Here’s a scandal no one’s really talking about in the press or elsewhere for that matter. Republican members of Congress, as well as conservatives across the internet, are engaged in a group lie about the cost of Obamacare. Correction — it’s either a group lie or group stupidity or perhaps a mixture of both. I prefer to think that it’s a deliberate deception about the healthcare law because the alternative explanation is arguably more frightening: an array of prominent conservatives are simply too dumb to read a chart or grasp the basic difference between “gross” costs and “net” costs. It’s economics and finance 101, and considering how they fancy themselves the party of money — the free market party — the distinction between gross and net ought to be common knowledge.

On Tuesday, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its quarterly report on the cost of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act — Obamacare. The upshot is that the 10-year net cost of the program has risen by $40 billion from estimates in the February report. There are several reasons why, but I won’t bore you with the wonky details. Suffice to say, there’s nothing even remotely worrisome about the report or the status of Obamacare. Actually, the biggest news on this front is that the CBO has refused any further scoring for the Republican effort to repeal the law. Good for the CBO. It’s about damn time.

Meanwhile, however, Republicans across the board freaked out about the CBO report, claiming that the cost of Obamacare has doubled. I first heard this assessment from talking bumper sticker Rep. Steve Stockman (R-TX) who tweeted: “CBO: #Obamacare costs double to $1.8 trillion in first decade.” Other congressional Republicans tweeted the same thing, including Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy and Ted Cruz. Stockman and his fellow liars included a link to a Washington Examiner article by Senior Editorial Writer Philip Klein:

When President Obama was selling his health care legislation to Congress, he declared that “the plan I’m proposing will cost around $900 billion over 10 years.” But with the law’s major provisions set to kick in next year, a new analysis by the Congressional Budget Office projects that the law will cost double that, or $1.8 trillion.

Horseshit.

See what Klein and the Republicans did here? In the same way they routinely and strategically confuse the national debt with the federal budget deficit, these idiots are confusing the net cost of Obamacare, originally around $900 billion, with the gross cost of the program, which is now around $1.8 trillion. It’s the smaller net cost figure that’s important, not only because it was the $900 billion number that was most commonly quoted at the time of the bill’s passage, but also because the net cost takes into consideration savings and offsets from the program. For example, the gross cost of a primer-level economics book for Steve Stockman costs, say, $20 (large print, lots of illustrations), but after coupons and other discounts the net cost of the book is only $12. If you paid $12, it’d be a lie to go around saying the book cost $20, wouldn’t it? But if your goal is to criticize the book and make it seem like a waste of money, you’d clearly lie and quote the $20 price tag.

That’s exactly what they’re doing with Obamacare. Lying. A sitting member of Congress, along with the right-wing press and many other congressional Republicans, flagrantly lied about the cost of Obamacare. Because, well, that’s what they do now. See, Stockman doesn’t think it’s a human right to have affordable access to quality healthcare (unless you’re an embryo), but he thinks it’s a human right to buy a military style assault rifle from Walmart.

A cursory Google search revealed that the lie has spread like a pandemic throughout the wingnutosphere. Fox News, Human Events, Heritage Foundation, Hot Air — they all lied and wrote that the cost of Obamacare has “doubled.”

As for Mr. Klein at the Washington Examiner, he continued by writing:

Today, the CBO released new projections from 2013 extending through 2022, and the results are as critics expected: the ten-year cost of the law’s core provisions to expand health insurance coverage has now ballooned to $1.76 trillion.

Whoops. Wait. That wasn’t what Klein wrote yesterday — it’s what he wrote last year. Yes, this is the second year in a row that Klein lied about the gross cost versus the net cost of Obamacare.

He basically wrote the exact same post in March of 2012. In it, he had the balls to accuse the president of using “accounting tricks.” Hilarious if it wasn’t so infuriating. Days after his 2012 post went up, FactCheck.org ran an article debunking the widespread lie about the CBO’s estimate titled Health Care Costs Didn’t Double. FactCheck noted several purveyors of the lie:

–House Republican Policy Committee Chairman Tom Price of Georgia put out a press release saying that “[t]he new CBO projection estimates that the law will cost $1.76 trillion over 10 years – well above the $940 billion Democrats originally claimed.”

–A Fox News article repeated the Republican criticisms and said that the CBO had found the law would cost “twice as much as the original $900 billion price tag.”

–Another Fox version carried the headline, “ ‘Obamacare’ to Cost Twice as Much as Previously Estimated, According to New CBO Report.”

–And the conservative news outlet Newsmax ran a headline saying, “Obamacare’s Gross Costs Double to $1.76 Trillion, CBO Projects.” An Internet search turns up many conservative blog reports making a similar costs-have-doubled claim.

Indeed, a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth puts its shoes on. And now they’re doing it all over again.

Fox News and Newsmax, not to mention Stockman and the others, are bouncing off the walls right now insisting that “Obama lied” about Benghazi. And here they are for the second year in a row lying about the cost of Obamacare.

Last year, Kevin Drum wrote of the Obamacare lie, “Moral of this story: Never believe anything that Republicans say about Obamacare until you check out the source yourself. But you already knew that.” I’ll go one further: don’t believe them on anything. They don’t deserve the trust of the American people or the benefit of the doubt. The 2012 Romney campaign alone suffocated the last breath of veracity out of the Republican playbook. The only way they can survive is to continue to lie and hope that their voters are too moronic and uneducated to realize it.

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The Affordable Care Act (ACA), otherwise known as Obamacare turns three today.  Many of the provisions will go into effect in January 2014 and you may be unsure about how this may impact your coverage.  Some states have seen insurance companies increase their premiums and you may be concerned that will happen to you.  A new web site has been set up to explain the bill and what your options will be.  If you are interested, check this out.

PS.  I recently had a heated conversation with someone who was convinced the ACA could have been written by Hitler (really, it was surreal, I am such a freak magnet).  Nothing I have read about makes me think that, if you have evidence to prove me wrong, please let me know.

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The House of Representatives voted this morning on Congressman Paul Ryan‘s budget proposal.  It passed by a vote of 221 to 207.  The 221 yeahs were all Republican, 197 Democrats and 10 Republicans voted no.   You can read the official vote count here.  You can read the official vote count here.  Read more about the actual legislation here.

This is how the House Budget Committee describes the Republican budget plan:

Washington owes the American people a responsible, balanced budget. This is a plan to balance the budget in ten years. It invites President Obama and Senate Democrats to commit to the same common-sense goal. This budget will achieve the following:

1. Stop spending money we don’t have by cutting wasteful spending.
2. Fix our broken tax code to create jobs and increase wages.
3. Protect and strengthen important priorities like Medicare and national security.
4. Reform welfare programs like Medicaid so they can deliver on their promise.

You can read the summary here and the full plan here.

Before I give my critique of Ryan’s budget, I would like to be very clear about something.  I do not have anything against him.  I just disagree with the approach he has taken to the overall budget and Medicare.

So, I do have problems with Ryan’s budget.  They are:

1. It doesn’t go anywhere near defense spending.  Not only that, despite claiming to be supporters of “fiscal responsibility” the GOP controlled House voted to give the Defense Department more money than it requested.  From the Associated Press, “The House Armed Services Committee on Thursday overwhelmingly backed a $642 billion defense bill that calls for construction of a missile defense site on the East Coast, restores aircraft and ships slated for early retirement and ignores the Pentagon’s cost-saving request for another round of domestic base closings.”  
2. Since the Defense Department budget is off the table, major cuts will be made to other discretionary spending.  It should be noted that this part of the budget is really small and cuts to these programs will not do a lot to impact the deficit or debt.
3. The Obamacare “repeal” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.  Sure, it gets rid of a lot of it but “Ryan’s budget doesn’t actually assume the repeal of all of Obamacare. It keeps the tax increases and Medicare cuts so that it can balance in 10 years, as top Republicans in the House promised conservatives.”  Link here.
4. It does nothing to address the sequester.  According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) the sequester’s impact on the economy is very real.  They looked into this and found, “In the absence of sequestration, CBO estimates, GDP growth would be about 0.6 percentage points faster during this calendar year, and the equivalent of about 750,000 more full-time jobs would be created or retained by the fourth quarter.” More on that can be found here.
5. It fails to address economic growth.  In 1992, one Clinton/Gore campaign slogan was “It’s the economy, stupid.”  That idea applies today.  A better rate of economic growth would solve a lot of our deficit and debt problems.  Louis Woodhill writes this in Forbes: ”The FY2014 Budget Resolution makes a few vague statements about economic growth, but it doesn’t promise that following Ryan’s plan will deliver a growth rate above the woefully inadequate CBO baseline, which peters out to a pathetic 2.19% rate by FY2023. This is what makes the whole exercise a suicide mission for House Republicans.”
6. Yes, we have a divided government but all the reports I have read indicate House Democrats received more votes than House Republicans and the only reason the GOP has a majority is gerrymandering (see my post on the Reform We Need for more on my view on this — and no, both sides try to do it so I don’t put all the blame for gerrymandering on the right side of the aisle).  The bigger issue, is that voters rejected the GOP budgetary priorities when they rejected the Romney/Ryan ticket.  Read more here.

While those are my basic problems with the plan, the specifics of which programs will be cut bother me a lot.  I watched Ryan this morning on the House floor talk about the differences between how Republicans and Democrats view government and I am going to address some of that now.

Ryan said, “This budget debate was constructive. It revealed each side’s priorities. We want to balance the budget. They don’t. We want to restrain spending. They want to spend more. We think taxpayers give enough to Washington. They want to raise taxes by $1 trillion—just take more to spend more. We want to strengthen programs like Medicare. They seem complicit in their demise. We see Obamacare as a roadblock to patient-centered reform. They see it as a sacred cow. We think national security is a top priority. They want to hollow out our military. We offer modernization and reform, growth and opportunity. They cling to the status quo.”

You can watch that below.

My belief is that government exists to do for us collectively what we cannot do individually.  While I do not share Ryan’s view that a balanced budget is the end all, be all of everything (to me that is a GOP “sacred cow”), I am not opposed to it.  The last time we had a balanced budget was not under a GOP administration but during President Clinton’s tenure.  Moreover, the Republicans spent a lot like drunken sailors when they had control so I am not sure what he is talking about there.  I also do not want to “hollow out our military.”  I want to make it more efficient.  I suspect if I were to talk to Ryan, he would have a similar answer to questions about Medicare — he says he doesn’t want to destroy it, he wants to save it by making it more efficient.

I do not think we should cut:

1. Education spending:  our workers compete against workers all over the globe. I would like our people to be as (or more) qualified as anyone else.   I saw an interview with Apple where they said they would love to manufacture more products in the US but we don’t have the numbers of qualified people they need to do it all.  We need more engineers, scientists, etc.  We face shortages in healthcare (nurses, techs and a variety of physician specialties such as primary care doctors and surgeons).  This is not the time to cut education spending.
2. Transportation & infrastructure spending:  Our infrastructure is crumbling.  Our highways, bridges and rail lines are so far behind other countries, it is crazy.  Repairing these systems would be a way to get large numbers of people jobs that cannot be exported anywhere.
3. Clean energy research and development.  I know, I know there have been some bad companies but the more energy sources we have, the lower the costs will be and the less dependent we will be on unstable and unfriendly regimes.
4. Programs to help the poor.  With unemployment where it is, too many people depend on food stamps, unemployment insurance and other programs to cut them off.  One of my mom’s friends (and no, Ryan has never said anything like this — as far as I know), she said “when the little squirrel cannot find a nut, he dies.”  I don’t want that to be our country’s approach to the poor.
5. Medicare — it should not be a voucher system.  You can read about my thoughts on Ryan’s plan for that here.

Watch Congressman Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) talk about the GOP budget plan.  He is also the Ranking Member of the House Budget Committee.

Originally this post was going to be solely about the Republican budget plan in the context of Ryan’s religious views. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) opposed Ryan’s budget last year and have expressed similar concerns with this year’s proposals.  Their opposition stems from cuts to programs such as food stamps, child tax credits and others that help the poor.  Their letters to Congress last year were in response to comments the Budget Committee chairman made:

“A person’s faith is central to how they conduct themselves in public and in private,” Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, said in the interview. “So to me, using my Catholic faith, we call it the social magisterium, which is how do you apply the doctrine of your teaching into your everyday life as a lay person?

“Those principles are very, very important,” Ryan said. “And the preferential option for the poor, which is one of the primary tenets of Catholic social teaching, means don’t keep people poor, don’t make people dependent on government so that they stay stuck at their station in life, help people get out of poverty, out into a life of independence.”  Source: the Hill.

A statement by the USCCB released yesterday laid out their case for including provisions to help the poor in any budget:

“We support the goal of reducing future unsustainable deficits, but insist that this worthy goal be pursued in ways that protect poor and vulnerable people at home and abroad,” said Bishop Stephen E. Blaire of Stockton, chairman of the USCCB Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development, and Bishop Richard E. Pates of Des Moines, chairman of the USCCB Committee on International Justice and Peace.

“The moral measure of this budget debate is not which party wins or which powerful interests prevail, but rather how those who are jobless, hungry, homeless or poor are treated. Their voices are too often missing, but they have the most compelling moral claim on our consciences and our common resources. The bishops stand ready to work with leaders of both parties for a budget that reduces future deficits, protects poor and vulnerable people, advances the common good, and promotes human life and dignity,”

The bishops also suggested the following three principles guide lawmakers:

• Every budget decision should be assessed by whether it protects or threatens human life and dignity.
• Every budget proposal should be measured by how it affects “the least of these” (Matthew 25). The needs of those who are hungry and homeless, without work or in poverty should come first.
• Government and other institutions have a shared responsibility to promote the common good of all, especially ordinary workers and families who struggle to live in dignity in difficult economic times.

Ryan responded to the Bishops’ concerns and argued that his budget proposals neither hurt the poor nor do they violate his Catholic faith.  From Town Hall Magazine.

“Our budget incorporates solidarity by recognizing a critical role for government in providing a strong safety net for those in need. And it restores the balance between solidarity and subsidiarity by returning a lot of power to individuals, to families and to communities. We are a nation that prides itself on looking out for one another—and government has an important role to play in that. But relying on distant government bureaucracies to lead this effort just hasn’t worked.

Some Catholics seem to mistake the preferential option for the poor for a preferential option for Big Government. When you look at the results of that approach—one out of every six Americans in poverty today, many of them mired in programs whose outdated structures often act as a trap that hinders upward mobility—that’s just not consistent with how I understand my Catholic faith. We need to break down the barriers to opportunity and attack the root causes of poverty. Informed by constitutional oath and my Catholic faith, this is a moral obligation I take very seriously.”

Ryan also defended the morality of his budget in The World Over with Raymond Arroyo, EWTN:

“These programs aren’t working the way they should. One in six Americans are in poverty today. We have the highest poverty rates in a generation. What House Republicans proposed in our budget was sensible reforms  want to do is put the kind of reforms in these programs – using subsidiarity, solidarity, local control, ideas that worked when we tried them in some other areas in the 1990’s. We want to reform these programs with the idea of getting people out of poverty onto lives of self sufficiency. Right! And there isn’t a monopoly. That’s my point. I can no more claim exclusive justification for my economic and political views than a liberal can for theirs within the Church’s social teaching. This is a matter for prudential judgment left to the laity to exercise their discretion. People of good will can disagree on these things. You have these hits come at you — like that letter — but we should raise the tone of the debate. We shouldn’t just try to shoot the messenger and try to nullify the notion that there are other ways in which to implement Church teaching. That just does a disservice to the kind of debate we need to have.”

Now, I do not doubt Ryan’s sincerity in this area.  I think he does believe that his plans will help the poor and I don’t think he cares more about the rich.  I cannot say the same thing about Mitt Romney — I do believe he thinks his wealth has more to do with how great he is and not so much to do with the incredible opportunities he has had that others have not.  Yes, I am aware of and appreciate the work he has done in his communities to help others, I don’t think he is a fundamentally evil or awful person, I just think he doesn’t get it.  I have read reports that Ryan had suggested the Romney/Ryan 2012 campaign spend some time in lower income neighborhoods in the cities they visited to educate people on how their policies would be more helpful to poor Americans than Obama’s.  These ideas were allegedly shot down because the campaign did not see the value as they did not expect to get any votes in those areas.

(Side note: if these reports are true, Ryan’s idea was a great one and should have been followed.  It may not have gotten a huge number of votes in those areas, though I am sure it would have gotten some, but it would have made the ticket more appealing to a number of people who may have been on the fence.)

The bottom line, however, is that Ryan’s budgets and Medicare plans violate what I think of when I think of Jesus’ teachings.  I am all for the idea that “if you give a man a fish, you feed him for one day but if you teach him to fish, you feed him for a lifetime” but cutting off assistance to people in real need, won’t accomplish that goal.

And if you want to read more about Ryan’s views on how to help the poor and his religious ideology:

1. Op-ed “Government Must Refocus its Safety Net to Those in Need”.
2. Interview with National Catholic Register’s Charlotte Hays – Ryan: ‘We have pursued solidarity but abused Subsidiarity’.
3. National Catholic Register Op-ed:  Applying Our Enduring Truths to our Defining Challenges.
4.  Ryan’s Opening Statement at House Budget Committee hearing on reforming the safety net.

Thank you to everyone who helped with this by sending supporting materials and documents.  Also I was impressed that Congressman Ryan went out of his way to praise his staff (that’s the former Hill staffer in me talking) and with Congressman Chris Van Hollen for thanking Ryan for his professionalism.  I may disagree with him but we should be able to disagree with people while remaining civil and it seems these two men have.  Good for you.

I promise to do an analysis of the Senate Democrats’ budget proposal.

And now for something completely different… (and hopefully fun)

I write political satire as Alyson Durden for Pardon the Pundit.  I have written a number of pieces where I call Ryan a vampire.  Now, I know Ryan is not a vampire and truly hope his staff, who were most helpful when I was researching his response to Catholic opposition to his budget plans, will not be totally offended because I meant it all in good fun.

Some are:

1. Paul Ryan Denies Allegations He Is a Vampire.
2. Ryan Claims “Twilight” Success Means He Does Have a Mandate, Admits He Is a Vampire.
3. Revealed! The Real Reason Romney Picked Ryan Was to Woo the All Important “Twilight” Voters.
4. As the Markets Worry about the Fiscal Cliff, Washington Works to Reassure America it is Working to Save “Twilight”.

And here is a goofy, fake add I put together making fun of a Democratic commercial bashing Ryan for his Medicare plans.  I did send it to his staff and it has received at least one thumbs down so I do hope it wasn’t from them because I was actually trying to point out the absurdity of the idea that his goal is to kill old people.

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After both Ted Cruz and Paul Ryan threatened to eliminate Obamacare, Speaker John Boehner announced that it’s not going to happen. TPM:

The chances of a government shutdown at the end of the month keep going down.

On Thursday, House Speaker John Boehner avoided one more tripwire when he rejected conservative demands that Republicans use government funding legislation to pick a fight over defunding the Affordable Care Act.

“Trying to put Obamacare on this vehicle risks shutting down the government,” Boehner told reporters at his weekly Capitol briefing.”That’s not what our goal is. Our goal is to reduce spending.”

Assuming the Senate passes its spending measure this week, the House will have to take it up and clear it by March 27 — the day the government’s budget authority expires. If Democrats support the bill in large numbers, that shouldn’t be a problem. But the question is whether House Republicans will oppose it this time around now that conservatives have endorsed using it to pick a fight over Obamacare.

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The Daily Banter Headline Grab from TPM:

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) said Sunday that the budget he will introduce next week repeals health care reform because that under ‘Obamacare,’ “we think it’s going to look very ugly over the next couple of years.”

Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” Ryan explained that his budget is based on the assumption of repealing ‘Obamacare’ and replacing it with a new system. His budget also reforms Medicare for those currently under 55 years of age.

“Are you saying, as part of your budget you assume the repeal of ObamaCare?,” host Chris Wallace asked.

“Yes,” said Ryan.

“Well, that’s not going to happen,” Wallace said.

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The Daily Banter Headline Grab. From AP:

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor on Wednesday denied a request to block part of the federal health care law that requires employee health-care plans to provide insurance coverage for the morning-after pill and similar emergency contraception pills.

Hobby Lobby Stores and a sister company, Mardel Inc., sued the government, claiming the mandate violates the religious beliefs of its owners.

In an opinion, Sotomayor said the stores fail to satisfy the demanding legal standard for blocking the requirement on an emergency basis. She said the companies may continue their challenge to the regulations in the lower courts.

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Here’s precisely why raising the Medicare eligibility age appears to be the only solution to keeping the program solvent: the Republican Party, which hates Medicare and always has, and the compliant DC news media, which self-consciously dittos the Republicans so as to not appear too “liberal,” say so.

And so it is.

But I probably don’t need to tell you that it’s really, really flipping stupid — times a thousand. And it’s simply designed to sabotage Medicare and the broader healthcare system.

During election campaigns the Republicans invariably pretend to be in love with Medicare, as Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan reminded us this year by turning the Affordable Care Act’s Medicare savings into a cudgel to flog the president and the Democrats as enemies of the program when in fact the opposite is true in nearly every way. Not only did Romney inject the $700 billion savings into the discourse as a campaign issue, it practically became a centerpiece of his campaign — not to mention one of his biggest lies. And now the same Republicans who joined Romney in this line of attack are insisting that Medicare be one of the programs on the fiscal cliff chopping block.

The idea is a familiar one. They want to raise the eligibility age from 65 to 67, and they’re receiving hearty endorsements from the cynical, nearsighted and compliant DC press. For example, within a strikingly revealing Politico exposé about creating the DC elite, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen wrote this:

They will also tell you Medicare, which is on pace to be insolvent in 12 years, is a much, much bigger mess and threat to long-term economic vitality — and much harder to solve. Yes, the rich need to get smaller benefits, but that is almost meaningless in terms of fixing it. Ultimately, many Americans will have to get less generous benefits that start to kick in at an older age — and those changes need to start a decade from now. Otherwise, the math simply doesn’t work.

This is the common wisdom. Sadly. The only way to “fix” Medicare, they say, is to stick it to regular Americans who need it the most. There’s no other solution, they say, other than to protect the rich and screw the middle class. And that’s precisely what they intend to do. It turns out that stripping 65- and 66-year-olds of Medicare benefits will cost those people two dollars for every dollar the government saves by keeping them out of the program.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, in the first year alone such a shift in the eligibility age would save the government around $5.7 billion. Sounds great! But it’ll actually cost seniors and the system more than $11 billion in the first year. Matt Yglesias wrote:

That includes $3.7 billion in higher costs for 65- and 66 year-olds, $4.5 billion from employers through company-sponsored insurance, $0.7 billion from state governments, and $2.5 billion in higher average prices for third parties once younger seniors are shifted out of the Medicare risk-pool and into the general population.

And the (very liberal) Wall Street Journal agrees that raising the eligibility age is a huge mistake.

The Republicans don’t really care because the goal isn’t savings for the system — the goal is to begin a trend in which every time Medicare reform comes up, raising the eligibility age becomes the standard fare. So it gets rolled back and rolled back, while fewer and fewer people are covered. Undermine and weaken the system by a thousand cuts. And, as an added bonus, the roll back trend make totally sabotages the notion of actually expanding Medicare or implementing Medicare For All.

Ironically, and in spite of what The Very Serious Republicans and Politicos, expanding Medicare to include everyone is one of several ideas that could actually help both Medicare and the broader healthcare system. By allowing everyone, especially younger Americans, to enter the system, a tsunami of new revenue enters the system from a demographic that’s generally healthy and would use very little of the system’s resources. Plus, Medicare operates with greater efficiency and lower overhead than private insurance, while privately doctors, hospitals and pharmaceuticals remain intact and, in some cases, prosper because everyone can receive care and pay for it.

Shy of providing Medicare For All, what about passing the public option? During the debate over the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the CBO reported that the public option would save the government $68 billion over ten years. It would further bend the cost curve and, hell, if they decided to raise the Medicare eligibility age anyway, it would at least give seniors an affordable stop gap.

Or they could simply make the Medicare tax portion of the payroll tax progressive. In other words, in the current system everyone pays a Medicare tax of 1.45 percent, regardless of income. Why not apply the Medicare tax with 1.45 percent as the minimum bracket and increase the tax for subsequently higher income brackets, while means testing wealthier Americans to discover whether they really need the same benefits as middle and working class Americans?

Of course none of this is considered to be Very Serious enough, so unless there are some loud voices telling them to cut crap, the Very Serious people in Washington appear to be moving the direction of raising eligibility age. And it’ll be a disaster.

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By Bob Cesca: We’ve all known a kid who upon losing a board game would freak out, hurl the game across the room and storm off while shouting something like, “This game sucks anyway!” The modern permutation of this unhinged sour grapes tantrum is to chuck a video game controller at the TV. (I sheepishly raise my hand: guilty as charged on the latter.)

It’s one thing to suffer a momentary lack of self-control after losing a simple game, especially if the game is stupid, stupid, stupid and doesn’t give you a chance to fire before enemies converge on your position seemingly out of nowhere I hate that game! Phew. Sorry. But it’s another thing entirely to engage in this kind of silly, irrational behavior as a business owner, politician or political pundit in reaction to the results of an election. It’s no surprise the Republicans are doing exactly that.

Last week, I wrote about the nonsensical secession movement. But it’s safe to say that it was spearheaded by a marginal, fringe, kneejerk group of mostly throw-back libertarian goofballs. The following examples of apoplexy, however, have come from people who reside squarely in the mainstream of the conservative right.

Let’s begin with fast food executives like Papa John’s CEO John Schnatter who threatened to raise the price of his crappy pizzas by 11-cents per pie while laying off workers as a means to side-stepping the forthcoming Affordable Care Act requirement that businesses with 50 or more employees provide all full time workers with health insurance or else pay a fine of $2,000 per employee. After crunching the numbers, however, Schnatter only needs to raise the price tag of each pizza by around 5-cents and use the proceeds to pay for health insurance for all of his full time workers. Done. Unless Papa John’s customers are radical misers, they’ll never notice the almost nonexistent price increase.

Elsewhere, a Denny’s franchise owner in New York threatened to add a five percent surcharge on each bill to pay for his new Obamacare expenses. The backlash was swift. Denny’s sales dropped all across the nation, even though John Metz, the franchise owner, only controlled a few dozen restaurants. So naturally the CEO of Denny’s had to step in and force-feed Metz some much-need Xanax.

Denny’s chief executive John Miller privately reached out to Metz to express his “disappointment” with the Florida franchisee’s controversial statements about Obamacare, which sparked a wave of backlash for the national restaurant chain over the past few days. Metz released a statement Monday night expressing “regret” over his statements.

“We recognize his right to speak on issues, but registered our disappointment that his comments have been interpreted as the company’s position,” Miller said in an email to The Huffington Post.

So that’s it. Hopefully Miller schooled Metz on the financial benefits of having a healthy workforce: fewer sick days, greater productivity, less turnover and higher-quality workers. In the case of Schnatter, the additional cost of health insurance will only reduce his profit margin by around $5-8 million annually if he doesn’t nothing to offset the cost. And yes — only. Last year, Schnatter’s pizza empire reported a profit of $87 million on gross sales of $1.218 billion, and if the trend holds, his profits for 2012 should be even higher.

Absent legitimate business concerns, what else do we call this behavior other than a tantrum?

Speaking of profits, if the president gets his way and taxes are returned to the Clinton-era levels for incomes above $250,000 for families and $200,000 for individuals, reports are coming in from various small business owners that they inexplicably intend to sabotage their revenue streams in order to keep incomes under the $250,000 threshold. For example:

Kristina Collins, a chiropractor in McLean, Va., said she and her husband planned to closely monitor the business income from their joint practice to avoid crossing the income threshold for higher taxes outlined by President Obama on earnings above $200,000 for individuals and $250,000 for couples.

Ms. Collins said she felt torn by being near the cutoff line and disappointed that federal tax policy was providing a disincentive to keep expanding a business she founded in 1998.

“If we’re really close and it’s near the end-year, maybe we’ll just close down for a while and go on vacation,” she said.

It’s shocking that they’re successful business people, given their total ignorance of how taxes work. At the very least they ought to fire their accountant. But, once again, I don’t think this has anything to do with reality and everything to do with acting out like spoiled, petulant children.

Here’s how the tax code really works. If the Bush tax cuts expire on income higher than $250,000, the slightly higher tax rate will only apply to income over $250,000 — not the entire sum of $250,000. In other words, if the Collins family earns $251,000 next year, they will only pay a higher marginal tax rate on $1,000, not $251,000. And that doesn’t even take into consideration various deductions and tax credits that would cumulatively give the Collins family a lower effective tax rate (the process by which Mitt Romney or Warren Buffet pays a tax rate in the range of 15%).

So these people are deliberately restraining their revenue potential because they’re pissed about the election. In my video game metaphor, this is not unlike bashing yourself in the head with a controller instead of hurling it across the room.

Then there are the red state governors who are refusing to implement the health insurance exchanges required in the Affordable Care Act. Rick Perry, Scott Walker, Rick Scott and the other usual suspects have stonewalled the law. Bobby Jindal, who not only blasted his own party for being “stupid” but who also criticized the stimulus while accepting gigantic stimulus checks, has also joined the blockade against Obamacare.

These so-called states’ rights Republicans obviously don’t realize that the federal government will simply create an exchange itself for any state that refuses. In other words, here’s a case where the states have total control and these governors have all but relinquished that control to the federal government — literally allowing a government takeover.

I can’t even imagine the tarring and feathering that would’ve taken place if any Democratic politician had refused to implement Medicare Part-D or the USA PATRIOT Act or had refused to allow the deployment of national guard units to Iraq. The outrage would’ve been punitive and nearly universal. I mean, look at what happened to former-Senator Max Cleland (D-GA) in the 2002 midterms when he dared to oppose the Iraq War. Karl Rove and the Republicans accused this triple-amputee Vietnam War veteran of being sympathetic to Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden. Saxby Chambliss won the election and has currently joined the witch hunt against U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, even though he and George W. Bush presided over a six year span of time when there were 11 terrorist attacks on various U.S. consulates resulting in dozens of casualties.

And finally, an article about kneejerk, childish reactions to the election wouldn’t be complete without mentioning the latest gibberish from Dean Chambers, the “portly” founder of Unskewed Polls. Immediately after the election, Chambers blamed me for his homophobic rant against Nate Silver. Yes, really. He blamed me. You know, because Republicans are all about personal responsibility. Evidently, Chambers objected to an article in which I described him as “portly” in an attempt to visually and professionally contrast him with Silver. Chambers is the “Bizarro Nate Silver,” I wrote. So naturally Chambers lashed out against… Silver. Odd.

But that’s not the worst of it. Chambers launched a new site called “Barack O’Fraudo.” I’m not making that up. Barack O’Fraudo. First of all, what’s the deal with the name? Chambers seems to have combined the president’s first name with an Irish version of the word “fraud” and tossed in a random “o” at the end — the president’s actual last name ends with an “a.”

The mission, as I predicted weeks ago, is to unskew the results of the election by smoking out cases of voter fraud orchestrated by Obama campaign. Chambers is back to doing what he does best: drawing wild conclusions from numbers he doesn’t fully understand. He’s pinpointed cases of alleged fraud in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Florida, and has therefore stripped 80 electoral votes away from the president. But, strangely, he doesn’t give those electoral votes to Romney — yet.

Four years ago, when the president won the first time, fringy Republicans merely threatened to “Go Galt,” in reference to the John Galt character in Atlas Shrugged who accumulates a group of wealthy disciples to stop contributing to the economy, thus bringing it to its knees. This time around it seems as if this conservative whiny freak-out is a futile extension of that initial effort. It won’t work and, in the final analysis, it will only serve to further embarrass and discredit a conservative movement that’s already in serious trouble. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

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The Daily Banter Headline Grab. From TPM:

Late last week more than a dozen Republican governors declared that they will not build the insurance market exchanges called for by the Affordable Care Act, including prominent names like Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, John Kasich of Ohio, Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Rick Perry of Texas.

On Monday, Gov. Mary Fallin of Oklahoma joined them, declaring in a statement that it “does not benefit Oklahoma taxpayers to actively support and fund a new government program that will ultimately be under the control of the federal government.”

The original deadline for states to notify the Department of Health and Human Services on whether they intend to build their own exchange was last Friday, but the administration extended it to Dec. 14. About a dozen Republican governors are weighing their options, including Chris Christie of New Jersey, Rick Scott of Florida and Terry Branstad of Iowa.

The Affordable Care Act encourages each state to build and operate its own exchange — a regulated, subsidized marketplace where consumers and small businesses can shop for insurance plans. If a state declines, the federal government has the power under the health care reform law to build one for it.

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