Barcelona October 1, 2013 BARCELONA And you think YOU have a lot to do between now and 2026. Take a look. One of the nicest cities in the world. WHICH DO YOU PREFER: OBAMACARE OR THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT? This Jimmy Kimmel segment is classic. Well-meaning men and women on the street strongly prefer the Affordable Care Act to Obamacare. Never mind that they’re the same thing — which is another key thing to know about Obamacare. Reprising yesterday, in case you missed it: A KEY THING TO KNOW ABOUT OBAMACARE When Republicans tell you that a majority of Americans don’t like it, they don’t mention that when you adjust for those who don’t like it because it doesn’t go far enough* it turns out that a majority of Americans do favor Obamacare. And yet the Republicans are dead set against it. Obamacare increases virtually everyone’s health care security, improves the health of the citizenry and improves the health of the economy . . . all achieved through increased efficiencies and incentives and through — most tangibly — a shift of several tens of billions of dollars a year from wealthy investors to the working poor and middle class. (Wealthy investors will pay an extra $380,000 on each $10 million in dividends and capital gains they earn — though still less than they were paying under Ronald Reagan.) (And yes, if you make only $300,000 a year — which after deductions and exemptions, let’s say, leaves you with $250,000 in taxable income — even you will pay $380 more on each additional $10,000 of capital gains or dividends you might earn. But it’s really not the end of the world, even for you.) *Quite rightly, they would prefer a single-payer system of the type all the other advanced nations of the world have. HEALTHCARE.GOV I assume with 50 million people all wanting to root around healthcare,gov for an hour there were loads of capacity problems and will continue to be for days or weeks. But please send me your stories — good and bad. Anybody sign up? Get a better deal than they have now? A worse deal? One friend emailed me Sunday to say Obamacare had caused his existing monthly premium to drop by 8.5% for the year starting today, “the first drop in many years.” And my flu shot last week was free. So that makes two of us. Anybody else? GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN Yep: the Republicans have shut it down. It’s that important to them to try to block care security and to keep preventive care from being free. (They claim to worry about the deficit, but repealing the law would actually increase the deficit.) At some point in the next 16 days Speaker Boehner will presumably waive the “Hastert rule” and allow the House to vote on raising the debt limit (and on starting the government back up again), even though it may cost him his speakership. No one who cries as freely as he does, and is as basically a simple, decent man as he is, would allow the global economy to collapse just to retain his gavel. Even the Koch brothers (and certainly the Wall Street Journal) are urging the House to raise the debt limit (i.e., pay its bills) and stop this insanity. The markets, barely fazed, seem to have high confidence we will not needlessly self-destruct and I think they’re right. I sure hope so! But to have taken it even this far — and to have fought so hard these past five years to obstruct the things that so clearly need doing (like putting people to work repairing our crumbling national infrastructure) is little short of tragic. As were the Bush years that led us into unnecessary war and wrecked our national balance sheet. Bring back Lincoln! Bring back Teddy Roosevelt! Bring back Dwight Eisenhower! Bring back Richard Nixon (even)! Bring back Ford! Bring back Rockefeller! But until then, please vote Democrat.