The Economist's Cookbook

See here is what I don't understand, if you look at the history of Marijuana and you learn WHY it was banned, there should be no problem legalizing/de-criminalizing it. My own mother has had cancer... twice. So this one is near and dear to me. She almost didn't survive her first encounter and was extremely ill due to the treatments.

Medical Cannabis is a wonder drug basically. The fact of the matter is that too many people shriek about how EVVVVVIIIILLLL it is, or how those that smoke pot are wastrels and no good people that are not worthy of relief from pain or other symptoms that Medical Cannabis can treat. I don't smoke pot, but by god, if I had severe pain issues I'd rather smoke pot than take any of the myriad of opiate derivative drugs out on the market for pain management.

These people are the same damn breed of Prohibitionists that we had running around the US in the 1920s and 30s. They should be treated with the same mockery and scorn.

There are no, repeat zero reasons for banning this for medical use as proscribed by a physician.
(Personally I think there are no reasons to to ban it period, but hey, I'm just a crazy liberty nut, what do I know?)

CNN has the scoop here.

Well played America ... you had a good run, but Ben Franklin was right:

When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.

Thanks America. RIP 1776-2010. Now we just wait for the downward spiral. Perhaps from the ashes of this we can build a free society but ... I'm not sure this is salvageable.

Thoughts?

NY times Op-Ed Link

I was astounded that this ran in the NYT at all, but it needs to be read by everyone. It needs to be read because of the budgetary garbage the current administration and its lackeys are feeding us. Now please understand that I am not trashing the CBO here. Largely these guys and gals do a pretty good job. But they have to operate under certain assumptions about government that we all know are fallacious. They make the fatal assumption that programs won't increase in spending in an effort to hold certain variables constant for the sake of calculation.

But like much of micro-economics, holding things constant that we know have a track record of NOT staying constant is ... slightly irresponsible. But anyway ... down to the nitty-gritty.

In reality, if you strip out all the gimmicks and budgetary games and rework the calculus, a wholly different picture emerges: The health care reform legislation would raise, not lower, federal deficits, by $562 billion.

Somehow I am not the least bit surprised that the math didn't work out.

Gimmick No. 1 is the way the bill front-loads revenues and back loads spending. That is, the taxes and fees it calls for are set to begin immediately, but its new subsidies would be deferred so that the first 10 years of revenue would be used to pay for only 6 years of spending.

But this makes perfect sense if you are a politician. You load down the tax burden and get on CNN and claim "this is a giant step forward to building a better society, a society where you won't be turned away at the hospital or at the doctor because you're not wealthy enough to blah blah blah." So yeah, pass the bill, tax the shit out of people, delay the benefits while claiming that you've solved a crisis.
This bit is especially interesting:

Finally, in perhaps the most amazing bit of unrealistic accounting, the legislation proposes to trim $463 billion from Medicare spending and use it to finance insurance subsidies. But Medicare is already bleeding red ink, and the health care bill has no reforms that would enable the program to operate more cheaply in the future.

Read the whole article ... now.