One of Matt Zeller's friends sent me a Facebook message from Zeller, which was sent to Zeller's friends, mainly to raise money. Here's the non-fundraising portion:
At this point, I'm taking the next couple of days to plan, organize,
and prepare our official launch. November is just seven months away,
and we have a lot of work to do to get this campaign up and running,
and to get our message out to the voters of the 29th District.This election is going to be about one thing: creating jobs. Our goal
is to develop and grow an economy that creates economic growth and
vitality that is both prosperous in the short term and enduring over
the long haul. I've got a boat load of great ideas on how we make that
happen – but none of them will ever get heard in Washington without
your immediate help.
Comments
Interested to hear his ideas on creating jobs. Thus far most Democrat actions don't seem to be helping much in that area.
Young Matthew will find out, like the rest of them, that government doesn't create jobs, it kills them. If he was really interested in creating jobs he's go to Albany and do something about the job-killers there. Property values are falling, property taxes are raising, and towns and villages can't afford to keep up.
Congressmen like Randy Kuhl, Eric Massa, and now these two candidates talk about creating jobs because it's what voters want to hear. The only jobs congressmen create are their own and a handfull of political operatives masquerading as government employees, and half of them will be located in DC contributing to their economy.
Government can create jobs just fine. You will see the new health care bill will mean a lot of jobs will be created to manage the new system. The problem is government jobs cannot create wealth. Creating wealth is the way private sector companies create jobs. The issue I think will gain prominence in national discussion.
Tax dollars will go to pay for the Assistant Under-Secretary of Sprains and Fractures, but that position doesn't create any wealth. Instead is is a siphon off from the productive part of the country.
You both make valid points. However, the mark is missed. In order to restore the country to economic stability, we must do six things:
1. We must ensure increased domestic production through the dimunation of the minimum wage, while increasing the standard of living;
2. We offset this dimunation through the decrease of American workers through union representation, we give the power back to the people so that wage control is once again a market force;
3. We re-instate the efficacy of the tenth amendment, and give sovereignty back to the states;
4. We focus on the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, and we require that our Federal Government consult it truthfully before any decision is made;
5. The People demand adequate representation in Washington, the second amendment is designed to allow us to make sure that we never cave to tyranny;
6. Yes, jobs are important, but they are worthless if the first freedoms are not protected. I do not see either Reed or Zeller making any effort to protect the Constitution or our first freedoms, thus jobs become an afterthought.
We need an independent candidate who can tell the parties where to stick it, and we need a candidate who can fight for the 29th Congressional District of New York, regardless of the consequences. I encourage you to vote for Joe Miller.
Voting for Joe and encouraging his run is a bi-partisan effort. VoteForJoeMiller@gmail.com.
Joe is our independent candidate who refuses to be blinded by party lines.
Joe is grassroots and deserves our support.
Mr. Miller,
A couple things.
2. We offset this dimunation through the decrease of American workers through union representation, we give the power back to the people so that wage control is once again a market force;
Please see any story out of New Jersey recently to see where powerful unions get you. I agree people shouldn't have to work 70 hours straight in a smelt factory, but more unionization doesn't mean that corruption and inefficiency won't abound.
3. We re-instate the efficacy of the tenth amendment, and give sovereignty back to the states;
I agree on this point. The feds do a lot of shenanigans that they have no right to do. Liberals don't seem to have a problem with it (See Health care)
Mike- See my reply to Rotten below. It was more tongue-in-cheek, than anything. Although, if I had the resources I would definitely consider a run, but not on the above platform!
Gottcha. Does anyone have the facebook link to Mr. Zeller? I can't find him.
Of course governments can create jobs and I'd like to see sustainable and generally available opportunities for wealth-creation in the absence of law enforcement, the justice system, transportation infrastructure, education and regulation of commerce. Health care reform comes under the latter category. Private insurers have certainly created wealth, but at the expense of patients and taxpayers. We pay roughly a fifty percent premium for health care, with little or no value added in terms of quality of care. And government workers pay taxes and buy things from private companies and in general do add value through their service.
No one is in favor of waste, and waste is a side effect of monopoly. AT&T, IBM, Xerox, and the American Auto Industry of the middle of the last century, and more recently the oil and financial industries, provide plenty of examples of waste. There are are some things that cannot legitimately be left to private enterprise if the benefits are to be distributed fairly. Those benefits are generally referred to as rights. Physical security, private property, speech, etc. can only protected by government monopolies. That's where representative government, an independent judicial system, and regulation are supposed to minimize waste and abuse of power.
This article in today's Times about the Tea Party Poll makes the tension between what we want and what we get clear, I think.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/15/us/politics/15poll.html?hp
Subtract the obvious element of bigotry from the Bagger Ideology and you pretty much get what most of us want. If anyone really wants a tiny government then they are just asking for a return to feudalism.
Explain how regulation of interstate commerce coincides with Health Care reform? You can’t buy health care across state lines. So by definition, Congress has no right to regulate it. Had Congress created a law that allows people to buy insurance anywhere in the country, I would have had to yield as that is a power granted them by the Constitution.
Private insurers have created wealth is true in that they turn a profit, but anyone who pictures the private insurers as big “fat cats” doesn’t understand the system or the market. Insurance companies average around 2-3% profit each year. That is far below a lot of other businesses. Insurance is expensive because health care is expensive. Health care is expensive for a lot of reasons including Law suits and regulations GOVERNMENT put in place. Insurance companies work by managing risk. Obamacare takes that power out of their hands. This only leads one place and I don’t think it is where you want to go. Also, this bill will cause premiums to go up, but still force you to buy it. So lets see how far down this road you like to go.
I currently don’t pay anything for my health care. My company does. Should my company decide it is cheaper to drop my coverage, pay the penalty, and throw me into the “exchange” I won’t be able to keep my health care coverage. (Thought that was promised?) America has the finest health care system in the world. When someone gets really sick in France, they come here. When Canadians can’t wait for their treatment they cross the border and have it done here. It is perfect? No, but it is the price you pay to live in a free society.
And government workers do pay taxes, with money from taxes. Their salary is paid by Joe and Jane American. So let’s say they pay $5,000 on $50,000 salary to taxes. That is still $45,000 of tax payer money and that doesn’t include the taxes needed to actually runt he program. Let’s take it to the extreme. 99.9% of Americans worked in private business and the government was only .1%. That it functioned off a very basic tax and got the rest from bonds and interest on loans, could America’s economy survive? Sure. What if 99.9% of the population worked for the government is some capacity. Where would the money come from to pay their salaries, let alone operating expenses?
No one is in favor of waste, and waste is a side effect of monopoly. It sure is. Look at the government’s running of the Postal Service and Amtrak. You think they have earned the right to run health care? The thing about private monopolies is they can be policed not only by the free market, but by Constitutional government regulation. Who polices the government if they are wasteful? In their wildest dreams, IBM, Xerox and AT&T could never be as wasteful with other people’s money as the government. If you want to point to the financial meltdown, do some research and see the government’s role in it. If you think they weren’t partially to blame then you lack understanding. I’ve challenged people before and I’ll do it again, show me a large government program that runs in budget, efficiently, and doesn’t require constant appropriated increases. I’ll show you hundreds that can be described just that way. So we want to give them MORE power?
The government is supposed to act in a limited function with in the Constitution. Remember a government cannot give freedoms; it can only take what was already there away. Speech, Physical Security, Private property can all be taken away by government’s laws. They cannot be taken away by private industries without going counter to law.
Look at the numbers of what our government spends and where. Do you really think THEY should regulate waste?
I also fail to see the bigotry of the Tea Parties Ideology. Most of what they have stated is that they don’t want government in their lives. They see that the government spends more than it earns and they intrinsically that will infringe on personal liberties. Are their bad apples in the bunch? Probably. Does the Democrat Party have similar apples? Sure. I don’t think you can discount the movement just because the media chooses to constantly show a small negative side.
You said interstate commerce, not me. 2-3% of trillions is not chump change for the five major insurers. US has the best health care system in the world? Joke, right? You know, there are studies and facts out there, you should check them out. Yes, people who are wealthy enough to go overseas for treatment of specific illnesses go overseas, often, but not overwhelmingly to the US. Yes, healthy people will need to buy insurance in order for the HCR plan to work. It's called managing risk in order to make health care affordable for all. Rates on some plans will go up, as will the quality of their coverage. "Keeping your own plan"" was not a guarantee against natural disaster, it was a reassurance that if that your circumstances don't change, you plan wouldn't need to. Did anyone expect that the government would instantly provide you with the same plan that your employer offers in case you leave the company, or that the company would be forbidden to alter your plan in any way? What a crock.
Your 99.9% paragraph barely merits a reply, except that it apparently assumes that government employees add no value to the economy. And yes, AT&T, IBM, etc. wasted other people's money, it's just that the money came in as fees and markups, not taxes and it wasn't theirs anymore. The idea that once the government has collected our taxes, the money is still ours is as ridiculous as thinking that when we paid our phone bill in 1960, it was still our money. Some people seem to assume that the Post Office and Amtrak are easy marks. Try to get UPS to deliver any piece of paper that you throw into its box to any individual in the country in four days or less for 42 cents. If Amtrak got the sort of subsidies that the airlines and trucking industries get (hint: imagine the truckers having to build their own roads), then you could make a comparison. Why is it that you can fly to Florida or the west coast for $100, stopping in Detroit, Chicago, Denver, or Atlanta (choose any two), while it costs the same amount to go from Rochester to Philly by train? And BTW, the airlines are almost all losing money. Hint: subsidies and waste.
"Remember a government cannot give freedoms; it can only take what was already there away. Speech, Physical Security, Private property can all be taken away by government’s laws. They cannot be taken away by private industries without going counter to law." Wow. If you could see how twisted the logic in that paragraph is then you might be able to see bigotry in much of what the Tea Party folks are saying.
I said interstate commerce because you said government can create jobs by “regulation of commerce”. They are constitutionally limited by interstate commerce. Health insurance is not interstate and thus should be out of their purview. Yes health insurance companies bring in a lot of money, but they also pay out a lot of money. By your logic, insurance companies should lower their premiums by 2-3% and everything is fine? Probably not. Businesses try there darned to cut where they can so they can see a profit. If the big insurance companies were so greedy, don’t you think they would have higher profits? I see you side-stepped the cause of expensive health care.
You show me the stats where the US falls behind other countries and I can show you faulty statistics. Infant mortality is a great example. You can see a chart and see that the US is outside the top 20 in infant mortality. I think it is around 6 children die for every 1,000 in the US. Compared to other countries and you assume the US is failing its infants. Look closer and you see that a lot of the countries ahead of us are smaller. Large populations make health care difficult. Japan is a highly populated country with low infant mortality, but they also don’t have large minority populations, and that is where a lot of infant mortality occurs. It is a variable the Japanese don’t have to cope with. A third variable is what is reported as an infant death. In the US if you are born sick or premature we devote huge resources to try to give that child a chance. Other countries can’t devote the resources so the child is not considered a live birth. So I have checked out the studies.
“Yes, people who are wealthy enough to go overseas for treatment of specific illnesses go overseas, often, but not overwhelmingly to the US”. If you get sick and have unlimited resources you aren’t going to the Mayo Clinic? You heading to Britian? Pakistan? Japan? A hidden benefit of our medical system is the advancement it affords the medical profession. The United States develops the top medical equipment, drugs, medicines, etc. Where would you like your doctors to go to school? Harvard, Penn, Cornell? Or Paris?
Healthy people won’t need to buy insurance, they will be required by their government to purchase it whether they want to or not. I think that is a slippery slope. Forcing healthy people to pay more for medical insurance is not managing risk, it is robbing Peter to pay Paul. Rate on everyone will go up. If you don’t believe me, see Massachusetts which out a similar system to Obamacare and how that is working out. (One of the main reasons I could never vote for Romney)
"Keeping your own plan" was not a guarantee against natural disaster? While I appreciate the rhetoric, Obama care wasn’t a natural disaster. My point was some businesses will dump their coverage of employees because it is cheaper to pay the fine than the premiums. The government set up a system where businesses are encouraged to put people into the exchange. Its not a crock, you just didn’t understand my point. For the record there are stories about all the people calling insurance companies asking for their “free health care”. I don’t think those are the type of people who were against the bill. Just more people looking for their handout on someone else’s dime.
My 99.9% paragraph went over your head. I really tried to show that if the number of government employees reaches too high a point, the economy can’t survive. (Google Russia and Cold War) I don’t understand your cell phone analogy. I never said it was still mine, merely that it costs more to employ a government worker than a free enterprise worker and as such we economical basics verify that too many government employees is unsustainable.
Try to get UPS to deliver any piece of paper that you throw into its box to any individual in the country in four days or less for 42 cents. I can’t, USPS in a government monopoly. On the other hand, UPS isn’t running 7 BILLION in the red on the taxpayer dime. Also, stamps are $0.44, checking those facts, buddy.
Amtrak does get government funding. The members of its board of directors are appointed by the President of the United States and are subject to confirmation by the United States Senate. They are essentially a government entity. Let’s take a look at getting from DC to Orlando by train: Cheapest price $220.00. And it will only take 17 hr, 25 min! (one way) Would you care to race? You on your train and me on my plane?
Amtrak loses all kinds of money too. Some airlines lose money because of massive regulations and unions. There are airlines that make a profit; there isn’t a SINGLE high speed rail that turns a profit in the world.
Please point out how my logic is twisted? It is easy to just say your logic is twisted and the tea party people are bigots. Prove it.
"Remember a government cannot give freedoms; it can only take what was already there away. Speech, Physical Security, Private property can all be taken away by government’s laws. They cannot be taken away by private industries without going counter to law."
In what world are speech, physical security, private property free? Government doesn't give freedom, it defines rights and privileges, and assuming that it's a good government, it then sets out to protect them.
Your premise is that we have innate freedoms and that government diminishes them ("can only take them away") by its laws. Then you contradict your premise by stating that the law protects "freedoms" (speech, physical security, private property) against any threat from "private industries."
I would certainly agree that laws both protect and limit freedom. I would argue that in a complex society in which everyone has the same rights, everyone must be willing to accept limits on their freedom. Where we would probably part company is my belief that the right to life includes competent and effective medical care. Bigotry is implicit in the assumption that "immigrants," the poor and people of color are undeserving of that right or that those more fortunate should not be inconvenienced by laws that seek to provide that care.
Right. 44 cents. There goes my argument, buddy.
My point was that all laws restrict freedom. There are laws against your freedom to kill a person. There are laws against your freedom to steal someone's possessions.
The United States Government was founded on the ideal that while government is needed for order, it should not infringe on basic liberties. The ability to make laws belongs solely to the government, but our Constitution gives very specific powers to the government and it shouldn't go outside its purview. Private industry can make no laws. It is subject to those the government puts in place.
If leaders in the government decide they want to take the country down a path, they can create laws restricting freedoms to get to that end. Private business can not enact such legal drivers.
You said yourself, "assuming that it's a good government". What if it isn't? Who decides what is good? Since government can, and often does, move in a poor direction, why wouldn't we want to contain it and limit its abilities. I believe that is the purpose of the Constitution.
Competent and effective medical care if something the US already has and making it available to everyone is something that we should certainly strive towards. Obamacare doesn't do that. It will make things worse. The poor already get coverage under Medicaid, there are free clinics and religious organizations that sponsors other medical facilities.
No one is saying the poor are undeserving of medical care, and if "immigrants" is a reference to my point that immigrants raise the national cost of health care, then that hardly makes me a bigot. That is an economic fact. If you are poor, you can't afford health care, so someone else must pay your way. Medical care in this country is vastly expensive, and I think I have shown that its not just the "greedy" insurance companies. Medical care is expensive. It doesn't help that our population is over weight, tanning, smoking, drinking, etc.
You can say I am being cold and callous, but the fact of the matter was our health care system was unsustainable before, and we just added a few million. I understand your feelings of compassion, but you need to understand the reality of the situation. It is basic math.
You not knowing the price of a stamp didn't sink your argument, my facts did.
My stamps are forever stamps and don't have numbers on them. I guess I missed the facts that disproved my point that the post office is in trouble because it now has an impossible job. It can't compete with email and its business model relies on every mailbox paying its share of the delivery cost as volume decreases and fuel costs increase. There was a time when long distance communication and the physical delivery of documents depended on the post office. Just as we needed roads, we needed the post office and the government provided it. No, it wasn't just a way of making jobs for otherwise useless people, as you comments suggest. While government services are not intended to make a profit (as in rapid mass transit) the post office did well, but it couldn't have done so if it had private competition which would have decreased its volume in key cities while it still had to serve rural mailboxes. Private firms could cherry pick. The post office couldn't. Hence its monopoly under law. That monopoly is superfluous now, as no one is about to volunteer to replace the actual function of the post office under its mandate. By the way, the post office is borrowing taxpayer money -- we aren't giving it a subsidy.
Speaking of cherry picking, in a similar way health insurance companies benefited from the government's obligation under Medicare and Medicaid to cover the oldest and sickest of our population, the they use rescission, pre-existing conditions and stonewalling to ensure that the covered those who were less likely to benefit at their expense. The new law makes this more difficult or impossible. Good medical care, as you say, is expensive. Applying resources to avoiding payment doesn't make it cheaper. It does help prevent fraud though. I hope that under the HCR law we can find an alternative method that is as effective.
As to rapid mass transit, airlines and autos have been heavily subsidized. The side effect of the interstate system was, of course to build sprawl and undermine the economic base of cities. On a passenger-mile basis, rapid rail has not been sufficiently subsidized. If it can't perform it can't get the ridership, and its lobby has been weak compared to that of private industry. Only a train buff, a retiree, a hobo or a fool would take a train over long distances, but fast trains can't be beat when it comes to moving people from city center to city center. An hour on a train from Market Street to Penn Station certainly beats two taxis and two airports. The government has consistently failed to recognize that fact.
Finally, the idea that private industry can't make laws is absurd given the facts. Corporations literally wrote the energy law under the last administration, pharma wrote most of the Medicare Part D law. HRC would almost certainly be more effective, less complex and not subject to corporate influence in its application if it had not been shaped by the lobbies and corporate donors. How did our tax system get distorted to the point that Exxon-Mobil, while gauging us at the pump, paid no income taxes on its multi-billions of profit? You and I didn't do it for them. Harder to document but undeniable is the huge effect of corporate lobbies on lawmakers. And of course, even the Supreme Court is making law at their behest. With no limits on corporate campaign "$peech" they will pretty much hire our future lawmakers. If the Court had simply ruled on the issue before them in Citizens United, this new law wouldn't exist. But maybe I'm pushing the point too hard to suggest that these me were somehow influenced by the corporate class.
So who is this fellow? Joe Miller...?
He's apparently running for the 'Party of Complete Contradictions', judging from his most recent response here.
It was meant to be an ironic commentary on my frustration with all of the rhetoric regarding jobs and the economy with no action or teeth behind it. Perhaps I need to be more clever. I have to admit that I am becoming completely disillusioned by the two-party system and deeply frustrated by the fact that we are continuing to go unrepresented here in the 29th District. I am about to go on a news and political hiatus until my blood pressure returns to normal levels!
BTW, I like the 'Party of Complete Contradictions', it has a nice ring to it.
I figured as much, but given some of the comments around here lately, I wasn't sure.
I guess I have been using your comment sections to vent some of these frustrations. Maybe I should star my own blog called "The Frustrating 29th" and then we can link to each other. I know I can depend on you to get the scoop, all I will have to do is sound-off.
I know Matt Zeller and am one of his friends on Facebook....he's an awesome dude and will surely have a lot more to say in the next few days.....
Been away and out of the loop..and just found out the news.
Zeller is the choice!!
Zeller!!!
You've GOT to be kidding me!!
I guess we should get used to the words..Congressman Reed.