Saturday, March 18, 2017

The Democrats won't save you -- Trump's 1980's Colorado Democrat politics

The Republican onslaught on 'Obamacare' is in full swing, and Democrats have nothing, unless you think that Hillary Clinton's possible return to public life, reported in today's TheGuardian, is a good thing.

Her recipe, according to the article, "But she urged a divided country to work together to solve problems,..."

Which brings the blogster to a brief post involving a former three time Democratic governor of Colorado. 

In a 1996 piece, the CATO Institute wrote this about the gentleman:
Among Lamm’s key issues are establishing population control, stopping immigration, raising taxes to reduce the deficit, increasing tariffs for greater trade protection and ending “excessive” medical care for the elderly.

Except for "raising taxes", this could describe Donald Trump and the Republican Party.

The awful "American Health Care Act" hits medical care for the elderly rather nicely in line with the call of this Democrat back in the 1970s and 80s.

The new administration still has to follow through with the tariffs, so we'll see.

The former governor, meanwhile, is no longer an advocate of tax hikes, and he has held a high office at the University of Colorado, which provides generous government financed health insurance, thus ensuring he can continue to call for curbs to health expenditures.

In this interview from 2016 in the Denver Post, his main prescription for the country bears an uncanny resemblance to Mrs. Clinton's "work together" call: the first issue is how do you make the political machine work in a more bipartisan basis.

In U.S. domestic policy over the past generation or so, "bipartisan" has been held up by prominent Democrats and Republicans alike, but reality has not held up, and "bipartisan" has been used to beat Democrats into submission.

In foreign policy, you can play a game of spot the difference and come up largely empty handed, except that the most offensive bellicose and ridiculous propositions tend to come from Republicans. 

But then again, see Mr. Lamm.

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