First The Twit, Then The Twat...

If Matty's proved himself a twit on this Monday, Kevin Drum's proved himself a twat:

The uncertainty meme is just mind boggling. Businesses always have a certain amount of regulatory uncertainty to deal with, and there's simply no evidence that this uncertainty is any greater now than it usually is.

Excuse me for noting this, Kevin, but you're a "professional" blogger. A.fucking.blogger.

As far as I can tell you've never placed yourself in the position of being socially useful enough to start and run an actual, real-life business. You've never employed people or paid taxes on profits have you, Kevin?

Of course not.

So answer me this, Kevin:

What would you know about it?

Since you won't answer the question, I'll do it for you:

Nothing. Nada. Zilch.

Just because you've swallowed the Obama kool-aid doesn't mean it's reality. 

You see, Kevin, if you passed your days doing real work in the real economy, you'd find that the uncertainty surrounding things like Obamacare is very real. I've already received a letter from one of my companies' health insurance provider informing us that significant changes (and price increases) will be coming in 2011. My wife's employer - a Fortune 100 company - has sent the same to its' employees. Both specifically cite the requirements of Obamacare as factors in both the changes and the price increases. A number of my clients have received similar letters. And Kevin, insurance companies aren't doing that for funsies. Nor are they doing it because they're a part of the VRWC.

But you wouldn't know about that, now would you Kevin? You're sitting in front of a keyboard and a monitor. If Paul Krugman, Dean Baker or Robert Reich doesn't mention it in a column, then it's an economic issue that's passed you by... Isn't it, Kevin? And why is that?

Because you don't work in the real world doing real work.

I could go on about the other issues you raise and dismiss, but what's the point? Your job isn't to educate, inform or be useful. In the realm of real-world business and economics, you don't have the skills to any of those things. Your job is to comfort those too stupid to understand why what happened on November 2 happened. Right, Kevin?

And now, because you and your flock of Mother Jones turkeys cannot come to grips with the failure of Father Obama's Great Big Keynesian Economic and Unemployment Solution, you're left trying to find someone else - anyone else - to blame for the state of the economy.

That's pathetic, Kevin. Genuinely pathetic in the most dishonest, childish way possible.

Let me leave it at this:

Get Mother Jones to send your smart ass out here to Ohio. I'll drop what I'm doing and I'll spend a week introducing you to Reality On The Ground. I'll show you what's going on in real-life small businesses. I'll introduce you to real business owners who have real businesses and real employees and real bills to pay. I'll let you spend some time explaining to them why their feelings of uncertainty about the future aren't grounded in reality.

And then you can see just how much you really know about the economy and uncertainty...

Whatcha say, Kevin? 

Note: That progressive brainiacs like Drum and Yglesias are now reduced to blaming the state of the economy on the irrationality of businesses and consumers speaks volumes about the intellectual (and moral) bankruptcy of these so-called "progressives", doesn't it?

Comments

[Dan from Madison]

Yep, just a few months after Obamacare went through the company that I own got a letter saying that the company that carries our health insurance would be getting out of that business in three years. Fun times!

[Mikey]

My company changed to a new plan that basically doubles employees' out-of-pocket obligations. Thanks, Obumblecare!

[Eric Blair]

Somebody at memeorandum likes you Dennis. First two items and you're linked on both! Heh.

But back to your point: I work for a Health insurance company and my rates are going up 28% next year. And I think they're trying to be nice to us.

I told people that the Obamacare was going to be a disaster.

[Mike C.]

They can't be wrong, so of course it has to be somebody else's fault.

[Lightwave]

It's real simple.

Small business, employers with less than 50 employees, are responsible for a significant majority of jobs in this country.

A great majority of these business owners will not be able to provide health care to their workers anymore. Period.

In the next couple years you're going to see tens of millions of Americans lose their health insurance and not be able to afford the time or the money to shop for an individual plan, because there will be virtually no employee health care plans by 2014.

It really is that simple. I get it. Dennis gets it. Republicans get it. Conservatives get it. And I damn well guarantee you anyone who has spent weeks banging out how the hell this is going to work in Quickbooks and coming up with "I have to drop my employee's coverage plan in 2012 because the insurance rates are going up 32% next year and even more after that and I have until Dec. 31 to figure out how to break it to my 12 employees" gets it.

Liberalism is a persistent vegetative state of being enslaved by the state. They produce nothing. They have no idea.

They will in November 2012, I guarantee you that.

[bandit]

The problem isn't so much uncertainty as it is 'pretty much certainty'. Business owners and investors look into the future with what the Dems are doing and say with pretty much certainty that it's going to suck. If the future looks like Greece they don't want any.

[ZT]

Destroying private health insurance was the whole point of Obamacare. For the Progressives, this isn't a bug, it's a feature.

[aelfheld]

The uncertainty isn't limited to the monstrosity that is Obamacare. The EPA is making moves to implement 'cap & trade' (courtesy of one of the more jugheaded rulings from the Supremes). No one has any clue what 'financial reform' means (if it doesn't involve running Barney Frank and Christopher Dodd through a shredder it can't be good). The IRS is ginning up to give colonoscopies to anyone still earning a pay check.

But, hey, we're irrational.

[Nodrog]

I've already received a letter from one of my companies' health insurance providers informing us that significant changes (and price increases) will be coming in 2011. My wife's employer - a Fortune 100 company - has sent the same to its' employees. A number of my clients have received similar letters. And Kevin, insurance companies aren't doing that for funsies.
Funny, Dennis, how insurance companies were jacking up rates and "making significant changes" to policies BEFORE Obamacare was even a glimmer of a Great Bogeyman to people like you who don't give a flying crapola that 45 million Americans don't even have health insurance and can just go die in the streets for all you care.

[Randy Rager]

There's still 45 million wastes of oxygen we haven't killed off?

Well fuck, there goes my whole afternoon.

On topic, it's pretty clear to anyone with the slightest reading comprehension at all (and that's not you, Gordon) that Dennis is referencing changes happening as a direct result of Obamacare.

I'd ask if you can see why that makes a difference, but it's clear you're denser than neutronium, so I won't bother.

[Ric Locke]

And the problem isn't uncertainty at all, anyway.

It's certainty.

Regards,
Ric

[Rob Crawford]

"45 million Americans don't even have health insurance"

So what? Does that mean they don't get medical care when they need it? No, it doesn't.

And how does it help them to increase the number without insurance to hundreds of millions?

[Allen]

This just keeps getting better and better. The real problem they're facing is that they know Obama has shot his bolt on the economy. The stimulus didn't do what they thought it would and Obama has no other ideas about what to do, and neither do they.

The rest is floundering around because they never asked the question "what if he's wrong?" That is an intellectual bridge to far as it makes them face up to the fact they put all their hopes into an unknown quantity.

[Dennis the Peasant]

Gordon-

You haven't a clue, have you?

[Nodrog]

And, Randy, your reading skills are ideologically suspect too. There was a health care crisis before Obamacare reared its ugly head on the horizon, with symptoms such as insurance companies jacking up rates, "reevaluating" their coverage, etc. According to numbskulls like you everything was just "fine and dandy" before November 2008 in the health care field, as the U.S. had the #37 best health care in the world.

Every other developed and civilized nation in the world has managed to provide universal health care in some form or another, except this one. And with bloody-minded intransigents like you around, it appears we'll keep that dubious honor.

[just passin by]

Going by your own assumption Gordon, Messiahcare still fails; health care crisis before Messiahcare = health care crisis after Messiahcare = FAIL.

If Messiahcare is such a great thing, why have 111 waivers already been granted by Your Living God?

[just passin by]

OT: What do Nancy Pelosi and Jerry Jones have in common besides a dessicated Michael Jackson face?
They both keep doing stupid things that don't work in the face of repeated failure...oops, Wade got fired and the Cowboys won last light.
So that leaves Nancy.

[Robert Bell]

Dennis: Not that your point about Matt seeing real-life entrepreneurial conditions isn't compelling, but I believe the reason people on the left are questioning the meme is because of the results of the NFIB survey a few months back. See, for example, here: (http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/08/whats_holding_small_business_b.html) In other words, Mr. Yglesias could take a sample size of one by listening to you, or he could base his decisions on a larger sample.

What that chart suggests is that the primary mechanism at work is aggregate demand. That is not to say that there isn't an indirect secondary mechanism as well - if businesses are uncertain about the regulatory environment, they choose not to hire, the amount of spending money in worker's pockets is lower, hence lower AD.

Lightwave: Actually the relationship between firm size and job growth is *not* as simple as you say, though it was believed to be for a long time. It seems to have more to do with firm age:

http://macroblog.typepad.com/macroblog/2010/09/my-entry.html

[Jim Ryan]

Wow, where to begin.

First off, business is already risky, like Drum said. You can't make something more risky. Either it's risky or it isn't.

B, this is Kevin Drum. Perhaps you've heard of him.

Kevin. Drum.

And three, why are conservatives so cruel, uncompassionate, and indecent? When a poor child gets health care, somewhere a conservative cries a little.

[richard mcenroe]

So 'risky' is an absolute, and can't be quantified or modified? No "more" or "less" risky?

Please don't send my the informational circular on your startup....

[JorgXMcKie]

@ Robert Bell, why not link to the actual NFIB study? Linking to Ezra Klein is like linking to Pravda or something. Klein isn't nearly as smart as he thinks he is, and he distorts stuff to prove his point on a routine basis.

And Jim Ryan, you can, indeed, make something more risky. Diving into dark water of unknown depth is risky. If someone has placed a large number of really bit, really sharp objects in the water just below the surface, it is more risky. Being alive is risky, taking seriously people like Drum and Klein makes it more risky.

[RobertRays]

No, insurance companies don't do it for funsies. Take it from someone who didn't draw a public sector paycheck (at a hospital with a Level One Trauma Center) until nearly age 50, having spent the prior 30 years in the Fortune 500, 4 of them at a large insurance company: insurance companies don't make their profit by taking in premiums. They make their profit by investing. Conservatively. Until the 1990s! When they got hi-tech fever, like everyone else. If their investments tank, they raise their rates and find someone to blame. No different now.

[Dennis the Peasant]

Robert-

I'm an NFIB member and I've seen the survey results you mention. While your point regarding the survey results are valid, I'm not sure it settles the issue. It has a wider sample, but I'm not sure that wider sample makes its results the final word.

In any event, the issue here is one of intellectual honesty. Neither Drum nor Yglesias are pondering the issue of uncertainty because they think it may or may not have merit in explaining the apparent failure of Obama's macroeconomic policy, they're suggesting that it is the economy that has it all wrong. Obama right, economy wrong.

That's self-serving, intellectually dishonest nonsense.

[Robert Bell]

Jorg: Two reasons. One is my point that Messrs Klein, Yglesias, and Drum's opinions are probably *not* coming out of nowhere - like many memes they are a particular summary interpretation of some primary source. The Ezra Klein piece nicely shows both the primary source *and* the interpretation of that source in context so that if, as you say, Klein is distorting stuff, it is easy to compare. Stylistically, it would perhaps have been better to specify two links, the primary source first, and the interpretation second.

The other reason is more pragmatic - the NFIB study is a large pdf, so may load slowly in a browser compared to an HTML.

[word economy]

Isn't it risky, riskier and riskiest and risqué, more risqué and most risqué?

[Pangur]

Gordon seems to be this fall's version of markg8, the man who has my vote for stupidest commenter, ever. Gordon: FOAD.

Re: lib commenters like Matt and Kev, yes, funny how chestnuts like "irrationality" and "ungovernable" rear their heads when Dems are not running the show. In other words, those not supporting the current regime's policies (such as they are) are emotional , recalcitrant children.

[Dennis the Peasant]

Pangur-

The resemblence is somewhat unnerving.

[DonnieDarko]

Nogrod! No shit?

I thought his parents had canceled his internet privileges.

[Randy Rager]

And, Randy, your reading skills are ideologically suspect too.

Really, Gordon? I read and reacted to the information given, instead viewing it through some shit for brains liberal filter, and somehow this makes my reading comprehension suspect?

I honestly wonder if you can breath and walk at the same time, or if you take a few steps and pause to re-oxygenate what passes for your brain.

I'm not even going to bother responding to the rest of your 5 million times debunked drivel. If you haven't already gotten it, try 5,000,001 isn't going to get it done.

[alanstorm]

"Funny, Dennis, how insurance companies were jacking up rates and "making significant changes" to policies BEFORE Obamacare..."

Gordon, you're rather slow, aren't you? Are you trying to say that government wasn't meddling with the medical industry prior to O-care? Medical costs have been rising noticeably since roughly the mid-60's - when a couple of small programs called Medicare and Medicaid were enacted, and the government started to seriously distort the market.