. if the responder doesn’t have to actually respond to a call for assistance, even though the responders must remain at work ready to respond. Can you imagine a receptionist being required to sit at her desk, but not getting paid unless the phone actually rings?

As a firefighter and as a Paramedic, I am exposed to all sorts of things that a government office worker is not.

Let me tell you the story of Oviedo Firefighter Shane Kelly. Firefighter Kelly stopped to assist victims of an auto accident on the Florida Turnpike in 2002. Shane was off duty. He was killed in full view of his wife when a tractor trailer slammed into the accident vehicles.  There were 2 occupants of the truck that killed Firefighter Kelly, and there was enough confusion as to which of them was driving that neither of them was ever charged.

The Federal Government ruled that Sean Kelly was acting in his capacity as a private citizen when he was killed, and since his death was not a line of duty death, his widow was not entitled to any of the benefits of the LOD status. Imagine how you would feel as an EMT, Firefighter, or other responder if you knew that helping an injured person carries the same risk of injury or death whether you are on duty or off duty, except that if you are injured, not only are you NOT paid for your time and skill, but you are not insured for that potentially career ending injury. Who will feed your family? Care for your kids?

In Firefighter Kelly’s case, they rallied some politicians and were able to get an exception in his case, but there is no guarantee that the next accident victim will get the same exception. State law in Florida allows localities to each determine what constitutes line of death, and what does not. In a meeting with my employer’s attorney, where Firefighters were attempting to get a written policy on what would be considered Line of Duty injury for off the clock employees, we were told that such decisions for off duty personnel would be made on a case by case basis by Administration AFTER the fact. I made a comment along the lines of, “So you get to decide AFTER I am injured whether or not you will pay for it. Will that decision take factors like the cost of treatment and PR benefit to you into account?” That REALLY pissed off the attorney. (I call em like I see em.)

Not only will the employer retroactively decide whether or not the employee who stops to help is covered if injured, they will decide on a case by case basis who they will provide legal representation to if the employee is sued by a personal injury attorney. That policy marked the end of my stopping to help in emergencies, and until that policy changes, I will no longer help anyone while I am off the clock. After all, requiring me to do something while not paying me is called slavery.

Many will say that I should just get my own insurance, and to that I reply: How many of you who are not in EMS would pay money to be able to do uncompensated work that could get you injured, killed, or sued? Other considerations: DO off duty EMTS carry equipment? Gloves, pocket masks, defibrillators? If they do not, what can they do that any other bystander can do? Or should the employer provide those items?

If I am at an accident scene, how can I keep other vehicles from hitting me? Should I block the lanes with my personal car, like we do with our ambulances and fire apparatus? If I do, and a semi crashes into my car- will my employer pay for my car? Will my own insurance pay? After all, they will surely argue that they do not cover me for high risk activity like using it as emergency equipment. If my wife is in the car when it is struck, who pays for HER care?

All of this is viewed in light of the new era of budget cuts. Cutting pay, retirement, benefits, and other compensation, and you get what you pay for.

Overheard at a party

I was at a party yesterday, and a person there was complaining that the attorney general was wasting the taxpayer’s money on a lawsuit that “had no judicial merit.” I said that I wasn’t so sure, and that IMO the Obama health plan was unconstitutional. I asked him which part of the Constitution granted the Federal Government the power to force me to buy a product.

His reply was that the government already does this when they force you to buy car insurance. This was easy to rebut, because the Federal Government doesn’t force you to buy insurance, that is a state law, and that law still allows a driver to be self insured, doesn’t require you to have insurance if you don’t have a car, nor does it require that you buy insurance to operate a car upon your private property.

I told him that the Obama plan will not work, because it requires an insurance company to cover a preexisting condition, so people will have no reason to get insurance until they are sick, and since the “fine” for not having insurance is significantly less than the cost of insurance, they won’t. Thus, a person who gets sick will simply call and purchase the insurance while he is on his way to the hospital.

He responded with some talking point about the last 8 years, blah, blah, to which I responded that I didn’t like Bush, either, but that this discussion had nothing to do with the exPresident, and that we were talking about Obama. He then said that we can’t blame Obama until the first 2 years (HALF the term) are over. So I replied that we could then lay 9/11 and the recession of 2001 directly at the feet of Clinton, since that all happened during the first 2 years of the Bush Whitehouse. “That’s different,” he said.

I moved in for the kill. “So Bush is responsible for all 8 years he was in office, and the first two years of Obama.” His wife, who was standing there agreeing with me, then took him away.

Every supporter of Obama uses the exact same words and phrases in their arguments, almost as if they are reading from a script. It is obvious that they are not thinking about this on their own, that they are simply parroting lines that they have heard somewhere else. This makes them easy to debate, as they are not putting any thought into this.