Romney Medicaid plan

Not Fully American is a commentary written by the author Ed Kilgore. He seems like he has a genuinely good intention in helping lower income people. This commentary is a liberal blog, so obliviously he is a liberal focusing on the Medicaid issue in the conservative platform for 2012 election. The Romney/Paul campaign wants to give the states the authority for Medicaid instead of the federal government. The government would just give grants to states. He is worried that Republican strong states would reject these grants and more lower income people would suffer. This makes the conservatives seem not caring. The audience intended for this would be of a left wing liberal nature. The ones sympathetic to the lower income people.  I agree with what the author is claiming that if strong hold Republican states are allowed to decide how to use federal grants for social programs then a lot of lower income people are going to suffer. Conservatives in general have an ideology of limited social programs. He doesn’t even have to provide facts to have a strong argument for that.  There is a strong point he made when he said that poverty stricken areas of the South will be hit the hardest. This puts in my mind the time before the civil rights movement when segregation was a common practice in the South. A bad era in U.S. history, but one we must learn from.

Will red states be hit hard if states are authorized to provide or not provide Medicaid? That’s a definite yes.

Medicaid, Medicare and Paid Family Leave?

In this commentary called, U.S. needs paid family leave . The columnist, Duncan black insist that paid leave for families with newborn children  should be mandatory in the United States, which of course he things that the government should provide this benefit because of how most collectivist think. They think the government should spread the wealth proportionally and provide benefits for all. While this would work in theory where everyone works equal and has a common goal. This will not work in reality. Some people are goal driven and others see themselves as victims.  One argument he uses is that he doesn’t have kids and still would like to see this benefit in the United States. Well, I have no kids either and I have the opposite belief. As a libertarian I believe the government should have a minimal role in an individual’s life. Of course, I believe that there should be a government. I’m not an anarchist. That would never work if we had everyone for him/herself and having no law enforcement, but the government’s very limited role would be to protect against crimes that involve force, fraud and YES to impose income tax, but used in very limited social programs. U.S. paying for family leave not one of them. While the columnist Duncan Black states that is only cost Sweden 0.8% of its GDP. Sweden’s GDP is about 387 billion compared to the U.S.’s  15.29 trillion as stated in the CIA fact book.  This is comparing apples and oranges.

 Only opinion that I agreed with was the one stating that the leave should be split between the male and the female. This coincides with my libertarian viewpoint that the male shouldn’t be thought of as the income maker and the female should be a stay at home mom.