Wednesday, August 12, 2026
New Poll Has Trump's Job Approval At Only 33%
The chart above reflects the results of the Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between August 7th and 10th of a nationwide sample of 1,589 adults (including 1,420 registered voters). The margin of error was 3.2 points for both adults and registered voters.
The U.S. Health Insurance System Is Already Mostly Socialized
It may surprise many right-wingers who profess to hate "socialized medicine", but the U.S. health insurance system is already mostly socialized. Economist Paul Krugman explains:
A system under which the government would pay almost all medical expenses. Isn’t that socialism?
Well, if that is the criterion then much of U.S. healthcare is already socialist. In fact, the government’s role is so large that U.S. healthcare is better described as partially privatized socialism than as anything resembling a free market.
Let’s start with the raw numbers on health insurance, which pays the bulk of Americans’ medical expenses. Americans receive health insurance either from private companies or from public programs, overwhelmingly Medicare and Medicaid.
While a majority of Americans with health insurance get it from private companies, well over 100 million of us are covered by government programs instead. And these government programs pay more total dollars for medical bills than the private insurers do.
Why do government programs that cover a minority of the population account for a majority of health insurers’ outlays? Mainly because Medicare covers seniors, and we’re expensive. Also, while Medicaid covers many younger Americans, disabled and elderly beneficiaries account for most of its spending.
Even by the raw numbers, then, U.S. health insurance looks as much public as private. But that understates the government’s role: Private health insurance in the U.S. is both highly regulated and heavily subsidized.
This is obviously true for the insurance coverage purchased by tens of millions of Americans through the exchanges established by the Affordable Care Act. But employment-based health insurance, which covers 161 million Americans, is far more of a government creation than most people realize. For employment-based insurance exists largely because of huge implicit government subsidies that come with major strings attached.
Here’s how that works. If your employer pays you $10,000, that’s taxable income. But if your employer pays $10,000 toward a company health insurance plan that meets certain criteria, it isn’t taxable. That’s a huge effective subsidy, running at more than $300 billion a year. Take that subsidy into account, along with the more than $100 billion per year spent subsidizing policies purchased under the ACA, as well as the outlays on Medicare and Medicaid, and net effect is that the government pays for more than two-thirds of Americans’ health insurance.
Granted, there are strings attached. Roughly speaking, employment-based health plans can’t discriminate based on medical history — that is, they can’t deny coverage to employees with pre-existing conditions — and they also can’t offer the plans only to highly compensated employees — a health plan that is only for the C-suite is considered taxable income.
So given the restrictions of the federal tax code, employer-based health insurance is a lot like Obamacare, which also prohibits discrimination based on medical history and provides subsidies to make insurance affordable to lower-paid workers. The fact is that virtually all of private healthcare insurance is already well under some form of government control through regulation and tax subsidies. . . .
If Medicare is socialism, then the whole U.S. health insurance system, with the government paying most of the bills and placing conditions on private insurers, is almost equally socialist. If you insist on calling any program the government pays for and regulates socialist, then U.S. healthcare would best be described as a partially privatized form of socialism.
And one must ask, what is the point of the part that is privatized? Do private insurers add anything positive? Or are they simply parasites, skimming off money that could have been paying for care?
The case for viewing insurers as parasites is strong. Many Medicare benefits are now delivered via Medicare Advantage, that is, plans paid for by the government but run through insurance companies. MedPAC, an independent advisory commission, estimates that last year Medicare Advantage plans were overpaid by $84 billion, thanks to practices such as “upcoding,” in which patients’ health problems are overstated to get larger sums from Medicare.
Assessing the waste from employer-based insurance is harder, but most evidencesuggests that private insurers have substantially higher administrative costs than Medicare does. Furthermore, the complexity of private insurance, with multiple payers all trying to deny care when they can, is a huge burden both on providers — doctors, nurses, and hospitals — and on patients.
What do private insurers offer to compensate for these costs? One must go through intellectual contortions to avoid the conclusion that they are, in fact, parasites.
Which brings me to El-Sayed. In supporting Medicare for All, he’s basically calling for an end to the partial, parasitic privatization of a healthcare system that is already hugely dependent on public funding. When one looks at it that way, it’s not at all a radical proposal. . . .
The political calculus may very well have shifted since the 2000s, as Americans are fed up with a system of unaffordable premiums, rampant claim denials, and byzantine claim administration. Moreover, funding healthcare insurance through taxation would allow for a much more progressive distribution of the cost. That is, compared to the present system, middle-income households would pay less as high-income households would pay more. And the U.S. would stop wasting large sums on pointless administrative costs.
So let’s be clear: El-Sayed’s healthcare platform is perfectly reasonable on the merits of cost, fairness and health efficacy. And with private insurers never more hated, while millions of Americans are losing their health insurance, 2026 may be its time.
A Democratic Voter's Message To Party Leaders
You were chosen to run the day-to-day activities of the party, recruit candidates for the party, raise campaign money for the party's candidates, and forward/defend the party's positions - and for the most part, I think you do a great job.
But sometimes you go a bit too far.
The Republican Party is a top-down party. Trump (and party leaders) say froggie, and the base asks how high to jump. This even extends to what candidates the leaders prefer.
The Democratic Party is not that way. We are (and pretty much always have been) a bottom-up party. The party's base voters decide what issues are important, and what candidates they want to address those issues and represent the party on the November ballot.
It is NOT the job of the DNC (or other party leaders) to choose the party's candidates. That is the job of the party's primary voters. They know better than anyone the problems and issues in their state, and the best candidates to address those problems and issues.
It is a mistake for party leaders (sometimes called the "establishment") to favor one Democratic candidate over another - to use their party position to favor a candidate or to fund one candidate over another. It is not your job to decide who is the better candidate or who should not represent the party. That is the job of the primary voters.
And it is not your job to complain about the candidates chosen by primary voters. That just creates dissension within the party, and lessens to chance of victory on Election Day.
Accept the decision of the voters. Then vocally and financially support ALL of the party's candidates.
We have a golden opportunity to flip Congress this year - maybe both houses. Don't blow it!
Tuesday, August 11, 2026
Not All Populist Movements Are The Same
Populist movements are not new to the United States. They are created when a significant portion of the population become convinced that the elites controlling the government are not carrying out the will of the people.
Some populist movements have been successful. It was a populist movement that put Andrew Jackson in the White House. But most aren't successful. Even those many times have their concerns adopted by one of the major political parties though (which is a kind of success).
But not all populist movements are the same. That is shown by the two populist movements here in the 21st century.
Donald Trump was elected by a right-wing populist movement. It was a cultural populist movement - made of of a combination of racists, misogynists, xenophobes, and fundamentalist christians. These people were afraid that the country was leaving them behind.
They longed for the past, where their ideas were accepted by the majority and they had power. As the people they looked down on gained equal rights they felt as though they were losing - and thy wanted the old country back.
They found a champion in Donald Trump, who agreed with their bigoted views. And they were able to eke out an electoral college victory. They were able to get him re-elected on a promise to create a better economy.
But the better economy didn't happen. Tax cuts for the rich, tariffs that raised prices, and an unnecessary war against Iran combined to create an economy in which the top 10% (especially the top 1%) did well at the expense of the bottom 90%.
That helped to spawn a left-wing populism. This was not cultural but economic. About 60% of the country is living paycheck-to-paycheck, and many of them are finding it hard just to keep up with inflation. In addition, the next 30% were also seeing their salaries weren't going as far as they used to.
Progressives, who had been preaching about economic unfairness for decades, found themselves becoming more popular as more people reached their economic breaking point. Progressive politicians found themselves winning more elections as the economic populist voters searched for those who would fight for them. And they made affordability the main issue in the coming election.
This has scared the Republicans (and sadly, some corporate Democrats) who created the economic mess, and have no solution for it. They have resorted to calling the new progressive winners "socialists" and "communists".
But most leaders of the new economic populism are neither "socialist" or "communist". They are fighters who are willing to fight for a fair economy for workers. And I think most voters see that. They see their own grocery and electric and medical bills, and they need some relief. That's why calling the new progressives names or trying to claim the economy is good is just not going to work.
The new economic populism is backed up by hard economic realities - not bigoted beliefs. It's going to result in an electoral blue wave in November - a wave that could grow into a blue tsunami if name-calling is all the opposition can do.
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